■ ■••'.•'' ' 
 
'/ J x' 
 
/r *J^ r 
 
 COMPLETE WORKS 
 
 OF 
 
 N. P. WILLIS. 
 
 Armado. How hast thou purchased this experience 7 
 Moth. By my penny of observation." 
 
 Shakspkrk. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 REDFIELD, CLINTON HALL, 
 
 CORNER OF NASSAU ANT) BEEKMAN STREETS 
 1846 
 
'h' 5 
 
 Entered, nwordine 10 Act of Corfgress, in the year lc4 r i, 
 
 BY J. S. REDFIKLD, 
 
 in the Clerk'* Office of the Dfotrkt Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. 
 
 STETU.OTYI'K!) HV RKDPIELT) ft SAVAOK, 
 l:l CkuaMn Stfnt, S V 
 
TO 
 
 GEORGE P. MORRIS, ESQ., 
 
 'HE FOLLOWING PAGE* ARK 
 
 RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED, 
 
 BY HTS FRIEND, 
 
 MJTHOR, 
 
 763854 
 
Dear Reader: — 
 
 This volume is sent forth, with a feeling 
 somewhat akin to a parent's apprehensiveness, 
 in giving his child into the hands of a stran- 
 ger. We have a cellar, as well as many 
 stories, in our giddy thought-house ; and it 
 is from this cave of privacy that we have, 
 with reluctance, and consentings far between, 
 drawn treasures of feeling and impression, 
 now bound and offered to you for the first 
 time in one bundle. Oh, from the differ- 
 ent stories of the mind — from the settled 
 depths, and from the effervescent and giddy 
 surface — how different looks the world ! — of 
 what different stuff and worth the link that 
 binds us to it ! In looking abroad from one 
 window of the soul, we see sympathy, good- 
 ness, truth, desire for us and our secrets, that 
 we may be more loved ; from another, we see 
 suspicion, coldness, mockery, and ill will — 
 the evil spirits of the world — lying in wait for 
 us. At one moment — the spirits down, and 
 the heart calm and trusting — we tear out the 
 golden leaf nearest the well of life, and pass 
 
 it forth to be read and wept over. At anoth- 
 er, we bar shutter and blind upon prying mal- 
 ice, turn key carefully on all below, and, 
 mounting to the summit, look abroad and jest 
 at the very treasures we have concealed — 
 wondering at our folly in even confessing to a 
 heartless world that we had secrets, and would 
 share them. We are not always alike. The 
 world does not seem always the same. We 
 believe it is all good sometimes. We believe 
 sometimes, that it is but a place accursed, giv- 
 en to devils and their human scholars. Some- 
 times we are all kindness — sometimes aching 
 only for an antagonist, and an arena without 
 barrier or law. And oh what a Procrustes' 
 bed is human opinion — trying a man's actions 
 and words, in whatever mood committed and 
 said, by the same standard of rigor ! How 
 often must the angels hovering over us reverse 
 the sentence of the judge — how oftener still 
 the rebuke of the old maid and the Pharisee. 
 But — a martingale on moralizing ! 
 Yours affectionately, 
 
 N. P. W. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PROSE WORKS. 
 
 Pencillings by the Way 1 
 
 Letters from under a Bridge 217 
 
 Dashks at Life with a Free Pencil — Parti. — 
 
 High Life in Europe — 
 
 Leaves from the Heart-book of Ernest Clay 251 
 
 The Marquis in Petticoats 269 
 
 Beauty and the Beast, or the handsome Mrs Titton 
 
 and her plain Husband 272 
 
 Brown's Day with the Mimpsons 275 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Follett, or the Danger of meddling 
 
 with Married People 278 
 
 The Countess Nyschriem, and the handsome Artist 281 
 
 My One Adventure as a Brigand 283 
 
 Wigwam versus Almack's 285 
 
 Miss Jones's Son 294 
 
 Lady Rachel 298 
 
 The Phantom Head upon the Table 300 
 
 Getting to AVindward 306 
 
 The Wife bequeathed and resumed 310 
 
 A Revelation of a Previous Life 313 
 
 American Life — 
 
 Count Pott's Strategy 3 1G 
 
 The Female Wand 318 
 
 Two Buckets in a Well 323 
 
 Light Vervain 326 
 
 Nora Mehidy, or the strange Road to the Heart of 
 
 Mr. Hypolet Leathers 330 
 
 The Pharisee and the Barber 332 
 
 Mrs. Passable Trott 335 
 
 The Spirit Love of "lone S " 336 
 
 Mabel Wynne 338 
 
 The Ghost-ball at Congress Hall 342 
 
 Born to love Pigs and Chickens 345 
 
 The Widow by Brevet 348 
 
 Those Ungrateful Blidgimses 352 
 
 Dashes at Life — Part II. — 
 
 Inklings of Adventure — 
 
 Pedlar Karl 3GJ 
 
 Niagara— Lake Ontario— The St. Lawrence 366 
 
 The Cherokee's Threat 372 
 
 Paob 
 
 F. Smith 377 
 
 Edith Linsey 333 
 
 Scenes of Fear 404 
 
 Incidents on the Hudson 410 
 
 The Gipsy of Sardis 412 
 
 Tom Fane and I j2y 
 
 Larks in Vacation 433 
 
 A L02 in the Archipelago 441 
 
 The Revenge of the Signer Basil 445 
 
 Love and Diplomacy 454 
 
 The Madhouse of Palermo 457 
 
 Minute Philosophies 450 
 
 Loiterings of Travel — 
 
 Lady Ravelgold 4^ 
 
 Paletto's Bride 474 
 
 Violanta Cesarini 479 
 
 Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice 486 
 
 The Bandit of Austria 489 
 
 Oonder-Hoofden, or the Undercliff. 50 1 
 
 The Picker and Piler 504 
 
 Kate Crediford , . 507 
 
 Flirtation and Fox-Chasing 50y 
 
 The Poet and the Mandarin 512 
 
 Meena Dimity, or why Mr Brown Crash took the 
 
 Tour 516 
 
 The Power of an "Injured Look" 518 
 
 Beware of Dogs and Waltzing 52 1 
 
 The Inlet of Peach-Blossoms 524 
 
 The Belle of the Belfry, or the daring Lover 528 
 
 Passages from an Epistolary Journal kept on a Vis- 
 it to England 530 
 
 My Adventures at the Tournament 543 
 
 Sketches of Travel 549 
 
 The four Rivers— the Hudson — the Mohawk — the 
 
 Chenango — the Susquehannah 574 
 
 Dashfs at Life — Part III. — 
 
 Ephemera 577 
 
 [Consisting of a collection of the "jottings down" 
 contributed to the New Mirror and other papers, 
 deemed worth preserving as daguerreotypes of 
 the present — :js records of matters as they fly.] 
 
 Lecture on Fashion 799 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 POETICAL WORKS. 
 Sacred Poems — 
 
 The Healing of the Daughter of Jairus 817 
 
 The Leper 818 
 
 David's Grief for his Child 819 
 
 The Sacrfice of Abraham 820 
 
 The Shunamite 820 
 
 Jephthah's Daughter 821 
 
 Absalom 822 
 
 Christ's Entrance into Jerusalem 823 
 
 Baptism of Christ 823 
 
 Scene in Gethsemane 824 
 
 The Widow of Nain 824 
 
 Hagar in the Wilderness 824 
 
 Rizpah with her Sons, the Day before they were 
 
 hanged on Gibeah 825 
 
 Lazarus and Mary 826 
 
 Thoughts while making the Grave of a new-born 
 
 Child 827 
 
 On the Departure of Rev. Mr. White from his 
 
 Parish 827 
 
 Birth-Day Verses 828 
 
 To my Mother from the Apennines 828 
 
 Lines on leaving Europe 829 
 
 A true Incident 829 
 
 The Mother to her Child 830 
 
 Thirty-Five 830 
 
 A Thought over a Cradle 830 
 
 Contemplation 830 
 
 On the Death of a Missionary 83 1 
 
 On the Picture of a " Child tired of Play" 83 1 
 
 A Child's first Impression of a Star 831 
 
 On Witnessing a Baptism 831 
 
 Revery at Glenmary 832 
 
 The Belfry Pigeon 832 
 
 The Sabbath 832 
 
 Dedication Hymn 832 
 
 Poems of Passion — 
 
 The dying Alchymist 833 
 
 Parrhasius 834 
 
 The Scholar of Thebet Ben Khorat 835 
 
 The Wife's Appeal 837 
 
 Melanie 838 
 
 Lord Ivon and his Daughter 841 
 
 To Ermengarde 844 
 
 The Pity of the Park Fountain 845 
 
 " Chamber Scene" 845 
 
 To a Stolen Ring 845 
 
 To her who has Hopes for me 845 
 
 The Death of Harrison , 846 
 
 " She was not there" 846 
 
 Fail me not thou ! 846 
 
 Spirit-Whispers 846 
 
 To M , from Abroad 847 
 
 Sunrise Thoughts at the Close of a Ball 847 
 
 To a Face beloved 847 
 
 Unseen Spirits 847 
 
 Better Moments 847 
 
 The Annoyer 848 
 
 Andre's Request to Washington 848 
 
 Dawn 848 
 
 The Lady Jane, a Novel in Rhyme . . . 849 
 
 Miscellaneous Poems — 
 
 An Apology 861 
 
 To Helen in a Huff 862 
 
 City Lyrics *. 862 
 
 To the Lady in the Chemisette with black Buttons 862 
 
 To the Lady in the white Dress 863 
 
 The white Chip-Hat 863 
 
 " You know if it was you" 863 
 
 Love in a Cottage 864 
 
 The Declaration 864 
 
 Tortesa, the Usurer 865 
 
 Bianca Visconti, or the Heart overtasked . 883 
 
PENCILLIMS BY THE WAY: 
 
 DURING SOME YEARS OF RESIDENCE AND TRAVEL 
 
 FRANCE, ITALY, GREECE, ASIA MINOR, TURKEY, AND ENGLAND. 
 
THE AUTHOR OF PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 
 
 TO THE READER OF THIS EDITION. 
 
 A word or two of necessary explanation, dear reader. 
 
 I had resided on the Continent for several years, and 
 had been a year in England, without being suspected, 
 I believe, in the societies in which I lived, of any hab- 
 it of authorship. No production of mine had ever 
 crossed the water, and my Letters to the New- York 
 Mirror, were (for this long period, and I presumed 
 would be for ever), as far as European readers were 
 concerned, an unimportant and easy secret. Within 
 a few months of returning to this country, the Quar- 
 terly Review came out with a severe criticism on the 
 Pencillings by the Way, published in the New York 
 Mirror. A London publisher immediately procured 
 a broken set of this paper from an American resident 
 there, and called on me with an offer of <£300 for an 
 immediate edition of what he had — rather less than 
 one half of the Letters in this present volume. This 
 chanced on the day before my marriage, and I left im- 
 mediately for Paris, — a literary friend most kindly un- 
 dertaking to look over the proofs, and suppress what 
 might annoy any one then living in London. The 
 book was printed in three volumes, at about $7 per j 
 copy, and in this expensive shape three editions were 
 sold by the original publisher. After his death a duo- 
 decimo edition was put forth, very beautifully illus- 
 trated ; and this ha3 been followed by a fifth edition, 
 lately published, with new embellishments, by Mr. 
 Virtue. The only American edition (long ago out of 
 print) was a literal copy of this imperfect and curtailed 
 book. 
 
 In the present complete edition, the Letters objected 
 to by the Quarterly, are, like the rest, re-published as 
 originally written. The offending portions must be, 
 at any rate, harmless, after being circulated extensively 
 in this country in the Mirror, and prominently quoted 
 from the Mirror in the Quarterly, — and this being 
 true, I have felt that I could gratify the wish to be put 
 fairly on trial for these alleged offences — to have a 
 comparison instituted between my sins, in this respect, 
 and Hamilton's, Muskau's, Von Raumer's, Marryat's 
 and Lockhart's — and so to put a definite value and 
 meaning upon the constant and vague allusions to 
 these iniquities with which the critiques of my con- 
 temporaries abound. I may state as a fact, that the 
 only instance in which a quotation by me from the 
 conversation of distinguished men gave the least of- 
 
 fence in England, was the one remark made by Moore 
 the poet at a dinner party, on the subject of O'Counell. 
 It would have been harmless, as it was designed to be, 
 but for the unexpected celebrity of my Pencillings ; 
 yet with all my heart I wished it unwritten. 
 
 I wish to put on record in this edition (and you need 
 not be at the trouble of perusing them unless you 
 pler.se, dear reader!) an extract or two from the Lon- 
 .':ccs to " Pencillings," and parts of two arti- 
 cles written apropos of the book's offences. 
 
 The following is from the Preface to the first Lon- 
 don edition : — 
 
 "The extracts from these Letters which have ap- 
 peared in the public prints, have drawn upon me much 
 severe censure. Admitting its justice in part, perhaps 
 I may shield myself from its remaining excess by a 
 slight explanation. During several years' residence 
 in Continental and Eastern countries, I have Lad op- 
 portunities (as attache to a foreign Legation) of seeing 
 phases of society and manners not usually described 
 in books of travel. Having been the Editor, before 
 leaving the United States, of a monthly review, I 
 found it both profitable and agreeable to continue my 
 interest in the periodical in which that Review was 
 merged at my departure, by a miscellaneous corres- 
 pondence. Foreign courts, distinguished men, royal 
 entertainments, &c, &c, — matters which were likely 
 to interest American readers more particularly — have 
 been in turn my themes. The distance of America 
 from these countries, and the ephemeral nature and 
 usual obscurity of periodical correspondence, were a 
 sufficient warrant to my mind that the descriptions 
 would die where they first saw the light, and fulfil on- 
 ly the trifling destiny for which they were intended. 
 I indulged myself, therefore, in a freedom of detail 
 and topic which is usual only in posthumous memoirs 
 — expecting as soon that they would be read in the 
 countries and by the persons described, as the biog- 
 rapher of Byron and Sheridan that these fruitful and 
 unconscious theme3 would rise from the dead to read 
 their own interesting memoirs ! And such a resurrec- 
 tion would hardly be a more disagreeable surprise to 
 that eminent biographer, than was the sudden appear- 
 ance to me of my own unambitious Letters in the 
 Quarterly Review. 
 
 " The reader will see (for every Letter containing the 
 
PREFACE TO PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 least personal detail has been most industriously re- 
 published in the English papers) that I have in some 
 slight measure corrected these Pencillings by the 
 Way. They were literally what they were styled — 
 notes written on the road, and despatched without a 
 second perusal ; and it would be extraordinary if, be- 
 tween the liberty I felt with my material, and the haste 
 in which I scribbled, some egregious errors in judg- 
 ment and taste had not crept in unawares. The Quar- 
 terly has made a long arm over the water to refresh 
 my memory on this point. There are passages I 
 would not re-write, and some remarks on individuals 
 which I would recal at some cost, and would not wil- 
 lingly see repeated in these volumes. Having con- 
 ceded thus much, however, I may express my surprise 
 that this particular sin should have been visited upon 
 me, at a distance of three thousand miles, when the 
 reviewer's own literary fame rests on the more aggra- 
 vated instance of a book of personalities published 
 under the very noses of the persons described. Those 
 of my Letters which date from England were written 
 within three or four months of my first arrival in this 
 country. Fortunate in my introductions, almost em- 
 barrassed with kindness, and, from advantages of com- 
 parison gained by long travel, qualified to appreciate 
 keenly the delights of English society, I was little dis- 
 posed to find fault. Everything pleased me. Yet in 
 one instance — one single instance — I indulged myself 
 in stricture upon individual character, and I repeat it 
 in this work, sure that there will be but one person in 
 the world of letters who will not read it with approba- 
 tion — the editor of the Quarterly himself. It was ex- 
 pressed at the time with no personal feeling, for I had 
 never seen the individual concerned, and my name had 
 probably never reached his ears. I but repeated what 
 I had said a thousand times, and never without an in- 
 dignant echo to its truth — an opinion formed from the 
 most dispassionate perusal of his writings — that the 
 editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic 
 of his age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, 
 we owe to the Quarterly, it is well known, every spark 
 of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England 
 and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, 
 the opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature, 
 have been received in a country where the machinery 
 of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the 
 English people, and an animosity for which there was 
 no other reason, has been thus periodically fed and 
 exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary 
 man — I know it is my duty as an American — to lose 
 no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this 
 reptile of criticism." 
 
 The following is part of an article, written by my- 
 self, on the subject of personalities, for a periodical in 
 New- York : — 
 
 " There is no question, I believe, that, pictures of 
 living society where society is in very high perfection, 
 and of living persons, where they are " persons of 
 mark," arc both interesting to ourselves, and valuable 
 to posterity. What would we not give for a descrip- 
 tion of a dinner with Shakspere and Ben Jonson — 
 
 of a danse with the Maids of Queen Elizabeth — of a 
 chat with Milton in a morning call ? We should say 
 the man was a churl, who, when he had the power, 
 should have refused to ' leave the world a copy' of 
 such precious hours. Posterity will decide who are 
 the great of our time— but they are at least among 
 those I have heard talk, and have described and quo- 
 ted, and who would read without interest, a hundred 
 years hence, a character of the second Virgin Queen, 
 caught as it was uttered in a ball-room of her time ? 
 or a description of her loveliest Maid of Honor, by 
 one who had stood opposite her in a dance, and wrote 
 it before he slept ? or a conversation with Moore or 
 Buhver ? — when the Queen and her fairest maid, and 
 Moore and Bulwer have had their splendid funerals, 
 and are dust, like Elizabeth and Shakspere ? 
 
 " The harm, if harm there be in such sketch- 
 es, is in the spirit in which they are done. If 
 they are ill-natured or untrue, or if the author says 
 aught to injure the feelings of those who have admit- 
 ted him to their confidence or hospitality, he is to 
 blame, and it is easy, since he publishes while his 
 subjects are living, to correct his misrepresentations, 
 and to visit upon him his infidelities of friendship. 
 
 "But (while I think of it) perhaps some fault-finder 
 will be pleased to tell me, why this is so much deeper 
 a sin in me than in all other travellers. Has Basil 
 Hall any hesitation in describing a dinner party in the 
 United States, and recording the conversation at table ? 
 Does Miss Martineau stick at publishing the portrait 
 of a distinguished American, and faithfully recording 
 all he says in a confidential tete-a-tete ? Have Captain 
 Hamilton and Prince Pukler, Von Raumer and Cap- 
 tain Marryat, any scruples whatever about putting 
 down anything they hear that is worth the trouble, or 
 of describing any scene, private or public, which 
 would tell in their book, or illustrate a national pecu- 
 liarity ? What would their books be without this class 
 of subjects ? What would any book of travels be, 
 leaving out everybody the author saw, and all he 
 heard 1 Not that I justify all these authors have done 
 in this way, for I honestly think they have stepped 
 over the line which I have but trod close upon. 
 
 Surely it is the abuse and not the use of information 
 thus acquired that makes the offence. 
 
 The most formal, unqualified, and severe condem- 
 nation recorded against my Pencillings, however, is 
 that of the renowned Editor of the Quarterly, and to 
 show the public the immaculate purity of the forge 
 where this long-echoed thunder is manufactured, 1 
 will quote a passage or two from a book of the same 
 description, by the Editor of the Quarterly himself. 
 ' Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,' by Mr. Lockhart, 
 are three volumes exclusively filled with portraits of 
 persons, living at the time it was written in Scotland, 
 their conversation with the author, their manners, 
 their private histories, etc., etc. In one of the letters 
 upon the ' Society of Edinburgh,' is the following 
 delicate passage : — 
 
 '"Even you, my dear Lady Johnes, are a perfect 
 tyro in this branch of knowledge. I remember, only 
 
PREFACE TO PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 the last time I saw you, you were praising witli all 
 
 your might the legs of Col. B , those flimsy, 
 
 worthless things that look as if they were bandaged 
 with linen rollers from the heel to the knee. You 
 may say what you will, but I still assert, and I will 
 prove it if you please by pen and pencil, that, with 
 one pair of exceptions, the best legs in Cardigan are 
 
 Mrs. P 's. As for Miss J T) *■, 1 think 
 
 they are frightful.' * 
 
 '« Two pages farther on he says : — 
 
 " ' As for myself, I assure you that ever since I spent 
 
 a week at Lady L 's, and saw those great fat girls 
 
 of hers waltzing every night with that odious De 
 B , I can not endure the very name of the thing.' 
 
 " 1 quote from the second edition of these letters, by 
 which it appears that even these are moderated passa- 
 ges. A note to the first of the above quotations runs 
 as follows : — 
 
 " ' A great part of this letter is omitted in the Second 
 Edition in consequence of the displeasure its publi- 
 cation gave to certain ladies in Cardiganshire. As for 
 the gentleman who chose to take what I said of him 
 in so much dudgeon, he will observe, that I have al- 
 lowed what I said to remain in statu quo, which I cer- 
 tainly should not have done, had he expressed his re- 
 sentment in a proper manner.' 
 
 " So well are these unfortunate persons' names known 
 by those who read the book in England, that in the 
 copy which I have from a circulating library, they are 
 all filled out in pencil. And I would here beg the 
 reader to remark that these are private individuals, 
 compelled by no literary or official distinction to come 
 out from their privacy and figure in print, and in this, 
 if not in the taste and quality of my descriptions, I 
 claim a fairer escutcheon than my self-elected judge 
 — for where is a person's name recorded in my letters 
 who is not, either by tenure of public office, or litera- 
 ry, or political distinction, a theme of daily newspaper 
 comment, and of course fair game for the traveller. 
 
 "I must give one more extract from Mr. Lockhart's 
 book, an account of a dinner with a private merchant 
 of Glasgow. 
 
 " * I should have told you before, that I had another 
 visiter early in the morning, besides Mr. H. This 
 
 was a Mr. P , a respectable merchant of the place, 
 
 also an acquaintance of my friend W . He came 
 
 before H , and after professing himself very sorry 
 
 that his avocations would not permit him to devote 
 his forenoon to my service, he made me promise to 
 dine with him. * * My friend soon joined me, 
 and observing from the appearance of my counte- 
 nance that I was contemplating the scene with some 
 disgust,' (the Glasgow Exchange) • ' My good fel- 
 low,' said he, 'you are just like every other well-edu- 
 cated stranger that comes into this town ; you can not 
 endure the first sight of us mercantile whelps. Do 
 not, however, be alarmed ; I will not introduce you to 
 any of these cattle at dinner. No, sir! You must 
 know that there are a few men of refinement and polite 
 information in this city. I have warned two or three 
 <>t these rara ores, and depend upon it, yon shall have 
 
 a very snug day's work.'' So saying he toe >k my arm, 
 and observing that five was just on the chap, hurried 
 me through several streets and lanes till we arrived in 
 
 the , where his house is situated. His wife was, 
 
 I perceived, quite the fine lady, and, withal, a little of 
 the blue stocking. Hearing that I had just come 
 from Edinburgh, she remarked that Glasgow would be 
 seen to much more disadvantage after that elegant 
 city. ' Tndeed,' said she, ' a person of taste, must, of 
 course, find many disagreeables connected with a resi- 
 dence in such a town as this ; but Mr. P 's busi- 
 ness renders the thing necessary for the present, and 
 one can not make a silk purse of a sow's ear — he, he, 
 he !' Another lady of the company carried this affec- 
 tation still farther; she pretended to be quite ignorant 
 of Glasgow and its inhabitants, although she had lived 
 among them the greater part of her life, and, by the 
 by, seemed no chicken. I was afterward told by nfy 
 friend Mr. H , that this damsel had in reality so- 
 journed a winter or two in Edinburgh, in the capacity 
 of lick-spittle or toad-eater to a lady of quality, tc 
 whom she had rendered herself amusing by a mali- 
 cious tongue ; and that during this short absence, she 
 had embraced the opportunity of utterly forgetting 
 everything about the West country. 
 
 " ' The dinner was excellent, although calculated ap- 
 parently for forty people rather than sixteen, which 
 last number sat down. While the ladies remained in 
 the room, there was such a noise and racket of coarse 
 mirth, ill-restrained by a few airs of sickly sentiment 
 on the part of the hostess, that I really could neither 
 attend to the wine nor the dessert ; but after a little 
 time a very broad hint from a fat Falstaff, near the foot 
 of the table, apparently quite a privileged character, 
 thank Heaven ! sent the ladies out of the room. The 
 moment after which blessed consummation, the butler 
 and footman entered, as if by instinct, the one with a 
 huge punch bowl, the other with Sfc.' " 
 
 I do not thank Heaven that there is no parallel in 
 my own letters to either of these three extracts. It 
 is a thing of course that there is not. They are vio- 
 lations of hospitality, social confidence, and delicacy, 
 of which even my abusers will allow me incapable. 
 Yet this man accuses me of all these things, and so 
 runs criticism ! 
 
 And to this I add (to conclude this long Preface) 
 some extracts from a careful review of the work in 
 the North American : — 
 
 " ' Pencillings by the Way, ' is a very spirited 
 book. The letters, out of which it is constructed, 
 were written originally for the New York 4 Mirror,' 
 and were not intended for distinct publication. From 
 this circumstance, the author indulged in a freedom 
 of personal detail, which we must say is wholly un- 
 justifiable, and we have no wish to defend it. This 
 book does not pretend to contain any profound obser- 
 vations or discussions on national character, political 
 condition, literature, or even art. It would be obvi- 
 ously impossible to carry any one of these topics 
 thoroughly out, without spending vastly more time 
 and labor upon it than a rambling poet is likely to 
 
XIV 
 
 PREFACE TO PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 have the inclination to do. In fact, there are very few 
 men, who are qualified, by the nature of their previous 
 studies, to do this with any degree of edification to 
 their readers. But a man of general intellectual cul- 
 ture, especially if he have the poetical imagination 
 superadded, may give us rapid sketches of other 
 countries, which will both entertain and instruct us. 
 Now this book is precisely such a one as we have 
 here indicated. The author travelled through Eu- 
 rope, mingling largely in society, and visited whatever 
 scenes were interesting to him as an American, a 
 scholar, and a poet. The impressions which these 
 scenes made upon his mind, are described in these 
 volumes ; and we must say, we have rarely fallen in 
 with a book of a more sprightly character, a more 
 elegant and graceful stjle, and full of more lively 
 descriptions. The delineations of manners are exe- 
 cuted with great tact ; and ihe shifting pictures of 
 natural scenery pass before us as we read, exciting a 
 never-ceasing interest. As to the personalities which 
 have excited the wrath of British critics, we have, as 
 we said before, no wish to defend them ; but a few 
 words upon the tone, temper, and motives, of those 
 gentlemen, in their dealing with our author, will not, 
 perhaps, be considered inappropriate. 
 
 " It is a notorious fact, that British criticism, for 
 many years past, has been, to a great extent, free 
 from all the restraints of a regard to literary truth. 
 Assuming the political creed of an author, it would 
 be a very easy thing to predict the sort of criticism 
 his writings would meet with, in any or all of the 
 leading periodicals of the kingdom. This tendency 
 has been carried so far, that even discussions of points 
 in ancient classical literature have been shaped and 
 colored by it. Thus, Aristophanes' comedies are 
 turned against modern democracy, and Pindar, the 
 Theban Eagle, has been unceremoniously classed 
 with British Tories, by the London Quarterly. In- 
 stead of inquiring 'What is the author's object? 
 How far has he accomplished it ? How far is that 
 object worthy of approbation ?'— three questions that 
 are essential to all just criticism ; the questions put 
 by English Reviewers are substantially 'What party 
 does he belong to ? Is he a Whig, Tory, Radical, 
 or is he an American ?' And the sentence in such 
 cases depends on the answer to them. Even where 
 British criticism is favorable to an American author, 
 its tone is likely to be haughty and insulting; like the 
 language of a condescending city gentleman toward 
 some country cousin, whom he is kind enough to 
 honor with his patronage. 
 
 Now, to critics of this sort, Mr. Willis was a tempt- 
 ing mark. No one can for a moment believe that the 
 London Quarterly, Frazer's Magazine, and Captain 
 Marryat's monthly, are honest in the language they 
 hold toward Mr. Willis. Motives, wide enough from 
 a love of truth, guided the conduct of these journals. 
 The editor of the London Quarterly, it is well known, 
 is the author of 'Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,' a 
 work full of personalities, ten times more objectiona- 
 ble than anything to be found in the 'Pencillings.' 
 
 Yet this same editor did not blush to write and print 
 a long and most abusive tirade upon the American 
 traveller, for doing what he had himself done to a 
 much greater and more reprehensible extent; and, to 
 cap the climax of inconsistency, republished in his 
 journal the very personalities, names and all, which 
 had so shocked his delicate sensibilities. It is much 
 more likely that a disrespectful notice of the London 
 Quarterly and its editor, in these ' Pencillings,' was 
 the source from which this bitterness flowed, than that 
 any sense of literary justice dictated the harsh review. 
 Another furious attack on Mr. Willis's book appeared 
 in the monthly journal, under the editorial manage- 
 j ment of Captain Marryat, the author of a series of 
 j very popular sea novels. Whoever was the author of 
 i that article, ought to be held disgraced in the opinions 
 ; of all honorable men. It is the most extraordinary 
 | tissue of insolence and coarseness, with one exception, 
 : that we have ever seen, in any periodical which pre- 
 | tended to respectability of literary character. It car- 
 I ries its grossness 10 the intolerable length of attacking 
 the private character of Mr. Willis, and throwing out 
 foolish sneers about his birth and parentage. It is 
 this article which led to the well-known correspon- 
 dence, between the American Poet and the British 
 Captain, ending in a hostile meeting. It is to be re- 
 gretted that Mr. Willis should so far forget the prin- 
 : ciples of his New England education, as to participate 
 | in a duel. We regard the practice with horror; we 
 J believe it not only wicked, but absurd. We can not 
 ! possibly see how Mr. Willis's tarnished fame could be 
 brightened by the superfluous work of putting an ad- 
 ditional quantity of lead into the gallant captain. But 
 there is, perhaps, no disputing about tastes ; and, bad 
 as we think the whole affair was, no candid man can 
 read the correspondence without feeling that Mr. 
 Willis's part of it is infinitely superior to the captain's, 
 in style, sense, dignity of feeling, and manly honor. 
 "But, to return to the work from which we have 
 been partially drawn aside. Its merits in point of 
 style are unquestionable. It is written in a simple, 
 vigorous, and highly descriptive form of English, and 
 rivets the reader's attention throughout. There are 
 passages in it of graphic eloquence, which it would be 
 difficult to surpass from the writings of any other 
 tourist, whatever. The topics our author selects, are, 
 as has been already stated, not those which require 
 long and careful study to appreciate and discuss ; they 
 are such as the poetic eye would naturally dwell upon, 
 and a poetic hand rapidly delineate, in a cursory sur- 
 vey of foreign lands. Occasionally, we think, Mr. 
 Willis enters too minutely into the details of the hor- 
 rible. Some of his descriptions of the cholera, and 
 the pictures he gives us of the catacombs of the dead, 
 are ghastly. But the manners of society he draws 
 with admirable tact ; and personal peculiarities of dis- 
 tinguished men, he renders with a most life-like vi- 
 vacity. Many of his descriptions of natural scenery 
 are more like pictures, than sketches in words. The 
 description of the Bay of Naples will occur as a good 
 
PREFACE TO PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 
 
 " It would be impossible to point out, with any de- 
 gree of particularity, the many passages in this book 
 whose beauty deserves attention. But it may be re- 
 marked in general, that the greater part of the first 
 volume is not so fresh and various, and animated, as 
 the second. This we suppose arises partly from the 
 fact that France and Italy have lung been beaten 
 ground ; but Greece and Asia Minor have a newness 
 of interest about them, which can not but give more 
 vigor and elasticity to a traveller's description. Mr. 
 Willis's account of the Ionian Islands is exceedingly 
 lively ; and his contrast between present scenes and 
 classic associations is highly amusing. 
 
 " We think most readers will find Mr. Willis's 
 sketches of Turkish scenes and Turkish life, the most 
 entertaining parts of his book. They are written 
 with great sprightliness, and will richly reward a care- 
 ful perusal. 
 
 "The last part of the book is a statement of the 
 author's observations upon English life and society ; 
 and it is this portion, which the English critics affect 
 to be so deeply offended with. The most objectiona- 
 ble passage in this is the account of a dinner at Lady 
 Blessington's. Unquestionably Mr. Moore's remarks 
 about Mr. O'Connell ought not to have been reported, 
 considering the time when, and the place where, they 
 
 were uttered; though they contain nothing new about 
 the great Agitator, the secrets disclosed being well 
 known to some millions of people who interest them- 
 selves in British politics, and read the British news- 
 papers. We close our remarks on this work by re- 
 ferring our readers to a capital scene on board a 
 Scotch steam-boat, and a breakfast at Professor Wil- 
 son's, the famous editor of Blackwood, both in the 
 second volume, which we regret our inability to 
 quote." 
 
 " Every impartial reader must confess, that for so 
 young a man, Mr. Willis has done much to promote 
 the reputation of American literature. His position 
 at present is surrounded with every incentive to a no- 
 ble ambition. With youth and health to sustain him 
 under labor ; with much knowledge of the world ac- 
 quired by travel and observation, to draw upon ; with 
 a mature style, and a hand practised in various forms 
 of composition, Mr. Willis's genius ought to take a 
 wider and higher range than it has ever done before. 
 We trust we shall meet him again, erelong, in the 
 paths of literature ; and we trust that he will take it 
 kindly, if we express the hope, that he will lay aside 
 those tendencies to exaggeration, and to an unhealthy 
 tone of sentiment, which mar the beauty of some of 
 his otherwise most agreeable books " 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 At Sea. — I have emerged from my berth this morn- 
 ing for the first time since we left the Capes. We 
 have been running six or seven days before a strong 
 northwest gale, which, by the scuds in the sky, is not 
 yet blown out, and my head and hand, as you will see 
 by my penmanship, are anything but at rights. If you 
 have ever plunged about in a cold rain-storm at sea 
 for seven successive days, you can imagine how I have 
 amused myself. 
 
 I wrote to you after my pilgrimage to the tomb of 
 Washington. It was almost the only object of natu- 
 ral or historical interest in our own country that I had 
 not visited, and that seen, I made all haste back to em- 
 bark, in pursuance of my plans of travel, for Europe. At 
 Philadelphia I found a first-rate merchant-brig, the 
 Pacific, on the eve of sailing for Havre. She was 
 nearly new, and had a French captain, and no passen- 
 gers, three very essential circumstances to my taste, 
 and I took a berth in her without hesitation. The 
 next day she fell down the river, and on the succeeding 
 morning I followed her with the captain in the steam- 
 boat. 
 
 Some ten or fifteen vessels, bound on different voy- 
 ages, lay in the roads waiting for the pilot-boat, and 
 as she came down the river, they all weighed anchor 
 together and we got under way. It was a beautiful 
 sight — so many sail in close company under a smart 
 breeze, and I stood on the quarter-deck and watched 
 them in a mood of mingled happiness and sadness till 
 we reached the Capes. There was much to elevate 
 and much to depress me. The dream of my lifetime 
 was about to be realized. I was bound to France, and 
 those fair Italian cities, with their world of association 
 and interest were within the limit of a voyage, and all 
 that one looks to for happiness in change of scene, and 
 all that I had been passionately wishing and imagining 
 since I could dream a day-dream or read a book, was 
 before me with a visible certainty ; but my home was 
 receding rapidly, perhaps for years, and the chances 
 of death and adversity in my absence crowded upon 
 my mind — and I had left friends (many — many as dear 
 to me, any of them, as the whole sum of my coming en- 
 joyment), whom a thousand possible accidents might 
 remove or estrange, and I scarce knew whether I was 
 more happy or sad. 
 
 We made Cape Henlopen about sundown, and all 
 shortened sail and came to. The little boat passed 
 1 
 
 from one to another, taking off the pilots, and in a 
 few minutes every sail was spread again, and away they 
 went with a dashing breeze, some on one course and 
 some on another, leaving us, in less than an hour, ap- 
 parently alone on the sea. By this time the clouds 
 had grown black, the wind had strengthened into a 
 gale, with fits of rain ; and as the order was given to 
 " close-reef the topsails," I took a last look at Cape 
 Henlopen, just visible in the far edge of the horizon, 
 and went below. 
 
 Oct. 18. — It is a day to make one in love with life. 
 The remains of the long storm, before which we have 
 been driven for a week, lie in white, turreted masses 
 around the horizon the sky overhead is spotlessly 
 blue, the sun is warm, the wind steady and fresh, but 
 soft as a child's breath, and the sea — I must sketch it 
 to you more elaborately. We are in the Gulf Stream. 
 The water here, as you know, even to the cold banks 
 of Newfoundland, is always blood-warm, and the tem- 
 perature of the air mild at all seasons, and just now. 
 like a south wind on land in June. Hundreds of sea- 
 birds are sailing around us — the spongy sea-weeds 
 washed from the West Indian rocks, a thousand miles 
 away in the southern latitudes, float by in large mas- 
 ses — the sailors, barefoot and bareheaded, are scatter- 
 ed over the rigging, doing " fair-woather work" — and 
 just in the edge of the horizon, hidden by every swell, 
 stand two vessels with all sail spread, making, with 
 the first fair wind they have had in many days, for 
 America. 
 
 This is the first day that I have been able to be long 
 enough on deck to study the sea. Even were it not, 
 however, there has been a constant and chilly rain 
 which would have prevented me from enjoying its 
 grandeur, so that I am reconciled to my unusually se- 
 vere sickness. I came on deck this morning and 
 looked around, and for an hour or two I could scarce 
 realize that it was not a dream. Much as I had 
 watched the sea from our bold promontory at Nahant, 
 and well as I thought I knew its character in storms 
 and calms, the scene which was before me surprised 
 and bewildered me utterly. At the first glance, we 
 were just in the gorge of the sea, and looking over the 
 leeward quarter, I saw, stretching up from the keel, 
 what 1 can only describe as a hill of dazzling blue, 
 thirty or forty feet in real altitude, but sloped so far 
 away that the white crest seemed to me a cloud, and 
 the space between a sky of the most wonderful beau- 
 ty and brightness. A moment more, and the crest 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 burst over with a splendid volume of foam ; the sun 
 struck through the thinner part of the swell in a line 
 of vivid emerald, and the whole mass swept under us, I 
 the brig rising and riding on the summit with the 
 buoyancy and grace of a bird. 
 
 The single view of the ocean which I got at that mo- 
 ment, will be impressed upon my mind for ever. Noth- 
 ing that I ever saw on land at all compares with it for 
 splendor. No sunset, no lake scene of hill and water, 
 no fall, not even Niagara, no glen or mountain gap ev- 
 er approached it. The waves had had no time to 
 " knock down," as the sailors phrase it, and it was a 
 storm at sea without the hurricane and rain. J looked 
 off to the horizon, and the long majestic swells were 
 heaving into the sky upon its distant limit, and between 
 it and my eye lay a radius of twelve miles, an im- 
 mense plain flashing with green and blue and white, 
 and changing place and color so rapidly as to be al- 
 most painful to, the sight. I stood.' holding by the taf- 
 ferel an hottr,". gazing c*>'it-v*itli ;\ tihildish delight and 
 wonder. The spray had broken over me repeatedly, 
 and as we «fcip.pecKhalf' h'.s'ea. a"t the scuppers at every 
 roll, I was'siaM-i'ng "kalf -t&e {iraC «p to the knees in 
 water; but the warm wind on my forehead, after a 
 week's confinement to my berth, and the excessive 
 beauty lavished upon my sight, were so delicious, that 
 I forgot all, and it was only in compliance with the 
 captain's repeated suggestion that I changed my po- 
 sition. 
 
 I mounted the quarter-deck, and pulling off my 
 shoes, like a schoolboy, sat over the leeward rails, and 
 with my feet dipping into the warm sea at every lurch, 
 gazed at the glorious show for hours. I do not hesi- 
 tate to say that the formation, progress, and final burst 
 of a sea-wave, in a bright sun, are the most gorgeously 
 beautiful sight under heaven. I must describe it like 
 a jeweller to you, or I can never convey my impres- 
 sions. 
 
 First of all, a quarter of a mile away to windward, 
 your eye is caught by an uncommonly high wave, 
 rushing right upon your track, and heaping up slowly 
 and constantly as it comes, as if some huge animal 
 were ploughing his path steadily and powerfully be- 
 neath the surface. Its " ground," as a painter would 
 say, is of a deep indigo, clear and smooth as enamel, 
 its front curved inward, like a shell, and turned over 
 at the summit with a crest of foam, flashing and chan- 
 ging perpetually in the sunshine, like the sudden out- 
 burst of a million of "unsunned diamonds," and right 
 through its bosom, as the sea falls off, or the angle of 
 refraction changes, there runs a shifting band of the 
 most vivid green, that you would take to have been 
 the cestus of Venus as she rose from the sea, it is so 
 supernaturally translucent and beautiful. As it nears 
 you, it looks in shape like the prow of Cleopatra's 
 barge, as they paint it in the old pictures ; but its col- 
 ors, and the grace and majesty of its march, and its 
 murmur (like the low tones of an organ, deep and 
 full, and, to my ear, ten times as articulate and solemn), 
 almost startle you into the belief that it is a sentient 
 being, risen glorious and breathing from the ocean. 
 As it reaches the ship, she rises gradually, for there is 
 apparently an under-wave driven before it, which pre- 
 pares her for its power; and as it touches the quarter, 
 the whole magnificent wall breaks down beneath you 
 with a deafening surge, and a volume of foam issues 
 from its bosom, green and blue and white, as if it had 
 been a mighty casket in which the whole wealth of 
 the sea, crysoprase, and emerald, and brilliant spars, 
 had been heaped and lavished at a throw. This is the 
 " tenth wave," and, for four or five minutes, the sea 
 will be smooth about you, and the sparkling and dy- 
 ing foam falls into the wake, and may be seen like a 
 white path, stretching away over the swells behind, till 
 you are tired of gazing at it. Then comes another 
 from the same direction, and with the same shape and 
 
 motion, and so on till the sun sets, or your eyes are 
 blinded and your brain giddy with splendor. 
 
 I am sure this language will seem exaggerated to 
 you, but, upon the faith of a lonely man (the captain 
 has turned in, and it is near midnight and a dead 
 calm), it is a mere skeleton, a goldsmith's inventory, of 
 the reality. I long ago learned that first lesson of a 
 man of the world, "to be astonished at nothing," but 
 the sea has overreached my philosophy — quite. I am 
 changed to a mere child in my wonder. Be assured no 
 view of the ocean from land can give you a shadow of an 
 idea of it. Within even the outermost Capes, the swell 
 is broken, and the color of the water in soundings is 
 essentially different — more dull and earthy. Go to 
 the mineral cabinets of Cambridge or New Haven, 
 and look at the Jiuor spars, and the turquoises, and 
 the clearer specimens of cryso-prase, and quartz, and 
 diamond, and imagine them all polished and clear, and 
 flung at. your feet by millions in a noonday sun, and 
 it may help your conceptions of the sea after a storm. 
 You may "swim on bladders" at Nahant and Rocka- 
 way till you are gray, and be never the wiser. 
 
 The " middle watch" is called, and the second mate, 
 a fine rough old sailor, promoted from " the mast," is 
 walking the quarter-deck, stopping his whistle now 
 and then with a gruff " how do you head ?" or "keep 
 her up, you lubber," to the man at the helm ; the 
 " silver-shell" of a waning moon, is just visible through 
 the dead-lights over my shoulder (it has been up two 
 hours, to me, and, by the difference of our present 
 meridians, is just rising now over a certain hill, and 
 peeping softly in at an eastern window that I have 
 watched many a time when its panes have been silver- 
 ed by the same chaste alchymy), and so, after a walk 
 on the deck for an hour to look at the stars and watch 
 
 the phosphorus in the wake, and think of , I'll 
 
 get to mine own uneven pillow, and sleep too! 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 At Sea, Octoekr 20. — We have had fine weather 
 for progress, so far, running with north and north- 
 westerly winds from eight to ten knots an hour, and 
 making of course over two hundred miles a day. The 
 sea is still rough ; and though the brig is light laden 
 and rides very buoyantly, tht ,e mounting waves break 
 over us now and then with a tremendous surge, keep- 
 ing the decks constantly wet, and putting me to many 
 an uncomfortable shiver. I have become reconciled, 
 however, to much that I should have anticipated with 
 no little horror. I can lie in my berth forty-eight 
 hours, if the weather is chill or rainy, and amuse my- 
 self very well with talking bad French across the cab- 
 in to the captain, or laughing at the distresses of my 
 friend and fellow-passenger, Turk (a fine setter dog, 
 on his first voyage), or inventing some disguise for the 
 peculiar flavor which that dismal cook gives to all his 
 abominations ; or, at the worst, I can bury my head 
 in my pillow, and brace from one side to the other 
 against the swell, and enjoy my disturbed thoughts — 
 all without losing my temper, or wishing that I had 
 not undertaken the voyage. 
 
 Poor Turk ! his philosophy is more severely tried. 
 He has been bred a gentleman, and is amusingly ex- 
 clusive. No assiduities can win him to take the least 
 notice of the crew, and I soon discovered that when 
 the ciptain and myself were below, he endured many 
 a persecution. In an evil hour, a night or two since, 
 I suffered his earnest appeals for freedom to work up- 
 on my feelings, and, releasing him from his chain un- 
 der the windlass, I gave him the liberty of the cabin. 
 He slept very quietly on the floor till about midnight, 
 when the wind rose and the vessel began to roll very 
 uncomfortably. With the first heavy lurch a couple 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 a 
 
 of chairs went tumbling to leeward, and by the yelp 
 of distress, Turk was somewhere in the way. He 
 changed his position, and, with the next roll, the 
 mate's trunk "brought away," and shooting across the 
 cabin, jammed him with such violence against the 
 captain's state-room door, that he sprang howling to 
 the deck, where the first thing that met him was a 
 washing; sea, just taken in at mid-ships, that kept him 
 swimming above the hatches for five minutes. Half- 
 drowned, and with a gallon of water in his long hair, 
 he took again to the cabin, and making a desperate 
 leap into the steward's berth, crouched down beside 
 the sleeping Creole with a long whine of satisfaction. 
 The water soon penetrated however, and with a "sacre /" 
 and a blow that he will remember the remainder of the 
 voyage, the poor dog was again driven from the cabin, 
 and I heard no more of him till morning. His deci- 
 ded preference for me has since touched my vanity, 
 and 1 have taken him under my more special protec- 
 tion — a circumstance which costs me two quarrels a 
 day at least, with the cook and steward. 
 
 The only thing which forced a smile upon me du- 
 ring the first week of the passage was the achieve- 
 ment of dinner. In rough weather, it is as much as 
 one person can do to keep his place at the table at all; 
 and to guard the dishes, bottles, and castors, from a 
 general slide in the direction of the lurch, requires a 
 sleight and coolness reserved only for a sailor. "Pre- 
 nez garde!" shouts the captain, as the sea strikes, and 
 in the twinkling of an eye, everything is seized and 
 held up to wait for the other lurch, in attitudes which 
 it would puzzle the pencil of Johnson to exaggerate. 
 With his plate of soup in one hand, and the larboard 
 end of the tureen in the other, the claret bottle be- 
 tween his teeth, and the crook of his elbow caught 
 around the mounting corner of the table, the captain 
 maintains his seat upon the transom, and with a look 
 of the most grave concern, keeps a wary eye on the 
 shifting level of his vermicelli ; the old weather-beat- 
 en mate, with the alacrity of a juggler, makes a long 
 leg back to the cabin panels at the same moment, 
 and with his breast against the table, takes his own 
 plate and the castors and one or two of the smaller 
 dishes under his charge ; and the steward, if he can 
 keep his legs, looks out for the vegetables, or if he 
 falls, makes as wide a lap as possible to intercept the 
 volant articles in their descent. "Gentlemen that live 
 at home at ease" forget to thank Providence for the 
 blessing of a water-level. 
 
 Oct. 24. — We are on the Grand Bank, and surround- 
 ed by hundreds of sea-birds. I have been watching 
 them nearly all day. Their performances on the wing 
 are certainly the perfection of grace and skill. With 
 the steadiness of an eagle and the nice adroitness of a 
 swallow, they wheel round in their constant circles 
 with an arrowy swiftness, lifting their long tapering 
 pinions scarce perceptibly, and mounting and falling 
 as if by a mere act of volition, without the slightest 
 apparent exertion of power. Their chief enjoyment 
 seems to be to scoop through the deep hollows of the 
 sea, and they do it so quickly that your eye can scarce 
 follow them, just disturbing the polish of the smooth 
 crescent, and leaving a fine line of ripple from swell to 
 swell, but never wetting a wing, or dipping their white 
 breasts a feather too deep in the capricious and wind- 
 driven surface. I feel a strange interest in these wild- 
 hearted birds. There is something in this fearless in- 
 stinct, leading them away from the protecting and 
 pleasant land to make their home on this tossing and 
 desolate element, that moves both my admiration and 
 my pity. I can not comprehend it. It is unlike the 
 self-caring instincts of the other families of heaven's 
 creatures. If I were half the Pythagorean that I used 
 to be, I should believe they were souls in punishment 
 — expiating some lifetime sin in this restless me- 
 empsychosis. 
 
 Now and then a land-bird has flown on board, driv- 
 en to sea probably by the gale, and so fatigued as 
 hardly to be able to rise again upon the wing. Yes- 
 terday morning a large curlew came struggling down 
 the wind, and seemed to have just sufficient strength 
 to reach the vessel. He attempted to alight on the 
 
 J main yard, but failed and dropped heavily into the 
 long-boat, where he suffered himself to be taken with- 
 
 ! out an attempt to escape. He must have been on the 
 wing two or three days without food, for we were at 
 
 ! least two hundred miles from land. His heart was 
 throbbing hard through his ruffled feathers, and he 
 
 ! held his head up with difficulty. He was passed aft, 
 
 i but while I was deliberating on the best means for re- 
 
 I suscitating and fitting him to get on the wing again, 
 the captain had taken him from me and handed him 
 over to the cook, who had his head off before I could 
 remember French enough to arrest him. I dreamed 
 all that night of the man " that shot the albatross." 
 The captain relieved my mind, however, by telling me 
 that he had tried repeatedly to preserve them, and that 
 they died invariably in a few hours. The least food, 
 in their exhausted state, swells in their throats and 
 suffocates them. Poor curlew! there was a tender- 
 ness in one breast for him at least — a feeling, I have 
 the melancholy satisfaction to know, fully reciproca- 
 ted by the bird himself — that seat of his affections 
 having been allotted to me for my breakfast the morn- 
 ing succeeding his demise. 
 
 Oct. 29. — We have a tandem of whales ahead. 
 They have been playing about the ship an hour, and 
 now are coursing away to the east, one after the other, 
 in gallant style. If we could only get them into tra- 
 ces now, how beautiful it would be to stand in the fore- 
 top and drive a degree or two on a summer sea ! It 
 would not be more wonderful, de novo, than the dis- 
 covery of the lightning-rod, or navigation by steam ! 
 And, by the way, the sight of these huge creatures 
 has made me realize, for the first time, the extent to 
 which the sea has grown upon my mind during the 
 voyage. I have seen one or two whales, exhibited in 
 the docks, and it seemed to me always that they were 
 monsters — out of proportion, entirely, to the range of 
 the ocean. I had been accustomed to look out to 
 the horizon from land (the radius, of course, as great 
 as at sea), and, calculating the probable speed with 
 which they would compass the diagonal, and the dis- 
 turbance they would make in doing it, it appeared that 
 in any considerable numbers, they would occupy more 
 than their share of notice and sea-room. Now — after 
 sailing five days, at two hundred miles a day, and not 
 meeting a single vessel — it seems to me that a troop 
 of a thousand might swim the sea a century and 
 chance to be never crossed, so endlessly does this eter- 
 nal horizon open and stretch away ! 
 
 Oct. 30. — The day has passed more pleasantly than 
 usual. The man at the helm cried "a sail," while 
 we were at breakfast, and we gradually overtook a 
 large ship, standing on the same course, with every 
 sail set. We were passing half a mile to leeward, 
 when she put up her helm and ran down to us, hoist- 
 ing the English flag. We raised the "star-spangled 
 banner" in answer, and " hove too," and she came 
 dashing along on our quarter, heaving most majesti- 
 cally to the sea, till she was near enough to speak us 
 without a trumpet. Her fore-deck was covered with 
 sailors dressed all alike and very neatly, and around 
 the gangway stood a large group of officers in uni- 
 form, the oldest of whom, a noble-looking man with 
 gray hair, hailed and answered us. Several ladies 
 stood back by the cabin-door— passengers apparently. 
 She was a man-of-war. sailing as a king's packet be- 
 tween Halifax and Falmouth, and had been out from 
 
 i the former port nineteen days. After the usual cour- 
 tesies had passed, she bore away a little, and then kept 
 
 I on her course again, the 'wo vessels in company at 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 the distance of half a pistol shot. I rarely have seen 
 a more beautiful sight. The fine effect of a ship un- 
 der sail is entirely lost to one on board, and it is only 
 at sea and under circumstances like these, that it can 
 be observed. The power of the swell, lifting such a 
 huge body as lightly as an egg-shell on its bosom, and 
 tossing it sometimes half out of water without the 
 slightest apparent effort, is astonishing. I sat on deck 
 watching her with undiminished interest for hours. 
 Apart from the spectacle, the feeling of companion- 
 ship, meeting human beings in the middle of the 
 ocean after so long a deprivation of society (five days 
 without seeing a sail, and nearly three weeks unspo- 
 ken from land), was delightful. Our brig was the fast- 
 er sailer of the two, but the captain took in some of 
 his canvass for company's sake ; and all the afternoon 
 we heard her half-hour bells, and the boatswain's 
 whistle, and the orders of the officer of the deck, and 
 I could distinguish very well with a glass, the expres- 
 sion of the faces watching our own really beautiful 
 vessel as she skimmed over the water like a bird. We 
 parted at sunset, the man-of-war making northerly for 
 her port, and we stretching south for the coast of 
 France. I watched her till she went over the horizon, 
 and felt as if I had lost friends when the night closed 
 in and we were once more 
 
 M Alone on the wide, wide sea." 
 
 Nov. 3. — We have just made the port of Havre, and 
 the pilot tells us that the packet has been delayed by 
 contrary winds, and sails early to-morrow morning. 
 The town bells are ringing "nine" (as delightful a 
 sound as I ever heard, to my sea-weary ear), and I 
 close in haste, for all is confusion on board. 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 Havre. — This is one of those places which scrib- 
 bling travellers hurry through with a crisp mention of 
 their arrival and departure, but as I have passed a day 
 here upon customhouse compulsion, and passed it 
 pleasantly too, and as I have an evening entirely to 
 myself, and a good fire, why I will order another pound 
 of wood (they sell it like a drug here), and Monsieur 
 and Mademoiselle Somebodies, " violin players right 
 from the hands of Paganini, only fifteen years of age, 
 and miracles of music" (so says the placard), may de- 
 'ight other lovers of precocious talent than I. Pen, 
 ink, and paper, for number two ! 
 
 If I had not been warned against being astonished 
 short of Paris, I should have thought Havre quite an 
 affair. I certainly have seen more that is novel and 
 amusing since morning than I ever saw before in any 
 seven days of my life. Not a face, not a building, not 
 a dress, not a child even, not a stone in the street, nor 
 shop, nor woman, nor beast of burden, looks in any 
 comparable degree like its namesake the other side of 
 the water. 
 
 It was very provoking to eat a salt supper and go to 
 bed in that tiresome berth again last night, with a 
 French hotel in full view, and no permission to send 
 for a fresh biscuit even, or a cup of milk. It was nine 
 o'clock when we reached the pier, and at that late 
 hour there was, of course, no officer to be had for per- 
 mission to land; and there paced the patrole, with his 
 high black cap and red pompon, up and down the 
 quay, within six feet of our tafferel, and a shot from his 
 arquebuss would have been the consequence of any 
 unlicensed communication with the shore. It was 
 something, however, to sleep without rocking; and 
 after a fit of musing anticipation, which kept me con- 
 
 scious of the sentinel's measured tread till midnight, 
 the " gentle goddess" sealed up my cares effectually, 
 and I awoke at sunrise — in France ! 
 
 It is a common thing enough to go abroad, and it 
 may seem idle and common-place to be enthusiastic 
 about it ; but nothing is common, or a trifle, to me, 
 that can send the blood so warm to my heart, and the 
 color to my temples as generously, as did my first 
 conscious thought when I awoke this morning. In 
 France! I would not have had it a dream fo,r the 
 price of an empire ! 
 
 Early in the morning a woman came clattering into 
 the cabin with wooden shoes, and a patois of mingled 
 French and English — a hlanchisseuse — spattered to the 
 knees with mud, but with a cap and 'kerchief that 
 would have made the fortune of a New-York milliner. 
 del! what politeness! and what white teeth! and 
 what a knowing row of papillotes, laid in precise par- 
 allel, on her clear brunette temples. 
 
 " Quelle nouvelle?" said the captain. 
 
 " Poland est a has!" was the answer, with a look 
 of heroic sorrow, that would have become a tragedy 
 queen, mourning for the loss of a throne. The French 
 manner, for once, did not appear exaggerated. It was 
 news to sadden us all. Pity ! pity ! that the broad 
 Christian world could look on and see this glorious 
 people trampled to the dust in one of the most noble 
 and desperate struggles for liberty that the earth ever 
 saw ! What an opportunity was here lost to France 
 for setting a seal of double truth and splendor on her 
 own newly-achieved triumph over despotism. The 
 washerwoman broke the silence with " Any clothes to 
 wash, monsieur ?" and in the instant return of my 
 thoughts to my own comparatively-pitiful interests, I 
 found the philosophy for all I had condemned in kings 
 — the humiliating and selfish individuality of human 
 nature. And yet I believe with Dr. Channing on that 
 dogma ! 
 
 At ten o'clock I had performed the traveller's rou 
 tine — had submitted my trunk and my passport to the 
 three authorities, and had got into (and out of) as 
 many mounting passions at what seemed to me the 
 intolerable impertinences of searching my linen, and 
 inspecting my person for scars. I had paid the portei 
 three times his due rather than endure his cataract of 
 French expostulation ; and with a bunch of keys, and 
 a landlady attached to it, had ascended by a cold, wet, 
 marble staircase, to a parlor and bedroom on the fifth 
 floor ; as pretty a place, when you get there, and as 
 difficult to get to as if it were a palace in thin air. It 
 is perfectly French ! Fine, old, last-century chairs, 
 covered with splendid yellow damask, two sofas of the 
 same, the legs or arms of every one imperfect ; a coarse 
 wood dressing-table, covered with fringed drapery and 
 a sort of throne pincushion, with an immense glass 
 leaning over it, gilded probably in the time of Henri 
 Quatre ; artificial flowers all round the room, and 
 prints of Atala and Napoleon mourant over the walls ; 
 windows opening to the floor on hinges, damask and 
 muslin curtains inside, and boxes for flower-pots with- 
 out ; a bell-wire that pulls no bell, a bellows too asth- 
 matic even to wheeze, tongs that refuse to meet, and 
 a carpet as large as a table-cloth in the centre of 
 the floor, may answer for an inventory of the " par- 
 lor." The bedchamber, about half as large as the 
 boxes in Rattle-row at Saratoga, opens by folding- 
 doors, and discloses a bed, that for tricksy ornament 
 as well as size might look the bridal couch for a faery 
 queen in a panorama ; the same golden-sprig damask 
 looped over it, tent-fashion, with splendid crimson 
 cord, tassels, fringes, etc., and a pillow beneath that 1 
 shall be afraid to sleep on, it is so dainty a piece of 
 needlework. There is a delusion about it, positively. 
 One can not help imagining that all this splendor 
 means something, and it would require a worse evil 
 than any of these little deficiencies of comfort to dis- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 turb the self-complacent, Captain-Jackson sort of 
 feeling, with which one throws his cloak on one sofa 
 and his hat on the other, and spreads himself out 
 for a lounge before this mere apology of a French 
 fire. 
 
 But for eating and drinking ! if they cook better in 
 Paris, I shall have my passport altered. The next 
 prefet that signs it shall substitute gourmand for pro- 
 pnetaire. I will profess a palate, and live to eat. 
 Making every allowance for an appetite newly from 
 sea, my experience hitherto in this department of 
 science is transcended in the degree of a rushlight to 
 Arcturus. 
 
 I strolled about Havre from breakfast till dinner, 
 seven or eight hours, following curiosity at random, 
 up one street and down another, with a prying avidity 
 which I fear travel will wear fast away. I must com- 
 press my observations into a sentence or two, for my 
 fire is out, and this old castle of a hotel lets in the 
 wind " shrewdly cold," and, besides, the diligence calls 
 for me in a few hours, and one must sleep. 
 
 Among my impressions the most vivid are — that of 
 the twenty thousand inhabitants of Havre, by far the 
 greater portion are women and soldiers — that the build- 
 ings all look toppling, and insecurely antique and un- 
 sightly — that the privates of the regular army are the 
 most stupid, and those of the national guard the most 
 intelligent-looking troops I ever saw — that the streets 
 are filthy beyond endurance, and the shops clean be- 
 yond all praise — that the women do all the buying and 
 selling, and cart-driving, and sweeping, and even shoe- 
 making, and other sedentary craftswork, and at the 
 same time have (the meanest of them) an air of ambi- 
 tious elegance and neatness, that sends your hand to 
 your hat involuntarily when you speak to them — that 
 the children speak French, and look like little old 
 men and women, and the horses (the famed Norman 
 breed) are the best of draught animals, and the worst 
 for speed in the world — and that for extremes ridicu- 
 lously near, dirt and neatness, politeness and knavery, 
 chivalry and pelitesse, of learning and language, the 
 people I have seen to-day must be pre-eminently re- 
 markable, or France, for a laughing philosopher, is a 
 paradise indeed ! And now for my pillow, till the dil- 
 igence calls. Good night. 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 Paris. — It seems to me as if I were going back a 
 *nonth to recall my departure from Havre, my mem- 
 ory is so clouded with later incidents. I was awaked 
 on the morning after I had written to you by a ser- 
 vant, who brought me at the same time a cup of cof- 
 fee, and at about an hour before daylight we were 
 passing through the huge gates of the town on our 
 way to Paris. The whole business of diligence-trav- 
 elling amused me exceedingly. The construction of 
 this vehicle has been often described ; but its separate 
 apartments (at four different prices), its enormous size, 
 its comfort and clumsiness, and, more than all, the 
 driving of its postillions, struck me as equally novel 
 and diverting. This last-mentioned performer on the 
 whip and voice (the only two accomplishments he at 
 all cultivates), rides one of the three wheel-horses, and 
 drives the four or seven which are in advance, as a 
 grazier in our country drives a herd of cattle, and 
 they travel very much in the same manner. There is 
 leather enough in two of their clumsy harnesses, to 
 say nothing of the postillion's boots, to load a com- 
 mon horse heavily. I never witnessed such a ludi- 
 crous absence of contrivance and tact as in the appoint- 
 
 ments and driving of horses in a diligence. It is so in 
 everything in France, indeed. They do not possess 
 the quality, as a nation. The story of the Gascoigne, 
 who saw a bridge for the first time, and admired the 
 ingenious economy that placed it across the river, in- 
 stead of lengthwise, is hardly an exaggeration. 
 
 At daylight I found myself in the coupe (a single 
 seat for three in the front of the body of the carriage, 
 with windows before and at the sides), with two whis- 
 kered and mustached companions, both very polite, 
 and very unintelligible. I soon suspected, by the 
 science with which my neighbor on the left hummed 
 little snatches of popular operas, that he was a pro- 
 fessed singer (a conjecture which proved true), and it 
 was equally clear, from the complexion of the port- 
 feuille on the lap of the other, that his vocation was a 
 liberal one — a conjecture which proved true also, as 
 he confessed himself a diplomat, when we became 
 better acquainted. For the first hour or more my at- 
 tention was divided between the dim but beautiful out- 
 line of the country by the slowly-approaching light of 
 the dawn, and my nervousness at the distressing want 
 ! of skill in the postillion's driving. The increasing and 
 singular beauty of the country, even under the disad- 
 vantage of rain and the late season, soon absorbed all 
 my attention, however, and my involuntary and half- 
 suppressed exclamations of pleasure, so unusual in an 
 Englishman (for whom I found I was taken), warmed 
 the diplomatist into conversation, and I passed the 
 three ensuing hours very pleasantly. My companion 
 was on his return from Lithuania, having been sent 
 out by the French committee with arms and money 
 for Poland. He was, of course, a most interesting 
 fellow-traveller ; and, allowing for the difficulty with 
 which I understood the language, in the rapid articu- 
 lation of an enthusiastic Frenchman, I rarely have 
 been better pleased with a chance acquaintance. I 
 found he had been in Greece during the revolution, 
 
 and knew intimately my friend, Dr. H , the best 
 
 claim he could have on my interest, and I soon di„- 
 covered an answering recommendation of myself to 
 him. 
 
 The province of Normandy is celebrated for its pic- 
 turesque beauty, but I had no conception before of 
 the cultivated picturesque of an old country. I have 
 been a great scenery-hunter in America, and my eye 
 was new, like its hills and forests. The massive, bat- 
 tlemented buildings of the small villages we passed 
 through, the heavy gateways and winding avenues and 
 antique structure of the distant and half-hidden cha- 
 teaux, the perfect cultivation, and, to me, singular ap- 
 pearance of a whole landscape without a fence or a 
 stone, the absence of all that we define by comfort and 
 neatness, and the presence of all that we have seen in 
 pictures and read of in books, but consider as the rep- 
 resentations and descriptions of ages gone by — all 
 seemed to me irresistibly like a dream. I could not 
 rub my hand over my eyes, and realize myself. I 
 could not believe that, within a month's voyage of my 
 home, these spirit-stirring places had stood all my life- 
 time as they do, and have for ages, every stone as it 
 was laid in times of worm-eaten history, and looking 
 to my eyes now as they did to the eyes of knights and 
 dames in the days of French chivalry. I looked at the 
 constantly-occurring ruins of the old pnories, and the 
 magnificent and still-used churches, and my blood 
 tingled in my veins, as I saw in the stepping-stones at 
 their doors cavities that the sandals of monks, and the 
 iron-shod feet of knights in armor a thousand years 
 I ago, had trodden and helped to wear, and the stone 
 J cross over the threshold, that hundreds of generations 
 I had gazed upon and passed under. 
 
 By a fortunate chanc" 'he postillion left the usual 
 ! route at Balbec, and pursued what appeared to be a 
 I by-road through the grain-fields and vineyards for 
 ! twenty or twenty-five miles. I can only describe it as 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 an uninterrupted green lane, winding almost the whole 
 distance through the bosom of a valley that must be 
 one of* the very loveliest in the world. Imagine one 
 of such extent, without a fence to break the broad 
 swells of verdure, stretching up from the winding and 
 unenclosed road on either side, to the apparent sky ; 
 the houses occurring at distances of miles, and every 
 one with its thatched roof covered all over with bright 
 green moss, and its walls of marl interlaid through all 
 the crevices with clinging vines, the whole structure 
 and its appurtenances faultlessly picturesque, and when 
 you have conceived a valley that might have content- 
 ed Rasselas, scatter over it here and there groups of 
 men, women, and children, the Norman peasantry in 
 their dresses of all colors, as you see them in the prints 
 — and if there is anything that can better please the 
 eye, or make the imagination more willing to fold up 
 its wings and rest, my travels have not crossed it. I 
 have recorded a vow to walk through Normandy. 
 
 As we approached Rouen the road ascended grad- 
 ually, and a sharp turn brought us suddenly to the 
 brow of a steep hill, opposite another of the same 
 height, and with the same abrupt descent, at the dis- 
 tance of a mile across. Between lay Rouen. 1 hard- 
 ly know how to describe, for American eyes, the pe- 
 culiar beauty of this view ; one of the most exquisite, 
 I am told, in all France. A town at the foot of a hill 
 is common enough in our country, but of the hun- 
 dreds that answer to this description, I can not name 
 one that would afford a correct comparison. ' The 
 nice and excessive cultivation of the grounds in so old 
 a country gives the landscape a complexion essentially 
 different from ours. If there were another Mount 
 Holyoke, for instance, on the other side of the Con- 
 necticut, the situation of Northampton would be very 
 similar to that of Rouen; but, instead of the rural vil- 
 lage, with its glimpses of white houses seen through 
 rich and luxurious masses of foliage, the mountain 
 6ides above broken with rocks, and studded with the 
 gigantic and untouched relics of the native forest, and 
 the fields below waving with heavy crops, irregularly 
 fenced and divided, the whole picture one of an over- 
 lavish and half-subdued Eden of fertility ; instead of 
 this, I say, the broad meadows, with the winding Seine 
 in their bosom, are as trim as a girl's flower-garden, 
 the grass closely cut, and of a uniform surface of green, 
 the edges of the river set regularly with willows, the 
 little bright islands circled with trees, and smooth as a 
 lawn ; and instead of green lanes lined with bushes, 
 single streets running right through the unfenced ver- 
 dure from one hill to another, and built up with an- 
 tique structures of stone, the whole looking, in the 
 coup d'ceil of distance, like some fantastic model of a 
 town, with gothic houses of sand-paper, and meadows 
 of silk velvet. 
 
 You will find the size, population, etc., of Rouen in 
 the guide-books. As my object is to record impres- 
 sions, not statistics, I leave you to consult those laco- 
 nic chronicles, or the books of a thousand travellers, 
 for all such information. The Maid of Orleans was 
 burnt here, as you know, in the fourteenth century. 
 There is a statue erected to her memory, which I did 
 not see, for it rained ; and after the usual stop of two 
 hours, as the barometer promised no change in the 
 weather, and as I was anxious to be in Paris, I took 
 my place in the night diligence, and kept on. 
 
 I amused myself till dark watching the streams that 
 poured into the broad mouth of the postillion's boots 
 from every part of his dress, and musing on the fate 
 of the poor Maid of Orleans ; and then, sinking down 
 into the comfortable corner of the coupe, I slept almost 
 without interruption till the next morning — the best 
 comment in the world on the only comfortable thing I 
 have yet seen in France, a diligence. 
 
 It is a pleasant thing in a foreign land to see the fa- 
 miliar face of the sun ; and as he rose over a distant 
 
 hill on the left, I lifted the window of the coupe to let 
 him in, as I would open the door to a long-missed 
 friend. He soon reached a heavy cloud, however, and 
 my hopes of bright weather when we should enter the 
 metropolis departed. It began to rain again ; and the 
 postillion, after his blue cotton frock was soaked 
 through, put on his great-coat over it — an economy 
 which is peculiarly French, and which I observed in 
 every succeeding postillion on the route. The last 
 twenty-five miles to Paris are uninteresting to the eye ; 
 and with my own pleasant thoughts, tinct as they were 
 with the brightness of immediate anticipation, and an 
 occasional laugh at the grotesque figures and equip- 
 ages on the road, I made myself passably contented 
 till we entered the suburb of St. Denis. 
 
 It is something to see the outside of a sepulchre for 
 kings, and the old abbey of Saint Denis needs no as- 
 sociation to make a sight of it worth many a mile of 
 weary travel. I could not stop within four miles of 
 Paris, however, and I contented myself with running 
 to get a second view of it in the rain while the postil- 
 lion breathed his horses. The strongest association 
 about it, old and magnificent as it is, is the fact, that 
 Napoleon repaired it after the revolution ; and stand- 
 ing in probably the finest point for its front view, my 
 heart leaped to my throat as I fancied that Napoleon, 
 with his mighty thoughts, had stood in that very spot, 
 possibly, and contemplated the glorious old pile before 
 me as the place of his future repose. 
 
 After four miles more, over a broad straight avenue, 
 paved in the centre and edged with trees, we arrived 
 at the Porte St. Denis. I was exceedingly struck 
 with the grandeur of the gate as we passed under, and 
 referring to the guide-book I find it was a triumphal 
 arch erected to Louis XIV., and the one by which 
 the kings of France invariably enter. This also was 
 restored by Napoleon, with his infallible taste, without 
 changing its design ; and it is singular how everything 
 that great man touched became his own, for who re- 
 members for whom it was raised while he is told who 
 employed his great intellect in its repairs ? 
 
 I entered Paris on Sunday at eleven o'clock. I 
 never should have recognised the day. The shops 
 were all open, the artificers all at work, the unintelli- 
 gible criers vociferating their wares, and the people in 
 their working-day dresses. We wound through street 
 after street, narrow and dark and dirty, and with my 
 mind full of the splendid views of squares, and col- 
 umns, and bridges, as I had seen them in the prints, I 
 could scarce believe I was in Paris. A turn brought 
 us into a large court, that of the Messagerie, the place 
 at which all travellers are set down on arrival. Here 
 my baggage was once more inspected, and, after a 
 half-hour's delay, I was permitted to get into a fiacre, 
 and drive to a hotel. As one is a specimen of all, I 
 may as well describe the Hotel d'Etrangcrs, Rue Vi- 
 vienne, which, by the way, I take the liberty at the 
 same time to recommend to my friends. It is the pre- 
 cise centre for the convenience of sight-seeing, admir- 
 ably kept, and, being nearly opposite Galignani's, that 
 bookstore of Europe, is a very pleasant resort for the 
 half hour before dinner, or a rainy day. I went there 
 at the instance of my friend the diplomat. 
 
 The fiacre stopped before an arched passage, and a 
 fellow in livery, who had followed me from the Mes- 
 sagerie (probably in the double character of porter and 
 police agent, as my passport was yet to bedemanded), 
 took my trunk into a small office on the left, over 
 which was written " Concierge." This person, who is 
 a kind of respectable doorkeeper, addressed me in 
 broken English, without waiting for the evidence of 
 my tongue that I was a foreigner, and, after inquiring 
 at what price I would have room, introduced me to the 
 landlady, who took me across a large court (the hous- 
 es are built round, the yard always in France), to the 
 corresponding story of the house. The room was 
 
PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 quite pretty, with its looking-glasses and curtains, but 
 there was no carpet, and the fireplace was ten feet 
 deep. I asked to see another, and another, and anoth- 
 er ; they were all curtains, and looking-glasses, and 
 stone floors ! There is no wearying a Frenchwoman, 
 and I pushed my modesty till I found a chamber to 
 my taste — a nutshell, to be sure, but carpeted — and 
 bowing my polite housekeeper out, I rang for break- 
 fast and was at home in Paris ! 
 
 There are few things bought with money that are 
 more delightful than a French breakfast. If you take it 
 at your room, it appears in the shape of two small ves- 
 sels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of 
 bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter, and one or 
 two of some thirty dishes from which you choose, the 
 latter flavored exquisitely enough to make one wish 
 to be always at breakfast, but cooked and composed I 
 know not how or of what. The coffee has an aroma 
 peculiarly exquisite, something quite different from 
 any I ever tasted before ; and the pelitc-pain, a slender 
 biscuit between bread and cake, is, when crisp and 
 warm, a delightful accompaniment. All this costs 
 about one third as much as the beefsteaks and coffee 
 in America, at the same time that you are waited up- 
 on with a civility that is worth three times the money. 
 
 It still rained at noon, and finding that the usual 
 dinner hour was five I took my umbrella for a walk. 
 In a strange city I prefer always to stroll about at haz- 
 ard, coming unawares upon what is fine or curious. 
 The hackneyed descriptions in the guidebooks profane 
 the spirit of a place, I never look at them till after I 
 have found the object, and then only for dates. The 
 Rue Vivienne was crowded with people, as I emerged 
 from the dark archway of the hotel to pursue my wan- 
 derings. 
 
 A walk of this kind, by the way, shows one a great 
 deal of novelty. In France there are no shop-men. 
 No matter what the article of trade — hats, boots, pic- 
 tures, books, jewellery, anything and everything that 
 gentlemen buy — you are waited upon by girls, always 
 handsome, and always dressed in the height of the 
 mode. They sit on damask-covered settees, behind 
 the counters ; and when you enter, bow and rise to 
 serve you, with a grace and a smile of courtesy that 
 would become a drawing-room. And this is uni- 
 versal. 
 
 I strolled on until I entered a narrow passage, pen- 
 etrating a long line of buildings. It was thronged with 
 people, and passing in with the rest, I found myself 
 unexpectedly in a scene that equally surprised and 
 delighted me. It was a spacious square enclosed by 
 one entire building. The area was laid out as a garden, 
 planted with long avenues of trees and beds of flowers, 
 and in the centre a fountain was playing in the shape 
 of a Jleur-de-lis, with a jet about forty feet in height. 
 A superb colonnade ran round the whole square, ma- 
 king a covered gallery of the lower story, which was 
 occupied by shops of the most splendid appearance, 
 and thronged through its long sheltered paves by thou- 
 sands of gay promenaders. It was the far-famed Pal- 
 ais Royal. I remembered the description I had heard 
 of its gambling-houses, and facilities for every vice, 
 and looked with a new surprise on its Aladdin-like 
 magnificence. The hundreds of beautiful pillars, 
 stretching away from the eye in long and distant per- 
 spective, the crowd of citizens, and women, and offi- 
 cers in full uniform, passing and repassing with French 
 liveliness and politeness, the long windows of plated 
 glass glittering with jewellery, and bright with every- 
 thing to tempt the fancy, the tall sentinels pacing be- 
 tween the columns, and the fountain turning over its 
 clear waters with a fall audible above the tread and 
 voices of the thousands who walked around it — who 
 could look upon such a scene and believe it what it is, 
 the most corrupt spot, probably, on the face of the 
 civilized world ? 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 THE LODVRE AMERICAN ARTISTS I.N PARIS — POL! 
 
 TICS, ETC. 
 
 The salient object in my idea of Paris has always 
 been the Louvre. I have spent some hours in its 
 vast gallery to-day, and I am sure it will retain the 
 same prominence in my recollections. The whole 
 palace is one of the oldest, and said to be one of the 
 finest, in Europe ; and, if I may judge by its impres- 
 siveness, the vast inner court (the facades of which 
 were restored to their original simplicity by Napo- 
 leon), is a specimen of high architectural perfection. 
 One could hardly pass through it without being better 
 fitted to see the masterpieces of art within ; and it 
 requires this, and all the expansiveness of which the 
 mind is capable besides, to walk through the Musec 
 Roy ale without the painful sense of a magnificence 
 beyond the grasp of the faculties. 
 
 I delivered my passport at the door of the palace, 
 and, as is customary, recorded my name, country, and 
 profession in the book, and proceeded to the gallery. 
 The grand double staircase, one part leading to the 
 private apartments of the royal household, is described 
 voluminously in the authorities ; and, truly, for one 
 who has been accustomed to convenient dimensions 
 only, its breadth, its lofty ceilings, its pillars and stat- 
 uary, its mosaic pavements and splendid windows, are 
 enough to unsettle for ever the standards of size and 
 grandeur. The strongest feeling one has as he stops 
 half way up to look about him, is the ludicrous dis- 
 proportion between it and the size of the inhabiting 
 animals. I should smile to see any man ascend such 
 a staircase, except, perhaps, Napoleon. 
 
 Passing through a kind of entrance-hall, I came to 
 a spacious salle ronde, lighted from the ceiling, and 
 hung principally with pictures of a large size, one of 
 the most conspicuous of which, " The Wreck," has 
 been copied by an American artist, Mr. Cooke, and 
 is now exhibiting in New York. It is one of the best 
 of the French school, and very powerfully conceived. 
 I regret, however, that he did not prefer the wonder- 
 fully fine piece opposite, which is worth all the pic- 
 tures ever painted in France, " The Marriage Supper 
 at Cana." The left wing of the table, projected tow- 
 ard the spectator, with the seven or eight guests 
 who occupy it, absolutely stands out into the hall. 
 It seems impossible that color and drawing upon a flat 
 surface can so cheat the eye. 
 
 From the salle ronde on the right opens the grand 
 gallery, which, after the lesson I had just received in 
 perspective, I took, at the first glance, to be a paint- 
 ing. You will realize the facility of the deception 
 when you consider that, with a breadth of but forty- 
 two feet, this gallery is one thousand three hundred 
 and thirty-two feet (more than a quarter of a mile) in 
 length. The floor is of tesselated woods, polished 
 with wax like a table ; and along its glassy surface 
 were scattered perhaps a hundred visiters, gazing at 
 the pictures in varied attitudes, and with sizes reduced 
 in proportion to their distance, the farthest off looking 
 in the long perspective like pigmies of the most dimin- 
 utive description. It is like a matchless painting to 
 the eye after all. The ceiling is divided by nine or 
 ten arches, standing each on four Corinthian columns, 
 projecting into the area, and the natural perspective 
 of these, and the artists scattered from oue end to the 
 other, copying silently at their easels ; and a soldier 
 at every division, standing upon his guard, quite as 
 silent and motionless, would make it difficult to con- 
 vince a spectator, who was led blindfold and unpre- 
 pared to the entrance, that it was not some superb 
 diorama, figures and all. 
 
 I found our distinguished countryman, Morse, copy- 
 ing a beautiful! Murillo at the end of the gallery. H« 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 is also engaged upon a Raffaelle for Cooper, the nov- 
 elist. Among; the French artists, I noticed several 
 soldiers, and some twenty or thirty females, the latter 
 with every mark in their countenances of absorbed 
 and extreme application. There was a striking differ- 
 ence in this respect between them and the artists of 
 the other sex. With the single exception of a lovely 
 girl, drawing from a Madonna, by Guido, and pro- 
 tected by the presence of an elderly companion, these 
 lady-painters were anything but interesting in their 
 appearance. 
 
 Greenough, the sculptor, is in Paris, and engaged 
 just now in taking the bust of an Italian lady. His 
 reputation is very enviable ; and his passion for his 
 art, together with his untiring industry and his fine 
 natural powers, will work him up to something that 
 will, before long, be an honor to our country. If the 
 wealthy men of taste in America would give Green- 
 ough liberal orders for his time and talents, and send 
 out Augur, of New Haven, to Italy, they would do 
 more to advance this glorious art in our country, than 
 by expending ten times the sum in any other way. 
 They are both men of rare genius, and both ardent 
 and diligent, and they are both cramped by the uni- 
 versal curse of genius — necessity. The Americans in 
 Paris are deliberating at present on some means for 
 expressing unitedly to our government their interest 
 in Greenough, and their appreciation of his merit of 
 public and private patronage. For the love of true 
 taste, do everything in your power to second such an 
 appeal when it comes. 
 
 It is a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner. 
 One can not realize long at a time how his face or his 
 manners should have become peculiar ; and after look- 
 ing at a print for five minutes in a shop-window, or 
 dipping into an English book, or in any manner throw- 
 ing off the mental habit of the instant, the curious gaze 
 of the passer-by, or the accent of a strange language, 
 strikes one very singularly. Paris is full of foreigners 
 of all nations, and of course physiognomies of all char- 
 acters may be met everywhere ; but, differing as the 
 European nations do decidedly from each other, they 
 differ still more from the American. Our country- 
 men, as a class, are distinguishable wherever they are 
 met ; not as Americans however, for of the habits and 
 manners of our country, people know nothing this 
 side the water. But there is something in an Ameri- 
 can face, of which I never was aware till I met them 
 in Europe, that is altogether peculiar. The French 
 take the Americans to be English ; but an English- 
 man, while he presumes him his countryman, shows 
 a curiosity to know who he is, which is very foreign 
 to his usual indifference. As far as I can analyze it, 
 V is the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man 
 unused to look up to any one as his superior in rank, 
 united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative ex- 
 pression which is the index to our national character. 
 The first is seldom possessed in England but by a man 
 of decided rank, and the latter is never possessed by an 
 Englishman at all. The two are united in no other 
 nation. Nothing is easier than to tell the rank of 
 an Englishman, and nothing puzzles a European 
 more than to know how to rate the pretensions of an 
 American. 
 
 On my way home from the Boulevards this even- 
 ing, 1 was fortunate enough to pass through the grand 
 court of the Louvre, at the moment when the moon 
 broke through the clouds that have concealed her own 
 light and the sun's ever since I have been in France. 
 I had often stopped, in passing the sentinels at the 
 entrance, to admire the grandeur of the interior to this 
 oldest of the royal palaces ; but to-night, my dead halt 
 within the shadow of the arch, as the view broke upon 
 my eye, and my sudden exclamation in English, star- 
 
 tled the grenadier, and he had half presented his mus- 
 ket, when I apologized, and passed on. It was magic- 
 ally beautiful indeed ! and with the moonlight pouring 
 obliquely into the sombre area, lying full upon the 
 taller of the three facades, and drawing its soft line 
 across the rich windows and massive pilasters and 
 arches of the eastern and western, while the remain- 
 ing front lay in the heavy black shadow of relief, it 
 seemed to me more like an accidental regularity in 
 some rocky glen of America, than a pile of human 
 design and proportion. It is strange how such high 
 walls shut out the world. The court of the Louvre is 
 in the very centre of the busiest quarter of Paris, thou- 
 sands of people passing and repassing constantly at the 
 extremity of the long arched entrances, and yet, stand- 
 ing on the pavement of that lonely court, no living 
 creature in sight but the motionless grenadiers at 
 either gate, the noises without coming to your ear in 
 a subdued murmur, like the wind on the sea, and 
 nothing visible above but the sky, resting like a ceil- 
 ing on the lofty walls, the impression of utter solitude 
 is irresistible. I passed out by the archway for which 
 Napoleon constructed his bronze gates, said to be the 
 most magnificent of modern times, and which are now 
 lying in some obscure corner unused, no succeeding 
 power having had the spirit or the will to complete, even 
 by the slight labor that remained, his imperial design. 
 All over Paris you may see similar instances; they 
 meet you at every step : glorious plans defeated ; 
 works, that with a mere moiety of what has been 
 already expended in their progress, might be finished 
 with an effect that none but a mind like Napoleon's 
 could have originally projected. 
 
 Paris, of course, is rife with politics. There is but 
 one opinion on the subject of another pending revo- 
 lution. The "people's king" is about as unpopular 
 as he need be for the purposes of his enemies ; and 
 he has aggravated the feeling against him very un- 
 necessarily by his late project in the Tuileries. The 
 whole thing is very characteristic of the French peo- 
 ple. He might have deprived them of half their civil 
 rights without immediate resistance ; but to cut off a 
 strip of the public garden to make a play-ground for 
 his children — to encroach a hundred feet on the pride 
 of Paris, the daily promenade of the idlers, who do all 
 the discussion of his measures, it was a little too ven- 
 turesome. Unfortunately, too, the offence is in the 
 very eye of curiosity, and the workmen are surround- 
 ed, from morning till night, by thousands of people, 
 of all classes, gesticulating, and looking at the palace- 
 windows, and winding themselves gradually up to the 
 revolutionary pitch. 
 
 In the event of an explosion, the liberal party will 
 not want partisans, for France is crowded with refu- 
 gees from tyranny of every nation. The Poles are 
 flocking hither every day, and the streets are full of 
 their melancholy faces ! Poor fellows ! they suffer 
 dreadfully from want. The public charity for refu- 
 gees has been wrung dry long ago, and the most he- 
 roic hearts of Poland, after having lost everything but 
 life, in their unavailing struggle, are starving abso- 
 lutely in the streets. Accident has thrown me into 
 the confidence of a well-known liberal — one of those 
 men of whom the proud may ask assistance without 
 humiliation, and circumstances have thus come to my 
 knowledge, which would move a heart of stone. The 
 fictitious sufferings of " Thaddeus of Warsaw," are 
 transcended in real-life misery every day, and by na- 
 tures quite as noble. Lafayette, I am credibly as- 
 sured, has anticipated several years of his income in 
 relieving them ; and no possible charity could be so 
 well bestowed as contributions for the Poles, starving 
 in these heartless cities. 
 
 I have just heard that Chodsko, a Pole, of distin- 
 guished talent and learning, who threw his whole for- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 tune and energy into the late attempted revolution, 
 was arrested here last night, with eight others of his 
 countrymen, under suspicions by the government. 
 The late serious insurrection at Lyons has alarmed 
 the king, and the police is exceedingly strict. The 
 Spanish and Italian refugees, who receive pensions 
 from France, have been ordered off to the provincial 
 towns, by the minister of the interior, and there is 
 every indication of extreme and apprehensive caution. 
 The papers, meantime, are raving against the ministry 
 in the most violent terms, and the king is abused, with- 
 out qualification, everywhere. We apprehend oppres- 
 sive measures in our country with sufficient indigna- 
 tion and outcry; but to see the result upon those who 
 bear their burdens till they are galled into the bone, is 
 enough to fire the most unwilling blood to resentment. 
 The irresistible enthusiasm to which one is kindled by 
 contact with an oppressed people, loses here all the 
 pleasure of a fine excitement, by the painfulness of the 
 sympathies it causes with it. Thank God ! our own 
 country is yet free from the scourges of Europe ! 
 
 I went, a night or two since, to one of the minor 
 theatres to see the representation of a play, which has 
 been performed for the hundredth and second time ! — 
 " Napoleon at Schoenbrun and St. Helena." My ob- 
 ject was to study the feelings of the people toward 
 Napoleon II., as the exile's love for his son is one of 
 the leading features of the piece. It was beautifully 
 played — most beautifully ! and I never saw more en- 
 thusiasm manifested by an audience. Every allusion 
 of Napoleon to his child, was received with that under- 
 toned, guttural acclamation, that expresses such deep 
 feeling in a crowd ; and the piece is so written, that its 
 natural pathos alone is irresistible. No one could 
 doubt, for an instant, it seems to me, that the en- 
 trance of young Napoleon into France, at any critical 
 moment, would be universally and completely trium- 
 phant. The great cry at Lyons was, " Five Napoleon 
 
 I have altered my arrangements a little, in conse- 
 quence of the state of feeling here. My design was 
 to go to Italy immediately, but affairs promise such an 
 interesting and early change, that I shall pass the win- 
 ter in Paris. 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 TAGLIONI FRENCH STAGE, ETC. 
 
 I went last night to the French opera, to see the 
 first dancer of the world. The prodigious enthusiasm 
 about her all over Europe had, of course, raised my 
 expectations to the highest possible pitch. " Have you 
 seen TaglioniV is the first question addressed to a 
 stranger in Paris ; and you hear her name constantly 
 over all the hum of the cafes, and in the crowded re- 
 sorts of fashion. The house was overflowed. The 
 king and his numerous family were present ; and my 
 companion pointed out to me many of the nobility, 
 whose names and titles have been made familiar to our 
 ears by the innumerable private memoirs and auto- 
 biographies of the day. After a little introductory 
 piece, the king arrived, and, as soon as the cheering 
 was over, the curtain drew up for " Le Dieu et la Bay- 
 adere." This is the piece in which Taglioni is most 
 famous. She takes the part of a dancing girl, of 
 whom the Bramah and an Indian prince are both en- 
 amored ; the former in the disguise of a man of low 
 rank at the court of the latter, in search of some one 
 whose love for him shall be disinterested. The dis- 
 guised god succeeds in winning her affection, and af- 
 ter testing her devotion by submitting for a while to the 
 
 resentment of his rival, and by a pretended caprice in 
 favor of a singing girl, who accompanies her, he mar- 
 ries her, and then saves her from the flames as she is 
 about to be burned for marrying beneath her caste. 
 Taglioni's part is all pantomime. She does not speak 
 during the play, but her motion is more than ar- 
 ticulate. Her first appearance was in a troop of Indian 
 dancing girls, who performed before the prince in the 
 public square. At a signal from the vizier a side pa- 
 vilion opened, and thirty or forty bayaderes glided out 
 together, and commenced an intricate dance. They 
 were received with a tremendous round of applause 
 from the audience; but, witli the exception of a little 
 more elegance in the four who led the dance, they were 
 dressed nearly alike; and, as I saw no particularly con- 
 spicuous figure, I presumed that Taglioni had not yet 
 appeared. The splendor of the spectacle bewildered 
 me for the first moment or two, but I presently found 
 my eyes riveted to a childish creature floating about 
 among the rest, and, taking her for some beautiful 
 young eleve making her first essays in the chorus, I 
 interpreted her extraordinary fascination as a triumph 
 of nature over my unsophisticated taste ; and wondered 
 to myself whether, after all, I should be half so much 
 captivated with the show of skill I expected presently 
 to witness. This was Taglioni! She came forward 
 directly, in a pas seul, and I then observed that her 
 dress was distinguished from that of her companions 
 by its extreme modesty both of fashion and ornament, 
 and the unconstrained ease with which it adapted itself 
 to her shape and motion. She looks not more than 
 fifteen. Her figure is small, but rounded to the very 
 last degree of perfection ; not a muscle swelled beyond 
 the exquisite outline ; not an angle, not a fault. Her 
 back and neck, those points so rarely beautiful in wo- 
 man, are faultlessly formed ; her feet and hands are in 
 full proportion to her size, and the former play as freely 
 and with as natural a yieldingness in her fairy slippers, as 
 if they were accustomed only to the dainty uses of a 
 drawing-room. Her face is most strangely interesting ; 
 not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half- 
 retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with 
 the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of a 
 young girl just "out" in a circle of high fashion. In 
 her greatest exertions her features retain the same 
 timid half smile, and she returns to the alternate by 
 play of her part without the slightest change of color, 
 or the slightest perceptible difference in her breathing, 
 or the ease of her look and posture. No language 
 can describe her motion. She swims in your eye like 
 a curl of smoke, or a flake of down. Her difficulty 
 seems to be to keep to the floor. You have that feel- 
 ing while you gaze upon her, that if she were to rise 
 and float away like Ariel, you would scarce be sur- 
 prised. And yet all is done with such a childish un- 
 consciousness of admiration, such a total absence of 
 exertion or fatigue, that the delight with which she 
 fills you is unmingled, and, assured as you are by the 
 perfect purity of every look and attitude, that her hith- 
 erto spotless reputation is deserved beyond a breath of 
 suspicion, you leave her with as much respect as ad- 
 miration ; and find with surprise that a dancing-girl, 
 who is exposed night after night to the profaning gaze 
 of the world, has crept into one of the most sacred 
 niches of your memory. 
 
 I have attended several of the best theatres in Pans, 
 and find one striking trait in all their first actors— nature. 
 They do not look like actors, and their playing is not 
 like acting. They are men, generally, of the most 
 earnest, unstudied simplicity of countenance ; and 
 when they come upon the stage it is singularly with- 
 out affectation, and as the character they represent 
 would appear. Unlike most of the actors I have seen, 
 too, they seem altogether unaware of the presence of 
 the audience. Nothing disturbs the fixed attention 
 
10 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 they give to each other in the dialogue, and no private 
 interview between simple and sincere men could be 
 more unconscious and natural. I have formed con- 
 sequently a high opinion of the French drama, degen- 
 erate as it is said to be since the loss of Talma; and it 
 is easy to see that the root of its excellence is in the 
 taste and judgment of the people. They applaud ju- 
 diciously. When Taglioni danced her wonderful pas 
 seul, for instance, the applause was general and suf- 
 ficient. It was a triumph of art, and she was applauded 
 as an artist. But when, as the neglected bayadere, 
 she stole from the corner of the cottage, and with her 
 indescribable grace, hovered about the couch of the 
 disguised Bramah, watching and fanning him while he 
 slept, she expressed so powerfully by^the saddened 
 tenderness of her manner, the devotion of a love that 
 even neglect could not estrange, that a murmur of de- 
 light ran through the whole house ; and when her si- 
 lent pantomime was interrupted by the waking of the 
 god, there was an overwhelming tumult of acclama- 
 tion that came from the hearts of the audience, and as 
 such must have been both a lesson, and the highest 
 compliment to Taglioni. An actor's taste is of course 
 very much regulated by that of his audience. He 
 will cultivate that for which he is most praised. We 
 shall never have a high-toned drama in America, while, 
 as at present, applause is won only by physical exer- 
 tion, and the nice touches of genius and nature pass 
 undetected and unfelt. 
 
 Of the French actresses T have been most pleased 
 with Leontine Fay. She is not much talked of here, 
 and perhaps, as a mere artist in her profession, is in- 
 ferior to those who are more popular; but she has that 
 indescribable something in her face that has interested 
 me through life — that strange talisman which is linked 
 wisely to every heart, confining its interest to some 
 nice difference invisible to other eyes, and, by a happy 
 consequence, undisputed by other admiration. She, 
 too, has that retired sweetness of look that seems to 
 come only from secluded habits, and in the highly- 
 wrought passages of tragedy, when her fine dark eyes 
 are filled with tears, and her tones, which have never 
 the out-of-doors key of the stage, are clouded and im- 
 perfect, she seems less an actress than a refined and 
 lovely woman, breaking through the habitual reserve 
 of society in some agonizing crisis of real life. There 
 are prints of Leontine Fay in the shops, and I have 
 seen them in America, but they resemble her very 
 little. 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 JOACHIM LELEWEL — PALAIS ROYAL PEHE LA CHAISE 
 
 VERSAILLES, ETC. 
 
 I met at a breakfast party, to-day, Joachim Lelewel, 
 the celebrated scholar and patriot of Poland. Having 
 fallen in with a great deal of revolutionary and emi- 
 grant society since I have been in Paris, 1 have often 
 heard his name, and looked forward to meeting him 
 with high pleasure and curiosity. His writings are 
 passionately admired by his countrymen. He was 
 the principal of the university, idolized by that effec- 
 tive part of the population, the students of Poland ; 
 and the fearless and lofty tone of his patriotic princi- 
 ples is said to have given the first and strongest mo- 
 mentum to the ill-fated struggle just over. Lelewel 
 impressed me very strongly." Unlike most of the 
 Poles, who are erect, athletic, and florid, he is thin, 
 bent, and pale ; and were it not for the fire and decision 
 of his eye, his uncertain gait and sensitive address 
 would convey an expression almost of timidity. His 
 
 form, features, and manners, are very like those of 
 Percival, the American poet, though their counte 
 nances are marked with the respective difference of 
 their habits of mind. Lelewel looks like a naturally 
 modest, shrinking man, worked up to the calm reso- 
 lution of a martyr. The strong stamp of his face ia 
 devoted enthusiasm. His eye is excessively bright, 
 but quiet and habitually downcast ; his lips are set 
 firmly, but without effort, together; and his voice is 
 almost sepulchral, it is so low and calm. He never 
 breaks through his melancholy, though his refugee 
 countrymen, except when Poland is alluded to, have 
 all the vivacity of French manners, and seem easily 
 to forget their misfortunes. He was silent, except 
 when particularly addressed, and had the air of a man 
 who thought himself unobserved, and had shrunk into 
 his own mind. I felt that he was winning upon my 
 heart every moment. I never saw a man in my life 
 whose whole air and character were so free from self- 
 consciousness or pretension — never one who looked 
 to me so capable of the calm, lofty, unconquerable 
 heroism of a martyr. 
 
 "Paris is the centre of the world," if centripetal 
 tendency is any proof of it. Everything struck off 
 from the other parts of the universe flies straight to 
 the Palais Royal. You may meet in its thronged 
 galleries, in the course of an hour, representatives of 
 every creed, rank, nation, and system, under heaven. 
 Hussein Pacha and Don Pedro pace daily the same 
 pave — the one brooding on a kingdom lost, the other 
 on the throne he hopes to win ; the Polish general and 
 the proscribed Spaniard, the exiled Italian conspirator, 
 the contemptuous Turk, the well-dressed negro from 
 Hayti, and the silk-robed Persian, revolve by the horn 
 together round the same jet d'cau, and costumes of 
 every cut and order, mustaches and beards of every 
 degree of ferocity and oddity, press so fast and thick 
 upon the eye that one forgets to be astonished. There 
 are no such things as "lions" in Paris. The extraor- 
 dinary persons outnumber the ordinary. Every other 
 man you meet would keep a small town in a ferment 
 for a month. 
 
 I spent yesterday at Pere la Chaise, and to-day at 
 Versailles. The two places are in opposite environs, 
 and of very opposite characters — one certainly making 
 you in love with life, the other almost as certainly with 
 death. One could wander for ever in the wilderness 
 of art at Versailles, and it must be a restless ghost that 
 could not content itself with Pere la Chaise for its 
 elysium. 
 
 This beautiful cemetery is built upon the broad 
 ascent of a hill, commanding the whole of Paris at a 
 glance. It is a wood of small trees, laid out in alleys, 
 and crowded with tombs and monuments of every pos- 
 sible description. You will scarce get through it 
 without being surprised into a tear ; but if affectation 
 and fantasticalness in such a place do not more grieve 
 than amuse you, you will much oftener smile. The 
 whole thing is a melancholy mock of life. Its distinc- 
 tions are all kept up. There are the fashionable ave- 
 nues, lined with costly chapels and monuments, with 
 the names of the exclusive tenants in golden letters 
 upon the doors, iron railings set forbiddingly about 
 the shrubs, and the blessing-scrap writ ambitiously in 
 Latin. The tablets record the long family titles, and 
 the offices and honors, perhaps the numberless virtues 
 of the dead. They read like chapters of heraldry 
 more than like epitaphs. It is a relief to get into the 
 outer alleys, and see how poverty and simple feeling 
 express what should be the same thing. It is usually 
 some brief sentence, common enough, but often ex- 
 quisitely beautiful in this prettiest of languages, and 
 expressing always the kind of sorrow felt by the 
 mourner. You can tell, for instance, by the senli 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 11 
 
 ment simply, without looking at the record below, 
 whether the deceased was young, or much loved, or 
 mourned by husband, or parent, or brother, or a circle 
 of all. I noticed one, however, the humblest and 
 simplest monument perhaps in the whole cemetery, 
 which left the story beautifully untold : it was a slab 
 of common marl, inscribed " Pauvre Marie /" nothing 
 more. I have thought of it, and speculated upon it, a 
 great deal since. What was she ? and who wrote her 
 epitaph? why was she pauvre Marie? 
 
 Before almost all the poorer monuments is a minia- 
 ture garden with a low wooden fence, and either the 
 initials of the dead sown in flowers, or rose-trees, care- 
 fully cultivated, trained to hang over the stone. I was 
 surprised to find in a public cemetery, in December, 
 roses in full bloom and valuable exotics at almost every 
 grave. It speaks both for the sentiment and delicate 
 principle of the people. Few of the more costly 
 monuments were either interesting or pretty. One 
 struck my fancy — a small open chapel, large enough 
 to contain four chairs, with the slab facing the door, 
 and a crucifix encircled with fresh flowers on a simple 
 shrine above. It is a place where the survivors in a 
 family might come and sit any time, nowhere more 
 pleasantly. From the chapel I speak of, you may 
 look out and see all Paris; and I can imagine how it 
 would lessen the feeling of desertion and forgetfulness 
 that makes the anticipation of death so dreadful, to be 
 certain that your friends would come, as they may 
 here, and talk cheerfully and enjoy themselves near 
 you, so to speak. The cemetery in summer must be 
 one of the sweetest places in the world. It would be 
 a sufficient inducement of itself to bring me to Paris 
 from almost any distance in another season. 
 
 Versailles is a royal summer chateau, about twelve 
 miles from Paris, with a demesne of twenty miles in 
 circumference. Take that for the scale, and imagine 
 a palace completed in proportion in all its details of 
 grounds, ornament, and architecture. It cost, says 
 the guide book, two hundred and fifty millions of dol- 
 lars; and leaving your fancy to expend that trifle over 
 a residence, which, remember, is but one out of some 
 half dozen, occupied during the year by a single 
 family, I commend the republican moral to your con- 
 sideration, and proceed with the more particular 
 description of my visit. 
 
 My friend, Dr. Howe, was my companion. We 
 drove up the grand avenue on one of the loveliest 
 mornings that ever surprised December with a bright 
 sun and a warm south wind. Before us, at the dis- 
 tance of a mile, lay a vast mass of architecture, with 
 the centre falling back between the two projecting 
 wings, the whole crowning a long and gradual ascent, 
 of which the tricolored flag waving against the sky 
 from the central turrets was the highest point. As 
 we approached, we noticed an occasional flash in 
 the sun, and a stir of bright colors through the broad 
 deep court between the wings, which, as we advanced 
 nearer, proved to be a body of about two or three 
 thousand lancers and troops of the line under review. 
 The effect was indescribably fine. The gay uniforms, 
 the hundreds of tall lances, each with its red flag flying 
 in the wind, the imposing crescent of architecture in 
 which the array was embraced, the ringing echo of 
 the grand military music from the towers, and all this 
 intoxication for the positive senses, fused with the his- 
 torical atmosphere of the place, the recollection of the 
 king and queen, whose favorite residence it had been 
 (the unfortunate Louis and Marie Antoinette), of the 
 celebrated women who had lived in their separate 
 palaces within its grounds, of the genius and chivalry 
 of court after court that had made it, in turn, the 
 scene of their brilliant follies, and, over all, Napolean, 
 *ht must have rode through its gilded gates with the 
 
 thought of pride that he was its imperial master by 
 the royalty of his great nature alone, it was in truth, 
 enough, the real and the ideal, to dazzle the eyes of a 
 simple republican. 
 
 After gazing at the fascinating show an hour, we 
 took a guide and entered the palace. We were walked 
 through suite after suite of cold apartments, deso 
 lately splendid with gold and marble, and crowded 
 with costly pictures, till I was sick and weary of mag- 
 nificence. The guide went before, saying over his 
 rapid rigmarole of names and dates, giving us about 
 three minutes to a room in which there were some 
 twenty pictures, perhaps, of which he presumed he 
 had told us all that was necessary to know. I fell be- 
 hind, after a while; and as a considerable English 
 party had overtaken and joined us, I succeeded in 
 keeping one room in the rear, and enjoying the re- 
 mainder in my own way. 
 
 The little marble palace, called "Petit Trianon.? 
 built for Madame Pompadour in the garden grounds, 
 is a beautiful affair, full of what somebody calls " af- 
 fectionate-looking rooms ;" and " Grand Trianon" 
 built also on the grounds at the distance of half a mile, 
 for Madame Maintenon, is a very lovely spot, made 
 more interesting by the preference given to it over all 
 other places by Marie Antoinette. Here she amused 
 herself with her Swiss village. The cottages and arti- 
 ficial " mountains" (ten feet high, perhaps) are exceed- 
 ingly pretty models' in miniature, and probably illustrate 
 very fairly the ideas of a palace-bred fancy upon natural 
 scenery. There are glens and grottoes, and rocky beds 
 for brooks that run at will (" les rivieres a. ro/an/e," the 
 guide called them), and trees set out upon the crags at 
 most uncomfortable angles, and every contrivance to 
 make a lovely lawn as inconveniently like nature as pos- 
 sible. The Swiss families, however, must have been 
 very amusing. Brought fresh from their wild country, 
 and set down in these pretty mock cottages, with orders 
 to live just as they did in their own mountains, they 
 must have been charmingly puzzled. In the midst of 
 the village stands an exquisite little Corinthian temple; 
 and our guide informed us that the cottage which the 
 queen occupied at her Swiss tea-parties was furnished 
 at an expense of sixty thousand francs — two not very 
 Switzer-like circumstances. 
 
 It was in the little palace of Trianon that Napoleon 
 signed his divorce from Josephine. The guide showed 
 us the room, and the table on which he wrote. I 
 have seen nothing that brought me so near Napoleon. 
 There is no place in France that could have for me a 
 greater interest. It is a little boudoir, adjoining the 
 state sleeping-room, simply furnished, and made for 
 familiar retirement, not for show. The single sofa — 
 the small round table — the enclosing, tent-like cur- 
 tains — the modest, unobtrusive elegance of ornaments 
 and furniture, give it rather the look of a retreat, 
 fashioned by the tenderness and taste of private fife, 
 than any apartment in a royal palace. I felt unwilling 
 to leave it. My thoughts were too busy. What was 
 the motive of that great man in this most affecting and 
 disputed action of his life ? That he loved Josephine 
 with his whole power of loving, no one can doubt. 
 That he was above making such a sacrifice to his am- 
 bition merely, I equally believe. There is but one 
 other principle into which it can be resolved — one 
 that has not been sufficiently weighed by those who 
 have written upon his character, but which, as a spring 
 of action, is second only to the ruling passion in the 
 bosoms of men— the desire for offspring. I can con- 
 ceive Napoleon's sacrifice of that glorious woman on 
 no other ground; and, ascribing it to this, it more 
 proves than discredits the tenderness of his great 
 nature. 
 
 After having been thridded through the palaces, we 
 had a few moments left for the ground*. They are 
 
12 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 magnificent beyond description. We know very little 
 of this thing in America, as an art; but it is one, I 
 have come to think, that, in its requisition of genius, 
 is scarce inferior to architecture. Certainly the three 
 palaces of Versailles together did not impress me so 
 much as the single view from the upper terrace of the 
 gardens. It stretches clear over the horizon. You 
 stand on a natural eminence that commands the 
 whole country, and the plan seems to you like some 
 work of the Titans. The long sweep of the avenue, 
 with a breadth of descent that at the first glance takes 
 away your breath, stretching its two lines of gigantic 
 statues and vases to the water level ; the wide, slum- 
 bering canal at its foot, carrying on the eye to the 
 horizon, like a river of an even flood lying straight 
 through the bosom of the landscape; the side avenues 
 almost as extensive ; the palaces in the distant grounds, 
 and the strange union altogether to an American, of as 
 much extent as the eye can reach, cultivated equally 
 with the trim elegance of a garden — all these, com- 
 bining together, form a spectacle which nothing but 
 nature's royalty of genius could design, and (to descend 
 ungracefully from the climax) which only the exac- 
 tions of an unnatural royalty could pay for. 
 
 I think the most forcible lesson one learns at Paris 
 is the value of time and money. I have always been 
 told, erroneously, that it was a place to waste both. 
 You could do so much with another hour, if you had 
 it, and buy so much with another dollar, if you could 
 afford it, that the reflected economy upon what you 
 can command, is inevitable. As to the worth of time, 
 for instance, there are some twelve or fourteen gratui- 
 tous lectures every day at the Sorbonne, the school of 
 medicine and the college of France, by men like Cuvicr, 
 Say, Spurzheim, and others, each in his professed 
 pursuit, the most eminent perhaps in the world ; and 
 there are the Louvre, and the Royal Library, and the 
 Mazarin Library, and similar public institutions, all 
 open to gratuitous use, with obsequious attendants, 
 warm rooms, materials for writing, and perfect seclu- 
 sion ; to say nothing of the thousand interesting but 
 less useful resorts with which Paris abounds, such as 
 exhibitions of flowers, porcelains, mosaics, and curious 
 handiwork of every description, and (more amusing 
 and time-killing still) the never-ending changes of 
 eights in the public places, from distinguished foreign- 
 ers down to miracles of educated monkeys. Life 
 seems most provokingly short as you look at it. Then, 
 for money, you are more puzzled how to spend a poor 
 pitiful franc in Paris (it will buy so many things you 
 want) than you would be in America with the outlay 
 of a month's income. Be as idle and extravagant as 
 you will, your idle hours look you in the face as they 
 pass, to know whether, in spite of the increase of their 
 value, you really mean to waste them ; and the money 
 that slipped through your pocket you know not how 
 at home, sticks embarrassed to your fingers, from the 
 mere multiplicity of demands made for it. There are 
 shops all over Paris called the " Vingt-cinq-sous,'''' 
 where every article is fixed at that price — twenty-five 
 cents ! They contain everything you want, except a 
 wife and fire-wood — the only two things difficult to be 
 got in France. (The latter, with or without a pun, is 
 much the dearer of the two.) I wonder that they are not 
 bought out, and sent over to America on speculation. 
 There is scarce an article in them that would not be 
 held cheap with us at five times its purchase. There 
 are bronze standishes for ink, sand, and wafers, pearl 
 paper-cutters, spice-lamps, decanters, essence-bottles, 
 sets of china, table-bells of all devices, mantel orna- 
 ments, vases of artificial flowers, kitchen utensils, dog- 
 collars, canes, guard-chains, chessmen, whips, ham- 
 mers, brushes, and everything that is either convenient 
 or pretty. You might freight a ship with them, and 
 all good and well finished, at twenty-five cents the set 
 
 or article ! You would think the man was joking, to 
 walk through his shop. 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 DR. BOWRING AMERICAN ARTISTS BRUTAL AMUSE- 
 MENT, ETC. 
 
 I have met Dr. Bowring in Paris, and called upon 
 him to-day with Mr. Morse, by appointment. The 
 translator of the "Ode to the Deity" (from the Rus- 
 sian of Derzzhavin) could not by any accident be an 
 ordinary man, and I anticipated great pleasure in his 
 society. He received us at his lodgings in the Place 
 Vendome. I was every way pleased with him. His 
 knowledge of our country and its literature surprised 
 me, and I could not but be gratified with the unpreju- 
 diced and well-informed interest with which he dis- 
 coursed on our government and institutions. He ex- 
 pressed great pleasure at having seen his ode in one 
 of our schoolbooks (Pierpont's Reader, I think), and 
 i assured us that the promise to himself of a visit to 
 ! America was one of his brightest anticipations. This 
 t is not at all an uncommon feeling, by the way, among 
 I the men of talent in Paris ; and I am pleasingly sur- 
 prised, everywhere, with the enthusiastic hopes ex- 
 I pressed for the success of our experiment in liberal 
 ' principles. Dr. Bowring is a slender man, a little 
 j above the middle height, with a keen, inquisitive ex- 
 ; pression of countenance, and a good forehead, from 
 j which the hair is combed straight back all round, in 
 ! the style of the Cameronians. His manner is all life, 
 I and his motion and gesture nervously sudden and an- 
 gular. He talks rapidly, but clearly, and uses beauti- 
 ful language — concise, and full of select expressions 
 and vivid figures. His conversation in this particular 
 was a constant surprise. He gave us a great deal of 
 information, and when we parted, inquired my route 
 of travel, and offered me letters to his friends, with a 
 cordiality very unusual on this side the Atlantic. 
 
 It is a cold but common rule with travellers in 
 Europe to avoid the society of their own country- 
 men. In a city like Paris, where time and money 
 are both so valuable, every additional acquaintance, 
 pursued either for etiquette or intimacy, is felt, and 
 one very soon learns to prefer his advantage to any 
 tendency of his sympathies. The infractions upon 
 the rule, however, are very delightful, and at the gen- 
 eral reunion at our ambassador's on Wednesday even- 
 ing, or an occasional one at Lafayette's, the look of 
 pleasure and relief at beholding familiar faces, and 
 hearing a familiar language once more, is universal. 
 I have enjoyed this morning the double happiness of 
 meeting an American circle, around an American 
 breakfast. Mr. Cooper had invited us (Morse, the 
 artist, Dr. Howe, a gentleman of the navy, and my- 
 self). Mr. C. lives with great hospitality, and in all 
 the comfort of American habits ; and to find him, as 
 he is always found, with his large family about him, 
 is to get quite back to the atmosphere of our country. 
 The two or three hours we passed at his table were, 
 of course, delightful. It should endear Mr. Cooper 
 to the hearts of his countrymen, that he devotes all his 
 influence, and no inconsiderable portion of his large 
 income, to the encouragement of American artists. It 
 would be natural enough, after being so long abroad, 
 to feel or affect a preference for the works of foreign- 
 ers ; but in this, as in his political opinions, most de- 
 cidedly, he is eminently patriotic. We feel this in 
 Europe, where we discern more clearly by comparison 
 the poverty of our country in the arts, and meet, at the 
 same time, American artists of the first talent, without 
 a single commission from home for original works, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 13 
 
 copying constantly for support. One of Mr. Cooper's 
 purchases, the " Cherubs," by Greenough, has been 
 sent to the United States, and its merit was at once 
 acknowledged. It was done, however (the artist, who 
 is here, informs me), under every disadvantage of feel- 
 ing and circumstances ; and, from what I have seen 
 and am told by others of Mr. Greenough, it is, I am 
 confident, however beautiful, anything but a fair spe- 
 cimen of his powers. His peculiar taste lies in a 
 bolder range, and he needs only a commission from 
 government to execute a work which will begin the 
 art of sculpture nobly in our country. 
 
 My curiosity led me into a strange scene to-day. I 
 had observed for some time among the affiches upon 
 the walls an advertisement of an exhibition of "fight- 
 ing animals," at the Barriere du Combat. I am dis- 
 posed to see almost any sight once, particularly where 
 it is, like this, a regular establishment, and, of course, 
 an exponent of the popular taste. The place of the 
 " Combats des Animavx," is in one of the most ob- 
 scure suburbs, outside the walls, and I found it with 
 difficulty. After wandering about in dirty lanes for 
 an hour or two, inquiring for it in vain, the cries of the 
 animals directed me to a walled place, separated from 
 the other houses of the suburb, at the gate of which a 
 man was blowing a trumpet. I purchased a ticket of 
 an old woman, who sat shivering in the porter's lodge ; 
 and, finding I was an hour too early for the fights, I 
 made interest with a savage-looking fellow, who was 
 carrying in tainted meat, to see the interior of the es- 
 tablishment. I followed him through a side gate, and 
 we passed into a narrow alley, lined with stone ken- 
 nels, to each of which was confined a powerful dog, 
 with just length of chain enough to prevent him from 
 reaching the tenant of the opposite hole. There were 
 several of these alleys, containing, I should think, two 
 hundred dogs in all. They were of every breed of 
 strength and ferocity, and all of them perfectly frantic 
 with rage or hunger, with the exception of a pair of 
 noble-looking black dogs, who stood calmly at the 
 mouths of their kennels: the rest struggled and howl- 
 ed incessantly, straining every muscle to reach us, and 
 resuming their fierceness toward each other when we 
 had passed by. They all bore, more or less, the 
 marks of severe battles ; one or two with their noses 
 split open, and still unhealed ; several with their necks 
 bleeding and raw, and galled constantly with the iron 
 collar, and many with broken legs, but all apparently 
 so excited as to be insensible to suffering. After fol- 
 lowing my guide very unwillingly through the several 
 alleys, deafened with the barking and howling of the 
 savage occupants, I was taken to the department of 
 wild animals. Here were all the tenants of the men- 
 agerie, kept in dens, opening by iron doors upon the 
 pit in which they fought. Like the dogs, they were 
 terribly wounded ; one of the bears especially, whose 
 mouth was torn all off from his jaws, leaving his teeth 
 perfectly exposed, and red with the continually ex- 
 uding blood. In one of the dens lay a beautiful deer, 
 with one of his haunches severely mangled, who, the 
 man told me, had been hunted round the pit by the 
 dogs but a day or two before. He looked up at us, 
 with his large soft eye, as we passed, and lying on the 
 <lamp stone floor, with his undressed wounds festering 
 in the chilly atmosphere of mid-winter : he presented 
 a picture of suffering which made me ashamed to the 
 smil ot my idle curiosity. 
 
 The spectators began to collect, and the pit was 
 
 lT"v ?7° thirds of those in the amphitheatre 
 were hnghshmen, most of whom were amateurs, who 
 
 hr ^°? g J lt d ? g 1 ° f ,heir own to P" a ? ainst ^ regu- 
 nateES f . * hC establishme »<- These were des- 
 
 ?o lar in? * ^ Stn l nge d °" W3S brou S ht in b y the 
 ta»S and J 00Sec} ln tb -e arena, and a trained dog let 
 ■ upon him. It was a cruel business. The sleek, 
 
 well-fed, good-natured animal was no match for the 
 exasperated, hungry savage, he was compelled to en- 
 counter. One minute, in all the joy of a release from 
 his chain, bounding about the pit, and fawning upon 
 his master, and the next attacked by a furious mastiff, 
 who was taught to fasten on him at the first onset in a 
 way that deprived him at once of his strength ; it was 
 but a murderous exhibition of cruelty. The combats 
 between two of the trained dogs, however, were more 
 equal. These succeeded to the private contests, and 
 were much more severe and bloody. There was a 
 small terrier among them, who disabled several dogs 
 successively, by catching at their fore-legs, and break- 
 ing them instantly with a powerful jerk of his body 
 I was very much interested in one of the private dogs, 
 a large yellow animal, of a noble expression of coun- 
 tenance, who fought several times very unwillingly, 
 but always gallantly and victoriously. There was a 
 majesty about him, which seemed to awe his antago- 
 nists. He was carried off in his master's arms, bleed- 
 ing and exhausted, after severely punishing the best 
 dogs of the establishment. 
 
 The baiting of the wild animals succeeded the can- 
 ine combats. Several dogs (Irish, I was told), of a 
 size and ferocity such as I had never before seen, 
 were brought in, and held in the leash opposite the 
 den of the bear whose head was so dreadfully man- 
 gled. 
 
 The door was then opened by the keeper, but poor 
 bruin shrunk from the contest. The dogs became 
 unmanageable at the sight of him, however, and fas- 
 tening a chain to his collar, they drew him out by 
 main force, and immediately closed the grating. He 
 fought gallantly, and gave more wounds than he re- 
 ceived, for his shaggy coat protected his body effectu- 
 ally. The keepers rushed in and beat oft' the dogs, 
 when they had nearly finished peeling the remaining 
 flesh from his head ; and the poor creature, perfectly 
 blind and mad with pain, was dragged into his den 
 again, to await another day of amusement ! 
 
 I will not disgust you with more of these details. 
 They fought several foxes and wolves afterward, and 
 last of all, one of the small donkeys of the country, a 
 creature not so large as some of the dogs, was led in, 
 and the mastiffs loosed upon her. The pity and in- 
 dignation I felt at first at the cruelty of baiting so un- 
 warlike an animal, I soon found was quite unnecessa- 
 ry. She was the severest opponent the dogs had vet 
 found. She went round the arena at full gallop, with 
 a dozen savage animals springing at her throat, but 
 she struck right and left with her fore-legs, and at 
 every kick with her heels threw one of them clear 
 across the pit. One or two were left motionless on 
 the field, and others carried off with their ribs kicked 
 in, and their legs broken, while their inglorious antag- 
 onist escaped almost unhurt. One of the mastiffs 
 fastened on her ear and threw her down, in the begin- 
 ning of the chase, but she apparently received no other 
 injury. 
 
 I had remained till the close of the exhibition with 
 some violence to my feelings, and I was very glad to 
 get away. Nothing would tempt me to expose myself 
 to a similar disgust again. How the intelligent and 
 gentlemanly Englishmen whom I saw there, and whom 
 I have since met in the most refined society of Paris, 
 can make themselves familiar, as they evidently were, 
 with a scene so brutal, I can not very well conceive. 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 MALIBRAN PARIS AT MIDNIGHT A MOB, ETC. 
 
 Our beautiful and favorite Malibran is playing in 
 Paris this winter. I saw her last night in Desdemona, 
 
)4 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 The other theatres are so attractive, between Taglioni, 
 Robert le Diable (the new opera), Leontine Fay, and 
 the political pieces constantly coming out, that I had 
 not before visited the Italian opera. Madame Mal- 
 ibran is every way changed. She sings, unquestion- 
 ably, better than when in America. Her voice is 
 firmer, and more under control, but it has lost that 
 gushing wildness, that brilliant daringness of execu- 
 tion, that made her singing upon our boards so indes- 
 cribably exciting and delightful. Her person is per- 
 haps still more changed- The round, graceful ful- 
 ness of her limbs and features has yielded to a half- 
 haggard look of care and exhaustion, and I could not 
 but think that there was more than Desdemona's ficti- 
 tious wretchedness in the expression of her face. 
 Still, her forehead and eyes have a beauty that is not 
 readily lost, and she will be a strikingly interesting, 
 and even splendid creature, as long as she can play. 
 Her acting was extremely impassioned ; and in the 
 more powerful passages of her part, she exceeded 
 everything I had conceived of the capacity of the hu- 
 man voice for pathos and melody. The house was 
 crowded, and the applause was frequent and univer- 
 sal. 
 
 Madame Malibran, as you probably know, is di- 
 vorced from the man whose name she bears, and has 
 married a violinist of the Italian orchestra. She is just 
 now in a state of health that will require immediate 
 retirement from the stage, and, indeed, has played al- 
 ready too long. She came forward after the curtain 
 dropped, in answer to the continual demand of the au- 
 dience, leaning heavily on Rubini, and was evidently 
 so exhausted as to be scarcely able to stand. She 
 made a single gesture, and was led off immediately, 
 with her head drooping on her breast, amid the most 
 violent acclamations. She is a perfect passion with 
 the French, and seems to have out-charmed their 
 usual caprice. 
 
 It was a lovely night, and after the opera I walked 
 home. I reside a long distance from the places of 
 public amusement. Dr. Howe and myself had stop- 
 ped at a cafe on the Italian Boulevards an hour, and 
 it was very late. The streets were nearly deserted — 
 here and there a solitary cabriolet with the driver 
 asleep under his wooden apron, or the motionless fig- 
 ure of a municipal guardsman, dozing upon his horse, 
 with his helmet and brazen armor glistening in the 
 light of the lamps. Nothing has impressed me more, 
 by the way, than a body of these men passing me in 
 the night. I have once or twice met the king return- 
 ing from the theatre with a guard, and I saw them 
 once at midnight on an extraordinary patrol winding 
 through the arch into the Place Carrousel. Their 
 equipments are exceedingly warlike (helmets of brass, 
 and coats of mail), and with the gleam of the breast- 
 plates through their horsemen's cloaks, the tramp of 
 hoofs echoing through the deserted streets, and the 
 silence and order of their march, it was quite a real- 
 ization of the descriptions of chivalry. 
 
 We kept along the Boulevards to the Rue Richelieu. 
 A carriage, with footmen in livery, had just driven up 
 to Frascati's, and, as we passed, a young man of un 
 common personal beauty jumped out and entered that 
 palace of gamblers. By his dress he was just from a 
 ball, and th necessity of excitement after a scene 
 meant to be so guy, was an obvious if not a fair satire 
 on the happiness of the "gay" circle in which he ev- 
 idently moved. We turned down the Paysage Pan- 
 orama, perhaps the most crowded thoroughfare in all 
 Paris, and traversed its long gallery without meeting a 
 soul. The widely-celebrated patisserie of Felix, the 
 first pastry-cook in the world, was the only shop open 
 from one extremity to the other. The guard, in his gray 
 capote, stood looking iq at the window, and the girl, 
 
 who had served the palates of half the fashion and 
 rank of Paris since morning, sat nodding fast asleep 
 behind the counter, paying the usual fatiguing penalty 
 of notoriety. The clock struck two as we passed the 
 facade of the Bourse. This beautiful and central 
 square is, night and day, the grand rendezvous of pub- 
 lic vice ; and late as the hour was, its pave was still 
 thronged with flaunting and painted women of the 
 lowest description, promenading without cloaks or 
 bonnets, and addressing every passer-by. 
 
 The Palais Royal lay in our way, just below the 
 Bourse, and we entered its magnificent court with 
 an exclamation of new pleasure. Its thousand lamps 
 were all burning brilliantly, the long avenues of trees 
 were enveloped in a golden atmosphere created by the 
 bright radiation of light through the mist, the Corin- 
 thian pillars and arches retreated on either side from 
 the eye in distinct and yet mellow perspective, the 
 fountain filled the whole palace with its rich murmur, 
 and the broad marble-paved galleries, so thronged by 
 day, were as silent and deserted as if the drowsy gens 
 d'armes standing motionless on their posts were the 
 only living beings that inhabited it. It was a scene 
 really of indescribable impressiveness. No one who 
 has not seen this splendid palace, enclosing with its 
 vast colonnades so much that is magnificent, can have 
 an idea of its effect upon the imagination. I had seen 
 it hitherto only when crowded with the gay and noisy 
 idlers of Paris, and the contrast of this with the utter 
 solitude it now presented — not a single footfall to be 
 heard on its floors, yet every lamp burning bright, and 
 the statues and flowers and fountains all illuminated 
 as if for a revel — was one of the most powerful and 
 captivating that I have ever witnessed. We loitered 
 slowly down one of the long galleries, and it seemed to 
 me more like some creation of enchantment than the 
 public haunt it is of pleasure and merchandise. A 
 single figure, wrapped in a cloak, passed hastily by us 
 and entered the door to one of the celebrated "hells," 
 in which the playing scarce commences till this hour 
 — but we met no other human being. 
 
 We passed on from the grand court to the Galerie 
 Nemours. This, as you may find in the descriptions, 
 is a vast hall, standing between the east and the west 
 courts of the Palais Royal. It is sometimes called 
 the " glass gallery." The roof is of glass, and the 
 shops, with fronts entirely of windows, are separated 
 only by long mirrors, reaching in the shape of pillars 
 from the roof to the floor. The pavement is tasselated, 
 and at either end stand two columns completing its 
 form, and dividing it from the other galleries into 
 which it opens. The shops are among the costliest 
 in Paris ; and what with the vast proportions of the 
 hall, its beautiful and glistening material, and the light- 
 ness and grace of its architecture, it is, even when de- 
 serted, one of the most fairy-like places in this fantas- 
 tic city. It is the lounging place of military men par- 
 ticularly ; and every evening from six to midnight, it 
 is thronged by every class of gayly dressed people, of- 
 ficers off duty, soldiers, polytechnic scholars, ladies, and 
 strangers of every costume and complexion, promen- 
 ading to and fro in the light of the cafes and the daz- 
 zling shops, sheltered completely from the weather, 
 and enjoying, without expense or ceremony, a scene 
 more brilliant than the most splendid ball-room in 
 Parish We lounged up and down the long echoing 
 pavement an hour. It was like some kingly " banquet- 
 hall deserted." The lamps burned dazzlingly bright, 
 the mirrors multiplied our figures into shadowy and 
 silent attendants, and our voices echoed from the glit- 
 tering roof in the utter stillness of the hour as if we 
 had broken in, Thalaba-like, upon some magical pal- 
 ace of silence. 
 
 It is singular how much the differences of time and 
 weather affects scenery. The first sunshine I saw in 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 15; 
 
 Paris, unsettled all my previous impressions com- 
 pletely. I had seen every place of interest through 
 the dull heavy atmosphere of a week's rain, and it was 
 in such leaden colors alone that the finer squares and 
 palaces had become familiar to me. The effect of a 
 cl^ar sun upon them was wonderful. The sudden 
 
 filding of the dome of the Invalides by Napoleon must 
 ave been something like it. 1 took advantage of it 
 to see everything over again, and it seemed to me like 
 another city. I never realized so forcibly the beauty 
 of sunshine. Architecture, particularly is nothing 
 without it. Everything looks heavy and flat. The 
 tracery of the windows and relievos, meant to be de- 
 finite and airy, appears clumsy and confused, and the 
 whole building flattens into a solid mass, without de- 
 sign or beauty. 
 
 I have spent the whole day in a Paris mob. The 
 arrival of General Romarino and some of his compan- 
 ions from Warsaw, gave the malcontents a plausible 
 opportunity of expressing their dislike to the measures 
 of government ; and, undercover of a public welcome 
 to tliis distinguished Pole, they assembled in immense 
 numbers at the Port St. Denis, and on the Boulevard 
 Montmartre. It was very exciting altogether. The 
 cavalary were out, and patroled the streets in compa- 
 nies, charging upon the crowd wherever there was a 
 stand ; the troops of the line marched up and down 
 the Boulevards, continually dividing the masses of 
 people, and forbidding any one to stand still. The 
 shops were all shut, in anticipation of an affray. The 
 students endeavored to cluster, and resisted, as far as 
 they dared, the orders of the soldiery ; and from noon 
 till night there was every prospect of a quarrel. The 
 French are a fine people under excitement. Their 
 handsome and ordinarily heartless faces become very 
 expressive under the stronger emotions ; and their 
 picturesque dresses and violent gesticulation set ofl* a 
 popular tumult exceedingly. I have been highly 
 amused all day, and have learned a great deal of what it 
 is very difficult for a foreigner to acquire — the language 
 of French passion. They express themselves very 
 forcibly when angry. The constant irritation kept up 
 by the intrusion of the cavalry upon the sidewalks, 
 and the rough manner of dispersing gentlemen by 
 sabre-blows and kicks with the stirrup, gave me suf- 
 ficient opportunity of judging. I was astonished, 
 however, that their summary mode of proceeding was 
 borne at all. It is difficult to mix in such a vast body, 
 and not catch its spirit, and I found myself, without 
 knowing why, or rather with a full conviction that the 
 military measures were necessary and right, entering 
 with all my heart into the rebellious movements of the 
 students, and boiling with indignation at every disper- 
 sion by force. The students of Paris are probably the 
 worst subjects the king has. They are mostly young 
 men of from twenty to twenty-five, full of bodily vigor 
 and enthusiasm, and excitable to tike last degree. 
 .Many of them are Germans, and no small proportion 
 Americans. They make a good amalgam for a mob, 
 dress being the last consideration, apparently, with a 
 medical or law studeut in Paris. I never saw such a 
 collection of atrocious-looking fellows as are to be 
 met at the lectures. The polytechnic scholars, on 
 the other hand, are the finest looking body of young 
 men I ever saw. Aside from their uniform, which is 
 remarkably neat and beautiful, their figures and faces 
 seem picked for spirit and manliness. They have al- 
 ways a distinguished air in a crowd, and it is easy, af- 
 ter seeing them, to imagine the part they played as 
 leaders in the revolution of the three days. 
 
 Contrary to my expectation, night came on without 
 any serious encounter. One or two individuals at- 
 tempted to resist the authority of the troops, and were 
 cons.derably bruised ; and one young man, a student, 
 had three of-his fingers cut off by the stroke of a dra- I 
 
 goon's sabre. Several were arrested, but by eight 
 o'clock all was quiet, and the shops on the Boulevards 
 once more exposed their tempting goods, and lit 
 up their brilliant mirrors without fear. The people 
 thronged to the theatres to see the political pieces, and 
 evaporate their excitement in cheers at the liberal al- 
 lusions ; and so ends a tumult that threatened danger, 
 but operated, perhaps, as a healthful event for the ac 
 cumulating disorders of public opinion. 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 GARDEN OF THE TUILERIES FASHIONABLE DRIVES 
 
 FRENCH OMNIBUSES CHEAP RIDING SIGHTS 
 
 STREET-BEGGARS IMPOSTORS, ETC. 
 
 The garden of the Tuileries is an idle man's para- 
 dise. Magnificent as it is in extent, sculptures, and 
 cultivation, we all know that statues may be too dumb, 
 gravel walks too long and level, and trees and flowers 
 and fountains a little too Platonic, with any degree of 
 beauty. But the Tuileries are peopled at all hours 
 of sunshine with, to me, the most lovely objects in the 
 world — children. You may stop a minute, perhaps, 
 to look at the thousand gold fishes in the basin under 
 the palace-windows, or follow the swans for a single 
 voyage round the fountain in the broad avenue — but 
 you will sit on your hired chair (at this season) under 
 the shelter of the sunny wall, and gaze at the children 
 chasing about, with their attending Swiss maids, till 
 your heart has outwearied your eyes, or the palace- 
 clock strikes five. I have been there repeatedly since 
 I have been in Paris, and have seen nothing like the 
 children. They move my heart always, more than 
 anything under heaven ; but a French child, with an 
 accent that all your paid masters can not give, and 
 manners, in the midst of its romping, that mock to the 
 life the air and courtesy for which Paris has a name 
 over the world, is enough to make one forget Napo- 
 leon, though the column of Vendome throws its shad- 
 ow within sound of their voices. Imagine sixty-seven 
 acres of beautiful creatures (that is the extent of the 
 garden, and I have not seen such a thing as an ugly 
 French child) — broad avenues stretching away as far 
 as you can see, covered with little foreigners (so they 
 seem to me), dressed in gay colors, and laughing and 
 romping and talking French, in all the amusing mix- 
 ture of baby passions and grown-up manners, and an- 
 swer me — is it not a sight better worth seeing than all 
 the grand palaces that shut it in ? 
 
 The Tuileries are certainly very magnificent, and to 
 walk across from the Seine to the Rue Rivoli, and 
 look up the endless walks and under the long per- 
 fect arches cut through the trees, may give one a very 
 pretty surprise for once — but a winding lane is a bet- 
 ter place to enjoy the loveliness of green leaves, and a 
 single New England elm, letting down its slendei 
 branches to the ground in the inimitable grace of na- 
 ture, has, to my eye, more beauty than all the clipped 
 vistas from the king's palace to the Arc de VEtoile, 
 the Champs Elysces inclusive. 
 
 One of the finest things in Paris, by the way, is the 
 view from the terrace in front of the palace to this 
 " Arch of Triumph," commenced by Napoleon at the 
 extremity of the " Elysian Fields," a single avenue 
 of about two miles. The part beyond the gardens is 
 the fashionable drive, and by a saunter on horseback 
 to the Boh de Boulogne, between four and five, on a 
 pleasant day, one may see all the clashing equipages 
 in Paris. Broadway, however, would eclipse every- 
 thing here, either for beauty of construction or ap- 
 pointments. Our carriages are every way handsomer 
 and better hung, and the horses are harnessed more 
 compactly and gracefully. The lumbering vehicles 
 
16 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 here make a great show, it is true, for the box, with 
 its heavy hammer cloth, is level with the top, and the 
 coachman and footmen and outriders are very striking 
 in their bright liveries ; but the elegant, convenient, 
 light-running establishments of Philadelphia and New 
 York, excel them, out of all comparison, for taste and 
 fitness. The best driving I have seen is by the king's 
 whips, and really it is beautiful to see his retinue on 
 the road, four or five coaches and six, with footmen 
 and outriders in scarlet liveries, and the finest horses 
 possible for speed and action. His majesty generally 
 takes the outer edge of the Champs Elysees, on the 
 bank of the river, and the rapid glimpses of the bright 
 show through the breaks in the wood, are exceedingly 
 picturesque. 
 
 There is nothing in Paris that looks so outlandish 
 to my eye as the common vehicles. I was thinking 
 of it this morning as I stood waiting for the St. Sulpice 
 omnibus, at the corner of the Rue Vivienne, the great 
 thoroughfare between the Boulevards and the Palais 
 Royal. There was the hack-cabriolet lumbering by 
 in the fashion of two centuries ago, with a horse and 
 harness that look equally ready to drop in pieces; the 
 hand-cart with a stout dog harnessed under the axle- 
 tree, drawing with twice the strength of his master ; 
 the market-wagon, driven always by women, and drawn 
 generally by a horse and a mule abreast, the horse of 
 the Norman breed, immensely large, and the mule 
 about the size of a well-grown bull-dog ; a vehicle of 
 which I have not yet found out the name, a kind of 
 long demi-omnibus, with two wheels and a single 
 horse, and carrying nine ; and last, but not least amu- 
 sing, a small close carriage for one person, swung 
 upon two wheels and drawn by a servant, very much 
 used, apparently, by elderly women and invalids, and 
 certainly most admirable conveniences either for the 
 economy or safety of getting about a city. It would 
 be difficult to find an American servant who would 
 draw in harness as they do here ; and it is amusing to 
 see a stout, well-dressed fellow, strapped to a carriage, 
 and pulling along the paves, sometimes at a jog-trot, 
 while his master or mistress sits looking unconcern- 
 edly out of the window. 
 
 I am not yet decided whether the French are the 
 best or the worst drivers in the world. If the latter, 
 they certainly have most miraculous escapes. A cab- 
 driver never pulls the reins except upon great emer- 
 gencies, or for a right-about turn, and his horse has a 
 ludicrous aversion to a straight line. The streets are 
 built inclining toward the centre, with the gutter in the 
 middle, and it is the habit of all cabriolet-horses to run 
 down one side and up the other constantly at such 
 sudden angles that it seems to you they certainly will 
 go through the shop-windows. This, of course, is 
 very dangerous to foot-passengers in a city where there 
 are no side-walks ; and, as a consequence, the average 
 number of complaints to the police of Paris for peo- 
 ple killed by careless driving, is about four hundred 
 annually. There are probably twice the number of 
 legs broken. One becomes vexed in riding with these 
 fellows, and I have once or twice undertaken to get 
 into a French passion, and insist upon driving my- 
 self. But I have never yet met with an accident. 
 " Gar-r-r-r-e /" sings out the driver, rolling the word 
 off his tongue like a bullet from a shovel, but never 
 thinking to lift his loose reins from the dasher, while 
 the frightened passenger, without looking round, makes 
 for the first door with an alacrity that shows a habit of 
 expecting very little from the cocker's skill. 
 
 Riding is very cheap in Paris, if managed a little. 
 The city is traversed constantly in every direction by 
 omnibuses, and you may go from the Tuileries to 
 Pere la Chaise, or from St. Surplice to the Italian 
 Boulevards (the two diagonals), or take the " Tous les 
 Boulevards,''' and ride quite round the city for six sous 
 the distance. The "fiacre" is like our own hacks, 
 
 except that you pay but "twenty sows the course," 
 and fill the vehicle with your friends if you please ; 
 and, more cheap and comfortable still, there is the 
 universal cabriolet, which for fifteen sous the course," 
 or "twenty the hour," will give you at least three 
 times the value of your money, with the advantage of 
 seeing ahead and talking bad French with the driver. 
 
 Everything in France is either grotesque or pictur- 
 esque. I have been struck with it this morning, while 
 sitting at my window, looking upon the close inner 
 court of the hotel. One would suppose that a pave, 
 between four high walls, would offer very little to se- 
 duce the eye from its occupation ; but, on the con- 
 trary, one's whole time may be occupied in watching 
 the various sights presented in constant succession. 
 First comes the itinerant cobbler, with his seat and 
 materials upon his back, and coolly selecting a place 
 against the wall, opens his shop under your window, 
 and drives his trade, most industriously, for half an 
 hour. If you have anything to mend, he is too happy ; 
 if not, he has not lost his time, for he pays no rent, 
 and is all the while at work. He packs up again, 
 bows to the concierge, as politely as his load will per- 
 mit, and takes his departure, in the hope to find your 
 shoes more worn another day. Nothing could be 
 more striking than his whole appearance. He is met 
 in the gate, perhaps, by an old clothes-man, who will 
 buy or sell, and compliment you for nothing, cheap- 
 ening your coat by calling the Virgin to witness that 
 your shape is so genteel that it will not fit one man in 
 a thousand ; or by a family of singers, with a monkey 
 to keep time ; or a regular beggar, who, however, 
 does not dream of asking charity till he has done 
 something to amuse you : after these, perhaps, will 
 follow a succession of objects singularly peculiar to 
 this fantastic metropolis; and, if one could separate 
 from the poor creatures the knowledge of the cold 
 and hunger they suffer, wandering about, houseless, 
 in the most inclement weather, it would be easy to 
 imagine it a diverting pantomime, and give them the 
 poor pittance they ask, as the price of an amused hour. 
 An old man has just gone from the court who comes 
 regularly twice a week, with a long beard, perfectly 
 white, and a strange kind of an equipage. It is an 
 organ, set upon a rude carriage, with four small 
 wheels, and drawn by a mule, of the most diminu- 
 tive size, looking (if it were not the venerable figure 
 crouched upon the seat) like some roughly-contrived 
 plaything. The whole affair, harness and all, is evi- 
 dently his own work ; and it is affecting to see the 
 difficulty, and, withal, the habitual apathy with which 
 the old itinerant fastens his rope-reins beside him, and 
 dismounts to grind his one — solitary — eternal tune, for 
 charity. 
 
 Among the thousands of wretched objects in Paris 
 (they make the heart sick with their misery at every 
 turn), there is, here and there, one of an interesting 
 character; and it is pleasant to select them, and make 
 a habit of your trifling gratuity. Strolling about, as I 
 do, constantly, and letting everybody and everything 
 amuse me that will, I have made several of these 
 penny-a-day acquaintances, and find them very agree- 
 able breaks to the heartless solitude of a crowd. There 
 is a little fellow who stands by the gate of the Tuile- 
 ries, opening to the Place Vendome, who, with all the 
 rags and dirt of a street-boy, begs with an air of su- 
 periority that is absolutely patronizing. One feels 
 obliged to the little varlet for the privilege of giving 
 to him — his smile and manner are so courtly. His 
 face is beautiful, dirty as it is ; his voice is clear, and 
 unaffected, and his thin lips have an expression of 
 high-bred contempt, that amuses me a little, and puz- 
 zles me a great deal. I think he must have a gentle- 
 man's blood in his veins, though he possibly came 
 indirectly by it. There is a little Jewess hanging 
 about the Louvre, who begs with her dark eyes very 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 J7 
 
 eloquently ; and, in the Rue de la Pair there may be 
 found at all hours, a melancholy, sick-looking Italian 
 boy, with his hand in his bosom, whose native lan- 
 guage and picture-like face are a diurnal pleasure to 
 me, cheaply bought with the poor trifle which makes 
 him happy. It is surprising how many devices there 
 are in the streets for attracting attention and pity. 
 There is a woman always to be seen upon the Boule- 
 vards, playing a solemn tune on a violin, with a child 
 as pallid as ashes, lying, apparently, asleep in her lap. 
 I suspected, after seeing it once or twice, that it was 
 wax, and, a day or two since I satisfied myself of the 
 fact, and enraged the mother excessively by touching 
 its cheek. It represents a sick child to the life, and 
 any one less idle and curious, would be deceived. I 
 have often seen people give her money with the most 
 unsuspecting look of sympathy, though it would be 
 natural enough to doubt the maternal kindness of 
 keeping a dying child in the open air in mid-winter. 
 Then there is a woman without hands, making braid 
 with wonderful adroitness; and a man without legs or 
 arms, singing, with his hat set appealingly on the 
 ground before him ; and cripples, exposing their ab- ! 
 breviated limbs, and telling their stories over and j 
 over, with or without listeners, from morning till 
 night ; and every description of appeal to the most 
 acute sympathies, mingled up with all the gayety, 
 show, and fashion, of the most crowded promenade in 
 Paris. 
 
 In the present dreadful distress of trade, there are 
 other still more painful cases of misery. It is not un- 
 common to be addressed in the street by men of per- 
 fectly respectable appearance, whose faces bear every 
 mark of strong mental struggle, and often of famish- 
 ing necessity, with an appeal for the smallest sum that 
 will buy food. The look of misery is so general, as to 
 mark the whole population. It has struck me most 
 forcibly everywhere, notwithstanding the gayety of 
 the national character, and, I am told by intelligent 
 Frenchmen, it is peculiar to the time, and felt and 
 observed by all. Such things startle one back to na- 
 ture sometimes. It is difficult to look away from the 
 face of a starving man, and see the splendid equipages, 
 and the idle waste upon trifles, within his very sight, 
 and reconcile the contrast with any belief of the exist- 
 ence of human pity — still more difficult, perhaps, to 
 admit without reflection, the right of one human being 
 to hold in a shut hand, at will, the very life and breath 
 for which his fellow-creatures are perishing at his 
 door. It is this that is visited back, so terribly in the 
 horrors of a revolution. 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 FOYETIER — THE THRACIAN GLADIATOR MADEMOI- 
 SELLE MARS DOCTOR FRANKLIN'S RESIDENCE I.N 
 
 PARIS ANNUAL BALL FOR THE POOR. 
 
 1 had the pleasure to-day of being introduced to 
 the young sculptor Foyetier, the author of the new 
 statue on the terrace of the Tuileries. Aside from 
 his genius, he is interesting from a circumstance con- 
 nected with his early history. He was a herd-driver 
 in one of the provinces, and amused himself in his 
 leisure moments with the carving of rude images, 
 which he sold for a sous or two on market-days in the 
 provincial town. The celebrated Dr. Gall fell in with 
 him accidentally, and felt of his head, en passant. The 
 bump was there which contains his present greatness, 
 and the phrenologist took upon himself the risk of his 
 education in the arts. He is now the first sculptor, 
 beyond all competition, in France. His " Spartacus," 
 the Thracian gladiator, is the admiration of Paris. It 
 •tauds in front of the palace, in the most conspicuous 
 9 
 
 part of the regal gardens, and there are hundreds of 
 people about the pedestal at all hours of the day. 
 The gladiator has broken his chain, and stands with 
 his weapon in his hand, every muscle and feature 
 breathing action, his body throw n back, and his right 
 foot planted powerfully for a spring. It is a gal hint 
 thing. One's blood stirs to look at it. I think that 
 Forrest (however well he may be playing now in the 
 new tragedy, of which I see so much in the papers), 
 would get from it even a more intense conception of 
 the gladiator. If I had written such a play, I would 
 make the voyage of the Atlantic to see the character 
 thus bodied out. 
 
 Foyetier is a young man, I should think about thir- 
 ty. He is small, very plain in appearance ; but he 
 has a rapid, earnest eye, and a mouth of singular 
 suavity of expression. I liked him extremely. His 
 celebrity seems not to have trenched a step on the na- 
 ture of his character. His genius is everywhere al- 
 lowed, and he works for the king altogether, his majes- 
 ty bespeaking everything he attempts, even in the 
 model ; but he is certainly, of all geniuses, one of the 
 most modest. 
 
 The celebrated Mars has come out from her retire 
 ment once more, and commenced an engagement at the 
 Theatre Francois. I went a short time since to see 
 her play in Tartuffe. This stane is the home of the 
 true French drama. Here Talma played when he and 
 Mademoiselle Mars were the delight of Napoleon and 
 of France. I have had few gratifications greater than 
 that of seeing this splendid woman reappear in the 
 place where she won her brilliant reputation. The 
 play, too, was Rloliere's, and it was here that it was 
 first performed. Altogether it was like something 
 plucked back from history ; a renewal, as in a magic 
 mirror, of glories gone by. 
 
 I could scarce believe my eyes when she appeared 
 as the " wife of Argon." She looked about twenty- 
 five. Her step was light and graceful ; her voice was 
 as tinlike that of a woman of sixty as could well be 
 imagined: sweet, clear, and under a control which 
 gives her a power of expression I never had conceived 
 before; her mouth had the definite, firm play of youth ; 
 her teeth (though the dentist might do that) were 
 white and perfect ; and her eyes can have lost none 
 of their fire, I am sure. I never saw so quiet a play- 
 er. Her gestures were just perceptible, no more ; and 
 yet they were done so exquisitely at the right moment 
 — so unconsciously, as if she had not meant them, 
 that they were more forcible than even the language 
 itself. She repeatedly drew a low murmur of delight 
 from the whole house with a single play of expression 
 across her face, while the other characters were speak- 
 ing, or by a slight movement of her fingers, in panto- 
 mimic astonishment or vexation. It was really some- 
 thing new to me. I had never before seen a first-rate 
 female player in comedy. Leontine Fay is inimitable 
 in tragedy; but, if there is any comparison between 
 them, it is that this beautiful young creature overpow- 
 ers the heart with her nature, while Mademoiselle 
 Mars satisfies the uttermost demand of the judg- 
 ment with her art. 
 
 I yesterday visited the house occupied by Franklin 
 while he was in France. It is one of the most beau- 
 tiful country residences in the neighborhood of Paris, 
 standing on the elevated ground of Passy, and over- 
 looking the whole city on one side, and the valley of 
 the Seine for a long distance toward Versailles on the 
 other. The house is otherwise celebrated. Madame 
 de Genlis lived there while the present king was her 
 pupil ; and Louis the Fifteenth occupied it six months 
 for the country air, while under the infliction of the 
 gout — its neighborhood to the palace probably ren- 
 dering it preferable to the more distant chateaux of 
 
18 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 St. Cloud or Versailles. Its occupants would seem 
 to have been various enough, without the addition of 
 a lieutenant general of the British army, whose hos- 
 pitality makes it delightful at present. The lightning- 
 rod, which was raised by Franklin, and which was the 
 first conductor used in France, is still standing. The 
 gardens are large, and form a sort of terrace, with the 
 house on the front edge. It must be one of the 
 sweetest places in the world in summer. 
 
 The great annual ball for the poor was given at the 
 Academie Royale, a few nights since. This is attend- 
 ed by the king and royal family, and is ordinarily the 
 most splendid affair of the season. It is managed by 
 twenty or thirty lady-patronesses, who have the con- 
 trol of the tickets ; and, though by no means exclu- 
 sive, it is kept within very respectable limits ; and, if 
 one is content to float with the tide, and forego dan- 
 cing, is an unusually comfortable and well-behaved 
 spectacle. 
 
 I went with a large party at the early hour of eight. 
 We fell into the train of carriages, advancing slowly 
 between files of dragoons, and stood before the door 
 in our turn in the course of an hour. The staircases 
 were complete orangeries, with immense mirrors at 
 every turn, and soldiers on guard, and servants in liv- 
 ery, from top to bottom. The long saloon, lighted by 
 ten chandeliers, was dressed and hung with wreaths 
 as a receiving-room ; and passing on through the spa- 
 cious lobbies, which were changed into groves of 
 pines and exotics, we entered upon the grand scene. 
 The coup d'aii would have astonished Aladdin. The 
 theatre, which is the largest in Paris, and gorgeously 
 built and ornamented, was thrown into one vast ball- 
 room, ascending gradually from the centre to plat- 
 forms raised at either end, one of which was occupied 
 by the throne and seats for the king's family and suite. 
 The four rows of boxes were crowded with ladies, and 
 the house presented, from the floor to the paradis, one 
 glittering and waving wall of dress, jewelry, and feath- 
 ers. An orchestra of near a hundred musicians occu- 
 pied the centre of the hall ; and on either side of them 
 swept by the long countless multitudes of people, 
 dressed with a union of taste and show ; while, instead 
 of the black coats which darken the complexion of a 
 party in a republican country, every other gentleman '■■ 
 was in a gay uniform ; and polytechnic scholars with I 
 their scarlet-faced coats, officers of the " National 
 Guard" and the " line," gentlemen of the king's 
 household, and foreign ministers, and attaches, pre- 
 sented a variety of color and splendor which nothing ! 
 could exceed. 
 
 The theatre itself was not altered, except by the 
 platform occupied by the king ; it is sufficiently splen- j 
 did as it stands ; but the stage, whose area is much 
 larger than that of the pit, was hung in rich drapery 
 as a vast tent, and garnished to profusion with flags 
 and arms. Along the sides, on a level with the lower 
 row of boxes, extended galleries of crimson velvet, 
 festooned with flowers. These were filled with ladies, 
 and completed a circle about the house of beauty and 
 magnificence, of which the king and his dazzling 
 suite formed the corona. Chandeliers were hung 
 close together from one end of the hall to the other. 
 I commenced counting them once or twice, but some 
 bright face flitting by in the dance interrupted me. 
 An English girl near me counted fifty-five, and I think 
 there must have been more. The blaze of light was 
 almost painful. The air glittered, and the fine grain 
 of the most delicate complexions was distinctly visible. 
 It is impossible to describe the effect of so much light 
 and space and music crowded into one spectacle. The 
 vastness of the hall, so long that the best sight could 
 not distinguish a figure at the opposite extremity, and 
 so high as to absorb and mellow the vibration of a 
 hundred instruments — the gorgeous sweep of splendor 
 
 from one platform to the other, absolutely drowning 
 the eye in a sea of gay colors, nodding feathers, jewel- 
 ry, and military equipment — the delicious music, the 
 strange faces, dresses, and tongues (one half of the 
 multitude at least being foreigners), the presence of 
 the king, and the gallant show of uniforms in his con- 
 spicuous suite, combined to make up a scene more 
 than sufficiently astonishing. 1 felt the whole night 
 the smothering consciousness of senses too narrow — 
 eyes, ears, language — all too limited for the demand 
 made upon them. 
 
 The king did not arrive till after ten. He entered 
 by a silken curtain in the rear of the platform on which 
 seats were placed for his family. The " Vive le JRoi' 
 was not so hearty as to drown the music, but his 
 majesty bowed some twenty times very graciously, and 
 the good-hearted queen courtsied, and kept a smile 
 on her excessively plain face, till I felt the muscles of 
 my own ache for her. King Philippe looks anxious. 
 By the remarks of the French people about me when 
 he entered, he has reason for it. I observed that the 
 polytechnic scholars all turned their backs upon him : 
 and one exceedingly handsome, spirited-looking boy, 
 standing just at my side, muttered a " sacre .'" and bit 
 his lip, with a very revolutionary air, at the continu- 
 ance of the acclamation. His majesty came down, 
 and walked through the hall about m idnight. His eldest 
 son, the Duke of Orleans, a handsome, unoffending- 
 looking youth of eighteen, followed him, gazing round 
 upon the crowd with his mouth open, and looking very 
 
 i much annoyed at his part of the pageant. The young 
 
 j duke has a good figure, and is certainly a very beauti- 
 ful dancer. His mouth is loose and weak, and his 
 
 I eyes are as opaque as agates. He wore the uniform 
 of the Garde Nationale, which does not become him. 
 
 ( In ordinary gentleman's dress he is a very authentical 
 copy of a Bond-street dandy, and looks as little like a 
 Frenchman as most of Stultz's subjects. He danced 
 all the evening, and selected, very popularly, decidedly 
 the most vulgar women in the room, looking all the 
 while as one who had been petted by the finest women 
 in France (Leontine Fay among the number), might 
 be supposed to look under such an infliction. The 
 king's second son, the Duke of Nemours, pursued the 
 same policy. He has a brighter face than his broth- 
 er, with hair almost white, and dances extremely well. 
 The second daughter is also much prettier than the 
 eldest. On the whole, the king's family is very plain, 
 though a very amiable one, and the people seem at- 
 tached to them. 
 
 These general descriptions, are, after all, very vague. 
 Here I have written half a sheet with a picture in my 
 mind of which you are getting no semblable idea. 
 Language is a mere skeleton of such things. The 
 Academie Royale should be borne over the water like 
 the chapel of Loretto, and set down in Broadway with 
 all its lights, music, and people to give you half a no- 
 tion of the " Bal en faveur des Pauvres." And so it 
 is with everything except the little histories of one's 
 own personal atmosphere, and that is the reason why 
 egotism should be held virtuous in a traveller, and the 
 reason why one can not study Europe at home. 
 
 After getting our American party places, I aban- 
 doned myself to the strongest current, and went in 
 search of "lions." The first face that arrested my 
 eye was that of the Duchess D'Istria, a woman cele- 
 brated here for her extraordinary personal beauty. 
 
 Directly opposite this lovely dutchess, in the othei 
 stage-box sat Donna Maria, the young Queen of For 
 tugal, surrounded by her relatives. Theex-emperess 
 her mother, was on her right, her grandmother on hei 
 left, and behind her some half-dozen of her Portu 
 guese cousins. She is a little girl of twelve or four 
 teen, with a fat, heavy face, and a remarkably pamper 
 ed, sleepy look. She was dressed like an old woman 
 and gaped incessantly the whole evening. The bo> 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 
 
 19 
 
 wa9 a perfect blaze of diamonds. I never before real- 
 ized the beauty of these splendid stones. The necks, I 
 heads, arms, and waists of the ladies royal were all 
 streaming with light. The necklace of the emperess ! 
 mother particularly flashed on the eye in every part of| 
 the house. By the unceasing exclamations of the 
 women, it was an unusually brilliant show, even here. ! 
 The little Donna has a fine, well-rounded chin ; and 
 when she smiled in return to the king's bow, I thought 
 I could see more than a child's character in the ex- 1 
 pression of her mouth. I should think a year or two 
 of mental uneasiness might let out a look of intelli- 
 gence through her heavy features. She is likely to 
 have it, I think, with the doubtful fortunes that seem 
 to beset her. 
 
 I met Don Pedro often in society before his depar- ; 
 ture upon his expedition. He is a short, well-made 
 man, of great personal accomplishment, and a very bad 
 expression, rather aggravated by an unfortunate cuta- 
 neous eruption. The first time I saw him, I was in- 
 duced to ask who he was, from the apparent coldness 
 and dislike with which he was treated by a lady whose 
 beauty had strongly arrested my attention. He sat by, 
 her on a sofa in a very crowded party, and seemed to' 
 be saying something very earnestly, which made the 
 lady's Spanish eyes flash fire, and brought a curl of! 
 very positive anger upon a pair of the loveliest lips 
 imaginable. She was a slender, aristocratic-looking 
 creature, and dressed most magnificently. After glan- 
 cing at them a minute or two, I made up my mind 
 that, from the authenticity of his dress and appoint- 
 ments, he was an Englishman, and that she was some 
 French lady of rank whom he was particularly annoy- 
 ing with his addresses. On inquiry, the gentleman ! 
 proved to be Don Pedro, and the lady the Countess 
 de Lourle, his sister! I have often met her since, 
 and never without wondering how two of the same 
 family could look so utterly unlike each other. The! 
 Count de Lourle is called the Adonis of Paris. He' 
 is certainly a very splendid fellow, and justifies the ro- 
 mantic admiration of his wife, who married him clan-! 
 destinely, giving him her left hand in the ceremony, \ 
 as is the etiquette, they say, when a princess marries 
 below her rank. One can not help looking with great' 
 interest on a beautiful creature like this, who has bro- ! 
 ken away from the imposing fetters of a royal sphere, 
 to follow the dictates of natural feeling. It does not 
 occur so often in Europe that one may not sentimen- \ 
 talizs about it without the charge of affectation. 
 
 To return to the ball. The king bowed himself 
 out a little after midnight, and with him departed most 
 of the fat people, and all the little girls. This made 
 room enough to dance, and the French set themselves ! 
 at it in good earnest. I wandered about for an hour 
 or two ; after wearying my imagination quite out in 
 speculating on the characters and rank of people whom 
 I never saw before and shall probably never see again, 
 I mounted to the paradis to take a last look down up- j 
 on the splendid scene, and made my exit. I should 
 be quite content never to go to such a ball again, ! 
 though it was by far the most splendid scene of the 
 kind I ever saw. 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 PLACE LOUIS XV. PANORAMIC VIEW OF PAK1S A LIT-! 
 
 ERARY CLUB DINNER THE GUESTS — THE PRESI- 
 DENT THE EXILED POLES, ETC. 
 
 I have spent the day in a long stroll. The wind J 
 blew warm and delicious from the south this morning, 
 and the temptation to abandon lessons and lectures ! 
 was irresistible. Taking the Arc de VEtoile as my j 
 pxtreme point. I yielded to all the leisurely hinder-| 
 
 ances of shop-windows, beggars, book-stalls, and views 
 by the way. Among the specimen-cards in an en- 
 graver's window I was amused at finding, in the latest 
 Parisian fashion, "Hussein-Pacha, Dcif d' Algiers." 
 These delightful Tuileries! We rambled through 
 them (I had met a friend and countryman, and enticed 
 him into my idle plans for the day), and amused our- 
 selves with the never-failing beauty and grace of tho 
 French children for an hour. On the inner terrace 
 we stopped to look at the beautiful hotel of Prince 
 Polignac, facing the Tuileries, on the opposite bank. 
 By the side of this exquisite little model of a palace 
 stands the superb commencement of Napoleon's min- 
 isterial hotel, breathing of his glorious conception in 
 every line of its ruins. It is astonishing what a god- 
 like impress that man left upon all he touched. 
 
 Every third or fourth child in the gardens was 
 dressed in the full uniform of the National Guard — 
 helmet, sword, epaulets, and all. They are ludi- 
 crous little caricatures, of course, but it inoculates 
 them with love of the corps, and it would be better if 
 that were synonymous with a love of liberal principles. 
 The Garde Rationale are supposed to be more than 
 half "Carlists"' at this moment. 
 
 We passed out by the guarded gate of the Tuileries 
 to the Place Louis XV. This square is a most beau- 
 tiful spot,. as a centre of unequalled views, and yet a 
 piece of earth so foully polluted with human blood 
 | probably does not exist on the face of the globe. It 
 divides the Tuileries from the Champs Elysces, and 
 ranges, of course, in the long broad avenue of two 
 I miles, stretching between the king's palace and the 
 I Arc de VEtoile. It is but a list of names to write down 
 ! the particular objects to be seen in such a view, 
 j but it commands, at the extremities of its radii, the 
 most princely edifices, seen hence with the most ad- 
 vantageous foregrounds of space and avenue, and 
 softened by distance into the misty and unbroken sur- 
 face of engraving. The king's palace is on one hand, 
 Napoleon's Arch at a distance of nearly two miles on 
 the other. Prince Talleyrand's regal dwelling behind, 
 with the church of Madeline seen through the Rue 
 Royale, while before you, to the south, lies a picture 
 of profuse splendor : the broad Seine, spanned by 
 bridges that are the admiration of Europe, and crowded 
 by specimens of architectural magnificence; the 
 chamber of deputies ; and the Palais Bourbon, ap- 
 proached by the Pont Louis XVI. with its gigantic 
 statuses and simple majesty of structure; and, rising 
 over all, the grand dome of the " Invalides," which 
 Napoleon gilded, to divert the minds of his subjects 
 from his lost battle, and which Peter the Great ad- 
 mired more than all Paris beside. What a spot for a 
 man to stand upon, with but one bosom to feel and 
 one tongue to express his wonder! 
 
 And yet, of what, that should make a spot of earth 
 sink to perdition, has it not been the theatre ? Here 
 were beheaded the unfortunate Louis XVI. — his wife, 
 Marie Antoinette — his kinsman; Philip duke of Orleans, 
 and his sister Elizabeth; and here were guillotined 
 the intrepid Charlotte Corday, the deputy Brissot, and 
 twenty of his colleagues, and all the victims of the 
 revolution of 1793, to the amount of two thousand 
 eight hundred; and here Robespierre and his cursed 
 crew met at last with their insufficient retribution; 
 and, as if it were destined to be the very blood-spot 
 of the earth, here the fireworks, which were celebra- 
 ting the marriage of the same Louis that was after- 
 ward brought hither to the scaffold, exploded and 
 killed fourteen hundred persons. It has been the 
 scene, also, of several minor tragedies not worth men- 
 tioning in such a connexion. Were I a Bourbon, and 
 as unpopular as King Philippe I. at this moment, tho 
 view of the Place Louis XV. from my palace windows 
 would very much disturb the beauty of the perspec- 
 tive. Without an equivoque, I should look with a very 
 
20 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ominous dissatisfaction on the "Elysian fields" that 
 lie beyond. 
 
 We loitered slowly on to the Barrier Neuilly, just 
 outside of which, and right before the city gates, 
 stands the Triumphal Arch. It has the stamp of 
 Napoleon — simple grandeur. The broad avenue from 
 the Tuileries swells slowly up to it for two miles, and 
 the view of Paris at its foot, even, is superb. We 
 ascended to the unfinished roof, a hundred and thirty- 
 five feet from the ground, and saw the whole of the 
 mighty capital of France at a coup d'ceil — churches, 
 palaces, gardens; buildings heaped upon buildings 
 clear over the edge of the horizon, where the spires 
 of the city in which you stand are scarcely visible for 
 the distance. 
 
 T dined a short time since, with the editors of the 
 Revue Encyclopedique at their monthly reunion. This 
 is a sort of club dinner, to which the eminent contrib- 
 utors of the review invite once a month all the stran- 
 gers of distinction who happen to be in Paris. 1 owed 
 my invitation probably to the circumstance of my liv- 
 ing with Dr. Howe, who is considered the organ of 
 American principles here, and whose force of charac- 
 ter has given him a degree of respect and prominence 
 not often attained by foreigners. It was the most re- 
 markable party, by far, that I had ever seen. There 
 were nearly a hundred guests, twenty or thirty of 
 whom were distinguished Poles, lately arrived from 
 Warsaw. Generals Romarino and Langermann were 
 placed beside the president, and another general, whose 
 name is as difficult to remember as his face is to forget, 
 and who is famous for having been the last on 
 the field, sat next to the head seat. Near him were 
 General Bernard and Dr. Bowring, with Sir Sidney 
 Smith (covered with orders, from every quarter of the 
 world), and the President of Colombia. After the 
 usual courses of a French dinner, the president, Mons. 
 Julien, a venerable man, with snow-white hair, ad- 
 dressed the company. He expressed his pleasure at 
 the meeting, with the usual courtesies of welcome, 
 and in the fervent manner of the old school of French 
 politeness; and then, pausing a little, and lowering 
 his voice, with a very touching cadence, he looked 
 around to the Poles, and began to speak of their coun- 
 try. Every movement was instantly hushed about the 
 table— the guests leaned forward, some of them half 
 rising in their earnestness to hear ; the old man's voice 
 trembled, and sunk lower; the Poles dropped their 
 heads upon their bosoms, and the whole company 
 were strongly affected. His mannersuddenly changed 
 at this moment, in a degree that would have seemed 
 too dramatic, if the strong excitement had not sustain- 
 ed him. He spoke indignantly of the Russian bar- 
 barity toward Poland — assured the exiles of the strong 
 sympathy felt by the great mass of the French people 
 in their cause, and expressed his confident belief that 
 the struggle was not yet done, and the time was near 
 when, with France at her back, Poland would rise and 
 be free. He closed, amid tumultuous acclamation, 
 and all the Poles near him kissed the old man, after 
 the French manner, upon both his cheeks. 
 
 This speech was followed by several others, much 
 to the same effect. Dr. Bowring replied handsomely, 
 in French, to some compliment paid to his efforts on 
 the "question of reform," in England. Cesar Moreau, 
 the great schemist, and founder of the Academie d' In- 
 dustrie, said a few very revolutionary things quite em- 
 phatically, rolling his fine visionary-looking eyes about 
 as if he saw the " shadows cast before" of coming 
 events; and then rose a speaker, whom I shall never 
 forget — he was a young Polish noble, of about nine- 
 teen, whose extreme personal beauty and enthusiastic 
 expression of countenance had particularly arrested 
 my attention in the drawing-room, before dinner. His 
 person was slender and graceful — his eye and mouth 
 
 full of beauty and fire, and his manner had a quiet na- 
 tive superiority, that would have distinguished him 
 anywhere. He had behaved very gallantly in the 
 struggle, and some allusion had been made to him in 
 one of the addresses. He rose modestly, and half un- 
 willingly, and acknowledged the kind wishes for his 
 country in language of great elegance. He then went 
 on to speak of the misfortunes of Poland, and soon 
 warmed into eloquence of the most vivid earnestness 
 and power. I never was more moved by a speaker — 
 he seemed perfectly unconscious of everything but the 
 recollections of his subject. His eyes swam with 
 tears and flashed with indignation alternately, and his 
 refined spirited mouth assumed a play of varied expres- 
 sion, which, could it have been arrested, would have 
 made a sculptor immortal. I can hardly write ex- 
 travagantly of him, for all present were as much ex- 
 cited as myself. One ceases to wonder at the desper- 
 ate character of the attempt to redeem the liberty of a 
 land when he sees such specimens of its people. I 
 have seen hundreds of Poles, of all classes, in Paris, 
 and I have not yet met with a face of even common 
 dulness among them. 
 
 You have seen by the papers, I presume, that a 
 body of several thousand Poles fled from Warsaw, after 
 the defeat, and took refuge in the northern forests of 
 Prussia. They gave up their arms under an assurance 
 from the king that they should have all the rights of 
 Prussian subjects. He found it politic afterward to 
 recall his protection, and ordered them back to Pohind. 
 They refused to go, and were sunounded by a detach- 
 ment of his army, and the orders given to fire upon 
 them. The soldiers refused, and the Poles, taking 
 advantage of the sympathy of the army, bioke through 
 the ranks, and escaped to the forest, where, at the last 
 news, they were armed with clubs, and determined to 
 defend themselves to the last. The consequence of a 
 return to Poland would be, of course, an immediate 
 exile to Siberia. The Polish committee, American 
 and French, with General Lafayette at their head, 
 have appropriated a great part of their funds to the re- 
 lief of this body, and our countryman, Dr. Howe, has 
 undertaken the dangerous and difficult task of carrying 
 it to them. He left Paris for Brussels, with letters 
 from the Polish generals, and advices from Lafayette 
 to all Polish committees upon his route, that they 
 should put all their funds into his hands. He is a gal- 
 lant fellow, and will succeed if any one can ; but he 
 certainly runs great hazard. God prosper him! 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 THE GAMBLING-HOUSES OF TARIS. 
 
 I accepted, last night, from a French gentleman 
 of high standing, a polite offer of introduction to one 
 of the exclusive gambling clubs of Paris. With the 
 understanding, of course, that it was only as a specta- 
 tor, my friend, whom I had met at a dinner party, 
 despatched a note from the table, announcing to the 
 temporary master of ceremonies his intention of pre- 
 senting me. We went at eleven, in full dress. I was 
 surprised at the entrance with the splendor of the 
 establishment — gilt balustrades, marble staircases, 
 crowds of servants in full livery, and all the formal 
 announcement of a court. Passing through several 
 ante-chambers, a heavy folding-door was thrown open, 
 and we were received by one of the noblest-looking 
 
 men I have seen in France — Count . I was put 
 
 immediately at my ease by his dignified and kind po- 
 liteness; and after a little conversation in English, 
 which he spoke fluently, the entrance of some other 
 person left me at liberty to observe at my leisure. 
 
PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 21 
 
 Everything about me had the impress of the studied 
 taste of high life. The lavish and yet soft disposition 
 >f light, the harmony of color in the rich hangings 
 pud furniture, the quiet manners and subdued tones j 
 of conversation, the respectful deference of the ser- | 
 vants, and the simplicity of the slight entertainment, \ 
 would have convinced me, without my Asmodeus, that I 
 I wa> in no every-day atmosphere. Conversation pro- ! 
 ceeded for an hour, while the members came dropping j 
 in from their evening engagements, and a little after 
 twelve a glass door was thrown open, and we passed j 
 from the reception-room to the spacious suite of apart- ] 
 meats intended for play. One or two of the gentle- ; 
 men entered the side rooms for billiards and cards, but ! 
 the majority closed about the table of hazard in the 
 central ball. I had never conceived so beautiful an ! 
 apartment. It can be described in two words — columns 
 and mirrors. There was nothing else between the 
 exquisitely-painted ceiling and the door. The form 
 was circular, and the wall was laid with glass, inter- j 
 rupted only with pairs of Corinthian pillars, with their , 
 rich capitals reflected and re-reflected innumerably. 
 It seemed like a hall of colonnades of illimitable ! 
 extent -the multiplication of the mirrors into each j 
 other was so endless and illusive. I felt an uncou- j 
 querable disposition to abandon myself to a waking 
 revery of pleasure; and as soon as the attention of 
 the company was perfectly engrossed by the silent 
 occupation before them, I sank upon a sofa, and gave ; 
 iny senses up for a while to the fascination of the j 
 scene. My eye was intoxicated. As far as my sight 
 could penetrate, stretched apparently interminable 
 halls, carpeted with crimson, and studded with grace- 
 ful columns and groups of courtly figures, forming 
 altogether, with its extent and beauty, and in the sub- 
 dued and skilfully-managed light, a picture that, if 
 real, would be one of unsurpassable splendor. I quite 
 forgot my curiosity to see the game. I had merely 
 observed, when my companion reminded me of the 
 arrival of my own appointed hour for departure, that, 
 whatever was lost or won, the rustling bills were j 
 passed from one to the other with a quiet and imper- 
 turbable politeness, that betrayed no sign either of 
 chagrin or triumph; though, from the fact that the 
 transfers were in paper only, the stakes must have 
 been anything but trifling. Refusing a polite invita- 
 tion to partake of the supper, always in waiting, we 
 took leave about two hours after midnight. 
 
 As we drove from the court, my companion sug- 
 gested to me, that, since we were out at so late an 
 hour, we might as well look in for a moment at the 
 more accessible " hells," and, pulling the cordon, he 
 ordered to " Frascati's." This, you know of course, 
 is the fashionable place of ruin, and here the heroes 
 of all noveis, and the rakes of all comedies, mar or J 
 make their fortunes. An evening dress, and the look \ 
 of a gentleman, are the only required passport. A j 
 servant in attendance took our hats and canes, and ! 
 we walked in without ceremony. It was a different I 
 scene from the former. Four large rooms, plainly J 
 but handsomely furnished, opened into each other, j 
 three of which were devoted to play, and crowded 
 with players. Elegantly-dressed women, some of j 
 them with high pretensions to French beauty, sat and j 
 stood at the table, watching their own stakes in the i 
 rapid games with fixed attention. The majority of ! 
 the gentlemen were English. The table was very 
 large, marked as usual with the lines and figures of 
 the game, and each person playing had a small rake 
 in his hand, with which he drew toward him his pro- 
 portion of the winnings. I was disappointed at the 
 first glance in the faces: there was very little of the 
 high-bred courtesy I had seen at the club-house, but 
 
 there 
 
 was no very striking exhibition of feeling, and I 
 
 should think, in any but an extreme case, the wins 
 
 poring silence and general quietness of the room 
 would repress it. After watching the variations of 
 luck awhile, however, I selected one or two pretty 
 desperate losers, and a young Frenchman who was a 
 large winner, and confined my observation to them 
 only. Among the former was a girl of about eighteen, 
 a mild, quiet-looking creature, with her hair curling 
 long on her neck, and hands childishly small and white, 
 who lost invariably. Two piles of five-franc pieces and 
 a small heap of gold lay on the table beside her, and I 
 watched her till she laid the last coin upon the losing 
 color. She bore it very well. By the eagerness with 
 which, at every turn of the last card, she closed her 
 hand upon the rake which she held, it was evident 
 that her hopes were high ; but when her last piece 
 was drawn in to the bank, she threw up her little 
 fingers with a playful desperation, and commenced 
 conversation even gayly with a gentleman who stood 
 leaning over her chair. The young Frenchman con- 
 tinued almost as invariably to win. He was excessively 
 handsome ; but there was a cold, profligate, unvarying 
 hardness of expression in his face, that made me dis- 
 like him. The spectators drew gradually about his 
 chair; and one or two of the women, who seemed to 
 know him well, selected a color for him occasionally, 
 or borrowed of him and staked for themselves. We 
 left him winning. The other players were mostly 
 English, and very uninteresting in their exhibition of 
 disappointment. My companion told me that there 
 would be more desperate playing toward morning, but 
 I had become disgusted with the cold selfish faces of 
 the scene, and felt no interest sufficient to detain me. 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 THE GARDEN* OF THE TUILF.RIES PRINCE MOSCOWA 
 
 SONS OF NAPOLEON COOPER AND MORSE SIR SID- 
 NEY SMITH FASHIONABLE WOMEN CLOSE OF THE 
 
 DAT THE FAMOUS EATING-HOUSES HOW TO DINE 
 
 WELL IN PARIS, ETC. 
 
 It is March, and the weather has all the character- 
 istics of New-England May. The last two or three 
 days have been deliciously spring-like, clear, sunny, 
 and warm. The gardens of the Tuileries are crowded. 
 The chairs beneath the terraces are filled by the old 
 men reading the gazettes, mothers and nurses watch- 
 ing their children at play, and, at every few steps, 
 circles of whole families sitting and sewing, or con- 
 versing, as unconcernedly as at home. It strikes a 
 stranger oddly. With the privacy of American feel- 
 ings, we can not conceive of these out-of-door French 
 habits. What would a Boston or New York mother 
 think of taking chairs for her whole family, grown-up 
 daughters and all, in the Mall or upon the Battery, 
 and spending the day in the very midst of the gayest 
 promenade of the city ? People of all ranks do it here. 
 You will see the powdered, elegant gentleman of the 
 ancicn regime, handing his wife or his daughter to a 
 straw-bottomed chair, with all the air of drawing-room 
 courtesy ; and, begging pardon for the liberty, pull his 
 journal from his pocket, and sit down to read beside 
 her ; or a tottering old man, leaning upon a stout Swiss 
 servant girl, goes bowing and apologizing through the 
 crowd, in search of a pleasant neighbor, or some old 
 compatriot, with whom he may sit and nod away the 
 hours of sunshine. It is a beautiful custom, positively. 
 The gardens are like a constant fete. It is a holyday 
 revel, without design or disappointment. It is a 
 masque, where every one plays his character uncon- 
 sciously, and therefore naturally and well. We get 
 no idea of it at home. We are too industrious a na- 
 tion to have idlers enough. It would even pain most 
 
22 
 
 PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY. 
 
 of the people of our country to see so many thousands 
 of all ages and conditions of life spending day after day 
 in such absolute uselessness. 
 
 Imagine yourself here, on the fashionable terrace, 
 the promenade, two days in the week, of all that is dis- 
 tinguished and gay in Paris. It is a short raised walk, 
 just inside the railings, and the only part of all these 
 wide and beautiful gardens where a member of the 
 beau monde is ever to be met. The hour is four, the 
 day Friday, the weather heavenly. I have just been 
 long enough in Paris to be an excellent walking dic- 
 tionary, and I will tell you who people are. In the 
 first place, all the well-dressed men you see are Eng- 
 lish. You will know the French by those flaring 
 coats, laid clear back on their shoulders, and their 
 execrable hats and thin legs. Their heads are right 
 from the hair-dresser; their hats are chateaux de sole, 
 or imitation beaver ; they are delicately rouged, and 
 wear very white gloves ; and, those who are with ladies, 
 lead, as you observe, a small dog by a string, or carry 
 it in their arms. No French lady walks out without 
 her lap-dog. These slow-paced men you see in brown 
 mustaches and frogged coats are refugee Poles. The 
 short, thick, agile looking man before us is General 
 
 , celebrated for having been the last to surrender on 
 
 the last field of that brief contest. His handsome face 
 is full of resolution, and, unlike the rest of his coun- 
 trymen, he looks still unsubdued and in good heart. 
 He walks here every day an hour or two, swinging his 
 cane round his forefinger, and thinking, apparently, of 
 anything but his defeat. Observe these two young 
 men approaching us. The short one on the left, with 
 the stiff hair and red mustache, is Prince Moskowa, 
 the son of Marshal Ney. He is an object of more 
 th n usual interest just now, as the youngest of the new 
 batch of peers. The expression of his countenance 
 is more bold than handsome, and indeed he is any- 
 thing but a carpet knight; a fact of which he seems, 
 like a man of sense, quite aware. He is to be seen at 
 the parties standing with his arms folded, leaning si- 
 lently against the wall for hours together. His com- 
 panion is, I presume to say, quite the handsomest man 
 you ever saw. A little over six feet, perfectly propor- 
 tioned, dark silken-brown hair, slightly curling about 
 his forehead, a soft curling mustache, and beard just 
 darkening the finest, cut mouth in the world, and an 
 olive complexion, of the most golden richness and 
 
 clearness — Mr. is called the handsomest man in 
 
 Europe. What is more remarkable still, he looks like 
 the most modest man in Europe, too ; though, like 
 most modest looking men, his reputation for constancy 
 in the gallant world is somewhat slender. And here 
 comes a fine looking man, though of a different order 
 of beauty — a natural son of Napoleon. He is about 
 his father's height, and has most of his features, though 
 his person and air must be quite different. You see 
 there Napoleon's beautiful mouth and thinly chiselled 
 nose, but I fancy that soft eye is his mother's. He is 
 said to be one of the most fascinating men in France. 
 His mother was the Countess Walewski, a lady with 
 whom the emperor became acquainted in Poland. It 
 is singular that Napoleon's talents and love of glory 
 have not descended upon any of the eight or ten sons 
 whose claims to his paternity are admitted. And here 
 come two of our countrymen, who are to be seen con- 
 stantly together — Cooper and Morse. That is Cooper 
 with the blue surtout buttoned up to his throat, and 
 his hat over his eyes. What a contrast between the 
 faces of the two men ! Morse, with his kind, open, 
 gentle countenance, the very picture of goodness and 
 sincerity ; and Cooper, dark and corsair-looking, with 
 his brows down over his eyes, and his strongly lined 
 mouth fixed in an expression of moodiness and reserve. 
 The two faces, however, are not equally just to their 
 owners — Morse is all that he looks to be, but Cooper's 
 features do him decided injustice. I take a pride in 
 
 the reputation this distinguished oounttymen of ou;s 
 has for humanity and generous sympathy. The dis- 
 tress of the refugee liberals from all countries comes 
 home especially to Americans, and the untiring liber- 
 ality of Mr. Cooper particularly, is a fact of common 
 admission and praise. It is pleasant to be able to say 
 such things. Morse is taking a sketch of the Gallery 
 of the Louvre, and he intends copying some of the 
 best pictures also, to accompany it as an exhibition, 
 when he returns. Our artists do our country credit 
 abroad. The feeling of interest in one's country ar 
 tists and authors become very strong in a foreign land. 
 Every leaf of laurel awarded them seems to touch one's 
 own forehead. And talking of laurels, here comes 
 Sir Sidney Smith — the short, fat, old gentleman yon- 
 der, with the large acquiline nose and keen eye. He 
 is one of the few men who ever opposed Napoleon 
 successfully, and that should distinguish him, even if 
 he had not won by his numerous merits and achieve- 
 ments the gift of almost every order in Europe. He 
 is, among other things, of a very mechanical turn, and 
 is quite crazy just now about a six-wheeled coach, 
 which he has lately invented, and of which nobody 
 sees the exact benefit but himself. An invitation to 
 his rooms, to hear his description of the model, is 
 considered the last new bore. 
 
 And now for ladies. Whom do you see that looks 
 distinguished ? Scarce one whom you would take 
 positively for a lady, I venture to presume. These 
 two, with the velvet pelisses and small satin bonnets, 
 are rather the most genteel-looking people in the gar- 
 den. I set them down for ladies of rank the first walk 
 I ever took here ; and the two who have just passed 
 us, with the curly lap-dog, I was equally sure were per- 
 sons of not very dainty morality. It is precisely au 
 contrarie. The velvet pelisses are gamblers from Fras- 
 cati's, and the two with the lap-dog are the Countess 
 N. and her unmarried daughter — two of the most ex- 
 clusive specimens of Parisian society. It is very odd — 
 but if you see a remarkably modest-looking woman in 
 Paris, you may be sure, as the periphrasis goes, that 
 "she is no better than she should be." Everything 
 gets travestied in this artificial society. The general 
 ambition seems to be, to appear that which one is not. 
 W T hite-haired men cultivate their sparse mustaches, 
 and dark-haired men shave. Deformed men are suc- 
 cessful in gallantry, where handsome men despair. 
 Ugly women dress and dance, while beauties mope 
 and are deserted. Modesty looks brazen, and vice 
 looks timid; and so all through the calendar. Life 
 in Paris is as pretty a series of astonishments as an 
 ennaye could desire. 
 
 But there goes the palace-bell — five o'clock ! The 
 sun is just disappearing behind the dome of the "In- 
 valides," and the crowd begins to thin. Look at the 
 atmosphere of the gardens. How deliciously the twi- 
 light mist softens everything. Statues, people, trees, 
 and the long perspectives down the alleys, all mel- 
 lowed into the shadowy indistinctness of fairy-land. 
 The throng is pressing out at the gates, and the 
 guard, with his bayonet presented, forbids all re-en- 
 trance, for the gardens are cleared at sundown. The 
 carriages are driving up and dashing away, and if you 
 stand a moment you will see the most vulgar-looking 
 people you have met in your promenade, waited for 
 by chasseurs, and departing with indications of rank in 
 their equipages, which nature has very positively de- 
 nied to their persons. And now all the world dines, 
 and dines well. The '■'■chef" stands with his gold re- 
 peater in his hand, waiting for the moment to decide 
 the fate of the first dish ; the garcons at the restau- 
 rants have donned their white aprons, and laid the sil- 
 ver forks upon the napkins ; the pretty women are 
 seated on their thrones in the saloons, and the interest- 
 ing hour is here. Where shall we dine ? We will walk 
 toward the Palais Royal, and talk of it as we go along. 
 
PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 23 
 
 That man would " deserve well of his country" who 
 should write a " Paris Guide" for the palate. I would 
 do it myself if I could elude the immortality it would 
 occasion me. One is compelled to pioneer his own 
 stomach through the endless cartes of some twelve 
 eating-houses, all famous, before he half knows wheth- 
 er he is dining well or ill. 1 had eaten a week at 
 Very's, for instance, before I discovered that, since 
 Peiham's day, that gentleman's reputation has gone 
 down. He is a subject for history at present. I was 
 misled also by an elderly gentleman at Havre, who 
 advised me to eat at Grig-lion's, in the Passage Vivi- 
 enne. Not liking my first coquilles aux huilres, I made 
 some private inquiries, and found that his chef had 
 deserted him about the time of Napoleon's return 
 from Elba. A stranger gets misguided in this way. 
 And then, if by accident you hit upon the right house, 
 you may be eating a month before you find out the 
 peculiar triumphs which have stamped its celebrity. 
 No mortal man can excel in everything, and it is as 
 true of cooking as it is of poetry. The " Rochers de 
 Cancalce" is now the first eating-house in Paris, yet 
 they only excel in fish. The " Trois Freres Proven- 
 caux," have a high reputation, yet their colcletles pro- 
 vencale are the only dish which you can not get equally 
 well elsewhere. A good practice is to walk about in 
 the Palais Royal for an hour before dinner, and select 
 a master. You will know a gourmet easily — a man 
 slightly past the prime of life, with a nose just getting 
 its incipient blush, a remarkably loose, voluminous 
 white cravat, and a corpulence more of suspicion than 
 fact. Follow him to his restaurant, and give the gar- 
 con a private order to serve you with the same dishes 
 as the bald gentleman. (I have observed that dainty 
 livers universally lose their hair early.) I have been 
 in the wake of such a person now for a week or more, 
 and I never lived, comparatively, before. Here we 
 are, however, at the " Trois Freres" and there goes 
 my unconscious model deliberately up stairs. We'll 
 follow him, and double his orders, and if we dine not 
 well, there is no eating in France. 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 HOPITAL DES INVALIDES — MONUMENT OF TURENNE — 
 MARSHAL NET — A POLISH LADY IN UNIFORM — FE- 
 MALES MASQUERADING IN MEN's CLOTHES DUEL BE- 
 TWEEN THE SONS OF GEORGE IV. AND OF BONAPARTE 
 GAMBLING PROPENSITIES OF THE FRENCH. 
 
 The weather still holds warm and bright, as it has 
 been all the month, and the scarcely " premature white 
 pantaloons" appeared yesterday in the Tuileries. The 
 ladies loosen their "boas;" the silken greyhounds of 
 Italy follow their mistresses without shivering ; the 
 birds are noisy and gay in the clipped trees — who that 
 had known February in New England would recog- 
 nise hiin by such a description ? 
 
 I took an indolent stroll with my friend, Mr. Van 
 
 B , this morning to the Hopital des Invalides, 
 
 on the other side of the river. Here, not long since, 
 were twenty-five thousand old soldiers. There are 
 but five thousand now remaining, most of them having 
 been dismissed by the Bourbons. It is of course one 
 of the most interesting spots in France; and of a 
 pleasant day there is no lounge where a traveller can 
 find so much matter for thought, with so much pleas- 
 ure to the eye. We crossed over by the Pons Louis 
 Quinze, and kept along the bank of the river to the 
 esplanade in front of the hospital. There was never 
 a softer sunshine, or a more deliciously tempered air; 
 and we found the old veterans ont of doors, sitting 
 upon the cannon along the rampart, or halting about, 
 with their wooden legs, under the trees, the pictures 
 
 of comfort and contentment. The building itself, as 
 you know, is very celebrated for its grandeur. The 
 dome of the Invalides rises upon the eye from all 
 parts of Paris, a perfect model of proportion and 
 beauty. It was this which Bonaparte ordered to be 
 gilded, to divert the people from thinking too much 
 : upon his defeat. It is a living monument of the most 
 j touching recollections of him now. Positively the 
 i blood mounts, and the tears spring to the eyes of 
 the spectator, as he stands a moment, and remembers 
 what is around him in that place. To see his maimed 
 followers, creeping along the corridors, clothed and 
 ; fed by the bounty he left, in a place devoted to his 
 soldiers alone, their old comrades about them, and all 
 i glowing with one feeling of devotion to his memory, 
 to speak to them, to hear their stories of " VEm- 
 pereur" 1 — it is better than a thousand histories to make 
 ! owe fed the glory of "the great captain." The inte- 
 j rior of the dome is vast, and of a splendid style of 
 : architecture, and out from one of its sides extends a 
 I superb chapel, hung all round with the tattered flags 
 taken in his victories alone. Here the veterans of his 
 army worship, beneath the banners for which they 
 fought. It is hardly appropriate, I should think, to 
 ! adorn thus the church of a "religion of peace;" but 
 j while there, at least, we feel strangely certain, some- 
 j how, that it is right and fitting ; and when, as we stood 
 ! deciphering the half-effaced insignia of the different 
 | nations, the organ began to peal, there certainly was 
 anything but a jar between this grand music, conse- 
 crated as it is by religious associations, and the thril- 
 ling and uncontrolled sense in my bosom of Napoleon's 
 glory. The anthem seemed to him ! 
 
 The majestic sounds were still rolling through the 
 dome when we came to the monument of Turenne. 
 Here is another comment on the character of Bona- 
 parte's mind. There was once a long inscription on 
 this monument, describing, in the fulsome style of an 
 epitaph, the deeds and virtues of the distinguished 
 man who is buried beneath. The emperor removed 
 and replaced it by a small slab, graven with the single 
 word Turenne. You acknowledge the sublimity 
 of this as you stand before it. Everything is in keep- 
 ing with its grandeur. The lofty proportions and 
 magnificence of the dome, the tangible trophies of 
 glory, and the maimed and venerable figures, kneeling 
 about the altar, of those who helped to win them, are 
 circumstances that make that eloquent word as ar- 
 ticulate as if it was spoken in thunder. You feel that 
 Napoleon's spirit might walk the place, and read the 
 hearts of those who should visit it, unoffended. 
 
 We passed on to the library. It is ornamented 
 with the portraits of all the generals of Napoleon, 
 save one. Ney's is not there. It should, and will be. 
 at some time or other, doubtless ; but I wonder that, 
 in a day when such universal justice is done to the 
 memory of this brave man, so obvious and it would 
 seem necessary a reparation should not be demanded. 
 Great efforts have been making of late to get his sen- 
 tence publicly reversed, but, though they deny his 
 widow and children nothing else, this melancholy and 
 unavailing satisfaction is refused them. Key's mem- 
 ory little needs it, it is true. Ko visiter looks about 
 the gallery at the Invalides without commenting feel- 
 ingly on the omission of his portrait; and probably no 
 one of the scarred veterans who sit there, reading their 
 own deeds in history, looks round on the faces of the 
 old leaders of whom it tells, without remembering and 
 feeling that the brightest name upon the page is want- 
 ing. I would rather, if I were his son, have the regret 
 than the justice. 
 
 We left the hospital, as all must leave it, full of 
 Kapoleon. France is full of him. The monuments 
 and the hearts of the people, all are alive with his 
 name and glory. Disapprove and detract from his 
 reputation as you will (and as powerful minds, with 
 
24 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 apparent justice, have done), as long as human nature 
 is what it is, as long as power and loftiness of heart 
 hold their present empire over the imagination, Napo- 
 leon is immortal. 
 
 The promenading world is amused just now with the 
 daily appearance in the Tuileries of a Polish lady, 
 dressed in the Polonaise undress uniform, decorated 
 with the order of distinction given for bravery at War- 
 saw. She is not very beautiful, but she wears the 
 handsome military cap quite gallantly; and her small 
 feet and full chest are truly captivating in boots and a 
 frogged coat. It is an exceedingly spirited, well- 
 charactered face, with a complexion slightly roughened 
 by her new habits. Her hair is cut snort, and brushed 
 up at the sides, and she certainly handles the little 
 switch she carries with an air which entirely forbids 
 insult. She is ordinarily seen lounging very idly along 
 between two polytechnic boys, who seem to have a 
 great admiration for her. I observe that the Polish 
 generals touch their hats very respectfully as she 
 passes, but as yet I have been unable to come at her 
 precise history. 
 
 By the by, masquerading in men's clothes is not at 
 all uncommon in Paris. I have sometimes seen two 
 or three women at a time dining at the restaurants in 
 this way. No notice is taken of it, and the lady is per- 
 fectly safe from insult, though every one that passes 
 may penetrate the disguise. It is common at the 
 theatres, and at the public balls still more so. 1 have 
 noticed repeatedly at the weekly soirees of a lady of 
 high respectabilily, two sisters in boy's clothes, who 
 play duets upon the piano for the dance. The lady 
 of the house told me they preferred it, to avoid atten- 
 tion, and the awkwardness of position natural to their 
 vocation, in society. The tailors tell me it is quite a 
 branch of trade — making suits for ladies of a similar 
 taste. There is one particularly, in the Rue Richelieu, 
 who is famed for his nice fits to the female figure. Tt 
 is remarkable, however, that instead of wearing their 
 new honors meekly, there is no such impertinent pup- 
 py as zfemme deguisee. I saw one in a cafe, not long 
 ago, rap the garcon very smartly over the fingers with 
 a rattan, for overrunning her cup; and they are sure 
 to shoulder you off the sidewalk, if you are at all in 
 the way. I have seen several amusing instances of a 
 probable quarrel in the street, ending in a gay bow, 
 and a '■'■pardon, madame!" 
 
 There has been a great deal of excitement here for 
 the past two days on the result of a gambling quarrel. 
 An English gentleman, a fine, gay, noble-looking fel- 
 low, whom I have often met at parties, and admired for 
 his strikingly winning and elegant manners, lost fifty 
 thousand francs on Thursday night at cards. The 
 Count St. Leon was the winner. It appears that 
 Hesse, the Englishman, had drank freely before sitting 
 down to play, and the next morning his friend, who 
 had bet upon the game, persuaded him that there had 
 been some unfairness on the part of his opponent. He 
 refused consequently to pay the debt, and charged the 
 Frenchman, and another gentleman who backed him, 
 with deception. The result was a couple of challen- 
 ges, which were both accepted. Hesse fought the 
 Count on Friday, and was dangerously wounded at the 
 first fire. His friend fought on Saturday (yesterday), 
 and is reported to be mortally wounded. It is a littie 
 remarkable that both the losers are shot, and still more 
 remarkable, that Hesse should have been, as he was 
 known to be, a natural son of George the Fourth ; and 
 Count Leon, as was equally well known, a natural son 
 of Bonaparte! 
 
 Everybody gambles in Paris. I had no idea that so 
 desperate a vice could be so universal, and so little 
 leprecated as it is. The gambling-houses are as open 
 
 ^d as ordinary a resort as any public promenade, and 
 
 one may haunt them with as little danger to his rep- 
 utation. To dine from six to eight, gamble from eight 
 to ten, go to a ball, and return to gamble till morning, 
 is as common a routine for married men and bachelors 
 both, as a system of dress, and as little commented on. 
 I sometimes stroll into the card-room at a party, buf 
 I can not get accustomed to the sight of ladies losin« 
 or winning money. Almost all Frenchwomen, who 
 are too old to dance, play at parties, and their daugh- 
 ters and husbands watch the game as unconcernedly 
 as if they were turning over prints. I have seen Eng- 
 lish ladies play, but with less philosophy. They do 
 not lose their money gayly. It is a great spoiler of 
 beauty, the vexation of a loss. I think I never could 
 respect a woman upon whose face I had remarked the 
 shade I often see at an English card-table. It is cer- 
 tain that vice walks abroad in Paris, in many a shape 
 that would seem, to an American eye, to show the 
 fiend too openly. I am not over particular, 1 think, 
 but I would as soon expose a child to the plague as 
 give either son or daughter a free reign for a year in 
 Paris. 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 THE CHOLERA A MASQUE BALL THE GAY WORLD 
 
 MOBS VISIT TO THE HOTEL DIEU. 
 
 You see by the papers. I presume, the official ac 
 counts of the cholera in Paris. It seems very terrible 
 to you, no doubt, at your distance from the scene, and 
 truly it is terrible enough, if one could realize it, any- 
 where ; but many here do not trouble themselves about 
 it, and you might be in this metropolis a month, and 
 if you observed the people only, and frequented only 
 the places of amusement, and the public promenades, 
 you might never suspect its existence. The weather 
 is June-like, deliciously warm and bright; the trees 
 are just in the tender green of the new buds, and the 
 public gardens are thronged all day with thousands of 
 the gay and idle, sitting under the trees in groups, 
 laughing and amusing themselves, as if there were no 
 plague in the air, though hundreds die every day. 
 The churches are all hung in black; there is a con- 
 stant succession of funerals; and you cross the biers 
 and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospi- 
 tals at eveiy turn, in every quarter of the city. It is 
 very hard to realize such things, and, it would seem, 
 very hard even to treat them seriously. I was at a 
 masque ball at the Theatre des Varietes, a night or 
 two since, at the celebration of the Mi-Careme, or 
 half-lent. There were some two thousand people, I 
 should think, in fancy dresses, most of them grotesque 
 and satirical, and the ball was kept up till seven in the 
 morning, with all the extravagant gayety, noise, and 
 fun, with which the French people manage such mat- 
 ters. There was a cholera-waltz, and a cholera- galop- 
 ade, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a per- 
 sonification of the Cholera itself, with skeleton armor, 
 bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a 
 walking pestilence. It was the burden of all the 
 jokes, and all the cries of the hawkers, and all the 
 conversation; and yet, probably, nineteen out of twen- 
 ty of those present lived in the quarters most ravaged 
 by the disease, and many of them had seen it face to 
 face, and knew perfectly its deadly character! 
 
 As yet, with few exceptions, the higher classes of 
 society have escaped- It seems to depend very much 
 on the manner in which people live, and the poor have 
 been struck in every quarter, often at the very next 
 door to luxury. A friend told me this morning, that 
 the porter of a large and fashionable hotel, in which 
 he lives, had been taken to the hospital ; and there 
 have been one or two cases in the airy quarter of St. 
 Germain, in the same street with Mr. Cooper, and 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 25 
 
 nearly opposite. Several physicians and medical stu- 
 dents have died too, but the majority of these li\e with 
 the narrowest economy, and in the parts of the city 
 the most liable to impure effluvia. The balls go on 
 still in the gay world; and I presume they wou Id go 
 on if there were only musicians enough left to make 
 an orchestra, or fashionists to compose a quadrille. I 
 was walking home very late from a party the night be- 
 fore last, with a captain in the English army. The 
 gray of the morning was just stealing into the sky ; 
 and after a stopping a moment in the Place Vendome, 
 to look at the column, stretching up apparently unto 
 the very stars, we bade good morning, and parted. 
 He bad hardly left me, he said, when he heard a fright- 
 ful scream from one of the houses in the Rue St. Ho- 
 nore, and thinking there might be some violence go- 
 ing on, he rang at the gate and entered, mounting the j 
 first staircase that presented. A woman had just , 
 opened a door, and fallen on the broad stair at the top, 
 and was writhing in great agony. The people of the j 
 house collected" immediately ; but the moment my '• 
 friend pronounced the word cholera, there was a gen- i 
 eral dispersion, and he was left alone with the patient, j 
 He took her in his arms, and carried her to a coach- j 
 stand without assistance, and driving to the Hotel Dieu, j 
 left her with the Sceurs de Charite. She has since j 
 died. _ | 
 
 As if one plague was not enough, the city is still 
 alive in the distant fauxbourgs with revolts. Last j 
 night, the rappel was beat all over the town, the na- j 
 tional guard called to arms, and marched to the Porte | 
 S£. Denis, and the different quarters where the mobs j 
 were collected. 
 
 Many suppose there is no cholera except such as is 
 produced by poison; and the Hotel Dieu, and the oth- 
 er hospitals, are besieged daily by the infuriated mob, j 
 who swear vengeance against the government for all i 
 the mortality they witness. 
 
 I have just returned from a visit to the Hotel Dieu 
 — the hospital for the cholera. Impelled by a power- | 
 ful motive, which it is not now necessary to explain, I j 
 had previously made several attempts to gain admis- | 
 sion in vain; but yesterday I fell in fortunately with ] 
 an English physician, who told me I could pass with 
 a doctor's diploma, which he offered to borrow for me 
 of some medical friend. He called by appointment at ; 
 seven this morning, to accompany me on my visit. 
 
 It was like one of our loveliest mornings in June — 
 an inspiriting, sunny, balmy day, all softness and ■ 
 beauty — and we crossed the Tuileries by one of its j 
 superb avenues, and kept down the bank of the river ' 
 to the island. With the errand on which we were 
 bounJ in our minds, it was impossible not to be struck : 
 very forcibly with our own exquisite enjoyment of life. 
 I am sure I never felt my veins fuller of the pleasure 
 of health and motion ; and I never saw a day when , 
 everything about me seemed better worth living for. j 
 The splendid palace of the Louvre, with its long fa- 
 fade of nearly half a mile, lay in the mellowest sun- j 
 shine on our left ; the lively river, covered with boats, : 
 and spanned with its magnificent and crowded bridges j 
 on our right; the view of the island, with its massive : 
 old structures below, and the fine gray towers of the : 
 church of Notre Dime rising, dark and gloomy, in the j 
 distance, rendered it difficult to realize anything but j 
 life and pleasure. That under those very towers, 
 which added so much to the beauty of the scene, there 
 lay a thousand and more of poor wretches dying of a 
 plague, was a thought my mind would not retain a 
 moment. 
 
 Half an hour's walk brought us to the Place Notre 
 Dame, on one side of which, next this celebrated 
 church, stands the hospital. My friend entered, lea- 
 ving me to wait till he had found an acquaintance of 
 whom he could borrow a diploma. A hearse was 
 
 standing at the door of the church, and I went in for 
 a moment. A few mourners, with the appearance of 
 extreme poverty, were kneeling round a coffin at one 
 of the side altars; and a solitary priest, with an at- 
 tendant boy, was mumbling the prayers for the dead. 
 As I came out, another hearse drove up, with a rough 
 coffin, scantily covered with a pall, and followed by one 
 poor old man. They hurried in, and I strolled around 
 the square. Fifteen or twenty water-carriers were 
 filling their buckets at the fountain opposite, singing 
 and laughing ; and at the same moment four different 
 litters crossed toward the hospital, each with its two 
 or three followers, women and children, friends or rel- 
 atives of the sick, accompanying them to the door, 
 where they parted from them, most probably for ever. 
 The litters were set down a moment before ascending 
 the steps; the crowd pressed around and lifted the 
 coarse curtains ; farewells were exchanged, and the 
 sick alone passed in. I did not see any great demon- 
 stration of feeling in the particular cases that were be- 
 fore me ; but I can conceive, in the almost deadly cer- 
 tainty of this disease, that these hasty partings at the 
 doorof the hospital might often be scenes of unsur- 
 passed suffering and distress. 
 
 I waited, perhaps, ten minutes more. In the whole 
 time that I had been there, twelve litters, bearing the 
 sick, had entered the Hotel Dieu. As I exhibited the 
 borrowed diploma, the thirteenth arrived, and with it 
 a young man, whose violent and uncontrolled grief 
 worked so far on the soldier at the door, that he al- 
 lowed im to pass. I followed the bearers to the 
 ward, interested exceedingly to observe the first treat 
 ment and manner of reception. They wound slowly 
 up the stone staircase to the upper story, and entered 
 the female department — a long low room, containing 
 nearly a hundred beds, placed in alleys scarce two feet 
 from each other. Nearly all were occupied, and those 
 which were empty my friend told me were vacated by 
 deaths yesterday. They set down the litter by the 
 side of a narrow cot, with coarse but clean sheets, and 
 a Satur de Charite, with a white cap, and a cro.*s at her 
 girdle, came and took off the canopy. A young wo- 
 man, of apparently twenty-five, was beneath, absolutely 
 convulsed with agony. Her eyes were started from 
 the sockets, her mouth foamed, and her face was of 
 a frightful, livid purple. I never saw so horrible a 
 sight! She had been taken in perfect health only 
 three hours before, but her features looked to me 
 marked with a year of pain. The first attempt to lift 
 her produced violent vomiting, and I thought she 
 must die instantly. They covered her up in bed, and 
 leaving the man who came with her hanging over her 
 with the moan of one deprived of his senses, they went 
 to receive others, who were entering in the same man- 
 ner. I inquired of my companion how soon she would 
 be attended to. He said. " possibly in an hour, as the 
 physician was just commencing his rounds." An hour 
 after this I passed the bed of this poor woman, and she 
 had not yet been visited. Her husband answered my 
 question with a choking voice and a flood of tears. 
 
 I passed down the Ward, and found nineteen or 
 twenty in the last agonies of death. They lay per- 
 fectly still, and seemed benumbed. I felt the limbs 
 of several, and found them quite cold. The stomach 
 only had a little warmth. Now and then a half groan 
 escaped those who seemed the strongest; but with the 
 exception of the universally open mouth and upturned 
 ghastly eye, there were no signs of much suffering. I 
 found two who must have been dead half an hour, 
 undiscovered by the attendants. One of them was au 
 old woman, nearly gray, with a very bad expression of 
 face, who was perfectly cold— lips, limbs, body, and 
 all. The other was younger, and looked as if she had 
 died in pain. Her eyes appeared as if they had been 
 forced half out of the sockets, and her skin was of the 
 most livid and deathly purple. The woman in the 
 
PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 next bed told me she had died since the Sosur de 
 Charile had been there. It is horrible to think how 
 these poor creatures may suffer in the very midst of 
 the provisions that are made professedly for their re- 
 lief. I asked why a simple prescription of treatment 
 might not be drawn up by the physicians, and admin- 
 istered by the numerous medical students who were 
 in Paris, that as few as possible might suffer from de- 
 lay. "Because," said my companion, "the chief 
 physicians must do everything personally, to study 
 the complaint." And so. I verily believe, more hu- 
 man lives are sacrificed in waiting for experiments, 
 than ever will be saved by the results. My blood 
 boiled from the beginning to the end of this melan- 
 choly visit. 
 
 I wandered about alone among the beds till my 
 heart was sick, and I could bear it no longer ; and 
 then rejoined my friend, who was in the train of one 
 of the physicians, making the rounds. One would 
 think a dying person should be treated with kindness. 
 I never saw a rougher or more heartless manner than 
 
 that of the celebrated Dr. , at the bedsides of 
 
 these poor creatures. A harsh question, a rude pull- 
 ing open of the mouth, to look at the tongue, a sen- 
 tence or two of unsuppressed commands to the stu- 
 dents on the progress of the disease, and the train 
 passed on. If discouragement and despair are not 
 medicines, I should think the visits of such physicians 
 were of little avail. The wretched sufferers turned 
 away their heads after he had gone, in every instance 
 that I saw, with an expression of visibly increased dis- 
 tress. Several of them refused to answer his ques- 
 tions altogether. 
 
 On reaching the bottom of the Salle St. Moniquc, 
 one of the male wards, I heard loud voices and laugh- 
 ter. I had noticed much more groaning and com- 
 plaining in passing among the men, and the horrible 
 discordance struck me as something infernal. It pro- 
 ceeded from one of the sides to which the patients 
 had been removed who were recovering. The most 
 successful treatment has been found to be fundi, very 
 strong, with but little acid, and being permitted to 
 drink as much as they would, they had become par- 
 tially intoxicated. It was a fiendish sight, positively. 
 They were sitting up, and reaching from one bed to 
 the other, and with their still pallid faces and blue lips, 
 and the hospital dress of white, they looked like so 
 many carousing corpses. I turned away from them 
 in horror. 
 
 I was stopped in the door-way by a litter entering 
 with a sick woman. They set her down in the main 
 passage between the beds, and left her a moment to 
 find a place for her. She seemed to have an interval 
 of pain, and rose up on one hand, and looked about 
 her very earnestly. T followed the direction of her 
 eyes, and could easily imagine her sensations. Twenty 
 or thirty death-like faces were turned toward her from 
 the different beds, and the groans of the dying and the 
 distressed came from every side. She was without a 
 friend whom she knew, sick of a mortal disease, and 
 abandoned to the mercy of those whose kindness is 
 mercenary and habitual, and of course without sym- 
 pathy or feeling. Was it not enough alone, if she 
 had been far less ill, to imbitter the very fountains of 
 life, and kill her with mere fright and horror ? She 
 sank down upon the litter again, and drew her shawl 
 over her head. I had seen enough of suffering, and I 
 left the place. 
 
 On reaching the lower staircase, my friend proposed 
 to me to look into the dead-room. We descended to 
 a large dark apartment below the street-level, lighted 
 by a lamp fixed to the wall. Sixty or seventy bodies 
 lay on the floor, some of them quite uncovered, and 
 some wrapped in mats. I could not see distinctly 
 enough by the dim light, to judge of their discolora- 
 tion. They appeared mostly old and emaciated. 
 
 I can not describe the sensation of relief with which 
 I breathed the free air once more. I had no fear of 
 the cholera, but the suffeiing and misery I had seen, 
 oppressed and half smothered me. Every one who 
 has walked through an hospital, will remember how 
 natural it is to subdue the breath, and close the nos- 
 trils to the smells of medicine and the close air. The 
 fact, too, that the question of contagion is still dispu- 
 ted, though I fully believe the cholera not to be con- 
 tagious, might have had some effect. My breast 
 heaved, however, as if a weight had risen from my 
 lungs, and I walked home, blessing God for health 
 with undissembled gratitude. 
 
 P. S. — I began this account of my visit to the Hotel 
 Dieu yesterday. As I am perfectly well this morning, 
 I think the point of non-contagion, in my own case at 
 least, is clear. I breathed the same air with the dying 
 and the diseased for two hours, and felt of nearly a 
 hundred to be satisfied of the curious phenornena of 
 the vital heat. Perhaps an experiment of this sort, 
 in a man not professionally a physician, may be con- 
 sidered rash or useless ; and I would not willingly be 
 thought to have done it from any puerile curiosity. I 
 have been interested in such subjects always ; and I 
 considered the fact that the king's sons had been per- 
 mitted to visit the hospital, a sufficient assurance that 
 the physicians were seriously convinced there could 
 be no possible danger. If I need an apology, it may 
 be found in this. 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 LEGION OF HONOR — PRESENTATION TO THE KING — THE 
 THRONE OF FRANCE — THE QUEEN AND THE PRIN- 
 CESSES COUNTESS GUICCIOLI THE LATE DUEL THE 
 
 SEASON OF CARNIVAL — ANOTHER FANCY BALL DIF- 
 FERENCE BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC MASKERS 
 — STREET MASKING — BALL AT THE PALACE — THE 
 YOUNG DUKE OF ORLEANS PRINCESS CHRISTINE- 
 LORD HARRY VANE HEIR OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 
 
 VILL1ERS BERNARD, FABVIER, COUSIN, AND OTHER 
 
 DISTINGUISHED CHARACTERS — THE SUPPER — THF 
 GLASS VERANDAH, ETC. 
 
 As I was getting out of a fiacre this morning on the 
 Boulevard, I observed that the driver had the cross of 
 the legion of honor, worn very modestly under his coat. 
 On taking a second look at his face, I was struck with 
 its soldier-like, honest expression ; and with the fear 
 that 1 might imply a doubt by a question, I simply ob- 
 served, that he probably received it from Napoleon. 
 He drew himself up a little as he assented, and with 
 half a smile pulled the coarse cape of his coat across 
 bis bosom. It was done evidently with a mixed feeling 
 of pride and a dislike of ostentation, which showed the 
 nurture of Napoleon. It is astonishing how superior 
 every being seems to have become that served under 
 him. Wherever you find an old soldier of the " em- 
 peror," as they delight to call him, you find a noble, 
 brave, unpretending man. On mentioning this circum- 
 stance to a friend, he informed me, that it was possibly 
 a man who was well known, from rather a tragical 
 circumstance. He had driven a gentleman to a party 
 one night, who was dissatisfied with him, for some 
 reason or other, and abused him very grossly. The 
 cocker the next morning sent him a challenge ; and, as 
 the cross of honor levels all distinctions, he was com- 
 pelled to fight him, and was shot dead at the first fire. 
 
 Honors of this sort must be a very great incentive. 
 They are worn very proudly in France. You see 
 men of all classes, with the striped riband in their but- 
 ton-hole, marking them as the heroes of the three 
 days of July. The Poles and the French and English, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 27 
 
 who fought well at Warsaw, wear also a badge ; and 
 it certainly produces a feeling of respect as one passes 
 them in the street. There are several very young 
 men, lads really, who are wandering about Paris, with 
 the latter distinction on their breasts, and every indi- 
 cation that it is all they have brought away from their 
 unhappy country. The Poles are coming in now from 
 every quarter. I meet occasionally in society the 
 celebrated Polish countess, who lost her property and 
 was compelled to flee, for her devotion to the cause. 
 Louis Philippe has formed a regiment of the refugees, 
 and sent them to Algiers. He allows no liberalists to 
 remain in Paris, if he can help it. The Spaniards and 
 Italians, particularly, are ordered of} - to Tours, and 
 other provincial towns, the instant they become pen- 
 sioners upon the government. 
 
 I was presented last night, with Mr. Carr and Mr. 
 Ritchie, two of our countrymen, to the king. We 
 were very naturally prepared for an embarrassing cere- 
 mony—an expectation which was not lessened in my 
 case, by the necessity of a laced coat, breeches, and 
 sword. We drove into the court of the Tuileries, as 
 the palace clock struck nine, in the costume of cour- 
 tiers of the time of Louis the Twelfth, very anxious 
 about the tenacity of our knee-buckles, and not at all 
 satisfied as to the justice done to our unaccustomed 
 proportions by the tailor. To say nothing of my looks, 
 1 am sure I should have fell much more like a gentle- 
 man in my costume bourgeois. By the lime we had 
 been passed through the hands of all the chamberlains, 
 however, and walked through all the preparatory halls 
 and drawing-rooms, each with its complement of gen- 
 tlemen in waiting, dressed like ourselves in lace and 
 small-clothes, I became more reconciled to myself, 
 and began to feel that I might possibly have looked 
 out of place in my ordinary dress. The atmosphere 
 of a court is certainly very contagious in this par- 
 ticular. 
 
 After being sufficiently astonished with long rooms, 
 frescoes, and guardsmen, seven or eight feet high, 
 (the tallest men I ever saw, standing with halberds at 
 the doors), we were introduced into the Salle du 
 Trone — a large hall lined with crimson velvet through- 
 out, with the throne in the centre of one of the sides. 
 Some half dozen gentlemen were standing about the 
 fire, conversing very familiarly, among whom was the 
 British ambassador, Lord Grenville, and the Brazilian 
 minister, both of whom I had met before. The king 
 was not there. The Swedish minister, a noble-look- 
 ing man, with snow-white hair, was the. only other 
 official person present, each of the ministers having 
 come to present one or two of his countrymen. The 
 king entered in a few moments, in the simple uniform 
 of the line, and joined the group at the fire, with the 
 most familiar and cordial politeness ; each minister 
 presenting his countrymen as occasion offered, cer- 
 tainly with far less ceremony than one sees at most 
 dinner-parties in America. After talking a few min- 
 utes with Lord Grenville, inquiring the progress of 
 the cholera, he turned to Mr. Rives, and we were pre- 
 sented. We stood in a little circle around him. and 
 he conversed with us about America for ten or fifteen 
 minutes. He inquired from what states we came, 
 and said he had been as far west as Nashville, Ten- 
 nessee, and had often slept in the woods, quite as 
 6oundly as he ever did in more luxurious quarters. 
 He begged pardon of Mr. Carr, who was from South 
 Carolina, for saying that he had found the southern 
 taverns not particularly good. He preferred the north. 
 All this time I was looking out for some accent in the 
 "king's English." He speaks the language with all 
 the careless correctness and fluency of a vernacular 
 tongue. We were all surprised at it. It is American 
 English, however. He has not a particle of the cock- 
 ney drawl, half Irish and half Scotch, with which 
 
 1 1 many Englishmen speak. He must be the most cos- 
 II mopolite king that ever reigned. He even said lie had 
 been at Tangiers, the place of Mr. Can's consulate. 
 After some pleasant compliment to our country, he 
 passed to the Brazilian minister, who stood on the 
 other side, leaving us delighted with his manner; and, 
 probably, in spile of our independence, much more 
 inclined than before to look indulgently upon his bad 
 politics. The queen had entered, meantime, with the 
 king's sister, Lady Adelaide, and one or two of the 
 ladies of honor; and, after saying something cour- 
 teous to all, in her own language, and assuring us that 
 his majesty was very fond of America, the royal group 
 bowed out, and left us once more to ourselves. 
 
 We remained a few minutes, and I occupied my- 
 self with looking at the gold and crimson throne before 
 me, and recalling to my mind the world of historical 
 circumstances connected with it. You can easily 
 imagine it all. The throne of France is, perhaps, the 
 most interesting one in the world. But of all its as- 
 sociations, none rushed upon me so forcibly, or re- 
 tained my imagination so long, as the accidental 
 drama of which it was the scene during the three days 
 of July. It was here that the people brought the 
 polytechnic scholar, mortally wounded in the attack 
 on the palace, to die. He breathed his last on the 
 throne of France, surrounded with his comrades and 
 a crowd of patriots. It is one of the most striking and 
 affecting incidents, I think, in all history. 
 
 As we passed out I caught a glimpse, through a 
 side door, of the queen and the princesses sitting 
 round a table, covered with books, in a small drawing- 
 room, while a servant, in the gaudy livery of the court, 
 was just entering with tea. The careless attitudes of 
 the figures, the mellow light of the shade-lamp, and 
 the happy voices of children coming through the door, 
 reminded me more of home than anything I have seen 
 in France. It is odd, but really the most aching 
 sense of home-sickness I have felt since I left Amer- 
 ica, was awakened at that moment — in the palace of a 
 king, and at the sight of his queen and daughters! 
 
 We stopped in the antechamber to have our names 
 recorded in the visiting-book — a ceremony which in- 
 sures us invitations to all the balls given at court du- 
 ring the winter. The first has already appeared in the 
 shape of a printed note, in which we are informed by 
 the " aide-de-camp of the king and the lady of honor 
 of the queen," that we are invited to a ball at the pal- 
 ace on Monday night. To my distress there is a little 
 direction at the bottom, " Les hommes seront en uni- 
 forme," which subjects those of us who are not mili- 
 tary, once more to the awkwardness of this ridiculous 
 court dress. I advise all Americans coming abroad to 
 get a commission in the militia to travel with. It is 
 of use in more ways than one. 
 
 I met the Countess Guiccioli, walking yesterday in 
 the Tuileries. She looks much younger than I anti- 
 cipated, and is a handsome blonde, apparently about 
 thirty. I am told by a gentleman who knows her, 
 that she has become a great flirt, and is quite spoiled 
 by admiration. The celebrity of Lord Byron's attach- 
 ment would, certainly, make her a very desirable ac- 
 quaintance, were she much less pretty "than she really 
 is; and I am told her drawing-room is thronged with 
 lovers of all nations, contending for a preference, 
 which, having been once given, as it has, should be 
 buried, I think, for ever. So, indeed, should have 
 been the Emperess Maria Louisa's, and that of the 
 widow of Bishop Heber ; and yet the latter has mar- 
 ried a Greek count, and the former a German baron! 
 
 I find I was incorrect in the statement I gave you 
 of the duel between Mr. Hesse and Count Leon. 
 The particulars have come out more fully, and from 
 the curious position of the parties (Mr. Hesse, as I 
 
St 
 
 PE^CILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 stated, being the natural son of George the Fourth ; 
 and Count Leon of Napoleon) are worth recapitula- 
 ting. Count Leon had lost several thousand francs to 
 Mr. Hesse, which he refused to pay, alleging that 
 there had been unfiir dealing in the game. The 
 niarter was left to arbitration, and Mr. Hesse fully 
 cleared of the charge. Leon still refused to pay, and 
 for fifteen days practised with the pistol from morning 
 till night. At the end of this time he paid the 
 money, and challenged Hesse. The latter had lost 
 the use of his right arm in the battle of Waterloo, 
 (fighting of course against Count Leon's father), but 
 accepted his challenge, and fired with his left hand. 
 Hesse was shot through the body, and has since died, 
 and Count Leon was not hurt. The affair has made 
 a great sensation here, for Hesse had a young and 
 lovely wife, only seventeen, and was unusually beloved 
 and admired; while his opponent is a notorious gam- 
 bler, and every way detested. People meet at the 
 gaming-table here, however, as they meet in the street, 
 without question of character. 
 
 Carnival is over. Yesterday was " Mardi Gras" — 
 the last day of the reign of Folly. Paris has been like 
 a city of grown-up children for a week. What with 
 masking all night, supping, or bieakfasting, what you 
 will, at sunrise, and going to bed between morning and 
 noon, I feel that I have done my devoir upon the ex- 
 periment of French manners. 
 
 It would be tedious, not to say improper, to describe 
 all the absurdities I have seen and mingled in for the 
 last fortnight; but I must try to give you some idea of 
 the meaning the French attach to the season of carni- 
 val, and the manner in which it is celebrated. 
 
 In society it is the time for universal gayety and 
 freedom. Parties, fancy balls, and private masques, 
 are given, and kept up till morning. The etiquette is 
 something more free, and gallantry is indulged and 
 followed with the privileges, almost, of a Saturnalia. 
 One of the gayest things I have seen was a fancy ball, 
 given by a man of some fashion, in the beginning of 
 the season. Most of the distinguzs of Paris were 
 there; and it was, perhaps, as fair a specimen of the 
 elegant gayety of the French capital, as occurred 
 during the carnival. The rooms were full by ten. 
 Everybody was in costume, and the ladies in dresses 
 of unusual and costly splendor. At a bal costume 
 there are no masks, of course, and dancing, waltzing, 
 and galopading followed each other in the ordinary 
 succession, but with all the heightened effect and ad- 
 ditional spirit of a magnificent spectacle. It was really 
 beautiful. There were officers from all the English 
 regiments, in their fine showy uniforms ; and French 
 officers who had brought dresses from their far-off cam- 
 paigns ; Turks, Egyptians, Mussulmans, and Algerine 
 rovers — every country that had been touched by 
 French soldiers, represented in its richest costume, 
 and by men of the finest appearance. There was a 
 colonel of the English Madras cavalry, in the uniform 
 of his corps — one mass of blue and silver, the most 
 spendidly dressed man I ever saw; and another Eng- 
 lishman, who is said to be the successor of Lord By- 
 ron in the graces of the gay and lovely Countess Guic- 
 cioli, was dressed as a Greek; and between the ex- 
 quisite taste and richness of his costume, and his 
 really excessive personal beauty, he made no ordinary 
 sensation. The loveliest woman there was a young 
 baroness, whose dancing, figure, and face, so resembled 
 a celebrated Philadelphia belle, that I was constantly 
 expecting her musical French voice to break into Eng- 
 lish. She was dressed as an eastern dancing-girl, and 
 floated about with the lightness and grace of a fairy. 
 Her motion intoxicated the eye completely. I have 
 seen her since at the Tuileries, where, in a waltz with 
 the handsome Duke of Orleans, she was the single ob- 
 ject of admiration for the whole court. She is a small, 
 
 lightly-framed creature, with very little feet, and a face 
 of more brilliancy than regular beauty, but all airiness 
 and spirit. A very lovely, indolent-looking English 
 girl, with large sleepy eyes, was dressed as a Circas- 
 sian slave, with chains from her ankles to her waist. 
 She was a beautiful part of the spectacle, but too pas- 
 sive to interest one. There were sylphs and nuns, 
 broom-girls and Italian peasants, and a great many in 
 rich Polonaise dresses. It was unlike any other fancy 
 ball I ever saw, in the variety and novelty of the char- 
 acters represented, and the costliness with which they 
 were dressed. You can have no idea of the splendor 
 of a waltz in such a glittering assemblage. It was 
 about time for an early breakfast when the ball was 
 over. 
 
 The private masks are amusing to those who are 
 intimate with the circle. A stranger, of course, is 
 neither acquainted enough to amuse himself within 
 proper limits, nor incognito enough to play his gallan- 
 tries at hazard. I never have seen more decidedly 
 triste assemblies than the balls of this kind which I 
 have attended, where the uniform black masks and 
 dominoes gave the party the aspect of a funeral, and the 
 restraint made it quite as melancholy. 
 
 The public masks are quite another affair. They 
 are given at the principal theatres, and commence at 
 midnight. The pit and stage are thrown into a bril- 
 liant hall, with the orchestra in the centre ; the music 
 is divine, and the etiquette perfect liberty. There is, 
 of course, a great deal of vulgar company, for every 
 one is admitted who pays the ten francs at the door; 
 but all classes of people mingle in the crowd ; and if 
 one is not amused, it is because he will neither listen 
 nor talk. I think it requires one or two masks to get 
 one's eye so much accustomed to the sight, that he is 
 not disgusted with the exteriors of the women. There 
 was something very diabolical to me at first in a dead, 
 black representation of the human face, and the long 
 black domino. Persuading one's self that there is 
 beauty under such an outside, is like getting up a pas- 
 sion for a very ugly woman, for the sake of her mind — 
 difficult, rather. I soon became used to it, however, 
 and amuse myself infinitely. One is liable to waste his 
 wit, to be sure ; for in a crowd so rarely bicn composce, 
 as they phrase it, the undistinguishing dress gives 
 every one the opportunity of bewildering you; but the 
 feet and manner of walking, and the tone and mode of 
 expression, are indices sufficiently certain to decide, 
 and give interest to a pursuit ; and, with tolerable cau- 
 tion, one is paid for his trouble, in nineteen cases out 
 of twenty. t 
 
 At the public masks, the visiters are not all in dom- 
 ino. One half at least are in caricature dresses, men 
 in petticoats, and women in boots and spurs. It is not 
 always easy to detect the sex. An English lady, a 
 carnival-acquaintance of mine, made love successfully, 
 with the aid of a tall figure and great spirit, to a num- 
 ber of her own sex. She wore a half uniform, and 
 was certainly a very elegant fellow. France is so re- 
 markable indeed, for effeminate looking men and mas- 
 culine looking women, that half the population might 
 change costume to apparent advantage. The French 
 are fond of caricaturing English dandies, and they do 
 it with great success. The imitation of Bond-street 
 dialect in another language is highly amusing. There 
 were two imitation exquisites at the " Varieties 1 ' 1 one 
 night, who were dressed to perfection, and must have 
 studied the character thoroughly. The whole theatre 
 was in a roar when they entered. Malcontents take the 
 opportunity to show up the king and ministers, and these 
 are excellent, too. One gets weary of fun. It is a 
 life which becomes tedious long before carnival is 
 over. It is a relief to sit down once more to books and 
 pen. 
 
 The three last days are devoted to street-masking. 
 This is the most ridiculous of all. Paris pours ou< 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 29 
 
 its whole population upon the Boulevards, and guards 
 are stationed to keep the goers and comers in separate 
 lines, and prevent all collecting of groups on the patt. 
 People in the most grotesque and absurd dresses pass 
 on loot, and in loaded carriages, and all is nonsense 
 and obscenity. It is difficult to conceive the motive 
 which can induce grown-up people to go to the ex- 
 pense and trouble of such an exhibition, merely to 
 amuse the world. A description of these follies would 
 be waste of paper. 
 
 On the last night but one of the carnival, I went to 
 a ball at the palace. We presented our invitations at 
 the door, and mounted through piles of soldiers of the 
 line, crowds of servants in the king's livery, and groves 
 of exotics at the broad landing places, to the reception 
 roam. We were ushered into the Salle des Mare- 
 cha's — a large hall, the ceiling of which rises into the 
 djiue of the Tuileries, ornamented with full-length 
 portraits of the living marshals of France. A gallery 
 of a light airy structure runs round upon the capitals 
 of the pillars, and this, when we entered, and at all the 
 after hours of the ball, was crowded with loungers from 
 the assembly beneath — producing a splendid effect, as 
 their glittering uniforms passed and repassed under the 
 flags and armor with which the ceilings were thickly 
 hung. The royal train entered presently, and the 
 band struck up a superb march. Three rows of vel- 
 vet-covered seats, one above another, went round the 
 hall, leaving a passage behind, and in front of these the 
 queen and her family made a circuit of courtesy, fol- 
 lowed by the wives of the ambassadors, among whom 
 was our countrywoman, Mrs. Rives. Her majesty 
 weut smiling past, stopping here and there to speak to 
 a lady whom she recognised, and the king followed 
 her with his eternal and painfully forced smile, saying 
 something to every second person he encountered. 
 The princesses have good faces, and the second one 
 has an expression of great delicacy and tenderness, but 
 no beauty. As soon as the queen was seated, the 
 band played a quadrille, and the crowd cleared away 
 from the centre for the dance. The Duke of Orleans 
 selected his partner, a pretty girl, who, T believe, was 
 English, and forward went the head couples to the ex- 
 quisite music of the new opera — Robert le Diable. 
 
 I fell into the little cortege standing about the queen, 
 and watched the interesting party dancing in the head 
 quadrille for an hour. The Dnke of Orleans, who is 
 nearly twenty, and seems a thoughtless, good-natured, 
 immature young man, moved about very gracefully 
 with his handsome figure, and seemed amused, and 
 quite unconscious of the attention he drew. The 
 princesses were vis-a-vis, and the second one a dark- 
 haired, slender, interesting girl of nineteen, had a 
 polytechnic scholar for her partner. He was a hand- 
 some, gallant-looking fellow, who must have distin- 
 guished himself to have been invited to court, and I 
 could not but admire the beautiful mixture of respect 
 and self-confidence with which he demanded the hand 
 of the princess from the lady of honor, and conversed 
 with her during the dance. If royalty does not seal 
 up the affections, I could scarce conceive how a being 
 so decidedly of nature's best nobility, handsome, grace- 
 ful, and confident, could come within the sphere of a 
 sensitive-looking girl, like the princess Christine, and 
 not leave more than a transient recollection upon her 
 fancy. The music stopped, and I had been so occu- 
 pied with my speculations upon the polytechnic boy, 
 that I had scarcely noticed any other person in the 
 dance. He led the princess back to her seat by the 
 dame d'honneur, bowing low, colored a little, and min- 
 gled with the crowd. A few minutes after I saw him 
 in the gallery, quite alone, leaning over the railing, 
 and looking down upon the scene below, having ap- 
 parently abandoned the dance for the evening. From 
 something in his face, and in the manner of resuming 
 his sword, I was certain he had come to the palace 
 
 | with that single object, and would dance no more. I 
 1 kept him in my eye most of the night, and am very 
 ! sure he did not. If the little romance 1 wove out of 
 ! it was not a true one, it was not because the material 
 ! was improbable. 
 
 As I was looking still at the quadrille dancing before 
 | the queen, Dr. Bowring took my arm and proposed a 
 1 stroll through the other apartments. I found that the 
 : immense crowd in the S(dle des Mareclials was but 
 : about one fifth of the assembly. We passed through 
 ' hall after hall, with music and dancing in each, all 
 ! crowded and gay alike, till we came at last to the Salle 
 \ du Trdne, where the old men were collected at card- 
 tables and in groups for conversation. My distinguish- 
 ed companion was of the greatest use to me here, for 
 he knew everybody, and there was scarce a person in 
 the room who did not strongly excite my curiosity. 
 1 One half of them at least were maimed ; some without 
 arms, and some with wooden legs, and faces scarred 
 and weather-burnt, but all in full uniform, and nearly 
 all with three or four orders of honor on the breast. 
 You would have held your breath to have heard the 
 recapitulation of their names. At one table sat Mar- 
 shal Grouchy and General Excelmans ; in a corner 
 stood Marshal Soidt, conversing with a knot of peers 
 of France ; and in the window nearest the door, Gen- 
 eral Bernard, our country's friend and citizen, was 
 earnestly engaged in talking to a group of distinguished 
 looking men, two of whom, my companion said, were 
 members of the chamber of deputies. We stood a 
 I moment, and a circle was immediately formed around 
 Dr. Bowring, who is a great favorite among the literary 
 and liberal people of France. The celebrated General 
 Fabvier came up among others, and Cousin the poet. 
 Fabvier, as you know, held a chief command in Greece, 
 and was elected governor of Paris pro tern, after the 
 "three days." He is a very remarkable looking man, 
 with a head almost exactly resembling that of the bust of 
 j Socrates. The engravings give him a more animated 
 and warlike expression than he wears in private. 
 Cousin is a mild, retired looking man, and was one of 
 I the very few persons present not in the court uniform. 
 J Among so many hundred coats embroidered with gold, 
 ■ his plain black dress looked singularly simple and 
 ! poet-like. 
 
 I left the diplomatist-poet conversing with his 
 ! friends, and went back to the dancing rooms. Music 
 and female beauty are more attractive metal than dis- 
 abled generals playing at cards; and encountering in 
 l my way an attache to the American legation, 1 in- 
 ' quired about one or two faces that interested me, and 
 ! collecting information enough to pass through the 
 courtesies of a dance, I found a partner and gave my- 
 ; self up, like the rest, to amusement. 
 
 Supper was served at two, and a more splendid af- 
 ! fair could not be conceived, A long and magnificent 
 I hall on the other side of the Salle du Tidnc, was set 
 ; with tables, covered with everything that France could 
 ! afford, in the royal services of gold and silver, and in 
 j the greatest profusion. There was room enough for 
 i all the immense assemblage, and when the queen was 
 I seated with her daughters and ladies of honor, the 
 company sat down and all was as quiet and well-reg- 
 ulated as a dinner party of four. 
 
 After supper the dancing was resumed, and the 
 
 queen remained till three o'clock. At her departure 
 
 the band played cotillons or waltzes with figures, in 
 
 i which the Duke of Orleans displayed the grace for 
 
 1 which he is celebrated, and at four, quite exhausted 
 
 ; with fatigue and heat, I went with a friend or two into 
 
 the long glass verandah, built by Napoleon as a pron 
 
 enadeforthe Emperes* Maria Louisa during her illness, 
 
 ! where tea, coffee, and ices were served to those who 
 
 ! wished them after supper. It was an interesting place 
 
 ! enough, and had my eyes and limbs ached less, I 
 
 : should have liked to walk up and down, and muse a 
 
30 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 little upon its recollections, but swallowing my tea as 
 hastily as possible, 1 was but too happy to make my 
 escape and get home to bed. 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 CHOLERA UNIVERSAL TERROR FLIGHT OF THE IN- 
 HABITANTS— CASES WITHIN THE WALLS OF THE PAL- 
 ACE DIFFICULTY OF ESCAPE DESERTED STREETS 
 
 CASES NOT REPORTED DRYNESS OF THE ATMO- 
 SPHERE PREVENTIVES RECOMMENDED PUBLIC 
 
 BATHS, ETC. 
 
 Cholera ! Cholera ! It is now the only topic. 
 There is no other interest — no other dread — no 
 other occupation, for Paris. The invitations for 
 parties are at last recalled — the theatres are at last 
 shut or languishing — the fearless are beginning to be 
 afraid — people walk the streets with camphor bags 
 and vinaigrettes at their nostrils — there is a universal 
 terror in all classes, and a general flight of all who 
 can afford to get away. I never saw a people so en- 
 grossed with one single and constant thought. The 
 waiter brought my breakfast this morning with a pale 
 face, and an apprehensive question, whether I was 
 quite well. I sent to my boot-maker yesterday, and 
 he was dead. I called on a friend, a Hanoverian, one 
 of those broad-chested, florid, immortal-looking men, 
 of whose health for fifty years, violence apart, one is 
 absolutely certain, and he was at death's door with the 
 cholera. Poor fellow ! He had fought all through 
 the revolution in Greece ; he had slept in rain and 
 cold, under the open sky, many a night, through a ten 
 years' pursuit of the profession of a soldier of fortune, 
 living one of the most remarkable lives, hitherto, of 
 which I ever heard, and to be taken down here in the 
 midst of ease and pleasure, reduced to a shadow with 
 so vulgar and unwarlike a disease as this, was quite too 
 much for his philosophy. He had been ill three days 
 when I found him. He was emaciated to a skeleton 
 in that short time, weak and helpless, and, though he 
 is not a man to exaggerate suffering, he said he never 
 had conceived such intense agony as he had endured. 
 He assured me, that if he recovered, and should ever 
 be attacked with it again, he would blowout his brains 
 at the first symptom. Nothing but his iron constitu- 
 tion protracted the disorder. Most people who are 
 attacked die in from three to twenty-four hours. 
 
 For myself, I have felt and still feel quite safe. My 
 rooms are in the airiest quarter of Paris, facing the 
 gardens of the Tuileries, with windows overlooking 
 the king's ; and, as far as air is concerned, if his ma- 
 jesty considers himself well situated, it would be quite 
 ridiculous in so insignificant a person as myself to be 
 alarmed. With absolute health, confident spirits, and 
 tolerably regular habits, I have usually thought one 
 may defy almost anything but love or a bullet. To- 
 day, however, there have been, they say, two cases 
 within the palace-icalls, members of the royal house- 
 hold, and Casimir Perier. who probably lives well and 
 has enough to occupy his mind, is very low with it, 
 and one cannot help feeling that he has no certain ex- 
 emption, when a disease has touched both above and 
 below him. I went to-day to the messagerie to en- 
 gage my place for Marseilles, on the way to Italy, but 
 the seats are all taken, in both mail-post and dili- 
 gence, for a fortnight to come, and, as there are no 
 extras in France, one must wait his turn. Having 
 done my duty to myself by the inquiry, I shall be con- 
 tent to remain quiet. 
 
 I have just returned from a social tea-party at a 
 house of one of the few English families left in Paris. 
 
 It is but a little after ten, and the streets, as I came 
 along, were as deserted and still as if it were a city of 
 the dead. Usually, until four or five in the morning, 
 the same streets are thronged with carriages hurrying 
 to and fro, and always till midnight the troltoirs are 
 crowded with promenaders. To-night I scarce met a 
 foot-passenger, and but one solitary cabriolet in a walk 
 of a mile. The contrast was really impressive. The 
 moon was nearly full, and high in the heavens, and 
 the sky absolutely without a trace of a cloud ; nothing 
 interrupted the full broad light of the moon, and the 
 empty streets were almost as bright as at noon-day ; 
 and, as I crossed the Place Vendome, I could hear, for 
 the first time since I have been in Paris, though I 
 have passed it at every hour of the night, the echo of 
 my footsteps reverberated from the walls around. You 
 should have been in these crowded cities of Europe to 
 realize the impressive solemnity of such solitude. 
 
 It is said that fifty thousand people have left Paris 
 within the past week. Adding this to the thousand a 
 day who are struck with the cholera, and the attend- 
 ance necessary to the sick, and a thinned population 
 is sufficiently accounted for. There are, however, 
 hundreds ill of this frightful disease, whose cases are 
 not reported. It is only those who are taken to the 
 hospitals, the poor and destitute, who are numbered in 
 the official statements. The physicians are wearied 
 out with their private practice. The medical lectures 
 are suspended, and a regular physician is hardly to be 
 had at all. There is scarce a house in which some 
 one has not been taken. You see biers and litters 
 issuing from almost every gate, and the better ranks 
 are no longer spared. A sister of the premier, M. 
 Perier, died yesterday ; and it was reported at the 
 Bourse, that several distinguished persons, who have 
 been ill of it, are also dead. No one feels safe ; and 
 the consternation and dread on every countenance you 
 meet, is enough to chill one's very blood. I went out 
 to-day for a little exercise, not feeling very well, and I 
 was glad to get home again. Every creature looks 
 stricken with a mortal fear. And this among a French 
 population, the gayest and merriest of people under 
 all depressions ordinarily, is too strong a contrast not 
 to be felt painfully. There is something singular in 
 the air, too ; a disagreeable, depressing dryness, which 
 the physicians say must change, or all Paris will be 
 struck with the plague. It is clear and cold, but al- 
 most suffocating with dryness. 
 
 It is very consoling in the midst of so much that is 
 depressing^ that the preventives recommended against 
 the cholera are so agreeable. " Live well," s;sy the 
 doctors, "and bathe often. Abstain from excesses, 
 keep a clear head and good spirits, and amuse your- 
 self as much and as rationally as possible." It is a 
 very excellent recipe for happiness, let alone the chol- 
 era. There is great room for a nice observance of this 
 system in Paris, particularly the eating and bathing. 
 The baths are delightful. You are received in hand- 
 some saloons, opening upon a garden in the centre of 
 the building, ornamented with statues and fountains, 
 the journals lying upon the sofas, and everything ar- 
 ranged with quite the luxury of a palace. The bath- 
 ing-rooms are furnished with taste; the baths are of 
 marble, and covered inside with spotlessly white linen 
 cloths ; the water is perfumed, and you may lie and 
 take your coffee, or have your breakfast served upon 
 the mahogany cover which shuts you in — a union of 
 luxuries which is enough to enervate a cynic. When 
 you are ready to come out, a pull of the bell brings a 
 servant, who gives you a peignoir — a long linen wrap- 
 per, heated in an oven, in the warm folds of which you 
 are enveloped, and in three minutes are quite dry. In 
 this you may sit, at your ease, reading, or musing, or 
 lie upon the sofa without the restraint of a tight dress, 
 till you are ready to depart ; and then four or five 
 francs, something less than a dollar, pays for all. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 3! 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 MORNING VIEW FROM THE RUE RIVOLI THE BOIS 
 
 DE BOULOGNE GUICCIOLI SISMONDI THE HISTO- 
 RIAN, ETC. 
 
 It is now the middle of April, and sitting at my 
 window on the Rue Rivoli, I look through one of the 
 lone;, clipped avenues of the Tuileries, and see an 
 arch of green leaves, the sun of tight o'clock in the 
 morning just breaking through the thin foliage and 
 dappling the straight, even gravel-walk below, with a 
 look of summer that makes my heart leap. The 
 cholera has put an end to dissipation, and one gets up 
 early from necessity. It is delicious to step out before 
 breakfast, and cross the street into those lovely gar- 
 dens, for an hour or two of fresh air and reflection. It 
 is warm enough now to sit on the stone benches about 
 the fountains, by the time the dew is dry; and I know 
 nothing so contemplative as the occupation of watch- 
 ing these royal swans in the dreamy, almost impercep- 
 tible motion with which they glide around the edges 
 of the basins. The gold fish swim up and circle 
 about the breast of the imperial birds with a motion 
 almost as idle; and the old wooden-legged soldier, 
 who has been made warden of the gardens for his 
 service, sits nodding on one of the chairs, or drawing 
 fortifications with his stick in the gravel; and so it 
 happens, that in the midst of a gay and busy city one 
 may feel always a luxurious solitude ; and, be he ever 
 so poor, loiter all day if he will, among scenes which 
 only regal munificence could provide for him. With 
 the Seine bounding them on one side, the splendid 
 uniform facade of the Rue Rivoli on the other, the 
 palace stretching across the southern terrace, and the 
 thick woods of the Champs Elysccs at the opposite 
 gate, where could one go in the world to give his taste 
 or his eye a more costly or delightful satisfaction? 
 
 The Bois de Boulogne, about which the Parisians 
 talk so much, is less to my taste. It is a level wood 
 of small trees, covering a mile or two square, and cut 
 from corner to corner with straight roads for driving. 
 The soil is sandy, and the grass grows only in tufts, 
 the walks are rough, and either muddy or dusty al- 
 ways, and, barring the equipages and the pleasure of 
 a word in passing an acquaintance, I find a drive to 
 this famous wood rather a dull business. I want ei- 
 ther one thing or the other — cultivated grounds like 
 the Tuileries, or the wild wood. 
 
 I have just left the Countess Guiccioli, with whom 
 I have been acquainted for some two or three weeks. 
 She is very much frightened at the cholera, and thinks 
 of going to America. The conversation turned princi-' 
 pally upon Shelley, whom of course she knew intirmte- 
 ly ; and she gave me one of his letters to herself as 
 an autograph. She says he was at times a little cra- 
 zy — "fou," as she expressed it — but that there never 
 was a nobler or a better man. Lord Byron, she says, 
 loved him like a brother. She is still in correspond- 
 ence with Shelley's wife, of whom also she speaks 
 with the greatest affection. There was several min- 
 iatures of Byron hanging up in the room, and I asked 
 her if any of them were perfect in the resemblance. 
 " No," she said, " this was the most like him," taking 
 down an exquisitely finished miniature by an Italian 
 artist, " mai3 el etait beaucoup plus beau — beaucoup ! — 
 beaucoup .'" She reiterated the word with a very 
 touching tenderness, and continued to look at the pic- 
 ture for some time, either forgetting our presence, or 
 affecting it. She speaks English sweetly, with a 
 soft, slow, honeyed accent, breaking into French when 
 ever she gets too much interested to choose herwords. 
 She went on talking in French of the painters who 
 had drawn Byron, and said the American, West's, was 
 
 the best likeness. I did not like to tell her that West's 
 picture of herself was excessively flattered. I am 
 sure no one would know her from the engraving of it 
 at least. Her cheek bones are high, her forehead is 
 badly shaped, and altogether, the frame of her fea- 
 tures is decidedly ugly. She dresses in the worst 
 taste, too, and yet, with all this, and poetry and celeb- 
 rity aside, the Countess Guiccioli is both a lovely and 
 a fascinating woman, and one whom a man of senti- 
 ment would admire e\en at this age, very sincerely, 
 but not for beauty. She has white and regular teeth, 
 however, and her hair is incomparably the most beau- 
 tiful I ever saw. It is of the richest and glossiest 
 gold, silken and luxuriant, and changes, as the light 
 falls upon it, with a mellow softness, than which noth- 
 ing could be lovelier. It is this and her indescribably 
 winning manner which are lost in a picture, and there- 
 fore, it is perhaps fair that she should be otherwise 
 flattered. Her drawing-room is one of the most 
 agreeable in Paris at present, and it is one of the chief 
 agremcns which console me for a detention in an at- 
 mosphere so tristc as well as dangerous. 
 
 My bed-room window opens upon the court in the 
 interior of the hotel Rivoli, in which I lodge. In 
 looking out occasionally upon my very near neigh- 
 bors opposite, I have frequently observed a gray-head- 
 ed, scholar-like, fine-looking old man, writing at a 
 window in the story below. One does not trouble 
 himself much about his fellow-lodgers, and I had 
 seen this gentleman at his work at all hours, for a 
 month or more, without curiosity enough to inquire 
 even his name. This morning the servant came in, 
 with a Mon Dieu .' and said M. Sismondi was fright- 
 eded by the cholera, and was leaving his lodgings at 
 that moment. The name startled me, and making 
 some inquiries, I found that my gray-headed neighbor 
 was no other than the celebrated historian of Italian 
 literature, and that I had been living under the same 
 roof with him for weeks, and watching him at his 
 classical labors, without being at all aware of the hon- 
 or of his neighborhood. He is a kind, benevolent- 
 looking man, of about sixty, I should think ; and al- 
 ways had a peculiarly affectionate manner to his wife, 
 who, I am told by the valet, is an Englishwoman. I 
 regretted exceedingly the opportunity I had lost of 
 knowing Ijim, for there are few writers of whom one 
 retains a more friendly and agreeable remembrance. 
 
 In a conversation with Mr. Cooper, the other day, 
 he was remarking of how little consequence any one 
 individual found himself in Paris, even the most dis- 
 tinguished. We were walking in the Tuileries, and 
 the remark was elicited by my pointing out to him 
 one or two celebrated persons, whose names are suf- 
 ficiently known, but who walk the public promenades, 
 quite unnoticed and unrecognised. He said he did 
 not think there were five people in Paris who knew 
 him at sight, though his works were advertised in all 
 the bookstores, and he had lived in Paris one or two 
 years, and walked there constantly. This was putting 
 a strong case, for the French idolize Cooper ; and the 
 peculiarly translateable character of his works makes 
 them read even better in a good translation than in 
 the original. It is so all over the continent, T am told. 
 The Germans, Italians, and Spaniards, prefer Cooper 
 to Scott ; and it is easily accounted for when one re- 
 members how much of" the beauty of the Waverley 
 novels depends on their exquisite style, and how pe- 
 culiarly Cooper's excellence lies in his accurate, defi 
 nite, tangible descriptions. There is not a more ad- 
 mired author in Europe than Cooper, it is very cer- 
 tain ; and I am daily asked whether he is in America 
 at present — so little do the people of these crowded 
 cities interest themselves about that which is imme- 
 diately at their elbows. 
 
32 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 GENERAL BERTRAND — FRIEND OF LADY MORGAN 
 
 PHRENOLOGY DR. SPURZHEI3I — HIS LODGINGS — PRO- 
 CESS OF TAKING A CAST OF THE HEAD — INCARCERA- 
 TION OF DR. BOWRING AND DE POTTER — DAVID THE 
 SCULPTOR — VISIT OF DR. SPURZHE1M TO THE UNITED 
 STATES. 
 
 My room-mate called a day or two since on General 
 Bertrand, and yesterday he returned the visit, and 
 spent an hour at our lodgings. He talked of Napo- 
 leon with difficulty, and became very much affected 
 when my friend made some inquiries about the safety 
 of the body at St. Helena. The inquiry was sug- 
 gested by some notice we had seen in the papers of 
 an attempt to rob the tomb of Washington. The 
 general said that the vault was fifteen feet deep, and 
 covered by a slab that could not be moved without 
 machinery. He told us that Madame Bertrand had 
 many mementoes of the emperor, which she would be 
 happy to show us, and we promised to visit him. 
 
 At a party, a night or two since, 1 fell into conversa- 
 tion witti an English lady, who had lived several years 
 in Dublin, and was an intimate friend of Lady Mor- 
 gan. She was an uncommonly fine woman, both in 
 appearance and conversational powers, and told me 
 many anecdotes of the authoress, defending her from 
 all the charges usually made against her, except that 
 of vanity, which she allowed. 1 received, on the whole, 
 the impression that Lady Morgan's goodness of heart 
 was more than an offset to her certainly very innocent 
 weaknesses. My companion was much amused at an 
 American's asking after the "fender inKildare street;" 
 though she half withdrew her cordiality when I told 
 her 1 knew the countryman of mine who wrote the 
 account of Lady Morgan, of which she complains so 
 bitterly in the "Book of the Boudoir." It was this 
 lady with whom the fair authoress " dined in the 
 Chaussce d'Antin," so much to her satisfaction. 
 
 While we were conversing, the lady's husband came 
 up, and finding I was an American, made some inqui- 
 ries about the progress of phrenology on the other 
 side of the water. Like most enthusiasts in the sci- 
 ence, his owu head was a remarkably beautiful one; 
 and I soon found that he was the bosom friend of Dr. 
 Spurzheim, to whom he offered to introduce me. We 
 made an engagement for the next day, and the party 
 separated. 
 
 My new acquaintance called on me the next morn- 
 ing, according to appointment, and we went together 
 to Dr. Spurzheim's residence. The passage at the 
 entrance was lined with cases, in which stood plaster 
 casts of the heads of distinguished men, orators, po- 
 ets, musicians — each class on its particular shelf — 
 making altogether a most ghastly company. The 
 doctor received my companion with great cordiality, 
 addressing him in French, and changing to very good 
 German-English when he made any observation to 
 me. He is a tall, large-boned man, and resembles 
 Harding, the American artist, very strikingly. His 
 head is" finely marked ; his features are bold, with 
 rather a German look ; and his voice is particularly 
 winning, and changes its modulations, in argument, 
 from the deep, earnest tone of a man, to an almost 
 child like softness. The conversation soon turned 
 upon America, and the doctor expressed, in ardent 
 terms, his desire to visit the United States, and said he 
 had thought of accomplishing it the coming summer. 
 He spoke of Dr. Channing — said he had read all his 
 works with avidity and delight, and considered him one 
 of the clearest and most expansive minds of the age. 
 If Dr. Channing had not strong developments of the 
 organs of ideality and benevolence, he said, he should 
 doubt his theory more than he had ever found reason 
 to. He knew Webster and Processor Silliman by 
 
 reputation, and seemed to be familiar with our country, 
 as tew men in Europe are. One naturally, on meet- 
 ing a distinguished phrenologist, wishes to have his 
 own developments pronounced upon; but I had been 
 warned by my friend that Dr. Spurzheim refused such 
 examinations as a general principle, not wishing to de- 
 ceive people, and unwilling to run the risk of offending 
 them. After a half-hour's conversation, however, he 
 came across the room, and putting his hands under 
 my thick masses of ltair, felt my head closely all over, 
 and mentioned at once a quality, which, right or wrong, 
 has given a tendency to all my pursuits in life. As 
 he knew absolutely nothing of me, and the gentleman 
 who introduced me knew no more, I was a little 
 startled. The doctor then requested me to submit to 
 the operation of having a cast taken of my head, an 
 offer which was too kind and particular to be declined; 
 and, appointing an hour to be at his rooms the follow- 
 ing day, we left him. 
 
 1 was there again at twelve the morning after, and 
 found De Potter (the Belgian patriot) and Dr. Bow- 
 ring, with the phrenologist, waiting to undergo the 
 same operation. The preparations looked very formi- 
 dable. A frame, of the length of the human body, 
 lay in the middle of the room, with a wooden bowl to 
 receive the head, a mattress, and a long white dress to 
 prevent stain to the clothes. As I was the youngest, 
 1 took my turn first. It was very like a preparation 
 for being beheaded. My neck was bared, my hair cut, 
 and the long white dress put on. The back of the 
 head is taken first; and, as I was only immersed up to 
 the ears in the liquid plaster, this was not very alarm- 
 ing. The second part, however, demanded more 
 patience. My head was put once more into the stiff- 
 ened mould of the first half, and as soon as 1 could 
 get my features composed I was ordered to shut my 
 eyes ; my hair was oiled and laid smooth, and the 
 liquid plaster poured slowly over my mouth, eyes, and 
 forehead, till I was cased completely in a stiffening 
 mask. The material was then poured on thickly, till 
 the mask was two or three inches thick, and the voices 
 of those standing over me were scarcely audible. I 
 breathed prettily freely through the two small orifices 
 at my nose; but the dangerous experiment of Made- 
 moiselle Sontag, who was nearly smothered in the 
 same operation, came across my mind rather vividly ; 
 and it seemed to me that the doctor handled the plas- 
 ter quite too ungingerly, when he came to mould about 
 my nostrils. After a half hour's imprisonment, the 
 plaster became sufficiently hardened, and the thread 
 which was laid upon my face was drawn through, di- 
 viding the mask into two parts. It was then gradually 
 removed, pulling very tenaciously upon my eyelashes 
 and eyebrows, and leaving all the cavities of my face 
 filled with particles of lime. The process is a tribute 
 to vanity, which one would not be willing to pay very 
 often. 
 
 I looked on at Dr. Bowring's incarceration with no 
 great feeling of relief. It is rather worse to see than 
 to experience, I think. The poet is a nervous man ; 
 and as long as the muscles of his face were visible, his 
 lips, eyelids, and mouth, were quivering so violently 
 that I scarcely believed it would be possible to get an 
 impression of them. He has a beautiful face for a 
 scholar — clear, well-cut, finished features, expressive 
 of great purity of thought; and a forehead of noble 
 amplitude, white and polished as marble. His hair is 
 black and curling (indicating in most cases, Dr. Spur- 
 zheim remarked, activity of mind), and forms a clas- 
 sical relief to his handsome temples. Altogether, his 
 head would look well in a picture, though his ordinary 
 and ungraceful dress, and quick, oustling manner, 
 rather destroy the effect of it in society. 
 
 De Potter is one of the noblest-looking men I ever 
 saw. He is quite bald, with a broad, ample, majestic 
 head, the very model of dignity and intellect. De 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 33 
 
 Spurzheim considers his head one of the most extra- 
 ordinary he has met. Firmness is the great develop- 
 ment of its organs. His tone and manner are calm 
 and very impressive, and he looks made for great occa- 
 sions — a man stamped with the superiority which 
 others acknowledge when circumstances demand it. 
 He employs himself in literary pursuits at Paris, and 
 has just published a pamphlet on " the manner of 
 conducting a revolution, so that no after-revolution 
 shall be necessary." I have translated the title awk- 
 wardly, but that is the subject. 
 
 I have since heard Dr. Spurzheim lecture twice, and 
 have been with him to a meeting of the "Anthropo- 
 logical society" (of which he is the president and De 
 Potter the secretary), where I witnessed the dissection 
 of the human brain. It was a most interesting and 
 satisfactory experiment, as an illustration of phre- 
 nology. David the sculptor is a member of the so- 
 ciety, and was present. He looks more like a soldier 
 than an artist, however — wearing the cross of the 
 legion of honor, with a military frock coat, and an 
 erect, stern, military carriage. Spurzheim lectures in 
 a free, easy,, unconstrained style, with occasionally a 
 little humor, and draws his arguments from admitted 
 facts only. Nothing could be more reasonable than 
 his premises, and nothing more like an axiom than 
 the results, as far as I have heard him. At any rate, 
 true or false, his theory is one of extreme interest, 
 and no time can be wasted in examining it; for it is 
 the study of man, and therefore the most important 
 of studies. 
 
 I have had several long conversations with Dr. 
 Spurzheim about America, and have at last obtained 
 his positive assurance that he would visit it. He 
 gave me permission this morning to say (what I am 
 sure all lovers of knowledge will be pleased to hear) 
 that he should sail for New York in the course of the 
 ensuing summer, and pass a year or more in lecturing 
 and travelling in the United States. He is a man to 
 obtain the immediate confidence and respect of a peo- 
 ple like ours, of the highest moral worth, and the 
 most candid and open mind. I hope, my dear M. 
 and F., that you will make our paper a vehicle for any 
 information he may wish to convey to the public, and 
 that you and all our friends will receive him with the 
 warmth and respect due to his reputation and worth. 
 If he arrive in August, as he anticipates, he proposes 
 to pass a month or so at New Haven, and then to pro- 
 ceed to Boston, to commence his tour at the North. 
 
 P. S. — As I shall leave Paris shortly, you may expect 
 but one or two letters more from this metropolis. I 
 shall, however, as I extend my travels, find a greater 
 variety of materials for my future communications. 
 
 LETTER XXI. 
 
 DEPARTURE PROM PARIS DESULTORY REMARKS. 
 
 I take my departure from Paris to-morrow. I have 
 just been making preparations to pack, and it has giv- 
 en me a fit of bad spirits. 1 have been in P>ance only 
 a few months, but if I had lived my life here, I could 
 not be more at home. In my almost universal ac- 
 quaintance, 1 have of course made pleasant friends, 
 and, however time and travel should make us indiffer- 
 ent to such volant attachments, I can not now cast off 
 these threads of intimacy, without pulling a little up- 
 on very sincere feelings. I have been burning the 
 mass of papers and cards that have accumulated in 
 my dr-nvers ; and the sight of these French invita- 
 tions, mementoes, as they are, of delightful and fascin- 
 ating hours, almost staggers my resolution of depar- 
 ture. It has been an intoxicating time to me. Aside 
 3 
 
 from lighter attractions, this metropolis collects with- 
 ' in itself so much of the distinction and genius of the 
 world ; and gifted men in Paris, coming here merely 
 ; for pleasure, are so peculiarly accessible, that one 
 looks upon them as friends to whom he has become 
 attached and accustomed, and leaves the sphere in 
 which he has met them, as if he had been a part of 
 ! it, and had a right to be regretted. I do not think I 
 shall ever spend so pleasant a winter again. And then 
 my local interest is not a light one. I am a great lov- 
 | er of out-of-doors, and I have ransacked Paris thor- 
 oughly. I know it all from its broad faubourgs to 
 its obscurest cul de sac. I have hunted with antiqua- 
 ries for coins and old armor ; with lovers of adven- 
 ture for the amusing and odd ; with the curious for 
 i traces of history ; with the romantic for the pictu- 
 resque. Paris is a world for research. It contains 
 more odd places, I believe, more odd people, and ev- 
 ery way more material for uncommon amusement, 
 than any other city in the universe. One might live 
 II a life of novelty without crossing the barrier. All this 
 insensibly attaches one. My eye wanders at this mo- 
 ment from my paper to these lovely gardens lying be- 
 neath my window, and I could not feel more regret if 
 they were mine. Just over the long line of low clip- 
 ped trees, edging the fashionable terrace, 1 see the win- 
 dows of the king within half a stone's throw — the 
 windows at which Napoleon has stood, and the long 
 line of the monarchs of France, and it has become 
 to me so much a habit of thought, sitting here in the 
 twilight and musing on the thousand, thousand things 
 linked with the spot my eye embraces, that I feel as 
 if I had grown to it — as if Paris had become to me, 
 what it is proverbially and naturally enough to a 
 Frenchman — " the world." 
 
 I have other associations which I part from less 
 painfully, because I hope at some future time to re- 
 new them — those with my own countrymen. There 
 | are few pleasanter circles than that of the Americans 
 in Paris. Lafayette and his numerous family make a 
 : part of them. I could not learn to love this good 
 ' man more, but seeing him often brings one's revcr- 
 | ence more within the limits of the affections ; and 1 
 consider the little of his attention that has fallen to 
 my share the honored part of my life, and the part 
 best worth recording and remembering. He called 
 '■ upon me a day or two ago, to leave with me some 
 | copies of a translation of Mr. Cooper's letter on the 
 I finances of our government, to be sent to my friend 
 | Dr. Howe ; but, to my regret, I did not see him. He 
 neglects no American, and is ever busied about some 
 ; project connected with their welfare. May God con- 
 tinue to bless him! 
 
 And speaking of Mr. Cooper, no one who loves or 
 owns a pride in his native land, can live abroad with- 
 out feeling every day what we owe to the patriotism 
 as well as the genius of this gifted man. If there is an 
 individual who loves the soil that gave him birth, and so 
 shows it that we are more respected for it, it is he. Mr. 
 Cooper's position is a high one ; he has great advan- 
 tages, and he improves them to the uttermost. His 
 benevolence and activity in all enterprises for the re- 
 lief of suffering, give him influence, and he employs 
 it like a true philanthropist and a real lover of his 
 country. I say this particularly, though it may look 
 like too personal a remark, because Americans abroad 
 are not always national. I am often mortified by re- 
 proaches from foreigners, quoting admissions made by 
 my countrymen, which should be the last on their 
 lips. A very distinguished person told me a day or 
 two since, that " the Americans abroad were the worst 
 enemies we had in Europe. It is difficult to conceive 
 at home how such a remark stings. Proportionately, 
 one takes a true patriot to his heart, and 1 feel it right 
 to say here, that the love of country and active be- 
 nevolence of Mr. Cooper, distinguish him abroad, 
 
34 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 even more than his genius. His house is one of the 
 most hospitable and agreeable in Paris ; and with 
 Morse and the circle of artists and men of distinction 
 and worth about him, he is an acquaintance sincerely 
 to regret leaving. 
 
 From Mr. Rives, our minister, I have received ev- 
 ery possible kindness. He has attached me to his le- 
 gation, to facilitate my access to other courts and the 
 society of other cities, and to free me from all delays 
 and annoyances at frontiers and custom-houses. It 
 is a particular and valuable kindness, and I feel a pleas- 
 ure in acknowledging it. Then there is Dr. Bowring, 
 the lover and defender of the United States, who, as 
 the editor of the Westminster Review, should be well 
 remembered in America, and of him I have seen 
 much, and from him I have received great kindness. 
 Altogether, as I said before, Paris is a home to me, 
 and I leave it with a heavy heart. 
 
 I have taken a place on the top of the diligence for 
 a week. It is a long while to occupy one seat, but the 
 weather and the season are delicious ; and in the cov- 
 ered and roomy cabriolet, with the conducteur for a 
 living reference, and all the appliances for comfort, I 
 expect to live very pleasantly, night and day, till I 
 reach Marseilles. Vaucleuse is on the way, and I 
 shall visit it if I have time and good weather, perhaps. 
 At Marseilles I shall take the steamboat for Leghorn, 
 and thence get directly to Florence, where I shall re- 
 main till I become familiar with the Italian, at least. I 
 lay down my pen till all this plan of travel is accom- 
 plished, and so, for the present, adieu ! 
 
 LETTER XXII. 
 
 Chalons, on the Saone. — I have broken my route 
 to stop at this pretty town, and take the steamboat 
 which goes down the Saone to Lyons to-morrow 
 morning. I have travelled two days and nights ; but 
 an excellent dinner and a quickened imagination indis- 
 pose me for sleep, and, for want of better amusement 
 in a strange city at night, I will pass away an hour in 
 transcribing the hurried notes I have made at the 
 stopping places. 
 
 I chose, by advice, the part of the diligence called 
 the banquette — a covered seat over the front of the car- 
 riage, commanding all the view, and free from the 
 dust of the lower apartments. The conducteur had 
 the opposite corner, and a very ordinary-looking man 
 sat between us ; the seat holding three very comforta- 
 bly. A lady and two gentlemen occupied the coupe; 
 a dragoon and his family, going to join his regiment, 
 filled the rotonde ; and in the interior was a motley 
 collection, whom I scarce saw after starting ; the oc- 
 cupants of the different parts of a diligence having 
 no more association, even in a week's travel, than peo- 
 ple living in an adjoining house in the city. 
 
 We rolled out of Paris by the faubourg St. Antoine, 
 and at the end of the first post passed the first object 
 that interested me — a small brick pavilion, built by 
 Henri Quatre for the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrees. 
 It stands on a dull, level plain, not far from the banks 
 of the river; and nothing but the fact that it was once 
 occupied by the woman who most enslaved the heart 
 of the most chivalrous and fickle of the French mon- 
 archs, would call your attention to it for a moment. 
 
 For the twenty or thirty miles which we travelled 
 by daylight, I saw nothing particularly curious or 
 beautiful. The guide-book is very diffuse upon the 
 chateaux and villages on the road, but I saw nothing 
 except very ordinary country-houses, and the same 
 suc^ssion of small and dirty villages, steeped to the 
 very chimi.evs in poverty. If ever I return to Amer- 
 ica, I shall make a journey to the west, for the pure 
 refreshment of seeing industry and thrift. I am sick 
 
 to the heart of pauperism and misery. Everything 
 that is near the large towns in France is either splen- 
 did or disgusting. There is no medium in condition 
 — nothing that looks like content — none of that class 
 we define in our country as the " respectable." 
 
 The moon was a little in the wane, but bright, and 
 the night lovely. As we got further into the interior, 
 the towns began to look more picturesque and antique ; 
 and, with the softening touch of the moonlight, and 
 the absence of beggars, the old low-browed buildings 
 and half-ruined churches assumed the beauty they 
 wear in description. I slept on the road, but the echo 
 of the wheels in entering a post-town woke me always; 
 and I rarely have felt the picturesque more keenly 
 than at these sudden wakings from dreams, perhaps, 
 of familiar things, finding myself opposite some shad- 
 owy relic of another age ; as if it were by magical 
 transportation, from the fireside to some place of which 
 I had heard or read the history. 
 
 I awoke as we drove into Sens at broad daylight. 
 We were just passing a glorious old pile of a cathe- 
 dral, which I ran back to see while the diligence stop- 
 ped to change horses. It is of pointed architecture, 
 black with age, and crusted with moss. It was to 
 this town that Thomas a Becket retired in disgrace at 
 his difference with Henry the Second. There is a 
 chapel in the cathedral, dedicated to his memory. 
 The French certainly should have the credit of leav- 
 ing things alone. This old pile stands as if the town 
 in which it is built had been desolate for centuries : 
 not a letter of the old sculptures chiselled out, not a 
 bird unnested, not a filament of the gathering moss 
 pulled away. All looks as if no human hand had 
 been near it — almost as if no human eye had looked 
 upon it. In America they would paint such an old 
 church white or red, shove down the pillars, and put 
 up pews, sell the pictures for fireboards, and cover 
 the tesselated pavement with sand, or a home-made 
 carpet. 
 
 As we passed under a very ancient gate, crowning 
 the old Roman ramparts of the town, a door opened, 
 and a baker, in white cap and apron, thrust out his 
 head to see us pass. His oven was blazing bright, 
 and he had just taken out a batch of hot bread, which 
 was smoking on the table; and what with the chill of 
 the morning air and having fasted for some fourteen 
 hours, I quite envied him his vocation. The diligence, 
 however, pushed on most mercilessly till twelve 
 o'clock, the French never dreaming of eating befoie 
 their late dejeuner — a mid-day meal always. When 
 we did get it, it was a dinner in every respect — meats 
 of all kinds, wine, and dessert, certainly as solid and 
 various as any of the American breakfasts, at which 
 travellers laugh so universally. 
 
 Auxerre is a pretty town, on a swelling bank of the 
 river Yonne ; and I had admired it as one of the most 
 improved-looking villages of Fiance. It was not till 
 I had breakfasted there, and travelled a league or two 
 toward Chalons, that I discovered by the guide-book 
 it was the ancient capital of Auxerrois, a famous 
 town in the time of Julius Caesar, and had the honor 
 of being ravaged "at different times by Attila, the 
 Saracens, the Normans, and the Calvinists, vestiges 
 of whose devastations may still be seen." If I had 
 not eaten of a positively modern fate fate gras, and an 
 omelette sovffic, at a nice little hotel, with a mistress in 
 a cap, and a coquettish French apron, I should for- 
 give myself less easily for not having detected anti- 
 quity in the atmosphere. One imagines more readilj 
 than he realizes the charm of mere age without 
 beauty. 
 
 We were now in the province of Burgundy, and to 
 say nothing of the historical recollections, the vine- 
 yards were all about us that delighted the palates of 
 the world. One does not dine at the Trois Freres, in 
 the Palais Royal, without contracting a tenderness for 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 35 
 
 the very name of Burgundy. 1 regretted that I was not 
 there in the season of the grape. The vines were just 
 budding, and the paytans, men and women, were scat- 
 tered over the vineyards, loosening the earth about the 
 roots, and driving stakes to support the young shoots. 
 At Saint Bris I found the country so lovely, that I left 
 the diligence at the post-house, and walked on to 
 mount a Ions succession of hills on foot. The road 
 sides were quite blue with the violets growing thickly 
 among the grass, and the air was filled with perfume. 
 I soon got out of sight of the heavy vehicle, and made 
 use of my leisure to enter the vineyards and talk to 
 the people at their work. I found one old man, with 
 all his family about him; the little ones with long bas- 
 kets on their backs, bringing manure, and one or two 
 grown-up boys and girls raking up the earth with the 
 unhandy hoe of the country, and setting it firmly 
 around the roots with their wooden shoes. It was a 
 pretty group, and I was very much amused with their 
 simplicity. The old man asked my country, and set 
 down his hoe in astonishment when I told him I was 
 an American. He wondered I was not more burnt, 
 living in such a hot country, and asked me what lan- 
 guage we spoke. I could scarce get away from his 
 civilities when I bade him " Good day." No polite- 
 ness could have been more elegant than the manner 
 and expressions of this old peasant, and certainly 
 nothing could have appeared sincerer or kinder. I 
 kept on up the hill till I reached a very high point, 
 passing on my way a troop of Italians, going to Paris 
 with their organs and shows — a set of as ragged speci- 
 mens of the picturesque as I ever saw in a picture. 
 A lovely scene lay before me when I turned to look 
 back. The valley, on one side of which lies St. Bris, 
 is as round as a bowl, with an edge of mountain-tops 
 absolutely even all around the horizon. It slopes 
 down from every side to the centre, as if it had been 
 measured and hollowed by art ; and there is not a fence 
 to be seen from one side to the other, and scarcely a 
 tree, but one green and almost unbroken carpet of 
 verdure, swelling up iu broad green slopes to the top, 
 and realizing, with a slight difference, the similitude 
 of Madame de Genlis, of the place of satiety, eternal 
 green meadow and eternal blue sky. St. Bris is a 
 little handful of stone buildings around an old church; 
 just such a thing as a painter would throw into a pic- 
 ture — and the different-colored grain, and here and 
 there a ploughed patch of rich yellow earth, and the 
 road crossing the hollow from hill to hill like a white 
 band ; and then for the life of the scene, the group of 
 Italians, the cumbrous diligence, and the peasants in 
 their broad straw hats, scattered over the fields — it 
 was something quite beyond my usual experience of 
 scenery and accident. I had rarely before found so 
 much in one view to delight me. 
 
 After looking a while, I mounted again, and stood 
 on the very top of the hill ; and, to my surprise, there, 
 on the other side, lay just such another valley, with 
 just such a village in its bosom, and the single im- 
 provement of a river — the Yonne stealing through it, 
 with its riband like stream ; but all the rest of the 
 valley almost exactly as I have described the other. 
 I crossed a vineyard to get a view to the southeast, 
 and once more there lay a deep hollow valley before 
 mo, formed like the other two, with its little hamlet 
 and its vineyards and mountains — as if there had been 
 three lakes in the hills, with their edges touching like 
 three bowls, and the terrace on which T stood was the 
 platform between them- It is a most singular forma- 
 tion of country, really, and as beautiful as it is singular. 
 Each of these valleys might be ten miles across; and 
 if the dukes of Burgundy in feudal times rode ever 
 to St. Bris, I can conceive that their dukedom never 
 seemed larger to them than when crossing this triple 
 ?pex of highland. 
 
 At Saulieu we left the usual route, and crossed over 
 
 I to Chagny. Between these two places lay a spot, 
 
 I I which, out of my own country, I should choose be- 
 fore all others for a retreat from the world. As it w;is 
 off the route, the guide-book gave me not even the 
 name, and 1 have discovered nothing but that the little 
 hamlet is called Bocliepot. It is a little nest of wild 
 scenery, a mimic valley shut in by high overhanging 
 crags, with the ruins of a battlemented and noble old 
 castle, standing upon a rock in the centre, with the 
 village of some hundred stone cottages at its very foot. 
 You might stand on the towers of the ruins, and toss 
 a biscuit into almost every chimney in the village. 
 The strong round towers are still perfect, and the 
 turrets and loop-holes and windows are still there ; 
 and rank green vines have overrun the whole mass 
 everywhere ; and nothing but the prodigious solidity 
 with which it was built could have kept it so lone from 
 falling, for it is evidently one of the oldest castles in 
 Burgundy. I never saw before anything, even in a 
 picture, which realized perfectly my idea of feudal 
 position. Here lived the lord of the domain, a hun- 
 dred feet in the air in his rocky castle, right over the 
 heads of his retainers, with the power to call in every 
 soul that served him at a minute's warning, and with 
 a single blast of his trumpet. I do not believe a stone 
 has been displaced in the village for a hundred years. 
 The whole thing was redolent of antiquity. We 
 wound out of the place by a sharp narrow pass, arid 
 there, within a mile of this old and deserted fortress, 
 lay the broad plains of Beaune and Chagny — one of 
 the most fertile and luxurious parts of France. I 
 was charmed altogether. How many things I have 
 seen this side the water that 1 have made an involun- 
 tary vow in my heart to visit again, and at more lei- 
 sure, before I die! 
 
 From Chagny it was but one post to Chalons, and 
 here I am in a pretty, busy town, with broad beautiful 
 quays, where I have promenaded till dark, observing 
 this out-of-doors people; and now. having written a 
 long letter for a sleepy man, I will get to bed, and 
 redeem some portion of my two nights' wakefulness 
 
 LETTER XXIII. 
 
 PASSAGE DOWN THE SAONE AN ODD ACQUAINTANCE — 
 
 LYONS — CHURCH OF NOTRE DAME DE FOURVIERES 
 
 VIEW FROM THE TOWER. 
 
 I looked out of my window the last thing before 
 going to bed at Chalons, and the familiar constellation 
 of ursa major never shone brighter, and never made 
 me a more agreeable promise than that of fair weather 
 the following day for my passage down the Saone. I 
 was called at four, and it rained in torrents. The 
 steamboat was smaller than the smallest I have seen 
 in our country, and crowded to suffocation with chil- 
 dren, women, and lap-dogs. I appropriated my own 
 trunk, and spreading my umbrella, sat down upon it, 
 to endure my disappointment with what philosophy I 
 might. A dirty-looking fellow, who must have slept 
 in his clothes for a month, came up, with a loaf of 
 coarse bread under his arm, and addressed me, to my 
 sufficient astonishment, in Latin! He wanted to sit 
 under my umbrella. I looked at him a second time, 
 but he had touched my passion. Latin is the only 
 thing I have been driven to, in this world, that I ever 
 really loved ; and a clear, mellow, unctuous pronuncia- 
 tion of my dirty companion equally astonished and 
 pleased me. I made room for him on my trunk, and 
 though rusted somewhat since I philosophized over 
 II Lucretius, we got on very tolerably. He was a Ger- 
 j man student, travelling to Italy, and a fine specimen of 
 lithe class. A dirtier man I never saw, and hardly a 
 
36 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 finer or more intellectual face. He knew everything, 
 and served me as a talking guide to the history of all 
 the places on the river. 
 
 Instead of eating all at once, as we do on board the 
 steamboats in America, the French boats have a res- 
 taurant, from which you order what you please, and at 
 any hour. The cabin was set round with small tables, 
 and the passengers made little parties, and breakfasted 
 and dined at their own time. It is much the better 
 method. I descended to the cabin very hungry about 
 twelve o'clock, and was looking about for a place, when 
 a French gentleman politely rose, and observing that I 
 was alone, (my German friend living on bread and 
 water only), requested me to join his party at breakfast. 
 Two young ladies and a lad of fourteen sat at the 
 table, and addressing them by their familiar names, my 
 polite friend requested them to give me a place; and 
 then told me that they were his daughters and son, 
 and that he was travelling to Italy for the health of the 
 younger girl, a pale, slender creature, apparently about 
 eighteen. I was very well pleased with my position, 
 and rarely have passed an hour more agreeably. 
 French girls of the better classes never talk, but the 
 father was very communicative, and a Parisian, with 
 the cross of the legion of honor, and we found 
 abundance of matter for conversation. They have 
 stopped at Lyons, where I write at present, and I shall 
 probably join their party to Marseilles. 
 
 The clouds broke away after mid-day, and the banks 
 of the river brightened wonderfully with the change. 
 The Saone is about the size of the Mohawk, but not 
 half so beautiful; at least for the greater part of its 
 course. Indeed, you can hardly compare American 
 with European rivers, for the charm is of another de- 
 scription quire, With us it is nature only, here it is 
 almost all art. Our rivers are lovely, because the out- 
 line of the shore is graceful, and particularly because 
 the vegetation is luxuriant. The hills are green, the 
 foliage deep and lavish, the rocks grown over with 
 vines or moss, the mountains in the distance covered 
 with pines and other forest-trees; everything is wild, 
 and nothing looks bare or steril. The rivers of 
 France are crowned on every height with ruins, and in 
 the bosom of every valley lies a cluster of picturesque 
 stone cottages ; but the fields are naked, and there are 
 no trees; the mountains are barren and brown, and 
 everything looks as if the dwellings had been deserted 
 by the people, and nature had at the same time gone 
 to decay. I can conceive nothing more melancholy 
 than the views upon the Saone, seen, as I saw them, 
 though vegetation is out everywhere, and the banks 
 should be beautiful if ever. As we approached Lyons 
 the river narrowed and grew bolder, and the last ten 
 miles were enchanting. Naturally the shores at this 
 part of the Saone are exceedingly like the highlands 
 of the Hudson above West Point. Abrupt hills rise 
 from the river's edge, and the windings are sharp and 
 constant. But imagine the highlands of the Hudson 
 crowded with antique chateaux, and covered to the 
 very top with terraces and summer-houses and hang- 
 ing-gardens, gravel walks and beds of flowers, instead 
 of wild pines and precipices, and you may get a very 
 correct idea of the Saone above Lyons. You emerge 
 from one of the dark passes of the river by a sudden 
 turn, and there before you lies this large city, built on 
 both banks, at the foot and on the sides of moun- 
 tains. The bridges are fine, and the broad, crowded 
 quays, all along the edges of the river, have a beautiful 
 effect. We landed at the stone stairs, and I selected 
 a hotel by chance, where I have found seven Amer- 
 icans of my acquaintance. We have been spending 
 the evening at the rooms of a townsman of mine, very 
 pleasantly. 
 
 There is a great deal of magnificence at Lyons, in 
 the way of quays, promenades, and buildings ; but its 
 
 excessive filthiness spoils everything. One could 
 scarce admire a Venus in such an atmosphere ; and 
 you can not find room to stand in Lyons where you 
 have not some nauseating odor. I was glad to escape 
 from the lower streets, and climb up the long staircases 
 to the observatory that overhangs the town. From 
 the base of this elevation the descent of the river is al- 
 most a precipice. The houses hang on the side of the 
 steep hill, and their doors enter from the long alleys 
 of stone staircases by which you ascend. On every 
 step, and at almost every foot of the way, stood a beg- 
 gar. They might have touched hands from the quay 
 to the summit. If they were not such objects of real 
 wretchedness, it would be laughable to hear the church 
 calendar of saints repeated so volubly. The lame 
 hobble after you, the blind stumble in your way, the 
 sick lie and stretch out their hands from the wall, and 
 all begin in the name of the Virgin Mary, and end 
 with "Mora bon Monsieur" and "un petit sous." I 
 confined my charities to a lovely child, that started out 
 from its mother's lap, and ran down to meet us — a dirty 
 and ragged little thing, but with the large dark eyes of 
 the province; and a skin, where one could see it, of 
 the clearest nut-brown teint. Her mother had five 
 such, and each of them, to any one who loved chil- 
 dren, would have been a treasure of beauty and in- 
 terest. 
 
 It was holy-week, and the church of Notre Dame de 
 Fourvieres, which stands on the summit of the hill, 
 was crowded with people. We went in for a moment, 
 and sat down on a bench to rest. My companion was 
 a Swiss captain of artillery, who was a passenger in the 
 boat, a very splendid fellow, with a mustache that he 
 might have tied behind his ears. He had addressed 
 me at the hotel, and proposed that we should visit the 
 curiosities of the town together. He was a model of 
 a manly figure, athletic, and soldier-like, and standing 
 near him was to get the focus of all the dark eyes in 
 the congregation. 
 
 The "new square tower stands at the side of the 
 church, and rises to the height of perhaps sixty feet. 
 The view from it is said to be one of the finest in the 
 world. I have seen more extensive ones, but never one 
 that comprehended more beauty and interest. Lyons 
 lies at the foot, with the Saone winding through its 
 bosom in abrupt curves; the Rhone comes down from 
 the north on the other side of the range of mountains, 
 and meeting the Saone in a broad stream below the 
 town, they stretch off to the south, through a diversi- 
 fied landscape; the Alps rise from the east like the 
 edges of a thunder-cloud, and the mountains of Savoy 
 fill up the interval to the Rhone. All about the foot 
 of the monument lie gardens, of exquisite cultivation; 
 and above and below the city the villas of the rich ; 
 giving you altogether as delicious a nucleus for a broad 
 circle" of scenery as art and nature could create, and 
 one sufficiently in contrast with the barrenness of the 
 rocky circumference to enhance the charm, and con- 
 tent you with your position. Half way down the hill 
 lies an old monastery, with a lovely garden walled in 
 from the world: and several of the brotherhood were 
 there, idling up and down the shaded alleys, with their 
 black dresses sweeping the ground, possibly in holy 
 contemplation. The river was covered with boats, the 
 bells were ringing to church, the glorious old cathe- 
 dral, so famous for its splendor, stood piled up, with 
 its arches and gray towers, in the square below; the 
 day was soft, sunny, and warm, and existence was a 
 blessing. I leaned over the balustrade, I know not 
 how long, looking down upon the scene about me; 
 and I shall ever remember it as one of those few un- 
 alloyed moments, when the press of care was taken off 
 my mind, and the chain of circumstances was strong 
 enough to set aside both the past and the future, and 
 leave me to the quiet enjoyment of the present. I have 
 found such hours " few and far between." 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 37 
 
 LETTER X^IV. 
 
 DEPARTURE FROM LYONS BATTEAUX DE POSTE 
 
 RIVER SCENERY VILLAGE OF CONDRIEU — VIENNE 
 
 VALENCE PONT ST. ESPRIT DAUPHINY AND 
 
 LANGUEDOC DEMI-FETE DAY, ETC. 
 
 I found a day and a half quite enough for Lyons. 
 The views from the mountain and the river were the 
 only things that pleased me. I made the usual dry 
 visit to the library and the museum, and admired the 
 Hotel de Ville, and the new theatre, and the front of 
 the Maison de Tolosan, that so struck the fancy of 
 Joseph II., and having "despatched the lions," like a 
 true cockney traveler, I was too happy to escape the 
 offensive smells of the streets, and get to my rooms. 
 One does not enjoy much comfort within doors eilher. 
 Lyons is a great imitation metropolis — a sort of sec- 
 ond-hand Paris. I am not very difficult to please, but 
 I found the living intolerable. It was an affectation 
 of abstruse cookery throughout. We sat down to 
 what is called the best table in the place, and it was a 
 series of ludicrous travesties, from the soup to the 
 salad. ' One can eat well in the country, because the 
 dishes are simple, and he gets the natural taste of 
 things ; but to come to a table covered with artificial 
 dishes, which he has been accustomed to see in their 
 perfection, and to taste and send away everything in 
 disgust, is a trial of temper which is reserved for the 
 traveller at Lyons. 
 
 The scenery on the river, from Lyons to Avignon, 
 has great celebrity, and I had determined to take that 
 course to the south. Just at this moment, however, 
 the Rhone had been pronounced too low, and the 
 steamboats were stopped. I probably made the last 
 passage by steam on the Saone, for we ran aground 
 repeatedly, and were compelled to wait till horses could 
 be procured to draw the boat into deep water. It was 
 quite amusing to see with what a regular, business-like 
 air, the postillions fixed their traces to the prow, and 
 whipped into the middle of the river. A small boat 
 was my only resource, and I found a man on the quay 
 who plied the river in what is called batteaux de poste, 
 rough shallops with fiat bottoms, which are sold for 
 firewood on their arrival, the rapidity of the Rhone 
 rendering a return against the current next to impos- 
 sible. The sight of the frail contrivance in which I 
 was to travel nearly two hundred miles, rather startled 
 me, but the man assured me he had several other pas- 
 sengers, and two ladies among them. I paid the 
 arrhes, or earnest money, and was at the river-stairs 
 punctually at four the next morning. 
 
 To my very sincere pleasure the two ladies were the 
 daughters of my polite friend and fellow passenger 
 from Chalons. They were already on board, and the 
 little shalop sat deep in the water with her freight. 
 Besides these, there were two young French chasseurs 
 going home on leave of absence, a pretty Parisian 
 dress-maker flying from the cholera, a masculine wo- 
 man, the wife of a dragoon, and my friend the captain. 
 We pushed out into the current, and drifted slowly 
 down under the bridges, without oars, the padrone 
 quietly smoking his pipe at the helm. In a few min- 
 utes we were below the town, and here commenced 
 again the cultivated and ornamented banks I had so 
 much admired on my approach to Lyons from the 
 other side. The thin haze was just stirring from the 
 river's surface, the sunrise flush was on the sky, the 
 air was genial and impregnated with the smell of grass 
 and flowers, and the little changing landscapes, as we 
 followed the stream, broke upon us like a series of ex- 
 quisite dioramas. The atmosphere was like Dough- 
 ty's pictures, exactly. I wished a thousand times Vor 
 that delightful artist, that he might see how richly the 
 old cWeauz and their picturesque appurtenances filled 
 up the scene. It would have given a new turn to his 
 pencil. 
 
 We soon arrived at the junction of the rivers, and as 
 we touched the rapid current of the Rhone, the little 
 shallop yielded to its sway, and redoubled its velocity. 
 The sun rose clear, the cultivation grew less and less, 
 the hills began to look distant and barren, and our little 
 party became sociable in proportion. We closed around 
 I the invalid, who sat wrapped in a cloak in the stern, 
 leaning on her father's shoulder, and talked of Paris 
 and its pleasures — a theme of which the French are 
 j never weary. Time passed delightfully. Without 
 ] being decidedly pretty, our two Parisiennes were quiet- 
 mannered and engaging; and the younger one partic- 
 i ularly, whose pale face and deeply-sunken eyes gave 
 j her a look of melancholy interest, seemed to have 
 thought much, and to feel besides, that her uncertain 
 health gave her a privilege of overstepping the rigid 
 reserve of an unmarried girl. She talks freely, and 
 | with great delicacy of expression and manner. 
 
 We ran ashore at the little village of Condrieu to 
 
 breakfast. We were assailed on stepping out of the 
 
 boat by the demoiselles of two or three rival auberges — 
 
 nice-looking, black-eyed girls, in white aprons, who 
 
 seized us by the arm, and pulled each to her own 
 
 door, with torrents of unintelligible patois. We left 
 
 j it to the captain, who selected the best-looking leader, 
 
 | and we were soon seated around a table covered with 
 
 j a lavish breakfast ; the butter, cheese, and wine ex- 
 
 | cellent, at least. A merrier party, I am sure, never 
 
 I astonished the simple people of Condrieu. The pretty 
 
 j dress-maker was full of good-humor and politeness, 
 
 and delighted at the envy with which the rural belles 
 
 'regarded her knowing Parisian cap; the chasseurs 
 
 j sang the popular songs of the army, and joked with 
 
 the maids of the auberge ; the captain was inexhaust- 
 
 I ibly agreeable, and the hour given us by the padrone 
 
 was soon gone. We embarked with a thousand adieus 
 
 from the pleased people, and altogether it was more 
 
 j like a scene from Wilhelm Meister, than a passage 
 
 from real life. 
 
 The wind soon rose free and steady from the north- 
 west, and with a spread sail we ran past Vienne, at ten 
 miles in the hour. This was the metropolis of my 
 old friends, " the Allobrogues," in Cesar's Commen- 
 taries. I could not help wondering at the feelings 
 with which I was passing over such classic ground. 
 The little dress-maker was giving us an account of 
 her fright at the cholera, and every one in the boat 
 was in agonies of laughter. I looked at the guide- 
 book to find the name of the place, and the first glance 
 at the word carried me back to my old school-desk at 
 Andover, and conjured up for a moment the redolent 
 classic interest with which I read the history of the 
 land I was now hurrying through. That a laugh with 
 a modern grisette should engross me entirely, at the 
 moment I was traversing such a spot, is a possibility 
 the man may realize much more readily than the 
 school-boy. A new roar of merriment from my com- 
 panions plucked me back effectually from Andover to 
 the Rhone, and I thought no more of Gaul or its great 
 historian. 
 
 We floated on during the day, passing chateaux and 
 ruins constantly ; but finding the country barren and 
 rocky to a dismal degree, I can not well imagine how 
 the Rhone has acquired its reputation for beauty. It 
 has been sung by the poets more than any other river 
 in France, and the various epithets that have been ap- 
 plied to it have become so common, that you can not 
 mention it without their rising to your lips ; but the 
 Saone and the Seine are incomparably more lovely, 
 and I am told the valleys of the Loire are the most 
 beautiful part of France. From its junction with the 
 Saone to the Mediterranean, the Rhone is one stretch 
 of barrenness. 
 
 We passed a picturesque chateau, built very wildly 
 on a rock washed by the river, called " La Roche de 
 Glun," and twilight soon after fell, closing in our view 
 
38 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 to all but the river edge. The wind died away, but 
 the stars were bright and the air mild ; and, quite 
 f.itigued to silence, our little party leaned on the sides 
 of the boat, and waited till the current should float us 
 down to our resting-place for the night. We reached 
 Valence at ten, and with a merry dinner and supper in 
 one, which kept us up till after midnight, we got to 
 our coarse but clean beds, and slept soundly. 
 
 The following forenoon we ran under the Pont St. 
 Esprit, an experiment the guide-book calls very dan- 
 gerous. The Rhone is rapid and noisy here, and we 
 shot under the arches of the fine old structure with 
 great velocity ; but the " Rapids of the St. Lawrence" 
 are passed constantly without apprehension by travel- 
 lers in America, and those of the Rhone are a mere 
 mill-race in comparison. We breakfasted just below, 
 at a village where we could scarce understand a sylla- 
 ble, the patois was so decided, and at sunset we were 
 far down between the provinces of Dauphiny and Lan- 
 guedoc, w\th the villages growing thicker and greener, 
 and a high mountain within ten or fifteen miles, cov- 
 ered with snow nearly to the base. We stopped op- 
 posite the old castle of Rochemeu.se to pay the droit. 
 It was a demi-fete day, and the inhabitants of a village 
 back from the river had come out to the green bank 
 in their holyday costume for a revel. The bank swell- 
 ed up from the stream to a pretty wood, and the green 
 sward between was covered with these gay people, ar- 
 rested in their amusements by our arrival. We jump- 
 ed out for a moment, and I walked up the bank and 
 endeavored to make the acquaintance of a strikingly 
 handsome woman of about thirty, but the patois was 
 quite too much. After several vain attempts to un- 
 derstand each other, she laughed and turned on her 
 heel, and 1 followed the call of the padrone to the 
 batteau. For five or six miles below, the river passed 
 through a kind of meadow, and an air more loaded 
 with fragrance I never breathed. The sun was just 
 down, and with the mildness of the air, and quiet glide 
 of the boat on the water, it was quite enchanting. 
 Conversation died away, and I went forward and lay 
 down in the bow alone, with a fit of desperate musing. 
 It is as singular as it is certain, that the more one en- 
 ioys the loveliness of a foreign land, the more he feels 
 how absolutely his heart is at home only in his own 
 country. 
 
 LETTER XXV. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF A BOATMAN THE TOWN OF ARLES 
 
 ROMAN RUINS THE CATHEDRAL MARSEILLES — THE 
 
 PASS OF OLLIOULES THE VINKYARDS TOULON 
 
 ANTIBES — LAZARETTO — VILLA FRANCA, ETC. 
 
 I entered Avignon after a delicious hour on the 
 Rhone, quite in the mood to do poetical homage to 
 its associations. My dreams of Petrarch and Vau- 
 cluse were interrupted by a scene between my friend 
 the captain, and a stout boatman, who had brought 
 his baggage from the batteau. The result was an 
 appeal to the mayor, who took the captain aside 
 after the matter was argued, and told him in his ear 
 (that he must compromise the matter, for he dared 
 not give a judgment in his favor ! The man had 
 demanded twelve francs where the regulations al- 
 lowed him but one, and palpable as the imposition 
 was, the magistrate refused to interfere. The captain 
 curled his mustache and walked the room in a terri- 
 ble passion, and the boatman, an herculean fellow, eyed 
 him with a look of assurance which quite astonished 
 me. After the case was settled, I asked an explana- 
 tion of the mayor. He told me frankly, that the fel- 
 low belonged to a powerful class of men of the low- 
 est description, who, having declared first for the 
 present government, were and would be supported by 
 
 it in almost any question where favor could be f.hown 
 — that all the other classes of inhabitants were mal- 
 contents, and that between positive strength and royal 
 favor, the boatmen and their party had become too 
 powerful even for the ordinary enforcement of the law. 
 
 The following day was so sultry and warm, that I 
 gave up all idea of a visit to Vaucluse. We spent 
 the morning under the trees which stand before the 
 cafe, in the village square, and at noon we took the 
 steamboat upon the Rhone for Aries. An hour or 
 two brought us to this ancient town, where we -were 
 compelled to wait till the next day, the larger boat 
 which goes hence by the mout 1 ^ of the Rhone to 
 Marseilles, being out of order. 
 
 We left our baggage in the boat, _rfid I walked up 
 with the captain to see the town. An officer whom 
 we addressed for information on the quay politely of- 
 fered to be our guide, and we passed three or four 
 hours rambling about, with great pleasure. Our first 
 object was the Roman ruins, for which the town is 
 celebrated. We traversed several streets, so narrow 
 that the old time-worn houses on either side seemed 
 to touch at the top, and in the midst of a desolate and 
 poverty-stricken neighborhood, we came suddenly up- 
 on a noble Roman amphitheatre of gigantic dimen- 
 sions, and sufficiently preserved to be a picturesque 
 ruin. It was built on the terrace of a hill, overlook- 
 ing the Rhone. From the towers of the gateway, the 
 view across the river into the lovely province of Lan- 
 guedoc, is very extensive. The arena is an excavation 
 of perhaps thirty feet in depth, and the rows of seats, 
 all built of vast blocks of stone, stretch round it in re- 
 treating and rising platforms to the stirface of the hill. 
 The lower story is surrounded with dens ; and the 
 upper terrace is enclosed with a circle of small apart- 
 ments, like boxes in a theatre, opening by handsome 
 arches upon the scene. It is the ruin of a noble 
 structure, and even without the help of the imagina- 
 tion, exceedingly impressive. It seems to be at pres- 
 ent turned into a play-ground. The dens and cavities 
 were full of black-eyed and happy creatures, hiding 
 and hallooing with all the delightful spirit and gayety 
 of French children. Probably, it was never appro- 
 priated to a better use. 
 
 We entered the cathedral in returning. It is an 
 antique, and considered a very fine one. The twilight 
 was just falling ; and the candles burning upon the 
 altar, had a faint, dull glare, making the dimness of 
 the air more perceptible. I walked up the long aisle 
 to the side chapel, without observing that my com- 
 panions had left me, and quite tired with my walk, 
 seated myself against one of the gothic pillars, enjoy- 
 ing the quiet of the place, and the momentary relief 
 from exciting objects. It struck me presently that 
 there was a dead silence in the church, and, as much 
 to hear the sound of English as for any better motive, 
 I approached the priest's missal, which lay open on a 
 stand near me, and commenced translating a familiar 
 psalm aloud. My voice echoed through the building 
 with a fulness which startled me, and looking over my 
 shoulder, I saw that a simple, poor old woman was 
 kneeling in the centre of the church, praying alone. 
 She had looked up at my interruption of the silence 
 of the place, but her beads still slipped slowly through 
 her fingers, and feeling that I was intruding possibly 
 between a sincere worshipper and her Maker, I with- 
 drew to the side aisle, and made my way softly out of 
 the cathedral. 
 
 Aries appears to have modernized less than any 
 town I have seen in France. The streets and the in- 
 habitants look as if they had not changed for a cen- 
 tury. The dress of the women is very peculiar ; the 
 waist of the gown coming up to a point behind, be- 
 tween the shoulder blades, and consequently very short 
 in front, and the high cap bound to the head with 
 broad velvet ribands, suffering nothing but the jet 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 black curls to escape over the forehead. As a class, 
 they are the handsomest women I have seen. Noth- 
 ing could be prettier than the small-featured lively 
 brunettes we saw sitting on the stone benches at every 
 door. 
 
 We ran down the next morning, in a few hours to 
 Marseilles. It was a cloudy, misty day, and I did not 
 enjoy, as I expected, the first view of the Mediterra- 
 nean from the mouths of the Rhone. We put quite 
 out into the swell of the sea, and the passengers were 
 all strewn on the deck in the various gradations of 
 sickness. My friend the captain, and myself, had the 
 only constant stomachs on board. I was very happy 
 to distinguish Marseilles through the mist, and as we 
 approached nearer, the rocky harbor and the islands 
 of Chateau <f' //"and Pomcguc, with the fortress at the 
 mouth of the harbor, came out gradually from the 
 mist, and the view opened to a noble amphitheatre of 
 rocky mountains, in whose bosom lies Marseilles at 
 the edge of the sea. We ran into the narrow cove 
 which forms the inner harbor, passing an American 
 ship, the " William Penn," just arrived from Phila- 
 delphia, and lying in quarantine. My blood started at 
 the sight of the starred flag ; and as we passed closer 
 and I read the name upon her stern, a thousand recol- 
 lections of that delightful city sprang to my heart, and 
 I leaned over to her from the boat's side, with a feeling 
 of interest and pleasure to which the foreign tongue 
 that called me to bid adieu to newer friends, seemed 
 an unwelcome interruption. 
 
 * I parted from my pleasant Parisian friend and his 
 family, however, with real regret. They were polite 
 and refined, and had given me their intimacy volun- 
 tarily and without reserve. I shook hands with them 
 on the quay, and wished the pale and quiet invalid bet- 
 ter health, with more of feeling than is common with 
 acquaintances of a day. I believe them kind and sin- 
 cere, and I have not found these qualities growing so 
 thickly in the world that I can thrust aside anything 
 that resembles them with a willing mistrust. 
 
 The quay of Marseilles is one of the most varied 
 scenes to be met with in Europe. Vessels of all na- 
 tions come trading to its port, and nearly every cos- 
 tume in the world may be seen in its busy crowds. I 
 was surprised at the number of Greeks. Their pic- 
 turesque dresses and dark fine faces meet you at every 
 step, and it would be difficult, if it were not for the 
 shrinking eye, to believe them capable of an ignoble 
 thought. The mould of the race is one for heroes, 
 but if all that is said of them be true, the blood has 
 become impure. Of the two or three hundred I must 
 have seen at Marseilles, I scarce remember one whose 
 countenance would not have been thought remarkable. 
 
 I have remained six days in Marseilles by the ad- 
 vice of the Sardinian consul, who assured me that so 
 long a residence in the south of France, is necessary 
 to escape quarantine for the cholera, at the ports or on 
 the frontiers of Italy. I have obtained his certificate 
 to-day, and depart to-morrow for Nice. My forced 
 sejour here has been far from an amusing or a willing 
 one. The " mistral" has blown chilly and with suf- 
 focating dryness, so that I have scarce breathed freely 
 since I entered the town, and the streets, though 
 handsomely laid out and built, are intolerable from the 
 dust. The sun scorches your skin to a blister, and 
 the wind chills your blood to the bone. There are 
 beautiful public walks, which, at the more moist sea- 
 sons, must be delightful, but at present the leaves on 
 the trees are all white, and you can not keep your eyes 
 open long enough to see from one end of the prom- 
 enade to the other. Within doors, it is true, I have 
 found everything which could compensate for such 
 evds : and I shall carrr away pleasant recollections of 
 the hospitality of the Messrs. Fitch, and others of my 
 countryman, living here — gentlemen whose courtesies 
 
 are well-remembered by every American traveller 
 through the south of France. 
 
 I sank into the corner of the coupe of the diligence 
 for Toulon, at nine o'clock in the evening, and awoke 
 with the gray of the dawn at the entrance of the pass 
 of OUioules, one of the wildest defiles I ever saw. 
 The gorge is the bed of a winter torrent, and you 
 travel three miles or more between two mountains 
 seemingly cleft asunder, on a road cut out a little 
 above the stream, with naked rock to the height of 
 two or three hundred feet almost perpendicularly 
 above you. Nothing could be more bare and desolate 
 than the whole pass, and nothing could be richer or 
 more delightfully cultivated than the low valleys upon 
 which it opens. It is some four or five miles hence 
 to Toulon, and we traversed the road by sunrise, the 
 soft, gray light creeping through the olive and orange 
 trees with which the fields are laden, and the peasants 
 just coming out to their early labor. You see no 
 brute animal here except the mule ; and every coun- 
 tryman you meet is accompanied by one of these ser- 
 viceable little creatures, often quite hidden from sight 
 by the enormous load he carries, or pacing patiently 
 along with a master on his back, who is by far the 
 larger of the two. 
 
 The vineyards begin to look delightfully ; for the 
 thick black stump which was visible over the fields 
 I have hitherto passed, is in these warm valleys cov- 
 ered already with masses of luxuriant vine leaves, and 
 the hill-sides are lovely with the light and tender ver- 
 dure. I saw here for the first time, the olive and date 
 trees in perfection. They grow in vast orchards 
 planted. regularly, and the olive resembles closely the 
 willow, and reaches about the same height and shape. 
 The leaves are as slender but not quite so long, and 
 the color is more dusky, like the bloom upon a grape. 
 Indeed, at a short distance, the whole tree looks like a 
 mass of untouched fruit. 
 
 I was agreeably disappointed in Toulon. It is a ru- 
 ral town with a harbor — not the dirty seaport one nat- 
 urally expects to find it. The streets are the cleanest 
 I have seen in France, some of them lined with trees, 
 and the fountains all over it freshen the eye delight- 
 fully. We had an hour to spare, and with Mr. D — e, 
 an Irish gentleman, who had been my travelling com- 
 panion, since I parted with my friend the Swiss, I 
 made the circuit of the quays. They were covered 
 with French naval officers and soldiers, promenading 
 and conversing in the lively manner of this gayest of 
 nations. A handsome child, of perhaps six years, was 
 selling roses at one of the corners, and for a sous, all 
 she demanded, I bought six of the most superb dam- 
 ask buds just breaking into flower. They were the 
 first I had seen from the open air since I left America, 
 and I have not often purchased so much pleasure with 
 a copper coin. 
 
 Toulon was interesting to me as the place where 
 Napoleon's career began. The fortifications are very 
 imposing. We passed out of the town over the draw- 
 bridge, and werp again in the midst of a lovely landscape, 
 with an air of bland and exhilarating softness, and ev- 
 erything that could delight the eye. The road runs 
 along the shore of the Mediterranean, and the fields 
 are green to the water edge. 
 
 We arrived at Antibes to-day at noon, within fifteen 
 miles of the frontier of Sardinia. We have run 
 through most of the south of France, and have found 
 it all like a garden. The thing most like it in our 
 country is the neighborhood of Boston, particularly 
 the undulated country about Brookline and Dorches- 
 ter. Remove all the stone fences from that sweet 
 country, put here and there an old chateau on an em- 
 inence, and change the pretty white mock cottages of 
 gentlemen, for the real stone cottages of peasantry, 
 and you have a fair picture of the 6cenery of this eel- 
 
40 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ebrated shore. The Mediterranean should be added 
 as a distance, with its exquisite blue, equalled by 
 nothing but an American sky in a July noon — its 
 crowds of sail, of every shape and nation, and the 
 Alps in the horizon crested with snow, like clouds half 
 touched by the sun. It is really a delicious climate. 
 Out of the scorching sun the air is bracing and cool ; 
 and though my ears have been blistered in walking up 
 the hills in a travelling cap, I have scarcely experienced 
 an uncomfortable sensation of heat, and this in my 
 winter dress, with flannels and a surtout, as 1 have 
 worn them for the six months past in Paris. The air 
 could not be tempered more accurately for enjoyment. 
 I regret to go in-doors. I regret to sleep it away. 
 
 Antibes was fortified by the celebrated Vauhan, and 
 it looks impregnable enough to my unscientific eye. 
 If the portcullises were drawn up, I would not under- 
 take to get into the town with the full consent of the 
 inhabitants. We walked around the ramparts which 
 are washed by the Mediterranean, and got an appetite 
 in the sea-breeze, which we would willingly have dis- 
 pensed with. I dislike to abuse people, but I must 
 say that the cuisine of Madame Agarra, at the " Gold 
 Eagle," is rather the worst I have fallen upon in my 
 travels. Her price, as is usual in France, was pro- 
 portionably exorbitant. My Irish friend, who is one 
 of the most religious gentlemen of his country I ever 
 met, came as near getting into a passion with his sup- 
 per and bill, as was possible for a temper so well dis- 
 ciplined. For myself, having acquired only polite 
 French, I can but "look daggers" when I am abused. 
 We depart presently for Nice, in a ricketty barouche, 
 with post-horses, the courier, or post-coach, going no 
 farther. It is a roomy old affair, that has had preten- 
 sions to style some time since Henri Quarte, but the 
 arms on its panels are illegible now, and the. ambi- 
 tious driving-box is occupied by the humble materials 
 to remedy a probable break-down by the way. The 
 postillion is cracking his whip impatiently, my friend 
 has called me twice, and I must put up my pencil. 
 
 Antibes again! We have returned here after an 
 unsuccessful attempt to enter the Sardinian domin- 
 ions. We were on the road by ten in the morning, 
 and drove slowly along the shores of the Mediterrane- 
 an, enjoying to the utmost the heavenly weather and 
 the glorious scenery about us. The driver pointed 
 out to us a few miles from Antibes, the very spot on 
 which Napoleon landed on his return from Elba, and 
 the tree, a fine old olive, under which he slept three 
 hours, before commencing his march. We arrived at 
 the Pont de Var about one, and crossed the river, but 
 here we were met by a guard of Sardinian soldiers, 
 and our passports were demanded. The commissary 
 came from the guard-house with a long pair of tongs 
 and receiving them open, read them at the longest 
 possible distance. They were then handed back to 
 us in the same manner, and we were told we could not 
 pass. We then handed him our certificates of quar- 
 antine at Marseilles ; but were told it availed nothing, 
 a new order having arrived from Turin that very mor- 
 ning, to admit no travellers from infected or suspected 
 places across the frontier. We asked if there were 
 no means by which we could pass ; but the commis- 
 sary only shook his head, ordered us not to dismount 
 on the Sardinian side of the river, and shut his door. 
 We turned about and recrossed the bridge in some 
 perplexity. The French commissary at St. Laurent, 
 the opposite village, received us with a suppressed 
 smile, and informed us that several parties of travel- 
 lers, among others an English gentleman and his wife 
 and sister, were at the auberge, waiting for an answer 
 from the prefect of Nice, having been turned back in 
 the same manner since morning. We drove up, and 
 they advised us to send our passports by the postillion. 
 
 with a letter to the consuls of our respective nations, 
 requesting information, which we did immediately. 
 
 Nice is three miles from St. Laurent, and as we 
 could not expect an answer for several hours, we 
 amused ourselves with a stroll along the banks of the 
 Var to the Mediterranean. The Sardinian side is bold, 
 and wooded to the tops of the hills very richly. We 
 kept along a mile or more through the vineyards, and 
 returned in time to receive a letter from the American 
 consul, confirming the orders of the commissary, but 
 advising us to return to Antibes, and sail thence for 
 Villa Franca, a lazaretto in the neighborhood of Nice, 
 whence we could enter Italy, after seven days quaran- 
 tine! By this time several travelling- carriages had 
 collected, and all, profiting by our experience, turned 
 back together. We are now at the " Gold Eagle," 
 deliberating. Some have determined to give up their 
 object altogether, but the rest of us sail to-morrow 
 morning in a fishing-boat for the lazaretto. 
 
 Lazaretto, Villa Franca. — There were but 
 eight of the twenty or thirty travellers stopped at the 
 bridge who thought it worth while to persevere. We 
 are all here in this pest-house, and a motley mixture 
 of nations it is. There are two young Sicilians re- 
 turning from college to Messina ; a Belgian lad of 
 seventeen, just started on his travels ; two aristocratic 
 young Frenchmen, very elegant and very ignorant of 
 the world, running down to Italy in their own carriage, 
 to avoid the cholera ; a middle-aged surgeon in the 
 British navy, very cool and very gentlemanly ; a vulgar 
 Marseilles trader, and myself. 
 
 We were from seven in the morning till two getting 
 away from Antibes. Our difficulties during the whole 
 day are such a practical comparison of the freedom 
 of European states and ours, that I may as well detail 
 them. 
 
 First of all, our passports were to be vised by the 
 police. We were compelled to stand an hour with 
 our hats off, in a close, dirty office, waiting our turn 
 for this favor. The next thing was to get the permis- 
 sion of the prefect of the marine to embark ; and this 
 occupied another hour. Thence we were taken to 
 the health-office, where a bill of health was made out 
 for eight persons going to a lazaretto! The padrone's 
 freight duties were then to be settled, and we went 
 back and forth between the Sardinian consul and the 
 French, disputing these for another hour or more. 
 Our baggage was piled upon the charrctte at last, to 
 be taken to the boat. The quay is outside the gate, 
 and here are stationed the douanes, or custom-officers, 
 who ordered our trunks to be taken from the cart, and 
 searched them from top to bottom. After a half hour 
 spent in repacking our effects in the open street, amid 
 a crowd of idle spectators, we were suffered to pro- 
 ceed. Almost all these various gentlemen expect a 
 fee, and some demand a heavy one ; and all this trou- 
 ble and expense of time and money to make a voyage 
 of fifteen miles in a fishing-boat ! 
 
 We hoisted the fisherman's lateen sail, and put out 
 of the little harbor in very bad temper. The wind 
 was fair, and we ran along the shore for a couple of 
 hours, till we came to Nice, where we were to stop for 
 permission to go to the lazaretto. We were hailed 
 off the mole with a trumpet, and suffered to pass. 
 Doubling a little point, half a mile farther on, we ran 
 into the bay of Villa Franca, a handful of houses at 
 the base of an amphitheatre of mountains. A little 
 round tower stood in the centre of the harbor, built 
 upon a rock, and connected with the town by a draw- 
 bridge, and we were landed at a staircase outside, by 
 which we mounted to show our papers to the health- 
 officer. The interior was a little circular yard, sepa- 
 rated from an office on the town side by an iron gra- 
 ting, and looking out on the sea by two embrasures 
 for cannon. Two strips of water and the sky above 
 
PENCI LUNGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 41 
 
 was our whole prospect for the hour that we waited 
 here. The cause of the delay was presently explained 
 by clouds of smoke issuing from the interior. The 
 tower filled, and a more nauseating odor l never in- 
 haled. We were near suffocating with the intolerable 
 smell, and the quantity of smoke deemed necessary to 
 secure his majesty's officers against contagion. 
 
 A cautious-looking old gentleman, with gray hair, 
 emerged at 'ast from the smoke, with a long cane-pole 
 in his hand, and, coughing at every syllable, requested 
 us to insert our passports in the split at the extremity, 
 which he thrust through the gate. This being done, 
 we asked him for bread. We had breakfasted at seven, 
 and it was now sundown — near twelve hours' fast. 
 Several of my companions had been seasick with the 
 swell of the Mediterranean, in coming from Antibes, 
 and all were faint with hunger and exhaustion. For 
 myself, the villanous smell of our purification had 
 made me sick, and I had no appetite; but the rest ate 
 very voraciously of a loaf of coarse bread, whicli was 
 extended to us with a tongs and two pieces of paper. 
 
 After reading our passports, the magistrate informed 
 us that he had no orders to admit us to the lazaretto, 
 and we must lie in our boat till lie could send a mes- 
 senger to Nice with our passports and obtain permis- 
 sion. We opened upon him, however, with such a 
 flood of remonstrance, and with such an emphasis 
 from hunger and fatigue, that he consented to admit 
 us temporarily on his own responsibility, and gave the 
 boatmen orders to row back to a long, low stone build- 
 ing, we had observed at the foot of a precipice at die 
 entrance to the harbor. 
 
 He was there before us, and as we mounted the 
 stone ladder he pointed through the bars of a large 
 inner gate to a single chamber, separated from the 
 rest of the building, and promising to send us some- 
 thing to eat in the course of the evening, left us to 
 take possession. Our position was desolate enough. 
 The building was new, and the plaster still soft and 
 wet. There was not an article of furniture in the 
 chamber, and but a single window; the floor was of 
 brick, and the air as damp within as a cellar. The 
 alternative was to remain out of doors, in the small 
 yard, walled up thirty feet on three sides, and washed 
 by the sea on the other; and here, on a long block of 
 granite, the softest thing I could find, I determined to 
 make an al fresco night of it. 
 
 Bread, cheese, wine, and cold meat, seethed, Italian 
 fashion, in nauseous oil, arrived about nine o'clock ; 
 and, by the light of a candle standing in a boot, we 
 sat around on the brick floor, and supped very merrily. 
 Hunger had brought even our two French exquisites 
 to their fare, and they ate well. The navy surgeon 
 had seen service, and had no qualms; the Sicilians 
 were from a German university, and were not delicate ; 
 the Marseilles trader knew no better; and we should 
 have been less contented with a better meal. It was 
 superfluous to abuse it. 
 
 A steep precipice hangs immediately over the laza- 
 retto, and the horn of the half moon was just dipping 
 below it, as I stretched myself to sleep. With a folded 
 coat under me, and a carpet-bag for a pillow, I soon fell 
 asleep, and slept soundly till sunrise. My companions 
 had chosen shelter, but all were happy to be early i 
 risers. We mounted our wall upon the sea, and 
 promenaded till the sun was broadly up, and the breeze j 
 from the Mediterranean sharpened our appetites, and j 
 then finishing the relics of our supper, we waited with 
 what patience we might the appearance of our break- 
 fast. 
 
 The magistrate arrived at twelve, yesterday, with a 
 commissary from Villa Franca, who is to be our vic- 
 tualler during the quarantine. He has enlarged our 
 limits, by a stone staircase and an immense chamber, 
 on condition that we pay for an extra guard, in the 
 
 shape of a Sardinian soldier, who is to sleep in our 
 room, and eat at our table. By the way, we have a 
 table, and four rough benches, and these, with three 
 single mattresses, are all the furniture we can procure. 
 We are compelled to sleep across the latter, of course, 
 to give every one his share. 
 
 We have come down very contentedly to our situa- 
 tion, and I have been exceedingly amused at the 
 facility with which eight such different tempers can 
 amalgamate upon compulsion. Our small quarters 
 bring us in contact continually, and we harmonize 
 like schoolboys. At this moment the Marseilles trader 
 and the two Frenchmen are throwing; stones at some- 
 thing that is floating out with the tide; the surgeon 
 has dropped his Italian grammar to decide upon the 
 best shot; the Belgian is fishing off the wall, with a 
 pin hook and a bit of cheese; and the two Sicilians 
 are talking lingua franca, at the top of their voices, to 
 Carolina, the guardian's daughter, who stands coquet- 
 ting on the pier just outside the limits. I have got 
 out my books and portfolio, and taken possession of 
 the broad stair, depending on the courtesy of my com- 
 panions to jump over me and my papers when they go 
 up and down. I sit here most of the day laughing 
 at the fun below, and writing or leading alternately. 
 The climate is too delicious for discontent. Every 
 breath is a pleasure. The hills of the amphitheatre 
 opposite to us are covered with olive, lemon, and 
 orange trees ; and in the evening, from the time the 
 land breeze commences to blow offshore, until ten or 
 II eleven, the air is impregnated with the delicate per- 
 | ! fume of the orange-blossom, than which nothing could 
 be more grateful. Nice is called the hospital of 
 Europe; and truly, under this divine sky, and with 
 ; the inspiriting vitality and softness of the air, and all 
 j that nature can lavish of luxuriance and variety upon 
 I the hills, it is the place, if there is one in the world, 
 ! where the drooping spirit of the invalid must revive 
 | and renew. At this moment the sun has crept from 
 i the peak of the highest mountain across the bay, and 
 I we shall scent presently the spicy wind from the shore. 
 I close my book to go upon the wall, which I see the 
 surgeon has mounted already with the same object, 
 j to catch the first breath that blows seaward. 
 
 It is Sunday, and an Italian summer morning. I do 
 not think my eyes ever woke upon so lovely a day. The 
 long, lazy swell comes in from the Mediterranean as 
 smooth as glass ; the sails of a beautiful yacht, belong- 
 ing to an English nobleman at Nice, and lying be- 
 calmed just now in the bay, are hanging motionless 
 about the masts ; the sky is without a speck, the air just 
 seems to me to steep every nerve and fibre of the 
 j frame with repose and pleasure. Now and then in 
 | America I have felt a June morning that approached 
 | it, but never the degree, the fulness, the sunny soft- 
 ness of this exquisite clime. It tranquillizes the mind 
 as well as the body. You can not resist feeling con- 
 tented and genial. We are all out of doors, and my 
 companions have brought down their mattresses, and 
 are lying along the shade of the east wall, talking 
 quietly and pleasantly; the usual sounds of the work- 
 men on the quays of the town are still, our harbor- 
 guard lies asleep in his boat, the yellow flag of the 
 lazaretto clings to the staff, everything about us 
 breathes tranquillity. Prisoner as I am, I would not 
 stir willingly to-day. 
 
 We have had two new arrivals this morning — a boat 
 from Antibes, with a company of players bound for the 
 theatre at Milan; and two French deserters from the 
 regiment at Toulon, who escaped in a leaky boat, and 
 have made this voyage along the coast to get into Italy. 
 They knew nothing of the quarantine, and were very 
 much surprised at their arrest. They will, probably, 
 be delivered up to the French consul. The new 
 comers are nil put together in the large chamber next 
 
42 
 
 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 us, and we have been talking with them through the 
 grate. His majesty of Sardinia is not spared in their 
 voluble denunciations. 
 
 Our imprisonment is getting to be a little tedious. 
 We lengthen our breakfasts and dinners, go to sleep 
 early and get up late, but a lazaretto is a dull place after 
 all. We have no books except dictionaries and gram- 
 mars, and I am on my last sheet of paper. What I shall 
 do the two remaining days, lean not divine. Our meals 
 were amusing for a while. We have but three knives 
 and four glasses; and the Belgian, having cut his plate 
 in two on the first day, has eaten since from the mash- 
 bowl. The salt is in a brown paper, the vinegar in a 
 shell; and the meats, to be kept warm during their 
 passage by water, are brought iu the black utensils in 
 which they are cooked. Our tablecloth appeared to- 
 day of all the colors of the rainbow. We sat down to 
 breakfast with a general cry of horror. Still, with 
 youth and good spirits, we manage to be more content- 
 ed than one would expect; and our lively discussions 
 of the spot on the quay where the table shall be laid 
 and the noise of our dinners en plein air, would con- 
 vince a spectator that we were a very merry and suf- 
 ficiently happy company. 
 
 I like my companions, on the whole, very much. 
 The surgeon has been in Canada and the west of New 
 York, and we have travelled the same routes, and 
 made, in several instances, the same acquaintances. 
 He has been in almost every part of the world also, 
 and his descriptions are very graphic and sensible. 
 The Belgian talks of his new king Leopold, the 
 Sicilians of the German universities; and, when I 
 have exhausted all they can tell me. I turn to our 
 Parisians, whom I find 1 have met all last winter with- 
 out noticing them at the parties; and we discuss the 
 belles, and the different members of the beau mondc, 
 with all the touching air and tone of exiles from par- 
 adise. In a case of desperate ennvi, wearied with 
 studying and talking, the sea-wall is a delightful lounge, 
 and the blue Mediterranean plays the witch to the in- 
 dolent fancy, and beguiles it well. I have never seen 
 such a beautiful sheet of water. The color is pecu- 
 liarly rich and clear, like an intensely blue sky, heaving 
 into waves. I do not find the often-repeated descrip- 
 tion of its loveliness exaggerated. 
 
 Our seven days expire to-morrow, and we ave pre- 
 paring to eat our last dinner in the lazaretto with great 
 glee. A temporary table is already laid upon the 
 quay, and two strips of board raised upon some in- 
 genious contrivance, I can not well sav what, and cov- 
 ered with all the private and public napkins that re- 
 tained any portion of their maiden whiteness. Our 
 knives are reduced to two, one having disappeared un- 
 accountably ; but the deficiency is partially remedied. 
 The surgeon has " whittled" a pine knot, which floated 
 in upon the tide, into a distant imitation ; and one of 
 the company has produced a delicate dagger, that 
 looks very like a keepsake from a lady ; and, by the re- 
 luctant manner in which it was put to service, the pro- 
 fanation cost his sentiment an effort. Its white han- 
 dle and silver sheath lie across a plate, abridged of its 
 proportions by a very formidable segment. There 
 was no disguising the poverly of the brown paper that 
 contained the salt. It was too necessary to be made 
 an "aside," and lies plump in the middle of the table. 
 I fear there has been more fun in the preparation than 
 we shall feel in eating the dinner when it arrives. The 
 Belgian stands on the wall, watching all the boats 
 from town ; but they pass off down the harbor, one 
 after another, and we are destined to keep our appetites 
 to a late hour, Their detestable cookery needs the 
 44 sauce of hunger." 
 
 The Belgian's hat waves in the air, and the commis- 
 sary's boat must be in sight. As we get off at six 
 o'clock to-morrow morning, my portfolio shuts till I 
 find another resting place, probably Genoa. 
 
 LETTER XXVI. 
 
 SHORE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN — NICE — FUNERAL SER- 
 VICES OF MARIA THERESK, ARCHDUCHESS OF AUS- 
 TRIA PRINCIPALITY OF MONACO— ROAD TO GENOA 
 
 — SARDINIA — PRISON OF THE POPE — HOUSE OF CO- 
 LUMBUS — GENOA. 
 
 The health-magistrate arrived at an early hour on 
 the morning of our departure, from the lazaretto of 
 Villa Franca. He was accompanied by a physician, 
 who was to direct the fumigation. The iron pot was 
 placed in the centre of the chamber, our clothes were 
 spread out upon the beds, and the windows shut. The 
 chlorin soon filled the room, and its detestable odor be- 
 came so intolerable that we forced the door, and rush- 
 ed past the sentinel into the open air, nearly suffocated. 
 This farce over, we were permitted to embark, and 
 rounding the point put inlo Nice. 
 
 The Mediterranean curves gracefully into the cres- 
 cented shore of this lovely bay, and the high hills lean 
 away from the skirts of the town in one unbroken 
 slope of cultivation to the top. Large, handsome 
 buildings, face you on the long quay, as you approach ; 
 and white chimneys, and half concealed parts of coun- 
 try-houses and suburban villas, appear through the 
 olive and orange trees, with which the whole amplii- 
 theatre is covered. We landed amid a crowd of half- 
 naked idlers, and were soon at a hotel, where we or- 
 dered the best breakfast the town would afford, and sat 
 down once more to clean cloths and unrepulsive food. 
 
 As we rose from the table, a note, edged with black, 
 and sealed and enveloped with considerable circum- 
 stance, was put into my hand by the master of the ho- 
 tel. It was an invitation from the governor to attend 
 a funeral service, to be performed in the cathedral that 
 day, at ten o'clock, for the " late queen-mother, Ma- 
 ria Therese, archduchess of Austria." Wondering 
 not a little how I came by the honor, I joined the 
 crowd flocking from all parts of the town to see the 
 ceremony. The central door was guarded by a file of 
 Sardinian soldiers; and, presenting my invitation to 
 the officer on duty, I was handed over to the master 
 of ceremonies, and shown to an excellent seat in the 
 centre of the church. The windows were darkened, 
 and the candles of the altar not yet lit; and, by the 
 indistinct light that came in through the door, I could 
 distinguish nothing clearly. A little silver bell tinkled 
 presently from one of the side-chapels, and boys 
 dressed in white appeared, with long tapers, and the 
 house was soon splendidly illuminated. I found my- 
 self in the midst of a crowd of four or five hundred 
 ladies, all in deep mourning. The church was hung 
 from the floor to the roof in black cloth, ornamented 
 gorgeously with silver; and under the large dome, 
 which occupied half the ceiling, was raised a pyra- 
 midal altar, with tripods supporting chalices for in- 
 cense at the four corners, a walk round the lower base 
 for the priests, and something in the centre, surround- 
 ed with a blaze of light, representing figures weeping 
 over a tomb. The organ commenced pealing, there 
 was a single beat on the drum, and a procession en- 
 tered. It was composed of the nobility of Nice, and 
 the military and civil officers, all in uniform and court 
 dresses. The gold and silver flashing in the light, the 
 tall plumes of the Sardinian soldiery below, the sol- 
 emn music, and the moving of the censers from the 
 four corners of the altar, produced a very impressive 
 effect. As soon as the procession had quite entered, 
 the fire was kindled in the four chalices ; and as the 
 white smoke rolled up to the roof, an anthem com- 
 menced with the full power of the organ The sing- 
 ing was admirable, and there was one female voice in 
 the choir, of singular power and sweetness. 
 
 The remainder of the service was the usual cere- 
 monies of the catholic church, and I amused myself 
 
PENCILLIXGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 43 
 
 with observing the people nbout me. It was little like 
 a scene of mourning. The officers gradually edged 
 in between the seats, and every wom;m of the least 
 pretension to prettiness was engaged in anything but 
 ber prayers lor the soul of the late archduchess. 
 Some of these, the very young girls, were pretty ; and 
 the women of thirty-five or forty apparently were fine- 
 looking; but, except a decided air of style and rank, 
 the fairly grown-up belles seemed to me of very small 
 attraction. 
 
 I s iw little else in Nice to interest me. I wandered 
 about with my friend the surgeon, laughing at the ri- 
 diculous figures and villanous uniforms of the Sardin- 
 ian infantry, and repelling the beggars, who radiated 
 to us from every corner ; and, having traversed the 
 terrace of a mile on the tops of the houses next the 
 sea, unravelled all the lanes of the old town, and ad- 
 mired all the splendor of the new, we dined and got 
 early to bed, anxious to sleep once more between 
 sheets, and prepare for an early start on the following 
 morning. 
 
 We were on the road to Genoa with the first gray 
 of the dawn— the surgeon, a French officer, and my- 
 self, three passengers" of a courier barouche. We 
 were climbing up mountains and sliding down with 
 locked wheels for several hours, by a road edging on 
 precipices, an 1 overhung by tremendous rocks, and 
 descending at last to the sea level, we entered Menfore, 
 a town of the little principality of Monaco. Having 
 paid our twenty sous tribute to this prince of a terri- 
 tory not larger than a Kentucky farm, we were suffer- 
 ed I-) cross his borders once more into Sardinia, hav- 
 ing posted through a whole state in less than half an 
 hour. 
 
 It is impossible to conceive a route of more grandeur 
 than the famous road along the Mediterranean from 
 Nice to Genoa. It is near a hundred and fifty miles, 
 over the edges of mountains bordering the sea for the 
 whole distance. The road is cut into the sides of the 
 precipice, often hundreds of feet perpendicular above 
 the surf, descending sometimes into the ravines formed 
 by the numerous rivers that cut their way to the sea, 
 and mounting immediately again to the loftiest sum- 
 mits. It is a dizzy business from beginning to end. 
 There is no parapet usually, and there are thousands 
 of places where half a "shie" by a timid horse would 
 drop you at once some hundred fathoms upon rocks 
 wet by the spray of every sea that breaks upon the 
 shore. The loveliest little nests of valleys lie between 
 that can be conceived. You will see a green spot, 
 miles below you, in turning the face of a rock ; and 
 riiiht in the midst, like a handful of plaster models on 
 a carpet, a cluster of houses, lying quietly in the warm 
 southern exposure, embosomed in everything refresh- 
 ing to the eye, the mountain sides cultivated in a 
 large circle around, and the ruins of an old castle to a 
 certainty on the eminence above. You descend and 
 descend, and wind into the curves of the shore, losing 
 and regaining sight of it constantly, till, entering at a 
 gate on the sea level, you find yourself in a filthy, nar- 
 row, half-whitewashed town, with a population of beg- 
 gars, priests, and soldiers; not a respectable citizen to 
 be seen from one end to the other, nor a clean woman, 
 nor a decent house. It is so all through Sardinia. 
 The towns from a distance lie in the most exquisitely- 
 chosen spots possible. A river comes down from the 
 hills and washes the wall; the uplands above are al- 
 ways of the very choicest shelter and exposure. You j 
 would think man and nature had conspired to com- j 
 plete its convenience and beauty; yet within, all is I 
 misery, dirt, and superstition. Every corner has a 
 cross — every bench a priest, idling in the sun — every 
 door a picture of the Virgin. You are delighted to 
 emerge once more, and get up a mountain to the 
 fresh air. 
 
 As we got farther on toward Genoa, the valleys be- 
 came longer by the sea, and the road ran through gar- 
 dens down to the very beach, of great richness and 
 beauty. It was new to me to travel for hours among 
 groves of orange and lemon trees, laden with both 
 fruit and flower, the ground beneath covered with the 
 windfalls, like an American apple-orchard. I never 
 saw such a profusion of fruit. The trees were break- 
 ing under the rich yellow clusters. Among other 
 things, there were hundreds of tall palms, spreading 
 out their broad fans in the sun, apparently perfectly 
 strong and at home under this warm sky. They are 
 cultivated as ornaments for the churches on sacred 
 days. 
 
 I caught some half dozen views on the way that I 
 shall never get out of my memory. At one place par- 
 ticularly, I think near Fenale, we ran round the cor- 
 ner of a precipice by a road cut right into the face of 
 a rock, two hundred feet at least above the sea, and a 
 long view burst upon us at once of a sweet green val- 
 ley, stretching back into the mountains as far as the 
 eye could go, with three or four small towns, with their 
 white churches, just checkering the broad sweeps of 
 verdure, a rapid river winding through its bosom, and a 
 back ground of" the Piedmontese Alps, with clouds half- 
 way up their sides, and snow glittering in the sun on 
 their summits. Language can not describe these scenes. 
 It is but a repetition of epithets to attempt it. You 
 must come and see them to feel how much one loses 
 to live always at home, and read of such things only. 
 
 The courier pointed out to us the place in which 
 Napoleon imprisoned the pope of Rome ; alow house, 
 surrounded with a wall close upon the sea ; and the 
 house a few miles from Genoa, believed to have been 
 that of Columbus. 
 
 We entered Genoa an hour after sunrise, by a noble 
 gate, placed at the western extremity of the crescenled 
 harbor. Thence to the centre of the city was one 
 continued succession of sumptuous palaces. We 
 drove rapidly along the smooth, beautifully paved 
 streets, and my astonishment was unbroken till we 
 were set down at the hotel. Congratulating ourselves 
 on the hiuderances which had conspired to bring us 
 here against our will, we took coffee, and went to bed 
 for a few hours, fatigued with a journey more weari- 
 some to the body than the mind. 
 
 I have spent two days in merely wandering about 
 Genoa, looking at the exterior of the city. It is a 
 group of hills, piled with princely palaces. I scarce 
 know how to commence a description of it. If there 
 were but one of these splendid edifices, or if I could 
 isolate a single palace, and describe it to you minutely, 
 it would be easy to convey an impression of the sur- 
 prise and pleasure of a stranger in Genoa. The whole 
 city, to use the expression of a French guide-book, 
 " respire la magnificence'" — breathes of splendor ! The 
 grand street, in which most of the palates stand, winds 
 around the foot of a high hill; and the gardens and 
 terraces are piled back, with palaces above them ; and 
 gardens, and tenaces, and palaces still above these, 
 forming wherever you can catch a vista, the most ex- 
 quisite rising perspective. On the summit of this 
 bill stands the noble fortress of St. George; and be- 
 hind it a lovely open garden, just now alive with mil- 
 lions of roses, a fountain playing into a deep oval ba- 
 sin in the centre, and a view beneath and beyond of 
 a broad winding valley, covered with the country vil 
 las of the nobility and gentry, and blooming with all 
 the luxuriant vegetation of a southern clime. 
 
 My window looks out upon the bay, across which 1 
 see the palace of Andrea Doria, the great winner of 
 the best glory of the Genoese; and just under me 
 floats an American flag, at the peak of a Baltimore 
 schooner, that sails to-morrow morning for the United 
 
44 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 States. I must close my letter, to send by her. I 
 shall remain in Genoa a week, and will write you of 
 its splendor more minutely. 
 
 LETTER XXVII. 
 
 FLORENCE THE GALLERY THE VENUS DE MEDICIS 
 
 THE TRIBUNE THE FORNARINA THE CASCINO 
 
 AN ITALIAN FASTA MADAME CATALANI. 
 
 Florence. — It is among the pleasantest things in 
 this very pleasant world, to find oneself for the first 
 time in a famous city. We sallied from the hotel this 
 morning an hour after our arrival, and stopped at the 
 first corner to debate where we should go. I could 
 not help smiling at the magnificence of the alterna- 
 tives. " To the gallery, of course," said I, "to see the 
 Venus de Medicis." "To Santa Croce," said one, 
 " to see the tombs of Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, and 
 Machiavelli." "To the Palazzo Pitti," said another, 
 " the grand duke's palace, and the choicest collection 
 of pictures in the world." The embarrassment alone 
 was quite a sensation. 
 
 The Venus carried the day. We crossed the Pi- 
 azza del Granduca, and inquired for the gallery. A. 
 fine court was shown us, opening out from the square, 
 around the three sides of which stood a fine uniform 
 structure, with a colonnade, the lower story occupied 
 by shops and crowded with people. We mounted a 
 broad staircase, and requested of the soldier at the 
 door to be directed to the presence of the Venus with- 
 out delay. Passing through one of the long wings of 
 the gallery, without even a glance at the statues, pic- 
 tures, and bronzes that lined the walls, we arrived at 
 the door of a cabinet, and putting aside the large crim- 
 son curtain at the entrance, stood before the en- 
 chantress. I must defer a description of her. We 
 spent an hour there, but, except that her divine beauty 
 filled and satisfied my eye, as nothing else ever did, 
 and that the statue is as unlike a thing to the casts 
 one sees of it as one thing could well be unlike anoth- 
 er, I made no criticism. There is an atmosphere of 
 fame and circumstantial interest about the Venus, 
 which bewilders the fancy almost as much as her 
 loveliness does the eye. She has been gazed upon 
 and admired by troops of pilgrims, each of whom it 
 were worth half a life to have met at her pedestal. 
 The painters, the poets, the talent and beauty, that have 
 come there from every country under the sun, and the 
 single feeling of love and admiration that she has 
 breathed alike into all, consecrate her mere presence 
 as a place for revery and speculation. Childe Harold 
 has been here, I thought, and Shelley and Words- 
 worth and Moore ; and, farther removed from our sym- 
 pathies, but interesting still, the poets and sculptors 
 of another age, Michael Angelo and Alfieri, the men I 
 of genius of all nations and times; and to stand in the 
 same spot, and experience the same feeling with them, 
 is an imaginative pleasure, it is true, but as truly a 
 deep and real one. Exceeding, as the Venus does 
 beyond all competition, every image of loveliness paint- 
 ed or sculptured that one has ever before seen, the 
 fancy leaves the eye gazing upon it, and busies itself 
 irresistibly with its pregnant atmosphere of recollec- 
 tions. At least I found it so, and I must go there 
 again and again before I can look at the marble sep- 
 arately, and with a merely admiring attention. 
 
 Three or four days have stolen away, I scarce know 
 how. I have seen but one or two things, yet have 
 felt so unequal to the description, that but for my 
 promise I should never write a line about them. 
 Really, to sit down and gaze into one of Titian's faces 
 for an hour, and then to go away and dream of putting 
 
 into language its color and expression, seems to me 
 little short of superlative madness. I only wonder at 
 the divine faculty of sight. The draught of pleasure 
 seems to me immortal, and the eye the only Ganyinede 
 that can carry the cup steadily to the mind. How 
 shall I begin to give you an idea of the Fornarina? 
 What can I tell you of the St. John in the desert, that 
 can afford you a glimpse even of Raphael's inspired 
 creations? 
 
 The Tribune is the name of a small octagonal cab- 
 inet in the gallery, devoted to the masterpieces of the 
 collection. There are five statues, of which one is the 
 Venus de Medicis; and a dozen or twenty pictures, 
 of which I have only seen as yet Titian's Two Venuses, 
 and Raphael's St. John and Fornarina. People walk 
 through the other parts of the gallery, and pause 
 here and there a moment before a painting or a statute; 
 but on the Tribune they sit down, and you may wait 
 hours before a chair is vacated, or often before the oc- 
 cupant shows a sign of life. Everybody seems en- 
 tranced there. They get before a picture, and bury 
 their eyes in it, as if it had turned them to stone. 
 After the Venus, the Fornarina strikes me most forci- 
 bly, and I have stood and gazed at it till my limbs 
 were numb with the motionless posture. There is no 
 affectation in this. I saw an English girl yesterday 
 gazing at the St. John. She was a flighty, coquettish- 
 looking creature, and I had felt that the spirit of the 
 place was profaned by the way she sailed into the room. 
 She sat down with half a glance at the Venus, and 
 began to look at this picture. It is a glorious thing, 
 to be sure, a youth of apparently seventeen, with a 
 leopard-skin about his loins, in the very pride of ma- 
 turing manliness and beauty. The expression of the 
 face is all human, but wrought to the very limit of 
 celestial enthusiasm. The wonderful richness of the 
 coloring, the exquisite ripe fulness of the limbs, the 
 passionate devotion of the kindling features combine 
 to make it the faultless ideal of a perfect human being 
 in youth. I had quite forgotten the intruder for an 
 hour. Quite a different picture had absorbed all my 
 attention. The entrance of some one disturbed me, 
 and as I looked round I caught a glance of my coquet, 
 sitting with her hands awkwardly clasped over her 
 guide-book, her mouth open, and the lower jaw hang- 
 ing down with a ludicrous expression of unconscious- 
 ness and astonished admiration. She was evidently 
 unaware of everything in the world except the form 
 before her, and a more absorbed and sincere wonder I 
 never witnessed. 
 
 I have been enjoying all day an Italian Festa. The 
 Florentines have a pleasant custom of celebrating this 
 particular festival, Ascension-day, in the open air; 
 breakfasting, dining, and dancing under the superb 
 trees of the Cascino. This is, by the way, quite the 
 loveliest public pleasure-ground I ever saw — a wood of 
 three miles in circumference, lying on the banks of the 
 Arno, just below the town ; not, like most European 
 promenades a bare field of clay or ground, set out 
 with stunted trees, and cut into rectangular walks, or 
 without a secluded spot or an untrodden blade of 
 grass ; but full of sward-paths, green and embowered, 
 the underbrush growing wild and luxuriant between , 
 ivy and vines of all descriptions hanging from the 
 limbs, and winding about every trunk ; and here and 
 there a splendid opening of velvet grass for half a mile, 
 with an ornamental temple in the centre, and beauti- 
 ful contrivances of perspective in every direction. I 
 have been not a little surprised with the enchantment 
 of so public a place. You step into the woods from 
 the very pavement of one of the most populous streets 
 in Florence ; from dust and noise and a crowd of busy 
 people to scenes where Boccacio might have fitly 
 laid his " hundred tales of love." The river skirts 
 the Cascino on one side, and the extensive grounds of 
 a young Russian nobleman's villa on the other; and 
 
PENCILLING^ BY THE WAV 
 
 49 
 
 here at sunset comes all the world to walk and drive, 
 and on festas like this to encamp, and keep holyday 
 under the trees. The whole place is more like a 
 half-redeemed wild- wood in America, than a public 
 promenade in Europe. 
 
 It is the custom, I am told for the grand duke and 
 the nobles of Tuscany to join in this festival, and 
 breakfast in the open air with the people. The late 
 death of the young and beautiful grand-dutchess has 
 prevented it this year, and the merry-makings are di- 
 minished of one half their interest. I should not 
 have imagined it, however, without the information. 
 I took a long stroll among the tents this morning, with 
 two ladies from Albany, old friends, whom I have en- 
 countered accidentally in Florence. The scenes were 
 peculiar and perfectly Italian. Everything was done 
 fantastically and tastefully. The tables were set about 
 the knolls, the bonnets and shawls hung upon the trees, 
 and the dark-eyed men and girls, with their expressive 
 faces full of enjoyment, leaned around upon the grass, 
 with the children playing among them, in innumera- 
 ble little parties, dispersed as if it had been managed 
 by a painter. At every few steps a long embowered 
 alley stretched off to the right or left, with strolling 
 groups scattered as far as the eye could see under the 
 trees, the red ribands and bright colored costumes 
 contrasting gayly with the foliage of every teint, from 
 the dusky leaf of the olive to the bright soft green of 
 the acacia. Wherever there was a circular opening 
 there were tents just in the edges of the wood, the 
 white festoons of the cloth hung from the limbs, and 
 tables spread under them, with their antique-looking 
 Tuscan pitchers wreathed with vines, and tables spread 
 with broad green leaves, making the prettiest cool cov- 
 ering that could be conceived. I have not come up 
 to the reality in this description, and yet, on reading 
 it, it sounds half a fiction. One must be here to feel 
 how little language can convey an idea of this "gar- 
 den of the world." 
 
 The evening was the fashionable hour, and with the 
 addition of Mr. Greenough, the sculptor, to our par- 
 ty, we drove to the cascines about an hour before sun- 
 set to see the equipages, and enjoy the close of the 
 festival. The drives intersect these beautiful grounds 
 irregularly in every direction, and the spectacle was 
 even more brilliant than in the morning. The nobil- 
 ity and the gay world of Florence flew past us in their 
 showy carriages of every description, the distinguish- 
 ed occupants differing in but one respect from well- 
 bred people of other countries — they looked happy. 
 If I had been lying on the grass, an Italian peasant, 
 with my kinsmen and friends, I should not have felt 
 that among the hundreds who were rolling past me 
 richer and better born, there was one face that looked 
 on me contemptuously or condescendingly. I was 
 very much struck with the universal air of enjoyment 
 and natural exhilaration. One scarce felt like a stran- 
 ger in such a happy-looking crowd. 
 
 Near the centre of the grounds is an open space, 
 where it is the custom for people to stop in driving to 
 exchange courtesies with their friends. It is a kind 
 of fashionable open air soiree. Every evening you 
 may see from fifty to a hundred carriages at a time, 
 moving about in this little square in the midst of the 
 woods, and drawing up side by side, one after the other, 
 for conversation. Gentlemen come ordinarily on horse- 
 back, and pass round from carriage to carriage, with 
 their hats off, talking gayly with the ladies within. 
 There could not be a more brilliant scene, and there 
 never was a more delightful custom. It keeps alive 
 the intercourse in the summer months, when there 
 are no parties, and it gives a stranger an opportunity 
 of seeing the lovely and the distinguished without the 
 difficulty and restraint of an introduction to society. 
 I wish some of these better habits of Europe were 
 hnitated in our country as readily as worse ones. 
 
 After thridding the embowered roads of the cas- 
 cines for an hour, and gazing with constant delight at 
 the thousand pictures of beauty and happiness^ that 
 meet us at every turn, we came back and mingled in 
 the gay throng of carriages at the centre. The valet 
 of our lady-friends knew everybody, and taking a con- 
 venient stand, we amused ourselves for an hour, gazing 
 at them as they were named in passing. Among oth- 
 ers, several of the Bonaparte family went by in a 
 splendid barouche ; and a heavy carriage, with a 
 showy, tasselled hammer-cloth, and servants in dashy 
 liveries, stopped just at our side, containing Madame 
 Catalani, the celebrated singer. She has a fine face 
 yet, with large expressive features, and dark, handsome 
 eyes. Her daughter was with her, but she has none 
 of her mother's pretensions to good looks. 
 
 LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE PITTI PALACE — TITIAN'S BELLA — AN IMPROVISA- 
 
 TRICE VIEW FROM A WINDOW ANNUAL EXPENSE 
 
 OF RESIDENCE AT FLORENCE. 
 
 I have got into the "back-stairs interest," as the 
 politicians say, and to-day I wound up the staircase 
 of the Pitti Palace, and spent an hour or two in its 
 glorious halls with the younger Greenough, without 
 the insufferable and usually inevitable annoyance of a 
 cicerone. You will not of course, expect a regular 
 description of such a vast labyrinth of splendor. I 
 could not give it to you even if I had been there the 
 hundred times that I intend to go, if I live long enough 
 in Florence. In other galleries you see merely the 
 arts, here you are dazzled with the renewed and costly 
 magnificence of a royal palace. The floors and ceil- 
 ings and furniture, each particular part of which it 
 must have cost the education of a life to accomplish, 
 bewilder you out of yourself quite; and, till you can 
 tread on a matchless pavement or imitated mosaic, 
 and lay your hat on a table of inlaid gems, and sit on 
 a sofa wrought with you know not what delicate and 
 curious workmanship, without nervousness or com- 
 punction, you are not in a state to appreciate the pic- 
 tures upon the walls with judgment or pleasure. 
 
 I saw but one thing well — Titian's Bella, as the 
 Florentines call it. There are two famous Venuses 
 by the same master, as you know in the other gallery, 
 hanging over the Venus de Medicis — full-length fig- 
 ures reclining upon couches, one of them usually 
 called Titian's mistress. The Bella in the Pitti gal- 
 lery, is a half-length portrait, dressed to the shoulders, 
 and a different kind of picture altogether. The oth- 
 ers are voluptuous, full-grown women. This repre- 
 sents a young girl of perhaps seventeen ; and if the 
 frame in which it hangs were a window, and the love- 
 liest creature that ever trod the floors of a palace 
 stood looking out upon you, in the open air, she could 
 not seem more real, or give you a stronger feeling of 
 the presence of exquisite, breathing, human beauty. 
 The face has no particular character. It is the look 
 with which a girl would walk to the casement in a 
 mood of listless happiness, and gaze out, she scarce 
 knew why. Y r ou feel that it is the habitual expres- 
 sion. Y"et, with all its subdued quiet and sweetness, 
 it is a countenance beneath which evidently sleeps 
 warm and measureless passion, capacities for loving 
 and enduring and resenting everything that makes up 
 a character to revere and adore. I do not know how 
 a picture can express so much — but it does express all 
 this, and eloquently too. 
 
 In a fresco on the ceiling of one of the private 
 chambers, is a portrait of the late lamented granddutch- 
 ess. On the mantelpiece in the duke's cabinet also is 
 
45 
 
 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 a beautiful marble bust of her. It is a face and head | 
 corresponding perfectly to the character given her by j 
 common report, full of nobleness and kindness. The j 
 duke, who loved her with a devotion rarely found in j 
 marriages of state, is inconsolable since her death, and 
 has shut himself from all society. He hardly slept 
 during her illness, watching by her bedside constantly. 
 She was a religious enthusiast, and her health is said 
 to have been first impaired by too rigid an adherence 
 to the fasts of the church, and self-inflicted penance. 
 The Florentines talk of her still, and she appears to 
 have been unusually loved and honored. 
 
 I have just returned from hearing an improiisatrice. 
 At a party last night I met an Italian gentleman, who 
 talked very enthusiastically of a lady of Florence, 
 celebrated for her talent of improvisation. She was 
 to give a private exhibition to her friends the next day 
 at twelve, and he offered politely to introduce me. He 
 called this morning, and we went together. 
 
 Some thirty or forty people were assembled in a 
 handsome room, darkened tastefully by heavy cur- 
 tains. They were sitting in perfect silence when we 
 entered, all gazing intently on the improvisatrice, a 
 lady of some forty or fifty years, of a fine countenance, 
 and dressed in deep mourning. She rose to receive 
 us; and my friend introducing me, to my infinite dis- 
 may, as an improvisatore Americano, she gave me a seat 
 on the sofa at her right hand, an honor I had not Italian 
 enough to decline. I regretted it the less that it gave 
 me an opportunity of observing the effects of the 
 " fine phrensy," a pleasure I should otherwise cer- 
 tainly have lost through the darkness of the room. 
 
 We were sitting in profound silence, the head of 
 the improvisatrice bent down upon her breast, and her 
 hands clasped over her lap, when she suddenly raised 
 herself, and with both hands extended, commenced in 
 a thrilling voice, "Patrice. 1 " Some particular passage 
 of Florentine history had been given her by one of 
 the company, and we had interrupted her in the midst 
 of her conception. She went on with astonishing flu- 
 ency, in smooth harmonious rhyme, without the hes- 
 itation of a breath, for half an hour. My knowledge 
 of the language was too imperfect to judge of the 
 finish of the style, but the Italians present were quite 
 carried away with their enthusiasm. There was an 
 improvisatore in company, said to be the second in 
 Italy; a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a 
 face that struck me as the very heau ideal of genius. 
 His large expressive eyes kindled as the poetess went 
 on, and the changes of his countenance soon attract- 
 ed the attention of the company. She closed and 
 sunk back upon her seat, quite exhausted ; and the 
 poet, looking round for sympathy, loaded her with 
 praises in the peculiarly beautiful epithets of the Ital- 
 ian language. I regarded her more closely as she sat 
 by me. Her profile was beautiful ; and her mouth, 
 which at the first glance had exhibited marks of age, 
 was curled by her excitement into a firm animated 
 curve, which restored twenty years at least by its ex- 
 pression. • 
 
 After a few minutes one of the company went out 
 of the room, and wrote upon a sheet of paper the last 
 words of every line for a sonnet ; and a gentleman 
 who had remained within, gave a subject to fill it up. 
 She took the paper, and looking at it a moment or 
 two, repeated the sonnet as fluently as if it had been 
 written out before her. Several other subjects were 
 then given her, and she filled the same sonnet with the 
 same terminations. Tt was wonderful. I could not 
 conceive of such facility. After she had satisfied 
 them with this, she turned to me and said, that in 
 compliment to the American improvisatore she would 
 give an ode upon America. To disclaim the charac- 
 ter and the honor would have been both difficult and 
 embarrassing even for one who knew the language 
 
 better than I, so I bowed and submitted. She began 
 with the discovery by Columbus, claimed him as her 
 countryman ; and with some poetical fancies about the 
 wild woods and the Indians, mingled up Montezuma 
 and Washington rather promiscuously, and closed 
 with a really beautiful apostrophe to liberty. My ac- 
 knowledgments were fortunately lost in the general 
 murmur. 
 
 A tragedy succeeded, in which she sustained four 
 characters. This, by the working of her forehead 
 and the agitation of her breast, gave her more trouble, 
 but her fluency was unimpeded ; and when she closed, 
 the company was in raptures. Her gestures were 
 more passionate in this performance, but, even with 
 my imperfect knowledge of the language, they always 
 seemed called for and in taste. Her friends rose as 
 she sunk back on the sofa, gathered round her, and 
 took her hands, overwhelming her with praises. It 
 was a very exciting scene altogether, and 1 went away 
 with new ideas of poetical power and enthusiasm. 
 
 One lodges like a prince in Florence, and pays like 
 a beggar. For the information of artists and scholars 
 desirous to come abroad, to whom exact knowledge on 
 the subject is important, I will give you the inventory 
 and cost of my whereabout. 
 
 I sit at this moment in a window of what was for- 
 merly the archbishop's palace — a noble old edifice, 
 with vast staircases and resounding arches, and a hall 
 in which you might put a dozen of the modern brick 
 houses of our country. My chamber is as large as a 
 ball-room, on the second story, looking out upon the 
 garden belonging to the house, which extends to the 
 eastern wall of the city. Beyond this lies one of the 
 sweetest views in the world — the ascending amphithe- 
 atre of hills, in whose lap lies Florence, with the tall 
 eminence of Ficsolc in the centre, crowned with the 
 monastery in which Milton passed six weeks, while 
 gathering* scenery for his Paradise. I can almost 
 count the panes of glass in the windows of the bard's 
 room; and, between the fine old building and my eye, 
 on the slope of the hill, lie thirty or forty splendid 
 villas, half-buried in trees (Madame Catalani's among 
 them), piled one above another on the steep ascent, 
 with their columns and porticoes, as if they were 
 mock temples in a vast terraced garden. I do not 
 think there is a window in Italy that commands more 
 points of beauty. Cole, the American landscape 
 painter, who occupied the room before me, took a 
 sketch from it. For neighbors, the Neapolitan am- 
 bassador lives on the same floor, the two Greenoughs 
 in the ground-rooms below, and the palace of one of 
 the wealthiest nobles of Florence overlooks the garden, 
 with a front of eighty-five windows, from which you 
 are at liberty to select any two or three, and imagine 
 the most celebrated beauty of Tuscany behind the 
 crimson curtains — the daughter of this same noble 
 bearing that reputation. She was pointed out to me 
 at the opera a night or two since, and I have seen as 
 famous women with less pretensions. 
 
 For the interior, my furniture is not quite upon the 
 same scale, but I have a clean snow-white bed, a cali- 
 co-covered sofa, chairs and tables enough, and pic- 
 tures three deep from the wail to the floor. 
 
 For all this, and the liberty of the episcopal garden, 
 I pay three dollars a month ! A dollar more is charged 
 for lamps, boots, and service, and a dark-eyed landlady 
 of thirty-five, mends my gloves, and pays me two vis- 
 its a day — items not mentioned in the bill. Then for 
 the feeding, an excellent breakfast of coffee and toast 
 is brought me for six cents ; and, without wine, one 
 may dine heartily at a fashionable restaurant for twelve 
 cents, and with wine, quite magnificently for twenty- 
 five. Exclusive of postage and pleasures, this is all 
 one is called upon to spend in Florence. Three hun- 
 i died dollars a year would fairly and largely cover the 
 
PENCILLIN'GS BY THE WAY. 
 
 47 
 
 expenses of a man living at this rate ; and a man who 
 would not be willing to live half as well for the sake 
 of his art, does not deserve to see Italy. I have sta- 
 ted these unsentimental particulars, because it is a 
 kind of information I believe much wanted. I should 
 have come to Italy years ago if I had known as much, 
 and I am sure there are young men in our country 
 dreaming of this paradise of art in half despair, who 
 will thank me for it, and take up at once " the pil- 
 grim's sandal-shoon and scollop-shell." 
 
 LETTER XXIX. 
 
 EXCURSION TO VENICE — AMERICAN ARTISTS — VALLEY 
 OF FLORENCE — MOUNTAINS OF CARRARA — TRAVEL- 
 LING COMPANIONS — HIGHLAND TAVERN— MIST AND 
 SUNSHINE — ITALIAN VALLEYS — VIEW OF THE ADRI- 
 ATIC — BORDER OF ROMAGNA — SUBJECTS FOR THE PEN- 
 CIL — HIGHLAND ITALIANS ROMANTIC SCENERY A 
 
 PAINFUL OCCURRENCE AN ITALIAN HUSBAND A 
 
 DUTCHMAN, HIS WIFE, AND CHILDREN — BOLOGNA 
 
 THE PILGRIM — MODEL FOR A MAGDALEN. 
 
 I started for Venice yesterday, in company with 
 Mr. Alexander and Mr. Cranch, two American artists. 
 We had taken the vetturino for Bologna, and at day- 
 light were winding up the side of the amphitheatre of 
 Appenines that bends over Florence, leaving Fiesole 
 risin2 sharply on our right. The mist was creeping 
 up the mountain just in advance of us, retreating 
 with a scarcely perceptible motion to the summits, 
 like the lift of a heavy curtain. Florence, and its 
 long, heavenly valley, full of white palaces sparkling in 
 the sun, lay below us, more like a vision of a better 
 world than a scene of human passion ; away in the 
 horizon the abrupt heads of the mountains of Carrara 
 rose into the sky, and with the cool, fresh breeze of 
 the hills, and the excitement of the pleasant excursion 
 before us, we were three of as happy travellers proba- 
 bly as were to be met on any highway in this garden 
 of the world. 
 
 We had six companions, and a motley crew they 
 were — a little effeminate Venitian, probably a tailor, 
 with a large, noble-looking, handsome contadina for a 
 wife ; a sputtering Dutch merchant, a fine, little, 
 coarse, good-natured fellow, with his wife, and two 
 very small and very disagreeable children ; an Austrian 
 corporal in full uniform, and a fellow in a straw hat, 
 speaking some unknown laniuase, and a nondescript 
 in every respect. The women and children, and my 
 friends, the artists, were my companions inside, the 
 double dickey in front accommodating the others. 
 Conversation commenced with the journey. The 
 Dutch spoke their dissonant language to each other, 
 and French to us, the contadina's soft Venitian dia- 
 lect broke in like a flute in a chorus of harsh instru- 
 ments, and our own hissing English added to a mix- 
 ture already sufficiently various. 
 
 We were all day ascending mountains, and slept 
 coolly under three or four blankets at a highland tav- 
 ern, on a very wild Appenine. Our supper was gayly 
 eaten, and our mirth served to entertain five or six I 
 English families, whose chambers were only separated j 
 from the rough raftered dining hall by double cur- 
 tains. It was pleasant to hear the children and nurses | 
 speaking English unseen. The contrast made us j 
 realize forcibly the eminently foreign scene about us. I 
 The next morning, after travelling two or three hours ! 
 in a thick, drizzling mist, we descended a sharp hill, 
 and emerged at its foot into a sunshine so sudden and 
 clear, that it seemed almost as if the night had burst j 
 into mid-day in a moment. We had come out of a j 
 black cloud. The mounlain behind us was capped ! 
 with it to the summit. Beneath us lay a map of a ! 
 hundred valleys, all bathed and glowing in unclouded 
 
 light, and on the limit of the horizon, far off as the 
 eye could span, lay a long sparkling line of water, like 
 a silver frame round the landscape. It was our first 
 view of the Adriatic. We looked at it with the sin- 
 gular and indefinable emotion with which one alway 
 sees a celebrated icater for the first time — a sensation, 
 it seems to me, which is like that of no other addition 
 to our knowledge. The Mediterranean at Marseilles, 
 the Arno at Florence, the Seine at Paris, affected me 
 in the same way. Explain it who will, or can ! 
 
 An hour after, we reached the border of Roma&na, 
 the dominions of the pope running up thus far into 
 the Appenines. Here our trunks were taken off and 
 searched minutely. The little village was full of the 
 dark-skinned, romantic-looking Romagnese, and my 
 two friends, seated on a wall, with a dozen curious ga- 
 zers about them, sketched the heads looking from the 
 old stone windows, beggars, buildings, and scenery, in 
 a mood of professional contentment. Dress apart, 
 these highland Italians are like North American In- 
 dians — the same copper complexions, high .cheek 
 bones, thin lips, and dead black hair. The old women 
 particularly, would pass in any of our towns for full- 
 blooded squaws. 
 
 The scenery after this grew of the kind "which 
 savage Rosa dashed'' — the only landscape I ever saw 
 exactly of the teints so peculiar to Salvator's pictures. 
 Our painters were in ecstasies with it, and truly, the 
 dark foliage, and blanched rocks, the wild glens, and 
 wind-distorted trees, gave the country the air of a 
 home for all the tempests and floods of a continent. 
 The Kaatskills are tame to it. 
 
 The forenoon came on, hot and sultry, and our lit- 
 tle republic began to display its character. The tai- 
 lor's wife was taken sick ; and fatigue, and heat, and 
 the rousrh motion of the vetturino in descending the 
 mountains, brought on a degree of suffering which it 
 was painful to witness. She was a woman of really 
 extraordinary beauty, and dignified and modest as few 
 women are in any country. Her suppressed groans, 
 her white, tremulous lips, the tears of agony pressing 
 thickly through her shut eyelids, and the clenching 
 of her sculpture-like hands, would have moved any- 
 thing but an Italian husband. The little effeminate 
 villain treated her as if she had been a dog. She bore 
 everything from him till he took her hand, which she 
 raised faintly to intimate that she could not rise, when 
 the carriage stopped, and threw it back into her face 
 with a curse. She roused, and looked at him with a 
 natural majesty and calmness that made my blood 
 thrill. " AspctlaV was her only answer, as she sunk 
 back and fainted. 
 
 The Dutchman's wife was a plain, honest, affection- 
 ate creature, bearing the humors of two heated and 
 ill-tempered children, with a patience we were com- 
 pelled to admire. Her husband smoked and laughed, 
 and talked villanous French and worse Italian, but 
 was glad to escape to the cabriolet in the hottest of the 
 day, leaving his wife to her cares. The baby scream- 
 ed, and the child blubbered and fretted, and for hours 
 the mother was a miracle of kindness. The " drop 
 | too much," came in the shape of a new crying fit 
 ! from both children, and the poor little Dutchwoman, 
 quite wearied out, burst into a flood of tears, and hic- 
 cupped her complaints in her own language, weeping 
 unrestrainedly for a quarter of an hour. After this 
 she felt better, took a gulp of wine from the black bot- 
 tle, and settled herself once more quietly and resign- 
 edly to her duties. We had certainly opened one or 
 two very fresh veins of human character, when we 
 stopped at the gates. 
 
 There is but one hotel for American travellers in 
 Bologna, of course. Those who have read Rogers's 
 Italy, will remember his mention of " The Pilgrim," 
 the house where the poet met Lord Byron by appoint- 
 ment, and passed the evening with him which h« de- 
 
4S 
 
 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 scribes so exquisitely. We took leave of our motley | 
 friends at the door, and our artists who had greatly ad- I 
 mired the iovely Venitiati, parted from her with the 
 regret of old acquaintances. She certainly was, as 
 they said, a splendid model for a Magdalen, " majesti- 
 cal and sad," and, always in attitudes for a picture : 
 sleeping or waking, she afforded a succession of stud- 
 ies of which they took the most enthusiastic advantage. 
 
 LETTER XXX. 
 
 EXCURSION TO VENICE CONTINUED BRIEF DESCRIPTION 
 
 OF BOLOGNA GALLERY OF THE FINE ARTS — RA- 
 PHAEL'S ST. CECILIA— PICTURES OF CARRACC1 — DO- 
 MENICHINOS' MADONNA DEL ROSARIO — GUIDO'S MAS- 
 SACRE OF THE INNOCENTS — THE CATHEDRAL AND THE 
 DUOMO — EFFECTS OF THESE PLACES OF "WORSHIP, AND 
 THE CEREMONIES, UPON THE WIND — RESORT OF THE 
 ITALIN PEASANTRY — OPEN CHURCHES SUBTERRA- 
 NEAN-CONFESSION CHAPEL — THE FESTA — GRAND PRO- 
 CESSIONS — ILLUMINATIONS — AUSTRIAN BANDS OF MU- 
 SIC — DEPORTMENT OF THE PEOPLE TO A STRANGER. 
 
 Another evening is here, and my friends have crept 
 to bed with the exclamation, "how much we may live 
 in a day." Bologna is unlike any other city we have 
 ever seen, in a multitude of things. You walk all over 
 it under arcades, sheltered on either side from the 
 sun, the elegance and ornament of the lines of pillars, 
 depending on the wealth of the owner of the particular 
 house, but columns and arches, simple or rich, every- 
 where. Imagine porticoes built on the front of every 
 house in Philadelphia or New York, so as to cover the 
 sidewalks completely, and down the long perspective 
 of every street, continued lines of airy Corinthian, or 
 simple Doric pillars, and you may faintly conceive the 
 impression of the streets of Bologna. With Lord 
 Byron's desire to forget everything English, I do not 
 wonder at his selection of this foreign city for a res- 
 idence, so emphatically unlike, as it is, to everything 
 else in the world. 
 
 We inquired out the gallery after breakfast, and 
 spent two or three hours among the celebrated master- 
 pieces of the Carracci, and the famous painters of the 
 Bolognese school. The collection is small, but said 
 to be more choice than any other in Italy. There 
 certainly are five or six among its forty or fifty gems, 
 that deserve each a pilgrimage. The pride of the 
 place is the St. Cecilia, by Raphael. This always 
 beautiful personification of music, a woman of celestial 
 beauty, stands in the midst of a choir who have been 
 interrupted in their anthem by a song, issuing from a 
 vision of angels in a cloud from heaven. They have 
 dropped their instruments, broken, upon the ground, 
 and are listening with rapt attention, all, except the 
 6aint, with heads dropped upon their bosoms, over- 
 come with the glory of the revelation. She alone, 
 with her harp hanging loosely from her fingers, gazes 
 up with the most serene and cloudless rapture beam- 
 ing from her countenance, yet with a look of full and 
 angelic comprehension, and understanding of the 
 melody and its divine meaning. You feel that her 
 beauty is mortal, for it is all woman ; but you see that, 
 for the moment, the spirit that breathes through and 
 mingles with the harmony in the sky, is seraphic and 
 immortal. If there ever was inspiration, out of holy 
 writ, it touched the pencil of Raphael. 
 
 It is tedious to read descriptions of pictures. I 
 liked everything in the gallery. The Bolognese style 
 of color suits my eye. It is rich and forcible, without 
 startling or offending. Its delicious mellowness of 
 color, and the vigor and triumphant power of concep- 
 tion, show two separate triumphs of the art, which in 
 the same hand are delightful. The pictures of Lu- 
 
 dovico Carracci especially fired my admiration. And 
 Domenichino, who died of a broken heart at Rome, 
 because his productions were neglected, is a painter 
 who always touches me nearly. His Madonna del 
 Rosario is crowded with beauty. Such children I 
 never saw in painting — the very ideals of infantile 
 grace and innocence. It is said of him, that after 
 painting his admirable frescoes in the church of St. 
 Andrew, at Rome, which, at the time, were ridiculed 
 unsparingly by the artists, he used to walk in on his 
 return from his studio, and gazing at them with a de- 
 jected air, remark to his friend, that he "could not 
 think they were quite so bad — they might have been 
 worse." How true it is, that "the root of a great 
 name is in the dead body." 
 
 Guido's celebrated picture of the "Massacre of the 
 Innocents," hangs just oppositethe St. Cecilia. It is a 
 powerful and painful thing. The marvel of it to me 
 is the simplicity with which its wonderful effects are 
 produced, both of expression and color. The kneel- 
 ing mother in the foreground, with her dead children 
 before her, is the most intense representation of agony 
 I ever saw. Yet the face is calm, her eyes thrown up 
 to heaven, but her lips undistorted, and the muscles of 
 her face, steeped as they are in suffering, still and nat- 
 ural. It is the look of a soul overwhelmned — that has 
 ceased to struggle because it is full. Her gaze is on 
 heaven, and in the abandonment of her limbs, and the 
 deep, but calm agony of her countenance, you see 
 that nothing between this and heaven can move her 
 more. One suffers in seeing such pictures. You go 
 away exhausted, and with feelings harassed and ex- 
 cited. 
 
 As we returned, we passed the gates of the universi- 
 ty. On the walls were pasted a sonnet printed with 
 some flourish, in honor of Camillo Rosalpina, the 
 laureate of one of the academical classes. 
 
 We visited several of the churches in the afternoon. 
 The cathedral and the Duomo are glorious places — 
 both. I wish I could convey to minds accustomed to 
 the diminutive size and proportions of our churches 
 in America, an idea of the enormous size and often al- 
 most supernatural grandeur of those in Italy. Aisles 
 in whose distance the figure of a man is almost lost — 
 pillars, whose bases you walk round in wonder, stretch- 
 ing into the lofty vaults of the roof, as if they ended in 
 the sky — arches of gigantic dimensions, mingling and 
 meeting with the fine tracery of a cobweb — altars piled 
 up on every side with gold, and marble, and silver — 
 private chapels ornamented with the wealth of nobles, 
 let into the sides, each large enough for a communion, 
 and through the whole extent of the interior, an un- 
 encumbered breadth of floor, with here and there a 
 solitary worshipper on his knees, or prostrated on his 
 face — figures so small in comparison with the immense 
 dome above them, that it seems as if, could distance 
 drown a prayer, they were as much lost as if they 
 prayed under the open sky ! Without having even a 
 leaning to the catholic faith, I love to haunt their 
 churches, and I am not sure that the religious awe of 
 the sublime ceremonies and places of worship does 
 not steal upon me daily. Whenever I am heated, or 
 fatigued, or out of spirits, I go into the first cathedral, 
 and sit down for an hour. They are always dark, and 
 cool, and quiet ; and the distant tinkling of the bell 
 from some distant chapel, and the grateful odor of the 
 incense, and the low, just audible murmur of prayer, 
 settles on my feelings like a mist, and softens and 
 soothes and refreshes me, as nothing else will. The 
 Italian peasantry who come to the cities to sell or bar- 
 gain, pass their noons in these cool places. You see 
 them on their knees asleep against a pillar, or sitting 
 in a corner, with their heads upon their bosoms ; and, 
 if it were as a place of retreat and silence alone, the 
 churches are an inestimable blessing to them. It seems 
 to me, that any sincere Christian, of whatever faith, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 49 
 
 would find a pleasure in going into a sacred place and 
 sitting down in the heat of the day, to be quiet and 
 devotional for an hour. It would promote the objects 
 of any denomination in our country, I should think, 
 if the churches were thus left always open. 
 
 Under the cathedral of Bologna is a svbterranean 
 con fission-chapel — as singular and impressive a device 
 as I ever saw. It is dark like a cellar, the daylight 
 faintly struggling through a painted window above the 
 altar, and the two solitary wax candles giving a most 
 ghastly intensity to the gloom. The floor is paved 
 with tomb-stones, the inscriptions and death's heads 
 of which you feel under your feet as you walk through. 
 The roof is so vaulted that every tread is reverberated 
 endlessly in hollow tones. All around are the confes- 
 sion-boxes, with the pierced plates at which the priest 
 within puts his ear, worn with the lips of penitents, and 
 at one of the sides is a deep cave, far within which, as in 
 a tomb, lies a representation on limestone of our Sa- 
 vior, bleeding as he came from the cross, with the 
 apostles made of the same cadaverous material, hang- 
 ing over him! 
 
 We have happened, by a fortunate chance, upon an 
 extraordinary day in Bologna — afesta, that occurs but 
 once in ten years. We went out as usual after break- 
 fast this morning, and found the city had been deco- 
 rated over-night in the most splendid and singular 
 manner. The arcades of some four or five streets in 
 the centre of the town were covered with rich crimson 
 damask, the pillars completely bound, and the arches 
 dressed and festooned with a degree of gorgeousness 
 and taste as costly as it was magnificent. The streets I 
 themselves were covered with cloths stretched above 
 the second stories of the houses from one side to the 
 other, keeping off the sun entirely, and making in 
 each street one long tent of a mile or more, with 
 two lines of crimson columns at the sides, and fes- 
 toons of gauze, of different colors, hung from win- 
 dow to window in every direction. It was by far the 
 most splendid scene I ever saw. The people were all 
 there in their gayest dresses, and we probably saw in 
 the course of the day every woman in Bologna. My 
 friends, the painters, give it the palm for beauty over 
 all the cities they had seen. There was a grand pro- 
 cession in the morning, and in the afternoon the bands 
 of the Austrian army made the round of the decora- 
 ted streets, playing most delightfully before the prin- 
 cipal houses. In the evening there was an illumina- 
 tion, and we wandered up and down till midnight 
 through the fairy scene, almost literally •« dazzled and 
 drunk with beauty." 
 
 The people of Bologna have a kind of earnest yet 
 haughty courtesy, very different from that of most of 
 the Italians I have seen. They bow to the stranger, 
 as he enters the cafe; and if they rise before him, the 
 men raise their hats and the ladies smile and courtesy 
 as they go out; yet without the least familiarity which i 
 could authorize farther approach to acquaintance. 
 We have found the officers, whom we meet at the 
 eating-houses particularly courteous. There is some- 
 thing delightful in this universal acknowledgment of a 
 stranger's claims on courtesy and kindness. I could 
 well wish it substituted in our country, for the surly 
 and selfish manners of people in public-houses to each 
 other. There is neither loss of dignity nor commit- ] 
 tal of acquaintance in such attentions ; and the man- 
 ner in which a gentleman steps forward to assist you 
 in any difficulty of explanation in a foreign tongue, or 
 sends the waiter to you if you are neglected, or hands 
 you the newspaper or his snuff-box, or rises to give 
 you room in a crowded place, takes away, from me at 
 least, all that painful sense of solitude and neglect 
 one feels as a stranger in a foreign land. 
 
 We go to Ferrara to-morrow, and thence by the Po 
 to Venice My letter must close for the present. 
 
 LETTER XXXI. 
 
 VENICE — THE FESTA — GONDOLIERS — WOMEN — AN ITAL- 
 IAN SUNSET — THE LANDING — PRISONS OF THE DU- 
 CAL PALACE — THE CELLS DESCRIBED BY BYRON 
 
 APARTMENT IN WHICH PRISONERS WERE STRANGLED 
 — DUNGEONS UNDER THE CANAL — SECRET GUILLO- 
 TINE — STATE CRIMINALS — BRIDGE OF SIGHS — PAS- 
 SAGE TO THE INQUISITION AND TO DEATH — CHURCH 
 OF SAINT MARC — A NOBLEMAN IN POVERTY, ETC., 
 ETC. 
 
 You will excuse me at present from a description of 
 Venice. It is a matter not to be hastily undertaken. 
 It has also been already done a thousand times ; and 
 I have just seen a beautiful sketch of it in the public 
 prints of the United States. I proceed with my let- 
 ters. 
 
 The Venetian festa is a gay affair, as you mav im- 
 agine. If not so beautiful and fanciful as the revels 
 by moonlight, it was more satisfactory, for we could 
 see and be seen, those important circumstances to 
 one's individual share in the amusement. At four 
 o'clock in the afternoon, the links of the long bridge 
 of boats across the Gindecca were cut away, and the 
 broad canal left clear for a mile up and down. It was 
 covered in a few minutes with gondolas, and all the 
 gayety and fashion of Venice fell into the broad prom- 
 enade between the city and the festal island. I should 
 think five hundred were quite within the number of 
 gondolas. You can scarcely fancy the novelty and 
 agreeableness of this singular promenade. It was 
 busy work for the eyes to the right and left, with the 
 great proportion of beauty, and the rapid glide of their 
 fairy-like boats. And the quietness of the thing was 
 so delightful — no crowding, no dust, no noise but the 
 dash of oars and the ring of merry voices ; and we 
 sat so luxuriously upon our deep cushions the while, 
 thridding the busy crowd rapidly and silently, without 
 a jar or touch of anything but the yielding element 
 that sustained us. 
 
 Two boats soon appeared with wreaths upon their 
 prows, and these had won the first and second prizes 
 at the last year's regatta. The private gondolas fell 
 away from the middle of the canal, and left them free 
 space for a trial of their speed. They were the most 
 airy things I ever saw afloat, about forty feet long, and 
 as slender and light as they could well be, and hold 
 together. Each boat had six oars, and the crews 
 stood with their faces to the beak of their craft ; 
 slight, but muscular men, and with a skill and quick- 
 ness at their oars which I had never conceived. I re- 
 alized the truth and force of Cooper's inimitable de- 
 scription of the race in the Bravo. The whole of his 
 book gives you the very air and spirit of Venice, and 
 one thanks him constantly for the lively interest which 
 he has thrown over everything in this bewitching city. 
 The races of the rival boats to-day were not a regular 
 part of the festa, and were not regularly contested. 
 The gondoliers were exhibiting themselves merely, 
 and the people soon ceased to be interested in them. 
 
 We rowed up and down till dark, following here 
 and there the boats whose freights attracted us, and 
 exclaiming every moment at some new glimpse of 
 beauty. There is really a surprising proportion of 
 loveliness in Venice. The women are all large, prob- 
 ably from never walking, and other indolent habits 
 consequent upon want of exercise; and an oriental air, 
 sleepy and passionate, is characteristic of the whole 
 race. One feels that be has come among an entirely 
 new class of women, and hence, probably, the far- 
 famed fascination of Venice to foreigners. 
 
 The sunset happened to be one of those so peculiar 
 to Italy, and which are richer and more enchanting in 
 Venice than in any other part of it, from the charac- 
 
50 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ter of its scenery. It was a sunset without a cloud ; 
 but at the horizon the sky was died of a deep orange, 
 which softened away toward the zenith almost imper- 
 ceptibly, the whole west like a wall of burning gold. 
 The mingled softness and splendor of these skies is 
 indescribable. Everything is touched with the same 
 hue. A mild, yellow glow is all over the canals and 
 buildings. The air seems filled with glittering golden 
 dust, and the lines of the architecture, and the out- 
 lines of the distant islands, and the whole landscape 
 about you is mellowed and enriched with a new and 
 glorious light. I have seen one or two such sunsets 
 in America; but there the sunsets are bolder and 
 clearer, and with much more sublimity — they have 
 rarely the voluptuous coloring of those in Italy. 
 
 It was delightful to glide along over a sea of light 
 so richly teinted, among those graceful gondolas, with 
 their freights of gayety and beauty. As the glow on 
 the sky began to fade, they all turned their prows to- 
 ward San Marc, and dropping into a slower motion, 
 the whole procession moved on together to the stairs 
 of the piazzetta ; and by the time the twilight was per- 
 ceptible, the cafes were crowded, and the square was 
 like one great fete. We passed the evening in wander- 
 ing up and down, never for an instant feeling like stran- 
 gers, and excited and amused till long after midnight. 
 
 After several days delay, we received an answer this 
 morning from the authorities, with permission to see 
 the bridge of sighs, and the prisons of the ducal palace. 
 We landed at the broad stairs, and passing the deso- 
 late cotirt, with its marble pillars and statues green 
 with damp and neglect, ascended the " giant's steps," 
 and found the warder waiting for us, with his enor- 
 mous keys, at the door of a private passage. At the 
 bottom of a staircase we entered a close gallery, from 
 which the first range of cells opened. The doors 
 were broken down, and the guide holding his torch in 
 th^m for a moment in passing, showed us the same 
 dismal interior in each — a mere cave, in which you 
 would hardly think it possible to breathe, with a raised 
 platform for a bed, and a small hole in the front wall' 
 to admit food and what air could find its way through 
 from the narrow passage. There were eight of these ; 
 and descending another flight of damp steps, we came 
 to a second range, differing only from the first in their 
 slimy dampness. These are the cells of which Lord 
 Byron gives a description in the notes to the fourth 
 canto of Childe Harold. He has transcribed, if you 
 remember, the inscription from the ceilings and walls 
 of one which was occupied successively by the victims 
 of the inquisition. The letters are cut rudely enough, 
 and must have been done entirely by feeling, as there 
 is no possibility of tho penetration of a ray of light. 
 I copied them with some difficulty, forgetting that 
 they were in print, and comparing them afterward 
 with my copy of Childe Harold, I found them exactly 
 the same, and I refer you, therefore, to his notes. 
 
 In a range ofcellsstill below these, and almost suffoca- 
 ting from their closeness, one was shown us in which 
 prisoners were strangled. The rope was passed through 
 an iron grating of four bars, the executioner standing 
 outside the cell. The prisoner within sat upon a 
 stone, with his back to the grating, and the cord was 
 passed round his neck, and drawn till he was choked. 
 The wall of the cell was covered with blood, which 
 had spattered against it with some violence. The 
 guide explained it by saying, that owing to the nar- 
 rowness of the passage the executioner had no room 
 to draw the cord, and to expedite his business his as- 
 sistant at the same time plunged a dagger into the 
 neck of the victim. The blood had flowed widely 
 over the wall, and ran to the floor in streams. With 
 the darkness of the place, the difficulty I found in 
 breathing, and the frightful reality of the scenes before 
 me, I never had in my life a comparable sensation of 
 horror. 
 
 At the end of the passage a door was walled up. It 
 led in the times of the republic, to dungeons under the 
 canal, in which the prisoner died in eight days from 
 his incarceration at the farthest, from the noisome 
 dampness and unwholesome vapors of the place. The 
 guide gave us a harrowing description of the swelling 
 of their bodies, and the various agonies of their slow 
 death. I hurried away from the place with a sickness 
 at my heart. In returning by the same way I passed 
 the turning, and stumbled over a raised stone across 
 the passage. It was the groove of a secret guillotine. 
 Here many of the state and inquisition victims were 
 put to death in the darkness of a narrow passage, shut 
 out even in their last moment from the light and 
 breath of heaven. The frame of the instrument had 
 been taken away ; but the pits in the wall, which had 
 sustained the axe, were still there ; and the sink on 
 the other side, where the head fell, to carry off the 
 blood. And these shocking executions took place di- 
 rectly before the cells of the other prisoners, within 
 twenty feet from the farthest. In a cell close to this 
 guillotine had been confined a state criminal for six- 
 teen years. He was released at last by the arrival of 
 the French, and on coming to the light in the square 
 of San Marc was struck blind, and died into a few days. 
 In another cell we stopped to look at the attempts of 
 a prisoner upon its walls, interrupted, happily, by his 
 release. He had sawed several inches into the front 
 wall, with some miserable instrument, probably a nail. 
 He had afterward abandoned this, and had, with pro- 
 digious strength, taken up a block from the floor; 
 and, the guide assured us, had descended into the cell 
 below. It was curious to look around his pent prison, 
 and see the patient labor of years upon those rough 
 walls, and imagine the workings of the human mind in 
 such a miserable lapse of existence. 
 
 We ascended to the light again, and the guide led us 
 to a massive door, with two locks, secured by heavy 
 iron bars. It swung open with a scream, and we 
 mounted a winding stair, and 
 
 " Stood in Venice on the bridge of sighs." 
 
 Two windows of close grating looked on either side 
 upon the long canal below, and let in the only light 
 to the covered passage. It is a gloomy place within, 
 beautifully as its light arch hangs in the air from with- 
 out. It was easy to employ the imagination as we 
 stood on the stone where Childe Harold had stood be- 
 fore us, and conjured up in fancy the despair and ag- 
 ony that must have been pressed into the last glance 
 at light and life that had been sent through those bar- 
 red windows. Across this bridge the condemned were 
 brought to receive their sentence in the chamber of 
 the ten, or to be confronted with bloody inquisitors, 
 and then were led back over it to die. The last light 
 that ever gladdened their eyes came through those 
 close bars, and the gay Gindecca in the distance, with 
 its lively waters covered with boats, must have made 
 that farewell glance to a Venetian bitter indeed. The 
 side next the prison is now massively walled up. We 
 stayed, silently musing at the windows, till the old cice- 
 rone ventured to remind us that his time was precious. 
 
 Ordering the gondola round to the stairs of the 
 piazzetta. we strolled for the first time into the church 
 of San Marc. The four famous bronze horses stood 
 with their dilated nostrils and fine action over the 
 porch, bringing back to us Andrea Doria, and his 
 threat ; and as I remembered the ruined palace of the 
 old admiral at Genoa, and glanced at the Austrian sol- 
 dier upon guard, in the very shadow of the winged 
 lion, I could not but feel most impressively the moral 
 of the contrast. The lesson was not attractive enough, 
 however, to keep us in a burning sun, and we put 
 aside the heavy folds of the drapery and entered. 
 How deliciously cool are these churches in Italy! 
 We walked slowly up toward the distant altar. An 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 M 
 
 old man rose from the base of one of the pillars, and 
 put out his hand for charity. It is an incident that 
 meets one at every step, and with half a glance at his 
 face I passed on. 1 was looking at the rich mosaic on 
 the roof, but his features lingered in my mind. They 
 grew upon me still more strongly ; and as I became 
 aware of the full expression of misery and pride upon 
 them, I turned about to see what had become of him. 
 My two friends had done each the very same thing, 
 with the same feeling of regret, and were talking of 
 the old man when I came back to them. We went 
 to the door, and looked all about the square, but he 
 was nowhere to be seen. It is singular that he should 
 have made the same impression upon all of us, of an 
 old Venetian nobleman in poverty. Slight as my 
 glance was, the noble expression of sadness about his 
 fine white head and strong features, are still indelible 
 in my memory. The prophecy which Byron puts in- 
 to the mouth of the condemned doge, is still true in J 
 every particular: — 
 
 " When the Hebrew's in thy palaces, 
 
 The Hun in thy high places, and the (ireek 
 Walks o'er thy mart, and smiles on it for his ; 
 When thy patricians beg their bitter bread," &c. 
 
 The church of San Marc is rich to excess, and its 
 splendid mosaic pavement is sunk into deep pits with j 
 age and the yielding foundations on which its heavy I 
 pile is built. Its pictures are not so fine as those of j 
 the other churches of Venice, but its age and historic 
 associations make it by far the most interesting. 
 
 LETTER XXXII. 
 
 VENICE SCENES BY MOONLIGHT THE CANALS — THE 
 
 ARMENIAN ISLAND THE ISLAND OF THE INSANE 
 
 IMPROVEMENTS MADE BY NAPOLEON SHADKD 
 
 WALKS — PAVILION AND ARTIFICIAL HILL ANT I- j 
 
 DOTES TO SADNESS PARTIES ON THE CANALS 
 
 NARROW STREETS AND SMALL BRIDGES THE RI- 
 
 ALTO MERCHANTS AND IDLERS SHELL-WORK AND 
 
 JEWELRY POETRY AND HISTORY — GENERAL VIEW 
 
 OF THE CITY THE FRIULI MOUNTAINS THE SHORE 
 
 OF ITALY A SILENT PANORAMA THE ADRIATIC 
 
 PROMENADERS AND SITTERS, ETC. 
 
 We stepped into the gondola to-night as the shad- 
 ows of the moon began to be perceptible, with orders 
 to Giuseppe to take us where he would. Abroad in a 
 summer's moonlight in Venice, is a line that might nev- 
 er be written but as the scene of a play. You can not 
 miss pleasure. If it were only the tracking silently 
 and swiftly the bosom of the broader canals, lying 
 asleep like streets of molten silver between the marble 
 palaces, or shooting into the dark shadows of the nar- 
 rower, with the black spirit-like gondolas gliding past, 
 or lying in the shelter of a low and not unoccupied 
 balcony ; or did you but loiter on in search of music, 
 \y\nz unperceived beneath the windows of a palace, 
 and listening, half asleep, to the sound of the guitar 
 and the song of the invisible player within ; this, with 
 the strange beauty of every building about you, and 
 the loveliness of the magic lights and shadows, were 
 enough to make a night of pleasure, even were no 
 charm of personal adventure to be added to the enu- 
 meration. 
 
 We glided along under the Rialto, talking of Belvi- 
 dera, and Othello, and Shylock, and, entering a cross 
 canal, cut the arched shadow of the bridge of sighs, I 
 hanging like a cobweb in the air, and shot in a mo- 
 ment forth to the full, ample, moonlit bosom of the 
 Gindecca. This is the canal that makes the harbor 
 and washes the stairs of San Marc. The Lido lay 
 off at a mile's distance across the water, and, with the j 
 moon riding over it, the bay between as still as the sky I 
 
 above, and brighter, it looked like a long cloud pencil- 
 led like a landscape in the heavens. To the right lay 
 the Armenian island, which Lord Byron visited so oft- 
 en, to study with the fathers at the convent; and, a 
 little nearer the island of the Insane — spite of its mis- 
 ery, asleep, with a most heavenly calmness on the sea. 
 You remember the touching story of the crazed girl, 
 who was sent here with a broken heart, described as 
 putting her hand through the grating at the dash of 
 every passing gondola, with her unvarying and affect- 
 ing " Venite per me ? Vcnite per me ?" 
 
 At a corner of the harbor, some three quarters of a 
 mile from San Marc, lies an island once occupied by 
 a convent. Napoleon raised the buildings, and con- 
 necting it with the town by a new, handsome street 
 and a bridge, laid out the ground as a public garden. 
 We debarked at the stairs, and passed an hour in strol- 
 ling through shaded walks, filled with the gay Vene- 
 tians, who come to enjoy here what they find nowhere 
 else, the smell of grass and green leaves. There is a 
 pavilion upon an artificial hill in the centre, where the 
 best lemonades and ices of Venice are to be found ; 
 and it was surrounded to-night by merry groups, amu- 
 sing themselves with all the heart-cheering gayety of 
 this delightful people. The very sight of them is an 
 antidote to sadness. 
 
 In returning to San Marc a large gondola crossed 
 us, filled with ladies and gentlemen, and followed by 
 another with a band of music. This is a common 
 mode of making a party on the canals, and a more 
 agreeable one never was imagined. We ordered the 
 gondolier to follow at a certain distance, and spent an 
 hour or two just keeping within the softened sound of 
 the instruments. How romantic are the veriest every- 
 day occurrences of this enchanting city. 
 
 We have strolled to-day through most of the nar- 
 row streets between the Rialto "and the San Marc. 
 They are, more properly, alleys. You wind through 
 them at sharp angles, turning constantly, from the in- 
 terruption of the canals, and crossing the small bridges 
 at every twenty yards. They are dark and cool ; and 
 no hoof of any description ever passing through them, 
 the marble flags are always smooth and clean ; and 
 with the singular silence, only broken by the shuffling 
 of feet, they are pleasant places to loiter in at noon- 
 day, when the canals are sunny. 
 
 We spent a half hour on the Rialto. This is the 
 only bridge across the grand canal, and connects the 
 two main parts of the city. It is, as you see by en- 
 gravings, a noble span of a single arch, built of pure 
 white marble. You pass it, ascending the arch by a 
 long flight of steps to the apex, and descending again 
 to the opposite side. It is very broad, the centre 
 forming a street, with shops on each side, with alleys 
 outside these, next the parapet, usually occupied by 
 idlers or merchants, probably very much as in the 
 time of Shylock. Here are exposed the cases of 
 shell-work and jewelry for which Venice is famous. 
 The variety and cheapness of these articles are surpri- 
 sing. The Rialto has always been to me, as it is prob- 
 ably to most others, quite the core of romantic local- 
 ity. I stopped on the upper stair of the arch, and 
 passed my hand across my eyes to recall my idea of it, 
 and realize that 1 was there. One is disappointed, 
 spite of all the common sense in the world, not to 
 meot Shylock and Antonio and Pierre. 
 
 " Shylock and the Moor 
 And Pierre can not be swept or worn away," 
 
 says Childe Harold ; and that, indeed, is the feeling 
 everywhere in these romantic countries. You can 
 not separate them from the characters with which po- 
 etry or history once peopled them. 
 
 At sunset we mounted into the tower of San Marc, 
 to get a general view of the city. The gold-duat at- 
 
52 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 mosphere, so common in Italy at this hour, was all 
 over the broad lagunes and the far stretching city ; 
 and she lay beneath us, in the midst of a sea of light, 
 an island far out into the ocean, crowned with towers 
 and churches, and heaped up with all the splendors of 
 architecture. The Friuli mountains rose in the north 
 with the deep blue dies of distance, breaking up the 
 else level horizon ; the shore of Italy lay like a low 
 line-cloud in the west; the spot where the Brenta 
 empties into the sea glowing in the blaze of the sun- 
 set. About us lay the smaller islands, the suburbs of 
 the sea-city, and all among them, and up and down 
 the Gindecca, and away off in the lagunes were sprin- 
 kled the thousand gondolas, meeting and crossing in 
 one continued and silent panorama. The Lido, with 
 its long wall hemmed in the bay, and beyond this lay 
 the wide Adriatic. The floor of San Marc's vast 
 square was beneath, dotted over its many-colored mar- 
 bles with promenaders, its cafts swarmed by the sit- 
 ters outside, and its long arcades thronged. One of 
 my pleasantest hours in Venice was passed here. 
 
 LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 palaces — palazzo grimani — old statuary — male 
 and female cherubs — the bath of cleofatra 
 — titian's palace — unfinished picture of the 
 great master — his magdalen and bust — his 
 daughter in the arms of a satyr — beautiful 
 female heads — the churches of venice — buri- 
 al-places of the doges — tomb of canova — de- 
 parture for verona, etc. 
 
 We have passed a day in visiting palaces. There 
 are some eight or ten in Venice, whose galleries are 
 still splendid. We landed first at the stairs of the 
 Palazzo Grimani, and were received by an old family 
 servant, who sat leaning on his knees, and gazing idly 
 into the canal. The court and staircase were orna- 
 mented with statuary, that had not been moved for 
 centuries. In the ante-room was a fresco painting by 
 Georgione, in which there were two female cherubs, 
 the first of that sex I ever saw represented. They 
 were beautifully contrasted with the two male cherubs, 
 who completed the picture, and reminded me strongly 
 of Greenough's group in sculpture. After examining 
 several rooms, tapestried and furnished in such a style 
 as befitted the palace of a Venetian noble, when Ven- 
 ice was in her glory, we passed on to the gallery. The 
 best picture in the first room was a large one by Cigoli, 
 the bath of Cleopatra. The four attendants of the 
 fair Egyptian are about her, and one is bathing her 
 feet from a rich vase. Her figure is rather a voluptu- 
 ous one, and her head is turned, but without alarm, 
 to Antony, who is just putting aside the curtain and 
 entering the room. It is a piece of fine coloring, 
 rather of the Titian school, and one of the few good 
 pictures left by the English, who have bought up al- 
 most all the private galleries of Venice. 
 
 We slopped next at the stairs of the noble old Bar- 
 bcrigo Palace, in which Titian lived and died. We 
 mounted the decaying staircases, imagining the choice 
 spirits of the great painter's time, who had trodden 
 them before us, and (as it was for ages the dwelling of 
 one of the proudest races of Venice) the beauty and 
 rank that had swept up and down those worn slabs of 
 marble on nights of revel, in the days when Venice 
 was a paradise of splendid pleasure. How thickly 
 come romantic fancies in such a place as this. We 
 passed through halls hung with neglected pictures to 
 an inner room, occupied only with those of Titian. 
 Here he painted, and here is a picture half-finished, 
 as he left it when he died. His famous Magdalen, 
 hangs on the wall, covered with dirt ; and so, indeed, 
 
 is everything in the palace. The neglect is melancholy. 
 On a marble table stood a plaster bust of Titian, 
 moulded by himself in his old age. It is a most no- 
 ble head, and it is difficult to look at it and believe hs 
 could have painted a picture which hangs just against 
 it — his own daughter in the arms of a satyr. There 
 is an engraving from it in one of the souvenirs ; but 
 instead of the satyr's head, she holds a casket in her 
 hands, which, though it does not sufficiently account 
 for the delight of her countenance, is an improvement 
 upon the original. Here, too, are several slight 
 sketches of female heads, by the same master. Oh 
 how beautiful they are! There is one, less than the 
 size of life, which I would rather have than his Mag- 
 dalen. 
 
 I have spent my last day in Venice in visiting 
 churches. Their splendor makes the eye ache and 
 the imagination weary. You would think the surplus 
 wealth of half the empires of the world would scaice 
 suffice to fill them as they are. I can give you no 
 descriptions. The gorgeous tombs of the doges are 
 interesting, and the plana black monument over^ Mari- 
 no Faliero made me linger. Canova's tomb is splen- 
 did ; and the simple slab under your feet in the church 
 of the Frari, where Titian lies with his brief epitaph, 
 is affecting — but, though I shall remember all the se, 
 the simplest as well as the grandest, a description 
 would be wearisome to all who had not seen them. 
 This evening at sunset I start in the post-boat for the 
 mainland, on my way to the place of Juliet's tomb — 
 Verona. My friends, the painters, are so attracted 
 with the galleries here that they remain to copy, and 
 I go back alone. Take a short letter from me this 
 time, and expect to hear from me by the next earliest 
 opportunity, and more at length. A.dieu. 
 
 LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 DEPARTURE FROM VENICE A SUNSET SCENE — PADUA 
 
 SPLENDID HOTEL MANNERS OF THE COUNTRY 
 
 VICENZA MIDNIGHT LADY RETURNING FROM A 
 
 PARTY VERONA JULIET'S TOMB THE TOMB OF 
 
 THE CAPULETS THE TOMBS OF THE SCALIGKRS 
 
 TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA A WALKING CHRON- 
 ICLE PALACE OF THE CAPULETS ONLY COOL 
 
 PLACE IN AN ITALIAN CITY BANQUETING HALL 
 
 OF THE CAPULETS FACTS AND FICTION, ETC. 
 
 We pushed from the post-office stairs in a gondola 
 with six oars at sunset. It was melancholy to leave 
 Venice. A hasty farewell look, as we sped down the 
 grand canal, at the gorgeous palaces, even less famous 
 than beautiful — a glance at the disappearing Rialto, 
 and we shot out into the Gindecca in ablaze of sunset 
 glory. Oh how magnificently looked Venice in that 
 light — rising behind us from the sea — all her superb 
 towers and palaces, turrets and spires fused into gold 
 and the waters about her, like a mirror of stained 
 glass, without a ripple ! 
 
 An hour and a half of hard rowing brought us to 
 the nearest land. You should go to Venice to know 
 how like a dream a reality may be. You will find it 
 difficult to realize when you smell once more the 
 fresh earth and grass and flowers, and walk about and 
 see fields and mountains, that this city upon the sea 
 exists out of the imagination. You float to it anc 
 about it and from it, in their light craft, so aerially, 
 that it seems a vision. 
 
 With a drive of two or three hours, half twilight 
 half moonlight, we entered Padua. It was too late tc 
 see the portrait of Petrarch, and I had not time to gc 
 to his tomb at Argua, twelve miles distant, so, musing 
 on Livy and Galileo, to both of whom Padua was 
 
PEXCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 53 
 
 home, I inquired for a cafe. A new one had lately 
 been built in the centre of the town, quite the largest 
 and most thronged I ever saw. Eight or ten large, 
 high-roofed halls were open, and filled with tables, at 
 which sat more beauty and fashion than I supposed 
 all Padua could have mustered. I walked through 
 »ne after another, without finding a seat, and was 
 ibout turning to go out, and seek a place of less pre- 
 tension, when an elderly lady, who sat with a party of 
 *even, eating ices, rose, with Italian courtesy, and of- 
 fered ine a chair at their table. I accepted it, and 
 made the acquaintance of eight as agreeable and pol- 
 ished people as it has been my fortune to meet. We 
 parted as if we had known each other as many weeks 
 is minutes. I mention it as an instance of the man- 
 ners of the country. 
 
 Three hours more, through spicy fields and on a 
 road lined with the country-houses of the Venetian 
 oobles, brought us to Vicenza. It was past midnight, 
 ind not a soul stirring in the bright moonlight streets. 
 1 remember it as a kind of city of the dead. As we 
 passed out of the opposite gate, we detained for a mo- 
 ment a carriage, with servants in splendid liveries, and 
 i» lady inside returning from a party in full dress. I 
 Kaiely have seen so beautiful a head. The lamps 
 shore strongly on a broad pearl fillet on her forehead, 
 aud lighted up features such as we do not often meet 
 evci> iu Italy. A gentleman leaned back in the corner 
 of tiro carriage, fast asleep — probably her husband! 
 
 I tiv. Wasted at Verona at seven. A humpbacked 
 cicerone there took me to " Juliet's tomb." A very 
 high w*\f, green with age, surrounds what was once a 
 cemetcn, just outside the city. An old woman an- 
 swered iht bell at the dilapidated gate, and, without 
 6aying a wt>id, pointed to an empty granite sarcopha- 
 gus, raised '.«pon a rude pile of stones. " Questa?" 
 asked I, wi.h a doubtful look. " Questa," said the 
 old woman. " Questa !" said the hunchback. And 
 here, I was V.I believe, lay the gentle Juliet ! There 
 was a raised \ lace in the sarcophagus, with a hollow- 
 ed socket for the head, and it was about the measure 
 for a woman ! I ran my fingers through the cavity, 
 and tried to imagine the dark curls that covered the 
 hand of Father Lawrence as he laid her down in the 
 trance, and fitted her beautiful head softly to the 
 place. But where was " the tomb of the Capulets?" 
 The beldame took me through a cabbage-garden, and 
 drove otl* a donkey who was feeding on an artichoke 
 that grew on the very spot. " Ecco !" said she, point- 
 ing to one of the slightly sunken spots on the surface. 
 I deferred my belief, and paying an extra paul for the 
 privilege of chipping off a fragment of the sto e cof- 
 fin, followed the cicerone. 
 
 The tombs of the Scaligers were more authentic. 
 They stand in the centre of the town, with a highly 
 ornamental railing about them, and are a perfect mock- 
 ery of death with their splendor. If the poets and 
 scholars whom these petty princes drew to their court 
 had been buried in these airy tombs beside them, one 
 would look at them with some interest. Now, one 
 asks, " who were the Scaligers, that their bodies 
 should be lifted high in air in the midst of a city, 
 and kept for ages, in marble and precious stones?" 
 With less ostentation, however, it were pleasant to be 
 so disposed of after death, lifted thus into the sun, and 
 in sight of moving and living creatures. 
 
 I inquired for the old palace of the Capulets. The 
 cicerone knew nothing about it, and I dismissed her 
 and went into a cafe. " Two gentlemen of Verona" 
 sat on different sides ; one reading, the other asleep, 
 with his chin on his cane — an old, white-headed man, 
 of about seventy. I sat down near the old gentleman, 
 and by the time I had eaten my ice, he awoke. I ad- 
 dressed him in Italian, which I speak indifferently; 
 but, stumbling for a word, he politely helped me out 
 
 in French, and I went on in that language with my in- 
 quiries. He was the very man — a walking chronicle 
 of Verona. He took up his hat and cane to conduct 
 me to casa Capuletli, and on the way told me the true 
 history, as I had heard it before, which differs but lit- 
 tle, as you know, from Shakspere's version. The 
 whole story is in the annuals. 
 
 After a half hour's walk among the handsomer, and 
 more modern parts of the city, we stopped opposite a 
 house of an antique construction, but newly stuccoed 
 and painted. A wheelwright occupied the lower sto- 
 ry, and by the sign, the upper part was used as a tav- 
 ern. " Impossible !" said I, as I looked at the fresh 
 front and the staring sign. The old gentleman smiled, 
 and kept his cane pointed at it in silence. " It is well 
 authenticated," said he, after enjoying my astonish- 
 ment a minute or two, and the interior still bears 
 marks of a palace. We went in and mounted the 
 dirty staircase to a large hall on the second floor. The 
 frescoes and cornices had not been touched, and, 1 in- 
 vited my kind old friend to an early dinner on the spot. 
 He accepted, and we went back to the cathedral, and 
 sat an hour in the only cool place in an Italian city. 
 The best dinner the house could afford was ready 
 when we returned, and a pleasanter one it has never 
 been my fortune to sit down to ; though, for the meats, 
 I have eaten better. That I relished an hour in the 
 very hall where the masque must have been held, to 
 which Romeo ventured in the house of his enemy, to 
 see the fair Juliet, you may easily believe. The wine 
 was not so bad either that my imagination did not 
 warm all fiction into fact ; and another time, perhaps, I 
 may describe my old friend and the dinner more par- 
 ticularly. 
 
 LETTER XXXV. 
 
 ANOTHER SHORT LETTER — DEPARTURE FROM VERONA 
 
 MANTUA FLEAS MODENA TASSONl's BUCKET A 
 
 MAN GOING TO EXECUTION — THE DUKE OF MODENA — 
 
 BOLOGNA AUSTRIAN OFFICERS THE APFENINES 
 
 MOONLIGHT ON THE MOUNTAINS — ENGLISH BRIDAL 
 PARTY — PICTURESQUE SUPPER, ETC. 
 
 I left Verona with the courier at sunset, and was 
 at Mantua in a few hours. I went to bed in a dirty 
 hotel, the best in the place, and awoke, bitten at every 
 pore by fleas — the first I have encountered in Italy, 
 strange as it may seem, in a country that swarms with 
 them. For the next twenty-four hours I was in such 
 positive pain that my interest in » Virgil's birthplace" 
 quite evaporated. I hired a caleche, and travelled all 
 night to Modena. 
 
 I liked the town as I drove in, and after sleeping an 
 hour or two, I went out in search of " Tassoni's buck- 
 et" (which Rogers says is not the true one), and the 
 picture of " Ginevra." The first thing I met was a 
 man going to execution. He was a tall, exceedingly 
 handsome man ; and, I thought, a marked gentleman, 
 even in his fetters. He was one of the body-guard of 
 the duke, and had joined a conspiracy against him, in 
 which he had taken the first step by firing at him 
 from a window as he passed. I saw him guillotined, 
 but I will spare you the description. The duke is tho 
 worst tyrant in Italy, it is well known, and has been 
 fired at eighteen times in the streets. So said the 
 cicerone, who added, that " the d — 1 took care of his 
 own." After many fruitless inquiries, I could find 
 nothing of "the picture," and I took my place for 
 Bologna in the afternoon. 
 
 I was at Bologna at ten the next morning. As I 
 felt rather indisposed, I retained my seat with the 
 courier for Florence ; and, hungry with travel and a 
 long fast, went into a restaurant, to make the best use 
 
54 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 of the hour given me for refreshment. A party of 
 Austrian officers sat at one end of the only table, 
 breakfasting ; and here I experienced the first rude- 
 ness I have seen in Europe. I mention it to show its 
 rarity, and the manner in which, even among military 
 men, a quarrel is guarded against or prevented. A 
 young man, who seemed the wit of the party, chose to 
 make comments from time to time on the solidity of 
 what he considered my breakfast. These became at 
 last so pointed, that I was compelled to rise and de- 
 mand an apology. With one voice, all except the 
 offender, immediately sided with me, and insisted on 
 the justice of the demand, with so many apologies of 
 their own, that I regretted noticing the thing at all. 
 The young man rose, after a minute, and offered me 
 his hand in the frankest manner ; and then calling for 
 a fresh bottle, they drank wine with me, and I went 
 back to my breakfast. In America, such an incident 
 would have ended, nine times out often, in a duel. 
 
 The two mounted gens d'armes, who usually attend 
 the courier at night, joined us as we began to ascend 
 the Appenines. We stopped at eleven to sup on the 
 highest mountain between Bologna and Florence, and 
 I was glad to get to the kitchen fire, the clear moon- 
 light was so cold. Chickens were turning on the long 
 spit, and sounds of high merriment came from the 
 rooms above. A bridal party of English had just ar- 
 rived, and every chamber and article of provision was 
 engaged. They had nothing to give us. A compli- 
 ment to the hostess and a bribe to the cook had their 
 usual effect, however ; and as one of the dragoons had 
 ridden back a mile or two for my travelling cap, which 
 had dropped off while I was asleep, T invited them both, 
 with the courier, to share my bribed supper. The 
 cloth was spread right before the fire, on the same 
 table with all the cook's paraphernalia, and a merry 
 and picturesque supper we had of it. The roujrh Tus- 
 can flasks of wine and Etruscan pitchers, the brazen 
 helmets formed on the finest models of the antique, 
 the long mustaches, and dark Italian eyes of the 
 men, all in the bright light of a blazing fire, made a 
 picture that Salvator Hosa would have relished. We 
 had time for a hasty song or two after the dishes were 
 cleared, and then went gayly on our way to Florence. 
 
 Excuse the brevity of this epistle, but I must stop 
 here, or lose the opportunity of sending. If my let- 
 ters do not reach you with the utmost regularity, it is 
 no fault of mine. You can not imagine the difficulty 
 I frequently experience in getting a safe conveyance. 
 
 LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 BATHS OF LUCCA SARATOGA OF ITALY — HILL SCENE- 
 RY RIVF.R LIMA — FASHIONABLE LODGINGS THE 
 
 VILLA THE DUKE'S FALACE — MOUNTAINS VALLEYS 
 
 — COTTAGES — FEASANTS — WINDING-PATHS — AMUSE- 
 MENTS — PRIVATE PARTIES — BALLS — FETES A CAS- 
 INO—ORIGINALS OF SCOTT'S DIANA VERNON AND 
 THE MISS PRATT OF THE INHERITANCE — A SUMMER 
 IN ITALY, ETC., ETC. 
 
 I spent a week at the baths of Lucca, which is 
 about sixty miles north of Florence, and the Saratoga 
 of Italy. None of the cities are habitable in summer 
 for the heat, and there flocks all the world to bathe 
 and keep cool by day, and dance and intrigue by night, 
 from spring to autumn. It is very like the month of 
 June in our country in many respects, and the differ- 
 ences are not disagreeable. The scenery is the finest 
 of its kind in Italy. The whole village is built about 
 a bridge across the river Lima, which meets the Ser- 
 chio a half mile below. On both sides of the stream 
 the mountains rise so abruptly, that the houses are 
 erected against them, and from the summits on both 
 sides you look directly down on the street. Half-way 
 
 up one of the hills stands a cluster of houses, over- 
 looking the valley to fine advantage, and these are 
 rather the most fashionable lodgings. Round the base 
 of this mountain runs the Lima, and on its banks for 
 a mile is laid out a superb road, at the extremity of 
 which is another cluster of buildings, called the Villa, 
 composed of the duke's palace and baths, and some 
 fifty lodging-houses. This, like the pavilion at Sara- 
 toga, is usually occupied by invalids and people of 
 more retired habits. I have found no hill scenery in 
 Europe comparable to the baths of Lucca. The 
 mountains ascend so sharply and join so closely, that 
 two hours of the sun are lost, morning and evening, 
 and the heat is very little felt. The valley is formed 
 by four or five small mountains, which are clothed 
 from the base to the summit with the finest chestnut 
 woods ; and dotted over with the nest-like cottages of 
 theLuccese peasants, the smoke from which, morning 
 and evening, breaks through the trees, and steals up 
 to the summits with an effect than which a painter 
 could not conceive anything more beautiful. It is 
 quite a little paradise ; and with the drives along the 
 river on each side at the mountain foot, and the trim 
 Avinding-paths in the hills, there is no lack of oppor- 
 tunity for the freest indulgence of a love of scenery 
 or amusement, 
 
 Instead of living as we do in great hotels, the peo- 
 ple at these baths take their own lodgings, three or 
 four families in a house, and meet in their drives and 
 walks, or in small exclusive parties. The duke gives 
 a ball every Tuesday, to which all respectable strangers 
 are invited ; and while I was there an Italian prince, 
 who married into the royal family of Spain, gave a 
 grand fete at the theatre. There is usually some par- 
 ty everv night, and with the freedom of a watering- 
 place, they are rather the pleasantest I have seen in 
 Italy. The duke's chamberlain, an Italian cavalier, 
 has the charge of a casino, or public hall, which is 
 open day and night for conversation, dancing and play. 
 The Italians frequent it very much, and it is free to 
 all well-dressed people; and as there is always a band 
 of music, the English sometimes make up a party, 
 and spend the evening there in dancing or promena- 
 ding. It is maintained at the duke's expense, lights, 
 music, and all, and he finds his equivalent in the prof- 
 its of the gambling bank. 
 
 I scarce know who of the distinguished people I 
 met there would interest you. The village was full 
 of coroneted carriages, whose masters were nobles of 
 every nation, and every reputation. The originals of 
 two well-known characters happened to be there — 
 Scott's Diana Vernon, and the Miss Pratt of the In- 
 heritance. The former is a Scotch lady, with five 01 
 six children : a tall, superb woman still, with the look 
 of a mountain-queen, who rode out every night wilt 
 two gallant boys mounted on ponies, and dashing afte? 
 her with the spirit you would bespeak for the sons of 
 Die Vernon. Her husband was the best horseman 
 there, and a " has been" handsome fellow, of about 
 forty-five. An Italian abbe came up to her one night, 
 at a small party, and told her he " wondered the king 
 of England did not marry her." " Miss Pratt" was 
 the companion of an English lady of fortune, who 
 lived on the floor below me. She was still what she 
 used to be, a much-laughed-at but much-sought per- 
 son, and it was quite requisite to know her. She flew 
 into a passion whenever the book was named. The 
 rest of the world there was very much what it is else- 
 where — a medley of agreeable and disagreeable, intel- 
 ligent and stupid, elegant and awkward. The women 
 were perhaps superior in style and manner to those 
 ordinarily met in such places in America, and the men 
 vastly inferior. It is so wherever I have been on the 
 continent. 
 
 I remained at the baths a few weeks, recruiting — 
 for the hot weather and travel had, for the first time in 
 
PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY. 
 
 55 
 
 my life, worn upon me. They say that a summer in 
 Italy is equal to five years elsewhere, in its ravages 
 upon the constitution, and so I found it. 
 
 LETTER XXXVII. 
 
 HETURN TO VENICE — CITY OF LUCCA — A MAGNIFICENT 
 WALL — A CULTIVATED AND LOVELY COUNTRY — A 
 COMFORTABLE PALACE — THE DUKE AND DUTCHESS OF 
 LUCCA — THE APPKNTNES— MOUNTAIN SCENERY — MO- 
 
 DENA — VIEW OF AN IMMENSE PLAIN VINEYARDS AND 
 
 FIELDS — AUSTRIAN TROOPS — A PETTY DUKE AND A 
 GREAT TYRANT SUSPECTED TRAITORS — LADIES UN- 
 DER ARREST — MODENKSE NOBILITY— SPLENDOR AND 
 MEANNESS — CORREGIO'S BAG OF COPPER COIN — PIC- 
 TURE GALLERY CHIEF OF THE CONSPIRATORS — OP- 
 PRESSIVE LAWS — ANTIQUITY — MUSEUM — BOLOGNA — 
 MANUSCRIPTS OF TASSO AND ARIOSTO— THE PO — 
 AUSTRIAN CUSTOM-HOUSE — POLICE OFFICERS — DIFFI- 
 CULTY ON BOARD THE STEAMBOAT VENICE ONCE 
 
 MORE, ETC. 
 
 After five or six weeks sejovrat the baths of Lucca, 
 the only exception to the pleasure of which was an 
 attack of the "country fever," I am again on the road, 
 with a pleasant party, bound for Venice ; but passing 
 by cities I had not seen, I have been from one place 
 to another for a week, till I find myself to-day in Mo- 
 dena — a place I might as well not have seen at all as 
 to have hurried through, as I was compelled to do a 
 month or two since. To go back a little, however, 
 our first stopping-place was the city of Lucca, about 
 fifteen miles from the baths ; a little, clean, beautiful 
 gem of a town, with a wall three miles round only, 
 and on the top of it a broad carriage road, giving you 
 on every side views of the best cultivated and loveliest 
 country in Italy. The traveller finds nothing so 
 rural and quiet, nothing so happy-looking, in the whole 
 land. The radius to the horizon is nowhere more 
 than five or six miles ; and the bright green farms and 
 luxuriant vineyards stretch from the foot of the wall 
 to the summits of the lovely mountains which form 
 the theatre around. It is a very ancient town, but the 
 dutchy is so rich and flourishing that it bears none of 
 the marks of decay, so common to even more modern 
 towns in Italy. Here Cesar is said to have stopped to 
 deliberate on passing the Rubicon. 
 
 The palace of the duke is the prettiest I ever saw. 
 There is not a room in it you could not live in — and 
 no feeling is less common than this in visiting palaces. 
 It is furnished with splendor, too — but with such an 
 eye to comfort, such taste and elegance, that you 
 would respect the prince's affections that should order 
 such a one. The duke of Lucca, however, is never 
 at home. He is a young man of twenty-eight or 
 thirty, and spends his time and money in travelling, as 
 caprice takes him. He has been now for a year at 
 Vienna, where he spends the revenue of these rich 
 plains most lavishly. The dutchess, too, travels always, 
 but in a different direction, and the people complain 
 loudly of the desertion. For many years they have 
 now been both absent and parted. The duke is a 
 member of the royal family of Spain, and at the death 
 of Maria Louisa of Parma, he becomes Duke of Par- 
 ma, and the dutchy goes to Tuscany. 
 
 From Lucca we crossed the Appenines, by a road 
 seldom travelled, performing the hundred miles to 
 Modena in three days. We suffered, as all must who 
 leave the high roads in continental countries, more 
 privations than the novelty was worth. The moun- 
 tain scenery was fine, of course, but I think less so 
 than that on the passes between Florence and Bologna, 
 the account of which I wrote a few weeks since. We 
 were too happy to get to Modena. 
 
 Modena lies in the vast campagnia lying between 
 the Appeuines and the Adriatic — an immense plain 
 looking like the sea as far as the eye can stretch from 
 north to south. The view of it from the mountains 
 in descending is magnificent beyond description. The 
 capital of the little dutchy lay in the midst of us, like a 
 speck on a green carpet, and smaller towns and rivers 
 varied its else unbroken surface of vineyards and fields. 
 We reached the gates just as a .'me sunset was redden- 
 ing the ramparts and towers, and, giving up our pass- 
 ports to the soldier on guard, rattled in to the hotel. 
 
 The town is full of Austrian troops, and in our walk 
 to the ducal palace we met scarce any one else. The 
 
 i streets look gloomy and neglected, and the people 
 singularly dispirited and poor. This petty duke of 
 Modena is a man of about fifty, and said to be the 
 
 ■ greatest tyrant after Don Miguel in the world. The 
 prisons are full of suspected traitors: one hundred 
 and thirty of the best families of the dutchy are ban- 
 ished for liberal opinions; three hundred and over are 
 now under arrest (among them a considerable number 
 
 | of ladies); and many of the Modenese nobility are 
 
 I now serving in the galleys for conspiracy. He has 
 been shot at eighteen times. The last man who at- 
 tempted it, as I stated in a former letter, was executed 
 the morning I passed through Modena on my return 
 from Venice. With all this he is a fine soldier, and 
 his capital looks in all respects like a garrison in the 
 first style of discipline. He is just now absent at a 
 chateau three miles in the country. 
 
 The ralace is a union of splendor and meanness 
 within. The endless succession of state apartments 
 are gorgeously draped and ornamented, but the en- 
 trance halls and intermediate passages are furnished 
 with an economy you would scarce find exceeded in 
 the "worst inn's worst room." Modena is Corregio's 
 birthplace, and it was from a duke of Modena that he 
 received the bag of copper coin which occasioned his 
 
 j death. It was, I think, the meager reward of his 
 celebrated "Night," and he broke a bloodvessel in 
 
 j carrying it to his house. The duke has sold this pic- 
 ture, as well as every other other sufficiently cele- 
 brated to bring a princely price. His gallery is a 
 heap of trash, with but here and there a redeeming 
 thing. Among others, there is a portrait of a boy, I 
 think by Rembrandt, very intellectual and lofty, yet 
 with all the youthfulness of fourteen ; and a copy of 
 " Giorgione's mistress," the " love in life" of the 
 Manfrein palace, so admired by Lord Byron. There 
 is also a remarkably fine crucifixion, I forget by whom. 
 The front of the palace is renowned for its beauty. 
 In a street near it, we passed a house half battered 
 down by cannon. It was the residence of the chief 
 of a late conspiracy, who was betrayed a few hours 
 before his plot was ripe. He refused to surrender, 
 and before the ducal troops had mastered his house, 
 the revolt commenced and the duke was driven from 
 Modena. He returned in a week or two with some 
 three thousand Austrians, and has kept possession by 
 their assistance ever since. While we were waiting 
 dinner at the hotel, I took up a volume of the Mode- 
 nese law, and opened upon a statute forbidding all 
 subjects of the dutchy to live out of the duke's territo- 
 ries under pain of the entire confiscation of their prop- 
 erty. They are liable to arrest, also, if it is suspected 
 that they are taking measures to remove. The alter- 
 natives are oppression here or poverty elsewhere, and 
 the result is that the duke has scarce a noble left in 
 his realm. 
 
 Modena is a place of great antiquity. It was a 
 strong-hold in the time of Cesar, and after his death 
 was occupied by Brutus, and besieged by Antony. 
 There are no traces left, except some mutilated and 
 uncettain relics in the museum. 
 
 We drove to Bologna the following morning, and I 
 slept once more in Rogers's chamber at "the Pilgrim '* 
 
56 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 I have described this city, which I passed on my way 
 to Venice, so fully before, that I pass it over now with 
 the mere mention. I should not forget, however, my 
 acquaintance with a snuffy little librarian, who showed 
 me the manuscripts of Tasso and Ariosto, with much 
 amusing importance. 
 
 We crossed the Po to the Austrian custom-house. 
 Our trunks were turned inside out, our papers and 
 books examined, our passports studied for flaws — as 
 usual. After two hours of vexation, we were permit- 
 ted to go on board the steamboat, thanking Heaven 
 that our troubles were over for a week or two, and 
 giving Austria the common benediction she gets from 
 travellers. The ropes were cast off from the pier 
 when a police retainer came running to the boat, and 
 ordered our whole party on shore, bag and baggage. 
 Our passports, which had been retained to be sent on 
 to Venice by the captain, were irregular. We had 
 not passed by Florence, and they had not the signa- 
 ture of the Austrian ambassador. We were ordered 
 imperatively back over the Po, with a flat assurance 
 that without first going to Florence, we never could 
 see Venice. To the ladies of the party, who had 
 made themselves certain of seeing this romance of 
 cities in twelve hours, it was a sad disappointment, and 
 after seeing them safely seated in the return shallop, 
 I thought I would go and make a desperate appeal to 
 the commissary in person. My nominal commission 
 as attache to the legation at Paris, served me in this 
 case as it had often done before, and making myself 
 and the honor of the American nation responsible for 
 the innocent designs of a party of ladies upon Venice, 
 the dirty and surly commissary signed our passports 
 and permitted us to remand our baggage. 
 
 It was with unmingled pleasure that I saw again the 
 towers and palaces of Venice rising from the sea. 
 The splendid approach to the Piazzetta ; the transfer 
 to the gondola and its soft motion ; the swift and still 
 glide beneath the balconies of palaces, with whose 
 history I was familiar; and the renewal of my own 
 first impressions in the surprise and delight of others, 
 made up, altogether, a moment of high happiness. 
 There is nothing like — nothing equal to Venice. She 
 is the city of the imagination — the realization of ro- 
 mance — the queen of splendor and softness and luxury. 
 Allow all her decay — feel all her degradation — see the 
 " Huns in her palaces," and the " Greek upon her 
 mart," and, after all, she is alone in the world for 
 beauty, and, spoiled as she has been by successive 
 conquerors, almost for riches too. Her churches of 
 marble, with' their floors of precious stones, and walls 
 of gold and mosaic ; her ducal palace, with its world 
 of art and massy magnificence ; her private palaces, 
 with their fronts of inland gems, and balconies and 
 towers of inimitable workmanship and richness; her 
 lovely islands and mirror-like canals — all distinguish 
 her, and will till the sea rolls over her, as one of the 
 wonders of time. 
 
 LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 VENrCE — CHURCH OF THE JESUITS — A MARBLE CURTAIN 
 —ORIGINAL OF TITIAN's MARTYRDOM OF ST. LAW- 
 RENCE—A SUMMER MORNING ARMENIAN ISLAND 
 
 VISIT TO A CLOISTER — A CELEBRATED MONK — THE 
 
 POET'S STUDY ILLUMINATED COPIES OF THE BIBLE 
 
 THE STRANGER'S BOOK A CLEAN PRINTING-OF- 
 FICE THE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE INNOCENT 
 
 AND HAPPY-LOOKING MANIACS — THE CELLS FOR UN- 
 GOVERNABLE LUNATICS — BARBARITY OF THE KEEPER 
 
 MISERABLE PROVISIONS — ANOTHER GLANCE AT THE 
 
 PRISONS UNDER THE DUCAL PALACE— THE OFFICE OF 
 EXECUTIONER — -THE ARSENAL— THE STATE GALLERY 
 — THE ARMOR OF HENRY THE FOURTH — A CURIOUS 
 KEY— MACHINES FOR TORTURE, ETC. 
 
 In a first visit to a great European city it is difficult 
 not to let many things escape notice. Among several 
 churches which 1 did not see when I was here before, 
 is that of the Jesuits. It is a temple worthy of the ce- 
 lebrity of this splendid order. The proportions are 
 finer than those of most of the Venetian churches, 
 and the interior is one tissue of curious marbles and 
 gold. As we entered, we were first struck with the 
 grace and magnificence of a large heavy curtain, hang- 
 ing over the pulpit, the folds of which, and the figures 
 wrought upon it, struck us as unusually elegant and 
 ingenious. Our astonishment was not lessened when 
 we found it was one solid mass of verd-antique marble. 
 Its sweep over the side and front of the pulpit is as 
 careless as if it were done by the wind. The whole 
 ceiling of the church is covered with sequin gold — the 
 finest that is coined. In one of the side chapels is the 
 famous " Martyrdom of St. Lawrence," by Titian. A 
 fine copy of it (said in the catalogue to be the original) 
 was exhibited in the Boston Athenaeum a year or two 
 since. 
 
 It is Sunday, and the morning has been of a heav- 
 enly, summer, sunny calmness, such as is seen often 
 in Italy, and once in a year, perhaps, in New England. 
 It is a kind of atmosphere that to breathe is to be 
 grateful and happy. We have been to the Armenian 
 island — a little gem on the bosom of the Lagune, a 
 mile from Venice, where stands the monastery, to 
 which place Lord Byron went daily to study and trans- 
 late with the fathers. There is just room upon it for 
 a church, a convent, and a little garden. It looks 
 afloat on the water. Our gondola glided up to the 
 clean stone stairs, and we were received by one of the 
 order, a hale but venerable looking monk, in the Ar- 
 menian dress, the long black cassock and sjnall round 
 cap, his beard long and scattered with gray, and his 
 complexion and eyes of a cheerful, child-like clearness, 
 such as regular and simple habits alone can give. I 
 inquired, as we walked through the cloister, for the fa- 
 ther with whom Lord Byron studied, and of whom the 
 poet speaks so often and so highly in his letters. The 
 monk smiled and bowed modestly, and related a little 
 incident that had happened to him at Padua, where he 
 had met two American travellers, who had asked him 
 of himself in the same manner. He had forgotten 
 their names, but from his description 1 presumed one 
 to have been Professor Longfellow, of Bowdoin uni- 
 versity. 
 
 The stillness and cleanliness about the convent, as 
 we passed through the cloisters and halls, rendered 
 the impression upon a stranger delightful. We passed 
 the small garden, in which grew a stately oleander in 
 full blossom, and thousands of smaller flowers, in neat 
 beds and vases, and after walking through the church, 
 a plain and pretty me, we came to the library, where 
 the monk had studied with the poet. It is a proper 
 place for study — disturbed by nothing but the dash of 
 oars from a passing gondola, or the scream of a sea- 
 bird, and well furnished with books in every language, 
 and very luxurious chairs. The monk showed us an 
 encyclopaedia, presented to himself by an English lady 
 of rank, who had visited the convent often. His hand- 
 some eyes flashed as he pointed to it on the shelves. 
 We went next into a smaller room, where the more 
 precious manuscripts are deposited, and he showed us 
 curious illuminated copies of the Bible, and gave us 
 the strangers book to inscribe our names. Byron 
 had scrawled his there before us, and the emperess Ma- 
 ria Louisa had written hers twice on separate visits. 
 The monk then brought us a volume of prayers, in 
 twenty-five languages, translated by himself. We 
 bought copies, and upon some remark of one of the 
 ladies upon his acquirements, he ran from one Ian 
 guage to another, speaking English, French, Italian, 
 German, and Dutch, with equal facility. His English 
 
PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY. 
 
 57 
 
 was quite wonderful; and a lady from Rotterdam, 
 who was with us, pronounced his Dutch and German 
 excellent. We tlien bought small histories of the or- 
 der, written by an English gentleman, who had studied 
 at the island, and passed on to the printing-office— the 
 first clean one I ever saw, and quite the best appointed. 
 Here the monks print their bibles and prayer-books in 
 really beautiful Armenian type, beside almanacs, and 
 other useful publications for Constantinople, and other 
 parts of Turkey. The monk wrote his name at our 
 request (Pascal Aucher) in the blank leaves of our 
 books, and we parted ftom him at the water-stairs 
 with sincere regret. I recommend this monastery to 
 all travellers to Venice. 
 
 On our return we passed near an island, upon which 
 stands a single building — an insane hospital. I was 
 not very curious to enter it, but the gondolier assured 
 us that it was a common visit for strangers, and we con- 
 sented to go in. We were received by the keeper, 
 who went through the horrid scene like a regular 
 cicerone, giving us a cold and rapid history of every 
 patient that arrested our attention. The men's apart- 
 ment was the first, and I should never have supposed 
 them insane. They were all silent, and either read 
 or slept like the inmates of common hospitals. We 
 came to a side door, and as it opened, the confusion of 
 a hundred tongues burst through, and we were intro- 
 duced into the apartment for women. The noise was 
 deafening. After traversing a short gallery, we entered 
 a large hall, containing perhaps fifty females. There 
 was a simultaneous smoothing back of the hair and 
 prinking of the dress through the room. These, 
 the keeper said, were the well-behaved patients, and 
 more innocent and happy-looking people I never saw. 
 If to be happy is to be wise, I should believe with the 
 mad philosopher, that the world and the lunatic should 
 change names. One large, fine-looking woman took 
 upon herself to do the honors of the place, and came 
 forward with a graceful courtesy and a smile of conde- 
 scension and begged the ladies to take oft' their bon- 
 nets, and offered me a chair. Even with her closely- 
 shaven head and coarse (lannel dress, she seemed a la- 
 dy. The keeper did not know her history. Her at- 
 tentions were occasionally interrupted by a stolen 
 glance at the keeper, and a shrinking in of the shoul- 
 ders, like a child that had been whipped. One hand- 
 some and perfectly healthy-looking girl of eighteen, 
 walked up and down the hall, with her arms folded, 
 and a sweet smile on her face, apparently lost in pleas- 
 ing thought, and taking no notice of us. Only one 
 was in bed, and her face might have been a conception 
 of Michael Angelo for horror. Her hair was uncut, 
 and fell over her eyes, her tongue hung from her 
 mouth, her eyes were sunken and restless, and the 
 deadly pallor over features drawn into the intensest 
 look of mental a^ony completed a picture that made 
 my heart sick. Her bed was clean, and she was as well 
 cared for as she could be, apparently. 
 
 We mounted a flight of stairs to the cells. Here 
 were confined those who were violent and ungoverna- 
 ole. The mingled souuds that came through the 
 £ratin2:$ as we passed were terrific. Laughter of a 
 demoniac wildness, moans, complaints in every lan- 
 guage, screams — every sound that could express im- j 
 patience and fear and suffering saluted our ears. The ! 
 keeper opened most of the cells and went in, rousing 
 occasionally one that was asleep, and insisting that all 
 should appear at the grate. I remonstrated, of course, 
 against such a piece of barbarity, but he said he did 
 it for all strangers, and took no notice of our pity. 
 The cells were small, just large enough for a bed, up- 
 on the post of which hung a small coarse cloth bag, 
 containing two or three loaves of the coarsest bread. 
 There was no other furniture. The beds were bags 
 of straw, without sheets or pillows, and each had a 
 coarse piece of matting for a covering. I expressed 
 
 some horror at the miserable provision made for their 
 comfort, but was told that they broke and injured 
 themselves with any loose furniture, and were so reck- 
 less in their habits, that it was impossible to give them 
 any other bedding than straw, which was changed ev- 
 ery day. I observed that each patient had a wisp of 
 long straw tied up in a bundle, given them, as the 
 keeper said, to employ their hands and amuse them. 
 The wooden blind before one of the gratings was re- 
 moved, and a girl flew to it with the ferocity of a tiger, 
 thrust her hands at us through the bars, and threw 
 her bread out into the passage, with a look of violent 
 and uncontrolled anger such as I never saw. She 
 was tall and very fine-looking. In another cell lay a 
 poor creature, with her face dreadfully torn, and her 
 hands tied strongly behind her. She was tossing about 
 restlessly upon her straw, and muttering to herself in- 
 distinctly. The man said she tore her face and bosom 
 whenever she could get her hands free, and was his 
 worst patient. In the last cell was a girl of eleven or 
 twelve years, who began to cry piteously the moment 
 the bolt was drawn. She was in bed, and uncovered 
 her head very unwillingly, and evidently expected to 
 be whipped. There was another range of cells above, 
 but we had seen enough, and were glad to get out 
 upon the calm Lagune. There could scarcely be a 
 stronger contrast than between those two islands lying 
 side by side — the first the very picture of regularity 
 and happiness, and the last a refuge for distraction and 
 misery. The feeling of gratitude to God for reason 
 after such a scene is irresistible. 
 
 In visiting again the prisons under the ducal palace, 
 several additional circumstances were told us. The 
 condemned were compelled to become executioners. 
 They were led from their cells into the dark passage 
 where stood the secret guillotine, and without warning 
 forced to put to death a fellow-creature either by this 
 instrument, or the more horrible method of strangling 
 against a grate. The guide said that the office of ex- 
 ecutioner was held in such horror that it was impossi- 
 ble to fill it, and hence this dreadful alternative. When 
 a prisoner was about to be executed, his clothes were 
 sent home to his family with the message, that " the 
 state would care for him." How much more agoni- 
 zing do these circumstances seem, when we remember 
 that most of the victims were men of rank and educa- 
 tion, condemned on suspicion of political crimes, and 
 often with families refined to a most unfortunate ca- 
 pacity for mental torture ! One ceases to regret the 
 fall of the Venetian republic, when he sees with how 
 much crime and tyranny her splendor was accompa- 
 nied. 
 
 I saw at the arsenal to-day the model of the " Bu- 
 centaur," the state galley in which the doge of Venice 
 went out annually to marry him to the sea. This 
 poetical relic (which, in Childe Harold's time, " lay 
 rotting unrestored") was burnt by the French — why, 
 I can not conceive. It was a departure from their 
 usual habit of respect to the curious and beautiful; 
 and if they had been jealous of such a vestige of the 
 grandeur of a conquered people, it might at least 
 have been sent to Paris as easily as "Saint Mark's 
 steeds of brass," and would have been as great a curi- 
 osity. I would rather have seen the Bucentaur than 
 all their other plunder. The arsenal contains many 
 other treasures. The armor given to the city of Venice 
 by Henry the Fourth is there, and a curious key con- 
 structed to shoot poisoned needles, and used by one 
 of the Henrys, I have forgotten which, to despatch 
 any one who offended him in his presence. One or 
 two curious machines for torture were shown us — 
 j mortars into which the victim was put, with an iron 
 | armor open only at the ear, which was screwed down 
 I upon him till his head was crushed, or confession 
 I stopped the torture. 
 
58 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 VENICE SAN MARC'S CHURCH — RECOCLECTIONS OF HOME 
 
 FESTA AT THE LIDO A POETICAL SCENE AN ITAL- 
 IAN SUNSET — PALACE OF MANFRINI PESARO'S PAL- 
 ACE AND COUNTRY RESIDENCE — CHURCH OF SAINT 
 MARY OF NAZARETH — PADUA THE UNIVERSITY- 
 STATUES OF DISTINGUISHED FOREIGNERS — THE PUB- 
 LIC PALACE — BUST OF TITUS LIVY BUST OF PE- 
 TRARCH — CHURCH OP ST. ANTONY DURING MASS 
 
 THE SAINT'S CHIN AND TONGUE MARTYRDOM OF 
 
 ST. AGATHA AUSTRIAN AND GERMAN SOLDIERS 
 
 TRAVELLER'S RECORD-BOOK — PETRARCH'S COTTAGE 
 
 AND TOMB ITALIAN SUMMER AFTERNOON — THE PO- 
 
 ET'S HOUSE A FINE VIEW THE ROOM WHERE PE- 
 TRARCH DIED, ETC. 
 
 I was loitering down one of the gloomy aisles of 
 San Marc's church, just at twilight this evening, lis- 
 tening to the far-off Ave Maria in one of the distant 
 chapels, when a Boston gentleman, who I did not 
 know was abroad, entered with his family, and passed 
 up to the altar. It is difficult to conceive with what a 
 title the half-forgotten circumstances of a home, so far 
 away, rush back upon one's heart in a strange land, 
 after a long absence, at the sight of familiar faces. I 
 could realize nothing about me after it — the glittering 
 mosaic of precious stones under my feet, the gold and 
 splendid colors of the roof above me, the echoes of 
 the monotonous chant through the arches — foreign 
 and strange as these circumstances all were. I was 
 irresistibly at home, the familiar pictures of my native 
 place filling my eye, and the recollections of those 
 whom I love and honor there crowding upon my heart 
 with irrepressible emotion. The feeling is a painful 
 one, and with the necessity for becoming again a for- 
 getful wanderer, remembering home only as a dream, 
 one shrinks from such things. The reception of a 
 letter, even, destroys a day. 
 
 There has been a grand festa to-day at the Lido. 
 This, you know, is a long island, forming part of the 
 sea-wall of Venice. It is, perhaps, five or six miles 
 long, covered in part with groves of small trees, and a 
 fine green sward ; and to the Venetians, to whom leaves 
 and grass are holyday novelties, is the scene of their 
 gayest festas. They were dancing and dining under 
 the trees ; and in front of the fort which crowns the 
 island, the Austrian commandant had pitched his tent, 
 and with a band of military music, the officers were 
 waltzing with ladies in a circle of green-sward, making 
 altogether a very poetical scene. We passed an hour 
 or two wandering among this gay and unconscious 
 people, and came home by one of the loveliest sunsets 
 that ever melted sea and sky together. Venice looked 
 like a vision of a city hanging in mid-air. 
 
 "We have been again to that delightful palace of 
 Manfrini. The " Portia swallowing fire," the Rem- 
 brandt portrait, the far-famed "Giorgione, son and 
 wife," and twenty others, which to see is to be charm- 
 ed, delighted me once more. I believe the surviving 
 Manfrein is the only noble left in Venice. Pesaro, 
 who disdained to live in his country after its liberty 
 was gone, died lately in London. His palace here is 
 the finest structure I have seen, and his country-house 
 on the Brenta is a paradise. It must have been a 
 strong feeling which exiled him from them for eigh- 
 teen years. 
 
 In coming from the Manfrini, we stopped at the 
 church of " St. Mary of Nazareth." This is one of 
 those whose cost might buy a kingdom. Its gold and 
 marbles oppress one with their splendor. In the cen- 
 tre of the ceiling is a striking fresco of the bearing of 
 
 " Loretto's chapel through the air;" and in one of the 
 corners a lovely portrait of a boy looking over a bal- 
 ustrade, done by the artist at fourteen years of age! 
 
 Padua. — We have passed two days in this venera- 
 ble city of learning, including a visit to Petrarch's 
 tomb at Arqua. The university here is still in its 
 glory, with fifteen hundred students. It has never 
 declined, I believe, since Livy's time. The beautiful 
 inner court has two or three galleries, crowded with 
 the arms of the nobles and distinguished individuals 
 who have received its honors. It has been the " cradle 
 of princes" from every part of Europe. 
 
 Around one of the squares of the city, stand forty 
 or fifty statues of the great and distinguished foreign- 
 ers who have received their education here. It hap- 
 pened to be the month of vacation, and we could not 
 see the interior. 
 
 At a public palace, so renowned for the size and 
 singular architecture of its principal hall, we saw a 
 very antique bust of Titus Livy — a fine, cleanly-chis- 
 elled, scholastic old head, that looked like the spirit 
 of Latin imbodied. We went thence to the Duomo, 
 where they show a beautiful bust of Petrarch, who 
 lived at Padua some of the latter years of his life. It 
 is a softer and more voluptuous conntenance than is 
 given him in the pictures. 
 
 The church of Saint Antony here has stood just 
 six hundred years. It occupied a century in building, 
 and is a rich and noble old specimen of the taste of 
 the times, with eight cupolas and towers, twenty-seven 
 chapels inside, four immense organs, and countless 
 statues and pictures. Saint Antony's body lies in the 
 midst of the principal chapel, which is surrounded 
 with relievos representing his miracles, done in the 
 best manner of the glorious artists of antiquity. We 
 were there during mass, and the people were nearly 
 suffocating themselves in the press to touch the altar 
 and tomb of the saint. This chnpel was formerly lit 
 by massive silver lamps, which Napoleon took, pre- 
 senting them with their models in gilt. He also ex- 
 acted from them three thousand sequins for permission 
 to retain the chin and tongue of St. Antony, which 
 works miracles still, and are preserved in a splendid 
 chapel with immense brazen doors. Behind the main 
 altar I saw a harrowing picture by Teipolo, of the 
 martyrdom of St. Agatha. Her breasts are cut off, 
 and lying in a dish. The expression in the face of 
 the dying woman is painfully well done. 
 
 Returning to the inn, we passed a magnificent palace 
 on one of the squares, upon whose marble steps and 
 column-bases, sat hundreds of brutish Austrian troops, 
 smoking and laughing at the passers-by. This is a 
 sight you may see now all through Italy. The pala- 
 ces of her proudest nobles are turned into barracks for 
 foreign troops, and there is scarce a noble old church 
 or monastery that is not defiled with their filth. The 
 German soldiers are, without exception, the most stol- 
 id and disagreeable looking body of men I ever saw, 
 and they have little to soften the indignant feeling with 
 which one sees them rioting in this lovely and oppress- 
 ed country. 
 
 We passed an hour before bedtime in the usual 
 amusement of travellers in a foreign hotel — reading 
 the traveller's record-book. Walter Scott's name was 
 written there, and hundreds of distinguished names 
 besides. I was pleased to find, on a leaf far back, 
 " Edward Everett," written in his own round legible 
 hand. There were at least the names of fifty Ameri- 
 cans, within the dates of the year past — such a wan- 
 dering nation we are. Foreigners express their aston- 
 ishment always at their numbers in these cities. 
 
 On the afternoon of the next day, we went to Arqua, 
 on a pilgrimage to Petrarch's cottage and tomb. It 
 was an Italian summer afternoon, and the Euganean 
 hills were rising green and lovely, with the sun an hour 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 59 
 
 high above them, and the yellow of the early sunset 
 already commencing to glow about the horizon. 
 
 We left the carriage at the " pellucid lake," and 
 went into the hills a "mile, plucking the ripe grapes 
 which hung over the road in profusion. We were 
 soon at the little village and the tomb, which stands 
 just before the church door, "reared in air." The 
 four laurels Byron mentions are dead. We passed up 
 the hill to the poet's house, a rural stone cottage, 
 commanding a lovely view of the campagna from the 
 portico. Sixteen villages may be counted from the 
 door, and the two large towns of Rovigo and Ferrara 
 are distinguishable in a clear atmosphere. It was a 
 retreat fit for a poet. We went through the rooms, 
 and saw the poet's cat, stuffed and exhibited behind a 
 wire grating, his chair and desk, his portrait in fresco, 
 and Laura's, and the small closet-like room where he 
 died. It was an interesting visit, and we returned by 
 the golden twilight of this heavenly climate, repeating 
 Chiide Harold, and wishing for his peu to describe 
 afresh the scene about us. 
 
 LETTER XL. 
 
 EXCURSION FROM VENICE TO VERONA TRUTH OF 
 
 BYRON'S DESCRIPTION OF ITALIAN SCENERY THE 
 
 LOMBARDY PEASANTRY APPEARANCE OF THE COUN- 
 TRY MANNER OF CULTIVATING THE VINE ON LIV- 
 ING TREES THE VINTAGE ANOTHER VISIT TO JU- 
 LIET'S TOMB THE OPERA AT VERONA — THE PRI- 
 MA DONNA ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE BOLOGNA 
 
 AGAIN MADAME MALIBRAN IN LA GAZZA LADRA 
 
 CHEAP LUXURIES THE PALACE OF THE LAMBAC- 
 
 CARI a MAGDALEN OF GUIDO CARRACCI — CHARLES 
 
 THE SECOND'S BEAUTIES VALLEY OF THE ARNO 
 
 FLORENCE ONCE MORE. 
 
 Our gondola set us on shore at Fusina an hour or 
 two before sunset, with a sky (such as we have had 
 for five months) without a cloud, and the same prom- 
 ise of a golden sunset, to which I have now become 
 so accustomed, that rain and a dark heaven would 
 seem to me almost unnatural. It was the hour and 
 the spot at which Chiide Harold must have left Ven- 
 ice, and we look at the " blue Friuli mountains," the 
 "deep-died Brenta," and the "far Rhoetian hill," and 
 feel the truth of his description as well as its beauty. 
 The two banks of the Brenta are studded with the 
 palaces of the Venetian nobles for almost twenty 
 miles, and the road runs close to the water on the 
 northern side, following all its graceful windings, and, 
 at every few yards, surprising the traveller with some 
 fresh scene of cultivated beauty, church, palace, or 
 garden, while the gondolas on the stream, and the fair 
 "damas" of Italy sitting under the porticoes, enliven 
 and brighten the picture. These people live out of 
 doors, and the road was thronged with the cnntadini ; 
 and here and there rolled by a carriage, with servants 
 in livery ; or a family of the better class on their eve- 
 ning walk, sauntered along at the Italian pace of indo- 
 lence, and a finer or happier looking race of people 
 would not easily be found. It is difficult to see the 
 athletic frames and dark flashing eyes of the Lom- 
 bardy peasantry, and remember their degraded condi- 
 tion. You can not believe it will remain so. If they 
 think at all, they must in time, feel too deeply to en- 
 dure. 
 
 The guide-book says, the " traveller wants words to 
 express his sensations at the beauty of the country 
 from Padua to Verona." Its beauty is owing to the per- 
 fection of a method of cultivation universal in Italy. 
 The fields are divided into handsome squares, by rows 
 of elms or other forest trees, and the vines are trained 
 upon these with all the elegance of holyday festoons, 
 
 winding about the trunks, and hanging with their 
 heavy clusters from one to the other, the foliage of 
 vine and tree mingled so closely that it appears as if 
 they sprung from the same root. Every square is per- 
 fectly enclosed with these fantastic walls of vine-leaves 
 and grapes, and the imagination of a poet could con- 
 ceive nothing more beautiful for a festival of Bacchus. 
 The ground between is sown with grass or corn. The 
 vines are luxuriant always, and often send their ten- 
 drils into the air higher than the topmost branch of 
 the tree, and this extends the whole distance from 
 Padua to Verona, with no interruption except the pal- 
 aces and gardens of the nobles lying between. 
 
 It was just the season for gathering and pressing the 
 grape, and the romantic vineyards were full of the hap- 
 py peasants, of all ages, mounting the ladders adven- 
 turously for the tall clusters, heaping the baskets and 
 carts, driving in the stately gray oxen with their loads, 
 and talking and singing as merrily as if it were Arca- 
 dia. Oh how beautiful these scenes are in Italy. The 
 people are picturesque, the land is like the poetry of 
 nature, the habits are all as they were described cen- 
 turies ago, and as the still living pictures of the glori- 
 ous old masters represent them. The most every-day 
 traveller smiles and wonders, as he lets down his car- 
 riage windows to look at the vintage. 
 
 We have been three or four days in Verona, visiting 
 Juliet's tomb, and riding through the lovely environs. 
 The opera here is excellent, and we went last night to 
 see "Romeo and Juliet" performed in the city re- 
 nowned by their story. The prima donna was one 
 of those sirens found often in Italy — a young singer 
 of great promise, with that daring brilliancy which 
 practice and maturer science discipline, to my taste, 
 too severely. It was like the wild, ungovernable trill 
 of a bird, and my ear is not so nice yet, that 1 even 
 would not rather feel a roughness in the harmony than 
 lose it. Malibran delighted me more in America than 
 in Paris. 
 
 The opera was over at twelve, and, as we emerged 
 from the crowded lobby, the moon, full, and as clear 
 and soft as the eye of a child, burst through the arch- 
 es of the portico. The theatre is opposite the cele- 
 brated Roman amphitheatre, and the wish to visit it 
 by moonlight was expressed spontaneously by the 
 whole party. The custode was roused, and we enter- 
 ed the vast arena and stood in the midst, with the gi- 
 gantic ranges of stone seats towering up in a receding 
 circle, as if to the very sky, and the lofty arches and 
 echoing dens lying black and silent in the dead shad- 
 ows of the moon. A hundred thousand people could 
 sit here ; and it was in these arenas, scattered through 
 the Roman provinces, that the bloody gladiator fights, 
 and the massacre of Christians, and every scene of 
 horror, amused the subjects of the mighty mistress of 
 the world. You would never believe it, if you could 
 have seen how peacefully the moonlight now sleeps 
 on the moss-gathering walls, and with what untrim- 
 med grace the vines and flowers creep and blossom on 
 the rocky crevices of the windows. 
 
 We arrived at Bologna just in time to get to the 
 opera. Malibran in La Gazza Ladra was enough to 
 make one forget more than the fatigue of a day's trav- 
 el. She sings as well as ever, and plays much better, 
 though she had been ill, and looked thin. In the pris- 
 on scene, she was ghastlier even than the character 
 required. There are few pleasures in Europe like 
 such singing as hers, and the Italians, in their excel- 
 lent operas, and the cheap rate at which they can be 
 frequented, have a resource corresponding to every- 
 thing else in their delightful country. Every comfort 
 and luxury is better and cheaper in Italy than else- 
 where, and it is a pity that he who can get his wine 
 for three cents a bottle, his dinner and his place at the 
 opera for ten, and has lodgings for anything he chooses 
 
CO 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 to pay, can not find leisure, and does not think it 
 worth the trouble, to look about for means to be free. 
 It is vexatious to see nature lavishing such blessings 
 on slaves. 
 
 The next morning we visited a palace, which, as it 
 is not mentioned in the guide-books of travel, I had 
 not before seen — the Lambaccari. It was full of glo- 
 rious pictures, most of them for sale. Among others 
 we were captivated with a Magdalen of unrivalled 
 sweetness, by Guido Carracci. It has been bought 
 since by Mr. Cabot, of Boston, who passed through 
 Bologna the day after, and will be sent to America, I 
 am happy to say, immediately. There were also six 
 of " Charles the Second's beauties," — portraits of the 
 celebrated women of that gay monarch's court, by 
 Sir Peter Lely — ripe, glowing English women, more 
 voluptuous than chary-looking, but pictures of ex- 
 quisite workmanship. There were nine or ten apart- 
 ments to this splendid palace, all crowded with paint- 
 ings by the first masters, and the surviving Lambaccari 
 is said to be selling them one by one for bread. It is 
 really melancholy to go through Italy, and see how 
 her people are suffering, and her nobles starving un- 
 der oppression. 
 
 We crossed the Appenines in two of the finest days 
 that ever shone, and descending through clouds and 
 mist to the Tuscan frontier, entered the lovely valley 
 of the Arno, sparkling in the sunshine, with all its 
 palaces and spires, as beautiful as ever. I am at Flor- 
 ence once more, and parting from the delightful party 
 with whom I have travelled for two months. I start 
 for Rome to-morrow, in company with five artists. 
 
 LETTER XLI. 
 
 JOURNEY TO THE ETERNAL CITY — TWO ROADS TO ROME 
 — SIENNA — THE PUBLIC SQUARE — AN ITALIAN FAIR 
 THE CATHEDRAL — THE LIBRARY THE THREE GRE- 
 CIAN RRACES DANDY OFFICERS PUBLIC PROMENADE 
 
 — LANDSCAPE VIEW — LONG GLEN — A WATERFALL — A 
 CULTIVATED VALLEY— THE TOWN OF AQUAPENDENK 
 
 SAN LORENZO — PLINY'S FLOATING ISLANDS — MON- 
 
 TEFTASCONE — VITERBO — PROCESSION OF FLOWER AND 
 
 DANCING GIRLS TO THE VINTAGE ASCENT OF THE 
 
 MONTECIMINO — THE ROAD OF THIEVES — LAKE VICO 
 
 BACCANO MOUNT SORACTE — DOME OF ST. PETER'S, 
 
 ETC. . 
 
 I left Florence in company with the five artists 
 mentioned in my last letter, one of them an English- 
 man, and the other four pensioners of the royal acad- 
 emy at Madrid. The Spaniards had but just arrived 
 in Italy, and could not speak a syllable of the lan- 
 guage. The Englishman spoke everything but French, 
 which he avoided learning/row principle. He "hated 
 a Frenchman !" 
 
 There are two roads to Rome. One goes by Sien- 
 na, and is a day shorter; the other by Perugia, the 
 Falls of Temi, LakeThrasymene, and the Clitumnus. 
 Childe Harold took the latter, and his ten or twelve 
 best cantos describe it. I was compelled to go by Si- 
 enna, and shall return, of course, by the other road. 
 
 I was at Sienna on the following day. As the sec- 
 ond capital of Tuscany, this should be a place of some 
 interest, but an hour or two is more than enough to 
 see all that is attractive. The public square was a gay 
 scene. It was rather singularly situated, lying fifteen 
 or twenty feet lower than the streets about it. I should 
 think there were several thousand people in its area — 
 all buying or selling, and vociferating, as usual, at the 
 top of their voices. We heard the murmur, like the 
 roar of the sea, in all the distant streets. There are 
 few sights more picturesque than an Italian fair, and I 
 strolled about in the crowd for an hour, amused with 
 
 the fanciful costumes, and endeavoring to make out 
 with the assistance of the eye what rather distracted 
 my unaccustomed ear — the cries of the various wan- 
 dering venders of merchandise. The women, who 
 were all from the country, were coarse, and looked 
 well only at a distance. 
 
 The cathedral is the great sight of Sienna. It has 
 a rich exterior, encrusted with curiously wrought mar- 
 bles, and the front, as far as I can judge, is in beauti- 
 ful taste. The pavement of the interior is very pre- 
 cious, and covered with a wooden platform, which is 
 removed but once a year. The servitor raised a part 
 of it, to show us the workmanship. It was like a 
 drawing in India ink, quite as fine as if pencilled, and 
 representing, as is customary, some miracle of a saint. 
 
 A massive iron door, made ingeniously to imitate a 
 rope-netting, opens from the side of the church into the 
 library. It contained some twenty volumes in black 
 letter, bound with enormous clasps, and placed upon 
 inclined shelves. It would have been a task for a man 
 of moderate strength to lift either of them from the 
 floor. The little sacristan found great difficulty in 
 only opening one to show us the letter. 
 
 In the centre of the chapel, on a high pedestal, 
 stands the original antique group, so often copied, of 
 the three Grecian Graces. It is shockingly mutilated; 
 but its original beauty i3 still, in a great measure, dis- 
 cernible. Three naked women are an odd ornament 
 for the private chapel of a cathedral.* One often 
 wonders, however, in Italian churches, whether his 
 devotion is most called upon by the arts or the Deity. 
 
 As we were leaving the church, four young officers 
 passed us in gay uniform, their long steel scabbards 
 rattling on the pavement, and their heavy tread dis- 
 turbing visibly every person present. As I turned to 
 look after them, with some remark on their coxcomb- 
 ry, they dropped on their knees at the bases of the 
 tall pillars about the altar, and burying their faces in 
 their caps, bowed their heads nearly to the floor, in at- 
 titudes of the deepest devotion. Sincere or not, cath- 
 olic worshippers of all classes seem absorbed in their re- 
 ligious duties. You can scarce withdraw the atten- 
 tion even of a child in such places. In the six months 
 that I have been in Italy, I never saw anything like ir- 
 reverence within the church walls. 
 
 The public promenade, on the edge of the hill upon 
 which the town is beautifully situated, commands a 
 noble view of the country about. The peculiar land- 
 scape of Italy lay before us in all its loveliness — the 
 far-off hills lightly teinted with the divided colors of 
 distance, the atmosphere between absolutely clear and 
 invisible, and villages clustered about, each with its 
 ancient castle on the hill-top above, just as it was set- 
 tled in feudal times, and just as painters and poets 
 would imagine it. You never get a view in this " gar- 
 den of the world" that would not excuse very extrava- 
 gant description. 
 
 Sienna is said to be the best place for learning the 
 language. Just between Florence and Rome, it com- 
 bines the " lingua Toscano," with the " bocca Roma- 
 na" — the Roman pronunciation with the Florentine 
 purity of language. It looks like a dull place, how- 
 ever, and I was very glad after dinner to resume my 
 passport at the gate and get on. 
 
 The next morning, after toiling up a considerable as- 
 cent, we suddenly rounded the shoulder of the moun- 
 tain, and found ourselves at the edge of a long glen, 
 walled up at one extremity by a precipice, with an old 
 town upon its brow, and a waterfall pouring off at its 
 side, and opening away at the other into a broad gen- 
 tly-sloped valley, cultivated like a garden as far as the 
 eye could distinguish. I think I have seen an engra- 
 
 * I remember hearing a friend receive a severe reproof from 
 one of the most enlightened men in our country for offering 
 his daughter an annual, upon the cover of which was an engra- 
 ving of these same " Graces." 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 Gl 
 
 viiif of it in the Landscape Annual. Taken together, 
 it is positively the most beautiful view I ever saw, 
 from the road edge, as you wind up into the town of 
 Acquaperulenk. The precipice might be a hundred 
 feet, and from its immediate edge were built up the 
 walls of the houses, so that a child at the window 
 might throw its plaything into the bottom of the ra- 
 vine. It is scarce a pistol-shot across the glen, and the 
 two hills on cither side lean oil" from the level of the 
 town in one long soft declivity to the valley — the little 
 river which pours oft' the rock at the very base of the 
 church, fretting and fuming its way between to the 
 meadows — its stony bed quite hidden by the thick ve- 
 getation of its banks. The bells were ringing to mass, 
 and the echoes came back to us at long distances with 
 every modulation. The streets, as we entered the 
 town, were full of people hurrying to the churches ; 
 the women with their red shawls thrown about their 
 heads, and the men with their immense dingy cloaks 
 flung romantically over their shoulders, with a grace, 
 one and all, that in a Parisian dandy, would be at- 
 tributed to a consummate study of effect. For out- 
 line merely, I think there is nothing in costume 
 which can surpass the closely-stockinged leg, heavy 
 cloak, and slouched hat of an Italian peasant. It is 
 added to by his indolent, and, consequently, graceful 
 motion and attitudes. Johnson, in his book on the 
 climate of Italy, says their sloth is induced by mala- 
 ria. You will see a man watching goats or sheep, 
 with his back against a rock, quite motionless for hours 
 together. His dog feels, apparently, the same influ- 
 ence, and lies couched in his long white hair, with 
 his eyes upon the flock, as lifeless, and almost as pic- 
 turesque, as his master. 
 
 The town of San Lorenzo is a handful of houses on 
 the top of a hill which hangs over Lake Bolsena. 
 You get the first view of the lake as you go out of the 
 gate toward Rome, and descend immediately to its 
 banks. There was a heavy mist upon the water, and 
 we could not see across, but it looked like as quiet 
 and pleasant a shore as might be found in the world — 
 the woods wild, and of uncommonly rich foliage for 
 Italy, and the slopes of the hills beautiful. Saving the 
 road, and here and there a house with no sign of an in- 
 habitant, there can scarcely be a lonelier wilderness 
 in America. We stopped two hours at an inn on its 
 banks, and whether it was the air, or the influence of 
 the perfect stillness about us, my companions went to 
 sleep, and I could scarce lesist my own drowsiness. 
 
 The mist lifted a little from the lake after dinner, 
 and we saw the two islands said by Pliny to have 
 floated in his time. They look like the tops of green 
 hills rising from the water. 
 
 It is a beautiful country again as you approach 
 Montefiascone. The scenery is finely broken up with 
 glens formed by columns of basalt, giving it a look of 
 great wildness. Montefiascone is built on the river of 
 one of these ravines. We stopped here long enough 
 to get a bottle of the wine for which the place is fa- 
 mous, drinking it to the memory of the " German prel- 
 ate," who, as Madame Stark relates, "stopped here 
 on his journey to Rome, and died of drinking it to ex- 
 cess." It has degenerated, probably, since his time, 
 or we chanced upon a bad bottle. 
 
 The walls of Vilerho are flanked with towers, and 
 have a noble appearance from the hill-side on which 
 the town stands. We arrived too late to see anything 
 of the place. As we were taking coffee at the cafe the 
 next morning, a half hour before daylight, we heard 
 music in the street, and looking out at the door, we 
 saw a long procession of young girls, dressed with 
 flowers in their hair, and each playing a kind of cymbal, 
 ami half dancing as she went along. Three or four at 
 the head of the procession sung a kind of verse, and the 
 rest joined in a short merry chorus at intervals. It 
 was more like a train of Corybantes than anything I 
 
 had seen. We inquired the object of it, and were told 
 it was a procession to the vintage. They were going 
 out to pluck the last grapes, and it was the custom to 
 make it a festa. It was a striking scene in the other- 
 wise perfect darkness of the streets, the torch-bearers 
 at the sides waving their flambeaux regularly over their 
 heads, and shouting with the rest in chorus. The 
 measure was quick, and the step very fast. They 
 were gone in an instant. The whole thing was po- 
 etical, and in keeping for Italy. I have never seen it 
 elsewhere. 
 
 We left Viterbo on a clear, mild autumnal morning; 
 and I think I never felt the excitement of a delightful 
 climate more thrill ingly. Theroad was wild, and with 
 the long ascent of the Monte-Cimino before us, I left the 
 carriage to its slow pace and went ahead several miles 
 on foot. The first rain of the season had fallen, and 
 the road was moist, and all the spicy herbs of Italy per- 
 ceptible in the air. Half way up the mountain, 1 over- 
 took a fat, bald, middle-aged priest, slowly toiling up 
 on his mule. I was passing him with a " huon giorno" 
 when he begged me for my own sake, as well as his, 
 to keep him company. "It was the worst road for 
 thieves," he said, "in all Italy," and he pointed at 
 every short distance to little crosses erected at the 
 road-side, to commemorate the finding of murdered 
 men on the spot. After he had told me several stories 
 of the kind, he elevated his tone, and began to talk of 
 other matters. I think I never heard so loud and long 
 a laugh as his. I ventured to express a wonder at his 
 finding himself so happy in a life of celibacy. He 
 looked at me slily a moment or two as if he were hes- 
 itating whether to trust me with his opinions on the 
 subject; but he suddenly seemed to remember his 
 caution, and pointing oft' to the right, showed me a 
 lake brought into view by the last turn of the road. It 
 was Lake Vico. From the midst of it rose a round 
 mountain covered to the top with luxuriant chestnuts — 
 the lake forming a sort of trench about it, with the 
 hill on which we stood rising directly from the other 
 edge. It was one faultless mirror of green leaves. 
 The two hill sides shadowed it completely. All the 
 views from Monte-Cimino were among the richest in 
 mere nature that I ever saw, and reminded me strong- 
 ly of the country about the Seneca lake of America. 
 1 was on the Cayuga at about the same season three 
 summers ago, and I could have believed myself back 
 again, it was so like my recollection. 
 
 We stopped on the fourth night of our journey, 
 seventeen miles from Rome, at a place called Baccano. 
 A ridge of hills rose just before us, from the top of 
 which we were told we could see St. Peter's. The 
 sun was just dipping under the horizon, and the ascent 
 was three miles. We threw off our cloaks, deter- 
 mining to see Rome before we slept, ran unbreathed 
 to the top of the hill, an effort which so nearly ex- 
 hausted us, that we could scarce stand long enough 
 upon our feet to search over the broad campagna for 
 the dome. 
 
 Tho sunset had lingered a great while — as it does 
 in Italy. Four or five light feathery streaks of cloud 
 glowed with intense crimson in the west, and on the 
 brow of Mount Soracte, (which I recognised instantly 
 from the graphic simile* of Childe Harold), and along 
 on all the ridges of mountain in the east, still play- 
 ed a kind of vanishing reflection, half purple, half eray. 
 With a moment's glance around to catch the outline 
 of the landscape, I felt instinctively where Rome should 
 stand, and my eye fell at once upon "the mighty 
 dome." Jupiter had by this time appeared, and hung 
 right over it, trembling in the sky with its peculiar 
 glorv, like a lump of molten spar, and as the color 
 faded from the clouds, and the dark mass of "the 
 eternal city" itself mingled and was lost in the shad- 
 
 • « A, long swept wave about to break, 
 
 And ott the curl hangs pausing " 
 
62 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ows of the campagna, the dome still seemed to 
 catch light, and tower visibly, as if the radiance of the 
 glowing star above fell more directly upon it. We 
 could see it till we could scarcely distinguish each 
 other's features. The dead level of the campagna 
 extended between and beyond for twenty miles, and it 
 looked like a far-off beacon in a dim sea. We sat an 
 hour on the summit of the hill, gazing into the in- 
 creasing darkness, till our eyes ached. The stars 
 brightened one by one, the mountains grew indistinct, 
 and we rose unwillingly to retrace our steps to Bac- 
 cano. 
 
 LETTER XLII. 
 
 first dat in rome — saint peter's — a solitary 
 monk strange music michael angelo's mas- 
 terpiece the museum likeness of young au- 
 gustus arollo belvedere the medicean venus 
 
 — Raphael's transfiguration — the pantheon — 
 the burial-place of carracci and raphael — ro- 
 man forum — temple of fortune — the rostrum 
 — palace of the cesars — the ruins — the col- 
 iseum, etc. 
 
 To be rid of the dust of travel, and abroad in a 
 strange and renowned city, is a sensation of no slight 
 pleasure anywhere. To step into the street under 
 these circumstances and inquire for the Roman Forum, 
 was a sufficient advance upon the ordinary feeling to 
 mark a bright day in one's calendar. I was hurrying 
 up the Corso with this object before me a half hour 
 after my arrival in Rome, when an old friend arrested 
 my steps, and begging me to reserve the " Ruins" for 
 moonlight, took me off to St. Peter's. 
 
 The facade of the church appears alone, as you 
 walk up the street from the castle of St. Angelo. It 
 disappointed me. There is no portico, and it looks 
 fiat and bare. But approaching nearer, I stood at the 
 base of the obelisk, and with those two magnificent 
 fountains sending their musical waters as if to the 
 sky, and the two encircling wings of the church em- 
 bracing the immense area with its triple colonnades, I 
 felt the grandeur of St. Peter's. I felt it again in the 
 gigantic and richly-wrought porches, and again with 
 indescribable surprise and admiration at the first step 
 on the pavement of the interior. There was not a 
 figure on its immense floor from the door to the altar, 
 and its far-off roof, its mighty piHars, its gold and 
 marbles in such profusion that the eye shrinks from 
 the examination, made their overpowering impression 
 uninterrupted. You feel that it must be a glorious 
 creature that could build such a temple to his Maker. 
 
 An organ was playing brokenly in one of the dis- 
 tant chapels, and. drawing insensibly to the music, we 
 found the door half open, and a monk alone, running 
 his fingers over the keys, and stopping sometimes as 
 if to muse, till the echo died and the silence seemed 
 to startle him anew. It was strange music very irreg- 
 ular, but sweet, and in a less excited moment, I could 
 have sat and listened to it till the sun set. 
 
 I strayed down the aisle, and stood before the 
 " Dead Christ" of Michael Angelo. The Savior lies 
 in the arms of Mary. The limbs hang lifelessly down, 
 and, exquisitely beautiful as they are, express death 
 with a wonderful power. It is the best work of the 
 artist, I think, and the only one I was ever moved in 
 looking at. 
 
 The greatest statue and the first picture in the world 
 are under the same roof, and we mounted to the Vati- 
 can. The museum is a wilderness of statuary. Old 
 Romans, men and women, stand about you, copied, 
 as you feel when you look on them, from the life, 
 and conceptions of beauty in children, nymphs, and 
 
 heroes, from minds that conceived beauty in a degree 
 that has never been transcended, confuse and bewilder 
 you with their number and wonderful workmanship. 
 It is like seeing a vision of past ages. It is calling up 
 from Athens and old classic Rome, all that was dis- 
 tinguished and admired of the most polished ages of 
 the world. On the right of the long gallery, as you 
 enter, stands the bust of the " Young Augustus" — a 
 kind of beautiful, angelic likeness of Napoleon, as 
 Napoleon might have been in his youth. It is a boy, 
 but with a serene dignity about the forehead and lips, 
 that makes him visibly a boy-emperor — born for his 
 throne, and conscious of his right to it. There is 
 nothing in marble more perfect, and I never saw any- 
 thing which made me realize that the Romans of his- 
 tory and poetry were men — nothing which brought 
 them so familiarly to my mind, as the feeling for beau- 
 ty shown in this infantine bust. I would rather have 
 it than all the gods and heroes of the Vatican. 
 
 No cast gives you any idea worth having of the 
 Apollo Belvidere. It is a god-like model of a man. 
 The lightness and the elegance of the limbs ; the free, 
 fiery, confident energy of the atitude ; the breathing, 
 indignant nostril and lips ; the whole statue's mingled 
 and equal grace and power, are, with all its truth to 
 nature, beyond any conception I had formed of manly 
 beauty. It spoils one's eye for common men to look 
 at it. It stands there like a descended angel, with a 
 splendor of form and an air of power, that makes one 
 feel what he should have been, and mortifies him for 
 what he is. Most women whom I have met in Eu- 
 rope, adore the Apollo as far the finest statue in the 
 world, and most men say as much of the Medicean 
 Venus. But, to my eye, the Venus, lovely as she is, 
 compares with the Apollo as a mortal with an angel of 
 light. The latter is incomparably the finest statue. 
 If it were only for its face, it would transcend the oth- 
 er infinitely. The beauty of the Venus is only in the 
 limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest 
 representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a wo- 
 man. The Apollo is all this, and has a soul. I have 
 seen women that approached the Venus in form, and 
 had finer faces — I never saw a man that was a shadow 
 of the Apollo in either. It stands as it should, in a 
 room by itself, and is thronged at all hours by female 
 worshippers. They never tire of gazing at it ; and I 
 should believe, from the open-mouthed wonder of 
 those whom I met at its pedestal, that the story of the 
 girl who pined and died for love of it, was neither im- 
 probable nor singular. 
 
 Raphael's " Transfiguration" is agreed to be the 
 finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind 
 to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was 
 painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it 
 from every corner of the room, and asked the custode 
 three times if he was sure this was the original. The 
 color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should 
 make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an un- 
 settled faith in my own taste, that made me seriously 
 unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours 
 after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the 
 drawing — the colors having quite changed with time. 
 I bought the engraving immediately, which you have 
 seen too often, of course, to need my commentary. 
 The aerial lightness with which he has hung the fig- 
 ures of the Savior and the apostles in the air, is a tri- 
 umph of the pencil over the laws of nature, that seem 
 to have required the power of the miracle itself. 
 
 I lost myself in coming home, and following a 
 priest's direction to the Corso, came unexpectedly up- 
 on the " Pantheon," which I recognised at once. 
 This wonder of architecture has no questionable beau- 
 ty. A dunce would not need to be told that it was 
 perfect. Its Corinthian columns fall on the eye with 
 that sense of fulness that seems to answer an instinct 
 of beauty in the very organ. One feels a fault or an 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 excellence in architecture long before he can give the 
 feeling a name ; and I can see why, by Childe Harold 
 and others, this heathen temple is called "the pride of 
 Rome," though I can not venture on a description. 
 The faultless interior is now used as a church, and 
 there lie Annibal Carracci and the divine Raphael — 
 two names worthy of the place, and the last of a shrine 
 in every bosom capable of a conception of beauty. 
 Glorious Raphael ! If there was no other relic in 
 Rome, one would willingly become a pilgrim to his 
 ashes. 
 
 With my countryman and friend, Mr. Cleveland, I 
 stood in the Roman forum by the light of a clear half 
 moon. The soft silver rays poured in through the 
 ruined columns of the Temple of Fortune and threw 
 our shadows upon the bases of the tall shafts near the 
 capitol, the remains, I believe, of the temple erected 
 by Augustus to Jupiter Tonans. Impressive things 
 they are, even without their name, standing tall and 
 alone, with their broken capitals wre'athed with ivy, 
 and neither roof nor wall to support them where they 
 were placed by hands that have mouldered for centu- 
 ries. It is difficult to rally one's senses in such a 
 place, and be awake coldly to the scene. We stood, 
 as we supposed, in the Rostrum. The noble arch, 
 still almost perfect, erected by the senate to Septimius 
 Severus, stood up clear and lofty beside us, the three 
 matchless and lonely columns of the supposed temple 
 of Jupiter Stator threw their shadows across the Fo- 
 rum below, the great arch, built at the conquest of 
 Jerusalem to Titus, was visible in the distance, and 
 above them all, on the gentle ascent of the Palatine, 
 stood the ruineil palace of the Cesars, the sharp edg- 
 es of the demolished walls breaking up through vines 
 and ivy, and the mellow moon of Italy softening rock 
 and foliage into one silver-edged mass of shadow. It 
 seems as if the very genius of the picturesque had ar- 
 ranged these immortal ruins. If the heaps of fresh 
 excavation were but overgrown with grass, no poet nor 
 painter could better image out the Rome of his dream. 
 It surpasses fancy. 
 
 We walked on over fragments of marble columns 
 turned up from the mould, and leaving the majestic 
 arches of the Temple of Peace on our left, passed 
 under the arch ol Titus (so dreaded by the Jews), to 
 the Coliseum. This too is magnificently ruined — 
 broken in every part, and yet showing still the brave 
 skeleton of what it was— its gigantic and triple walls, 
 half encircling the silent arena, and its rocky seats 
 lifting one above the other amid weeds and ivy, and 
 darkening the dens beneath, whence issued the gladi- 
 ators, beasts, and Christian martyrs, to be sacrificed for 
 the amusement of Rome. A sentinel paced at the 
 gigantic archway, a capuchin monk, whose duty is to 
 attend the small chapels built around the arena, walk- 
 ed up and down in his russet cowl and sandals, the 
 moon broke through the clefts in the wall, and the 
 whole place was buried in the silence of a wilderness. 
 I have given you the features of the scene— I leave 
 you to people it with your own thoughts. I dare not 
 trust mine to a colder medium than poetry. 
 
 LETTER XLIII. 
 
 TIVOLI RUINS OF THE BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN FALLS 
 
 OF TIVOLI CASCATELLI SUBJECT OF ONE OFCOLE's 
 
 LANDSCAPES RUINS OF THE VILLAGE OF MECENAS 
 
 RUINED VILLA OF ADRIAN THE FORUM TEMPLE 
 
 OF VESTA THE CLOACA MAXIMA THE RIVER JU- 
 
 TURNA, ETC. 
 
 I have spent a day at Tivoli with Messrs. Auchmu- 
 ty and Bissell, of our navy, and one or two others, 
 forming quite an American party. We passed the ru- 
 
 ins of the baths of Diocletian, with a heavy cloud over 
 our heads; but we were scarce through the gate 
 when the sun broke through, the rain swept off over 
 Soracte, and the sky was clear till sunset. 
 
 I have seen many finer falls than Tivoli; that is 
 more water, and failing farther ; but I do not think 
 there is so pretty a place in the world. A very dirty 
 village, a dirtier hotel, and a cicerone all rags and ruf- 
 fianism, are somewhat dampers to anticipation. We 
 passed through a broken gate, and with a step, were in 
 a glen of fairy land; the lightest and loveliest of an- 
 tique temples on a crag above, a snowy waterfall of 
 some hundred and fifty feet below, grottoes mossed to 
 the mouth at the river\s outlet, and all up and down 
 the cleft valley vines twisted in the crevices of rock, 
 and shrubbery hanging on every ledge, with a felicity 
 of taste or nature, or both, that is uncommon even in 
 Italy. The fall itself comes rushing down through a 
 grotto to the face of the precipice, over which it leaps, 
 and looks like a subterranean river just coming to light. 
 Its bed is rough above, and it bursts forth from its cav- 
 ern in dazzling foam, and falls in one sparry sheet to 
 the gulf. The falls of Montmorenci are not unlike it. 
 We descended to the bottom, and from the little ter- 
 race, wet by the spray, and dark with overhanging 
 rocks, looked up the " cavern of Neptune," a deep pas- 
 sage, through which half the divided river rushes to 
 meet the fall in the gulf. Then remounting to the 
 top, we took mules to make the three miles' circuit of 
 the glen, and see what are called the CascateUi. 
 
 No fairy-work could exceed the beauty of the little an- 
 tique Sybil's temple perched on the top of the crag above 
 the fall. As we rode round the other edge of the glen, it 
 stood opposite us in all the beauty of its light and airy 
 architecture ; a thing that might be borne, " like Lo- 
 retto's chapel, through the air," and seem no miracle. 
 A mile farther on I began to recognise the features- 
 of the scene, at a most lovely point of view. It was 
 J the subject of one of Cole's landscapes, which I had 
 seen in Florence; and I need not say to any one who 
 knows the works of this admirable artist, that it was 
 done with truth and taste.* The little town of Tivoli 
 hangs on a jutting lap of the mountain, on the side of 
 the ravine opposite to your point of view. From be- 
 neath its walls, as if its foundations were laid upon a 
 river's fountains, bursts foaming water in some thirty 
 different falls; and it seems to you as if the long de- 
 clivities were that moment for the first time overflowed, 
 for the currents go dashing under trees, and overleap- 
 ing vines and shrubs, appearing and disappearing con- 
 tinually, till they all meet in the quiet bed of the river 
 below. " It was marie by Bernini,'''' said the guide, as 
 we stood gazing at it ; and, odd as this information 
 sounded, while wondering at a spectacle worthy of the 
 happiest accident of nature, it will explain the phe- 
 nomena of the place to you — the artist having turned 
 a mountain river from its course, and leading it under 
 the town of Tivoli, threw it over the sides of the pre- 
 cipitous hill upon which it stands. One of the streams 
 appears from beneath the ruins of the "Villa of Me- 
 caenas," which topples over a precipice just below the 
 town, looking over the campagna toward Rome— a 
 situation worthy of the patron of the poets. We rode 
 through the immense subterranean arches, which form- 
 ed its court in ascending the mountain again to the 
 town. 
 
 Near Tivoli is the ruined villa of Adrian, where was 
 found the Venus de Medicis, and some other of the 
 wonders of antique art. The sun had set, however, 
 and the long campagna of twenty miles lay between us 
 • On my way to Rome (near Radicofani, I think), we pass- 
 ed an old man, whose picturesque figure, enveloped in his brown 
 cloak and slouched hat, arrested the attention of all my com- 
 panions. I had seen him before. From a five minutes' sketch 
 in passing, Mr. Cole had made one of the most spirited heads 
 I ever saw, admirably like, and worthy of Caravajrgio fo 
 force and expression. 
 
64 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 and Rome. We were compelled to leave it unseen. 
 We entered the gates at nine o'clock, unrobbed — ra- 
 ther an unusual good fortune, we were told, for travel- 
 lers after dark on that lonely waste. Perhaps our 
 number deprived us of the romance. 
 
 I left a crowded ball-room at midnight, wearied with 
 a day at Tivoli, and oppressed with an atmosphere 
 breathed by two hundred, dancing and card-playing, 
 Romans and foreigners ; and with a step from the por- 
 tico of the noble palace of our host, came into a broad 
 beam of moonlight, that with the stillness and cool- 
 ness of the night refreshed me at once, and banished 
 all disposition for sleep. A friend was with me, and I 
 proposed a ramble among the ruins. 
 
 The sentinel challenged us as we entered the Fo- 
 rum. The frequent robberies of romantic strangers 
 in this lonely place have made a guard necessary, and 
 they are now stationed from the Arch of Severus to 
 the Coliseum. We passed an hour rambling among 
 the ruins of the temples. Not a footstep was to be 
 heard, nor a sound even from the near city ; and the 
 tall columns, with their broken friezes and capitals, 
 and the grand imperishable arches, stood up in the 
 bright light of the moon, looking indeed like monu- 
 ments of Rome. I am told they are less majestic by 
 daylight. The rubbish and fresh earth injure the ef- 
 fect. But I have as yet seen them in the garb of 
 moonlight only, and I shall carry this impression away. 
 It is to me, now, all that my fancy hoped to find it — 
 its temples and columns just enough in ruin to be af- 
 fecting and beautiful. 
 
 We went thence to the Temple of Vesta. It is 
 shut up in the modern streets, ten or fifteen minutes 
 walk from the Forum. The picture of this perfect 
 temple, and the beautiful purpose of its consecration, 
 have been always prominent in my imaginary Rome. 
 It is worthy of its association — an exquisite round 
 temple, with its simple circle of columns from the 
 base to the roof, a faultless thing in proportion, and as 
 light and floating to the eye as if the wind might lift 
 it. It was no common place to stand beside, and re- 
 call the poetical truth and fiction of which it has been 
 the scene — the vestal lamp cherished or neglected by 
 its high-horn votaries, their honors if pure, and their 
 dreadful death if faithless. It needed not the heaven- 
 ly moonlight that broke across its columns to make it 
 a very shrine of fancy. 
 
 My companion proposed a visit next to the Cloaca 
 Maxima. A common sewer, after the Temple of Vesta, 
 sounds like an abrupt transition; but the arches be- 
 neath which we descended were touched by moonlight, 
 and the vines and ivy crossed our path, and instead of 
 a drain of filth, which the fame of its imperial builder 
 would scarce have sweetened, a rapid stream leaped to 
 the right, and disappeared again beneath the solid ma- 
 sonry, more like a wild brook plunging into a grotto 
 than the thing one expects to find it. The clear little 
 river Juturna (on the banks of which Castor and Pol- 
 lux watered their foaming horses, when bringing the 
 news of victory to Rome), dashes now through the 
 Cloaca Maxima ; and a fresher and purer spot, or wa- 
 ters with a more musical murmur, it has not been my 
 fortune to see. We stopped over a broken column 
 for a drink, and went home, refreshed, to bed. 
 
 LETTER XLIV. 
 
 MASS IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL THE CARDINALS 
 
 THE " LAST JUDGMENT" THE POPE OF ROME 
 
 THE " ADAM AND EVE" CHANTING OF THE PRIESTS 
 
 FESTA AT THE CHURCH OF SAN CARLOS GREG- 
 ORY THE SIXTEENTH, HIS EQUIPAGE, TRAIN, ETC. 
 
 All the world goes to hear " mass in the Sistine 
 chapel," and all travellers describe it. It occurs infre- 
 
 quently and is performed by the pope. We were there 
 to-day at ten, crowding at the door with hundreds of 
 foreigners, mostly English, elbowed alternately by 
 priests and ladies, and kept in order by the Swiss 
 guards in their harlequin dresses and long pikes. We 
 were admitted after an hour's pushing, and the guard 
 retreated to the grated door, through which no woman 
 is permitted to pass. Their gay bonnets and feathers 
 clustered behind the gilded bars, and we could admire 
 them for once without the qualifying reflection that 
 they were between us and the show. An hour more 
 was occupied in the entrance, one by one, of some 
 forty cardinals with their rustling silk trains supported 
 by boys in purple. They passed the gate, their train- 
 bearers lifted their cassocks and helped them to kneel 
 a moment's prayer was mumbled, and they took theii 
 seats with the same servile assistance. Their attend- 
 | ants placed themselves at their feet, and, taking the 
 j prayer-books, the only use of which appeared to be 
 j to display their jewelled fingers, they looked over 
 i them at the faces behind the grating, and waited for his 
 I holiness. 
 
 The intervals of this memory, gave us time to study 
 | the famous frescoes for which the Sistine chapel is re- 
 j nowned. The subject is the "Last judgment." The 
 j Savior sits in the midst, pronouncing the sentence, the 
 wicked plunging from his presence on the left hand, 
 and the righteous ascending with the assistance of an- 
 gels on the right. The artist had, of course, infinite 
 scope for expression, and the fame of the fresco (which 
 occupies the whole of the wall behind the altar) would 
 seem to argue his success. The light is miserable, 
 however, and incense or lamp-smoke, has obscured 
 the colors, and one looks at it now with little pleasure. 
 As well as I could see, too, the figure of the Savior 
 was more that of a tiler throwing down slates from the 
 top of a house in some fear of falling, than the judge 
 of the world upon his throne. Some of the other 
 parts are better, and one or two naked female figures 
 might once have been beautiful, but one of the suc- 
 ceeding popes ordered them dressed, and they now 
 flaunt at the judgment seat in colored silks, obscuring 
 both saints and sinners with their finery. There are 
 some redeeming frescoes, also by Michael Angelo, on 
 the ceiling, among them "Adam and Eve," exquisite- 
 ly done. 
 
 The pope entered by a door at the side of the altar. 
 With him came a host of dignitaries and church ser- 
 vants, and, as he tottered round in front of the altar, 
 to kneel, his cap was taken off and put on, his flowing 
 robes lifted and spread, and he was treated in all re- 
 spects, as if he were the Deity himself. In fact, the 
 whole service was the worship, not of God, but of the 
 pope. The cardinals came up, one by one, with their 
 heads bowed, and knelt reverently to kiss his hand and 
 the hem of his white satin dress; his throne was higher 
 than the altar, and ten times as gorgeous ; the incense 
 was flung toward him, and his motions from one side 
 of the chapel to the other, were attended with more 
 ceremony and devotion than all the rest of the service 
 together. The chanting commenced with his en- 
 trance, and this should have been to God alone, for it 
 was like music from heaven. The choir was com- 
 posed of priests, who sang from massive volumes 
 bound in golden clasps, in a small side gallery. One 
 stood by the book, turning the leaves as the chant 
 proceeded, and keeping the measure, and the others 
 clustered around with their hands clasped, their heads 
 thrown back, and their eyes closed or fixed upon the 
 turning leaves in such grouping and attitude as you 
 see in pictures of angels singing in the clouds. 1 
 have heard wonderful music since I have been on the 
 continent, and have received new ideas of the compass 
 of the human voice, and its capacities for pathos and 
 sweetness. But, after all the wonders of the opera, as 
 it i9 learned to sing before kings and courts, the chant 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 65 
 
 ing of these priests transcended every conception in 
 my mind of music. It was the human voice, cleared 
 of ail earthliness, and gushing through its organs with 
 uncontrollable feeling and nature. The burden of the 
 various parts returned continually upon one or two 
 simple notes, the deepest and sweetest in the octave 
 for melody, and occasionally a single voice outran the 
 choir in a passionate repetition of the air, which seem- 
 ed less like musical contrivance, than an abandonment 
 of soul and voice to a preternatural impulse of devo- 
 tion. One writes nonsense in describing such things, 
 but there is no other way of conveying an idea of them. 
 The subject is beyond the wildest superlatives. 
 
 To-day we have again seen the pope. It was a 
 festa, and the church of San Carlos was the scene of 
 the ceremonies. His holiness came in the state-coach 
 with six long-tailed black horses, and all his cardinals 
 in their red and gold carriages in his train. The 
 gaudy procession swept up to the steps, and the father 
 of the church was taken upon the shoulders of his 
 bearers in a chair of gold and crimson, and solemnly 
 borne up the aisle, and deposited within the railings 
 of the altar, where homage was done to him by the 
 cardinals as before, and the half-supernatural music 
 of his choir awaited his motions. The church was 
 half filled with soldiers armed to the teeth, and drawn 
 up on either side, and his body-guard of Roman no- 
 bles, stood even within the railing of the altar, capped 
 and motionless, conveying, as everything else does, 
 the irresistible impression that it was the worship of 
 the pope, not of God. 
 
 Gregory the sixteenth, is a small old man, with a 
 large heavy nose, eyes buried in sluggish wrinkles, and 
 a flushed apoplectic complexion. He sits, or is borne 
 about with his eyes shut, looking quite asleep, even 
 his limbs hanging lifelessly. The gorgeous and heavy 
 pap/1 costumes only render him more insignificant, 
 and when he is borne about, buried in his deep chair, 
 or lost in the corner of his huge black and gold pa- 
 goda of a carriage, it is difficult to look at him without 
 a smile. Among his cardinals, however, there are 
 magnificent heads, boldly marked, noble and scholar- 
 like, and I may say, perhaps, that there is no one of 
 them, who had not nature's mark upon him of superior- 
 ity. They are a dignified and impressive body of men, 
 and their servile homage to the pope, seems unnatural 
 and disgusting. 
 
 LETTER XLV. 
 
 ROME— A MORNING IN THE STUDIO OF THORWALSDEN 
 
 — colossal statue of the savior — statue of 
 byron— Gibson's rooms— cupid and psyche— hy- 
 las with the river nymphs — palazzo spada — 
 statue of pompey — borghese palace — portrait 
 
 OF CESAR BORGIA— DOSSI'S PSYCHE SACRED AND 
 
 PROFANE LOVE — ROO.M DEVOTED TO VENUSES- -THE 
 SOCIETY OF ROME, ETC. 
 
 1 have spent a morning in the studio of Thorwals- 
 den. He is probably the greatest sculptor now living. 
 A. colossal statue of Christ, thought by many to be his 
 masterpiece, is the prominent object as you enter. It 
 19 a noble conception— the mild majesty of a Savior 
 expressed in a face of the most dignified human beauty. 
 Perhaps his full-length statue of Byron is inferior to 
 some of his other works, but it interested me, and I 
 spent most of my time in looking at it. It was taken 
 from life ; and my friend, Mr. Auchmuty, who was 
 with me, and who had seen Byron frequently on board 
 one of our ships-of-war at Leghorn, thought it the 
 only faithful likeness he had ever seen. The poet is 
 dressed oddly enough, in a morning frock coat, cravat, 
 pantaloons, and shoes; and, unpromising as these ma- 
 
 terials would seem, the statue is classic and elegant to 
 a very high degree. His coat is held by the two centre 
 buttons in front (a more exquisite cut never came from 
 the hands of a London tailor), swelled out a little above 
 and below by the fleshy roundness of his figure ; his 
 cravat is tied loosely, leaving his throat bare (which, 
 by the way, both in the statue and the original, was 
 very beautifully chiselled) ; and he sits up ,n a frag- 
 ment of a column, with a book in one hand and a pen- 
 cil in the other. A man reading a pleasant poem 
 among the ruins of Rome, and looking up to reflect 
 upon a fine passage before marking it, would assum 
 the attitude and expression exactly. The face has 
 half a smile upon it, and, differing from the Apollo 
 /aces usually drawn for Byron, is finer, and more 
 expressive of his character than any I ever met with. 
 Thorwalsden is a Dane, and is beloved by every one 
 for his simplicity and modesty. I did not see him. 
 
 We were afterward at Gibson's rooms. This gen- 
 tleman is an English artist, apparently about thirty, 
 and full of genius. He has taken some portraits which 
 are esteemed admirable ; but his principal labor has 
 been thrown upon the most beautiful fables of anti- 
 quity. His various groups and bas-reliefs of Cupid 
 and Psyche are worthy of the beauty of the story. 
 His chef d'auvrc, 1 think, is a group of three figures, 
 representing the boy "Hylas with the river nymphs." 
 He stands between them with the pitcher in his hand, 
 startled with their touch, and listening to their persua- 
 sions. The smaller of the two female figures is an 
 almost matchless conception of loveliness. Gibson 
 went round with us kindly, and I was delighted with 
 his modesty of manner, and the apparently completely 
 poetical character of his mind. He has a noble head, 
 a lofty forehead well marked, and a mouth of finely 
 mingled strength and mildness. 
 
 We devoted this morning to palaces. At the Pa- 
 lazzo Spada we saw the statue of Pompey, at the 
 I base of which Cesar fell. Antiquaries dispute its 
 j authenticity, but the evidence is quite strong enough 
 for a poetical belief; and if it were not, one's time is 
 not lost, for the statue is a majestic thing, and well 
 worth the long walk necessary to see it. The muti- 
 lated arm, and the hole in the wall behind, remind one 
 of the ludicrous fantasy of the French, who carried it 
 to the Forum to enact " Brutus" at its base. 
 
 The Borghesc Palace is rich in pictures. The por- 
 trait of Cesar Borgia, by Titian, is one of the most 
 striking. It represents that accomplished villain with 
 rather slight features, and, barring a look of cool de- 
 termination about his well-formed lips, with rather a 
 prepossessing countenance. One detects in it the ca- 
 pabilities of such a character as his, after the original 
 is mentioned; but otherwise he might pass for a hand- 
 ■ some gallant, of no more dangerous trait than a fiery 
 temper. Just beyond it is a very strong contrast 
 in a figure of Psyche, by Dossi, of Ferrara. 'She is 
 coming on tiptoe, with the lamp, to see her lover. 
 The Cupid asleep is not so well done; but for an 
 image of a real woman, unexaggerated and lovely, I 
 have seen nothing which pleases me better than this 
 Psyche. Opposite it hangs a very celebrated Titian, 
 representing " Sacred and Profane Love." Two fe- 
 male figures are sitting by a well — one quite nude, 
 with her hair about her shoulders, and the other 
 dressed, and coifled a la mode, but looking less modest 
 to my eye than her undraped sister. It is little won- 
 der, however, that a man who could paint his own 
 daughter in the embraces of a satyr (a revolting picture, 
 which I saw in the Barberigo palace at Venice) should 
 fail in drawing the face of Virtue. The coloring of 
 the picture is exquisite, but the design is certainly a 
 failure. 
 
 The last room in the palace is devoted to Venuses — 
 all very naked and very bad. There might be forty, 
 
66 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 I think, and not a limb among them that one's eye 
 would rest upon with the least pleasure for a single 
 
 moment. 
 
 The society of Rome is of course changing con- 
 tinually. At this particular season, strangers from 
 every part of the continent are beginning to arrive, and 
 it promises to be pleasant. I have been at most of 
 the parties during the fortnight that I have been here, 
 but find them thronged with priests, and with only the 
 resident society, which is dull. Cards and conversa- 
 tion with people one never saw before, and will cer- 
 tainly never see again, are heavy pastimes. I start for 
 Florence to-morrow, and shall return to Rome for 
 Holy Week and the spring months. 
 
 LETTER XL VI. 
 
 ITALIAN AND AMERICAN SKIES — FALLS OF TERNI THE 
 
 CLITUMNUS — THE TEMPLE — EFFECTS OF AN EARTH- 
 QUAKE AT FOLIGNO — LAKE THRASIMENE — JOURNEY 
 
 FROM ROME FLORENCE FLORENTINE SCENERY 
 
 PRINCE FONIATOWSKI — JEROME BONAPARTE AND FAM- 
 ILY — WANT OF A MINISTER IN ITALY. 
 
 I left Rome by the magnificent " Porta del Popo- 
 lo," as the flush of a pearly and spotless Italian sun- 
 rise deepened over Soracte. They are so splendid 
 without clouds — these skies of Italy ! so deep to the 
 eye, so radiantly clear ! Clouds make the glory of an 
 American sky. The "Indian summer" sunsets ex- 
 cepted, our sun goes down in New England, with the 
 extravagance of a theatrical scene. The clouds are 
 massed and heavy, like piles of gold and fire, and day 
 after day, if you observe them, you are literally aston- 
 ished with the brilliant phenomena of the west. Here, 
 for seven months, we have had no rain. The sun has 
 risen faultlessly clear, with the same gray, and silver, 
 and rose teints, succeeding each other as regularly as 
 the colors in a turning prism, and it has set as con- 
 stantly in orange, gold, and purple, with scarce the 
 variation of a painter's pallet, from one day to another. 
 It is really most delightful to live under such heavens 
 as these ; to be depressed never by a gloomy sky, nor 
 ill from a chance exposure to a chill wind, nor out of 
 humor because the rain or damp keeps you a prisoner 
 at home. You feel the delicious climate in a thou- 
 sand ways. It is a positive blessing, and were worth 
 more than a fortune, if it were bought and sold. I 
 would rather be poor in Italy, than rich in any other 
 country in the world. 
 
 We ascended the mountain that shuts in the cam- 
 pagna on the north, and turned, while the horses 
 breathed, to take a last look at Rome. My two friends, 
 the lieutenants, and myself, occupied the interior of 
 the vetturino, in company with a young Roman wo- 
 man, who was making her first journey from home. 
 She was going to see her husband. I pointed out of 
 the window to the distant dome of St. Peter's, rising 
 above the thin smoke hung over the city, and she 
 looked at it with the tears streaming from her large 
 black eyes in torrents. She might have cried because 
 she was going to her husband, but I could not divest 
 myself of the fact that she was a Roman, and leaving 
 a home that could be very romantically wept for. She 
 was a fine specimen of this finest of the races of wo- 
 men — amply proportioned without grossness, and with 
 that certain presence or dignity that rises above man- 
 ners and rank, common to them all. 
 
 We saw beautiful scenery at Narni. The town 
 stands on the edge of a precipice, and the valley, a 
 hundred feet or two below, is coursed by a wild stream, 
 that goes foaming along its bed in a long line of froth 
 for miles away. We dined here, and drove afterward 
 to Terni, where the voiturier stopped for the night, to 
 give us an opportunity to see the Falls. 
 
 We drove to the mountain base, three miles, in an 
 old post barouche, and made the ascent on foot. A 
 line of precipices extends along from the summit, and 
 from the third or fourth of these leaps the Velino, 
 clear into the valley. We saw it in front as we went 
 on, and then followed the road round, till we reached 
 the bed of the river behind. The fountain of Egeria 
 is not more secludedly beautiful than its current above 
 the fall. Trees overhang and meet, and flowers spring 
 in wonderful variety on its banks, and the ripple 
 against the roots is heard amid the roar of the cata- 
 ract, like a sweet, clear voice in a chorus. It is a 
 place in which you half expect to startle a fawn, it 
 looks so unvisited and wild. We wound out through 
 the shrubbery, and gained a projecting point, from 
 which we could see the sheet of the cascade. It is 
 " horribly beautiful," to be sure. Childe Harold's 
 description of it is as true as a drawing. 
 
 I should think the quantity of water at Niagara 
 would make five hundred such falls as those of Ter- 
 ni, without exaggeration. It is a " hell of waters," 
 however, notwithstanding, and leaps over with a cur- 
 rent all turned into foam by the roughness of its bed 
 above — a circumstance that gives the sheet more rich- 
 ness of surface. Two or three lovely little streams 
 steal oft" on either side of the fall, as if they shrunk 
 from the leap, and drop down, from rock to rock, till 
 they are lost in the rising mist. 
 
 The sun set over the little town of Terni, while we 
 stood silently looking down into the gulf, and the wet 
 spray reminded ns that the most romantic people may 
 take cold. We descended to our carriage; and in an 
 hour were sitting around the blazing fire at the post- 
 house, with a motley group of Germans, Swiss, 
 French, and Italians — a mixture of company univer- 
 sal in the public room of an Italian albergo, at night. 
 The coming and going vetturini stop at the same 
 houses throughout, and the concourse is always amu- 
 sing. We sat till the fire burned low, and then wishing 
 our chance friends a happy night, had the "priests"* 
 taken from our beds, and were soon lost to everything 
 but sleep. 
 
 Terni was the Italian Tempe, and its beautiful sce- 
 nery was shown to Cicero, whose excursion hither is 
 recorded. It is part of a long, deep valley, between 
 abrupt ranges of mountains, and abounds in loveliness. 
 
 We went to Spoleto, the next morning, to break- 
 fast. It is a very old town, oddly built, and one of its 
 gates still remains, at which Hannibal was repulsed 
 after his victory at Thrasimene. It bears his name in 
 timeworn letters. 
 
 At the distance of one post from Spoleto we came 
 to the Clitummis, a small stream, still, deep, and glas- 
 sy — the clearest water I ever saw. It looks almost 
 like air. On its bank, facing away from the road, 
 stands the temple, " of small and delicate propor- 
 tion," mentioned so exquisitely by Childe Harold. 
 
 The temple of the Clitumnus might stand in a 
 drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this 
 little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were 
 raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes 
 one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is 
 a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of 
 such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream 
 running still at the base of its facade, just as it did 
 when Cicero and his contemporaries passed it on their 
 visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of 
 Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the high 
 est demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson, 
 " Pass not unblest the genius of the place " 
 was scarce necessai-y.f 
 
 * The name of a wooden trame by which a pot of coals is 
 hung between the sheets of a bed in Italy. 
 
 t As if everything should be poeticaron the shores of the 
 Clitumnus, the beggars ran after us in quartettes, singing a 
 chant, and sustaining the four parts as they ran. Every child 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 07 
 
 We slept at Foligno. For many miles we had ob- 
 served that the houses were propped in every direc- 
 tion, many of them in ruins apparently recent, and 
 small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares, 
 or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The 
 next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its 
 gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chap- 
 els, to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half 
 standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed, 
 and the interior of the dome one mass of stone and 
 rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects 
 of an earthquake. For eight or ten miles further, we 
 found every house cracked and deserted, and the peo- 
 ple living like the settlers in a new country, half in the 
 open air. The beggars were innumerable. 
 
 We stopped the next night on the shores of lake 
 Thrasimene. For once in my life, I felt that the time 
 spent at school on the " dull drilled lesson," had not 
 been wasted. I was on the battle ground of Hannibal 
 — the " locus aptus insidiis" where the consul Fla- 
 minius was snared and beaten by the wily Carthagin- 
 ian on his march to Rome. I longed for my old copy 
 of Livy, "much thumbed," that I might sit on the 
 hill and compare the image in my mind, made by his 
 pithy and sententious description, with the reality. 
 
 The battle ground, the scene of the principal 
 slaughter, was beyond the albergo, and the increasing 
 darkness compelled us to defer a visit to it till the next 
 morning. Meantime the lake was beautiful. We 
 were on the eastern side, and the deep-red sky of a 
 departed sunset over the other shore, was reflected 
 glowingly on the water. All around was dark, but 
 the light in the sky and lake seemed to have forgotten 
 to follow. It is a phenomenon peculiar to Italy. The 
 heavens seem " died - ' and steeped in the glory of the 
 sunset. 
 
 We drank our host's best bottle of wine, the grape 
 plucked from the battle-ground ; and if it was not 
 better for the Roman blood that had manured its an- 
 cestor, it was better for some other reason. 
 
 Early the next morning we were on our way, and 
 wound down into the narrow pass between the lake 
 and the hill, as the sun rose. We crossed the San- 
 guinctto, a little stream which took its name from the 
 battle. The principal slaughter was just on its banks, 
 and the hills are so steep above it, that everybody 
 which fell near must have rolled into its bed. It crawls 
 on very quietly across the road, its clear stream scarce in- 
 terrupted by the wheels of the vetturino, which in cros- 
 sing it, passes from the Roman states into Tuscany. 
 I ran a little up the stream, knelt and drank at a small 
 gurgling fall. The blood of the old Flaminian Co- 
 hort spoiled very delicious water, when it mingled 
 with that brook. 
 
 We were six days and a half accomplishing the hun- 
 dred and eighty miles from Rome to Florence — slow 
 travelling — but not too slow in Italy, where every stone 
 has its story, and every ascent of a hill its twenty 
 matchless pictures, sprinkled with ruins, as a painter's 
 eye could not imagine them. We looked down on the 
 Eden-like valley of the Arno at sunrise, and again my 
 heart leaped to see the tall dome of Florence, and the 
 hills all about the queenly city, sparkling with palaces 
 and bright in a sun that shines nowhere so kindly. If 
 there is a spot in the world that could wean one from 
 his native home, it is Florence ! " Florence the fair," 
 they call her! I have passed four of the seven months 
 I have been in Italy, here — and I think I shall pass 
 here as great a proportion of the rest of my life. 
 There is nothing that can contribute to comfort and 
 pleasure, that is not within the reach of the smallest 
 
 sings well in Italy ; and I have heard worse music in a church 
 anthem, than was made by these half-clothed and homeless 
 wretches, running at full speed by the carriage- wheels. I have 
 never met the same thing elsewhere. 
 
 means in Florence. I never saw a place where wealth 
 made less distinction. The choicest galleries of art in 
 the world, are open to all comers. The palace of the 
 monarch may be entered and visited, and enjoyed by 
 all. The ducal gardens of the Boboli rich in every- 
 thing that can refine nature, and commanding views 
 that no land can equal, cooled by fountains, haunted in 
 every grove by statuary, are the property of the stran- 
 ger and the citizen alike. Museums, laboratories, li- 
 braries, grounds, palaces, are all free as Utopia. You 
 may take any pleasure that others can command, and 
 have any means of instruction, as free as the common 
 air. Where else would one live so pleasantly — so 
 profitably — so wisely ? 
 
 The society of Florence is of a very fascinating de- 
 scription. The Florentine nobles have a casino, or 
 club-house, to which most of the respectable stran- 
 gers are invited, and balls are given there once a week, 
 frequently by the duke and his court, and the best so- 
 ciety of the place. I attended one on my first arrival 
 from Rome, at which I saw a proportion of beauty 
 which astonished me. The female descendants of 
 the great names in Italian history, seem to me to have 
 almost without exception the mark of noble beauty by 
 nature. The loveliest woman in Florence is a Medi- 
 ci. The two daughters of Capponi, the patriot and 
 the descendant of patriots, are of the finest order of 
 beauty. I could instance many others, the mention 
 of whose names, when I have first seen them, has 
 j made my blood start. I think if Italy is ever to be re- 
 I deemed, she must owe it to her daughters. The men, 
 ! the brothers of these women, with very rare excep- 
 | tions, look like the slaves they are, from one end of 
 j Italy to the other. 
 
 One of the most hospitable houses here, is that of 
 I Prince Poniatowski, the brother of the hero of Po- 
 | land. He has a large family, and his soirees are 
 | thronged with all that is fair and distinguished. He is a 
 ! venerable, grayheadedoldman, of perhaps seventy, very 
 fond of speaking English, of which rare acquisition 
 abroad he seems a little vain. He gave me the heartiest 
 welcome as an American, and said he loved the nation. 
 I had the honor of dining, a day or two since, with 
 the ex-king of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte. He 
 lives here with the title of Prince Montfort, confer- 
 red on him by his father-in-law, the king of Wurtem- 
 burg. Americans are well received at this house also; 
 and his queen, as the prince still calls her, can never 
 say enough in praise of the family of Mr. H., cur for- 
 mer secretary of legation at Paris. It is a constantly 
 recurring theme, and ends always with " Taime leau- 
 coup les Atnericains." The prince resembles his 
 brother, but has a milder face, and his mouth is less 
 firm and less beautiful than Napoleon's. His second 
 son is most remarkably like the emperor. He is 
 about ten years of age ; but except his youth, you can 
 detect no difference between his head and the busts of 
 his uncle. He has a daughter of about twelve, and 
 an elder son at the university of Sienna. His family 
 is large, as his queen still keeps up her state, with the 
 ladies of honor and suite. He never goes out, but his 
 house is open every night, and the best society of 
 Florence may be met there almost at the prima sera, 
 or early part of the evening. 
 
 The grand duke is about to be married, and the 
 court is to be unusually gay in the carnival. Our 
 countryman, Mr. Thorn, was presented some time 
 since, and I am to have that honor in two or three 
 days. By the way, we feel exceedingly in Italy the 
 want of a minister. There is no accredited agent of 
 our government in Tuscany, and there are rarely less 
 than three hundred Americans within its dominions. 
 Fortunately the marquis Corsi, the grand chamber- 
 lain of the duke, offers to act in the capacity of an am- 
 bassador, and neglects nothing for our advantage in 
 
68 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 
 
 such matters, but he never fails to express his regret 
 that we should not have some charge d'affaires at his 
 court. We have officers in many parts of the world 
 where they are much less needed. 
 
 LETTER XL VII. 
 
 FLORENCE — GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY — THE GRAND 
 CHAMBERLAIN — PRINCE DE LIGNE — THE AUSTRIAN 
 
 AMBASSADOR — THE MARQUIS TORRIGIANI LEOPOLD 
 
 OF TUSCANY — VIEWS OF THE VAL d'aRNO — SPLEN- 
 DID BALL — TREES OF CANDLES — THE DUKE AND DUTCH- 
 ESS — HIGHBORN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH BEAUTIES, 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 I was presented to the grand duke of Tuscany yes- 
 terday morning, at a private audience. As we have 
 no minister at this court, I drove alone to the ducal 
 palace, and, passing through the body-guard of young 
 nobles, was met at the door of the antechamber by 
 the Marquis Corsi, the grand chamberlain. Around 
 a blazing fire, in this room, stood five or six persons, 
 in splendid uniforms, to whom I was introduced on 
 entering. One was the Prince de Ligne — travelling at 
 present in Italy, and waiting to be presented by the 
 Austrian ambassador — a young and remarkably hand- 
 some man of twenty-five. He showed a knowledge 
 of America, in the course of a half hour's conversa- 
 tion, which rather surprised me, inquiring particularly 
 about the residences and condition of the United 
 States' ministers whom he had met at the various 
 courts of Europe. The Austrian ambassador, an 
 old, wily-looking man, covered with orders, joined in 
 the conversation, and- asked after our former minister 
 at Paris, Mr. Brown, remarking that he had done the 
 United States great credit, during his embassy. He 
 had known Mr. Gallatin also, and spoke highly of him. 
 Mr. Van Buren's election to the vice-presidency, af- 
 ter his recall, seemed greatly to surprise him. 
 
 The prince was summoned to the presence of the 
 duke, and 1 remained some fifteen minutes in conver- 
 sation with a venerable and noble looking man, the 
 Marquis Torrigiani, one of the chamberlains. His 
 eldest son has lately gone upon his travels in the 
 United States, in company with Mr. Thorn, an Amer- 
 ican gentleman living in Florence. He seemed to 
 think the voyage a great undertaking. Torrigiani is 
 one of the oldest of the Florentine nobles, and his fam- 
 ily is in high esteem. 
 
 As the Austrian minister came out, the grand cham- 
 berlain came for me, and I entered the presence of the 
 duke. He was standing quite alone in a small plain 
 room, dressed in a simple white uniform, with a star 
 upon his breast — a slender, pale, scholar-like looking 
 young man, of perhaps thirty years. He received me 
 with a pleasant smile, and crossing his hands behind 
 him, came close to me, and commenced questioning 
 me about America. The departure of young Tor- 
 rigiani for the United States pleased him, and he said 
 he should like to go himself — " but," said he, " a voy- 
 age of three thousand miles and back — comment fair e P" 1 
 and he threw out his hands with a look of mock de- 
 spair that was very expressive. He assured me he felt 
 great pleasure at Mr. Thorn's having taken up his res- 
 idence in Florence. He had sent for his whole fam- 
 ily a few days before, and promised them every atten- 
 tion to their comfort during the absence of Mr. Thorn. 
 He said young Torrigiani was bien inslruit, and would 
 travel to advantage, without doubt. At every pause 
 of his inquiries, he looked me full in the eyes, and 
 seemed anxious to yield me the parole and listen. He 
 bowed with a smile, after I had been with him perhaps 
 half an hour, and I took my leave with all the impres- 
 sions of his character which common report had given 
 
 me, quite confirmed. He is said to be the best mon- 
 arch in Europe, and it is written most expressively in 
 his mild amiable features. 
 
 The duke is very unwilling to marry again, although 
 the crown passes from his family if he die without a 
 male heir. He has two daughters, lovely children, 
 between five and seven, whose mother died not quite 
 a year since. She was unusually beloved, both by 
 her husband and his subjects, and is still talked of by 
 the people, and never without the deepest regret. 
 She was very religious, and is said to have died of a 
 cold taken in doing a severe penance. The duke 
 watched with her day and night, till she died; and I 
 was told by the old chamberlain, that he can not yet 
 speak of her without tears. 
 
 With the new year, the grand duke of Tuscany 
 threw off his mourning. Not from his countenance, 
 for the sadness of that is habitual; but his equipages 
 have laid off their black trappings, his grooms and 
 outriders are in drab and gold, and, more important 
 to us strangers in his capital, the ducal palace is aired 
 with a weekly reception and ball, as splendid and hos- 
 pitable as money and taste can make them. 
 
 Leopold of Tuscany is said to be the richest indi- 
 vidual in Europe. The Palazzo Pitti, in which he 
 lives, seems to confirm it. The exterior is marked 
 with the character of the times in which it was built, 
 and might be that of a fortress — its long, dark front of 
 roughly-hewn stone, with its two slight, out-curving 
 wings, bearing a look of more strength than beauty. 
 The interior is incalculably rich. The suite of halls 
 on the front side is the home of the choicest and most 
 extensive gallery of pictures in the world. The tables 
 of inlaid gems and mosaic, the walls encrusted with 
 relievos, the curious floors, the drapery — all satiate the 
 eye with sumptuousness. It is built against a hill, 
 and I was surprised, on the night of the ball, to find 
 myself alighting from the carriage upon the same floor 
 to which I had mounted from the front by tediously 
 long staircases. The duke thus rides in his carriage 
 to his upper story — an advantage which saves him no 
 little fatigue and exposure. The gardens of the Bo- 
 boli, which cover the hill behind, rise far above the 
 turrets of the palace, and command glorious views of 
 the Val d'Arno. 
 
 The reception hour at the ball was from eight to 
 nine. We were received at the steps on the garden 
 side of the palace, by a crowd of servants, in livery, 
 under the orders of a fat major-domo, and passing 
 through a long gallery, lined with exotics and grena- 
 diers, we arrived at the anteroom, where the duke's 
 body-guard of nobles were drawn up in attendance. 
 The band was playing delightfully in the saloon be- 
 yond. I had arrived late, "having been presented a 
 few days before, and desirous of avoiding the stiffness 
 of the first hour of presentations. The rooms were 
 in a blaze of light from eight trees of candles, cypress- 
 shaped, and reaching from the floor to the ceiling, 
 and the company entirely assembled, crowded them 
 with a dazzling show of jewels, flowers, feathers, and 
 uniforms. 
 
 The duke and the grand dutchess (the widow of the 
 late duke) stood in the centre of the room, and in the 
 pauses of conversation, the different ambassadors pre- 
 sented their countrymen. His highness was dressed 
 in a suit of plain black, probably the worst made 
 clothes in Florence. With his pale, timid face, his 
 bent shoulders, an inexpressibly ill-tied cravat, and 
 rank, untrimmed whiskers, he was the most uncourtly 
 person present. His extreme popularity as a monarch 
 is certainly very independent of his personal address. 
 His mother-in-law is about his own age, with marked 
 features, full of talent, a pale, high forehead, and the 
 bearing altogether of a queen. She wore a small 
 diadem of the purest diamonds, and with her height 
 and her flashing jewels, she was conspicuous from 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 
 
 (v.) 
 
 every part of the room. She is a high catholic, and 
 is said to be bending all her powers upon the re- 
 establishment of the Jesuits in Florence. 
 
 As soon as the presentations were over, the grand 
 duke led out the wife of the English ambassador, and 
 opened the ball with a waltz. He then danced a 
 quadrille with the wife of the French ambassador, and 
 for his next partner selected an American lady — the 
 daughter of Colonel T , of New York. 
 
 The supper rooms were opened early, and among 
 the delicacies of a table loaded with everything rare 
 and luxurious, were a brace or two of pheasants from 
 the duke's estates in Germany. Duly flavored with 
 truffes, and accompanied with Rhine wines, which 
 deserved the conspicuous place given them upon the 
 royal table — and in this letter. 
 
 I hardly dare speak of the degree of beauty in the 
 assembly ; it is so difficult to compare a new impres- 
 sion with an old one, and the thing itself is so in- 
 definite. But there were two persons present whose 
 extreme loveliness, as it i3 not disputed even by ad- 
 miring envy, may be worth describing, for the sake of 
 the comparison. 
 
 The princess S may be twenty-four years of 
 
 age. She is of the middle height, with the slight 
 stoop in her shoulders, which is rather a grace than a 
 fault. Her bust is exquisitely turned, her neck slen- 
 der but full, her arms, hands, and feet, those of a 
 Psyche. Her face is the abstraction of highborn 
 Italian beauty — calm, almost to indifference, of an 
 indescribably glowing paleness — a complexion that 
 would be alabaster if it were not for the richness of 
 the blood beneath, betrayed in lips whose depth of 
 color and fineness of curve seem only too curiously 
 beautiful to be the work of nature. Her eyes are 
 dark and large, and must have had an indolent ex- 
 pression in her childhood, but are now the very seat 
 and soul of feeling. A constant trace of pain mars 
 the beauty of her forehead. She dresses her hair 
 with a kind of characteristic departure from the mode, 
 parting its glossy flakes on her brow with nymph-like 
 simplicity, a peculiarity which one regrets not to see 
 in the too Parisian dress of her person. In her man- 
 ner she is strikingly elegant, but without being absent, 
 she seems to give an unconscious attention to what is 
 about her, and to be gracious and winning without 
 knowing or intending it, merely because she could not 
 listen or speak otherwise. Her voice is sweet, and, in 
 her own Italian, mellow and soft to a degree incon- 
 ceivable by those who have not heard this delicious 
 language spoken in its native land. With all these 
 advantages, and a look of pride that nothing could 
 insult, there is an expression in her beautiful face that 
 reminds you of her sex and its temptations, and pre- 
 pares you fully for the history which you may hear 
 from the first woman that stands at your elbow. 
 
 The other is that English girl of seventeen, shrink- 
 ing timidly from the crowd, and leaning with her 
 hands clasped over her father's arm, apparently listen- 
 ing only to the waltz, and unconscious that every eye 
 is fixed upon her in admiration. She has lived all her 
 life in Italy, but has been bred by an English mother, 
 in a retired villa of the Val d'Arno— her character 
 and feelings are those of her race, and nothing of 
 Italy about her, but the glow of its sunny clime in 
 the else spotless snow of her complexion, and an 
 enthusiasm in her downcast eye that you may account 
 for as you will— it is not English ! Her form has 
 just ripened into womanhood. The bust still wants 
 fulness, and the step confidence. Her forehead is 
 rather too intellectual to be maidenly ; but the droop 
 of her singularly long eye-lashes over eyes that elude 
 the most guarded glance of your own, and the modest 
 expression of her lips closed but not pressed together, 
 redeem her from any look of conscious superiority, 
 and convince you that she only seeks to be unob- 
 
 served. A single ringlet of golden brown hair falls 
 nearly to her shoulder, catching the light upon its 
 glossy curves with an effect that would enchant a 
 painter. Lilies of the valley, the first of the season, 
 are in her bosom and her hair, and she might be the 
 personification of the flower for delicacy and beauty. 
 You are only disappointed in talking with her. She 
 expresses herself with a nerve and self-command 
 which, from a slight glance, you did not anticipate. 
 She shrinks from the general eye, but in conversation 
 she is the high-minded woman more than the timid 
 child for which her manner seems to mark her. In 
 either light, she is the very presence of purity. She 
 stands by the side of her not less beautiful rival, like 
 a Madonna by a Magdalen — both seem not at home 
 in the world, but only one could have dropped from 
 heaven. 
 
 LETTER XL VIII. 
 
 VALLOMBROSA — ITALIAN OXEN — CONVENT — SERVICE IN 
 THE CHAPEL — HOUSE OCCUPIED BY MILTON. 
 
 I left Florence for Vallombrosa at daylight on a 
 warm summer's morning, in company with four ladies. 
 We drove along the northern bank of the Arno for four 
 or five miles, passing several beautiful villas, belonging 
 to the Florentine nobles; and, crossing the river by a 
 picturesque bridge, took the road to the village of Pe- 
 lago, which lies at the foot of the mountain, and is 
 the farthest point to which a carriage can mount. It 
 is about fourteen miles from Florence, and the ascent 
 thence to the convent is nearly three. 
 
 We alighted in the centre of the village, in the 
 midst of a ragged troop of women and children, 
 among whom were two idiot beggars ; and, while the 
 preparations were making for our ascent, we took 
 chairs in the open square around a basket of cherries, 
 and made a delicious luncheon of fruit and bread, 
 very much to the astonishment of some two hundred 
 spectators. 
 
 Our conveyances appeared in the course of half an 
 hour, consisting of two large baskets, each drawn by a 
 pair of oxen and containing two persons, andasmall Sar- 
 dinian pony. The ladies seated themselves with some 
 hesitation in their singular sledges; I mounted the 
 pony, and we made a dusty exit from Pelago, attended 
 to the gate by our gaping friends, who bowed, and 
 wished us the bon viaggio with more gratitude than 
 three Tuscan crazie would buy, I am sure, in any other 
 part of the world. 
 
 The gray oxen of Italy are quite a different race 
 from ours, much lighter and quicker, and in a small 
 vehicle they will trot off five or six miles in the hour 
 as freely as a horse. They are exceedingly beautiful. 
 The hide is very fine, of a soft squirrel gray, and as 
 sleek and polished often as that of a well-groomed 
 courser. With their large, bright, intelligent eyes, 
 high-lifted heads, and open nostrils, they are among 
 the finest-looking animals in the world in motion. We 
 soon came to the steep path, and the facility with 
 which our singular equipages mounted was surprising. 
 I followed, as well as I could, on my diminutive pony, 
 my feet touching the ground, and my balance con- 
 stantly endangered by the contact of stumps and 
 stones — the hard-mouthed little creature taking his 
 own way, in spite of every effort of mine to the con- 
 trary. 
 
 We stopped to breathe in a deep, cool glen, which 
 lay across our path, the descent into which was very 
 difficult. The road through the bottom of it ran just 
 above the bank of a brook, into which poured a pretty 
 fall of eight or ten feet, and with the spray-wet grass 
 beneath, and the full-leaved chestnuts above, it was as 
 
70 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 delicious a spot for a rest in a summer noontide as I 
 ever saw. The ladies took out their pencils and 
 sketched it, making a group themselves the while, 
 which added all the picture wanted. 
 
 The path wound continually about in the deep 
 woods, with which the mountain is covered, and occa- 
 sionally from an opening we obtained a view back up- 
 on the valley of the Arno, which was exceedingly fine. 
 We came in sight of the convent in about two hours, 
 emerging from the shade of the thick chestnuts into 
 a cultivated lawn, fenced and mown with the nicety of 
 the grass-plot before a cottage, and entering upon a 
 smooth, well-swept pavement, approached the gate of 
 the venerable-looking pile, as anxious for the refresh- 
 ment of its far-famed hospitality as ever pilgrims 
 were. 
 
 An old cheerful-looking monk came out to meet us, 
 and shaking hands with the ladies very cordially, as- 
 sisted in extracting them from their cramped convey- 
 ances. He then led the way to a small stone cottage, 
 a little removed from the convent, quoting gravely by 
 the way the law of the order against the entrance of 
 females over the monastic threshold. We were ush- 
 ered into a small, neat parlor, with two bedrooms 
 communicating, and two of the servants of the monas- 
 tery followed, with water and show-white napkins, the 
 -padre degli forestieri, as they called the old monk, 
 who received us, talking most volubly all the while. 
 
 The cook appeared presently with a low reverence, 
 and asked what we would like for dinner. He ran 
 over the contents of the larder before we had time to 
 answer his question, enumerating half a dozen kinds 
 of game, and a variety altogether that rather surprised 
 our ideas of monastical seventy. His own rosy gills 
 bore testimony that it was not the kitchen of Dennis 
 Bul-iruddery. 
 
 While dinner was preparing, Father Gasparo pro- 
 posed a walk. An avenue of the most majestic trees 
 opened immediately away from the little lawn before 
 the cottage door. We followed it perhaps half a mile 
 round the mountain, thridding a thick pine forest, till 
 we emerged on the edge of a shelf of greensward, 
 running just under the summit of the hill. From 
 this spot the view was limited only by the power of the 
 eye. The silver line of the Mediterranean oft* Leg- 
 horn is seen hence on a clear day, between which and 
 the mountain lie sixty or seventy miles, wound into 
 the loveliest undulations by the course of the Arno. 
 The vale of this beautiful river, in which Florence 
 stands, was just distinguishable as a mere dell in the 
 prospect. It was one of the sultriest days of August, 
 but the air was vividly fresh, and the sun, with all the 
 strength of the climate of Italy, was unoppressive. 
 We seated ourselves on the small fine grass of the hill- 
 side, and with the good old monk narrating passages 
 of his life, enjoyed the glorious scene till the cook's 
 messenger summoned us back to dinner. 
 
 We were waited upon at table by two young servi- 
 tors of the convent, with shaven crowns and long black 
 cassocks, under the direction of Father Gasparo, who 
 sat at a little distance, entertaining us with his inex- 
 haustible stories till the bell rung for the convent sup- 
 per. The dinner would have graced the table of an 
 emperor. Soup, beef, cutlets, ducks, woodcock, fol- 
 lowed each other, cooked in the most approved man- 
 ner, with all the accompaniments established by taste 
 and usage ; and better wine, white and red, never was 
 pressed from the Tuscan grape. The dessert was va- 
 rious and plentiful ; and while we were sitting, after 
 the good father's departure, wondering at the luxuries 
 we had found on a mountain-top, strong coftee and 
 liqueurs were set before us, both of the finest flavor. 
 
 I was to sleep myself in the convent. Father Gas- 
 paro joined us upon the wooden bench in the avenue, 
 where we were enjoying a brilliant sunset, and inform- 
 ed me that the ga'es shut at eight. The vesper-bell 
 
 soon rung, echoing round from the rocks, and I bade 
 my four companions good night, and followed the 
 monk to the cloisters. As we entered the postern, he 
 asked me whether I would go directly to the cell, or 
 attend first the service in the chapel, assisting my de- 
 cision at the same time by gently slipping his arm 
 through mine and drawing me toward the cloth door, 
 from which a strong peal of the organ was issuing. 
 
 We lifted the suspended curtain, and entered I 
 chapel so dimly lit, that I could only judge of its ex 
 tent from the reverberations of the music. The lamps 
 were all in the choir, behind the altar, and the shuf- 
 fling footsteps of the gathering monks approached it 
 from every quarter. Father Gasparo led me to the 
 base of a pillar, and telling me to kneel, left me and 
 entered the choir, where he was lost in the depth of 
 one of the old richly-carved seats for a few minutes, 
 appearing again with thirty or forty others, who rose 
 and joined in the chorus of the chant, making the 
 hollow roof ring with the deep unmingled base of then- 
 voices. 
 
 I stood till I was chilled, listening to the service, 
 and looking at the loug line of monks rising and sit- 
 ting, with their monotonous changes of books and 
 positions, and not knowing which way to go for warmth 
 or retirement. I wandered up and down the dim 
 church during the remaining hour, an unwilling, but 
 not altogether an unamused spectator of the scene. 
 The performers of the service, with the exception of 
 Father Gasparo, were young men of from sixteen to 
 twenty ; but during my slow turns to and fro on the 
 pavement of the church, fifteen or twenty old monks 
 entered, and, with a bend of the knee before the altar, 
 went off into the obscure corners, and knelt motionless 
 at prayer, for almost an hour. I could just distin- 
 guish the dark outline of their figures when my eye 
 became accustomed to the imperfect light, and 1 nev 
 er saw a finer spectacle of religious devotion. 
 
 The convent clock struck ten, and shutting up their 
 " clasped missals," the young monks took their cloaks 
 about them, bent their knees in passing the altar, and 
 disappeared by different doors. Father Gasparo was 
 the last to depart, and our footsteps echoed as we 
 passed through the long cloisters to the cell appropri- 
 ated for me. We opened one of some twenty small 
 doors, and I was agreeably surprised to find a supper 
 of cold game upon the table, with a bottle of wine, 
 and two plates — the monk intending to give me his 
 company at supper. The cell was hung round with 
 bad engravings of the virgin, the death of martyrs, 
 crosses, &c, and a small oaken desk stood against the 
 wall beneath a large crucifix, with a prayer-book upon 
 it. The bed was high, ample, and spotlessly white, 
 and relieved the otherwise comfortless look of a stone 
 floor and white-washed walls. I felt the change from 
 summer heat to the keen mountain air, and as I shiv- 
 ered and buttoned my coat, my gay guest threw over 
 me his heavy black cowl of cloth — a dress that, with 
 its closeness and numerous folds, would keep one 
 warm in Siberia. Adding to it his little black scull- 
 cap, he told me, with a hearty laugh, that but for a 
 certain absence of sanctity in the expression of my 
 face, and the uncanonical length of my hair, I looked 
 the monk complete. We had a merry supper. The 
 wine was of a choicer vintage than that we had drank 
 at dinner, and the father answered, upon my discovery 
 of its merits, that he never tvasted it upon women. 
 
 In the course of the conversation, I found out that 
 my entertainer was a kind of butler, or heard-servitor 
 of the convent, and that the great body of the monks 
 were of noble lineage. The feeling of pride still re- 
 mains among them from the days when the Certosa of 
 Vallombrosa was a residence for princes, before its 
 splendid pictures were pillaged by a foreign army, its 
 wealth scattered, and its numbers demolished. "In 
 those days," said the monk, "we received nothing for 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 71 
 
 our hospitality but the pleasure it gave us" — relieving 
 my mind, by the remark, of what I looked forward to 
 at parting as a delicate point. 
 
 My host left me at midnight, and I went to bed, and 
 slept under a thick covering in an Italian August. 
 " The blanched linen, white and lavendered," seemed 
 to have a peculiar charm, for though I had promised 
 to meet my excluded companions at sunrise, on the 
 top of the mountain, I slept soundly till nine, and was 
 obliged to breakfast alone in the refectory of the con- 
 vent. 
 
 We were to dine at three, and start for Florence at 
 four the next day, and we spent our morning in trav- 
 ersing the mountain paths, and getting views on ev- 
 ery side. Fifty or a hundred feet above the convent, 
 perched on a rock like an eyry, stands a small build- 
 ing in which Milton is supposed to have lived, during 
 his six weeks sojourn at the convent. It is now fitted 
 up as a nest of small chapels — every one of its six or 
 eight little chambers having an altar. The ladies were 
 not permitted to enter it. I selected the room I pre- 
 sumed the poet must have chosen — the only one com- 
 manding the immense view to the west, and, looking 
 from the window, could easily feel the truth of his 
 simile, "thick as leaves in Vallombrosa." It is a 
 mountain of foliage. 
 
 Another sumptuous dinner was served, Father Gas- 
 paro sitting by, even more voluble than before, the 
 baskets and the pony were brought to the door, and 
 we bade farewell to the old monk with more regret 
 than a day's acquaintance often produces. We reach- 
 ed our carriage in an hour, and were in Florence at 
 eight — having passed, by unanimous opinion, the two 
 brightest days in our calendar of travel. 
 
 LETTER XLIX. 
 
 HOUSE OF MICHAEL ANGELO — THE ANCIENT CHURCH 
 OF SAN MINIATO — MADAME CATALANI — WALTER 
 RAVAGE LANDOR — MIDNIGHT MASS, ETC. 
 
 I went with a party this morning to visit the house 
 of Michael Angelo. It stands as he lived in it, in the 
 Via Ghibellini, and is still in possession of his de- 
 scendants. It is a neat building of three stories, 
 divided on the second floor into three rooms, shown as 
 those occupied by the painter, sculptor, and poet. 
 The first is panelled and painted by his scholars after 
 his death — each picture representing some incident of 
 his life. There are ten or twelve of these, and several 
 of them are highly beautiful. One near the window 
 represents him in his old age on a visit to " Lorenzo 
 the Magnificent," who commands him to sit in his 
 presence. The duke is standing before his chair, and 
 the figure of the old man is finely expressive. 
 
 The next room appears to have been his parlor, and 
 the furniture is exactly as it stood when he died. In 
 one corner is placed a bust of him in his youth, with 
 nis face perfect ; and opposite, another, taken from a 
 cast after his nose was broken by a fellow painter in 
 the church of the Carmine. There are also one or 
 two portraits of him, and the resemblance through 
 them all shows that the likenesses we have of him in 
 the engravings are uncommonly correct. 
 
 In the inner room, which was his studio, they show 
 his pallet, brushes, pots, maul-sticks, slippers, and 
 easel — all standing carelessly in the little closets 
 around, as if he had left them but yesterday. The 
 walls are painted in fresco, by Angelo himself, and 
 represent groups of all the distinguished philosophers, 
 poets and statesmen of his time. Among them are 
 the heads of Petrarch, Dante, Galileo, and Lorenzo 
 de Medici. It is a noble gallery ! perhaps a hundred 
 heads in all. 
 
 The descendant of Buonarotti is now an old man, 
 and fortunately rich enough to preserve the house of 
 his great ancestor as an object of curiosity. He has 
 a son, I believe, studying the arts at Rome. 
 
 On a beautiful hill which ascends directly from one 
 of the southern gates of Florence, stands a church 
 built so Ions; ago as at the close of the first century. 
 The gate, church, and hill, are all called San Miniato, 
 after a saint buried under the church pavement. A 
 large, and at present flourishing convent, hangs on 
 the side of the hill below, and around the church 
 stand the walls of a strong fortress, built by Michael 
 Angelo. A half mile or more south, across a valley, 
 an old tower rises against the sky, which was erected 
 for the observations of Galileo. A mile to the left, on 
 the same ridge, an old villa is to be seen in which 
 Boccaccio wrote most of his "Hundred Talesof Love." 
 The Arno comes down from Vallombrosa, and pas- 
 sing through Florence at the foot of San Miniato, is 
 seen for three miles further on its way to Pisa ; the 
 hill, tower, and convent of Fiesole, where Milton 
 studied and Catiline encamped with his conspirators, 
 rise from the opposite bank of the river ; and right 
 below, as if you could leap into the lantern of the 
 dome, nestles the lovely city of Florence, in the lap 
 of the very brightest vale that ever mountain shel- 
 tered or river ran through. Such are the temptations 
 to a walk in Italy, and add to it the charms of the 
 climate, and you may understand one of a hundred 
 reasons why it is the land of poetry and romance, and 
 why it so easily becomes the land of a stranger's 
 affection. 
 
 The villas which sparkle all over the hills which 
 lean unto Florence, are occupied mainly by foreigners 
 living here for health or luxury, and most of them are 
 known and visited by the floating society of the place. 
 Among them are Madame Catalani, the celebrated 
 singer, who occupies a beautiful palace on the ascent 
 of Fiesole, and Walter Savage Landor, the author 
 of the " Imaginary Conversations," as refined a scholar 
 perhaps as is now living, who is her near neighbor. 
 A pleasant family of my acquaintance lives just back 
 of the fortress of San Miniato, and in walking out to 
 them with a friend yesterday, I visited the church 
 again, and remarked more particularly the features of 
 the scene I have described. 
 
 The church of San Miniato was built by Henry I. 
 of Germany, and Cunegonde his wife. The front is 
 pretty — a kind of mixture of Greek and Arabic archi- 
 tecture, crusted with marble. The interior is in the 
 style of the primitive churches, the altar standing in 
 what was called the presbijtery, a high platform occu- 
 pying a third of the nave, with two splendid flights of 
 stairs of the purest white marble. The most curious 
 part of it is the rotunde in the rear, which is lit by 
 five windows of transparent oriental alabaster, each 
 eic;ht or nine feet high and three broad, in single slabs. 
 The sun shone full on one of them while we were 
 there, and the effect was inconceivably rich. It was 
 like a sheet of half molten gold and silver. The 
 transparency of course was irregular, but in the yel- 
 low spots of the stone the light came through like 
 the effect of deeply stained glass. 
 
 A partly subterranean chapel, six or eight feet lower 
 than the pavement of the church, extends under the 
 presbytery. It is a labyrinth of marble columns 
 which support the platform above, no two of which 
 are alike. The ancient cathedral of Modena is the 
 only church 1 have seen in Italy built in the same 
 manner. 
 
 The midnight mass on " Christmas eve," is abused 
 in all catholic countries, I believe, as a kind of satur- 
 nalia of gallantry. I joined a party of young men 
 who were leaving a ball for the church of the An- 
 
72 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 nunciata, the fashionable rendezvous, and we were set 
 down at the portico when the mass was about half 
 over. The entrances of the open vestibule were 
 thronged to suffocation. People of all ages and con- 
 ditions were crowding in and out, and the sound of 
 the distant chant at the altar came to our ears as we 
 entered, mingled with every tone of address and reply 
 from the crowd about us. The body of the church 
 was quite obscured with the smoke of the incense. 
 We edged our way on through the press, carried 
 about in the open area of the church by every tide 
 that rushed in from the various doors, till we stopped 
 in a thick eddy in the centre, almost unable to stir a 
 limb. I could see the altar very clearly from this 
 point, and I contented myself with merely observing 
 what was about me, leaving my motions to the im- 
 pulse of the crowd. 
 
 It was a curiously mingled scene. The ceremonies 
 of the altar were going on in all their mysterious 
 splendor. The waving of censers, the kneeling and 
 rising of the gorgeously clad priests, accompanied 
 simultaneously by the pealing of solemn music from 
 the different organs — the countless lights burning 
 upon the altar, and, ranged within the paling, a semi- 
 circle of the duke's grenadiers, standing motionless, 
 with their arms presented, while the sentinel paced to 
 and fro, and all kneeling, and grounding arms at the 
 tinkle of the slight bell — were the materials for the 
 back-ground of the picture. In the immense area of 
 the church stood perhaps, four thousand people, one 
 third of whom, doubtless, came to worship. Those 
 who did and those who did not, dropped alike upon 
 the marble pavement at the sound of the bell ; and 
 then, as I was heretic enough to stand, I had full 
 opportunity for observing both devotion and intrigue. 
 The latter was amusingly managed. Almost air the 
 pretty and young women were accompanied by an 
 ostensible duenna, and the methods of eluding their 
 vigilance in communication were various. I had 
 detected under a blond wig, in entering, the young 
 ambassador of a foreign court, who being cavaliere ser- 
 vente to one of the most beautiful women in Florence, 
 certainly had no right to the amusement of the hour. 
 We had been carried up the church in the same tide, 
 and when the whole crowd were prostrate, I found 
 him just beyond me, slipping a card into the shoe of 
 an uncommonly pretty girl kneeling before him. She 
 was attended by both father and mother apparently, 
 but as she gave no sign of surprise, except stealing an 
 almost imperceptible glance behind her, I presumed 
 she was not offended. I passed an hour, perhaps, in 
 amused observation of similar matters, most of which 
 could not be well described on paper. It is enough 
 to say, that I do not think more dissolute circum- 
 stances accompanied the worship of Venus in the 
 most defiled of heathen temples. 
 
 LETTER L. 
 
 FLORENCE — VISIT TO THE CHURCH OF SAN GAETANO — 
 
 PENITENTIAL PROCESSIONS THE REFUGEE CARLISTS 
 
 — THE MIRACLE OF RAIN — CHURCH OF THE ANNUNCI- 
 ATA — TOMB OF GIOVANNI DI BOLOGNA — MASTER- 
 PIECE OF ANDREA DEL SARTO, ETC., ETC. 
 
 I heard the best passage of the opera of " Romeo 
 and Juliet" delightfully played in the church of San 
 Gattano this morning. I was coming from the cafe, 
 where I had been breakfasting, when the sound of the 
 organ drew me in. The communion was administering 
 at one of the side chapels, the showy Sunday mass 
 was going on at the great altar, and the numerous con- 
 fession boxes were full of penitents, all female, as usual. 
 As I took a seat near the communicants, the sacred 
 
 wafer was dipped into the cup and put into the mouth 
 of a young woman kneeling before the railing. She 
 rose soon after, and I was not lightly surprised to find 
 it was a certain errand-girl of a bachelor's washerwo- 
 man, as unfit a person for the holy sacrament as wears 
 a petticoat in Florence. 
 
 I was drawn by the agreeable odor of the incense to 
 the paling of the high altar. The censers were flung 
 by unseen hands from the doors of the sacristy at the 
 sides, and an unseen chorus of boys in the choir be- 
 hind broke in occasionally with the high-keyed chant 
 that echoes with its wild melody from every arch and 
 corner of these immense churches. It seems running 
 upon the highest note that the ear can bear, and yet 
 nothing could be more musical. A man knelt on the 
 pavement near me, with two coarse baskets beside 
 him, and the traces of long and dirty travel from his 
 heels to his hips. He had stopped in to the mass 
 probably on his way to market. There can be no 
 greater contrast than that seen in catholic churches, 
 between the splendor of architecture, renowned pic- 
 tures, statues and ornaments of silver and gold, and 
 the crowd of tattered, famished, misery-marked, wor- 
 shippers that throng them. I wonder it never occurs 
 to them, that the costly pavement upon which they 
 kneel might feed and clothe them.* 
 
 Penitential processions are to be met all over Flor- 
 ence to-day, on account of the uncommon degree of 
 sickness. One of them passed under my window just 
 now. They are composed of people of all classes, 
 upon whom it is inflicted as a penance by the priests. 
 A white robe covers them entirely, even the face, and, 
 with their eyes glaring through the two holes made 
 for that purpose, they look like processions of shroud- 
 ed corpses. Eight of the first carry burning candles 
 of six feet in length, and a company in the rear have 
 the church books, from which they chant, the whole 
 procession joining in a melancholy chorus of three 
 notes. It rains hard to-day, and their white dresses 
 cling to them with a ludicrously ungraceful effect. 
 
 Florence is an unhealthful climate in the winter. 
 The tramontane winds come down from the Appenines 
 so sharply, that delicate constitutions, particularly 
 those liable to pulmonary complaints, suffer invariably. 
 There has been a dismal mortality among the Italians. 
 The Marquis Corsi, who presented me at court a 
 week ago (the last day he was out, and the last duty 
 he performed), lies in state, at this moment, in the 
 church of Santa Trinita, and another of the duke's 
 counsellors of state died a few days before. His prime 
 minister, Fossombroni, is dangerously ill also, and all 
 of the same complaint, the mal di petto, as it is called, 
 or disease of the lungs. Corsi is a great loss to Amer- 
 icans. He was the grand chamberlain of court, 
 wealthy and hospitable, and took particular pride in 
 fulfilling the functions of an American ambassador. 
 He was a courtier of the old school, accomplished, 
 elegant, and possessed of universal information. 
 
 The refugee Garlists are celebrating to-day, in the 
 church of Santa Maria Novella, the anniversary of the 
 death of Louis XVI. The bishop of Strasbourg is 
 here, and is performing high mass for the soul of the 
 " martyr," as they term him. Italy is full of the more 
 aristocratic families of France, and it has become 
 mauvais ton in society to advocate the present govern- 
 ment of France, or even its principles. They detest 
 Louis Philippe with the virulence of a deadly private 
 enmity, and declare universally, that they will exile 
 themselves till they can return to overthrow him. 
 Among the refugees are great numbers of young men, 
 
 * The Tuscans, who are the best governed people in Italy, 
 pay twenty per cent, of their property in taxes — paying the 
 whole value of their estates, of course, in five years. The 
 extortions of the priests, added to this, are sufficiently bur- 
 densome 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 T.i 
 
 who are sent away from home with a chivalrous devo- 
 tion to the cause of the Dutchess of Berri, which they 
 avow so constantly in the circles of Italian society, that 
 she seems the exclusive heroine of the day. There 
 was nothing seen of the French exquisites in Florence 
 for a week after she was taken. They were in mourn- 
 ing for the misfortune of their mistress. 
 
 All Florence is ringing with the miracle. The city 
 fountains have for some days been dry, and the whole 
 country was suffering for rain. The day before (he 
 moon changed, the processions began, and the day af- 
 ter, when the sky was full of clouds, the holy picture 
 in the church of the Annunciata, "painted by St. 
 Luke himself," was solemnly uncovered. The re- 
 sult was the present miracle of rain, and the priests 
 are preaching upon it from every pulpit. The padrone 
 of my lodgings came in this morning, and told me the 
 circumstances with the most serious astonishment. 
 
 I joined the crowd this morning, who are still 
 thronging up the via de Serti to the church of the 
 Annunciata at all hours of the day. The square in 
 front of the church was like a fair — every nook occu- 
 pied with the little booths of the sellers of rosaries, 
 6aint's books, and pictures. We were assailed by a 
 troop of pedlars at the door, holding leaden medals 
 and crucifixes, and crying, at the top of their voices, 
 for fidele Christiani to spend a crazie for the love of 
 God. 
 
 After crowding up the long cloister with a hundred 
 or two of wretches, steaming from the rain, and fresh 
 from every filthy occupation in the city, we were 
 pushed under the suspended leather door, and reached 
 the nave of the church. In the slow progress we 
 made toward the altar, I had full opportunity to study 
 the fretted-gold ceiling above me, the masterly pic- 
 tures in the side chapels, the statuary, carving, and 
 general architecture. Description can give you no 
 idea of the waste of splendor in these places. 
 
 I stood at last within sight of the miraculous pic- 
 ture. It is painted in fresco above an altar surrounded 
 with a paling of bronze and marble projecting into the 
 body of the church. Eight or ten massive silver 
 lamps, each one presented by some trade in Florence, 
 hung from the roof of the chapel, burning with a 
 dusky glare in the daylight. A grenadier, with cap 
 and musket, stood on each side of the bronze gate, re- 
 pressing the eager rush of the crowd. Within, at the 
 side of the altar, stood the officiating priest, a man 
 with a look of intellect and nobleness on his fine fea- 
 tures and lofty forehead, that seemed irreconcilable 
 with the folly he was performing. The devotees came 
 in, one by one, as they were admitted by the sentinel, 
 knelt, offered their rosary to the priest, who touched 
 it to the frame of the picture with one hand, and re- 
 ceived their money with the other, and then crossing 
 themselves, and pressing the beads to their bosom, 
 passed out at the small door leading into the cloisters. 
 
 As the only chance of seeing the picture, I bought 
 a rosary for two crazie (about three cents), and pressed 
 into the throng. In a half hour it came to my turn 
 to pass the guard. The priest took my silver paul, 
 and while he touched the beads to the picture, I had 
 a moment to look at it nearly. I could see nothing 
 but a confused mass of black paint, with an indistinct 
 outline of the head of a Madonna in the centre. The 
 large spiked rays of glory standing out from every side 
 were all I could see in the imperfect light. The rich- 
 ness of the chapel itself, however, was better worth the 
 trouble to see. It is quite encrusted with silver. Sil- 
 ver bas.si relievi, two silver candelabra, six feet in 
 height, two very large silver statues of angels, a ciborio 
 (enclosing a most exquisite head of our Savior by An- 
 drea del Sarto), a massive silver cornice sustaining a 
 heavily folded silver curtain, and silver lilies and lamps 
 
 in any quantity all around. I wonder, after the plun- 
 dering of the church of San Antonio, at Padua, that 
 these useless riches escaped Napoleon. 
 
 How some of the priests, who are really learned and 
 clever men, can lend themselves to such barefaced im- 
 posture as this miracle, it is difficult to conceive. The 
 picture has been kept as a doer of these miracles, per- 
 haps for a century. It is never uncovered in vain. Su- 
 pernatural results are certain to follow, and it is done 
 as often as they dare make a fresh draught on the 
 credulity and money of the people. The story is as 
 follows: "A certain Bartolomeo, while painting a 
 fresco of the annunciation, being at a loss how to make 
 the countenance of the Madonna properly seraphic, 
 fell asleep while pondering over his work ; and, on 
 waking, found it executed in a style he was unable to 
 equal." I can only say that St. Luke, or the angel, 
 or whoever did it, was a very indifferent draughtsman. 
 It is ill drawn, and whatever the colors might have been 
 upon the pallet of the sleepy painter, they were not 
 made immortal by angelic use. It is a mass of con- 
 fused black. 
 
 I was glad to get away from the crowd and their 
 mummery, and pay a new tribute of reverence at the 
 tomb of Giovanni di Bologna. He is buried behind 
 the grand altar, in a chapel ornamented at his own ex- 
 pense, and with his owe inimitable works. Six bas- 
 reliefs in bronze, than which life itself is not more nat- 
 ural, represent different passages of our Savior's histo 
 ry. They were done for the grand duke, who, at the 
 death of the artist, liberally gave them to ornament his 
 tomb. After the authors of the Venus and the Apollo 
 Belvidere, John of Bologna is, in my judgment, the 
 greatest of sculptors. His mounting Mercury, in the 
 Florence gallery, might have been a theft from heaven 
 for its divine beauty. 
 
 In passing out by the cloisters of the adjoining con- 
 vent, I stopped a moment to see the fresco of the Ma- 
 donna del Sacco, said to have been the masterpiece 
 of Andrea del Sarto. Michael Angelo and Kaphael 
 are said to have " gazed at it unceasingly." It is 
 much defaced, and preserves only its graceful drawing. 
 The countenance of Mary has the beau reste of singu- 
 lar loveliness. The models of this delightful artist 
 (who, by the way, is buried in the vestibule of this 
 same church), must have been the most beautiful in 
 the world. All his pictures move the heart. 
 
 LETTER LI. 
 
 FLORENTINE PECULIARITIES SOCIETY BALLS DU- 
 CAL ENTERTAINMENTS PRIVILEGE OF STRANGERS 
 
 FAMILIES OF HIGH RANK THE EXCLUSIVES 
 
 SOIREES PARTIES OF A RICH BANKER PEASANT 
 
 BEAUTY VISITERS OF A BARONESS AWKWARD DE- 
 PORTMENT OF A PRINCE A CONTENTED MARRIED 
 
 LADY HUSBANDS, CAVALIERS, AND WIVES PER- 
 SONAL MANNERS HABITS OF SOCIETY, ETC. 
 
 I am about starting on my second visit to Rome, 
 after having passed nearly three months in Florence. 
 As I have seen most of the society of this gayest and 
 fairest of the Italian cities, it may not be uninteresting 
 to depart a little from the traveller's routine by sketch- 
 ing a feature or two. 
 
 Florence is a resort for strangers from every part, of 
 the world. The gay society is a mixture of all na- 
 tions, of whom one third may be Florentine, one 
 third English, and the remaining part equally divided 
 between Russians, Germans, French, Poles, and Amer- 
 icans. The English entertain a great deal, and give 
 most of the balls and dinner parties. The Floren- 
 
74 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 tines seldom trouble themselves to give parties, but 
 are always at home for visits in the prima sera (from 
 seven till nine), and in their box at the opera. They 
 go, without scruple, to all the strangers' balls, consid- 
 ering courtesy repaid, perhaps, by the weekly recep- 
 tion of the grand duke, and a weekly ball at the club- 
 house of young Italian nobles. 
 
 The ducal entertainments occur every Tuesday, 
 and are the most splendid of course. The foreign 
 ministers present all of their countrymen who have 
 been presented at their own courts, and the company 
 is necessarily more select than elsewhere. The Flor- 
 entines who go to court are about seven hundred, of 
 whom half are invited on each week — strangers, when 
 once presented, having the double privilege of coming 
 uninvited to all. There are several Italian families, 
 of the highest rank, who are seen only here ; but, 
 with the single exception of one unmarried girl, of 
 uncommon beauty, who bears a. name celebrated in 
 Italian history, they are no loss to general society. 
 Among the foreigners of rank, are three or four Ger- 
 man princes, who play high and waltz well, and are 
 remarkable for nothing else ; half a dozen star-wear- 
 ing dukes, counts, and marquises, of all nations and in 
 any quantity, and a few English noblemen and noble 
 ladies — only the latter nation showing their blood at 
 all in their features and bearing. 
 
 The most exclusive society is that of the Prince 
 Montfort (Jerome Bonaparte), whose splendid palace 
 is shut entirely against the English, and difficult of 
 access to all. He makes a single exception in favor 
 of a descendant of the Talbots, a lady whose beauty 
 might be an apology for a much graver departure 
 from rule. He has given two grand entertainments 
 since the carnival commenced, to which nothing was 
 wanting but people to enjoy them. The immense 
 rooms were flooded with light, the nmsic was the best 
 Florence could give, the supper might have supped 
 an army — stars and red ribands entered with every 
 fresh comer, but it looked like a "banquet hall desert- 
 ed." Some thirty ladies, and as many men, were all 
 that Florence contained worthy of the society of the 
 ex-king. A kinder man in his manners, however, or 
 apparently a more affectionate husband and father, I 
 never saw. He opened the dance by waltzing with 
 the young princess, his daughter, a lovely girl of four- 
 teen, of whom he seems fond to excess, and he was 
 quite the gayest person in the company till the ball 
 was over. The ex-queen, who is a miracle of size, 
 sat on a divan, with her ladies of honor about her, fol- 
 lowing her husband with her eyes, and enjoying his 
 gayety with the most childish good humor. 
 
 The Saturday evening soirees, at Prince Ponia- 
 towski's (a brother of the hero), are perhaps as agree- 
 able as any in Florence. He has several grown-up 
 sons and daughters married, and, with a very sumptu- 
 ous palace and great liberality of style, he has made 
 his parties more than usually valued. His eldest 
 daughter is the leader of the fashion, and his second 
 is the " cynosure of all eyes." The old prince is a 
 tall, bent, venerable man, with snow-white hair, and 
 very peculiarly marked features. He is fond of speak- 
 ing English, and professes a great affection for Amer- 
 ica. 
 
 Then there are the soirees of the rich banker, Fen- 
 zi, which, as they are subservient to business, assem- 
 ble all ranks on the common pretensions of interest. 
 At the last, I saw, among other curiosities, a young 
 girl of eighteen from one of the more common fam- 
 ilies of Florence — a fine specimen of the peasant 
 beauty of Italy Her heavily moulded figure, hands, 
 and feet, were quite forgiven when you looked at her 
 dark, deep, indolent eye, and glowing skin, and strong- 
 ly-lined mouth and forehead. The society was evi- 
 dently new to her, but she had a manner quite beyond 
 
 being astonished. It was the kind of animal dignity 
 so universal in the lower classes of this country. 
 
 A German baroness of high rank receives on the 
 Mondays, and here one sees foreign society in its 
 highest coloring. The prettiest woman that frequents 
 her parties, is a Genoese marchioness, who has left her 
 husband to live with a Lucchese count, who has left 
 his wife. He is a very accomplished man, with the 
 look of Mephistopheles in the " Devil's Walk," and 
 she is certainly a most fascinating woman. She is re- 
 ceived in most of the good society of Florence — a se- 
 vere, though a very just comment on its character. A 
 
 prince, the brother of the king of , divided the 
 
 attention of the company with her last Monday. He 
 is a tall, military-looking man, with very bad manners, 
 ill at ease, and impudent at the same time. He en- 
 tered with his suite in the middle of a song. The 
 singer stopped, the company rose, the prince swept 
 about, bowing like a dancing-master, and, after the 
 sensation had subsided, the ladies were taken up and 
 presented to him, one by one. He asked them all the 
 same question, stayed through two songs, which he 
 spoiled by talking loudly all the while, and then bow- 
 ed himself out in the same awkward style, leaving ev- 
 erybody more happy for his departure. 
 
 One gains little by his opportunities of meeting 
 Italian ladies in society. The cavaliere servente flour- 
 ishes still as in the days of Beppo, and it is to him 
 only that the lady condescends to talk. There is a 
 delicate, refined-looking, little marchioness here, who 
 is remarkable as being the only known Italian lady 
 without a cavalier. They tell you, with an amused 
 smile, " that she is content with her husband." It 
 really seems to be a business of real love between the 
 lady of Italy and her cavalier. Naturally enough too 
 — for her parents marry her without consulting her at 
 all, and she selects a friend afteiward, as ladies in oth- 
 er countries select a lover, who is to end in a husband. 
 The married couple are never seen together by any 
 accident, and the lady and her cavalier never apart. 
 The latter is always invited with her as a matter of 
 course, and the husband, if there is room, or if he is 
 not forgotten. She is insulted if asked without a cav- 
 alier, but is quite indifferent whether her husband 
 goes with her or not. These are points really settled 
 in the policy of society, and the rights of the cavalier 
 are specified in the marriage contracts. I had thought, 
 until I came to Italy, that such things were either a 
 romance, or customs of an age gone by. 
 
 I like very much the personal manners of the Ital- 
 ians. They are mild and courteous to the farthest ex- 
 tent of looks and words. They do not entertain, it is 
 true, but their great dim rooms are free to you when- 
 ever you can find them at home, and you are at liber- 
 ty to join the gossipping circle around the lady of 
 the house, or sit at the table and read, or be silent 
 unquestioned. You are let alone, if you seem to 
 choose it, and it is neither commented on, nor thought 
 uncivil, and this I take to be a grand excellence in 
 manners. 
 
 The society is dissolute, I think, almost without an 
 exception. The English fall into its habits, with the 
 difference that they do not conceal it so well, and have 
 the appearance of knowing its wrong — which the Ital- 
 ians have not. The latter are very much shocked at the 
 want of propriety in the management of the English. 
 To suffer the particulars of an intrigue to get about is 
 a worse sin, in their eyes, than any violation of the 
 commandments. It is scarce possible for an Ameri- 
 can to conceive the universal corruption of a society 
 like this of Florence, though, if he were not told of 
 it he would think it all that was delicate and attrac- 
 tive. There are external features in which the soci- 
 ety of our own country is far less scrupulous and 
 proper. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 75 
 
 LETTER LTI. 
 
 SIENNA — POGGIOBONSI BONCONVENTO ENCOURAGE- 
 MENT OF FRENCH ARTISTS BY THEIR GOVERNMENT 
 
 ACQ.UAPENDENTE — POOR BEGGAR, THE ORIGINAL OF 
 A ^SKETCH BY COLE — BOLSENA— VOLSCINIUM — SCE- 
 NERY—CURIOUS STATE OF THE CHESTNUT WOODS. 
 
 Sienna. — A day and a half on ray second journey to 
 Rome. With a party of four nations inside, and two 
 strangers, probably Frenchmen, in the cabriolet, we 
 have jogged on at'some three miles in the hour, enjoy- 
 ing the lovely scenery of these lower Appenines at our 
 leisure. We slept last night at Poggiobonsi, a little 
 village on a hill-side, and arrived at Sienna for our 
 midday rest. I pencil this note after an hour's ram- 
 ble over the city, visiting once more the cathedral, 
 with its encrusted marbles and naked graces, and the 
 three shell-shaped square in the centre of the city, at 
 the rim of which the eight principal streets terminate. 
 There is a fountain in the midst, surrounded with 
 bassi relieri much disfigured. It was mentioned by 
 Dante. The streets were deserted, it being Sunday, 
 and all the people at the Corso, to see the racing of 
 horses without riders. 
 
 Bonconvento. — We sit, with the remains of a trav- 
 eller's supper on the table — six very social companions. 
 Our cabriolet friends are two French artists, on their 
 way to study at Rome. They are both pensioners of 
 the government, each having gained the annual prize 
 at the academy in his separate branch of art, which 
 entitles him to five years' support in Italy. They are 
 full of enthusiasm, and converse with all the amusing 
 vivacity of their nation, The academy of France 
 send out in this manner five young men annually, who 
 have gained the prizes for painting, sculpture, archi- 
 tecture, music, and engraving. 
 
 This is the place where Henry the Seventh of Ger- 
 many was poisoned by a monk, on his way to Rome. 
 The drug was given to him in the communion cup. 
 The "ave marie" was ringing when we drove into 
 town, and I left the carriage and followed the crowd, 
 in the hope of finding an old church where the crime 
 might have been committed. But the priest was 
 mumbling the service in a new chapel, which no ro- 
 mance that I could summon would picture as the 
 scene of a tragedy. 
 
 Acquapendentf.. — While the dirty customhouse 
 officer is deciphering our passports, in a hole a dog 
 would live in unwillingly, I take out my pencil to 
 mark once more the pleasure I have received from the 
 exquisite scenery of this place. The wild rocks en- 
 closing the little narrow valley below, the waterfalls, 
 the town on its airy perch above, the just starting ve- 
 getation of spring, the roads lined with snowdrops, cro- 
 cuses and violets, have renewed, in a tenfold degree, 
 the delight with which I saw this romantic spot on 
 my former journey to Rome. 
 
 We crossed the mountain of Radicofani yesterday, 
 in so thick a mist that I could not even distinguish the 
 ruin of the old castle, towering into the clouds above. 
 The wild, half-naked people thronged about us as be- 
 fore, and I gave another paul to the old beggar with 
 whom I became acquainted by Mr. Cole's graphic 
 sketch. The winter had, apparently, gone hard with 
 him. He was scarce able to come to the carriage 
 window, and coughed so hollowly that I thought he 
 had nearly begged his last pittance. 
 
 Bolskna. — We have walked in advance of the vettu- 
 rino along the borders of this lovely and beautiful lake 
 till we are tired. Our artists have taken off their coats 
 with the heat, and sit, a quarter of a mile further on, 
 pointing in every direction at these unparalleled views. 
 The water is as still as a mirror, with a soft mist on 
 
 its face, and the water-fowl in thousands are diving 
 and floating within gunshot of us. An afternoon in 
 June could not be more summer-like, and this, to a 
 lover of soft climate, is no trifling pleasure. 
 
 A mile behind us lies the town, the seat of ancient 
 Volscinium, the capital of the Volscians. The coun- 
 try about is one quarry of ruins, mouldering away in 
 the moss. Nobody can live in health in the neighbor- 
 hood, and the poor pale wretches who call it a home 
 are in melancholy contrast to the smiling paradise 
 about them. Before us, in the bosom of the lake, lie 
 two green islands, those which Pliny records to have 
 floated in his time ; and one of which, Mariana, a 
 small conical isle, was the scene of the murder of the 
 qneen of the Goths by her cousin Theodatus. She 
 was taken there and strangled. It is difficult to ima- 
 gine, with such a sea of sunshine around and over it, 
 that it was ever anything but a spot of delight. 
 
 The whole neighborhood is covered with rotten 
 trunks of trees — a thing which at first surprised me 
 in a country where wood is so economised. It is ac- 
 counted for in the French guide-book of one of our 
 party by the fact, that the chestnut woods of Bolsena 
 are considered sacred by the people from their antiqui- 
 ty, and are never cut. The trees have ripened and 
 fallen and rotted thus for centuries — one cause, per- 
 haps, of the deadly change in the air. 
 
 The vetturino comes lumbering up, and I must 
 pocket my pencil and remount. 
 
 LETTER LIII. 
 
 MONTEFIASCONE — ANECDOTE OF THE WINE — VITERBO — 
 MOUNT C1MINO — TRADITION — VIEW OF ST. PETER 's — 
 ENTRANCE INTO ROME — A STRANGER'S IMPRESSIONS 
 OF THE CITY. 
 
 Montefiascone. — We have stopped for the night 
 at the hotel of this place, so renowned for its wine — 
 the remnant of a bottle of which stands, at this mo- 
 ment, twinkling between me and my French compan- 
 ions. The ladies of our party have gone to bed, and 
 left us in the room where sat Jean Defoucris, the mer- 
 ry German monk, who died of excess in drinking the 
 same liquor that flashes through this straw-covered 
 flask. The story is told more fully in the French 
 guide-books. A prelate of Augsbourg, on a pilgrim- 
 age to Rome, sent forward his servant with orders to 
 mark every tavern where the wine was good with the 
 word est, in large letters of chalk. On arriving at 
 this hotel, the monk saw the signal thrice written over 
 the door — Est! Est! Est? He put up his mule, 
 and drank of Montefiascone till he died. His servant 
 wrote his epitaph, which is still seen in the church of 
 St. Florian :— 
 
 " Propter minium est, est, 
 Dominus metis mortuus est !" 
 
 u Est, Est, Est!" is the motto upon the sign of the 
 hotel to this day. 
 
 In wandering about Viterbo in search of amusement, 
 while the horses were baiting, I stumbled upon the 
 shop of an antiquary. After looking over his medals, 
 Etruscan vases, cameos, &c, a very interesting col- 
 lection, I inquired into the state of trade for such 
 things in Viterbo. He was a cadaverous, melancholy 
 looking old man, with his pockets worn quite out with 
 the habit of thrusting his hands into (hem, and about 
 his mouth and eye there was the proper virtuoso ex- 
 pression of inquisitiveness and discrimination. He 
 kept also a small cafe adjoining his shop, into which 
 we passed, as he shrugged his shoulders at my ques- 
 tion. I had wondered to find a vender of costly curi- 
 
76 
 
 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 osities in a town of such poverty, and I was not sur- 
 prised at the sad fortunes which had followed upon his 
 enterprise. They were a base herd, he said, of the 
 people, utterly ignorant of the value of the precious 
 objects he had for sale, and he had been compelled to 
 open a cafe , and degrade himself by waiting on them 
 for a contemptible crazie worth of coffee, while his 
 lovely antiquities lay unappreciated within. The old 
 gentleman was eloquent upon his misfortunes. He 
 had not been long in trade, and had collected his mu- 
 seum originally for his own amusement. He was an 
 odd specimen, in a small way, of a man who was quite 
 above his sphere, and suffered for his superiority. I 
 bought a pretty intaglio, and bad him farewell, after 
 an hour's acquaintance, with quite the feeling of a 
 friend. 
 
 Mount Cimino rose before us soon after leaving Vi- 
 terbo, and we walked up most of the long and gentle 
 ascent, inhaling the odor of the spicy plants for which 
 it is famous, and looking out sharply for the brigands 
 with which it is always infested. English carriages 
 are constantly robbed on this part of the route of late. 
 The robbers are met usually in parties of ten and 
 twelve, and, a week before we passed, Lady Berwick 
 (the widow of an English nobleman, and a sister of the 
 famous Harriet Wilson) was stopped and plundered in 
 broad mid-day. The excessive distress among the 
 peasantry of these misgoverned states accounts for 
 these things, and one only wonders why there is not 
 even more robbing among such a starving population. 
 This mountain, by the way, and the pretty lake below 
 it, are spoken of in the ^Eneid : " Cimini cum monte 
 locum,' 1 '' etc. There is an ancient tradition, that in the 
 crescent-shaped valley which the lake fills, there was 
 formerly a city, which was overwhelmed by the rise 
 of the water, and certain authors state that, when the 
 lake is clear, the ruins are still to be seen at the bottom. 
 
 The sun rose upon us as we reached the mountain 
 above Baccano, on the sixth day of our journey, and, 
 by its clear golden flood, we saw the dome of St. Pe- 
 ter's, at a distance of sixteen miles, towering amid 
 the campagna in all its majestic beauty. We descend- 
 ed into the vast plain, and traversed its gentle undula- 
 tions for two or three hours. With the forenoon well 
 advanced, we turned into the valley of the Tiber, and 
 saw the home of Raphael, a noble chateau on the side 
 of a hill, near the river, and, in the little plain be- 
 tween, the first peach-trees we had seen, in full blos- 
 som. The tomb of Nero is on one side of the road, 
 before crossing the Tiber, and on the other a newly 
 painted and staring restaurant, where the modern Ro- 
 man cockneys drive for punch and ices. The bridge 
 of Pontemolle, by which we passed into the immediate 
 suburb of Rome, was the ancient Pons JEmilius, and 
 here Cicero arrested the conspirators on their way to 
 join Catiline in his camp. It was on the same bridge, 
 too, that Constantine saw his famous vision, and gain- 
 ed his victory over the tyrant Maxentius. 
 
 Two miles over the Via Flaminia, between garden 
 walls that were ornamented with sculpture and inscrip- 
 tion in the time of Augustus, brought us to the Porta 
 del Popolo. The square within this noble gate is 
 modern, but very imposing. Two streets diverge be- 
 fore you, as far away as you can see into the heart of 
 the city, a magnificent fountain sends up its waters in 
 the centre, the facades of two handsome churches face 
 you as you enter, and on the right and left are gar- 
 dens and palaces of princely splendor. Gay and 
 sumptuous equipages cross it in every direction, dri- 
 ving out to the villa Borghese, and up to the Pincian 
 mount, the splendid troops of the pope are on guard, 
 and the busy and stirring population of modern Rome 
 swell out to its limit like the ebb and flow of the sea. 
 All this disappoints while it impresses the stranger. 
 
 He has come to Rome — but it was old Rome that he 
 had pictured to his fancy. The Forum, the ruins of 
 her temples, the palaces of her emperors, the homes 
 of her orators, poets, and patriots, the majestic relics 
 of the once mistress of the world, are the features in 
 his anticipation. But he enters by a modern gate to 
 a modern square, and pays his modern coin to a 
 whiskered officer of customs ; and in the place of a 
 venerable Belisarius begging an obolus in classic Lat- 
 in, he is beset by a troop of lusty and filthy lazzaroni 
 entreating for a baioch in the name of the Madonna, 
 and in effeminate Italian. He drives down the Corso, 
 and reads nothing but French signs, and sees all the 
 familiar wares of his own country exposed for sale, 
 and every other person on the pave is an Englishman, 
 with a narrow-rimmed hat and whalebone stick, and 
 with an hour at the Dogama where his baggage is 
 turned inside out by a snuffy old man who speaks 
 French, and a reception at a hotel where the porter 
 addresses him in his own language, whatever it may 
 be; he goes to bed under Parisian curtains, and tries 
 to dream of the Rome he could not realize while 
 awake. 
 
 LETTER LIV. 
 
 APPIAN WAT — TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA — ALBANO — 
 TOMB OF THE CURIATII — ARICIA — TEMPLE OF DIANA 
 
 FOUNTAIN OF EfiERIA LAKE OF NEMI VELLETRI 
 
 PONTINE MARSHES CONVENT CANAL TERRAC1NA 
 
 — SAN FELICE — FONDI — STORY OF JULIA GONZAGA — 
 CICERO'S GARDEN AND TOMB — MOLA — MINTURNA — 
 RUINS OF AN AMPHITHEATRE AND TEMPLE — FALER- 
 NIAN MOUNT AND WINE — THE DOCTOR OF ST. 
 AGATHA — CAPUA — ENTRANCE INTO NAPLES — THE 
 QUEEN. 
 
 With the intention of returning to Rome for the 
 ceremonies of the holy week, I have merely passed 
 through on my way to Naples. We left it the morn- 
 ing after our arrival, going by the " Appian way," to 
 Mount Albano, which borders the Campagna on the 
 south, at a distance of fifteen miles. This celebrated 
 road is lined with the ruined tombs of the Romans. 
 Off at the right, some four or five miles from the city, 
 rises the fortress-like tomb of Cecilia Metella, so ex- 
 quisitely mused upon by Childe Harold. This, says 
 Sismondi, with the tombs of Adrian and Augustus, 
 became fortresses of banditti, in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, and were taken by Brancallone, the Bolognese 
 governor of Rome, who hanged the marauders from 
 the walls. It looks little like " a woman's grave." 
 
 We changed horses at the pretty village of Albano, 
 and, on leaving it, passed an ancient mausoleum, be- 
 lieved to be the tomb of the Curiatii who fought the 
 Horatii on this spot. It is a large structure, and had 
 originally four pyramids on the corners, two of which 
 only remain. 
 
 A mile from Albano lies Aricia, in a country of the 
 loveliest rural beauty. Here was the famous temple 
 of Diana, and here were the lake and grove sacred to 
 the "virgin huntress," and consecrated as her home 
 by peculiar worship. The fountain of Egeria is here, 
 where Numa communed with the nymph, and the 
 lake of Nemi, on the borders of which the temple 
 stood, and which was called Dian's mirror (speculum 
 Diance), is at this day, perhaps, one of the sweetest 
 gems of natural scenery in the world. 
 
 We slept at Velletri, a pretty town of some twelve 
 thousand inhabitants, which stands on a hill-side, 
 leaning down to the Pontine marshes. It was one of 
 the grand days of carnival, and the streets were full of 
 masks, walking up and down in their ridiculous 
 dresses, and committing every sort of foolery. The 
 next morning, by daylight, we were upon the Pontine 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 marshes, the long thirty miles level of which we 
 passed in an unbroken trot, one part of a day's jour- 
 ney of seventy-five miles, done by the same horses, at 
 the rate of six miles in the hour ! They are small, 
 compact animals, and look in good condition, though 
 they do as much habitually. 
 
 At a distance of fifteen miles from Velletri, we 
 passed a convent, which is built opposite the spot 
 where St. Paul was met by his friends, on his journey 
 from the seaside to Rome. The canal upon which 
 Horace embarked on his celebrated journey to Brun- 
 dusium, runs parallel with the road for its whole dis- 
 tance. This marshy desert is inhabited by a race of 
 as wretched beings, perhaps, as are to be found upon 
 the face of the earth. The pestiferous miasma of the 
 pools is certain destruction to health, and the few who 
 are needed at the distant post-houses, crawl out to the 
 road-side like so many victims from a pest-house, 
 stooping with weakness, hollow-eyed, and apparently 
 insensible to everything. The feathered race seems 
 exempt from its influence, and the quantities of game 
 of every known description are incredible. The 
 ground was alive with wild geese, turkeys, pigeons, 
 plover, clucks, and numerous birds we did not know, 
 as far as the eye could distinguish. The travelling 
 books caution against sleeping in the carriage while 
 passing these marshes, but we found it next to impos- 
 sible to resist the heavy drowsiness of the air. 
 
 At Terracina the marshes end, and the long avenue 
 of elms terminates at the foot of a romantic precipice, 
 which is washed by the Mediterranean. The town 
 is most picturesquely built between the rocky wall 
 and the sea. We dined with the hollow murmur of 
 the surf in our ears, and then, presenting our pass- 
 ports, entered the kingdom of Naples. This Terraci- 
 na, by the way, was the ancient Anxur, which Horace 
 describes in his line — 
 
 " Imposilum late saxis candentibus Anxur." 
 
 For twenty or thirty miles before arriving at Terra- 
 cina, we had seen before us the headland of Circceum, 
 lying like a mountain island off the shore. It is 
 usually called San Felice, from the small town seated 
 upon it. This was the ancient abode of the "daugh- 
 ter of the sun," and here were imprisoned, according 
 to Homer, the champions of Ulysses, after their 
 metamorphoses. 
 
 From Terracina to Fondi, we followed the old Ap- 
 pian way, a road hedged with flowering myrtles and 
 orange trees laden with fruit. Fondi itself is dirtier 
 than imagination could picture it, and the scowling 
 men in the streets look like myrmidons of Fra Diavolo, 
 their celebrated countryman. This town, however' 
 was the scene of the romantic story of the beautful 
 Julia Gonzaga, and was destroyed by the corsair Bar- 
 barossa, who had intended to present the rarest beauty 
 of Italy to the sultan. It was to the rocky mountains 
 above the town that she escaped in her night-dress, 
 and lay concealed till the pirate's departure. 
 
 In leaving Fondi, we passed the ruined walls of a 
 garden said to have belonged to Cicero, whose tomb 
 is only three leagues distant. Night came on before 
 we reached the tomb, and we were compelled to prom- 
 ise ourselves a pilgrimage to it on our return. 
 
 We slept at Mola, and here Cicero was assassinated. 
 The ruins of his country-house are still here. The 
 town lies in the lap of a graceful bay, and in all Italy, 
 it is said, there is no spot more favored by nature. 
 The mountains shelter it from the winds of the north; 
 tne soil produces, spontaneously, the orange, the 
 myrtle, the olive, delicious grapes, jasmine, and many 
 odoriferous herbs. This and its neighborhood was 
 called, by the great orator and statesman who selected 
 it for his retreat, "the most beautiful patrimony of the 
 Romans." The Mediterranean spreads out from its 
 bosom, the lovely islands near Naples bound its view, 
 Vesuvius sends up its smoke and fire in the south. 
 
 77 
 
 and back from its hills stretches a country fertile and 
 beautiful as a paradise. This is a place of great re- 
 sort for the English and other travellers in the summer. 
 The old palaces are turned into hotels, and we entered 
 our inn through an avenue of shrubs that must have 
 been planted and trimmed for a century. 
 
 We left Mola before dawn and crossed the small 
 river Garigliano as the sun rose. A short distance 
 from the southern bank, we found ourselves in the 
 midst of ruins, the golden beams of the sun pouring 
 upon us through the arches of some once magnificent 
 structure, whose area is now crossed by the road. 
 This was the ancient Minturna, and the ruins are 
 those of an amphitheatre, and a temple of Venus. 
 Some say that it was in the marshes about this now 
 waste city, that the soldier, sent by Sylla to kill Mari- 
 us, found the old hero, and, struck with his noble 
 mien, fell with respect at his feet. 
 
 The road soon enters a chain of hills, and the sce- 
 j nery becomes enchanting. At the left of the first as- 
 cent lies the Falernian mount, whose wines are im- 
 mortalized by Horace. It is a beautiful hill, which 
 throws round its shoulder to the south, and is covered 
 with vineyards. 1 dismounted and walked on whfte 
 the horses breathed at the post-house of St. Agatha, 
 and was overtaken by a good-natured-looking man, 
 mounted on a mule, of whom I made some inquiry 
 respecting the modern Falernian. He said it was still 
 the best wine of the neighborhood, but was far below 
 ( its ancient reputation, because never kept long enough 
 to ripen. It is at its prime from the fifteenth to the 
 I twentieth year, and is usually drank the first or second. 
 My new acquaintance, I soon found, was the phy- 
 I sician of the two or three small villages nested about 
 among the hills and a man of some pretensions to 
 learning. I was delighted with his frank good-humor, 
 and a certain spice of drollery in his description of his 
 patients. The peasants at work in the fields saluted 
 him from any distance as he passed ; and the pretty 
 contadini going to St. Agatha with their baskets on 
 their heads, smiled as he nodded, calling them all by 
 name, and I was rather amused than offended with the 
 inquisitiveness he manifested about my age. family, 
 pursuits, and even morals. His mule stopped of its 
 own will at the door of the apothecary of the small 
 village on the summit of the hill, and as the carriage 
 came in sight the doctor invited me, seizing my hand 
 with a look of friendly sincerity, to stop at St. Agatha 
 on my return, to shoot, and drink Falernian with 
 him for a month. The apothecary stopped the vettu- 
 rino at the door; and, to the astonishment of my com- 
 panions within, the doctor seized me in his arms and 
 kissed me on both sides of my face with a volume of 
 blessings and compliments which I had no breath in 
 my surprise to return. I have made many friends on 
 the road in this country of quick feelings, but the doc- 
 tor of St. Agatha had a readiness of sympathy which 
 threw all my former experience into the shade. 
 
 We dined at Capua, the city whose luxuries ener- 
 vated Hannibal and his soldiers— the " dives, amoro- 
 so,, felix" Capua. It is in melancholy contrast with 
 the description now — its streets filthy, and its people 
 looking the antipodes of luxury. The climate should 
 be the same, as we dined with open doors, and with 
 the branch of an orange tree heavy with fruit hanging 
 in at the window, in a month that with us is one of the 
 wintriest. 
 
 From Capua to Naples, the distance is but fifteen 
 miles, over a flat uninteresting country. We entered 
 " this third city in the world" in the middle of the af- 
 ternoon, and were immediately surrounded with beg- 
 gars of every conceivable degree of misery. We sat 
 an hour at the gate while our passports were recorded, 
 and the vetturino examined, aud then passing up a no- 
 ble street, entered a dense crowd, through which was 
 
78 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 creeping slowly a double line of carnages. The 
 mounted dragoons compelled our postillion to fall into 
 the line, and we were two hours following in a fashion- 
 able corso with our mud-spattered vehicle and tired 
 holies, surrounded by all that was brilliant and gay 
 in Naples. It was the last day of carnival. Every- 
 Dody was abroad, and we were forced, however unwil- 
 lingly to see all the rank and beauty of the city. The 
 carriages in this fine climate are all open, and the la- 
 dies were in full dress. As we entered the Toledo, the 
 cavalcade came to a halt, and with hats off and hand- 
 kerchiefs flying in every direction about them, the 
 young new-married queen of Naples rode up the mid- 
 dle of the street preceded and followed by outriders in 
 the gayest livery. She has been married about a 
 month, is but seventeen, and is acknowledged to be 
 the most beautiful woman in the kingdoin. The de- 
 scription I had heard of her, though very extravagant, 
 had hardly done her justice. She is a little above 
 the middle height, with a fine lift to her head and neck, 
 and a countenance only less modest and maidenly than 
 noble. 
 
 LETTER LV. 
 
 rome — front of saint peter 's — equipages of the 
 cardinals — beggars — body of the church — 
 tomb of saint peter — the tiber — fortress- 
 tomb of adrian — jews' quarter — forum — bar- 
 
 berini palace portrait of beatrice cenci 
 
 her melancholy history picture of the for- 
 
 narina — likeness of giorgione's mistress jo- 
 seph and potiphar's wife the palaces do- 
 
 ria and sciarra— portrait of olivia walda- 
 
 chini of " a celebrated widow" of semira- 
 
 mis — claude's landscapes— brill's — brughel's — 
 
 NOTTl's " WOMAN CATCHING FLEAS" DA VINCl's 
 
 QUEEN GIOVANNA PORTRAIT OF A FEMALE DOR1A 
 
 — PRINCE DORIA PALACE SCIARRA BRILL AND 
 
 BOTH'S LANDSCAPES — CLAUDE'S — PICTURE OF NOAH 
 INTOXICATED — ROMANA's FORNARINA — DA VINCl's 
 TWO PICTURES. 
 
 Drawn in twenty different directions on starting 
 from my lodgings this morning, I found myself, unde- 
 cided where to pass my day, in front of St. Peter's. 
 Some gorgeous ceremony was just over, and the sump- 
 tuous equipages of the cardinals, blazing in the sun 
 with their mountings of gold and silver, were driving 
 up and dashing away from the end of the long colon- 
 nades, producing any effect upon the mind rather than 
 a devout one. I stood admiring their fiery horses and 
 gay liveries, till the last rattled from the square, and 
 then mounted to the deserted church. Its vast vesti- 
 bule was filled with beggars, diseased in every conceiv- 
 able manner, halting, groping, and crawling about in 
 search of strangers of whom to implore charity — a 
 contrast to the splendid pavement beneath and the 
 gold and marble above and around, which would 
 reconcile one to see the "mighty dome" melted into 
 alms, and his holiness reduced to a plain chapel and 
 a rusty cassock. 
 
 Lifting the curtain I stood in the body of the church. 
 There were perhaps twenty persons, at different distan- 
 ces, on its immense floor, the farthest off (six hundred 
 and fourteen feet from me!) looking like a pigmy in the 
 far perspective. St. Peter's is less like a church than 
 a collection of large churches enclosed under a gigan- 
 tic roof. The chapels at the sides are larger than most 
 houses of public worship in our country, and of these 
 there may be eight or ten, not included in the effect 
 of the vast interior. One is lost in it. It is a city of 
 columns and sculpture and mosaic. Its walls are en- 
 crusted with precious stones and masterly workman- 
 
 ship to the very top, and its wealth may be conceived 
 when you remember that, standing in the centre and 
 raising your eyes aloft, there are four hundred and 
 forty feet between you and the roof of the dome — the 
 height, almost of a mountain. 
 
 I walked up toward the tomb of St. Peter, passing 
 in my way a solitary worshipper here and there, upon 
 his knees, and arrested constantly by the exquisite 
 beauty of the statuary with which the columns are 
 carved. Accustomed, as we are in America, to church- 
 es filled with pews, it is hardly possible to imagine the 
 noble effect of a vast mosaic floor, unencumbered even 
 with a chair, and only broken by a few prostrate fig- 
 ures, just specking its wide area. All catholic church- ' 
 es are without fixed seats, and St. Peter's seems scarce 
 measurable to the eye, it is so far and clear, from one 
 extremity to the other. 
 
 I passed the hundred lamps burning over the tomb 
 of St. Peter, the lovely female statue (covered with a 
 bronze drapery, because its exquisite beauty was 
 thought dangerous to the morality of the young 
 priests), reclining upon the tomb of Paul III., the 
 ethereal figures of Canova's geniuses weeping at the 
 door of the tomb of the Stuarts (where sleeps the 
 pretender Charles Edward), the thousand, thousand 
 rich and beautiful monuments of art and taste ciowding 
 every corner of this wondrous church — I passed them, I 
 say, with the same lost and unexamining, unparticular- 
 izing feeling which I can not overcome in this place 
 — a mind borne quite off" its feet and confused and 
 overwhelmed with the tide of astonishment — the one 
 grand impression of the whole. I dare say, a little 
 more familiarity with St. Peter's will do away the 
 feeling, but I left the church, after two hours loitering 
 in its aisles, despairing, and scarce wishing to examine 
 or make a note. 
 
 Those beautiful fountains, moistening the air over 
 the whole area of the column encircled front ! — and 
 that tall Egyptian pyramid, sending up its slender 
 and perfect spire between ! One lingers about, and 
 turns again and again to gaze around him, as he leaves 
 St. Peter's, in wonder and admiration. 
 
 I crossed the Tiber, at the fortress-tomb of Adrian, 
 and thridding the long streets at the western end of 
 Rome, passed through the Jews' quarter, and entered 
 the Forum. The sun lay warm among the ruins of 
 the great temples and columns of ancient Rome, and, 
 seating myself on a fragment of an antique frieze, 
 near the noble arch of Septimius Severus, I gazed on 
 the scene, for the first time, by daylight.. I had been 
 in Rome, on my first visit, during the full moon, and 
 my impressions of the forum with this romantic en- 
 hancement were vivid in my memory. One would 
 think it enough to be upon the spot at any time, with 
 light to see it, but what with modern excavations, fresh 
 banks of earth, carts, boys playing at marbles, and 
 wooden sentry-boxes, and what with the Parisian 
 promenade, made by the French through the centre, 
 the imagination is too disturbed and hindered in day- 
 light. The moon gives it all one covering of gray and 
 silver. The old columns stand up in all their solitary 
 majesty, wrecks of beauty and taste ; silence leaves 
 the fancy to find a voice for itself; and from the pal- 
 aces of the Cesars to the prisons of the capitol, the 
 whole train of emperors, senators, conspirators, and 
 citizens, are summoned with but half a thought and 
 the magic glass is filled with moving and reanimated 
 Rome. There, beneath those walls, on the right, in 
 the Mamertine prisons, perished Jugurtha (and 
 there, too, were imprisoned St. Paul and St. Peter), 
 and opposite upon the Palatine-hill, lived the mighty 
 masters of Rome, in the " palaces of the Cesars," 
 and beneath the majestic arch beyond, were led, as a 
 seal of their slavery, the captives from Jerusalem, and 
 in these temples, whose ruins cast their shadows at my 
 feet, walked and discoursed Cicero and the philoso- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAV. 
 
 79 
 
 phers, Brutus and the patriots, Catiline and the con- 
 spirators, Augustus and the scholars and poets, and 
 the great stranger in Rome, St. Paul, gazing at the 
 false altars, and burning in his heart to reveal to them 
 the " unknown God." What men have crossed the 
 shadows of these very columns ! and what thoughts, 
 that have moved the world, have been born beneath 
 them ! 
 
 The Barberini palace contains three or four master- 
 pieces of painting. The most celebrated is the por- 
 trait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido. The melancholy 
 and strange history of this beautiful girl has been told 
 in a variety of ways, and is probably familar to every 
 reader. Guido saw her on her way to execution, and 
 has painted ber as she was dressed, in the gray habit 
 and head-dress made by her own hands, and finished 
 but an hour before she put it on. There are engra- 
 vings and copies of the picture all over the world, but 
 none that I have seen give any idea of the excessive 
 gentleness and serenity of the countenance. The 
 eyes retain traces of weeping, but the child-like mouth, 
 the soft, girlish lines of features that look as if they 
 never had worn more than the one expression of youth- 
 fulness and affection, are all in repose, and the head is 
 turned over the shoulder with as simple a sweetness as 
 if she had but looked back to say a good-night before 
 going to her chamber to sleep. She little looks like 
 what she was— one of the firmest and boldest spirits 
 whose history is recorded. After murdering her fa- 
 ther for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she en- 
 dured every torture rather than disgrace her family by 
 confession, and was only moved from her constancy, 
 at last, by the agonies of her younger brother on the 
 rack. Who would read capabilities like these, in these 
 heavenly and child-like features? 
 
 I have tried to purchase the life of the Cenci, in vain. 
 A bookseller told me to-day, that it was a forbidden 
 book, on account of its reflections upon the pope. 
 Immense interest was made for the poor girl, but, it is 
 said, the papal treasury ran low, and if she was par- 
 doned, the large possessions of the Cenci family could 
 not have been confiscated. 
 
 The gallery contains also, a delicious picture of the 
 Fornarina, by Raphael himself, and a portrait of Gior- 
 gione's mistress, as a Carthaginian slave, the same 
 head multiplied so often in his and Titian's pictures. 
 The original of the admirable picture of Joseph and 
 the wifo of Potiphar, is also here. A copy of it is in 
 the gallery of Florence. 
 
 I have passed a day between the two palaces Doria 
 and Sciarra, nearly opposite each other in the Corso 
 at Rome. The first is an immense gallery of perhaps 
 a thousand pictures, distributed through seven large 
 halls, and four galleries encircling the court. In the 
 first four rooms I found nothing that struck me par- 
 ticularly. In the fifth was a portrait, by an unknown ar- 
 tist, of Olivia Waldachini, the favorite and sister-in- 
 law of Pope Innocent X. — a handsome woman, with 
 that round fulness in the throat and neck, which 
 (whether it existed in the originals, or is a part of a 
 painter's ideal of a woman of pleasure), is universal in 
 portraits of that character. In the same room was a 
 portrait of a " celebrated widow," by Vandyck,* a 
 had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap (the hands 
 wonderfully painted), and a large and rich picture of 
 Semiramis, by one of the Carraccis. 
 
 In the galleries hung the landscapes by Claude, fa- 
 mous through the world. It is like roving through 
 
 • So called in the catalogue. The custode, however, told us 
 it was a portrait of the wife of Varulvck, painted as an old 
 woman to mortify her excessive vanity, when she was but 
 twenty-three. He kept the picture until she was older, and, 
 at the time of his death, it had become a nattering likeness, 
 and was carefully treasured by the widow. 
 
 a paradise, to sit and look at them. His broad preen 
 lawns, his half-hidden temples, his life-like luxuriant 
 trees, his fountains, his sunny streams — nil flush into 
 the eye like the bright opening of a Utopia, or some 
 dream over a description from Boccaccio. It is what 
 Italy might be in a golden age — her ruins rebuilt into 
 the transparent air, her woods unprofaned, her people 
 pastoral and refined, and every valley a landscape of 
 Arcadia. I can conceive no higher pleasure for the 
 imagination than to see a Claude in travelling through 
 Italy. It is finding a home for one's more visionary 
 fancies — those children of moonshine that one begets 
 in a colder dime, but scarce dares acknowledge till he 
 has seen them under a more congenial skv. More 
 plainly, one does not know whether his abstract imagi- 
 nations of pastoral life and scenery are not ridiculous 
 and unreal, till he has seen one of these landscapes, 
 and felt steeped, if I may use such a word, in the very 
 loveliness which inspired the pencil of the painter. 
 There he finds the pastures, the groves, the fairy 
 structures, the clear waters, the straying groups, the 
 whole delicious scenery, as bright as in his dreams, 
 and he feels as if he should bless the artist for the lib- 
 erty to acknowledge freely to himself the possibility 
 of so beautiful a world. 
 
 We went on through the long galleries, going back 
 again and again to see the Claudes. In the third di- 
 vision of the gallery were one or two small and bright 
 landscapes, by Brill, that would have enchanted us if 
 seen elsewhere ; and four strange pictures, by Breit- 
 ghel, representing the four elements, by a kind of half- 
 poetical, half-supernatural landscapes, one of which 
 had a very lovely view of a distant village. Then 
 there was the famous picture of the "woman catching 
 fleas," by Gherardodelle Notti, a perfect piece of life. 
 She stands close to a lamp, with a vessel of hot water 
 before her, and is just closing her thumb and finger 
 over a flea, which she has detected on the bosom of 
 her dress. Some eight or ten are boiling already in 
 the water, and the expression upon the girl's face is 
 that of the most grave and unconscious interest in her 
 employment. Next to this amusing picture hangs a 
 portrait of Queen Giovanna, of Naples, by Leonardo 
 da Vinci, a copy of which I had seen, much prized, in 
 the possession of the archbishop of Torento. It 
 scarce looks like the talented and ambitious queen she 
 was, but it does full justice to her passion for amorous 
 intrigue — a face full of the woman. 
 
 The last picture we came to, was one not even men- 
 tioned in the catalogue, an old portrait of one of the 
 females of the Doria family. It was a girl of eighteen, 
 with a kind of face that in life must have been ex- 
 tremely fascinating. While we were looking at it, we 
 heard a kind of gibbering laugh from the outer apart- 
 ment, and an old man, in a cardinal's dress, dwarfish in 
 size, and with deformed and almost useless legs, came 
 shuffling into the gallery, supported by two priests. 
 His features were imbecility itself, rendered almost 
 horrible by the contrast of the cardinal's red cap. 
 The custode took off his hat and bowed low, and the 
 old man gave us a half-bow and a long laugh in pas- 
 sing, and disappeared at the end of the gallery. This 
 was the Prince Doria, the owner of the palace, and a 
 cardinal of Rome ! the sole remaining representative 
 of one of the most powerful and ambitious families of 
 Italy ! There could not be a more affecting type of 
 the great " mistress of the world" herself. Her very 
 children have dwindled into idiots. 
 
 We crossed the Corso to the Palace Sciarra. The 
 collection here is small, but choice. Half a dozen 
 small but exquisite landscapes, by Brill and Both, 
 grace the second room. Here are also three small 
 Claudes, very, very beautiful. In the next room is a 
 finely-colored but most indecent picture of Noah in- 
 toxicated, by Andrea Sacchi, and a portrait by Giulio 
 
60 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 Romano, of Raphael's celebrated Fornarina, to whose 
 lovely face one becomes so accustomed in Italy, that it 
 seems like that of an acquaintance. 
 
 In the last room are two of the most celebrated pic- 
 tures in Rome. The first is by Leonardo da Vinci, 
 and represents Vanity and Modesty, by two females 
 standing together in conversation — one a handsome, 
 gay, volatile looking creature, covered with ornaments, 
 and listening unwillingly to what seems a lecture from 
 the other, upon her foibles. The face of the other is 
 a heavenly conception of woman — earnest, delicate, and 
 lovely — the idea one, forms to himself, before inter- 
 course with the world, gives him a distaste for its pu- 
 rity. The moral lesson of the picture is more forcible 
 than language. The painter deserved to have died, as 
 he did, in the arms of an emperor. 
 
 The other picture represents two gamblers cheating 
 a youth, a very striking picture of nature. It is com- 
 mon from the engravings. On the opposite side of 
 the room, is a very expressive picture by Schidone. 
 On the ruins of an old tomb stands a scull, beneath 
 which is written — "/, too, was of Arcadia ;" and, at a 
 little distance, gazing at it in attitudes of earnest re- 
 flection, stand two shepherds, struck simultaneously 
 with the moral. It is a poetical thought, and wrought 
 out with great truth and skill. 
 
 Our eyes aching and our attention exhausted with 
 pictures, we drove from the Sciarra to the ruined pal- 
 aces of the Cesars. Here, on an eminence above the 
 Tiber, with the Forum beneath us on one side, the 
 Coliseum on the other, and all the towers and spires 
 of modern and catholic Rome arising on her many 
 hills beyond, we seated ourselves on fragments of 
 marble, half buried in the grass, and mused away the 
 hours till sunset. On this spot Romulus founded 
 Rome. The princely Augustus, in the last days of 
 her glory, laid here the foundations of his imperial 
 palace, which, continued by Caligula and Tiberius, 
 and completed by Domitian, covered the hill, like a 
 small city. It was a labyrinth of temples, baths, pa- 
 vilions, fountains, and gardens, with a large theatre at 
 the western extremity ; and, adjoining the temple of 
 Apollo, was a library filled with the best authors, and 
 ornamented with a colossal bronze statue of Apollo, 
 "of excellent Etruscan workmanship." " Statues of 
 the fifty daughters of Danaus Siuramdert, surrounded 
 the portico" (of this same temple), "and opposite 
 them were equestrian statues of their husbands." 
 About a hundred years ago, accident discovered, in the 
 gardens buried in rubbish, a magnificent hall, two 
 hundred feet'in length and one hundred and thirty-two 
 in breadth, supposed to have been built by Domitian. 
 It was richly ornamented with statues, and columns 
 of precious marbles, and near it were baths in excel- 
 lent preservation. "But," says Stark, "immense and 
 superb as was this first-built palace of the Cesars, 
 Nero, whose extravagance and passion for architecture 
 knew no limits, thought it much too small for him, 
 and extended its edifices and gardens from the Palatine 
 to the Esquiline. After the destruction of the whole, 
 by fire, sixty-five years after Christ, he added to it his 
 celebrated ' Golden House,' which extended from one 
 extremity to the other of the Ccelian Hill."* 
 
 * The following description is given of this splendid palace, 
 by Suetonius : " To give an idea of the extent and beauty of 
 this edifice, it is sufficient to mention, that in its vestibule 
 was placed his colossal statue, one hundred and twenty feet 
 in height. It had a triple portico, supported by a thousand 
 columns ; with a lake like a little sea, surrounded by buildings 
 which resembled cities. It contained pasture-grounds and 
 'groves in which were all descriptions of animals, wild and 
 tame. Its interior shone with gold, gems, and mother-of- 
 pearl. In the vaulted roofs of the eating-rooms were ma- 
 chines of ivory, which turned round and scattered perfumes 
 upon the guests. The principal banqueting room was a ro- 
 tundo, so constructed that it turned round night and day, in 
 
 The ancient walls, which made the whole of the 
 Mount Palatine a fortress, still hold together its earth 
 and its ruins. It is a broad tabular eminence, worn 
 into footpaths which wind at every moment around 
 broken shafts of marble, fragments of statuary, or bro 
 ken and ivy -covered fountains. Part of it is cultiva- 
 ted as a vineyard, by the degenerate modern Romans, 
 and the baths, into which the water still pours from 
 aqueducts encrusted with aged stalactites, are public 
 washing-places for thecontadini, eight or ten of whom 
 were splashing away in their red jackets, with gold 
 bodkins in their hair, while we were moralizing on 
 their worthier progenitors of eighteen centuries ago. 
 It is a beautiful spot of itself, and with the delicious 
 soft sunshine of an Italian spring, the tall green grass 
 beneath our feet, and an air as soft as June just stir- 
 ring the myrtles and jasmines, growing wild wherever 
 the ruins gave them place, our enjoyment of the over- 
 powering associations of the spot was ample and un- 
 troubled. I could wish every refined spirit in the 
 world had shared our pleasant hour upon the Palatine. 
 
 LETTER LVI. 
 
 ANNUAL DOWRIES TO TWELVE GIRLS VESPERS IN 
 
 THE CONVENT OF SANTA TRINITA RUINS OF RO- 
 MAN BATHS A MAGNIFICENT MODERN CHURCH 
 
 WITHIN TWO ANCIENT HALLS— -GARDENS OF ME- 
 
 C.ENAS TOWER WHENCE NERO SAW ROME ON FIRE 
 
 HOUSES OF HORACE AND VIRGIL BATHS OF Tl 
 
 TUS AND CARACALLA. 
 
 The yearly ceremony of giving dowries to twelve 
 girls, was performed by the pope, this morning, in the 
 church built over the ancient temple of Minerva. His 
 holiness arrived, in state, from the Vatican, at ten, 
 followed by his red troop of cardinals, and preceded 
 by a clerical courier, on a palfrey, and the body-guard 
 of nobles. He blessed the crowd, right and left, with 
 his three fingers (precisely as a Parisian dandy salutes 
 his friend across the street), and, descending from his 
 carriage (which is like a good-sized glass boudoir up- 
 on wheels), he was received in the papal sedan, and 
 carried into the church by his Swiss bearers. My le- 
 gation button carried me through the guard, and I 
 found an excellent place under a cardinal's wing, in 
 the penetralia within the railing of the altar. Mass 
 commenced presently, with a chant from the celebra 
 ted choir of St. Peter's. Room was then made through 
 the crowd, the cardinals put on their red caps, and the 
 small procession of twelve young girls entered from 
 side chapel, bearing each a taper in her hand, and 
 robed to the eyes in white, with a chaplet of flowers 
 round the forehead. I could form no judgment of any- 
 thing but their eyes and feet. A Roman eye could 
 not be otherwise than fine, and a Roman woman's foot 
 could scarce be other than ugly, and, consequently, 
 there was but one satin slipper in the group that a 
 man might not have worn, and every eye I could see 
 from my position, might have graced an improvisa- 
 trice. They stopped in front of the throne, and, giv- 
 ing their long tapers to the servitors, mounted in 
 conples, hand in hand, and kissed the foot of his ho- 
 liness, who, at the same time, leaned over and blessed 
 them, and then turning about, walked off* again behind 
 the altar in the same order in which they had entered. 
 
 The choir now struck up their half-unearthly chant 
 (a music so strangely shrill and clear, that I scarce 
 know whether the exquisite sensation is pleasure or 
 pain), the pope was led from his throne to his sedan, 
 and his mitre changed for a richly jewelled crown, the 
 bearers lifted their burden, the guard presented arms, 
 
 imitation of the motion of the earth. When Nero took pos- 
 session of this fairy palace, his only observation was — ' Now 
 I shall begin to live like a man '" 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 81 
 
 the cardinals summoned their officious servants to un- 
 robe, and the crowd poured out as it came. 
 
 This ceremony, I found, upon inquiry, is performed 
 every year, on the day of the annunciation — just nine 
 months before Christmas, and is intended to commem- 
 orate the incarnation of our Savior. 
 
 As I was returning from a twilight stroll upon the 
 Pincian hill, this evening, the bells of the convent of 
 Santa Trinita rung to vespers. I had heard of the 
 singing of the nuns in the service at the convent chap- 
 el, but the misbehavior of a party of English had ex- 
 cluded foreigners, of late, and it was thought impos- 
 sible to get admittance. I mounted the steps, however, 
 and rung at the door. It was opened by a pale nun, 
 of thirty, who hesitated a moment, and let me pass. 
 In a small, plain chapel within, the service of the al- ! 
 tar was just commencing, and, before I reached a seat, 
 a low plaintive chant commenced, in female voices, 
 from the choir. It went on, with occasional interrup- 
 tions from the prayers, for perhaps an hour. I can 
 not describe the excessive mournfulness of the music. 
 One or two familiar hymns occurred in the course of 
 it, like airs in a recitative, the same sung in our church- 
 es, but the effect was totally different. The neat, white 
 caps of the nuns were just visible over the railing be- 
 fore the organ, and, as 1 looked up at them and listen- 
 ed to their melancholy notes, they seemed, to me, 
 mourning over their exclusion from the world. The 
 small white cloud from the censer mounted to the ceil- 
 ing, and creeping away through the arches, hung over 
 the organ till it was lost to the eye in the dimness of 
 the twilight. It was easy, under the influence of their 
 delightful music, to imagine within it the wings of 
 that tranquillizing resignation one would think so ne- 
 cessary to keep down the heart in these lonely cloisters. 
 
 The most considerable ruins of ancient Rome are 
 those of the Baths. The Emperors Titus, Caracalla, 
 Nero, and Agrippa, constructed these immense places 
 of luxury, and the remains of them are among the 
 most interesting and beautiful relics to be found in the 
 world. It is possible that my readers have as imper- 
 fect an idea of the extent of a Roman bath as I have 
 had, and I may as well quote from the information 
 given by writers upon antiquities. " They were open 
 every day, to both sexes. In each of the great baths, 
 there were sixteen hundred seats of marble, for the 
 convenience of the bathers, and three thousand two 
 hundred persons could bathe at the same time. There 
 were splendid porticoes in front for promenade, ar- 
 cades with shops, in which was found every kind of 
 luxury for the bath, and halls for corporeal exercises, 
 and for the discussion of philosophy ; and here the 
 poets read their productions and rhetoricians ha- 
 rangued, and sculptors and painters exhibited their 
 works to the public. The baths were distributed into 
 grand halls, with ceilings enormously high and paint- 
 ed with admirable frescoes, supported on columns of 
 the rarest marble, and the basins were of oriental ala- 
 baster, porphyry, and jasper. There were in the cen- 
 tre vast reservoirs, for the swimmers, and crowds of 
 slaves to attend gratuitously upon all who should 
 come." 
 
 The baths of Diocletian (which I visited to-day), 
 covered an enormous space. They occupied seven 
 years in building, and were the work of fort 'y thousand 
 Christian slaves, two thirds of whom died of fatigue and 
 misery! Mounting one of the seven hill's of Rome, 
 we come to some half-ruined arches, of enormous 
 size, extending a long distance, in the sides of which 
 were built two modern churches. One was the work 
 of Michael Angelo, and one of his happiest efforts. 
 He has turned two of the ancient halls into a magnif- 
 icent church, in the shape of a Greek cross, leaving in 
 their places eight gigantic columns of granite. Af- 
 6 
 
 ter St. Peter's it is the most imposing church in 
 Rome. 
 
 We drove thence to the baths of Titus, passing the 
 site of the ancient gardens of Mecamas, in which still 
 stands the tower from which Nero beheld the confla- 
 gration of Rome. The houses of Horace and Virgil 
 communicated with this garden, but they are now un- 
 distinguishable. We turned up from the Coliseum 
 to the left, and entered a gate leading to the baths of 
 Titus. Five or six immense arches presented their 
 front to us, in a state of picturesque ruin. We took a 
 guide, and a long pole, with a lamp at the extremity, 
 and descended to the subterranean halls, to see the 
 still inimitable frescoes upon the ceilings. Passing 
 through vast apartments, to the ruined walls of which 
 still clung, here and there, pieces of the finely-colored 
 stucco of the ancients, we entered a suite of long gal- 
 leries, some forty feet high, the arched roofs of which 
 were painted with the most exquisite art, in a kind of 
 fanciful border-work, enclosing figures and landscapes, 
 in as bright colors as if done yesterday. Farther on 
 was the niche in which was found the famous group 
 of Laocoon, in a room belonging to a subterranean 
 palace of the emperor, communicating with the baths. 
 The Belvedeve Meleager was also found here. The 
 imagination loses itself in attempting to conceive the 
 splendor of these under-ground palaces, blazing with 
 artificial light, ornamented with works of art, never 
 equalled, and furnished with all the luxury which 
 an emperor of Rome, in the days when the wealth 
 of the world flowed into her treasury, could com- 
 mand for his pleasure. How short life must have 
 seemed to them, and what a tenfold curse became 
 death and the common ills of existence, interrupting 
 or taking away pleasures so varied and inexhaustible. 
 
 These baths were built in the last great days of 
 Rome, and one reads the last stages of national corrup- 
 tion and, perhaps, the secret of her fall, in the charac- 
 ter of these ornamented walls. They breathe the very 
 spirit of voluptuousness. Naked female figures fill every 
 plafond, and fauns and satyrs, with the most licentious 
 passions in their faces, support the festoons and hold 
 together the intricate ornament of the frescos. The 
 statues, the pictures, the object of the place itself, in- 
 spired the wish for indulgence, and the history of the 
 private lives of the emperors and wealthier Romans 
 shows the effect in its deepest colors. 
 
 We went on to the baths of Caracalla, the largest 
 ruins of Rome. They are just below the palaces of 
 the Cesars, and ten minutes' walk from the Coliseum. 
 It is one labyrinth of gigantic arches and ruined halls, 
 the ivy growing and clinging wherever it can fasten its 
 root, and the whole as fine a picture of decay as 
 imagination could create. This was the favorite haunt 
 of Shelley, and here he wrote his fine tragedy of Pro- 
 metheus. He could not have selected a more fitting 
 spot for solitary thought. A herd of goats were 
 climbing over one of the walls, and the idle boy who 
 tended them lay asleep in the sun, and every footstep 
 echoed loud through the place. We passed two or 
 three hours rambling about, and regained the populous 
 streets of Rome in the last light of the sunset. 
 
 LETTER LVI1. 
 
 SUMMER WEATHER IN MARCH — BATHS OF CARACALLA 
 
 BEGINNING OF THE APFIAN WAT— TOMB OF THE 
 
 SCIPIOS— CATACOMBS — CHURCH OF SAN SEBASTIANO 
 —YOUNG CAPUCHIN FRIAR— TOMBS OF THE EARLY 
 CHRISTIAN MARTYRS— CHAMBER WHERE THE APOS- 
 TLES WORSHIPPED— TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA— 
 
 THE CAMPAGNA CIRCUS OF CARACALLA OR KOMU- 
 
 LUS— TEMPLE DEDICATED TO RIDICULE— KEATs's 
 GRAVE- -FOUNTAIN OF EGERIA — THE WOOD WHERE 
 NUMA MET THE NYMPH— HOLY WEEK. 
 
82 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 The last days of March have come, clothed in sun- 
 shine and summer. The grass is tall in the Cam- 
 pagna, the fruit-trees are in blossom, the roses and 
 myrtles are in full flower, the shrubs are in full leaf, 
 the whole country about breathes of June. We left 
 Rome this morning on an excursion to the " Fountain 
 of Egeria." A more heavenly day never broke. The 
 gigantic baths of Caracalla turned us aside once more, 
 and we stopped for an hour in the shade of their ro- 
 mantic arches, admiring the works, while we execrated 
 the character of their ferocious builder. 
 
 This is the beginning of the ancient Appian Way, 
 and, a little farther on, sunk in the side of a hill, near 
 the road, is the beautiful doric tomb of the Scipios. 
 We alighted at the antique gate, a kind of portico, 
 with seats of stone beneath, and reading the inscrip- 
 tion, " Sepulchro degli Scipioni," mounted, by ruined 
 steps, to the tomb. A boy came out from the house, 
 in the vineyard above, with candles to show us the 
 interior; but, having no curiosity to see the damp cave 
 from which the sarcophagi have been removed (to 
 the museum), we sat down upon a bank of grass 
 opposite the chaste facade, and recalled to memory 
 the early-learnt history of the family once entombed 
 within. The edifice (for it is more like a temple to 
 a river-nymph or a dryad than a tomb) was built by 
 an ancestor of the great Scipio Africanus, and here 
 was deposited the noble dust of his children. One 
 feels, in these places, as if the improvisatore's inspira- 
 tion was about him — the fancy draws, in such vivid 
 colors, the scenes that have passed where he is stand- 
 ing. The bringing of the dead body of the conqueror 
 of Africa from Rome, the passing of the funeral train 
 beneath the portico, the noble mourners, the crowd of 
 people, the eulogy of perhaps some poet or orator, 
 whose name has descended to us — the air seems to 
 speak, and the gray stones of the monument against 
 which the mourners of the Scipios have leaned, seem 
 to have had life and thought, like the ashes they have 
 sheltered. 
 
 We drove on to the Catacombs. Here, the legend 
 says, St. Sebastian was martyred, and the modern 
 church of St. Sebastiano stands over the spot. We 
 entered the church, where we found a very handsome 
 young capuchin friar, with his brown cowl and the 
 white cord about his waist, who offered to conduct us 
 to the catacombs. He took three wax-lights from 
 the sacristy, and we entered a side door, behind the 
 tomb of the saint, and commenced a descent of a long 
 flight of stone steps. We reached the bottom and 
 found ourselves upon damp ground, following a nar- 
 row passage, so low that I was compelled constantly 
 to stoop, in the sides of which were numerous small 
 niches of the size of a human body. These were the 
 tombs of the early Christian martyrs. We saw near 
 a hundred of them. They were brought from Rome, 
 the scene of their sufferings, and buried in these 
 secret catacombs by the small church of perhaps the 
 immediate converts of St. Paul and the apostles. 
 What food for thought is here, for one who finds more 
 interest in the humble traces of the personal followers 
 of Christ, who knew his face and had heard his voice, 
 to all the splendid ruins of the works of the persecu- 
 ting emperors of his time ! Most of the bones have 
 been taken from their places, and are preserved at the 
 museum, or enclosed in the rich sarcophagi raised to 
 the memory of the martyrs in the catholic churches. 
 Of those that are left we saw one. The niche was 
 closed by a thin slab of marble, through a crack of 
 which the monk put his slender candle. We saw the 
 skeleton as it had fallen from the flesh in decay, un- 
 touched, perhaps, since the time of Christ. 
 
 We passed through several cross-passages, and 
 came to a small chamber, excavated simply in the 
 earth, with an earthen altar, and an antique marble 
 cross above. This was the scene of the forbidden 
 
 worship of the early Christians, and before this very 
 cross, which was, perhaps, then newly selected as the 
 emblem of their faith, met the few dismayed followers 
 of Christ, hidden from their persecutors, while they 
 breathed their forbidden prayers to their lately cru- 
 cified master. 
 
 We reascended to the light of day by the rough 
 stone steps, worn deep by the feel of those who, for 
 ages, for so many different reasons, have passed up and 
 down, and, taking leave of our capuchin conductor, 
 drove on to the next object upon the road — the tomb 
 of Cecilia Metella. It stands upon a slight elevation, 
 in the Appian Way, a "stern round tower," with the 
 ivy dropping over its turrets and waving from the em- 
 brasures, looking more like a castle than a tomb. 
 Here was buried " the wealthiest Roman's wife," or, 
 according to Corinne, his unmarried daughter. It 
 was turned into a fortress by the marauding nobles of 
 the thirteenth century, who sallied from this and the 
 tomb of Adrian, plundering the ill-defended subjects 
 of Pope Innocent IV. till they were taken and hanged 
 from the walls by Brancaleone, the Roman senator. 
 It is built with prodigious strength. We stooped in 
 passing under the low archway, and emerged into the 
 round chamber within, a lofty room, open to the sky, 
 in the circular wall of which there is a niche for a 
 single body. Nothing could exceed the delicacy 
 and fancy with which Childe Harold muses on this 
 spot. 
 
 The lofty turrets command a wide view of the 
 Campagna, the long aqueducts stretching past at a 
 short distance, and forming a chain of noble arches 
 from Rome to the mountains of Albano. Cole's pic- 
 ture of the Roman Campagna, as seen from one of 
 these elevations, is, I think, one of the finest land- 
 scapes ever painted. 
 
 Just below the tomb of Metella, in a flat valley, lie 
 the extensive ruins of what is called the " circus of 
 Caracalla" by some, and the "circus of Romulus" 
 by others — a scarcely distinguishable heap of walls 
 and marble, half buried in the earth and moss; and 
 not far off stands a beautiful ruin of a small temple 
 dedicated (as some say) to Ridicule. One smiles to 
 look at it. If the embodying of that which is power- 
 ful, however, should make a deity, the dedication of a 
 temple to ridicule is far from amiss. In our age par- 
 ticularly, one would think, the lamp should be relit, 
 and the reviewers should repair the temple. Poor 
 Keats sleeps in his grave scarce a mile from the spot, 
 a human victim, sacrificed, not long ago, upon its 
 highest altar. 
 
 In the same valley almost hidden with the luxuriant 
 ivy waving before the entrance, flows the lovely Foun- 
 tain of Egeria, trickling as clear and musical into its 
 pebbly bed as when visited by the enamored successor 
 of Romulus twenty-five centuries ago ! The hill 
 above, leans upon the single arch of the small temple 
 which embosoms it, and the green soft meadow spreads 
 j away from the floor, with the brightest verdure con- 
 | ceivable. We wound around by a halfworn path in 
 descending the hill, and, putting aside the long 
 branches of ivy, entered an antique chamber, sprinkled 
 with quivering spots of sunshine, at the extremity of 
 which, upon a kind of altar, lay the broken and de- 
 faced statue of the nymph. The fountain poured 
 from beneath in two streams as clear as crystal. In 
 the sides of the temple were six empty niches, through 
 one of which stole, from a cleft in the wall, a little 
 stream, which wandered from its way. Flowers, p-ale 
 with growing in the shade, sprang from the edges of 
 the rivulet as it found its way out, the small creepers, 
 dripping with moisture, hung out from between the 
 diamond-shaped stones of the roof, the air was re- 
 freshingly cool, and the leafy door at the entrance, 
 seen against the sky, looked of a transparent green, as 
 vivid as emerald. No fancy could create a sweeter 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 8:< 
 
 spot. The fountain and the inspiration it breathed 
 into Childe Harold are worthy of each other. 
 
 Just above the fountain, on the crest of a hill, 
 stands a thick grove, supposed to occupy the place of 
 the consecrated wood, in which Numa met the nymph. 
 It is dark with shadow, and full of birds, and might 
 afford a fitting retreat for meditation to another king 
 and lawgiver. The fields about it are so thickly 
 studded with flowers, that you can not step without 
 crushing them, and the whole neighborhood seems a 
 favorite of nature. The rich banker, Torlonia, has 
 bought this and several other classic spots about Rome 
 — possessions for which he is more to be envied than 
 for his purchased dukedom. 
 
 All the travelling world assembles at Rome for the 
 ceremonies of the holy week. Naples, Florence, and 
 Pisa, send their hundreds of annual visiters, and the 
 hotels and palaces are crowded with strangers of every 
 nation and rank. It would be difficult to imagine a 
 gayer or busier place than this usually sombre city has 
 become within a few days. 
 
 LETTER LVIII. 
 
 PALM SUNDAY — SISTINE CHAPEL — ENTRANCE OF THE 
 POPE — THE CHOIR THE POPE ON HIS THRONE PRE- 
 SENTING THE PALMS — PROCESSION BISHOP ENGLAND'S 
 
 LECTURE HOLY TUESDAY THE MISERERE — ACCI- 
 DENTS IN THE CROWD— TENEBRjE THE EMBLEMATIC 
 
 CANDLES HOLY THURSDAY FRESCOES OF MICHAEL 
 
 ANGELO "CREATION OF EVE" — "LOT INTOXICATED" 
 
 — DELPHIC SYBIL POPE "WASHING PILGRIMS' FEET 
 
 STRIKING RESEMBLANCE OF ONE TO JUDAS POPE 
 
 AND CARDINALS WAITING UPON PILGRIMS AT DINNER. 
 
 Palm Sunday opens the ceremonies. We drove 
 to the Vatican this morning, at nine, and, after wait- 
 ing a half hour in the crush, kept back, at the point 
 of the spear, by the pope's Swiss guard, I succeeded 
 in getting an entrance into the Sistine chapel. Leav- 
 ing the ladies of the party behind the grate, I passed 
 two more guards, and obtained a seat among the cowl- 
 ed and bearded dignitaries of the church and state 
 within, where I could observe the ceremony with ease. 
 
 The pope entered, borne in his gilded chair by 
 twelve men, and, at the same moment, the chanting 
 from the Sistine choir commenced with one long, 
 piercing note, by a single voice, producing the most 
 impressive effect. He mounted his throne as high as 
 the altar opposite him, and the cardinals went through 
 their obeisances, one by one, their trains supported by 
 their servants, who knelt on the lower steps behind 
 them. The palms stood in a tall heap beside the al- 
 tar. They were beautifully woven in wands of perhaps 
 six feet in length, with a cross at the top. The cardi- 
 nal nearest the papal chair mounted first, and a palm 
 was handed him. He laid it across the knees of the 
 pope, and, as his holiness signed the cross upon it, he 
 stooped, and kissed the embroidered cross upon his 
 foot, then kissed the palm, and taking it in his two 
 hands, descended with it to his seat. The other forty 
 or fifty cardinals did the same, until each was provided 
 with a palm. Some twenty other persons, monks of 
 apparent clerical rank of every order, military men, 
 and members of the catholic embassies, followed and 
 took palms. A procession was then formed, the car- 
 dinals going first with their palms held before them, 
 and the pope following, in his chair, with a small frame 
 of palmwork in his hands, in which was woven the 
 initial of the Virgin. They passed out of the Sistine 
 chapel, the choir chanting most delightfully, and, hav- 
 ing made a tour around the vestibule, returned in the 
 same order. 
 
 The ceremony is intended to represent the entrance 
 of the Savior into Jerusalem. Bishop England, of 
 Charleston, South Carolina, delivered a lecture at the 
 house of the English cardinal Weld, a day or two ago, 
 explanatory of the ceremonies of the holy week. It 
 was principally an apology for them. He confessed 
 that, to the educated, they appeared empty, and even 
 absurd rites, but they were intended not for the refined, 
 but the vulgar, whom it was necessary to instruct and 
 impress through their outward senses. As nearly all 
 these rites, however, take place in the Sistine chapel, 
 which no person is permitted to enter who is not fur- 
 nished with a ticket, and in full dress, his argument 
 rather fell to the ground. 
 
 With all the vast crowd of strangers in Rome, 1 
 went to the Sistine chapel on Holy Tuesday, to hear 
 the far-famed Miserere. It is sung several times du- 
 ring the holy week, by the pope's choir, and has been 
 described by travellers, of all nations in the most rap- 
 turous terms. The vestibule was a scene of shocking 
 confusion, for an hour, a constant struggle going on 
 between the crowd and the Swiss guard, amounting 
 occasionally to a fight, in which ladies fainted, chil- 
 dren screamed, men swore, and, unless by force of 
 contrast, the minds of the audience seemed likely to 
 be little in tune for the music. The chamberlains at 
 last arrived, and two thousand people attempted to get 
 into a small chapel which scarce holds four hundred. 
 Coat-skirts, torn cassocks, hats, gloves, and fragments 
 of ladies' dresses, were thrown up by the suffocating 
 throng, and, in the midst of a confusion beyond de- 
 scription, the mournful notes of the tenehrce (or lam- 
 entations of Jeremiah) poured in full volume from the 
 choir. Thirteen candles burned in a small pyramid 
 within the paling of the altar, and twelve of these, 
 representing the apostles, were extinguished, one by 
 one (to signify their desertion at the cross), during the 
 singing of the tenahrai. The last, which was left 
 burning, represented the mother of Christ. As the 
 last before this was extinguished, the music ceased. 
 The crowd had, by this time, become quiet. The 
 twilight had deepened through the dimly-lit chapel, 
 and the one solitary lamp looked lost at the distance of 
 the altar. Suddenly the miserere commenced with 
 one high prolonged note, that sounded like a wail ; 
 another joined it, and another and another, and all the 
 different parts came in, with a gradual swell of plain- 
 tive and most thrilling harmony, to the full power of 
 the choir. It continued for perhaps half an hour. 
 The music was simple, running upon a few notes, like 
 a dirge, but there were voices in the choir that seemed 
 of a really supernatural sweetness. No instrument 
 could be so clear. The crowd, even in their uncom- 
 fortable positions, were breathless with attention, and 
 the effect was universal. It is really extraordinary 
 music, and if but half the rites of the catholic church 
 had its power over the mind, a visit to Rome would 
 have quite another influence. 
 
 The candles were lit, and the motley troop of car- 
 dinals and red-legged servitors passed out. The har- 
 lequin-looking Swiss guard stood to their tall halberds, 
 the chamberlains and mace-bearers, in their cassock 
 and frills, took care that the males and females should 
 not mix until they reached the door, the pope disap- 
 peared in the sacristy, and the gay world, kept an hour 
 beyond their time, went home to cold dinners. 
 
 The ceremonies of Holy Thursday commenced 
 with the mass in the Sistine chapel. Tired of seeing 
 genuflexions, and listening to a mumbling of which I 
 could not oatch a syllable, I took advantage of my 
 privileged seat, in the ambassador's box, to lean back 
 and study the celebrated frescoes of Michael Angelo 
 upon the ceiling. A little drapery would do no harm 
 to any of them. They illustrate, mainly, passages of 
 
84 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 scripture history, but the " creation of Eve,"' in the 
 centre, is an astonishingly fine representation of a 
 naked man and woman, as large as life ; and •« Lot 
 intoxicated and exposed before his two daughters," 
 is about as immodest a picture, from its admira- 
 ble expression as well as its nudity, as could easi- 
 ly be drawn. In one corner there is a most beau- 
 tiful draped figure of the Delphic Sybil — and I think 
 this bit of heathenism is almost the only very decent 
 part of the pope's most consecrated chapel. 
 
 After the mass, the host was carried, with a showy 
 procession, to be deposited among the thousand lamps 
 in the Capella Paolina, and, as soon as it had passed, 
 there was a general rush for the room in which the 
 pope was to ivash the feet of the pilgrims. 
 
 Thirteen men, dressed in white, with sandals open 
 at the top, and caps of paper covered with white linen, 
 sat on a high bench, just under a beautiful copy of the 
 last supper of Da Vinci, in gobelin tapestry. It was 
 a small chapel, communicating with the pope's private 
 apartments. Eleven of the pilgrims were as vulgar 
 and brutal-looking men as could have been found in 
 the world ; but of the two in the centre, one was the 
 personification of wild fanaticism. He was pale, ema- 
 ciated, and abstracted. His hair and beard were neg- 
 lected, and of a singular blackness. His lips were 
 firmly set in an expression of severity. His brows 
 were gathered gloomily over his eyes, and his glan- 
 ces, occasionally sent among the crowd, were as gla- 
 ring and flashing as a tiger's. With all this, his 
 countenance was lofty, and if I had seen the face on 
 canvass, as a portrait of a martyr, I should have 
 thought it finely expressive of courage and devotion. 
 The man on his left wept, or pretended to weep, con- 
 tinually ; but every person in the room was struck 
 with his extraordinary resemblance to Judas, as he is 
 drawn in the famous picture of the last supper. It 
 was the same marked face, the same treacherous, ruf- 
 fian look, the same style of hair and beard, to a won- 
 der. It is possible that he might have been chosen on 
 purpose, the twelve pilgrims being intended to repre- 
 sent the twelve apostles of whom Judas was one — but 
 if accidental, it was the most remarkable coincidence 
 that ever came under my notice. He looked the hyp- 
 ocrite and traitor complete, and his resemblance to 
 the Judas in the picture directly over his head, would 
 have struck a child. 
 
 The pope soon entered from his apartments, in a 
 purple stole, with a cape of dark crimson satin, and 
 the mitre of silver-cloth, and, casting the incense into 
 the golden censer, the white smoke was flung from 
 side to side before him, till the delightful odor filled 
 the room. A short service was then chanted, and 
 the choir sang a hymn. His holiness was then un- 
 robed, and a fine napkin, trimmed with lace, was tied 
 about him by the servitors, and with a deacon before 
 him, bearing a splendid pitcher and basin, and a pro- 
 cession behind him, with large bunches of flowers, he 
 crossed to the pilgrims' bench. A priest, in a snow- 
 white tunic, raised and bared the foot of the first. The 
 pope knelt, took water in his hand, and slightly rub- 
 bed the instep, and then drying it well with a napkin, 
 he kissed it. 
 
 The assistant-deacon gave a large bunch of flowers 
 and a napkin to the pilgrim, as the pope left him, and 
 another person in rich garments, followed, with pieces 
 of money presented in a wrapper of white paper. The 
 same ceremony took place with each — one foot only 
 being honored with a lavation. When his holiness 
 arrived at the " Judas," there was a general stir, and 
 every one was on tip-toe to watch his countenance. 
 He took his handkerchief from his eyes, and looked 
 at the pope very earnestly, and when the ceremony 
 was finished, he seized the sacred hand, and, imprint- 
 ing a kiss upon it, flung himself back, and buried his 
 face again in his handkerchief, quite overwhelmed with 
 
 his feelings. The other pilgrims took it very coolly, 
 comparatively, and one of them seemed rather amused 
 than edified. The pope returned to his throne, and 
 water was poured over his hands. A cardinal gave 
 him a napkin, his splendid cape was put again over his 
 shoulders, and, with a paternoster the ceremony was 
 over. 
 
 Half an hour after, with much crowding and several 
 losses of foothold and temper, I had secured a place 
 in the hall where the apostles, as the pilgrims are 
 called after the washing, were to dine, waited on by 
 the pope and cardinals. With their gloomy faces and 
 ghastly white caps and white dresses, they looked 
 more like criminals waiting for execution, than guests 
 at a feast. They stood while the pope went round 
 with a gold pitcher and basin, to wash their hands, 
 and then seating themselves, his holiness, with a good- 
 natured smile, gave each a dish of soup, and said 
 something in his ear, which had the effect of putting 
 him at his ease. The table was magnificently set out 
 with the plate and provisions of a prince's table, and 
 spite of the thousands of eyes gazing on them, the 
 pilgrims were soon deep in the delicacies of every 
 dish, even the lachrymose Judas himself, eating most 
 voraciously. We left them at their dessert. 
 
 LETTER LIX. 
 
 SEPULCHRE OF CAIIIS CESTITJS — PROTESTANT BURYING 
 GROUND — GRAVES OF KEATS AND SHELLEY — SHEL- 
 LEY : S LAMENT OVER KEATS — GRAVES OF TW. 
 AMERICANS — BEAUTY OF THE BURIAL PLACE — 
 MONUMENTS OVER TWO INTERESTING YOUNG FE- 
 MALES — INSCRIPTION ON KEATs's MONUMENT — THE 
 STYLE OF KEATS'S POEMS— GRAVE OF DR. BELL — 
 RESIDENCE AND LITERARY UNDERTAKINGS OF HIS 
 WIDOW. 
 
 A beautiful pyramid, a hundred and thirteen feet 
 high, built into the ancient wall of Rome, is the proud 
 Sepulchre of Caius Cestius. It is the most imperish- 
 able of the antiquities, standing as perfect after 
 eighteen hundred years as if it were built but yester- 
 day. Just beyond it, on the declivity of a hill, over 
 the ridge of which the wall passes, crowning it with 
 two mouldering towers, lies the protestant burying- 
 ground. It looks toward Rome, which appears in 
 the distance, between Mount Aventine and a small hill 
 called Mont Testaccio, and leaning to the southeast, 
 the sun lies warm and soft upon its banks, and the 
 grass and wild flowers are there the earliest and tallest 
 of the Campagna. I have been here to-day, to see 
 the graves of Keats and Shelley. With a cloudless 
 sky and the most delicious air ever breathed, we sat 
 down upon the marble slab laid over the ashes of 
 poor Shelley, and read his own lament over Keats, 
 who sleeps just below, at the foot of the hill. The 
 cemetery is rudely formed into three terraces, with 
 walks between, and Shelley's grave and one other, 
 without a name, occupy a small nook above, made by 
 the projections of a mouldering wall-tower, and 
 crowded with ivy and shrubs, and a peculiarly fragrant 
 yellow flower, which perfumes the air around for 
 several feet. The avenue by which you ascend from 
 the gate is lined with high bushes of the marsh-rose 
 in the most luxuriant bloom, and all over the cemetery 
 the grass is thickly mingled with flowers of every die. 
 In his preface to his lament over Keats, Shelley says, 
 "he was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery 
 of the protestants, under the pyramid which is the 
 tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now 
 mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of 
 ancient Rome. It is an open space among the ruins, 
 covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might 
 
PENCI LUNGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 85 
 
 make one in love with death, to think that one should be 
 buried in so sweet a place.'' If Shelley had chosen 
 his own grave at the time, he would have selected the 
 very spot where he has since been laid — the most 
 sequestered and flowery nook of the place he de- 
 scribes so feelingly. In the last verses of the elegy, 
 he speaks of it again with the same feeling of its 
 beauty : — 
 
 " The spirit of the spot shall lead 
 Thy footsteps to a slope of green acces-s, 
 Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, 
 A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. 
 
 " And gray walls moulder round, on which dull time 
 Feeds like slow fire upon a hoary brand : 
 And one keen pyramid, with wedge sublime, 
 Pavilioning the dust of him who planned 
 This refuge for his memory, doth stand 
 Like flame transformed to marble ; and beneath 
 Afield is spread, on which a newer band 
 Have pitched, in heaven's smile, their camp of death, 
 
 Welcoming him we lose, with scarce extinguished breath. 
 
 " Here pause : these graves are all too young a.y yet 
 To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned 
 Its charge to each." 
 m 
 Shelley has left no poet behind, who could write so j 
 touchingly of his burial-place in turn. He was, in- j 
 deed, as they have graven on his tombstone, "corj 
 cordium " — the heart of hearts. Dreadfully mistaken 
 as he was in his principles, he was no less the soul of 
 genius than the model of a true heart and of pure in- 
 tentions. Let who will cast reproach upon his 
 memory, I believe, for one, that his errors were of the ! 
 kind most venial in the eye of Heaven, and I read, ! 
 almost like a prophecy, the last lines of his elegy on ! 
 one he believed had gone before him to a happier 
 world : — 
 
 " Burning through the inmost veil of heaven, 
 The soul of Adonais, like a star, 
 Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." 
 
 On the second terrace of the declivity, are ten or 
 twelve graves, two of which bear the names of Ameri- 
 cans who have died in Rome. A portrait carved in 
 bas-relief, upon one of the slabs, told me, without the 
 inscription, that one whom I had known was buried 
 beneath.* The slightly rising mound was covered 
 with small violets, half hidden by the grass. It takes 
 away from the pain with which one stands over the 
 grave of an acquaintance or a friend, to see the sun 
 lying so warm upon it, and the flowers springing so 
 profusely and cheerfully. Nature seems to have cared 
 for those who have died so far from home, binding the 
 earth gently over them with grass, and decking it with 
 the most delicate flowers. 
 
 A little to the left, on the same bank, is the new- 
 made grave of a very young man, Mr. Elliot. He 
 came abroad for health, and died at Rome, scarce two 
 months since. Without being disgusted with life, one 
 feels, in a place Mke this, a certain reconciliation, if I 
 may so express it, with the thought of a burial — an 
 almost willingness, if his bed could be laid amid such 
 loveliness, to be brought and left here to his repose. 
 Purely imaginary as any difference in this circum- 
 stance is, it must, at least, always affect the sick 
 powerfully ; and with the common practice of sending 
 the dying to Italy, as a last hope, I consider the ex- 
 quisite beauty of this place of burial, as more than a 
 common accident of happiness. 
 
 Farther on, upon the same terrace, are two monu- 
 ments that interested me. One marks the grave of a 
 young English girl,f the pride of a noble family, and, 
 
 • Mr. John Hone, of New York. 
 
 t An interesting account of this ill-fated young lady, who 
 wm on the eve of marriage, has appeared in the Mirror. 
 
 as a sculptor told me, who had often seen and admired 
 her, a model of high-born beauty. She was riding 
 with a party on the banks of the Tiber, when her 
 horse became unmanageable, and backed into the 
 river. She sank instantly, and was swept so rapidly 
 away by the current, that her body was not found for 
 many months. Her tombstone is adorned with a bas- 
 relief, representing an angel receiving her from the 
 waves. 
 
 The other is the grave of a young lady of twenty, 
 who was at the baths of Lucca, last summer, in pur- 
 suit of health. She died at the first approach of 
 winter. I had the melancholy pleasure of knowing 
 her slightly, and we used to meet her in the winding 
 path upon the bank of the romantic river Lima, at 
 evening, borne in a sedan, with her mother and sister 
 walking at her side, the fairest victim consumption 
 ever seized. She had all the peculiar beauty of the 
 disease, the transparent complexion and the unnatu- 
 rally bright eye, added to features cast in the clearest 
 and softest mould of female loveliness. She excited 
 general interest even among the gay and dissipated 
 crowd of a watering place ; and if her sedan was 
 missed in the evening promenade, the inquiry for her 
 was anxious and universal. She is buried in a place 
 that seems made for such as herself. 
 
 We descended to the lower enclosure at the foot of 
 the slight declivity. The first grave here is that of 
 Keats. The inscription on his monument runs thus : 
 " This grave contains all that teas mortal of a young 
 English poet, who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of 
 his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired 
 these words to be engraved on his tomb : here lies o>e 
 whose name was written IN water." He died at 
 Rome in 1821. Every reader knows his history and 
 the cause of his death. Shelley says, in the preface 
 to his elegy, " The savage criticism on his poems, 
 which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced 
 the most violent effect on his susceptible mind ; the 
 agitation thus originated ended in a rupture of a 
 blood-vessel in the lungs ; a rapid consumption ensued, 
 and the succeeding acknowledgments, from more can- 
 did critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were in- 
 effectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted." 
 Keats was, no doubt, a poet of very uncommon 
 promise. He had all the wealth of genius within 
 him, but he had not learned, before he was killed by 
 criticism, the received, and, therefore, the best manner 
 of producing it for the eye of the world. Had he 
 lived longer, the strength and richness which break 
 continually through the affected style of Endymion 
 and Lamia and his other poems, must have formed ' 
 themselves into some noble monuments of his powers. 
 As it is, there is not a poet living who could surpass 
 the material of his " Endymion" — a poem, with all 
 its faults, far more full of beauties. But this is not 
 the place for criticism. He is buried fitly for a poet, 
 and sleeps beyond criticism now. Peace to his 
 ashes ! 
 
 Close to the grave of Keats is that of Dr. Bell, the 
 author of "Observations on Italy." This estimable 
 man, whose comments on the fine arts are, perhaps, as 
 judicious and high-toned as any ever written, has left 
 behind him, in Naples (where he practised his pro- 
 fession for some years), a host of friends, who remem- 
 ber and speak of him as few are remembered and 
 spoken of in this changing and crowded portion of the 
 world. His widow, who edited his works so ably 
 and judiciously, lives still at Naples, and is preparing 
 just now a new edition of his book on Italy. Having 
 known her, and having heard from her own lips many 
 particulars of his life, I felt an additional interest in 
 visiting his grave. Both his monument and Keats's 
 are almost buried in the tall flowering clover of this 
 beautiful place. 
 
80 
 
 PENCIL LINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER LX. 
 
 PRESENTATION AT THE PAPAL COURT PILGRIMS GO- 
 ING TO VESPERS PERFORMANCE OF THE MISERERE 
 
 TARPEIAN ROCK THE FORUM — PALACE OF THE 
 
 CESARS COLISEUM. 
 
 I have been presented to the pope this morning, in 
 company with several Americans — Mr. and Mrs. Gray, 
 of Boston, Mr. Atherton and daughters, and Mr. 
 Walsh, of Philadelphia, and Mr. Mayer of Baltimore. 
 With the latter gentleman, I arrived rather late, and 
 found that the rest of the party had been already re- 
 ceived, and that his holiness was giving audience, at 
 the moment, to some Russian ladies of rank. Bishop 
 England, of Charleston, however, was good enough to 
 send in once more, and, in the course of a few min- 
 utes, the chamberlain in waiting announced to us that 
 11 Padre Santo would receive us. The ante-room 
 was a picturesque and rather peculiar scene. Clus- 
 ters of priests, of different rank, were scattered about 
 in the corners, dressed in a variety of splendid cos- 
 tumes, white, crimson, and ermine, one or two monks, 
 with their picturesque beards and flowing dresses of 
 gray or brown, were standing near one of the doors, 
 in their habitually humble attitudes, two gentleman 
 mace-bearers guarded the door of the entrance to the 
 pope's presence, their silver batons under their arms, 
 and their open-breasted cassocks covered with fine 
 lace ; the deep bend of the window was occupied by 
 the American party of ladies, in the required black 
 veils, and around the outer door stood the helmeted 
 guard, a dozen stout men-at-arms, forming a forcible 
 contrast to the mild faces and priestly company within. 
 
 The mace-bearers lifted the curtain, and the pope 
 stood before us, in a small plain room. The Irish 
 priest who accompanied us prostrated himself on the 
 floor, and kissed the embroidered slipper, and Bishop 
 England hastily knelt and kissed his hand, turning to 
 present us as he rose. His holiness smiled, and step- 
 ped forward, with a gesture of his hand, as if to pre- 
 vent our kneeling, and, as the bishop mentioned our 
 names, he looked at us and nodded smilingly, but 
 without speaking to us. Whether he presumed we 
 did not speak the language, or whether he thought us 
 too young to answer for ourselves, he confined his in- 
 quiries about us entirely to the good bishop, leaving 
 me, as I had wished, at leisure to study his features 
 and manner. It was easy to conceive that the fa- 
 ther of the catholic church stood before me, but I 
 could scarcely realize that it was a sovereign of Eu- 
 rope, and the temporal monarch of millions. He was 
 dressed in along vesture of snow-white flannel, buttoned 
 together in front, with a large crimson velvet cape over 
 his shoulders, and band and tassels of silver cloth 
 hanging from beneath. A small white scull-cap cov- 
 ered the crown of his head, and his hair, slightly griz- 
 zled, fell straight toward a low forehead, expressive of 
 good-nature merely. A large emerald on his fingers, 
 and slippers wrought in gold, with a cross on the in- 
 step, completed his dress. His face is heavily mould- 
 ed, but unmarked, and expressive mainly of sloth and 
 kindness; his nose is uncommonly large, rather 
 pendent than prominent, and an incipient double chin, 
 slightly hanging cheeks, and eyes, over which the lids 
 drop, as if in sleep, at the end of every sentence, con- 
 firm the general impression of his presence — that of 
 an indolent and good old man. His inquiries were 
 principally of the catholic church in Baltimore (men- 
 tioned by the bishop as the city of Mr. Mayer's resi- 
 dence), of its processions, its degree of state, and 
 whether it was recognised by the government. At the 
 first pause in the conversation, his holiness smiled and 
 bowed, the Irish priest prostrated himself again, and 
 kissed his foot, and, with a blessing from the father of 
 the church, we retired- 
 
 On the evening of holy Thursday, as I was on my 
 way to St. Peter's, to hear the miserere once more, I 
 overtook the procession of the pilgrims going up to 
 vespers. The men went first in couples, following a 
 cross, and escorted by gentlemen penitents covered 
 conveniently with sackcloth, their eyes, peeping 
 through two holes, and their well-polished boots be- 
 neath, being the only indications by which their pen- 
 ance could be betrayed to the world. The pilgrims 
 themselves, perhaps a hundred in all, were the dirtiest 
 collection of beggars imaginable, distinguished from 
 the lazars in the street, only by a long staff with a fa- 
 ded bunch of flowers attached to it, and an oil-cloth 
 cape stitched over with scallop shells. Behind came 
 the female pilgrims, and these were led by the first la- 
 dies of rank in Rome. It was really curious to see 
 the mixture of humility and pride. There were, per- 
 haps, fifty ladies of all ages, from sixteen to fifty, 
 walking each between two filthy old women, who sup- 
 ported themselves by her arms, while near them, on 
 either side of the procession, followed their splendid 
 equipages, with numerous servants, in livery, on foot, 
 as if to contradict to the world their temporary degra- 
 dation. The lady penitents, unlike the gentlemen, 
 walked in their ordinary dress. I had several acquain- 
 tances among them ; and it was inconceivable, to me, 
 how the gay, thoughtless, fashionable creatures I had 
 met in the most luxurious drawing-rooms of Rome, 
 could be prevailed upon to become a part in such a ri- 
 diculous parade of humility. The chief penitent, 
 who carried a large, heavy crucifix at the head of the 
 
 procession, was the Princess , at whose weekly 
 
 soirees and balls assemble all that is gay and pleasure- 
 loving in Rome. Her two nieces, elegant girls of 
 eighteen or twenty, walked at her side, carrying light- 
 ed candles, of four or five feet in length, in broad day- 
 light, through the streets ! 
 
 The procession crept slowly up to the church, and 
 I left them kneeling at the tomb of St. Peter, and 
 went to the side chapel, to listen to the miserere. The 
 choir here is said to be inferior to that in the Sistine 
 chapel, but the circumstances more than make up for 
 the difference, which, after all, it takes a nice ear to 
 detect. I could not but congratulate myself, as I sat 
 down upon the base of a pillar, in the vast aisle, with- 
 out the chapel where the choir were chanting, with 
 the twilight gathering in the lofty arches, and the 
 candles of the various processions creeping to the con- 
 secrated sepulchre from the distant parts of the church. 
 It was so different in that crowded and suffocating 
 chapel of the Yatican, where, fine as was the music, I 
 vowed positively never to subject myself to such an- 
 noyance again. 
 
 It had become almost dark, when the last candle 
 but one was extinguished in the symbolical pyramid, 
 and the first almost painful note of the miserere wailed 
 out into the vast church of St. Peter. For the next 
 half hour, the kneeling listeners, around the door of 
 the chapel, seemed spell-bound in tdieir motionless at- 
 titudes. The darkness thickened, the hundred lamps 
 at the far-off sepulchre of the saint, looked like a gal- 
 axy of twinkling points of fire, almost lost in the dis- 
 tance, and from the now perfectly obscured choir, 
 poured, in ever-varying volume, the dirge-like music, 
 in notes inconceivably plaintive and affecting. The 
 power, the mingled mournfulness and sweetness, the 
 impassioned fulness, at one moment, and the lost, 
 shrieking wildness of one solitary voice, at another, 
 carry away the soul like a whirlwind. I have never 
 been so moved by anything. It is not in the scope of 
 language to convey an idea to another of the effect of 
 the miserere. 
 
 It was not till several minutes after the music had 
 ceased, that the dark figures rose up from the floor 
 about me. As we approached the door of the church, 
 the full moon, about three hours risen, poured broadly 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 87 
 
 under the arches of the portico, inundating the whole 
 front of the lofty dome with a flood of light, such as 
 falls only on Italy. There seemed to be no atmo- 
 sphere between. Daylight is scarce more intense. 
 The immense square, with its slender obelisk and em- 
 bracing crescents of colonnade, lay spread out as def- 
 initely to the eye as at noon, and the two famous foun- 
 tains shot up their clear waters to the sky, the moon- 
 light streaming through the spray, and every drop as 
 visible and bright as a diamond. 
 
 I got out of the press of carriages, and took a by- 
 street along the Tiber, to the Coliseum. Passing the 
 Jews' quarter, which shuts at dark by heavy gates, 
 I found myself near the Tarpeian rock, and entered 
 the Forum, behind the ruins of the temple of For- 
 tune. I walked toward the palace of the Cesars, 
 stopping to gaze on the columns, whose shadows have 
 fallen on the same spot, where I now saw them for six- 
 teen or seventeen centuries. It checks the blood at 
 one's heart, to stand on the spot and remember it. There 
 was not the sound of a footstep through the whole 
 wilderness of the Forum. I traversed it to the arch 
 of Titus in a silence, which, with the majestic ruins 
 around, seemed almost supernatural — the mind was 
 left so absolutely to the powerful associations of the 
 place. 
 
 Ten minutes more brought me to the Coliseum. 
 Its gigantic walls, arches on arches, almost to the very 
 clouds, lay half in shadow, half in light, the ivy hung 
 trembling in the night air, from between the cracks of 
 the ruin, and it looked like some mighty wreck in 
 a desert. I entered, and a hundred voices announced 
 to me the presence of half the fashion of Rome. I 
 had forgotten that it was the mode " to go to the Co- 
 liseum by moonlight." Here they were dancing and 
 laughing about the arena where thousands of Chris- 
 tians had been torn by wild beasts, for the amusement 
 of the emperors of Rome ; where gladiators had fought 
 and died ; where the sands beneath their feet were 
 more eloquent of blood than any other spot on the 
 face of the earth — and one sweet voice proposed a 
 dance, and another wished she could have music and 
 supper, and the solemn old arches re-echoed with 
 shouts and laughter. The travestie of the thing was 
 amusing. I mingled in the crowd, and found ac- 
 quaintances of every nation, and an hour I had devo- 
 ted to romantic solitude and thought passed away per- 
 haps quite as agreeably, in the nonsense of the most 
 thoughtless triflers in society. 
 
 LETTER LXI. 
 
 VIGILS OVER THE HOST CEREMONIES OF EASTER SUN- 
 DAY — THE PROCESSION HIGH MASS — THE POPE 
 
 BLESSING THE PEOPLE CURIOUS ILLUMINATION 
 
 RETURN TO FLORENCE RURAL FESTA HOSPITAL- 
 ITY OF THE FLORENTINES EXPECTED MARRIAGE 
 
 OF THE GRAND DUKE. 
 
 Rome, 1833— This is Friday of the holy week. 
 The host, which was deposited yesterday amid its 
 thousand lamps in the Paoline chapel, was taken from 
 its place this morning, in solemn procession, and car- 
 ried back to the Sistine, after lying in the consecrated 
 place twenty-four hours. Vigils were kept over it all 
 night. The Paoline chapel has no windows, and the 
 lights are so disposed as to multiply its receding arch- 
 es till the eye is lost in them. The altar on which 
 the host lay was piled up to the roof in a pyramid of 
 light, and with the prostrate figures constantly cover- 
 ing the floor, and the motionless soldier in antique ar- 
 mor at the entrance, it was like some scene of wild 
 romance. 
 
 The ceremonies of Easter Sunday were performed 
 where all others should have been — in the body of St. 
 Peter's. Two lines of soldiers, forming an aisle up 
 the centre, stretched from the square without the por- 
 tico to the sacred sepulchre. Two temporary plat- 
 forms for the various diplomatic corps and other priv- 
 ileged persons occupied the sides, and the remainder 
 of the church was filled by thousands of strangers, Ro- 
 man peasantry, and contadini (in picturesque red bod- 
 dices, and with golden bodkins through their hair), 
 from all the neighboring towns. 
 
 A loud blast of trumpets, followed by military mu- 
 sic, announced the coming of the procession. The 
 two long lines of soldiers presented arms, and the es- 
 quires of the pope entered first, in red robes, followed 
 by the long train of proctors, chamberlains, mitre- 
 bearers, and incense-bearers, the men-at-arms escort- 
 ing the procession on either side. Just before the 
 cardinals, came a cross-bearer, supported on either 
 side by men in showy surplices carrying lights, and 
 then came the long and brilliant line of white-headed 
 cardinals, in scarlet and ermine. The military digni- 
 taries of the monarch preceded the pope, a splendid 
 mass of uniforms, and his holiness then appeared, sup- 
 ported, in his great gold and velvet chair, upon the 
 shoulders of twelve men, clothed in red damask, with 
 a canopy over his head, sustained by eight gentlemen, 
 in short, violet-colored silk mantles. Six of the Swiss 
 guard (representing the six catholic cantons) walked 
 near the pope, with drawn swords on their shoulders, 
 and after his chair followed a troop of civil officers, 
 whose appointments 1 did not think it worth while to 
 inquire. The procession stopped when the pope was 
 opposite the " chapel of the holy sacrament," and his 
 holiness descended. The tiara was lifted from his 
 head by a cardinal-, and he knelt upon a cushion of vel- 
 vet and gold to adore the " sacred host," which was 
 exposed upon the altar. After a few minutes he re- 
 turned to his chair, his tiara was again set on his head, 
 and the music rang out anew, while the procession 
 swept on to the sepulchre. 
 
 The spectacle was all splendor. The clear space 
 through the vast area of the church, lined with glit- 
 tering soldiery, the dazzling gold and crimson of the 
 coming procession, the high papal chair, with the im- 
 mense fan-banners of peacock's feathers, held aloft, 
 the almost immeasurable dome and mighty pillars 
 above and around, and the multitudes of silent people, 
 produced a scene which, connected with the idea of 
 religious worship, and added to by the swell of a hun- 
 dred instruments of music, quite dazzled and over- 
 powered me. 
 
 The high mass (performed but three times a year) 
 proceeded. At the latter part of it, the pope mounted 
 to the altar, and, after various ceremonies, elevated the 
 sacred host. At the instant that the small white wa- 
 fer was seen between the golden candlesticks, the two 
 immense lines of soldiers dropped upon their knees, 
 and all the people prostrated themselves at the same 
 instant. 
 
 This fine scene over, we hurried to the square in 
 front of the church, to secure places for a still finer 
 one — that of the pope blessing the people. Several 
 thousand troops, cavalry and footmen, were drawn up 
 between the steps and the obelisk, in the centre of the 
 piazza, and the immense area embraced by the two 
 circling colonnades was crowded by, perhaps, a hun- 
 dred thousand people, with eyes directed to one single 
 point. The variety of bright costumes, the gay liv- 
 eries of the ambassadors' and cardinals' carriages, the 
 vast body of soldiery, and the magnificent fram« of 
 columns and fountains in which this gorgeous picture 
 was contained, formed the grandest scene conceivable. 
 
 In a few minutes the pope appeared in the balcony, 
 over the great door of St. Peter's. Every hat in the 
 vast multitude was lifted and every knee bowed in an 
 
88 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 instant. Half a nation prostrate together, and one 
 gray old man lifting up his hands to heaven, and bles- 
 sing them! 
 
 The cannon of the castle of St. Angelo thundered, 
 the innumerable bells of Rome pealed forth simulta- 
 neously, the troops fell into line and motion, and the 
 children of the two hundred and fifty-seventh succes- 
 sor of St. Peter departed blessed. 
 
 In the evening all the world assembled to see the il- 
 lumination, which it is useless to attempt to describe. 
 
 The night was cloudy and black, and every line in 
 the architecture of the largest building in the world 
 was defined in light, even to the cross, which, as I 
 have said before, is at the height, of a mountain from 
 the base. For about an hour it was a delicate butvast 
 structure of shining lines, like the drawing of a glo- 
 rious temple on the clouds. At eight, as the clock 
 struck, flakes of fire burst from every point, and the 
 whole building seemed started into flame. Jt was done 
 by a simultaneous kindling of torches in a thousand 
 points a man stationed at each. The glare seemed to 
 exceed that of noonday. No description can give an 
 idea of it. 
 
 I am not sure that I have not been a little tedious in 
 describing the ceremonies of the holy week. Forsyth 
 says in his bilious book, that he "never could read, 
 and certainly never could write, a description of them." 
 They have struck me, however, as particularly unlike 
 anything ever seen in our own country, and I have en- 
 deavored to draw them slightly and with as little par- 
 ticularity as possible. I trust that some of the read- 
 ers of the Mirror may find them entertaining and 
 novel. 
 
 Florence, 1833. — I found myself at six this mor- 
 ning, where I had found myself at the same hour a 
 year before — in the midst of the rural festa in the Cas- 
 c'tne of Florence. The duke, to-day, breakfasts at his 
 farm. The people of Florence, high and low, come 
 out, and spread their repasts upon the fine sward of 
 the openings in the wood, the roads are watered, and 
 the royal equipages dash backward and forward, while 
 the ladies hang their shawls in the trees, and children 
 and lovers stroll away into the shade, and all looks 
 like a scene from Boccaccio. 
 
 I thought it a picturesque and beautiful sight last 
 year, and so described it. But I was a stranger then, 
 newly arrived in Florence, and felt desolate amid the 
 happiness of so many. A few months among so frank 
 and warm-hearted a people as the Tuscans, however, 
 makes one at home. The tradesman and his wife, 
 familiar with your face, and happy to be seen in their 
 holyday dresses, give you the " buon giorno," as you 
 pass, and a cup of red wine or a seat at the cloth on 
 the grass is at your service in almost any group in the 
 prato. I am sure I should not find so many acquain- 
 tances in the town in which I have passed my life. 
 
 A little beyond the crowd, lies a broad open glade 
 of the greenest grass, in the very centre of the woods 
 of the farm. A broad fringe of shade is flung by the 
 trees along the eastern side, and at their roots cluster 
 the different parties of the nobles and the ambassadors. 
 Their gayly-dressed chasseurs are in waiting, the sil- 
 ver plate quivers and glances, as the chance rays of 
 the sun break through the leaves over head, and at a 
 little distance, in the road, stand their showy equipa- 
 ges in a long line from the great oak to the farmhouse. 
 
 In the evening, there was an illumination of the 
 green alleys and the little square in front of the house, 
 and a band of music for the people. Within, the 
 halls were thrown open for a ball. It was given by the 
 grand duke to the Dutchess of Lichtenberg, the widow 
 of Eugene Beauharnois. The company assembled at 
 eight, and the presentations (two lovely countrywomen 
 of our own among them), were over at nine. The 
 dancing then commenced, and we drove home, through 
 
 the fading lights still burning in the trees, an hour or 
 two past midnight. 
 
 The grand duke is about to be married to one of the 
 princesses of Naples, and great preparations are ma- 
 king for the event. He looks little like a bridegroom, 
 with his sad face, and unshorn beard and hair. It is, 
 probably, not a marriage of inclination, for the fat 
 princess expecting him, is every way inferior to the 
 incomparable woman he has lost, and he passed half 
 the last week in a lonely visit to the chamber in which 
 she died, in his palace at Pisa. 
 
 LETTER LXII. 
 
 PISA — DULNESS OF THE TOWN — LEANING TOWER — 
 
 CRUISE IN THE FRIGATE UNITED STATES — ELBA 
 
 FIOMBTNO— PORTO FERRAJO — APPEARANCE OF THE 
 BAY NAVAL DISCIPLINE — VISIT TO THE TOWN RESI- 
 DENCE OF NAPOLEON HIS EMPLOYMENT DURING HIS 
 
 CONFINEMENT ON THE ISLAND — HIS SISTERS ELIZA 
 
 AND PAULINE — HIS COUNTRY-HOUSE SIMPLICITY OF 
 
 THE INHABITANTS OF ELBA. 
 
 I left Florence on one of the last days of May for 
 Pisa, with three Italian companions, who submitted as 
 quietly as myself to being sold four times from one 
 vetturino to another, at the different stopping-places, 
 and we drove into the grass-grown, melancholy streets 
 of Pisa, in the middle of the afternoon, thankful to 
 escape from the heat and dust of the low banks of the 
 Arno. My fellow-travellers were Florentines, and in 
 their sarcastic remarks upon the dulness of Pisa, I 
 imagined I could detect a lingering trace of the an- 
 cient hatred of these once rival republics. Prepara- 
 tions for the illumination in honor of the new grand 
 dutchess, were going on upon the streets bordering 
 the river, but other sign of life there was none. It 
 must have been solitude itself which tempted Byron 
 to reside in Pisa. I looked at the hot sunny front of 
 the Palazzo Lanfranchi in which he lived, and tried 
 in vain to imagine it the home of anything in the 
 shape of pleasure. 
 
 I hurried to dine with the friends whose invitation 
 had brought me out of my way (I was going to Leg- 
 horn), and with a warm, golden sunset flushing in the 
 sky, we left the table a few hours after to mount to 
 the top of the " leaning tower." On the north and 
 east lay the sharp terminating ridges of the Appenines. 
 in which lay nested Lucca and its gay baths, and on 
 the west and south, over a broad bright green meadow 
 of from seven to fourteen miles, thridded by the Arno 
 and the Serchio, coiled the distant line of the Medi- 
 terranean, peaked with the many ships, entering and 
 leaving the busy port of Leghorn, and gilded like a 
 flaunting riband, with the gold of the setting sun. 
 Below us lay Pisa, and away to the mountains, and off 
 over the plains, the fertile farms of Tuscany. Every • 
 point of the scene was lovely. But there was an un- 
 accustomed feature in the southern view, which had 
 more power over my feelings than all else around me. 
 Floating like small clouds in the distance, I could 
 just distinguish two noble frigates, lying at anchor in 
 the roads. The guardian of the tower handed me his 
 glass, and I strained my eye till I fancied I could see 
 the "stars and stripes" of my country's flag flying at 
 the peaks. I pointed them out with pride to my 
 English friends ; and while they hung over the dizzy 
 railing, watching the fading teintsof the sunset on the 
 mountains of Tuscany, I kept my eye on the distant 
 ships, lost in a thousand reveries of home. The 
 blood so stirs to see that free banner in a foreign land. 
 
 We remained on the tower till the moon rose, clear 
 and full, and then descended by its circling galleries 
 to the square, looked at the tall fairy stru mire in her 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 89 
 
 mellower light, its sides laced with the shadows of the 
 hundred columns winding around it, and the wondrous 
 pile, as it leaned forward to meet the light, seeming in 
 the very act of toppling to the earth. 
 
 I had come from Florence to join the "United 
 States," at the polite invitation of the officers of the 
 ward-room, on a cruise up the Mediterranean. My 
 cot was swung immediately on my arrival, but we lay 
 three days longer than was expected in the harbor, 
 riding out a gale of wind, which broke the chain 
 cables of both ships, and drove several merchant ves- 
 sels on the rocks. We got under way on the third of 
 June, and the next morning were off Elba, with 
 Corsica on our quarter, and the little island of Capreja 
 just ahead. 
 
 The firing of guns took me just now to the deck. 
 Three Sardinian gun-boats had saluted the commo- 
 dore's flag in passing, and it was returned with twelve 
 guns. They were coming home from the affair at 
 Tunis. It is a fresh, charming morning, and we are 
 beating up against a light head-wind, all the officers 
 on deck, looking at the island with their glasses, and 
 discussing the character of the great man to whom 
 this little barren spot was a temporary empire. A 
 bold fortification just appears on the point, with the 
 Tuscan flag flying from the staff. The sides of the 
 hills are dotted with desolate looking buildings, among 
 which are one or two monasteries, and in rounding 
 the side of the island, we have passed two or three 
 small villages, perched below and above on the rocks. 
 Off to the east, we can just distinguish Piombino, the 
 nearest town of the Italian shore, and very beautiful 
 it looks, rising from the edge of the water like Venice, 
 with a range of cloudy hills relieving it in the rear. 
 
 Our anchor is dropped in the bay of Porto Ferrajo. 
 As we ran lightly in upon the last tack, the walls of 
 the fort appeared crowded with people, the whole 
 town apparently assembled to see the unusual spec- 
 tacle of two ships- of-war entering their now quiet 
 waters. A small curving bay opened to us, and as we 
 rounded directly under the walls of the fort, the tops 
 of the houses in the town behind, appeared crowded 
 with women, whose features we could easily distinguish 
 with a glass. By the constant exclamations of the 
 midshipmen, who were gazing intently from the quar- 
 ter deck, there was among them a fair proportion of 
 beauty, or what looked like it in the distance. Just 
 below the summit of the fort, upon a terrace com- 
 manding a view of the sea, stood a handsome house, 
 with low windows shut with Venetian blinds and shaded 
 with acacias, which the pilot pointed out to us as the 
 town residence of Napoleon. As the ship lost her 
 way, we came in sight of a gentle amphitheatre of 
 hills rising away from the cove, in a woody ravine of 
 which stood a handsome building, with eight win- 
 dows, built by the exile as a country-house. Twenty 
 or thirty, as good or better, spot the hills around, 
 ornamented with avenues and orchards of low olive- 
 trees. It is altogether a rural scene, and disappoints 
 us agreeably after the barren promise of the outer 
 sides of the isle. 
 
 The Constellation came slowly in after us, with 
 every sail set, and her tops crowded with men, and as 
 she fell under the stern of the commodore's ship, the 
 word was given, and her vast quantity of sail was 
 furled with that wonderful alacrity which so astonishes 
 a landsman. I have been continually surprised in the 
 few days that I have been on board, with the wonders 
 of sea discipline ; but for a spectacle, I have seen 
 nothing more imposing than the entrance of these two 
 beautiful frigates into the little port of Elba, and their 
 magical management. The anchors were dropped, 
 the yards came down by the run, the sails disappeared, 
 the living swarm upon the rigging slid below, all in a 
 moment, and then struck up the delightful band on 
 
 our quarter deck, and the sailors leaned on the guns, 
 the officers on the quarter railing, and boats from the 
 shore filled with ladies, lay off at different distances, 
 the whole scene as full of repose and enjoyment, as if 
 we had lain idle for a month in these glassy waters. 
 How beautiful are the results of order i 
 
 We had made every preparation for a pic-nic party 
 to the country-house of Napoleon yesterday — but it 
 rained. At sunset, however, the clouds crowdedinto 
 vast masses, and the evening gave a glorious promise, 
 which was fulfilled this morning in freshness and sun- 
 shine. The commodore's barge took off the ladies 
 for an excursion on horseback to the iron mines, on 
 the other side of the island — the midshipmen were set 
 ashore in various directions for a ramble, and I, 
 tempted with the beauty of the ravine which enclosed 
 the villa of Napoleon, declined all invitations with an 
 eye to a stroll thither. 
 
 We were first set ashore at the mole to see the town. 
 A medley crowd of soldiers, citizens, boys, girls, and 
 galley-slaves, received us at the landing, and followed 
 us up to the town-square, gazing at the officers with 
 undisguised curiosity. We met several gentlemen 
 from the other ship at the cafe, and taking a cicerone 
 together, started for the town-residence of the emper- 
 or. It is now occupied by the governor, and stands on 
 the summit of the little fortified city. We mounted 
 by clean excellent pavements, getting a good-natured 
 " buon giornol" from every female head thrust from 
 beneath the blinds of the houses. The governor's 
 aid received us at the door, with his cap in his hand, 
 and we commenced the tour of the rooms with all the 
 household, male and female, following to gaze at us. 
 Napoleon lived on the first floor. The rooms were as 
 small as those of a private house, and painted in the 
 pretty fresco common in Italy. The furniture was all 
 changed, and the fireplaces and two busts of the em- 
 peror's sisters (Eliza and Pauline) were all that re- 
 mained as it was. The library is a pretty room, though 
 very small, and opens on a terrace level with his favor- 
 ite garden. The plants and lemon-trees were planted 
 by himself, we were told, and the officers plucked sou- 
 venirs on all sides. The officer who accompanied us 
 was an old soldier of Napoleon's, and a native of Elba, 
 and after a little of the reluctance common to the teller 
 of an oft-told tale, he gave us some interesting partic- 
 ulars of the emperor's residence at the island. It ap- 
 pears that he employed himself, from the first day of 
 his arrival, in the improvement of his little territory, 
 making roads, &c.,and behaved quite like a man, who 
 had made up his mind to relinquish ambition, and con- 
 tent himself with what was about him. Three as- 
 sassins were discovered and captured in the course of 
 the eleven months, the first two of whom he pardon- 
 ed. The third made an attempt upon his life, in the 
 disguise of a beggar, at a bridge leading to his country- 
 house, and was condemned and executed. He was a 
 native of the emperor's own birthplace in Corsica. 
 
 The second floor was occupied by his mother and 
 Pauline. The furniture of the chamber of the re- 
 nowned beauty is very much as she left it. The bed 
 is small, and the mirror opposite its foot very large, and 
 in a mahogany frame. Small mirrors were set also in 
 to the bureau, and in the back of a pretty cabinet of 
 dark wood standing at the head of the bed. It is de- 
 lightful to breathe the atmosphere of a room that has 
 been the home of the lovely creature whose marble 
 image by Canova thrills every beholder with love, and 
 is fraught with such pleasing associations. Her sit- 
 ting-room, though «ss interesting, made us linger and 
 muse again. It looks out over the sea to the west, and 
 the prospect is beautiful. One forgets that her histo- 
 ry could not be written without many a blot. How 
 much we forgive to beauty/! Of all the female branch- 
 es of the Bonaparte family. Pauline bore the greatest 
 
90 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 resemblance to her brother Napoleon. But the grand 
 and regular profile which was in him marked with the 
 stern air of sovereignty and despotic rule, was in her 
 tempered with an enchanting softness and fascinating 
 smile. Her statue, after the Venus de Medicis, is the 
 chefd'osuvre of modern sculpture. 
 
 We went from the governor's house to the walls of 
 the town, loitering along and gazing at the sea; and 
 then rambled through the narrow streets of the town, 
 attracting, by the gay uniforms of the officers, the at- 
 tentfon and courtesies of every smooched petticoat far 
 and near. What the faces of the damsels of Elba 
 might be, if washed, we could hardly form a conjec- 
 ture 
 
 The country-house of Napoleon is three miles from 
 the town, a little distance from the shore, farther round 
 into the bay. Captain Nicholson proposed to walk 
 to it, and send his boat across — a warmer task for the 
 mid-day of an Italian June than a man of less enter- 
 prise would choose for pleasure. We reached the 
 stone steps of the imperial casino, after a melting and 
 toilsome walk, hungry and thirsty, and were happy to 
 fling ourselves upon broken chairs in the denuded 
 drawing-room, and wait for an extempore dinner of 
 twelve eggs and bottle of wine as bitter as criticism. 
 A farmer and his family live in the house, and a couple 
 of bad busts and the fireplaces, are all that remain of 
 its old appearance. The situation and the view, how- 
 ever, are superb. A little lap of a valley opens right 
 away from the door to the bosom of the bay, and in 
 the midst of the glassy basin lies the bold peninsular 
 promontory and fortification of Porto Ferrajo, like a 
 castle in a loch, connected with the body of the island 
 by a mere rib of sand. Off beyond sleeps the main- 
 land of Italy, mountain and vale, like a smoothly- 
 shaped bed of clouds ; and for the foreground of the 
 landscape, the valleys of Elba are just now green 
 with fig-trees and vines, speckled here and there with 
 fields of golden grain, and farmhouses shaded with all 
 the trees of this genial climate. 
 
 We examined the place, after our frugal dinner, and 
 found a natural path under the edge of the hill behind, 
 stretching away back into the valley, and leading, af- 
 ter a short walk, to a small stream and a waterfall. 
 Across it, just above the fall, lay the trunk of an old 
 and vigorous fig-tree, full of green limbs, and laden 
 with fruit half ripe. It made a natural bridge over the 
 stream, and as its branches shaded the rocks below, 
 we could easily imagine Napoleon, walking to and fro 
 in the smooth path, and seating himself on the broad- 
 est stone in the heat of the summer evenings he pass- 
 ed on the spot. It was the only walk about the place, 
 and a secluded and pleasant one. The groves of firs 
 and brush above, and the locust and cherry-trees on 
 the edges of the walk, are old enough to have shaded 
 him. We sat and talked under the influence of the 
 " genius of the spot," till near sunset, and then, cut- 
 ting each a walking-stick from the shoots of the old 
 fig-tree, returned to the boats and reached the ship as 
 the band struck up their exhilarating music for the 
 evening on the quarter-deck. 
 
 We have passed two or three days at Elba most 
 agreeably. The weather has been fine, and the ships 
 have been thronged with company. The common 
 people of the town come on board in boat-loads, men, 
 women, and children, and are never satisfied with ga- 
 zing and wondering. The inhabitants speak very pure 
 Tuscan, and are mild and simple in their manners. 
 They all take the ships to be bound upon a mere voy- 
 age of pleasure ; and, with the officers in their gay 
 dresses, and the sailors in their clean white and blue, 
 the music morning and evening, and the general gay- 
 ety on board, the impression is not much to be won- 
 dered at. 
 
 Yesterday, after dinner, Captain Nicholson took us 
 ashore in his gig, to pass an hour or two in the shade. 
 His steward followed, with a bottle or two of old wine, 
 and landing near the fountain to which the boats are 
 sent for water, we soon found a spreading fig-tree, and, 
 with a family of the country people from a neighbor- 
 ing cottage around us, we idled away the hours till 
 the cool of the evening. The simplicity of the old 
 man and his wife, and the wonder of himself and sev- 
 eral laborers in his vineyard, to whom the captain gave 
 a glass or two of his excellent wines, would have made 
 a study for Wilkie. Sailors are merry companions for 
 a party like this. We returned over the unruffled ex- 
 panse of the bay, charmed with the beauty of the 
 scene by sunset, and as happy as a life, literally sans 
 souci, could make us. What is it, in this rambling ab 
 sence from all to which we look forward to in love and 
 hope, that so fascinates the imagination ? 
 
 I went, in the commodore's suite, to call upon the 
 governor this morning. He is a military, command- 
 ing looking man, and received us in Napoleon's sa- 
 loon, surrounded by his officers. He regretted that 
 his commission did not permit him to leave the shore, 
 even to visit a ship, but offered a visit on the part of 
 his sister and a company of the first ladies of the town. 
 They came off this evening. She was a lady-like 
 woman, not very pretty, of thirty years perhaps. As 
 she spoke only Italian, she was handed over to me, and 
 I waited on her through the ship, explaining a great 
 many things of which I knew as much as herself. 
 This visit over, we get under way to-morrow morning 
 for Naples. 
 
 LETTER LXIII. 
 
 VISIT TO NAPLES, HERCULANEUM, AND POMPEII. 
 
 I have passed my first day in Naples in wandering 
 about, without any definite object. I have walked 
 around its famous bay, looked at the lazzaroni, watch- 
 ed the smoke of Vesuvius, traversed the square where 
 the young Conradine was beheaded and Masaniello 
 commenced his revolt, mounted to the castle of St. 
 Elmo, and dined on macaroni in a trattoria, where the 
 Italian I had learned in Tuscany was of little more 
 use to me than Greek. 
 
 The bay surprised me most. It is a collection of 
 beauties, which seems more a miracle than an acci 
 dent of nature. It is a deep crescent of sixteen 
 miles across and a little more in length, between the 
 points of which lies a chain of low mountains, called 
 the island of Capri, looking, from the shore, like a 
 vast heap of clouds brooding at sea. In the bosom of 
 the crescent lies Naples. Its palaces and principal 
 buildings cluster around the base of an abrupt hill 
 crowned by the castle of St. Elmo, and its half mill- 
 ion of inhabitants have stretched their dwellings over 
 the plain toward Vesuvius, and back upon Posilipo, 
 bordering the curve of the shore on the right and left, 
 with a broad white band of city and village for twelve 
 or fourteen miles. Back from this, on the southern 
 side, a very gradual ascent brings your eye to the base 
 of Vesuvius, which rises from the plain in a sharp 
 cone, broken in at the top, its black and lava-streaked 
 sides descending with the evenness of a sand-hill, on 
 one side to the disinterred city of Pompeii, and on 
 the other to the royal palace of Portici, built over the 
 yet unexplored Herculaneum. In the centre of the 
 crescent of the shore, projecting into the sea by a 
 bridge of two or three hundred feet in length, stands 
 a small castle built upon a rock, on one side of which 
 lies the mole with its shipping. The other side is 
 bordered, close to the beach, with the gardens of the 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 91 
 
 oyal villa, a magnificent promenade of a mile, orna- 
 mented with fancy temples nod statuary, on the smooth 
 alleys of which may be mot, at certain hours, all that 
 is brilliant and gay in Naples. Farther on, toward the 
 northern horn of the bay, lies the mount of Posilipo, 
 the ancient coast of Baise, Cape Mysene, and the 
 mountain isles of Procida and Ischia, the last of which 
 still preserves the costumes of Greece, from which it 
 was colonized centuries ago. The bay itself is as blue 
 as the sky, scarcely ruffled all day with the wind, and 
 covered by countless boats fishing or creeping on with 
 their picturesque lateen sails just filled ; while the at- 
 mosphere oversea, city, and mountain, is of a clearness 
 and brilliancy which is inconceivable in other coun- 
 tries. The superiority of the sky and climate of Ita- 
 ly is no fable in any part of this delicious land — but 
 in Naples, if the day I have spent here is a fair speci- 
 men, it is matchless even for Italy. There is some- 
 thing like a fine blue veil of a most dazzling transpa- 
 rency over the mountains around, but above and be- 
 tween there seems nothing but viewless space — noth- 
 ing like air that a bird could rise upon. The eye gets 
 intoxicated almost with gazing on it. 
 
 We have just returned from our first excursion to 
 Pompeii. It lies on the southern side of the bay, just 
 below the volcano which overwhelmed it, about twelve 
 miles from Naples. The road lay along the shore, 
 and is lined with villages which are only separated by 
 name. The first is Portici, where the king has a sum- 
 mer palace, through the court of which the road pass- 
 es. It is built over Herculaneum, and the danger of 
 undermining it has stopped the excavations of unques- 
 tionably the richest city buried by Vesuvius. We 
 stopped at a little gate in the midst of the village, and 
 taking a guide and two torches, descended to the only 
 part of it now visible, by near a hundred steps. We 
 found ourselves at the back of an amphitheatre. We 
 entered the narrow passage, and the guide pointed to 
 several of the upper seats for the spectators which 
 had been partially dug out. They were lined with 
 marble, as the whole amphitheatre appears to have 
 been. To realize the effect of these ruins, it is to be 
 remembered that they are imbedded in solid lava, like 
 rock, near a hundred feet deep, and that the city which 
 is itself ancient is built above them. The carriage in 
 which we came stood high over our heads, in a time- 
 worn street, and ages had passed and many generations 
 of men had lived and died over a splendid city, whose 
 very name had been forgotten! It was discovered in 
 sinking a well, which struck the door of the amphi- 
 theatre. The guide took us through several other 
 long passages, dug across and around it, showing us 
 the orchestra, the stage, the numerous entrances, and 
 the bases of several statues which are taken to the 
 museum at Naples. This is the only part of the ex- 
 cavation that remains open, the others having again 
 been filled with rubbish. The noise of the carriages 
 overhead in the street of Portici was like a deafening 
 thunder. 
 
 In a hurry to get to Pompeii, which is much more 
 interesting, we ascended to daylight, and drove on. — 
 Coasting along the curve of the bay, with only a suc- 
 cession of villas and gardens between us and the beach, 
 we soon came to Torre del Greco, a small town which 
 was overwhelmed by an eruption thirty-nine years ago. 
 Vesuvius here rises gradually on the left, the crater 
 being at a distance of five miles. The road crossed 
 the bed of dry lava, which extends to the sea in a 
 broad black mass of cinders, giving the country the most 
 desolate aspect. The town is rebuilt just beyond the 
 ashes, and the streets are crowded with the thought- 
 less inhabitants, who buy and sell, and lounge in the 
 sun, with no more remembrance or fear of the volcano 
 than the people of a city in America. 
 
 Another half hour brought us to a long, high bank 
 of earth and ashes, thrown out from the excavations ; 
 and, passing on, we stopped at the gate of Pompeii. 
 A guide met us, and we entered. We found ourselves 
 in the ruins of a public square, surrounded with small 
 low columns of red marble. On the right were sev- 
 eral small prisons, in one of which was found the 
 skeleton of a man with its feet in iron stocks. The 
 cell was very small, and the poor fellow must have 
 been suffocated without even a hope of escape. The 
 columns just in front were scratched with ancient 
 names, possibly those of the guard stationed at the 
 door of the prison. This square is surrounded with 
 shops, in which were found the relics and riches of 
 tradesmen, consisting of an immense variety. In one 
 of the buildings was found the skeleton of a newborn 
 child, and in one part of the square the skeletons of 
 sixty men, supposed to be soldiers, who, in the severi- 
 ty of Roman discipline, dared not fly, and perished at 
 their post. There were several advertisements of 
 gladiators on the pillars, and it appears that at the 
 time of the eruption the inhabitants of Pompeii were 
 principally assembled in the great amphitheatre, at a 
 show. 
 
 We left the square, and visiting several small pri- 
 vate houses near it, passed into a street with a slight 
 ascent, the pavement of which was worn deep with 
 carriage-wheels. It appeared to have led from the up- 
 per part of the city directly to the sea, and in rainy 
 weather must have been quite a channel for water, as 
 high stones at small distances were placed across the 
 street, leaving open places between for the carriage 
 wheels. (I think there is a contrivance of the same 
 kind in one of the streets of Baltimore.) 
 
 We mounted thence to higher ground, the part of 
 the city not excavated. A peasant's hut and a iarge 
 vineyard stand high above the ruins, and from the door 
 the whole city and neighborhood are seen to advan- 
 tage. The effect of the scene is strange beyond de- 
 scription. Columns, painted walls, wheelworn streets, 
 amphitheatres, palaces, all as lonely and deserted as 
 the grave, stand around you, and behind is a poor cot- 
 tage and a vineyard of fresh earth just putting forth 
 its buds, and beyond the broad, blue, familiar bay, cov- 
 ered with steamboats and sails, and populous modern 
 Naples in the distance — a scene as strangely mingled? 
 perhaps, as any to be found in the world. We looked 
 around for a while, and then walked on through the 
 vineyard to the amphitheatre which lies beyond, near 
 the other gate of the city. It is a gigantic ruin, com- 
 pletely excavated, and capable of containing twenty 
 thousand spectators. The form is oval, and the archi- 
 tecture particularly fine. Besides the many vomitories 
 or passages for ingress and egress, there are three small- 
 er alleys, one used as the entrance for wild beasts, one 
 for the gladiators, and the third as that by which the 
 dead were taken away. The skeletons of eight lions 
 and a man, supposed to be their keeper, were found in 
 one of the dens beneath, and those of five other per- 
 sons near the different doors. It is presumed that the 
 greater proportion of the inhabitants of Pompeii must 
 have escaped by sea, as the eruption occurred while 
 they were nearly all assembled on this spot, and these 
 few skeletons only have been found.* 
 
 We returned through the vineyard, and stopping at 
 the cottage, called for some of the wine of the last 
 vintage (delicious, like all those in the neighborhood 
 j of Vesuvius), and producing our basket of provisions, 
 made a most agreeable dinner. Two parties of Eng- 
 lish passed while we were sitting at our out-of-doors 
 table. Our attendant was an uncommonly pretty 
 girl of sixteen, born on the spot, and famous just now 
 as the object of a young English nobleman's particu- 
 lar admiration. She is a fine, dark-eyed creature, but 
 
 • " The number of skeletons hitherto disinterred in Pom- 
 peii and its suburbs is three hundred." — Stark. 
 
92 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 certainly no prettier than every fifth peasant girl in Italy. 
 Having finished our picturesque meal, we went down 
 into the ancient streets once more, and arrived at the 
 small temple of Isis, a building in excellent preserva- 
 tion. On the altar stood, when it was excavated, a 
 small statue of Isis, of exquisite workmanship (now 
 in the museum, to which all the curiosities of the 
 place are carried), and behind this we were shown the 
 secret penetralia, where the priests were concealed 
 who uttered the oracles supposed to be pronounced by 
 the goddess. The access was by a small secret flight 
 of stairs, communicating with the apartments of the 
 priests in the rear. The largest of these apartments 
 was probably the refectory, and here was found a hu- 
 man skeleton near a table, upon which lay dinner 
 utensils, chicken bones, bones of fishes, bread and 
 wine, and a faded garland of flowers. In the kitchen, 
 which we next visited, were found cooking utensils, 
 remains of food, and the skeleton of a man leaning 
 against the wall with an axe in his hand, and near him 
 a considerable hole, which he had evidently cut to 
 make his escape when the door was stopped by cinders. 
 The skeleton of one of the priests was found prostrate 
 near the temple, and in his hand three hundred and 
 sixty coins of silver, forty-two of bronze, and eight of 
 gold, wrapped strongly in a cloth. He had probably 
 stopped before his flight to load himself with the 
 treasures of the temple, and was overtaken by the 
 shower of cinders and suffocated. The skeletons of 
 one or two were found upon beds, supposed to have 
 been smothered while asleep or ill. The temple is 
 beautifully paved with mosaic (as indeed are all the 
 better private houses and public buildings of Pom- 
 peii), and the open inner court is bordered with a 
 quadrilateral portico. The building is of the Roman 
 Doric order. (I have neither time nor room to enu- 
 merate the curiosities found here and in the other parts 
 of the city, and I only notice those which most im- 
 pressed my memory. The enumeration by Madame 
 Stark, will be found exceedingly interesting to those 
 who have not read her laconic guide-book.) 
 
 We passed next across a small street to the tragic 
 theatre, a large handsome building, where the seats for 
 the vestals, consuls, and other places of honor, are 
 well preserved, and thence up the hill to the temple 
 of Hercules, which must have been a noble edifice, 
 commanding a superb view of the sea. 
 
 The next object was the triangular forum, an open 
 space surrounded with three porticoes, supported by 
 a hundred Doric columns. Here were found several 
 skeletons, one of which was that of a man who had 
 loaded himself with plunder. Gold and silver coins, 
 cups, rings, spoons, buckles, and other things, were 
 found under him. Near here, under the ruins of a 
 wall, were discovered skeletons of a man and a wo- 
 man, and on the arms of the latter two beautiful 
 bracelets of gold. 
 
 We entered from this a broad street, lined with 
 shops, against the walls of which were paintings in 
 fresco and inscriptions in deep-red paint, representing 
 the occupations and recording the names of the occu- 
 pants. In one of them was found a piece of salt-fish, 
 smelling strongly after seventeen centuries! In a 
 small lane leading from this street, the guide led us to 
 a shop, decorated with pictures of fish of various 
 kinds, and furnished with a stove, marble dressers, ;u^l 
 earthen jars, supposed to have belonged to a vender of 
 fish and olives. A little further en was a baker's shop, 
 with a well-used oven, in which was found a batch of 
 bread burnt to a cinder. Near this was the house of a 
 midwife. In it were found several instruments of a 
 simple and excellent construction, unknown to the 
 moderns, a forceps, remains of medicines in a wooden 
 box, and various pestles and mortars. The walls were 
 ornamented with frescoes of the Graces, Venus, and 
 Adonis, and similar subjects. 
 
 The temple of the pantheon is a magnificent ruin, 
 and must have been one of the choicest in Pompeii. 
 Its walls are decorated with exquisite paintings in fresco, 
 arabesques, mosaics, &c, and its court is one hundred 
 and eighty feet long, and two hundred and thirty broad, 
 and contains an altar, around which are twelve pedes- 
 tals for statues of the twelve principal deities of the 
 ancients. Gutters of marble are placed at the base of 
 the triclinium, to carry away the blood of the victims. 
 A thousand coins of bronze, and forty or fifty of silver, 
 were found near the sanctuary. 
 
 We passed on to the Curea, a semicircular building, 
 for the discussion of matters of religion by the magis- 
 trates ; a temple of Romulus ; the remains of a tem- 
 ple of Janus ; a splendid building called the chalcidi- 
 cum, constructed by the priestess Eumachea and her 
 son, and dedicated as a temple of concord, and came 
 at last, by a regular ascent, into a large and spacious 
 square, called the forum civile. This part of the city 
 of Pompeii must have been extremely imposing. 
 Porticoes, supported by noble columns, encompassed 
 its vast area ; the pedestals of colossal statues, erected 
 to distinguished citizens, are placed at the corners ; at 
 the northern extremity rose a stately temple of Jupiter; 
 on the right was another temple to Venus ; beyond, a 
 large public edifice, the use of which is not known; 
 across the narrow street which bounds it stood the 
 Basilica, an immense building, which served as a court 
 of justice and an exchange. 
 
 We passed out at the gate of the city and stopped 
 at a sentry-box, in which was found a skeleton in full 
 armo r — a soldier who had died at his post ! From 
 hence formerly the road descended directly to the sea, 
 and for some distance was lined on either side with the 
 magnificent tombs of the Pompeians. Among them 
 was that of the vestal virgins, left unfinished when 
 the city was destroyed ; a very handsome tomb, in 
 which was found the skeleton of a woman, with a lamp 
 in one hand and jewels in the other (who had probably 
 attempted to rob before her flight), and a very hand- 
 some square monument, with a beautiful relievo on 
 one of the slabs, representing (as emblematic of death) 
 a ship furling her sails on coming into port. Near 
 one of the large family sepulchres stands a small semi- 
 circular room, intended for the funeral feast after a 
 burial ; and here were found the remains of three men 
 around a table, scattered with relics of a meal. They 
 were overwhelmed ere their feast was concluded over 
 the dead ! 
 
 The principal inn of Pompeii was just inside the 
 gate. We went over the ruins of it. The skeleton 
 of an ass was found chained to a ring in the stable, and 
 the tire of a wheel lay in the court yard. Chequers 
 are painted on the side of the door, as a sign. 
 
 Below the tombs stands the " suburban villa of 
 Diomed," one of the most sumptuous edifices of 
 Pompeii. Here was found everything that the age 
 could furnish for the dwelling of a man of wealth. 
 Statues, frescoes, jewels, wine, household utensils of 
 every description, skeletons of servants and dogs, and 
 every kind of elegant furniture. The family was large, 
 and in the first moment of terror, they all retreated to 
 a wine vault under the villa, where their skeletons 
 (eighteen grown persons and two children) were found 
 seventeen centuries after ! There was really some- 
 thing startling in walking through the deserted rooms 
 of this beautiful villa — more than one feels elsewhere 
 in Pompeii, for it is more like the elegance and taste 
 of our own day ; and with the brightness of the pre- 
 served walls, and the certainty with which the use of 
 each room is ascertained, it seems as if the living in- 
 habitant would step from some corner and welcome 
 you. The fiaures on the walls are as fresh as if done 
 yesterday. The baths look as if they might scarce be 
 dry from use. It seems incredible that the whole 
 Christian age has elapsed since this was a human 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 dwelling — occupied by its last family while our Savior 
 was walking the world! 
 
 It would be tedious to enumerate all the curious 
 places to which the guide led us in this extraordinary 
 city. On our return through the streets, among the ob- 
 jects of interest was the home of Sallust, the historian. 
 I did not think, when reading his beautiful latin at 
 school, that I should ever sit down in his parlor ! 
 Sallust was rich, and his house is uncommonly hand- 
 some. Here is his chamber, his inner court, his 
 kitchen, his garden, his dining-room, his guest cham- 
 ber, all perfectly distinguishable by the symbolical 
 frescoes on the walls. In the court was a fountain of 
 pretty construction, and opposite, in the rear, was a 
 flower-garden, containing arrangements for dining in 
 open air in summer. The skeleton of a female (suppo- 
 sed to be the wife of the historian) and three servants, 
 known by their different ornaments, were found near 
 the door of the street. 
 
 We passed a druggist's shop and a cook-shop, and 
 entered, treading on a beautiful mosaic floor, the 
 " house of the dramatic poet," so named, from the 
 character of the paintings with which it is ornamented 
 throughout. The frescoes found here are the finest 
 ancient paintings in the world, and from some pecu- 
 liarity in the rings upon the fingers of the female 
 figures, they are supposed to be family portraits. With 
 assistance like this, how easily the imagination repeo- 
 ples these deserted dwellings ! 
 
 A heavy shower drove us to the shelter of the wine- 
 vaults of Diomed, as we were about stepping into our 
 carriage to return to Naples. We spent the time in 
 exploring, and found some thirty or forty earthen jars 
 still half-buried in the ashes which drifted through the 
 loop-holes of the cellar. In another half hour the 
 black cloud had passed away over Vesuvius, and the 
 sun set behind Posilipo in a flood of splendor. We 
 were at home soon after dark, having had our fill of 
 astonishment for once. I have seen nothing in my life 
 so remarkable as this disentombed city. I have passed 
 over, in the description, many things which were well 
 worth noting, but it would have grown into a mere 
 catalogue else. You should come to Italy. It is a 
 privilege to realize these things which could not be 
 bought too dearly, and they can not be realized but 
 by the eye. Description conveys but a poor shadow 
 of them to the fancy. 
 
 LETTER LXIV. 
 
 ACCOUNT OF VESUVIUS — THE HERMITAGE — THE FAMOUS 
 LAGRIMA CHRISTI — DIFFICULTIES OF THE PATH — CU- 
 RIOUS APPEARANCE OF THE OLD CRATER — ODD AS- 
 SEMBLAGE OF TRAVELLERS — THE NEW CRATER 
 
 SPLENDID PROSPECT — MR. MATHIAS, AUTHOR OF THE 
 PURSUITS OF LITERATURE — THE ARCHBISHOP OF TA- 
 RENTO. 
 
 Mounted upon asses much smaller than their ri- 
 ders, and with each a barelegged driver behind, we 
 commenced the ascent of Vesuvius. It was a trou- 
 blesome path worn through the rough scoria of old 
 eruptions, atiu^fter two hours' toiling, we were glad 
 to dismount at " the hermitage." Here lives a capu- 
 chin friar on a prominent rib in the side of the volcano, 
 the red-hot lava dividing above his dwelling every year 
 or two, and coursing away to the valley in two rivers 
 of fire on either side of him. He has been there 
 twelve years, and supports himself, and probably half 
 the brotherhood at the monastery by selling lagrima 
 Chrisli to strangers. It is a small white building with 
 a little grass and a few trees about it, and looks like an 
 island in the black waste of cinders and lava. 
 
 A shout from the guide was answered by the open- 
 
 ing of a small window above, and the shaven crown 
 of the old friar was thrust forth with a welcome and a 
 request that we would mount the stairs to the parlor. 
 He received us at the top, and gave us chairs around 
 a plain board table, upon which he set several bottles 
 of the far-famed wine of Vesuvius. One drinks it, 
 and blesses the volcano that warmed the roots of the 
 grape. It is a ripe, rich, full-bodied liquor which 
 " ascends me into the brain" sooner than any conti- 
 nental wine I have tasted. I never drank anything 
 more delicious. 
 
 We remounted our asses and rode on, much more 
 indifferent than before to the roughness of the path. 
 It strikes one like the road to the infernal regions. 
 No grass, not a shrub, nothing but a wide mountain 
 of cinders, black and rugged, diversified only by the 
 deeper die of the newer streaks of lava. The eye 
 wearied of gazing on it. We mounted thus for an 
 hour or more, arriving at last at the base of a lofty 
 cone whose sides were but slopes of deep ashes. W T e 
 left our donkeys here in company with those of a large 
 party that had preceded us, and made preparations to 
 ascend on foot. The drivers unlaced their sashes and 
 passing them round the waists of the ladies, took the 
 ends over their shoulders, and proceeded. Harder 
 work could scarce be conceived. The feet had no 
 hold, sinking knee-deep at every step, and we slipped 
 back so much, that our progress was almost imper- 
 ceptible. The ladies were soon tired out, although 
 more than half dragged up by the guides. At every 
 few steps there was a general cry for a halt, and we lay 
 down in the warm ashes, quite breathless and dis- 
 couraged. 
 
 In something more than an hour from the hermit- 
 age we reached the edge of the old crater. The 
 scene here was very curious. A hollow, perhaps a 
 mile round, composed entirely of scoria (like the cin- 
 ders under a blacksmith's window) contained in its 
 centre the sharp new cone of the last eruption. 
 Around, in various directions, sat some thirty groups 
 of travellers, with each their six or seven Italian guides, 
 refreshing themselves with a lunch after the fatigues 
 of the ascent. There were English, Germans, French, 
 Russians, and Italians, each speaking their own lan- 
 guage, and the largest party, oddly enough, was from 
 the United States. As I was myself travelling with 
 foreigners, and found my countrymen on Vesuvius un- 
 expectedly, the mixture of nations appeared still more 
 extraordinary. The combined heat of the sun and the 
 volcano beneath us, had compelled the Italians to 
 throw off half their dress, and they sat, or stood lean- 
 ing on their long pikes, with their brown faces and 
 dark eyes glowing with heat, as fine models of ruffians 
 as ever startled a traveller in this land of bandits. 
 Eight or ten of them were grouped around a crack in 
 the crater, roasting apples and toasting bread. There 
 were several of these cracks winding about in different 
 directions, of which I could barely endure the heat, 
 holding my hand at the top. A stick thrust in a foot 
 or more, was burnt black in a moment. 
 
 With another bottle or two of " lagrima Christi" 
 and a roasted apple, our courage was renewed, and we 
 picked our way across the old crater, sometimes lost 
 in the smoke which steamed up through the cracks, 
 and here and there treading on beautiful beds of crys- 
 tals of sulphur. The ascent of the new cone was 
 shorter but very difficult. The ashes were so new 
 and light, that it was like a steep sandbank, giving dis- 
 couragingly at the least pressure, and sinking till the 
 next step was taken. The steams of sulphur as we 
 approached the summit, were all but intolerable. The 
 ladies coughed, the guides sneezed and called on the 
 Madonna, and I never was more relieved than in 
 catching the first clear draught of wind on the top of 
 the mountain. 
 
 Here we all stood at last — crowded together on the 
 
94 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 narrow edge of a crater formed within the year, and 
 liable every moment to be overwhelmed with burning 
 lava. There was scarce room to stand, and the hot 
 ashes burnt our feet as they sunk into it. The fe- 
 males of each party sunk to the ground, and the com- 
 mon danger and toil breaking down the usual stiff bar- 
 rier of silence between strangers, the conversation be- 
 came general, and the hour on the crater's edge pass- 
 ed very agreeably. 
 
 A strong lad would just about throw a stone from 
 one side to the other of the new crater. It was about 
 forty feet deep, perhaps more, and one crust of sul- 
 phur lined the whole. It was half the time obscured 
 in smoke, which poured in volumes from the broad 
 cracks with which it was divided in every direction, 
 and occasionally an eddy of wind was caught in the 
 vast bowl, and for a minute its bright yellow surface 
 was perfectly clear. There had not been an eruption 
 for four or five months, and the abyss which is for 
 years together a pit of fire and boiling lava, has had 
 time to harden over, and were it not for the smoking 
 seams, one would scarce suspect the existence of the 
 tremendous volcano slumbering beneath. 
 
 After we had been on the summit a few minutes, an 
 English clergyman of my acquaintance to our surprise 
 emerged from the smoke. He had been to the bottom 
 for specimens of sulphur for his cabinet. Contrary to 
 the advice of the guide, I profited by his experience, 
 and disappearing in the flying clouds, reached the low- 
 est depths of the crater with some difficulties of foot- 
 hold and breath. The cracks, which I crossed twice, 
 were so brittle as to break like the upper ice of a twice 
 frozen pond beneath my feet, and the stench of the ex- 
 haling gases, was nauseating beyond all the sulphuret- 
 ted hydrogen I have ever known. The sensation was 
 painfully suffocating from the moment I entered the 
 crater. I broke off as many bits of the bright golden 
 crystals from the crust as my confusion and failing 
 strength would allow, and then remounted, feeling my 
 way up through the smoke to the summit. 
 
 I can compare standing on the top of Vesuvius and 
 looking down upou the bay and city of Naples, to 
 nothing but mounting a peak in the infernal regions 
 overlooking paradise. The larger crater encircles you 
 entirely for a mile, cutting off the view of the sides of 
 the mountain, and from the elevation of the new cone, 
 you look over the rising edge of this black field of smoke 
 and cinders, and drop the eye at once upon Naples, 
 lying asleep in the sun, with its lazy sails upon the 
 water, and the green hills enclosing it clad in the inde- 
 scribable beauty of an Italian atmosphere. Beyond 
 all comparison, by the testimony of every writer and 
 traveller, the most beautiful scene in the world, the 
 loveliest water, and the brightest land, lay spread out 
 before us. With the stench of hot sulphur in our 
 nostrils, ankle deep in black ashes, and a waste of 
 smouldering cinders in every direction around us, the 
 enjoyment of the view certainly did not want for the 
 heightening of contrast. 
 
 We made our descent by jumps through the sliding 
 ashes, frequently tumbling over each other, and re- 
 tracing in five minutes the toil of an hour. Our don- 
 keys stood tethered together on the herbless field of 
 cinders, and we were soon in the clumsy saddles, and 
 with a call at the hermitage, and a parting draught of 
 wine with the friar, we reached our carriages at the 
 little village of Resina in safety. The feet of the whole 
 troop were in a wretched condition. The ladies had 
 worn shoes, or slight boots, which were cut to pieces 
 of course, and one very fine-looking girl, the daughter 
 of an elderly French gentleman, had, with the usual 
 improvidence of her nation, started in satin slippers. 
 She was probably lamed for a month, as she insisted 
 on persevering, and wrapped her feet in handkerchiefs 
 to return. 
 
 We rode along the curve of the bay, by one of these 
 
 matchless sunsets of Italy, and arrived at Naples at 
 dark. 
 
 I have had the pleasure lately of making the acquaint- 
 ance of Mr. Malhias, the distinguished author of the 
 " Pursuits of Literature," and the translator of Spenser 
 and other English poets into Italian. About twentv 
 years ago, this well-known scholar came to Italy on a 
 desperate experiment of health. Finding himself 
 better, almost against hope, he has remained from year 
 to year in Naples, in love with the climate and the 
 language, until, at this day, he belongs less to the 
 English than the Italian literature, having written 
 various original poems in Italian, and translated into 
 Italian verse to the wonder and admiration of the 
 scholars of the country. I found him this morning 
 at his lodgings, in an old palace on the Pizzofalcone, 
 buried in books as usual, and good-humored enough 
 to give an hour to a young man, who had no claim on 
 him beyond the ordinary interest in a distinguished 
 scholar. He talked a great deal of America naturally, 
 and expressed a very strong friendship for Mr. Everett, 
 whom he had met on his travels, requesting me at the 
 same time to take to him a set of his works as a remem- 
 brance. Mr. Mathias is a small man, of perhaps sixty 
 years, perfectly bald, and a little inclined to corpulency. 
 His head is ample, and would make a fine picture of a 
 scholar. His voice is hurried and modest, and from 
 long residence in Italy his English is full of Italian 
 idioms. He spoke with rapture of Da Ponte, calling 
 me back as I shut the door to ask for him. It seemed 
 to give him uncommon pleasure that we appreciated 
 and valued him in America. 
 
 I have looked over, this evening, a small volume, 
 which he was kind enough to give me. It is entitled 
 " Lyric Poetry, by T. I. Mathias, a new edition, priut- 
 ed privately." It is dated 1832, and the poems were 
 probably all written within the last two years. The 
 shortest extract I can make is a "Sonnet to the Mem 
 ory of Gray," which strikes me as very beautiful. 
 
 " Lord of the various lyre ! devout we turn 
 Our pilgrim steps to thy supreme abode, 
 And tread with awe the solitary road 
 To grace with votive wreaths thy hallowed urn. 
 Yet, as we wander through this dark sojourn, 
 No more the strains we hear, that all abroad 
 Thy fancy wafted, as the inspiring God 
 Prompted' the thoughts that breathe, the words that burn.' 
 
 u But hark ! a voice in solemn accents clear 
 Bursts from heaven's vault that glows with temperate fire ; 
 Cease, mortal, cease to drop the fruitless tear, 
 Mute though the raptures of his full-strung lyre, 
 E'en his own warblings, lessened on his ear, 
 Lost in seraphic harmony expired 
 
 I have met also, at a dinner party lately, the cele- 
 brated antiquary, Sir William Gell. He too lives 
 abroad. His work on Pompeii has become authority, 
 and displays very great learning. He is a tall, large- 
 featured man, and very commanding in his appearance, 
 though lamed terribly with the gout. 
 
 A friend, whom I met at the same house, took me 
 to see the archbishop of Tarento yesterday. This 
 venerable man, it is well known, lost his gown for his 
 participation in the cause of the Carbonari (the revo- 
 lutionary conspirators of Italy). He has always play- 
 ed a conspicuous part in the politics of his time, and 
 now, at the age of ninety, unlike the usual fate of med- 
 dlers in troubled waters, he is a healthy, happy, ven- 
 erated old man, surrounded in his palace with all that 
 luxury can give him. The lady who presented me, 
 took the privilege of intimate friendship to call at an 
 unusual hour, and we found the old churchman in his 
 slippers, over his breakfast, with two immense tortoise- 
 shell cats, upon stools, watching his hand for bits of 
 bread and purring most affectionately. He looks like 
 one of Titian's pictures. His face is a wreck of com- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 99 
 
 manding features, and his eye seems less to have lost 
 its fire, than to slumber in its deep socket. His hair 
 is snowy white — his forehead of prodigious breadth 
 and height — and his skin has that calm, settled, and 
 yet healthy paleness, which carries with it the history 
 of a whole life of temperance and thought. 
 
 The old man rose from his chair with a smile, and 
 came forward with a stoop and a feeble step, and took 
 my two hands, as my friend mentioned my name, and 
 looked me in the face very earnestly. "Your country," 
 said he, in Italian, " has sprung into existence like 
 Minerva, full grown and armed. We look for the 
 result." He went on with some comments upon the 
 dangers of republics and then sent me to look at a por- 
 trait of Queen Giovanna, of Naples, by Leonardo da 
 Vinci, while he sat down to talk with the lady who 
 brought me. His secretary accompanied me as a 
 cicerone. Five or six rooms, communicating with 
 each other were filled with choice pictures, every one 
 a gift from some distinguished individual. The pres- 
 ent king of France had sent him his portrait ; Queen 
 Adelaide had sent a splendid set of Sevres china, with 
 the portraits of her family ; the queen of Belgium had 
 presented him with her miniature and that of Leopold ; 
 the king and queen of Naples had half furnished his 
 house ; and so the catalogue went on. It seemed as 
 if the whole continent had united to honor the old man. 
 While I was looking at a curious mosaic portrait of a 
 cat, presented to him on the death of the original, by 
 some prince whose name I have forgotten, he came to 
 us, and said he had just learned that my pursuits were 
 literary, and would present me with his own last work. 
 He opened the drawer of a small bureau and produced 
 a manuscript of some ten pages, written in a feeble 
 hand. " This," said he, " is an enumeration from 
 memory of what I have not seen for many years, the 
 classic spots about our beautiful city of Naples, and 
 their associations. I have written it in the last month 
 to wile away the time, and call up again the pleasure 
 I have received many times in my life in visiting them." 
 I put the curious document in my bosom with many 
 thanks, and we kissed the hand of the good old priest 
 and left him. We found his carriage, with three or 
 four servants in handsome livery, waiting for him in 
 the court below. We had intruded a little on the hour 
 for his morning ride. 
 
 I found his account of the environs merely a simple 
 catalogue, with here and there a classic quotation from 
 a Greek or Latin author, referring to them. I keep 
 the MS. as a curious memento of one of the noblest 
 relics I have seen of an age gone by. 
 
 LETTER LXV. 
 
 THE FASHIONABLE WORLD OF NAPLES AT THE RACES 
 —BRILLIANT SHOW OF EQUIPAGES — THE KING AND 
 HIS BROTHER— RANK AND CHARACTER OF THE 
 
 JOCKEYS — DESCRIPTION OF THE RACES THE PUBLIC 
 
 BURIAL-GROUND AT NAPLES HORRID AND INHUMAN 
 
 SPECTACLES — THE LAZZARONI THE MUSEUM AT NA- 
 PLES—ANCIENT RELICS FROM POMPEII— FORKS NOT 
 USED BY THE ANCIENTS— THE LAMP LIT AT THE 
 TIME OF OUR SAVIOR — THE ANTIQUE CHAIR OF SAL- 
 LUST THE VILLA OF CICERO THE BALBI FAMILY 
 
 — BACCHUS ON THE SHOULDERS OF A FAUN — GAL- 
 LERY OF DIANS, CUPIDS, JOVES, MERCURIES, AND 
 APOLLOS, STATUE OF ARISTIDES, ETC. 
 
 I have been all day at " the races." The king of 
 Naples, who has a great admiration for everything 
 English, has abandoned the Italian custom of running 
 horses without riders through the crowded street, and 
 has laid out a magnificent course on the summit of a 
 
 broad hill overlooking the city on the east. Here he 
 astonishes his subjects with ridden races, and it was 
 to see one of the best of the season, that the whole 
 fashionable world of Naples poured out to the campo 
 this morning. The show of equipages was very bril- 
 liant, the dashing liveries of the various ambassadors, 
 and the court and nobles of the kingdom, showing on 
 the bright green-sward to great effect. I never saw a 
 more even piece of turf, and it was fresh in the just- 
 born vegetation of spring. The carriages were drawn 
 up in two lines, nearly half round the course, and for 
 an hour or two before the races, the king and his broth- 
 er, Prince Carlo, rode up and down between with the 
 royal suite, splendidly mounted, the monarch himself 
 upon a fiery gray blood horse, of uncommon power 
 and beauty. The director was an Aragonese noble- 
 man, cousin to the king, and as perfect a specimen of 
 the Spanish cavalier as ever figured in the pages of 
 romance. He was mounted on a Turkish horse, snow- 
 white, and the finest animal I ever saw ; and he car- 
 ried all eyes with him, as he dashed up and down, like 
 a meteor. I like to see a fine specimen of a man, as I 
 do a fine picture, or an excellent horse, and I think I 
 never saw a prettier spectacle of its kind, than this 
 wild steed from the Balkan and his handsome rider. 
 
 The king is tall, very fat, but very erect, of a light 
 complexion, and a good horseman, riding always in 
 the English style, trotting and rising in his stirrup. — 
 (He is about twenty-three, and so surprisingly like a 
 friend of mine in Albany, that the people would raise 
 their hats to them indiscriminately, 1 am sure.) 
 Prince Charles is smaller and less kingly in his ap- 
 pearance, dresses carelessly and ill, and is surrounded 
 always in public with half a dozen young Englishmen. 
 He is said to have been refused lately by the niece of 
 the wealthiest English nobleman in Italy, a very beau- 
 tiful girl of eighteen, who was on the ground to-day 
 in a chariot and four. 
 
 The horses were led up and down — a delicate, fine- 
 limbed sorrel mare, and a dark chestnut horse, com- 
 pact and wiry — both English. The bets were arran- 
 ged, the riders weighed, and, at the beat of a bell, off 
 they went like arrows. Oh what a beautiful sight ! 
 The course was about a mile round, and marked with 
 red flags at short distances ; and as the two flying 
 creatures described the bright green circle, spread out 
 like greyhounds, and running with an ease and grace 
 that seemed entirely without effort, the king dashed 
 across the field followed by the whole court ; the Tur- 
 kish steed of Don Giovanni restrained with difficulty 
 in the rear, and leaping high in the air at every bound, 
 his nostrils expanded, and his head thrown up with 
 the peculiar action of his race, while his snow-white 
 mane and tail flew with every hair free to the wind. 
 I had, myself, a small bet upon the sorrel. It was 
 nothing, a pair of gloves with a lady, but as the horses 
 came round, the sorrel a whip's length a-head, and 
 both shot by like the wind, scarce touching the earth 
 apparently, and so even in their speed that the rider 
 in blue might have kept his hand on the other's back, 
 the excitement became breathless. Away they went 
 again, past the starting post, pattering, pattering on 
 with their slender hoofs, the sorrel still keeping her 
 ground, and a thousand bright lips wishing the grace- 
 ful creature success. Half way round the blue jacket 
 began to whip. The sorrel still held her way, and I 
 felt my gloves to be beyond peril. The royal cortege 
 within the ring spurred across at the top of their speed 
 to the starting post. The horses came on — their nos- 
 trils open and panting, bounding upon the way with 
 the same measured leaps a little longer and more 
 eager than before; the rider of the sorrel leaning over 
 the neck of his horse with a loose rein, and his whip 
 hanging untouched from his wrist. Twenty leaps 
 more ! With every one the rider of the chestnut gave 
 the fine animal a blow. The sorrel sprang desperately 
 
96 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 on, every nerve strained to the jump, but at the instant 
 that they passed the carriage in which I stood, the 
 chestnut was developing his wiry frame in tremendous 
 leaps, and had already gained on his opponent the 
 length of his head. They were lost in the crowd that 
 broke instantly into the course behind them, and in a 
 moment after a small red flag was waved from the 
 stand. My favorite had lost ! 
 
 The next race was ridden by a young Scotch noble- 
 man, and the son of the former French ambassador, 
 upon the horses with which they came to the ground. 
 It was a match made up on the spot. The French- 
 man was so palpably better mounted, that there was a 
 general laugh when the ground was cleared and the 
 two gentlemen spurred up and down to show them- 
 selves as antagonists. The Parisian himself stuffed 
 his white handkerchief in his bosom, and jammed 
 down his hat upon his head with a confident laugh, 
 and among the ladies there was scarce a bet upon the 
 grave Scotchman, who borrowed a stout whip, and 
 rode his bony animal between the lines with a hard 
 rein and his feet set firmly in the stirrups. The 
 Frenchman generously gave him every advantage, be- 
 ginning with the inside of the ring. The bell struck, 
 and the Scotchman drove his spurs into his horse's 
 flanks and started away, laying on with his whip most 
 industriously. His opponent followed, riding very 
 gracefully, but apparently quite sure that he could 
 overtake him at any moment, and content for the first 
 round with merely showing himself off to the best 
 advantage. Round came Sawney, twenty leaps 
 ahead, whipping unmercifully still ; the blood of his 
 hired hack completely up, and himself as red in the 
 face as an alderman, and with his eye fixed only on 
 the road. The long-tailed bay of the Frenchman 
 came after, in handsome style, his rider sitting com- 
 placently upright, and gathering up his reins for the 
 first time to put his horse to his speed. The Scotch- 
 man flogged on. The Frenchman had disdained to 
 take a whip, but he drove his heels hard into his horse's 
 sides soon after leaving the post, and leaned forward 
 quite in earnest. The horses did remarkably well, 
 both showing much more bottom than was expected. 
 On they came, the latter gaining a little and working 
 very hard. Sawney had lost his hat, and his red hair 
 streamed back from his redder face ; but flogging and 
 spurring, with his teeth shut and his eyes steadily 
 fixed on the road, he kept the most of his ground and 
 rode away. They passed me a horse's length apart, 
 and the Scotchman's whip flying to the last, disap- 
 peared beyond me. He won the race by a couple of 
 good leaps at least. The king was very much amused, 
 and rode off laughing heartily, and the discomfited 
 Frenchman came back to his party with a very ill-con- 
 cealed dissatisfaction. 
 
 A very amusing race followed between two mid- 
 shipmen from an English corvette lying in the bay, and 
 then the long lines of splendid equipages wheeled 
 into train and dashed off the ground. The road, after 
 leaving the campo, runs along the edge of the range 
 of hills enclosing the city, and just below, within a 
 high white wall, lies the public burial-place of Naples. 
 I had read so many harrowing descriptions of this 
 spot, that my curiosity rose as we drove along in sight 
 of it, and requesting my friends to set me down, I 
 joined an American of my acquaintance, and we start- 
 ed to visit it together. 
 
 An old man opened the iron door, and we entered a 
 clean, spacious, and well-paved area, with long rows 
 of iron rings in the heavy slabs of the pavement. 
 Without asking a question, the old man walked across 
 to the farther corner, where stood a moveable lever, 
 and fastening the chain into the fixture, raised the 
 massive stone cover of a pit. He requested us to 
 stand back for a few minutes to give the effluvia time 
 to escape, and then, sheltering our eyes with our hats, 
 
 we looked in. You have read of course, that there 
 are three hundred and sixty-five pits in this place, one 
 of which is opened every day for the dead of the city. 
 They are thrown in without shroud or coffin,, and the 
 pit is sealed up at night for a year. They are thirty 
 or forty feet deep, and each would contain perhaps 
 two hundred bodies. Lime is thrown upon the daily 
 heap, and it soon melts into a mass of garbage, and by 
 the end of the year the bottom of the pit is covered 
 with dry white bones. 
 
 It was some time before we could distinguish any 
 thing in the darkness of the abyss. Fixing my eyes 
 on one spot, however, the outlines of a body became 
 defined gradually, and in a few minutes, sheltering my 
 eyes completely from the sun above, I could see all 
 the horrors of the scene but too distinctly. Eight 
 corpses, all of grown persons, lay in a confused heap 
 together, as they had been thrown in one after another 
 in the course of the day. The last was a powerfully 
 made, gray old man, who had fallen flat on his back, 
 with his right hand lying across and half covering the 
 face of a woman. By his full limbs and chest, and 
 the darker color of his legs below the knee, he was 
 probably one of the lazzaroni, and had met with a 
 sudden death. His right heel lay on the forehead of 
 a young man, emaciated to the last degree, his chest 
 thrown up as he lay, and his ribs showing like a skele- 
 ton covered with skin. The close black curls of the 
 latter, as his head rested on another body, were in 
 such strong relief that I could have counted them. 
 Off to the right, quite distinct from the heap, lay, in a 
 beautiful attitude, a girl, as well as I could judge, of 
 not more than nineteen or twenty. She had fallen on 
 the pile and rolled or slid away. Her hair was very 
 long, and covered her left shoulder and bosom ; her 
 arm was across her body, and if her mother had laid 
 her down to sleep, she could not have disposed her 
 limbs more decently. The head had fallen a little 
 away to the right, and the feet, which were small, 
 even for a lady, were pressed one against the other, 
 as if she were about turning on her side. The sex- 
 ton said that a young man had come with the body, 
 and was very ill for some time after it was thrown in. 
 We asked him if respectable people were brought 
 here. " Yes," he said, " many. None but the rich 
 would go to the expense of a separate grave for their 
 relations. People were often brought in handsome 
 grave clothes, but they were always stripped before 
 they were left. The shroud, whenever there was one, 
 was the perquisite of the undertakers." And thus are 
 flung into this noisome pit, like beasts, the greater part 
 of the population of this vast city — the young and 
 the old, the vicious and the virtuous together, without 
 the decency even of a rag to keep up the distinctions 
 of life ! Can human beings thus be thrown away ? — 
 men like ourselves — women, children, like our sisters 
 and brothers ? I never was so humiliated in my life 
 as by this horrid spectacle. I did not think a man— a 
 felon even, or a leper — what you will that is guilty or 
 debased — I did not think anything that had been hu- 
 man could be so recklessly abandoned. Pah ! It 
 makes one sick at heart ! God grant I may never die 
 at Naples ! 
 
 While we were recovering from our disgust, the 
 old man lifted the stone from the pit destined to re- 
 ceive the dead on the following day. We looked in. 
 The bottom was strewn with bones, already fleshless 
 and dry. He wished us to see the dead of several 
 previous days, but my stomach was already tried to its 
 utmost. We paid our gratuity, and hurried away. 
 A few steps from the gate, we met a man bearing a 
 coffin on his head. Seeing that we came from the 
 cemetery, he asked us if we wished to look into it 
 He set it down, and the lid opening with a hinge, we 
 were horror-struck with the sight of seven dead in- 
 fants ! The youngest was at least three months old, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 97 
 
 the eldest perhaps a year ; and they lay heaped to- 
 gether like so many puppies, one or two of them 
 spotted with disease, and all wasted to baby-skeletons. 
 While we were looking at them, six or seven noisy 
 children ran out from a small house at the road-side 
 and surrounded the coffin. One was a fine girl of 
 twelve years of age, and instead of being at all shock- 
 ed at the sight, she lifted the whitest of the dead 
 things, and looked at its face very earnestly, loading it 
 with all the tenderest diminutives of the language. 
 The others were busy in pointing to those they 
 thought had been prettiest, and none of them betrayed 
 fear or disgust. In answer to a question of my friend 
 about the marks of disease, the man rudely pulled out 
 one by the foot that lay below the rest, and holding it 
 up to show the marks upon it, tossed it again careless- I 
 ly into the coffin. He had brought them from the j 
 hospital for infants, and they had. died that morning. 
 The coffin was worn with use. He shut down the 
 lid, and lifting it again upon his head, went on to the 
 cemetery, to empty it like so much offal upon the heap 
 we had seen ! 
 
 I have been struck repeatedly with the little value 
 attached to human life in Italy. I have seen several 
 of these houseless lazzaroni literally dying in the 
 streets, and no one curious enough to look at them. 
 The most dreadful sufferings, the most despairing 
 cries, in the open squares, are passed as unnoticed as 
 the howling of a dog. The day before yesterday, a 
 woman fell in the Toledo, in a fit, frothing at the 
 mouth, and livid with pain; and though the street 
 was so crowded that one could make his way with dif- 
 ficulty, three or four ragged children were the only 
 persons even looking at her. 
 
 I have devoted a week to the museum at Naples. 
 It is a world! Anything like a full description of it 
 would tire even an antiquary. It is one of those things 
 (and there are many in Europe) that fortunately compel 
 travel. You must come abroad to get an idea of it. 
 
 The first day I buried myself among the curiosities 
 found at Pompeii. After walking through the cham- 
 bers and streets where they were found, I came to 
 them naturally with an intense interest. I had visited a 
 disentombed city, buried for seventeen centuries — had 
 trodden in their wheel-tracks— had wandered through 
 their dining rooms, their chambers, their baths, their 
 theatres, their market-places. And here were gather- 
 ed in one place, their pictures, their statues, their 
 cooking-utensils, their ornaments, the very food as it 
 was found on their tables! I am puzzled, in looking 
 over my note-book, to know what to mention. The 
 catalogue fills a printed volume. 
 
 A curious corner in one of the cases was that con- 
 taining the articles found on the toilet of the wealthiest 
 Pompeian's wife. Here were pots of rouge, ivory pins, 
 necklaces, ear-rings, bracelets, small silver mirrors, 
 combs, ear-pickers, etc., etc. In the next case were | 
 two loaves of bread, found in a baker's oven, and stamp- 
 ed with his name. Two large cases of precious gems, 
 cameos and intaglios of all descriptions, stand in the 
 centre of this room (among which, by the way, the 
 most exquisitely done are two which one can not look 
 at without a blush). Another case is filled with eat- 
 ables, found upon the tables— eggs, fish-bones, honey- 
 comb, grain, fruits, etc. In the repository for ancient 
 glass are several cinerary urns, in which the ashes of 
 the dead are perfectly preserved ; and numerous small 
 glass lachrymatories, in which the tears of the survi- 
 vors were deposited in the tombs. 
 
 The brazen furniture of Pompeii, the lamps par- 
 ticularly, are of the most curious and beautiful models. 
 Irees, to which the lamps were suspended like fruit, 
 vines, statues holding them in their hands, and numer- 
 ous other contrivances, were among them, exceeding 
 tat in beauty any similar furniture of our time. It ap- 
 7 
 
 pears that the ancients did not know the use of the 
 fork, as every other article of table service except this 
 has been found here. 
 
 To conceive the interest attached to the thousand 
 things in this museum, one must imagine a modern 
 city, Boston for example, completely buried by an un- 
 expected and terrific convulsion of nature. Its inhab- 
 itants mostly escape, but from various causes leave 
 their city entombed, and in a hundred years the grass 
 grows over it. and its very locality is forgotten. Near 
 two thousand years elapse, and then a peasant, digging 
 in the field, strikes upon some of its ruins, and it is un- 
 earthed just as it stands at this moment, with all its 
 utensils, books, pictures, houses, and streets, in un- 
 touched preservation. What a subject for speculation ! 
 What food for curiosity ! What a living and breath- 
 ing chapter of history were this! Far more interest- 
 ing is Pompeii. For the age in which it flourished 
 and the characters who trod its streets, are among the 
 most remarkable in history. This brazen lamp, shown 
 to me to-day as a curiosity, was lit every evening in 
 the time of Christ. The handsome chambers through 
 which I wandered a day or two ago, and from which 
 were brought this antique chair, were the home of 
 Sallust, and doubtless had been honored by the visits 
 of Cicero (whose villa, half-excavated, is near by), and 
 by all the poets and scholars and statesmen of his 
 time. One might speculate endlessly thus! And it is 
 that which makes these lands of forgotten empires so 
 delightful to the traveller. His mind is fed by the 
 very air. He needs no amusements, no company, no 
 books except the history of the place. The spot is 
 peopled, wherever he may stray, and the common ne- 
 cessities of life seem to pluck him from a far-reaching 
 dream, in which he had summoned back receding 
 ages, and was communing, face to face, with philos- 
 ophers and poets and emperors, like a magician before 
 his mirror. Pompeii and Herculaneum seem to me vis- 
 ions. I can not shake myself and wake to their real- 
 ity. My mind refuses to go back so far. Seventeen 
 hundred years! 
 
 I followed the cicerone on, listening to his astonish- 
 ing enumeration, and looking at everything as he point- 
 ed to it, in a kind of stupor. One has but a certain 
 capacity. We may be over-astonished. Still he went 
 on in the same every-day tone, talking as indifferently 
 of this and that surprising antiquity as a pedlar of his 
 two-penny wares. We went from the bronzes to the 
 hall of the papyri — thence to the hall of the frescoes, 
 and beautiful they were. Their very number makes 
 them indescribable. The next morning we devoted 
 to the statuary — and of this, if I knew where to begin, 
 I should like to say a word or two. 
 
 First of all comes the Balbi family — father, mother, 
 sons, and daughters. He was proconsul of Hercula- 
 neum, and by the excellence of the statues, which are 
 life itself for nature, he and his family were worth the 
 artist's best effort. He is a fine old Roman himself, 
 and his wife is a tall, handsome woman, much better- 
 looking than her daughters. The two Misses Balbi 
 are modest-looking girls, and that is all. They were 
 the high-born damsels of Herculaneum, however; 
 and, if human nature has not changed in seventeen 
 centuries, they did not want admirers who compared 
 them to the Venuses who have descended with them 
 to the "Museo Borbonico." The eldest son is on 
 horseback in armor. It is one of the finest equestrian 
 statues in the world. He is a noble youth, of grave 
 and handsome features, and sits the superb animal 
 with the freedom of an Arab and the dignity of a Ro- 
 man. It is a beautiful thing. If one had visited these 
 Balbis, warm and living, in the time of Augustus, he 
 could scarcely feel more acquainted with them than 
 after having seen their statues as they stand before 
 him here. 
 
 Come a little farther on ! Bacchus on the shoulders 
 
98 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 of a faun — a child delighted with a grown-up playfel- 
 low. I have given the same pleasure to just such an- 
 other bright "picture in little" of human beauty. It 
 moves one's heart to see it. 
 
 Pass now a whole gallery of Dians, Cupids, Joves, 
 Mercuries and Apollos, and come to the presence of 
 Aristides — him whom the Athenians exiled because 
 they were tired of hearing him called " The Just." 
 Cauova has marked three spots upon the floor where 
 the spectator should place himself to see to the best 
 advantage this renowned statue. He stands wrapped 
 in his toga, with his head a little inclined, as if in re- 
 flection, and in his face there is a mixture of firmness 
 and goodness from which you read his character as 
 clearly as if it were written across his forehead. It 
 was found at Herculaneum, and is, perhaps, the sim- 
 plest and most expressive statue in the world. 
 
 LETTER LXVI. 
 
 *.KSTUM TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE DEPARTURE FROM EL- 
 BA ISCHIA — BAY OF NAPLES — THE TOLEDO — THE 
 
 YOUNG QUEEN — CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE KING — 
 NEAPOLITANS VISITING THE FRIGATES — LEAVE THE 
 BAY — CASTELLAMARE. 
 
 Salvator Rosa studied the scenery of La Cava — the 
 country between Pompeii and Salerno, on the road to 
 Psestum. It is a series of natively abrupt glens, but 
 gemmed with cottages and hanging gardens, through 
 which the wildness of every feature is as apparent as 
 those of a savage through his trinkets. I was going 
 to Paastum with an agreeable party, and we came out 
 upon the bluff's overhanging Salerno and the sea, an 
 hour before sunset. We darted down upon the little 
 city lying in the bend of the bay, like a bird's descent 
 upon her nest. The road is cut through the side of 
 the precipice, and runs to the bottom with a single 
 sweep. We were to pass the night here and go to 
 Psestum the next morning, see the ruins, and return 
 here to sleep once more before returning to Naples. 
 
 We were five or six miles from Salerno before sun- 
 rise, and entering upon the dreary wastes of Calabria. 
 The people we passed on the road were dressed in 
 skins with the wool outside, and the country looked 
 abandoned by nature itself, scarce a flourishing tree 
 or a healthy plant within the range of the sight. We 
 turned from the main road after a while, crossed a ru- 
 inous bridge, and tracked a broad, waste, gloomy plain, 
 till my eyes ached with its barrenness. In an hour 
 more, three stately temples began to rise in the dis- 
 tance, increasing in grandeur as we approached. A 
 cluster of ruined tombs on the right — a grass-grown 
 and broken city wall, through a rent of which passed 
 the road — and we stood among them, in the desert, 
 amid temples of inimitable beauty! 
 
 There seemed to be a general feeling in the party 
 that silence and solitude were the spirits of the place. 
 We separated and rambled about alone. The grand 
 temple of Neptune stands in the centre. A temple in 
 the midst of the sea could scarce seem more strangely 
 placed. I stood on the high base of the altar within, 
 and looked out between the columns on every side. 
 The Mediterranean slept in a broad sheet of silver 
 on the west, and on every other side lay the bare, 
 houseless desert, stretching away to the naked moun- 
 tains on the south and east, with a barrenness that 
 made the heart ache, while it filled the imagination 
 with its singleness and grandeur. I descended to look 
 at the columns. They were eaten through and 
 through with snails and worms, and all of the same 
 rich yellow so admirably represented in the cork mod- 
 els. But their size, and their noble proportion as 
 they stand, can not be represented. They seem the 
 
 conception and the work of giant minds and hands. 
 One's soul rises among them. 
 
 We walked round the ruins for hours. A little 
 toward the sea, lie the traces of an amphitheatre, 
 filled with fragments of statuary, and parts of immense 
 friezes and columns. We all assembled at last in the 
 great temple, and sat down on the immense steps 
 toward the east, in the shadow of the pediment, specu- 
 lating on the wonderful fabric above us, till we were 
 summoned to start on our return. To think that these 
 very temples were visited as venerable antiquities in 
 the time of Christ ! What events have these worm- 
 eaten columns outlived ! What moths of an hour, in 
 comparison, are we ? 
 
 It is difficult to conceive how three such magnifi- 
 cent structures, so near the sea, the remains of a great 
 city, should have been lost for ages. A landscape- 
 painter, searching for the picturesque, came suddenly 
 upon them fifty years ago, and astonished the world 
 with his discovery ! It adds to their interest now. 
 
 We turned our horses' heads toward Naples. What 
 an extraordinary succession of objects were embraced 
 in the fifty miles between ! — Paestum, Pompeii, Vesu- 
 vius, Herculaneum ! — and, added to these, the thou- 
 sand classic associations of the lovely coast along 
 Sorrento ! The value of life deepens incalculably 
 with the privileges of travel. 
 
 Written on board the frigate United States 
 — We set sail from Elba on the third of June. The in 
 habitants, all of whom, I presume, had been on boara 
 of the ships, were standing along the walls and look- 
 ing from the embrasures of the fortress to see us off 
 It was a clear summer's morning, without much wind, 
 and we crept slowly off from the point, gazing up al 
 the windows of Napoleon's house as we passed under, 
 and laying on our course for the shore of Italy. Wt 
 soon got into the fresher breeze of the open sea, an<? 
 the low white line of villages on the Tuscan coast ap- 
 peared more distant, till, with a glass, we could see 
 the people at the windows watching our progress. 
 Fishing boats were drawn up on shore, and the idle 
 sailors were leaning in the half shadow which they 
 afforded; but with the almost total absence of trees, 
 and the glaring white of the walls, we were content to 
 be out upon the cool sea, passing town after town un- 
 visited. Island after island was approached and left 
 during the day; barren rocks, with only a lighthouse 
 to redeem their nakedness ; and in the evening at sun- 
 set we were in sight at Ischia, the towering isle in the 
 bosom of the bay of Naples. The band had been 
 called as usual at seven, and were playing a delightful 
 waltz upon the quarter deck ; the sea was even, and 
 just crisped by the breeze from the Italian shore : the 
 sailors were leaning on the guns listening ; the officers 
 clustered in their various places ; and the murmur of 
 the foam before the prow was just audible in the lighter 
 passages of the music. Above and in the west glowed 
 the eternal but untiring teints of the summer sky of 
 the Mediterranean, a gradually fading gold from the 
 edge of the sea to the zenith, and the early star soon 
 twinkled through it, and the air dampened to a reviving 
 freshness. I do not know that a mere scene like this, 
 without incident, will interest a reader, but it was so 
 delightful to myself, that I have described it for the 
 mere pleasure of dwelling on it. The desert stillness 
 and loneliness of the sea, the silent motion of the ship, 
 and the delightful music swelling beyond the bulwarks 
 and dying upon the wind, were such singularly com- 
 bined circumstances! It was a moving paradise in 
 the waste of the ocean. 
 
 Sail was shortened last night, and we lay to under 
 the shore of Ischia, to enter the bay of Naples by 
 daylight. As the morning mist lifted a little, the pe- 
 culiar shape of Vesuvius, the boldness of the island 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 99 
 
 of Capri, the sweeping curves of Baia and Portici, 
 and the small promontory which lifts Naples toward 
 the sea, rose like the features of a familiar friend to 
 my eye. It would be difficult to have seen Naples 
 without having a memory steeped in its beauty. A 
 fair wind set us straight into the bay, and one by one 
 the towns on its shore, the streaks of lava on the sides 
 of its volcano, and, soon after, the houses of friends on 
 the street of the Chiaga, became distinguishable to 
 the eye. There had been a slight eruption since I 
 was here ; but now, as before, there was scarce a puff 
 of smoke to be seen rising from Vesuvius. My little 
 specimen of sulphur which I took from the just hard- 
 ened bosom of the crater now destroyed, lies before 
 me on the table as I write, more valued than ever, 
 since its bed has been melted and blown into the air. 
 The new and lighter-colored streak on the right of the 
 mountain, would have informed me of itself that the 
 lava had issued since I was here. The sound of bells 
 and the hum of the city reached our ears, and running 
 in between the mole and the castle, the anchor was 
 dropped, and the ship surrounded with boats from the 
 shore. 
 
 The heat kept us on board till the evening, and 
 with several of the officers I landed and walked up the 
 Toledo as the lazzaroni were stirring from their sleep 
 under the walls of the houses. With the exception 
 of the absence of the English, who have mostly flit- 
 ted to the baths, Naples was the same place as ever, 
 crowded, busy, dirty, and gay. Her thousand beg- 
 gars were still "dying of hunger," and telling it to the 
 passenger in the same exhausted tone ; her gay car- 
 riages and skeleton hacks were still flying up and 
 down, and dashing at and over you for your custom ; 
 the cows and goats were driven about to be milked in 
 the street; the lemonade sellers stood in their stalls; 
 the money changers at their tables in the open 
 squares; puncinello squeaked and beat his mistress at 
 every corner; the awnings of the cafes covered hun- 
 dreds of smokers and loungers; and this gay, misera- 
 ble, homeless, out-of-doors people, seemed as de- 
 graded and thoughtless, and, it must be owned, as in- 
 sensibly happy as before. You would think, to walk 
 through the Toledo of Naples, that two thirds of its 
 crowd of wretches, and all its horses and dogs, were at 
 their last extremity, and yet they go on, and, I was 
 told by an Englishman resident here, who has been 
 accustomed to meet always the same faces, seem 
 never to change or disappear, suffering, and groaning, 
 and dragging up and down, shocking the eye and 
 sickening the heart of the inexperienced stranger for 
 years and years. 
 
 We passed the prima sera the first part of the evening, 
 as most men in Italy pass it, eating ices at the thronged 
 cafe, and at nine we went to the splendid theatre of San 
 Carlo to see " La Somnambula." The king and queen 
 were present, with the dissolute old queen-mother 
 and her grayheaded lover. I was instantly struck 
 with the alteration in the appearance of the young 
 queen. When I was here three months ago, she was 
 just married, and appeared frequently in the public 
 walks, and a fresher or brighter face I never had seen. 
 She was acknowledged the most beautiful woman in 
 Naples, and had, what is very much valued in this 
 land of pale brunettes, a clear rosy cheek, and lips 
 as bright as a child's. She is now thin and white, and 
 looks to me like a person fading with a rapid consump- 
 tion. 
 
 Several conspiracies have been detected within a 
 month or two, the last of which was very nearly suc- 
 cessful. The day before we arrived, two officers in 
 the royal army, men of high rank, had shot themselves, 
 each putting a pistol to the other's breast, believing 
 discovery inevitable. One died instantly, and the 
 other lingers to-day without any hope of recovery. 
 
 The king was fired at on parade the day previous, 
 which was supposed to have been the first step, but 
 the plot had been checked by partial disclosure, and 
 hence the tragedy I have just related. 
 
 The ships have been thronged with visiters during 
 the two or three days we have lain at Naples, among 
 whom have been the prime minister and his family. 
 Orders are given to admit every one on board that 
 wishes to come, and the decks, morning and evening, 
 present the most motley scene imaginable. Cameo 
 and lava sellers expose their wares on the gun-car- 
 riages, surrounded by the midshipmen — Jews and 
 fruit-sellers hail the sailors through the ports — boats 
 full of chickens and pigs, all in loud outcry, are held 
 up to view with a recommendation in broken English 
 — contadini in their best dresses walk up and down, 
 smiling on the officers, and wondering at the cleanli- 
 ness of the decks, and the elegance of the captain's 
 cabin — Punch plays his tricks under the gun-deck 
 ports — bands of wandering musicians sing and hold 
 | out their hats, as they row around, and all is harmony 
 J and amusement. In the evening it is pleasanter still, 
 ! for the band is playing, and the better classes of peo- 
 i pie come off from the shore, and boats filled with 
 j these pretty dark-eyed Neapolitans, row round and 
 J round the ship, eying the officers as they lean over 
 the bulwarks, and ready with but half a nod to make 
 i acquaintance and come up the gangway. I have had 
 j a private pride of my own in showing the frigate as 
 ; American to many of my foreign friends. One's na 
 | tionality becomes nervously sensitive abroad, and in 
 I the beauty and order of the ships, the manly elegance 
 of the officers, and the general air of superiority and 
 decision throughout, I have found food for some of 
 the highest feelings of gratification of which I am ca- 
 pable. 
 
 We weighed anchor yesterday morning (the twen- 
 tieth of June), and stood across the4)ay for Castella- 
 mare. Running close under Vesuvius, we passed 
 Portici, Torre del Greco, and Pompeii, and rounded 
 to in the little harbor of this fashionable watering- 
 place soon after noon. Castellamare is about fifteen 
 miles from Naples, and in the summer months it is 
 crowded with those of the fashionables who do not 
 make a northern tour. The shore rises directly from 
 the sea into a high mountain, on the side of which the 
 king has a country-seat, and around it hang, on ter- 
 races, the houses of the English. Strong mineral 
 springs abound on the slope. 
 
 We landed directly, and mounting the donkeys 
 waiting on the pier, started to make the round of the 
 village walks. English maids with their prettily 
 dressed and rosy children, and English ladies and gen- 
 tlemen, mounted like ourselves on donkeys, met us at 
 every turn as we wound up the shady and zigzag roads 
 to the palace. The views became finer as we ascend- 
 ed, till we look down into Pompeii, which was but 
 four miles off, and away toward Naples, following the 
 white road with the eye along the shore of the sea. 
 The paths were in fine order, and as beautiful as green 
 trees, and shade, and living fountains, crossing the 
 road continually, could make them. In the neighbor- 
 hood of the royal casino, the ground was planted 
 more like a park, and the walks were terminated with 
 artificial fountains, throwing up their bright waters 
 amid statuary and over grottoes, and here we met the 
 idlers of the place of all nations, enjoying the sunset. 
 I met an acquaintance or two, and felt the yearning 
 unwillingness to go away which I have felt on every 
 spot almost of this " delicious land." 
 
 We set sail again with the night-breeze, and at this 
 moment are passing between Ischia and Capri, run- 
 ning nearly on our course for Sicily. We shall prob- 
 ably be at Palermo to morrow. The ship's bell beats 
 ten, and the lights are ordered out, and under this im- 
 perative government, I must say "good night!" 
 
100 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER LXVII. 
 
 BALE GROTTO OF PAUSILYPPO TOMB OF VIRGIL 
 
 POZZUOLI RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER SER- 
 
 APIS THE LUCRINE LAKE LAKE OF AVERNUS, THE 
 
 TARTARUS OF VIRGIL TEMPLE OF PROSERPINE 
 
 GROTTO OF THE CUM.EAN SYBIL NERO'S VILLA 
 
 CAPE OF MISENUM ROMAN VILLAS RUINS OF THE 
 
 TEMPLE OF VENUS CENTO CAMERELLE THE STY- 
 GIAN LAKE THE ELYSIAN FIELDS GROTTO DEL 
 
 CANE VILLA OF LUCULLUS. 
 
 We made the excursion to Baits on one of those 
 premature days of March common to Italy. A south 
 wind and a warm sun gave it the feeling of June. The 
 heat was even oppressive as we drove through the city, 
 and the long echoing grotto of Pausilyppo, always dim 
 and cool, was peculiarly refreshing. Near the en- 
 trance to this curious passage under the mountain, 
 we stopped to visit the tomb of Virgil. A ragged boy 
 took us up a steep path to the gate of a vineyard, and 
 winding in among the just budding vines, we came to 
 a small ravine, in the mouth of which, right over the 
 deep cut of the grotto, stands the half-ruined mau- 
 soleum which held the bones of the poet. An Eng- 
 lishman stood leaning against the entrance, reading 
 from a pocket copy of the iEneid. He seemed 
 ashamed to be caught with his classic, and put the 
 book in his pocket as I came suddenly upon him, and 
 walked off to the other side whistling an air from the 
 Pirata, which is playing just now at San Carlo. We 
 went in, counted the niches for the urns, stood a few 
 minutes to indulge in what recollections we could 
 summon, and then mounted to the top to hunt for the 
 "myrtle." Even its root was cut an inch or two be- 
 low the ground. We found violets however, and they 
 answered as well. The pleasure of visiting such pla- 
 ces, I think, is nftt found on the spot. The fatigue of 
 the walk, the noise of a party, the difference between 
 reality and imagination, and worse than all, the caprice 
 of mood — one or the other of these things disturbs and 
 defeats for me the dearest promises of anticipation. 
 It is the recollection that repays us. The picture re- 
 curs to the fancy till it becomes familiar; and as the 
 disagreeable circumstances of the visit fade from the 
 memory, the imagination warms it into a poetic feeling, 
 and we dwell upon it with the delight we looked for 
 in vain when present. A few steps up the ravine, al- 
 most buried in luxuriant grass, stands a small marble 
 tomb, covering the remains of an English girl. She 
 died at Naples. It is as lovely a place to lie in as the 
 world could show. Forward a little toward the edge 
 of the hill some person of taste has constructed a little 
 arbor, laced over with vines, whence the city and 
 bay of Naples is seen to the finest advantage. Par- 
 adise that it is ! 
 
 It is odd to leave a city by a road piercing the base 
 of a broad mountain, in at one side and out at the 
 other, after a subterranean drive of near a mile ! The 
 grotto of Pausilyppo has been one of the wonders of 
 the world these two thousand years, and it exceeds all 
 expectation as a curiosity. Its length is stated at two 
 thousand three hundred and sixteen feet, its breadth 
 twenty-two, and its height eighty-nine. It is thronged 
 with carts and beasts of burden of all descriptions, and 
 the echoing cries of these noisy Italian drivers are al- 
 most deafening. Lamps, struggling with the distant 
 daylight as you near the end, just make darkness vis- 
 ible, and standing in the centre and looking either way, 
 the far distant arch of daylight glows like a fire through 
 the cloud of dust. What with the impressiveness of 
 the place, and the danger of driving in the dark amid 
 so many obstructions, it is rather a stirring half-hour 
 that is spent in its gloom! One emerges into the 
 fresh open air and the bright light of day with a feeling 
 of relief. 
 
 The drive hence to Pozzuoli, four or five miles, was 
 extremely beautiful. The fields were covered with 
 the new tender grain, and by the short passage through 
 the grotto we had changed a busy and crowded city for 
 scenes of as quiet rural loveliness as ever charmed the 
 eye. We soon reached the lip of the bay, and then 
 the road turned away to the right, along the beach, 
 passing the small island of Nisida (where Brutus had 
 a villa, and which is now a prison for the carbonari). 
 
 Pozzuoli soon appeared, and mounting a hill we de- 
 scended into its busy square, and were instantly beset 
 by near a hundred guides, boatmen, and beggars, all 
 preferring their claims and services at the tops of their 
 voices. I fixed my eye on the most intelligent face 
 among them, a curly -headed fellow in a red lazzaroni 
 cap, and succeeded, with some loss of temper, in getting 
 him aside from the crowd and bargaining for our boats. 
 
 While the boatmen were forming themselves into a 
 circle to cast lots for the bargain, we walked up to the 
 famous ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis. This 
 was one of the largest and richest of the temples of an- 
 tiquity. It was a quadrangular building, near the edge 
 of the sea, lined with marble, and sustained by col- 
 umns of solid cipollino, three of which are still stand- 
 ing. It was buried by an earthquake and forgotten 
 for a century or two, till in 1750 it was discovered by 
 a peasant, who struck the top of one of the columns 
 in digging. We stepped around over the prostrate 
 fragments, building it up once more in fancy, and 
 peopling the aisles with priests and worshippers. In 
 the centre of the temple was the place of sacrifice, 
 raised by flights of steps, and at the foot still remain 
 two rings of Corinthian brass, to which the victims 
 were fastened, and near them the receptacles for their 
 blood and ashes. The whole scene has a stamp of 
 grandeur. We obeyed the call of our red-bonnet 
 guide, whose boat waited for us at the temple stairs, 
 very unwillingly. 
 
 As we pushed off from the shore, we deviated a mo- 
 ment from our course to look at the ruins of the an- 
 cient mole. Here probably St. Paul set his foot, land- 
 ing to pursue his way to Rome. The great apostle 
 spent seven days at this place, which was then called 
 Puteoli — a fact that attaches to it a deeper interest 
 than it draws fronvall the antiquities of which it is the 
 centre. 
 
 We kept on our way along the beautiful bend of the 
 shore of Bake, and passing on the right a small moun- 
 tain formed in thirty-six hours by a volcanic explosion, 
 some three hundred years ago, we came to the Lu- 
 crine Lake, so famous in the classics for its oysters. 
 The same explosion that made the Monte Nuovo, and 
 sunk the little village of Tripergole, destroyed the 
 oyster-beds of the poets. 
 
 A ten minutes' walk brought us to the shores of 
 Lake Avernus — the " Tartarus" of Virgil. This was 
 classic ground indeed, and we hoped to have found a 
 thumbed copy of the JEneid in the pocket of the 
 cicerone. He had not even heard of the poet. A 
 ruin on the opposite shore, reflected in the still dark 
 water, is supposed to have been a temple dedicated tc 
 Proserpine. If she was allowed to be present at hei 
 own worship, she might have been consoled for her ab- 
 duction. A spot of more secluded loveliness could 
 scarce be found. The lake lay like a sheet of silvei 
 at the foot of the ruined temple, the water looking un- 
 fathomly deep through the clear reflection, and the 
 fringes of low shrubbery leaning down on every side, 
 were doubled in the bright mirror, the likeness even 
 fairer than the reality. 
 
 Our unsentimental guide hurried us away as we 
 were seating ourselves upon the banks, and we struck 
 into a narrow footpath of wild shrubbery which circled 
 the lake, and in a few minutes stood before the door 
 of a grotto sunk in the side of the hill. Here dwelt 
 the Cumfean sybil, and by this dark passage, the soul9 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 101 
 
 of the ancients passed from Tartarus to Elysium. The 
 guide struck a light and kindled two large torches, and 
 we followed him into the narrow cavern, walking down- 
 ward at a rapid pace for ten or fifteen minutes. With 
 a turn to the right, we stood before a low archway 
 which the guide entered, up to his knees in water at 
 the first step. It looked like the mouth of an abyss, 
 and the ladies refused to go on. Six or seven stout 
 fellows had followed us in, and the guide assured us 
 we should be safe on their backs. I mounted first 
 myself to carry the torch, and holding my head very 
 low, we went plunging on, turning to the right and left 
 through a crooked passage, dark as Erebus, till I was 
 set down on a raised ledge called the sybil's bed. The 
 lady behind me, I soon discovered by her screams had 
 not made so prosperous a voyage. She had insisted 
 on being taken up something in the side-saddle fashion; 
 and the man, not accustomed to hold so heavy a bur- 
 deu on his hip with one arm, had stumbled and let her 
 slip up to her knees in water. He took her up im- 
 mediately, in his own homely but safer fashion, and 
 she was soon set beside me on the sybil's stony couch, 
 dripping with water, and quite out of temper with an- 
 tiquities. 
 
 The rest of the party followed, and the guide lifted 
 the torches to the dripping roof of the cavern, and 
 showed us the remains of beautiful mosaic with which 
 the place was once evidently encrusted. Whatever 
 truth there may be in the existence of the sybil, these 
 had been, doubtlessly, luxurious baths, and probably 
 devoted by the Roman emperors to secret licentious- 
 ness. The guide pointed out to us a small perforation 
 in the rear of the sybil's bed, whence, he said (by what 
 authority I know not), Caligula used to watch the 
 lavations of the nymph. It communicates with an 
 outer chamber. 
 
 We reappeared, our nostrils edged with black from 
 the smoke of the torches, and the ladies' dresses in a 
 melancholy plight, between smoke and water. It 
 would be a witch of a sybil that would tempt us to re- 
 peat our visit. 
 
 We retraced our steps, and embarked for Nero's 
 villa. % It was perhaps a half mile further down the 
 bay. The only remains of it were some vapor baths, 
 built over a boiling spring which extended under the 
 sea. One of our boatmen waded first a few feet into 
 the surf, and plunging under the cold sea-water, brought 
 up a handful of warm gravel— the evidence of a sub- 
 marine outlet from the springs beyond. We then 
 mounted a high and ruined flight of steps, and entered 
 a series of chambers dug out of the rock, where an old 
 man was stripping off his shirt, to go through the usual 
 process of taking eggs down to boil in the fountain. 
 He took his bucket, drew a long breath of fresh air, 
 and rushed away by a dark passage, whence he re- 
 appeared in three or four minutes, the eggs boiled, 
 and the perspiration streaming from his body like rain. 
 He set the bucket down, and rushed to the door, gasp- 
 ing as if from suffocation. The eggs were boiled hard, 
 but the distress of the old man, and the danger of such 
 sudden changes of atmosphere to his health, quite 
 destroyed our pleasure at the phenomenon. 
 
 Hence to the cape of Misenum, the curve of the bay 
 presents one continuation of Roman villas. And cer- 
 tainly there was not probably in the world, a place 
 more adapted to the luxury of which it was the scene. 
 These natural baths, the many mineral waters, the 
 balmy climate, the fertile soil, the lovely scenery, the 
 matchless curve of the shore from Pozzuoli to the 
 cape, and the vicinity, by that wonderful subterranean 
 passage, to a populous capital on the other side of a 
 range of mountains, rendered Baia; a natural paradise 
 to the emperors. It was improved as we see. Temples 
 to Venus, Diana, and Mercury, the villas of Marius, 
 of Hortensius, of Caesar, of Lucullus. and others whose 
 masters are disputed, follow each other in rival beauty 
 
 of situation. The ruins are not much now, except 
 the temple of Venus, which is one of the most pictur- 
 esque fragments of antiquity I have ever seen. The. 
 long vines hang through the rent in its circular roof, 
 and the bright flowers cling to the crevices in its still 
 half-splendid walls with the very poetry of decay. Our 
 guide here proposed a lunch. We sat down on the 
 immense stone which has fallen from the ceiling, and 
 in a few minutes the rough table was spread with a 
 hundred open oysters fro nj Fusaro (near Lake Avernus), 
 bottles at will of lagrima.chrizti.fzom. Vesuyfu^lxotied 
 crabs from the shore benoath i'ke> temple of Mercury, 
 fish from the Lucrinc iake,, apd br,e?,d from Pozzuoii. 
 The meal was not less dar.stc th?te tpffiakiig. .We 
 drank to the goddess \the only one in mythology, by 
 the way, whose worship has not fallen into contempt), 
 and leaving twenty ragged descendants of ancient Baia? 
 to feast on the remains, mounted our donkeys and 
 started over land for " Elysium." 
 
 We passed the villa of Hortensius, to which Nero 
 invited his mother, with the design of murdering her, 
 visited the immense subterranean chambers in which 
 water was kept for the Roman fleet, the horrid prisons 
 called the Cento Camerelle of the emperors, and then 
 rising the hill at the extremity of the cape, the Stygian 
 lake lay off on the right, a broad and gloomy pool, and 
 around its banks spread the Elysian fields, the very 
 home and centre of classic fable. An overflowed 
 march, and an adjacent cornfield will give you a per- 
 fect idea of it. The sun was setting while we swallow- 
 ed our disappointment, and we turned our donkeys' 
 heads toward Naples. 
 
 We left the city again this morning by the grotto of 
 Pausilyppo, to visit the celebrated " Grotto del Cane.' 1 
 It is about three miles off, on the borders of a pretty 
 lake, once the crater of a volcano. On the way there 
 arose a violent debate in the party on the propriety of 
 subjecting the poor dogs to the distress of the common 
 experiment. We had not yet decided the point when 
 we stopped before the door of the keeper's house. 
 Two miserable-looking terriers had set up a howl, ac- 
 companied with a ferocious and half-complaining bark 
 from our first appearance around the turn of the road, 
 and the appeal was effectual. We dismounted and 
 walking toward the grotto, determined to refuse to see 
 the phenomenon. Our scruples were unnecessary. 
 The door was surrounded with another party less 
 merciful, and as we approached, two dogs were dragged 
 out by the heels, and thrown lifeless on the grass. We 
 gathered round them, and while the old woman coolly 
 locked the door of the grotto, the poor animals began 
 to kick, and after a few convulsions, struggled to their 
 feet and crept feebly away. Fresh dogs were offered 
 to our party, but we contented ourselves with the more 
 innocent experiments. The mephitic air of this cave 
 rises to a foot above the surface of the ground, and a 
 torch put into it, was immediately extinguished. It has 
 been described too often, however, to need a repetition. 
 We took a long stroll around the lake, which was 
 covered with wild-fowl, visited the remains of a villa 
 of Lucullus on the opposite shore, and returned to 
 Naples to dinner. 
 
 LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 ISLAND OF SICILV PALERMO SARACENIC APPEAR- 
 ANCE OF THE TOWN CATHEDRAL THE MARINA 
 
 VICEROY LEOPOLD MONASTERY OF THE CAPU- 
 CHINS CELEBRATED CATACOMBS FANCIFUL GAR- 
 DENS. 
 
 Frigate United States, June 25. — The mount- 
 ain coast of Sicily lay piled up before us at the dis 
 tance of ten or twelve miles, when I came on deck 
 
102 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 this morning. The quarter-master handed me the 
 glass, and running my eye along the shore, I observed 
 three or four low plains, extending between projecting 
 spurs of the hills, studded thickly with country-hous- 
 es, and bright with groves which I knew, by the deep 
 glancing green, to be the orange. In a corner of the 
 longest of these intervals, a sprinkling of white, look- 
 ing in the distance like a bed of pearly shells on the 
 edge of the sea, was pointed out as Palermo. With 
 a steady glass its turrets and gardens became apparent, 
 and its ynyle, br'utUng .abfove the wall with masts; and, 
 running in witli a- free w'mi'i-, the character of our ship 
 was soon. r<?cogn ; .eed from the shore, and the flags of 
 every jftMji] iq the Sikrbdr ra-n ui> to the mast, the cus- 
 tomary courtesy to "a man-of-war entering port. 
 
 As the ship came to her anchorage, the view of the 
 city was very captivating. The bend of the shore 
 embraced our position, and the eastern half of the 
 curve was a succession of gardens and palaces. A 
 broad street extended along in front, crowded with 
 people gazing at the frigates, and up one of the long 
 avenues of the public gardens we could distinguish 
 the veiled women walking in groups, children playing, 
 priests, soldiers, and all the motley frequenters of such 
 places in this idle clime, enjoying the refreshing sea- 
 breeze, upon whose wings we had come. I was im- 
 patient to get ashore, but between the health-officer 
 and some other hinderances, it was evening before we 
 set foot upon the pier. 
 
 With Captain Nicholson and the purser I walked 
 up the Toledo, as the still half-asleep tradesmen were 
 opening their shops after the siesta. The oddity of 
 the Palermitan style of building struck me forcibly, j 
 Of the two long streets, crossing each other at right 
 angles and extending to the four gates of the city, the I 
 lower story of every house is a shop, of course. The 
 second and third stories are ornamented with tricksy- 
 looking iron balconies, in which the women sit at work 
 universally, while from above projects, far over the 
 street, a grated enclosure, like a long bird-cage, from 
 which look down girls and children (or, if it is a con- 
 vent, the nuns), as if it were an airy prison to keep 
 the household from the contact of the world. The 
 whole air of Palermo is different from that of the 
 towns upon the continent. The peculiarities are said 
 to be Saracenic, and inscriptions in Arabic are still 
 found upon the ancient buildings. The town is poet- 
 ically called the concha d'oro, or " the golden shell." 
 
 We walked on to the cathedral, followed by a troop 
 of literally naked beggars, baked black in the sun, and 
 more emaciated and diseased than any I have yet seen 
 abroad. Their cries and gestures were painfully ener- 
 getic. In the course of five minutes we had seen two 
 or three hundred. They lay along the sidewalks, and 
 upon the steps of the houses and churches, men, wo- 
 men, and children, nearly or quite naked, and as unno- 
 ticed by the inhabitants as the stones of the street. 
 
 Ten or twenty indolent-looking priests sat in the 
 shade at the porch of the cathedral. The columns 
 of the vestibule were curiously wrought, the capitals 
 exceedingly rich with fretted leaf-work, and the orna- 
 ments of the front of the same wild-looking character 
 as the buildings of the town. A hunchback scarce 
 three feet high, came up and offered his services as a 
 cicerone, and we entered the church. The antiquity 
 of the interior was injured by the new wViite paint, cov- 
 ering every part except the more valuable decorations, 
 but with its four splendid sarcophagi standing like sep- 
 arate buildings in the aisles, and covering the ashes 
 of Ruggiero and his kinsmen ; the eighty columns of 
 Egyptian granite in the nave ; the ciborio of entire 
 lapis-lazuli with its lovely blue, and the mosaics, fres- 
 coes and relievoes about the altar, it could scarce fail of 
 producing an effect of great richness. The floor was 
 occupied by here and there a kneeling beggar, praying 
 in his rags, and undisturbed even by the tempting 
 
 neighborhood of strangers. I stood long by an old 
 man, who seemed hardly to have the strength to hold 
 himself upon his knees. His eyes were fixed upon a 
 lovely picture of the Virgin, and his trembling hands 
 loosed bead after bead as his prayer proceeded. I 
 slipped a small piece of silver between his palm and 
 the cross of his rosary, and without removing his eyes 
 from the face of the holy mother, he implored an audi- 
 ble blessing upon me in a tone of the most earnest 
 feeling. I have scarce been so moved within my rec- 
 ollection. 
 
 The equipages were beginning to roll toward the 
 " Marina," and the Seabreeze was felt even through 
 the streets. We took a carriage and followed to the 
 corso, where we counted near two hundred gay, well- 
 appointed equipages, in the course of an hour. What 
 a contrast to the wretchedness we had left behind ! 
 Driving up and down this half-mile in front of the 
 palaces on the sea, seemed quite a sufficient amuse- 
 ment for the indolent nobility of Palermo. They 
 were named to us by their imposing titles as they 
 passed, and we looked in vain into their dull unanima- 
 ted faces for the chivalrous character of the once re- 
 nowned knights of Sicily. Ladies and gentlemen sat 
 alike silent, leaning back in their carriages in the ele- 
 gant attitudes studied to such effect on this side of the 
 water, and gazing for acquaintances ' among those 
 passing on the opposite line. 
 
 Toward the dusk of the evening, an avant-couricr 
 on horseback announced the approach of the viceroy 
 Leopold, the brother of the king of Naples. He 
 drove himself in an English hunting-wagon with two 
 seats, and looked like a dandy whip of the first water 
 from Regent street. He is about twenty, and quite 
 handsome. His horses, fine English bays, flew up 
 and down the short corso, passing and repassing every 
 other minute, till we were weary of touching our hats 
 and stopping till he had gone by. He noticed the 
 uniform of our officers, and raised his hat with partic- 
 ular politeness to them. 
 
 As it grew dark, the carriages came to a stand 
 around a small open gallery raised in the broadest part 
 of the Marina. Rows of lamps, suspended from the 
 roof, were lit, and a band of forty or fifty musicians 
 appeared in the area, and played parts of the popular 
 operas. We were told they performed every night 
 from nine till twelve. Chairs were set around for the 
 people on foot, ices circulated, and some ten or 
 twelve thousand people enjoyed the music in a deli- 
 cious moonlight, keeping perfect silence from the first 
 note to the last. These heavenly nights of Italy are 
 thus begun, and at twelve the people separate and go 
 to visit, or lounge at home till morning, when the win- 
 dows are closed, the cool night air shut in, and they 
 sleep till evening comes again, literally "keeping the 
 hours the stars do." It is very certain that it is the 
 only way to enjoy life in this enervating climate. The 
 sun is the worst enemy to health, and life and spirits 
 sink under its intensity. The English, who are the 
 only people abroad in an Italian noon, are constant vic- 
 tims to it. 
 
 We drove this morning to the monastery of the 
 capuchins. Three or four of the brothers in long 
 gray beards, and the heavy brown sackcloth cowls of 
 the order tied around the waist with ropes, received 
 us cordially and took us through the cells and chapels. 
 We had come to see the famous catacombs of the con- 
 vent. A door was opened on the side of the main 
 cloister, and we descended a long flight of stairs into 
 the centre of three lofty vaults, lighted each by a 
 window at the extremity of the ceiling. A more 
 frightful scene never appalled the eye. The walls 
 were lined with shallow niches, from which hung, 
 leaning forward as if to fall upon the gazer, the dried 
 bodies of monks in the full dress of their order. Their 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 103 
 
 hands were crossed upon their breasts or hung at their 
 sides, their faces were blackened and withered, and 
 every one seemed to have preserved, in diabolical cari- 
 cature, the very expression of life. The hair lay red- 
 dened and dry on the dusty scull, the teeth, perfect or 
 imperfect, had grown brown in their open mouths, the 
 nose had shrunk, the cheeks fallen in and cracked, and 
 they looked more like living men cursed with some 
 horrid plague, than the inanimate corpses they were. 
 The name of each was pinned upon his cowl, with his 
 a<je and the time of his death. Below in three or four 
 tiers, lay long boxes painted fantastically, and contain- 
 ing, the monk told us, the remains of Sicilian nobles. 
 Upon a long shelf above sat perhaps a hundred children 
 of from one year to five, in little chairs worn with their 
 use while in life, dressed in the gayest manner, with 
 fanciful caps upon their little blackened heads, dolls in 
 their hands, and in one or two instances, a stuffed dog 
 or parrot lying in their laps. A more horribly ludicrous 
 collection of little withered faces, shrunk into expres- j 
 sion so entirely inconsistent with the gayety of their j 
 dresses, could scarce be conceived. One of them had 
 his arm tied up, holding a child's whip in the act of | 
 striking, while the poor thing's head had rotted and 
 dropped upon its breast; and a leather cap fallen on : 
 one side, showed his bare scull, with the most comical 
 expression of carelessness. We quite shocked the 
 old monk with our laughter, but the scene was irresis- 
 tible. 
 
 We went through several long galleries filled in the 
 same manner, with the dead monks standing over the 
 coffins of nobles, and children on the shelf above. 
 There were three thousand bodies and upward in the 
 place, monks and all. Some of them were very an- 
 cient. There was one, dated a century and a half 
 back, whose tongue still hangs from his mouth. The 
 frair took hold of it, and moved it up and down, rattling 
 it against his teeth. It was like a piece of dried fish- 
 skin, and as sharp and thin as a nail. 
 
 At the extremity of the last passage was a new vault 
 appropriated to women. There were nine already 
 lying on white pillows in the different recesses, who 
 had died within the year, and among them a young 
 girl, the daughter of a noble family of Palermo, stated 
 in the inscription to have been a virgin of seventeen 
 years. The monk said her twin-sister was the most 
 beautiful woman of the city at this moment. She was 
 laid upon her back, on a small shelf faced with a wire 
 grating, dressed in white, withalarge bouquet of artificial 
 flowers on the centre of the body. Her hands and face 
 were exposed, and the skin which seemed to me scarce- 
 ly dry, was covered with small black ants. I struck 
 with my stick against the shelf, and, startled by the 
 concussion, the disgusting vermin poured from the 
 mouth and nostrils in hundreds. How difficult it is 
 to believe that the beauty we worship must come to 
 this! 
 
 As we went toward the staircase, the friar showed 
 us the deeper niches, in which the bodies were placed 
 for the first six months. There were fortunately no 
 fresh bodies in them at the time of our visit. The 
 stench, for a week or two, he told us, was intolerable. 
 They are suffered to get quite dry here, and then are 
 disposed of according to their sex or profession. A 
 rope passed round the middle, fastens the dead monk 
 to his shallow niche, and there he stands till his bones 
 rot from each other, sometimes for a century or more. 
 
 We hurried up the gloomy stairs, and giving the 
 monk our gratuity, were passing out of the cloister to 
 our carriage when two of the brothers entered, bearing 
 a sedan chair with the blinds closed. Our friend called 
 us back, and opened the door. An old gray-headed 
 woman sat bolt upright within, with a rope around her 
 body and another around her neck, supporting her by 
 two rings in the back of the sedan. She had died that 
 morning, and was brought to be dried in the capuchin 
 
 catacombs. The effect ot the newly deceased body in 
 a handsome silk dress and plaited cap was horrible. 
 
 We drove from the monastery to the gardens of a 
 Sicilian prince, near by. I was agreeably disappointed 
 to find the grounds laid out in the English taste, wind- 
 ing into secluded walks shaded with undipped trees, 
 and opening into glades of greensward cooled by foun- 
 tains. We strolled on from one sweet spot to another, 
 coming constantly upon little Grecian temples, ruins, 
 broken aqueducts, aviaries, bowers furnished with 
 curious seats and tables, bridges over streams, and 
 labyrinths of shrubbery ending in hermitages built 
 curiously of cane. So far, the garden, though lovely, 
 was like many others. On our return, the person who 
 accompanied us began to surprise us with singular 
 contrivances, fortunately selecting the coachman who 
 had driven us as the subject of his experiments. In 
 the middle of a long green alley he requested him to 
 step forward a few paces, and, in an instant, streams 
 of water poured upon him from the bushes around in 
 every direction. There were seats in the arbors, the 
 least pressure of which sent up a stream beneath the 
 unwary visiter ; steps to an ascent, which you no sooner 
 touched than you were showered from an invisible 
 source ; and one small hermitage, which sent a jet 
 d'eau into the face of a person lifting the latch. Nearly 
 in the centre of the garden stood a pretty building, 
 with an ascending staircase. At the first step, a friar 
 in white, represented to the life in wax, opened the 
 door, and fixed his eyes on the comer. At the next 
 step, the door was violently shut. At the third, it was 
 half opened again, and as the foot pressed the platform 
 above, both doors flew wide open, and the old friar 
 made room for the visiter to enter. Life itself could 
 not have been more natural. The garden was full of 
 similar tricks. We were hurried away by an engage- 
 ment before we had seen them all, and stopping for a 
 moment to look at a magnificent Egyptian Ibis, walk- 
 ing around in an aviary like a temple, we drove into 
 town to dinner. 
 
 LETTER LXIX. 
 
 THE LUNATIC ASYLUM AT PALERMO. 
 
 Palermo, June 28. — Two of the best-conducted 
 lunatic asylums in the world are in the kingdom of 
 Naples — one at Aversa, near Capua, and the other at 
 Palermo. The latter is managed by a whimsical Si- 
 cilian baron, who has devoted his time and fortune to 
 it, and with the assistance of the government, has car- 
 ried it to great extent and perfection. The poor are 
 received gratuitously, and those who can afford it en- 
 ter as boarders, and are furnished with luxuries ac- 
 cording to their means. 
 
 The hospital stands in an airy situation in the love- 
 ly neighborhood of Palermo. We were received by 
 a porter in a respectable livery, who introduced us im- 
 mediately to the old baron — a kind-looking man, rather 
 advanced beyond middle life, of manners singularly 
 genteel and prepossessing. " Je suis It premier fou," 
 said he, throwing his arms out, as he bowed on our 
 entrance. We stood in an open court, surrounded 
 with porticoes lined with stone seats. On one of 
 them lay a fat, indolent-looking man, in clean gray 
 clothes, talking to himself with great apparent satis- 
 faction. He smiled at the baron as he passed without 
 checking the motion of his lips, and three others 
 standing in the doorway of a room marked as the 
 kitchen, smiled also as he came up, and fell into his 
 train, apparently as much interested as ourselves in 
 the old man's explanations. 
 
 The kitchen was occupied by eight or ten people 
 all at work, and all, the baron assured us, mad. One 
 
104 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 man, of about forty, was broiling a steak with the gra- 
 vest attention. Another, who had been furious till em- 
 ployment was given him, was chopping meat with vio- 
 lent industry in a large wooden bowl. Two or three 
 girls were about, obeying the little orders of a middle- 
 aged man, occupied with several messes cooking on a 
 patent stove. I was rather incredulous about his in- 
 sanity, till he took a small bucket and went to the jet 
 of a fountain, and getting impatient from some cause 
 or other, dashed the water upon the floor. The baron 
 mildly called him by name, and mentioned to him as 
 a piece of information that he had wet the floor. He 
 nodded his head, and filling his bucket quietly, poured 
 a little into one of the pans, and resumed his occu- 
 pation. 
 
 We passed from the kitchen into an open court, cu- 
 riously paved, and ornamented with Chinese grottoes, 
 artificial rocks, trees, cottages, and fountains. Within 
 the grottoes reclined figures of wax. Before the altar 
 of one, fitted up as a Chinese chapel, a mandarin was 
 prostrated in prayer. The walls on every side were 
 painted in perspective scenery, and the whole had as 
 little the air of a prison as the open valley itself. In 
 one of the corners was an unfinished grotto, and a 
 handsome young man was entirely absorbed in thatch- 
 ing the ceiling with strips of cane. The baron 
 pointed to him, and said he had been incurable till he 
 had found this employment for him. Everything 
 about us, too, he assured us, was the work of his pa- 
 tients. They had paved the court, built the grottoes 
 and cottages, and painted the walls, under his direc- 
 tion. The secret of his whole system, he said, was 
 employment and constant kindness. He had usually 
 about one hundred and fifty patients, and he dismissed 
 upon an average two thirds of them quite recovered. 
 
 We went into the apartment of the women. These, 
 he said, were his worst subjects. In the first room sat 
 eight or ten employed in spinning, while one infuriated 
 creature, not more than thirty, but quite gray, was 
 walking up and down the floor, talking and gesticula- 
 ting with the greatest violence. A young girl of six- 
 teen, an attendant, had entered into her humor, and 
 with her arm put affectionately round her waist, assent- 
 ed to everything she said, and called her by every 
 name of endearment while endeavoring to silence her. 
 When the baron entered, the poor creature addressed 
 herself to him, and seemed delighted that he had 
 come. He made several mild attempts to check her, 
 but she seized his hands, and with the veins of her 
 throat swelling with passion, her eyes glaring terribly, 
 and her tongue white and trembling, she continued to 
 declaim more and more violently. The baron gave an 
 order to a male attendant at the door, and beckoning 
 us to follow, led her gently through a small court 
 planted with trees, to a room containing a hammock. 
 She checked her torrent of language as she observed 
 the preparations going on, and seemed amused with 
 the idea of swinging. The man took her up in his 
 arms without resistance, and laced the hammock over 
 her, confining everything but her head, and the female 
 attendant, one of the most playful and prepossessing 
 little creatures I ever saw, stood on a chair, and at every 
 swing threw a little water on her face as if in sport. 
 Once or twice, the maniac attempted to resume the 
 subject of her ravings, but the girl laughed in her face 
 and diverted her from it, till at last she smiled and 
 dropping her head into the hammock, seemed disposed 
 to sink into an easy sleep. 
 
 We left her swinging and went out into the court, 
 where eight or ten women in the gray gowns of the 
 establishment were walking up and down, or sitting 
 under the trees, lost in thought. One, with a fine, in- 
 telligent face, came up to me and courtesied gracefully 
 without speaking. The physician of the establish- 
 ment joined me at the moment, and asked her what 
 she wished. » To kiss his hand," said she, " but his 
 
 looks forbade me." She colored deeply, and folded 
 her arms across her breast and walked away. The 
 baron called us, and in going out I passed her again, 
 and taking her hand, kissed it, and bade her good-by. 
 " You had better kiss my lips," said she, "you'll never 
 see me again." She laid her forehead against the iron 
 bars of the gate, and with a face working with emo- 
 tion, watched us till we turned out of sight. I asked 
 the physician for her history. " It was a common 
 case," he said. " She was the daughter of a Sicilian 
 noble, who, too poor to marry her to one of her own 
 rank, had sent her to a convent, where confinement 
 had driven her mad. She is now a charity patient in 
 the asylum." 
 
 The courts in which these poor creatures are con- 
 fined, open upon a large and lovely garden. We walk- 
 ed through it with the baron, and then returned to the 
 apartments of the females. In passing a cell, a large 
 majestic woman strided out with a theatrical air, and 
 commenced an address to the Deity, in a language 
 strangely mingled of Italian and Greek. Her eyes were 
 naturally large and soft, but excitement had given 
 them additional dilation and fire, and she looked a 
 prophetess. Her action, with all its energy, was lady- 
 like. Her feet, half covered with slippers were well- 
 formed and slight, and she had every mark of superi- 
 ority both of birth and endowment. The baron took 
 her by the hand with the deferential courtesy of the 
 old school, and led her to one of the stone seats. She 
 yielded to him politely, but resumed her harangue, 
 upbraiding the Deity, as well as I could understand 
 her, for her misfortunes. They succeeded in soothing 
 her by the assistance of the same playful attendant 
 who had accompanied the other to the hammock, and 
 she sat still, with her lips white and her tongue tremb- 
 ling like an aspen. While the good old baron was 
 endeavoring to draw her into a quiet conversation, the 
 physician told me some curious circumstances respect- 
 ing her. She was a Greek, and had been brought to 
 Palermo when a girl. Her mind had been destroyed 
 by an illness, and after seven years' madness, during 
 which she had refused to rise from her bed and had 
 quite lost the use of her limbs, she was brought to this 
 establishment by her friends. Experiments were tried 
 in vain to induce her to move from her painful posi- 
 tion. At last the baron determined upon addressing 
 what he considered the master-passion in all female 
 bosoms. He dressed himself in the gayest manner, 
 and, in one of her gentle moments, entered her room 
 with respectful ceremony and offered himself to her 
 in marriage! She refused him with scorn, and with 
 seeming emotion he begged forgiveness and left her. 
 The next morning, on his entrance, she smiled — the 
 first time for years. He continued his attentions for a 
 day or two, and after a little coquetry she one morn- 
 ing announced to him that she had re-considered his 
 proposal, and would be his bride. They raised her 
 from her bed to prepare her for the ceremony, and she 
 was carried in a chair to the garden, where the bridal 
 feast was spread, nearly all the other patients of the 
 hospital being present. The gayety of the scene ab- 
 sorbed the attention of all ; the utmost decorum pre- 
 vailed ; and when the ceremony was performed, the 
 bride was crowned, and carried back in state to her 
 apartment. She recovered gradually the use of her 
 limbs, her health is improved, and excepting an occa- 
 sional paroxysm, such as we happened to witness, she 
 is quiet and contented. The other inmates of the 
 asylum still call her the bride ; and the baron, as her 
 husband, has the greatest influence over her. 
 
 While the physician was telling me these circum- 
 stances, the baron had succeeded in calming her, and 
 she sat with her arms folded, dignified and silent. He 
 was still holding her hand, when the woman whom we 
 had left swinging in the hammock, came stealing up 
 behind the trees on tiptoe, and putting her hand sud- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 105 
 
 denly over the baron's eyes, kissed him on both sides 
 of his face, laughing heartily, and calling him by every 
 name of affection. The contrast between this mood 
 and the infuriated one in which we had found her, was 
 the best comment on the good man's system. He 
 gently disengaged himself, and apologised to his lady 
 for allowing the liberty, and we followed him to an- 
 other apartment. 
 
 It opened upon a pretty court, in which a fountain 
 was playing, and against the columns of the portico sat 
 some half dozen patients. A young man of eighteen, 
 with a very-pale, scholar-like face, was reading Ariosto. 
 Near him, under the direction of an attendant, a fair, 
 delicate girl, with a sadness in her soft blue eyes that 
 might have been a study for a mater dolorosa, was cut- 
 ting paste upon a board laid across her lap. She 
 seemed scarcely conscious of what she was about, and 
 when I approached and spoke to her, she laid down 
 the knife and rested her head upon her hand, and 
 looked at me steadily, as if she was trying to recollect 
 where she had known me. " I can not remember," 
 she said to herself, and went on with her occupation. 
 I bowed to her as we took our leave, and she returned 
 it gracefully but coldly. The young man looked up 
 from his book and smiled, the old man lying on the 
 stone seat in the outer court rose up and followed us 
 to the door, and we were bowed out by the baron and 
 his gentle madmen as politely and kindly as if we were 
 concluding a visit with a company of friends. 
 
 An evening out of doors, in summer, is pleasant 
 enough anywhere in Italy : but I have found no place 
 where the people and their amusements were so con- 
 centrated at that hour, as upon the " Marina" of Pa- 
 lermo. A ramble with the officers up and down, re- 
 newing the acquaintances made with visiters to the 
 ships, listening to the music and observing the various 
 characters of the crowd, concludes every day agreeably. 
 A terraced promenade, twenty feet above the street, 
 extends nearly the whole length of the Marina, and 
 here, under the balconies of the viceroy's palace, with 
 the crescent harbor spread out before the eye, trees 
 above, and marble seats tempting the weary at every 
 step, may be met pedestrians of every class, from the 
 first cool hour when the Seabreeze sets in till midnight 
 or morning. The intervals between the pieces per- 
 formed by the royal band in the centre of the drive, is 
 seized by the wandering improvisatrice, or the ludicrous 
 puncindlo, and even the beggars cease to importune in 
 the general abandonment to pleasure. Every other 
 moment the air is filled with a delightful perfume, and 
 you are addressed by the bearer of a tall pole tied 
 thickly with the odorous flowers of this voluptuous 
 climate — a mode of selling these cheap luxuries which 
 I believe is peculiar to Palermo. The gayety they 
 give a crowd, by the way, is singular. They move 
 about among the gaudily-dressed contadini like a troop ' 
 of banners — tulips, narcissus, moss-roses, branches of ' 
 jasmine, geraniums, every flower that is rare and beau- ! 
 tiful scenting the air from a hundred overladen poles, j 
 and the merest pittance will purchase the rarest and 
 loveliest. It seems a clime of fruits and flowers; and 
 if one could but shut his eyes to the dreadful contrasts 
 of nakedness and starvation, he might believe himself 
 in a Utopia. 
 
 We were standing on the balcony of the consul's 
 residence (a charming situation overlooking the Ma- 
 rina), and remarking the gayety of the scene on the 
 first evening of our arrival. The conversation turned 
 upon the condition of the people. The consul re- 
 marked that it was an every-day circumstance to find 
 beggars starved to death in the streets ; and that, in 
 the small villages near Palermo, eight or ten were of- 
 ten taken up dead from the road-side in the morning. 
 The difficulty of getting a subsistence is every day in- 
 creasing, and in the midst of one of the most fertile 
 
 spots of the earth, one half the population are driven 
 to the last extremity for bread. The results appear 
 in constant conspiracies against the government, de- 
 tected and put down with more or less difficulty. The 
 island is garrisoned with troops from Italy," and the 
 viceroy has lately sent to his brother for a reinforce- 
 ment, and is said to feel very insecure. A more la- 
 mentably misgoverned kingdom than that of the Sici- 
 lies, probably does not exist in the world. 
 
 LETTER LXX. 
 
 PALERMO — FETE GIVEN BY ME. GARDINER, THE AMERI- 
 CAN CONSUL — TEMPLE OF CLITUMNTJS — COTTAGE OF 
 PETRARCH — MESSINA — LIPAEI ISLANDS — SCYLLA AND 
 CHARTBDIS. 
 
 Palermo, June 28. — The curve of " The Golden 
 Shell," which bends to the east of Palermo, is a luxu- 
 riant plain of ten miles in length, terminated by a 
 bluff which forms a headland corner of the bay. A 
 broad neck of land between this bay and another in- 
 denting the coast less deeply on the other side, is oc- 
 cupied by a cluster of summer palaces belonging to 
 several of the richer princes of Sicily. The breeze, 
 whenever there is one on land or sea, sweeps freshly 
 across this ridge, and a more desirable residence for 
 combined coolness and beauty could scarce be imagin- 
 ed. The Palermitan princes, however, find every 
 country more attractive than their own; and while you 
 may find a dozen of them in any city of Europe, their 
 once magnificent residences are deserted and falling to 
 decay, almost without an exception. 
 
 The old walls of one of these palaces were enlivened 
 yesterday, by a fete given to the officers of the squadron 
 by the American consul, Mr. Gardiner. "We left 
 Palermo in a long cavalcade, followed by a large omni- 
 bus containing the ship's band, early in the forenoon. 
 The road was lined with prickly pear and oleander in 
 the most luxuriant blossom. Exotics in our country, 
 these plants are indigenous to Sicily, and form the only 
 hedges to the large plantations of cane and the spread- 
 ing vineyards and fields. A more brilliant show than 
 these long lines of trees, laden with bright pink flowers, 
 and varied by the gigantic and massive leaf of the pear, 
 can not easily be imagined. 
 
 We were to visit one or two places on our way. The 
 carriage drew up about eight miles from town, at the 
 gate of a ruinous building, and passing through a 
 deserted court, we entered an old-fashioned garden, 
 presenting one succession of trimmed walks, urns, 
 statues and fountains. The green mould of age and 
 exposure upon the marbles, the broken seats, the once 
 costly but now ruined and silent fountains, the tall 
 weeds in the seldom-trodden walks, and the wild vege- 
 tation of fragrant jasmine and brier burying everything 
 with its luxuriance, all told the story of decay. I re- 
 membered the scenes of the Decameron ; the many 
 " tales of love," laid in these very gardens ; the gay 
 romances of which Palermo was the favorite home ; 
 and the dames and knights of Sicily the fairest and 
 bravest themes, and I longed to let my merry com- 
 panions pass on, and remain to realize more deeply the 
 spells of poetry and story. The pleasure of travel is 
 in the fancy. Men and manners are so nearly alike 
 over the world, and the same annoyances disturb so 
 certainly, wherever we are, the gratification of seeing 
 and conversing with our living fellow-beings, that it is 
 only by the mingled illusion of fancy and memory, by 
 getting apart, and peopling the deserted palace or the 
 sombre ruin from the pages of a book, that we ever 
 realize the anticipated pleasure of standing on cele- 
 brated ground. The eye, the curiosity, are both dis- 
 appointed, and the voice of a common companion re- 
 duces the most romantic ruin to a heap of stone. In 
 
106 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 some of the footsteps of Childe Harold himself, with 
 his glorious thoughts upon my lips, and all that moved 
 his imagination addressing my eye, with the additional 
 grace which his poetry has left around them, I have 
 found myself unable to overstep the vulgar circum- 
 stances of the hour — the " Temple of the Clitumnus" 
 was a ruined shed glaring in the sunshine, and the 
 " Cottage of Petrarch" an apology for extortion and 
 annoyance. 
 
 I heard a shout from the party, and followed them 
 to a building at the foot of the garden. I passed the 
 threshold and started back. A ghastly monk, with a 
 broom in his hand, stood gazing at me, and at a door 
 just beyond, a decrepit nun was see-sawing backward 
 and forward, ringing a bell with the most impatient 
 yiolence. I ventured to pass in, and a door opened at 
 the right, disclosing the self-denying cell of a hermit 
 with his narrow bed and single chair, and at the table 
 sat the rosy-gilled friar, filling his glass from an anti- 
 quated bottle, and nodding his head to his visiter in 
 grinning welcome. A long cloister with six or eight 
 cells extended beyond, and in each was a monk in some 
 startling attitude, or a pale and saintly nun employed in 
 work or prayer. The whole was as like a living mon- 
 astery as wax could make it. The mingling of monks 
 and nuns seemed an anachronism, but we were told 
 that it represented a tale, the title of which I have for- 
 gotten. It was certainly an odd as well as an expensive 
 fancy for a garden ornament, and shows by its useless- 
 ness the once princely condition of the possessors of 
 the palace. An Englishman married not many years 
 since an old princess, to whom the estates had descend- 
 ed, and with much unavailable property and the title 
 of prince, he has entered the service of the king of the 
 Sicilies for a support. 
 
 We drove on to another palace, still more curious 
 in its ornaments. The extensive walls which enclosed 
 it, the gates, the fountains in the courts and gardens, 
 were studded with marble monsters of every conceiva- 
 ble deformity. The head of a man crowned the body 
 of an eagle standing on the legs of a horse ; the lovely 
 face and bosom of a female crouched upon the body 
 of a dog ; alligators, serpents, lions, monkeys, birds, 
 and reptiles, were mixed up with parts of the human 
 body in the most revolting variety. So admirable was 
 the work, too, and so beautiful the material, that even 
 outraged taste would hesitate to destroy them. The 
 wonder is that artists of so much merit could have been 
 hired to commit such sins against decency, or that a 
 man in his senses would waste upon them the fortune 
 they must have cost. 
 
 We mounted a massive flight of steps, with a balus- 
 trade of gorgeously-carved marble, and entered a hall 
 hung round with the family portraits, the eccentric 
 founder at their head. He was a thin, quizzical-looking 
 gentleman, in a laced coat and sword, and had precisely 
 the face I imagined for him — that of a whimsied mad- 
 man. You would select it from a thousand as the 
 subject for a lunatic asylum. 
 
 We were led next to a long narrow hall, famous for 
 having dined the king and his courtiers an age or two 
 ago. The ceiling was of plate mirror, reflecting us all, 
 upside down, as we strolled through, and the walls 
 were studded from the floor to the roof with the quartz 
 diamond, (valueless but brilliant), bits of colored glass, 
 spangles, and everything that could reflect light. 
 The effect, when the quaint old chandeliers were lit, 
 and the table spread with silver and surrounded by a 
 king and his nobles, in the costume of a court in the 
 olden time, must have exceeded faery. 
 
 Beyond, we were ushered into the state drawing- 
 room, a saloon of grand proportions, roofed like the 
 other with mirrors, but paved and lined throughout 
 with the costliest marbles, Sicilian agates, \ aintings 
 set in the wall and covered with glass, while on pedestals 
 around, stood statues of the finest workmanship, rep- 
 
 resenting the males of the family in the costume or 
 armor of the times. A table of inlaid precious stones 
 stood in the centre, cabinets of lapis-lazuli and side- 
 tables, occupied the spaces between the furniture, and 
 the chairs and sofas were covered with the rich velvet 
 stuffs now out of use, embroidered and fringed magni- 
 ficently. 1 sat down upon a tripod stool, and with my 
 eyes half closed, looked up at the mirrored reflections 
 of the officers in the ceiling, and tried to imagine back 
 the gay throngs that had moved across the floor they 
 were treading so unceremoniously, the knightly and 
 royal feet that had probably danced the stars down with 
 the best beauty of Sicily beneath those silent mirrors; 
 the joy, the jealousy, the love and hate, that had lived 
 their hour and been repeated, as were our lighter feel- 
 ings and faces now, outlived by the perishing mirrors 
 that might still outlive ours as long. How much there 
 is an atmosphere ! How full the air of these old palaces 
 is of thought! How one might enjoy them could he 
 ramble here alone, or with one congenial and musing 
 companion to answer to his moralizing. 
 
 We drove on to our appointment. At the end of a 
 handsome avenue stood a large palace, in rather more 
 modern taste than those we had left. The crowd of 
 carriages in the court, the gold-laced midshipmen 
 scattered about the massive stairs and in the formal 
 walks of the gardens, the gay dresses of the ship's 
 band, playing on the terrace, and the troops of ladies 
 and gentlemen in every direction, gave an air of bustle 
 to the stately structure that might have reminded the 
 marble nymphs of the days when they were first lifted 
 to their pedestals. 
 
 The old hall was thrown open at two, and a table 
 stretching from one end to the other, loaded with every 
 luxury of the season, and capable of accommodating 
 sixty or seventy persons, usurped the place of unsub- 
 stantial romance, and brought in the wildest straggler 
 willingly from his ramble. No cost had been spared, 
 and the hospitable consul (a Bostonian) did the honors 
 of his table in a manner that stirred powerfully my 
 pride of country and birthplace. All the English 
 resident in Palermo were present; and it was the more 
 agreeable to me that their countrymen are usually the 
 only givers of generous entertainment in Europe. One 
 feels ever so distant a reflection on his country abroad. 
 The liberal and elegant hospitality of one of our coun- 
 trymen at Florence, has served me as a better argu- 
 ment against the charge of hardness and selfishness 
 urged upon our nation, than all which could be drawn 
 from the acknowledgments of travellers. 
 
 When dinner was over, an hour was passed at coffee 
 in a small saloon stained after the fashion of Pompeii, 
 and we then assembled on a broad terrace facing the 
 sea, and with the band in the gallery above, commen- 
 ced dances which lasted till an hour or two into the 
 moonlight. The sunset had the eternal but untiring 
 glory of the Italian summer, and it never set on a gayer 
 party. There were among the English one or two 
 lovely girls, and with the four ladies belonging to the 
 squadron (the commodore's family and Captain Reed's), 
 the dancers were sufficient to include all the officers, 
 and the scene in the soft light of the moon was like a 
 description in an old tale. The broad sea on either 
 side, broke by the headland in front, the distant crescent 
 of lights glancing along the seaside at Palermo, the 
 solemn old palaces seen from the eminence around us, 
 and the noble pile through whose low windows we 
 strolled out upon the terrace, the music and the ex- 
 citement, all blended a scene that is drawn with bright 
 and living lines in my memory. We parted unwilling- 
 ly, and reaching Palermo about midnight, pulled off 
 to the frigates, and were under way at daylight for 
 Messina. 
 
 This is the poetry of sailing. The long, low frigate 
 glides on through the water with no more motion titan 
 
PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 107 
 
 is felt in a dining-room on shore. The sea changes 
 only from a glossy calm to a feathery ripple, the sky 
 is always serene, the merchant sail appears and dis- 
 appears on the horizon edge, the island rides on the 
 bow, creeps along the quarter, is examined by the 
 glasses of the idlers on deck and sinks gradually astern, 
 the sun-fish whirls in the eddy of the wake, the tortoise 
 plunges and breathes about us, and the delightful 
 temperature of the sea, even and invigorating, keeps 
 both mind and body in an undisturbed equilibrium 
 of enjoyment. For me it is a paradise. 1 am glad 
 to escape from the contact, the dust, the trials of tem- 
 per, the noon-day sultriness, and the midnight chill, 
 the fatigue and privation and vexation, which beset the 
 traveller on shore. I shall return to it no doubt willing- 
 ly after a while, but for the present, it is rest, it is re- 
 lief, refreshment, to be at sea. There is no swell in 
 the Mediterranean during the summer months, and 
 this gliding about, sleeping or reading as if at home, 
 from one port to another, seems to me just now the 
 Utopia of enjoyment. 
 
 We have been all day among the Lijyari islands. 
 It is pleasant to look up at the shaded and peaceful 
 huts on their mountainous sides, as we creep along 
 under them or to watch the fisherman's children with 
 a glass, as they run out from their huts on the sea- 
 shore to gaze at the uncommon apparition of a ship- 
 of-war. They seem seats of solitude and retirement. 
 I have just dropped the glass, which I had raised to 
 look at what I took to be a large ship in full sail round- 
 ing the point of Felicudi. It is a tall, pyramidal rock, 
 rising right from the sea, and resembling exactly a ship 
 with studding-sails set, coming down before the wind. 
 The band is playing on the deck ; and a fisherman's 
 boat with twenty of the islanders resting on their oars 
 and listening in wondering admiration, lies just under 
 our quarter. It will form a tale for the evening meal, 
 to which they were hastening home. 
 
 We run between Scylla and Charyhdis, with a fresh 
 wind and a strong current. The "dogs" were silent, 
 and the " whirlpool" is a bubble to Hurl-gate. Scylla 
 is quite a town, and the tall rock at the entrance of the 
 strait is crowned with a large building, which seems 
 part of a fortification. The passage through the Faro 
 is lonely — quite like a river. Messina lies in a curve 
 of the western shore, at the base of a hill ; and, opposite, 
 a graceful slope covered with vineyards, swells up to a 
 broad table plain on the mountain, which looked like 
 the home of peace and fertility. 
 
 We rounded to, off the town, to send in for letters, 
 and I went ashore in the boat. Two American friends, 
 whom I had as little expectation of meeting as if I had 
 dropped upon Jerusalem, hailed me from the grating 
 of the health-office, before we reached the land, and 
 having exhibited our bill of health, I had half an hour 
 for a call upon an old friend, resident at Messina, and 
 we were off again to the ship. The sails filled, and 
 we shot away on a strong breeze down the straits. 
 Rhegium lay on our left, a large cluster of old-looking 
 houses on the edge of the sea. It was at this town of 
 Calabria that St. Paul landed on his journey to Rome. 
 We sped on without much time to look at it, even 
 with a glass, and were soon rounding the toe of "the 
 boot," the southern point of Italy. We are heading 
 at this moment for the gulf of Tarento, and hope to 
 be in Venice by the fourth of July. 
 
 LETTER LXXI. 
 
 THE ADRIATIC — ALBANIA GAT COSTUMES AND BEAU- 
 TY OF THE ALBANESE — CAPO DTSTRIA — TRIESTE 
 RESEMBLES AN AMERICAN TOWN — VISIT TO THE 
 AUSTRIAN AUTHORITIES OF THE PROVINCE — CURIOS- 
 ITY OF THE INHABITANTS GENTLEMANLY RECEP- 
 TION BY THE MILITARY COMMANDANT — VISIT TO 
 
 VIENNA — SINGULAR NOTIONS OF THE AUSTRIAN'S 
 RESPECTING THE AMERICANS — SIMILARITY OF THE 
 SCENERY TO THAT OF NEW-ENGLAND — MEETING 
 WITH GERMAN STUDENTS — FREQUENT SIGHT OF SOL- 
 DIERS AND MILITARY PREPARATIONS — PICTURESQUE 
 SCENERY OF STYRIA. 
 
 The doge of Venice has a fair bride in the Adriatic. 
 It is the fourth of July, and with the Italian Cape 
 Colonna on our left, and the long, low coast of Alba- 
 nia shading the horizon on the east, we are gazing 
 upon her from the deck of the first American frigate 
 that has floated upon her bosom. We head for Ven- 
 ice, and there is a stir of anticipation on board, felt 
 even through the hilarity of our cherished anniversa- 
 ry. I am the only one in the ward-room to whom 
 that wonderful city is familiar, and I feel as if I had 
 forestalled my own happiness — the first impression of 
 it is so enviable. 
 
 It is difficult to conceive the gay costumes and 
 handsome features of the Albanese, existing in these 
 barren mountains that bind the Adriatic. It has been 
 but a continued undulation of rock and sand, for three 
 days past ; and the closer we hug to the shore, the 
 more we look at the broad canvass above us, and pray 
 for wind. We make Capo d'Istria now, a small town 
 nestled in a curve of the sea, and an hour or two more 
 will bring us to Trieste, where we drop anchor, we 
 hope, for many an hour of novelty and pleasure. 
 
 Trieste lies sixty or eighty miles from Venice, 
 across the head of the gulf. The shore between is 
 piled up to the sky with the " blue Friuli mountains ;" 
 and from the town of Trieste, the low coast of Istria 
 breaks away at a right angle to the south, forming the 
 eastern bound of the Adriatic. As we ran into the 
 harbor on our last tack, we passed close under the 
 garden walls of the villa of the ex-queen of Naples, a 
 lovely spot just in the suburbs. The palace of Je- 
 rome Bonaparte was also pointed out to us by the 
 pilot on the hill just above. They have both removed 
 since to Florence, and their palaces are occupied by 
 English. We dropped anchor within a half mile of 
 the pier, and the flags of a dozen American vessels 
 were soon distinguishable among the various colors of 
 the shipping in the port. 
 
 I accompanied Commodore Patterson to-day on a 
 visit of ceremony to the Austrian authorities of the 
 province. We made our way with difficulty through 
 the people, crowding in hundreds to the water-side, 
 and following us with the rude freedom of a skow- 
 man's audience. The vice-governor, a polite but 
 Frenchified German count, received us with every 
 profession of kindness. His Parisian gestures sat ill 
 enough upon his national high cheek-bones, lank hair, 
 and heavy shoulders. We left him to call upon the 
 military commandant, an Irishman, who occupies part 
 of the palace of the ex-king of Westphalia. Our 
 reception by him was gentlemanly, cordial, and digni- 
 fied. I think the Irish are, after all, the best-manner- 
 ed people in the world. They are found in every 
 country, as adventurers for honor, and they change 
 neither in character nor manner. They follow foreign 
 fashions, and acquire a foreign language ; but in the 
 first they retain their heart, and in the latter their 
 brogue. They are Irishmen always. Count Nugent 
 is high in the favor of the emperor, has the commis- 
 sion of a field marshal, and is married to a Neapolitan 
 princess, who is a most accomplished and lovely wo- 
 man, and related to most of the royal houses of Eu- 
 rope. His reputation as a soldier is well known, and 
 he seems to me to have no drawback to the enviable- 
 ness of his life, except its expatriation. 
 
 Trieste is a busy, populous place, resembling ex- 
 tremely our new towns in America. We took a strol 
 
108 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 through the principal streets after our visits were 
 over, and I was surprised at the splendor of the shops, 
 and the elegance of the costumes and equipages. It 
 is said to contain thirty thousand inhabitants. 
 
 Vienna. — The frigates were to lie three or four 
 weeks at Trieste. One half of the officers had taken 
 the steamboat for Venice on the second evening of 
 our arrival, and the other half waited impatiently their 
 turn of absence. Vienna was but some four hundred 
 miles distant, and I might never be so near it again. 
 On a rainy evening, at nine o'clock, I left Trieste in 
 the " eil-ivagon," with a German courier, and com- 
 menced the ascent of the spur of the Friuli mountains 
 that overhangs the bay. 
 
 My companions inside were, a merchant from Gratz, 
 a fantastical and poor Hungarian count, a Corfu shop- 
 keeper, and an Italian ex-militaire and present apoth- 
 ecary, going to Vienna to marry a lady whom he had 
 never seen. After a little bandying of compliments in 
 German, of which I understood nothing except that 
 they were apologies for the incessant smoking of three 
 disgusting pipes, the conversation, fortunately for me, 
 settled into Italian. The mountain was steep and 
 very high, and my friends soon grew conversible. 
 The novelty of two American frigates in the harbor 
 naturally decided the first topic. Our Gratz merchant 
 was surprised at the light color of the officers he had 
 seen, and doubted if they were not Englishmen in the 
 American service. He had always heard Americans 
 were black. " They are so," said the soldier-apothe- 
 cary ; " I saw the real Americans yesterday in a boat, 
 quite black." (One of the cutters of the Constella- 
 tion has a negro crew, which he had probably seen at 
 the pier.) The assertion seemed to satisfy the doubts 
 of all parties. They had wondered how such beauti- 
 ful ships could come from a savage country. It was 
 now explained. " They were bought from the Eng- 
 lish, and officered by Englishmen." I was too much 
 amused with their speculations to undeceive them ; 
 and with my head thrust half out of the window to 
 avoid choking with the smoke of their pipes, I gazed 
 back at the glittering lights of the town below, and 
 indulged the never-palling sensation of a first entrance 
 into a new country. The lantern at the peak of the 
 " United States " was the last thing I saw as we rose 
 the brow of the mountain, and started off on a rapid 
 trot toward Vienna. 
 
 I awoke at daylight with the sudden stop of the 
 carriage. We were at the low door of a German tav- 
 ern, and a clear, rosy, good-humored looking girl bade 
 us good morning, as we alighted one by one. The 
 phrase was so like English, that 1 asked for a basin of 
 water in my mother tongue. The similarity served 
 me again. She brought it without hesitation ; but 
 the question she asked me as she set it down was like 
 nothing that had ever before entered my ears. The 
 count smiled at my embarrassment, and explained that 
 she wished to know if I wanted soap. 
 
 I was struck with the cleanliness of everything. 
 The tables, chairs, and floors, looked worn away with 
 scrubbing. Breakfast was brought in immediately, 
 eggs, rolls, and coffee, the latter in a glass bottle like 
 a chemist's retort, corked up tightly, and wrapped in 
 a snowy napkin. It was an excellent breakfast, served 
 with cleanliness and good humor, and cost about four- 
 teen cents each. Even from this single meal, it seem- 
 ed to me that I had entered a country of simple man- 
 ners and kind feelings. The conductor gravely kissed 
 the cheek of the girl who had waited on us, my com- 
 panions lit their pipes afresh, and the postillion, in 
 cocked hat and feather, blew a stave of a waltz on his 
 horn, and fell into a steady trot, which he kept up 
 with phlegmatic perseverance to the end of his post. 
 
 As we get away from the sea, the land grows richer, 
 
 and the farm-houses more frequent. We are in the 
 dutchy of Carniola, forty or fifty miles from Trieste. 
 How very unlike Italy and France, and how very like 
 New England it is! There are no ruined castles, nor 
 old cathedrals. Every village has its small white 
 church with a tapering spire, large manufactories 
 cluster on the water-courses, the small rivers are rapid 
 and deep, the horses large and strong, the barns im- 
 mense, the crops heavy, the people grave and hard at 
 work, and not a pauper by the post together. We are 
 very far north, too, and the climate is like New Eng- 
 land. The wind, though it is midsummer, is bracing, 
 and there is no travelling as in Italy, with one's hat off 
 and breast open, dissolving at midnight in the luxury 
 of the soft air. The houses, too, are ugly and com- 
 fortable, staring with paint and pierced in all directions 
 with windows. The children are white-headed and 
 serious. The hills are half covered with woods, and 
 clusters of elms are left here and there through the 
 meadows, as if their owners could afford to let them 
 grow for a shade to the mowers. I was perpetually 
 exclaiming, "how like America!" 
 
 We dined at Laybach. My companions had found 
 out by my passport that 1 was an American, and their 
 curiosity was most amusing. The report of the arri- 
 val of the two frigates had reached the capital of lllyria, 
 and with the assistance of the information of my 
 friends, I found myself an object of universal attention. 
 The crowd around the door of the hotel, looked into 
 the windows while we were eating, and followed me 
 round the house as if I had been a savage. One of 
 the passengers told me they connected the arrival of 
 the ships with some political object, and thought 1 
 might be the envoy. The landlord asked me if we 
 had potatoes in our country. 
 
 I took a walk through the city after dinner with my 
 mincing friend the count. The low, two-story wood- 
 en houses, the sidewalks enclosed with trees, the mat- 
 ter-of-fact looking people, the shut windows, and neat 
 white churches remind me again strongly of America. 
 It was like the more retired streets of Portland or 
 Portsmouth. The Illyrian language spoken here, 
 seemed to me the most inarticulate succession of 
 sounds I had ever heard. In crossing the bridge in 
 the centre of the town, we met a party of German stu- 
 dents travelling on foot with their knapsacks. My 
 friend spoke to them to gratify my curiosity. I wished 
 to know where they were going. They all spoke 
 French and Italian, and seemed in high heart, bold, 
 cheerful, and intelligent. They were bound for 
 Egypt, determined to seek their fortunes in the service 
 of the present reforming and liberal pacha. Their 
 enthusiasm, when they were told I was an American, 
 quite thrilled me. They closed about me and looked 
 into my eyes, as if they expected to read the spirit of 
 freedom in them. I was taken by the arms at last, 
 and almost forced into a beer-shop. The large 
 tankards were filled, each touched mine and the others, 
 and "America" was drank with a grave earnestness of 
 manner that moved my heart within me. They shook 
 me by the hand on parting, and gave me a blessing in 
 German, which, as the old count translated it, was the 
 first word I have learned of their language. We had 
 met constantly parties of them on the road. They all 
 dress alike, in long travelling frocks of brown stuff, and 
 small green caps with straight visors ; but, coarsely as 
 they are clothed, and humbly as they seem to be 
 faring, their faces bear always a mark that can never 
 be mistaken. They look like scholars. 
 
 The roads, by the way, are crowded with pedestrians. 
 It seems to be the favorite mode of travelling in this 
 country. We have scarce met a carriage, and I have 
 seen, I am sure, in one day, two hundred passengers 
 on foot. Among them is a class of people peculiar to 
 Germany. I was astonished occasionally at being 
 asked for charity by stout, well-dressed young men, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 109 
 
 to all appearance as respectable as any travellers on 
 the road. Expressing my surprise, my companions 
 informed me that they were apprentices, and that the 
 custom or law of the country compelled them, after 
 completing their indentures, to travel in some distant 
 province, and depend upon charity and their own ex- 
 ertions for two or three years before becoming masters 
 at their trade. It is a singular custom, and, I should 
 think, i. useful lesson in hardship and self-reliance. 
 They held out their hats with a confident indepen- 
 dence of look that quite satisfied me they felt no deg- 
 radation in it. 
 
 We soon entered the province of Styria, and bright- 
 er rivers, greener woods, richer and more graceful up- 
 lands and meadows, do not exist in the world. I had 
 thought the scenery of Stockbridge, in my own state, 
 unequalled till now. I could believe myself there, 
 were not the women alone working in the fields, and 
 the roads lined for miles together with military wag- 
 ons and cavalry upon march. The conscript law of 
 Austria compels every peasant to serve fourteen years! 
 and the labors of agriculture fall, of course, almost ex- 
 clusively upon females. Soldiers swarm like locusts 
 through the country, but they seem as inoffensive and 
 as much at home as the cattle in the farm-yards. It 
 is a curious contrast, to my eye, to see parks of artil- 
 lery glistening in the midst of a wheat-field, and sol- 
 diers sitting about under the low thatches of these 
 peaceful-looking cottages. I do not think, among the 
 thousands that I have passed in three days' travel, I 
 have seen a gesture or heard a syllable. If sitting, 
 they smoke and sit still, and if travelling, they econo- 
 mise motion to a degree that is wearisome to the eye. 
 
 Words are limited, and the description of scenery be- 
 comes tiresome. It is a fault that the sense of beauty, 
 freshening constantly on the traveller, compels him 
 who makes a note of impressions to mark every other 
 line with the same ever-recurring exclamations of 
 pleasure. I saw a hundred miles of unrivalled scenery 
 in Styria, and how can I describe it? I were keeping 
 silence on a world of enjoyment to pass it over. We 
 come to a charming descent into a valley. The town 
 beneath, the river, the embracing mountains, the 
 swell to the ear of its bells ringing some holyday, affect 
 my imagination powerfully. I take out my tablets, 
 What shall I say ? How convey to your minds who 
 have not seen it, the charm of a scene I can only de- 
 scribe as I have described a thousand others ? 
 
 LETTER LXXII. 
 
 GRATZ VIENNA. 
 
 We had followed stream after stream through a 
 succession of delicious valleys for a hundred miles. 
 Descending from a slight eminence, we came upon 
 the broad and rapid Mukr, and soon after caught sight 
 of a distant citadel upon a rock. As we approached, 
 it struck me as one of" the most singular freaks of na- 
 ture I had ever seen. A pyramid, perhaps three hun- 
 dred feet in height, and precipitous on every side, rose 
 abruptly in the midst of a broad and level plain, and 
 around it in a girdle of architecture, lay the capital 
 of Styria. The fortress on the summit hung like an 
 eagle's nest over the town, and from its towers, a pis- 
 tol-shot would reach the outermost point of the wall. 
 
 Wearied with travelling near three hundred miles 
 without sleep, I dropped upon a bed at the hotel, with 
 an order to be called in two hours. It was noon, and 
 we were to remain at Gratz till the next morning. 
 My friend, the Hungarian, had promised as he threw 
 himself on the opposite bed, to wake and accompany 
 me iq a walk through the town, but the shake of a 
 stout German chambermaid at the appointed time had 
 
 no effect upon him, and I descended to my dinner 
 alone. I had lost my interpreter. The carte was in 
 German, of which I did not know even the letters. 
 After appealing in vain in French and Italian to the 
 persons eating near me, I fixed my finger at hazard 
 upon a word, and the waiter disappeared. The result 
 was a huge dish of cabbage cooked in some filthy oil 
 and graced with a piece of beef. I was hesitating 
 whether to dine on bread or make another attempt, 
 when a gentlemanly man of some fifty years came in 
 and took the vacant seat at my table. He addressed 
 me immediately in French, and smiling at my difficul- 
 ties, undertook to order a dinner for me something 
 less national. We improved our acquaintance with a 
 bottle of Johannesburgh, and after dinner he kindly 
 offered to accompany me in my walk through the 
 city. 
 
 Gratz is about the size of Boston, a plain German 
 city, with little or no pretensions to style. The mili- 
 tary band was playing a difficult waltz very beautifully 
 in the public square, but no one was listening except 
 a group of young men dressed in the worst taste of 
 dandyism. We mounted by a zig-zag path to the 
 fortress. On a shelf of the precipice, half way up, 
 hangs a small casino, used as a beer-shop. The view 
 from the summit was a feast to the eye. The wide 
 and lengthening valley of theMuhr lay asleep beneath 
 its loads of grain, its villas and farmhouses, the pic- 
 ture of " waste and mellow fruitfulness," the rise to 
 the mountains around the head of the valley was clus- 
 tered with princely dwellings, thick forests with glades 
 between them, and churches with white slender spires 
 shooting from the bosom of elms, and right at our 
 feet, circling around the precipitous rock for protec- 
 tion, lay the city enfolded in its rampart, and sending 
 up to our ears the sound of every wheel that rolled 
 through her streets. Among the striking buildings 
 below, my friend pointed out to me a palace which he 
 said had been lately purchased by Joseph Bonaparte, 
 who was coming here to reside. The people were 
 beginning to turn out for their evening walk upon the 
 ramparts which are planted with trees and laid out for 
 a promenade, and we descended to mingle in the 
 crowd. 
 
 My old friend had a great many acquaintances. 
 He presented me to several of the best-dressed people 
 we met, all of whom invited me to supper. I had 
 been in Italy almost a year and a half, and such a 
 thing had never happene i to me. We walked about 
 until six, and as I prefer ed going to the play, which 
 opened at that early hour, we took tickets for " Der 
 Schlimme Leisel" and were seated presently in one of 
 the simplest and prettiest theatres I have ever seen. 
 
 Der Schlimme Leisel was an old maid who kept 
 house for an old bachelor brother, proposing, at the 
 time the play opens, to marry. Her dislike to the 
 match, from the dread of losing her authority over 
 his household, formed the humor of the piece, and 
 was admirably represented. After various unsuccess- 
 ful attempts to prevent the nuptials, the lady is brought 
 to the house, and the old maid enters in a towering 
 passion, throws down her keys, and flirts out of the 
 room with a threat that she " will go to America /" 
 Fortunately she is not driven to that extremity. The 
 lady has been already married secretly to a poorer 
 lover, and the old bachelor, after the first shock of 
 the discovery, settles a fortune on them, and returns 
 to his celibacy and his old maid sister,' to the satisfac- 
 tion of all parties. Certainly the German is the most 
 unmusical language of Babel. If my good old friend 
 had not translated it for me word for word, I should 
 scarce have believed the play to be more than a gib- 
 bering pantomime. I shall think differently when 1 
 have learned it, no doubt, but a strange language 
 strikes upon one's ear so oddly ! I was quite too tired 
 when the play was over (which, by the way, was at 
 
110 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 the sober hour of nine), to accept any of the kind in- 
 vitations of which my companion reminded me. We 
 supped tete-a-tete, instead, at the hotel. I was delight- 
 ed with my new acquaintance. He was an old citizen 
 of the world. He had left Gratz at twenty, and after 
 thirty years wandering from one part of the globe to 
 the other, had returned to end his days in his birth- 
 place. His relations were all dead, and speaking all 
 the languages of Europe, he preferred living at a ho- 
 tel for the society of strangers. With a great deal of 
 wisdom, he had preserved his good humor toward the 
 world ; and I think I have rarely seen a kinder and 
 never a happier man. I parted from him with regret, 
 and the next morning at daylight, had resumed my 
 seat at the Eil-wagon. 
 
 Imagine the Hudson, at the highlands, reduced to 
 a sparkling little river a bowshot across, and a rich 
 valley thridded by a road accompanying the remain- 
 ing space between the mountains, and you have the 
 scenery for the first thirty miles beyond Gratz. There 
 is one more difference. On the edge of one of the 
 most towering precipices, clear up against the clouds, 
 hang the ruins of a noble castle. The rents in the 
 wall, and the embrazures in the projecting turrets, 
 seem set into the sky. Trees and vines grow within 
 and about it, and the lacings of the twisted roots seem 
 all that keep it together. It is a perfect " castle in 
 the air." 
 
 A long day's journey and another long night (during 
 which we passed Neustadt, on the confines of Hunga- 
 ry) brought us within sight of Baden, but an hour or 
 two from Vienna. It was just sunrise, and market- 
 carts and pedestrians and suburban vehicles of all de- 
 scriptions notified us of our approach to a great capi- 
 tal. A few miles farther we were stopped in the midst 
 of an extensive plain by a crowd of carriages. A 
 criminal was about being guillotined. What was that 
 to one who saw Vienna for the first time ? A few 
 steps farther the postillion was suddenly stopped. A 
 gentleman alighted from a carriage in which were two 
 ladies, and opened the door of the diligence. It was 
 the bride of the soldier-apothecary come to meet him 
 with her mother and brother. He was buried in dust, 
 just waked out of sleep, a three day's beard upon his 
 face, and, at the best, not a very lover-like person. 
 He ran to the carriage door, jumped in, and there was 
 an immediate cry for water. The bride had fainted ! 
 We left her in his arms and drove on. The courier 
 had no bowels for love. 
 
 There is a small Gothic pillar before us, on the rise 
 of a slight elevation. Thence we shall see Vienna. 
 " Stop, thou tasteless postillion !" Was ever such a 
 scene revealed to mortal sight ! It is like Paris from 
 the Barriere de VEtoile — it seems to cover the world. 
 Oh, beautiful Vienna ! What is that broad water on 
 which the rising sun glances so brightly ? " The 
 Danube /" What is that unparalleled Gothic structure 
 piercing the sky ? What columns are these ? What 
 spires ? Beautiful, beautiful city ! 
 
 Vienna. — It must be a fine city that impresses one 
 with its splendor before breakfast, after driving all night 
 in a mail-coach. It was six o'clock in the morning 
 when I left the postofhce, in Vienna, to walk to a 
 hotel. The shops were still shut, the milkwomen 
 were beating at the gates, and the short, quick ring 
 upon the church bells summoned all early risers to 
 mass. A sudden turn brought me upon a square. In 
 its centre stood the most beautiful fabric that has ever 
 yet filled my eye. It looked like the structure of a 
 giant, encrusted by fairies — a majestically proportioned 
 mass, and a spire tapering to the clouds, but a surface 
 so curiously beautiful, so traced and fretted, so full of 
 exquisite ornament, that it seemed rather some curious 
 cabinet gem, seen through a magnifier, than a building 
 in the open air. In these foreign countries, the laborer 
 
 goes in with his load to pray, and I did not hesitate to 
 enter the splendid church of St. Etienne, though a 
 man followed me with a portmanteau on his back. 
 What a wilderness of arches ! Pulpits, chapels, altars, 
 ciboriums, confessionals, choirs, all in the exquisite 
 slenderness of Gothic tracery, and all of one venerable 
 and timeworn die, as if the incense of a myriad cen- 
 sers had steeped them in their spicy odors. The mass 
 was chanting, and hundreds were on their knees about 
 me, and not one without some trace that he had come 
 in on his way to his daily toil. It was the hour of the 
 poor mail's prayer. The rich were asleep in their beds. 
 The glorious roof over their heads, the costly and 
 elaborated pillars against which they pressed their fore- 
 heads, the music and the priestly service, were, for that 
 hour, theirs alone. I seldom have felt the spirit of a 
 place of worship so strong upon me. 
 
 The foundations of St. Etienne were laid seven hun- 
 dred years ago. It has twice been partly burnt, and 
 has been embellished in succession by nearly all the 
 emperors of Germany. Among its many costly tombs, 
 the most interesting is thatofthe hero Eugene oj 'Savoy ; 
 erected by his niece, the Princess Therese, of Liech- 
 tenstein. There is also a vault in which it is said, in 
 compliance with an old custom, the entrails of all the 
 emperors are deposited. 
 
 Having marked thus much upon my tablets, I re- 
 membered the patient porter of my baggage, who had 
 taken the opportunity to drop on his knees while I was 
 gazing about, and having achieved his matins, was now 
 waiting submissively till I was ready to proceed. A 
 turn or two brought us to the hotel, where a bath and 
 a breakfast soon restored me, and in an hour I was 
 again on the way with a valet de place, to visit the 
 tomb of the son of JSapoleon. 
 
 He lies in the deep vaults of the capuchin convent, 
 with eighty-four of the imperial family of Austria beside 
 him. A monk answered our pull at the cloister-bell, 
 and the valet translated my request into German. He 
 opened the gate with a guttuial "Yaw!" and lighting 
 a wax candle at a lamp burning before the image of 
 the Virgin, unlocked a massive brazen door at the end 
 of the corridor, and led the way into the vault. The 
 capuchin was as pale as marble, quite bald, though 
 young, and with features which expressed, I thought, 
 the subdued fierceness of a devil. He impatiently 
 waved away the officious interpreter after a moment or 
 two, and asked me if I understood Latin. Nothing 
 could have been mere striking than the whole scene. 
 The immense bronze sarcophagi, lay in long isles be- 
 hind railings and gates of iron, and as the long-robed 
 monk strode on with his lamp through the darkness, 
 pronouncing the name and title of each as he unlocked 
 the door and struck it with his heavy key, he seemed 
 to me, with his solemn pronunciation, like some mys- 
 terious being calling forth the imperial tenants to judg- 
 ment. He appeared to have a something of scorn in 
 his manner as he looked on the splendid workmanship 
 of the vast coffin and pronounced the sounding titles of 
 the ashes within. At that of the celebrated Emperess 
 Maria Theresa alone, he stopped to make a comment. 
 It was a simple tribute to her virtues, and he uttered it 
 slowly, as if he were merely musing to himself. He 
 passed on to her husband, Francis the first, and then 
 proceeded uninterruptedly till he came to a new copper 
 coffin. It lay in a niche, beneath a tall, dim window, 
 and the monk, merely pointing to the inscription, set 
 down his lamp, and began to pace up and down the 
 damp floor, with his head on his breast, as if it was a 
 matter of course that here I was to be left awhile to 
 my thoughts. 
 
 It was certainly the spot, if there is one in the world, 
 to feel emotion. In the narrow enclosure on which 
 my finger rested lay the last hopes of Napoleon. The 
 heart of the master-spirit of the world was bound up 
 in these ashes. He was beautiful, acce* plished, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 Ill 
 
 generous, brave. He was loved with a sort of idolatry 
 oy the nation with which he had passed his childhood. 
 He had won all hearts. His death seemed impossible. 
 There was a universal prayer that he might live, his 
 inheritance of glory was so incalculable. 
 
 I read his epitaph. It was that of a private individual. 
 It gave his name, and his father's and mother's; and 
 then enumerated his virtues, with a commonplace 
 regret for his early death. The monk took up his 
 lamp and reascended to the cloister in silence. He 
 shut the convent-door behind me, and the busy street 
 seemed to me profane. How short a time does the 
 most moving event interrupt the common current of 
 life. 
 
 LETTER LXXIII. 
 
 VIENNA MAGNIFICENCE OF THE EMPEROR'S MANAGE 
 
 THE TOUNG QUEEN OF HUNGARY THE PALACE 
 
 HALL OF CURIOSITIES, JEWELRY, ETC. THE POLY- 
 TECHNIC SCHOOL GEOMETRICAL FIGURES DESCRI- 
 BED BY THE VIBRATIONS OF MUSICAL NOTES 
 
 LIBERAL PROVISION FOR THE PUBLIC INSTITU- 
 TIONS POPULARITY OF THE EMPEROR. 
 
 I had quite forgotten, in packing up my little port- 
 manteau to leave the ship, that I was coming so far 
 north. Scarce a week ago, in the south of Italy, we 
 were panting in linen jackets. I find myself shivering 
 here, in a latitude five hundred miles north of Boston, 
 with no remedy but exercise and an extra shirt, for a 
 cold that would grace December. 
 
 It is amusing, sometimes, to abandon one's self to a 
 valet de place. Compelled to resort to one from my 
 ignorance of the German, I have fallen upon a dropsi- 
 cal fellow, with a Bardolph nose, whose French is ex- 
 ecrable, and whose selection of objects of curiosity is 
 worthy of his appearance. His first point was the em- 
 peror's stables. We had walked a mile and a half to 
 see them. Here were two or three hundred horses of 
 all breeds, in a building that the emperor himself 
 might live in, with a magnificent inner court for a 
 menage, and a wilderness of grooms, dogs, and other 
 appurtenances. I am as fond of a horse as most peo- 
 ple, but with all Vienna before me, and little time to 
 lose, I broke into the midst of the head groom's ped- 
 igrees, and requested to be shown the way out. Mon- 
 sieur Karl did not take the hint. We walked on a 
 half mile, and stopped before another large building. 
 " What is this !" — " The imperial carriage-house, mon- 
 eeigneur." I was about turning on my heel and taking 
 my liberty into my own hands,' when the large door 
 flew open, and the blaze of gilding from within, turned 
 me from my purpose. I thought I had seen the ne 
 plus ultra of equipages at Rome. The imperial fam- 
 ily of Austria ride in more style than his holiness. 
 The models are lighter and handsomer, while the gold 
 and crimson is put on quite as resplendently. The 
 most curious part of the show were ten or twelve state 
 traineaux or sleighs. I can conceive nothing more 
 brilliant than a turnout of these magnificent f ructures 
 upon the snow. They are built with aerial ightness, 
 of gold and sable, with a seat fifteen or jnty feet 
 from the ground, and are driven, with /o or four 
 horses, by the royal personage himself. The grace 
 of their shape and the splendor of their gilded trap- 
 pings are inconceivable to one who has never seen them. 
 Our way lay through the court of the imperial pal- 
 ace A large crowd was collected round a carriage 
 with four horses standing at the side-door. As we ap- 
 proached it, all hats flew off, and a beautiful woman, 
 of perhaps twenty-eight, came down the steps, leading 
 a handsome boy of two or three years. It was the 
 young queen of Hungary and her son. If I had seen 
 »uch a face in a cottage ornee on the borders of an 
 
 American lake, I should have thought it made for the 
 spot. 
 
 We entered a door of the palace at which stood a 
 ferocious-looking croat sentinel, near seven feet high. 
 Three German travelling students had just been refused 
 admittance. A little man appeared at the ring of the 
 bell within, and after a preliminary explanation by my 
 valet, probably a lie, he made a low bow, and invited 
 me to enter. I waited a moment, and a permission 
 was brought me to see the imperial treasury. Hand- 
 ing it to Karl, I requested him to get permission in- 
 serted for my three friends at the door. He accom- 
 plished it in the same incomprehensible manner in 
 which he had obtained my own, and introducing them 
 with the ill-disguised contempt of a valet for all men 
 with dusty coats, we commenced the rounds of thp 
 curiosities together. 
 
 A large clock, facing us as we entered, was just 
 striking. From either side of its base, like companies 
 of gentlemen and ladies advancing to greet each other, 
 appeared figures in the dress and semblance of the 
 royal family of Austria, who remained a moment, and 
 then retired bowing themselves courteously out back- 
 ward. It is a costly affair, presented by the landgrave 
 of Hesse to Maria Theresa, in 1750. 
 
 After a succession of watches, snuff-boxes, necklaces, 
 and jewels of every description, we came to the famous 
 Florentine diamond, said to be the largest in the world. 
 It was lost by a duke of Burgundy upon the battle- 
 field of Granson, found by a soldier, who parted with 
 it for five florins, sold again, and found its way at last 
 to the royal treasury of Florence, whence it was 
 brought to Vienna. Its weight is one hundred and 
 thirty-nine and a half carats, and it is estimated at one 
 million forty-three thousand three hundred and thirty- 
 four florins. It looks like a lump of light. Enormous 
 diamonds surround it, but it hangs among them like 
 Hesperus among the stars. 
 
 The next side of the gallery is occupied by speci- 
 mens of carved ivory. Many of them are antique, and 
 half of them are more beautiful than decent. There 
 were two bas-reliefs among them by Raphael Donner, 
 which were worth, to my eye, all the gems in the gal- 
 lery. They were taken from scripture, and represented 
 the Woman of Samaria at the well, and Ha gar waiting 
 for the death of her son. No powers of elocution, no 
 enhancement of poetry, could bring those touching pas- 
 sages of the Bible so movingly to the heart. The 
 latter particularly arrested me. The melancholy 
 beauty of Hagar, sitting with her head bowed upon her 
 knees, while her boy is lying a little way off, beneath 
 a shrub of the desert, is a piece of unparalleled work- 
 manship. It may well hang in the treasury of an em- 
 peror. 
 
 Miniatures of the royal family in their childhood, 
 set in costly gems, massive plate curiously chased, 
 services of gold, robes of diamonds, gem-hilted swords, 
 dishes wrought of solid integral agates, and finally the 
 crown and sceptre of Austria upon red velvet cushions, 
 looking very much like their imitations on the stage, 
 were among the world of splendors unfolded to our 
 eyes. The Florentine diamond and the bas-reliefs by 
 Raphael Donner were all I coveted. The beauty of 
 the diamond was royal. It needed no imagination 
 to feel its value. A savage would pick it up in the 
 desert for a star dropped out of the sky. For the 
 rest, the demand on my admiration fatigued me, and 
 I was glad to escape with my dusty friends from the 
 unive-sity, and exchange courtesies in the free air. 
 One of them spoke English a little, and called me 
 " Mister Englishman," on bidding me adieu. I was 
 afraid of a beer-shop scene in Vienna, and did not 
 correct the mistake. 
 
 As we were going out of the court, four covered 
 wagons, drawn each by four superb horses, dashed 
 through the gate. I waited a moment to see what 
 
112 
 
 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 they contained. Thirty or forty servants in livery 
 came out from the palace, and took from the wagons 
 quantities of empty baskets carefully labelled with 
 directions. They were from Schoenbrunn, where the 
 emperor is at present residing with his court, and had 
 come to market for the imperial kitchen. It should 
 be a good dinner that requires sixteen such horses to 
 carry to the cook. 
 
 It was the hungry hour of two, and I was still mu- 
 sing on the emperor's dinner, and admiring the anx- 
 ious interest his servants took in their disposition of the 
 baskets, when a blast of military music came to my 
 ear. It was from the barracks of the imperial guard, 
 and I stepped under the arch, and listened to them 
 an hour. How gloriously they played ! It was prob- 
 ably the finest band in Austria. I have heard much 
 good music, but of its kind this was like a new sensa- 
 tion to me. They stand, in playing, just under the 
 window at which the emperor appears daily when in 
 the city. 
 
 I have been indebted to Mr. Schwartz, the Ameri- 
 can consul at Vienna, for a very unusual degree of 
 kindness. Among other polite attentions, he procured 
 for me to-day an admission to the Polytechnic school 
 — a favor granted with difficulty, except on the ap- 
 pointed days for public visits. 
 
 The Polytechnic school was established in 1816, by 
 the present emperor. The building stands outside the 
 rampart of the city, of elegant proportions, and about 
 as large as all the buildings of Yale or Harvard col- 
 lege thrown into one. Its object is to promote in- 
 struction in the practical sciences, or, in other words, 
 to give a practical education for the trades, commerce, 
 or manufactures. It is divided into three departments. 
 The first is preparatory, and the course occupies two 
 years. The studies are religion and morals, element- 
 ary mathematics, natural history, geography, univer- 
 sal history, grammar, and " the German style" decla- 
 mation, drawing, writing, and the French, Italian, and 
 Bohemian languages. To enter this class, the boy 
 must be thirteen years of age, and pays fifty cents per 
 month. 
 
 The second course is commercial, and occupies one 
 year. The studies are mercantile correspondence, 
 commercial law, mercantile arithmetic, the keeping of 
 books, geography, and history, as they relate to com- 
 merce, acquaintance with merchandise, &c, &c. 
 
 The third course lasts one year. The studies are 
 chymistry as applicable to arts and trades, the fermen- 
 tation of woods, tannery, soap-making, dying, blanch- 
 ing, &c, &c. ; also mechanism, practical geometry, 
 civil architecture, hydraulics, and technology. The 
 two last courses are given gratis. 
 
 The whole is under the direction of a principal, 
 who has under him thirty professors and two or three 
 guardians of apparatus. 
 
 We were taken first into a noble hall, lined with 
 glass cases containing specimens of every article man- 
 ufactured in the German dominions. From the finest 
 silks down to shoes, wigs, nails, and mechanics' tools, 
 here were all the products of human labor. The va- 
 riety was astonishing. Within the limits of a single 
 room, the pupil is here made acquainted with every 
 mechanic art known in his country. 
 
 The next hall was devoted to models. Here was 
 every kind of bridge, fortification, lighthouse, dry-dock, 
 breakwater, canal-lock, &c, &c. ; models of steam- 
 boats, of ships, and of churches, in every style of archi- 
 tecture. It was a little world. 
 
 We went thence to the chemical apartment. The 
 servitor here, a man without education, has construct- 
 ed all the apparatus. He is an old gray-headed man, 
 of a keen German countenance, and great simplicity 
 of manners. He takes great pride in having con- 
 structed the largest and most complete chemical ap- 
 paratus now in London. The one which he exhibited 
 
 to us occupies the whole of an immense hall, and pro- 
 duces an electric discharge like the report of a pistol. 
 The ordinary batteries in our universities are scarce a 
 twentieth part as powerful. 
 
 After showing us a variety of experiments, the old 
 man turned suddenly and asked us if we knew the ge- 
 ometrical figures described by the vibrations of musi- 
 cal notes. We confessed our ignorance, and he pro- 
 duced a pane of glass covered with black sand. He 
 then took a fiddle-bow, and holding the glass horizon- 
 tally, drew it downward against the edge at a peculiar 
 angle. The sand flew as if it had been bewitched, 
 and took the shape of a perfect square. He asked us 
 to name a figure. We named a circle. Another 
 careful draw of the bow, and the sand flew into a cir- 
 cle, with scarce a particle out of its perfect curve. 
 Twenty times he repeated the experiment, and with 
 the most complicated figures drawn on paper. He had 
 reduced it to an art. It would have hung him for a 
 magician a century ago. 
 
 However one condemns the policy of Austria with 
 respect to her subject provinces and the rest of Eu- 
 rope, it is impossible not to be struck with her liberal 
 provision for her own immediate people. The public 
 institutions of all kinds in Vienna are allowed to be 
 the finest and most liberally endowed on the continent. 
 Her hospitals, prisons, houses of industry, and schools, 
 are on an imperial scale of munificence. The emper- 
 or himself is a father to his subjects, and every tongue 
 blesses him. Napoleon envied him their affection, it 
 is said, and certainly no monarch could be more uni- 
 versally beloved. 
 
 Among the institutions of Vienna are two which 
 are peculiar. One is a maison d' accouchement, into 
 which any female can enter veiled, remain till after 
 the period of her labor, and depart unknown, leaving 
 her child in the care of the institution, which rears it 
 as a foundling. Its object is a benevolent prevention 
 of infanticide. 
 
 The other is a private penitentiary, to which the 
 fathers of respectable families can send for reforma- 
 tion children they are unable to govern. The name 
 is kept a secret, and the culprits are returned to their 
 families after a proper time, punished without dis- 
 grace. Pride of character is thus preserved, while the 
 delinquent is firmly corrected. 
 
 LETTER LXXIV. 
 
 VIENNA, — PALACES AND GARDENS MOSAIC COPY OF 
 
 DA VINCI'S "LAST SUPPER" COLLECTION OF WAR- 
 LIKE ANTIQUITIES ; SCANDERBURG's SWORD, MON- 
 TEZUMA'S TOMAHAWK, RELICS OF THE CRUSADERS, 
 WARRIORS IN ARMOR, THE FARMER OF AUGSBURGH 
 
 ROOM OF PORTRAITS OF CELEBRATED INDIVIDUALS 
 
 GOLD BUSTS OF JUPITER AND JUNO THE GLACIS, 
 
 FULL OF GARDENS, THE GENERAL RESORT OF THE 
 PEOPLE UNIVERSAL SPIRIT OF ENJOYMENT SIM- 
 PLICITY AND CONFIDENCE IN THE MANNERS OF 
 THE VIENNESE BADEN. 
 
 At the foot of a hill in one of the beautiful suburbs 
 of Vienna, stands a noble palace, called the Linoer 
 Belvidere. On the summit of the hill stands another, 
 equally mangnificent, called the Upper Belvidere, and 
 between the two extend broad and princely gardens, 
 open to the public. 
 
 On the lower floor of the entrance-hall in the former 
 palace, lies the copy, in mosaic, of Leonardo da Vinci's 
 " Last Supper," done at Napoleon's order. Though 
 supposed to be the finest piece of mosaic in the world, 
 it is so large that they have never found a place for it. 
 A temporary balcony has been erected on one side of 
 the room, and the spectator mounts nearly to the 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 113 
 
 ceiling to get a fair position for looking down upon it. 
 That unrivalled picture, now going to decay in the 
 convent at Milan, will probably depend upon this copy 
 for its name with posterity. The expression in the 
 faces of the apostles is as accurately preserved as in 
 the admirable engraving of Morghen. 
 
 The remaining halls in the palace are occupied by 
 a grand collection of antiquities, principally of a warlike 
 character. When I read in my old worm-eaten Burton, 
 of " Scanderburg's strength," I never thought to see 
 his sword. It stands here against the wall, a long straight 
 weapon with a cross hilt, which few men could heave 
 to their shoulders. The tomahawk of poor Montezuma 
 hnngs near it. It was presented to the emperor by the 
 king of Spain. It is of a dark granite, and polished very 
 beautifully. What a singular curiosity to find in Austria! 
 
 The windows are draped with (lags dropping in pieces 
 with age. This, so in tatters, was renowned in the 
 crusades. It was carried to the Holy Land and brought 
 back by the archduke Ferdinand. 
 
 A hundred warriors in bright armor stand round the 
 hall. Their visors are down, their swords in their 
 hands, their feet planted for a spring. One can scarce 
 believe there are no men in them. The name of some 
 renowned soldier is attached to each. This was the 
 armor of the cruel Visconti of Milan — that, of Duke 
 Alba of Florence — both costly suits, beautifully inlaid 
 with gold. In the centre of the room stands a gigantic 
 fellow in full armor, with a sword on his thigh and a 
 beam in his right hand. It is the shell of the famous 
 fanner of Augsbunrh, who was in the service of one 
 of the emperors. He was over eight feet in height, 
 and limbed in proportion. How near such relics bring 
 history! With what increased facility one pictures 
 the warrior to his fancy, seeing his sword, and hearing 
 the very rattle of his armor. Yet it puts one into Ham- 
 let's vein to see a contemptible valet lay his hand with 
 impunity on the armed shoulder, shaking the joints 
 that once belted the soul of a Visconti ! I turned, in 
 leaving the room, to take a second look at the flag of 
 the ctusade. It had floated, perhaps, ovei the helmet 
 of Cmir de Lion. Saladin may have had it in his eye, 
 assaulting the Christian camp with his pagans. 
 
 In the next room hung fifty or sixty portraits of 
 celebrated individuals, presented in their time to the 
 emperors of Austria. There was one of Mary of 
 Scotland. It is a face of superlative loveliness, taken 
 with a careless and most bewitching half smile, and 
 yet not without the look of royalty, which one traces 
 in all the pictures of the unfortunate queen. One of 
 the emperors of Germany married Phillippina, a far- 
 mer's daughter, and here is her portrait. It is done in the 
 prim old style of the middle ages, but the face is full 
 of character. Her husband's portrait hangs beside it, 
 and she looks more born for an emperor than he. 
 
 Hall after hall followed, of costly curiosities. A 
 volume would not describe them. Two gold busts of 
 Jupiter and Juno, by Benvenuto Cellini, attracted my 
 attention particularly. They were very beautiful, but 
 I would copy them in bronze, and coin "the thunderer 
 and his queen," were they mine. 
 
 Admiration is the most exhausting thing in the world. 
 The servitor opened a gate leading into the gardens of 
 the palace, that we might mount to the Upper Belvi- 
 dere, which contains the imperial gallery of paintings. 
 But 1 had no more strength. I could have dug in the 
 field till dinner-time — but to be astonished more than 
 three hours without respite is beyond me. I took a 
 stroll in the garden. How delightfully the unmeaning 
 beauty of a fountain refreshes one after this inward 
 fatigue. I walked on, up one alley and down another, 
 happy in finding nothing that surprised me, or worked 
 upon my imagination, or bothered my historical rec- 
 ollections, or called upon my wornout superlatives 
 for expression. I fervently hoped not to have another 
 new sensation till after dinner. 
 8 
 
 Vienna is an immense city (two hundred and fifty 
 thousand inhabitants), but its heart only is walled in. 
 You may walk from gate to gate in twenty minutes. 
 In leaving the walls you come upon a feature of the 
 city which distinguishes it from every other in Eu- 
 rope. Its rampart is encircled by an open park (called 
 Ike Glacis), a quarter of a mile in width and perhaps 
 three miles in circuit, which is, in fact, in the centre 
 of Vienna. The streets commence again on the oth- 
 er side of it, and on going from one part of the city to 
 the other, you constantly cross this lovely belt of ver- 
 dure, which girds her heart like a cestus of health. 
 The top of the rampart itself is planted with trees, and, 
 commanding beautiful views in every direction, it is 
 generally thronged with people. (It was a favorite 
 walk of the Duke of Keichstadt.) Between this and 
 the Glacis lies a deep trench, crossed by drawbridges 
 at every gate, the bottom of which is cultivated pret- 
 tily as a flower-garden. Altogether Vienna is a beau- 
 tiful city. Paris may have single views about the 
 Tuileries that are finer than anything of the same 
 kind here, but this capital of western Europe, as a 
 whole, is quite the most imposing city I have seen. 
 
 The Glacis is full of gardens. I requested my dis- 
 agreeable necessity of a valet, this afternoon, to take 
 me to two or three of the most general resorts of the 
 people. We passed out by one of the city gates, five 
 minutes walk from the hotel, and entered immediately 
 into a crowd of people, sauntering up and down under 
 the alleys of the Glacis. A little farther on we found 
 a fanciful building, buried in trees, and occupied as 
 a summer cafe. In a little circular temple in front 
 was stationed a band of music, and around it for a con- 
 siderable distance were placed small tables, filled just 
 now with elegantly-dressed people, eating ices, or 
 drinking coffee. It was in every respect like a private 
 fete champelre. I wandered about for an hour, expect- 
 ing involuntarily to meet some acquaintance — there 
 was such a look of kindness and unreserve through- 
 out. It is a desolate feeling to be alone in such a 
 crowd. 
 
 We jumped into a carriage and drove round the 
 Glacis for a mile, passing everywhere crowds of peo- 
 ple idling leisurely along and evidently out for pleas- 
 ure. We stopped before a superb facade, near one of 
 the gates of the city. It was the entrance to the 
 Volksgarlen. We entered in front of a fountaiu, and 
 turning up a path to the left, found our way almost 
 impeded by another crowd. A semicircular building, 
 with a range of columns in front encircling a stand for 
 a band of music, was surrounded by perhaps two or 
 three thousand people. Small tables and seats under 
 trees, were spread in every direction within reach of 
 the music. The band played charmingly. Waiters 
 in white jackets and aprons were running to and fro, 
 receiving and obeying orders for refreshments, and 
 here again all seemed abandoned to one spirit of en- 
 joyment. I had thought we must have left all Vien- 
 na at the other garden. I wondered how so many 
 people could be spared from their occupations and 
 families. It was no holyday. " It is always as gay in 
 fair weather," said Karl. 
 
 A little back into the garden stands a beautiful little 
 structure, on the model of the temple of Theseus in 
 Greece. It was built for Canova's group of " Theseus 
 and the Centaur," bought by the emperor. 1 had 
 seen copies of it in Rome, but was of course much 
 more struck with the original. It is a noble piece of 
 sculpture. 
 
 Still farther back, on the rise of a mount, stood 
 another fanciful cafe, with another band of music — and 
 another crowd ! After we had walked around it, my 
 man was hurrying me away. " You have not seen the 
 augarten," said he. It stands upon a little green 
 island in the Danube, and is more extensive than either 
 of the others. But I was content where I was ; and 
 
114 
 
 PENC1LLJNGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 dismissing my Asmodeus, I determined to spend the 
 evening wandering about in the crowds alone. The 
 sun went down, the lamps were lit, the alleys were il- 
 luminated, the crowd increased, and the emperor him- 
 self could not have given a gayer evening's entertain- 
 ment. 
 
 Vienna has the reputation of being the most profli- 
 gate capital in Europe. Perhaps it is so. There is 
 certainly, even to a stranger, no lack of temptation to 
 every species of pleasure. But there is, besides, a 
 degree of simplicity and confidence in the manners of 
 the Viennese which I had believed peculiar to Amer- 
 ica, and inconsistent with the state of society in Eu- 
 rope. In the most public resorts, and at all hours of 
 the day and evening, modest and respectable young 
 women of the middle classes walk alone perfectly se- 
 cure from molestation. They sit under the trees in 
 these public gardens, eat ices at the cafes, walk home 
 unattended, and no one seems to dream of improprie- 
 ty. Whole families, too, spend the afternoon upon a 
 seat in a thronged place of resort, their children play- 
 ing about them, the father reading, and the mother 
 sewing or knitting, quite unconscious of observation. 
 The lower and middle classes live all summer, I am 
 told, out of doors. It is never oppressively warm in 
 this latitude, and their houses are deserted after three 
 or four o'clock in the afternoon, and the whole popu- 
 lation pours out to the different gardens on the Gla- 
 cis, where till midnight, they seem perfectly happy in 
 the enjoyment of the innocent and unexpensive pleas- 
 ures which a wise government has provided for them. 
 
 The nobles and richer class pass their summer in 
 the circle of rural villages near the city. They are 
 nested about on the hills, and crowded with small and 
 lovely rural villas, more like the neighborhood of Bos- 
 ton than anything I have seen in Europe. 
 
 Baden, where the emperor passes much of his time, 
 is called " the miniature Switzerland." Its baths are 
 excellent, its hills are cut into retired and charming 
 walks, and from June till September it is one of the 
 gayest of watering-places. It is about a two hours' 
 drive from the city, and omnibuses at a very low rate, 
 run between at all times of the day. The Austrians 
 seldom travel, and the reason is evident. They have 
 everything for which others travel, at home 
 
 LETTER LXXV. 
 
 VIENNA THE PALACE OF LIECHTENSTEIN. 
 
 The red-nosed German led on through the crowded 
 Graben, jostling aside the Parisian-looking lady and 
 her handsome Hungarian cavalier, the phlegmatic 
 smoker and the bearded Turk, alike. We passed the 
 imperial guard, the city gate, the lofty bridge over the 
 trench (casting a look below at the flower garden laid 
 out in "the ditch" which encircles the wall), and en- 
 tered upon the lovely Glacis — one step from the 
 crowded street to the fresh greenness of a park. 
 
 Would you believe, as you walk up this shaded 
 alley, that you are in the heart of the city still ? 
 
 The Glacis is crossed, with its groups of fair chil- 
 dren and shy maids, its creeping invalids, its solitude- 
 seeking lovers, and its idling soldiers, and we again 
 enter the crowded street. A half hour more, and the 
 throng thins again, the country opens, and here you 
 are, in front of the palace of Licchstcnstein, the first 
 noble of Austria. A modern building, of beautiful 
 and light architecture, rises from its clustering trees ; 
 servants in handsome livery hang about the gates and 
 lean against the pillars of the portico, and with an ex- 
 planation from my lying valet, who evidently makes 
 me out an ambassador at least by the ceremony with 
 which Tarn received, a grav servitor makes bis appear- 
 
 ance and opens the immense glass door leading from 
 the side of the court. 
 
 One should step gingerly on the polished marble of 
 this superb staircase ! It opens at once into a lofty 
 hall, the ceiling of which is painted in fresco by an 
 Italian master. It is a room of noble proportions. 
 Few churches in America are larger, and yet it seems 
 in keeping with the style of the palace, the staircase 
 — everything but the creature meant to inhabit it. 
 
 How different are the moods in which one sees pic- 
 tures ! To-day I am in the humor to give it to the 
 painter's delusion. The scene is real. Asmodeus is 
 at my elbow, and I am witched from spot to spot, in- 
 visible myself, gazing on the varied scenes revealed 
 only to the inspired vision of genius. 
 
 A landscape opens.* It is one of the woody recess- 
 es of Lake Nervi, at the very edge of " Dian's Mir- 
 ror." The huntress queen is bathing with her 
 nymphs. The sandal is half laced over an ankle that 
 seems fit for nothing else than to sustain a goddess, 
 when casting her eye on the lovely troop emerging 
 from the water, she sees the unfortunate Calista sur- 
 rounded by her astonished sisters, and fainting with 
 shame. Poor Calista ! one's heart pleads for her. 
 But how expressive is the cold condemning look in 
 the beautiful face of her mistress queen ! Even the 
 dogs have started from their reclining position on the 
 grass, and stand gazing at the unfortunate, wondering 
 at the silent astonishment of the virgin troop. Pardon 
 her, imperial Dian ! 
 
 Come to the baptism of a child ! It is a vision of 
 Guido Reni's.f A young mother, apparently scarce 
 sixteen, has brought her "first child to the altar. She 
 kneels with it in her arms, looking earnestly into the 
 face of the priest while he sprinkles the water on its 
 pure forehead, and pronounces the words of consecra- 
 tion. It is a most lovely countenance, made lovelier 
 by the holy feeling in her heart. Her eyes are moist, 
 her throat swells with emotion — my own sight dims 
 while I gaze upon her. We have intruded on one of 
 the most holy moments of nature. A band of girls, 
 sisters by the resemblance, have accompanied the 
 young mother, and stand, with love and wonder in 
 their eyes, gazing on the face of the child. How 
 strangely the mingled thoughts, crowding through 
 their minds, are expressed in their excited features. 
 It is a scene worthy of an audience of angels. 
 
 We have surprised Giorgione's wife (the " Flora " 
 of Titian, the " love in life " of Byron) looking at a 
 sketch by her husband. It stands on his easel, out- 
 lined in crayons, and represents Lucretia the moment 
 before she plunges the dagger into her bosom. She 
 was passing through his studio, and you see by the half 
 suspended foot, that she stopped but for a momentary 
 glance, and has forgotten herself in thoughts that 
 have risen unaware. The head of Lucretia resembles 
 her own, and she is wondering what Giorgione though! 
 while he drew it. Did he resemble her to the Ro- 
 man's wife in virtue as well as in feature ? There is 
 an embarrassment in the expression of her face, as if 
 she doubted he had drawn it half in mischief. We 
 will leave the lovely Venetian to her thoughts. When 
 she sits again to Titian, it will be with a colder 
 modesty. 
 
 Hoogstraeten, a Dutch painter, conjures up a scene 
 for you. It is an old man, who has thrust his head 
 through a prison gate, and is looking into the street 
 with the listless patience and curiosity of one whom 
 habit has reconciled to his situation. His beard is 
 neglected, his hair is slightly grizzled, and on his 
 
 * By Franceschini. He passed his life with the Prince 
 Lieehstenstein, and his pictures are found only in this collec- 
 tion. He is a delicious painter, full of poetry, with the one 
 fault of too voluptuous a style. 
 
 f One of the loveliest pictures that divine painter ever 
 drew. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 115 
 
 head sits a shabby fur cap, that has evidently shared 
 all his imprisonment, and is quite past auy pride of 
 appearance. What a vacant face! How perfectly he 
 seems to look upon the street below, as upon some- 
 thing with which he has nothing more to do. There 
 is no anxiety to get out, in its expression. He is past 
 that. He looks at the playing children, and watches 
 the zigzag trot of an idle dog with the quiet apathy 
 of one who can find nothing better to help off the 
 hour. It is a picture of stolid, contented, unthinking 
 misery. 
 
 Look at this boy, standing impatiently on one foot 
 at his mother's knee, while she pares an apple for 
 him ! With what an amused and playful love she 
 istens to his hurrying entreaties, stealing a glance at 
 him as he pleads, with a deeper feeling than he will 
 be able to comprehend for years ! It is one of the 
 commonest scenes in life, yet how pregnant with spec- 
 ulation ! 
 
 On — on — what an endless gallery ! I have seen 
 twelve rooms, with forty or fifty pictures in each, and 
 there are thirteen halls more! The delusion begins 
 to fade. These are pictures merely. Beautiful ones, 
 however ! If language could convey to your eye the 
 impressions that this waste and wealth of beauty have 
 conveyed to mine, I would write of every picture. 
 There is not an indifferent one here. All Italy to- 
 gether has not so many works by the Flemish mas- 
 ters as are contained in this single gallery — certainly 
 none so fine. A most princely fortune for many gen- 
 erations must have been devoted to its purchase. 
 
 I have seen seven or eight things in all Italy, by ' 
 Corregio. They were the gems of the galleries in 
 which they exist, but always small, and seemed to me 
 to want a certain finish. Here is a Corregio, a large 
 picture, and no miniature ever had so elaborate a 
 beauty. It melts into the eye. It is a conception of 
 female beauty so very extraordinary, that it seems to j 
 me it must become, in the mind of every one who sees ! 
 it, the model and the standard of all loveliness. It is j 
 a nude Venus, sitting lost in thought, with Cupid j 
 asleep in her lap. She is in the sacred retirement of \ 
 solitude, and the painter has thrown into her attitude ' 
 and expression so speaking an unconsciousness of all 
 presence, that you feel like a daring intruder while you 
 gaze upon the picture. Surely such softness of color- 
 ing, such faultless proportions, such subdued and yet 
 eloquent richness of teint in the skin, was never before 
 attained by mortal pencil. I am here, some five thou- 
 sand miles from America, yet would I have made the • 
 voyage but to raise my standard of beauty by this rav- j 
 ishing image of woman. 
 
 Iu the circle of Italian galleries, one finds less of 
 female beauty, both in degree and in variety, than his ' 
 anticipations had promised. Three or four heads at 
 the most, of the many hundreds that he sees, are im- | 
 printed in his memory, and serve as standards in his ! 
 future observations. Even when standing before the i 
 most celebrated pictures, one often returns to recollec- 
 tions of living beauty in his own country, by which j 
 the most glowing head of Titian or the Veronese suf- 
 fer in comparison. In my own experience this has 
 been often true, and it is perhaps the only thing in j 
 which my imagination of foreign wonders was too I 
 fervent. To this Venus of Corregio's, however, I j 
 unhesitatingly submit all knowledge, all conception j 
 even, of female loveliness. I have seen nothing in | 
 life, imagined nothing from the descriptions of poets, 
 that is any way comparable to it. It is matchless. 
 
 In one of the last rooms the servitor unlocked two 
 handsome cases, and showed me, with a great deal of 
 circumstance, two heads by Denner. They were an 
 old man and his wife — two hale, temperate, good old 
 country gossips — but so curiously finished ! Every 
 pore was painted. You counted the stiff stumps of 
 the goodman's beard as you might those of a living 
 
 person, till you were tired. Every wrinkle looked as 
 if a month had been spent in elaborating it. The man 
 said they were extremely valuable, and I certainly 
 never saw anything more curiously and perhaps use- 
 lessly wrought. 
 
 Near them was a capital picture of a drunken fellow, 
 sitting by himself and laughing heartily at his own per- 
 formance on the pipe. It was irresistible, and I join- 
 ed in the laugh till the long suite of halls rung again. 
 
 Landscapes by Van Delen — such as I have seen 
 engravings of in America, and sighed over as unreal — 
 the skies, the temples, the water, the soft mountains, 
 the distant ruins, seemed so like the beauty of a dream. 
 Here, they recall to me even lovelier scenes in Italy — 
 atmospheres richer than the painter's pallet can imi- 
 tate, and ruins and temples whose ivy-grown and mel- 
 ancholy grandeur are but feebly copied at the best 
 
 Come, Karl ! I am bewildered with these pictures. 
 You have twenty such galleries in Vienna, you say! 
 I have seen enough for to-day, however, and we will 
 save the Belvidere till to-morrow. Here ! pay the 
 servitor, and the footman, and the porter, and let us 
 get into the open air. How common look your Vi- 
 ennese after the celestial images we have left behind ! 
 And, truly, this is the curse of refinement. The faces 
 we should have loved else, look dull ! The forms 
 that were graceful before, move somehow heavily. I 
 have entered a gallery ere now, thinking well of a face 
 that accompanied me, and I have learned indifference 
 to it, by sheer comparison, before coming away. 
 
 We return through the Kohlmarket, one of tl e most 
 fashionable streets of Vienna. It is like a fancy-ball. 
 Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Molda- 
 vians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and 
 striking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking 
 all, and none exciting the slightest observation. Every 
 third window is a pipe-shop, and they show, by their 
 splendor and variety, the expensiveness of the passion. 
 Some of them are marked "two hundred dollars." 
 The streets reek with tobacco smoke. Y r ou never 
 catch a breath of untainted air within the Glacis. 
 Your hotel, your cafe, your coach, your friend, are 
 all redolent of the same disgusting odor. 
 
 LETTEB LXXVI. 
 
 THE PALACE OF SCHOENBRUNN HIETZING, THE SUMMER 
 
 RETREAT OF THE WEALTHY VIENNESE — COUNTRY- 
 HOUSE OF THE AMERICAN CONSUL — SPECIMEN OF PURE 
 DOMESTIC HAPPINESS IN A GERMAN FAMILY — SPLENDID 
 VILLAGE BALL — SUBSTANTIAL FARE FOR THE LADIES 
 
 CURIOUS FASHION OF CUSHIONING THE WINDOWS 
 
 GERMAN GRIEF — THE UPPER BELVIDERE PALACE — 
 ENDLESS QUANTITY OF FICTURES. 
 
 Drove to Schoenbrunn. It is a princely palace, some 
 three miles from the city, occupied at present by the 
 emperor and his court. Napoleon resided here during 
 his visit to Vienna, and here his son died — the two 
 circumstances which alone make it worth much trou- 
 ble to see. The afternoon was too cold to hope to 
 meet the emperor in the grounds, and being quite 
 satisfied with drapery and modern paintings, I content- 
 ed myself with having driven through the court, and 
 kept on to Hictzing. 
 
 This is a small" village of country-seats within an 
 hour's drive of the city — another Jamaica-Plains, or 
 Dorchester in the neighborhood of Boston. It is the 
 summer retreat of most of the rank and fashion of 
 Vienna. The American consul has here a charming 
 country-house, buried in trees, where the few of our 
 countrymen who travel to Austria find the most hospi- 
 table of welcomes. A bachelor friend of mine from 
 New-York is domesticated in the village with a German 
 
116 
 
 PENC1LL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 family. I was struck with the Americanism of their 
 manners. The husband and wife, a female relative 
 and an intimate friend of the family, were sitting in the 
 garden engaged in grave, quiet, sensible conversation. 
 They had passed the afternoon together. Their man- 
 ners were affectionate to each other, but serious and 
 respectful. When I entered, they received me with 
 kindness, and the conversation was politely changed to 
 French, which they all spoke fluently. Topics were 
 started, in which it was supposed I would be interested, 
 and altogether the scene was one of the simplest and 
 purest domestic happiness. This seems to you, I dare 
 say, like the description of a very common thing, but I 
 have not seen such a one before since I left my coun- 
 try. It is the first family I have found in two years' 
 travel who lived in, and seemed sufficient for, them- 
 selves. It came over me with a kind of feeling of 
 refreshment. 
 
 In the evening there was a ball at a public room in 
 the village. It was built in the rear of a cafe, to which 
 we paid about thirty cents for entrance. I was not 
 prepared for the splendor with which it was got up. 
 The hall was very large and of beautiful proportions, 
 built like the interior of a temple, with columns on the 
 four sides. A partition of glass divided it from a sup- 
 per-room equally large, in which were set out perhaps 
 fifty tables, furnished with a carte, from which each 
 person ordered his supper when he wished it, after the 
 fashion of a restaurant. The best band in Vienna 
 filled the orchestra, led by the celebrated Strauss, who 
 has bee 1 honored for his skill with presents from half 
 the monarchs of Europe. 
 
 The ladies entered, dressed in perfect taste, a la 
 Parisienne, but the gentlemen (hear it, Basil Hall and 
 Mrs. Trollope !) came in frock coats and boots, and 
 danced with their hats on ! It was a public ball, and 
 there was, of course, a great mixture of society ; but I 
 was assured that it was attended constantly by the most 
 respectable people of the village, and was as respecta- 
 ble as anything of the kind in the middle classes. 
 There were, certainly, many ladies in the company of 
 elegant manners and appearance, and among the gen- 
 tlemen I recognised two attaches to the French em- 
 bassy, whom I had known in Paris, and several Austrian 
 gentlemen of rank were pointed out to me among the 
 dancers. The galopade and the waltz were the only 
 dances, and dirty boots and hats to the contrary not- 
 withstanding, it was the best waltzing I ever saw. They 
 danced with a soul. 
 
 The best part of it was the supper. They danced 
 and eat — danced and eat, the evening through. It 
 was quite the more important entertainment of the two. 
 The most delicate ladies present returned three and 
 four times to the supper, ordering fried chicken, salads, 
 cold meats, and beer, again and again, as if every 
 waltz created a fresh appetite. The bill was called 
 for, the ladies assisted in making the change, the tankard 
 was drained, and off they strolled to the ball-room to 
 engage with renewed spirit in the dance. And these, 
 positively, were ladies who, in dress, manners, and mod- 
 est demeanor, might pass uncriticised in any society 
 in the world ! Their husbands and brothers attended 
 them, and no freedom was attempted, and I am sure it 
 would not have been permitted even to speak to a lady 
 without a formal introduction. 
 
 We left most of the company supping at a late hour, 
 and I drove into the city, amused with the ball, and 
 reconciled to any or all of the manners which travellers 
 in America find so peculiarly entertaining. 
 
 These cold winds from the Danube have given me 
 a rheumatism. I was almost reconciled to it this 
 morning, however, by a curtain-scene which I should 
 have missed but for its annoyance. I had been driven 
 out of my bed at daylight, and was walking my room 
 between the door and the window, when a violent 
 
 knocking in the street below arrested my attention. 
 A respectable family occupies the house opposite, con- 
 sisting of a father and mother and three daughters, the 
 least attractive of whom has a lover. I can not well 
 avoid observing them whenever I am in my room, for 
 every house in Vienna has a leaning cushion on the 
 window for the elbows, and the ladies of all classes are 
 upon them the greater part of the day. A handsome 
 carriage, servants in livery, and other circumstances, 
 leave no doubt in my mind that my neighbors are rather 
 of the better class. 
 
 The lover stood at the street door with a cloak on 
 his arm, and a man at his side with his portmanteau. 
 He was going on a journey and had come to take leave 
 of his mistress. He was let in by a gaping servant, 
 who looked rather astonished at the hour he had chosen 
 for his visit, but the drawing-room windows were soon 
 thrown open, and the lady made her appearance with 
 her hair in papers and other marks of a hasty toilet. 
 My room is upon the same floor, and as I paced to and 
 fro, the narrowness of the street in a manner forced 
 them upon my observation. The scene was a very 
 violet one, and the lady's tears flowed without restraint. 
 After twenty partings at least, the lover scarce getting 
 to the door before he returned to take another embrace, 
 he finally made his exit, and the lady threw herself on 
 a sofa and hid her face — for five minutes ! I had began 
 to feel for her, although her swollen eyes added very 
 unnecessarily to her usual plainness, when she rose 
 and rang the bell. The servant appeared and disap- 
 peared, and in a few minutes returned with a ham, a 
 loaf of bread, and a mug of beer ! and down sets my 
 sentimental miss and consoles the agony of parting 
 with a meal that I would venture to substitute in quan- 
 tity for any working man's lunch. 
 
 I went to bed and rose at nine, and she was sitting 
 at breakfast with the rest of the family, playing as good 
 a knife and fork as her sisters, though, I must admit, 
 with an expression of sincere melancholy in her coun- 
 tenance. 
 
 The scene, I am told by my friend the consul, was 
 perfectly German. They eat a great deal, he says, in 
 affliction. The poet writes : — 
 
 " They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings." 
 
 For silent read hungry. 
 
 The Upper Belvidere, a palace containing eighteen 
 large rooms, filled with pictures. This is the imperial 
 gallery and the first in Austria. How can I give you 
 an idea of perhaps five hundred masterpieces ! You 
 see here now, and by whom Italy has been strip- 
 ped. They have bought up all Flanders one would 
 think, too. In one room here are are twenty-eight 
 superb Vandykes. Austria, in fact, has been growing 
 rich while every other nation on the continent has 
 been growing poor, and she has purchased the treas- 
 ures of half the world at a discount.* 
 
 It is wearisome writing of pictures, one's language 
 is so limited. I must mention one or two in this col- 
 lection, however, and I will let you off entirely on the 
 Esterhazy, which is nearly as fine. 
 
 Cleopatra dying. She is represented younger than 
 usual and with a more fragile and less queenly style of 
 beauty than is common. It is a fair slight creature of 
 seventeen, who looks made to depend for her very 
 breath upon affection, and is dying of a broken heart. 
 It is painted with great feeling, and with a soft and de- 
 lightful tone of color which is peculiar to the artist. 
 It is the third of Guido Cagnacci's pictures that I have 
 
 •Besides the three galleries of the Belvidere, Leichsten- 
 stein, and Esterhazy, which contain as many choice masters 
 as Rome and Florence together, the guide-book refers the 
 traveller to sixty-four private galleries of oil paintings, well 
 worth his attention, and to ticenty-five private collections of 
 engravings and antiquities. We shall soon be obliged to go to 
 Vienna to study the arts, at this rate. They have only no 
 sculpture. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 117 
 
 seen. One was the gem of a gallery at Bologna, and 
 was bought last summer by Mr. Cabot of Boston. 
 
 The wife of Potiphar is usually represented as a 
 woman of middle age, with a full voluptuous person. 
 She is so drawn, T remember, in the famous picture in 
 the Barberini palace at Rome, said to be the most ex- 
 pressive thing of its kind in the world. Here is a 
 painting, less dangerously expressive of passion, but 
 full of beauty. She is eighteen at the most, fair, del- 
 icate, and struggles with the slender boy, who seems 
 scarce older than herself, more like a sister from whom 
 a mischievous brother has stolen something in sport. 
 Her partly disclosed figure has all the incomplete 
 slightness of a girl. The handsome features of Jo- 
 seph express more embarrassment than anger. The 
 habitual courtesy to his lovely mistress is still there, 
 his glance is just averted from the snowy bosom tow- 
 ard which lie is drawn, but in the firmly curved lip the 
 sense of duty sits clearly defined, and evidently will 
 triumph. I have forgotten the painter's name. His 
 model must have been some innocent girl whose mod- 
 est beauty led him away from his subject. Called by 
 another name the picture were perfect. 
 
 A portrait of Count Wallenstein, by Vandyke. It 
 looks a man, in the fullest sense of the word. The 
 pendant to it is the Countess Turentaxis, and she 13 a 
 woman he might well have loved — calm, lofty, and 
 pure. They are pictures I should think would have 
 an influence on the character of those who saw them 
 habitually. 
 
 Here is a curious picture by Schnoer — Mephistoph- 
 eles tempting Faust. The scholar sits at his table, 
 with a black letter volume open before him, and appa- 
 ratus of all descriptions around. The devil has en- 
 tered in the midst of his speculations, dressed in 
 black like a professor, and stands waiting the decision 
 of Faust, who gazes intently on the manuscript held 
 in his hand. His fingers are clenched, his eyes start 
 from his head, his feet are braced, and the devil eyes 
 him with a side glance, in which malignity and satis- 
 faction are admirably mingled. The features of p"aust 
 are emaciated, and show the agitation of his soul very 
 powerfully. The points of his compasses, globes, and 
 instruments, emit electric sparks toward the infernal 
 visiter; his lamp burns blue, and the picture altogeth- 
 er has the most diabolical effect. It is quite a large 
 painting, and just below, by the same artist, hangs a 
 small, simple, sweet Madonna. It is a singular con- 
 trast in subjects by the same hand. 
 
 A portrait of the Princess Esterhazy, by Angelica 
 Kauffman — a beautiful woman, painted in the pure, 
 touching style of that interesting artist. 
 
 Then comes a Cleopatra dropping the pearl into the 
 cup. How often, and how variously, and how admi- 
 rably always, the Egyptian queen is painted ! I nev- 
 er have seen an indifferent one. In this picture the 
 painter seems to have lavished all he could conceive 
 of female beauty upon his subject. She is a glorious 
 creature. It reminds me of her own proud descrip- 
 tion of herself, when she is reproaching Antony to one 
 of her maids, in the "The False One" of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher : — 
 
 " To prefer 
 
 The lustre of a little trash, Arsinoe, 
 Before the life of love and soul of beauty .'" 
 I have marked a great many pictures in this collec- 
 tion I can not describe without wearying you, yet I feel 
 unwilling to let them go by. A female, representing 
 religion, feeding a dove from a cup, a most lovely thing 
 by Guido ; portraits of Gerard Douw and Rembrandt, 
 by themselves ; Rubens's children, a boy and girl ten 
 or twelve years of age, one of the most finished paint- 
 ings I ever saw, and entirely free from the common 
 dropsical style of coloring of this artist ; another por- 
 trait of Giorgione's u-ife, the fiftieth that I have seen, 
 at least, yet a face of which one would never become 
 
 weary ; a glowing landscape by Fischer, the first by 
 this celebrated artist I have met ; and last (for this is 
 mere catalogue-making), a large picture representing 
 the silting of the English 'parliament in the time of 
 Pitt. It contains about a hundred portraits, among 
 which those of Pitt and Fox are admirable. The 
 great prime minister stands speaking in the foreground, 
 and Fox sits on the opposite side of the house listen- 
 ing attentively with half a smile on his features. It is 
 a curious picture to find in Vienna. 
 
 One thing more, however — a Venus, by Lampi. It 
 kept me a great while before it. She lies asleep on a 
 rich couch, and, apparently in her dream, is pressing 
 a rose to her bosom, while one delicate foot, carelessly 
 thrown back, is half imbedded in a superb cushion 
 supporting a crown and sceptre. It is a lie, by all ex- 
 perience. The moral is false, but the picture is de 
 licious. 
 
 LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 DEPARTURE FROM VIENNA — THE EIL-WAGON — MOTLEY 
 QUALITY OF THE PASSENGERS — THUNDERSTORM IN 
 
 THE MOUNTAINS OF STYRIA TRIESTE SHORT BEDS 
 
 OF THE GERMANS — GROTTO OF ADELSBURG ; CURIOUS 
 BALL-ROOM IN THE CAVERN NAUTICAL PREPARA- 
 TIONS FOR A DANCE ON BOARD THE UNITED STATES 
 SWEPT AWAY BY THE BORA — ITS SUCCESSFUL TER- 
 MINATION. 
 
 I left Vienna at daylight in a diligence nearly as 
 capacious as a steamboat — inaptly called the eil-wagon. 
 A Friuli count with a pair of cavalry mustaches^ his 
 wife, a pretty Viennese of eighteen, scarce married a 
 year, two fashionable looking young Russians, an Aus- 
 trian midshipman, a fat Gratz lawyer, a trader from 
 the Danube, and a young Bavarian student, going to 
 seek his fortune in Egypt, were my companions. The 
 social habits of continental travellers had given me 
 thus much information by the end of the first post. 
 
 We drove on with German regularity, three days 
 and three nights, eating four meals a-day (and very 
 good ones), and improving hourly in our acquaintance. 
 The Russians spoke all our languages. The Friulese 
 and the Bavarian spoke everything but English, and 
 the lady, the trader, and the Gratz avocat, were confined 
 to their vernacular. It was a pretty idea of Babel 
 when the conversation became general. 
 
 We were coursing the bank of a river, in one of the 
 romantic passes of the mountains of Styria, with a 
 dark thunder-storm gathering on the summit of a 
 crag overhanging us. I was pointing out to one of 
 my companions a noble ruin of a castle seated very 
 loftily on the edge of one of the precipices, when a 
 streak of the most vivid lightning shot straight upon 
 the northernmost turret, and the moment after several 
 large masses rolled slowly down the mountain-side. 
 It was so like the scenery in a play, that I looked at 
 my companion with half a doubt that it was some op- 
 tical delusion. It reminded me of some of Martin's 
 engravings. The sublime is so well imitated in our 
 day that one is less surprised than he would suppose 
 when nature produces the reality. 
 
 The night was very beautiful when we reached the 
 summit of the mountain above Trieste. The new 
 moon silvered the little curved bay below like a polish- 
 ed shield, and right in the path of its beams lay the 
 two frigates like a painting. I must confess that the 
 comfortable cot swinging in the ward-room of the 
 " United States " was the prominent thought in my 
 mind as I gazed upon the scene. The fatigue of 
 three days and nights' hard driving had dimmed rv 
 eye for the picturesque. Leaving my compan u v 
 
118 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 
 
 the short beds* and narrow coverlets of a German ho- 
 tel, 1 jumped into the first boat at the pier, and in a 
 few minutes was alongside the ship. How musical is 
 the hail of a sentry in one's native tongue, after a short 
 habituation to the jargon of foreign languages ! 
 44 Boat ahoy !" It made my heart leap. The officers 
 had just returned from Venice, some over land by the 
 Friuli and some by the steamer through the gulf, and 
 were sitting round the table laughing with profession- 
 al merriment over their various adventures. It was 
 getting back to country and friends and home. 
 
 I accompanied the commodore's family yesterday in 
 a visit to the Grotto of Adelsburg. It is about thirty 
 miles back into the Friuli mountains, near the prov- 
 ince of Cariola. We arrived at the nearest tavern at 
 three in the afternoon, and subscribing our names 
 upon the magistrate's books, took four guides and the 
 requisite number of torches, and started on foot. A 
 half hour's walk brought us to a large, rushing stream, 
 which, after turning a mill, disappeared with violence 
 into the mouth of a broad cavern, sunk in the base of 
 a mountain. An iron gate opened on the nearest side, 
 and lighting our torches, we received an addition of 
 half a dozen men to our party of guides, and entered. 
 We descended for ten or fifteem minutes, through a 
 capacious gallery of rock, up to the ankles in mud, 
 and feeling continually the drippings exuding from 
 the roof, till by the echoing murmurs of dashing wa- 
 ter we found ourselves approaching the bed of a sub- 
 terraneous river. We soon emerged in a vast cavern, 
 whose height, though we had twenty torches, was lost 
 in the darkness. The river rushed dimly below us, at 
 the depth of perhaps fifty feet, partially illuminated by 
 a row of lamps, hung on a slight wooden bridge by 
 which we were to cross to the opposite side. 
 
 We descended by a long flight of artificial stairs, 
 and stood upon the bridge. The wildness of the 
 scene is indescribable. A lamp or two glimmered 
 faintly from the lofty parapet from which we had de- 
 scended, the depth and breadth of the surrounding 
 cave could only be measured by the distance of the 
 echoes of the waters, and beneath us leaped and 
 foamed a dark river, which sprang from its invisible 
 channel, danced a moment in the faint light of our 
 lamps, and was lost again instantly in darkness. It 
 brought with it, from the green fields through which 
 it had come, a current of soft warm air, peculiarly de- 
 lightful after the chilliness of the other parts of the 
 cavern ; there was a smell of new-mown hay in it 
 which seemed lost in the tartarean blackness around. 
 
 Our guides led on, and we mounted along staircase 
 on the opposite side of the bridge. At the head of it 
 stood a kind of monument, engraved with the name 
 of the emperor of Austria, by whose munificence the 
 staircase had been cut and the conveniences for stran- 
 gers provided. We turned hence to the right, and 
 entered a long succession of natural corridors, roofed 
 with stalactites, with a floor of rock and mud, and so 
 even and wide that the lady under my protection had 
 seldom occasion to leave my arm. In the narrowest 
 part of it, the stalactites formed a sort of reversed 
 grove, with the roots in the roof. They were of 
 a snowy white, and sparkled brilliantly in the light of 
 the torches. One or two had reached the floor, and 
 formed slender and beautiful sparry columns, upon 
 which the names of hundreds of visiters were written 
 in pencil. 
 
 The spars grew white as we proceeded, and we were 
 constantly emerging into large halls of the size of hand- 
 some drawing-rooms, whose glittering roofs, and sides 
 
 * A German bed is never over five feet in length, and pro- 
 portioaately narrow. The sheets, blankets, and coverlets, are 
 cut exactly to the size of the bed's surface, so that there is 
 no tucking up. The bed-clothes seem made for cradles. It 
 is easy to imaging how a tall person slaeps in them. 
 
 lined with fantastic columns, seemed like the brilliant 
 frost-work of a crystallized cavern of ice. Some of 
 the accidental formations of the stalagmites were very 
 curious. One large area was filled with them of the 
 height of small plants. It was called by the guides 
 the "English Garden." A.t the head of another sa- 
 loon, stood a throne, with a stalactite canopy above it, 
 so like the work of art, that it seemed as if the sculp- 
 tor had but left the finishing undone. 
 
 We returned part of the way we had come, and 
 took another branch of the grotto, a little more on the 
 descent. A sign above informed us that it Was the 
 44 road to the infernal regions." We walked on an hour 
 at a quick pace, stopping here and there to observe 
 the oddity of the formations. In one place, the sta- 
 lactites had enclosed a room, leaving only small open- 
 ings between the columns, precisely like the grating 
 of a prison. In another, the ceiling lifted out of the 
 reach of torch-light, and far above us we heard the 
 deep-toned beat as upon a muffled-bell. It was a thin 
 circular sheet of spar, called "the bell," to which one 
 of the guides had mounted, striking upon it with a bil- 
 let of wood. 
 
 We came after a while to a deeper descent, which 
 opened into a magnificent and spacious hall. It is 
 called "the ballroom," and used as such once a year, 
 on the occasion of a certain Illyrian festa. The floor 
 has been cleared of stalagmites, the roof and sides are 
 ornamented beyond all art with glittering spars, a nat- 
 ural gallery with a balustrade of stalactites contains 
 the orchestra, and side-rooms are all around where 
 supper might be laid, and dressing-rooms offered in 
 the style of a palace. I can imagine nothing more 
 magnificent than such a scene. A literal description 
 of it even would read like a fairy tale. 
 
 A little farther on, we came to a perfect representa- 
 tion of a waterfall. The impregnated water had fallen 
 on a declivity, and with a slightly ferruginous tinge of 
 yellow, poured over in the most natural resemblance 
 to a cascade after a rain. We proceeded for ten or 
 fifteen minutes, and found a small room like a chapel, 
 with a pulpit, in which stood one of the guides, who 
 gave us, as we stood beneath, an Illyrian exhortation. 
 There was a sounding-board above, and I have seen 
 pulpits in old gothic churches that seemed at a first 
 glance, to have less method in their architecture. The 
 last thing we reached, was the most beautiful. From 
 the cornice of a long gallery, hung a thin, translucent 
 sheet of spar, in the graceful and waving folds of a cur- 
 tain; with a lamp behind, the hand could be seen 
 through any part of it. It was perhaps twenty feet in 
 length, and hung five or six feet down from the roof 
 of the cavern. The most singular part of it was the 
 fringe. A ferruginous stain ran through it from one 
 end to the other, with the exactness of a drawn line, 
 and thence to the curving edge a most delicate rose- 
 teint faded gradually down like the last flush of sunset 
 through a silken curtain. Had it been a work of art, 
 done in alabaster, and stained with the pencil, it would 
 have been thought admirable. 
 
 The guide wished us to proceed, but our feet were 
 wet, and the air of the cavern was too chill. We were 
 at least four miles, they told us, from the entrance, 
 having walked briskly for upward of two hours. The 
 grotto is said to extend ten miles under the moun- 
 tains, and has never been thoroughly explored. Par- 
 ties have started with provisions, and passed forty-eight 
 hours in it without finding the extremity. It seems 
 to me that any city I ever saw might be concealed in 
 its caverns. I have often tried to conceive of the grot- 
 toes of Antiparos, and the celebrated caverns of our 
 own country, but I received here an entirely new idea 
 of the possibility of space under ground. There is no 
 conceiving it unseen. The river emerges on the other 
 side of the mountain, seven or eight miles from its first 
 entrance. 
 
PENC1LL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 119 
 
 We supped and slept at the little albergo of the vil- 
 lage, and returned the next day to an early dinner. 
 
 Trieste.— A ball on board the United States. The 
 guns were run out of the ports; the main and mizen- 
 masts were wound with red and white bunting; the 
 capstan was railed with arms and wreathed with 
 flowers; the wheel was tied with nose-gays; the 
 American eagle stood against the mainmast, with a 
 6tar of midshipmen's swords glittering above it; fes- 
 toons of evergreens were laced through the rigging; 
 the companion-way was arched with hoops of green 
 leaves and roses ; the decks were tastefully chalked ; 
 the commodore's skylight was piled with cushions and 
 covered with red damask for an ottoman; seats were 
 laid along from one carronade to the other; and the 
 whole was enclosed with a temporary tent lined 
 throughout with showy flags, and studded all over 
 with bouquets of all the flowers of lllyria. Chande- 
 liers made of bayonets, battle-lanterns, and caudles in 
 any quantity, were disposed all over the hall. A splen- 
 did supper was set out on the gun-deck below, draped 
 in with flags. Our own and the Constellation's boats 
 were to be at the pier at niue o'clock to bring off the 
 ladies, and at noon everything promised of the brightest. 
 
 First, about four in the afternoon came up a saucy- 
 looking cloud from the westernmost peak of the Friuli. 
 Then followed from every point toward the north, an 
 extending edge of a broad solid black sheet which rose 
 with the regularity of a curtain, and began to send 
 down a wind upon us which made us look anxiously 
 to our ball-room bowlines. The midshipmen were all 
 forward, watching it from the forecastle. The lieu- 
 tenants were in the gangway, watching it from the 
 ladder. The commodore looked seriously out of the 
 larboard cabin port. It was as grave a ship's company 
 as ever looked out for a shipwreck. 
 
 The country about Trieste is shaped like a bellows, 
 and the city and harbor lie in the nose. They have 
 a wind that comes down through the valley, called the 
 " bora," which several times in the year is strong 
 enough to lift people from their feet. We could see, 
 by the clouds of dust on the mountain roads, that it 
 was coming. At six o'clock the shrouds began to 
 creak ; the white tops flew from the waves in showers 
 of spray, and the roof of our sea-palace began to shiver 
 in the wind. There was no more hope. We had 
 waited even too long. All hands were called to take 
 down the chandeliers, sword-stars, and ottomans, and 
 before it was half done, the storm was upon us ; the 
 bunting was flying and flapping, the nicely-chalked 
 decks were swashed with rain, and strown with leaves 
 of flowers, and the whole structure, the taste and labor 
 of the ship's company for two days, was a watery wreck. 
 
 Lieutenant C , who had had the direction of the 
 
 whole, was the officer of the deck. He sent for his 
 pea-jacket, and leaving him to pace out his watch 
 among the ruins of his imagination, we went below to 
 get early to bed, and forget our disappointment in sleep. 
 
 The next morning the sun rose without a veil. The 
 "blue Friuli" looked clear and fresh; the southwest 
 wind came over softly from the shore of Italy, and we 
 commenced retrieving our disaster with elastic spirit. 
 Nothing had suffered seriously except the flowers, and 
 boats were despatched ashore for fresh supplies, while 
 the awnings were lifted higher and wider than before, 
 the bright-colored flags replaced, the arms polished 
 and arranged in improved order, and the decks re- 
 chalked with new devices. At six in the evening ev- 
 erything was swept up, and the ball-room astonished 
 even ourselves. It was the prettiest place for a dance 
 in the world. 
 
 The ship has an admirable band of twenty Italians, 
 collected from Naples and other ports, and a fanciful 
 orchestra was raised for them on the terboard side of 
 the mainmast. They struck up a march as the first 
 
 boatful of ladies stepped upon the deck, and in the 
 course of half an hour the waltzing commenced with 
 at least two hundred couples, while the ottoman and 
 seats under the hammock-cloths were filled with spec 
 tators. The frigate has a lofty poop, and there was 
 room enough upon it for two quadrilles after it had 
 served as a reception-room. It was edged with a tem- 
 porary balustrade, wreathed with flowers and studded 
 with lights, and the cabin beneath (on a level with the 
 main ball-room), was set out with card-tables. From 
 the gangway entrance, the scene was like a brilliant 
 theatrical ballet. 
 
 An amusing part of it was the sailors' imitation on 
 the forward decks. They had taken the waste shrub- 
 bery and evergreens, of which there was a great quan- 
 tity, and had formed a sort of grove, extending all 
 round. It was arched with festoons of leaves, with 
 quantities of fruit tied among them ; and over the en- 
 j trance was suspended a rough picture of a frigate with 
 ! the inscription, " Free trade and sailors' rights:' The 
 j forecastle was ornamented with cutlasses and one or 
 I two nautical transparencies, with pistols and miniature 
 | ships interspersed, and the whole lit up handsomely. 
 The men were dressed in their white duck trowsers 
 and blue jackets, and sat round on the guns playing at 
 draughts, or listening to the music, or gazing at the 
 ladies constantly promenading fore and aft, and to me 
 this was one of the most interesting parts of the spec- 
 tacle. Five hundred weather-beaten and manly faces 
 are a fine sight anywhere. 
 
 The dance went gayly on. The reigning belle was 
 an American, but we had lovely women of all nations 
 among our guests. There are several wealthy Jewish 
 families in Trieste, and their dark-eyed daughters, we 
 may say at this distance, are full of the thoughtful 
 loveliness peculiar to the race. Then we had Illyrians 
 and Germans, and — Terpsichore be our witness — how 
 they danced ! My travelling companion, the Count 
 of Friuli, was there; and his little Viennese wife, 
 though she spoke no Christian language, danced as 
 featly as a fairy. Of strangers passing through the 
 Trieste, we had several of distinction. Among them 
 was a fascinating Milanese marchioness, a relative of 
 Manzoni's, the novelist (and as enthusiastic and elo 
 quent a lover of her country as I ever listened to on 
 the subject of oppressed Italy), and two handsome 
 young men, the counts Neipperg, sons-in-law to Maria 
 Louisa, who amused themselves as if they had seen 
 nothing better in the little dutchy of Parma. 
 
 We went below at midnight to supper, and the ladies 
 came up with renewed spirit to the dance. It was a 
 brilliant scene indeed. The officers of both ships, in 
 full uniform, the gentlemen from shore, mostly mili- 
 tary, in full dress, the gayety of the bright red bunting, 
 laced with white and blue, and studded, wherever they 
 would stand, with flowers, and the really uncommon 
 number of beautiful women, with the foreign features 
 and complexions so rich and captivating to our eyes, 
 produced altogether an effect unsurpassed by anything 
 I have ever seen even at the court fetes of Europe. 
 The daylight gun fired at the close of a galopade, 
 and the crowded boats pulled ashore with their lovely 
 freight by the broad light of morning. 
 
 LETTER LXXVIII. 
 
 TRIESTE, ITS EXTENSIVE COMMERCE — HOSPITALITY OF 
 MR. MOORE — RUINS OF POLA — IMMENSE AMPHITHEATRE 
 
 VILLAGE OF FOLA COAST OF DALMATIA, OF APULIA 
 
 AND CALABRIA — OTRANTO — SAILS FOR THE ISLES OF 
 GREECE. 
 
 Trieste is certainly a most agreeable place. Its 
 streets are beautifully paved and clean, its nouses new 
 
120 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 and well built, and its shops as handsome and as well 
 stocked with every variety of thing as those of Paris. 
 Its immense commerce brings all nations to its port, 
 and it is quite the commercial centre of the continent. 
 The Turk smokes cross-legged in the cafe, the English 
 merchant has his box in the country and his snug 
 establishment in town, the Italian has his opera and 
 his wife her cavalier, the Yankee captain his respecta- 
 ble boarding-house, and the German his four meals a 
 day at a hotel died brown with tobacco. Every nation 
 is at home in Trieste. 
 
 The society is beyond what is common in a European 
 mercantile city. The English are numerous enough 
 to support a church, and the circle, of which our 
 hospitable consul is the centre, is one of the most 
 refined and agreeable it has been my happiness to 
 meet. The friends of Mr. Moore have pressed every 
 possible civility and kindness upon the commodore 
 and his officers, and his own house has been literally 
 our home on shore. It is the curse of this volant life, 
 otherwise so attractive, that its frequent partings are 
 bitter in proportion to its good fortune. We make 
 friends but to lose them. 
 
 We got under way with a light breeze this morning, 
 and stole gently out of the bay. The remembrance 
 of a thousand kindnesses made our anchors lift heavily. 
 We waved our handkerchiefs to the consul, whose 
 balconies were filled with his charming family watching 
 our departure, and, with a freshening wind, disappeared 
 around the point, and put up our helm for Pola. 
 
 The ruins of Pola, though among the first in the 
 world, are seldom visited. They lie on the eastern 
 shore of the Adriatic, at the head of a superb natural 
 bay, far from any populous town, and are seen only by 
 the chance trader who hugs the shore for the land- 
 breeze, or the Albanian robber who looks down upon 
 them with wonder from the mountains. What their 
 age is I can not say nearly. The country was con- 
 quered by the Romans about one hundred years before 
 the time of our Savior, and the amphitheatre and tem- 
 ples were probably erected soon after. 
 
 We ran into the bay, with the other frigate close 
 astern, and anchored off a small green island which 
 shuts in the inner harbor. There is deep water up 
 to the ancient town on either side, and it seems as if 
 nature had amused herself with constructing a harbor 
 incapable of improvement. Pola lay about two miles 
 from the sea. 
 
 It was just evening, and we deferred our visit to the 
 ruins till morning. The majestic amphitheatre stood 
 on a gentle ascent, a mile from the ship, goldenly 
 bright in the flush of sunset ; the pleasant smell of the 
 shore stole over the decks, and the bands of the two 
 frigates played alternately the evening through. The 
 receding mountains of Istria changed their light blue 
 veils gradually to gray and sable, and with the pure 
 stars of these enchanted seas, and the shell of a new 
 moon bending over Italy in the west, it was such a 
 night as one remembrances like a friend. The Con- 
 stellation was to part from us here, leaving us to pursue 
 our voyage to Greece. There were those on board 
 who had brightened many of our " hours ashore," in 
 these pleasant wanderings. We pulled back to our 
 own ship, after a farewell visit, with regrets deepened 
 by crowds of pleasant remembrances. 
 
 The next morning we pulled ashore to the ruins. 
 The amphitheatre was close upon the sea, and, to my 
 surprise and pleasure, there was no cicerone. A con- 
 templative donkey was grazing under the walls, but 
 there was no other living creature near. We looked 
 at its vast circular wall with astonishment. The coli- 
 seum at Rome, a larger building of the same descrip- 
 tion, is, from the outside, much less imposing. The 
 whole exterior wall, a circular pile one hundred feet 
 high in front, and of immense blocks of marble and 
 
 granite, is as perfect as when the Roman workman 
 hewed the last stone. The interior has been nearly 
 all removed. The well-hewn blocks of the many rows 
 of seats were too tempting, like those of Rome, to the 
 barbarians who were building near. The circle of the 
 arena, in which the gladiators and wild beasts of these 
 then new-conquered provinces fought, is still marked 
 by the foundations of its barrier. It measures two 
 hundred and twenty-three feet. Beneath it is a broad 
 and deep canal, running toward the sea, filled with 
 marble columns, still erect upon their pedestals, used 
 probably fori he introduction of waterfor the naumachia. 
 The whole circumference of the amphitheatre is twelve 
 hundred and fifty-six feet, and the thickness of the ex- 
 terior wall seven feet six inches. Its shape is oblong, 
 the length being four hundred and thirty-six feet, and 
 the breadth three hundred and fifty. The measure- 
 ments were taken by the captain's orders, and are doubt- 
 less critically correct. 
 
 We loitered about the ruins several hours, finding 
 in every direction the remains of the dilapidated in- 
 terior. The sculpture upon the fallen capitals and 
 fragments of frieze was in the highest style of ornament. 
 The arena is overgrown with rank grass, and the crevi- 
 ces in the walls are filled with flowers. A vineyard, 
 with its large blue grape just within a week of ripe- 
 ness, encircles the rear of the amphitheatre. The 
 boat's crew were soon among them, much better amu- 
 sed than they could have been by all the antiquities in 
 Istria. 
 
 We walked from the amphitheatre to the town ; a 
 miserable village built around two antique temples, 
 one of which still stands alone, with its fine corinthian 
 columns, looking just ready to crumble. The other 
 is incorporated barbarously with the guard-house of 
 the place, and is a curious mixture of beautiful sculpture 
 and dirty walls. The pediment, which is still perfect, 
 in the rear of the building, is a piece of carving, worthy 
 of the choicest cabinet of Europe. The thieveries 
 from the amphitheatre are easily detected. There is 
 scarce a beggar's house in the village, that does not 
 show a bit or two of sculptural marble upon its front. 
 
 At the end of the village stands a triumphal arch, 
 recording the conquests of a Roman consul. Its front, 
 toward the town, is of Parian marble, beautifully 
 chiselled. One recognises the solid magnificence of 
 that glorious nation, when he looks on these relics of 
 their distant conquests, almost perfect after eighteen 
 hundred years. It seems as if the foot-print of a Roman 
 were eternal. 
 
 We stood out of the little bay, and with a fresh 
 wind, ran down the coast of Dalmatia, and then cross- 
 ing to the Italian side, kept down the ancient shore of 
 Apulia and Calabria to the mouth of the Adriatic. I 
 have been looking at the land with the glass, as we ran 
 smoothly along, counting castle after castle built boldly 
 on the sea, and behind them, on the green hills, the 
 thickly built villages, with their smoking chimneys and 
 tall spires, pictures of fertility and peace. It was upon 
 these shores that the Barbary corsairs descended so 
 often during the last century, carrying off for eastern 
 harems, the lovely women of Italy. We are just off 
 Otranto, and a noble old castle stands frowning from 
 the extremity of the Cape. We could throw a shot 
 into its embrasures as we pass. It might be the "Castle 
 of Otranto," for the romantic looks it has from the sea. 
 
 We have out-sailed the Constellation, or we should 
 part from her here. Her destination is France ; and 
 we should be to-morrow amid the *Isles of Greece. 
 The pleasure of realizing the classic dreams of one's 
 boyhood, is not to be expressed in a line. I look for- 
 ward to the succeeding month or two as to the " red- 
 letter" chapter of my life. Whatever I may find the 
 
 • It Avas to this joint (the ancient Hydrantum) that Pyrrhus 
 proposed to build a bridge from Greece — only sixty miles ! He 
 deserved to ride on an elephant. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 121 
 
 reality, my heart has glowed warmly and delightfully 
 with the anticipation. Commodore Patterson is, 
 fortunately for me, a scholar and a judicious lover of 
 the arts, and loses no opportunity, consistently with his 
 duty, to give his officers the means of examining the 
 curious and the beautiful in these interesting seas. 
 The cruise, thus far, has been one of continually ming- 
 led pleasure and instruction, and the best of it, by every 
 association of our early days, is to come. 
 
 LETTER LXXIX. 
 
 THE IONIAN ISLES LORD AND LADY NUGENT COR- 
 FU GREEK AND ENGLISH SOLDIERS — COCKNEYISM 
 
 THE GARDENS OF ALCINOUS ENGLISH OFFICERS 
 
 ALBANIANS DIONISIO SALOMOS, THE GREEK POET 
 
 GREEK LADIES DINNER WITH THE ARTILLERY- 
 MESS. 
 
 This is proper dream-land. The "Isle of Ca- 
 lypso,"* folded in a drapery of blue air, lies behind, 
 fading in the distance, "the Acroceraunian mountains 
 of old name," which causht Byron's eye as he entered 
 Greece, are piled up before us on the Albanian shore, 
 and the Ionian sea is rippling under our bow, breath- 
 ing, from every wave, of Homer, and Sappho, and 
 " sad Penelope." Once more upon Childe Harold's 
 footsteps. I closed the book at Rome, after following 
 him for a summer through Italy, confessing, by many 
 pleasant recollections, that 
 
 " Not in vain 
 He wore his sandal shoon, and scallop shell." 
 
 I resume it here, with the feeling of Thalaba when he 
 caught sight of the green bird that led him through 
 the desert. It lies open on my knee at the second 
 canto, describing our position, even to the hour : 
 
 " 'Twas on a Grecian autumn's gentle eve 
 Childe Harold hailed Leucadia's cape afar ; 
 A spot he longed to see, nor cared to leave." 
 
 We shall lie off-and-on to-night, and go in to Corfu 
 in the morning. Two Turkish vessels-of-war, with 
 the crescent flag flying, lie in a small cove a mile olf, 
 on the Albanian shore, and by the discharge of mus- 
 ketry our pilot presumes that they have accompanied 
 the sultan's tax-gatherer, who gets nothing from these 
 wild people without fighting for it. 
 
 The entrance to Corfu is considered pretty, but the 
 English flag flying over the forts, divested ancient 
 Corcyra of its poetical associations. It looked to me 
 a commonplace seaport, glaring in the sun. The 
 "Gardens of Alcinous" were here, but who could im- 
 agine them, with a red-coated sentry posted on every 
 corner of the island. 
 
 The lord high commissioner of the Ionian Isles, 
 Lord Nugent, came off to the ship this morning in a 
 kind of Corfiate boat, called a Scampavia, a greyhound- 
 looking craft, carrying sail enough for a schooner. 
 She cut the water like the wing of a swallow. His 
 lordship was playing sailor, and was dressed like the 
 mate of one of our coasters, and his manners were as 
 bluff*. He has a fine person, however, and is said to 
 be a very elegant man when he chooses it. He is the 
 author of the "Life and Times of John Hampden," 
 and Whig, of course. Southey has lately reviewed 
 him rather bitterly in the Quarterly. Lady N. is lit- 
 erary, too, and they have written between them a book 
 of tales called (I think) "Legends of the Lilies," of 
 which her ladyship's half is said to be the better. 
 
 Went on shore for a walk. Greeks and English 
 * Kano, which disputes it with Uozo. near Malta. 
 
 soldiers mix oddly together. The streets are narrow, 
 and crowded with them in about equal proportions. 
 John Bull retains his red face, and learns no Greek. 
 We passed through the Bazar, and bad English was 
 the universal language. There is but one square in 
 the town, and round its wooden fence, enclosing a 
 dusty area without a blade of grass, were riding the 
 English officers, while the regimental band played in 
 the centre. A more arid and cheerless spot never 
 pained the eye. The appearance of the officers, re- 
 taining all their Bond street elegance and mounted 
 upon English hunters, was in singular contrast with 
 the general shabbiness of the houses and people. I 
 went into a shop at a corner to inquire for the resi- 
 dence of a gentleman to whom I had a letter. "It's 
 werry 'ot, sir," said a little red-faced woman behind 
 the counter, as I went out, " perhaps you'd like a glass 
 of rater." It was odd to hear the Wapping dialect in 
 the "isles of Greece." She sold green groceries, and 
 wished me to recommend her to the /jofficers. Mrs. 
 Mary Flack's "grocery" in the gardens of Alcinous. 
 
 " The wild Albanian kirtled to the knee," walks 
 through the streets of Corfu, looking unlike and supe- 
 rior to everything about him. I met several in re- 
 turning to the boat. Their gait is very lofty, and the 
 snow-white juktanilla, or kirtle, with its thousand folds, 
 sways from side to side as they walk, with a most 
 showy effect. Lord Byron was very much captivated 
 with these people, whose capital (just across the strait 
 from Corfu) he visited once or twice in his travels 
 through Greece. Those I have seen are all very tall, 
 and have their prominent features, with keen eyes and 
 limbs of the most muscular proportions. The com- 
 mon English soldiers look like brutes beside them. 
 
 The placard of a theatre hung on the walls of a 
 church. A rude picture of a battle between the 
 Greeks and Turks hung above it, and beneath was 
 written, in Italian, " Honor the representation of the 
 immortal deeds of your hero Marco Bozzaris.'" It is 
 singular that even a pack of slaves can find pleasure 
 in a remembrance that reproaches every breath they 
 draw. 
 
 Called on Lord Nugent with the commodore. The 
 governor, sailor, author, antiquary, nobleman (for he is 
 all these, and a jockey, to boot), received us in a calico 
 morning-frock, with his breast and neck bare, in a large 
 library lumbered with half-packed antiquities and strewn 
 with straw. Books, miniatures of his family (a lovely 
 one of Lady Nugent among them), Whig pamphlets, 
 riding-whips, spurs, minerals, hammer and nails, half- 
 eaten cakes, plans of fortifications, printed invitations 
 to his own balls and dinners, military reports, Turkish 
 pistols, and, lastly, his own just printed answer to Mr. 
 Southey's review of his book, occupied the table. He 
 was reading his own production when we entered. His 
 lordship mentioned, with great apparent satisfaction, a 
 cruise he had taken some years ago with Commodore 
 Chauncey. The conversation was rather monologue 
 than dialogue; his excellency seeming to think, with 
 Lord Bacon, that "the honorablest part of talk was to 
 give the occasion, and then to moderate and pass to 
 something else." He started a topic, exhausted and 
 changed it with the same facility and rapidity with 
 which he sailed his scampavia. An engagement with 
 the artillery-mess prevented my acceptance of an invi- 
 tation to dine with him to-morrow, a circumstance I 
 rather regret, as he is said to be, at his own table, one 
 of the most polished and agreeable men of his time. 
 
 Thank Heaven, revolutionsdo not affect the climate ! 
 The isle that gave a shelter to the storm-driven Ulys- 
 ses is an English barrack, but the same balmy air that 
 fanned the blind eyes of old Homer blows over it still. 
 " The breezes," says Landor, beautifully, " are the 
 children of eternity." I never had the hair lifted so 
 pleasantly from my temples as to-night, driving into 
 the interior of the island. The gardening of Alcinous 
 
122 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 seems to have been followed up by nature. The rhodo- 
 dendron, the tamarisk, the almond, cypress, olive, and 
 rig, luxuriate in the sweetest beauty everywhere. 
 
 There was a small party in the evening at the house 
 of the gentleman who had driven me out, and among 
 other foreigners present were the count Dionisio Sal- 
 omos, of Zante, and the Cavaliere Andrea Mustoxidi, 
 both men of whom I had often heard. The first is 
 almost the only modern Greek poet, and his "hymns," 
 principally patriotic, are in the common dialect of the 
 country, and said to be full of fire. He is an exces- 
 sively handsome man, with large, dark eyes, almost ef- 
 feminate in its softness. His features are of the clear- 
 est Greek chiselling as faultless as a statue, and are 
 stamped with nature's most attractive marks of refine- 
 ment and feeling. I can imagine Anacreon to have 
 resembled him. 
 
 Mustoxidi has been a conspicuous man in the late 
 chapter of Grecian history. He was much trusted by 
 Capo d'Istria, and among other things had the whole 
 charge of his school at Egina. An Italian exile (a 
 Modenese, and a very pleasant fellow), took me aside 
 when I asked something of his history, and told me a 
 story of him, which proves either that he was a dis- 
 honest man, or (no new truth) that conspicuous men 
 are liable to be abused. A valuable donation of books 
 was given by some one to the school library. They 
 stood on the upper shelves, quite out of reach, and 
 Mustoxidi was particular in forbidding all approach to 
 them. Some time after his departure from the island, 
 the library was committed to the charge of another 
 person, and the treasures of the upper shelves were 
 found to be — painted boards ! His physiognomy 
 would rather persuade me of the truth of the story. 
 He is a small man, with a downcast look, and a sly, 
 gray eye, almost hidden by his projecting eyebrows. 
 His features are watched in vain for an open expres- 
 sion. 
 
 The ladies of the party were principally Greeks. 
 None of them were beautiful, but they had the mel- 
 ancholy, retired expression of face which one looks 
 for, knowing the history of their nation. They are 
 unwise enough to abandon their picturesque national 
 costume, and dress badly in the European style. The 
 servant-girls, with their hair braided into the folds of 
 their turbans, and their open laced bodices and sleeves 
 are much more attractive to the stranger's eye. The 
 liveliest of the party, a little Zantiote girl of eighteen, 
 with eyes and eyelashes that contradicted the merry 
 laugh on her lips, sang us an Albanian song to the 
 guitar, very sweetly. 
 
 Dined to-day with the artillery-mess, in company 
 with the commodore and some of his officers. In a 
 place like this, the dinner naturally is the great cir- 
 cumstance of the day. The inhabitants do not take 
 kindly to their masters, and there is next to no society 
 for the English. They sit down to their soup after 
 the evening drive, and seldom rise till midnight. It 
 was a gay dinner, as dinners will always be where the 
 whole remainder of what the " day may bring forth" 
 is abandoned to them, and we parted from our hospit- 
 able entertainers, after four or five hours " measured 
 with sands of gold." We must do the English the 
 justice of confessing the manners of their best bred 
 men to be the best in the world. It is inevitable that 
 one should bear the remainder of the nation little 
 love. Neither the one class nor the other, doubtless, 
 will ever seek it at our hands. But mutual hospitality 
 may soften so much of our intercourse as happens in 
 the traveller's way, and without loving John Bull bet- 
 ter, all in all, one soon finds out in Europe that the 
 dog and the lion are not more unlike, than the race 
 of bagmen and runners with which our country is 
 overrun, and the cultivated gentlemen of England. 
 
 On my right sat a captain of the corps, who had 
 
 spent the last summer at the Saratoga Springs. We 
 found any number of mutual acquaintances, of course, 
 and I was amused with the impressions which some 
 of the fairest of my friends had made upon a man who 
 had passed years in the most cultivated society of Eu- 
 rope. He liked America, with reservations. He pre- 
 ferred our ladies to those of any other country ex- 
 cept England, and he had found more dandies in 
 one hour in Broadway than he should have met in a 
 week in Regent-street. He gave me a racy scene or 
 two from the City Hotel, in New York, but he doubt- 
 ed if the frequenters of a public table in any country 
 in the world were, on the whole, so well-mannered. If 
 Americans were peculiar for anything, he thought it 
 was for confidence in themselves and tobacco-chewing. 
 
 LETTER LXXX. 
 
 CORFU — UNPOPULARITY OF BRITISH RULE — SUPERSTI- 
 TION OF THE GREEKS ACCURACY OF THE DESCRIP- 
 TIONS IN THE ODYSSEY — ADVANTAGE OF THE GREEK 
 COSTUME — THE PAXIAN ISLES — CAPE LEUCAS, OR 
 SAPPHO'S LEAP — BAY OF NAVARINO, ANCIENT FY- 
 Los — MODON — CORAN's BAY — CAPE ST. ANGELO — 
 ISLE OF CYTHERA. 
 
 Corfu. — Called on one of the officers of the tenth 
 this morning, and found lying on his table two books 
 upon Corfu. They were from the circulating library 
 of the town, much thumbed, and contained the most 
 unqualified strictures on the English administration in 
 the islands. In one of them, by a Count or Colonel 
 Boig de St. Vincent, a Frenchman, the Corfiotes 
 were taunted with their slavish submission, and called 
 upon to shake off the yoke of British dominion in the 
 most inflammatory language. Such books in Italy or 
 France would be burnt by the hangman, and prohibi- 
 ted on penalty of death. Here, with a haughty con- 
 sciousness of superiority, which must be galling 
 enough to an Ionian who is capable of feeling, they 
 circulate uncensured in two languages, and the officers 
 of the abused government read them for their amuse- 
 ment, and return them coolly to go their rounds 
 among the people. They have twenty-five hundred 
 troops upon the island, and they trouble themselves 
 little about what is thought of them. They confess 
 that their government is excessively unpopular, the 
 officers are excluded from the native society, and the 
 soldiers are scowled upon in the streets. 
 
 The body of St. Spiridion was carried through the 
 streets of Corfu to-day, sitting bolt upright in a sedan- 
 chair, and accompanied by the whole population. He 
 is the great saint of the Greek church, and such is his 
 influence, that the English government thought prop- 
 er, under Sir Frederick Adam's administration, to 
 compel the officers to walk in the procession. The 
 saint was dried at his death, and makes a neat, black 
 mummy, sans eyes and nose, but otherwise quite per- 
 fect. He was carried to-day by four men in a very 
 splendid sedan, shaking from side to side with the mo- 
 tion, preceded by one of the bands of music from the 
 English regiments. Sick children were thrown under 
 the feet of the bearers, half dead people brought to 
 the doors as he passed, and every species of disgust- 
 ing mummery practised. The show lasted about four 
 hours, and was, on the whole, attended with more, 
 marks of superstition than anything I found in Italy. 
 I was told that the better educated Christians of the 
 Greek church, disbelieve the saint's miracles. The 
 whole body of the Corfiote ecclesiastics were in the 
 procession, however. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 123 
 
 I passed the first watch in the hammock-nettings to- 
 night, enjoying inexpressibly the phenomena of this 
 brilliant climate. The stars seem burning like lamps 
 in the absolute clearness of the atmosphere. Meteors 
 shoot constantly with a slow liquid course, over the 
 sky. The air comes off from the land laden with the 
 breath of the wild thyme, and the water around the 
 ship is another deep blue heaven, motionless with its 
 studded constellations. The frigate seems suspended 
 between them. 
 
 We have little idea, while conning an irksome 
 school-task, how strongly the "unwilling lore" is 
 rooting itself in the imagination, The frigate lies 
 perhaps a half mile from the most interesting scenes 
 of the Odyssey. I have been recalling from the long 
 neglected stores of memory, the beautiful descriptions 
 of the court of King Alcinous, and of the meeting of 
 his matchless daughter with Ulysses. The whole 
 web of the poet's fable has gradually unwound, and 
 the lamps ashore, and the outline of the hills, in the 
 deceiving dimness of night, have entered into the de- 
 lusion with the facility of a dream. Every scene in 
 Homer may be traced to this day, the blind old poet's 
 topography was so admirable. It was over the point 
 of land sloping down to the right, that the Princess 
 Nausicaa, went with her handmaids to wash her bridal 
 robes in the running streams, The description still 
 guides the traveller to the spot where the damsels of 
 the royal maid spread the linen on the grass, and com- 
 menced the sports that waked Ulysses from his slum- 
 bers in the bed of leaves. 
 
 Ashore with one of the officers this morning, amu- 
 sing ourselves with trying on dresses in a Greek tailor's 
 shop. It quite puts one out of conceit with these 
 miserable European fashions. The easy and flowing 
 juktanilla, the unembarrassed leggins, the open sleeve 
 of the collarless jacket leaving the throat exposed, 
 and the handsome close-binding girdle from it, seems 
 to me the very dress dictated by reason and nature. 
 The richest suit in the shop, a superb red velvet, 
 wrought with gold, was priced at one hundred and 
 forty dollars. The more sober colors were much 
 cheaper. A dress lasts several years. 
 
 We made our farewell visits to the officers of the 
 English regiments, who had overwhelmed us with hos- 
 pitality during our stay, and went on board to get un- 
 der way with the noon breeze. We were accompa- 
 nied to the ship, not as the hero of Homer, when he 
 left the same port, by three damsels of the royal train, 
 bearing, " one a tunic, another a rich casket, and a 
 third bread and wine" for his voyage, but by Mrs. 
 Thompson and Mrs. Wilson, soldiers' wives, and 
 washerwomen, with baskets of hurriedly dried linen, 
 pinned, every bundle, with a neat bill in shillings and 
 half-pence 
 
 Ulysses slept all the way from Corcyra to Ithaca. 
 He lost a great deal of fine scenery. The passage 
 between Corfu and Albania is beautiful. We ran 
 past the southern cape of the island with a free wind, 
 and are now off the Paxian Isles, where, according to 
 Plutarch, Emilanus, the rhetorician, voyaging by 
 night, " heard a voice louder than human, announcing 
 the death of Pan." A "schoolboy midshipman" is 
 breaking the same silence with " on deck, all hands ! 
 on deck, all of you!" 
 
 Off the mouth of the Alpheus. If he still chases 
 Arethusa under the sea, aud she makes straight for 
 Sicily, her bed is beneath our keel. The moon is 
 pouring her broad light over the ocean, the shadows 
 of the rigging on the dcek lis in clear and definite 
 
 lines, the sailors of the watch sit around upon the 
 guns in silence, and the ship, with her clouds of 
 snowy sail spread aloft, is stealing through the water 
 with the noiseless motion of a swan. Even the gal- 
 lant man-of-war seems steeped in the spirit of the 
 scene. The hour wants but an " Ionian Myrrha " to 
 fill the last void of the heart. 
 
 Cape Leucas on the lee — the scene of Sappho's leap. 
 We have coursed down the long shore of ancient Leu- 
 cadia, and the precipice to which lovers came from all 
 parts of Greece for an oblivious plunge is shining in 
 the sun, scarce a mile from the ship. The beautiful 
 Grecian here sung her last song, and broke her lyre 
 and died. The leap was not always so tragical, there 
 are two lovers, at least, on record (Maces of Euthro 
 turn, and Cephalosson of Deioneos), who survived the 
 fall, and were cured effectually by salt water. It was 
 a common resource in the days of Sappho, and Stra- 
 bo says that they were accustomed to check their de- 
 scent by tying birds and feathers to their arms. Fe- 
 males, he says, were generally killed by the rapidity 
 of the fall, their frames being too slight to bear the 
 shock ; but the men seldom failed to come safe to 
 shore. The sex has not lost its advantages since the 
 days of Phaon. 
 
 We have caught a glimpse of Ithaca through the 
 isles, the land 
 
 " Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave," 
 
 and which Ulysses loved, non quia larga, sed quia sua 
 — the most natural of reasons. We lose Childe Har- 
 old's track here. He turned to the left into the gulf 
 of Lepanto. We shall find him again at Athens. 
 Missolonghi, where he died, lies about twenty or thirty 
 miles on our lee, and it is one, of several places in the 
 gulf, that I regret to pass so near, unvisited. 
 
 Entering the bay of Navarino. A picturesque and 
 precipitous rock, filled with caves, nearly shuts the 
 mouth of this ample harbor. We ran so close to it, 
 that it might have been touched from the deck with a 
 tandem whip. On a wild crag to the left, a small, 
 white marble monument, with the earth still fresh 
 about it, marks the grave of some victim of the late 
 naval battle. The town and fortress, miserable heaps 
 of dirty stone, lie in the curve of the southern shore. 
 A French brig-of-war is at anchor in the port, and 
 broad, barren hills, stretching far away on every side, 
 complete the scene before us. We run up the har- 
 bor, and tack to stand out again, without going ashore. 
 Not a soul is to be seen, and the bay seems the very 
 sanctuary of silence. It is difficult to conceive, that 
 but a year or two ago, the combined fleets of Europe, 
 were thundering among these silent hills, and hun- 
 dreds of human beings lying in their blood, whose 
 bones are now whitening in the sea beneath. Our pi- 
 lot was in the fight, on board an English frigate. He 
 has pointed out to us the position of the different 
 fleets, and among other particulars, he tells me, that 
 when the Turkish ships were boarded, Greek sailors 
 were found chained to the guns, who had been com- 
 pelled, at the muzzle of the pistol, to fight against the 
 cause of their country. Many of them must thus 
 have perished in the vessels that were sunk. 
 
 Navarino was the scene of a great deal of fight- 
 ing, during the late Greek revolution. It was in- 
 vested, while in possession of the Turks, by two thou- 
 sand Pelopennesians and a band of Ionians, and the 
 garrison were reduced to such a state of starvation, as 
 to eat their slippers. They surrendared at last, under 
 promise that their lives should be spared; but the 
 news of the massacre of the Greek patriarchs and 
 clergy, at Adrianople, was received at the moment, 
 and the exasperated troops put their prisoners to death, 
 without mercy. 
 
124 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 The peaceful aspect of the place is better suited to 
 its poetical associations. Navarino was the ancient 
 Pylos, and it is here that Homer brings Telemachus 
 in search of his father. He finds old Nestor and his 
 sons sacrificing on the seashore to Neptune, with nine 
 altars, and at each five hundred men. I should think 
 the modern town contained scarce a twentieth of this 
 number. 
 
 Rounding the little fortified town of Modon, under 
 full sail. It seems to be built on the level of the wa- 
 ter, and nothing but its high wall and its towers are 
 seen from the sea. This, too, has been a much con- 
 tested place, and remained in possession of the Turks 
 till after the formation of the provisional government 
 under Mavrocordato. It forms the southwestern point 
 of the Morea, and is a town of great antiquity. King 
 Philip gained his first battle over the Athenians here, 
 some thousands of years ago ; and the brave old Miu- 
 alis beat the Egyptian fleet in the same bay, without 
 doubt in a manner quite as deserving of as long a re- 
 membrance. It is like a city of the dead — we can not 
 even see a sentinel on the wall. 
 
 Passed an hour in the mizen-chains with " the Cor- 
 sair" in my hand, and " Coran's Bay'" opening on the 
 lee. With what exquisite pleasure one reads, when 
 he can look off from the page, and study the scene of 
 the poet's fiction : — 
 
 " In Coran's bay floats many a galley light, 
 Through Coran's lattices the lamps burn bright 
 For Seyd, the pacha, makes a feast to-night," 
 
 It is a small, deep bay, with a fortified town, on the 
 western shore, crowned on the very edge of the sea, 
 with a single, tall tower. A small aperture near the 
 top, helps to realize the Corsair's imprisonment, and 
 his beautiful interview with Gulnare : — 
 
 " In the high chamber of his highest tower, 
 Sate Conrad fettered in the pacha's power," etc. 
 
 The Pirate's Isle is said to have been Poros, and 
 the original of the Corsair himself, a certain Hugh 
 Crevelier, who filled the iEgean with terror, not many 
 years ago. 
 
 Made the Cape St. Angelo, the southern point of 
 the Peloponnesus, and soon after the island of Cythe- 
 ra, near which Venus rose from the foam of the sea. 
 We are now running northerly, along the coast of an- 
 cient Sparta. It is a mountainous country, bare and 
 rocky, and looks as rude and hardy as the character of 
 its ancient sons. I have been passing the glass in vain 
 along the coast, to find a tree. A small hermitage 
 stands on the desolate extremity of the Cape, and a 
 Greek monk, the pilot tells me, has lived there many 
 years, who comes from his cell, and stands on the 
 rock with his arms outspread to bless the passing ship. 
 I looked for him in vain. 
 
 A French man-of-war bore down upon us a few 
 minutes ago, and saluted the commodore. He ran so 
 close, that we could see the features of his officers on 
 the poop. It is a noble sight at sea, a fine ship pas- 
 sing, with all hercanvass spread, with the added rapid- 
 ity of your own course and hers. The peal of the 
 guns in the midst of the solitary ocean, had a singular 
 effect. The echo came back from the naked shores 
 of Sparta, with a warlike sound, that might have stir- 
 red old Leonidas in his grave. The smoke rolled 
 away on the wind, and the noble ship hoisted her roy- 
 als once more, and went on her way. We are ma- 
 king for Napoli di Romania, with a summer breeze, 
 and hope to drop anchor beneath its fortress, at sun- 
 set. 
 
 LETTER LXXXI. 
 
 THE HARBOR OF NAPOLI — TRICOUPI AND MAVROCOR- 
 DATO, OTHo's CABINET COUNSELLORS — COLONEL GOR- 
 DON KING OTHO THE MISSES ARMANSPERGS 
 
 PRINCE OF SAXE MIAULIS, THE GREEK ADMIRAL — 
 
 EXCURSION TO ARGOS, TRE ANCIENT TERYNTHUS. 
 
 Napoli di Romania. — Anchored in the harbor of 
 Napoli after dark. An English frigate lies a little 
 in, a French and Russian brig-of-war astern, and two 
 Greek steamboats, King Otho's yacht, and a quantity 
 of caiques, fill the inner port. The fort stands a hun- 
 dred feet over our heads on a bold promontory, and 
 the rocky Palamidi soars a hundred feet still higher, 
 on a crag that thrusts its head sharply into the clouds, 
 as if it would lift the little fortress out of eyesight. 
 The town lies at the base of the mountain, an irregu- 
 lar looking heap of new houses ; and here, at present, 
 resides the boy-king of Greece, Otho the first. His 
 predecessors were Agamemnon and Perseus, who, 
 some three thousand years ago (more or less, I am 
 not certain of my chronology), reigned at Argos and 
 Mycenae, within sight of his present capitol. 
 
 Went ashore with the commodore, to call on Tri- 
 coupi and Mavrocordato, the king's cabinet counsel- 
 lors. We found the former in a new stone house, 
 slenderly furnished, and badly painted, but with an 
 entry full of servants, in handsome Greek costumes. 
 He received the commodore with the greatest friend- 
 liness. He had dined on board the Constitution six 
 years before, when his prospects were less promising 
 than now. He is a short, stout man, of dark com- 
 plexion, and very bright black eyes, and looks very 
 honest and very vulgar. He speaks English perfectly. 
 He shrugged bis shoulders when the commodore allu- 
 ded to having left him fighting for a republic, and 
 said anything was better than anarchy. He spoke in 
 the highest terms of my friend, Dr. Howe (who was 
 at Napoli with the American provisions, when Grivas 
 held the Palamidi). Greece, he said, had never a bet- 
 ter friend. Madam Tricoupi (the sister of Prince 
 Mavrocordato) came in presently with two very pretty 
 children. She spoke French fluently, and seemed an 
 accomplished woman. Her family had long furnished 
 the Prince Hospodars of Wallachia, and though not 
 a beautiful woman, she has every mark of the gentle 
 blood of the east. Colonel Gordon, the famous Phil- 
 hellene, entered, while we were there. He was an in- 
 timate friend of Lord Byron's, and has expended the 
 best part of a large fortune in the Greek cause. He 
 is a plain man, of perhaps fifty, with red hair and 
 freckled face, and features and accent very Scotch. I 
 liked his manners. He had lately written a book upon 
 Greece, which is well spoken of in some review that 
 has fallen in my way. 
 
 Went thence to Prince Mavrocordato's. He occu- 
 pies the third story of a very indifferent house, fur- 
 nished with the mere necessaries of life. A shabby 
 sofa, a table, two chairs, and a broken tumbler, hold- 
 ing ink and two pens, is the inventory of his drawing- 
 room. He received us with elegance and courtesy, 
 and presented us to his wife, a pretty and lively little 
 Constantinopolitan, who chattered French like a mag- 
 pie. She gave the uncertainty of their residence un- 
 til the seat of government was decided on, as the apol- 
 ogy for their lodgings, and seemed immediately to 
 forget that she was not in a palace. Mavrocordato is 
 a strikingly handsome man, with long, curling black 
 hair, and most luxuriant mustaches. His mouth is 
 bland, and his teeth uncommonly beautiful; but with- 
 out being able to say where it lies, there is an expres- 
 sion of guile in his face, that shut my heart to him. 
 He is getting fat, and there is a shade of red in the 
 
PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 125 
 
 clear olive of his cheek, which is very uncommon in 
 this country. The commodore remarked that he was 
 very thin when he was here six years before. The 
 settlement of affairs in Greece, has probably relieved 
 him from a great deal of care. 
 
 Presented, with the commodore, to King Otho. 
 Tricoupi officiated as chamberlain, dressed in a court 
 suit of light-blue, wrought with silver. The royal 
 residence is a comfortable house, built by Capo d'ls- 
 tria, in the principal street of Napoli. The king's 
 aid, a son of Marco Bozzaris, a very fine, resolute- 
 looking young man of eighteen, received us in the 
 antechamber, and in a few minutes the door of the 
 inner room was thrown open. His majesty stood at 
 the foot of the throne (a gorgeous red velvet arm- 
 chair, raised on a platform, and covered with a splendid 
 canopy of velvet), and with a low bow to each of us 
 as we entered, he addressed his conversation immedi- 
 ately, and without embarrassment, to the commodore. 
 I had leisure to observe him closely for a few minutes. 
 He appears about eighteen. He was dressed in an 
 exceedingly well cut, swallow-tailed coat, of very 
 light blue, with a red standing collar, wrought with 
 silver. The same work upon a red ground, was set 
 between the buttons of the waist, and upon the edges 
 of the skirts. White pantaloons, and the ordinary 
 straight court-sword, completed his dress. He is 
 rather tall, and his figure is extremely light and ele- 
 gant. A very flat nose, and high cheek-bones, are the 
 most marked features of his face ; his hair is straight, 
 and of a light brown, and with no claim to beauty ; 
 the expression of his countenance is manly, open, and 
 prepossessing. He spoke French fluently, though 
 with a German accent, and went through the usual 
 topics of a royal presentation (very much the same all 
 over the world) with grace and ease. In the few re- 
 marks which he addressed to me, he said that he 
 promised himself great pleasure in the search for an- 
 tiquities in Greece. He bowed us out after an audi- 
 ence of about ten minutes, no doubt extremely happy 
 to exchange his court-coat and our company for a ri- 
 ding-frock and saddle. His horse and a guard of 
 twelve lancers were in waiting at the door. 
 
 The king usually passes his evenings with the Miss- 
 es Armanspergs, the daughters of the president of the 
 regency. They accompanied him from Munich, and 
 are the only ladies in his realm with whom he is ac- 
 quainted. They keep a carriage, which is a kind of 
 wonder at Napoli ; ride on horseback in the English 
 style, very much to the amusement of the Greeks; 
 and give soirees once or twice a week, which are par- 
 ticularly dull. One of the three is a beautiful girl, 
 and if policy does not interfere, is likely to be Queen j 
 of Greece. The Count Armansperg is a small, 
 shrewd-looking man, with a thin German countenance, ! 
 and agreeable manners. He is, of course, the real 
 kins; of Greece. 
 
 The most agreeable man I found in Napoli, was 
 the king's uncle, the prince of Saxe. at present in 
 command of his army. He is a tall, and uncommon- 
 ly handsome soldier, of perhaps thirty-six years, and, 
 with all the air of a man of high birth, has the open 
 and frank manners of the camp. He has been twice 
 on board the ship, and seemed to consider his ac- 
 quaintance with the commodore's family as a respite 
 liom exile. The Bavarian officers in his suite spoke 
 nothing but the native German, and looked like mere 
 beef-eaters. The prince returns in two years, and 
 when the king is of age, his Bavarian troops leave 
 him, and he commits himself to the country. 
 
 Hired the only two public vehicles in Napoli, and 
 set off with the commodore's family, on an excursion 
 to the ancient cities in the neighborhood. We left the 
 gate built by the Venetians, and still adorned with a 
 bas relief of a winged lion, at nine o'clock of a clear 
 
 Grecian summer's day. Auguries were against us. 
 Pyrrhusdid the same thing with his elephants and his 
 army, one morning about two thousand years ago, and 
 was killed before noon ; and our driver stopped his 
 horses a half mile out of the gate, and told us very 
 gravely that the evil eye was upon him. He had dream- 
 ed that he had found a dollar the night before — a cer- 
 tain sign by the laws of witchcraft in Greece, that he 
 should lose one. He concluded by adding anothei 
 dollar to the price of each carriage. 
 
 We passed the house of old Miaulis, the Greek ad- 
 miral, a pretty cottage a mile from the city, and imme- 
 diately after came the ruins of the ancient Terynthvs, 
 the city of Hercules. The wails, built of the largest 
 hewn stones in the world, still stand, and will till time 
 ends. It would puzzle modern mechanics to carry 
 them away. We drove along the same road upon 
 which Autolycus taught the young hero to drive a 
 chariot, and passing ruins and fragments of columns 
 strewn over the whole length of the plain of Argos, 
 stopped under a spreading aspen tree, the only shade 
 within reach of the eye. A dirty khan stood a few 
 yards off, and our horses were to remain here while 
 we ascended the hills to Mycenae. 
 
 It was a hot walk. The appearance of ladies, as we 
 passed through a small Greek village on our way, 
 drew out all the inhabitants, and we were accompa- 
 nied by about fifty men, women, and children, resem- 
 bling very much in complexion and dress, the Indians 
 of our country. A mile from our carriages we arrived 
 at a subterranean structure, built in the side of the 
 hill, with a door toward the east, surmounted by the 
 hewn stone so famous for its size among the antiqui- 
 ties of Greece. It shuts the tomb of old Agamemnon. 
 The interior is a hollow cone, with a small chamber at 
 the side, and would make "very eligible lodgings for 
 a single gentleman," as the papers say. 
 
 We kept on up the hill, wondering that the "king 
 of many islands and of all Argos," as Homer calls 
 him, should have built his city so high in this hot cli- 
 mate. We sat down at last, quite fagged, at the gate 
 of a city built only eighteen hundred years before 
 Christ. A descendant of Perseus brought us some 
 water in a wooden piggin, and somewhat refreshed, we 
 went on with our examination of the ruins. The 
 mere weight of the walls has kept them together three 
 thousand six hundred years. Yon can judge how im- 
 moveable they must be. The antiquarians call them 
 the "cyclopean walls of Mycenae ;" and nothing less 
 than a giant, I should suppose, would dream of heav- 
 ing such enormous masses one upon the other. " The 
 gate of the Lions," probably the principal entrance to 
 the city, is still perfect. The bas-relief from which it 
 takes its name, is the oldest sculptured stone in Eu- 
 rope. It is of green basalt, representing two lions 
 rampant, very finely executed, and was brought from 
 Egypt. An angle of the city wall is just below, and 
 the ruins of a noble aqueduct are still visible, follow- 
 ing the curve of the opposite hill, and descending to 
 Mycenae on the northern side. 1 might bore you now 
 with a long chapter on antiquities (for, however dry in 
 the abstract, they are exceedingly interesting on the 
 spot), but I let you off. Those who like them will 
 find Sphon and Wheeler, Dodwell, Leake, and Gell, 
 diffuse enough for the most classic enthusiasm. 
 
 We descended by a rocky ravine, in the bosom of 
 which lay a well with six large fig-trees growing at its 
 brink. A woman, burnt black with the sun, was draw- 
 ing water in a goat-skin, and we were too happy to get 
 into the shade, and, in the name of Pan, sink delicacy 
 and ask for a drink of water. 1 have seen the time 
 when nectar in a cup of gold would have been less re- 
 freshing. 
 
 We arrived at the aspen about two o'clock, and 
 made preparations for our dinner. The sea-breeze 
 had sprung up, and came freshly over the plain of 
 
126 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 Argos. We put our claret in a goat-skin of water 
 hung at one of the wheels, the basket was produced, 
 the ladies sat in the interior of the carriage, and the 
 commodore and his son and myself, made tables of the 
 footboards ; and thus we achieved a meal which, if 
 meals are measured by content, old King Danaus and 
 his fifty daughters might have risen from their graves 
 to envy us. 
 
 A very handsome Greek woman had brought us 
 water and stood near while we were eating, and ma- 
 king over to her the remnants of the ham and its 
 condiments and the empty bottles, with which she 
 seemed made happy for a day, we went on our way to 
 Argos. 
 
 " Rivers die," it is said, "as well as men and cities." 
 We drove through the bed of " Father Inachus," 
 which was a i-espectable river in the time of Homer, 
 but which, in our day, would be puzzled to drown a 
 much less thing than a king. Men achieve immor- 
 tality in a variety of ways. King Inachus might have 
 been forgotten as the first Argive ; but by drowning 
 himself in the river which afterward took his name, 
 every knowledge-hunter that travels is compelled to 
 look up his history. So St. Nepomuc became the 
 guardian of bridges by breaking his neck over one. 
 
 The modern Argos occupies the site of the ancient. 
 It is tolerably populous, but it is a town of most wretch- 
 ed hovels. We drove through several long streets of 
 mud houses with thatched roofs, completely open in 
 front, and the whole family huddled together on the 
 clay floor, with no furniture but a flock bed in the I 
 corner. The first settlement by Deucalion and Pyr- 
 rha, on the sediment of the deluge, must have looked 
 like it. Mud, stones, and beggars, were all we saw. 
 Old Pyrrhus was killed here, after all his battles, by a 
 tile from a house-top; but modern Argos has scarce a 
 roof high enough to overtop his helmet. 
 
 We left our carriages in the street, and walked to 
 the ruins of the amphitheatre. The brazen thalamos 
 in which Dante was confined when Jupiter visited her 
 in a shower of gold, was near this spot, the supposed 
 site of most of the thirty temples once famous in 
 Argos. 
 
 Some solid brick walls, the seats of the amphithea- 
 tre cut into the solid rock of the hill, the rocky acrop- 
 olis above, and twenty or thirty horses tied together, 
 and treading out grain on a thrashing-floor in the open 
 field, were all we found of ancient or picturesque in 
 the capitol of the Argives. A hot, sultry afternoon, 
 was no time to weave romance from such materials. 
 
 We returned to our carriages, and while the Greek 
 was getting his horses into their harness, we entered 
 a most unpromising cafe for shade and water. A bil- 
 liard-table stood in the centre; and the high, broad 
 bench on which the Turks seat themselves, with their 
 legs crooked under them, stretched around the wall. 
 The proprietor was a Venetian woman, who sighed, as 
 she might well, for a gondola. The kingdom of Aga- 
 memnon was not to her taste. 
 
 After waiting awhile here for the sun to get behind 
 the hills of Sparta, we received a message from our 
 coachman, announcing that he was arrested. The 
 " evil eye" had not glanced upon him in vain. There 
 was no returning without him, and I walked over with 
 the commodore to see what could be done. A fine- 
 looking man sat cross-legged on a bench, in the upper 
 room of a building, adjoining a prison, and a man with 
 a pen in his hand, was reading the indictment. The 
 driver had struck a child who was climbing on his 
 wheel. I pleaded his case in "choice Italian," and 
 after half an hour's delay, they dismissed him, exact- 
 ing a dollar as a security for reappearance. It was a 
 curious verification of his morning's omen. 
 
 We drove on over the plain, met the king, five 
 camels, and the Misses Armanpergs, and were on 
 board soon after sunset. 
 
 LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 VISIT FROM KING OTHO AND MIAULIS — VISITS AN ENGLISH 
 AND RUSSIAN FRIGATE — BEAUTY OF THE GRECIAN 
 
 MEN LAKE LEMA — THE HERM10NICAS SINUS — HYDRA 
 
 EFINA. 
 
 Napoli di Romania. — Went ashore with one of the 
 officers, to look for the fountain of Canathus. Its 
 waters had the property (vide Pausanias) of renewing 
 the infant purity of the women who bathed in them. 
 Juno used it once a year. We found but one natural 
 spring in all Napoli. It stands in a narrow street, filled 
 with tailors, and is adorned with a marble font bearing 
 a Turkish inscription. Two girls were drawing water 
 in skins. We drank a little of it, but found nothing 
 peculiar in the taste. Its virtues are confined probably 
 to the other sex. 
 
 The king visited the ship. As his barge left the 
 pier, the vessels of war in the harbor manned their 
 yards and fired the royal salute. He was accompanied 
 by young Bozzaris and the prince, his uncle, and 
 dressed in the same uniform in which he received us 
 at our presentation. As he stepped on the deck, and 
 was received by Commodore Patterson, I thought 1 
 had never seen a more elegant and well-proportioned 
 man. The frigate was in her usual admirable order, 
 and the king expressed his surprise and giatification 
 at every turn. His questions were put with uncommon 
 judgment for a landsman. We had heard, indeed, on 
 board the English frigate which brought him from 
 Trieste, that he lost no opportunity of learning the 
 duties and management of the ship, keeping watch 
 with the midshipmen, and running from one deck to 
 the other at all hours. After going thoroughly through 
 the ship, the commodore presented him to his family. 
 He seemed very much pleased with the ease and frank- 
 ness with which he was received, and seating himself 
 with our fair countrywomen in the after-cabin, pro- 
 longed his visit to a very unceremonious length, con- 
 versing with the most unreserved gayety. The yards 
 were manned again, the salutes fired once more, and 
 the king of Greece tossed his oars for a moment under 
 the stern, and pulled ashore. 
 
 Had the pleasure and honor of showing Miaulis 
 through the ship. The old man carne on board very 
 modestly, without even announcing himself, and as he 
 addressed one of the officers in Italian, 1 was struck 
 with his noble appearance, and offered my services as 
 interpreter. He was dressed in the Hydriote costume, 
 the full blue trowsers gathered at the knee, a short open 
 jacket worked with black braid, and a red scull-cap. 
 His lieutenant, dressed in the same costume, a tall, 
 superb-looking Greek, was his only attendant. He 
 was quite at home on board, comparing the " United 
 States" continually to the Hellas, the American-built 
 frigate which he commanded. Every one on board 
 was struck with the noble simplicity and dignity of his 
 address. I have seldom seen a man who impressed 
 me more. He requested me to express his pleasure 
 at his visit, and his friendly feelings to the commodore, 
 and invited us to his country-house, which he pointed 
 out from the deck, just without the city. Every officer 
 in the ship uncovered as he passed. The gratification 
 at seeing him was universal. He looks worthy to be 
 one of the " three" that Byron demanded, in his im- 
 passioned verse, 
 
 " To make a new Thermopylae." 
 
 Returned visits of ceremony with the commodore, 
 to the English and Russian vessels of war. The British 
 frigate Madagascar is about the size of the United 
 States, but not in nearly so fine a condition. The 
 superior cleanliness and neatness of arrangement on 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 127 
 
 board our own ship are indisputable. The cabin of 
 Captain Lyon (who is said to be one of the best officers 
 in the English service), was furnished in almost oriental 
 luxury, and, what I should esteem more, crowded with 
 the choicest books. He informed us that of his twenty- 
 four midshipmen, nine were sons of noblemen, and 
 possessed the best family influence on both father's 
 and mother's side, and several of the remainder had 
 high claims for preferment. There is small chance 
 there, one would think, for commoners. 
 
 Captain Lyon spoke in the highest terms of his late 
 passenger, King Otho, both as to disposition and talent. 
 Somewhere in the iEgean, one of his Bavarian servants 
 fell overboard, and the boatswain jumped after him, 
 and sustained him till the boat was lowered to his relief. 
 On his reaching the deck, the king drew a valuable 
 repeater from his pocket, and presented it to him in 
 the presence of the crew. He certainly has caught the 
 " trick of royalty" in its perfection. 
 
 The guard presented, the boatswain " piped us over 
 the side," and we pulled alongside the Russian. The 
 file of marines drawn up in honor of the commodore 
 on her quarterdeck, looked like so many standing bears. 
 Features and limbs so brutally coarse I never saw. 
 The officers, however, were very gentlemanly, and the 
 vessel was in beautiful condition. In inquiring after 
 the health of the ladies on board our ship, the captain 
 and his lieutenant rose from their seats and made a low 
 bow — a degree of chivalrous courtesy very uncommon, 
 I fancy, since the days of Sir Piercie Shafton. I left 
 his imperial majesty's ship with an improved impres- 
 sion of him. 
 
 They are a gallant-looking people, the Greeks. By- 
 ron says of them, "all are beautiful, very much re- 
 sembling the busts of Alcibiades." We walked be- 
 yond the walls of the city this evening, on the plain 
 of Argos. The whole population were out in their 
 Sunday costumes, and no theatrical ballet was ever 
 more showy than the scene. They are a very affec- 
 tionate people, and walk usually hand in hand, or sit 
 upon the rocks at the road side, with their arms over 
 each other's shoulders ; and their picturesque attitudes 
 and lofty gait, combined with the flowing beauty of 
 their dress, give them all the appearance of heroes on 
 the stage. I saw literally no handsome women, but 
 the men were magnificent, almost without exception. 
 Among others, a young man passed us with whose 
 personal beauty the whole party were struck. As he 
 went by he laid his hand on his breast and bowed to 
 the ladies, raising his red cap, with its flowing blue 
 tassel, at the same time with perfect grace. It was a 
 young man to whom I had been introduced the day 
 previous, a brother of Mavromichalis, the assassin of 
 Capo d'Istrias. He is about seventeen, tall and straight 
 as an arrow, and has the eye of a falcon. His family 
 is one of the first in Greece ; and his brother who was 
 a fellow of superb beauty, is said to have died in the 
 true heroic style, believing that he had rid his country 
 of a tyrant. 
 
 The view of Napoli and the Palamidi from the 
 plain, with its back ground of the Spartan mountains, 
 and the blue line of the Argolic gulf between, is very 
 fine. The home of the Nemean lion, the lofty hill 
 rising above Argos, was enveloped in a black cloud as 
 the sun set on our walk, the short twilight of Greece 
 thickened upon us, and the white, swaying juktanillas 
 of the Greeks striding past, had the effect of spirits 
 gliding by in the dark. 
 
 The king, with his guard of lancers on a hard trot, 
 passed us near the gate, followed close by the Misses 
 Armansperg, mounted on fine Hungarian horses. His 
 majesty rides beautifully, and the effect of the short 
 high-DOOM flag; on the "tips of the lances, and the tall 
 Polish caps with their cord and tassels, is highly pic- 
 turesque. 
 
 Made an excursion with the commodore across the 
 gulf, to Lake Lerna, the home of the hydra. We saw 
 nothing save the half dozen small marshy lakes, whose 
 overflow devastated the country, until they were dam- 
 med by Hercules, who is thus poetically said to have 
 killed a many-headed monster. We visited, near-by, 
 " the mills," which were the scene of one of the most 
 famous battles of the late struggle. The mill is sup- 
 plied by a lovely stream, issuing from beneath a rock, 
 and running a short course of twenty or thirty rods to 
 the sea. It is difficult to believe that human blood 
 has ever stained its pure waters. 
 
 Left Napoli with the daylight breeze, and are now 
 entering the Hermionicus Sinus A more barren land 
 never rose upon the eye. The ancients considered 
 this part of Greece so near to hell, that they omitted 
 to put the usual obolon into the hands of those who 
 died here, to pay their passage across the Styx. 
 
 Off the town of Hydra. This is the birthplace of 
 Miaulis, and its neighbor island, Spesia, that of the sail- 
 or heroine Bobolina. It is a heap of square stone hous- 
 es set on the side of a hill, without the slightest refer- 
 ence to order. I see with the glass, an old Greek 
 smoking on his balcony, with his feet over the railing, 
 and half a dozen bare-legged women getting a boat 
 into the water on the beach. The whole island has 
 a desolate and steril aspect. Across the strait, directly 
 opposite the town, lies a lovely green valley, with ol 
 ive groves and pastures between, and hundreds of gray 
 cattle feeding in all the peace of Arcadia. I have seen 
 such pictures so seldom of late, that it is like a medi 
 cine to my sight. " The sea and the sky," after a 
 while, " lie like a load on the weary eye." 
 
 In passing two small islands just now, we caught a 
 glimpse between them of the "John Adams," sloop- 
 of-war, under full sail in the opposite direction. Five 
 minutes sooner or later we should have missed her. 
 She has been cruising in the archipelago a month or 
 two, waiting the commodore's arrival, and has on board, 
 despatches and letters, which make the meeting a very 
 exciting one to the officers. There is a general stir of 
 expectation on board, in which my only share is that 
 of sympathy. She brings her news from Smyrna, to 
 which port, though my course has been errant enough, 
 you will scarce have thought of directing a letter for 
 
 Anchored off" the island of Egina, a mile from the 
 town. The rocks which King iEacus (since Judge 
 TEacus of the infernal regions) raised in the harbor to 
 keep off the pirates, prevent our nearer approach. A 
 beautiful garden of oranges and figs close to our an- 
 chorage, promises to reconcile us to our position. 
 The little bay is completely shut in by mountainous 
 islands, and the sun pours down upon us, unabated bv 
 the " wooing Egean wind." 
 
 LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 THE MAID OF ATHENS ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 AMERICAN BENEFACTIONS TO GREECE A GREEK 
 
 WIFE AND SCOTTISH HUSBAND SCHOOL OF CAPC 
 
 D'ISTRIAS GRECIAN DISINTERESTEDNESS RUINS 
 
 OF THE MOST ANCIENT TEMPLE BEAUTY OF THE 
 
 GRECIAN LANDSCAPE HOPE FOR THE LAND OF 
 
 EPAMINONDAS AND ARISTIDES. 
 
 Island of Egina. — The "Maid of Athens," in the 
 very teeth of poetry, has become Mrs. Black of Egina! 
 The beautiful Teresa Makri, of whom Byron asked 
 back his heart, of whom Moore and Hobhouse, and 
 
128 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 the poet himself have written so much and so passion- 
 ately, has forgotten the sweet burtheu of the sweet- 
 est of love songs, and taken the unromantic name, 
 and followed the unromantic fortunes, of a Scotch- 
 man ! 
 
 The commodore proposed that we should call upon 
 her on our way to the temple of Jupiter, this morning. 
 We pulled up to the town in the barge, and landed on 
 the handsome pier built by Dr. Howe (who expended 
 thus, most judiciously, a part of the provisions sent 
 from our country in his charge), and, finding a Greek 
 in the crowd, who understood a little Italian, we were 
 soon on our way to Mrs. Black's. Our guide was a 
 fine, grave-looking man of forty, with a small cockade 
 on his red cap, which indicated that he was some 
 way in the service of the government. He laid his 
 hand on his heart, when I asked him if he had 
 known any Americans in Egina. " They built this," 
 said he, pointing to the pier, the handsome granite 
 posts of which we were passing at the moment. " They 
 gave us bread, and meat, and clothing, when we should 
 otherwise have perished." It was said with a look 
 and tone that thrilled me. I felt as if the whole 
 debt of sympathy which Greece owes our country, 
 were repaid by this one energetic expression of grat- 
 itude. 
 
 We stopped opposite a small gate, and the Greek 
 went in without cards. It was a small stone house of 
 a story and a half, with a rickety flight of wooden steps 
 at the side, and not a blade of grass or sign of a flower 
 in court or window. If there had been but a geranium 
 in the porch, or a rose-tree by the gate, for descrip- 
 tion's sake. 
 
 Mr. Black was out — Mrs. Black was in. We walk- 
 ed up the creaking steps, with a Scotch terrier barking 
 and snapping at our heels, and were met at the door 
 by, really, a very pretty woman. She smiled as I 
 apologized for our intrusion, and a sadder or a sweeter 
 smile I never saw. She said her welcome in a few, 
 simple words of Italian, and I thought there were few 
 sweeter voices in the world. I asked her if she had 
 not learned English yet. She colored, and said, " No, 
 signore !" and the deep spot in her cheek faded gradu- 
 ally down, in teints a painter would remember. Her 
 husband, she said, had wished to learn her language, 
 and would never let her speak English. I began to 
 feel a prejudice against him. Presently, a boy of per- 
 haps three years, came into the room — an ugly, white- 
 headed, Scotch-looking little ruffian, thin-lipped and 
 freckled, and my aversion for Mr. Black became quite 
 decided. "Did you not regret leaving Athens?" I 
 asked. " Very much, signore," she answered with 
 half a sigh ; " but my husband dislikes Athens." 
 Horrid Mr. Black ! thought I. 
 
 I wished to ask her of Lord Byron, but I had heard 
 that the poet's admiration had occasioned the usual 
 scandal attendant on every kind of pre-eminence, and 
 her modest and timid manners, while they assured me 
 of her purity of heart, made me afraid to venture 
 where there was even a possibility of wounding her. 
 She sat in a drooping attitude on the coarsely-covered 
 divan, which occupied three sides of the little room, 
 and it was difficult to believe that any eye but her 
 husband's had ever looked upon her, or that the 
 "wells of her heart" had ever been drawn upon for 
 anything deeper than the simple duties of a wife and 
 mother. 
 
 She offered us some sweetmeats, the usual Greek 
 compliment to visiters, as we rose to go, and laying 
 her hand upon her heart, in the beautiful custom 
 of the country, requested me to express her thanks to 
 the commodore for the honor he had done her in call- 
 ing, and to wish him and his family every happiness. 
 A servant-girl, very shabbily dressed, stood at the side 
 door, and we offered her some money, which she 
 
 might have taken unnoticed. She drew herself up 
 very coldly, and refused it, as if she thought we had 
 quite mistaken her. In a country where gifts of the 
 kind are so universal, it spoke well for the pride of the 
 family, at least. 
 
 I turned after we had taken leave, and made an 
 apology to speak to her again ; for, in the interest of 
 the general impression she had made upon me, I had 
 forgotten to notice her dress, and I was not sure that 
 I could remember a single feature of her face. We 
 had called unexpectedly of course, and her dress was 
 very plain. A red cloth cap bound about the temples, 
 with a colored shawl, whose folds were mingled with 
 large braids of dark brown hair, and decked with a 
 tassel of blue silk, which fell to her left shoulder, 
 formed her head-dress. In other respects she was 
 dressed like a European. She is a little above the 
 middle height, slightly and well formed, and walks 
 weakly, like most Greek women, as if her feet were 
 too small for her weight. Her skin is dark and clear, 
 and she has a color in her cheek and lips that looks to 
 me consumptive. Her teeth are white and regular, 
 her face oval, and her forehead and nose form the 
 straight line of the Grecian model — one of the few in- 
 stances I have ever seen of it. Her eyes are large, 
 and of a soft, liquid hazel, and this is her chief beauty. 
 There is that " looking out of the soul through them," 
 which Byron always described as constituting the love- 
 liness that most moved him. I made up my mind, as 
 we walked away, that she would be a lovely woman 
 anywhere. Her horrid name, and the unpreposses- 
 sing circumstances in which we found her, had un- 
 charmed, I thought, all poetical delusion that would 
 naturally surround her as the "Maid of Athens." We 
 met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose Scotch hus- 
 band's terrier had worried us at her door, and we left 
 her, feeling that the poetry which she had called forth 
 from the heart of Byron, was her due by every law of 
 loveliness. 
 
 From the house of the maid of Athens we walked 
 to the school of Capo d'Istrias. It is a spacious stone 
 quadrangle, enclosing a court handsomely railed and 
 gravelled, and furnished with gymnastic apparatus. 
 School was out, and perhaps a hundred and fifty 
 boys were playing in the area. An intelligent-looking 
 man accompanied us through the museum of antiqui- 
 ties, where we saw nothing very much worth noticing, 
 after the collections of Rome, and to the library, where 
 there was a superb bust of Capo d'Istrias, done by a 
 Roman artist. It is a noble head, resembling Wash- 
 ington. 
 
 We bought a large basket of grapes for a few cents 
 in returning to the boat, and offered money to one or 
 two common men who had been of assistance to us, 
 but no one would receive it. I italicise the remark, be- 
 cause the Greeks are so often stigmatized as utterly 
 mercenary. 
 
 We pulled along the shore, passing round the point 
 on which stands a single fluted column, the only re- 
 mains of a magnificent temple of Venus, and, getting 
 the wind, hoisted a sail, and ran down the northern 
 side of the island five or six miles, till we arrived op- 
 posite the mountain on which stands the temple of 
 Jupiter Panhetlenios. The view of it from the sea 
 was like that of a temple drawn on the sky. It occu- 
 pies the very peak of the mountain, and is seen many 
 miles on either side by the mariner of the Egean. 
 
 A couple of wild-looking, handsome fellows, bare- 
 headed and barelegged, with shirts and trowsers 
 reaching to the knee, lay in a small caique under 
 the shore; and, as we landed, the taller of the two 
 laid his hand on his breast, and offered to conduct 
 us to the temple. The ascent was about a mile. 
 
 We toiled over ploughed fields, with here and there 
 a cluster of fig trees, wild patches of rock and brier. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 129 
 
 and an occasional wall, and arrived breathless at the 
 top, where a cool wind met us from the other side of 
 the sea with delicious refreshment. 
 
 We sat down among the ruins of the oldest temple 
 of Greece after that of Corinth. Twenty-three noble 
 columns still lifted their heads over us, after braving 
 the tempests of more than two thousand years. The 
 ground about was piled up with magnificent frag- 
 ments of marble, preserving, even in their fall, the 
 sharp edges of the admirable sculpture of Greece. 
 The Doric capital, the simple frieze, the well-fitted 
 frustra, might almost be restored in the perfection 
 with which they were left by the last touch of the 
 chisel. 
 
 The view hence comprised a classic world. There 
 was Athens ! The broad mountain over the intensely 
 blue gulf at our feet was Hy mettus, and a bright white 
 summit as of a mound between it and the sea, glitter- 
 ing brightly in the sun, was the venerable pile of tem- 
 ples in the Acropolis. To the left, Corinth was dis- 
 tinguishable over its low isthmus, and Megara and 
 Salamis, and following down the wavy line of the 
 mountains of Attica, the promontory of Sunium, mod- 
 ern Cape Colonna, dropped the horizon upon the sea. 
 One might sit out his life amid these loftily-placed 
 ruins, and scarce exhaust in thought the human his- 
 tory that has unrolled within the scope of his eye. 
 
 We passed two or three hours wandering about 
 among the broken columns, and gazing away to the 
 main and the distant isles, confessing the surpassing 
 beauty of Greece. Yet have its mountains scarce a 
 green spot, and its vales are treeless and uninhabited, 
 and all that constitutes desolation is there, and strange 
 as it may seem, you neither miss the verdure, nor the 
 people, nor find it desolate. The outline of Greece, 
 in the first place, is the finest in the world. The 
 mountains lean down into the valleys, and the plains 
 swell up to the mountains, and the islands rise from 
 the sea, with a mixture of boldness and grace alto- 
 gether peculiar. In the most lonely parts of the 
 Egean, where you can see no trace of a human foot, 
 it strikes you like a foreign land. Then the atmos- 
 phere is its own, and it exceeds that of Italy, far. It 
 gives it the look of a landscape seen through a faintly- 
 teinted glass. Soft blue mists of the most rarefied and 
 changing shapes envelop the mountains on the clear- 
 est day, and without obscuring the most distant points 
 perceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses 
 that of verdure. I never saw such air as I see in 
 Greece. It has the same effect on the herbless and 
 rocky scenery about us, as a veil over the face of a 
 woman. 
 
 The islander who had accompanied us to the tem- 
 ple, stood on a fragment of a column, still as a statue, 
 looking down upon the sea toward Athens. His fig- 
 ure for athletic grace of mould, and his head and fea- 
 tures, for the expression of manly beauty and charac- 
 ter, might have been models to Phidias. The beau- 
 tiful and poetical land, of which he inherited his share 
 of unparalleled glory, lay around him. I asked myself 
 why it should have become, as it seems to be, the de- 
 spair of the philanthropist. Why should its people, 
 who, in the opinion of Child Harold, are "nature's fa- 
 vorites still," be branded and abandoned as irreclaima- ! 
 blc rogues, and the source to which we owe, even to j 
 this day, our highest models of taste, be neglected and ' 
 forgotten ? The nine days' enthusiasm for Greece 
 has died away, and she has received a king from a j 
 family of despots. But there seems to me in her very j 
 beauty, and in the still superior qualities of her chil- I 
 dren, wherever they have room for competition, a 
 promise of resuscitation. The convulsions of Europe 
 may leave her soon to herself, and the slipper of the 
 Turk, and the hand of the Christian, once lifted fairly 
 from her neck, she will rise, and stand up amid these 
 imperishable temples, once more/re« / 
 
 LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 ATHENS — RUINS OF THE PARTHENON THE ACROPO- 
 LIS TEMPLE OF THESEUS THE OLDEST OF ATHE- 
 NIAN ANTIQUITIES BURIAL-PLACE OF THE SON OF 
 
 MIAULIS REFLECTIONS ON STANDING WHERE PLATO 
 
 TAUGHT, AND DEMOSTHENES HARANGUED BAVARI- 
 AN SENTINEL TURKISH MOSQUE, ERECTED WITHIN 
 
 THE SANCTUARY OF THE PARTHENON WRETCHED 
 
 HABITATIONS OF THE MODERN ATHENIANS. 
 
 Egean Sea. — We got underway this morning, and 
 stood toward Athens, followed by the sloop-of-war, 
 John Adams, which had come to anchor under our 
 stern the evening of our arrival at Egina. The day 19 
 like every day of the Grecian summer, heavenly. The 
 stillness and beauty of a new world lie about us. The 
 ships steal on with their clouds of canvass just filling 
 in the li°ht breeze of the Egean, and withdrawing the 
 eye from the lofty temple crowning the mountain on 
 our lee, whose shining columns shift slowly as we pass ; 
 we could believe ourselves asleep on the sea. I have 
 been repeating to myself the beautiful reflection of 
 Servius Sulpitius, which occurs in his letter of condo- 
 lence to Cicero, on the death of his daughter, written 
 on this very spot. *"On my return from Asia," he 
 says, " as I was sailing from Egina toward Megara, I 
 began to contemplate the prospect of the countries 
 around me. Egina was behind, Megara before me ; 
 Piraeus on the right, Corinth on the left; all which 
 towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturn- 
 ed and buried in the ruins ; upon this sight, I could 
 not but presently think within myself, ' Alas ! how do 
 we poor mortals fret and vex ourselves if any of our 
 friends happen to die or be killed, whose life is yet so 
 short, when the carcases of so many cities lie here ex- 
 posed before me in one view.' " 
 
 The columns of the Parthenon are easily distin- 
 guishable with the glass, and to the right of the Acrop- 
 olis, in the plain, I see a group of tall ruins, which by 
 the position must be near the banks of the llissus. I 
 turn the glass upon the sides of the mount Hymettus, 
 whose beds of thyme, "the long, long summer gilds," 
 and I can scarce believe that the murmur of the bees 
 is not stealing over the water to my ear. Can this be 
 Athens? Are these the same isles and mountains Al- 
 cibiades saw, returning with his victorious galleys from 
 the Hellespont ; the same that faded on the long gaze 
 of the conqueror of Salamis, leaving his ungrateful 
 country for exile : the same that to have seen, for a 
 Roman, was to be complete as a man; the same whose 
 proud dames wore the golden grasshopper in their 
 hair, as a boasting token that they had sprung from 
 the soil ; the same where Pericles nursed the arts, and 
 Socrates and Plato taught "humanity," and Epicurus 
 walked with his disciples, looking for truth? What 
 an offset are these thrilling thoughts, with the nearing 
 view in my sight, to a whole calendar of common mis- 
 fortune! 
 
 Dropped anchor in the Piraeus, the port of Athens. 
 The city is five miles in the interior, and the "arms 
 of Athens," as the extending walls were called, stretch- 
 ed in the times of the republic from the Acropolis to 
 the sea. The Piraeus, now nearly a deserted port, 
 with a few wretched houses, was then a large city. It 
 wants an hour to sunset, and I am about starting with 
 one of the officers to walk to Athens. 
 
 Five miles more sacred in history than those be- 
 tween the Piraeus and the Acropolis, do not exist in 
 the world. We walked them in about two hours, 
 with a golden sunset at our backs, and the excitement 
 inseparable from an approach to "the eye of Greece," 
 giving elasticity to our steps. Near the Parthenon, 
 
 • " Ex Asia rediens," etc.— I have given the translation frorn 
 Middleton's Cicero. 
 
130 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 which had been glowing in a flood of saffron light be- 
 fore us, the road separated, and taking the right, we 
 entered the city by its southern gate. A tall Greek, 
 who was returning from the plains with a gun on his 
 shoulder, led us through the narrow streets of the 
 modern town to a hotel, where a comfortable supper, 
 of which the most attractive circumstance to me was 
 some honey from Hymettus, brought us to bed-time. 
 
 We were standing under the colonnades of the 
 temples of Theseus, the oldest, and the best preserved 
 of the antiquities of Athens, at an early hour. We 
 walked around it in wonder. The sun that threw in- 
 ward the shadows of its beautiful columns, had risen 
 on that eastern porch for more than two thousand 
 years, and it is still the transcendent model of the 
 world. The Parthenon was a copy of it. The now 
 venerable and ruined temples of Rome, were built in 
 its proportions when it was already an antiquity. The 
 modern edifices of every civilized nation are considered 
 faulty only as they depart from it. How little dream- 
 ed the admirable Grecian, when its proportions rose 
 gradually to his patient thought, that the child of his 
 teeming imagination would be so immortal! 
 
 The situation of the Theseion has done much to 
 preserve it. It stands free of the city, while the Par- 
 thenon and the other temples of the Acropolis, being 
 within the citadel, have been battered by every assail- 
 ant, from the Venetian to the ikonoklast and the Turk. 
 It looks at a little distance like a modern structure, its 
 parts are so nearly perfect. It is only on coming close 
 to the columns that you see the stains in the marble 
 to be the corrosion of the long-feeding tooth of ages. 
 A young Englishman is buried within the nave of the 
 temple, and the son of Miaulis, said to have been a 
 young man worthy of the best days of Greece, lies in 
 the eastern porch, with the weeds growing rank over 
 his grave. 
 
 We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid 
 a heap of ruins. It was the entrance to the ancient 
 Agora. Here assembled the people of Athens, the 
 constituents and supporters of Pericles, the first pos- 
 sessors of these god-like temples. Here were sown, 
 in the ears of the Athenians, the first seeds of glory 
 and sedition, by patriots and demagogues, in the stir- 
 ring days of Plataea and Marathon. Here was it first 
 whispered that Aristides had been too long called 
 " the just," and that Socrates corrupted the youth of 
 Athens. And, for a lighter thought, it was here that 
 the wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come 
 forth publicly and sign her divorce, was snatched up 
 in the arms of her brilliant, but dissolute husband, and 
 carried forcibly home, forgiving him, woman-like, with 
 but half a repentance. The feeling with which I read 
 the story when a boy, is strangely fresh in my memory. 
 
 We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is 
 winding and difficult, and, near the gates, encumbered 
 with marble rubbish. Volumes have been written on 
 the antiquities which exist still within the walls. The 
 greater part of four unrivalled temples are still lifted to 
 the sun by this tall rock in the centre of Athens, the 
 majestic Parthenon, visible over half Greece, towering 
 above all. A Bavarian soldier received our passport 
 at the gate. He was resting the butt of his musket 
 on a superb bas-relief, a fragment from the ruins. 
 How must the blood of a Greek boil to see a barbarian 
 thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his glory. 
 
 We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and 
 looked down on Greece. Right through a broad gap 
 in the mountains, as if they had been swept away that 
 Athens might be seen, stood the shining Acropolis of 
 Corinth. I strained my eyes to see Diogenes lying 
 under the walls, and Alexander standing in his sun- 
 shine. "Sea-born Salamis" was beneath me, but the 
 "ships by thousands" were not there, and the king had 
 
 vanished from his " rocky throne" with his " men and 
 nations." JEgina lay far down the gulf, folded in its 
 blue mist, and I strained my sight to see Aristides 
 wandering in exile on its shore. " Mars Hill," was 
 within the sound of my voice, but its Areopagus was 
 deserted of its judges, and the intrepid apostle was 
 gone. The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the acad- 
 emy of Plato, and the banks of the llissus, where Soc- 
 rates and Zeno taught, were all around me, but the 
 wily orator, and the, philosopher "on whose infant lips 
 the bees shed honey as he slept," and he whose death 
 and doctrine have been compared to those of Christ, 
 and the self-denying stoic, were alike departed. Si- 
 lence and ruin brood over all ! 
 
 I walked through the nave of the Parthenon, passing 
 a small Turkish mosque (built sacrilegiously by the 
 former Disdar of Athens, within its very sanctuary), 
 and mounted the southeastern rampart of the Acrop- 
 olis. Through the plain beneath ran the classic ll- 
 issus, and on its banks stood the ruins of the temple 
 of Jupiter Olympus, which I had distinguished with 
 the glass in coming up the Egean. The llissus was 
 nearly dry, but a small island covered with verdure di- 
 vided its waters a short distance above the temple, and 
 near it were distinguishable the foundations of the 
 Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there 
 no more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feed- 
 ing up toward Hymettus, the only trace of life in a 
 valley that was once alive with the brightest of the 
 tides of human existence. 
 
 The sun poured into the Acropolis with an inten 
 sity I have seldom felt. The morning breeze had 
 died away, and the glare from the bright marble ruins 
 was almost intolerable to the eye. I climbed around 
 over the heaps of fragmented columns, and maimed and 
 fallen statues, to the northwestern corner of the cita- 
 adel, and sat down in the shade of one of the embra- 
 sures to look over toward Plato's academy. The part 
 of the city below this corner of the wall was the an- 
 cient Pelasgicum. It was from the spot where I sat 
 that Parrhesiades, the fisherman, is represented in 
 Lucian to have angled for philosophers, with a hook 
 baited with gold and figs. 
 
 The academy (to me the most interesting spot of 
 Athens) is still shaded with olive groves, as in the 
 time of Plato. The Cephissus, whose gentle flow has 
 mingled its murmur with so much sweet philosophy, 
 was hidden from my sight by the numberless trees. I 
 looked toward the spot with inexpressible interest. I 
 had not yet been near enough to dispel the illusion. 
 To me, the academy was still beneath those silvery 
 olives in all its poetic glory. The "Altar of Love" 
 still stood before the entrance; the temple of Prome- 
 theus, the sanctuary of the Muses, the statues of 
 Plato and of the Graces, the sacred olive, the tank in 
 the coal gardens, and the tower of the railing Timon, 
 were all there. I could almost have waited till even- 
 ing to see Epicurus and Leontium, Socrates and As- 
 pasia, returning to Athens. 
 
 We passed the Tower of the Winds, the ancient 
 Klepsydra or water-clock of Athens, in returning to 
 the hotel. The Eight Winds sculptured on the oc- 
 tagonal sides, are dressed according to their tempera- 
 tures, six of them being more or less draped, and the 
 remaining two nude. It is a small marble building, 
 more curious than beautiful. 
 
 Our way lay through the sultry streets of modern 
 Athens. I can give you an idea of it in a single sen- 
 tence. It is a large village, of originally mean houses, 
 pulled down to the very cellars, and lying choked in its 
 rubbish. A* large square in ruins after a fire in one of 
 our cities, looks like it. It has been destroyed so often 
 by Turks and Greeks alternately, that scarce one stone 
 is left upon the other. The inhabitants thatch over 
 one corner of these wretched and dusty holes with 
 
PENCILLLNGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 131 
 
 maize stalks and straw, and live there like beasts. The 
 fineness of the climate makes a roof almost unneces- 
 sary for eight months in the year. The consuls and 
 authorities of the place, and the missionaries, have 
 tolerable houses, but the paths to them are next to 
 impracticable for the rubbish. Nothing but a Turk- 
 ish horse, which could be ridden up a precipice, would 
 ever pick his way through the streets. 
 
 LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 THE "LANTERN OF DEMOSTHENES" — BYRON's RESIDENCE 
 IN ATHENS — TEMPLE OF JUPITER OLYMPUS, SEVEN 
 
 HUNDRED YEARS IN BUILDING SUPERSTITIOUS FANCY 
 
 OF THE ATHENIANS RESPECTING ITS RUINS — HERMIT- 
 AGE OF A GREEK MONK — PETARCHES, THE ANTIQUA- 
 RY AND POET, AND HIS WIFE, SISTER TO THE " MAID 
 OF ATHENS" — MUTILATION OF A BASSO RELIEVO BY AN 
 ENGLISH OFFICER THE ELGIN MARBLES — THE CARY- 
 ATIDES—LORD BYRON'S AUTOGRAPH ATTACHMENT 
 
 Or THE GREEKS TO DR. HOWE — THE SLIDING STONE 
 
 A SCENE IN THE ROSTRUM OF DEMOSTHENES. 
 
 Took a walk by sunset to the Ilissus. I passed, on 
 the way, the " Lantern of Demosthenes," a small oc- 
 tagonal building of marble, adorned with splendid col- 
 umns and a beautifully-sculptured frieze, in which it 
 is said the orator used to shut himself for a month, 
 with his head half shaved, to practise his orations. 
 The Franciscan convent, Byron's residence while in 
 Athens, was built adjoining it. It is now demolished. 
 The poet's name is written with his own hand on a 
 marble slab of the wall. 
 
 I left the city by the gate of Hadrian, and walked on 
 to the temple of Jupiter Olympus. It crowns a small 
 elevation on the northern bank of the Ilissus. It was 
 onre beyond all comparison the largest and most costly 
 building in the world. During seven hundred years 
 it employed the attention of the rulers of Greece, from 
 Pisistratus to Hadrian, and was never quite completed. 
 As a ruin it is the most beautiful object I ever saw. 
 Thirteen columns of Pentelic marble, partly connect- 
 ed by a frieze, are all that remain. They are of the 
 flowery Corinthian order, and sixty feet in height, ex- 
 clusive of base or capital. 
 
 Three perfect columns stand separate from the rest, 
 and lift from the midst of that solitary plain with an 
 effect that, to my mind, is one of the highest sublim- 
 ity. The sky might rest on them. They seem made 
 to sustain it. As I lay on the parched grass and gazed 
 on them in the glory of a Grecian sunset, they seemed 
 to me proportioned for a continent. The mountains 
 I saw between them were not designed with more am- 
 plitude, nor corresponded more nobly to the sky above. 
 
 The people of Athens have a superstitious reverence 
 for these ruins. Dodwell says, "The single column 
 toward the western extremity was thrown down, many 
 years ago. by a Turkish voivode, for the sake of the 
 materials, which were employed in constructing the 
 great mosque of the bazar. The Athenians relate, 
 that, after it was thrown down, the three others nearest 
 it were heard to lament the loss of their sister! and 
 these nocturnal lamentations did not cease till the 
 sacrilegious voivode was destroyed by poison. 
 
 Two of the columns, connected by one immense 
 slab, are surmounted by a small building, now in ruins, 
 but once the hermitage of a Greek monk. Here he 
 passed his life, seventy feet in the air, sustained by two 
 of the most graceful columns of Greece. A basket, 
 lowered by a line, was filled by the pious every morn- 
 ing, but the romantic eremite was never seen. With 
 the lofty Acropolis crowned with temples just bevond 
 him, the murmuring Ilissus below, the thyme-covered 
 sides of Hymettus to the south, and the "blue Egean | 
 
 stretching away to the west, his eye, at least, could 
 never tire. There are times when I could envy him 
 his lift above the world. 
 
 I descended to the Fountain of Callirhne, which 
 gushes from beneath a rock in the bed of the Jlissus, 
 just below the temple. It is the scene of the death 
 of the lovely nymph-mother of Ganymede. The twi- 
 light air was laden with the fragrant thyme, and the 
 songs of the Greek laborers returning from the fields 
 came faintly over the plains. Life seems too short, 
 when every breath is a pleasure. I loitered about the 
 clear and rocky lip of the fountain, till the pool below 
 reflected the stars in its trembling bosom. The lamps 
 began to twinkle in Athens, Hesperus rose over Mount 
 Pentelicus like a blazing lamp, the sky over Salamis 
 faded down to the sober teint of night, and the columns 
 of the Parthenon mingled into a single mass of shade. 
 And so, I thought, as I strolled back to the city, con- 
 cludes a day in Athens — one, at least, in my life, for 
 j which it is worth the trouble to have lived. "• 
 
 I was again in the Acropolis the following morning. 
 Mr. Hill had kindly given me a note to Petarches 
 the king's antiquary, a young Athenian, who married 
 the sister of the Maid of Athens.* AVe went together 
 through the ruins. They have lately made new exca- 
 vations, and some superb bassi-relieii are among the 
 discoveries. One of them represented a procession 
 leading victims to sacrifice, and was quite the finest 
 thing I ever saw. The leading figure was a superb 
 female, from the head of which the nose had lately 
 been barbarously broken. The face of the enthusi- 
 astic antiquary flushed while I was lamenting it. It 
 was done, he told me, but a week before, by an officer 
 of the English squadron then lying at the Piraeus. 
 Petarches detected it immediately, and sent word to 
 the admiral, who discovered the heartless Goth in a 
 j nephew of an English duke, a midshipman of his own 
 ship. I should not have taken the trouble to men- 
 | tion so revolting a circumstance if I had not seen, in a 
 | splendid copy of the "Illustrations of Byron's Travels 
 [ in Greece," a most virulent attack on the officers of 
 j the Constellation, and Americans generally, for the 
 same thing. Who but Englishmen have robbed 
 Athens, and Egina, and all Greece ? Who but Eng- 
 lishmen are watched like thieves in their visits to every 
 place of curiQsity in the world ? Where is the superb 
 caryatid of the Erechtheion? stolen, with such bar- 
 barous carelessness, too, that the remaining statues 
 and the superb portico they sustained are tumblingto 
 the ground ! The insolence of England's laying such 
 sins at the door of another nation is insufferable. 
 
 For my own part, I can not conceive the motive for 
 carrying away a fragment of a statue or a column. I 
 should as soon think of drawing a tooth as a specimen 
 of some beautiful woman I had seen in my travels. 
 And how one dare show such a theft to any person of 
 taste, is quite as singular. Even when a whole column 
 or statue is carried away, its main charm is gone with 
 the association of the place. I venture to presume, 
 that no person of classic feeling ever saw Lord Elgin's 
 marbles without execrating the folly that could bring 
 them from their bright, native sky, to the vulgar atmo- 
 sphere of London. For the love of taste, let us dis- 
 countenance such barbarisms in America. 
 
 The Erechtheion and the adjoining temple are gems 
 of architecture. The small portico of the caryatides 
 (female figures, in the place of columns, with their 
 hands on their hips) must have been one of the most 
 exquisite things in Greece. One of them (fallen in 
 consequence of Lord Elgin's removal of the sister 
 
 * You will recollect what Byron says of these three girls 
 in one of his letters to Dr. Drtiry : " I had almost forgot to 
 tell you, that I am dying for love of three Greek girls, at 
 Athens, sisters. I lived in the same house. Teresa, Mar- 
 
 cama, and Katinka, are the names of these divinities ail 
 
 under fifteen." 
 
132 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 statue), lies headless on the ground, and the remaining 
 ones are badly mutilated, but they are very, very beau- 
 tiful. I remember two in the Villa Albani, at Rome, 
 brought from some other temple in Greece, and con- 
 sidered the choicest gems of the gallery. 
 
 We climbed up to the sanctuary of the Erechtheion, 
 in which stood the altars to the two elements to which 
 the temples were dedicated. The sculpture around 
 the cornices is still so sharp that it might have been 
 finished yesterday. The young antiquary alluded to 
 Byron's anathema against Lord Elgin, in Chile Har- 
 old, and showed me, on the inside of the capital of 
 one of the columns, the place where the poet had 
 written his name. It was, as he always wrote it, sim- 
 ply " Byron," in small letters, and would not be noticed 
 by an ordinary observer. 
 
 If the lover, as the poet sings, was jealous of the 
 star his mistress gazed upon, the sister of the " Maid 
 of Athens" may well be jealous of the Parthenon. 
 Petarches looks at it and talks of it with a fever in his 
 eyes. I could not help smiling at his enthusiasm. 
 He is about twenty-five, of a slender person, with 
 downcast, melancholy eyes, and looks the poet ac- 
 cording to the most received standard. His reserved 
 manners melted toward me on discovering that I knew 
 our countryman, Dr. Howe, who, he tells me, was his 
 groomsman (or the corresponding assistant at a Greek 
 wedding), and to whom he seems, in common with all 
 his countrymen, warmly attached. To a man of his 
 taste, I can conceive nothing more gratifying than his 
 appointment to the care of the Acropolis. He spends 
 his day there with his book, attending the few travel- 
 lers who come, and when the temples are deserted, he 
 sits down in the shadow of a column, and reads amid 
 the silence of the ruins he almost worships. There 
 are {ew vocations in this envious world so separated 
 from the jarring passions of our nature. 
 
 Passed the morning on horseback, visiting the an- 
 tiquities without the city. Turning by the temple of 
 Theseus, we crossed Mars Hill, the seat of the Are- 
 opagus, and passing a small valley, ascended the Pnyx. 
 On the right of the path we observed the rock of the 
 hill worn to the polish of enamel by friction. It was 
 an almost perpendicular descent of six or seven feet, 
 and steps were cut at the sides to mouni to the top. 
 It is the famous sliding stone, believed by the Athenians 
 to possess the power of determining the sex of unborn 
 children. The preference of sons, if the polish of the 
 stone is to be trusted, is universal in Greece. 
 
 The rostrum of Demosthenes was above us on the 
 side of the hill facing from the sea. A small platform 
 is cut into the rock, and on either side a seat is hewn 
 out, probably for the distinguished men of the state. 
 The audience stood on the side-hill, and the orator 
 and his listeners were in the open air. An older ros- 
 trum is cut into the summit of the hill, facing the sea. 
 It is said that when the maritime commerce of Greece 
 began to enrich the lower classes, the thirty tyrants 
 turned the rostrum toward the land, lest their orators 
 should point to the ships of the Piraeus, and remind 
 the people of their power. 
 
 Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood 
 on the spot. I saw Demosthenes, after his first unsuc- 
 cessful oration, descending with a dejected air toward 
 the temple of Theseus, followed by old Eunomas ;* 
 abandoning himself to despair, and repressing the fiery 
 consciousness within him as a hopeless ambition. I 
 saw him again, with the last glowing period of a Phil- 
 
 * " However, in his first address to the people, he was 
 laughed at and interrupted by their clamors ; for the violence 
 of his manner threw him into a confusion of periods, and a 
 distortion of his argument. At last, upon his quitting the 
 assembly, Eunomus, the Thriasian, a man now extremely 
 old. found him wandering in a dejected condition in the 
 Piraeus, and took upon him to set him right."' — Plutarch's 
 Life of Demosthenes. 
 
 lipic on his lips, standing on this rocky eminence, his 
 arm stretched toward Macedon ; his eye flashing with 
 success, and his ear catching the low murmur of the 
 crowd below, which told him he had moved his coun- 
 try as with the heave of an earthquake. I saw the 
 calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically 
 about him ; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with 
 a smile on his lips to speak ; and Socrates, gazing on 
 his wild but winning disciple with affection and fear. 
 How easily is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now 
 alights unaffrighted, repeopled with the crowding 
 shadows of the past. 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 THE PRISON OF SOCRATES— TURKISH STIRRUPS AND 
 SADDLES — FLATo's ACADEMY — THE AMERICAN MIS- 
 SIONARY SCHOOL AT ATHENS THE SON OF PETARCHES 
 
 AND NEPHEW OF "MRS. BLACK OF EGINA." 
 
 Athens. — We dismounted at the door of Socrates' 's 
 prison. A hill between the Areopagus and the sea, is 
 crowned with the remains of a showy monument to a 
 Roman pro-consul. Just beneath it the hill forms a 
 low precipice, and in the face of it you see three low 
 entrances to caverns hewn in the solid rock. The 
 farthest to the right was the room of the Athenian 
 guard, and within it is a chamber with a round ceiling, 
 which the sage occupied during the thirty days of his 
 imprisonment. There are marks of an iron door which 
 separated it from the guard-room, and through the 
 bars of this he refused the assistance of his friends to 
 escape, and held those conversations with Crito, Plato, 
 and others, which have made his name immortal. On 
 the day upon which he was doomed to die, he was re- 
 moved to the chamber nearest the Acropolis, and here 
 the hemlock was presented to him. A shallower ex- 
 cavation between, held an altar to the gods; and after 
 his death, his body was here given to his friends. 
 
 Nothing, except some of the touching narrations of 
 scripture, ever seemed to me so affecting as the history 
 of the death of Socrates. It has been likened (I think, 
 not profanely), to that of Christ. His virtuous life, his 
 belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state 
 of reward and punishment, his forgiveness of his ene- 
 mies and his godlike death, certainly prove him, in 
 the absence of revealed light, to have walked the 
 " darkling path of human reason" with an almost in- 
 spired rectitude. I stood in the chamber which had 
 received his last breath, not without emotion. The 
 rocky walls about me had witnessed his composure as 
 he received the cup from his weeping jailer; the 
 roughly-hewn floor beneath my feet had sustained 
 him, as he walked to and fro, till the poison had chilled 
 his limbs ; his last sigh, as he covered his head with 
 his mantle and expired, passed forth by that low por- 
 tal. It is not easy to be indifferent on spots like these. 
 The spirit of the place is felt. We can not turn back 
 and touch the brighter links of that " fleshly chain," 
 in which all human beings since the creation have been 
 bound alike, without feeling, even through the rusty 
 coil of ages, the electric sympathy. Socrates died 
 here ! The great human leap into eternity, the inevit- 
 able calamity of our race, was here taken more nobly 
 than elsewhere. Whether the effect be to " fright us 
 from the shore," or, to nerve us by the example, to look 
 more steadily before us, a serious thought, almost of 
 course a salutary one, lurks in the very air. 
 
 We descended the hill and galloped our small Turk- 
 ish horses at a stirring pace over the plain. The short 
 stirrup and high peaked saddle of the country, are (at 
 least to men of my length and limb) uncomfortable 
 contrivances. With the knees almost up to the chin, 
 one is compelled, of course, to lean far over the horse's 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 133 
 
 head, and it requires all the fullness of Turkish trousers 
 to conceal the awkwardness of the position. We drew 
 rein at the entrance of the " olive grove." Our horses 
 walked leisurely along the shaded path between the 
 trees, and we arrived in a few minutes at the site of 
 Plato's academy. The more ethereal portion of my 
 pleasure in seeing it must be in the recollection. The 
 Cephissus was dry, the noon-day sun was hot, and we 
 were glad to stop, with throbbing temples, under a 
 cluster of fig-trees, and eat the delicious fruit, forget- 
 ting all the philosophers incontinently. We sat in our 
 saddles, and a Greek woman, of great natural beauty, 
 though dressed in rags, bent down the boughs to our 
 reach. The honey from the over-ripe figs, dropped 
 upon us as the wind shook the branches. Our dark- 
 eyed and bright-lipped Pomona served us with a grace 
 aod cheerfulness that would draw me often to the 
 neighborhood of the academy if I lived in Athens. I 
 venture to believe that Phryne herself, in so mean a 
 dress, would scarce have been more attractive. We 
 kissed our hand to her as our spirited horses leaped 
 the hollow with which the trees were encircled, and 
 passing the mound sacred to the Furies, where QZdipus 
 was swallowed up, dashed over the sultry plain once 
 more, and were soon in Athens. 
 
 I have passed most of my leisure hours here in a 
 scene I certainly did not reckon in anticipation, among 
 the pleasures of a visit to Athens — the American mis- 
 sionary school. We have all been delighted with it, 
 from the commodore to the youngest midshipman. 
 Mr. and Mrs. Hill have been here some four or five 
 years, and have attained their present degree of suc- 
 cess in the face of every difficulty. Their whole 
 number of scholars from the commencement, has 
 been upward of three hundred ; at present they have 
 a hundred and thirty, mostly girls. 
 
 We found the school in a new and spacious stone 
 building on the site of the ancient "market," where 
 Paul, on his visit to Athens, "disputed daily with 
 those that met with him." A large court-yard, shaded 
 partly with a promegranate-tree, separates it from the 
 marble portico of the Agora, which is one of the finest 
 remains of antiquity. Mrs. Hill was in the midst of 
 the little Athenians. Two or three serious-looking 
 Greek girls were assisting her in regulating their move- 
 ments, and the new and admirable system of combined 
 instruction and amusement was going on swimmingly. 
 There were, perhaps, a hundred children in the bench- 
 es, mostly from three to six or eight years of age; 
 dark-eyed, cheerful little creatures, who looked as if 
 their •■ birthright of the golden grasshopper" had made 
 them nature's favorites as certainly as in the days when 
 their ancestor-mothers settled questions of philosophy. 
 They marched and recited, and clapped their sun- 
 burnt hands, and sung hymns, and I thought I never 
 had seen a more gratifying spectacle. I looked around 
 in vain for one who seemed discontented or weary. 
 Mrs. Hill's manner to them was most affectionate. 
 She governs, literally, with a smile. 
 
 I selected several little favorites. One was a fine 
 fellow of two to three years, whose name I inquired 
 immediately. He was Plato Petarches, the nephew 
 of the " maid of Athens," and the son of the second 
 of the three girls so admired by Lord Byron. Another 
 was a girl of six or seven, with a face, surpassing, for 
 expressive beauty, that of any child I ever saw. She 
 was a Hydriote by birth, and dressed in the costume 
 of the islands. Her little feet were in Greek slippers ; 
 her figure was prettily set off with an open jacket, 
 laced with buttons from the shoulder to the waist, and 
 her head was enveloped in a figured handkerchief, 
 folded gracefully in the style of a turban, and brought 
 under her chin, so as to show suspended a rich me- 
 tal'ic fringe. Her face was full, but marked with 
 
 childish dimples, and her mouth and eyes, as beautiful 
 as ever those expressive features were made, had a re- 
 tiring seriousness in them, indescribably sweet. She 
 looked as if she had been born in some scene of Turk- 
 ish devastation, and had brought her mother's heart- 
 ache into the world. 
 
 At noon, at the sound of a bell, they marched out, 
 clapping their hands in time to the instructer's voice, 
 and sealed themselves in order upon the portico, in 
 front of the school. Here their baskets were given 
 them, and each one produced her dinner and ate it 
 with the utmost propriety. It was really a beautiful 
 scene. 
 
 It is to be remembered that here is educated a class 
 of human beings who were else deprived of instruction 
 by the universal custom of their country. The females 
 of Greece are suffered to grow up in ignorance. One 
 who can read and write is rarely found. The school 
 has commenced fortunately at the most favorable mo- 
 ment. The government was in process of change, and 
 an innovation was unnoticed in the confusion that at a 
 later period might have been opposed by the preju- 
 dices of custom. The king and the president of the 
 regency, Count Armansperg, visited the school fre- 
 quently during their stay in Athens, and expressed 
 their thanks to Mrs. Hill warmly. The Countess 
 Armansperg called repeatedly to have the pleasure 
 of sitting in the school-room for an hour. His majes- 
 ty, indeed, could hardly find a more useful subject in 
 his realm. Mrs. Hill, with her own personal efforts, 
 has taught more than one hundred children to read the 
 Bible! How few of us can write against our names 
 an equal offset to the claims of human duty ? 
 
 Circumstances made me acquainted with one or two 
 wealthy persons residing in Athens, and I received 
 from them a strong impression of Mr. Hill's useful- 
 ness and high standing. His house is the hospitable 
 resort of every stranger of intelligence and respecta- 
 bility. 
 
 Mr. King and Mr. Robinson, missionaries of the 
 Foreign Board, are absent at Psera. Their families 
 are here. 
 
 I passed my last evening among the magnificent 
 ruins on the banks of the Ilissus. The next day was 
 occupied in returning visits to the families who had 
 been polite to us, and, with a farewell of unusual re- 
 gret to our estimable missionary friends, we started on 
 horseback to return by a gloomy sunset to the Piraeus. 
 I am looking more for the amusing than the useful in 
 my rambles about the world, and I confess I should 
 not have gone far out of my way to visit a missionary 
 station anywhere. But chance has thrown this of 
 Athens across my path, and I record it as a moral 
 spectacle to which no thinking person could be indif- 
 ferent. I freely say I never have met with an equal 
 number of my fellow-creatures, who seemed to me so 
 indisputably and purely useful. The most cavilling 
 mind must applaud their devoted sense of duty, bear- 
 ing up against exile from country and friends, priva- 
 tions, trial of patience, and the many, many ills inevi- 
 table to such an errand in a foreign land, while even 
 the coldest politician would find in their efforts the 
 best promise for an enlightened renovation of Greece. 
 Long after the twilight thickened immediately about 
 us, the lofty Acropolis stood up, bathed in a glow of 
 light from the lingering sunset. I turned back to gaze 
 upon it with an enthusiasm I had thought laid on the 
 shelf with my half-forgotten classics. The intrinsic 
 beauty of the ruins of Greece, the loneliness of their 
 situation, and the divine climate in which, to use By- 
 ron's expression, they are "buried," invest them with 
 an interest which surrounds no other antiquities in the 
 world. I rode on, repeating to myself Milton's beau- 
 tiful description : 
 
 " Look ! on the Egean a city stands 
 
 Built nobly ; pure the air and light the soil • 
 
134 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 Athens — the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
 
 And eloquence ; native to famous wits 
 
 Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, 
 
 City or suburban, studious walks or shades. 
 
 See, there the olive-groves of Academe, 
 
 Plato's retirement, where the attic bird 
 
 Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long. 
 
 There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound 
 
 Of bees' industrious murmurs, oft invites 
 
 To studious musing ; there Ilissus rolls 
 
 His whispering stream ; within the walls there view 
 
 The schools of ancient sages, his who bred 
 
 Great Alexander to subdue the world ."' 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 THE PIRAEUS — THE SACRA VIA — RUINS OF ELEUSIS — GI- 
 GANTIC MEDALLION — COSTUME OF THE ATHENIAN WO- 
 MEN — THE TOMB OF THEMISTOCLES — THE TEMPLE OF 
 MINERVA — AUTOGRAPHS. 
 
 PirjEus. — With a basket of ham and claret in the 
 stern-sheets, a cool awning over our heads, and twelve 
 men at the oars, such as the coxswain of Themistocles' 
 galley might have sighed for, we pulled away from the 
 ship at an early hour, for Eleusis. The conqueror of 
 Salamis delayed the battle for the ten o'clock breeze, 
 and as nature (which should be called he instead of 
 she, for her constancy) still ruffles the Egean at the 
 same hour, we had a calm sea through the strait, 
 where once lay the " ships by thousands." 
 
 We soon rounded the point, and shot along under 
 the 
 
 " Rocky brow 
 Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis." 
 It is a bare, bold precipice, a little back from the sea, 
 and commands an entire view of the strait. Here sat 
 Xerxes, "on his throne of gold,* with many secreta- 
 ries about him to write down the particulars of the ac- 
 tion." The Athenians owed their victory to the wis- 
 dom of Themistocles, who managed to draw the Per- 
 sians into the strait (scarce a cannon shot across just 
 here), where only a small part of their immense fleet 
 could act at one time. The wind, as the wily Greek 
 had foreseen, rose at the same time, and rendered the 
 lofty-built Persian ships unmanageable ; while the 
 Athenian galleys, cut low to the water, were easily 
 brought into action in the most advantageous position. 
 It is impossible to look upon this beautiful and lovely 
 spot and imagine the stirring picture it presented. 
 The wild sea-bird knows no lonelier place. Yet on 
 that rock once sat the son of Darius, with his royal 
 purple floating to the wind, and, below him, within 
 these rocky limits, lay " one thousand two hundred 
 ships-of-war, and two thousand transports," while be- 
 hind him, on the shores of the Piraeus, were encamped 
 H seven hundred thousand foot, and four hundred 
 thousand horse" — "amounting," says Potter, in his 
 notes, " with the retinue of women and servants that 
 attended the Asiatic princes in their military expedi- 
 tions, to more than five millions.' 1 '' How like a king 
 must the royal Persian have felt, when 
 
 " He counted them at break of day !" 
 
 With an hour or two of fast pulling, we opened into 
 the broad bay of Eleusis. The first sabbath after the 
 creation could not have been more absolutely silent. 
 Megara was away on the left, Eleusis before us at the 
 distance of four or five miles, and the broad plains 
 where agriculture was first taught by Triptolemus, 
 the poetical home of Ceres, lay an utter desert in the 
 sunshine. Behind us, between the mountains, de- 
 scended the Sacra Via, by which the procession came 
 from Athens to celebrate the "Eleusinian mysteries" — 
 
 • So says Phanodemus, quoted by Plutarch. The commen- 
 tators upon the tragedy of iEschylus on this subject, say it 
 was a " silver chair," and that it " was afterward placed in 
 the temple of Minerva, at Athens, with the golden-hilted 
 c'saeter of Mardonius." 
 
 a road of five or six miles, lined, in the time of Peri- 
 cles, with temples and tombs. I could half fancy the 
 scene as it was presented to the eyes of the invading 
 Macedonians — when the procession of priests and vir- 
 gins, accompanied by the whole population of Athens, 
 wound down into the plain, guarded by the shining 
 spears of the army of Alcibiades. It is still doubtful, 
 I believe, whether these imposing ceremonies were the 
 pure observances of a lofty and sincere superstition, or 
 the orgies of licentious saturnalia. 
 
 We landed at Eleusis, and were immediately sur- 
 rounded by a crowd of people, as simple and curious 
 in their mannets, and resembling somewhat in their 
 dress and complexion, the Indians of our country. 
 The ruins of a great city lay about us, and their huts 
 were built promiscuously among them. Magnificent 
 fragments of columns and blocks of marble interrupted 
 the path through the village, and between two of the 
 houses lay, half buried, a gigantic medallion of Pen- 
 telic marble, representing, in alto relievo, the body and 
 head of a warrior in full armor. A hundred men 
 would move it with difficulty. Commodore Patterson 
 attempted it six years ago, in the Constitution, but his 
 launch was found unequal to its weight. 
 
 The people here gathered more closely around the 
 ladies of our party, examining their dress with childish 
 curiosity. They were doubtless the first females ever 
 seen at Eleusis in European costume. One of the 
 ladies happening to pull off her glove, there was a 
 general cry of astonishment. The brown kid had 
 clearly been taken as the color of the hand. Some 
 curiosity was then shown to see their faces, which 
 were coveted with thick green veils, as a protection 
 against the sun. The sight of their complexion (in 
 any country remarkable for a dazzling whiteness) com- 
 pleted the astonishment of these children of Ceres. 
 
 We, on our part, were scarcely less amused with 
 their costumes in turn. Over the petticoat was worn 
 a loose jacket of white cloth reaching to the knee, 
 and open in front — its edges and sleeves wrought very 
 tastefully with red cord. The head-dress was com- 
 posed entirely of money. A fillet of gold sequins was 
 first put, a la feroniere. around the forehead, and a 
 close cap, with a throat-piece like the gorget of a hel- 
 met, fitted the scull exactly, stitched with coins of all 
 values, folded over each other according to their sizes, 
 like scales. The hair was then braided and fell down 
 the back, loaded also with money. Of the fifty or six- 
 ty women we saw, I should think one half had money 
 on her head to the amount of from one to two hundred 
 dollars. They suffered us to examine them with per- 
 fect good humor. The greater proportion of pieces 
 were paras, a small and thin Turkish coin of very small 
 value. Among the larger pieces were dollars of all 
 nations, five-franc pieces, Sicilian piastres, Tuscan 
 colonati, Venetian swansicas, etc., etc. I doubted 
 much whether they were not the collections of some 
 piratical caique. There is no possibility of either 
 spending or getting money within many miles of Ele- 
 usis, and it seemed to be looked upon as an ornament 
 which they had come too lightly by to know its use. 
 
 We walked over the foundations of several large 
 temples with the remains of their splendor lying un- 
 valued about them, and at half a mile from the village 
 came to the " well of Proserpine," whence, say the 
 poets, the ravished daughter of Ceres emerged from 
 the infernal regions on her visits to her mother. The 
 modern Eelusinians know it only as a well of the purest 
 water. 
 
 On our return, we stopped at the southern point of 
 the Piraeus, to see the tomb of Themistocles. We 
 were directed to it by thirteen or fourteen frusta of 
 enormous columns, which once formed the monument 
 to his memory. They buried him close to the edge 
 of the sea, opposite Salamis. The continual beat of 
 the waves for so many hundred years has worn away 
 
PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 135 
 
 the promontory, and his sarcophagus, which was laid 
 in a grave cut in the solid rock, is now filled by every 
 swell from the Egean. The old hero was brought 
 back from his exile to be gloriously buried. He could 
 not lie better for the repose of his spirit (if it returned 
 with his bones from Argos). The sea on which he 
 beat the haughty Persians with his handful of galleys, 
 sends every wave to his feet. The hollows in the 
 rock around his grave are full oPsnowy salt left by the 
 evaporation. You might scrape up a bushel within 
 six feet of him. It seems a natural tribute to his 
 memory.* 
 
 On a high and lonely rock, stretching out into the 
 midst of the sea, stands a solitary temple. As far as 
 the eye can reach, along the coast of Attica and to 
 the distant isles, there is no sign of human habitation. 
 There it stands, lifted into the blue sky of Greece, like 
 the unreal "fabric of a vision." 
 
 Cape Colomia and its "temple of Minerva," were 
 familiar to my memory, but my imagination had pic- 
 tured nothing half so beautiful. As we approached 
 it from the sea, it seemed so strangely out of place, 
 even for a ruin, so far removed from what had ever 
 been the haunt of man, that I scarce credited my eyes. 
 We could soon count them — thirteen columns of 
 sparkling marble, glittering in the sun. The sea-air 
 keeps them spotlessly white, and, until you approach 
 them nearly, they have the appearance of a structure, 
 from its freshness, still in the sculptor's hands. 
 
 The boat was lowered, anuVthe ship lay otf-and-on 
 while we landed near the rocks where Falconer was 
 shipwrecked, and mounted to the temple. The sum- 
 mit of the promontory is strewn with the remains of M 
 the fallen columns, and their smooth surfaces are ' 
 thickly inscribed with the names of travellers. Among | 
 others, I noticed Byron's and Hobhouse's, and that; 
 of the agreeable author of " A year in Spain." Byron, J | 
 by the way, mentions having narrowly escaped robbery ' 
 here, by a band of Mainote pirates. He was surprised 
 swimming off the point, by an English vessel contain- 
 ing some ladies of his acquaintance. He concludes 
 the " Isles of Greece" beautifully with an allusion to 
 it by its ancient name : — 
 
 " Place me on Sunium's marbled steep," etc. 
 
 The view from the summit is one of the finest in all 
 Greece. The isle where Plato was sold as a slave, 
 and where Aristides and Demosthenes passed their 
 days in exile, stretches along the west ; the wide 
 Egean, sprinkled with here and there a solitary rock, 
 herbless, but beautiful in its veil of mist, spreads away 
 from its feet to the southern line of the horizon, and 
 crossing each other almost imperceptibly on the light 
 winds of this summer sea, the red-sailed caique of 
 Greece, the merchantmen from the Dardanelles, and 
 the heavy men-of-war of England and France, cruis- 
 ing wherever the wind blows fairest, are seen like 
 broad-winged and solitary birds, lying low with spread 
 pinions upon the waters. The place touched me. I 
 shall remember it with an affection. 
 
 There is a small island close to Sunium, which was 
 fortified by one of the heroes of the Iliad on his return 
 from Troy — why, heaven only knows. It was here, 
 too, that Phrontes, the pilot of Menelaus, died and 
 was buried. 
 
 We returned on board after an absence of two hours 
 from the ship, and are steering now straight for the 
 Dardanelles. The plains of Marathon are but a few 
 hours north of our course, and I pass them unwilling- 
 ly ; but what is there one would not see? Greece 
 lies behind, and I have realized one of my dearest 
 dreams in rambling over its ruins. Tiavel is an appe- 
 tite that " grows by what it feeds on." 
 
 * Langhorne says in his not^s on Plutarch, " There is the 
 genuine attic salt in most of the retorts and observations of 
 themselves. His wit seems to have been equal to his military 
 and political capacity." 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 MYTILENE— THE TOMB OF ACHILLES — TURKISH BURYING 
 
 GROUND LOST REPUTATION OF THE SCAMANDER 
 
 ASIATIC SUNSETS VISIT TO A TURKISH BEY THE 
 
 CASTLES OF THE DARDANELLES — TURKISH BATH, AND 
 ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 Lesbos to windward. A caique, crowded with 
 people, is running across our bow, all hands singing 
 a wild chorus (perhaps the Lesboun carmen), most 
 merrily. The island is now called Mytilene, said to 
 be the greenest and most fertile of the Mediterranean. 
 The Lesbean wine is still good, but they have had no 
 poetesses since Sappho. Cause and effect have quar- 
 relled, one would think. 
 
 Tenedos on the lee. The tomb of Achilles is dis- 
 tinguishable with the glass on the coast of Asia. The 
 column which Alexander "crowned and anointed and 
 danced around naked," in honor of the hero's ghost, 
 stands above it no longer. The Macedonian wept over 
 Achilles, says the schoolbook, and envied him the 
 blind bard who had sung his deeds. He would have 
 dried his tears if he had known that his pas seul would 
 be remembered as long. 
 
 Tenedos seems a pretty island as we near it. It 
 was here that the Greeks hid, to persuade the Tro- 
 jans that they had abandoned the siege, while the 
 wooden horse was wheeled into Troy. The site of 
 the city of Priam is visible as we get nearer the coa^t 
 of Asia. Mount Ida and the marshy valley of the 
 Scamander are appearing beyond Cape Sigrcum, and 
 we shall anchor in an hour between Europe and Asia, 
 in the mouth of the rapid Dardanelles. The wind is 
 not strong enoueh to stem the current that sets down 
 like a mill-race from the sea of Marmora. 
 
 Went ashore on the Asian side for a ramble. We 
 landed at the strong Turkish castle that, with another 
 on the European side, defends the strait, and passing 
 under their bristling batteries, entered the small Turk- 
 ish town in the rear. Our appearance excited a great 
 deal of curiosity. The Turks, who were sitting cross- 
 legged on the broad benches extending like a tailor's 
 board, in front of the cafes, stopped smoking as we 
 passed, and the women, wrapping up their own faces 
 more closely, approached the ladies of our party, and 
 lifted their veils to look at them with the freedom of 
 our friends at Eleusis. We came unaware upon two 
 squalid wretches of women in turning a corner, who 
 pulled their ragged shawls oyer their heads with looks 
 of the greatest resentment at having exposed their 
 faces to us. 
 
 A few minutes' walk brought us outside of the 
 town. An extensive Turkish grave-yard lay on the 
 left. Between fig-trees and blackberry bushes it was 
 a green spot, and the low tombstones of the men, 
 crowned each with a turban carved in marble of the 
 shape befitting the sleeper's rank, peered above the 
 grass like a congregation sitting in a uniform head- 
 dress at a field-preaching. Had it not been for the 
 female graves, which were marked with a slab like 
 ours, and here and there the tombstone of a Greek, 
 carved, after the antique, in the shape of a beautiful 
 shell, the effect of an assemblage sur I'herbe would 
 have been ludicrously perfect. 
 
 We walked on to the Scamander. A rickety bridge 
 gave us a passage, toll free, to the other side, where 
 we sat round the rim of a marble well, and ate delicious 
 grapes, stolen for us by a Turkish boy from a near 
 vineyard. Six or seven camels were feeding on the 
 unenclosed plain, picking a mouthful and then lifting 
 their long, snaky necks into the air to swallow ; a stray- 
 horseman, with the head of his bridle decked with red 
 tassels and his knees up to his chin.scoured the bridle 
 path to the mountains ; and three devilish-looking 
 buffaloes scratched their hides and rolled up theii 
 
136 
 
 PEiNCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 fiendish green eyes under a bramble-hedge near the 
 river. Voila ! a scene in Asia. 
 
 The poets lie, or the Scamander is as treacherous 
 as Macassar. Venus bathed in its waters before con- 
 tending for the prize of beauiy adjudged to her on 
 this very Mount Ida that I see covered with brown 
 grass in the distance. Her hair became "flowing 
 gold" in the lavation. My friends compliment me 
 upon no change after a similar experiment. My long 
 locks (run riot with a four months' cruise) are as dingy 
 and untractable as ever, and, except in the increased 
 brownnessof a Mediterranean complexion, the cracked 
 glass in the state-room of my friend the lieutenant 
 gives me no encouragement of a change. It is soft 
 water, and runs over fine white sand ; but the fountain 
 of Callirhoc, at Athens (she was the daughter of the 
 Scamander, and, like most daughters, is much more 
 attractive than her papa), is softer and clearer. Per- 
 haps the loss of the Scamander's virtues is attributable 
 to the cessation of the tribute paid to the god in Helen's 
 time. 
 
 The twilights in this part of the world are unpar- 
 alleled — but I have described twilights and sunsets in 
 Greece and Italy till I am ashamed to write the words. 
 Each one comes as if there never had been and never 
 were to be another, and the adventures of the day, 
 however stirring, are half forgotten in its glory, and 
 seem, in comparison, unworthy of description ; but 
 one look at the terms that might describe it, written 
 on paper, uncharms even the remembrance. You 
 must come to Asia and feel sunsets. You can not get 
 them by paying postage. 
 
 At anchor, waiting for a wind. Called to-day on 
 the Bey Effendi, commander of the two castles, "Eu- 
 rope" and " Asia," between which we lie. A pokerish- 
 looking dwarf, with ragged beard and high turban, and 
 a tall Turk, who I am sure never smiled since he was 
 born, kicked off their slippers at the threshold, and 
 ushered us into a chamber on the second story. It 
 was a luxurious little room, lined completely with 
 cushions, the muslin-covered pillows of down leaving 
 only a place for the door. The divan was as broad as 
 a bed, and, save the difficulty of rising from it, it was 
 perfect as a lounge. A ceiling of inlaid woods, em- 
 browned with smoke, windows of small panes fantas- 
 tically set, and a place lower than the floor for the 
 attendants to stand and leave their slippers, were all 
 that was peculiar else. 
 
 The bey entered in a few minutes, with a pipe- 
 bearer, an interpreter, and three or four attendants. 
 He was a young man, about twenty, and excessively 
 handsome. A clear, olive complexion, a mustache 
 of silky black, a thin, aquiline nose, with almost trans- 
 parent nostrils, cheeks and chin rounded into a perfect 
 oval, and mouth and eyes expressive of the most reso- 
 lute firmness, and, at the same time, girlishly beautiful, 
 completed the picture of the finest-looking fellow I 
 have seen within my recollection. His person was 
 very slight, and his feet and hands small, and particu- 
 larly well shaped. Like most of his countrymen of 
 latter years, his dress was half European, and much 
 less becoming, of course, than the turban and trowser. 
 Pantaloons, rather loose, a light fawn-colored short- 
 jacket, a red cap, with a blue tassel, and stockings, 
 without shoes, were enough to give him the appear- 
 ance of a dandy half through his toilet. He entered 
 with an indolent step, bowed, without smiling, and, 
 throwing one of his feet under him, sunk down upon 
 the divan, and beckoned for his pipe. The Turk in 
 attendance kicked off his slippers, and gave him the 
 long tube with its amber mouth-piece, setting the bowl 
 inlo a basin in the centre of the room. The bey put it 
 c?. Lis handsome lips, and drew till the smoke mounted 
 
 to the ceiling, and then handed it, with a graceful 
 gesture, to the commodore. 
 
 The conversation went on through two interpreta- 
 tions. The bey's interpreter spoke Greek and Turk- 
 ish, and the ship's pilot, who accompanied us, spoke 
 Greek and English, and the usual expressions of good 
 feeling, and offers of mutual service, were thus passed 
 between the puffs of the pipe with sufficient facility. 
 The dwarf soon entered with coffee. The small gilded 
 cups had about the capacity of a goodwife's thimble, 
 and were covered with gold tops to retain the aroma. 
 The fragrance of the rich berry filled the room. We 
 acknowledged, at once, the superiority of the Turkish 
 manner of preparing it. It is excessively strong, and 
 drunk without milk. 
 
 I looked into every corner while the attendants were 
 removing the cups, but could see no trace of a book. 
 Ten or twelve guns, with stocks inlaid with pearl and 
 silver, two or three pair of gold-handled pistols, and a 
 superb Turkish cimeter and belt, hung upon the 
 walls, but there was no other furniture. We rose, 
 after a half hour's visit, and were bowed out by the 
 handsome effendi, coldly and politely. As we passed 
 under the walls of the castle, on the way to the boat, 
 we saw six or seven women, probably a part of his 
 harem, peeping from the embrasures of one of the 
 bastions. Their heads were wrapped in white, one 
 eye only left visible. It was easy to imagine them 
 Zuleikas after having seen their master. 
 
 Went ashore at Castle Europe, with one or two of 
 the officers, to take a bath. An old Turk, sitting upon 
 his hams, at the entrance, pointed to the low door at 
 his side, without looking at us, and we descended, by 
 a step or two, into a vaulted hall, with a large, circular 
 ottoman in the centre, and a very broad divan all 
 around. Two tall young mussulmans, with only tur- 
 bans and waistcloths to conceal their natural propor- 
 tions, assisted us to undress, and led us into a stone 
 room, several degrees warmer than the first. We 
 walked about here for a few minutes, and, as we began 
 to perspire, were taken into another, filled with hot 
 vapor, and, for the first moment or two, almost intol- 
 erable. It was shaped like a dome, with twenty or 
 thirty small windows at the top, several basins at the 
 sides into which hot water was pouring, and a raised 
 stone platform in the centre, upon which we were all 
 requested, by gestures, to lie upon our backs. The 
 perspiration, by this time, was pouring from us like 
 rain. I lay down with the others, and a Turk, a dark- 
 skinned, fine-looking fellow, drew on a mitten of rough 
 grass cloth, and, laying one hand upon my breast to 
 hold me steady, commenced rubbing me, without 
 water, violently. The skin peeled off under the fric- 
 tion, and I thought he must have rubbed into the flesh 
 repeatedly. Nothing but curiosity to go through the 
 regular operation of a Turkish bath prevented my 
 crying out " enough !" He rubbed away, turning me 
 from side to side, till the rough glove passed smoothly 
 all over my body and limbs, and then, handing me a 
 pair of wooden slippers, suffered me to rise. I walked 
 about for a few minutes, looking with surprise at the 
 rolls of skin he had taken from me, and feeling almost 
 transparent as the hot air blew upon me. 
 
 In a few minutes my mussulman beckoned to me to 
 follow him to a smaller room, where he seated me on 
 a stone beside a fount of hot water. He then made 
 some thick soap-suds in a basin, and, with a handful 
 of fine flax, soaped and rubbed me all over again, and 
 a few dashes of the hot water, from a wooden saucer, 
 completed the bath. 
 
 The next room, which had seemed so warm on our 
 entrance, was now quite chilly. "We remained here 
 until we were dry, and then returned to the hall in 
 which our clothes were left, where beds were prepared 
 on the divans, and we were covered in warm cloths, 
 and left to our repose. The disposition to sleep was 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 137 
 
 almost irresistible. We rose in a short time, and went 
 to the coffee-house opposite, when a cup of strong 
 coffee, and a hookah smoked through a highly orna- 
 mented glass bubbling with water, refreshed us deli- 
 riously. 
 
 I have had ever since a feeling of suppleness and 
 lightness, which is like wings growing at my feet. It 
 is certainly a very great luxury, though, unquestion- 
 ably, most enervating as a habit. 
 
 LETTER LXXXIX. 
 
 A TURKISH PIC-NIC, ON THE PLAIN OF TROY — FINGERS 
 VS. FORKS — TRIESTE — THE BOSCHETTO — GRACEFUL 
 FREEDOM OF ITALIAN MANNERS — A RURAL FETE — 
 FIREWORKS AMATEUR MUSICIANS. 
 
 Dardanelles. — The oddest invitation I ever had 
 in my life was from a Turkish bey to a. fete champetre, 
 on the ruins of Troy ! We have just returned, full 
 of wassail and pillaw, by the light of an Asian moon. 
 
 The morning was such a one as you would expect 
 in the countiy where mornings were first made. The 
 sun was clear, but the breeze was fresh, and as we sat 
 on the bey's soft divans, taking coffee before starting, 
 I turned my cheek to the open window, and confessed 
 the blessing of existence. 
 
 We were sixteen, from the ship, and our boat was 
 attended by his interpreter, the general of his troops, 
 the governor of Bournabashi (the name of the Turkish 
 town near Troy), and a host of attendants on foot and 
 horseback. His cook had been sent forward at day- 
 light with the provisions. 
 
 The handsome bey came to the door, and helped 
 to mount us upon his own horses, and we rodfe off, 
 with the whole population of the village assembled to 
 see our departure. We forded the Scamander, near 
 the town, and pushed on at a hard gallop over the 
 plain. The bey soon overtook us upon a fleet gray 
 mare, caparisoned with red trappings, holding an um- 
 brella over his head, which he courteously offered to 
 the commodore on coming up. We followed a grass 
 path, without hill or stone, for nine or ten miles, and 
 after having passed one or two hamlets, with their 
 open thrashing-floors, and crossed the Simois, with 
 the water to our saddle-girths, we left a slight rising 
 ground by a sudden turn, and descended to a cluster 
 of trees, where the Turks sprang from their horses, 
 and made signs for us to dismount. 
 
 It was one of nature's drawing-rooms. Thickets 
 of brush and willows enclosed a fountain, whose clear 
 waters were confined in a tank, formed of marble slabs, 
 from the neighboring ruins. A. spreading tree above, 
 and soft meadow-grass to its very tip, left nothing to 
 wish but friends and a quiet mind to perfect its beau- 
 ty. The cook's fires were smoking in the thicket, the 
 horses were grazing without saddle or bridle in the 
 pasture below, and we lay down upon the soft, Turk- 
 ish carpets, spread beneath the trees, and reposed from 
 our fatigues for an hour. 
 
 The interpreter came when the sun had slanted a 
 little across the trees, and invited us to the bey's gar- 
 dens, hard by. A path, overshadowed with wild brush, 
 led us round the little meadow to a gate, close to the 
 fountain-head of the Scamander. One of the common 
 cottages of the country stood upon the left, and in 
 front of it a large arbor, covered with a grape-vine, 
 was underlaid with cushions and carpets. Here we 
 reclined, and coffee was brought us with baskets of 
 grapes, figs, quinces, and pomegranates, the bey and 
 his officers waiting on us themselves with amusing 
 assiduity. The people of the house, meantime, were 
 sent to the fields for green corn, which was roasted for 
 us, and this with nuts, wine, and conversation, and a 
 ramble to the source of the Simois, which bursts from 
 
 a cleft in the rock very beautifully, whiled away the 
 hours till dinner. 
 
 About four o'clock we returned to the fountain. A 
 white muslin cloth was laid upon the grass between 
 the edge and the overshadowing tree, and all around 
 it were spread the carpets upon which we were to re- 
 cline while eating. Wine and melons were cooling 
 in the tank, and plates of honey and grapes, and new- 
 made butter (a great luxury in the archipelago), stood 
 on the marble rim. The dinner might have fed Pri- 
 am's army. Haifa lamb, turkeys, and chickens, were 
 the principal meats, but there was, besides, " a rabble 
 route*' of made dishes, peculiar to the country, of in- 
 gredients at which I could not hazard even a conjec- 
 ture. 
 
 We crooked our legs under us with some awkward- 
 ness, and producing our knives and forks (which we 
 had brought with the advice of the interpreter), com- 
 menced, somewhat abated in appetite by too liberal a 
 lunch. The bey and his officers sitting upright, with 
 their feet under them, pinched off bits of meat dexter- 
 ously with the thumb and forefinger, passing from one 
 to the other a dish of rice, with a large spoon, which 
 all used indiscriminately. It is odd that eating with 
 the fingers seemed only disgusting to me in the bey. 
 His European dress probably made the peculiarity 
 more glaring. The fat old governor who sat beside 
 me was greased to the elbows, and his long grey beard 
 was studded with rice and drops of gravy to his girdle. 
 He rose when the meats were removed, and waddled 
 off to the stream below, where a wash in the clean 
 water made him once more a presentable person. 
 
 It is a Turkish custom to rise and retire while the 
 dishes are changing, and after a little ramble through 
 the meadow, we returned to a lavish spread of fruits 
 and honey, which concluded the repast. 
 
 It is doubted where Troy stood. The reputed site 
 is a rising ground, near the fountain of Bournabashi, 
 to which we strolled after dinner. We found nothing 
 but quantities of fragments of columns, believed by 
 antiquaries to be the ruins of a city, that sprung up 
 and died long since Troy. 
 
 We mounted and rode home by a round moon, 
 whose light filled the air like a dust of phosphoric sil- 
 ver. The plains were in a glow with it. Our Indian 
 summer nights, beautiful as they are, give you no idea 
 of an Asian moon. 
 
 The bey's rooms were lit, and we took coffee with 
 him once more, and, fatigued with pleasure and ex- 
 citement, got to our boats, and pulled up against the 
 arrowy current of the Dardanelles to the frigate 
 ******** 
 
 A long, narrow valley, with precipitous sides, com- 
 mences directly at the gate of Trieste, and follows a 
 small stream into the mountains of Friuli. It is a 
 very sweet, green place, and studded on both sides 
 with cottages and kitchen-gardens, which supply the 
 city with flowers and vegetables. The right hand 
 slope is called the Boschetto, and is laid out with pret- 
 ty avenues of beach and elm as a public walk, while, 
 at every few steps, stands a bowling-alley or drinking 
 arbor, and here and there a trim little restaurant, just 
 large enough for a rural party. It is, perhaps, a mile 
 and a half in length, and one grand cafe in the centre, 
 usually tempts the better class of promenaders into 
 the expense of an ice. 
 
 It was a Sunday afternoon, and all Trieste was pour- 
 ing out to the Boschetto. I had come ashore with 
 one of the officers, and we fell into the tide. Few 
 spots in the world are so variously peopled as this 
 thriving seaport, and we encountered every style of 
 dress and feature. The greater part were Jewesses. 
 How instantly the most common observer distinguish- 
 es them in a crowd ! The clear sallow skin, the sharp 
 black eye and broad eyebrow, the aqueline nose, the 
 small person, the slow, cautious step of the old, and 
 
138 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 the quick, restless one of the young, the ambitious or- 
 naments, and the look of cunning, which nothing but 
 the highest degree of education does away, mark the 
 race with the definiteness of another species. 
 
 We strolled on to the end of the walk, amused con- 
 stantly with the family groups sitting under the trees 
 with their simple repast of a fritata and a mug of beer, 
 perfectly unconscious of the presence of the crowd. 
 There was something pastoral and contented in the 
 scene that took my fancy. Almost all the female 
 promenaders were without bonnets, and the mixture 
 of the Greek style of head-dress with the Parisian 
 coiffure, had a charming effect. There was just 
 enough of fashion to take off the vulgarity. 
 
 We coquetted along, smiled upon by here and there 
 a group that hid visited the ship, and on our return 
 sat down at a table in front of the cafe, surrounded by 
 some hundreds of people of all classes, conversing and 
 eating ices. I thought as I glanced about me, how 
 oddly such a scene would look in America. In the 
 broad part of an open walk, the whole town passing 
 and repassing, sat elegantly dressed ladies with their 
 husbands or lovers, mothers with their daughters, and 
 occasionally a group of modest girls alone, eating or 
 drinking with as little embarrassment as at home, and 
 preserving toward each other that courtesy of deport- 
 ment which in these classes of society can result only 
 from being so much in public. 
 
 Under the next tree to us sat an excessively pretty 
 woman with two gentlemen, probably her husband 
 and cavalier. I touched my hat to them as we seated 
 ourselves, and this common courtesy of the country 
 was returned with smiles that put us instantly upon 
 the footing of a half acquaintance. A caress to the 
 lady's greyhound, and an apology for smoking, pro- 
 duced a little conversation, and when they rose to leave 
 us, the compliments of the evening were exchanged 
 with a cordiality that in America would scarce follow 
 an acquaintance of months. I mention it as an every- 
 day instance of the kind-hearted and open manners of 
 Europe. It is what makes these countries so agree- 
 able to the stranger and the traveller. Every cafe, on 
 a second visit, seems like a home. 
 
 We were at a rural fete last night, given by a wealthy 
 merchant of Trieste, at his villa in the neighborhood. 
 We found the company assembled on a terraced ob- 
 servatory, crowning a summer-house, watching the 
 sunset over one of the sweetest landscapes in the world. 
 We were at the head of a valley broken at the edge 
 of the Adriatic by the city, and beyond spread the 
 golden waters of the gulf toward Venice, headed in on 
 the right by the long chain of the Friuli. The coun- 
 try around was green and fertile, and small white vil- 
 las peeped out everywhere from the foliage, evidences 
 of the prosperous commerce of the town. We watch- 
 ed the warm colors out of the sky, and the party hav- 
 ing by this time assembled, we walked through the 
 long gardens to a house open with long windows from 
 the ceilino; t the floor, and furnished only with the 
 light and luxurious arrangement of summer. 
 
 Music is the life of all amusement within the reach 
 of Italy, and the waltzing was mingled with perform- 
 ances on the piano (and very wonderful ones to me) 
 by an Italian count and his friend, a German. They 
 played duetts in a style I have seldom heard even by 
 professors. 
 
 The supper was fantastically rural. The table was 
 spread under a large tree, from the branches of which 
 was trailed a vine, by a square frame of lattice-work in 
 the proportions of a pretty saloon. The lamps were 
 hung in colored lanterns among the branches, and the 
 trunk of the tree passed through the centre of the ta- 
 ble hollowed to receive it. The supper was sumptu- 
 ously splendid, and the effect of the party within, seen 
 from the grounds about, through the arched and vine- 
 concealed doors, was the most picturesque imaginable. 
 
 A waltz or two followed, and we were about calling 
 for our horses, when the whole place was illuminated 
 with a discharge of fireworks. Every description of 
 odd figures was described in flame during the hour 
 they detained us, and the bright glare on the trees, 
 and the figures of the party strolling up and down the 
 gravelled walks, was admirably beautiful. 
 
 They do these things so prettily here ! We were 
 invited out on the morning of the same day, and ex- 
 pected nothing but a drive and a cup of tea, and we 
 found an entertainment worthy of a king. The sim- 
 plicity and frankness with which we were received, and 
 the unpretendingness of the manner of introducing the 
 amusements of the evening, might have been lessons 
 in politeness to nobles. 
 
 A drive to town by starlight, and a pull off to the 
 ship in the cool and refreshing night air, concluded a 
 day of pure pleasure. It has been my good fortune 
 of late to number many such. 
 
 LETTER XC 
 
 THE DARDANELLES— VISIT FROM THE PACHA— HIS DELIGHT 
 AT HRARING THE PIANO TURKISH FOUNTAINS — CARA- 
 VAN OF MULES LADEN WITH GRAPES— TURKISH MODE 
 
 OF LIVING — HOUSES, CAFES, AND WOMEN THE MOSQUE 
 
 AND THE MUEZZIN — AMERICAN CONSUL OF THE DARDA- 
 NELLES, ANOTHER CALEB QUOTEM. 
 
 Coast of Asia. — We have lain in the mouth of the 
 Dardanelles sixteen mortal days, waiting for a wind. 
 ! Like Don Juan (who passed here on his way to Con 
 stantinople) — 
 
 " Another time we might have liked to see 'em, 
 But now are not much pleased with Cape Sigaeum.'' 
 
 An occasional trip with the boats to the watering-place, 
 a Turkish bath, and a stroll in the bazar of the town 
 behind the castle, gazing with a glass at the tombs of 
 Ajax and Achilles, and the long, undulating shores of 
 Asia, eating often and sleeping much, are the only 
 appliances to our philosophy. One can not always be 
 thinking of Hero and Leander, though he lie in the 
 Hellespont. 
 
 A merchant-brig from Smyrna is anchored just 
 astern of us, waiting like ourselves for this eternal 
 northeaster to blow itself out. She has forty or fifty 
 passengers for Constantinople, among whom are the 
 wife of an American merchant (a Greek lady), and Mr. 
 Schaufner,a missionary, in whom I recognised a quon- 
 dam fellow student. They were nearly starved out on 
 board the brig, as she was provisioned but for a few 
 days, and the commodore has courteously offered them 
 a passage in the frigate. Fifty or sixty sail lie below 
 Castle Europe, in the same predicament. With the 
 " cap of King Erricus," this cruising, pleasant as it is 
 would be a thought pleasanter to my fancy. 
 
 Still wind-bound. The angel that 
 
 " Looked o'er my almanac 
 And crossed out my ill-days," 
 
 suffered a week or so to escape him here. Not that 
 the ship is not pleasant enough, and the climate de- 
 serving of its Sybarite fame, and the sunsets and stars 
 as much brighter than those of the rest of the world, 
 as Byron has described them to be (vide letter to 
 Leigh Hunt), but life has run in so deep a current 
 with me of late, that the absence of incident seems 
 like water without wine. The agreeable stir of travel, 
 the incomplete adventure, the change of costumes and 
 scenery, the busy calls upon the curiosity and the 
 imagination, have become, in a manner, very breath 
 to me. Hitherto upon the cruise, we have scarce 
 ever been more than one or two days at a time out 
 of port. Elba, Sicily. Naples, Vienna, the Ionian 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 139 
 
 Isles, and the various ports of Greece have come and 
 gone so rapidly, and so entirely without exertion of my 
 own, that I seem to have lived in a magic panorama. 
 After dinner on one day I visit a city here, and the day 
 or two after, lounging and reading and sleeping mean- 
 while quietly at home, I find myself rising from table, 
 hundreds of miles farther to the north or east, and 
 another famous city before me, having taken no care, 
 and felt no motion, nor encountered danger or fatigue. 
 A summer cruise in the Mediterranean is certainly the 
 perfection of sight-seeing. With a sea as smooth as 
 a river, and cities of interest, classical and mercantile, 
 everywhere on the lee, I can conceive of no class of 
 persons to whom it would not be delightful. A com- 
 pany of pleasure, in a private vessel, would see all 
 Greece and Italy with less trouble and expense than 
 is common on a trip to the lakes. 
 
 " All hands up anchor !" The dog-vane pojnts at 
 last to Constantinople. The capstan is manned, the 
 sails loosed, the quarter-master at the wheel, and the 
 wind freshens every moment from the "sweet south." 
 " Heave round merrily !" The anchor is dragged in by 
 this rushing Hellespont, and holds on as if the bridge 
 of Xerxes were tangled about the flukes. " Up she 
 comes at last," and yielding to 'her broad canvass, the 
 gallant frigate begins to make headway against the 
 current. There is nothing in the whole world of 
 senseless matter, so like a breathing creature as a 
 ship ! The energy of her motion, the beauty of her 
 shape and contrivance, and the ease with which she 
 is managed by the one mind upon her quarter-deck, 
 to whose voice she is as obedient as the courser to the 
 rein, inspire me with daily admiration. I have been 
 four months a guest in this noble man-of-war, and to 
 this hour, 1 never set my foot on her deck without a 
 feeling of fresh wonder. And then Cooper's novels 
 read in a ward-room as grapes eat in Tuscany. It 
 were missing one of the golden leaves of a life not to 
 have thumbed them on a cruise. 
 
 The wind has headed us off again, and we have 
 dropped anchor just below the castles of the Darda- 
 nelles. We have made but eight miles, but we have 
 new scenery from the ports, and that is something to 
 a weary eye. I was as tired of "the shores of Ilion" 
 as ever was Ulysses. The hills about our present 
 anchorage are green and boldly marked, and the 
 frowning castles above us give that addition to the 
 landscape which is alone wanting on the Hudson. 
 Sestos and Abydos are six or seven miles up the 
 stream. The Asian shore (I should have thought it 
 a pretty circumstance, once, to be able to set foot 
 either in Europe or Asia in five minutes) is enlivened 
 by numbers of small vessels, tracking up with buffa- 
 loes, against wind and tide. And here" we lie, says the 
 old pilot, without hope till the moon changes. The 
 "■fickle moon," quotha ! I wish my friends were half 
 as constant ! 
 
 The pacha of the Dardanelles has honored us 
 with a visit. He came in a long caique, pulled by 
 twenty stout rascals, his excellency of "two tails" 
 silting on a rich carpet on the bottom of the boat with 
 his boy of a year old in the same uniform as himself, 
 and his suite of pipe and slipper-bearers, dwarf and 
 executioner, sitting cross-legged about him. He was 
 received with the guard and all the honor due his 
 rank. His face is that of a cold, haughty, and reso- 
 lute, but well-born man, and his son is like him. He 
 looked at everything attentively, without expressing 
 any surprise, till he came to the pianoforte, which 
 one of the ladies played to his undisguised delight. It 
 was the first he had ever seen. He inquired, through 
 his interpreter, if she had not been all her life in 
 learning. 
 
 The poet says, " The seasons of the year conae in 
 
 like masquers." To one who had made their ac- 
 quaintance in New-England, most of the months 
 would literally pass incog, in Italy. But here is hon- 
 est October, the same merry old gentleman, though I 
 meet him in Asia, and I remember him, last year, at 
 the baths of Lucca, as unchanged as here. It has 
 been a clear, bright, invigorating day, with a vitality 
 in the air as rousing to the spirits as a blast from the 
 " horn of Astolpho." I can remember just such a day 
 ten years ago. It is odd how a little sunshine will 
 cling to the memory when loves and hates that, in 
 their time, convulsed the very soul, are so easily for- 
 gotten. 
 
 We heard yesterday that there was a Turkish village 
 seven or eight miles in the mountains on the Asian 
 side, and, as a variety to the promenade on the quar- 
 ter-deck, a ramble was proposed to it. 
 
 We landed, this morning, on the bold shore of the 
 Dardanelles, and, climbing up the face of a sand-hill, 
 struck across a broad plain, through bush and brier, 
 for a mile. On the edge of a ravine we found a pretty 
 road, half hedged over with oak and hemlock, and a 
 mounted Turk, whom we met soon after, with a gun 
 across his pummel, and a goose looking from his 
 saddle-bag, directed us to follow it till we reached the 
 village. 
 
 It was a beautiful path, flecked with the shade of 
 leaves of all the variety of eastern trees, and refreshed 
 with a fountain at every mile. About half way we 
 stopped at a spring welling from a rock, under a large 
 fig-tree, from which the water poured, as clear as 
 crystal, into seven tanks, and one after the other rip- 
 pling away from the last into a wild thicket, whence a 
 stripe of brighter green marked its course down the 
 mountain. It was a spot worthy of Tempe. We 
 seated ourselves on the rim of the rocky basin, and, 
 with a drink of bright water, and a half hour's repose, 
 re-commenced our ascent, blessing the nymph of the 
 fount, like true pilgrims of the east. 
 
 A few steps beyond we met a caravan of the pacha's 
 tithe-gatherers, with mules laden with grapes ; the 
 turbaned and showily-armed drivers, as they came 
 winding down the dell, produced the picturesque 
 effect of a theatrical ballet. They laid their hands 
 on their breasts, with grave courtesy as they ap- 
 proached, and we helped ourselves to the ripe, blush- 
 ing clusters, as the panniers went by, with Arcadian 
 freedom. 
 
 We reached the summit of the ridge a little before 
 noon, and turned our faces back for a moment to 
 catch the cool wind from the Hellespont. The Dar- 
 danelles came winding out from the hills, just above 
 Abydos, and sweeping past the upper castles of Europe 
 and Asia, rushed down by Tenedos into the archipel- 
 ago. Perhaps twenty miles of its course lay within 
 our view. Its colors were borrowed from the divine 
 sky above, and the rainbow is scarce more varied or 
 brighter. The changing purple and blue of the mid- 
 stream, specked with white crests, the crysoprase green 
 of the shallows, and the dies of the various depths 
 along the shore, gave it the appearance of a vein of 
 transparent marble, inlaid through the valley. The 
 frigate looked like a child's boat on its bosom. To 
 our left, the tombs of Ajax and Achilles were just dis- 
 tinguishable in the plains of the Scamander, and Troy 
 (if Troy ever stood), stood back from the sea, and the 
 blue-wreathed isles of the archipelago bounded the 
 reach of the eye. It was a view that might "cure a 
 month's grief in a day." 
 
 We descended now into a kind of cradle valley, 
 yellow with rich vineyards. It was alive with people 
 gathering in the grapes. The creaking wagons filled 
 the road, and shouts and laughter rang over the moun- 
 tain-sides merrily. The scene would have been Italian, 
 but for the Turbans peering out everywhere from the 
 leaves, and those diabolical-looking buffaloes in the 
 
140 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 wagons. The village was a mile or two before us, and 
 we loitered on, entering here and there a vineyard, 
 where the only thing evidently grudged us was our 
 peep at the women. They scattered like deer as we 
 stepped over the walls. 
 
 Near the village we found a grave Turk, of whom 
 one of the officers made some inquiries, which were a 
 part of our errand to the mountains. It may spoil the 
 sentiment of my description, but, in addition to the 
 poetry of the ramble, we were to purchase beef for the 
 mess. His bullocks were out at grass (feeding in pas- 
 toral security, poor things!), and he invited us to his 
 house, while he sent his boy to drive them in. I rec- 
 ognised them, when they came, as two handsome 
 steers, which had completed the beauty of an open 
 glade, in the centre of a clump of forest trees, on our 
 route. The pleasure they have afforded the eye will 
 be repeated upon the palate — a double destiny not ac- 
 corded to all beautiful creatures. 
 
 Our host led us up a flight of rough stone steps to 
 the second story of his house, where an old woman 
 sat upon her heels, rolling out paste, and a younger 
 one nursed a little Turk at her bosom. They had, 
 like every man, woman, or child I have seen in this 
 country, superb eyes and noses. No chisel could im- 
 prove the meanest of them in these features. Our 
 friend's wife seemed ashamed to be caught with her 
 face uncovered, but she offered us cushions on the 
 floor before she retired, and her husband followed up 
 her courtesy with his pipe. 
 
 We went thence to the cafe, where a bubbling 
 hookah, a cup of coffee, and a divan, refreshed us a 
 little from our fatigues. While the rest of the party 
 were lingering over their pipes, I took a turn through 
 the village in search of the house of the aga. After 
 strolling up and down the crooked streets for half an 
 hour, a pretty female figure, closely enveloped in her 
 veil, and showing, as she ran across the street, a dainty 
 pair of feet in small yellow slippers, attracted me into 
 the open court of the best-looking house in the village. 
 The lady had disappeared, but a curious-looking car- 
 riage, lined with rich Turkey carpeting and cushions, 
 and covered with red curtains, made to draw close in 
 front, stood in the centre of the court. I was going up 
 to examine it, when an old man, with a beard to his 
 girdle, and an uncommonly rich turban, stepped from 
 the house, and motioned me angrily away. A large 
 wolf-dog, which he held by the collar, added em- 
 phasis to his command, and I retreated directly. 
 A giggle and several female voices from the close- 
 ly-latticed window, rather aggravated the mortifica- 
 tion. I had intruded on the premises of the aga, 
 a high offence in Turkey, when a woman is in the 
 case. 
 
 It was " deep i' the afternoon," when we arrived at 
 the beach, and made signal for a boat. We were on 
 board as the sky kindled with the warm colors of an 
 Asian sunset — a daily offset to our wearisome deten- 
 tion which goes far to keep me in temper. My fear is 
 that the commodore's patience is not "so good a con- 
 tinuer" as this " vento maledetto," as the pilot calls it, 
 and in such a case I lose Constantinople most provo- 
 kingiy. 
 
 Walked to the Upper Castle Asia, some eight miles 
 above our anchorage. This is the main town on the 
 Dardanelles, and contains forty or fifty thousand in- 
 habitants. Sestos and Abydos are a mile or two farther 
 up the strait. 
 
 We kept along the beach for an hour or two, passing 
 occasionally a Turk on horseback, till we were stopped 
 by a small and shallow creek without a bridge, just on 
 the skirts of the town. A woman with one eye peep- 
 ing from her veil, dressed in a tunic of fine blue cloth, 
 stood at the head of a large drove of camels on the 
 
 other side, and a beggar with one eye, smoked his pipe 
 on the sand at a little distance. The water was knee- 
 deep, and we were hesitating on the brink when the 
 beggar offered to carry us across on his back — a task 
 he accomplished (there were six of us) without taking 
 his pipe from his mouth. 
 
 1 tried in vain to get a peep at the camel-driver's 
 wife or daughter, but she seemed jealous of showing 
 even her eyebrow, and I followed on to the town. 
 The Turks live differently from every other people, I 
 believe. You walk through their town and see every 
 individual in it, except perhaps the women of the 
 pacha. Their houses are square boxes, the front 
 side of which lifts on a hinge in the day time, expo- 
 sing the whole interior, with its occupants squatted in 
 the corners or on the broad platform where their trades 
 are followed. They are scarce larger than boxes in 
 the theatre, and the roof projects into the middle of 
 the street, meeting that of the opposite neighbor, so 
 that the pavement between is always dark and cool. 
 The three or four Turkish towns I have seen, have 
 the appearance of cabins thrown up hastily after a fire. 
 You would not suppose they were intended to last 
 more than a month at the farthest. 
 
 We roved through the narrow streets an hour or 
 more, admiring the fine-bearded old Turks, smoking 
 cross-legged in the cafes, the slipper-makers with their 
 gay morocco wares in goodly rows around them, the 
 wily Jews with their high caps and caftans (looking, 
 crouched among their merchandise, like the "venders 
 of old bottles and abominable lies," as they are drawn 
 in the plays of Queen Elizabeth's time), the muffled 
 and gliding spectres of the moslem women, and the 
 livelier-footed Greek girls, in their velvet jackets and 
 braided hair, and by this time we were kindly disposed 
 to our dinners. 
 
 On our way to the consul's, where we were to dine, 
 we passed a mosque. The minaret (a tall peaked 
 tower, about of the shape and proportions of a pencil- 
 case) commanded a view down the principal streets; 
 and a stout fellow, with a sharp clear voice, leaned 
 over the balustrade at the top, crying out the invita- 
 tion to prayer in a long drawling sing-song, that must 
 have been audible on the other side of the Hellespont. 
 Open porches, supported by a paling extended all 
 around the church, and the floors were filled with 
 kneeling Turks, with their pistols and ataghans lying 
 beside them. I had never seen so picturesque a con- 
 gregation. The slippers were left in hundreds at the 
 threshold, and the bare and muscular feet and legs, 
 half concealed by the full trowsers, supported as 
 earnest a troop of worshippers as ever bent fore- 
 head to the ground. I left them rising from a flat 
 prostration, and hurried after my companions to 
 dinner. 
 
 Our consul of the Dardanelles is an American. 
 He is absent just now, in search of a runaway female 
 slave of the sultan's ; and his wife, a gracious Italian, 
 full of movement and hospitality, does the honors 
 of his house in his absence. He is a physician as 
 well as consul and slave-catcher, and the presents of 
 a hand-organ, a French clock, and a bronze standish, 
 rather prove him to be a favorite with the " brother of 
 the sun." 
 
 We were smoking the hookah after dinner, when 
 an intelligent-looking man, of fifty or so, came in to 
 pay us a visit. He is at present an exile from Con- 
 stantinople, by order of the grand seignior, because 
 a brother physician, his friend, failed in an attempt 
 to cure one of the favorites of the imperial harem ! 
 This is what might be called " sympathy upon com- 
 pulsion." It is unnecessary, one would think, to 
 make friendship more dangerous than common human 
 treachery renders it already. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 141 
 
 LETTER XCI. 
 
 TURKISH MILITARY LIFE A VISIT TO THE CAMP 
 
 TURKISH MUSIC SUNSETS THE SEA OF MARMORA. 
 
 A half hour's walk brought us within sight of the 
 pacha's camp. The green and white tents of five thou- 
 sand Turkish troops were pitched on the edge of a 
 stream, partly sheltered by a grove of noble oaks, and 
 defended by wicker batteries at distances of thirty or 
 forty feet. We were stopped by the sentinel on guard, 
 while a message was sent in to the pacha for permis- 
 sion to wait upon him. Meantime a number of young 
 officers came out from their tents, and commenced 
 examining our dresses with the curiosity of boys. 
 One put on my gloves, another examined the cloth of 
 my coat, a third took from me a curious stick I had 
 purchased at Vienna, and a more familiar gentleman 
 took up my hand, and after comparing it with his own 
 black fingers, stroked it with an approving smile that 
 was meant probably as a compliment. My compan- 
 ions underwent the same review, and their curiosity 
 was still unsated when a good-looking officer, with his 
 cimeter under his arm, came to conduct us to the 
 commander-in-chief. 
 
 The long lines of tents were bent to the direction 
 of the stream, and, at short distances, the silken ban- 
 ner stuck in the ground under the charge of a senti- 
 nel, and a divan covered with rich carpets under the 
 shade of the nearest tree, marked the tent of an offi- 
 cer. The interior of those of the soldiers exhibited 
 merely a stand of muskets and a raised platform for 
 bed and table, covered with coarse mats, and decked 
 with the European accoutrements now common in 
 Turkey. It was the middle of the afternoon, and 
 most of the officers lay asleep on low ottomans, with 
 their tent-curtains undrawn, and their long chibouques 
 beside them, or still at their lips. Hundreds of sol- 
 diers loitered about, engaged in various occupations, 
 sweeping, driving their tent-stakes more firmly into the 
 ground, cleaning arms, cooking, or with their heels 
 under them playing silently at dominoes. Half the 
 camp lay on the opposite bank of the stream, and 
 there was repeated the same warlike picture, the 
 white uniform and the loose red cap with its gold bul- 
 lion and blue tassel, appearing and disappearing be- 
 tween the rows of tents, and the bright red banners 
 clinging to the staff* in the breathless sunshine. 
 
 We soon approached the splendid pavilion of the 
 pacha, unlike the rest in shape, and surrounded bv a 
 quantity of servants, some cooking at the root of a 
 tree, and all pursuing their vocation with a singular 
 earnestness. A superb banner of bright crimson silk, 
 wrought with long lines of Turkish characters, prob- 
 ably passages from the Koran, stood in a raised socket 
 guarded by two sentinels. Near the tent, and not far 
 from the edge of the stream, stood a gayly-painted 
 kiosk, not unlike the fantastic summer-houses some- 
 times seen in a European garden, and here our con- 
 ductor stopped, and kicking off his slippers, motioned 
 for us to enter. 
 
 We mounted the steps, and passing a small en- 
 trance-room filled with guards, stood in the presence 
 of the commander-in-chief. He sat on a divan, cross- 
 legged, in a military frock-coat wrought with gold on 
 the collar and cuffs, a sparkling diamond crescent on 
 his breast, and a cimeter at his side, with a belt richly 
 wrought, and held by a buckle of dazzling brilliants. 
 His aid sat beside him, in a dress somewhat similar, j 
 and both appeared to be men of about forty. The j 
 pacha is a stern, dark, soldier like man, with a thick, i 
 straight beard as black as jet, and features which look ] 
 incapable of a smile. He bowed without rising when 
 we entered, and motioned for us to be seated. A little 
 conversation passed between him and the consul's 
 son, who acted as our interpreter, and coffee came in 
 
 almost immediately. There was an aroma about it 
 which might revive a mummy. The small china- 
 cups, with thin gold filagree sockets, were soon emp- 
 tied and taken away, and the officer in waiting intro- 
 duced a soldier to go through the manual exercise by 
 way of amusing us. 
 
 He was a powerful fellow, and threw his muske 
 about with so much violence, that I feared every mo- 
 ment, the stock, lock, and barrel, would part compa- 
 ny. He had taken off his shoes before venturing into 
 the presence of his commander, and looked oddly 
 enough, playing the soldier in his stockings. I was 
 relieved of considerable apprehension when he order- 
 ed arms, and backed out to his slippers. 
 
 The next exhibition was that of a military band. 
 A drum-major, with a proper gold-headed stick, 
 wheeled some sixty fellows with all kinds of instru- 
 ments under the windows of the kiosk, and with a 
 whirl of his baton, the harmony commenced. I could 
 just detect some resemblance to a march. The drums 
 rolled, the "■ear-piercing fifes" fulfilled their destiny, 
 and trombone, serpent, and horn, showed of what 
 they were capable. The pacha got upon his knees to 
 lean out of the window, and, as I rose from my low 
 seat at the same time, he pulled me down beside him, 
 and gave me half his carpet, patting me on the back, 
 and pressing me to the window with his arm over my 
 neck. I have observed frequently among the Turks 
 this singular familiarity of manners both to strangers 
 and one another. It is an odd contrast with their ha- 
 bitual gravity. 
 
 The sultan, I think unwisely, has introduced the 
 Europeau uniform into his army. With the excep- 
 tion of the Tunisian cap, which is substituted for the 
 thick and handsome turban, the dress is such as is 
 worn by the soldiers of the French army. Their tai- 
 lors are of course bad, and their figures, accustomed 
 only to the loose and graceful costume of the east, 
 are awkward and constrained. I never saw so uncouth 
 a set of fellows as the five thousand mussulmans in 
 this army of the Dardanelles; and yet in their Turk- 
 ish trowsers and turban, with the belt stuck full of 
 arms, and their long mustache, they would be as mar- 
 tial-looking troops as ever followed a banner. 
 
 We embarked at sunset to return to the ship. The 
 shell-shaped caique, with her tall sharp extremities 
 and fantastic sail, yielded to the rapid current of the 
 Hellespont; and our two boatmen, as handsome a 
 brace of Turks as ever were drawn in a picture, pull- 
 ed their legs under them more closely, and commen- 
 ced singing the alternate stanzas of a villanous duet. 
 The helmsman's part was rather humorous, and his 
 merry black eyes redeemed it somewhat, but his fel- 
 low was as grave as a dervish, and howled as if he 
 were ferrying over Xerxes after his defeat. 
 
 If I were to live in the east as long as the wander- 
 ing Jew, I think these heavenly sunsets, evening after 
 evening, scarce varying by a shade, would never be- 
 come familiar to my eye. They surprise me day after 
 day, like some new and brilliant phenomenon, though 
 the thoughts which they bring, as it were by a habit 
 contracted of the hour, are almost always the same. 
 The day, in these countries where life flows so thick- 
 ly, is engrossed, and pretty busily too, by the present. 
 The past comes up with the twilight, and wherever I 
 may be, and in whatever scene mingling, my heart 
 breaks away, and goes down into the west with the 
 sun. I am at home as duly as the bird settles to her 
 nest. 
 
 It was natural in paying the boatman, after such a 
 musing passage, to remember the poetical justice of 
 Uhland in crossing the ferry : — 
 
 " Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee ! 
 Take ! I give it willingly ; 
 For, invisibly to thee, 
 
 Spirits twain have crossed with m* !" 
 
142 
 
 PENC1LL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 I should have paid for one other seat, at least, by 
 this fanciful tariff. Our unmusical mussulmans were 
 content, however, and' we left them to pull back 
 against the tide, by a star that cast a shadow like a 
 meteor. 
 
 The moon changed this morning, and the wind, 
 that in this clime of fable is as constant to her as En- 
 dymion, changed too. The white caps vanished from 
 the hurrying waves of the Dardanelles, and after an 
 hour or two of calm, the long-expected breeze came 
 tripping out of Asia, with oriental softness, and is now 
 leading us gently up the Hellespont. 
 
 As we passed between the two castles of the Darda- 
 nelles, the commodore saluted the pacha with nine- 
 teen guns, and in half an hour we were off Abydos, 
 where our friend from the south has deserted us, and 
 we are compelled to anchor. It would be unclassical 
 to complain of delay on so poetical a spot. It is beau- 
 tiful, too. The shores on both the Asian and Euro- 
 pean sides are charmingly varied and the sun lies on 
 them, and on the calm strait that links them, with a 
 beauty worthy of the fair spirit of Hero. A small 
 Turkish castle occupies the site of the " torch-lit 
 tower" of Abydos, and there is a corresponding one 
 at Sestos. The distance between looks little more 
 than a mile — not a surprising feat for any swimmer, I 
 should think. Lady-loves in our day, alas ! are not 
 won so lightly. The current of the Hellespont, how- 
 ever, remains the same, and so does the moral of Le- 
 ander's story. The Hellespont of matrimony may be 
 crossed with the tide. The deuse is to get back ! 
 
 Lampsacus on the starboard-bow, and a fairer spot 
 lies on no river's brink. Its trees, vineyards, and cot- 
 tages, slant up almost imperceptibly from the water's 
 edge, and the hills around have the look " of a clean 
 and quiet privacy,'' with a rural elegance that might 
 tempt Shakspere's Jaques to come and moralize. 
 By the way, there have been philosophers here. Did 
 not Alexander forgive the ciry its obstinate defence for 
 the sake of Anaximenes ? There was a sad dog of a 
 deity worshipped here about that time. 
 
 I take a fresh look at it from the port, as I write. 
 Pastures, every one with a bordering of tall trees, cat- 
 tle as beautiful as the daughter of Ianchus, lanes of 
 wild shrubbery, a greener stripe through the fields like 
 the track of a stream, and smoke curling from every 
 cluster of trees, telling as plainly as the fancy can 
 read, that there is both poetry and pillow at Lamp- 
 sacus. 
 
 Just opposite stands the modern Gallipoli, a Turk- 
 ish town of some thirty thousand inhabitants, at the 
 head of the Hellespont. The Hellespont gets broad- 
 er here, and a few miles farther up we open into the 
 Sea of Marmora. A French brig-of-war, that has 
 been hanging about us for a fortnight (watching our 
 movements in this unusual cruise for an American 
 frigate, perhaps), is just ahead, and a quantity of 
 sail are stretching off on the southern tack, to make 
 the best use of their new sea room for beating up to 
 Constantinople. 
 
 We hope to see Seraglio Point to-morrow. Mr. 
 Hodgson, the secretary of our embassy to Turkey, 
 has just come on board from the Smyrna packet, and 
 the agreeable preparations for going on shore, are al- 
 ready on the stir. I do not find that the edge of curi- 
 osity dulls with use. Thcprospect of seeing a strange 
 city to-morrow, produces the same quick-pulsed emo- 
 tion that I felt in the diligence two years ago, rattling 
 over the last post to Paris. The entrances to Flor- 
 ence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Athens, are marked 
 each with as white a stone. He may " gather no moss" 
 who rolls about the world ; but that which the gold 
 of the careful can not buy — pleasure — when the soul 
 is most athirst for it, grows under his feet. Of 
 the many daily reasons I find to thank Providence, 
 
 not the least is that of being what Clodio calls himself 
 in the play "a here-and-thereian." 
 
 LETTER XCII. 
 
 GALLIPOLI — ARISTOCRACY OF BEARDS — TURKISH SHOP- 
 KEEPERS THE HOSPITABLE JEW AND HIS LOVELY 
 
 DAUGHTER UNEXPECTED RENCONTRE CONSTANTI- 
 NOPLE — THE BOSPHORUS, THE SERAGLIO, AND THE 
 GOLDEN HORN. 
 
 What an image of life it is ! The good ship dash- 
 es bravely on her course — the spray flies from her 
 prow — her sheets are steady and full — to look up to 
 her spreading canvass, and (eel her springing away be- 
 neath, you would not give her " for the best horse the 
 sun has in his stable." The next moment, hey ! the 
 foresail is aback! the wind baffles and dies, the ripples 
 sink from the sea, the ship loses her "way," and the 
 pennant drops to the mast in a breathless calm ! 
 " Clear away the anchor !" and here we are till this 
 " crab in the ascendant" that makes "all our affairs go 
 backward," yields to our better stars. 
 
 We went ashore to take a stroll through the streets 
 of Gallipoli (the ancient Gallipoli of Thrace) as a sop 
 to our patience. A deeply-laden Spanish merchant 
 lay off the pier, with a crew of red-capped and olive- 
 complexioned fellows taking in grain from a Turkish 
 caique, and a crowd of modern Thraciaus, in the noble 
 costumes and flowing beards of the country, closed 
 around us as we stepped from the boat. 
 
 A street of cafes led from the end of the pier, and 
 as usual, they were all crowded with Turks, leaning, 
 forward over their slippers, and crossing their long 
 chibouques as they conversed together. It is odd 
 that even the habit of a life can make their painful 
 and unnatural posture an agreeable one. Yet they 
 will sit with their legs crooked under them, in a way 
 that strains the unaccustomed knee till it cracks again, 
 motionless by the hour together. 
 
 I had no idea till I came to Turkey how rare "a 
 beauty is a handsome beard. Here no, man shaves, 
 and there is as great a difference in beards as in stature. 
 The men of rank that we have seen, might have been 
 picked out anywhere by their superior beauty in this 
 respect. It grows vilely, it seems to me, on scoun- 
 drels. The beggars ashore, the low Jews who board 
 us with provisions, the greater part of the soldiers and 
 petty shopkeepers of the towns, have all some mark 
 in their beards that nature never intended them for 
 gentlemen. Your smooth chin is a great leveller, trust 
 me ! 
 
 These Turkish towns have a queer look altogether. 
 Gallipoli is so seldom touched by a Christian foot, 
 that it preserves all its peculiarities entire, and is likely 
 to do so for the next century. We walked on, ascend- 
 ing a narrow street completely shut in by the roofs of 
 the low houses meeting above. There are no car- 
 riages or carts, and the Turks glide over the stones in 
 their loose slippers with an indolent shuffle that seems 
 rather to add to the silence. You hear no voice, for 
 they seldom speak, and never above the key of a bas- 
 soon ; and what with the odd costumes, long beards, 
 grave faces, and twilight darkness all about you, it is 
 like a scene on the stage when the lights are lowered 
 in some incantation scene. 
 
 Each street is devoted to some one trade. We first 
 got among the grocers. Every shop was a fellow to 
 the other, containing an old Turk squatted among 
 soap, jars of oil, raisins, olives, pickled fish, and swee* 
 meats, and everything within his reach. He would 
 sell you his whole stock in trade without taking his 
 pipe from his mouth, or disturbing his yellow slipper. 
 
 The next turn brought us into the Jews' quarter. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 143 
 
 They were nil tailors, and their shops were as dark as 
 Erebus. The light crept through the chinks in the 
 roof, falling invariably on the same aquiline nose and 
 ragged beard, with now and then a pair of copper spec- 
 tacles, while in the back of the dim tenement sat an 
 olJ woman with a group of handsome little Hebrews, 
 (they are .always handsome when very young, with 
 their clear 3kins and dark eyes) the whole family 
 stitching away most diligently. It was laughable to 
 see how every shop in the street presented the same 
 picture. 
 
 We then got among the slipper-makers, and vile 
 work they turned out. We were hesitating between 
 two turnings when an old Jew, with a high lamb's- 
 wool cap and long black caftan, rather shabby for 
 wear, addressed me in a sort of lingua Franca, half 
 Italian, half French, with a sprinkling of Spanish, and 
 inquiring whether I belonged to the frigate in the har- 
 bor, offered to supply us with provisions, etc., etc. I 
 declined his services, and he asked us directly to his 
 house to take coffee, as plump a non sequitur as I 
 have met in my travels. 
 
 We followed the old man to a very secluded part of 
 the town, stopping a moment by the way to look at 
 the remains of an old fort built by the Genoese in the 
 stout times of Andrea Doria. (Where be their gal- 
 leys now ?) Hajji (so he was called, he said, from 
 having been to Jerusalem) stopped at last at the door 
 of a shabby house, and throwing it open with a hos- 
 pitable smile, bade us welcome. We mounted a creak- 
 ing stair, and found things within better than the prom- 
 ise of the exterior. One half the floor of the room 
 was raised perhaps a foot, and matted neatly, and a 
 nicely carpeted and cushioned divan ran around the 
 three sides, closed at the two extremities by a lattice- 
 work like the arm of a sofa. The windows were set 
 in fantastical arabesque frames, the upper panes coarse- 
 ly colored, but with a rich effect, and the view hence 
 stretched over the Hellespont toward the south, with a 
 delicious background of the valleys about Lampsacus. 
 No palace window looks on a fairer scene. The broad 
 strait was as smooth as the amber of the old Hebrew's 
 pipe, and the vines that furnished Themistocles with 
 wine during his exile in Persia, looked of as golden a 
 green in the light of the sunset, as if the honor of the 
 tribute still warmed their classic juices. 
 
 The rich Turkish coffee was brought in by an old 
 woman, who left her slippers below as she stepped 
 upon the mat, and our host followed with chibouques 
 and a renewed welcome. A bright pair of eyes had 
 been peeping for some time from one of the chambers, 
 and with Hajji's permission I called out a graceful 
 creature of fourteen, with a shape like a Grecian Cu- 
 pidon, and a timid sweetness of expression that might 
 have descended to her from the gentle Ruth of scrip- 
 ture. There are lovely beings all over the world. It 
 were a desert else. But I did not think to find such 
 a diamond in a Hebrew's bosom. I have forgotten to 
 mention her hair, which was very remarkable. I 
 thought at first it was died with henna. It covered 
 her back and shoulders in the greatest profusion, braid- 
 ed near the head, and floating below in glossy and 
 silken curls of a richness you would deny nature had 
 you seen it in a painting. The color was of the deep 
 burnt brown of a berry, almost black in the shade, but 
 catching the light at every motion like threads of gold. 
 In my life I have seen nothing so beautiful. It was 
 the "hair lustrous and smiling" of quaint old Burton.* 
 There was something in it that you could scarce avoid 
 associating with the character of the wearer — as if it 
 stole its softness from some inborn gentleness in her 
 heart. I shall never thread my fingers through such 
 locks again ! 
 
 We shook our kind host by the hand, and stepped 
 
 * " Hair lustrous and smiling. The trope is none of mine. 
 Alneus Sylvius hath nines ridevtc*."— Anatomy of Melancholy . 
 
 gingerly down in the fading twilight to our boat. As 
 we were crossing an open space between the bazars, 
 two gentlemen in a costume half European half Ori- 
 ental, with spurs and pistols, and a quantity of dust on 
 their mustaches, passed, and immediately turned and 
 called me by name. The last place in which 1 should 
 have looked for acquaintances, would be GalHpoli. 
 They were two French exquisites whom I had known 
 at Rome, travelling to Constantinople with no more 
 serious object, I dare be sworn, than to return with 
 long beards from the east. They had just arrived on 
 horseback, and were looking for a khan. I commend- 
 ed them to my old friend the Jew, who offered at once 
 to lodge them at his house, and we parted in this by- 
 corner of Thrace, as if we had but met for the second 
 time in a morning stroll to St. Peter's. 
 
 We lay till noon in the glassy harbor of Gallipoli, 
 and then the breeze came slowly up the Hellespont, 
 its advancing edge marked by a crowd of small sail 
 keeping even pace with its wings. We soon opened 
 into the extending sea of Marmora, and the cloudy 
 island of the same name is at this moment on our lee. 
 The sun is setting gorgeously over the hills of Thrace, 
 and thankful for sea-room once more, and a good 
 breeze, we make ourselves certain of seeing Constan- 
 tinople to-morrow. 
 
 We were ten miles distant when I came on deck 
 this morning. A long line of land with a slightly- 
 waving outline began to emerge from the mist of sun- 
 rise, and with a glass I could distinguish the cluster- 
 ing masses and shining eminences of a distant and far 
 extending city. We were approaching it with a cloud 
 of company. A Turkish ship-of-war with the cres- 
 cent and star fluttering on her blood-red flag, a French 
 cutter bearing the handsome tri-color at her peak, and 
 an uncounted swarm of merchantmen, taking advan- 
 tage of the newly-changed wind, were spreading every 
 thread of canvass, and stretching on as eagerly as we 
 toward the metropolis of the east. There was some- 
 thing in the companionship which elated me. It 
 seemed as if all the world shared in my anticipations — 
 as if all the world were going to Constantinople. 
 
 I approached the mistress of the east with different 
 feelings from that which had inspired me in entering 
 the older cities of Europe. The interest of the latter 
 sprang from the past. Rome, Florence, Athens, were 
 delightful from the store of history and poetry I 
 brought with me and had accumulated in my youth — 
 from what they once were, and for that of which they 
 preserved the ruins. Constantinople, on the contrary, 
 is still the gem of the Orient — still the home of the 
 superb Turk, and the resort of many nations of the 
 east— still all that fires curiosity and excites the ima- 
 gination in the descriptions of the traveller. I was 
 doming to a living city, full of strange people and 
 strange costumes, language, and manners. It was, to 
 the places I had seen, like the warm and breathing 
 woman perfect in life, to the interesting but lifeless 
 and mutilated statue. 
 
 As the distance lessened, the tall, slender, glittering 
 minarets of a hundred mosques were first distinguish- 
 able. Towers, domes, and dark spots of cypresses 
 next emerged to the eye, and a sea of buildings, fol- 
 lowed undulating in many swells and widening along 
 the line of the sea as if we were approaching a conti- 
 nent covered to its farthest limits with one unbroken 
 city. 
 
 We kept on with unslackened sail to the shore 
 which seemed closed before us. A few minutes open- 
 ed to us a curving bay, winding in and lost to the eye 
 behind a swelling eminence, and as if mosques, towers, 
 and palaces, had spread away and opened to receive us 
 
144 
 
 PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 into their bosom, we shot into the heart of a busy city, 
 and dropped anchor at the feet of a cluster of hills, 
 studded from base to summit with buildings of inde- 
 scribable splendor. 
 
 An American gentleman had joined us in the Dar- 
 danelles, and stood with us, looking at the transcen- 
 dant panorama. M What is this lovely point, gemmed 
 with gardens and fantastic palaces, and with every va- 
 riety of tree and building on its gentle slope descend- 
 ing so gracefully to the sea ?" The Seraglio ! " What 
 is this opening of bright water, crowded with shipping, 
 and sprinkled with these fairy boats so gayly decked and 
 so slender, shooting from side to side like the crossing 
 flight of a thousand arrows ?" The Golden Horn, that 
 winds up through the city and terminates in the valley 
 of Sweet Waters ! " And what is this other stream, 
 opening into the hills to the east, and lined with glit- 
 tering palaces as far as the eye can reach ?" The 
 Bosphorus. " And what is this, and that, and the 
 other exquisite and surpassing beauty — features of a 
 scene to which the earth surely has no shadow of a 
 parallel!" Patience ! patience ! We have a month 
 before us, and we will see. 
 
 LETTER XCIII. 
 
 CONSTANTINOPLE — AN ADVENTURE WITH THE DOGS OF 
 
 STAMBOUL— THE SULTAN'S KIOSK THE BAZARS — 
 
 GEORGIANS — SWEETMEATS— HINDOOSTANEE FAKEERS 
 
 TURKISH WOMEN AND THEIR EYES THE JEWS — A 
 
 TOKEN OF HOME THE DRUG-BAZAR OPIUM-EATERS. 
 
 The invariable '■'■Where am 27" with which a trav- 
 eller awakes at morning was to me never more agree- 
 ably answered. At Constantinople ! The early ship- 
 of-war summons to "turn out," was obeyed with 
 alacrity, and with the first boat after breakfast I was 
 set ashore at Tophana, the landing-place of the Frank 
 quarter of Stnmboul. 
 
 A row of low-built cafes, with a latticed enclosure 
 and a plentiful shade of plane-trees on the right; a 
 large square, in the centre of which stood a magnifi- 
 cent Persian fountain, as large as a church, covered 
 with lapis-lazuli and gold, and endless inscriptions in 
 Turkish; a mosque buried in cypresses on the left ; a 
 hundred indolent-looking, large-trousered, mustached, 
 and withal very handsome men, and twice the number 
 of snarling, wolfish, and half starved dogs, are some of 
 the objects which the first glance, as I stepped on 
 shore, left on my memory. 
 
 I had heard that the dogs of Constantinople knew 
 and hated a Christian. By the time I had reached 
 the middle of the square, a wretched puppy at my 
 heels had succeeded in announcing the presence of a 
 stranger. They were upon me in a moment from 
 every heap of garbage, and every hole and corner. I 
 was beginning to be seriously alarmed, standing per- 
 fectly still, with at least a hundred infuriated dogs bark- 
 ing in a circle around me, when an old Turk, selling 
 sherbet under the shelter of the projecting roof of the 
 Persian fountain, came kindly to my relief. A stone 
 or two well aimed, and a peculiar cry, which I have 
 since tried in vain to imitate, dispersed the hungry 
 wretches, and I took a glass of the old man's raisin- 
 water, and pursued my way up the street. The 
 circumstance, however, had discolored my anticipa- 
 tions; nothing looked agreeably to me for an hour 
 after it. 
 
 I ascended through narrow and steep lanes, between 
 rows of small wooden houses, miserably built and 
 painted, to the main street of the quarter of Pera. 
 Here live all Christians and Christian ambassadors, 
 
 and here T found our secretary of legation, Mr. H., 
 who kindly offered to accompany me to old Stam- 
 boul. 
 
 We descended to the water-side, and stepping into 
 an egg-shell caique, crossed the Golden Horn, and 
 landed on a pier between the sultan's green kiosk and 
 the seraglio. I was fortunate in a. companion who 
 knew the people and spoke the language. The red- 
 trousered and armed kervas, at the door of the kiosk, 
 took his pipe from his mouth, after a bribe and a little 
 persuasion, and motioned to a boy to show us the in- 
 terior. A circular room, with a throne of solid silvei 
 embraced in a double colonnade of marble pillars, and 
 covered with a roof laced with lapis lazuli and gold, 
 formed the place from which Sultan Mahmoud for- 
 merly contemplated, on certain days, the busy and 
 beautiful panorama of his matchless bay. The kiosk 
 is on the edge of the water, and the poorest caikjee 
 might row his little bark under its threshold, and fill 
 his monarch's eye, and look on his monarch's face 
 with the proudest. The green canvass curtains, which 
 envelop the whole building, have, for a long time, been 
 unraised, and Mahmoud is oftener to be seen on horse- 
 back, in the dress of a European officer, guarded by 
 troops in European costume and array. The change 
 is said to be dangerously unpopular. 
 
 We walked on to the square of Sultana Valide. Its 
 large area was crowded with the buyers and sellers of 
 a travelling fair — a sort of Jews' market held on differ- 
 ent days in different parts of this vast capital. In 
 Turkey every nation is distinguished by its dress, and 
 almost as certainly by its branch of trade. On the 
 right of the gate, under a huge plane-tree, shedding 
 its yellow leaves among the various wares, stood the 
 booths of a group of Georgians, their round and rosy- 
 dark faces (you would know their sisters must be half 
 houris) set off with a tall black cap of curling wool, 
 their small shoulders with a tight jacket studded with 
 silk buttons, and their waists with a voluminous silken 
 sash, whose fringed ends fell over their heels as they 
 sat cross-legged, patiently waiting for custom. Hard- 
 ware is the staple of their shops, but the cross-pole in 
 front is fantastically hung with silken garters and tas- 
 selled cords, and their own Georgian caps, with a gay 
 crown of cashmere, enrich and diversify the shelves. 
 I bought a pair or two of blushing silk garters of 
 a young man, whose eyes and teeth should have 
 been a woman's, and we strolled on to the next 
 booth. 
 
 Here was a Turk, with a table covered by a broad 
 brass waiter, on which was displayed a tempting array 
 of mucilage, white and pink, something of the consis- 
 tency of blanc-mange. A dish of sugar, small gilded 
 saucers, and long-handled, flat, brass spoons, with a 
 vase of rose-water, completed his establishment. The 
 grave mussulman cut, sugared, and scented the por- 
 tions for which we asked, without condescending to 
 look at us or open his lips, and, with a glass of mild 
 and pleasant sherbet from his next neighbor, as im 
 moveable a Turk as himself, we had lunched, ex- 
 tremely to my taste, for just five cents American cur- 
 rency. 
 
 A little farther on I was struck with the appearance 
 of two men, who stood bargaining with a Jew. My 
 friend knew them immediately as fakeers, or religious 
 devotees, from Hindoostan. He addressed them in 
 Arabic, and, during their conversation often minutes, 
 I studied them with some curiosity. They were sin- 
 gularly small, without any appearance of dwarfishness, 
 their limbs and persons slight, and very equally and 
 gracefully proportioned. Their features were abso- 
 lutely regular, and, though small as a child's of ten or 
 twelve years, were perfectly developed. They appear- 
 ed like men seen through an inverted opera-glass. An 
 exceedingly ashy, olive complexion, hair of a kind of 
 glittering black, quite unlike in texture and color any 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 145 
 
 I have ever before seen ; large, brilliant, intense black 
 eyes, and lips (the most peculiar feature of all), of 
 lustreless black* completed the portraits of two as 
 remarkable-looking men as I have anywhere met. 
 Their costume was humble, but not unpicturesque- 
 A well-worn sash of red silk enveloped the waist in 
 many folds, and sustained trousers tight to the legs, 
 but of the Turkish ampleness over the hips. Their 
 small feet, which seemed dried up to the bone, were 
 bare. A blanket, with a hood marked in a kind of 
 arabesque figure, covered their shoulders, and a high- 
 quilted cap, with a rim of curling wool, was pressed 
 down closely over the forehead. A crescent-shaped 
 tin vessel, suspended by a leather strap to the waist, 
 and serving the two purposes of a charity-box, and a 
 receptacle for bread and vegetables, seemed a kind of 
 badge of their profession. They were lately from 
 Hindoostan, and were begging their way still farther 
 into Europe. They received our proffered alms with- 
 out any mark of surprise or even pleasure, and laying 
 their hands on their breasts, with countenances per- 
 fectly immoveable, gave us a Hindoostanee blessing, 
 and resumed their traffic. They see the world, these 
 rovers on foot ! And I think, could I see it myself in 
 no other way, I would e'en take sandal and scrip, and 
 traverse it as dervish or beggar ! 
 
 The alleys between the booths were crowded with 
 Turkish women, who seemed the chief purchasers. 
 1 he effect of their enveloped persons, and eyes peer- 
 ing from the muslin folds of the yashmack, is droll to 
 a stranger. It seemed to me like a masquerade, and 
 the singular sound of female voices, speaking through 
 several thicknesses of a stuff, bound so close on the 
 mouth as to show the shape of the lips exactly, per- 
 fected the delusion. It reminded me of the half- 
 smothered tones beneath the masks in carnival-time. 
 A clothes-bag with yellow slippers would have about 
 as much form, and might be walked about with as 
 much grace as a Turkish woman. Their fat hands, 
 the finger-nails dyed with henna, and their unexcep- 
 tionably magnificent eyes, are all that the stranger is 
 permuted to peruse. It is strange how universal is 
 the beauty of the eastern eye. I have looked in vain 
 hitherto, for a small or an unexpressive one. It is 
 quite startling to meet the gaze of such large liquid 
 orbs, bent upon you from their long silken fringes, 
 with the unwinking steadiness of look common to the 
 females of this country. Wrapped in their veils, they 
 seem unconscious of attracting attention, and turn and 
 look you lull in the face, while you seek in vain for a 
 pair of lips to explain by their expression the meaning 
 of such particular notice. 
 
 The Jew is more distinguishable at Constantinople 
 than elsewhere. He is compelled to wear the dress 
 oi his tribe (and its "badge of sufferance," too), and 
 you will find him, wherever there is trafficking to be 
 done, in a small cap, not ungracefully shaped, twisted 
 about with a peculiar handkerchief of a small black 
 print and set back so as to show the whole of his na- 
 tional high and narrow forehead. He is always good- 
 humored and obsequious, and receives the curse with 
 which his officious offers of service are often repelled, 
 with a smile, and a hope that he may serve you another 
 time. One of them, as we passed his booth, called 
 our attention to some newly-opened bales, bearing the 
 
 Stamp, "TREMONT MILL, LOWELL, MASS." It was 
 
 a long distance from home to meet such familiar 
 words ! 
 
 We left the square of the sultan mother, and entered 
 a street of confectioners. The east is famous for its 
 sweetmeats, and truly a more tempting array never 
 
 tinoile a Ind i i C fi,H e t t ™ n y of them in the streets of Constan- 
 Th?.y ool as ii ,hl> r * ,llstin p i «hing feature of their race. 
 bene y a h°t h e sk n ^ ™ n dead ~ as if the blood ^ dried 
 
 visited the Christmas dream of a schoolboy. Even 
 Felix, the palissier nonpareil of Paris, might take a 
 lesson in jellies. And then for "candy" of all colors 
 of the rainbow (not shut enviously in with pitiful glass 
 cases, but piled up to the ceiling in a shop all in the 
 street, as it might be in Utopia, with nothing to pay), 
 it is like a scene in the Arabian Nights. The last 
 part of the parenthesis is almost true, for with a small 
 coin of the value of two American cents, I bought of a 
 certain kind called, in Turkish, "peace to your throat" 
 (they call things by such poetical names 'in the east), 
 the quarter of which I could not have eaten, even in 
 my best "days of sugar-candy." The women of 
 Constantinople, I am told, almost live on confection- 
 ary. They eat incredible quantities. The sultan's 
 eight hundred wives and women employ five hundred 
 cooks, and consume two thousand Jive hundred pounds 
 of sugar daily .' It is probably the most expensive 
 item of the seraglio kitchen. 
 
 A turn or two brought us to the entrance of a long 
 dark passage, of about the architecture of a covered 
 bridge in our country. A place richer in the oriental 
 and picturesque could scarce be found between the 
 Danube and the Nile. It is the bazar of drugs. As 
 your eye becomes accustomed to the light, you dis- 
 tinguish vessels of every size and shape, ranged along 
 the receding shelves of a stall, and filled to the uncov- 
 ered brim with the various productions of the Orient. 
 The edges of the baskets and jars are turned over '^hh 
 rich colored papers (a peculiar color to every drug), 
 and broad spoons of boxwood are crossed on the top. 
 There is the henna in a powder of deep brown, with 
 an envelope of deep Tyrian purple, and all the precious 
 gums in their jars, golden-leafed, and spices and dies 
 and medicinal roots, and above hang anatomies of 
 curious monsters, dried and stuffed, and in the midst 
 of all, motionless as the box of sulphur beside him, 
 and almost as yellow, sits a venerable Turk, with his 
 beard on his knees, and his pipe-bowl thrust away 
 over his drugs, its ascending smoke-curls his only 
 sign of life. This class of merchants is famous for 
 opium-eaters, and if. you pass at the right hour, you 
 find the large eye of the silent smoker dilated and 
 wandering, his fingers busy in tremulously counting 
 his spicewood beads, and the roof of his stall wreathed 
 with clouds of smoke, the vent to every species of 
 eastern enthusiasm. If you address him, he smiles, 
 and puts his hand to his forehead and breast, but con- 
 descends to answer no question till it is thrice reitera- 
 ted, and then in the briefest word possible, he answers 
 wide of your meaning, strokes the smoke out of his 
 mustache, and slipping the costly amber between h's 
 lips, abandons himself again to his exalted revery. I 
 write this after being a week at Constantinople, du- 
 ring which the Egyptian bazar has been my frequent 
 and most fancy-stirring lounge. Of its forty mer- 
 chants, there is not one whose picturesque features 
 are not imprinted deeply in my memory. I have idled 
 up and down in the dim light, and fingered the soft 
 henna, and bought small parcels of incense-wood for 
 my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of 
 the unconscious old mussulmans, till my mind became 
 somehow tinctured of the east, and (what will be bet- 
 ter understood) my clothes steeped in the mixed and 
 agreeable odors of the thousand spices. Where are 
 the painters, that they have never found this mine of 
 admirable studies ? There is not a corner of Con- 
 stantinople, nor a man in its streets, that were not a 
 novel and a capital subject for the pencil. Pray, Mr. 
 Cole, leave things that have been painted so often, as 
 aqueducts and Italian ruins (though you do make de- 
 licious pictures, and could never waste time or pencils 
 on anything), and come to the east for one single book 
 of sketches ! How I have wished I was a painter since 
 I have been here ! 
 
146 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER XCIV. 
 
 THE SULTAN'S PERFUMER ETIQUETTE OF SMOKING 
 
 TEMPTATIONS FOR PURCHASERS — EXQUISITE FLA- 
 VOR OF THE TURKISH PERFUMES THE SLAVE- 
 MARKET OF CONSTANTINOPLE SLAVES FROM VA- 
 RIOUS COUNTRIES, GREEK, CIRCASSIAN, EGYPTIAN, 
 
 PERSIAN AFRICAN FEMALE SLAVES AN IMPRO- 
 
 VISATRICE EXPOSURE FOR SALE CIRCASSIAN 
 
 BEAUTIES PROHIBITED TO EUROPEANS FIRST 
 
 SIGHT OF ONE, EATING A PIE SHOCK TO ROMAN- 
 TIC FEELINGS— BEAUTIFUL ARAB GIRL CHAINED 
 
 TO THE FLOOR THE SILK-MERCHANT A CHEAP 
 
 PURCHASE. 
 
 An Abyssinian slave, with bracelets on his wrists 
 and ankles, a white turban, folded in the most approv- 
 ed fashion around his curly head, and a showy silk 
 sash about his waist, addressed us in broken English 
 as we passed a small shop on the way to theBezestein. 
 His master was an old acquaintance of my polyglot 
 friend, and, passing in at a side door, we entered a 
 dimly-lighted apartment in the rear, and were receiv- 
 ed, with a profusion of salaams, by the sultan's per- 
 fumer. For a Turk, Mustapha Effendi was the most 
 voluble gentleman in his discourse that I had yet met 
 in Stamboul. A sparse gray beard just sprinkled a 
 pair of blown-up cheeks, and a collapsed double chin 
 that fell in curtain folds to his bosom, a mustache, of 
 seven or eight hairs on a side, curled demurely about 
 the corners of his mouth, his heavy, oily black eyes 
 twinkled in their pursy recesses, with the salacious good 
 humor of a satyr; and, as he coiled his legs under 
 him on the broad ottoman in the corner, his boneless 
 body completely lapped over them, knees and all, and 
 left him, apparently, bolt upright on his trunk, like a 
 man amputated at the hips. A string of beads in one 
 hand, and a splendid narghile, or rose-water pipe in 
 the other, completed as fine a picture of a mere ani- 
 mal as I remember to have met in my travels. 
 
 My learned friend pursued the conversation in Turk- 
 ish, and, in a few minutes, the , black entered, with 
 pipes of exquisite amber filled with the mild Persian 
 tobacco. Leaving his slippers at the door, he drop- 
 ped upon his knee, and placed two small brass dishes 
 in the centre of the room to receive the hot pipe- 
 bowls, and, with a showy flourish of his long, naked 
 arm, brought round the rich mouth-pieces to our 
 lips. A spicy atom of some aromatic composition, 
 laid in the centre of the bowl, removed from the 
 smoke all that could offend the most delicate organs, 
 and, as I looked about the perfumer's retired sanctum, 
 and my eye rested on the small heaps of spice-woods, 
 the gilded pastilles, the curious bottles of ottar of ro- 
 ses and jasmine, and thence to the broad, soft divans 
 extending quite around the room, piled in the corners 
 with cushions of down, I thought Mustapha, the per- 
 fumer, among those who lived by traffic, had the 
 cleanliest and most gentleman-like vocation. 
 
 Observing that I smoked but little, Mustapha gave 
 an order to his familiar, who soon appeared, with two 
 small gilded saucers; one containing a jelly of incom- 
 parable delicacy and whiteness, and the other a can- 
 died liquid, tinctured with quince and cinnamon. My 
 friend explained to me that I was to eat both, and that 
 Mustapha said, " on his head be the injury it would 
 do me." There needed little persuasion. The cook 
 to a court of fairies might have mingled sweets less 
 delicately. t 
 
 For all this courtesy Mustapha finds his offset in 
 the opened hearts of his customers, when the pipes 
 are smoked out, and there is nothing to delay the offer 
 of his costly wares. First calling for a jar of jessa- 
 mine, than which the sultan himself perfumes his 
 beard with no rarer, he turned it upside down, and, 
 leaning toward me, rubbed the moistened cork over 
 
 my nascent mustache, and waited with a satisfied cer- 
 tainty for my expression of admiration as it " ascended 
 me into the brain." There was no denying that it 
 was of a celestial flavor. He held up his fingers : 
 " One ? two ? three ? ten ? How many bottles shall 
 your slave fill for you?" It was a most lucid panto- 
 mime. An interpreter would have been superfluous. 
 
 The ottar of roses stood next on the shelf. It was 
 the best ever sent from Adrianople. Bottle after bot- 
 tle of different extracts was passed under nasal review; 
 each, one might think, the triumph of the alchymy 
 of flowers, and of each a specimen was laid aside foi 
 me in a slender vial, dexterously capped with vellum, 
 and tied with a silken thread by the adroit Abyssinian. 
 I escaped emptying my purse by a single worthless 
 coin, the fee I required for my return boat over the 
 Golden Horn — but I had seen Mustapha, the per 
 fumer. 
 
 My friend led the way through several intricate 
 windings, and passing through a gateway, we entered 
 a circular area, surrounded with a single building di 
 vided into small apartments, faced with open porches. 
 It was the slave-market of Constantinople. My first 
 idea was to look round for Don Juan and Johnson. 
 In their place we found slaves of almost every eastern 
 nation, who looked at us with an " I wish to heaven 
 that somebody would buy us" sort of an expression, 
 but none so handsome as Haidee's lover. In a low 
 cellar, beneath one of the apartments, lay twenty or 
 thirty white men chained together by the legs, and 
 with scarce the covering required by decency. A 
 small-featured Arab stood at the door, wrapped in a 
 purple-hooded cloak, and Mr. H. addressing him in 
 Arabic, inquired their nations. He was not their 
 master, but the stout fellow in the corner, he said, was 
 a Greek by his regular features, and the boy chained 
 to him was a Circassian by his rosy cheek and curly 
 hair, and the black-lipped villain with the scar over his 
 forehead, was an Egyptian, doubtless, and the two that 
 looked like brothers, were Georgians or Persians, or 
 perhaps Bulgarians. Poor devils ! they lay on the 
 clay floor with a cold easterly wind blowing in upon 
 them, dispirited and chilled, with the prospect of being 
 sold to a task-master for their best hope of relief. 
 
 A shout of African laughter drew us to the other 
 side of the bazar. A dozen Nubian-damsels, flat-nos- 
 ed and curly-headed, but as straight and fine-limbed 
 as pieces of black statuary, lay around on a platform 
 in front of their apartment, while one sat upright in 
 the middle, and amused her companions by some nar- 
 ration accompanied by grimaces irresistibly ludicrous. 
 Each had a somewhat scant blanket, black with dirt, 
 and worn as carelessly as a lady carries her shawl. 
 Their black, polished frames were disposed about, in 
 postures a painter would scarce call ungraceful, and 
 no start or change of attitude when we approached be- 
 trayed the innate coyness of the sex. After watching 
 the improvisatrice awhile, we were about passing on, 
 when a man came out from the inner apartment, and 
 beckoning to one of them to follow him, walked into 
 the middle of the bazar. She was a tall, arrow- 
 straight lass of about eighteen, with the form of a 
 nymph, and the head of a baboon. He commenced 
 by crying in a voice that must have been educated in 
 the gallery of a minaret, setting forth the qualities of 
 the animal at his back, who was to be sold at public 
 auction forthwith. As he closed his harangue he 
 slipped his pipe back into his mouth, and lifting the 
 scrimped blanket of the ebon Venus, turned her twice 
 round, and walked to the other side of the bazar, 
 where his cry and the exposure of the submissive 
 wench were repeated. 
 
 We left him to finish his circuit, and walked on in 
 search of the Circassian beauties of the market. 
 Several turbaned slave-merchants were sitting round a 
 manghal, or brass vessel of coals, smoking or making 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 147 
 
 their coffee, in one of the porticoes, and my friend ad- 
 dressed one of them with an inquiry on the subject. 
 " There were Circassians in the bazar," he said, " but 
 there was an express firman, prohibiting the exposing 
 or selling of them to Franks, under heavy penalties." 
 We tried to bribe him. It was of no use. He point- 
 ed to the apartment in which they were, and, as it was 
 upon the ground floor, I took advice of modest assu- 
 rance, and approaching the window, sheltered my eyes 
 with my hand, and looked in. A great, fat girl, with 
 a pair of saucer-like black eyes, and cheeks as red and 
 round as a cabbage-rose, sat facing the window, de- 
 vouring a pie most voraciously. She had a small car- 
 pet spread beneath her, and sat on one of her heels, 
 with a row of fat, red toes, whose nails were tinged 
 with henna, just protruding on the other side from the 
 folds of her ample trousers. The light was so dim 
 that I could not see the features of the others, of 
 whom there were six or seven in groups in the cor- 
 ners. And so faded the bright colors of a certain 
 boyish dream of Circassian beauty ! A fat girl eating 
 a pie! 
 
 As we were about leaving the bazar, the door of a 
 small apartment near the gate opened, and disclosed 
 the common cheerless interior of a chamber in a khan 
 In the centre burned the almost extinguished embers 
 of a Turkish nianghal, and, at the moment of my 
 passing, a figure rose from a prostrate position, and 
 exposed, as a shawl dropped from her face in rising, 
 the exquisitely small features and bright olive skin of 
 an Arab girl. Her hair was black as night, and the 
 bright braid of it across her forehead seemed but ano- 
 ther shade of the warm dark eye that lifted its heavy 
 and sleepy lids, and looked out of the accidentally 
 opened door as if she were trying to remember how 
 she had dropped out of "Araby the blest" upon so 
 cheerless a spot. She was very beautiful. I should 
 have taken her for a child, from her diminutive size, 
 but for a certain fulness in the limbs and a womanly 
 ripeness in the bust and features. The same dusky lips 
 which give the males of her race a look of ghastliness, 
 either by contrast with a row of dazzlingly white teeth, 
 or from their round and perfect chiselling, seemed in 
 her almost a beauty. I had looked at her several min- 
 utes before she chose to consider it as impertinence. 
 At last she slowly raised her little symmetrical figure 
 (the '• Barbary shape" the old poets talk of), and slip- 
 ping forward to reach the latch, I observed that she was 
 chained by one of her ankles to a ring in the floor. 
 To think that only a " malignant and a turbaned Turk" 
 may possess such a Hebe ! Beautiful creature ! 
 Your lot, 
 
 " By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced, 
 In Fate's eternal volume." 
 
 And yet it is very possible she would eat pies, too ! 
 
 We left the slave-market, and wishing to buy apiece 
 of Brusa silk for a dressing-gown, my friend conduct- 
 ed me to a secluded khan in the neighborhood of the 
 far-famed "burnt column." Entering by a very mean 
 door, closed within by a curtain, we stood on fine In- 
 dian mats in a large room, piled to the ceiling with 
 silks enveloped in the soft satin-paper of the east. 
 Herea«;ain coffee must be handed round before a sin- 
 gle fold of the old Armenian's wares could see the 
 light, and fortunate it is, since one may not courteous- 
 ly refuse it, that Turkish coffee is very delicious, and 
 served in acorn cups for size. A handsome boy took 
 away the little filagree holders at last, and the old tra- 
 der, setting his huge calpack firmly on his shaven 
 head, began to reach down his costly wares. I had 
 never seen such an array. The floor was soon like a 
 shivered rainbow, almost paining the eye with the 
 brilliancy and variety of beautiful fabrics. And all 
 this to tempt the taste of a poor description-monger, 
 who wanted but a plain robe de chambre to conceal 
 
 from a chance visiter the poverty of an unmade toilet! 
 There were stuffs of gold for a queen's wardrobe ; 
 there were gauze-like fabrics interwoven with flowers 
 of silver ; and there was no leaf in botany, nor device 
 in antiquity, that was not imitated in their rich border- 
 ings. I laid my hand on a plain pattern of blue and 
 silver, and half-shutting my eyes to imagine how I 
 should look in it, resolved upon the degree of deple- 
 tion which my purse could bear, and inquired the 
 price. As "green door and brass knocker" says of 
 his charges in the farce, it was " ridiculously trifling." 
 It is a cheap country, the east ! A beautiful Circas- 
 sian slave for a hundred dollars (if you are a Turk), 
 and an emperor's dressing-gown for three ! The Ar- 
 menian laid his hand on his breast, as if he had made 
 a good sale of it, the coffee-bearer wanted but a sous, 
 and that was charity ; and thus, by a mere change of 
 place, that which were but a gingerbread expenditure 
 becomes a rich man's purchase. 
 
 LETTER XCV. 
 
 THE BOSPHORUS TURKISH PALACES THE BLACK SEA 
 
 BUYUKDERE. 
 
 We left the ship with two caiques, each pulled by 
 three men, and carrying three persons, on an excur- 
 sion to the Black sea. We were followed by the 
 captain in his fast-pulling gig with six oars, who pro- 
 posed to beat the feathery boats of the country in a 
 twenty miles' pull against the tremendous current of 
 the Bosphorus. 
 
 The day was made for us. We coiled ourselves 
 a la Turque, in the bottom of the sharp caique, and 
 as our broad-brimmed pagans, after the first mile, took 
 off their shawled turbans, unwound their cashmere 
 girdles, laid aside their gold-broidered jackets, and 
 with nothing but the flowing silk shirt and ample 
 trousers to embarrass their action, commenced "giv- 
 ing way," in long, energetic strokes — I say, just then, 
 with the sunshine and the west wind attempered to 
 half a degree warmer than the blood (which I take to 
 be the perfection of temperature), and a long, long 
 autumn day, or two, or three before us, and not a 
 thought in the company that was not kindly and joy- 
 ous — just then, I say, I dropped a "white stone" on 
 the hour, and said, " Here is a moment, old Care, that 
 has slipped through your rusty fingers ! You have 
 pinched me the past somewhat, and you will doubtless 
 mark your cross on the future — but the present, by a 
 thousand pulses in this warm frame laid along in the 
 sunshine, is care-free, and the last hour of Eden came 
 not on a softer pinion !" 
 
 We shot along through the sultan's fleet (some 
 eighteen or twenty lofty ships-of-war, looking, as they 
 lie at anchor in this narrow strait, of a supernatural 
 size), and then, nearing the European shore to take 
 advantage of the counter-current, my kind friend, Mr. 
 H., who is at home on these beautiful waters, began 
 to name to me the palaces we were shooting by, with 
 many a little history of their occupants between, to 
 which in a letter, written with a traveller's haste, and 
 in moments stolen from fatigue, or pleasure, or sleep, 
 I could not pretend to do justice. 
 
 The Bosphorus is quite — there can be no manner 
 of doubt of it — the most singularly beautiful scenery 
 in the world. From Constantinople to the Black 
 Sea, a distance of twenty miles, the two shores of 
 Asia and Europe, separated by but half a mile of 
 bright blue water, are lined by lovely villages, each 
 with its splendid palace or two, iis mosque and mina- 
 rets, and its hundred small houses buried in trees, 
 each with its small dark cemetery of cypresses ana 
 turbaned head-stones, and each with its valley stretch- 
 
148 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ing back into the hills, of which every summit and 
 swell is crowned with a fairy kiosk. There is no tide, 
 and the palaces of the sultan and his ministers, and of 
 the wealthier Turks and Armenians, are built half over 
 the water, and the ascending caique shoots beneath 
 his window, within the length of the owner's pipe ; 
 and with his own slender boat lying under the stairs, 
 the luxurious oriental makes but a step from the cush- 
 ions of his saloon to those of a conveyance, which 
 bears him (so built on the water's edge is this mag- 
 nificent capital) to almost every spot that can require 
 his presence. 
 
 A beautiful palace is that of the " Marble Cradle," 
 or Beshiktash, the sultan's winter residence. Its bright 
 gardens with latticed fences (through which, as we 
 almost touched in passing, we saw the gleam of the 
 golden orange and lemon trees, and the thousand 
 flowers, and heard the splash of fountains and the 
 singing of birds) lean down to the lip of the Bospho- 
 rus, and declining to the south, and protected from 
 everything but the sun by an enclosing wall, enjoy, 
 like the terrace of old King Rene, a perpetual sum- 
 mer. The brazen gates open on the water, and the 
 palace itself, a beautiful building, painted in the ori- 
 ental style, of a bright pink, stands between the gar- 
 dens, with its back to the wall. 
 
 The summer palace, where the " unmuzzled lion" 
 as his flatterers call him, resides at present, is just 
 above on the Asian side, at a village called Beylerbey. 
 It is an immense building, painted yellow, with white 
 cornices, and has an extensive terrace-garden, rising 
 over the hill behind. The harem has eight projecting 
 wings, each occupied by one of the sultan's lawful 
 wives. 
 
 Six or seven miles from Constantinople, on the 
 European shore, stands the serai of the sultan's eldest 
 sister. It is a Chinese-looking structure, but exceed- 
 ingly picturesque, and like everything else on the 
 Bosphorus, quite in keeping with the scene. There 
 is not a building on either side, from the Black sea to 
 Marmora, that would not be ridiculous in other coun- 
 tries; and yet, here, their gingerbread balconies, imi- 
 tation perspectives, lattices, bird-cages, and kiosks, 
 seem as naturally the growth of the climate as the 
 pomegranate and the cypress. The old maid sultana 
 lives here with a hundred or two female slaves of con- 
 dition, a little emperess in an empire sufficiently large 
 (for a woman), seeing no bearded face, it is presumed, 
 except her black eunuchs' and her European physi- 
 cian's, and having, though a sultan's sister, less liberty 
 than she gives even her slaves, whom she permits to 
 marry if they will. She can neither read nor write, 
 and is said to be fat, indolent, kind, and childish. 
 
 A little farther up, the sultan is repairing a fantas- 
 tical little palace for his youngest sister, Esmeh Sul- 
 tana, who is to be married to Haleil Pacha, the com- 
 mander of the artillery. She is about twenty, and, 
 report says, handsome and spirited. Her betrothed 
 was a Georgian slave, bought by the sultan when a 
 boy, and advanced by the usual steps of favoritism. 
 By the laws of imperial marriages in this empire, he 
 is to be banished to a distant pachalik after living with 
 his wife a year, his connexion with blood-royal making 
 him dangerously eligible to the throne. His bride 
 remains at Stamboul, takes care of her child (if she 
 has one), and lives the remainder of her life in a wid- 
 ow's seclusion, with an allowance proportioned to her 
 rank. His consolation is provided for by the mussul- 
 man privilege of as many more wives as he can sup- 
 port. Heaven send him resignation — if he needs it 
 notwithstanding. 
 
 The hakim, or chief physician to the sultan, has a 
 handsome palace on the same side of the Bosphorus; 
 and the Armenian seraffs, or bankers, though com- 
 pelled, like all rayahs, to paint their houses of a dull 
 lead color (only a mussulman may live in a red house 
 
 in Constantinople), are said, in those dusky-looking 
 tenements, to maintain a luxury not inferior to that 
 of the sultan himself. They have a singular effect, 
 those black, funereal houses, standing in the fore- 
 ground of a picture of such light and beauty ! 
 
 We pass Orta-Jceni, the Jew village, the Arnaout- 
 keni, occupied mostly by Greeks ; and here, if you 
 have read " the Armenians," you are in the midst of 
 its most stirring scenes. The story is a true one, not 
 much embellished in the hands of the novelist, and 
 there, on the hill opposite, in Anatolia, stands iht 
 house of the heroine's father, the old seraff Oglou 
 and, behind the garden, you may see the small cot- 
 tage, inhabited, secretly, by the enamored Constan- 
 tine, and here, in the pretty village of Bebec, lives, at 
 this moment, the widowed and disconsolate Veronica, 
 dressed ever in weeds, and obstinately refusing all so- 
 ciety but her own sad remembrance. I must try to 
 see her. Her " husband of a night" was compelled to 
 marry again by the hospodar, his father (but this is 
 not in the novel, you will remember), and there is late 
 news that his wife is dead, and the lovers of romance 
 in Stamboul are hoping he will return and make a 
 happier sequel than the sad one in the story. The 
 "orthodox catholic Armenian, broker and money- 
 changer to boot," who was to have been her forced 
 husband, is a very amiable and good-looking fellow, 
 now in the employ of our charge d'affaires as second 
 dragoman. 
 
 We approach Roumeli-Hissar, a jutting point al- 
 most meeting a similar projection from the Asian 
 shore, crowned, like its vis-a-vis, with a formidable 
 battery. The Bosphorus here is but half an arrow- 
 flight in width, and Europe and Asia, here at their 
 nearest approach, stand looking each other in the 
 face, like boxers, with foot forward, fist doubled, and 
 a most formidable row of teeth on either side. The 
 current scampers through between the two castles, as 
 if happy to get out of the way, and, up-stream, it is 
 hard pulling for a caique. They are beautiful points, 
 however, and I am ashamed of my coarse simile, when 
 I remember how green was the foliage that half en- 
 veloped the walls, and how richly picturesque the 
 hills behind them. Here, in the European castle, 
 were executed the greater part of the janisaries, hun- 
 dreds in a day, of the manliest frames in the empire, 
 thrown into the rapid Bosphorus, headless and strip- 
 ped, to float, unmourned and unregarded, to the sea. 
 
 Above Roumeli-Hissar, the Bosphorus spreads 
 again, and a curving bay, which is set Iikc a mirror, in 
 a frame of the softest foliage and verdure, is pointed 
 out as a spot at which the crusaders, Godfrey of Bou- 
 illon and Raymond of Toulouse encamped on their 
 way to Palestine. The hills beyond this are loftier, 
 and the Giant's mountain, upon which the Russian 
 army encamped at their late visit to the Porte, would 
 be a respectable eminence in any country. At its 
 foot, the strait expands into quite a lake, and on the 
 European side, in a scoop of the shore, exquisitely 
 placed, stand the diplomatic villages of Terapia and 
 Buyukdere. The English, French, Russian, Aus- 
 trian and other flags were flying over a half dozen of 
 the most desirable residences I have seen since 
 Italy. 
 
 We soon pulled the remaining mile or two, and our 
 spent caikjees drew breath, and lay on their oars in the 
 Black sea. The waves were breaking on the " blue 
 Symplegades," a mile on our left, and, before us, tow- 
 ard the Cimmerian, Bosphorus, and, south, towar 
 Colchis and Trebizond, spread one broad, blue waste 
 of waters, apparently as limitless as the ocean. The 
 Black sea is particularly blue. 
 
 We turned our prow to the west, and I sighed to 
 remember that I had reached my farthest step into 
 the east. Henceforth I shall be on the return. I 
 sent a long look over the waters to the bright lands 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 149 
 
 beyond, so famed in history and fiction, and wishing 
 for even a metamorphosis into the poor sea-bird flying 
 above us (whose travelling expenses Nature pays), I 
 lay back in the boat with a " change in the spirit of 
 my dream." 
 
 We stopped on the Anatolian shore to visit the 
 ruins of a fine old Genoese castle, which looks over 
 the Black sea, and after a lunch upon grapes and cof- 
 fee, at a small village at the foot of the hill on which 
 it stands, we embarked and followed our companions. 
 Running down with the current to Buyukdere, we 
 landed and walked along the thronged and beautiful 
 shore to Terapia, meeting hundreds of fair Armenians 
 and Greeks (all beautiful, it seemed to me), issuing 
 forth for their evening promenade, and, with a call of 
 ceremony on the English ambassador, for whom I 
 had letters, we again took to the caique, and fled down 
 with the current like a bird. Oh, what a sunset was 
 there ! 
 
 We were to dine and pass the night at the country- 
 house of an English gentleman at Bebec, a secluded 
 and lovely village, six or eight miles from Constanti- 
 nople. We reached the landing as the stars began to 
 glimmer, and, after one of the most agreeable and hos- 
 pitable entertainments I remember to have shared, we 
 took an early breakfast with our noble host, and re- 
 turned to the ship. I could wish my friends no 
 brighter passage in their lives than such an excursion 
 as mine to the Black sea. 
 
 LETTER XCVI. 
 
 THE GOLDEN HORN AND ITS SCENERY — THE SULTAN'S 
 "WIVES AND ARABIANS — THE VALLEY OF SWEET WA- 
 TERS — BEAUTY OF THE TURKISH MINARETS — THE 
 MOSQUE OF SULYMANYE — MUSSULMANS AT THEIR DE- 
 VOTIONS THE MUEZZIN THE BAZAR OF THE OPIUM- 
 EATERS — THE MAD-HOUSE OF CONSTANTINOPLE, AND 
 DESCRIPTION OF ITS INMATES — THEIR WRETCHED 
 TREATMENT — THE HIPPODROME AND THE MOSQUE OF 
 SULTAN ACHMET — THE JANIZARIES — REFLECTIONS ON 
 THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE. 
 
 The " Golden Horn" is a curved arm of the sea, 
 the broadest extremity meeting the Bosphorus and 
 forming the harbor of Constantinople, and the other 
 tapering away till it is lost in the " Valley of Sweet 
 Waters." It curls through the midst of the " seven- 
 hilled" city, and you cross it whenever you have an 
 errand in old Stamboul. Its hundreds of shooting 
 caiques, its forests of merchantmen and men-of-war, 
 its noise and its confusion, are exchanged in scarce 
 ten minutes of swift pulling for the breathless and 
 Eden -like solitude of a valley that has not its parallel, 
 I am inclined to think, between the Mississippi and 
 the Caspian. It is called in Turkish khyat-khana. 
 Opening with a gentle curve from the Golden Horn, 
 it winds away into the hills toward Belgrade, its long 
 and even hollow, thridded by a lively stream, and 
 carpeted by a broad belt of unbroken green sward 
 swelling up to the enclosing hills, with a grass so ver- 
 dant and silken that it seems the very floor of faery. 
 In the midst of its longest stretch to the eye (perhaps 
 two miles of level meadow) stands a beautiful serai of 
 the sultan's, unfenced and open, as if it had sprung 
 from the lap of the green meadow like a lily. The 
 stream runs by its door, and over a mimic fall whose 
 lip is of scolloped marble, is built an oriental kiosk, all 
 carving and gold, that is only too delicate and fantas- 
 tical for reality. 
 
 Here, with the first grass of spring, the sultan sends 
 his fine-footed Arabians to pasture; and here come 
 the ladies of his harem (chosen, women and horses, 
 for much the same class of qualities), and in the long 
 
 summer afternoons, with mounted eunuchs on the 
 hills around, forbidding on pain of death, all approach 
 to the sacred retreat, they venture to drop their jeal- 
 ous veils and ramble about in their unsunned beauty. 
 
 After a gallop of three or four miles over the broad 
 waste table plains, in the neighborhood of Constanti- 
 nople, we checked our horses suddenly on the brow 
 of a precipitous descent, with this scene of beauty 
 spread out before us. I had not yet approached it 
 by water, and it seemed to me as if the earth had burst 
 open at my feet, and revealed some realm of enchant- 
 ment. Behind me, and away beyond the valley to the 
 very horizon, I could see only a trackless heath, brown 
 and treeless, while a hundred feet below lay a strip of 
 very Paradise, blooming in all the verdure and heaven- 
 ly freshness of spring. We descended slowly, and 
 crossing a bridge half hidden by willows, rode in upon 
 the elastic green sward (for myself ) with half a feeling 
 of profanation. There were no eunuchs upon the 
 hills, however, and our spirited Turkish horses threw 
 their wild heads into the air, and we flew over the ver- 
 dant turf like a troop of Delhis, the sound of the hoofs 
 on the yielding carpet scarcely audible. The fair 
 palace in the centre of this domain of loveliness was 
 closed, and it was only after we had walked around it 
 that we observed a small tent of the prophet's green 
 couched in a small dell on the hill-side, and containing 
 probably the guard of its imperial master. 
 
 We mounted again and rode up the valley for two 
 or three miles, following the same level and verdant 
 curve, the soft carpet broken only by the silver thread 
 of the Barbyses, loitering through it on its way to the 
 sea. A herd of buffaloes, tended by a Bulgarian boy, 
 stretched on his back in the sunshine, and a small 
 caravan of camels bringing wood from the hills, and 
 keeping to the soft valley as a relief to their spongy 
 feet, were the only animated portions of the landscape. 
 I think I shall never form to my mind another picture 
 of romantic rural beauty (an employment of the ima- 
 gination I am much given to when out of humor with 
 the world) that will not resemble the " Valley of Sweet 
 Waters" — the khyat-khdna of Constantinople. " Poor 
 Slingsby" never was here.* 
 
 The lofty mosque of Sulymanye, the bazars of the 
 opium-eaters, and the Timar-hanc, or mad-house of 
 Constantinople, are all upon one square in the highest 
 part of the city. We entered the vast court of the 
 mosque from a narrow and filthy street, and the im- 
 pression of its towering plane-trees and noble area, and 
 of the strange, but grand and costly pile in its centre, 
 was almost devotional. An inner court, enclosed by 
 a kind of romanesque wall, contained a sacred marble 
 fountain of light and airy architecture, and the portico 
 facing this was sustained by some of those splendid 
 and gigantic columns of porphyry and jasper, the 
 spoils of the churches of Asia Minor, f 
 
 I think the most beautiful spire that rises into the 
 
 • Irving says, in one of his most exquisite passages — " He 
 who has sallied forth into the world like poor Slingsby, full of 
 sunny anticipations, finds too soon how different the distant 
 scene becomes when visited. The smooth place roughens as 
 he approaches ; the wild place becomes tame and barren ; the 
 fairy teints that beguiled him on, still fly to the distant hill, 
 or gather upon the land he has left behind, and every part of 
 tt" landscape is greener than the spot he stands on." Full of 
 nv «.. - and beautiful expression as this is, I, for one, have not 
 found it true. Bright as 1 had imagined the much-sung lands 
 beyond the water, I have found many a scene in Italy and the 
 east that has more than answered the craving for beauty in 
 my heart. Val d'Arno, Vallombrosa, Venice, Temi, Tivoli, 
 Albano, the Isles of Greece, the Bosphorus, and the matchless 
 valley I have described, have, with a hundred other spots less 
 famous, far outgone in their exquisite reality, even the bright- 
 est of my anticipations. The passage is not necessarily limit- 
 ed in its meaning to scenery, however, and of moral disappoint- 
 ment it is beautifully true. There is many a . " poor Slings- 
 by," the fate of whose sunny anticipations of life it describes 
 but too faithfully. 
 
 t Sulymanye was built of the ruins of the church, St. Eu- 
 phemia, at Chalcedonia. 
 
150 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 sky is the Turkish minaret. If I may illustrate an 
 object of such magnitude by so trifling a comparison, 
 it is exactly the shape and proportions of an ever- 
 pointed pencil-case — the silver bands answering to the 
 encircling galleries, one above another, from which 
 the muezzin calls out the hour of prayer. The min- 
 aret is painted white, the galleries are fantastically 
 carved, and rising to the height of the highest steeples 
 in our country (four and sometimes six to a single 
 mosque), these slender and pointed fingers of devotion 
 seem to enter the very sky. Remembering, dear 
 reader, that there are two hundred and twenty mosques, 
 and three hundred chapels in Constantinople, raising, 
 perhaps, in all, a thousand minarets to heaven, you 
 may get some idea of the magnificence of this seven- 
 hilled capital of the east. 
 
 It was near the hour of prayer, and the devout mus- 
 sulmans were thronging into the court of Sulymanye 
 by every gate. Passing the noble doors, with their 
 strangely-carved arches of arabesque, which invite all 
 to enter but the profaning foot of the Christian, the 
 turbaned crowd repaired first to the fountains. From 
 the walls of every mosque, by small conduits pouring 
 into a marble basin, flow streams of pure water for the 
 religious ablutions of the* faithful. The mussulman 
 approaches, throws off" his flowing robe, steps out of 
 his yellow slippers, and unwinds his voluminous tur- 
 ban with devout deliberateness. A small marble step, 
 worn hollow with pious use, supports his foot while 
 he washes from the knee downward. His hands and 
 arms, with the flowing sleeve of his silk shirt rolled to 
 the shoulder, receive the same lavation, and then, 
 washing his face, he repeats a brief prayer, resumes 
 all but his slippers, and enters the mosque barefooted. 
 The mihrab (or niche indicating the side toward the 
 tomb of the prophet), fixes his eye. He folds his 
 hands together, prays a moment standing, prostrates 
 himself flat on his face toward the hallowed quarter, 
 rises upon his knees, and continues praying and pros- 
 trating himself for perhaps half an hour. And all this 
 process is required by the mufti, and performed by 
 every good mussulman five times a day ! A rigid ad- 
 herence to it is almost universal among the Turks. In 
 what an odor of sanctity would a Christian live, who 
 should make himself thus "familiar with heaven !" 
 
 As the muezzin from the minaret was shouting his 
 last " mashallah!" with a voice like a man calling out 
 from the clouds, we left the court of the majestic 
 mosque, with Byron's reflection : — 
 
 "Alas ! man makes that great which makes him little !" 
 and, having delivered ourselves of this scrap of poeti- 
 cal philosophy, we crossed over the square to the 
 opium-eaters. 
 
 A long row of half-ruined buildings, of a single sto- 
 ry, with porticoes in front, and the broad, raised plat- 
 form beneath, on which the Turks sit cross-legged at 
 public places, is the scene of what was once a pecu- 
 liarly oriental spectacle. The mufti has of late years 
 denounced the use of opium, and the devotees to its 
 sublime intoxication have either conquered the habit, 
 or what is more probable, indulge it in more secret 
 places. The shops are partly ruinous, and those that 
 remain in order are used as cafes, in which, however, 
 it is said that the dangerous drug may still be procured. 
 My companion inquired of a good-humored-looking 
 caffejee whether there was any place at which a con- 
 firmed opium-eater could be seen under its influence. 
 He said there was an old Turk, who was in the habit 
 of frequenting his shop, and, if we could wait an hour 
 or two, we might see him in the highest state of in- 
 toxication. We had no time to spare, if the object 
 had been worth our while. 
 
 And here, thought I, as we sal down and took a cup 
 of coffee in the half-ruined cafe, have descended upon 
 the delirious brains of these noble drunkards, the vis- 
 ions of Paradise so glowingly described in books — 
 
 visions, it is said, as far exceeding the poor invention 
 of the poet, as the houris of the prophet exceed the 
 fair damsels of this world. Here men, otherwise in 
 their senses, have believed themselves emperors, war- 
 riors, poets ; these wretched walls and bending roof 
 the fair proportions of a palace ; this gray old caffejee 
 a Hylas or a Ganymede. Here men have come to 
 cast off, for an hour, the dull thraldom of the body ; 
 to soar into the glorious world of fancy at a penalty of 
 a thousand times the proportion of real misery ; to 
 sacrifice the invaluable energies of health, and delib- 
 erately poison the very fountain of life, for a few brief 
 moments of magnificent and phrensied blessedness. 
 It is powerfully described in the "Opium-Eater" of 
 De Quincy. 
 
 At the extremity of this line of buildings, by a nat- 
 ural proximity, stands the Timar-hane. We passed 
 the porter at the gate without question, and entered a 
 large quadrangle, surrounded with the grated windows 
 of cells on the ground-floor. In every window was 
 chained a maniac. The doors of the cells were all 
 open, and, descending by a step upon the low stone 
 floor of the first, we found ourselves in the presence 
 of four men chained to rings, in the four corners, by 
 massy iron collars. The man in the window sat 
 crouched together, like a person benumbed (the day 
 was raw and cold as December), the heavy chain of 
 his collar hanging on his naked breast, and his shoul- 
 ders imperfectly covered with a narrow blanket. His 
 eyes were large and fierce, and his mouth was fixed in 
 an expression of indignant sullenness. My compan-* 
 ion asked him if he were ill. He said he should be 
 well, if he were out — that he was brought there in a 
 fit of intoxication two years ago, and was no more 
 crazy than his keeper. Poor fellow ! It might easi- 
 ly be true! He lifted his heavy collar from his neck 
 as he spoke, and it was not difficult to believe that 
 misery like his for two long years would, of itself, de- 
 stroy reason. There was a better dressed man in the 
 opposite corner, who informed us, in a gentlemanly 
 voice, that he had been a captain in the sultan's army, 
 and was brought there in the delirium of a fever. He 
 was at a loss to know, he said, why he was imprisoned 
 still. 
 
 We passed on to a poor, half naked wretch in the 
 last stage of illness and idiocy, who sat chattering to 
 himself, and, though trembling with the cold, inter- 
 rupted his monologue continually with fits of the 
 wildest laughter. Farther on sat a young man of a 
 face so full of intellectual beauty, an eye so large and 
 mild, a mouth of such mingled sadness and sweet- 
 ness, and a forehead so broad, and marked so nobly, 
 that we stood, all of us, struck with a simultaneous 
 feeling of pity and surprise. A countenance more 
 beaming with all that is admirable in human nature, I 
 have never seen, even in painting. He might have sat 
 to Da Vinci for the "beloved apostle." He had tied 
 the heavy chain by a shred to a round of the grating, 
 to keep its weight from his neck, and seemed calm 
 and resigned, with all his sadness. My friend spoke 
 to him, but he answered obscurely, and, seeing that 
 our gaze disturbed him, we passed unwillingly on. 
 Oh, what room there is in the world for pity ! If that 
 poor prisoner be not a maniac (as he may not be), and, 
 if nature has not falsified in the structure of his mind 
 the superior impress on his features, what Prome- 
 theus-like agony has he suffered ! The guiltiest felon 
 is better cared for. And allowing his mind to be a 
 wreck, and allowing the hundred human minds, in the 
 same cheerless prison, to be certainly in ruins, oh what 
 have they done to be weighed down with iron on their 
 necks, and exposed, like caged beasts, shivering and 
 naked, to the eye of pitiless curiosity? I have visited 
 lunatic asylums in France, Italy, Sicily, and Germany, 
 but, culpably neglected as most of them are, I have 
 seen nothing comparable to this in horror. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 151 
 
 " Is he never unchained ?" we asked. " Never !" 
 And yet, from the ring to the iron collar, there was 
 just chain enough to permit him to stand upright ! 
 There were no vessels near them, not even a pitcher 
 of water. Their dens were cleansed and the poor suf- 
 ferers fed at appointed hours, and, come wind or rain, 
 there was neither shutter nor glass to defend them 
 from the inclemency of the weather. 
 
 We entered most of the rooms, and found in all the 
 same dampness, filth, and misery. One poor wretch 
 had been chained to the same spot for twenty years. 
 The keeper said he never slept. He talked all the 
 night long. Sometimes at mid-day his voice would j 
 cease, and his head nod for an instant, and then with 
 a start as if he feared to be silent, he raved on with 
 the same incoherent rapidity. He had been a dervish. 
 His collar and chain were bound with rags, and a tat- 
 tered coat was fastened up on the inside of the window, 
 forming a small recess in which he sat, between the 
 room and the grating. He was emaciated to the last j 
 degree. His beard was tangled and filthy, his nails 
 curled over the ends of his fingers, and his appear- 
 ance, save only an eye of the keenest lustre, that of a 
 wild beast. 
 
 In the last room we entered, we found a good-look- 
 ing young man, well dressed, healthy, composed, and 
 having every appearance of a person in the soundest 
 state of mind and body. He saluted us courteously, 
 and told my friend that he was a renegade Greek. He 
 had turned mussulman a year or two ago, had lost his 
 reason, and so was brought here. He talked of it quite 
 as a thing of course, and seemed to be entirely satis- 
 fied that the best had been done for him. One of the 
 party took hold of his chain. He winced as the col- 
 lar stirred on his neck, and said the lock was on the 
 outside of the window (which was true), and that the 
 boys came in and tormented him by pulling it some- 
 times. " There they are," he said, pointing to two or 
 three children who had just entered the court, and 
 were running round from one prisoner to another. 
 We bade him good morning, and he laid his hand to 
 his breast and bowed with a smile. As we passed tow- 
 ard the gate, the chattering lunatic on the opposite 
 side screamed after us, the old dervish laid his skinny 
 hands on the bars of his window, and talked louder 
 and faster, and the children, approaching close to the 
 poor creatures, laughed with delight at their excite- 
 ment. 
 
 It was a relief to escape to the common sights and 
 sounds of the city. We walked on to the Hippo- 
 drome. The only remaining beauty of this famous 
 square is the unrivalled mosque of Sultan Achmet, 
 which, though inferior in size to the renowned Santa 
 Sophia, is superior in elegance both within and with- 
 out. Its six slender and towering minarets are the 
 handsomest in Constantinople. The wondrous obe- 
 lisk in the centre of the square, remains perfect as in 
 the time of the Christian emperors, but the brazen tri- 
 pod is gone from the twisted column, and the serpent- 
 like pillar itself is leaning over with its brazen folds to 
 its fall. 
 
 Here stood the barracks of the powerful Janisaries, 
 and from the side of Sultan Achmet the cannon were 
 levelled upon them, as they rushed from the confla- 
 gration within. And here, when Constantinople was 
 the "second Rome," were witnessed the triumphal 
 processions of Christian conquest, the march of the 
 crusaders, bound for Palestine, and the civil tumults 
 which Justinian, walking among the people with the 
 gospel in his hand, tried in vain to allay ere they burnt 
 the great edifice built of the ruins of the temple of 
 Solomon. And around this now neglected area, the 
 captive Gelimer followed in chains the chariot of the 
 conquering Belisarius, repeating the words of Solo- 
 mon, " Yanity of vanities! all is vanity!" while the 
 conquerer himself, throwing aside his crown, prostra- 
 
 ted himself at the feet of the beautiful Theodora, 
 raised from a Roman actress to be the Christian em- 
 peress of the east. From any elevated point of the 
 city, you may still see the ruins of the palace of the 
 renowned warrior, and read yourself a lesson on hu- 
 man vicissitudes, remembering the school-book story 
 of " an obolon for Belisarius !" 
 
 The Hippodrome was, until late years, the constant 
 scene of the games of the jereed. With the destruc- 
 tion of the Janizaries, and the introduction of Euro- 
 pean tactics, this graceful exercise has gone out of 
 fashion. The east is fast losing its picturesqueness. 
 Dress, habits, character, everything seems to be un- 
 dergoing a gradual change, and when, as the Turks 
 themselves predict, the moslem is driven into Asia, 
 this splendid capital will become another Paris, and 
 with the improvements in travel, a summer in Con- 
 stantinople will be as little thought of as a tour in Ita- 
 ly. Politicians in this part of the world predict such 
 a change as about to arrive. 
 
 LETTER XCVI1 
 
 SULTAN MAHMOUD AT HIS DEVOTIONS — COMPARATIVE 
 SPLENDOR OF PAPAL, AUSTRIAN, AND TURKISH EQUIP- 
 AGES — THE SULTAN'S BARGE OR CAIQUE DESCRIP- 
 TION OF THE SULTAN — VISIT TO A TURKISH LANCAS- 
 TERIAN SCHOOL — THE DANCING DERVISHES — VISIT 
 
 FROM THE SULTAN'S CABINET THE SERASK1ER AND 
 
 THE CAPITAN PACHA— HUMBLE ORIGIN OF TURKISH 
 DIGNITARIES. 
 
 I had slept on shore, and it was rather late before 1 
 remembered that it was Friday (the moslem Sunday), 
 and that Sultan Mahmoud was to go in state to 
 mosque at twelve. I hurried down the precipitous 
 street of Pera, and, as usual, escaping barely with my 
 life from the Christian-hating dogs of Tophana, em- 
 barked in a caique, and made all speed up the Bos- 
 phorus. There is no word in Turkish for faster, but 
 I was urging on my caikjees by a wave of the hand 
 and the sight of a bishlik (about the value of a quarter 
 of a dollar), when suddenly a broadside was fired from 
 the three-decker, Mahmoudier, the largest ship in the 
 world, and to the rigging of every man-of-war in the 
 fleet through which l^was passing, mounted, simulta- 
 neously, hundreds of blood-red flags, filling the air 
 about us like a shower of tulips and roses. Imagine 
 twenty ships-of-war, with yards manned, and scarce a 
 line in their rigging to be seen for the flaunting of 
 colors ! The jar of the guns, thundering in every di- 
 rection close over us, almost lifted our light boat out 
 of the water, and the smoke rendered our pilotage be- 
 tween the ships and among their extending cables 
 rather doubtful. The white cloud lifted after a few 
 minutes, and, with the last gun, down went the flags 
 all together, announcing that the " Brother of the 
 Sun" had left his palace. 
 
 He had but crossed to the mosque of the small vil- 
 lage on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, and was 
 already at his prayers when I arrived. His body-guard 
 was drawn up before the door, in their villanous Eu- 
 ; ropean dress, and, as their arms were stacked, 1 pre- 
 ! sumed it would be some time before the sultan reap- 
 i peared, and improved the interval in examining the 
 handja-bashes, or state-caiques, lying at the landing. 
 I have arrived at my piesent notions of equipage by 
 three degrees. The pope's carriages at Rome, rather 
 astonished me. The emperor of Austria's sleighs di- 
 minished the pope in my admiration, and the sultan's 
 caiques, in their turn, "pale the fires" of the emperor 
 of Austria. The handja-bash is built something like 
 the ancient galley, very high at the prow and stern, 
 carries some fifty oars, and has a roof over her poop, 
 
152 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 supported by four columns, and loaded with the most 
 sumptuous ornaments, the whole gilt brilliantly. The 
 prow is curved over, and wreathed into every possible 
 device that would not affect the necessary lines of the 
 model ; her crew are dressed in the beautiful costume 
 of the country, rich and flowing, and with the costly 
 and bright-colored carpets hanging over her side, and 
 the flashing of the sun on her ornaments of gold, she 
 is really the most splendid object of state equipage 
 (if I may be allowed the misnomer) in the world. 
 
 I was still examining the principal barge, when the 
 troops stood to their arms, and preparation was made 
 for the passing out of the sultan. Thirty or forty of 
 his highest military officers formed themselves into 
 two lines from the door of the mosque to the landing, 
 and behind them were drawn up single files of soldiers. 
 I took advantage of the respect paid to the rank of 
 Commodore Patterson, and obtained an excellent po- 
 sition, with him, at the side of the caique. First is- 
 sued from the door two Georgian slaves, bearing cen- 
 sers, from which they waved the smoke on either side, 
 and the sultan immediately followed, supported by the 
 capitan-pacha, the seraskier, and Haleil Pacha (who 
 is to marry the Sultana Esmeh). He walked slowly 
 down to the landing, smiling and talking gayly with 
 the seraskier, and, bowing to the commodore in pas- 
 sing, stepped into his barge, seated himself on a raised 
 sofa, while his attendants coiled their legs on the car- 
 pet below, and turned his prow across the Bosphorus. 
 
 I have, perhaps, never set my eyes on a handsomer 
 man than Sultan Mahmoud. His figure is tall, 
 straight, and manly, his air unembarrassed and digni- 
 fied, and his step indicative of the well-known firmness 
 of his character. A superb beard of jetty blackness, 
 with a curling mustache, conceals all the lower part of 
 his face ; the decided and bold lines of his mouth just 
 marking themselves when he speaks. It is said he 
 both paints and dies his beard, but a manlier brown 
 upon a cheek, or a richer gloss upon a beard, I never 
 saw. His eye is described by writers as having a 
 doomed darkness of expression, and it is certainly one 
 that would well become a chief of bandits — large, 
 steady, and overhung with an eyebrow like a thunder- 
 cloud. He looks the monarch. The child of a ser- 
 aglio (where mothers are chosen for beauty alone) 
 could scarce escape being handsome. The blood of 
 Circassian upon Circassian is in his veins, and the 
 wonder is, not that he is the handsomest man in his 
 empire, but that he is not the greatest slave. Our 
 " mother's humor," they say, predominates in our 
 mixtures. Sultan Mahmoud, however, was marked 
 by nature for a throne. 
 
 I accompanied Mr. Goodell and Mr. Dwight, Ameri- 
 can missionaries at Constantinople, to visit a Lancas- 
 trian school established with their assistance in the 
 Turkish barracks. The building stands on the ascent 
 of one of the lovely valleys that open into the Bos- 
 phorus, some three miles from the city, on the Euro- 
 pean side. We were received by the colonel of the 
 regiment, a young man of fine appearance, with the 
 diamond crescent and star glittering on the breast of 
 his military frock, and after the inevitable compliment 
 of pipes and coffee, the drum was beat and the soldiers 
 called to school. 
 
 The sultan has an army of boys. Nine tenths of 
 those I have seen are under twenty. They marched 
 in, in single file, and facing about, held up their hands 
 at the word of command, while a subaltern looked 
 that each had performed the morning ablution. They 
 were healthy-looking lads, mostly from the interior 
 provinces, whence they are driven down like cattle to 
 fill the ranks of their sovereign. Duller-looking sub- 
 jects for an idea it has not been my fortune to see. 
 
 The Turkish alphabet hung over the teacher's desk 
 (the colonel is the schoolmaster, and takes the great- 
 est interest in his occupation), and th? front seats are 
 
 faced with a long box covered with sand, in which the 
 beginners write with their fingers. It is fitted with a 
 slide that erases the clumsy imitation when completed, 
 and seemed to me an ingenious economy of ini and 
 paper. (I would suggest to the minds of the benevo- 
 lent, a school on the same principle for beginners in 
 poetry. It would save the critics much murder, and 
 tend to the suppression of suicide.) The classes hav- 
 ing filed into their seats, the school opened with a 
 prayer by the colonel. The higher benches then 
 commenced writing, on slates and paper, sentences 
 dictated from the desk, and I was somewhat surprised 
 at the neatness and beauty of the characters. 
 
 We passed afterward into another room where arith- 
 metic and geography were taught, and then mounted 
 to an apartment on the second story occupied by stu- 
 dents in military drawing. The proficiency of all 
 was most creditable, considering the brief period during 
 which the schools have been in operation — something 
 less than a year. Prejudiced as the Turks are against 
 European innovation, this advanced step toward im 
 provement tells well. Our estimable and useful mis 
 sionaries appear, from the respect everywhere shown 
 them, to be in high esteem, and with the sultan's en- 
 ergetic disposition for reform, they hope everything in 
 the way of an enlightened change in the moral condi 
 tion of the people. 
 
 Went to the chapel of the dancing dervishes. It is 
 a beautiful marble building, with a court-yard orna- 
 mented with a small cemetery shaded with cypresses, 
 and a fountain enclosed in a handsome edifice, and 
 defended by gilt gratings from the street of the suburb 
 of Pera, in which it stands. They dance here twice 
 a week. We arrived before the hour, and were de- 
 tained at the door by a soldier on guard, who would 
 not permit us to enter without taking off our boots — a 
 matter, about which, between straps and their very 
 muddy condition, we had some debate. The dervishes 
 began to arrive before the question was settled, and 
 one of them, a fine-looking old man, inviting us to 
 enter, Mr. H. explained the difficulty. " Go in," said 
 he, " go in !" and turning to the more scrupulous 
 mussulman with the musket, as he pushed us within 
 the door, " stupid fellow !" said he, " if you had been 
 less obstinate, they would have given you a bakshish"'' 
 (Turkish for a fee). He should have said less reli- 
 gious — for the poor fellow looked horror-struck as our 
 dirty boots profaned the clean white Persian matting 
 of the sacred floor. One would think, " the nearer 
 the church the farther from God," were as true here 
 as it is said to be in some more civilized countries. 
 
 It was a pretty, octagonal interior, with a gallery, 
 the mihrab or niche indicating the direction of the 
 prophet's tomb, standing obliquely from the front 
 of the building. Hundreds of small lamps hung in 
 the area, just out of the reach of the dervishes' tall 
 caps, and all around between the gallery ; a part of 
 the floor was raised, matted, and divided from the 
 body of the church by a balustrade. It would have 
 made an exceedingly pretty ball-room. 
 
 None but the dervishes entered within the paling, 
 and they soon began to enter, each advancing first 
 toward the mihrab, and going through fifteen or twen- 
 ty minutes' prostrations and prayers. Their dress is 
 very humble. A high, white felt-cap, without a rim, 
 like a sugar-loaf enlarged a little at the smaller end, 
 protects the head, and a long dress of dirt-colored 
 cloth, reaching quite to the heels and bound at the 
 waist with a girdle, completes the costume. They 
 look like men who have made up their minds to seem 
 religious, and though said to be a set of very good fel- 
 lows, they have a Mawworm expression of face gener- 
 ally, which was very repulsive. I must except the 
 chief of the sect, however, who entered when all the 
 rest had seated themselves on the floor, and after a 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 153 
 
 brief genuflection or two, took possession of a rich 
 Angora carpet placed for him near the mihrab. He 
 was a small old man, distinguished in his dress only 
 by the addition of a green band to his cap (the sign 
 of his pilgrimage to Mecca) and the entire absence of 
 the sanctimonious look. Still he was serious, and 
 there was no mark in his clear, intelligent eye and 
 amiable features, of any hesitancy or want of sincerity 
 in his devotion. He is said to be a learned man, and 
 he is certainly a very prepossessing one, though he 
 would be taken up as a beggar in any city in the Uni- 
 ted States. It is a thing one learns in " dangling 
 about the world," by the way, to form opinions of 
 men quite independently of their dress. 
 
 After sitting a while in quaker meditation, the 
 brotherhood rose one by one (there were ten of them 
 I think), and marched round the room with their toes 
 turned in, to the music of a drum and a Persian flute, 
 played invisibly in some part of the gallery. As they 
 passed the carpet of the cross-legged chief, they twist- 
 ed dexterously and made three salaams, and then 
 raising their arms, which they held out straight during 
 the whole dance, they commenced twirling on one 
 foot, using the other after the manner of a paddle to 
 keep up the motion. I forgot to mention that they 
 laid aside their outer dresses before commencing the 
 dance. They remained in dirty white tunics reaching 
 to the floor, and very full at the bottom, so that with 
 the regular motion of their whirl, the wind blew them 
 out into a circle, like what the girls in our country 
 call " making cheeses." They twisted with surprising 
 exactness and rapidity, keeping clear of each other, 
 and maintaining their places with the regularity of 
 machines. I have seen a great deal of waltzing, but I 
 think the dancing dervishes for precision and spirit, 
 might give a lesson even to the Germans. 
 
 We left them twisting. They had been going for 
 half an hour, and it began to look very like perpetual 
 motion- Unless their brains are addled, their devo- 
 tion, during this dizzy performance at least, must be 
 quite suspended. A man who could think of his 
 Maker, while revolving so fast that his nose is indis- 
 tinct, must have some power of abstraction. 
 
 The frigate was visited to-day by the sultan's cab- 
 inet. The seraskier pacha came alongside first in his 
 state caique, and embraced the commodore as he 
 stepped upon the deck, with great cordiality. He is a 
 short, fat old man, with a snow-white beard, and so 
 bow-legged as to be quite deformed. He wore the 
 red Fez cap of the army, with a long blue frock-coat, 
 the collar so tight as nearly to choke him, and the 
 body not shaped to the figure, but made to fall around 
 him like a sack. The red, bloated skin of his neck 
 fell over, so as almost to cover the gold with which the 
 collar was embroidered. He was formerly capitan 
 pacha, or admiral-in-chief of the fleet, and though a 
 good-humored, merry-looking old man, has shown 
 himself, both in his former and present capacity, to be 
 wily, cold, and a butcher in cruelty. He possesses 
 unlimited influence over the sultan, and though nom- 
 inally subordinate to the grand vizier, is really the 
 second if not the first person in the empire. He was 
 originally a Georgian slave. 
 
 The seraskier was still talking with the commodore 
 in the gang-way, when the present capitan pacha 
 mounted the ladder, and the old man, who is under- 
 stood to be at feud with his successor, turned abruptly 
 away and walked aft. The capitan pacha is a tall, 
 slender man, of precisely that look and manner which 
 we call gentlemanly. His beard grows untrimmed in 
 the Turkish fashion, and is slightly touched with gray. 
 His eye is anxious, but resolute, and he looks like a 
 man of resource and ability. His history is as singu- 
 lar as that of most other great men in Turkey. He 
 
 was a slave of Mohammed Ali, the rebellious pacha 
 of Egypt. Being intrusted by his master with a brig 
 and cargo for Leghorn, he sold vessel and lading, 
 lived like a gentleman in Italy for some years with the 
 proceeds, and as the best security against the retribu- 
 tion of his old master, offered his services to the sultan, 
 with whom Ali was just commencing hostilities. Na- 
 val talent was in request, and he soon arrived at his 
 present dignity. He is said to be the only officer in 
 the fleet who knows anything of his profession. 
 
 Haleil Pacha arrived last. The sultan's future son- 
 in-law is a man of perhaps thirty-five. He is light- 
 complexioned, stout, round-faced, and looks, like a 
 respectable grocer, " well to do in the world." He 
 has commanded the artillery long enough to have ac 
 quired a certain air of ease and command, and carries 
 the promise of good fortune in his confident features. 
 He is to be married almost immediately. He, too, 
 was a Georgian, sent as a present to the sultan. 
 
 The three dignitaries made the rounds of the ship 
 and then entered the cabin, where the pianoforte (a 
 novelty to the seraskier and Haleil Pacha, and to most 
 of the attendant officers), and the commodore's agree- 
 able society and champagne, promised to detain them 
 the remainder of the day. They were like children 
 with a holyday. I was engaged to dine on shore, and 
 left them on board. 
 
 In a country where there is no education and no 
 rank, except in the possession of present power, it is 
 not surprising that men should rise from the lowest 
 class to the highest offices, or that they should fill 
 those offices to the satisfaction of the sultan. Yet it 
 is curious to hear their histories. An English phy- 
 sician, who is frequently called into the seraglio, and 
 whose practice among all the families in power gives 
 him the best means of information, has entertained 
 me not a little with these secrets. I shall make use 
 of them when I have more leisure, merely mentioning 
 here, in connexion with the above accounts, that the 
 present grand vizier was a boatman on the Bosphorus, 
 and the commander of the sultan's body-guard, a 
 shoemaker! The latter still employs all his leisure 
 in making slippers, which he presents to the sultan 
 and his friends, not at all ashamed of his former voca- 
 tion. So far, indeed, are any of these mushroom offi- 
 cers from blushing at their origin, that it is common 
 to prefix the name of their profession to the title of 
 pacha, and they are addressed by it as a proper name. 
 This is one respect in which their European educa- 
 tion will refine them to their disadvantage. 
 
 LETTER XCVIII. 
 
 THE GRAND BAZAR OF CONSTANTINOPLE, AND ITS IN- 
 FINITE VARIETY OF "WONDERS — SILENT SHOPKEEP- 
 ERS — FEMALE CURIOSITY — ADVENTURE WITH A 
 
 BLACK-EYED STRANGER THE BEZESTEIN — THE 
 
 STRONG-HOLD OF ORIENTALISM — PICTURE OF A DRA- 
 GOMAN — THE KIBAUB-SHOP ; A DINNER WITHOUT 
 KNIVES, FORKS, OR CHAIRS — CISTERN OF THE THOU- 
 SAND AND ONE COLUMNS. 
 
 Bring all the shops of New York, Philadelphia, 
 and Boston, together around the City Hall, remove 
 their fronts, pile up all their goods on shelves facing 
 the street, cover the whole with a roof, and metamor- 
 phose your trim clerks into bearded, turbaned, and 
 solemn old mussulmans, smooth Jews, and calpacked 
 and rosy Armenians, and you will have something like 
 the grand bazar of Constantinople. You can scarce- 
 ly get an idea of it, without bavins; been there. It is 
 a city under cover. You walk all day, and day after 
 I day, from one street to another, winding and turning, 
 
154 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 and trudging up hill and down, and never go out of 
 doors. The roof is as high as those of our three-sto- 
 ry houses, and the dim light so favorable to shop-keep- 
 ers, comes struggling down through skylights, never 
 cleaned except by the rains of heaven. 
 
 Strolling through the bazar is an endless amuse- 
 ment. It is slow work, for the streets are as crowded 
 as a church-aisle after service ; and, pushed aside one 
 moment by a bevy of Turkish ladies, shuffling along 
 in their yellow slippers, muffled to the eyes, the next 
 by a fat slave carrying a child, again by a kervas armed 
 to the teeth, and clearing the way for some coming 
 dignitary, you find your only policy is to draw in your 
 elbows, and suffer the motley crowd to shove you about 
 at their pleasure. 
 
 Each shop in this world of traffic may be two yards 
 wide. The owner sits cross-legged on the broad 
 counter below, the height of a chair from the ground, 
 and hands you all you want without stirring from his 
 seat. One broad bench or counter runs the length of 
 the street, and the different shops are only divided by 
 the slight partition of the shelves. The purchaser 
 seats himself on the counter, to be out of the way of 
 the crowd, and the shopman spreads out his goods on 
 his knees, never condescending to open his lips except 
 to tell you the price- If he exclaims " bono" or 
 "calo," (the only words a real Turk ever knows of an- 
 other language), he is stared at by his neighbors as a 
 man would be in Broadway who should break out 
 with an Italian bravura. Ten to one, while you are 
 examining his goods, the bearded trader creeps 
 through the hole leading to his kennel of a dormitory 
 in the rear, washes himself and returns to his coun- 
 ter, where, spreading his sacred carpet in the direction 
 of Mecca, he goes through his prayers and prostra- 
 tions, perfectly unconscious of your presence, or that 
 of the passing crowd. No vocation interferes with 
 his religious duty. Five times a day, if he were run- 
 ning from the plague, the mussulman would find time 
 for prayers. 
 
 The Frank purchaser attracts a great deal of curi- 
 osity. As he points to an embroidered handkerchief, 
 or a rich shawl, or a pair of gold-worked slippers, 
 Turkish ladies of the first rank, gathering their yash- 
 macks securely over their faces, stop close to his side, 
 not minding if they push him a little to get nearer 
 the desired article. Feeling not the least timidity, ex- 
 cept for their faces, these true children of Eve exam- 
 ine the goods in barter, watch the stranger's counte- 
 nance, and if he takes off his glove, or pulls out his 
 purse, take it up and look at it, without even saying 
 " by your leave." Their curiosity often extends to 
 your dress, and they put out their little henna-stained 
 fingers and pass them over the sleeve of your coat 
 with a gurgling expression of admiration at its fine- 
 ness, or if you have rings or a watch-guard, they lift 
 your hand or pull out your watch with no kind of 
 scruple. I have met with several instances of this in 
 the course of my rambles. But a day or two ago I 
 found myself rather more than usual a subject of cu- 
 riosity. I was alone in the street of embroidered 
 handkerchiefs (every minute article has its peculiar 
 bazar), and wishing to look at some of uncommon 
 beauty, I called one of the many Jews always near a 
 stranger to turn a penny by interpreting for him, and 
 was soon up to the elbows in goods that would tempt 
 a female angel out of Paradise. As I was selecting 
 one for a purchase, a woman plumped down upon the 
 seat beside me, and fixed her great, black, unwinking 
 eyes upon my face, while an Abyssinian slave and an- 
 other white woman, both apparently her dependants, 
 stood respectfully at her back. A small turquoise 
 ring (the favorite color in Turkey), first attracted her 
 attention. She took up my hand, and turned it over 
 in her soft, fat fingers, and dropped it again without 
 saying a word. I looked at my interpreter, but he 
 
 seemed to think it nothing extraordinary, and I went 
 on with my bargain. Presently my fine-eyed friend 
 pulled me by the sleeve, and as I leaned toward her. 
 rubbed her forefinger very quickly over my cheek, 
 looking at me intently all the while. I was a little 
 disturbed with the lady's familiarity, and asked my Jew 
 what she wanted. I found that my rubicund com- 
 plexion was something uncommon among these dark- 
 skinned orientals, and she wished to satisfy herself 
 that I was not painted ! I concluded my purchase, 
 and putting the parcel into my pocket, did my prettiest 
 at an oriental salaam, but to my mortification, the lady 
 only gathered up her yashmack, and looked surprised 
 out of her great eyes at my freedom. My Constanti- 
 nople friends inform me that I am to lay no " unction 
 to my soul" from her notice, such liberties being not 
 at all particular. The husband exacts from his half- 
 dozen wives only the concealment of their faces, and 
 they have no other idea of impropriety in public. 
 
 In the centre of the bazar, occupying about as 
 much space as the body of the City Hall in New 
 York, is what is called the bezestein. You descend 
 into it from four directions by massive gates, which 
 are shut, and all persons excluded, except between 
 seven and twelve of the forenoon. This is the core 
 of Constantinople — the soul and citadel of oriental- 
 ism. It is devoted to the sale of arms and to costly 
 articles only. The roof is loftier and the light more 
 dim than in the outer bazars, and the merchants who 
 occupy its stalls, are old and of established credit. 
 Here are subjects for the pencil ! If you can take 
 your eye from those Damascus sabres, with their jew- 
 elled hilts and costly scabbards, or from those gemmed 
 daggers and guns inlaid with silver and gold, cast a 
 glance along that dim avenue and see what a range 
 there is of glorious old gray beards, with their snowy 
 turbans ! These are the Turks of the old regime, be- 
 fore Sultan Mahmoud disfigured himself with a coat 
 like a " dog of a Christian," and broke in upon the 
 customs of the orient. These are your opium-eaters, 
 who smoke even in their sleep, and would not touch 
 wine if it were handed them by houris ! These are 
 your fatalists, who would scarce take the trouble to 
 get out of the way of a lion, and who are as certain 
 of the miracle of Mohammed's coffin as of the length 
 of the pipe, or of the quality of the tobacco of 
 Shiraz ! 
 
 I have spent many an hour in the bezestein, steep- 
 ing my fancy in its rich orientalism, and sometimes 
 trying to make a purchase for myself or others. It is 
 curious to see with what perfect indifference these old 
 cross-legs attend to the wishes of a Christian. I was 
 idling round one day with an English traveller, whom 
 I had known in Italy, when a Persian robe of singu- 
 lar beauty hanging on one of the stalls arrested my 
 companion's attention. He had with him his Turk- 
 ish dragoman, and as the old merchant was smoking 
 away and looking right at us, we pointed to the dress 
 over his head, and the interpreter asked to see it. The 
 mussulman smoked calmly on, taking no more notice 
 of us than of the white clouds curling through his 
 beard. He might have sat for Michael Angelo's Mo- 
 ses. Thin, pale, calm, and of a statue-like repose of 
 countenance and posture, with a large old-fashioned 
 turban, and a curling beard half mingled with gray, 
 his neck bare, and his fine bust enveloped in the flow- 
 ing and bright colored drapery of the east — I had 
 never seen a more majestic figure. He evidently did 
 not wish to have anything to do with us. At last I 
 took out my snuff-box, and addressing him with " ef- 
 fendi !" the Turkish title of courtesy, laid my hand 
 on my breast and offered him a pinch. Tobacco in 
 this unaccustomed shape is a luxury here, and the 
 amber mouth-piece emerged from his mustache, and 
 putting his three fingers into my box, he said u pek 
 Me.'" the Turkish ejaculation of approval. He then 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 155 
 
 made room for us on his carpet and with a cloth meas- 
 ure took the robe from its nail, and spread it before 
 us. My friend bought it unhesitatingly for a dressing- 
 gown, and we spent an hour in looking at shawls, of 
 prices perfectly startling, arms, chalices for incense, 
 spotless amber for pipes, pearls, bracelets of the time 
 of Sultan Selim, and an endless variety of " things 
 rich and rare." The closing of the bezestein gates 
 interrupted our agreeable employment, and our old 
 friend gave us the parting salaam very cordially for a 
 Turk. I have been there frequently since, and never 
 pass without offering my snuff-box, and taking a whiff 
 or two from his pipe, which I cannot refuse, though it 
 is not out of his mouth, except when offered to a 
 friend, from sunrise till midnight. 
 
 One of the regular " lions" of Constantinople is a 
 kibaub shop, or Turkish restaurant. In a ramble with 
 our consul, the other day, in search of the newly-dis- 
 covered cistern of a " thousand and one columns," 
 we found ourselves, at the hungry hour of twelve, op- 
 posite a famous shop near the slave-market. I was 
 rather staggered at the first glance. A greasy fellow, 
 with his shirt rolled to his shoulders, stood near the 
 door, commending his shop to the world by slapping 
 on the flank a whole mutton that hung beside him, 
 while, as a customer came in, he dexterously whipped 
 out a slice, had it cut in a twinkling into bits as large 
 as a piece of chalk (I have stopped five minutes in 
 vain, to find a better comparison), strung upon a long 
 iron skewer, and laid on the coals. My friend is an 
 old Constantinopolitan, and had eaten kibaubs before. 
 He entered without hesitation, and the adroit butcher, 
 giving his big trowsers a fresh hitch, and tightening 
 his girdle, made a new cut for his " narrow legged" 
 customers, and wished us a good appetite (the Turks 
 look with great contempt on our tight pantaloons, and 
 distinguish us by this epithet). We got up on the 
 platform, crossed our legs under us as well as we 
 could, and I can not deny that the savory missives that 
 occasionally reached my nostrils, bred a gradual rec- 
 onciliation between my stomach and my eyes. 
 
 In some five minutes, a tin platter was set between 
 us, loaded with piping hot kibaubs, sprinkled with 
 salad, and mixed with bits of bread ; our friend the 
 cook, by way of making the amiable, stirring it up 
 well with his fingers as he brought it along. As Mo- 
 dely says in the play, " In love or mutton, I generally 
 fall to without ceremony," but, spite of its agreeable 
 flavor, I shut my eyes, and selected a very small bit, 
 before I commenced upon the kibaubs. It was very 
 good eating, I soon found out, and, my fingers once 
 greased (for we are indulged with neither knife, fork, 
 nor skewer, in Turkey), I proved myself as good a 
 trencher-man as my friend. 
 
 The middle and lower classes of Constantinople live 
 between these shops and the cafes. A dish of kibaubs 
 serves them for dinner, and they drink coffee, which 
 they get for about half a cent a cup, from morning till 
 night. We paid for our mess (which was more than 
 any two men could eat at once, unless very hungry), 
 twelve cents. 
 
 We started again with fresh courage, in search of 
 the cistern. We soon found the old one, which is an 
 immense excavation, with a roof, supported by five 
 hundred granite columns, employed now as a place 
 for twisting silk, and escaping from its clamorous 
 denizens, who rushed up after us to the daylight, beg- 
 ging paras, we took one of the boys for a guide, and 
 soon found the object of our search. 
 
 Knocking at the door of a half-ruined house, in one 
 of the loneliest streets of the city, an old, sore-eyed 
 Armenian, with a shabby calpack, and every mark of 
 extreme poverty, admitted us, pettishly demanding 
 our entrance money, before he let us pass the thresh- 
 old. Flights of steps, dangerously ruinous, led us 
 
 down, first into a garden, far below the level of the 
 street, and thence into a dark and damp cavern, the 
 bottom of which was covered with water. As the eye 
 became accustomed to the darkness, we could distin- 
 guish tall and beautiful columns of marble and gran- 
 ite, with superb corinthian capitals, perhaps thirty feet 
 in height, receding as far as the limits of our obscured 
 sight. The old man said there were a thousand of 
 them. The number was doubtless exaggerated, but 
 we saw enough to convince us, that here was covered 
 up, almost unknown, one of the mostly and magnificent 
 works of the Christian emperors of Constantinople 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 BELGRADE — THE COTTAGE OF LADY MONTAGUE — TURK- 
 ISH CEMETERIES— NATURAL TASTE OF THE MOSLEMS 
 FOR THE PICTURESQUE A TURKISH CARRIAGE WASH- 
 ERWOMEN SURPRISED— GIGANTIC FOREST TREES— THE 
 RESERVOIR RETURN TO CONSTANTINOPLE. 
 
 I left Constantinople on horseback with a party of 
 officers, and two American travellers in the east, early 
 on one of nature's holyday mornings, for Belgrade. 
 We loitered a moment in the small Armenian ceme- 
 tery, the only suburb that separates the thickly crowd- 
 ed street from the barren heath that stretches away 
 from the city on every side to the edge of the horizon. 
 It is singular to gallop thus from the crowded pave- 
 ment, at once into an uncultivated and unfenced des- 
 ert. We are so accustomed to suburban gardens that 
 the traveller wonders how the markets of this over- 
 grown and immense capital are supplied. A glance 
 back upon the Bosphorus,and toward the Asian shore, 
 and the islands of the sea of Marmora, explains the 
 secret. The waters in every direction around this 
 sea-girdled city are alive with boats, from the larger 
 kachambas and sandals to the egg-shell caique, swarm- 
 ing into the Golden Horn in countless numbers, la- 
 den with every vegetable of the productive east. Jt is 
 I said, however, that it is dangerous to thrive too near the 
 eye of the sultan. The summary mode for rewarding 
 , favorites and providing for the residence of ambassa- 
 dors, by the simple confiscation of the prettiest estate 
 desirably situated, is thought to have something to do 
 with the barrenness of the immediate neighborhood. 
 The Turks carry their contempt of the Christian 
 even beyond the grave. The funereal cypress, so sin- 
 gularly beautiful in its native east, is permitted to 
 throw its dark shadows only upon turbaned tombstones. 
 The Armenian rayah, the oppressed Greek, and the 
 more hated Jew, slumber in their unprotected graves 
 on the open heath. It almost reconciles one to the 
 haughtiness and cruelty of the Turkish character, 
 however, to stand on one of the " seven hills" of 
 Stamboul, and look around upon their own beautiful 
 cemeteries. On every sloping hill side, in every rural 
 nook, in the court of the splendid mosque, stands a 
 dark nekropolis, a small city of the dead, shadowed so 
 thickly by the close-growing cypresses, that the light 
 of heaven penetrates but dimly. You can have no 
 conception of the beauty it adds to the landscape. 
 And then from the bosom of each, a slender minaret 
 shoots into the sky as if pointing out the flight of the 
 departed spirit, and if you enter within its religious 
 darkness, you find a taste and elegance unknown in 
 more civilized countries, the humblest headstone let- 
 tered with gold, and the more costly sculptured into 
 forms the most sumptuous, and fenced and planted 
 with flowers never neglected. 
 
 In the east, the graveyard is not, as with us, a place 
 abandoned to its dead. Occupying a spot of chosen 
 loveliness it is resorted to by women and children, and 
 on holydays by men, whose indolent natures find hap- 
 
156 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 piness enough in sitting on the green bank around the 
 resting-place of their relatives and friends. Here, 
 while their children are playing around them, they 
 smoke in motionless silence, watching the gay Bos- 
 phorus or the busier curve of the Golden Horn, one 
 of which is visible from every cemetery in the Stam- 
 boul. Occasionally you see large parties of twenty or 
 thirty, sitting together, their slight feast of sweetmeats 
 and sherbet spread in some grassy nook, and the sur- 
 rounding headstones serving as leaning-places for the 
 women, or bounds for the infant gambols of the gayly- 
 dressed little mussulmans. 
 
 Whatever else we may deny the Turk, we must al- 
 low him to possess a genuine love for rural beauty. 
 The cemeteries we have described, the choice of his 
 dwelling on the Bosphorus, and his habit of resorting, 
 whenever he has leisure, to some lovely scene to sit 
 the livelong day in the sunshine, are proof enough. 
 And then all over the hills, both in Anatolia and Rou- 
 melia, wherever there is a fine view or a greener spot 
 than elsewhere, you find the small sairgah, the grassy 
 platform on which he spreads his carpet, and you may 
 look in vain for a spot better selected for his purpose. 
 
 Things are sooner seen than described (I wish it 
 were as agreeable to describe as to see them !) and all 
 this digression, and much more which I spare the 
 reader, is the fruit of five minutes' reflection while the 
 suridjee tightens his girths in the Armenian burying- 
 ground. The turbaned Turk once more in his saddle 
 then we will canter on some three miles, if you please, 
 over as naked a heath as the sun looks upon, to the 
 " Valley of Sweet Waters." I have described this, 
 I think, before. We live to learn, and my intelligent 
 friend tells me, as we draw rein, and wind carefully 
 down the steep descent, that the site of the sultan's 
 romantic serai, in the bosom of the valley, was once 
 occupied by the first printing-press established in Tur- 
 key — the fruit of an embassy to the court of Louis 
 the fifteenth, by Mehemet Effendi, in the reign of Ach- 
 met the third. And thus having delivered myself of a 
 fact, a thing for which I have a natural antipathy in 
 writing, let us gallop up the velvet brink of the Bar- 
 byses. 
 
 We had kept our small Turkish horses to their 
 speed for a mile, with the enraged suridjee crying after 
 us at the top of his voice, " ya-wash ! ya-tvash /" 
 (slowly, slowly!) when, at a bend of the valley, right 
 through the midst of its velvet verdure, came rolling 
 along an aruba, loaded with ladies. This pretty word 
 signifies in Turkish a carriage, and the thing itself re- 
 minds you directly of the fantastic vehicles in which 
 fairy queens come upon the stage. First appear two 
 gray oxen, with their tails tied to a hoop bent back 
 from the end of the pole, their heads and horns and 
 the long curve of the hoop decked with red and yel- 
 low tassels so profusely, that it looks at a distance 
 like a walking clump of hollyhocks. As you pass 
 the poor oxen (almost lifted off their hind legs by the 
 straining of the hoop upon their tails), a four-wheeled 
 vehicle makes its appearance, the body and wheels 
 carved elaborately and gilt all over, and the crimson 
 cover rolled up just so far as to 'show a cluster of veil- 
 ed women, cross-legged upon cushions within, and 
 riding in perfect silence !'* A eunuch or a very old 
 Turk walks at the side, and thus the moslem ladies 
 " take Tcaif" as it is called — in other words go-a-pleas- 
 uring. But a prettier sight than this gay affair rolling 
 noiselessly over the pathless green sward of the Valley 
 of Sweet Waters, you may not see in a year's travel. 
 
 A beautiful Englishwoman, mounted (if I may dare 
 to write it) on a more beautiful Arabian, came flying 
 
 * Whether the difficulty of talking through the yashmack, 
 which is drawn tight over the mouth and nose, may account 
 for it, or whether they have another race of the sex in the 
 east, I am not prepared to say, but Turkish women are re- 
 markable for their taciturnity . 
 
 toward us as we approached the head of the valley, the 
 long feathers in her riding-cap all but brushing our 
 admiring eyes out as she passed, and other living riling 
 met we none till we drew up in the edge of the forest 
 of Belgrade. A half hour brought us to a bold de- 
 scent, and through the openings in the wood we caught 
 a glimpse of the celebrated retreat of Lady Montague, 
 a village, tossed into the lap of as bright a dell as the 
 sun looks upon in his journey. A lively brook, that 
 curls about in the grass like a silver flower worked in- 
 to the green carpet, overcomes at last its unwillingness 
 to depart, and vanishes from the fair scene under a 
 clump of willows ; and, as if it knew it was sitting for its 
 picture, there must needs be a group of girls with 
 their trowsers tucked up to the knee, washing away so 
 busily in the brook, that they did not see that half a 
 dozen Frank horsemen were upon them, and their for- 
 gotten yashmacks all fallen about their shoulders! 
 
 We dismounted, and finding (what I never saw be- 
 fore) a re^-headed Frenchman, walking about in his 
 slippers, we inquired for the house of Lady Montague. 
 He had never heard of her ! A cottage, a little sepa- 
 rated from the village, untenanted, and looking as if it 
 should be hers, stood on a swell of the valley, and we 
 found by the scrawled names and effusions of travel- 
 lers upon the gates, that we were not mistaken in se- 
 lecting it for the shrine of our sentiment. 
 
 I am sorry to be obliged to add, that in the roman- 
 tic forest of Belgrade, we listened to the calls of mor- 
 tal hunger. With some very sour wine, however, 
 we did drink to the memory of Lady Mary and the 
 "fair Fatima," washing down with the same draught 
 as brown bread as ever I saw, and some very indiffer- 
 ent filberts. 
 
 We mounted once more, and followed our silent 
 guide across the brook, politely taking it below the 
 spot where our naiads of the stream were washing, 
 and following its slender valley for a mile, arrived at one 
 of the gigantic bendts, for which the place is famous. 
 To give romance its proper precedence over reality, 
 however, I must first mention, that on the soft bank 
 of the artificial lake, which I shall presently describe, 
 Constantine Ghika, disguised as a shepherd, stole an 
 interview with the fair Veronica, and in the wild forest 
 to the right, they wandered till they lost their way ; 
 an adventure of which they only regretted the sequel, 
 finding it again ! If you have not read " The Arme- 
 nians," this pretty turn in my travels is thrown away 
 upon you. 
 
 The valley of Belgrade widens and rounds into a 
 lake-shaped hollow just here, and across it, to form a 
 reservoir for the supply of the city by the aqueducts 
 of Valens and Justinian, is built a gigantic marble wall. 
 There is no water just now, which, for a lake, is rather 
 a deficiency; but the vast white wall only stands up 
 against the sky, bolder and more towering, and coming 
 suddenly upon it in that lonely place, you might take 
 it, if the " fine phrensy" were on you, for the barrier 
 of some enchanted demesne. 
 
 We passed on into the forest, winding after an al- 
 most invisible path, up hill and down dale, till we came 
 to the second bendt. This, and the third, which is 
 near by, are larger and of more ornamental architecture 
 than the first, and the forest around them is one in 
 which, if he turned his back on the lofty walls, a wild 
 Indian would feel himself at home. I have not seen 
 such trees since I left America ; clear of all underwood, 
 and the long vistas broken only by the trunk of some 
 noble oak, fallen aslant, it has for miles the air of a 
 grand old wilderness, unprofaned by axe or fire. In 
 the midst of such scenery as this, to ride up to the 
 majestic bendt, faced with a front like a temple, and 
 crowned by a marble balustrade, with a salient and rais 
 ed crescent in the centre, like a throne for some mon- 
 arch of the forest, it must be a more staid imagination 
 than mine that would not feel a touch of the knight 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 15? 
 
 of La Mancha, and spur up to find a gate, and a bugle 
 to blow a blast for the warder ! It is just the looking 
 place I imagined for an enchanted castle, when read- 
 ing my first romances. 
 
 Farther on in the forest we found several circular 
 structures, like baths, sunk in the earth, with flights 
 of steps winding to the bottom, but with the same gi- 
 gantic trees growing at their very rim, and nothing 
 near them to show the purpose of their costly mason- 
 ry. We stopped to form a conjecture or two with the 
 aid of the genus loci, but the surly suridjee, probably 
 at a loss to comprehend the object of looking into a 
 hole full of dead leaves, chose to put his horse to a 
 gallop ; and having no Veronica to make a romance 
 of a lost path, we left our conjectures to gallop after. 
 
 We reached the waste plains above the city at sun- 
 set, and turned a little out of our way to enter through 
 the Turkish cemetery (poetically called by Mr. Mac- 
 Farlane " death's coronal"), on the summit and sides 
 of the hill behind Pera. Broad daylight, as it was 
 still without, it was deep twilight among its thick- 
 planted cypresses ; and our horses, starting at the tall, 
 white tombstones, hurried through its damp hollows 
 and emerged on a brow overlooking the bright and 
 crowded Bosphorus, bathed at the moment in a flood 
 of sunset glory. I said again, as I reined in my horse 
 and gazed down upon those lovely waters, there is no 
 such scene of beauty in the world ! And again I say, 
 " poor Slingsby" never was here ! 
 
 LETTER C. 
 
 SCUTARI — TOMB OF THE SULTANA VALIDE — MOSQUE OF 
 THE HOWLING DERVISHES — A CLERICAL SHOEMAKER — 
 VISIT TO A TURKISH CEMETERY — BIRD's-EYE VIEW OF 
 STAMBOUL AND ITS ENVIRONS — SERAGLIO-POINT — THE 
 SEVEN TOWERS. 
 
 Pulled over to Scutari in a caique, for a day's 
 ramble. The Chrysopolis, the " golden city" of the 
 ancients, forms the Asian side of the bay, and, though 
 reckoned, generally, as a part of Constantinople, is in 
 itself a large and populous capital. It is built on a 
 hill, very bold upon the side washed by the sea of 
 Marmora, but leaning toward the seraglio, on the op- 
 posite shore, with the grace of a lady (Asia) bowing 
 to her partner (Europe). You will find the simile 
 very beautifully elaborated in the first chapter of " The 
 Armenians." 
 
 We strolled through the bazar awhile, meeting, oc- 
 casionally, a caravan of tired and dusty merchants, 
 coming in from Asia, some with Syrian horses, and 
 some with uusky, Nubian slaves, following barefoot, 
 in their blankets ; and, emerging from the crowded 
 street upon a square, we stopped a moment to look at 
 the cemetery and gilded fountains of a noble mosque. 
 Close to the street, defended by a railing of gilt iron, 
 and planted about closely with cypresses, stands a 
 small temple of airy architecture, supported on four 
 slender columns, and enclosed by a net of gilt wire, 
 forming a spacious aviary. Within sleeps the Sultana 
 Valide. Her costly monument, elaborately inscribed 
 in red and gold, occupies the area of this poetical 
 sepulchre ; small, sweet-scented shrubs half bury it in 
 their rich flowers, and birds of the gayest plumage 
 flutter and sing above her in their beautiful prison. If 
 the soul of the departed sultana is still susceptible of 
 sentiment, she must look down with some complacen- 
 cy upon the disposition of her " mortal coil." I have 
 not seen so fanciful a grave in my travels. 
 
 We ascended the hill to the mosque of the Howling 
 Dervishes. It stands in the edge of the great cemetery 
 of Scutari, the favorite burial-place of the Turks. 
 The self-torturing worship of this singular class of 
 
 devotees takes place only on a certain day of the week, 
 and we found the gates closed. A small cafe stood 
 opposite, sheltered by large plane-trees, and on a 
 bench at the door, sat a dervish, employed in the un- 
 clerical vocation of mending slippers. Calling for a 
 cup of the fragrant Turkish coffee, we seated our- 
 selves on ihe matted bench beside him, and, entering 
 into conversation, my friend and he were soon upon 
 the most courteous terms. He laid down his last, and 
 accepted a proffered narghile, and, between the heavily- 
 drawn puffs of the bubbling vase, gave us some infor- 
 mation respecting his order, of which the peculiarity 
 that most struck me was a law compelling them to 
 follow some secular profession. In this point, at least, 
 they are more apostolic than the clergy of Christen- 
 dom. Whatever may be the dervish's excellence as a 
 " mender of souls," thought I, as I took up the last, 
 and looked at the stitching of the bright new patch, 
 (may I get well out of this sentence without a pun !) 
 I doubt whether there is a divine within the Christian 
 pale who could turn out so pretty a piece of work in 
 any corresponding calling. Our coffee drunk and our 
 chibouques smoked to ashes, we took leave of our 
 papoosh-mending friend, who laid his hand on his 
 breast, and said, with the expressive phraseology of 
 the east, "You shall be welcome again." 
 
 We entered the gloomy shadow of the vast ceme- 
 tery, and found its cool and damp air a grateful ex- 
 change for the sunshine. The author of Anastasius 
 gives a very graphic description of this place, throwing 
 in some horrors, however, for which he is indebted to 
 his admirable imagination. I never was in a more 
 agreeable place for a summer-morning's lounge, and, 
 as I sat down on a turbaned headstone, near the tomb 
 of Mohammed the second's horse, and indulged in a 
 train of reflections arising from the superior distinc- 
 tion of the brute's ashes over those of his master, I 
 could remember no place, except Plato's Academy at 
 Athens, where I had mused so absolutely at my ease. 
 
 We strolled on. A slender and elegantly-carved 
 slab, capped with a small turban, fretted and gilt, ar- 
 rested my attention. " It is the tomb," said my com- 
 panion, " of one of the ichoglans or sultan's pages. 
 The peculiar turban is distinctive of his rank, and the 
 inscription says, he died at eighteen, after having seen 
 enough of the world ! Similar sentiments are to be 
 found on almost every stone." Close by stood the 
 ambitious cenotaph of a former pacha of Widin, with 
 a swollen turban, crossed with folds of gold, and a foot- 
 stone painted and carved, only less gorgeously than 
 the other; and under his name and titles was written, 
 " I enjoyed not the icorld." Farther on, we stopped at 
 the black-banded turban of a cadi, and read again, un- 
 derneath, " / took no pleasure in this evil world." You 
 would think the Turks a philosophizing people, judg- 
 ing by these posthumous declarations ; but one need 
 not travel to learn that tombstones are sad liars. 
 
 The cemetery of Scutari covers as much ground as 
 a city. Its black cypress pall spreads away over hill 
 and dale, and terminates, at last, on a long point pro- 
 jecting into Marmora, as if it would pour into the sea 
 the dead it could no longer cover. From the Arme- 
 nian village, immediately above, it forms a dark, and 
 not unpicturesque foreground to a brilliant picture of 
 the gulf of Nicomedia and the clustering Princes' isl- 
 ands. With the economy of room which the Turks 
 practise in their burying-grounds, laying the dead, 
 literally, side by side, and the immense extent of this 
 forest of cypresses, it is probable that on no one spot 
 on the earth are so many of the human race gathered 
 together. 
 
 We wandered about among the tombs till we began 
 to desire to see the cheerful light of day, and crossing 
 toward the height of Bulgurlu. commenced its ascent, 
 with the design of descending jy the other side to the 
 Bosphorus. and returning, by caique, to the city. 
 
158 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 Walking leisurely on between fields of the brightest 
 cultivation, we passed, half way up, a small and rural 
 serai, the summer residence of Esmeh Sultana, the 
 younger sister of the sultan, and soon after stood, well 
 breathed, on the lofty summit of Bulgurlu. The con- 
 stantly-occurring sairgahs, or small grass platforms, 
 for spreading the carpet and " taking kaif" show how 
 well the Turks appreciate the advantages of a position 
 commanding, perhaps, views unparallelled in the 
 world for their extraordinary beauty. But let us take 
 breath and look around us. 
 
 We stood some three miles back from the Bospho- 
 rus, perhaps a thousand feet above its level. There 
 lay Constantinople ! The " temptation of Satan" 
 could not have been more sublime. It seemed as if 
 all the " kingdoms of the earth" were swept confused- 
 ly to the borders of the two continents. From Serag- 
 lio Point, seven miles down the coast of Roumelia, 
 the eye followed a continued wall ; and from the same 
 point, twenty miles up the Bosphorus, on either shore, 
 stretched one crowded and unbroken city ! The star- 
 shaped bay in the midst, crowded with flying boats ; 
 the Golden Horn sweeping out from behind the hills, 
 and pouring through the city like a broad river, stud- 
 ded with ships ; and, in the palace-lined and hill-shel- 
 tered Bosphorus, the sultan's fleet at anchor, the lofty 
 men-of-war flaunting their blood-red flags, and thrust- 
 ing their tapering spars almost into the balconies of 
 the fairy dwellings, and among the bright foliage of 
 the terraced gardens above them. Could a scene be 
 more strangely and beautifully mingled ? 
 
 But sit down upon this silky grass, and let us listen 
 to my polyglot friend, while he explains the details of 
 the panorama. 
 
 First, clear over the sea of Marmora, you observe a 
 snow-white cloud resting on the edge of the horizon. 
 That is Olympus. Within sight of his snowy sum- 
 mit, and along toward the extremity of this long line 
 of eastern hills, lie Bithynia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, 
 Paphlagonia, and the whole scene of the apostles' 
 travels in Asia Minor ; and just at his feet, if you will 
 condescend to be modern, lies Brusa, famous for its 
 silks, and one of the most populous and thriving of 
 the sultan's cities. Returning over Marmora by the 
 Princes' Islands, at the western extremity of Constan- 
 tinople, stands the Fortress of the Seven Towers, 
 where fell the Emperor Constantine Palaeologus, 
 where Othman the second was strangled, where refrac- 
 tory ambassadors are left to come to their senses and 
 the sultan's terms, and where, in short, that "zealous 
 public butcher," the seraskier, cuts any Gordian knot 
 that may tangle his political meshes ; and here was 
 the famous " Golden Gate," attended no more by its 
 " fifty porters with white wands," and its crowds of 
 " ichoglans and mutes, turban-keepers, nail-cutters, 
 and slipper-bearers," as in the days of the Selims. 
 
 Between the Seven Towers and the Golden Horn 
 you may count the " seven hills" of ancient Stam- 
 boul, the towering arches of the aqueduct of Valens, 
 crossing from one to the other, and the swelling dome 
 and gold-tipped minarets of a hundred imperial 
 mosques crowning and surrounding their summits. 
 What an orient look do those gallery-bound and sky- 
 piercing shafts give to the varied picture ! 
 
 There is but one " Seraglio Point" in the world. 
 Look at that tapering cape, shaped like a lady's foot, 
 projecting from Stamboul toward the shore of Asia, 
 and dividing the bay from the sea of Marmora. It is 
 cut off from the rest of the city, you observe, by a 
 high wall, flanked with towers, and the circumference 
 of the whole seraglio may be three miles. But what 
 a gem of beauty it is ! In what varied foliage its un- 
 approachable palaces are buried, and how exquisitely 
 gleam from the midst of the bright leaves its gilded 
 cupolas, its gay balconies, its airy belvideres, and its 
 glittering domes ! And mark the height of those 
 
 dark and arrowy cypresses, shooting from every corner 
 of its imperial gardens, and throwing their deep shad- 
 ows on every bright cluster of foliage, and every gild- 
 ed lattice of the sacred enclosure. They seem to re- 
 mind one, that amid all its splendor and with all its 
 secluded retirement, this gorgeous sanctuary of roy- 
 alty has been stained, from its first appropriation by 
 the monarchs of the east till now, with the blood of 
 victims to the ambition of its changing masters. The 
 cypresses are still young over the graves of an uncle 
 and a brother, whose cold murder within those lovely 
 precincts prepared the throne for the present sultan. 
 The seraglio, no longer the residence of Mahmoud 
 himself, is at present occupied by his children, two 
 noble boys, of whom one, by the usual system, must 
 fall a sacrifice to the security of the other. 
 
 Keeping on toward the Black sea, we cross the 
 Golden Horn to Pera, the European and diplomatic 
 quarter of the city. The high hill on which it stands 
 overlooks all Constantinople ; and along its ridge 
 toward the beautiful cemetery on the brow, runs the 
 principal street of the Franks, the promenade of the 
 dragoman exquisites, and the Broadway of shops and 
 belles. Here meet, on the narrow pave, the veiled 
 Armenian, who would die with shame to show her 
 chin to a stranger, and the wife of the European mer- 
 chant, in a Paris hat and short petticoats, mutually 
 each other's sincere horror. Here the street is some- 
 what cleaner, the dogs somewhat less anti-Christian, 
 and hat and trowsers somewhat less objects of con- 
 tempt. It is a poor abortion of a place, withal, nei- 
 ther Turkish nor Christian ; and nobody who could 
 claim a shelter for his head elsewhere, would take the 
 whole of its slate-colored and shingled palaces as a gift. 
 
 Just beyond is the mercantile suburb of Galata, 
 which your dainty diplomatist would not write on his 
 card for an embassy, but for which, as being honestly 
 what it calls itself, I entertain a certain respect, want- 
 ing in my opinion of its mongrel neighbor. Heavy 
 gates divide these different quarters of the city, and 
 if you would pass after sunset, you must anoint the 
 hinges with a piastre. 
 
 LETTER CI. 
 
 BEAUTIES OF THE BOSPHORUS — SUMMER-PALACE OF THE 
 SULTAN ADVENTURE WITH AN OLD TURKISK WO- 
 MAN — THE FEAST OF BAIRAM THE SULTAN HIS OWN 
 
 BUTCHER HIS EVIL PROPENSITIES — VISIT TO THE 
 
 MOSQUES— A FORMIDABLE DERVISH SANTA SOPHIA — 
 
 MOSQUE OF SULTAN ACHMET — TRACES OF CHRISTIAN- 
 ITY. 
 
 From this elevated point, the singular effect of a 
 desert commencing from the very streets of the city is 
 still more observable. The compact edge of the me- 
 tropolis is visible even upon the more rural Bospho- 
 rus, not an enclosure or a straggling house venturing 
 to protrude beyond the closely pressed limit. To re- 
 peat the figure, it seems, with the prodigious mass of 
 habitations on either shore, as if all the cities of both 
 Europe and Asia were swept to their respective bor- 
 ders, or as if the crowded masses upon the long ex- 
 tending shores were the depositeof some mighty over- 
 flow of the sea. 
 
 From Pera commence the numerous villages, sep- 
 arated only by name, which form a fringe of peculiarly 
 light and fantastic architecture to the never-wearying 
 Bosphorus. Within the small limit of your eye, up- 
 on that silver link between the two seas, there are fifty 
 valleys and thirty rivers, and an imperial palace on ev- 
 ery loveliest spot from the Black Sea to Marmora 
 The Italians say, " See Naples and die !" but for Ne 
 pies I would read Stamboul and the Bosphorus. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 159 
 
 Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot, 
 we entered along glen, closed at the water's edge by 
 the sultan's summer-palace, and present residence of 
 Beylerbey. Half way down, we met a decrepit old 
 woman, toiling up the path, and my friend, with a 
 Wordsworthian passion for all things humble and sim- 
 ple, gave her the Turkish good-morrow, and inquired 
 her business at the village. She had been to Stavros, 
 to sell ten paras' worth of herbs — about one cent of 
 our currency. He put a small piece of silver into her 
 hand, while, with the still strong habit of Turkish 
 modesty, she employed the other in folding her tatter- 
 ed yashmack so as to conceal her features from the 
 gaze of strangers. She had not expected charity. 
 " What is this for?" she asked, looking at it with some 
 surprise. " To buy bread for your children, mother ?" 
 " Effendi !" said the poor old creature, her voice trem- 
 bling, and the tears streaming from her eyes, " My 
 children are all dead ! There isno one now betwccnme 
 and Allah /" It were worth a poet's while to live in 
 the east. Like the fairy in the tale, they never open 
 their lips but they " speak pearls." 
 
 We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim, 
 at Beylerbey, and floated slowly past the imperial pal- 
 ace. Five or six eunuchs, with their red caps and 
 Ions; blue dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the 
 courtyard of the harem, and we gazed long and ear- 
 nestly at the fine lattices above, concealing so many of 
 the picked beauties of the empire. A mandolin, very 
 indifferently strummed in one of the projecting wings, 
 betrayed the employment of some fair Fatima, and 
 there was a single moment when we could see, by the 
 relief of a corner window, the outline of a female fig- 
 ure ; but the caique floated remorselessly on, and our 
 busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows for 
 their reward. As we approached the central facade 
 the polished brazen gates flew open, and a band of 
 thirty musicians came out and ranged themselves on 
 the terrace beneath the palace-windows, announcing, 
 in their first flourish, that Sultan Mahmoud had thrust 
 his fingers into his pilaw, and his subjects were at lib- 
 erty to dine. Not finding their music much to our 
 taste, we ordered the caikjees to assist the current a 
 little, and shooting past Stavros, we put across the 
 strait from the old palace of Shemsheh the vizier, 
 and, in a few minutes, 1 was once more in my floating 
 home, under the " star-spangled banner." 
 
 Constantinople was in a blaze last night, with the 
 illumination for the approach of the Turkish feast of 
 Bairam. The minarets were extremely beautiful, their 
 encircling galleries hung with colored lamps, and il- 
 luminated festoons suspended from one to the other. 
 The ships of the fleet were decked also with thousands 
 of lamps, and the effect was exceedingly fine, with the 
 reflection in the Bosphorus, and the waving of the 
 suspended lights in the wind. The sultan celebrates 
 the festa by taking a virgin to his bed, and sacrificing 
 twenty sheep with his own hand. I am told by an in- 
 telligent physician here, that this playing the butcher 
 is an every-day business with the " Brother of the 
 Sun," every safe return from a ride, or an excursion in 
 his sullaneliie caique, requiring him to cut the throat 
 of his next day's mutton. It may account partly for 
 the excessive cruelty of character attributed to him. 
 
 Among other bad traits, Mahmoud is said to be 
 very avaricious. It is related of his youth, that he 
 was permitted occasionally, with his brother (who was 
 murdered to make room for him on the throne), to 
 walk out in public on certain days with their governor; 
 and that, upon these occasions, each was intrusted 
 with a purse to be expended in charity. The elder 
 brother soon distributed his piastres, and borrowed of 
 his attendants to continue his charities ; while Mah- 
 moud quietly put the purse in his pocket, and added 
 it to his private hoard on his return. It is said, too, 
 
 that he has a particular passion for upholstery, and in 
 his frequent change from one serai to another, allows 
 no nail to be driven without his supervision. Add to 
 this a spirit of perverse contradiction, so truculenl 
 that none but the most abject flatterers can preserve 
 his favor, and you have a pretty handful of offsets 
 against a character certainly not without some royal 
 qualities. 
 
 With one of the Reis Eftendi's and one of the se 
 raskier's officers, followed by four kcrvasses in the 
 Turkish military dress, and every man a pair of slip- 
 pers in his pocket, we accompanied the commodore, 
 to-day, on a visit to the principal mosques. 
 
 Landing first at Tophana, on the Pera side, we en- 
 tered the court of the new mosque built by the pres- 
 ent sultan, whose elegant exterior of white marble and 
 two freshly gilded minarets we had admired daily, ly- 
 ing at anchor without sound of the muezzin. The 
 morning prayers were just over, and the retiring Turks 
 looked, with lowering brows, at us, as we pulled oft 
 our boots on the sacred threshold. 
 
 We entered upon what, but for the high pulpit, I 
 should have taken for rather a superb ball-room. An 
 unencumbered floor carpeted gayly,a small arabesque 
 gallery over the door quite like an orchestra, chande- 
 liers and lamps in great profusion, and walls painted of 
 the brightest and most varied colors, formed an inte- 
 rior rather wanting in the "dim religious light" of a 
 place of worship. We were shuffling around in our 
 slippers from one side to the other, examining the 
 marble Mihrab and the narrow and towering pulpit, 
 when a ragged and decrepit dervish, with hispapoosh- 
 es in his hand, and his toes and heels protruding from 
 a very dirty pair of stockings, rose from his prayers 
 and began walking backward and forward, eying us 
 ferociously and muttering himself into quite a pas- 
 sion. His charity for infidels was evidently at a low 
 ebb. Every step we took upon the holy floor seemed 
 to add to his fury. The kcrvasses observed him, but 
 his sugar-loaf cap carried some respect with it, and 
 they evidently did not like to meddle with him. He 
 followed us to the door, fixing his hollow gray eyes 
 with a deadly glare upon each one as he went out, and 
 the Turkish officers seemed rather glad to hurry us out 
 of his way. He left us in the vestibule, and we mount- 
 ed a handsome marble staircase to a suite of apart- 
 ments above, communicating with the sultan's private 
 gallery. The carpets here were richer, and the divans 
 with which the half dozen saloons were surrounded, 
 were covered with the most costly stuffs of the east. 
 The gallery was divided from the area of the mosque 
 by a fine brazen grating curiously wrought, and its 
 centre occupied by a rich ottoman, whereon the im- 
 perial legs are crossed in the intervals of his prostra- 
 tions. It was about the size and had the air altogeth- 
 er of a private box at the opera. 
 
 We crossed the Golden Horn, and passing the eu- 
 nuch's guard, entered the gardens of the seraglio on 
 our way to Santa Sophia. An inner wall still separa- 
 ted us from the gilded kiosks, at whose latticed win- 
 dows peering above the trees, we might have clearly 
 perused the features of any peeping inmate ; but the 
 little cross bars revealed nothing but their own provo- 
 king eye of the size of a roseleaf in the centre, and 
 we reached the upper gate without even a glimpse 
 of a waved handerchief to stir our chivalry to the res- 
 cue. 
 
 A confused mass of buttresses without form or or- 
 der, is all that you are shown for the exterior of that 
 » wonder of the world," the mosque of mosques, the 
 renowned Santa Sophia. We descended a dark av- 
 enue, and leaving our boots in a vestibule that the 
 horse of Mohammed the second, if he was lodged as 
 ambitiously living as dead, would have disdained for 
 his stable, we entered the vaulted area. A long breath 
 
160 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 nnd an admission of its almost attributable supernatural 
 grandeur, followed our too hasty disappointment. It is 
 indeed a " vast and wondrous dome !" Its dimensions 
 are less than those of St. Peter's, at Rome, but its effect, 
 owing to its unity and simplicity of design, is, I think 
 superior. The numerous small galleries let into its 
 sides add richness to it without impairing its apparent 
 magnitude, and its vast floor, upon which a single in- 
 dividual is almost lost, the sombre colors of its walls 
 untouched probably for centuries, and the dim sepul- 
 chral light that struggles through the deep-niched and 
 retiring windows, form altogether an interior from 
 which the imagination returns, like the dove to the 
 ark, fluttering and bewildered. 
 
 Our large party separated over its wilderness of a 
 floor, and each might have had his hour of solitude, 
 had the once Christian spirit of the spot (or the pres- 
 ent pagan demon) affected him religiously. I found, 
 myself, a singular pleasure in wandering about upon 
 the elastic mats (laid four or five thick all over the 
 floor), examining here a tattered banner hung against 
 the wall, and there a rich cashmere which had covered 
 the tomb of the prophet ; on one side a slab of trans- 
 parent alabaster from the temple of Solomon (a 
 strange relic for a Mohammedan mosque !) and on the 
 other, a dark Mihrab surrounded by candles of incred- 
 ible proportions, looking like the marble columns of 
 some friezeless portico. The four " six-winged cher- 
 ubim" on the roof of the dome, sole remaining trace 
 as they are of the religion to which the building was 
 first dedicated, had better been left to the imagination. 
 They are monstrous in Mosaic. It is said that the 
 whole interior of the mosque is cased beneath its 
 dusky plaster with the same costly Mosaic which cov- 
 ers the ceiling. To make a Mohammedan mosque of a 
 Christian church, however, it was necessary to erase 
 Christian emblems from the walls ; besides which the 
 Turks have a superstitious horror of all imitative arts, 
 considering the painting of the human features par- 
 ticularly, as a mockery of the handiwork of Allah. 
 
 We went hence to the more modern mosque of Sul- 
 tan Achmet, which is an imitation of Santa Sophia 
 within, but its own beautiful prototype in exterior. Its 
 spacious and solemn court, its six heaven-piercing 
 minarets, its fountains, and the mausoleums of the 
 sultans, with their gilded cupolas and sarcophagi cov- 
 ered with cashmeres (the murdering sultan and his 
 murdered brothers lying in equal splendor side-by- 
 side!), are of a style of richness peculiarly oriental and 
 imposing. We visited in succession Sultan Bajazet, 
 Sulymanye, and Sultana Valide, all of the same ara- 
 besque exterior and very similar within. The descrip- 
 tion of one leaves little to be said of the other, and, 
 with the exception of Santa Sophia, of which I should 
 like to make a lounge when I am in love with my own 
 company, the mosques of Constantinople are a kind 
 of " lion" well killed in a single visit. 
 
 LETTER CII. 
 
 UNERRING DETECTION OF FOREIGNERS — A CARGO OF 
 ODALISQUES — THE FANAR, OR QUARTER OF THE 
 GREEKS — STREET OF THE BOOKSELLERS — ASPECT OF 
 ANTIQUITY — PURCHASES — CHARITY FOR DOGS AND 
 PIGEONS — PUNISHMENT OF CANICIDE — A BRIDAL PRO- 
 CESSION — TURKISH FEMALE PHYSIOGNOMY. 
 
 Pulling up the Golden Horn to-day in a caique 
 without any definite errand (a sort of excursion par- 
 ticularly after my own heart), I was amused at the 
 caikjee's asking my companion, who shaves clean like 
 a Christian, and has his clothes from Regent street, 
 
 and looks for aught I can see, as much like a foreigner 
 in Constantinople as myself, " in what vessel I had ar 
 rived." We asked him if he had ever seen either of us 
 before. "No!" How then did he know that my 
 friend, who had not hitherto spoken a word of Turk- 
 ish, was not as lately arrived as myself? What is it 
 that so infallibly, in every part of the world, distin 
 guishes the stranger ? 
 
 We passed under the stern of an outlandish-looking 
 vessel just dropping her anchor. Her deck was crowd- 
 ed with men and women in singular costumes, and 
 near the helm, apparently under the protection of a 
 dark-visaged fellow in a voluminous turban, stood three 
 young, and, as well as we could see, uncommonly 
 pretty girls. The captain answered to our hail that 
 he was from Trebizond, and his passengers were slaves . 
 for the bazar. How redolent of the east ! Were one 
 but a Turk, now, to forestall the market and barter for 
 a pair of those dark eyes while they are still full of 
 surprise and innocence ! 
 
 We landed at the Fanar. Bow-windows crowded 
 with fair faces, in enormous pink turbans, naked 
 shoulders (which I am already so orientalized as to 
 think very indecent), puffed curls and pinched waists, 
 reminded us at every step that we were in a Christian 
 quarter of Constantinople. From this paltry and mis- 
 erable suburb, spring the modern princes of Greece, 
 the Mavrocordatos, and Ghikas, the Hospodars of 
 Wallachia and Moldavia, the subtle, insinuating, in- 
 triguing, but talented and ever-successful Fanariotes. 
 One hears so much of them in Europe, and so much 
 is made of a stray scion from the very far-traced root 
 of Paloeologus or some equally boasted blood of the 
 Fanar (I met a Fanariote princess G — at the baths of 
 Lucca last year, whom I except from every dispara- 
 ging remark), that he is a little disappointed with the 
 dirty alleys and the stuffed windows, shown him as 
 the hereditary homes of these very sounding names. 
 There are a hundred families at least in the Fanar, 
 that trace their origin back to no less than an imperial 
 stock, and there is not a house in the whole quarter 
 that would pass in our country for a respectable barn. 
 In personal appearance they are certainly very inferior 
 to any other race of their ownnation. The Albanians, 
 and the Greeks I saw at Napoli and in the Morea, were 
 (except the North American Indians) the finest people, 
 physically, I have ever been among; while it would 
 be difficult to find a more diminutive and degenerate- 
 looking body of men and women, than swarm in this 
 nest of Grecian princes. 
 
 We re-entered our little bark, and gliding along 
 leisurely through the crowd of piades, kachambas, and 
 caiques, landed at Stamboul, and walked on toward 
 the bazar. Always discovering new passages in that 
 labyrinth of shops, we found ourselves after an hour's' 
 rambling, in a long street of booksellers. This is rath- 
 er the oldest and narrowest part of the bazar, and the 
 light of heaven meets with the additional interruption 
 of two rows of pillars with arched friezes standing in 
 the middle of the street. On entering the literary twi- 
 light of the passage in the rear of these columns, the 
 classic nostril detects instantly the genuine odor of 
 manuscript, black-letter, and ancient binding ; and the 
 trained eye, accustomed to the dim niches of libraries, 
 wanders over the well-piled shelves with their quaint 
 rows of volumes in vellum, and appreciates at once 
 their varied riches. Here is nothing of the complex- 
 ion of a shelf at the Harpers', or the Hendees', or the 
 Careys' — no fresh and uncut novel, no new-born poem, 
 no political pamphlet or gay souvenir ! And the price- 
 less treasures of learning are not here doled out by a 
 talkative publisher or dapper clerk, skilled only in the 
 lettered backs of the volumes he barters. But in som- 
 bre and uneven rows, or laid in heaps, whose order is 
 not in their similarity of binding, but in the correspon- 
 dence of their contents, lie venerable and much-thumb- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 161 
 
 ed tomes of Arabic or Persian ; while the venerable 
 bibliopole, seated motionless on his hams, with his 
 gray beard reaching to his crossed slippers, peruses an 
 illuminated volume of Hafiz, lifting his eyes from the 
 page only to revolve some sweet image in his mind, 
 and murmur a low " pekke !" of approbation. 
 
 We had stepped back into the last century. Here 
 was the calamus still in use. The small, brown reed, 
 not yet superseded by the more useful but less classic 
 quill, stood in every clotted inkstand, and nothing less 
 than the purchase of a whole scrivener's furniture, 
 from a bearded bookworm, whose benevolent face took 
 my fancy, would suffice my enthusiasm. Not to waste 
 all our oriental experience at a single stall, we strolled 
 farther on to buy an illuminated Hafiz. We stopped 
 simultaneously before an old Armenian who seemed, 
 by his rusty calpack and shabby robe, to be something 
 poorer than even his plainly-clad neighbors ; for in I 
 Turkey, as elsewhere, he who lives in a world of his j 
 own, has but a slender portion in that of the vulgar. 
 A choice-looking volume lay open upon one of the 
 old man's knees, while from a wooden bowl he was 
 eating hastily a pottage of rice. His meal was evi- 
 dently an interruption. He had not even laid aside 
 his book. 
 
 There was something in his handling of the volume, 
 as he took down a pocket-sized Hafiz, that showed an ! 
 affection for the author. He turned it over with a | 
 slight dilation of countenance, and opening it with a 
 careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian. I ! 
 took it from him open at the place, and marked the 
 passage with my nail, to look for it in the transla- 
 tion. 
 
 With my cheaply-bought treasures in my pockets, 
 we turned up the street of the diamond-merchants, { 
 and making a single purchase more in the bazar, of a t 
 tcsbih or Turkish rosary of spice-wood, emerged to the 
 open air in the neighborhood of the mosque of Sultan 
 Bajazet. 
 
 Whether slipping the pagan beads through my 
 fingers affected me "devoutly, or whether it was the 
 mellow humor of the moment, I felt a disposition to 
 forgive my enemies, and indulge in an act of Moham- 
 medan piety — feeding the unowned dogs of the street. 
 We stepped into a baker's shop, and laid out a piastre 
 in bread, and were immediately observed and surround- 
 ed, before we could break a loaf, by twenty or thirty 
 as ill-looking curs, as ever howled to the moon. Hav- 
 ing distributed about a dozen loaves, and finding that 
 our largess had by no means satisfied the appetites of 
 the expecting rabble, we found ourselves embarrassed 
 to escape. Nothing but the baker's threshold prevent- 
 ed them from jumping upon us, in their eagerness, and 
 the array of so many formidable mouths, ferocious 
 with hunger, was rather staggering. The baker drew 
 off the hungry pack at last, by walking round the 
 corner with a loaf in his hand, while we made a speedy 
 exit, patted on the back in passing by several of the j 
 assembled spectators. 
 
 It is surprising that the Turks can tolerate this filthy 
 breed of curs, in such extraordinary numbers. They 
 have a whimsical punishment for killing one of them. 
 The dead dog is hung by his heels, so'that his nose | 
 just touches the ground, and the canicide is compelled | 
 to heap wheat about him, till he is entirely covered ; j 
 the wheat is then given to the poor, and the dog buried 
 at the expense of the culprit. There are, probably, 
 five dogs to every man in Constantinople, and besides ! 
 their incessant barking, they often endanger the lives 
 of children and strangers. MacFarlane, I think, tells 
 the story of a drunken sea-captain, who was entirely 
 devoured by the dogs at Tophana ; nothing being 
 found of him in the morning but his "indigestible pis- 
 tail!" ' a 
 
 We entered the court of Sultan Bajazet, and found 
 the majestic plane-trees that shadow its arabesque 
 11 
 
 fountains, bending beneath the weight of hundreds of 
 pensionary pigeons. Here, as at several of the 
 mosques, an old man sits by the gate, whose business 
 it is to expend the alms given him in distributing 
 grain to these sacred birds. Not to be outdone in 
 piety, my friend gave the blind old Turk a piastre ; 
 and, as he arose and unlocked the box beneath him, 
 the pigeons descended about us in such a cloud, as 
 literally to darken the air. Handful after handful was 
 then thrown among them, and the beautiful creatures 
 ran over our feet and fluttered round us with a fear- 
 lessness that sufficiently proved the safety in which 
 they haunted the sacred precincts. In a few minutes 
 they soared altogether again to the trees, and their 
 mussulman-feeder resumed his seat upon the box to 
 wait for another charity. 
 
 A crowd of women at the harem gate, in the rear 
 of the seraskier's palace, attracted our attention. 
 Upon inquiry, we found that he had married a daugh- 
 ter to one of the sultan's military officers, and the bri- 
 dal party was expected presently to come out in aru- 
 bahs, and make the tour of the Hippodrome, on the 
 way to the house of the bridegroom. We wiled away 
 an hour returning the gaze of curiosity bent upon us 
 from the idle and bright eyes of a hundred women, and 
 the first of the gilded vehicles made its appearance ; 
 though in the same style of ornament with the one I 
 have already described, it differed in being drawn by 
 horses, and having a frame top, with small round mir- 
 rors set in the corners. Within sat four very young 
 women, one of whom was the bride ; but which, we 
 found no one who could tell us. It is no description 
 of a face in the east to say, that the eyes were dark, 
 and the nose regular — all that the jealous yashmack 
 permitted us to ascertain of the beauty of the bride. 
 Their eyes are all dark, and their noses are all regular; 
 the Turkish nose differing from the Grecian, as that 
 of the Antinous from the Apollo, only in its more vo- 
 luptuous fullness, and a nostril less dilated. Four 
 darker pairs of eyes, however, and four brows of whiter 
 orb, never pined in a harem, or were reflected in those 
 golden-rimmed mirrors; and as the twelve succeeding 
 arubas rattled by, and in each suit four young women, 
 with the same eternal dark eyes, "full of sleep," and 
 the same curved and pearly forehead, and noses like 
 the Antinous, I thought of toujours pcrdrix, and felt 
 that if there had been but one with a slight toss in 
 that prominent member, it would not have been dis- 
 pleasing. 
 
 In a conversation with a Greek lady the other day, 
 she remarked that the veils of the Turkish ladies con- 
 ceal no charms. Their mouths, she says, are gener- 
 ally coarse, and their teeth, from the immoderate use 
 of sweetmeats, or neglect, or some other cause, almost 
 universally defective. How far the interest excited by 
 these hidden features may have jaundiced the eyes of 
 my fair informer, I can not say ; but as a general fact, 
 uneducated women, whatever other beauties they may 
 possess, have rarely expressive or agreeable mouths. 
 Nature forms and colors the nose, the eyes, the fore- 
 head, and the complexion ; but the character, from 
 the cradle up, moulds gradually to its own inward 
 changes, the plastic and passion-breathing lines of the 
 lips. Allowing this, it would be rather surprising if 
 there was a mouth in all Turkey that had more than 
 a pretty silliness at the most — the art of dying their 
 finger-nails, and painting their eyebrows, being the 
 highest branches of female education. How they 
 came by these " eyes that teach us what the sun is 
 made of," the vales of Georgia and Circassia best can 
 tell. * 
 
 And so having rambled away a sunny autumn day, 
 and earned some little appetite, if not experience, we 
 will get out of Stamboul, before the sunset guard 
 makes us prisoners, and climb up to our dinner in 
 Pera. 
 
162 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER CHI. 
 
 THE PERFECTION OF BATHING — PIPES — DOWNY CUSH- 
 IONS — COFFEE RUBBING DOWN "CIRCULAR JUS- 
 TICE," AS DISPLAYED IN THE RETRIBUTION OF 
 
 BOILED LOBSTERS — A DELUGE OF SUDS THE SHAM- 
 
 PqO — LUXURIOUS HELPS TO IMAGINATION — A PEDES- 
 TRIAN EXCURSION STORY OF AN AMERICAN TAR, 
 
 BURDENED WITH SMALL CHANGE — BEAUTY OF THE 
 
 TURKISH CHILDREN — A CIVILIZED MONSTER GLIMPSE 
 
 AT SULTAN MAHMOUD IN AN ILL HUMOR. 
 
 "Time is (not) money" in the east. We were 
 three hours to-day at the principal bath of Constan- 
 tinople, going through the ordinary process of the 
 establishment, and were out-stayed, at last, by two 
 Turkish officers who had entered with us. During 
 this time, we had each the assiduous service of an 
 attendant, and coffee, lemonade and pipes ad libitum, 
 for the consideration of half a Spanishdollar. 
 
 Although I have once described a Turkish bath, the 
 metropolitan " pomp and circumstance" so far exceed 
 the provincial in this luxury, that I think I shall be 
 excused for dwelling a moment upon it again. The 
 dressing-room opens at once from the street. We 
 descended half a dozen steps to a stone floor, in the 
 centre of which stood a large marble fountain. Its 
 basin was kept full by several jets d'cau, which threw 
 their silver curves into the air, and the edge was set 
 round with narghiles (or Persian water-pipes with 
 glass vases), ready for the smokers of the mild tobac- 
 co of Shiraz. The ceiling of this large hall was lofty, 
 and the sides were encircled by three galleries, one 
 above the other, with open balustrades, within which 
 the bathers undressed. In a corner sat several attend- 
 ants, with only a napkin around their waists, smoking 
 till their services should be required ; and one who 
 had just come from the inner bath, streaming with 
 perspiration, covered himself with cloths, and lay 
 crouched upon a carpet till he could bear, with safety, 
 the temperature of the outer air. 
 
 A half-naked Turk, without his turban, looks more 
 a Mephistopheles than a Ganymede, and I could 
 scarce forbear shrinking as this shaven-headed troop 
 of servitors seized upon us, and, without a word, pull- 
 ed off our boots, thrust our feet into slippers, and led 
 us up into the gallery to undress. An ottoman, piled 
 with cushions, and overhung, on the wall, by a small 
 mirror, was allotted to each, and with the assistance 
 of my familiar (who was quite too familiar!) I found 
 myself stripped nolens volens, and a snowy napkin, 
 with a gold-embroidered edge, twisted into a becom- 
 ing turban around my head. 
 
 We were led immediately into the first bath, a small 
 room, in which the heat, for the first breath or two, 
 seemed rather oppressive. Carpets were spread for 
 us on the warm marble floor, and crossing our legs, 
 with more ease than when cased in our un-oriental 
 pantaloons, we were served with pipes and coffee of a 
 delicious flavor. 
 
 After a half hour, the atmosphere, so warm when 
 we entered, began to feel chilly, and we were taken by 
 the arm, and led by our speechless mussulman, 
 through an intermediate room, into the grand bath. 
 The heat here seemed to me, for a moment, almost 
 intolerable. The floor was hot, and the air so moist 
 with the suffocating vapor, as to rest like mist upon 
 the skin. It was a spacious and vaulted room, with, 
 perhaps, fifty small square windows in the dome, and 
 four arched recesses in the sides, supplied with marble 
 seats, and small reservoirs of hot and cold water. In 
 the centre was a broad platform, on which the bather 
 was rubbed and shampooed, occupied, just then, by 
 two or three dark-skinned Turks, lying on their backs, 
 
 with their eyes shut, dreaming, if one might judge 
 by their countenances, of Paradise. 
 
 After being left to walk about for half an hour, by 
 this time bathed in perspiration, our respective demons 
 seized upon us again, and led us to the marble seats 
 in the recesses. Putting a rough mitten on the right 
 hand, my Turk then commenced upon my breast, 
 scouring me, without water or mercy, from head to 
 foot, and turning me over on my face or my back, 
 without the least " by-your-leave" expression in his 
 countenance, and with an adroitness which, in spite 
 of the novelty of my situation, I could not but admire. 
 I hardly knew whether the sensation was pleasurable 
 or painful. I was less in doubt presently, when he 
 seated me upright, and, with the brazen cup of the 
 fountain, dashed upon my peeled shoulders a quantity 
 of half boiling water. If what Barnacle, in the play, 
 calls " a circular justice," existed in the world, I should 
 have thought it a judgment for eating of lobsters. 
 My familiar was somewhat startled at the suddenness 
 with which I sprang upon my feet, and, turning some 
 cold water into the reservoir, laid his hand on his 
 breast, and looked an apology. The scalding was 
 only momentary, and the qualified contents of the 
 succeeding cups highly grateful. 
 
 We were left again, for a while, to our reflections, 
 and then reappeared our attendants, with large bowls 
 of the suds of scented soap, and small bunches of soft 
 Angora wool. With this we were tenderly washed, 
 and those of my companions who wished it were shav- 
 ed. The last operation they described as peculiarly 
 agreeable, both from the softened state of the skin and 
 dexterity of the operators. 
 
 Rinsed once more with warm water, our snowy tur- 
 bans were twisted around our heads again, cloths were 
 tied about our waists, and we returned to the second 
 room. The transition from the excessive heat within, 
 made the air, that we had found oppressive when we 
 entered, seem disagreeably chilly. We wrapped our- 
 selves in our long cloths, and, resuming our carpets, 
 took coffee and pipes as before. In a kw minutes we 
 began to feel a delightful glow in our veins, and then 
 our cloths became unpleasantly warm, and, by the 
 time we were taken back to the dressing-room, its cold 
 air was a relief. They led us to the ottomans, and, 
 piling the cushions so as to form a curve, laid us upon 
 them, covered with clean white cloths, and bringing us 
 sherbets, lemonade, and pipes, dropped upon their 
 knees, and commenced pressing our limbs all over 
 gently with their hands. My sensations during the 
 half hour that we lay here were indescribably agreea- 
 ble. I felt an absolute repose of body, a calm, half- 
 sleepy languor in my whole frame, and a tranquillity 
 of mind, which, from the busy character of the scenes 
 in which ] was daily conversant, were equally unusual 
 and pleasurable. Scarce stirring a muscle or a nerve, 
 I lay the whole hour, gazing on the lofty ceiling, and 
 listening to the murmur of the fountain, while my si- 
 lent familiar pressed my limbs with a touch as gentle 
 as a child's, and it seemed to me as if pleasure was 
 breathing from every pore of my cleansed and softened 
 skin. I could willingly have passed the remainder of 
 the day upon the luxurious couch. I wonder less 
 than ever at the flowery and poetical character of the 
 oriental literature, where the mind is subjected to in- 
 fluences so refining and exhilarating. One could 
 hardly fail to grow a poet, I should think, even with 
 this habit of eastern luxury alone. If I am to con- 
 ceive a romance, or to indite an epithalamium, send 
 me to the bath on a day of idleness, and, covering me 
 up with their snowy and lavendered napkins, leave me 
 till sunset ! 
 
 With a dinner in prospect at a friend's house, six 
 or eight miles up the Bosphorus, we started in the 
 morning on foot, with the intention of seeing Sultan 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 163 
 
 Mahmoud go to mosque, by the way. We stop- 
 ped a moment to look into the marble pavilion, con- 
 taining the clocks of the mosque of Tophana, and 
 drank at the opposite pavilion, from the brass cup 
 chained in the window, and supplied constantly from 
 the fountain within, and then kept on through the long 
 street to the first village of Dolma-baktchi, or the 
 Garden of Gourds. 
 
 Determined, with the day before us, to yield to eve- 
 ry temptation on the road, we entered a small cafe, 
 overlooking a segment of the Bosphorus, and while 
 the acorn-sized cups were simmering on the manghal, 
 my friend entered into conversation in Arabic, with a 
 tawny old Egyptian, who sat smoking in the corner. 
 He was a fine specimen of the " responsible-looking'' 
 oriental, and had lately arrived from Alexandria on 
 business. Pleasant land of the east ! where, to be 
 the pink of courtesy, you must pass your snuff-box, 
 or your tobacco-pouch to the stranger, and ask him 
 those questions of his " whereabouts," so impertinent 
 in more civilized Europe ! 
 
 After a brief dialogue, which was Hebrew to me, 
 our Alexandrian, knocking the ashes from his pipe, 
 commenced a narration with a great deal of expressive 
 gesture, at which my friend seemed very provokingly 
 amused. I sipped my coffee, and wondered what 
 could have lead one of these silent gray-beards into 
 an amusing story, till a pause gave me an opportunity 
 to ask a translation. Hearing that we were Ameri- 
 cans, the Egyptian had begun by asking whether there 
 was a superstition in our country against receiving 
 back money in change. He explained his question 
 by saying that he was in a cafe, at Tophana, when a 
 boat's crew, from the American frigate, waiting for 
 some one at the landing, entered, and asked for coffee. 
 They drank it very quietly, and one of them gave the 
 cafejee a dollar, receiving in change a handful of the 
 shabby and adulterated money of Constantinople. 
 Jack was rather surprised at getting a dozen cups of 
 coffee, and so much coin for his dollar, and requested 
 the boy, by signs, to treat the company at his ex- 
 pense. This was done, the Turks all acknowledging 
 the courtesy by laying their hands upon their fore- 
 heads and breasts, and still Jack's money lay heavy in 
 his hands. He called for pipes, and they smoked 
 awhile; but finding still that his riches were not per- 
 ceptibly diminished, he hitched up his trousers, and 
 with a dexterous flirt, threw his piastres and pares all 
 round upon the company, and rolled out of the cafe. 
 From the gravity of the other sailors at this remarka- 
 ble flourish, the old Egyptian and his fellow cross-legs 
 had imagined it to be a national custom ! 
 
 Idling along through the next village, we turned to 
 admire a Turkish child, led by an Abyssinian slave. 
 There is no country in the world where the children 
 are so beautiful, and this was a cherub of a boy, like 
 one of Domenichino's angels. As we stopped to look 
 at him, the little fellow commenced crying most 
 lustily. 
 
 " Hush ! my rose !" said the Abyssinian, " these are 
 good Franks ! these are not the Franks that eat chil- 
 dren! hush!" 
 
 It certainly takes the nonsense out of one to travel. 
 I should never have thought it possible, if I had not 
 been in Turkey, that I could be made a bugbear to 
 scare a child! 
 
 We passed the tomb of Frederick Barbarossa, get- 
 ting between the walls of the palaces on the water's 
 edge, continual and incomparable views of tbe Bos- 
 phorus, and arrived at Beshiktash (or the marble cra- 
 dle), just as the troops were drawn up to the door of 
 the mosque. We took our stand under a plane-tree, 
 in the midst of a crowd of women, and presently the 
 noisy band struck up the sultan's march, and the led 
 horses appeared in sight. They came on with their 
 grooms and their rich housings, a dozen matchless 
 
 Arabians, scarce touching the ground with their pran- 
 cings ! Oh how beautiful they were ! Their delicate 
 limbs, their small, veined heads and fiery nostrils, their 
 glowing, intelligent eyes, their quick, light, bounding 
 action, their round bodies, trembling with restrained 
 and impatient energy, their curved, haughty necks, 
 and dark manes flowing wildly in the wind! El Bo- 
 rak, the mare of the prophet, with the wings of a bird, 
 was not lighter or more beautiful. 
 
 The sultan followed, preceded by his principal offi- 
 cers, with a stirrup-holder running at each side, and 
 mounted on a tame-looking Hungarian horse. He 
 wore the red Fez cap, and a cream-colored cloak, 
 which covered his horse to the tail. His face was 
 lowering, his firm, powerful jaw, set in an expression 
 of fixed displeasure, and his far-famed eye had a 
 fierceness within its dark socket, from which 1 invol- 
 untarily shrank. The women, as he came along, set 
 up a kind of howl, according to their custom, but he 
 looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed totally 
 unconscious of any one's existence but his own. He 
 was quite another-looking man from the Mahmoud I 
 had seen smiling in his handja-bash on the Bosphorus. 
 
 As he dismounted and entered the mosque, we went 
 on our way, moralizing sagely on the novel subject 
 of human happiness — our text, the cloud on the brow 
 of a sultan, and the quiet sunshine in the bosoms of 
 two poor pedestrians by the way-side. 
 
 LETTER CIV. 
 
 PUNISHMENT OF CONJUGAL INFIDELITY — DROWNING IN 
 THE BOSPHORUS FREQUENCY OF ITS OCCURRENCE AC- 
 COUNTED FOR — A BAND OF WILD R0UMEL10TES — 
 
 THEIR PICTURESQUE APPEARANCE ALI PACHA, OF 
 
 YANINA — A TURKISH FUNERAL — FAT WIDOW OF SUL- 
 TAN SELIM— A VISIT TO THE SULTAN'S SUMMER PAL- 
 ACE — A TRAVELLING MOSLEM — UNEXPECTED TOKEN 
 OF HOME. 
 
 A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the 
 Bosphorus this morning. I was idling away the day 
 in the bazar and did not see her. The ward-room 
 steward of the "United States," a very intelligent 
 man, who was at the pier when she was brought down 
 to the caique, describes her as a young woman of 
 twenty-two or three years, strikingly beautiful ; and 
 with the exception of a short quick sob in her throat, 
 as if she had wearied herself out with weeping, she 
 was quite calm and submitted composedly to her fate. 
 She was led down by two soldiers, in her usual dress, 
 her yashmack only torn from her face, and rowed off 
 to the mouth of the bay, where the sack was drawn 
 over her without resistance. The plash of her body 
 in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had 
 followed her to the water. 
 
 It is horrible to reflect on these summary execu- 
 tions, knowing as we do, that the poor victim is taken 
 before the judge, upon the least jealous whim of her 
 husband or master, condemned often upon bare suspi- 
 cion, and hurried instantly from the tribunal to this 
 violent and revolting death. Any suspicion of com- 
 merce with a Christian particularly, is, with or without 
 evidence, instant ruin. Not long ago, the inhabitants 
 of Arnamt-Jceni, a pretty village on the Bosphorus. 
 were shocked with the spectacle of a Turkish woman 
 and a younc: Greek, hanging dead from the shutters 
 of a window on the water's-side. He had been de- 
 tected in leaving her house at daybreak, and in less 
 than an hour the unfortunate lovers had met their 
 fate. They are said to have died most heroically, em- 
 bracing and declaring their attachment to the last. 
 
 Such tragedies occur every week or two in Con- 
 stantinople, and it is not wonderful, considering the 
 
164 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 superiority of the educated and picturesque Greek to 
 his brutal neighbor, or the daring and romance of Eu- 
 ropeans in the pursuit of forbidden happiness. The 
 liberty of going and coming, which the Turkish wo- 
 men enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which assist by their 
 secrecy, is temptingly favorable to intrigue, and the 
 self-sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is 
 concerned, shows itself here in proportion to the de- 
 mand for it. 
 
 An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of 
 the sultan's sister, consisting of a great number of 
 women, tells me that their time is principally occupied 
 in sentimental correspondence, by means of flowers, 
 with the forbidden Greeks and Armenians. These 
 platonic passions for persons whom they have only 
 seen from their gilded lattices, are their only amuse- 
 ment, and they are permitted by the sultana, who has 
 herself the reputation of being partial to Franks, and 
 old as she is, ingenious in contrivances to obtain their 
 society. My intelligent informant thinks the Turkish 
 women, in spite of their want of education, somewhat 
 remarkable for their sentiment of character. 
 
 With two English travellers, whom I had known in 
 Italy, I pulled out of the bay in a caique, and ran 
 down under the wall of the city, on the side of the 
 sea of Marmora. For a mile or more we were be- 
 neath the wall of the seraglio, whose small water- 
 gates, whence so many victims have found 
 
 " Their way to Marmora without a boat ;" 
 
 <ire beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with 
 the dramatis personce of a thousand tragedies. One 
 smiles to detect himself gazing on an old postern, 
 with his teeth shut hard together, and his hair on end, 
 in the calm of a pure, silent, sunshiny morning of 
 September! 
 
 We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven 
 Towers, and dismissed our boat to walk across to the 
 Golden Horn. Our road was outside of the triple 
 walls of Stamboul, whose two hundred and fifty towers 
 look as if they were toppling after an earthquake, and 
 are overgrown superbly with ivy. Large trees, root«g[ 
 in the crevices, and gradually bursting the thick walls, 
 overshadow entirely their once proud turrets, and for 
 the whole length of the five or six miles across, it is 
 one splendid picture of decay. I have seen in no 
 country such beautiful ruins. 
 
 At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of 
 horsemen, armed in the wild manner of the east, who 
 had accompanied a Roumeliote chief from the mount- 
 ains. They were not allowed to enter the city, and, 
 with their horses picketed on the plain, were lying 
 about in groups, waiting till their leader should con- 
 clude his audience with the seraskier. They were as 
 cut-throat looking a set as a painter would wish to see. 
 The extreme richness of eastern arms, mounted 
 showily in silver, and of shapes so cumbersome, yet 
 picturesque, contrasted strangely with their ragged ca- 
 potes, and torn legging, and their way-worn and weary 
 countenances. Yet they were almost without excep- 
 tion fine-featured, and of a resolute expression of face, 
 and they had flung themselves, as savages will, 
 into attitudes that art would find it difficult to im- 
 prove. 
 
 Directly opposite this gate stand five marble slabs, 
 indicating the spots in which are buried the heads of 
 Ali Pacha, of Albania, his three sons and grandson. 
 The inscription states, that the rebel lost his head for 
 having dared to aspire to independence. He was a 
 brave old barbarian, however, and, as the worthy chief 
 of the most warlike people of modern times, one 
 stands over his grave with regret. It would have been 
 a classic spot had Byron survived to visit it. No event 
 in his tvavels made more impression on his mind than 
 
 the pacha's detecting his rank by the beauty of his 
 hands. His fine description of the wild court of 
 Yanina, in Childe Harold, has already made the poet's 
 return of immortality, but had he survived the revolu- 
 tion in Greece, with his increased knowledge of the 
 Albanian soldier and his habits, and his esteem for the 
 old chieftain, a hero so much to his taste would have 
 been his most natural theme. It remains to be seen 
 whether the age or the language will produce another 
 Byron to take up the broken thread. 
 
 As we were poring over the Turkish inscription, 
 four men, apparently quite intoxicated, came running 
 and hallooing from the city gate, bearing upon their 
 shoulders a dead man in his bier. Entering the cem- 
 etery, they went stumbling on over the footstones, tos- 
 sing the corpse about so violently, that the helpless 
 limbs frequently fell beyond the limits of the rude 
 barrow, while the grave-digger, the only sober person, 
 save the dead man, in the company, followed at his 
 best speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These ex- 
 traordinary bearers set down their burden not far from 
 the gate, and, to my surprise, walked laughing off like 
 men who had merely engaged in a moment's frolic by 
 the way, while the sexton, left quite alone, composed 
 a little the posture of the disordered body, and sat 
 down to get breath for his task. 
 
 My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Ko- 
 ran blesses him who carries a dead body forty paces 
 on its way to the grave. The poor are thus carried 
 out to the cemeteries by voluntary bearers, who, after 
 they have completed their prescribed paces, change 
 with the first individual whose reckoning with heaven 
 may be in arrears. 
 
 The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last 
 journey, was, or had been, a middle-aged Turk. He 
 had neither shroud nor coffin, but 
 
 " Lay like a gentleman taking a snoose," 
 
 in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his 
 bosom the only token that he was dressed for any par- 
 ticular occasion. We had not time to stay and see 
 his grave dug, and "his face laid toward the tomb of 
 the prophet." 
 
 We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the 
 triangle, which old Stamboul nearly forms, by a line 
 approaching its hypothenuse. Though in a city so 
 thickly populated, it was one of the most lonely walks 
 conceivable. We met, perhaps, one individual in a 
 street ; and the perfect silence, and the cheerless look 
 of the Turkish houses, with their jealously closed 
 windows, gave it the air of a city devastated by the 
 plague. The population of Constantinople is only 
 seen in the bazars, or in the streets bordering on the 
 Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter occupied by 
 dwelling-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, oc- 
 cupy apartments opening on their secluded gardens, 
 or are hidden from the gaze of the street by their fine 
 dull-colored lattices. It strikes one with melancholy 
 after the gay balconies and open doors of France and 
 Italy ! 
 
 We passed the Eskai serai, the palace in which the 
 imperial widows wear their chaste weeds in solitude ; 
 and, weary with our long walk, emerged from the si- 
 lent streets at the bazar of wax-candles, and took 
 caique for the Argentopolis of the ancients, the " Sil- 
 ver city" of Galatia. 
 
 The thundering of guns from the whole Ottoman 
 fleet in the Bosphorus announced, some, days since, 
 that the sultan had changed his summer for his winter 
 serai, and the commodore received yesterday, a firman 
 to visit the deserted palace of Beylerbey. 
 
 We left the frigate at an early hour, our large party 
 of officers increased by the captain of the Acteon, 
 sloop-of-war, some gentlemen of the English ambas- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 165 
 
 sador'9 household, and several strangers who took ad- 
 vantage of the commodore's courtesy to enjoy a privi- 
 lege granted so very rarely. 
 
 As we pulled up the strait, some one pointed out 
 the residence, on the European shore, of the once fa- 
 vorite wife, and now fat widow, of Sultan Selim. She 
 is called by the Turks, the " boneless sultana," and is 
 the model of shape by the oriental standard. The 
 poet's lines, 
 
 '< Who turned that little waist with so much care, 
 And shut perfection in so small a ring ?" 
 
 though a very neat compliment in some countries, 
 would be downright rudeness in the East. Near this 
 jelly in weeds lives a venerable Turk, who was once 
 ambassador to England. He came back too much 
 enlightened, and the mufti immediately procured his 
 exile, for infidelity. He passes his day, we are told, 
 in looking at a large map hung on the wall before him, 
 and wondering at Tiis own travels. 
 
 We were received at the shining brazen gate of 
 Beylerbey, by Hamik Pacha (a strikingly elegant 
 man, just returned from a mission to England), depu- 
 ted by the sultan to do the honors. A side-door in- 
 troduced us immediately to the grand hall upon the 
 lower floor, which was separated only by four marble 
 pillars, and a heavy curtain rolled up at will, from the 
 gravel walk of the garden in the rear. We ascended 
 thence by an open staircase of wood, prettily inlaid, 
 to the second floor, which was one long suite of spa- 
 cious rooms, built entirely in the French style, and 
 thence to the third floor, the same thing over again. 
 It was quite like looking at lodgings in Paris. There 
 was no furniture, except an occasional ottoman turned 
 with its face upon another, and a prodigious quantity 
 of French musical clocks, three or four in every 
 room, and all playing in our honor with an amusing 
 confusion. One other article, by the way — a large, 
 common, American rocking-chair! The poor thing 
 stood in a great gilded room, all alone, looking pitia- 
 bly home-sick. I seated myself in it, malgre a thick 
 coat of dust upon the bottom, as I would visit a sick 
 countryman in exile. 
 
 The harem was locked, and the polite pacha regret- 
 ted that he had no orders to open it. We descended 
 to the gardens, which rise by terraces to a gim-crack 
 temple and orangery, and having looked at the sultan's 
 poultry, we took our leave. If his pink palace in Eu- 
 rope is no finer than his yellow palace in Asia, there 
 is many a merchant in America better lodged than the 
 padishah of the Ottoman empire. We have not seen 
 the old seraglio, however, and in its inaccessible re- 
 cesses, probably, moulders that true oriental splendor 
 which this upholsterer monarch abandons in his rage 
 for the novel luxuries of Europe. 
 
 LETTER CV. 
 
 FAREWELL TO CONSTANTINOPLE— EUROPE AND THE 
 EAST COMPARED — THE DEPARTURE — SMYRNA, THE 
 GREAT MART FOR FIGS — AN EXCURSION INTO ASIA 
 MINOR — TRAVELLING EQUIPMENTS — CHARACTER OF 
 THE HAJJIS — ENCAMPMENT OF GIPSIES — A YOUTHFUL 
 HEBE — NOTE — HORROR OF THE TURKS FOR THE 
 "UNCLEAN ANIMAL" — AN ANECDOTE. 
 
 I have spent the last day or two in farewell visits to 
 my favorite haunts in Constantinople. I galloped up 
 the Uosphorus, almost envying les ames damnces that 
 skim so swiftly and perpetually from the Symplegades 
 to Marmora, and from Marmora back to the Symple- 
 
 gades. I took a caique to the Valley of Sweet Wa- 
 ters, and rambled away an hour on its silken sward. 
 1 lounged a morning in the bazars, smoked a parting- 
 pipe with my old Turk in the Bezestein, and exchang- 
 ed a last salaam with the venerable Armenian book- 
 seller, still poring over his illuminated Hafiz. And 
 last night, with the sundown boat waiting at the pier, 
 I loitered till twilight in the small and elevated ceme- 
 tery between Galata and Pera, and, with feelings of 
 even painful regret, gazed my last upon the matchless 
 scene around me. In the words of the eloquent 
 author of Anastasius, when taking the same farewell, 
 " For the last time, my eye wandered over the dim- 
 pled hills, glided along the winding waters, and dived 
 into the deep and delicious dells, in which branch out 
 its jagged shores. Reverting from these smiling out- 
 lets of its sea-beat suburbs to its busy centre, I sur- 
 veyed, in slow succession, every chaplet of swelling 
 cupolas, every grove of slender minarets, and every 
 avenue of glittering porticoes, whose pinnacles dart 
 their golden shafts from between the dark cypress- 
 trees into the azure sky. I dwelt on them as on things 
 I never was to behold more ; and not until the evening 
 had deepened the veil it cast over the varied scene 
 from orange to purple, and from purple to the sable 
 hue of night, did I tear myself away from the impres- 
 sive spot. I then bade the city of Constantine fare- 
 well for ever, descended the high-crested hill, stepped 
 into the heaving boat, turned my back upon the 
 shore, and sank my regrets in the sparkling wave, 
 across which the moon had already flung a trembling 
 bar of silvery light, pointing my way, as it were, to 
 other unknown regions." 
 
 There are few intellectual pleasures like that of 
 finding our own thoughts and feelings well described 
 by another ! 
 
 I certainly would not live in the east; and when I 
 sum up its inconveniences and the deprivations to 
 which the traveller from Europe, with his refined 
 wants, is subjected, I marvel at the heart-ache with 
 which I turn my back upon it, and the deep die it has 
 infused into my imagination. Its few peculiar luxu- 
 ries do not compensate for the total absence of com- 
 fort ; its lovely scenery can not reconcile you to 
 wretched lodgings; its picturesque costumes and po- 
 etical people, and golden sky, fine food for a summer's 
 fancy as they are, can not make you forget the civili- 
 zed pleasures you abandon for them — the fresh litera- 
 ture, the arts and music, the refined society, the ele- 
 gant pursuits, and the stirring intellectual collision of 
 the cities of Europe. 
 
 Yet the world contains nothing like Constantinople ! 
 If we could compel all our senses into one, and live 
 by the pleasures of the eye, it were a paradise untran- 
 scended. The Bosphorus — the superb, peculiar, in- 
 comparable Bosphorus ! the dream-like, fairy-built se- 
 raglio ! the sights within the city so richly strange, 
 and the valleys and streams around it so exquisitely 
 fair ! the voluptuous softness of the dark eyes haunt- 
 ing your every step on shore, and the spirit-like swift- 
 ness and elegance of your darting caique upon the 
 waters ! In what land is the priceless sight such a 
 treasure ? Where is the fancy so delicately and di- 
 vinely pampered ? 
 
 Every heave at the capstan-bars drew upon my 
 heart ; and when the unwilling anchor at last let go its 
 hold, and the frigate swung free with the outward cur- 
 rent, I felt as if, in that moment, I had parted my 
 hold upon a land of faery. The dark cypresses and 
 golden pinnacles of Seraglio Poinv, and the higher 
 shafts of Sophia's sky-touching minarets were the last 
 objects in my swiftly receding eye, and, in a short 
 hour or two, the whole bright vision had sunk below 
 the horizon. 
 
 We crossed Marmora, and shot down the rapid 
 Dardanelles in as many hours aa a passage up had oc- 
 
166 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAV. 
 
 cupied days, and, rounding the coast of Anatolia, en- 
 tered between Mitylene and the Asian shore, and, on 
 the third day, anchored in the bay of Smyrna. 
 
 " Everybody knows Smyrna," says Mac Farlane, 
 " it is such a place for figs /" It is a low-built town, 
 at the head of the long gulf, which bears its name, 
 and, with the exception of the high rock immediately 
 over it, topped by the ruins of an old castle, said to 
 imbody in its walls the ancient Christian church, it has 
 no very striking features. Extensive gardens spread 
 away on every side, and, without exciting much of 
 your admiration for its beauty, there is a look of peace 
 and rural comfort about the neighborhood that affects 
 the mind pleasantly. 
 
 Almost immediately on my arrival, I joined a party 
 for a few days' tour in Asia Minor. We were five, 
 and, with a baggage-horse, and a mounted suridjee, 
 our caravan was rather respectable. Our appoint- 
 ments were orientally simple. We had each a Turk- 
 ish bed (alias, a small carpet), a nightcap, and a 
 "copyhold" upon a pair of saddlebags, containing 
 certain things forbidden by the Koran, and therefore 
 not likely to be found by the way. Our attendant was 
 a most ill-favored Turk, whose pilgrimage to Mecca 
 (he was a hajji, and wore a green turban) had, at least, 
 imparted no sanctity to his visage. If he was not a 
 rogue, nature had mis-labelled him, and I shelter my 
 want of charity under the Arabic proverb : " Distrust 
 thy neighbor if he has made a hajji ; if he has made 
 two, make haste to leave thy house." 
 
 We wound our way slowly out of the narrow and 
 ill-paved streets of Smyrna, and passing through the 
 suburban gardens, yellow with lemons and oranges, 
 crossed a small bridge over the Hermus. This is the 
 favorite walk of the Smyrniotes, and if its classic river, 
 whose "golden sands" (here, at least), are not golden, 
 and its " Bath of Diana" near by, whose waters would 
 scarce purify her "silver bow," are something less 
 than their sounding names ; there is a cool, dark ceme- 
 tery beyond, less famous, but more practicable for sen- 
 timent, and many a shadowy vine and drooping tree in 
 the gardens around, that might recompense lovers, 
 perhaps, for the dirty labyrinth of the intervening 
 suburb. 
 
 We spurred away over the long plain of Hadjilar, 
 leaving to the right and left the pretty villages, orna- 
 mented by the summer residences of the wealthy mer- 
 chants of Smyrna, and in two or three hours reached 
 a small lone cafe, at the foot of its bounding range of 
 mountains. We dismounted here to breathe our 
 horses, and while coffee was preparing, I discovered, 
 in a green hollow hard by, a small encampment of 
 gipsies. With stones in our hands, as the cafejee told 
 us the dogs were troublesome, we walked down into 
 the little round-bottomed dell, a spot selected with " a 
 lover's eye for nature," and were brought to bay bv a 
 dozen noble shepherd-dogs, within a few yards of their 
 outer tent. 
 
 The noise brought out an old sunburnt woman, and 
 two or three younger ones, with a troop of boys, who 
 called in the dogs, and invited us kindly within their 
 limits. The tents were placed in a half circle, with 
 their doors inward, and were made with extreme neat- 
 ness. There were eight or nine of them, very small 
 and low, with round tops, the cloth stretched tightly 
 over an inner frame, and bound curiously down on 
 the outside with beautiful wicker-work. The curtains 
 at the entrance were looped up to admit the grateful 
 sun, and the compactly arranged interiors lay open to 
 our prying curiosity. In the rounded corner farthest 
 from the door, lay uniformly the same goat-skin beds, 
 flat on the ground, and in the centre of most of them, 
 stood a small loom, at which the occupant plied her 
 task like an automaton, not betraying by any sign a 
 consciousness of our presence. They sat cross-leg- 
 
 ged like the Turks, and had all a look of habitua. 
 sternness, which, with their thin, strongly-marked 
 gipsy features, and wild eyes, gave them more the ap- 
 pearance of men. It was the first time I had ever re- 
 marked such a character upon a class of female faces, 
 and I should have thought I had mistaken their sex, 
 if their half-naked figures had not put it beyond a 
 doubt. The men were probably gone to Smyrna, as 
 none were visible in the encampment, As we were 
 about returning, the curtain of the largest tent, 
 which had been dropped on our entrance, was lifted 
 cautiously, by a beautiful girl, of perhaps thirteen, 
 who, not remarking that I was somewhat in the rear 
 of my companions, looked after them a moment, and 
 then fastening back the dingy folds by a string, return- 
 ed to her employment of swinging an infant in a small 
 wicker hammock, suspended in the centre of the tent. 
 Her dark, but prettily-rounded arm, was decked with 
 a bracelet of silver pieces, and just between two of the 
 finest eyes I ever saw, was suspended by a yellow 
 thread, one of the small gold coins of Constantinople. 
 Her softly-moulded bust was entirely bare, and might 
 have served for the model of a youthful Hebe. A 
 girdle around her waist sustained loosely a long pair 
 of full Turkish trousers, of the color and fashion usu- 
 ally worn by women in the east, and, caught over her 
 hip, hung suspended by its fringe the truant shawl 
 that had been suffered to fall from her shoulders and 
 expose her guarded beauty. I stood admiring her a 
 full minute, before I observed a middle-aged woman in 
 the opposite corner, who, bending over her work, was 
 fortunately as late in observing my intrusive presence. 
 As I advanced half a step, however, my shadow fell 
 into the tent, and starting with surprise, she rose and 
 dropped the curtain. 
 
 We remounted, and I rode on, thinking of the 
 vision of loveliness I was leaving in that wild dell. 
 We travel a great way to see hills and rivers, thought 
 I, but, after all, a human being is a more interesting 
 object than a mountain. I shall remember the little 
 gipsy of Hadjilar, long after I have forgotten Hermus 
 and Sypilus. 
 
 Our road dwindled to a mere bridle-path, as we ad- 
 vanced, and the scenery grew wild and barren. The 
 horses were all sad stumblers, and the uneven rocks 
 gave them every apology for coming down whenever 
 they could forget the spur, and so we entered the 
 broad and green valley of Yackerhem (I write it as I 
 heard it pronounced), and drew up at the door of a 
 small hovel, serving the double purpose of a cafe and 
 a guard-house. 
 
 A Turkish officer of the old regime, turbanned and 
 cross-legged, and armed with pistols and ataghan, sat 
 smoking on one side the brazier of coals, and the 
 cafejee exercised his small vocation on the other. Be- 
 fore the door, a raised platform of greensward, and a 
 marble slab, facing toward Mecca, indicated the place 
 for prayer ; and a dashing rider of a Turk, who had 
 kept us company from Smyrna, flying past us and 
 dropping to the rear alternately, had taken off his slip- 
 pers at the moment we arrived, and was commencing 
 his noon devotions. 
 
 We gathered round our commissary's saddle-bags, 
 and shocked our mussulman friends, by producing the 
 unclean beast* and the forbidden liquor, which, with 
 the delicious Turkish coffee, never belter than in these 
 wayside hovels, furnished forth a traveller's meal. 
 
 * Talking of hams, two of the sultan's chief eunuchs ap- 
 plied to an English physician, a friend of mine, at Constan- 
 tinople, to accompany them on board the American frigate. 
 I engaged to wait on board for them on a certain day, but 
 they did not make their appearance. They gave, as their 
 apology, that they could not defile themselves by entering a 
 ship, polluted by the presence of that unclean animal, the 
 hog. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 167 
 
 LETTER CVI. 
 
 NATURAL STATUE OF NIOBE — THE THORN OF SYRIA AND 
 ITS TRADITION APPROACH TO MAGNESIA HERED- 
 ITARY RESIDENCE OF THE FAMILY OF BEY-OGLOU — 
 CHARACTER OF ITS PRESENT OCCUPANT— THE TRUTH 
 
 ABOUT ORIENTAL CARAVANSERAIS COMFORTS AND 
 
 APPLIANCES THEY YIELD TO TRAVELLERS FIGARO 
 
 OF THE TURKS— THE PILAW — MORNING SCENE AT 
 THE DEPARTURE — PLAYFUL FAMILIARITY OF A SOL- 
 EMN OLD TURK — MAGNIFICENT PROSPECT FROM 
 MOUNT CYPILUS. 
 
 Threk or four hours more of hard riding brought 
 us to a long glen, opening upon the broad plains of 
 Lydia. We were on the look-out here for the " natu- 
 ral statue of Niobe," spoken of by the ancient writers 
 as visible from the road in this neighborhood; but 
 there was nothing that looked like her, un.ess she vas, 
 as the poet describes her, a " Niobe, all tears," and 
 runs down toward the Sarabat, in what we took to be 
 only a very pretty mountain rivulet. It served for 
 simple fresh water to our volunteer companion, who 
 darted off an hour before sunset, and had finished his 
 ablutions and prayers, and was rising from his knees as 
 we overtook him upon its grassy border. Almost the 
 only thing that grows in these long mountain passes, 
 is the peculiar thorn of Syria, said to be the same of 
 which our Savior's crown was plaited. It differs from 
 the common species, in having a hooked thorn alter- 
 nating with the straight, adding cruelly to its power 
 of laceration. It is remarkable that the flower, at this 
 season withering on the bush, is a circular golden- 
 colored leaf, resembling exactly the radiated glory 
 usually drawn around the heads of Christ and the 
 Virgin. 
 
 Amid a sunset of uncommon splendor, firing every 
 peak of the opposite range of hills with an effulgent 
 red, and filling the valley between with an atmosphere 
 of heavenly purple, we descended into the plain. 
 
 Mount Sijpilus, in whose rocks the magnetic ore is 
 said to have been first discovered, hung over us in 
 bold precipices ; and, rounding a projecting spur, we 
 came suddenly in sight of the minarets and cypresses 
 of Magnesia (not pronounced as if written in an 
 apothecary's bill), the ancient capital of the Ottoman 
 empire. 
 
 On the side of the ascent, above the town, we ob- 
 served a large isolated mansion, surrounded with a 
 wall, and planted about with noble trees, looking, 
 with the exception that it was too freshly painted, like 
 one of the fine old castle palaces of Italy. It was 
 something very extraordinary for the east, where no 
 man builds beyond the city wall, and no house is 
 very much larger than another. It was the hereditary 
 residence, we afterward discovered, of almost the 
 only noble family in Turkey — that of the Bey-Oglou. 
 You will recollect Byron's allusion to it in the "Bride 
 of Abydos :" 
 
 " We Moslem reck not much of blood, 
 But yet the race of Karaisman, 
 Unchanged, unchangeable hath stood, 
 
 First of the bold Timareot bands 
 Who won, and well can keep, their lands ; 
 Enough that he who comes to woo 
 Is kinsman of the Bey-Oglou." 
 I quote from memory, perhaps incorrectly. 
 
 The present descendant is still in possession of the 
 title, and is said to be a liberal-minded and hospitable 
 old Turk, of the ancient and better school. His cam- 
 els are the finest that come into Smyrna, and are fa- 
 mous for their beauty and appointments. 
 
 Our devout companion left us at the first turning in 
 the town, laving his hand to his breast in gratitude 
 for having been suffered to annoy us all day with his 
 brilliant equitation, and we stumbled in through the 
 increasing shadows of twilight to the caravanserai. 
 
 It is very possible that the reader has but a slender 
 conception of an oriental hotel. Supposing it, at least, 
 from the inadequacy of my own previous ideas, I shall 
 allow myself a little particularity in the description 
 of the conveniences which the travelling Zuleikas and 
 Fatimas, the Maleks and Othmans, of eastern story, 
 encounter in their romantic journeys. 
 
 It was near the farther outskirt of the large city of 
 Magnesia (the accent, I repeat, is on the penult), that 
 we found the way encumbered with some scores of 
 kneeling camels, announcing our vicinity to a khan. 
 A large wooden building, rather off its perpendicular, 
 with a great many windows, but no panes in them, and 
 only here and there a shutter "hanging by the eye- 
 lids," presently appeared, and entering its hospitable 
 gateway, which had neither gate nor porter, we dis- 
 mounted in a large court, lit only by the stars, and 
 pre-occupied by any number of mules and horses 
 An inviting staircase led to a gallery encircling the 
 whoie area, from which opened thirty or forty small 
 doors ; but, though we made as much noise as could 
 be expected of as many men and horses, no waiter 
 looked over the balustrade, nor maid Cicely, nor Bon- 
 iface, or their corresponding representatives in Tur- 
 key, invited us in. The suridjee looked to his horses, 
 which was his business, and to look to ourselves was 
 ours ; though, with our stiff limbs and clamorous ap- 
 petites, we set about it rather despairingly. 
 
 The Figaro of the Turks is a cafcjee, who, besides 
 shaving, making coffee, and bleeding, is supposed to 
 be capable of every office required by man. He is 
 generally a Greek, the Mussulman seldom having 
 sufficient facility of character for the vocation. In a 
 few minutes, then, the nearest Figaro was produced, 
 who, scarce dissembling his surprise at the improvi- 
 dence of travellers who went about without pot or 
 kettle, bag of rice or bottle of oil, led the way with 
 his primitive lamp to our apartment. We might have 
 our choice of twenty. Having looked at the other 
 nineteen, we came back to the first, reconciled to it 
 by sheer force of comparison. Of its two windows, 
 one alone had a shutter that would fulfil its destiny. 
 It contained neither chair, table, nor utensil of any 
 description. Its floor had not been swept, nor its 
 walls whitewashed since the days of Timour the Tar- 
 tar. "Kalo! Kalo!" (Greek for you will be very 
 comfortable), cried our commissary, throwing down 
 some old mats to spread our carpets upon. But 
 the mats were alive with vermin, and, for sweep- 
 ing the room, the dust would not have been laid 
 till midnight. So we threw down our carpets up- 
 on the floor, and driving from our minds the too 
 luxurious thoughts of clean straw, and a corner 
 in a warm barn, sat down, by the glimmer of a 
 flaring taper, to wait, with what patience we might, 
 for a chicken still breathing freely on his roost, and 
 turn our backs as ingeniously as possible on a chilly 
 December wind, that came in at the open window, as 
 if it knew the caravanserai were* free to all comers. 
 There is but one circumstance to add to this faithful 
 description — and it is one which, in the minds of ma- 
 ny very worthy persons, would turn the scale in favor 
 of the hotels of the east, with all their disadvantages 
 — there was nothing to pay ! 
 
 Ali Bey, in his travels, predicts the fall erf the Otto- 
 man empire from the neglected state of the khans; 
 this inattention to the public institutions of hospitali- 
 ty, being a falling away from the leading Mussulman 
 virtue. They never gave the traveller more than a 
 shelter, however, in their best days ; and to enter a 
 cold, unfurnished room, after a day's hard travel, even 
 if the floor were clean, and the windows would shut, 
 is rather comfortless. Yet such is eastern travel, and 
 the alternative is to take " the sky for a great-coat, 
 and find as soft a stone as possible foryour pillow. 
 We gathered around our pilaw, which came in the 
 
168 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 progress of time, and consisted of a chicken, buried 
 in a handsomely-shaped cone of rice and butter, form- 
 ing, with a large crater-like black bowl in which it 
 stood, the cloud of smoke issuing from its peak, and 
 the lava of butter flowing down its sides, as pretty a 
 miniature Vesuvius, as you would find in a modeller's 
 window in the Toledo. Encouraging that sin in 
 Christians, which they would not commit themselves, 
 they brought us some wine of the country, the sin of 
 drinking which, one would think, was its own sufficient 
 punishment. With each a wooden spoon, the imme- 
 diate and only means of communication between the 
 dish and the mouth, we soon solved the doubtful 
 problem of the depth of the crater, and then casting 
 lots who should lie next the window to take off the 
 edge of the December blast, we improved upon some 
 hints taken from the fig-packers of Smyrna, and with 
 an economy of exposed surface, which can only be 
 learned by travel, disposed ourselves in a solid body to 
 sleep. 
 
 The tinkling of the camels' bells awoke me as the 
 day was breaking, and my toilet being already made, 
 I sprang readily up and descended to the court of the 
 caravanserai. It was an eastern scene, and not an un- 
 poetical one. The patient and intelligent camels were 
 kneeling in regular ranks to receive their loads, com- 
 plaining in a voice almost human, as the driver flung 
 the heavy bales upon the saddles too roughly, while 
 the small donkey, no larger than a Newfoundland 
 dog, leader of the long caravan, took his place at the 
 head of the gigantic file, pricking back his long ears 
 as if he were counting his spongy-footed followers, as 
 they fell in behind him. Here and there knelt six or 
 seven, with their unsightly humps still unburdened, 
 eating with their peculiar deliberateness from small 
 heaps of provender, and scattered over the adjacent 
 fields, wandered separately the caravan of some indo- 
 lent driver, browsing upon the shrubs, and looking oc- 
 casionally with intelligent expectation toward the 
 khan, for the appearance of their tardy master. Over 
 all rose the mingled music of the small bells, with 
 which their gay-covered harness was profusely cover- 
 ed, varied by the heavy beat of the larger ones borne 
 at the necks of the leading and last camels of the fde, 
 while the retreating sounds of the caravans already on 
 their march, came in with the softer tones which com- 
 pleted its sweetness. 
 
 In a short time my companions joined me, and we 
 started for a walk in the town. The necessity of at- 
 tending the daylight prayers, makes all Mussulmans 
 early risers, and we found the streets already crowded, 
 and the merchants and artificers as busy as at noon. 
 Turning a corner to get out of the way of a row of 
 butchers, who were slaughtering sheep revolting]}' in 
 front of their stalls, we met two old Turks coming 
 from the mosque, one of whom, with the familiarity 
 of manners which characterizes the nation, took from 
 my hand a stout English riding-whip which I carried, 
 and began to exercise it on the bag-like trousers of 
 his friend. After amusing himself a while in this 
 manner, he returned the whip, and, patting me con- 
 descendingly on the cheek, gave me two figs from his 
 voluminous pocket, and walked on. Considering that 
 I stand six feet in my stockings, an unwieldy size, you 
 may say, for a pet, this freak of the old Magnesian 
 would seem rather extraordinary. Yet it illustrates 
 the Turkish manners, which, as I have often had oc- 
 casion to notice, are a singular mixture of profound 
 gravity and the most childish simplicity. 
 
 We found a few fine old marble columns in the 
 porches of the mosques, but one Turkish town is just 
 like another, and after an hour or two of wandering 
 about among the wooden houses and narrow streets, 
 we returned to the khan, and, with a cup of coffee, 
 mounted and resumed our journey. 
 
 I have never seen a finer plain than that of Magne- 
 
 sia. With an even breadth of seven or eight miles, 
 its length can not be less than fifty or sixty, and 
 throughout its whole extent it is one unbroken picture 
 of fertile field and meadow, shut in by two lofty ranges 
 of mountains, and watered by the full and winding 
 Hermus. Without fence, and almost without human 
 habitation, it is a noble expanse to the eye, possessing 
 all the untrammelled beauty of a wilderness without 
 its detracting inutility. It is literally " clothed with 
 flocks." As we rode on under the eastern brow of 
 Mount Sypilus, and struck out more into the open 
 plain, as far as we could distinguish by the eye, spread 
 the snowy sheep in hundreds, at merely separating 
 distances, checkered here and there by a herd of the tall 
 jet-black goats of the east, walking onward in slow 
 and sober procession, with the solemn state of a fu- 
 neral. The road was lined with camels, coming into 
 Smyrna by this grand highway of nature, and bring- 
 ing all the varied produce of Asia Minor to barter in 
 its busy mart. We must have passed a thousand in 
 our day's journey. 
 
 LETTER CVII. 
 
 THE EYE OF THE CAMEL — ROCKY SEPULCHRES — VIR- 
 TUE OF AN OLD PASSPORT, BACKED BY IMPUDENCE 
 TEMPLE OF CYBELE — PALACE OF CROESUS — AN- 
 CIENT CHURCH OF SARDIS — RETURN TO SMYRNA. 
 
 Unsightly as the camel is, with its long snaky 
 neck, its frightful hump, and its awkward legs and ac- 
 tion, it wins much upon your kindness with a little 
 acquaintance. Its eye is exceedingly fine. There is 
 a lustrous, suffused softness in the large hazel orb that 
 is the rarest beauty in a human eye, and so remarka- 
 ble is this feature in the camel, that I wonder it has 
 never fallen into use as a poetical simile. They do 
 not shun the gaze of man like other animals, and I 
 pleased myself often when the suridjee slackened his 
 pace, with riding close to some returning caravan, and 
 exchanging steady looks in passing with the slow-pa- 
 ced camels. It was like meeting the eye of a kind old 
 man. 
 
 The face of Mount Sypilus, in its whole extent, is 
 excavated into sepulchres. They are mostly ancient, 
 and form a very singular feature in the scenery. A 
 range of precipices, varying from one to three hundred 
 feet in height, is perforated for twenty miles with these 
 airy depositories for the dead, many of them a hun- 
 dred feet from the plain. Occasionally they are ex- 
 tended to considerable caves, hewn with great labor in 
 the rock, and probably from their numerous niches, 
 intended as family sepulchres. They are now the 
 convenient eyries of great numbers of eagles, which 
 circle continually around the summits, and poise 
 themselves on the wing along the sides of these lone- 
 ly mountains, in undisturbed security. 
 
 We arrived early in the afternoon at Casabar, a 
 pretty town at the foot of Mount Tmolus. Having 
 eaten a melon, the only thing for which the place is 
 famous, we proposed to go on to Achmet-lee, some 
 three hours farther. The suridjee, however, whose 
 horses were hired by the day, had made up his mind 
 to sleep at Casabar, and so we were at issue. Our 
 stock of Turkish was soon exhausted, and the haji' 
 was coolly unbuckling the girths of the baggage- 
 horse without condescending even to answer our ap- 
 peal with a look. The mussulman idlers of the cafe 
 opposite, took their pipes from their mouths and 
 smiled. The gay cqfejee went about his arrangements 
 for our accommodation, quite certain that we were 
 there for the night. I had given up the point myself, 
 when one of my companions, with a look of the most 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 169 
 
 confident triumph, walked up to the suridjee, and tap- 
 ping him on the shoulder, held before his eyes a paper 
 with the seal of the pacha of Smyrna in broad char- 
 acters at the top. After the astonished Turk had 
 looked at it for a moment, he commenced in good 
 round English, and poured upon him a volume of in- 
 coherent rhapsody, slapping the paper violently with 
 his hand and pointing to the road. The effect was in- 
 stantaneous. The girth was hastily rebuckled, and 
 the frightened suridjee put his hand to his head in to- 
 ken of submission, mounted in the greatest hurry and 
 rode out of the court of the caravanserai. The cafe- 
 jee made his salaam, and the spectators wished us re- 
 spectfully a good journey. The magic paper was an 
 old passport, and our friend had calculated securely on 
 the natural dread of the incomprehensible, quite sure 
 that there was not more than one man in the village 
 that could read, and none short of Smyrna who could 
 understand his English. 
 
 The plain between Casabar and Achmet-lee, is quite 
 a realization of poetry. It is twelve miles of soft, 
 bright green-sward, broken only with clumps of luxu- 
 riant oleanders, an occasional cluster of the " black 
 tents of Kedar" with their flocks about them, and here 
 and there a loose and grazing camel indolently lifting 
 his broad foot from the grass as if he felt the coolness 
 and verdure to its spongy core. One's heart seems 
 to stay behind as he rides onward through such 
 places. 
 
 The village of Achmet-lee consists of a coffee- 
 house with a single room. We arrived about sunset, 
 and found the fireplace surrounded by six or seven 
 Turks squatted on their hams, travellers like ourselves, 
 who had arrived before us. There was fortunately a 
 second fireplace, which was soon blazing with fagots 
 of fir and oleander, and with a pilaw between us, we 
 crooked our tired legs under us on the earthen floor, 
 and made ourselves as comfortable as a total absence 
 of every comfort would permit. The mingled smoke 
 of tobacco and the chimney drove me out of doors as 
 soon as our greasy meal was finished, and the con- 
 trast was enough to make one in love with nature. 
 The moon was quite full, and pouring her light down 
 through the transparent and dazzling sky of the east 
 with indescribable splendor. The fires of twenty or 
 thirty caravans were blazing in the fields around, and 
 the low cries of the camels and the hum of voices 
 from the various groups, were mingled with the sound 
 of a stream that came noisily down its rocky chan- 
 nel from the nearest spur of Mount Tmolus. I walk- 
 ed up and down the narrow camel-path till midnight ; 
 and if the kingly spirits of ancient Lydia did not keep 
 me company in the neighborhood of their giant graves, 
 it was perhaps because the feet that trod down their 
 ashes came from a world of which Croesus and Abyat- 
 tis never heard. •» 
 
 The sin of late rising is seldom chargeable upon an 
 earthen bed, and we were in the saddle by sunrise, 
 breathing an air that, after our smoky cabin, was like 
 a spice-wind from Arabia. Winding round the base 
 of the chain of mountains which we had followed for 
 twenty or thirty miles, we ascended a little, after a 
 brisk trot of two or three hours, and came in sight of 
 the citadel of ancient Sardis, perched like an eagle's 
 nest on the summit of a slender rock. A natural ter- 
 race, perhaps a hundred feet above the plain, expand- 
 ed from the base of the hill, and this was the com- 
 manding site of the capital of Lydia. Dividing us 
 from it ran the classic and " golden-sanded" Pactolus, 
 descending from the mountains in a small, narrow val- 
 ley, covered with a verdure so fresh, that it requires 
 some power of fancy to realize that a crowded empire 
 ever swarmed on its borders. Crossing the small, 
 bright stream, we rode along the other bank, winding 
 up its ascending curve, and dismounted at the ruins 
 of the temple of Cybele, a heap of gigantic frag- 
 
 ments strewn confusedly over the earth, with two ma- 
 jestic columns rising lone and beautiful into the air. 
 
 A. Dutch artist, who was of our party, spread his 
 drawing-board and pencils upon one of the fallen 
 Ionic capitals, the suridjee tied his horses' heads to- 
 gether, and laid himself at his length upon the grass, 
 and the rest of us ascended the long steep hill to the 
 citadel. With some loss of breath, and a battle with 
 the dogs of a gipsy encampment, hidden so as almost 
 to be invisible among the shrubbery of the hill-side, 
 we stood at last upon a peak, crested with one totter- 
 ing remnant of a wall, the remains of a castle whose 
 foundations have crumbled beneath it. It looks as if 
 the next rain must send the whole mass into the valley. 
 It puzzled my unmihtary brain to conceive how 
 Alexander and his Macedonians climbed these airy 
 precipices, if taking the citadel was a part of his con- 
 quest of Lydia. The fortifications in the rear have a 
 sheer descent from their solid walls of two or three 
 hundred perpendicular feet, with scarce a vine cling- 
 ing by the way. I left my companions discussing the 
 question, and walked to the other edge of the hill, 
 overlooking the immense plains below. The tumuli 
 which mark the sepulchres of the kings of Lydia, rose 
 like small hills on the opposite and distant bank of the 
 Hermus. The broad fields, which were once the 
 "wealth of Crcesus," lay still fertile and green along 
 the banks of their historic river. Thyatira and Phila- 
 delphia were almost within reach of my eye, and I 
 stood upon Sardis — in the midst of the sites of the 
 Seven Churches. Below lay the path of the myriad 
 armies of Persia, on their march to Greece ; here 
 Alexander pitched his tents after the battle of Grani- 
 cus, wiling away the winter in the lap of captive 
 Lydia : and over the small ruin just discernible on the 
 southern bank of the Pactolus, " the angel of the 
 church of Sardis" brooded with his protecting wings 
 till the few who had " not defiled their garments," were 
 called to " walk in white," in the promised reward of 
 the apocalypse. 
 
 We descended again to the temple of Cybele, and 
 mounting our horses, rode down to the palace of 
 Crcesus. Parts of the outer walls, the bases of the 
 portico, and the marble steps of an inner court, are all 
 that remain of the splendor that Solon was called upon 
 in vain to admire. With the permission of six or 
 seven storks, whose coarse nests were built upon the 
 highest points of the ruins, we selected the broadest 
 of the marble blocks, lying in the deserted area, and 
 spreading our traveller's breakfast upon it, forgot even 
 the kingly builder in our well-earned appetites. 
 
 There are three parallel walls remaining of the an- 
 cient church of Sardis. They stand on a gentle slope, 
 just above the edge of the Pactolus, and might easily 
 be rebuilt into a small chapel, with only the materials 
 within them. There are many other ruins on the site 
 of the city, but none designated by a name. We loi- 
 tered about, collecting relics, and indulging our fan- 
 cies, till the suridjee reminded us of the day's journey 
 before us, and with a drink from the Pactolus, and a 
 farewell look at the beautiful Ionic columns standing 
 on its lonely bank, we put spurs to our horses and gal- 
 loped once more down into the valley. 
 
 Our Turkish saddles grew softer on the third day's 
 journey, and we travelled more at ease. I found the 
 freedom and solitude of the wide and unfenced coun- 
 try growing at every mile more upon my liking. The 
 heart expands as one gives his horse the rein and gal- 
 lops over these wild paths without toll-gate or obsta- 
 cle. I can easily understand the feeling of Ali Bey 
 on his return to Europe from the east. 
 
 Our fourth day's journey lay through the valley be- 
 tween Tmolus and Semering — the fairest portion of 
 the dominion of Timour the Tartar. How graceful- 
 ly shaped were those slopes to the mountains ! How 
 bright the rivers ! How green the banks! How like 
 
170 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 a new created and still unpeopled world it seemed, 
 with every tree and flower and fruit the perfect model 
 of its kind ! 
 
 Leaving the secluded village of Nymphi nested in 
 the mountains on our left, as we approached the end 
 of our circuitous journey, we entered early in the af- 
 ternoon the long plains of Hadjilar, and with tired 
 horses and (malgre romance) and an agreeable antici- 
 pation of Christian beds and supper, we dismounted 
 in Smyrna at sunset. 
 
 LETTER CVIII. 
 
 SMYRNA — CHARMS OF ITS SOCIETY — HOSPITALITY OF 
 
 FOREIGN RESIDENTS THE MARINA — THE CASINO 
 
 A NARROW ESCAPE FROM THE PLAGUE— DEPARTURE 
 OF THE FRIGATE HIGH CHARACTER OF THE AMER- 
 ICAN NAVY— A TRIBUTE OF RESPECT AND GRATI- 
 TUDE — THE FAREWELL. 
 
 What can I say of Smyrna? Its mosques and 
 bazars scarce deserve description after those of Con- 
 stantinople. It has neither pictures, scenery, nor any 
 peculiarities of costume or manners. There are no 
 " lions" here. It is only one of the most agreeable 
 places in the world, exactly the sort of thing, that 
 (without compelling private individuals to sit for their 
 portraits),* is the least describable. Of the fortnight 
 of constant pleasure that I have passed here, I do not 
 well know how I can eke out half a page that would 
 amuse you. 
 
 The society of Smyrna has some advantages over 
 that of any other city I have seen. It is composed 
 entirely of the families of merchants, who, separated 
 from the Turkish inhabitants, occupy a distinct quar- 
 ter of the town, are responsible only to their consuls, 
 and having no nobility above, and none but dependants 
 below them, live in a state of cordial republican equal- 
 ity that is not found even in America. They are of 
 all nations, and the principal languages of Europe are 
 spoken by everybody. Hospitality is carried to an 
 extent more like the golden age than these " days of 
 iron ;" and, as a necessary result of the free mixture 
 of languages and feelings, there is a degree of infor- 
 mation and liberality of "sentiment among them, uni- 
 ted to a free and joyous tone of manners and habits of 
 living, that is quite extraordinary in men of their care- 
 fraught profession. Our own country, I am proud to 
 say, is most honorably represented. There is no trav- 
 eller to the east, of any nation, who does not carry 
 away with him from Smyrna, grateful recollections of 
 one at least whose hospitality is as open as his gate. 
 This living over warehouses of opium, I am inclined 
 to think, is healthy for the heart. 
 
 After having seen the packing of figs, wondered at 
 the enormous burdens carried by the porters, ridden 
 to Bougiar and the castle on the hill, and admired the 
 caravan of the Bey-Oglou, whose camels are the 
 handsomest that come into Smyrna, one has nothing 
 to do but dine, dance, and walk on the Marina. The 
 last is a circumstance the traveller does well not to 
 miss. A long street extends along the bay, lined with 
 
 * A courteous old traveller, of the last century, whose book 
 I have somewhere fallen in with, indulges his recollections 
 of Smyrna with less scruples, " Mrs. B.," he says, " who 
 has travelled a great deal, is mistress of both French and 
 Italian. The Misses W. are all amiable young ladies. A 
 Miss A., whose name is expressive of the passion she inspires, 
 without being beautiful, possesses a je ne seals quoi, which 
 fascinates more than beauty itself. Not to love her, one 
 must never have seen her. And who would not be captivated 
 by the vivacity of Miss B.?" How charming thus to go 
 about the world, describing the fairest of its wonders, instead 
 of stupid mountains and rivers ! 
 
 the houses of the rich merchants of the town, and for 
 the two hours before sunset, every family is to be seen 
 sitting outside its door upon the public pavement, 
 while beaux and belles stroll up and down in all the 
 gayety of perpetual holyday. They are the most out- 
 of-doors people, the Smyrniotes, that I have ever seen. 
 And one reason perhaps is, that they have a beauty 
 which has nothing to fear from the daylight. The 
 rich, classic, glowing faces of the Greeks, the paler 
 and livelier French, the serious and impassioned Ital- 
 ian, the blooming English, and the shrinking and fra- 
 gile American, mingle together in this concourse of 
 grace and elegance like the varied flowers in the gar- 
 den. I would match Smyrna against the world for 
 beauty. And then such sociability, such primitive 
 cordiality of manners as you find among them ! It is 
 quite a Utopia. You would think that little republic 
 of merchants, separate from the Christian world on a 
 heathen shore, had commenced cle novo, from Eden — 
 ignorant as yet of jealousy, envy, suspicion, and 
 the other ingredients with which the old world min- 
 gles up its refinements. It is a very pleasant place, 
 Smyrna ! 
 
 The stranger, on his arrival, is immediately introdu- 
 ced to the Casino — a large palace, supported by the 
 subscription of the residents, containing a reading- 
 room, furnished with all the gazettes and reviews of 
 Europe, a ball-room frequently used, a coftee-room 
 whence the delicious mocha is brought to you when- 
 ever you enter, billiard-tables, card-rooms, etc., etc. 
 The merchants are all members, and any member can 
 introduce a stranger, and give him all the privileges 
 of the place during his stay in the city. It is a cour- 
 tesy that is not a little drawn upon. English, French, 
 and American ships-of-war are almost always in the 
 port, and the officers are privileged guests. Every 
 traveller to the east passes by Smyrna, and there are 
 always numbers at the Casino. In fact, the hospitali- 
 ty of this kindest of cities, has not the usual demerit 
 of being rarely called upon. It seems to have grown 
 with the demand for it. 
 
 Idling away the time very agreeably at Smyrna, 
 waiting for a vessel to go — I care not where. I have 
 offered myself as a passenger in the first ship that 
 sails. I rather lean toward" Palestine and Egypt, but 
 there are no vessels for Jaffa or Alexandria. A brig, 
 crowded with hajjis to Jerusalem, sailed on the first 
 day of my arrival at Smyrna, and I was on the point 
 of a hasty embarkation, when my good angel, in the 
 shape of a sudden caprice, sent me off to Sardis. The 
 plague broke out on board immediately on leaving the 
 port, and nearly the whole ship's company perished at 
 sea! 
 
 There are plenty of vessels bound to Trieste and 
 the United States, but there would be nothing new to 
 me in lllyria and Lombardy ; and much as I love my 
 country, I am more enamored for the present of my 
 " sandal-shoon." Besides, I have a yearning to the 
 south, and the cold " Bora" of that bellows-like Adri- 
 atic, and the cutting winter winds of my native shore, 
 chill me even in the thought. Meantime I breathe an 
 air borrowed by December of May, and sit with my 
 windows open, warming myself in a broad beam of 
 the soft sun of Asia. With such " appliances," even 
 suspense is agreeable. 
 
 The commodore sailed this morning for his winter 
 quarters in Minorca. I watched the ship's prepara- 
 tions for departure from the balcony of the hotel, with 
 a heavy heart. Her sails dropped from the yards, her 
 head turned slowly outward as the anchor brought 
 away, and with a light breeze in her topsails the gal- 
 lant frigate moved majestically down the harbor, and 
 
PENC1LLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 171 
 
 in an hour was a speck on the horizon. She had 
 been my home for more than six months. T had seen 
 from her deck, and visited in her boats some of the 
 fairest portions of the world. She had borne me to 
 Cicily, to Illyria, to the Isles and shores of Greece, to 
 Marmora and the Bosphorus, and the thousand lovely 
 pictures with which that long summer voyage had 
 stored my memory, and the thousand adventures and 
 still more numerous kindnesses and courtesies, linked 
 with these interesting scenes, crowded on my mind as 
 the noble ship receded from my eye, with an emotion 
 that I could not repress. 
 
 There is a "pomp and circumstance" about a man- 
 of-war, which is exceedingly fascinating. Her impo- 
 sing structure and appearance, the manly and deferen- 
 tial etiquette, the warlike appointment and impressive 
 order upon her decks, the ready and gallantly manned 
 boat, the stirring music of the band, and the honor 
 and attention with which her officers are received in 
 every port, conspire in keeping awake an excitement, 
 a kind of chivalrous elation, which, it seems to me, 
 would almost make a hero of a man of straw. From 
 the hoarse " seven bells, sir !" with which you are 
 turned out of your hammock in the morning, to the 
 blast of the bugle and the report of the evening 
 gun, it is one succession of elevating sights and 
 sounds, without any of that approach to the ridicu- 
 lous which accompanies the sublime or the impres- 
 sive on shore. 
 
 From the comparisons I have made between our 
 own and the ships-of-war of other nations, I think we 
 may well be proud of our navy. I had learned in Eu- 
 rope, long before joining the "United States," that 
 the respect we exact from foreigners is paid more to 
 Americans afloat, than to a continent they think as far 
 oil at least as the moon, They see our men-of-war, 
 *nd they know very well what they have done, and 
 from the appearance and character of our officers, 
 what they might do again — and there is a tangibility 
 in the deductions from knowledge and eyesight, which 
 beats books and statistics. I have heard Englishmen 
 deny, one by one, every claim we have to political and 
 moral superiority ; but I have found no one illiberal 
 enough to refuse a compliment, and a handsome one, 
 to Yankee ships, 
 
 I consider myself, I repeat, particularly fortunate to 
 have made a cruise on board an American frigate. 
 It is a chapter of observation in itself, which is worth 
 much to any one. But, in addition to this, it was my 
 good fortune to have happened upon a cruise directed 
 by a mind full of taste and desire for knowledge, and 
 a cruise which had for its principal objects improve- 
 ment and information. Commodore Patterson knew 
 'he ground well, and was familiar with the history and 
 localities of the interesting countries visited by the 
 ship, and every possible facility and encouragement 
 was given by him to all to whom the subjects and pla- 
 ces were new. An enlightened and enterprising trav- 
 eller himself, he was the best of advisers and the best 
 and kindest of guides. I take pleasure in recording 
 almost unlimited obligations to him. 
 
 And so, to the gallant ship — to the " warlike world 
 within" — to the decks I have so often promenaded, and 
 the moonlight watches I have so often shared — to the 
 groups of manly faces I have learned to know so well 
 — to the drum-beat and the bugle-call, and the stir- 
 ring music of the band — to the hammock in which I 
 swung and slept so soundly, and last and nearest my 
 heart, to the gay and hospitable mess with whom for 
 six happy months I have been a guest and a friend, 
 whose feelings I have learned but to honor my country 
 more, and whose society has become to me even a 
 painful want — to all this catalogue of happiness, I am 
 bidding a heavy-hearted farewell. Luck and Heaven's 
 blessing to ship and company ! 
 
 LETTER CIX. 
 
 RETURN TO ITALY BOLOGNA MALIBRAN PARMA 
 
 NIGHTINGALES OF LOMBARDY FIACENZA AUSTRI- 
 AN SOLOIERS — THESIMPLON — MILAN — RESEMBLANCE 
 
 TO PARIS THE CATHEDRAL GUERCINO'S HAGAR 
 
 MILANESE COFFEE. 
 
 Milan. — My fifth journey over the Apennines — dull 
 of course. On the second evening we were at Bo 
 logna. The long colonnades pleased me less than be 
 fore, with their crowds of foreign officers and ill- 
 dressed inhabitants, and a placard for the opera, 
 announcing Malibran's last night, relieved us of the 
 prospect of a long evening of weariness. The divine 
 music of La Norma and a crowded and brilliant au- 
 dience, enthusiastic in their applause, seemed to in- 
 spire this still incomparable creature even beyond her 
 wont. She sang with a fulness, an abandonment, a 
 passionate energy and sweetness that seemed to come 
 from a soul rapt and possessed beyond control, with 
 the melody it had undertaken. They were never done 
 calling her on the stage after the curtain had fallen. 
 After six reappearances, she came out once more to 
 the footlights, and murmuring something inaudible 
 from her lips that showed strong agitation, she pressed 
 her hands together, bowed till her long hair, falling 
 over her shoulders, nearly touched her feet, and re- 
 tired in tears. She is the siren of Europe for me! 
 
 I was happy to have no more to do with the Duke 
 of Modena, than to eat a dinner in his capital. We 
 did " not forget the picture," but my inquiries for it 
 were as fruitless as before. I wonder whether the au- 
 thor of the Pleasures of Memory has the pleasure of 
 remembering having seen the picture himself! " Tas- 
 soni's bucket which is not the true one," is still shown 
 in the tower, and the keeper will kiss the cross upon 
 his fingers, that Samuel Rogers has written a false line. 
 
 At Parma we ate parmesan and saw the Correggio. 
 The angel who holds the book up to the infant Sa- 
 vior, the female laying her cheek to his feet, the 
 countenance of the holy child himself, are creations 
 that seem apart from all else in the schools of paint- 
 ing. They are like a group, not from life, but from 
 heaven. They are superhuman, and, unlike other 
 pictures of beauty which stir the heart as if they re- 
 sembled something one had loved or might have loved, 
 these mount into the fancy like things transcending 
 sympathy, and only within reach of an intellectual 
 and elevated wonder. This is the picture that Sir 
 Thomas Lawrence returned six times in one day to 
 see. It is the only thing I saw to admire in thedutchy 
 of Maria Louisa. An Austrian regiment marched in- 
 to the town as we left it, and an Italian at the gate told 
 us that the dutchess had disbanded her last troops of 
 the country, and supplied their place with these yel- 
 low and black Croats and Illyrians. Italy is Austria 
 now to the foot of the Apennines — if not to the top 
 of Radicofani. 
 
 Lombardy is full of nightingales. They sing by 
 day, however (as not specified in poetry). They are 
 up quite as early as the lark, and the green hedges are 
 alive with their gurgling and changeful music till 
 twilight. Nothing can exceed the fertility of these 
 endless plains. They are four or five hundred miles 
 of uninterrupted garden. The same eternal level 
 road, the same rows of elms and poplars on either side, 
 the same long, slimy canals, the same square, vine- 
 laced, perfectly green pastures and cornfields, the same 
 shaped houses, the same-voiced beggars with the same 
 sing-song whine, and the same villanous Austrians 
 poring over your passports and asking to be paid for 
 it, from the Alps to the Apennines. It is wearisome, 
 spite of green leaves and nightingales. A bare rock 
 or a good brigand-looking mountain would so refresh 
 the eye ! 
 
172 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 At Piacenza, one of those admirable German bands 
 was playing in the public square, while a small corps 
 of picked men were manoeuvred. Even an Italian, I 
 should think, though he knew and felt it was the mu- 
 sic of his oppressors, might have been pleased to lis- 
 ten. And pleased they seemed to be — for there were 
 hundreds of dark-haired and well-made men, with 
 faces and forms for heroes, standing and keeping time 
 to the well-played instruments, as peacefully as if 
 there were no such thing as liberty, and no meaning 
 in the foreign uniforms crowding them from their own 
 pavement. And there were the women of Piacenza, 
 nodding from the balconies to the white mustaches 
 and padded coats strutting below, and you would nev- 
 er dream Italy thought herself wronged, watching the 
 exchange of courtesies between her dark-eyed daugh- 
 ters and these fair-haired coxcombs. 
 
 We crossed the Po, and entered Austria's nominal 
 dominions. They rummaged our baggage as if they 
 smelt republicanism somewhere, and after showing 
 a strong disposition to retain a volume of very bad 
 poetry as suspicious, and detaining us two long hours, 
 they had the modesty to ask to be paid for letting us 
 off lightly. When we declined it, the chef threatened 
 us a precious searching "the next time.''' How wil- 
 lingly I would submit to the annoyance to have that 
 next time assured to me ! Every step I take toward 
 the bounds of Italy, pulls so upon my heart ! 
 
 As most travellers come into Italy over the Simplon, 
 Milan makes generally the first enthusiastic chapter 
 in their books. I have reversed the order myself, and 
 have a better right to praise it from comparison. For 
 exterior, there is certainly no city in Italy comparable 
 to it. The streets are broad and noble, the buildings 
 magnificent, the pavement quite the best in Europe, 
 and the Milanese (all of whom I presume I have seen, 
 for it is Sunday, and the streets swarm with them), are 
 better dressed, and look " better to do in the world" 
 than the Tuscans, who are gayer and more Italian, 
 and the Romans, who are graver and vastly handsom- 
 er. Milan is quite like Paris. The showy and mir- 
 ror-lined cafes, the elegant shops, the variety of strange 
 people and costumes, and a new gallery lately opened 
 in imitation of the glass-roofed passages of the French 
 capital, make one almost feel that the next turn will 
 bring him upon the Boulevards. 
 
 The famous cathedral, nearly completed by Napo- 
 leon, is a sort of Aladdin creation, quite too delicate 
 and beautiful for the open air. The filmly traceries 
 of gothic fretwork, the needle-like minarets, the hun- 
 dreds of beautiful statues with which it is studded, the 
 intricate, graceful, and bewildering architecture of ev- 
 ery window and turret, and the frost-like frailness and 
 delicacy of the whole mass, make an effect altogether 
 upon the eye that must stand high on the list of new 
 sensations. It is a vast structure withal, but a mid- 
 dling easterly breeze, one would think in looking at it, 
 would lift it from its base and bear it over the Atlan- 
 tic like the meshes of a cobweb. Neither interior nor 
 exterior impresses you with the feeling of awe com- 
 mon to other large churches. The sun struggles 
 through the immense windows of painted glass stain- 
 ing every pillar and carved cornice with the richest 
 hues, and wherever the eye wanders it grows giddy 
 with the wilderness of architecture. The people on 
 their knees are like paintings in the strong artificial 
 light, the checkered pavement seems trembling with 
 a quivering radiance, the altar is far and indistinct, and 
 the lamps burning over the tomb of Saint Carlo, shine 
 out from the centre like gems glistening in the midst 
 of some enchanted hall. This reads very like rhap- 
 sody, but it is the way the place impressed me. It is 
 like a great dream. Its excessive beauty scarce seems 
 constant while the eye rests upon it. 
 
 The Brera is a noble palace, occupied by the pub- 
 lic galleries of statuary and painting. I felt on leav- 
 
 ing Florence that I could give pictures a very long 
 holyday. To live on them, as one does in Italy, is 
 like dining from morn till night. The famous Guer- 
 cino, is at Milan, however, the " Hagar," which By- 
 ron talks of so enthusiastically, and I once more sur- 
 rendered myself to a cicerone. The picture catches 
 your eye on your first entrance. There is that har- 
 mony and effect in the. color that mark a masterpiece, 
 even in a passing glance. Abraham stands in the cen- 
 tre of the group, a fine, prophet-like, " green old 
 man," with a mild decision in his eye, from which 
 there is evidently no appeal. Sarah has turned her 
 back, and you can just read in the half-profile glance 
 of her face, that there is a little pity mingled in her 
 hard-hearted approval of her rival's banishment. But 
 Hagar — who can describe the world of meaning in 
 her face ? The closed lips have in them a calm in- 
 credulousness, contradicted with wonderful nature in 
 the flushed and troubled forehead, and the eyes red 
 with long weeping. The gourd of water is hung over 
 her shoulder, her hand is turning her sorrowful boy 
 from the door, and she has looked back once more, 
 with a large tear coursing down her cheek, to read in 
 the face of her master if she is indeed driven forth 
 for ever. It is the instant before pride and despair close 
 over her heart. You see in the picture that the next 
 moment is the crisis of her life. Her gaze is strain- 
 ing upon the old man's lips, and you wait breathlessly 
 to see her draw up her bending form, and depart in 
 proud sorrow for the wilderness. It is a piece of pow- 
 erful and passionate poetry. It affects you like noth- 
 ing but a reality. The eyes get warm, and the heart 
 beats quick, and as you walk away you feel as if a 
 load of oppressive sympathy was lifting from your 
 heart. 
 
 I have seen little else in Milan, except Austrian sol- 
 diers, of whom there are fifteen thousand in this sin- 
 gle capital ! The government has issued an order 
 to officers not on duty, to appear in citizen's dress, it 
 is supposed to diminish the appearance of so much 
 military preparation. For the rest, they make a kind 
 of coffee here, by boiling it with cream, which is bet- 
 ter than anything of the kind either in Paris or Con- 
 stantinople ; and the Milanese are, for slaves, the 
 most civil people I have seen, after the Florentines. 
 There is little English society here; I know not why, 
 except that the Italians are rich enough to be exclu- 
 sive and make their houses difficult of access to stran- 
 gers. 
 
 LETTER CX. 
 
 A MELANCHOLY PROCESSION — LAGO MAGGIORE — ISOLA 
 BELLA — THE SIMPLON — MEETING A FELLOW-COUN- 
 TRYMAN — THE VALLEY OF THE RHONE. 
 
 In going out of the gates of Milan, we met a cart 
 full of peasants, tied together and guarded by gens 
 d'armes, the fifth sight of the kind that has crossed us 
 since we passed the Austrian border. The poor fel- 
 lows looked very innocent and very sorry. The ex- 
 tent of their offences probably might be the want of a 
 passport, and a desire to step over the limits of his 
 majesty's 'possessions. A train of beautiful horses, 
 led by soldiers along the ramparts, the property of the 
 Austrian officers, were in melancholy contrast to their 
 sad faces. 
 
 The clear snowy Alps soon came in sight, and their 
 cold beauty refreshed us in the midst of a heat that 
 prostrated every nerve in the system. It is only the 
 first of May, and they are mowing the grass every- 
 where on the road, the trees are in their fullest leaf, 
 the frogs and nightingales singing each other down, 
 and the grasshopper would be a burden. Toward night 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 173 
 
 we crossed the Sardinian frontier, and in an hour were 
 set down at an auberge on the bank of Lake Maggi- 
 ore, in the little town of Arona. The mountains on 
 the other side of the broad and mirror-like water, are 
 speckled with ruined castles, here and there a boat is 
 leaving iis long line of ripples behind in its course, 
 the cattle are loitering home, the peasants sit on the 
 benches before their doors, and all the lovely circum- 
 stances of a rural summer's sunset are about us, in 
 one of the very loveliest spots in nature. A very old 
 Florence friend is my companion, and what with mu- 
 tual reminiscences of sunny Tuscany, and the deep- 
 est love in common for the sky over our heads, and 
 the green land around us, we are noting down " red 
 days" in our calendar of travel. 
 
 We walked from Arona by sunrise, four or five miles 
 along the borders of Lake Maggiore. The kind- 
 hearted peasants on their way to the market raised their 
 hats to us in passing, and I was happy that the greet- 
 ing was still " buon gior-no." Those dark-lined moun- 
 tains before us were to separate me too soon from the 
 mellow accents in which it was spoken. As yet, how- 
 ever, it was all Italian — the ultra-marine sky, the clear, 
 half-purpled hills, the inspiring air — we felt in every 
 pulse that it was still Italy. 
 
 We were at Baveno at an early hour, and took a 
 boat for Isola Bella. It looks like a gentleman's villa 
 afloat. A boy would throw a stone entirely over it in 
 any direction. It strikes you like a kind of toy as you 
 look at it from a distance, and getting nearer, the illu- 
 sion scarcely dissipates — for, from the water's edge, 
 the orange-laden terraces are piled one above another 
 like a pyramidal fruit-basket, the villa itself peers 
 above like a sugar castle, and it scarce seems real 
 enough to land upon. We pulled round to the north- 
 ern side, and disembarked at a broad stone staircase, 
 where a cicerone, with a look of suppressed wisdom, 
 common to his vocation, met us with the offer of his 
 services. 
 
 The entrance-hall was hung with old armor, and a 
 magnificent suite of apartments above, opening on all 
 sides upon the lake, was lined thickly with pictures, 
 none of them remarkable except one or two land- 
 scapes by the savage Tempesta. Travellers going the 
 other way would probably admire the collection more 
 than we. We were glad to be handed over by our 
 pragmatical custode to a pretty contadino, who an- 
 nounced herself as the gardener's daughter, and gave 
 us each a bunch of roses. It was a proper com- 
 mencement to an acquaintance upon Isola Bella. She 
 led the way to the water's edge, where, in the foun- 
 dations of the palace, a suite of eight or ten spacious 
 rooms is constructed a la grotte — with a pavement laid 
 of small stones of different colors, walls and roof of 
 fantastically set shells and pebbles, and statues that 
 seem to have reason in their nudity. The only light 
 came in at the long doors opening down to the lake, 
 and the deep leather sofas, and dark cool atmosphere, 
 with the light break of the waves outside, and the long 
 views away toward Isola Madra, and the far-off* oppo- 
 site shore, composed altogether a most seductive spot 
 for an indolent humor and a summer's day. I shall 
 keep it as a cool recollection till sultry summers 
 trouble me no more. 
 
 But the garden was the prettiest place. The lake 
 is lovely enough any way ; but to look at it through 
 perspectives of orange alleys, and have the blue 
 mountains broken by stray branches of tulip-trees, 
 clumps of crimson rhododendron, and clusters of cit- 
 ron, yellower than gold ; to sit on a garden-seat in the 
 shade of a thousand roses, with sweet-scented shrubs 
 and verbenums, and a mixture of novel and delicious 
 perfumes embalming the air about you, and gaze up 
 at snowy Alps and sharp precipices, and down upon a 
 broad smooth mirror in which the islands lie like 
 clouds, and over which the boats are silently creeping 
 
 with their white sails, like birds asleep in the sky — 
 why (not to disparage nature), it seems to my poor 
 judgment, that these artificial appliances are an im- 
 provement even to Lago Maggiore. 
 
 On one side, without the villa walls, are two or three 
 small houses, one of which is occupied as a hotel ; 
 and here, if I had a friend with matrimony in his eye, 
 would I strongly recommend lodgings for the honey- 
 moon. A prettier cage for a pair of billing doves no 
 poet would conceive you. 
 
 We got on to Domo d'Ossola to sleep, saying many 
 an oft-said thing about the entrance to the valleys of 
 the Alps. They seem common when spoken of, these 
 romantic places, but they are not the less new in the 
 glow of a first impression. 
 
 We were a little in start of the sun this morning, 
 and commenced the ascent of the Simplon by a gray 
 summer's dawn, before which the last bright star had 
 not yet faded. From Domo d'Ossola we rose direct- 
 ly into the mountains, and soon wound into the wildest 
 glens by a road which was flung along precipices and 
 over chasms and waterfalls like a waving riband. The 
 horses went on at a round trot, and so skilfully are the 
 difficulties of the ascent surmounted, that we could 
 not believe we had passed the spot that from below 
 hung above us so appallingly. The route follows the 
 foaming river Vedro, which frets and plunges along at 
 its side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the im- 
 petuosity of a mountain torrent, where the stream is 
 swollen at every short distance with pretty waterfalls, 
 messengers from the melting snows on the summits. 
 There was one, a water-slide rather than a fall, which 
 I stopped long to admire. It came from near the peak 
 of the mountain, leaping at first from a green clump 
 of firs, and descending a smooth inclined plane, of 
 perhaps two hundred feet. The effect was like dra- 
 pery of the most delicate lace, dropping into festoons 
 from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other 
 and mingled and separated, always preserving their el- 
 liptical and foaming curves, till, in a smooth scoop 
 near the bottom, they gathered into a snowy mass, 
 and leaped into the Vedro in the shape of a twisted 
 shell. If wishing could have witched it into Mr. 
 Cole's sketch-book, he would have a new variety of 
 water for his next composition. 
 
 After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed as- 
 cending but for the snow and ice and the clear air it 
 brought us into, we stopped to breakfast at the village 
 of Simplon, "three thousand, two hundred and six- 
 teen feet above the sea level." Here we first realized 
 that we had left Italy. The landlady spoke French 
 and the postillions German ! My sentiment lias 
 grown threadbare with travel, but I don't mind confes- 
 sing that the circumstance gave me an unpleasant 
 thickness in the throat. I threw open the southern 
 window, and looked back toward the marshes of Lom- 
 bardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it was 
 because 
 
 " It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings." 
 
 In sober sadness, one may well regret any country 
 where his life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of 
 sunshine and gladness ; and such, by a thousand en- 
 chantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life 
 in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of 
 such things, and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, be- 
 set the soul like the very necessities of existence. 
 You can exist elsewhere, but oh! you live in Italy ! 
 
 I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge 
 in front of the hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the 
 diligence drove up, and six or eight young men alight- 
 ed. One of them, walking up and down the road to 
 get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, ad- 
 dressed a remark to us in English. We had neither 
 of us seen him before, but we exclaimed simultane- 
 ously, as he turned away, "That's an American." 
 
174 
 
 PENCILLING^ BY THE WAY. 
 
 " How did you know he was not an Englishman ?" I 
 asked. " Because," said my friend, " he spoke to us 
 without an introduction and without a reason, as Eng- 
 lishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he 
 ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does 
 except he is talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult 
 you. And how did you know it ?" asked he. 
 " Partly by instinct," I answered, "but more, because, 
 though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him 
 ten dollars, and a new cloak that cost him fifty (a pe- 
 culiarly American extravagance), because he made no 
 inclination of his body either in addressing or leaving 
 us, though his intention was to be civil, and because 
 he used fine dictionary words to express a common 
 idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern 
 breeding. And, if you want other evidence, he has 
 : ust asked the gentleman near him to ask the conduc- 
 teur something about his breakfast, and an American 
 is the only man in the world that ventures to come 
 abroad without at least French enough to keep him- 
 self from starving." It may appear ill-natured to 
 write down such criticisms on one's own countryman; 
 but the national peculiarities by which we are distin- 
 guished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in this 
 instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We 
 found afterward that our conjecture was right. His 
 name and country were on the brass plate of his port- 
 manteau in most legible letters, and I recognised it di- 
 rectly as the address of an amiable and excellent man, 
 of whom I had once or twice heard in Italy, though I 
 had never before happened to meet him. Three of 
 the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen, are 
 over-fine clothes, over-fine words, and over-fine, or over- 
 free manners ! 
 
 From Simplon we drove two or three miles between 
 heaps of snow, lying in some places from ten to six 
 feet deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through 
 fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After 
 passing one or two galleries built over the road to pro- 
 tect it from the avalanches where it ran beneath the 
 loftier precipices, we got out of the snow, and saw 
 Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon, on the 
 other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked 
 as if one might toss his cap down into its pretty gar- 
 dens. Yet we were four or five hours in reaching it, 
 by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely to descend 
 at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, 
 which opened continually before us, were of exquisite 
 beauty. The river itself, which is here near its source, 
 looked like a meadow rivulet in its silver windings, and 
 the gigantic Helvetian Alps which rose in their snow 
 on the other side of the valley, were glittering in the 
 slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of 
 size and outline which diminished, even more than 
 distance, the river and the clusters of villages at their 
 feet. 
 
 LETTER CXI. 
 
 SWITZERLAND— LA VALAIS THE CRETINS AND THE 
 
 GOITRES A FRENCHMAN'S OPINION OF NIAGARA 
 
 LAKE LEMAN CASTLE OF CHILLON ROCKS OF MEIL- 
 
 LERIE — REPUBLICAN AIR MONT BLANC GENEVA 
 
 THE STEAMER — PARTING SORROW. 
 
 We have been two days and a half loitering down 
 through the Swiss canton of Valais, and admiring ev- 
 ery hour the magnificence of these snow-capped and 
 green-footed Alps. The little chalets seem just lodg- 
 ed by accident on the crags, or stuck against slopes so 
 steep, that the mowers of the mountain-grass are lit- 
 erally let down by ropes to their dizzy occupation. 
 The goats alone seem to have an exemption from all 
 
 ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs 
 which it makes one giddy to look on only ; and the 
 short-waisted girls, dropping a courtesy and blushing 
 as they pass the stranger, emerge from the little moun- 
 tain-paths, and stop by the first spring, to put on their 
 shoes and arrange their ribands coquetishly, before 
 entering the village. 
 
 The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one 
 at every step — the cretins, or natural fools, of which 
 there is at least one in every family ; and the goitre or 
 swelled throat, to which there is hardly an exception 
 among the women. It really makes travelling in 
 Switzerland a melancholy business, with all its beau- 
 ty ; at every turn in the road, a gibbering and mowing 
 idiot, and in every group of females, a disgusting ar- 
 ray of excrescences too common even to be concealed. 
 Really, to see girls that else were beautiful, arrayed 
 in all their holyday finery, but with a defect that makes 
 them monsters to the unaccustomed eye, their throats 
 swollen to the size of their heads, seems to me one 
 of the most curious and pitiable things I have met in 
 I my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to 
 account for the growth of the goitre, but it is yet un- 
 explained. The men are not so subject to it as the 
 women, though among them, even, it is frightfully 
 common. But how account for the continual produc- 
 tion by ordinary parents of this brute race of cretins 1 
 They all look alike, dwarfish, large-mouthed, grinning, 
 and of hideous features and expression. It is said 
 that the children of strangers, born in the valley, are 
 very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin exactly. 
 It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The 
 Valaisians, however, consider it a blessing to have one 
 in the family. 
 
 The dress of the women of La Valais is excessive- 
 ly unbecoming, and a pretty face is rare. Their man- 
 ners are kind and polite, and at the little auberges, 
 where we have stopped on the road, there have been 
 a cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the 
 table, which prove virtues among them not found in 
 Italy. 
 
 At Turttmann, we made a little excursion into the 
 mountains to see a cascade. It falls about a hundred 
 feet, and has just now more water than usual from the 
 melting of the snows. It is a pretty fall. A French- 
 man writes in the book of the hotel, that he has seen 
 Niagara and Trenton Falls, in America, and that they 
 do not compare with the cascade of Turttmann ! 
 
 From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer, 
 and after passing the celebrated Fall of the Pisse- 
 vache (which springs from the top of a high Alp al- 
 most into the road, and is really a splendid cascade), 
 we approached Lake Leman in a gorgeous sunset. 
 We rose a slight hill, and over the broad sheet of wa- 
 ter on the opposite shore, reflected with all its towers 
 in a mirror of gold, lay the castle of Chilian. A bold 
 green mountain, rose steeply behind, the sparkling vil- 
 lage of Vevey lay farther down on the water's edge ; 
 and away toward the sinking sun, stretched the long 
 chain of the Jura, teinted with all the hues of a dol- 
 phin. Never was such a lake of beauty — or it never 
 sat so pointedly for its picture. Mountains and water, 
 chateaux and shallops, vineyards and verdure, could 
 do no more. We left the carriage and walked three 
 or four miles along the southern bank, under the 
 " Rocks of Meillerie," and the spirit of St. Preux's 
 Julie, if she haunt the scene where she caught her 
 death, of a sunset in May, is the most enviable of 
 ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in albums of 
 Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from 
 Fiezoli) the ne plus ultra of a scenery Paradise. 
 
 We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on 
 a swelling bank of the lake, and we have been lying 
 under the trees in front of the hotel till the last per- 
 ceptible teint is gone from the sky over Jura. Two 
 pedestrian gentlemen, with knapsacks and dogs, have 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 17* 
 
 just arrived, and a whole family of French people, in- 
 cluding parrots and monkeys, came in before us, and 
 are deafening the house with their chattering. A cup 
 of coffee, and then good night ! 
 
 My companion, who has travelled all over Europe 
 on foot, confirms my opinion that there is no drive on 
 the continent equal to the forty miles between the 
 rocks of Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank 
 of the Leman. The lake is not often much broader 
 than the Hudson, the shores are the noble mountains 
 sung so gloriously by Childe Harold; Vevey, Lau- 
 sanne, Copet, and a string of smaller villages, all fa- 
 mous in poetry and story, fringe the opposite water's 
 edge with cottages and villages, while you wind for 
 ever along a green lane following the bend of the 
 shore, the road as level as your hall pavement, and 
 green hills massed up with trees and verdure, over- 
 shadowing you continually. The world has a great 
 many sweet spots in it, and I have found many a one 
 which would make fitting scenery for the brightest act 
 of life's changeful drama — but here is one, where it 
 seems to me as difficult not to feel genial and kindly, 
 as for Taglioni to keep from floating away like a smoke- 
 curl when she is dancing in La Bayadere. 
 
 We passed a bridge and drew in a long breath to 
 try the difference in the air — we were in the republic 
 of Geneva. It smelt very much as it did in the do- 
 minions of his majesty of Sardinia — sweet-brier, haw- 
 thorn, violets and all. I used to think when I first came 
 from America, that the flowers (republicans by na- 
 ture as well as birds) were less fragrant under a mon- 
 archy. 
 
 Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south, hut 
 like other distinguished persons of whom we form an 
 opinion from the description of poets, the " monarch 
 of mountains" did not seem to me so very superior to 
 his fellows. After a look or two at him as we ap- 
 proached Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of 
 the cabriolet, and devoted my eyes to things more 
 within the scale of my affections — the scores of lovely 
 villas sprinkling the hills and valleys by which we ap- 
 proached the city. Sweet — sweet places they are to 
 be sure ! And then the month is May, and the straw- 
 bonneted and white-aproned girls, ladies and peasants 
 alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lov- 
 er-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes, 
 one servant passed us with a tri-cornered blue billet- 
 doux between his thumb and finger, the nightingales 
 were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown 
 roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of 
 sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresisti- 
 bly. I should like to see June out in Geneva. 
 
 The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Le- 
 man, began to " phiz" by sunrise directly under the 
 windows of our hotel. We were soon on the pier, 
 where our entrance into the boat was obstructed by a 
 weeping cluster of girls, embracing and parting very 
 unwillingly with a young lady of some eighteen years, 
 who was lovely enough to have been wept for by as 
 many grown-up gentlemen. Her own tears were un- 
 der better government, though her sealed lips showed 
 that she dared not trust herself with her voice. After 
 another and another lingering kiss, the boatman ex- 
 pressed some impatience, ancl she tore herself from 
 their arms and stepped into the waiting batteau. We 
 were soon along side the steamer, and sooner under 
 way, and then, having given one wave of her hand- 
 kerchief to the pretty and sad group on the shore, our 
 fair fellow-passenger gave way to her feelings, and 
 sinking upon a seat, burst into a passionate flood of 
 tears. There was no obtruding on such sorrow, and 
 the next hour or two were employed by my imagina- 
 tion in filling up the little drama of which we" had 
 seen but the touching conclusion. 
 
 I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the 
 " Winkelreid," in compliment to the vessel which 
 
 makes the same voyage in Cooper's " Headsman of 
 Berne." The day altogether had begun like a chap 
 ter in a romance. 
 
 " Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face," 
 but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over 
 its unruffled mirror, and the green uplands that rose 
 from its edge had a softness like dreamland upon their 
 verdure. I know not whether the tearful girl whose 
 head was drooping over the railing felt the sympathy, 
 but I could not help thanking nature for her in my 
 heart, the whole scene was so of the complexion of 
 her own feelings. I could have "thrown my ring in- 
 to the sea," like Policrates Samius, " to have cause 
 for sadness too." 
 
 The "Winkelreid" has (for a republican ste.amer) 
 
 rather the aristocratical arrangement of making those 
 
 who walk aft the funnel pay twice as much as those 
 
 who choose to promenade forward — for no earthly 
 
 reason that I can divine, other than that those who 
 
 I pay dearest have the full benefit of the oily gases from 
 
 the machinery, while the humbler passenger breathes 
 
 the air of heaven before it has passed through that 
 
 improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French 
 
 I ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a 
 
 fishing-rod and gun, and a coxcomb of a Swiss artist 
 
 I to whom I had taken a special aversion at Rome, from 
 
 j a criticism I overheard upon my favorite picture in the 
 
 Colonna, my friends and myself, were the exclusive 
 
 inhalers of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. 
 
 I A crowd of the ark's own miscellaneousness thronged 
 
 j the forecastle — and so you have the programmed' a 
 
 day on Lake Leman. 
 
 LETTER CXII. 
 
 LAKE LEMAN— AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENE- 
 VESE — STEAMBOAT ON THE RHONE — GIBBON AND ROUS- 
 SEAU — ADVENTURE OF THE LILIES — GENEVESE JEW- 
 ELLERS — RESIDENCE OF VOLTAIRE BTRON's NIGHT- 
 CAP — Voltaire's walking-stick and stockings. 
 
 The water of Lake Leman looks very like other 
 water, though Byron and Shelley were nearly drowned 
 in it ; and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side, 
 where we left three women and took up one man (the 
 village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no 
 Paradise, though Madame de Stael made it her resi- 
 dence. There are Paradises, however, with very short 
 distances between, all the way down the northern 
 shore ; and angels in them, if women are angels — a 
 specimen or two of the sex being visible with the aid 
 of the spyglass, in nearly every balcony and belvi- 
 dere, looking upon the water. The taste in country- 
 houses seems to be here very much the same as in New 
 England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle 
 style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress, 
 physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make 
 an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the 
 Leman. There is that subdued decency, that grave 
 respectableness, that black-coated, straight-haired, 
 saint-like kind of look which is universal in the small 
 towns of our country, and which is as unlike France 
 and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a methodist chap- 
 el. You would know the people of Geneva were 
 Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a dil- 
 igence. 
 
 I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tete-a- 
 tete breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzer- 
 land is the only place out of America where one gets 
 cream for his coffee. I cry Morges mercy on that 
 plea. 
 
 We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed 
 forty miles in five hours. This is not quite up to 
 the ilmty-milers on the Hudson, of which I see ac- 
 
176 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 counts in the papers, but we had the advantage of not 
 being blown up either going or coming, and of look- 
 ing for a continuous minute on a given spot in the 
 scenery. Then we had an iron railing between us and 
 that portion of the passengers who prefer garlic to 
 lavender-water, and we achieved our breakfast without 
 losing our tempers or complexions in a scramble. 
 The question of superiority between Swiss and Amer- 
 ican steamers, therefore, depends very much on the 
 value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as 
 my time is not measured in " diamond sparks," and 
 as my life and temper are the only gifts with which 
 fortune has blessed me, I prefer the Swiss. 
 
 Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last 
 chapter of his History of Rome — a circumstance 
 which he records with an affection. It is a spot of no 
 ordinary beauty, and the public promenade, where we 
 sat and looked over to Vevey and Chillon, and the 
 Rocks of Meillerie, and talked of Rousseau, and 
 agreed that it tvas a scene "faite pour une Julie, pour 
 une Claire, et pour un Saint Preux," is one of the pla- 
 ces where, if I were to " play statue," I should like 
 to grow to my seat, and compromise merely for eye- 
 sight. We have one thing against Lausanne, howev- 
 er — it is up hill and a mile from the water; and if 
 Gibbon walked often from Ouchet at noon, and "lard- 
 ed the way" as freely as we, I make myself certain 
 he was not the fat man his biographers have drawn 
 him. 
 
 There were some other circumstances at Lausanne 
 which interested us — but which criticism has decided 
 can not be obtruded upon the public. We looked 
 about for "Julie" and " Claire," spite of Rousseau's 
 " ne les y cherchez jms," and gave a blind beggar a sous 
 (all he asked) for a handful of lilies-of-the-valley, 
 pitying him ten times more than if he had lost his 
 eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on Lake Le- 
 man ! blind within sight of Mont Blanc ! We turned 
 back to drop another sous into his hat, as we reflected 
 upon it. 
 
 The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to 
 go to Vevey for Rousseau's sake, and as much for 
 Cooper's), took us up on its way to Geneva, and we 
 had the advantage of seeing the same scenery in a dif- 
 ferent light. Trees, houses, and mountains, are so 
 much finer seen against the sun, with the deep shad- 
 ows toward you ! 
 
 Sitting by the stern, was a fat and fair Frenchwo- 
 man, who, like me, had bought lilies, and about as 
 many. With a very natural facility of dramatic po- 
 sition, I imagined it had established a kind of sympa- 
 thy between us, and proposed to myself, somewhere 
 in the fair hours, to make it serve as an introduction. 
 She went into the cabin after a while, to lunch on cut- 
 lets and beer, and returned to the deck without her 
 lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach of her four 
 fingers ; and as I was making up my mind to offer to 
 replace her loss, she coolly took them up, and without 
 even a French monosyllable, commenced throwing 
 them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she 
 had mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew 
 over the tafferel, the gentleman who paid for la bierre 
 et les cottelettes, husband or lover, came up with a 
 smile and a flourish, and reminded her that she had 
 left her bouquet between the mustard and the beer- 
 bottle. Sequitur, a scene. The lady apologized, and 
 I disclaimed ; and the more I insisted on the delight 
 she had given me by throwing my pretty lilies into 
 Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy, 
 and insisted on my being inconsolable. One should 
 come abroad to know how much may be said upon 
 throwing overboard a bunch of lilies ! 
 
 The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a 
 storm, but the " darkened Jura" was merely dim, and 
 the "live thunder" waited for another Childe Harold. 
 We were at Geneva at seven, and had the whole pop- 
 
 ulation to witness our debarkation. The pier where 
 we landed, and the new bridge across the outlet of 
 the Rhone, are the evening promenade. 
 
 The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an 
 aristocratic class of merchants. They are to be sought 
 in chambers, and their treasures are produced box by 
 box, from locked drawers, and bought, if at all, with- 
 out the pleasure of " beating down." They are, with- 
 al, a gentlemanly class of men ; and, of the principal 
 one, as many stories are told as of Beau Brummel. 
 He has made a fortune by his shop, and has the man- 
 ners of a man who can afford to buy the jewels out of 
 a king's crown. 
 
 We were sitting at the table d'hote, with about forty 
 people, on the first day of our arrival, when the ser- 
 vant brought us each a gilt-edged note, sealed with an 
 elegant device ; invitations, we presumed, to a ball, at 
 least. Mr. So-and-so (I forget the name), begged 
 pardon for the liberty he had taken, and requested us 
 to call at his shop in the Rue de Rhone, and look at 
 his varied assortment of bijouterie. A card was en- 
 closed, and the letter in courtly English. We went, 
 of course ; as who would not? The cost to him was 
 a sheet of paper, and the trouble of sending to the 
 hotel for a list of the new arrivals. I recommend the 
 system to all callow Yankees, commencing a " push- 
 ing business." 
 
 Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it 
 has quite the complexion of an agreeable place. The 
 environs are, of course, unequalled, and the town it- 
 self is a stirring and gay capital, full of brilliant shops, 
 handsome streets and promenades, where everything 
 is to be met but pretty women. Female beauty would 
 come to a good market anywhere in Switzerland. We 
 have seen but one pretty girl (our Niobe of the steam- 
 er) since we lost sight of Lombardy. They dress 
 well here, and seem modest, and have withal an air of 
 style, but of some five hundred ladies, whom I may 
 have seen in the valley of the Rhone and about this 
 neighborhood, it would puzzle a modern Apelles to 
 compose an endurable Venus. I understand a fair 
 countrywoman of ours is about taking up her resi- 
 dence in Geneva ; and if Lake Leman does not " woo 
 her," and the " live thunder" leap down from Jura, 
 the jewellers, at least, will crown her queen of the 
 Canton, and give her the tiara at cost. 
 
 I hope "Maria Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs" will 
 forgive me for having gone to Ferney in an omnibus ! 
 Voltaire lived just under the Jura, on a hill-side, over- 
 looking Geneva and the lake, with a landscape before 
 him in the foreground that a painter could not im- 
 prove, and Mont Blanc and its neighbor mountains, 
 the breaks to his horizon. At six miles off, Geneva 
 looks very beautifully, astride the exit of the Rhone 
 from the lake ; and the lake itself looks more like a 
 broad river, with its edges of verdure and its outer- 
 frame of mountains. We walked up an avenue to a 
 large old villa, embosomed in trees, where an old gar- 
 dener appeared, to show us the grounds. We said 
 the proper thing under the tree planted by the philos- 
 opher, fell in love with the view from twenty points, 
 met an English lady in one of the arbors, the wife of 
 a French nobleman to whom the house belongs, and 
 were bowed into the hall by the old man and handed 
 over to his daughter to be shown the curiosities of the 
 interior. These were Voltaire's rooms, just as he 
 left them. The ridiculous picture of his own apoth- 
 eosis, painted under his own direction, and represent- 
 ing him offering his Henriade to Apollo, with all the 
 authors of his time dying of envy at his feet, occupies 
 the most conspicuous place over his chamber-door. 
 Within was his bed, the curtains nibbled quite bare 
 by relic-gathering travellers; a portrait of the Emper- 
 ess Catherine, embroidered by her own hand, and pre- 
 sented to Voltaire ; his own portrait and Frederick the 
 Great's, and many of the philosophers', including 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 177 
 
 Franklin. A little monument stands opposite the 
 fireplace, with the inscription u ?non esprit est partout, 
 et mon cceur est id." It is a snug little dormitory, 
 opening with one window to the west ; and, to those 
 who admire the character of the once illustrious oc- 
 cupant, a place for very tangible musing. They 
 showed us afterward his walking-stick, a pair of silk- 
 stockings he had half worn, and a night-cap. The 
 last article is getting quite fashionable as a relic of ge- 
 nius. They show Byron's at Venice. 
 
 LETTER CXIII. 
 
 PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES — TRAV- 
 ELLING COMPANIONS AT THE SIMPLON — CUSTOM- 
 HOUSE COMFORTS TRIALS OF TEMPER — CONQUERED 
 
 AT LAST ! — DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, 
 AND SWITZERLAND— FORCE OF POLITENESS. 
 
 Whether it was that I had offended the genius of 
 the spot, by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I 
 never can resist in such places, to travesty and ridicule 
 the mock solemnity with which they are exhibited, 
 certain it is that I left Ferney, without having encoun- 
 tered, even in the shape of a more serious thought, 
 the spirit of Voltaire. One reads the third canto of 
 Childe Harold in his library, and feels as if "Lau- 
 sanne and Ferney" should be very interesting places to 
 the traveller, and yet when he is shown Gibbon's bow- 
 er by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his 
 trousers the while, and the nightcap that enclosed the 
 busy brain from which sprang the fifty brilliant tomes 
 on his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through 
 her drilled description, with her eye on the silver 
 douceur in his fingers, he is very likely to rub his hand 
 over his eyes, and disclaim, quite honestly, all preten- 
 sions to enthusiasm. And yet, 1 dare say, I shall have 
 a great deal of pleasure in remembering that I have 
 been at Ferney. As an English traveller would say, 
 " I have done Voltaire !" 
 
 Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to 
 Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it, re- 
 gretting not having seen Sismondi and Simond, and a 
 whole coterie of scholars and authors, whose home it 
 is, and with a mind quite made up to return to Swit- 
 zerland, when my beaux jours of love, money, and leis- 
 ure, shall have arrived, I crossed the Rhone at sunrise, 
 and turned my face toward Paris. 
 
 The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pass 
 of the Jura. We were all day getting up the moun- 
 tains by roads that would make me anxious if there 
 were a neck in the carriage I would rather should not 
 be broken. My company, fortunately, consisted of 
 three Scotch spinsters, who would try any precipice 
 of the Jura, I think, if there were a lover at the bot- 
 tom. If the horses had backed in the wrong place, it 
 would have been to all three, I am sure, a deliverance 
 from a world in whose volume of happiness 
 
 " their leaf 
 By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced." 
 
 As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special 
 providence for bachelors, even if they were of impor- 
 tance enough to merit a care. Spinsters and bache- 
 lors, we all arrived safely at Rousses, the entrance to 
 France, and here, if I were to write before repeating 
 the alphabet, you would see what a pen could do in a 
 passion. 
 
 The carriage was stopped by three custom-house 
 officers, and taken under a shed, where the doors were 
 closed behind it. We were then required to dismount 
 and give our honors that we had nothing new in the 
 way of clothes; no "jewelry; no unused manufac- 
 tures of wool, thread, or lace ; no silks or floss silk ; 
 no polished metals, plated or varnished ; no toys, (ex- 
 12 
 
 cept a heart each); nor leather, glass, or crystal man 
 ufactures." So far, I kept my temper. 
 
 Our trunks, carpet-bags, hat-boxes, dressing-cases, 
 and portfeuilles, were then dismounted and critically 
 examined — every dress and article unfolded ; shirts, 
 cravats, unmentionables and all, and searched thor- 
 oughly by two ruffians, whose fingers were no im- 
 provement upon the labors of the washerwoman. In 
 an hour's time or so we were allowed to commence re- 
 packing. Still, I kept my temper. 
 
 We were then requested to walk into a private room, 
 while the ladies, for the same purpose, were taken, by 
 a woman, into another. Here we were requested to 
 unbutton our coats, and, begging pardon for the liber- 
 ty, these courteous gentlemen thrust their hands into 
 our pockets, felt in our bosoms, pantaloons, and shoes, 
 examined our hats, and even eyed our " pet curls" 
 very earnestly, in the expectation of finding us cram- 
 med with Geneva jewelry. Still, I kept my temper. 
 
 Our trunks were then put upon the carriage, and a 
 sealed string put upon them, which we were not to cut 
 till we arrived in Paris. (Nine days !) They then de- 
 manded to be paid for the sealing, and the fellows who 
 had unladen the carriage were to be paid for their la- 
 bor. This done, we were permitted to drive on. Still. 
 I kept my temper! 
 
 We arrived, in the evening, at Morez, in a heavy 
 rain. We were sitting around a comfortable fire, and 
 the soup and fish were just brought upon the table. 
 A soldier entered and requested us to walk to the po- 
 lice-office. " But it rains hard, and our dinner is just 
 ready." The man in the mustache was inexorable. 
 The commissary closed his office at eight, and we 
 must go instantly to certify to our passports, and get 
 new ones for the interior. Cloaks and umbrellas were 
 brought, and, bon grc, mal gre, we walked half a mile 
 in the mud and rain to a dirty commissary, who kept 
 us waiting in the dark fifteen minutes, and then, ma- 
 king out a description of the person of each, demand- 
 ed half a dollar for the new passport, and permitted us 
 to wade back to our dinner. This had occupied an 
 hour, and no improvement to soup or fish. Still, I 
 kept my temper — rather ! 
 
 The next morning, while we were forgetting the 
 annoyances of the previous night, and admiring the 
 new-pranked livery of May by a glorious sunshine, a 
 civil arretez vous brought up the carriage to the door 
 of another custom-house ! The order was to dismount, 
 and down came once more carpet-bags, hat-boxes, and 
 dressing-cases, and a couple of hours were lost again 
 in a fruitless search for contraband articles. When it 
 was all through, and the officers and men paid as be- 
 fore, we were permitted to proceed with the gracious 
 assurance that we should not be troubled again till we 
 got to Paris ! I bade the commissary good morning, 
 felicitated him on the liberal institutions of his coun- 
 try and his zeal in the exercise of his own agreeable 
 vocation, and — I am free to confess — lost my temper! 
 Job and Xantippe's husband! could I help it! 
 
 I confess I expected better things of France. In 
 Italy, where you come to a new dukedom every half- 
 day, you do not much mind opening your trunks, for 
 they are petty princes and need the pitiful revenue of 
 contraband articles and the officer's fee. Yet even 
 they leave the person of the traveller sacred ; and 
 where in the world, except in France, is a party trav- 
 elling evidently for pleasure subjected twice at the 
 same border to the degrading indignity of a search ! 
 Ye " hunters of Kentucky"— thank heaven that you 
 can go into Tennessee without having your "plunder" 
 overhauled and your pockets searched by successive 
 parties of scoundrels, whom you are to pay "by order 
 of the government" for their trouble ! 
 
 The Simplon, which you pass in a day, divides two 
 nations, each other's physical and moral antipodes. 
 
178 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 The handsome, picturesque, lazy, unprincipled Ital- 
 ian, is left in the morning in his own dirty and exorbi- 
 tant inn ; and, on the evening of the same day, having 
 crossed but a chain of mountains, you find yourself 
 in a clean auberge, nestled in the bosom of a Swiss 
 valley, another language spoken around you, and in 
 the midst of a people who seem to require the virtues 
 they possess to compensate them for more than their 
 share of uncomeliness. You travel a day or two down 
 the valley of the Rhone, and when you are become 
 reconciled to cretins and goitres, and ill-dressed and 
 worse formed men and women, you pass in another 
 single day the chain of the Jura, and find yourself in 
 France — a country as different from both Switzerland 
 and Italy as they are from each other. How is it that 
 these diminutive cantons preserve so completely their 
 nationality ? It seems a problem to the traveller who 
 passes from one to the other without leaving his car- 
 riage. 
 
 One is compelled to like France in spite of himself. 
 You are no sooner over the Jura than you are enslav- 
 ed, past all possible ill-humor, by the universal polite- 
 ness. You stop for the night at a place, which, as 
 my friend remarked, resembles an inn only in its in- 
 attention, and after a bad supper, worse beds, and every 
 kind of annoyance, down comes my lady-hostess in 
 the morning to receive her coin, and if you can fly 
 into a passion with such a cap, and such a smile, and 
 such a " bon jour,' 1 ' 1 you are of less penetrable stuff 
 than man is commonly made of. 
 
 I loved Italy, but detested the Italians. I detest 
 France, but I can not help liking the French. " Po- 
 liteness is among the virtues," says the philosopher. 
 Rather, it takes the place of them all. What can you 
 believe ill of a people whose slightest look toward you 
 is made up of grace and kindness. 
 
 We are dawdling along thirty miles a day through 
 Burgundy, sick to death of the bare vine-stakes, and 
 longing to see a festooned vineyard of Lombardy. 
 France is such an ugly country ! The diligences 
 lumber by, noisy and ludicrous ; the cow-tenders wear 
 cocked hats ; the beggars are in the true French ex- 
 treme, theatrical in all their misery; the climate is 
 rainy and cold, and as unlike that of Italy as if a 
 thousand leagues separated them, and the roads are 
 long, straight, dirty, and uneven. There is neither 
 pleasure nor comfort, neither scenery nor antiquities, 
 nor accommodations for the weary — nothing but po- 
 liteness. And it is odd how it reconciles you to it all. 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 ARIS AND LONDON — REASONS FOR LIKING PARIS — JOY- 
 
 OtJSNESS OF ITS CITIZENS — LAFAYETTE'S FUNERAL 
 
 ROYAL RESPECT AND GRATITUDE — ENGLAND — DOVER 
 — ENGLISH NEATNESS AND COMFORT, AS DISPLAYED 
 IN THE HOTELS, WAITERS, FIRES, BELL-ROPES, LAND- 
 SCAPES, WINDOW-CURTAINS, TEA-KETTLES, STAGE- 
 COACHES, HORSES, AND EVERYTHING ELSE — SPECIMEN 
 
 OF ENGLISH RESERVE THE GENTLEMAN DRIVER OF 
 
 FASHION A CASE FOR MRS. TROLLOPE. 
 
 It is pleasani to get back to Paris. One meets ev- 
 erybody there one ever saw ; and operas and coffee, 
 Taglioni and Leontine Fay, the belles and the Boule- 
 vards, the shops, spectacles, life, lions, and lures to 
 every species of pleasure, rather give you the impres- 
 sion that, outside the barriers of Paris, time is wasted 
 in travel. 
 
 What pleasant idlers they look ! The very shop- 
 keepers seem standing behind their counters for 
 amusement. The soubrette who sells you a cigar, or 
 ties a crape on your arm (it was for poor old Lafayette), 
 is coiffed as for a ball ; the frotteur who takes the dust 
 
 from your boots, sings his lovesong as he brushes 
 away, the old man has his bouquet in his bosom, and 
 the beggar looks up at the new statue of Napoleon in 
 the Place Vendome — everybody has some touch of 
 fancy, some trace of a heart on the look-out, at least, 
 for pleasure. 
 
 I was at Lafayette's funeral. They buried the old 
 patriot like a criminal. Fixed bayonets before and 
 behind his hearse, his own National Guard disarmed, 
 and troops enough to beleaguer a city, were the hon- 
 ors paid by the " citizen king" to the man who had 
 made him ! The indignation, the scorn, the bitter- 
 ness, expressed on every side among the people, and 
 the ill-smothered cries of disgust as the two empty 
 royal carriages went by, in the funeral train, seemed 
 to me strong enough to indicate a settled and univer- 
 sal hostility to the government. 
 
 I met Dr. Bowring on the Boulevard after the fu- 
 neral was over. I had not seen him for two years, but 
 he could talk of nothing but the great event of the 
 day — " You have come in time," he said, " to see 
 how they carried the old general to his grave ! What 
 would they say to this in America ? Well — let them 
 go on ! We shall see what will come of it ! They 
 have buried Liberty and Lafayette together — our last 
 hope in Europe is quite dead with him !" 
 
 After three delightful days in Paris we took the 
 northern diligence ; and, on the second evening, hav- 
 ing passed hastily through Montreuil, Abbeville, Bou- 
 logne, and voted the road the dullest couple of hun- 
 dred miles we had seen in our travels, we were set 
 down in Calais. A stroll through some very indiffer- 
 ent streets, a farewell visit to the last French cafe we 
 were likely to see for a long time, and some unsatis- 
 factory inquiries about Beau Brummel, who is said to 
 live here still, filled up till bedtime our last day on 
 the continent. 
 
 The celebrated Countess of Jersey was on board the 
 steamer, and some forty or fifty plebeian stomachs 
 shared with her fashionable ladyship and ourselves the 
 horrors of a passage across the channel. It is rather 
 the most disagreeble sea I ever traversed, though I 
 have seen "the Euxine," " the roughest sea the trav- 
 eller e'er s in," etc., according to Don Juan. 
 
 I was lying on my back in a berth when the steamer 
 reached her moorings at Dover, and had neither eyes 
 nor disposition to indulge in the proper sentiment on 
 approaching the " white cliffs" of my fatherland. I 
 crawled on deck, and was met by a wind as cold as 
 December, and a crowd of rosy English faces on the 
 pier, wrapped in cloaks and shawls, and indulging cu- 
 riosity evidently at the expense of a shiver. It was 
 the first of June ! 
 
 My companion led the way to a hotel, and we were 
 introduced by English waiters (I had not seen such a 
 thing in three years, and it was quite like being wait- 
 ed on by gentlemen), to two blazing coal fires in the 
 " coffee-room" of the " Ship." Oh what a comfort- 
 able place it appeared ! A rich Turkey carpet snug- 
 ly fitted, nice-rubbed mahogany tables, the morning 
 papers from London, bellropes that would ring the 
 bell, doors that would shut, a landlady that spoke Eng- 
 lish, and was kind and civil ; and, though there were 
 eight or ten people in the room, no noise above the 
 rustle of a newspaper, and positively, rich red damask 
 curtains, neither second-hand nor shabby, to the win- 
 dows ! A greater contrast than this to the things that 
 answer to them on the continent, could scarcely be 
 imagined. 
 
 Malgre all my observations on the English, whom 
 I have found everywhere the most open-hearted and 
 social people in the world, they are said by themselves 
 and others to be just the contrary ; and, presuming 
 they were different in England, I had made up my 
 mind to seal my lips in all public places, and be con- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 17£ 
 
 scious of nobody's existence but my own. There 
 were several elderly persons dining at the different ta- 
 bles ; and one party, of a father and son, waited on by 
 their own servants in livery. Candles were brought 
 in, the different cloths were removed; and, as my com- 
 panion had gone to bed, I took up a newspaper to keep 
 me company over my wine. In the course of an 
 hour, some remark had been addressed to me, provo- 
 cative of conversation, by almost every individual in 
 the room ! The subjects of discussion soon became 
 general, and I have seldom passed a more social and 
 agreeable evening. And so much for the first speci- 
 men of English reserve! 
 
 The fires were burning brilliantly, and the coffee- 
 room was in the nicest order when we descended to 
 our breakfast at six the next morning. The tea-kettle 
 sung on the hearth, the toast was hot, and done to a 
 turn, and the waiter was neither sleepy nor uncivil — 
 all, again, very unlike a morning at a hotel in la belle 
 France. 
 
 The coach rattled up to the door punctually at the 
 hour ; and, while they were putting on my way-worn 
 baggage, 1 stood looking in admiration at the carriage 
 and horses. They were four beautiful bays, in small, 
 neat harness of glazed leather, brass-mounted, their 
 coats shining like a racer's, their small, blood-looking 
 heads curbed up to stand exactly together, and their 
 hoofs blacked and brushed with the polish of a gentle- 
 man's boots. The coach was gaudily painted, the only 
 thing out of taste about it ; but it was admirably built, 
 the wheel-horses were quite under the coach-man's 
 box, and the whole affair, though it would carry twelve 
 or fourteen people, covered less ground than a French 
 one-horse cabriolet. It was altogether quite a study. 
 
 We mounted to the top of the coach ; " all right," 
 said the ostler, and away shot the four fine creatures, 
 turning their small ears, and stepping together with 
 the ease of a cat, at ten miles in the hour. The dri- 
 ver was dressed like a Broadway idler, and sat in his 
 place, and held his " ribands" and his tandemwhip 
 with a confident air of superiority, as if he were quite 
 convinced that he and his team were beyond criticism 
 — and so they were ! I could not but smile at con- 
 Hasting his silence and the speed and ease with which 
 we went along, with the clumsy, cumbrous diligence 
 or vetturino, and the crying, whipping, cursing and 
 ill-appointed postillions of France and Italy. It seems 
 odd, in a two hours' passage, to pass over such strong 
 lines of national difference — so near, and not even a 
 shading of one into the other. 
 
 England is described always very justly, and always 
 in the same words : " it is all one garden." There is 
 not a cottage between Dover and London (seventy 
 miles), where a poet might not be happy to live. I 
 saw a hundred little spots I coveted with quite a heart- 
 ache. There was no poverty on the road. Every- 
 body seemed employed, and everybody well-made and 
 healthy. The relief from the deformity and disease 
 of the way-side beggars of the continent was very 
 striking. 
 
 We were at Canterbury before I had time to get ac- 
 customed to my seat. The horses had been changed 
 twice ; the coach, it seemed to me, hardly stopping 
 while it was done ; way-passengers were taken up and 
 put down, with their baggage, without a word, and in 
 half a minute; money was tossed to the keeper of the 
 turnpike gate as we dashed through ; the wheels went 
 over the smooth road without noise, and with scarce 
 a sense of motion — it was the perfection of travel. 
 
 The new driver from Canterbury rather astonished 
 me. He drove into London every day, and was more 
 of a " swell:' 1 He owned the first team himself, four 
 blood horses of great beauty, and it was a sight to see 
 him drive them ! His language was free from all slang, 
 and very gentlemanlike and well chosen, and he dis- 
 cussed everything. He found out that I was an Amer- 
 
 ican, and said we did not think enough of the memo- 
 ry of Washington. Leaving his bones in the miser- 
 able brick tomb, of which he had read descriptions, 
 was not, in his opinion, worthy of a country like mine. 
 He went on to criticise Julia Grisi (the new singer just 
 then setting London on fire), hummed airs from " II 
 Pirata," to show her manner; sang an English song 
 like Braham ; gave a decayed count, who sat on the 
 box, some very sensible advice about the management 
 of a wild son ; drew a comparison between French 
 and Italian women (he had travelled) ; told us who the 
 old count was in very tolerable French, and preferred 
 Edmund Kean and Fanny Kemble to all actors in the 
 world. His taste and his philosophy, like his driving, 
 were quite unexceptionable. He was, withal, very 
 handsome, and had the easy and respectful manners of 
 a well-bred person. It seemed very odd to give him 
 a shilling at the end of the journey. 
 
 At Chatham we took up a very elegantly dressed 
 young man, who had come down on a fishing excur- 
 sion. He was in the army, and an Irishman. We had 
 not been half an hour on the seat together, before he 
 had discovered, by so many plain questions, that I was 
 an American, a stranger in England, and an acquaint- 
 ance of a whole regiment of his friends in Malta and 
 Corfu. If this had been a Yankee, thought I, what 
 a chapter it would have made for Basil Hall or Mad- 
 ame Trollope ! With all his inquisitiveness I liked 
 my companion, and half-accepted his offer to drive me 
 down to Epsom the next day to the races. I know no 
 American who would have beaten that on a stage- 
 coach acquaintance. 
 
 LETTER CXV. 
 
 FIRST VIEW OF LONDON — THE KING'S BIRTH-DAY — 
 
 PROCESSION OF MAIL-COACHES — REGENT STREET 
 
 LADY BLESSINGTON — THE ORIGINAL PELHAM BUL- 
 
 WER, THE NOVELIST — JOHN GALT — D'lSRAELI, THE 
 AUTHOR OF VIVIAN GREY — RECOLLECTIONS OF BY- 
 RON — INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN OPINIONS ON ENG- 
 LISH LITERATURE. 
 
 London. — From the top of Shooter's Hill we got 
 our first view of London — an indistinct, architectural 
 mass, extending all round to the horizon, and half en- 
 veloped in a dim and lurid smoke. " That is St. 
 Paul's ! — there is Westminster Abbey ! — there is the 
 Tower of London!" What directions were these to 
 follow for the first time with the eye! 
 
 From Blackheath (seven or eight miles from the 
 centre of London), the beautiful hedges disappeared, 
 and it was one continued mass of buildings. The 
 houses were amazingly small, a kind of thing that 
 would -do for an object in an imitation perspective park, 
 but the soul of neatness pervaded them. Trellises 
 were nailed between the little windows, roses quite 
 overshadowed the low doors, a painted fence enclosed 
 the hand's breadth of grass-plot, and very, oh, very 
 sweet faces bent over lapfuls of work beneath the snowy 
 and looped -up curtains. It was all home-like and 
 amiable. There was an affectionatencss in the mere 
 outside of every one of them. 
 
 After crossing Waterloo Bridge, it was busy work 
 for the eyes. The brilliant shops, the dense crowds 
 of people, the absorbed air of every passenger, the 
 lovely women, the cries, the flying vehicles of every 
 description, passing with the most dangerous speed — 
 accustomed as I am to large cities, it quite made me 
 dizzy. We got into a "jarvey" at the coach-office, 
 and in half an hour I was in comfortable quarters, 
 with windows looking down St. James street, and the 
 most agreeable leaf of my life to turn over. " Great 
 emotions interfere little with the mechanical operations 
 
180 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 of life," however, and I dressed and dined, though it 
 was my first hour in London. 
 
 I was sitting in the little parlor alone over a fried 
 sole and a mutton cutlet, when the waiter came in, 
 and pleading the crowded state of the hotel, asked my 
 permission to spread the other side of the table for a 
 clergyman. I have a kindly preference for the cloth, 
 and made not the slightest objection. Enter a fat 
 man, with top-boots and a hunting-whip, rosy as Bac- 
 chus, and excessively out of breath with mounting 
 one flight of stairs. Beefsteak and potatoes, a pot of 
 porter, and a bottle of sherry followed close on his 
 heels. With a single apology for the intrusion, the 
 reverend gentleman fell to, and we ate and drank for a 
 while in true English silence. 
 
 " From Oxford, sir, I presume," he said at last, 
 pushing back bis plate, with an air of satisfaction. 
 " No, I had never the pleasure of seeing Oxford." 
 "R — e — ally ! may I take a glass of wine with you, 
 sir?" 
 
 We got on swimmingly. He would not believe I 
 had never been in England till the day before, but his 
 cordiality was no colder for that. We exchanged port 
 and sherry, and a most amicable understanding found 
 its way down with the wine. Our table was near the 
 window, and a great crowd began to collect at the cor- 
 ner of St. James' street. It was the king's birth-day, 
 and the people were thronging to seethe nobility come 
 in state from the royal levee. The show was less 
 splendid than the same thing in Rome or Vienna, but 
 it excited far more of my admiration. Gaudiness and 
 tinsel were exchanged for plain richness and perfect 
 fitness in the carriages and harness, while the horses 
 were incomparably finer. My friend pointed out to 
 me the different liveries as they turned the corner into 
 Piccadilly, the duke of Wellington's among others. 
 I looked hard to see his grace ; but the two pale and 
 beautiful faces on the back seat, carried nothing like 
 the military nose on the handles of the umbrellas. 
 
 The annual procession of mail-coaches followed, 
 and it was hardly less brilliant. The drivers and 
 guard in their bright red and gold uniforms, the admi- 
 rable horses driven so beautifully, the neat harness, 
 the exactness with which the room of each horse was 
 calculated, and the small space in which he worked, 
 and the compactness and contrivance of the coaches, 
 formed altogether one of the most interesting specta- 
 cles I have ever seen. My friend, the clergyman, with 
 whom I had walked out to see them pass, criticised 
 the different teams con amore, but in language which 
 I did not always understand. I asked him once for 
 an explanation ; but he looked rather grave, and said 
 something about " gammon," evidently quite sure that 
 my ignorance of London was a mere quiz. 
 
 We walked down Piccadilly, and turned into, be- 
 yond all comparison, the most handsome street I ever 
 saw. The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of Rome, the 
 Kohl-market of Vienna, the Rue de la Paix and Bou- 
 levards of Paris, have each impressed me strongly 
 with their magnificence, but they are really nothing to 
 Regent-street. I had merely time to get a glance at 
 it before dark ; but for breadth and convenience, for 
 the elegance and variety of the buildings, though all 
 of the same scale and material, and for the brilliancy 
 and expensiveness of the shops, it seemed to me quite 
 absurd to compare it with anything between New 
 York and Constantinople — Broadway and the Hippo- 
 drome included. 
 
 It is the custom for the king's tradesmen to illumi- 
 nate their shops on his majesty's birth-night, and the 
 principal streets on our return were in ablaze of light. 
 The crowd was immense. None but the lower order 
 seemed abroad, and I can not describe to you the effect 
 on my feelings on hearing my language spoken by 
 every man, woman, and child, about me. It seemed a 
 completely foreign country in every other respect, dif- 
 
 ferent from what I had imagined, different from my 
 own and all that I had seen, and coming to it last, it 
 seemed to me the farthest off and strangest country 
 of all — and yet the little sweep, who went laughing 
 through the crowd, spoke a language that 1 had heard 
 attempted in vain by thousands of educated people, 
 and that I had grown to consider next to unattainable 
 by others, and almost useless to myself. Still, it did 
 not make me feel at home. Everything else about me 
 was too new. It was like some mysterious change in 
 my own ears — a sudden power of comprehension, 
 such as a man might feel who was cured suddenly of 
 deafness. You can scarcely enter into my feelings 
 till you have had the changes of French, Italian, Ger- 
 man, Greek, Turkish, Illyrian, and the mixtures and 
 dialects of each, rung upon your hearing almost ex- 
 clusively, as I have for years. I wandered about as if I 
 were exercising some supernatural faculty in a dream. 
 A friend in Italy had kindly given me a letter to 
 Lady Blessington, and with a strong curiosity to see 
 this celebrated lady, I called on the second day after 
 my arrival in London. It was " deep i' the after- 
 noon," but I had not yet learned the full meaning of 
 " town hours." " Her ladyship had not come down 
 to breakfast." I gave the letter and my address to the 
 powdered footman, and had scarce reached home when 
 a note arrived inviting me to call the same evening 
 at ten. 
 
 In a long library lined alternately with splendidly 
 bound books and mirrors, and with a deep window of 
 the breadth of the room, opening upon Hyde Park, 1 
 found Lady Blessington alone. The picture to my 
 eye as the door opened was a very lovely one. A wo- 
 man of remarkable beauty half buried in a fauteuil of 
 yellow satin, reading by a magnificent lamp, suspend- 
 ed from the centre of the arched ceiling ; sofas, 
 couches, ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a 
 crowded sumptuousness through the room ; enamel 
 tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles in 
 every corner, and a delicate white hand relieved on the 
 back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by the 
 blaze of its diamond rings. As the servant mentioned 
 my name, she rose and gave me her hand very cor- 
 dially, and a gentleman entering immediately after, 
 she presented me to her son-in-law, Count D'Orsay, 
 the well known Pelham of London, and certainly the 
 most splendid specimen of a man and a well-dressed 
 one that I had ever seen. Tea was brought in imme- 
 diately, and conversation went swimmingly on. 
 
 Her ladyship's inquiries were principally about 
 America, of which, from long absence I knew very 
 little. She was extremely curious to know the de- 
 grees of reputation the present popular authors of 
 England enjoy among us, particularly Bulwer, Gait, 
 and D'lsraeli (the author of Vivian Grey). " If you 
 will come to-morrow night," she said, "you will see 
 Bulwer. I am delighted that he is popular in Ameri- 
 ca. He is envied and abused by all the literary men 
 of London, for nothing, I believe, except that he gets 
 five hundred pounds for his books and they fifty, and 
 knowing this, he chooses to assume a pride (some 
 people call it puppyism), which is only the armor of a 
 sensitive mind, afraid of a wound. He is to his friends 
 the most frank and gay creature in the world, and 
 open to boyishness with those who he thinks under- 
 stand and value him. He has a brother, Henry, who 
 is as clever as himself in a different vein, and is just 
 now publishing a book on the present state of France. 
 Bulwer's wife, you know, is one of the most beautiful 
 women in London, and his house is the resort of both 
 fashion and talent. He is just now hard at work on a 
 new book, the subject of which is the last days of 
 Pompeii. The hero is a Roman dandy, who wastes 
 himself in luxury, till this great catastrophe rouses 
 him and develops a character of the noblest capabili- 
 ties. Is Gait much liked ?" 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 181 
 
 t answered to the best of my knowledge that he 
 was not. His life of Byron was a stab at the dead 
 body of the noble poet, which, for one, I never could 
 forgive, and his books were clever, but vulgar. He 
 was evidently not a gentleman in his mind. This was 
 the opinion I had formed in America, and I had never 
 heard another. <• . . t 
 
 " I am sorry for it," said Lady B., "for he is the 
 dearest and best old man in the world. I know him 
 well. He is just on the verge of the grave, but comes 
 to see me now and then, and if you had known how 
 shockingly Byron treated him, you would only won- 
 der at his sparing his memory so much." 
 
 " Nil morluis~nisi bonum" I thought would have 
 been a better course. If he had reason to dislike 
 him, he had better not have written since he was dead. 
 
 " Perhaps — perhaps. But Gait has been all his life 
 miserably poor, and lived by his books. That must 
 be his apology. Do you know the D'Israeli's in 
 America ?" 
 
 I assured her ladyship that the " Curiosities of Lit- 
 erature," by the father, and " Vivian Grey and Con- 
 tarini Fleming," by the son, were universally known. 
 
 " I am pleased at that, too, for I like them both. 
 D'Israeli the elder, came here with his son the other 
 night. It would have delighted you to see the old 
 man's pride in him. He is very fond of him, and as 
 he was going away, he patted him on the head, and 
 said to me, " take care of him, Lady Blessington, for 
 my sake. He is a clever lad, but he wants ballast. 1 1 
 am glad he has the honor to know you, for you will 
 check him sometimes when I am away !" D'Israeli, j 
 the elder, lives in the country, about twenty miles j 
 from town, and seldom comes up to London. He is 
 a very plain old man in his manners, as plain as his 
 son is the reverse. D'Israeli, the younger, is quite 
 his own character of Vivian Grey, crowded with tal- 
 ent, but very soigyit of his curls, and a bit of a cox- 
 comb. There is no reverse about him, however, and 
 he is the only joyous dandy I ever saw." 
 
 I asked if the account I had seen in some American 
 paper of a literary celebration at Canandaigua, and 
 the engraving of her ladyship's name with some others 
 upon a rock, was not a quiz. 
 
 "Oh, by no means. I was equally flattered and 
 amused by the whole affair. I have a great idea of 
 taking a trip to America to see it. Then the letter, 
 commencing ' Most charming countess — for charm- 
 ing you must be since you have written the conversa- 
 tions of Lord Byron' — oh, it was quite delightful. I 
 have shown it to everybody. By the way, I receive a 
 great many letters from America, from people I never 
 heard of, written in the most extraordinary style of 
 compliment, apparently in perfectly good faith. I 
 hardly know what to make of them." 
 
 I accounted for it by the perfect seclusion in which 
 great numbers of cultivated people live in our coun- 
 try, who, having neither intrigue, nor fashion, nor 
 twenty other things to occupy their minds as in Eng- 
 land, depend entirely upon books, and consider an 
 author who has given them pleasure as a friend. 
 America, I said, has probably more literary enthusiasts 
 than any country in the world ; and there are thou- 
 sands of romantic minds in the interior of New Eng- 
 land, who know perfectly every writer this side the 
 water, and hold them all in affectionate veneration, 
 scarcely conceivable by a sophisticated European. If 
 it were not for such readers, literature would be the 
 most thankless of vocations. I, for one, would never 
 write another line. 
 
 " And do you think these are the people who write 
 to me? If I could think so, I should be exceedingly 
 happy. People in England are refined down to such 
 heartlessness — criticism, private and public, is so in- 
 terested and so cold, that it is really delightful to know 
 there is a more generous tribunal. Tndeed I think all 
 
 our authors now are beginning to write for America. 
 We think already a great deal of your praise or 
 censure." 
 
 I asked if her ladyship had known manv Amer 
 icans. 
 
 "Not in London, but a great many abroad. I was 
 with Lord Blessington in his yacht at Naples, when 
 the American fleet was lying there, eight or ten years 
 ago, and we were constantly on board your ships. I 
 knew Commodore Creighton and Captain Deacon ex- 
 tremely well, and liked them particularly. They 
 were with us, either on board the yacht or the frigate 
 every evening, and I remember very well the bands 
 playing always ' God save the King' as we went up 
 the side. Count D'Orsay here, who spoke very little 
 English at that time, had a great passion for Yankee 
 Doodle, and it was always played at his request." 
 
 The count, who still speaks the language with a 
 very slight accent, but with a choice of words that 
 shows him to be a man of uncommon tact and ele- 
 gance of mind, inquired after several of the officers, 
 whom I have not the pleasure of knowing. He seem- 
 ed to remember his visits to the frigate with great 
 pleasure. The conversation, after running upon a va- 
 riety of topics, which I could not with propriety put 
 into a letter for the public eye, turned very naturally 
 upon Byron. I had frequently seen the Countess 
 Guiccioli on the continent, and I asked Lady Blessing- 
 ton if she knew her. 
 
 " No. We were at Pisa when they were living to- 
 gether, but though Lord Blessington had the greatest 
 curiosity to see her, Byron would never permit it. 
 « She has a red head of her own,' said he, ' and don't 
 like to show it.' Byron treated the poor creature 
 dreadfully ill. She feared more than she loved him." 
 
 She had told me the same thing herself in Italy. 
 
 It would be impossible, of course, to make a full 
 and fair record of a conversation of some hours. I 
 have only noted one or two topics which I thought 
 most likely to interest an American reader. During 
 all this long visit, however, my eyes were very busy in 
 finishing for memory a portrait of the celebrated and 
 beautiful woman before me. 
 
 The portrait of Lady Blessington in the Book of 
 Beauty is not unlike her, but it is still an unfavorable 
 likeness. A picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence hung 
 opposite me, taken, perhaps, at the age of eighteen, 
 which is more like her, and as captivating a represent- 
 ation of a just matured woman, full of loveliness and 
 love, the kind of creature with whose divine sweet- 
 ness the gazer's heart aches, as ever was drawn in the 
 painter's most inspired hour. The original is now 
 (she confessed it very frankly) forty. She looks 
 something on the sunny side of thirty. Her person 
 is full, but preserves all the fineness of an admirable 
 shape ; her foot is not crowded in a satin slipper, for 
 which a Cinderella might long be looked for in vain, 
 and her complexion (an unusually fair skin, with very 
 dark hair and eyebrows), is of even a girlish delicacy 
 and freshness. Her dress of blue satin (if I am de- 
 scribing her like a milliner, it is because I have here 
 and there a reader of the Mirror in my eye who will 
 be amused by it), was cut low and folded across her 
 bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round and 
 sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair of ex- 
 quisite shoulders, while her hair dressed close to her 
 head, and parted simply on her forehead with a rich 
 fcrronier of turquoise, enveloped in clear outline a 
 head with which it would be difficult to find a fault. 
 Her features are regular, and her mouth, the most ex- 
 pressive of them, has a ripe fulness and freedom of 
 play, peculiar to the Irish physiognomy, and expres- 
 sive of the most unsuspicious good humor. Add to 
 all this a voice merry and sad by turns, but always mu- 
 sical, and manners of the most unpretending elegance, 
 yet even more remaikable for their winning kindaess, 
 
182 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 and you have the most prominent traits of one of the 
 most lovely and fascinating women I have ever seen. 
 Remembering her talents and her rank, and the un- 
 envying admiration she receives from the world of 
 fashion and genius, it would be difficult to reconcile 
 her lot to the "doctrine of compensation." 
 
 There is one remark I may as well make here, with 
 regard to the personal descriptions and anecdotes with 
 which my letters from England will of course be fill- 
 ed. It is quite a different thing from publishing such 
 letters in London. America is much farther off from 
 England than England from America. You in New 
 York read the periodicals of this country, and know 
 everything that is done or written here, as if you lived 
 within the sound of Bow-bell. The English, how- 
 ever, just know of our existence, and if they get a 
 general idea twice a year of our progress in politics, 
 they are comparatively well informed. Our periodi- 
 cal literature is never even heard of. Of course, 
 there can be no offence to the individuals themselves 
 in anything which a visiter could write, calculated to 
 convey an idea of the person or manners of distin- 
 guished people to the American public. I mention 
 it lest, at first thought, I might seem to have abused 
 the hospitality or frankness of those on whom letters 
 of introduction have given me claims for civility. 
 
 LETTER CXVL 
 
 THE LITERATI OF LONDON. 
 
 Spent my first day in London in wandering about 
 the finest part of the West End. It is nonsense to 
 compare it to any other city in the world. From the 
 Horse-Guards to the Regent's Park alone, there is 
 more magnificence in architecture than in the whole 
 of any other metropolis in Europe, and I have seen 
 the most and the best of them. Yet this, though a 
 walk of more than two miles, is but a small part even 
 of the fashionable extremity of London. I am not 
 easily tired in a city ; but I walked till I could scarce 
 lift my feet from the ground, and still the parks and 
 noble streets extended before and around me as far as 
 the eye could reach, and strange as they were in real- 
 ity, the names were as familiar to me as if my child- 
 hood had been passed among them. " Bond Street," 
 " Grosvenor Square," " Hyde Park," look new to my 
 eye, but they sound very familiar to my ear. 
 
 The equipages of London are much talked of, but 
 they exceed even description. Nothing could be more 
 perfect, or apparently more simple than the gentle- 
 man's carriage that passes you in the street. Of a 
 modest color, but the finest material, the crest just vis- 
 ible on the panels, the balance of the body upon its 
 springs true and easy, the hammercloth and liveries of 
 the neatest and most harmonious colors, the harness 
 slight and elegant, and the horses " the only splendid 
 thing" in the establishment — is a description that an- 
 swers the most of them. Perhaps the most perfect 
 thing in the world, however, is a St. James's-street 
 stanhope or cabriolet, with its dandy owner on the 
 whip-seat, and the " tiger" beside him. The attitudes 
 of both the gentleman and the " gentleman's gentle- 
 man" are studied to a point, but nothing could be 
 more knowing or exquisite than either. The whole 
 affair, from the angle of the bell-crowned hat (the 
 prevailing fashion on the steps of Crockford's at pres- 
 ent), to the blood legs of the thorough-bred creature 
 in harness, is absolutely faultless. I have seen many 
 subjects for study in my first day's stroll, but I leave 
 the men and women and some other less important fea- 
 tures of London for maturer observation. 
 
 In the evening I kept my appointment with Lady 
 
 Blessington. She had deserted her exquisite library 
 for the drawing-room, and sat, in fuller dress, with six 
 or seven gentlemen about her. I was presented im- 
 mediately to all, and when the conversation was re- 
 sumed, 1 took the opportunity to remark the distin- 
 guished coterie with which she was surrounded. 
 
 Nearest me sat Smith, the author of " Rejected Ad- 
 dresses" — a hale, handsome man, apparently fifty, 
 with white hair, and a very nobly-formed head and 
 physiognomy. His eye alone, small and with lids 
 contracted into an habitual look of drollery, betrayed 
 the bent of his genius. He held a cripple's crutch in 
 his hand, and though otherwise rather particularly 
 well dressed, wore a pair of large Indiarubber shoes — 
 the penalty he was paying doubtless for the many good 
 dinners he had eaten. He played rather an aside in 
 the conversation, whipping in with a quiz or a witticism 
 whenever he could get an opportunity, but more a lis- 
 tener than a talker. 
 
 On the opposite side of Lady B. stood Henry Bul- 
 wer, the brother of the novelist, very earnestly en- 
 gaged in a discussion of some speech of O'Connell's. 
 He is said by many to be as talented as his brother, 
 and has lately published a book on the present state 
 of France. He is a small man, very slight and gen- 
 tleman-like, a little pitted with the smallpox, and of 
 very winning and persuasive manners. I liked him at 
 the first glance. 
 
 His opponent in the argument was Fonblanc, the 
 famous editor of the Examiner, said to be the best 
 political writer of his day. I never saw a much worse 
 face — sallow, seamed, and hollow, his teeth irregular, 
 his skin livid, his straight black hair uncombed and 
 straggling over his forehead — he looked as if he might 
 be the gentleman 
 
 Whose " coat was red, and whose breeches were blue." 
 
 A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, 
 with a smile like a skeleton's, certainly did not improve 
 his physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awk- 
 wardly, and was very ill-dressed, but every word he 
 uttered showed him to be a man of claims very su- 
 perior to exterior attraction. The soft musical voice, 
 and elegant manner of the one, and the satirical sneer- 
 ing tone and angular gesture of the other, were in 
 very strong contrast. 
 
 A German prince, with a star on his breast, trying 
 with all his might, but, from his embarrassed look, 
 quite unsuccessfully, to comprehend the drift of the 
 argument, the Duke de Richelieu, whom I had seen 
 at the court of France, the inheritor of nothing but 
 the name of his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool, 
 making no attempt to listen ; a famous traveller just 
 returned from Constantinople ; and the splendid per- 
 son of Count D'Orsay in a careless attitude upon the 
 ottoman, completed the cordon. 
 
 I fell into conversation after a while with Smith, 
 who, supposing I might not have heard the names of 
 the others, in the hurry of an introduction, kindly 
 took the trouble to play the dictionary, and added a 
 graphic character of each as he named him. Among 
 other things he talked a great deal of America, 
 and asked me if I knew our distinguished coun- 
 tryman, Washington Irving. I had never been so 
 fortunate as to meet him. " You have lost a great 
 deal," he said, "for never was so delightful a fellow. 
 I was once taken down with him into the country by a 
 merchant, to dinner. Our friend stopped his carriage 
 at the gate of his park, and asked us if we would walk 
 through his grounds to the house. Irving refused 
 and held me down by the coat, so that we drove on to 
 the house together, leaving our host to follow on foot. 
 ' 1 make it a principle,' said Irving, ' never to walk 
 with a man through his own grounds. I have no idea 
 of praising a thing whether I like it or not. You and 1 
 will do them to-morrow morning by ourselves.' " The 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 183 
 
 rest of the company had turned their attention to 
 Smith as he began his story, and there was a univer- 
 sal inquiry after Mr. Irving. Indeed the first ques- 
 tions on the lips of every one to whom I am intro- 
 duced as an American, are of him and Cooper. The 
 latter seems to me to be admired as much here as 
 abroad, in spite of a common impression that he dis- 
 likes the nation. No man's works could have higher 
 praise in the general conversation that followed, though 
 several instances were mentioned of his having shown 
 an unconquerable aversion to the English when in Eng- 
 land. Lady Blessington mentioned Mr. Bryant, and 
 I was pleased at the immediate tribute paid to his de- 
 lightful poetry by the talented circle around her. 
 
 Toward twelve o'clock, " Mr. Lytton Bulwer" was 
 announced, and enter the author of Pelham. I had 
 made up my mind how he should look, and between 
 prints and descriptions thought I could scarcely be 
 mistaken in my idea of his person. No two things 
 could be more unlike, however than the ideal Mr. 
 Bulwer in my mind and the real Mr. Bulwer who fol- 
 lowed the announcement. Imprimis, the gentleman 
 who entered was not handsome. I beg pardon of the 
 boarding-schools — but he really was not. The engra- 
 ving of him published some time ago in America is as 
 much like any other man living, and gives you no idea 
 of his head whatever. He is short, very much bent 
 in the back, slightly knock-kneed, and, if my opinion 
 in such matters goes for anything, as ill-dressed a man 
 for a gentleman, as you will find in London. His fig- 
 ure is slight and very badly put together, and the only 
 commendable point in his person, as far as I could 
 see, was the smallest foot I ever saw a man stand up- 
 on. Au teste, I liked his manners extremely. He 
 ran up to Lady Blessington, with the joyous heartiness 
 of a boy let out of school ; and the " how d'ye, Bul- 
 v,er!" went round, as he shook hands with everybody, 
 in the style of welcome usually given to "the best fel- 
 low in the world." As I had brought a letter of in- 
 troduction to him from a friend in Italy, Lady Bles- 
 sington introduced me particularly, and we had a long 
 conversation about Naples and its pleasant society. 
 
 Bulwer's head is phrenologically a fine one. His 
 forehead retreats very much, but is very broad and 
 well marked, and the whole air is that of decided men- 
 tal superiority. His nose is aquiline, and far too large 
 for proportion, though he conceals its extreme prom- 
 inence by an immense pair of red whiskers, which en- 
 tirely conceal the lower part of his face in profile. 
 His complexion is fair, his hair profuse, curly, and of 
 a light auburn, his eye not remarkable, and his mouth 
 contradictory, I should think, of all talent. A more 
 good-natured, habitually-smiling, nerveless expression 
 could hardly be imagined. Perhaps my impression 
 is an imperfect one, as he was in the highest spirits, 
 and was not serious the whole evening for a minute — 
 but it is strictly and faithfully my impression. 
 
 I can imagine no style of conversation calculated 
 to be more agreeable than Bulwer's. Gay, quick, va- 
 rious, half-satirical, and always fresh and different from 
 everybody else, he seemed to talk because he could 
 not help it, and infected everybody with his spirits. I 
 can not give even the substance of it in a letter, for it 
 was in a great measure local or personal. A great 
 deal of fun was made of a proposal by Lady Blessing- 
 ton, to take Bulwer to America and show him at so 
 much a head. She asked me whether I thought it 
 would be a good speculation. I took upon myself to 
 assure her ladyship, that, provided she played showman, 
 the "concern," as they would phrase it in America, 
 would be certainly a profitable one. Bulwer said he 
 would rather go in disguise and hear them abuse his 
 books. It would be pleasant, he thought, to hear the 
 opinions of people who judged him neither as a mem- 
 ber of parliament nor a dandy — simply a book-maker. 
 
 Smith asked him if he kept an amanuensis. " No," 
 he said, " I scribble it all out myself, and send it to 
 the press in a most ungentlemanlike hand, half print 
 and half hieroglyphic, with all its imperfections on its 
 head, and correct in the proof— very much to the dis- 
 satisfaction of the publisher, who sends me in a bill 
 of sixteen pounds six shillings and fourpence for extra 
 corrections. Then I am free to confess I don't know 
 grammar. Lady Blessington, do you know grammar? 
 I detest grammar. There never was such a thing 
 heard of before Lindley Murray. I wonder what they 
 did for grammar before his day ! Oh, the delicious 
 blunders one sees when they are irretrievable ! And 
 the best of it is, the critics never get hold of them. 
 Thank Heaven for second editions, that one may scratch 
 out his blots, and go down clean and gentleman-like 
 to posterity !" Smith asked him if he had ever re- 
 viewed one of his own books. " No — but I could ! 
 And then how I should like to recriminate and defend 
 myself indignantly ! I think I could be preciously 
 severe. Depend upon it nobody knows a book's de- 
 fects half so well as its author. I have a great idea 
 of criticising my works for my posthumous memoirs. 
 Shall I, Smith ? Shall I, Lady Blessington ?" 
 
 Bulwer's voice, like his brother's, is exceedingly 
 lover-like and sweet. His playful tones are quite de- 
 licious, and his clear laugh is the soul of sincere and 
 careless merriment. 
 
 It is quite impossible to convey in a letter scrawled 
 literally between the end of a late visit and a tempting 
 pillow, the evanescent and pure spirit of a conversa- 
 tion of wits. I must confine myself, of course, in such 
 sketches, to the mere sentiment of things that con- 
 cern general literature and ourselves. 
 
 " The Rejected Addresses" got upon his crutches 
 about three o'clock in the morning, and I made my 
 exit with the rest, thanking Heaven, that, though in a 
 strange country, my mother-tongue was the language 
 of its men of genius. 
 
 LETTER CXVII. 
 
 LONDON— VISIT TO A RACE-COURSE — GIPSIES — THE PRIN- 
 CESS VICTORIA SPLENDID APPEARANCE OF THE ENG 
 
 LISH NOBILITY A BREAKFAST WITH ELIA AN1 
 
 BRIDGET ELIA MYSTIFICATION— CHARLES LAMB'S 
 
 OPINION OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 I have just returned from Ascot races. Ascot 
 Heath, on which the course is laid out, is a high plat- 
 form of land, beautifully situated on a hill above 
 Windsor Castle, about twenty-five miles from Lon- 
 don. I went down with a party of gentlemen in the 
 morning and returned at evening, doing the distance 
 with relays of horses in something less than three 
 hours. This, one would think, is very fair speed, but 
 we were passed continually by the " bloods" of the 
 road, in comparison with whom we seemed getting on 
 rather at a snail's pace. 
 
 The scenery on the way was truly English — one 
 series of finished landscapes, of every variety of 
 combination. Lawns, fancy-cottages, manor-houses, 
 groves, roses and flower-gardens, make up England. 
 It surfeits the eye at last. You could not drop a poet 
 out of the clouds upon any part of it I have seen, 
 where, within five minutes' walk, he would not find 
 himself in Paradise. 
 
 We flew past Virginia Water and through the sun- 
 flecked shades of Windsor Park, with the speed of the 
 wind. On reaching the Heath, we dashed out of the 
 road, and cutting through fern and brier, our experi- 
 enced whip put his wheels on the rim of the course, 
 as near the stands as some thousands of carriage* 
 
184 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 arrived before us would permit, and then, caution- 
 ing us to take the bearings of our position, least we 
 should lose him after the race, he took off his horses, 
 and left us to choose our own places. 
 
 A thousand red and yellow flags were flying from as 
 many snowy tents in the midst of the green heath ; 
 ballad-signers and bands of music were amusing their 
 little audiences in every direction ; splendid markees 
 covering gambling-tables, surrounded the winning- 
 post ; groups of country people were busy in every 
 bush, eating and singing, and the great stands were 
 piled with row upon row of human heads waiting 
 anxiously for the exhilarating contest. 
 
 Soon after we arrived, the king and royal family 
 drove up the course with twenty carriages, and scores 
 of postillions and outriders in red and gold, flying over 
 the turf as majesty flies in no other country ; and, 
 immediately after, the bell rang to clear the course 
 for the race. Such horses ! The earth seemed to 
 fling them off as they touched it. The lean jockeys, 
 in their party-colored caps and jackets, rode the fine- 
 limbed, slender creatures up and down together, and 
 then returning to the starting-post, off they shot like 
 so many arrows from the bow. 
 
 Whiz! you could tell neither color nor shape as 
 they passed across the eye. Their swiftness was in- 
 credible. A horse of Lord Chesterfield's was rather 
 the favorite; and for the sake of his great-grand- 
 father, I had backed him with my small wager. 
 " Glaucus is losing," said some one on the top of a 
 carriage above me, but round they swept again, and I 
 could just see that one glorious creature was doubling 
 the leaps of every other horse, and in a moment 
 Glaucus and Lord Chesterfield had won. 
 
 The course between the races is a promenade of 
 some thousands of the best-dressed people in Eng- 
 land, I thought I had never seen so many handsome 
 men and women, but particularly men. The nobility 
 of this country, unlike every other, is by far the man- 
 liest and finest looking class of its population. The 
 contadini of Rome, the lazzaroni of Naples, the pay- 
 sans of France, are incomparably more handsome 
 than their superiors in rank, but it is strikingly differ- 
 ent here. A set of more elegant and well-propor- 
 tioned men than those pointed out to me by my 
 friends as the noblemen on the course, I never saw, 
 except only in Greece. The Albanians are seraphs 
 to look at. 
 
 Excitement is hungry, and after the first race our 
 party produced their baskets and bottles, and spread- 
 ing out the cold pie and champaign upon the grass, 
 between the wheels of the carriages, we drank Lord 
 Chesterfield's health and ate for our own, in an al 
 fresco style worthy of Italy. Two veritable Bohe- 
 mians, brown, black-eyed gipsies, the models of those 
 I had seen in their wicker tents in Asia, profited by 
 the liberality of the hour, and came in for an upper 
 crust to a pigeon pie, that, to tell the truth, they 
 seemed to appreciate. 
 
 Race followed race, but T am not a contributor to 
 the Sporting Magazine, and could not give you their 
 merits in comprehensible terms if I were. 
 
 In one of the intervals, I walked under the king's 
 stand, and saw her majesty, the queen, and the young 
 Princess Victoria, very distinctly. They were listen- 
 ng to a ballad-singer, and leaning over the front of 
 the box with an amused attention, quite as sincere, 
 apparently, as any beggar's in the ring. The queen 
 is the plainest woman in her dominions, beyond a 
 doubt. The princess is much better-looking than the 
 pictures of her in the shops, and, for the heir to such 
 a crown as that of England, quite unnecessarily pretty 
 and interesting. She will be sold, poor thing — bar- 
 tered away by those great dealers in royal hearts, 
 whose grand calculations will not be much consolation 
 to her if she happens to have a taste of her own. 
 
 [The following sketch was written a short time pre- 
 vious to the death of Charles Lamb.] 
 
 Invited to breakfast with a gentleman in the temple to 
 meet Charles Lamb and his sister — " Elia and Bridget 
 Elia." I never in my life had an invitation more to 
 my taste. The essays of Elia are certainly the most 
 charming things in the world, and it has been for the 
 last ten years my highest compliment to the literary 
 taste of a friend to present him with a copy. Who 
 has not smiled over the humorous description of Mrs. 
 Battle? Who that has read Elia would not give 
 more to see him than all the other authors of his time 
 put together ? 
 
 Our host was rather a character. I had brought a 
 letter of introduction to him from Walter Savage 
 Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, living 
 at Florence, with a request that he would put me in a 
 way of seeing one or two men about whom I had a 
 curiosity, Lamb more particularly. 1 could not have 
 been recommended to a better person. Mr. R. is a 
 gentleman who everybody says, should have been an 
 author, but who never wrote a book. He is a pro- 
 found German scholar, has travelled much, is the inti- 
 mate friend of Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb, has 
 breakfasted with Goethe, travelled with Wordsworth 
 through France and Italy, and spends part of every 
 summer with him, and knows everything and every- 
 body that is distinguished — in short, is, in his bach- 
 elor's chambers in the temple, the friendly nucleus of 
 a great part of the talent of England. 
 
 I arrived a half hour before Lamb, and had time to 
 learn some of his peculiarities. He lives a little out 
 of London, and is very much of an invalid. Some 
 family circumstances have tended to depress him very 
 much of late years, and unless excited by convivial 
 intercourse, he scarce shows a trace of what he was. 
 He was very much pleased with the American reprint 
 of his Elia, though it contains several things which are 
 not his — written so in his style, however, that it is 
 scarce a wonder the editor should mistake them. If 
 I remember right, they were "Valentine's Day," the 
 " Nuns of Caverswell," and " Twelfth Night." He 
 is excessively given to mystifying his friends, and is 
 never so delighted as when he has persuaded some 
 one into the belief of one of his grave inventions. His 
 amusing biographical sketch of Liston was in this vein, 
 and there was no doubt in anybody's mind that it was 
 authentic, and written in perfectly good faith. Liston 
 was highly enraged with it, and Lamb was delighted 
 in proportion. 
 
 There was a rap at the door at last, and enter a 
 gentleman in black small-clothes and gaiters, short 
 and very slight in his person, his head set on his 
 shoulders with a thoughtful, forward bent, his hair just 
 sprinkled with gray, a beautiful deepset eye, aquiline 
 nose, and a very indescribable mouth. Whether 
 it expressed most humor or feeling, good nature 
 or a kind of whimsical peevishness, or twenty other 
 things which passed over it by turns, I can not in the 
 least be certain. 
 
 His sister, whose literary reputation is associated 
 very closely with her brother's, and who, as the 
 original of " Bridget Elia," is a kind of object for 
 literary affection, came in after him. She is a small, 
 bent figure, evidently a victim to illness, and hears 
 with difficulty. Her face has been, I should think, a 
 fine and handsome one, and her bright gray eye is still 
 full of intelligence and fire. They both seemed quite 
 at home in our friend's chambers, and as there was to 
 be no one else, we immediately drew round the break- 
 fast table. I had set a large arm chair for Miss Lamb, 
 " Don't take it, Mary," said Lamb, pulling it away 
 from her very gravely, " it appears as if you were go- 
 ing to have a tooth drawn." 
 
 The conversation was very local. Our host and his 
 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 185 
 
 guest had not met for some weeks, and they had a 
 great deal to say of their mutual friends. Perhaps in 
 this way, however, I saw more of the author, for his 
 manner of speaking of them and the quaint humor 
 with which he complained of one, and spoke well of 
 another, was so in the vein of his inimitable writings, 
 that I could have fancied myself listening to an audible 
 composition of a new Elia. Nothing could be more 
 delightful than the kindness and affection between the 
 brother and the sister, though Lamb was continually 
 taking advantage of her deafness to mystify her with 
 the most singular gravity upon every topic that was 
 started. " Poor Mary !" said he, " she hears all of an 
 epigram but the point." "What are you saying of 
 me, Charles?" she asked. "Mr. Willis," said he, 
 raising his voice, " admires your Confessions of a 
 Drunkard very much, and I was saying that it was no 
 merit of yours, that you understood the subject." We 
 had been speaking of this admirable essay (which is 
 his own) half an hour before. 
 
 The conversation turned upon literature after awhile, 
 and our host, the templar, could not express himself 
 strongly enough in admiration of Webster's speeches, 
 which he said were exciting the greatest attention 
 among the politicians and lawyers of England. Lamb 
 said, " I don't know much of American authors. 
 Mary, there, devours Cooper's novels with a ravenous 
 appetite, with which I have no sympathy. The only 
 American book I ever read twice, was the 'Journal 
 of Edward Woolman,' a quaker preacher and tailor, 
 whose character is one of the finest I ever met with. 
 He tells a story or two about negro slaves, that brought 
 the tears into my eyes. I can read no prose now, 
 though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure — but then Hazlitt 
 is worth all modern prose writers put together." 
 
 Mr. R. spoke of buying a book of Lamb's a few 
 days before, and I mentioned my having bought a copy 
 of Elia the last day I was in America, to send as a 
 parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented 
 women in our country. 
 
 " What did you give for it ?" said Lamb. 
 
 " About seven and sixpence." 
 
 " Permit me to pay you that," said he, and with the 
 utmost earnestness he counted put the money upon 
 the table. 
 
 " I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he 
 continued. " I am the publisher's ruin. My last 
 poem won't sell a copy. Have you seen it, Mr. 
 . Willis?" 
 V I had not. 
 
 "It's only eighteen pence, and I'll give you six- 
 pence toward it ;" and he described to me where I 
 should find it sticking up in a shop-window in the 
 Strand. 
 
 Lamb ate nothing, and complained in a querulous 
 tone of the veal pie. There was a kind of potted fish 
 (of which I forget the name at this moment) which he 
 had expected our friend would procure for him. He 
 inquired whether there was not a morsel left perhaps in 
 the bottom of the last pot. Mr. R. was not sure. 
 
 " Send and see," said Lamb, " and if the pot has 
 been cleaned, bring me the cover. I think the sight 
 of it would do me good." 
 
 The cover was brought, upon which there was a 
 picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it with a reproachful 
 look at his friend, and then left the table and began to 
 wander round the room with a broken, uncertain step, 
 as if he almost forgot to put one leg before the other. 
 His sister rose after awhile, and commenced walking 
 up and down very much in the same manner on the 
 opposite side of the table, and in the course of half an 
 hour they took their leave. 
 
 To any one who loves the writings of Charles Lamb 
 with but half my own enthusiasm, even these little 
 particulars of an hour passed in his company, will 
 have an interest. To him who does not, they will 
 
 seem dull and idle. Wreck as he certainly is, and 
 must be, however, of what he was, I would rather have 
 seen him for that single hour, than the hundred and 
 one sights of London put together. 
 
 LETTER CXVIII. 
 
 DINNER AT LADY BLESSINGTON's — BtlLWER, D'ISRAELI. 
 
 PROCTER, FONBLANC, ETC. ECCENTRICITIES OF 
 
 BECKFORD, AUTHOR OF VATHEK D'iSRAELl's EX- 
 TRAORDINARY TALENT AT DESCRIPTION. 
 
 Dined at Lady Blessington's, in company with sev- 
 eral authors, three or four noblemen, and a clever ex- 
 quisite or two. The authors were Bulwer, the novel- 
 ist, and his brother, the statist; Procter (better known 
 as Barry Cornwall), D'Israeli, the author of Vivian 
 Grey ; and Fonblanc, of the Examiner. The princi- 
 pal nobleman was Lord Durham, and the principal 
 exquisite (though the word scarce applies to the mag- 
 nificent scale on which nature has made him, and on 
 which he makes himself), was Count D'Orsay. 
 There were plates for twelve. 
 
 I had never seen Procter, and, with my passionate 
 love for his poetry, he was the person at table of the 
 most interest to me. He came late, and as twilight 
 was just darkening the drawing-room, I could only see 
 that a small man followed the announcement, with a 
 remarkably timid manner, and a very white forehead. 
 
 D'Israeli had arrived before me, and sat in the deep 
 window, looking out upon Hyde Park, with the last 
 rays of daylight reflected from the gorgeous gold 
 flowers of a splendidly embroidered waistcoat. Pat- 
 ent leather pumps, a white stick, with a black cord 
 and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck 
 and pockets, served to make him, even in the dim 
 light, rather a conspicuous object. 
 
 Bulwer was very badly dressed, as usual, and wore 
 a flashy waistcoat of the same description as D'Israeli's. 
 Count D'Orsay was very splendid, but very undefina- 
 ble. He seemed showily dressed till you looked to 
 particulars, and then it seemed only a simple thing, 
 well fitted to a very magnificent person. Lord Albert 
 Conyngham was a dandy of common materials ; and 
 my Lord Durham, though he looked a young man, if 
 he passed for a lord at all in America, would pass for 
 a very ill-dressed one. 
 
 For Lady Blessington, she is one of the most hand- 
 some and quite the best-dressed woman in London ; 
 and, without farther description, I trust the readers of 
 the Mirror will have little difficulty in imagining a 
 scene that, taking a wild American into the account, 
 was made up of rather various material. 
 
 The blaze of lamps on the dinner table was very fa- 
 vorable to my curiosity, and as Procter and D'Israeli 
 sat directly opposite me, I studied their faces to ad- 
 vantage. Barry Cornwall's forehead and eye are all 
 that would strike you in his features. His brows are 
 heavy ; and his eye, deeply sunk, has a quick, restless 
 fire, that would have struck me, I think, had I not 
 known he was a poet. His voice has the huskiness 
 and elevation of a man more accustomed to think 
 than converse, and it was never heard except to give a 
 brief and very condensed opinion, or an illustration, 
 admirably to the point, of the subject under discus- 
 sion. He evidently felt that he was only an observer 
 in the party. 
 
 D'Israeli has one of the most remarkable faces I 
 ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy 
 of his action and the strength of his lungs, would 
 seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as 
 Erebus, and has the most mocking and lying-in-wait 
 sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive 
 with a kind of working and impatient nervousness, 
 
186 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly, 
 with a particularly successful cataract of expression, 
 it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be 
 worthy of a Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraor- 
 dinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick heavy mass 
 of jet black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to 
 his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is 
 parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a 
 girl's, and shines most unctiously, 
 
 " With thy incomparable oil, Macassar !" 
 
 The anxieties of the first course, as usual, kept 
 every mouth occupied for awhile, and then the dan- 
 dies led off with a discussion of Count D'Orsay's rifle 
 match (he is the best rifle shot in England), and va- 
 rious matters as uninteresting to transatlantic readers. 
 The new poem, Philip Van Artevelde, came up after 
 awhile, and was very much over-praised (me judice). 
 Bulwer said, that as the author was the principal wri- 
 ter for the Quarterly Review, it was a pity it was first 
 praised in that periodical, and praised so unqualifiedly. 
 Procter said nothing about it, and I respected his si- 
 lence ; for, as a poet, he must have felt the poverty 
 of the poem, and was probably unwilling to attack a 
 new aspirant in his laurels. 
 
 The next book discussed was Beckford's Italy, or 
 rather the next author, for the writer of Vathek is 
 more original, and more talked of than his books, and 
 just now occupies much of the attention of London. 
 Mr. Beckford has been all his life enormously rich, 
 has luxuriated in every country with the fancy of a 
 poet, and the refined splendor of a Sybarite, was the 
 admiration of Lord Byron, who visited him at Cintra, 
 was the owner of Fonthill, and, plies fort encore, his is 
 one of the oldest families in England. What could 
 such a man attempt that would not be considered ex- 
 traordinary ! 
 
 D'Israeli was the only one at table who knew him, 
 and the style in which he gave a sketch of his habits 
 and manners, was worthy of himself. I might as well 
 attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey 
 an idea of the extraordinary language in which he 
 clothed his description. There Were, at least, five 
 words in every sentence that must have been very much 
 astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no oth- 
 ers apparently could so well have conveyed his idea. 
 He talked like a race-horse approaching the winning- 
 post, every muscle in action, and the utmost energy 
 of expression flung out in every burst. It is a great 
 pity he is not in parliament.* 
 
 The particulars he gave of Beckford, though strip- 
 ped of his gorgeous digressions and parentheses, may 
 be interesting. He lives now at Bath, where he has 
 built a house on two sides of the street, connected by 
 a covered bridge a la Ponte de Sospiri, at Venice. 
 His servants live on one side, and he and his sole 
 companion on the other. This companion is a hide- 
 ous dwarf, who imagines himself, or is, a Spanish 
 duke ; and Mr. Beckford for many years has support- 
 ed him in a style befitting his rank, treats him with all 
 the deference due to his tide, and has, in general, no 
 other society (I should not wonder, myself, if" it 
 turned out a woman) ; neither of them is often seen, 
 and when in London, Mr. Beckford is only to be ap- 
 proached through his man of business. If you call, 
 he is not at home. If you would leave a card or ad- 
 dress him a note, his servant has strict orders not to 
 take in anything of the kind. At Bath he has built a 
 high tower, which is a great mystery to the inhabitants. 
 Around the interior, to the very top, it is lined with 
 books, approachable with a light spiral staircase ; and 
 in the pavement below, the owner has constructed a 
 
 * I have been told that he stood once for a London borough. 
 A coarse fellow came up at the hustings, and said to him, " I 
 should like to know on what ground "you stand here, sir?" 
 
 On my head, sir !" answered D'Israeli. The populace had 
 not read Vivian Grey, however, and he lost his election. 
 
 double crypt for his own body, and that of his dwarf 
 companion, intending, with a desire for human neigh- 
 borhood which has not appeared in his life, to leave 
 the library to the city, that all who enjoy it shall pass 
 over the bodies below. 
 
 Mr. Beckford thinks very highly of his own books, 
 and talks of his early production (Vathek) in terms of 
 unbounded admiration. He speaks slightingly of 
 Byron, and of his praise, and affects to despise utterly 
 the popular taste. It appeared altogether, from D'ls- 
 raeli's account, that he is a splendid egotist, determin- 
 ed to free life as much as possible from its usual fet- 
 ters, and to enjoy it to the highest degree of which 
 his genius, backed by an immense fortune, is capable. 
 He is reputed, however, to be excessively liberal, and 
 to exercise his ingenuity to contrive secret charities in 
 his neighborhood. 
 
 Victor Hugo and his extraordinary novels came 
 next under discussion ; and D'Israeli, who was fired 
 with his own eloquence, started off, apropos des bottes, 
 with a long story of an empalement he had seen in 
 Upper Egypt. It was as good, and perhaps as authen- 
 tic, as the description of the chow-chow-tow in Vivian 
 Grey. He had arrived at Cairo on the third day after 
 the man was transfixed by two stakes from hip to 
 shoulder, and he was still alive ! The circumstantial- 
 ity of the account was equally horrible and amusing. 
 Then followed the sufferer's history, with a score of 
 murders and barbarities, heaped together like Martin's 
 Feast of Belshazzar, with a mixture of horror and 
 splendor that was unparalleled in my experience of 
 improvisation. No mystic priest of the Corybantes 
 could have worked himself up into a finer phrensy of 
 language. 
 
 Count D'Orsay kept up, through the whole of the 
 conversation and narration, a running fire of witty pa- 
 rentheses, half French and half English ; and, with 
 champaign in all the pauses, the hours flew on very 
 dashingly. Lady Blessington left us toward midnight, 
 and then the conversation took a rather political turn, 
 and something was said of O'Connell. D'Israeli's 
 lips were playing upon the edge of a champaign glass, 
 which he had just drained, and off he shot again with 
 a description of an interview he had had with the agi- 
 tator the day before, ending in a story of an Irish dra- 
 goon who was killed in the peninsula. His name was 
 Sarsfield. His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding 
 to death. When told that he could not live, he called 
 for a large silver goblet, out of which he usually drank 
 his claret. He held it to the gushing artery and filled 
 it to the brim with blood, looked at it a moment, turn- 
 ed it out slowly upon the ground, muttering to him- 
 self, " If that had been shed for old Ireland !" and ex- 
 pired. You can have no idea how thrillingly this lit- 
 tle story was told. Fonblanc, however, who is a cold 
 political satirist, could see nothing in a man's "de- 
 canting his claret," that was in the least sublime, and 
 so Vivian Grey got into a passion and for awhile was 
 silent. 
 
 Bulwer asked me if there was any distinguished 
 literary American in town. I said, Mr Slidell, one 
 of our best writers, was here. 
 
 " Because," said he, " I received a week or more 
 ago a letter of introduction by some one from Wash- 
 ington Irving. It lay on the table, when a lady came 
 in to call on my wife, who seized upon it as an auto- 
 graph, and immediately left town, leaving me with 
 neither name nor address." 
 
 There was a general laugh and a cry of "Pelham! 
 Pelham !" as he finished his story. Nobody chose to 
 believe it. 
 
 " I think the name was Slidell," said Bulwer. 
 
 " Slidell !" said D'Israeli, " I owe him two-pence, 
 by Jove !" and he went on in his dashing way to nar- 
 rate that he had sat next Mr. Slidell at a bull-fight in 
 Seville, that he wanted to buy a fan to keep off the 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 187 
 
 flies, and having nothing but doubloons in his pocket, 
 Mr. S. had lent him a small Spanish coin to that 
 value, which he owed him to this day. 
 
 There was another general laugh, and it was agreed 
 that on the whole the Americans were 'done.' 
 
 Apropos to this, DTsraeli gave us a description in a 
 gorgeous, burlesque, galloping style, of a Spanish 
 bullfight; and when we were nearly dead with laugh- 
 ing at it, some one made a move, and we went up to 
 Lady Blessington in the drawing-room. Lord Dur- 
 ham requested her ladyship to introduce him particu- 
 larly to D'Israeli (the effect of his eloquence). I sat 
 down in the corner with Sir Martin Shee, the presi- 
 dent of the Royal Academy, and had a long talk about 
 Allston and Harding and Cole, whose pictures he 
 knew ; and " somewhere in the small hours," we took 
 our leave, and Procter left me at my door in Caven- 
 dish street, weary, but in a better humor with the 
 world than usual. 
 
 LETTER CXIX. 
 
 «HE ITALIAN OPERA — MADEMOISELLE GRISI — A GLANCE 
 
 AT LORD BROUGHAM MRS. NORTON AND LORD SEF- 
 
 TON — RAND, THE AMERICAN PORTRAIT PAINTER AN 
 
 EVENING PARTY/ AT BULWER's — PALMY STATE OF 
 LITERATURE IN MODERN DATS — FASHIONABLE NEG- 
 
 LECTOF FEMALES PERSONAGES PRESENT SHIEL THE 
 
 ORATOR, THE PRINCE OF MOSCOWA, MRS. LEICESTER 
 STANHOPE, THE CELEBRATED BEAUTY, ETC., ETC. 
 
 Went to the opera to hear Julia Grisi. I stood out 
 he first act in the pit, and saw instances of rudeness 
 *■ " Fop's-alley," which I had never seen approached 
 n three years on the continent. The high price of 
 tickets, one would think, and the necessity of appear- 
 ing in full dress, would keep the opera clear of low- 
 ered people ; but the conduct to which I refer seemed 
 io excite no surprise and passed off without notice, 
 though, in America, there would have been ample 
 matter for at least four duels. 
 
 Grisi is young, very pretty, and an admirable actress 
 — three great advantages to a singer. Her voice is 
 under absolute command, and she manages it beauti- 
 fully, but it wants the infusion of soul — the gushing, 
 uncontrollable, passionate feeling of Malibran. You 
 merely feel that Grisi is an accomplished artist, while 
 Malibran melts all your criticism into love and admi- 
 ration. I am easily moved by music, but I came 
 away without much enthusiasm for the present pas- 
 sion of London. 
 
 The opera-house is very different from those on the 
 continent. The stage only is lighted abroad, the 
 single lustre from the ceiling just throwing that clair 
 obscure over the boxes so favorable to Italian com- 
 plexions and morals. Here, the dress circles are 
 lighted with bright chandeliers, and the whole house 
 sits in such a blaze of light as leaves no approach 
 even, to a lady, unseen. The consequence is that 
 people here dress much more, and the opera, if less 
 interesting to the habitue., is a gayer thing to the many. 
 
 I went up to Lady Blessington's box for a moment, 
 and found Strangways, the traveller, and several other 
 distinguished men with her. Her ladyship pointed 
 out to me Lord Brougham, flirting desperately with a 
 pretty woman on the opposite side of the house, his 
 mouth going with the convulsive twitch which so dis- 
 figures him, and his most unsightly of pug-noses in 
 the strongest relief against the red lining behind. 
 There never was a plainer man. The Honorable 
 Mrs. Norton. Sheridan's daughter and poetess, sat 
 nearer to us, looking like a queen, certainly one of the 
 most beautiful women I ever looked upon ; and the 
 gastronomic and humpbacked Lord Sefton, said to be 
 
 the best judge of cookery in the world, sat in the 
 " dandy's omnibus," a large box on a level with the 
 stage, leaning forward with his chin on his knuckles, 
 and waiting with evident impatience for the appearance 
 of Fanny Elssler in the ballet. Beauty and all, the 
 English opera-house surpasses anything I have seen 
 in the way of a spectacle. 
 
 An evening party at Bulwer's. Not yet perfectly 
 initiated in London hours, I arrived not far from 
 eleven and found Mrs. Bulwer alone in her illumina- 
 ted rooms, whiling away an expectant hour in playing 
 with a King Charles spaniel, that seemed by his fond- 
 ness and delight to appreciate the excessive loveliness 
 of his mistress. As far off as America, I may express 
 even in print an admiration which is no heresy in 
 London. 
 
 The author of Pelham is a younger son and de- 
 pends on his writings for a livelihood, and truly, 
 measuring works of fancy by what they will bring, 
 (not an unfair standard perhaps), a glance around his 
 luxurious and elegant rooms is worth reams of puff 
 in the quarterlies. He lives in the heart of the fash- 
 ionable quarter of London, where rents are ruinously 
 extravagant, entertains a great deal, and is expensive 
 in all his habits, and for this pay Messrs. Clifford, 
 Pelham, and Aram — (it would seem) most excellent 
 good bankers. As I looked at the beautiful woman 
 seated on the costly ottoman before me, waiting to 
 receive the rank and fashion of London, I thought 
 that old close-fisted literature never had better reason 
 for his partial largess. I half forgave the miser for 
 starving a wilderness of poets. 
 
 One of the first persons who came was Lord By- 
 ron's sister, a thin, plain, middle-aged woman, of a 
 very serious countenance, and with very cordial and 
 pleasing manners. The rooms soon filled, and two 
 professed singers went industriously to work in their 
 vocation at the piano ; but, except one pale man, with 
 staring hair, whom I took to be a poet, nobody pre- 
 tended to listen. 
 
 Every second woman has some strong claim to 
 beauty in England, and the proportion of those who 
 just miss it, by a hair's breadth as it were — who seem 
 really to have been meant for beauties by nature, but 
 by a slip in the moulding or pencilling are imperfect 
 copies of the design — is really extraordinary. One 
 after another entered, as I stood near the door with 
 my old friend Dr. Bowring for a nomenclator, and the 
 word " lovely" or " charming," had not passed my 
 lips before some change in the attitude, or unguarded 
 animation had exposed the flaw, and the hasty hom- 
 age (for homage it is, and an idolatrous one, that we 
 pay to the beauty of woman) was coldly and unspar- 
 ingly retracted. From a goddess upon earth to a 
 slighted and unattractive trap for matrimony is a long 
 step, but taken on so slight a defect sometimes as, 
 were they marble, a sculptor would etch away with 
 his nail. 
 
 I was surprised (and I have been struck with the 
 same thing at several parties I have attended in Lon- 
 don), at the neglect with which the female part of the 
 assemblage is treated. No young man ever seems to 
 dream of speaking to a lady, except to ask her to 
 dance. There they sit with their mammas, their 
 hands hung over each other before them in the re- 
 ceived attitude ; and if there happens to be no 
 dancing (as at Bulwer's), looking at a print, or eating 
 an ice, is for them the most enlivening circumstance 
 of the evening. As well as I recollect, it is better 
 managed in America, and certainly society is quite 
 another thing in France and Italy. Late in the 
 evening a charming girl, who is the reigning belle of 
 Naples, came in with her mother from the opera, and 
 I made the remark to her. " I detest England for 
 that very reason." she said frankly. " It is the fash- 
 
188 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ion in London for the young men to prefer everything 
 to the society of women. They have their clubs, 
 their horses, their rowing matches, their bunting and 
 betting, and everything else is a bore ! How different 
 are the same men at Naples ! They can never get 
 enough of one there ! We are surrounded and run 
 after, 
 
 " ' Our poodle dog is quite adored, 
 Our sayings are extremely quoted,' 
 
 and really one feels that one is a belle." She men- 
 tioned several of the beaux of last winter who had re- 
 turned to England. u Here I have been in London a 
 month, and these very men that were dying for me, at 
 my side every day on the Strada Nuova, and all but 
 fighting to dance three times with me of an evening, 
 have only left their cards ! Not because they care 
 less about me, but because it is • not the fashion' — it 
 would be talked of at the club, it is 'knowing' to let us 
 alone." 
 
 There were only three men in the party, which was 
 a very crowded one, who could come under the head 
 of beaux. Of the remaining part, there was much 
 that was distinguished, both for rank and talent. 
 Sheil, the Irish orator, a small, dark, deceitful, but 
 talented-looking man, with a very disagreeable squeak- 
 ing voice, stood in a corner, very earnestly engaged 
 in conversation with the aristocratic old earl of Clar- 
 endon. The contrast between the styles of the two 
 men, the courtly and mild elegance of one, and the 
 uneasy and half-bred, but shrewd earnestness of the 
 other, was quite a study. Fonblanc of the Examiner, 
 with his pale and dislocated-looking face, stood in the 
 door-way between the two rooms, making the amiable 
 with a ghastly smile to Lady Stepney. The ' bilious 
 Lord Durham,' as the papers call him, with his Bru- 
 tus head, and grave, severe countenance, high-bred in 
 his appearance, despite the worst possible coat and 
 trousers, stood at the pedestal of a beautiful statue, 
 talking politics with Bowring ; and near them, leaned 
 over a chair the Prince Moscowa, the son of Marshal 
 Ney, a plain, but determined-looking young man, 
 with his coat buttoned up to his throat, unconscious 
 of everything but the presence of the Honorable Mrs. 
 Leicester Stanhope, a very lovely woman, who was 
 enlightening him in the prettiest English French, 
 upon some point of national differences. Her hus- 
 band, famous as Lord Byron's companion in Greece, 
 and a great liberal in England, was introduced to me 
 soon after by Bulwer ; and we discussed the bank 
 and the president, with a little assistance from Bow- 
 ring, who joined us with a paean for the old general 
 and his measures, till it was far into the morning. 
 
 LETTER CXX. 
 
 breakfast with barky cornwall — luxury of 
 
 the followers of the modern muse beauty 
 
 of the dramatic sketches gains procter a 
 Wife — hazlitt's extraordinary taste for the 
 picturesque in women — coleridge's opinion of 
 cornwall. 
 
 Breakfasted with Mr. Procter (known better as 
 Barry Cornwall). I gave a partial description of this 
 most delightful of poets in a former letter. In the 
 dazzling circle of rank and talent with which he was 
 surrounded at Lady Blessington's, however, it was 
 difficult to see so shrinkingly modest a man to advan- 
 tage, and with the exception of the keen gray eye, liv- 
 ina: with thought and feeling, I should hardly have rec- 
 ognised him at home for the same person. 
 
 Mr. Procter is a barrister ; and his " whereabout" 
 is more like that of a lord chancellor than a poet 
 proper. With the address he had given me at parting, 
 
 I drove to a large house in Bedford square ; and, not 
 accustomed to find the children of the Muses waited 
 on by servants in livery, I made up my mind as I 
 walked up the broad staircase, that I was blundering 
 upon some Mr. Procter of the exchange, whose re- 
 spect for his poetical namesake, I hoped would smooth 
 my apology for the intrusion. Buried in a deep mo- 
 rocco chair, in a large library, notwithstanding, I found 
 the poet himself — choice old pictures, filling every 
 nook between the book-shelves, tables covered with 
 novels and annuals, rolls of prints, busts and drawings 
 in all the corners ; and, more important for the nonce, 
 a breakfast table at the poet's elbow, spicily set forth, 
 not with flowers or ambrosia, the canonical food of 
 rhymers, but with cold hams and ducks, hot rolls and 
 butter, coffee-pot and tea-urn — as sensible a breakfast, 
 in short, as the most unpoetical of men could desire. 
 
 Procter is indebted to his poetry for a very charm- 
 ing wife, the daughter of Basil Montagu, well known 
 as a collector of choice literature, and the friend and 
 patron of literary men. The exquisite beauty of the 
 Dramatic Sketches interested this lovely woman in his 
 favor before she knew him, and far from worldly-wise 
 as an attachment so grounded would seem, I never 
 saw two people with a more habitual air of happiness. 
 I thought of his touching song, 
 
 " How many summers, love, 
 Hast thou been mine ?" 
 
 and looked at them with an irrepressible feeling of 
 envy. A beautiful girl, of eight or nine years, the 
 " golden-tressed Adelaide," delicate, gentle and pen- 
 sive, as if she was born on the lip of Castaly, and 
 knew she was a poet's child, completed the picture of 
 happiness. 
 
 The conversation ran upon various authors, whom 
 Proctor had known intimately. Hazlitt, Charles 
 Lamb, Keats, Shelley, and others , and of all he gave 
 me interesting particulars, which I could not well re- 
 peat in a public letter. The account of Hazlitt's 
 death-bed, which appeared in one of the magazines, 
 he said was wholly untrue. This extraordinary writer 
 was the most reckless of men in money matters, but 
 he had a host of admiring friends who knew his char- 
 acter, and were always ready to assist him. He was 
 a great admirer of the picturesque in women. He 
 was one evening at the theatre with Procter, and 
 pointed out to him an Amazonian female, strangely 
 dressed in black velvet and lace, but with no beauty 
 that would please an ordinary eye. " Look at her !" 
 said Hazlitt, " isn't she fine ? — isn't she magnificent ? 
 Did you ever see anything more Titianesque ?"* 
 
 After breakfast, Procter took me into a small closet 
 adjoining his library, in which he usually writes. 
 There was just room in it for a desk and two chairs, 
 and around were piled in true poetical confusion, his 
 favorite books, miniature likenesses of authors, manu- 
 scripts, and all the interesting lumber of a true poet's 
 corner. From a drawer, veiy much thrust out of the 
 way, he drew a volume of his own, into which he pro- 
 ceeded to write my name — a collection of songs, pub- 
 lished since I have been in Europe, which I had never 
 seen. I seized upon a worn copy of the Dramatic 
 Sketches, which I found crossed and interlined in 
 every direction. " Don't look at them," said Procter, 
 they are wretched things, which should never have 
 been printed, or at least with a world of correction. 
 You see how I have mended them ; and, some day, 
 perhaps, I will publish a corrected edition, since I can 
 
 * The following story has been told me by another gentle- 
 man. Hazlitt was married to an amiable woman, and divor- 
 ced, after a few years, at his own request. He left London, 
 and returned with another wife. The first thing he did was 
 to send to his first wife to borrow five pounds ! She had not 
 so much in the world, but she sent to a friend (the gentleman 
 who told me the story), borrowed it, and sent it to him ! It 
 seems to me theie is a whole drama in this single fact. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 not get them back." He took the book from my 
 hand, and opened to " The Broken Heart," certainly 
 the most highly-finished and exquisite piece of pathos 
 in the language, and read it to me with his alterations. 
 It ma to "gild refined gold and paint the lily." I 
 would recommend to the lovers of Barry Cornwall, to 
 keep their original copy, beautifully as he has polish- 
 ed his lines anew. 
 
 On a blank leaf of the same copy of the Dramatic 
 Sketches, I found some indistinct writing in pencil. 
 "Oh! don't read that," said Procter, "the book was 
 given me some years ago by a friend at whose house 
 Coleridge had been staying, for the sake of the criti- 
 cisms that great man did me the honor to write at the 
 end." I insisted on reading them, however, and his 
 wife calling him out presently, I succeeded in copying 
 them in his absence. He seemed a little annoyed, but 
 on my promising to make no use of them in England, 
 he allowed me to retain them. They are as follows: 
 
 " Barry Cornwall is a poet, me saltern judice, and in that 
 sense of the word in which I apply it to Charles Lamb and 
 W. Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the au- 
 thors of which I should not yet feel impelled so to designate. 
 " The faults of these poems are no less things of hope 
 than the beauties. Both are just what they ought to be : i. e. 
 now. 
 
 " If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn 
 him that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledge, so 
 .1 poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise and in- 
 clusively an historian and a naturalist in the light as well as 
 the life of philosophy. All other men's worlds are his chaos. 
 " Hints — Not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to se- 
 duce into effeminacy. 
 
 "Not to permit beauties by repetition to become man- 
 nerism. 
 
 " To be jealous of fragmentary composition as epicurism 
 of genius — apple-pie made all of quinces. 
 
 " Item. That dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in 
 thought and passion, not thought or passion hid in the dregs 
 of poetry. 
 
 " Lastly, to be economic and withholding in similes, figures, 
 etc. They will all find their place sooner or later, each in the 
 luminary of a sphere of its own. There can be no galaxy in 
 poetry, because it is language, ergo successive, ergo every the 
 smallest star must be seen singly. 
 
 " There are not five metrists in the kingdom whose works 
 are known by me, to whom I could have held myself allowed 
 to speak so plainly ; but B. C. is a man of genius, and it de- 
 pends on himself {competence protecting him from gnawing and 
 distracting cares) to become a rightful poet — i. e. a great man. 
 " Oh, for such a man ; worldly prudence is transfigured in- 
 to the high spiritual duty. How generous is self-interest in 
 him whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages 
 as far as the language of Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, is 
 the mother tongue. 
 
 " A map of the road to Paradise drawn in Purgatory on 
 the confines of Hell, by S. T. C. July 30, 1819." 
 
 I took my leave of this true poet after half a day 
 passed in his company, with the impression that he 
 makes upon every one — of a man whose sincerity and 
 kind-heartedness were the most prominent traits in his 
 character. Simple in his language and feelings, a 
 fond father, an affectionate husband, a business-man 
 of the closest habits of industry — one reads his 
 strange imaginations, and passionate, high-wrought, 
 and even sublimated poetry, and is in doubt at which 
 most to wonder — the man as he is, or the poet as we 
 know him in his books. 
 
 LETTER CXXI. 
 
 AN EVENING AT LADY BLESSINGTON's — ANECDOTES OF 
 MOORE, THE POET — TAYLOR, THE PLATONIST — POLI- 
 TICS — ELECTION OF SPEAKER — PRICES OF BOOKS. 
 
 I am obliged to " gazette" Lady Blessington rather 
 more than I should wish, and more than may seem 
 delicate to those who do not know the central position 
 she occupies in the circle of talent in London. Her 
 soirees and dinner-parties, however, are literally the 
 
 single and only assemblages of men of genius, without 
 reference to party — the only attempt at a republic of 
 letters in the world of this great, envious, and gifted 
 metropolis. The pictures of literary life, in which 
 my countrymen would be most interested, therefore, 
 are found within a very small compass, presuming 
 them to prefer the brighter side of an eminent charac- 
 ter, and presuming them (is it a presumption?) not 
 to possess that appetite for degrading the author to the 
 man by an anatomy of his secret personal failings, 
 which is lamentably common in England. Having 
 premised thus much, I go on with my letter. 
 
 I drove to Lady Blessington's an evening or two 
 since, with the usual certainty of finding her at home, 
 as there was no opera, and the equal certainty of find- 
 ing a circle of agreeable and eminent men about her. 
 She met me with the information that Moore was in 
 town, and an invitation to dine with her whenever she 
 should be able to prevail upon " the little Bacchus" 
 to give her a day. D'Israeli, the younger, was there, 
 and Dr. Beattie, the king's physician (and author, 
 unacknowledged, of "The Heliotrope"), and one or 
 two fashionable young noblemen. 
 
 Moore was naturally the first topic. He had appear- 
 ed at the opera the night before, after a year's ruializ 
 ing at " Slopperton cottage," as fresh and young and 
 witty as he ever was known in his youth — (for Moore 
 must be sixty at least). Lady B. said the only dif- 
 ference she could see in his appearance was the loss 
 of his curls, which once justified singularly his title of 
 Bacchus, flowing about his head in thin, glossy, 
 elastick tendrils, unlike any other hair she had ever 
 seen, and comparable to nothing but the rings of the 
 vine. He is now quite bald, and the change is very- 
 striking. D'Israeli regretted that he should have been 
 met, exactly on his return to London, with the savage 
 but clever article in Eraser's Magazine on his pla- 
 giarisms. " Give yourself no trouble about that," 
 said Lady B. " for you may be sure he will never see 
 it. Moore guards against the sight and knowledge 
 of criticism as people take precautions against the 
 plague. He reads few periodicals, and but one news- 
 paper. If a letter comes to him from a suspicious 
 quarter, he burns it unopened. If a friend mentions 
 a criticism to him at the club, he never forgives him ; 
 and, so well is this understood among his friends, that 
 he might live in London a year, and all the magazines 
 might dissect him, and he would probably never hear 
 of it. In the country he lives on the estate of Lord 
 Lansdown, his patron and best friend, with half a 
 dozen other noblemen within a dinner-drive ; and he 
 passes his life in this exclusive circle, like a bee in 
 amber, perfectly preserved from everything that could 
 blow rudely upon him. He takes the world en pJiil- 
 osophe, and is determined to descend to his grave per 
 fectly ignorant if such things as critics exist." Some- 
 body said tliis was weak, and D'Israeli thought it was 
 wise, and made a splendid defence of his opinion, as 
 usual, and I agreed with D'Israeli. Moore deserves a 
 medal, as the happiest author of his day, to possess 
 the power. 
 
 A remark was made in rather a satirical tone upon 
 Moore's worldliness and passion for rank. " He was 
 sure," it was said, " to have four or five invitations to 
 dine on the same day, and he tormented himself with 
 the idea that he had not accepted perhaps the most ex- 
 clusive. He would get off from an engagement with 
 a countess to dine with a marchioness, and from a 
 marchioness to accept the later invitation of a dutchess ; 
 and as he cared little for the society of men, and 
 would sing and be delightful only for the applause of 
 women, it mattered little whether one circle was 
 more talented than another. Beauty was one of his 
 passions, but rank and fashion were all the rest." 
 This rather left-handed portrait was confessed by all 
 to be just. Lady B. herself making no comment 
 
190 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 upon it. She gave, as an offset, however, some par- 
 ticulars of Moore's difficulties from his West Indian 
 appointment, which left a balance to his credit. 
 
 " Moore went to Jamaica with a profitable appoint- 
 ment. The climate disagreed with him, and he re- 
 turned home, leaving the business in the hands of a 
 confidential clerk, who embezzled eight thousand 
 pounds in the course of a few months and absconded. 
 Moore's politics had made him obnoxious to the gov- 
 ernment, and he was called to account with unusual 
 severity; while Theodore Hook, who had been re- 
 called at this very time from some foreign appoint- 
 ment for a deficit of twenty thousand pounds in his 
 accounts, was never molested, being of the ruling 
 party. Moore's misfortune awakened a great sympa- 
 thy among his friends. Lord Lansdowne was the 
 first to offer his aid. He wrote to Moore, that for 
 many years he had been in the habit of laying aside 
 from his income eight thousand pounds, for the en- 
 couragement of the arts and literature, and that he 
 should feel that it was well disposed of for that year 
 if Moore would accept it, to free him from his difficul- 
 ties. It was offered in the most delicate and noble 
 manner, but Moore declined it. The members of 
 " White's" (mostly noblemen) called a meeting, and 
 (not knowing the amount of the deficit) subscribed in 
 one morning twenty-five thousand pounds, and wrote 
 to the poet that they would cover the sum, whatever 
 it might be. This was declined. Longman and 
 Murray then offered to pay it, and wait for their re- 
 muneration from his works. He declined even this, 
 and went to Passy with his family, where he econo- 
 mized and worked hard till it was cancelled." 
 
 This was certainly a story most creditable to the 
 poet, and it was told with an eloquent enthusiasim 
 that did the heart of the beautiful narrator infinite 
 credit. I have given only the skeleton of it. Lady 
 Blessington went on to mention another circumstance, 
 very honorable to Moore, of which I had never before 
 heard. " At one time two different counties of Ire- 
 land sent committees to him, to offer him a seat in 
 parliament; and as he depended on his writings for a 
 subsistence, offering him at the same time twelve 
 hundred pounds a year while he continued to repre- 
 sent them. Moore was deeply touched with it, and 
 said no circumstance of his life had ever gratified him 
 so much. He admitted that the honor they proposed 
 him had been his most cherished ambition, but the 
 necessity of receiving a pecuniary support at the same 
 time was an insuperable obstacle. He could never 
 enter parliament with his hands tied, and his opinions 
 and speech fettered, as they would be irresistibly in 
 such circumstances." This does not sound like 
 " jump-up-and-kiss-me Tom Moore," as the Irish 
 ladies call him ; but her ladyship vouched for the truth 
 of it. It was worthy of an old Roman. 
 
 By what transition I know not, the conversation 
 turned on Platonism, and D'Israeli (who seemed to 
 have remembered the shelf on which Vivian Grey was 
 to find " the latter Platonists" in his father's library) 
 " flared up," as a dandy would say, immediately. His 
 wild, black eyes glistened, and his nervous lips quiver- 
 ed and poured out eloquence ; and a German profes- 
 sor, who had entered late, and the Russian charge 
 d'affaires, who had entered later, and a whole ottoman- 
 full of noble exquisites, listened with wonder. He 
 gave us an account of Taylor, almost the last of the 
 celebrated Platonists, who worshipped Jupiter in a 
 back parlor in London a few years ago with undoubted 
 sincerity. He had an altar and a brazen figure of the 
 Thunderer, and performed his devotions as regularly 
 as the most pious sacerdos of the ancients. In his old 
 age he was turned out of the lodgings he had occu- 
 pied for a great number of years, and went to a friend 
 in much distress to complain of the injustice. He 
 had "only attempted to worship his gods according to 
 
 the dictates of his conscience." "Did you pay your 
 bills?" asked the friend. "Certainly." " Then what 
 is the reason ?" " His landlady had taken offence at 
 his sacrificing a bull to Jupiter in his back parlor!" 
 
 The story sounded very Vivian-Grey-ish, and every- 
 body laughed at it as a very good invention ; but 
 D'Israeli quoted his father as his authority, and it 
 may appear in the Curiosities of Literature — where, 
 however, it will never be so well told as by the extra- 
 ordinary creature from whom we had heard it. 
 
 February 22d, 1835. — The excitement in London 
 about the choice of a speaker is something startling. 
 It took place yesterday, and the party are thunderstruck 
 at the non-election of Sir Manners Sutton. This is a 
 terrible blow upon them, for it was a defeat at the out- 
 set ; and if they failed in a question where they had 
 the immense personal popularity of the late speaker 
 to assist them, what will they do on general questions? 
 The house of commons was surrounded all day with 
 
 an excited mob. Lady told me last night that she 
 
 drove down toward evening, to ascertain the result 
 (Sir C. M. Sutton is her brother-in-law), and the 
 crowd surrounded her carriage, recognising her as 
 the sister of the tory speaker, and threatened to tear 
 the coronet from the pannels. " We'll soon put an 
 end to your coronets," said a rapscallion in the mob. 
 The tories were so confident of success that Sir 
 Robert Peel gave out cards a week ago for a soiree to 
 meet Speaker Sutton, on the night of the election. 
 There is a general report in town that the whigs will 
 impeach the duke of Wellington ! This looks like 
 a revolution, does it not ? It is very certain that the 
 duke and Sir Robert Peel have advised the king to 
 dissolve parliament again, if there is any difficulty in 
 getting on with the government. The duke was dining 
 with Lord Aberdeen the other day, when some one at 
 table ventured to wonder at his accepting a subordi- 
 nate office in the cabinet he had himself formed. "If 
 I could serve his majesty better," said the patrician 
 soldier, " I would ride as king's messenger to-mor- 
 row !" He certainly is a remarkable old fellow. 
 
 Perhaps, however, literary news would interest you 
 more. Bulwer is publishing in a volume his papers 
 from the New Monthly. I met him an hour age in 
 Regent-street, looking, what is called in London, 
 "uncommon seedy!" He is either the worst or the 
 best dressed man in London, according to the time of 
 day or night you see him. D'Israeli, the author of 
 Vivian Grey, drives about in an open carriage, with 
 
 Lady S , looking more melancholy than usual. 
 
 The absent baronet, whose place he fills, is about 
 bringing an action against him, which will finish his 
 career, unless he can coin the damages in his brain. 
 Mrs. Hemans is dying of consumption in Ireland. I 
 have been passing a week at a country house, where 
 Miss Jane Porter, Miss Pardoe, and Count Krazinsky 
 (author of the Court of Sigismund), are domiliciated 
 for the present. Miss Porter is one of her own 
 heroines, grown old — a still handsome and noble 
 wreck of beauty. Miss Pardoe is nineteen, fairhaired 
 sentimental, and has the smallest feet and is the best 
 waltzer I ever saw, but she is not otherwise pretty. 
 The Polish count is writing the life of his grand- 
 mother, whom I should think he strongly resembled in 
 person. He is an excellent fellow, for all that. 1 
 dined last week with Joanna Baillie, at Hampstead — 
 the most charming old lady I ever saw. To-day I 
 dine with Longman to meet Tom Moore, who is living 
 incog, near this Nestor of publishers at Hampstead. 
 Moore is fagging hard on his history of Ireland. I 
 shall give you the particulars of all these things in my 
 letters hereafter. 
 
 Poor Elia — my old favorite — is dead. I consider 
 it one of the most fortunate things that ever hap- 
 pened to me to have seen him. I think I sent you in 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 191 
 
 one of my letters an account of my breakfasting in 
 company with Charles Lamb and his sister (" Bridget 
 Elia,") in the Temple. The exquisite papers on his 
 life and letters in the Atheneum, are by Barry Corn- 
 wall. 
 
 Lady Blessington's new book makes a great 
 noise. Living as she does twelve hours out of the 
 twenty-four in the midst of the most brilliant and 
 mind-exhausting circle in London, I only wonder how 
 she found the time. Yet it was written in six weeks. 
 Her novels sell for a hundred pounds more than any 
 other author's except Bulwer. Do you know the real 
 prices of books ? Bulwer gets fifteen hundred pounds 
 — Lady B. four hundred, Honorable Mrs. Norton txvo 
 hundred and fifty, Lady Charlotte Bury two hundred, 
 Grattan three hundred and most others below this. 
 Captain Marryat's gross trash sells immensely about 
 Wapping and Portsmouth, and brings him five or six 
 hundred the book — but that can scarce be called lit- 
 erature. D'Israeli can not sell a book at all, I hear ? 
 Is not that odd ? I would give more for one of his 
 novels than for forty of the common saleable things 
 about town. 
 
 The authoress of the powerful book called Two 
 Old Men's Tales, is an old unitarian lady, a Mrs. 
 Marsh. She declares she will never write another 
 book. The other was a glorious one, though! 
 
 LETTER CXXII. 
 
 LONDON THE POET MOORE LAST DAYS OF SIR 
 
 WALTER SCOTT MOORE'S OPINION OF O'CONNELL 
 
 ANACREON AT THE PIANO DEATH OF BYRON 
 
 A SUPPRESSED ANECDOTE. 
 
 I called on Moore with a letter of introduction, 
 and met him at the door of his lodgings. I knew him 
 instantly from the pictures I had seen of him, but was 
 surprised at the diminutiveness of his person. He 
 is much below the middle size, and with his white 
 hat and long chocolate frock-coat, was far from 
 prepossessing in his appearance. With this ma- 
 terial disadvantage, however, his address is gentleman- 
 like to a very marked degree, and I should think no 
 one could see Moore without conceiving a strong 
 liking for him. As I was to meet him at dinner, I 
 did not detain him. In the moment's conversation 
 that passed, he inquired very particularly after Wash- 
 ington Irving, expressing for him the warmest friend- 
 ship, and asked what Cooper was doing. 
 
 I was at Lady Blessington's at eight. Moore had 
 not arrived, but the other persons of the party — a 
 Russian count, who spoke all the languages of Europe 
 as well as his own; a Roman banker, whose dynasty 
 is more powerful than the pope's; a clever English 
 nobleman, and the " observed of all observers," 
 Count D'Orsay, stood in the window upon the park, 
 killing, as they might, the melancholy twilight half 
 hour preceding dinner. 
 
 " Mr. Moore !" cried the footman at the bottom of 
 the staircase. " Mr. Moore !" cried the footman at 
 the top. And with his glass at his eye, stumbling 
 over an ottoman between his near-sightedness and the 
 darkness of the room, enter the poet. Half a glance 
 tells you that he is at home on a carpet. Sliding his 
 little feet up to Lady Blessington (of whom he was 
 a lover when she was sixteen, and to whom some of 
 the sweetest of his songs were written), he made his 
 compliments, with a gayety and an ease combined 
 with a kind of worshipping deference that was worthy 
 of a prime-minister at the court of love. With the 
 gentlemen, all of whom he knew, he had the frank, 
 merry manner of a confident favorite, and he was 
 
 greeted like one. He went from one to the other, 
 straining back his head to look up at them (for, sin- 
 gularly enough, every gentleman in the room was six 
 feet high and upward), and to every one he said some- 
 thing which, from any one else, would have seemed 
 peculiarly felicitous, but which fell from his lips as il 
 his breath was not more spontaneous. 
 
 Dinner was announced, the Russian handed down 
 "miladi," and I found myself seated opposite Moore, 
 with a blaze of light on his Bacchus head, and the 
 mirrors with which the superb octagonal room is pan- 
 nelled reflecting every motion. To see him only at 
 table, you would think him not a small man. His 
 principal length is in his body, and his head and shoul- 
 ders are those of a much larger person. Consequently 
 he sits tall, and with the peculiar erectness of head 
 and neck, his diminutiveness disappears. 
 
 The soup vanished in the busy silence that beseems 
 it, and as the courses commenced their procession, 
 Lady Blessington led the conversation with the bril- 
 liancy and ease for which she is remarkable over all 
 the women of her time. She had received from Sir 
 William Gell, at Naples, the manuscript of a volume 
 upon the last days of Sir Walter Scott. It was a 
 melancholy chronicle of imbecility and the book was 
 suppressed, tfut there were two or three circumstances 
 narrated in its pages which were interesting. Soon 
 after his arrival at Naples, Sir Walter went with his 
 physician and one or two friends to the great museum. 
 It happened that on the same day a large collection 
 of students and Italian literati were assembled, in one 
 of the rooms, to discuss some newly-discovered man- 
 uscripts. It was soon known that the " Wizard of the 
 North" was there, and a deputation was sent immedi- 
 ately to request him to honor them by presiding at 
 their session. At this time Scott was a wreck, with a 
 memory that retained nothing for a moment, and 
 limbs almost as helpless as an infant's. He was drag- 
 ging about among the relics of Pompeii, taking no 
 interest in anything he saw, when their request was 
 made known to him through his physician. "No, 
 no," said he, "I know nothing of their lingo. Tell 
 them I am not well enough to come." He loitered 
 on, and in about half an hour after, he turned to Dr. 
 H. and said, " Who was that you said wanted to see 
 me?" The doctor explained. "I'll go," said he, 
 "they shall see me if they wish it ;" and, against the 
 advice of his friends, who feared it would be too much 
 for his strength, he mounted the staircase, and made 
 his appearance at the door. A burst of enthusiastic 
 cheers welcomed him on the threshold, and forming 
 in two lines, many of them on their knees, they seized 
 his hands as he passed, kissed them, thanked him in 
 their passionate language for the delight with which 
 he had filled the world, and placed him in the chair 
 with the most fervent expressions of gratitude for his 
 condescension. The discussion went on. but not 
 understanding a syllable of the language, Scott was 
 soon wearied, and his friends observing it, pleaded the 
 state of his health as an apology, and he rose to take 
 his leave. These enthusiastic children of the south 
 crowded once more around him, and with exclama- 
 tions of affection and even tears, kissed his hands once 
 more, assisted his tottering steps, and sent after him a 
 confused murmur of blessings as the door closed on 
 his retiring form. It is described by the writer as the 
 most affecting scene he had ever witnessed. 
 
 Some other remarks were made upon Scott, but 
 the parole was soon yielded to Moore, who gave us an 
 account of a visit he made to Abbotsford when its 
 illustrious owner was in his pride and prime. " Scott,' 
 he said, "was the most manly and natural character 
 in the world. You felt when with him, that he was 
 the soul of truth and heartiness. His hospitality was 
 as simple and open as the day, and he lived freely 
 
192 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 himself, and expected his guests to do so. I remem- 
 ber his giving us whiskey at dinner, and Lady Scott 
 met my look of surprise with the assurance that Sir 
 Walter seldom dined without it. He never ate or 
 drank to excess, but he had no system, his constitu- 
 tion was herculean, and he denied himself nothing. 
 I went once from a dinner-party with Sir Thomas 
 Lawrence to meet Scott at Lockhart's. We had 
 hardly entered the room when we were set down to a 
 hot supper of roast chickens, salmon, punch, etc., 
 etc., and Sir Walter ate immensely of everything. 
 What a contrast between this and the last time I 
 saw him in London! He had come down to embark 
 for Italy — broken quite down in mind and body. He 
 gave Mrs. Moore a book, and I asked him if lie would 
 make it more valuable by writing in it. He thought 
 I meant that he should write some verses, and said, 
 ' Oh I never write poetry now.' I asked him to write 
 only his own name and hers, and he attempted it, but 
 it was quite illegible." 
 
 Some one remarked that Scott's life of Napoleon 
 was a failure. 
 
 "I think little of it," said Moore; "but after all, it 
 was an embarrassing task, and Scott did what a wise 
 man would do — made as much of his subject as was 
 pblitic and necessary, and no more." • 
 
 " It will not live," said some one else; " as much 
 because it is a bad book, as because it is the life of an 
 individual." 
 
 "But what an individual!" Moore replied. "Vol- 
 taire's life of Charles the Twelfth was the life of an in- 
 dividual, yet that will live and be read as long as there 
 is a book in the world, and what was he to Napo- 
 leon ?" 
 
 O'Connell was mentioned. 
 
 " He is a powerful creature," said Moore, " but his 
 eloquence has done great harm both to England and 
 Ireland. There is nothing so powerful as oratory. 
 The faculty of ' thinking on his legs,' is a tremendous 
 engine in the hands of any man. There is an undue 
 admiration for this faculty, and a sway permitted to it 
 which was always more dangerous to a country than 
 anything else. Lord Althorpis a wonderful instance 
 of what a man may do without talking. There is a 
 general confidence in him — a universal belief in his 
 honesty, which serves him instead. Peel is a fine 
 speaker, but, admirable as be had been as an opposi- 
 tionist, he failed when he came to lead the house. 
 O'Connell would be irresistible were it not for the two 
 blots on his character — the, contributions in Ireland 
 for his support, and his refusal to give satisfaction 
 to the man he is still coward enough to attack. 
 They may say what they will of duelling, it is the 
 great preserver of the decencies of society. The 
 old school, which made a man responsible for his 
 words, was the better. I must confess I think so. 
 Then, in O'Connell's case, he had not made his vow 
 against duelling when Peel challenged him. He ac- 
 cepted the challenge, and Peel went to Dover on his 
 way to France, where they were to meet ; and O'Con- 
 nell pleaded his wife's illness, and delayed till the law 
 interfered. Some other Irish patriot, about the same 
 time, refused a challenge on account of the illness of 
 his daughter, and one of the Dublin wits made a good 
 epigram on the two : — 
 
 11 1 Some men, with a horror of slaughter, 
 Improve on the scripture command, 
 
 And ■ honor their' wife and daughter — 
 
 ' That their days may be long in the land. ' ' 
 
 The great period of Ireland's glory was between '82 
 and '98, and it was a time when a man almost lived 
 with a pistol in his hand. Grattan's dying advice to 
 his son, was, « Be always ready with the pistol !' He 
 j^ttfitMut never hesitated a moment. At one time, 
 
 there was a kind of conspiracy to fight him out of the 
 world. On some famous question, Corrie was em- 
 ployed purposely to bully him, and made a personal 
 attack of the grossest virulence. Grattan was so ill, 
 at the time, as to be supported into the house between 
 two friends. He rose to reply ; and first, without al- 
 luding to Corrie at all, clearly and entirely overturned 
 every argument he had advanced that bore upon 
 the question. He then paused a moment, and 
 stretching out his arm, as if he would reach across 
 the house, said, ' For the assertions the gentleman 
 has been pleased to make with regard to myself, my 
 answer here is, they are false! elsewhere it would be — 
 a blow ." They met, and Grattan shot him through 
 the arm. Corrie proposed another shot, but Grattan 
 said, 'No! let the curs fight it out!' and they were 
 friends ever after. I like the old story of the Irish- 
 man who was challenged by some desperate black- 
 guard. ' Fight him ." said he, ' I would sooner go to 
 my grave without a fight!' Talking of Grattan, is it 
 not wonderful that, with all the agitation in Ireland, 
 we have had no such men since his time ? Look at 
 the Irish newspapers. The whole country in convul- 
 sion — people's lives, fortunes, and religion, at stake, 
 and not a gleam of talent from one year's end to the 
 other. It is natural for sparks to be struck out in a 
 time of violence like this — but Ireland, for all that is 
 worth living for, is dead! You can scarcely reckon 
 Shiel of the calibre of her spirits of old, and O'Con- 
 nell, with all his faults, stands ' alone in his glory.' " 
 The conversation I have thus run together is a mere 
 skeleton, of course. Nothing but a short-hand re- 
 port could retain the delicacy and elegance of Moore's 
 language, and memory itself can not imbody again 
 the kind of frost-work of imagery which was formed 
 and melted on his lips. His voice is soft or firm as 
 the subject requires, but perhaps the word gentleman- 
 ly describes it better than any other. It is upon a 
 natural key, but, if I may so phrase it, it is fused 
 with a high-bred affectation, expressing deference and 
 courtesy, at the same time that its pauses are con- 
 structed peculiarly to catch the ear. It would be dif- 
 ficult not to attend him while he is talking, though the 
 subject were but the shape of a wine-glass. 
 
 Moore's head is distinctly before me while I write, 
 but I shall find it difficult to describe. His hair, 
 which curled once all over it in long tendrils, unlike 
 anybody else's in the world, and which probably sug- 
 gested his soubriquet of "Bacchus," is diminished 
 now to a few curls sprinkled with gray, and scattered 
 in a single ring above his ears. His forehead 
 wrinkled, with the exception of a most prominent 
 development of the organ of gayety, which, singu- 
 larly enough, shines with the lustre and smooth pol- 
 ish of a pearl, and is surrounded by a semicircle of 
 lines drawn close about it, like entrenchments against 
 Time. His eyes still sparkle like a champaign bub- 
 ble, though the invader has drawn his pencillings 
 about the corners; and there is a kind of wintry red, 
 of the tinge of an October leaf, that seems enamelled 
 on his cheek, the eloquent record of the claret his wit 
 has brightened. His mouth is the most characteris- 
 tic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, slight 
 and changeable as an aspen ; but there is a set-up 
 look about the lower lip, a determination of the mus 
 cle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you 
 can almost see wit astride upon it. It is written legi 
 bly with the imprint of habitual success. It is arch 
 confident, and half diffident, as if he were disguising 
 his pleasure at applause, while another bright glean 
 of fancy was breaking on him. The slightly-tossed 
 nose confirms the fun of the expression, and altogeth 
 er it is a face that sparkles, beams, radiates, — every 
 thing but feels. Fascinating beyond all men as he i* 
 Moore looks like a worldling. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 193 
 
 This description maybe supposed to have occupied 
 the hour after Lady Blessing ton retired from the ta- 
 ble ; for with her vanished Moore's excitement, and 
 everybody else seemed to feel that light had gone out 
 of the room. Her excessive beauty is less an inspi- 
 ration than the wondrous talent with which she draws 
 from every person around her his peculiar excellence. 
 Talking better than anybody else, and narrating, par- 
 ticularly, with a graphic power that I never saw ex- 
 celled, this distinguished woman seems striving only 
 to make others unfold themselves ; and never had dif- 
 fidence a more apprehensive and encouraging listener. 
 But this is a subject with which I should never be 
 done. 
 
 We went up to coffee, and Moore brightened again 
 over his chasse-cafe, and went glittering on with criti- 
 cisms on Grisi, the delicious songstress now ravishing 
 the world, whom he placed above all but Pasta ; and 
 whom he thought, with the exception that her legs 
 were too short, an incomparable creature. This in- 
 troduced music very naturally, and with a great deal 
 of difficulty he was taken to the piano. My letter is 
 getting long, and I have no time to describe his sing- 
 ing. It is well known, however, that its effect is only 
 equalled by the beauty of his own words; and, for 
 one, I could have takeu him into my heart with my 
 delight. He makes no attempt at music. It is a kind 
 of admirable recitative, in which every shade of 
 thought is syllabled and dwelt upon, and the senti- 
 ment of the song goes through your blood, warming 
 you to the very eyelids, and starting your tears, if you 
 have soul or sense in you. I have heard of women's 
 fainting at a song of Moore's ; and if the burden of it 
 answered by chance to a secret in the bosom of the 
 listener, I should think, from its comparative effect 
 upon so old a stager as myself, that the heart would 
 break with it. 
 
 We all sat around the piano, and after two or three 
 songs of Lady Blessington's choice, he rambled over 
 the keys awhile, and sang " When first I met thee," 
 with a pathos that beggars description. W T hen the 
 last word had faltered out, he rose and took Lady 
 Blessington's hand, said good-night, and was gone 
 before a word was uttered. For a full minute after 
 he had closed the door no one spoke. I could have 
 wished, for myself, to drop silently asleep where I sat, 
 with the tears in my eyes and the softness upon my 
 heart. 
 
 " Here's a health to thee, Tom Moore !" 
 
 1 was in company the other evening where West- 
 macott, the sculptor, was telling a story of himself 
 and Leigh Hunt. They were together one day at 
 Fiesole, when a butterfly, of an uncommon sable 
 color, alighted on Westmacott's forehead, and re- 
 mained there several minutes. Hunt immediately 
 cried out, " The spirit of some dear friend is depart- 
 ed," and as they entered the gate of Florence on their 
 return, some one met them and informed them of the 
 death of Byron, the news of which had at that mo- 
 ment arrived. 
 
 I have just time before the packet sails to send you 
 an anecdote that is bought out of the London papers. 
 A nobleman, living near Belgrave square, received a 
 visit a day or two ago from a police officer, who sta- 
 ted to him, that he had a man-servant in his house, 
 who had escaped from Botany Bay. His lordship 
 was somewhat surprised, but called up the male part 
 of his household, at the officer's request, and passed 
 them in review. The culprit was not among them. 
 Th«j officer then requested to see the female part of 
 the establishment ; and, to the inexpressible astonish- 
 ment of the whole household, he laid his hand upon 
 the shoulder of the lady's confidential maid, and in- 
 formed her she was his prisoner. A change of dress 
 13 
 
 was immediately sent for, and miladi's dressing-maid 
 was remetamorphosed into an effeminate-looking 
 fellow, and marched off to a new trial. It is a most 
 extraordinary thing that he had lived unsuspected in 
 the family for nine months, performing all the func- 
 tions of a confidential Abigail, and very much in favor 
 with his unsuspecting mistress, who is rather a serious 
 person, and would as soon have thought of turning 
 out to be a man herself. It is said, that the husband 
 once made a remark upon the huskiness of the maid's 
 voice, but no other comment was ever made reflecting 
 in the least upon her qualities as a member of the 
 beau sexe. The story is quite authentic, but hushed 
 up out of regard to the lady. 
 
 LETTER CXXIII. 
 
 IMMENSITY OF LONDON — VOYAGE TO LEITH — SOCIETY 
 
 OF THE STEAM-PACKET ANALOGY BETWEEN SCOTCH 
 
 AND AMERICAN MANNERS — STRICT OBSERVANCE OF 
 THE SABBATH ON BOARD EDINBURGH — UNEXPECT- 
 ED RECOGNITION. 
 
 Almost giddy with the many pleasures and occu- 
 pations of London, I had outstayed the last fashiona- 
 ble lingerer; and, on appearing again, after a fort- 
 night's confinement with the epidemic of the season, 
 I found myself almost without an acquaintance, and 
 was driven to follow the world. A preponderance of 
 letters and friends determined my route toward Scot- 
 land. 
 
 One realizes the immensity of London when he is 
 compelled to measure its length on a single errand. I 
 took a cab at my lodgings at nine in the evening, and 
 drove six miles through one succession of crowded and 
 blazing streets to the East India Docks, and with the 
 single misfortune of being robbed on the way of a 
 valuable cloak, secured a birth in the Monarch steam- 
 er, bound presently for Edinburgh. 
 
 I found the drawing-room cabin quite crowded, 
 cold supper on the two long tables, everybody very 
 busy with knife and fork, and whiskey-and-water and 
 broad Scotch circulating merrily. All the world seem- 
 ed acquainted, and each man talked to his neighbor, 
 and it was as unlike a ship's company of dumb Eng 
 lish as could easily be conceived. I had dined too 
 late to attack the solids, but imitating my neighbor's 
 potation of whiskey and hot water, I crowded in be- 
 tween two good-humored Scotchmen, and took the 
 happy color of the spirits of the company. A small 
 j centre-table was occupied by a party who afforded 
 '■ considerable amusement. An excessively fat old wo- 
 | man, with a tall scraggy daughter and a stubby little 
 old fellow, whom they called "pa;" and a singular 
 man, a Major Somebody, who seemed showing them 
 up, composed the quartette. Noisier women I never 
 ; saw, nor more hideous. They bullied the waiter, 
 were facetious with the steward, and talked down all 
 the united buzz of the cabin. Opposite me sat a pale, 
 ' severe-looking Scotchman, who had addressed one or 
 j two remarks to me ; and, upon an uncommon burst 
 of uproariousness, he laughed with the rest, and re- 
 marked that the ladies were excusable, for they were 
 doubtless Americans, and knew no better. 
 
 " It strikes me," said I, " that both in manners and 
 accent they are particularly Scotch." 
 
 "Sir!" said the pale gentleman. 
 
 " Sir !" said several of my neighbors on the right 
 and left. 
 
 I repeated the remark. 
 
 " Have you ever been in Scotland ?" asked the 
 pale gentleman, with rather a ferocious air. 
 
 " No, sir ! Have you ever been in America ?" 
 
 " No, sir ! but I have read Mrs. Trollope." 
 
194 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WA\ 
 
 " And I have read Cyril Thornton ; and the man- 
 ners delineated in Mrs. Trollope, I must say, are 
 rather elegant in comparison." 
 
 I particularized the descriptions I alluded to, which 
 will occur immediately to those who have read the 
 novel I have named ; and then confessing I was an 
 American, and withdrawing my illiberal remark, which 
 I had only made to show the gentleman the injustice 
 and absurdity of his own, we called for another tass 
 of whiskey, and became very good friends. Heaven 
 knows I have no prejudice against the Scotch, or any 
 other nation — but it is extraordinary how universal the 
 feeling seems to be against America. A half hour in- 
 cog, in any mixed company in England I should think 
 would satisfy the most rose-colored doubter on the 
 subject. 
 
 We got under way at eleven o'clock, and the pas- 
 sengers turned in. The next morning was Sunday. 
 It was fortunately of a " Sabbath stillness;" and the 
 open sea through which we were driving, with an easy 
 south wind in our favor, graciously permitted us to do 
 honor to as substantial a breakfast as ever was set be- 
 fore a traveller, even in America. (Why we should 
 be ridiculed for our breakfasts I do not know.) 
 
 The "Monarch" is a superb boat, and, with the 
 aid of sails and a wind right aft, we made twelve miles 
 in the hour easily. I was pleased to see an observance 
 of the Sabbath which had not crossed my path before 
 in three years' travel. Half the passengers at least 
 took their bibles after breakfast, and devoted an hour 
 or two evidently to grave religious reading and reflec- 
 tion. With this exception, I have not seen a person 
 with the Bible in his hand, in travelling over half the 
 world. 
 
 The weather continued fine, and smooth water 
 tempted us up to breakfast again on Monday. The 
 wash-room was full of half-clad men, but the week- 
 day manners of the passengers were perceptibly gayer. 
 The captain honored us by taking the head of the" ta- 
 ble, which he had not done on the day previous, and 
 his appeaiance was hailed by three general cheers. 
 When the meats were removed, a gentleman rose, and, 
 after a very long and parliamentary speech, proposed 
 the health of the captain. The company stood up, 
 ladies and all, and it was drank with a "tremendous 
 "hip-hip-hurrah," in bumpers of whiskey. They 
 don't do that on the Mississippi, I reckon. If they 
 did, the travellers would be down upon us, " I guess," 
 out-Hamiltoning Hamilton. 
 
 We rounded St. Abb's head into the Forth, at five, 
 in the afternoon, and soon dropped anchor oft' Leith. 
 The view of Edinburgh, from the water, is, ] think, 
 second only to that of Constantinople. The singular 
 resemblance, in one or two features, to the view of 
 Athens, as you approach from the Piraeus, seems to 
 have struck other eyes than mine, and an imitation 
 Acropolis is commenced on the Calton-hill, and has 
 already, in its half-finished state, much the effect of 
 the Parthenon. Hymettus is rather loftier than the 
 Pentland-hills, and Pentelicus farther off and grander 
 than Arthur's seat, but the old castle of Edinburgh is 
 a noble and peculiar feature of its own, and soars up 
 against the sky, with its pinnacle-placed turrets, su- 
 perbly magnificent. The Forth has a high shore on 
 either side, and, with the island of Inchkeith in its 
 broad bosom, it looks more like a lake than an arm of 
 the sea. 
 
 It is odd what strange links of acquaintance will 
 develop between people thrown together in the most 
 casual manner, and in the most out-of-the-way places. 
 I have never entered a steamboat in my life without 
 finding, if hot an acquaintance, some one who should 
 have been an acquaintance from mutual knowledge of 
 friends. I thought, through the first day, that the 
 Monarch would be an exception. On the second 
 morning, however, a gentleman came up and called 
 
 me by name. He was an American, and had seen me 
 in Boston. Soon after, another gentleman addressed 
 some remark to me, and, in a few minutes, we dis- 
 covered that we were members of the same club in 
 London, and bound to the same hospitable roof in 
 Scotland. We went on, talking together, and I hap- 
 pened to mention having lately been in Greece, when 
 one of a large party of ladies, overhearing the remark, 
 
 turned, and asked me, if I had met Lady in my 
 
 travels. I had met her at Athens, and this was her 
 sister. I found I had many interesting particulars of 
 the delightful person in question which were new to 
 them, and, sequilur, a friendship struck up immedi- 
 ately between me and a party of six. You would 
 have never dreamed, to have seen the adieux on the 
 landing, that we had been unaware of each other's ex- 
 istence forty-four hours previous. 
 
 Leith is a mile or more from the town, and we drove 
 into the new side of Edinburgh — a splendid city of 
 stone — and, with my English friend, I was soon in- 
 stalled in a comfortable parlor at Douglas's — an hotel 
 to which the Tremont, in Boston, is the only parallel. 
 It is built of the same stone and is smaller, but it has 
 a better situation than the Tremont, standing in a 
 magnificent square, with a column and statue to Lord 
 Melville in the centre, and a perspective of a noble 
 street stretching through the city from the opposite 
 side. 
 
 We dined upon grovse, to begin Scotland fairly, 
 and nailed down our sherry with a tass o' Glenlivet, 
 and then we had still an hour of daylight for a ramble 
 
 LETTER CXXIV. 
 
 EDINBURGH — A SCOTCH BREAKFAST — THE CASTLE - 
 PALACE OF HOLYROOD — QUEEN MARY — RIZZIO — 
 CHARLES THE TENTH. 
 
 It is an odd place, Edinboro'. The old town and 
 the new are separated by a broad and deep ravine, 
 planted with trees and shrubbery ; and across this, on 
 a level with the streets on either side, stretches a 
 bridge of a most giddy height, without which ail com- 
 munication would apparently be cut oft'. " Auld 
 Reekie" itself looks built on the back-bone of a ridgy 
 crag, and towers along on the opposite side of the 
 ravine, running up its twelve-story houses to the sky 
 in an ascending curve, till it terminates in the frown- 
 ing and battlemented castle, whose base is literally on 
 a mountain top in the midst of the city. At the foot 
 of this ridge, in the lap of the valley, lies Holyiood- 
 house ; and between this and the castle runs a single 
 street, part of which is the old Canongate. Princes' 
 street, the Broadway of the new town, is built along 
 the opposite edge of the ravine facing the long, many- 
 windowed walls of the Canongate, and from every 
 part of Edinboro' these singular features are con- 
 spicuously visible. A more striking contrast than exists 
 between these two parts of the same city could hardly 
 be imagined. On one side a succession of splendid 
 squares, elegant granite houses, broad and well-paved 
 streets, columns, statues, and clean sidewalks, thinly 
 promenaded and by the well-dressed exclusively — a 
 kind of wholly grand and half-deserted city, which has 
 been built too ambitiously for its population — and 
 on the other, an antique wilderness of streets and 
 " wynds," so narrow and lofty as to shut out much of 
 the light of heaven ; a thronging, busy, and particu- 
 larly dirty population, sidewalks almost impassable 
 from children and other respected nuisances ; and 
 altogether, between the irregular and massive archi- 
 tecture, and the unintelligible jargon agonizing the air 
 about you, a most outlandish and strange city. Paris 
 is not more unlike Constantinople than one side of 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 195 
 
 Edinboro' is unlike the other. Nature has probably 
 placed " a great gulf" between them. 
 
 We toiled up the castle to see the sunset. Oh, but 
 it was beautiful! I have no idea of describing it ; but 
 Edinboro', to me, will be a picture seen through an 
 atmosphere of powdered gold, mellow as an eve on the 
 rampagna. We looked down on the surging sea of 
 architecture below us, and whether it was the wavy 
 clou liness of a myriad of reeking chimneys, or 
 whether it was a fancy Glenlivet-born in my eye, the 
 city seemed to me like a troop of war-horses, rearing 
 into the air with their gallant riders. The singular 
 boldness of the hills on which it is built, and of the 
 Cragfl and mountains which look down upon it, and the 
 impressive lift of its towering architecture into the sky, 
 gaye it altogether a look of pride and warlikeness that 
 answers peculiarly to the chivalric history of Scot- 
 lauil. And so much for the first look at " Auld 
 Reekie." 
 
 My friend had determined to have what he called a 
 "flare-up" of a Scotch breakfast, and we were set 
 down the morning after our arrival, at nine, to cold 
 grouse, salmon, cold beef, marmalade, jellies, honey, 
 five kinds of bread, oatmeal cakes, coffee, tea, and 
 toast ; and I am by no means sure that that is all. It is 
 a fine country in which one gets so much by the simple 
 order of " breakfast at nine." 
 
 We parted after having achieved it, my companion 
 going before me to Dumbartonshire; and, with a 
 "wee callant" for a guide, I took my way to Holy- 
 rood. 
 
 At the very foot of Edinboro' stands this most inter- 
 esting of royal palaces — a fine old pile, though at the 
 first view rather disappointing. It might have been in 
 the sky, which was dun and cold, or it might have 
 been in the melancholy story most prominent in its 
 history, but it oppressed me with its gloom. A rosy 
 cicerone in petticoats stepped out from the porter's 
 lodge, and rather brightened my mood with her smile 
 and courtesy, and I followed on to the chapel royal, 
 built, Heaven knows when, but in a beautiful state of 
 gothic ruin. The girl went on with her knitting and 
 her well-drilled recitation of the sights upon which 
 those old fretted and stone traceries had let in the 
 light ; and I walked about feeding my eyes upon its 
 hoar and touching beauty, listening little till she came 
 to the high altar, and in the same broad Scotch monot- 
 ony, and with her eyes still upon her work, hurried 
 over something about Mary Queen of Scots. She 
 was married to Darnley on the spot where I stood ! 
 The mechanical guide was accustomed evidently to an 
 interruption here, and stood silent a minute or two to 
 give my surprise the usual grace. Poor, poor Mary ! 
 I had the common feeling, and made probably the 
 same ejaculation that thousands have made on the 
 spot, that I had never before realized the melancholy 
 romance of her life half so nearly. It had been the 
 sadness of an hour before — a feeling laid aside with 
 the book that recorded it — now it was, as it were, a 
 pity and a grief for the living, and I felt struck with it 
 as if it had happened yesterday. If Rizzio's harp had 
 sounded from her chamber, it could not have seemed 
 more tangibly a scene of living story. 
 
 " And through this door they dragged the murdered 
 favorite; and here under this stone, he was buried !" 
 
 •' Yes, sir." 
 
 " Poor Rizzio !" 
 
 " I'm thinkin' that's a', sir !" 
 
 It was a broad hint, but I took another turn down 
 the nave of the old ruin, and another look at the scene 
 of the murder, and the grave of the victim. 
 
 " And this door communicated with Mary's apart- 
 ments!" 
 
 M Yes — ye hae it a' the noo !" 
 
 I paid my shilling, and exit. 
 
 On inquiry for the private apartments, I was directed 
 
 to another Girzy, who took me up to a suite of rooms 
 appropriated to the use of the earl of Breadalbane, and 
 furnished very much like lodgings for a guinea a week 
 in London. 
 
 " And which was Queen Mary's chamber?" 
 
 " Ech ! sir ! It's t'ither side. I dinna show that." 
 
 "And what am I brought here for?" 
 
 " Y'e cam' yoursell !" 
 
 With this wholesome truth, I paid my shilling 
 again, and was handed over to another woman, who 
 took me into a large hall containing portraits of 
 Robert Bruce, Baliol, Macbeth, Queen Mary, and 
 some forty other men and women famous in Scotch 
 story ; and nothing is clearer than that one patient 
 person sat to the painter for the whole. After 
 " doing" these, I was led with extreme deliberativeness 
 through a suite of unfurnished rooms, twelve, I think, 
 the only interest of which was their having been ten- 
 anted of late by the royal exile of France. As if any- 
 body would give a shilling to see where Charles the 
 Tenth slept and breakfasted ! 
 
 I thanked Heaven that I stumbled next upon the 
 right person, and was introduced into an ill-lighted 
 room, with one deep window looking upon the court, 
 and a fireplace like that of a country inn — the state 
 chamber of the unfortunate Mary. Here was a chair 
 she embroidered — there was a seat of tarnished velvet, 
 where she sat in state with Darnley — the very grate in 
 the chimney that she had sat before — the mirror in 
 which her fairest face had been imaged — the table at 
 which she had worked — the walls on which her eyes 
 had rested in her gay and her melancholy hours — all, 
 save the touch and mould of time, as she lived in it and 
 left it. It was a place for a thousand thoughts. 
 
 The woman led on. We entered another room — 
 her chamber. A small, low bed, with tattered hang- 
 ings of red and figured silk, tall, ill-shapen posts, and 
 altogether a paltry look, stood in a room of irregular 
 shape ; and here, in all her peerless beauty, she had 
 slept. A small cabinet, a closet merely, opened on 
 the right, and in this she was supping with Rizzio, 
 when he was plucked from her and murdered. We 
 went back to the audience-chamber to see the stain of 
 his blood on the floor. She partitioned it off after his 
 death, not bearing to look upon it. Again — "poor 
 Mary !" 
 
 On the opposite side was a similar closet, which 
 served as her dressing-room, and the small mirror, 
 scarce larger than your hand, which she used at her 
 toilet. Oh for a magic wand, to wave back, upon 
 that senseless surface, the visions of beauty it has re- 
 flected ! 
 
 LETTER CXXV. 
 
 DALHOUSIE CASTLE — THE EARL AND COUNTESS — ANTI- 
 QUITY OF THEIR FAMILY. 
 
 Edinboro' has extended to "St. Leonard's," and 
 the home of Jeanie Deans is now the commencement 
 of the railway ! How sadly is romance ridden over 
 by the march of intellect ! 
 
 With twenty-four persons and some climbers be- 
 hind, I was drawn ten miles in the hour by a single 
 horse upon the Dalkeith railroad, and landed within a 
 mile of Dalhousie Castle. Two "wee callants" here 
 undertook my portmanteau, and in ten minutes more 
 I was at the rustic lodge in the park, the gate of which 
 swung hospitably open with the welcome announce- 
 ment that I was expected. An avenue of near three 
 quarters of a mile of firs, cedars, laburnums, and 
 larches, wound through the park to the castle ; and 
 dipping over the edge of a deep and wild dell, I found 
 the venerable old pile below me, its round towers and 
 
96 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 battlemented turrets frowning among the trees, and 
 forming with the river, which swept round its base, 
 one of the finest specimens imaginable of the feudal 
 picturesque.* The nicely gravelled terraces, as I ap- 
 proached, the plate-glass windows and rich curtains, 
 diminished somewhat of the romance; but I am not 
 free to say that the promise they gave of the luxury 
 within did not offer a succedaneum. 
 
 I was met at the threshold by the castle's noble and 
 distinguished master, and as the light modern gothic 
 door swung open on its noiseless hinges, I looked up 
 at the rude armorial scutcheon above, and at the slits 
 for the portcullis chains and the rough hollows in the 
 walls which had served for its rest, and it seemed to 
 me that the kind and polished earl, in his velvet cap, 
 and the modern door on its patent hinges, were pleas- 
 ant substitutes even for a raised drawbridge and a hel- 
 meted knight. I beg pardon of the romantic, if this 
 be treason against Delia Crusca. 
 
 The gong had sounded its first summons to dinner, 
 and I went immediately to my room to achieve my 
 toilet. I found myself in the south wing, with a glo- 
 rious view up the valley of the Esk, and comforts 
 about me such as are only found in a private chamber 
 in England. The nicely-fitted carpet, the heavy cur- 
 tains, the well-appointed dressing-table, the patent 
 grate and its blazing fire (for where is a fire not 
 welcome in Scotland ?) the tapestry, the books, the 
 boundless bed, the bell that will ring, and the servants 
 
 that anticipate the pull oh, you should have pined 
 
 for comfort in France and Italy to know what this cat- 
 alogue is worth. 
 
 After dinner, Lady Dalhousie, who is much of an 
 invalid, mounted a small poney to show me the 
 grounds. We took a winding path away from the 
 door, and descended at once into the romantic dell over 
 which the castle towers. It is naturally a most wild 
 and precipitous glen, through which the rapid Esk 
 pursues its way almost in darkness; but, leaving only 
 the steep and rocky shelves leaning over the river with 
 their crown of pines, the successive lords of Dalhou- 
 sie have cultivated the banks and hills around for a 
 park and a paradise. The smooth gravel walks cross 
 and interweave, the smoother lawns sink and swell 
 with their green bosoms, the stream dashes on mur- 
 muring below, and the lofty trees shadow and over- 
 hang all. At one extremity of the grounds are a flow- 
 er and a fruit garden, and beyond it the castle-farm ; 
 at the other, a little village of the family dependants, 
 with their rose-imbowered cottages ; and, as far as you 
 would ramble in a day, extend the woods and glades, 
 and hares leap across your path, and pheasants and 
 partridges whirr up as you approach, and you may fa- 
 tigue yourself in a scene that is formed in every fea- 
 ture from the gentle-born and the refined. The labor 
 and the taste of successive generations can alone cre- 
 ate such an Eden. Primogeniture ! I half forgive 
 thee. 
 
 The various views of the castle from the bottom of 
 the dell are perfectly beautiful. With all its internal 
 refinement, it is still the warlike fortress at a little dis- 
 tance, and bartizan and battlement bring boldly back 
 the days when Bruce was at Hawtbornden (six miles 
 distant), and Lord Dalhousie's ancestor, the knightly 
 Sir Alexander Ramsay, defended the ford of the Esk, 
 and made himself a name in Scottish story in the days 
 of Wallace and the Douglasses. Dalhousie was be- 
 sieged by Edward the first and by John of Gaunt, 
 among others, and being the nearest of a chain of cas- 
 tles from the Esk to the Pentland Hills, it was the 
 scene of some pretty fighting in most of the wars of 
 Scotland. 
 
 * " The castle of Dalhousie upon the South-Esk, is a strong 
 and large castle, with a large wall of aslure work going round 
 about the same, with a tower upon ilk corner thereof."— 
 Grose's Antiquities. 
 
 Lord Dalhousie showed me a singular old bridle- 
 bit, the history of which is thus told in Scott's Tales 
 of a Grandfather : 
 
 " Sir Alexander Ramsay having taken by storm the strong 
 castle of Roxburgh, the king bestowed on him the office of 
 sheriff of the county, which was before engaged by the knight 
 of Liddesdale. As this was placing another person in his 
 room, the knight of Liddesdale altogether forgot his old 
 friendship for Ramsay, and resolved to put him to death. He 
 came suddenly upon him with a strong party of men while he 
 was administering justice at Hawick. Ramsay, having no 
 suspicion of injury from the hands of his old comrade, and 
 having few men with him, was easily overpowered ; and. be- 
 ing wounded, was hurried away to the lonely castle of the 
 Hermitage, which stands in the middle of the morasses of 
 Liddesdale. Here he was thrown into a dungeon (with his 
 horse) where he had no other sustenance than some grain 
 which fell down from a granary above ; and, after lingering 
 awhile in that dreadful condition, the brave Sir Alexander 
 Ramsay died. This was in 1412. Nearly four hundred and 
 fifty years afterward, that is, about forty years ago. a mason, 
 digging among the ruins of Hermitage Castle, broke into a 
 dungeon, where lay a quantity of chaff, some human bones 
 and a bridle-bit, which were supposed to mark the vault as 
 the place of Ramsay's death, 'the bridle-bit was given to 
 grandpapa, who presented it to the present gallant earl of 
 Dalhousie, a brave soldier, like his ancestor, Sir Alexander 
 Ramsay, from whom he is lineally descended." 
 
 There is another singular story connected with the 
 family which escaped Sir Walter, and which has never 
 appeared in print. Lady Dalhousie is of the ancient 
 family of Coulston, one of the ancestors of which, 
 Brown of Coulston, married the daughter of the fa- 
 mous Warlock of Gifford, described in Marmion. As 
 they were proceeding to the church, the wizard lord 
 stopped the bridal procession beneath a pear-tree, and 
 plucking one of the pears, he gave it to his daughter, 
 telling her that he had no dowry to give her, but that 
 as long as she kept that gift, good fortune would never 
 desert her or her descendants. This was in 1270, 
 and the pear is still preserved in a silver box. About 
 two centuries ago, a maiden lady of the family chose 
 to try her teeth upon it, and very soon after two of the 
 best farms of the estate were lost in some litigation— 
 the only misfortune that has befallen the inheritance 
 of the Coulstons in six centuries — thanks (perhaps) 
 to the Warlock pear ! 
 
 LETTER CXXVI. 
 
 SPORTING AND ITS EQUIPMENTS — BOSLIN CASTM 
 AND CHAPEL. 
 
 The nominal attraction of Scotland, particularly 
 at this season, is the shooting. Immediately on your 
 arrival, you are asked whether you prefer a flint or a 
 percussion lock, and (supposing that you do not travel 
 with a gun, which all Englishmen do), a double-bar- 
 relled Manton is appropriated to your use, the game- 
 keeper fills your powder and shot-pouches, and waits 
 with the dogs in a leash till you have done your break- 
 fast ; and the ladies leave the table, wishing you a 
 good day's sport, all as matters of course. 
 
 I would rather have gone to the library. An aver- 
 sion to walking, except upon smooth flag-stones, a 
 poetical tenderness on the subject of " putting birds 
 out of misery," as the last office is elegantly called, 
 and hands much more at home with a goose-quill than 
 a gun, were some of my private objections to the "or- 
 der of the day." Between persuasion and a most 
 truant sunshine, I was overruled, however; and, with 
 a silent prayer that I might not destroy the hopes of 
 my noble host, by shooting his only son, who was to 
 be my companion and instructer, I shouldered the 
 proffered Manton and joined the game-keeper in the 
 park , 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 )97 
 
 Lord Ramsay and his man looked at me with some 
 astonishment as I approached, and I was equally sur- 
 prised at the young nobleman's metamorphosis. From 
 the elegant Oxonian I had seen at breakfast, he was 
 transformed to a figure something rougher than his 
 highland dependant, in a woollen shooting-jacket, that 
 might have been cut in Kentucky, pockets of any ■ 
 number and capacity, trousers of the coarsest plaid, j 
 hob-nailed shoes, and leather gaiters, and a manner 
 of handling his gun that would have been respected 
 on the Mississippi. My own appearance in high- 
 Steeled French boots and other corresponding geerfor 
 a tramp over stubble and marsh, amused them equally ; 
 but my wardrobe was exclusively metropolitan, and 
 there was no alternative. 
 
 The dogs were loosed from their leash and bounded 
 away, and crossing the Esk under the castle walls, ! 
 we found our way out of the park, and took to the 
 open fields. A large patch of stubble was our first 
 ground, and with a " hie away !" from the game- 
 keeper, the beautiful setters darted on before, their 
 tails busy with delight and their noses to the ground, 
 first dividing, each for a wall-side, and beating along 
 till they met, and then scouring toward the centre, as 
 regularly, as if every step were guided by human 
 reason. Suddenly they both dropped low into the 
 stubble, and with heads eagerly bent forward and the 
 intensest gaze upon a spot, a yard or more in advance, 
 stood as motionless as stone. ' A covey, my lord !" | 
 said the game-keeper, and, with our guns cocked, we ! 
 advanced to the dogs, who had crouched, and lay as 
 still, while we passed them, as if their lives depended 
 upon onr shot. Another step, and whirr! whirr! a 
 dozen partridges started up from the furrow, and j 
 while Lord Ramsey cried " Now !" and reserved his ! 
 fire to give me the opportunity, I stood stock still in 
 my surprise, and the whole covey disappeared over ■ 
 the wall. My friend laughed, the game- keeper smiled, 
 and the dogs hied on once more. 
 
 J mended my shooting in the course of the morning, 
 but it was both exciting and hard work. A heavy 
 shower soaked us through, without extracting the 
 slightest notice from my companion; and on we 
 trudged through peas, beans, turnips, and corn, mud- ! 
 died to the knees and smoking with moisture, exces- 
 sively to the astonishment, I doubt not, of the produc- 
 tions of Monsieur Clerx, of the Rue Vivienne, which ' 
 were reduced to the consistency of brown paper, and 
 those of my London tailor, which were equally en- | 
 titled to some surprise at the use they were put to. 
 It was quite beautiful, however, to see the ardor and 
 training of the dogs; their caution, their obedience, j 
 and their perfect understanding of every motion of 
 their master. I found myself interested quite beyond j 
 fatigue, and it was only when we jumped the park i 
 paling and took it once more leisurely down the grav- ; 
 el-walks, that [ realized at what an expense of mud, I 
 water, and weariness, my day's sport had been pur- 
 chased. Mejn. Never to come to Scotland again 
 without hob-nailed shoes and a shooting-jacket. 
 
 Rode over to Roslin castle. The country between 
 Dalhousie castle and Roslin, including the village of I 
 Lasswade, is of uncommon loveliness. Lasswade 
 itself clings to the two sides of a small valley, with its 
 village church buried in trees, and the country-seat I 
 of Lord Melvill looking down upon it, from its green 
 woods ; and away over the shoulder of the hill, swell 
 the forests and rocks which imbosom Hawthornden 
 (the residence of Drummond, the poet, in the days of 
 Ben Jonson), and the Pentltad Hills, with their bold 
 outline, form a background that completes the pic- 
 ture. 
 
 We left our horse3 at the neighboring inn, and 
 walked first to Roslin chapel. This little gem of 
 
 florid architecture is scarcely a ruin, so perfect are its 
 arches and pillars, its fretted cornices and its painted 
 windows. A whimsical booby undertook the cicei 
 one, with a long cane-pole to point out the beauties 
 We entered the low side-door, whose stone thresh 
 old the feet of Cromwell's church-stabled troopers 
 assisted to wear, and walked at once to a singular col- 
 umn of twisted marble, most curiously carved, stand- 
 ing under the choir. Our friend with the cane-pole, 
 who had condescended to familiar Scotch on the way, 
 took his distance from the base, and drawing up his 
 feet like a soldier on drill, assumed a most extraordi- 
 nary elevation of voice, and recited its history in a 
 declamation of which I could only comprehend the 
 words " A?t'braham and Isaac." I saw by the direc- 
 tion of the pole that there was a bas-relief of the 
 Father of the Faithful, done on the capital, but for 
 the rest I was indebted to Lord Ramsay, who did it 
 into English as follows : " The master-mason of this 
 chapel, meeting with some difficulties in the execu- 
 tion of his design, found it necessary to go to Rome 
 for information, during which time his apprentice 
 carried on the work, and even executed some parts 
 concerning which his master had been most doubtful; 
 particularly this fine fluted column, ornamented with 
 wreaths of foliage and flowers twisting spirally round 
 it. The master on his return, stung with envy at this 
 proof of the superior abilities of his apprentice, slew 
 him by a blow of his hammer." 
 
 The whole interior of the chapel is excessively 
 rich. The roof, capitals, key-stones, and architraves, 
 are covered with sculptures. On the architrave joining 
 the apprentice's pillar to a smaller one, is graved the 
 sententious inscription, "Forte est vinum, fortior est 
 rex, fortiores sunt mulieres ; super omnia vincit Veritas." 
 It has been built about four hundred years, and is, 1 
 am told, the most perfect thing of its kind in Scot- 
 land. 
 
 The ruins of Roslin castle are a few minutes walk 
 beyond. They stand on a kind of island rock, in the 
 midst of one of the wildest glens of Scotland, sepa- 
 rated from the hill nearest to the base by a drawbridge, 
 swung over a tremendous chasm. I have seen nothing 
 so absolutely picturesque in my travels. The North 
 Esk runs its dark course, unseen, in the ravine below ; 
 the rocks on every side frown down upon it in black 
 shadows, the woods are tangled and apparently path- 
 less, and were it not for a most undeniable two-story 
 farm-house, built directly in the court of the old cas- 
 tle, you might convince yourself that foot had never 
 approached it since the days of Wallace. 
 
 The fortress was built by William St. Clair, of 
 whom Grose writes: "He kept a great court and was 
 royally served at his own table in vessels of gold and 
 silver; Lord Dirleton being his master-household; 
 Lord Borthwick his cup-bearer, and Lord Fleming 
 his carver; in whose absence they had deputies to at- 
 tend, viz : Stewart, Laird of Drumlanrig ; Tweddie, 
 Laird of Drumerline; and Sandilands, Laird of Cal- 
 der. He had his halls and other apartments richly 
 adorned with embroidered hangings. He flourished 
 in the reigns of James the First and Second. His 
 princess, Elizabeth Douglas, wr* served by seventy- 
 five gentlewomen, whereof fifty- hree were daughters 
 of noblemen, all clothed in velvets and silks, with 
 their chains of gold and other ornaments, and was 
 attended by two hundred riding gentlemen in all her 
 journeys ;" and, if it happened to be dark w hen she 
 went to Edinburgh, where her lodgings were at the 
 foot of the Black Fryar's Wynd, eighty lighted 
 torches were carried before her." 
 
 With a scrambling walk up the glen, which is. as 
 says truly Mr. Grose, *« inconceivably romantic." we 
 returned to our horses, and rode back to our dinner at 
 Dalhousie, delighted with Roslin castle, and uncom- 
 monly hungry. 
 
198 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER CXXVII. 
 
 "CHRISTOPHER NORTH" — MR. BLACKWOOD— THE ET- 
 
 TRICK SHEPHERD LOCKHART — NOCTES AMBROSIAN^E 
 
 WORDSWORTH — SOTJTHEY CAPTAIN HAMILTON 
 
 AND HIS BOOK ON AMERICA — PROFESSOR WILSON'S 
 FAMILY, ETC. 
 
 One of my most valued letters to Scotland was an 
 introduction to Professor Wilson — the " Christopher 
 North" of Blackwood, and the well-known poet. 
 The acknowledgment of the reception of my note 
 came with an invitation to breakfast the following 
 morning, at the early hour of nine. 
 
 The professor's family were at a summer residence 
 in the country, and he was alone in his house in 
 Gloucester-place, having come to town on the melan- 
 choly errand of a visit to poor Blackwood — (since 
 dead). I was punctual to my hour, and found the 
 poet standing before the fire with his coat-skirts ex- 
 panded — a large, muscular man, something slovenly 
 in his dress, but with a manner and face of high good 
 humor, and remarkably frank and prepossessing ad- 
 dress. While he was finding me a chair, and saying 
 civil things of the noble friend who had been the me- 
 dium of our acquaintance, I was trying to reconcile 
 my idea of him, gathered from portraits and descrip- 
 tions, with the person before me. I had imagined a 
 thinner and more scholar-like lo'oking man, with a 
 much paler face, and a much more polished exterior. 
 His head is exceedingly ample, his eye blue and rest- 
 less, his mouth full of character, and his hair, of a 
 very light sandy color, is brushed up to cover an in- 
 cipient baldness, but takes very much its own way, 
 and has the wildness of a Highlander's. He has the 
 stamp upon him of a remarkable man to a degree sel- 
 dom seen, and is, on the whole, fine-looking and cer- 
 tainly a gentleman in his appearance ; but (I know 
 not whether the impression is common) I expected in 
 Christopher North, a finished and rather over-refined 
 man of the world of the old school, and I was so far 
 disappointed. 
 
 The tea was made, and the breakfast smoked upon 
 the table, but the professor showed no signs of being 
 aware of the fact, and talked away famously, getting 
 up and sitting down, walking to the window and 
 standing before the fire, and apparently carried quite 
 away with his own too rapid process of thought. He 
 talked of the American poets, praised Percival and 
 Pierpont more particularly ; expressed great pleasure 
 at the criticisms of his own works that had appeared 
 in the American papers and •magazines — and still the 
 toast was getting cold, and with every move he seemed 
 less and less aware of the presence of breakfast. 
 There were plates and cups for but two, so that he 
 was not waiting for another guest, and after half an 
 hour had thus elapsed, I began to fear he thought he 
 had already breakfasted. Jf I had wished to remind 
 him of it, however, 1 should have had no opportunity, 
 for the stream of his eloquence ran on without a 
 break ; and eloquence it certainly was. His accent is 
 very broadly Scotch, but his words are singularly well 
 chosen, and his illustrations more novel and poetical 
 than those of any man I ever conversed with. He 
 spoke of Blackwood, returning to the subject repeat- 
 edly, and always with a softened tone of voice and a 
 more impressive manner, as if his feelings were entire- 
 ly engrossed by the circumstances of his illness. 
 " Poor Blackwood," he said, setting his hands togeth- 
 er, and fixing his eyes on the wall, as if he were solil- 
 oquising with the picture of the sick man vividly be- 
 fore him, " there never was a more honest creature, or 
 a better friend. I have known him intimately for 
 years, and owe him much ; and I could lose no friend 
 that would affect me more nearly. There is some- 
 thing quite awful in the striking down thus of a fa- 
 
 miliar companion by your side — the passing away — 
 the death — the end forever of a man you have been 
 accustomed to meet as surely as the morning or even- 
 ing, and have grown to consider a part of your exis- 
 tence almost. To have the share he took in your 
 thoughts thrown back upon you — and his aid and 
 counsel and company with you no more. His own 
 mind is in a very singular state. He knows he is to 
 die, and he has made every preparation in the most 
 composed and sensible manner, and if the subject is 
 alluded to directly, does not even express a hope of 
 recovery ; yet, the moment the theme is changed, he 
 talks as if death were as far from him as ever, and 
 looks forward, and mingles himself up in his remarks 
 on the future, as if he were to be here to see this and 
 the other tiling completed, and share with you the ad- 
 vantage for years to come. What a strange thing it 
 is — this balancing between death and life — standing on 
 the edge of the grave, and turning, first to look into 
 its approaching darkness, and then back on the famil- 
 iar and pleasant world, yet with a certain downward 
 progress, and no hope of life, beyond the day over 
 your head !" 
 
 I asked if Blackwood was a man of refined literary 
 taste. 
 
 M Yes," he said, " I would trust his opinion of a 
 book sooner than that of any man I know. He might 
 not publish everything he approved, for it was his bu- 
 siness to print only things that would sell ; and, there- 
 fore, there are perhaps many authors who would com- 
 j plain of him ; but, if his opinion had been against my 
 own, and it had been my own book, I should believe 
 he was right and give up my own judgment. He was 
 a patron of literature, and it owes him much. He is 
 a loss to the world-" 
 
 I spoke of the " Nodes." 
 
 He smiled, as you would suppose Christopher 
 North would do, with the twinkle proper of genuine 
 hilarity in his eye, and said, "Yes, they have been very 
 popular. Many people in Scotland believe them to 
 be transcripts of real scenes, and wonder how a pro- 
 fessor of moral philosophy can descend to such ca- 
 rousings, and poor Hogg comes in for his share of 
 abuse, for they never doubt he was there and said 
 everything that is put down for him." 
 
 "How does the Shepherd take it?" 
 
 "Very good humoredly, with the exception of one 
 or two occasions, when cockney scribblers have visit- 
 ed him in their tours, and tried to flatter him by con- 
 vincing him he was treated disrespectfully. But five 
 minutes' conversation and two words of banter restore 
 his good humor, and he is convinced, as he ought to 
 be, that he owes half his reputation to the Noctes." 
 
 " What do you think of his Life of Sir Walter, 
 which Lockhart has so butchered in Fraser?" 
 
 "Did Lockhart write that ?" 
 
 " I was assured so in London." 
 
 " It was a barbarous and unjustifiable attack; and, 
 oddly enough, I said so yesterday to Lockhart him- 
 self, who was here, and he differed from*me entirely. 
 Now you mention it, I think from his manner, he must 
 have written it." 
 
 " Will Hogg forgive him ?" 
 
 " Never ! never! I do not think he knows yet who 
 has done it, but I hear that he is dreadfully exaspera- 
 ted. Lockhart is quite wrong. To attack an old 
 man, with gray hairs, like the Shepherd, and accuse 
 him so flatly and unnecessarily of lie upon lie — oh, it 
 was not right!" 
 
 " Do you think Hogg misrepresented facts wil- 
 fully ?" 
 
 " No, oh no ! he is perfectly honest, no doubt, and 
 quite revered Sir Walter. He has an unlucky inac- 
 curacy of mind, however; and his own vanity, which 
 is something quite ridiculous, has given a coloring to 
 his conversations with Scott, which puts them in a 
 
PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY 
 
 199 
 
 very false light ; and Sir Walter, who was the best 
 natured of men, may have said the things ascribed to 
 him iu a variety of moods, such as no one can under- 
 stand who does not know what a bore Hogg must 
 sometimes have been at Abbottsford. Do you know 
 Lockhart .'" 
 
 " No, I do not. He is almost the only literary man 
 in London I have not met ; and I must say, as the 
 editor of the Quarterly, and the most unfair and un- 
 principled critic of the day, I have no wish to know 
 him. I never heard him well spoken of. I probably 
 have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have 
 not yet seen one who pretended to be his friend." 
 
 "Yet there is a great deal of good in Lockhart. I 
 allow all you say of his unfairness and severity; but 
 if he were sitting there, opposite you, you would find 
 him the mildest and most unpresumingof men, and so 
 he appears in private life always." 
 
 " Not always. A celebrated foreigner, who had 
 been very intimate with him, called one morning to 
 deprecate his severity upon Baron DTIaussez's book 
 in a forthcoming review. He did his errand in a 
 friendly way, and, on taking his leave, Lockhart, with 
 much ceremony, accompanied him down to his car- 
 riage. ' Pray don't give yourself the trouble to come 
 down,' said the polite Frenchman. ' 1 make a point 
 of doing it, sir;' said Lockhart, with a very offensive 
 manner, 'for I understand from your friend's book, 
 that we are not considered a polite nation in France.' 
 Nothing certainly could be more ill-bred and in- 
 sulting." 
 
 " Still it is not in his nature. I do believe that it is 
 merely an unhappy talent he has for sarcasm, with 
 which his heart has nothing to do. When he sits 
 down to review a book, he never thinks of the author 
 or his feelings. He cuts it up with pleasure, because 
 he does it with skill in the way of his profession, as a 
 surgeon dissects a dead body. He would be the first 
 to show the man a real kindness if he stood before 
 him. I have known Lockhart long. He was in Ed- 
 inboro' a great while, and when he was writing ' Va- 
 lerius,' we were in the habit of walking out together 
 every morning, and when we reached a quiet spot in 
 the country, he read to me the chapters as he wrote 
 them. He finished it in three weeks. I heard it all 
 thus by piecemeal as it went on, and had much diffi- 
 culty in persuading him that it was worth publishing. 
 He wrote it very rapidly, and thought nothing of it. 
 We used to sup together with Blackwood, and that 
 was the real origin of the ' Noctes.' " 
 
 "At Ambrose's?" 
 
 " At Ambrose's." 
 
 "But is there such a tavern, really?" 
 
 "Oh, certainly. Anybody will show it to you. It 
 is a small house, kept in an out-of-the-way corner of 
 the town, by Ambrose, who is an excellent fellow in 
 his way, and has had a great influx of custom in con- 
 sequence of his celebrity in the Noctes. We were 
 there one night very late, and had all been remarkably 
 gay and agreeable. ' What a pity,' said Lockhart, 
 4 that some short-hand writer had not been here to 
 take down the good things that have been said at this 
 supper.' The next day he produced a paper called 
 4 Noctes Ambros\7lll3^, , and that was the first. I con- 
 tinued them afterward." 
 
 44 Have you no idea of publishing them separately? 
 I think a volume or two should be made of the more 
 poetical and critical parts, certainly. Leaving out the 
 politics and the meiely local topics of the day, no book 
 could be more agreeable." 
 
 44 It was one of the things pending when poor 
 Blackwood was taken ill. But, will you have some 
 breakfast?" 
 
 The breakfast had been cooling for an hour, and T 
 most willingly acceded to his proposition. Without 
 rising, he leaned back, with his chair still toward the 
 
 fire, and seizing the tea-pot as if it were a sledge- 
 hammer, he poured from one cup to the other with- 
 out interrupting the stream, overrunning both cup and 
 saucer, and partly flooding the tea-tray. He then set 
 j the cream toward me with a carelessness which near- 
 [ ly overset it, and in trying to reach an egg from the cen- 
 tre of the table, broke two. He took no notice of his 
 own awkwardness, but drank his cup of tea at a single 
 draught, ate his egg in the same expeditious manner, 
 and went on talking of the Noctes and Lockhart and 
 Blackwood, as if eating his breakfast were rather a 
 troublesome parenthesis in his conversation. After a 
 while he digressed to Wordsworth and Southey, and 
 asked me if I was going to return by the Lakes. I 
 proposed doing so. 
 
 44 I will give you letters to both, if you haven't 
 j them. I lived a long time in that neighborhood, and 
 know Wordsworth perhaps as well as any one. Many 
 a day T have walked over the hills with him, and listen- 
 j ed to his repetition of his own poetry, which of course 
 ; filled my mind completely at the time, and perhaps 
 I started the poetical vein in me, though I can not agree 
 { with the critics that my poetry is an imitation of 
 ! Wordsworth's." 
 
 44 Did Wordsworlh repeat any other poetry than his 
 own ?" 
 
 44 Never in a single instance, to my knowledge. He 
 is remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped 
 up in his own poetical life. He thinks of nothing 
 else. Everything ministers to it. Everything is done 
 with reference to it. He is all and only a poet." 
 
 44 Was the story true that was told in the papers of 
 his seeing, for the first time, in a large company some 
 new novel of Scott's, in which there was a motto ta- 
 ken from his works ; and that he went immediately to 
 the shelf and took down one of his own volumes and 
 read the whole poem to the party, who were waiting 
 for a reading of the new book ?" 
 
 44 Perfectly true. It happened in this very house. 
 Wordsworth was very angry at the paragraph, and I 
 believe accused me of giving it to the world. I was 
 as much surprised as himself, however, to see it in 
 print." 
 
 44 What is Southey's manner of life ?" 
 44 Walter Scott said of him that he lived too much 
 with women. He is secluded in the country, and sur- 
 rounded by a circle of admiring friends who glorify 
 every literary project he undertakes, and persuade 
 him in spite of his natural modesty, that he can do 
 nothing wrong or imperfectly. He has great genius 
 and is a most estimable man." 
 
 44 Hamilton lives on the Lakes too — does he not ?" 
 44 Yes. How terribly he was annoyed by the re- 
 view of his book in the North American. Who 
 wrote it?" 
 
 44 1 have not heard positively, but I presume it was 
 Everett. I know nobody else in the country who 
 holds such a pen. He is the American Junius." 
 
 44 It was excessively clever but dreadfully severe, 
 and Hamilton was frantic about it. I sent it to him 
 myself, and could scarce have done him a more un- 
 gracious office. But what a strange »hing it is that 
 nobody can write a good book on America ! The ri- 
 diculous part of it seems to me that men of common 
 sense go there as travellers, and fill their books with 
 scenes such as they may see everyday within five 
 minutes' walk of their own doors, and call them Amer- 
 ican. Vulgar people are to be found all over the 
 world, and I will match any scene in Hamilton or 
 Mrs. Trollope, any day or night, here in Edinburgh. 
 I have always had an idea that I should be the best 
 traveller in America myself. I have been so in the 
 habit of associating with people of every class in my 
 own country, that 1 am better fitted to draw the proper 
 distinctions, I think, between what is universal over 
 the world or peculiar to America." 
 
2Q0 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 ** I promise you a hearty welcome, if you should 
 be inclined to try." 
 
 " I have thought seriously of it. It is, after all, 
 not more than a journey to Switzerland or Italy, of 
 which we think nothing, and my vacation of five 
 months would give me ample time, I suppose, to run 
 through the principal cities. I shall do if, I think." 
 
 I asked if he had written a poem of any length 
 within the last few years. 
 
 " No, though I am always wishing to do it. Many 
 things interfere with my poetry. In the first place I 
 am obliged to give a lecture once a day for six months, 
 and in the summer it is such a delight to be released, 
 and get away into the country with my girls and boys, 
 that I never put pen to paper till I am driven. Then 
 Blackwood is a great care ; and, greater objection still, 
 I have been discouraged in various ways by criticism. 
 It used to gall me to have my poems called imitations 
 of Wordsworth and his school ; a thing I could not 
 see myself, but which was asserted even by those who 
 praised me, and which modesty forbade I should dis- 
 avow. I really can see no resemblance between the 
 Isle of Palms and anything of Wordsworth's. I think 
 I have a style of my own, and as my ain bairn, I think 
 better of it than other people, and so pride prevents 
 my writing. Until late years, too, I have been the 
 subject of much political abuse, and for that I should 
 not have cared if it were not disagreeable to have 
 children and servants reading it in the morning papers, 
 and a fear of giving them another handle in my poetry 
 was another inducement for not writing." 
 
 I expressed my surprise at what he said, for, as far 
 as I knew the periodicals, Wilson had been a singu- 
 larly continued favorite. 
 
 "Yes, out of this immediate sphere, perhaps — but 
 it requires a strong mind to suffer annoyance at one's 
 lips, and comfort oneself with the praise of a distant 
 and outer circle of public opinion. I had a family 
 growing up. of sons and daughters, who felt for me 
 more than I should have felt for myself, and 1 was an- 
 noyed perpetually. Now, these very papers praise 
 me, and I really can hardly believe my eyes when I 
 open them and find the same type and imprint ex- 
 pressing such different opinions. It is absurd to mind 
 such weathercocks; and, in truth, the only people 
 worth heeding or writing for are the quiet readers in 
 the country, who read for pleasure, and form sober 
 opinions apart from political or personal prejudice. I 
 would give more for the praise of one country clergy- 
 man and his family than I would for the momentary 
 admiration of a whole city. People in towns require 
 a constant plantasmagoria, to keep up even the re- 
 membrance of your name. What books and authors, 
 what battles and heroes, are forgotten in a day !" 
 
 My letter is getting too long, and I must make it 
 shorter, as it is vastly less agreeable than the visit it- 
 self. Wilson went on to speak of his family, and his 
 eyes kindled with pleasure in talking of his children. 
 He invited me to stop and visit him at his place near 
 Selkirk, in my way south, and promised me that I 
 should see Hogg, who lived not far off. Such in- 
 ducement was scarce necessary, and I made a half 
 promise to do it and left him, after having passed sev- 
 eral hours of the highest pleasure in his fascinating 
 society. 
 
 LETTER CXXYIII. 
 
 LORD JEFFREY AND HIS FAMILY — LORD BROUGHAM 
 
 COUNT FLAHAULT POLITICS THE " GREY" BALL 
 
 ABERDEEN— GORDON CASTLE. 
 
 1 was engaged to dine with Lord Jeffrey on the 
 same day that I had breakfasted with Wilson, and the 
 
 opportunity of contrasting so closely these two dis- 
 tinguished men, both editors of leading Reviews, yet 
 of different politics, and no less different minds, per- 
 sons, and manners, was highly gratifying. 
 
 At seven o'clock I drove to Moray-place, the Gros- 
 venor-square of Edinburgh. I was not sorry to be 
 early, for never having seen my host, nor his lady 
 (who, as is well known, is an American), I had some 
 little advantage over the awkwardness of meeting a 
 large party of strangers. After a few minutes' con- 
 versation with Mrs. Jeffrey, the door was thrown 
 quickly open, and the celebrated editor of the Edin- 
 burgh, the distinguished lawyer, the humane and 
 learned judge, and the wit of the day, par excellence, 
 entered with his daughter. A frank, almost merry 
 smile, a perfectly unceremonious, hearty manner, and 
 a most playful and graceful style of saying the half- 
 apologetic, half-courteous things, incident to a first 
 meeting after a letter of introduction, put me at once 
 at my ease, and established a partiality for him, im- 
 promptu, in my feelings. Jeffrey is rather below the 
 middle size, slight, rapid in his speech and motion, 
 never still, and glances from one subject to another, 
 with less abruptness and more quickness than any 
 man I had ever seen. His head is small, but compact 
 and well-shaped ; and the expression of his face, 
 when serious, is that of quick and discriminating 
 earnestness. His voice is rather thin, but pleasing : 
 and if I had met him incidentally, I should have de- 
 scribed him, I think, as a most witty and well-bred 
 gentleman of the school of Wilkes and Sheridan. 
 Perhaps as distinguishing a mark as either his wit or 
 his politeness, is an honest goodness of heart ; which, 
 however it makes itself apparent, no one could doubt, 
 who had been with Jeffrey ten minutes. 
 
 To my great disappointment, Mrs. Jeffrey informed 
 me that Lord Brougham, who was their guest at the 
 time, was engaged to a dinner, given by the new lord 
 advocate to Earl Grey. I had calculated much on 
 seeing two such old friends and fellow-wits as Jeffrey 
 and Brougham at the same table, and I could well 
 believe what my neighbor told me at dinner, that it 
 was more than a common misfortune to have missed 
 it. 
 
 A large dinner-party began to assemble, some dis- 
 tinguished men in the law among them, and last of all 
 was announced Lady Keith, rather a striking and very 
 fashionable person, with her husband, Count Flahault, 
 who, after being Napoleon's aid-de-camp at the battle 
 of Waterloo, offered his beauty and talents, both very 
 much above the ordinary mark, to the above named 
 noble heiress. I have seen few as striking-looking 
 men as Count Flahault, and never a foreigner who 
 spoke English so absolutely like a native of the 
 country. 
 
 The great " Grey dinner" had been given the day 
 before, and politics were the only subject at table. It 
 had been my lot to be thrown principally among to- 
 ries (conservatives is the new name), since my arrival 
 in England, and it was difficult to rid myself at 
 once of the impressions of a fortnight just passed in 
 the castle of a tory earl. My sympathies in the 
 " great and glorious" occasion, were slower than those 
 of the company, and much of their enthusiasm seem- 
 ed to me overstrained. Then I had not even dined 
 with the two thousand whigs under the pavilion, and 
 as I was incautious enough to confess it, I was rallied 
 upon having fallen into bad company, and altogether 
 entered less into the spirit of the hour than I could 
 have wished. Politics are seldom witty or amusing, 
 and though I was charmed with the good sense and 
 occasional eloquence of Lord Jeffrey, I was glad to 
 get up stairs after dinner to chasse-cafe and the ladies 
 
 We were all bound to the public ball that evening 
 and at eleven I accompanied my distinguished host tc 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 201 
 
 the assembly-room. Dancing; was going on with 
 great spirit when we entered ; Lord Grey's statesman- 
 like head was bowing industriously on the platform ; 
 Lady Grey and her daughters sat looking on from the 
 same elevated position, and Lord Brougham's ugliest 
 and shrewdest of human faces, flitted about through 
 the crowd, good fellow to everybody, and followed by 
 all eyes but those of the young. One or two of the 
 Scotch nobility were there, but whigism is not popu- 
 lar among Us hautes volailles, and the ball, though 
 crowded, was but thinly sprinkled with " porcelain." 
 I danced till three o'clock, without finding my part- 
 ners better or worse for their politics, and having ag- 
 gravated a temporary lameness by my exertions, went 
 home with a leg like an elephant to repent my aban- 
 donment of tory quiet. 
 
 Two or three days under the hands of the doctor, 
 with the society of a Highland crone, of whose cease- 
 less garrulity over my poultices and plasters I could 
 not understand two consecutive words, fairly finished 
 my patience, and abandoning with no little regret a 
 charming land route to the north of Scotland, I had 
 myself taken, "this side up," on board the steamer 
 for Aberdeen. The loss of a wedding in Perthshire 
 by the way, of a week's deer-shooting in the forest of 
 Athol, and a week's fishing with a noble friend at 
 Kinrara (long-standing engagements all), I lay at the 
 door of the whigs. Add to this Loch Leven, Cairn- 
 Gorm, the pass of Killicrankie, other sights lost on 
 that side of Scotland, and I paid dearly for " the Grey 
 ball." 
 
 We steamed the hundred and twenty miles in 
 twelve hours, paying about three dollars for our pas- 
 sage. I mention it for the curiosity of a cheap thing 
 in this country. 
 
 I lay at Aberdeen four days, getting out but once, 
 and then for a drive to the " Marichal College," the 
 alma mater of Dugald Dalgetty. It is a curious and 
 rather picturesque old place, half in ruins, and is 
 about being pulled down. A Scotch gentleman, who 
 was a fellow-passenger in the steamer, and who lived 
 in the town, called on me kindly twice a day, brought 
 me books and papers, offered me the use of his car- 
 riage, and did everything for my comfort that could 
 have been suggested by the warmest friendship. Con- 
 sidering that it was a casual acquaintance of a day, it 
 speaks well, certainly, for the " Good Samaritanism" 
 of Scotland. 
 
 I took two places in the coach at last (one for my 
 leg), and bowled away seventy miles across the coun- 
 try, with the delightful speed of these admirable con- 
 veyances, for Gordon Castle. I arrived at Lochabers, 
 a small town on the estate of the duke of Gordon, at 
 three in the afternoon, and immediately took a post- 
 chaise for the castle, the gate of which was a stone's 
 throw from the inn. 
 
 The immense iron gate surmounted by the Gordon 
 arms, the handsome and spacious stone lodges on 
 either side, the canonically fat porter in white stock- 
 ings and gay livery, lifting his hat as he swung open 
 the massive portal, all bespoke the entrance to a noble 
 residence. The road within was edged with velvet 
 sward, and rolled to the smoothness of a terrace-walk, 
 the winding avenue lengthened away before, with 
 trees of every variety of foliage ; light carriages pass- 
 ed me driven by ladies or gentlemen bound on their 
 afternoon airing ; a groom led up and down two beau- 
 tiful blood-horses, prancing along, with side-saddles 
 and morocco stirrups, and keepers with hounds and 
 terriers ; gentlemen on foot, idling along the walks, 
 and servants in different liveries, hurrying to and fro, 
 betokened a scene of busy gayety before me. I had 
 hardly noted these various circumstances, before a 
 suddri curve in the road brought the castle into view, 
 a vast~toi*» pile with castellated wings, and in another 
 
 moment I was at the door, where a dozen lounging 
 and powdered menials were waiting on a party of 
 ladies and gentlemen to their several carriages. It was 
 the moment for the afternoon drive. 
 
 LETTER CXXIX. 
 
 GORDON CASTLE — COMPANY THERE — THE PARK — PUKE 
 OF GORDON — PERSONAL BEAUTY OF THE ENGLISH 
 ARISTOCRACY. 
 
 The last phaeton dashed away and my chaise 
 advanced to the door. A handsome boy, in a kind of 
 page's dress, immediately came to the window, address- 
 ed me by name, and informed me that his grace was 
 out deer-shooting, but that my room was prepared, 
 and he was ordered to wait on me. I followed him 
 through a hall lined with statues, deers' horns, and 
 armor, and was ushered into a large chamber, look- 
 ing out on a park, extending with its lawns and woods 
 to the edge of the horizon. A more lovely view never 
 feasted human eye. 
 
 " Who is at the castle ?" I asked, as the boy busied 
 himself in unstrapping my portmanteau. 
 
 M Oh, a great many, sir." He stopped in his occu- 
 pation and began counting on his fingers. "There's 
 Lord Aberdeen, and Lord Claud Hamilton and Lady 
 Harriette Hamilton (them's his lordship's two step- 
 children, you know, sir), and the Dutchess of Rich- 
 mond and Lady Sophia Lennox, and Lady Keith, and 
 Lord Mandeville and Lord Aboyne, and Lord Stor- 
 mont and Lady Stormont, and Lord Morton and Lady 
 
 Morton, and Lady Alicia, and and and 
 
 twenty more, sir." 
 
 " Twenty more lords and ladies ?" 
 
 " No, sir ! that's all the nobility." 
 
 "And you can't remember the names of the others?" 
 
 " No, sir." 
 
 He was a proper page. He could not trouble his 
 memory with the names of commoners. 
 
 "And how many sit down to dinner?" 
 
 " Above thirty, sir, besides the duke and dutchess." 
 
 "That will do." And off tripped my slender gen- 
 tleman with his laced jacket, giving the fire a terrible 
 stir-up in his way out, and turning back to inform me 
 that the dinner hour was seven precisely. 
 
 It was a mild, bright afternoon, quite warm for the 
 end of an English September, and with a fire in the 
 room, and a soft sunshine pouring in at the windows, 
 a seat by the open casement was far from disagreea- 
 ble. I passed the time till the sun set, looking out on 
 the park. Hill and valley lay between my eye and the 
 horizon ; sheep fed in picturesque flocks ; and small 
 fallow deer grazed near them ; the trees were planted, 
 and the distant forest shaped by the hand of taste ; and 
 broad and beautiful as was the expanse taken in by the 
 eye, it was evidently one princely possession. A mile 
 from the castle wall, the shaven sward extended in a 
 carpet of velvet softness, as bright as emerald, stud- 
 ded by clumps of shrubbery, like flowers wrought 
 elegantly on tapestry, and across it bounded occa- 
 sionaly a hare, and the pheasants fed undisturbed near 
 the thickets, or a lady with flowing riding-dress and 
 flaunting feather, dashed into sight upon her fleet 
 blood-palfrey, and was lost the next moment in the 
 woods, or a boy put his pony to its mettle up the 
 ascent, or a gamekeeper idled into sight with his gun 
 in the hollow of his arm, and his hounds at his heels 
 —and all this little world of enjoyment and luxury, 
 and beauty, lay in the hand of one man, and was 
 created by his wealth in these northern wilds of Scot- 
 land, a day's journey almost from the possession of 
 
202 
 
 PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 another human being. I never realized so forcibly the 
 splendid result of wealth and primogeniture. 
 
 The sun set in a blaze of fire among the pointed 
 firs crowning the hills, and by the occasional prance 
 of a horse's feet on the gravel, and the roll of rapid 
 wheels, and now and then a gay laugh and merry 
 voices, the different parties were returning to the 
 castle. Soon after a loud gong sounded through the 
 gallery, the signal to dress, and I left my musing oc- 
 cupation unwillingly to make my toilet for an ap- 
 pearance in a formidable circle of titled aristocrats, 
 not one of whom I had ever seen, the duke himself a 
 stranger to me, except through the kind letter of invita- 
 tion lying upon the table. 
 
 I was sitting by the fire imagining forms and faces 
 for the different persoi : who had been named to me, 
 when there was a knoc at the door, and a tall, white- 
 haired gentleman, of n ble physiognomy, but singu- 
 larly cordial address, en red, with the broad red riband 
 of a duke across his b. jast, and welcomed me most 
 heartily to the castle. The gong sounded at the next 
 moment, and, in our way down, he named over his 
 other guests, and prepared me in a measure for the 
 introductions which followed. The drawing-room 
 was crowded like a soiree. The dutchess, a very tall 
 and very handsome woman, with a smile of the most 
 winning sweetness, received me at the door, and I was 
 presented successively to every person present. Din- 
 ner was announced immediately, and the difficult 
 question of precedence being sooner settled than I had 
 ever seen it before in so large a party, we passed 
 through files of servants to the dining-room. 
 
 It was a large and very lofty hall, supported at the 
 ends by marble columns, within which was stationed 
 a band of music, playing delightfully. The walls 
 were lined with full-length famiiy pictures, from old 
 knights in armor to the modern dukes in kilt of the 
 G trdon plaid; and on the sideboards stood services 
 of gold plate, the most gorgeously massive, and the 
 most beautiful in workmanship I have ever seen. 
 There were, among the vases, several large coursing- 
 cups, won by the duke's hounds, of exquisite shape and 
 ornament. 
 
 I fell into my place between a gentleman and a very 
 beautiful woman, of perhaps twenty-two, neither of 
 whose names I remembered, though I had but just 
 been introduced. The duke probably anticipated as 
 much, and as I took my seat he called out to me, from 
 the top of the table, that I had upon my right, Lady 
 
 , " the most agreeable woman in Scotland." It 
 
 was unnecessary to say that she was the most lovely. 
 
 I have been struck everywhere in England with 
 the beauty of the higher classes, and as I looked 
 around me upon the aristocratic company at the table, 
 I thought I never had seen " heaven's image double- 
 stamped as man and noble" so unequivocally clear. 
 There were two young men and four or five young 
 ladies of rank — and five or six people of more decided 
 personal attractions could scarcely be found ; the style 
 of form and face at the same time being of that cast 
 of superiority which goes by the expressive name of 
 " thoroughbred." There is a striking difference in 
 this respect between England and the countries of the 
 continent — the paysans of France and the contadini 
 of Italy being physically far superior to their degen- 
 erate masters; while the gentry and nobility of Eng- 
 land differ from the peasantry in limb and feature as 
 the racer differs from the dray-horse, or the grey- 
 hound from the cur. The contrast between the man- 
 ners of English and French gentlemen is quite as 
 striking. The empressment, the warmth, the shrug 
 and gesture of the Parisian ; and the working eye- 
 brow, dilating or contracting eye, and conspirator-like 
 action of the Italian in the most common conversation, 
 are the antipodes of English high breeding. I should 
 •;iy a North American Indian, in his more dignified 
 
 phrase, approached nearer to the manner of an Eng- 
 lish nobleman than any other person. The calm re- 
 pose of person and feature, the self-possession under 
 all circumstances, that incapability of surprise or 
 dereglement, and that decision about the slightest 
 circumstance, and the apparent certainty that he is 
 acting absolutely comtne U faut, is equally "gentle- 
 manlike" and Indianlike. You can not astonish an 
 English gentleman. If a man goes into a fit at his 
 side, or a servant drops a dish upon his shoulder, or he 
 hears that the house is on fire, he sets down his wine- 
 glass with the same deliberation. He has made up 
 his mind what to do in all possible cases, and he does it. 
 He is cold at a first introduction, and may bow stiffly 
 (which he always does) in drinking wine with you, but 
 it is his manner; and he would think an Englishman 
 out of his senses, who should bow down to his very 
 plate and smile as a Frenchman does on a similar oc- 
 casion. Rather chilled by this, you are a little aston- 
 ished when the ladies have left the table, and he 
 closes his chair up to you, to receive an invitation to 
 pass a month with him at his country-house, and to 
 discover that at the very moment he bowed so coldly 
 he was thinking how he should contrive to facilitate 
 your plans for getting to him or seeing the country to 
 advantage on the way. 
 
 The band ceased playing when the ladies left the 
 table, the gentlemen closed up, conversation assumed 
 a merrier cast, coffee and chasse-cafe were brought in 
 when the wines began to be circulated more slowly ; 
 and at eleven, there was a general move to the draw- 
 ing-room. Cards, tea, and music, filled up the time 
 till twelve, and then the ladies took their departure 
 and the gentlemen sat down to supper. I got to bed 
 somewhere about two o'clock ; and thus ended an 
 evening which 1 had anticipated as stiff and embar- 
 rassing, but which is marked in my tablets as one of 
 the most social and kindly 1 have had the good for- 
 tune to record on my travels. I have described it, and 
 shall describe others minutely — and I hope there is 
 no necessity of reminding any one that my apology 
 for thus disclosing scenes of private life has been 
 already made. Their interest as sketches by an 
 American of the society that most interests Ameri- 
 cans, and the distance at which they are published, 
 justify them, I would hope, from any charge of in- 
 delicacy. 
 
 LETTER CXXX. 
 
 ENGLISH BREAKFASTS— SALMON FISHERY LORD ABER- 
 DEEN MR. MC LANE — SPORTING ESTABLISHMENT OF 
 
 GORDON CASTLE. 
 
 I arose late on the first morning after my arrival at 
 Gordon Castle, and found the large party already 
 assembled about the breakfast-table. I was struck on 
 entering with the different air of the room. The deep 
 windows, opening out upon the park, had the effect 
 of sombre landscapes in oaken frames; the troops of 
 liveried servants, the glitter of plate, the music, that 
 had contributed to the splendor of the scene the night 
 before, were gone; the duke sat laughing at the head 
 of the table, with a newspaper in his hand, dressed in 
 a coarse shooting jacket and colored cravat; the 
 dutchess was in a plain morning-dress and cap of the 
 simplest character; and the high-born women about 
 the table, whom I had left glittering with jewels, anr 1 
 dressed in all the attractions of fashion, appeared with 
 the simplest coiffure and a toilet of studied plainness. 
 The ten or twelve noblemen present were engrossed 
 with their letters or newspapers over tea and toast ; 
 and in them, perhaps, the transformation was still 
 greater. The soigne man of fashion of the night be- 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 203 
 
 Tore, faultless in costume and distinguished in his ap- 
 pearance, in the full force of the term, was enveloped 
 now in a coat of fustian, with a coarse waistcoat of 
 plaid, a gingham cravat, and hob-nailed shoes (for 
 shooting), and in place of the gay hilarity of the sup- 
 per-table, wore a face of calm indifference, and ate his 
 breakfast and read the paper in a rarely broken silence. 
 I wondered, as I looked about me, what would be the 
 impression of many people in my own country, could 
 they look in upon that plain party, aware that it was 
 composed of the proudest nobility and the highest 
 fashion of England. 
 
 Breakfast in England is a confidential and uncere- 
 monious hour, and servants are generally dispensed 
 with. This is to me, I confess, an advantage it has 
 over every other meal. I detest eating with twenty 
 tall fellows standing opposite, whose business it is to 
 watch me. The coffee and tea were on the table, with 
 toast, muffins, oat-cakes, marmalade, jellies, fish, and 
 all the paraphernalia of a Scotch breakfast ; and on the 
 sideboard stood cold meats for those who liked them, j 
 I and they were expected to go to it and help themselves. 
 Nothing could be more easy, unceremonious, and af- 
 fable, than the whole tone of the meal. One after 
 another rose and fell into groups in the windows, or 
 walked up and down the long room, and, with one or 
 two others, I joined the duke at the head of the table, 
 who gave us some interesting particulars of the salmon 
 fisheries of the Spey. The privilege of fishing the 
 river within his lands, is bought of him at the pretty 
 sum of eight thousand pounds a year ! A salmon was 
 brought in for me to see, as of remarkable size, which 
 was not more than half the weight of our common 
 American salmon. 
 
 The ladies went off unaccompanied to their walks 
 in the park and other avocations, those bound for the 
 covers joined the game-keepers, who were waiting 
 with their dogs in the leash at the stables ; some paired 
 off to the billiard-room, and I was left with Lord Aber- 
 deen in the breakfast-room alone. The tory ex-min- 
 ister made a thousand inquiries, with great apparent 
 interest, about America. When secretary for foreign 
 affairs in the Wellington cabinet, he had known Mr. 
 McLane intimately. He said he seldom had been so 
 impressed with a man's honesty and straight-forward- 
 ness, and never did public business with any one with 
 more pleasure. He admired Mr. McLane, and hoped 
 he enjoyed his friendship. He wished he might return 
 as our minister to England. One such honorable, 
 uncompromising man, he said, was worth a score of 
 practised diplomatists. He spoke of Gallatin and Rush 
 in the same flattering manner, but recurred continu- 
 ally to Mr. McLane, of whom he could scarcely say 
 enough. His politics would naturally lead him to ap- 
 prove of the administration of General Jackson, but he 
 seemed to admire the president very much as a man. 
 Lord Aberdeen has the name of being the proudest 
 and coldest aristocrat of England. It is amusing to 
 see the person who bears such a character. He is of 
 the middle height, rather clumsily made, with an ad- 
 dress more of sober dignity than of pride or reserve. 
 With a black coat much worn, and always too large 
 for him, a pair of coarse check trousers very ill made, 
 a waistcoal buttoned up to his throat, and a cravat of 
 the most primitive neglige, his aristocracy is certainly 
 not in his dress. His manners are of absolute simpli- 
 city, amounting almost to want of style. He crosses 
 his hands behind him, and balances on his heels ; in 
 conversation his voice is low and cold, and he seldom 
 smiles. Yet there is a certain benignity in his coun- 
 tenance, and an indefinable superiority and high breed- 
 ing in his simple address, that would betray his rank 
 after a few minutes' conversation to any shrewd obser- 
 ver. It is only in his manner toward the ladies of the 
 party that he would be immediately distinguishable 
 from men of It wer rank in society. 
 
 Still suffering from lameness, I declined all invita- 
 tions to the shooting parties, who started across the 
 park, with the dogs leaping about them in a phrensy 
 of delight, and accepted the dutchess's kind offer of a 
 pony phaeton to drive down to the kennels. The 
 duke's breed, both of setters and hounds, is celebrated 
 throughout the kingdom. They occupy a spacious 
 building in the centre of a wood, a quadrangle enclos- 
 ing a court, and large enough for a respectable poor- 
 house. The chief huntsman and his family, and per- 
 haps a gamekeeper or two, lodge on the piemises, and 
 the dogs are divided by palings across the court. 1 
 was rather startled to be introduced into the small en- 
 closure with a dozen gigantic blood-hounds, as high 
 as my breast, the keeper's whip in my hand the only 
 defence. I was not easier for the man's assertion that, 
 without it, they would "hae the life oot o' me in a 
 crack." They came around me very quietly, and one 
 immense fellow, with a chest like a horse, and a head 
 of the finest expression, stood up and laid his paws 
 on my shoulders, with the deliberation of a friend 
 about to favor me with some grave advice. One can 
 scarce believe these noble creatures have not reason 
 like ourselves. Those slender, thorough-bred heads, 
 large, speaking eyes, and beautiful limbs and graceful 
 action, should be gifted with more than mere animal 
 instinct. The greyhounds were the beauties of the 
 kennel, however. I never had seen such perfect crea- 
 tures. " Dinna tak' pains to caress 'em, sir," said the 
 huntsman, " they'll only be hangit for it !" 1 asked 
 for an explanation, and the man, with an air as if 1 was 
 uncommonly ignorant, told me that a hound was hung 
 the moment he betrayed attachment to any one, or in 
 any way showed signs of superior sagacity. In cours- 
 ing the hare, for instance, if the dog abandoned the 
 scent to cut across and intercept the poor animal, he 
 was considered as spoiling the sport. Greyhounds are 
 valuable only as they obey their mere natural instinct, 
 and if they leave the track of the hare, either in their 
 own sagacity, or to follow their master, in intercepting 
 it, they spoil the pack, and are hung without mercy. 
 It is an object, of course, to preserve them what they 
 usually are, the greatest fools as well as the handsom- 
 est of the canine species, and on the first sign of at- 
 tachment to their master, their death-warrant is signed. 
 j They are too sensible to live. The dutchess told me 
 I afterward that she had the greatest difficulty in saving 
 j the life of the finest hound in the pack, who had com- 
 mitted the sin of showing pleasure once or twice when 
 j she appeared. 
 
 The setters were in the next division, and really 
 
 j they were quite lovely. The rare tan and black dog 
 
 j of this race, with his silky, floss hair, intelligent muz- 
 
 j zle, good-humored face and caressing fondness (lucky 
 
 | dog ! that affection is permitted in his family!), quite 
 
 excited my admiration. There were thirty or forty 
 
 of these, old and young; and a friend of the duke's 
 
 would as soon ask him for a church living as for the 
 
 present of one of them. The former would be by 
 
 much the smaller favor. Then there were terriers of 
 
 four or five breeds, of one family of which (long-haired, 
 
 long-bodied, short-legged and perfectly white little 
 
 wretches) the keeper seemed particularly proud. I 
 
 evidently sunk in his opinion for not admiring them. 
 
 I passed the remainder of the morning in threading 
 the lovely alleys and avenues of the park, miles after 
 miles of gravel-walk, extending away in every direc- 
 tion, with every variety of turn and shade, now a deep 
 wood, now a sunny opening upon a glade, here along 
 the bank of a stream, and there around the borders of 
 a small lagoon, the little ponies flying on over the 
 i smoothly-rolled paths, and tossing their mimicking 
 | heads, as if they too enjoyed the beauty of the princely 
 j domain. This, I thought to myself, as I sped on 
 j through light and shadow, is very like what is called 
 happiness : and this (if to be a duke were to enjoy it 
 
204 
 
 PRNCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 as I do with this fresh feeling of novelty and delight) 
 is a condition of life it is not quite irrational to envy. 
 And giving my little steeds the rein, I repeated to my- 
 self Scott's graphic description, which seems written 
 for the park of Gordon castle, and thanked Heaven for 
 one more day of unalloyed happiness. 
 
 " And there soft swept in velvet green, 
 The plain with many a glude between, 
 Whose tangled alleys far invade 
 The depths of the bro vn forest shade : 
 And the tall fern obscured the lawn, 
 Fair shelter for the sportive fawn. 
 There, tufted close with copse-wood green, 
 "Was many a swelling hillock seen, 
 And all around was verdure meet 
 For pressure of the fairies' feet. 
 The glossy valley loved the park, 
 The yew-tree lent its shadows dark, 
 And many an old oak worn and bare 
 With all its shivered boughs was there." 
 
 LETTER CXXXI. 
 
 SCOTCH HOSPITALITY IMMENSE POSSESSIONS OF THE 
 
 NOBILITY DUTCHESS' INFANT SCHOOL MANNERS 
 
 OF HIGH LIFE THE TONE OF CONVERSATION IN 
 
 ENGLAND AND AMERICA CONTRASTED. 
 
 The aim of Scotch hospitality seems to be, to con- 
 vince you that the house and all that is in it is your 
 own, and you are at liberty to enjoy it as if you were, 
 in the French sense of the French phrase, chez vous. 
 The routine of Gordon castle was what each one 
 chose to make it. Between breakfast and lunch the 
 ladies were generally invisible, and the gentlemen rode 
 or shot, or played billiards, or kept their rooms. At 
 two o'clock, a dish or two of hot game and a profu- 
 sion of cold meats were set on the small tables in the 
 dining-room, and everybody came in for a kind of 
 lounging half-meal, which occupied perhaps an hour. 
 Thence all adjourned to the drawing-room, under the 
 windows of which were drawn up carriages of all de- 
 scriptions, with grooms, outriders, footmen, and sad- 
 dle-horses for gentlemen and ladies. Parties were 
 then made up for driving or riding, and from a pony- 
 chaise to a phaeton and four, there was no class of 
 vehicle which was not at your disposal. In ten min- 
 utes the carriages were usually all filled, and away 
 they flew, some to the banks of the Spey or the sea- 
 side, some to the drives in the park, and with the de- 
 lightful consciousness that, speed where you would, 
 the horizon scarce limited the possession of your host, 
 and you were everywhere at home. The ornamental 
 gates flying open at your approach, miles distant from 
 the castle ; the herds of red deer trooping away from 
 the sound of wheels in the silent park ; the stately 
 pheasants feeding tamely in the immense preserves ; 
 the hares scarce troubling themselves to get out of the 
 length of the whip ; the stalking game-keepers lifting 
 their hats in the dark recesses of the forest — there 
 was something in this perpetual reminding of your 
 privileges, which, as a novelty, was far from disagree- 
 able. I could not at the time bring myself to feel, 
 what perhaps would be more poetical and republican, 
 that a ride in the wild and unfenced forest of my own 
 country would have been more to my taste. 
 
 The second afternoon of my arrival, I took a seat 
 in the carriage with Lord Aberdeen and his daughter, 
 and we followed the dutchess, who drove herself in a 
 pony-chaise, to visit a school on the estate. Attached 
 to a small gothic chapel, a few minutes drive from the 
 castle, stood a building in the same style, appropriated 
 to the instruction of the children of the duke's ten- 
 antry. There were a hundred and thirty little crea- 
 tures, from two years to five or six, and, like all infant 
 schools in these days of improved education, ^as an 
 
 interesting and affecting sight. The last one I had 
 been in was at Athens, and though I missed here the 
 dark eyes and Grecian faces of the iEgean, I saw 
 health and beauty of a kind which stirred up more 
 images of home, and promised, perhaps, more for the 
 future. They went through their evolutions, and 
 answered their questions, with an intelligence and 
 cheerfulness that were quite delightful, and J was sor- 
 ry to leave them even for a drive in the loveliest sun- 
 set of a lingering day of summer. 
 
 People in Europe are more curious about the com- 
 parison of the natural productions of America with 
 those of England, than about our social and political 
 differences. A man who does not care to know 
 whether the president has destroyed the bank, or the 
 bank the president, or whether Mrs. Trollope has 
 flattered the Americans or not, will be very much in- 
 terested to know if the pine-tree in his park is com- 
 parable to the same tree in America, if the same cat- 
 tle are found there, or the woods stocked with the 
 same game as his own. I would recommend a little 
 study of trees particularly, and of vegetation gener 
 ally, as valuable knowledge for an American coming 
 abroad. I think there is nothing on which I have 
 been so often questioned. The dutchess led the way 
 to a plantation of American trees, at some distance 
 from the castle, and stopping beneath some really no- 
 ble firs, asked if our forest-trees were often larger, 
 with an air as if she believed they were not. They 
 were shrubs, however, compared to the gigantic pro- 
 ductions of the west. Whatever else we may see 
 abroad, we must return home to find the magnificence 
 of nature. 
 
 The number at the dinner-table of Gordon castle 
 was seldom less than thirty, but the company was 
 continually varied by departures and arrivals. No 
 sensation was made by either one or the other. A 
 travelling-carriage dashed up to the door, was disbur- 
 dened of its load, and drove round to the stables, and 
 the question was seldom asked, " Who is arrived ?" 
 You were sure to see at dinner — and an addition of 
 half a dozen to the party made no perceptible differ- 
 ence in anything. Leave-takings were managed in 
 the same quiet way. Adieus were made to the duke 
 and dutchess, and to no one else except he happened 
 to encounter the parting guest upon the staircase, or 
 were more than a common acquaintance. In short, 
 in every way the gene of life seemed weeded out, and 
 if unhappiness or ennui found its way into the castle, 
 it was introduced in the sufferer's own bosom. For 
 me, I gave myself up to enjoyment with an abandon 
 I could not resist. With kindness and courtesy in 
 every look, the luxuries and comforts of a regal es- 
 tablishment at my freest disposal; solitude when I 
 pleased, company when I pleased, the whole visible 
 horizon fenced in for the enjoyment of a household, 
 of which I was a temporary portion, and no enemy 
 except time and the gout, I felt as if I had been spirit- 
 ed into some castle of felicity, and had not come by 
 the royal mailcoach at all. 
 
 The great spell of high life in this country seems to 
 be repose. All violent sensations are avoided as 
 out of taste. In conversation, nothing is so " odd" (a 
 word, by the way, that in England means everything 
 disagreeable) as emphasis or startling epithet, or ges- 
 ture, and in common intercourse nothing so vulgar as 
 any approach to " a scene." The high-bred English- 
 man studies to express himself in the plainest words 
 that will convey his meaning, and is just as simple and 
 calm in describing the death of his friend, and just as 
 technical, so to speak, as in discussing the weather. 
 For all extraordinary admiration the word " capital" 
 suffices; for all ordinary praise the word "nice!" for 
 all condemnation in morals, manners, or religion, the 
 word "odd!" To express yourself out of this sim- 
 ple vocabulary is to raise the eyebrows of the whole 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 205 
 
 company at once, and stamp yourself under-bred, or a 
 foreigner. 
 
 This sounds ridiculous, but it is the exponent not 
 only of good breeding, but of the true philosophy of 
 social life. The general happiness of a party con- 
 sists in giving every individual an equal chance, and 
 in wounding no one's self-love. What is called an 
 " overpowering person," is immediately shunned, for 
 he talks too much, and excites too much attention. 
 In any other country he would be called "amusing." I 
 He is considered here as a mere monopolizer of the j 
 general interest, and his laurels, talk he never so well, 
 shadow the rest of the company. You meet your 
 most intimate friend in society after a long separation, 
 and he gives you his hand as if you had parted at 
 breakfast. If he had expressed all he felt, it would 
 have been "a scene," and the repose of the company j 
 would have been disturbed. You invite a clever man ! 
 to dine with you, and he enriches his descriptions with | 
 new epithets and original words. He is offensive, j 
 fie eclipses the language of your other guests, and is 
 aut of keeping with the received and subdued tone to 
 which the most common intellect rises with ease. 
 Society on this footing is delightful to all, and the 
 diffident man, or the dull man, or the quiet man, en- 
 joys it as much as another. For violent sensations | 
 you tnust go elsewhere. Your escape-valve is not at 
 your neighbor's ear. 
 
 There is a great advantage in this in another re- 
 spect. Your tongue never gets you into mischief. The j 
 " unsafeness of Americans" in society (I quote a 
 phrase I have heard used a thousand times) arises 
 wholly from the American habit of applying high- 
 wrought language to trifles. I can tell one of my 
 countrymen abroad by his first remark. Ten to one 
 his first sentence contains a superlative that would 
 make an Englishman imagine he had lost his senses. 
 The natural consequence is continual misapprehen- 
 sion, offence is given where none was intended, words 
 that have no meaning are the ground of quarrels, and 
 gentlemen are shy of us. A good-natured young 
 nobleman, whom I sat next to at dinner on my first 
 arrival at Gordon castle, told me he was hunting with 
 Lord Abercorn when two very gentleman-like young 
 men rode up and requested leave to follow the 
 hounds, but in such extraordinary language that they 
 were not at first understood. The hunt continued for 
 some days, and at last the strangers, who rode well 
 and were seen continually, were invited to dine with 
 the principal nobleman of the neighborhood. They 
 turned out to be Americans, and were every way well- 
 bred and agreeable, but their extraordinary mode of 
 expressing themselves kept the company in continual 
 astonishment. They were treated with politeness, of 
 course, while they remained, but no little fun was 
 made of their phraseology after their departure, and 
 the impression on the mind of my informant was very 
 much against the purity of the English language, as 
 spoken by Americans. I mention it for the benefit of 
 those whom it may concern. 
 
 LETTER CXXXII. 
 
 DEPARTURE FROM GORDON CASTLE — THE PRETENDER — 
 
 SCOTCH CHARACTER MISAPPREHENDED OBSERVANCE 
 
 OF SUNDAY — HIGHLAND CHIEFTAINS. 
 
 Ten days had gone by like the ** Days of Thalaba," 
 and I took my leave of Gordon Castle. It seemed to 
 me, as I looked back upon it, as if I had passed a 
 separate life there— so beautiful had been every object 
 on which I had looked in that time, and so free from 
 every mixture of ennui had been the hours from the 
 first to the last, I have set them apart in my memory, 
 
 those ten days, as a bright ellipse in the usual proces- 
 sion of joys and sorrows. It is a little world, walled 
 in from rudeness and vexation, in which 1 have lived a 
 life. 
 
 I took the coach for Elgin, and visited the fine old 
 ruins of the cathedral, and then kept on to Invt /ness, 
 passing over the " Blasted Heath," the tryst of Mac- 
 beth and the witches. We passed within sight of 
 Culloden Moor, at sunset, and the driver pointed out 
 to me a lonely castle where the Pretender slept the 
 night before the battle. The interest with which I 
 had read the romantic history of Prince Charlie, in 
 my boyhood, was fully awakened, for his name is still 
 a watch-word of aristocracy in Scotland ; and the 
 jacobite songs, with their half-warlike, half-melan- 
 choly music, were favorites of the Dutchess of Gor- 
 don, who sung them in their original Scotch, with an 
 enthusiasm and sweetness that stirred my blood like 
 the sound of a trumpet. There certainly never was a 
 cause so indebted to music and poetry as that which 
 was lost at Culloden. 
 
 The hotel at Inverness was crowded with livery- 
 servants, and the door inaccessible for carriages. I 
 had arrived on the last day of a county meeting, and 
 all the chieftains and lairds of the north and west of 
 Scotland were together. The last ball was to be given 
 that evening, and I was strongly tempted to go by four 
 or five acquaintances whom I found in the hotel, but 
 the gout was peremptory. My shoe would not go on, 
 and I went to bed. 
 
 I was limping about in the morning when a kind old 
 baronet, whom I had met at Gordon Castle, when I 
 was warmly accosted by a gentleman whom I did not 
 immediately remember. On his reminding me that 
 we had parted last on Lake Leman, however, I rec- 
 ollected a gentlemanlike Scotchman, who had offered 
 me his glass opposite Copet to look at the house of 
 Madame de Stael, and whom 1 had left afterward at 
 Lausanne, without even knowing his name. He in- 
 vited me immediately to dine, and in about an hour or 
 two after, called in his carriage, and drove me to a 
 charming country-house, a few miles down the shore 
 of Loch Ness, where he presented me to his family, 
 and treated me in every respect as if I had been the 
 oldest of his friends. 1 mention the circumstance for 
 the sake of a comment on what seems to me a univer- 
 sal error with regard to the Scotch character. Instead 
 of a calculating and cold people, as they are always 
 described by the English, they seem to me more a 
 nation of impulse and warm feeling than any other I 
 have seen. Their history certainly goes to prove a 
 most chivalrous character in days gone by, and as far 
 as I know Scotchmen, they preserve it still with even 
 less of the modification of the times than other 
 nations. The instance I have mentioned above, is one 
 of many that have come under my own observation, 
 and in many inquiries since, I have never found an 
 Englishman, who had been in Scotland, who did not 
 confirm my impression. I have not traded with them, 
 it is true, and I have seen only the wealthier class, but 
 still I think my judgment a fair one. The Scotch in 
 England are, in a manner, what the Yankees are in 
 the southern states, and their advantages of superior 
 quickness and education have given them a success 
 which is ascribed to meaner causes. I think (com- 
 mon prejudice contradicenle) that neither the Scotch 
 nor the English are a cold or an unfriendly people, 
 but the Scotch certainly the farther remove from cold- 
 ness of the two. 
 
 Inverness is the only place I have ever been in where 
 no medicine could be procured on a Sunday. I did 
 not want, indeed, for other mementoes of the sacred- 
 ness of the day. In the crowd of the public room of 
 the hotel, half the persons at least, had either bible or 
 prayer-book, and there was a hush through the house, 
 and a gravity in the faces of the people passing in the 
 
►06 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 street, that reminded me more of New-England than 
 anything I have seen. I had wanted some linen 
 washed on Saturday. " Impossible !" said the waiter, 
 "no one does up linen on Sunday." Toward evening 
 I wished for a carnage to drive over to my hospitable 
 friend. Mine host stared, and I found it was in- 
 decorous to drive out on Sunday. I must add, how- 
 ever, that the apothecary's shop was opened after the 
 second service, and that I was allowed a carriage on 
 pleading my lameness. 
 
 Inverness is a romantic-looking town, charmingly 
 situated between Loch Ness and the Murray Firth, 
 with the bright river Ness running through it, parallel 
 to its principal street, and the most picturesque emi- 
 nences in its neighborhood. There is a very singular 
 elevation on the other side of the Ness, shaped like a 
 ship, keel up, and rising from the centre of the plain, 
 covered with beautiful trees. It is called, in Gaelic, 
 Tonnaheuric, or the Hill of the Fairies. 
 
 It has been in one respect like getting abroad aejain, 
 to come to Scotland. Nothing seemed more odd to 
 me on my first arrival in England, than having sud- 
 denly ceased to be a " foreigner." I was as little at 
 home myself, as in France or Turkey (much less 
 than in Italy), yet there was that in the manner of 
 every person who approached me which conveyed the 
 presumption that 1 was as familiar with everything 
 about me as himself. In Scotland, however, the 
 Englishman is the "Sassenach," and a stranger; and, 
 as I was always taken for one, I found myself once 
 more invested with that agreeable consequence which 
 accompanies it, my supposed prejudices consulted, 
 my opinion about another country asked, and com- 
 parisons referred to me as an exparte judge. I found 
 here, as abroad, too, that the Englishman was expect- 
 ed to pay more for trifling services than a native, and 
 that he would be much more difficult about his ac- 
 commodations, and more particular in his chance 
 company. I was amused at the hotel with an instance 
 of the want of honor shown " the prophet in his own 
 country." I went down to the coffee-room for my break- 
 fast about noon, and found a remarkably fashionable, 
 pale, " Werter-like man," excessively dressed, but 
 with all the air of a gentleman, sitting with the news- 
 paper on one side of the fire. He offered me the 
 paper after a few minutes, but with the cold, half- 
 supercilious politeness which marks the dandy tribe, 
 and strolled off to the window. The landlord entered 
 presently, and asked me if I had any objection to 
 breakfasting with that gentleman, as it would be a 
 convenience in serving it up. " None in the world," 
 I said " but you had better ask the other gentleman 
 first." "Hoot !" said Boniface, throwing up his chin 
 with an incredulous expression, "it's honor for the 
 like o'him. He's joost a laddie born and brought up 
 i' the toon. I kenn'd him weel." And so enter 
 breakfast for two. I found my companion a well- 
 bred man ; rather surprised, however, if not vexed, to 
 discover that I knew he was of Inverness. He had 
 been in the civil services of the East India Company 
 for some years (hence his paleness), and had returned 
 to Scotland for his health. He was not the least 
 aware that he was known, apparently and he certainly 
 had not the slightest trace of his Scotch birth. The 
 landlord told me afterward that his parents were poor, 
 ind he had raised himself by his own cleverness alone, 
 and yet it was " honor for the like o' him" to sit at 
 table with a common stranger ! The world is really 
 very much the same all over. 
 
 In the three days I passed at Inverness, I made the 
 acquaintance of several of the warm-hearted Highland 
 chiefs, and found great difficulty in refusing to go 
 home with them. One of the "Lords of the Isles" 
 was among the number, a handsome, high-spirited 
 youth, who would have been the chivalrous Lord 
 Ronald of a century ago, but was now only the best 
 
 shot, the best rider, the most elegant man, and the 
 most " capital fellow" in the west of Scotland. He 
 had lost everything but his "Isle" in his London cam- 
 paigns, and was beginning to listen to his friends' 
 advice, and look out for a wife to mend his fortune 
 and his morals. There was a peculiar style about all 
 these young men, something very like the manner of 
 our high-bred Virginians — a free, gallant self-posses- 
 sed bearing, fiery and prompt, yet full of courtesy. 
 I was pleased with them altogether. 
 
 I had formed an agreeable acquaintance, on my 
 passage from London to Edinburgh in the steamer, 
 with a gentleman bound to the Highlands for the 
 shooting season. He was engaged to pay a visit to 
 Lord Lumley, with whom I had myself promised to 
 pass a week, and we parted at Edinboro' in the hope 
 of meeting at Kinrara. On my return from Dalhonsie, 
 a fortnight after, we met by chance at the hotel in 
 Edinboro', he having arrived the same day, and hav- 
 ing taken a passage like myself for Aberdeen. We 
 made another agreeable passage together, and he left 
 me at the gate of Gordon castle, proceeding north on 
 another visit. I was sitting in the coffee-room at 
 Inverness, pondering how I should reach Kinrara, 
 when, enter again my friend, to my great surprise, 
 who informed me that Lord Lumley had returned to 
 England. Disappointed alike in our visit, we took a 
 passage together once more in the steamer from 
 Inverness to Fort William for the following morning. 
 It was a singular train of coincidences, but I was 
 indebted to it for one of the most agreeable chance 
 acquaintances I have yet made. 
 
 LETTER CXXXIII. 
 
 CALEDONIAN CANAL — DOGS ENGLISH EXCLUSIVENESS — 
 
 ENGLISH INSENSIBILITY OF FINE SCENERY FLORA 
 
 MACDONALD AND THE PRETENDER HIGHLAND TRAV- 
 ELLING. 
 
 We embarked early in the morning in the steamer 
 which goes across Scotland from 6ea to sea, by the 
 half-natural, half-artificial passage of the Caledonian 
 canal. One long glen, as the reader knows, extends 
 quite through this mountainous country, and in its 
 bosom lies a chain of the loveliest lakes, whose ex- 
 tremities so nearly meet, that it seems as if a blow of a 
 spade should have run them together. Their differ- 
 ent elevations, however, made it an expensive work in 
 locks, and the canal altogether cost ten times the 
 original calculation. 
 
 I went on board with my London friend, who, from 
 our meeting so frequently, had now become my estab- 
 lished companion. The boat was crowded, yet moie 
 with dogs than people ; for every man, I think, had 
 his brace of terriers or his pointers, and every lady her 
 hound or poodle, and they were chained to every leg 
 of a sofa, chair, portmanteau, and fixture in the vessel. 
 It was like a floating kennel, and every passenger was 
 fully occupied in keeping the peace between his own 
 dog and his neighbor's. The same thing would have 
 been a much greater annoyance in any other country; 
 but in Scotland the dogs are all of beautiful and 
 thorough-bred races, and it is a pleasure to see them. 
 Half as many French pugs would have been insuffer- 
 able. 
 
 We opened into Loch Ness immediately, and the 
 scenery was superb. The waters were like a mirror: 
 and the hills draped in mist, and rising one or two 
 thousand feet directly from the shore, and nothing to 
 break the wildness of the crags but the ruins of the 
 constantly occurring castles, perched like eyries upon 
 their summits. You might have had the same natural 
 scenery in America, but the ruins and the thousand 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 207 
 
 associations would have been wanting ; and it is this, 
 much more than the mere beauty of hill or lake, which 
 makes the pleasure of travel. We ran close in to a 
 green cleft in the mountains on the southern shore, in 
 which stands one of the few old castles, still inhabited 
 by the chief of his clan — that of Fraser of Lovat, so 
 well-known in Scottish story. Our object was to visit 
 the Fall of Foyers, in sight of which it stands, and the 
 boat came to off the point, and gave us an hour for 
 the excursion. It was a pretty stroll up through the 
 woods, and we found a cascade very like the Turtmann 
 in Switzerland, but with no remarkable feature which 
 would make it interesting in description. 
 
 I was amused after breakfast with what has always 
 struck me on board English steamers — the gradual di- 
 vision of the company into parties of congenial rank 
 or consequence. Not for conversation — for fellow- 
 travellers of a day seldom become acquainted — but, as 
 if it was a process of crystallization, the well-bred and 
 the hall-bred, and the vulgar, each separating to his 
 natural neighbor, apparently from a mere fitness of 
 propinquity. This takes place sometimes, but rarely 
 and in a much less degree, on board an American 
 steamer. There are, of course, in England, as with 
 us, those who are presuming and impertinent, but an 
 instance of it has seldom fallen under my observation. 
 The English seem to have an instinct of each other's 
 position in life. A gentleman enters a crowd, looks 
 about him, makes up his mind at once from whom an 
 advance of civility would be agreeable or the contrary, 
 gets near the best set without seeming to notice them, 
 and if any chance accident brings on conversation 
 with his neighbors, you may be certain he is sure of 
 his man. 
 
 We had about a hundred persons on board (Miss 
 Inverarity, the singer, among others), and I could see 
 no one who seemed to notice or enjoy the lovely 
 scenery we were passing through. I made the remark 
 to my companion, who was an old stager in London 
 fashion, fifty, but still a beau, and he was compelled 
 to allow it, though piqued for the taste of his country- 
 men. A baronet with his wife and sister sat in the 
 corner opposite us, and one lady slept on the other's 
 shoulder, and neither saw a feature of the scenery ex- 
 cept by an accidental glance in changing her position. 
 Yet it was more beautiful than most things I have 
 seen that are celebrated, and the ladies, as my friend 
 said, looked like " nice persons." 
 
 I had taken up a book while we were passing the 
 locks at the junction of Loch Ness and Loch Oich, 
 and was reading aloud to my friend the interesting de- 
 scription of Flora Macdouald's heroic devotion to 
 Prince Charles Edward. A very lady-like girl, who sat 
 next me, turned around as I laid down the book, and 
 informed me, with a look of pleased pride, that the 
 heroine was her grandmother. She was returning from 
 the first visit she had ever made to the Isle (I think of 
 Skye), of which the Macdonalds were the hereditary 
 lords, and in which the fugitive prince was concealed. 
 Her brother, an officer, just returned from India, had 
 accompanied her in her pilgrimage, and as he sat on 
 the other side of his sister he joined in the conversa- 
 tion, and entered into the details of Flora's history 
 with great enthusiasm. The book belonged to the 
 boat, and my friend had b-ought it from below, and 
 the coincidence was certainly singular. The present 
 chief of the Macdonalds was on board, accompanying 
 his relatives back to their home in Sussex; and on ar- 
 riving at Fort William, where the boat stopped for 
 the night, the young lady invited us to take tea with 
 her at the inn ; and for so improvised an acquaintance, 
 I have rarely made three friends more to my taste. 
 
 We had decided to leave the steamer at Fort Wil- 
 liam, and cross through the heart of Scotland to Loch 
 Lomond. My companion was very fond of Loudon 
 hours, and slept late, knowing that the cart— the only 
 
 conveyance to be had in that country — would wait our 
 time. I was lounging about the inn, and amusing 
 myself with listening to the Gaelic spoken by every- 
 body who belonged to the place, when the pleasant 
 family with whom we had passed the evening, drove 
 out of the yard (having brought their horses down in 
 the boat), intending to proceed by land to Glasgow. 
 We renewed our adieus, on my part with the sincerest 
 regret, and I strolled down the road and watched them 
 till they were out of sight, feeling that (selfish world 
 as it is) there are some things that hole at least like 
 impulse and kindness — so like, that 1 can make out 
 of them a very passable happiness. 
 
 We mounted our cart at eleven o'clock, and with a 
 bright sun, a clear, vital air, a handsome and good- 
 humored callant for a driver, and the most renowned 
 of Scottish scenery before us, the day looked very 
 auspicious. I could not help smiling at the appear- 
 ance of my fashionable friend silting, with his well- 
 poised hat and nicely-adjusted curls, upon the spring- 
 less cross-board of a most undisguised and unscrupu- 
 lous market-cart, yet in the highest good-humor with 
 himself and the world. The boy sat on the shafts, 
 and talked Gaelic to his horse ; the mountains and the 
 lake, spread out before us, looked as if human eye had 
 never profaned their solitary beauty, and I enjoyed it 
 all the more, perhaps, that our conversation was of 
 London and its delights : and the racy scandal of the 
 distinguished people of that great Babel amused me 
 in the midst of that which is most unlike it — pure and 
 lovely nature. Everything is seen so much better by 
 contrast! 
 
 We crossed the head of Loch Linnhe, and kept 
 down its eastern bank, skirting the water by a winding 
 road directly under the wall of the mountains. We 
 were to dine at Ballyhulish, and just before reaching 
 it we passed the opening of a glen on the opposite 
 side of the lake, in which lay, in a green paradise shut 
 in by the loftiest rocks, one of the most enviable habi- 
 tations I have ever seen. I found on inquiry that it 
 was the house of a Highland chief, to whom Lord 
 Dalhousie had kindly given me a letter, but my lame- 
 ness and the presence of my companion induced me 
 to abandon the visit ; and, hailing a fishing-boat, I 
 despatched my letters, which were sealed, across the 
 loch, and we kept on to the inn. We dined here ; 
 and I just mention, for the information of scenery- 
 hunters, that the mountain opposite Ballyhulish sweeps 
 down to the lake with a curve which is even more ex- 
 quisitely graceful than that of Vesuvius in its far-famed 
 descent to Portici. That same inn of Ballyhulish, by 
 the way, stands in the midst of a scene, altogether, 
 that does not pass easily from the memory — a i^nely 
 and sweet spot that would recur to one in a moment 
 of violent love or hate, when the heart shrinks from 
 the intercourse and observation of men. 
 
 We found the travellers' book, at the inn, full of 
 records of admiration, expressed in all degrees of dog- 
 gerel. People on the road write very bad poetry. I 
 found the names of one or two Americans, whom I 
 knew, and it was a pleasure to feel that my enjoyment 
 would be sympathized in. Our host had been a noble- 
 man's travelling valet, and he amused us with his de- 
 j scriptions of our friends, every one of whom he per- 
 i fectly remembered. He had learned to use his eyes, 
 at least, and had made very shrewd guesses at the con- 
 dition and tempers of his visiters. His life, in that 
 lonely inn, must be in sufficient contrast with his for- 
 mer vocation. 
 
 We had jolted sixteen miles behind our Highland 
 
 horse, but he came out fresh for the remaining twenty 
 
 j of our day's journey, and with cushions of dried and 
 
 ! fragrant fern, gathered and put in by our considerate 
 
 ' landlord, we crossed the ferry and turned eastward into 
 
 the far-famed and much-boasted valley of Glencoe. 
 
 The description of it must lie over till my next letter. 
 
208 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER CXXX1V. 
 
 INVARERDEN — TARBOT — COCKNEY TOURISTS — LOCH LO- 
 MOND INVERSNADE — ROB ROY'S CAVE DISCOMFI- 
 TURE — THE BIRTHPLACE OF HELEN M'GREGOR. 
 
 We passed the head of the valley near Tyndrum, 
 where M'Dougal of Lorn defeated the Bruce, and 
 were half way up the wild pass that makes its southern 
 outlet, when our Highland driver, with a shout of de- 
 light, pointed out to us a red deer, standing on the 
 very summit of the highest mountain above us. It 
 was an incredible distance to see any living thing, but 
 he stood clear against the sky, in a relief as strong as 
 if he had been suspended in the air, and with his head 
 up, and his chest toward us, seemed the true monarch 
 of the wild. 
 
 At Invarenden, Donald M'Phee begged for the dis- 
 charge of himself a d his horse and cart from our 
 service. He had co le with us eighty miles, and was 
 afraid to venture fart er on his travels, having never 
 before been twenty miles from the Highland village 
 where he lived. It was amusing to see the curiosity 
 with which he looked about him, and the caution with 
 which he suffered the hostler at the inn to take the 
 black mare out of his sight. The responsibility of 
 the horse and cart weighed heavily on his mind, and 
 he expressed his hope to " get her back safe," with an 
 apprehensive resolution that would have become a 
 knight-errant guiding himself for his most perilous 
 encounter. Poor Donald! how little he knew how 
 wide is the world, and how very like one part of it is 
 to another! 
 
 Our host of Invarerden supplied us with another 
 cart to take us down to Tarbot, and having dined with 
 a waterfall-looking inn at each of our two opposite 
 windows (the inn stands in a valley between two 
 moun'ains), we were committed to the care of his eld- 
 est boy, and jolted off for the head of Loch Lomond. 
 
 I have never happened to see a traveller who had 
 seen Loch Lomond in perfectly good weather. My 
 companion had"been there every summer for several 
 years, and believed it always rained under Ben Lo- 
 mond. As we came in sight of the lake, however, the 
 water looked like one sheet of gold-leaf, trembling, as 
 if by the motion of fish below, but unruffled by wind; 
 and if paradise were made so fair, and had such waters 
 in its midst, I could better conceive than before, the 
 unhappiness of Adam when driven forth. The sun 
 was just setting, and the road descended immediately 
 to the shore, and kept along under precipitous rocks, 
 and slopes of alternate cultivation and heather, to the 
 place of our destination. And a lovely place it is ! 
 Send me to Tarbot when I would retreat from the 
 world. It is an inn buried in a grove at the foot of 
 the hills, and set in a bend of the lake shore, like a 
 diamond upon an "orbed brow; 1 ' and the light in its 
 kitchen, as we approached in the twilight, was as in- 
 teresting as a ray of the "first water" from the same. 
 We had now reached the route of the cockney tour- 
 ists, and while we perceived it agreeably in the excel- 
 lence of the hotel, we perceived it disagreeably in the 
 price of the wines, and the presence of what my friend 
 called " unmitigated vulgarisms" in the coffee-room. 
 That is the worst of England. The people are vul- 
 gar, but not vulgar enough. One dances with the 
 lazzaroni at Naples, when he would scarce think of 
 handing the newspaper to the "person" on a tour at 
 Tarbot. Condescension is the only agreeable virtue, 
 I have made up my mind. 
 
 Well — it was moonlight. The wind was south and 
 affectionate, and the road in front of the hotel " fleck'd 
 with silver," and my friend's wife, and the correspond- 
 ing object of interest to myself, being on the other 
 side of Ben Lomond and the Tweed, we had nothing 
 for it after supper but to walk up and down with one 
 
 another, and talk of the past. In the course of our 
 ramble, we walked through an open gate, and ascend- 
 ing a gravel-walk, found a beautiful cottage, built be- 
 tween two mountain streams, and ornamented with 
 every device of taste and contrivance. The mild pure 
 torrents were led over falls, and brought to the thresh- 
 olds of bowers ; and seats, and bridges, and winding- 
 paths, were distributed up the steep channels, in a way 
 that might make it a haunt for Titania. It is the 
 property, we found afterward, of a Scotch gentleman, 
 and a great summer retreat of the celebrated Jeffrey, 
 his friend. It was one more place to which my heart 
 clung in parting. 
 
 Loch Lomond still sat for its picture in the morn- 
 ing, and after an early breakfast, we took a row-boat, 
 with a couple of Highlanders, for Inversnade, and 
 pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy delight- 
 fulness in the scene and air which I have never before 
 found out of Italy. We overshot our destination a 
 little to look into Rob Roy's Cave, a dark den in the 
 face of the rock, which has the look of his vocation ; 
 and then, pulling back along the shore, we were land- 
 ed, in the spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied 
 by the boatmen of this Highland ferry. From this 
 point across to Loch Katrine, is some five miles, and 
 the scene of Scott's novel of Rob Roy. It has been 
 " done" so often by tourists, that I leave all particular 
 description of the localities and scenery to the well- 
 hammered remembrance of readers of magazines, 
 and confine myself to my own private adventures. 
 
 The distance between the lakes is usually perform- 
 ed by ladies on donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot, 
 but being myself rather tender-toed with the gout, my 
 companion started off alone, and I lay down on the 
 grass at Inversnade to wait the return of the long- 
 eared troop, who were gone across with an earlier 
 party. The waterfall and the cottage just above the 
 edge of the lake, a sharp hill behind, closely wooded 
 with birch and fir, and, on a green sward platform in 
 the rear of the house, two Highland lasses and a lad- 
 die, treading down a stack of new hay, were not bad 
 circumstances in which to be left alone with the witch- 
 eries of the great enchanter. 
 
 I must narrate here an adventure in which my own 
 part was rather a discomfiture, but which will show 
 somewhat the manners of the people. My compan- 
 ion had been gone half an hour, and I was lying at 
 the foot of a tree, listening to the waterfall and look- 
 ing off on the lake, and watching, by fits, the lad and 
 lasses I have spoken of, who were building a haystack 
 between them, and chattering away most unceasingly 
 in Gaelick. The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill-fa- 
 vored damsel, merry as an Oread, but as ugly as Don- 
 ald Bean; and, after a while, I began to suspect, by 
 the looks of the boy below, that I had furnished her 
 with a new theme. She addressed some remark to 
 me presently, and a skirmish of banter ensued, which 
 ended in a challenge to me to climb upon the stack. 
 It was about ten feet high, and shelving outward from 
 the bottom, and my Armida had drawn up the ladder. 
 The stack was built, however, under a high tree, and 
 I was soon up the trunk, and, swinging oft" from a long 
 branch, dropped into the middle of the stack. In the 
 same instant, I was raised in a grasp to which I could 
 offer no resistance, and, with a fling to which I should 
 have believed the strength of few men equal, thrown 
 clear of the stack to the ground. I alighted on my 
 back, with a fall of, perhaps, twelve feet, and felt seri- 
 ously hurt. The next moment, however, my gentle 
 friend had me in her arms (I am six feet high in my 
 stockings), and I was carried into the cottage, and laid 
 on a flock bed, before I could well decide whether my 
 back was broken or no. Whiskey was applied exter- 
 nally and internally, and the old crone, who was the 
 only inhabitant of the hovel, commenced a lecture in 
 Gaelick, as I stood once more sound upon my legs, 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 209 
 
 which seemed to take effect upon the penitent, though 
 her victim was no wiser for it. I took the opportunity 
 to look at the frame which had proved itself of such 
 vigorous power ; but, except arms of extraordinary 
 length, she was like any other equally ugly, middle- 
 sized woman. In the remaining half hour, before the 
 donkeys arrived, we became the best of friends, and 
 she set me off for Loch Katrine, with a caution to the 
 ass-driver to take care of me, which that sandy-haired 
 Highlander took as an excellent joke. And no won- 
 der ! 
 
 The long mountain-glen between these two lakes 
 was the home of Rob Roy, and the Highlanders point 
 out various localities, all commemorated in Scott's in- 
 comparable story. The house where Helen M'Gregor 
 was born lies a stone's throw off the road to the left, 
 and Rob's gun is shown by an old woman who lives 
 near by. He must have been rich in arms by the 
 same token ; for, beside the well-authenticated one at 
 Abbotsford, I have seen some dozen guns, and twice 
 as many daggers and shot-pouches, which lay claim 
 to the same honor. I paid my shilling to the old wo- 
 man not the less. She owed it to the pleasure I had 
 received from Sir Walter's novel. 
 
 The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest 
 point of the pass is incomparably fine; at least, when 
 I saw it ; for sunshine and temperature, and the effect 
 of the light vapors on the hills, were at their loveliest 
 and most favorable. It looks more like the haunt of 
 a robber and his caterans, probably, in its more com- 
 mon garb of Scotch mist ; but, to my eye, it was a 
 scene of the most Arcadian peace and serenity. I 
 dawdled along the five miles upon my donkey, with 
 something of an ache in my back, but a very health- 
 ful and sunny freedom from pain and impatience at 
 my heart. And so did not Baillie Nicol Jarvey make 
 the same memorable journey. 
 
 LETTER CXXXV. 
 
 HIGHLAND HUT, ITS FURNITURE AND INMATES 
 
 HIGHLAND AMUSEMENT AND DINNER " ROB ROY," 
 
 AND SCENERY OF THE " LADY OF THE LAKE." 
 
 The cottage-inn at the head of Loch Katrine, was 
 tenanted by a woman who might have been a horse- 
 guardsman in petticoats, and who kept her smiles for 
 other cattle than the Sassenach. We bought her 
 whiskey and milk, praised her butter, and were civil to 
 the little Highland man at her breast; but neither 
 mother nor child were to be mollified. The rocks 
 were bare around, we were too tired for a pull in the 
 boat, and three mortal hours lay between us and the 
 nearest event in our history. I first penetrated, in the 
 absence of our Hecate, to the inner room of the 
 shieling. On the wall hung a broadsword, two guns, 
 a trophy or two of deers' horns, and a Sunday suit 
 of plaid, philibeg and short red coat, surmounted by 
 a gallant bonnet and feather. Four cribs, like the 
 births in a ship, occupied the farther side of the 
 chamber, each large enough to contain two persons; 
 a snow-white table stood between the windows; a six- 
 penny glass, with an eagle's feather stuck in the frame, 
 hung at such a height that, " though tall of my 
 hands," I could just see my nose; and just under the 
 ceiling on the left was a broad and capacious shelf, on 
 which reposed apparently the old clothes of a century 
 —a son of place where the gude-wife would have 
 hidden Prince Charlie, or might rummage for her 
 grandmother's baby-linen. 
 
 The heavy steps of the dame came over the thresh- 
 old, and I began to doubt, from the look in her eyes, 
 *hciher I should get a blow of her hairy arm or a 
 1 1 
 
 " persuader" from the butt of a gun for my intrusion. 
 " What are ye wantin' here ?" she speered at me, 
 with a Helen-M'Gregor-to-Baillie-Nicol-Jarvie-sort- 
 of-an expression. 
 
 " I was looking for a potato to roast, my good wo- 
 man." 
 
 " Is that a' t Ye'll find it ayont, then !" and, point- 
 ing to a bag in the corner, she stood while I subtract- 
 ed the largest, and then followed me to the general 
 kitchen and receiving-room, where I buried my int- 
 provista dinner in the remains of the peat fire, and 
 congratulated myself on my ready apology. 
 
 What to do while the potato was roasting! My 
 English friend had already cleaned his gun for amuse- 
 ment, and I had looked on. We had stoned the pony 
 till he had got beyond us in the morass, (small thanks 
 to us, if the dame knew it !) We had tried to make 
 a chicken swim ashore from the boat, we had fired 
 away all my friend's percussion caps, and there was 
 nothing for it but to converse a rigueur. We lay on 
 our backs till the dame brought us the hot potato on a 
 shovel, with oat-cake and butter, and, with this High- 
 land dinner, the last hour came decently to its death. 
 
 An Englishman, with his wife and lady's maid, 
 came over the hills with a boat's crew; and a lassie 
 who was not very pretty, but who lived on the lake 
 and had found the means to get " Captain Rob" and 
 his men pretty well under her thumb. We were all 
 embarked, the lassie in the stern-sheets with the cap- 
 tain; and ourselves, though we "paid the Scot," of 
 no more consideration than our portmanteaus. I was 
 amused, for it was the first instance I had seen in any 
 country (my own not excepted), of thorough emanci- 
 pation from the distinction of superiors and inferiors. 
 Luckily the girl was bent on showing the captain to 
 advantage, and by ingenious prompting and catechism, 
 she induced him to do what probably was his custom 
 when he could not better amuse himself — point out 
 the localities as the boat sped on, and quote the Lady 
 of the Lake, with an accent which made it a piece of 
 good fortune to have " crammed" the poem before- 
 hand. 
 
 The shores of the lake are flat and uninteresting at 
 the head, but, toward the scene of Scott's romance, 
 they rise into bold precipices, and gradually become 
 worthy of their celebrity. The Trosachs are a clus- 
 ter of small, green mountains, strewn, or rather piled, 
 with shrubs and mossy verdure, and from a distance 
 you would think only a bird, or Ranald of the Mist, 
 could penetrate their labyrinthine recesses. Captain 
 Rob showed us successively the Braes of Balquidder, 
 Rob Roy's birth and burial place, Benledi, and the 
 eras; from which hung, by the well-woven skirts of 
 braidcloth, the worthy baillie of Glasgow ; and, be- 
 neath a precipice of remarkable wildness, the half- 
 intoxicated steersman raised his arm and began to re- 
 peat, in the most unmitigated gutterals : — 
 
 " High o'er the south huge Benrenue 
 Down to the lake his masses threw, 
 Crags, knowls and mounds confusedly hurl'd 
 The fragments of an earlier uurruld!" etc. 
 
 I have underlined it according to the captain's ju- 
 dicious emphasis, and in the last word have endeav- 
 ored to spell after his remarkable pronunciation. 
 Probably to a Frenchman, however, it would have 
 seemed all very fine — for Captain Rob (I must do him 
 justice, though he broke the strap of my portmanteau) 
 was as good-looking a ruffian as you would sketch on 
 a summer's tour. 
 
 Some of the loveliest water I have ever seen in my 
 life (and I am rather an amateur of that element — to 
 look at), lies deep down at the bases of these divine. 
 Trosachs. The usual approaches from lake to moun- 
 tain (beach or sloping shore), are here dispensed with ; 
 and, straight up from the deeD water, rise the green 
 
210 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 precipices and bold and ragged rocks, overshadowing 
 the glassy mirror below with teints like a cool corner 
 in a landscape of Ruysdael's. It is something — (in- 
 deed, on a second thought, exceedingly) like — Lake 
 George ; only that the islands in this extremity of 
 Loch Katrine lie closer together, and permit the sun 
 no entrance except by a ray almost perpendicular. 
 A painter will easily understand the effect of this — 
 the loss of all that makes a surface to the water, and 
 the consequent far depth to the eye, as if the boat in 
 which you shot over it, brought with it its own water 
 and sent its ripple through the transparent air. I 
 write currente calamo, and have no time to clear up 
 my meaning, but it will be evident to all lovers of 
 nature. 
 
 Captain Rob put up his helm for a little fairy green 
 island, lying like a lapfull of green moss on the water, 
 and, rounding a point, we ran suddenly into a cove 
 sheltered by a tree, and in a moment the boat grated 
 on the pebbles of a natural beach, perhaps ten feet in 
 length. A flight of winding steps, made roughly of 
 roots and stones, ascended from the water's edge. 
 
 " Gentlemen and ladies !" said the captain, with a 
 hiccup, "this is Ellen's Isle. This is the gnarled 
 oak," (catching at a branch of the tree as the boat 
 
 swung astern), " and you'll please to go up them 
 
 steps, and I'll tell ye the rest in Ellen's bower." 
 
 The Highland lassie sprang on shore, and we fol- 
 lowed up the steep ascent, arriving breathless at last 
 at the door of a fanciful bower, built by Lord Wil- 
 loughby d'Eresby (the owner of the island), exactly 
 after the description in the Lady of the Lake. The 
 chairs were made of crooked branches of trees and 
 covered with deer-skins, the tables were laden with 
 armor and every variety of weapon, and the rough 
 beams of the building were hung with antlers and 
 other spoils of the chase. 
 
 " Here's where she lived !" said the captain, with 
 the gravity of a cicerone at the Forum, " and noo, if 
 ye'll come out, I'll show you the echo !" 
 
 We followed to the highest point of the island, and 
 the Highlandman gave a scream that showed consid- 
 erable practice, but I thought he would have burst his 
 throat in the effort. The awful echo went round, "as 
 mentioned in the bill of performance," every separate 
 mountain screaming back the discord till you would 
 have thought the Trosachs a crew of mocking giants. 
 It was a wonderful echo, but, like most wonders, I 
 could have been content to have had less for my 
 money. 
 
 There was a "small silver beach" on the mainland 
 opposite, and above it a high mass of mountain. 
 
 "There," said the captain, " gentlemen and ladies, 
 is where Fitz-James bloio'd his bugle, and waited for 
 the ' light shallop' of Ellen Douglas ; and here, 
 where you landed and came up them steps, is where 
 she brought him to the bower, and the very tree's still 
 there (as you see'd me tak' hold of it), and over the 
 hill, yonder, is where the gallant gray giv out and 
 breathed his last, and (will you turn round, if you 
 please, them that like's) yonder's where Fitz-James 
 met Red Murdoch that killed Blanche of Devon, and 
 right across this water sivum young Greme that dis- 
 dained the regular boat, and I 'spose on that lower 
 step set the old harper and Ellen many a time a-watch- 
 ing for Douglas ; and now if you'd like to hear the 
 echo once more" — 
 
 " Heaven forbid" was the universal cry ; and, in 
 fear of our ears, we put the bower between us and 
 Captain Rob's lungs, and followed the Highland girl 
 back to the boat. 
 
 From Ellen's Isle to the head of the small creek, 
 so beautifully described in the Lady of the Lake, the 
 scenery has the same air of lavish and graceful vege- 
 tation, and the same features of mingled boldness and 
 oeauty. It was a spot altogether that one is sure to 
 
 live much in with memory. I see it as clearly now as 
 then. 
 
 The whiskey had circulated pretty freely among 
 the crew, and all were more or less intoxicated. Cap- 
 tain Rob's first feat on his legs was to drop my friend's 
 gun-case and break it to pieces, for which he instantly 
 got a cuff between the eyes from the boxing dandy, 
 that would have done the business for a softer head. 
 The Scot was a powerful fellow, and I anticipated a 
 row; but the tremendous power of the blow and the 
 skill with which it was planted, quite subdued him. 
 He rose from the grass as white as a sheet, but quietly 
 shouldered the portmanteau with which he had fallen, 
 and trudged on with sobered steps to the inn. 
 
 We took a post-chaise immediately for Callender, 
 and it was not till we were five miles from the foot of 
 the lake, that I lost my apprehensions of an apparition 
 of the Highlander from the darkening woods. We 
 arrived at Callender at nine, and the next morning at 
 sunrise were on our way to breakfast at Stirling. 
 
 LETTER CXXXVI. 
 
 SCOTTISH STAGES THOROUGH-BRED SETTER SCEN- 
 ERY FEMALE PEASANTRY MARY, QUEEN OF 
 
 SCOTS STIRLING CASTLE. 
 
 The lakes of Scotland are without the limits of 
 stage-coach and post-horse civilization, and to arrive at 
 these pleasant conveniences is to be consoled for the 
 corresponding change in the character of the scenery. 
 From Callander there is a coach to Stirling, and it was 
 on the top of the " Highlander" (a brilliant red coach, 
 with a picture of Rob Roy on the panels), that, with 
 my friend and his dog, I was on the road, bright and 
 early, for the banks of the Teith. I have scarce done 
 justice, by the way, to my last-mentioned companion 
 (a superb, thorough-bred setter, who answered to the 
 derogatory appellation of Flirt") for he had accompa- 
 nied me in most of my wanderings for a couple of 
 months, and his society had been preferred to that of 
 many a reasoning animal on the road, in the frequent 
 dearth of amusement. Flirt's pedigree had been 
 taken on trust by my friend, the dog-fancier, of 
 whom he was bought, only knowing that he came of 
 a famous race, belonging to a gentleman living some- 
 where between Stirling and Callander; and to deter- 
 mine his birthplace and get another of the same breed, 
 was a greater object with his master than to see all the 
 lakes and mountains of Caledonia. Poor Flirt was 
 elevated to the highest seat on the coach, little aware 
 that his reputation for birth and breeding depended on 
 his recognising the scenes of his puppyhood — for if 
 his former master had told truly, these were the fields 
 where his young ideas had been taught a dog's share 
 in shooting, and his unconscious tail and ears were 
 now under watchful surveillance for a betrayal of his 
 presumed reminiscences. 
 
 The coach rolled on over the dew-damp road, cross- 
 ing continually those bright and sparkling rivulets, 
 which gladden the favored neighborhood of moun- 
 tains; and the fields and farm-houses took gradually 
 the look of thrift and care, which indicates an approach 
 to a thickly-settled country. The castle of Doune, a 
 lovely hunting-seat of the Queen of Scots, appeared 
 in the distance, with its gray towers half buried in 
 trees, when Flirt began to look before and behind, and 
 take less notice of the shabby gentleman on his left, 
 who, from sharing with him a volant breakfast of bread 
 and bacon, had hitherto received the most of his at 
 tention. We kept on at a pretty pace, and Flirt's tail 
 shifted sides once or twice with a v^rv decided whis' : 
 
PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAV. 
 
 211 
 
 and his intelligent head gradually grew more erect 
 upon his neck of white-and-tan. It was evident he 
 had travelled the road before. Still on, and as the 
 pellucid Teith began to reflect in her eddying mirror 
 the towers of Castle Doune — a scene worthy of its ten- 
 der and chivalrous associations — a suppressed whine 
 and a fixed look over the fields to the right, satisfied 
 us that the soul of the setter was stirring with the rec- 
 ognition of the past. The coach was stopped and 
 Flirt loosed from his chain, and, with a promise to join 
 me at Stirling at dinner, my friend "hied away" the 
 delighted dog over the hedge, and followed himself 
 on foot, to visit, by canine guidance, the birthplace of 
 this accomplished family. It was quite beautiful to 
 see the fine creature beat the field over and over in his 
 impatience, returning to his slower-footed master, as 
 if to hurry him onward, and leaping about him with 
 an extravagance eloquent of such unusual joy. I lost 
 sight of them by a turning in the road, and reverted 
 for consolation to that loveliest river, on whose green 
 bank I could have lain (had I breakfasted) and dreamed 
 till the sunset of the unfortunate queen, for whose 
 soft eyes and loving heart it perhaps flowed no more 
 brightly in the days of Ri/.zio, than now for mine and 
 those of the early marketers to Stirling. 
 
 The road was thronged with carts, and peasants in 
 their best attire. The gentleman who had provided 
 against the enemy with a brown-paper of bread and 
 bacon, informed me that it was market-day. A very 
 great proportion of the country people were women 
 and girls, walking all of them barefoot, but with shoes 
 in their hands, and gowns and bonnets that would have 
 eclipsed in finery the bevy of noble ladies at Gordon 
 Castle. Leghorn straw-hats and dresses of silk, with 
 ribands of any quantity and brilliancy, were the com- 
 monest articles. Feet excepted, however (for they 
 had no triflers of pedestals, and stumped along the 
 road with a sovereign independence of pools and peb- 
 bles), they were a wholesome-looking and rather pret- 
 ty class of females ; and, with the exception of here 
 and there a prim lassie, who dropped her dress over 
 her feet while the coach passed, and hid her shoes 
 under her handkerchief, they seemed perfectly satis- 
 fied with their own mode of conveyance, and gave us a 
 smile in passing, which said very distinctly, " You'll be 
 there before us, but it's only seven miles, and we'll 
 foot it in time." How various are the joys of life ! I 
 went on with the coach, wondering whether I ever 
 could be reduced to find pleasure in walking ten miles 
 barefoot to a fair — and back again ! 
 
 I thought again of Mary, as the turrets of the proud 
 castle where she was crowned became more distinct in 
 the approach — but it is difficult in entering a crowded 
 town, with a real breakfast in prospect and live Scotch- 
 men about me, to remember with any continuous en- 
 thusiasm even the most brilliant events of history. 
 
 " Can history cui my hay or get my corn in ? 
 Or can philosophy vend it in the market?" 
 
 says somebody in the play, and with a similar thought 
 I looked up at the lofty towers of the home of Scot- 
 land's kings, as the "Highlander" bowled round its 
 rocky base to the inn. The landlord appeared with 
 his whire apron, "boots" with his ladder, the coach- 
 man and guard with their hints to your memory ; and, 
 having ordered breakfast of the first, descended the 
 "convenience" of the second, and received a tip of 
 the hat for a shilling to the remaining two, I was at 
 liberty to walk up stairs and while away a melancholy 
 half hour in humming such charitable stanzas as 
 would come uncalled to my aid. 
 
 " Oh for a plump fat leg of mutton, 
 Veal, lamb, capon, pig and cony, 
 None is happy but a glutton, 
 
 None an ass but who wants money." 
 
 So sang the servant of Diogenes, with an exception 
 J able morality, which, nevertheless, it is difficult to get 
 j out of one's head at Stirling, if one has not already 
 breakfasted. 
 
 I limped up the long street leading to the castle, 
 stopping on the way to look at a group of natives who 
 were gaping at an advertisement just stuck to the wall, 
 offering to take emigrants to New- York on terms "ri- 
 diculously trifling." Remembering the " bannocks 
 o' barley meal" I had eaten for breakfast, the haddocks 
 and marmalade, the cold grouse and porridge, I longed 
 to pull Sawney by the coat, and tell him he was just 
 as well where he was. Y r et the temptation of the 
 Greenock trader, "cheap and nasty" though it were, 
 was not uninviting to me ! 
 
 I was met on the drawbridge of the castle by a trim 
 corporal, who offered to show me the lions for a con- 
 sideration. I put myself under his guidance, and he 
 took me to Queen Mary's apartments, used at present 
 for a mess-room, to the chamber where Earl Douglas 
 was murdered, etc., etc., etc., in particulars which are 
 accurately treated of in the guide-books. The pipers 
 were playing in the court, and a company or two of a 
 Highland regiment, in their tartans and feathers, were 
 under parade. This was attractive metal to me, and I 
 sat down on a parapet, where I soon struck up a friend- 
 ship with a curly-headed varlet, some four years old, 
 who shouldered my stick without the ceremony of 
 " by-your-leave," and commenced the drill upon an 
 unwashed regiment of his equals in a sunshiny corner 
 below. It was delightful to see their gravity and the 
 military air with which they cocked their bonnets and 
 stuck out their little round stomachs at the word of 
 command. My little Captain Cockchafer returned 
 my stick like a knight of honor, and familiarly climbed 
 upon my knee to repose after his campaign, very much 
 j to the surprise of his mother, who was hanging out to 
 | dry, what looked like his father's inexpressibles, from 
 a window above, and who came down and apologized 
 in the most unmitigated Scotch for the liberty the 
 " babby" had taken with " his honor." For the child 
 of a camp-follower, it was a gallant boy, and I remem- 
 ber him better than the drill-sergeant or the piper. 
 
 On the north side of Stirling Castle the view is 
 bounded "by the Grampians and laced by the winding 
 Teith; and just under the battlements lies a green 
 hollow, called the " King's Knot." where the gay tour- 
 naments were held, and the "Ladies' Hill," where sat 
 the gay and lovely spectators of the chivalry of Scot- 
 land. Heading Hill is near it, where James executed 
 Albany and his sons, and the scenes and events of his- 
 tory and poetry are thickly sown at your feet. Once 
 recapitulated, however — the Bruce and the Douglas, 
 Mary and the " Gudeman of Ballengiech," once hon- 
 ored in memory — the surpassing beauty of the pros- 
 pect from Stirling towers, engross the fancy and fill the 
 eye. It was a day of predominant sunshine, with here 
 and there the shadow of a cloud darkening a field of 
 stubble or a bend of the river, and I wandered round 
 from bastion to bastion, never sated with gazing, and 
 returning continually to the points from which the 
 corporal had hurried me on. There lay the Forth — 
 here Bannockburn and Falkirk, and all bathed and 
 flooded with beauty. Let him who thinks the earth 
 ill-looking, peep at it through the embrasures of Stir- 
 ling Castle. 
 
 My friend, the corporal, got but sixteen pence a 
 day, "and had a wife and children — but much as I 
 should dislike all three as disconnected items, I envied 
 him his lot altogether. A garrison life at Stirling, and 
 plenty of leisure, would reconcile one almost to wife 
 and children and a couple of pistareens per diem. 
 
212 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER CXXXVII. 
 
 SCOTCH SCENERY — A RACE — CHEAPNESS OF LODGINGS 
 
 IN EDINBURGH — ABBOTTSFORD— SCOTT LORD DAL- 
 
 HOTJSIE — THOMAS MOORE — JANE PORTER — THE GRAVE 
 OF SCOTT. 
 
 I was delighted to find Stirling rather worse than 
 Albany in the matter of steamers. I had a running 
 fight for my portmanteau and carpet-bag from the 
 hotel to the pier, and was at last embarked in entirely 
 the wrong boat, by sheer force of pulling and lying. 
 They could scarce have put me in a greater rage be- 
 tween Cruttenden's and the Overslaugh. 
 
 The two rival steamers, the " Victory" and the 
 "Ben Lomond," got under way together; the former, 
 in which I was a compulsory passenger, having a 
 flagelet and a bass-drum by way of a band, and the 
 other a dozen lusty performers and most of the com- 
 pany. The river was very narrow and the tide down, 
 and though the other was the better boat, we had the 
 bolder pilot and were lighter laden and twice as des- 
 perate. I found my own spunk stirred irresistibly 
 after the first mile. We were contending against 
 odds, and there was something in it that touched my 
 Americanism nearly. We had three small boys 
 mounted on the box over the wheel, who cheered and 
 waved their hats at our momentary advantages ; but 
 the channel was full of windings, and if we gained on 
 the larboard tack we lost on the starboard. When- 
 ever we were quite abreast, and the wheels touched 
 with the narrowness of the river, we marched our 
 flagelet and bass-drum close to the enemy and gave 
 them a blast " to wake the dead," taking occasion, 
 during our moments of defeat, to recover breath and 
 ply the principal musician with beer and encourage- 
 ment. It was a scene for Cooper to describe. The 
 two pilots stood broad on their legs, every muscle on 
 the alert : and though Ben Lomond wore the cleaner 
 jacket, Victory had the " varminter" look. You 
 would have bet on Victory to have seen the man. He 
 was that wickedest of all wicked-looking things, a 
 wicked Scotchman — a sort of saint-turned-sinner. 
 The expression of early good principles was glazed 
 over with drink and recklessness, like a scene from the 
 Inferno painted over a Madonna of Raphael's. It was 
 written in his face that he was a transgressor against 
 knowledge. We were perhaps, a half-dozen passen- 
 gers, exclusive of the boys, and we rallied round our 
 Bardolph-nosed hero and applauded his skilful manoeu- 
 vres ; sun, steam and excitement together, producing 
 a temperature on deck that left nothing to dread from 
 the boiler. As we approached a sharp bend in the 
 course of the stream, I perceived by the countenance 
 of our pilot, that it was to be a critical moment. The 
 Ben Lomond was a little ahead, but we had the advan- 
 tage of the inside of the course, and very soon, with 
 the commencement of the curve, we gained sensibly 
 on the enemy, and I saw clearly that we should cut 
 her off by a half-boat's length. The three boys on the 
 wheel began to shout, the flagelet made all split again 
 with "the Campbells are comin'," the brass-drum was 
 never so belabored, and " Up with your helm !" 
 cried every voice, as we came at the rate of twelve 
 miles in the hour sharp on to the angle of mud and i 
 bulrushes, and, to our utter surprise, the pilot jammed 
 down his tiller, and ran the battered nose of the 
 Victory plump in upon the enemy's forward quarter ! j 
 The next moment we were going it like mad down j 
 the middle of the river, and far astern stuck the Ben 
 Lomond in the mud, her paddles driving her deeper j 
 at every stroke, her music hushed, and the crowd on I 
 her deck standing speechless with amazement. The I 
 flagelet and bass-drum marched aft and played louder j 
 than ever, and we were soon in the open Frith, get- j 
 ting on merrily, but without competition, to the sleep- j 
 
 ing isle of Inchkeith. Lucky Victory ! luckier pilot! 
 to have found an historian ! How many a red-nosed 
 Palinurus — how many a bass-drum and flagelet, have 
 done their duty as well, yet achieved no immortality. 
 
 I was glad to see "Auld Reekie" again, though the 
 influx of strangers to the "Scientific Meeting" had 
 over-run every hotel, and I was an hour or two with- 
 out a home. I lit at last upon a good old Scotch- 
 woman who had " a flat" to herself, and who, for the 
 sum of one shilling and sixpence per diem, proposed 
 to transfer her only boarder from his bed to a sofa, as 
 long as I should wish to stay. I made a humane 
 remonstrance against the inconvenience to her friend. 
 " It's only a Jew," she said, "and they're na difficult, 
 puir bodies!" The Hebrew came in while we were 
 debating the point — a smirking gentleman, with very 
 elaborated whiskers, much better dressed than the 
 proposed usurper of his sanctum — and without the 
 slightest hesitation professed that nothing would give 
 him so much pain as to stand in the way of his land- 
 lady's interest. So for eighteen pence (and I could 
 not prevail on her to take another farthing) I had a 
 Jew put to inconvenience, a bed, boots and clothes 
 
 brushed, and Mrs. Mac to sit up forme till two 
 
 in the morning — what the Jew himself would have 
 called a " cheap article." 
 
 I returned to my delightful headquarters at Dal- 
 housie castle on the following day, and among many 
 excursions in the neighborhood during the ensuing 
 week, accomplished a visit to Abbottsford. This most 
 interesting of all spots has been so minutely and so 
 often described, that a detailed account of it would be 
 a mere repetition. Description, however, has antici- 
 pated nothing to the visiter. The home of Sir Walter 
 Scott would possess an interest to thrill the hqart, if it 
 were as well painted to the eye of fancy as the homes 
 of his own heroes. 
 
 It is a dreary country about Abbottsford, and the 
 house itself looks from a distance like a small, low 
 castle, buried in stunted trees, on the side of a long, 
 sloping upland or moor. The river is between you 
 and the chateau as you come down to Melrose from 
 the north, and you see the gray towers opposite you 
 from the road at the distance of a mile — the only 
 habitable spot in an almost desolate waste of country. 
 From the town of Melrose you approach Abbottsford 
 by a long, green lane, and, from the height of the 
 hedge, and the descending ground on which the house 
 is built, you would scarce suspect its vicinity till you 
 enter a small gate on the right and find yourself in an 
 avenue of young trees. This conducts you im- 
 mediately to the door, and the first effect on me was 
 that of a spacious castle seen through a reversed 
 glass. In fact it is a kind of castle cottage — not larger 
 than what is often called a cottage in England, yet to 
 the minutest point and proportion a model of an an- 
 cient castle. The deception in the engravings of the 
 place lies in the scale. It seems like a vast building 
 as usually drawn. 
 
 One or two hounds were lounging round the door ; 
 but the only tenant of the place was a slovenly house- 
 maid, whom we interrupted in the profane task of 
 scrubbing the furniture in the library. I could have 
 pitched her and her scrubbing-brushes out of the 
 window with a good will. It really is a pity that this 
 sacred place, with its thousand valuable and irreplacea- 
 ble curiosities, should be so carelessly neglected. We 
 were left to wander over the house and the museum 
 as we liked. I could have brought away (and nothing 
 is more common than this species of theft in England) 
 twenty things from that rare collection, of which the 
 value could scarce be estimated. The pistols and 
 dagger of Rob Roy, and a hundred equally valuable 
 and pocketable things, lay on f he shelves unprotected, 
 quite at the mercy of th<> ill-disposed, to say nothing 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 213 
 
 of the merciless " cleanings" of the housemaid. The 
 present Sir Walter Scott is a captain of dragoons, 
 with his regiment in Ireland, and the place is never 
 occupied by the family. Why does not Scotland buy 
 Abbottsford, and secure to herself, while it is still per- 
 fect, the home of her great magician, and the spot that 
 to after ages would be, if preserved in its curious 
 details, the most interesting in Great Britain? 
 
 After showing us the principal rooms, the woman 
 opened a small closet adjoining the study, in which 
 hung the last clothes that Sir Walter had worn. 
 There was the broad-skirted blue coat with large but- 
 tons, the plaid trousers, the heavy shoes, the broad- 
 rimmed hat and stout walking-stick — the dress in 
 which he rambled about in the morning, and which 
 he laid olf when he took to his bed in his last illness. 
 She took down the coat and gave it a shake and a 
 wipe of the collar, as if he were waiting to put it on 
 again 1 
 
 It was encroaching somewhat on the province of 
 Touchstone and Wamba to moralize on a suit of 
 clothes — but I am convinced that I got from them a 
 belter idea of Scott, as he was in his familiar hours, 
 than any man can have who has seen neither him nor 
 them. There was a character in the hat and shoes. 
 The coat was an honest and hearty coat. The 
 stout, rough walking-stick, seemed as if it could 
 have belonged to no other man. I appeal to my kind 
 friends and fellow-travellers who were there three days 
 before me (I saw their names on the book), if the same 
 impression was not made on them. 
 
 1 asked for the room in which Sir Walter died. 
 She showed it to me, and the place where the bed had 
 stood which was now removed. I was curious to see 
 the wall or the picture over which his last looks must 
 have passed. Directly opposite the foot of the bed 
 hung a remarkable picture — the head of Mary Queen 
 of Scots, in a dish taken after her execution. The 
 features were composed and beautiful. On either side 
 of it hung spirited drawings from the Tales of a Grand- 
 father — one very clever sketch, representing the wife 
 of a border-knight serving up her husband's spurs for 
 dinner, to remind him of the poverty of the larder and 
 the necessity of a foray. On the left side of the bed 
 was a broad window to the west — the entrance of the 
 last light to his eyes — and from hence had sped the 
 greatest spirit that has walked the world since Shaks- 
 pere. It almost makes the heart stand still to be 
 silent and alone on such a spot. 
 
 What an interest there is in the trees of Abbotts- 
 ford — planted every one by the same hand that waved 
 its wand of enchantment over the world ! One walks 
 among them as if they had thoughts and memories. 
 
 Everybody talks of Scott who has ever had the hap- 
 piness of seeing him, and it is strange how interesting 
 it is even when there is no anecdote, and only the 
 most commonplace interview is narrated. I have 
 heard, since I have been in England, hundreds of 
 people describe their conversations with him, and never 
 the dullest without a certain interest far beyond that 
 of common topics. Some of these have been cele- 
 brated people, and there is the additional weight that 
 they were honored friends of Sir Walter's. 
 
 Lord Dalhousie told me that he was Scott's play- 
 fellow at the high school of Edinboro'. There was a 
 peculiar arrangement of the benches with a head and 
 foot, so that the boys sat above or below, according to 
 their success in recitation. It so happened that the 
 warmest seat in the school, that next to the stove, was 
 about two from the bottom, and this Scott, who was 
 a very good scholar, contrived never to leave. He 
 stuck to his seat from autumn till spring, never so 
 deficient as to get down, and never choosing to answer 
 rightly if the result was to go up. He was very lame, 
 and seldom shared in the sports of the other boys, but 
 
 was a prodigious favorite, and loved to sit in the sun- 
 shine, with a knot of boys around him telling stories. 
 Lord Dalhousie's friendship with him was uninter- 
 rupted through life, and he invariably breakfasted at 
 the castle on his way to and from Edinboro'. 
 
 I met Moore at a dinner-party not long since, and 
 Scott was again (as at a previous dinner I have de- 
 scribed) the subject of conversation. " He was the 
 soul of honesty," said Moore. " When I was on a 
 visit to him, we were coming up from Kelso at sunset, 
 and as there was to be a fine moon, I quoted to him 
 his own rule for seeing 'fair Melrose aright,' and pro- 
 posed to stay an hour and enjoy it. 'Bah!' said 
 Scott, ' / never saw it by moonlight.' We went, how- 
 ever ; and Scott, who seemed to be on the most 
 familiar terms with the cicerone, pointed to an empty 
 ' niche and said to him, ' I think, by the way, that I 
 have a Virgin and Child that will just do for your 
 j niche. I'll send it to you!' 'How happy you have 
 I made that man !' said I to him. ' Oh,' said Scott, 'it 
 j was always in the way, and Madame S. is constantly 
 grudging it house-room. We're well rid of it.'" 
 
 " Any other man," said Moore, " would have allow- 
 ed himself at least the credit of a kind action." 
 
 I have had the happiness since I have been in Eng- 
 
 : land of passing some weeks at a country-house where 
 
 \ Miss Jane Porter was an honored guest, and, among 
 
 a thousand of the most delightful reminiscences that 
 
 ; were ever treasured, she has told me a great deal of 
 
 I Scott, who visited at her mother's as a boy. She 
 
 remembers him then as a good-humored lad, but very 
 
 fond of fun, who used to take her younger sister (Anna 
 
 Maria Porter) and frighten her by holding her out of 
 
 ; the window. Miss Porter had not seen him since that 
 
 ! age ; but, after the appearance of Guy Mannering, she 
 
 heard that he was in London, and drove with a friend 
 
 ; to his house. Not quite sure (as she modestly says) 
 
 of being remembered, she sent in a note, saying, that 
 
 if he remembered the Porters, whom he used to visit, 
 
 Jane would like to see him, He came rushing to the 
 
 ] door, and exclaimed, '■'■Remember you! Miss Porter!" 
 
 \ and threw his arms about her neck and burst into 
 
 ', tears. After this he corresponded constantly with the 
 
 family, and about the time of his first stroke of par- 
 
 1 alysis, when his mind and memory failed him, the 
 
 mother of Miss Porter died, and Scott sent a letter of 
 
 condolence. It began — " Dear Miss Porter" — but, 
 
 | as he went on, he forgot himself, and continued the 
 
 letter as if addressed to her mother, ending it with — 
 
 "And now, dear Mrs. Porter, farewell! and believe 
 
 me yours for ever (as long as there is anything of 
 
 me), Walter Scott." Miss Porter bears testimony, 
 
 like every one else who knew him, to his greatheart- 
 
 j edness no less than to his genius. 
 
 I am not sure that others like as well as myself 
 
 ! these " nothings" about men of genius. I would 
 
 j rather hear the conversation between Scott and a 
 
 peasant on the road, for example, than the most 
 
 piquant anecdote of his brighter hours. I like a great 
 
 mind in dishabille. 
 
 We returned by Melrose Abbey, of which I can say 
 nothing new, and drove to Dryburgh to see the grave 
 of Scott. He is buried in a rich old Gothic corner 
 of a ruin — fittingly. He chose the spot, and he 
 sleeps well. The sunshine is broken on his breast 
 by a fretted and pinnacled window, overrun with 
 ivy, and the small chapel in which he lies is open 
 to the air, and ornamented with the mouldering 
 scutcheons of his race. There are few more beauti- 
 ful ruins than Dryburgh Abbey, and Scott lies in its 
 sunniest and most fanciful nook — a grave that seems 
 divested of the usual horrors of a grave. 
 
 We were ascending the Gala-water at sunset, and 
 supped at Dalhousie, after a day crowned with thought 
 and feeling. 
 
214 
 
 PENC1LL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 LETTER CXXXVIII. 
 
 BORDER SCENERY COACHMANSHIP ENGLISH COUN- 
 TRY-SEATS THEIR EXQUISITE COMFORT OLD 
 
 CUSTOMS IN HIGH PRESERVATION PRIDE AND 
 
 STATELINESS OF THE LANCASHIRE AND CHESHIRE 
 GENTRY THEIR CONTEMPT FOR PARVENUS. 
 
 If Scott had done nothing else, he would have de- 
 served well of his country for giving an interest to the 
 barren wastes by which Scotland is separated from 
 England. "A' the blue bonnets" must have had a 
 melancholy march of it " Over the Border." From 
 Gala-Water to Carlisle it might be anywhere a scene 
 for the witches' meeting in Macbeth. We bowled 
 away at nearly twelve miles in the hour, however, 
 (which would unwind almost any " serpent of care" 
 from the heart), and if the road was not lined with 
 witches and moss-troopers, it was well macadamized. 
 I got a treacherous supper at Howick, where the 
 Douglas pounced upon Sir Alexander Ramsay ; and, 
 recovering my good-humor at Carlisle, grew happier 
 as the fields grew greener, and came down by Kendal 
 and its emerald valleys with the speed of an arrow and 
 the light-heartedness of its feather. How little the 
 farmer thinks when he plants his hedges and sows his 
 fields, that the passing wayfarer will anticipate the 
 gleaners and gather sunshine from his ripening har- 
 vest. 
 
 I was admiring the fine old castle of Lancaster 
 (now desecrated to the purposes of a county jail), 
 when our thirteen-mile whip ran over a phaeton 
 standing quietly in the road, and spilt several vvotnen 
 and children, as you may say, en passant. The coach 
 must arrive, though it kill as many as Juggernaut, 
 and Jehu neither changed color, nor spoke a word, 
 but laid the silk over his leaders to make up the 
 back-water of the jar, and rattled away up the 
 street, with the guard blowing the French horn to the 
 air of " Smile again, my bonny lassie." Nobody 
 threw stones after us ; the horses were changed in a 
 minute and three quarters, and away we sped from 
 the town of the " red nose." There was a cool, you- 
 know-where-to-find-me sort of indifference in this ad- 
 venture, which is peculiarly English. I suppose if 
 his leaders had changed suddenly into griffins, he 
 would have touched them under the wing and kept 
 his pace. 
 
 Bound on a visit to Hall in Lancashire, I 
 
 left the coach at Preston. The landlady of the Red 
 Lion became very suddenly anxious that I should not 
 take cold when she found out the destination of her 
 post-chaise. I arrived just after sunset at my friend's 
 lodge, and ordering the postillion to a walk, drove 
 leisurely through the gathering twilight to the Hall. 
 It was a mile of winding road through the peculiarly 
 delicious scenery of an English park, the game visible 
 in every direction, and the glades and woods disposed 
 with that breadth and luxuriance of taste that make 
 the country-houses of England palaces in Arcadia. 
 Anxious as I had been to meet my friend, whose hos- 
 pitality I had before experienced in Italy, I was almost 
 sorry when the closely-shaven sward and glancing 
 lights informed me that my twilight drive was near its 
 end. 
 
 An arrival in a strange house in England seems, to 
 a foreigner, almost magical. The absence of all the 
 bustle consequent on the same event abroad, the 
 silence, respectfulness, and self-possession of the ser- 
 vants, the ease and expedition with which he is in- 
 stalled in a luxurious room, almost with his second 
 breath under the roof — his portmanteau unstrapped, 
 his toilet laid out, his dress-shoes and stockings at his 
 feet, and the fire burning as if he had sat by it all 
 day — it is like the golden facility of a dream. " Din- 
 ner at seven !" are the only words he has heard, and 
 
 he finds himself (some three minutes having elapsed 
 since he was on the road), as much at home as if he 
 had lived there all his life, and pouring the hot water 
 into his wash-basin with the feeling that comfort and 
 luxury in this country are very much matters of 
 course. 
 
 The bell rings for dinner, and the new-comer finds 
 his way to the drawing-room. He has not seen his 
 host, perhaps, for a year, but his entree is anything 
 but a scene. A cordial shake of the hand, a simple 
 inquiry after his health, while the different members 
 of the family collect in the darkened room, and the 
 preference of his arm by the lady of the house to 
 walk into dinner, are all that would remind him that 
 he and his host had ever parted. The soup is criti- 
 cised, the weather "resumed," as the French have it, 
 gravity prevails, and the wine that he used to drink is 
 brought him without question by the remembering 
 butler. The stranger is an object of no more atten- 
 tion than any other person, except in the brief " glad 
 to see you," and the accompanying just perceptible 
 nod with which the host drinks wine with him; and, 
 not even in the abandon of after-dinner conversation, 
 are the mutual reminiscences of the host and his 
 friend suffered to intrude on the indifferent portion of 
 I the company. The object is the general enjoyment, 
 and you are not permitted to monopolize the sympa- 
 : thies of the hour. You thus escape the aversion 
 with which even a momentary favorite is looked upon 
 J in society, and in your turn you are not neglected, or 
 i bored with a sensation, on the arrival of another. In 
 what other country is civilization carried to the same 
 j rational perfection ? 
 
 I was under the hands of a physician during the 
 
 | week of my stay at Hall, and only crept out 
 
 j with the lizards for a little sunshine at noon. There 
 | was shooting in the park for those who liked it, and 
 fox hunting in the neighborhood for those who could 
 follow, but I was content (upon compulsion) to be in- 
 nocent of the blood of hares and partridges, and the 
 ditches of Lancashire are innocent of mine. The 
 well-stocked library, with its caressing chairs, was a 
 paradise of repose after travel ; and the dinner, with 
 its delightful society, sufficed for the day's event. 
 
 My host was himself very much of a cosmopolite; 
 but his neighbors, one or two most respectable squires 
 of the old school among them, had the usual charac- 
 teristics of people who have passed their lives on one 
 spot, and though gentlemanlike and good-humored, 
 were rather difficult to amuse. I found none of the 
 uproariousness which distinguished the Squire Wes- 
 tern of other times. The hale fox-hunter was in 
 white cravat and black coat, and took wine and poli- 
 tics moderately ; and his wife and daughters, though 
 silent and impracticable, were well-dressed, and mark- 
 ed by that indefinable stamp of " blood" visible no 
 less in the gentry than in the nobility of England. 
 
 I was delighted to encounter at my friend's table 
 one or two of the old English peculiarities, gone out 
 nearer the metropolis. Toasted cheese and spiced 
 ale — " familiar creatures" in common life — were here 
 served up with all the circumstance that attended them 
 when they were not disdained as the allowance of 
 maids of honor. On the disappearance of the pastry, 
 a massive silver dish, chased with the ornate elegance 
 of ancient plate, holding coals beneath, and protected 
 by a hinged cover, was set before the lady of the 
 house. At the other extremity of the table stood a 
 " peg tankard" of the same fashion, in the same mas- 
 sive metal, with two handles, and of an almost fabu- 
 lous capacity. Cold cheese and port were at a dis- 
 count. The celery, albeit both modish and popular, 
 was neglected. The crested cover erected itself on 
 its hinge and displayed a flat surface, covered thinly 
 with blistering cheese, with a soupcon of brown in its 
 complexion, quivering and delicate, and of a most 
 
PENCILL1NGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 215 
 
 stimulating odor. A little was served to each guest 
 and commended as it deserved, and then the flagon's 
 lid was lifted in its turn by the staid butler, and the 
 master of the house drank first. It went around with 
 the sun, not disdained by the ladies' lips in passing, 
 and came to me. something lightened of its load. As 
 a stranger I was advised of the law before lifting it to 
 ,ny head. Within, from the rim to the bottom, ex- 
 tended a line of silver pegs, supposed to contain, in 
 the depth from one to the other, a fair draught for 
 each bibber. The flagon must not be taken from the 
 lips, and the penalty of drinking deeper than the first 
 
 peg below the surface, was to drink to the second a 
 
 task for the friar of Copmanhurst. As the visible 
 measure was of course lost when the tankard was 
 dipped, it required some practice or a cool judgmeul 
 not to exceed the draught. Raising it with my two 
 hands, I -measured the distance witli my eye, and 
 watched till the floating argosy of toast should swim 
 beyond the reach of my nose. The spicy odor as- 
 cended gratefully to the brain. The cloves and cin- 
 namon clung in a dark circle to the edges. I drank 
 without drawing breath, and complacently passed the 
 flagon. As the sea of all settled to a calm, my next 
 neighbor silently returned the tankard. I had exceed- 
 ed the draught. There was a general cry of " drink ! 
 drink!" and sounding my remaining capacity with the 
 plummet of a long breath, I laid my hands once more 
 on the vessel, and should have paid the penalty or 
 perished in the attempt, but for the grace shown me 
 as a foreigner, at the intercession of that sex dis- 
 tinguished for its mercy. 
 
 This adherence to the more hearty viands and cus- 
 toms of olden time, by the way, is an exponent of a 
 feeling sustained with peculiar tenacity in that part of 
 England. Cheshire and Lancashire are the strong- 
 hold of that race peculiar to this country, the gentry. 
 In these counties the peerage is no authority for gen- 
 tle birth. A title unsupported by centuries of hon- 
 orable descent, is worse than nothing ; and there is 
 many a squire, living in his immemorial " Ha/Z," who 
 would not exchange his name and pedigree for the 
 title of ninety-nine in a hundred of the nobility of 
 England. Here reigns aristocracy. Your Baron 
 Rothschild, or your new-created lord from the Bank 
 or the Temple, might build palaces in Cheshire, and 
 live years in the midst of its proud gentry unvisited. 
 They are the cold cheese, celery, and port, in com- 
 parison with the toasted cheese and spiced ale. 
 
 LETTER CXXXIX. 
 
 ENGLISH CORDIALITY AND HOSPITALITY, AND THE 
 FEELINGS AWAKENED BY IT — LIVERPOOL, UNCOM- 
 FORTABLE COFFEEHOUSE THERE — TRAVELLING AMER- 
 ICANS — NEW YORK PACKETS — THE RAILWAY MAN- 
 CHESTER. 
 
 * England would be a more pleasant country to 
 travel in if one's feelings took root with less facility. 
 In the continental countries, the local ties are those of 
 the mind and the senses. In England they are those 
 of the affections. One wanders from Italy to Greece, 
 and from Athens to Ephesus, and returns and departs 
 again ; and, as he gets on shipboard, or mounts his 
 horse or his camel, it is with a sigh over some picture 
 or statue left behind, some temple or waterfall — per- 
 haps some cook or vintage. He makes his last visit 
 to the Fount of Egeria, or the Venus of the Tribune 
 — to the Caryatides of the Parthenon, or the Casca- 
 telles of Tivoli — or pathetically calls for his last bottle 
 of untransferable lachryma christi, or his last coteletles 
 yrovencales. He has "five hundred friends" like 
 other people, and has made the usual continental inti- 
 
 macies — but his valet-de-place takes charge of his 
 adieus — (distributes his " p. p. c.'s" for a penny each), 
 and he forgets and is fc.rgotten by those he leaves be- 
 hind, ere his passport is recorded at the gates. In all 
 these countries, it is only as a resident or a native that 
 you are treated with kindness or admitted to the pen- 
 etralia of domestic life. You are a bird of passage, 
 expected to contribute a feather for every nest, but 
 welcomed to none. In England this same disqualifi- 
 cation becomes a claim. The name of a stranger 
 opens the private house, sets you the chair of honor, 
 prepares your bed, and makes everything that contrib- 
 utes to your comfort or pleasure temporarily your 
 own. And when you take your departure, your host 
 has informed himself of your route, and provided you 
 with letters to his friends, and you may go through 
 the country from end to end, and experience every- 
 where the same confiding and liberal hospitality. Ev 
 ery foreigner who has come well introduced to Eng 
 land, knows how unexaggerated is this picture. 
 
 I was put upon the road again by my kind friend, 
 and with a strong west wind coming off the Atlantic, 
 drove along within sound of the waves, on the road to 
 Liverpool. It was a mild wind, and came with a wel- 
 come — for it was freighted with thoughts of home. 
 Goethe says, we are never separated from our friends 
 as long as the streams run down from them to us. 
 Certain it is that distance seems less that is measured 
 by waters and winds. America seemed near, with the 
 ocean at my feet and only its waste paths between. I 
 sent my heart over (against wind and tide) with a bles- 
 sing and a prayer. t 
 
 There are good inns, I believe, at Liverpool, but 
 the coach put me down at the dirtiest and worst speci- 
 men of a public house that I have encountered in 
 England. As I was to stay but a night, I overcame 
 the prejudice of the first coup d'ccil, and made the 
 best of a dinner in the coffeeroom. It was crowded 
 with people, principally merchants, I presumed, and 
 the dinner-hour having barely passed, most of them 
 were sitting over their wine or toddy at the small ta- 
 bles, discussing prices or reading the newspapers. 
 Near me were two young men, whose faces I thought 
 familiar to me, and with a second look I resolved them 
 into two of my countrymen, who, I found out 
 presently by their conversation, were eating their first 
 dinner in England. They were gentlemanlike young 
 men, of good education, and I pleased myself with 
 looking about and imagining the comparison they 
 would draw, with their own country fresh in their 
 recollection, between it and this. I could not help 
 feeling how erroneous in this case would be a first im- 
 pression. The gloomy coft'eeroom, the hurried and 
 uncivil waiters, the atrocious cookery, the bad air, 
 greasy tables, filthy carpet, and unsocial company — 
 and this one of the most popular and crowded inns of 
 the first commercial town in England ! My neighbors 
 themselves, too, afforded me some little speculation. 
 They were a fair specimen of the young men of our 
 country, and after several years' exclusive conversance 
 with other nations, I was curious to compare an un- 
 travelled American with the Europeans around me. 
 I was struck with the exceeding ambitiousncss of their 
 style of conversation. Dr. Pangloss fymself would 
 have given them a degree. They called nothing by 
 its week-day name, and avoided with singular pertina- 
 city exactly that upon which the modern English are 
 as pertinaciously bent — a concise homeliness of 
 phraseology. They were dressed much better than 
 the people about them (who were apparently in the 
 same sphere of life), and had on the whole a superior 
 air — owing possibly to the custom prevalent in Ameri- 
 ca of giving young men a university education before 
 they enter into trade. Like myself, too, they had not 
 yet learned the English accomplishment of total un- 
 consciousness of the presence of othert. When not 
 
216 
 
 PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 
 
 conversing they did not study profoundly the grain of 
 the mahogany, nor gaze with solemn earnestness into 
 the bottom of their wine-glasses, nor peruse, with the 
 absorbed fixedness of Belshazzar, the figures on the 
 wall. They looked about them with undisguised cu- 
 riosity, ordered a great deal more wine than they 
 wanted (very American, that!) and were totally with- 
 out the self-complacent, self-amused, sober-felicity air 
 which John Bull assumes after his cheese in a coffee- 
 room. 
 
 I did not introduce myself to my countrymen, for 
 an American is the last person in the world with whom 
 one should depart from the ordinary rules of society. 
 Having no fixed rank either in their own or a foreign 
 country, they construe all uncommon civility into 
 either a freedom, or a desire to patronise, and the last 
 is the unpardonable sin. They called after awhile for 
 a " mint julep" (unknown in England), for slippers, 
 (rather an unusual call also — gentlemen usually wear- 
 ing their own), and, seemed very much surprised on 
 asking for candles, at being ushered to bed by the 
 chambermaid. 
 
 I passed the next morning in walking about Liver- 
 pool. It is singularly like New York in its general 
 air, and quite like it in the character of its population. 
 I presume I must have met many of my countrymen, 
 for there were some who passed me in the street, whom 
 I could have sworn to. In a walk to the American 
 consul's (to whose polite kindness I, as well as all my 
 compatriots, have been very much indebted), I was 
 lucky enough to see a New York packet drive into 
 the harbor under full sail — as gallant a sight as you 
 would wish to see. It was blowing rather stiffly, and 
 she run up to her anchorage like a bird, and taking in 
 her canvass with the speed of a man-of-war, was lying 
 in a few moments with her head to the tide, as neat 
 and as tranquil as if she had slept for the last month 
 at her moorings. I could feel in the air that came 
 ashore from her, that 1 had letters on board. 
 
 Anxious to get on to Cheshire, where, as they say 
 
 of the mails, I had been due some days, and very 
 anxious to get rid of the perfume of beer, beefsteaks, 
 and bad soup, with which 1 had become impregnated 
 at the inn, I got embarked in an omnibus at noon, and 
 was taken to the railway. I was just in time, and 
 down we dived into the long tunnel, emerging from 
 the darkness at a pace that made my hair sensibly 
 tighten and hold on with apprehension. Thirty miles 
 in the hour is pleasant going when one is a little ac- 
 customed to it. It gives one such a contempt for 
 time and distance ! The whizzing past of the return 
 trains, going in the other direction with the same ve- 
 locity, making you recoil in one second, and a mile 
 off* the next — was the only thing which, after a few 
 minutes, I did not take to very kindly. There wer 
 near a hundred passengers, most of them precisely the 
 class of English which we see in our country — the 
 fags of Manchester and Birmingham — a class, I dare 
 say, honest and worthy, but much more to my taste 
 in their own country than mine. 
 
 I must confess to a want of curiosity touching spin- 
 ning-jennies. Half an hour of Manchester contented 
 me, yet in that half hour I was cheated to the amount 
 of four-and-six-pence — unless the experience was 
 worth the money. Under a sovereign I think it not 
 worth while to lose one's temper, and I contented my- 
 self with telling the man (he was a coach proprietor) 
 as I paid him the second time for the same thing in 
 the course of twenty minutes, that the time and trou- 
 ble he must have had in bronzing his face to that de- 
 gree of impudence gave him some title to the money. 
 I saw some pretty scenery between Manchester and 
 my destination, and having calculated my time very 
 
 accurately, I was set down at the gates of Hall, 
 
 as the dressing-bell for dinner came over the park 
 upon the wind. I found another English welcome, 
 passed three weeks amid the pleasures of English 
 country life, departed as before with regrets, and with- 
 out much more incident or adventure reached London 
 on the first of November, and established mvself for 
 the winter. 
 
 END OF PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE, 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The " Letters from under a Bridge" were written in a secluded glen of the valley of the Susquehannah. 
 The author after several years residence and travel abroad, made there, as he hoped, an altar of life-time 
 tranquillity for his household-gods. Most of the letters were written in the full belief that he should pass 
 there the remainder of his days. Inevitable necessity drove him again into active metropolitan life, and the 
 remembrance of that enchanting interval of repose and rural pleasure seems to him, now, little but a dream. 
 As picturing truly the color of his own mind, and the natural flow of his thoughts during a brief enjoyment 
 of the kind of life alone best suited to his disposition as well as to his better nature, the book is interesting 
 to himself and to those who love him. As picturing faithfully the charm of nature and seclusion, after years 
 of intoxicated life in the gayest circles of the gayest cities of the world, it may be curious to the reader. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 My Dear Doctor : Twice in the year, they say, 
 the farmer may sleep late in the morning — between 
 hoeing and haying, and between harvest and thrash- 
 ing. If I have not written to you since the frost was 
 out of the ground, my apology lies distributed over 
 the "spring-work," in due proportions among plough- 
 ing, harrowing, sowing, plastering, and hoeing. We 
 have finished the last — some thanks to the crows, who 
 saved us the labor of one acre of corn, by eating it in 
 the blade. Think what times we live in, when even 
 the crows are obliged to anticipate their income ! 
 
 When I had made up my mind to write to you, I 
 cast about for a cool place in the shade — for, besides 
 the changes which farming works upon my epidermis, 
 I find some in the inner man, one of which is a vege- 
 table necessity for living out-of-doors. Between five 
 in the morning and "flower-shut," I feel as if four 
 walls and a ceiling would stop my breath. Very 
 much to the disgust of William (who begins to think 
 it was infra dig. to have followed such a hob-nail 
 from London), I showed the first symptom of this 
 chair-and-carpet asthma, by ordering my breakfast 
 under a balsam-fir. Dinner and tea soon followed; 
 and now, if I go in-doors by daylight, it is a sort of 
 fireman's visit — in and out with a long breath. I have 
 worn quite a dial on the grass, working my chair 
 around with the sun. 
 
 "If ever you observed," (a phrase with which a 
 neighbor of mine ludicrously prefaces every possible 
 remark), a single tree will do very well to sit, or dine, 
 or be buried under, but you can not write in the shade 
 of it. Beside the sun-flecks and the light all around 
 you, there is a want of that privacy, which is neces- 
 sary to a perfect abandonment to pen and ink. I dis- 
 
 covered this on getting as far as "dear Doctor," and, 
 pocketing my tools, strolled away up the glen to bor- 
 row "stool and desk" of Nature. Half open, like a 
 broad-leafed book (green margin and silver type), the 
 brook-hollow of Glenmary spreads wide as it drops 
 upon the meadow, but above, like a book that deserves 
 its fair margent, it deepens as you proceed. Not far 
 from the road, its little rivulet steals forth from a 
 shadowy ravine, narrow as you enter, then widening 
 back to a mimic cataract ; and here, a child would 
 say, is fairy parlor. A small platform (an island 
 when the stream is swollen) lies at the foot of the fall, 
 carpeted with the fine silky grass which thrives with 
 shade and spray. The two walls of the ravine are 
 mossy, and trickling with springs ; the trees over- 
 head interlace, to keep out the sun; and down comes 
 the brook, over a flight of precipitous steps, like chil- 
 dren bursting out of school, and after a laugh at its 
 own tumble, it falls again into a decorous ripple, and 
 trips murmuring away. The light is green, the 
 leaves of the overhanging trees look translucent above, 
 and the wild blue grape, with its emerald rings, has 
 wove all over it a basket-lattice so fine, that you 
 would think it were done to order — warranted to keep 
 out the hawk, and let in the humming-bird. With a 
 yellow pine at my back, a moss cushion beneath, and 
 a ledge of flat stone at my elbow, you will allow I had 
 a secretary's outfit. I spread my paper, and mended 
 my pen ; and then (you will pardon me, dear Doctor) 
 I forgot you altogether. The truth is, these fanciful 
 garnishings spoil work. Silvio Pellico had a better 
 place to write in. If it had been a room with a Chi- 
 nese paper (a bird standing; for ever on one leg, and a 
 tree ruffled by the summer wind, and fixed with its 
 leaves on edge, as if petrified with the varlet's impu- 
 dence), the eye might get accustomed to it. But first 
 
218 
 
 LETTERS 'FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 came a gold-robin, twittering out his surprise to find 
 strange company in his parlor, yet never frighted from 
 his twig by pen and ink. By the time I had sucked a 
 lesson out of that, a squirrel tripped in without knock- 
 ing, and sat nibbling at a last-year's nut, as if nobody 
 but he took thought for the morrow. Then came an 
 enterprising ant, climbing my knee like a discoverer ; 
 and I wondered whether Fernando Cortes would have 
 mounted so boldly, had the peak of Darien been as 
 new-dropped between the Americas, as my leg by his 
 ant-hill. By this time, a small dripping from a moss- 
 fringe at my elbow betrayed the lip of a spring ; and, 
 dislodging a stone, I uncovered a brace of lizards 
 lying snug in the ooze. We flatter ourselves, thought 
 I, that we drink first of the spring. We do not know 
 always whose lips were before us. 
 
 Much as you see of insect life, and hear of bird- 
 music, as you walk abroad, you should lie perdu in a 
 nook, to know how much is frighted from sight, and 
 hushed from singing, by your approach. What 
 worms creep out when they think you gone, and what 
 chatterers go on with their story ! So among friends, 
 thought I, as I fished for the moral. We should be 
 wiser, if we knew what our coming hides and silences, 
 but should we walk so undisturbed on our way ? 
 
 You will see with half a glance, dear Doctor, that 
 here was too much company for writing. I screwed 
 up my inkstand once more, and kept up the bed of 
 the stream till it enters the forest, remembering a still 
 place by a pool. The tall pines hold up the roof high 
 as an umbrella of Brobdignag, and neither water j 
 brawls, nor small birds sing, in the gloom of it. Here, 
 thought I, as far as they go, the circumstances are 
 congenial. But, as Jean Paul says, there is a period 
 of iife when the real gains ground upon the ideal; 
 and to be honest, dear Doctor, I sat leaning on the 
 shingle across my knees, counting my sky-kissing 
 pines, and reckoning what they would bring in saw- 
 logs — so much standing — so much drawn to the mill. 
 Then there would be wear and tear of bob-sled, 
 teamster's wages, and your dead-pull springs — the 
 horses' knees. I had nearly settled the per and con- 
 tra, when my eye lit once more on "my dear Doctor," 
 staring from the unfilled sheet, like the ghost of a 
 murdered resolution. " Since when," I asked, look- 
 ing myself sternly in the face, " is it so difficult to be 
 virtuous! Shall I not write when I have a mind? 
 Shall I reckon pelf whether I will or no? Shall but- 
 terfly imagination thrust iron-heart to the wall ? No !" 
 
 I took a straight cut through my ruta-baga patch 
 and cornfield, bent on finding some locality (out of 
 doors it must be) with the average attractions of a 
 sentry-box, or a church-pew. I reached the high- 
 road, making insensibly for a brush dam, where I 
 should sit upon a log, with my face abutted upon a 
 wall of chopped saplings. I have not mentioned my 
 dog, who had followed me cheerfully thus far, putting 
 up now and then a partridge, to keep his nose in; but, 
 on coming to the bridge over the brook, he made up 
 his mind. "My master," he said (or looked), "will 
 neither follow the game, nor sit in the cool. Chacun 
 a son gout. I'm tired of this bobbing about for noth- 
 ing in a hot sun." So, dousing his tail (which, "if 
 you ever observed," a dog hoists, as a flag-ship does 
 her pennant, only when the commodore is aboard), he 
 sprung the railing, and spread himself for a snooze 
 under the bridge. "Ben trovatoV said I, as I seated 
 myself by his side. He wagged his tail half round to 
 acknowledge the compliment, and I took to work like 
 a hay-maker. 
 
 I have taken some pains to describe these difficulties 
 to you, dear Doctor, partly because I hold it to be fair, 
 in this give-and-take world, that a man should know 
 what it costs his fellow to fulfil obligations, but more 
 especially, to apprize you of the metempsychose that is 
 taking place in myself. You will have divined, ere 
 
 this, that, in my out-of-doors life, I am approaching a 
 degree nearer to Arcadian perfectability, and that, if 1 
 but manage to get a bark on and live by sap (spare 
 your wit, sir), I shall be rid of much that is trouble- 
 some, not to say expensive, in the matters of drink and 
 integument. What most surprises me in the past, is, 
 that I ever should have confined my free soul and body, 
 in the very many narrow places and usages I have 
 known in towns. I can only assimilate myself to a 
 squirrel, brought up in a school-boy's pocket, and let 
 out some June morning on a snake fence. 
 
 The spring has been damp for corn, but I had 
 planted on a warm hill-side, and have done better than 
 my neighbors. The Owaga* creek, which makes a 
 bend round my meadow before it drops into the Sus- 
 quehannah (a swift, bright river the Owaga, with as 
 much water as the Arno at Florence), overflowed my 
 cabbages and onions, in the May freshet; but that 
 touches neither me nor my horse. The winter wheat 
 looks like "velvet of three-pile," and everything is 
 out of the ground, including, in my case, the buck- 
 wheat, which is not yet put in. This is to be an old- 
 fashioned hot summer, and I shall sow late. The 
 peas are podded. Did it ever strike you, by the way 
 that the pious JEneas, famous through all ages for 
 carrying old Anchises a mile, should, after all, yield 
 glory to a bean. Perhaps you never observed, that 
 this filial esculent grows up with his father on his 
 back. 
 
 In my "new light," a farmer's life seems to me 
 what a manufacturer's might resemble, if his factory 
 were an indigenous plant — machinery, girls, and all. 
 What spindles and fingers it would take to make an 
 orchard, if nature found nothing but the raw seed, 
 and rain-water and sunshine were brought as far as a 
 cotton bale! Your despised cabbage would be a 
 prime article — if you had to weave it. Pumpkins, if 
 they ripened with a hair-spring and patent lever, 
 would be, "by'r lady," a curious invention. Yet 
 these, which Aladdin nature produces if we but 
 "rub the lamp," are more necessary to life than 
 clothes or watches. In planting a tree (I write it 
 reverently), it seems to me working immediately with 
 the divine faculty. Here are two hundred forest trees 
 set out with my own hand. Yet how little is my part 
 in the glorious creatures they become ! 
 
 This reminds me of a liberty I have lately taken 
 with nature, which I ventured upon with proper diffi- 
 dence, though the dame, as will happen with dames, 
 proved less coy than was predicted. The brook at my 
 feet, from its birth in the hills till it dropped into the 
 meadow's lap, tripped down like a mountain-maid 
 with a song, bright and unsullied. So it flowed by 
 my door. At the foot of the bank, its song and 
 sparkle ceased suddenly, and, turning under the hill, 
 its waters disappeared among sedge and rushes. It 
 was more a pity, because you looked across the 
 meadow to the stately Owaga, and saw that its un- 
 fulfilled destiny was to have poured its brightness into 
 his. The author of Ernest Maltravers has set the 
 fashion of charity to such fallings away. I made a 
 new channel over the meadow, gravelled its bed, and 
 grassed its banks, and (last and best charity of all) 
 protected its recovered course with overshadowy trees. 
 Not quite with so gay a sparkle, but with a placid and 
 tranquil beauty, the lost stream glides over the 
 meadow, and, Maltravers-like, the Owaga takes her 
 lovingly to his bosom. The sedge and rushes are 
 turned into a garden, and if you drop a flower into the 
 brook at my door, it scarce loses a breath of its per- 
 fume before it is flung on the Owaga, aud the Sus- 
 quehannah robs him of it but with his life. 
 
 I have scribbled away the hours till near noon, and 
 
 * Corrupted now to Owego. Ochwaga was the Indian 
 word, and means txMfl water. 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 219 
 
 it is time to see that the oxen get their potatoes. 
 Faith ! it's a cool place under a bridge. Knock out 
 the two ends of the Astor-house, and turn the Hudson 
 through the long passage, and you will get an idea of it. 
 The breeze draws through here deftly, the stone wall 
 is cool to my back, and this floor of running water, be- 
 sides what the air steals from it, sounds and looks re- 
 freshingly. My letter has run on, till I am inclined 
 to think the industry of running water "breeds i'the 
 brain." Like the tin-pot at the cur's tail, it seems to 
 overtake one with an admonition, if he but slack to 
 breathe. Be not alarmed, dear Doctor, for, sans po- 
 tatoes, my oxen will loll in the furrow, and though the 
 brook run till doomsday, I must stop here. Amen. 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 My Dear Doctor : I have just had a visit from 
 the assessor. As if a man should be taxed for a 
 house, who could be luxurious under a bridge ! I 
 have felt a decided "call" to disclaim roof and thresh- 
 old, and write myself down a vagabond. Fancy the 
 variety of abodes open, rent-free, to a bridge-fancier. 
 It is said among the settlers, that where a stranger 
 finds a tree blown over (the roots forming, always, an 
 upright and well-matted wall), he has only his house 
 to finish. Cellar and chimney-back are ready done to 
 his hand. But, besides being roofed, walled, and wa- 
 tered, and better situated, and more plenty than over- 
 blown trees — bridges are on no man's land. You are 
 no " squatter," though you sit upon your hams. You 
 may shut up one end with pine boughs, and you have 
 a room a-la-mode — one large window open to the 
 floor. The view is of banks and running water — ex- 
 quisite of necessity. For the summer months I 
 could imagine this bridge-gipsying delicious. What 
 furniture might pack in a donkey-cart, would set forth 
 a better apartment than is averaged in hotels (so 
 yclept), and the saving to your soul (of sins commit- 
 ted, sitting at a bell-rope, ringing in vain for water) 
 would be worthy a conscientious man's attention. 
 
 I will not deny that the bridge of Glenmary is a fa- 
 vorable specimen. As its abutments touch my cot- 
 tage-lawn, I was under the necessity of presenting the 
 public with anew bridge, for which act of munificence 
 I have not yet received the freedom of the town. Per- 
 haps I am expected to walk through it when I please, 
 without asking. The hitherward railing coming into 
 the line of my fence, I have, in a measure, a private 
 entrance; and the whole structure is overshadowed by 
 a luxuriant tree. To be sure, the beggar may go 
 down the bank in the road, and, entering by the other 
 side, sit under it as well as I — but he is welcome. I 
 like society sans- gene — where you may come in or go 
 out without apology, or whistle, or take off your shoes. 
 And I would give notice here to the beggary of Tioga, 
 that in building a stone seat under the bridge, and 
 laying the banks with green-sward, I intend no seques- 
 tration of their privileges. I was pleased that a swal- 
 low, who had laid her mud-nest against a sleeper 
 overhead, took no offence at my improvements. Her 
 three nestlings made large eyes when I read out what 
 I have scribbled, but she drowses on without astonish- 
 ment. She is a swallow of last summer, and has seen 
 authors. 
 
 A foot-passenger has just gone over the bridge, 
 and, little dreaming there were four of us listening 
 (the swallows and I), he leaned over the railing, and 
 ventured upon a soliloquy. "Why don't he cut 
 down the trees so's he can see out?" said my uncon- 
 scious adviser. I caught the eye of the mother-swal- 
 low, and fancied she was amused. Her swallowlings 
 looked petrified at the sacrilegious suggestion. Bv 
 the way, it is worthy of remark, that though h*>r little 
 
 ones have been hatched a week, this estimable parent 
 still sits upon their heads. Might not this continued 
 incubation be tried with success upon backward chil- 
 dren? We are so apt to think babies are finished 
 when their bodies are brought into the world! 
 
 For some minutes, now, I have observed an occa- 
 sional cloud rising from the bottom of the brook, and, 
 peering among the stones, I discovered one of the 
 small lobsters with which the streams abound. (The 
 naturalists may class them differently, but as there is 
 but one, and he has all the armament of a lobster, 
 though on the scale of a shrimp, the swallows agree 
 with me in opinion that he should rank as a lobster.) 
 So we are five. " Cocksnouns !" to borrow Scott's 
 ejaculation, people should never be too sure that they 
 are unobserved. When I first came under the bridge, 
 I thought myself alone. 
 
 This lobster puts me in mind of Talleyrand. You 
 would say he is going backward, yet he gets on faster 
 that way than the other. After all, he is a great man 
 who can turn his reverses to account, and that I take 
 to be, oftentimes, one of the chief secrets of great- 
 ness. If I were in politics, I would take the lobster 
 for my crest. It would be ominous, I fear, in poetry. 
 You should come to the country now, if you would 
 see the glory of the world. The trees have been co- 
 quetting at their toilet, waiting for warmer weather; 
 but now I think they have put on their last flounce 
 and furbelow, spread their bustle, and stand to be ad- 
 mired. They say "leafy June." To-day is the first 
 of July, and though I give the trees my first morning 
 regard (out-of-doors) when my eyes are clearest, I 
 have not fairly thought till to-day, that the foliage was 
 full. If it were not for lovers and authors, who keep 
 vigil and count the hours, I should suspect there was 
 foul play between sun and moon — a legitimate day 
 made away with now and then. (The crime is not 
 unknown in the upper circles. Saturn devoured his 
 children.) 
 
 There is a glory in potatoes — well hoed. Corn — 
 the swaying and stately maize — has a visible glory. 
 To see the glory of turnips, you must own the crop, 
 and have cattle to fat — but they have a glory. Pease 
 ! need no psean — they are appreciated. So are not cab- 
 j bages, which, though beautiful as a Pompeian wine- 
 cup, and honored above roses by the lingering of the 
 dew, are yet despised of all handicrafts — save one. 
 Apt emblem of ancient maidenhood, which is despised, 
 like cabbages, yet cherishes unsunned in its bosom the 
 very dew we mourn so inconsistently when rifled from 
 the rose. 
 
 Apropos — the delicate tribute in the last sentence 
 shall serve for an expiation. In a journey I made 
 through Switzerland, I had for chance-travelling com- 
 panions, three Scotch ladies, of the class emulated by 
 this chaste vegetable. They were intelligent, refined, 
 and lady-like; yet in some Pencillings by the Way 
 (sketched, perhaps, upon an indigestion of mountain 
 cheese, or an acidity of bad wine — such things affect 
 us) I was perverse enough to jot down a remark, more 
 invidious than just. We are reached with a long 
 whip for our transgressions, and, but yesterday, I re- 
 ceived a letter from the Isle of Man, of which thus 
 runs an extract : " In your description of a dangerous 
 pass in Switzerland, you mention travelling in the 
 same public conveyance with three Scotch spinsters, 
 I and declare you would have been alarmed, had there 
 been any neck in the carriage you cared for, and as- 
 sert, that neither of your companions would have hesi- 
 tated to leap from a precipice, had there been a lover 
 at the bottom. Did either of us tell you so, sir ? Or 
 what ground have you for this assertion ? You could 
 not have judged of us by your own beautiful country- 
 women, for they are proverbial for delicacy of feeling. 
 You had not yet made the acquaintance of mine. 
 VT«, therefore, nrast appropriate entirely to ourselves 
 
220 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 the very flattering idea of having inspired such an 
 opinion. Yet allow me to assure you, sir, that lovers 
 are by no means so scarce in my native country, as 
 you seem to imagine. No Scotchwoman need go 
 either to Switzerland, or Yankee-land, in search of 
 them. Permit me to say then, sir, that as the attack 
 was so public, an equally public amende honorable is 
 due to us." 
 
 I make it here. I retract the opinion altogether. I 
 do not think you " would have leaped from the preci- 
 pice, had there been a lover at the bottom." On the 
 
 contrary, dear Miss , I think you would have 
 
 waited till he climbed up. The amende, I flatter my- 
 self, could scarce be more complete. Yet I will make 
 it stronger if you wish. 
 
 As I look out from under the bridge, I see an oriel 
 sitting upon a dog-wood tree of my planting. His 
 song drew my eye from the paper. I find it difficult, 
 now, not to take to myself the whole glory of tree, 
 song, and plumage. By an easy delusion, I fancy he 
 would not have come but for the beauty of the tree, 
 and that his song says as much, in bird-recitative. I 
 go back to one rainy day of April, when, hunting for 
 maple saplings, I stopped under that graceful tree, in 
 a sort of island jungle, and wondered what grew so 
 fair that was so unfamiliar, yet with a bark like the 
 plumage of the pencilled pheasant. The limbs grew 
 curiously. A lance-like stem, and, at regular distan- 
 ces a cluster of radiating branches, like a long cane 
 thrust through inverted parasols. I set to work with 
 spade and pick, took it home on my shoulder, and set 
 it out by Glenmary brook, and there it stands to-day, 
 in the full glory of its leaves, having just shed the 
 white blossoms with which it kept holyday in June. 
 Now the tree would have leaved and flowered, and the 
 oriel, in black and gold, might perchance have swung 
 and sung on the slender branch, which is still tilting 
 with his effort in that last cadenza. But the fair pic- 
 ture it makes to my eye, and the delicious music in 
 my ear, seem to me no less of my own making and 
 awaking. Is it the same tree, flowering unseen in 
 the woods, or transplanted into a circle of human love 
 and care, making a part of a woman's home, and 
 thought of and admired whenever she comes out from 
 her cottage, with a blessing on the perfume and ver- 
 dure ? Is it the same bird, wasting his song in the 
 thicket, or singing to me, with my whole mind afloat 
 on his music, and my eyes fastened to his glittering 
 breast ? So it is the same block of marble, unmoved 
 in the caves of Pentelicus, or brought forth and 
 wrought under the sculptor's chisel. Yet the sculp- 
 tor is allowed to create. Sing on, my bright oriel ! 
 Spread to the light and breeze your desiring finger, 
 my flowering tree ! Like the player upon the organ, 
 I take your glory to myself; though, like the hallelu- 
 jah that burns under his fingers, your beauty and mu- 
 sic worship God. 
 
 There are men in the world whose misfortune it is 
 to think too little of themselves — rari nantes in gur- 
 gite vaslo. I would recommend to such to plant trees, 
 and live among them. This suggesting to nature — 
 working, as a master-mind, with all the fine mysteries 
 of root and sap, obedient to the call — is very king-like. 
 Then how elevating is the society of trees ! The ob- 
 jection I have to a city, is the necessity, at every other 
 step, of passing some acquaintance or other, with all 
 his merits or demerits entirely through my mind — 
 some man, perhaps, whose existence and vocation I 
 have not suggested (as I might have done were he a 
 tree) — whom I neither love, nor care to meet ; and 
 yet he is thrust upon my eye, and must be noticed. 
 But to notice him with propriety, I must remember 
 what he is — what claims he has to my respect, my ci 
 vility. I must, in a minute balance the account be 
 tween my character and his, and if he speak to me, 
 emember his wife and children, his last illness, his 
 
 mishap or fortune in trade, or whatever else it is ne- 
 cessary to mention in condolence or felicitation. A 
 man with but a moderate acquaintance, living in a 
 city, will pass through his mind each day, at a fair 
 calculation, say two hundred men and women, witb 
 their belongings. What tax on the memory ! Whal 
 fatigue (and all profitless) to them and him ! " Sweep 
 me out like a foul thoroughfare!" say I. " The town 
 has trudged through me !" 
 
 I like my mind to be a green lane, private to th« 
 dwellers in my own demesne. I like to be bowed to 
 as the trees bow, and have no need to bow back 01 
 smile. If I am sad, my trees forego my notice without 
 offence. If I am merry, or whimsical, they do not 
 suspect my good sense, or my sanity. We have a 
 constant itching (all men have, I think) to measure 
 ourselves by those about us. I would rather it should 
 be a tree than a fop, or a politician, or a 'prentice. 
 We grow to the nearest standard. We become Lilli- 
 putians in Lilliput. Let me grow up like a tree. 
 
 But here comes Tom Groom with an axe, as if he 
 had looked over my shoulder, and started, apropos of 
 trees. 
 
 " Is it that big button-ball you'll have cut down, 
 sir ?" 
 
 " Call it a sycamore, Tom, and I'll come and see." 
 It is a fine old trunk, but it shuts out the village spire, 
 and must come down. 
 
 Adieu, dear Doctor ; you may call this a letter if you 
 will, but it is more like an essay. 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 Dear Doctor: There are some things that grow 
 more certain with time and experience. Among 
 them, I am happier for finding out, is the affinity 
 which makes us friends. But there are other matters 
 which, for me, observation and knowledge only serve 
 to perplex, and among these is to know whose " edu- 
 cation has been neglected." One of the first new 
 lights which broke on me, was after my first day in 
 France. I went to bed with a newborn contempt, 
 mingled with resentment, in my mind, toward my ven- 
 erable alma mater. The three most important branches 
 of earthly knowledge, I said to myself, are, to under- 
 stand French when it is spoken, to speak it so as to be 
 understood, and to read and write it with propriety 
 and ease. For accomplishment in the last, I could 
 refer to my diploma, where the fact was stated on in- 
 destructible parchment. But, allowing it to speak 
 the truth (which was allowing a great deal), there 
 were the two preceding branches, in which (most 
 culpably to my thinking) "my education had been 
 neglected." . Could I have taken out my brains, and, 
 by simmering in a pot, have decocted Virgil, Homer, 
 Playfair, Dugald Stewart, and Copernicus, all five, 
 into one very small Frenchman — (what they had 
 taught me to what he could teach) — I should have 
 been content, though the fiend blew the fire. 
 
 I remember a beggarly Greek, who acquired an 
 ascendency over eight or ten of us, gentlemen and 
 scholars, travelling in the east, by a knowledge of 
 what esculents, growing wild above the bones of Mil- 
 tiades, were " good for greens." We were out of pro- 
 visions, and fain to eat with Nebuchadnezzar. " Hang 
 grammar!" thought I, "here's a branch in which my 
 education has been neglected." Who was ever called 
 upon in his travels to conjugate a verb ? Yet here, 
 but for this degenerate Athenian, we had starved for 
 our ignorance of what is edible in plants. 
 
 I had occasion, only yesterday, to make a similar 
 remark. I was in a crowded church, listening to a 
 Fourth of July oration; what with one sort of caloric 
 and what with another, it was very uncomfortable, and 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 221 
 
 a lady near me became faint. To get her out, was 
 impossible, and there was neither fan, nor sal volatile, 
 within twenty pews. The bustle, after awhile, drew 
 the attention of an uncombed Yankee in his shirt- 
 sleeves, who had stood in the aisle with his mouth 
 open, gazing at the stage in front of the pulpit, and 
 wondering, perhaps, what particular difference be- 
 tween sacred and profane oratory, required this pains- 
 taking exhibition of the speaker's legs. Compre- 
 hending the state of the case at a single glance, the 
 backwoodsman whipped together the two ends of his 
 riding-switch, pulled his cotton handkerchief tightly 
 over it, and, with this effective fan, soon raised a 
 breeze that restored consciousness to the lady, besides 
 cooling everybody in the vicinity. Here is a man, 
 thought I, brought up to have his wits ready for an 
 emergency. His " education has not been neglected." j 
 
 To know nothing of sailing a ship, of farming, of 
 carpentering, in short, of any trade or profession, may | 
 be a proper, though sometimes inconvenient igno- j 
 ranee. I only speak of such deficiencies, as a modest 
 person will not confess without giving a reason — as a j 
 man who can not swim will say he is liable to the 
 cramp in deep water. With some reluctance, lately, i 
 I have brought myself to look after such dropped 
 threads in my own woof of acquisitions, in the hope i 
 of mending them before they were betrayed by an exi- j 
 gency. Trout-fishing is one of these. I plucked up | 
 heart a day or two since, and drove to call upon a I 
 young sporting friend of mine, to whom I confessed, ' 
 plump, I never had caught a trout. I knew nothing i 
 of flies, worms, rods, or hooks. Though I had seen 
 in a book that " hog's down" was the material for the ; 
 May-fly, I positively did not know on what part of that ; 
 succulent quadruped the down was found. 
 
 "Positively ?" 
 
 " Positively !" 
 
 My friend F. gravely shut the door to secure pri- , 
 vacy to my ignorance, and took from his desk a vol- j 
 U me — of flies ! Here was new matter ! Why, sir ! j 
 your trout-fishing is a politician of the first water !\ 
 Here were baits adapted to all the whims, weaknesses, | 
 states of appetite, even counter-baits to the very cun- 
 ning, of the fish. Taking up the "Spirit of the! 
 Times" newspaper, his authority in all sporting mat- I 
 tens, which he had laid down as I came in, he read a | 
 recipe for the construction of one out of the many of j 
 these seductive imitations, as a specimen of the labor 
 bestowed on them. "The body is dubbed with hog's 
 down, or light bear's hair mixed with yellow mohair, i 
 whipped with pale floss silk, and a small strip of pea- j 
 cock's herl for the head. The wings from the rayed { 
 feathers of the mallard, dyed yellow ; the hackle from j 
 the bittern's neck, and the tail from the long hairs of 
 the sable or ferret." 
 
 I cut my friend short midway in his volume, for, 
 ever since my disgust at discovering that the perplexed 
 grammar I had been whipped through was nothing 
 but the art of talking correctly, which I could do be- 
 fore I began, 1 have had an aversion to rudiments. 
 "Frankly," said I, "dear F. my education has been i 
 neglected. Will you take me with you, trout-fishing, i 
 fish yourself, answer my questions, and assist me to j 
 pick up the science in my own scrambling fashion?" 
 
 He was good-natured enough to consent, and now, 
 dear Doctor, you see to what all this prologue was 
 tending. A day's trout-fishing may be a very com- 
 mon matter to you, but the sport was as new to me as 
 to the trout. I may say, however, that of the two, I 
 took to the novelty of the thing more kindly. 
 
 The morning after was breezy, and the air, without 
 a shower, had become cool. 1 was sitting under the 
 bridge, with my heels at the waters edge, reading a 
 newspaper, while waiting for my breakfast, when a 
 slight motion apprized me that the water had invaded 
 my instep. I had been wishing the tun had drank less 
 
 freely of my brook, and within a few minutes of the 
 wish, it had risen, doubtless, from the skirt of a shower 
 in the hills beyond us. "Come!" thought I, pulling 
 my boots out of the ripple, " so should arrive favors 
 that would be welcome — no herald, and no weary ex- 
 pectation. A human gift so uses up gratitude with 
 the asking and delaying." The swallow heard the in- 
 creased babble of the stream, and came out of the air 
 like a cimeter to see if her little ones were afraid, and 
 the fussy lobster bustled about in his pool, as if there 
 were more company than he expected. " Semper pa- 
 ratus is a good motto, Mr. Lobster !" " I will look 
 after your little ones, Dame Swallow !" I had scarce 
 distributed these consolations among my family, when 
 a horse crossed the bridge at a gallop, and the head of 
 my friend F. peered presently over the railing. 
 
 " How is your brook ?" 
 
 "Rising, as you see!" 
 
 It was evident there had been rain west of us, and 
 the sky was still gray — good auspices for the fisher. 
 In half an hour we were climbing the hill, with such 
 contents in the wagon-box as my friend advised — the 
 debris of a roast pig and a bottle of hock supposed to 
 be included in the bait. As we got into the woods 
 above (part of my own small domain), I could scarce 
 help addressing my tall tenantry of trees. " Grow 
 away, gentlemen," I would have said, had I been 
 alone ; " I rejoice in your prosperity. Help your- 
 selves to the dew and the sunshine ! If the showers are 
 not sent to your liking, thrust your roots into my 
 cellar, lying just under you, and moisten your clay 
 without ceremony — the more the better." After all, 
 trees have pleasant ways with them. It is something 
 that they find their own food and raiment — something 
 that they require neither watching nor care — some- 
 thing that they know, without almanac, the proces- 
 sions of the seasons, and supply, unprompted and 
 unaided, the covering for their tender family of germes. 
 So do not other and less profitable tenants. But it is 
 more to me that they have no whims to be reasoned 
 with, no prejudices to be soothed, no garrulity to re- 
 ply or listen to. I have a peculiarity which this 
 touches nearly. Some men "make a god of their 
 belly;" some spend thought and cherishing on their 
 feet, faces, hair; some few on their fancy or their 
 reason, /am chary of my gift of speech. I hate to 
 talk but for my pleasure. In common with my fel- 
 low-men, I have one faculty which distinguishes me 
 from the brute — an articulate voice. I speak (I am 
 warranted to believe) like my Maker and his angels. 
 I have committed to me an instrument no human art 
 has ever imitated, as incomprehensible in its fine and 
 celestial mechanism, as the reason which controls it. 
 Shall 1 breathe on this articulate wonder at every 
 fool's bidding ? Without reasoning upon the matter 
 as I do now, I have felt indignant at the common ad- 
 age, " words cost nothing!" It is a common saying 
 in this part of the country, that " you may talk off ten 
 dollars in the price of a horse." Those who have 
 travelled in Italy, know well that in procuring any- 
 thing in that country, from a post-carriage to a paper 
 of pins, you pay so much money, so much talk — the 
 less talk the more money. I commenced all my liar- 
 gains with a compromise — "You charge me ten scudi, 
 and you expect me to talk you down to five. I know 
 the price and the custom. Now, I will give you seven 
 and a half if you will let me off the talk." I should 
 be glad if all buying and selling were done by signs. 
 It seems to me that talking on a sordid theme invades 
 and desecrates the personal dignity. The " scripta 
 verba manent" has no terrors for me. I could write 
 that without a thought, which I would put myself to 
 great inconveniences to avoid saying. 
 
 You, dear Doctor, among others, have often asked 
 me how long I should be contented in the country. 
 Comment, diable! ask. rather, how you are contented 
 
I'l'l 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 in a town ! Does not every creature, whose name 
 may have been mentioned to you — a vast congrega 
 tion of nothinglings — stop you in the street, and, will 
 you, nill you, make you perform on your celestial or 
 gan of speech — nay, even choose the theme out of his 
 own littlenesses ? When and how do you possess your 
 thoughts, and their godlike interpreter, in dignity and 
 peace ? You are a man, of all others, worthy of the 
 unsuggestive listening of trees. Your coinage of 
 thought, profuse and worthy of a gift of utterance, is 
 alloyed and depreciated by the promiscuous admix- 
 tures of a town. Who ever was struck with the 
 majesty of the human voice in the street ? Yet, who 
 ever spoke, the meanest, in the solitude of a temple, 
 or a wilderness, or, in the stillness of night — wher- 
 ever the voice is alone heard — without an awe of his 
 own utterance — a feeling as if he had exercised a gift, 
 which had in it something of the supernatural ? 
 
 The Indian talks to himself, or to the Great Spirit, 
 in the woods, but is silent among men. We take 
 many steps toward civilization as we get on in life, 
 but it is an error to think that the heart keeps up with 
 the manners. At least, with me, the perfection of ex- 
 istence seems to be, to possess the arts of social life, 
 with the simplicity and freedom of the savage. They 
 talk of "unbridled youth!" Who would not have 
 borne a rein at twenty, he scorns at thirty ? Who 
 does not, as his manhood matures, grow more im- 
 patient of restraint — more unwilling to submit to the 
 conventional tyrannies of society — more ready, if there 
 were half a reason for it, to break through the whole 
 golden but enslaving mesh of society, and start fresh, 
 with Nature and the instincts of life, in the wilderness. 
 The imprisonment to a human eye may be as irksome 
 as a fetter — yet they who live in cities are never loosed. 
 Did you ever stir out of doors without remembering 
 that you were seen ? 
 
 I have given you my thoughts as I went by my tall 
 foresters, dear Doctor, for it is a part of trout-fishing, 
 as quaint Izaak held it, to be stirred to musing and 
 revery by the influences of nature. In this free air, 
 too, I scorn to be tied down to " the proprieties." 
 Nay, if it come to that, why should I finish what I 
 begin ? Dame swallow, to be sure, looks curious to 
 hear the end of my first lesson with the angle. But 
 no ! rules be hanged ! I do not live on a wild brook to 
 be plagued with rhetoric. I will seal up my letter 
 where I am, and go a-field. You shall know what 
 we brought home in the basket when I write again. 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 My Dear Doctor: Your letters, like yourself, trav- 
 el in the best of company. What should come with 
 your last, but a note from our friend Stetson of the 
 Astor, forwarding a letter which a traveller had left in II 
 the bronze vase, with "something enclosed which feels 
 like a key." "A Are?/," quotha ! Attar of jasmine, 
 subtle as the breath of the prophet from Constantino- 
 ple by private hand! No less! The small gilt bottle, 
 with its cubical edge and cap of parchment, lies breath- 
 ing before me. I think you were not so fortunate as 
 to meet Bartlett, the draughtsman of the American sce- 
 nery — the best of artists in his way, and the pleasantest 
 of John Bulls, any way. He travelled with me a sum- 
 mer here, making his sketches, and has since been 
 sent by the same enterprising publisher (Virtue, of 
 Ivy Lane), to sketch in the Orient. (" Stand by," as 
 Jack savs, for something glorious from that quarter.) 
 Well — pottering about the Bezestein, he fell in with 
 my old friend Mustapha, the attar-merchant, who lift- 
 ed the silk curtains for him, and over sherbet and 
 spiced coffee in the inner divan, questioned him of 
 America — a country which, to Mustapha's fancy, is as 
 
 far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt 
 tip of the seraglio. Bartlett told him the sky was 
 round in that country, and the women faint and exquis- 
 ite as his own attar. Upon which Mustapha took his 
 pipe from his mouth, and praised Allah. After stro- 
 king the smoke out of his beard, and rolling his idea 
 over the whites of his eyes for a few minutes, the old 
 merchant pulled from under his silk cushion, a visit- 
 ing-card, once white, but stained to a deep orange with 
 the fingering of his fat hand, unctuous from bath-hour 
 to bath-hour with the precious oils he traffics in. 
 When Bartlett assured him he had seen me in Amer- 
 jica (it was the card I had given the old Turk at part- 
 ing, that he might remember my name), he settled the 
 curtains which divide the small apartment from the 
 shop, and commanding his huge Ethiopian to watch 
 the door, entered into a description of our visit to the 
 forbidden recesses of the slave-market, of his pur- 
 chase (for me), of the gipsy Maimuna, and some oth- 
 er of my six weeks' adventures in his company — for 
 Mustapha and I, wherever it might lie in his fat body, 
 had a nerve in unison. We mingled like two drops 
 of the oil of roses. At parting, he gave Bartlett this 
 small bottle of jasmine, to be forwarded to me, with 
 much love, at his convenience; and with the perfume 
 of it in my nostrils, and the corpulent laugh of old 
 Mustapha ringing in my ear, I should find it difficult 
 at this moment, to say how much of me is under this 
 bridge in Tioga, North America. I am not sure that 
 my letter should not be dated " attar-shop, near the se- 
 raglio" for there, it seems to me, I am writing. 
 
 " Tor-mentingest growin' time, aint it !" says a neigh- 
 bor, leaning over the bridge at this instant, and little 
 thinking that on that breath of his I travelled from the 
 Bosphorus to the Susquehannah. Really, they talk 
 of steamers, but there is no travelling conveyance like 
 an interruption. A minute since, I was in the capital 
 of the Palaeologi, smoking a narghile in the Turk's 
 shop. Presto! here I am in the county of Tiog', sit- 
 ting under a bridge, with three swallows and a lobster 
 (not three lobsters at a swallow — as you are very like- 
 ly to read it in your own careless way), and no outlay 
 for coals or canvass. Now, why should not this be re- 
 duced to a science — like steam ! I'll lend the idea to 
 the cause of knowledge. If a man may travel from 
 Turkey to New York on a passing remark, what might 
 be done on a long sermon ? At present the agent is 
 irregular, so was steam. The performance of the 
 journey, at present, is compulsory. So was travelling 
 by steam before Fulton. The discoveries in animal 
 magnetism justify the most sanguine hopes on the sub- 
 ject, and "open up," as Mr. Bulwer would express it, 
 a vast field of novel discovery. 
 
 The truth is (I have been sitting a minute thinking 
 it over), the chief obstacle and inconvenience in trav- 
 elling is the prejudice in favor of taking the body with 
 us. It is really a preposterous expense. Going abroad 
 exclusively for the benefit of the mind, we are at no 
 little trouble, in the first place, to provide the means 
 for the body's subsistence on the journey (the mind 
 not being subject to " charges") and then, besides trail- 
 ing after us through ruins and galleries, a companion 
 who takes no enjoyment in pictures or temples, and is 
 perpetually incommoded by our enthusiasm, we un- 
 dergo endless vexation and annoyance with the care of 
 his baggage. Blessed be Providence, the mind is in- 
 dependent of boots and linen. When the system 
 above hinted at is perfected, we can leave our box-coats 
 at home, item pantaloons for all weathers, item cravats, 
 flannels, and innumerable hose. I shall use my port- 
 manteau to send egas to market, with chickens in the 
 two carpet-bags. My body I shall leave with the dai- 
 ry-woman, to be fed at milking-time. Probably, how- 
 ever, in the progress of knowledge, there will be some 
 discovery by which it can be closed in the absence 
 of the mind, like a town-house when the occupant is 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 223 
 
 in the country — blinds down, and a cobweb over the 
 keyhole. 
 
 In all the prophetic visions of a millenium, the chief 
 obstacle to its progress is the apparently undiminish- 
 ing necessity for the root of all evil. Intelligence is 
 diffusing, law becoming less merciless, ladies driving 
 hoops, and (I have observed) a visible increase of mar- 
 riages between elderly ladies and very young gentle- 
 men — the last a proof that the affections (as will be 
 universally true in the milleninm) may retain their 
 freshness in age. But among all these lesser begin- 
 nings, the philanthropist has hitherto despaired, for to 
 his most curious search, there appeared no symptom 
 of beginning to live without money. May we not dis- 
 cern in this system (by which the mind, it is evident, 
 may perform some of the most expensive functions of 
 the body), a dream of moneyless millenium — a first 
 step toward that blessed era when " Biddle and dis- 
 counts" will be read of like "Aaron and burnt-offer- 
 ings" — ceremonies which once made it necessary for 
 a high-priest, and an altar at which the innocent suf- 
 .ered for the guilty, but which shall have passed away 
 'n the blessed progress of the millenium? 
 
 If I may make a grave remark to you, dear Doctor, 
 I think the whole bent and spirit of the age we live in, 
 is, to make light of matter. Religion, which used to 
 De seated in the heart, is, by the new light of Chan- 
 ning, addressed purely to the intellect. The feelings 
 and passions, which are bodily affections, have less to 
 do with it than the mind. To eat with science and 
 drink hard, were once passports to society. To think 
 shrewdly and talk well, carry it now. Headaches 
 were cured by pills, which now yield to magnetic 
 fluid — nothing so subtle. If we travelled once, it 
 must be by pulling of solid muscle. Rarefied air does 
 it now better than horses. War has yielded to nego- 
 tiation. A strong man is no better than a weak one. 
 
 crimes. That the London Quarterly ever existed, 
 will be classed with such historical enormities as the 
 Inquisition, and torture for witchcraft; and "to be 
 Lockharted" will mean, then, what "to be Burked" 
 means now. 
 
 You will say, dear Doctor, that I am the "ancient 
 mariner" of letter-writers — telling my tale out of all 
 apropos-ity. But after some consideration, I have 
 made up my mind, that a man who is at all addicted 
 to revery, must have one or two escape-valves — a 
 journal, or a very random correspondence. For rea- 
 sons many and good, I prefer the latter ; and the best 
 of those reasons is my good fortune in possessing a 
 friend like yourself, who is above " proprieties" (pro- 
 sodically speaking), and so you have become to me, 
 what Asia was to Prometheus — 
 
 " When his being overflowed, 
 Was like a golden chalice to bright wine, 
 Which else had sunk into the thirsty dusk." 
 
 Talking of trout. We emerged from the woods of 
 Glenmary (you left me there in my last letter), and 
 rounding the top of the hill, which serves for my sun- 
 set drop-curtain, we ran down a mile to a brook in the 
 bed of a low valley. It rejoices in no name, that I 
 could hear of; but, like much that is uncelebrated, it 
 has its virtues. Leaving William to tie the horse to a 
 hemlock, and bring on the basket, we started up the 
 stream, and coming to a cold spring, my friend sat 
 down to initiate me into the rudiments of preparing 
 the fly. A very gay-coated gentleman was selected, 
 rather handsomer than your horse-fly, and whipped 
 upon a rod quite too taper for a comparison. 
 
 " What next?" 
 
 " Take a bit of worm out of the tin box, and cover 
 the barb of the hook !" 
 
 " I will. Stay ! where are the bits ? 1 see nothing 
 
 Electro-magnetism will soon do all the work of the || here but full-length worms, crawling about, with 
 world, and men's muscles will be so much weight — j every one his complement of extremities — not a tail 
 no more. The amount of it is, that we are graduaUy\\ astray." 
 learning to do without our bodies. The next great dis- j j "Bah! pull a bit off !" 
 
 covery will probably be some pleasant contrivance fori: " What ! you don't mean that I am to pull one of 
 getting out of them, as the butterfly sheds his worm. | these squirming unfortunates in two ?" 
 Then, indeed, having no pockets, and no " corpus" for " Certainly !" 
 
 your "habeas" we can dispense with money and its! "Well, come! that seems to me rather a liberty, 
 consequences, and lo ! the millenium! Having no j I grant you 'my education has been neglected,' but, 
 stomachs to care for, there will be much cause of sin j my dear F., there is mercy in a guillotine. I had 
 done away, for in most penal iniquities, the stomach ' made up my mind to the death of the fish, but this 
 is at the bottom. Think what smoothness will follow preliminary — horror !" 
 in " the cause of true love" — money coming never be- " Come ! don't be a woman !" 
 
 tween! It looks ill for your profession, dear Doctor. "I wish I were— I should have a pair of scissors. 
 We shall have no need of physic. The fee will go to Fancy having your leg pulled off, my good fellow. I 
 him who " administers to the mind deceased" — prob- say it is due to the poor devil that the operation be as 
 ably the clergy. {Mem. to put your children in the short as possible. Suppose your thumb slips?" 
 church.) I am afraid crowded parties will go out of "Why, the worm feels nothing! Pain is in the 
 fashion — it would be so difficult to separate one's imagination. Stay ! I'll do it for you — there ?" 
 globule in case of " mixed society" — yet the extrica- What the remainder of the worm felt, I had no op- 
 tion of gases might be improved upon. Fancy a| portunity of observing, as my friend thrust the tin box 
 lady and gentleman made " common air" of, by "the i; into his pocket immediately ; but the "bit" which he 
 mixture of their "oxygen and hydrogen !" (dropped into the palm of my hand, gave ever)- symp- 
 
 What most pleases me in the'prospect of this Swe- torn of extreme astonishment, to say the least. The 
 denborg order of things, is the probable improvement; passing of the barb of the hook three times through 
 in the laws. In the physical age passing away, we j him, seemed rather to increase his vitality, and looked 
 have legislated for the protection of the body, but no j to me as little like happiness as anything I ever saw 
 pains or penalties for wounds upon its more sensitive on an excursion of pleasure. Far be it from me, to 
 inhabitant — murder to break the snail's shell, but in- j| pretend to more sensibility than Christopher North, or 
 nocent pastime to thrust a pin into the snail. In the!! Izaak Walton. The latter had his humanities; and 
 new order of things, we shall have penal laws for the ! Wilson, of all the men I have ever seen, fames, most 
 protection of the sensibilities— whether they be touch- . marked in his fine face, the philtre which bewitches 
 ed through the fancy, the judgment, or the personal affection. But, emulous as I am of their fame as an- 
 dignity. ' Those will be days for poets ! Critics will; glers, and modest as I should feel at introducing nino- 
 be hanged— or worse. A sneer will be manslaughter, vations upon an art so refined, I must venture upon 
 Ridicule will be a deadly weapon, only justifiable when some less primitive instrument than thumb and finger, 
 used in defence of life. For scandal, imprisonment | ! for the dismemberment of worms. 1 must take 
 from ten to forty years, at the mercv of the court, scissors. 
 All attacks upon honor, honesty, or innocence, capital I T had never seen a trout caught in my life, and I do 
 
224 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 not remember at this moment ever having, myself, 
 caught a fish, of any genus or gender. My first les- 
 son, of course, was to see the thing done. F. stole 
 up to the bank of the stream, as if his tread might 
 wake a naiad, and threw his fly into a circling, black 
 pool, sparkling with brilliant bubbles, which coiled 
 away from a small brook-leap in the shade. The 
 same instant the rod bent, and a glittering spotted 
 creature rose into the air, swung to his hand, and was 
 dropped into the basket. Another fling, and a small 
 trail of the fly on the water, and another followed. 
 With the third, I felt a curious uneasiness in my el- 
 bow, extending quickly to my wrist — the tingling of a 
 newborn enthusiasm. F. had taken up the stream, 
 and with his lips apart, and body bent over, like a mortal 
 surprising some troop of fays at revel, it was not rea- 
 sonable to expect him to remember his pupil. So, 
 silently I turned down, and at the first pool threw in 
 my fly. Something bright seemed born at the instant 
 under it, and the slight tilting pull upon the pole, 
 took me so much by surprise, that for a second 1 for- 
 got to raise it. Up came the bright trout, raining the 
 silver water from his back, and at the second swing 
 through the air (for I had not yet learned the sleight 
 of the fisher to bring him quick to hand), he dropped 
 into the pool, and was gone. I had already begun to 
 take his part against myself, and detected a pleased 
 thrill, at his escape, venturing through my bosom. 
 I sat down upon a prostrate pine, to new-Shylock my 
 poor worm. The tin box was in F.'s pocket ! Come ! 
 here was a relief. As to the wild-wood worms that 
 might be dug from the pine-tassels under my feet, I 
 was incapable of violating their forest sanctuary. I 
 would fish no more. I had had my pleasure. It is 
 not like pulling up a stick or a stone, to pull up a re- 
 sisting trout. It is a peculiar sensation, unimaginable 
 till felt. I should like to be an angler very well, but 
 for the worm in my pocket. 
 
 The brook at my feet, and around me, pines of the 
 tallest lift, by thousands! You may travel through 
 a forest, and look upon these communicants with the 
 sky, as trees. But you can not sit still in a forest, 
 alone, and silent, without feeling the awe of their pres- 
 ence. Yet the brook ran and sang as merrily, in 
 their black shadow, as in the open sunshine ; and the 
 woodpecker played his sharp hammer on a tree ever- 
 green for centuries, as fearlessly as on a shivering 
 poplar, that will be outlived by such a fish-catcher as 
 I. Truly, this is a world in which there is small rec- 
 ognition of greatness. As it is in the forest, so it is 
 in the town. The very gods would have their toes 
 trod upon, if they walked without their wings. Yet 
 let us take honor to ourselves above vegetables. The 
 pine beneath me has been a giant, with his top in the 
 clouds, but lies now unvalued on the earth. We rec- 
 ognise greatness when it is dead. We are prodigal 
 of love and honor when it is unavailing. We are, in 
 something, above wood and stubble. 
 
 I have fallen into a sad trick, dear Doctor, of preach- 
 ing sermons to myself, from these texts of nature. 
 Sometimes, like other preachers, I pervert the meaning 
 and forget the context, but revery would lose its 
 charm if it went by reason. Adieu ! Come up to 
 Glenmary, and catch trout if you will. But I will 
 have your worms decently drowned before boxed for 
 use. I can not sleep o'nights, after slipping one of 
 these harmless creatures out of his own mouth, in a 
 vain attempt to pull him asunder. 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 My dear Doctor: If this egg hatch without get- 
 ting cold, or, to accommodate my language to your 
 oity apprehension, if the letter I here begin comes to 
 
 a finishing, it will be malgre blistering hands and 
 weary back — the consequences of hard raking — of 
 hay. The men are taking their four o'clock of cheese 
 and cider in the meadow, and not having simplified 
 my digestion as rapidly as my habits, I have retired 
 to the shelter of the bridge, to be decently rid of the 
 master's first bit, and pull at the pitcher. After 
 employing my brains in vain, to discover why this par- 
 ticular branch of farming should require cider and 
 cheese (eaten together at no other season that I can 
 learn), I have pulled out my scribble-book from the 
 niche in the sleeper overhead, and find, by luck, one 
 sheet of tabula rasa, upon which you are likely to pay 
 eighteen pence to Amos Kendall. 
 
 Were you ever in a hay-field, Doctor? I ask for 
 information. Metaphorically, I know you " live in 
 clover'" — meaning, the society of wits, and hock of a 
 certain vintage — but seriously, did you ever happen 
 to stand on the natural soil of the earth, oft' the pave- 
 ment ? If you have not, let me tell you it is a very 
 pleasant change. I have always fancied there was a 
 mixture of the vegetable in myself; and I am con- 
 vinced now, that there is something in us which grows 
 more thriftily on fresh earth, than on flag-stones. 
 There are some men indigenous to brick and mortar, 
 as there are plants which thrive best with a stone on 
 them ; but there are " connecting links'' between all 
 j the varieties of God's works, and such men verge on 
 | the mineral kingdom. I have seen whole geodes of 
 j them, with all the properties of flints, for example. 
 But in you, my dear Doctor, without flattery, I think 
 j I see the vegetable, strong, though latent. You 
 would thrive in the country, well planted and a little 
 I pruned. I am not sure it would do to icater you free- 
 i ly — but you want sunshine and fresh air, and a little 
 bird to shake the " dew" out of your top. 
 
 I see, from my seat under the bridge, a fair mead- 
 ow, laid like an unrolled carpet of emerald, along the 
 windings of a most bright and swift river. The first 
 owner of it after the savage, all honor to his memory, 
 sprinkled it with forest trees, now at their loftiest 
 growth, here and there one, stately in the smooth 
 grass, like a polished monarch on the foot-cloth of 
 his throne. The river is the Owaga, and its opposite 
 bank is darkened with thick wood, through which a 
 j liberal neighbor has allowed me to cut an eye-path to 
 i the village spire — a mile across the fields. From my 
 I cottage door across this meadow-lawn, steals, with 
 j silver foot, the brook I redeemed from its lost stray - 
 ings, and, all along between brook and river, stand hay- 
 j cocks, not fairies. Now, possess me as well of your 
 whereabout — what you see from your window in 
 Broadway! Is there a sapling on my whole arm that 
 would change root-hold with you? 
 
 The hay is heavy this year, and if there were less, I 
 should still feel like taking oft" my hat to the meadow. 
 There is nothing like living in the city, to impress one 
 with the gratuitous liberality of the services rendered 
 one in the country. Here are meadows now, that 
 without hint or petition, pressing or encouragement, 
 pay or consideration, nay, careless even of gratitude, 
 shoot me up some billions of glass-blades, clover- 
 flowers, white and red, and here and there a nodding 
 regiment of lilies, tall as my chin, and it is under- 
 stood, I believe, that I am welcome to it all. Now, 
 you may think this is all easy enough, and the meadow 
 is happy to be relieved ; but so the beggar might think 
 of your alms, and be as just. But you have made the 
 money you give him by the sweat of your brow. So 
 has the meadow its grass. " It is estimated," says 
 the Book of Nature, " that an acre of grass-land trans- 
 pires, in twenty-four hours, not less than six thousand 
 four hundred quarts of water." Sweat me that with- 
 out a fee, thou " dollar a visit !" 
 
 Here comes William from the post, with a handful 
 of papers. The Mirror, with a likeness of Sprague. 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 225 
 
 A likeness in a mirror could scarce fail, one would 
 think, and here, accordingly, he is, — the banker-poet, 
 the Rogers of our country — fit as " as himself to be 
 his parallel." Yet T have never seen that stern look 
 on him. We know he bears the "globe"* on his 
 back, like old Atlas, but he is more urbane than the 
 world-bearer. He keeps a muscle unstrained for a 
 smile. A more courteous gentleman stands not by 
 Mammon's altar — no, nor by the lip of Helicon — yet | 
 this is somehow stern. In what character, if you ; 
 please, Mr. Harding ? Sat Plutus, or Apollo, astride \ 
 your optic nerve when you drew that picture ? It may- 
 be a look he has, but, fine head as it stands on paper, 
 they who form from it an idea of the man, would be 
 agreeably disappointed in meeting him. And this, 
 which is a merit in most pictures, is a fault in one 
 which posterity is to look at. 
 
 Sprague has the reputation of being a most able 
 financier. Yet he is not a rich man. Best evidence 
 in the world that he puts his genius into his calcula- 
 tions, for it is the nature of uncommon gifts to do 
 good to all but their possessor. That he is a poet, 
 and a true and high one, has been not so much ac- 
 knowledged by criticism, nsfelt in the republic. The 
 great army of editors, who paragraph upon one name, 
 as an entry of college-boys will play upon one flute, , 
 till the neighborhood would rather listen to a volun- 
 tary upon shovel and tongs, have not made his name 
 diurnal and hebdomadal ; but his poetry is diffused 
 by more unjostled avenues, to the understandings and 
 hearts of his countrymen. I, for one, think he is a 
 better banker for his genius, as with the same power 
 he would have made a better soldier, statesman, far- 
 mer, what you will. I have seen excellent poetry 
 from the hand of Plutus — (Biddle, I should have said, 
 but I never scratch out to you) — yet he has but ruf- 
 fled the muse, while Sprague has courted her. Our 
 Theodore,f bien-aime, at the court of Berlin, writes a 
 better despatch, I warrant you, than a fellow born of 
 red tape and fed on sealing-wax at the department. I 
 am afraid the genius of poor John Quincy Adams is 
 more limited. He is only the best president we have 
 had since Washington — not a poet, though he has a 
 volume in press. Briareus is not the father of all who 
 will have a niche. Shelley would have made an un- ; 
 safe banker, for he was prodigal of stuff. Pope, 
 Rogers, Crabbe, Sprague, Halleck, waste no gold, 
 even in poetry. Every idea gets his due of those 
 poets, and no more ; and Pope and Crabbe, by the 
 same token, would have made as good bankers as 
 Sprague and Rogers. We are under some mistake 
 about genius, my dear Doctor. I'll just step in-doors, 
 and find a definition of it in the library. 
 
 Really, the sun is hot enough, as Sancho says, to 
 fry the brains in a man's scull. 
 
 " Genius," says the best philosophical book I know 
 of, " wherever it is found, and to whatever purpose 
 directed, is mental power. It distinguishes the man 
 of fine phrensy, as Shakspere expresses it, from the 
 man of mere phrensy. It is a sort of instantaneous in- 
 sight that gives us knowledge without going to school 
 for it. Sometimes it is directed to one subject, some- 
 times to another; but under whatever form it exhibits 
 itself, it enables the individual who possesses it, to 
 make a wonderful, and almost miraculous progress in 
 the line of his pursuit." 
 
 Si non e vero, e ben trovato. If philosophy were 
 more popular, we should have Irving for president, 
 Halleck for governor of Iowa, and Bryant envoy to 
 Texas. But genius, to the multitude, is a phantom 
 without mouth, pockets, or hands — incapable of work, 
 unaccustomed to food, ignorant of the uses of coin, 
 
 • Mr. Sprague is cashier of the Globe Bank, Boston, 
 t Theodore Fay, secretary of the American embassy to 
 Prussia. 
 
 10 
 
 and unfit candidate, consequently, for any manner of 
 loaves and fishes. A few more Spragues would leaven 
 this lump of narrow prejudice. 
 
 I wish you would kill off your patients, dear Doctor, 
 and contrive to be with us at the agricultural show. I 
 flatter myself I shall take the prize for turnips. By 
 the way, to answer your question while I think of it, 
 that is the reason why I am not at Niagara, " taking a 
 look at the viceroy." I must watch my turnip-ling. 
 I met Lord Durham once or twice when in London, 
 and once at dinner at Lady Blessington's. I was ex- 
 cessively interested, on that occasion, by the tactics of 
 D'Israeli, who had just then chipped his political shell, 
 and was anxious to make an impression on Lord Dur- 
 ham, whose glory, still to come, was confidently fore- 
 told in that bright circle. I rather fancy the dinner 
 was made to give Vivian Grey the chance ; for her 
 ladyship, benevolent to every one, has helped D'Isra- 
 eli to " imp his wing," with a devoted friendship, of 
 which he should imbody in his maturest work the 
 delicacy and fervor. Women are glorious friends to 
 stead ambition ; but effective as they all can be, few 
 have the tact, and fewer the varied means, of the lady 
 in question. The guests dropped in, announced but 
 unseen, in the dim twilight ; and, when Lord Durham 
 came, I could only see that he was of middle stature, 
 and of a naturally cold address. Bulwer spoke to him, 
 but he was introduced to no one — a departure from 
 the custom of that maison sans-gene, which was ei- 
 ther a tribute to his lordship's reserve, or a ruse on the 
 part of Lady Blessington, to secure to D'Israeli the 
 advantage of having his acquaintance sought — suc- 
 cessful, if so ; for Lord Durham, after dinner, re- 
 quested a formal introduction to him. But for D'Or- 
 say, who sparkles, as he does everything else, out of 
 rule, and in splendid defiance of others' dulness, the 
 soup and the first half hour of dinner would have 
 passed off, with the usual English fashion of earnest 
 silence. I looked over my spoon at the future premier, 
 a dark, saturnine man, with very black hair, combed 
 very smooth, and wondered how a heart, with the tur- 
 bulent ambitions, and disciplined energies which were 
 stirring, I knew, in his, could be concealed under that 
 polished and marble tranquillity of mien and manner. 
 He spoke to Lady Blessington in an under-tone, re- 
 plying with a placid serenity that never reached a 
 smile, to so much of D'Orsay's champagne wit as 
 threw its sparkle in his way, and Bulwer and D'Israeli 
 were silent altogether. I should have foreboded a dull 
 dinner if, in the open brow, the clear sunny eye, and 
 unembarrassed repose of the beautiful and expressive 
 mouth of Lady Blessington, I had not read the prom- 
 ise of a change. It came presently. With a tact, of 
 which the subtle ease and grace can in no way be con- 
 veyed into description, she gathered up the cobweb 
 threads of conversation going on at different parts of 
 the table, and, by the most apparent accident, flung 
 them into D'Israeli's fingers, like the ribands of a four- 
 in-hand. And, if so coarse a figure can illustrate it, 
 he took the whip-hand like a master. It was an ap- 
 peal to his opinion on a subject he well understood, 
 and he burst at once, without preface, into that fiery 
 vein of eloquence which, hearing many times after, 
 and always with new delight, have stamped D'Israeli 
 on my mind as the most wonderful talker I have ever 
 had the fortune to meet. He is anything but a de- 
 claimed You would never think him on stilts. If 
 he catches himself in a rhetorical sentence, he mocks 
 at it in the next breath. He is satirical, contemptuous, 
 pathetic, humorous, everything in a moment ; and his 
 conversation on any subject whatever, embraces the 
 omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis. Add to this, that 
 D'Israeli's is the most intellectual face in England- 
 pale, regular, and overshadowed with the most luxu- 
 riant masses of raven-black hair ; and you will scarce 
 wonder that, meeting him for the first time. Lord Dur- 
 
22f3 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 ham was (as he was expected to be by the Aspasia of 
 that London Academe), impressed. He was not car- 
 ried away as we were. That would have been unlike 
 Lord Durham. He gave his whole mind to the bril- 
 liant meteor blazing before him ; but the telescope of 
 judgment was in his hand — to withdraw at pleasure. 
 He has evidently native to his blood, that great quality 
 of a statesman — retenu. D'Israeli and he formed at 
 the moment a finely contrasted picture. Understand- 
 ing his game perfectly, the author deferred, constantly 
 and adroitly, to the opinion of his noble listener, shap- 
 ed his argument by his suggestions, allowed him to 
 say nothing without using it as the nucleus of some 
 new turn to his eloquence, and all this, with an appa- 
 rent effort against it, as if he had desired to address 
 himself exclusively to Lady Blessington, but was com- 
 pelled, by a superior intellectual magnetism, to turn 
 aside and pay homage to her guest. With all this in- 
 stinctive management there was a flashing abandon in 
 his language and choice of illustration, a kindling of 
 his eye, and, what I have before described, a positive 
 foaming at his lips, which contrasted with the warm 
 but clear and penetrating eye of Lord Durham, his 
 calm yet earnest features, and lips closed without com- 
 pression, formed, as I said, a picture, and of an order 
 worth remembering in poetry. Without meaning any 
 disrespect to D'Israeli, whom I admire as much as any 
 man in England, I remarked to my neighbor, a cele- 
 brated artist, that it would make a glorious drawing of 
 Satan tempting an archangel to rebel. 
 
 Well — D'Israeli is in parliament, and Lord Durham 
 on the last round but one of the ladder of subject 
 greatness, The viceroy will be premier, no doubt ; 
 but it is questionable if the author of Vivian Grey 
 does more than carry out the moral of his own tale. 
 Talking at a brilliant table, with an indulgent and su- 
 perb woman on the watch for wit and eloquence, and 
 rising in the face of a cold common-sense house of 
 commons, on the look out for froth and humbug, are 
 two different matters. In a great crisis, with the na- 
 tion in a tempest, D'Israeli would flash across the 
 darkness very finely — but he will never do for the calm 
 right-hand of a premier. I wish him, I am sure, ev- 
 ery success in the world : but I trust that whatever 
 political reverses fall to his share, they will drive him 
 back to literature. 
 
 I have written this last sentence in the red light of 
 sunset, and I must be out to see my trees watered, and 
 my kine driven a-field after their milking. What a 
 coverlet of glory the day-god draws about him for his 
 repose ! I should like curtains of that burnt crimson. 
 If I have a passion in the world, it is for that royal 
 trade, upholstery; and so thought George the Fourth, 
 and so thinks Sultan Mahmoud, who, with his own 
 henna-tipped fingers, assisted by his assembled harem, 
 arranges every fold of drapery in the seraglio. If po- 
 etry fail, I'll try the profession some day en errand, and 
 meantime let me go out and study one of the three 
 hundred and sixty-five varieties of couch-drapery in 
 the west. 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 Mr dear Doctor: Your letter contained 
 
 « A few of the unpleasantest words 
 That e'er were writ on paper !" 
 
 Why should you not pass August at Glenmary? 
 Have your patients bought you, body and soul ? Is 
 there no "night-bell" in the city but yours? Have 
 ypu no practice in the country, my dear Esculapius ? 
 Faith ! I'll be ill ! By the time you reach here, I 
 shall be a " case." I have not had a headache now 
 in twenty years, and my constitution requires a change. 
 I'll begin by eating the cucumbers we had saved for 
 
 your visit, and you know the consequences. Mix me a 
 pill for the cholera — first, second, or third stage of the 
 disease, according to your speed — and come with 
 what haste you may. If you arrive too late, you lose 
 your fee, but I'll return your visit, by the honor of a 
 ghost. 
 
 By the way, as a matter of information, do you 
 charge in such cases? Or, the man being dead, do 
 you deduct for not feeling his pulse, nor telling him 
 the name of his damaged organ in Latin ? It should 
 be half-price, I think, these items off. Let me know 
 by express mail, as one likes to be prepared. 
 
 Since I wrote to you, I have added the Chemung 
 river to my list of acquaintances. It was done a Vim- 
 frovista, as most pleasant things are. We were dri- 
 ving to the village on some early errand, and met a 
 friend at the cross-roads, bound with an invalid to 
 Avon Springs. He was driving his own horses, and 
 proposed to us to set him a day's journey on his way. 
 I had hay to cut, but the day was made for truants — 
 bright, breezy, and exhilarating ; and as I looked over 
 my shoulder, the only difficulty vanished, for there 
 stood a pedlar chaffering for a horn-comb with a girl 
 at a well. We provided for a night's toilet from his 
 tin-box, and easing off the check-reins a couple of 
 holes, to enlighten my ponies as to the change in 
 their day's work, we struck into the traveller's trot, 
 and sped away into the eye of a southwest breeze, 
 happy as urchins when the schoolmaster is on a jury. 
 When you come here, I shall drive you to the 
 Narrows of the Susquehannah. That is a word, nota 
 bene, which, in this degree of latitude, refers not at all 
 to the breadth of the stream. It is a place where the 
 mountain, like many a frowning coward, threatens to 
 crowd its gentler neighbor, but gives room at its calm 
 approach, and annoys nobody but the passer-by. The 
 road between them, as you come on, looks etched 
 with a thumb-nail along the base of the cliff, and you 
 would think it a pokerish drive, making no allowance 
 for perspective. The friable rock, however, makes 
 rather a smooth single track, and if you have the in- 
 side when you meet Farmer Giles or the stage-coach, 
 you have only to set your hub against the rock, and 
 "let them go by as likes." The majestic and tranquil 
 river sweeps into the peaked shadow, and on again, 
 with the disdain of a beauty used to conquer. It re- 
 minded me of Lady Blessington's "do if you dare !" 
 when the mob at the house of lords threatened to 
 break her chariot windows. There was a calm cour- 
 age in Miladi's French glove that carried her through, 
 and so amid this mob of mountains, glides the Sus- 
 quehannah to the sea. 
 
 While I am here, let me jot down an observation 
 worthy the notice of Mr. Capability Brown. This 
 cliff falls into a a line of hills running from northwest 
 to southeast, and by five in the summer afternoon, 
 their tall shoulders have nudged the sun, and the long, 
 level road at their bases lies in deep shadow, for miles 
 along the Owaga and Susquehannah. " Consequence 
 is," as my friend of the "Albany Daily" says, we can 
 steal a march upon twilight, and take a cool drive be- 
 fore tea. What the ruination shops on the west side 
 of Broadway are to you, this spur of the Allega- 
 nies is to me (minus the plate-glass, and the tempta- 
 tions). I value this — for the afternoons in July and 
 August are hot and long ; the breeze dies away, the 
 flies get in-doors, and with the desire for motion, yet 
 no ability to stir, one longs for a ride with Ariel 
 through "the veins o' the earth." Mr. C. Brown 
 now would mark me down, for this privilege of road 
 well shaded, some twenty pound in the rent. He is a 
 man in England who trades upon his taste. He goes 
 to your country-seat to tell you what can be done 
 with it — what are its unimproved advantages, what to 
 do with your wood, and what with your water. He 
 would rate this shady mountain as an eligibility in the 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 2*7 
 
 site, to be reckoned, of course, as income. A very I 
 pleasant man is Mr. Brown ! 
 
 It occurs to me, Doctor, that a new branch of this ] 
 gentleman's profession might be profitable. Why not j 
 set up a shop to tell penjjle what they can make of 
 themselves ? I have a great mind to take out a patent I 
 for the idea. The stock in trade would be two chairs I 
 and a green curtain — (for taste, like rouge, should be j 
 sold privately) — not expensive. I would advertise to 
 see gentlemen in the morning, ladies in the evening, I 
 " secresy in all cases strictly observed." Few people j 
 of either sex know their own style. Your Madonna 
 is apt to romp, for instance, and your romp to wear | 
 her hair plain and a rosary. Few ladies know what 
 eolon they look best in — whether smiles or tears are j 
 most becoming, whether they appear to most advan- 
 tage sitting, like Queen Victoria and Tom Moore (and | 
 this involves a delicate question), or standing and | 
 walking. The world is full of people who mistake \ 
 their style — fish for your net every one. How many 
 women are never charming till they forget themselves ! 
 A belle is a woman who knows her weapons — colors, 
 smiles, moods, caprices ; who has looked at her face 
 in the glass like an artist, and knows what will lighten 
 a defect or enhance a beauty. The art is as rare as 
 the belle. " Pourquoy, my dear knight." Because 
 taste is, where knowledge was before the discovery of 
 printing — locked up with the first possessor. Why 
 should it not be diffused ? What a refuge for reduced 
 gentility would be such a vocation. What is now the 
 disease of fortunes would be then their remedy ; pa- 
 rents would cultivate a taste for eloquence in their 
 children, because there is no knowing what they may 
 come to — the reason, now, why they take pains to re- 
 press it. 
 
 I presume it is in consequence of the diffusion of 
 printing that ignorance of the law is no apology for 
 crime. Were "taste within reach of all (there might 
 be dispensaries for the poor), that " shocking bad hat" 
 of yours, my dear Doctor, would be a criminal offence. 
 Our fat friend with the long-tailed coat, and the waist 
 at his shoulder-blades, would be liable to fine for mis- 
 informing the tailor as to the situation of his hips — 
 the tailor of course not to blame, having nothing to go 
 by. Two scandalous old maids together would be 
 abated as a nuisance — as it is the quantity of tin-pots, 
 which, in a concert upon that tintinnabulary instru- 
 ment, constitutes a disturbance of the peace. The 
 reform would be endless. I am not sure it could be 
 extended to bad taste in literature, for, like rebellion, 
 the crime would merge in the universality of the of- 
 fenders. But it would be the general putting down of 
 tame monsters, now loose on society. Pensez y ! 
 
 What should you think of dining with a woman be- 
 hind your chair worth seven hundred thousand pounds 
 sterling — well invested? You may well stare — but 
 unless a large number of sensible people are very 
 much mistaken, you may do so any day, for some 
 three shillings, at a small inn on the Susquehannah. 
 Those who know the road, leave behind them a showy, 
 porticoed tavern, new, and carefully divested of all 
 trees and grass, and pull up at the door of the old inn 
 at the place, a low, old-fashioned house, built on a 
 brook-side, and with all the appearance of a comfort- 
 able farmhouse, save only a leaning and antiquated 
 sign-post. Here lives a farmer well off" in the world, 
 a good-natured old man, who for some years has not 
 meant to keep open tavern, but from the trouble of 
 taking down his sign-post, or the habit, and acquaint- 
 ance with travellers, gives all who come what chance 
 fare may be under the roof, and at the old prices com- 
 mon in days when the bill was not ridden by leagues 
 of white paint and portico. His dame, the heiress, is 
 a tall and erect woman of fifty ("or, by'r lady, three- 
 score"), a smiling, intelligent, ready hostess, with the 
 
 natural manners of a gentlewoman. Now and then, a 
 pale daughter, unmarried, and twenty-four or younger, 
 looks into the whitewashed parlor, and if the farmer 
 is home from the field, he sits down with his hat on, 
 and lends you a chat with a voice sound and hearty as 
 the smell of day. It is altogether a pleasant place to 
 loiter away the noon, and though it was early for din- 
 ner when we arrived, we put up our horses (the men 
 were all a-field), and Dame Raymond spread her white 
 cloth, and set on her cherry-pie, while her daughter 
 broiled for us the de quoi of the larder, in the shape 
 of a salt mackerel. The key of the " bin" was in her 
 pocket, and we were young enough, the dame said, as 
 she gave it to us, to feed our own horses. This good 
 woman, or this great lady, is the only daughter, as I 
 understand it, of an old farmer ninety years of age, 
 who has fallen heir to an immense fortune in England. 
 He was traced out several years ago by the executors, 
 and the proper testimonials of the property placed in 
 his hands ; but he was old, and his child was well off 
 and happy, and he refused to put himself to any trou- 
 ble about it. Dame Raymond herself thought Eng- 
 land a great way off; and the pride of her life is her 
 fine chickens, and to go so far upon the strength of a 
 few letters, leaving the farm and hen-roost to take care 
 of themselves, was an undertaking which, she felt, jus- 
 tified Farmer Raymond in shaking his head. Lately 
 an enterprising gentleman in the neighborhood has 
 taken the papers, and she consented to write to her 
 father, who willingly made over to her all authority in 
 the matter. The claim, I understand, is as well au- 
 thenticated as paper evidence can make it, and the 
 probability is, that in a few months Dame Raymond 
 will be more troubled with her riches than she ever 
 was with her chickens. 
 
 We dined at our leisure, and had plenty of sharp 
 gossip with the tall hostess, who stood to serve the tea 
 from a side-table, and between our cups kept the flies 
 from her tempting cherry-pie and brown sugar, with a 
 large fan. I have not often seen a more shrewd and 
 sensible woman, and she laughs and philosophizes 
 about her large fortune in a way that satisfied me she 
 would laugh just as cheerly if it should turn out a 
 bubble. She said her husband had told her " it was 
 best not to be proud, till she got her money." The 
 only symptom that I detected of castle-building, was a 
 hint she let slip of hoping to entertain travellers, some 
 day, in a better house. I coupled this with another 
 remark, and suspected that the new tavern, with its big 
 portico and blazing sign, had not taken the wind out 
 of her sails without offence, and that, perhaps, the 
 only use of her money, on which she had determined, 
 was to build a bigger and eclipse the intruder. 
 
 I amused myself with watching her as she bustled 
 about with old-fashioned anxiety to anticipate our 
 wants, and fancying the changes to which the acquisi- 
 tion of this immense fortune might introduce her in 
 England. There was her daughter, whom a little mil- 
 linery would improve into a very presentable heiress, 
 cooking our mackerel ; while Mrs. Thwaites, the gro- 
 cer's widow in London, with no more money probably, 
 was beset by half the unmarried noblemen in England, 
 Lord Lyndhurst, it is said, the most pressing. But 
 speculation is endless, and you shall go down with 
 your trout line, dear Doctor, and spin your own cob- 
 webs while Dame Raymond cooks your fish. 
 
 I have spun out my letter to such a length, that I 
 have left myself no room to prate to you of the beau- 
 ties of the Chemung, but you are likely to hear 
 enough of it, for it is a subject with which I am just 
 now something enamoured. I think you share with 
 me my passion for rivers. If you have the grace to 
 come and visit us, and I survive the cholera you have 
 brought upon me, we will visit this new Naiad in com- 
 pany^ and take Dame Raymond in our way. Adieu. 
 
228 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 I am of opinion, dear Doctor, that a letter to be read 
 understanding^, should have marginal references to 
 the state of the thermometer, the condition of the 
 writer's digestion, and the quality of his pen and ink 
 at the time of writing. These matters, if they do not 
 affect a man's belief in a future state, very sensibly op 
 erate upon his style of composition, sometimes (so 
 with me at least), upon his sentiments and minor mor- 
 als. 
 
 Like most other pen-and-inklings in this be-printed 
 country, I commenced authorship at precisely the 
 wrong end — criticism. Never having put my hat upon 
 more than one or two grown-up thoughts, I still feel 
 myself qualified to pronounce upon any man's litera- 
 ry stature from Walter Scott to whom you please — 
 God forgive me ! I remember (under this delusion of 
 Sathan) sitting down to review a book by one of the 
 most sensible women in this country. It was a pleas- 
 ant morning — favorable symptom for the author. I 
 wrote the name of the book at the head of a clean sheet 
 of Bath post, and the nib of my pen capered nimbly 
 away into a flourish, in a fashion to coax praise out of 
 a pumpkin. What but courtesy on so bright a morn- 
 ing and with so smooth a pen ? I was in the middle 
 of the page, taking breath after a long and laudatory 
 sentence, when, paff ! through the window came a 
 gust of air, labelled for the bare nerves. (If you have 
 ever been in Boston, perhaps you have observed that 
 an east wind, in that city of blue noses in June, gives 
 you a sensation like being suddenly deprived of your 
 skin.) In a shudder of disgust I bore down upon the 
 dot of an i, and my pen, like an " over-tried friend," 
 gave way under the pressure. With the wind in that 
 same quarter, dexterity died. After vain efforts to 
 mend my pen to its original daintiness, I amputated the 
 nib to a broad working stump, and aimed it doggedly 
 at the beginning of a new paragraph. But my wits 
 had gone about with the grasshopper on the church- 
 steeple. Nothing would trickle from that stumpy 
 quill, either graceful or gracious ; and having looked 
 through the book, but with a view to find matter to 
 praise, I was obliged to run it over anew to forage for 
 the east wind. "Hence the milk in the cocoa-nut," 
 as the showman says of the monkey's stealing ch 
 dren. I wrote a savage review, which the reader w 
 expected to believe contained the opinions of the re- 
 viewer ! ! Oh, Jupiter ! 
 
 All this is to apologize, not for my own letter, which 
 I intend to be a pattern of good humor, but for a pas- 
 sage in your last (if written upon a hard egg you 
 should have mentioned it in the margin), in which, 
 apropos of my jaunt to the Chemung, you accuse me 
 of being glad to get away from my hermitage. I 
 could write you a sermon now on the nature of content, 
 but you would say the very text is apocryphal. My 
 "lastly," however, would go to prove that there is big- 
 otry in retirement as in alhthings either good or pleas- 
 ureable. The eye that never grows familiar with na- 
 ture, needs freshening from all things else. A room, a 
 chair, a musical instrument, a horse, a dog, the road 
 you drive daily, and the well you drink from, are all 
 more prized when left and returned to. The habit of 
 turning back daily from a certain mile-stone, in your 
 drive, makes that milestone after a while, a prison wall. 
 It is pleasant to pass it, though the road beyond be 
 less beautiful. If I were once more " brave Master 
 Shoetie, the great traveller," it would irk me, I dare 
 say, to ride thirty miles in a rail-car drawn by one slow 
 horse- Yet it is a pleasant "lark" now, to run down 
 to Ithaca for a night, in this drowsy conveyance, 
 though I exchange a cool cottage for a fly-nest, "lav- 
 endered linen" for abominable cotton, and the service 
 of civil William for the " young lady that takes care 
 of the chambers," I like the cobwebs swept out 
 
 of my eyes. I like to know what reason I have to 
 keep my temper among my household gods. I like 
 to pay an extravagant bill for villanous entertainment 
 abroad, and come back to escape ruin in the luxuries 
 of home. 
 
 Doctor! were you ever a vagabond for years togeth- 
 er ? I know you have hung your hat on the south 
 pole, but you are one of those " friend of the family" 
 men, who will travel from Dan to Beersheba, and be 
 at no charges for lodging. You can not understand, 1 
 think, the life from which I have escaped — the life of 
 " mine ease in mine inn." Pleasant mockery ! You 
 have never had the hotel fever — never sickened of the 
 copperplate human faces met exclusively in those 
 homes of the homeless — never have gone distracted at 
 the eternal "one piece of soap, and the last occupant's 
 tooth-brush and cigar !" To be slighted any hour of 
 the evening for a pair of slippers and a tin candle- 
 stick — to sleep and wake amid the din of animal wants, 
 complaining and supplied — to hear no variety of hu- 
 man tone but the expression of these baser necessities 
 — to be waited on either by fellows who would bring 
 your coffin as unconcernedly as your breakfast, or by a 
 woman who is rude, because insulted when kind — to lie 
 ways in strange beds — to go home to a house of stran- 
 gers — to be weary without pity, sick without soothing, 
 sad without sympathy — to sit at twilight by your lone- 
 ly window, in some strange city, and, with a heart 
 which a child's voice would dissolve in tenderness, to 
 see door after door open and close upon fathers, broth- 
 ers, friends, expected and welcomed by the beloved 
 and the beloving — these are costly miseries against 
 which I almost hourly weigh my cheaper happiness in 
 a home I Yet this is the life pined after by the grown- 
 up boy — the life called fascinating and mystified in ro- 
 mance — the life, dear Doctor, for which even yourself 
 can fancy I am " imping my wing" anew ! Oh, no ! 
 I have served seven years for this Rachel of content- 
 ment, and my heart is no Laban to put me off with a 
 Leah. 
 
 " A !" Imagine this capital letter laid on its back, 
 and pointed south by east, and you have a pretty fair 
 diagram of the junction of the Susquehannah and the 
 Chemung. The note of admiration describes a su- 
 perb line of mountains at the back of the Chemung 
 valley, and the quotation marks express the fine bluffs 
 that overlook the meeting of the waters at Athens. 
 The cross of the letter (say a line of four miles), de- 
 fines a road from one river to the other, by which 
 travellers up the Chemung save the distance to the 
 point of the triangle, and the area between is a broad 
 plain, just now as fine a spectacle of teeming harvest 
 as you would find on the Genesee. 
 
 As the road touches the Chemung, you pass undei 
 the base of a round mountain, once shaped like a 
 sugar-loaf, but now with a top, o' the fashion of a 
 schoolboy's hat punched in to drink from; the floor- 
 worn edge of the felt answering to a fortification 
 
 around the rim of the hill built by I should 
 
 be obliged if you would tell me whom. They call 
 it Spanish Hill, and the fortifications were old at 
 the time of the passing through of Sullivan's ar- 
 my. It is as pretty a fort as my Uncle Toby could 
 have seen in Flanders, and was, doubtless, occupied 
 by gentlemen soldiers long before the Mayflower 
 moored off the rock of Plymouth. The tradition 
 runs that an Indian chief once ascended it to look for 
 Spanish gold ; but on reaching the top, was enveloped 
 in clouds and thunder, and returned with a solemn 
 command from the spirit of the mountain that no In- 
 dian should ever set foot on it again. An old lady, 
 who lives in the neighborhood (famous for killing two 
 tories with a stone in her stocking), declares that the 
 dread of this mountain is universal among the tribes, 
 and that nothing would induce a red man to ascend it. 
 This looks as if the sachem had found what he went 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 229 
 
 after ; and it is a modern fact, I understand, that a man 
 hired to plough on the hill-side, suddenly left his em- 
 ployer and purchased a large farm, by nobody knows 
 what windfall of fortune. Half this mountain belongs 
 to a gentleman who is building a country-seat on an 
 exquisite site between it and the river, and to the kind- 
 ness of his son and daughter, who accompanied us in 
 our ascent, we are indebted for a most pleasant hour, 
 and what information I have given you. 
 
 I will slip in here a memorandum for any invalid, 
 town-weary person, or new-married couple, to whom 
 you may have occasion, in your practice, to recom- 
 mend change of air. The house formerly occupied 
 by this gentleman, a roomy mansion, in a command- 
 ing and beautiful situation, is now open as an inn, and 
 I know nowhere a retreat so private and desirable. It 
 is near both the Susquehannah and the Chemung, the 
 hills laced with trout-streams, four miles from Athens, 
 and half way between Owegoand Elmira. The scen- 
 ery all about is delicious, and the house well kept at 
 country charges. My cottage is some sixteen miles 
 off; and if you give any of your patients a letter to 
 me, I will drive up and see them, with a posy and a pot 
 of jelly. You will understand that they must be peo- 
 ple who do not "add perfume to the violet." In my 
 way — simple. 
 
 I can in no way give you an idea of the beauty of 
 the Chemung river from Brigham's Inn to Elmira. 
 We entered immediately upon the Narrows — a spot 
 where the river follows into a curve of the mountain, 
 like an inlaying of silver around the bottom of an em- 
 erald cup — the brightest water, the richest foliage — 
 and a landscape of meadow between the horns of the 
 crescent that would be like the finest park scenery in 
 England, if the boldness of the horizon did not mix 
 with it a resemblance, to Switzerland. 
 
 We reached Elmira at sunset. What shall I say 
 of it ? From a distance, its situation is most beauti- 
 ful. It lies (since we have begun upon the alphabet) 
 in the tail of a magnificent L, formed by the bright 
 winding of the river. Perhaps the surveyor, instead 
 of deriving its name from his sweetheart, called it L. 
 mirabile — corrupted to vulgar comprehension, Elmi- 
 ra. If he did not, he might, and I will lend him the 
 etymology. 
 
 The town is built against a long island, covered 
 with soft green-sward, and sprinkled with noble trees ; 
 a promenade of unequalled beauty and convenience, 
 but that all which a village can muster of unsightli- 
 ness has chosen the face of the river-bank " to turn 
 its lining to the sun." Fie on you, Elmira ! I in- 
 tend to get up a memorial to Congress, praying that 
 the banks of rivers in all towns settled henceforth, 
 shall be government property, to be reserved and 
 planted for public grounds. It was the design of 
 William Penn at Philadelphia, and think what a 
 binding it would have been to his chequer-board. 
 Fancy a pier and promenade along the Hudson at 
 New York ! Imagine it a feature of every town in 
 this land of glorious rivers ! 
 
 There is a singular hotel at Elmira (big as a state- 
 house, and be-turreted and be-columned according to 
 the most approved system of impossible rent and 
 charges to make it possible), in the plan of which, 
 curious enough, the chambers were entirely forgotten. 
 The house is all parlors and closets ! We were 
 shown into superb drawing-rooms (one for each party), 
 with pier-glasses, windows to the floor, expensive fur- 
 niture, and a most polite landlord ; and began to think 
 the civilization for which he had been looking east, 
 had stepped over our heads and gone on to the Paci- 
 fic. Excellent supper and civil service. At dark, 
 two very taper mutton candles set on the superb mar- 
 ble-table — but that was but a trifling incongruity. 
 After a call from a pleasant friend or two, and a walk, 
 we made an early request to be shown to our bed- 
 
 rooms. The " young lady, that sometimes uses a 
 broom for exercise," opened a closet-door with a look 
 of la voila ! and left us speechless with astonishment, 
 There was a bed of the dimensions of a saint's niche, 
 but no window by which, if stifled, the soul could es- 
 cape to its destination. Yet here we were, evidently 
 abandoned on a hot night in July, with a door to shut 
 if we thought it prudent, and a candle-wick like an 
 ignited poodle-dog to assist in the process of suffoca- 
 tion! I hesitated about calling up the landlord, for, 
 as I said before, he was a most polite and friendly 
 person ; and if we were to give up the ghost in that 
 little room, it was evidently in the ordinary arrange- 
 ments of the house. "Why not sleep in the parlor?" 
 you will have said. So we did. But, like the king 
 of Spain, who was partly roasted because nobody 
 came to move back the fire, this obvious remedy did 
 not at the instant occur to me. The pier-glass and 
 other splendors of course did duty as bed-room furni- 
 ture, and, I may say, we slept sumptuously. Our 
 friends in the opposite parlor did as we did, but took the 
 moving of the bed to be, tout bonnement, what the land- 
 lord expected. I do not think so, yet I was well pleased 
 with him and his entertainment, and shall stop at the 
 " Eagle" incontinently — if I can choose my apartment. 
 I am not sure but, in other parts of the house, the 
 blood-thirsty architect has constructed some of these 
 smothering places without parlors. God help the un- 
 wary traveller! 
 
 Talking of home (we were at home to dinner the 
 next day), I wonder whether it is true that adverse for- 
 tunes have thrown Mrs. Sigourney's beautiful home 
 into the market. It is offered for sale, and the news- 
 papers say as much. If so, it is pity, indeed. I was 
 there once ; and to leave so delicious a spot must, 1 
 think, breed a heart-ache. In general, unless the re- 
 verse is extreme, compassion is thrown away on those 
 who leave a large house to be comfortable in a small 
 one ; but she is a poetess, and a most true and sweet 
 one, and has a property in that house, and in all its 
 trees and flowers, which can neither be bought nor 
 sold. It is robbery to sell it for its apparent value. 
 You can understand, for "your spirit is touched to 
 these fine issues," how a tree that the eye of genius 
 has rested on while the mind was at work among its 
 bright fancies, becomes the cradle and home of these 
 fancies, The brain seems driven out of its workshop 
 if you cut it down. So with walks. So with streams. 
 So with the modifications of natural beauty seen thence 
 habitually — sunrise, sunsetting, moonlight. In pecu- 
 liar places these daily glories take peculiar effects, and 
 in that guise genius becomes accustomed to recognise 
 and love them most. Who can buy this at auction ! 
 Who can weave this golden mesh in another tree — 
 give the same voices to another stream — the same sun- 
 set to other hills ? This fairy property, invisible as it 
 is, is acquired slowly. Habit, long association, the con- 
 nexion with many precious thoughts (the more pre- 
 cious the farther between)* make it precious. To 
 sell such a spot for its wood and brick, is to value 
 Tom Moore for what he will weigh — Daniel Webster 
 for his superficies. Then there uill be a time (I trust 
 it is far off") when the property will treble even in sale- 
 able value. The bee and the poet must be killed be- 
 fore their honey is tasted. For how much more would 
 Abbotsford sell now than in the lifetime of Scott ? For 
 what could you buy Ferney — Burns's cottage — Shak- 
 spere's house at Stratford ? I have not the honor of 
 a personal acquaintance with Mrs. Sigourney, and 
 can not judge with what philosophy she may sustain 
 this reverse. But bear it well or ill, there can be no 
 doubt it falls heavily ; and it is one of those instances, 
 I think, where public feeling should be called on to 
 interpose. But in what shape? I have always ad- 
 mired the generosity and readiness with which actors 
 play for the benefit of a decayed " brother of the sock." 
 
230 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 Let American authors contribute to make up a volume, 
 and let the people of Hartford, who live in the light 
 of this bright spirit, head the subscription with ten 
 thousand copies. You live among literary people, 
 dear Doctor, and your " smile becomes you better than 
 any man's in all Phrygia." You can set it afloat if you 
 will. My name is among the W.'s, but I will be 
 ready in my small turn. 
 
 "Now God b'wi'you, good Sir Topas!" for on this 
 sheet there is no more room, and I owe you but one. 
 Correspondence, like thistles, " is not blown away till 
 it hath got too high a top." Adieu. 
 
 LETTER VIII 
 
 Mr Dear Doctor : What can keep you in town 
 during this insufferable hot solstice ? I can not fancy, 
 unless you shrink from a warm welcome in the coun- 
 try. It is too hot for enthusiasm, and I have sent the 
 cart to the hay-field, and crept under the bridge in 
 my slippers, as if I had found a day to be idle, though 
 I promised myself to see the harvest home, without 
 missing sheaf or winrow. Yet it must be cooler here 
 than where you are, for I see accounts of drought on 
 the seaboard, while with us every hot noon has bred 
 its thunder-shower, and the corn on the dry hill-sides 
 is the only crop not kept back by the moisture. Still, 
 the waters are low, and the brook at my feet has de- 
 pleted to a slender vein, scarce stouter than the pulse 
 that flutters under your thumb in the slightest wrist 
 in your practice. My lobster is missing — probably 
 gone to " the springs." My swallowlets too, who 
 have, "as it were, eat paper and drunk ink," have 
 flitted since yesterday, like illiterate gipseys, leaving 
 no note of their departure. " Who shall tell Priam 
 so, or Hecuba." The old swallows circle about as if 
 they expected them again. Heaven send they are not 
 in some crammed pocket in that red school-house, 
 unwilling listeners to the vexed alphabet, or, perhaps, 
 squeezed to death in the varlet's perplexity at crook- 
 ed S. 
 
 I have blotted that last sentence like a school-boy, 
 but between the beginning and the end of it, I have 
 lent a neighbor my side-hill plough, besides answering, 
 by the way, raiher an embarrassing question. My 
 catechiser lives above me on the drink (his name for 
 the river), and is one of those small farmers, common 
 here, who live without seeing money from one year's 
 end to the other. He never buys, he trades. He 
 takes a bag of wheat, or a fleece, to the village for salt 
 fish and molasses, pays his doctor in corn or honey, 
 and "changes work" with the blacksmith, the sad- 
 dler, and the shoemaker. He is a shrewd man withal, 
 likes to talk, and speaks Yankee of the most Boeotian 
 fetch and purity. Imagine a disjointed-looking En- 
 celadus, in a homespun sunflower-colored coat, and 
 small yellow eyes, expressive of nothing but the merest 
 curiosity, looking down on me by throwing himself 
 over the railing like a beggar's wallet of broken meats. 
 
 " Good morning, Mr. Willis?/ !" 
 
 From hearing my name first used in the possessive 
 case, probably (Willis's farm, or cow), he regularly 
 throws me in that last syllable. 
 
 "Ah ! good morning !" (Looking up at the inter- 
 ruption, I made that unsightly blot which you have 
 just excused.) 
 
 " You aint got no side-hill plough?" 
 
 " Yes, I have, and I'll lend it to you with pleasure." 
 
 "Wal! you're darn'd quick. I warnt a go'n' to 
 ask you quite yet. Writin' to your folks at hum ?" 
 
 "No!" 
 
 "Making out a lease!" 
 
 "No!" 
 
 " How you do spin it off ! You haint always work'd 
 on a farm, hare ye !" 
 
 It is a peculiarity (a redeeming peculiarity, I think), 
 of the Yankees, that though their questions are rude, 
 they are never surprised if you do not answer them. 
 I did not feel that the thermometer warranted me in 
 going into the* history of my life to my overhanging 
 neighbor, and I busied myself in crossing my t's and 
 dotting my i's very industriously. He had a maggot 
 in his brain, however, and must e'en be delivered of it. 
 He pulled off a splinter or two from under the bridge 
 with his long arms, and during the silence William 
 came to me with a message, which he achieved with 
 his English under-tone of respect. 
 
 " Had to lick that boy some, to make him so darn'd 
 civil, hadn't ye ?" 
 
 " You have a son about his age, I think." 
 " Yes ; but I guess he couldn't be scared to talk 
 that way. What's the critter 'fear'd on ?" 
 No answer. 
 
 " You haint been a minister, have ye ?" 
 "No!" 
 
 "Wal ! they talk a heap about your place. I say, 
 Mr. Wittisy, you aint nothing particular, be yeV 
 
 You should have seen, dear Doctor, the look of 
 eager and puzzled innocence with which this rather 
 difficult question was delivered. Something or other 
 had evidently stimulated my good neighbor's curiosi- 
 ty, but whether I had been blown up in a steamboat, 
 or had fatted a prize pig, or what was my claim to the 
 digilo monstrari, it was more than half his errand to 
 discover. I have put down our conversation, I be- 
 lieve, with the accuracy of a short-hand writer. Now, 
 is not this a delicious world in which, out of a mu- 
 seum neither stuffed nor muzzled, you may find such 
 an arcadian ? What a treasure he would be to those 
 ancient mariners of polite life, who exist but to tell 
 ! you of their little peculiarities ! 
 
 | I have long thought, dear Doctor, and this reminds 
 ! me of it, that there were two necessities of society un- 
 fitted with a vocation. (If you know of any middle- 
 ! aged gentlemen out of employment, I have no objec- 
 tion to your reserving the suggestion for a private 
 charity, but otherwise, I would communicate it to the 
 world as a new light.) The first is a luxury which no 
 hotel should be without, no neighborhood, no thor- 
 oughfare, no editor's closet. I mean a professed, 
 salaried, stationary, and confidential listener. Fancy 
 the comfort of such a thing. There should be a well- 
 dressed silent gentleman, for instance, pacing habitu- 
 ally the long corridor of the Astor, with a single button 
 on his coat of the size of a door-handle. You enter 
 in a violent hurry, or with a mind tenanted to suit 
 yourself, and some faineant babbler, weary of his 
 emptiness, must needs take you aside, and rob you of 
 two mortal hours, more or less, while he tells you his 
 tale of nothing. If " a penny saved is a penny got," 
 what a value it would add to life to be able to transfer 
 this leech of precious time, by laying his hand polite- 
 ly on the large button of the listener ! " Finish your 
 story to this gentleman !" quoth you. Then, again, 
 there is your unhappy man in hotels, newly arrived, 
 without an acquaintance save the crisp and abbrevia- 
 ting bar-keeper, who wanders up and down, silent- 
 sick, and more solitary in the crowd about him than 
 the hermit on the lone column of the temple of Jupi- 
 ter. What a mercy to such a sufferer to be able to 
 step to the bar, and order a listener. Or to send for 
 him with a bottle of wine when dining alone (most 
 particularly alone), at a table of two hundred ! Or to 
 ring for him in number four hundred and ninety-three, 
 of a rainy Sunday, with punch and cigars ! I am de- 
 ceived in Stetstort of the Astor, if he is not philoso- 
 pher enough to see the value of this suggestion 
 " Baths in the house, and a respectable listener if de- 
 sired," would be an attractive advertisement, let me 
 
 promise you ! 
 
 The other vocation 
 
 to which I referred, would be 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 231 
 
 that of a sort of ambulant dictionary, used mostly at 
 evening parties. It should be a gentleman not dis- 
 tinguishable from the common animated wall-flower, 
 except by some conventional sign, as a bit of blue rib- 
 and in his button-hole. His qualifications should be 
 to know all persons moving in the circle, and some- 
 thing about them — to be up, in short, to the town 
 gossip — what Miss Thing's expectations are — who 
 " my friend" is with the died mustache — and which 
 of the stout ladies on the sofa are the forecast shad- 
 ows of coming balls, or the like desirablenesses. There 
 are a thousand invisible cobwebs threaded through so- 
 ciety, which the stranger is apt to cross a trovers — 
 committing his enthusiasm, for instance, to the deaf 
 ears of a fiancee ; or, from ignorance, losing opportu- 
 nities of knowing the clever, the witty, and the famous 
 — all of whom look, at a first glance, very much like 
 other people. The gentleman with the blue riband, 
 you see, would remedy all this. You might make 
 for him after you bow to the lady of the house, and in 
 ten minutes put yourself aw courant of the entire field. 
 You might apply to him (if you had been absent to 
 Santa Fe or the Pyramids) for the last new shibboleth, 
 the town rage, the name of the new play or poem, the 
 form and color of the freshest change in the kaleido- 
 scope of society. It is not uncommon for sensible 
 people to retire, and "sweep and garnish" their self- 
 respect in a month's seclusion. It is some time before 
 they become au fait again of what it is necessary to 
 know of the follies of the hour. The graceful yet 
 bitter wit, the unoffending yet pointed rally, the con- 
 fidence which colors all defeats like successes, are del- 
 icate weapons, the dexterity at which depends much 
 on familiarity with the ground. What an advent to 
 the diffident and the embarrassed would be such a 
 profession ! How many persons of wit and spirit j 
 there are in society blank for lack of confidence, who, 
 with such a friend in the corner, would come out like 
 magic-ink to the fire ! " Ma hardiesse" (says the as- 
 piring rocket), " vient de mon ardeur /" But the de- 
 vice would lose its point did it take a jack-o'-lantern 
 for a star. Mention these little hints to your cleverest 
 female friend, dear Doctor. It takes a woman to in- 
 troduce an innovation. 
 
 Since I wrote to you, I have been adopted by per- 
 haps the most abominable cur you will see in your 
 travels. I mention it to ward off the first impression i 
 — for a dog gives a character to a house ; and I would : 
 not willingly have a friend light on such a monster in j 
 my premises without some preparation. His first ap- | 
 parition was upon a small floss carpet at the foot of an j 
 ottoman, the most luxurious spot in the house, of | 
 which he had taken possession with a quiet impudence j 
 that perfectly succeeded. A long, short-legged cur, 
 of the color of spoiled mustard, with most base tail 
 and erect ears — villanous in all his marks. Rather a 
 dandy gentleman, from New- York, was calling on us 
 when he was discovered, and presuming the dog to be 
 his, we forbore remark ; and, assured by this chance 
 indulgence, he stretched himself to sleep. The in- 
 dignant outcry with which the gentleman disclaimed 
 all knowledge of him, disturbed his slumber; and, 
 not to leave us longer in doubt, he walked confidently 
 across the room, and seated himself between my feet 
 with a canine freedom I had never seen exhibited, ex- 
 cept upon most familiar acquaintance. I saw clearly 
 that our visiter looked upon my disclaimer as a " fetch." 
 It would have been perilling my credit for veracity to 
 deny the dog. So no more was said about him, and 
 since that hour he has kept himself cool in my shad- 
 ow. I have tried to make him over to the kitchen, 
 but he will neither feed nor stay with them. I can 
 neither outrun him on horseback, nor lose him by 
 crossing ferries. Very much to the discredit of my 
 taste, I am now never seen without this abominable 
 follower — and there is no help for it, unless I kill him, 
 
 which, since he loves me, would be worse than shoot- 
 ing the albatross ; besides, I have at least a drachm 
 (three scruples) of Pythagoreanism in me, and " fear 
 to kill woodcock, lest I dispossess the soul of my 
 grandam." I shall look to the papers to see what 
 friend I have lost in Italy, or the East. I can think 
 of some who would come to me thus. 
 
 Adieu, dear Doctor. Send me a good name for my 
 cur — for since he will have me, why I must needs be 
 his, and he shall be graced with an appellation. I 
 think his style of politics might be worth something 
 in love. If I were the lady, it would make a fair be- 
 ginning. But I will waste no more ink upon you. 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 My Dear Doctor : As they say an oyster should 
 be pleased with his apotheosis in a certain sauce, I 
 was entertained with the cleverness of your letter 
 though you made minced-meat of my trout-fishing. 
 Under correction, however, I still cover the barb of my 
 " fly," and so I must do till I can hook my trout if he 
 but graze the bait with his whisker. You are an 
 alumnus of the gentle science, in which I am but a 
 neophyte, and your fine rules presuppose the dexteri- 
 ty of a practised angler. Now a trout (I have ob- 
 served in my small way) will jump once at your naked 
 fly ; but if he escape, he will have no more on't, un- 
 less there is a cross of the dace in him. As it is a fish 
 that follows his nose, however, the smell of the worm 
 will bring him to the lure again, and if your awkward- 
 ness give him time, he will stick to it till he has 
 cleaned the hook. Probatum est. 
 
 You may say this is unscientific, but, if I am to 
 breakfast from the contents of my creel, I must be 
 left with my worm and my ignorance. 
 
 Besides — hang rules ! No two streams are alike — 
 no two men (who are not fools) fish alike. Walton 
 and Wilson would find some new " wrinkle," if they 
 were to try these wild waters ; and, to generalize the 
 matter, I have, out of mathematics, a distrust of rules, 
 descriptions, manuals, etc., amounting to a 'phobia. 
 Experience was always new to me. I do not seem to 
 myself ever to have seen the Rome I once read of. 
 The Venice I know is not the Venice of story nor of 
 travellers' books. There are two Londons in my 
 mind — one where I saw whole shelves of my library 
 walking about in coats and petticoats, and another 
 where there was nothing visible through the fog but 
 fat men with tankards of porter — one memory of it all 
 glittering with lighted rooms, bright and kind faces, 
 men all manly, and women all womanly, and another 
 memory (got from books) where every man was surly, 
 and dressed in a buff waistcoat, and every woman a 
 giantess, in riding-hat and boots. 
 
 It is delightful to think how new everything is, 
 spite of description. Never believe, dear Doctor, that 
 there is an old world. There is no such place, on 
 my honor ! You will find England, France, Italy, 
 and the East, after all you have read and heard, as 
 altogether new as if they were created by your eye, 
 and were never sung, painted, nor be-written — you 
 will indeed. Why — to be sure — what were the world 
 else ? A pawnbroker's closet, where every traveller 
 had left his clothes for you to wear after him ! No ! 
 no ! Thanks to Providence, all things are new ! Pen 
 and ink can not take the gloss off your eyes, nor can 
 any man look through them as you do. I do not be- 
 lieve the simplest matter — sunshine or verdure — has 
 exactly the same look to any two people in the world. 
 How much less a human face — a landscape — a broad 
 kingdom ? Travellers are very pleasant people. They 
 tell you what picture was produced in their brain by 
 the things they saw ; but if they forestalled novelty by 
 
232 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 that, I would as soon read them as beseech a thief to 
 steal my dinner. How it looks to one pair of eyes .' 
 would be a good reminder pencilled on the margin of 
 many a volume. 
 
 I have run my ploughshare, in this furrow, upon a 
 root of philosophy, which has cured heart-aches for 
 me ere now. I struck upon it almost accidentally, 
 while administering consolation, years since, to a sen- 
 sitive friend, whose muse had been consigned, alive 
 and kicking, to the tomb, by a blundering undertaker 
 of criticism. I read the review, and wrote on it with 
 a pencil, " So thinks one man in fifteen millions;" and, 
 to my surprise, up swore my dejected friend, like Mas- 
 ter Barnardine, that he would " consent to die that 
 day, for no man's persuasion." Since that I have 
 made a practice of counting the enemy ; and trust me, 
 dear Doctor, it is sometimes worth while not to run 
 away without this little preliminary. A friend, for in- 
 stance, with a most boding solemnity, takes you aside, 
 and pulls from his pocket a newspaper containing a 
 paragraph that is aimed at your book, your morals, 
 perhaps your looks and manners. You catch the 
 alarm from your friend's face, and fancy it is the voice 
 of public opinion, and your fate is fixed. Your book 
 is detestable, your character is gone. Your manners 
 and features are the object of universal disapprobation. 
 Stay ! count the enemy ! Was it decided by a conven- 
 tion ? No ! By a caucus ? No ! By a vote on the 
 deck of a steamboat ? No ! By a group at the cor- 
 ner of the street, by a club, by a dinner-party ? No ! 
 By whom then ? One small gentleman, sitting in a 
 dingy corner of a printing-office, who puts his quill 
 through your reputation as the entomologist slides a 
 pin through a beetle — in the way of his vocation. No 
 particular malice to you. He wanted a specimen of 
 the genus poet, and you were the first caught. If 
 there is no head to the pin (as there often is none), the 
 best way is to do as the beetle does — pretend to be 
 killed till he forgets you, and then slip off without a 
 buzz. 
 
 The only part of calumny that I ever found trouble- 
 some was my friends' insisting on my being unhappy 
 about it. I dare say you have read the story of the 
 German criminal, whose last request that his head 
 might be struck off while he stood engaged in conver- 
 sation, was humanely granted by the provost. The 
 executioner was an adroit headsman, and watching his 
 opportunity, he crept behind his victim while he was 
 observing the flight of a bird, and sliced off his bulb 
 without even decomposing his gaze. It was suggest- 
 ed to the sufferer presently that he was decapitated, but 
 he thought not. Upon which one of his friends step- 
 ped up, and begging he would take the pains to stir 
 himself a little, his head fell to the ground. If the 
 story be not true the moral is. In the many times I 
 have been put to death by criticism, I have never felt 
 incommoded, till some kind friend insisted upon it, 
 and now that I can stand on a potato-hill in a circle 
 of twice the diameter of a rifleshot, and warn oft" all 
 trespassers, I intend to defy sympathy, and carry my 
 top as long as it will stay on — behead me as often as 
 you like, beyond my periphery. 
 
 Still, though 
 
 " The eagle suffers little birds to sing, 
 
 And is not careful what they mean thereby," 
 
 it is very pleasant now and then to pounce upon a big- 
 ger bird screaming in the same chorus. Nothing im- 
 pairs the dignity of an author's reputation like a news- 
 paper wrangle, yet one bold literary vulture struck 
 down promptly and successfully serves as good a pur- 
 pose as the hawk nailed to the barn door. But I do 
 not live in the country to be pestered with resentments. 
 I do not well know how the thoughts of them came 
 under the bridge. I'll have a fence that shall keep 
 
 out such stray cattle, or there are no posts and rails in 
 philosophy. 
 
 There is a little mental phenomenon, dear Doctor, 
 which has happened to me of late so frequently, that 
 I must ask you if you are subject to it, in the hope 
 that your singular talent for analysis will give me the 
 "pourquoy." I mean a sudden novelty in the impres- 
 sion of very familiar objects, enjoyments, etc. For 
 example, did it ever strike you all at once that a tree 
 was a very magnificent production? After looking at 
 lakes and rivers for thirty years (more or less), have 
 you ever, some fine morning, caught sight of a very 
 familiar stream, and found yourself impressed with its 
 new and singular beauty ? I do not know that the mir- 
 acle extends to human faces, at least in the same de- 
 gree. I am sure that my old coat is not rejuvenes- 
 cent. But it is true that from possessing the nil 
 admirari becoming to a "picked man of countries" 
 (acquired with some pains, I may say), I now catch 
 myself smiling with pleasure to think the river will not 
 all run by, that there will be another sunset to-mor- 
 row, that my grain will ripen and nod when it is ripe, 
 and such like every-day marvels. Have we scales 
 that drop off our eyes at a " certain age ?" Do our 
 senses renew as well as our bodies, only more ca- 
 priciously? Have we a chrysalis state, here below, 
 like that parvenu gentleman, the butterfly ? Still 
 more interesting query — does this delicious novelty 
 attach, later in life, or ever, to objects of affection — 
 compensating for the ravages in the form, the dulness 
 of the senses, loss of grace, temper, and all outward 
 loveliness? I should like to get you over a flagon of 
 tokay on that subject. 
 
 There is a curious fact, I have learned for the first 
 time in this wild country, and it may be new to you, 
 that as the forest is cleared, new springs rise to the 
 surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the sun- 
 shine. The settler knows that water as well as herb- 
 age will start to the light, and as his axe lets it in up- 
 on the black bosom of the wilderness, his cattle find 
 both pasture and drink, where, before, there had never 
 been either well-head or verdure. You have yourself 
 been, in your day, dear Doctor, " a warped slip of 
 wilderness," and will see at once that there lies in this 
 ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain mor- 
 al changes that come in upon the heels of more cul- 
 tivated and thoughtful manhood. Of the springs that 
 start up in the footsteps of thought and culture, the 
 sources are like those of forest springs, unsuspect- 
 ed till they flow. There is no divining-rod, whose 
 dip shall tell us at twenty what we shall most relish at 
 thirty. We do not think that with experience we shall 
 have grown simple, that things we slight and overlook 
 will have become marvels, that our advancement in 
 worth will owe more to the cutting away of overgrowth 
 in tastes than to their acquisition or nurture. 
 
 I should have thought this change in myself scarce 
 worth so much blotting of good paper, but for its bear- 
 ing on a question that has hitherto given me no little 
 anxiety. The rivers flow on to the sea, increasing in 
 strength and glory to the last, but we have our pride 
 and fulness in youth, and dwindle and fall away tow- 
 ard the grave. How I was to grow dull to the ambi- 
 tions and excitements which constituted my whole ex- 
 istence — be content to lag and fall behind and forego 
 emulation in all possible pursuits — in short, how I 
 was to grow old contentedly and gracefully, has been 
 to me a somewhat painful puzzle. With what should 
 I be pleased ? How should I fill the vacant halls 
 from which had fled merriment and fancy, and hope, 
 and desire ? 
 
 You can scarce understand, dear Doctor, with what 
 pleasure I find this new spring in my path — the con- 
 tent with which I admit the conviction, that without 
 effort or self-denial, the mind may slake its thirst, and 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 233 
 
 the heart be satisfied with but the waste of what lies 
 so near us. I have all my life seen men grow old. 
 tranquilly and content, but I did not think it possible 
 that /should. I took pleasure only in that which re- 
 quired young blood to follow, and I felt that to look 
 backward for enjoyment, would be at best but a diffi- 
 cult resignation. 
 
 Now let it be no prejudice to the sincerity of my 
 philosophy, if, as a corollary, I beg you to take a farm 
 on the Susquehumiah, and let us grow old in com- 
 pany. I should think Fate kinder than she passes for, 
 if I could draw you, and one or two others whom we 
 know and " love with knowledge," to cluster about 
 this — certainly one of the loveliest spots in nature, and, 
 while the river glides by unchangingly, shape our- 
 selves to our changes with a helping sympathy. 
 Think of it, dear Doctor! Meantime I employ my- 
 self in my rides, selecting situations on the river banks 
 which I think would be to yours and our friends' 
 liking ; and in the autumn, when it is time to trans- 
 plant, I intend to suggest to the owners where trees 
 might be wanted in case they ever sold, so that you 
 will not lose even a season in your shrubbery, though 
 you delay your decision. Why should we not renew 
 Arcady ? God bless you. 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 You may congratulate me on the safe getting in of 
 my harvest, dear Doctor ; for I have escaped, as you 
 may say, in a parenthesis. Two of the most destruc- 
 tive hail-storms remembered in this part of the country 
 have prostrated the crops of my neighbors, above and 
 below — leaving not a blade of corn, nor an unbroken 
 window ; yet there goes my last load of grain into the 
 barn, well-ripened, and cut standing and fair. 
 
 " Some bright little cherub, that sits up aloft, 
 Keeps watch for the soul of poor Peter." 
 
 I confess I should have fretted at the loss of my 
 firstlinsrs more than for a much greater disaster in an- 
 other shape. I have expended curiosity, watching, and 
 fresh interest, upon my uplands, besides plaster and my 
 own labor ; and the getting back five hundred bushels 
 for five or ten, has been to me, through all its beauti- 
 ful changes from April till now, a wonder to be en- 
 joyed like a play. To have lost the denouement by a 
 hail-storm, would be like a play with the fifth act 
 omitted, or a novel with the last leaf torn out. Now, if 
 no stray spark set fire to my barn, I can pick you out the 
 whitest of a thousand sheaves, thrash them with the 
 first frost, and send you a barrel of Glenmary flour, 
 which shall be, not only very excellent bread, but 
 should have also a flavor of wonder, admiration — all 
 the feelings, in short, with which I have watched it, 
 from seed-time to harvest. Yet there is many a dull 
 dog will eat of it, and remark no taste of me ! And so 
 there are men who will read a friend's book as if it 
 were a stranger's — but we are not of those. If we 
 love the man, whether we eat a potato of his raising, 
 or read a verse of his inditing, there is in it a sweet- 
 ness which has descended from his heart — by quill or 
 hoe-handle. I scorn impartiality. If it be a virtue, 
 Death and Posterity may monopolize it for me. 
 
 I was interrupted a moment since by a neighbor, 
 who, though innocent of reading and writing, has a 
 coinage of phraseology, which would have told in 
 authorship. A stray mare had broken into his peas, 
 and he came to me to write an advertisement for the 
 court-house door. After requesting the owner " to 
 pay charges and take her away," in good round char- 
 acters, I recommended to my friend, who was a good 
 
 deal vexed at the trespass, to take a day's work out 
 of her. 
 
 " Why, I haint no job on the mounting," said he, 
 folding up the paper very carefully. " It's a side- 
 hill critter! Two off legs so lame, she can't stand 
 even." 
 
 It was certainly a new idea, that a horse with two 
 spavins on a side, might be used with advantage on a 
 hill-farm. While I was jotting it down for your bene- 
 fit, my neighbor had emerged from under the bridge, 
 and was climbing the railing over my head. 
 
 "What will you do if he won't pay damages?" 1 
 cried out. 
 
 " Put the types on to him .'" he answered : and, 
 jumping into the road, strided away to post up his ad- 
 vertisement. 
 
 I presume, that "to put the types on to" a man, is 
 to send the constable to him with a printed warrant ; 
 but it is a good phrase. 
 
 The hot weather of the last week has nearly dried 
 up the brook, and, forgetting to water my young trees 
 in the hurry of harvesting, a few of them have hung 
 out the quarantine yellow at the top, and, I fear, will 
 scarce stand it till autumn. Not to have all my hopes 
 in one venture, and that a frail one, I have set about 
 converting a magnificent piece of wild jungle into an 
 academical grove — an occupation that makes one feel 
 more like a viceroy than a farmer. Let me interest 
 you in this metempsychosis; for, if we are to grow 
 old together, as I proposed to you in my last, this 
 grove will lend its shade to many a slippered noontide, 
 and echo, we will hope, the philosophy of an old age, 
 wise and cheerful. Aptly for my design, the shape of 
 the grove is that of the Greek V. — the river very nearly 
 encircling it ; and here, if I live, will I pass the Omega 
 of my life ; and, if you will come to the christening, 
 dear Doctor, so shall the grove be named, in solemn 
 ceremony — The Omega. 
 
 How this nobly-wooded and water-clasped little pen- 
 insula has been suffered to run to waste, I know not. 
 It contains some half-score acres of rich interval ; and, 
 to the neglect of previous occupants of the farm, I prob- 
 ably owe its gigantic trees, as well as its weedy under- 
 growth, and tangled vines. Time out of mind (five 
 years, in this country) it has been a harbor for wood- 
 cocks, wood-ducks, minks, wild bees, humming birds, 
 and cranes — (two of the latter still keeping possession) 
 -=-«nd its labyrinth of tall weeds, interlaced with the 
 low branches of the trees, was seldom penetrated, ex- 
 cept once or twice a year by the sportsman, and as 
 often by the Owaga in its freshet. Scarce suspecting 
 the size of the trees within, whose trunks were entirely 
 concealed, I have looked upon its towering mass of 
 verdure but as a superb emerald wall, shutting the 
 meadows in on the east — and, though within a lance- 
 shot of my cottage, have neglected it, like my prede- 
 cessors, for more manageable ground. 
 
 I have enjoyed very much the planting of young 
 wood, and the anticipation of its shade and splendor in 
 Heaven's slow, but good time. It was a pleasure of 
 Hope; and, to men of leisure and sylvan taste in Eng- 
 land, it has been — literature bears witness — a pursuit 
 full of dignity and happiness. But the redemption of 
 a venerable grove from the wilderness, is an enjoyment 
 of another measure. It is a kind of playing of King 
 Lear backward — discovering the old monarch in his 
 abandonment, and sweeping off his unnatural offspring, 
 to bring back the sunshine to his old age, and give him 
 room, with his knights, in his own domain. You 
 know how trees that grow wild near water, in this 
 country, put out foliage upon the trunk as well as the 
 branches, covering it, like ivy, to the roots. It is a 
 beautiful caprice of Nature ; but the grandeur of the 
 dark and massive stem is entirely lost — and I have 
 been as much surprised at the giant bodies we have 
 developed, stripping off this unfitting drapery, as 
 
234 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 Richard at the thewes and sinews of the uncowled 
 friar of Copmanhurst. 
 
 You can not fancy, if you have never exercised this 
 grave authority, how many difficulties of judgment 
 arise, and how often a jury is wanted to share the re- 
 sponsibility of the irretrievable axe. I am slow to 
 condemn ; and the death-blow to a living tree, how- 
 ever necessary, makes my blood start, and my judg- 
 ment half repent. There are, to-day, several under 
 reprieve — one of them a beautiful linden, which I can 
 see from my seat under the bridge, nodding just now 
 to the wind, as careless of its doom as if it were sure 
 its bright foliage would flaunt out the summer. In 
 itself it is well worth the sparing and cherishing, for it 
 is full of life and youth — and, could I transplant it to 
 another spot, it would be invaluable. But, though 
 full grown and spreading, it stands among giants, 
 whose branches meet above it at twice its height ; and, 
 while it contributes nothing to the shade, its smaller 
 trunk looks a Lilliputian in Brobdignag, out of keep- 
 ing and proportion. So I think it must come down — 
 and, with it, a dozen in the same category — condemned, 
 like many a wight who was well enough in his place, 
 for being found in too good company. 
 
 There is a superstition about the linden, by the 
 way, to which the peculiarity in its foliage may easily | 
 have given rise. You may have remarked, of course, 
 that from the centre of the leaf starts a slender stem, j 
 which bears the linden-flower. Our Savior is said, i 
 by those who believe in the superstition, to have been 
 crucified upon this tree, which has ever since borne ! 
 the flowering type of the nails driven into it through 
 his palms. 
 
 Another, whose doom is suspended, is a ragged 
 sycamore, whose decayed branches are festooned to 
 the highest top by a wild grape-vine, of the most su- 
 perb fruitfulness and luxuriance. No wife ever pleaded 
 for a condemned husband with more eloquence than 
 these delicate tendrils to me, for the rude tree with 
 whose destiny they are united. I wish you were here, 
 dear Doctor, to say spare it, or cut it down. In itself, 
 like the linden, it is a splendid creature ; but, alas ! it 
 spoils a long avenue of stately trees opening toward my 
 cottage porch, and I fear policy must outweigh pity. 
 I shall let it stand over Sunday, and fortify myself 
 with an opinion. 
 
 Did you ever try your hand, dear Doctor, at this 
 forest-sculpture? It sounds easy enough to trim out 
 a wood, and so it is, if the object be merely to produce 
 butter-nuts, or shade-grazing cattle. But to thin, and 
 trim, and cut down, judiciously, changing a "wild and 
 warped slip of wilderness" into a chaste and studious 
 grove, is not done without much study of the spot, let 
 alone a taste for the sylvan. There are all the many 
 effects of the day's light to be observed, how morning 
 throws her shadows, and what protection there is from 
 noon, and where is flung open an aisle to let in the 
 welcome radiance of sunset. There is a view of 
 water to be let through, perhaps, at the expense of 
 trees otherwise ornamental, or an object to hide by 
 shrubbery which is in the way of an avenue. I have 
 lived here as long as this year's grasshoppers, and am 
 constantly finding out something which should have a 
 bearing on the disposition of grounds or the sculpture 
 (permit me the word) of my wood and forest. I am 
 sorry to finish "the Omega" without your counsel 
 and taste ; but there is a wood on the hill which I will 
 keep, like a cold pie, till you come to us, and we will 
 shoulder our axes and carve it into likelihood together. 
 
 And now here comes my Yankee axe (not curtal) 
 which I sent to be ground when I sat down to scrawl 
 you this epistle. As you owe the letter purely to its 
 dulness (and mine), I must away to a half-felled tree, 
 which I deserted in its extremity. If there were truth 
 in Ovid, what a butcher I were ! Yet there is a groan 
 when a tree falls, which sometimes seems to me more 
 
 than the sundering of splinters. Adieu, dear Doctor, 
 and believe that 
 
 " Whate'er the ocean pales or sky inclips 
 Is thine," 
 
 if I can give it you by wishing. 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 The box of Rhenish is no substitute for yourself, 
 dear Doctor, but it was most welcome — partly, per- 
 haps, for the qualities it has in common with the gen- 
 tleman who should have come in the place of it. The 
 one bottle that has fulfilled its destiny, was worthy to 
 have been sunned on the Rhine and drank on the Sus- 
 quehannah, and I will never believe that anything can 
 come from you that will not improve upon acquaint- 
 ance. So I shall treasure the remainder for bright 
 hours. I should have thought it superior even to the 
 Tokay I tasted at Vienna, if other experiments had not 
 apprized me that country life sharpens the universal 
 relish. I think that even the delicacy of the palate is 
 affected by the confused sensations, the turmoil, the 
 vexations of life in town. You will say you have your 
 quiet chambers, where you are as little disturbed by 
 the people around you as I by my grazing herds. But, 
 by your leave, dear Doctor, the fountains of thought 
 (upon which the senses are not a little dependant) will 
 not clear and settle over-night like a well. No — nor 
 in a day, nor in two. You must live in the country 
 to possess your bodily sensations as well as your mind, 
 in tranquil control. It is only when you have forgot- 
 ten streets and rumors and greetings — forgotten the 
 whip of punctuality, and the hours of forced pleasures 
 — only when you have cleansed your ears of the din 
 of trades, the shuffle of feet, the racket of wheels, and 
 coarse voices — only when your own voice, accustomed 
 to contend against discords, falls, through the fragran' 
 air of the country, into its natural modulations, in har- 
 mony with the low key upon which runs all the music 
 of nature — only when that part of the world which par 
 took not of the fall of Adam, has had time to affect 
 you with its tranquillity — only then that the dregs of 
 life sink out of sight, and while the soul sees through 
 its depths, like the sun through untroubled water, the 
 senses lose their fever and false energy, and play their 
 part, and no more, in the day's expenditure of time 
 and pulsation. 
 
 " Still harping on my daughter," you will say ; and 
 I will allow that I can scarce write a letter to you with- 
 out shaping it to the end of attracting you to the Sus- 
 quehannah. At least watch when you begin to grow 
 old, and transplant yourself in time to take root, and 
 then we may do as the trees do — defy the weather till 
 we are separated. The oak, itself, if it has grown up 
 with its kindred thick about it, will break if left stand- 
 ing alone ; and you and I, dear Doctor, have known the 
 luxury of friends too well to bear the loneliness of an 
 unsympathizing old age. Friends are not pebbles, 
 lying in every path, but pearls gathered with pain, and 
 rare as they are precious. We spend our youth and 
 manhood in the search and proof" of them, and when 
 Death has taken his toll we have too few to scatter — 
 none to throw away. I, for one, will be a miser of mine. 
 I feel the avarice of friendship growing on me with 
 every year — tightening my hold and extending my 
 grasp. Who at sixty is rich in friends ? The richest 
 are those who have drawn this wealth of angels around 
 them, and spent care and thought on the treasuring. 
 Come, my dear Doctor ! I have chosen a spot on 
 one of the loveliest of our bright rivers. Here is all 
 that goes to make an Arcadia, except the friendly 
 dwellers in its shade. I will choose your hill-side, 
 and plant your grove, that the trees at least shall lose 
 no time by your delay. Set a limit to your ambition. 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 235 
 
 achieve it, and come away. It is terrible to grow old 
 amid the jostle and disrespectful hurry of a crowd. 
 The academy of the philosophers was out of Athens. 
 You can not fancy Socrates run against, in the mar- 
 ket-place. Respect, which grows wild in the fields, 
 requires watching and management in cities. Let us 
 have an old man's Arcady — where we can slide our 
 "slippered shoon" through groves of our own con- 
 secrating, and talk of the world as tvithout — ourselves 
 and gay philosophy within. I have strings pulling 
 upon one or two in other lands, who, like our- 
 selves, are not men to let Content walk unrecognised 
 in their path. Slowly, but, I think, surely, they are 
 drawing thitherward; and I have chosen places for 
 their hearthstones, too, and shall watch, as I do for 
 you, that the woodman's axe cuts down no tree that 
 would be regretted, If the cords draw well, and 
 Death take but his tithe, my shady "Omega" will 
 soon learn voices to which its echo will for long years 
 be familiar, and the Owaga and Susquehannah will 
 join waters within sight of an old man's Utopia. 
 
 " My sentiments better expressed" have come in 
 the poet's corner of the Albion to-day — a paper, by 
 the way, remarkable for its good selection of poetry. 
 You will allow that these two verses, which are the 
 closing ones of a piece called " The men of old," are 
 above the common run of newspaper fugitives : — 
 
 " A man's best things are nearest him, 
 
 Lie close about his feet ; 
 It is the distant and the dim 
 
 That we are sick to greet : 
 For flowers that grow our hands beneath 
 
 We struggle and aspire, 
 Our hearts must die except we breathe 
 
 The air of fresh desire. 
 " But, brothers, who up reason's hill 
 
 Advance with hopeful cheer, 
 O loiter not ! those heights are chill, 
 
 As chill as they are clear. 
 And still restrain your haughty gaze — 
 
 The loftier that ye go, 
 Remembering distance leaves a haze 
 
 On all that lies below." 
 
 The man who wrote that, is hereby presented with the 
 freedom of the Omega. 
 
 The first of September, and a frost ! The farmers 
 from the hills are mourning over their buckwheat, 
 but the river-mist saves all which lay low enough for 
 its white wreath to cover ; and mine, though sown on 
 the hill-side, is at mist-mark, and so escaped. Nature 
 seems to intend that I shall take kindly to farming, and 
 has spared my first crop even the usual calamities. I 
 have lost but an acre of corn, I think, and that by the 
 crows, who are privileged marauders, welcome at 
 least to build in the Omega, and take their tithe with- 
 out rent-day or molestation. I like their noise, though 
 discordant. It is the minor in the anthem of nature — 
 making the gay song of the blackbird, and the merry 
 chirp of the robin and oriel, more gay and cheerier. 
 Then there is a sentiment about the raven family, and 
 for Shakspere's lines and his dear sake, I love them, 
 " Some say the ravens foster forlorn children 
 The while their own birds famish in their nests." 
 
 The very name of a good deed shall protect them. 
 Who shall say that poetry is a vain art, or that 
 poets are irresponsible for the moral of their verse! 
 For Burns's sake, not ten days since, I beat off my dog 
 from the nest of a field-mouse, and forbade the mow- 
 ers to cut the grass over her. She has had a poet for 
 her friend, and her thatched roof is sacred. I should 
 not like to hang about the neck of my soul all the evil 
 that, by the last day, shall have had its seed in Byron's 
 poem of the Corsair. It is truer of poetry than of 
 most other matters, that 
 
 " More water glideth by the mill 
 Than wots the miller of." 
 
 But I am slipping into a sermon. 
 
 Speaking of music, some one said here the other 
 day, that the mingled hum of the sounds of nature, 
 and the distant murmur of a city, produce, invariably, 
 the note F in music. The voices of all tune, the 
 blacksmith's anvil and the wandering organ, the church 
 bells and the dustman's, the choir and the cart-wheel, 
 the widow's cry, and the bride's laugh, the prisoner's 
 clanking chain and the schoolboy's noise at play — at 
 the height of the church steeple are one ! It is all 
 "F" two hundred feet in air! The swallow can out- 
 soar both our joys and miseries, and the lark — what 
 are they in his chamber of the sun ! If you have any 
 unhappiness at the moment of receiving this letter, 
 dear Doctor, try this bit of philosophy. It's all F 
 where the bird flies! You have no wings to get there, 
 you say, but your mind has more than the six of the 
 cherubim, and in your mind lies the grief you would 
 be rid of. As Caesar says, 
 
 " By all the gods the Romans bow before, 
 I here discard my sickness." 
 I'll be above F, and let troubles hang below. What 
 a twopenny matter it makes of all our cares and vexa- 
 tions. I'll find a boy to climb to the top of a tall pine 
 I have, and tie me up a white flag, which shall be 
 above high-sorrow mark henceforth. I will neither be 
 elated or grieved without looking at it. It floats at 
 " F," where it is all one ! Why, it will be a castle in 
 the air, indeed — impregnable to unrest. Why not, 
 dear Doctor! Why should we not set up a reminder, 
 that our sorrows are only so deep — that the lees are 
 but at the bottom, and there is good wine at the top — 
 that there is an atmosphere but a little above us where 
 our sorrows melt into our joys! No man need be un- 
 happy who can see a grasshopper on a church vane. 
 
 It is surprising how mere a matter of animal spirits 
 is the generation of many of our bluest devils ; and it 
 is more surprising that we have neither the memory to 
 recall the trifles that have put them to the flight, nor 
 the resolution to combat their approach. A man 
 will be ready to hang himself in the morning for an 
 annoyance that he has the best reason to know would 
 scarce give him a thought at night. Even a dinner is a 
 doughty devil-queller. How true is the apology of 
 Menenius when Coriolanus had repelled his friend ! 
 " He had not dined. 
 The veins unfilled, our blood is cold, and then 
 We pout upon the morning : are unapt 
 To give or to forgive ; but when we have stufPd 
 These pipes, and these conveyances of our blood, 
 With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls 
 Than in our priest-like fasts. Therefore I'll watch him 
 Till he be dieted to my request." 
 I have recovered my spirits ere now by a friend ask- 
 ing me what was the matter. One seems to want but 
 the suggestion, the presence of mind, the expressed 
 wish, to be happy any day. My white flag shall serve 
 me that good end! "Tut, man!" it shall say, "your 
 grief is not grief where I am ! Send your imagination 
 this high to be whitewashed !" 
 
 Our weather to-day is a leaf out of October's book, 
 soft, yet invigorating. The harvest moon seems to 
 have forgotten her mantle last night, for there lies on 
 the landscape a haze, that to be so delicate, should be 
 born of moonlight. The boys report plenty of deer- 
 tracks in the woods close by us, and the neighbors tell 
 me they browse in troops on my buckwheat by the 
 light of the moon, Let them ! I have neither trap 
 nor gun on my premises, and Shakspere shall be (heir 
 sentinel too. At least, no Robin or Diggory shall 
 shoot them without complaint of damage ; though if 
 you were here, dear Doctor, I should most likely bor- 
 row a gun, and lie down with you in the buckwheat to 
 see you bring down the fattest. And so do our par- 
 tialities modify our benevolence. I fear I should com- 
 pound for a visit by the slaughter of the whole herd. 
 Perhaps you will come to shoot deer, and with that 
 pleasant hope I will close my letter. 
 
236 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 I have nearly had by breath taken away this morn- 
 ing, dear Doctor, by a grave assurance from a rail- 
 road commissioner, that rive years hence I should 
 "devour the way" between this and New York in 
 seven hours. Close on the heels of this gentleman 
 came an engineer of the canal, who promised me as 
 trippingly, that in three years I should run in a packet- 
 boat from my cottage to tide-water. This was in- 
 tended, in both cases, I presume, to be very pleasant 
 intelligence. With a little time, I dare say, I shall 
 come to think it so. But I assure you at present, 
 that, of all dwellers upon the canal route, myself, and 
 the toads disentombed by the blasting of the rocks, are, 
 perhaps, the most unpleasantly surprised — they, poor 
 hermits, fancying themselves safe from the troubles of 
 existence till dooms-day, and I as sure that my cot- 
 tage was at a safe remove from the turmoil of city 
 propinquity. 
 
 If I am compelled to choose a hearthstone again 
 (God knows whether Broadway will not reach bodily 
 to this), I will employ an engineer to find me a spot, 
 if indeed there be one, which has nothing behind it or 
 about it, or in its range, which could by any chance 
 make it a thoroughfare. There is a charm to me in 
 an ira-navigable river, which brought me to the Sus- 
 quehannah. I like the city sometimes, and I bless 
 Heaven for steamboats ; but I love haunts where I 
 neither see a steamboat nor expect the city. "What is 
 the Hudson but a great highroad ? You may have 
 your cottage, it is true, and live by the water-side in 
 the shade, and be a hundred miles, more or less, from 
 the city. But every half hour comes twanging through 
 your trees, the clang of an untuneable bell informing 
 you, whether you will or no, that seven hundred cits 
 are seething past your solitude. You must be an ab- 
 stracted student indeed if you do not look after the 
 noisy intruder till she is lost to the eye. Then follow 
 conjectures what news may be on board, what friends 
 may be passing unknown, what celebrities or oddities, 
 or wonders of beauty, may be mingling in the throng 
 upon her decks ; and by the time you remember again 
 that you are in the country, there sounds another bell, 
 and another discordant whiz, and so your mind is 
 plucked away to city thoughts and associations, while 
 your body sits alone and discontented amid the trees. 
 
 Now, for one, I like not this divorce. If I am to be 
 happy, my imagination must keep my body company, 
 and both must be in the country, or both in town. 
 With all honor to Milton, who avers — 
 
 " The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell,'* 
 
 my mind to make a heaven, requires the society of its 
 material half. Though my pores take in a palpable 
 pleasure from the soft air of morning, my imagination 
 feeds twice as bountifully, foraging amid the sunshine 
 and verdure with my two proper eyes ; and in turn my 
 fancy feeds more steadily when I breathe and feel what 
 she is abroad in. Ask the traveller which were his 
 unhappiest hours under foreign skies. If he is of my 
 mind, he will say, they were those in which his 
 thoughts (by letters or chance news) were driven irre- 
 sistibly home, leaving his eyes blind and his ears deaf 
 in the desert or the strange city. There are persons, 
 I know, who make a pleasure of revery, and, walking 
 on the pavement, will be dreaming of fields, and in the 
 fields think only of the distractions of town. But 
 with me, absent thoughts, unless to be rid of disagree- 
 able circumstances, are a disease. When in health, I 
 am all together, what there is of me — soul and body, 
 head and heart — and a steamboat that should daily cut 
 the line of my horizon with human interest enough on 
 board to take my thoughts with her when she disap- 
 peared, would, to my thinking, be a daily calamity. I 
 
 thank God that the deep shades of the Omega lie be- 
 tween my cottage and the track of both canal and rail- 
 road. I live in the lap of a semicircle of hills, and the 
 diameter, I am pleased to know, is shorter than the 
 curve. There is a green and wholesome half mile, 
 thickly wooded, and mine own to keep so, between my 
 threshold and the surveyor's line, and like the laird's 
 Jock, I shall be " aye sticking in a tree." 
 
 Do not think, dear Doctor, that I am insensible tc 
 the grandeur of the great project to connect Lake Erie 
 with the Hudson by railroad, or that I do not feel a 
 becoming interest in my country's prosperity. I would 
 fain have a farm where my cattle and I can ruminatb 
 without fear of falling asleep on a rail-track, or slip- 
 ping into a canal ; but there is an imaginative and a 
 bright side to these improvements, which I look on as 
 often as on the other. What should prevent steam- 
 posting, for example — not in confined and cramped 
 carriages, suited to the strength of a pair of horses, but 
 in airy and commodious apartments, furnished like a 
 bachelor's lodgings, with bed, kitchen, and servants ? 
 What should prevent the transfer of such a structure 
 from railroad to canal-boat as occasion required ? In 
 five years probably, there will pass through this village 
 a railroad and a canal, by which, together, we shall 
 have an unbroken chain of canal and railroad commu- 
 nication with most of the principal seaboard cities of 
 this country, and with half the towns and objects of 
 curiosity in the west and north. 
 
 I build a tenement on wheels, considerably longer 
 than the accommodations of single gentlemen at ho- 
 tels, with a small kitchen, and such a cook as pleases 
 the genius of republics. The vehicle shall be fur- 
 nished, we wih say, with tangent moveable rails, or 
 some other convenience for wheeling off the track 
 whenever there is occasion to stop or loiter. As 1 
 said before, it should be arranged also for transfer to a 
 boat. In either case there shall be post-horses, as 
 upon the English roads, ready to be put to at a mo- 
 ment's warning, and capable, upon the railroad at 
 least, of a sufficient rate of speed. What could be 
 more delightful or more easy than to furnish this am- 
 bulatory cottage with light furniture from your sta- 
 tionary home, cram it with books, and such little re- 
 finements as you most miss abroad, and, purchasing 
 provisions by the way, travel under your own roof from 
 one end of the country to the other ? Imagine me 
 sending you word, some fine morning, from Jersey 
 city, to come over and breakfast with me at my cot- 
 tage, just arrived by railroad from the country? Or 
 going to the Springs with a house ready furnished ? 
 Or inviting you to accept of my hospitality during a 
 trip to Baltimore, or Cincinnati, or Montreal ! The 
 English have anticipated this luxury in their expensive 
 private yachts, with which they traverse the Levant, 
 and drink wine from their own cellars at Joppa and 
 Trebizond ; but what is that to travelling the same 
 distance on land, without storms or sea-sickness, with 
 the choice of companions every hour, and at a hun- 
 dredth part of the cost? The snail has been before 
 us in the invention. 
 
 I presume, dear Doctor, that even you would be 
 obliged to fish around considerably to find Owego on 
 the map ; yet the people here expect in a year or 
 two to sit at their windows, and see all the fashion 
 and curiosity, as well as the dignity and business of 
 the world go by. This little village, to which pros- 
 perity 
 
 " Is as the osprey to the fish, who takes it 
 By sovereignty of nature," 
 
 lies at the joint of a great cross of northern and west- 
 ern travel. The Erie railroad will intersect here the 
 canal whieh follows the Susquehannah to the Che- 
 nango, and you may as well come to Glenmary if you 
 wish to see your friend, the General, on his annual 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 237 
 
 trip to the Springs. Think what a superb route it 
 will be for southern travellers. Instead of being fil- 
 tered through all the seaboard cities, at great cost 
 of money and temper, they will strike the Susquehan- 
 nah at Columbia, and follow its delicious windings past 
 Wyoming to Owega, where, turning west, they may 
 steam up the small lakes to Niagara, or keeping on the 
 Chenango, track that exquisite river by canal to the 
 Mohawk, and so on to the Springs — all the way by the 
 most lovely river-courses in the world. Pure air, 
 new scenery, and a near and complete escape from the 
 cities in the hot months, will be (the O-egoists think) 
 inducements enough to bring the southern cities, rank 
 and file in annual review before us. The canal-boat, 
 of course will be " the genteel tiling" among the arri- 
 vals in this metropolis. Pleasure north and south, 
 business east and west. We shall take our fashions 
 from New Orleans, and I do not despair of seeing a 
 cafe on the Susquehannah, with a French dame de 
 comptoir, marble tables, and the Picayune newspaper. 
 If my project of travelling cottages should succeed, I 
 shall offer the skirt of my Omega to such of my New 
 Orleans friends as would like to pasture a cow during 
 the summer, and when they and the orioles migrate in 
 the autumn, why, we will up cottage and be off to the 
 south too — freeze who likes in Tioga. 
 
 I wish my young trees liked this air of Italy as well 
 as I. This ten days' sunshine has pinched their thirsty 
 tops, and it looks like mid-autumn from my seat under 
 the bridge. No water, save a tricklet in the early morn- 
 ing. But such weather for pick-nick-ing ! The buck- 
 wheat is sun-dried, and will yield but half a crop. The 
 deer come down to the spring-heads, and the snakes 
 creep to the river. Jenny toils at the deep-down well- 
 bucket, and the minister prays for rain. I love the sun, 
 and pray for no advent but yours. 
 
 You have never seen, I dare be certain, a vol me 
 of poems called " Mundi et Cordis Carmina," by 
 Thomas Wade. It is one of those volumes killed, 
 like my trees, in the general drought of poesy, but 
 there is stuff in it worth the fair type on which it is 
 printed, though Mr. Wade takes small pains to shape 
 his verse to the common comprehension. I mention 
 him now, because, in looking over his volume, I find 
 he has been before me in particularizing the place 
 where a letter is written, and goes beyond me, by 
 specifying also the place where it should be read. 
 " The Pencilled Letter" and its "Answer" are among 
 his most intelligible poems, and I will give you their 
 concluding lines as containing a new idea in amatory 
 correspondence : — 
 
 " Dearest, love me still ; 
 I know new objects must thy spirit fill ; 
 But yet I pray thee, do not love me less ; 
 This write I where I dress. Bless thee ! for ever bless !" 
 
 The reply has a very pretty conclusion, aside from the 
 final oddity : — 
 
 " Others may inherit 
 My heart's wild perfume ; but the flower is thine. 
 This read where thou didst write. All blessings round thee 
 throng." 
 
 It is in your quality as bachelor that you get the loan 
 of this idea, for in love, " a trick not worth an egg," 
 so it be new, is worth the knowing. 
 
 Here's a precious coil ! The red heifer has chewed 
 up a lace cape, and the breachy ox has run over the 
 " bleach and lavender" of a seven days' wear and 
 washing. It must be laid to the drought, unless a 
 taste for dry lace as well as wet can be proved on the 
 peccant heifer. The ox would to the drink— small 
 blame to him. But lace is expensive fodder, and the 
 heifer must be " hobbled" — so swears the washerwo- 
 man. 
 
 " Her injury 
 's the jailer to her pity.'"' 
 I have only the " turn overs" left, dear Doctor, and I 
 
 will cover them with one of Mr. Wade's sonnets, 
 which will serve you, should you have occasion for an 
 epithalamium. It is called " the Bride," and should 
 be read fasting by a bachelor : — 
 
 " Let the trim tapers burn exceeding brightly ! 
 And the white bed be deck'd as for a goddess, 
 Who must be pillow'd, like high vesper, nightly 
 On couch ethereal ! Be the curtains fleecy, 
 Like vesper's fairest, when calm nights are breezy — 
 Transparent, parting — showing what they hide, 
 Or strive to veil — by mystery deified ! 
 The floor, gold carpet, that her zone and boddice 
 May lie in honor where they gently fall, 
 Slow loosened from her form symmetrical — 
 Like mist from sunlight. Burn, sweet odors, burn ! 
 For incense at the altar of her pleasure ! 
 Let music breathe with a voluptuous measure, 
 And witchcrafts trance her wheresoe'er she turns." 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 This is not a very prompt answer to your last, my 
 dear Doctor, for I intended to have taken my brains 
 to you bodily, and replied to all your "whether-or- 
 noes" over a broiled oyster at ***** . Perhaps I 
 may bring this in my pocket. A brace of ramblers, 
 brothers of my own, detained me for a while, but are 
 flitting to-day ; and Bartlett has been here a week, to 
 whom, more particularly, I wish to do the honors of 
 the scenery. We have climbed every hill-top that has 
 the happiness of looking down on the Owaga and Sus- 
 quehannah, and he agrees with me that a more lovely 
 and habitable valley has never sat to him for its pic- 
 ture. Fortunately, on the day of his arrival, the dust 
 of a six weeks' drought was washed from its face, and, 
 barring the wilt that precedes autumn, the hill-sides 
 were in holyday green and looked their fairest. He 
 has enriched his portfolio with four or five delicious 
 sketches, and if there were gratitude or sense of re- 
 nown in trees and hills, they would have nodded their 
 tops to the two of us. It is not every valley or pine- 
 tree that finds painter and historian, but these are as 
 insensible as beauty and greatness were ever to the 
 claims of their trumpeters. 
 
 How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett's 
 visit to Constantinople ? Not more than four or five 
 weeks, it seems to me, and yet, here he is, on his re- 
 turn from a professional trip to Canada, with all its 
 best scenery snug in his portmanteau ! He steamed to 
 Turkey and back, and steamed again to America, and 
 will be once more in England in some twenty days — 
 having visited and sketched the two extremities of the 
 civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susque- 
 hannah and keep my town-house in Constantinople — 
 (with money). It seemed odd to me to turn over a 
 drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly-pencilled 
 sketch of a mosque, and on the next a view of Glen- 
 mary — my turnip-field in the foreground. And then 
 the man himself — pulling a Turkish para and a Yan- 
 kee shinplaster from his pocket with the same pinch 
 — shuffling to breakfast in my ahri on the Susquehan- 
 nah, in a pair of peaked slippers of Constantinople, 
 that smell as freshly of the bazar as if they were 
 bought yesterday — waking up with "pekke! pekke ! 
 my good fellow!" when William brings him his boots 
 — and never seeing a blood-red maple (just turned 
 with the frost) without fancying it the sanguine flag 
 of the Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek ! All 
 this unsettles me strangely. The phantasmagoria of 
 my days of vagabondage flit before my eyes again. 
 This, "by-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?" 
 and "the view you recollect from the Seraglio!" and 
 such like slip-slop of travellers, heard within reach of 
 my corn and pumpkins, affects me like the mad poet's 
 proposition, 
 
 " To twitch the rainbow from the sky, 
 And splice both ends together." 
 
238 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 I have amused my artist friend since he has been 
 here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as 
 the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful — 
 the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over 
 the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three 
 or four young men who have been staying with us 
 were very content to tramp into the woods with a bun- 
 dle of straw and a match-box, and they have been in- 
 itiated into the mysteries of "picking and piling," to 
 the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glen- 
 mary. Shelley says, 
 
 " Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is ;" 
 
 and 1 am inclined to think that there are varieties of 
 glory in its phenomena which would make it worth 
 even your metropolitan while to come to the west and 
 "burn fallow." At this season of the year — after the 
 autumn droughts, that is to say — the whole country 
 here is covered with a thin smoke, stealing up from 
 the fires on every hill, in the depths of the woods, and 
 on the banks of the river ; and what with the graceful 
 smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing beacons all 
 around the horizon by night, it adds much to the va- 
 riety, and, I think, more to the beauty of our western 
 October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood 
 by the pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in 
 the disforested Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a 
 crackling wood, and toast himself by a thousand cords 
 burnt for the riddance. What experience I have had 
 of these holocausts on my own land has not diminished 
 the sense of waste and wealth with which I first 
 watched them. Paddy's dream of "rolling in a bin 
 of gold guineas," could scarce have seemed more 
 luxurious. 
 
 Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way 
 burnt enough, I dare say, to have made a comfortable 
 drawing-room of Hyde Park in January, and the ef- 
 fects of the white light upon the trees above and 
 around were glorious. But our fires were piles of 
 logs and brush — small beer, of course, to the confla- 
 gration of a forest. I have seen one that was like the 
 Thousand Columns of Constantinople ignited to a red 
 heat, and covered with carbuncles and tongues of 
 flame. It was a temple of fire — the floor, living coals 
 — the roof, a heavy drapery of crimson — the aisles 
 held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, sometimes 
 swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked 
 redness while the eye could see far into their depths, 
 and again covered and wreathed and laved in ever- 
 changing billows of flame. We want an American 
 Tempesta or " Savage Rosa," to " wreak" such pic 
 tures on canvass ; and perhaps the first step to it would 
 be the painting of the foliage of an American autumn. 
 These glorious wonders are peculiarities of our coun 
 try ; why should they not breed a peculiar school of 
 effect and color? 
 
 " Gentle Doughty, tell me why !" 
 
 Among the London news which has seasoned our 
 breakfasts of late, 1 hear pretty authentically that Camp 
 bell is coming to look up his muse on the Susquehan 
 nah. He is at present writing the life of Petrarch, and 
 superintending the new edition of his works (to be il- 
 lustrated in the style of Rogers's), and, between whiles, 
 projecting a new poem; and, my letters say, is likely 
 to find the way, little known to poets, from the Tem- 
 ple of Fame to the Temple of Mammon. One would 
 think it were scarce decent for Campbell to die without 
 seeing Wyoming. I trust he will not. What would 
 I not give to get upon a raft with him, and float down 
 the Susqrehannah a hundred miles to the scene of 
 his Gertride, watching his fine face while the real dis- 
 placed t'je ideal valley of his imagination. I think it 
 would 'rouble him. Probably in the warmth of com- 
 posite n and the familiarity of years, the imaginary 
 Bcenf has become ennmelled and sunk into his mind, 
 
 and it would remain the home of his poem after Wy- 
 oming itself had made a distinct impression on his 
 memory. They would be two places — not one. He 
 wrote it with some valley of his own land in his mind's 
 eye, and gray Scotland and sunny and verdant Penn- 
 ylvania will scarce blend. But he will be welcome. 
 Oh, how welcome ! America would rise up to Camp- 
 bell. He has been the bard of freedom, generous and 
 chivalric in all his strains; and, nation of merchants 
 as we are, I am mistaken if the string he has most 
 played is not the master-chord of our national char- 
 acter. The enthusiasm of no people on earth is so 
 easily awoke, and Campbell is the poet of enthusiasm. 
 The schoolboys have him by heart, and what lives up- 
 on their lips, will live and be beloved for ever. 
 
 It would be a fine thing, I have often thought, dear 
 Doctor, if every English author would be at the pains 
 to reap his laurels in this country. If they could 
 overcome their indignation at our disgraceful robbery 
 of their copyrights, and come among the people who 
 read them for the love they bear them — read them as 
 they are not read in England, without prejudice or fa- 
 vor, personal or political — it would be more like taking 
 a peep at posterity than they think. In what is the 
 judgment of posterity better than that of contempora- 
 ries ? Simply in that the author is seen from a dis- 
 tance — his personal qualities lost to the eye, and his 
 literary stature seen in proper relief and proportion. 
 We know nothing of the degrading rivalries and diffi- 
 culties of his first efforts, or, if we do, we do not real- 
 ize them, never having known him till success sent his 
 name over the water. His reputation is a Minerva to 
 us — sprung full-grown to our knowledge. We praise 
 him, if we like him, with the spirit in which we criti- 
 cise an author of another age — with no possible pri- 
 vate bias. Witness the critiques upon Bulwer in this 
 country, compared with those of his countrymen. 
 What review has ever given him a tithe of his deserv- 
 ings in England ! Their cold acknowledgment of his 
 merits reminds one of Enobarbus's civility to Menas: 
 
 " Sir ! I have praised you 
 When you have well deserved ten times as much 
 As I have said you did !" 
 
 1 need not to you, dear Doctor enlarge upon the ben- 
 efits, political and social, to both countries, which 
 would follow the mutual good-will of our authors. 
 We shall never have theirs while we plunder them so 
 barefacedly as now, and I trust in heaven we shall, 
 some time or other, see men in Congress who will go 
 deeper for their opinions than the circular of a pira- 
 ting bookseller. 
 
 I wish you to send me a copy of Dawes's poems 
 when they appear. I have long thought he was one 
 of the unappreciated ; but I see that his fine play of 
 Atbanasia is making stir among the paragraphers. Ru- 
 fus Dawes is a poet if God ever created one, and he 
 lives his vocation as well as imagines it. I hope he 
 will shuffle off the heavenward end of his mortal coil 
 under the cool shades of my Omega. He is our Cole- 
 ridge, and his talk should have reverent listeners. I 
 have seldom been more pleased at a change in the lit- 
 erary kaleidoscope, than at his awakening popularity ; 
 and, I pray you blow what breath you have into bis 
 new-spread sail. Cranch, the artist, who lived with 
 me in Italy (a beautiful scholar in the art, whose hand 
 is fast overtaking his head), has, I see by the papers, 
 made a capital sketch of him. Do you know wheth- 
 er it is to be engraved for the book ? 
 
 Ossian represents the ghosts of his heroes lament- 
 ing that they had not had their fame, and it is a pity, 
 I think, that we had not some literary apostle to tell 
 us, from the temple of our Athens, who are the un- 
 known great. Certain it is, they often live among us, 
 and achieve their greatness unrecognised. How pro- 
 foundly dull was England to the merits of Charles 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 139 
 
 Lamb till he died ! Yet he was a fine illustration of 
 my remark just now. America was posterity to 
 him. The writings of all our young authors were 
 tinctured with imitation of his style, when, in Eng- 
 land (as I personally know), it was difficult to light up- 
 on a person who had read his Elia. Truly " the root 
 of a great name is in the dead body." There is Wal- 
 ter Savage Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations 
 contain more of the virgin ore of thought than any 
 six modern English writers together, and how many 
 persons in any literary circle know whether he is alive 
 or dead — an author of Queen Elizabeth's time or 
 Queen Victoria's ? He is a man of fortune, and has 
 bought Boccacio's garden at Fiesole, and there upon 
 the classic Africus, he is tranquilly achieving his re- 
 nown, and it will beunburied, and acknowledged when 
 he is dead. Travellers will make pilgrimages to the 
 spot where Boccacio and Landor have lived, and won- 
 der that they did not mark while it was done — this 
 piling of Ossa on Pelion. 
 
 By the way, Mr. Landor has tied me to the tail of 
 his immortality, for an offence most innocently com- 
 mitted ; and I trust his biographer will either let me 
 slip off" at " Lethe's wharf," by expurgating the book 
 of me, or do me justice in a note. When I was in 
 Florence, I was indebted to him for much kind atten- 
 tion and hospitality ; and I considered it one of the 
 highest of my good fortunes abroad to go to Fiesole, 
 and dine in the scene of the Decameron with an au- 
 thor who would, I thought, live as long as Boccacio. 
 Mr. Landor has a glorious collection of paintings, and 
 at parting he presented me with a beautiful picture by 
 Cuyp, which I had particularly admired, and gave me 
 some of my most valuable letters to England, where I 
 was then going. I mention it to show the terms on 
 which we separated. While with him on my last vis- 
 it, I had expressed a wish that the philosophical con- 
 versations in his books were separated from the politi- 
 cal, and republished in a cheap form in America ; and 
 the following morning, before daylight, his servant 
 knocked at the door of my lodgings, with a package 
 of eight or ten octavo volumes, and as much manu- 
 script, accompanied by a note from Mr. Landor, com- 
 mitting the whole to my discretion. These volumes, 
 I should tell you, were interleaved and interlined very 
 elaborately, and having kept him company under his 
 olive-trees, were in rather a dilapidated condition. 
 How to add such a bulk of precious stuff to my bag- 
 gage, I did not know. I was at the moment of start- 
 ing, and it was very clear that even if the custom- 
 house officers took no exception to them (they are 
 outlawed through Italy for their political doctrines), 
 they would never survive a rough journey over the 
 Appenines and Alps. I did the best I could. I sent 
 them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in 
 Florence, requesting him to forward them to America 
 by ship from Leghorn ; a commission which I knew 
 that kindest and most honorable of men and poets, 
 would execute with the fidelity of an angel. So he 
 did. He handed them to an American straw-bonnet 
 maker (who, he had no reason to suppose, was the ma- 
 licious donkey he afterward proved), and through him 
 they were shipped and received in New York. I ex- 
 pected, at the time I left Florence, to make but a short 
 stay in England, and sail in the same summer for 
 America ; instead of which I remained in England 
 two years at the close of which appeared a new book 
 of Mr. Landor's Pericles and Aspasia. I took it up 
 with delight, and read it through to the last chapter, 
 where, of a sudden, the author jumps from the acad- 
 emy of Plato, clean over three thousand years, upon 
 the shoulders of a false American, who had robbed 
 him of invaluable manuscripts ! So there I go to pos- 
 terity astride the Finis of Pericles and Aspasia! I 
 had corresponded occasionally with Mr. Landor, and 
 in one of my letters had stated the fact, that the man- 
 
 uscripts had been committed to Mr. Miles to forward 
 to America. He called, in consequence, at the shop 
 of this person who denied any knowledge of the 
 books, leaving Mr. Landor to suppose that I had been 
 either most careless or most culpable in my manage- 
 ment of his trust. The books had, however, after a 
 brief stay in New York, followed me to London ; and 
 Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, 
 the explanation was made and the books and manu- 
 scripts restored unharmed to the author. I was not 
 long enough in London afterward to know whether I 
 was forgiven by Mr. Landor; but, as his book has not 
 reached a second edition, I am still writhing in my 
 purgatory of print. 
 
 I have told you this long story, dear Doctor, because 
 I am sometimes questioned on the subject by the lit- 
 erary people with whom you live, and hereafter I shall 
 transfer them to your button for the whole matter. 
 But what a letter! Write me two for it, and revenge 
 yourself in the postage. 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 This is return month, dear Doctor, and if it were 
 only to be in fashion, you should have a quid pro quo 
 for your four pages. October restores and returns; 
 your gay friends and invalids return to the city ; the 
 birds and the planters return to the south ; the seed 
 returns to the granary; the brook at my feet is noisy 
 again with its returned waters ; the leaves are return- 
 ing to the earth ; and the heart that has been out-of- 
 doors while the summer lasted, comes home from its 
 wanderings by field and stream, and returns to feed on 
 its harvest of new thoughts, past pleasures, and 
 strengthened and confirmed affections. At this time 
 of the year, too, you expect a return (not of paste 
 board) for your " visits ;" but, as you have made me 
 no visit, either friendly or professional, I owe you 
 nothing. And that is the first consolation I have 
 found for your short-comings (or no-comings-at-all) 
 to Glenmary. 
 
 Now, consider my arms a-kimbo, if you please, 
 while I ask you what you mean by calling Glenmary 
 " backwoods !" Faith, I wish it were more back- 
 woods than it is. Here be cards to be left, sir, morn- 
 ing calls to be made, body-coat soirees, and ceremony 
 enough to keep one's most holyday manners well aired. 
 The two miles' distance between me and Owego serves 
 me for no exemption, for the village of Canewana, 
 which is a mile nearer on the road, is equally within 
 the latitude of silver forks ; and dinners are given in 
 both, which want no one of the belongings of Bel- 
 grave-square, save port-wine and powdered footmen. 
 I think it is in one of Miss Austin's novels that a lady 
 claims it to be a smart neighborhood in which she 
 " dines with four-and-twenty families." If there are 
 not more than half as many in Owego who give din- 
 ners, there are twice as many who ask to tea and give 
 ice-cream and champaign. Then for the fashions, 
 there is as liberal a sprinkling of French bonnets in 
 the Owego church as in any village congregation in 
 England. And for the shops — that subject is worthy 
 of a sentence by itself. When I say there is no need 
 to go to New- York for hat, boots, or coat, I mean 
 that the Owego tradesmen (if you are capable of de- 
 scribing what you want) are capable of supplying you 
 with the best and most modish of these articles. Call 
 you that " backwoods ?" 
 
 All this, I am free to confess, clashes with the beau 
 ideal of the 
 
 " Beatus Me qui procul,' 1 etc. 
 
 I had myself imagined (and continued to imagine 
 for some weeks after coming here), that, so near the 
 
240 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 primeval wilderness, I might lay up my best coat and 
 my ceremony in lavender, and live in fustian and a 
 plain way. I looked forward to the delights of a broad 
 straw hat, large shoes, baggy habiliments, and leave to 
 sigh or whistle without offence ; and it seemed to me 
 that it was the conclusion of a species of apprentice- 
 ship, and the beginning of my " freedom." To be 
 above no clean and honest employment of one's time, 
 to drive a pair of horses or a yoke of oxen with equal 
 alacrity, and to be commented on for neither the one 
 nor the other ; to have none but wholesome farming 
 cares, and work with nature and honest yeomen, and 
 be quite clear of mortifications, envies, advice, remon- 
 strance, coldness, misapprehensions, and etiquettes ; 
 this is what I, like most persons who " forswear the 
 full tide of the world," looked upon as the blessed 
 promise of retirement. But, alas ! wherever there is 
 a butcher's shop and a post-office, an apothecary and 
 a blacksmith, an " Arcade" and a milliner— wherever 
 the conveniences of life are, in short — there has al- 
 ready arrived the Procrustes of opinion. Men's eyes 
 will look on you and bring you to judgment, and un- 
 less you would live on wild meat and corn-bread in the 
 wilderness, with neither friend nor helper, you must 
 give in to a compromise — yield half at least of your 
 independence, and take it back in common-place com- 
 fort. This is very every-day wisdom to those who 
 know it, but you are as likely as any man in the world 
 to have sat with your feet over the fire, and fancied 
 yourself on a wild horse in a prairie, with nothing to 
 distinguish you from the warlike Camanche, except 
 capital wine in the cellar of your wigwam, and the last 
 new novel and play, which should reach this same wig- 
 wam — you have not exactly determined how ! Such 
 " pyramises are goodly things," but they are built of 
 the smoke of your cigar. 
 
 This part of the country is not destitute of the 
 chances of adventure, however, and twice in the year, 
 at least, you may, if you choose, open a valve for your 
 spirits. One half the population of the neighbor- 
 hood is engaged in what is called lumbering, and until 
 the pine timber of the forest can be counted like the 
 cedars of Lebanon, this vocation will serve the uses 
 of the mobs of England, the revolutions of France, and 
 the plots of Italy. I may add the music and theatres 
 of Austria and Prussia, the sensual indulgence of the 
 Turk, and the intrigue of the Spaniard ; for there is 
 in every people under the sun a superflu of spirits un- 
 consumed by common occupation, which, if not turn- 
 ed adroitly or accidentally to some useful or harmless 
 end, will expend its reckless energy in trouble and 
 mischief. 
 
 The preparations for the adventures of which I 
 speak, though laborious, are often conducted like a 
 frolic. The felling of the trees in mid-winter, the cut- 
 ting of shingles, and the drawing out on the snow, are 
 employments preferred by the young men to the tamer 
 but less arduous work of the farm-yard ; and in the 
 temporary and uncomfortable shanties, deep in the 
 woods, subsisting often on nothing but pork and whis- 
 key, they find metal more attractive than village or 
 fireside. The small streams emptying into the Sus- 
 quehannah are innumerable, and eight or ten miles 
 back from the river the arks are built, and the mate- 
 rials of the rafts collected, ready to launch with the 
 first thaw. I live, myself, as you know, on one of these 
 tributaries, a quarter of a mile from its junction. The 
 Owago trips along at the foot of my lawn, as private 
 and untroubled for the greater part of the year as 
 Virginia Water at Windsor ; but, as it swells in March, 
 the noise of voices and hammering coming out from 
 the woods above, warn us of the approach of an ark, 
 and at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour the rude 
 structure shoots by, floating high on the water without 
 its lading (which it takes in at the village below), and 
 manned with a singing and saucy crew, who dodge the 
 
 branches of the trees, and work their steering paddles 
 with an adroitness and nonchalance which sufficiently 
 shows the character of the class. The sudden bends 
 which the river takes in describing my woody Omega, 
 put their steersmanship to the test ; and when the 
 leaves are off the trees, it is a curious sight to see the 
 bulky monsters, shining with new boards, whirling 
 around in the swift eddies, and, when caught by the 
 current again, gliding off among the trees like a sing- 
 | ing and swearing phantom of an unfinished barn. 
 i At the village they take wheat and pork into the 
 i arks, load their rafts with plank and shingles, and wait 
 for the return of the freshet. It is a fact you may not 
 i know, that when a river is rising, the middle is the 
 ■ highest, and vice versa when falling, sufficiently proved 
 ! by the experience of the raftsmen, who, if they start 
 I before the flow is at its top, can not keep their crafts 
 from the shore. A pent house, barely sufficient for 
 | a man to stretch himself below, is raised on the deck, 
 ! with a fire-place of earth and loose stone, and with 
 I what provision they can afford, and plenty of whiskey, 
 they shove out into the stream. Thenceforward it is 
 vogue la galere ! They have nothing to do, all day, 
 but abandon themselves to the current, sing and dance 
 and take their turn at the steering oars ; and when the 
 sun sets they look out for an eddy, and pull in to the 
 shore. The stopping-places are not very numerous, 
 and are well known to all who fellow the trade ; and, 
 as the river swarms with rafts, the getting to land, and 
 making sure of a fastening, is a scene always of great 
 competition, and often of desperate fighting. When 
 all is settled for the night, however, and the fires are 
 lit on the long range of the flotilla, the raftsmen get 
 together over their whiskey and provender, and tell 
 the thousand stories of their escapes and accidents | 
 and with the repetition of this, night after night, the 
 whole rafting population along the five hundred miles 
 of the Susquehannah becomes partially acquainted, 
 and forms a sympathetic corps, whose excitement and 
 esprit might be roused to very dangerous uses. 
 
 By daylight they are cast off and once more on the 
 current, and in five or seven days they arrive at tide 
 water, where the crew is immediately discharged, and 
 start, usually on foot, to follow the river home again. 
 There are several places in the navigation which are 
 dangerous, such as rapids and dam-sluices ; and what 
 with these, and the scenes at the eddies, and their pil- 
 grimage through a thinly settled and wild country 
 home again, they see enough of adventure to make 
 them fireside heroes, and incapacitate them (while 
 their vigor lasts, at least), for all the more quiet habits 
 of the farmer. The consequence is easy to be seen. 
 Agriculture is but partially followed throughout the 
 country, and while these cheap facilities for transport- 
 ing produce to the seaboard exist, those who are con- 
 tented to stay at home, and cultivate the rich river 
 lands of the country, are sure of high prices and a 
 ready reward for their labor. 
 
 Moral. Come to the Susquehannah, and settle on 
 a farm. You did not know what I was driving at all 
 this while ! 
 
 The raftsmen who " follow the Delaware" (to use 
 their own poetical expression) are said to be a much 
 wilder class than those on the Susquehannah. In re- 
 turning to Owego, by different routes, I have often 
 fallen in with parties of both : and certainly nothing 
 could be more entertaining than to listen to their tales. 
 In a couple of years the canal route on the Susque- 
 hannah will lay open this rich vein of the picturesque 
 and amusing, and as the tranquil boat glides peace- 
 fully along the river bank, the traveller will be sur- 
 prised with the strange effect of these immense flo- 
 tillas, with their many fires and wild people, lying in 
 the glassy bends of the solitary stream, the smoke 
 stealing through the dark forest, and the confusion of 
 a hundred excited voices breaking the silence. In my 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 241 
 
 trip down the river in the spring, I saw enough that 
 was novel in this way to fill a now portfolio for Bart- 
 lett, and I intend he shall raft it with me to salt water 
 the next time he comes among us. 
 
 How delicious are these October noons ! They 
 will soon chill, I am afraid, and I shall be obliged to 
 give up my out-of-door's habits ; but I shall do it un- 
 willingly. I have changed sides under the bridge, to 
 sit with my feet in the sun, and I trust this warm cor- 
 ner will last me till November at least. The odor of 
 the dying leaves, and the song of the strengthening 
 brook, are still sufficient allurements, and even your 
 rheumatism (of which the Latin should be podagra) 
 might safely keep me company till dinner. Adieu, 
 dear Doctor ! write me a long account of Vestris and 
 Matthews (how you like them, I mean, for I know very 
 well how I like them myself), and thank me for turning 
 over to you a new leaf of American romance. You 
 are welcome to write a novel, and call it " The Rafts- 
 man of the Susquehannah." 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 " When did I descend the Susquehannah on a 
 raft?" Never, dear Doctor ! But I have descended 
 it in a steamboat, and that may surprise you more. It 
 is an in-navigable river, it is true : and it is true, too, 
 that there are some twenty dams across it between 
 Owego and Wilkesbarre ; yet have I steamed it from 
 Owego to Wyoming, one hundred and fifty miles, in 
 twelve hours — on the top of a freshet. The dams were 
 deep under water, and the river was as smooth as the 
 Hudson. And now you will wonder how a steamer 
 came, by fair means, at Owego. 
 
 A year or two since, before there was a prospect of 
 extending the Pennsylvania canal to this place, it be- 
 came desirable to bring the coal of " the keystone 
 state" to these southern counties by some cheaper 
 conveyance than horse-teams. A friend of mine, liv- 
 ing here, took it into his head that, as salmon and 
 shad will ascend a fall of twenty feet in a river, the 
 propulsive energy of their tails might possibly furnish 
 a hint for a steamer that would shoot up dams and 
 rapids. The suggestion was made to a Connecticut 
 man, who, of course, undertook it. He would have 
 been less than a Yankee if he had not tried. The 
 product of his ingenuity was the steamboat "Susque- 
 hannah," drawing but eighteen inches ; and, besides 
 her side-paddles, having an immense wheel in the 
 stern, which playing in the slack water of the boat, 
 would drive her up Niagara, if she would but hold to- 
 gether. The principal weight of her machinery hung 
 upon two wooden arches running fore and aft, and al- 
 together she was a neat piece of contrivance, and 
 promised fairly to answer the purpose. 
 
 I think the " Susquehannah" had made three trips 
 when she broke a shaft, and was laid up ; and, what 
 with one delay and another, the canal was half com- 
 pleted between her two havens before the experiment 
 had fairly succeeded. A month or two since, the pro- 
 prietors determined to run her down the river for the 
 purpose of selling her, and I was invited among others 
 to join in the trip. 
 
 The only offices professionally filled on board were 
 those of the engineer and pilot. Captain, mate, fire- 
 men, steward, cook, and chambermaid, were repre- 
 sented en amateur by gentlemen passengers. We 
 r*ag the bell at the starting hour with the zeal usually 
 displayed in that department, and, by the assistance of 
 the current, got off in the usual style of a steamboat 
 departure, wanting only the newsboys and pickpockets. 
 With a stream running at five knots, and paddles cal- 
 culated to mount a cascade, we could not fail to take 
 the river in gallant style, and before we had regulated 
 16 
 
 our wood-piles and pantry, we were backing water at 
 Athens, twenty miles on our way. 
 
 Navigating the Susquehannah is very much like 
 dancing " the cheat." You are always making straight 
 up to a mountain, with no apparent possibility of 
 escaping contact with it, and it is an even chance up 
 to the last moment which side of it you are to chassez 
 with the current. Meantime the sun seems capering 
 about to all points of the compass, the shadows falling 
 in every possible direction, and north, south, east, and 
 west, changing places with the familiarity of a mas 
 querade. The blindness of the river's course is in- 
 creased by the innumerable small islands in its bosom, 
 ! whose tall elms and close-set willows meet half-way 
 ! those from either shore; and, the current very often 
 ■ dividing above them, it takes an old voyager to choose 
 : between the shaded alleys, by either of which you 
 would think Arethusa might have eluded her lover. 
 
 My own mental occupation, as we glided on, was 
 the distribution of white villas along the shore, on 
 spots where nature seemed to have arranged the 
 ground for their reception. I saw thousands of sites 
 where the lawns were made, the terraces defined and 
 levelled, the groves tastefully clumped, the ancient 
 trees ready with their broad shadows, the approaches 
 to the water laid out, the banks sloped, and in every- 
 thing the labor of art seemingly all anticipated by na- 
 ture. I grew tired of exclaiming, to the friend who 
 was beside me, "What an exquisite site for a villa! 
 What a sweet spot for a cottage!" If I had had 
 the power to people the Susquehannah by the wave 
 of a wand, from those I know capable of appreciating 
 its beauty, what a paradise I could have spread out 
 between my own home and Wyoming ! It was pleas- 
 ant to know, that by changes scarcely less than ma- 
 gical, these lovely banks will soon be amply seen and 
 admired, and probably as rapidly seized upon and in- 
 habited by persons of taste. The gangs of laborers 
 at the foot of every steep cliff, doing the first rough 
 work of the canal, gave promise of a speedy change 
 in the aspect of this almost unknown river. 
 
 It was sometimes ticklish steering among the rafts 
 and arks with which the river was thronged, and we 
 never passed one without getting the raftsman's rude 
 hail. One of them furnished my vocabulary with a 
 new measure of speed. He stood at the stern oar of 
 a shingle raft, gaping at us, open-mouthed as we came 
 down upon him. "Wal!" said he, as we shot past, 
 "you're going a good hickory, mister !" It was amu- 
 sing, again, to run suddenly round a point and come 
 upon a raft with a minute's warning ; the voyagers as 
 little expecting an intrusion upon their privacy, as a 
 retired student to be unroofed in a London garret. 
 The different modes of expressing surprise became at 
 last quite a study to me, yet total indifference was not 
 infrequent ; and there were some who, I think, would 
 not have risen from their elbows if the steamer had 
 flown bodily over them. 
 
 We passed the Falls of Wyalusing (most musical 
 of Indian names) and Buttermilk Falls, both cascades 
 worthy of being known and sung, and twilight over- 
 took us some two hours from Wyoming. We had no 
 lights on board, and the engineer was unwilling to run 
 in the dark ; so our pilot being an old raftsman, we 
 put into the first "eddy," and moored for the night. 
 These eddies, by the way, would not easily be found 
 by a stranger, but to the practised navigators of the 
 river they are all numbered and named like harbors on 
 a coast. The strong current, in the direct force of 
 which the clumsy raft would find it impossible to come 
 to, and moor, is at these places turned back by some 
 projection of the shore, or ledge at the bottom, and a 
 pool of still water is formed in which the craft may lie 
 secure for the night. The lumbermen give a cheer 
 when they have steered successfully in, and springing 
 joyfully ashore, drive their stakes, eat, dance, quarrel, 
 
242 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 and sleep ; and many a good tale is told of rafts slily I 
 unmoored, and set adrift at midnight by parties from 
 the eddies above, and of the consequent adventures of | 
 running in the dark. We had on board two gentle- 
 men who had earned an independence in this rough 
 vocation, and their stories, told laughingly against 
 each other, developed well the expedient and hazard 
 of the vocation. One of them had once been mis- 
 chievously cut adrift by the owner of a rival cargo, 
 when moored in an eddy with an ark-load of grain, j 
 The article was scarce and high in the markets below, i 
 and he had gone to sleep securely under his pent- 1 
 house, and was dreaming of his profits, when he sud- j 
 denly awoke with a shock, and discovered that he was j 
 high and dry upon a sedgy island some miles below j 
 his moorings. The freshet was falling fast, and soon 
 after daylight his competitor for the market drifted \ 
 past with a laugh, and confidently shouted out a good- \ 
 by till another voyage. The triumphant ark-master j 
 floated on all day, moored again at night, and arrived 
 safely at tide-water, where the first object that struck 
 his sight was the ark he had left in the sedges, its 
 freight sold, its owner preparing to return home, and 
 the market of course forestalled ! The " Roland for 
 his Oliver" had, with incredible exertion, dug a canal 
 for his ark, launched her on the slime, and by risking the 
 night-running, passed him unobserved and gained a 
 day — a feat as illustrative of the American genius for 
 emergency as any on record. 
 
 It was a still, starlight night, and the river was laced 
 with the long reflections of the raft-fires, while the 
 softened songs of the men over their evening carouse, 
 came to us along the smooth water with the effect of 
 far better music. What with " wooding" at two or 
 three places, however, and what with the excitement 
 of the day, we were too fatigued to give more than a 
 glance and a passing note of admiration to the beauty \ 
 of the scene, and the next question was, how to come I 
 by Sancho's "blessed invention of sleep." We had! 
 been detained at the wooding-places, and had made 
 no calculation to lie by a night. There were no beds 
 on board, and not half room enough in the little cabin 
 to distribute to each passenger six feet by two of 
 floor. The shore was wild, and not a friendly lamp 
 glimmering on the hills ; but the pilot at last recollect- 
 ed having once been to a house a mile or two back 
 from the river, and with the diminished remainder of 
 our provender as a pis alter in case of finding no sup- 
 per in our forage, we started in search. We stum- 
 bled and scrambled, and delivered our benisons to rock 
 and brier, till I would fain have lodged with Trinculo 
 " under a moon-calf's gaberdine," but by-and-by our 
 leader fell upon a track, and a light soon after glim- 
 mered before us. We approached through cleared 
 fields, and, without the consent of the farmer's dog, to 
 whose wishes on the subject we were compelled to do 
 violence, the blaze of a huge fire (it was a chilly night 
 of spring) soon bettered our resignation. A stout, 
 white-headed fellow of twenty-eight or thirty, bare- 
 footed, sat in a cradle, see-sawing before the fire, and 
 without rising when we entered, or expressing the 
 slightest surprise at our visit, he replied to our ques- 
 tions, that he was the father of some twelve sorrel and 
 barefoot copies of himself huddled into the corner, 
 that "the woman" was his wife, and that we were 
 welcome "to stay." Upon this the "woman" for the 
 first time looked at us, counted us with the nods of 
 her head, and disappeared with the only candle. 
 
 When his wife reappeared, the burly farmer ex- 
 tracted himself with some difficulty from the cradle, 
 and without a word passing between them, entered 
 upon his office as chamberlain. We followed him 
 up stairs, where we were agreeably surprised to find 
 three very presentable beds ; and as I happened to 
 be the last and fifth, I felicitated myself on the good 
 chance of sleeping alone, " clapped into my prayers," 
 
 was recommended to Master Barnardine, and was 
 asleep before the candle-snuff. I should have said 
 that mine was a "single bed," in a sort of a closet par- 
 titioned off from the main chamber. 
 
 How long I had travelled in dream-land I have no 
 means of knowing, but I was awoke by a touch on the 
 shoulder, and the information that 1 must make room 
 for a bedfellow. It was a soft-voiced young gentle- 
 man, as well as I could perceive, with his collar turned 
 down, and a book under his arm. Without very clear- 
 ly remembering where I was, I represented to my pro- 
 posed friend that I occupied as nearly as possible the 
 whole of the bed — to say nothing of a foot, over which 
 he might see (the foot) by looking where it outreached 
 the coverlet. It was a very short bed, indeed. 
 
 ' It was large enough for me till you came," said 
 the stranger, modestly. 
 
 " Then I am the intruder ?" I asked. 
 
 " No intrusion if you will share with me," he said; 
 
 but as this is my bed, and I have no resource but 
 the kitchen-fire, perhaps you will let me in." 
 
 There was no resisting his tone of good humor, and 
 my friend by this time having prepared himself to take 
 upas little room as possible, I consented that he should 
 blow out the candle and get under the blanket. The 
 argument and the effort of making myself small as he 
 crept in, had partially waked me, and before my ears 
 were sealed up again, I learned that my companion, 
 who proved rather talkative, was the village school- 
 master. He taught for twelve dollars a month and his 
 board — taking the latter a week at a time with the dif- 
 ferent families to which his pupils belonged. For the 
 present week he was quartered upon our host, and hav- 
 ing been out visiting past the usual hour of bedtime, 
 he was not aware of the arrival of strangers till he found 
 me on his pillow. 
 
 I went to sleep, admiring the amiable temper of my 
 new friend under the circumstances, but awoke pres- 
 ently with a sense of suffocation. The schoolmaster 
 was fast asleep, but his arms were clasped tightly round 
 my throat. I disengaged them without waking him, 
 and composed myself again. 
 
 Once more I a woke half suffocated. My friend's arms 
 had found their way again round my neck, and, though 
 evidently fast asleep, he was drawing me to him with 
 a clasp I found it difficult to unloose. I shook him 
 broad awake, and begged him to take notice that he 
 was sleeping with a perfect stranger. He seemed very 
 much annoyed at having disturbed me, made twenty 
 apologies, and turning his back, soon fell asleep. I 
 followed his example, wishing him a new turn to his 
 dream. 
 
 A third time I sprang up choking from the pillow, 
 drawing my companion fairly on end with me. I could 
 stand it no longer. Even when half aroused he could 
 hardly be persuaded to let go his hold of my neck. I 
 jumped out of bed, and flung open the window for a 
 little air. The moon had risen, and the night was ex- 
 quisitely fine. A brawling brook ran under the win- 
 dow, and after a minute or two, being thoroughly 
 awaked, I looked at my watch in the moonlight, and 
 found it wanted but an hour or two of morning Airaid 
 to risk my throat again, and remembering that 1 could 
 not fairly quarrel with my friend, who had undoubtedly 
 a right to embrace, after his own fashion, any intruder 
 who ventured into his proper bed, I went down stairs, 
 and raked open the embers of the kitchen fire, which 
 served me for less affectionate company till dawn. 
 How and where he could have acquired his caressing 
 habits, were subjects upon which I speculated unsatis- 
 factorily over the coals. 
 
 My companions were called up at sunrise by the 
 landlord, and as we were paying for our lodging, the 
 schoolmaster came down to see us off I was less sur- 
 prised when I came to look at him by daylight. It 
 i was a fair, delicate boy of sixteen, whose slender health 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 243 
 
 had probably turned his attention to books, and who, I 
 perhaps, had never slept away from his mother till he j 
 went abroad to teach school. Quite satisfied with one ! 
 experiment of filling the maternal relation, I wished • 
 him a less refractory bedfellow, and we hastened on j 
 board. 
 
 The rafts were under weigh before us, and the tor- i 
 toise had overtaken the hare, for we passed several 
 that we had passed higher Up, and did not fail to get a 
 jeer for our sluggishness. An hour or two brought 
 us to Wilkesbarre, an excellent hotel, good breakfast, 
 and new and kind friends ; and so ended my trip on 
 the Susquehannah. Some other time I will tell you 
 how beautiful is the valley of Wyoming, which I have i 
 since seen in the holyday colors of October. Thereby 
 hangs a tale too, worth telling and hearing ; and as a 
 promise is good parting stuff, adieu ! 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 The books and the music came safe to hand, dear 
 Doctor, but I trust we are not to stand upon quid-pro- 
 quosities. The barrel of buckwheat not only cost me 
 nothing, but I have had my uses of it in the raising, and 
 can no more look upon it as value, than upon a flower 
 which I pluck to smell, and give away when it is faded. 
 I have sold some of my crops for the oddity of the sensa- 
 tion ; and I assure you it is very much like being paid 
 for dancing when the ball is over. Why, consider the 
 offices this very buckwheat has performed. There was 
 the trust in Providence, in the purchase of the seed — 
 a sermon. There were the exercise and health in 
 ploughing, harrowing, and sowing — prescription, and 
 pill. There was the performance of the grain, its 
 sprouting, its flowering, it earing, and its ripening — a 
 great deal more amusing than a play. Then there 
 were the harvesting, thrashing, fanning, and grinding — 
 a sort of pastoral collection, publication, and purgation 
 by criticism. Now, suppose your clergyman, your 
 physician, your favorite theatrical corps, your pub- 
 lisher, printer, and critic, thrashed and sold in bags 
 for six shillings a bushel ! I assure you the cases are 
 similar, except that the buckwheat makes probably 
 the more savory cake. 
 
 The new magazine was welcome ; the more, that it 
 brought back to my own days of rash adventure in 
 such ticklish craft, with a pleasant sense of deliver- 
 ance from its risk and toil. The imprint of " No. I., 
 Vol. I.," reads to me like a bond for the unreserved 
 abandonment of time and soul. Truly, youth is wise- 
 ly provided with little forethought, and much hope. 
 What child would learn the alphabet if he could see 
 at a glance the toil that lies behind it ? I look upon 
 the fresh type and read the sanguine prospectus of 
 this new-born monthly, and remember, with astonish- 
 ment, the thoughtlessness with which, years ago, I 
 launched in the same gay colors such a venture on 
 the wave. It is a voyage that requires plentiful stores, 
 much experience of the deeps and shallows of the 
 literary seas, and a hand at every halyard; yet, to 
 abandon my simile, I proposed to be publisher and 
 editor, critic and contributer ; and I soon found that I 
 might as well have added reader to my manifold of- 
 fices. No one who has not tried this vocation can 
 have any idea of the difficulty of procuring the light, 
 yet condensed — the fragmented, yet finished — the 
 good-tempered and gentlemanly, yet high-seasoned 
 and dashing papers necessary to a periodical. A man 
 who can write them, can, in our country, put himself 
 to a more profitable use— and does. The best maga- 
 zine writer living, in my opinion, is Edward Everett; 
 and he governs a state with the same time and atten- 
 tion which in England, perhaps, would be cramped 
 to contributing to a review. Calhoun might write 
 
 wonderfully fine articles. LegarS, of Charleston, has 
 the right talent, with the learning. Crittenden, of the 
 senate, I should think might have written the most 
 brilliant satirical papers. But these, and others like 
 them, are men the country and their own ambition 
 can not spare. There is a younger class of writers 
 however ; and though the greater number of these, too] 
 fill responsible stations in society, separate from general 
 literature, they might be induced, probably, were the 
 remuneration adequate, to lend their support to a 
 periodical " till the flower of their fame shall be more 
 blown," Among them are Felton and Longfellow, 
 both professors at Cambridge; and Sumner and Hen- 
 ry Cleaveland, lawyers of Boston — a knot of writers 
 who sometimes don the cumbrous armor of the North 
 American Review, but who would show to more ad- 
 vantage in the lighter harness of the monthlies. I 
 could name twenty more to any one interested to 
 know them, all valuable allies to a periodical ; but no 
 literary man questions that. We have in our country 
 talent enough, if there were the skill and means to put 
 it judiciously together. 
 
 Coleridge and others have mourned over the age of 
 reviews, as the downfall and desecration of authorship; 
 but I am inclined to think authors gain more than they 
 lose by the facility of criticism. What chance has a 
 book on a shelf, waiting to be called for by the purcha 
 ser uninformed of its merits, to one whose beauties 
 and defects have been canvassed by these Mercury- 
 winged messengers, volant and universal as the quick- 
 est news of the hour? How slow and unsympathetic 
 must have been the progress of a reputation, when the 
 judicious admirer of a new book could but read and 
 put it by, expressing his delight, at farthest, to his 
 immediate friend or literary correspondent? The ap- 
 prehensive and honest readers of a book are nevti 
 many; but in our days, if it reach but one of these, 
 what is the common outlet of his enthusiasm ? Why, 
 a trumpet-tongued review, that makes an entire peo- 
 ple partakers of his appreciation, in the wax and wane 
 of a single moon. Greedily as all men and women 
 devour books, ninety-nine in a hundred require them 
 to be first cut up, liable else, like children at their 
 meals, to swallow the wrong morsel. Yet, like chil- 
 dren still, when the good is pointed out, they digest it 
 as well as another, and so is diffused an understanding, 
 as well as prompt admiration of the author. For my- 
 self, I am free to confess I am one of those who like 
 to take the first taste of an author in a good review. 1 
 look upon the reviewer as a sensible friend, who came 
 before me to the feast, and recommends me the dish 
 that has most pleased him. There is a fellowship in 
 agreeing that it is good. I have often wished there 
 were a Washington among the critics — some one up- 
 on whose judgment, freedom from paltry motives, gen- 
 erosity and fairness, I could pin my faith blindly and 
 implicitly. Dilke, of the London Athenamm, is the 
 nearest approach to this character, and a good proof 
 of it is an order frequently given (a London publisher 
 informed me), by country gentlemen : " Send me ev- 
 erything the Athenaeum praises." Though a man of 
 letters, Dilke is not an author, and, by the way, dear 
 Doctor, I think in that lies the best qualification, if not 
 the only chance for the impartiality of the critic. 
 How few authors are capable of praising a book by 
 which their own is thrown into shadow. " Why does 
 Plato never mention Zenophon ? and why does Zen- 
 ophon inveigh against Plato V 
 
 But I think there is less to fear from jealousy, than 
 from the want of sympathy between writers on differ- 
 ent subjects, or in different styles. DTsraeli the el- 
 der, from whom I have just quoted, sounds the depth 
 of this matter with the very plummet of truth. " Ev- 
 ery man of genius has a manner of his own; a mode 
 of thinking and a habit of style; and usually decides 
 on a work as it approximates or varies from his own. 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 When one great author depreciates another, it has oft- 
 en no worse source than his own taste. The witty 
 Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; the cold, clas- 
 sical Boileau, the rough sublimity of Crebillon ; the 
 refining Marivaux, the familiar Moliere. The deficient 
 sympathy in these men of genius, for modes of feeling 
 opposite to their own, was the real cause of their opin- 
 ions ; and thus it happens that even superior genius is 
 so often liable to be unjust and false in its decisions." 
 Apropos of English periodicals, we get them now 
 almost wet from the press, and they seem far off and 
 foreign no longer. But there is one (to me) melan- 
 choly note in the Paean with which the Great West- 
 ern was welcomed. In literature we are no longer a 
 distinct nation. The triumph of Atlantic steam navi- 
 gation has driven the smaller drop into the larger, and 
 London has become the centre. Farewell nationali- 
 ty! The English language now marks the limits of a 
 new literary empire, and America is a suburb. Our 
 themes, our resources, the disappearing savage, and 
 the retiring wilderness, the free thought, and the ac- 
 tion as free, the spirit of daring innovation, and the ir- 
 reverent question of usage, the picturesque mixture 
 of many nations in an equal home, the feeling of ex- 
 panse, of unsubserviency, of distance from time-hal- 
 lowed authority and prejudice — all the elements which 
 were working gradually but gloriously together to 
 make us a nation by ourselves, have, in this approxi- 
 mation of shores, either perished for our using, or 
 slipped within the clutch of England. What effect 
 the now near and jealous criticism of that country will 
 have upon our politics is a deeper question, but our 
 literature is subsidized at a blow. Hitherto we have 
 been to them a strange country ; the few books that 
 reached them they criticised with complimentary jeal- 
 ousy, or with the courtesy due to a stranger ; while 
 our themes and our political structures were looked on 
 with the advantage of distance, undemeaned by ac- 
 quaintance with sources or familiarity with details. 
 "While all our material is thrown open to English au- 
 thors, we gain nothing in exchange, for, with the in- 
 stinct of descendants, we have continued to look back 
 to our fathers, and our conversance with the wells of 
 English literature was as complete as their own. 
 
 The young American author is the principal suffer- 
 er by the change. Imagine an actor compelled to 
 make a debut without rehearsal and you get a faint 
 shadow of what he has lost. It was some advantage, 
 let me tell you, dear Doctor, to have run the gauntlet 
 of criticism in America before being heard of in 
 England. When Irving and Cooper first appeared as 
 authors abroad, they sprung to sight like Minerva, full- 
 grown. They had seen themselves in print, had re- 
 flected and improved upon private and public criticism, 
 and were made aware of their faults before they were 
 irrecoverably committed on this higher theatre. Keats 
 died of a rebuke to his puerilities, which, had it been 
 administered here, would have been borne up against 
 with the hope of higher appeal and new effort. He 
 might have been the son of an American apothecary, 
 and never be told by an English critic to " return to 
 his gallipots." The Atlantic was, hitherto, a friendly 
 Lethe, in which the sins of youth (so heavily and un- 
 justly visitited on aspirants to fame), were washed out 
 and forgotton. The American "licked into shape" 
 by the efficient tongues of envy and jealousy at home, 
 stepped ashore in England, wary and guarded against 
 himself and others. The book by which he made 
 himself known, might have been the successful effort 
 after twenty failures, and it met with the indulgence 
 of a first. The cloud of his failures, the remem- 
 brance of his degradations by ridicule were left behind. 
 His practised skill was measured by other's beginnings. 
 We suffer, too, in our social position, in England. 
 We have sunk from the stranger to the suburban or 
 provincial. In a year or two every feature and detail 
 
 of our country will be as well known to English soci- 
 ety as those of Margate and Brighton. Our similar- 
 ity to themselves in most things will not add to their 
 respect for us. We shall have the second place ac- 
 corded to the indigenous society of well-known pla- 
 ces of resort or travel, and to be an American will be 
 in England like being a Maltese or an East Indian — 
 every way inferior, in short, to a metropolitan in Lon- 
 don. 
 
 You see, my dear Doctor, how 1 make my corre- 
 spondence with you serve as a trap for my stray 
 thoughts ; and you will say, that in this letter I have 
 caught some that might as well have escaped. But 
 as the immortal Jack "turned" even "diseases to 
 commodity," and as " la superiorite est une infirmite 
 sociale," perhaps you will tolerate my dulness, or con- 
 sider it a polite avoidance of your envy. Write me 
 better or worse, however, and I will shape a welcome 
 to it. 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 Do you remember, my dear Doctor, in one of the 
 Elizabethan dramas (I forget which), the description 
 of the contention between the nightingale and the 
 page's lute ? Did you ever remark how a bird, sitting 
 silent in a tree, will trill out, at the first note which 
 breaks the stillness, as if it had waited for that signal 
 to begin ? Have you noticed the emulation of pigs in 
 a pasture — how the gallopping by of a horse in the 
 road sets them off for a race to the limits of the cross- 
 fence ? 
 
 I have been sitting here with my feet upon the 
 autumn leaves, portfolio on knee, for an hour. The 
 shadow of the bridge cuts a line across my breast, 
 leaving my thinking machinery in shadow, while the 
 farmer portion of me mellows in the sun ; the air is as 
 still as if we had suddenly ceased to hear the growing 
 of the grain, and the brooks runs leaf-shod over the 
 pebbles like a child frightened by the silence into a 
 whisper. You would say this was the very mark and 
 fashion of an hour for the silent sympathy of letter- 
 writing. Yet here have I sat, with the temptation of 
 an unblotted sheet before me, and my heart and 
 thoughts full and ready, and by my steady gazing in 
 the brook, you would fancy I had taken the sun's func- 
 tion to myself, and was sitting idle to shine. All at 
 once from the open window of the cottage poured a 
 passionate outbreak of Beethoven's music (played by 
 the beloved hand), and with a kind of fear that I should 
 not overtake it, and a resistless desire (which, I dare 
 say, you have felt in hearing music) to appropriate 
 such angelic utterance to the expression of my own 
 feelings, I forthwith started into a scribble, and have 
 filled my first page as you see — without drawing nib. 
 If turning over the leaf break not the charm, you are 
 likely to have an answer writ to your last before the 
 shadow on my breast creep two buttons downward. 
 
 Your letter was short, and if this were not the com- 
 mencement of a new score, I should complain of it 
 more gravely. Writing so soon after we had parted, 
 you might claim that you had little to say ; yet I 
 thought (over that broiled oyster after the play) that 
 your voluble discourse would " put a girdle round the 
 earth" in less time than Ariel. I listened to you as a 
 child looks at the river, wondering when it would all 
 run by. Yet that might be partly disuse in listening — 
 for I have grown rustic with a year's seclusion, I 
 found it in other things. My feet swelled with walk- 
 ing on the pavement. My eyes were giddy with the 
 multitude of people. My mouth became parched 
 with the excitement of greetings, and surprises, and 
 the raising of my tones to the metropolitan pitch. I 
 was nearly exhausted by mid-day with the "infinite 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 245 
 
 deal of nothing." Homoeopathy alone can explain 
 why " patter versus clatter" did not finish me quite. 
 
 Ah ! how admirably Charles Matthews played that 
 night ! The papers have well named him the Mer- 
 cury of comedians. His playing will probably create 
 a new school of p\ay-writing — something like what he 
 has aimed at (without sufficient study) in the pieces he 
 has written for himself. The finest thing I could im- 
 agine in the dramatic way, would be a partnership (a 
 la Beaumont and Fletcher) between the stage knowl- 
 edge and comic talent of Matthews, and the penetra- 
 ting, natural, and observant humor of Boz. The true 
 " humor of the time" has scarcely been reached, on 
 the stage, since Moliere ; and it seems to me, that a 
 union of the talents of these two men (both very 
 young) might bring about a new era in high comedy. 
 Matthews has the advantage of having been from boy- 
 hood conversant with the most polished society. He 
 was taken to Italy when a boy by one of the most 
 munificent and gay noblemen of England, an intimate 
 of his father, and, if I have been rightly informed, was 
 his companion for several years of foreign residence 
 and travel. I remember meeting him at a dinner-party 
 in London three or four years since, when probably 
 he had never thought seriously of the stage. Yet at j 
 that time it was remarked by the person who sat next 
 me, that a better actor than his father was spoiled in j 
 the son. He was making no particular effort at humor 
 on the occasion to which I refer ; but the servants, in- I 
 eluding a fat butler of remarkable gravity, were forced j 
 to ask permission to leave the room — their laughter j 
 becoming uncontrollable. He would doubtless have 
 doubled his profits in this country had he come as a sin- i 
 gle star; but I trust his success will still be sufficient 
 to establish him in an annual orbit — from east to west. 
 
 One goes to the city with fresh eyes after a year's i 
 absence, and I was struck with one or two things, 
 which, in their gradual wax or wane, you do not seem 
 to have remarked. What Te Dcum has been chanted, 
 for example, over the almost complete disappearance 
 of the dandies ? I saw but two while I was in New- 
 York, and in them it was nature's caprice. They 
 would have been dandies equally in fig-leaves or wam- 
 pum. The era of (studiously) plain clothes arrived 
 some years ago in England, where Count D'Orsay, 
 and an occasional wanderer from Broadway, are the 
 only freshly-remembered apparitions of excessively 
 dressed men ; and slow as has been its advent to us, 
 it is sooner come than was predicted. I feared, 
 for one, that our European reputation of being the 
 most expensive and showy of nations was based upon 
 the natural extreme of our political character, and 
 would last as long as the republic. I am afraid 
 still, that the ostentation once shown in dress is but 
 turned into another channel, and that the equipages 
 of New- York more than supply the showiness abated 
 in the costume. But even this is a step onward. 
 Finery on the horse is better than finery on the own- 
 er. The caparison of an equipage is a more manly 
 study than the toilet of the fine gentleman ; and pos- 
 sesses, besides, the advantage of being left properly to 
 the saddler. On the whole, it struck me that the 
 countenance of Broadway had lost a certain flimsy and 
 tinsel character with which it used to impress me, and 
 had, in a manner, grown hearty and unpretentious. I 
 should be glad to know (and none can tell me better 
 than yourself) whether this is the outer seeming of 
 deeper changes in our character. Streets have ex- 
 pressive faces, and I have long marked and trusted 
 them. It would be difficult to feel fantastic in the 
 sumptuous gravity of Bond street — as difficult to feel 
 grave in the bright airiness of the Boulevard. In 
 these two thoroughfares you are made to feel the dis- 
 tinctive qualities of England and France. What say 
 you of the changed expression of Broadway ? 
 
 Miss Martineau, of all travellers, has doubtless 
 written the most salutary book upon our manners 
 
 (malgre the womanish pique which distorted her 
 judgment of Everett and others), but there is one re- 
 proach which she has recorded against us, in which I 
 have felt some patriotic glory, but which I am begin- 
 ning to fear we deserve no longer. The text of hei 
 fault-finding is the Quixotic attentions of Americans 
 to women in public conveyances, apropos of a gentle- 
 man's politeness who took an outside seat upon a 
 coach to give a lady room for her feet. From what I 
 could observe in my late two or three days' travel, 1 
 think I could encourage Miss Martineau to return to 
 America with but a trifling risk of being too particularly 
 attended to, even were she incognita and young. We 
 owe this decadence of chivalry to Miss Martineau, I 
 think it may be safely said. In a country where every 
 person of common education reads every book of 
 travels in which his manners are discussed, the most 
 casual mention of a blemish, even by a less authority 
 than Miss Martineau, acts as an instant cautery. 1 
 venture to say that a young lady could scarcely be 
 found in the United States, who would not give you 
 on demand a complete list of our national faults and 
 foibles, as recorded by Hall, Hamilton, Trollope, and 
 Martineau. Why, they form the common staple of 
 conversation and jest. Ay, and of speculation ! Ham- 
 i ilton's book was scarcely dry from the press before or- 
 | ders were made out to an immense extent for egg-cups 
 j and silver forks. Mrs. Trollope quite extinguished 
 j the'trade in spit-boxes, and made fortunes for the fin- 
 ! ger-glass manufacturers ; and Captain Marryat, I un- 
 | derstand, is besieged in every city by the importers, to 
 know upon what deficiency of table furniture he in- 
 tends to be severe. It has been more than once sug- 
 gested (and his manners aided the idea) that Hamilton 
 was probably a travelling agent for the plated-fork 
 manufactories of Birmingham. And a fair caveat to 
 both readers and reviewers of future books of travels, 
 would be an inquiry touching their probable bearing 
 on English manufactures. I would not be illiberal to 
 Miss Martineau, but I would ask any candid person 
 whether the influx of thick shoes and cotton stockings, 
 simultaneously with her arrival in this country, could 
 have been entirely an unpremeditated coincidence? 
 
 We are indebted, I think, to the Astor House, for 
 one of the pleasantest changes that I noticed while 
 away — and I like it the better, that it is a departure 
 from our general rule of imitating English habits too 
 exclusively. You were with us there, and can bear wit- 
 ness to the delightful society we met at the ladies' ordi- 
 nary ; while the excellence of the table and service, 
 and the prevalence of well-bred company, had drawn 
 the most exclusive from their private parlors, and 
 given to the daily society of the drawing-room the 
 character of the gay and agreeable watering-places of 
 Germany. The solitary confinement of English ho- 
 tels always seemed to me particularly unsuited to the 
 position and wants of the traveller. Loneliness is no 
 evil at home, where books and regular means of em- 
 ployment are at hand ; but to be abandoned to four 
 walls and a pormanteau, in a strange city, of a rainy 
 day, is what nothing but an Englishman would dream 
 of calling comfortable. It was no small relief to us, 
 on that drizzly and chilly autumn day, which you re- 
 member, to descend to a magnificent drawing-room, 
 filled with some fifty or a hundred well-bred people, 
 and pass away the hours as they would be passed un- 
 der similar circumstances in a hospitable country- 
 house in England. The beautiful architecture of the 
 Astor apartments, and the sumptuous elegance of the 
 furniture and table service, make it in a measure a pe- 
 culiarity of the house ; but the example is likely to be 
 followed in other hotels and cities, and I hope it will 
 become a national habit, as in Germany, for strangers 
 to meet at their meals and in the public rooms. Life 
 seems to me too short for English exclusiveness in travel. 
 
 1 determined to come home by Wyoming, after you 
 left us, and took the boat to Philadelphia accordingly 
 
246 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 We passed two or three days in that clean and pleasant 
 city, and among other things made an excursion to 
 Laurel Hill — certainly the most beautiful cemetery in 
 the world after the Necropolis of Scutari. Indeed, 
 the spot is selected with something like Turkish feel- 
 ing , for it seems as if it were intended to associate the 
 visits to the resting-places of the departed more with 
 our pleasures than our duties. The cemetery occu- 
 pies a lofty promontory above the Schuylkill, possess- 
 ing the inequality of surface so favorable to the ob- 
 ject, and shaded with pines and other ornamental trees 
 of great age and beauty. The views down upon the 
 river, and through the sombre glades and alleys of the 
 burial-grounds, are unsurpassed for sweetness and re- 
 pose. The elegance which marks everything Phila- 
 delphian, is shown already in the few monuments 
 erected. An imposing gateway leads you in from the 
 high road, and a freestone group, large as life, repre- 
 senting old Mortality at work on an inscription, and 
 Scott leaning upon a tombstone to watch his toil, faces 
 the entrance. I noticed the area of one tomb en- 
 closed by a chain of hearts, cast beautifully in iron. 
 The whole was laid out in gravel-walks, and there was 
 no grave without its flowers. I confess the spirit of 
 this sweet spot affected me deeply, and I look upon 
 this, and Mount Auburn at Cambridge, as delightful 
 indications of a purer growth in our national character 
 than politics and money-getting. It is a real-life 
 poetry, which reflects as much glory upon the age as 
 the birth of a Homer. 
 
 The sun has crept down to my paper, dear Doctor, 
 and the shadow of the bridge falls cooler than is good 
 for my rheumatism. I wish that the blessing of Ceres 
 upon Ferdinand and Miranda, 
 
 " Spring come to you at farthest, 
 In the very end of harvest," 
 might light on Glenmary. I enjoy winter when it 
 comes, but its approach is altogether detestable. It 
 is delightful to get home, however; for, like Prospero, 
 in the play I have just quoted, there is a "delicate 
 Ariel" (content), who only waits on me in solitude. You 
 will carry out the allegory, and tell me I have Caliban 
 too, but to the rudeness of country monsters, I take as 
 kindly as Trinculo. And now I must to the woods, 
 and by the aid of these same " ancient and fish-like" 
 monsters, transplant me a tree or two before sunset. 
 Adieu. 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 Our summer friends are flown, dear Doctor ; not a 
 leaf on the dogwood worth watching, though its flu- 
 ted leaves were the last. Still the cottage looks sum- 
 mery when the sun shines, for the fir-trees, which 
 were half lost among the flauntings of the deciduous 
 foliage, look out green and unchanged from the naked 
 branches of the grove, with neither reproach for our 
 neglect, nor boast over the departed. They are like 
 friends, who, in thinking of our need, forget all they 
 have laid up against us ; and, between them and the 
 lofty spirits of mankind, there is another point of re- 
 semblance which I am woodsman enough to know. 
 Hew down those gay trees, whose leaves scatter at the 
 coming of winter, and they will sprout from the trod- 
 den root more vigorously than before. The ever- 
 green, once struck to the heart, dies. If you are of 
 my mind, you would rather learn such a pretty mock 
 of yourself in nature, than catch a fish with a gold 
 ring in his maw. 
 
 A day or two since, very much such another bit of 
 country wisdom dropped into my ears, which I thought 
 might be available in poetry, albeit the proof be un- 
 poetical. Talking with my neighbor, the miller, about 
 sawing lumber for a stable I am building, I discovered, 
 incidentally, that the mill will do more work between 
 sunset and dawn, than in the same number of hours 
 
 by daylight. Without reasoning upon it, the miller 
 knows practically that streams run faster at night. The 
 increased heaviness of the air, and the withdrawal of 
 the attraction of light, are probably the causes. But 
 there is a neat tail for a sonnet coiled up in the fact, 
 and you may blow it with a long breath to Tom Moore. 
 
 Many thanks for your offer of shopping for us, but 
 you do injustice to the "cash stores" of Owego when 
 you presume that there is anything short of " a hair 
 off the great Cham's beard," which is not found in 
 their inventory. By the way, there is one article of 
 which I feel the daily want, and as you live among au- 
 thors who procure them ready made for ballads and 
 romances, perhaps you can send me one before the 
 canal freezes. I mean a venerable hermit, who hav- 
 ing passed through all the vicissitudes of human life 
 shall have nothing earthly to occupy him but to live 
 in the woods and dispense wisdom, gratis, to all com- 
 ers. I don't know whether, in your giddy town voca- 
 tions, it has ever occurred to you to turn short upon 
 yourself, in the midst of some grave but insignificant 
 routine, and inquire (of the gentleman within) wheth- 
 er this is the fulfilment of your destiny ; whether these 
 little nothings are the links near your eye of the great 
 chain, which you fancy, in your elevated hours, con- 
 nects you with something kindred to the stars. It is 
 oftenest in fine weather that I thus step out of myself, 
 and retiring a little space, borrow the eyes of my bet- 
 ter angel, and take a look at the individual I have evac- 
 uated. You shall see him yourself, dear Doctor, with 
 three strokes of the pen ; and in giving your judgment 
 of the dignity of his pursuits, perform the office to 
 which I destine the hermit above bespoken. 
 
 It is not the stout fellow, with the black London 
 hat, somewhat rusty, who stands raking away cobs 
 from the barn-floor, though the hat has seen worship- 
 ful society (having fallen on those blessed days when 
 hats are as inseparable from the wearer as silk stock- 
 ing or culotte), and sports that breadth of brim by 
 which you know me as far off as your indigenous om- 
 nibus. That's Jem, the groom, to whom, with all its 
 reminiscences, the hat is but a tile. Nor is it the half 
 sailor-looking, world-worn, never-smiling man, who is 
 plying a flail upon that floor of corn, with a look as if 
 he had learned the stroke with a cutlass, though in his 
 ripped and shredded upper garment, you might recog- 
 nise the frogged and velvet redingote, native of the 
 Rue de la Paix, which has fluttered on the Symple- 
 gades, and flapped the dust ot the Acropolis. That 
 is my tenant in the wood, who, having passed his youth 
 and middle age with little content in a more responsi- 
 ble sphere of life, has limited his wishes to solitude 
 and a supply of the wants of nature ; and though quite 
 capable of telling story for story with my old fellow- 
 traveller, probabiy thinks of it only to wish its ravelled 
 frogs were horn buttons, and its bursted seams less 
 penetrable by the rain. 
 
 And a third person is one of my neighbors, who can 
 see nothing done without showing you a "'cuter 
 way," and who, sitting on the sill of the barn, is amu- 
 sing himself, quite of his own accord, with beheading, 
 cleaning, and picking an unfortunate duck, whose leg 
 was accidentally broken by the flail. His voluntary 
 occupation is stimulated by neither interest nor good 
 nature, but is simply the itching to be doing some- 
 thing, which in one shape or another, belongs to ev 
 ery genuine Jonathan. Near him, in cowhide boots, 
 frock of fustian, and broad-brimmed sombrero of coarse 
 straw, stands, breathing from a bout with the flail, the 
 individual from whom I have stepped apart, and upon 
 whose morning's worth of existence you shall put a 
 philosopher's estimate. 
 
 I presume my three hours' labor might be done for 
 about three shillings — my mind, meantime, being en- 
 tirely occupied with what I was about, calculating the 
 number of bushels to the acre, the price of corn far- 
 ther down the river, and between whiles, discussing 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 247 
 
 the merits of a patent corn-sheller, which we had 
 abandoned for the more laborious but quicker process 
 of thrashing. 
 
 "Purty'cute tool!" says my neighbor, giving the 
 machine a look out of the corner of his yellow eye, 
 "but tcoo slow ! Corn ought to come off ravin' dis- 
 tracted. 'Taint no use to eat it up in labor. Where 
 was that got out ?" 
 
 "'Twas invented in Albany, I rather think." 
 "Wal, I guess t'want. It's a Varmount notion. 
 Rot them Green Mountingeers ! they're a spiling 
 the country. People won't work when them things 
 lay round. Have you heern of a machine for botton- 
 ing your gallowses behind?" 
 " No, I have not." 
 
 " Wal, I've been expecting on't. There aint no 
 other hard work they haint economized. Is them 
 your hogs in the garding?" 
 
 Three vast porkers had nosed open the gate, during 
 the discussion, and were making the best of their op- 
 portunities. After a vigorous chase, the latch was 
 closed upon them securely, and my neighbor resumed 
 his duck. 
 
 " Is there no way of forcing people to keep those 
 brutes at home," I asked of my silent tenant. 
 
 " Yes, sir. The law provides that you may shut 
 them up, and send word to the owners to come and 
 take them away." 
 
 "Wal! It's a chore, if you ever tried it, to catch 
 a hog if he's middlin' spry, and when he's cotch, 
 you've got to feed him, by law, tjll he's sent for ; and 
 it don't pay, mister." 
 
 " But you can charge for the feed," says the other. 
 " Pesky little, I tell ye. Pig fodder 's cheap, and 
 they don't pay you for carrying on't to 'em, nor for 
 catching the critters. It's a losin' consarn." 
 " Suppose I shoot them." 
 
 " Sartin you can. The owner '11 put his vally on it, 
 and you can have as much pork at that price as '11 fill 
 your barn. The hull neighb'r'hood '11 drive their 
 hogs into your garding." 
 
 I saw that my neighbor had looked at the matter all 
 round ; but I was sure, from his manner, that he could, 
 if encouraged, suggest a remedy for the nuisance. 
 
 " I would give a bushel of that handsome corn," said 
 I, " to know how to be rid of them." 
 
 " Be so perlite as to measure it out, mister, while I 
 head in that hog. I'll show you how the deacon kept 
 'em out of the new buryin' ground while the fence was 
 buildin'." 
 
 He laid down the duck, which was, by this time, 
 fairly picked, and stood a moment looking at the three 
 hogs, now leisurely turning up the grass at the road- 
 side. For a reason which I did not at the moment 
 conceive, he presently made a dash at the thinnest of 
 the three, a hungry-looking brute, built with an ap- 
 proach to the greyhound, and missed catching him by 
 an arm's length. Unluckily for the hog, however, the 
 road was lined with crooked rail-fence, which deceived 
 him with constant promise of escape by a short turn, 
 and by a skilful heading off, and a most industrious 
 chase of some fifteen minutes, he was cornered at last, 
 and secured by the hind leg. 
 
 " A hog," said he, dragging him along with the 
 greatest gravity, " hates a straight line like pizen. If 
 they'd run right in eend, you'd never catch 'em in 
 natur. Like some folks, aint it ? Boy, fetch me a 
 skrimmage of them whole corn." 
 
 He drove the hog before him, wheelbarrow fashion, 
 into an open cow-pen, and put up the bars. The boy 
 (his son, who had been waiting for him outside the barn) 
 brought him a few ears of ripe corn, and as soon as the 
 hog had recovered his breath a little, he threw them 
 into the pen, and drew out a knife from his pocket, 
 which he whetted on the rail before him. 
 
 "Now," said he, as the voracious animal, unaccus- 
 
 tomed to such appetizing food, seized ravenously on 
 the corn, "it's according to law to take up a stray hog 
 and feed him, aint it?" 
 " Certainly." 
 
 By this time the greedy creature began to show symp- 
 toms of choking, and my friend's design became clearer. 
 " And it's Christian charity," he continued, letting 
 down the bars, and stepping in as the hog rolled upon 
 his side, " not to let your neighbor lose his critters by 
 choking, if you can kill 'em in time to save their meat, 
 ain't it ?" 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 "Wal!" said he, cutting the animal's throat, " you 
 can send word to the owner of that pork to come and 
 take it away, and if he don't like to salt down at a min- 
 ute's notice, he'll keep the rest at hum, and pay you 
 for your corn. And that's the way the deacon sarved 
 my hogs, darn his long face, and I eat pork till I was 
 sick of the sight on't." 
 
 A bushel of corn being worth about six shillings, 1 
 had paid twice the worth of my own morning's work for 
 this very Yankee expedient. My neighbor borrowed 
 a bag, shouldered his grist, and trudged off to the 
 mill, and relinquishing my flail to Jem, I leaned over 
 the fence in the warm autumn sunshine, and with my 
 eyes on the swift yet still bosom of the river below, 
 fell to wondering, as 1 said before, whether the hour 
 of which I have given you a picture, was a fitting link 
 in a wise man's destiny, The day was one to give 
 birth to great resolves, bright, elastic, and genial ; and 
 the leafless trees, so lorn and comfortless in cloudier 
 times, seemed lifting into the sky with heroic endu- 
 rance, while the swollen Owaga, flowing on with twice 
 the summer's depth, seemed gathering soul to defy the 
 fetters of winter. There was something inharmonious 
 with little pursuits in everything I could see. Such 
 air and sunshine, I thought, should overtake one in 
 some labor of philanthropy, in some sacrifice for 
 friend or country, in the glow of some noble composi- 
 tion, or, if in the exercise of physical energy, at least to 
 some large profit. Yet a few shillings expressed the 
 whole result of my morning's employment, and the 
 society by which my thoughts had been colored were 
 such as I have described. Still this is "farming," and 
 so lived Cincinnatus. 
 
 Now, dear Doctor, you can be grand among your 
 gallipots, and if your eye turns in upon yourself, you 
 may reflect complacently on the almost sublime ends 
 of the art of healing ; but resolve me, if you please, 
 my little problem. What state of the weather should 
 I live up to ? My present avocations, well enough in 
 a gray day, or a rainy, or a raw, are quite put out of 
 countenance by a blue sky and a genial sun. If it 
 were always like to-day, I should be obliged to seek 
 distinction in some way- There would be no looking 
 such a sky in the face three days consecutively, busi- 
 ed always with pigs and corn. You see the use of a 
 hermit to settle such points. But adieu, while I have 
 room to write it. 
 
 LETTER TO THE UNKNOWN PURCHASER AND NEXT 
 OCCUPANT OF GLENMARY. 
 
 Sir : In selling you the dew and sunshine ordained 
 to fall hereafter on this bright spot of earth—the 
 waters on their way to this sparkling brook — the tints 
 mixed for the flowers of that enamelled meadow, and 
 the songs bidden to be sung in coming summers by 
 the feathery builders in Glenmary, I know not whether 
 to wonder more at the omnipotence of money, or at 
 my own impertinent audacity toward Nature. How 
 you can buy the right to exclude at will every other 
 creature made in God's image from sitting by this 
 brook, treading on that carpet of flowers, or lying lis- 
 tening to the birds in the shade of these glorious trees 
 
248 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 — how I can sell it you, is a mystery not understood 
 by the Indian, and dark, I must say to me. 
 
 "Lord of the soil," is a title which conveys your 
 privileges but poorly. You are master of waters flow 
 ing at this moment, perhaps, in a river of Judea, or 
 floating in clouds over some spicy island of the tropics, 
 bound hither after many changes. There are lilies 
 and violets ordered for you in millions, acres of sun- 
 shine in daily instalments, and dew nightly in propor- 
 tion. There are throats to be tuned with song, and 
 wings to be painted with red and gold, blue and yel- 
 low; thousands of them, and all tributaries to you. 
 Your corn is ordered to be sheathed in silk, and lifted 
 high to the sun. Your grain is to be duly bearded 
 and stemmed. There is perfume distilling for your 
 clover, and juices for your grasses and fruits. Ice 
 will be here for your wine, shade for your refreshment 
 at noon, breezes and showers and snow-flakes ; all in 
 their season, and all " deeded to you for forty dollars 
 the acre ! Gods ! what a copyhold of property for a 
 fallen world !" 
 
 Mine has been but a short lease of this lovely and 
 well-endowed domain (the duration of a smile of for- 
 tune, five years, scarce longer than a five-act play) ; 
 but as in a play we sometimes live through a life, 
 it seems to me that I have lived a life at Glenmary. 
 Allow me this, and then you must allow me the priv- 
 ilege of those who, at the close of life, leave something 
 behind them : that of writing out my will. Though I 
 depart this life, I would fain, like others, extend my 
 ghostly hand into the future ; and if wings are to be 
 borrowed or stolen where I go, you may rely on my 
 hovering around and haunting you, in visitations not 
 restricted by cock-crowing. 
 
 Trying to look at Glenmary through your eyes, sir, 
 I see too plainly that I have not shaped my ways as if 
 expecting a successor in my lifetime. I did not, lam 
 free to own. I thought to have shuffled off my mor- 
 tal coil tranquilly here; flitting at last in company 
 with some troop of my autumn leaves, or some bevy 
 of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw; my 
 tenants at my back, as a landlord may say. I have 
 counted on a life-interest in the trees, trimming them 
 accordingly ; and in the squirrels and birds, encour- 
 aging them to chatter and build and fear nothing ; no 
 guns permitted on the premises. I have had my will 
 of this beautiful stream. I have carved the woods into 
 a shape of my liking. I have propagated the despised 
 sumach and the persecuted hemlock and "pizen lau- 
 rel." And " no end to the weeds dug up and set out 
 again," as one of my neighbors delivers himself. I 
 have built a bridge over Glenmary brook, which the 
 town looks to have kept up by " the place," and we 
 have plied free ferry over the river, I and my man 
 Tom, till the neighbors, from the daily saving of the 
 two miles round, have got the trick of it. And be- 
 twixt the aforesaid Glenmary brook and a certain 
 muddy and plebeian gutter formerly permitted to join 
 company with, and pollute it, I have procured a di- 
 vorce at much trouble and pains, a guardian duty en- 
 tailed of course on my successor. 
 
 First of all, sir, let me plead for the old trees of 
 Glenmary ! Ah ! those friendly old trees ! The cot- 
 tage stands belted in with them, a thousand visible 
 from the door, and of stems and branches worthy of the 
 great valley of the Susquehannah. For how much 
 music played without thanks am I indebted to those 
 leaf-organs of changing tone ? for how many whisper- 
 ings of thought breathed like oracles into my ear ? for 
 how many new shapes of beauty moulded in the 
 leaves by the wind ? for how much companionship, 
 solace, and welcome ? Steadfast and constant is the 
 countenance of such friends, God be praised for their 
 staid welcome and sweet fidelity ! If I love them bet- 
 ter than some things human, it is no fault of am- 
 bitiousness in the trees. They stand where they did. 
 But in recoiling from mankind, one may find them the 
 
 next kindliest things, and be glad of dumb friendship. 
 Spare those old trees, gentle sir ! 
 
 In the smooth walk which encircles the meadow be- 
 twixt that solitary Olympian sugar-maple and the mar- 
 gin of the river, dwells a portly and venerable toad ; 
 who (if I may venture to bequeath you my friends) 
 must be commended to your kindly consideration. 
 Though a squatter, he was noticed in our first rambles 
 along the stream, five years since, for his ready civility 
 in yielding the way, not hurriedly, however, nor with 
 an obsequiousness unbecoming a republican, but de- 
 liberately and just enough ; sitting quietly on the grass 
 till our passing by gave him room again on the warm 
 and trodden ground. Punctually after the April 
 cleansing of the walk, this jewelled habitue, from his 
 indifferent lodgings hard by, emerges to take his pleas- 
 ure in the sun; and there, at any hour when a gentle- 
 man is likely to be abroad, you may find him, patient 
 on his os coccygis, or vaulting to his asylum of high 
 grass. This year, he shows, I am grieved to remark, 
 an ominous obesity, likely to render him obnoxious to 
 the female eye, and, with the trimness of his shape, 
 has departed much of that measured alacrity which 
 first won our regard. He presumes a little on your 
 allowance for old age ; and with this pardonable weak- 
 ness growing upon him, it seems but right that his 
 position and standing should be tenderly made known 
 to any new-comer on the premises. In the cutting of 
 the next grass, slice me not up my fat friend, sir! nor 
 set your cane down heedlessly in his modest domain. 
 He is "mine ancient," and I would fain do him a 
 good turn with you. 
 
 For my spoilt family of squirrels, sir, I crave nothing 
 but immunity from powder and shot. They require 
 coaxing to come on the same side of the tree with 
 you, and though saucy to me, I observe that they com- 
 mence acquaintance invariably with a safe mistrust. 
 One or two of them have suffered, it is true, from too 
 hasty a confidence in my greyhound Maida, but the 
 beauty of that gay fellow was a trap against which na- 
 ture had furnished them with no warning instinct ! 
 (A fact, sir, which would prettily point a moral !) The 
 large hickory on the edge of the lawn, and the black 
 walnut over the shoulder of the flower-garden, have 
 been, through my dynasty, sanctuaries inviolate foi 
 squirrels. I pray you, sir, let them not be "reformed 
 out," under your administration. 
 
 Of our feathered connexions and friends, we are 
 most bound to a pair of Phebe-birds and a merry Bob- 
 o'-Lincoln, the first occupying the top of the young 
 maple near the door of the cottage, and the latter ex- 
 ecuting his bravuras upon the clump of alder-bushes 
 in the meadow, though, in common with many a gay- 
 plumaged gallant like himself, his whereabout after dark 
 is a dark mystery. He comes every year from his rice 
 plantation in Florida to pass the summer at Glenmary. 
 Pray keep him safe from percussion-caps, and let no 
 urchin with a long pole poke down our trusting Phe- 
 bes; annuals in that same tree for three summers. 
 There are humming-birds, too, whom we have com- 
 plimented and looked sweet upon, but they can not be 
 identified from morning to morning. And there is a 
 golden oriole who sings through May on a dog-wood 
 tree by the brook-side, but he has fought shy of our 
 crumbs and coaxing, and let him go ! We are mates 
 for his betters, with all his gold livery ! With these 
 reservations, sir, I commend the birds to your friend- 
 ship and kind keeping. 
 
 And now, sir, I have nothing else to ask, save only 
 your watchfulness over the small nook reserved from 
 this purchase of seclusion and loveliness. In the sha- 
 dy depths of the small glen above you, among the wild- 
 flowers and music, the music of the brook babbling 
 over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to love and memo- 
 ry. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness 
 of Glenmary as we can leave behind, stay with you fo 
 recompense ! 
 
DASHES AT LIFE 
 
 WITH A FREE PENCIL. 
 
 PART I; 
 
 HIGH LIFE IN EUROPE, 
 
 AND 
 
 AMERICAN LIFE. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It has been with difficult submission to 
 marketableness that the author has broken up 
 his statues at the joints, and furnished each 
 fragment with head and legs to walk alone. 
 Continually accumulating material, with the 
 desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as 
 continually tempted by extravagant prices to 
 shape these separate forms of society and char- 
 acter into tales for periodicals ; and between 
 two persuaders — the law of copyright, on the 
 one hand, providing that American books at 
 fair prices should compete with books to be 
 had for nothing, and necessity on the other 
 hand, pleading much more potently than the 
 ambition for an adult stature in literary fame — 
 he has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing 
 off for a magazine any chance view of life that 
 turned up to him, and selling in fragmentary 
 chapters what should have been kept together 
 and moulded into a proportionate work of im- 
 agination. So has gradually accumulated the 
 large collection of tales which follow — literally 
 dashes at life with a free pencil — each one, 
 though a true copy of a part, conveying, of 
 course, no portion of the meaning and moral 
 of a whole. It is as a parcel of fragments — as 
 a portfolio of sketches for a picture never paint- 
 ed — that he offers them to the public. Their 
 lack of what an English critic cleverly calls the 
 "ponderous goodness of a didactic purpose," 
 
 must be balanced, if at all, by their truth to life, 
 for they have been drawn mostly from impres- 
 sions freshly made, and with no record of what 
 they were a part of. In proportion to his pow- 
 er of imagination, the reader will supply the 
 back-ground and adjuncts — some, no doubt (if 
 the author may judge by himself), preferring 
 the sketch to the finished picture. 
 
 A word explanatory of the character of Part 
 I. Most of the stories in it are illustrative of 
 the distinctions of English society. As a re- 
 publican visiting a monarchical country for the 
 first time, and traversing the barriers of differ- 
 ent ranks with a stranger's privilege, the au- 
 thor's curiosity was most on the alert to know 
 how nature's nobility held its own against no- 
 bility by inheritance, and how heart and judg- 
 ment were modified in their action by the thin 
 air at the summit of refinement. Circumstances 
 in the career of men of genius now living, and 
 feelings in titled and exclusive circles which 
 the author had opportunities to study, furnished 
 hints for the storied illustrations of the dis- 
 tinctions that interested him, and he has thought 
 it worth while to present these together, as 
 bearing upon those relations of aristocratic 
 life which first interest republican curiosity 
 abroad. 
 
 With these explanations, the author commits 
 his book to the reader's kind allowance. 
 
HIGH LIFE IN EUROPE. 
 
 LEAVES FROM THE HEART-BOOK OF ERNEST CLAY 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 In a small room, second floor, front. No. 
 
 South Audley street, Grosvenor square, on one of 
 the latter days of May, five or six years ago, there 
 stood an inkstand, of which you may buy the like for 
 three halfpence in most small shops in Soho. It was 
 stuck in the centre of the table, like the largest of 
 the Azores, on a schoolboy's amateur map — a large 
 blot surrounded by innumerable smaller blotlings. 
 On the top of a small leather portmanteau near by, 
 stood two pair of varnished-leather boots of a sump- 
 tuous expensiveness, slender, elegant, and without 
 spot, except the leaf of a crushed orange blossom 
 clinging to one of the heels. Between the inkstand 
 and the boots sat the young and then fashionable au- 
 thor of , and the boots and the ink- 
 stand were tolerable exponents of his two opposite 
 but closely woven existences. 
 
 It was two o'clock, P. M., and the author was stir- 
 ring his tea. He had been stirring it with the same 
 velocity three quarters of an hour — for when that cup 
 should be drank, inevitably the next thing wa9 to 
 write the first sentence of an article for the New 
 Month. Mag., and he was prolonging his breakfast, 
 as a criminal his last prayer. 
 
 The "fatigued" sugar and milk were still flying 
 round the edge of the cup in a whity blue concave, 
 when the "maid of all work" of his landlord the 
 baker, knocked at the door with a note. 
 
 »« 13 G M street. 
 
 "Dear Sir: 
 
 " Has there been any mistake in the two-penny post 
 delivery, that I have not received your article for this 
 month ? If so, please send me the rough draught by 
 the bearer (who waits), and the compositors will try- 
 to make it out. Yours, truly, 
 
 " P. S. If the tale is not finished, please send me 
 the title and motto, that we may print the ' contents' 
 during the delay." 
 
 The tea, which, for some minutes, had turned off" a 
 decreasing ripple from the edge of the arrested spoon, 
 came to a standstill at the same moment, with the 
 author's wits. He had seized his pea and com- 
 menced : — 
 
 " Dear Sir : 
 
 " The tale of this month will be called " 
 
 As it was not yet conceived, he found a difficulty . 
 in baptizing it. His eyebrows descended like the 
 bars of a knight's visor ; his mouth, which had ex- 
 pressed only lassitude and melancholy, shut close, 
 and curved downward, and he sat for some minutes 
 dipping his pen in the ink, and, at each dip, adding a 
 new shoal to the banks of the inky Azores. 
 
 A long sigh of relief, and an expansion of every 
 
 II line of his face into a look of brightening thought gave 
 token presently that the incubation had been success- 
 II ful. The gilded note-paper was pushed aside, a broad 
 and fair sheet of "foreign post" was hastily drawn 
 from his blotting-book. and forgetful alike of the un- 
 achieved cup of tea, and the waiting "devil" of Marl- 
 borough street, the felicitous author dashed the first 
 magic word on mid-page, and without title or motto, 
 traced rapidly line after line, his face clearing of las- 
 situde, and his eyes of their troubled languor, as the 
 erasures became fewer, and his punctuations farther 
 between. 
 
 " Any answer to the note, sir?" said the maid-ser- 
 vant, who had entered unnoticed, and stood close at 
 his elbow, wondering at the flying velocity of his pen. 
 
 He was at the bottom of the fourth page, and in 
 the middle of a sentence. Handing the wet and blot- 
 ted sheet to the servant, with an order for the messen- 
 ger to call the following morning for the remainder, 
 he threw down his pen and abandoned himself to the 
 most delicious of an author's pleasures — revery in the 
 mood of composition. He forgot work. Work is to 
 put such reveries into words. His imagination flew 
 on like a horse without his rider — gloriously and ex- 
 ultingly, but to no goal. The very waste made his 
 indolence sweeter — the very nearness of his task 
 brightened his imaginative idleness. The ink dried 
 upon his pen. Some capricious association soon 
 drew back his thoughts to himself. His eye dulled. 
 His lips resumed their mingled expression of pride 
 and voluptuousness. He started to find himself idle, 
 remembered that had sent oft' the sheet with a bro- 
 ken sentence, without retaining even the concluding 
 word, and with a sigh more of relief than vexation, 
 he drew on his boots. Presto ! — the world of which 
 his penny-half-penny inkstand was the immortal cen- 
 tre — the world of heaven-born imagination — melted 
 from about him ! He stood in patent leather — hu- 
 man, handsome, and liable to debt! 
 
 And thus fugitive and easy of decoy, thus compul- 
 sory, irresolute, and brief, is the unchastised toil of 
 genius — the earning of the "fancy-bread" of poets! 
 
 It would be hard if a man who has " made himself 
 a name" (beside being paternally christened), should 
 want one in a story — so, if you please, I will name 
 my hero in the next sentence. Ernest Clay was 
 dressed to walk to Marlborough street to apply for his 
 " guinea-a-page" in advance, and find out the con- 
 cluding word of his MS., when there was heard a foot- 
 man's rap at the street door. The baker on the 
 ground floor ran to pick up his penny loaves jarred 
 from the shelves by the tremendous rat-a-tat-laf, and 
 the maid ran herself out of her shoes to inform Mr 
 
 Clay that Lady Mildred wished to speak witL 
 
 him. Neither maid nor baker were displeased at bein£ 
 put to inconvenience, nor was the baker's hysterica 
 
252 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 mother disposed to murmur at the outrageous clat- 
 ter which shattered her nerves for a week. There 
 is a spell to a Londoner in a coronetted carriage which 
 changes the noise and impudence of the unwhipped 
 varlets who ride behind it, into music and condescen- 
 sion. 
 
 "You were going out," said Lady Mildred ; " can 
 I take you anywhere?" 
 
 "You can take me," said Clay, spreading out his 
 hands in an attitude of surrender, "when and where 
 you please ; but I was going to my publisher's." 
 
 The chariot-steps rattled down, and his foot was on 
 the crimson carpet, when a plain family carriage sud- 
 denly turned out of Grosvenor square, and pulled up 
 as near his own door as the obstruction permitted. 
 
 Ernest changed color slightly, and Lady Mildred, 
 after a glance through the window behind her, stamp- 
 ed her little foot and said "Come!" 
 
 "One moment!" was his insufficient apology as he 
 sprang to the window of the other carriage, and with 
 a manner almost infantile in its cordial simplicity, ex- 
 pressed his delight at meeting the two ladies who sat 
 within. 
 
 "Have you set up a chariot, Ernest?" said the 
 younger, laying her hand upon the dark mass of curls 
 on his temple, and pushing his head gently back that 
 she might see what equipage stopped the way. 
 
 He hesitated a moment, but there was no escape 
 from the truth. 
 
 " It is Lady Mildred, who has just 
 
 " Is she alone ?" 
 
 The question was asked by the elder lady with a 
 look that expressed a painfully sad wish to hear him 
 answer, "No." 
 
 While he hesitated, the more forgiving voice next 
 him hurriedly broke the silence. 
 
 " We are forgetting our errand, Ernest. Can you 
 come to Ashurst to-morrow?" 
 
 " With all my heart." 
 
 "Do not fail! My uncle wishes to see you. 
 Stay — I have brought you a note from him. Good- 
 by ! Are you going to the rout at Mrs. Rothschild's 
 to-night?" 
 
 " f was not — but if you are going, I will." 
 
 "Till this evening, then?" 
 
 The heavy vehicle rolled away, and Ernest crushed 
 the note in his hand unread, and with a slower step 
 than suited the impatience of Lady Mildred, returned 
 to the chariot. The coachman, with that mysterious 
 instinct that coachmen have, let fall his silk upon the 
 backs of his spirited horses, and drove in time with 
 his master's quickened pulses ; and at the corner of 
 Chesterfield street, as the family carriage rolled slowly 
 on its way to Howell and James's (on an errand con- 
 nected with bridal pearls), the lofty-stepping bays of 
 Lady Mildred dashed by as if all the anger and scorn 
 of a whole descent of coronets were breathing from 
 their arched nostrils. 
 
 What a boon from nature to aristocracy was the 
 pride of the horse ! 
 ******* 
 
 Lady Mildred was a widow of two years' weeds, 
 thirty-two, and of a certain kind of talent, which will be 
 explained in the course of this story. She had no per- 
 sonal charms, except such as are indispensably neces- 
 sary to lady-likeness — indispensably necessary, for 
 that very reason, to any control over the fancy of a 
 man of imagination. Her upper lip was short enough 
 to express scorn, and her feet and hands were ex- 
 quisitely small. Some men of fancy would exact 
 these attractions and great many more. But without 
 these, no woman ever secured even the most transient 
 homage of a poet. She had one of those faces you 
 never find yourself at leisure to criticise, or rather she 
 had one of those siren voices, that, if you heard her 
 speak before you had found leisure to look at her 
 
 features, you had lost your opportunity for ever. Her 
 voice expressed the presence of beauty, as much as a 
 carol in a tree expresses the presence of a bird, and 
 though you saw not the beauty, as you may not see 
 the bird.it was impossible to doubt it was there. Yet 
 with all this enchantment in her voice it was the most 
 changeable music on earth — for hear it when you 
 would, if she were in earnest, you might be sure it 
 was the softened echo of the voice to which she was 
 replying. She never spoke first. She never led the 
 conversation. She had not (or never used) the talent 
 which many very common-place women have, of 
 giving a direction to the feelings and controlling even 
 the course of thought of superior men who may ad- 
 mire them. In everything she played a second. She 
 was silent through all your greetings, through all your 
 compliments; smiled and listened, if it was for hours, 
 till your lighter spirits were exhausted and you came 
 down to the true under tone of your heart ; and by the 
 first-struck chord of feeling and earnest (and her skill 
 in detecting it was an infallible instinct), she modulated 
 her voice and took up the strain, and from the echo 
 of your own soul and the flow of the most throbbing 
 vein in your own heart, she drew your enchantment 
 and intoxication. Her manners were a necessary part 
 of such a character. Her limbs seemed always en- 
 chanted into stillness. When you gazed at her more 
 earnestly, her eyes gradually drooped, and, again her 
 enlarged orbs brightened and grew eager as your gaze 
 retreated. With her slight forefinger laid upon her 
 cheek, and her gloved hand supporting her arm, she 
 sat stirless and rapt, and by an indescribable magnetism 
 you felt that there was not a nerve in your eye, nor a 
 flutter toward change in the expression of your face, 
 that was not linked to hers, nerve for nerve, pulsation 
 for pulsation. Whether this charm would work on 
 common men it is difficult to say — for Lady Mildred's 
 passions were invariably men of genius. 
 
 You may not have seen such a woman as Lady 
 Mildred — but you have seen girls like Eve Gore. 
 There are many lilies, though each one, new-found, 
 seems to the finder the miracle of nature. She was a 
 pure, serene-hearted, and very beautiful girl of seven- 
 teen. Her life had been hitherto the growth of love 
 and care, as the lily she resembled is the growth of 
 sunshine and dew ; and, flower-like, all she had ever 
 known or felt had turned to spotless loveliness. She 
 had met the gifted author of her favorite romance at 
 a country-house where they were guests together, and 
 I could not, short of a chapter of metaphysics, tell you 
 how natural it was for these two apparently uncon- 
 genial persons to mingle, like drops of dew. I will 
 merely say now, that strongly marked as seems the 
 character of every man of genius, his very capability 
 of tracking the mazes of human nature, makes him 
 the very chameleon and Proteus of his species, and 
 that after he has assimilated himself by turns to every 
 variety of mankind, his masks never fall off* without 
 disclosing the very soul and type of the most infantine 
 simplicity. Other men's disguises, too, become a 
 second nature. Those of genius are worn to their 
 last day, as loosely as the mantles of the gods. 
 
 The kind of man called " a penetrating observer," 
 if he had been in the habit of meeting Mr. Clay in 
 London circles, and had afterward seen him rambling 
 
 through the woods of Park with Eve Gore, 
 
 natural, playful sometimes, and sometimes sad, his 
 manner the reflex of hers, even his voice almost as 
 feminine as hers, in his fine sympathy with her charac- 
 ter and attractions — one of these shrewd people I say 
 would have shaken his head and whispered, " pool 
 girl, how little she understands him!" But of all the 
 wise and worldly, gentle and simple, who had ever 
 crossed the path of Ernest Clay, the same child-like 
 girl was the only creature to whom he appeared utterly 
 himself— for whom he wore no disguise — to whose 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 253 
 
 plummet of simple truth he opened the seldom-sound- 
 ed depths of his prodigal and passionate heart. Lady 
 Mildred knew his weaknesses and his genius. Eve 
 Gore knew his better and brighter nature. And both 
 loved him. 
 
 And now, dear reader, having drawn you the portraits 
 of my two heroines, I shall go on with a disembarras- 
 sed narrative to the end. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Lady Mildred's bays panced proudly up Bond 
 street, and kept on their way to the publisher's, at 
 whose door they fretted and champed the bit — they 
 and their high-born mistress in attendance upon the 
 poor author who in this moment of despondency com- 
 plained of the misappreciation of the world. Of the 
 scores of people who knew him and his companion 
 as London celebrities, and who followed the showy 
 equipage with their eyes, how many, think you, look- 
 ed on Mr. Ernest Clay as a misappreciated man ? 
 How many, had they known that the whole errand 
 of this expensive turn out was to call on the publisher 
 for the price of a single magazine paper, would have 
 reckoned those sixteen guineas and the chariot of a 
 noble lady to come for the payment — five hundred 
 pounds for your romance, and a welcome to all the 
 best houses and costliest entertainments of England 
 — a hundred pounds for your poem and the attention 
 of a thousand eager admirers — these are some of the 
 " lengthening shadows" to the author's profits which 
 the author does not reckon, but which the world does. 
 To the rest of mankind these are " chattels" priced 
 and paid for. Twenty thousand a year would hardly 
 buy for Mr. Clay, simple and uncelebrated, what Mr. 
 Clay, author, etc., has freely with five hundred. To 
 whose credit shall the remaining nineteen thousand 
 five hundred be set down ? Common people who pay 
 for these things are not believers in fairy gifts. They 
 see the author in a station of society unattainable ex- 
 cept by the wealthiest and best born, with all that 
 profuse wealth could purchase as completely at his 
 service as if the bills of cost were to be brought in to 
 him at Christmas ; and besides all this (once more 
 "into the bargain") caressed and flattered as no 
 " golden dulness" ever was or could be. To rate the 
 revenue of such a pampered idol of fortune, what man 
 in his senses would inquire merely into the profits of 
 his book ! 
 
 And in this lies the whole secret of the envy and 
 malice which is the peculiar inheritance of genius. 
 Generous-minded men, all women, the great and rich 
 who are too high themselves to feel envy, and the poor 
 and humble who are too low to feel aught but wonder 
 and grateful admiration — these are the fosterers and 
 flatterers, the paymasters of the real wealth and the 
 receivers of the choicest fruits of genius. The aspi- 
 ring mediocrity, the slighted and eclipsed pretenders 
 to genius, are a large class, to whose eyes all bright- 
 ness is black, and the great mass of men toil their lives 
 and utmost energies away for the hundredth part of 
 what the child of genius wins by his unseen pen — by 
 the toil which neither hardens his hands nor trenches 
 on his hours of pleasure. They see a man no come- 
 lier nor better born than they — idle apparently, as the 
 most spoilt minion of wealth, vying with the best born 
 in the favor of beautiful and proud women, using all 
 the goodsof fortune with a profuse carelessness, which 
 the possession of the lamp of Aladdin could not more 
 than inspire, and by bitter criticism, by ingenious 
 slander, by continual depreciation, ridicule, and ex- 
 aggeration of every pretty foible, they attempt to level 
 the inequalities of fortune, and repair the flagrant in- 
 justice of the blind goddess to themselves. Upon the 
 
 class generally, they are avenged. Their malice 
 poisons the joy and cripples the fine-winged fancy of 
 nineteen in the score. But the twentieth is born 
 proud and elastic, and the shaft his scorn does not 
 fling back, his light-heartedness eludes, and his is the 
 destiny which, more than that of kings or saints, proves 
 the wide inequality in human lot. 
 
 I trust, dear reader, that you have been more amused 
 than Lady Mildred at this half hour's delay at the 
 publisher's. While I have been condensing into a 
 theory by scattered observations of London authors, 
 her ladyship has been musing upon the apparition of 
 the family carriage of the Gores at Mr. Clay's lodgings. 
 Lady Mildred's position in society, though she had 
 the entree to all the best houses in London, precluded 
 an intimate acquaintance with any unmarried girl — 
 but she had seen Eve Gore and knew and dreaded her 
 loveliness. A match of mere interest would have 
 given her no uneasiness, but she could see far enough 
 into the nature of this beautiful and fresh-hearted girl 
 to know that hers would be no divided empire. All 
 women are conscious that a single-minded, concentra- 
 ted, pure affection, melting the whole character into 
 the heart, is omnipotent in perpetuating fidelity. 
 
 " Ernest," said Lady Mildred, as the chariot sped 
 from the publisher's door, and took its way to the 
 Park, "you are grown ceremonious. Am I so new a 
 friend that you can not open a note in my presence ?" 
 
 Clay placed the crushed letter in her hand. 
 
 "1 will have no secrets from you, dear Lady Mildred. 
 There is probably much in that note that will surprise 
 you. Break the seal, however, and give me your ad- 
 vice. I will not promise to follow it." 
 
 The blood flushed to the temples of Lady Mildred 
 as she read- but her lips, though pale and trembling, 
 were compressed by a strong effort of self control. 
 She turned back and read the note again in a murmur- 
 ing undertone: — 
 
 " Dear Mr. Clay : From causes which you will 
 probably understand, I have been induced to recon- 
 sider your proposal of marriage to my niece. — Impru- 
 dent as I must still consider your union, I find myself 
 in such a situation that, should you persevere, I must 
 decide in its favor, as the least of two evils. You will 
 forgive my anxious care, however, if I exact of you, 
 before taking any decided step, a full and fair state- 
 ment of your pecuniary embarrassments (which I 
 understand are considerable) and your present income 
 and prospects. I think it proper to inform you that 
 Miss Gore's expectations, beyond an annuity of c£300 
 a year, are very distant, and that all your calculations 
 should be confined to that amount. With this under- 
 standing, I should be pleased to see you at Ashurst 
 to-morrow morning. Yours, truly, 
 
 " Thomas Gore." 
 
 "Hear me before you condemn, dear Lady Mildred," 
 passionately exclaimed Ernest, as she clasped her 
 hands over the letter and her tears fell fast upon them : 
 " I was wrong to leave the discovery of this to chance 
 — I should have dealt more frankly with you — indeed, 
 if I had had the opportunity — "' 
 
 Lady Mildred looked up, as if to reproach him for 
 the evasion half uttered. 
 
 " I have seen you daily, it is true, but every hour is 
 not an hour for confession like this, and besides, my 
 new love was a surprise, and what I have to confess is 
 a change in my feelings still more recent — a constant- 
 ly brightening vision of a life (pardon me, Lady Mil- 
 dred !) deeper a thousand fold, and a thousand times 
 sweeter and more engrossing than ours." 
 
 " You are frank," said his pale listener, who had re- 
 covered her self-possession, and seemed bent now, as 
 usual, only on listening and entering into his feelings. 
 
 " I would be so, indeed," he resumed; "but I have 
 
•254 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 not yet come to my confession. Life is too short, 
 Lady Mildred, and youth too vanishing, to waste feel- 
 ing on delusion." 
 
 " Such as your love, do you mean, Ernest ?" 
 
 " Pardon me ! Were you my wife " 
 
 Lady Mildred made a slight motion of impatience 
 with her hand, and unconsciously raised the expressive 
 arching of her lip. 
 
 " I must name this forbidden subject to be under- 
 stood. See what a false position is mine ! You are 
 too proud to marry, but have not escaped loving me, 
 and you wish me to be contented with a perfume on 
 the breeze, to feel a property in a bird in the sky. It 
 was very sweet to begin to love you, to win and join 
 step by step, to have food for hope in what was refused 
 me. But I am checked, and you are still free. I stand 
 at an impassable barrier, and you demand that I should 
 feel united to you." 
 
 " You are ungrateful, Ernest !" 
 
 " If I were your slave, I am, for you load me with 
 favors — but as your lover, no ! It does not fill my 
 heart to open your house to me, to devote to me your 
 dining hours, your horses and servants, to let the 
 world know that you love me, to make me your 
 romance — yet have all the common interests of life 
 apart, have a station in society apart, and ambition not 
 mine, a name not mine, and hearth not mine. You 
 share my wild passions, and my fashionable negations, 
 not my homely feelings and everyday sorrows. I have 
 a whole existence into which you never enter. I am 
 something besides a fashionable author — but not to 
 you. I have a common human heart — a pillow upon 
 which lies down no fancy — a morning which is not 
 spent in sleep or listlessness, but in the earning of my 
 bread — I have dulness and taciturnity and caprice — 
 and in all these you have no share. I am a butterfly 
 and an earth-worm, by turns, and you know me only 
 on the wins;. You do not answer me!" 
 
 Lady Mildred, as I have said before, was an admirer 
 of genius, and though Ernest was excusing an infideli- 
 ty to herself, the novelty of his distinctions opened to | 
 her a new chapter in the book of love, and she was 
 interested far beyond resentment. He was talking 
 from his heart, too, and every one who has listened to a 
 murmur of affection, knows what sweetness the breath- 
 ings of those deeper veins of feeling infuse into the 
 voice. To a palled Sybarite like Lady Mildred, there 
 was a wild-flower freshness in all this that was irresisti- 
 bly captivating. A smile stole through her lips instead 
 of the reproach and anger that he expected. 
 
 " I do not answer you, my dear Ernest, for the same 
 reason I would not tear a leaf out of one of your books 
 unread. I quite enter into your feelings. I wish I 
 could hear you talk of them hours longer. Their 
 simplicity and truth enchant me — but I confess I can 
 not see what you propose to yourself. Do you think 
 to reconcile and blend all these contradictory moods 
 by an imprudent marriage ? Or do you mean to vow 
 your butterfly to celibacy, and marry your worm-fly 
 alone, and grovel in sympathy rather than take love 
 with you when you soar, and keep your grovelling to 
 yourself." 
 
 " I think Eve Gore would love me, soaring or creep- 
 ing, Lady Mildred ! She would be happier sitting by 
 my table while I wrote, than driving in this gay crowd 
 with her chariot. She would lose the light of her life 
 in absence from me, like a cloud receding from the 
 moon, whatever stars sparkled around her. She 
 would be with me at all hours of the day and the night, 
 sharing every thought that could spring to my lips, 
 and reflecting my own soul for ever. You will forgive 
 me for finding out this want, this void, while you loved 
 me. But I have felt it sickeningly in your bright 
 rooms, with music and perfume, and the touch of your 
 hand all conspiring to enchant me. In the very hours 
 when most men on earth would have envied me, I 
 
 have felt the humbler chambers of my heart ache with 
 loneliness. I have longed for some still and dark re 
 treat, where the beating of my pulse would be protes- 
 tation enough, and where she who loved me was blest 
 to overflowing with my presence only. Affection is a 
 glow-worm light, dear Lady Mildred ! It pales amid 
 splendor." 
 
 " But you should have a glow-worm's habits to 
 relish it, my dear poet. You can not live on a blade 
 of grass, nor shine brightest out of doors in the rain. 
 Let us look at it without these Claude Lorraine 
 glasses, and see the truth. Mr. Thomas Gore offers 
 you c£300 a year with his neice. Your own income, 
 the moment you marry, is converted from pocket- 
 money into subsistence — from the purchase of gloves 
 and Hungary water into butcher's meat and groceries. 
 You retire to a small house in one of the cheaper streets. 
 You have been accustomed to drive out continually, 
 and for several years you have not only been free from 
 the trouble and expense of your own dinner, but you 
 have pampered your taste with the varied chefs cVazuvre 
 of all the best cooks of London. You dine at home 
 now, feeding several mouths beside your own, on what 
 is called a family dinner — say, as a good specimen, a 
 beefsteak and potatoes, with a Yorkshire pudding. 
 Instead of retiring after your coffee to a brilliantly 
 lighted drawning-room, where collision with some 
 portion of the most gifted society of London dis- 
 ciplines your intellect and polishes your wit and fancy, 
 you sit down by your wife's work-table, and grow 
 sleepy over your plans of economy, sigh for the gay 
 scenes you once moved in, and go to bed to be rid of 
 your regrets." 
 
 " But why should I be exiled from society, my dear 
 Lady Mildred ? What circle in London would not 
 take a new grace from the presence of such a woman 
 as Eve Gore ?" 
 
 "Oh, marvellous simplicity ! If men kept the gates 
 of society, a la bonne heure ! — for then a party would 
 consist of one man (the host), and a hundred pretty 
 women. But the "free list" of society, you know, 
 as well as I, my love-blind friend, is exclusively mas- 
 culine. Woman keeps the door, and easy as turns the 
 hinge to the other sex, it swings reluctant to her own. 
 You may name a hundred men in your circle whose 
 return for the hospitality of fashionable houses it 
 would be impossible to guess at, but you can not 
 point me out one married woman, whose price of 
 admission is not as well known and as rigidly exacted, 
 as the cost of an opera-box. — Those who do not give 
 sumptuous parties in their turn (and even these must 
 be well bred and born people), are in the first place 
 very ornamental ; but, besides being pretty, they must 
 either sing or flirt. There are but two classes of 
 women in fashionable society — the leaders or party- 
 givers, and the decoys to young men. There is the 
 
 pretty Mrs. , for example, whose habitation 
 
 nobody knows but as a card with an address; and why 
 is she everywhere ? Simply, because she draws four 
 or five fashionable young men, who would find no in- 
 ducement to come if she were not there. Then there 
 
 is Mrs. , who sings enchantingly, and Mrs. 
 
 , who is pretty, and a linguist, and entertains 
 
 stupid foreigners, and Mrs. , who is ciever at 
 
 charades, and plays quadrilles, and what would Mrs. 
 Clay do? Is she musical ?" 
 
 " She is beautiful !" 
 
 " Well — she must flirt. With three or four fash- 
 ionable lovers " 
 
 "Lady Mildred!" 
 
 "Pardon me, I was thinking aloud. Well — I will 
 suppose you an exception to this Mede-and-Persian 
 law of the beau monde, and allow for a moment that 
 Mrs. Clay, with an income of five or six hundred a 
 year, with no eyes for anybody but her husband, 
 poor, pretty, and innocent (what a marvel it would be 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 255 
 
 in May Fair, by-the-way !), becomes as indispensable 
 to a partie fine as was Mr. Clay while in unmarried 
 celebrity. Mind, I am not talking of routs and balls, 
 where anybody can go, because there must be a crowd, 
 but of petits soupers, select dinners, and entertain- 
 ments where every guest is invited as an ingredient to 
 a well-studied cup of pleasure. I will suppose for an 
 instant, that a connubial and happy pair could be de- 
 sirable in such circles. What part of your income 
 of five or six hundred a year, do you suppose, would 
 dress and jewel your wife, keep carriage and servants, 
 and pay for your concert-tickets and opera-boxes — all 
 absolutely indispensable to people who go out ? Why, 
 my dear Ernest, your whole income would not suffice 
 for the half. You must ' live shy,' go about in hack- 
 ney-coaches, dress economically (which is execrable 
 in a woman), and endure the neglects and mortifica- 
 tions which our pampered servants inevitably inflict 
 on shabby people. Your life would be one succes- 
 sion of bitter mortifications, difficulties, and heart- 
 burnings. Believe me, there is no creature on earth 
 so exquisitely wretched as a man with a fashionable 
 wife and small means." 
 
 Lady Mildred had been too much accustomed to 
 the management of men, not to leave Ernest, after this 
 homily, to his own thoughts. A woman of less 
 knowledge and tact would have followed up this argu- 
 ment with an appeal to his feelings. But beside that, 
 she wished the seed she had thus thrown into his 
 mind to germinate with thought. She knew that it 
 was a wise principle in the art of love to be cold by 
 daylight. Ernest sat silent, with his eyes cast musing- 
 ly down to the corner of the chariot, where the smal- 
 lest foot and prettiest chaussure conceivable was play- 
 ing with the tassel of the window-pull ; and reserving 
 her more effective game of feeling for the evening, 
 
 when they were to meet at Mrs. R 's, she set him 
 
 down at his clubhouse with a calm and cold adieu, 
 and drove home to bathe, dine alone, sleep, and re- 
 fresh body and spirit for the struggle against love and 
 Eve Gore. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Genius is lord of the world. Men labor at the 
 foundation of society, while the lowly lark, unseen 
 and little prized, sits, hard by, in his nest on the earth, 
 gathering strength to bear his song up to the sun. 
 Slowly rise basement and monumental aisle, column 
 and architrave, dome and lofty tower; and when the 
 cloud-piercing spire is burnished with gold, and the 
 fabric stands perfect and wondrous, up springs the for- 
 gotten lark, with airy wheel to the pinnacle, and 
 standing poised and unwondering on his giddy perch, 
 he pours out his celestial music till his bright footing 
 trembles with harmony. And when the song is done, 
 and mounting thence, he soars away to fill his ex- 
 hausted heart at the fountains of the sun, the dwel- 
 lers in the towers below look up to the gilded spire 
 and shout — not to the burnished shaft, but to the 
 lark — lost from it in the sky. 
 
 " Mr. Clay !" repeated the last footman on Mrs. K's 
 flower-laden staircase. 
 
 I have let you down as gently as possible, dear 
 reader; but here we are in one of the most fashion- 
 able houses in May Fair. 
 
 Pardon me a moment! Did I say I had let you 
 down ? What pyramid of the Nile is piled up like 
 the gradations between complete insignificance and 
 the effect of that footman's announcement? On the 
 heels of Ernest, and named with the next breath of 
 the menial's lips, came the bearer of a title laden 
 with the emblazoned honors of descent. Had he en- 
 
 | tered a hall of statuary, he could not have been less 
 regarded. All eyes were on the pale forehead and 
 calm lips that had entered before him ; and the blood 
 of the warrior who made the name, and of the states- 
 men and nobles who had borne it, and the accumu- 
 lated honor and renown of centuries of unsullied dis- 
 tinctions — all these concentrated glories in the midst 
 of the most polished and discriminating circle on 
 earth, paled before the lamp of yesterday, burning in 
 the eye of genius. Where is distinction felt ? In 
 secret, amid splendor ? No ! In the street and the 
 vulgar gaze? No! In "the bosom of love? She 
 only remembers it. Where, then, is the intoxicating 
 cup of homage — the delirious draught for which 
 brain, soul, and nerve, are tasked, tortured, and 
 spent — where is it lifted to the lips ? The answer 
 brings me back. Eyes shining from amid jewels, 
 voices softened with gentle breeding, smiles awaken- 
 ing beneath costly lamps — an atmosphere of perfume, 
 splendor, and courtesy — these form the poet's Hebe, 
 and the hero's Ganymede. These pour for ambition 
 the draught that slakes his fever — these hold the cup 
 to lips, drinking eagerly, that would turn away in sol- 
 itude, from the ambrosia of the gods ! 
 
 Clay's walk through the sumptuous rooms of Mrs. 
 
 R was like a Roman triumph. He was borne on 
 
 from lip to lip — those before him anticipating his 
 greeting, and those he left, still sending their bright 
 and kind words after him. He breathed incense. 
 
 Suddenly, behind him, he heard the voice of Eve 
 Gore. She was making the tour of the rooms on the 
 arm of a friend, and following Ernest, had insensibly 
 tried to get nearer to him, and had become flushed 
 and troubled in the effort. They had never before 
 met in a large party, and her pride, in the universal 
 attention he attracted, still more flushed her eyelids 
 and injured her beauty. She gave him her hand as 
 he turned ; but the greeting that sprang to her lips 
 was checked by a sudden consciousness that many 
 eyes were on her, and she hesitated, murmured some 
 broken words, and was silent. The immediate atten- 
 tion that Clay had given to her, interrupted at the 
 same moment the undertoned murmur around him, 
 and there was a minute's silence, in which the inevit- 
 able thought flashed across his mind that he had over- 
 rated her loveliness. Still the trembling and clinging 
 clasp of her hand, and the appealing earnestness of 
 her look, told him what was in her heart — and when 
 was ever genius ungrateful for love ! He made a 
 strong effort to reason down his disappointment, and 
 had the embarrassed girl resumed instantly her natu- 
 ral ease and playfulness, his sensitive imagination 
 would have been conquered, and its recoil forgotten. 
 But love, that lends us words, smiles, tears, all we 
 want, in solitude, robs us in the gay crowd of every- 
 thing but what we can not use — tears ! As the man 
 she worshipped led her on through those bright 
 rooms, Eve Gore, though she knew not why, felt the 
 large drops ache behind her eyes. She would have 
 sobbed if she had tried to speak. Clay had given her 
 his arm, and resumed his barter of compliment with 
 the crowd, and with it a manner she had never before 
 seen. He had been a boy, fresh, frank, ardent, and 
 unsuspicious, at Annesley Park. She saw him now 
 in the cold and polished armor of a man who has 
 been wounded as well as flattered by the world, and 
 who presents his shield even to a smile. Impossible 
 as it was that he should play the lover now, she felt 
 wronged and hurt by his addressing the same tone of 
 elegant trifling and raillery which was the key of the 
 conversation around them. She knew, too, that she 
 herself was appearing to disadvantage ; and before a 
 brief hour had elapsed, she had become a prey to an- 
 other feeling — the bitter avarice which is the curse 
 of all affection for the gifted or the beautiful— an ava- 
 arice that makes every smile given back for admiration., 
 
256 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 a germ torn from us — every word, even of thanks for 
 courtesy, a life-drop of our hearts drank away. 
 
 H The moon looks 
 On many brooks, 
 The brook can see no moon but this," 
 
 contains the mordent secret of most hearts vowed to 
 the love of remarkable genius or beauty. 
 
 The supper-rooms had been some time open; from 
 these and the dancing hall, the half-weary guests 
 were coming back to the deep fauteuils, the fresher 
 air, and the graver society of the library, which had 
 served as an apartment of reception. "With a clouded 
 brow, thoughtful and silent, Eve Gore sat with her 
 mother in a recess near the entrance, and Clay, who 
 had kept near them, though their conversation had 
 long since languished, stood in the centre of a small 
 group of fashionable men, much more brilliant and 
 far louder in his gayety than he would have been 
 with a heart at ease. It was one of those nights of 
 declining May, when the new foliage of the season 
 seems to have exhausted the air, and though it was 
 near morning, there came through the open windows 
 neither coolness nor vitality. Fans, faded wreaths, 
 and flushed faces, were universal. 
 
 A footman stood suddenly in the vacant door. 
 
 " Lady Mildred !" 
 
 The announcements had been over for hours, and ev- 
 ery eye was turned on the apparition of so late a comer. 
 
 Quietly, but with a step as elastic as the nod of a 
 water-lily, Lady Mildred glided inio the room, and 
 the high tones and unharmonized voices of the differ- 
 ent groups suddenly ceased, and were succeeded by 
 a low and sustained murmur of admiration. A white 
 dress of faultless freshness of fold, a snowy turban, 
 from which hung on either temple a cluster of crim- 
 son camelias still wet with the night dew ; long raven 
 curls of undisturbed grace falling on shoulders of that 
 undescribable and dewy coolness which follows a 
 morning bath, giving the skin the texture and the 
 opaque whiteness of the lily ; lips and skin redolent 
 of the repose and purity, and the downcast but wake- 
 ful eye so expressive of recent solitude, and so pecu- 
 liar to one who has not spoken since she slept. 
 These were attractions which, in contrast with the 
 paled glories around, elevated Lady Mildred at once 
 into the predominant star of the night. 
 
 " What news from the bottom of the sea, most 
 adorable Venus ?" said a celebrated artist, standing 
 out from the group and drawing a line through the 
 air with his finger as if he were sketching the flowing 
 outline of her form. 
 
 Lady Mildred laid her small hand on Clay's, and 
 with a smile, but no greeting else, passed on. The 
 bantering question of the great painter told her that 
 her spell worked to a miracle, and she was too shrewd 
 an enchantress to dissolve it by the utterance of a 
 word. She glided on like a spirit of coolness, calm, 
 silent, and graceful, and, standing a moment on the 
 threshold of the apartment beyond, disappeared, 
 with every eye fixed on her vanishing form in won- 
 dering admiration. Purity was the effect she had pro- 
 duced — purity in contrast with the flowers in the 
 room — purity (Ernest Clay felt and wondered at it), 
 even in contrast with Eve Gore ! There was silence 
 in the library for an instant, and then, one by one, the 
 gay group around our hero followed in search of the 
 new star of the hour, and he was left standing alone. 
 He turned to speak to his silent friends, but the man- 
 ner of Mrs. Gore was restrained, and Eve sat pale and 
 tearful within the curtain of the recess, and looked as 
 if her heart was breaking. 
 
 " I should like — I should like to go home, mother!" 
 she said presently, with a difficult articulation. " I 
 think I am not well. Mr. Clay — Ernest — will see, 
 perhaps, if our carriage is here." 
 
 "You will find us in the shawl-room," said Mrs. 
 Gore, following him to the staircase, and looking after 
 him with troubled eyes. 
 
 The carriage was at the end of the line, and could 
 not come up for an hour. Day was dawning, and 
 Ernest had need of solitude and thought. He crossed 
 to the park, and strode off through the wet grass, 
 bathing his forehead with handfuls of dew. Alas ! 
 the fevered eyes and pallid lips he had last seen were 
 less in harmony with the calm stillness of the dawn 
 than the vision his conscience whispered him was 
 charmed for his destruction. As the cool air brought 
 back his reason, he remembered Eve's embarrassed 
 address and his wearisome and vain efforts to amuse 
 her. He remembered her mother's reproving eye, 
 her own colder utterance of his name, and then in 
 powerful relief came up the pictures he had brooded 
 on since his conversation in the chariot with Lady 
 Mildred, visions of self-denial and loss of caste op- 
 posed to the enchantments of passion without re- 
 straint or calculation, and his head and heart became 
 wild with conflicting emotions. One thing was cer- 
 tain. He must decide now. He must speak to Eve 
 Gore before parting, and in the tone of his voice, if it 
 were but a word, there must be that which her love 
 would interpret as a bright promise or a farewell. He 
 turned back. At the gate of the park stood one ot 
 the guilty wanderers of the streets, who seized him 
 by the sleeve and implored charity. 
 
 " Who are you ?" exclaimed Clay, scarce knowing 
 what he uttered. 
 
 "As good as she is," screamed the woman, pointing 
 to Lady Mildred's carriage, "only not so rich! Oh, 
 we could change places, if all's true." 
 
 Ernest stood still as if his better angel had spoken 
 through those painted lips. He gasped with the 
 weight that rose slowly from his heart ; and purcha- 
 sing his release from the unfortunate wretch who 
 had arrested his steps, he crossed slowly to the 
 door crowded with the menials of the gay throng 
 within. 
 
 " Lady Mildred's carriage stops the way !" shouted 
 a footman, as he entered. He crossed the hall, and 
 at the door of the shawl-room he was met by Lady 
 Mildred herself, descending from the hall, surrounded 
 with a troop of admirers. Clay drew back to let her 
 pass ; but while he looked into her face, it became 
 radiant with the happiness of meeting him, and the 
 temptation to join her seemed irresistible. She en- 
 tered the room, followed by her gay suite, and last of 
 all by Ernest, who saw with the first glance at the 
 Gores that he was believed to have been with her du- 
 ring the half-hour that had elapsed. He approached 
 Eve ; but the sense of an injustice he could not im- 
 mediately remove, checked the warm impulse with 
 which he was coming to pour out his heart, and 
 against every wish and feeling of his soul, he was 
 constrained and cold. 
 
 " No, indeed !" exclaimed Lady Mildred, her voice 
 suddenly becoming audible, " I shall set down Mr. 
 Clay, whose door I pass. Lord George, ask Mr. 
 Clay if he is ready." 
 
 Eve Gore suddenly laid her hand on his arm, as if 
 a spirit had whispered that her last chance for happi- 
 ness was poised on that moment's lapse. 
 
 " Ernest," she said, in a voice so unnaturally low 
 that it made his veins creep with the fear that her 
 reason was unseated, " I am lost if you go with her. 
 Stay, dear Ernest ! She can not love you as I do ! 
 I implore you remember that my life — my life " 
 
 " Beg pardon," said Lord George, laying his hand 
 familiarly on Clay's shoulder, and drawing him away, 
 " Lady Mildred waits for you !" 
 
 " I will return in an instant, dearest Eve," he said, 
 springing again to her side, " I will apologize and be 
 with you. One instant — only one " 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 257 
 
 "Thank God!" said the poor girl, sinking into a 
 chair and bursting into tears. 
 
 Lady Mildred sat in her chariot, but her head 
 drooped on her breast, and her arm hung lifeless at 
 her side. 
 
 "She is surely ill," said Lord George; "jump in, 
 Clay, my fine fellow. Get her home. Shut the door, 
 Thomas! Go on, coachman!" And away sped the 
 fleet horses of Lady Mildred, but not homeward. 
 Clay lifted her head and spoke to her, but receiving 
 no answer, he busied himself chafing her hands, 
 and the carriage-blinds being drawn, he thought mo- 
 mently he should be rid of his charge by their arrival 
 in Grosvenor square. But the minutes elapsed, and 
 still the carriage sped on ; and surprised at last into 
 suspicion, he raised his hand to the checkstring, but 
 the small fingers he had been chafing so earnestly ar- 
 rested his arm. 
 
 "No, no!" said Lady Mildred, rising from his 
 shoulder, and throwing her arms passionately around 
 his neck, " you must go blindfold, and go with me ! 
 Ernest! Ernest!" she continued, as he struggled an 
 instant to reach the string; but he felt her tears on 
 his breast, and his better angel ceased to contend with 
 him. He sank back in the chariot with those fragile 
 arms wound around him, and, with fever in his brain, 
 and leaden sadness at his heart, suffered that swift 
 chariot to speed on its guilty way. 
 
 In a small maison de plaisance, which he well knew, 
 in one of the most romantic dells of Devon, built 
 with exquisite taste by Lady Mildred, and filled with 
 all that art and wealth could minister to luxury, Er- 
 nest Clay passed the remainder of the summer, for- 
 getful of everything beyond his prison of pleasure, 
 except a voice full of bitter remorse, which some- 
 times, in the midst of his abandonment, whispered the 
 name of Eve Gore. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The rain poured in torrents from the broad leads and 
 
 Gothic battlements of Castle, and the dull and 
 
 plashing echoes, sent up with steady reverberation ! 
 from the stone pavement of the terrace and courts, I 
 lulled to a late sleep one of most gay and fashionable I 
 parties assembled out of London. It was verging j 
 toward noon, and, startled from a dream of music, by | 
 the entrance of a servant, Ernest Clay drew back the 
 heavy bed-curtains and looked irresolutely around his 
 luxurious chamber. The coals in the bright fire 
 widened their smoking cracks and parted with an in- 
 dolent effort, the well-trained menial glided stealthily 
 about, arranging the preparations for the author's 
 toilet, the gray daylight came in grayer and softer 
 through the draped folds which fell over the windows, 
 and if there was temptation to get up, it extended no 
 farther than to the deeply cushioned and spacious 
 chair, over which was flung a dressing-gown of the 
 loose and flowing fashion, and gorgeous stuff of the 
 Orient. 
 
 " Thomas, what stars are visible to the naked eye 
 this morning?" said the couchant poet with a heavy 
 yawn. 
 
 " Sir !" 
 
 " I asked if Lady Grace was at breakfast?" 
 
 " Her ladyship took breakfast in her own room, I 
 believe, sir!" 
 
 " ' Qualis rex, talis grex.' Bring mine !" 
 
 " Beg pardon, sir ?" 
 
 "I said 1 would have an egg and a spatchcock, 
 Ihomas! And, Thomas, see if the duke has done 
 with the Morning Post." 
 
 "I could have been unusually agreeable to Lady 
 Grace," soliloquized the author, as he completed his 
 17 
 
 toilet; "I feel both gregarious and brilliant this 
 morning and should have breakfasted below. Strange 
 that one feels so dexterous-minded sometimes after a 
 hard drink! — Bacchus waking like Aurora! Thomas, 
 you forgot the claret ! 1 could coin this efflux of 
 soul, now, into ' burning words,' and I will. What 
 is the cook's name, Thomas ? Gone ? So has the 
 builder of this glorious spatchcock narrowly escaped 
 immortality ! Fairest Lady Grace, the sonnet shall 
 be yours at the rebound! A sonnet? N — n — no! 
 But I could write such a love-letter this morning! 
 | Morning Post. ' Died at Brighton Mr. William 
 Brown.'' Brown — Brown — what was that pretty girl's 
 name that married a Brown — a rich William Brown. 
 Beverley was her name — Julia Beverley — a flower for 
 the garden of Epicurus — a mate for Leontium! I 
 loved her till I was stopped by Mr. Brown — loved her? 
 by Jove, I loved her — as well as I loved anybody that 
 year. Suppose she were now the widow Brown ? If 
 I thought so, faith ! I would write her such a te- 
 miniscent epistle — Why not as it is — on the supposi- 
 tion ? Egad, if it is not her William Brown, it is no 
 fault of mine. Here goes at a venture ! 
 
 " To her who was Julia Beverley — 
 " Your dark eye rests on this once familiar hand- 
 1 writing. If your pulse could articulate at this moment, 
 it would murmur he loved me well! He who writes to 
 you now, after years of silence, parted from you with 
 your tears upon his lips — parted from you as the last 
 shadow parts from the sun, with a darkness that must 
 [ deepen till morn again. I begin boldly, but the usage 
 j of the world is based upon forgetfulness in absence, 
 i and I have not forgotten. Yet this is not to be a love- 
 letter. 
 
 " I am turning back a leaf in my heart. Turn to 
 it in yours ! On a night in June, within the shadow 
 of the cypress by the fountain of Ceres, in the ducal 
 gardens of Florence, at the festa of the duke's birth- 
 night, I first whispered to you of love. Is it so writ in 
 your tablet ? Or were those broken words, and those 
 dark tresses drooped on my breast, mockeries of a 
 night — flung from remembrance with the flowers you 
 wore ? Flowers, said I ? Oh, Heaven ! how beautiful 
 you were with those lotus-stems braided in your hair, 
 and the white chalices gleaming through your ringlets 
 as if pouring their perfume over your shoulders! 
 How rosy-pale, like light through alabaster, showed 
 the cheek that shrank from me beneath the betraying 
 brightness of the moon! How musical above the 
 murmur of the fountain rose the trembling wonder 
 at my avowal, and the few faint syllables of forgiveness 
 and love. I strained you wildly to my heart ! Oh, 
 can that be forgotten ! 
 
 " With the news that your husband was dead, rush- 
 ed back these memories in a whirlwind. For one 
 brief, one delirious moment, I fancied you might yet 
 be mine. I write because the delirium is over. Had 
 it not been, I should be now weeping at your feet — 
 my life upon your lips ! 
 
 "I will try to explain to you, calmly, a feeling that 
 I have. We met in the aisle of Santa Croce — 
 strangers. There was a winged lightness in your 
 step, and a lithe wave in the outline of your form, as 
 you moved through the sombre light, which thrilled 
 me like the awakening to life of some piece of aerial 
 sculpture. I watched you to your carriage, and re- 
 turned to trace that shadowy aisle for hours, breathing 
 the same air, and trying to conjure up to ray imagina- 
 tion the radiant vision lost to me, 1 feared, for ever. 
 That night your necklace parted and fell at my feet, 
 in the crowd at the Pitti, and as I returned the warm 
 jewel to your hand, I recognised the haunting features 
 which 1 seemed to live but to see again. By the first 
 syllable of acknowledgment I knew you — for in your 
 voice there was that profound sweetness that comes 
 
!58 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 only from a heart thought-saddened, and therefore 
 careless of the cold fashion of the world. In the em- 
 bayed window looking out on the moonlit terrace of 
 the garden, I joined you with the confidence of a 
 familiar friend, and in the low undertone of earnest 
 and sincerity we talked of the thousand themes with 
 which the walls of that palace of pilgrimage breathe 
 and kindle. Chance-guided and ignorant even of 
 each other's names, we met on the galleries of art, in 
 the gardens of noble palaces, in the thronged re- 
 sorts open to all in that land of the sun, and my heart 
 expanded to you like a flower, and love entered it with 
 the fulness of light. Again, I say, we dwelt but upon 
 themes of intellect, and I had not breathed to you of 
 the passion that grew hour by hour. 
 
 "We met for the last time on the night of the duke's 
 festa — in that same glorious palace where we had first 
 blended thought and imagination, or the wondrous 
 miracles of art. You were sad and lower-voiced than 
 even your wont, and when I drew you from the crowd, 
 and wandering with you through the flowering alleys 
 of the garden, stood at last by that murmuring fountain, 
 and ceased suddenly to speak — there was the threshold 
 of love. Did you forbid me to enter? You fell on 
 my bosom and wept ! 
 
 " Had I brought you to this by love-making? Did 
 I flatter or plead my way into your heart ? Were you 
 wooed or importuned? It is true your presence drew 
 my better angel closer to my side, but I was myself — 
 such as your brother might be to you — such as you 
 would have found me through life ; and for this — for 
 being what I was — with no art or effort to win affec- 
 tion, you drew the veil from between us — you tempted 
 from my bosom the bird that comes never back — you 
 suffered me to love you, helplessly and wildly, when 
 you knew that love such as mine impoverishes life 
 for ever. The only illimitable trust, the only bound- 
 less belief on earth, is first love ! What had I done to 
 be robbed of this irrecoverable gem — to be sent wander- 
 ing through the world, a hopeless infidel in woman ? 
 
 " I have become a celebrity since we parted, and 
 perhaps you have looked into my books, thinking I 
 might have woven into some one of my many-colored 
 woofs the bright thread you broke so suddenly. You 
 found no trace of it, and you thought, perhaps, that 
 all memory of those simpler hours was drowned in the 
 intoxicating cup of fame. I have accounted in this 
 way for your never writing to cheer or congratulate 
 me. But if this conjecture be true, how little you 
 know the heart you threw away — how little you know 
 of the thrice-locked, light-shining, care-hidden casket 
 in which is treasured up the refused gold of a first 
 love. What else is there on earth worth hiding and 
 brooding over? Should I wing such treasures with 
 words and lose them ? 
 
 " And now you ask. why, after years of healing 
 silence, I open this wound afresh, and write to you. 
 Is it to prove to you that I love you ? — to prepare the 
 way to see you again, to woo and win you ? No — 
 though I was worthy of you once ! No — though I 
 feel living in my soul a passion that with long silence 
 and imprisonment has become well-nigh uncontrolla- 
 ble. I am not worthy of you now! My nature is 
 soiled and world-polluted. I am prosperous and 
 famous, and could give you the station you never 
 won, though you trod on my heart to reach it — but 
 the lamp is out on my altar of truth — I love by my 
 lips — I mock at faith — I marvel at belief in vows or 
 fidelity — I would not trust you, no, if you were mine, 
 I would not trust you though I held every vein of 
 your bosom like a hound's leash. Till you can re- 
 buke whim, till you can chain imagination, till you 
 cau fetter blood, 1 will not believe in woman. Yet this 
 is your work ! 
 
 '■' Would you know why I write to you ? Why has 
 Uod given us the instinct of outcry in agony, but to 
 
 inflict on those who wound us a portion of our pain ? 
 I would tell you that the fire you kindled so wantonly 
 burns on — that after years of distracting ambition, 
 fame, and pleasure, I still taste the bitterness you 
 threw into my cup — that in secret when musing on 
 my triumphs, in the crowd when sick with adulation, 
 in this lordly castle when lapt in luxury and regard — 
 in all hours and phazes of a life brilliant and exciting 
 above that of most men, I mourn over that betrayed 
 affection, I see that averted face, I worship in bitter 
 despair that' surpassing loveliness which should have 
 been mine in its glory and flower. 
 
 " I have made my moan. I have given voice to 
 my agony. Farewell !" 
 
 When Mr. Clay had concluded this "airing of his 
 vocabulary," he enclosed it in a hasty note to his 
 friend, the secretary of legation at the court of 
 Tuscany, requesting him to call on " two abominable 
 old maids, by the name of Buggins or Bridgins," who 
 represented the scan. mag. of Florence, and could 
 doubtless tell him how to forward his letter to " the 
 Browns ;" and the castle-bell sounding as he achieved 
 the superscription, he descended to lunch, very much 
 lightened of his ennui, but with no more memory of 
 the " faithless Julia," than of the claret which had 
 supplied some of the " intensity" of his style. The 
 letter — began as a mystification, or, if it had an object 
 beyond the amusement of an idle hour, intended as a 
 whimsical revenge for Miss Beverley's preference of 
 a rich husband to her then undistinguished admirer 
 — had, in the heat of composition, and quite uncon- 
 sciously to Clay, enlisted real feelings, totally discon- 
 nected with the fair Julia, but not the less easily fused 
 into shape and probability by the facile alchymy of 
 genius. The reader will see at once that the feelings 
 expressed in it could never be the work of imagination. 
 Truth and bitter suffering show through every line, 
 and all its falsehood or fancy lay in its capricious ad- 
 dress to a woman who had really not the slightest 
 share in contributing to its material. The irreparable 
 mischief it occasioned, will be seen in the sequel. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 While the ambassador's bag is steadily posting over 
 the hills of Burgundy with Mr. Clay's letter to Julia 
 Beverley, the reader must be content to gain a little 
 upon her majesty's courier and look in upon a family 
 party assembled in the terraced front of a villa in the 
 neighborhood of Fiesole. The evening was Italian 
 and autumnal, of a ripe, golden glory, and the air was 
 tempered to the blood, as daylight is to the eye — so 
 fitly as to be a forgotten blessing. 
 
 A well-made, well-dressed, robust gentleman, who 
 might be forty-five, or a well-preserved sixty, sat at a 
 stone table on the westward edge of the terrace. The 
 London Times lay on his lap, and a bottle of sherry 
 and a single glass stood at his right hand, and he was 
 dozing quietly after his dinner. Near a fountain be- 
 low, two fair English children played with clusters of 
 ripe grapes. An Italian nurse, forgetting her charge, 
 stood with folded arms leaning against a rough garden 
 statue, and looked vacantly at the sunset sky, while 
 up and down a level and flowering alley in the slope 
 of the garden, paced slowly and gracefully Mrs. 
 William Brown, the mother of these children, the 
 wife of the gentleman sleeping over his newspaper, 
 and the heroine of this story. 
 
 Julia Beverley had been married five years, and fot 
 three years at least she had relinquished the habit of 
 dressing her fine person to advantage. Yet in that 
 untransparent sleeve was hiclden an arm of statuary 
 roundness and polish, and in those carelessly fitted 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 259 
 
 shoes were disguised feet of a plump diminutiveness 
 and arched instep worthy to be the theme of a new 
 Cenerentola. The voluptuous chisel of the Greek 
 never moulded shoulders and bust of more exquisite 
 beauty, yet if she had not become unconscious of the 
 possession of these charms altogether, she had so far 
 lost the vanity of her girlhood that the prudery of a 
 quakeress would not have altered a fold of her cash- 
 mere- Her bonnet, as she walked, had fallen back, 
 and, holding it by one string over her shoulder, she 
 put away behind her "pearl-round ear" the dark and 
 heavy ringlet it had tangled in iis fall, and, with its 
 fellow shading her cheek and shoulder in broken 
 masses of auburn, she presented a picture of luxurious 
 and yet neglected beauty such as the undress pencil 
 of Grenze would have revelled in portraying. The 
 care of such silken fringes as veiled her indolent eyes 
 is not left to mortals, and the covert loves who curve 
 these soft cradles and sleep in them, had kept Julia 
 Beverley's with the fidelity of fairy culture. 
 
 The Beverleys had married their daughter to Mr. 
 Brown with the usual parental care as to his fortune, 
 and the usual parental forgetfulness of everything else. 
 There was a better chance for happiness, it is true, 
 than in most matches of convenience, for the bride- 
 groom, though past his meridian, was a sensible and 
 very presentable sort of man, and the bride was natural- 
 ly indolent, and therefore likely to travel the road 
 shaped out for her by the very marked hedges of ex- 
 pectation and duty. What she had felt for Mr. Clay 
 during their casual and brief intimacy, will be seen by- 
 and-by, but it had made no barrier to her union with 
 Mr. Brown. With a luxurious house, fine horses, 
 and her own way, the stream of life, for the first year 
 of marriage, ran smoothly off. The second year was 
 chequered with misgivings that she had thrown her- 
 self away, and nights of bitter weeping over a destiny 
 in which no one of her bright dreams of love seemed 
 possible to be realized, and still habit riveted its thou- 
 sand chains, her children grew attractive and attach- 
 ing, and by the time at which our story commences, 
 the warm images of a life of passionate devotion had 
 cased to haunt her dreams, sleeping or waking, and 
 she bade fair to live and die one of the happy many 
 about whom " there is no story to tell." 
 
 Mr. Brown at this period occupied a villa in the 
 neighborhood of Florence, and on the arrival of Mr. 
 ('lay's letter at English Embassy, it was at once for- 
 warded to Fiesole, where it intruded like the serpent 
 of old on the domestic paradise to which the reader 
 has been introduced. 
 
 Weak and ill-regulated as was the mind of Mrs. 
 Brown, her first feeling after reading the ardent epistle 
 of Mr. Clay, was unmingled resentment at its freedom. 
 Her husband's back was turned to her as he sat on the 
 terrace, and, ascending the garden steps, she threw the 
 letter on the table. 
 
 •' Here is a letter of condolence on your death," 
 she said, the blood mantling in her cheek, and her 
 lips arched into an expression of wounded pride and 
 indignation. 
 
 Alas for the slight pivot on which turns the balance 
 of destiny — her husband slept ! 
 
 " William!" she said again, but the tone was fainter 
 and the hand she raised to touch him, stayed suspend- 
 ed above the fated letter. 
 
 Waiting one instant more for an answer, and bending 
 over her husband to be sure that his sleep was real, 
 she hastily placed the letter in her bosom, and, with 
 pale brow and limbs trembling beneath her, fled to 
 her chamber. Memory had required but an instant 
 to call up the past, and in that instant, too, the honeyed 
 ll iiieiies she had glanced over in such haste, had 
 burnt into her imagination, effacing all else, even the 
 object for which he had written, and the reproaches 
 he had lavished on her unfaithfulness. With locked 
 
 doors, and curtains dropped between her and the 
 glowing twilight, she reperused the worshipping 
 picture of herself, drawn so covertly under the sem- 
 blance of complaint, and the feeling of conscious 
 beauty so long forgotten, stole back into her veins 
 like the reincarnation of a departed spirit. With a 
 flashing glance at the tall mirror before her, she stood 
 up, arching her white neck and threading her fingers 
 through the loosened masses of her hair. She felt 
 that she was beautiful — still superbly beautiful. She 
 advanced to the mirror. 
 
 Her bright lips, her pliant motion, the smooth trans- 
 parence of her skin, the fulness of vein and limb, all 
 mingled in one assurance of youth, in a wild desire 
 for admiration, in a strange, restless^ feverish im- 
 patience to be away where she could be seen and 
 loved — away to fulfil that destiny of the heart which 
 seemed now the one object of life, though for years 
 so unaccountably forgotten ! 
 
 " 1 was born to be loved !" she wildly exclaimed, 
 pacing her chamber, and wondering at her own beauty 
 as the mirror gave back her kindling features and 
 animated grace of movement; "How could I have 
 forgotten that I was beautiful ?" But at that instant 
 her husband's voice, cold, harsh, and unimaginative, 
 forced its way to her ear, and, convulsed with a 
 tumultuous misery, she could neither struggle with 
 nor define, she threw herself on her bed and abandoned 
 herself to an uncontrolled agony of tears. 
 
 Let those smile at this paroxysm of feeling whose 
 " dream has come to pass!" Let those wonder who 
 have never been startled from their common-place 
 existence with the heart's bitter question — Is tliis alt! 
 
 Reader ! are you loved ? — loved as you dreamed in 
 youth you might and must be — loved by the matchless 
 creature you painted in your imagination, lofty-hearted, 
 confiding, and radiantly fair? Have you spent your 
 treasure ? Have you lavished the boundless wealth 
 of your affection ? Have you beggared heart and 
 soul by the wild abandonment to love, of which you 
 once felt capable ? 
 
 Lady! of you I ask : Is the golden flow of your 
 youth coined as it melts away ? Are your truth and 
 fervor, your delicacy and devotedness, your unutter- 
 able depths of tenderness and tears — are they named 
 on another's lips? — are they made the incense to 
 Heaven of another's nightly prayer? — Your beauty 
 is in its pride and flower. Who lays back with idola- 
 trous caress the soft parting of your hair? Who 
 smiles when your cheek mantles, and shudders when 
 it is pale? — Who sits with your slenderfingers clasped 
 in his, dumb because there are bounds to lan- 
 guage, and trembling because death will divide you? 
 Oh, the ray of light wasted on the ocean, and the ray 
 caught and made priceless in a king's diamond — the 
 wild-flower perishing in the woods, and its sister culled 
 for culture in the garden of a poet — are not wider 
 apart in their destiny than the loved and the neglected ! 
 — " Blessed are the beloved," should read a new 
 beatitude — " for theirs is the foretaste of Paradise!" 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The autumn following found Mr. Clay a pilgrim 
 for health to the shores of the Mediterranean. Ex- 
 hausted, body and soul, with the life of alternate 
 gayety and passion into which his celebrity had drawn 
 him, he had accepted, with a sense of exquisite relief, 
 the offer of a cruise among the Greek Isles in a friend's 
 yacht, and in the pure stillness of those bright seas, 
 with a single companion and his books, he idled away 
 the summer in a luxury of repose and enjoyment such 
 as only the pleasure-weary can understand. Recruited 
 in health, and with a mind beginning to yearn once 
 
200 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 more for the long foregone stimulus of society, he 
 landed at Naples in the beginning of October. 
 
 " We are not very gay just now," said the English 
 minister with whom he hastened to renew an ac- 
 quaintance commenced in his former travels, "but the 
 prettiest woman in the world is ' at home' to-night, 
 and if you are as susceptible as most of the cavaliers 
 of the Chiaja, you will find Naples attractive enough 
 after you have seen her." 
 
 "English?" 
 
 •* Yes — but you can not have known her, for I think 
 she was never heard of till she came to Naples." 
 
 " Her name?" 
 
 "Why, you should hear that after seeing her. 
 Call her Queefl Giovanna and she will come nearer 
 your prepossession. By-the-by, what have you to do 
 this morning ?" 
 
 " I am at your excellency's disposal," 
 
 " Come with me to the atelier of a very clever artist 
 then, and I will show you her picture. It should be 
 the man's chef-d'teuvre, for he has lost his wits in 
 painting it." 
 
 "Literally, do you mean ?" 
 
 " It would seem so — for though the picture was 
 finished some months since, he has never taken it off 
 his easel, and is generally found looking at it. Besides, 
 he has neither cleaned pallet nor brush since the last 
 day she sat to him." 
 
 " If he were young and handsome " 
 
 " So he is — and so are scores of the lady's devoted 
 admirers ; but she is either prudent or cold to a degree 
 that effectually repels hope, and the painter pines with 
 the rest." 
 
 A few minutes walk brought them to a large room 
 near the Corso, tenanted by the Venetian artist, 
 Ippolito Incontri. The minister presented his friend, 
 and Clay forgot their errand in admiration of the 
 magnificent brigand face and figure of the painter, 
 who, after a cold salutation, retreated into the darkest 
 corner of the point of view, and stood gazing past them 
 at his easel, silent and unconscious of observation. 
 
 "I have seen your wonder," said Clay, turning to 
 the picture with a smile, and at the first glance only 
 remarking its resemblance to a face that should be 
 familiar to him. " I am surprised that I can not 
 name her at once, for I am sure I know her well. 
 But, stay ! — the light grows on my eye — no ! — with 
 that expression, certainly not — I am sure, now, that I 
 have not seen her. Wonderful beauty ! Yet there 
 was a superficial likeness ! Have you ever remarked, 
 Signor Incontri, that, through very intellectual faces, 
 such as this, you can sometimes see what the counte- 
 nance would have been in other circumstances — with- 
 out the advantages of education, I mean ?" 
 
 No answer. The painter was absorbed in his pic- 
 ture, and Clay turned to the ambassador. 
 
 " I have seen somewhere a face, and a very lovely 
 one, too, that was strangely like these features ; yet, 
 not only without the soul that is here, but incapable, 
 I should think, of acquiring it by any discipline, ei- 
 ther of thought or feeling." 
 
 " Perhaps it was the original of this, and the painter 
 has given the soul!" 
 
 " He could as soon warm a statue into life as do it. 
 Invent that look ! Oh, he would be a god, not a 
 painter! Raphael copied, and this man copies; but 
 nature did the original of this, as he did of Raphael's 
 immortal beauties; and the departure of the most 
 vanishing shadow from the truth would be a blot irre- 
 mediable." 
 
 Clay lost himself in the picture and was silent. 
 Yeil after veil fell away from the expression as he 
 gazed, and the woman seemed melting out from the 
 canvass into life. The pose and drapery were nothing. 
 It was the portrait of a female standing still — perhaps 
 looking idly out on the sea — lost in revery perhaps — 
 
 perhaps just feeling the breath of a coming thought, 
 the stirring of some lost memory that would presently 
 awake. The lips were slightly unclosed. The heavy 
 eyelashes were wakeful yet couchant in their expres- 
 sion. The large dark orbs lustrous and suffused, 
 looked of the depth and intense stillness of the mid- 
 night sky close to the silver rim of a moon high in 
 heaven. The coloring was warm and Italian, but 
 every vein of the transparent temple was steeped in 
 calmness; and even through the bright pomegranate 
 richness of a mouth full of the capability of passion, 
 there seemed to breathe the slumberous fragrance of 
 a flower motionless under its night-burthen of dew. 
 It portrayed no rank in life. The drapery might have 
 been a queen's or a contadina's. It was a woman sto- 
 len to the canvass from her inmost cell of privacy, 
 with her soul unstartled by a human look, and mere 
 life and freedom from pain or care expressed in her 
 form and countenance — yet, with all this, a radiance 
 of beauty, and a sustained loftiness of feeling, as ap- 
 parent as the altitude of the stars. It was a match- 
 less woman incomparably painted ; and though not a 
 man to fall in love with a semblance, Clay felt and 
 struggled in vain against the feeling, that the creature 
 drawn in that portrait controlled the next and perhaps 
 the most eventful revolution of his many-sphered ex- 
 istence. 
 
 The next five hours have (for this tale) no history. 
 
 "I have perplexed myself in vain since I left you," 
 Clay said to the ambassador, as they rolled on their 
 way to the palace of the fair Englishwoman; "but 
 when I yield to the secret conviction that I have seen 
 the adorable original of the picture, I am lost in a 
 greater mystery — how I ever could have forgotten her. 
 The coming five minutes will undo the Sphinx's riddle 
 for me." 
 
 "My life on it you have never seen her," said his 
 friend, as the carriage turned through a reverberating 
 archway, and rapidly making the circuit of a large 
 court, stopped at the door of a palace blazing with 
 light. 
 
 An opening was made through the crowd, as the 
 ambassador's name was announced, and Clay followed 
 him through the brilliant rooms with an agitation to 
 which he had long been a stranger. Taste, as well 
 as sumptuous expensiveness, was stamped on every- 
 thing around, and there was that indefinable expres- 
 sion in the assembly, which no one could detect or 
 appreciate better than Clay, and which is composed, 
 among other things, of a perfect conviction on the 
 part of the guests, that their time, presence, and ap- 
 probation, are well bestowed where they are. 
 
 At the curtained door of a small boudoir, draped 
 like a tent, a Neapolitan noble of high rank turned 
 smiling to the ambassador and placed his finger on 
 his lip. The silken pavilion was crowded, and only 
 uniforms and heads, fixed in attention, could be seen 
 by those without ; but from the arching folds of the 
 curtain came a female voice of the deepest and sweet- 
 est melodiousness, reading in low and finely-measured 
 cadence from an English poem. 
 
 " Do you know the voice ?" asked the ambassador, 
 as Clay stood like a man fixed to marble, eagerly 
 listening. 
 
 " Perfectly ! I implore you tell me who reads!" 
 
 "No ! — though your twofold recognisance is singu- 
 lar. You shall see her before you hear her name. 
 What is she reading ?" 
 
 " My own poetry, by Heaven ! and yet I can not 
 name her! This passes belief. I have heard that 
 voice sob — sob convulsively, and with accents of love — 
 I have heard it whisper and entreat — you look incred- 
 ulous, but it is true. If she do not know me — nay, 
 
 if she has not " he would have said " loved me" — 
 
 but the look of scrutiny and surprise on the counte- 
 nance of the ambassador checked the imprudent 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 261 
 
 avowal, and he became aware that he was on danger- 
 ous ground. He relapsed into silence, and crowding 
 close to the tent, heard the numbers he had long ago 
 linked and forgotten, breathing in music from those 
 mysterious lips, and, possessed as he was by suspense 
 and curiosity, he could have wished that sweet mo- 
 ment to have lasted for ever. I call upon the poet, if 
 there be one who reads this idle tale, to tell me if 
 there is a flattery more exquisite on earth, if there is 
 a deeper-sinking plummet of pride ever dropped into 
 the profound bosom of the bard, than the listening to 
 thoughts born in pain and silence, articulate in the 
 honeyed accents of woman! Answer me, poet! 
 Answer me, women beloved of poets, who have 
 breathed their worshipping incense, and know by 
 what its bright censor was kindled ! 
 
 The voice ceased, and there was one moment of 
 stillness, and then the rooms echoed with acclamation. 
 "Crown her!" cried a tall old man, who stood near 
 the entrance covered with military orders. "Crown 
 her!" repeated every tongue; and from a vase that 
 hung suspended in the centre of the pavilion, the 
 fresh flowers were snatched by eager hands and 
 wreathed into a chaplet. But those without became 
 clamorous to see the imposition of the crown; and, 
 clearing a way through the entrance, the old man took 
 the chaplet from the busy hands that had entwined it, 
 and crying out with Italian enthusiasm, "A triumph! a 
 triumph!" led forth the majestic Corinna to the crowd. 
 
 The ambassador looked at Clay. He had shrunk 
 behind the statue of a winged cupid, and though his 
 eyes were fixed with a gaze of stone on the magnifi- 
 cent creature who was the centre of all regards, he 
 seemed by his open lips and heaving chest, to be gasp- 
 ing with some powerful emotion. 
 
 "Give me the chaplet!" suddenly exclaimed the 
 magnificent idol of the crowd. And with no apparent 
 emotion, except a glowing spot in her temples, and a 
 quicker throb in the snowy curve of her neck and 
 bosom, she waved back the throng upon her right, 
 and advanced with majestic steps to the statue of Love. 
 
 "Welcome, Ernest!" she said in a low voice, 
 taking him by the hand, and losing, for a scarce per- 
 ceptible moment, the smile from her lips. " Here, 
 my friends!" she exclaimed, turning again, and lead- 
 ing him from his concealment, "honor to whom hon- 
 or is due ! A crown for the poet of my country, Er- 
 nest Clay !" 
 
 " Clay, the poet!" "The English poet!" "The 
 author of the poem!" were explanations that ran 
 quickly through the room, and as the crowd pressed 
 closer around, murmuring the enthusiasm native to 
 that southern clime, Julia Beverley sprang upon an ot- 
 toman, and standing in her magnificent beauty con- 
 spicuous above all, she placed the crown upon Clay's 
 head, and bending gracefully and smilingly over him, 
 impressed a kiss on his forehead, and said, " This for 
 the poet /" 
 
 And of the many lovers of this superb woman who 
 saw that kiss, not one showed a frown or turned away, 
 so natural to the warm impulse of the hour did it 
 seem — so pure an expression of admiration of genius — 
 so mere a tribute of welcome from Italy to the bard, 
 by an inspiration born of its sunny air. Surrounded 
 with eager claimants for his acquaintance, intoxicated 
 with flattery, giddy with indefinable emotions of love 
 and pleasure, Ernest Clay lost sight for a moment of 
 the face that had beamed on him, and in that moment 
 she had made an apology of fatigue and retired, leav- 
 ing her guests to their pleasures. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 " Un amour rechauffe ne vaut jamais rien," is one 
 oi those common-places in the book of love, which 
 
 ! are true only of the common-place and unimaginative. 
 The rich gifts of affection, which surfeit the cold 
 ! bosom of the dull, fall upon the fiery heart of genius 
 j like spice-wood and incense, and long after the giver's 
 ! prodigality has ceased, the mouldering embers lie 
 j warm beneath the ashes of silence, and a breath will 
 I uncover and rekindle them. The love of common 
 j men is a world without moon or stars. When the 
 i meridian is passed, the shadows lengthen, and the 
 light departs, and the night that follows is dark indeed. 
 But as the twilight closes on the bright and warm pas- 
 sion of the poet, memory lights her pale lamp, like 
 the moon, and brightens as the darkness deepens ; and 
 : the warm sacrifices made in love's noon and eve, go 
 up to their places like stars, and with the light treasur- 
 | ed from that fervid day, shine in the still heaven of 
 ! the past, steadfast though silent. If there is a feature 
 of the human soul in which more than in all others, 
 the fiend is manifest, it is the masculine ingratitude 
 for love. What wrongs, what agonies, what unutter- 
 able sorrows are the reward of lavished affection, of 
 ; generous self-abandonment, of unhesitating and idola- 
 | trous trust ! Yet who are the ungrateful ? Men lack- 
 ; ing the imagination which can reclose the faded form 
 ! in its youthful beauty ! Men dead to the past — with 
 I no perception but sight and touch — to whom woman 
 ! is a flower and no more — fair to look on and sweet to 
 I pluck in her pride and perfume but scarce possessed 
 j ere trampled on and forgotten ! Genius alone treasures 
 the perishing flower and remembers its dew and fra- 
 i grance, and so, immemorially and well, poets have been 
 beloved of women. 
 
 I am recording the passions of genius. Let me 
 say to you, lady ! (reading this tale understand ingly, 
 for you have been beloved by a poet), trust neither 
 absence, nor silence, nor untoward circumstances ! 
 He has loved you once. Let not your eye rest on 
 him when you meet — and if you speak, speak coldly ! 
 For, with a passion strengthened and embellished 
 tenfold by a memory all imagination, he will love you 
 agaiu ! The hours you passed with him — the caresses 
 you gave him, the tears you shed, and the beauty 
 with which you bewildered him, have been hallowed 
 in poetry, and glorified in revery and dream, and he 
 will come back to you as he would spring into para- 
 dise were it so lost and recovered ! 
 But to my story ! 
 
 Clay's memory had now become the home of an all- 
 absorbing passion. By a succession of mischances, 
 or by management so adroit as never to alarm his pride, 
 a week passed over, and he had found no opportunity 
 of speaking alone to the object of his adoration. She 
 favored him in public, talked to him at the opera, 
 leaned on his arm in the crowd, caressed his genius 
 with exquisite flattery, and seemed at moments to 
 escape narrowly from a phrase too tender or a subject 
 that would lead to the past — yet without a violation 
 of the most palpable tact, love was still an impossible 
 topic. That he could have held her hand in his, un- 
 forbidden — that he could have pressed her to his 
 bosom while she wept — that she could have loved 
 him ever, though but for an hour — seemed to him 
 sometimes an incredible dream, sometimes a most 
 passionate happiness only to believe. He left her at 
 night to pace the sands of the bay till morning, re- 
 membering — for ever remembering — the scene by the 
 fountain at Florence ; and he passed his day between 
 | her palace and the picture of poor Incontri, who loved 
 her more hopelessly than himself, but found a sym- 
 pathy in the growing melancholy of the poet. 
 
 " She has no heart," said the painter; but Clay had 
 felt it beat against his own, and he fed his love in 
 silence on that remembrance. 
 
 They sat upon the rocks by the gate of the Villa 
 Real. The sun was just setting and as the waves 
 formed near the shore and rode in upon the glassy 
 
262 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 6well of the bay, there seemed to writhe on each wavy 
 hack a golden serpent, who broke on the sands at their 
 feet in sparkles of fire. At a little distance lay the 
 swallow-like yacht, in which Clay had threaded the 
 Archipelago, and as the wish to feel the little craft 
 bounding once more beneath him, was checked by the 
 anchor-like heaviness of his heart, an equestrian party 
 stopped suddenly on the chiaja. 
 
 41 There is Mr. Clay !" said the thrilling voice of 
 Julia Beverley, " perhaps he will take us over in the 
 yacht. Sorrento looks so blue and tempting in the 
 distance." 
 
 Without waiting for a repetition of the wish he 
 had overheard, Clay sprang upon a rock, and made 
 signal for the boat, and before the crimson of the de- 
 parting day had faded from the sky, the fair Julia and 
 her party of cavaliers, were standing on the deck of the 
 swift vesse!, bound on a moonlight voyage to Sorrento, 
 and watching on their lee the reddening ribs and lurid 
 eruption of (he volcano. The night was Neapolitan, 
 and the air was the food of love. 
 
 Jr was a voyage of silence, for the sweetness of life 
 in such an atmosphere and in the midstof that match- 
 less bay, lay like a voluptuous burthen in the heart, 
 and the ripple under the clearing prow was language 
 enough for all. Incontri leaned against the mast, 
 watching the moonlit features of the signora with his 
 melancholy but idolizing gaze, and Clay lay on the 
 deck at her feet, trying with pressed-down lids to recall 
 the tearful eyes of the Julia Beverley he had loved at 
 the fountain. 
 
 It was midnight when the breath of the orange 
 groves of Sorrento, stealing seaward, slackened the 
 way of the little craft, and running in close under the 
 rocky foundations of the house of Tasso, Clay dropped 
 his anchor, and landed his silent party at their haven. 
 Incontri was sent forward to the inn to prepare their 
 apartments, and leaning on Clay's arm and her hus- 
 band's, the superb Englishwoman ascended to the 
 overhanging balcony of the dwelling of the Italian 
 bard, and in a few words of eloquent sympathy in the 
 homage paid by the world to these shrines of genius, 
 added to the overflowing heart of her gifted lover one 
 more intoxicating drop of flattery and fascination. 
 They strolled onward to the inn, and he bade her good 
 night at the gate, for he could no longer endure the 
 fetter of another's presence, and the emotion stifled in 
 his heart and lips. 
 
 I have forgotten the name of that pleasant inn at 
 Sorrento, built against the side of its mountain shore, 
 with terraced orange-groves piled above its roof, and 
 the golden fruit nodding in at its windows. From the 
 principal floor, you will remember, projects a broad 
 verandah, jutting upon one of these fruit-darkened 
 alleys. If you have ever slept there after a scramble 
 over Scaricatoja, you have risen, even from your 
 fatigued slumber, to go out and pace awhile that over- 
 hanging garden, oppressed with the heavy perfume of 
 the orange flowers. Strange that I should forget the 
 name of that inn ! I thought, when the busy part of 
 mv life should be well over, I should go back and die 
 there. 
 
 The sea had long closed over the orbed forehead of 
 the moon, and still Clay restlessly hovered around the 
 garden of the inn. Mounting at last to the alley on 
 a level with the principal chambers of the house, he 
 saw outlined in shadow upon the curtain of a long 
 window* a female figure holding a book, with her 
 cheek resting on her hand. He threw himself on the 
 grass and gazed steadily. The hand moved from the 
 cheek, and raised a pencil from the table, and wrote 
 upon the margin of the volume, and then the pencil 
 was laid down, and the slender fingers raised the 
 masses of fallen hair from the shoulder, and threaded 
 the wavy ringlets indolently as she read : From the 
 slightest, motion of that statuary hand, from the most 
 
 fragmented outline of that bird-like neck, Clay would 
 have known Julia Beverley ; and as he watched her 
 graceful shadow, the repressed and pent-up feelings 
 of that evening of restraint, fed as they had been by 
 every voluptuous influence known beneath the moon, 
 rose to a height that absorbed brain and soul in one 
 wild tumult of emotion. He sprang to his feet to rush 
 into her presence, but at that instant a footstep started 
 from the darkness of a tree, at the extremity of the 
 alley. He paused and the shadow arose, and laying 
 aside the book, leaned back, and lifted the tapering 
 arms, and wound up the long masses of fallen hair, 
 and then kneeling, remained a few minutes motion- 
 less, with the face buried in the hands. 
 Clay trembled and felt rebuked. 
 Once more the flowing drapery swept across the 
 curtain, the light was extinguished, and the window 
 thrown open to the night air; and then all was still. 
 
 Clay walked to and fro in an agitation bordering on 
 
 i delirium. " I must speak to her !" he said, murmur- 
 
 ! ing audibly, and advancing toward the window. But 
 
 ' hurried footsteps started again from the shadow of the 
 
 ; pine, and he stopped to listen. All was silent, and 
 
 , lie stood a moment pressing his hands on his brow, 
 
 and trying to struggle with the wild impulse in his 
 
 brain. His closed eyes brought back instantly the 
 
 unfading picture of Julia Beverley, weeping on his 
 
 breast at the fountain, and with one rapid movement 
 
 ' he divided the curtains and stood breathless in her 
 
 chamber. 
 
 The heavy breathing of the unconscious husband 
 ' fell like music on his ear. 
 
 " Julia !" he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "I am 
 j here — Ernest Clay!" 
 
 "You are frantic, Ernest!" said a voice so calm 
 i that it fell on his ear like an assurance of despair. 
 ' " I have no feeling for you that answers to this free- 
 I dom. Leave my chamber !" 
 
 " No !" said Clay, dropping the curtain behind him, 
 and advancing into the room, " wake your husband if 
 you will — this is the only spot on earth where I can 
 breathe, and if you are relentless, here will I die ' 
 Was it false when you said you loved me ? Speak, 
 Julia!" 
 
 "Ernest !" she said, in a less assured tone, "T have 
 done wrong not to check this wild passiou earlier, and 
 I have that to say to you which, perhaps, had better 
 be said now. I will come to you in the garden." 
 
 " My vessel waits, and in an hour " 
 
 " Nay, nay, you mistake me. But go ! I will 
 follow instantly !" 
 
 Vesuvius was burning with an almost smokeless 
 flame when Clay stood again in the night-air, and every 
 object was illuminated with the clearness of a confla- 
 gration. At the first glance around, he fancied he 
 saw figures gliding behind the lurid body of a pine 
 opposite the window, but in the next moment the cur- 
 tain again parted, and Julia Beverley, wrapped in a 
 I cloak, stood beside him on the verandah. 
 
 "Stand back !" she said, as he endeavored to put 
 | his arm around her, " I have more than one defender 
 I within call, and I must speak to you where I am. 
 [ Will you listen to me, Ernest ?" 
 
 Clay's breast heaved ; but he folded his arms and 
 j leaned against the slender column of the verandah in 
 I silence. 
 
 " Were it any other person who had so far forgot- 
 ten himself," she continued, "it would be sufficient 
 j to say, ' I can never love you,' and leave my privacy 
 ! to be defended by my natural protector. But I wish 
 to show to you, Ernest, not only that you can have 
 I no hope in loving me, but that you have made me the 
 j mischievous woman I have become. From an hum- 
 i blc wife to a dangerous coquette, the change may 
 I well seem startling — but it is of your working." 
 
 " Mine, madam !" said Clay, whose pride was 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 263 
 
 aroused with the calm self-possession and repulse of 
 her tone and manner. 
 
 " 1 have never answered the letter you wrote me." 
 
 " Pardon and spare me !" said Clay, who remem- 
 bered at the instant only the whim under which it 
 was written. 
 
 " It awoke me to a new existence," she continued, 
 without heeding his confusion, " for it first made me 
 aware that I could ever be the theme of eloquent ad- 
 miration. I had never been praised but in idle com- 
 pliment, and by those whose intellect I despised; and 
 though as a girl 1 had a vague feeling that I was 
 slighted and unappreciated, I yielded gradually to the 
 conviction that the world was right, and that women 
 sung by poets and described in the glowing language 
 of romance, were of another mould, I scarce rea- 
 soned upon it. I remember, on first arriving in Italy, 
 drawing a comparison favorable to myself between 
 my own beauty and the Fornarina's, and the portraits 
 of Laura and Leonora D'Este ; but as I was loved by 
 neither painters nor poets, 1 accused myself of pre- 
 sumption, and with a sigh, returned to my humility. 
 My life seemed more vacant than it should be, and I 
 sometimes wept from an unhappiness I could not de- 
 fine; and I once or twice met persons who seemed 
 to have begun to love me, and appreciate my beauty 
 as I wished, and in this lies the history of my heart 
 up to the time of your writing to me. That letter, 
 Ernest " * 
 
 " You believed that I loved you then !" passion- 
 ately interrupted her listener, " you know now that I 
 loved you ! Tell me so, I implore you !" 
 
 " My dear poet," said the self-possessed beauty, 
 with a smile expressive of as much mischief as frank- 
 ness, "let us be honest. You never loved me! I 
 never believed it but for one silly hour ! Stay! — 
 stay ! — vou shall not answer me ! I have not left my 
 bed at this unseasonable hour to listen to protesta- 
 tions. At least, let me first conclude the history of 
 my metempsychosis! I can tell it to nobody else, 
 and like the Ancient Mariner's, it is a tale that must 
 be told. Revcnons ! Your very brilliant letter awoke 
 me from the most profound lethargy by which beauty 
 such as mine was ever overtaken. A moment's in- 
 ventory of my attractions satisfied me that your ex- 
 quisite description (written, I have since suspected, 
 to amuse an idle hour, but done, nevertheless, with 
 the fine memory and graphic power of genius) was 
 neither fanciful nor over-colored, and for the first time 
 in my life I felt beautiful. You are an anatomist of 
 the heart, and I may say to you that I looked at my 
 own dark eyes and fine features and person with the 
 admiration and wonder of a blind beauty restored to 
 sight and beholding herself in a mirror. You will 
 think, perhaps, that love for the writer of this magic 
 letter should have been the inevitable sequel. But I 
 am here to avert the consequences of my coquetry, 
 and I will be frank with you. I forgot you in a day! 
 In the almost insane desire to be seen and appreciated, 
 painted, sung, and loved, which-took possession of me 
 when the tumult of my first feeling had passed away, 
 your self-controlled and manageable passion seemed 
 to me frivolous and shallow." 
 
 " Have you been better loved ?" coldly asked Clay. 
 
 " I will answer that question before we part. I did 
 not suffer myself to think of a love that could be 
 returned — for I had husband and children — and 
 though I felt that a mutual passion such as I could 
 imagine, would have absorbed, under happier circum- 
 stances, every energy of my soul, 1 had no disposition 
 to make a wreck of another's happiness and honor, 
 whatever the temptation. Still I must be loved — I 
 must come out from my obscurity and shine — I must 
 be the idol of some gifted circle — I must control the 
 painter's pencil and the poet's pen and the statesman's 
 pcbeme — I must sun my beauty in men's eyes, and 
 
 be caressed and conspicuous — I must use my gift and 
 fulfil my destiny ! I told my husband this. He se- 
 cured my devotion lo his peace and honor for ever, by 
 giving me unlimited control over his fortune and him- 
 self. We came to Naples, and my star, hitherto 
 clouded in its own humility, sprang at once to the as- 
 cendant. The " attraction of unconscious beauty" is 
 a poet's fiction, believe me! Set it down in your 
 books, Ernest — we are our own nomenclators — the 
 belle as well as the hero ! I claimed to be beautiful, 
 and queened it to the top of my bent — and all Naples 
 is at my feet! Oh, Ernest! it is a delicious power 
 to hold human happiness in your control — to be the 
 loadstar of eminent men and bright intellects! Per- 
 haps a woman who is absorbed in one passion, finds 
 in her lover's character and fame room enough for her 
 pride and her thirst for influence; but to me, giving 
 nothing in return but the light of my eyes, there 
 seems scarce in the world celebrity, rank, .genius 
 enough, to limit my ambition. I would be Helen ! 
 I would be Mary of Scots ! I would have my beauty 
 as undisputed and renowned as the Apollo's! Am I 
 insane or heartless?" 
 
 Clay smiled at the abrupt naivete of the question, 
 but his eyes were full of visible admiration of the 
 glowing pictures before him. 
 
 "You are beautiful!" was his answer. 
 
 "Am I not! Shall I be celebrated hereafter, Er- 
 nest? I should be willing to grow old, if my beauty 
 were ' in amber' — if by some burning line in your 
 book, some wondrous touch of the pencil, some bold 
 novejty in sculpture, my beauty would live on men's 
 lips for ever! Incontri's picture is beautiful and like, 
 but it is not, if you understand, a conception — it is not 
 a memoir of the woman as the Cenei's is — it does not 
 embody a complete fame in itself, like the ' Bella' of 
 Titian, or the 'Wife of Giorgione.' If you loved 
 me, Ernest " 
 
 "If you loved me, Julia!" echoed Clay, with a 
 tone rather of mockery than sincerity. 
 
 "Ah, but you threw me away ; and even with my 
 own consent, I could never be recovered ! Believe 
 me, Ernest, there never was a coquette, who, in some 
 one of her earlier preferences, had not made a des- 
 perate and single venture of her whole heart's devo- 
 tion. That wrecked, she was lost to love. I em- 
 barked with you, soul and heart, and you left to the 
 mercy of the chance wind a freight that no tide could 
 bring to port again !" 
 
 "You forget the obstacles." 
 
 " A poet ! and talk of obstacles in love ! Did you 
 even ask me to run away with you, Ernest! I would 
 have gone ! Ay— coldly as I talk to you now, I 
 would have followed you to a hovel — for it was first 
 love to me. Had it been first love to both of us, I 
 should now be your wife — sharer of your fame ! And 
 oh, how jealous !" 
 
 " With your beauty, jealous ?" 
 
 " Not of fiesh-and-blood women, Ernest ! With a 
 wife's opportunities, I could outcharm, with half my 
 beauty, the whole troop of Circe. I was thinking of 
 the favors of your pen ! Who would I let you de- 
 scribe ! What eyes, what hair, what form but mine 
 
 what character, what name, would I even suffer you 
 
 to make immortal ! Paul Veronese had a wife with 
 my avarice. In his hundred pictures there is the 
 same blue-eyed, golden-haired woman, as much link 
 ed to his fame as Laura to Petrarch's. If he had 
 drawn her but once, she would have been known as 
 the woman Paul Veronese painted ! She is known 
 now as the woman he loved. Delicious immortality !" 
 
 " Yet she could not have exacted it. That would 
 have required an intellect which looked abroad— and 
 poets love no women who are not like birds, content 
 with the summer around them, and with every thought 
 in their nest. Paul Veronese's Bionda, with her soft 
 
264 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 mild eyes and fair hair, is the very type of such a 
 woman, and she would not have foregone a caress for 
 twenty immortalities." 
 
 " May 1 ask what was my attraction, then?" said 
 the proud beauty, with a tone of pique. 
 
 " Julia Beverley, unconscious and unintellectual !" 
 answered Clay, drawing on his gloves with the air of 
 a man who has got through with an interview. " You 
 have explained your ' metempsychosis,' but I was in 
 love with the form you have cast off. The night 
 grows chill. Sweet dreams to you !" 
 
 " Stay, Mr. Clay ! You asked me if I had been 
 ' better loved,' and I promised you an answer. What 
 think you of a lover who has forgotten the occupation 
 that gave him bread, abandoned his ambition, and at 
 all hours of the night is an unrewarded and hopeless 
 watcher beneath my window ?" 
 
 " To-night excepted," said Clay, looking around. 
 
 " Incontri !" called Mrs. Brown, without raising 
 her voice. 
 
 Clay started and frowned, as the painter sprang 
 from the shadow of the pine-tree which had before 
 attracted his attention. Falling on his knee, the un- 
 happy lover kissed the jewelled fingers extended to 
 him, and giving Clay his hand in rising, the poet 
 sprang back, for he had elapsed the handle of a stiletto ! 
 
 " Fear not — she does not love you !" said Incontri, 
 remarking his surprise, and concealing the weapon in 
 his sleeve. 
 
 " I was destined to be cured of my love, either 
 way," said Clay, bowing himself off the verandah with 
 half a shudder and half a smile. 
 
 The curtain closed at the same moment over the 
 retreating form of Julia Beverley, and so turned 
 another leaf of Clay's voluminous book of love. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Clay threw the volume aside, in which he had been 
 reading, and taking up " the red book," looked for 
 the county address of Sir Harry Freer, the exponent 
 (only) of Lady Fanny Freer, who, though the "nicest 
 possible creature," is not the heroine of this story. 
 Sir Harry's ancestral domain turned out to be a por- 
 tion of the earth's surface in that county of England 
 where the old gentry look down upon very famous 
 lords as too new, and proportionately upon all other 
 families that have not degenerated since William the 
 conqueror. 
 
 Sir Harry had married an earl's daughter ; but as 
 the earldom was not only the fruit of two generations 
 of public and political eminence, Sir Harry was not 
 considered in Cheshire as having made more than a 
 tolerable match; and if she passed for a " Cheshire 
 cheese*' in London, he passed for but the rind in the 
 county. In the county therefore there was a lord 
 paramount of Freer Hall, and in town, a lady par- 
 amount of Brook-street ; and it was under the town 
 dynasty that Miss Blanch Beaufin was invited up from 
 Cheshire to pass a first winter in London — Miss 
 Beaufin being the daughter of a descendant of a Nor- 
 man retainer of the first Sir Harry, and the relative 
 position of the families having been rigidly kept up to 
 the existing epoch. 
 
 The address found in the red book was described 
 upon the following letter: — 
 
 " Dear Lady Fanny : If you have anything be- 
 side the ghost-room vacant at Freer Hall, I will run 
 down to you. Should you, by chance, be alone, ask 
 up the curate for a week to keep Sir Harry off my 
 hands ; and, as you don't flirt, provide me with some- 
 body more pretty than yourself for our mutual 
 
 security. As my autograph sells for eighteen pence, 
 you will excuse the brevity of Yours truly, 
 
 " Ernest Clay. 
 " N. B. Tell me in your answer if Blanch Beaufit 
 is within a morning's ride." 
 
 Lady Fanny was a warm-hearted, extravagant 
 beautiful creature of impulse, a passionate friend of 
 Clay's (for such women there are), without a spice of 
 flirtation. She was a perennial belle in London; and 
 he had begun his acquaintance with her by throwing 
 himself at her head in the approved fashion — in love 
 to the degree of rose-asking and sonnet-writing. As 
 she did not laugh when he sighed, however, but only 
 told him very seriously that she was not a bit in love 
 with him, and thought he was throwing away his 
 time, he easily forgave her insensibility, and they be- 
 came very warm allies. Spoiled favorite as he was 
 of London society, Clay had qualities for a very sin- 
 cere friendship ; and Lady Fanny, full of irregular 
 talent, had also a strong vein of common sense, and 
 perfectly understood him. This explanation to the 
 reader. It would have saved some trouble and pain 
 if it had been made by some good angel to Sir Harry 
 Freer. 
 
 As the London coach rattled under the bridged 
 gate of the gloomy old town of Chester, Lady Fanny's 
 dashing ponies were almost on their haunches with 
 her impetuous pull-up at the hotel ; and returning 
 I with a nod the coachman's respectful bow, she put 
 | her long whip in at the coach window to shake hands 
 I with Clay, and in a few minutes they were again off 
 j the pavements, and taking the road at her ladyship's 
 j usual speed. 
 
 " Steady, Flash ! steady !" (she ran on, talking to 
 I Clay, and her ponies in the same breath), " doleful 
 ride down, isn't it? — (keep up, Tom, you villain .') — 
 very good of you to come, I'm sure, dear Ernest, and 
 you'll stay; how long will you stay ? (down, Flash !) 
 — Oh, Miss Beaufin ! I've something to say to you 
 about Blanch Beaufin ! I didn't answer your Nota 
 Bene — (go along, Tom ! that pony wants blooding) — 
 because to tell the truth, it's a delicate subject at 
 Freer Hall, and 1 would rather talk than write about 
 it. You see — (will you be done, Flash !) — the 
 Beaufins, though very nice people, and Blanch quite 
 a love — (go along, lazy Tom !) — the Beaufins, I say, 
 are rated rather crockery in Cheshire. And I am 
 ashamed to own, really quite ashamed, I have not 
 been near them in a month. Shameful, isn't it ? 
 There's good action, Ernest ! Look at that nigh 
 pony ; not a blemish in him; and such a goer in sin- 
 gle harness! Well, I'll go around by the Beaufins 
 now." 
 
 " Pray consider, Lady Fanny !" interrupted Clay 
 deprecatingly, "eighteen hours in a coach." 
 
 " Not to go in ! oh, not to go in ! Blanch is very ill, 
 and sees nobody ; — and (come, Tom ! come !) — 1 only 
 heard of it this morning — (there's for your laziness, 
 you stupid horse !, — We'll, just call and ask how she is, 
 
 though Sir Harry " 
 
 " Is she very ill, then ?" asked Clay, with a concern 
 which made Lady Fanny turn her eyes from her 
 ponies' ears to look at him. 
 
 " They say, very ! Of course, Sir Harry can't for- 
 bid a visit to the sick." 
 
 " Surely he does not forbid you to call on Blanch 
 Beaufin !" 
 
 " Not 'forbid' precisely; that wouldn't do — (gently, 
 sweet Flash ! now, Tom ! now, lazy ! trot fair through 
 the hollow !) — but I invited her to pass the winter 
 with me without consulting him, and he liked it well 
 enough, till he got back among his stupid neighbors 
 — (well done, Flash ! plague take that bothering 
 whipple-tree !) — and they and their awkward daughters, 
 whom I might have invited — (whoa ! Flash !) — if J 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 2G5 
 
 had wanted a menagerie, set him to looking into her 
 pedigree. There's the house; the old house with 
 the vines over it yonder! So then, Sir Harry — such 
 a sweet girl, too — set his face against the acquaintance. 
 Here we are ! — (Whoa, bays ! whoa !) Hold the 
 reins a moment while I run in!" 
 
 More to quell a vague and apprehensive feeling of 
 remorse than to wile away idle time, Clay passed the 
 reins back to the stripling in gray livery behind, and 
 walked round Lady Fanny's ponies, expressing his 
 admiration of them and the turnout altogether. 
 
 " Yes, sir," said the lad, who seemed to have caught 
 some of the cleverness of his mistress, for he scarce 
 looked fourteen, " they're a touch above anything in 
 Cheshire ! Look at the forehand of that nigh 'an, 
 sir! — arm and withers like a greyhound, and yet what 
 a quarter for trotting, sir ! Quite the right thing all 
 over! Carries his flag that way quite natural ; never 
 was nicked, sir ! Did you take notice, begging your 
 pardon, sir, how milady put through that hollow? 
 Wasn't it fine, sir ? Tother's a goodish nag, too, 
 but, nothing to Flash ; can't spread, somehow ; that's 
 Sir Harry's picking up, and never was a match; no 
 blood in Tom, sir ! Look at his fetlock : underbred, 
 but a jimpy nag for a roadster, if a man wanted work 
 out on him. See how he blows, sir, and Flash as 
 etill as a stopped wheel !" 
 
 Lady Fanny's reappearance at the door of the 
 house interrupted her page's eulogy on the bays ; and 
 with a very altered expression of countenance she re- 
 sumed the reins, and drove slowly homeward. 
 
 " She is very ill, very ill ! but she wishes to see 
 you, and you must go there ; but not to-morrow. 
 She is passing a crisis now, and her physician says, 
 will be easier if not better, after to-morrow. Poor 
 girl! dear Blanch ! Ah, Clay ! but no — no matter; 
 I shall talk about it with more composure by-and-by 
 — poor Blanch !" 
 
 Lady Fanny's tears rained upon her two hands as 
 she let out her impatient horses to be sooner at home, 
 and, in half an hour, Clay was alone in his luxurious 
 quarters, under Sir Harry's roof, with two hours to 
 dinner, and more than thoughts enough, and very sad 
 ones, to make him glad of time and solitude. 
 
 Freer Hall was full of company — Sir Harry's com- 
 pany — and Clay, with the quiet assurance of a London 
 star, used to the dominant, took his station by Lady 
 Fanny on entering the drawing-room, and when din- 
 ner was announced, gave her his arm, without troubling 
 himself to remember that there was a baronet who had 
 claim to the honor, and of whom he must simply make 
 a mortal enemy. At table, the conversation ran main- 
 ly in Sir Harry's vein, hunting, and Clay did not even 
 take the listener's part ; but, in a low tone, talked of 
 London to Lady Fanny — her ladyship (unaccountably 
 to her husband and his friends, who were used to 
 furnish her more merriment than revery) pensive 
 and out of spirits. With the announcement of coffee 
 in the drawing room, Clay disappeared with her, and 
 their evening was tete-a-tete, for Sir Harry and his 
 friends were three-bottle men, and commonly bade 
 good-night to ladies when the ladies left the table. 
 If there had been a second thought in the convivial 
 squirearchy, they would have troubled their heads 
 less about a man who did not exhibit the first symptom 
 of love for the wife — civility to the husband. But 
 this is a hand-to-mouth world in the way of knowl- 
 edge, and nothing is stored but experiences, lifetime 
 by lifetime. 
 
 Another day passed and another, and mystery seem- 
 ed the ruling spirit of the hour, for there were enigmas 
 for all. Regularly, morning and afternoon, the high 
 stepping ponies were ordered round, and Lady Fanny 
 (with Mr. Clay for company to the gate) visited the 
 Beaufins, now against positive orders from the irate 
 Sir Harry, and daily, Clay's reserve with his beautiful 
 
 hostess increased, and his distress of mind with it, for 
 both he and she were alarmed with the one piece of 
 unexplained intelligence between them — MissBeaufin 
 would see Mr. Clay when she should be dying! 
 Not before — for worlds not before — and of the phy- 
 sician constantly in attendance (Lady Fanny often 
 present), Clay knew that the poor girl besought with 
 an eagerness, to the last degree touching and ear- 
 nest, to know when hope could be given over. She 
 was indulged, unquestioned, as a dying daughter; 
 and, whatever might be her secret, Lady Fanny 
 promised that at the turning hour, come what would 
 , of distressing and painful, she would herself come 
 i, with Mr. Clay to her death-bed. 
 
 Sir Harry and his friends were in the billiard-room, 
 and Lady Fanny and Clay breakfasting together, when 
 a note was brought in by one of the footmen, who 
 waited for an answer. 
 
 " Say that I will come," said Lady Fanny, " and 
 stay, George! See that my ponies are harnessed im- 
 mediately ; put the head of the phaeton up, and let it 
 stand in the coach-house. And, Timson !" she added 
 to the butler who stood at the side-table, " if Sir Harry 
 inquires for me, say that I am gone to visit a sick 
 friend." 
 
 Lady Fanny walked to the window. It rained in 
 torrents. There was no need of explanation to Clay; 
 he understood the note and its meaning. 
 
 " The offices connect with the stables by a covered 
 way," she said, " and we will get in there. Shall you 
 be ready in a few minutes ?" 
 
 " Quite, dear Lady Fanny ! I am ready now." 
 
 " The rain is rather fortunate than otherwise," she 
 added, in going out, " for Sir Harry will not see ua 
 go; and he might throw an obstacle in the way, and 
 make it difficult to manage. Wrap well up, Ernest !" 
 
 The butler looked inquisitively at Clay and his mis- 
 tress, but both were preoccupied, and in ten minutes 
 the rapid phaeton was on its way, the ponies pressing 
 on the bit as if the eagerness of the two hearts beating 
 behind them was communicated through the reins, 
 and Lady Fanny, contrary to her wont, driving in un- 
 encouraging silence. The three or four miles between 
 Freer Hall and their destination were soon traversed, 
 and under the small porte-cochere of the ancient man- 
 sion the ponies stood panting and sheltered. 
 
 "Kind Lady Fanny! God bless you !" said a tall, 
 dark man, of a very striking exterior, coming out to 
 the phaeton. " And you, sir, are welcome !" 
 
 They followed him into the little parlor, where Clay 
 was presented by Lady Fanny to the mother of Miss 
 Beaufin, a singularly yet sadly sweet woman in voice, 
 person, and address; to the old, white-haired vicar, 
 and to the physician, who returned his bow with a 
 cold and very formal salute. 
 
 "There is no time to be lost." said he, " and at the 
 request of MissBeaufin, Lady Fanny and this gentle- 
 man will please go to her chamber without us. 1 can 
 trust your ladyship to see that her remainder of life 
 is not shortened nor harassed by needless agitation." 
 
 Clay's heart beat violently. At the extremity of 
 the long and dimly-lighted passage thrown open by 
 the father to Lady Fanny, he saw a while curtained 
 bed — the death-bed, he knew, of the gay and fair 
 flower of a London season, the wonder and idol of 
 difficult fashion, and unadmiring rank. Blanch Beaufin 
 had appeared like a marvel in the brilliant circles of 
 Lady Fanny's acquaintance, a distinguished, uncon- 
 scious, dazzling girl, of whom her fair introductress 
 (either in mischief or good nature) would say nothing 
 but that she was her neighbor in Cheshire, though 
 all that nature could lavish on one human creature 
 seemed hers, with all that high birth could stamp on 
 mien, countenance, and manners. Clay paid her his 
 tribute with the rest — the hundred who flattered and 
 followed her ; but she was a proud girl, and though 
 
266 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 he seized every opportunity of being near her, nothing 
 in her manner betrayed to him that he was not counted 
 among the hundred. A London season fleets fast, 
 and, taken by surprise with Lady Fanny's early de- 
 parture for the country, her farewells were written 
 on the corners of cards, and with a secret deep buried 
 in the heart, she was brought back to the retirement 
 of home. 
 
 Brief history of the breaking of a heart ! 
 
 Lady Fanny started slightly on entering the cham- 
 ber. The sick girl sat propped in an arm chair, 
 dressed in snowy white ; even her slight foot appear- 
 ing beneath the edge of her dress in a slipper of white 
 satin. Her brown hair fell in profuse ringlets over 
 her shoulders ; but it was gathered behind into a 
 knot, and from it depended a white veil, the diamonds 
 which fastened it, pressing to the glossy curve of her 
 head, a slender stem of orange-flowers. Her features 
 were of that slight mould which shows sickness by 
 little except higher transparency of the blue veins, 
 and brighter redness in the lips, and as she smiled 
 with suffused cheek, and held out her gloved hand to 
 Clay, with a vain effort to articulate, lie passed his 
 hands across his eyes and looked inquiringly at his 
 friend. He had expected, though he had never 
 realized, that she would be altered. She looked 
 almost as he had left her. He remembered her only 
 as he had oftenest seen her — dressed for ball or party, 
 and but for the solemnity of the preparation he had 
 gone through, he might have thought his feelings 
 had been played upon only; that Blanch Beaufin 
 was well — still beautiful and well ; that he should 
 again see her in the brilliant circles of London; still 
 love her as he secretly did, and receive what he now 
 felt would be under any circumstances a gift of 
 Heaven, the assurance of a return. This and a world 
 of confused emotion, tumultuously and in an instant, 
 rushed through his heart ; for there are moments in 
 which we live lives of feeling and thought; moments, 
 glances, which supply years of secret or bitter memory. 
 
 This is but a sketch — but an outline of a tale over 
 true. Were there space, were there time to follow 
 out the traverse thread of its mere mournful incidents, 
 we might write the reverse side of a leaf of life ever 
 read partially and wrong — the life of the gay and un- 
 lamenting. Sickness and death had here broken 
 down a wall of adamant between two creatures, every 
 way formed for each other. In health and ordinary 
 regularity of circumstances, they would have loved as 
 truly and deeply as those in humbler or in more for- 
 tunate relative positions ; but they probably would 
 never have been united. It is the system, the neces- 
 sary system of the class to which Clay belonged, to 
 turn adroitly and gayly off every shaft to the heart; 
 to take advantage of no opening to affection; to 
 smother all preference that would lead to an inter- 
 change of hallowed vows ; to profess insensibility 
 equally polished and hardened on the subject of pure 
 love ; to forswear marriage, and make of it a mock 
 and an impossibility. And whose handiwork is this 
 unnatural order of society? Was it established by 
 the fortunate and joyous — by the wealthy and un- 
 trammelled, at liberty to range the world if they liked, 
 and marry where they chose, but preferring gayety to 
 happiness, and lawless liberty to virtuous love ? No, 
 indeed ! not by these ! Show me one such man, and 
 I will show you a rare perversion of common feeling 
 
 a m an who under any circumstances would have 
 
 been cold and eccentric. It is not to those able to 
 marry where they will, that the class of London gay 
 men owe their system of mocking opinions. But it 
 is to the companions of fortunate men — gifted like 
 them, in all but fortune, and holding their caste by 
 the tenure of forsworn ties — abiding in the paradise 
 of aristocracy, with pure love for the forbidden fruit ! 
 Are such men insensible to love ? Has this forbidden 
 
 joy — this one thing hallowed in a bad world ; has it no 
 temptation for the gay man ? Is his better nature 
 quite dead within him ? Is he never ill and sad where 
 gayety can not reach him ? Does he envy the rich 
 young lord (his friend), everything but his blushing 
 and pure bride ? Is he poet or wit, or the mirror of 
 taste and elegance, yet incapable of discerning the 
 qualities of a true love ; the celestial refinement of a 
 maiden passion, lawful and fearless, devoted because 
 spotless, and enduring because made up half of prayer 
 and gratitude to her Maker ? Does he not know dis- 
 tinctions of feeling, as he knows character in a play ? 
 Does he not discriminate between purity and guilt in 
 love, as he does in his nice judgment of honor and 
 taste ? Is he gayly dead to the deepest and most 
 elevated cravings of nature — love, passionate, single- 
 hearted, and holy ? Trust me, there is a bitterness 
 whose depths we can only fathom by refinement ! 
 To move among creatures embellished and elevated 
 to the last point of human attainment, lovely and un- 
 sullied, and know yourself (as to all but gazing on and 
 appreciating them) a pariah and an outcast ! to breathe 
 their air, and be the companion and apparent equal of 
 those for whose bliss they are created, and to whom 
 they are offered for choice, with the profusion of 
 flowers in a garden — (the chooser and possessor of 
 the brightest your inferior in all else)— to live thus ; 
 to suffer thus, and still smile and call it choice and 
 your own way to happiness — this is mockery indeed ! 
 He who now stood in the death-room of Blanch 
 Beaufin, had felt it in its bitterest intensity ! 
 
 " Mr. Clay ! — Ernest !" said the now pale creature, 
 breaking the silence with a strong effort, for he had 
 dropped on his knee at her side in ungovernable emo- 
 tion, and, as yet, had but articulated her name — "Er- 
 nest! I have but little time for anything — least of all 
 for disguise or ceremony. I am assured that I am dy- 
 ing. I am convinced," she added firmly, taking up 
 the watch that lay beside her, " that I have been told 
 the truth, and that when this hourhand comes round 
 again, I shall be dead. I will conceal nothing. They 
 have given me cordials that will support me one hour, 
 and for that hour — and for eternity — I wish — if I may 
 be so blest — if God will permit — to be your wife !" 
 
 Lady Fanny Freer rose and came to her with rapid 
 steps, and Clay sprang to his feet, and in a passion of 
 tears exclaimed, "Oh God! can this be true !" 
 
 " Answer me quickly !" she continued, in a voice 
 raised, but breaking through sobs, " an hour is short — 
 oh hoxo short, when it is the last ! I can not stay with 
 you long, were you a thousand times mine. Tell 
 me, Ernest ! — shall it be ? — shall I be wedded ere I 
 die ? — wedded now ?" 
 
 A passionate gesture to Lady Fanny was all the 
 answer Clay could make, and in another moment the 
 aged vicar was in the chamber, with her parents and 
 the physician, to all of whom a few words explained 
 a mystery which her bridal attire had already half un- 
 ravelled. 
 
 Blanch spoke quickly — " Shall he proceed, Er- 
 nest?" 
 
 Her prayer-book was open on her knee, and Clay 
 gave it to the vicar, who, with a quick sense of sym- 
 pathy, and with but a glance at the weeping and si- 
 lent parents, read without delay the hallowed cercn;o- 
 nial. 
 
 Clay's countenance elevated and cleared as he pro- 
 ceeded, and Blanch, with her large suffused eyes fixed 
 on his, listened with a smile, serene, but expressive of 
 unspeakable rapture. Her beauty had never been so 
 radiant, so angelic. In heaven, on her bridal night, 
 beatified spirit as she was, she could not have been 
 more beautiful ! 
 
 One instant of embarrassment occurred, unobserved 
 by the dying bride, but, with the thoughtfulness of 
 womanly generosity, Lady Fanny had foreseen it, and, 
 
ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 267 
 
 drawing off her own wedding-ring, she passed it into 
 Ernest's hand ere the interruption became apparent. 
 Alas! the emaciated hand ungloved to receive it! 
 That wasted finger pointed indeed to heaven! Till 
 then, Clay had felt almost in a dream. But here was 
 suffering— sickness — death ! This told what the hec- 
 tic brightness and the faultless features would fain 
 deny— what the fragrant and still unwithering flowers 
 upon her temples would seem to mock ! But the 
 hectic was already fading, and the flowers outlived the 
 light in the dark eyes they shaded! 
 
 The vicar joined their hands with the solemn ad- 
 juration, "Those whom God hath joined together let 
 no man put asunder ;" and Clay rose from his knees, 
 and pressing his first kiss upon her lips, strained her 
 passionately to his heart. 
 
 " .Mine in heaven!"' she cried, giving way at last to 
 her tears, as she closed her slight arms over his neck ; 
 "mine in heaven! Is it not so, mother! father! is 
 he not mine now ? There is no giving in marriage in 
 heaven, but the ties, hallowed here, are not forgotten 
 there ! Tell me they are not ! Speak to me, my ! 
 husband! Press me to your heart, Ernest ! Your j 
 wife — oh, I thank God !" 
 
 The physician sprang forward and laid his hand j 
 upon her pulse. She fell back upon her pillows, and 
 with a smile upon her lips, and the tears still wet upon 
 her long and drooping lashes, lay dead. 
 
 Lady Fanny took the mother by the arm, and with 
 a gesture to the father and the physician to follow, 
 they retired and left the bridegroom alone. 
 * * * * * * * | 
 
 Life is full of sudden transitions ; and the next i 
 event in that of Ernest Clay, was a duel with Sir Har- j 
 ry Freer — if the Morning Post was to be believed — \ 
 "occasioned by the indiscretion of Lady Fanny, who, | 
 'n a giddy moment, it appears, had given to her ad- 
 nirer, Sir Harry's opponent, her wedding-ring !" 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Late one night in June two gentlemen arrived at 
 the Villa Hotel of the Baths of Lucca. They stop- 
 ped the low britzka in which they travelled, and, leav- 
 ing a servant to make arrangements for their lodging, 
 linked arms and strolled up the road toward the banks 
 of the Lima. The moon was chequered at the mo- 
 ment with the poised leaf of a treetop, and as it pas- 
 sed from her face, she arose and stood alone in the ! 
 steel-blue of the unclouded heavens — a luminous and ! 
 tremulous plate of gold. And you know how beau- 
 tiful must have been the night, a June night in Italy, 
 with a moon at the full ! 
 
 A lady, with a servant following her at a little dis- 
 tance, passed the travellers on the bridge of the Lima. 
 She dropped her veil and went by in silence. But 
 the Freyherr felt the arm of his friend tremble within 
 his own. 
 
 "Do you know her, then?" asked Von Leisten. 
 
 "By the thrill in my veins we have me*, before," 
 said Clay; "but whether this involuntary sensation 
 was pleasurable or painful, I have not' yet decided. 
 There are none I care to meet — none who can be 
 here." He added the last few words after a moment's 
 pause, and sadly. 
 
 They walked on in silence to the base of the moun- 
 tain, busy each with such coloring as the moonlight 
 threw on their thoughts, but neither of them was 
 happy. 
 
 Clay was humane, and a lover of nature — a poet, 
 tha» is to say — and, in a world so beautiful, could nev- 
 er be a prey to disgust; but he was satiated with the 
 eoinmon emotions of life. His heart, for ever over- 
 flowing, hnd filled many a cup with love, but with 
 
 strange tenacity he turned back for ever to the first. 
 He was weary of the beginnings of love — weary of 
 its probations and changes. He had passed the pe- 
 riod of life when inconstancy was tempting. He 
 longed now for an affection that would continue into 
 another world — holy and pure enough to pass a gate 
 guarded by angels. And his first love — recklessly as 
 he had thrown it away — was now the thirst of his ex- 
 istence. 
 
 ]t was two o'clock at night. The moon lay broad 
 upon the southern balconies of the hotel, and every 
 casement was open to its luminous and fragrant still- 
 ness. Clay and the Freyherr Von Leisten, each in 
 his apartment, were awake, unwilling to lose the lux- 
 ury of the night. And there was one other under 
 that roof waking, with her eyes fixed on the moon. 
 
 As Clay leaned his head on his hand, and looked 
 outward to the sky, his heart began to be troubled. 
 There was a point in the path of the moon's rays 
 where his spirit turned back. There was an influence 
 abroad in the dissolving moonlight around him which 
 resistlessly awakened the past— the sealed but unfor- 
 gottenpast. He could not single out the emotion. He 
 knew not whether it was fear or hope — pain or pleasure. 
 He called, through the open window, to Von Leisten. 
 The Freyherr, like himself, and like all who have 
 outlived the effervescence of life, was enamored of the 
 night. A moment of unfathomable moonlight was 
 dearer to him than hours disenchanted with the sun. 
 He, too, had been looking outward and upward — but 
 with no trouble at his heart. 
 
 " The night is inconceivably sweet," he said, as he 
 entered, " and your voice called in my thought and 
 sense from the intoxication of a revel. What would 
 you, my friend ?" 
 
 " I am restless, Von Leisten! There is some one 
 near us whose glances cross mine on the moonlight, 
 and agitate and perplex me. Yet there was but one 
 on earth deep enough in the life-blood of my being 
 to move me thus — even were she here ! And she is 
 not here !" 
 
 His voice trembled and softened, and the last word 
 was scarce audible on his closing lips, for the Frey- 
 herr had passed his hands over him while he spoke, 
 and he had fallen into the trance of the spirit-world. 
 
 Clay and Von Leisten had retired from the active 
 passions of life together, and had met and mingled at 
 that moment of void and thirst when each supplied 
 the want of the other. The Freyherr was a German 
 noble, of a character passionately poetic, and of sin- 
 gular acquirement in the mystic fields of knowledge. 
 Too wealthy to need labor, and too proud to submit 
 his thoughts or his attainments to the criticism or 
 judgment of the world, he lavished on his own life, and 
 on those linked to him in friendship, the strange powers 
 he had acquired, and the prodigal overthrow of his 
 daily thought and feeling. Clay was his superior, 
 perhaps, in genius, and necessity had driven him to 
 develop the type of his inner soul, and leave its im- 
 press on the time. But he was inferior to Von Leis- 
 ten in the power of will, and he lay in his control like 
 a child in its mother's. Four years they had passed 
 together, much of it in the secluded castle of Von 
 Leisten, busied with the occult studies to which the 
 Freyherr was secretly devoted ; but travelling down 
 to Italy to meet the luxurious summer, and dividing 
 their lives between the enjoyment of nature and the 
 ideal world they had unlocked. Von Leisten had 
 lost, by death, the human altar on which his heart 
 could alone burn the incense of love; and Clay had 
 flung aside in an hour of intoxicating passion the ODe 
 pure affection in which his happiness was sealed— 
 and both were desolate. But in the world of the 
 past. Von Leisten, though more irrevocably lonely, 
 was more tranquilly blest. 
 
 The Freyherr released he entranced spirit of hia 
 
268 
 
 ERNEST CLAY. 
 
 friend, and bade him follow back the rays of the moon 
 to the source of his agitation. 
 
 A smile crept slowly over the speaker's lips. 
 
 In an apartment flooded with the silver lustre of the 
 night, reclined, in an invalid's chair, propped with pil- 
 lows, a woman of singular, though most fragile beauty. 
 Books and music lay strewn around, and a lamp, sub- 
 dued to the tone of the moonlight by an orb of ala- 
 baster, burned beside her. She lay bathing her blue 
 eyes in the round chalice of the moon. A profusion 
 of brown ringlets fell over the white dress that envel- 
 oped her, and her oval cheek lay supported on the 
 palm of her hand, and her bright red lips were parted. 
 The pure, yet passionate spell of that soft night pos- 
 sessed her. 
 
 Over her leaned the disembodied spirit of him who 
 had once loved her — praying to God that his soul 
 might be so purified as to mingle unstartingly, unre- 
 pulsively, in hallowed harmony with hers. And pres- 
 ently he felt the coming of angels toward him, breath- 
 ing into the deepest abysses of his existence a tearful 
 and purifying sadness. And with a trembling aspira- 
 tion of grateful humility to his Maker, he stooped to 
 her forehead, and with his impalpable lips impressed 
 upon its snowy tablet a kiss. 
 
 It seemed to Eve Gore a thought of the past that 
 brought the blood suddenly to her cheek. She started 
 from herrecliningposition, and, removing theobscuring 
 shade from her lamp, arose and crossed her hands 
 upon her wrists, and paced thoughtfully to and fro. 
 Her lips murmured inarticulately. But the thought, 
 painfully though it came, changed unaccountably to 
 melancholy sweetness ; and, subduing her lamp again, 
 she resumed her steadfast gaze upon the moon. 
 
 Ernest knelt beside her, and with his invisible brow 
 bowed upon her hand, poured forth, in the voiceless 
 language of the soul, his memories of the past, his 
 hope, his repentance, his pure and passionate adora- 
 tion at the present hour. 
 
 And thinking she had been in a sweet dream, yet 
 wondering at its truthfulness and power, Eve wept, 
 silently and long. As the morning touched the east, 
 slumber weighed upon her moistened eyelids, and 
 kneeling by her bedside she murmured her gratitude 
 to God for a heart relieved of a burden long borne, 
 and so went peacefully to her sleep. * * * 
 
 It was in the following year, and in the beginning 
 of May. The gay world of England was concentra- 
 ted in London, and at the entertainments of noble 
 houses there were many beautiful women and many 
 marked men. The Freyherr Von Leisten, after 
 years of absence, had appeared again, his mysterious 
 and undeniable superiority of mien and influence 
 again yielded to, as before, and again bringing to his 
 feet the homage and deference of the crowd he moved 
 among. To his inscrutable power the game of so- 
 ciety was easy, and he walked where he would through 
 *ts barriers of form. 
 
 He stood one night looking on at a dance. A lady 
 of a noble air was near him, and both were watching 
 the movements of the loveliest woman present, a crea- 
 ture in radiant health, apparently about twenty-three, 
 and of matchless fascination of person and manner. 
 Von Leisten turned to the lady near him to inquire 
 her name, but his attention was arrested by the re- 
 
 semblance between her and the object of his admiring 
 curiosity, and he was silent. 
 
 The lady had bowed before he withdrew his gaze, 
 however. 
 
 "I think we have met before!" she said; but at 
 the next instant a slight flush of displeasure came to her 
 cheek, and she seemed regretting that she had spoken. 
 
 "Pardon me!" said Von Leisten, "but — if the 
 | question be not rude — do you remember where ?" 
 
 She hesitated a moment. 
 
 " I have recalled it since I have spoken," she con- 
 j tinued; " but as the remembrance of the person who 
 i accompanied you always gives me pain, I would wil- 
 ! lingly have unsaid it. One evening of last year, cros- 
 sing the bridge of the Lima, you were walking with 
 Mr. Clay. Pardon me — but, though I left Lucca 
 | with my daughter on the following morning, and saw 
 i you no more, the association, or your appearance, 
 j had imprinted the circumstance on my mind." 
 
 "And is that Eve Gore ?" said Von Leisten, mu- 
 singly, gazing on the beautiful creature now gliding 
 with light step to her mother's side. 
 
 But the Freyherr's heart was gone to his friend. 
 
 As the burst of the waltz broke in upon the closing 
 of the quadrille, he offered his hand to the fair girl, 
 and as they moved round to the entrancing music, he 
 murmured in her ear, " He who came to you in the 
 moonlight of Italy will be with you again, if you are 
 alone, at the rising of to-night's late moon. Believe 
 the voice that then speaks to you !" * * * 
 
 It was with implacable determination that Mrs. 
 Gore refused, to the entreaties of Von Leisten, a re- 
 newal of Clay's acquaintance with her daughter. 
 Resentment for the apparent recklessness with which 
 he had once sacrificed her maiden love for an unlaw- 
 ful passion — scornful unbelief of any change in his 
 character — distrust of the future tendency of the 
 powers of his genius — all mingled together in a hos- 
 tility proof against persuasion. She had expressed 
 this with all the positiveness of language, when her 
 daughter suddenly entered the room. It was the 
 morning after the ball, and she had risen late. But 
 though subdued and pensive in her air, Von Leisten 
 saw at a glance that she was happy. 
 
 " Can you bring him to me ?" said Eve, letting her 
 hand remain in Von Leisten's, and bending her deep 
 blue eyes inquiringly on his. 
 
 And with no argument but tears and caresses, and 
 an unexplained assurance of her conviction of the re- 
 pentant purity and love of him to whom her heart 
 was once given, the confiding and strong -hearted 
 girl bent, at last, the stern will that forbade her happi- 
 ness. Her mother unclasped the slight arms from her 
 neck, and gave her hand in silent consent to Von Leisten. 
 
 The Freyherr stood a moment with his eyes fixed 
 on the ground. The color fled from his cheeks, and 
 his brow moistened. 
 
 "I have called him," he said — " he will be here !" 
 
 An hour elapsed, and Clay entered the house. He 
 had risen from a bed of sickness, and came, pale and 
 in terror — for the spirit-summons was powerful. But 
 Von Leisten welcomed him at the door with a smile, 
 and withdrew the mother from the room, and left Er- 
 nest alone with his future bride — the first union, save 
 in spirit, after years of separation. 
 
 m 
 
THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS. 
 
 269 
 
 THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS 
 
 (THE OUTLINE FROM A FRENCH MEMOIR.) 
 
 I introduce you at once to the Marquis de la Che- 
 tardie— a diplomatist who figured largely in the gay 
 age of Louis XV. — and the story is but one of the 
 illuminated pages of the dark book of diplomacy. 
 
 Charles de la Chetardie appeared for the first time 
 to the eyes of the king at a masquerade ball, given at 
 Versailles, under the auspices of la belle Pompadour. 
 He was dressed as a young lady of high rank, making 
 her debut, ; and, so perfect was his acting, and the de- 
 ception altogether, that Louis became enamored 
 of the disguised marquis, and violently excited the 
 jealousy of "Madame," by his amorous attentions. 
 An eclaircissement, of course, took place, and the re- 
 sult was a great partiality for the marquis's society, 
 and his subsequent employment, in and out of petti- 
 coats, in many a scheme of state diplomacy and royal 
 amusement. 
 
 La Chetardie was at this time just eighteen. He 
 was very slight, and had remarkably small hands and 
 feet, and the radiant fairness of his skin and the luxu- 
 riant softness of his profuse chestnut curls, might 
 justly have been the envy of the most delicate woman. 
 He was, at first, subjected to some ridicule for his 
 effeminacy, but the merry courtiers were soon made 
 aware, that, under this velvet fragility lay concealed 
 the strength and ferocity of the tiger. The grasp of 
 his small hand was like an iron vice, and his singular 
 activity, and the cool courage which afterward gave 
 him a brilliant career on the battle-field, established 
 him, in a very short time, as the most formidable 
 swordsman of the court. His ferocity, however, lay 
 deeply concealed in his character, and, unprovoked, 
 he was the gayest and most brilliant of merry com- 
 panions. 
 
 This was the age of occult and treacherous diplo- 
 macy, and the court of Russia, where Louis would 
 fain have exercised an influence (private as well as po- 
 litical in its results), was guarded by an implacable 
 Argus, in the person of the prime minister, Bestucheff. 
 Aided by Sir Hambury Williams, the English ambas- 
 sador, one of the craftiest men of that crafty period, he 
 had succeeded for some years in defeating every at- 
 tempt at access to the imperial ear by the secret emis- 
 saries of France. The sudden appearance of La 
 Chetardie, his cool self-command, and his successful 
 personation of a female, suggested a new hope to the 
 king, however; and, called to Versailles by royal man- 
 date, the young marquis was taken into cabinet confi- 
 dence, and a secret mission to St. Petersburgh, in 
 petticoats, proposed to him and accepted. 
 
 With his instructions and secret despatches stitched 
 into his corsets, and under the ostensible protection of 
 a scientific man, who was to present him to the tzarine 
 as a Mademoiselle de Beaumont, desirous of entering 
 the service of Elizabeth, the marquis reached St. Pe- 
 tersburg without accident or adventure. "The young 
 lady's guardian requested an audience through Bestu- 
 cheff, and having delivered the open letters recom- 
 mending her for her accomplishments to the imperial 
 protection, he begged leave to continue on his scien- 
 tific tour to the central regions of Russia. 
 
 Conge was immediately granted, and on the disap- 
 pearance of the savant, and before the departure of 
 Bestucheff, the tzarine threw off all ceremony, and 
 pinching the cheeks and imprinting a kiss on the fore- 
 
 head of the beautiful stranger, appointed her, by one 
 of those sudden whims of preference against which 
 her ministers had so much trouble to guard, lectrice 
 intime et parliculiere — in short, confidential personal 
 attendant. The blushes of the confused marquis, who 
 was unprepared for so affectionate a reception, served 
 rather to heighten the disguise, and old Bestucheff 
 bowed himself out with a compliment to the beauty 
 of Mademoiselle de Beaumont, veiled in a diplomatic 
 congratulation to her imperial mistress. 
 
 Elizabeth was forty and a little passee, but she still 
 had pretensions, and was particularly fond of beauty 
 in her attendants, female as well as male. Her favor- 
 ite, of her personal suite, at the time of the arrival of 
 the marquis, was an exquisite little creature who had 
 been sent to her, as a compliment to this particular 
 taste, by the Dutchess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz — a kind 
 of German "Fenella," or " Mignon," by the name of 
 Nadege Stein. Not much below the middle size, 
 Nadege was a model of symmetrica] proportion, and 
 of very extraordinary beauty. She had been carefully 
 educated for her present situation, and was highly 
 accomplished ; a fine reader, and a singularly sweet 
 musician and dancer. The tzari tie's passion for this 
 lovely attendant was excessive, and the arrival of a new 
 favorite of the same sex was looked upon with some 
 pleasure by the eclipsed remainder of the palace 
 idlers. 
 
 Elizabeth summoned Nadege, and committed Mad- 
 emoiselle de Beaumont temporarily to her charge; 
 but the same mysterious magnetism which had reached 
 the heart of the tzarine, seemed to kindle, quite as 
 promptly, the affections of her attendant. Nadege 
 was no sooner alone with her new friend, than she 
 jumped to her neck, smothered her with kisses, called 
 her by every endearing epithet, and overwhelmed her 
 with questions, mingled with the most childlike ex- 
 clamations of wonder at her own inexplicable love for 
 a stranger. In an hour, she had shown to the new 
 demoiselle all the contents of the little boudoir in which 
 she lived ; talked to her of her loves and hates at the 
 Russian court; of her home in Mecklenberg, and her 
 present situation — in short, poured out her heart with 
 the naif abandon of a child. The young marquis had 
 never seen so lovely a creature; and, responsibly as he 
 felt his difficult and delicate situation, he returned the 
 affection so innocently lavished upon him, and by the 
 end of this first fatal hour, was irrecoverably in love. 
 And, gay as his life had been at the French court, it 
 was the first, and subsequently proved to be the deep- 
 est, passion of his life. 
 
 On the tzarine's return to her private apartment, she 
 summoned her new favorite, and superintended, with 
 condescending solicitude, the arrangements for hei 
 palace lodging. Nadege inhabited a small tower ad- 
 joining the bedroom of her mistress, and above this 
 was an unoccupied room, which, at the present sug- 
 gestion of the fairy little attendant, was allotted to the 
 new-comer. The staircase opened by one door into 
 the private gardens, and by the opposite, into the cor- 
 ridor leading immediately to the imperial chamber. 
 The marquis's delicacy would fain have made some 
 objection to this very intimate location ; but he could 
 hazard nothing against the interests of his sovereign, 
 and he trusted to a speedy termination of his disguise 
 
270 
 
 THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS. 
 
 with the attainment of his object. Meantime, the 
 close neighborhood of the fair Nadege was not the . 
 most intolerable of necessities. 
 
 The marquis's task was a very difficult one. He 
 was instructed, before abandoning his disguise and de- , 
 livering his secret despatches, to awaken the interest 
 of the tzarine on the two subjects to which the docu- j 
 ments had reference : viz., a former partiality of her 
 majesty for Louis, and a formerly discussed project of ' 
 seating the Prince de Conti on the throne of Poland. 
 Bestucheff had so long succeeded in cutting off all | 
 approach of these topics to the ear of the tzarine, that 
 her majesty had probably forgotten them altogether. 
 
 Weeks passed, and the opportunities to broach these 
 delicate subjects had been inauspiciously rare. Mad- 
 emoiselle de Beaumont, it is true, had completely 
 eclipsed the favorite Nadege; and Elizabeth, in her 
 hours of relaxation from state affairs, exacted the con- 
 stant attendance of the new favorite in her private 
 apartments. But the almost constant presence of 
 some other of the maids of honor, opposed continual 
 obstacles and interruptions, and the tzarine herself 
 was not always disposed to talk of matters more seri- 
 ous than the current trifles of the hour. She was 
 extremely indolent in her personal habits; and often 
 reclining at length upon cushions on the floor of her 
 boudoir, she laid her imperial head in the lap of the 
 embarrassed demoiselle, and was soothed to sleep by 
 reading and the bathing of her temples. And during 
 this period, she exacted frequently of the marquis, with 
 a kind of instinctive mistrust, promises of continuance 
 for life in her personal service. 
 
 But there were sweeter hours for the enamored La 
 Chetardie than those passed in the presence of his 
 partial and imperial mistress. Encircled by sentinels, 
 and guarded from all intrusion of other eyes, in the 
 inviolable sanctuary of royalty, the beautiful Nadege, 
 impassioned she knew not why, in her love for her 
 new companion, was ever within call, and happy in 
 devoting to him all her faculties of caressing endear- 
 ment. He had not yet dared to risk the interests of 
 his sovereign by a disclosure of his sex, even in the 
 confidence of love. He could not trust Nadege to 
 play so difficult a part as that of possessor of so em- 
 barrassing a secret in the presence of the shrewd and 
 observing tzarine. A betrayal, too, would at once put 
 an end to his happiness. With the slight arm of the 
 fair and relying creature about his waist, and her head 
 pressed close against his breast, they passed the balmy 
 nights of the Russian summer in pacing the flowery 
 alleys of the imperial garden, discoursing, with but 
 one reserve, on every subject that floated to their lips. 
 It required, however, all the self-control of La Che- 
 tardie, and all the favoring darkness of the night, to con- 
 ceal his smiles at the naive confessions of the uncon- 
 scious girl, and herwonderings at the peculiarity of her 
 feelings. She had thought, hitherto, that there were 
 affections in her nature which could only be called forth 
 by a lover. Yet now, the thought of caressing another 
 than her friend — of repeating to any human ear, least 
 of all to a man, those new-born vows of love — filled 
 her with alarm and horror. She felt that she had 
 given her heart irrevocably away — and to a woman ! 
 Ah, with what delirious, though silent passion, La 
 Chetardie drew her to his bosom, and, with the pres- 
 sure of his lips upon hers, interrupted those sweet 
 confessions ! 
 
 Yet the time at last drew near for the waking from 
 this celestial dream. The disguised diplomatist had 
 found his opportunity, and had successfully awakened 
 in Elizabeth's mind both curiosity and interest as to 
 the subjects of the despatches still sewed safely in his 
 corsets. There remained nothing for him now but to 
 seize a favorable opportunity, and, with the delivery 
 of his missives, to declare his sex to the tzarine. There 
 wa3 risk to life and libert}' in this, but the marquis 
 
 knew not fear, and he thought but of its consequences 
 to his love. 
 
 In La Chetardie's last interview with the savant who 
 conducted him to Russia, his male attire had been 
 successfully transferred from one portmanteau to the 
 other, and it was now in his possession, ready for the 
 moment of need. With his plans brought to within a 
 single night of the denouement, he parted from the 
 tzarine, having asked the imperial permission for an 
 hour's private interview on the morrow, and, with gen- 
 tle force excluding Nadege from his apartment, he 
 dressed himself in his proper costume, and cut open 
 the warm envelope of' his despatches. This done, he 
 threw his cloak over him, and, with a dark lantern in 
 his hand, sought Nadege in the garden. He had de- 
 termined to disclose himself to her, renew his vows of 
 love in his proper guise, and arrange, while he had 
 access and opportunity, some means for uniting their 
 destinies hereafter. 
 
 As he opened the door of the turret, Nadege flew 
 up the stair to meet him, and observing the cloak in 
 the faint glimmer of the stars, she playfully endeavored 
 to envelope herself in it. But, seizing her hands, 
 La Chetardie turned and glided backward, drawing 
 her after him toward a small pavilion in the remoter 
 part of the garden. Here they had never been inter- 
 rupted, the empress alone having the power to intrude 
 upon them, and La Chetardie felt safe in devoting this 
 place and time to the double disclosure of his secret 
 and his suppressed passion. 
 
 Persuading her with difficulty to desist from putting 
 her arms about him and sit down without a caress, he 
 retreated a few steps, and in the darkness of the pa- 
 vilion, shook down his imprisoned locks to their mas- 
 culine abandon, threw off his cloak, and drew up the 
 blind of his lantern. The scream of surprise, which 
 instantly parted from the lips of Nadege, made him 
 regret his imprudence in not having prepared her for 
 the transformation, but her second thought was mirth, 
 for she could believe it of course to be nothing but a 
 playful masquerade; and with delighted laughter she 
 sprang to his neck, and overwhelmed him with her 
 kisses — another voice, however, joining very unexpect- 
 edly in the laughter ! 
 
 The empress stood before them ! 
 
 For an instant, with all his self-possession, La Che- 
 tardie was confounded and dismayed. Siberia, the 
 knout, the scaffold, flitted before his eyes, and Nadege 
 I was the sufferer ! But a glance at the face of the 
 ! tzarine reassured him. She, too, took it for a girlish 
 masquerade ! 
 
 But the empress, unfortunately, was not disposed to 
 have a partner in her enjoyment of the society of this 
 new apparition of "hose and doublet." She ordered 
 Nadege to her turret, with one of those petulant com- 
 mands which her attendants understood to admit of no 
 delay, and while the eclipsed favorite disappeared with 
 the tears of unwilling submission in her soft eyes, La 
 Chetardie looked after her with the anguish of eternal 
 separation at his heart, for a presentiment crowded 
 irresistibly upon him that he should never see her 
 more ! 
 
 The empress was in slippers and robe de mtit, and, 
 as if fate had determined that this well-kept secret 
 should not survive the hour, her majesty laid her arm 
 within that of her supposed masquerader, and led the 
 way to the palace. She was wakeful, and wished to 
 be read to sleep. And, with many a compliment to 
 the beauty of her favorite in male attire, and many a 
 playful caress, she arrived at the door of her chamber. 
 
 But the marquis could go no farther. He had hith- 
 erto been spared the embarrassment of passing this 
 sacred threshold, for the passee empress had secrets 
 of toilet for the embellishment of her person, which 
 she trusted only to the eyes of an antiquated attend- 
 ant. La Chetardie had never passed beyond the bo"- 
 
THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS. 
 
 271 
 
 doir which was between the antechamber and the bed- 
 room, and the time had come for the disclosure of his 
 secret. He fell on his knees and announced himself 
 a man .' 
 
 Fortunately they were alone. Incredulous at first, 
 the empress listened to his asseverations, however, 
 with more amusement than displeasure, and the im- 
 mediate delivery of the despatches, with the commen- 
 dations of the disguised ambassador by his royal mas- 
 ter to the forgiveness and kindness of the empress, 
 amply secured his pardon. But it was on condition 
 that he should resume his disguise and remain in her 
 service. 
 
 Alone in* his tower (for Nadege had disappeared, and 
 he knew enough of the cruelty of Elizabeth to dread 
 the consequences to the poor girl of venturing on di- 
 rect inquiries as to her fate), La Chetardie after a few 
 weeks fell ill; and fortunate, even at this price, to I 
 escape from the silken fetters of the enamored tzarine, 
 be departed under the care of the imperial physician, 
 for the more genial climate of France — not without 
 reiterated promises of return, however, and offers, in 
 that event, of unlimited wealth and advancement. 
 
 But, as the marquis made his way slowly toward 
 Vienna, a gleam of light dawned on his sadness. 
 The Princess Sophia Charlotte was newly affianced to 
 George the Third of England, and this daughter of 
 the house of Mecklenberg had been the playmate of 
 Nadege Stein, from infancy till the time when Nadege jj 
 was sent to the tzarine by the Dutchess of Mecklen- 
 berg. Making a confidant of the kind physician who 
 accompanied him, La Chetardie was confirmed, by the 
 good man's better experience and knowledge, in the 
 belief that Nadege had shared the same fate of every 
 female of the court who had ever awakened the jeal- 
 ousy of the empress. She was doubtless exiled to 
 Siberia; but, as she had committed no voluntary fault, 
 it was probably without other punishment ; and, with 
 a playmate on the throne of England, she might be 
 demanded and recovered ere long, in all her freshness I 
 and beauty. Yet the recent fate of the fair Eudoxie 
 Lapoukin, who, for an offence but little more distaste- 
 ful to the tzarine, had been pierced through the tongue 
 with hot iron, whipped with the knout, and exiled for 
 life to Siberia, hung like a cloud of evil augury over 
 his mind. 
 
 The marquis suddenly determined that he would see 
 the affianced princess, and plead with her for her friend, ! 
 before the splendors of a throne should make her in- 
 accessible. The excitement of this hope had given || 
 him new life, and he easily persuaded his attendant, as j 
 they entered the gates of Vienna, that he required his 
 attendance no farther. Alone with his own servants, 
 he resumed his female attire, and directed his course 
 to Mecklenberg-Strelitz. 
 
 The princess had maintained an intimate corre- 
 spondence with her playmate up to the time of her 
 betrothal, and the name of Mademoiselle de Beau- 
 mont was passport enough. La Chetardie had sent 
 forward his servant, on arriving at the town, in the 
 neighborhood of the ducal residence, and the reply 
 
 to his missive was brought back by one of the officers 
 in attendance, with orders to conduct the demoiseile 
 to apartments in the castle. He was received with all 
 honor at the palace-gate by a chamberlain in waiting, 
 who led the way to a suite of rooms adjoining those 
 of the princess, where, after being left alone for a few 
 minutes, he was familiarly visited by the betrothed 
 girl, and overwhelmed, as formerly by her friend, with 
 most embarrassing caresses. In the next moment, 
 however, the door was hastily flung open, and Nadege, 
 like a stream of light, fled through the room, hung 
 upon the neck of the speechless and overjoyed mar- 
 quis, and ended with convulsions of mingled tears and 
 laughter. The moment that he could disengage him- 
 self from her arms, La Chetardie requested to be left 
 for a moment alone. He felt the danger and impro- 
 priety of longer maintaining his disguise. He closed 
 his door on the unwilling demoiselles, hastily changed 
 his dress, and, with his sword at his side, entered the 
 adjoining reception-room of the princess, where Made- 
 moiselle de Beaumont was impatiently awaited. 
 
 The scene which followed, the mingled confusion 
 and joy of Nadege, the subsequent hilarity and mas- 
 querading at the castle, and the particulars of the 
 marriage of the Marquis de la Chetardie to his fair 
 fellow maid-of-honor, must be left to the reader's im- 
 agination. We have room only to explain the reap- 
 pearance of Nadege at Mecklenberg. 
 
 Nadege retired to her turret at the imperative com- 
 mand of the empress, sad and troubled ; but waited 
 wakefully and anxiously for the re-entrance of her dis- 
 guised companion. In the course of an hour, how- 
 ever, the sound of a sentinel's musket, set down at her 
 door, informed her that she was a prisoner. She knew 
 Elizabeth, and the Dutchess of Mecklenberg, with an 
 equal knowledge of the tzarine's character, had provi- 
 ded her with a resource against the imperial cruelty, 
 should she have occasion to use it. She crept to the 
 battlements of the tower, and fastened a handkerchief 
 to the side looking over the public square. 
 
 The following morning, at daylight, Nadege was 
 summoned to prepare for a journey, and, in an hour, 
 she was led between soldiers to a carriage at the pal- 
 ace-gate, and departed by the northern egress of the 
 city, with a guard of three mounted cossacks. In two 
 hours from that time, the carriage was overtaken, the 
 guard overpowered, and the horses' heads turned in 
 the direction of Moscow. After many difficulties and 
 dangers, during which she found herself under the 
 charge of a Mecklenbergian officer in the service of 
 the tzarine, she reached Vienna in safety, and was im- 
 mediately concealed by her friends in the neighbor- 
 hood of the palace at Mecklenberg, to remain hidden 
 till inquiry should be over. The arrival of Mademoi- 
 selle de Beaumont, for the loss of whose life or liberty 
 she had incessantly wept with dread and apprehension, 
 was joyfully communicated to her by her friends ; and 
 so the reader knows some of the passages in the early 
 life of the far-famed beauty in the French couit in 
 the time of Louis XV. — the Marchioness de la Che- 
 tardie. 
 
272 
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST." 
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST; 
 
 ." 
 
 OR, HANDSOME MRS. TITTON AND HER PLAIN HUSBAND. 
 
 1 That man i' the world who shall report he has 
 A better wife, let him in naught be trusted 
 For speaking false in that." — Henry VIII. 
 
 I have always been very fond of the society of 
 portrait-painters. Whether it is, that the pursuit of 
 a beautiful and liberal art softens their natural quali- 
 ties, or that, from the habit of conversing while en- 
 grossed with the pencil, they like best that touch-and- 
 go talk which takes care of itself; or, more probably 
 still, whether the freedom with which they are ad- 
 mitted behind the curtains of vanity and affection gives 
 a certain freshness and truth to their views of things 
 around them — certain it is, that, in all countries, their 
 rooms are the most agreeable of haunts, and they 
 themselves most enjoyable of cronies. 
 
 I had chanced in Italy to make the acquaintance of 
 
 S , an English artist of considerable cleverness 
 
 in his profession, but more remarkable for his frank 
 good breeding and his abundant good nature. Four 
 years after, I had the pleasure of renewing my inter- 
 course with him in London, where he was flourishing, 
 quite up to his deserving, as a portrait-painter. His 
 rooms were hard by one of the principal thorough- 
 fares, and, from making an occasional visit, I grew to 
 frequenting them daily, often joining him at his early 
 breakfast, and often taking him out with me to drive 
 whenever we changed to tire of our twilight stroll. 
 While rambling in Hyde Park, one evening, I men- 
 tioned for the twentieth time, a singularly ill-assorted 
 couple I had once or twice met at his room — a woman 
 of superb beauty attended by a very inferior-looking 
 
 and ill-dressed man. S ■ had, previously, with 
 
 a smile at my speculations, dismissed the subject 
 rather crisply ; but, on this occasion, I went into some 
 surmises as to the probable results of such " pairing 
 without matching," and he either felt called upon to 
 defend the lady, or made my misapprehension of her 
 character an excuse for telling me what he knew about 
 her. He began the story in the Park, and ended it 
 over a bottle of wine in the Haymarket — of course 
 with many interruptions and digressions. Let me see 
 if I can tie his broken threads together. 
 
 "That lady is Mrs. Fortescue Titton, and the 
 gentleman you so much disparage is, if you please, 
 the incumbrance to ten thousand a year — the money 
 as much at her service as the husband by whom she 
 gets it. Whether he could have won her had he been 
 
 " Bereft and gelded of his patrimony," 
 
 I will not assert, especially to one who looks on them 
 as 'Beauty and the Beast;' but that she loves him, 
 or at least prefers to him no handsomer man, I may 
 say I have been brought to believe, in the way of my 
 profession." 
 
 "You have painted her, then?" I asked rather 
 eagerly, thinking I might get a sketch of her face to 
 take with me to another country. 
 
 "No, but I have painted him — and for her — and it 
 is not a case of Titania and Bottom, either. She is 
 quite aware he is a monster, and wanted his picture 
 for a reason you would never divine. But I must be- 
 gin at the beginning. 
 
 " After you left me in Italy, I was employed by the 
 
 earl of , to copy one or two of his favorite 
 
 pictures in the Vatican, and that brought me rather 
 
 well acquainted with his son. Lord George was a gay 
 youth, and a very 'look-and-die' style of fellow, and, 
 as much from admiration of his beauty as anything 
 else, I asked him to sit to me, on our return to Lon- 
 don. I painted him very fantastically in an Albanian 
 cap and oriental morning-gown and slippers, smoking 
 a narghile — the room in which he sat, by the way, 
 being a correct portrait of his own den, a perfect 
 museum of costly luxury. It was a pretty gorgeous 
 turn-out in the way of color, and was ssverely criticised, 
 but still a good deal noticed — for I sent it to the ex- 
 hibition. 
 
 " I was one day going into Somerset-house, when 
 Lord George hailed me from his cab. He wished to 
 suggest some alteration in his picture, or to tell me 
 of some criticism upon it, I forget exactly what ; but 
 we went up together. Directly before the portrait, 
 gazing at it with marked abstraction, stood a beautiful 
 woman, quite alone ; and as she occupied the only 
 point where the light was favorable, we waited a mo- 
 ment till she should pass on — Lord George, of course, 
 rather disposed to shrink from being recognised as the 
 original. The woman's interest in the picture seemed 
 rather to increase, however, and what with variations 
 of the posture of her head, and pulling at her glove 
 fingers, and other female indications of restlessness 
 and enthusiasm, I thought I was doing her no injus- 
 tice by turning to my companion with a congratulatory 
 smile. 
 
 " ' It seems a case, by Jove !' said Lord George, try- 
 ing to look as if it was a matter of very simple occur- 
 rence ; ' and she's as fine a creature as I've seen this 
 season! Eh, old boy? we must run her down, and 
 see where she burrows — and there's nobody with her, 
 by good luck!' 
 
 "A party entered just then, and passed between her 
 and the picture. She looked annoyed, I thought, but 
 started forward and borrowed a catalogue of a little 
 girl, and we could see that she turned to the last page, 
 on which the portrait was numbered, with, of course, 
 the name and address of the painter. She made a 
 memorandum on one of her cards, and left the house. 
 Lord George followed, and I too, as far as the door, 
 where I saw her get into a very stylishly appointed 
 carriage and drive away, followed closely by the cab 
 of my friend, whom I had declined to accompany. 
 
 "You wouldn't have given very heavy odds against 
 his chance, would you?" said S , after a mo- 
 ment pause. 
 
 " No, indeed !" I answered quite sincerely. 
 
 " Well, I was at work, the next morning, glazing a 
 picture I had just finished, when the servant brought 
 up the card of Mrs. Fortescue Titton. I chanced to 
 be alone, so the lady was shown at once into my paint- 
 ing room, and lo ! the incognita of Somerset-House. 
 The plot thickens, thought I ! She sat down in my 
 ♦subject' chair, and, faith! her beauty quite dazzled 
 me ! Her first smile — but you have seen her, so I'll 
 not bore you with a description. 
 
 " Mrs. Titton blushed on opening her errand to me, 
 first inquiring if 1 was the painter of • No 403' in the 
 exhibition, and saying some very civil things about the 
 
" BEAUTY AND THE BEAST." 
 
 273 
 
 picture. I mentioned that it was a portrait of Lord 
 
 George (for his name was not in the catalogue), 
 
 and I thought she M&sh«d still more confusedly — 
 hut that. I think now. was fancy, or at any rate had 
 nothing to do with feeling for his lordship. It was 
 natural enough for me to be mistaken, for she was very 
 particular in her inquiries as to the costume, furniture, 
 and little belongings of the picture, and asked me 
 among other things, whether it was a flattered like- 
 ness : — this last question very pointedly, too ! 
 
 " She arose to go. Was I at leisure, and could I 
 sketch a head for her, and when ? 
 
 " I appointed the next day, expecting of course that 
 the subject was the lady herself, and scarcely slept 
 with thinking of it, and starved myself at breakfast to 
 have a clear eye, and a hand wide awake. And at 
 ten she came, with her Mr. Fortescue Titton ! I was 
 sorry to see that she had a husband, for I had indulged 
 myself with a vague presentiment that she was a 
 widow ; but I begged him to take a chair, and prepar- 
 ed the platform for my beautiful subject. 
 
 "'Will you take your seat ?' I asked, with all my 
 suavity, when my palette was ready. 
 
 " ' My dear,' said she, turning to her husband, and 
 pointing to the chair, ■ Mr. S is ready for you.' 
 
 " I begged pardon for a moment, crossed over to 
 Verey's and bolted a beef-steak ! A cup of coffee, and 
 a glass of Curacoa, and a little walk round Hanover- 
 square, and I recovered from the shock a little. It 
 went very hard, I give you my word. 
 
 " I returned, and took a look, for the first time, at 
 Mr. Titton. You have seen him, and have some idea 
 of what his portrait might be, considered as a pleasure 
 to the artist — what it might promise, I should rather 
 say, for, after all, I ultimately enjoyed working at it, 
 quite aside from the presence of Mrs. Titton. It was 
 the ugliest face in the world, but full of good-nature ; 
 and, as I looked closer into it, I saw, among its coarse 
 features, lines of almost feminine delicacy, and capa- 
 bilities of enthusiasm of which the man himself was 
 probably unconscious. Then a certain helpless style 
 of dress was a wet blanket to him. Rich from his 
 cradle, I suppose his qualities had never been needed 
 on the surface. His wife knew them. 
 
 "From time to time, as I worked, Mrs. Titton came 
 and looked over my shoulder. With a natural desire 
 to please her, I, here and there, softened a harsh line, 
 and was going on to flatter the likeness — not as suc- 
 cessful as I could wish, however, for it is much easier 
 to get a faithful likeness than to flatter without destroy- 
 ing it. 
 
 " 'Mr. S ,' said she, laying her hand on my 
 
 arm as I thinned away the lumpy rim of his nostril, 
 ' I want, first, a literal copy of my husband's features. 
 Suppose, with this idea, you take a fresh canvass ?' 
 
 " Thoroughly mystified by the whole business, I 
 did as she requested ; and, in two sittings, made a 
 likeness of Titton which would have given you a face- 
 ache. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and seemed 
 very glad when the bore of sitting was over; but they 
 seemed to understand each other very well, or, if not, 
 he reserved hisquestions till there could be no restraint 
 upon the answer. He seemed a capital fellow, and I 
 liked him exceedingly. 
 
 "I asked if I should frame the picture and send it 
 home ? No ! I was to do neither. If I would be kind 
 enough not to show it. nor to mention it to any one, 
 and come the next day and dine with them en famille, 
 Mrs. Titton would feel very much obliged to me. 
 And this dinner was followed up by breakfasts and 
 lunches and suppers, and, for a fortnight, I really lived 
 with the Tittons — and pleasanter people to live with, 
 by Jove, you haven't seen in your travels, though you 
 are 'a picked man of countries!' 
 
 " I should mention, by the way, that f. was always 
 placed opposite Titton at table, and that he was a good 
 IS 
 
 deal with me, one way and another, taking me out, as 
 you do, for a stroll, calling and sitting with me when 
 I was at work, etc. And as to Mrs. Ti-ton — if I did 
 not mistrust your arriere pensei, I would enlarge a 
 little on my intimacy with Mrs. Titton! — Hut, believe 
 me when I tell you, that, without a ray of flirtation, 
 we became as cozily intimate as brother and sister." 
 
 " And what of Lord George, all this time ?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, Lord George! — Well, Lord George of course 
 had no difficulty in making Mrs. Titton's acquaintance, 
 though they were not quite in the same circle, and he 
 had been presented to her, and had seen her at a party 
 or two, where he managed to be invited on purpose — 
 but of this, for a while, J heard nothing. She had not 
 yet seen him at her own house, and 1 had not chanced 
 to encounter him. But let me go on with my story. 
 
 " Mrs. Titton sent for me to come to her, one 
 morning rather early. I found her in her boudoir, in 
 a neglige morning-dress, and looking adorably beauti- 
 ful, and as pure as beautiful, you smiling villain ! She 
 seemed to have something on her mind about which she 
 was a little embarrassed, but I knew her too well to lay 
 any unction to my soul. We chatted about the weather 
 a few moments, and she came to the point. You will 
 see that she was a woman of some talent, won ami ! 
 
 " ' Have you looked at my husband's portrait since 
 you finished it ?' she asked. 
 
 "'No, indeed!' I replied rather hastily — but im 
 mediately apologized. 
 
 " ' Oh, if I had not been certain you would not,' 
 she said with a smile, ' I should have requested it, for 
 I wished you to forget it, as far as possible. And now 
 let me tell you what I want of you! You have got, 
 on canvass, a likeness of Fortescue as the world sees 
 him. Since taking it, however, you have seen him 
 more intimately, and — and — like his face better, do 
 you not ?' 
 
 "'Certainly! certainly!' I exclaimed, in all sincerity. 
 
 " ' Thank you ! If I mistake not, then, you do not, 
 when thinking of him, call up to your mind the 
 features in your portrait, but a face formed rather of 
 his good qualities, as you have learned to trace t^iem 
 in his expression.' 
 
 " ' True,' I said, ' very true !' 
 
 " ' Now, then,' she continued, leaning over to me 
 very earnestly, ' I want you to paint a new picture, 
 and without departing from the real likeness, which 
 you will have to guide you, breathe into it the expres- 
 sion you have in your ideal likeness. Add, to what 
 the world sees, what I see, what you see, what all who 
 love him see, in his plain features. Idealize it, 
 spiritualize it — and without lessening the resemblance. 
 Can this be done?' 
 
 " 1 thought it could. I promised to do my utmost. 
 
 " ' I shall call and see you as you progress in it,' 
 she said, ' and now, if you have nothing better to do, 
 stay to lunch, and come out with me in the carriage. 
 I want a little of your foreign taste in the selection of 
 some pretty nothings for a gentleman's toilet.' 
 
 " We passed the morning in making what I should 
 consider very extravagent purchases for anybody but 
 a prince royal, winding up with some delicious cabinet 
 pictures and some gems of statuary — all suited only, 
 I should say, to the apartments of a fastidious luxuriast. 
 I was not yet at the bottom of her secret. 
 
 "I went to work upon the new picture with the 
 zeal always given to an artist by an appreciative and 
 confiding employer. She called every day and made 
 important suggestions, and at last 1 finished it to her 
 satisfaction and mine ; and, without speaking of it as 
 a work of art, I may give you my opinion that Titton 
 will scarcely be more embellished in the other world 
 —that is, if it be true, as the divines tell us, that our 
 mortal likeness will be so far preseived, though im- 
 proved upon, that we shall be recognisable by our 
 friends. Still I was to paiut a third picture — a cabinet 
 
•274 
 
 " BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. 
 
 full length — and for this the other two were but studies, 
 and so intended by Mrs. Fortescue Titton. It was 
 to be an improvement upon Lord George's portrait 
 (which of course had given her the idea), and was to 
 represent her husband in a very costly, and an exceed- 
 ingly recherche morning costume — dressing-gown, 
 slippers, waistcoat, and neckcloth, worn with perfect 
 elegance, and representing a Titton with a faultless 
 attitude (in a fauteuil, reading), a faultless exterior, 
 and around him the most sumptuous appliances of 
 dressing-room luxury. This picture cost me a great 
 deal of vexation and labor, for it was emphatically a 
 fancy picture — poor Titton never having appeared in 
 that character, even ' by particular desire.' I finished 
 it however, and again, to her satisfaction. I afterward 
 added some finishing touches to the other two, and 
 sent them home, appropriately framed according to 
 very minute instructions." 
 
 '•'■ How long ago was this ?" I asked. 
 
 " Three years," replied S , musing over his wine. 
 
 " Well — the sequel ?" said I, a little impatient. 
 
 " I was thinking how I should let it break upon you, 
 as it took effect upon her acquaintances — for, under- 
 stand, Mrs. Titton is too much of a diplomatist to do 
 anything obviously dramatic in this age of ridicule. 
 She knows very well that any sudden 'flare-up' of her 
 husband's consequence — any new light on his charac- 
 ter obviously calling for attention — would awaken 
 speculation and set to work the watchful anatomizers 
 of the body fashionable. Let me see! J will tell you 
 what I should have known about it, had I been only 
 an ordinary acquaintance — not in the secret, and not 
 the painter of the pictures. 
 
 " Some six months after the finishing of the last 
 portrait, I was at a large ball at their house. Mrs. 
 Titton's beauty, I should have told you, and the style 
 in which they lived, and very possibly a little of Lord 
 George's good will, had elevated them from the wealthy 
 and respectable level of society to the fashionable and 
 exclusive. All the best people went there. As I was 
 going in, I overtook, at the head of the stairs, a very 
 clever little widow, an acquaintance of mine, and she 
 honored me by taking my arm and keeping it for a 
 promenade through the rooms. We made our bow 
 to Mrs. Titton and strolled across the reception room, 
 where the most conspicuous object, dead facing us, 
 with a flood of light upon it, was my first veracious 
 portrait of Titton ! As I was not known as the artist, 
 I indulged myself in some commonplace exclamations 
 of horror. 
 
 " ' Do not look at that,' said the widow, 'you will 
 distress poor Mrs. Titton. What a quiz that clever 
 husband of hers must be to insist on exposing such a 
 caricatuie!' 
 
 " ' How insist upon it ?' I asked. 
 
 m i Why, have you never seen the one in her boudoir? 
 Come with me !' 
 
 " We made our way through the apartments to the 
 little retreat lined with silk, which the morning lounge 
 of the fair mistress of the house. There was but one 
 picture, with a curtain drawn carefully across it — my 
 second portrait ! We sat down on the luxurious 
 cushions, and the widow went off into a discussion of 
 it and the original, pronouncing it a perfect likeness, 
 not at all flattered, and very soon begging me to re- 
 draw the curtain, lest we should be surprised by Mr. 
 Titton himself. 
 
 " ' And suppose we were?' said I. 
 
 " ' Why, he is such an oddity !' replied the widow 
 lowering her tone. ' They say that in this very house 
 he has a suite of apartments entirely to himself, furnish- 
 ed with a taste and luxury really wonderful ! There 
 are two Mr. Tittons, my dear friend ! — one a perfect 
 Sybarite, very elegant in his dress when he chooses 
 to be, excessively accomplished and fastidious, and 
 brilliant and fascinating to a degree ! — (and in this I 
 
 character they say he won that superb creature for a 
 wife), and the other Mr. Titton is just the slovenly 
 monster that everybody sees ! Isn't it odd !' 
 
 " ' Queer enough !' said I, affecting great astonish- 
 ment ; * pray, have you ever been into these mysterious 
 apartments V 
 
 " ' No ! — they say only his wife and himself and one 
 confidential servant ever pass the threshold. Mrs. 
 Titton don't like to talk about it — though one would 
 think she could scarcely object to her husband's being 
 thought better of. It's pride on his part — sheer pride 
 — and I can understand the feeling very well ! He's 
 a very superior man, and he has made up his mind 
 that the world thinks him very awkward and 
 ugly, and he takes a pleasure in showing the world 
 that he don't care a rush for its opinion, and has re- 
 sources quite sufficient within himself. That's the 
 reason that atrocious portrait is hung up in the best 
 room, and this good-looking one covered up with a 
 curtain ! I suppose this wouldn't be here if he could 
 have his own way, and if his wife wasn't so much in 
 love with him !' 
 
 " This, 1 assure you," said S , " is the im- 
 pression throughout their circle of acquaintances. 
 The Tittons themselves maintain a complete silence 
 on the subject. Mr. Fortescue Titton is considered 
 a very accomplished man, with a very proud and very 
 secret contempt for the opinions of the world — dressing 
 badly on purpose, silent and simple by design, and only 
 caring to show himself in his real character to his 
 beautiful wife, who is thought to be completely in love 
 with him, and quite excusable for it ! What do you 
 think of the woman's diplomatic talents?" 
 
 " I think I should like to know her," said I; " but 
 what says Lord George to all this ?" 
 
 " I had a call from Lord George not long ago," 
 
 replied S , " and for the first time since our 
 
 chat at Somerset-House, the conversation turned upon 
 the Tittons. 
 
 '"Devilish sly of you !' said his lordship, turning 
 to me half angry, ' why did you pretend not to know 
 the woman at Somerset-House ? You might have 
 saved me lots of trouble and money, for I was a month 
 or two finding out what sort of people they were — 
 feeing the servants and getting them called on and 
 invited here and there — all with the idea that it was 
 a rich donkey with a fine toy that didn't belong to him !" 
 
 " ' Well !' exclaimed I — 
 
 " ' Well! — not at all well ! I made a great ninny 
 of myself, with that satirical slyboots, old Titton, 
 laughing at me all the time, when you, that had 
 painted him in his proper character and knew what a 
 deep devil he was, might have saved me with but half 
 a hint !' 
 
 " 'You have been in the lady's boudoir then !' 
 
 " ' Yes, and in the gentleman's sanctum sanctorum ! 
 Mrs. Titton sent for me about some trumpery thing 
 or other, and when I called, the servant showed me in 
 there by mistake. There was a great row in the house 
 about it, but I was there long enough to see what a 
 monstrous nice time the fellow has of it, all to him- 
 self, and to see your picture of him in his private 
 character. The picture you made of me was only a 
 copy of that, you sly traitor ! And I suppose Mrs. 
 Titton didn't like your stealing from hers, did she — 
 for, I take it that was what ailed her at the exhibition, 
 when you allowed me to be so humbugged !' 
 
 " I had a good laugh, but it was as much at the 
 quiet success of Mrs. Titton's tactics as at Lord 
 George's discomfiture. Of course, I could not un- 
 deceive him. And now," continued S , very 
 
 good-naturedly, "just ring for a pen and ink, and I'll 
 write a note to Mrs. Tittop, asking leave to bring you 
 there this evening, for it's her 'night at home,' and 
 she's worth seeing, if my pictures, which you will see 
 there, are not." 
 
BROWN'S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. 
 
 275 
 
 BROWN'S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. 
 
 Wk got down from an omnibus in Charing-Cross. 
 
 " Sovereign or ha'penny ?" said the cad, rubbing 
 the coin between his thumb and finger. 
 
 •'Sovereign, of course !" said B confidently, 
 
 pocketing the change which the man had ready for 
 the emergency in a bit of brown paper. 
 
 It was a muggy, misty, London twilight. I was 
 coming up to town from Blackheath, and in the 
 crowded vehicle had chanced to encounter my com- 
 patriot B (call it Brown), who had been lion- 
 izing the Thames tunnel. In the course of conver- 
 sation, it came out that we were both on the town for 
 our dinner, and as we were both guests at the Trav- 
 eller's Club, we had pulled the omnibus-string at the 
 nearest point, and, after the brief dialogue recorded 
 above, strolled together down Pall Mall. 
 
 As we sat waiting for our fish, one of us made a re- 
 mark as to the difference of feel between gold and 
 copper coin, and Brown, fishing in his pocket for 
 money to try the experiment, discovered that the 
 doubt of the cad was well founded, for he had uncon- 
 sciously passed a halfpenny for a sovereign. 
 
 " People are very apt to take your coin at your own 
 valuation ."' said Brown, with a smile of some mean- 
 ing, " and when they are in the dark as to your original 
 coinage (as the English are with regard to Americans 
 abroad), it is as easy to pass for gold as for copper. 
 Indeed, you may pass for both in a day, as I have 
 lately had experience. Remind me presently to tell 
 yon how. Here comes the fried sole, and it's trouble- 
 some talking when there are bones to fight shy of — 
 the 'flow of sole' to the contrary notwithstanding." 
 
 I will take advantage of the hiatus to give the reader 
 a slight idea of my friend, as a preparation for his 
 story. 
 
 Brown was the " mirror of courtesy." He was 
 also the mirror of vulgarity. And he was the mirror 
 of everything else. He had that facility of adapta- 
 tion to the society he was in, which made him seem 
 born for that society, and that only ; and, without cal- 
 culation or forethought — by an unconscious instinct, 
 indeed — he cleverly reflected the man and manners 
 before him. The result was a popularity of a most 
 varied quality. Brown was a man of moderate for- 
 tune and no profession. He had travelled for some 
 years on the continent, and had encountered all classes 
 of Englishmen, from peers to green-grocers, and as 
 he had a visit to England in prospect, he seldom part- 
 ed from the most chance acquaintance without a vol- 
 unteer of letters of introduction, exchange of addres- 
 ses, and similar tokens of having "pricked through 
 his castle wall." When he did arrive in London, at 
 last, it was with a budget like the postman's on Val- 
 entine's day, and he had only to deliver one letter in 
 a 9core to be put on velvet in any street or square 
 within the bills of mortality. Sagacious enough to 
 know that the gradations of English society have the 
 facility of a cat's back (smooth enough from the head 
 downward), he began with a most noble duke, and at 
 the date of his introduction to the reader, was on the 
 dinner-list of most of the patricians of May Fair. 
 
 Presuming that you see your man, dear reader, let 
 us come at once to the removal of the cloth. 
 
 " As 1 was calling m y s elf to account, the other day, 
 over my breakfast," said Brown, filling his glass and 
 pushing the bottle, " it occurred to me that my round 
 
 of engagements required some little variation. There's 
 a ' toujours perdiix,' even among lords and ladies, par- 
 ticularly when you belong as much to their sphere, 
 and are as likely to become a part of it, as the fly re- 
 volving in aristocratic dust on the wheel of my lord's 
 carriage. I thought, perhaps, I had better see some 
 other sort of people. 
 
 " I had, under a presse papier on the table, about a 
 hundred litters of introduction — the condemned re- 
 mainder, after the selection, by advice, of four or five 
 only. I determined to cut this heap like a pack of 
 cards, and follow up the trump. 
 
 " ' John Mimpson, Esq., House of Mimpson and 
 Pkipps, Mark's Lane, London.' 
 
 " The gods had devoted me to the acquaintance of 
 Mr. (and probably Mrs.) John Mimpson. After turn- 
 ing over a deal of rubbish in my mind, I remembered 
 that the letter had been given me five years before by 
 an American merchant — probably the correspondent 
 of the firm in Mark's Lane. It was a sealed letter, 
 and said in brackets on the back, ' Introducing Mr. 
 Brown.'' I had a mind to give it up and cut again, 
 for I could not guess on what footing I was intro- 
 duced, nor did I know what had become of the wri- 
 ter — nor had I a very clear idea how long a letter of 
 recommendation will hold its virtue. It struck me 
 again that these difficulties rather gave it a zest, and 
 I would abide by the oracle. 1 dressed, and, as the 
 day was fine, started to stroll leisurely through the 
 Strand and Fleet street, and look into the shop-win- 
 dows on my way — assuring myself, at least, thus 
 much of diversion in my adventure. 
 
 " Somewhere about two o'clock, I left daylight be- 
 hind, and plunged into Mark's Lane. Up one side 
 and down the other — ' Mimpson and Co.' at last, on a 
 small brass plate, set in a green baize door. With my 
 unbuttoned coat nearly wiped off my shoulder by the 
 strength of the pulley, I shoved through, and emerged 
 in a large room, with twenty or thirty clerks perched 
 on high stools, like monkeys in a menagerie. 
 
 " ' First door right!' said the nearest man, without 
 raising his eyes from the desk, in reply to my inquiry 
 for Mr. Mimpson. 
 
 " I entered a closet, lighted by a slanting skylight, 
 in which sat my man. 
 
 " ' Mr. John Mimpson ?' 
 
 " ' Mr. John Mimpson !' 
 
 " After this brief dialogue of accost, I produced my 
 letter, and had a second's leisure to examine my new 
 friend while he ran his eye over the contents. He 
 was a rosy, well-conditioned, tight-skinned little man, 
 with black hair, and looked like a pear on a chair. 
 (Hang the bothering rhymes !) His legs were com- 
 pletely hid under the desk, so that the ascending eyf 
 began with his equatory line, and whether he had no 
 shoulders or no neck, 1 could not well decide — but it 
 was a tolerably smooth plane from his seat to the top 
 curl of his sinciput. He was scrupulously well dress- 
 ed, and had that highly washed look which marks the 
 city man in London— bent on not betraying his 'dig- 
 gins' by his complexion. 
 
 "I answered Mr. Mimpson's inquiries about our 
 mutual friend with rather a hazardous particularity, 
 and assured him he was quite well (1 have since dis- 
 covered that he has been dead three years), and con- 
 versation warmed between us for ten minutes, till we 
 
'?G 
 
 BROWN'S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. 
 
 were ready to part sworn friends. I rose to go, and 
 the merchant seemed very much perplexed. 
 
 " ' To-morrow,' said he, rubbing the two great busi- 
 ness bumps over his eyebrows — 'no — yes — that is to 
 say, Mrs. Mimpson — well, it shall be to-morrow! 
 Can you come out to Rose Lodge, and spend the day 
 to-morrow?' 
 
 " ' With great pleasure,' said I, for I was determined 
 to follow my trump letter to extremities. 
 
 •• ' Mrs. Mimpson,' he next went on to say, as he 
 wrote down the geography of Rose Lodge — 'Mrs. 
 Mimpson expects some friends to-morrow — indeed, 
 some of her very choice friends. If you come early, 
 you will see more of her than if you just save your 
 dinner. Bring your carpetbag, of course, and stay 
 over night. Lunch at two — dine at seven. I can't 
 be there to receive you myself, but I will prepare Mrs. 
 Mimpson to save you all trouble of introduction. 
 Hampstead road. Good morning, my dear sir.' 
 
 " So, 1 am in for a suburban bucolic, thought I, as I 
 regained daylight in the neighborhood of the Mansion 
 House. 
 
 "It turned out a beautiful day, sunny and warm; 
 and had I been sure of my navigation, and sure of my 
 disposition to stay all night, I should have gone out 
 oy the Hampstead coach, and made the best of my 
 way, carpetbag in hand. I went into Newman's for a 
 postchaise, however, and on showing him the written 
 address, was agreeably surprised to find he knew 
 Rose Lodge. His boys had all been there. 
 
 "Away I went through the Regent's park, behind 
 the blood-posters, blue jacket and white hat, and, 
 eomewhere about one o'clock, mounted Hampstead 
 Hill, and in ten minutes thence was at my destination. 
 The postboy was about driving in at the open gate, 
 but I dismounted and sent him back to the inn to 
 leave his horses, and then depositing my bag at the 
 porter's lodge, walked up the avenue. It was a much 
 finer place, altogether, than I expected to see. 
 
 "Mrs. Mimpson was in the garden. The dashing 
 footman who gave me the information, led me through 
 a superb drawing-room and out at a glass door upon 
 the lawn, and left me to make my own way to the la- 
 dy's presence. 
 
 "It was a delicious spot, and I should have been 
 very glad to ramble about by myself till dinner, but, 
 at a turn in the grand-walk, I came suddenly upon 
 two ladies. 
 
 "I made my bow, and begged leave to introduce 
 myself as 'Mr. Brown.' 
 
 "With a very slight inclination of the head, and no 
 smile whatever, one of the ladies asked me if I had 
 walked from town, and begged her companion (with- 
 out introducing me to her) to show me in to lunch. 
 The spokester was a stout and tall woman, who had 
 rather an aristocratic nose, and was not handsome, 
 but, to give her her due, she had made a narrow 
 escape of it. She was dressed very showily, and evi- 
 dently had great pretensions ; but, that she was not 
 at all glad to see Mr. Brown, was as apparent as was 
 at all necessary. As the other, and younger lady, 
 who was to accompany me, however, was very pretty, 
 though dressed very plainly, and had, withal, a look 
 in her eye which assured me she was amused with my 
 unwelcome apparition, I determined, as I should not 
 otherwise have done, to stay it out, and accepted 
 her convoy with submissive civility — very much in- 
 clined, however, to be impudent to somebody, some- 
 how. 
 
 "The lunch was on a tray in a side-room, and I 
 rang the bell and ordered a bottle of champagne. The 
 servant looked surprised, but brought it, and mean- 
 time I was getting through the weather and the other 
 commonplaces, and the lady saying little, was watch- 
 ing me very calmly. I liked her looks, however, and 
 was sure she was not a Mimpson. 
 
 " ' Hand this to Miss Armstrong !' said I to the foot- 
 man, pouring out a glass of champagne. 
 
 "'Miss Bellamy, you mean, sir.' 
 
 "I rose and bowed, and, with as grave a courtesy 
 as I could command, expressed my pleasure at my 
 first introduction to Miss Bellamy — through Thomas, 
 the footman ! Miss Bellamy burst into a laugh, and 
 was pleased to compliment my American manners, 
 and in ten minutes we were a very merry pair of 
 friends, and she accepted my arm for a stroll through 
 the grounds, carefully avoiding the frigid neighbor- 
 hood of Mrs. Mimpson. 
 
 "Of course I set about picking Miss Bellamy's 
 brains for what information I wanted. She turned 
 out quite the nicest creature I had seen in England — 
 fresh, joyous, natural, and clever ; and as I was deliv- 
 ered over to her bodily, by her keeper and feeder, she 
 made no scruple of promenading me through the 
 grounds till the dressing-bell — four of the most agree- 
 able hours I have to record in my travels. 
 
 "By Miss Bellamy's account, my advent that day 
 was looked upon by Mrs. Mimpson as an enraging 
 calamity. Mrs. Mimpson was, herself, fourth cousin 
 to a Scotch lord, and the plague of her life was the 
 drawback to the gentility of her parties in Mimpson's 
 mercantile acquaintance. She had married the little 
 man for his money, and had thought, by living 
 out of town, to choose her own society, with her hus- 
 band for her only incumbrance; but Mimpson vowed 
 that he should be ruined in Mark's Lane, if he did 
 not house and dine his mercantile fraternity and their 
 envoys at Rose Lodge, and they had at last compro- 
 mised the matter. No Yankee clerk, or German 
 agent, or person of any description, defiled by trade, 
 was to be invited to the Lodge without a three days' 
 premonition to Mrs. Mimpson, and no additions were 
 to be made, whatever, by Mr. M., to Mrs. M's din- 
 ners, soirees, matinees, archery parties, suppers, de- 
 jeuners, tableaux, or private theatricals. This holy 
 treaty, Mrs. Mimpson presumed, was written 'with a 
 gad of steel on a leaf of brass' — inviolable as her cous- 
 in's coat-of-arms. 
 
 "But there was still ' Ossa on Pelion.' The din- 
 ner of that day had a diplomatic aim. Miss Mimp- 
 son (whom I had not yet seen) was ready to ' come 
 out,' and her mother had embarked her whole soul in 
 the enterprise of bringing about that debut at Al- 
 
 mack's. Her best card was a certain Lady S , 
 
 who chanced to be passing a few days in the neigh- 
 borhood, and this dinner was in her honor — the com- 
 pany chosen to impress her with the exclusiveness of 
 the Mimpsons, and the prayer for her ladyship's in- 
 fluence (to procure vouchers from one of the patron- 
 esses) was to be made, when she was ' dieted to their 
 request.' And all had hitherto worked to a charm. 
 
 Lady S had accepted — Ude had sent his best 
 
 cook from Crockford's — the Belgian charge, and a 
 Swedish attache were, coming — the day was beautiful, 
 and the Lodge was sitting for its picture ; and on the 
 very morning, when every chair at the table was ticketed 
 and devoted, what should Mr. Mimpson do, but send 
 back a special messenger from the city, to say that he 
 had forgotten to mention to Mrs. M. at breakfast, that he 
 had invited Mr. Brown! Of course he had for got- 
 ten it, though it would have been as much as his 
 eyes were worth to mention it in person to Mrs. 
 Mimpson. 
 
 "To this information, which 1 give you in a lump, 
 but which came to light in the course of rather a de- 
 sultory conversation, Miss Bellamy thought I had 
 some title, from the rudeness of my reception. It 
 was given in the shape of a very clever banter, it is 
 true, but she was evidently interested to set me right 
 with regard to Mr. Mimpson's good intentions in my 
 behalf, and, as far as that and her own civilities would 
 do it, to apologise for the inhospitality of Rose Lodge. 
 
BROWN'S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS. 
 
 277 
 
 Very kind of the girl— for I was passing, recollect, 
 at a most ha'penny valuation. 
 
 "I had made some casual remark touching the ab- 
 surdity of Almack's aspirations in general, and Mrs. 
 Mimpson's in particular, and my fair friend, who of 
 course fancied an Almack's ticket as much out of Mr. 
 Brown's reach as the horn of the new moon, took up 
 the defence of Mrs. Mimpson on that point, and un- 
 dertook to dazzle my untutored imagination by a pic- j 
 ture of this seventh heaven — as she had heard it de- 
 scribed — for to herself, she freely confessed, it was not 
 even within the limits of dream-land. I knew this 
 was true of herself, and thousands of highly-educated 
 and charming girls in England; but still, looking at 
 her while she spoke, and seeing what an ornament she 
 would be to any ballroom in the world, I realized, 
 with more repugnance than I had ever felt before, the 
 arbitrary barriers of fashion and aristocracy. As ac- j 
 cident had placed me in a position to 'look on the re- 
 verse of the shield,' I determined, if possible, to let j 
 Miss Bellamy judge of its color with the same ad- I 
 vantage. It is not often that a plebeian like myself 
 has the authority to 
 
 "' Bid the pebbles 
 Fillip the stars.' 
 
 the hungry beach 
 
 " We were near the open window of the library, 
 
 and I stepped in and wrote a note to Lady 
 
 (one of the lady patronesses, and the kindest friend I \ 
 have in England), asking for three vouchers for the 
 next ball. I had had occasion once or twice before to 
 apply for similar favors, for the countrywomen of my 
 own, passing through London on their travels, and I 
 knew that her ladyship thought no more of granting 
 them than of returning bows in Hyde Park. I did 
 not name the ladies for whom the three tickets were j 
 intended, wishing to reserve the privilege of handing 
 one to Miss Mimpson, should she turn out civil and 
 presentable. The third, of course, was to Miss Bel- 
 lamy's chaperon, whoever that might be, and the 
 party might be extended to a quartette by the 'Mon- 
 sieur De Trop' of the hour — cela selon. Quite a dra- 
 matic plot — wasn't it? 
 
 " I knew that Lady was not very well, and 
 
 would be found at home by the messenger (my post- 
 boy), and there was time enough between soup and 
 coffee to go to London and back, even without the 
 spur in his pocket. 
 
 "The bell rang, and Miss Bellamy took herself off 
 to dress. I went to my carpetbag in the bachelor 
 quarters of the house, and through a discreet entretien 
 with the maid who brought me hot water, became 
 somewhat informed as to my fair friend's position in 
 the family. She was the daughter of a gentleman who 
 had seen better days. They lived in a retired cottage 
 in the neighborhood; and, as Miss Bellamy and a 
 younger sister were both very highly accomplished, 
 they were usually asked to the Lodge, whenever there 
 was company to be entertained with their music. 
 
 " I was early in the drawing-room, and found there 
 Mrs. Mimpson and a tall dragoon of a young lady I 
 presumed to be her daughter. She did not introduce 
 me. I had hardly achieved my salutary salaam when 
 Miss Bellamy came in opportunely, and took me off 
 their hands, and as they addressed no conversation to 
 us, we turned over music, and chatted in the corner 
 while the people came in. It was twilight in the re- 
 ception-room, and 1 hoped, by getting on the same 
 
 side of the table with Lady S (whom I had 
 
 the honor of knowing), to escape recognizance till 
 we joined the ladies in the drawing-room after dinner. 
 As the guests arrived, they were formally introduced 
 to Miss Mimpson by the mother, and everybody but 
 
 myself was formally presented to Lady S , the 
 
 exception not noticeable, of course, among thirty 
 people. Mr. Mimpson came late from the city, pos- 
 
 sibly anxious to avoid a skirmish on the subject of his 
 friend Brown, and he entered the room barely in time 
 to hand Lady S in to dinner. 
 
 " My tactics were ably seconded by my unconscious 
 ally. I placed myself in such a position at table, 
 that, by a little management, I kept Miss Bellamy's 
 
 head between me and Lady S , and my name 
 
 was not so remarkable as to draw attention to me 
 when called on to take wine with the peccant spouse 
 of the Scotch lord's cousin. Meantime I was very 
 charmingly entertained — Miss Bellamy not having, at 
 all, the fear of Mrs. Mimpson before her eyes, and 
 apparently finding the Yankee supercargo, or cotton 
 clerk, or whatever he might be, quite worth trying her 
 hand upon. The provender was good, and the wine 
 was enough to verify the apocrypha — at least for the 
 night — ' a man remembering neither sorrow nor debt' 
 with such glorious claret. 
 
 " As I was vis-a-vis to Miss Mimpson, and only two 
 plates removed from her mother, I was within reach 
 of some syllable or some civility, and one would have 
 thought that good-breeding might exact some slight 
 notice for the devil himself, under one's own roof by 
 invitation ; but the large eyes of Miss Aurelia and her 
 mamma passed over me as if I had on the invisible 
 ring of Gyges. I wonder, by-the-way, whether the 
 ambitious youths who go to London and Paris with 
 samples, and come back and sport 'the complete var- 
 nish of a man' acquired in foreign society — I wonder 
 whether they take these rubs to be part of their pol- 
 ishing ! 
 
 " The ladies rose and left us, and as I had no more 
 occasion to dodge heads, or trouble myself with hu- 
 mility, I took Lady S 's place at old Mimpson's 
 
 right hand, and was immediately recognised with great 
 empressement by the Belgian charge, who had met me 
 'very often, in very agreeable society.' Mimpson 
 stared, and evidently took it for a bit of flummery or 
 a mistake ; but he presently stared again, for the but- 
 ler came in with a coronetted note on his silver tray, 
 and the seal side up, and presented it to me with a 
 most deferential bend of his white coat. I felt the 
 vouchers within, and pocketed it without opening, and 
 we soon after rose and went to the drawing-room for 
 our coffee. 
 
 " Lady S sat with her back to the door, be- 
 sieged by Mrs. Mimpson ; and at the piano, beside 
 Miss Bellamy, who was preparing to play, stood one 
 of the loveliest young creatures possibly to fancy. A 
 pale and high-bred looking lady in widow's weeds sat 
 near them, and I had no difficulty in making out who 
 were the after-dinner additions to the party. I joined 
 them, and was immediately introduced by Miss Bel- 
 lamy to her mother and sister, with whom (after a 
 brilliant duet by the sisters) I strolled out upon the 
 lawn for an hour — for it was a clear night, and the 
 moon and soft air almost took me back to Italy. And 
 (perhaps by a hint from Miss Bellamy) I was allowed 
 to get on very expeditiously in my acquaintance with 
 her mother and sister. 
 
 " My new friends returned to the drawing-room, 
 and as the adjoining library was lighted, I went in and 
 filled up the blank vouchers with the names of Mrs. 
 Bellamy and her daughters. I listened a moment to 
 the conversation in the next room. The subject was 
 Almack's, and was discussed with great animation. 
 
 Lady S , who seemed to me trying to escape 
 
 the trap they had baited for her, was quietly setting 
 forth the difficulties of procuring vouchers, and rec- 
 ommending to Mrs. Mimpson not to subject herself 
 to the mortification of a refusal. Old Mimpson 
 backed up this advice with a stout approval, and this 
 brought Mrs. Mimpson out ' horse and foot,' and she 
 declared that she would submit to anything, do any- 
 thing, give anything, rather than fail in this darling 
 object of her ambition. She would feel under eternal, 
 
27S 
 
 MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT. 
 
 inexpressible obligations to any friend who would pro- 
 cure, for herself and daughter, admission for but one 
 night to Almack'a. 
 
 " And then came in the sweet voice of Miss Bel- 
 lamy, who ' knew it was both wrong and silly, but she 
 would give ten years of her life to go to one of Al- 
 mack's balls, and in a long conversation she had had 
 with Mr. Brown on the subject that morning ' 
 
 " ' Ah !' interrupted Lady S , ' if it had been 
 
 the Mr. Brown, you would have had very little trouble 
 about it.' 
 
 " ' And who is the Mr. Brown?' asked Mis. Mimpson. 
 
 '"The pet and protege of the only lady patroness 
 
 I do not visit,' said Lady S , ' and unluckily. 
 
 too, the only one who thinks the vouchers great rub- 
 bish, and gives them away without thought or scruple.' 
 
 " At that moment I entered the room. 
 
 "'Good heavens." screamed Lady S , 'is 
 
 that his ghost? Why, Mr. Brown !' she gasped, giv- 
 ing me her hand very cautiously, ' do you appear 
 when you are talked of like — like — like ' 
 
 "'Like the devil? No! But I am here in the 
 body, and very much at your ladyship's service,' said 
 I, ' for of course you are going to the duke's to-night, 
 and so am I. Will you take me with you, or shall 
 my po-chay follow where I belong — in your train ?" 
 
 " • I'll take you, of course,' said her ladyship, rising, 
 • but first about these vouchers. You have just come, 
 and didn't hear our discussion. Mrs. Mimpson is ex- 
 tremely anxious that her daughter should come out 
 at Almack's, and as I happened to say, the moment 
 before you entered, that you were the very person to 
 
 procure the tickets from Lady . How very 
 
 odd that you should come in just then ! But tell 
 us — can you?' 
 
 " A dead silence followed the question. Mrs. 
 Mimpson sat with her eyes on the floor, the picture 
 of dismay and mortification. Miss Mimpson blushed 
 and twisted her handkerchief, and Miss Bellamy 
 looked at her hostess, half amused and half dis- 
 tressed. 
 
 "I handed the three vouchers to Miss Bellamy, 
 and begged her acceptance of them, and then turning 
 to Lady S , without waiting for a reply, regret- 
 ted that, not having had the pleasure of being pre- 
 sented to Mrs. Mimpson, I had not felt authorized to 
 include her in my effort to oblige Miss Bellamy. 
 
 "And what with old Mimpson's astonishment, and 
 
 Lady S 's immediate tact in covering, by the 
 
 bustle of departure, what she did not quite under- 
 stand, though she knew it was some awkward contre 
 temps or other, I found time to receive Miss Bella- 
 my's thanks, and get permission from the mother to 
 call and arrange this unexpected party, and in ten 
 minutes I was on my way to London with Lady 
 S , amusing her almost into fits with my expla- 
 nations of the Mimpson mystery. 
 
 " Lady S was to be still at Hampstead for a 
 
 few days, and, at my request, she called with me on 
 the Bellamys, and invited the girls up to town. Rose 
 Bellamy, the younger, is at this moment one of the 
 new stars of the season accordingly, and Miss Bel- 
 lamy and I carry on the war, weekly, at Almack's, 
 and nightly at some waxlight paradise or other, and 
 
 Lady S has fallen in love with them both, and 
 
 treats them like daughters. 
 
 "So you sec, though I passed for a ha'penny with 
 the Mimpsons, I turned out a sovereign to the Bel- 
 lamys. 
 
 " Pass the bottle !" 
 
 MR, AND MRS. FOLLETT; 
 
 OR, THE DANGERS OF MEDDLING WITH MARRIED PEOPLE. 
 
 There are two commodities, much used by gentle- 
 men, neither of which will bear tinkering or tampering 
 with — matrimony and patent leather. Their necessi- 
 ties are fair weather and untroubled wear and tear. 
 Ponder on the following melancholy example ! 
 
 My friend Follett married a lady contrary to my 
 advice. I gave the advice contrary to my wont and 
 against my will. He would have it. The lady was a 
 tolerably pretty woman, on whose original destiny it 
 was never written that she should be a belle. How 
 she became one is not much matter; but nature being 
 thoroughly taken by surprise with her success, had 
 neglected to provide the counterpoise. I say it is no 
 great matter how she became a belle — nor is it — for if 
 such things were to be accounted for to the satisfaction 
 of the sex, the world have little time for other specu- 
 lations ; but I will devote a single paragraph to the 
 elucidation of this one of many mysteries, for a reason 
 I have. Fcenam habet in cornu. 
 
 Poets are the least fastidious, and the least discrim- 
 -inating of men, in their admiration of women (vide 
 Byron), partly because their imagination, like sun- 
 shine, glorifies all that turns to it, and partly because 
 the voluptuous heart, without which they were not 
 poets, is both indolent and imperial, from both causes 
 waiting always to be sought. In some circles, bards 
 are rather comets than stars, and the one whose orbit 
 for a few days intersected that of Miss Adele Burnham, 
 vis the exclusive marvel of the hour. Like other po- 
 
 ets, the one of which I speak was concentrative in his 
 attentions, and he chose (why, the gods knew better 
 than the belles of the season) to have neither eyes nor 
 ears, flowers, flatteries, nor verses, for any other than 
 Miss Burnham. He went on his way, but the incense, 
 in which he had enveloped the blest Adele, lingered 
 like a magic atmosphere about her, and Tom Follett 
 and all his tribe breathed it in blind adoration. I trust 
 the fair reader has here nodded her head, in evidence 
 that this history of the belleship of Miss Burnham is 
 no less brief than natural and satisfactory. 
 
 When Follett came to me with the astounding in- 
 formation that he intended to propose to Miss Burn- 
 ham (he had already proposed and been accepted, the 
 traitor) ! my fancy at once took the prophetic stride so 
 natural on the first breaking of such news, and in the 
 five minutes which I took for reflection, I had travelled 
 far into that land of few delusions — holy matrimony. 
 Before me, in all the changeful variety of a magic 
 mirror, came and went the many phases of which that 
 multiform creature, woman, is susceptible. I saw her 
 in diamonds and satin, and in kitchen-apron and curl- 
 papers; in delight, and in the dumps; in supplication, 
 and in resistance ; shod like a fairy in French shoes, 
 and slip-shod (as perhaps fairies are, too, in their bed- 
 rooms and dairies). I saw her approaching the cli- 
 macteric of age, and receding from it — a mother, a 
 nurse, an invalid — mum over her breakfast, chatty over 
 her tea—doing the honors at Tom's table, and mend- 
 
MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT. 
 
 279 
 
 ing with sober diligence Tom's straps and suspenders. 
 The kaleidoscope of fancy exhausted its combinations. 
 
 "Tom!" said I (looking up affectionately, for he 
 was one of my weaknesses, was Tom, and I indulged 
 myself in loving him without a reason), "Miss Burn- 
 ham is in the best light where she is. If she cease 
 to be a belle, as of course she will, should she mar- 
 ry " 
 
 "Of course !" interrupted Tom very gravely. 
 
 "Well, in that case, she lays off the goddess, trust 
 me ! You will like her to dress plainly — — " 
 
 "Quite plain !" 
 
 "And stripped of her plumage, your bird of paradise II 
 would be nothing but a very indifferent hen — with the 
 disadvantage of remembering that she had been a bird 
 of paradise." 
 
 "But it was not her dress that attracted the brilliant 
 author of " 
 
 Possibly not. But as the false gods of mythology 
 are only known by their insignia, Jupiter by his thun- 
 derbolt, and Mercury by his talaria and caduceus, so 
 a woman, worshipped by accident, will find a change 
 of exterior nothing less than a laying aside of her di- 
 vinity. That's a didactic sentence, but you will know 
 what I mean, when I tell you that I myself can not see 
 a pair of coral ear-rings without a sickness of the j 
 heart, though the woman who once wore them, and 
 who slighted me twenty years ago, sits before me in ; 
 church, without diverting a thought from the sermon. 
 Don't marry her, Tom !" 
 
 Six weeks after this conversation, I was at the wed- 
 ding, and the reader will please pass to the rear the 
 six succeeding months — short time as it seems — to 
 record a change in the bland sky of matrimony. It was 
 an ellipse in our friendship as well ; for advice (con- 
 trary to our wishes and intentions) is apt to be resent- 
 ed, and I fancied, from the northerly bows I received 
 from Mrs. Follett, that my friend had made a merit to 
 her of having married contrary to my counsel. At the j 
 end of this period Tom called on me. 
 
 Follett, I should have said, was a man of that unde- | 
 cided exterior which is perfectly at the mercy of a cra- 
 vat or waistcoat. He looked "snob" or "nob," ac- | 
 cording to the care with which he had made his toilet, j 
 While a bachelor, of course, he could never afford in 
 public a negligence or a mistake, and was invariably 
 an elegant man, harmonious and " pin-point" from 
 straps to whiskers. But alas! the security of wedded 
 life ! When Tom entered my room, I perused him 
 as a walking homily. His coat, still made on the old 
 measure, was buttoned only at the top, the waist being 
 rather snug, and his waistcoat pockets loaded with the 
 copper which in his gayer days he always left on the 
 counter. His satin cravat was frayed and brownish, 
 with the tie slipped almost under his ear. The heel 
 of his right boot (he trod straight on the other foot) 
 almost looked him in the face. His pantaloons (the 
 one article of dress in which there are no gradations — 
 nothing, if not perfect) were bulged and strained. He 
 wore a frightfully new hat, no gloves, and carried a 
 baggy brown umbrella, which was, in itself, a most ex- 
 pressive portrait of "gone to seed." Tom entered 
 with his usual uppish carriage, and. through the how- 
 d'ye-dos, and the getting into his chair, carried off the 
 old manner to a charm. In talking of the weather, a 
 moment after, his eye fell on his stumpy umbrella, 
 which, with an unconscious memory of an old affecta- 
 tion with his cane, he was balancing on the toe of his 
 boot, and the married look slid over him like a mist. 
 Down went his head between his shoulders, and down 
 went the corners of his mouth — down the inflation of 
 his chest like a collapsed balloon ; and down, in its 
 youth and expression it seemed to me, every muscle 
 of his face. He had assumed in a minute the style 
 and countenance of a man ten years older. 
 I smiled. How could I but smile ! 
 
 " Then you have heard of it !" exclaimed Tom, 
 suddenly starting to his feet, and flushing purple to the 
 roots of his hair. 
 
 "Heard of what ?" 
 
 My look of surprise evidently took him aback ; and, 
 seating himself again with confused apologies, Tom 
 proceeded to " make a clean breast," on a subject 
 which I had not anticipated. 
 
 It seemed that, far from moulting her feathers after 
 marriage, according to my prediction, Mrs. Follett 
 clearly thought that she had not yet "strutted her 
 hour," and, though everything Tom could wish behind 
 the curtain, in society she had flaunted and flirted, not 
 merely with no diminution of zest from the wedding- 
 day, but, her husband was of opinion, with a ratio 
 alarmingly increasing. Her present alliance was with 
 a certaiu Count Hautenbas, the lion of the moment, 
 and though doubtless one in which vanity alone was 
 active, Tom's sense of connubial propriety was at its 
 last gasp. He could stand it no longer. He wished 
 my advice in the choice between two courses. Should 
 he call out the Frenchman, or should he take advan- 
 tage of the law's construction of " moral insanity," and 
 shut her up in a mad-house. 
 
 My advice had been of so little avail in the first in- 
 stance, that I shrank from troubling Tom with any 
 more of it, and certainly should have evaded it alto- 
 gether, but for an experiment I wished to make, as 
 much for my own satisfaction as for the benefit of that 
 large class, the unhappy married. 
 
 "Your wife is out every night, I suppose, Tom ?" 
 
 "Every night when she has no party at home." 
 
 "Do you go with her always ?" 
 
 " I go for her usually — but the truth is, that since 
 I married, parties bore me, and after seeing my wife off, 
 I commonly smoke and snooze, or read, or run into 
 Bob Thomas's and 'talk horse,' till I have just time to 
 be in at the death." 
 
 "And when you get there, you don't dance ?" 
 
 "Not I, faith ! I haven't danced since I was mar- 
 ried !" 
 
 "But you used to be the best waltzer of the day." 
 
 "Well, the music sometimes gets into my heels 
 now, but, when I remember I am married, the fit cools 
 off. The deuce take it ! a married man shouldn't be 
 seen whirling round the room with a girl in his arms !" 
 
 "I presume that were you still single, you would 
 fancy your chance to be as good for ladies' favors as 
 any French count's that ever came over ?" 
 
 "Ehem ! why — yes !" 
 
 Tom pulled up his collar. 
 
 "And if you had access to her society all day and 
 all night, and the Frenchman only an hour or two in 
 the evening, any given lady being the object, you would 
 bet freely on your own head ?" 
 
 " I see your drift," said Tom, with a melancholy 
 smile, " but it won't do !" 
 
 "No, indeed — it is what would have done. You had 
 at the start a much better chance with your wife than 
 Count Hautenbas ; but husbands and lovers are the 
 'hare and the tortoise' of the fable. We must resort 
 now to other means. Will you follow my advice, as 
 well as lake it, should I be willing again to burn my 
 fingers in your affairs ?" 
 
 The eagerness of Tom's protestations quite made 
 the amende to my mortified self-complacency, and I 
 entered zealousy into my little plot for his happiness. 
 At this moment I heartily wish I had sent him and his 
 affairs to the devil, and (lest I should forget it at the 
 close of this tale) I here caution all men, single and 
 double, against "meddling or making" marring or 
 mending, in matrimonial matters. The alliteration 
 may, perhaps, impress this salutary counsel on the 
 mind of the reader. 
 
 I passed the remainder of the day in repairing the 
 damage of Tom's person. I had his whiskers curled 
 
280 
 
 MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT. 
 
 and trimmed even (his left whisker was an inch nearer 
 his nose than the right), and his teeth looked to by the 
 dentist. I stood by, to be sure that there was no care- 
 lessness in his selection of patent leathers, and on his 
 assuring me that he was otherwise well provided, I 
 suffered him to go home to dress, engaging him to 
 dine with me at seven. 
 
 He was punctual to the hour. By Jove, I could 
 scarce believe it was the same man. The conscious- 
 ness of being well dressed seemed to have brightened 
 his eyes and lips, as it certainly changed altogether his 
 address and movements. He had a narrow escape of 
 being handsome. After all, it is only a " man of mark," 
 or an Apollo, who can well afford to neglect the outer 
 man ; and a judicious negligence, or a judicious plain- 
 ness, is probably worth the attention of both the man 
 of m;irk and the Apollo. Tom was quite another or- 
 der of creature — a butterfly that was just now a worm — 
 and would have been treated with more consideration 
 in consequence, even by those least tolerant of "the 
 pomps and vanities." We dined temperately, and I 
 superseded the bottle by a cup of strong green tea, at 
 an early moment after the removal of the cloth, deter- 
 mined to have Tom's wits in as full dress as his per- 
 son. Without being at all a brilliant man, he was — 
 the next best thing — a steady absorbent; and as most 
 women are more fond of giving than receiving in all 
 things, but particularly in conversation, I was not un- 
 easy as to his power of making himself agreeable. Nor 
 was he, faith ! 
 
 The ball of the night was at the house of an old 
 friend of my own, and Mr. and Mrs. Follett were but 
 newly introduced to the circle. I had the company 
 very clearly in my eye, therefore, while casting about 
 for dramatis persona, and fixing upon Mrs. Beverly 
 Fairhe, for the prominent character, I assured suc- 
 cess, though being very much in love with that co- 
 quettish widow myself, I had occasion for some self- 
 denial in the matter. Of Mrs. Fairlie's weak points 
 (on which it seemed necessary that I should enlighten 
 Tom), I had information not to be acquired short of 
 summering and wintering her, and with my eye solely 
 directed to its effect upon Mrs. Follett, I put the clues 
 into my friend's hands in a long after-dinner conversa- 
 tion. As he seemed impatient to open the campaign 
 after getting these definite and valuable instructions, I 
 augured well for his success, and we entered the ball- 
 room in high spirits. 
 
 It was quite enough to say to the mischievous widow 
 that another woman was to be piqued by any attentions 
 she might choose to pay Mr. Follett. Having said 
 thus much, and presented Tom, I sought out Mrs. 
 Follett myself, with the double purpose of breaking 
 up the monopoly of Mons. Hautenbas, and of direct- 
 ing her attention, should it be necessary, to the suavi- 
 ties between Tom and the widow. 
 
 It was a superb ball, and the music, as Tom said, 
 went to the heels. The thing he did well was waltz- 
 ing, and after taking a turn or two with Mrs. Fairlie, 
 the rustic dame ran up to Mrs. Follett with the most 
 innocent air imaginable, and begged the loan of her 
 husband for the rest of the evening ! I did not half 
 like the look of earnest with which she entered into 
 
 the affair, indeed, and there was little need of my 
 taking much trouble to enlighten Mrs. Follett; for a 
 woman so surprised with a six months' husband I never 
 saw. They were so capitally matched, Tom and the 
 widow, in size, motion, style of waltzing, and all, that 
 not we only, but the whole party, were occupied with 
 observing and admiring them. Mrs. Follett and I (for 
 a secret sympathy, somehow, drew us together, as the 
 thing went on) kept up a broken conversation, in which 
 the count was even less interested than we ; and after 
 a few ineffectual attempts to draw her into the tea- 
 room, the Frenchman left us in pique, and we gave 
 ourselves up to the observation of the couple who (we 
 presumed) severally belonged to us. They carried on 
 the war famously, to be sure ! Mrs. Fairlie was a 
 woman who could do as she liked, because she would; 
 and she cared not a straw for the very pronounce dem- 
 onstration of engrossing one man for all the quadrilles, 
 waltzes, and galopades, beside being with him to sup- 
 per. Once or twice I tried to find an excuse for leav- 
 ing Mrs. Follett, to put in an oar for myself; but the 
 little woman clung to me as if she had not the courage 
 to undertake another person's amusement, and, new 
 and sudden as the feeling must have been, she was 
 pale and wretched, with a jealousy more bitter proba- 
 bly than mine. Tom never gave me a look after the 
 first waltz ; and as to the widow, she played her part 
 with rather more zeal than we set down for her. 
 I passed altogether an uncomfortable night, for a 
 gay one, and it was a great relief to me when 
 Mrs. Follett asked me to send Tom for the car- 
 riage. 
 
 "Be so kind as to send a servant for it," said Fol- 
 lett, very coolly, "and say to Mrs. Follett, that I will 
 join her at home. I am going to sup, or rather break- 
 fast, with Mrs. Beverly Fairlie !" 
 
 Here was a mess ! 
 
 " Shall 1 send the count for your shawl ?" I asked, 
 after giving this message, and wishing to know whether 
 she was this side of pride in her unhappiness. 
 
 The little woman burst into tears. 
 
 "I will sit in the cloak-room till my husband is 
 ready," she said; "go to him, if you please, and im- 
 plore him to come and speak to me." 
 
 As I said before, I wished the whole plot to the 
 devil. We had achieved our object, it is true — and 
 so did the man who knocked the breath out of his 
 friend's body, in killing a fly on his back. Tom is 
 now (this was years ago) a married flirt of some celeb- 
 rity, for after coming out of the widow's hands with a 
 three months' education, he had quite forgot to be 
 troubled about Mrs. Follett ; and instead of neglect- 
 ing his dress, which was his only sin when I took him 
 in hand, he now neglects his wife, who sees him, as 
 women are apt to see their husbands, through other 
 women's eyes. I presume they are doomed to quite 
 as much unhappiness as would have fallen to their lot, 
 had I let them alone — had Mrs. Follett ran away with 
 the Frenchman, and had Tom died a divorced sloven. 
 But when I think that, beside achieving little for them, 
 I was the direct means of spoiling Mrs. Beverly Fair- 
 lie for myself, I think I may write myself down as a 
 warning to meddlers in matrimony. 
 
THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM. 
 
 281 
 
 THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM, 
 
 AND THE HANDSOME ARTIST. 
 
 That favored portion of the light of one summer's 
 morning that was destined to be the transparent bath 
 of the master-pieces on the walls of the Pitti, was 
 pouring in a languishing Hood through the massive 
 windows of the palace. The ghosts of the painters 
 (who, ministering to the eye only, walk the world from 
 cock-crowing to sunset) were haunting invisibly the 
 sumptuous rooms made famous by their pictures ; 
 and the pictures themselves, conscious of the presence 
 of the fountain of soul from which gushed the soul 
 that is in them, glowed with intoxicated mellowness 
 and splendor, and amazed the living students of the 
 gallery with effects of light and color till that moment 
 undiscovered. 
 
 [And now, dear reader, having paid you the com- 
 pliment of commencing my story in your vein (poetical), 
 let me come down to a little every-day brick-and-mor- 
 tar, and build up a fair aud square common-sense 
 foundation.] 
 
 Graeme McDonald was a young highlander from 
 Rob Roy's country, come to Florence to study the 
 old masters. He was an athletic, wholesome, hand- 
 some fellow, who had probably made a narrow escape 
 of being simply a fine animal ; and, as it was, you 
 never would have picked him from a crowd as any- 
 thing but a hussar out of uniform, or a brigand per- 
 verted to honest life. His peculiarity was (and this I 
 foresee is to be an ugly sentence), that he had pecu- 
 liarities which did not seem peculiar. He was full of 
 genius for his art, but the canvass which served him I 
 him as a vent, gave him no more anxiety than his 
 pocket-handkerchief. He painted in the palace, or 
 wiped his forehead on a warm day with equally small ; 
 care, to all appearance, and he had brought his mother 
 and two sisters to Italy, and supported them by a most I 
 heroic economy and industry — all the while looking as 
 if the " silver moon" and all the small change of the 
 stars would scarce serve liim for a day's pocket-money. 
 Indeed, the more 1 kuew of McDonald, the more I i 
 became convinced that there was another man built ! 
 over him. The painter was inside. And if he had | 
 free thoroughfare and use of the outer man's windows 
 and ivory door, he was at any rate barred from hang- 
 ing out the smallest sign or indication of being at any 
 time " within." Think as hard as he would — devise, 
 combine, study, or glow with enthusiasm — the pro- 
 prietor of the front door exhibited the same careless 
 and smiling bravery of mien, behaving invariably as if 
 he had the whole tenement to himself, and was neither 
 proud of, nor interested in the doings of his more 
 spiritual inmate — leading you to suppose, almost, 
 that the latter, though billeted upon him, had not I 
 been properly introduced. The thatch of this com- ! 
 mon tenement was of jetty black hair, curling in most 
 opulent prodigality, and, altogether, it was a house j 
 that Hadad, the fallen spirit, might have chosen, when | 
 becoming incarnate to tempt the sister of Absalom. 
 
 Perhaps you have been in Florence, dear reader, ' 
 aud know by what royal liberality artists are permitted 
 to bring their easels into the splendid apartments of j 
 the palace, and copy from the priceless pictures on 
 the walls. At the time I have my eye upon (some 
 few years ago), McDonald was making a beginning 1 
 ot n copy of Titian's Bella, and near him stood the! 
 
 easel of a female artist who was copying from the 
 glorious picture of " Judith and Holofernes," in the 
 same apartment. Mademoiselle Folie (so she was 
 called by the elderly lady who always accompanied 
 her) was a small and very gracefully-formed creature, 
 with the plainest face in which attraction could possi- 
 bly reside. She was a passionate student of her art, 
 J pouring upon it apparently the entire fulness of her 
 life, and as unconsciously forgetful of her personal 
 : impressions on those around her, as if she wore the 
 invisible ring of Gyges. The deference with which 
 she was treated by her staid companion drew some 
 notice upon her, however, and her progress, in the 
 copy she was making, occasionally gathered the artists 
 about her easel ; and, altogether, her position among 
 the silent and patient company at work in the different 
 halls of the palace, was one of affectionate and tacit 
 respect. McDonald was her nearest neighbor, and 
 they frequently looked over each other's pictures, but, 
 as they were both foreigners in Florence (she of Polish 
 birth, as he understood), their conversation was in 
 French or Italian, neither of which languages were 
 fluently familiar to Graeme, and it was limited gene- 
 rally to expressions of courtesy or brief criticism oi 
 each other's labors. 
 
 As I said before, it was a " proof-impression" of a 
 celestial summer's morning, and the thermometer 
 stood at heavenly idleness. McDonald sat with his 
 maul-stick across his knees, drinking from Titian's 
 picture. An artist, who had lounged in from the 
 next room, had hung himself by the crook of his arm 
 over a high peg, in his comrade's easel, and every now 
 and then he volunteered an observation to which he 
 expected no particular answer. 
 
 " When I remember how little beauty ] have seen 
 in the world," said Ingarde (this artist), "I am inclined 
 to believe with Saturninus, that there is no resurrec- 
 tion of bodies, and that only the spirits of the good 
 return into the body of the Godhead — for what is 
 ugliness to do in heaven !" 
 
 McDonald only said, " hm — hm !" 
 
 " Or rather," said Ingarde again, " I should like to 
 fashion a creed for myself, and believe that nothing 
 was immortal but what was heavenly, and that the 
 good among men and the beautiful among women 
 would be the only reproductions hereafter. How will 
 this little plain woman look in the streets of the New 
 Jerusalem, for example ? Yet she expects, as we all 
 do, to be recognisable by her friends in Heaven, and, 
 of course, to have the same irredeemably plain face ! 
 (Does she understand English, by the way — for she 
 might not be altogether pleased with my theory !") 
 
 "I have spoken to her very often," said McDonald, 
 " and I think English is Hebrew to her — but my theo- 
 ry of beauty crosses at least one corner of your argu- 
 ment, my friend ! I believe that the original type of 
 every human face is beautiful, and that every human 
 being could be made beautiful, without, in any essential 
 particular, destroying the visible identity. The like- 
 ness preserved in the faces of a family through several 
 generations is modified by the bad mental qualities, 
 and the bad health of those who hand is down. Re- 
 move these modifications, and, without destroying the 
 family likeness, you would take away all that mars the 
 
282 
 
 THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM. 
 
 beauty of its particular type. An individual coun- 
 tenance is an integral work of God's making, and God 
 'saw that it was good' when he made it. Ugliness, 
 as you phrase it, is the damage that type of countenance 
 has received from the sin and suffering of life. But 
 the type can be restored, and will be, doubtless, in 
 Heaven !" 
 
 " And you think that little woman's face could be 
 made beautiful ?" 
 
 "I know it." 
 
 "Try it, then! Here is your copy of Titian's 
 •Bella,' all finished but the face. Make an apotheosis 
 portrait of your neighbor, and while it harmonizes 
 with the body of Titian's beauty, still leave it recogni- 
 sable as her portrait, and I'll give in to your theory — 
 believing in all other miracles, if you like, at the same 
 time!" 
 
 Ingarde laughed, as he went back to his own picture, 
 and McDonald, after sitting a few minutes lost in 
 revery, turned his easel so as to get a painter's view 
 of his female neighbor. He thought she colored 
 slightly as he fixed his eyes upon her ; but, if so, she 
 apparently became very soon unconscious of his gaze, 
 and he was soon absorbed himself in the task to which 
 his friend had so mockingly challenged him. 
 
 II. 
 
 [Excuse me, dear reader, while with two epistles I 
 build a bridge over which you can cross a chasm of a 
 month in my story.] 
 
 41 To Graeme McDonald. 
 
 "Sir: I am intrusted with a delicate commission, 
 which I know not how to broach to you, except by 
 simple proposal. Will you forgive my abrupt brevity, 
 if I inform you, without further preface, that the 
 Countess Nyschriem, a Polish lady of high birth and 
 ample fortune, does you the honor to propose for your 
 hand. If you are disengaged, and your affections are 
 not irrevocably given to another, I can conceive no 
 sufficient obstacle to your acceptance of this brilliant 
 connexion. The countess is twenty-two, and not 
 beautiful, it must in fairness be said ; but she has 
 high qualities of head and heart, and is worthy of any 
 man's respect and affection. She has seen you, of 
 course, and conceived a passion for you, of which this 
 is the result. lam directed to add, that should you 
 consent, the following conditions are imposed — that 
 you marry her within four days, making no inquiry 
 except as to her age, rank, and property, and that, 
 without previous interview, she come veiled to the 
 altar. 
 
 "An answer is requested in the course of to-morrow, 
 addressed to ' The Count Hanswald, minister of his 
 majesty the king of Prussia.' 
 
 "I have the honor, &c, &c. "Hanswald." 
 
 McDonald's answer was as follows : — 
 
 " To his Excellency, Hanswald, &c, &c. 
 
 " You will pardon me that I have taken two days to 
 consider the extraordinary proposition made me in 
 your letter. The subject, since it is to be entertained 
 a moment, requires, perhaps, still further reflection — 
 but my reply shall be definite, and as prompt as I can 
 bring myself to be, in a matter so important. 
 
 " My first impulsewns to return your letter, declining 
 the honor you would do me, and thanking the lady 
 for the compliment of her choice. My first reflection 
 was the relief and happiness which an independence 
 would bring to a mother and two sisters dependant, 
 now, on the precarious profits of my pencil. And I 
 first consented to ponder the matter with this view, 
 and I now consent to marry (frankly) for this advan- 
 tage. But still I have a condition to propose. 
 
 •' lu the studies I have had the opportunity to make 
 
 of the happiness of imaginative men in matrimony, I 
 have observed that their two worlds of fact and fancy 
 were seldom under the control of one mistress. It 
 must be a very extraordinary woman of course, who, 
 with the sweet domestic qualities needful for common 
 life, possesses at the same time the elevation and 
 spirituality requisite for the ideal of the poet and 
 painter. And I am not certain, in any case, whethej 
 the romance of some secret passion, fed and pursued 
 in the imagination only, be not the inseparable neces- 
 sity of a poetical nature. For the imagination is in- 
 capable of being chained, and it is at once disenchant- 
 ed and set roaming by the very possession and cer 
 tainty, which are the charms of matrimony. Whethei 
 exclusive devotion of all the faculties of mind and bod} 
 be the fidelity exacted in marriage, is a question every 
 woman should consider before making a husband of 
 an imaginative man. As I have not seen the countess, 
 I can generalize on the subject without offence, and 
 she is the best judge whether she can chain my fancy 
 as well as my affections, or yield to an imaginative 
 mistress the devotion of so predominant a quality of 
 my nature. I can only promise her the constancy of 
 a husband. 
 
 " Still — if this were taken for only vague specula 
 tion — she might be deceived. I must declare, frankly, 
 that I am, at present, completely possessed with an 
 imaginative passion. The object of it is probably as 
 poor as I, and I could never marry her were I to con- 
 tinue free. Probably, too, the high-born countess 
 would be but little jealous of her rival, for she has no 
 pretensions to beauty, and is an humble artist. But, 
 in painting this lady's portrait — (a chance experiment, 
 to try whether so plain a face could be made lovely) 
 — I have penetrated to so beautiful an inner counten- 
 ance (so to speak) — I have found charms of impres- 
 sion so subtly masked to the common eye — I have 
 traced such exquisite lineament of soul and feeling, 
 visible, for the present, I believe, to my eye only — 
 that, while I live. I shall do irresistible homage to her 
 as the embodiment of my fancy's want, the very spirit 
 and essence suitable to rule over my unseen world of 
 imagination. Marry whom I will, and be true to hei 
 as I shall, this lady will (perhaps unknown to herself J 
 be my mistress in dream-land and revery. 
 
 " This inevitable license allowed — my ideal world 
 and its devotions, that is to say, left entirely to myself 
 — I am ready to accept the honor of the countess's 
 hand. If, at the altar, she should hear me murmur 
 another name ivith her own — (for the bride of my fancy 
 must be present when I wed, and I shall link the vows 
 to both in one ceremony) — let her not fear for my 
 constancy to herself, but let her remember that it is 
 not to offend her hereafter, if* the name of the other 
 come to my lip in dreams. 
 
 " Your excellency may command my time and 
 presence. With high consideration, &c. 
 
 "Graeme McDonald." 
 
 Rather agitated than surprised seemed Mademoiselle 
 Folie, when, the next day, as she arranged her brushes 
 upon the shelf of her easel, her handsome neighbor 
 commenced, in the most fluent Italian he could com- 
 mand, to invite her to his wedding. Very much 
 surprised was McDonald when she interrupted him 
 in English, and begged him to use his native tongue, 
 as madame, her attendant, would not then understand 
 him. He went on delightedly in his own honest 
 language, and explained to her his imaginative ad- 
 miration, though he felt compunctious, somewhat, 
 that so unreal a sentiment should bring the blood into 
 her cheek. She thanked him — drew the cloth from 
 the upper part of her own picture, and showed him an 
 admirable portrait of his handsome features, substituted 
 for the masculine head of Judith in the original from 
 which she copied — and promised to be at his weddiag. 
 
MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND. 
 
 283 
 
 and to listen sharply for her murmured name in his 
 vow at the altar. He chanced to wear at the moment 
 a ring of red cornelian, and he agreed with her that 
 she should stand whereuhe could see her, and, at the 
 moment of his putting the marriage ring upon the 
 bride's fingers, that she should put on this, and for 
 ever after wear it, as a token of having received his 
 spiritual vows of devotion. 
 
 The day came, and the splendid equipage of the 
 countess dashed into the square of Santa Maria, with 
 a veiled bride and a cold bridegroom, and deposited 
 them at the steps of the church. And they were fol- 
 lowed by other coroneted equipages, and gayly dress- 
 ed from each — the mother and sisters of the bride- 
 groom gayly dressed, among them, but looking pale 
 with incertitude and dread. 
 
 The veiled bride was small, but she moved grace- 
 fully up the aisle, and met her future husband ;it the 
 altar with a low courtesy, and made a sign to the priest 
 to proceed with the ceremony. McDonald was color- 
 
 less, but firm, and indeed showed little interest, except 
 by an anxious look now and then among the crowd of 
 spectators at the sides of the altar. He pronounced 
 with a steady voice, but when the ring was to be put 
 on, he looked around for an instant, and then sudden- 
 ly, and to the great scandal of the church, clasped his 
 bride with a passionate ejaculation to his bosom. 
 The cornelian ring was on her finger — and the Countess* 
 Nyschriem and Mademoiselle Folie — his bride and 
 his fancy queen — were one. 
 
 This curious event happened in Florence some 
 eight years since — as all people then there will re- 
 member — and it was prophesied of the countess that 
 she would have but a short lease of her handsome and 
 gay husband. But time does not say so. A more 
 constant husband than McDonald to his plain and 
 titled wife, and one more continuously in love, does 
 not travel and buy pictures, and patronize artists — 
 though few except yourself and I, dear reader, know 
 the philosophy of it ! 
 
 MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND, 
 
 I was standing in a hostelry, at Geneva, making a 
 bargain with an Italian for a place in a return carriage 
 to Florence, when an Englishman, who had been in 
 the same steamer with me on Lake Leman, the day 
 before, came in and stood listening to the conversa- 
 tion. We had been the only two passengers on board, 
 but had passed six hours in each other's company 
 without speaking. The road to an Englishman's 
 friendship is to have shown yourself perfectly indiffer- 
 ent to his acquaintance, and, as I liked him from the 
 first, we were now ready to be conscious of each oth- 
 er's existence. 
 
 "I beg pardon," said he, advancing in a pause of 
 the vetturino's oration, "will you allow me to engage 
 a place with you ? 1 am going to Florence, and, if 
 agreeable to you, we will take the carriage to our- 
 selves." 
 
 I agreed very willingly, and in two hours we were 
 free of the gates of Geneva, and keeping along the 
 edge of the lake in the cool twilight of one of the love- 
 liest of heaven's summer evenings. The carriage was 
 spaciously contrived for four; and, with the curtains 
 up all around, our feet on the forward seat, my com- 
 panion smoking, and conversation bubbling up to 
 please itself, we rolled over the smooth road, gliding 
 into the first chapter of our acquaintance as tranquilly 
 as Geoffrey Crayon and his reader into the first chap- 
 ter of anything he has written. 
 
 My companion (Mr. St. John Elmslie, as put down 
 in his passport) seemed to have something to think of 
 beside propitiating my good will, but he was consid- 
 erate and winning, from evident high breeding, and 
 quite open, himself, to my most scrutinizing study. 
 He was about thirty, and, without any definite beauty, 
 was a fine specimen of a man. Probably most per- 
 sons would have called him handsome. I liked him 
 better, probably, from the subdued melancholy with 
 which he brooded on his secret thought, whatever it 
 might be — sad men, in this world of boisterous gayety 
 or selfish ill-humor, interesting me always. 
 
 From that something, on which his memory fed in j 
 quiet but constant revery, nothing aroused my com- j 
 panion except the passing of a travelling carriage, go- \ 
 log in the other direction, on our own arrival at an inn. j 
 I began to suspect, indeed, after a little while, that j 
 ElmsUe had some understanding with our vetturino, I 
 
 for, on the approach of any vehicle of pleasure, our 
 horses became restiff, and, with a sudden pull-up, 
 stood directly across the way. Out jumped my friend 
 to assist in controlling the restiff animals, and, in the 
 five minutes during which the strangers were obliged 
 to wait, we generally saw their heads once or twice 
 thrust inquiringly from the carriage window. This 
 done, our own vehicle was again wheeled about, and 
 the travellers allowed to proceed. 
 
 We had arrived at Bologna with but one interruption 
 to the quiet friendliness of our intercourse. Apropos 
 of some vein of speculation, 1 had asked my companion 
 if he were married. He was silent for a moment, and 
 then, in a jocose tone of voice, which was new to me, 
 replied, " I believe I have a wife — somewhere in Scot- 
 land." But though Elmslie had determined to show 
 me that he was neither annoyed nor offended at my 
 inquisitiveness, his manner changed. He grew cere- 
 monious. For the remainder of that day, I felt un- 
 comfortable, I scarce knew why; and I silently deter- 
 mined that if my friend continued so exceedingly well- 
 bred in his manner for another day, I should find an 
 excuse for leaving him at Bologna. 
 
 But we had left Bologna, and, at sunset of a warm 
 day, were slowly toiling up the Apennines. The inn to 
 which we were bound was in sight, a mile or two above 
 us, and, as the vetturino stopped to breathe his horses, 
 Elmslie jumped from the carriage and started to walk 
 on. I took advantage of his absence to stretch myself 
 over the vacated cushions, and, on our arrival at the 
 inn, was soundly asleep. 
 
 My friend's voice, in an unusual tone, awoke me, 
 and, by his face, as he looked in at the carriage win- 
 dow, I saw that he was under some extraordinary ex- 
 citement. This I observed by the light of the stable- 
 lantern— for the hostelry, Italian fashion, occupied 
 the lower story of the inn, and our carriage was driven 
 under the archway, where the faint light from without 
 made but little impression on the darkness. I followed 
 Elmslie's beckoning finger, and climbing after him up 
 the stairway of stone, stood in a large refectory occu- 
 pying the whole of the second story of the building. 
 
 At the first glance I saw that there was an English 
 party in the house. An Italian inn of the lower order 
 has no provision for private parties, and few, except 
 English travellers, object to joining the common even- 
 
284 
 
 MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND. 
 
 ing meal. The hall was dark with the twilight, but a 
 large curtain was suspended across the farther ex- 
 tremity, and, by the glimmer of lights, and an occa- 
 sional sound of a knife, a party was within supping in 
 silence. 
 
 "If you speak, speak in Italian," whispered Elms- 
 lie, taking me by the arm, and leading me on tiptoe to 
 bne of the corners of the curtain. 
 
 I looked in and saw two persons seated at a table — 
 a bold and soldierly-looking man of fifty, and a young 
 lady, evidently his daughter. The beauty of the last- 
 mentioned person was so extraordinary that I nearly 
 committed the indiscretion of an exclamation in Eng- 
 lish. She was slight, but of full and well-rounded 
 proportions, and she sat and moved with an emi- 
 nent grace and ladylikeness altogether captivating. 
 Though her face expressed a settled sadness, it was 
 of unworn and faultless youth and loveliness, and 
 while her heavily-fringed eyes would have done, in 
 their expression, for a Niobe, Hebe's lips were not 
 more ripe, nor Juno's arched more proudly. She was 
 a blonde, with eyes and eyelashes darker than her 
 hair — a kind of beauty almost peculiar to England. 
 
 The passing in of a tall footman, in a plain livery of 
 gray, interrupted my gaze, and Elmslie drew me away 
 by the arm, and led me into the road in front of the 
 locanda. The night had now fallen, and we strolled 
 up and down in the glimmer of the starlight. My 
 companion was evidently much disturbed, and we 
 made several turns after I had seen very plainly that 
 he was making up his mind to communicate to me the 
 secret. 
 
 "1 have a request to make of you," he said, at last; 
 " a service to exact, rather, to which there were no 
 hope that you would listen for a moment if I did not 
 first tell you a very singular story. Have a little pa- 
 tience with me, and I will make it as brief as I can — 
 the briefer, that I have no little pain in recalling it with 
 the distinctness of description." 
 
 I expressed my interest in all that concerned my 
 new friend, and begged him to go on. 
 
 " Hardly six years ago," said Elmslie, pressing my 
 arm gently in acknowledgment of my sympathy, " I 
 left college and joined my regiment, for the first time, 
 in Scotland. By the way, I should re-introduce my- 
 self to you as Viscount S , of the title of which, 
 
 then, I was in prospect. My story hinges somewhat 
 upon the fact that, as an honorable captain, a noble- 
 man in expectancy, I was an object of some extrane- 
 ous interest to the ladies who did the flirting for the 
 garrison. God forgive me for speaking lightly on the 
 subject ! 
 
 " A few evenings after my arrival, we had been dining 
 rather freely at mess, and the major announced to us 
 that we were invited to take tea with a linen-draper, 
 whose house was a popular resort of the officers of 
 the regiment. The man had three or four daughters, 
 who, as the phrase goes, ' gave you a great deal for 
 your money,' and, for romping and frolicking, they 
 had good looks and spirit enough. The youngest was 
 really very pretty, but the eldest, to whom I was ex- 
 clusively presented by the major, as a sort of quiz on 
 a new-comer, was a sharp and sneering old maid, red- 
 headed, freckled, and somewhat lame. Not to be out- 
 done in frolic by my persecutor, I commenced making 
 love to Miss Jacky in mock heroics, and we were soon 
 marching up and down the room, to the infinite enter- 
 tainment of my brother officers, lavishing on each other 
 every possible term of endearment. 
 
 " In the midst of this, the major came up to me with 
 rather a serious face. 
 
 " ' Whatever you do,' said he, ' for God's sake don't 
 call the old girl your wife. The joke might be seri- 
 ous.' 
 
 " It was quite enough that I was desired not to do 
 anything in the reign of misrule then prevailing. I 
 
 immediately assumed a connubial air, to the best of 
 my dramatic ability, begged Miss Jacky to join me in 
 the frolic, and made the rounds of the room, introdu- 
 cing the old girl as Mrs. Elmslie, and receiving from 
 her quite as many tendernesses as were bearable by 
 myself or the company present. I observed that the 
 lynx-eyed linen-draper watched this piece of fun very 
 closely, and my friend, the major, seemed distressed 
 and grave about it. But we carried it out till the 
 party broke up, and the next day the regiment was 
 ordered over to Ireland, and I thought no more, for 
 awhile, either of Miss Jacky or my own absurdity. 
 
 " Two years afterward, I was, at a drawing-room at 
 St. James's, presented, for the first time, by the name 
 which I bear. It was not a very agreeable event to me, 
 as our family fortunes were inadequate to the proper 
 support of the title, and on the generosity of a maternal 
 uncle, who had been at mortal variance with my father, 
 depended our hopes of restoration to prosperity. From 
 the mood of bitter melancholy in which I had gone 
 through the ceremony of an introduction, I was aroused 
 by the murmur in the crowd at the approach of a young 
 girl just presented to the king. She was following a 
 lady whom I slightly knew, and had evidently been 
 presented by her; and, before I had begun to recover 
 from my astonishment at her beauty, I was requested 
 by this lady to give her protege an arm and follow to a 
 less crowded apartment of the palace. 
 
 "Ah, my friend! the exquisite beauty of Lady 
 Meiicent — but you have seen her. She is here, and 
 I must fold her in my arms to-night, or perish in the 
 attempt. 
 
 "Pardon me!" he added, as I was about to inter- 
 rupt him with an explanation. " She has been — she 
 is — my wife ! She loved me and married me, making 
 life a heaven of constant ecstacy — for I worshipped 
 her with every fibre of my existence." 
 
 He paused and gave me his story brokenly, and I 
 waited for him to go on without questioning. 
 
 "We had lived together in absolute and unclouded 
 happiness for eight months, in lover-like seclusion at 
 her father's house, and I was looking forward to the 
 birth of my child with anxiety and transport, when the 
 death of my uncle left me heir to his immense fortune, 
 and I parted from my greater treasure to go and pay 
 the fitting respect at his burial. 
 
 " I returned, after a week's absence, with an impa- 
 tience and ardor almost intolerable, and found the door 
 closed against me. 
 
 " There were two letters for me at the porter's lodge 
 
 — one from Lord A , my wife's father, informing 
 
 me that the Lady Meiicent had miscarried and was 
 dangerously ill, and enjoining upon me as a man of 
 honor and delicacy, never to attempt to see her again ; 
 and another from Scotland, claiming a fitting support 
 for my lawful wife, the daughter of the linen-draper. 
 The proofs of the marriage, duly sworn to and certi- 
 fied by the witnesses of my fatal frolic, were enclosed, 
 and on my recovery, six weeks after, from the delirium 
 into which these multiplied horrors precipitated me, I 
 found that, by the Scotch law, the first marriage was 
 valid, and my ruin was irrevocable." 
 
 "And how long since was this ?" I inquired, break- 
 ing in upon his narration for the first time. 
 
 "A year and a month — and till to-night I have not 
 seen her. But I must break through this dreadful 
 separation now — and I must speak to her, and press 
 her to my breast — and you will aid me ?" 
 
 "To the last drop of my blood, assuredly. But 
 how ?" 
 
 " Come to the inn ! You have not supped, and we 
 will devise as you eat. And you must lend me your 
 invention, for my heart and brain seem to me going 
 wild." 
 
 Two hours after, with a pair of loaded pistols in my 
 breast, we went to the chamber of the host, and bound 
 
WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 285 
 
 him and his wife to the posts of their beds. There 
 was but one man about the house, the hostler, and we 
 had made him intoxicated with our travelling flask of 
 brandy. Lord A and his daughter were still sit- 
 ting up, and she, at her chamber window, was watch- 
 ing the just risen moon, over which the clouds were 
 drifting very rapidly. Our business was, now, only 
 with them, as, in their footman, my companion had 
 found an attached creature, who remembered him, and 
 willingly agreed to offer no interruption. 
 
 After taking a pull at the brandy-flask myself (for, 
 in spite of my blackened face and the slouched hat of 
 the hostler, I required some fortification of the mus- 
 cles of my face before doing violence to an English 
 nobleman), I opened the door of the chamber which 
 must be passed to gain access to that of Lady Meli- 
 
 cent. It was Lord A 's sleeping-room, and, though 
 
 the light was extinguished, I could see that he was 
 still up, and sitting at the window. Turning my lan- 
 tern inward, I entered the room and set it down, and, 
 
 to my relief, Lord A soliloquized in English, that 
 
 it was the host with a hint that it was time to go to 
 bed. My friend was at the door, according to my ar- 
 rangement, ready to assist me should I find any diffi- 
 culty; but, from the dread of premature discovery of 
 the person, he was to let me manage it alone if pos- 
 sible. 
 
 Lord A sat unsuspectingly in his chair, with 
 
 his head turned half way over his shoulders to see why 
 the officious host did not depart. I sprung suddenly 
 upon him, drew him backward and threw him on his 
 face, and, with my hand over his mouth, threatened 
 
 him with death, in my choicest Italian, if he did not 
 remain passive till his portmanteau had been looked 
 into. I thought he might submit, with the idea that 
 it was only a robbery, and so it proved. He allowed 
 me, after a short struggle, to tie his hands behind him, 
 and march him down to his carriage, before the muz- 
 zle of my pistol. The hostelry was still as death, and, 
 shutting his carriage door upon his lordship, I mount- 
 ed guard. 
 
 The night seemed to me very long, but morning 
 dawned, and, with the earliest gray, the postillions 
 came knocking at the outer door of the locanda. My 
 friend went out to them, while I marched back Lord 
 
 A to his chamber, and, by immense bribing, the 
 
 horses were all put to our carriage a half hour after, 
 and the outraged nobleman was left without the means 
 of pursuit till their return. We reached Florence in 
 safety, and pushed on immediately to Leghorn, where 
 we took the steamer for Marseilles and eluded arrest, 
 very much to my most agreeable surprise. 
 
 By a Providence that does not always indulge mor- 
 tals with removing those they wish in another world, 
 
 Lord S has lately been freed from his harrowing 
 
 chain by the death of his so-called lady; and, having 
 re-married Lady Melicent, their happiness is renewed 
 and perfect. In his letter to me, announcing it, he 
 gives me liberty to tell the story, as the secret was di- 
 vulged to Lord A on the day of his second nup- 
 tials. He said nothing, however, of his lordship's 
 forgiveness for my rude handling of his person, and, 
 in ceasing to be considered a brigand, possibly I am 
 responsible as a gentleman. 
 
 WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 In one of the years not long since passed to your 
 account and mine by the recording angel, gentle read- 
 er, I was taking my fill of a delicious American June, 
 as Ducrow takes his bottle of wine, on the back of a 
 beloved horse. In the expressive language of the 
 raftsmen on the streams of the West, I was " follow- 
 ing" the Chemung — a river whose wild and peculiar 
 loveliness is destined to be told in undying song, when- 
 ever America can find leisure to look up her poets. 
 Such bathing of the feet of precipices, such kissing 
 of flowery slopes, such winding in and out of the bo- 
 soms of round meadows, such frowning amid broken 
 rocks, and smiling through smooth valleys, you would 
 never believe could go in this out-of-doors world, 
 unvisitod and uncelebrated. 
 
 Not far from the ruins of a fortification, said to have 
 been built by the Spaniards before the settlement of 
 New-England by the English, the road along the Che- 
 mung dwindles into a mere ledge at the foot of a 
 precipice, the river wearing into the rock at this spot 
 by a black and deep eddy. At the height of your lip 
 above the carriage track, there gushes from the rock 
 a stream of the size and steady clearness of a glass 
 rod, and all around it in the small rocky lap which it 
 has worn away, there grows a bed of fragrant mint, 
 kept by the shade and moisture of a perpetual green, 
 bright as emerald. Here stops every traveller who is 
 not upon an errand of life or death, and while his 
 horse stands up to his fetlocks in the river, he parts 
 the dewy stems of the mint, and drinks, for once in 
 his life, like a fay or a poet. It is one of those ex- 
 quisite spots which paint their own picture insensibly 
 
 I in the memory, even while you look on them, natural 
 ; " Daguerrotypes," as it were ; and you are surprised, 
 ! years afterward, to find yourself remembering every 
 leaf and stone, and the song of every bird that sung 
 in the pine-trees overhead while you were watching' 
 the curve of the spring-leap. As I said before, it will 
 be sung and celebrated, when America sits down weary 
 with her first century of toil, and calls for her min- 
 strels, now toiling with her in the fields. 
 
 Within a mile of this spot, to which I had been 
 looking forward with delight for some hours, I over- 
 took a horseman. Before coming up with him I had 
 ; at once decided he was an Indian. His relaxed limbs 
 swaying to every motion of his horse with the grace 
 and ease of a wreath of smoke, his neck and shoulders 
 so cleanly shaped, and a certain watchful look about 
 j his ears which I cannot define, but which you see in 
 a spirited horse — were infallible marks of the race 
 whom we have driven from the fair land of our inde- 
 pendence. He was mounted upon a small black horse 
 — of the breed commonly called Indian ponies, now 
 ; not very common so near the Atlantic — and rode with 
 a slack rein and air, I thought, rather more dispirited 
 than indolent. 
 
 The kind of morning T have described, is, as every 
 one must remember, of a sweetness so communicative 
 that one would think two birds could scarce meet on 
 the wing without exchanging a carol; and I involun- 
 tarily raised my bridle after a minute's study of the 
 traveller before me, and in a brief gallop was at his 
 side. With the sound of my horse's feet, however, 
 he changed in all his characteristics to another man — 
 sat erect in his saddle, and assumed the earnest air of 
 an American who never rides but upon some erraud ; 
 
286 
 
 WIGvVAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 and, on his giving me back my " good morning" in 
 the unexceptionable accent of the country, 1 presum- 
 ed I had mistaken my man. He was dark, but not 
 darker than a Spaniard, of features singularly hand- 
 some and regular, dressed with no peculiarity except 
 an otter-skin cap of a silky and golden-colored fur, too 
 expensive and rare for any but a fanciful, as well as a 
 luxurious purchaser. A slight wave in the black hair 
 which escaped from it, and fell back from his temples, 
 confirmed me in the conviction that his blood was of 
 European origin. 
 
 We rode on together with some indifferent conver- 
 sation, till we arrived at the spring-leap I have de- 
 scribed, and here my companion, throwing his right 
 leg over the neck of his poney, jumped to the ground 
 very actively, and applying his lips to the spring, drank 
 a free draught. His horse seemed to know the spot, 
 and, with the reins on his neck, trotted on to a shal- 
 lower ledge in the river and stood with the water to 
 his knees, and his quick eye turned on his master with 
 an expressive look of satisfaction. 
 
 "You have been here before," I said, tying my 
 less disciplined horse to the branch of an overhanging 
 shrub. 
 
 " Yes — often !" was his reply, with a tone so quick 
 and rude, however, that, but for the softening quality 
 of the day, I should have abandoned there all thought 
 of further acquaintance. 
 
 I took a small valise from the pommel of my sad- 
 dle, and while my fellow-traveller sat on the rock-side 
 looking moodily into the river, I drew forth a flask of 
 wins and a leathern cup, a cold pigeon wrapped in a 
 cool cabbage leaf, the bigger end of a large loaf, and 
 as much salt as could be tied up in the cup of a large 
 water-lily — a set-out of provender which owed its 
 daintiness to the fair hands of my hostess of the night 
 before. 
 
 The stranger's first resemblance to an Indian had 
 probably given a color to my thoughts, for, as I hand- 
 ed him a cup of wine, I said, "I wish the Shawanee 
 chief to whose tribe this valley belongs, were here to 
 get a cup of my wine." 
 
 The young man sprang to his feet with a sudden 
 flash through his eyes, and while he looked at me, he 
 seemed to stand taller than, from my previous impres- 
 sion of his height, I should have thought possible. 
 " Surprised as I was at the effect of my remark, I did 
 not withdraw the cup, and with a moment's searching 
 look into my face, he changed his attitude, begged 
 pardon rather confusedly, and, draining the cup, said 
 with a faint smile, " The Shawanee chief thanks 
 you !" 
 
 " Do you know the price of land in the valley?" I 
 asked, handing him a slice of bread with the half 
 pigeon upon it, and beginning to think it was best to 
 stick to commonplace subjects with a stranger. 
 
 " Yes !" he said, his brow clouding over again. "It 
 was bought from the Shawanee chief you speak of for 
 a string of beads the acre. The tribe had their burial- 
 place on the Susquehannah, some twenty miles from 
 this, and they cared little about a strip of a valley 
 which, now, I would rather have for my inheritance 
 than the fortune of any white man in the land." 
 
 " Throw in the landlord's daughter at the village 
 below," said I, " and I would take it before any half- 
 dozen of the German principalities. Have you heard 
 the news of her inheritance?" 
 
 Another moody look and a very crisp " Yes," put 
 a stop to all desire on my part to make further advan- 
 ces in my companion's acquaintance. Gathering my 
 pigeon bones together, therefore, and putting them on 
 the top of a stone where they would be seen by the 
 first "lucky dog" that passed, flinging my emptied 
 water-lily on the river, and strapping up cup and flask 
 once more in my valise, I mounted, and with a crusty 
 good morning, set off at a hand-gallop down the river. 
 
 My last unsuccessful topic was, at the time I write 
 of, the subject of conversation all through the neigh- 
 borhood of the village toward which I was travelling. 
 The most old-fashioned and comfortable inn on the 
 Susquehannah, or Chemung, was kept at the junction 
 of these two noble rivers, by a certain Robert Plymton, 
 who had " one fair daughter and no more." He was 
 a plain farmer of Connecticut, who had married the 
 grand-daughter of an English emigrant, and got, with 
 his wife, a chest of old papers, which he thought had 
 better be used to mend a broken pane or wrap up gro- 
 ceries, but which his wife, on her death-bed, told him 
 " might turn out worth something." With this slen- 
 der thread of expectation, he had kept the little chest 
 under his bed, thinking of it perhaps once a year, and 
 satisfying his daughter's inquisitive queries with a 
 shake of his head, and something about " her poor 
 mother's tantrums," concluding usually with some 
 reminder to keep the parlor in order, or mind her 
 housekeeping. Ruth Plymton had had some sixteen 
 " winters' schooling," and was known to be much 
 "smarter" (Anslice, cleverer), than was quite neces- 
 sary for the fulfilment of her manifold duties. Since 
 twelve years of age (the period of her mother's death) 
 she had officiated with more and more success as bar- 
 maid and host's daughter to the most frequented inn 
 of the village, till now, at eighteen, she was the only 
 ostensible keeper of the inn, the old man usually be- 
 ing absent in the fields with his men, or embarking his 
 grain in an " ark," to take advantage of the first 
 freshet. She was civil to all comers, but her manner 
 was such as to make it perfectly plain even to the 
 rudest raftsman and hunter, that the highest respect 
 they knew how to render to a woman was her due. 
 She was rather unpopular with the girls of the village 
 from what they called her pride and "keeping to her- 
 self," but the truth was, that the cheap editions ol 
 romances which Ruth took instead of money for the 
 lodging of the itinerant book-pedlars, were more 
 agreeable companions to her than the girls of the vil- 
 lage ; and the long summer forenoons, and half the 
 long winter nights, were little enough for the busy 
 young hostess, who, seated on her bed, devoured tales 
 of high-life which harmonized with some secret long- 
 ing in her breast — she knew not and scarce thought 
 of asking herself why. 
 
 I had been twice at Athens (by this classical name 
 is known the village I speak of), and each time had 
 prolonged my stay at Plymton's inn for a day longer 
 than my horse or my repose strictly exacted. The 
 scenery at the junction is magnificent, but it was 
 scarce that. And I cannot say that it was altogther 
 admiration of the host's daughter; for though I break- 
 fasted late for the sake of having a clean parlor while 
 I ate my broiled chicken, and, having been once to 
 Italy, Miss Plymton liked to pour out my tea and hear 
 me talk of St. Peter's and the Carnival, yet there was 
 that marked retenu and decision in her manner that 
 made me feel quite too much like a culprit at school, 
 and large and black as her eyes were, and light and 
 airy as were all her motions, 1 mixed up with my pro- 
 pensity for her society, a sort of dislike. In short, I 
 never felt a tenderness for a woman who could "queen 
 it" so easily, and I went heart-whole on my journey, 
 though always with a high respect for Ruth Plymton, 
 and a pleasant remembrance of her conversation. 
 
 The story which I had heard farther up the river 
 was, briefly, that there had arrived at Athens an Eng- 
 lishman, who had found in Miss Ruth Plymton, the 
 last surviving descendant of the family of her mother; 
 that she was the heiress to a large fortune, if the 
 proof of her descent were complete, and that the con- 
 tents of the little chest had been the subject of a 
 week's hard study by the stranger, who had departed 
 after a vain attempt to persuade old Plymton to ac- 
 company him to England with his daughter. This 
 
WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 28t 
 
 was the rumor, the allusion to which had been re- 
 ceived with such repulsive coldness by my dark com- 
 panion at the spring-leap. 
 
 America is so much of an asylum for despairing 
 younger sons and the proud and starving branches of 
 great families, that a discovery of heirs to property 
 among people of very inferior condition, is by no 
 means uncommon. It is a species of romance in real 
 life, however, which we never believe upon hearsay, 
 and I rode on to the village, expecting my usual re- 
 ception by the fair damsel of the inn. The old sign 
 still hung askew as I approached, and the pillars of 
 the old wooden "stoop" or portico, were as much off 
 their perpendicular as before, and true to my augury, 
 out stepped my fair acquaintance at the sound of my 
 horse's feet, and called to Reuben the ostler, and gave 
 me an unchanged welcome. The old man was down 
 at the river side, and the key of the grated bar hung 
 at the hostess's girdle, and with these signs of times 
 as they were, my belief in the marvellous tale vanish- 
 ed into thin air. 
 
 " So you are not gone to England to take posses- 
 sion ?" 1 said. 
 
 Her serious " No !" unsoftened by any other re- 
 mark, put a stop to the subject again, and taking my- 
 self to task for having been all day stumbling on 
 mal-apropos subjects, I asked to be shown to my room, 
 and spent the hour or two before dinner in watching 
 the chickens from the window, and wondering a great 
 deal as to the " whereabouts" of my friend in the 
 otter-skin cap. 
 
 The evening of that day was unusually warm, and 
 I strolled down to the bank of the Susquehannah, to 
 bathe. The moon was nearly full and halfway to the 
 zenith, and between the lingering sunset and the clear 
 splendor of the moonlight, the dusk of the " folding 
 hour" was forgotten, and the night went on almost as 
 radiant as day. I swam across the river, delighting 
 myself with the gold rims of the ripples before my 
 breast, and was within a yard or two of the shore on 
 my return, when I heard a woman's voice approaching 
 in earnest conversation. I shot forward and drew my- 
 self in beneath a large clump of alders, and with only 
 my head out of water, lay in perfect concealment. 
 
 "You are not just, Shahatan!" were the first words 
 I distinguished, in a voice I immediately recognised 
 as that of my fair hostess. "You are not just. As 
 far as I know myself I love you better than any one I 
 ever saw — but" — 
 
 As she hesitated, the deep low voice of my com- 
 panion at the spring-leap, uttered in a suppressed and 
 impatient guttural, "But what?" He stood still with 
 his back to the moon, and while the light fell full on 
 her face, she withdrew her arm from his and went on. 
 
 " I was going to say that I do not yet know myself 
 or the world sufficiently to decide that I shall always 
 love you. I would not be too hasty in so important a 
 thing, Shahatan ! We have talked of it before, and 
 therefore I may say to you, now, that the prejudices 
 of my father and all my friends are against it." 
 • " My blood" — interrupted the young man, with a 
 movement of impatience. 
 
 She laid her hand on his arm. " Stay ! the objec- 
 tion is not mine. Your Spanish mother, besides, 
 shows more in your look and features than the blood 
 of your father. But it would still be said I married 
 an Indian, and though I care little for what the village 
 would say, yet I must be certain that I shall love you 
 with all my heart and till death, before I set my face 
 with yours against the prejudices of every white man 
 and woman in my native land ! You have urged me 
 for my secret, and there it is. I feel relieved to have 
 unburthened my heart of it." 
 
 " That secret is but a summer old !" said he, half 
 turning on his heel, and looking from her upon the 
 moon's path across the river. 
 
 " Shame !" she replied ; "you know that Ions be- 
 fore this news came, I talked with you constantly of 
 other lands, and of my irresistible desire to see the 
 people of great cities, and satisfy myself whether I 
 was like them. That curiosity, Shahatan, is, 1 fear, 
 even stronger than my love, or at least, it is more im- 
 patient ; and now that I have the opportunity fallen to 
 me like a star out of the sky, shall I not go ? I must. 
 Indeed I must." 
 
 The lover felt that all had been said, or was too 
 proud to answer, for they fell into the path again, side 
 by side, in silence, and at a slow step were soon out of 
 my sight and hearing. I emerged from my compul- 
 sory hiding-place wiser than I went in, dressed and 
 strolled back to the village, and finding the old land- 
 lord smoking his pipe alone under the portico, I light- 
 ed a cigar, and sat down to pick his brains of the little 
 information I wanted to fill out the story. 
 
 I took my leave of Athens on the following morn- 
 ing, paying my bill duly to Miss Plymton, from whom 
 I requested a receipt in writing, for I foresaw without 
 any very sagacious augury beside what the old man 
 told me, that it might be an amusing document by- 
 and-by. You shall judge by the sequel of the story, 
 dear reader, whether you would like it in your book 
 of autographs. 
 
 Not long after the adventure described in the pre- 
 ceding chapter, I embarked for a ramble in Europe. 
 Among the newspapers which were lying about in the 
 
 [ cabin of the packet, was one which contained this 
 paragraph, extracted from a New-Orleans Gazette. 
 
 : The American reader will at once remember it: — 
 
 ; " Extraordinary attachment to savage life. — The of- 
 ficers at Fort (one of the most distant outposts 
 
 of human habitation in the west), extended their hos- 
 pitality lately to one of the young proteges of govern- 
 ment, a young Shawanee chief, who has been educated 
 at public expense for the purpose of aiding in the 
 civilization of his tribe. This youth, the son of a 
 
 | Shawanee chief by a Spanish mother, was put to a 
 
 ! preparatory school in a small village on the Susque- 
 hannah, and subsequently was graduated at 
 
 i College with the first honors of his class. He had 
 
 ; become a most accomplished gentleman, was appa- 
 rently fond of society, and, except in a scarce distin- 
 
 : guishable tinge of copper color in his skin, retained 
 
 j no trace of his savage origin. Singular to relate, 
 however, he disappeared suddenly from the fort, leav- 
 
 | ing behind him the clothes in which he had arrived, 
 and several articles of a gentleman's toilet ; and as the 
 sentry on duty was passed at dawn of the same day by 
 
 \ a mounted Indian in the usual savage dress, who gave 
 the pass- word in issuing from the gate, it is presumed 
 it was no other than the young Shahatan, and that he 
 
 j has joined his tribe, who were removed some years 
 
 I since beyond the Mississippi." 
 
 The reader will agree with me that I possessed the 
 key to the mystery. 
 
 As no one thinks of the thread that disappears in an 
 
 ; intricate embroidery till it comes out again on the 
 
 | surface, I was too busy in weaving my own less inter- 
 esting woof of adventure for the two years following, 
 
 j to give Shahatan and his love even a passing thought. 
 
 I On a summer's night in 18 — , however, I found my- 
 self on a banquette at an Almack's ball, seated beside 
 
 j a friend who, since we had met last at Almack's, had 
 given up the white rose of girlhood for the diamonds 
 of the dame, timidity and blushes for self-possession 
 and serene sweetness, dancing for conversation, and 
 
 j the promise of beautiful and admired seventeen for the 
 
 | perfection of more lovely and adorable twenty-two. 
 She was there as chaperon to a younger sister, and it 
 
 was delightful in that whirl of giddy motion, and more 
 
 giddy thought, to sit beside a tranquil and unfevered 
 
288 
 
 WI'JWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 mind and talk with her of what was passing, without 
 either bewilderment or effort. 
 
 " What is it," she said, " that constitutes aristocratic 
 beauty ? — for it is often remarked that it is seen no- 
 where in such perfection as at Almack's; yet, I have 
 for a half-hour looked in vain among these handsome 
 faces for a regular profile, or even a perfect figure. It 
 is not symmetry, surely, that gives a look of high 
 breeding — nor regularity of feature." 
 
 " If you will take a leaf out of a traveller's book," 
 I replied, "we may at least have the advantage of 
 a comparison. I remember recording, when travel- 
 ling in the East, that for months I had not seen an 
 irregular nose or forehead in a female face ; and, al- 
 most universally, the mouth and chin of the Orientals 
 are, as well as the upper features, of the most classic 
 correctness. Yet where, in civilized countries, do 
 women look lower-born or more degraded?" 
 
 "Then it is not in the features," said my friend. 
 
 " No, nor in the figure, strictly," I went on to say, 
 " for the French and Italian women (vide the same 
 book of mems), are generally remarkable for shape and 
 fine contour of limb, and the French are, we all know 
 (begging your pardon), much better dancers, and more 
 graceful in their movements, than all other nations. 
 Yet what is more rare than a 'thorough-bred' looking 
 Frenchwoman ?" 
 
 "We are coming to a conclusion very fast," she 
 said, smiling. " Perhaps we shall find the great secret 
 in delicacy of skin, after all." 
 
 " Not unless you will agree that Broadway in New- 
 York is the ' prato fiarito,' of aristocratic beauty — for 
 nowhere on the face of the earth do you see such 
 complexions. Yet, my fair countrywomen stoop too 
 much, and are rather too dressy in their tastes to con- 
 vey very generally the impression of high birth." 
 
 "Stay!" interrupted my companion, laying her 
 hand on my arm with a look of more meaning than I 
 quite understood ; "before you commit yourself far- 
 ther on that point, look at this tall girl coming up the 
 floor, and tell me what you think of her, apropos to 
 the subject." 
 
 "Why, that she is the very forth-shadowing of 
 noble parentage," I replied, " in step, air, form — every- 
 thing. But surely the face is familiar to me." 
 
 " It is the Miss Trevanion whom you said you had 
 never met. Yet she is an American, and with such a 
 fortune as hers, I wonder you should not have heard 
 of her at least." 
 
 " Miss Trevanion ! I never knew anybody of the 
 name, I am perfectly sure — yet that face I have seen 
 before, and I would stake my life I have known the 
 lady, and not casually either." 
 
 My eyes were riveted to the beautiful woman who 
 now sailed past with a grace and stateliness that were 
 the subject of universal admiration, and I eagerly at- 
 tempted to catch her eye ; but on the other side of 
 her walked one of the most agreeable flatterers of the 
 hour, and the crowd prevented my approaching her, 
 even if I had solved the mystery so far as to know in 
 what terms to address her. Yet it was marvellous 
 that I could ever have seen such beauty and forgotten 
 the when and where, or that such fine and unusually 
 lustrous eyes could ever have shone on me without 
 inscribing well in my memory their " whereabout" 
 and history. 
 
 "Well!" said my friend, "are you making out 
 your theory, or are you ' struck home' with the first 
 impression, like many another dancer here to-night?" 
 
 " Pardon me ! I shall find out presently, who Miss 
 Trevanion is — but, meantime, revenous. I will tell 
 you where I think lies the secret of the aristocratic 
 beauty of England. It is in the lofty maintien of the 
 head and bust — the proud carriage; if you remark, in 
 all these women— the head set back, the chest eleva- 
 ted and expanded, and the whole port and expression, 
 
 that of pride and conscious superiority. This, mind 
 you, though the result of qualities in the character, is 
 not the work of a day, nor perhaps of a single gener- 
 ation. The effect of expanding the breast and pre- 
 serving the back straight, and the posture generally 
 erect, is the high health and consequent beauty of" 
 those portions of the frame ; and the physical advan 
 tage, handed down with the pride which produced it, 
 from mother to child, the race gradually has become 
 perfect in those points, and the look of pride and high- 
 bearing is now easy, natural, and unconscious. Glance 
 your eye around and you will see that there is not a 
 defective bust, and hardly a head ill set on, in the 
 room. In an assembly in any other part of the world, 
 to find a perfect bust with a gracefully carried head, is 
 as difficult as here to find the exception." 
 
 " What a proud race you make us out, to be sure," 
 said my companion, rather dissentingly. 
 
 " And so you are, eminently and emphatically 
 proud," I replied. "What English family does not 
 revolt from any proposition of marriage from a for- 
 eigner ? For an English girl to marry a Frenchman 
 or an Italian, a German or a Russiau, Greek, Turk, or 
 Spaniard, is to forfeit a certain degree of respectabili- 
 ty, let the match be as brilliant as it may. The first 
 feeling on hearing of it is against the girl's sense of 
 delicacy. It extends to everything else. Your sol- 
 diers, your sailors, your tradesmen, your gentlemen, 
 your common people, and your nobles, are all (who 
 ever doubted it, you are mentally asking) out of all 
 comparison better than the same ranks and professions 
 in any other country. John Bull is literally surprised 
 if any one doubts this — nay, he does not believe that 
 any one does doubt it. Yet you call the Americans 
 ridiculously vain because they believe their institutions 
 better than yours, that their ships fight as well, their 
 women are as fair, and their men as gentlemanly as 
 any in the world. The ' vanity' of the French, who 
 believe in themselves, just as the English do, only in a 
 less blind entireness of self-glorification, is a common 
 theme of ridicule in English newspapers ; and the 
 French and the Americans, for a twentieth part of 
 English intolerance and self-exaggeration, are written 
 down daily by the English, as the two vainest nations 
 on earth." 
 
 "Stop!" said my fair listener, who was beginning 
 to smile at my digression from female beauty to na- 
 tional pride, "let me make a distinction there. As the 
 English and French are quite indifferent to the opin- 
 ion of other nations on these points, and not at all 
 shaken in their self-admiration by foreign incredulity, 
 theirs may fairly be dignified by the name of pride. 
 But what shall 1 say of the Americans, who are in a 
 perpetual fever at the ridicule of English newspapers, 
 and who receive, I understand, with a general convul- 
 sion throughout the states, the least slur in a review, 
 or the smallest expression of disparagement in a tory 
 newspaper. This is not pride, but vanity." 
 
 " I am hit, I grant you. A home thrust that I wish 
 I could foil. But here comes Miss Trevanion, again, 
 and I must make her out, or smother of curiosity. I 
 leave you a victor." 
 
 The drawing of the cord which encloses the dan- 
 cers, narrowed the path of the promenaders so effect- 
 ually, that I could easily take my stand in such a 
 position that Miss Trevanion could not pass without 
 seeing me. With my back to one of the slight pil- 
 lars of the orchestra, I stood facing her as she came 
 down the room ; and within a foot or two of my po- 
 sition, yet with several persons between us, her eye 
 for the first time rested on me. There was a sudden 
 flush, a look of embarrassed but momentary curiosity, 
 and the beautiful features cleared up, and I saw, with 
 vexatious mortification, that she had the advantage 
 of me, and was even pleased to remember where we 
 had met. She held out her hand the next moment, 
 
WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 a ay 
 
 but evidently understood my reserve, for, with a mis- 
 chievous compression of the lips, she leaned over, and 
 said in a voice intended only for my ear, "Reuben! 
 take the gentleman's horse I" 
 
 My sensations were very much those of the Irish- 
 man who fell into a pit in a dirk night, and catching 
 a straggling root in his descent, hung suspended by 
 incredible exertion and strength of arm till morning, 
 when daylight disclosed the bottom, at just one inch 
 below the points of his toes. So easy seemed the 
 solution — after it was discovered. 
 
 Miss Trevanion (ci-devant Plymton) took my arm. 
 Her companion was engaged to dance. Our meeting 
 at Al mack's was certainly one of the last events either 
 could have expected when we parted— but Almack's 
 is not the place to express strong emotions. We 
 walked leisurely down the sides of the quadrilles to 
 the tea-room, and between her bows and greetings to 
 her acquaintances, she put me au courant of her 
 movements for the last two years — Miss Trevanion 
 being the name she had inherited with the fortune 
 from her mother's family, and her mother's high but 
 distant connexions having recognised and taken her 
 by the hand in England. She had come abroad with 
 the representative of her country, who had been at 
 the trouble to see her installed in her rights, and had 
 but lately left heron his return to America. A house 
 in May Fair, and a chaperon in the shape of a card- 
 playiog and aristocratic aunt, were the other principal 
 points in her parenthetical narration. Her communi- 
 cativeness, of course, was very gracious, and indeed 
 her whole manner was softened and mellowed down, 
 from the sharpness and hauteur of Miss Plymton. 
 Prosperity had improved even her voice. 
 
 As she bent over her tea, in the ante-room, I could 
 not but remark how beautiful she was by the change 
 usually wrought by the soft moisture of the English 
 air, on persons from dry climates — Americans particu- 
 larly. That filling out and rounding of the features, 
 and renewing and freshening of the skin, becoming 
 and improving to all, had to her been like Juno's 
 bath. Then who does not know the miracles of 
 dress ? A circlet of diamonds whose " water" was 
 hsjht itself, followed the fine bend on either side back- 
 ward from her brows, supporting, at the parting of her 
 hair, one large emerald. And on what neck (ay — 
 even of age) is not a diamond necklace beautiful ? 
 Miss Trevanion was superb. 
 
 The house in Grosvenor Place, at which I knocked 
 the next morning, I well remembered as one of the 
 
 most elegant and sumptuous in London. Lady L 
 
 had ruined herself in completing and furnishing it, 
 and her parties "in my time" were called, by the most 
 apathetic blase, truly delightful. 
 
 " I bought this house of Lady L ," said Miss 
 
 Trevanion, as we sat down to breakfast, " with all its 
 furniture, pictures, books, incumbrances, and trifles, 
 even to the horses in the stables, and the coachman 
 In his wig; fori had too many things to learn, to 
 study furniture and appointments, and in this very 
 short life, time is sadly wasted in beginnings. People 
 are for ever getting read;/ to live. What think you ? 
 Is it not true in everything?" 
 
 44 Not in love, certainly." 
 
 "Ah! very true!" And she became suddenly 
 thoughtful, and for some minutes sipped her coffee in 
 silence. I did not interrupt it, for 1 was thinking of 
 Shahatan, and our thoughts very possibly were on the 
 same long journey. 
 
 " You are quite right," said I, looking round at the 
 exquisitely-furnished room in which we were break- 
 tasting, "you have bought these things at their intrin- 
 sic value, and you have all Lady L 's taste, trouble. 
 
 and vexation for twenty years, thrown into the bar- 
 19 
 
 gain. It is a matter of a lifetime to complete a house 
 like this, and just as it is all done, Lady L re- 
 tires, an old woman, and you come all the way from a 
 country-inn on the Susquehanuuh to enjoy it. Wh t 
 a whimsical world we live in !" 
 
 "Yes!" she said, in a sort of soliloquizing tone, 
 " I do enjoy it. It is a delightful sensation to take a 
 long stride at once in the art of life — to have lived for 
 years believing that the wants you felt could only be 
 supplied in fairy-land, and suddenly to change your 
 sphere, and discover that not ordy these wants, but a 
 thousand others, more unreasonable, and more im- 
 aginary, had been the subject of human ingenuity 
 and talent, till those who live in luxury have no wants — 
 j that science and chymistry and mechanics have left 
 I no nerve in the human system, no recess in human 
 sense, unquestioned of its desire, and that every de- 
 sire is supplied ! What mistaken ideas most people 
 have of luxury ! They fancy the senses of the rich 
 ; are over-pampered, that their zest of pleasure is al- 
 i ways dull with too much gratification, that their 
 , health is ruined with excess, and their tempers spoiled 
 | with ease and subserviency. It is a picture drawn by 
 j the poets in times when money could buy nothing but 
 j excess, and when those who were prodigal could only 
 be gaudy and intemperate. It was necessary to prac- 
 j tise upon the reverse, too ; and hence all the world is 
 convinced of the superior happiness of the plough- 
 man, the absolute necessity of early rising and coarse 
 food to health, and the pride that must come with the 
 flaunting of silk and satin." 
 
 I could not but smile at this cool upset of all the 
 j received philosophy of the poets. 
 
 "You laugh," she continued, "but is it not true 
 that in England, at this moment, luxury is the sci- 
 ence of keeping up the zest of the senses rather than 
 of pampering them — that the children of the wealthy 
 are the healthiest and fairest, and the sons of the aris- 
 tocracy are the most athletic and rational, as well as 
 the most carefully nurtured and expensive of all clas- 
 ses — that the most costly dinners are the most digesti- 
 ble, the most expensive wines the least injurious, the 
 most sumptuous houses the best ventilated and whole- 
 some, and the most aristocratic habits of life the most 
 \ conducive to the preservation of the constitution and 
 consequent long life. There will be excesses, of 
 course, in all spheres, but is not this true ?" 
 
 " I am wondering how so gay a life as yours could 
 furnish such very grave reflections." 
 
 " Pshaw ! I am The very person to make them. My 
 aunt (who, by-the-way, never rises till four in the af- 
 ternoon) has always lived in this sublimated sphere, 
 and takes all these luxuries to be matters of course, 
 as much as I take them to be miracles. She thinks 
 ] a good cook as natural a circumstance as a fine tree, 
 \ and would be as much surprised and shocked at the 
 absence of wax candles, as she would at the going out 
 ! of the stars. She talks as if good dentists, good mil- 
 liners, opera-singers, perfumers, etc., were the com- 
 mon supply of nature, like dew and sunshine to the 
 flowers. My surprise and delight amuse her, as the 
 child's wonder at the moon amuses the nurse." 
 
 "Yet you call this dull unconsciousness the per- 
 fection of civilized life." 
 
 "I think my aunt altogether is not a bad specimen 
 of it, certainly. You have seen her, I think." 
 "Frequently." 
 
 " Well, you will allow that she is still a very hand- 
 some woman. She is past fifty, and has every fac- 
 ulty in perfect preservation; an erect figure, undimin- 
 ished delicacy and quickness in all her senses and 
 j tastes, and is still an ornament to society, and an at- 
 tractive person in appearance and conversation. Con- 
 trast her (and she is but one of a class) with the 
 | women past fifty in the middle and lower walks of life 
 | in America. At that age, with us, they are old 
 
290 
 
 WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 women in the commonest acceptation of the term. 
 Their teeth are gone or defective from neglect, their 
 faces are wrinkled, their backs bent, ther feet enlarged, 
 their voices cracked, their senses impaired, their rel- 
 ish in the joys of the young entirely gone by. What 
 makes the difference ? Costly care. The physician 
 has watched over her health at a guinea a visit. The 
 dentist has examined her teeth at twenty guineas a 
 year. Expensive annual visits to the seaside have re- 
 newed her skin. The friction of the weary hands of 
 her maid has kept down the swelling of her feet and 
 preserved their delicacy of shape. Close and open 
 carriages at will, have given her daily exercise, either 
 protected from the damp, or refreshed with the fine 
 lir of the country. A good cook has kept her diges- 
 tion untaxed, and good wines have invigorated with- 
 out poisoning her constitution." 
 
 " This is taking very unusual care of oneself, how- 
 ever." 
 
 " Not at all. My aunt gives it no more thought 
 than the drawing on of her glove. It is another ad- 
 vantage of wealth, too, that your physician and den- 
 tist are distinguished persons who meet you in society, 
 and call on you unprofessionally, see when they are 
 needed, and detect the approach of disease before 
 you are aware of it yourself. My aunt, though ' nat- 
 urally delicate,' has never been ill. She was watched 
 in childhood with great cost and pains, and, with the 
 habit of common caution herself, she is taken such 
 care of by her physician and servants, that nothing 
 but some extraordinary fatality could bring disease 
 near her." 
 
 " Blessed are the rich, by your showing." 
 
 " Why, the beatitudes were not written in our times. 
 If long life, prolonged youth and beauty, and almost 
 perennial health, are blessings, certainly, now-a-days, 
 blessed are the rich." 
 
 "But is there no drawback to all this? Where 
 people have surrounded themselves with such costly 
 and indispensable luxuries, are they not made selfish 
 by the necessity of preserving them? Would any 
 exigence of hospitality, for instance, induce your aunt 
 to give up her bed, and the comforts of her own room, 
 to a stranger?" 
 
 ** Oh dear, no !" 
 
 "Would she eat her dinner cold for the sake of 
 listening to an appeal to her charity?" 
 
 " How can you fancy such a thing ?" 
 
 "Would she take a wet and dirty, but perishing 
 beggar-woman into her chariot on her way to a din- 
 ner-party, to save her from dying by the roadside ?" 
 
 "Urn — why, I fear she would be very nearsighted 
 till she got fairly by." 
 
 " Yet these are charities that require no great ef- 
 fort in those whose chambers are less costly, whose 
 stomachs are less carefully watched, and whose car- 
 riages and dresses are of a plainer fashion." 
 
 "Very true !" 
 
 " So far, then, 'blessed are the poor!' But is not 
 the heart slower in all its sympathies among the rich? 
 Are not friends chosen and discarded, because their 
 friendship is convenient or the contrary ? Are not 
 many worthy people 'ineligible' acquaintances, many 
 near relations unwelcome visiters, because they are 
 out of keeping with these costly circumstances, or 
 involve some sacrifice of personal luxury ? Are not 
 people, who would not preserve their circle choice 
 and aristocratic, obliged to inflict cruel insults on 
 eensitive minds, to slight, to repulse, to neglect, to 
 equivocate and play the unfeeling and ungrateful, at 
 the same time that to their superiors they must often 
 sacrifice dignity, and contrive, and flatter, and de- 
 ceive — all to preserve the magic charm of the life you 
 have painted so attractive and enviable?" 
 
 "Heigho! it's a bad world, I believe !" said Miss 
 Trevanion, betraying by that ready sigh, that even 
 
 while drawing the attractions of high life, she had not 
 been blind to this more unfavorable side of the pic- 
 ture. 
 
 " And, rather more important query still, for an 
 heiress," I said, "does not an intimate acquaintance 
 with these luxurious necessities, and the habit of 
 thinking them indispensable, make all lovers in this 
 class mercenary, and their admiration, where there is 
 wealth, subject, at least, to scrutiny and suspicion ?" 
 
 A quick flush almost crimsoned Miss Trevanion's 
 face, and she fixed her eyes upon me so inquisitively 
 as to leave me in no doubt that I had inadvertently 
 touched upon a delicate subject. Embarrassed by a 
 searching look, and not seeing how I could explain 
 that I meant no allusion, I said hastily, " I was think- 
 ing of swimming across the Susquehannah by moon- 
 light." 
 
 "Puck is at the door, if you please, miss!" said 
 the butler, entering at the moment. 
 
 " Perhaps while I am putting on my riding-hat," 
 said Miss Trevanion, with a laugh, "I may discover 
 the connexion between your last two observations. It 
 certainly is not very clear at present." 
 
 I took up my hat. 
 
 "Stay — you must ride with me. You shall have 
 the groom's horse, and we will go without him. I 
 hate to be chased through the park by a flying ser- 
 vant — one English fashion, at least, that I think un- 
 comfortable. They manage it better where 1 learned 
 to ride," she added with a laugh. 
 
 " Yes, indeed ! I do not know which they would 
 first starve to death in the backwoods — the master for 
 his insolence in requiring the servant to follow him, 
 or the servant for being such a slave as to obey." 
 
 I never remember to have seen a more beautiful 
 animal than the highbred blood-mare on which my 
 ci-devant hostess of the Plymton inn rode through 
 the park gates, and took the serpentine path at a free 
 gallop. I was as well mounted myself as I had ever 
 been in my life, and delighted, for once, not to fret a 
 hundred yards behind ; the ambitious animal seemed 
 to have wings to his feet. 
 
 " Who ever rode such a horse as this," said my 
 companion, " without confessing the happiness of 
 riches! It is the one luxury of this new life that 1 
 should find it misery to forego. Look at the eager- 
 ness of his ears ! See his fine limbs as he strikes for- 
 ward ! What nostrils! What glossy shoulders! 
 What bounding lightness of action ! Beautiful Puck ! 
 I could never live without you! What a shame to 
 nature that there are no such horses in the wilder- 
 ness !" 
 
 " I remember seeing an Indian pony," said I, watch- 
 ing her face for the effect of my observation, " which 
 had as many fine qualities, though of a different 
 kind — at least when his master was on him." 
 
 She looked at me inquiringly. 
 
 "By-the-way, too, it was at your house on the Sus- 
 quehannah," I added, " you must remember the 
 horse — a black, double-jointed " 
 
 "Yes, yes! I know. I remember. Shall we 
 quicken our pace ? I hear some one overtaking us, 
 and to be passed with such horses as ours were a 
 shame indeed." 
 
 -We loosed our bridles and flew away like the wind; 
 but a bright tear was presently tossed from her 
 dark eyelash, and fell glittering on the dappled shoul- 
 der of her horse. " Her heart is Shahatan's," thought 
 I, "whatever chance there may be that the gay hon- 
 orable who is at our heels may dazzle her into throw- 
 ing away her hand." 
 
 Mounted on a magnificent hunter, whose powerful 
 and straightforward leaps soon told against the lavish 
 and high action of our more showy horses, the Hon. 
 
 Charles (the gentleman who had engrossed the 
 
 attention of Miss Trevanion the night before at 
 
WIGWAM versus ALM AUK'S. 
 
 291 
 
 Almack's) was soon beside ray companion, and leaning 
 from his saddle, was taking pains to address conversa- 
 tion to her in a tone not meant for my ear. As the 
 lady picked out her path with a marked preference 
 for his side of the road, I of course rode with a free 
 rein on the other, rather discontented, however, I 
 must own, to be playing Monsieur de Trop. The 
 Hon. Charles, I very well knew, was enjoying a tem- 
 porary relief from the most pressing of his acquaint- 
 ances by the prospect of his marrying an heiress, and 
 in a two years' gay life in London I had traversed his 
 threads too often to believe that he had a heart to be 
 redeemed from dissipation, or a soul to appreciate the 
 virtues of a high-minded woman. I found myself, 
 besides, without wishing it, attorney for Shahatan in 
 the case. 
 
 Observing that I " sulked," Miss Trevanion, in the 
 next round, turned her horse's head toward the Ser- 
 pentine Bridge, and we entered into Kensington Gar- 
 dens. The band was playing on the other side of the 
 ha-ha, and fashionable London was divided between 
 the equestrians on the road, and the promenaders on 
 the greensward. We drew up in the thickest of the 
 crowd, and presuming that, by Miss Trevanion's tac- 
 tics, I was to find some other acquaintance to chat 
 with while our horses drew breath, I spurred to a lit- 
 tle distance, and sat mum in my saddle with forty or 
 fifty horsemen between me and herself. Her other 
 companion had put his horse as close by the side of i 
 Puck as possible; but there were other dancers at i 
 Almack's \s ho had an eye upon the heiress, and their 
 ttte-a-tele was interrupted presently by the how-d'ye- 
 do's and attentions of half a dozen of the gayest men 
 about town. After looking black at them for a mo- 
 
 ment, Charles drew bridle, and backing out of 
 
 the press rather unceremoniously, rode to the side of I 
 a lady who sat in her saddle with a mounted servant 
 behind her, separated from me by only the trunk of a j 
 superb lime-tree. I was fated to see all the workings 
 of Miss Trevanion's destiny. 
 
 •'You see what I endure for you!" he said, as a 
 flush came and went in his pale face. 
 
 "You are false!" was the answer. "I saw you 
 ride in — your eyes fastened to hers — your lips open 
 with watching for her words — your horse in a foam 
 with your agitated and nervous riding. Never call 
 her a giraffe, or laugh at her again, Charles ! She is 
 handsome enougli to be loved for herself, and you 
 love her ."' 
 
 " No. by Heaven !" 
 
 The lady made a gesture of impatience and whipped 
 her stirrup through the folds of her riding-dress till it 
 was beard even above the tinkling triangle of the band. 
 
 " No !" he continued, "and you are less clever than 
 you think, if you interpret my excitement into love. 
 I am excited — most eager in my chase after this wo- 
 man. You shall knoio why. But for herself— good 
 heavens ! — why, you have never heard her speak ! 
 She is never done wondering at silver forks, never 
 done with ecstatics about finger-glasses and pastilles. 
 She is a boor — and you are silly enough to put her 
 beside yourself!" 
 
 The lady's frown softened, and she gave him her 
 whip to hold while she reimprisoned a stray ringlet. 
 
 "Keep an eye on her, while I am talking to you," 
 he continued, " for I must stick to her like her shad- 
 ow. She is full of mistrust, and if I lose her by the 
 want of attention for a single hour, that hour will cost 
 me yourself, dearest, first and most important of all, 
 and it will cost me England or my liberty — for failing 
 this, I have not a chance." 
 
 44 Go ! go !" said the lady, in a new and now anx- 
 ious tone, touching his horse at the same time with 
 the whip he had just restored to her, "she is off! 
 Adieu !" 
 
 And with half a dozen attendants, Miss Trevanion 
 
 took the road at a gallop, while her contented rival 
 followed at a pensive amble, apparently quite content 
 to waste the time as she best might till dinner. The 
 handsome fortune-hunter watched his opportunity 
 and regained his place at Miss Trevanion's side, and 
 with an acquaintance, who was one of her self-select- 
 ed troop, I kept in the rear, chatting of the opera, 
 and enjoying the movement of a horse of as free and 
 admirable action as I had ever felt communicated, 
 like inspiration, through my blood. 
 
 I was resumed as sole cavalier and attendant at 
 Hyde Park gate. 
 
 44 Do you know the Baroness ?" I asked, as 
 
 we walked our horses slowly down Grosvenor Place. 
 
 44 Not personally," she replied, " but I have heard 
 my aunt speak of her, and I know she is a woman of 
 most seductive manners, though said to be one of 
 
 very bad morals. But from what Mr. Charles 
 
 tells me, I fancy high play is her only vice. And 
 meantime she is received everywhere." 
 
 41 1 fjancy," said I, "that the Hon. Charles is 
 
 good authority for the number of her vices, and beg- 
 ging you, as a parting request, to make this remark 
 the key to your next month's observation, I have the 
 honor to return this fine horse to you, and make my 
 adieux." 
 
 44 But you will come to dinner! And, by-the-by, 
 you have not explained to me what you meant by 
 'swimming across the Susquehannah,' in the middle 
 of your breakfast, this morning." 
 
 While Miss Trevanion gathered up her dress to 
 mount the steps, I told her the story which I have 
 already told the reader, of my involuntary discovery, 
 while lying in that moonlit river, of Shahatan's unfor- 
 tunate passion. Violently agitated by the few words 
 in which I conveyed it, she insisted on my entering 
 the house, and waiting while she recovered herself 
 sufficiently to talk to me on the subject. But 1 had 
 no fancy for match-making or breaking. I reiterated 
 my caution touching the intimacy of her fashionable 
 admirer with the baroness, and said a word of praise 
 of the noble savage who loved her. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Ln the autumn of the year after the events outlined 
 in the previous chapter, I received a visit at my resi- 
 dence on the Susquehannah, from a friend I had never 
 before seen a mile from St. James's street— a May-fair 
 man of fashion who took me in his way back from 
 Santa Fe. He stayed a few days to brush the cob- 
 webs from a fishing-rod and gun which he found in 
 inglorious retirement in the lumber-room of my cot- 
 tage, and, over our dinners, embellished with his trout 
 and woodcock, the relations of his adventures (com- 
 pared, as everything was, with London experience ex- 
 clusively) were as "delightful to me as the tales of 
 Scheherezade to the calif. 
 
 41 1 have saved to the last," he said, pushing me the 
 bottle, the evening before his departure, " a bit of ro- 
 mance which I stumbled over in the prairie, and I 
 dare swear it will surprise you as much as it did me, 
 for I think you will remember having seen the heroine 
 at Almack's." 
 
 44 At Almack's ?" 
 
 "You may well stare. I have been afraid to tell 
 you the story, lest you should think I drew too long 
 a bow. I certainly should never be believed in Lon- 
 don." 
 
 44 Well — the story ?" 
 
 " I told you of my leaving St. Louis with a trading 
 party for Santa Fe. Our leader was a rough chap, 
 big-boned, and ill put together, but honestly fond of 
 fight, and never content with a stranger till he had 
 
292 
 
 WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 settled the question of which was the better man. He 
 refused at first to take rne into his party, assuring me 
 that his exclusive services and those of his company 
 had been engaged at a high price, by another gentle- 
 man. By dint of drinking 'juleps' with him, how- 
 ever, and giving him a thorough • mill' (for though 
 strong as a rhinoceros, he knew nothing of 'the sci- 
 ence'), he at last elected me to the honor of his friend- 
 ship, and took me into the party as one of his own 
 men. 
 
 " I bought a strong horse, and on a bright May 
 morning the party set forward, bag and baggage, the 
 leader having stolen a march upon us, however, and 
 gone ahead with the person who hired his guidance. 
 It was fine fun at first, as I have told you, to gallop 
 away over the prairie without fence or ditch, but I 
 soon tired of the slow pace and the monotony of the 
 scenery, and began to wonder why the deuce our 
 leader kept himself so carefully out of sight — for in 
 three days' travel I had seen him but once, and then 
 at our bivouac fire on the second evening. The men 
 knew or would tell nothing, except that he had one 
 man and a packhorse with him, and that the ' gentle- 
 man' and he encamped farther on. I was under prom- 
 ise to perform only the part of one of the hired carriers 
 of the party, or I should soon have made a push to 
 penetrate 'the gentleman's' mystery. 
 
 " I think it was on the tenth day of our travels that 
 the men began to talk of falling in with a tribe of In- 
 dians, whose hunting-grounds we were close upon, 
 and at whose village, upon the bank of a river, they 
 usually got fish and buffalo-hump, and other luxuries 
 not picked up on the wing. We encamped about 
 sunset that night as usual, and after picketing my 
 horse, I strolled off to a round mound not far from the 
 fire, and sat down upon the top to see the moon rise. 
 The east was brightening, and the evening was de- 
 licious. 
 
 "Up came the moon, looking like one of the duke 
 of Devonshire's gold plates (excuse the poetry of the 
 comparison), and still the rosy color hung on in the 
 west, and turning my eyes from one to the other, I at 
 last perceived, over the southwestern horizon, a mist 
 slowly coming up, which indicated the course of a 
 river. It was just in our track, and the whim struck 
 me to saddle my horse and ride on in search of the 
 Indian village, which, by their description, must be on 
 its banks. 
 
 " The men were singing songs over their supper, 
 and with a flask of brandy in my pocket, I got off un- 
 observed, and was soon in a flourishing gallop over the 
 wild prairie, without guide or compass. It was a silly 
 freak, and might have ended in an unpleasant adven- 
 ture. Pass the bottle and have no apprehensions, 
 however. 
 
 " For an hour or so, I was very much elated with 
 my independence, and my horse too seemed delighted 
 to get out of the slow pace of the caravan. It was as 
 light as day with the wonderful clearness of the atmo- 
 sphere, and the full moon and the coolness of the 
 evening air made exercise very exhilarating. I rode 
 on, looking up occasionally to the mist, which retreat- 
 ed long after I thought I should have reached the 
 river, till I began to feel uneasy at last, and wondered 
 whether I had not embarked in a very mad adventure. 
 As I had lost sight of our own fires, and might miss 
 my way in trying to retrace my steps, I determined to 
 push on. 
 
 " My horse was in a walk, and I was beginning to 
 feel very grave, when suddenly the beast pricked up 
 his ears and gave a loud neigh. I rose in my stirrups, 
 and looked round in vain for the secret of his improved 
 spirits, till with a second glance forward, I discovered 
 what seemed the faint light reflected upon the smoke 
 of a concealed fire. The horse took his own counsel, 
 and set up a sharp gallop for the spot, and a few min- 
 
 utes brought me in sight of a fire half concealed by a 
 clump of shrubs, and a white object near it, which to 
 my surprise developed to a tent. Two horses picketed 
 near, and a man sitting by the fire with his hands 
 crossed before his shins, and his chin on his knees, 
 completed the very agreeable picture. 
 
 " 'Who goes there?' shouted this chap, springing 
 to his rifle as he heard my horse's feet sliding through 
 the grass. 
 
 " I gave the name of the leader, comprehending at 
 once that this was the advanced guard of our party ; 
 but though the fellow lowered his rifle, he gave me a 
 very scant welcome, and motioned me away from the 
 tent-side of the fire. There was no turning a man out 
 of doors in the midst of a prairie ; so, without cere- 
 mony, I tethered my horse to his stake, and getting 
 out my dried beef and brandy, made a second supper 
 with quite as good an appetite as had done honor to 
 the first. 
 
 " My brandy-flask opened the lips of my sulky friend 
 after a while, though he kept his carcass very obsti- 
 nately between me and the tent, and I learned that the 
 leader (his name was Rolfe, by-the-by), had gone on 
 to the Indian village, and that 'the gentleman' had 
 dropped the curtain of his tent at my approach, and 
 was probably asleep. My word of honor to Rolfe that 
 I would 'cut no capers' (his own phrase in adminis- 
 tering the obligation), kept down my excited curiosity, 
 and prevented me, of course, from even pumping the 
 man beside me, though I might have done so with a 
 little more of the contents of my flask. 
 
 " The moon was pretty well overhead when Rolfe 
 returned, and found me fast asleep by the fire. I awoke 
 with the trampling and neighing of horses, and, spring- 
 ing to my feet, I saw an Indian dismounting, and Rolfe 
 and the fire-tender conversing together while picketing 
 their horses. The Indian had a tall feather in his cap, 
 and trinkets on his breast, which glittered in the moon- 
 light ; but he was dressed otherwise like a white man, 
 with a huuting-frock and very loose large trowsers. 
 By the way, he had moccasins, too, and a wampum 
 belt ; but he was a clean-limbed, lithe, agile-looking 
 devil, with an oye like a coal of fire. 
 
 " 'You've broke your contract, mister!' said Rolfe, 
 coming up to me; 'but stand by and say nolhing.' 
 
 "He then went to the tent, gave an 'ehem!' by 
 way of a knock, and entered 
 
 " 'It's a fine night !' said the Indian, coming up to 
 the fire and touching a brand with the toe of his moc- 
 casin. 
 
 " I was so surprised at the honest English in which 
 he delivered himself, that I stared at him without an- 
 swer. 
 
 " ' Do you speak English ?' he said. 
 
 " ' Tolerably well,' said I, ' but I beg your pardon 
 for being so surprised at your own accent that I forgot 
 to reply to you. And now I look at you more closely, 
 I see that you are rather Spanish than Indian.' 
 
 " ' My mother's blood,' he answered rather coldly, 
 'but my father was an Indian, and I am a chief.' 
 
 " ' Well, Rolfe,' he continued, turning the next in- 
 stant to the trader, who came toward us, ' who is this 
 that would see Shahatan ?' 
 
 " The trader pointed to the tent. The curtain was 
 put aside, and a smart-looking youth, in a blue cap 
 and cloak, stepped out and took his way off into the 
 prairie, motioning to the chief to follow. 
 
 " ' Go along ! he won't eat ye !' said Rolfe, as the 
 Indian hesitated, from pride or distrust, and laid his 
 hand on his tomahawk. 
 
 " I wish I could tell you what was said at that in- 
 terview, for my curiosity was never so strongly excited. 
 Rolfe seemed bent on preventing both interference and 
 observation, however, and in his loud and coarse voice 
 commenced singing and making preparations for his 
 supper; and, persuading me into the drinking part of 
 
WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S. 
 
 293 
 
 it, I listened to his stories and toasted my shins till I j 
 was too sleepy to feel either romance or curiosity;; 
 and leaving the moon to waste its silver on the wilder- 
 new, and the mysterious colloquists to ramble and ! 
 finish their conference as they liked, I rolled over on 
 my buffalo-skin and dropped off to sleep. 
 
 " The next morning I rubbed my eyes to discover 
 whether all 1 have been telling you was not a dream, 
 for tent and demoiselle had evaporated, and I lay with 
 toy feet to the smouldering fire, and all the trading 
 party preparing: for breakfast around me. Alarmed at 
 my absence, they had made a start before sunrise to 
 overtake Rolfe, and had come up while I slept. The 
 leader after a while gave me a slip of paper from the 
 chief, saying that he should be happy to give me a 
 specimen of Indian hospitality at the Shawanee vil- ] 
 lage, on my return from Santa Fe — a neat hint that I 
 was not to intrude upon him at present." 
 
 '• Which you took ?" 
 
 " Rolfe seemed to have had a hint which was prob- 
 ably in some more decided shape, since he took it for i 
 us all. The men grumbled at passing the village with- 
 out stopping for fish, but the leader was inexorable, \ 
 and we left it to the right and 'made tracks,' as the 
 hunters say, for our destination. Two days from there 
 we saw a buffalo " 
 
 " Which you demolished. You told me that story 
 last night. Come, get back to the Shawanees ! You 
 called on the village at your return ?" 
 
 " Yes, and an odd place it was. We came upon it 
 from the west, Rolfe having made a bend to the west- 
 ward, on his return back. We had been travelling all 
 day over a long plain, wooded in clumps, looking very 
 much like an immense park, and I began to think that 
 the trader intended to cheat me out of my visit — for 
 he said we should sup with the Shawanees that night, 
 and I did not in the least recognise the outline of the | 
 country. We struck the bed of a small and very beau- 
 tiful river, presently, however, and after following it j 
 through a wood for a mile, came to a sharp brow 
 where the river suddenly descended to a plain at least 
 two hundred feet lower than the table-land on which 
 we had been travelling. The country below looked 
 as if it might have been the bed of an immense lake, 
 and we stood on the shore of it. 
 
 " I sat on my horse geologizing in fancy about this 
 singular formation of land, till, hearing a shout, I 
 found the party had gone on, and Rolfe was hallooing 
 to me to follow. As I was trying to get a glimpse of 
 him through the trees, up rode my old acquaintance 
 Shahatan, with his rifle across his thigh, and gave me 
 a very cordial welcome. He then rode on to show me 
 the way. We left the river, which was foaming among 
 some fine rapids, and by a zig-zag side-path through 
 the woods, descended about half way to the plain, 
 where we rounded a huge rock, and stood suddenly in 
 the village of the Shawanees. You can not fancy any 
 thing so picturesque. On the left, for a quarter of a 
 mile, extended a natural steppe, or terrace, a hundred 
 yards wide, and rounding in a crescent to the south. 
 The river came in toward it on the right in a superb 
 cascade, visible from the whole of the platform, and 
 against the rocky wall at the back, and around on the 
 edge overlooking the plain, were built the wigwams 
 and log-huts of the tribe, in front of which lounged 
 men, women, and children, enjoying the cool of the 
 summer evening. Not far from the base of the hill 
 the river reappeared from the woods, and I distin- 
 guished some fields planted with corn along its banks, 
 and horses and cattle grazing. What, with the pleas- 
 ant sound of the falls, and the beauty of the scene al- 
 together, it was to me more like the primitive Arcadia 
 we dream about, than anything I ever saw. 
 
 "Well, Rolfe and his party reached the village pres- 
 ently, for the chief had brought me by a shorter cut, 
 and in a moment the whole tribe was about us, and 
 4 
 
 the trader found himself apparently among old ac- 
 quaintances. The chief sent a lad with my horse 
 down into the plain to be picketed where the grass was 
 better, and took me into a small hut, where I treated 
 myself to a little more of a toilet than I had been ac- 
 customed to of late, in compliment to the unusual 
 prospect of supping with a lady. The hut was lined 
 with bark, and seemed used by the chief for the same 
 purpose, as there were sundry articles of dress and 
 other civilized refinements hanging to the bracing- 
 poles, and covering a rude table in the corner. 
 
 " Fancy my surprise, on coming out, to meet the 
 chief strolling up and down his prairie shelf with, not 
 one lady, but half a dozen — a respectable looking gen- 
 tleman in black (I speak of his coat), and a bevy of 
 nice-looking girls, with our Almack's acquaintance in 
 the centre — the whole party, except the chief, dressed 
 in a way that would pass muster in any village in Eng- 
 land. Shahatan wore the Indian's blanket, modified 
 with a large mantle of fine blue cloth, and crossed over 
 his handsome bare chest something after the style of 
 a Hieland tartan. I really never saw a better made or 
 more magnificent looking fellow, though I am not sure 
 that his easy and picturesque dress would not have im- 
 proved a plainer man. 
 
 " I remembered directly that Rolfe had said some- 
 thing to me about missipnaries living among the Shaw- 
 anees, and I was not surprised to hear that the gentle- 
 man in a black coat was a reverend, and the ladies the 
 
 j sisterhood of the mission. Miss Trevanion seemed 
 
 j rather in haste to inform me of the presence of 'the 
 cloth,' and in the next breath claimed my congratula- 
 
 j tions on her marriage ! She had been a chieftainess 
 
 S for two months. 
 
 "We strolled up and down the grassy terrace, divi- 
 ding our attention between the effects of the sunset on 
 the prairie below and the preparations for our supper, 
 which was going on by the light of pine-knots stuck 
 in the clefts of the rock in the rear. A dozen Indian 
 girls were crossing and recrossing before the fires, 
 and with the bright glare upon the precipice, and the 
 moving figures, wigwams, &c, it was like a picture of 
 Salvator Rosa's. The fair chieftainess, as she glided 
 across occasionally to look after the people, with a step 
 as light as her stately figure would allow, was not the 
 least beautiful feature of the scene. We lost a fine 
 creature when we let her slip through our fingers, my 
 dear fellow !" 
 
 " Thereby hangs a tale, I have little doubt, and I 
 can give you some data for a good guess at it — but as 
 the ' nigger song' has it — 
 
 " Tell us what dey had for supper— 
 Black-eyed pease, or bread and butter ?" 
 
 "We had everything the wilderness could produce 
 — appetites included. Lying in the track of the tra- 
 ding-parties, Shahatan, of course, made what additions 
 he liked to the Indian mode of living, and except that 
 our table was a huge buffalo-skin stretched upon stakes, 
 the supper might have been a traveller's meal among 
 Turks or Arabs, for all that was peculiar about it. I 
 should except, perhaps, that no Turk or Arab ever saw 
 so pretty a creature as the chiefs sister, who was my 
 neighbor at the feast." 
 
 " So — another romance !" 
 
 " No, indeed ! For though her eyes were eloquent 
 enough to persuade one to forswear the world and turn 
 Shawanee, she had no tongue for a stranger. What 
 little English she had learned of the missionaries she 
 was too sly to use, and our flirtation was a very unsat- 
 isfactory pantomime. I parted from her at night in 
 the big wigwam, without having been out of ear-shot 
 of the chief for a single moment; and as Rolfe was in- 
 exorable about getting off with the daybreak the next 
 morning, it was the last I saw of the little fawn. But 
 to tell you the truth, I had forty minds between that 
 
294 
 
 MISS JONES'S SON. 
 
 and St. Louis to turn about and have another look 
 at her. 
 
 " The big wigwam, I should tell you, was as large 
 as a common breakfast-room in London. It was built 
 of bark very ingeniously sewed together, and lined 
 throughout with the most costly furs, even the floor 
 covered with highly-dressed bear-skins. After finish- 
 ing our supper in the open air, the large curtain at the 
 door, which was made of the most superb gold-colored 
 otters, was thrown up to let in the blaze of the pine 
 torches stuck in the rock opposite, and, as the evening 
 was getting cool, we followed the chiefiainess to her 
 savage drawing-room, and took coffee and chatted till 
 a late hour, lounging on the rude, fur-covered couch- 
 es. I had not much chance to talk with our old 
 friend, but I gathered from what little she said that 
 she had been disgusted with the heartlessness of Lon- 
 don, and preferred the wilderness with one of nature's 
 nobility to all the splendors of matrimony in high-life. 
 
 She said, however, that she should try to induce Sha-. 
 hatan to travel abroad for a year or two, and after that, 
 she thought their time would be agreeably spent in 
 such a mixture of savage and civilized life as her for- 
 tune and his control over the tribe would enable them 
 to manage." 
 
 When my friend had concluded his story, I threw 
 what little light I possessed upon the undeveloped 
 springs of Miss Trevanion's extraordinary movements, 
 and we ended our philosophizings on the subject by 
 promising ourselves a trip to the Shawanees some day 
 together. Now that we are together in London, how- 
 ever, and have had the benefit of Mrs. Melicent's ad- 
 ditional chapter, with the still later news that Shahatan 
 and his wife were travelling by the last accounts in the 
 east, we have limited our programme to meeting them 
 in England, and have no little curiosity to see whether 
 the young savage will decide like his wife in the ques- 
 tion of "Wigwam versus Almack's." 
 
 MISS JONES'S SON, 
 
 One night, toward the close of the London season 
 — the last week in August, or thereabouts — the Dept- 
 ford omnibus set down a gentleman at one of the small 
 brick-block cottages on the Kent road. He was a 
 very quietly disposed person, with a face rather in- 
 scrutable to a common eye, and might, or might not, 
 pass for what he was — a man of mark. His age was 
 perhaps thirty, and his manners and movements had 
 that cool security which can come only from con- 
 versance with a class of society that is beyond being 
 laughed at. He was handsome — but when the style 
 of a man is well pronounced, that is an unobserved 
 trifle. 
 
 Perhaps the reader will step in to No. 10, Verandah 
 Row, without further ceremony. 
 
 The room — scarce more than a squirrel-box from 
 back to front — was divided by folding doors, and the 
 furniture was fanciful and neatly kept. The canary- 
 bird, in a very small cage, in the corner, seemed rather 
 an intruder on such small quarters. You could scarce 
 give a guess what style of lady was the tenant of such 
 miniature gentility. 
 
 The omnibus passenger sat down in one of the little 
 cane-bottomed and straight backed chairs, and present- 
 ly the door opened and a stout elderly woman, whose 
 skirts really filled up the remaining void of the little 
 parlor, entered with a cordial exclamation, and an 
 affectionate embrace was exchanged between them. 
 
 " Well, my dear mother !" said the visiter, " I am 
 off to-morrow to Warwickshire to pass the shooting 
 season, and I came to wind up your household clock- 
 work, to go for a month — (ticking, I am sorry to say!) 
 What do you want ? How is the tea-caddy ?" 
 
 "Out of green, James, but the black will do till you 
 come back. La! don*t talk of such matters when you 
 are just going to leave me. I'll step up stairs and 
 make you out a list of my wants presently. Tell me 
 — where are you going in Warwickshire ? I went to 
 school in Warwickshire. Dear me ! the lovers I had 
 there ! Well, well ! Where did you say you were 
 going?" 
 
 " To the marquis of Headfort — Headfort court, I 
 think his place is called — a post and a half from Strat- 
 ford. Were you ever there, mother ?" 
 
 "/ there, indeed ! no, my son ! But I had a lover 
 near Stratford — young Sir Humphrey Fencher, he 
 was then — old Sir Humphrey now ! I'm sure he re- 
 
 members me, lone; as it is since I saw him — and, James, 
 I'll give you a letter to him. Yes — I should like to 
 know how he looks, and what he will say to my grown- 
 up boy. I'll go and write it now, and I'll look over 
 the groceries at the same time. If you move your 
 chair, James, don't crush the canary-bird !" 
 
 The mention of the letter of introduction lingered 
 i in the ear of the gentleman left in the parlor, and 
 smiling to himself with a look of covert humor, he 
 drew from his pocket a letter of which it reminded 
 him — the letter of introduction, on the strength of 
 which he was going to Warwickshire. As this and 
 the one which was being written up stairs, were the 
 two pieces of ordnance destined to propel the incidents 
 of our story, the reader will excuse us for presenting 
 them as a " make ready." 
 
 " Crockford's, Monday. 
 
 " Dear Fred : Nothing going on in town, except 
 a little affair of my own, which I can't leave to go 
 down to you. Dull even at Crocky's — nobody plays 
 this hot weather. And now, as to your commissions. 
 You will receive Dupree, the cook, by to-night's mail. 
 Grisi won't come to you without her man — ' 'twasn't 
 thus when we were boys." — so I send you a figurante, 
 and you must do tableaux. I was luckier in finding 
 
 you a wit. S will be withyou to-morrow, though, 
 
 by the way, it is only on condition of meeting Lady 
 Midge Bellasys, for whom, if she is not with you, you 
 must exert your inveiglements. This, by way only 
 of shuttlecock and battledore, however, for they play 
 at wit together — nothing more, on her part at least. 
 Look out for this devilish fellow, my lord Fred ! — 
 and live thin till you see the last of him — for he'll 
 laugh you into your second apoplexy with the danger- 
 ous ease of a hair-trigger. I could amuse you with 
 a turn or two in my late adventures, but black and 
 white are bad confidants, though very well as a busi- 
 ness firm. And, mentioning them, I have drawn on 
 you for a temporary d£500, which please lump with 
 my other loan, and oblige " Yours, faithfully, 
 
 " Vaurien." 
 
 And here follows the letter of Mrs. S to her 
 
 ancient lover, the baronet of Warwickshire : — 
 
 M No. 10, Verandah Row, Kent Road. 
 " Dear Sir Humphrey : Perhaps you will scarce 
 remember Jane Jones, to whom you presented the 
 
MISS JONES'S SON. 
 
 295 
 
 brush of your first fox. This was thirty years ago. 
 I was then at school in the little village near Tally-ho 
 hall. Dear ine ! how well 1 remember it ! On hear- 
 ing of your marriage, I accepted an offer from my late 
 
 husband, Mr. S , and our union was blessed 
 
 with one boy, who, I must say, is an angel of good- 
 ness. Out of his small income, my dear James fur- 
 nished and rented this very genteel house, and he 
 tells me f shall have it for life, and provides me one 
 servant, and everything I could possibly want. Thrice 
 a week he comes out to spend the day and dine with 
 me, and, in short, he is the pattern of good sons. As 
 this dear boy is going down to Warwickshire, I can not 
 resist the desire I have that you should know him, 
 and that he should bring me back an account of my 
 lover in days gone by. Any attention to him, dear 
 Sir Humphrey, will very much oblige one whom you 
 once was happy to oblige, and still 
 
 " Your sincere friend, Jane S , 
 
 "Formerly Jones." 
 
 It was a morning astray from paradise when S— 
 
 awoke at Stratford. Ringing for his breakfast, he re- 
 quested that the famous hostess of the red horse 
 would grace him so far as to join him over a muffin 
 and a cup of coffee, and between the pauses of his 
 toilet, he indited a note, enclosing his mother's letter 
 of introduction to Sir Humphrey. 
 
 Enter dame hostess, prim and respectful, and as 
 
 breakfast proceeded, S easily informed himself 
 
 of the geography of Tally-ho hall, and the existing 
 branch and foliage of the family tree. Sir Humphrey's 
 domestic circle consisted of a daughter and a neice 
 (his only son having gone with his regiment to the 
 Canada wars), and the hall lay half way to Headfort 
 court — the Fenchers his lordship's nearest neighbors, 
 Mrs. Boniface was inclined to think. 
 
 S divided his morning very delightfully be- 
 tween the banks of the Avon, and the be-scribbled 
 localities of Shakspere's birth and residence, and by 
 two o'clock the messenger had returned with this note 
 "rom Sir Humphrey : — 
 
 "Dear Sir: I remember Miss Jones very well, 
 God bless me, I thought she had been dead many 
 years. I am sure I shall be very happy to see her 
 6on. Will you come out and dine with us ? — dinner 
 at seven. Your ob't servant, "Humphrey Fencher. 
 
 "James S -, Esq." 
 
 As the crack wit and diner-out of his time, S- 
 
 was as well known to the brilliant society of London 
 as the face of the "gold stick in waiting" at St. 
 James's, and, with his very common name, he was a 
 little likely to be recognised out of his peculiar sphere 
 as the noble lord, when walking in Cheapside, to be 
 recognised as the " stick," so often mentioned in the 
 Court Journal. He had delayed his visit to Headfort 
 court for a day, and undertaken to deliver his mother's 
 letter, and look up her lang-syne lover, very much as 
 he would stop in the Strand to purchase her a parcel 
 of snuff— purely from the filial habit of always doing 
 her bidding, even in whims. He had very little curiosi- 
 ty to see a Warwickshire Nimrod, and, till his post- 
 chaise stopped at the lodge-gate of Tally-ho hall, it 
 had never entered his head to speculate upon the 
 ground of his introduction to Sir Humphrey, nor to 
 anticipate the nature of his reception. His name had 
 been so long to him an "open sesame," that he had 
 no doubt of its potency, and least of all when he pro- 
 nounced it at an inferior gate in the barriers of society. 
 
 Thedressing-bell had rang, and S was shown 
 
 into the vacant drawing-room, where he buried him- 
 self in the deepest chair he could find, and sat looking 
 at the wall with the composure of a barber's customer 
 waiting to be shaved. There presently entered two 
 young ladies, very showily dressed, who called him 
 Mr. "Jones," in replying to hia salutation, and im- 
 
 mediately fell to promenading between the two old 
 mirrors at the extremities of the room, discoursing 
 upon topics evidently chosen to exclude the new- 
 comer from the conversation. With rather a feeling 
 
 that it was their loss, not his, S recomposed 
 
 himself in the leathern chair and resumed the perusal 
 of the oaken ceiling. The neglect sat upon him a 
 little uncomfortable withal. 
 
 " How d'ye do, young man ! What ! you are Miss 
 Jones's son, eh ?" was the salutation of a burly old 
 gentleman, who now entered and shook hands with 
 the great incognito. " Here, 'Bel ! Fan ! Mr. Jones, 
 My daughter and my niece, Mr. Jones !" 
 
 S was too indignant for a moment to explain 
 
 that Miss Jones had changed her name before his 
 birth, and on second thought, finding that this real 
 character was not suspected, and that he represented 
 to Sir Humphrey simply the obscure son of an obscure 
 girl, pretty, thirty years ago, he fell quietly into the 
 role expected of him, and walked patiently in to dinner 
 with Miss Fencher, who accepted his arm for that 
 purpose, but forgot to take it ! 
 
 It was hard to be witty as a Mr. Jones, but the habil 
 was strong and the opportunities were good, and 
 
 S , warming with his first glass of sherry, struck 
 
 out some sparks that would have passed for gems of 
 the first water, with choicer listeners ; but wit is slowly 
 recognised when not expected, and though now and 
 then the young ladies stared, and now and then the 
 old baronet chuckled and said "egad! very well!' 
 there was evidently no material rise in the value of 
 Mr. Jones, and he at last confined his social talents 
 exclusively to his wine-glass and nut-picker, feeling, 
 spite of himself, as stupid as he seemed. 
 
 Relieved of the burden of replying to their guess, 
 the young ladies now took up a subject which evident- 
 ly lay nearest their hearts — a series of dejeuners, the 
 first of which was to come off the following morning 
 at Headfort court. As if by way of caveat, in case 
 Mr. Jones should fancy that he could be invited to 
 accompany Sir Humphrey, Miss Fencher took the 
 trouble to explain that these were, by no means, com- 
 mon country entertainments, but exclusive and select 
 parties, under the patronage of the beautiful and witty 
 Lady Imogen Bellasys, now a guest at Headfort. 
 Her ladyship had not only stipulated for societe choisic, 
 but had invited down a celebrated London wit, a great 
 friend of her own, to do the mottoes and keep up the 
 spirit of the masques and tableaux. Indeed, Miss 
 Fencher considered herself as more particularly the 
 guest and ally of Lady Imogen, never having been 
 permitted during her mother's life to visit Headfort 
 (though she did not see what the marquis's private 
 character had to do with his visiting list), and she ex- 
 pected to be called upon to serve as a sort of maid of 
 honor, or in some way to assist Lady Imogen, who 
 had invited her very affectionately, after church, on 
 Sunday. She thought, perhaps, she had better wake 
 up Sir Humphrey while she thought of it (and while 
 papa was good natured, as he always was after dinner), 
 and exact of him a promise that the great London 
 Mr., what d'ye call 'im, should be invited to pass a 
 week at Tally-ho hall — for, of course, as mutual 
 allies of Lady Imogen, Miss Fencher and he would 
 become rather well acquainted. 
 
 To this enlightenment, f which we have given only 
 a brief resumir, Mr. Jones listened attentively, as he 
 was expected to do, and was very graciously answered, 
 when by way of feeling one of the remote pulses of 
 his celebrity, he ventured to ask for some further par- 
 ticulars about the London wit aforementioned. He 
 learned, somewhat to his disgust, that his name was 
 either Brown or Simpson, some very common name, 
 however, but that he had a wonderful talent for writing 
 impromptu epigrams on people and singing them after- 
 ward to impromptu music on the piano, and that he 
 
296 
 
 MISS JONES'S SON. 
 
 was supposed to be a natural son of Talleyrand or 
 Lord Byron, Miss Fencher had forgotten which. He 
 had written something, but Miss Fencher had for- 
 gotten what. He was very handsome — no, very plain 
 — indeed, Miss Fencher had forgotten which — but it 
 was one or the other. 
 
 At this crisis of the conversation Sir Humphrey 
 roused from his post-prandial snooze, and begged Mr. 
 Jones to pass the port and open the door for the 
 ladies. By the time the gloves were rescued from 
 under the table, the worthy baronet had drained a 
 bumper, and, with his descending glass, dropped his 
 eyes to the level of his daughter's face, where they 
 rested with paternal admiration. Miss Fencher was 
 far from ill-looking, and she well knew that her father 
 waxed affectionate over his wine. 
 
 "Papa!" said she, coming behind him, and looking 
 down his throat, as he strained his head backward, 
 leaving his reluctant double chin resting on his cravat. 
 " I have a favor to ask, my dear papa !" 
 
 " He shall go, my dear! he shall go ! I have been 
 thinking of it — I'll arrange it, Bel, I'll arrange it ! Go 
 your ways, chick, and send me my slippers !" gurgled 
 the baronet, with his usual rapid brevity, when slight- 
 ly elevated. 
 
 Miss Fencher turned quite pale. 
 
 " Pa — pa !" she exclaimed, with horror in her voice, 
 coming round front, " pa — pa ! — good gtacious ! Do ! 
 you know it is the most exclusive — however, papa ! 
 let us talk that over in the other room. What 1 wish 
 to ask is quite another matter. You know that 
 Mr — Mr.—" 
 
 " The gentleman you mean is probably James 
 S ," interrupted Mr. Jones. 
 
 " Thank you, sir, so it is !" continued Miss Fencher, 
 putting her hand upon the Baronet's mouth, who was 
 
 about to speak — " It is Mr. James S ; and 
 
 what I wish, papa, is, to have Mr. James S in- 
 vited to pass a week with us. You know, papa, we 
 
 shall be very intimate — James S and I — both 
 
 of us assisting Lady Imogen, you know, papa ! and 
 — and — stay till I get some note-paper — will you, 
 dear papa ?" 
 
 " You will have your way, chick, you will have 
 your way," sighed Sir Humphrey, getting his specta- 
 cles out of a very tight pocket on his hip. "But, 
 bless me, I can't write in the evening. Mr. Jones — 
 perhaps Mr. Jones will write the note for me — just 
 
 present my compliments to Mr. S , and request 
 
 the honor, and all that — can you do it, Mr. Jones?" 
 
 S rapidly indited a polite note to himself, 
 
 which he handed to Miss Fencher for her approba- 
 tion, and meantime entered the butler with the coffee. 
 
 " Stuggins !" cried Sir Humphrey — " I wish Mr. 
 Jones — " 
 
 " Good Heavens! papa !" exclaimed Miss Fencher, 
 ending the remainder of her objurgation in a whisper 
 in her father's ear. But the baronet was not in a 
 mood to be controlled. 
 
 " My love!— Bel, 1 say !— he shall go. You d-d-d- 
 diddedent see Miss Jones's letter. He's a p-p-p-pattern 
 of filial duty ! — he gives his mother a house, and all 
 she wants!— he's a good son, I tell you! St-Stuggins, 
 come here ! Pass the port, Jones, my good fellow !" 
 
 Stuggins stepped forward a pace, and presented his 
 white waistcoat, and Miss Fencher flounced out of the 
 room in a passion. 
 
 " Stuggins!" said the old man, a little more tran- 
 quilly, since he had no fear now of being interrupted, 
 " I wish my friend, Mr. Jones, here, to see this cock- 
 a-hoop business to-morrow. It'll be a fine sight, they 
 tell me. I want him to see it, Stuggins ! You under- 
 stand me. His mother, Miss Jones, was a pretty girl, 
 Stuggins ! And she'll be very glad to hear that her 
 boy has seen such a fine show — eh, Jones ? eh, Stug- 
 gins ? Well, you know what I want. The Headlort 
 
 tenants will have a place provided for them, of course 
 — some shrubbery, eh? — some gallery — some place 
 behind the musicians, where they are out of the way, 
 but can see — isn't it so? eh ? eh ?" 
 
 "Yes, Sir Humphrey — no doubt, Sir Humphrey. 1 " 
 acceded Stuggins, with his ears still open to know how 
 the details were to be managed. 
 
 " Well — very well — and you'll take Jones with you 
 in the dickey — eh ? — Thomas will go on the box — eh ? 
 Will that do ? — and Mr. Jones will stay with us 
 to-nighl, and perhaps you'll show him his room, now, 
 and talk it over, eh, Stuggins ? — good night, Mr. 
 Jones ! — good night, Jones, my good fellow !" 
 
 And Sir Humphrey, having done this act of grate- 
 ful reminiscence for his old sweetheart, managed to 
 find his way into the next room unaided. 
 
 S — had begun, by this time, to see " straw for 
 
 his bricks," in the course matters were taking ; and 
 instead of throwing a decanter after Sir Humphrey, 
 and knocking down the butler for calling him Mr. 
 Jones, he accepted Stuggins's convoy to the house- 
 keeper's room, and with his droll stories and funny 
 ways, kept the maids and footmen in convulsions of 
 laughter till break of day. Such a merry time had 
 not come off in servants' hall for many a day, and of 
 many a precious morsel of the high life below stairs 
 of Tally-ho hall did he pick the brains of the delight- 
 ed Abigails. 
 
 The ladies, busied with their toilets, had their 
 breakfasts in their own rooms, and Mr. Jones did not 
 make his appearance till after the baronet had achieved 
 his red herring and seltzer. The carriage came round 
 at twelve, and the ladies stepped in, dressed for triumph, 
 tumbled after by burly Sir Humphrey, who required 
 one side of the vehicle to himself — Mr. Jones outside, 
 on the dickey with Stuggins, as previously arranged. 
 
 Half way up the long avenue of Headfort court, 
 Stuggins relinquished the dickey to its rightful oc- 
 cupant, Thomas, and, with Mr. Jones, turned off by 
 a side path that led to the dairy and offices — the latter 
 barely saving his legs, however, for the manoeuvre 
 was performed servant fashion, while the carriage kept 
 its way. 
 
 Lord Headfort was a widower, and his niece, Lady 
 Imogen Bellasys, the wittiest and loveliest girl in 
 England, stood upon the lawn for the mistress of the 
 festivities. She had occasion for a petticoat aid-de- 
 camp, and she knew that Lord Headfort wished to 
 propitiate his Warwickshire neighbors; and as Miss 
 Fencher was a fine grenadier looking girl, she pro- 
 moted her to that office immediately on her arrival, 
 decking her for the nonce with a broad blue riband of 
 authority. Miss Fencher made the best use of her 
 powers of self congratulation, and thanked God private- 
 ly besides, that Sir Humphrey had provided an eclipse 
 for Mr. Jones ; for with the drawback of presenting 
 such a superfluous acquaintance of their own to the 
 fastidious eyes of Lady Imogen, she felt assured that 
 her new honors would never have arrived to her. 
 She had had a hint, moreover, from her dressing- 
 maid, of Mr. Jones' comicalities below stairs ; and 
 the fact that he was a person who could be funny in 
 a kitchen, was quite enough to confirm the aristocratic 
 instinct by which she had at once pronounced upon 
 his condition. If her papahad been gay in his youth, 
 there was no reason why every Miss Jones should 
 send her child to him to be made a gentleman of! 
 " Filial pattern," indeed ! 
 
 The gayeties began. The French figurante, de- 
 spatched by Lord Vaurien from the opera, made up 
 her tableaux from the beauties, and those who had 
 ugly faces, but good figures, tried their attitudes on 
 the archery-lawn, and those whose complexions would 
 stand the aggravation, tripped to the dancing tents, 
 and the falcon was flown, and the greyhounds were 
 coursed, and a few couple of Warwickshire lads tried 
 
MISS JONES'S SON. 
 
 297 
 
 their backs at a wrestling fall, and the time wore on. 
 But to Lady Imogen's shrewd apprehension, it wore 
 on very heavily. "There was no wit afloat. Nobody 
 seemed gayer than he meant to be. The bubble was 
 wanting to their champagne of enjoyment. Miss 
 Fencher's blue riband went to and fro like a pendulum, 
 perpetually crossing the lawn between Lady Imogen 
 and the footman in waiting, to inquire if a post-chaise 
 had arrived from London. 
 
 " I will never forgive that James S , never !" 
 
 pettishly vowed her ladyship, as Miss Fencher came 
 back for the fiftieth time with no news of his arrival. 
 
 "Better feed your menagerie at once !" whispered 
 Lord Headfort to his niece, as he caught a glance at 
 her vexed face in passing. 
 
 The decision with which the order was given to 
 serve breakfast, seemed to hurry the very heat of the 
 kitchen fires, for in an incredibly short time, the hot 
 soups and delicate entremets of Monsieur Dupres 
 were on the tables, and breakfast was announced. The 
 band played a march, the games were abandoned, Miss 
 Fencher followed close upon the heels of her chef, to 
 secure a seat in her neighborhood, and in ten minutes 
 a hundred questions of precedence were settled, and 
 Sir Humphrey, somewhat to his surprise, and as much 
 to his delight, was called to the left hand of the mar- 
 quis. Tally-ho hall was in the ascendant. 
 
 During the first assault upon the soups, the band 
 played a delicious set of waltzes, terminating with the 
 clatter of changing plates. But at the same moment, 
 above all the ring of impinging china, arose a shout 
 of laughter from a party somewhere without the 
 pavilion, and so sustained and hearty was the peal, 
 that the servants stood petrified with their dishes, 
 and the guests sat in wondering silence. The steward 
 was instantly despatched to enforce order, and Lord 
 Headfort explained, that the tenants were feasted on 
 beef and ale, in the thicket beyond, though he could 
 scarce imagine what should amuse them so uncom- 
 monly. 
 
 " They have promised to maintain order, my lord!" 
 said the steward, returning, and stooping to his master's 
 ear, " but there is a droll gentleman among them, my 
 lord !" 
 
 "Then I dare swear it's better fun than this!" 
 mumbled his lordship for the steward's hearing, as 
 he looked round upon the unamused faces in his 
 neighborhood. 
 
 " Headfort," cried Lady Imogen, presently, from 
 the other end of the table, "did you send to Stratford 
 
 for S , or did you not ? Let us know whether 
 
 there is a chance of his coming !" 
 
 " Upon my honor, Lady Imogen, my own chariot 
 has been at the Stratford inn, waiting for him since 
 morning," was the marquis's answer. " Vaurien wrote 
 that he had booked him by the mail of the night be- 
 fore ! I'd give a thousand pounds if he were here !" 
 
 Bursts of laughter, breaking through all efforts to 
 suppress them, again rose from the offending quarter. 
 
 " It's a Mr. Jones, my lord," said the steward, 
 speaking between the marquis and Sir Humphrey ; 
 " he's a friend of Sir Humphrey's butler — and — if you 
 will excuse me, my lord — Stuggins says he is the son 
 of a Miss Jones, formerly an acquaintance of Sir 
 Humphrey's !" 
 
 Red as a turkey-cock grew the old baronet in a 
 moment. " I beg ten thousand pardons for having 
 intruded him here, my lord !" said Sir Humphrey ; 
 •' it's a poor lad that brought me a letter from his 
 mother, and I told Stuggins—" 
 
 But here Stuggins approached with a couple of 
 notes for his master, and, begging permission of the 
 marquis, Sir Humphrey put on his spectacles to read. 
 The guests at the table, meantime, were passing the 
 wine very slowly, and conversation more slowly still, 
 and, with the tranquillity that reigned in the pavilion, 
 the continued though half-smothered merriment of 
 the other party was provokingly audible. 
 
 " Can't we borrow a little fun from those merry 
 people ?" cried Lady Imogen, throwing up her eyes 
 despairingly as the marquis exchanged looks with her. 
 
 " [f we could persuade Sir Humphrey to introduce 
 his friend, Jones, to us — " 
 
 "J introduce him!" exclaimed the fuming baronet, 
 
 tearing off his spectacles in a rage, " read that before 
 
 you condescend to talk of noticing such a varlet ! 
 
 j Faith ! I think he's the clown from a theatre, or the 
 
 I waiter from a pot-house!" 
 
 The marquis read : — 
 
 " Dear Nu> t cle : It's hard on to six o'clock, and 
 I'm engaged at seven to a junketing at the ' Hen and 
 chickens,' with Stuggins and the maids. If you in- 
 tend to make me acquainted with your great lord, now 
 is the time. If you don't, I shall walk in presently, 
 and introduce myself; for I know how to make my 
 own way, nuncle — ask Miss Bel's maid, and the other 
 girls you introduced me to at Tally-ho hall ! Be in 
 a hurry, I'm just outside. Yours, " Jo^es. 
 
 " Sir Humphrey Fencher." 
 
 The excitement of Sir Humphrey, and the amused 
 face of the marquis as he read, had drawn Lady Imogen 
 from her seat, and as he read aloud, at her request, the 
 urgent epistle of Mr. Jones, she clapped her hands 
 with delight, and insisted on having him in. Sir 
 Humphrey declared he should take it as an affront if 
 the thing was insisted on, and Miss Fencher, who had 
 followed to her father's chair, and heard the reading 
 of the note, looked the picture of surprised indignation. 
 "Insolent! vulgar! abominable!" was all the com- 
 pliment she ventured upon, however. 
 
 " Will you let me look at Mr. Jones's note?" said 
 Lady Imogen. 
 
 " Good Heavens!" she exclaimed, after glancing at 
 it an instant, " I was sure it must be he !" 
 
 And out ran the beautiful queen of the festivities, 
 and the next moment, to Sir Humphrey's amazement, 
 and Miss Fencher's utter dismay, she returned, drag- 
 ging in, with her own scarf around his body, and her 
 own wreath of roses around his head, the friend of 
 Stuggins — the abominable Jones ! Up jumped the 
 marquis, and called him by name (not Jones), and 
 seized him by both hands, and up jumped with de- 
 lighted acclamation half a dozen other of the more 
 distinguished guests at table, and the merriment was 
 now on the other side of the thicket. 
 
 It was five or ten minutes before they were again 
 
 seated at table, S on Lady Imogen's right hand, 
 
 but there were two vacant chairs, for Sir Humphrey 
 and his daughter had taken advantage of the confusion 
 to disappear, and the field was open, therefore, for a 
 full account of Mr. Jones's adventures above and below 
 stairs at Tally-ho hall. A better subject never fell 
 into the hand of that inimitable humorist, and glorious- 
 ly he made use of it. 
 
 As he concluded, amid convulsions of laughter, the 
 
 butler brought in a note addressed to James S , 
 
 Esq., which had been given him by Stuggins early 
 in the day — his own autograph invitation to the hospi- 
 talities of Tally-ho hall ! 
 
298 
 
 LADY RACHEL. 
 
 LADY RACHEL, 
 
 " Beauty, alone, is lost, too warily kept." 
 
 I once had a long conversation with a fellow-trav- 
 eller in the coupe of a French diligence. It was a 
 bright moonlight night, early in June — not at all the 
 scene or season for talking long on very dry topics — 
 and with a mutual abandon which must be explained 
 by some theory of the silent sympathies, we fell to 
 chatting rather confidentially on the subject of love. 
 He gave me some hints as to a passage in his life 
 which seemed to me, when he told it, a definite and 
 interesting story ; but in recalling it to mind after- 
 ward, I was surprised to find how little he really said, 
 and how much, from seeing the man and hearing his 
 voice, I was enabled without, effort to supply. To 
 save roundabout, I'll tell the story in the first person, 
 as it was told to me, begging the reader to take my 
 place in the coupe and listen to a very gentlemanly 
 man, of very loveable voice and manners; supplying, 
 also, as I did, by the imagination, much more than is 
 told in the narration. 
 
 " I am inclined to think that we are sometimes best 
 loved by those whom we least suspect of being inter- 
 ested in us; and while a sudden laying open of hearts 
 would give the lie to many a love professed, it would, 
 here and there, disclose a passion which, in the or- 
 dinary course of things, would never have been be- 
 trayed. I was once a little surprised with a circum- 
 stance of the kind I allude to. 
 
 " I had become completely domesticated in a fam- 
 ily living in the neighborhood of London — I can 
 scarce tell you how, even if it were worth while. A 
 chance introduction, as a stranger in the country, 
 first made me acquainted with them, and we had gone 
 on, from one degree of friendship to another, till I 
 was as much at home at Lilybank as any one of the 
 children. It was one of those little English paradises, 
 rural and luxurious, where love, confidence, simplicity, 
 and refinement, seem natural to the atmosphere, and I 
 thought, when I was there, that I was probably as 
 near to perfect happiness as I was likely to be in the 
 course of my life. But I had my annoyance even 
 there. 
 
 "Mr. Fleming (the name is fictitious, of course) 
 was a man of sufficient fortune, living, without a pro- 
 fession, on his means. He was avowedly of the mid- 
 dle class, but his wife, a very beautiful specimen of 
 the young English mother, was very highly connect- 
 ed, and might have moved in what society she pleased. 
 She chose to find her happiness at home, and leave 
 society to come to her by its own natural impulse and 
 affinity — a sensible choice, which shows you at once 
 the simple and rational character of the woman. 
 Fleming and his wife were very fond of each other, 
 but, at the same time, very fond of the companion- 
 ship of those who were under their roof; and between 
 them and their three or four lovely children, I could 
 have been almost contented to have been a prisoner 
 at Lilybank, and to have seen nobody but its charm- 
 ing inmates for years together. 
 
 "I had become acquainted with the Flemings, how- 
 ever, during the absence of one of the members of 
 the family. Without being at all aware of any new 
 arrival in the course of the morning, I went late to 
 dinner after a long and solitary ride on horseback, and 
 was presented to Lady Rachel , a tall and re- 
 served-looking person, sitting on Fleming's right 
 hand. Seeing no reason to abate any of my outward 
 
 show of happiness, or to put any restraint on the nat- 
 ural impulse of my attentions, I took my accustomed 
 seat by the sweet mistress of the house, wrapped up 
 my entire heart, as usual, in every word and look 
 that I sent toward her, and played the schoolboy that 
 I felt myself, uncloudedly frank and happy. Fleming 
 laughed and mingled in our chat occasionally, as he 
 was wont to do, but a glance now and then at his 
 stately right-hand neighbor, made me aware that I 
 was looked upon with some coolness, if not with a 
 marked disapproval. I tried the usual peace-offer- 
 ings of deference and marked courtesy, and lessened 
 somewhat the outward show of my happiness, but 
 Lady Rachel was apparently not propitiated. You 
 know what it is to have one link cold in the chain of 
 sympathy around a table. 
 
 " The next morning I announced my intention of 
 returning to town. I had hitherto come and gone at 
 my pleasure. This time the Flemings showed a de- 
 termined opposition to my departure. They seemed 
 aware that my enjoyment under their roof had been, 
 for the first time, clouded over, and they were not 
 willing I should leave till the accustomed sunshine 
 was restored. I felt that I owed them too much to 
 resist any persuasion of theirs against my own feelings 
 merely, and I remained. 
 
 "But I determined to overcome Lady Rachel's 
 aversion — a little from pique, I may as well confess, 
 but mostly for the gratification I knew it would give 
 to my sweet friends and entertainers. The saddle is 
 my favorite thinking-place. I mounted a beautiful 
 hunter which Fleming always put at my disposal 
 while I stayed with them, and went off for a long gal- 
 lop. I dismounted at an inn, some miles off, called 
 for black wax, and writing myself a letter, despatched 
 it to Lilybank. To play my part well, you will easily 
 conceive, it was necessary that my kind friends should 
 not be in the secret. 
 
 " The short road to the heart of a proud woman, I 
 well knew, was pity. I came to dinner that day a 
 changed man. It was known through the family, of 
 course, that a letter sealed with black had arrived for 
 me, during my ride, and it gave me the apology I 
 needed for a sudden alteration of manner. Delicacy 
 would prevent any one, except Mrs. Fleming, from 
 alluding to it, and she would reserve the inquiry till 
 we were alone. I had the evening before me, of 
 course. 
 
 " Lady Rachel, I had remarked, showed her supe- 
 riority by habitually pitching her voice a note or two 
 below that of the persons around her — as if the re- 
 pose of her calm mind was beyond the plummet of 
 their superficial gayety. I had also observed, how- 
 ever, that if she succeeded in rebuking now and then 
 the high spirits of her friends, and lowered the gen- 
 eral diapason till it harmonized with her own voice, 
 she was more gratified than by any direct compliment 
 or attention. I ate my soup in silence, and while the 
 children, and a chance guest or two, were carrying on 
 some agreeable banter in a merry key, I waited fot 
 the first opening of Lady Rachel's lips, and, when 
 she spoke, took her tone like an echo. Without look- 
 ing at her, I commenced a subdued and pensive de- 
 scription of my morning's ride, like a man uncon- 
 sciously awakened from his revery by a sympathetic 
 voice, and betraying, by the tone in which he spoke, 
 
 
LADY RACHEL. 
 
 299 
 
 the chord to which he responded. A newer guest 
 had taken my place, next to Mrs. Fleming, and I was 
 opposite Lady Rachel. I could feel her eyes sud- 
 denly fixed on me as 1 spoke. For the first time, she 
 addressed a remark to me, in a pause of my descrip- 
 tion. I raised my eyes to her with as much earnest- 
 ness and deference as I could summon into them, 
 and, when I had listened to her and answered her ob- 
 servation, kept them fastened on her lips, as if I hoped 
 she would speak to me again — yet without a smile, 
 and with an expression that I meant should be that 
 of sadness, forgetful of usages, and intent only on an 
 eager longing for sympathy. Lady Rachel showed 
 her woman's heart, by an almost immediate change 
 of countenance and manner. She leaned slightly 
 over the table toward me, with her brows lifted from 
 " her large dark eyes, and the conversation between us 
 became continuous and exclusive. After a little while, 
 my kind host, finding that he was cut off from his 
 other guests by the fear of interrupting us, proposed 
 to give me the head of the table, and I took his place 
 at the left hand of Lady Rachel. Her dinner was 
 forgotten. She introduced topics of conversation 
 such as she thought harmonized with my feelings, 
 and while I listened, with my eyes alternately cast 
 down or raised timidly to hers, she opened her heart 
 to me on the subject of death, the loss of friends, the 
 vanity of the world, and the charm, to herself, of sad- 
 ness and melancholy. She seemed unconscious of the 
 presence of others as she talked. The tears suffused 
 her fine eyes, and her lips quivered, and I found, to 
 my surprise, that she was a woman, under that mask 
 of haughtiness, of the keenest sensibility and feeling. 
 When Mrs. Fleming left the table, Lady Rachel 
 pressed my hand, and, instead of following into the 
 drawing-room, went out by the low window upon the 
 lawn. I had laid up some little food for reflection as 
 you may conceive, and I sat the next hour looking 
 into my wineglass, wondering at the success of my 
 manoeuvre, but a little out of humor with my own hy- 
 pocrisy, notwithstanding. 
 
 "Mrs. Fleming's tender kindness to me when I 
 joined her at the tea-table, made me again regret 
 the sacred feelings upon which I had drawn for 
 my experiment. But there was no retreat. I ex- 
 cused myself hastily, and went out in search of Lady 
 Rachel, meeting her ladyship, as I expected, slowly 
 pacing the dark avenues of the garden. The dimness 
 of the starlight relieved me from the effort of keeping 
 sadness in my countenance, and I easily played out 
 my part till midnight, listening to an outpouring of 
 mingled kindness and melancholy, for the waste of 
 which I felt some need to be forgiven. 
 
 "Another day of this, however, was all that I could 
 bring my mind to support. Fleming and his wife had 
 entirely lost sight — in sympathy with my presumed 
 affliction — of the object of detaining me at Lilybank, 
 and I took my leave, hating myself for the tender 
 pressure of the hand, and the sad and sympathizing 
 farewells which I was obliged to receive from them. 
 I did not dare to tell them of my unworthy ruse. 
 Lady Rachel parted from me as kindly as the rest, 
 and I had gained my point with the loss of my self- 
 esteem. With a prayer that, notwithstanding this de- 
 ceit and misuse, I might find pity when I should in- 
 deed stand in need of it, I drove from the door. 
 
 "A month passed away, and I wrote, once more, to 
 my friends at Lilybank, that I would pass a week 
 with them. An occurrence, in the course of that 
 month, however, had thrown another mask over my 
 face, and t went there again with a part to play — and, 
 as if by a retributive Providence, it was now my need 
 of sympathy that 1 was most forced to conceal. An 
 affair which I saw no possibility of compromising, had 
 compelled me to call out a man who was well known 
 as a practical duelist. The particulars would not in- 
 
 terest you. In accepting the challenge, my antago- 
 nist asked a week's delay, to complete some import- 
 ant business from which he could not withdraw his at- 
 tention. And that week I passed with the Flemings. 
 
 "The gayety of Lilybank was resumed with the 
 smile I brought back, and chat and occupation took 
 their natural course. Lady Rachel, though kind and 
 courteous, seemed to have relapsed into her reserve, 
 and, finding society an effort, I rode out daily alone, 
 seeing my friends only at dinner and in the evening. 
 They took it to be an indulgence of some remainder 
 of my former grief, and left me consequently to the 
 disposition of my own time. 
 
 " The last evening before the duel arrived, and I 
 bade my friends good-night as usual, though with 
 some suppressed emotion. My second, who was to 
 come from town and take me up at Lilybank on his 
 way to the ground, had written to me that, from what 
 he could gather, my best way was to be prepared for 
 the worst, and, looking upon it as very probably the 
 last night of my life, I determined to pass it waking, 
 and writing to my friends at a distance. I sat dcwn 
 to it, accordingly, without undressing. 
 
 " Jt was toward three in the morning that I sealed 
 up my last letter. My bedroom was on the ground- 
 floor, with a long window opening into the garden; 
 and, as I lifted my head up from leaning over the seal, 
 I saw a white object standing just before the casement, 
 but at some little distance, and half buried in the dark- 
 ness. My mind was in a fit mood for a superstitious 
 feeling, and my blood crept cold for a moment; I 
 passed my hand across my eyes — looked again. The 
 figure moved slowly away. 
 
 " To direct my thoughts, 1 took up a book and 
 read. But, on looking up, the figure was there again, 
 and, with an irresistible impulse, I rushed out to the 
 garden. The figure came toward me, but, with its 
 first movement, I recognised the stately step of Lady 
 Rachel. 
 
 " Confused at having intruded on her privacy, for I 
 presumed that she was abroad for solitude, and with 
 no thought of being disturbed, I turned to retire. 
 She called to me, however, and, sinking upon a gar- 
 den-seat, covered her face with her hands. I stood 
 before her, for a moment, in embarrassed silence. 
 
 " 'You keep late hours,' she said, at last, with a 
 tremulous voice, but rising at the same time and, with 
 her arm put through mine, leading me to the thickly- 
 shaded walk. 
 
 "'To-night I do,' I replied; 'letters I could not 
 well defer ' 
 
 "'Listen to me!' interrupted Lady Rachel. »I 
 know your business for the morning ' 
 
 " I involuntarily released my arm and started back. 
 The chance of an interruption that would seem dis 
 honorable flashed across my mind. 
 
 " ' Stay !' she continued ; ' I am the only one in the 
 family who knows of it, and my errand with you is 
 not to hinder this dreadful meeting. The circum- 
 stances are such, that, with society as it is, you could 
 not avoid it with honor.' 
 
 " I pressed her arm with a feeling of gratified jus- 
 tification which quite overcame, for the moment, my 
 curiosity as to the source of her knowledge of the 
 affair. 
 
 " 'You must forgive me,' she said, ' that I come to 
 you like a bird of ill omen. I can not spare the pre- 
 cious moments to tell you how I came by my infor- 
 mation as to your design. I have walked the night 
 away, before your window, not daring to interrupt you 
 in what was probably the performance of sacred du- 
 ties. But T know your antagonist — I know his de- 
 moniac nature, and — pardon me! — I dread the worst!* 
 
 " I still walked by her side in silence. She re- 
 sumed, though strongly agitated. 
 
 " ' I have said that I justify you in an intention 
 
300 
 
 THE PHANTOxM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 
 
 which will probably cost you your life. Yet, but for 
 a feeling which I am about to disclose to you, I should 
 lose no time and spare no pains in preventing this 
 meeting. Under such circumstances, your honor 
 would be less dear to me than now, and I should be 
 acting as one of my sex who had but a share of in- 
 terest in resisting and striving to correct this murder- 
 ous exaction of public opinion. I would condemn 
 duelling in argument — avoid the duellist in society — 
 make any sacrifice with others to suppress it in the 
 abstract — but, till the feeling changes in reference to 
 it, I could not bring myself to sacrifice, in the honor 
 of the man I loved, my world of happiness for my 
 share only.' 
 
 "'And mean you to say ' I began, but, as the 
 
 light broke upon my mind, amazement stopped my 
 utterance. 
 
 " ' Yes — that I love you ! — that I love you !' mur- 
 mured Lady Rachel, throwing herself into my arms, 
 and fastening her lips to mine in a long and passion- 
 ate kiss — 'that I love you, and, in this last hour of 
 your life, must breathe to you what I never before 
 breathed to mortal !' 
 
 " She sank to the ground, and, with handfuls of 
 dew, swept up from the grass of the lawn, I bathed 
 her temples, as she leaned senseless against my knee. 
 The moon had risen above the trees, and poured its 
 full radiance on her pale face and closed eyes. Her 
 hair loosened and fell in heavy masses over her shoul- 
 ders and bosom, and, for the first time, I realized 
 Lady Rachel's extraordinary beauty. Her features 
 were without a fault, her skin was of marble fairness 
 and paleness, and her abandonment to passionate feel- 
 ing had removed, for the instant, a hateful cloud of 
 
 pride and superciliousness that, at all other times, had 
 obscured her loveliness. With a newborn emotion 
 in my heart, I seized the first instant of returning 
 consciousness, and pressed her, with a convulsive ea- 
 gerness, to my bosom. 
 
 " The sound of wheels aroused me from this de- 
 lirious dream, and, looking up, I saw the gray of 
 the dawn struggling with the moonlight. I tore my- 
 self from her arms, and the moment after was whirl- 
 ing away to the appointed place of meeting. 
 
 " I was in my room, at Lilybank, dressing, at eleven 
 of that same day. My honor was safe, and the affair 
 was over, and now my whole soul was bent on this 
 new and unexpected vision of love. True — I was 
 but twenty-five, and Lady Rachel probably twenty 
 years older — but she loved me — she was highborn and 
 beautiful — and love is not so often brought to the lip 
 in this world, that we can cavil at the cup which holds 
 it. With these thoughts and feelings wrangling tu- 
 multuously in my heated blood, I took the following 
 note from a servant at my door. 
 
 " ' Lady Rachel buries in eutire oblivion the 
 
 last night past. Feelings over which she has full con- 
 trol in ordinary circumstances, have found utterance 
 under the conviction that they were words to the dy- 
 ing. They would never have been betrayed without 
 impending death, and they will never, till death be 
 near to one of us, find voice, or give token of exist- 
 ence again. Delicacy and honor will prompt you to 
 visit Lilybank no more.' 
 
 "Lady Rachel kept her room till I left, and I have 
 never visited Lilybank, nor seen her since." 
 
 THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SHOWING THE HUMILIATIONS OF THE BARRIERS OF 
 HIGH-LIFE. 
 
 There is no aristocracy in the time o' night. It 
 was punctually ten o'clock, in Berkeley square. It 
 rained on the nobleman's roof. It rained on the beg- 
 gar's head. The lamps, for all that was visible except 
 themselves, might as well have been half way to the 
 moon, but even that was not particular to Berkeley 
 square. 
 
 A hack cabriolet groped in from Bruton street. 
 
 " Shall I ring any bell for you, sir?" said the cab- 
 man, pulling aside the wet leather curtain. 
 
 " No ! I'll get out anywhere ! Pull up to the side- 
 walk !" 
 
 But the passenger's mind changed while paying his 
 shilling. 
 
 "On second thoughts, my good fellow, you may 
 knock at the large door on the right." 
 
 The driver scrambled up the high steps and gave a 
 single knock — such a knock as the drivers of only the 
 poor and unfashionable are expected to give, in well- 
 regulated England. 
 
 The door was opened only to a crack, and a glitter- 
 ing livery peered through. But the passenger was 
 close behind, and setting his foot against the door, he 
 drove back the suspicious menial and walked in. 
 Three men, powdered and emblazoned in blue and 
 Sold, started to their feet, and came toward the appa- 
 rent intruder. He took the wet cap from his head, 
 deliberately flung his well-worn cloak into the arms 
 
 of the nearest man, and beckoning to another, pointed 
 to his overshoes. With a suppressed titter, two of 
 the footmen disappeared through a side-door, and the 
 third, mumbling something about sending up one of 
 the stable-boys, turned to follow them. 
 
 The new-comer's hand passed suddenly into the 
 footman's white cravat, and, by a powerful and sud- 
 den throw, the man was brought to his knee. 
 
 " Oblige me by unbuckling that shoe !" said the 
 stranger in a tone of imperturbable coolness, setting 
 his foot upon the upright knee of the astonished me- 
 nial. 
 
 The shoe was taken off, and the other set in its 
 place upon the plush-covered leg, and unbuckled, as 
 obediently. 
 
 " Keep them until I call you to put them on again !" 
 said the wearer, taking his gloves from his pockets, as 
 the man arose, and slowly walking up and down the 
 hall while he drew them leisurely on. 
 
 From the wet and muddy overshoes had been de- 
 livered two slight and well-appointed feet, however, 
 shining in pliable and unexceptionable jet. With a 
 second look, and the foul-weather toggery laid aside, 
 the humbled footman saw that he had been in error, 
 and that, hack-cab and dirty overshoes to the contrary 
 notwithstanding, the economising guest of "my lord" 
 would appear, on the other side of the drawing-room 
 door, only at home on " velvet of three pile" — an ele- 
 gant of undepreciable water! 
 
 " Shall I announce you, sir ?" respectfully inquired 
 the servant. 
 
 " If Lord Aymar has come up from the dinner ta- 
 ble — yes! If the ladies are alone — no !" 
 
THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 
 
 301 
 
 »« Coffee has just gone in to the ladies, sir !" 
 
 " Then I'll find my own way !" 
 
 Lady Aymar was jamming the projecting diamond 
 of a bracelet through and through the thick white 
 leaf of an Egyptian kala, lost apparently in an eclipse 
 of revery — possibly in a swoon of slumberous diges- 
 tion. By the drawing-room light, in her negligent 
 posture, she looked of a ripeness of beauty not yet 
 sapped by one autumnal minute — plump, drowsy, and 
 voluptuous. She looked up as the door opened. 
 
 " Spiridion !" 
 
 "Sappho !" 
 
 "Don't be silly ! — how are you, Count Pallardos? 
 And how like a ghost you come in, unannounced! 
 Suppose I had been tying my shoe, or anything?" 
 
 " Is your ladyship quite well ?" 
 
 " I will take coffee and wake up to tell you ! Was 
 I asleep when you opened the door? They were all 
 so dull at dinner. Ah me ! stupid or agreeable, we 
 grow old all the same! How am I looking, Spiri- 
 dion?" 
 
 " Ravishingly ! Where is Lady Angelica?" 
 
 " Give me another lump of sugar ! La ! don't you 
 take coffee ?" 
 
 " There are but two cups, and this was meant for 
 a lip of more celestial earth — has she been gone 
 long ?" 
 
 The door opened, and the rustling dress of Lady 
 Angelica Aymar made music in the room. Oh, how 
 gloriously beautiful she was, and how changed was 
 Count Spiridion Pallardos by her coming in ! A 
 minute before so inconsequent, so careless and com- 
 plimentary — now so timid, so deferential, so almost 
 awkward in every motion ! 
 
 The name of " Greek count" has been for a long 
 time, in Europe, the synonym for " adventurer" — a 
 worse pendant to a man's name, in high life at least, 
 than " pirate" or " robber." Not that a man is pecu- 
 liar who is trying to make the most out of society and 
 would prefer an heiress to a governess, but that it is a 
 disgrace to be so labelled ! An adventurer is the same 
 as any other gentleman who is not rich, only without 
 a mask. 
 
 Count Pallardos was lately arrived from Constanti- 
 nople, and was recognised and received by Lord Aymar 
 as the son of a reduced Greek noble who had been 
 the dragoman to the English embassy when his lord- 
 ship was ambassador to the Porte. With a prompt- 
 ness a little singular in one whose patronage was so 
 difficult to secure, Lord Aymar had immediately pro- 
 cured, for the son of his old dependant, a small em- 
 ployment as translator in the Foreign office, and with 
 its most limited stipend for his means, the young 
 count had commenced his experience of English life. 
 His acquaintance with the ladies of Lord Aymar's 
 family was two stages in advance of this, however. 
 Lady Aymar remembered him well as the beautiful 
 child of the lovely Countess Pallardos, the playfellow 
 of her daughter Angelica on the shore of the Bos- 
 phorus; and on his first arrival in England, hearing 
 that the family of his patron was on the coast for sea- 
 bathing, Spiridion had prepared to report himself first 
 to the female portion of it. Away from society in a 
 retired collage ornee upon the seashore, they had re- 
 ceived him with no hinderance to their appreciation or 
 hospitality ; and he had thus been subjected, by acci- 
 dent, to a month's unshared intoxication with the 
 beauty of the Lady Angelica. The arrival of the 
 young Greek had been made known to Lord Aymar 
 by his lady's letters, and the situation had been pro- 
 cured for him ; but Pallardos had seen his lordship 
 but once, and this was his first visit to the town estab- 
 lishment of the family. 
 
 The butler came in with a petil verre of Curagoa 
 for Miladi, and was not surprised, as the footmen 
 would have been, to see Lady Angelica on her knee, 
 
 and Count Pallardos imprisoning a japonica in the 
 knot a la Grecque of that head of Heaven's most 
 heavenly moulding. Brother and sister, Cupid and 
 Psyche, could not have been grouped with a more 
 playful familiarity. 
 
 " Spiridion !"— said Lady Aymar — " I shall call you 
 Spiridion till the men come up — how are you lodged, 
 my dear ! Have you a bath in your dressing-room ?" 
 " Pitcher and bowl of the purest crockery, my dear 
 lady ! May I venture to draw this braid a little closer, 
 Angelica — to correct the line of this raven mass on 
 your cheek ? It robs us now of a rose-leaf's breadth 
 at least — flat burglary, my sweet friend !" 
 
 But the Lady Angelica sprang to her feet, for a 
 I voice was heard of some one ascending from the 
 dining-room. She flung herself into a dormeuse, 
 Spiridion twirled his two fingers at the fire, as if bodi- 
 ly warmth was the uppermost necessity of the moment, 
 and enter Lord Aymar, followed by a great statesman, 
 j a famous poet, one sprig of unsurpassed nobility, and 
 one wealthy dandy commoner. 
 
 Lord Aymar nodded to his protege, but the gentle- 
 men grouped themselves, for a moment, around a silver 
 easel, upon which stood a Correggio, a late purchase 
 of which his lordship had been discoursing, and in 
 that minute or two the name and quality of the stran- 
 ger were communicated to the party — probably, for 
 they took their coffee without further consciousness 
 I of his presence. 
 
 The statesman paired off to a corner with his host 
 ! to talk politics, the poet took the punctured flower 
 ! from the lap of Lady Aymar, and commenced mend- 
 ' ing, with patent wax wafers, from the ormolu desk 
 ! near by, the holes in the white leaves ; and the two in- 
 I effables lingered a moment longer over their Curar-oa. 
 Pallardos drew a chair within conversation-reach of 
 j Lady Angelica, and commenced an unskilful discus- 
 sion of the opera of the night before. He felt angry, 
 insulted, unseated from his self-possession, yet he 
 could not have told why. The two young men lounged 
 leisurely across the room, and the careless Lord Fred- 
 erick drew his chair partly between Pallardos and 
 Lady Angelica, while Mr. Townley Manners reclined 
 upon an ottoman behind her and brought his lips 
 within whisper-shot of her ear, and, with ease and un- 
 forced nonsense, not audible nor intended to be audible 
 to the " Greek adventurer," they inevitably engrossed 
 the noble beauty. 
 
 The blood of Count Spiridion ran round his heart 
 like a snake coiled to strike. He turned to a portfolio 
 of drawings for a cover to self-control and self-com- 
 muning, for he felt that he had need of summoning 
 his keenest and coldest judgment, his boldest and 
 I wariest courage of conduct and endurance, to submit 
 ! to, and outnerve and overmaster, his humiliating po- 
 j sition. He was under a roof of which he well knew 
 that the pride and joy of it, the fair Lady Angelica, 
 ' the daughter of the proud earl, had given him her 
 ! heart. He well knew that he had needed reserve and 
 management to avoid becoming too much the favorite 
 of the lady mistress of that mansion; yet, in it, he had 
 been twice insulted grossly, cuttingly, but in both 
 cases unresentably — once by unpunishable menials, 
 of whom he could not even complain without expo- 
 sing and degrading himself, and once by the supercil- 
 ious competitors for the heart he knew was his own— 
 and they too, unpunishable! 
 
 At this moment, at a sign from Lady Aymar, her 
 lord swung open the door of a conservatory to give 
 the room air, and the long mirror, set in the panel, 
 showed to Spiridion his own pale and lowering fea- 
 tures. He thanked Heaven for the chance . To see 
 himself once more was what he bitterly needed !— to 
 see whether his head had shrunk between his shoul- 
 ders—whether his back was crouched— whether Ins 
 ey«s and lips had lost their fearlessness and pride! He 
 
302 
 
 THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 
 
 had feared so — felt so ! He almost wondered that he 
 did not look like a dependant and a slave ! But oh, 
 no ! The large mirror showed the grouped figures 
 of the drawing-room, his own the noblest among them 
 by nature's undeniable confession ! His clear, statua- 
 ry outline of features — the finely-cut arches of his 
 lips — the bold, calm darkness of his passionate eyes — 
 his graceful and high-born mien,— all apparent enough 
 to his own eye when seen in the contrast of that mir- 
 rored picture — he was not changed ! — not a slave — not 
 metamorphosed by that hour's humiliation ! He 
 clenched his right hand, once, till the nails were dri- 
 ven through his glove into the clammy palm, and then 
 rose with a soft smile on his features, like the remain- 
 der of a look of pleasure. 
 
 " I have found," said he, in a composed and musical 
 tone, " I have found what we were looking for, Lady 
 Angelica !" 
 
 He raised the large portfolio from the print-stand, 
 and setting it open on his knee, directly between Lord 
 Frederick and Lady Angelica, cut off that nobleman's 
 communication with her ladyship very effectually, 
 while he pointed out a view of the Acropolis at Athens. 
 Her ladyship was still expressing her admiration of the 
 drawing, when Spiridion turned to the astonished gen- 
 tleman at her ear. 
 
 "Perhaps, sir," said he, " in a lady's service, I may 
 venture to dispossess you of that ottoman! Will you 
 be kind enough to rise?" 
 
 With a stare of astonishment, the elegant Mr. 
 Townley Manners reluctantly complied ; and Spiri- 
 dion, drawing the ottoman in front of Lady Angelica, 
 set the broad portfolio upon it, and seating himself at 
 her feet upon the outer edge, commenced a detailed 
 account of the antiquities of the grand capitol. The 
 lady listened with an amused look of mischief in her 
 eye, Lord Frederick walked once around her chair 
 humming an air very rudely, Mr. Manners attempted 
 in vain to call Lady Angelica to look at something 
 wonderful in the conservatory, and Spiridion's triumph 
 was complete. He laid aside the portfolio after a mo- 
 ment or two, drew the ottoman back to its advantageous 
 position, and, self-assured and at his ease, engrossed 
 fully and agreeably the attention of his heart's mistress. 
 
 Half an hour elapsed. Lord Aymar took a kind 
 of dismission attitude before the fire, and the guests 
 one and all took their leave. They were all cloaking 
 together in the entry, when his lordship leaned over 
 the bannister. 
 
 "Have you your chariot, Lord Frederick?" he 
 asked. 
 
 " Yes — it's at the door now !" 
 
 " Lady Aymar suggests that perhaps you'll set down 
 Count Pallardos, on your way !" 
 
 " Why — ah, certainly, certainly !" replied Lord 
 Frederick, with some hesitation. 
 
 "My thanks to Lady Aymar," said Spiridion very 
 quietly, " but say to her ladyship that I am provided 
 with overshoes and umbrella ! Shall I offer your lord- 
 ship half of the latter?" added he in another key, 
 leaning with cool mock-earnestness toward Lord 
 Frederick, who only stared a reply as he passed out to 
 his chariot. 
 
 And marvelling who would undergo such humilia- 
 tions and such antagonism as had been his lot that 
 evening, for anything else than the love of a Lady 
 Angelica, Count Spiridion stepped forth into the rain 
 to grope his way to his obscure lodgings in Parlia- 
 ment street. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 SHOWING A GENTLEMAN'S NEED OF A HORSE. 
 
 It was the hour when the sun in heaven is sup- 
 posed to be least promiscuous — the hour when the 
 
 five hundred fashionables of London West-End re- 
 ceive his visit in the open air, to the entire exclusion 
 (it is presumed) of the remaining population of the 
 globe. The cabs and jarveys, the vehicles of the de- 
 spised public, rolled past the forbidden gate of Hyde 
 park, and the echo stationed in the arched portal an- 
 nounced the coroneted carriages as they nicely nibbled 
 the pleased gravel in passing under. A plebeian or 
 two stood outside to get a look at the superior beings 
 whose daily list of company to dine is the news most 
 carefully furnished to the instructed public. The 
 birds (having " fine feathers") flew over the iron rail- 
 ing unchallenged by the gate-keeper. Four o'clock 
 went up to Heaven's gate with the souls of those who 
 had died since three, and with the hour's report of the 
 world's sins and good deeds; and at the same moment 
 a chariot rolled into the park, holding between its 
 claret panels the embellished flesh and blood of Lady 
 Aymar and her incomparable daughter. 
 
 A group of gay men on horseback stood at the bend 
 of " Rotten Row," watching the comers-in ; and within 
 the inner railing of the park, among the promenaders 
 on foot, was distinguishable the slight figure of Count 
 Pallardos, pacing to and fro with step somewhat irreg- 
 ular. As Lady Aymar's chariot went by, he bowed 
 with a frank and ready smile, but the smile was quickly 
 banished by a flushed cheek and lowering brow, for, 
 from the group of mounted dandies, dashed out Lord 
 Frederick Beauchief, upon a horse of unparalleled 
 beauty, and with a short gallop took and kept his place 
 close at the chariot window. 
 
 Pallardos watched them till the turn of the ring took 
 them from his sight. The fitness of the group — tho 
 evident suitableness of Lord Frederick's position at 
 that chariot window, filled him with a jealousy he could 
 no longer stifle. The contest was all unequal, it was 
 too palpable to deny. He, himself, whatever his per- 
 son or qualities, was, when on foot, in the place allot- 
 ted to him by his fortunes — not only unnoticed by the 
 contagious admiration of the croud, but unable even 
 to obey his mistress, though beckoned by her smile to 
 follow her ! That superb animal, the very type of 
 pride and beauty, arching his glossy neck and tossing 
 his spirited head before the eyes of Lady Angelica, 
 was one of those unanalyzed, undisputed vouchers for 
 the owner's superiority, which make wealth the devil's 
 gift — irresistible but by the penetrating and cold judg- 
 ment of superior beings. How should a woman, born 
 with the susceptible weaknesses of her sex, most im- 
 pressible by that which is most showy and beautiful — 
 how should she be expected to reason coldly and with 
 philosophic discrimination on this subject ? — how sep- 
 arate from Lord Frederick, the mere man, his subser- 
 vient accompaniments of wealth, attendance, homage 
 from others, and infatuated presumption in himself? 
 Nay — what presumption in Spiridion Pallardos (so 
 he felt, with his teeth set together in despair, as he 
 walked rapidly along) — to suppose that he could con- 
 tend successfully against this and a thousand such ad- 
 vantages and opportunities, with only his unpriced, 
 unproved love to offer her, with a hand of poverty ! 
 His heart ran drowningly over with the bitterness of 
 conviction ! 
 
 After a few steps, Pallardos turned back with an in 
 stinctive though inexplicable desire to hasten the pang 
 of once more meeting them as they came round the 
 ring of the park. Coming toward him, was one of the 
 honorable officials of Downing street, with whom he 
 had been thrown in contact, a conceited and well- 
 born diner-out, mounted on a handsome cob, but 
 with his servant behind him on a blood hunter. 
 Mr. Dallinger was walking his horse slowly along the 
 fence, and, as he came opposite Pallardos, he drew 
 rein. 
 
 " Count !" said he, in that patronising tone which is 
 tossed over the head of the patronised like a swan's 
 
THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 
 
 303 
 
 neck over the worm about to be gobbled, " a — a — a — 
 do you know Spanish ?" 
 
 » Yes. Why ?" 
 
 » A — a — I've a job for you ! You know Moreno, 
 the Spanish secretary — well, his wife — she ivill persist 
 in disguising her billet-doux in that stilted language, 
 and — you know what I want — suppose you come and 
 breakfast with me to-morrow morning ?" 
 
 Pallardos was mentally crowding his contemptuous 
 refusal into the smallest phrase that could convey re- 
 pulse to insolence, when the high-stepping and foam- 
 spattered forelegs of Lady Aymar's bays appeared un- 
 der the drooping branch of the tree beyond him. The 
 next instant, Lord Frederick's easily-carried head 
 danced into sight — a smile of perfect self-satisfaction 
 on his face, and his magnificent horse, excited by the 
 constant check, prancing at his proudest. At the mo- 
 ment they passed, Dallinger's groom, attempting to 
 restrain the impatience of the spirited hunter he was 
 upon, drew the curb a little too violently, and the man 
 was thrown. The sight of the empty saddle sent a 
 thought through the brain of Pallardos like a shaft. 
 
 " May I take a little of the nonsense out of that 
 horse for you?" said he quickly, springing over the 
 railing, and seizing the rein, to which the man still 
 held, while the frighted horse backed and reared 
 toward his master. 
 
 " A — a — ye9, if you like !" 
 
 Pallardos sprang into the saddle, loosened the rein 
 and leaned forward, and with three or four powerful 
 bounds, the horse was at the other window of the 
 chariot. Away, with the bursted trammels of heart 
 and brain, went all thoughts of the horse's owner, and 
 all design, if any had flashed on his mind, of time or 
 place for restoring him. Bred in a half-civilized coun- 
 try, where the bold hand was often paramount to law, 
 the Greek had no habit of mind likely to recognise in 
 a moment of passion even stronger barriers of propri- 
 ety than he was now violating ; and, to control his 
 countenance and his tongue, and summon his resour- 
 ces for an apparently careless and 9miling contest of 
 attraction with his untroubled rival, was work enough 
 for the whole mind and memory, as well as for all the 
 nerve aurl spirit of the excited Greek. He laid his 
 hand on the chariot window, and thinking no more of 
 the horse he was subduing than the air he breathed, 
 broke up his powerful gallop to a pace that suited him, 
 and played the lover to the best of his coolness and 
 ability. 
 
 " We saw you walking just now, and were lament- 
 ing that you were not on horseback," said Lady Ay- 
 mar, "for it is a sweet evening, and we thought of 
 driving out for a stroll in old Sir John Chasteney's 
 grounds at Bayswater. Will you come, Spiridion ? 
 Tell White to drive there !" 
 
 Lord Frederick kept his place, and with its double 
 escort, the equipage of the Aymars sped on its way to 
 Bayswater. Spiridion was the handsomer man, and 
 the more graceful rider, and, without forcing the diffi- 
 cult part of keeping up a conversation with those 
 within the chariot, he soon found his uneasiness dis- 
 placed by a glow of hope and happiness ; for Lady 
 Angelica, leaning far back in her seat, and completely 
 hidden from Lord Frederick, kept her eyes watchfully 
 and steadily upon the opposite side where rode her less 
 confident lover. The evening was of summer's softest 
 and richest glory, breezy and fragrant ; and as the sun 
 grew golden, the party alighted at the gates of Chas- 
 teney park — in tune for love, it must needs be, if ever 
 conspiring smiles in nature could compel accord in 
 human affections. 
 
 Ah, happy Spiridion Pallardos ! The Lady Ange- 
 lica called him to disengage her dress from the step 
 of the carriage, and her arm was in his when he arose, 
 placed there as confidingly as a bride's, and with a 
 gentle pressure that was half love and half mischief— - 
 
 for she quite comprehended that Lord Frederick's 
 ride to Bayswater was not for the pleasure of a twilight 
 stroll through Chasteney park with her mother ! That 
 mother, fortunately, was no duenna. She had pre- 
 tensions of her own to admiration, and she was only 
 particular as to the quantity. Her daughter's division 
 with her of the homage of their male acquaintances, 
 was an evil she indolently submitted to, but she was 
 pleased in proportion as it was not obtruded upon her 
 notice. As Pallardos and the Lady Angelica turned 
 into one of the winding alleys of the grounds, Lady 
 Aymar bent her large eyes very fixedly upon another, 
 and where such beautiful eyes went before, her small 
 feet were very sure to follow. The twilight threw its 
 first blur over the embowering foliage as the parties 
 lost sight of each other, and, of the pair who are the 
 hero and heroine of this story, it can oidy be disclosed 
 that they found a heaven (embalmed, for their partic- 
 ular use, in the golden dusk of that evening's twi- 
 light), and returned to the park gate in the latest min- 
 ute before dark, sworn lovers, let come what would ! 
 
 i But meantime, the happy man's horse had disap- 
 
 ' peared, as well he might have been expected to do, his 
 bridle having been thrown over a bush by the en- 
 grossed Pallardos, when called upon to assist Lady 
 Angelica from her carriage, and milord's groom and 
 
 j miladi's footman having no sovereign reasons for se- 
 curing him. Lord Frederick laughed till the count 
 
 I accepted the offer of Lady Aymar to take him home, 
 bodkin-wise, between herself and hcrdaughter; and for 
 the happiness of being close pressed to the loving side 
 of the Lady Angelica for one hour more, Pallardos 
 would willingly have lost a thousand horses — his own 
 
 ! or the honorable Mr. Dallinger's. And, by the way, 
 of Mr. Dallinger and his wrath, and his horseless 
 groom, Spiridion began now to have a thought or two 
 of an uncomfortable pertinacity of intrusion. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SHOWING WHAT MAKES A HORSE-STEALER A GENTLE- 
 MAN. 
 
 It was the first day of September, and most of the 
 I gold threads were drawn from the tangled and vari- 
 1 colored woof of London society. " The season" was 
 over. Two gentlemen stood in the window of Crock- 
 ford's, one a Jew barrister (kersey enough for more 
 russet company by birth and character, but admitted 
 to the society of "costly stuff" for the equivalent he 
 gave as a purveyor of scandal), and the other a com- 
 moner, whose wealth and fashion gave him the privi- 
 lege of out-staying the season in town, without pub- 
 lishing in the Morning Post a better reason than incli- 
 nation for so unnatural a procedure. 
 
 Count Spiridion Pallardos was seen to stroll slowly 
 , up St. James street, on the opposite side. 
 
 "Look there, Abrams!" said Mr. Townley Man- 
 ners, " there's the Greek who was taken up at one 
 i time by the Aymars. I thought he was transported." 
 "No ! he still goes to the Aymars, though he is 
 j 'in Coventry' everywhere else. Dallinger had him 
 i arrested — for horse-stealing, wasn't it ? The officer 
 \ nabbed him as he was handing Lady Angelica out of 
 her carriage in Berkeley square. 1 remember hearing 
 of it two months ago. What a chop-fallen blackguard 
 it looks !" 
 
 " Blackguard ! Come, come, man .'—give the devil 
 his due !" deprecated the more liberal commoner ; 
 "may be it's from not having seen a gentleman for the 
 last week, but, hang me if I don't think that same 
 horse-stealer turning the corner is as crack-looking a 
 man as I ever saw from this window. What's o'clock ?" 
 " Half-past four," replied the gcandal-monger, swal- 
 
304 
 
 THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 
 
 lowing, with a bland smile, what there tvas to swallow 
 in Manners's Iwo-edged remark, and turning suddenly 
 on his heel. 
 
 Pallardos slowly took his way along Picadilly, and 
 was presently in Berkeley square, at the door of the 
 Aymars. The porter admitted him without question, 
 and he mounted, unannounced, to the drawing-room. 
 The ladies sat by the window, looking out upon the 
 garden. 
 
 "Is it you, Spiridion?" said Lady Aymar, "I had 
 hoped you would not come to-day!" 
 
 " Oh, mamma!" appealed Lady Angelica. 
 "Welcome all other days of the year, my dear 
 Pallardos — warmly welcome, of course" — continued 
 Lady Aymar, " but — to-day — oh God ! you have no 
 idea what the first of September is — to us — to my 
 husband !" 
 
 Lady Aymar covered her face with her hands, and 
 the tears streamed through her fingers. 
 
 " Pardon me," said Pallardos — " pardon me, my 
 dear lady, but I am here by the earl's invitation, to 
 dine at six." 
 
 Lady Aymar sprang from her seat in astonishment. 
 " By the earl's invitation, did you say ? Angelica, 
 what can that mean ? Was it bv note, Count Pal- 
 lardos ?" 
 
 " By note," he replied. 
 
 " I am amazed !" she said, " truly amazed! Does 
 he mean to have a confidant for his family secret ? Is 
 his insanity on one point affecting his reason on all ? 
 What shall we do, Angelica ?" 
 
 "We may surely confide in Spiridion, whatever the 
 meaning of it, or the result" — gently murmured Lady 
 Angelica. 
 
 " We may — we may !" said Lady Aymar. " Prepare 
 him for it as you will. I pray Heaven to help me 
 through with this day without upsetting my own 
 reason. I shall meet you at dinner, Spiridion." 
 
 With her hands twisted together in a convulsive 
 knot, Lady Aymar slowly and musingly passed into 
 the conservatory on her way to her own room, leaving 
 to themselves two lovers who had much to talk of 
 beside dwelling upon a mystery which, even to Lady 
 Angelica, who knew most of it, was wholly inexpli- 
 cable. Yet it was partially explained by the trembling 
 girl — explained as a case of monomania, and with the 
 brevity of a disagreeable subject, but listened to by 
 her lover with a different feeling — a conviction as of a 
 verified dream, and a vague, inexplicable terror which 
 he could neither reason down nor account for. But 
 the lovers must be left to themselves, by the reader as 
 well as by Lady Aymar; and meantime, till the dinner 
 hour, when our story begins again, we may glance at 
 a note which was received, and replied to, by Lord 
 Aymar in the library below. 
 
 " My dear Lord : In the belief that a frank com- 
 munication would be best under the circumstances, I 
 wish to make an inquiry, prefacing it with the assu- 
 rance that my only hope of happiness has been for 
 some time staked upon the successful issue of my 
 suit for your daughter's hand. It is commonly under- 
 stood, I believe, that the bulk of your lordship's for- 
 tune is separate from the entail, and may be disposed 
 of at your pleasure. May 1 inquire its amount, or 
 rather, may I ask what fortune goes with the hand of 
 Lady Angelica. The Beauchief estates are unfortu- 
 nately much embarrassed, and my own debts (I may 
 frankly confess) are very considerable. 5Tou will at 
 once see, my lord, that, in justice to your daughter, as 
 well as to myself, I could not do otherwise than make 
 this frank inquiry before pushing my suit to extremity. 
 Begging your indulgence and an immediate answer, I 
 remain, my dear lord, Yours very faithfully, 
 
 " Frederick Beauchief. 
 " Ths Earl of Aymar." 
 
 (reply.) 
 
 " Dear Lord Frederick : I trust you will not 
 accuse me of a want of candor in declining a direct 
 answer to your question. Though I freely own to a 
 friendly wish for your success in your efforts to engage 
 the affections of Lady Angelica, with a view to mar- 
 riage, it can only be in the irrevocable process of a 
 marriage settlement that her situation, as to the prob- 
 able disposal of my fortune, can be disclosed. I may 
 admit to you, however, that, upon the events of this 
 day on which you have written (it so chances), may 
 depend the question whether I should encourage you 
 to pursue further your addresses to Lady Angelica. 
 "Yours very faithfully, "Aymar. 
 
 " Lord Frederick Beauchief." 
 
 It seemed like the first day after a death, in the 
 house of Lord Aymar. An unaccountable hush pre- 
 vailed through the servants' offices ; the gray-headed 
 old butler crept noiselessly about, making his prepa- 
 rations for dinner, and the doors, that were opened 
 and shut, betrayed the careful touch of apprehension. 
 With penetrating and glassy clearness, the kitchen 
 clock, seldom heard above stairs, resounded through 
 the house, striking six. 
 
 In the same neglected attire which she had worn in 
 the morning, Lady Aymar re-entered the drawing- 
 room. The lids were drawn up around her large eyes 
 with a look of unresisting distress, and she walked 
 with relaxed steps, and had, altogether, an air absent 
 and full of dread. The interrupted lovers ceased 
 talking as she approached, but she did not remark the 
 silence, and walked, errandless, from corner to corner. 
 
 The butler announced dinner. 
 
 " May I give your ladyship an arm ?" asked Pal- 
 lardos. 
 
 " Oh God ! is it dinner-time already !" she exclaimed 
 with a voice of terror. " Williams ! is Lord Aymar 
 below ?" 
 
 "In the dining-room, miladi." 
 
 She took Spiridion's arm, and they descended the 
 stairs. As they approached the dining-room, her arm 
 trembled so violently in his that he turned to her with 
 the fear that she was about to fall. He did not speak. 
 A vague dread, which was more than he had caught 
 from her looks — a something unaccountably heavy at 
 his own heart — made his voice cling to his throat. 
 He bowed to Lord Aymar. 
 
 His noble host stood leaning upon the mantel-piece, 
 pale, but seeming less stern and cold than suffering 
 and nerved to bear pain. 
 
 " I am glad to see you, my dear count !" he said, 
 giving him his hand with an alfectionateness that he 
 had never before manifested. " Are you quite well ?" 
 he added, scrutinizing his features closely with the 
 question — " for, like myself, you seem to have grown 
 pale upon this September dulness." 
 
 " I am commonly less well in this month than in 
 any other," said Pallardos, "and — now I think of it — 
 I had forgotten that I arose this morning with a 
 depression of spirits as singular as it was unendurable. 
 I forgot it, when I received your lordship's note, in 
 the happiness the day was to bring me." 
 
 The lovers exchanged looks, unremarked, appa- 
 rently, by either Lord or Lady Aymar, and the con- 
 versation relapsed into the commonplaces of dinner- 
 table civility. Spiridion observed that the footmen 
 were excluded, the old butler alone serving them at 
 table ; and that the shutters, of which he got a chance 
 glimpse between the curtains, were carefully closed. 
 Once or twice Pallardos roused himself with the 
 thought that he was ill playing the part of an agree- 
 able guest, and proposed some question that might 
 lead to discussion ; but the spirits of Lady Angelica 
 seemed frighted to silence, and Lord and Lady Aymar 
 
THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE. 
 
 305 
 
 were wholly absorbed, or were at least unconscious of 
 their singular incommuriicativeness. 
 
 Dinner dragged on slowly — Lady Aymar retarding 
 every remove with terrified and flurried eagerness. 
 Pallardos remarked that she did not eat, but she asked 
 to be helped again from every dish before its removal, j 
 Hei fork rattled on the plate with the trembling of her 
 hand, and, once or twice, an outbreak of hysterical 
 tears was evidently prevented by a stern word and look 
 from Lord Aymar. 
 
 The butler leaned over to his mistress's ear. 
 
 •♦ No — no — no ! Not yet — not yet !" she exclaimed, 
 in a hurried voice, " one minute more !" But the 
 clock at that instant struck seven, counted by that 
 table company in breathless silence. Pallardos felt 
 his heart sink, he knew not why. 
 
 Lord Aymar spoke quickly and hoarsely. 
 
 " Turn the key, Williams."' 
 
 Lady Aymar screamed and covered her face with 
 her hands. 
 
 "Remove the cloth!'' he again ordered precipi- 
 tately. 
 
 The butler's hand trembled. He fumbled with the 
 corner of the cloth a moment, and seemed to want 
 strength or courage to fulfil his office. With a sudden 
 effort Lord Aymar seized and threw the cloth to the 
 other end of the apartment. 
 
 "There !" cried he, starting to his feet, and point- 
 ing to the bare table, "there! there!" he repeated, 
 seizing the hand of Lady Angelica, as she arose terrifi- 
 ed upon her feet. " See you nothing? Do you see 
 nothing?'' 
 
 With a look, at her father, of blank inquiry — a look 
 of pity at her mother, sunk helpless upon the arm of 
 her chair — a look at Pallardos, who with open mouth, 
 and eyes starling from their sockets, stood gazing upon 
 the table, heedless of all present — she answered — 
 "Nothing — my dear lather ! — nothing !" 
 
 He flung her arm suddenly from his hand. 
 
 " I knew it," said he, with angry emphasis. " Take 
 her, shameless woman ! Take your child, and be- 
 gone !" 
 
 But Pallardos laid his hand upon the earl's arm. 
 
 " My lord ! my lord !" he said, in a tone of fearful 
 suppression of outcry, " can we not remove this 
 hideous object! How it glares at you! — at me! 
 Why does it look at me ! What is it, Lord Aymar ? 
 What brings that ghastly head here ? Oh God ! 
 oh God! 1 have seen it so often !"' 
 
 " You 1 — you have seen it ?" suddenly asked Lady 
 Aymar in a whisper. " Is there anything to see ? Do 
 you see the same dreadful si«ht, Spiridion ?" Her 
 voice rose with the last question to a scream. 
 
 Pallardos did not answer. He had forgotten the 
 presence ol them all. He struggled a moment, gasp- 
 ing and choking for self-control, and then, with a sud- 
 den movement, clutched at the bare table. His empty 
 hand slowly opened, and his strength sufficed to pass 
 his linger across the palm. He staggered backward 
 with an idiotic laugh, and was received in his fall by 
 the trembling arms of Lady Angelica. A motion ! 
 from Lord Aymar conveyed to his faithful servant i 
 that the phantom was vanishing ! The door was flung 
 •pen and the household summoned. 
 
 *• Count Pallardos has fainted from the heat of the 
 room," said Lord Aymar. " Place him upon my 
 bed! And — Lady Aymar! — will you step into the 
 library — I would speak with you a moment !" 
 
 There was humility and beseechingness in the last 
 few words of Lord Aymar, which (ell strangely on the 
 ear of the affrighted and guilty woman. Her mind 
 had been too fearfully tasked to comprehend the j 
 meaning of that changed tone, but, with a vague ■ 
 feeling of relief, she staggered through the hall, and j 
 the door of the library closed behind her. 
 20 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 A letter from Lord Aymar to Lady Angelica will 
 put the story forward a little : — 
 
 " My dkar Angklica : I am happy to know thr.t 
 there are circumstances which will turn aside much 
 of the poignancy of the communication I am about to 
 make to you. If I am not mistaken at least, in be- 
 lieving a mutual attachment to exist between your- 
 self and Count Pallardos, you will at once compre- 
 hend the ground of my mental relief, and perhaps, in 
 a measure, anticipate what I am about to say. 
 
 " I have never spoken to you of the fearful in- 
 heritance in the blood of the Aymars. This would 
 appear a singular omission between two members of 
 one family, but I had strong reasons for my silence, 
 one of which was your possible sympathy with your 
 mother's obstinate incredulity. Now — since yester- 
 day's appalling proof — you can no longer doubt the 
 inheritance of the phantom head — the fearful record of 
 some nameless deed of guilt, which is doomed to 
 haunt out festal table as often as the murderous day 
 shall come around to a descendant of our blood. 
 Fortunately — mercifully, I shall perhaps say, we are 
 not visited by this dread avenger till the maturity of 
 manhood gives us the courage to combat with its 
 horror. The Septembers, since my twentieth year, 
 have brought it with fatal certainty to me. God alone 
 knows how long I shall be able to withstand the taint 
 it gives to my thoughts when waking, and to the dreams 
 upon my haunted pillow. 
 
 " You will readily see, in what I have said, another 
 reason for my silence toward you on this subject. In 
 the strong sympathy and sensitive imagination of a 
 woman, might easily be bred, by too vivid picturing, 
 a fancy which would be as palpable almost as the 
 reality ; and 1 wished you to arrive at woman's years 
 with a belief that it was but a monomaniac affection of 
 my own brain — a disease to pity but not to share ! 
 You are now twenty. The females of my family have 
 invariably seen the phantom at seventeen ! Do you 
 anticipate the painful inference 1 draw from the fact 
 that this spectre is invisible to you ! 
 
 " No, Angelica! you are not my daughter! The 
 Aymar blood does not run in your veins, and I know 
 not how much it will soften the knowledge of your 
 mother's frailty to know, that you are spared the dread 
 inheritance that would have been yours with a legiti- 
 macy of honor. I had grounds for this belief at your 
 birth, but I thought it due to the hallowed character 
 of woman and wife to summon courage to wait for 
 confirmation. Had I acted out the impulse, then 
 almost uncontrollable within me, I should have piofit- 
 ed by the lawless land in which 1 resided to add more 
 weight to the errand of this phantom avenger. But 
 time and reason have done their work upon me. Your 
 mother is safe from open retribution. May God 
 pardon her ! 
 
 "You will have said, here, that since Count Pallar- 
 dos has been revealed by the same pursuing Provi- 
 dence to be my son, I may well refrain from appear- 
 ing as my wife's accuser. I have no wish to profit by 
 the difference the world makes between infidelity in 
 man, and infidelity in woman; nor to look, for an 
 apology, into the law of nature upon which so general 
 and undisputed a distinction must needs be founded. 
 I confess the justice of Heaven's vengeance upon the 
 crime — visited upon me, I fearfully believe, in the 
 unconscious retaliation which gave you birth. Yet 
 I can not, for this, treat you as the daughter of my 
 blood. 
 
 " And this brings me to the object of my letter. 
 With the care of years, I have separated, from the 
 
306 
 
 GETTING TO WINDWARD. 
 
 entail of Aymar, the bulk of my fortune. God has 
 denied me a legitimate male heir, and I have long ago 
 determined, to leave, to its natural conflict with cir- 
 cumstances, the character of a child I knew to be 
 mine, and to adopt its destiny, if it proved worthy, 
 should my fears as to your own parentage be confirm- 
 ed by the undeniable testimony of our spectral curse. 
 Count Pallardos is that child. Fate drew him here, 
 without my interference, as the crisis of your destiny 
 turned against you. The innocent was not to be 
 punished for the guilty, and the inheritance he takes 
 from you goes back to you — with his love in wedlock ! 
 So, at least, appearances have led me to believe, and 
 so would seem to be made apparent the kind provisions 
 of Heaven against our resentful injustices. I must 
 confess that I shall weep tears of joy if it be so, for, 
 dear Angelica, you have wound yourself around my 
 heart, nearer to its core than the coil of this serpent 
 of revenge. 1 shall find it to be so, I am sadly sure, 
 if I prove incorrect in my suppositions as to your at- 
 tachment. 
 
 "I have now to submit to you, I trust only as a 
 matter of form, two offers for your hand — one from 
 Mr. Townley Manners, and the other (conditional, 
 however, with your fortune) from Lord Frederick 
 Beauchief. An annuity of five hundred a year would 
 be all you would receive for a fortune, and your 
 choice, of course, is free. As the countess Pallardos, 
 
 you would share a very large fortune (my gifts to my 
 son, by a transfer to be executed this day), and to that 
 destiny, if need be, I tearfully urge you. 
 
 " Affectionately yours, my dear Angelica, 
 
 " Aymar." 
 
 With one more letter, perhaps, the story will be 
 sufficiently told. 
 
 "Dear Count: You will wonder at receiving a 
 friendly note from me after my refusal, two months 
 since, to meet you over ' pistols and coffee ;' but rep- 
 aration may not be too late, and this is to say, that 
 you have your choice between two modes of settle- 
 ment, viz : — to accept for your stable the hunter you 
 stole from me (vide police report) and allow me to take 
 a glass of wine with you at my own table and bury the 
 hatchet, or, to shoot at me if you like, according to 
 your original design. Manners and Beauchief hope 
 you will select the latter, as they owe you a grudge 
 for the possession of your incomparable bride and her 
 fortune ; but I trust you will prefer the horse, which 
 (if I am rightly informed) bore you to the declaration 
 of love at Chasteney. Reply to Crockford's. 
 " Yours ever (if you like), 
 
 " POMFRET DALLINGER. 
 
 "Count Pallardos." 
 
 Is the story told ? I think so ! 
 
 GETTING TO WINDWARD. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 London is an abominable place to dine. I mean, 
 of course, unless you are free of a club, invited out, or 
 pay a ridiculous price for a French dinner. The un- 
 known stranger, adrift on the streets, with a traveller's 
 notions of the worth of things to eat, is much worse 
 off, as to his venture for a meal, than he would be in 
 the worst town of the worst province of France — much 
 worse off than he would be in New York or New Or- 
 leans. There is a " Very's," it is true, and there are 
 one or two restaurants, so called, in the Haymarket; 
 but it is true, notwithstanding, that short of a two- 
 guinea dinner at the Clarendon, or some hotel of this 
 class, the next best thing is a simple pointed steak with 
 potatoes, at a chop-house. The admirable club-sys- 
 tem (admirable for club-members) has absorbed all the 
 intermediate degrees of eating-houses, and the travel- 
 ler's chance and solitary meal must be either absurdly 
 expensive, or dismally furnished and attended. 
 
 The only real liberty one ever enjoys in a metropo- 
 lis is the interval (longer or shorter, as one is more or 
 less a philosopher) between his arrival and the deliv- 
 ery of his letters of introduction. While perfectly 
 unknown, dreading no rencontre of acquaintances, sub- 
 ject to" no care of dress, equipage, or demeanor, the 
 stranger feels, what he never feels afterward, a com- 
 plete abandon to what immediately surrounds him, a 
 complete willingness to be amused in any shape which 
 chance pleases to offer, and, his desponding loneliness 
 serving him like the dark depths of a well, he sees lights 
 invisible from the higher level of amusement. 
 
 Tired of my solitary meals in the parlor of a hotel 
 during my first week in London, I made the round of 
 such dining-places as I could inquire out at the West 
 End — of course, from the reserved habits of the coun- 
 try toward strangers, making no acquaintnnces, and 
 
 scarce once exchanging a glance with the scores who 
 sat at the tables around me. Observation was my only 
 amusement, and I felt afterward indebted to those si- 
 lent studies of character for more acquaintance with 
 the under-crust of John Bull, than can be gathered 
 from books or closer intercourse. It is foreign to my 
 present purpose, however, to tell why his pride should 
 seem want of curiosity, and why his caution and deli- 
 cacy should show like insensibility and coldness. I 
 am straying from my story. 
 
 The covered promenade of the Burlington Arcade 
 is, on rainy days, a great allure for a small chop-house 
 hard by, called "The Blue Posts." This is a snug 
 little tavern, with the rear of its two stories cut into a 
 single dining-room, where chops, steaks, ale, and punch, 
 may be had in unusual perfection. It is frequented 
 ordinarily by a class of men peculiar, I should think, 
 to England — taciturn, methodical in their habits, and 
 highly respectable in their appearance — men who seem 
 to have no amusements and no circle of friends, but 
 who come in at six and sit over their punch and the 
 newspapers till bed time, without speaking a syllable, 
 except to the waiter, and apparently turning a cold 
 shoulder of discouragement to any one in the room 
 who may be disposed to offer a passing remark. They 
 hang their hats daily on the same peg, daily sit at the 
 same table (where the chair is turned down for them 
 by Villiam, the short waiter), daily drink a small pitcher 
 of punch after their half-pint of sherry, and daily read, 
 from beginning to end, the Herald, Post, and Times, 
 with the variation of the Athenaeum and Spectator, on 
 Saturdays and Sundays. I at first hazarded various 
 conjectures as to their condition in life. They were 
 evidently unmarried, and men of easy though limited 
 means — men of no great care, and no high hopes, and 
 in a fixed station; yet of that degree of intelligence 
 and firm self-respect which, in other countries (the 
 
GETTING TO WINDWARD. 
 
 307 
 
 United States, certainly, at least), would have made 
 them sought for in some more social and higher sphere 
 than that with which they seemed content. I after- 
 ward obtained something of a clue to the mystery of 
 the "Blue Posts" society, by discovering two of the 
 most respeetable looking of its customers in the exer- 
 cise of their daily vocations. One. a man of fine phre- 
 nological development, rather bald, and altogether very 
 intellectual in his l -os sublime," I met at the rooms of 
 a fashionable friend, taking his measure for pantaloons-. 
 He was the foreman of a celebrated Bond-street tailor. 
 The other was the head-shopman of a famous haber- 
 dasher in Regent street ; and either might have passed 
 for Godwin the novelist, or Babbidge the calculator — 
 with those who had seen those great intellects only in 
 their imaginations. It is only in England, that men 
 who, like these, have read or educated themselves far 
 above their situations in life, would quietly submit to 
 the arbitrary disqualifications of their pursuits, and 
 agree unresistingly to the sentence of exile from the 
 society 9uited to their mental grade. But here again 
 I am getting away from my story. 
 
 It was the close of a London rainy day. Weary of 
 pacing my solitary room, I sallied out as usual, to the 
 Burlington Arcade (I say as usual, for in a metropolis 
 where it rains nine days out of ten, rainy-weather re- 
 sorts become habitual). The little shops on either 
 side were brightly lit, the rain pattered on the glass 
 roof overhead, and to one who had not a single ac- | 
 quaintance in so vast a city, even the passing of the | 
 crowd and the glittering of lights seemed a kind of I 
 society. I began to speculate on the characters of 
 those who passed and repassed me in the turns of the i 
 short »,illery ; and the dinner-hours coming round, and i 
 the men gradually thinning off from the crowd, I ad- 
 journed to the Blue Posts with very much the feeling 
 of a reader interrupted in the progress of a novel. One 
 of the faces that had most interested me was that of a 
 foreigner, who, with a very dejected air, leaned on the 
 arm of an older man, and seemed promenading to kill 
 time, without any hope of killing his ennui. On seat- 
 ing myself at one of the small tables, I was agreeably 
 surprised to find the two foreigners my close neigh- 
 bors, and in the national silence of the company pres- 
 ent, broken only by the clatter of knives and forks, it 
 was impossible to avoid overhearing every word spoken 
 by either. After a look at me, as if to satisfy them- 
 selves that I, too, was a John Bull, they went on with 
 their conversation in French, which, so long as it was 
 confined to topics of drink and platter, weather and 
 news, I did not care to interrupt. But with their 
 progress through a second pint of sherry, personal top- 
 ics came up, and as they seemed to be conversing with 
 an impression that their language was not understood, 
 I felt obliged to remind them that I was overhearing 
 unwillingly what they probably meant for a private 
 conversation. With a frankness which I scarcely ex- 
 pected, they at once requested me to transfer my glass 
 to their table, and calling for a pitcher of punch, they 
 extended their confidence by explaining to me the 
 grounds of the remarks I had heard, and continuing to 
 converse freely on the subject. Through this means, 
 and a subsequent most agreeable acquaintance, I pos- 
 sessed myself of the circumstances of the following 
 story; and having thus shown the reader (rather di- 
 gressively, I must own) how I came by it, I proceed 
 in the third person, trusting that my narration will not 
 now seem like the "coinage of the brain." 
 
 The two gentlemen dining at the Blue Posts on the 
 rainy day just mentioned, were Frenchmen, and polit- 
 ical exiles. With the fortunes of the younger, this 
 story has chiefly to do. He was a man past the senti- 
 mental age. perhaps nearer thirty-seven than thirty- 
 five, less handsome than distinguished in his appear- 
 ance, yet with one of those variable faces which 
 are handsome for single instants once in a half 
 
 hour, more or less. His companion called him Be- 
 laccueil. 
 
 " I could come down to my circumstances," he said 
 to Monsieur St. Leger, his friend, " if I knew now. It 
 is not courage that is wanting. I would do anything 
 for a livelihood. But what is the first step ? What 
 is the next step from this ? This last dinner — this last 
 night's lodging — I am at the end of my means ; and 
 unless I accept of charity from you, which I will not, 
 to-morrow must begin my descent. Where to put my 
 foot ?" 
 
 He stopped and looked down into his glass, with the 
 air of a man who only expects an answer to refute its 
 reasoning. 
 
 " My dear Belaccueil," said the other, after a mo- 
 ment's hesitation, "you were famous in your better 
 days for almost universal accomplishment. xMimic, 
 dancer, musician, cook — what was there in our merry 
 carnival-time, to which you did not descend with suc- 
 cess, for mere amusement ? Why not now for that 
 independence of livelihood to which you adhere so 
 I pertinaciously ?" 
 
 "You will be amused to find," he answered, "how 
 ! well I have sounded the depths of every one of these 
 \ resources. The French theatre of London has re- 
 fused me, point-blank, all engagement, spite of the 
 most humiliating exhibitions of my powers of mimicry 
 before the stage-manager and a fifth-rate actress. I 
 j am not musician enough for a professor, though very 
 I well for an amateur, and have advertised in vain for 
 employment as a teacher of music, and — what was 
 I your other vocation! — cook! Oh no ! I have just 
 science enough to mend a bad dinner and spoil a good 
 one, though I declare to you, I would willingly don 
 i the white cap and apron and dive for life to the base- 
 | ment. No, my friend, I have even offered myself as 
 j assistant dancing-master, and failed ! Is not that 
 ! enough ? If it is not, let me tell you, that I would 
 j sweep the crossings, if my appearance would not ex- 
 I cite curiosity, or turn dustman, if I were strong enough 
 ! for the labor. Come down ! Show me how to come 
 ! down, and see whether I am not prepared to do it. 
 But you do not know the difficulty of earning a penny 
 ! in London. Do you suppose, with all the influence 
 I and accomplishments I possess, I could get the place 
 ! of this scrubby waiter who brings us our cigars ? No, 
 j indeed ! His situation is a perfect castle — impregna- 
 I ble to those below him. There are hundreds of poor 
 | wretches within a mile of us who would think them- 
 i selves in paradise to get his situation. How easy it is 
 for the rich to say, 'go and work!' and how difficult 
 to know how and where !" 
 
 Belaccueil looked at his friend as if he felt that he 
 had justified his own despair, and expected no com- 
 fort. 
 
 "Why not try matrimony?" said St. Leger. "I 
 can provide you the means for a six months' siege, 
 and you have better qualification for success than nine 
 tenths of the adventurers who have succeeded." 
 
 " Why — 1 could do even that — for with all hope of 
 prosperity, I have of course given up all idea of a ro- 
 mantic love. But I could not practise deceit, and 
 without pretending to some little fortune of my own, 
 the chances are small. Besides, you remember my 
 ill luck at Naples." 
 
 "Ah, that was a love affair, and you were too hon- 
 est." 
 
 " Not for the girl, God bless her ! She would have 
 married me, penniless as I was, but through the inter- 
 ference of that officious and purse-proud Englishman, 
 I her friends put me hors de combat:' 
 
 "What was his name ? Was he a relative J 
 " \ mere chance acquaintance ol their own, but he 
 entered at once upon the office of family adviser. He 
 was rich, and he had it in his power to call me an ad- 
 venturer. 1 did not discover his interference till some 
 
308 
 
 GETTING TO WINDWARD. 
 
 time after, or he would perhaps have paid dearly for 
 his nomenclature." 
 
 " Who did you say it was ?" 
 
 " Hitchings ! Mr. Plantagenet Hitchings, of Hitch- 
 ing Park, Devonshire — and the one point, to which 1 
 cling, of a gentleman's privileges, is that of calling him 
 to account, should I ever meet him." 
 
 St. Leger smiled and sat thoughtfully silent for a 
 while. Belaccueil pulled apart the stems of a bunch 
 of grapes on his plate, and was silent with a very dif- 
 ferent expression. 
 
 " You are willing," said the former, at last, " to teach 
 music and dancing, for a proper compensation." 
 
 " Parbleu ! Yes !" 
 
 "And if you could unite this mode of support with 
 a very pretty revenge upon Mr. Plantagenet Hitch- 
 ings (with whom, by the way, I am very well acquaint- 
 ed), you would not object to the two-fold thread in 
 your destiny ?" 
 
 "They would be threads of gold, mon ami/" said 
 the surprised Belaccueil. 
 
 St. Leger called for pen, ink, and paper, and wrote 
 d letter at the Blue Posts, which the reader will follow 
 to its destination, as the next step in thi3 story. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 A grekx angel (I mean an angel ignorant of the 
 world) would probably suppose that the feeding of 
 these animal bodies of ours, if not done in secret, must 
 at least be the one act of human life separated entirely 
 from the more heavenly emotions. Yet the dinner is 
 a meal dear to lovers ; and novelists and tale-tellers 
 choose the moments stolen from fork and plate for the 
 birth and interchange of the most delicious and tender 
 sentiments of our existence. Miss Hitchings, while 
 unconsciously shocking Monsieur Sansou by tilting 
 Tier soup-plate for the last spoonful of vermicelli, was 
 controlling the beating of a heart full of feminine and 
 delicate tenderness; and as the tutor was careful never 
 to direct his regards to the other end of the table (for 
 reasons of his own), Miss Henrietta laid the unction 
 to her soul that such indifference to the prettiest girl 
 who hud ever honored them as a guest, proved the 
 strength of her own magnet, and put her more at ease 
 on the subject of Monsieur Sansou's admiration". He, 
 indeed, was committing the common fault of men 
 whose manners are naturally agreeable — playing that 
 passive and grateful game of courtesy and attention so 
 easy to the object of regard, and so delightful to wo- 
 man, who is never so blest as in bestowing. Besides, 
 he had an object in suppressing his voice to the lowest 
 audible pitch, and the rich and deep tone, sunk only to 
 escape the ear of another, sounded, to the watchful 
 and desiring sense of her to whom it was addressed, 
 like the very key-note and harmony of affection. 
 
 At a table so surrounded with secrets, conversation 
 flagged, of course. Mr. Hitchings thought it very 
 uphill work to entertain Miss Hervey, whose heart 
 and senses were completely absorbed in the riddle of 
 Belaccueil's disguise and presence; Mr. Hervey, the 
 uncle, found old Mrs. Plantagenet rather absent, for 
 the smitten dame had eyes for every movement of 
 
 Monsieur Sansou ; and the tutor himself, with his re- 
 sentment toward his host, and his suspicions of the 
 
 ove of his daugViter, his reviving passion for Miss 
 Hervey, and his designs on Mrs. Plantagenet, had 
 enough to render him as silent as the latter could wish, 
 
 and as apparently insensible to the attraction of the 
 
 fair stranger. 
 
 How little we know what is in the bosoms of those 
 
 around us ! How natural it is, however, to feel and 
 
 act as if we knew — to account for all that appears on 
 
 the surface by the limited acquaintance we have with 
 
 circumstances and feelings — to resent an indifference 
 of which we know not the cause — to approve or con- 
 demn, without allowance for chagrin, or despair, or 
 love, or hope, or distress — any of the deep undercur- 
 rents for ever at work in the depths of human bosoms. 
 The young man at your side at a dinner-party may 
 have a duel on his hands for the morning, or a disgrace 
 imminent in credit or honor, or a refused heart or an 
 accepted one, newly crushed or newly made happy* 
 or (more common still, and less allowed for) he may 
 feel the first impression of disease, or the consequen- 
 ces of an indigestion ; and, for his agreeableness or 
 disagreeableness, you try to account by something in 
 yourself, some feeling toward yourself — as if you and 
 you only could affect his spirits or give a color to his 
 mood of manners. The old man's thought of death. 
 the mother's overwhelming interest in her child, the 
 woman's up-spring of emotion or love, are visiters to 
 the soul that come unbidden and out of time, and you 
 can neither feast nor mourn, secure against their in- 
 terruption. It would explain many a coldness, could 
 we look into the heart concealed from us. We should 
 often pity when we hate, love when we think we can 
 not even forgive, admire where we curl the lip with 
 scorn and indignation. To judge without reserve of 
 any human action is a culpable temerity, of all our 
 sins the most ttnfeeling and frequent. 
 
 I will deal frankly with you, dear reader. I have 
 arrived at a stage of my story which, of all the stages 
 of story-writing, I detest the most cordially. Poets 
 I have written about the difficulty of beginning a story 
 ! (vide Byron) — Ca ne me coule pas ; others of the end- 
 j ing. That I do with facility, joy, and rejoicing. But 
 the love pathos of a story — the place where the reader 
 is expected to sigh, weep, or otherwise express his 
 emotion — that is the point, I confess, the most diffi- 
 cult to write, and the most unsatisfactory when written. 
 " Pourquoy, Sir Knight ?" Not because it is difficult 
 to write love-scenes — according to the received mode — 
 not that it is difficult to please those (a large majority) 
 who never truly loved, and whose ideas, therefore, of 
 love and its making, are transcendentalized out of all 
 ! truth and nature — not that it would be more labor to 
 j do this than to copy a circular, or write a love-letter 
 I for a modest swain (this last my besetting occupation) 
 — but because, just over the inkstand there peers a 
 ! face, sometimes of a man of forty, past the nonsense 
 of life, but oftener of some friend, a woman who has 
 loved, and this last more particularly knows that 
 true love is never readable or sensible — that if its lan- 
 I guage be truly written, it is never in polished phrase 
 [ or musical cadence — that it is silly, but for its con- 
 i cealed meaning, embarrassed and blind, but for the 
 j interpreting and wakeful heart of one listener — that 
 ! love, in short, is the god of unintelligibility, mystery, 
 and adorable nonsense, and, of course, that which 1 
 i have written (if readable and sensible) is out of taste 
 i and out of sympathy, and none but fancy-lovers and 
 enamored brains (not hearts) will approve or believe it. 
 D'Israeli the younger is one of the few men of ge- 
 nius who, having seen truth without a veil, dare to re- 
 veal the vision ; and he has written Henrietta Temple 
 ! — the silliest yet truest love-book of modern time. 
 | The critics (not an amative race) have given him a 
 benefit of the "besom" of ridicule, but D'Israeli, far 
 from being the effeminate intellect they would make 
 him, is one of the most original and intrepid men of 
 genius living, and whether the theme be "wine, wo- 
 man, or war," he writes with fearless truth, piquancy, 
 and grace. Books on love, however, should be read 
 i by lovers only, and pity it is, that there is not au ink 
 j in chemistry, invisible save to the eye kindled with ain- 
 I atory fire. But "to our muttons." 
 
 It was not leap-year, but Monsieur Belaccueil, on 
 j i the day of the dinner-party at Hitchings park, was 
 I] made aware (I will not say by proposals, for ladies make 
 
GETTING TO WINDWARD. 
 
 309 
 
 known their inclinations in ways much less formidable) 
 —lie was made aware, I say, that the hearts of three 
 of the parly were within the flight of his arrow. Prob- 
 ably his humble situation reversed the usual relative 
 position of the sexes in the minds of the dame and 
 damsels — and certainly there is no power woman exer- 
 cises so willingly as a usurpation of the masculine 
 privilege. I have stated my objection to detail the 
 dialogue between Miss Hitchings and her tutor at the 
 dinner-table. To be recorded faithfully, the clatter 
 of silver forks on China, the gurgle of wine, the inter- 
 ruptions of the footmen with champagne and vegeta- 
 bles, should all be literally interspersed — for to all the 
 broken sentences (so pathetic when properly punctu- 
 ated — vide Neal's novels) these were the sequels and 
 the accompaniments: " No, thank you !" and "If you 
 please," and " May I fill your glass ?" — have filled out, 
 to the perfect satisfaction of the lady, many an unfin- 
 ished sentence upon which depended the "whole des- 
 tiny of her affections; and, as I said before, the truth 
 is not faithfully rendered when these interstices are 
 unsupplied. 
 
 It was dark when the ladies left the dinner-table. 
 followed by Monsieur Sanson, and, at the distance of 
 a few feet from the windows opening on the lawn, the 
 air was black and impenetrable. There were no stars 
 visible and no moon, but the clouds which were gath- 
 ering alter a drought, seemed to hush the air With 
 their long expected approach, and it was one of those 
 soft, stiJ!, yet murky and fragrant nights when the 
 earth seems to breathe only — without light, sound, or 
 motion. What lover does not remember such a night ? 
 
 Oppressed with the glaring lights and the company 
 of people she cared nothing about, Miss Hervey 
 stepped out upon the lawn, and with her face lifted as 
 if to draw deeper inhalations of the dew and freshness, 
 she strolled leisurely over the smooth carpet of grass. 
 At a slight turn to avoid a clump of shrubbery, she 
 encountered Belaccueil, who was apologizing and 
 about to pass her, when she called him by his name, 
 and passing her arm through his, led him on to the 
 extremity of the lawn. A wire fence arrested their 
 progress, and leaning against it, Miss Hervey inquired 
 into the cause of the disguise she had penetrated, and 
 softened and emboldened by the fragrant darkness, 
 said all that a woman might say of tenderness and en- 
 couragement. Belaccueil's heart beat with pride and 
 gratified amour propre, but he confined himself to the 
 expression of this feeling, and leaving the subject open, 
 took advantage of Mrs. Plantagenet's cali to Miss 
 Hervey from the window, to leave her and resume his 
 ramble through the grounds. 
 
 The supper tray had been brought in, and the party 
 were just taking their candles to separate, when the 
 tutor entered at the glass door and arrested the steps 
 of Mrs. Plantagenet. She set down her candle and 
 courtesied a good-night to the ladies (Mr. Hitchings had 
 gone to bed, for wine made him sleepy, and Mr. Her- 
 vey always retired early— where he was bored), and 
 closing the windows, mixed a glass of negus for Mon- 
 sieur Sansou ; and, herself pulling a sandwich to 
 pieces, deliberately, and it must be confessed, some- 
 what patronisingly, invited the Frenchman to become 
 her lord. And after a conversation, which (la verite 
 avant (out) turned mainly on will and investments, the 
 window dame sailed blissfully to bed, and Belaccueil 
 wrote the following letter to his friend and adviser : — 
 
 "Mv dear St. Leger: Enclosed you have the 
 on y surviving lock of my grizzled wig— sign and sym- 
 bol that my disguises are over and my object attained, 
 lhe « wig .burns at this instant in the grate, item my 
 hand-ruffles, item sundry embroidered cravats a la 
 vielle cour, Hem (this last not without some trouble at 
 my heart) a solitary love-token from Coustantia Her- 
 vey. One faded rose— given me at Paestum, the day 
 before 1 was driven disgraced from her presence by 
 
 ' the interference of this insolent fool— one faded rose 
 has crisped and faded into smoke with the rest. And 
 
 : so fled from the world the last hope of a warm and 
 passionate heart, which never gave up its destiny till 
 now — never felt that it was made in vain, guarded, re- 
 fined, cherished in vain, till that long-loved flower lay 
 in ashes. I am accustomed to strip emotion of its 
 drapery — determined to feel nothing but what is real — 
 yet this moment, turn it and stiip it, and deny its illu- 
 sions as I will, is anguish. ' Self-inflicted,' you smile 
 and say ! 
 
 "You will marvel what stars will not come into 
 conjunction, when I tell you that Miss Hervey is at 
 this moment under the same roof with me and my 
 affianced bride, and you will marvel what good turn I 
 have done the devil, that he should, in one day, offer 
 
 j me my enemy's daughter, »my enemy's fortune (with 
 the drawback of an incumbrance), and the woman who 
 
 j I thought had spurned me. After all. it is a devil's 
 
 ; gift — for in choosing that to which I am most impelled, 
 I crush hope, and inflict pain, and darken my own 
 
 | heart for ever. I could not have done this once. 
 
 ; Manhood and poverty have embittered me. 
 
 " Miss Hitchings has chosen to fall in love with her 
 tutor. She is seventeen, a sweet blonde, with large, 
 suffused eyes, tender, innocent, and (without talent) 
 singularly earnest and confiding. I could be very 
 happy with such a woman, and it would have been a 
 very tolerable revenge (failing the other) to have stolen 
 her from her father. But he would have disinherited 
 and forgotten us, and I have had enough of poverty, 
 and can not afford to be forgotten — by my enemy. 
 "You never saw Miss Hervey. It is not much to 
 i tell you she is the most beautiful woman I have met. 
 j If she were not beautiful, her manners would win all 
 i hearts. If her manners were less fascinating, her sin- 
 gular talents would make her remarkable. She is not 
 : appreciated, because her beauty blinds people to her 
 
 i talents, and her manners make them forget her beauty. 
 ; She is something in the style of the Giorgione we 
 adored at Venice — a transparently dark beauty, with 
 unfathomable eyes and lashes that sweep her cheek; 
 her person tall and full, and her neck set on like Ze- 
 nobia's. Yet she is not a proud woman — I think she 
 is not. She is too natural and true to do anything 
 which looks like pride, save walk like an empress. 
 She says everything rightly — penetrates instantly to 
 the core of meaning — sings, dances, talks, with the 
 ease, confidence, grace, faithlessness, with which a 
 swallow flies. Perfection in all things is her nature. 
 I am jotting down her qualities now as they are al- 
 lowed by the world. I will not write of them like a 
 lover. Oh, my friend, with what plummet can you 
 fathom the depth of my resentments, when, for them, 
 I forego possession of this woman ! She offered me, 
 two hours since, the unqualified control of her desti- 
 ny ! She asked me with tremulous voice to forgive 
 her for the wrong done me in Italy. She dropped 
 that faultless and superb head on my bosom, and told 
 me that she loved me — and I never answered ! The 
 serpent in my heart tied up my tongue, and with cold 
 thanks and fiend-like resistance to the bliss of even 
 once pressing her to my bosom, I left her. I do not 
 know myself when I remember that I have done this. 
 I am possessed — driven out — by some hard and bitter 
 spirit who neither acts nor speaks like me. Yet could 
 I not undo what I have done. 
 
 " To-morrow morning will disappear Monsieur San- 
 sou from Hitchings park, and. on the brief condition 
 of a brief ceremony, the law, the omnipotent law, will 
 deliver into my hands the lauds, tenements, goods, 
 chattels, and liberty of my enemy — for even so deeply 
 has he sunk into the open pocket of Mrs. Plantage- 
 net ! She holds mortgages on all he has, for money 
 advanced, and all that is hers will be mine, without 
 reserve. The roof I have been living in degradation 
 
310 
 
 THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. 
 
 under, will be to-morrow my own. The man who 
 called me an adventurer, who stood between me and 
 my love, who thrust me from my heaven without cause 
 or provocation — the meddling fool who boasts that he 
 saved a countrywoman from a French swindler (he 
 has recurred to it often in my presence), will be to- 
 morrow my dependant, beggar for shelter, suppli- 
 ant for his liberty and subsistence ! Do you ask if 
 that outweighs the love of the woman I have lost ? 
 Alas ! yes. 
 
 44 You are older, and have less taste for sentiment 
 even than I. I will not bore you with my crowd of 
 new feelings in this situation. My future wife is amia- 
 ble and good. She is also vain, unattractive, and old. 
 I shall be kind to her and endeavor that she shall not 
 be disenchanted, and if I can make her happy, it may 
 mollify my penance for the devil with which I am pos- 
 sessed. Miss Hitchings will lose nothing by having 
 loved me, for she shall be the heiress of my wealth, 
 
 and her father but I will not soil my heart by 
 
 thinking of an alleviation to his downfall. 
 
 "Farewell, mon ami. Congratulate and pily me. 
 "Adolphk Belaccueil." 
 
 In one of the most fashionable squares of London 
 lives, "in the season," Monsieur Belaccueil, one of 
 the most hospitable foreigners in that great metropo- 
 lis. He is a pensive and rather melancholy-looking 
 man by day; but society, which he seems to seek like 
 an opiate to restless feeling, changes him to a gay 
 ! man, the most mirth-loving of Amphytrions. His 
 i establishment is presided over by his wife, who, as his 
 i society is mostly French, preserves a respectable si- 
 i lence, but seems contented with her lot and proud of 
 j her husband ; while in Miss Plantagenet (ci-devant 
 | Hitchings) his guests find his table's chief attraction — 
 | one of the prettiest heiresses and most loveable girls in 
 I London. How deeply Monsieur Belaccueil still rejoices 
 I at his success in "getting to windward," is matter of 
 I problem. Certainly there is one chariot which passes 
 ! him in his solitary ride in the park, to which he bows 
 with a pang of unabating and miserable anguish. And 
 if the occupant of that plain chariot share at all in bis 
 suffering, she has not the consolation to which he flies 
 in society — for a more secluded and lonely woman 
 lives not in the great solitude of London, than Con- 
 stantia Hervey. 
 
 THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. 
 
 The following story was told to the writer by a lady 
 in France — told during supper at a ball, and of course 
 only partially. The interstices have been supplied in 
 writing it, and the main thread of the narrative may 
 be relied on as fact. The names are fictitious : — 
 
 A beautiful girl of seventeen, in the convent-parlor 
 of Saint Agatha. She is dressed as a novice, and the 
 light breaks off from the curve of the raven hair put 
 away under the close-fitting cap — breaks off almost in 
 sparkles. For so it may — as an artist knows. Her 
 eyes are like hounds in the leash — fiery and eager. 
 And if, in those ever-parted and forward-pressing lips 
 there is a possibility of languid repose, the proof of it 
 lies in the future. They are sleepless and dreamless, 
 as yet, with a thirst unnamed and irrepressible, for the 
 passions of life. Her name is Zelie. 
 
 But we can not make the past into the present. 
 Change the tense — for Zelie is dead now, or we could 
 not record her strange story. 
 
 There was a ring at the convent door, and presently 
 entered Colonel Count Montalembert, true to his ap- 
 pointment. He had written to the lady-abbess to 
 request an interview with the daughter of his com- 
 rade, dead on the frozen track of the retreat from 
 Moscow. Flahault was to him, as his right hand to 
 his left, and as he covered up the stiffened body with 
 snow, he had sworn to devote his life to that child 
 whose name was last on the lips closed for ever. The 
 Count Montalembert was past fifty, and a constant 
 sufferer from his wounds; and his physicians had 
 warned him that death was not far off. His bearing 
 was still noble and soldierly, however, and his frank 
 and clear eye had lost little of its lustre. 
 
 " I wrote to you the particulars of your father's 
 death, my child," said the colonel, after the abbess 
 had left them alone, at his request. "I could not 
 dwell on it again without more emotion than is well 
 for me. I must be brief even with what I have to say 
 to his daughter — for that, too, will move me overmuch. 
 You are very lovely, Zelie." 
 
 " You are very kind !" answered the novice, blush- 
 ing, and dropping her long lashes upon her cheek. 
 
 "Very lovely, I say, and must love and be beloved. 
 It is a woman's destiny, and your destiny more than 
 most women's." 
 
 The count gazed into the deep eyes of his eager 
 listener, and seemed embarrassed to know how to pro- 
 ceed. 
 
 " Hear me through," he said, " before you form an 
 ! opinion of my motives. And first answer me a bold 
 question. Have you any attachment — have you ever 
 seen a man you could love and marry ?" 
 
 " No !" murmured the blushing novice, after a mo- 
 ment's hesitation. 
 
 " But you are likely to love, soon and rashly, once 
 free in the world — and that is one evil against which 
 I will make myself your shield. And there is another 
 — which I am only sorry that I need your permission 
 and aid in averting." 
 
 Zelie looked up inquiringly. 
 
 " Poverty — the grave of love — the palsy of the 
 heart — the oblivion of beauty and grace ! To avert 
 this from you, I have a sacrifice to demand at your 
 hands." 
 
 Again the count stopped in embarrassment almost 
 painful, and Mademoiselle Montalembert with diffi- 
 culty suppressed her impatience. 
 
 " My physicians tell me," he resumed, in a tone 
 lower and calmer, " that my lease of life is wearing 
 rapidly to a close. A year hence lies its utmost and 
 inevitable limit. Could you live in the world, without 
 love, for one year, Zelie?" 
 
 "Monsieur !" was her surprised exclamation. 
 
 " Then listen to my proposal. I have a fortune 
 while I live, large enough for your most ambitious 
 desires. But it is left to me with conditions which 
 forbid my conveying it through any link save mar- 
 riage, and to my widow only for life. To give it 
 you, I regret deeply for your sake to say, I must wed 
 you. You start — do not answer me now. I leave you 
 to revolve this in your mind till to-morrow. Remem- 
 ber that I shall not trouble you long, and that the 
 name of Montalembert is as noble as your own, and 
 that you require a year, perhaps more than a year, to 
 recover from your first dizzy gaze upon the world. 1 
 
THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. 
 
 311 
 
 shall put no restraint upon you. I have no wish but 
 to fulfil mv duty to my dead comrade in arms, and to 
 die, knowing that you will well bestow your heart 
 when I am gone. Adieu !" 
 
 The count disappeared, and, with her clasped hands 
 pressed to her forehead, the novice paced the convent- 
 parlor until the refectory bell rang for dinner. * * * 
 
 It was an evening of June, in the gardens of Ver- 
 sailles. It was an evening of June, also, in the pest- 
 house of St. Lazarus, and in the cell of the condemned 
 felon in St. Pelagic Time, even in his holyday dress, 
 visits indiscriminately — the levelling caitiff! Have the 
 unhappy any business with June ? 
 
 But the gardens of Versailles were beginning to 
 illuminate, and the sky faded, with a glory more fes- 
 tal than sunlight, with the radiance of a myriad of 
 glittering lamps, embellishing even the trees and (low- 
 ers beyond the meaning of nature. The work of the 
 architect and the statuary at once stood idealized, and 
 draped in an atmosphere of fairy-land, and the most 
 beautiful woman of the imperial court became more 
 beautiful as she stepped into the glare of the alley of 
 fountains. And who should that be — the fairest flower 
 of French nobility — but the young Countess Monta- 
 lembert, just blooming through the close of her first 
 year of wedlock ! 
 
 The Count Montalembert stepped with her from the 
 shade of the orange-grove, and, without her arm, fell 
 behind scarce perceptibly, that he might keep his eye 
 filled with the grace of her motion, without seeming 
 to worship her before the world. With every salient 
 flow of that cloud-like drapery onward — with every 
 twinkling step of those feet of airy lightness — the dark 
 eyelashes beneath the soldier's brow lifted and drooped 
 again, as if his pulse of life and vision were alone 
 governed by her swan-like motion. The count had 
 forgotten that he was to die. The year allotted to 
 him by his physicians had passed, and, far from falling 
 gradually to his doom, his figure had straightened, and 
 his step grown firm, and his cheek and lip and eye had 
 brightened with returning health. He had drank life 
 from love. The superb Zelie had proved grateful and 
 devoted, and at the chateau of Montalembert, in 
 southern France, she had seemed content to live with 
 him, and him only, the most assiduous of nurses in 
 all her glorious beauty. But though this was Para- 
 dise to the count, his reason, not his heart, told him 
 it was imprisonment to her, and he had now been a 
 month at the sumptuous court of Napoleon, an at- 
 tendant upon a wife who was the star of the time — the 
 beloved of all the court's gay beholders. 
 
 As the Montalemberts strolled toward the chateau, 
 which was now emitting floods of light from its many 
 windows, a young soldier, with a slight mustache just 
 shading his Grecian lip, joined them from a side-path, 
 and claimed the hand of the countess for a waltz. 
 The mercurial music at the same instant fled through 
 the air, and under an exclamation at its thrilling 
 sweetness, the countess concealed from her husband 
 an emotion which the trembling of her slight hand' 
 betrayed instantly to her partner. With a bow of af- 
 fected gayety to the count, she quickened her pace, 
 and in another moment stood blushing in the dazzling 
 ring of waltzers, the focus herself of all eyes open to 
 novelty and beauty. 
 
 De Mornay, the countess's partner, was but an en- 
 sign in the imperial guard. He had but his sword. 
 Not likely to be called handsome, or to be looked 
 upon as attractive or dangerous by any but the most 
 penetrating of his own sex, he had that philtre, that 
 inexplicable something, which at once commended 
 him to woman. His air was all earnest. The sup- 
 pressed devotion of life and honor breathed in his 
 voice. He seemed ever hiding his heart with pain — 
 shamed with betrayed adoration— calm by the force of 
 a respect that rebuked passion. He professed no gal- 
 
 I lantries. He professed nothing. His eyes alone, large, 
 
 [ steadfast, imploring, conveyed language of love. An 
 hour of that absorbing regard — an apparently calm, 
 
 ! unimpassioned hour of the intercourse common to 
 
 i those newly met — sufficed to awaken in the bosom of 
 the countess an interest alarming to himself, and dan- 
 gerous to her content as the wife of another. Strange 
 she thought it, that, as the low and deferential tones 
 of De Mornay fell on her ear, they seemed to expel 
 
 ! from her heart all she bad hitherto treasured — ambi- 
 tion for the splendors of the court, passion for admi- 
 
 ! ration, and even her gratitude for her husband. A 
 hut in the forest, with De Mornay only, was the Para- 
 dise now most present to the dreams and fancy of the 
 proud wife of Montalembert. 
 
 As his wife left him, the count thrust his hand into 
 his breast with a gesture of controlled emotion, and 
 turned aside, as if to seek once more the retired covert 
 he had left. But his steps were faltering. At the 
 entrance of the alley he turned again, and walking 
 
 , rapidly to the chateau, entered the saloon trembling 
 to the measured motion of the dancers. 
 
 Waiting for an opportunity to float into the giddy 
 ring, De Mornay stood with his arm around the waist 
 
 ! of the countess. Montalembert's face flushed, but he 
 stepped to a column which supported the orchestra, 
 and looked on unobserved. Her transparent cheek 
 
 I was so near to the lips of her partner, that his breath 
 must warm it. Her hand was pressed — ay, by the 
 
 I bend of her gloved wrist, pressed hard — upon the 
 
 ' shoulder of De Mornay. Her bosom throbbed per- 
 ceptibly in its jewelled vest. She leaned toward him 
 
 ! with a slight sway of her symmetrical waist, and 
 
 ! away, like two smoke wreaths uniting, away in volup- 
 tuous harmony of movement, gazing into each other's 
 eyes, murmuring inaudibly to the crowd — lips, cheeks, 
 and eyes, in passionate neighborhood — away floated 
 the wife and friend of Montalembert in the authorized 
 
 I commerce of the gay world. Their feet chased each 
 other, advancing, retreating, amid the velvet folds of 
 
 i her dress. Her waist was drawn close to his side in 
 the more exciting passages of the music. Her luxu- 
 riant tresses floated from her temples to his. She 
 curved her swan-like neck backward, and, with a look 
 of pleasure, which was not a smile, gave herself up to 
 the thrilling wedlock of music and motion, her eyes 
 half-drooped and bathed in the eager gaze of De 
 Mornay's. Montalembert's face was pallid and his 
 eye on fire. The cold sweat stood on his forehead. 
 He felt wronged, though the world saw all. With his 
 concealed hand he clenched his breast till he drew 
 blood. There was a pause in the music, and with a 
 sudden agony at the thought of receiving his wife 
 again from the hands of De Mornay, Montalembert 
 fled on to the open air. 
 An hour elapsed. 
 
 "I ask a Heaven for myself, it is true, but not much 
 for you to give !" said a voice approaching through 
 the shadowy alley of the garden. 
 
 The count lay on the ground with his forehead 
 pressed to the marble pedestal of a statue, and he 
 heard, with the voice, the rustling of a female dress, 
 and the rattling of a sabre-chain and spurs. 
 
 " But one ringlet, sacred to me," continued the 
 voice, in a tone almost feminine with its pleading ear- 
 nestness; "not given to me, no, no! — that were a 
 child's desire ! — but mine, though still playing on this 
 ivory shoulder, and still lying neatly beneath that vein- 
 ed temple — mine with your knowledge only, and 
 caressed and cared for, morn and night, with the 
 thought that it is mine ! Oh, Zelie ! there is no 
 wrong to Montalembert in this ! Keep it from his 
 touch! Let him not breathe upon it! Let not the 
 wind blow that one ringlet toward him! And when it 
 kisses your cheek, and plays with the envied breeze 
 upon your bosom — think — think of the soul of Do 
 
312 
 
 THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED. 
 
 Mornay, bound in it ! Oh, God ! why am I made 
 capable of love like this !" 
 
 There was no reply, and long ere Montalembert 
 had recovered from Lis amazement at these daring 
 words, the sound of their footsteps had died away. 
 
 Pass two years. It is enough to wait on Time in 
 the Present. In the Past and Future, the graybeard, 
 like other ministers out of place, must do without 
 usher and secretary. 
 
 It was a summer's noon on the Quai D'Orsay, of 
 Paris. The liveried lacqueys of the princely hotels j 
 were lounging by the heavy gateways of stone, or 
 leaning over the massy parapet of the river. And, j 
 true to his wont, the old soldier came with the noon, j 
 creeping from the " Invalides," to take his seat under 
 the carved lion of the Montalemberts. He had served \ 
 under the late count, and the memory of his house j 
 was dear to the old veteran. The sabre-cut which had 
 disfigured his face, was received, he said, while fight- < 
 ing between Montalembert and Flahault, and to see | 
 the daughter of the one, and the gay heir of the j 
 other's wife and fortune, he made a daily pilgrimage I 
 to the Quai, and sat in the sun till the countess drove \ 
 out in her chariot. 
 
 By the will of the first husband of Zelie de Fla- 
 hault, the young De Mornay, to become her husband j 
 and share her fortune, was compelled to take the , 
 name and title of Count Montalembert, subject to the ; 
 imperial accord. Napoleon had given the rank un- j 
 willingly, and as a mark of respect to the last will of i 
 a brave man who had embellished the title — for the 
 eagle-eye of the Corsican read the soul of De Mor- | 
 nay like an illuminated book, and knew the use he j 
 would make of fortune and power. 
 
 In the quadrangle of the hotel Montalembert, there ; 
 were two cnrriage-Iandings, or two persons, and the j 
 apartments were separated into two entirely distinct 
 establishments. In one suite the young count chose 
 to live at his pleasure, en garcon, and in the other the I 
 mixed hospitalities of the house were given, and the j 
 coLintess was there, and there only, at home. At this | 
 moment the court was ringing with the merry laugh- 
 ter of the count's convives, for he had a bachelor party J 
 to breakfast, and the wine seemed, even at that early 
 hour of the day, to have taken the ascendant. The i 
 carriages of the bacchanalians lined one side of the 
 court, and the modest chariot of the countess stood 
 along) at the door on the other; for it was near the j 
 hour for promenade in th^ Champs Elysees. 
 
 It was an hour after noon when the countess de- 
 scended. She came slowly, drawing on her glove, 
 and the old soldier at the gate rose quickly to his feet, 
 and leaned forward to gaze on her. She had changed 
 since the death of her father's friend — the brave Mon- 
 talembert, to whom she owed her fortune. But she 
 was still eminently beautiful. Thought, perhaps sad- 
 ness, had dimmed to a sweet melancholy the bright j 
 sparkle of her glance, and her mouth, no longer [ 
 fiercely spirited, was firm but gentle. Her curtains I 
 of sable lashes moved languidly over her drooping j 
 eye. She looked like one who was subdued in her | 
 hopes, not in her courage, and like one who had shut 
 the door of her heart upon its unextinguishable fires 
 to let them burn on, but in secret. She was dressed 
 more proudly than gayly, and she wore upon her 
 breast one memorial of her first husband — his own 
 black cross that he had worn in battle, and in the few 
 happy days of his wedlock, and which he had sent her 
 from his death-bed. 
 
 At the moment the countess stepped from her 
 threshold, the door on the opposite side of the quad- 
 rangle was thrown open, and, with a boisterous laugh. 
 the count sprang into his phaeton, calling to one of 
 his party to follow him. His companion shrank back 
 on seeing the countess, and in that moment's delay 
 the door of the carriage was closed and the coachman 
 
 ordered to drive on. The count's whip had waved 
 over his spirited horses, however, and as they stood 
 rearing and threatening to escape from their excited 
 master, his friend sprang to his side, the reins were 
 suddenly loosed, and with a plunge which threatened 
 to tear the harness from their backs, they leaped for- 
 ward. In the next moment, the horses of both vehicles 
 were drawn upon their haunches, half locked together 
 in the narrow gateway, and with a blow from the crutch 
 of the old veteran who rushed from the porter's lodge, 
 the phaeton was driven back against the wall, the pole 
 broken, and the count and his friend precipitated upon 
 the pavement. The liberated horses flew wildly 
 through the gate, and then followed a stillness like 
 that of midnight in the court — for on the pavement, 
 betrayed by her profusion of fair locks, loosened by 
 the fall, lay a woman in man's attire, the dissolute 
 companion of the count, in his daylight revel. Un- 
 injured himself, the count stood a moment, abashed 
 and motionless, but the old soldier, with folded arms 
 and the remnant of his broken crutch in his hand, 
 looked sternly on the scene, and as the servants start- 
 ed from their stupor to raise the insensible woman, 
 the countess, reading her husband's impulse in his 
 looks, sprang from the open door of the chariot, and 
 interposed between him and his intended victim. 
 With the high-born grace of noble, the soldierly in- 
 valid accepted her protection, and followed her to her 
 chariot ; and, ordered to drive to the Hospital of the 
 Invalides, the coachman once more turned slowly to 
 the gateway. 
 
 The night following, at the opera. Paris was on 
 the qui vive of expectation, for a new prima donna 
 was to make her debut before the emperor. 
 
 Paris was also on the qui vive for the upshot of a 
 certain matter of scandal. The eclair cissement at the 
 hotel Montalembert had been followed, it is said, by 
 open war between the count and countess ; and, de- 
 termined to carry out his defiance, the dissolute hus- 
 band had declared to his associates that he would 
 produce at the opera, in a box opposite to his wife, 
 the same person whose appearance she had resented, 
 and in the same attire. It was presumed, by the 
 graver courtiers who had heard this, that the actors iu 
 this brutal scene, if it should be carried out, would be 
 immediately arrested by the imperial guard. 
 
 The overture commenced to a crowded house, and 
 before it was half played, the presence of the count 
 and his companion, in a conspicuous box on the left 
 of the circle, drew the attention of every eye. The 
 Montalemberts were the one subject of conversation. 
 The sudden disappearance of the old count, his death 
 in a distant province, his will relative to his widow and 
 De Mornay — all the particulars of that curious inher- 
 itance of wife and fortune, by written testament — were 
 passed from lip to lip. 
 
 There was a pause at the close of the overture. 
 The house was silent, occupied partly in looking at 
 the audacious count and his companion, partly in 
 watching for the entrance of the injured countess. 
 
 A sudden light illuminated the empty box, shed 
 from the lobby lamps upon the curtains at the open- 
 ing of the door, and the Countess Montalembert en- 
 tered, with every eye in that vast assembly bent 
 anxiously upon her. But how radiantly beautiful, 
 and how strangely dressed ! Her toilet was that of 
 a bride. Orange-flowers were woven into her long 
 raven tresses, and her robe of spotless white was fold- 
 ed across her bust with the simplicity of girlhood. A 
 white rose-bud breathed on her bosom, and bracelets 
 of pearls encircled her wrists of alabaster. And her 
 smile, as she took her seat and looked around upon 
 her friends — oh! that was bridal too! — unlike any 
 look known lately upon her face — joyous, radiant, 
 blissful, as the first hour of acknowledged love. Nev- 
 er had Zelie de Flahault looked so triumphantly 
 
A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE. 
 
 313 
 
 beautiful. The opera-glnsses from every corner of the 
 hoiise remained fixed upon her. A murmur arose 
 gradually, a murmur of admiration succeeding the 
 silent wonder of her first entrance; and but for the 
 sudden burst of music from the orchestra, heralding 
 the approach of the emperor, it would have risen into 
 a shout of spontaneous homage. 
 
 The emperor came in. 
 
 But who is there ! — at the right hand of Napoleon 
 — smiled upon by the emperor, as the emperor seldom 
 smiled, decorated with the noblest orders of France — 
 a star on his breast? — Motalkmbert! 
 
 "Montalembert! Montalembert !" resounded from 
 a thousand voices. 
 
 Was he risen from the dead? Was this an appa- 
 rition — t he indignant apparition of the first husband — 
 risen to rebuke the unmanly brutality of the second ? 
 Would the countess start at the si^ht of him ? 
 
 Look ! she turns to the illuminated box of the em- 
 peror I She smiles — with a radiant blush of joy and 
 happiness she smiles — she -lifts that ungloved and 
 
 nnjewelled hand, decorated only with a plain gold 
 ring, and waves it to the waved" hand of Montalem- 
 bert ! — the brave, true, romantic Montalembert. For, 
 with the quickness of French divination, the whole 
 story is understood by the audience. And there is 
 not a brain so dull as not to know, that the audacious 
 invalid veteran was the disguised count, watching over 
 the happiness of her whose destiny of love he had too 
 rashly undertaken to make cloudless — make cloudless 
 at the expense of a crushed heart, and a usurped hearth, 
 and asecretdeath and burial, if so much were necessary. 
 But he is a happy bridegroom now. And Adolphe 
 de Mornay is once more an untitled ensign — plucked 
 
 j for ever from the chaste heart and bosom of the de- 
 voted wife of Montalembert. 
 
 And Montalembert himself — whose springs of life 
 
 I were fed only by love — died when that fountain of love 
 
 was broken; for his wife died in childbed one year 
 
 after his return to her, and he followed her in one day. 
 
 j Never man was more loved than he. Surely never 
 
 , "man more deserved it. 
 
 A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE, 
 
 1 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, 
 
 The sou! that rises in us, our life's star, 
 Has had elsewhere its settine. 
 
 And cometh from afar."— Wordsworth. 
 
 The death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at 
 liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow. 
 
 A few words of previous explanation, however. 
 
 I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the 
 subject with many sensible persons, that there are few 
 men who have not had, at different intervals in their 
 lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections 
 of mind and body, which, not only were wholly dis- 
 connected with the course of life thus interrupted, but 
 seemed to belong to a wholly different being. 
 
 Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader's expe- 
 rience by describing rather minutely, and in the first 
 person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to 
 myself. 
 
 Walking in a crowded street, for example, in perfect 
 health, with every faculty gayly alive, I suddenly lose 
 the sense of neighborhood. I see — I hear — but I 
 feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and 
 was, at the same time, present and visible elsewhere. 
 I know everything that passes around me, but I seem 
 disconnected and (magnetically speaking) unlinked 
 from the human beings near. Jf spoken to at such a j 
 moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who 
 speaks seems addressing me from a world to which I I 
 no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irre-H 
 sistible inner consciousness of being present in another ' 
 scene of every-day life — where there are streets, and 
 bouses, and people — where I am looked on without 
 surprise as a familiar object — where I have cares, i; 
 fears, objects to attain — a different scene altogether, 
 and a different life, from the scene and life of which I 
 was a moment before conscious. I have a dull ache 
 at the back of my eyes for the minute or two that this 
 trance lasts, and then, slowly and reluctantly, my, 
 absent soul seems creeping back, the magnetic links 
 of conscious neighborhood, one by one, re-attach, and 
 I resume my ordinary life, but with an irrepressible 
 feeling of sadness. 
 
 It is in vain that I try to fix these shadows as they \ 
 recede. I have struggled a thousand times in vain to j 
 particularize and note down what I saw in the strange | 
 
 I city to which I was translated. The memory glides 
 from my grasp with preternatural evasiveness. 
 
 In a book called " The Man of Two Lives," similar 
 sensations to these are made the basis of the story. 
 j Indeed, till I saw that book, the fear of having my 
 ; sanity suspected sealed my lips on the subject. 
 
 1 have still a reserve in my confession. I have 
 I been conscious, since boyhood, of a mental peculiarity 
 j which I fear to name while I doubt that it is possessed 
 by others than myself — which I should not allude to 
 now, but that it forms a strange link of identity 
 betweeu me and another being to be mentioned in this 
 story. 
 
 ] may say, also, without attaching any importance 
 to it, except as it bears upon this same identity, that, 
 of those things which I have no occasion to be taught, 
 or which I did, as the common phrase is, by intuition, 
 drawing was the easiest and most passionately followed 
 of my boyish pursuits. 
 
 With these preliminaries, and probably some simi- 
 lar experience of his own, the reader may happily form 
 a woof ou which to embroider the following circum- 
 stances. 
 
 Travelling through Styria, some years since, I 
 chanced to have, for a fellow-occupant of the coupe 
 of a diligence, a very courteous and well-bred person, a 
 gentleman of Gratz. As we rolled slowly along on the 
 banks of the Muer, approaching his native town, he 
 very kindly invited me to remain with him a day or 
 two, offering me, as an inducement, a presentation at 
 the soiree of a certain lady of consequence, who was 
 to receive, on the night of our arrival, and at whose 
 house I should see some fair specimens of the beauty 
 of Styria. 
 
 Accepted. 
 
 It was a lovely summer's night, when we strolled 
 through the principal street toward our gay destina- 
 tion, and as 1 drew upon my friend's arm to stop him 
 while the military band of the fortress finished a deli- 
 cious waltz (they were playing in the public square), 
 he pointed out to me the spacious balconies of the 
 
314 
 
 A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE. 
 
 countess's palace, whither we were going, crowded 
 with the well-dressed company, listening silently to 
 the same enchanting music. We entered, and after 
 an interchange of compliments with the hostess, I 
 availed myself of my friend's second introduction to 
 take a stand in one of the balconies beside the person I 
 was presented to, and under cover of her favor, to hear 
 out the unfinished music of the band. 
 
 As the evening darkened, the lights gleamed out 
 from the illuminated rooms more brightly, and most 
 of the guests deserted the balconies and joined the 
 gayer circles within. The music ceased at the beat 
 of the drum. My companion in the balcony was a 
 very quiet young lady, and, like myself, she seemed 
 subdued by the sweet harmonies we had listened to, 
 and willing to remain without the shadow of the cur- 
 tain. We were not alone there, however. A tall 
 lady, of very stately presence, and with the remains of 
 remarkable beauty, stood on the opposite side of the 
 balcony, and she, too, seemed to shrink from the glare 
 within, and cling to the dewy darkness of the summer 
 night. 
 
 After the cessation of the music, there was no 
 longer an excuse for intermittent conversation, and, 
 starting a subject which afforded rather freer scope, I 
 did my best to credit my friend's flattering introduc- 
 tion. I had discoursed away for half an hour very 
 unreservedly, before I discovered that, with her hand 
 upon her side, in an attitude of repressed emotion, the 
 tall lady was earnestly listening to me. A third person 
 embarrasses even the most indifferent dialogue. The 
 conversation languished, and my companion rose and 
 took my arm for a promenade through the rooms. 
 
 Later in the evening, my friend came in search of 
 me to the supper-room. 
 
 " Mon ami .'" he said, " a great honor has fallen out 
 of the sky for you. I am sent to bring you to the 
 beau reste of the handsomest woman of Styria — 
 
 Margaret, Baroness R , whose chateau I pointed 
 
 out to you in the gold light of yesterday's sunset. 
 She wishes to know you — why I can not wholly divine — 
 for it is the first sign of ordinary feeling that she has 
 given in twenty years. But she seems agitated, and 
 sits alone in the countess's boudoir. Allons-y .'" 
 
 As we made our way through the crowd, he hastily 
 sketched me an outline of the lady's history : "At 
 seventeen taken from a convent for a forced marriage 
 with the baron whose name she bears ; at eighteen a 
 widow, and, for the first time, in love — the subject of 
 her passion a young artist of Vienna on his way to 
 Italy. The artist died at her chateau — they were to 
 have been married — she has ever since worn weeds 
 for him. And the remainder you must imagine — for 
 here we are!" 
 
 The baroness leaned with her elbow upon a small 
 table of or molu, and her position was so taken that I 
 seated myself necessarily in a strong light, while her 
 features were in shadow. Still, the light was suffi- 
 cient to show me the expression of her countenance. 
 She was a woman apparently about forty-five, of noble 
 physiognomy, and a peculiar fulness of the eyelid — 
 something like to which I thought I remembered to 
 have seen in a portrait of a young girl, many years 
 before. The resemblance troubled me somewhat. 
 
 " You will pardon me this freedom," said the bar- 
 oness with forced composure, " when I tell you 
 that — a friend — whom I have mourned twenty-five 
 years — seems present to me when you speak." 
 
 I was silent, for I knew not what to say. The bar- 
 oness shaded her eyes with her hand, and sat silent 
 for a few moments, gazing at me. 
 
 " You are not like him in a single feature," she 
 resumed, " yet the expression of your face, strangely, 
 very strangely, is the same. . He was darker — 
 slighter" — 
 
 " Of my age V 1 inquired, to break my own silence. 
 
 For there was something in her voice which gave me 
 the sensation of a voice heard in a dream. 
 
 " Oh God ! that voice ! that voice !" she exclaimed 
 wildly, burying her face in her hands, and giving way 
 to a passionate burst of tears. 
 
 " Rodolph," she resumed, recovering herself with 
 a strong effort, " Rodolph died with the promise on 
 his lips that death should not divide us. And I have 
 seen him ! Not in dreams — not in revery — not at 
 times when my fancy could delude me. I have seen 
 him suddenly before me in the street — in Vienna— 
 here — at home at noonday — for minutes together, 
 gazing on me. It is more in latter years that I have 
 been visited by him ; and a hope has latterly sprung 
 into being in my heart — I know not how — that in 
 person, palpable and breathing, I should again hold 
 converse with him — fold him living to my bosom. 
 Pardon me ! You will think me mad !" 
 
 I might well pardon her ; for, as she talked, a vague 
 sense of familiarity with her voice, a memory, pow- 
 erful, though indistinct,* of having before dwelt on 
 those majestic features, an impulse of tearful passion- 
 ateness to rush to her embrace, well nigh overpowered 
 me. She turned to me again. 
 
 " You are an artist ?" she said, inquiringly. 
 
 " No ; though intended for one, I believe, by na- 
 ture." 
 
 "And you were born in the year ." 
 
 " I was !" 
 
 With a scream she added the day of my birth, and 
 waiting an instant for my assent, dropped to the floor 
 and clung convulsively and weeping to my knees. 
 
 " Rodolph ! Rodolph !" she murmured faintly, as 
 her long gray tresses fell over her shoulders, and her 
 head dropped insensible upon her breast. 
 
 Her cry had been heard, and several persons entered 
 the room. I rushed out of doors. I had need to be 
 in darkness and alone. 
 
 It was an hour after midnight when I re-entered my 
 hotel. A chasseur stood sentry at the door of my 
 apartment with a letter in his hand. He called me by 
 name, gave me his missive, and disappeared. It was 
 from the baroness, and ran thus : — 
 
 " You did not retire from me to sleep. This letter 
 will find you waking. And I must write, for my heart 
 and brain are overflowing. 
 
 " Shall I write to you as a stranger ? — you whom I 
 have strained so often to my bosom — you whom I have 
 loved and still love with the utmost idolatry of mortal 
 passion — you who have once given me the soul that, 
 like a gem long lost, is found again, but in a newer 
 casket ! Mine still — for did we not swear to love 
 for ever ! 
 
 " But I am taking counsel of my own heart only. 
 You may still be unconvinced. You may think that 
 a few singular coincidences have driven me mad. 
 You may think that, though born in the same hour 
 that my Rodolph died, possessing the same voice, the 
 same countenance, the same gifts — though by irresist- 
 ible consciousness I knmv you to be him — my lost 
 lover returned in another body to life — you may still 
 think the evidence incomplete — you may, perhaps, 
 even now, be smiling in pity at my delusion. Indulge 
 me one moment. 
 
 " The Rodolph Isenberg whom I lost, possessed a 
 faculty of mind, which, if you are he, answers with the 
 voice of an angel to my appeal. In that soul resided, 
 and wherever it be, must noxo reside, the singular 
 power" ****** 
 ******* 
 
 (The reader must be content with my omission of 
 this fragment of the letter. It contained a secret 
 never before clothed in language — a secret that will die 
 with me, unless betrayed by what indeed it may lead 
 to — madness ! As I saw it in writing — defined accu- 
 rately and inevitably in the words of another — 1 felt as 
 
A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE. 
 
 315 
 
 if the innermosl chamber of my soul was suddenly 
 laid open to the day— I abandoned doubt— I answered 
 to the name by which she called me— I believed in the 
 previous existence of which my whole life, no less than 
 these extraordinary circumstances, had furnished me 
 with repeated evidence. But, to resume the letter.) 
 
 "And now that we know each other again — now 
 that I can call you by name, as in the past, and be 
 sure that your inmost consciousness must reply— 
 a new terror seizes me! Your soul comes back, 
 youthfully and newly clad, while mine,, though of 
 unfading freshness and youthfulness within, shows to 
 your eye the same outer garment, grown dull with 
 mourning and faded with the wear of time. Am I 
 grown distasteful ? Is it with the sight only of this 
 new body that you look upon me ? Rodolph ! — spirit 
 th;<t was my devoted and passionate admirer! soul 
 that was sworn to me for ever ! — am I — the same Mar- 
 garet, refound and recognised, grown repulsive? Oh 
 God ! What a bitter answer would this be to my 
 prayers for your return to me ! 
 
 " I will trust in Him whose benign goodness smiles 
 upon fidelity in love. I will prepare a fitter meeting 
 for two who parted as lovers. You shall not see me 
 again in the house of a stranger and in a mourning 
 attire. When this letter is written, I will depart at 
 once for the scene of our love. I hear my horses 
 already in the court-yard, and while you read this I 
 am speeding swiftly home. The bridal dress you were 
 secretly shown the day before death came between us, 
 is still freshly kept. The room where we sat — the 
 bowers by the stream — the walks where we projected 
 our sweet promise of a future — they shall all be made 
 ready. They shall be as they were! And I — oh 
 Rodolph, I shall be the same ! My heart is not 
 grown old, Rodolph ! Believe me, I am unchanged 
 
 in soul ! And I will strive to be — I will strive to 
 look — God help me to look and be — as of 
 yore! 
 
 " Farewell now ! f leave horses and servants to 
 wait on you till I send to bring you to me. Alas, for 
 any delay ! but we will pass this life and all other 
 time together. We have seen that a vow of eternal 
 union may be kept — that death can not divide those 
 who will to love for ever ! Farewell now ! 
 
 44 Margaret." 
 
 Circumstances compelled me to read this letter 
 with but one feeling, exquisite pain ! Love lasts till 
 death, but it is mortal ! The affections, however 
 intense and faithful (I now know), are part of the 
 perishable coil, forgotten in the grave. With the 
 memory of this love of another life, haunting me 
 through my youth, and keeping its vow of visitation, 
 | I had given the whole heart of my second youth to 
 I another. Affianced to her, waited for by her, bound 
 to her by vows which death had not divided, I had but 
 one course to pursue. I left Gratz in an hour, never 
 to return. 
 
 A (ew days since I was walking alone in the 
 crowded thoroughfare of the city where I live. Sud- 
 denly my sense of presence there fell oft* me. I 
 walked on, but my inward sight absorbed all my con- 
 sciousness. A room which was familiar to me shut 
 me in, and a bed hung in mourning became apparent. 
 In another instant a figure laid out in a winding-sheet, 
 and partially covered with a velvet pall, grew distinct 
 through the dimness, and in the low-laid head I rec- 
 ognised, what a presentiment had already betrayed to 
 
 me, the features of Margaret, Baroness R . It 
 
 will be still months before I can see the announce- 
 ment of her death. But she is dead. 
 
AMERICAN LIFE. 
 
 COUNT POTT'S STRATEGY. 
 
 " L'Esprit est un faux monnayeur, qui change continuellement les gros sous en louis d'or, et qui souvent fait de ses louis d'or des 
 
 Therk were five hundred guardian angels (and of 
 course as many evil spirits), in and about the merry 
 premises of Congress Hall. Each gay guest had his 
 pair; but though each pair had their special ministry 
 (and there was here and there a guest who would not 
 have objected to transform his, for the time being, into 
 a pair of trotting ponies), the attention of the cherubic 
 troop, it may fairly be piesumed, was directed mainly 
 to tiie momentous flirtations of Miss C. Sophy On- 
 thank, the dread disposer of the destinies of eighty 
 thousand innocent little dollars. 
 
 Miss Chittaline Sophy (though this is blabbing, 
 for that mysterious " C." was generally condemned 
 to travel in domino) — Miss Chittaline Sophy, besides 
 her good and evil spirit already referred to, was under 
 the additional watch and ward of a pair of bombazine 
 aunts, Miss Charity Onthank and Miss Sophy the 
 same, of whom she was the united namesake. — 
 "Chittaline" being the embellished diminutive of 
 " Charity." These Hesperian dragons of old maids 
 were cut after the common pattern of such utensils, 
 and of course would not dignify a description; though 
 this disparaging remark (we must stop long enough to 
 say) is not at all to the prejudice of that occasional 
 love-of-an-old-maid that one does sometimes see — 
 that four-leaved clover of virginity — that star aparl in 
 the spilled milk of the Via Lactea : — 
 
 " For now and then you find one who could rally 
 At forty, and go back to twenty-three — 
 A handsome, plump, affectionate • Aunt Sally,' 
 With no rage for cats, flannel, and Bohea/' 
 
 But the two elderly Misses Onthank were not of this 
 category. 
 
 By the absence of that Junonic assurance, common 
 to those ladies who are born and bred heiresses, Miss 
 C. Sophy's autograph had not long been an object of 
 interest at the bank. She had all the air of having 
 been "brought up at the trough," as the French 
 phrase it, 
 
 " Round as a cipher, simple as good day," 
 and her belle-ship was still a surprise to her. Like 
 the red-haired and freckled who find, when they get 
 to Italy, that their flaming peculiarities are considered 
 as captivating signs of a skin too delicate for exposure, 
 she received with a slight incredulity the homage to 
 her unseen charms — homage not the less welcome for 
 exacting from the giver an exercise of faith and im- 
 agination. The same faith and imagination, she was 
 free to suppose, might find a Venus within her girdle, 
 as the sculptor sees one in the goodly block of marble, 
 lacking only the removal of its clumsy covering by 
 chisel and sandpaper. With no visible waist, she was 
 as tall as a pump, and riotously rosy like a flowering 
 rhododendron. Hair brown and plenty of it. Teeth 
 
 white and all at home. And her voice, with but one 
 semitone higher, would have been an approved con- 
 tralto. 
 
 Having thus compressed into a couple of paragraphs 
 what would have served a novelist for his first ten 
 chapters, permit us, without the bother of intermediate 
 mortar or moralizing (though this is rather a mixed 
 I figure), to lay on the next brick in the shape of a bint 
 at the character of Miss Onthank's two prominent 
 admirers. 
 
 Mr. Greville Seville was a New York beau. He 
 had all the refinement that could possibly be imported. 
 He had seen those who had seen all that is visible m 
 the fashionable man of London and Paris, ar.d he wa* 
 well versed in the conduits through which theit 
 several peculiarities found their way across the Atlantic. 
 Faultlessly booted, pantalooned, waistcoated, and shirl- 
 ed, he could afford to trust his coat and scarf to Provi- 
 dence, and his hat to Warnock or Leary. He wore 
 a slightly restrained whisker, and a faint smut of an 
 imperial, and his gloves fitted him inexorably. His 
 figure was a matter of course. He was brought up in 
 New York, and was one of the four hundred thousand 
 results (more or less) of its drastic waters — washy and 
 short. And he had as good a heart as is compatible 
 with the above personal advantages. 
 
 It would very much have surprised the "company" 
 at Congress Hall, to have seen Mr. Chesterfield Potts 
 put down as No. 2, in the emulous contest for the two 
 hands of Miss Onthank. The count (he was com- 
 monly called " Count Potts," a compliment to good 
 manners not unusual in America), was, by his own 
 label, a man of " thirty and upward" — by the parish 
 register possibly sixty-two. He was an upright, well- 
 preserved, stylish looking man, with an expensive wig, 
 fine teeth (commonly supposed not to be indigenous), 
 and a lavish outlay of cotton batting, covering the re- 
 treat of such of his muscular forces as were inclined 
 to retire from the field. What his native qualities 
 might be was a branch of knowledge long since lost to 
 the world. His politeness had superseded the neces- 
 sity of any particular inquiry into the matter; indeed, 
 we are inclined to believe his politeness had superseded 
 his character altogether. He was as incapable of the 
 [ impolite virtues (of which there are several) as of the 
 j impolite vices. Like cricketing, punning, political 
 speech making, and other mechanical arts, compli- 
 j menting may be brought to a high degree of dexteri- 
 | ty, and Count Potts, after a practice of many years, 
 j could, over most kinds of female platitude, spread a 
 | flattering unction huinbugative to the most suspicious 
 J incredulity. As he told no stories, made no puns, 
 I volunteered but little conversation, and had the air of 
 a modest man wishing to avoid notice, the blockheads 
 I and the very young girls stoutly denied his fascination. 
 
COUNT POTT'S STRATEGY. 
 
 317 
 
 But in the memory of the riper belles, as they went 
 to sleep night after night, lay snugly lodged and care- 
 fully treasured, some timely compliment, some sooth- 
 ing word, and, though credited to "old Potts," the 
 smile with which it was gracefully re-acknowledged 
 the next morning at breakfast, would have been warm 
 enough for young Ascanins. " Nice old Potts !" was 
 the faint murmur of many a bright lip turning down- 
 ward to the pillow in the "last position." 
 
 And now. dear reader, you have an idea of the forces 
 in the field, and you probably know how "the war is 
 carried on" at Saratoga. Two aunts and a guardian 
 angel versus an evil spirit and two lovers — Miss On- 
 thank's hand, the (well-covered) bone of contention. 
 Whether the citadel would speedily yield, and which 
 of these two rival knights would bear away the palm 
 of victory, were questions upon which the majority 
 of lookers-on were doomed to make erroneous predic- 
 tions. The reader of course is in the sagacious 
 minority. 
 
 Mr. Potts' income was a net answer to his morning 
 prayer. It provided his "daily bread" but no proven- 
 der for a horse. He probably coveted Miss Onthank 
 as much for her accompanying oats as for her personal 
 avoirdupois, since the only complaint with which he 
 ever troubled his acquaintances, was one touching his 
 inability to keep an equipage. Man is instinctively a 
 centaur, he used to say, and when you cut him off 
 from his horse and reduce him to his simple trunk 
 (and a trunk was all the count's worldly furniture), he 
 is but a mutilated remainder, robbed of his natural 
 locomotive. 
 
 It was not authenticated in Wall street that Mr. 
 Greville Seville was reasonably entitled to horse-flesh 
 and caparison ; but he had a trotting wagon and two 
 delicious cropped sorrels; and those who drove in his 
 company were obliged to " down with the dust" (a 
 bon mot of Count Potts'). Science explains many of 
 the eniamas of common life, however, and the secret 
 of Mr. Seville's equipment and other means of going 
 on swimmingly, lay in his unusually large organ of 
 hope. He was simply anticipating the arrival of 1840, 
 a year in which he had reason to believe there would 
 be paid in to the credit of the present Miss Onthank 
 a sufficient sum to cover his loosest expenditure. 
 The intermediate transfer to himself of her rights to 
 the same, was a mere filling up of an outline, his mind 
 being entirely made up as to the conditional incum- 
 brance of the lady's person. He was now paying her 
 some attentions in advance, and he felt justified in 
 charging his expenses on the estate. She herself 
 would wish it, doubtless, if she could look into the 
 future with his eyes. 
 
 By all the common data of matrimonial skirmish- 
 ing, a lover with horses easily outstrips a lover with 
 none. Miss C. Sophy, besides, was particularly fond of 
 driving, and Seville was an accomplished whip. There 
 was no lack of the " golden opportunity" of tetc-d-tete, 
 for, with a deaf aunt and somebody else on the back 
 seat, he had Miss Onthank to himself on the driving 
 box, and could talk to his horses in the embarrassing 
 pauses. It looked a clear case to most observers; 
 and as to Seville, he had studied out a livery for his 
 future footman and tiger, and would not have taken an 
 insurance at a quarter per cent. 
 
 But Potts — ah ! Potts had traced back the wires of 
 woman's weaknesses. The heiress had no conversa- 
 tion (why should she have it and money too?), and 
 the part of her daily drive which she remembered with 
 must pleasure, was the flourish of starting and return- 
 ing — managed by Potts with a pomp and circumstance 
 that won!, | have done honor to the goings and comings 
 hi Queen Victoria. Once away from the portico, it 
 was a monotonous drag through the dust for two or 
 three hours, and as most ladies know, it takes a great 
 deal of chit-chat to butter so large a slice of time ; 
 
 for there was no making love, parbleu ! Miss Chitta- 
 line Onthank was of a stratum of human nature sus- 
 ceptible of no sentiment less substantial than a kiss, 
 and when the news, and the weather, and the virtues 
 of the sorrel ponies, were exhausted, the talk came to 
 a stand-still. The heiress began to remember with 
 alarm that her education had been neglected, and that 
 it was a relief to get back to old Potts and the portico. 
 Fresh from his nap and warm bath, the perfumed 
 count stepped out from the group he had purposely 
 
 j collected, gave her his hand with a deferential inquiry, 
 spread the loungers to the right and left like an " usher 
 of the black rod," and with some well-studied im- 
 promptu compliment, waited on her to her chamber 
 door. He received her again after her toilet, and for 
 
 | the remainder of the day devoted his utmost powers 
 
 ! to her aggrandizement. If talking alone with her, it 
 
 ' was to provoke her to some passage of school-girl 
 autobiocraphv, and listen like a charmed stone to the 
 
 : harp of Orpheus. If others were near, it was to catch 
 her stupidities half uttered and twist them into sense 
 before they came to the ground. His own clever- 
 
 i nesses were prefaced with " As you remarked yester- 
 
 ; day, Miss Onthank," or, "As you were about to say 
 when I interrupted you." If he touched her foot, it 
 
 i was "so small he didn't see it." If she uttered an 
 irredeemable and immitigable absurdity, he covered 
 
 j its retreat with some sudden exclamation. He called 
 her pensive, when she was sleepy and vacant. He 
 
 j called her romantic, when he couldn't understand her. 
 
 ! In short, her vanity was embodied — turned into a 
 
 I magician and slave — and in the shape of Count Ches- 
 terfield, Potts ministeied to her indefatigably. 
 
 But the summer solstice began to wane. A week 
 
 ' more was all that was allotted to Saratoga by that 
 great American commander, General Consent. 
 Count Potts came to breakfast in a shawl cravat! 
 "Off, Potts?" 
 
 " Are you flitting, my dear count ?" 
 "What — going away, dear Mr. Potts ?" 
 " Gracious me ! don't go, Mr. Potts !" 
 The last exclamation was sent across the table in a 
 
 i tone of alarm by Miss C. Sophy, and responded to 
 only by a bow of obsequious melancholy. 
 
 Breakfast was over, and Potts arose. His baggage 
 
 i was at the door. He sought no interview with Miss 
 Onthank. He did not even honor the two bombazini- 
 ties with a farewell. He stepped up to the group of 
 
 i belles, airing their demi-toilettes on the portico, said 
 
 j " Ladies ! au revoir!" took the heiress's hand and put 
 
 ' it gallantly toward his lips, and walked off with his 
 umbrella, requesting the driver to pick him up at the 
 
 : spring. 
 
 " He has been refused !" said one. 
 " He has given Seville a clear field in despair!" said 
 another. And this was the general opinion. 
 
 The day crept on. But there was an emptiness 
 without Potts. Seville had the field to himself, and 
 as there was no fear of a new squatter, he thought he 
 might dispense with tillage. They had a very dull 
 drive and a very dull dinner, and in the evening, as 
 there was no ball, Seville went off to play billiards. 
 Miss Onthank was surrounded, as usual, by the belles 
 and beaux, but she was down flat — unmagnetized, un- 
 galvanized. The magician was gone. Her stupid 
 things "stayed put." She was like a glass bead lost 
 from a kaleidoscope. 
 
 That weary week was spent in lamentations over 
 Potts. Everybody praised him. Everybody com- 
 plimented Miss Onthank on her exclusive power of 
 monopoly over such porcelain ware. The two aunts 
 were his main glorifiers ; for, as Potts knew, they 
 were of that leathery toughness that only shines on 
 you with rouiih usage. 
 
 We have said little, as yet, of MissOnthank's capa- 
 bilities in the love line. We doubt, indeed, whethei 
 
318 
 
 THE FEMALE WARD. 
 
 she rightly understood the difference between loving 
 and being born again. As to giving away her heart, 
 she believed she could do what her mother did before 
 her, but she would rather it would be one of her back 
 teeth, if that would do as well. She liked Mr. Potts 
 because he never made any difficulty about such 
 things. 
 
 Seville considered himself accepted, though he had 
 made no direct proposition. He had asked whether 
 she preferred to live in country or town — she said 
 " town." He had asked if she would leave the choice 
 and management of horses and equipages to him — 
 she said " be sure !" He had asked if she had any 
 objection to his giving bachelor dinners occasionally 
 — she said " la ! no !" As he understood it, the whole 
 thing was most comfortably arranged, and he lent 
 money to several of his friends on the strength of it — 
 giving his note, this is to say. 
 
 On a certain morning, some ten days after the de- 
 parture of the count from Saratoga, Miss Onthank 
 and her two aunts sat up in state in their parlor at the 
 City hotel. They always went to the City hotel 
 because Willard remembered their names, and asked 
 after their uncle the major. Mr. Seville's ponies and 
 wagon were at the door, and Mr. Seville's father, 
 mother, seven sisters, and two small brothers, were in 
 the progress of a betrothal visit — calling on the future 
 Mrs. Greville Seville. 
 
 All of a sudden the door was thrown open, and enter 
 Count Potts ! 
 
 Up jumped the enchanted Chittaline Sophy. 
 
 " How do you do, Mr. Potts?" 
 
 "Good morning, Mr. Potts!" said the aunts in a 
 breath. 
 
 "D'ye-do, Potts !"said Seville, giving him his fore- 
 finger, with the air of a man rising from winning at 
 cards. 
 
 Potts made his compliments all round. He was 
 about sailing for Carolina, he said, and had come to 
 ask permission of Miss Onthank to leave her sweet 
 society for a few years of exile. But as this was the 
 last of his days of pleasure, at least till he saw Miss 
 Onthank again, he wished to be graced with the honor 
 of her arm for a promenade in Broadway. The ladies 
 and Mr. Seville doubtless would excuse her if she put 
 on her bonnet without further ceremony. 
 
 Now Potts's politenesses had such an air of irresisti- 
 ble authority that people fell into heir track like cars 
 after a locomotive. While Miss Onthank was bonnet- 
 ing and shawling, the count entertained the entire 
 party most gayly, though the Sevilles thought it rather 
 
 unceremonious in the affianced miss to leave them in 
 the midst of a first visit, and Mr. Greville Seville had 
 arranged to send his mother home on foot, and drive 
 Miss Onthank out to Harlem. 
 
 " Pll keep my horses here till you come back !" he 
 shouted after them, as she tripped gayly down stairs 
 on the count's arm. 
 
 And so he did. Though it was two hours befote 
 she appeared again, the impatient youth kept the old 
 aunts company, and would have stayed till night, sorrels 
 and all — for in that drive he meant to " name the day," 
 and put his creditors at ease. 
 
 "I wouldn't even go up stairs, my dear!" said the 
 count, handing her to the wagon, and sending up the 
 groom for his master, " it's but an hour to dine, and 
 you'll like the air after your fatigue. Ah. Seville, 
 I've brought her back ! Take good care of her for 
 my sake, my good fellow!" 
 
 " What the devil has his sake to do with it, I won- 
 der?" said Seville, letting his horses offlike two rockets 
 in harness. 
 
 And away they went toward Harlem ; and in about 
 an hour, very much to the surprise of the old aunts, 
 who were looking out of the parlor window, the young 
 lady dismounted from an omnibus ! Count Potts had 
 come to dine with them, and he tripped down to meet 
 I her with uncommon agility. 
 
 " Why, do you know, aunties," she exclaimed, as 
 she came up stairs, out of breath, "do you know that 
 Mr. Seville, when I told him I was married already to 
 Mr. Potts, stopped his wagon, and p-p-put me into an 
 omnibus !" 
 
 " Married to Mr. Potts !" screamed Aunt Charity. 
 
 " Married to Mr. Potts !" screamed Aunt Sophy. 
 
 "Why — yes, aunties; he said he must go south, 
 if I didn't !" drawled out the bride, with only a very 
 little blush indeed. " Tell aunties all about it, Mr. 
 Potts!" 
 
 And Mr. Potts, with the same smile of infallible 
 propriety, which seemed a warrant for everything he 
 said or did, gave a very sketchy account of his morning's 
 work, which, like all he undertook, had been exceed- 
 ingly well done — properly witnessed, certified, dec, 
 dec, dec. All of which shows the very sound policy 
 of first making yourself indispensable to people you 
 wish to manage. Or, put it receipt-wise : — 
 
 To marry a fiat : — First, raise her up till she is 
 giddy. Second, go away, and let her down. Third, 
 come back, and offer to support her, if she will give 
 you her hand. 
 
 " Simple comme bonjour " as Balsac says. 
 
 THE FEMALE WARD. 
 
 Most men have two or more souls, and Jem Thal- 
 imer was a doublet, with sets of manners correspond- 
 ing. Indeed one identity could never have served the 
 pair of him ! When sad — that is to say, when in dis- 
 grace or out of money — he had the air of a good man 
 with a broken heart. When gay — flush in pocket 
 and happy in his little ambitions — you would have 
 thought him a dangerous companion for his grand- 
 mother. The last impression did him more injustice 
 than the first, for he was really very amiably disposed 
 when depressed, and not always wicked when gay — 
 but he made friends in both characters. People sel- 
 
 dom forgive us for compelling them to correct then 
 first impressions of us, and as this was uniformly the 
 case with Jem, whether he had begun as saint or sin- 
 ner, he was commonly reckoned a deep-water fish ; 
 and, where there were young ladies in the case, early 
 warned oft' the premises. The remarkable exception 
 to this rule, in the incident I am about to relate, arose, 
 as may naturally be supposed, from his appearing, du- 
 ring a certain period, in one character only. 
 
 To begin my story fairly, I must go back for a mo- 
 ment to our junior Jem in college, showing, by a lit- 
 tle passage in our adventures, how Thalimer and 1 
 
THE FEMALE WARD. 
 
 319 
 
 became acquainted with the confiding gentleman to 
 be referred to. 
 
 A college suspension, very agreeably timed, in June, 
 left my friend Jem and myself masters of our travels 
 for an uncertain period ; and as our purse was always 
 in common, like our shirts, love-letters, and disgraces, 
 our several borrowings were thrust into a wallet which 
 was sometimes in his pocket, sometimes in mine, as 
 each took the turn to be paymaster. With the (in- 
 tercepted) letters in our pockets, informing the gov- 
 ernors of our degraded position, we travelled very 
 prosperously on — bound to Niagara,but very ready to fall 
 into any obliquity by the way. We arrived at Albany, 
 Thalimer chancing to be purser, and as this function 
 tacitly conferred, on the holder, all other responsibil- 
 ities, I made myself comfortable at the hotel for the 
 second day and the third— up to the seventh — rather 
 wondering at Jem's depressed spirits and the sudden 
 falling off of his enthusiasm for Niagara, but con- 
 tent to stay if he liked, and amusing myself in the 
 side-hill city passably well. It was during my ram- 
 bles without him in this week that he made the ac- 
 quaintance of a bilious-looking person lodging at the 
 game hotel — a Louisianian on a tour of health. This 
 gentleman, whom he introduced to me by the name 
 of Dauchy, seemed to have formed a sudden attach- 
 ment to my friend, and as Jem had a " secret sorrow" 
 unusual to him, and the other an unusual secretion 
 of bile, there was of course between them that "se- 
 cret sympathy" which is the basis of many tender 
 friendships. I rather liked Mr. Dauchy. He seemed 
 one of those chivalric, polysyllabic southerners, inca- 
 pable of a short word or a mean action, and, interested 
 that Jem should retain his friendship, I was not sorry 
 to find our departure follow close on the recovery of 
 his spirits. 
 
 We went on toward Niagara, and in the irresistible 
 confidence of canal travelling I made out the secret 
 of my fidus achates. He had attempted to alleviate 
 the hardship of a deck-passage for a bright-eyed girl 
 on board the steamer, and, on going below to his 
 berth, left her his greatcoat for a pillow. The stuffed 
 wallet, which somewhat distended the breast-pocket, 
 was probably in the way of her downy cheek, and 
 Jem supposed that she simply forgot to return the 
 " removed deposite" — but he did not miss his money 
 till twelve hours after, and then, between lack of 
 means to pursue her, and shame at the sentiment he 
 had wasted, he kept the disaster to himself, and passed 
 a melancholy week in devising means for replenishing. 
 Through this penseroso vein, however, lay his way 
 out of the difficulty, for he thus touched the soul 
 and funds of Mr. Dauchy. The correspondence 
 (commenced by the repayment of the loan) was kept 
 up stragglingly for several years, bolstered somewhat 
 by barrels of marmalade, boxes of sugar, hommony, 
 &c, till finally it ended in the unlooked-for consign- 
 ment which forms the subject of my story. 
 
 Jem and myself had been a year out of college, and 
 were passing through that "tight place" in life, com- 
 monly understood in New England as " the going in 
 at the little end of the horn." Expected by our pa- 
 rents to take to money-making like ducks to swim- 
 ming, deprived at once of college allowance, called 
 on to be men because our education was paid for, and 
 frowned upon at every manifestation of a lingering 
 taste for pleasure — it was not surprising that we some- 
 times gave tokens of feeling "crowded," and obtained 
 somewhat the reputation of " bad subjects" — (using 
 this expressive phrase quite literally). Jem's share 
 of this odor of wickedness was much the greater, his 
 unlucky deviltry of countenance doing him its usual 
 disservice ; but like the gentleman to whom he was 
 attributed as a favorite protege", he was "not so black 
 as he was painted." 
 
 We had been so fortunate as to find one believer in 
 
 the future culmination of our clouded stars — Galla- 
 gher, "mine host" — and for value to be received when 
 our brains should fructify, his white soup and " red- 
 string Madeira," his game, turtle, and all the forth- 
 comings of the best restaurant of our epoch, were 
 served lovingly and charged moderately. Peace be 
 with the ashes of William Gallagher ! " The brains" 
 have fructified, and "the value" Acs been received — 
 but his name and memory are not " filed away" with 
 the receipt ; and though years have gone over his 
 grave, his modest welcome, and generous dispensation 
 of entertainment and service, are, by one at least of 
 those who enjoyed them, gratefully and freshly re- 
 membered ! 
 
 We were to dine as usual at Gallagher's at six — one 
 May day which I well remember. I was just addres- 
 sing myself to my day's work, when Jem broke into 
 my room with a letter in his hand, and an expression 
 on his face of mingled embarrassment and fear. 
 
 " What the deuce to do with her!" said he, hand- 
 ing me the letter. 
 
 " A new scrape, Jem?" I asked, as I looked for an 
 instant at the Dauchy coat-of-arms on a seal as big as 
 a dollar. 
 
 "Scrape? — yes, it is a scrape! — for I shall never 
 
 get out of it reputably. What a dunce old Dauchy 
 
 : must be to send me a girl to educate ! I a young 
 
 lady's guardian ! Why, I shall be the laugh of the 
 
 ; town ! What say ? Isn't it a good one ?" 
 
 I had been carefully perusing the letter while Thal- 
 ! imer walked soliloquizing about the room. It was 
 from his old friend of marmalades and sugars, and in 
 j the most confiding and grave terms, as if Jem and he 
 had been a couple of contemporaneous old bachelors, 
 j it consigned to his guardianship and friendly counsel, 
 Miss Adelmine Lasacque, the only daughter of a 
 neighboring planter ! Mr. Lasacque having no friends 
 at the north, had applied to Mr. Dauchy for his gui- 
 I dance in the selection of a proper person to superin- 
 tend her education, and as Thalimer was the only cor- 
 respondent with whom Mr. Dauchy had relations of 
 ; friendship, and was, moreover, " fitted admirably for 
 ! the trust by his impressive and dignified address," (?) 
 j he had "taken the liberty," &c, &c. 
 
 " Have you seen her?" I asked, after a long laugh, 
 in which Jem joined but partially. 
 
 " No, indeed ! She arrived last night in the New 
 Orleans packet, and the captain brought me this let- 
 i ter at daylight, with the young lady's compliments. 
 j The old seadog looked a little astounded when I an- 
 I nounced myself. Well he might, faith ! 1 don't look 
 I like a young lady's guardian, do I?" 
 
 t. Well — you are to go on board and fetch her — is 
 that it ?" 
 
 " Fetch her! Where shall I fetch her? Who is 
 to take a young lady of my fetching? I can't find a 
 
 female academy that I can approve " 
 
 I burst into a roar of laughter, for Jem was in ear- 
 j nest with his scruples, and looked the picture of un- 
 happiness. 
 
 " I say I can't find one in a minute — don't laugh, 
 i; you blackguard ! — and where to lodge her meantime ? 
 ! What should I say to the hotel-keepers ? They all 
 j; know me ? It looks devilish odd, let me tell you, to 
 jl bring a young girl, without matron or other acquaint- 
 I ances than myself, and lodge her at a public house." 
 "Your mother must take your charge oil your 
 | hands." 
 
 "Of course that was the first thing I thought of. 
 You know my mother ! She don't half believe the 
 I story, in the first place. If there u such a man as 
 | Mr. Dauchv, she says, and if this is a ' Miss La- 
 sacque,' all "the way from Louisiana, there is but one 
 thing to do— send'her back in the packet she came 
 in! She'll have nothing to do with it! There's 
 more in ii than I am willing to explain. T never 
 
320 
 
 THE FEMALE WARD. 
 
 mentioned this Mr. Dauchy before. Mischief will come 
 of it! Abduction's a dreadful thing! If I will make 
 myself notoiious, I need not think to involve my 
 mother and sistprs ! That's the way she talks about it." 
 
 "But couldn't we mollify your mother? — for, after 
 all, her countenance in the matter will be expected." 
 
 " Not a chance of it !" 
 
 ** The money part of it is all right ?" 
 
 " Turn the letter over. Credit for a large amount 
 on the Robinsons, payable to my order only !" 
 
 "Faith! it's a very hard case if a nice girl with 
 plenty of money can't be permitted to land in Boston! 
 You didn't ask the captain if she was pretty?" 
 
 "No, indeed! But pretty or plain, I must get her 
 ashore and be civil to her. I must ask her to dine ! 
 I must do something besides hand her over to a 
 boarding-school ! Will you come down to the ship 
 with me ?" 
 
 My curiosity was quite aroused, and I dressed im- 
 mediately. On our way down we stopped at Gallagher's, 
 to request a little embellishment to our ordinary dinner. 
 It was quite clear, for a variety of reasons, that she must 
 dine with her guardian there, or nowhere. Gallagher 
 looked surprised, to say the least, at our proposition 
 to bring a young lady to dine with us, but he made no 
 comment beyond a respectful remark that " No. 2 
 was very private !" 
 
 We had gone but a few steps from Devonshire 
 street when Jem stopped in the middle of the side- 
 walk. 
 
 " We have not decided yet what we are to do with 
 Miss Lasacque all day, nor where we shall send her 
 baggage, nor where she is to lodge to-night. For 
 Heaven's sake, suggest something!" added Jem, quite 
 out of temper. 
 
 "Why, as you say, it would be heavy work to walk 
 her about the streets from now till dinner-time — eight 
 hours or more ! Gallagher's is only an eating-house, 
 unluckily, and you are so well known at all the ho- 
 tels, that, to take her to one of them without a chap- 
 eron, would, to say the least, give occasion for remark. 
 But here, around the corner, is one of the best board- 
 ing-houses in town, kept by the two old Misses Smith, j 
 You might offer to put her under their protection. | 
 Let's try." 
 
 The Misses Smith were a couple of reduced gen- 
 tlewomen, who charged a very good price for board 
 and lodging, and piqued themselves on entertaining ] 
 only very good company. Begging Jem to assume ' 
 the confident tone which the virtuous character of his j 
 errand required, I rang at the door, and in answer to 
 our inquiry for the ladies of the house, we were shown | 
 into the basement parlor, where the eldest Miss Smith 
 sat with her spectacles on, adding new vine2ar to some 
 pots of pickles. Our business was very briefly stated. 
 Miss Smith had plenty of spare room. Would we 
 wait a moment till she tied on the covers to her pickle- 
 jars ? 
 
 The cordiality of the venerable demoiselle evidently 
 put Thalimer in spirits. He gave me a glance which 
 said very plainly, " You see we needn't have troubled 
 our heads about this !" — but the sequel was to come. 
 
 Miss Smith led the way to the second story, where 
 were two very comfortable unoccupied bedrooms. 
 
 "A single lady?" she asked. 
 
 "Yes," said Jem, "a Miss Lasacque of Louisiana." 
 
 "Young, did you say ?" 
 
 " Seventeen, or thereabout, I fancy." (This was a 
 guess, but Jem chose to appear to know all about 
 her.) 
 
 "And — ehem ! — and — quite alone ?" 
 
 "Quite alone — she is come here to go to school." 
 
 " Oh, to go to school ! Pray — will she pass her 
 vacations with your mother?" 
 
 "No!" said Jem, coughing, and looking rather em- 
 barrassed. 
 
 " Indeed ! She is with Mrs. Thalimer at present, 
 I presume." 
 
 " No — she is still on shipboard ! Why, my dear 
 madam, she only arrived from New Orleans this 
 morning." 
 
 "And your mother has not had time to see her? 
 I understand. Mrs. Thalimer will accompany her 
 here, of course." 
 
 Jem began to see the end of the old maid's cate- 
 chism, and thought it best to volunteer the remainder 
 of the information. 
 
 "My mother is not acquainted with this young la- 
 dy's friends," he said ; " and, in fact, she comes intro- 
 duced only to myself." 
 
 " She has a guardian, surely ?" said Miss Smith, 
 drawing back into her Elizabethan ruff with more 
 dignity than she had hitherto worn. 
 
 " I am her guardian!" replied Jem, looking as red 
 and guilty as if he had really abducted the young la- 
 dy, and was ashamed of his errand. 
 
 The spinster bit her lips and looked out of the 
 window. 
 
 " Will you walk down stairs for a moment, gentle- 
 men," she resumed, "and let me speak to my sister. 
 I should have told you that the rooms might possibly be 
 engaged. I am not quite sure — indeed — ehem — pray 
 walk down and be seated a moment !" 
 
 Very much to the vexation of my discomfited 
 friend, I burst into a laugh as we closed the door of 
 the basement parlor behind us. 
 
 " You don't realize my confoundedly awkward po- 
 sition," said he. " I am responsible for every step I 
 take, to the girl's father in the first place, and then to 
 my friend Dauchy, one of the most chivalric old 
 cocks in the world, who, at the same time, could nev- 
 er understand why there was any difficulty in the 
 matter ! And it does seem strange, that in a city witl 
 eighty thousand inhabitants, it should be n°xt to impos- 
 sible to find lodging for a virtuous lady, 5 stranger!" 
 
 I was contriving how to tell Thalimer that " there 
 was no objection to the camel but for the dead cat 
 hung upon its neck," when a maidservant opened the 
 door with a message — " Miss Smith's compliments, 
 and she was very sorry she had no room to spare !" 
 
 " Pleasant!" said Jem, "very pleasant ! I suppose 
 every other keeper of a respectable house will be 
 equally sorry. Meantime, it's getting on toward noon, 
 and that poor girl is moping on shipboard, wondering 
 whether she is ever to be taken ashore! Do you 
 think she might sleep at Gallagher's ?" 
 
 "Certainly not! He has, probably, no accommo- 
 dations for a lady, and, to lodge in a restaurant, after 
 dining with yon there, would be an indiscreet first 
 step, in a strange city, to say the least. But let us 
 make our visit to your fair ward, my dear Jem ! Per- 
 haps she has a face innocent enough to tell its own 
 story — like the lady who walked through Eriu ' with 
 the snow-white wand.'" 
 
 The vessel had lain in the stream all night, and was 
 just hauling up to the wharf with the moving tide. 
 A crowd of spectators stood at the end of her moor- 
 ing cable, and, as she warped in, universal attention 
 seemed to be given to a single object. Upon a heap 
 of cotton-bales, the highest point of the confused 
 lumber of the deck, sat a lady under a sky-blue par- 
 asol. Her gown was of pink silk ; and by the volume 
 of this showy material which was presented to the 
 eye, the wearer, when standing, promised to turn out 
 of rather conspicuous stature. White gloves, a pair 
 of superb amethyst bracelets, a string of gold beads 
 on her neck, and shoulders quite naked enough for a 
 ball, were all the disclosures made for a while by the 
 envious parasol, if we except a little object in blue, 
 which seemed the extremity of something she was 
 sitting on, held in her left hand — and which turned 
 out to be her right foot in a blue satin slipper ' 
 
THE FEMALE WARD. 
 
 321 
 
 I turned to Thalimer. He was literally pale with 
 consternation. 
 
 " Hadn't you better send for a carriage to take your 
 ward away ?" I suggested. 
 
 " You don't believe that to be Miss Lasacque, sure- 
 ly !" exclaimed Jem, turning upon me with an implo- 
 ring look. 
 
 "Such is my foreboding," I replied; "but wait a 
 moment. Her face may be pretty, and you, of course, 
 in your guardian capacity, may suggest a simplifica- 
 tion of her toilet. Consider ! — the poor girl was 
 never before off the plantation — at least, so says old 
 Dauchy's letter." 
 
 The sailors now began to pull upon the sternline, 
 and, as the ship came round, the face of the unconscious 
 object of curiosity stole into view. Most of the spec- 
 tators, after a single glance, turned their attention 
 elsewhere with a smile, and Jem, putting his hands 
 into his two coat-pockets behind him, walked off tow- I 
 ard the end of the pier, whistling to himself very en- j 
 ergetically. She was an exaggeration of the peculiar 
 physiognomy of the south — lean rather than slight, 
 sallow rather than pale. Yet I thought her eyes fine. 
 
 Thalimer joined me as the ship touched the dock, 
 and we stepped on board together. The cabinboy 
 confirmed our expectations as to the lady's identity, 
 and putting on the very insinuating manner which 
 was part of his objectionable exterior, Jem advanced 
 and begged to know if he had the honor of addressing 
 Miss Lasacque. 
 
 Without loosing her hold upon her right foot, the 
 lady nodded. 
 
 "Then, madam!" said Jem, "permit me to intro- 
 duce to you your guardian, Mr. Thalimer !" 
 
 "What, that old gentleman coming this way?" 
 asked Miss Lasacque, fixing her eyes on a custom- 
 house officer who was walking the deck. 
 
 Jem handed the lady his card. 
 
 "That is my name," said he, "and I should be 
 happy to know how I can begin the duties of my of- 
 fice !" 
 
 "Dear me!" said the astonished damsel, dropping 
 her foot to take his hand, "isn't there an older Mr. 
 James Thalimer? Mr. Dauchy said it was a gentle- 
 man near his own age!" 
 
 "I grow older, as you know me longer!" Jem re- 
 plied apologetically ; but his ward was too well satis- 
 fied with his appearance, to need even this remarka- 
 ble fact to console her. She came down with a slide 
 from her cotton-bag elevation, called to the cook to 
 bring the bandbox with the bonnet in it, and mean- 
 time gave us a brief history of the inconveniences she 
 had suffered in consequence, of the loss of her slave, 
 Dinah, who had died of sea-sickness three days out. 
 This, to me, was bad news, for I had trusted to a "la- 
 dy's maid" for the preservation of appearances, and 
 the scandal threatening Jem's guardianship looked, 
 in consequence, very imminent. 
 
 " I am dying to get my feet on land again !" said 
 Miss Lasacque, putting her arm in her guardian's, 
 and turning toward the gangway — her bonnet not 
 tied, nor her neck covered, and thin blue satin slip- 
 pers, though her feet were small, showing forth in 
 contrast with her pink silk gown, with frightful con- 
 spicuousness ! Jem resisted the shoreward pull, and 
 stood motionless and aghast. 
 
 " Your baggage," he stammered at last. 
 
 " Here, cook !" cried the lady, " tell the captain, 
 when he comes aboard, to send my trunks to Mr. 
 Thalimer's ! They are down in the hold, and he told 
 me he couldn't get at 'em till to-morrow," she added, 
 by way of explanation to Thalimer. 
 
 I felt constrained to come to the rescue. 
 
 " Pardon me, madam !" said I, " there is a little 
 peculiarity in our climate, of which you probably are 
 not advised. An east wind commonly sets in about 
 21 
 
 noon, which makes a shawl very necessary. In con- 
 sequence, too, of the bronchitis which this sudden 
 change is apt to give people of tender constitutions, 
 the ladies of Boslon are obliged to sacrifice what is 
 becoming, and wear their dresses very high in the 
 throat." 
 
 " La !" said the astonished damsel, putting her 
 hand upon her bare neck, " is it sore throat that you 
 mean? I'm very subject to it, indeed ! Cook! bring 
 me that fur-tippet out of the cabin ! I'm so sorry my 
 dresses are all made so low, and I haven't a shawl un- 
 packed either ! — dear! dear!" 
 
 Jem and I exchanged a look of hopeless resigna- 
 tion, as the cook appeared with the chinchilli tippet. 
 A bold man might have hesitated to share the con- 
 spicuousness of such a figure in a noon promenade, 
 but we each gave her an arm when she had tied the 
 soiled riband around her throat, and silently set for- 
 ward. 
 
 It was a bright and very warm day, and there seem- 
 ed a conspiracy among our acquaintances, to cross 
 our path. Once in the street, it was not remarkable 
 that they looked at us, for the towering height at 
 which the lady carried her very showy bonnet, the 
 flashy material of her dress, the jewels and the chin- 
 chilli tippet, formed an ensemble which caught the eye 
 like a rainbow; and truly people did gaze, and the 
 boys, spite of the unconscious look which we attempt- 
 ed, did give rather disagreeable evidence of being 
 amused. I had various misgivings, myself, as to the 
 necessity for my own share in the performance, and, 
 at every corner, felt sorely tempted to bid guardian 
 and ward good morning; but friendship and pity pre- 
 vailed. By streets and lanes not calculated to give 
 Miss Lasacque a very favorable first impression of 
 Boston, we reached Washington street, and made an 
 intrepid dash across it, to the Marlborough hotel. 
 
 Of this public house, Thalimer had asked my opin- 
 ion during our walk, by way of introducing an apolo- 
 gy to Miss Lasacque for not taking her to his own 
 home. She had made it quite clear that she expected 
 this, and Jem had nothing for it but to draw such a 
 picture of the decrepitude of Mr. Thalimer, senior, 
 and the bedridden condition of his mother (as stout 
 a couple as ever plodded to church !) as would satisfy 
 the lady for his short-comings in hospitality. This 
 had passed off" very smoothly, and Miss Lasacque en- 
 tered the Marlboro', quite prepared to lodge there, 
 but very little aware (poor girl !) of the objections to 
 receiving her as a lodger. 
 
 Mr. , the proprietor, had stood in the arch- 
 way as we entered. Seeing no baggage in the lady's 
 train, however, he had not followed us in, supposing, 
 probably, that we were callers on some of his guests. 
 Jem left us in the drawing-room, and went upon his 
 errand to the proprietor, but after half an hour's ab- 
 sence, came back, looking very angry, and informed 
 us that no rooms were to be had ! Instead of taking 
 the rooms without explanation, he had been unwise 
 
 enough to " make a clean breast" to Mr. , and 
 
 the story of the lady's being bis "ward," and come 
 from Louisiana to go to school, rather staggered that 
 discreet person's credulity. 
 
 Jem beckoned me out, and we held a little council 
 of war in the entry. Alas! I had nothing to suggest. 
 I knew the puritan metropolis very well — I knew its 
 phobia was " the appearance of evil." In Jem's care- 
 for-nothing face lay the leprosy which closed all doors 
 against us. Even if we had succeeded, by a coup-de- 
 main, in lodging Miss Lasacque at the Marlboro', her 
 guardian's daily visits would have procured for her, in 
 the first week, some intimation that she could no 
 longer be accommodated. 
 
 " We had best go and dine upon it," said I ; " worst 
 come to the worst, we can fiud some sort of dormitory 
 for her at Gallagher's, and to-morrow sh« must b% put 
 
322 
 
 THE FEMALE WARD. 
 
 to school, out of the reach of your 'pleasant, but 
 wrong society.' " 
 
 "I hope to Heaven she'll 'stay put,'" said Jem, 
 with a long sigh. 
 
 We got Miss Lasacque again underway, and avoid- 
 ing the now crowded pave of Washington street, made 
 a short cut by Theatre Alley to Devonshire street and 
 Gallagher's. Safely landed in "No. 2," we drew a 
 long breath of relief. Jem rang the bell. 
 
 "Dinner, waiter, as soon as possible." 
 
 "The same that was ordered at six, sir?" 
 
 "Yes, only more champagne, and bring it imme- 
 diately. Excuse me, Miss Lasacque," added Jem, 
 with a grave bow, " but the non-appearance of that 
 east wind my friend spoke of, has given me an unnat- 
 ural thirst. Will you join me in some champagne 
 after your hot walk ?" 
 
 " No, thank you," said the lady, untying her tip- 
 pet, " but, if you please, I will go to my room before 
 dinner!" 
 
 Here was trouble, again .' It nad never occurred (o 
 either of us, that ladies must go to their rooms before 
 bedtime. 
 
 " Stop !" cried Jem, as she laid her hand on the 
 bell to ring for the chamber-maid, "excuse me — I 
 must first speak to the landlord — the room — the room 
 is not ready, probably !" 
 
 He seized his hat, and made his exit, probably wish- 
 ing all confiding friends, with their neighbor's daugh- 
 ters, in a better world ! He had to do with a man of 
 sense, however. Gallagher had but one bedroom in 
 the house, which was not n servant's room, and that 
 was his own. In ten minutes it was ready, and at the | 
 lady's service. A black scullion was promoted for the . 
 nonce, to the post of chamber-maid, and, fortunately, i 
 the plantation-bred girl had not been long enough 
 from home to be particular. She came to dinner as 
 radiant as a summer-squash. 
 
 With the door shut, and the soup before us, Tha- 
 iimer's spirits and mine flung off their burthens to- 
 gether. Jem was the pleasantest table-companion in 
 the world, and he chatted and made the amiable to his 
 ward, as if he owed her some amends for the awkward 
 position of which she was so blessedly unconscious. 
 Your "dangerous man" (such as he was voted), in- 
 spires, of course, no distrust in those to whom he 
 chooses to be agreeable. Miss Lasacque grew, every 
 minute, more delighted with him. She, too, improved 
 on acquaintance. Come to look at her closely, Nature 
 meant her for a fine showy creature, and she was 
 " out of condition," as the jockeys say — that was all ! 
 Her features were good, though gamboged by a 
 southern climate, and the fever-and-ague had flatten- 
 ed what should be round and ripe lips, and reduced 
 to the mere frame, what should be the bust and neck 
 of a Die Vernon. I am not sure I saw all this at the 
 time. Her subsequent chrysalis and emergence into 
 a beautiful woman, naturally color my description 
 now. But I did see, then, that her eyes were large 
 and lustrous, and that naturally she had high spirit, 
 good abilities, and was a thorough woman in senti- 
 ment, though deplorably neglected— for, at the age 
 of twenty, she could hardly read and write ! It was 
 not surprising that she was pleased with us ! She was 
 the only lady present, and we were the first coxcombs 
 she had ever seen, and the day was summery, and the 
 dinner in Gallagher's best style. We treated her like 
 a princess ; and the more agreeable man of the two 
 being her guardian, and responsible for the propriety 
 of the whole affair, there was no chance for a failure. 
 We lingered over our coffee ; and we lingered over 
 our chassecafe; and we lingered over our tea; and, 
 when the old South struck twelve, we were still at the 
 table in " No. 2," quite too much delighted with each 
 other to have thought of separating. It was the ven- 
 erated guardian who made the first move, and. after 
 
 ringing up the waiter to discover that the scullion had, 
 six hours before, made her nightly disappearance, the 
 lady was respectfully dismissed with only a candle for 
 her chamber-maid, and Mr. Gallagher's room for her 
 destination — wherever that might be ! 
 
 We dined together every successive day for a week, 
 and during this time the plot rapidly thickened. Tha- 
 limer, of course, vexed soul and body, to obtain for 
 Miss Lasacque a less objectionable lodging — urged 
 scarcely more by his sense of propriety than by a 
 feeling for her good-natured host, who, meantime, 
 slept on a sofa. But the unlucky first step of dining 
 and lodging a young lady at a restaurant, inevitable 
 as it was, gave a fatal assurance to the predisposed 
 scandal of the affair, and every day's events heighten- 
 ed its glaring complexion. Miss Lasacque had ideas 
 of her own, and very independent ones, as to the 
 amusement of her leisure hours. She had never been 
 before where there were shops, and she spent her first 
 two or three mornings in perambulating Washington 
 street, dressed in a style perfectly amazing to behold- 
 ers, and purchasing every description of gay trumpe- 
 ry — the parcels, of course, sent to Gallagher's, and 
 the bills to James Thalimer, Esq. ! To keep her out 
 of the street, Jem took her, on the third day, to the 
 riding-school, leaving her (safely enough, he thought), 
 in charge of the authoritative Mr. Roulstone, while 
 he besieged some school-mistress or other to under- 
 take her ciphering and geography. She was all but 
 born on horseback, however, and soon tired of riding 
 round the ring. The street-door was set open for a 
 moment, leaving exposed a tempting tangent to the 
 circle, and out flew Miss Lasacque, saving her " Leg- 
 horn flat" by a bend to the saddle-bow, that would 
 have done credit to a dragoon, and no more was seen, 
 for hours, of the " bonnie black mare" and her rider. 
 
 The deepening of Miss Lasacque's passion for Jem, 
 would not interest the reader. She loved like other 
 women, timidly and pensively. Young as the passion 
 was, however, it came too late to affect her manners 
 before public opinion had pronounced on them. There 
 was neither boarding-house nor " private female acad- 
 emy" within ten miles, into which "Mr. Thalimer's 
 young lady" would have been permitted to set her 
 foot — small as was the foot, and innocent as was the 
 pulse to which it stepped. 
 
 Uncomfortable as was this state of suspense, and 
 anxious as we were to fall into the track marked 
 "virtuous," if virtue would only permit; public opin- 
 ion seemed to think we were enjoying ourselves quite 
 too prosperously. On the morning of the seventh day 
 of our guardianship. I had two calls after breakfast, 
 one from poor Gallagher, who reported that he had 
 been threatened with a prosecution of his establish- 
 ment as a nuisance, and another from poorer Jem, 
 whose father had threatened to take the lady out of 
 his hands, and lodge her in the insane asylum ! 
 
 "* Not that I don't wish she was there," added Jem, 
 " for it is a very fine place, with a nice garden, and 
 luxurious enough for those who can pay for them, and 
 faith, I believe it's the only lodging-house I've not ap- 
 plied to !" 
 
 I must shorten my story. Jem anticipated his 
 father, by riding over, and showing his papers con- 
 stituting him the guardian of Miss Lasacque, in which 
 capacity, he was, of course, authorized to put his 
 ward under the charge of keepers. Everybody who 
 knows Massachusetts, knows that its insane asylums 
 are sometimes brought to bear on irregular morals, as 
 well as on diseased intellect*, and as the presiding of- 
 ficer of the institution was quite well assured that 
 Miss Lasacque was well qualified to become a patient, 
 Jem had no course left but to profit by the error. 
 The poor girl was invited, that afternoon, to take a 
 drive in the country, and we came back and dined 
 without her. in abominable spirits, I must say 
 
TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. 
 
 323 
 
 Provided with the best instruction, the best of care || and at the end of that time he came on, accompanied 
 taken of her health, and the most exemplary of ma- i| by his friend, Mr. Danchy. He found his daughter 
 trotis interesting herself in her patient's improvements, ,j sufficiently improved in health, manners, and beauty, 
 Miss Lasacque rapidly improved — more rapidly, no I to be quite satisfied with Jems discharge of his trust, 
 doubt, than she ever could have done by control less :i and we all dined very pleasantly in " No. 2 ;" Miss 
 rigid and inevitable. Her father, by the advice of the <\ Lasacque declining, with a blush, my invitation to her 
 matron, was not informed of her location for a year, || to make one of the party. 
 
 TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL 
 
 "Five hundred dollars a year!" echoed Fanny 
 Bellairs, as the first silver gray of the twilight spread 
 over her picture. 
 
 "And my art," modestly added the painter, prying 
 into his bright copy of the lips pronouncing upon 
 his destiny. 
 
 " And how much may that be at the present rate 
 of patronage — one picture a year painted for love!" 
 
 " Fanny, how can you be so calculating !" 
 
 "By the bumps over my eyebrows, I suppose. 
 Why, my dear coz, we have another state of existence 
 to look forward to — old man-age and old woman-age ! 
 What am I to do with five hundred dollars a year, 
 when my old frame wants gilding — (to use one of 
 your own similes) — I shan't always be pretty Fanny 
 Bellairs !" 
 
 " But, good Heavens ! we shall grow old together!" 
 exclaimed the painter, sitting down at her feet, " and 
 what will you care for other admiration, if your husband 
 see you still beautiful, with the eyes of memory and 
 habit." 
 
 " Even if I were sure he would so look upon me !" 
 answered Miss Bellairs more seriously, " I can not 
 but dread an old age without great means of embellish- 
 ment. Old people, except in poetry and in very 
 primitive society, are dishonored by wants and cares. 
 And, indeed, before we are old — when neither young 
 nor old — we want horses and ottomans, kalydor and 
 conservatories, books, pictures, and silk curtains — all 
 quite out of the range of your little allowance, don't 
 you see !" 
 
 " You do not love me, Fanny !" 
 
 " I do — and will marry you, Philip — as I, long ago, 
 with my whole heart promised. But I wish to be 
 happy with you — as happy, quite as happy, as is at all 
 possible, with our best efforts and coolest, discreetest 
 management. I laugh the matter over sometimes, 
 but I may tell you, since you are determined to be in 
 earnest, that I have treated it, in my solitary thought, 
 as the one important event of my life — (so indeed it 
 is !) — and, as such, worthy of all fore-thought, patience, 
 self-denial, and calculation. To inevitable ills 1 can 
 make up my mind like other people. If your art were 
 your only hope of subsistence — why — I don't know — 
 (should I look well as a page?) — 1 don't know that I 
 couldn't run your errands and grind your paints in 
 hose and doublet. But there is another door open 
 for you — a counting-house door, to be sure — leading 
 to opulence and all the appliances of dignity and happi- 
 ness, and through this door, my dear Philip, the an 
 you would live by comes to pay tribute and beg for 
 patronage. Now, out of your hundred and twenty 
 reasons, give me the two stoutest and best, why you 
 should refuse your brother's golden offer of partner- 
 ship — my share, in your alternative of poverty, left for 
 the moment out of the question." 
 
 Rather overborne by the confident decision of his 
 
 beautiful cousin, and having probably made up his 
 mind that he must ultimately yield to her, Philip re- 
 plied in a lower and more dejected tone : — 
 
 " If you were not to be a sharer in my renown, 
 should I be so fortunate as to acquire it, I should feel 
 as if it were selfish to dwell so much on my passion 
 for distinction and my devotion to my pencil as the 
 means of winning it. My heart is full of you — but it 
 is full of ambition too, paradox though it be. 1 can 
 not live ignoble. I should not have felt worthy to 
 press my love upon you — worthy to possess you — 
 except with the prospect of celebrity in my art. You 
 make the world dark to me, Fanny ! You closedown 
 the sky, when you shut out this hope ! Yet it shall 
 be so." 
 
 Philip paused a moment and the silence was unin- 
 terrupted. 
 
 " There was another feeling I had, upon which I 
 have not insisted," he continued. "By my brother's 
 project, I am to reside almost wholly abroad. Even 
 the little stipend I have to offer you now, is absorbed 
 of course by the investment of my property in his 
 trading capital, and marriage, till I have partly enrich- 
 ed myself, would be even more hopeless than at present. 
 Say the interval were five years — and five years of 
 separation !" 
 
 " With happiness in prospect, it would soon pass, 
 my dear Philip!" 
 
 "But is there nothing wasted in this time? My 
 life is yours — the gift of love. Are not these com- 
 ing five years the very flower of it ? — a mutual loss, 
 too. for are they not, even more emphatically, the very 
 flower of yours? Eighteenand twenty-five are ages at 
 which to marry, not ages to defer. During this time the 
 entire flow of my existence is at its crowning fulness 
 — passion, thought, joy, tenderness, susceptibility to 
 beauty and sweetness— —all I have that can be diminish- 
 ed or tarnished or made dull by advancing age and 
 contact with the world, is thrown away for its spring 
 and summer. Will the autumn of life repay us for 
 this? Will it — even if we are rich and blest with 
 health, and as capable of an unblemished union as 
 now ? Think of this a moment, dear Fanny !" 
 
 " I do — it is full of force and meaning, and could 
 we marry now, with a tolerable prospect of competen- 
 cy, it would be irresistible. But poverty in wedlock, 
 Philip—" 
 
 " What do you call poverty ! If we can suffice for 
 each other, and have the necessaries of life, we are not 
 poor ! My art will bring us consideration enough — 
 which is the main end of wealth, after all — and of 
 society, speaking for myself only, I want nothing. 
 Luxuries for yourself, Fanny, means for your dear 
 comfort and pleasure, you should not want if the 
 world held them, and surely the unbounded devotion 
 of one man to the support of the one woman he loves, 
 ought to suffice for the task ! I am strong — I am 
 
324 
 
 TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. 
 
 capable of labor — I have limbs to toil, if my genius 
 and my present means fail me, and, oh, Heaven, you 
 could not want !" 
 
 " No, no, no ! I thought not of want !" murmured 
 Miss Bellairs, "I thought only — " 
 
 But she was not permitted to finish the sentence. 
 
 " Then my bright picture for the future may be 
 realized !" exclaimed Philip, knitting his hands to- 
 gether in a transport of hope. " I may build up a I 
 reputation, with you for the constant partner of its 
 triumphs and excitements! I may go through the 
 world and have some care in life besides subsistence, 
 how I shall sleep, and eat, and accumulate gold ; some 
 companion, who, from the threshold of manhood, 
 shared every thought — and knew every feeling — some 
 pure and present angel who walked with me and puri- 
 fied my motives and ennobled my ambitions, and re- 
 ceived from my lips and eyes, and from the beating 
 of my heart, against her own, all the love I had to give 
 in a lifetime. Tell me, Fanny! tell me, my sweet 
 cousin ! is not this a picture of bliss, which, combined 
 with success in my noble art, might make a Paradise 
 on earth for you and me ?" 
 
 The hand of Fanny Bellairs rested on the upturned 
 forehead of her lover as he sat at her feet in the 
 deepening twilight, and she answered him with such 
 sweet words as are linked together by spells known 
 only to woman — but his palette and pencils were, 
 nevertheless, burned in solemn holocaust that very 
 night, and the lady carried her point, as ladies must. 
 And to the importation of silks from Lyons was de- 
 voted, thenceforth, the genius of a Raphael — perhaps • 
 Who knows ? 
 
 The reader will naturally have gathered from this 
 dialogue that Miss Fanny Bellairs had black eyes, 
 and was rather below the middle stature. She was a 
 belle, and it is only belle-metal of this particular 
 description which is not fusible by " burning words." 
 She had mind enough to appreciate fully the romance 
 and enthusiasm of her cousin, Philip Ballister, and 
 knew precisely the phenomena which a tall blonde 
 (this complexion of woman being soluble in love and 
 tears), would have exhibited under a similar experi- 
 ment. While the fire of her love glowed, therefore, 
 she opposed little resistance and seemed softened and 
 yielding, but her purpose remained unaltered, and she 
 rang out "no!" the next morning, with a tone as little 
 changed as a convent-bell from matins to vespers, 
 though it has passed meantime through the furnace ' 
 of an Italian noon. 
 
 Fanny was not a designing girl, either. She might 
 have found a wealthier customer for her heart than 
 her cousin Philip. And she loved this cousin as truly 
 and well as her nature would admit, or as need be, 
 indeed. But two things had conspired to give her 
 the unmalleable quality just described — a natural dis- 
 position to confide, first and foremost, on all occasions, 
 in her own sagacity, and a vivid impression made upon 
 her mind by a childhood of poverty. At the age of 
 twelve she had been transferred from the distressed 
 fireside of her mother, Mrs. Bellairs, to the luxurious 
 roof of her aunt, Mrs. Ballister, and her mother dying 
 soon after, the orphan girl was adopted and treated as 
 a child; but the memory of the troubled health at 
 which she had first learned to observe and reason, 
 colored all the purposes and affections, thoughts, 
 impulses and wishes of the ripening girl, and to think 
 of happiness in any proximity to privation seemed to 
 her impossible, even though it were in the bosom of 
 love. Seeing no reason to give her cousin credit for 
 any knowledge of the world beyond his own experience, 
 she decided to think for him as well as love him, and 
 not being so much pressed as the enthusiastic painter 
 by the " besoin d'aimer et de se faire aimer" she very 
 composedly prefixed, to the possession of her hand, 
 
 the trifling achievement of getting rich — quite sure 
 that if he knew as much as she, he would willingly run 
 that race without the incumbrance of matrimony. 
 
 The death of Mr. Ballister, senior, had left the 
 widow and her two boys more slenderly provided for 
 than was anticipated — Phil's portion, after leaving 
 college, producing the moderate income before men- 
 tioned. The elder brother had embarked in his father's 
 business, and it was thought best on all hands for the 
 younger Ballister to follow his example. But Philip, 
 whose college leisure had been devoted to poetry and 
 painting, and whose genius for the latter, certainly, 
 was very decided, brought down his habits by a res- 
 olute economy to the limits of his income, and took 
 up the pencil for a profession. With passionate en- 
 thusiasm, great purity of character, distaste for all 
 society not in harmony with his favorite pursuit, and 
 an industry very much concentrated and rendered 
 effective by abstemious habits, Philip Ballister was 
 very likely to develop what genius might lie between 
 his head and hand, and his progress in the first year 
 had been allowed by eminent artists to give very 
 unusual promise. The Ballisters were still together 
 under the maternal roof, and the painter's studies 
 were the portraits of the family, and Fanny's picture 
 of course much the most difficult to finish. It would 
 be very hard if a painter's portrait of his liege mistress, 
 the lady of his heart, were not a good picture, and 
 Fanny Bellairs on canvass was divine accordingly. If 
 the copy had more softness of expression than the 
 original (as it was thought to have), it only proves that 
 wise men have for some lime suspected, that love is 
 more dumb than blind, and the faults of our faultless 
 idols are noted, however unconsciously. Neither 
 thumb-screws nor hot coals — nothing piobably but re- 
 pentance after matrimony — would have drawn from 
 Philip Ballister, in words, the same confession of his 
 mistress's foible that had oozed out through his 
 treacherous pencil ! 
 
 Cupid is often drawn as a stranger pleading to be 
 "taken in," but it is a miracle that he is not invariably 
 drawn as a portrait-painter. A bird tied to the muzzle 
 of a gun — an enemy who has written a book — an Indian 
 prince under the protection of Giovanni Bulletto (Tus- 
 can for John Bull), — is not more close upon demoli- 
 tion, one would think, than the heart of a lady deliver- 
 ed over to a painter's eyes, posed, draped and lighted 
 with the one object of studying her beauty. If there 
 be any magnetism in isolated attention, any in stead- 
 fast gazing, any in passes of the hand hither and thither 
 — if there be any magic in ce doux demi-jour so loved 
 in France, in stuff for flattery ready pointed and feather- 
 ed, in freedom of admiration, "and all in the way of 
 business" — then is a loveable sitter to a love like 
 painter in " parlous" vicinity (as the new school would 
 phrase it), to sweet-heart-land ! Pleasure in a voca- 
 tion has no offset in political economy as honor has 
 ("the more honor the less profit,") or portrait-painters 
 would be poorer than poets. 
 
 And malgre his consciousness of the quality which 
 required softening in his cousin's beauty, and malgre 
 his rare advantages for obtaining over her a lover's 
 proper ascendency, Mr. Philip Ballister bowed to the 
 stronger will of Miss Fanny Bellairs, and sailed for 
 France on his apprenticeship to Mammon. 
 
 The reader will please to advance five years- Be- 
 fore proceeding thence with our story, however, let 
 us take a Parthian glance at the overstepped interval. 
 
 Philip Ballister had left New York with the triple 
 vow that he would enslave every faculty of his mind 
 and body to business, that he would not return till he 
 had made a fortune, and that such interstices as might 
 occur in the building up of this chateau for felicity 
 should be filled with sweet reveries about Fanny Bel- 
 lairs. The forsworn painter had genius, as we have 
 
TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL 
 
 325 
 
 before hinted, and genius is (as much as it is any one 
 thing), the power of concentration. He entered upon 
 his duties accordingly with a force, and patience of 
 application, which soon made him master of what are 
 called business habits, and, once in possession of the 
 details, his natural cleverness gave him a speedy insight 
 to all the scope and tactics of his particular field of 
 •rade. Under his guidance, the affairs of the house 
 .vere soon in a much more prosperous train, and after 
 a year's residence at Lyons, Philip saw his way very 
 clear to manage them with a long arm and take up his 
 quarters in Paris. 
 
 '• Les fats sont les seuls homines qui aient soin-d'eux 
 mimes,' 1 ' 1 says a French novelist, but there is a period, 
 early or late, in the lives of the cleverest men, when 
 they become suddenly curious as to their capacity for 
 the graces. Paris, to a stranger who does not visit in 
 the Faubourg St. Germain, is a republic of personal 
 exterior, where the degree of privilege depends with 
 Utopian impartiality on the style of the outer man; 
 and Paris, therefore, if he is not already a Bachelor 
 of Arts (qu? — beau's Arts), usually serves the traveller 
 as an Alma Mater of the pomps and vanities. 
 
 Phil. Ballister, up to the time of his matriculation 
 in Chaussee D'Antin, was a romantic-looking sloven. 
 From this to a very dashing coxcomb is but half a step, 
 and to be rid of the coxcombry and retain a look of 
 fashion, is still within the easy limits of imitation. 
 But — to obtain superiority of presence with no apparent 
 aid from dress and no describable manner, and to dis- 
 play at the same time every natural advantage in ef- 
 fective relief, and, withal, to adapt this subtle philtre, 
 not only to the approbation of the critical and censori- 
 ous, but to the taste of fair women gifted with judg- 
 ment as God pleases — this is a finish not born with 
 any man (though unsuccessful if it do not seem to be), 
 and never reached in the apprenticeship of life, and 
 never reached at all by men not much above their 
 fellows. He who has it, has " bought his doublet in 
 Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germa- 
 ny, and his behavior everywhere," for he must know, 
 as a chart of quicksands, the pronounced models of 
 other nations ; but to be a " picked man of countries," 
 and to have been a coxcomb and a man of fashion, are, 
 as a painter would say, but the setting of the palette 
 toward the making of the chef-d'ceuvre. 
 
 Business prospered and the facilities of leisure in- 
 creased, while Ballister passed through these transi- 
 tions of taste, and he found intervals to travel, and 
 time to read, and opportunity to indulge ; as far as he 
 could with the eye only, his passion for knowledge in 
 the arts. To all that appertained to the refinement 
 of himself, he applied the fine feelers of a delicate and 
 passionate construction, physical and mental, and, as 
 the reader will already have included, wasted on culture 
 comparatively unprofitable, faculties that would have 
 eeen better employed but for the meddling of Miss 
 fanny Bellairs. 
 
 Ballister's return from France was heralded by the 
 jrrival of statuary and pictures, books, furniture, and 
 uumberless articles of tasteful and costly luxury. The 
 reception of these by the family at home threw rather 
 n new light on the probable changes in the long-absent 
 brother, for, from the signal success of the business 
 he had managed, they had very naturally supposed 
 that it was the result only of unremitted and plodding 
 care. Vague rumors of changes in his personal ap- 
 pearance had reached them, such as might be expected 
 from conformity to foreign fashions, but those who 
 had seen Philip Ballister in France, and called subse- 
 quently on the family in New York, were not people 
 qualified to judge of the man, either from their own 
 powers of observation or from any confidence he was 
 likely to put forward while in their society. His 
 letters had been delightful, but they were confined to 
 
 third-person topics, descriptions of things likely to in- 
 terest them, &c, and Fanny had few addressed per- 
 sonally to herself, having thought it worth while, for 
 the experiment's sake or for some other reason, to see 
 whether love would subsist without its usual pabulum 
 of tender correspondence, and a veto on love-letters 
 having served her for a parting injunction at Phil's 
 embarkation for Havre. However varied by their 
 different fancies, the transformation looked for by the 
 whole family was substantially the same — the romantic 
 artist sobered down to a practical, plain man of busi- 
 ness. And Fanny herself had an occasional misgiving 
 as to her relish for his counting-house virtues and 
 manners; though, on the detection of the feeling, she 
 immediately closed her eyes upon it, and drummed 
 up her delinquent constancy for " parade and inspec- 
 tion." 
 
 All bustles are very much alike (we use the word 
 as defined in Johnson), and the reader will appreciate 
 our delicacy, besides, in not intruding on the first re- 
 union of relatives and lovers long separated. 
 
 The morning after Philip Ballister's arrival, the 
 family sat long at breakfast. The mother's gaze 
 fastened untiringly on the features of her son — still her 
 I boy — prying into them with a vain effort to reconcile 
 the face of the man with the cherished picture of the 
 child with sunny locks, and noting little else than the 
 work of inward change upon the countenance and ex- 
 I pression. The brother, with the predominant feeling 
 I of respect for the intelligence and industry of one who 
 had made the fortunes of the house, read only subdued 
 sagacity in the perfect simplicity of his whole exterior. 
 And Fanny — Fanny was puzzled. The bourgeoisie 
 and leger-bred hardness of manner which she had 
 looked for were not there, nor any variety of the 
 "foreign slip-slop" common to travelled youth, nor 
 any superciliousness, nor (faith !) any wear and tear 
 of youth or good looks — nothing that she expected — 
 nothing ! Not even a French guard-chain ! 
 
 What there was in her cousin's manners and ex- 
 terior, however, was much more difficult to define by 
 Miss Bellairs than what there was not. She began the 
 j renewal of their intercourse with very high spirits, 
 I herself — the simple nature and unpretendingness of 
 his address awakening only an unembarrassed pleasure 
 at seeing him again — but she soon began to suspect 
 there was an exquisite refinement in this very sim- 
 plicity, and to wonder at "the trick of it;" and after 
 the first day passed in his society, her heart beat when 
 he spoke to her, as it did not use to beat when she 
 was sitting to him for her picture, and listening to his 
 passionate love-making. And with all her faculties she 
 studied him. What was the charm of his presence! He 
 was himself, and himself only. He seemed perfect, but 
 he seemed to have arrived at perfection like a statue, 
 not like a picture — by what had been taken away, not 
 by what had been laid on. He was as natural as a bird, 
 and as graceful and unembarrassed. He neither forced 
 conversation, nor pressed the little attentions of the draw- 
 ing-room, and his attitudes were full of repose ; yet she 
 was completely absorbed in what he said, and she had 
 been impressed imperceptibly with his high-bred polite- 
 ness, and the singular elegance of his person. Fanny 
 felt there was a change in her relative position to her 
 cousin. In what it consisted, or which had the ad- 
 vantage, she was perplexed to discover — but she bit 
 her lips as she caught herself thinking that if she were 
 not engaged to marry Philip Ballister, she should 
 suspect that she had just fallen irrecoverably in love 
 with him. 
 
 It would have been a novelty in the history of Miss 
 Bellairs that any event to which she had once con- 
 sented, should admit of reconsideration ; and the 
 Ballister family, used to her strong will, were confirm- 
 ed fatalists as to the coming about of her ends and 
 aims. Her marriage with Philip, therefore, was 
 
326 
 
 TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. 
 
 discussed, cceur ouvert, from his first arrival, and, in- 
 deed, in her usual fashion of saving others the trouble 
 of making up their minds. " herself had named the 
 day." This, it is true, was before his landing, and 
 was then, an effort of considerable magnanimity, as 
 the expectant Penelope was not yet advised of her 
 lover's state of preservation or damages by cares and 
 keeping. If Philip had not found his wedding-day 
 fixed on his arrival, however, he probably would have 
 had a voice in the naming of it, for with Fanny's new 
 inspirations as to his character, there had grown up a 
 new flower in her garden of beauties — timidity ! 
 Whit bird of the air had sown the seed in such a soil 
 was a problem to herself — but true it was! — the con- 
 fident belle had grown a blushing trembler! She 
 would as soon have thought of bespeaking her wings 
 for the sky, as to have ventured on naming the day in 
 a short week after. 
 
 The day was named, however, and the preparations 
 went on — nem. con. — the person most interested (after 
 herself) accepting every congratulation and allusion, 
 touching the event, with the most impenetrable suavity. 
 The marbles and pictures, upholstery and services, 
 were delivered over to the order of Miss Bellairs, and 
 Philip, disposed, apparently, to be very much a recluse 
 in his rooms, or at other times, engrossed by troops 
 of welcoming friends, saw much less of his bride elect 
 than suited her wishes, and saw her seldom alone. By 
 particular request, also, he took no part in the 'plenish- 
 ing and embellishing of the new abode — not permitted I 
 even to inquire where it was situated, and under this ! 
 cover, besides the pleasure of having her own way, 
 Fanny concealed a little secret, which, when disclosed, 
 •he now felt, would figure forth to Philip's comprehen- j 
 sion, her whole scheme of future happiness. She had [ 
 taken the elder brother into her counsels a fortnight j 
 after Philip's return, and, with his aid and consent, 
 bad abandoned the original idea of a house in town, 
 purchased a beautifully-secluded estate and cottage j 
 ornee, on the East river, and transferred thither all the 
 objects of art, furniture, &c. One room only of the ! 
 maternal mansion was permitted to contribute its j 
 quota to the completion of the bridal dwelling — the j 
 wing, never since inhabited, in which Philip had made 
 his essay as a painter — and without variation of a cob- 
 web, and with whimsical care and effort on the part 
 of Miss Fanny, this apartment was reproduced at j 
 Revedere — her own picture on the easel, as it stood j 
 on the night of his abandonment of his art, and palette, j 
 pencils and colors in tempting readiness on the table. 
 Even the fire-grate of the old studio had been re-set 
 in the new, and the cottage throughout had been re- 
 fitted with a view to occupation in the winter. And 
 to sundry hints on the part of the elder brother, that I 
 Borne thought should be given to a city residence — I 
 for the Christmas holydays, at least — Fanny replied, 
 through a blush, that she should never wish to see the 
 town — with Philip at Revedere! 
 
 Five years had ripened and mellowed the beauty 
 of Fanny Bellairs, and the same summer-time of youth 
 had turned into fruit the feeling left by Philip in bud 
 and flower. She was ready now for love. She had 
 felt the variable temper of society, and there was a 
 presentiment in the heart of receding flatteries, and 
 the winter of life. It was with mournful self-reproach 
 that she thought of the years wasted in separation, of 
 her own choosing, from the man she loved, and with 
 the power to recall time, she would have thanked 
 God with tears of joy for the privilege of retracing 
 the chain of life to that link of parting. Not worth a 
 day of those lost years, she bitterly confessed to her- 
 self, was the wealth they had purchased. 
 
 It lacked as little as one week of '-the happy day,"' 
 when the workmen were withdrawn from Revedere, 
 and the preparations for a family breakfast, to be suc- 
 ceeded by the agreeable surprise to Philip of inform- 
 
 ing him he was at home, were finally completed. One 
 or two very intimate friends were added to the party, 
 and the invitations (from the elder Ballister) proposed 
 simply a dejeuner sur Vherbe in the grounds of an un- 
 occupied villa, the property of an acquaintance. 
 
 With the subsiding of the excitement of return, the 
 early associations which had temporarily confused and 
 colored the feelings of Philip Ballister, settled gradu- 
 ally away,* leaving uppermost once more the fastidious 
 refinement of the Parisian. Through this medium, 
 thin and cold, the bubbles from the breathing of the 
 heart of youth, rose rarely and reluctantly. The Bal- 
 listers held a good station in society, without caring 
 for much beyond the easy conveniences of life, and 
 Fanny, though capable of any degree of elegance, had 
 not seen the expediency of raising the tone of her 
 manners above that of her immediate friends. With- 
 out being positively distasteful to Philip, the family 
 circle, Fanny included, left him much to desire in the 
 way of society, and unwilling to abate the warmth of 
 his attentions while with them, he had latterly pleaded 
 occupation more frequently, and passed his time in 
 the more congenial company of his library of art. 
 This was the less noticed that it gave Miss Bellairs 
 the opportunity to make frequent visits to the work- 
 men at Revedere, and in the polished devotion of her 
 betrothed, when with her, Fanny saw nothing reflected 
 but her own daily increasing tenderness and admira- 
 tion. 
 
 The morning of the fete came in like the air in an 
 overture — a harmony of all the instruments of sum- 
 mer. The party were at the gate of Revedere by ten, 
 and the drive through the avenue to the lawn drew a 
 burst of delighted admiration from all. The place was 
 exquisite, and seen in its glory, and Fanny's heart was 
 brimming with gratified pride and exultation. She 
 assumed at once the dispensation of the honors, and 
 beautiful she looked with her snowy dress and raven 
 ringlets flitting across the lawn, and queening it like 
 Perdita among the flowers. Having narrowly escaped 
 bursting into tears of joy when Philip pronounced the 
 place prettier than anything he had seen in his travels, 
 she was, for the rest of the day, calmly happy, and 
 with the grateful shade, the delicious breakfast in the 
 grove, the rambling and boating on the river, the hours 
 passed off like dreams, and no one even hinted a re- 
 gret that the house itself was under lock and bar. And 
 so the sun set, and the twilight came on, and the 
 guests were permitted to order round their carriages 
 and depart, the Ballisters accompanying them to the 
 gate. And, on the return of the family through the 
 avenue, excuses were made for idling hither and thith- 
 er, till lights began to show through the trees, and by 
 the time of their arrival at the lawn, the low windows 
 of the cottage poured forth streams of light, and the 
 open doors^ and servants busy within, completed a 
 scene more like magic than reality. Philip was led in 
 by the excited girl who was the fairy of the spell, and 
 his astonishment at the discovery of his statuary and 
 pictures, books and furniture, arranged in complete 
 order within, was fed upon with the passionate delight 
 of love in authority. 
 
 When an hour had been spent in examining and 
 admiring the different apartments, an inner room was 
 thrown open, in which supper was prepared, and this 
 fourth act in the day's drama was lingered over in un- 
 tiring happiness by the family. 
 
 Mrs. Ballister, the mother, rose and retired, and 
 Philip pleaded indisposition, and begged to be shown 
 to the room allotted to him. This was ringing-up the 
 curtain for the last act sooner than had been planned by 
 Fanny, but she announced herself as his chamberlain, 
 and with her hands affectionately crossed on his arm, 
 led him to a suite of rooms in a wing still unvisited, 
 and with a good-night kiss left him at the open door 
 of the revived studio, furnished for the night with a 
 
TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL. 
 
 327 
 
 bachelor's bed. Turning upon the threshold, he 
 closed the door with a parting wish of sweet dreams, 
 and Fanny, after listening a moment with a vain hope 
 of overhearing some expression of pleasure, and lin- 
 gering again on her way back, to be overtaken by her 
 surprised lover, sought her own bed without rejoining 
 the circle, and passed a sleepless and happy night of 
 tean and joy. 
 
 Breakfast was served the next morning on a terrace 
 overlooking the river, and it was voted by acclamation, 
 that Fanny never before looked so lovely. As none 
 but the family were to be present, she had stolen a 
 march on her marriage wardrobe, and added to her 
 demi-toilet a morning cap of exquisite becomingness. 
 Altogether, she looked deliciously wife-like, and did 
 the honors of the breakfast-table with a grace and 
 sweetness that warmed out love and compliments even 
 from the sober soil of household intimacy. Philip 
 had not yet made his appearance, and they lingered 
 long at table, till at last a suggestion that he might be 
 ill started Fanny to her feet, and she ran to his door 
 before a servant could be summoned. 
 
 The rooms were open, and the bed had not been j 
 occupied. The candle was burned to the socket, and | 
 on the easel, resting against the picture, was a letter 
 addressed — " Miss Fanny Bellairs." 
 
 THE LETTER. 
 
 •• I have followed up to this hour, my fair cousin, in 
 the path you have marked out for me. It has brought 
 me back, in this chamber, to the point from which I 
 started under your guidance, and if it had brought me 
 back unchanged — if it restored me my energy, my 
 hope, and my prospect of fame, I should pray Heaven 
 that it would also give me back my love, and be con- 
 tent — more than content, if it gave me back also my 
 poverty. The sight of my easel, and of the surround- 
 ings of my boyish dreams of glory, have made my 
 heart bitter. They have given form and voice to a 
 vague unhappiness, which has haunted me through all 
 these absent years — years of degrading pursuits and 
 wasted powers — and it now impels me from you, kind , 
 and lovely as you are, with an aversion I can not con- i 
 trol. I can not forgive you. You have thwarted my : 
 destiny. You have extinguished with sordid cares a | 
 lamp within me that might, by this time, have shone ; 
 through the world. And what am I, since your wishes 
 are accomplished ? Enriched in pocket, and bankrupt 
 in happiness and self-respect. 
 
 " With a heart sick, and a brain aching for distinc- ! 
 tion, I have come to an unhonored stand-still at thirty ! | 
 I am a successful tradesman, and in this character I j 
 shall probably die. Could I begin to be a painter now, j 
 say you ? Alas ! my knowledge of the art is too great ! 
 for patience with the slow hand ! I could not draw a 
 line without despair. The pliant fingers and the plas- I 
 tic mind must keep pace to make progress, in art. My I 
 taste is fixed, and my imagination uncreative, because j 
 chained down by certainties; and the shortsighted ar- ] 
 dor and daring experiment which are indispensable to ] 
 sustain and advance the follower in Raphael's foot- j 
 steps, are too far behind for my resuming. The tide 
 ebbed from me at the accursed burning of my pencils j 
 by your pitiless hand, and from that hour I have felt 
 hope receding. Could I be happy with you, stranded 
 here in ignoble idleness, and owing to you the loss of 
 my whole venture of opportunity ? No, Fanny ! — 
 surely no ! 
 
 " 1 would not be unnecessarily harsh, ^im sensi- 
 ble of your affection and constancy. I have deferred 
 this explanation unwisely, till the time and place make 
 it seem more cruel. You are at this very moment, I 
 
 well know, awake in your chamber, devoting to me the 
 vigils of a heart overflowing with tenderness. And 1 
 would — if it were possible — if it were not utterly be- 
 yond my powers of self-sacrifice and concealment — I 
 would affect a devotion I can not feel, and carry out 
 this error through a life of artifice and monotony. But 
 here, again, the work is your own, and my feelings re- 
 vert bitterly to your interference. If there were no 
 other obstacle to my marrying you — if you were not 
 associated repulsively with the dark cloud on my life, 
 you are not the woman I could now enthrone in my 
 bosom. We have diverged since the separation which 
 I pleaded against, and which you commanded. I need 
 for my idolatry, now, a creature to whom the sordid 
 cares you have sacrificed me to, are utterly unknown 
 — a woman born and educated in circumstances where 
 want is never feared, and where calculation never en- 
 ters. I must lavish my wealth, if I fulfil my desire, 
 on one who accepts it like the air she breathes, and 
 who knows the value of nothing but love — a bird with 
 a huuaan soul and form, believing herself free of all 
 the world is rich in, and careful only for pleasure and 
 the happiness of those who belong to her. Such 
 women, beautiful and highly educated, are found only 
 in ranks of society between which and my own I have 
 been increasing in distance — nay, building an impassa- 
 ble barrier, in obedience to your control. Where I 
 stop, interdicted by the stain of trade, the successful 
 artist is free to enter. You have stamped me plebeian 
 — you would not share my slow progress toward a 
 higher sphere, and you have disqualified me for attain- 
 ing it alone. In your mercenary and immoveable will, 
 and in that only, lies the secret of our twofold unhap- 
 piness. 
 
 " I leave you, to return to Europe. My brother and 
 my friends will tell you I am mad and inexcusable, and 
 look upon you as a victim. They will say that, to 
 have been a painter, were nothing to the career that 1 
 might mark out for my ambition, if ambition 1 must 
 have, in politics. Politics in a country where distinc- 
 tion is a pillory ! But I could not live here. It is my 
 misfortune that my tastes are so modified by that long 
 and compulsory exile, that life, here, would be a per- 
 petual penance. This unmixed air of merchandise 
 suffocates me. Our own home is tinctured black with 
 it. You yourself, in this rural paradise you have con- 
 jured up, move in it like a cloud. The counting- 
 house rings in your voice, calculation draws together 
 your brows, you look on everything as a means, and 
 know its cost; and the calm and means-forgetting// u- 
 ition, which forms the charm and dignity of superior 
 life, is utterly unknown to you. What would be my 
 happiness with such a wife ? What would be yours 
 with such a husband ? Yet I consider the incompat- 
 ibility between us as no advantage on my part — on the 
 contrary, a punishment, and of your inflicting. What 
 shall I be anywhere but a Tantalus — a fastidious en- 
 nuye, with a thirst for the inaccessible burning in my 
 bosom continually ! 
 
 " I pray you let us avoid another meeting before my 
 departure. Though I can not forgive you as a lover. 
 I can think of you with pleasure as a cousin, and I 
 give you, as your due ("damages," the law would 
 phrase it), the portion of myself which you thought 
 most important when I offered you my all. You 
 would not take me without the fortune, but perhaps 
 you will be content with the fortune without me. I 
 shall immediately take steps to convey to you this 
 property of Revedere, with an income sufficient to 
 maintain it, and I trust soon to hear that you have 
 found a husband better worthy of you than your 
 couam "Philip Baluster," 
 
328 
 
 LIGHT VERVAIN. 
 
 LIGHT VERVAIN. 
 
 And thou light vervain, too — thou next come after, 
 Provoking souls to mirth and easy laughter."— Old Somebody. 
 
 Rome, May 30, 1832. 
 
 Dined with F — , the artist, at a trattoria. F — is 
 a man of genius, very adventurous and imaginative in 
 his art, but never caring to show the least touch of 
 these qualities in his conversation. His pictures have 
 given him great vogue and consideration at Rome, so 
 that his daily experience furnishes staple enough for 
 his evening's chit-chat, and he seems, of course, to be 
 always talking of himself. He is very generally set 
 down as an egotist. His impulse to talk, however, 
 springs from no wish for self-glorification, but rather 
 from an indolent aptness to lay hands on the readiest 
 and most familiar topic, and that is a kind of egotism 
 to which I have very little objection — particularly i 
 with the mind fatigued, as it commonly is m Rome, 
 by a long day's study of works of art. 
 
 I had passed the morning at the Barberini palace 
 with a party of picture-hunters, and I made some 
 remark as to the variety of impressions made upon 
 the minds of different people by the same picture. 
 Apropos of this remark, F — told me a little anecdote, 
 which I must try to put down by way of a new shoal 
 in the chart of human nature. 
 
 " It is very much the same with everything else," 
 said F — ; "no two people see with the same eyes, 
 physically or morally ; and faith, we might save our- 
 selves a great deal of care and bother if we did but 
 keep it in mind." 
 
 " As how ?" I asked, for I saw that this vague 
 remark was premonitory of an illustration. 
 
 " I think I introduced young Skyring to you at a 
 party somewhere?" 
 
 "A youth with a gay waistcoat and nothing to say ? 
 Yes." 
 
 " Well — your observation just now reminded me of 
 the different estimate put by that gentleman and 
 myself upon something, and if I could give you any 
 idea of my month's work in his behalf, you would 
 agree with me that I might have spared myself some 
 trouble — keeping in mind, as I said before, the differ- 
 ence in optics. 
 
 "I was copying a bi't of foreshortening from a pic- 
 ture in the Vatican, one day, when this youth passed 
 without observing me. I did not immediately recol- 
 lect him. He was dressed like a figure in a tailor's 
 widow, and with Mrs. Stark in his hand was hunting 
 up the pictures marked with four notes of admiration, 
 and I, with a smile at the waxy dandyism of the man, 
 turned to my work and forgot him. Presently his 
 face recurred to me, or rather his sister's face, which 
 some family likeness had insensibly recalled, and 
 getting another look, I recognised in him an old, 
 though not very intimate playmate of my boyish days. 
 It immediately occurred to me that I could serve him 
 a very good turn by giving him the entree to society 
 here, and quite as immediately, it occurred to me to 
 doubt whether it was worth my while." 
 
 " And what changed your mind," I asked, " for of 
 course you came to the conclusion that it was not ?" 
 
 " Oh, for his sake alone I should have left him as 
 he was, a hermit in his varnished boots — for he had 
 not an acquaintance in the city — but Kate Skyring 
 had given me roses when roses were to me, each a 
 world; and for her sake, though I was a rejected 
 lover, I thought better of my demurrer. Then I had 
 
 a little pique to gratify — for the Skyrings had rather 
 given me the de haut en has in declining the honor of 
 my alliance (lucky for me, since it brought me here 
 and made me what I am), and I was not indisposed to 
 show that the power to serve, to say the least, was now 
 on my side." 
 
 "Two sufficient, as well as dramatic reasons for 
 being civil to a man." 
 
 " Only arrived at, however, by a night's deliberation, 
 for it cost me some trouble of thought and memory to 
 get back into my chrysalis and imagine myself at all 
 subject to people so much below my present vogue — 
 whatever that is worth ! Of course 1 don't think of 
 Kate in this comparison, for a woman one has once 
 loved is below nothing. We'll drink her health, God 
 bless her !" 
 
 (A bottle of Lagrima.) 
 
 " I left my card on Mr. Skyring the next morning, 
 with a note enclosing three or four invitations which I 
 had been at some trouble to procure, and a hope from 
 myself of the honor of his company to a quiet dinner. 
 He took it as a statue would take a shower-bath, wrote 
 me a note in the third person in reply to mine in the 
 first, and came in ball-dress and sulphur gloves at pre- 
 cisely the canonical fifteen minutes past the hour. 
 Good old Thorwalsden dined with me, and an English 
 viscount for whom I was painting a picture, and 
 between my talking Italian to the venerable sculptor, 
 and Skyring's belording and belordshipping the good- 
 natured nobleman, the dinner went trippingly off — the 
 Little Pedlington of our mutual nativity furnishing 
 less than its share to the conversation. 
 
 " We drove, all together, to the Palazzo Rossi, for 
 its was the night of the Marchesa's soiree. As spon- 
 sor, I looked with some satisfaction at Skyring in the 
 ante-room, his toggery being quite unexceptionable, 
 and his maintien very uppish and assured. I presented 
 him to our fair hostess, who surveyed him as he 
 approached with a satisfactory look of approval, and 
 no one else chancing to be near, I left him to improve 
 what was rather a rare opportunity — a tete-a-tete with 
 the prettiest woman in Rome. Five minutes after I 
 returned to reconnoitre, and there he stood, stroking 
 down his velvet waistcoat and looking from the carpet 
 to the ceiling, while the marchioness was quite red 
 with embarrassment and vexation. He had not opened 
 his lips ! She had tried him in French and Italian 
 (the dunce had told me that he spoke French too), 
 and finally she had ventured upon English, which she 
 knew very little of, and still he neither spoke nor ran 
 away ! 
 
 " 'Perhaps Monsieur would like to dance,' said the 
 marchioness, gliding away from him with a look of 
 inexpressible relief, and trusting to me to find him a 
 partner. 
 
 " I had no difficulty in finding him a partner, for 
 (that far) his waistcoat 'put him on velvet' — but I 
 could not trust him alone again ; so, having presented 
 him to a «ery pretty woman and got them vis-a-vis in 
 the quadrille, I stood by to supply the shortcomings. 
 And little of a sinecure it was ! The man had nothing 
 to say ; nor, confound him, had he any embarrassment 
 on the subject. He looked at his varnished pumps, 
 and coaxed his coat to his waist, and set back his neck 
 like a goose bolting a grasshopper, and took as much 
 
LIGHT VERVAIN. 
 
 329 
 
 interest in the conversation as a footman behind your 
 chair— deaf and dumb apparently, but perfectly at his 
 ease. He evidently had no idea that there was any 
 distinction between men except in dress, and was per- 
 suaded that he was entirely successful as far as he had 
 gone : and as to my efforts in his behalf, he clearly 
 took them as gratuitous on my part — probably thinking, 
 from the difference in our exteriors, that I paid myself 
 in the glory of introducing him. 
 
 m Well — I had begun so liberally that I could scarce 
 refuse to find my friend another partner, and after that 
 another and another — 1, to avoid the odium of inflict- 
 ing a bore on my fair acquaintances, feeling compelled 
 to continue my service as chorus in the pantomime — 
 and, you will scarce believe me when 1 tell you that I 
 submitted to this bore nightly for a month ! 1 could 
 not get rid of him. He would not be let go. With- 
 out offending him mortally, and so undoing all my 
 sentimental outlay for Kate Skyring and her short- 
 sighted papa, I had nothing for it but to go on till he 
 should »o off— ridden to death with him in every con- 
 ceivable variety of bore." 
 
 " And is he gone ?" 
 
 " Gone. And now, what thanks do you suppose I 
 got for all this ?" 
 
 " A present of a pencil-case ?" 
 
 " No, indeed ! but a lesson in human nature that 
 will stick by me much longer. He called at my studio 
 yesterday morning to say good-by. Through all my 
 sense of his boredom and relief at the prospect of 
 being rid of him, I felt embarrassed when he came in, 
 thinking how difficult it would be for him to express 
 properly his sense of the obligation he was under to 
 me. After half an hour's monologue (by myself) on 
 pictures, &c, he started up and said he must go. 
 ' And by-the-by,' said he, coloring a little, ' there is 
 one thing I want to say to you, Mr. F — ! Hang it, 
 it has stuck in my throat ever since I met you ! 
 You've been very polite and I'm obliged to you, of 
 course — but I don't like your devilish, patronizing 
 manner! Good-by, Mr. F — !'" 
 
 ****** 
 
 The foregoing is a leaf from a private diary which I 
 kept at Rome. In making a daily entry of such 
 passing stuff as interests us, we sometimes, amid much 
 that should be ticketed for oblivion, record that which 
 has a bearing, important or amusing, on the future; 
 and a late renewal of my acquaintance with Mr. F — , 
 followed by a knowledge of some fortunate changes 
 in his worldly condition, has given that interest to this 
 otherwise unimportant scrap of diary which will be 
 made apparent presently to the reader. A vague 
 recollection that I had something in an old book 
 which referred to him, induced me to look it up, and 
 I was surprised to find that I had noted down, in this 
 trifling anecdote, what turned out to be the mainspring 
 of his destiny. 
 
 F — returned to his native country after five years 
 study of the great masters of Italy. His first pictures 
 painted at Rome procured for him, as is stated in the 
 diary I have quoted, a high reputation. He carried 
 with him a style of his own which was merely stimu- 
 lated and heightened by his first year's walk through 
 the galleries of Florence, and the originality and bold- 
 ness of his manner of coloring seemed to promise a 
 sustained novelty in the art. Gradually, however, the 
 awe of the great masters seemed to overshadow his 
 confidence in himself, and as he travelled and deep- 
 ened his knowledge of painting, he threw aside feature 
 after feature of his own peculiar style, till at last he 
 fell into the track of the great army of imitators, Avho 
 follow the immortals of the Vatican as doomed ships 
 follow the Flying Dutchman. 
 
 Arrived at home, and depending solely on his art 
 for a subsistence, F — commenced the profession to 
 which he had served so long an apprenticeship. But 
 
 [ his pictures sadly disappointed his friends. After the 
 I first specimens of his acquired style in the annual ex- 
 i hibitions, the calls at his rooms became fewer and 
 j farther between, and his best works were returned 
 j from the galleries unsold. Too proud to humor the 
 , popular taste by returning to what he considered an 
 ! inferior stage of his art. he stood still with his reputa- 
 I tion ebbing from him, and as his means, of course, 
 ': depended on the tide of public favor, he was soon in- 
 | volved in troubles before which his once-brilliant hopes 
 rapidly faded. 
 
 " You will be surprised on glancing at the signature 
 ! to this letter. You will be still more surprised when 
 j you are reminded that it is a reply to an unanswered 
 I one of your own — written years ago. That letter lies 
 j by me, expressed with all the diffidence of boyish 
 1 feeling. And it seems as if its diffidence would en- 
 courage me in what I wish to say. Yet I write far 
 j more tremblingly than you could have done. 
 
 " Let me try to prepare the way by some explana- 
 ■ tion of the past. 
 
 "You were my first lover. I was not forbidden, at 
 fourteen, to express the pleasure I felt at your admi- 
 ration, and you can not have forgotten the ardor and 
 simplicity with which I returned it. I remember 
 ! giving you roses better than I remember anything so 
 long ago. Now — writing to you with the same feel- 
 j ing warm at my heart — it seems to me as if it needed 
 j but a rose, could I give it you in the same garden, to 
 i make us lovers again. Yet I know you must be 
 changed. I scarce know whether I should go on with 
 j this letter. 
 
 "But I owe you reparation. I owe you an answer 
 i to this which lies before me : and if I err in answer- 
 ! ing it as my heart burns to do, you will at least be 
 I made happier by knowing that when treated with 
 ! neglect and repulsion, you were still beloved. 
 
 " I think it was not long before the receipt of this 
 letter that my father first spoke to me of our attach- 
 I ment. Till then I had only thought of loving you. 
 I That you were graceful and manly, that your voice 
 I was sweet, and that your smile made me happy, was 
 all I could have told of you without reflection. I had 
 |j never reasoned upon your qualities of mind, though I 
 had taken an unconscious pride in your superiority to 
 your companions, and least of all had I asked myself 
 whether those abilities for making your way in the 
 world which my father denied you, were among your 
 boyish energies. With a silent conviction that you 
 had no equal among your companions, in anything, I 
 listened to my father's disparagement of you, bewil- 
 dered and overawed, the very novelty and unexpected- 
 ness of the light in which he spoke of you, sealing 
 my lips completely. Perhaps resistance to his will 
 would have been of no avail, but had I been better 
 prepared to reason upon what he urged, I might have 
 expressed to you the unwillingness of my acquies- 
 cence. I was prevented from seeing you till your 
 [I letter came, and then all intercourse with you was 
 |: formally forbidden. My father said he would himself 
 j reply to your proposal. But it was addressed to me, 
 !; and I have only recovered possession of it by his death. 
 " Though it may seem like reproaching you for 
 yielding me without an effort, I must say, to complete 
 | the history of my own feelings, that I nursed a vague 
 j hope of hearing from you until your departure for 
 ; Italy, and that this hope was extinguished not without 
 i bitter tears. The partial resentment that mingled with 
 i this unhappiness aided me doubtless in making up my 
 i miud to forget you, and for a while, for years I may 
 ! say, I was possessed by other excitements and feel- 
 ings. It is strange, however, that, though scarce 
 j remembering you "when waking, I still saw you per- 
 petually in my dreams. 
 
330 
 
 NORA MEHIDY. 
 
 "And, so far, this is a cold and easy recital. How 
 shall I describe to you the next change, the re-awaken- 
 mg of this smothered and slumbering affection ! How 
 shall I evade your contempt when I tell you that it 
 awoke wiih your renown! But my first feeling was 
 not one of love. When your name began to come to 
 us in the letters of travellers and in the rumor of lit- 
 erary circles, I felt as if something that belonged to 
 me was praised and honored ; a pride, an exulting and 
 gratified pride, that feeling seemed to be, as if the 
 heart of my childhood had been staked on your aspi- 
 rations, and was borne up with you, a part and a par- 
 taker of your fame. With all my soul I drank in the 
 news of your successes in the art ; I wrote to those 
 who came home from Italy; I questioned those likely 
 to have heard of you, as critics and connoisseurs ; I 
 devoted all my reading to the literature of the arts, 
 and the history of painters, for my life was poured 
 into yours irresistibly, by a power I could not, and 
 cannot now, control. My own imagination turned 
 painter, indeed, for I lived on revery, calling up, with 
 endless variations, pictures of yourself amid the works 
 of your pencil, visited and honored as I knew you 
 were, yet unchanged in the graceful and boyish beauty 
 I remembered. I was proud of having loved you, of 
 having been the object of the earliest and purest pref- 
 erence of a creature of genius ; and through this 
 pride, supplanting and overflowing it, crept and 
 strengthened a warmer feeling, the love I have the 
 hardihood to avow. Oh ! what will you think of this 
 boldness ! Yet to conceal my love were now a se- 
 verer task than to wait the hazard of your contempt. 
 
 "One explanation — a palliative, perhaps you will 
 allow it to be, if you are generous — remains to be 
 given. The immediate impulse of this letter was in- 
 formation from my brother, long withheld, of your 
 kindness to him in Rome. From some perverseness 
 
 which I hardly understand, he has never before hinted 
 in my presence that he had seen you in Italy, and it 
 was only by needing it as an illustration of some feel- 
 ing which seemed to have piqued him, and which he 
 was expressing to a friend, that he gave the particulars 
 of your month of devotion to him. Knowing the dif- 
 ference between your characters, and the entire want 
 of sympathy between your pursuits and my brother's, 
 to what motive could I attribute your unusual and 
 self-sacrificing kindness ? 
 
 " Did I err — was I presumptuous, in believing that 
 it was from a forgiving and tender memory of myself? 
 
 " You are prepared now, if you can be, for what I 
 would say. We are left alone, my brother and I, or- 
 phan heirs to the large fortune of my father. I have 
 no one to control my wishes, no one's permission to 
 ask for any disposition of my hand and fortune. Will 
 you have them ? In this question is answered the 
 sweet, and long-treasured, though long-neglected let- 
 ter lying beside me. " Katherine Skyring." 
 
 Mrs. F — , as will be seen from the style of her let- 
 ter, is a woman of decision and cleverness, and of such 
 a helpmeet, in the way of his profession as well as in 
 the tenderer relations of life, F — was sorely in need. 
 By her common-sense counsels and persuasion, he 
 has gone back with his knowledge of the art to the 
 first lights of his own powerful genius, and with 
 means to command leisure and experiment, he is, 
 without submitting the process to the world, perfect- 
 ing a manner which will more than redeem his early 
 promise. 
 
 As his career, though not very uncommon or dra- 
 matic, hinged for its more fortunate events on an act 
 of high-spirited politeness, I have thought, that in 
 this age of departed chivalry, the story was worth 
 preserving for its lesson. 
 
 NORA MEHIDY; 
 
 OR, THE STRANGE ROAD TO THE HEART OF MR. HYPOLET LEATHERS. 
 
 Now, Heaven rest the Phoenicians for their pleasant 
 invention of the art of travel. 
 
 This is to be a story of love and pride, and the he- 
 ro's name is Hypolet Leathers. 
 
 You have smiled prematurely, my friend and reader, j 
 if you "think you see" Mr. Leathers foreshadowed, j 
 as it were, in his name. 
 
 (Three mortal times have I mended this son of a 
 goose of a pen, and it will not — as you see bv the || 
 three unavailing attempts recorded above — it will not I 
 commence, for me, this tale, with a practicable begin- 
 ning.) 
 
 The sun was rising (I think this promises well) — 
 leisurely rising was the sun on the opposite side of the 
 Susquehannah. The tall corn endeavored to lift its 
 silk tassel out of the sloppy fog that had taken upon 
 itself to rise from the water and prognosticate a hot fair 
 day, and the driver of the Binghamton stage drew over 
 his legs a two-bushel bag as he cleared the street of 
 the village, and thought that, for a summer's morn- 
 ing, it was " very cold" — wholly unaware, however, 
 that, in murmuring thus, he was expressing himself 
 as Hamlet did while waiting for his father's ghost upon 
 the platform. • 
 
 Inside the coach were three passengers. A gentle- 
 man sat by the window on the middle seat, with his 
 cloak over his lap, watching the going to heaven of 
 the fog that had fulfilled its destiuy. His mind was 
 melancholy — partly for the contrast he could not but 
 draw between this exemplary vapor and himself, who 
 was " but a vapor,"* and partly that his pancreas be- 
 gan to apprehend some interruption of the thorough- 
 fare above — or, in other words, that he was hungry 
 for his breakfast, having gone supperless to bed. He 
 mused as he rode. He was a young man, about 
 twenty-five, and had inherited from his father, John 
 Leathers, a gentleman's fortune, with the two draw- 
 backs of a name troublesome to Phoebus ("Phoebus! 
 what a name !"), and premature gray hair. He was, 
 in all other respects, a finished and well-conditioned 
 hero — tall, comely, courtly, and accomplished — and 
 had seen the sight-worthy portions of the world, and 
 knew their differences. Travel, indeed, had become 
 a kind of diseased necessity with him — for he fled 
 from the knowledge of his name, and from the obser- 
 vation of his gray hair, like a man fleeing from twe 
 fell phantoms. He was now returning from Niagara, 
 
 * " Man's but a vapor, 
 Full of woes, 
 Cuts a caper, 
 
 And down he goes." — Familiar Ballad*. 
 
NORA MEHIDY. 
 
 331 
 
 and left the Mohawk route to see where the Susque- 
 bannah makes its Great Bend in taking final leave of | 
 Mr. Cooper, who lives above; and at the village of j 
 the Great Bend he was to eat (hat day's breakfast. 
 
 On the back seat, upon the leather cushion, behind | 
 Mr. Leathers, sat two other chilly persons, a middle- | 
 aged man and a girl of sixteen— the latter wiih her j 
 shawl drawn close to her arms, and her dark eyes bent j 
 upon her knees, as if to warm them (as unquestion- 
 ably they did). Her black curls swung out from her 
 bonnet, like ripe grapes from the top of an arbor — 
 heavy, slumberous, bulky, prodigal black curls — oh, 
 how beautiful! And I do not know that it would be 
 a " trick worth an egg" to make any mysiery of these 
 two persons. The gentleman was John Mehidy. the 
 widowed tailor of Binghamton, and the lady was Nora j 
 Mehidy, his daughter"; and they were on their way to j 
 New York to change the scene, Mrs. Mehidy having j 
 left the painful legacy of love — her presence — behind j 
 her. For, ill as he could afford the journey, Mr. Me- j 
 hidy thought the fire of Nora's dark eyes might be 
 put out with water, and he must go where every j 
 patch and shred would not set her a weeping. She j 
 " took it hard," as they describe grief for the dead in j 
 the country. 
 
 The Great Bend is a scene you may look at with 
 pleasure, even while waiting for procrastinated prog, 
 and Hypolet Leathers had been standing for ten min- 
 utes on the high bank around which the Susquehan- 
 nah sweeps, like a train of silver tissue after a queen 
 turning a corner, when past him suddenly tripped No- j 
 ra Mehidy honnetless, and stood gazing on the river [ 
 from the outer edge of the precipice. Leathers's vis- j 
 ual consciousness dropped into that mass of cluster- 
 ing hair like a ring into the sea, and disappeared, j 
 His soul dived after it, and left him with no sense or 
 remembrance of how his outer orbs were amusing 
 themselves. Of what unpatented texture of velvet, : 
 aod of what sifting of diamond dust were those lights 
 and shadows manufactured ! What immeasurable 
 thickness in those black flakes — compared, with all 
 locks that he had ever seen, as an edge of cocoa- j 
 meat, fragrantly and newly broken, to a torn leaf, limp 
 with wilting. Nora stood motionless, absorbed in the 
 incomparable splendor of that silver hook bent into i 
 the forest — Leathers as motionless, absorbed in her [ 
 wilderness of jetty locks — till the barkeeper rang the 
 bell for them to come to breakfast. Ah, Hypolet! 
 Hypolet! what dark thought came to share, with that j 
 innocent beefsteak, your morning's digestion ! 
 
 That tailors have, and why they have, the hand- j 
 somest daughters, in all countries, have been points 
 of observation and speculation for physiology, written 
 and unwritten. Most men know the fact. Some 
 writers have ventured to guess at the occult secret. 
 But I think " it needs no ghost, come from the grave," 
 to unravel the matter. Their vocation is the embel- 
 lishment — partly indeed the creation — of material 
 beauty. If philosophy sit on their shears (as it should 
 ever), there are questions to decide which discipline 
 the sense of beauty — the degree in which fashion 
 should be sacrificed to becomingness, and the resist- 
 ance to the invasion of the poetical by whim and 
 usage, for example — and as a man thinketh — to a cer- 
 tain degree — so is his daughter. Beauty is the busi- 
 ness thought of every day, and the desire to know 
 how best to remedy its defects is the ache and agony 
 of the tailor's soul, if he be ambitious. Why should 
 not this have its exponent on the features of the race, 
 as other strong emotions have — plastic and malleable 
 as the human body is, by habit and practice. Shak- 
 spere, by-the-way, says — 
 
 'Tis use that breeds a habit in a man, 
 
 and I own to the dulness of never till now apprehend- 
 ing that this remarkable passage typifies the steeping 
 
 of superfine broadcloth (made into superfine habits) 
 info the woof and warp of the tailor's idiosvncracy. 
 Q. E. D. 
 
 Nora Mehidy had ways with her that, if ihe world 
 had not been thrown into a muss by Eve and Adam, 
 would doubtless have been kept for queens. Leath- 
 ers was particularly struck with her never lifting up 
 her eyelids till she was ready. If she chanced to be 
 looking thoughtfully down when he spoke to her, 
 which was her habit of sadness just now, she heard 
 what he had to say and commenced replying — and 
 then, slowly, up went the lids, combing the loving air 
 with their long lashes, and no more hurried than the 
 twilight taking its fringes off the stars. It was ado- 
 rable — altogether adorable! And her hands and lips, 
 and feet and shoulders, had the same contemptuous 
 and delicious deliberateness. 
 
 On the second evening, at half-past five — just half 
 an hour too late for the "Highlander" steamer — the 
 " Binghamton stage" slid down the mountain into 
 Newburgh. The next boat was to touch at the pier 
 at midnight, and Leathers had six capacious hours to 
 work on the mind of John Mehidy. What was the 
 process of that fiendish temptation, what the lure and 
 the resistance, is a secret locked up with Moloch — 
 but it was successful ! The glorious chevelure of the 
 victim — (sweet descriptive word — chevelure ! ) — the 
 matchless locks that the matchlocks of armies should 
 have defended — went down in the same boat with No- 
 ra Mehidy, but tied up in Mr. leathers' linen pocket- 
 handkerchief! And, in one week from that day, the 
 head of Hypolet Leathers was shaven nude, and the 
 black curls of Nora Mehidy were placed upon its 
 irritated organs in an incomparable wig ! ! 
 
 A year had elapsed. It was a warm day, in No. 77 
 of the Astor, and Hypolet Leathers, Esq., arrived a 
 week before by the Great Western, sat aiding the 
 evaporation from his brain by lotions of iced lavender. 
 His wig stood before him, on the blockhead that was 
 now his inseparable companion, the back toward him; 
 and, as the wind chased of the volatile lavender from 
 the pores of his skull, he toyed thoughtfully with the 
 lustrous curls of Nora Mehidy. His heart was on 
 that wooden block ! He dressed his own wig habit- 
 ually, and by dint of perfuming, combing, and cares- 
 sing those finger-like ringlets — he had tangled up his 
 ! heart in their meshes. A phantom, with the superb 
 I face of the owner, stayed with the separated locks, and 
 : it grew hourly more palpable and controlling. The 
 sample had made him sick at heart for the remainder. 
 He wanted the rest of Nora Mehidy. He had come 
 | over for her. He had found John Mehidy, following 
 j his trade obscurely in a narrow lane, and he had asked 
 for Nora's hand. But though this was not the whole 
 of his daughter, and he had already sold part of her 
 to Leathers, he shook his head over his shiny shears. 
 Even if Nora could be propitiated after the sacrifice 
 she had made (which he did not believe she could be), 
 he would as lief put her in the world of spirits as in a 
 world above him. She was his life, and he would not 
 give his life willingly to a stranger who would take it 
 from him, or make it too fine for his using. Oh, no ' 
 Nora must marry a tailor, if she marry at all— and 
 this was the adamantine resolution, stern and without 
 appeal, of John Mehidy. 
 
 Some six weeks after this, a new tailoring estab- 
 lishment of great outlay and magnificence was opened 
 in Broadway. The show-window was like a new rev- 
 elation of stuff for trowsers, and resplendent, but not 
 gaudy, were the neckcloths and waistcoatings— for 
 absolute taste reigned over all. There was not an ar- 
 ticle on show possible to William street— not a waist- 
 coat that, seen in Maiden lane, would not have been 
 as unsphered as the Lost Pleiad in Botany Bay. It 
 was quite clear that there was some one of the firm 
 
332 
 
 THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. 
 
 of " Mehidy & Co." (the new sign) who exercised 
 his taste " from within, out," as the Germans say of 
 the process of true poetry. He began inside a gen- 
 tleman, that is to say, to guess at what was wanted for 
 a gentleman's outside. He was a tailor-gentleman, 
 and was therefore, and by that quality only, fitted to 
 be a gentleman's tailor. 
 
 The dandies flocked to Mehidy & Co. They 
 could not be measured immediately — oh no ! The 
 gentleman to be built was requested to walk about the 
 shop for a half hour, till the foreman got him well in 
 his eye, and then to call again in a week. Meantime 
 he would mark his customer in the street, to see how 
 he performed. Mehidy & Co. never ventured to take 
 measure for terra incognita. The man's gait, shrug, 
 speed, style, and quality, were all to be allowed for, 
 and these were not seen in a minute. And a very 
 sharp and stylish looking fellow seemed that foreman 
 to be. There was evidently spoiled some very capa- 
 ble stuff for a lord when he was made a tailor. 
 
 " His leaf, 
 By some o'er hasty angel, was misplaced 
 In Fate's eternal volume." 
 
 And, faith ! it was a study to see him take a custom- j 
 er's measure! The quiet contempt with which he j 
 overruled the man's indigenous idea of a coat! — the \ 
 rather satirical comments on his peculiarities of wear- | 
 ing his kerseymere ! — the cool survey of the adult to i 
 be embellished, as if he were inspecting him for ad- : 
 mission to the grenadiers ! On the whole, it was a 
 nervous business to be measured for a coat by that I 
 fellow with the devilish fine head of black hair! 
 
 And, with the hair upon his head, from which Nora J 
 had once no secrets — with the curls upon his cheek 
 and temples which had once slumbered peacefully 
 over hers, Hypolet Leathers, the foreman of " Mehi- 
 dy & Co.," made persevering love to the tailor's mag- 
 nificent daughter. For she was magnificent! She 
 had just taken that long stride from girl to woman, 
 and her person had filled out to the imperial and vo- 
 luptuous model indicated by her deliberate eyes. 
 
 With a dusky glow in her cheek, that looked like a 
 peach teinted by a rosy twilight, her mouth, up to the 
 crimson edge of its bow of Cupid, was moulded with 
 the slumberous fairness of newly wrought sculpture, 
 and gloriously beautiful in expression. She was a 
 creature for whom a butterfly might do worm over 
 again — to whose condition in life, if need be, a prince 
 might proudly come down. Ah, queenly Nora Me- 
 hidy ! 
 
 But the wooing — alas! the wooing throve slowly • 
 That lovely head was covered again with prodigal 
 locks, in short and massive clusters, but Leathers was 
 pertinacious as to his property in the wig, and its he- 
 comingness and indispensableness — and to be made 
 love to by a man in her own hair! — to be obliged to 
 keep her own dark curls at a respectful distance! — to 
 forbid all intercourse between them and their chil- 
 dren-ringlets, as it were — it roughened the course of 
 Leathers's true love that Nora must needs be obliged 
 to reason on such singular dilemmas. For, though a 
 tailor's daughter, she had been furnished by nature 
 with an imagination ! 
 
 But virtue, if nothing more and no sooner, is its 
 own reward, and in time " to save its bacon." John 
 Mehidy's fortune was pretty well assured in the course 
 of two years, and made, in his own line, by his pro- 
 posed son-in-law, and he could no longer refuse to 
 throw into the scale the paternal authority. Nora's 
 hair was, by this time, too, restored to its pristine 
 length and luxuriousness, and, on condition that Hyp- 
 olet would not exact a new wig from his new posses- 
 sions, Nora, one summer's night, made over to him 
 the remainder. The long-exiled locks revisited theii 
 natal soil, during the caresses which sealed the com- 
 pact, and a very good tailor was spoiled the week 
 after, for the married Leathers became once more a 
 gentleman at large, having bought, in two instalments, 
 at an expense of a hundred dollars, a heart, and two 
 years of service, one of the finest properties of which 
 Heaven and a gold ring ever gave mortal the copy- 
 hold ! 
 
 THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. 
 
 Isheafe lane, in Boston, is an almost unmention- 
 able and plebeian thoroughfare, between two very 
 mentionable and patrician streets. It is mainly used 
 by bakers, butchers, urchins going to school, and i 
 clerks carrying home parcels — in short, by those who ! j 
 care less for the beauty of the road than for economy jj 
 of time and shoe-leather. If you please, it is a shabby ; 
 hole. Children are born there, however, and people 1 
 die and marry there, and are happy and sad there, and | 
 the great events of life, more important than our : 
 liking or disliking of Sheafe lane, take place in K[] 
 continually. It used not to be a very savory place. 
 Yet it has an indirect share of such glory as attaches | 
 to the birth-places of men above the common. The 
 (present) great light of the Unitarian church was born 
 at one end of Sheafe lane, and one of the most accom- 
 plished merchant-gentlemen in the gay world of New 
 York was born at the other. And in the old Hay- 
 market (a kind of cul-de-sac, buried in the side of 
 Sheaf lane), stood the dusty lists of chivalric old 
 Roulstone, a gallant horseman, who in other days 
 would have been a knight of noble devoir, though in 
 the degeneracy of a Yankee lustrum, he devoted his 
 
 soldierly abilities to the teaching of young ladies how 
 to ride. 
 
 Are you in Sheafe lane ? (as the magnetisers in- 
 quire). Please to step back twenty-odd years, and 
 take the hand of a lad with a rosy face (ourself — for 
 we lived in Sheafe lane twenty-odd years ago), and 
 come to a small house, dingy yellow, with a white 
 gate. The yard is below the level of the street. 
 Mind the step. 
 
 The family are at breakfast in the small parlor 
 fronting on the street. But come up this dark stair- 
 case, to the bedroom over the parlor — a very neat 
 room, plainly furnished ; and the windows are cur- 
 tained, and there is one large easy chair, and a stand 
 with a bible open upon it. In the bed lies an old man 
 of seventy, deaf, nearly blind, and bed-ridden. 
 
 We have now shown you what comes out of tha 
 shadows to us, when we remember the circumstances 
 we are about to body forth in a sketch, for it can 
 scarcely be called a story. 
 
 It wanted an hour to noon. The Boylston clock 
 struck eleven, and close on the heel of the last stroke 
 followed the ty-» of the barber's knuckle on the door 
 
THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. 
 
 333 
 
 of the yellow hofcse in Sheafe lane. Before answering 
 to the rap, the maid-of-all-work filled a tin can from 
 the simmering kettle, and surveying herself in a three- 
 cornered bit of looking-glass, fastened on a pane of the 
 kitchen window : then, with a very soft and sweet 
 " good morning," to Rosier, the barber, she led the 
 wav to the old man's room. 
 
 "He looks worse to-day," said the barber, as the 
 skinny hand of the old man crept up tremblingly to 
 his face, conscious of the daily office about to be per- 
 formed for him. 
 
 "They think so below stairs," said Harriet, "and 
 one of the church is coming to pray with him to-night. 
 Shall I raise him up now?" 
 
 The barber nodded, and the girl seated herself near 11 
 the pillow, and lifting the old man, drew him upon her jj 
 breast, and as the operation went rather lingeringly on, | 
 the two chatted together very earnestly. 
 
 Rosier was a youth of about twenty-one, talkative 
 and caressing, as all barbers are; and what with his 
 COrly hair and ready smile, and the smell of soap that 
 seemed to be one of his natural properties, he was a 
 man to be thought of over a kitchen fire. Besides, he 
 was thriving in his trade, and not a bad match. All of; 
 which was duly considered by the family with which 
 Harriet lived, for they loved the poor girl. 
 
 Poor girl, I say. But she was not poor, at least if 
 it be true that as a woman thinketh so is she. Most 
 people would have described her as a romantic girl. 
 And so she was, but without deserving a breath of the 
 -idicule commonly attached to the word. She was 
 uneducated, too, if any child of New England can be 
 called uneducated. Beyond school-books and the 
 Bible, she had read nothing but the Scottish Chiefs, 
 and this novel was to her what the works of God are ; 
 to others. Il could never become familiar. It must j 
 be the gate of dream-land ; what the moon is to a 
 poet, what a grove is to a man of revery, what sun- 
 shine is to all the world. And she mentioned it as \ 
 seldom as people praise sunshine, and lived in it as j 
 unconsciously. 
 
 Harriet had never before been out to service. She | 
 was a farmer's daughter, new from the country. If 
 she was not ignorant of the degradation of her condi- 
 tion in life, she forgot it habitually. A cheerful and 
 thoughtful smile was perpetually on her lips, and the 
 hardships of her daily routine were encountered as 
 thinos of course, as clouds in the sky, as pebbles in 
 the inevitable path. Her attention seemed to belong 
 to her body, but her consciousness only to her j 
 imagination. In her voice and eyes there was no 
 touch or taint of her laborious servitude, and if 
 she had suddenly been " made a lady," there would 
 have been nothing but her hard hands to redeem from 
 her low condition. Then, hard-working creature as 
 she was, she was touchinaly beautiful. A coarse eye 
 would have passed her without notice, perhaps, but a 
 painter would not. She was of a fragile shape, and had 
 a slight stoop, but her head was small and exquisitely 
 moulded, and her slender neck, round, graceful, and 
 polished, was set upon her shoulders with the fluent 
 grace of a bird's. Her hair was profuse, and of a 
 tinge almost yellow in the sun, but her eyes were of a 
 blue, deep almost to blackness, and her heavy eye- 
 lashes darkened them still more deeply. She had the 
 least possible color in her cheeks. Her features were 
 soft and unmarked, and expressed delicacy and repose, 
 though her nostrils were capable of dilating with an 
 energy of expression that seemed wholly foreign to 
 her character. 
 
 Rosier had first seen Harriet when called in to the 
 old man, six months before, and they were now sup- 
 posed by the family to be engaged lovers, waiting only 
 for a little more sunshine on the barber's fortune. 
 Meantime, they saw each other at least half an hour 
 every morning, and commonly passed their evenings 
 
 together, and the girl seemed very tranquilly happy in 
 her prospect of marriage. 
 
 At four o'clock on the afternoon of the day before 
 mentioned, Mr. Flint was to make a spiritual visit to 
 the old man. Let us first introduce him to the reader. 
 Mr. Asa Flint was a bachelor of about forty-five, 
 and an "active member" of a church famed for its 
 zeal. He was a tall man, with a little bend in his 
 back, and commonly walked with his eyes upon the 
 ground, like one intent on meditation. His complex- 
 ion was sallow, and his eyes dark and deeply set ; but 
 by dint of good teeth, and a little " wintry redness in 
 his cheek," he was good-looking enough for all his 
 ends. He dressed in black, as all religious men must 
 (in Boston), and wore shoes with black stockings the 
 year round. In his worldly condition, Mr. Flint had 
 always been prospered. He spent five hundred dollars 
 a year in his personal expenses, and made five thou- 
 sand in his business, and subscribed, say two hundred 
 dollars a year to such societies as printed the name of 
 the donors. Mr. Flint had no worldly acquaintances. 
 He lived in a pious boarding-house, and sold all his 
 goods to the members of the country churches in 
 communion with his own. He " loved the brethren," 
 for he wished to converse with no one who did not see 
 heaven and the church at his back— himself in the 
 foreground, and the other two accessories in the per- 
 spective. Piety apart, he had found out at twenty-five, 
 that, as a sinner he would pass through the world 
 simply Asa Flint — as a saint, he would be Asa Flint 
 plus eternity and the respect of a large congregation. 
 He was a shrewd man, and chose the better part. 
 Also, he remembered, sin is more expensive than 
 sanctity. 
 
 At four o'clock Mr. Flint knocked at the door. At 
 the same hour there was a maternal prayer-meeting at 
 the vestry, and of course it was to be numbered 
 among his petty trials that he must find the mistress 
 of the house absent from home. He walked up 
 stairs, and after a look into the room of the sick man, 
 despatched the lad who had opened the door for him, 
 to request the "help" of the family to be present at 
 the devotions. 
 
 Harriet had a rather pleasing recollection of Mr. 
 Flint. He had offered her his arm, a week before, in 
 coming out from a conference meeting, and had " pre- 
 sumed that she was a young lady on a visit" to the 
 mistress ! She arranged her 'kerchief and took the 
 kettle off the fire. 
 
 Mr. Flint was standing by the bedside with folded 
 hands. The old man lay looking at him with a kind 
 of uneasy terror in his face, which changed, as Harriet 
 entered, to a smile of relief. She retired modestly to 
 the foot of the bed, and, hidden by the curtain, open 
 only at the side, she waited the commencement of the 
 prayer. 
 
 "Kneel there, little boy !" said Mr. Flint, pointing 
 to a chair on the other side of the light-stand, " and 
 you, my dear, kneel here by me ! Let us pray !" 
 
 Harriet had dropped upon her knees near the cor- 
 ner of the bed, and Mr. Flint dropped upon his, on 
 i the other side of the post, so that after raising his 
 I hands in the first adjuration, they descended gradually, 
 j and quite naturally, upon the folded hands of th\i 
 I neighbor — and there they remained. She dared not 
 withdraw them, but as his body rocked to and fro in 
 j his devout exercise, she drew back her head to avoid 
 coming into farther contact, and escaped with only his 
 breath upon her temples. 
 
 It was a very eloquent prayer. Mr. Flint s voice, 
 in a worldly man. would have been called insinuating, 
 but its kind of covert sweetness, low and soft, seemed, 
 
 in a prayer, 
 
 onlv the subdued monotony of reverence 
 
 and devotion. "But it won upon the ear all the same. 
 He began, with a repetition of all the most sublime 
 ascriptions of the psalmist, filling the room, it appeared 
 
334 
 
 THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER. 
 
 to Harriet, with a superhuman presence. She trem- 
 bled to be so near him with his words of awe. Grad- 
 ually he took up the more affecting and lender pas- 
 sages of scripture, and drew the tears into her eyes 
 with the pathos of his tone and the touching images 
 he wove together. His hand grew moist upon hers, 
 and he leaned closer to her. He began, after a short 
 pause, to pray for her especially — that her remarkable 
 beauty might not be a snare to her — that her dove- 
 like eyes might beam only on the saddened faces of 
 the saints — that she might be enabled to shun the 
 company of the worldly, and consort only with God's 
 people — and that the tones of prayer now in her ears 
 might sink deep into her heart as the voice of one 
 who would never cease to feel an interest in her tem- 
 poral and eternal welfare. His hand tightened its 
 grasp upon hers, and his face turned more toward 
 her; and as Harriet, blushing, spite of the awe 
 weighing on her heart, stole a look at the devout 
 man, she met the full gaze of his coal-black eyes 
 fixed unwinkingly upon her. She was entranced. 
 She dared not stir, and she dared not take her 
 eyes from his. And when he came to his amen, she 
 sank back upon (he ground, and covered her face with 
 her hands. And presently she remembered, with 
 some wonder, that the old man, for whom Mr. Flint 
 had come to pray, had not been even mentioned in 
 the prayer. 
 
 The lad left the room after the amen, and Mr. FlirK 
 raised Harriet from the floor and seated her upon a 
 chair out of the old man's sight, and pulled a hymn- 
 book from his pocket, and sat down beside her. She 
 was a very enthusiastic singer, to say the least, and he 
 commonly led the singing at the conferences, and so, 
 holding her hand that she might beat the time with 
 him, he passed an hour in what he would call very- 
 sweet communion. And by this time the mistress of 
 the family came home, and Mr. Flint took his leave. 
 
 From that evening, Mr. Flint fairly undertook the 
 " eternal welfare'' of the beautiful girl. From her 
 kind mistress he easily procured for her the indul- 
 gence due to an awakened sinner, and she had permis- 
 sion to frequent the nightly conference, Mr. Flint 
 always charging himself with the duty of seeing her 
 safely home. He called sometimes in the afternoon, 
 and had a private interview to ascertain the "state of 
 her mind," and under a strong " conviction'' of some- 
 thing or other, the excited girl lived now in a constant 
 revery, and required as much looking after as a child. 
 She was spoiled as a servant, but Mr. Flint had only 
 done his duty by her. 
 
 This seemed all wrong to Rosier, the barber, how- 
 ever. The bright, sweet face of the girl he thought 
 to marry, had grown sad, and her work went all amiss 
 — he could see that. She had no smile, and almost 
 no word, for him. He liked little her going out at 
 dusk when he could not accompany her, and coming 
 home late with the same man always, though a very 
 good man, no doubt. Then, once lately, when he 
 had spoken of the future, she had murmured some- 
 thing which Mr. Flint had said about " marrying with 
 unbelievers," and it stuck in Rosier's mind and trou- 
 bled him. Harriet grew thin and haggard besides, 
 though she paid more attention to her dress, and 
 dressed more ambitiously than she used to do. 
 
 ] We are reaching back over a scire or more of 
 
 I years for the scenes we are describing, and memory 
 
 i drops here and there a circumstance by the way. The 
 reader can perhaps restore the lost fragments, if we 
 give what we remember of the outline. 
 
 The old man died, and Rosier performed the last 
 of his offices to fit him for the grave, and that, if we 
 remember rightly, was the last of his visits, but one, 
 to the white house in Sheafe lane. The bed was 
 scarce vacated by the dead, ere it was required again 
 
 ! for another object of pity. Harriet was put into it 
 with a brain fever. She was ill for many weeks, and 
 called constantly on Mr. Flint's name in her delirium; 
 
 ! and when the fever left her, she seemed to have but 
 
 i one desire on earth — that he should come and see 
 her. Message after message was secretly carried to 
 him by the lad, whom she had attached to her with 
 her uniform kindness and sweet temper, but he never 
 came. She relapsed after a while into a state of stu- 
 por, like idiocy, and when day after day passed with- 
 out amendment, it was thought necessary to send for 
 her father to take her home. 
 
 A venerable looking old farmer, with white hairs, 
 drove his rough wagon into Sheafe lane one evening, 
 we well remember. Slowly, with the aid of his long 
 
 ' staff, he crept up the narrow staircase to his daugh- 
 ter's room, and stood a long time, looking at her in 
 
 | silence. She did not speak to him. 
 
 He slept upon a bed made up at the side of hers, 
 
 ! upon the floor, and the next morning he went out 
 early for his horse, and she was taken up and dressed 
 for the journey. She spoke to no one, and when the 
 old man had breakfasted, she quietly submitted to be 
 carried toward the door. The sight of the street first 
 seemed to awaken some recollection, and suddenly in 
 a whisper she called to Mr. Flint. 
 
 " Who is Mr. Flint ?" asked the old man. 
 Rosier was at the gate, standing there with his hat 
 off to bid her farewell. She stopped upon the side- 
 walk, and looked around hurriedly. 
 
 "He is not here — I'll wait for him."' cried Harriet, 
 in a troubled voice, and she let go her father's arm 
 
 ; and stepped back. 
 
 They took hold of her and drew her toward the 
 
 ! wagon, but she struggled to get free, and moaned like 
 a child in grief. Rosier took her by the hand and 
 tried to* speak to her, but he choked, and the tears 
 
 | came to his eyes. Apparently she did not know him. 
 
 A few passers-by gathered around now, and it was 
 
 necessary to lift her into the wagon by force, for the 
 
 distressed father was confused and embarrassed with 
 
 | her struggles, and the novel scene around him. At 
 the suggestion of the mistress of the family, Rosier 
 
 : lifted her in his arms and seated hsr in the chair in- 
 
 ! tended for her, but her screams began to draw a crowd 
 around, and her struggles to free herself were so vio- 
 lent, that it was evident the old man could never take 
 her home alone. Rosier kindly offered to accompany 
 him, and as he held her in her seat and tried to sooth her, 
 
 : the unhappy father got in beside her and drove away. 
 
 She reached home. Rosier informed us, in a state 
 
 of dreadful exhaustion, still calling on the name that 
 
 : haunted her; and we heard soon after, that she re- 
 
 I lapsed into a brain fever, and death soon came to her 
 
 ! with a timely deliverance from her trouble. 
 
 
 
' 
 
 MRS. PASSABLE TROTT. 
 
 335 
 
 MRS. PASSABLE TROTT. 
 
 Je n'aimc pas que Us autres soient htureux.' 
 
 The temerity with which I hovered on the brink 
 of matrimony when a very young man could only be 
 appreciated by a fatuitous credulity. The number 
 of very fat mothers of very plain families who can 
 point me out to their respectable offspring as their 
 once imminent papa, is ludicrously improbable. The 
 truth was that I had a powerful imagination in my 
 early youth, and no "realizing sense." A coral neck- 
 lace, warm from the wearer — a shoe with a little round 
 stain in the sole — anything flannel — a bitten rosebud 
 with the mark of a tooth upon it — a rose, a glove, a 
 thimble— either of these was agony, ecstasy ! To any- 
 thing with curls and skirts, and especially if encircled 
 by a sky-blue sash, my heart was as prodigal as a 
 Croton hydrant. Ah me ! 
 
 But, of all my short eternal attachments, Fidelia 
 Balch (since Mrs. P. Trott) was the kindest and fair- 
 est. Faithless of course she was, since my name 
 does not begin with a T. — but if she did not continue 
 to love me — P. Trott or no P. Trott — she was shock- 
 ingly forsworn, as can be proved by several stars, 
 usually considered very attentive listeners. J rather 
 pitied poor Trott — for 1 knew 
 
 " Her heart — it was another's," 
 
 and he was rich and forty-odd. But they seemed to 
 live very harmoniously, and if I availed myself of 
 such little consolations as fell in my way, it was the 
 result of philosophy. I never forgot the faithless 
 Fidelia. 
 
 This is to be a disembowelled narrative, dear reader 
 — skipping from the maidenhood of my heroine to 
 her widowhood, fifteen years — yet I would have you 
 supply here and there a betweenity. My own suffer- 
 ings at seeing my adored Fidelia go daily into another 
 man's house and shut the door after her, you can 
 easily conceive. Though not in the habit of rebelling 
 against human institutions, it did seem to me that the 
 marriage ceremony had no business to give old Trott 
 quite so much for his money. But the aggravating 
 part of it was to come! Mrs. P. Trott grew prettier 
 every day, and of course three hundred and sixty- 
 five noticeable degrees prettier every year! She 
 seemed incapable of, or not liable to, wear and tear; 
 and probably old Trott was a man, in-doors, of very 
 even behavior. And, it should be said too, in expla- 
 nation, that, as Miss Balch, Fidelia was a shade too 
 fat for her model. She embellished as her dimples 
 grew shallower. Trifle by trifle, like the progress of 
 a statue, the superfluity fell away from nature's ori- 
 ginal Miss Balch (as designed in Heaven), and when 
 old Passable died (and no one knew what that P. 
 stood for, till it was betrayed by the indiscreet plate 
 on his coffin) Mrs. Trott, thirty-three years old, was 
 at her maximum of beauty. Plump, taper, transpa- 
 rently fair, with an arm like a high-conditioned Venus, 
 and a neck set on like the swell of a French horn, 
 she was consumedly good-looking. When I saw in 
 the paper, " Died. Mr. P. Trott," I went out and 
 walked passed the house, with overpowering emotions. 
 Thanks to a great many refusals, /had been faithful ! 
 I could bring her the same heart, unused and undam- 
 aged, which I had offered her before ! I could 
 generously overlook Mr. Trott's temporary occupa- 
 tion (sine* he had left us his money !) — and when her 
 
 j mourning should be over— the very day— the very 
 ! h our — her first love should be ready for her, good as 
 new! 
 
 I have said nothing of any evidences of continued 
 ! attachment on the part of Mrs. Trott. She was a 
 | discreet person, and not likely to compromise Mr. P. 
 ! Trott till she knew the strength of his constitution. 
 | But there was one evidence of lingering prefetence 
 ; which I built upon like a rock. I had not visited her 
 1 during these fifteen years. Trott liked me not — you 
 i can guess why ! But I had a nephew, five years old 
 j when Miss Balch was my " privately engaged," and 
 I as like me, that boy, as could be copied by nature. 
 He was our unsuspecting messenger of love, going to 
 play in old Balch's garden when I was forbidden the 
 house, unconscious of the billet-doux in the pocket 
 of his pinafore ; and to this boy, after our separation, 
 ! seemed Fidelia to cling. He grew up to a youth of 
 ! mind and manners, and still she cherished him. He 
 i all but lived at old Trott's, petted and made much of 
 | — her constant companion — reading, walking, riding — 
 indeed, when home from college, her sole society. 
 Are you surprised that, in all this, there was a tender- 
 ness of reminiscence that touched and assured me ? 
 Ah— 
 
 " On revient toujours 
 A ses premiers amours !" 
 
 I thought it delicate, and best, to let silence do its 
 work during that year of mourning. I did not whis- 
 per even to my nephew Bob the secret of my happi- 
 ness. I left one card of condolence after old Trott's 
 funeral, and lived private, counting the hours. The 
 slowest kind of eternity it appeared ! 
 
 The morning never seemed to me to break with so 
 much difficulty and reluctance as on the anniversary 
 of the demise of Mr. Passable Trott— June 2, 1840. 
 Time is a comparative thing, I well know, but the 
 minutes seemed to stick, on that interminable morn- 
 ing. I began to dress for breakfast at four — but de- 
 tails are tiresome. Let me assure you that twelve 
 o'clock, A. M.. did arrive ! The clocks struck it, and 
 the shadows verified it. 
 
 I could not have borne an accidental " not at home," 
 and I resolved not to run the risk of it. Lovers, be- 
 sides, are not tied to knockers and ceremony. 1 bribed 
 the gardener. Fidelia's boudoir, I knew, opened upon 
 the lawn, and it seemed more like love to walk in. 
 She knew — I knew — Fate and circumstance knew and 
 had ordained — that that morning was to be shoved up, 
 joined on, and dovetailed to our last separation. The 
 time between was to be a blank. Of course she ex- 
 | pected me. 
 
 The garden door was ajar— as paid for. I entered, 
 traversed the vegetable beds, tripped through the flow- 
 er-walk, and — oh bliss! — the window was open! I 
 j could just see the Egyptian urn on its pedestal of 
 ' sphinxes, into which I knew (per Bob) she threw all 
 I her fading roses. I glided near. I looked in at the 
 '.'■ window. 
 
 Ah, that picture ! She sat with her back to me— 
 !! her arm— that arm of rosy alabaster— thrown careless- 
 ! ly over her chair— her egg-shell chin resting on her 
 \\ other thumb and forefinger— her eyelids sweeping her 
 ! cheek— and a white— ye» ! a whit* bow in h«r hair . 
 
336 
 
 THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF " IONE S- 
 
 And her dress was of snowy lawn — white, bridal 
 white ! Adieu, old Passable Trott ! 
 
 1 wiped my eyes and looked again. Old Trott's 
 portrait hung on the wall, but that was nothing. Her 
 guitar lay on the table, and — did I see aright ? — a 
 miniature just beside it ! Perhaps of old Trott — ta- 
 ken out for the last time. Well — well ! He was a 
 very respectable man, and had been very kind to her, 
 most likely. 
 
 " Ehem !" said I, stepping over the sill, " Fidelia !" 
 
 She started and turned, and certainly looked sur- 
 prised. 
 
 »M r . G !" said she. 
 
 " It is long since we parted !" I said, helping my- 
 self to a chair. 
 
 " Quite long !" said Fidelia. 
 
 " So long that you have forgotten the name of 
 G ?" I asked tremulously. 
 
 " Oh no !" she replied, covering up the miniature 
 on the table by a careless movement of her scarf. 
 
 " And may I hope that that name has not grown 
 distasteful to you ?" I summoned courage to say. 
 
 "N , no! I do not know that it has, Mr. G !" 
 
 The blood returned to my fainting heart ! I felt as 
 in days of yore. 
 
 "Fidelia !" said I, " let me not waste the precious 
 moments. You loved me at twenty — may I hope that 
 I may stand to you in a nearer relation ! May I ven- 
 ture to think that our family is not unworthy of a 
 
 union with the Balches ? — that, as Mrs. G , you 
 
 could be happy ?" 
 
 Fidelia looked — hesitated — took up the miniature, 
 and clasped it to her breast. 
 
 "Do 1 understand you rightly, Mr. G !" she 
 
 tremulously exclaimed. " But I think I do ! Ire- 
 member well what you were at twenty ! This picture 
 is like what you were then — with differences, it is true, 
 but still like! Dear picture!" she exclaimed again, 
 kissing it with rapture. 
 
 (How could she have got my miniature? — but no 
 matter — taken by stealth, I presume. Sweet and ea- 
 ger anticipation!) 
 
 "And Robert has returned from college, then ?" 
 she said, inquiringly. 
 
 "Not that I know of," said I. 
 
 " Indeed ! — then he has written to you !" 
 
 " Not recently !" 
 
 " Ah, poor boy ! he anticipated ! Well, Mr. G ! 
 
 1 will not affect to be coy where my heart has been so 
 long interested." 
 
 (I stood ready to clasp her to my bosom.) 
 
 " Tell Robert my mourning is over — tell him his 
 name" (the name of G , of course) " is the mu- 
 sic of my life, and that I will marry whenever he 
 pleases !" 
 
 A horrid suspicion crossed my mind. 
 
 "Pardon me!" said I; "whenever he pleases, did 
 ' you say ? Why, particularly, when he pleases?'" 
 
 M La .' his not being of age is no impediment, I 
 hope!" said Mrs. Trott, with some surprise. "Look 
 
 at his miniature, Mr. G ! It has a boyish look, 
 
 it's true — but so had you — at twenty !" 
 
 Hope sank within me ! I would have given worlds 
 to be away. The truth was apparent to me — perfect- 
 ly apparent. She loved that boy Bob — that child — 
 that mere child — and meant to marry him ! Yet how 
 could it be possible ! I might be — yes — I must be, 
 mistaken. Fidelia Balch — who was a woman when 
 he was an urchin in petticoats! — she to think of mar- 
 rying that boy ! I wronged her — oh 1 wronged her ! 
 But, worst come to the worst, there was no harm in 
 having it perfectly understood. 
 
 "Pardon me!" said I, putting on a look as if I 
 expected a shout of laughter for the mere supposi- 
 tion, " I should gather — (categorically, mind you !— 
 only categorically) — 1 should gather from what you 
 said just now — (had I been a third person listening, 
 that is to say — with no knowledge of the parties) — I 
 should really have gathered that Bob — little Bob — was 
 the happy man, and not I ! Now don't laugh at me!" 
 
 " You the happy man ! — Oh Mr. G ! you are 
 
 joking ! Oh no! pardon me if I have unintentionally 
 
 ! misled you — but if I marry again, Mr. G , it will 
 
 be a young man! ! ! In short, not to mince the mat- 
 ter, Mr. G ! your nephew is to become my hus- 
 band (nothing unforeseen turning up), in the course 
 of the next week ! We shall have the pleasure of 
 seeing you at the wedding, of course ' Oh no ! You! 
 I should fancy that no woman would make hvo une- 
 qual marriages, Mr. G ! Good morning, Mr. 
 
 I was left alone, and to return as I pleased, by the 
 vegetable garden or the front door. I chose the lat- 
 ter, being somewhat piqued as well as inexpressibly 
 grieved and disappointed. But philosophy came to 
 my aid, and I soon fell into a mood of speculation. 
 
 " Fidelia is constant!" said I to myself — " constant, 
 after all ! She made up her mouth for me at twenty. 
 But I did not stay twenty! Oh no! I, unadvisedly, 
 and without preparatively cultivating her taste for 
 thirty-five, became thirty-five. And now what was she 
 to do ? Her taste was not at all embarked in Passa- 
 ble Trott, and it stayed just as it was — waiting to be 
 called up and used. She locks it up decently till old 
 Trott dies, and then reproduces — what? Why, just 
 what she locked up — a taste for a young man at 
 twenty — and just such a young man as she loved when 
 she was twenty ! Bob — of course ! Bob is like me — 
 Bob is twenty ! Be Bob her husband ! 
 
 But I cannot say I quite like such constancy! 
 
 THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF "IONE S- 
 
 (SINCE DISCOVERED TO BE MISS JONES.) 
 
 Not long ago, but before poetry and pin-money 
 were discovered to be cause and effect, Miss Phebe 
 Jane Jones was one of the most charming contributors 
 to a certain periodical now gone over "Lethe's wharf." 
 
 Her signature was " lone S !" a neat anagram, 
 
 out of which few would have picked the monosyllable 
 engraved upon her father's brass knocker. She wrote 
 mostly in verse ; but her prose, of which you will 
 presently see a specimen or two, was her better vein — 
 
 as being more easily embroidered, and not crampea 
 with the inexorable fetters of rhyme. Miss Jones 
 abandoned authorship before the New Mirror was es- 
 tablished, or she would, doubtless, have been one of 
 its paid contributors — as much (" we" flatter ourselves) 
 as could well be said of her abilities. 
 
 The beauty of hectics and hollow chests has been 
 written out of fashion ; so I may venture upon the 
 simple imagery of truth and nature. Miss Jones was 
 
THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF " IONE S- 
 
 337 
 
 as handsome as a prize heifer. She was a compact, | 
 plump, wholesome, clean-limbed, beautifully-marked 
 animal, with eyes like inkstands running over; and a 
 mouth that looked, when she smiled, as if it had never J 
 been opened before, the teeth seemed so fresh and un- j 
 handled. Her voice had a tone clear as the ring of a ; 
 silver dollar; and her lungs must have been as sound 
 as a pippin, for when she laughed (which she never 
 did unless she was surprised into it, for she loved mel- 
 ancholy), it was like the gurgling of a brook over the 
 pebbles. The bran-new people made by Deucalion 
 and Pyrrha, when it cleared up after the flood, were 
 probably in Miss Jones's style. 
 
 But do you suppose that "lone S " cared any 
 
 thing for her looks ! What — value the poor perishing 
 tenement in which nature had chosen to lodge her 
 intellectual and spiritual part ! What — care for her 
 covering of clay ! What — waste thought on the chain 
 that kept her from the Pleiades, of which, perhaps, 
 she was the lost sister (who knows) ? And, more than 
 all — oh gracious ! — to be loved for this trumpery-dra- 
 pery of her immortal essence ! 
 
 Yes — infra dig. as it may seem to record such an 
 unworthy trifle — the celestial Phebe had the superflu- 
 ity of an every-day lover. Gideon Flimmins was wil- 
 ling to take her on her outer inventory alone. He 
 loved her cheeks — he did not hesitate to admit ! He 
 loved her lips — he could not help specifying ! He had 
 been known to name her shoulders ! And, in taking 
 out a thorn for her with a pair of tweezers one day, he 
 had literally exclaimed with rapture that she had a 
 
 heavenly little pink thumb! But of " lone S " 
 
 he had never spoken a word. No, though she read 
 him faithfully every effusion that appeared — asked his 
 opinion of every separate stanza — talked of "lone 
 
 S " as the person on earth she most wished to see 
 
 (for she kept her literary incog.) — Gideon had never 
 alluded to her a second time, and perseveringly, hate- 
 fully, atrociously, and with mundane motive only, he 
 made industrious love to the outside and visible Phe- 
 be ! Well! well! 
 
 Contiguity is something, in love ; and the Flim- 
 minses were neighbors of the Joneses. Gideon had 
 another advantage — for Ophelia Flimmins, his eldest 
 sister, was Miss Jones's eternally attached friend. To 
 explain this, I must trouble the reader to take notice 
 that there were two streaks in the Flimmins family. 
 Fat Mrs. Flimmins, the mother (who had been dead a 
 year), was a thorough "man of business," and it was 
 to her downright and upright management of her hus- 
 band's wholesale and retail hat-lining establishment, 
 that the family owed its prosperity; for Herodotus 
 Flimmins, whose name was on the sign, was a flimsy- 
 ish kind of sighing-dying man, and nobody could ever 
 find out what on earth he wanted. Gideon and the 
 two fleshy Miss Flimminses took after their mother; 
 but Ophelia, whose semi-translucent frame was the 
 envy of her faithful Phebe, was, with very trifling ex- 
 ceptions, the perfect model of her sire. She devotedly 
 loved the moon. She had her preferences among the 
 stars of heaven. She abominated the garish sun. And 
 she and Phebe met by night — on the sidewalk around 
 their mutual nearest corner — deeply veiled to conceal 
 their emotion from the intruding gaze of such stars as 
 they were not acquainted with — and there they com- 
 muned ! 
 
 I never knew, nor have I any, the remotest suspicion 
 of the reasoning by which these commingled spirits 
 arrived at the conclusion that there was a want in their 
 delicious union. They might have known, indeed, 
 that the chain of bliss, ever so far extended, breaks off 
 at last with an imperfect link — that though mustard 
 and ham may turn two slices of innocent bread into a 
 sandwich, there will still be an unbuttered outside. 
 But they were young— they were sanguine. Phebe, 
 at least, believed that in the regions of space there ex- 
 22 
 
 isted — "wandering but not lost" — the aching worser 
 half of which she was the "better" — some lofty intel- 
 lect, capable of sounding the unfathomable abysses of 
 hers — some male essence, all soul and romance, with 
 whom she could soar finally, arm-in-arm, to their na- 
 tive star, with no changes of any consequence between 
 their earthly and their astral communion. It occurred 
 to her at last that a letter addressed to him, through 
 her favorite periodical, might possibly reach his eye. 
 The following (which the reader may very likely re- 
 member to have seen) appeared in the paper of the 
 following Saturday : — 
 
 " To my spirit-husband, greeting : — 
 
 "Where art thou, bridegroom of my soul ? Thy 
 
 lone S calls to thee from the aching void of her 
 
 lonely spirit ! What name bearest thou ? What path 
 walkest thou ? How can I, glow-worm like, lift my 
 wings and show thee my lamp of guiding love ? Thus 
 wing I these words to thy dwelling-place (for thou art, 
 
 perhaps, & subscriber to the M r). Go — truants ! 
 
 Best not till ye meet his eye. 
 
 "But I must speak to thee after the manner of this 
 world. 
 
 " I am a poetess of eighteen summers. Eighteen 
 weary years have I worn this prison-house of flesh, in 
 which, when torn from thee, I was condemned to wan- 
 der. But my soul is untamed by its cage of dark- 
 ness ! I remember, and remember only, the lost hus- 
 band of my spirit-world. I perform, coldly and scorn- 
 fully, the unheavenly necessities of this temporary 
 existence; and from the windows of my prison (black 
 — like the glimpses of the midnight heaven they let in) 
 I look out for the coming of my spirit-lord. Lonely ! 
 lonely ! 
 
 "Thou wouldst know, perhaps, what semblance 1 
 bear since my mortal separation from thee. Alas! the 
 rose, not the lily, reigns upon my cheek ! I would 
 not disappoint thee, though of that there is little fear, 
 for thou lovest for the spirit only. But believe not, 
 because health holds me rudely down, and I seem not 
 fragile and ready to depart — believe not, oh bridegroom 
 of my soul ! that I bear willingly my fleshly fetter, or 
 endure with patience the degrading homage to its 
 beauty. For there are soulless worms who think mc 
 fair. Ay — in the strength and freshness of my corpo- 
 real covering, there are those who rejoice! Oh! 
 mockery ! mockery ! 
 
 " List to me, Ithuriel (for I must have a name to 
 call thee by, and, till thou breathest thy own seraphic 
 name into my ear, be thou Ithuriel) ! List ! I would 
 meet thee in the darkness only ! Thou shalt not see 
 me with thy mortal eyes ! Penetrate the past, and 
 remember the smoke-curl of wavy lightness in which 
 I floated to thy embrace! Remember the sunset- 
 cloud to which we retired; the starry lamps that hung 
 over our slumbers! And on the softest whisper of 
 our voices let thy thoughts pass to mine! Speak not 
 aloud! Murmur! murmur! murmur! 
 
 "Dost thou know, Ithuriel, I would fain prove to 
 thee my freedom from the trammels of this world ? In 
 what chance shape thy accident of clay may be cast, I 
 know not. Ay, and 1 care not ! I would thou wert a 
 hunchback, Ithuriel ! I would thou wert disguised 
 as a monster, my spirit-husband ! So would I prove 
 to thee my elevation above mortality ! So would I 
 show thee, that in the range of eternity for which we 
 are wedded, a moment's covering darkens thee not — 
 that, like a star sailing through a cloud, thy brightness 
 is remembered while it is eclipsed— that thy lone 
 would recognise thy voice, be aware of thy presence, 
 adore thee, as she was celestially wont — ay, though 
 thou wert imprisoned in the likeness of a reptile! 
 lone care for mortal beauty! Ha! ha! ha!— Ha' 
 ha! ha! 
 
 " Come to me, Ithuriel ! My heart writhes in its 
 
338 
 
 THE SPIRIT-LOVE OF " IONE S- 
 
 cell for converse with thee ! I am sick-thoughted ! 
 My spirit wrings its thin fingers to play with thy ethe- 
 real hair ! My earthly cheek, though it obstinately 
 refuses to pale, tingles with fever for thy coming. 
 Glide to me in the shadow of eve — softly ! softly ! 
 
 "Address 'P.' at the M r office. 
 
 "Thine, "IoneS ." 
 
 ****** 
 
 There came a letter to "P." 
 
 It was an inky night. The moon was in her private 
 chamber. The stars had drawn over their heads the 
 coverlet of clouds and pretended to sleep. The street 
 lamps heartlessly burned on. 
 
 Twelve struck with "damnable iteration." 
 
 On tiptoe and with beating heart Phebe Jane left 
 her father's area. Ophelia Flimmins followed her at 
 a little distance, for lone was going to meet her spirit- 
 bridegroom, and receive a renewal of his ante-vital 
 vows ; and she wished her friend, the echo of her soul, 
 to overhear and witness them. For oh — if words were 
 anything — if the soul could be melted and poured, 
 Java-like, upon " satin post" — if there was truth in feel- 
 ings magnetic and prophetic — then was he who had 
 
 responded to, and corresponded with, lone S (she 
 
 writing to "I," and he to "P"), the ideal for whom 
 she had so long sighed — the lost half of the whole so 
 mournfully incomplete — her soul's missing and once 
 spiritually Siamesed twin ! His sweet letters had 
 echoed every sentiment of her heart. He had agreed 
 with her that outside was nothing — that earthly beauty 
 was poor, perishing, pitiful — that nothing that could 
 be seen, touched, or described, had anything to do 
 with the spiritually-passionate intercourse to which 
 their respective essences achingly yearned — that, un- 
 seen, unheard, save in whispers faint as a rose's sigh 
 when languishing at noon, they might meet in com- 
 munion blissful, superhuman, and satisfactory. 
 
 Yet where fittingly to meet — oh agony ! agony ! 
 
 The street-lamps two squares oft' had been taken up 
 to lay down gas. Ophelia Flimmins had inwardly 
 marked it. Between No. 126 and No. 132, more par- 
 ticularly, the echoing sidewalk was bathed in unfath- 
 omable night — for there were vacant lots occupied as 
 a repository for used-up omnibuses. At the most 
 lonely point there stood a tree, and, fortunately, this 
 night, in the gutter beneath the tree, stood a newly- 
 disabled 'bus of the Knickerbocker line — and (sweet 
 omen !) it was blue ! In this covert could the witness- 
 ing Ophelia lie perdu, observing unseen through the 
 open door; and beneath this tree was to take place the 
 meeting of souls — the re-interchange of sky-born vows 
 — the immaterial union of Ithuriel and lone ! Bliss ! 
 bliss ! — exquisite to anguish. 
 
 But — oh incontinent vessel — Ophelia had blabbed ! 
 The two fat Miss Flimminses were in the secret — 
 nay, more — they were in the omnibus ! Ay — deeply 
 in, and portentously silent, they sat, warm and won- 
 dering, on either side of the lamp probably extin- 
 guished for ever ! They knew not well what was to 
 be. But whatever sort, of thing was a "marriage of 
 soul," and whether " Ithuriel" was body or nobody — 
 mortal man or angel in a blue scarf — the Miss Flim- 
 minses wished to see him. Half an hour before the 
 trysting-time they had fanned their way thither, for a 
 thunder-storm was in the air and the night was intol- 
 erably close; and, climbing into the omnibus, they re- 
 ciprocally loosened each other's upper hook, and with 
 their moistened collars laid starchless in their laps, 
 awaited the opening of the mystery. 
 
 Enter Ophelia, as expected. She laid her thin hand 
 upon the leather string, and, drawing the door after 
 
 her, leaned out of its open window in breathless sus- 
 pense and agitation. 
 
 Ione's step was now audible, returning from 132. 
 Slowly she came, but invisibly, for it had grown sud- 
 denly pitch-dark ; and only the far-off lamps, up and 
 down the street, served to guide her footsteps. 
 
 But hark ! the sound of a heel ! He came ! They 
 met ! He passed his arm around her and drew her 
 beneath the tree — and with whispers, soft and low, 
 leaned breathing to her ear. He was tall. He was in 
 a cloak. And, oh ecstasy, he was thin ! But thinkest 
 thou to know, oh reader of dust, what passed on those 
 ethereal whispers ? Futile — futile curiosity ! Even to 
 Ophelia's straining ear, those whispers were inaudible. 
 
 But hark ! a rumble ! Something wrong in the 
 bowels of the sky ! And pash ! pash ! — on the re- 
 sounding roof of the omnibus — fell drops of rain — fit- 
 fully ! fitfully! 
 
 " My dear!" whispered Ophelia (for lone had bor- 
 rowed her chip hat, the better to elude recognition), 
 "ask Ithuriel to step in." 
 
 Ithuriel started to find a witness near, but a whisper 
 from lone reassured him, and gathering his cloak 
 around his face, he followed his spirit-bride into the 
 'bus. 
 
 The fat Miss Flimminses contracted their orbed 
 shapes, and made themselves small against the padded 
 extremity of the vehicle ; Ophelia retreated to the mid- 
 dle, and, next the door, on either side, sat the starry 
 j bride and bridegroom — all breathlessly silent. Yet 
 there was a murmur — for five hearts beat within that 
 ! 'bus's duodecimal womb ; and the rain pelted on the 
 j roof, pailsful-like and unpityingly. 
 
 But slap! dash! whew! heavens! — In rushed a 
 youth, dripping, dripping ! 
 
 " Get out !" cried lone, over whose knees he drew 
 himself like an eel pulled through a basket of con- 
 torted other eels. 
 
 " Come, come, young man !" said a deep bass voice, 
 of which everybody had some faint remembrance. 
 
 " Oh !" cried one fat Miss Flimmins. 
 
 "Ah !" screamed the other. 
 
 " What ? — dad !" exclaimed Gideon Flimmins, who 
 had dashed into the sheltering 'bus to save his new 
 hat — "dad here with a girl !" 
 
 But the fat Flimminses were both in convulsions. 
 Scream ! scream ! scream ! 
 
 A moment of confusion ! The next moment a sud- 
 den light ! A watchman with his lantern stood at the 
 door. 
 
 "Papa !" ejaculated three of the ladies. 
 
 "Old Flimmins! — my heart will burst !" murmured 
 IoDe. 
 
 The two fat girls hurried on their collars; and Gid- 
 eon, all amazement at finding himself in such a family 
 party at midnight in a lonely 'bus, stepped out and en- 
 tered into converse wjth the guardian of the night. 
 
 The rain stopped suddenly, and the omnibus gave 
 up its homogeneous contents. Old Flimmins, who 
 was in a violent perspiration, gave Gideon his cloak to 
 carry, and his two arms to his two pinguid adult 
 pledges. Gideon took Ophelia and Phebe, and they 
 mizzled. Mockery ! mockery ! 
 
 lone is not yet gone to the spirit-sphere — kept here 
 partly by the strength of the fleshy fetter over which 
 she mourned, and partly by the dove-tailed duties con- 
 sequent upon annual Flimminses. Gideon loves her 
 after the manner of this world — but she sighs " when 
 she hears sweet music," that her better part is still 
 unappreciated — unfathomed — "cabined, cribbed, con- 
 fined !" 
 
MABEL WYNNE. 
 
 339 
 
 MABEL WYNNE. 
 
 Mabel Wynne was the topmost sparkle on the 
 crest of the first wave of luxury that swept over New 
 York. Up to her time, the aristocratic houses were 
 furnished with high buffets, high-backed and hair- 
 bottomed mahogany chairs, one or two family portraits, 
 and a silver tray on the side-board, containing cordials 
 and brandy for morning-callers. In the centre of the 
 room hung a chandelier of colored lamps, and the 
 lighting of this and the hiring of three negroes (to 
 "fatigue," as the French say, a clarinet, a baseviol, 
 and a violin) were the only preparations necessary for 
 the most distinguished ball. About the time that 
 Mabel left school, however, some adventurous poineer 
 of the Dutch haul ton ventured upon lamp-stands for 
 the corners of the rooms, stuffed red benches along 
 the walls, and chalked floors; and upon this a French 
 family of great beauty, residing in the lower part of 
 Broadway, ventured upon a fancy ball with wax-candles 
 instead of lamps, French dishes and sweetmeats in- 
 stead of pickled oysters and pink champagne ; and, 
 the door thus opened, luxury came in like a flood. 
 Houses were built on a new plan of sumptuous ar- 
 rangement, the ceiling stained in fresco, and the 
 columns of the doors within painted iu imitation of 
 bronze and marble; and at last the climax was topped 
 by Mr. Wynne, who sent the dimensions of every 
 room in his new house to an upholsterer in Paris, 
 with carte blanche as to costliness and style, and the 
 fournisseur to comeout himself and see to the arrange- 
 ment and decoration. 
 
 It was Manhattan tea-time, old style, and while 
 Mr. Wynne, who had the luxury of a little plain 
 furniture in the basement, was comfortably taking his 
 toast and hyson below stairs, Miss Wynne was just 
 announced as "at home," by the black footman, and 
 two of her admirers made their highly-scented entree. 
 They were led through a suite of superb rooms, light- 
 ed with lamps hid in alabaster vases, and ushered in 
 at a mirror-door beyond, where, in a tent of fluted silk, 
 with ottomans and draperies of the same stuff, ex- 
 quisitely arranged, the imperious M a °el held her 
 court of 'teens. 
 
 Mabel Wynne was one of those accidents of sover- 
 eign beauty which nature seems to take delight in mis- 
 placing in the world — like the superb lobelia flashing 
 among the sedges, or the golden oriole pluming his 
 dazzling wings in the depth of a wilderness. She 
 was no less than royal in all her belongings. Her 
 features expressed consciousness of sway — a sway 
 whose dictates had been from infancy anticipated. 
 Never a surprise had startled those languishing eyelids 
 from their deliberateness — never a suffusion other than 
 the humid cloud of a tender and pensive hour had 
 
 dimmed those adorable dark eyes. Or, so at least it 
 
 seemed ! 
 
 She was a fine creature, nevertheless — Mabel 
 
 Wynne! But she looked to others like a specimen 
 
 of such fragile and costly workmanship that nothing 
 
 beneath a palace would be a becoming home for her. 
 " For the present," said Mr. Bellallure, one of the 
 
 gentlemen who entered, " the bird has a fitting cage." 
 Miss Wynne only smiled in reply, and the other 
 
 gentlemau took upon himself to be the interpreter of 
 
 her unexpressed thought. 
 
 " The cage is the accessory — not the bird." said 
 
 Mr. Blythe, " and, for my part, I think Miss Wynne 
 
 would show better the humbler her surroundings. 
 As Perdita upon the greensward, and open to a shep- 
 herd's wooing, I should inevitably sling my heart upon 
 a crook — " 
 
 "And forswear that formidable, impregnable vow of 
 celibacy ?" interrupted Miss Wynne. 
 
 " I am only supposing a case, and you are not likely 
 to be a shepherdess on the green." But Mr. Blythe's 
 smile ended in a look of clouded revery, and, after 
 a few minutes' conversation, ill sustained by the gen- 
 tlemen, who seemed each in the other's way, they 
 rose and took their leave — Mr. Bellallure lingering 
 last, for he was a lover avowed. 
 
 As the door closed upon her admirer, Miss Wynne 
 ji drew a letter from her portfolio, and turning it over 
 ! and over with a smile of abstracted curiosity, opened 
 ; and read it for the second time. She had received it 
 i that morning from an unknown source, and as it was 
 ] rather a striking communication, perhaps the reader 
 j had better know something of it before we go on. 
 It commenced without preface, thus: — 
 
 " On a summer morning, twelve years ago, a 
 chimney-sweep, after doing his work and singing his 
 song, commenced his descent. It was the chimney 
 of a large house, and becoming embarrassed among 
 the flues, he lost his way and found himself on the 
 hearth of a sleeping-chamber occupied by a child. 
 The sun was just breaking through the curtains of 
 the room, a vacated bed showed that some one had 
 risen lately, probably the nurse, and the sweep, with 
 , an irresistible impulse, approached the unconscious 
 I little sleeper. She lay with her head upon a round 
 arm buried in flaxen curls, and the smile of a dream 
 on her rosy and parted lips. It was a picture of 
 singular loveliness, and something in the heart of that 
 boy-sweep, as he stood and looked upon the child, 
 knelt to it with an agony of worship. The tears gush- 
 ed to his eyes. He stripped the sooty blanket from 
 his breast, and looked at the skin white upon his side. 
 The contrast between his condition and that of the 
 fair child sleeping before him brought the blood to his 
 blackened brow with the hot rush of lava. He knelt 
 beside the bed on which she slept, took her hand in 
 his sooty grasp, and with a kiss upon the white and 
 dewy fingers poured his whole soul with passionate 
 earnestness into a resolve. 
 
 " Hereafter you may learn, if you wish, the first 
 struggles of that boy in the attempt to diminish the 
 distance between yourself and him — for you will have 
 understood that you were the beautiful child he saw 
 asleep. I repeat that it is twelve years since he stood 
 in your chamber. He has seen you almost daily since 
 then — watched your going out and coming in — fed his 
 eyes and heart on your expanding beauty, and inform- 
 ed himself of every change and development iu your 
 mind and character. With this intimate knowledge 
 of you, and with the expansion of his own intellect, 
 his passion has deepened and strengthened. It pos- 
 sesses him now as life does his heart, and will endure 
 as long. But his views with regard to you have 
 changed, nevertheless. 
 
 "You will pardon the presumption of my first 
 feeling— that to attain my wishes I had only to be- 
 come your equal. It was a natural error— for my 
 agony at realizing the difference of our conditions iu 
 
340 
 
 MABEL WYNNE. 
 
 life was enough to absorb me at the time — but it is 
 surprising to me how long that delusion lasted. I am 
 rich now. I have lately added to my fortune the last 
 acquisition I thought desirable. But with the thought 
 of the next thing to be done, came like a thunderbolt 
 upon me the fear that after all my efforts you might 
 be destined for another! The thought is simple 
 enough. You would think that it would have haunted 
 me from the beginning. But I have either uncon- 
 sciously shut my eyes to it, or I have been so absorbed 
 in educating and enriching myself that that goal only 
 was visible to me. It was perhaps fortunate for my 
 perseverance that I was so blinded. Of my midnight 
 studies, of my labors, of all my plans, self-denials, and 
 anxieties, you have seemed the reward ! I have never 
 gained a thought, never learned a refinement, never 
 turned over gold and silver, that it was not a step 
 nearer to Mabel Wynne. And now, that in worldly 
 advantages, after twelve years of effort and trial, I 
 stand by your side at last, a thousand men who never 
 thought of you till yesterday are equal competitors 
 with me for your hand ! 
 
 "But, as I said, my views with regard to you have 
 changed. I have, with bitter effort, conquered the 
 selfishness of this one lifetime ambition. I am devo- 
 ted to you, as I have been from the moment I first 
 saw you — life and fortune. These are still yours — 
 but without the price at which you might spurn them. 
 My person is plain and unattractive. You have seen 
 me, and shown me no preference. There are others 
 whom you receive with favor. And with your glorious 
 beauty, and sweet, admirably sweet qualities of char- 
 acter, it would be an outrage to nature that you should 
 not choose freely, and be mated with something of 
 your kind. Of those who now surround you I see no 
 one worthy of you — but he may come ! Jealousy 
 shall not blind me to his merits. The first mark of 
 your favor (and I shall be aware of it) will turn upon 
 him my closest, yet most candid scrutiny. He must 
 love you well — for I shall measure his love by my 
 own. He must have manly beauty, and delicacy, and 
 honor — he must be worthy of you, in short — but he 
 need not be rich. He who steps between me and you 
 takes the fortune I had amassed for you. 1 tell you 
 this that you may have no limit in your choice — for the 
 worthiest of a woman's lovers is often barred from her 
 by poverty. 
 
 "Of course I have made no vow against seeking 
 your favor. On the contrary, I shall lose no oppor- 
 tunity of making myself agreeable to you. It is against 
 my nature to abandon hope, though I am painfully 
 conscious of my inferiority to other men in the quali- 
 ties which please a woman. All I have done is to 
 deprive my pursuit of its selfishness — to make it sub- 
 servient to your happiness purely — as it still would be 
 were I the object of your preference. You will hear 
 from me at any crisis of your feelings. Pardon my 
 being a spy upon you. I know you well enough to 
 be sure that this letter will be a secret — since 1 wish 
 it. Adieu." 
 
 Mabel laid her cheek in the hollow of her hand and 
 mused long on this singular communication. It stirred 
 her romance, but it wakened still more her curiosity. 
 Who was he? She had "seen him and shown him 
 no preference !" Which could it be of the hundred 
 of her chance-made acquaintances ? She conjectured 
 at some disadvantage, for " she had come out" within 
 the past year only, and her mother having long been 
 dead, the visiters to the house were all but recently 
 made known to her. She could set aside two thirds 
 of them, as sons of families well known, but there 
 were at least a score of others, any one of whom might, 
 twelve years before, have been as obscure as her 
 anonymous lover. Whoever he might be, Mabel 
 thought he could hardly come into her presence again 
 
 without betraying himself, and, with a pleased smile 
 at the thought of the discovery, she again locked up 
 the letter. 
 
 Those were days (to be regretted or not, as you 
 please, dear reader !) when the notable society of 
 New York revolved in one self-complacent and clear- 
 ly-defined circle. Call it a wheel, and say that the 
 centre was a belle and the radii were beaux— (the 
 periphery of course composed of those who could 
 " down with the dust"). And on the fifteenth of July, 
 regularly and imperatively, this fashionable wheel 
 rolled off to Saratoga. 
 
 "Mabel! my daughter!" said old Wynne, as he 
 bade her good night the evening before starting for 
 the springs, " it is useless to be blind to the fact that 
 among your many admirers you have several very 
 pressing lovers — suiters for your hand I may safely 
 say. Now, I do not wish to put any unnecessary re- 
 straint upon your choice, but as you are going to a 
 gay place, where you are likely to decide the matter 
 in your own mind, I wish to express an opinion. You 
 may give it what weight you think a father's judg- 
 ment should have in such matters. I do not like Mr. 
 Bellallure — for, beside my prejudice against the man, 
 we know nothing of his previous life, and he may be 
 a swindler or anything else. I do like Mr. Blythe — 
 for I have known him many years, he comes of a 
 most respectable family, and he is wealthy and worthy. 
 These two seem to me the most in earnest, and you 
 apparently give them the most of your time. If thede- 
 cision is to be between them, you have my choice. 
 Good night, my love !" 
 
 Some people think it is owing to the Saratoga 
 water. I differ from them. The wateris an "altera- 
 tive, " if is true — but I think people do not so much 
 alter as develop at Saratoga. The fact is clear enough 
 — that at the springs we change our opinionsof almost 
 everybody — but (though it seems a bold supposition 
 at first glance) I am inclined to believe it is because 
 we see so much more of them ! Knowing people in 
 the city and knowing them at the springs is very much 
 in the same line of proof as tasting wine and drinking 
 a bottle. Why, what is a week's history of a city ac- 
 quaintance ? A morning call thrice a week, a diurnal 
 bow in Broadway, and perhaps a quadrille or two in 
 the party season. What chance in that to ruffle a 
 temper or try a weakness? At the springs, now, dear 
 lady, you wear a man all day like a shoe. Down at 
 the platform with him to drink the waters before break- 
 fast — strolls on the portico with him till ten — drives with 
 him to Barheight's till dinner — lounges in the draw- 
 ing-room with him till tea — dancing and promenading 
 with him till midnight — very little short altogether of 
 absolute matrimony ; and, like matrimony, it is a very 
 severe trial. Your " best fellow" is sure, to be found 
 out, and so is your plausible fellow, your egotist, and 
 your "spoon." 
 
 Mr. Beverly Bellallure had cultivated the male 
 attractions with marked success. At times he proba- 
 bly thought himself a plain man, and an artist who 
 should only paint what could be measured with a rule, 
 would have made a plain portrait of Mr. Bellallure. 
 But — the atmosphere of the man ! There is a phys- 
 iognomy in movement — there is aspect in the har- 
 monious link between mood and posture — there is ex- 
 pression in the face of which the features are as much 
 a portrait as a bagpipe is a copy of a Scotch song. 
 Beauty, my dear artist, can not always be translated 
 by canvass and oils. You must paint " the magnetic 
 fluid" to get a portrait of some men. Sir Thomas 
 Lawrence seldom painted anything else — as you may 
 see by his picture of Lady Blessington, which is like 
 her without having copied a single feature of her face. 
 Yet an artist would be very much surprised if you 
 should offer to sit to him for your magnetic atmo- 
 sphere — though it expresses (does it not ?) exactly 
 
MABEL WYNNE. 
 
 341 
 
 what you want when you order a picture ! You wish 
 to be painted as your appear to those who love you — 
 a picture altogether unrecognisable by those who love 
 you not. 
 
 Mr. Bellallure, then, was magnetically handsome 
 —positively plain. He dressed with an art beyond 
 detection. He spent his money as if he could dip it 
 at will out of Pactolus. He was intimate with nobody, 
 and so nobody knew his history ; but he wrote him- 
 self on the register of Congress hall as " from New 
 York," and he threw all his forces into one unmista- 
 kable demonstration — the pursuit of Miss Mabel 
 Wynne. 
 
 But Mr. Bellallure had a formidable rival. Mr. 
 Blytlie was as much in earnest as he, though he play- 
 ed his game with a touch-and-go freedom, as if he 
 was prepared to lose it. And Mr. Blythe had very 
 much surprised those people at Saratoga who did not 
 know that between a very plain man and a very elegant 
 man there is often but the adding of the rose-leaf to 
 the brimming jar. He was perhaps a little gayer 
 than in New York, certainly a little more dressed, 
 certainly a little more prominent in general conversa- 
 tion — but without any difference that you could swear 
 to, Mr. Blythe, the plain and reliable business man, 
 whom everybody esteemed without particularly ad- 
 miring, had become Mr. Blythe the model of* ele- 
 gance and ease, the gentleman and conversationist 
 par excellence. And nobody could tell how the statue 
 could have lain so long unsuspected in the marble. 
 
 The race for Miss Wynne's hand and fortune was 
 a general sweepstakes, and there were a hundred men 
 at the springs ready to take advantage of any falling 
 back on the part of the two on the lead ; but with 
 Blythe and Bellallure Miss Wynne herself seemed 
 fully occupied. The latter had a " friend at court" 
 — the belief, kept secret in the fair Mabel's heart, that 
 he was the romantic lover of whose life and fortune 
 she had been the inspiration. She was an eminently 
 romantic girl with all her strong sense ; and the devo- 
 tion which had proved itself so deep and controlling 
 was in reality the dominant spell upon her heart. 
 She felt that she must love that man, whatever his 
 outside might be, and she construed the impenetrable 
 silence with which Bellallure received her occasional 
 hints as to his identity, into a magnanimous deter- 
 mination to win her without any advantage from the 
 romance of his position. 
 
 Yet she sometimes wished it had been Mr. Blythe! 
 The opinion of her father had great weight with her; 
 but, more than that, she felt instinctively that he was 
 the safer man to be intrusted with a woman's happi- 
 ness. If there had been a doubt — if her father had 
 not assured her that " Mr. Blythe came of a most 
 respectable family" — if the secret had wavered be- 
 tween them — she would have given up to Bellallure 
 without a sigh. Blythe was everything she admired 
 and wished for in a husband — but the man who had 
 made himself for her, by a devotion unparalleled even 
 in her reading of fiction, held captive her dazzled im- 
 agination, if not her grateful heart. She made con- 
 stant efforts to think only of Bellallure, but the efforts 
 were preceded ominously with a sigh. 
 
 And now Bellallure'sstar seemed in theascendant — 
 for urgent business called Mr. Wynne to the city, and 
 on the succeeding day Mr. Blythe followed him, 
 though with an assurance of speedy return. Mabel 
 was left under the care of an indulgent chaperon, who 
 took a pleasure in promoting the happiness of the 
 supposed lovers ; and driving, lounging, waltzing, and 
 promenading, Bellallure pushed his suit with ardor 
 unremitted. He was a skilful master of the art of 
 wooing, and it would have been a difficult woman in- 
 deed who wouldwiot have been pleased with his soci- 
 ety — but the secret in Mabel's breast was the spell by 
 which he held her. 
 
 A week elapsed, and Bellallure pleaded the receipt 
 of unexpected news, and left suddenly for New York — 
 to Mabel's surprise exacting no promise at parting, 
 though she felt that she should have given it with re- 
 luctance. The mail of the second day following 
 brought her a brief letter from her father, requesting 
 her immediate return; and more important still, a note 
 i 1 from her incognito lover. It ran thus: — 
 
 " You will recognise my handwriting again. I have 
 ! little to say — for I abandon the intention I had formed 
 | to comment on your apparent preference. Your hap- 
 piness is in your own hands. Circumstances which 
 I will be explained to you, and which will excuse this 
 abrupt forwardness, compel me to urge you to an im- 
 ! mediate choice. On your arrival at home, you will 
 { meet me in your father's house, where I shall call to 
 await you. I confess tremblingly, that I still cherish 
 I a hope. If I am not deceived — if you can consent to 
 | love me — if my long devotion is to be rewarded — take 
 I my hand when you meet me. That moment will de- 
 cide the value of my life. But be prepared also to 
 j name another if you love him — for there is a neces- 
 | sity, which I can not explain to you till you have 
 chosen your husband, that this choice should be made 
 on your arrival. Trust and forgive one who has so 
 long loved you!" 
 
 Mabel pondered long on this strange letter. Her 
 spirit at moments revolted against its apparent dicta- 
 tion, but there was the assurance, which she could 
 not resist trusting, that it could be explained and for- 
 given. At all events, she was at liberty to fulfil its 
 requisitions or not — and she would decide when the 
 time came. Happy was Mabel — unconsciously hap- 
 py — in the generosity and delicacy of her unnamed 
 lover! Her father, by one of the sudden reverses of 
 mercantile fortune, had been stripped of his wealth 
 in a day ! Stunned and heart-broken, he knew not 
 how to break it to his daughter, but he had written 
 for her to return. His sumptuous house had been 
 sold over his head, yet the purchaser, whom he did 
 not know, had liberally offered the use of it till his 
 affairs were settled. And, meantime, his ruin was 
 made public. The news of it, indeed, had reached 
 Saratoga before the departure of Mabel — but there 
 were none willing to wound her by speaking of it. 
 
 The day was one of the sweetest of summer, and 
 as the boat ploughed her way down the Hudson, Ma- 
 bel sat on the deck lost in thought. Her father's 
 opinion of Bellallure, and his probable displeasure at 
 her choice, weighed uncomfortably on her mind. 
 She turned her thoughts upon Mr. Blythe, and felt sur- 
 prised at the pleasure with which she remembered his 
 kind manners and his trust-inspiring look. She be- 
 gan to reason with herself more calmly than she had 
 power to do with her lovers around her. She con- 
 fessed to herself that Bellallure might have the ro- 
 mantic perseverance shown in the career of the chim- 
 ney-sweep, and still be deficient in qualities necessary 
 to domestic happiness. There seemed to her some- 
 thing false about Bellallure. She could not say in 
 what — but he had so impressed her. A long day's 
 silent reflection deepened this impression, and Mabel 
 arrived at the city with changed feelings. She pre- 
 pared herself to meet him at her father's house, and 
 show him by her manner that she could accept nei- 
 ther his hand nor his fortune. 
 
 Mr. Wynne was at the door to receive his daughter, 
 and Mabel felt relieved, for she thought that his pres- 
 sence would bar all explanation between herself and 
 Bellallure. The old man embraced her with an effu- 
 sion of tears which she did not quite understand, but 
 he led her to the drawing-room and closed the door. 
 Mr. Blythe stood before her ! 
 
 Forgetting the letter — dissociated wholly as it was, 
 in her mind, with Mr. Blythe— Mabel ran to him 
 with frank cordiality and gave him her hand ! Blythe 
 
342 
 
 THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. 
 
 stood a moment — his hand trembling in hers — and as 
 a suspicion of the truth flashed suddenly on Mabel's 
 mind, the generous lover drew her to his bosom and 
 folded her passionately in his embrace. Mabel's 
 struggles were slight, and her happiness unexpectedly 
 complete. 
 
 The marriage was like other marriages. 
 
 Mr. Wynne had drawn a little on his imagination 
 in recommending Mr. Blythe to his daughter as "a 
 young man of most respectable family." 
 
 Mr. Blythe was the purchaser of Mr. Wynne's su- 
 perb house, and the old man ended his days under its 
 roof — happy to the last in the society of the Blythes, 
 large and little. 
 
 Mr. Bellallure turned out to be a clever adventurer, 
 and had Mabel married him, she would have been 
 Mrs. Bellallure No. 2 — possibly No. 4. He thought 
 himself too nice a young man for monopoly. 
 
 I think my story is told — if your imagination has 
 filled up the interstices, that is to say. 
 
 THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. 
 
 It was the last week of September, and the keeper 
 of " Congress hail" stood on his deserted colonnade. 
 Ths dusty street of Saratoga was asleep in the still- 
 ness of village afternoon. The whittlings of the stage- 
 runners at the corners, and around the leaning posts, 
 were fading into dingy undistinguishableness. Stiff 
 and dry hung the slop-cloths at the door of the livery 
 stable, and drearily clean was doorway and stall. 
 * The season" was over. 
 
 " Well, Mr. B !" said the Boniface of the 
 
 great caravansary, to a gentlemanly-looking invalid, 
 crossing over from the village tavern on his way to 
 Congress spring, " this looks like the end of it ! A 
 
 slimmish season, though, Mr. B ! 'Gad, things 
 
 isn't as they used to be in your time ! Three months 
 we used to have of it, in them days, and the same 
 people coming and going all summer, and folks' own 
 horses, and all the ladies drinking champagne ! And 
 every ' hop' was as good as a ball, and a ball — when do 
 you ever see such balls now-a-days? Why, here's 
 all my best wines in the cellar; and as to beauty — 
 pooh! — they're done coming here, any how, are the 
 belles, such as belles ivas .'" 
 
 " You may say that, mine host, you may say that !" 
 replied the damaged Corydon, leaning heavily on his 
 cane, — " what — they're all gone, now, eh — nobody at 
 the ' United States ?' " 
 
 " Not a soul — and here's weather like August ! — 
 capital weather for young ladies to walk out evenings, 
 and, for a drive to Barheight's — nothing like it ! It's 
 a sin, /say, to pass such weather in the city ! Why 
 shouldn't they come to the springs in the Indian 
 summer, Mr. B ?" 
 
 Coming events seemed to have cast their shadows 
 before. As Boniface turned his eyes instinctively 
 toward the sand hill, whose cloud of dust was the 
 precursor of new pilgrims to the waters, and the sign 
 for the black boy to ring the bell of arrival, behold, on 
 its summit, gleaming through the nebulous pyramid, 
 like a lobster through the steam of the fisherman's 
 pot, one of the red coaches of " the People's Line." 
 
 And another! 
 
 And another! 
 
 And another! 
 
 Down the sandy descent came the first, while the 
 driver's horn, intermittent with the crack of his whip, 
 set to bobbing every pine cone of the adjacent wil- 
 derness. 
 
 »« p rrr — ru — te — too — toot — pash! — crack ! — snap ! 
 — prrrr — r — rut — rut — xxui ! ! G'lang ! — Hip !" 
 
 Boniface laid his hand on the pull of the porter's 
 bell, but the thought flashed through his mind that 
 he might have been dreaming — was he awake ? 
 
 And, marvel upon wonder ! — a horn of arrival from 
 
 the other end of the village ! And as he turned his 
 eyes in that direction, he saw the dingier turnouts 
 from Lake Sacrament — extras, wagons — every variety 
 of rattletrap conveyance — pouring in like an Irish 
 funeral on the return, and making (oh, climax more 
 satisfactory !) straight, all, for Conijress Hall ! 
 Events now grew precipitate — 
 Ladies were helped out with green veils — parasols 
 and baskets were handed after them — baggage was 
 chalked and distributed — (and parasols, baskets, and 
 baggage, be it noted, were all of the complexion that 
 innkeepers love, the indefinable look which betrays 
 the owner's addictedness to extras) — and now there 
 was ringing of bells ; and there were orders for the 
 woodcocks to be dressed with pork chemises, and for 
 the champagne to be iced, the sherry not — and 
 through the arid corridors of Congress hall floated 
 a delicious toilet air of cold cream and lavender — and 
 ladies' maids came down to press out white dresses, 
 while the cook heated the curling irons — and up and 
 down the stairs flitted, with the blest confusion of 
 other days, boots and iced sangarees, hot water, towels, 
 and mint-juleps — all delightful, but all incomprehen- 
 sible ! Was the summer encored, or had the Jews 
 gone back to Jerusalem? To the keeper of Con- 
 gress hall the restoration of the millenium would have 
 been a rush-light to this second advent of fun-and- 
 fashion-dom ! 
 
 Thus far we have looked through the eyes of the 
 
 person (pocket-ually speaking) most interested in the 
 
 singular event we wished to describe. Let us now 
 
 j (tea being over, and your astonishment having had 
 
 l time to breathe) take the devil's place at the elbow ot 
 
 the invalided dandy beforementioned, and follow him 
 
 over to Congress Hall. It was a mild night and, as I 
 
 said before (or meant to, if I did not), August, having 
 
 been prematurely cut off by his raining successor, 
 
 seemed up again, like Hamlet's governor, and bent on 
 
 1 walking out his time. 
 
 Rice (you remember Rice — famous for his lemon- 
 ades with a corrective) — Rice, having nearly ignited 
 his forefinger with charging wines at dinner, was out 
 
 to cool on the colonnade, and B , not strong 
 
 enough to stand about, drew a chair near the drawing- 
 room window, and begged the rosy barkeeper to throw 
 what light he could upon this multitudinous appari- 
 tion. Rice could only feed the fire of his wonder 
 with the fuel of additional circumstances. Coaches 
 had been arriving from every direction till the house 
 was full. The departed black band had been stopped 
 at Albany, and sent back. There seemed no married 
 people in the party — at least, judging by dress and 
 flirtation. Here and there a belle, a little on the 
 wane, but all most juvenescent in gayety, and (Rice 
 
THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. 
 
 343 
 
 thought) handsomer girls than had been at Congress 
 hall since the days of the Albany regency (the regency 
 of beauty), ten years ago ! Indeed, it struck Rice 
 that he had seen the faces of these lovely girls before, 
 though they whom he thought they resembled had 
 long since gone off the stage— grandmothers, some of 
 them, now! 
 
 Rice had been told, also, that there was an extraor- 
 dinary and overwhelming arrival of children and 
 nurses at the Pavilion Hotel, but he thought the 
 eport smelt rather like a jealous figment of the 
 Pavilioners. Odd, if true — that's all ! 
 
 Mr. ft had taken his seat on the colonnade, as 
 
 Shakspere expresses it, "about cock-shut time" — 
 twilight — and in the darkness made visible of the 
 rooms within, he could only distinguish the outline of 
 some very exquisite, and exquisitely plump figures 
 gliding to and fro, winged, each one, with a pair of 
 rather stoutish, but most attentive admirers. As the 
 curfew hour stole away, however, the ladies stole away 
 with it, to dress; and at ten o'clock the sudden out- 
 break of the full band in a mazurka, drew Mr. 
 
 B 's attention to the dining-room frontage of the i 
 
 colonnade, and, moving his chair to one of the win- ! 
 dows, the cockles of his heart warmed to see the ! 
 orchestra in its glory of old — thirteen black Orpheuses j 
 perched on a throne of dining-tables, and the black 
 veins on their shining temples strained to the crack 
 of mortality with their zealous execution. The 
 waiters, meantime, were lighting the tinBriareus (that 
 spermaciti monster so destructive to broadcloth), and 
 the side-sconces and stand-lamps, and presently a 
 blaze of light flooded the dusty evergreens of the 
 facade, and nothing was wanting but some fashionable 
 Curtius to plunge first into the void — some adventu- 
 rous Benton, " to set the ball in motion." 
 
 Wrapped carefully from the night-air in his cloak 
 
 and belcher, B sat, looking earnestly into the 
 
 room, and to his excited senses there seemed, about 
 all this supplement to the summer's gayety, a weird 
 mysteriousness, an atmosphere of magic, which was 
 observable, he thought, even in the burning of the 
 candles! And as to Johnson, the sable leader of the 
 band — " God's-my-Iife," as Bottom says, how like a 
 tormented fiend writhed the cremona betwixt his chin 
 and white waistcoat! Such music, from instruments 
 so vexed, had never split the ears of the Saratoga 
 groundlings since the rule of Saint Dominick (in 
 whose hands even wine sparkled to song) — no, not 
 since the golden age of the Springs, when that lord of 
 harmony and the nabobs of lower Broadway made, of 
 Congress hall, a paradise for the unmarried ? Was 
 Johnson bewitched ? Was Congress hall repossessed 
 
 by the spirits of the past ? If ever Mr. B , sitting 
 
 in other years on that resounding colonnade, had felt 
 the magnetic atmosphere of people he knew to be up 
 staus, he felt it now ! If ever he had been contented, 
 knowing that certain bright creatures would presently 
 glide into the visual radius of black Johnson, he felt 
 contented, inexplicably, from the same cause now — 
 expecting, as if such music could only be Oieir herald, 
 the entrance of the same bright creatures, no older, 
 and as bright after years of matrimony. And now and 
 
 then B pressed his hand to his head — for he was 
 
 not quite sure that he might not be a little wandering 
 in his mind. 
 
 But suddenly the band struck up a march! The 
 
 first bar was played through, and B looked at 
 
 the door, sighing that this sweet hallucination — this 
 waking dream of other days — was now to be scattered 
 by reality He could have filliped that mercenary 
 Ethiopian < n the nose for playing such music to such 
 falling off from the past as he now looked to see 
 enter. 
 
 A lady crossed the threshold on a gentleman's arm. 
 " Ha ! ha !" said B , trying with a wild effort to 
 
 laugh, and pinching his arm into a blood-blister, 
 
 " come — this is too good ! Helen K ! oh, no ! 
 
 Not quite crazy yet, I hope — not so far gone yet ! 
 Yet it is ! I swear it is! And not changed either ! 
 Beautiful as ever, by all that is wonderful! Psha ! 
 I'll not be mad ! Rice ! — are you there ? Why, who 
 
 are these coming after her? Julia L ! Anna 
 
 K , and my friend Fanny ! The D s ! The 
 
 M s! Nay, I'm dreaming, silly fool that I am ! 
 
 I'll call for a light ! Waiter ! ! Where the devil's 
 the bell ?" 
 
 And as poor B insisted on finding himself in 
 
 bed, reached out his hand to find the bell-pull, one of 
 the waiters of Congress hall came to his summons. 
 The gentleman wanted nothing, and the waiter 
 thought he had cried out in his nap ; and rather 
 embarrassed to explain his wants, but still unconvinced 
 
 of his freedom from dream-land, B drew his hat 
 
 over his eyes, and his cloak around him, and screwed 
 up his courage to look again into the enchanted ball- 
 room. 
 
 The quadrilles were formed, and the lady at the 
 head of the first set was spreading her skirts for the 
 avant-deux. She was a tall woman, superbly hand- 
 some, and moved with the grace of a frigate at sea 
 with a nine-knot breeze. Eyes capable of taking in 
 lodgers (hearts, that is to say) of any and every calibre 
 and quality, a bust for a Cornelia, a shape all love and 
 lightness, and a smile like a temptation of Eblis— 
 there she was — and there were fifty like her — not like 
 her, exactly, either, but of her constellation — belles, 
 every one of them, who will be remembered by old 
 men, and used for the disparagement of degenerated 
 
 younglings — splendid women of Mr. B 's time, 
 
 and of the palmy time of Congress hall — 
 
 " The past— the past — the past !" 
 
 Out on your staring and unsheltered lantern of 
 brick — your " United States hotel," stiff, modern, and 
 promiscuous ! Who ever passed a comfortable hour 
 in its glaring cross-lights, or breathed a gentle senti- 
 ment in its unsubdued air and townish open-to-dusti- 
 ness ! What is it to the leafy dimness, the cool shad- 
 ows, the perpetual and pensive dcmi-jour — what to the 
 ten thousand associations — of Congress hall ! Who 
 has not lost a heart (or two) on the boards of that 
 primitive wilderness of a colonnade ! Whose first 
 adorations, whose sighs, hopes, strategies, and flirta- 
 tions, are not ground into that warped and slipper- 
 polished floor, like heartache and avarice into the 
 bricks of Wall street! Lord bless you, madam! 
 don't desert old Congress hall ! We have done going 
 to the Springs — {we) — and wouldn't go there again 
 for anything, but a good price for a pang — (that is, 
 except to see such a sight as we are describing) — but 
 we can not bear, in our midsummer flit through the 
 Astor, to see charming girls bound for Saratoga, and 
 hear no talk of Congress hall ! What ! no lounge 
 on those proposal sofas — no pluck at the bright green 
 leaves of those luxuriant creepers while listening to 
 " the voice of the charmer" — no dawdle on the steps 
 to the spring (mamma gone on before) — no hunting 
 for that glow-worm in the shrubbery by the music- 
 room — no swing — no billiards — no morning gossips 
 with the few privileged beaux admitted to the up- 
 stairs entry, ladies' wing ? 
 
 « I'd sooner be set quick i' the earth. 
 And bowled to death with turnips,' 
 
 than assist or mingle in such ungrateful forgetfulnesa 
 of pleasure-land ! But what do we with a digression 
 in a ghost-story ? 
 
 The ball went on. Champagne of the " exploded 
 color (pink) was freely circulated between the dances— 
 (rosy wine suited to the bright days when all things 
 were tinted rose)— and wit, exploded, too, in these 
 
344 
 
 THE GHOST-BALL AT CONGRESS HALL. 
 
 leaden times, went round with the wine; and as a 
 glass of the bright vintage was handed up to old 
 Johnson, B stretched his neck over the window- 
 sill in an agony of expectation, confident that the 
 black ghost, if ghost he were, would fail to recognise 
 the leaders of fashion, as he was wont of old, and to 
 bow respectfully to them before drinking in their pres- 
 ence. Oh, murder ! not he ! Down went his black 
 poll to the music-stand, and up, and down again, and 
 at every dip, the white roller of that unctuous eye was 
 brought to bear upon some well-remembered star of 
 
 the ascendant ! He saw them as B did ! He 
 
 was not playing to an unrecognised company of late- 
 comers to Saratoga — anybodies from any place! He, 
 the unimaginative African, believed evidently that 
 they were there in flesh — Helen, the glorious, and all 
 her fair troop of contemporaries ! — and that with them 
 had come back their old lovers, the gay and gallant j 
 Lotharios of the time of Johnson's first blushing | 
 honors of renown ! The big drops of agonized horror | 
 and incredulity rolled off the forehead of Mr. B ! 
 
 But suddenly the waiters radiated to the side-doors, 
 and with the celestial felicity of star-rising and mor- 
 ning-breaking, a waltz was found playing in the ears 
 of the revellers ! Perfect, yet when it did begin ! 
 Waltzed every brain and vein, waltzed every swim- 
 ming eye within the reach of its magic vibrations ! 
 Gently away floated couple after couple, and as they 
 
 circled round to his point of observation, B could 
 
 have called every waltzer by name — but his heart was 
 in his throat, but his eyeballs were hot with the stony 
 immovableness of his long gazing. 
 
 Another change in the music ! Spirits of bedevil- 
 ment ! could not that waltz have been spared ! Boni- 
 face stood waltzing his head from shoulder to shoulder 
 — Rice twirled the head-chambermaid in the entry — 
 the black and white boys spun round on the colonnade 
 — the wall-flowers in the ball-room crowded their 
 chairs to the wall — the candles flared embracingly — 
 
 ghosts or no ghosts, dream or hallucination, B 
 
 could endure no more ! He flung off his cloak and 
 hat, and jumped in at the window. The divine Emily 
 C had that moment risen from tying her shoe. 
 
 With a nod to her partner, and a smile to herself, 
 B encircled her round waist, and away he flew 
 
 like Ariel, light on the toe, but his face pallid and 
 wild, and his emaciated legs playing like sticks in his 
 unfilled trousers. Twice he made the circuit of the 
 room, exciting apparently less surprise than pleasure 
 by his sudden appearance ; then, with a wavering halt, 
 and his hand laid tremulously to his forehead, he flew 
 at the hall-door at a tangent, and rushing through 
 servants and spectators, dashed across the portico, and 
 disappeared in the darkness ! A fortnight's brain-fever 
 deprived him of the opportunity of repeating this re- 
 markable flourish, and his subsequent sanity was es- 
 tablished through some critical hazard. 
 
 There was some inquiry at supper about " old 
 
 B ," but the lady who waltzed with him knew 
 
 as little of his coming and going as the managers; 
 and, by one belle, who had been at some trouble in 
 other days to quench his ardor, it was solemnly be- 
 lieved to be his persevering apparition. 
 
 The next day there was a drive and dinner at Bar- 
 
 height's, and back in time for ball and supper; and 
 the day after there was a most hilarious and memora- 
 ble fishing-party to Saratoga lake, and all back again 
 in high force for the ball and supper; and so like a 
 long gala-day, like a short summer carnival, all frolic, 
 sped the week away. Boniface, by the third day, had 
 rallied his recollections, and with many a scrape and 
 compliment, he renewed his acquaintance with the 
 belles and beaux of a brighter period of beauty and 
 gallantry. And if there was any mystery remaining 
 in the old functionary's mind as to the identity and 
 miracle of their presence and reunion, it was on the 
 one point of the ladies' unfaded loveliness — for, saving 
 a half inch aggregation in the waist, which was rather 
 an improvement than otherwise, and a little more ful- 
 ness in the bust, which was a most embellishing dif- 
 ference, the ten years that had gone over them had 
 made no mark on the lady portion of his guests ; and 
 as to the gentlemen — but that is neither here nor there. 
 They were "men of mark," young or old, and their 
 wear and tear is, as Flute says, " a thing of naught." 
 
 It was revealed by the keeper of the Pavilion, after 
 the departure of the late-come revellers of Congress 
 hall, that there had been constant and secret visita- 
 tions by the belles of the latter sojourn, to the numer- 
 ous infantine lodgers of the former. Such a troop 
 of babies and boys, and all so lovely, had seldom 
 gladdened even the eyes of angels, out of the cheru- 
 bic choir (let alone the Saratoga Pavilion), and though, 
 in their white dresses and rose-buds, the belles afore 
 spoken of looked like beautiful elder sisters to those 
 motherless younglings, yet when they came in, moth- 
 ers confessed, on the morning of departure, openly 
 to superintend the preparations for travel, they had so 
 put off the untroubled maiden look from their coun- 
 tenances, and so put on the indescribable growing- 
 old-iness of married life in their dress, that, to the 
 eye of an observer, they might well have passed for 
 the mothers of the girls they had themselves seemed 
 to be, the day before, only. 
 
 Who devised, planned, and brought about, this prac- 
 tical comment on the needlessness of the American 
 haste to be old, we are not at liberty to mention. The 
 reader will have surmised, however, that it was some 
 one who had observed the more enduring quality of 
 beauty in other lands, and on returning to his own, 
 looked in vain for those who, by every law of nature, 
 should be still embellishing the society of which he 
 had left them the budding flower and ornament. To 
 get them together again, only with their contempora- 
 ries, in one of their familiar haunts of pleasure — to 
 suggest the exclusion of everything but youthfulness 
 in dress, amusement, and occupation — to bring to 
 meet them their old admirers, married like themselves, 
 but entering the field once more for their smiles against 
 their rejuvenescent husbands — to array them as belles 
 again, and see whether it was any falling off in beauty 
 or the power of pleasing which had driven them from 
 their prominent places in social life — this was the ob- 
 vious best way of doing his immediate circles of 
 friends the service his feelings exacted of him; the 
 only way, indeed, of convincing these bright creatures 
 that they had far anticipated the fading hour of bloom 
 and youthfulness. Pensez-y ! 
 
BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS. 
 
 345 
 
 BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS, 
 
 The guests at the Astor House were looking mourn- 
 fully out of the drawing-room windows, on a certain 
 rainy day of an October passed over to history. No 
 shopping — no visiting! The morning must be passed 
 in-doors. And it was some consolation to those who 
 were in town for a few days to see the world, that their 
 time was not quite lost, for the assemblage in the large 
 drawing-room was numerous and gay. A very dressy 
 affair is the drawing-room of the Astor, and as full of 
 eyes as a peacock's tail — (which, by the way, is also a 
 very dressy affair). Strangers who wish to see and be 
 seen (and especially "be seen") on rainy days, as well 
 as on sunny days, in their visits to New York, should, 
 as the phrase goes, " patronize" the Astor. As if 
 there was any patronage in getting the worth of your 
 money ! 
 
 Well — the people in the drawing-room looked a 
 little out of the windows, and a great deal at each 
 other. Unfortunately, it is only among angels and 
 underbred persons that introductions can be dispensed 
 with, and as the guests of that day at the Astor House 
 were mostly strangers to each other, conversation was 
 very fitful and guarded, and any movement whatever 
 extremely conspicuous. There were four very silent 
 ladies on the sofa, two very silent ladies in each of the 
 windows, silent ladies on the ottomans, silent ladies in 
 the chairs at the corners, and one silent lady, very 
 highly dressed, sitting on the music-stool, with her 
 back to the piano. There was here and there a gen- 
 tleman in the room, weather-bound and silent; but 
 we have only to do with one of these, and with the 
 last-mentioned much-embellished young lady. 
 
 " Well, I can't sit on this soft chair all day, cousin 
 Meg !" said the gentleman. 
 
 " 'Sh ! — call me Margaret, if you must speak so 
 loud," said the lady. "And what would you do out 
 of doors this rainy day ? I'm sure it's very pleasant 
 here." 
 
 «• Not for me. I'd rather be thrashing in the barn. 
 But there must be some 'rainy-weather work' in the 
 city as well as the country. There's some fun, / know, 
 that's kept for a wet day, as we keep corn-shelling and 
 grinding the tools." 
 
 " Dear me!" 
 
 "Well — what now?" 
 
 " Oh, nothing ! — but I do wish you wouldn't bring 
 the stable with you to the Astor House." 
 
 The gentleman slightly elevated his eyebrows, and 
 took a leaf of music from the piano, and commenced 
 diligently reading the mystic dots and lines. We have 
 ten minutes to spare before the entrance of another 
 person upon the scene, and we will make use of the 
 silence to conjure up for you, in our mag;ic mirror, 
 the semblance of the two whose familiar dialogue we 
 have just jotted down. 
 
 Miss Margaret Pifflit was a young lady who had a 
 large share of what the French call la beaute du dia- 
 ble— youth and freshness. (Though, why the devil 
 should have the credit of what never belonged to him, 
 it takes a Frenchman, perhaps, to explain.) To look 
 at, she was certainly a human being in very high per- 
 fection. Her cheeks were like two sound apples; her 
 waist was as round as a stove-pipe ; her shoulders had 
 two dimples just at the back, that looked as if they 
 defied punching to make them any deeper; her eyes 
 looked as if they were just made, they were so bright 
 
 and new ; her voice sounded like " C sharp" in a new 
 piano ; and her teeth were like a fresh break in a 
 cocoa-nut. She was inexorably, unabatedly, despe 
 rately healthy. This fact, and the difficulty of uniting 
 all the fashions of all the magazines in one dress, 
 were her two principal afflictions in this world of care. 
 She had an ideal model, to which she aspired with 
 constant longings — a model resembling in figure the 
 high-born creatures whose never-varied face is seen 
 in all the plates of fashion, yet, if possible, paler and 
 more disdainful. If Miss Pifflit could have bent her 
 short wrist with the curve invariably given to the well- 
 gloved extremities of that mysterious and nameless 
 beauty ; if she could but have sat with her back to 
 her friends, and thrown her head languhhingly over 
 her shoulder without dislocating her neck; if she 
 could but have protruded from the flounce of her 
 dress a foot more like a mincing little muscle-shell, 
 and less like a jolly fat clam ; in brief, if she could 
 have drawn out her figure like the enviable joints of a 
 spy-glass, whittled off more taperly her four extremi- 
 ties, sold all her uproarious and indomitable roses for 
 a pot of carmine, and compelled the publishers of the 
 magazines to refrain from the distracting multiplicity 
 of their monthly fashions — with these little changes 
 in her allotment, Miss Pifflit would have realized all 
 her maiden aspirations up to the present hour. 
 
 A glimpse will give you an idea of the gentleman 
 in question. He was not much more than he looked 
 to be — a compact, athletic young man of twenty- one, 
 with clear, honest blue eyes, brown face, where it was 
 not shaded by the rim of his hat, curling brown hair, 
 and an expression of fearless qualities, dashed just 
 now by a tinge of rustic bashfulness. His dress was 
 a little more expensive and gayer than was necessary, 
 and he wore his clothes in a way which betrayed that 
 he would be more at home in shirt-sleeves. His hands 
 were rough, and his attitude that of a man who was 
 accustomed to fling himself down on the nearest 
 bench, or swing his legs from the top rail of a fence, 
 or the box of a wagon. We speak with caution of 
 his rusticity, however, for he had a printed card, " Mr. 
 Ephraim Bracely," and he was a subscriber to the 
 " Spirit of the Times." We shall find time to say a 
 thing or two about him as we get on. 
 
 "Eph." Bracely and "Meg" Pifflit were "enga- 
 ged." With the young lady it was, as the French 
 say, faute de mieux, for her beau-ideal (or, in plain 
 English, her ideal beau) was a tall, pale young gentle- 
 man, with white gloves, in a rapid consumption. She 
 and Eph. were second cousins, however, and as she 
 was an orphan, and had lived since childhood with his 
 father, and, moreover, had inherited the Pifflit farm, 
 which adjoined that of the Bracelys, and, moreover, 
 | had been told to " kiss her little husband, and love 
 him always" by the dying breath of her mother, and 
 (moreover third) had been " let be" his sweetheart by 
 the unanimous consent of the neighborhood, why, it 
 seemed one of those matches made in Heaven, and 
 not intended to be travestied on earth. It was under- 
 stood that they were to be married as soon as the 
 young man's savings should enable him to pull down 
 the old Pifflit house and build a cottage, and, with a 
 fair season, that might be done in another year. 
 Meantime, Eph. wa9 a loyal keeper of his troth, 
 though never having the trouble to win the young 
 
346 
 
 BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS. 
 
 lady, he was not fully aware of the necessity of court- 
 ship, whether or no ; and was, besides, somewhat un- 
 susceptible of the charms of moonlight, after a hard 
 day's work at haying or harvesting. The neighbors 
 thought it proof enough of his love that he never 
 " went sparking" elsewhere, and as he would rather 
 talk of his gun or his fishing-rod, his horse or his 
 crop, pigs, politics, or anything else, than of love or 
 matrimony, his companions took his engagement with 
 his cousin to be a subject upon which he felt too 
 deeply to banter, and they neither invaded his domain 
 by attentions to his sweetheart, nor suggested thought 
 by allusions to her. It was in the progress of this 
 even tenor of engagement, that some law business 
 had called old Farmer Bracely to New York, and the 
 young couple had managed to accompany him. And 
 of course nothing would do for Miss Pifflit but " the 
 Astor." 
 
 And now, perhaps, the reader is ready to be told 
 whose carriage is at the Vesey street door, and 
 who sends up a dripping servant to inquire for Miss 
 Pifflit. 
 
 It is allotted to the destiny of every country-girl to 
 have one fashionable female friend in the city — some- 
 body to correspond with, somebody to quote, some- 
 body to write her the particulars of the last elopement, 
 somebody to send her patterns of collars, and the rise 
 and fall of tournures, and such other things as are not 
 entered into by the monthly magazines. How these 
 apparently unlikely acquaintances are formed, is as 
 much a mystery as the eternal youth of post-boys, 
 and the eternal duration of donkeys. Far be it from 
 me to pry irreverently into those pokerish corners of 
 the machinery of the world. I go no farther than 
 the fact, that Miss Julia Hampson was an acquaintance 
 of Miss Pifflit's. 
 
 Everybody knows "Hampson and Co." 
 Miss Hampson was a good deal what the Fates had 
 tried to make her. If she had not been admirably 
 well dressed, it would have been by violent opposition 
 to the united zeal and talent of dressmakers and mil- 
 liners. These important vicegerents of the Hand that 
 reserves to itself the dressing of the butterfly and 
 lily, make distinctions in the exercise of their voca- 
 tion. Wo be to an unloveable woman, if she be not 
 endowed with taste supreme. She may buy all the 
 stuffs of France, and all the colors of the rainbow, 
 but she will never get from those keen judges of fit- 
 ness the loving hint, the admiring and selective per- 
 suasion, with which they delight to influence the 
 embellishment of sweetness and loveliness. They 
 who talk of " anything's looking well on a pretty 
 woman," have not reflected on the lesser providence 
 of dressmakers and milliners. Woman is never mer- 
 cenary but in monstrous exceptions, and no trades- 
 woman of the fashion will sell taste or counsel; and, 
 in the superior style of all charming women, you see, 
 not the influence of manners upon" dress, but the af- 
 fectionate tribute of these dispensers of elegance to 
 the qualities they admire. Let him who doubts, go 
 shopping with his dressy old aunt to-day, and to-mor- 
 row with his dear little cousin. 
 
 Miss Hampson, to whom the supplies of elegance 
 came as naturally as bread and butter, and occasioned 
 as little speculation as to the whence or how, was as 
 unconsciously elegant, of course, as a well-dressed 
 lily. She was abstractly a very beautiful girl, though 
 in a very delicate and unconspicuous style ; and by 
 dint of absolute fitness in dressing, the merit of her 
 beauty, by common observers at least, would be half 
 given to her fashionable air and unexceptionable toilet. 
 The damsel and her choice array, indeed, seemed 
 the harmonious work of the same maker. How much 
 was nature's gift, and how much was bought in Broad- 
 way, was probably never duly understood by even her 
 most discriminate admirer. 
 
 But we have kept Miss Hampson too long upon the 
 stairs. 
 
 The two young ladies met with a kiss, in which (to 
 the surprise of those who had previously observed 
 Miss Mifflit) there was no smack of the latest fashion. 
 
 "My dear Julia!" 
 
 " My dear Margerine!" (This was a romantic va- 
 riation of Meg's, which she had forced upon her 
 intimate friends at the point of the bayonet.) 
 
 Eph. twitched, remindingly, the jupon of his cousin, 
 and she introduced him with the formula which she 
 had found in one of Miss Austin's novels. 
 
 " Oh, but there was a mock respectfulness in that 
 deep courtesy," thought Eph. (and so there was — for 
 Miss Hampson took an irresistible cue from the in- 
 flated ceremoniousness of the introduction). 
 
 Eph. made a bow as cold and stiff as a frozen horse- 
 blanket. And if he could have commanded the 
 blood in his face, it would have been as dignified and 
 resentful as the eloquence of Red Jacket — but that 
 rustic blush, up to his hair, was like a mask dropped 
 over his features. 
 
 "A bashful country-boy," thought Miss Hampson, 
 as she looked compassionately upon his red hot fore- 
 head, and forthwith dismissed him entirely from her 
 thoughts. 
 
 With a consciousness that he had better leave the 
 room, and walk off his mortification under an um- 
 brella, Eph. took his seat, and silently listened to the 
 conversation of the young ladies. Miss Hampson had 
 come to pass the morning with her friend, and she 
 took off her bonnet, and showered down upon her 
 dazzling neck a profusion of the most adorable brown 
 ringlets. Spite of his angry humiliation, the young 
 farmer felt a thrill run through his veins as the heavy 
 curls fell indolently about her shoulders. He had 
 j never before looked upon a woman with emotion. He 
 hated her — oh, yes ! for she had given him a look 
 I that could never be forgiven — but for somebody, she 
 must be the angel of the world. Eph. would have 
 given all his sheep and horses, cows, crops, and hay- 
 stacks, to have seen the man she would fancy to be 
 { her equal. He could not give even a guess at the 
 height of that conscious superiority from which she 
 individually looked down upon him; but it would 
 have satisfied a thirst which almost made him scream, 
 to measure himself by a man with whom she could 
 be familiar. Where was his inferiority ? What was 
 
 it? Why had he been blind to it 
 
 now ? Was 
 
 there no surgeon's knife, no caustic, that could carve 
 out, or cut away, burn or scarify, the vulgarities she 
 looked upon so contemptuously ? But the devil take 
 her superciliousness, nevertheless! 
 
 It was a bitter morning to Eph. Bracely, but still it 
 went like a dream. The hotel parlor was no longer 
 a stupid place. His cousin Meg had gained a con- 
 sequence in his eyes, for she was the object of caress 
 from this superior creature — she was the link which 
 kept her within his observation. He was too full of 
 other feelings just now to do more than acknowledge the 
 superiority of this girl to his cousin. He felt it in 
 his after thoughts, and his destiny then, for the firs' 
 time, seemed crossed and inadequate to his wishes. 
 ******* 
 
 (We hereby draw upon your imagination for six 
 months, courteous reader. Please allow the teller ta 
 show you into the middle of the following July.) 
 
 Bracely farm, ten o'clock of a glorious summer 
 morning — Miss Pifflit extended upon a sofa in despair. 
 But let us go back a little. 
 
 A week before, a letter had been received from 
 Miss Hampson, who, to the delight and surprise of 
 her friend Margerine, had taken the whim to pass a 
 month with her. She was at Rockaway, and was 
 sick and tired of waltzing and the sea. Had Farmer 
 Bracely a spare corner for a poor girl ? 
 
BORN TO LOVE PIGS AND CHICKENS. 
 
 347 
 
 But Miss Pifflit's "sober second thought" was utter 
 consternalion. How to lodge fitly the elegant Julia 
 Hampson? No French bed in the house.no bou- 
 doir, no ottomans, no pastilles, no baths, no Psyche to 
 dress by. What vulgar wretches they would seem to 
 her. What insupportable horror she would feel at 
 the dreadful inelegance of the farm. Meg was pale 
 with terror and dismay as she went into the details of 
 anticipation. 
 
 Something must be done, however. A sleepless 
 night of reflection and contrivance sufficed to give 
 some shape to the capabilities of the case, and by 
 daylight the next morning the whole house was in 
 commotion. Meg had fortunately a large bump of 
 constructiveness, very much enlarged by her habitual 
 dilemmas-toilet. A boudoir must be constructed. 
 Farmer Bracely slept in the dried apple-room, on 
 the lower floor, and he was no sooner out of his 
 bed than his bag and baggage were tumbled upstairs, 
 his gun and Sunday whip were taken down from their 
 nails, and the floor scoured, and the ceiling white- 
 washed. Eph. was by this time returned from the 
 village with all the chintz that could be bought, and a 
 paper of tacks, and some new straw carpeting; and by 
 ten o'clock that night the four walls of the apartment 
 were covered with the gayly-flowered material, the 
 carpet was nailed down, and old Farmer Bracely 
 thought it a mighty nice, cool-looking place. Eph. 
 was a bit of a carpenter, and he soon knocked togeth- 
 er some boxes, which, when covered with chintz, and 
 stuffed with wool, looked very like ottomans; and, 
 with a handsome cloth on the round-table, geraniums 
 in the windows, and a chintz curtain to subdue the 
 light, it was not far from a very charming boudoir, 
 and Meg began to breathe more freely. 
 
 But Eph. had heard this news with the blood hot in 
 his temples. Was that proud woman coming to look I 
 again upon him with contempt, and here, too, where | 
 the rusticity, which he presumed to be the object of 
 her scorn, would be a thousand times more flagrant j 
 and visible? And yet, with the entreaty on his lip i 
 that his cousin would refuse to receive her, his heart 
 had checked the utterance — for an irresistible desire \ 
 sprung suddenly within him to see her, even at the I 
 bitter cost of tenfold his former mortification. 
 
 Yet, as the preparations for receiving Miss Hamp- | 
 son went on, other thoughts took possession of his j 
 mind. Eph. was not a man, indeed, to come off sec- ; 
 ond best in the long pull of wrestling with a weak- ; 
 ness. His pride began to show its colors. He re- j 
 membered his independence as a farmer, dependant 
 on no man, and a little comparison between his pur- 
 suits, and life, such as he knew it to be, in a city, soon 
 put him, in his own consciousness at least, on a par j 
 with Miss Hampson's connexions. This point once 
 attained, Eph. cleared his brow, and went whistling ' 
 about the farm as usual — receiving without reply, ! 
 however, a suggestion of his cousin Meg's, that he 
 had better burn his old straw hat, for, in a fit of ab- 
 sence, he might possibly put it on while Miss Hamp- 
 son was there. 
 
 Well, it was ten o'clock on the morning after j 
 Miss Hampson's arrival at Bracely farm, and, as we 
 said before, Miss Pifflit was in despair. Presuming 
 that her friend would be fatigued with her journey, i 
 she had determined not to wake her, but to order 
 breakfast in the boudoir at eleven. Farmer Bracely 
 and Eph. must have their breakfast at seven, however, 
 and what was the dismay of Meg, who was pouring 
 out their coffee as usual, to see the elegant Julia rush 
 into the first kitchen, courtesy very sweetly to the old 
 man, pull up a chair to the table, apologise for being 
 late, and end this extraordinary scene by producing 
 two newly-hatched chickens from her bosom ! She 
 had been up since sunrise, and out at the barn, down 
 by the river, and up in the haymow, and was perfectly 
 
 enchanted with everything, especially the dear little 
 pigs and chickens ! 
 
 "A very sweet young lady!" thought old Farmer 
 Bracely. 
 
 " Very well — but hang your condescension !" thought 
 Eph.. distrustfully. 
 
 "Mercy on me ! — to like pigs and chickens!" men- 
 tally ejaculated the disturbed and bewildered Miss Pif- 
 flit. 
 
 But with her two chicks pressed to her breast 
 with one hand, Miss Hampson managed her coffee 
 and bread and butter with the other, and chattered 
 away like a child let out of school. The air was so 
 delicious, and the hay smelt so sweet, and the trees in 
 the meadow were so beautiful, and there were no stiff 
 sidewalks, and no brick houses, and no iron railings, 
 and so many dear speckled hens, and funny little 
 chickens, and kind-looking old cows, and colts, and 
 calves, and ducks, and turkeys — it was delicious — it 
 was enchanting — it was worth a thousand Saratogas 
 and Rockaways. How anybody could prefer the city 
 to the country, was to Miss Hampson matter of in- 
 credulous wonder. 
 
 "Will you come into the boudoir?" asked Miss 
 Pifflit, with a languishing air, as her friend Julia rose 
 from breakfast. 
 
 "Boudoir!" exclaimed the city damsel, to the in- 
 finite delight of old Bracely, "no, dear! I'd rather go 
 out to the barn! Are you going anywhere with the 
 oxen to-day, sir?" she added, going up to the gray- 
 headed farmer caressingly, " I should so like to ride 
 in that great cart!" 
 
 Eph. was a little suspicious of all this unexpected 
 agreeableness, but he was naturally too courteous not 
 to give way to a lady's whims. He put on his old 
 straw hat, and tied his handkerchief over his shoulder 
 (not to imitate the broad riband of a royal order, but 
 to wipe the sweat off handily while mowing), and of- 
 fering Miss Hampson a rake which stood outside the 
 door, he begged her to be ready when he came by 
 with the team. He and his father were bound to the 
 far meadow, where they were cutting hay, and would 
 like her assistance in raking. 
 
 It was a "specimen" morning, as the magazines 
 say, for the air was temperate, and the whole country 
 was laden with the smell of the new hay, which some- 
 how or other, as everybody knows, never hinders or 
 overpowers the perfume of the flowers. Oh, that 
 winding green lane between the bushes was like an 
 avenue to paradise. The old cart jolted along 
 through the ruts, and Miss Hampson, standing up 
 and holding on to old Farmer Bracely, watched the 
 great oxen crowding their sides together, and looked 
 off over the fields, and exclaimed, as she saw glimpses 
 of the river between the trees, and seemed veritably 
 and unaffectedly enchanted. The old farmer, at least, 
 had no doubt of her sincerity, and he watched her, 
 and listened to her, with a broad honest smile of ad- 
 miration on his weather-browned countenance. 
 
 The oxen were turned up to the fence, while the 
 dew dried off the hay, and Eph. and his father turned 
 to mowing, leaving Miss Hampson to ramble about 
 over the meadow, and gather flowers by the river-side. 
 In the course of an hour, they began to rake up, and 
 she came to offer her promised assistance, and stoutly 
 followed Eph. up and down several of the long swaths, 
 t: ill 1 her face glowed under her sunbonnet as it never 
 had glowed with waltzing. Heated and tired at last, 
 she made herself a seat with the new hay under a 
 large elm, and, with her back to the tree, watched the 
 labors of her companions. 
 
 Eph. was a well-built and manly figure, and all he 
 did in the way of his vocation, he did with a fine dis- 
 play of muscular power, and (a sculptor would have 
 thought) no little grace. Julia watched him a* he 
 stepped along after his rake on the elastic sward, and 
 
348 
 
 THE WIDOW BY BREVET. 
 
 she thought, for the first time, what a very handsome 
 man was young Bracely, and how much more finely 
 a man looked when raking hay, than a dandy when 
 waltzing. And for an hour she sat watching his mo- 
 tion, admiring the strength with which he pitched up 
 the hay, and the grace and ease of all his movements 
 and postures; and, after a while, she began to feel 
 drowsy with fatigue, and pulling up the hay into a fra- 
 grant pillow, she lay down and fell fast asleep. 
 
 It was now the middle of the forenoon, and the old 
 farmer, who, of late years, had fallen into the habit 
 of taking a short nap before dinner, came to the big j 
 elm to pick up his waistcoat and go home. As he ap- j 
 preached the tree, he stopped, and beckoned to his son. 
 
 Eph. came up and stood at a little distance, looking 
 at the lovely picture before him. With one delicate 
 hand under her cheek, and a smile of angelic content 
 and enjoyment on her finely cut lips, Julia Hampson 
 slept soundly in the shade. One small foot escaped 
 from her dress, and one shoulder of faultless polish 
 and whiteness showed between her kerchief and her 
 sleeve. Her slight waist bent to the swell of the hay, 
 throwing her delicate and well-moulded bust into 
 high relief; and all over her neck, and in large clus- 
 ters on the tumbled hay, lay those glossy brown ring- 
 lets, admirably beautiful and luxuriant. 
 
 And as Eph. looked on that dangerous picture of 
 loveliness, the passion, already lying perdu in his 
 bosom, sprung to the throne of heart and reason. 
 
 (We have not room to do more than hint at the 
 consequences of this visit of Miss Hampson to the 
 country. It would require the third volume of a 
 novel to describe all the emotions of that month at 
 Bracely farm, and bring the reader, point by point, 
 gingerly and softly, to the close. We must touch 
 here and there a point only, giving the reader's im- 
 agination some gleaning to do after we have been over 
 the ground.) 
 
 Eph. Bracely's awakened pride served him the good 
 turn of making him appear simply in his natural char- 
 acter during the whole of Miss Hampson's visit. By 
 the old man's advice, however, he devoted himself to 
 the amusement of the ladies after the haying was 
 over ; and what with fishing, and riding, and scenery- 
 hunting in the neighborhood, the young people were 
 together from morning till night. Miss Pifflit came 
 down unwillingly to plain Meg, in her attendance on 
 her friend in her rustic occupations, and Miss Hamp- 
 son saw as little as possible of the inside of the bou- 
 doir. The barn, and the troops of chickens, and all 
 the out-door belongings of the farm, interested her 
 daily, and with no diminution of her zeal. She 
 seemed, indeed, to have found her natural sphere in 
 the simple and affectionate life which her friend Mar- 
 gerine held in such superfine contempt; and Eph., 
 who was the natural mate to such a spirit, and him- 
 self, in his own home, most unconsciously worthy of 
 love and admiration, gave himself up irresistibly to 
 his new passion. 
 
 And this new passion became apparent, at last, to 
 the incredulous eyes of his cousin. And that it was 
 timidly, but fondly returned by her elegant and high- 
 bred friend, was also very apparent to Miss Pifflit. 
 And after a few jealous struggles, and a night or two 
 of weeping, she gave up to it tranquilly — for, a city 
 life and a city husband, truth to say, had long been 
 her secret longing and secret hope, and she never had 
 fairly looked in the face a burial in the country with 
 the "pigs and chickens." 
 
 She is not married yet, Meg Pifflit — but the rich 
 merchant, Mr. Hampson, wrecked completely with 
 the disastrous times, has found a kindly and pleasant 
 asylum for his old age with his daughter, Mrs. Brace 
 ly. And a better or lovelier farmer's wife than Julia, 
 or a happier farmer than Eph., can scarce be found 
 in the valley of the Susquehannah. 
 
 THE WIDOW BY BREVET 
 
 Let me introduce the courteous reader to two la- 
 dies. 
 
 Miss Picklin, a tall young lady of twenty-one, near 
 enough to good-looking to permit of a delusion on the 
 subject (of which, however, she had an entire monop- 
 oly), with cheeks always red in a small spot, lips not 
 so red as "the cheeks, and rather thin, sharpish nose, 
 and waist very slender; and last (not least important), 
 a very long neck, scalded on either side into a resem- 
 blance to a scroll of shrivelled parchment, which might 
 or might not be considered as a wu's-fortune — serving 
 her as a title-deed to twenty thousand dollars. The 
 scald was inflicted, and the fortune left in consequence, 
 by a maiden aunt who, in the babyhood of Miss Pick- 
 lin, attempted to cure the child's sore throat by an ap- 
 plication of cabbage-leaves steeped in hot vinegar. 
 
 Miss Euphemia Picklin, commonly called Phemie 
 — a good-humored girl, rather inclined to be fat, but 
 gifted with several points of beauty of which she was 
 not at all aware, very much a pet among her female 
 friends, and admitting, with perfect sincerity and sub- 
 mission, her sister's exclusive right to the admiration 
 of the gentlemen of their acquaintance. 
 
 Captain Isaiah Picklin, the father of these ladies, 
 was a merchant of Salem, an importer of figs and opi- 
 um, and once master of the brig "Simple Susan," 
 which still plied between his warehouse and Constan- 
 tinople — nails and codfish the cargo outward. I have 
 
 not Miss Picklin's permission to mention the precise 
 date of the events I am about to record, and leaving 
 that point alone to the imagination of the reader, I 
 shall set down the other particulars and impediments 
 in her "course of true love" with historital fidelity. 
 
 Ever since she had been of sufficient age to turn her 
 attention exclusively to matrimony, Miss Picklin had 
 nourished a presentiment that her destiny was exotic ; 
 that the soil of Salem was too poor, and the indigenous 
 lovers too mean; and that, potted in her twenty thou- 
 sand dollars, she was a choice production, set aside for 
 I flowering in a foreign clime, and destined to be trans- 
 I planted by a foreign lover. With this secret in her 
 | bosom, she had refused one or two gentlemen of mid- 
 dle age, recommended by her father, beside sundry 
 score of young gentlemen of slender revenues in her 
 own set of acquaintances, till, if there had been any- 
 thing beside poetry in Shakspere's assertion that it is — 
 
 u Broom groves 
 Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves," 
 
 the neighboring "brush barrens" of Saugus would 
 have sold in lots at a premium. It was possibly from 
 the want of nightingales, to whose complaining notes 
 the gentleman of Verona "turned his distresses," that 
 the discarded of Salem preferred the consolations of 
 Phemie Picklin. 
 
 News to the Picklins ! Hassan Keui, the son of old 
 
THE WIDOW BY BREVET. 
 
 349 
 
 Abdoul Keui, was coming out in the " Simple Susan !" 
 A Turk — a live Turk — a young Turk, and the son of 
 her father's rich correspondent in Turkey ! " Ah me !" 
 thought Miss Picklin. 
 
 The captain himself was rather taken aback. He 
 had known old Abdoul for many years, had traded and 
 smoked with him in the cafes of Galata, had gone out 
 with him on Sundays to lounge on the tombstones at 
 Scutari, and had never thought twice about his yellow 
 gown and red trowsers ; but what the deuce would be 
 thought of them in Salem? True, it was his son; 
 but a Turk's clothes descend from father to son 
 through three generations ; he knew that, from re- 
 membering this very boy all but smothered in a sort of 
 saffron blanket, with sleeves like pillowcases — his first 
 assumption of the toga virilis (not that old Picklin 
 knew Latin, but such was "his sentiment better ex- 
 pressed"). Then he had never been asked to the 
 house of the Stamboul merchant, not introduced to 
 his wives nor his daughters (indeed, he had forgotten 
 that old Keui was near cutting his throat for asking 
 after them) — but of course it was very different in Sa- 
 lem. Young Keui must be the Picklin guest, fed and 
 lodged, and the girls would want to give him a tea- 
 party. Would he sit on a chair, or want cushions on 
 the floor ? Would he come to dinner with his breast 
 bare, and leave his boots outside ? Would he eat rice 
 pudding with his fingers ? Would he think it inde- 
 cent if the girls didn't wear linen cloths, Turkey fash- 
 ion, over their mouths and noses ? Would he bring 
 his pipes ? Would he fall on his face and say his 
 prayers four times a day, wherever he should be (with 
 a clean place handy)? What would the neighbors 
 say ? The captain worked himself into a violent per- 
 spiration with merely thinking of all this. 
 
 The Salemites have a famous museum, and know 
 "what manner of thing is your crocodile;" but a live 
 Turk consigned to Captain Picklin ! It set the town 
 in a fever ! 
 
 It would leave an indelicate opening for a conjec- 
 ture as to Miss Picklin's present age, were I to state 
 whether or not the arrival of the "Simple Susan" was 
 reported by telegraph. She ran in with a fair wind 
 one Sunday morning, and was immediately boarded by 
 the harbor-master and Captain Picklin ; and there, true 
 to the prophetic boding of old Isaiah, the young Turk 
 sat cross-legged on the quarter-deck, in a white tur- 
 ban and scarlet et ceteras, smoking his father's identical 
 pipe — no other, the captain would have taken his oath ! 
 
 Up rose Hassan, when informed who was his visiter, 
 and taking old Picklin's hand, put it to his forehead. 
 The weather-stained sea-captain had bleached in the 
 counting-house, and he had not, at first sight remem- 
 bered the old friend of his father. He passed the pipe 
 into Isaiah's hand and begged him to keep it as a me- 
 mento of Abdoul, for his father had died at the last 
 Ramazan. Hassan had come out to see the world, 
 and secure a continuance of codfish and good-will from 
 the house of Picklin, and the merchant got astride the 
 tiller of his old craft, and smoked this news through 
 his amber-mouthed legacy, while the youth went be- 
 low to get ready to go ashore. 
 
 The reader of course would prefer to share the first 
 impressions of the ladies as to the young Mussulman's 
 personal appearance, and I pass at once, therefore, to 
 their disappointment, surprise, mortification, and vex- 
 ation; when, as the bells were ringing for church, the 
 front door opened, their father entered, and in followed 
 a young gentleman in frockcoat and trowsers ! Yes, 
 and in his hand a hat — a black hat — and on his feet no 
 yellow boots, but calfskin, mundane and common calf- 
 skin, and with no shaved head, and no twisted shawl 
 around his waist ; nothing to be seen but a very hand- 
 some young man indeed, with teeth like a fresh slice 
 of cocoa-nut meat, and a very deliberate pronunciation 
 to his bad English. 
 
 Miss Picklin's disappointment had to be slept upon, 
 for she had made great outlay of imagination upon the 
 pomp and circumstance of wedding a white Othello in 
 the eyes of wondering Salem; but Phemie's surprise 
 took but five minutes to grow into a positive pleasure; 
 and never suspecting, at any time, that she was visible 
 to the naked eye during the eclipsing presence of her 
 sister, she sat with a very admiring smile upon her 
 lips, and her soft eyes fixed earnestly on the stranger, 
 till she had made out a full inventory of his features, 
 proportions, manners, and other stuff available in 
 dream-land. What might be Hassan's impression of 
 the young ladies, could not be gathered from his man- 
 ner; for, in the first place, there was the reserve which 
 belonged to him as a Turk, and, in the second place, 
 there was a violation of all oriental notions of modesty 
 in their exposing their chins to the masculine obser- 
 vation; and though he could endure the exposure, it 
 was of course with that diffidence of gaze which ac- 
 companies the consciousness of improper objects — 
 adding to his demeanor another shade of timidity. 
 
 Miss Picklin's shoulders were not invaded quite to 
 the limits of terra cognita by the cabbage-leaves which 
 had exercised such an influence on her destiny; and 
 as the scalds somewhat resembled two maps of South 
 America (with Patagonia under each ear), she usu- 
 ally, in full dress, gave a clear view of the surrounding 
 ocean — wisely thinking it better to have the geogra- 
 phy of her disfigurement well understood, than, by 
 covering a small extremity (as it were the isthmus of 
 Darien), to leave an undiscovered North America to 
 the imagination. She appeared accordingly at dinner 
 in a costume not likely to diminish the modest embar- 
 rassment of Mr. Keui (as she chose to call him) — ex- 
 tremely decollete, in a pink silk dress with short sleeves, 
 and in a turban with a gold fringe — the latter, of 
 course, out of compliment to his country. "Money 
 is power," even in family circles, and it was only Miss 
 Picklin who exercised the privilege of full dress at 
 a mid-day dinner. Phemie came to table dressed as 
 at breakfast, and if she felt at all envious of her sister's 
 pink gown and elbows to match, it did*not appear in 
 her pleasant face or sisterly attention. The captain 
 would allow anything, and do almost anything, for his 
 rich daughter; but as to dining with his coat on, in hot 
 weather, company or no company, he would rather — 
 
 '•' be set quick i' the earth, 
 And bowled to death with turnips" — 
 
 though that is not the way he expressed it. The parti 
 carre, therefore (for there was no Mrs. Picklin), was, 
 in the matter of costume, rather incongruous, but, as 
 the Turk took it for granted that it was all according 
 to the custom of the country, the carving was achieved 
 by the shirt-sleeved captain, and the pudding "helped" 
 by his bare-armed daughter, with no particular com- 
 motion in the elements. Earthquakes do not invaria- 
 bly follow violations of etiquette — particularly where 
 nobody is offended. 
 
 After the first day, things took their natural course 
 — as near as they were able. Hassan was not very 
 quick at conversation, always taking at least five min- 
 utes to put together for delivery a sentence of Eng- 
 lish, but his laugh did not hang fire, nor did his nods 
 and smiles; and where ladies are voluble (as ladies 
 sometimes are), this paucity of ammunition on the 
 gentleman's part is no prelude to discomfiture. Then 
 Phemie had a very fair smattering of Italian, and that 
 being the business language of the Levant, Hassan 
 took refuge in it whenever brought to a stand-still in 
 English— a refuge, by the way, of which he seemed 
 inclined to avail himself oftener than was consistent 
 with Miss Picklin's exclusive property in his atten- 
 tion. Rebellious though Hassan might secretly have 
 been to this authority over himself, Phemie was no ac- 
 complice, natural modesty combining with the long 
 
350 
 
 THE WIDOW BY BREVET 
 
 habit of subserviency to make her even anticipate the 
 exactions of the heiress; and so Miss Picklin had 
 41 Mr. Keui" principally to herself, promenading him 
 through the streets of Salem, and bestowing her 
 sweetness upon him from his morning entrance to his 
 evening exit; Phemie relieving guard very cheerfully, 
 while her sister dressed for dinner. It was possibly 
 from being permitted to converse in Italian during this 
 half hour, that Hassan made it the only part of the 
 day in which he talked of himself and his house on 
 the Bosphorus, but that will not account also for Phe- 
 mie's sighing while she listened — never having sighed 
 before in her life, not even while the same voice was 
 talking English to her sister. 
 
 Without going into a description of the Picklin tea- 
 party, at which Hassan was induced to figure in his 
 oriental costume, while Miss Picklin sat by him on a 
 cushion, turbaned and (probably) cross-legged, a la 
 Sultana, and without recording other signs satisfac- 
 tory to the Salemites, that the young Turk had fallen 
 to the scalded heiress — 
 
 " As does the ospray to the fish, that takes it, 
 By sovereignty of nature" - 
 
 I must come plump to the fact that, on the Monday 
 following (one week after his arrival), Hassan left Sa- 
 lem, wnaccompanied by Miss Picklin. As he had 
 asked for no private interview in the best parlor, and 
 had made his final business arrangements with the 
 captain, so that he could take passage from New York 
 without returning, some people were inclined to fancy 
 that Miss Picklin's demonstrations with regard to him 
 had been a little premature. And "some people" 
 chose to smile. But it was reserved for Miss Picklin 
 to look round in church, in about one year from this 
 event, and have her triumph over "some people;" 
 for she was about to sail for Constantinople — "sent 
 for," as the captain rudely expressed it. But I must 
 explain. 
 
 The "Simple Susan" came in, heavily freighted 
 with a consignment from the house of Keui to Picklin 
 & Co., and a letter from the American consul at Con- 
 stantinople wrapped in the invoice. With the careful 
 and ornate wording of an official epistle, it stated that 
 Effendi Hassan Keui had called on the consul, and 
 partly from the mistrust of his ability to express him- 
 self in English on so delicate a subject, but more par- 
 ticularly for the sake of approaching the object of his 
 affections with proper deference and ceremony, he had 
 requested that officer to prepare a document convey- 
 ing a proposal of marriage to the daughter of Captain 
 Picklin. The incomplete state of his mercantile ar- 
 rangements, while at Salem the previous year, would 
 account for his silence on the subject at that time, but 
 he trusted that his preference had been sufficiently 
 manifest to the lady of his heart ; and as his prosper- 
 ity in business depended on his remaining at Constan- 
 tinople, enriching himself only for her sake, he was 
 sure that the singular request appended to his offer 
 would be taken as a mark of his prudence rather than 
 as a presumption. The cabin of the " Simple Susan," 
 as Captain Picklin knew, was engaged on her next pas- 
 sage to Constantinople by a party of missionaries, male 
 and female, and the request was to the intent that, in 
 case of an acceptance of his offer, the fair daughter of 
 the owner would come out, under their sufficient pro- 
 tection, to be wedded, if she should so please, on the 
 day of her arrival in the "Golden Horn." 
 
 As Miss Picklin had preserved a mysterious silence 
 on the subject of " Mr. Keui's" attentions since his 
 departure, and as a lady with twenty thousand dollars 
 in her own right is, of course, quite independent of 
 parental control, the captain, after running his eye 
 hastily through the document, called to the boy who 
 was weighing out a quintal of codfish, and bid him 
 wrap the letter in a brown paper and run with it to 
 
 Miss Picklin — taking it for granted that she knew 
 more about the matter than he did, and would explain 
 it all, when he came home to dinner. 
 
 In thinking the matter over, on his way home, it 
 occurred to old Picklin that it was worded as if he had 
 but one daughter. At any rate, he was quite sure 
 that neither of his daughters was particularly specified, 
 either by name or age. No doubt it was all right, 
 however. The girls understood it. 
 
 "So, it's you, miss!" he said, as Miss Picklin look- 
 ed round from the turban she was trying on before 
 the glass. 
 
 " Certainly, pa ! who else should it be ?" 
 
 And there ended the captain's doubts, for he never 
 again got sight of the letter, and the turmoil of prep- 
 aration for Miss Picklin's voyage, made the house 
 anything but a place for getting answers to impertinent 
 questions. Phemie, whom the news had made silent 
 and thoughtful, let drop a hint or two that she would 
 like to see the letter ; but a mysterious air, and "La ' 
 child, you wouldn't understand it," was check enough 
 for her timid curiosity, and she plied her needle upon 
 her sister's wedding dress with patient submission. 
 
 The preparations for the voyage went on swimming- 
 ly. The missionaries were written to, and willingly 
 consented to chaperon Miss Picklin over the seas, 
 provided her union with a pagan was to be sanctified 
 with a Christian ceremonial. Miss Picklin replied 
 with virtuous promptitude that the cake for the wed- 
 ding was already soldered up in a tin case, and that 
 she was to be married immediately on her arrival, 
 under an awning on the brig's deck, and she hoped 
 that four of the missionaries' wives would oblige her 
 by standing up as her bridesmaids. Many square 
 feet of codfish were unladen from the "Simple Susan" 
 to make room for boxes and bags, and one large case 
 was finally shipped, the contents of which had been 
 shopped for by ladies with families — no book of orien- 
 tal travels making any allusion to the sale of such 
 articles in Constantinople, though, in the natural 
 course of things, they must be wanted as much in 
 Turkey as in Salem. 
 
 The brig was finally cleared and lay off in the stream, 
 and on the evening before the embarkation the mis- 
 sionaries arrived and were invited to a tea-party at the 
 Picklins. Miss Picklin had got up a little surprise 
 for her friends with which to close the party — a 
 " walking tableau" as she termed it, in which she 
 should suddenly make her apparition at one door, 
 pass through the room, and go out at the other, 
 dressed as a sultana, with a muslin kirtle and satin 
 trowsers. She disappeared accordingly half an hour 
 before the breaking up ; and, conversation rather 
 languishing in her absence, the eldest of the mission- 
 aries rose to conclude the evening with a prayer, in 
 the midst of which Miss Picklin passed through the 
 room unperceived — the faces of the company being 
 turned to the wall. 
 
 The next morning at daylight the " Simple Susan" 
 put to sea with a fair wind, and at the usual hour for 
 opening the store of Picklin and Co., she had drop- 
 ped below the horizon. Phemie sat upon the end of 
 the wharf and watched her till she was out of sight, 
 and the captain walked up and down between two 
 puncheons of rum which stood at the distance of a 
 quarter-deck's length from each other, and both father 
 and daughter were silent. The captain had a confused 
 thought or two besides the grief of parting, and Phemie 
 had feelings quite as confused, which were not all 
 made up of sorrow for the loss of her sister. Perhaps 
 the reader will be at the trouble of spelling out their 
 riddles while I try to let him dowD softly to the catas- 
 trophe of my story. 
 
 Without confessing to any ailment whatever, the 
 plump Phemie paled and thinned from the day of hei 
 sister's departure. Her spirits, too, seemed to keep 
 
THE WIDOW BY BREVET. 
 
 351 
 
 ner flesh and color company, and at the end of a 
 month the captain was told by one of the good dames 
 of Salem that he had better ask a physician what 
 ailed her. The doctor could make nothing out of it 
 except that she might be fretting for the loss of her 
 sister, and he recommended a change of scene and 
 climate. That day Captain Brown, an old mate of 
 Isaiah's, dropped in to eat a family dinner and say 
 good-by, as lie was about sailing iu the new schooner 
 Nancy for the Black sea — his wife for his only passen- 
 ger. Of course he would be obliged to drop anchor 
 at Constantinople to wait for a fair wind up the 
 Bosphorus, and part of his errand was to offer to take 
 letters and nicknackeries to Mrs. Keui. Old Pickhn 
 put the two things together, and over their glass of 
 wine he proposed to Brown to take Phemie with Mrs. 
 Brown to Constantinople, leave them both there on a 
 visit to Mrs. Keui, till the return of the Nancy from 
 the Black sea, and then re-embark them for Salem. 
 Phemie came into the room just as they were touch- 
 ing glasses on the agreement, and when the trip was 
 proposed to her she first colored violently, then grew 
 pale and burst into tears ; but consented to go. And, 
 with such preparations as she could make that even- 
 ing, she was quite ready at the appointed hour, and 
 was off with the land-breeze the next morning, taking 
 leave of nobody but her father. And this time the 
 old man wiped his eyes very often before the depart- 
 ing vessel was "hull down," and was heartily sorry he 
 had let Phemie go without a great many presents and 
 a great many more kisses. ******* 
 
 A fine, breezy morning at Constantinople ! 
 
 Rapidly down the Bosphorus shot the caique of 
 Hassan Keui, bearing its master from his country- 
 house at Dolma-batchi to his warehouses at Galata. 
 Just before the sharp prow rounded away toward the 
 Golden Horn, the merchant motioned to the caikjis 
 to rest upon their oars, and, standing erect in the 
 Blender craft, he strained his gaze long and with anxi- 
 ous earnestness toward the sea of Marmora. Not a 
 sail was to be seen coming from the west, except a 
 man-of-war with a crescent flag at the peak, lying off 
 toward Scutari from Seraglio point, and with a sigh 
 that carried the cloud off his brow, Hassan gayly 
 squatted once more to his cushions, and the caique 
 sped merrily on. In and out, among the vessels at 
 anchor, the airy bark threaded her way with the dex- 
 terous swiftness of a bird, when suddenly a cable rose 
 beneath her and lifted her half out of the water. A 
 vessel newly-arrived was hauling in to a close anchor- 
 age, and they had crossed her hawser as it rose to the 
 surface. Pitched headlong into the lap of the nearest 
 caikji, the Turk's snowy turban fell into the water and 
 was carried by the eddy under the stern of the vessel 
 rounding to, and as the caique was driven backward 
 to regain it, the bareheaded owner sank back aghast— 
 Simple Susan of Salem staring him in the face in 
 golden capitals. 
 
 " Oh! Mr. Keui ! how do you do !" cried a well- 
 remembered voice, as he raised himself to fend off 
 by the rudder of the brig. And there she stood 
 within two feet of his lips— Miss Picklin in her bridal 
 veil, waiting below in expectant modesty, and though 
 surprised by his peep into the cabin windows, excusing 
 it as a natural impatience in a bridegroom coming to 
 his bride. 
 
 The captain- of the Susan, meantime, had looked 
 over the tafferel and recognised his old passenger, and 
 Hassan, who would have given a cargo of opium for 
 an hour to compose himself, mounted the ladder 
 which was thrown out to him, and stepped from the 
 gangway into Miss Picklin's arms ! She had rushed 
 up to receive him, dressed in her muslin kirtle and 
 satin trousers, though, with her dramatic sense of 
 propriety, she had intended to remain below till sum- 
 moned to the bridal. The captain, of course, kept 
 
 back from delicacy, but the missionaries stood in a 
 cluster gazing on the happy meeting, and the sailors 
 looked over their shoulders as they heaved at the 
 windlass. As Miss Picklin afterward remarked, "it 
 would have been a tableau vivant if the deck had not 
 been so very dirty ."' 
 
 Hassan wiped his eyes, for he had replaced his wet 
 turban on his head, but what with his escape from 
 drowning, and what with his surprise and embarrass- 
 ment (for he had a difficult part to play, as the reader 
 will presently understand), he had lost all memory 
 of his little stock of English. Miss Picklin drew him 
 gently by the hand to the quarter-deck, where, under 
 an awning fringed with curtains partly drawn, stood a 
 table with a loaf of wedding-cake upon it, and a bottle 
 of wine and a bible. She nodded to the Rev. Mr. 
 Griffin, who took hold of a chair and turned it round, 
 and placing it against his legs with the back toward 
 him, looked steadfastly at the happy couple. 
 
 "Good morning — good night — your sister — aspetta! 
 per amor' 1 di Dio .'" cried the bewildered Hassan, 
 giving utterance to all the English he could re- 
 member, and seizing the bride by the arm. 
 
 " These ladies are my bridesmaids," said Miss 
 Picklin, pointing to the missionaries' wives who stood 
 by in their bonnets and shawls. " I dare say he ex- 
 pected my sister would come as my bridesmaid !" 
 she added, turning to Mr. Griffin to explain the out- 
 break as she understood it. 
 
 Hassan beat his hand upon his forehead, walked 
 twice up and down the quarterdeck, looked around 
 over the Golden Horn as if in search of an interpreter 
 to his feelings, and finally walked up to Miss Picklin 
 with a look of calm resignation, and addressed to her 
 and to the Rev. Mr. Griffin a speech of three minutes, 
 in Italian. At the close of it he made a very cere- 
 monious salaam, and offered his hand to the bride ; 
 and, as no one present understood a syllable of what 
 he had intended to convey in his address, it was re- 
 ceived as probably a welcome to Turkey, or perhaps 
 a formal repetition of his offer of heart and hand. At 
 any rate, Miss Picklin took it to be high time to blush 
 and take off her glove, and the Rev. Mr. Griffin then 
 bent across the back of the chair, joined their hands 
 and went through the ceremony, ring and all. The 
 ladies came up, one after another, and kissed the 
 bride, and the gentlemen shook hands with Hassan, 
 who received their good wishes with a curious look 
 of unhappy resignation, and after cutting the cake and 
 permitting the bride to retire for a moment to calm 
 her feelings and put on her bonnet, the bridegroom 
 made rather a peremptory movement of departure, 
 and the happy couple went off in the caique toward 
 Dolma-batchi amid much waving of handkerchiefs 
 from the missionaries, and hurrahs from the Salem 
 hands of the Simple Susan. 
 
 And now, before giving the reader a translation of 
 the speech of Hassan before the wedding, we must 
 go back to some little events which had taken place 
 one month previously at Constantinople. 
 
 The Nancy arrived off Seraglio Point after a very 
 remarkable passage, having still on her quarter the 
 northwest breeze which had stuck to her like a blood- 
 hound ever since leaving the harbor of Salem. She 
 had brought it with her to Constantinople indeed, for 
 twenty or thirty vessels which had been long waiting 
 a favorable wind to encounter the adverse current of 
 the Bosphorus, were loosing sail and getting under 
 way, and the pilot, knowing that the destination of the 
 Nancy was also to the Black sea, strongly dissuaded 
 Captain Brown from dropping anchor in the horn, 
 with a chance of losing the good luck, and lying, per- 
 haps a month, wind-bound in harbor. Understanding 
 that the captain's only object in stopping was to leave 
 the two ladies with Keui the opium-merchant, the 
 pilot, who knew his residence at Dolma-batchi, made 
 
352 
 
 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 
 
 signal for a caique, and kept up the Bosphorus. 
 Arriving opposite the little village of which Has- 
 san's house was one of the chief ornaments, the la- 
 dies were lowered into the caique and sent ashore — 
 expecting of course to be received with open arms 
 by Mrs. Keui — and then, spreading all her canvass, 
 the swift little schooner sped on her way to Trebi- 
 sond. 
 
 Hassan sat in the little pavilion of his house which 
 looked out on the Bosphorus, eating his piilau, for it 
 was the noon of a holyday, and he had not been that 
 morning to Galata. Recognising at once the sweet 
 face of Phemie as the caique came near the shore, 
 he flew to meet her, supposing that the " Simple 
 Susan" had arrived, and that the lady of his love 
 had chosen to come and seek him. The reader 
 will understand of course that there was no " Mrs. 
 Keui." 
 
 And now to shorten my story. 
 
 Mrs. Brown and Phemie were in Hassan's own house, 
 with no other acquaintance or protector on that side 
 of the world, and there was no possibility of escaping 
 a true explanation. The mistake was explained, and 
 explained to Brown's satisfaction. Phemie was the 
 "daughter" of Captain Picklin,to whom the offer was 
 transmitted, and as, by blessed luck, the Nancy had 
 outsailed the Simple Susan, Providence seemed to 
 have chosen to set right for once, the traverse of true 
 love. The English embassy was at Burgurlu, only 
 six miles above, on the Bosphorus, and Hassan and 
 his mother and sisters, and Mrs. Brown and Phemie 
 were soon on their way thither in swift caiques, and 
 the happy couple were wedded by the English chaplain. 
 The arrival of the Simple Susan was of course looked 
 for, by both Hassan and his bride, with no little dis- 
 may. She had met with contrary winds on the 
 Atlantic, and had been caught in the Archipelago by 
 a Levanter, and from the damage of the last she had 
 been obliged to come to anchor off" the little island of 
 Paros and repair. This had been a job of six weeks, 
 
 and meantime the Nancy had given them the go-by, 
 and reached Constantinople. 
 
 Hassan was daily on the look-out for the brig in his 
 trips to town, and on the morning of her arrival, his 
 mind being put at ease for the day by his glance 
 toward the sea of Marmora, the stumbling so suddenly 
 and so unprepared on the object of his dread, com- 
 pletely bewildered and unnerved him. Through all 
 his confusion, however, and all the awkwardness of 
 his situation, there ran a feeling of self-condemnation, 
 as well as pity for Miss Picklin ; and this had driven 
 him to the catastrophe described above. He felt that 
 he owed her some reparation, and as the religion 
 which he was educated did not forbid a plurality of 
 wives, and there was no knowing but possibly she 
 might be inclined to " do in Turkey as Turkeys do," 
 he felt it incumbent on himself to state the fact of 
 his previous marriage, and then offer her the privilege 
 of becoming Mrs. Keui No. 2, if she chose to accept. 
 As he had no English at his command, he stated his 
 dilemma and made his offer in the best language he 
 had — Italian— -and with the results the reader has been 
 made acquainted. 
 
 Of the return passage of Miss Picklin, formerly 
 Mrs. Keui, under the charge of Captain and Mrs. 
 Brown, in the schooner Nancy, I have never learned 
 the particulars. She arrived at Salem in very good 
 health, however, and has since been distinguished 
 principally by her sympathy for widows — based on 
 what, I can not very positively say. She resides at 
 present in Salem with her father, Captain Picklin, 
 who is still the consignee of the house of Keui, having 
 made one voyage out to see the children of his 
 daughter Phemie and strengthen the mercantile con- 
 nexion. His old age is creeping on him, undistinguish- 
 ed by anything except the little monomania of read- 
 ing the letters from his son-in-law at least a hundred 
 times, and then wafering them up over the fireplace 
 of his counting-room — in doubt, apparently, whethei 
 he rightly understands the contents. 
 
 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 
 
 
 "For, look you, he hath as many friends as enemies; which friends, sir (as it were), durst not (look you, sir) show 
 themselves (as we term it) his friends, while he's in directitude." — Coriolanus. 
 
 " Hermione. — Our praises are our wages."— Winter's Tale. 
 
 F , the portrait-painter, was a considerable ally 
 
 of mine at one time. His success in his art brought 
 him into contact with many people, and he made 
 friends as a fastidious lady buys shoes — trying on a 
 great many that were destined to be thrown aside. It 
 was the prompting, no doubt, of a generous quality — 
 that of believing all people perfect till he discovered 
 their faults — but as he cut loose without ceremony 
 from those whose faults were not to his mind, and as 
 ill-fitting people are not as patient of rejection as ill- 
 fitting shoes, the quality did not pass for its full value, 
 and his abusers were " thick as leaves in Vallambro- 
 sa." The friends who "wore his bleeding roses," 
 however (and of these he had his share), fought his 
 battles quite at their own charge. What with plenty 
 of pride, and as plentiful a lack of approbativeness, 
 F took abuse as a duck's back takes rain — buoy- 
 ant in the shower as in the sunshine. 
 
 " Well, F !" I said, as I occupied his big chair 
 
 one morning while he was at work, " there was great 
 skirmishing about you last night at the tea-party !" 
 
 " No ! — really ? Who was the enemy ?" 
 
 "Two ladies, who said they travelled with you 
 through Italy, and knew all about you — the Blid- 
 gimses." 
 
 "Oh, the dear old Blidgimses — Crinny and Nin- 
 ny — the ungrateful monsters ! Did I ever tell you 
 of my nursing those two old girls through the chol- 
 era?" 
 
 " No. But before you go off with a long story, 
 tell me how you can stand such abominable back- 
 biting? It isn't once in a way, merely! — you are 
 their whole stock in trade, and they vilify you in ev- 
 ery house they set foot in. The mildest part of it is 
 criminal slander, my good fellow ! Why not do the 
 world a service, and show that slander is actionable, 
 though it is committed in good society ?" 
 
 "Pshaw! What does it amount to? 
 ' The eagle suffers little birds to sing, 
 And is not careful what they mean thereby,' 
 and in this particular instance, the jury would prob- 
 ably give the damages the other way — for if they 
 
THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 
 
 353 
 
 hammer at me till doomsday, I have had my fun out 
 of them — my quid pro quo!" 
 
 " Well, preface your story by telling me where 
 you met them. I never knew by what perverse thread 
 you were drawn together." 
 
 "A thread that might have drawn me into much 
 more desperate extremity — a letter from the most lov- 
 able of women, charging me to become the trusty 
 squire of these errant damsels wherever I should en- 
 counter them. 1 was then studying in Italy. They 
 came to Florence, where I chanced to be, and were 
 handed over to me without dog, cat, or waiting-maid, 
 by a man who seemed ominously glad to be rid of 
 them. As it was the ruralizing season, and all the 
 world was flocking to the baths of Lucca, close by, 
 they went there till I could get ready to undertake 
 them — which I did, with the devotion of a courier in 
 a new place, one fig-desiring evening of June." 
 
 "Was there a delivery of the great seal?" I asked, 
 
 rather amused at F 's circumstantial mention of 
 
 his introitus to office. 
 
 " Something very like it, indeed. I had not fairly 
 got the blood out of my face, after making my sa- 
 laam, when Miss Crinny Blidgims fished up from 
 some deep place she had about her, a memorandum- 
 book, with a well-thumbed brown paper cover, and 
 gliding across the room, placed it in my hands as peo- 
 ple on the stage present pocket books — with a sort 
 of dust-flapping parabola. Now if I have any partic- 
 ular antipathy, it is to the smell of old flannel, and as 
 this equivocal-looking object descended before my 
 nose — faith! But I took it. It was the account- 
 book of the eatables and drinkables furnished to the 
 ladies in their travels, the prices of eggs, bread, figs, 
 et cetera, and I was to begin my duties by having up 
 the head waiter of the lodging-house, and holding in- 
 quisition on his charges. The Blidgimses spoke no 
 Italian, and no servant in the house spoke English, 
 and they were bursting for a translator to tell him that 
 the eggs were over-charged, and that he must deduct 
 threepence a day for wine, for they never touched it!" 
 
 " ' What do the ladies wish ?' inquired the dumb- 
 founded waiter, in civil Tuscan. 
 
 '"What does he say? what does he say?' cried 
 Miss Corinna, in resounding nasal. 
 
 M ' Tell the impudent fellow what eggs are in Dutch- 
 ess county !' peppered out Miss Katrina, very sharply. 
 
 "Of course I translated with a discretion. There 
 was rather an incongruity between the looks of the 
 damsels and what they were to be represented as say- 
 ing — Katrina Blidgims living altogether in a blue op- 
 era-hat with a white feather." 
 
 I interrupted F to say that the blue hat was 
 
 immortal, for it was worn at the tea-party of the night 
 before. 
 
 *' I had enough of the blue hat and its bandbox be- 
 fore we parted. It was the one lifetime extravagance 
 of the old maid, perpetrated in Paris, and as it cov- 
 ered the back seam of a wig (a subsequent discovery 
 of mine), she was never without it, except when bon- 
 neted to go out. She came to breakfast in it, mended j 
 her stockings in it, went to parties in it. I fancy it j 
 took some trouble to adjust it to the wig, and she de- j 
 voted to it the usual dressing-hours of morning and i 
 dinner; for in private she wore a handkerchief over' 
 it, pinned under her chin, which had only to be whip- 
 ped off when company was announced, and this, per- 
 haps, is one of the secrets of its immaculate, yet 
 threadbare preservation. She called it her abbo /" 
 
 " Her what?" 
 
 " You have heard of the famous Herbault, the 
 man-milliner, of Paris? The bonnet was his pro- 
 duction, and called after him with great propriety. 
 In Italy, where people dress according to their con- 
 dition in life, this perpetual abbo was something a la 
 princess?, and henr* my embarrassment in explaining 
 23 
 
 to Jacomo, the waiter, that Signorina Katrina's high 
 summons concerned only an overcharge of a penny 
 in the eggs !" 
 
 " And what said Jacomo ?" 
 
 "Jacomo was incapable of an incivility, and begged 
 pardon before stating that the usual practice of the 
 house was to charge half a dollar a day for board and 
 lodging, including a private parlor and bedroom, three 
 meals and a bottle of wine. The ladies, however, 
 had applied through an English gentleman (who 
 chanced to call on them, and who spoke Italian), to 
 have reductions made on their dispensing with two 
 dishes of meat out of three, drinking no wine, and 
 wanting no nuts and raisins. Their main extrava- 
 gance was in eggs, which they ate several times a 
 day between meals, and wished to have cooked and 
 served up at the price per dozen in the market. On 
 this they had held conclave below stairs, and the re- 
 sult had not been communicated, because there was 
 no common language ; but Jacomo wished, through 
 me, respectfully to represent, that the reductions from 
 j the half dollar a day should be made as requested, 
 but that the eggs could not be bought, cooked, and 
 served up (with salt and bread, and a clean napkin), 
 j for just their price in the market. And on this point 
 the ladies were obstinate. And to settle this difficulty 
 between the high contracting parties, cost an argu- 
 ment of a couple of hours, my first performance as 
 translator in the service of the Blidgimses. Thence- 
 forward, I was as necessary to Crinny and Ninny — 
 (these were their familiar diminutives for Corinna and 
 Katrina) — as necessary to Crinny as the gift of speech, 
 and to Ninny as the wig and abbo put together. Obe- 
 dient to the mandate of the fair hand which had con- 
 signed me to them, I gave myself up to their service, 
 even keeping in my pocket their frowsy grocery- 
 book — though not without some private outlay in 
 burnt vinegar. What penance a man will undergo 
 for a pretty woman who cares nothing about him!" 
 
 " But what could have started such a helpless pair 
 of old quizzes upon their travels ?" 
 
 " I wondered myself till I knew them better. 
 Crinny Blidgims had a tongue of the liveliness of an 
 eel's tail. It would have wagged after she was skinned 
 and roasted. She had, beside, a kind of pinchbeck 
 smartness, and these two gifts, and perhaps the name 
 of Corinna, had inspired her with the idea that she 
 was an improrisatrice. So, how could she die without 
 going to Italy ?" 
 
 " And Ninny went for company ?" 
 
 " Oh, Miss Ninny Blidgims had a passion too ! 
 She had come out to see Paris. She had heard that, 
 in Paris, people could renew their youth, and she 
 thought she had done it, with her abbo. She thought, 
 too, that she must have manners to correspond. So, 
 while travelling in her old bonnet, she blurted out her 
 bad grammer as she had done for fifty years, but in 
 her blue hat she simpered and frisked to the best ot 
 her recollection. Silly as that old girl was, however 
 she had the most pellucid set of ideas on the prices 
 of things to eat. There was no humbugging her on 
 that subject, even in a foreign language. She filled 
 her pockets with apples, usually, in our walks ; and 
 the translating between her and a street-huckster, she 
 in her abbo and the apple-woman in Italian rags, was 
 vexatious to endure, but very funny to remember. I 
 have thought of painting it, but, to understand the 
 picture, the spectator must make the acquaintance of 
 Miss Fanny Blidgims — rather a pill for a connoisseur! 
 But by this time you are ready to approfond, as the 
 French aptly say, the depths of my subsequent dis- 
 tresses. 
 
 THE STORY. 
 
 " I had been about a month at Lucca, when it was 
 suddenly proposed by Crinny that we should take a 
 
354 
 
 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 
 
 vetturino together, and go to Venice. Ninny and she 
 had come down to dinner with a sudden disgust for 
 the baths — owing, perhaps, to the distinction they had 
 received as the only strangers in the place who were 
 not invited to the ball of a certain prince, our next-door 
 neighbor. The Blidgimses and their economies, in 
 fact, had become the joke of the season, and, as the 
 interpreter in the egg-trades, I was mixed up in the 
 omelette, and as glad to escape from my notoriety as 
 they. So I set about looking up the conveyance with 
 some alacrity. 
 
 " By the mass, it was evidently a great saving of 
 distance to cross the mountains to Modena. and of 
 course a great saving of expense, as vetturinos are 
 paid by the mile ; but the guide-books stated that the 
 road was rough, and the inns abominable, and recom- 
 mended to all who cared for comfort to make a circum- 
 bendibus by the way of Florence and Bologna. 
 Ninny declared she could live on bread and apples, 
 however, and Crinny delighted in mountain air — in 
 short, economy carried it, and after three days' chaf- 
 fering with the owner of a rattletrap vettura, we set off 
 up the banks of the Lima without the blessing of 
 Jacomo, the head waiter. 
 
 " We soon left the bright little river, and struck 
 into the mountains, and as the carriage crept on very 
 slowly, I relieved the horses of my weight and walked 
 on. The ladies did the same thing whenever they 
 came in sight of an orchard, and for the first day 
 Ninny munched the unripe apples and seemed getting 
 along very comfortably. The first night's lodging 
 was execrable, but as the driver assured us it was the 
 best on the route, we saved our tempers for the worst, 
 and the next day began to penetrate a country that 
 looked deserted of man, and curst with uninhabitable 
 sterility. Its effect upon my spirits, as I walked on 
 alone, was as depressing as the news of some trying 
 misfortune, and I was giving it credit for one redeem- 
 ing quality — that of an opiate to a tongue like Crinny 
 Blidgims's — when both the ladies began to show symp- 
 toms of illness. It was not long after noon, and we 
 were in the midst of a waste upland, the road bending 
 over the horizon before and behind us, and neither 
 shed nor shelter, bush, wall, or tree, within reach of 
 the eye. The only habitation we had seen since morn- 
 ing was a wretched hovel where the horses were fed 
 at noon, and the albergo, where we should pass the 
 night, was distant several hours — a long up-hill 
 stretch, on which the pace of the horses could not 
 possibly be mended. The ladies were bent double in 
 the carriage, and said they could not possibly go on. 
 Going back was out of the question. The readiest 
 service I could proffer was to leave them and hurry 
 on to the inn, to prepare for their reception. 
 
 " Fortunately our team was unicorn-rigged — one 
 horse in advance of a pair. I took off the leader, and 
 galloped away. 
 
 " Well, the cholera was still lingering in Italy, and 
 stomachs must be cholera-proof to stand a perpetual 
 diet of green apples, even with no epidemic in the air. 
 So I had a very clear idea of the remedies that would 
 be required on their arrival. 
 
 " At a hand-gallop I reached the albergo in a couple 
 of hours. It was a large stone barrack, intended, no 
 doubt, as was the road we had travelled, for military 
 uses. A thick stone wall surrounded it, and it stood 
 in the midst, in a pool of mud. From the last emi- 
 nence before arriving, not another object could be 
 descried within a horizon of twenty miles diameter, 
 and a whitish soil of baked clay, browned here and 
 there by a bit of scanty herbage, was foreground and 
 middle and background to the pleasant picture. The 
 site of the barrack had probably been determined by 
 the only spring within many miles, and by the dryness 
 without and the mud within the walls, it was contrived 
 for a monopoly by the besieged. 
 
 " I cantered in at the unhinged gate, and roared 
 out ' casa !' ' cameriere !' ' botega !' till I was fright- 
 ened at my own voice. 
 
 " No answer. I threw my bridle over a projection 
 of the stone steps, and mounted, from an empty 
 stable which occupied the ground floor (Italian 
 fashion), to the second story, which seemed equally 
 uninhabited. Here were tables, however, and wooden 
 settees, and dirty platters — the first signs of life. On 
 the hearth was an iron pot and a pair of tongs, and 
 with these two musical instruments I played a tune 
 which I was sure would find ears, if ears there were 
 on the premises. And presently a heavy foot was 
 heard on the stair above, and with a sonorous yawn 
 descended mine host — dirty and stolid — a goodly pat- 
 tern of the ' fat weed on Lethe's wharf,' as you would 
 meet in a century. He had been taking his siesta, 
 and his wife had had a colpo di sole, and was confined 
 helplessly to her bed. The man John was out tend- 
 i ing sheep, and he, the host, was vicariously, cook, 
 j waiter, and chambermaid. What might be the pleas- 
 ! ure of il signore ? 
 
 " My pleasure was, first, to see the fire kindled and 
 the pot put over, and then to fall into a brown 
 : study. 
 
 " Two fine ladies with the cholera — two days' jour- 
 I ney from a physician — a fat old Italian landlord for 
 j nurse and sole counsellor — nobody who could under- 
 i stand a word they uttered, except myself, and not a 
 ' drug nor a ministering petticoat within available 
 ■ limits ! Then the doors of the chambers were with- 
 : out latches or hinges, and the little bed in each great 
 [ room was the one article of furniture, and the house 
 j was so still in the midst of that great waste, that all 
 ! sounds and movements whatever, must be of common 
 cognisance ! Should I be discharging my duty to 
 ladies under my care to leave them to this dirty old 
 j man ? Should I offer my own attendance as constant 
 ! nurse, and would the service be accepted ? How, in 
 j the name of Robinson Crusoe, were these delicate 
 damsels to be ' done for' ? 
 
 " As a matter of economy in dominos, as well as to 
 have something Italian to bring home, I had bought at 
 Naples the costume of a sister of charity, and in it I 
 had done all my masquerading for three carnivals. It 
 , was among my baggage, and it occurred to me 
 whether I had not better take the landlord into my 
 confidence, and bribe him to wait upon the ladies, dis- 
 guised in coif and petticoat. No — for he had a mus- 
 tache, and spoke nothing but Italian. Should 1 do it 
 myself? 
 
 "I paced up and down the stone floor in an agony 
 of dilemma. 
 
 " In the course of half an hour I had made up my 
 mind. I called to Boniface, who was watching the 
 j boiling pot, and made a clean breast to him of my 
 impending distresses, aiding his comprehension by 
 such eye-water as landlords require. He readily un- 
 dertook the necessary lies, brought out his store of 
 brandy, added a second bed to one of the apartments, 
 and promised faithfully to bear my sex in mind, and 
 treat me with the reverence due my cross and rosary. 
 I then tore out a leaf of the grocery book, and wrote 
 with my pencil a note to this effect, to be delivered to 
 the ladies on their arrival : — 
 
 "'Dear Miss Blidgims : Feeling quite indispo- 
 sed myself, apd being firmly persuaded that we are 
 three cases of cholera, I have taken advantage of a 
 return calesino to hurry on to Modena for medical 
 advice. The vehicle I take, brought hither a sister of 
 charity, who assures me she will wait on you, even in 
 the most malignant stage of your disease. She is 
 collecting funds for an hospital, and will receive com- 
 pensation for her services in the form of a donation to 
 this object. I shnll send you a physician by express 
 
THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 
 
 355 
 
 from Modena, where it is still possible we may meet. 
 With prayers, <fcc, &c. 
 
 " ' Yours very devotedly, " ' F. 
 
 " ' P. S. Sister Benedetta understands French when 
 spoken, though she speaks only Italian.' 
 
 " The delivery of this was subject, of course, to 
 the condition of the ladies when they should arrive, 
 though I had a presentiment they were in for a serious 
 business. 
 
 "And, true to my boding, they did arrive, exceed- 
 ingly ill. An hour earlier than I had looked for him, 
 the vetturino came up with foaming horses at a tug- 
 ging trot, frightened half out of his senses. The 
 ladies were dying, he swore by all the saints, before he 
 dismounted. He tore open the carriage door, shouted 
 for il sig nore and the landlord, and had carried both 
 the groaning girls up stairs in his arms, before fat 
 Boniface, who had been killing a sheep in the stable, 
 could wash his hands and come out to him. To his 
 violent indignation, the landlord's first care was to 
 unstrap the baggage and take off my portmanteau, 
 condescending to give him neither why nor wherefore, 
 and as it mounted the stairs on the broad shoulders of 
 my faithful ally, it was followed by a string of oaths 
 such as can rattle off from nothing but the voluble 
 tongue of an Italian. 
 
 " I immediately despatched the note by the host, 
 requesting him to come back and 'do my dress,' and 
 in half an hour sister Benedetta's troublesome toilet 
 was achieved, and my old Abigail walked around me, 
 rubbing his hands, and swore I was a 'meraviglia di 
 belleza.' The lower part of my face was covered by 
 the linen coif, and the forehead was almost completely 
 concealed in the plain put-away of a ' false front ;' 
 and, unless the Blidgimses had reconnoitred my nose 
 and eyes very carefully, I was sure of my disguise. 
 The improvements in my figure were, unluckily, 
 fixtures in the dress, for it was very hot ; but by the 
 landlord's account they were very becoming. Do you 
 believe the old dog tried to kiss me? 
 
 " The groans of Ninny, meantime, resounded 
 through the house, for, as I expected, she had the 
 worst of it. Her exclamations of pain were broken 
 up, I could also hear, by sentences in a sort of spiteful 
 monotone, answered in regular ' humphs !' by Crin- 
 ny — Crinny never talking except to astonish, and being 
 as habitually crisp to her half-witted sister as she was 
 fluent to those who were capable of surprise. Fear- 
 ing that some disapprobation of myself might find its 
 way to Ninny's lips, and for several other reasons 
 which occurred to me, 1 thought it best to give the 
 ladies another half hour to themselves, and by way of 
 testing my incognito, bustled about in the presence of 
 the vetturino, warming oil and mixing brandies-and- 
 water, and getting used to the suffocation of my petti- 
 coats — for you have no idea how intolerably hot they 
 are, with trowsers under. 
 
 " Quite assured, at last, I knocked at the door. 
 "'That's his nun!' said Ninny, after listening an 
 instant. 
 
 "'Come in! — that is to say, cntrezV feebly mur- 
 mured Crinny. 
 
 " They were both in bed, rolled up like pocket- 
 handkerchiefs ; but Ninny had found strength to band- 
 box her wig and abbo, and array herself in a nightcap 
 with an exceedingly broad frill. But 1 must not 
 trench upon the 'secrets of the prison-house.' You 
 are a baehelor, and the Blidgimses are still in a ' world 
 of hope.' 
 
 " 1 walked in and leaned over each of them, and 
 whispered a benedicite, felt their pulses, and made 
 signs that I understood their complaints and they need 
 not trouble themselves to explain ; and forthwith I com- 
 menced operations by giving them their grog (which 
 I bey swallowed without making farrs, by-the-by), and, 
 
 as they relaxed their postures a little, I got one foot at 
 a time hung over to me from the side of the bed into 
 the pail of hot water, and set them to rubbing them- 
 selves with the warm oil, while I vigorously bathed 
 their extremities. Crinny, as I very well knew, had 
 but five-and-twenty words of French, just sufficient to 
 hint at her wants, and Ninny spoke only such English 
 as Heaven pleased, so I played the ministering angel 
 in safe silence — listening to my praises, however, for I 
 handled Ninny's irregular doigts du pied with a ten- 
 derness that pleased her. 
 
 "Well — you know what the cholera is. I knew 
 that at the Hotel Dieu at Paris, women who had not 
 been intemperate were oftenest cured by whiskey 
 punches, and as brandy toddies were the nearest ap- 
 proach of which the resources of the place admitted, 
 I plied my patients with brandy toddy. In the weak 
 I state of their stomachs, it produced, of course, a de- 
 lirious intoxication, and as I began very early in the 
 i morning, there were no lucid intervals in which my 
 incognito might be endangered. My ministrations 
 ; were, consequently, very much facilitatsd, and after 
 : the second day (when I really thought the poor girls 
 would die), we fell into a very regular course of hos- 
 pital life, and for one, I found it very entertaining. 
 Quite impressed with the idea that sister Bellidettor 
 i (as Ninny called me) understood not a word of Eng- 
 lish, they discoursed to please themselves, and I was 
 ' obliged to get a book, to excuse, even to their tipsy 
 j comprehension, my outbreaks of laughter. Crinny 
 spouted poetry and sobbed about Washington Irving, 
 | who, she thought, should have been her lover, and 
 j Ninny sat up in bed, and, with a small glass she had 
 | in the back of a hair-brush, tried on her abbo at every 
 | possible angle, always ending by making signs to sister 
 ! Bellidettor to come and comb her hair ! There was a 
 long, slender, mustache remaining on the back of the 
 bald crown, and after putting this into my hand, with 
 the hair-brush, she sat with a smile of delight till she 
 found my brushing did not come round to the front ! 
 
 '"Why don't you brush this lock?' she cried, 
 'this — and this — and this!' making passes from her 
 shining skull down to her waist, as if, in every one, she 
 had a handful of hair ! And so, for an hour together, 
 I threaded these imaginary locks, beginning where 
 they were rooted ' long time ago,' and passing the 
 brush off to the length of my arm — the cranium, 
 when I had done, looking like a balloon of shot silk, 
 its smooth surface was so purpled with the friction of 
 the bristles. Poor Ninny ! She has great temptation 
 to tipple, I think — that is, ' if Macassar won't bring 
 back the lost chevelure ." 
 
 " About the fifth day, the ladies began to show 
 signs of convalescence, and it became necessary to 
 reduce their potations. Of course they grew less 
 entertaining, and 1 was obliged to be much more on 
 my guard. Crinny fell from her inspiration, and 
 Ninny from her complacency, and they came down to 
 their previous condition of damaged spinsters, prim 
 and peevish. 'Needs must' that 1 should ' play out 
 the play,' however, and I abated none of my petits 
 soins for their comfort, laying out very large anticipa- 
 tions of their grateful acknowledgments lor my dra- 
 matic chivalry, devotion, and delicacy !" 
 
 " Well— they are ungrateful !" said I, interrupting 
 
 F for the first time in his story. 
 
 " Now, are not they ? They should at least, since 
 they denv me my honors, pay me for my services as 
 maid-of-all-work, nurse, hair-dresser, and apothecary ! 
 Well, if I hear of their abusing me again, I'll send in 
 my bills. Wouldn't you ? But, to wind up this long 
 story. 
 
 " [ thought that perhaps there might be some little 
 circumstances connected with my attentions which 
 would look best at a distance, and that it would be 
 more delicate to go on and take leave at Modena as 
 
356 
 
 THOSE UNGRATEFUL BLIDGIMSES. 
 
 sister Benedetfa, and rejoin them the next morning in 
 hose and doublet as before — reserving to some future 
 period the clearing up of my apparently recreant de- 
 sertion. On the seventh morning, therefore, I in- 
 structed old Giuseppe, the landlord, to send in his bill 
 to the ladies while I was dressing, and give notice to 
 the vetturino that he was to take the holy sister to 
 Modena in the place of il signore, who had gone on 
 before. 
 
 * Crinny and Ninny were their own reciprocal 
 dressing-maids, but Crinny's fingers had weakened by 
 sickness much more than hor sister's waist had dimin- 
 ished, and, in the midst of shaving, in my own room, 
 I was called to ' finish doing' Ninny, who backed up 
 to me with her mouth full of pins, and the breath, for 
 the time being, quite expelled from her body. As I 
 was straining, very red in the face, at the critical hook, 
 Giuseppe knocked at the door, with the bill, and the 
 lack of an interpreter to dispute the charges, brought 
 up the memory of the supposed ' absquatulator' with 
 no very grateful odor. Before I could finish Miss 
 Ninny and get out of the room, I heard myself 
 charged with more abominations, mental and personal, 
 than the monster that would have made the fortune of 
 Trinculo. Crinny counted down half the money, and 
 attempted, by very expressive signs, to impress upon 
 Giuseppe that it was enough ; but the oiiy palm of 
 the old publican was patiently held out for more, and 
 she at last paid the full demand, fairly crying with vex- 
 ation. 
 
 "Quite sick of the new and divers functions to 
 which I had been serving an apprenticeship in my 
 black petticoat, I took my place in the vettura, and 
 dropped veil, to be sulky in one lump as far as Mode- 
 na. I would willingly have stopped my ears, but after 
 wearing out their indignation at the unabated charges 
 of old Giuseppe, the ladies took up the subject of the 
 expected donation to the charity-fund of sister Bene- 
 detta, and their expedients to get rid of it occupied 
 (very amusingly to me) the greater part of a day's 
 travel. They made up their minds at last, that half a 
 dollar would be as much as I could expect for my 
 week's attendance, and Crinny requested that she 
 should not be interrupted while she thought out the 
 French for saying as much when we should come to 
 the parting. 
 
 " I was sitting quietly in the corner of the vellura, 
 the next day, felicitating myself on the success of my 
 masquerade, when we suddenly came to a halt at the 
 
 gate of Modena, and the doganiere put his mustache 
 in at the window, with '■passaporti, signore !' 
 
 "Murder! thought I — here's a difficulty I never 
 provided for! 
 
 " The ladies handed out their papers, and I thrust 
 my hand through the slit in the side of my dress and 
 pulled mine from my pocket. As of course you 
 know, it is the business of this gatekeeper to compare 
 every traveller with the description given of him in 
 his passport. He read those of the Blidgimses and 
 looked at them — all right. I sat still while he opened 
 mine, thinking it possible he might not care to read 
 the description of a sister of charity. But to my dis- 
 may he did — and opened his eyes, and looked again 
 into the carriage. 
 
 "'Aspetta, caroV said I, for I saw it was of no use. 
 I gathered up my bombazine and stepped out into the 
 road. There were a dozen soldiers and two or three 
 loungers sitting una long bench in the shade of the gate- 
 way. The officer read through the description once 
 more, and then turned to me with the look of a func- 
 tionary who has detected a culprit. I began to pull up 
 my petticoat. The soldiers took their pipes out of their 
 mouths and uttered the Italian 'keck' of surprise. 
 When I had got as far as the knee, however, I came 
 to the rolled-up trowsers, and the officer joined in the 
 sudden uproar of laughter. I pulled my black petti- 
 coat over my head, and stood in my waistcoat and 
 shirt-sleeves, and bowed to the merry official. The 
 Blidgimses, to my surprise, uttered no exclamation, 
 but I had forgotten my coif. When that was unpin- 
 ned, and my whiskers came to light, their screams 
 became alarming. The vetturino ran for water, the 
 soldiers started to their feet, and in the midst of the 
 excitement, I ordered down my baggage and resumed 
 my coat and cap, and repacked under lock and key 
 the sister Benedetta. And not quite ready to en- 
 counter the Blidgimses, I walked on to the hotel and 
 left the vetturino to bring on the ladies at his leisure. 
 
 "Of course I had no control over accidents, and 
 this exposure was unlucky ; but if I had had time to 
 let myself down softly on the subject, don't you see it 
 would have been quite a different sort of an affair? I 
 parted company from the old girls at Modena, how- 
 ever, and they were obliged to hire a man-servant who 
 spoke English and Italian, and probably the expense 
 of that was added to my iniquities. Anyhow, abusing 
 me this way is very ungrateful of these Blidgimses. 
 Now, isn't it ?" 
 
DASHES AT LIFE 
 
 WITH A FREE PENCIL 
 
 PART II; 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, 
 
 LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following passages are extracts from the 
 prefaces to the English editions of the two works 
 included in this book — " Inklings of Adventure" 
 and " Loiterings of Travel :" — 
 
 It will be seen, by many marks in the narratives 
 which follow, that they are not the work of ima- 
 gination. The dramas of real life are seldom well 
 wound up, and the imperfectness of plot which 
 might be objected to them as tales, will prove to 
 the observant reader that they are drawn more 
 from memory than fancy. It is because they are 
 thus imperfect in dramatic accomplishment, that I 
 have called them by the name under which they 
 have been introduced. They are rather intima- 
 tions of what seemed to lead to a romantic termi- 
 nation than complete romances — in short, they are 
 Inklings of Adventure. The adventures were jotted 
 down — the events recorded — the poems indited, 
 and the letters despatched, while the thought was 
 freshly born, or the incident freshly heard or re- 
 membered — at the first place which afforded the 
 leisure — in short, during Loiterings of Travel. 
 
 For the living portraitures of the book I have a 
 word to say. That sketches of the whim of the 
 hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral 
 trifles, which, slight as they are, constitute in a 
 great measure its " form and pressure" — that these, 
 and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our 
 time, are popular and amusing, I have the most 
 weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell. 
 " Are they innocent ?" is the next question. And 
 to this I know no more discreet answer than that 
 mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has 
 been said that sketches of contemporary society 
 require little talent, and belong to an inferior or- 
 der of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be well 
 done to attract notice at all ; and if true and graphic, 
 
 they are not only excellent material for future 
 biographers, but to all who live out of the magic 
 circles of fashion and genius, they are more than 
 amusing — they are instructive. To such persons, 
 living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much 
 characters of history, and society in cities is as 
 much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a 
 century had intervened. The critic who finds 
 these matters " stale and unprofitable," lives in the 
 circles described, and the pictures drawn at his 
 elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance ; but 
 the same critic woidd delight in a familiar sketch 
 of a supper with " my lord of Leicester" in Eliz- 
 abeth's time, of an evening with Raleigh and 
 Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a 
 description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of 
 Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of 
 admiring nobles. I have not named in the same 
 sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge 
 of Shakspere's person and manners. What 
 would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be 
 worth now — if it were nothing but how he gave 
 the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap ? 
 
 How far sketches of the living are a breach of 
 courtesy committed by the author toward the per- 
 sons described, depends, of course, on the temper 
 in which they are done. To select a subject for 
 complimentary description is to pay the most un- 
 doubted tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have 
 observed, most distinguished persons sympathize 
 with the public interest in them and their belong- 
 ings, and are willing to have their portraits drawn, 
 either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer 
 them the compliment. It would be ungracious to 
 the admiring world if they were not. 
 
 The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid 
 to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound, 
 like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable 
 
360 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invis- 
 ible tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the 
 world. 
 
 For myself, I am free to confess that no age 
 interests me like the present ; that no pictures of 
 society since the world began, are half so enter- 
 taining to me as those of English society in our 
 day; and that, whatever comparison the living 
 great men of England may sustain with those of 
 other days, there is no doubt in my mind that Eng- 
 lish social life, at the present moment, is at a high- 
 er pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was 
 ever here or elsewhere since the world began — 
 consequently it, and all who form and figure in it, 
 are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity 
 and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady 
 Bellair of D'Israeli's last romance, are, to my 
 mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most 
 entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing ; 
 and D'Israeli, by the way, is the only English au- 
 thor who seems to have the power of enlarging 
 his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the 
 times he lives in. His novels are far more popu- 
 lar in America than in England, because the At- 
 
 lantic is to us a century. We picture to ourselves 
 England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves 
 England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote 
 of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford 
 or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is 
 like the distance of time ; and while all that is 
 minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater 
 lights of the age and the prominent features of so- 
 ciety stand out apart, and we judge of them like 
 posterity. Much as I have myself lived in Eng- 
 land, I have never been able to remove this long 
 perspective from between my eye and the great men 
 of whom I read and thought on the other side of 
 the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same 
 room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps 
 as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough ; and 
 I sit down afterward to describe how he looked, 
 with the eagerness with which I should commu- 
 nicate to my friends some disinterred description 
 of these renowned heroes by a contemporary 
 writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in 
 short, and would show rne his magic mirror, I 
 should as soon call up Moore as Dryden — Words- 
 worth or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton. 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 PEDLAR KARL. 
 
 " Which manner of digression, however some dislike as frivo- 
 lous and impertinent, yet ( am of Beroaldus his opinion, such di- 
 gressions do mightily delight and refresh a weary reader : they are 
 like *awce to a bad stomach, and I therefore do most willingly use 
 them."— Burton. 
 
 " Bienheureuses les imparfaites ; a elles appartient le royaume 
 de l'amour." — L' Evangilc des Femmes. 
 
 I am not sure whether Lebanon Springs, the scene 
 of a romantic story I am about to tell, belong to New 
 York or Massachusetts. It is not very important, to 
 be sure, in a country where people take Vermont and 
 Patagonia to be neighboring states, but I have a natu- 
 ral looseness in geography which I take pains to mor- 
 tify by exposure. Very odd that I should not remem- 
 ber more of the spot where I took my first lessons in 
 philandering ! — where I first saw you, brightest and 
 most beautiful A. D. (not Anno Domini)., in your white 
 morning-frocks and black French aprons ! 
 
 Lebanon Springs are the rage about once in three 
 years. I must let you into the secret of these things, 
 gentle reader, for perhaps I am the only individual 
 existing who has penetrated the mysteries of the four 
 dynasties of American fashion. In the fourteen mil- 
 lions of inhabitants in the United States, there are 
 precisely four authenticated and undisputed aristo- 
 cratic families. There is one in Boston, one in New 
 York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. By 
 a blessed Providence they are not all in one state, or 
 we should have a civil war and a monarchy in no time. 
 With two hundred miles' interval between them, they 
 agree passably, and generally meet at one or another 
 of the three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston, or 
 Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as the pro- 
 cess of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. You 
 must explain it by some theory of homoeopathy or 
 magnetism. As it is not known till the moment they 
 arrive, there is of course great excitement among the 
 hotel-keepers in these different parts of the country, 
 and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabit- 
 ants one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many 
 score. The vast and solitary temples of Paestum are 
 gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment. 
 
 As I make a point of dawdling away July and Au- 
 gust in this locomotive metropolis of pleasure, and 
 rather prefer Lebanon, it is always agreeable to me to 
 hear that the nucleus is formed in that valley of hem- 
 locks. Not for its scenery, for really, my dear east- 
 
 ern-hemispherian ! you that are accustomed to what 
 is called nature in England (to wit, a soft park, with a 
 gray ruin in the midst), have little idea how wearily 
 upon heart and mind presses a waste wilderness of 
 mere forest and water, without stone or story. Trees 
 in England have characters and tongues ; if you see a 
 fine one, you know whose father planted it, and for 
 whose pleasure it was designed, and about what sum 
 the man must possess to afford to let it stand. They 
 are statistics, as it were — so many trees, ergo so many 
 owners so rich. In America, on the contrary, trees 
 grow and waters run, as the stars shine, quite unmean- 
 ingly ; there may be ten thousand princely elms, and 
 not a man within a hundred miles worth five pounds 
 five. You ask, in England, who has the privilege of 
 this water ? or you say of an oak, that it stood in such 
 a man's time : but with us, water is an element un- 
 claimed and unrented, and a tree dabbles in the clouds 
 as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul 
 or responsibility. 
 
 If Lebanon had a history, however, it would have 
 been a spot for a pilgrimage, for its natural beauty. 
 It is shaped like a lotus, with one leaf laid back by 
 the wind. It is a great green cup, with a scoop for a 
 drinking-place. As you walk in the long porticoes of 
 the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a 
 leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine- 
 tops, and the eagles sail across from horizon to hori- 
 zon, without lifting their wings, as if you saw them 
 from the bottom of a well. People born there think 
 the world about two miles square, and hilly. 
 
 The principal charm of Lebanon to me is the vil- 
 lage of " shakers," lyiug in a valley about three miles 
 of?. As Glaucus wondered at the inert tortoise of 
 Pompeii, and loved it for its antipodal contrast to him- 
 self, so do I affection (a French verb that I beg leave 
 to introduce to the English language) the shaking 
 quakers. That two thousand men could be found in 
 the New World, who would embrace a religion en- 
 joining a frozen and unsympathetic intercourse with 
 the diviner sex. and that an equal number of females 
 could be induced to live in the same community, with- 
 out locks or walls, in the cold and rigid observance 
 of a creed of celibacy, is to me an inexplicable and 
 grave wonder. My delight is to get into my stanhope 
 after breakfast, and drive over and spend the forenooc 
 in contemplating them at their work in the fields 
 They have a peculiar and most expressive phvsiogno 
 
362 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, 
 
 my ; the women are pale, or of a wintry redness in 
 the cheek, and are all attenuated and spare. Gravity, 
 deep and habitual, broods in every line of their thin 
 faces. They go out to their labor in company with 
 those serious men, and are never seen to smile ; their 
 eyes are all hard and stony, their gait is precise and 
 stiff, their voices are of a croaking hoarseness, and na- 
 ture seems dead in them. I would bake you such men 
 and women in a brick-kiln. 
 
 Do they think the world is coming to an end ? Are 
 there to be no more children ? Is Cupid to be thrown 
 out of business, like a coach proprietor on a railroad ? 
 What can the shakers mean, I should be pleased to 
 know ? 
 
 The oddity is that most of them are young. Men 
 of from twenty to thirty, and women from sixteen to 
 twenty-five, and often, spite of their unbecoming dress, 
 good-looking and shapely, meet you at every step. In- 
 dustrious, frugal, and self-denying, they certainly are, 
 and there is every appearance that their tenets of 
 difficult abstinence are kept to the letter. There is 
 little temptation beyond principle to remain, and they 
 are free to go and come as they list, yet there they 
 live on in peace and unrepining industry, and a more 
 thriving community does not exist in the republic. 
 Many a time have I driven over on a Sunday, and 
 watched those solemn virgins dropping in one after 
 another to the church ; and when the fine-limbed and 
 russet-faced brotherhood were swimming round the 
 floor in their fanatical dance, I have watched their 
 countenances for some look of preference, some be- 
 trayal of an ill-suppressed impulse, till my eyes ached 
 again. I have selected the youngest and fairest, and 
 have not lost sight of her for two hours, and she 
 might have been made of cheese-parings for any trace 
 of emotion. There is food for speculation in it. Can 
 we do without matrimony ? Can we "strike," and be 
 independent of these dear delightful tyrants, for whom 
 we " live and move and have our being ?" Will it 
 ever be no blot on our escutcheon to have attained 
 thirty-five as an unfructifying unit ? Is that fearful 
 campaign, with all its embarrassments and awkward- 
 nesses, and inquisitions into your money and morals, 
 its bullyings and backings-out — is it inevitable ? 
 
 Lebanon has one other charm. Within a morning 
 drive of the springs lies the fairest village it has ever 
 been my lot to see. It is English in its character, 
 except that there is really nothing in this country 
 so perfect of its kind. There are many towns in the 
 United States more picturesquely situated, but this, 
 before I had been abroad, always seemed to me the 
 very ideal of English rural scenery, and the kind of 
 place to set apart for either love or death — for one's 
 honeymoon or burial — the two periods of life which 
 I have always hoped would find me in the loveliest 
 spot of nature. Stockbridge lies in a broad sunny 
 valley, with mountains at exactly the right distance, 
 and a river in its bosom that is as delicate in its wind- 
 ings, and as suited to the charms it wanders among, 
 as a vein in the transparent neck of beauty. I am 
 not going into a regular description, but I have car- 
 ried myself back to Lebanon ; and the remembrance 
 of the leafy mornings of summer in which I have 
 driven to that fair earthly paradise, and loitered under 
 its elms, imagining myself amid the scenes of song 
 and story in distant England, has a charm for me now. 
 I have seen the mother-land ; I have rambled through 
 park, woodland, and village, wherever the name was 
 old and the scene lovely, and it pleases me to go back 
 to my dreaming days and compare the reality with the 
 anticipation. Most small towns in America have traces 
 of newness about them. The stumps of a clearing, or 
 freshly-boarded barns — something that is the antipodes 
 of romance — meets your eye from every aspect. Stock- 
 bridge, on the contrary, is an old town, and the houses 
 
 are of a rural structure; the fields look soft and genial 
 the grass is swardlike, the bridges picturesque, the 
 hedges old, and the elms, nowhere so many and so 
 luxuriant, are full-grown and majestic. The village 
 is embowered in foliage. 
 
 Greatest attraction of all, the authoress of " Redwood" 
 and " Hope Leslie," a novelist of whom America has 
 the good sense to be proud, is the Miss Mitford of Stock- 
 bridge. A man, though a distinguished one, may have 
 little influence on the town he lives in, but a remarka- 
 ble woman is the invariable cynosure of a community, 
 and irradiates it all. I think I could divine the presence 
 of one almost by the growing of the trees and flowers. 
 " Our Village" does not look like other villages. 
 
 II. 
 
 You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell. 
 
 dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of 
 
 (perhaps you don't care about knowing exactly when 
 it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of 
 dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on 
 faster than I). The Springs were thronged. The 
 president's lady was there (this was under our admin- 
 istration, the Adams'), and all the four cliques spoken 
 of above were amicably united — each other's beaux 
 dancing with each other's belles, and so on. If I were 
 writing merely for American eyes, I should digress 
 once more to describe the distinctive characters of the 
 south, north, and central representations of beauty; 
 but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I 
 may say, in passing, that the Boston belles were a 
 V Anglaise, rosy and riantes ; the New-Yorkers, like 
 Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy ; and the Balti- 
 moreans (and so south), like Ionians or Romans, in- 
 dolent, passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men, 
 women, and pine-apples, I am inclined to think, flour- 
 ish with a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes. 
 
 The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it 
 was — for the parties concerned had the management 
 of their own affairs ; that is, they who had hearts to 
 sell made the bargain for themselves (this was the 
 greater number), and they who disposed of this com- 
 modity gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant 
 of the world, made the transfer in the same manner, in 
 person. This is your true republic. The trading in 
 affections by reference — the applying to an old and 
 selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenu- 
 ous one — the swearing to your rents, and not to your 
 faithful passion — to your settlements, and not your 
 constancy — the cold distance between yourself and 
 the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till 
 the purchase-money is secured — and the hasty mar- 
 riage and sudden abandonment of a nature thus 
 chilled and put on its guard, to a freedom with one 
 almost a stranger, that can not but seem licentious, 
 and can not but break down that sense of propriety in 
 which modesty is most strongly intrenched — this 
 seems to me the one evil of your old worm-eaten mon- 
 archies this side the water, which touches the essen- 
 tial happiness of the well-bred individual. Taxation 
 and oppression are but things he reads of in the morn- 
 ing paper. 
 
 This freedom of intercourse between unmarried 
 people has a single disadvantage — one gets so desper- 
 ately soon to the end of the chapter ! There shall be 
 two hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given 
 season, and, by the difference in taste so wisely ar- 
 ranged by Providence, there will scarcely be, of course, 
 more than four in that number whom any one gentle- 
 man at all difficult will find within the range "of his 
 beau ideal. With these four he may converse freely 
 twelve hours in the day — more, if he particularly de- 
 sires it. They may ride together, drive together, ram- 
 ble together, sing together, be together from morning 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 363 
 
 till night, and at the end of a month passed in this way, 
 if he escape a committal, as is possible, he will know 
 all that are agreeable, in one-large circle, at least, as well 
 as he knows his sisters — a state of things that is very 
 likely to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere 
 dearth of amusement. I have imagined, however, 
 the case of an unmarrying idle man, a character too 
 rare as yet in America to affect the general question. 
 People marry as they die in that country — when their 
 time come. We must all marry is as much an axiom 
 is we must all die, and eke as melancholy. 
 
 Shall we go on with the story ? I had escaped for 
 wo blessed weeks, and was congratulating the sus- 
 ceptible gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we 
 should never be in love with less than the whole sex 
 
 again, when a German Baron Von arrived at 
 
 the Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen, 
 transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly 
 dependant, so delicate, so childlike, that attention to 
 her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as 
 naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The 
 only womanly trait about her was her voice, which 
 was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gen- 
 tle, so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melan- 
 choly calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I 
 turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she 
 was not the same — as if some impassioned and elo- 
 quent woman had taken unaware the place of the 
 simple and petted child. 
 
 I am inclined to think there is a particular tender- 
 ness in the human breast for lame women. Any 
 other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous ; but 
 lameness (the devil's defect) is "the devil." I picture 
 to myself, to my own eye, now — pacing those rickety 
 colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging 
 heavily, and with the dependance inseparable from 
 her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was 
 the moon of the Rhine to her, full of thrilling and un- j 
 earthly influences) rode solemnly up above the moun- ! 
 tain-tops. And that strange voice filling like a flute | 
 with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregu- 
 lar pressure of the small wrist in ber forgotten lame- 
 ness, and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling 
 as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her 
 delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that ! 
 dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and 
 womanly passion, of dependance and superiority, of 
 reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confi- 
 dence on every other — if I had not a story to tell, I 
 could prate of those June nights and their witcheries 
 till you would think 
 
 " Tutti gli alberi del mondo 
 Fossero penne," 
 
 and myself " bitten by the dipsas." 
 
 We were walking one night late in the gallery run- 
 ning around the second story of the hotel. There was 
 a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened 
 somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and 
 mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added 
 to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my 
 bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta 
 that I loved her. 
 
 The building stands against the side of a steep moun- 
 tain high up above the valley, and the pines and hem- 
 locks at that time hung in their primeval blackness 
 almost over the roof. As the most difficult and em- 
 barrassed sentence of which I had ever been delivered 
 died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on 
 my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my 
 9ide, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the 
 woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song. 
 It produced an instant and startling effect on my com- 
 panion. With the first word she quickly withdrew 
 her arm ; and, after a moment's pause, listening with 
 
 her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense ea- 
 gerness, she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade, 
 and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of the for- 
 est. The voice ceased, and she started back, and laid 
 her hand hastily upon my arm. 
 
 " I must go," she said, in a voice of hurried feeling ; 
 " if you are generous, stay here and await me !" and in 
 another moment she sprang along the bridge connect- 
 ing the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and 
 was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks. 
 
 " I have made a declaration," thought I, "just five 
 minutes too soon." 
 
 I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade, 
 and picked up the fragments of my dream with what 
 philosophy I might. By the time Meeta returned — 
 perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure 
 by her feelings or mine — I had hatched up a very pret- 
 ty and heroical magnanimity. She would have spoken, 
 but was breathless. 
 
 " Explain nothing," I said, taking her arm within 
 mine, " and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you 
 better than by silence, command me entirely. I live 
 but for your happiness — even," I added after a pause, 
 " though it spring from another." 
 
 We were at her chamber-door. She pressed my 
 hand with a strength of which I did not think those 
 small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me, 
 I am free to confess, less resigned than you would sup- 
 pose from my last speech. I had done the dramatic 
 thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry 
 Cornwall ! but it was not in a play. I remained killed 
 after the audience was gone. 
 
 III. 
 
 The next day a new character appeared on the 
 stage. 
 
 " Such a handsome pedlar !" said magnificent Hel- 
 en to me, as I gave my horse to the groom after 
 
 a ride in search of hellebore, and joined the prome- 
 nade at the well : " and what do you think 1 he sells 
 only by raffle ! It's so nice ! All sorts of Berlin iron 
 ornaments, and everything German and sweet ; and 
 the pedlar's smile's worth more than the prizes ; and 
 such a mustache ! See ! there he is ! — and now, if 
 he has sold all his tickets — will you come, Master 
 Gravity ?" 
 
 " I hear a voice you can not hear," thought I, as I 
 gave the beauty my arm, and joined a crowd of people 
 gathered about a pedlar's box in the centre of the 
 parterre. 
 
 The itinerant vender spread his wares in the midst 
 of the gay assemblage, and the raffle went on. He 
 was excessively handsome. A head of the sweet gen- 
 tleness of Raphael's, with locks flowing to his shoul- 
 ders in the fashion of German students, a soft brown 
 mustache curving on a short Phidian upper lip, a 
 large blue eye expressive of enthusiasm rather than 
 passion, and features altogether purely intellectual — 
 formed a portrait of which even jealousy might con- 
 sole itself. Through all the disadvantages of a dress 
 suited to his apparent vocation, an eye the least on 
 the alert for a disguise would have penetrated his in 
 a moment. The gay and thoughtless crowd about 
 him, not accustomed to impostors who were more than 
 they pretended to be, trusted him for a pedlar, but 
 treated him with a respect far above his station msen- 
 
 Whatever his object was, so it were honorable, I 
 inly determined to give him all the assistance in my 
 power. A single glance at the face of Meeta, who 
 joined the circle as the prizes were drawn-a face so 
 changed since yesterday, so flushed with hope and 
 pleasure, and yet so saddened by doubt and fear, the 
 small lips compressed, the soft black eye kindled and 
 
364 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, 
 
 restless, and the red leaf on her cheek deepened to a 
 feverish beauty — left me no shadow of hesitation. I 
 exchanged a look with her that I intended should say 
 as much. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I know nothing that gives one such an elevated idea 
 of human nature (in one's own person) as helping 
 another man to a woman one loves. Oh last days of 
 minority or thereabout ! oh primal manhood ! oh 
 golden time, when we have let go all but the enthu- 
 siasm of the boy, and seized hold of all but the sel- 
 fishness of the man ! oh blessed interregnum of the 
 evil and stronger genius ! why can we not bottle up 
 thy hours like"the~wine of a better vintage, and enjoy 
 them in the parched world-weariness of age ? In the 
 tardy honeymoon of a bachelor (as mine will be, if it 
 come ever, alas !) with what joy of paradise should we 
 bring up from the cellars of the past a hamper of that 
 sunny Hippocrene ! 
 
 Pedlar Karl and "the gentleman in No. 10" would 
 have been suspected in any other country of conspira- 
 cy. (How odd, that the highest crime of a monarchy 
 — the attempt to supplant the existing ruler — becomes 
 in a republic a creditable profession ! You are a trai- 
 tor here, a politician there !) We sat together from 
 midnight onward, discoursing in low voices over sherry 
 and sandwiches; and in that crowded Babylon, his 
 entrances and exits required a very conspirator-like 
 management. Known as my friend, his trade and his 
 disguise were up. As a pedlar, wandering about 
 where he listed when not employed over his wares, his 
 interviews with Meeta were easily contrived, and his 
 lover's watch, gazing on her through the long hours 
 of the ball from the crowd of villagers at the windows, 
 hovering about her walks, and feeding his heart on 
 the many, many chance looks of fondness given him 
 every hour in that out-of-doors society, kept him com- 
 paratively happy. 
 
 ■ The baron looked hard at you to-day," said I, as 
 he closed the door in my little room, and sat down on 
 the bed. 
 
 44 Yes ; he takes an interest in me as a countryman, 
 but he does not know me. He is a dull observer, and 
 has seen me but once in Germany." 
 
 44 How, then, have you known Meeta so long ?" 
 
 44 I accompanied her brother home from the uni- 
 versity, when the baron was away, and for a long month 
 we were seldom parted. Riding, boating on the Rhine, 
 watching the sunset from the bartizan of the old castle- 
 towers, reading in the old library, rambling in the park 
 and forest — it was a heaven, my friend, than which I 
 can conceive none brighter." 
 
 44 And her brother?" 
 
 " Alas ! changed ! We were both boys then, and a 
 brother is slow to believe his sister's beauty dangerous. 
 He was the first to shut the doors against me, when 
 he heard that the poor student had dared to love his 
 highborn Meeta." 
 
 Karl covered his eyes with his hand, and brooded 
 for a while in silence on the remembrances he had 
 awakened. 
 
 " Do you think the baron came to America pur- 
 posely to avoid you ?" 
 
 " Partly, I have no doubt, for I entered the castle 
 one night in my despair, when I had been forbidden 
 entrance, and he found me at her feet in the old cor- 
 ridor. It was the only time he ever saw me, if, in- 
 deed, he saw me at all in the darkness : and he imme- 
 diately hastened his preparations for a long-contem- 
 plated journey, 1 knew not whither." 
 
 44 Did you follow him soon ?" 
 
 44 No, for my heart was crushed at first, and I de- 
 spaired. The possibility of following them in my 
 
 wretched poverty did not even occur to me for 
 months." 
 
 * 4 How did you track them hither, of all places in 
 the world ?" 
 
 44 1 sought them first in Italy. It is easy on the 
 continent to find out where persons are not, and after 
 two years' wanderings, I heard of them in Paris. 
 They had just sailed for America. I followed ; but 
 in a country where there are no passports, and no 
 espionage, it is difficult to trace the traveller. It was 
 probable only that they would be at a place of general 
 resort, and I came here with no assurance but hope. 
 Thanks to God, the first sight that greeted my eyes 
 was my dear Meeta, whose irregular step, as she 
 walked back and forth with you in the gallery, enabled 
 me to recognise her in the darkness." 
 
 Who shall say the days of romance are over ? The 
 plot is not brought to the catastrophe, but we hope it 
 is near. 
 
 V. 
 
 My aunt, Isabella Slingsby (now in heaven, with 
 the 44 eleven thousand virgins," God rest her soul!), 
 was at this time, as at all others, under my respecta- 
 ble charge. She would have said I was under hers — 
 but it amounts to the same thing — we lived together 
 in peace and harmony. She said what she pleased, 
 for I loved her — and I did what I pleased, for she 
 loved me. When Karl told me that Meeta's principal 
 objection to an elopement was the want of a matron, 
 I shut the teeth of my resolution, as they say in Per- 
 sia, and inwardly vowed my unconscious aunt to this 
 exigency. You should have seen Miss Isabella Slings- 
 by to know what a desperate man may be brought ;,» 
 resolve on. 
 
 On a certain day, Count Von Raffle-off (as my witty 
 friend and ally, Tom Fane, was pleased to call the 
 handsome pedlar) departed with his pack and the 
 hearts of all the dressing-maids and some of their mis- 
 tresses, on his way to New York. 1 drove down the 
 road to take my leave of him out of sight, and give 
 him my last instructions.* 
 
 How to attack my aunt was a subject about which 
 I had many unsatisfactory thoughts. . If there was one 
 thing she disapproved of more than another, it was an 
 elopement ; and with what face to propose to her to 
 run away with a baron's only daughter, and leave her 
 in the hands of a pedlar, taking upon herself, as she 
 must, the whole sin and odium, was an enigma I ate, 
 drank, and slept upon, in vain. One thing at last be- 
 came very clear — she would do it for nobody but me. 
 Sequitur, I must play the lover myself. 
 
 I commenced with a fit of illness. What was the 
 matter ? For two days I was invisible. Dear Isabella ! 
 it was the first time I had ever drawn seriously on thy 
 fallow sympathies, and, how freely they flowed at my 
 affected sorrows, I shame to remember! Did ever 
 woman so weep ? Did ever woman so take antipathy 
 to man as she to that innocent old baron for his sup- 
 posed refusal of his daughter to Philip Slingsby ? This 
 revival of the remembrance shall not be in vain. The 
 mignonette and roses planted above thy grave, dearest 
 aunt, shall be weeded anew ! 
 
 Oh that long week of management and hypocrisy ! 
 The day came at last. 
 
 "Aunt Bel!" 
 
 44 What, Philip, dear ?" 
 
 44 1 think I feel better to-day." 
 
 44 Yes ?" 
 
 44 Yes. What say you to a drive ? There is the 
 stanhope." 
 
 44 My dear Phil, don't mention that horrid stanhope. 
 I am sure, if you valued my life — " 
 
 44 Precisely, aunt — (I had taken care to give her j 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 365 
 
 good fright the day before) — but Tom Fane has offered 
 me his ponies and Jersey wagon, and that, you know, 
 is the most quiet thing in the world, and holds four. 
 So, perhaps ehem ! you'll ask Meeta?" 
 
 »• Urn ! Why, you see, Philip—*' 
 
 I saw at once, that, if it got to an argument, I was 
 perdu. Miss Slingsby, though a sincere Christian, 
 never could keep her temper when she tried to reason. 
 I knelt down on her footstool, smoothed away the false 
 hair on her forehead, and kissed her. It was a fasci- 
 nating endearment of mine, that I only resorted to on 
 great emergencies. The hermit tooth in my aunt's 
 mouth became gradually visible, heralding what in 
 youth had been a smile ; and, as I assisted her in roll- 
 ing up her embroidery, she looked on me with an un- 
 suspecting affection that touched my heart. I made 
 a silent vow that if she survived the scrape into which 
 6he was being inveigled, I would be to her and her 
 dog Wbimsiculo (the latter my foe and my aversion) 
 the soul of exemplary kindness for the remainder of 
 their natural lives. 1 lay the unction to my soul that 
 this vow was kept. My aunt blessed me shortly before 
 Bhe was called to " walk in white" (she had hitherto 
 walked in yellow), and as it would have been unnatu- 
 ral in Whimsiculo to survive her, I considered his 
 44 natural life" as ended with hers, and had him peace- 
 fully strangled on the same day. He lies at her feet, 
 as usual, a delicate attention of which (I trust in Swe- 
 denborg) her spirit is aware. 
 
 With the exception of " Tom Thumb" and " Rat- 
 tler," who were of the same double-jointed family of 
 interminable wind and bottom, there was never per- 
 haps such a pair of goers as Tom Fane's ponies. My 
 aunt had a lurking hope, I believe, that the baron 
 would refuse Meeta permission to join us, but either 
 he did not think me a dangerous person (I have said 
 before he was a dull man), or he had no objection to 
 me as a son-in-law, which my aunt and myself (against 
 the world) would have thought the natural construc- 
 tion upon his indifference. He came to the end of the 
 colonnade to see us start, and as I eased the ribands 
 and let the ponies off like a shot from a crossbow, I 
 stole a look at Meeta. The color had fled from cheek 
 and lip, and the tears streamed over them like rain. 
 Aunt Bel was on the back seat, grace a Dieu ! 
 
 We met Tom at the foot of the hill, and I pulled 
 up. He was the best fellow, that Tom Fane! 
 
 44 Ease both the bearing reins," said I, " I am going 
 up the mountain." 
 
 44 The devil you are !" said Tom, doing my bidding, 
 however ; " you'll find the road to the shakers much 
 pleasanter. What an odd whim ! It's a perpendicu- 
 lar three miles, Miss Slingsby. I would as lief be 
 noisted up a well and let down again. Don't go that 
 way, Phil, unless you are going to run away with 
 
 Miss Von " 
 
 " Many a shaft at random sent," 
 
 thought I, and waving the tandem lash over the ears 
 of the ponies, I brought up the silk on the cheek of 
 their malaprop master, and spanked away up the hill, 
 leaving him in a range likely to get a fresh supply of 
 fuel by dinner-time. Tom was of a plethoric habit, 
 and if I had not thought he could afford to burst a 
 blood-vessel better than two lovers to break their hearts, 
 I should not have ventured on the bold measure of 
 borrowing his horses for an hour, and keeping them a 
 week. We have shaken hands upon it since, but it is 
 my private opinion that he has never forgiven me in 
 his heart. 
 
 As we wound slowly up the mountain, I gave Meeta 
 the reins, and jumped out to gather some wild flowers 
 for my aunt. Dear old soul ! the attention reconciled 
 her to what she considered a very unwarrantable ca- 
 price of mine. What I could wish to toil up that 
 
 steep mountain for ? Well ! the flowers are charming 
 in these high regions ! 
 
 " Don't you see my reason for coming, then, aunt 
 Bella?" 
 
 44 Was it for that, dear Philip ?" said she, putting 
 the wild flowers affectionately into her bosom, where 
 they bloomed like broidery on saffron tapestry ; " how 
 considerate of you !" And she drew her shawl around 
 her, and was at peace with all the world. So easily 
 are the old made happy by the young ! Reader, I 
 scent a moral in the air ! 
 
 We were at the top of the hill. If I was sane, my 
 aunt was probably thinking, I should turn here, and 
 go back. To descend the other side, and reascend 
 and descend again to the Springs, was hardly a sort of 
 thing one would do for pleasure. 
 
 " Here's a good place to turn, Philip," said she, as 
 we entered a smooth broad hollow on the top of the 
 i mountain. 
 
 I dashed through it as if the ponies were shod with 
 I talaria. My aunt said nothing, and luckily the road 
 < was very narrow for a mile, and she had a horror of a 
 ' short turn. A new thought struck me. 
 
 " Did you ever know, aunt, that there was a way 
 back around the foot of the mountain ?" 
 
 " Dear, no ; how delightful ! Is it far ?" 
 
 44 A couple of hours or so ; but I can do it in less. 
 We'll try ;" and 1 gave the sure-footed Canadians the 
 whip, and scampered down the hills as if the rock of 
 Sisyphus had been rolling after us. 
 
 We were soon over the mountain-range, and the 
 road grew better and more level. Oh, how fast pat- 
 tered those little hoofs, and how full of spirit, and 
 excitement looked those small ears, catching the 
 lightest chirrup I could whisper, like the very spell of 
 swiftness ! Pines, hemlocks and cedars, farmhouses 
 and milestones, flew back like shadows. My nunt sat 
 speechless in the middle of the back seat, holding on 
 with both hands, in apprehensive resignation ! She 
 expected soon to come in sight of the Springs, and 
 had doubtless taken a mental resolution that if, please 
 God, she once more found herself at home, she would 
 never " tempt Providence" (it was a favorite expression 
 of hers) by trusting herself again behind such a pair 
 of fly-away demons. As I read this thought in her 
 countenance by a stolen glance over my shoulder, we 
 rattled into a village distant from Lebanon twenty 
 miles. 
 
 44 There, aunt," said I, as I pulled up at the door of 
 the inn, 44 we have very nearly described a circle. 
 Now, don't speak ! if you do, you'll stait the horses. 
 There's nothing they are so much afraid of as a wo- 
 man's voice. Very odd, isn't it ? We'll just sponge 
 their mouths now, and be at home in the crack of a 
 whip. Five miles more, only. Come !" 
 
 Off we sped again like the wind, aunt Bel just ven- 
 turing to wonder whether the horses wouldn't rather go 
 slower. Meeta had hardly spoken ; she had thoughts 
 of her own to be busy with, and I pretended to be fully 
 occupied with my driving. The nonsense I talked to 
 those horses, to do away the embarrassment of her si- 
 lence, would convict me of insanity before any jury in 
 the world. 
 
 The sun began to throw long shadows, and the short- 
 legged ponies figured like flying giraffes along the re- 
 tiring hedges. Luckily, my aunt had very little idea 
 of conjecturing a course by the points of the compass. 
 We sped on gloriously. 
 
 "Philip, dear ! hav'n't you lost your way ? It seems 
 to me we've come more than five miles since you 
 stopped" (ten at least), " and I don't see the moun- 
 tains about Lebanon at all !" 
 
 44 Don't be alarmed, aunty, dear ! We're very high, 
 just here, and shall drop down on Lebanon, as it were. 
 Are you afraid, Meeta ?" 
 
366 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, 
 
 " Nein ."' she answered. She was thinking in Ger- 
 man, poor girl, and heart and memory were wrapped 
 up in the thought. 
 
 I drove on almost cruelly. Tom's incomparable 
 horses justified all his eulogiums ; they were indefati- 
 gable. The sun blazed a moment through the firs, 
 and disappeared ; the gorgeous changes of eve came 
 over the clouds ; the twilight stole through the damp 
 air with its melancholy gray ; and the whippoorwills, 
 birds of evening, came abroad, like gentlemen in debt, 
 to flit about in the darkness. Everything was sad- 
 dening. My own volubility ceased ; the whiz of the 
 lash, as I waved it over the heads of my foaming po- 
 nies, and an occasional " Steady !" as one or the other 
 broke into a gallop, were the only interruptions to the 
 silence. Meeta buried her face in the folds of her 
 shawl, and sat closer to my side, and my aunt, soothed 
 and flattered by turns, believed and doubted, and was 
 finally persuaded, by my ingenious and well-inserted 
 fibs, that it was only somewhat farther than I antici- 
 pated, and we should arrive " presently." 
 
 Somewhere about eight o'clock the lights of a town 
 appeared in the distance, and, straining every nerve, 
 the gallant beasts whirled us in through the streets, 
 and I pulled up suddenly at the door of an hotel. 
 
 " Why, Philip !" said my aunt in a tone of unut- 
 terable astonishment, looking about her as if she had 
 awoke from a dream, " this is Hudson !" 
 
 It was too clear to be disputed. We were upon the 
 North river, forty miles from Lebanon, and the steam- 
 er would touch at the pier in half an hour. My aunt 
 was to be one of the passengers to New York, but she 
 was yet to be persuaded of it; the only thing now was 
 to get her into the house, and enact the scene as soon 
 as possible. 
 
 I helped her out as tenderly as I knew how, and, as 
 we went up stairs, I requested Meeta to sit down in a 
 corner of the room, and cover her face with her hand- 
 kerchief. When the servant was locked out, I took 
 my aunt into the recess of the window, and informed 
 her, to her very great surprise, that she had run away 
 with the baron's daughter. 
 " Philip Slingsby !" 
 
 My aunt was overcome. I had nothing for it but to 
 be overcome too. She sunk into one chair, and I into 
 the other, and burying my face in my hands, I looked 
 through my fingers to watch the effect. Five mortal 
 minutes lasted my aunt's wrath ; gradually, however, 
 she began to steal a look at me, and the expression of 
 resentment about her thin lips softened into something 
 like pity. 
 
 " Philip !" said she, taking my hand. 
 " My dear aunt !" 
 " What is to be done ?" 
 
 I pointed to Meeta, who sat with her head on her 
 bosom, pressed my hand to my heart, as if to suppress 
 a pang, and proceeded to explain. It seemed impos- 
 sible for my aunt to forgive the deception of the thing. 
 Unsophisticated Isabella ! If thou hadst known that 
 thou wert, even yet, one fold removed from the truth, 
 — if thou couldst have divined that it was not for the 
 darling of thy heart that thou wert yielding a point 
 only less dear to thee than thy maiden reputation — 
 if it could have entered thy region of possibilities that 
 thine own house in town had been three days aired 
 for the reception of a bride, run away with by thy os- 
 tensible connivance, and all for a German pedlar, in 
 whose fortunes and loves thou hadst no shadow of 
 interest — I think the brain in thee would have turned, 
 and the dry heart in thy bosom have broken with sur- 
 prise and grief! 
 
 I wrote a note to Tom, left his horses at the inn, 
 and at nine o'clock we were steaming down the Hud- 
 son, my aunt in bed, and Meeta pacing the deck with 
 me, and pouring forth her fears and hor gratitude in 
 
 a voice of music that made me almost repent my self 
 sacrificing enterprise. I have told the story gayly, 
 gentle reader ! but there was a nerve ajar in my heart 
 while its little events went on. 
 
 How we sped thereafter, dear reader ! — how the 
 consul of his majesty of Prussia was persuaded by my 
 aunt's respectability to legalize the wedding by his 
 presence — how my aunt fainted dead away when the 
 parson arrived, and she discovered who was not to be 
 the bridegroom and who was — how I persuaded her 
 she had gone too far to recede, and worked on her ten- 
 derness once more — how the weeping Karl, and his 
 lame and lovely bride, lived with us till the old baron 
 thought it fit to give Meeta his blessing and some 
 money — how Tom Fane wished no good to the ped- 
 lar's eyes — and lastly, how Miss Isabella Slingsby lived 
 and died wondering what earthly motive I could have 
 for my absurd share in these events, are matters of 
 which I spare you the particulars. 
 
 NIAGAM- 
 
 -LAKE ONTARIO-THE ST. LAW- 
 RENCE. 
 
 " He was born when the crab was ascending, and all his affairs 
 go backward."— Love for Love. 
 
 It was in my senior vacation, and I was bound to 
 Niagara for the first time. My companion was a spe- 
 cimen of the human race found rarely in Vermont, and 
 never elsewhere. He was nearly seven feet high, 
 walked as if every joint in his body was in a hopeless 
 state of dislocation, and was hideously, ludicrously, 
 and painfully ugly. This whimsical exterior contained 
 the conscious spirit of Apollo, and the poetical suscep- 
 tibility of Keats. He had left his plough in the Green 
 mountains at the age of twenty-five, and entered as a 
 poor student at the university, where, with the usual 
 policy of the college government, he was allotted to 
 me as a compulsory chum, on the principle of break- 
 ing in a colt with a cart-horse. I began with laughing 
 at him, and ended with loving him. He rejoiced in 
 the common appellation of Job Smith — a synonymous 
 soubriquet, as I have elsewhere remarked, which was 
 substituted by his classmates for his baptismal name 
 of Forbearance. 
 
 Getting Job away with infinite difficulty from a 
 young Indian girl who was selling moccasins in the 
 streets of Buffalo (a straight, slender creature of eigh- 
 teen, stepping about like a young leopard, cold, stern, 
 and beautiful), we crossed the outlet of Lake Erie at 
 the ferry, and took horses on the northern bank of 
 Niagara river to ride to the falls. It was a noble 
 stream, as broad as the Hellespont and as blue as the 
 sky, and I could not look at it, hurrying on headlong 
 to its (earful leap, without a feeling almost of dread. 
 
 There was only one thing to which Job was more 
 susceptible than to the beauties of nature, and that 
 was the beauty of woman. His romance had been 
 stirred by the lynx-eyed Sioux, who took her money 
 for the moccasins with such haughty and thankless 
 supcrbia, and full five miles of the river, with all the 
 gorgeous flowers and rich shrubs upon its rim, might 
 as well have been Lethe for his admiration. He rode 
 along, like the man of rags you see paraded on an ass 
 in the carnival, his legs and arms dangling about in 
 ludicrous obedience to the sidelong hitch of his pacer. 
 
 The roar of the falls was soon audible, and Job's 
 enthusiasm and my own, if the increased pace of our 
 Narraganset ponies meant anything, were fully aroused. 
 Thn river broke into rapids, foaming furiously on its 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 367 
 
 course, and the subterranean thunder increased like a 
 succession of earthquakes, each louder than the last. 
 I had never heard a sound so broad and universal. It 
 was impossible not to suspend the breath, and feel ab- 
 sorbed, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, in the 
 great phenomenon with which the world seemed trem- 
 bling to its centre. A tall, misty cloud, changing its 
 shape continually, as it felt the shocks of the air, rose 
 up before us, and with our eyes fixed upon it, and our 
 horses at a hard gallop, we found ourselves unexpect- 
 edly in front of a vast white hotel ! which sud- 
 denly interposed between the cloud and our vision. 
 Job slapped his legs against the sides of his panting 
 beast, and urged him on, but a long fence on either 
 side the immense building cut him off from all ap- 
 proach ; and having assured ourselves that there was 
 no access to Niagara except through the back-door of 
 the gentleman's house, who stood with hat off to re- 
 ceive us, we wished no good to his majesty's province 
 of Upper Canada, and dismounted. 
 
 " Will you visit the falls before dinner, gentlemen ?" 
 asked mine host. 
 
 " No, sir !" thundered Job, in a voice that, for a mo- 
 ment, stopped the roar of the cataract. 
 
 He was like an improvisatore who had been checked 
 by some rude birbone in the very crisis of his elo- 
 quence. He would not have gone to the falls that 
 night to have saved the world. We dined. 
 
 As it was the first meal we had ever eaten under a 
 monarchy, I proposed the health of the king ; but Job 
 refused it. There was an impertinent profanity, he 
 said, in fencing up the entrance to Niagara that was a 
 greater encroachment on natural liberty than the stamp 
 act. He would drink to no king or parliament under 
 which such a thing could be conceived possible. I left 
 the table and walked to the window. 
 
 " Job, come here ! Miss , by all that is love- 
 ly !" 
 
 He flounced up, like a snake touched with a torpe- 
 do, and sprang to the window. Job had never seen 
 the lady whose name produced such a sensation, but 
 he had heard more of her than of Niagara. So had 
 every soul of the fifteen millions of inhabitants between 
 us and the gulf of Mexico. She was one of those mir- 
 acles of nature that occur, perhaps, once in the rise 
 and fall of an empire — a woman of the perfect beauty 
 of an angel, with the most winning human sweetness 
 of character and manner. She was kind, playful, un- 
 affected, and radiantly, gloriously beautiful. I am sor- 
 ry I may not mention her name, for in more chival- 
 rous times she would have been a character of history. 
 Everybody who has been in America, however, will 
 Know who I am describing, and I am sorry for those 
 who have not. The country of Washington will be 
 in its decadence before it sees such another. 
 
 She had been to the fall and was returning with her 
 mother and a troop of lovers, who, I will venture to 
 presume, brought away a very imperfect impression of 
 the scene. I would describe her as she came laugh- 
 ing up that green bank, unconscious of everything but 
 the pleasure of life in a summer sunset ; but I leave it 
 for a more skilful hand. The authoress of " Hope 
 Leslie" will, perhaps, mould her image into one of 
 her inimitable heroines. 
 
 I presented my friend, and we passed the evening 
 in her dangerous company. After making an engage- 
 ment to accompany her in the morning behind the 
 sheet of the fall, we said " Good-night" at twelve — one 
 of us at least as many " fathom deep in love" as a thou- 
 sand Rosalinds. My poor chum ! The roar of the 
 cataract that shook the very roof over thy head was 
 less loud to thee that night than the beating of thine 
 own heart, I warrant me ! 
 
 I rose at sunrise to go alone to the fall, hut Job was 
 before me, and the angular oulline of his gaunt ('mure, 
 .ctrf tohing up from Table Rock in strong relief against 
 
 the white body of the spray, was the first object that 
 caught my eye as I descended. 
 
 As I came nearer the fall, a feeling of disappoint- 
 ment came over me. I had imagined Niagara a vast 
 body of water descending as if from the clouds. The 
 approach to most falls is from below, and we get an 
 idea of them as of rivers pitching down to the plain 
 from the brow of a hill or mountain. Niagara river, 
 on the contrary, comes out from Lake Erie through a 
 flat plain. The top of the cascade is ten feet perhaps 
 below the level of the country around — consequently 
 invisible from any considerable distance. You walk 
 to the bank of a broad and rapid river, and look over 
 the edge of a rock, where the outlet flood of an inland 
 sea seems to have broken through the crust of the 
 earth, and, by its mere weight, plunged with an awful 
 leap into an immeasurabb and resounding abyss. It 
 seems to strike and thunder upon the very centre of 
 the world, and the ground beneath your feet quivers 
 with the shock till you feel unsafe upon it. 
 
 Othef disappointment than this I can not conceive 
 at Niagara. It is a spectacle so awful, so beyond the 
 
 I scope and power of every other phenomenon in the 
 
 ! world, that I think people who are disappointed there 
 
 I mistake the incapacity of their own conception for the 
 
 i want of grandeur in the scene. 
 
 The "hell of waters" below need but a little red 
 
 ' ochre to out-Phlegethon Phlegethon. I can imagine 
 the surprise of the gentle element, after sleeping away 
 a se'nnight of moonlight in the peaceful bosom of 
 
 i Lake Erie, at finding itself of a sudden in such a coil ! 
 A Mediterranean sea-gull, which had tossed out the 
 
 ! whole of a January in the infernal " yeast" of the 
 Archipelago (was 1 not all but wrecked every day be- 
 tween Troy and Malta in a score of successive hurri- 
 canes?) — I say, the most weather-beaten of sea-birds 
 would look twice before he ventured upon the roaring 
 caldron below Niagara. It is astonishing to see how 
 far the descending mass is driven under the surface of 
 the stream. As far down toward Lake Ontario as the 
 eye can reach, the immense volumes of water rise 
 like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing 
 out in rings of foam, with an appearance of rage and 
 anger that I have seen in no other cataract in the 
 world. 
 
 "A nice fall, as an Englishman would say, my dear 
 Job." 
 
 "Awful !" 
 
 Halleck, the American poet (a better one never 
 "strung pearls"), has written some admirable verses 
 on Niagara, describing its effect on the different indi- 
 
 | viduals of a mixed party, among whom was a tailor. 
 The sea of incident that has broken over me in years 
 of travel, has washed out of my memory all but the 
 
 | two lines descriptive of its impression upon Snip : — 
 
 " The tailor made one single note — 
 ' Gods ! what a place to sponge a coat !' " 
 
 " Shall we go to breakfast, Job ?" 
 
 " How slowly and solemnly they drop into the 
 abysm !" 
 
 It was not an original remark of Mr. Smith's. Noth- 
 ing is so surprising to the observer as the extraordi- 
 nary deliberateness with which the waters of Niagara 
 take their tremendous plunge. All hurry and foam 
 and fret, till they reach the smooth limit of the curve 
 —and then the laws of gravitation seem suspended, 
 and, like Cesar, they pause, and determine, since it is 
 inevitable, to take the death-leap with becoming dig- 
 
 nit " Shall we go to breakfast, Job ?" I was obliged to 
 raise my voice, to be heard, to a pitch rather exhaust- 
 ing to an empty stomach. 
 
 His eyes remained fixed upon the shifting rainbows 
 bendin" and vanishing in the spray. There was no 
 moving him. and T gave in for another five minutes 
 
368 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 41 Do you think it probable, Job, that the waters of 
 Niagara strike on the axis of the world V 
 
 No answer. 
 
 "Job!" 
 
 44 What ?" 
 
 " Do you think his majesty's half of the cataract is 
 finer than ours ?" 
 
 " Much." 
 
 <* For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the de- 
 licious verdure on the American shore, the glorious 
 trees, the massed foliage, the luxuriant growth even to 
 the very ritn of the ravine ! By Jove ! it seems to me 
 things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a 
 more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand 
 upon ?" 
 
 41 How exquisitely," said Job, soliloquizing, " that 
 small green island divides the fall ! What a rock it 
 must be founded on, not to have been washed away 
 in the ages that these waters have split against it !" 
 
 41 I'll lay you a bet it is washed away before the 
 year two thousand — payable in any currency with 
 which we may then be conversant." 
 
 " Don't trifle !" 
 
 " With time, or geology, do you mean ? Isn't it 
 perfectly clear from the looks of that ravine, that Ni- 
 agara has backed up all the way from Lake Ontario ? 
 These rocks are not adamant, and the very precipice 
 you stand on has cracked, and looks ready for the 
 plunge.* It must gradually wear back to Lake Erie, 
 and then there will be a sweep, I should like to live 
 long enough to see. The instantaneous junction of 
 two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in their 
 levels, will be a spectacle — eh, Job?" 
 
 " Tremendous !" 
 
 44 Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you come 
 to breakfast '.'" 
 
 He was immoveable. I left him on the rock, went 
 up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee, 
 and when they were on the table, gave two of the 
 waiters a .dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens. 
 He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite, 
 and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet 
 
 Miss , as she stepped like Aurora from her 
 
 chamber. 
 
 It is necessary to a reputation for prowess in the 
 United States to have been behind the sheet of the 
 fall (supposing you to have been to Niagara). This 
 achievement is equivalent to a hundred shower-baths, 
 one severe cold, and being drowned twice — but most 
 people do it. 
 
 We descended to the bottom of the precipice, at the 
 side of the fall, where we found a small house, fur- 
 nished with coarse linen dresses for the purpose, and 
 having arranged ourselves in habiliments not particu- 
 larly improving to our natural beauty, we reappeared — 
 only three out of a party of ten having had the courage 
 to trust their attractions to such a trial. Miss 
 
 looked like a fairy in disguise, and Job like the most 
 ghostly and diabolical monster that ever stalked un- 
 sepultured abroad. He would frighten a child in his 
 best black suit — but with a pair of wet linen trowsers 
 scarcely reaching to his knees, a jacket with sleeves 
 shrunk to the elbows, and a white cap, he was some- 
 thing supernaturally awful. The guide hesitated 
 about going under the fall with him. 
 
 It looked rather appalling. Our way lay through a 
 dense descending sheet of water, along a slender 
 pathway of rocks, broken into small fragments, with 
 an overhanging wall on one side, and the boiling 
 caldron of the cataract on the other. A false step, 
 and you were a subject for the " shocking accident" 
 maker. 
 
 • It has since fallen into the abyss— fortunately in the night, 
 as visiters were always upon it during the day. The noise was 
 heard at an incredible distance. 
 
 The guide went f rst, taking Miss 
 
 -'s right 
 hand. She gave me her left, and Job brought up the 
 rear, as they say in Connecticut, " on his own hook." 
 We picked our way boldly up to the water. The wall 
 leaned over so much, and the fragmented declivity 
 was so narrow and steep, that if it had not been done 
 before, 1 should have turned back at once. Two 
 steps more, and the small hand in mine began to strug- 
 gle violently, and, in the same instant, the torrent beat 
 into my eyes, mouth, and nostrils, and I felt as if 1 
 was drowning. I staggered a blind step onward, but 
 still the water poured into my nostrils, and the con- 
 viction rushed for a moment on my mind that we were 
 lost. I struggled for breath, stumbled forward, and 
 with a gasp that I thought was my last, sunk upon 
 the rocks within the descending waters. Job tumbled 
 over me the next instant, and as soon as I could clear 
 my eyes sufficiently to look about me, I saw the 
 
 guide sustaining Miss , who had been as nearly 
 
 drowned as most of the subjects of the Humane So- 
 ciety, but was apparently in a state of resuscitation. 
 None but the half-drowned know the pleasure of 
 breathing. - 
 
 Here we were within a chamber that Undine might 
 have coveted, a wall of rock at our back, and a trans- 
 parent curtain of shifting water between us and the 
 world, having entitled ourselves a. pcu pres to the same 
 reputation with Hylas and Leander, for seduction by 
 the Naiad9. 
 
 Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there, we 
 could but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode. 
 A lofty and well-lighted hall, shaped like a long pavil- 
 ion, extended as far as we could see through the spray, 
 and with the two objections, that you could not have 
 heard a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the 
 floor was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce im- 
 agine a more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who 
 was disgusted with the world, and subject to dryness 
 of the skin. In one respect it resembled the enchanted 
 dwelling of the Witch of Atlas, where, Shelley tells 
 
 " The invisible rain did ever sing 
 A silver music on the mossy lawn. 
 
 It is lucky for Witches and Naiads that they are not 
 subject to rheumatism. 
 
 The air was scarcely breathable — (if air it may be 
 called, which streams down the face with the density 
 of a shower from a watering-pot), and our footing upon 
 the slippery rocks was so insecure, that the exertion 
 of continually wiping our eyes was attended with im- 
 minent danger. Our sight was valuable, for surely, 
 never was such a brilliant curtain hung up to the sight 
 of mortals, as spread apparently from the zenith to our 
 feet, changing in thickness and lustre, but with a con- 
 stant and resplendent curve. It was what a child might 
 imagine the arch of the sky to be where it bends over 
 the edge of the horizon. 
 
 The sublime is certainly very much diluted when 
 one contemplates it with his back to a dripping and 
 slimy rock, and his person saturated with a continual 
 supply of water. From a dry window, I think the in- 
 fernal writhe and agony of the abyss into which we 
 were continually liable to slip, would have been as fine 
 a thing as I have seen in my travels; but I am free to 
 admit, that, at the moment, I would have exchanged 
 my experience and all the honor attached to it, for a 
 dry escape. The idea of drowning back through that 
 thick column of water, was at least a damper to en- 
 thusiasm. We seemed cut off from the living. There 
 was a death between us and the vital air and sunshine- 
 
 1 was screwing up my courage for the return, when 
 the guide seized me by the shoulder. I looked around, 
 
 and what was my horror to see Miss standing 
 
 far in behind the sheet upon the last visible point ol 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 369 
 
 rock, with the water pouring over her in torrents, and 
 a gulf of foam between us, which I could in no way 
 understand how she had passed over. 
 
 She seemed frightened and pale, and the guide ex- 
 plained to me by signs (for I could not distinguish a 
 syllable through the roar of the cataract), that she had 
 walked over a narrow ledge, which had broken with 
 her weight. A long fresh mark upon the rock at the 
 foot of the precipitous wall, made it sufficiently evi- 
 dent : her position was most alarming. 
 
 I made a sign to her to look well to her feet; for 
 the little island on which she stood was green with 
 slime and scarce larger than a hat, and an abyss of full 
 six feet wide, foaming and unfathomable, raged be- 
 tween it and the nearest foothold. What was to be 
 done? Had we a plank, even, there was no possible 
 hold for the further extremity, and the shape of the 
 rock was so conical, that its slippery surface evidently 
 would not hold a rope for a moment. To jump to her, 
 even if it were possible, would endanger her life, and I 
 while I was smiling and encouraging the beautiful 
 creature, as she stood trembling and pale on her dan- 
 gerous foothold, I felt my very heart sink within me. 
 
 The despairing guide said something which I could 
 not hear, and disappeared through the watery wall, 
 and I fixed my eyes upon the lovely form, standing, 
 like a spirit in the misty shroud of the spray, as if the 
 intensity of my gaze could sustain her upon her dan- 
 gerous foothold. I would have given ten years of my 
 life at that moment to have clasped her hand in mine. 
 
 I bad scarce thought of Job until I felt him trying 
 to pass behind me. His hand was trembling as he 
 laid it on my shoulder to steady his steps ; but there 
 was something in his ill-hewn features that shot an 
 indefinable ray of hope through my mind. His sandy 
 hair was plastered over his forehead, and his scant 
 dress clung to him like a skin ; but though I recall 
 his image ncnv with a smile, I looked upon him with a 
 feeling far enough from amusement then. God bless 
 thee, my dear Job! wherever in this unfit world thy 
 fine spirit may be fulfilling its destiny! 
 
 He crept down carefully to the edge of the foaming 
 abyss, till he stood with the breaking bubbles at his 
 knees. I was at a loss to know what he intended. 
 She surely would not dare to attempt a jump to his 
 arms from that slippery rock, and to reach her in any 
 way seemed impossible. 
 
 The next instant he threw himself forward, and 
 while I covered my eyes in horror, with the flashing 
 conviction that he had gone mad and flung himself 
 into the hopeless whirlpool to reach her, she had 
 crossed the awful gulf, and lay trembling and ex- 
 hausted at my feet ! He had thrown himself over the 
 chasm, caught the rock barely with the extremities of 
 his fingers, and with certain death if he missed his 
 hold or slipped from his uncertain tenure, had sus- 
 tained her with supernatural strength as she walked 
 over his body ! 
 
 The guide providentially returned with a rope in 
 the same instant, and fastening it around one of his 
 feet, we dragged him back through the whirlpool, and 
 after a moment or two to recover from the suffocating 
 immersion, he fell on his knees, and we joined him, 
 I doubt not devoutly, in his inaudible thanks to God. 
 
 II. — LAKE ONTARIO. 
 
 The next bravest achievement to venturing behind 
 the sheet of Niagara, is to cross the river in a small 
 boat, at some distance below the Phlegethon of the 
 abyss. I should imagine it was something like riding 
 in a howdah on a swimming elephant. The im- 
 mense masses of water driven under by the Fall, rise 
 splashing and fuming far down the river; and they 
 are as unlike a common wave, to ride, as a horse and 
 a camel. You are, perhaps, ten or fifteen minutes 
 24 
 
 pulling across, and you may get two or three of these 
 lifts, which shove you straight into the air about ten 
 feet, and then drop you into the cup of an eddy, as if 
 some long-armed Titan had his hand under the water, 
 and were tossing you up and down for his amuse- 
 ment. It imports lovers to take heed how their mis- 
 tresses are seated, as all ladies, on these occasions, 
 throw themselves into the arms of the nearest " hose 
 and doublet." 
 
 Job and I went over to dine on the American side 
 and refresh our patriotism. We dined under a hickory- 
 tree on Goat island, just over the glassy curve of the 
 cataract; and as we grew joyous with our champagne, 
 we strolled up to the point where the waters divide 
 for the American and British Falls; and Job ha- 
 rangued the "mistaken gentleman on his right," in 
 I eloquence that would have turned a division in the 
 house of commons. The deluded multitude, how- 
 ! ever, rolled away in crowds for the monarchy, and at 
 j the close of his speech the British Fall was still, by a 
 ' melancholy majority, the largest. We walked back 
 to our bottle like foiled patriots, and soon after, hope- 
 i less of our principles, went over to the other side too ! 
 I advise all people going to Niagara to suspend ma- 
 I king a note in their journal till the last day of their 
 visit. You might as well teach a child the magni- 
 \ tude of the heavens by pointing to the sky with your 
 j finger, as comprehend Niagara in a day. It has to 
 I create its own mighty place in your mind. You have 
 j no comparison through which it can enter. It is too 
 | vast. The imagination shrinks from it. It rolls in 
 i gradually, thunder upon thunder, and plunge upon 
 ; plunge ; and the mind labors with it to an exhaustion 
 
 ■ such as is created only by the extremest intellectual 
 
 ■ effort. I have seen men sit and gaze upon it in a cool 
 ! day of autumn, with the perspiration standing on 
 \ their foreheads in large beads, from the unconscious 
 
 but toilsome agony of its conception. After haunting 
 its precipices, and looking on its solemn waters for 
 seven days, sleeping with its wind-played monotony 
 in your ears, dreaming, and returning to it till it has 
 grown the one object, as it will, of your perpetual 
 thought, you feel, all at once, like one who has com- 
 passed the span of some almighty problem. It has 
 stretched itself within you. Your capacity has at- 
 tained the gigantic standard, and you feel an elevation 
 and breadth of nature that could measure girth and 
 stature with a seraph. We had fairly " done" Niaga- 
 ra. We had seen it by sunrise, sunset, moonlight; 
 from top and bottom ; fasting and full ; alone and to- 
 gether. We had learned by heart every green path 
 on the island of perpetual dew, which is set like an 
 imperial emerald on its front (a poetical idea of my 
 own, much admired by Job) — we had been grave, gay, 
 I tender, and sublime, in its mighty neighborhood, we 
 had become so accustomed to the base of its broad 
 thunder, that it seemed to us like a natural property 
 in the air, and we were unconscious of it for hours; 
 our voices had become so tuned to its key, and our 
 thoughts so tinged by its grand and perpetual anthem, 
 that I almost doubted if the air beyond the reach of 
 its vibrations would not agonize us with its unnatural 
 silence, and the common features of the world seem 
 of an unutterable and frivolous littleness. 
 
 We were eating our last breakfast there, in tender 
 melancholy: mine for the Falls, and Job's for the 
 Falls and Miss , to whom I had a half sus- 
 picion that he had made a declaration. 
 
 " Job!" said I. 
 
 He looked up from his egg. 
 
 " My dear Job !" 
 
 " Don't allude to it, my dear chum," said he, drop- 
 ping his spoon, and rushing to the window to hide his 
 agitation. It was quite clear. 
 
 I could scarce restrain a smile. Psyche in the em- 
 brace of a respectable giraffe would be the first thought 
 
370 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 in anybody's mind who should see them together. 
 And yet why should he not woo her — and win her 
 too ? He had saved her life in the extremest peril, at 
 the most extreme hazard of his own ; he had a heart 
 as high and worthy, and as capable of an undying 
 worship of her as she would find in a wilderness of 
 lovers; he felt like a graceful man, and acted like a 
 brave one, and was sans peur et sans reproche, and 
 why should he not love like other men ? My dear 
 Job ! I fear thou wilt go down to thy grave, and but 
 one woman in this wide world will have loved thee — 
 thy mother ! Thou art the soul of a preux chevalier 
 in the body of some worthy grave-digger, who is strut- 
 ting about the world, perhaps, in thy more proper car- 
 cass. These angels are so o'er hasty in packing ! 
 
 We got upon our horses, and had a pleasant amble 
 before us of fifteen miles, on the British side of the 
 river. We cantered off stoutly for a mile to settle our 
 regrets, and then I pulled up, and requested Job to 
 ride near me, as I had something to say to him. 
 
 " You are entering," said I, " my dear Job, upon 
 your first journey in a foreign land. You will see 
 other manners than your own, which are not therefore 
 laughable, and hear a different pronunciation from 
 your own, which is not therefore vulgar. You are to 
 mix with British subjects, whom you have attacked 
 vigorously in your school declamations as ' the enemy.' 
 but who are not therefore to be bullied in their own 
 country, and who have certain tastes of their own, 
 upon which you had better reserve your judgment. 
 We have no doubt that we are the greatest country 
 that ever was, is, or ever shall be ; but, as this is an 
 unpalatable piece of information to other nations, we 
 will not stuff it into their teeth, unless by particular 
 request. John Bull likes his coat too small. Let him 
 wear it. John Bull prefers his beefsteak to a frican- 
 deau. Let him eat it. John Bull will leave no stone 
 unturned to serve you in his own country, if you will 
 let him. Let him. John Bull will suffer you to find 
 fault for ever with king, lords, and commons, if you 
 do not compare them invidiously with other govern- 
 ments. Let the comparison alone. In short, my 
 dear chum, as we insist that foreigners should adopt 
 our manners while they are travelling in the United 
 States, we had better adopt theirs when we return the 
 visit. They are doubtless quite wOng throughout, 
 but it is not worth while to bristlp one's back against 
 the opinions of some score mi'hons." 
 
 The foam disappeared frr.n the stream, as we fol- 
 lowed it on, and the roar A' the falls — 
 
 * * * " Now loud, now calm again, 
 Like a ring of bell;!, whose sound the wind still alters, ' 
 
 was soon faint in our ears, and like the regret of part- 
 ing, lessened with the increasing distance till it was 
 lost. Job began to look around him, and see some- 
 thing else besides a lovely face in the turnings of the 
 road, and the historian of this memorable journey, 
 who never had but one sorrow that " would not budge 
 with a fillip," rose in his stirrups as he descried the 
 broad blue bosom of Lake Ontario, and gave vent to 
 his feelings in (he begs the reader to believe) the most 
 suitable quotation. 
 
 Seeing any celebrated water for the first time was 
 always, to me, an event. River, waterfall, or lake, if 
 I have heard of it and thought of it for years, has a 
 sensible presence, that I feel like the approach of a 
 human being in whom I am interested. My heart flut- 
 ters to it. It is thereafter an acquaintance, and I de- 
 fend its beauty or its grandeur as I would the fair fame 
 and worth of a woman that had shown me a prefer- 
 ence. My dear reader, do you love water? Not to 
 drink, for I own it is detestable in small quantities — 
 but water, running or falling, sleeping or gliding, tin- 
 ged by the sunset glow, or silvered by the gentle al- 
 chymist of the midnight heaven ? Do you love a 
 
 lake? Do you love a river? Do you "affect" any 
 one laughing and sparkling brook that has flashed on 
 your eye like a fay overtaken by the cock-crowing, 
 and tripping away slily to dream-land? As you see 
 four sisters, and but one to love ; so, in the family of 
 the elements, I have a tenderness for water. 
 
 Lake Ontario spread away to the horizon, glittering 
 in the summer sun, boundless to the eye as the Atlan- 
 tic ; and directly beneath us lay the small town of 
 Fort Niagara, with the steamer at the pier, in which 
 we "promised ourselves a passage down the St. Law- 
 rence. We rode on to the hotel, which we found to 
 our surprise crowded with English officers, and having 
 disposed of our Narragansets, we inquired the hour 
 of departure, and what we could eat meantime, in as 
 nearly the same breath as possible. 
 
 " Cold leg of mutton and the steamboat's engaged, 
 sir !" 
 
 The mercury in Job's Britishometer fell plump to 
 zero. The idea of a monopoly of the whole steamer 
 by a colonel and his staff, and no boat again for a 
 week ! 
 
 There was a government to live under ! 
 
 We sat down to our mutton, and presently enter 
 the waiter. 
 
 "Colonel 's compliments; hearing that two 
 
 gentlemen have arrived who expected to go by the 
 steamer, he is happy to offer them a passage if they 
 can put up with rather crowded accommodations." 
 
 "Well, Job! what do you think now of England, 
 politically, morally, and religiously ? Has not the 
 gentlemanlike courtesy of one individual materially 
 changed your opinions upon every subject connected 
 with the United Kingdom of Great Britain ?" 
 
 " It has." 
 
 " Then, my dear Job, I recommend you never again 
 to read a book of travels without writing down on the 
 margin of every bilious chapter, 'probably lost his 
 passage in the steamer,' or ' had no mustard to his 
 mutton,' or 'could find no ginger-nuts for the interest- 
 ing little traveller,' or some similar annotation. De* 
 pend upon it, that dear delightful Mrs. Trollope would 
 never have written so agreeable a book, if she ha.d 
 thriven with her bazar in Cincinnati." 
 
 We paid our respects to the colonel, and at six 
 o'clock in the evening got on board. Part of an Irish 
 regiment was bivouacked on the deck, and happier 
 fellows I never saw. They had completed their nine 
 years' service on the three Canadian stations, and 
 were returning to the ould country, wives, children, 
 and all. A line was drawn across the deck, reserving 
 the after quarter for the officers ; the sick were dis- 
 posed of among the women in the bows of the boat, 
 and the band stood ready to play the farewell air to the 
 cold shores of Upper Canada. 
 
 The line was cast off, when a boy of thirteen rushed 
 down to the pier, and springing on board with a 
 desperate leap, flew from one end of the deck to the 
 other, and flung himself at last upon the neck of a 
 pretty girl sitting on the knee of one of the privates. 
 
 " Mary, dear Mary !" was all he could utter. His 
 sobs choked him. 
 
 " Avast with the line, there !" shouted the captain, 
 who had no wish to carry off this unexpected passen- 
 ger. The boat was again swung to the wharf, and the 
 boy very roughly ordered ashore. His only answer 
 was to cling closer to the girl, and redouble his tears, 
 and by this time the colonel had stepped aft, and the 
 case seemed sure of a fair trial. The pretty Canadian 
 dropped her head on her bosom, and seemed divided 
 between contending emotions, and the soldier stood up 
 and raised his cap to his commanding officer, but held 
 firmly by her hand. The boy threw himself on his 
 knees to the colonel, but tried in vain to speak. 
 
 " Who's this, O'Shane ?" asked the officer. 
 
 " Sure, my swateheart, your honor." 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 371 
 
 " And how dare you bring her on board, sir ?" 
 " Och, she'll go to ould Ireland wid us, your hon- 
 or." 
 
 " No, no, no !" cried the convulsed boy, clasping 
 the colonel's knees, and sobbing as if his heart would 
 break; "she is my sister ! She isn't his wife! Fa- 
 ther'Il die if she does ! She can't go with him ! She 
 shu'n't go with him !" 
 
 Job began to snivel, and I felt warm about the eyes 
 myself. 
 
 " Have you got a wife, O'Shane ?" asked the 
 colonel. 
 
 " Plase your honor, never a bit," said Paddy. He 
 was a tight, good-looking fellow, by the way, as you 
 would wish to see. 
 
 .i Well — we'll settle this thing at once. Get up, my 
 little fellow ! Come here, my good girl ! Do you 
 love O'Shane well enough to be his wife ?" 
 
 " Indeed I do, sir !" said Mary, wiping her eyes with | 
 the back of her hand, and stealing a look at the " six 
 feet one" that stood as straight as a pike beside her. 
 " O'Shane ! I allow this girl to go with us only on 
 condition that you marry her at the first place where 
 we can find a priest. We will make her up a bit of a 
 dowry, and I will look after her comfort as long as she 
 follows the regiment. What do you say, sir? Will 
 you marry her?" 
 
 O'Shane began to waver in his military position, 
 from a full front face getting to very nearly a right- 
 about. It was plain he was taken by surprise. The 
 eyes of the company were on him, however, and pub- 
 lic opinion, which, in most human breasts, is consider- 
 ably stronger than conscience, had its effect. 
 
 " I'll do it, your honor !" said he, bolting it out as 
 a man volunteers upon a "forlorn hope." 
 
 Tears might as well have been bespoken for the 
 whole company. The boy was torn from his sister's 
 neck, and set ashore in the arms of two sailors, and 
 poor Mary, very much in doubt whether she was hap- 
 py or miserable, sank upon a heap of knapsacks, and 
 buried her eyes in a cotton handkerchief with a map 
 of London upon it, probably a gage d'amour from the 
 desaving O'Shane. I did the same myself with a 
 silk one, and Job item. Hem the colonel and several 
 officers. 
 
 The boat was shoved off, and the wheels spattered 
 away, but as far as we could hear his voice, the cry 
 came following on, " Mary, Mary !" 
 
 It rung in my ears all night : " Mary, Mary !" 
 I was up in the morning at sunrise, and was glad 
 to escape from the confined cabin and get upon deck 
 The steamer was booming on through a sea as calm 
 as a mirror, and no land visible. The fresh dewiness 
 of the morning air ashore played in my nostrils, and 
 the smell of grass was perceptible in the mind, but in 
 all else it was like a calm in mid ocean. The soldiers 
 were asleep along the decks, with their wives and 
 children, and the pretty runaway lay with her head on 
 O'Shane's bosom, her red eyes and soiled finery 
 showing too plainly how she had passed the night. 
 Poor Mary ! she has enough of following a soldier, 
 by this, I fear. 
 
 I stepped forward, and was not a little surprised to 
 see standing against the railing on the larboard bow, 
 the motionless figure of an Indian girl of sixteen. 
 Her dark eye was fixed on the line of the horizon we 
 were leaving behind, her arms were folded on her 
 bosom, and she seemed not even to breathe. A com- 
 mon shawl was wrapped carelessly around her, and 
 another glance betrayed to me that she was in a situ- 
 ation soon to become a mother. Her feet were pro- 
 tected by a pair of once gaudy but now shabby and 
 torn moccasins, singularly small ; her hands were of a 
 delicate thinness unusual to her race, and her hollow 
 cheeks, and forehead marked with an expression of 
 
 pain, told all I could have prophesied of the history of 
 a white man's tender mercies. I approached very 
 near, quite unperceived. A small burning spot was 
 just perceptible in the centre of her dark cheek, and 
 as I looked at her steadfastly, I could see a working of 
 the muscles of her dusky brow, which betrayed, in one 
 of a race so trained to stony calmness, an unusual fever 
 of feeling. I looked around for the place in which 
 she must have slept. A mantle of wampum-work, 
 folded across a heap of confused baggage, partly oc- 
 cupied as a pillow by a brutal-looking and sleeping 
 soldier, told at once the main part of her story. 1 felt 
 for her, from my soul ! 
 
 " You can hear the great waterfall no more," I said, 
 touching her arm. 
 
 " I hear it when I think of it," she replied, turning 
 her eyes upon me as slowly, and with as little surprise, 
 as if I had been talking to her an hour. 
 
 I pointed to the sleeping soldier. "Are you going 
 with him to his country ?" 
 
 'Yes." 
 
 " Are you his wife ?" 
 
 " My father gave me to him." 
 
 " Has he sworn before the priest in the name of the 
 Great Spirit to be your husband !" 
 
 " No." She looked intently into my eyes as she 
 answered, as if she tried in vain to read my meaning. 
 
 " Is he kind to you ?" 
 
 She smiled bitterly. 
 
 " Why then did you follow him ?" 
 
 Her eyes dropped upon the burden she bore at hei 
 heart. The answer could not have been clearer if 
 written with a sunbeam. I said a few words of kind- 
 ness, and left her to turn over in my mind how I could 
 best interfeie for her happiness. 
 
 III. — THE ST. LAWRENCE. 
 
 On the third evening we had entered upon the St. 
 Lawrence, and were winding cautiously into the 
 channel of the Thousand Isles. I think there is not, 
 within the knowledge of the "all-beholding sun," a 
 spot so singularly and exquisitely beautiful. Between 
 the Mississippi and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, I know 
 there is not, for I have pic-nicked from the Sy mplegades 
 westward. The Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence 
 are as imprinted on my mind as the stars of heaven. 
 I could forget them as soon. 
 
 The river is here as wide as a lake, while the chan- 
 nel just permits the passage of a steamer. The 
 islands, more than a thousand in number, are a sin- 
 gular formation of flat, rectangular rock, split, as it 
 were, by regular mathematical fissures, and over- 
 flowed nearly to the tops, which are loaded with a 
 most luxuriant vegetation. They vary in size, but 
 the generality of them would about accommodate a 
 tea-party of six. The water is deep enough to float a 
 large steamer directly at the edge, and an active deer 
 would leap across from one to the other in any direc- 
 tion. What is very singular, these little rocky plat- 
 forms are covered with a rich loam, and carpeted with 
 moss and flowers, while immense trees take root in the 
 clefts, and interlace their branches with those of the 
 neighboring islets, shadowing the water with the un- 
 sunned dimness of the wilderness. It is a very odd 
 thing to glide through in a steamer. The luxuriant 
 leaves sweep the deck, and the black funnel parts the 
 drooping sprays as it keeps its way, and you may 
 pluck the blossoms of the acacia, or the rich chestnut 
 flowers, sitting on the tartVail, and, really, a mag.c pas- 
 sage in a witch's steamer, beneath the tree-tops ol an 
 untrodden forest, could not be more novel and start- 
 ling. Then the solitude and silence of tlie dun and 
 still waters are continually broken by the plunge and 
 leap of the wild deer springing or swimming from one 
 
372 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 island to another, and the swift and shadowy canoe of 
 the Indian glides out from some unseen channel, and 
 with a single stroke of his broad paddle he vanishes, 
 and is lost again, even to the ear. If the beauty-sick 
 and nature-searching spirit of Keats is abroad in the 
 world, " my basnet to a 'prentice-cap" he passes his 
 summers amid the thousand isles of the St. Law- 
 rence ! I would we were there with our tea-things, 
 sweet Rosa Matilda! 
 
 We had dined on the quarter-deck, and were sitting 
 over the colonel's wine, pulling the elm-leaves from 
 the branches as they swept saucily over the table, and 
 listening to the band, who were playing waltzes that 
 probably ended in the confirmed insanity of every 
 wild heron and red deer that happened that afternoon 
 to come within ear-shot of the good steamer Queens- 
 ton. The paddles began to slacken in their spattering, 
 and the boat came to, at the sharp side of one of the 
 largest of the shadowy islands. We were to stop an 
 hour or two, and take in wood. 
 
 Everybody was soon ashore for a ramble, leaving 
 only the colonel, who was a cripple from a score of 
 Waterloo tokens, and your servant, reader, who had 
 something on his mind. 
 
 " Colonel ! will you oblige me by sending for Ma- 
 honey ? Steward J call me that Indian girl sitting 
 with her head on her knees in the boat's bow." 
 
 They stood before us. 
 
 " How is this ?" exclaimed the colonel ; " another ! 
 good God ! these Irishmen ! Well, sir! what do you 
 intend to do with this girl, now that you have ruined 
 her?" 
 
 Mahoney looked at her out of a corner of his eye 
 with a libertine contempt that made my blood boil. 
 The girl watched for his answer with an intense but 
 calm gaze into his face, that if he had had a soul, 
 would have killed him. Her lips were set firmly but 
 not fiercely together, and as the private stood looking 
 from one side to the other, unable or unwilling to an- 
 swer, she suppressed a rising emotion in her throat, 
 and turned her look on the commanding officer with a 
 proud coldness that would have become Medea. 
 
 "Mahoney!" said the colonel, sternly, "will you 
 marry this poor girl ?" 
 
 " Never, I hope, your honor !" 
 
 The wasted and noble creature raised her burdened 
 form to its fullest height, and, with an inaudible mur- 
 mur bursting from her lips, walked back to the bow 
 of the vessel. The colonel pursued his conversation 
 with Mahoney, and the obstinate brute was still re- 
 fusing the only reparation he could make the poor 
 Indian, when she suddenly reappeared. The shawl 
 was no longer around her shoulders. A coarse blan- 
 ket was bound below her breast with a belt of wam- 
 pum, leaving her fine bust entirely bare, her small feet 
 trod the deck with the elasticity of a leopard about to 
 leap on his prey, and her dark, heavily- fringed eyes, 
 glowed like coals of fire. She seized the colonel's 
 hand, and imprinted a kiss upon it, another upon mine, 
 and without a look at the father of her child, dived 
 with a single leap over the gangway. She rose di- 
 rectly in the clear water, swam with powerful strokes 
 to one of the most distant islands, and turning once 
 more to wave her hand as she stood on the "shore, 
 strode on, and was lost in the tangles of the forest. 
 
 THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT. 
 
 " Notre bonheur, mon cher, se liendra toujours etitre la planle de 
 nos pieds et, notre occiput ; et qu'il coute un million par an ou cent 
 louis, la perception intrinsique est la meme au-dedans de nous." 
 
 Le Pere Goriot, 
 
 There were a hundred students in the new class 
 matriculated at Yale College in Connecticut, in the 
 
 year 18 — . They were young men of different ages 
 and of all conditions in life, but less various in their 
 mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the 
 widely-separate states from which they came. It is 
 not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French 
 and English, the German, and the Italian, should pos- 
 sess distinct national traits : yet one American is sup- 
 posed to be like every other, though the two between 
 whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as 
 far apart, and in as different latitudes, as the Highland 
 cateran and the brigand of Calabria. 
 
 I looked around me with some interest, when, on 
 the first morning of the term, the president, professors, 
 and students of the university assembled in the college 
 chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my 
 brother freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing 
 up with our motley, and, as yet, unclassical heads and 
 habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes. 
 The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched 
 by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of one; 
 the look of command, breathing through the indolent 
 attitude, betrayed, in another, the young Carolinian 
 and slave-master ; a coat of green, garnished with fur 
 and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than 
 by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it 
 was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complex- 
 ion ; the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold ex- 
 pression, stiff black coat, and serious attention to the 
 service, told of the puritan son of New Hampshire or 
 Vermont ; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the 
 exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan 
 New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and him- 
 self written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional 
 look at his neighbors' coats and shoulders, that might 
 have been construed into wonder upon what western 
 river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and 
 men ! 
 
 Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two 
 seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple 
 gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more 
 immediate neighborhood. A youth with close, curl- 
 ing, brown hair, rather under-size, but with a certain 
 decision and nerve in his lip which struck me imme- 
 diately, and which seemed to express somehow a con- 
 fidence in himself which his limbs scarce bore out, 
 stood with his back to the pulpit, and, with his foot on 
 the seat and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have 
 fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be 
 beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of 
 the college to take places at prayers and recitation 
 alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbor 
 in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated 
 rather more than I should else have done on his face 
 and manner; and as the president came to his Amen, 
 I came to the conclusion, that whatever might be Mr. 
 "S.'s" capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be 
 very demonstrative and uncomfortable. 
 
 The term went on, the politics of the little republic 
 fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or 
 peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by in- 
 timacy, the different members of the class rose or fell 
 in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent 
 and spirit became more just and definite. The 
 " Southerners and Northerners," as they are called, 
 soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before 
 them, that they had no qualities in common, and, of 
 the secret societies which exist among the students in 
 that university, joined each that of his own compatri- 
 ots. The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his 
 life on a plantation, secluded from the society of his 
 equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous de- 
 portment and graceful indolence in the gay society for 
 which the town is remarkable ; while the Vermontese, 
 or White-Mountaineer, " made unfashionably," and ill 
 at ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and 
 sat down with the advantage of constitutional patience 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 373 
 
 aud perseverance to the study which he would find in 
 the end a " better continuer," even in the race for a 
 lady's favor. 
 
 It was the only republic I have ever known — that 
 class of freshmen. It was a fair arena ; and neither 
 in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor re- 
 ligion, have I, in much searching through the world, 
 found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our 
 own republic! — its society is the very core and gall of 
 the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic 
 of letters !— the two graves by the pyramid of Caius 
 Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love! — of religion. 
 What is bought and sold like that which has the name 
 of the first 1 What is made a snare and a tool by the 
 designing like the last? But here— with a govern- 
 ment over us ever kindly aud paternal, no favor shown, 
 aud no privilege denied; every equality in the com- 
 petitors at all possible — age, previous education, and, 
 above all, worldly position — it was an arena in which 
 a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of 
 heart and limb he might never know in the world 
 again. Every individual rising or falling by the esti- 
 mation he exacts of his fellows, there is no such 
 school of honor ; each, of the many palms of scholar- 
 ship, from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that 
 which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another 
 to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of 
 the feelings that stir the heart in our youth — of the 
 few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no 
 repentance — this leaping from the starting-post of 
 mind — this first spread of the encouraged wing in the 
 free heaven of thought and knowledge — is recorded in 
 my own slender experience as the most joyous and 
 the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright 
 honor with the tools of political ambition — he who has 
 leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion — 
 he who has loved, hoped, and trusted, in the greater 
 arena of life and manhood — must look back on days 
 like these as the broken-winged eagle to the sky — as 
 the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie. 
 
 II. 
 
 New Haven is not alone the seat of a university. 
 It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive 
 beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and 
 sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its cen- 
 tral position and accessibility, and the facilities for at- 
 tending the lectures of the college professors, render 
 it a most desirable place of instruction in every de- 
 partment. Among others, the female schools of the 
 place have a great reputation, and this, which in Eu- 
 rope, or with a European state of society, would 
 probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank 
 character of manners in America, a mutual and de- 
 cided advantage. The daughters of the first families 
 of the country are sent here, committed for two, three, 
 and four years, to the exclusive care of the head of 
 the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and 
 advantages of the school) associating freely with the 
 general society of the town, the male part, of course, 
 composed principally of students. A more easy and 
 liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world, 
 and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of 
 morals and manners so high and unexceptionable. 
 Attachments are often formed, and little harm is 
 thought of it ; and unless it is a very strong case of 
 disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the 
 way of the common intercourse between lovers; and 
 the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman 
 senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and 
 marry — if they like. If they do not, the lady stands 
 as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the 
 gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by hav- 
 ing been on his knees. 
 
 Like " Le Noir Faineant," at the tournament, my 
 
 friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor 
 in the various pursuits of the university. A sudden 
 interference in a quarrel, in which a brother freshman 
 was contending against odds, enlightened the class as 
 to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted him- 
 self at recitations with the air of self-contempt for 
 such easy excellence ; he dressed plainly, but with 
 instinctive taste ; and at the end of the first term, 
 having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with 
 his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought 
 with him from the west, he had acquired an ascen- 
 dency in the opinion of the class for which no one 
 could well account, but to which every one unhes- 
 itatingly assented. 
 
 We returned after our first short vacation, and of 
 my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I 
 much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the 
 vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at 
 meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his 
 heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him. 
 By favor seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodg- 
 ing in the town — the rest of the class being compelled 
 to live with a chum in the college buildings. I found 
 his rooms — (I was the first of the class who had en- 
 tered them) — more luxuriously furnished than I had 
 expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but 
 his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America 
 an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and 
 superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise. 
 How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra- 
 civilization in the forests of the west was a mystery 
 that remained to be solved. 
 
 III. 
 
 At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt 
 of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a ram- 
 bling old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle 
 of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town. 
 It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describa- 
 ble shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony, 
 to use an expressive Gallicism, "gave upon the bay." 
 Long Island sound, the great highway from the north- 
 ern Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead 
 and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the cli- 
 mate is divine), between the curving lip of the bay and 
 the interminable and sandy shore of the island some 
 six leagues distant ; the procession of ships and steam- 
 ers stole past with an imperceptible progress ; the 
 ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened 
 through the trees from behind, and (the day being one 
 of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting 
 while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun- 
 steeped precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood- 
 red maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light, 
 drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a 
 holyday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage 
 of an American October: but just now, while I remem- 
 ber it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as 
 philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives — if 
 
 "our star 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar" — 
 
 it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am re- 
 membering and describing — profoundly serene, sunny 
 as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more 
 invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy ; 
 the sort of air that the visiting angels might have 
 brought with them to the tent of Abraham— it is on 
 such days, I would record, that my own memory steps 
 back over the dim threshold of life (so it seems to me), 
 and on such days only. It is worth the translation of 
 our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land, 
 if it were alone for those immortal revelations. 
 
 In a few minutes from this time were assembled in 
 
374 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young 
 ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her 
 pupils, of whom one was a newcomer, and the object 
 of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the 
 one day of the week when morning visiters were ad- 
 mitted, and I was there, in compliance with an unex- 
 pected request from my friend, to present him to the 
 agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitue in 
 her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to 
 introduce to me, a week or two before, the newcomer 
 of whom I have spoken above — a departure from the 
 ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be 
 a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit 
 claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny 
 as deeply as I should find agreeable. The newcomer 
 was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name 
 was Nunu. 
 
 The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines 
 of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in 
 the United States, and will ultimately become the po- 
 etry of the nation. At present the sentiment takes 
 occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of 
 the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to 
 be educated at the expense of the government, and of 
 several young men of the same high birth to different 
 colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in his- 
 tory that we did not plough the bones of their fathers 
 into our fields without some feelings of compunction. 
 Nunu had come to the seaboard under the charge of a 
 female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one 
 of the native schools of the west, and was destined, 
 though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to 
 her tribe when she should have mastered some of 
 the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an 
 apt scholar, but her settled melancholy, when away 
 from her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try 
 the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my 
 privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing- 
 room. 
 
 As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sun- 
 shine of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want 
 of interest, and the manner of course, with which St. 
 John had received my animated descriptions of the 
 personal beauty of the Cherokee. 
 
 " I have hunted with the tribe," was his only an- 
 swer, " and know their features." 
 
 " But she is not like them," I replied, with a tone 
 of some impatience ; " she is the beau ideal of a red 
 skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or 
 an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and 
 has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in 
 your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in 
 her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose 
 of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra. 
 I tell you she is divine." 
 
 St. John called to his dog, and we turned along 
 the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's 
 house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Ra- 
 phael, steeped as their colors seem to have been in the 
 divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I 
 have scarcely found so many lovely women, of so dif- 
 ferent models and so perfect, as were assembled during 
 my sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington. 
 They went about in their evening walks, graceful and 
 angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they 
 poured the light of their loveliness on the vegeta- 
 ting oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had 
 yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those 
 days of the scale of beauty, their features are enam- 
 elled in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by 
 that standard (and found wanting) of every court in 
 Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born. 
 
 Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of 
 sunshine and passion ! Pale and transparent princess 
 — pearl of the court of Florence — than whom the cre- 
 ations on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline 
 our eye for the shapes of heaven ! Gipsy of the Pac- 
 tolus ! Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis ! Bright 
 and gifted cynosure of the aristocracy of England ! — 
 ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wan- 
 dering over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to 
 remember and admire — a constellation, I almost be- 
 lieve, that has absorbed all the intensest light of the 
 beauty of a hemisphere — yet, with your pictures col- 
 ored to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and 
 state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm, 
 I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile 
 if you will !) they were as lovely, and stately, and as 
 worthy of the worship of the world. 
 
 I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they 
 came in. Having never seen him, except in the pres- 
 ence of men, 1 was a little curious to know whether 
 his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the 
 other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very 
 slender experience. My attention was distracted at 
 the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little 
 Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the 
 south), by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had 
 been left in the hall ; and as the door opened, and the 
 slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the 
 usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing 
 caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight 
 of a recognition. 
 
 In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I 
 had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's 
 manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu 
 was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was 
 talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Geor- 
 gian. 
 
 " I must apologize for my dog," said St. John, bow- 
 ing gracefully to the mistress of the house; " he was 
 bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee remind- 
 ed him of happier days — as it did his master." 
 
 Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but im- 
 mediately resumed her apparent deep study of the ab- 
 struse figures in the Kidderminster carpet. 
 
 " You are well arrived, young gentlemen," said Mrs. 
 Ilfrington ; " we press you into our service for a bo- 
 tanical ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be 
 delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you, 
 Mr. St. John ?" 
 
 St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for 
 their bonnets — Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was 
 scarcely closed when Nunu reappeared, and checking 
 herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the 
 threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under 
 very powerful emotion. 
 
 " Nunu !" he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly, 
 and holding out his hand with the air of one who for- 
 gives an offence. 
 
 She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a 
 leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endear- 
 ing epithets of her native tongue, in words that I only 
 understood by their passionate and thrilling accent. 
 The language of the heart is universal. 
 
 The fair scholars came in one after another, and we 
 were soon on our way through the green fields to the 
 flowery mountain-side of East Rock; Mrs. Ilfrington's 
 arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and 
 St. John rambling at large with the rest of the party, 
 but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose 
 Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian char- 
 ity had no bowels for broken hearts. 
 
 The most sociable individuals of the party for a while 
 were Nunu and Lash ; the dog's recollections of the 
 past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreea- 
 ble than the present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs. 
 Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic whicb 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 375 
 
 she had never displayed before— sometimes fairly out- 
 running the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting 
 down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude 
 creature overpowered her with his caresses. The 
 scene gave origin to a grave discussion between that 
 well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular 
 force of childish association— the extraordinary intima- 
 cy between the Indian and the trapper's dog being 
 explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that at- 
 tractive principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring 
 into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she 
 might have added a material corollary to her proposi- 
 tion. If the dog and the chief's daughter were not 
 old friends, the chief's daughter and St. John certain- 
 ly were. 
 
 A.s well as I could judge by the motions of two 
 people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast 
 in the favor and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian. 
 Her southern indolence was probably an apology in 
 Mrs. Ilfrington's eyes for leaning heavily on her com- 
 panion's arm ; but, in a momentary halt, the capricious 
 beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that 
 had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully 
 around his waist. This was rather strong on a first 
 acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opin- 
 ion. 
 
 " Miss Temple !" said she, advancing to whisper a 
 reproof in the beauty's ear. 
 
 Before she had taken a second step, Nunu bounded 
 over the low hedge, followed by the dog, with whom 
 she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon 
 St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scarf 
 into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet 
 on the silken fragments. 
 
 " Madam !" said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfring- 
 ton, after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise 
 and displeasure, " I should have told you before that 
 your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her 
 father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and 
 have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will 
 believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises 
 me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may 
 have over her will be in accordance with your own 
 wishes exclusively." 
 
 His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips 
 and frowning eyes. 
 
 "Have you seen her before since her arrival?" asked 
 Mrs. Ilfrington. 
 
 " My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence 
 that she was here : he returned from his morning ram- 
 ble with a string of wampum about his neck, which 
 had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift," he added, 
 patting the head of the dog, and looking with a soft- 
 ened expression at Nunu, who dropped her head upon 
 her bosom, and walked on in tears. 
 
 The chain of the Green mountains, after a gallop of 
 some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut, 
 suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long-island sound, 
 and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees, 
 three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career 
 by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold preci- 
 pice, you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer per- 
 pendicular below you ; and, spreading away from the 
 broken masses at its feet, lies an emerald meadow, in- 
 laid with a crystal and rambling river, across which, 
 at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the 
 university, from what else were a thick-serried wilder- 
 ness of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice 
 extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on 
 its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of 
 marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serve 
 as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It 
 were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard 
 
 pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of 
 pine tassels overhung. 
 
 Antiquity in America extends no farther back than 
 the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary 
 ground with us — for there harbored the regicides 
 Whalley and Goffe, and many a breath-hushing tale 
 is told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Con- 
 necticut. Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say 
 that this cavernous path to the mountain-top was the 
 resort in the holyday summer afternoons of most of the 
 poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen sopho- 
 mores, and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Il- 
 frington and herseven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The 
 1 kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm, 
 j and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and 
 i a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had 
 ! not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flow- 
 ers had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded 
 upward. 
 
 The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in 
 upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had 
 been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to 
 show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of 
 pine-tassels ; and emerging from the brown shadow of 
 the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage 
 of sighing trees overhead, a fairies' velvet beneath you, 
 and a view below that you may as well (if you would 
 not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the 
 water to see. 
 
 We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink 
 of the precipice, and gazing oft* over the waters of the 
 sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a 
 friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom. 
 We recovered our breath in silence, I alone, perhaps, 
 of that considerable company gazing with admiration 
 at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in 
 the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow 
 of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and mo- 
 tionless with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly 
 curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow, 
 her small hand buried and clinched in the moss, and 
 | her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, es- 
 caped carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained 
 back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense con- 
 trol of emotion. 
 
 The game of the coquettish Georgian was well 
 played. With a true woman's pique, she had re- 
 doubled her attentions to my friend from the moment 
 that she found it gave pain to another of her sex ; and 
 St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see 
 a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he 
 had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss 
 Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that teint of 
 opaque and patrican white which is found oftenest in 
 Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed toward 
 the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine 
 through the thick white petal of a magnolia; her eyes 
 were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the 
 expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or mel- 
 ancholy ; .her teeth were like strips from the lily's 
 heart; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a 
 thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, roman- 
 tic-looking, superior, and, just now, the only victim in 
 the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities 
 which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella un- 
 amiable ; and yielded himself, as all men will, a satis- 
 fied prey to enchantments of which he knew the 
 springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantress. 
 How singular it is that the highest and best qualities 
 of the female heart are those with which men are the 
 least captivated ! 
 
 A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little 
 back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss 
 Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself 
 and her tamed lion ; her lap full of flowers, which he 
 had found time to gather on the way, and her white 
 
376 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 hands employed in arranging a bouquet, of which the 
 destiny was yet a secret. Next 'to their own loves, 
 ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring 
 the loves of others ; and while the violets and already- 
 drooping wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or re- 
 jected by those slender fingers, the sun might have 
 swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those 
 seven-and-twenty misses would have watched their 
 lovely schoolfellow the same. Nunu turned her head 
 slowly around at last, and silently looked on. St. 
 John lay at the feet of the Georgian, glancing from 
 the flowers to her face, and from her face to the flow- 
 ers, with an admiration not at all equivocal. Mrs. 
 Ufrington sat apart, absorbed in finishing a sketch of 
 New-Haven ; and I, interested painfully in watching 
 the emotions of the Cherokee, sat with my back to 
 the trunk of a hemlock — the only spectator who 
 comprehended the whole extent of the drama. 
 
 A wild rose was set in the heart of the bouquet at 
 last, a spear of riband-grass added to give it grace 
 and point, and nothing was wanting but a string. Ret- 
 icules were searched, pockets turned inside out, and 
 never a bit of riband to be found. The beauty was 
 in despair 
 
 " Stay," said St. John, springing to his feet. 
 "Lash! Lash!" 
 
 The dog came coursing in from the wood, and 
 crouched to his master's hand. 
 
 " Will a string of wampum do ?" he asked, feeling 
 under the long hair on the dog's neck, and untying a 
 fine and variegated thread of many-colored beads, 
 worked "exquisitely. 
 
 The dog growled, and Nunu sprang into the mid- 
 dle of the circle with the fling of an adder, and seiz- 
 ing the wampum as he handed it to her rival, called the 
 dog, and fastened it once more around his neck. 
 
 The ladies rose in alarm ; the belle turned pale, and 
 clung to St. Johu's arm ; the dog, with his hair brist- 
 ling upon his back, stood close to her feet in an atti- 
 tude of defiance ; and the superb Indian, the peculiar 
 genius of her beauty developed by her indignation, 
 her nostrils expanded, and her eyes almost showering 
 fire in their flashes, stood before them like a young 
 Pythoness, ready to strike them dead with a regard. 
 
 St. John recovered from his astonishment after a 
 moment, and leaving the arm of Miss Temple, ad- 
 vanced a step, and called to his dog. 
 
 The Cherokee patted the animal on his back, and 
 spoke to him in her own language ; and, as St. John 
 still advanced, Nunu drew herself to her fullest height, 
 placed herself before the dog, who slunk growling 
 from his master, and said to him, as she folded her 
 arms, " The wampum is mine." 
 
 St. John colored to the temples with shame. 
 
 44 Lash !" he cried, stamping with his feet, and en- 
 deavoring to fright him from his protectress. 
 
 The dog howled and crept away, half crouching 
 with fear, toward the precipice ; and St. John shoot- 
 ing suddenly past Nunu, seized him on the brink, and 
 held him down by the throat. 
 
 The next instant, a scream of horror from Mrs. II- 
 frington, followed by a terrific echo from every female 
 present, started the rude Kentuckian to his feet. 
 
 Clear over the abyss, hanging with one hand by an 
 ashen sapling, the point of her tiny foot just poising 
 on a projecting ledge of rock, swung the desperate 
 Cherokee, sustaining herself with perfect ease, but 
 with all the determination of her iron race collected 
 in calm concentration on her lips. 
 
 " Restore the wampum to his neck," she cried, with 
 a voice that thrilled the very marrow with its subdued 
 fierceness, " or my blood rest on your soul !" 
 
 St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his 
 hands in silent horror. 
 
 The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender 
 stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with 
 
 the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The 
 subdued student sprang to her side ; but with scorn 
 on her lip, and the flush of exertion already vanished 
 from her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid 
 strides took her way alone down the mountain. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the 
 sheltered river of boyhood — had encountered the 
 storms of a first entrance into life — had trimmed my 
 boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to wind- 
 ward, was lying fairly on my course. Among others 
 from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John, 
 who had shaken hands with me at the university gate, 
 leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in 
 doubt as to his real character and history as the first 
 day we met. I had never heard him speak of either 
 father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, re- 
 ceived a letter from the day of his matriculation. He 
 passed his vacations at the university ; he had studied 
 well, yet refused one of the highest college honors 
 offered him with his degree ; he had shown many 
 good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults ; and, 
 all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I 
 knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of 
 superiority ; and my knowledge went no farther. The 
 coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off; 
 and, after four years' constant association, I had not 
 an idea where he was going, or to what he was des- 
 tined. The driver blew his horn. 
 " God bless you, Slingsby !" 
 "God bless you, St. John " 
 And so we parted. 
 
 It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the 
 bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgot- 
 ten there was such a being in the world. Late in the 
 j month of October, in 1829, I was on my way west- 
 ward, giving myself a vacation from the law. I em- 
 barked, on a clear and delicious day, in the small 
 steamer which plies up and down the Cayuga lake, 
 ! looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring 
 j little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we 
 got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern 
 for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight 
 of a group of Indians standing motionless by the 
 wheel. They were chiefs, returning from a diplomatic 
 visit to Washington. 
 
 I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened 
 I soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding 
 j through. The first severe frost had come, and the 
 j miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which 
 j is known only in America. The blood-red sugar ma- 
 ple, with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Cir- 
 cassian lip, stood here and there in the forest like the 
 Sultan's standard in a host — the solitary and far-seen 
 aristocrat of the wilderness ; the birch, with its spirit- 
 like and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer, 
 turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining 
 of the palest gold ; the broad sycamore and the fan- 
 like catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun, 
 spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird ; the 
 kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its 
 majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a 
 stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about 
 him to die royally in his purple ; the tall poplar, with 
 its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a cow- 
 ard in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with 
 its complainings ; the hickory paled through its en- 
 during green ; the bright berries of the mountain-ash 
 flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed 
 sun ; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation, 
 stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating 
 light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of an 
 Indian shell was never more delicately teinted ; the 
 still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perish- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 377 
 
 ing with the noble things whose summer they had 
 6hared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in 
 her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life 
 she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this 
 universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir 
 and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads 
 darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the 
 death-struck glory of their companions. 
 
 The dull colors of English autumnal foliage give 
 you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon. 
 The change here is gradual ; in America it is the 
 work of a night — of a single frost ! 
 
 Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the 
 still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the 
 morning to a spectacle like this! 
 
 It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through 
 the tree-tops — as if the sunsets of a summer — gold, 
 purple, and crimson — had been fused in the alembic 
 of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light 
 and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf 
 in those countless trees had been painted to outflush 
 the tulip — as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of 
 the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals 
 and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let 
 forth their imprisoned colors to mount through the 
 roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden 
 time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the per- 
 ishing leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery. 
 
 I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to 
 what on earth these masses of foliage could be resem- 
 bled, when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the 
 moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder. 
 
 "St. John? Impossible!" 
 
 " Bodily!" answered my quondam classmate. 
 
 I looked at him with astonishment. The soigne 
 man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a 
 kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to 
 his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap 
 of rich otter skin ; his pantaloons spread with a slov- 
 enly carelessness over his feet ; and, altogether, there 
 was that in his air which told me at a glance that he 
 had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his 
 leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched 
 between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if 
 he was brooding over the more idle days in which we 
 had been acquainted. 
 
 " And where are you bound ?" I asked, having an- 
 swered the same question for myself. 
 
 " Westward with the chiefs !" 
 
 "For how long ?" 
 
 " The remainder of my life." 
 
 I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise. 
 
 " You would wonder less," said he, with an impa- 
 tient gesture, "if you knew more of me. And, by- 
 the-way," he added with a smile, " I think I never 
 told you the first half of the story — my life up to the 
 time I met you." 
 
 " It was not for want of a catechist," I answered, 
 settling myself in an attitifde of attention. 
 
 " No ; and I was often tempted to gratify your cu- 
 riosity : but from the little intercourse I had had with 
 the world, I had adopted some precocious principles; 
 and one was, that a man's influence over others was 
 vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his 
 history." 
 
 I smiled, and as the boat sped on her way over the 
 calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on lei- 
 surely with a story which is scarce remarkable enough 
 for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son 
 of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed 
 his early youth on the borders of civilization, between 
 whites and Indians, and that he had been more par- 
 ticularly indebted for protection to the father of Nunu. 
 Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward 
 while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond 
 hfe in the different cities had taught him the caution 
 
 and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A 
 fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with 
 the means of education, and, with singular application 
 in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied 
 himself to study under a private master, fitted him- 
 self for the university in half the usual time, and cul- 
 tivated, in addition, the literary taste which I have re- 
 marked upon. 
 
 " This," he said, smiling at my look of astonish- 
 ment, " brings me up to the time when we met. I 
 came to college at the age of eighteen, with a few 
 hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experi- 
 ence of the rough side of the world, great confidence 
 in myself, and distrust of others, and, I believe, a kind 
 of instinct of good manners, which made me ambi- 
 tious of shining in society. Yon were a witness to 
 my debHt. Miss Temple was the first highly-edu- 
 cated woman I had ever known, and you saw her 
 effect on me." 
 
 " And since we parted ?" 
 
 " Oh, since we parted my life has been vulgar 
 enough. I have ransacked civilized life to the bot- 
 tom, and found it a heap of unredeemed falsehoods. 
 I do not say it from common disappointment, for I 
 I may say I succeeded in everything I undertook " 
 
 "Except Miss Temple," 1 said, interrupting, at the 
 I hazard of wounding him. 
 
 " No ; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I 
 ! had my turn. You see me in my new character now. 
 But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, play- 
 ing my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for 
 a woman worth ten thousand of her — and here she 
 is." 
 
 As Nunu came up the companion-way from the 
 cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature 
 so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair 
 of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in 
 the usual manner, but with the most absolute sim- 
 plicity. She had changed in those five years from 
 the child to the woman, and, with a round and well- 
 developed figure, additional height, and manners at 
 once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked 
 the chieftain's daughter. St. John took her hand, 
 and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes. 
 
 " That I could ever have put a creature like this," 
 he said, " into comparison with the dolls of civiliza- 
 tion!" 
 
 We parted at Buffalo ; St. John with his wife and 
 the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake 
 Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara. 
 
 F. SMITH. 
 
 " Nature had made him for some other planet, 
 And pressed his soul into a human shape 
 By accident or malice." Coleridge. 
 
 " I 'U have you chronicled, and chronicled, and cut-and-chron- 
 icled, and sung in all-to-be-praised sonnets, and graved in new 
 brave ballads, that all tongues shall troule you."— Philaster. 
 
 If you can imagine a buried Titan lying along the 
 length of a continent with one arm stretched out into 
 the midst of the sea, the place to which I would trans- 
 port you, reader mine ! would lie as it were in the 
 palm of the giant's hand. The small promontory to 
 which I refer, which becomes an island in certain 
 states of the tide, is at the end of one of the long capes 
 of Massachusetts, and is still called by its Indian name, 
 Nahant. Not to make you uncomfortable, I beg to 
 introduce you at once to a pretentious hotel, "squat 
 like a toad" upon the unsheltered and highest poiut 
 of this citadel in mid sea, and a very great resort for 
 j the metropolitan New-Englanders. Nahant is per- 
 
378 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 haps, liberally measured, a square half-mile; and it is 
 distant from what may fairly be called mainland, per- 
 haps a league. 
 
 Road to Nahant there is none. The oi polloi go 
 there by steam ; but when the tide is down, you may 
 drive there with a thousand chariots over the bottom 
 of the sea. As I suppose there is not such another 
 place in the known world, my tale will wait while I 
 describe it more fully. If the Bible had been a fic- 
 tion (not to speak profanely), I should have thought 
 the idea of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host 
 hud its origin in some such wonder of nature. 
 
 Nahant is so far out into the ocean, that what is 
 called the "ground swell," the majestic heave of its 
 great bosom going on for ever like respiration (though 
 its face may be like a mirror beneath the sun, and a 
 wind may not have crisped its surface for days and 
 weeks), is as broad and powerful within a rood of the 
 shore as it is a thousand miles at sea. 
 
 The promontory itself is never wholly left by the 
 ebb ; but, from its western extremity, there runs a 
 narrow ridge, scarce broad enough for a horse-path, 
 impassible for the rocks and sea-weed of which it is 
 matted, and extending at just high-water mark from 
 Nahant to the mainland. Seaward from this ridge, 
 which is the only connexion of the promontory with 
 the continent, descends an expanse of sand, left bare 
 six hours out of the twelve by the retreating sea, as 
 smooth and hard as marble, and as broad and appa- 
 rently as level as the plain of the Hermus. For three 
 miles it stretches away without shell or stone, a sur- 
 face of white, fine-grained sand, beaten so hard by the 
 eternal hammer of the surf, that the hoof of a horse 
 scarce marks it, and the heaviest wheel leaves it as 
 printless as a floor of granite. This will be easily un- 
 derstood when you remember the tremendous rise and 
 fall of the ocean swell, from the very bosom of which, 
 in all its breadth and strength, roll in the waves of the 
 flowing tide, breaking down on the beach, every one, 
 with tlie thunder of a host precipitated from the bat- 
 tlements of a castle. Nothing could be more solemn 
 and anthem-like than the succession of these plunging 
 surges. And when the " tenth wave" gathers, far out 
 at sea, and rolls onward to the shore, first with a 
 glassy and heaving swell as if some mighty monster 
 were lurching inland beneath the water, and then, 
 bursting up into foam, with a front like an endless and 
 sparry crystal wall, advances and overwhelms every- 
 thing in its progress, till it breaks with a centupled 
 thunder on the beach — it has seemed to me, standing 
 there, as if thus might have beaten the first surge on 
 the shore after the fiat which " divided sea and land." 
 I am no Cameronian, but the sea (myself on shore) 
 always drives me to Scripture for an illustration of my 
 feelings. I 
 
 The promontory of Nahant must be based on the 
 earth's axle, else 1 can not imagirie how it should have 
 lasted so long. In the mildest weather, the ground- 
 swell of the sea gives it a fillip at every heave that 
 would lay the " castled crag of Drachenfels" as low as 
 Memphis. The wine trembles in your beaker of 
 claret as you sit after dinner at the hotel ; and if you 
 look out at the eastern balcony (for it is a wooden 
 pagoda, with balconies, verandahs, and colonnades ad 
 Libitum), you will see the grass breathless in the sun- 
 shine upon the lawn, and the ocean as polished and 
 calm as MilacWs brow beyond, and yet the spray and 
 foam dashing fifty feet into the air between, and en- 
 veloping the "Devil's Pulpit" (a tall rock split off from 
 the promontory's front) in a perpetual kaleidoscope of 
 mist and rainbows. Take the trouble to transport 
 yourself there ! I will do the remaining honors on the 
 spot. A cavern as cool (not as silent) as those of 
 Trophonius lies just under the brow of yonder preci- 
 pice, and the waiter shall come after us with our wine. 
 You have dined with the Borromeo in the grotto of 
 
 Isola Bella, I doubt not, and know the perfection of 
 art — I will show you that of nature. (I should like to 
 transport you for a similar contrast from Terni to 
 Niagara, or from San Giovanni Laterano to an aisle in 
 a forest of Michigan ; but the Daedalian mystery, alas ! 
 is unsolved. We "fly not yet.") 
 
 Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave." The 
 floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and 
 from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look 
 forth upon the broad Atlantic — the shore of Ireland 
 the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is 
 a dark pool left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator, 
 and with the champagne in the midst, we will recline 
 about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned 
 pleasure in the east, and drink to the small-featured 
 and purple-lipped " Mignons" of Syria — those fine- 
 limbed and fiery slaves, adorable as Peris, and by turns 
 languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch 
 of piastres (say bl. bs.) in sunny Damascus. Your 
 drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery 
 Georgian — fit dolls for the sensual Turk — is, to him 
 who would buy soul, dear at a para the hecatomb. 
 
 We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid, with a 
 hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth 
 side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and 
 dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let 
 into the pearly arch of heaven. The tide is at half- 
 ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at 
 first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip 
 of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock 
 below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn 
 of its retreating fellows, and, like the chieftain of Cul- 
 loden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And 
 now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come 
 forward and look on the sea ! The swell lifts ! — would 
 you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? 
 It falls ! — would you not think the foundation of the 
 deep had given way? A plain, broad enough for the 
 navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly 
 and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a 
 moment spell-bound in its place, and falls again as 
 far — the respiration of a sleeping child not more reg- 
 ular and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that 
 it chafes. Blessed emblem ! it is at peace with itself! 
 The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and 
 the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through 
 the caverns they have rent open ; but beyond, in the 
 calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what 
 godlike unconsciousness of alarm ! I did not think we 
 should stumble on such a moral in the cave ! 
 
 By the deeper base of its hoarse organ, the sea is 
 now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down. 
 Hear! how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and 
 stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing 
 and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad 
 of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is 
 audible. There is fine music in the sea! 
 
 And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to 
 cool and darken, and the fifst gold teint of sunset is 
 stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing 
 opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were 
 paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up 
 through the waters. And there heaves a ship into the 
 horizon, like a white-winged bird lying with dark breast 
 on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight 
 of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that 
 comes with a welcome off the shore. She comes from 
 "merry England." She is freighted with more than 
 merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on her 
 snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and 
 bless it ; for the wind that first filled it on its way 
 swept through the green valley of his home ! What 
 links of human affection brings she over the sea? 
 How much comes in her that is not in her "bill of 
 lading," yet worth, to the heart that is waiting for it, a 
 thousand times the purchase of her whole venture! 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 379 
 
 Mais montons nous ! I hear the small hoofs of 
 Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half 
 Dottle of champagne, that " remainder biscuit," and the 
 echoes of our philosophy, to the Naiads who have lent 
 us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, 
 or Arethusa! whatever thou art called, nympth of this 
 shadowy cave! adieu! 
 
 Slowly, Thalaba ! Tread gingerly down this rocky 
 descent ! So ! Here we are on the floor of the vasty 
 deep! What a glorious race-course ! The polished 
 and printless sand spreads away before you as far as 
 the eye can see, the surf comes in below, breast-high 
 ere it breaks, and the white fringe of the sliding wave 
 shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching 
 of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. 
 Oh, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily 
 we slide along, feeling our motion but in the resist- 
 ance of the wind, and by the trout-like pull of the 
 ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the 
 color of the sand ! White at high-water mark, and 
 thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has 
 evaporated less — a slab of Egyptian granite in the 
 obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpres- 
 sible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is 
 none ; and mar or deface its bright surface as you 
 will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of 
 the dust of the foot of man, by the returning sea. 
 You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow- 
 quill — you may course over its dazzling expanse with 
 a troop of chariots. 
 
 Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty 
 yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left 
 the sand, it holds the water without losing its firm- 
 ness, and is like a gray mirror, bright as the bosom of 
 the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean 
 over the dasher, and see those small fetlocks striking 
 up from beneath — the flying mane, the thorough-bred 
 action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in 
 the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's 
 swan, he 
 
 u Trots double, horse and shadow." 
 
 You would swear you were skimming the surface of 
 the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the 
 white foam of the "tenth wave" skims in beneath 
 wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous 
 element gliding away visibly beneath you. 
 
 We seem not to have driven fast, yet three miles, 
 fairly measured, are left behind, and Thalaba's blood 
 is up. Fine creature! I would not give him 
 
 " For the best horse the Sun has in his stable." 
 
 We have won champagne ere now, Thalaba, and I, 
 trotting on this silvery beach ; and if ever old age 
 comes on me, and I intend it never shall on aught 
 save my mortal coil (my spirit vowed to perpetual 
 youth), I think these vital breezes, and a trot on these 
 exhilarating sands, would sooner renew my prime 
 than a rock in St. Hilary's cradle, or a dip in the well 
 of Kanathos. May we try the experiment together, 
 gentle reader! 
 
 I am not settled in my own mind whether this de- 
 scription of one of my favorite haunts in America 
 was written most to introduce the story that is to fol- 
 low, or the story to introduce the description. Possi- 
 bly the latter, for having consumed by callow youth 
 in wandering " to and fro in the earth," like Sathanas 
 of old, and looking on my country now with an eye 
 from which all the minor and temporary features have 
 gradually faded, I find my pride in it (after its glory 
 as a republic) settling principally on the superior 
 handiwork of nature in its land and water. When 
 I talk of it now, it is looking through another's eyes 
 — his who listens. I do not describe it after my own 
 memory of what it was once to ?ne, but according to 
 my idea of what it will seem now to a stranger. 
 
 Hence I speak not of the friends I made, rambling by 
 lake or river. The lake and the river are there, but 
 the friends are changed — to themselves and me. I 
 speak not of the lovely and loving ones that stood by 
 me, looking on glen or waterfall. The glen and the 
 waterfall ar« romantic still, but the form and the heart 
 that breathed through it are no longer lovely or loving. 
 I should renew my joys by the old mountain and 
 river, for, all they ever were I should find them still, 
 and never seem to myself grown old, or cankered of 
 the world, or changed in form or spirit, while they 
 reminded me but of my youth, with their familiar 
 sunshine and beauty. But the friends that I knew — 
 as I knew them — are dead. They look no longer 
 the same; they have another heart in them; the 
 kindness of the eye, the smilingness of the lip, are 
 no more there. Philosophy tells me the material 
 and living body changes and renews, particle by par- 
 ticle, with time ; and experience — cold-blooded and 
 j stony monitor — tells me, in his frozen monotone, that 
 heart and spirit change with it and renew ! But the 
 1 name remains, mockery that it is! and the memory 
 ! sometimes; and so these apparitions of the past — that 
 ; we almost fear to question when they encounter us, 
 ; lest the change they have undergone should freeze our 
 i blood — stare coldly on us, yet call us by name, and 
 ; answer, though coldly to their own, and have that 
 j terrible similitude to what they were, mingled with 
 j their unsympathizing and hollow mummery, that we 
 wish the grave of the past, with all that it contained 
 of kind or lovely, had been sealed for ever. The 
 | heart we have lain near before our birth (so read I the 
 i book of human life) is the only one that can not for- 
 get that it has loved us. Saith well and affection- 
 ately an American poet, in some birth-day verses to 
 ! his mother — 
 
 " Mother ! dear mother ! the feelings nurst 
 As I hung at thy bosom, clung round thee first — 
 'Twas the earliest link in love's warm chain, 
 'Tis the only one that will long remain ; 
 And as, year by year, and day by day, 
 Some friend, still trusted, drops away, 
 Mother ! dear mother ! oh, dost thou see 
 How the shortened chain brings me nearer thee .'" 
 
 II. 
 
 I have observed that of all the friends one has in the 
 course of his life, the truest and most attached is ex- 
 actly the one who, from his dissimilarity to yourself, 
 the world finds it very odd you should fancy. We 
 hear sometimes of lovers who " are made for each 
 other," but rarely of the same natural match in friend- 
 ship. It is no great marvel. In a world like this, 
 where we pluck so desperately at the fruit of pleasure, 
 we prefer for company those who are not formed with 
 precisely the same palate as ourselves. You will sel- 
 dom go wrong, dear reader, if you refer any human 
 question about which you are in doubt to that icy 
 oracle — selfishness. 
 
 My shadow for many years was a gentle monster, 
 whom I have before mentioned, baptized by the name 
 of Forbearance Smith. He was a Vermontese, a de- 
 scendant of one of the puritan pilgrims, and the first 
 of his family who had left the Green mountains since 
 the flight of the regicides to America. We assimilate 
 to what we live among, and Forbearance was very 
 green, and very like a mountain. He had a general 
 resemblance to one of Thorwaldsen's unfinished apos- 
 tles — larger than life, and just hewn into outline. My 
 acquaintance with him commenced during my first 
 year at the university. He stalked into my room one 
 morning with a hair-trunk on his back, and handed me 
 the following note from the tutor : — 
 
 " Sir : The faculty have decided to impose upon 
 you the fine of ten dollars and damages, for painting 
 
380 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the president's horse on sabbath night while grazing 
 on the college green. They, moreover, have removed 
 Freshman Wilding from your rooms, and appoint as 
 your future chum the studious and exemplary bearer, 
 Forbearance Smith, to whom you are desired to show 
 a becoming respect. 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 " Erasmus Snufflegreek. 
 N To Freshman Slingsby." 
 
 Rather relieved by my lenient sentence (for, till the 
 next shedding of his well-saturated coat, the sky-blue 
 body and red mane and tail of the president's once 
 gray mare would interfere with that esteemed animal's 
 usefulness), I received Mr. Smith with more polite- 
 ness than he expected. He deposited his hair-trunk in 
 the vacant bedroom, remarked with a good-humored 
 smile that it was a cold morning, and seating himself 
 in my easiest chair, opened his Euclid, and went to 
 work upon a problem, as perfectly at home as if he 
 had furnished the room himself, and lived in it from 
 his matriculation. I had expected some preparatory 
 apology at least, and was a little annoyed ; but being 
 upon my good behavior, I bit my lips, and resumed 
 the "Art of Love," upon which I was just then prac- 
 tising my nascent Latinity, instead of calculating loga- 
 rithms for recitation. In about an hour, my new chum 
 suddenly vociferated "Eureka!" shut up his book, 
 and having stretched himself (a very unnecessary op- 
 eration), coolly walked to my dressing-table, selected 
 my best hair-brush, redolent of Macassar, and used it 
 with the greatest apparent satisfaction. 
 
 " Have you done with that hair-brush ?" I asked, as 
 he laid it in its place again. 
 
 " Oh yes !" 
 
 " Then, perhaps, you will do me the favor to throw 
 it out of the window." 
 
 He did it without the slightest hesitation. He then 
 resumed his seat by the fire, and I went on with my 
 book in silence. Twenty minutes had elapsed, per- 
 haps, when he rose very deliberately, and without a 
 word of preparation, gave me a cuff that sent me fly- 
 ing into the wood-basket in the corner behind me. As 
 soon as I could pick myself out, I flew upon him, but 
 I might as well have grappled with a boa-constrictor. 
 He held me off at arm's length till I was quite ex- 
 hausted with rage, and, at last, when I could struggle 
 no more, I found breath to ask him what the devil he 
 meant. 
 
 " To resent what seemed to me, on reflection, to be 
 an insult," he answered, in the calmest tone, " and 
 now to ask your pardon for a fault of ignorance. The 
 first was due to myself, the second to you." 
 
 Thenceforth, to the surprise of everybody, and Bob 
 Wilding and the tutor, we were inseparable. I took 
 Bruin (by a double elision Forbearance became " bear," 
 and by paraphrase Bruin, and he answered to the 
 name)— I took him, I say, to the omnium shop, and 
 presented him with a dressing-case, and other appli- 
 ances for his outer man ; and as my inner man was 
 relatively as much in need of his assistance, we mu- 
 tually improved. I instructed him in poetry and po- 
 liteness, and he returned the lesson in problems and 
 politics. My star was never in more fortunate con- 
 junction. 
 
 Four years had woven their threads of memory about 
 us, and there was never woof more free from blemish. 
 Our friendship was proverbial. All that much care 
 and Macassar could do for Bruin had been done, but 
 there was no abating his seven feet of stature, nor re- 
 ducing the size of his feet proper, nor making the mus- 
 cles of his face answer to their natural wires. At his 
 most placid smile, a strange waiter would run for a 
 hot towel and the doctor (colic was not more like it- 
 self than that like colic) ; and for his motions — oh 
 Lord ! a skeleton, with each individual bone append- 
 
 ed to its neighbor with a string, would execute a pas 
 seul with the same expression. His mind, however, 
 had none of the awkwardness of his body. A simpli- 
 city and truth, amounting to the greatest naivete, and 
 a fatuitous unconsciousness of the effect on beholders 
 of his outer man, were its only approaches to fault or 
 foible. With the finest sense of the beautiful, the 
 most unerring judgment in literary taste, the purest 
 romance, a fervid enthusiasm, constancy, courage, and 
 good temper, he walked about the world in a mask — 
 an admirable creature, in the guise and seeming of a 
 ludicrous monster. 
 
 Bruin was sensitive on but one point. He never 
 could forgive his father and mother for the wrong they 
 had entailed on him at his baptism. "Forbearance 
 Smith !" he would say to himself sometimes in uncon- 
 scious soliloquy, "they should have given me the vir- 
 tue as well as the name !" And then he would sit 
 with a pen, and scrawl " F. Smith" on a sheet of paper 
 by the hour together. To insist upon knowing his 
 Christian name was the one impertinence he never 
 forgave. 
 
 III. 
 
 My party at Nahant consisted of Thalaba, Forbear- 
 ance, and myself. The place was crowded, but 1 
 I passed my time very much between my horse and my 
 J friend, and was as certain to be found on the beach 
 ; when the tide was down, as the sea to have left the 
 
 I sands. Job (a synonyme for Forbearance which be- 
 ! came at this time his common soubriquet) was, of 
 
 ' ! course, in love. Not the least to the prejudice, how- 
 | ever, of his last faithful passion — for he was as fond 
 
 ;, of the memory of an old love, as he was tender in the 
 i presence of the new. I intended to have had him dis- 
 I sected after his death, to see whether his organization 
 | was not peculiar. I strongly incline to the opinion 
 
 II that we should have found a mirror in the place of his 
 heart. Strange ! how the same man who is so fickle 
 in love, will be so constant in friendship ! But is it 
 fickleness ? Is it not rather a supcrjlu of tenderness in 
 the nature, which overflows to all who approach the 
 fountain ? I have ever observed that the most suscep- 
 tible men are the most remarkable for the finer quali- 
 ties of character. They are more generous, more 
 delicate, and of a more chivalrous complexion alto- 
 gether, than other men. It was surprising how reason- 
 ably Bruin would argue upon this point. " Because 
 I was happy at Niagara," he was saying one day as 
 we sat upon the rocks, " shall I take no pleasure in 
 the falls of Montmorenci ? Because the sunset was 
 glorious yesterday, shall I find no beauty in that of 
 to-day ? Is my fancy to be used but once, and the 
 key turned upon it for ever? Is the heart like a bon- 
 
 || bon, to be eaten up by the first favorite, and thought 
 I of no more ? Are our eyes blind, save to one shape 
 ! ! of beauty ? Are our ears insensible to the music save 
 of one voice ?" 
 
 11 But do you not weaken the heart, and become in- 
 capable of a lasting attachment, by this habit of incon- 
 stancy ?" 
 
 " How long, my dear Phil, will you persist in talk- 
 ! ing as if the heart was material, and held so much love 
 as a cup so much water, and had legs to be weary, or 
 organs to grow dull ? How is my sensibility lessened 
 — how my capacity enfeebled ? What would I have 
 done for my first love, that I would not do for my last ? 
 I would have sacrificed my life to secure the happi- 
 ness of one you wot of in days gone by : I would jump 
 into the sea, if it would make Blanche Carroll happier 
 to-morrow." 
 
 " Sautez-donc /" said a thrilling voice behind ; and 
 as if the utterance of her name had conjured her out 
 of the ground, the object of all Job's admiration, and 
 a little of my own, stood before us. She had a work- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 381 
 
 basket in her hand, a gipsy-hat tossed carelessly on 
 her head, and had preceded a whole troop of belles 
 and matrons, who were coming out to while away the 
 morning, and breathe the invigorating sea-air on the 
 
 rocks. , ,j 11 
 
 Blanche Carroll was what the women would call 
 " a little love," but that phrase of endearment would 
 not at all express the feeling with which she inspired 
 the men. She was small, and her face and figure 
 might have been framed in fairy-land for bewitching 
 beauty ; but with the manner of a spoiled child, and, 
 apparently, the most thoughtless playfulness of mind, 
 she was as veritable a little devil as ever took the shape 
 of woman. Scarce seventeen at this time, she had 
 a knowledge of character that was like an instinct, and 
 was an accomplished actress in any part it was neces- 
 sary for her purpose to play. No grave Machiavel 
 ever managed his cards with more finesse than that 
 little intriguante the limited world of which she was 
 the star. She was a natural master-spirit and plotter; 
 and the talent that would have employed itself in the 
 deeper game of politics, had she been born a woman 
 of rank in Europe, displayed itself, in the simple so- 
 ciety of a republic, in subduing to her power every- 
 thing in the shape of a single man that ventured to her 
 net. I have nothing to tell of her at all commensu- 
 rate with the character I have drawn, for the disposal 
 of her own heart (if she has one) must of course be 
 the most important event of her life ; but I merely 
 pencil the outline of the portrait in passing, as a 
 specimen of the material that exists — even in the 
 simplest society — for the dramatis personce of a 
 court. 
 
 We followed the light-footed beauty to the shelter 
 of one of the caves opening on the sea, and seated our- 
 selves about her upon the rocks. Some one proposed 
 that Job or myself should read. 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Smith," interrupted the belle, "where is 
 my bracelet ? — and where are my verses ?" 
 
 At the ball the night before she had dropped a 
 Dracelet in the waltz, and Job had been permitted to 
 take care of the fragments, on condition of restoring 
 them, with a sonnet, the next morning. She had just 
 thought of it. 
 
 " Read them out ! read them out !" she cried, as 
 Job, blushing a deep blue, extracted a tri-colored pink 
 document from his pocket, and tried to give it to her 
 unobservsd, with the packet of jewelry. Job looked 
 at her imploringly, and she took the verses from his 
 hand, and ran her eye through them. 
 
 " Pretty well !" she said ; " but the last line might 
 be improved. Give me a pencil, some one !" And 
 bending over it, till her luxuriant hair concealed her 
 fairy fingers in their employment, she wrote a moment 
 upon her knee, and tossing the paper to me, bade me 
 read it out with the emendation. Bruin had, mean- 
 time, modestly disappeared, and I read with the more 
 freedom • — 
 
 " 'Twas broken in the gliding dance, 
 
 When thou wert in ihe dream of power ; 
 When shape and motion, tone and glance, 
 
 Were glorious all — the woman's hour ! 
 The light lay soft upon thy brow, 
 
 The music melted in thine ear, 
 And one perhaps forgotten now, 
 
 With 'wildered thoughts stood listening near, 
 Marvelling not that links of gold 
 A pulse like thine had not controlled. 
 
 " 'Tis midnight now. The dance is done, 
 
 And thou, in thy soft dreams, asleep, 
 And I, awake, am gazing on 
 
 The fragments given me to keep : 
 I think of every glowing vein 
 
 That ran beneath these links of gold, 
 And wonder if a thrill of pain 
 
 Made those bright channels ever cold ! 
 With gifts like thine, I can not think 
 Orief ever chilled this broken link. 
 
 " Good-night ! 'Tis little now to thee 
 
 That in my ear thy words were spoken, 
 And thou wilt think of them and me 
 
 As long as of the bracelet broken. 
 For thus is riven many a chain 
 
 That thou hast fastened but to break, 
 And thus thou'lt sink to sleep again, 
 
 As careless that another wake : 
 The only thought thy heart can rend 
 Is— what the fellow'll charge to mend .'" 
 
 Job's conclusion was more pathetic, but probably 
 less true. He appeared alter the applause had ceased, 
 and resumed his place at the lady's feet, with a look 
 in his countenance of having deserved an abatement 
 of persecution. The beauty spread out the fragments 
 of the broken bracelet on the rock beside her. 
 
 " Mr. Smith !" said she, in her most conciliating 
 tone. 
 
 Job leaned toward her with a look of devoted in- 
 quiry. 
 
 " Has the tide turned ?" 
 
 " Certainly. Two hours since." 
 
 " The beach is passable, then ?" 
 
 " Hardly, I fear." 
 
 " No matter. How many hours' drive is it to Sa- 
 lem ?" 
 
 " Mr. Slingsby drives it in two." 
 
 " Then you'll get Mr. Slingsby to lend you his 
 stanhope, drive to Salem, have this bracelet mended, 
 and bring it back in time for the ball. / have spoken, 
 as the grand Turk says. Allez !" 
 
 " But my dear Miss Carroll " 
 
 She laid her hand on his mouth as he began to re- 
 monstrate, and while I made signs to him to refuse, 
 she said something to him which I lost in a sudden 
 dash of the waters. He looked at me for my consent. 
 
 " Oh ! you can have Mr. Slingsby's horse," said the 
 beauty, as I hesitated whether my refusal would not 
 check her tyranny, " and I'll drive him out this even- 
 ing for his reward, iV est -ce pas? you cross man !" 
 
 So, with a sun hot enough to fry the brains in his 
 skull, and a quivering reflection on the sands that 
 would burn his face to a blister, exit Job, with the 
 broken bracelet in his bosom. 
 
 "Stop, Mr. Slingsby," said the imperious little belle, 
 as I was making up a mouth, after his departure, to 
 express my disapprobation of her measures, "no lec- 
 ture, if you please. Give me that book of plays, and 
 I'll read you a precedent. Because you are virtuous, 
 shall we have no more cakes and ale ? Ecoutez ! And, 
 with an emphasis and expression that would have been 
 perfect on the stage, she read the following passage 
 from " The Careless Husband :" — 
 
 " Lady Betty. — The men of sense, my dear, make 
 the best Yools in the world; their sincerity and good 
 breeding throw them so entirely into one's power, and 
 give one such an agreeable thirst of using them ill, to 
 show that power — 'tis impossible not to quench it. 
 
 "Lady Easy. — But, my Lord Morelove — 
 
 " Lady B. — Pooh ! my Lord Morelove's a mere In- 
 dian damask — one can't wear him out: o' my con- 
 science, I must give him to my woman at last. 1 begin 
 to be known by him ; had I not best leave him oil", tin- 
 dear ? 
 
 " Lady E. — Why did .you ever encourage him > 
 
 " Lady B.— Why, what would you have one do ? 
 For my part, I could no more choose a man by my 
 eye than a shoe— one must draw them on a little, to 
 see if they are right to one's foot. 
 
 " Lady E— But I'd no more fool on with a man I 
 could not like, than wear a shoe that pinched me. 
 
 " Lady B.—Ay ; but then a poor wretch tells one 
 he'll widen 'em, or do anything, and is so evil and 
 silly, that one does not know how to turn such a trifle 
 as a pair of shoes, or a heart, upon a fellow's hands 
 again. 
 
 " Lady TS.—And thpre's my Lord Fnppington. 
 
382 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 "Lady B. — My dear! fine fruit will have flies about 
 it ; but, poor things! they do it no harm; for, if you 
 observe, people are generally most apt to choose that 
 the flies have been busy with. Ha ! ha ! 
 
 " Lady E. — Thou art a strange, giddy creature ! 
 
 14 Lady B. — That may be from too much circula- 
 tion of thought, my dear !" 
 
 " Pray, Miss Carroll," said I, as she threw aside the 
 book with a theatrical air, " have you any precedent 
 for broiling a man's brains, as well as breaking his 
 heart ? For, by this time, my friend Forbearance has 
 a coup de soleil, and is hissing over the beach like a 
 steam-engine." 
 
 " How tiresome you are ! Do you really think it 
 will kill him ?" 
 
 " It might injure him seriously — let alone the dan- 
 ger of driving a spirited horse over the beach, with the 
 tide quarter-down." 
 
 " What shall I do to be ' taken out of the corner,' 
 Mr. Slingsby ?" 
 
 "Order your horses an hour sooner, and drive to 
 Lynn, to meet him halfway on his return. I will re- 
 sume my stanhope, and give him the happiness of 
 driving back with you." 
 
 " And shall I be gentle Blanche Carroll, and no 
 ogre, if I do?" 
 
 "Yes; Mr. Smith surviving." 
 
 " Take the trouble to give my orders, then ; and 
 come back immediately, and read to me till it is time 
 to go. Meantime, I shall look at myself in this black 
 mirror." And the spoilt, but most lovely girl bent 
 over a dark pool in the corner of the cave, forming a 
 picture on its shadowy background that drew a mur- 
 mur of admiration even from the neglected group who 
 had been the silent and disapproving witnesses of her 
 caprice." 
 
 IV 
 
 A thunder-cloud strode into the sky with the rapid- 
 ity which marks that common phenomenon of a 
 breathless summer afternoon in America, darkened the 
 air for a few minutes, so that the birds betook them- 
 selves to their nests, and then poured out its refresh- 
 ing waters with the most terrific flashes of lightning, 
 and crashes of thunder, which for a moment seemed to 
 still even the eternal base of the sea. With the same 
 fearful rapidity, the black roof of the sky tore apart, and 
 fell back, in rolling and changing masses, upon the 
 horizon ; the sun darted with intense brilliancy 
 through the clarified and transparent air ; the light- 
 stirring breeze came freighted with delicious coolness; 
 and the heavy sea-birds, who had lain brooding on the 
 waves while the tumult of the elements went on, rose 
 on their cimeter-like wings, and fled away, with in- 
 comprehensible instinct, from the beautiful and freshen- 
 ed land. The whole face of earth and sky had been 
 changed in an hour. 
 
 Oh, of what fulness of delight are even the senses 
 capable ! What a nerve there is sometimes in every 
 pore ! What love for all living and all inanimate 
 things may be born of a summer shower ! How stirs 
 the fancy, and brightens hope, and warms the heart, 
 and sings the spirit within us, at the mere animal joy 
 with which the lark flees into heaven ! And yet, of 
 this exquisite capacity for pleasure we take so little 
 care ! We refine our taste, we elaborate and finish 
 our mental perception, we study the beautiful, that 
 we may know it when it appears — yet the senses by 
 which these faculties are approached, the stops by 
 which this fine instrument is played, are trifled with 
 and neglected. We forget that a single excess blurs 
 and confuses the music written on our minds ; we 
 forget that an untimely vigil weakens and bewilders 
 the delicate minister to our inner temple; we know 
 
 not, or act as if we knew not, that the fine and easily- 
 jarred harmony of health is the only interpreter of 
 Nature to our souls ; in short, we drink too much 
 claret, and eat too much pale foie gras. Do you un- 
 derstand me, gourmand et gourmet ? 
 
 Blanche Carroll was a beautiful whip, and the two 
 bay ponies in her phaeton were quite aware of it. La 
 Bruyere says, with his usual wisdom, " Une belle 
 femme qui a les qualit6s d'un honnete homme est ce 
 qu'il y a au monde d'un commerce plus delicieux ;" 
 and, to a certain degree, masculine accomplishments 
 too, are very winning in a woman — if pretty ; if plain, 
 she is expected not only to be quite feminine, but 
 quite perfect. Foibles are as hateful in a woman who 
 does not possess beauty, as they are engaging in a wo- 
 man who does. Clouds are only lovely when the 
 heavens are bright. 
 
 She looked loveliest while driving, did Blanche 
 Carroll, for she was born to rule, and the expression 
 native to her lip was energy and nerve ; and as she 
 sat with her little foot pressed against the dasher, and 
 reined in those spirited horses, the finely-pencilled 
 mouth, usually playful or pettish, was pressed to- 
 gether in a curve as warlike as Minerva's, and twice 
 as captivating. She drove, too, as capriciously as 
 she acted. At one moment her fleet ponies fled over 
 the sand at the top of their speed, and at the next they 
 were brought down to a walk, with a suddenness 
 which threatened to bring them upon their haunches. 
 Now far up on the dry sand, cutting a zigzag to 
 lengthen the way, and again below at the tide edge, 
 with the waves breaking over her seaward wheel ; all 
 her powers at one instant engrossed in pushing them 
 to their fastest trot, and in another the reins lying 
 loose on their backs, while she discussed some sudden 
 flight of philosophy. " Be his fairy, his page, his 
 everything that love and poetry have invented," said 
 Roger Ascham to Lady Jane Grey, just before her 
 marriage; but Blanche Carroll was almost the only 
 woman I ever saw capable of the beau ideal of fascina- 
 ting characters. 
 
 Between Miss Carroll and myself there was a safe 
 and cordial friendship. Besides loving another better, 
 she was neither earnest, nor true, nor affectionate 
 enough to come at all within the range of my possible 
 attachments, and though I admired her, she felt that 
 the necessary sympathy was wanting for love ; and, 
 the idea of fooling me with the rest once abandoned, 
 we were the greatest of allies. She told me all her 
 triumphs, and I listened and laughed without thinking 
 it worth while to burden her with my confidence in 
 return ; and you may as well make a memorandum, 
 gentle reader, that that is a very good basis for a friend- 
 ship. Nothing bores women or worldly persons so 
 much as to return their secrets with your own. 
 
 As we drew near the extremity of the beach, a boy 
 rode up on horseback, and presented Miss Carroll with 
 a note I observed that it was written on a very dirty 
 slip of paper, and was waiting to be enlightened as to 
 its contents, when she slipped it into her belt, took the 
 whip from the box, and flogging her ponies through 
 the heavy sand of the outer beach, went off, at a pace 
 which seemed to engross all her attention, on her road 
 to Lynn. We reached the hotel and she had not 
 spoken a syllable, and as I made a point of never in- 
 quiring into anything that seemed odd in her conduct, 
 I merely stole a glance at her face, which wore the 
 expression of mischievous satisfaction which I liked 
 the least of its common expressions, and descended 
 from the phaeton with the simple remark, that Job 
 could not have arrived, as I saw nothing of my stan- 
 hope in the yard. 
 
 " Mr. Slingsby." It was the usual preface to asking 
 some particular favor. 
 
 " Miss Carroll." 
 
 " Will you be so kind as to walk to the library and 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 383 
 
 select me a book to your own taste, and ask no ques- 
 tions as to what I do with myself meantime ?" 
 
 "But, my dear Miss Carroll — your father " 
 
 " Will feel quite satisfied when he hears that Cato 
 was with me. Leave the ponies to the groom, Cato, 
 and follow me." I looked after her as she walked 
 down the village street with the old black behind her, 
 not at all certain of the propriety of my acquiescence, 
 but feeling that there was no help for it. 
 
 I lounged away a half hour at the library, and found 
 Miss Carroll waiting for me on my return. There 
 were no signs of Bruin ; and as she seemed impatient 
 to be off, I jumped into the phaeton, and away we flew 
 to the beach as fast as her ponies could be driven 
 under the whip. As we descended upon the sands 
 she spoke for the first time. 
 
 " It is so civil of you to ask no questions, Mr. Slings- 
 by; but you are not offended with me ?" 
 
 " If you have got into no scrape while under my 
 charge, I shall certainly be too happy to shake hands 
 upon it to-morrow." 
 
 " Are you quite sure ?" she asked archly. 
 
 " Quite sure." 
 
 " So am not I," she said with a merry laugh; and 
 in her excessive amusement she drove down to the sea, 
 till the surf broke over the nearest pony's back, and 
 filled the bottom of the phaeton with water. Our wet 
 feet were now a fair apology for haste, and taking the 
 reins from her, I drove rapidly home, while she wrap- 
 ped herself in her shawl, and sat apparently absorbed 
 in the coming of the twilight over the sea. 
 
 I slept late after the ball, though I had gone to bed 
 exceedingly anxious about Bruin, who had not yet 
 made his appearance. The tide would prevent his 
 crossing the beach afrer ten in the morning, however, 
 and I made myself tolerably easy till the sands were 
 passable with the evening ebb. The high-water mark 
 was scarcely deserted by the waves, when the same 
 boy who had delivered the note to Miss Carroll the 
 day before, rode up from the beach on a panting horse, 
 and delivered me the following note : — 
 
 " Dear Philip : You will be surprised to hear 
 that I am in the Lynn jail on a charge of theft and 
 utterance of counterfeit money. I do not wait to tell 
 you the particulars. Please come and identify, 
 " Yours truly, 
 
 " F. Smith." 
 
 I got upon the boy's horse, and hurried over the 
 beach with whip and spur. I stopped at the justice's 
 office, and that worthy seemed uncommonly pleased 
 to see me. 
 
 " We have got him, sir," said he. 
 
 " Got whom ?" I asked rather shortly. 
 
 •« Why, the fellow that stole your stanhope and Miss 
 Carroll's bracelet, and passed a twenty dollar counter- 
 feit bill — ha'n't you hearn on't ?" 
 
 The justice's incredulity, when I told him it was 
 probably the most intimate friend I had in the world, 
 would have amused me at any other time. 
 
 " Will you allow me to see the prisoner?" I asked. 
 
 " Be sure I will. I let Miss Carroll have a peep at 
 him yesterday, and what do you think ? Oh, Lord ! 
 he wanted to make her believe she knew him ! Good ! 
 wasn't it? Ha! ha! And such an ill-looking fel- 
 low ! Why, I'd know him for a thief anywhere ! 
 Your intimate friend, Mr. Slingsby ! Oh, Lord ! 
 when you come to see him ! Ha ! ha !" 
 
 We were at the prison-door. The grating bolts 
 turned slowly, the door swung rustily on its hinges as 
 if it was not often used, and in the next minute I was 
 enfolded in Job's arms, who sobbed and laughed, and 
 was quite hysterical with his delight. I scarce won- 
 
 dered at the justice's prepossessions when I looked at 
 the figure he made. His hat knocked in, his coat 
 muddy, his hair full of the dust of straw — the natural 
 hideousness of poor Job had every possible aggrava- 
 tion. 
 
 We were in the stanhope, and fairly on the beach, 
 before he had sufficiently recovered to tell me the 
 story. He had arrived quite overheated at Lynn, but, 
 in a hurry to execute Miss Carroll's commission, he 
 merely took a glass of soda-water, had Thalaba's 
 mouth washed, and drove on. A mile on his way, he 
 was overtaken by a couple of ostlers on horseback, 
 who very roughly ordered him back to the inn. He 
 refused, and a fight ensued, which ended in his being 
 tied into the stanhope, and driven back as a prisoner. 
 The large note, which he had given for his soda-water, 
 it appeared, was a counterfeit, and placards, offering a 
 reward for the detection of a villain, described in the 
 usual manner as an ill-looking fellow, had been stick- 
 ing up for some days in the village. He was taken 
 before the justice, who declared at first sight that he 
 answered the description in the advertisement. His 
 stubborn refusal to give the whole of his name (he 
 would rather have died, I suppose), his possession of 
 my stanhope, which was immediately recognised, and 
 lastly, the bracelet found in his pocket, of which he 
 refused indignantly to give any account, were circum- 
 stances enough to leave no doubt on the mind of the 
 worthy justice. He made out his mittimus forthwith, 
 granting Job's request that he might be allowed to 
 write a note to Miss Carroll (who, he knew, would 
 drive over the beach toward evening), as a very great 
 favor. She arrived as he expected. 
 
 " And what in Heaven's name did she say V- said I, 
 interested beyond my patience at this part of the story. 
 
 "Expressed the greatest astonishment when the 
 justice showed her the bracelet, and declared she 
 never saw me before in her life .'" 
 
 That Job forgave Blanche Carroll in two days, and 
 gave her a pair of gloves with some verses on the 
 third, will surprise only those who have not seen that 
 lady. It would seem incredible, but here are the 
 verses, as large as life : — 
 
 " Slave of the snow-white hand ! I fold 
 
 My spirit in thy fabric fair ; 
 And when that dainty hand is cold, 
 
 And rudely comes the wintry air, 
 Press in thy light and straining form 
 Those slender fingers soft and warm ; 
 
 And, as the fine-traced veins within 
 Quicken their bright and rosy flow, 
 
 And gratefully the dewy skin 
 Clings to the form that warms it so 
 
 Tell her my heart is hiding there, 
 Trembling to be so closely prest, 
 
 Yet feels how brief its moments are, 
 And saddens even to be blest — 
 Fated to serve her for a day, 
 And then, like thee, be flung away." 
 
 EDITH L1NSEY. 
 
 PART 1. 
 
 FROST AND FLIRTATION. 
 
 Oh yes — for you're in love with me! 
 
 (I'm very glad of it, I'm sure ;) 
 But then you are not rich, you see, 
 
 And I you know I'm very poor ! 
 
 'Tis true that I can drive a tandem— 
 
 'Tis true that I can turn a sonnet— 
 'Tis true I leave the law at random, 
 
 When I should study— plague upon it ! 
 But this is not— excuse me !— m y ! 
 
 (A thing they give for house and land ;) 
 And we must eat in matrimony— 
 And love is neither bread nor honey— 
 
 And so you understand ?" 
 
384 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 " Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine, lady mine ! 
 Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine ! 
 But the noon will have its ray, 
 And snow-wreaths melt away — 
 And hearts — why should not thevt — 
 Why not thine V 
 
 It began to snow. The air softened; the pattering 
 of the horse's hoofs was muffled with the impeded vi- 
 bration ; the sleigh glided on with a duller sound ; 
 the large loose flakes fell soft and fast, and the low 
 and just audible murmur, like the tread of a fairy 
 host, melted on the ear with a drowsy influence, as if 
 it were a descent of palpable sleep upon the earth. 
 You may talk of falling water — of the running of a 
 brook — of the humming song of an old crone on a 
 sick vigil — or of the levi susurro of the bees of Hybla 
 — but there is nothing like the falling of the snow for 
 soft and soothing music. You hear it or not, as you 
 will, but it melts into your soul unaware. If you have 
 ever a heartache, or feel the need of "poppy or man- 
 dragora," or, like myself, grow sometimes a-weary of 
 the stale repetitions of this unvaried world, seek me 
 out in Massachusetts, when the wind softens and veers 
 south, after a frost — say in January. There shall 
 have been a long-lying snow on the ground, well- 
 trodden. The road shall be as smooth as the paths 
 to our first sins — of a seeming perpetual declivity, as 
 it were — and never a jolt or jar between us and the 
 edge of the horizon ; but all onward and down appa- 
 rently, with an insensible ease. You sit beside me in 
 my spring-sleigh, hung with the lightness of a cob- 
 web cradle for a fairy's child in the trees. Our horse 
 is, in the harness, of a swift and even pace, and around 
 his neck is a string of fine small bells, that ring to his 
 measured step in a kind of muffled music, softer and 
 softer as the snow-flakes thicken in the air. Your 
 seat is of the shape of the fauteuil in your library, 
 cushioned and deep, and with a backward and gentle 
 slope, and you are enveloped to the eyelids in warm 
 furs. You settle down, with every muscle in repose, 
 the visor of your ermine cap just shedding the snow 
 from your forehead, and with a word, the groom stands 
 back, and the horse speeds on, steady, but beautifully 
 fast. The bells, which you hear loudly at first, begin 
 to dcaderi, and the low hum of the alighting flakes 
 steals gradually on your ear ; and soon the hoof- 
 strokes are as silent as if the steed were shod with 
 wool, and away you flee through the white air, like 
 birds asleep upon the wing diving through the feathery 
 fleeces of the moon. Your eyelids fall — forgetfulness 
 steals upon the senses — a delicious torpor takes pos- 
 session of the uneasy blood — and brain and thought 
 yield to an intoxicating and trance-like slumber. It 
 were perhaps too much to ask that any human bosom 
 may go scathless to the grave ; but in my own un- 
 worthy petitions I usually supplicate that my heart 
 may be broken about Christmas. I know an anodyne 
 o' that season. 
 
 Fred Fleming and I occupied one of the seven long 
 seats in a stage-sleigh, flying at this time twelve miles 
 in the hour (yet not fast enough for our impatience), 
 westward from the university gates. The sleighing 
 had been perfect for a week, and the cold keen air had 
 softened for the first time that morning, and assumed 
 the warm and woolly complexion that foretokened 
 snow. Though not very cheerful in its aspect, this is 
 an atmosphere particularly pleasant to breathe, and 
 Fred, who was making his first move after a six weeks' 
 fever, sat with the furs away from his mouth, nostrils 
 expanded, lips parted, and the countenance altogether 
 of a man in a high state of physical enjoyment. I 
 had nursed him through his illness, by-the-way, in 
 my own rooms, and hence our position as fellow- 
 travellers. A pressing invitation from his father to 
 come home with him to Skaneateles, for the holydays, 
 had divened me from my usual winter journey to the 
 North ; and for the first time in my life, I was going 
 
 upon a long visit to a strange roof. My imagination 
 had never more business upon its hands. 
 
 Fred had described to me, over and over again, 
 every person I was to meet, brothers, sisters, aunts, 
 cousins, and friends — a household of thirty people, 
 guests included ; but there was one person among 
 them of whom his descriptions, amplified as they 
 were, were very unsatisfactory. 
 
 '• Is she so very plain ?" I asked for the twentieth 
 time. 
 
 m Abominably !" 
 
 " And immense black eyes?" 
 
 " Saucers !" 
 
 "And large mouth?" 
 
 "Huge!" 
 
 " And very dark ?" 
 
 " Like a squaw !" 
 
 "And skinny hands, did you say ?" 
 
 " Lean, long, and pokerish !" 
 
 " And so very clever ?" 
 
 " Knows everything, Phil !" 
 
 " But a sweet voice ?" 
 
 " Um ! everybody says so." 
 
 "And high temper?" 
 
 " She's the devil, Phil ! don't ask any more ques- 
 tions about her." 
 
 " You don't like her, then ?" 
 
 " She never condescends to speak to me ; how 
 should I ?" 
 
 And thereupon I put my head out of the sleigh, and 
 employed myself with catching the snow-flakes on my 
 nose, and thinking whether Edith Linsey would like 
 me or no ; for through all Fred's derogatory descrip- 
 tions, it was clearly evident that she was the ruling 
 spirit of the hospitable household of the Flemings. 
 
 As we got farther on, the new snow became deeper, 
 and we found that the last storm had been heavier 
 here than in the country from which we had come. 
 The occasional farm-houses were almost wholly 
 buried, the black chimney alone appearing above the 
 ridgy drifts, while the tops of the doors and windows 
 lay below the level of the trodden road, from which a 
 descending passage was cut to the threshold, like the 
 entrance to a cave in the earth. The fences were 
 quite invisible. The fruit-trees looked diminished to 
 shrubberies of snow-flowers, their trunks buried under 
 the visible surface, and their branches loaded with the 
 still falling flakes, till they bent beneath the burden. 
 Nothing was abroad, for nothing could stir out of the 
 road without danger of being lost, and we dreaded to 
 meet even a single sleigh, lest in turning out, the 
 horses should "slump" beyond their depth, in the 
 untrodden drifts. The poor animals began to labor 
 severely, and sunk at every step over their knees in 
 the clogging and wool-like substance ; and the long 
 and cumbrous sleigh rose and fell in the deep pits like 
 a boat in a heavy sea. It seemed impossible to get on. 
 Twice we brought up with a terrible plunge and stood 
 suddenly still, for the runners had struck in too deep 
 for the strength of the horses; and with the snow- 
 shovels, which formed a part of the furniture of the 
 vehicle, we dug them from their concrete beds. Our 
 progress at last was reduced to scarce a mile in the 
 hour, and we began to have apprehensions that our 
 team would give out between the post-houses. For- 
 tunately it was still warm, for the numbness of cold 
 would have paralyzed our already flagging exertions. 
 
 "We had reached the summit of a long hill with the 
 greatest difficulty. The poor beasts stood panting 
 and reeking with sweat ; the runners of the sleigh 
 were clogged with hard cakes of snow, and the air 
 was close and dispiriting. We came to a stand-still, 
 with the vehicle lying over almost on its side, and I 
 stepped out to speak to the driver and look forward. 
 It was a discouraging prospect ; a long deep valley 
 lay before us, closed at the distance of a couple of 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 385 
 
 miles by another steep bill, through a cleft in the top 
 of wliicli lay our way. We could not even distinguish 
 the line of the road between. Our disheartened ani- 
 mals stood at this moment buried to their breasts, and 
 to get forward without rearing at every step seemed 
 impossible. The driver sat on his box looking un- 
 easily down into the valley. It was one undulating 
 ocean of snow, not a sign of a human habitation to be 
 seen, and even the trees indistinguishable from the 
 general mass by their whitened and overladen branch- 
 es. The storm had ceased, but the usual sharp cold 
 that succeeds a warm fall of snow had not yet light- I 
 ened the clamminess of the new-fallen flakes, and 
 they clung around the foot like clay, rendering every ' 
 step a toil. 
 
 " Your leaders are quite blown," I said to the dri- 
 ver, as he slid off his uncomfortable seat. 
 
 " Pretty nearly, sir !" 
 
 "And your wheelers are not much better." 
 
 " Sca'cely." 
 
 "And what do you think of the weather?" 
 
 " It'll be darn at ion cold in an hour." As he spoke 
 he looked up to the sky, which was already peeling 
 off its clouds in long stripes, like the skin of an 
 orange, and looked as hard and cold as marble be- 
 tween the widening rifts. A sudden gust of a more \ 
 chilling temperature followed immediately upon his 
 prediction, and the long cloth curtains of the sleigh 
 flew clear of their slight pillars, and shook off their 
 fringes of icicles. 
 
 " Could you shovel a little, mister?" said the dri- 
 ver, handing me one of the broad wooden utensils 
 from his foot-board, and commencing himself, after 
 having thrown off his box-coat, by heaving up a solid 
 cake of the moist snow at the side of the road. 
 
 "It's just to make a place to rub down them ere- j 
 turs," said he, as I looked at him, quite puzzled to 
 know what he was going to do. 
 
 Fred was too weak to assist us, and having righted 
 the vehicle a little, and tied down the flapping cur- 
 tains, he wrapped himself in his cloak, and I set heart- ! 
 ily to work with my shovel. In a (ew minutes, taking i 
 advantage of the hollow of a drift, we had cleared a ' 
 small area of frozen ground, and releasing the tired i 
 animals from their harness, we rubbed them well down 
 with the straw from the bottom of the sleigh. The l 
 persevering driver then cleared the runners of their 
 iced and clinging masses, and a half hour having 
 elapsed, he produced two bottles of rum from his box, 
 and, giving each of the horses a dose, put them again 
 to their traces. 
 
 We heaved out of the pit into which the sleigh had 
 settled, and for the first mile it was down-hill, and we ! 
 got on with comparative ease. The sky was by this 
 time almost bare, a dark, slaty mass of clouds alone ! 
 settling on the horizon in the quarter of the wind, I 
 while the sun, as powerless as moonlight, poured with 
 dazzling splendor on the snow, and the gusts came 
 keen and bitter across the sparkling waste, rimming 
 the nostrils as if with bands of steel, and penetrating to 
 the innermost nerve with their pungent iciness. No ' 
 protection seemed of any avail. The whole surface 
 of the body ached as if it were laid against a slab of : 
 ice. The throat closed instinctively, and contracted 
 its unpleasant respiration — the body and limbs drew 
 irresistibly together, to economize, like a hedge-hog, 
 the exposed surface — the hands and feet felt transmu- 
 ted to lead — and across the forehead, below the pres- 
 sure of the cap, there was a binding and oppressive 
 ache, as if a bar of frosty iron had been let into the 
 scull. The mind, meantime, seemed freezing up — un- 
 willingness to stir, and inability to think of anything 
 but the cold, becoming every instant more decided. 
 
 From the bend of" the valley our difficulties became 
 more serious. The drifts often lay across the road 
 like a wall, some feet above the heads of the horses, 
 25 
 
 and we had dug through one or two, and had been 
 once upset, and often near it, before we came to the 
 steepest part of the ascent. The horses had by this 
 time begun to feel the excitement of the rum. and 
 bounded on through the snow with continual leaps, 
 jerking the sleigh after them with a violence that 
 threatened momently to break the traces. The steam 
 from their bodies froze instantly, and covered them 
 with a coat like hoar-frost, and spite of their heat, and 
 the unnatural and violent exertions they were making, 
 it was evident by the pricking of their ears, and the 
 sudden crouch of the body when a stronger blast 
 swept over, that the cold struck through even their 
 hot and intoxicated blood. 
 
 We toiled up, leap after leap, and it seemed mirac- 
 ulous to me that the now infuriated animals did not 
 burst a blood-vessel or crack a sinew with every one 
 of those terrible springs. The sleigh plunged on af- 
 ter them, stopping dead and short at every other mo- 
 ment, and reeling over the heavy drifts, like a boat in a 
 surging sea. A finer crystallization had meantime 
 taken place upon the surface of the moist snow, and 
 the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on the 
 blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting 
 the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle- 
 points. The driver and his maddened but almost ex- 
 hausted team were blinded by the glittering and « hill- 
 ing eddies, the cold grew in tenser every moment, the 
 forward motion gradually less and less, and when, with 
 the very last effort apparently, we reached a spot on 
 the summit of the hill, which, from its exposed situa- 
 tion, had been kept bare by the wind, the patient and 
 persevering whip brought his horses to a stand, and 
 despaired, for the first time, of his prospects of getting 
 on. I crept out of the sleish, the iron-bound runners 
 of which now grated on the bare ground, but found it 
 impossible to stand upright. 
 
 " If you can use your hands," said the driver, turn- 
 ing his back to the wind which stung the face like the 
 lash of a whip, " I'll trouble you to untackle them 
 horses." 
 
 I set about it, while he buried his hands and face 
 in the snow to relieve them for a moment from the 
 agony of cold. The poor animals staggered stiffly as 
 1 poshed them aside, and every vein stood out from 
 their bodies like ropes under the skin. 
 
 " What are you going to do ?" 1 asked, as he joined 
 me again, and taking off the harness of one of the 
 leaders, flung it into the snow. 
 
 " Ride for life !" was his ominous answer. 
 
 " Good God ! and what is to become of my sick 
 friend ?" 
 
 " The Almighty knows — if he can't ride to the 
 tavern !" 
 
 I sprang instantly to poor Fred, who was lying in 
 the bottom of the sleigh almost frozen to death, in- 
 formed him of the driver's decision, and asked him if 
 he thought he could ride one of the horses. He was 
 beginning to grow drowsy, the first symptom of" death 
 by cold, and could with difficulty be roused. With 
 the driver's assistance, however. I lifted him out of the 
 sleigh, shook him soundly, and making stirrups of the 
 traces, set him upon one of the horses, and started 
 him off before us. The poor beasts seemed to have a 
 presentiment of the necessity of exertion, and though 
 stiff and sluggish, entered willingly upon the deep 
 drift which blocked up the way, and toiled exhaustedly 
 I on. The cold in our exposed position was agonizing. 
 Every small fibre in the skin of my own face felt split- 
 ting and cracked, and my eyelids seemed made of ice. 
 Our limbs soon lost all sensation. I could only press 
 1 with my knees to the horse's side, and the whole col- 
 ' lected energy of inv frame seemed expended in the 
 exertion. Fred held on wonderfully. The driver had 
 still the use of hi? arm, and rode beh'wd, flogging the 
 i poor animals on. whose every step seemed to be the 
 
386 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 last summons of energy. The sun set, and it was 
 rather a relief, for the glitter upon the snow was ex- 
 ceedingly painful to the sight, and there was no warmth 
 in its beams. I could see my poor friend drooping 
 gradually to the neck of his horse, but until he should 
 drop off it was impossible to assist him, and his faith- 
 ful animal still waded on. 1 felt my own strength fast 
 ebbing away. If I had been alone, I should certainly 
 have lain down, with the almost irresistible inclination 
 to sleep ; but the thought of my friend, and the shout- 
 ing of the energetic driver, nerved me from time to 
 time — and with hands hanging helplessly down, and 
 elbows fastened convulsively to my side, we plunged 
 and struggled painfully forward. I but remember 
 being taken afterward to a fire, and shrinking from it 
 with a shriek — the suffering of reviving consciousness 
 was so intolerable. We had reached the tavern liter- 
 ally frozen upon our horses. 
 
 II. 
 
 I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at 
 the breakfast-table, the morning after our arrival, when 
 Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my 
 virtues as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same 
 moment, he said simply in parenthesis, " My cousin 
 Edith, Mr. Slingsby," and went on with his story. I 
 rose and bowed, and as Fred had the parole, I had 
 time to collect my courage, and take a look at the 
 enemy's camp — for, of that considerable household, I 
 felt my star to be in conjunction or opposition with 
 hers only, who was at that moment my vis-d-vis across 
 a dish of stewed oysters. 
 
 In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait-paint- 
 ing, I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I 
 see at this moment (I have carried it about the world 
 for ten years) as distinctly as the incipient lines of age 
 in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in 
 that lime from dread or admiration, or something be- 
 tween these, to pity ; she was so unscrupulously and 
 hopelessly plain — so wretchedly ill and suffering in 
 her aspect — so spiritless and unhappy in every motion 
 and look. " I'll win her heart," thought I, " by being 
 kind to her. Poor thing ! it will be something new to 
 her, 1 daresay !" Oh, Philip Slingsby ! what a doomed 
 donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy! 
 
 And yet even as she sat there, leaning over her un- 
 tasted breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy — with her 
 large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow 
 complexion, and not one redeeming feature — there 
 was something in her face which produced a phantom 
 of beauty in my mind — a glimpse, a shadowing of a 
 countenance that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at 
 her last innocent orison — a loveliness moulded and 
 exalted by superhuman and overpowering mind — in- 
 stinct through all its sweetness with energy and fire. 
 So strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my 
 thoughts of her as an angel in heaven (for [ supposed 
 her dying for many a month, and a future existence 
 was her own most frequent theme), she always rose to 
 my fancy with a face half xN"iobe. half Psyche, radiantly 
 lovely. And this, too, with a face of her own, a bond 
 fide physiognomy, that must have made a mirror an 
 unpleasant article of furniture in her chamber. 
 
 I have no suspicion in my own mind whether Time 
 was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of 
 those Christmas holydays. The second Saturday had 
 come round, and I just remember that Fred was very 
 much out of humor with me for having appeared to 
 his friends to be everything he had said I was not, and 
 nothing he had said I was. He had described me as 
 the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, and agree- 
 able dog in the world. And I was not that at all — 
 particularly the last. The old judge told him he had 
 not improved in his penetration at the university. 
 
 A week ! and what a life had been clasped within 
 
 its brief calendar, for me ! Edith Linsey was two 
 years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She 
 was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of 
 consumption ; and it was little matter whom she loved, 
 or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by 
 a new affection, she could beguile the preying melan- 
 choly of illness ; for by that gentle name they called, 
 in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of charac- 
 ter that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have 
 been endured for a day. But she was not capricious, 
 or bitter to vie ! Oh no ! And from the very extreme 
 of her impatience with others — from her rudeness, her 
 violence, her sarcasm — she came to me with a heart 
 softer than a child's, and wept upon my hands, and 
 weighed every word that might give me offence, and 
 watched to anticipate my lightest wish, and was hum- 
 ble, and generous, and passionately loving and depen- 
 dant. Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She 
 gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate 
 abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar 
 character, but more to her own solemn conviction that 
 she was dying — that her best hope of life was not worth 
 a week's purchase. 
 
 We had begun with books, and upon them her past 
 enthusiasm had hitherto been released. She loved her 
 favorite authors with a passion. They had relieved 
 her heart ; and there was nothing of poetry or philoso- 
 phy that was deep or beautiful, in which she had not 
 steeped her very soul. How well I remember her re- 
 peating to me from Shelley those glorious lines to the 
 soaring swan : — 
 
 " Thou hast a home, 
 Beautiful bird ! Thou voyagest to thy home — 
 Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck 
 With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes 
 Bright with the lustre of their own fond joy ! 
 And what am I, that I should linger here, 
 With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, 
 Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned 
 To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers 
 To the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven 
 That echoes not my thoughts !" 
 
 There was a long room in the southern wing of the 
 house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtain- 
 ed, dim old place, with deep-embayed windows, and so 
 many nooks, and so much furniture, that there was 
 that hushed air, that absence of echo within it, which 
 is the great charm of a haunt for study or thought. 
 It was Edith's kingdom. She might lock the door, 
 if she pleased, or shut or open the windows ; in short, 
 when she was there, no one thought of disturbing her, 
 and she was like a " spirit in its cell," invisible and 
 inviolate. And heie I drank into my very life and 
 soul the outpourings of a bosom that had been locked 
 till (as we both thought) the last hour of its life — a 
 flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran my 
 heart like lava, sweeping everything into its resistless 
 fire, and (may God forgive her!) leaving it scorched 
 and desolate when its mocking brightness had gone 
 out. 
 
 I remember that " Elia" — Charles Lamb's Elia — 
 was the favorite of favorites among her books ; and 
 partly that the late death of this most-to-be-loved au- 
 thor reminded me to look it up, and partly to have 
 time to draw back my indifference over a subject that 
 it something stirs me to recall, you shall read an imi- 
 tation (or continuation, if you will) that I did for Editli's 
 eye, of his " Essay on Books and Reading." I sat 
 with her dry and fleshless hand in mine while I read 
 it to her, and the fingers of Psyche were never fairer 
 to Canova than they to me. 
 
 "It is a little singular," I began (looking into her 
 eyes as long as I could remember what I had written), 
 " that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which 
 the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought 
 of writing a book upon ' Reading.' The refinement* 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 387 
 
 of the true epicure in hooks are 3urelv as various as 
 those of the gastronome and the opium-eater; and I 
 can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural 
 occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless 
 it is that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indo- 
 lence, has never numbered among its votaries one of 
 the busy craft of writers. 
 
 M The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for 
 hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true 
 secret of the thing is no more adapted to their compre- 
 hension, than the sublimations of Louis Eustache Ude 
 for the taste of a day-laborer. The refined reading- 
 taste, like the palate of gourmand eric, must have got 
 beyond appetite — gross appetite. It shall be that of a 
 man who, having fed through childhood and youth 
 on simple knowledge, values now only, as it were, the 
 apotheosis of learning — the spiritual mire. There are, 
 it is true, instances of a keen natural relish : a boy, as 
 you will sometimes find one, of a premature thought- 
 fulness, will carry a favorite author in his bosom, and 
 feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the 
 exquisite story : — 
 
 ' I saw a hoy, with eager eye, 
 Open a book upon a stall, 
 And read as he'd devour it all ; 
 Which, when the stall-mm did espy, 
 Soon to the boy I heard him call, 
 " You sir, you never buy a book, 
 Therefore in one you •shall not look !" 
 The boy passed slowly on. and with a sigh, 
 He wished he had never been taught to read — 
 Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.' 
 
 "The pleasure as well as the profit of reading de- 
 pends as much upon time and manner, as upon the 
 book. The mind is an opal — changing its color with 
 every shifting shade. Ease of position is especially 
 necessary. A muscle strained, a nerve unpoised, an 
 admitted sunbeam caught upon a mirror, are slight 
 circumstances; but a feather may tickle the dreamer 
 from paradise to earth. ' Many a fro ward axiom,' 
 says a refined writer, ' many an inhumane thought 
 hath arisen from sitting uncomfortably, or from a want 
 of symmetry in your chamber.' Who has not felt, at 
 times, an unaccountable disrelish for a favorite author? 
 Who has not, by a sudden noise in the street, been 
 startled from a reading dream, and found, afterward, 
 that the broken spell was not to be rewound ? An 
 ill-tied cravat may unlink the rich harmonies of Tay- 
 lor. You would not think Barry Cornwall the de- 
 licious heart he is, reading him in a tottering chair. 
 
 "There is much in the mood with which you come 
 to a book. If you have been vexed out of doors, the 
 good humor of an author seems unnatural. I think 
 I should scarce relish the 'gentle spiriting' of Ariel 
 with a pulse of ninety in the minute. Or if I had 
 been touched by the unkindness of a friend, Jack 
 Falstalf would not move me to laughter as easily as 
 he is wont. There are tones of the mind, however, 
 to which a book will vibrate with a harmony than 
 which there is nothing more exquisite in nature. To 
 go abroad at sunrise in June, and admit all the holy 
 influences of the hour — stillness, and purity, and 
 balm — to a mind subdued and dignified, as the mind 
 will be by the sacred tranquillity of sleep, and then to 
 come in with bathed and refreshed senses, and a tem- 
 per of as clear joyfulness as the soaring lark's and 
 sit down to Milton or Spenser, or, almost loftier still, 
 the divine 'Prometheus' of Shelley, has seemed to 
 me a harmony of delight almost too heavenly to be 
 human. The great secret of such pleasure is sym- 
 pathy. You must climb to the easle poet's eyry. 
 You hum have senses, like his, for the music that is 
 only audible to the fine ear of thought, and the beauty 
 that is visible only to the "spirit-eye of a clear, and for 
 the time, unpolluted fancy. The stamp and pressure 
 of the magician's own time and season must be upon 
 you. You would not read Ossian, for example, in a 
 
 bath, or sitting under a tree in a sultry noon; but 
 after rushing into the eye of the wind wish a fleet 
 horse, with all his gallant piide and glorious stiength 
 and file obedient to your rem, and so mingling, as it 
 will, with his rider's consciousness, that you feel as 
 if you were gifted in your own body with the swift- 
 ness and energy of an angel ; after this, to sit down 
 to Ossian, is to read him with a magnificence of de 
 lusion, to my mind scarce less than reality. 1 never 
 envied Napoleon till 1 heard it was his habit, alter a 
 
 j battle, to read Ossian. 
 
 "You can not often read to music. But 1 love, 
 
 ; when the voluntary is pealing in church — every breath 
 
 | in the congregation suppressed, and the deep voiiimed 
 notes pouring through the arches of the roof with the 
 sublime and almost articulate praise of the organ — to 
 read, from the pew Bible, the book of Ecelesiastes. 
 
 j The solemn stateliness of its periods is fitted to music 
 like a hymn. It is to me a spring of the most thril- 
 
 { ling devotion — though I shame to confess that the 
 richness of its eastern imagery, and, above all, the in- 
 imitable beauty of its philosophy, stand out somewhat 
 definitely in the reminiscences of the hour. 
 
 "A taste for reading comes comparatively late. 
 'Robinson Crusoe' will turn a boy's head at ten. 
 The 'Arabian Nights' are taken to bed with us at 
 twelve. At fourteen, a forward boy will read the 
 ' Lady of the Lake,' ' Tom Jones,' and 'Peregrine 
 Pickle;' and at seventeen (not before) he is ready for 
 Shakspere, and, if he is of a thoughtful turn, Milton. 
 Most men do not read these last with a true relish till 
 after this period. The hidden beauties of standard 
 authors break upon the mind by sui prise. It is like 
 discovering a secret spring in an old jewel. You take 
 up the hook in an idle moment, as you have done a 
 thousand times before, perhaps wondering, as you 
 turn over the leaves, what the world finds in it to ad- 
 mire, when suddenly, as you read, your fingers press 
 close upon the covers, your frame thrills, and the 
 passage you have chanced upon chains you like a 
 spell — it is so vividly true and beautiful. Milton's 
 'Comus' flashed upon me in this way. J never could 
 read the 'Rape of the Lock' till a friend quoted some 
 passages from it during a walk. I know no more ex- 
 quisite sensation than this wanning of the heart to an 
 old author; and it seems to me that the most delictus 
 portion of intellectual existence is the brief period in 
 which, one by one, the great minds of old are admit- 
 ted with all their time- mellowed worth to the affec- 
 tions. With what delight 1 read, for the fust time, 
 the 'kind-hearted plays' of Beaumont and Fletcher! 
 How 1 doated on Burton! What treasures to me 
 were the 'Fairy Queen' and the Lyrics of Milton! 
 
 "I used to think, when studying the Greek and 
 Latin poets in my boyhood, that to be made a school- 
 author was a fair offset against immortality. 1 would 
 as lief, it seemed to me, have my verses handed down 
 by the town-crier. But latterly, after an interval of a 
 few years, I have taken up my classics (the identical 
 school copies with the hard places all thummed and 
 pencilled) and have read them with no little pleasure. 
 It is not to be believed with what a satisfaction the 
 riper eye glides smoothly over the once difficult line, 
 finding the golden cadence of poetry beneath what 
 once seemed only a tangled chaos of inversion. The 
 associations of hard study, instead of reviving the old 
 distaste, added wonderfully to the interest of a re- 
 perusal. I could see now what brightened the sunken 
 eye of the pale and sickly master, as he took up the 
 hesitating passage, and read on, forgetful of the delin- 
 quent, to the end. I could enjoy now, what was a 
 dead letter to me then, the heightened fulness of He- 
 rodotus, and the strong-woven style of Thucydides, 
 and the magnificent invention of Ks.hylus. 1 took 
 an aversion to Homer from hearing a classmate in the 
 next room scan it perpetually through his nose. 
 
388 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 There is no music for me in the ' Iliad.' But, spite of 
 the lecollections scored alike upon my palm and the 
 margin, 1 own to an Augustan relish for the smooth 
 melody of Virgil, and freely forgive the sometime 
 troublesome ferule — enjoying by its aid the raciness 
 of Horace and Juvenal, and the lofty philosophy of 
 Lucretius. It will be a dear friend to whom 1 put 
 down in my will that shelf of defaced classics. 
 
 " There are some books that bear reading pleasantly 
 once a year. 'Tristram Shandy' is an annual with 
 me. Tread him regularly about Christmas. Jeremy 
 Taylor (not to mingle things holy and profane) is a 
 good table-book, to be used when you would collect 
 your thoughts and be serious a while. A man of 
 taste need never want for Sunday reading while he 
 can find the sermons of Taylor, and South, and Ful- 
 ler — writers of good theological repute — though, be- 
 tween ourselves, I think one likelier to be delighted 
 with the poetry and quaint fancifulness of their style, 
 than edified by the piety it covers. I like to have a 
 quarto edition of Sir Thomas Brown on a near shelf, 
 or Milton's prose works, or Bacon. These are health- 
 ful moods of the mind when lighter nutriment is dis- 
 tasteful. 
 
 " I am growing fastidious in poetry, and confine 
 myself more and more to the old writers. Castaly of 
 late runs shallow. Shelley's (peace to his passionate 
 heart!) was a deep draught, and Wordsworth and 
 Wilson sit near the well, and Keats and Barry Corn- 
 wall have been to the fountain's lip, feeding their 
 imaginations (the latter his heart as well), but they 
 have brought back little for the world. The 'small 
 silver stream' will, I fear, soon cease to flow down to 
 us, and as it dries back to its source, we shall close 
 nearer and nearer upon the 'pure English undefiled.' 
 The dabblers in muddy waters (tributaries to Lethe) 
 will liave Parnassus to themselves. 
 
 "The finest pleasures of reading come unbidden. 
 You can not, with your choicest appliances for the 
 boJy, always command the many-toned mind. In the 
 twilight alcove of a library, with a time-mellowed 
 chair yielding luxuriously to your pressure, a June 
 wind laden with idleness and balm floating in at the 
 window, and in your hand some Russia-bound ram- 
 bling old author, as Izaak Walton, good-humored and 
 quaint, one would think the spirit could scarce fail to 
 be conjureJ. Yet often, after spending a morning 
 hour restlessly thus, I have risen with my mind un- 
 hinged, and strolled off with a book in my pocket to 
 the woods; and, as I live, the mood has descended 
 upon me under some chance tree, with a crooked root 
 under my head, and I have lain there, reading and 
 sleeping by turns, till the letters were blurred in the 
 dimness of twilight. It is the evil of refinement that 
 it breeds caprice. You will sometimes stand unfa- 
 tigued for hours on the steps of a library; or in a 
 shop, the eye will be arrested, and all the jostling of 
 customers and the looks of the jealous shopman will 
 not divert you till you have read out the chapter. 
 
 "I do not often indulge in the supernatural, for I 
 am an unwilling believer in ghosts, and the topic ex- 
 cites me. But, for its connexion with the subject 
 upon which I am writing, I must conclude these 
 rambling observations with a late mysterious visitation 
 of my own. 
 
 " 1 had, during the last year, given up the early 
 summer tea-parties common in the town in which the 
 university stands ; and having, of course, three or 
 four more hours than usual on my hands, I took to an 
 afternoon habit of imaginative reading. Shakspere 
 came first, naturally; and I feasted for the hundredth 
 time upon what I think his (and the world's) most 
 delicate creation — the 'Tempest.' The twilight of 
 the first day overtook me at the third act, where the 
 banquet is brought in with solemn music by the fairy 
 troop of Prospero, and set before th& shipwrecked 
 
 king and his followers. I closed the book, and lean- 
 ing back in my chair, abandoned myself to the crowd 
 of images which throng always upon the traces of 
 Shakspere. The fancy music was still in my mind, 
 when an apparently real strain of the most solemn 
 melody came to my ear, dying, it seemed to me as it 
 reached it, the tones were so expiringly faint and low. 
 I was not startled, but lay quietly, holding my breath, 
 and more fearing when the strain would be broken, 
 than curious whence it came. The twilight deepened, 
 till it was dark, and it still played on, changing the 
 tune at intervals, but always of the same melancholy 
 sweetness; till, by-and-by, I lost all curiosity, and, 
 giving in to the charm, the scenes I had been reading 
 began to form again in my mind, and Ariel, with his 
 delicate ministers, and Prospero, and Miranda, and 
 Caliban, came moving before me to the measure, as 
 bright and vivid as the reality. I was disturbed in the 
 midst of it by Alfonse, who came in at the usual 
 hour with my tea; and, on starting to my feet, I lis- 
 tened in vain for the continuance of the music. I sat 
 thinking of it a while, but dismissed it at last, and went 
 out to enjoy, in a solitary walk, the loveliness of the 
 summer night. The next day I resumed my book, 
 with a smile at my previous credulity, and had read 
 through the last scenes of the 'Tempest.' when the 
 light failed me. I again closed the book, and pres- 
 ently again, as if the sympathy was instantaneous, the 
 strain broke in, playing the same low and solemn mel- 
 odies, and falling with the same dying cadence upon 
 the ear. I listened to it, as before, with breathless at- 
 tention ; abandoned myself once more to its irresistible 
 spell; and, half-wakng, half-sleeping, fell again into 
 a'vivid dream, brilliait as fairy-land, and creating itself 
 to the measures of the still audible music. 1 could 
 not now shake off my belief in its reality ; but I was so 
 wrapt with its strange sweetness, and the beauty of my 
 dream, that I cared not whether it came from earth or 
 air. My indifference, singularly enough, continued 
 for several days; and, regularly at twilight, I threw 
 aside my book, and listened with dreamy wakefulness 
 for the music. It never failed me, and its results were 
 as constant as its coming. Whatever J had read — 
 sometimes a canto of Spenser, sometimes an act of a 
 play, or a chapter of romance — the scene rose before 
 me with the stately reality of a pageant. At last I 
 began to think of it more seriously ; and it was a relief 
 to me one evening when Alfonse came in earlier than 
 usual with a message. 1 told him to stand perfectly 
 still; and after a minute's pause, during which 1 heard 
 distinctly an entire passage of a funeral hymn, I asked 
 him if he heard any music ? He said he did not. My 
 blood chilled at his positive reply, and I bade him 
 listen once more. Still he heard nothing. 1 could 
 endure it no longer. It was to me as distinct and 
 audible as my own voice; and I rushed from my room 
 as he left me, shuddering to be left alone. 
 
 "The next day I thought of nothing but death. 
 Warnings by knells in the air, by apparitions, by mys- 
 terious voices, were things I had believed in specula- 
 tively for years, and now their truth came upon me 
 like conviction. I felt a dull, leaden presentiment 
 about my heart, growing heavier and heavier with 
 every passing hour. Evening came at last, and with 
 it, like a summons from the grave, a ' dead march' 
 swelled clearly on the air. I felt faint and sick at 
 heart. This could not be fancy; and why was it, as 
 I thought 1 had proved, audible to my ear alone ? I 
 threw open the window, and the first rush of the cool 
 north wind refreshed me ; but, as if to mock my at- 
 tempts at relief, the dirge-like sounds rose, at the in- 
 stant, with treble distinctness. I seized my hat and 
 rushed into the street, but, to my dismay, every step 
 seemed to bring me nearer to the knell. Still I hur- 
 ried on, the dismal sounds growing distractingly loud- 
 er, till, on turning a corner that leads to the lovely 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 389 
 
 bury'mg-ground of New Haven, I came suddenly upon 
 — a bell foundry ! In the rear had lately been hung, 
 for trial, the chiming bells just completed for the new 
 Trinity church, and the master of the establishment 
 informed me that one of his journeymen was a fine 
 player, and every day after his work, he was in the 
 habit of amusing himself with the 4 Dead March in 
 Saul,' the ' Marsellois Hymn,' and other melancholy 
 and easy tunes, muhTmg the hammers that he might 
 not disturb the neighbors." 
 
 I have had my reward for these speculations, dear 
 reader — a smile that is lying at this instant, perdu, in 
 the innermost recess of memory — and I care not much 
 (without offence) whether you like it or no. She 
 thanked me — she thought it well done — she laid her 
 head on my bosom while I read it in the old library of 
 the Flemings, and every word has been " paid for in 
 fairy gold." 
 
 I have taken up a thread that lengthens as I unra- 
 vel it, and I can not well see how I shall come to the 
 end, without trespassing on your patience. We will 
 cut it here, if you like, and resume it after a pause ; 
 but before 1 close, 1 must give you a little instance of 
 how love makes the dullest earth poetical. Edith 
 had given me a portefeuille crammed with all kinds of 
 embossed and curious note-paper, all quite too pret- 
 ty for use, and what I would show you are my verses 
 on the occasion. For a hand unpractised, then, in 
 aught save the " Gradus ad Parnassum," I must own 
 I have fished them out of that same old portefeuille 
 (faded now from its glory, and worn with travel — but 
 O how cherished !) with a pleasant feeling of paternity : 
 
 i: Thanks for thy gift ! But heardst thou ever 
 
 A story of a wandering fay, 
 Who, tired of playing sylph for ever, 
 
 Came romping to the earth one day ; 
 And, flirting like a little love 
 
 With everything that flew and flirted, 
 Made captive of a sober dove, 
 
 Whose pinions (so the tale asserted), 
 Though neither very fresh nor fair, 
 Were well enough tor common wear. 
 
 u The dove, though plain, was gentle bred, 
 And cooed agreeably, though low ; 
 But still the fairy shook her head, 
 
 And, patting with her foot, said ' No ." 
 'Twas true that he was rather fat : 
 
 But that was living in an abbey ; — 
 . And solemn— but it was not that. 
 
 ' What then?' ' Why, sir, your wings are shabby.' 
 
 " The dove was dumb : he drooped, and sidled 
 
 In shame along the abbey-wall ; 
 And then the haughty fay unbridled, 
 
 And blew her snail-shell trumpet-call ; 
 And summoning her waiting-sprite, 
 
 Who bore her wardrobe on his back, 
 She took the wings she wore at night, 
 
 (Silvery stars on plumes of black,) 
 And, smiling, begged that he would take 
 And wear them for his lady's sake. 
 
 " He took them ; but he could not fly .' 
 
 A fay-wing was too fine for him ; 
 And when she pouted, by-and-by, 
 
 And left him for some other whim, 
 He laid them softly in his nest, 
 
 And did his flying with his own, 
 And they were soft upon his breast, 
 
 When many a night he slept alone ; 
 And many a thought those wings would stir, 
 And many a dream of love and her." 
 
 PART II. 
 
 LOVE AND SPECULATION. 
 
 Edith Linset was religious. There are many 
 intensijiers (a new word, that I can't get on without : 
 I submit it for admission into the language) ; there 
 
 are many intensifies, I say, to the passion of love : 
 such as pride, jealousy, poetry (money, sometimes, 
 Dio mio !) and idleness:* but, if the experience of 
 one who first studied the Art of Love in an "evan- 
 gelical" country is worth a para, there is nothing 
 within the bend of the rainbow that deepens the ten- 
 der passion like religion. I speak it not irreverently. 
 The human being that loves us throws the value of 
 its existence into the crucible, and it can do no more. 
 Love's best alchymy can only turn into affection what 
 is in the heart. The vain, the proud, the poetical, 
 the selfish, the weak, can and do fling their vanity, 
 pride, poetry, selfishness, and weakness, into a first 
 passion: but these are earthly elements, and there is 
 an antagonism in their natures that is for ever stri- 
 ving to resolve them back to their original earth. But 
 religion is of the soul as well as the heart — the mind 
 as well as the affections — and when it mingles in love, 
 it is the infusion of an immortal essence into an un- 
 worthy and else perishable mixture. 
 
 Edith's religion was equally without cant, and 
 without hesitation or disguise. She had arrived 
 at it by elevation of mind, aided by the habit of never 
 counting on her tenure of life beyond the setting of 
 the next sun, and with her it was rather an intellec- 
 tual exaltation than an humility of heart. She thought 
 of God because the subject was illimitable, and her 
 powerful imagination found in it the scope for which 
 she pined. She talked of goodness, and purity, and 
 disinterestedness, because she found them easy virtues 
 with a frame worn down with disease, and she was 
 removed by the sheltered position of an invalid from 
 the collision which tries so shrewdly in common life 
 the ring of our metal. She prayed, because the ful- 
 ness of her heart was loosed by her eloquence when 
 on her knees, and she found that an indistinct and 
 mystic unburthening of her bosom, even to the Deity, 
 was a hush and a relief. The heart does not always 
 require rhyme and reason of language and tears. 
 
 There are many persons of religious feeling who, 
 from a fear of ridicule or misconception, conduct them- 
 selves as if to express a devout sentiment was a want 
 of taste or good-breeding. Edith was not of these. 
 Religion was to her a powerful enthusiasm, applied 
 without exception to every pursuit and affection. She 
 used it as a painter ventures on a daring color, or a 
 musician a new string in his instrument. She felt 
 that she aggrandized botany, or history, or friendship, 
 or love, or what you will, by making it a stepping- 
 stone to heaven, and she made as little mystery of it as 
 she did of breathing and sleep, and talked o*f subjects 
 which the serious usually enter upon with a sup- 
 pressed breath, as she would comment upon a poem or 
 define a new philosophy. It was surprising what an 
 impressiveness this threw over her in everything; 
 how elevated she seemed above the best of those 
 about her; and with what a worshipping and half- 
 reverent admiration she inspired all whom she did not 
 utterly neglect or despise. For myself, my soul was 
 drank up in hers as the lark is taken into the sky, and 
 I forgot there was a world beneath me in my intoxica- 
 tion. I thought her an angel unrecognised on earth. 
 I believed her as pure from worldliness, and as spot- 
 less from sin, as a cherub with his breast upon his 
 lute; and I knelt by her when she prayed, and held 
 her upon my bosom in her fits of faintness and ex- 
 haustion, and sat at her feet with my face in her hands 
 listening to her wild speculations (often till the morn- 
 ing brightened behind the curtains) with an utter and 
 irresistible abandonment of my existence to hers, 
 which seems to me now like a recollection of another 
 life — it were, with this conscious body and mind, a 
 self-relinquishment so impossible ! 
 
 Our life was a singular one. Living in the midst 
 
 * " La paresse dans les femmes est le presage de l'amour." 
 —La Bruvere. 
 
390 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 of a numerous household, with kind and cultivated 
 people about us, we were as separated from them as if 
 the rin° of Gyges encircled us from their sight. Fred 
 wished me juy of my giraffe, as he offensively called 
 his cousin, and his sisters, who were quite too pretty to 
 have been left out of my story so long, were more indul- 
 gent, I thought, to the indigenous beaux of Skaneat- 
 eles than those aboriginal specimens had a right to 
 expect; but I had no eyes, ears, sense, or civility for 
 anything but Edith. The library became a forbidden 
 spot to all feet but ours ; we met at noon after our late 
 vigils and breakfasted together; a light sleigh was set 
 apart for our tele-a tele drives over the frozen lake, 
 and the world seemed to me to revolve on its axle 
 with a special reference to Philip Slingsby's happiness. 
 1 won ler whether an angel out of heaven would have 
 made me believe that I should ever write the story of 
 those passionate hours with a smile and a sneer ! I 
 tell thee, Edith ! (for thou wilt read every line that I 
 have written, and feel it, as far as thou canst feel any- 
 thing), that I have read " Faust" since, and thought 
 thee Mephistopheles ! I have looked on thee since, 
 with thy cheek rosy dark, thy lip filled with the blood 
 of health, and curled with thy contempt of the world 
 and thy yet wild ambition to be its master-spirit and 
 idol, and struck my breast with instinctive self-ques- 
 tioning if thou hadst given back my soul that was 
 thine own ! I fear thee, Edith. Thou hast grown 
 beautiful that wert so hideous — the wonder-wrought 
 miricle of health and intellect, filling thy veins, and 
 breathing almost a newer shape over form and feature; 
 but it is not thy beauty; no, nor thy enthronement 
 in the admiration of thy woman's world. These are 
 little to me ; for [ saw thy loveliness from the first, 
 and I worshipped thee more in the duration of a 
 thought than a hecatomb of these worldlings in their 
 lifetime. I fear thy mysterious and unaccountable 
 power over the human soul! I can scorn thee here, 
 in another land, with an ocean weltering between us, 
 and anatomize the character that 1 alone have read 
 truly and too well, for the instruction of the world (its 
 amusement, too, proud woman — thou wilt writhe at 
 that) — but [ confess to a natural and irresistible obedi- 
 ence to the mastery of thy spirit over mine. I would 
 not willingly again touch the radius of thy sphere. I 
 would come out of Paradise to walk alone with the 
 devil as soon. 
 
 How little even the most instructed women knew 
 the secret of this power ! They make the mistake of 
 cultivating only their own minds. They think that, 
 by $e//*e legation, they will climb up to'lhe intellects 
 of men, and win them by seeming their equals. Shal- 
 low philosophers! You never remember that to sub- 
 due a human being to your will, it is more necessary 
 to know his mind than you own—that, in conquering 
 a heart vanity is the first out-post — that while your are 
 employing your wits in thinking how most effectually 
 to dazzle him, you should be sounding his character 
 for its undeveloped powers to assist him to dazzle you 
 —that love is a reflected light, and to be pleased with 
 others we must be first pleased with ourselves ! 
 
 Edith (it his occurred to me in my speculations 
 since) seemed to me always an echo of myself. She 
 expressed my thought as it sprang into my brain. I 
 thought that in her I had met my double and coun- 
 terpirt, with the reservation that I was a little the 
 stronger spirit, and that in my mind lay the material 
 of the eloquence that flowed from her lips — as the al- 
 mond that you endeavor to split equally leaves the 
 kernel in the deeper cavity of its shell. Whatever 
 the topic, she seemed using my thoughts, anticipating 
 mji reflections, and, with an unobtrusive but thrilling 
 flattery, referring me to myself for the truth of what 
 1 must know was but a suggestion of my own ! O! 
 Lucrezia Borgia ! if iVIachiavelli had but practised that 
 subtle cunning upon thee, thou wouldst have had lit- 
 
 tle space in thy delirious heart for the passion that, in 
 the history of crime, has made thee the marvel and 
 the monster. 
 
 The charm of Edith to most people was that she 
 
 was no sublimation. Her mind seemed of ai 
 
 y or no 
 
 stature. She was as natural, and earnest, and as sat- 
 isfied to converse, on the meanest subject as on the 
 highest. She overpowered nobody. She (apparently) 
 eclipsed nobody. Her passionate and powerful elo- 
 quence was only lavished on the passionate and pow- 
 eiful. She never ?nisapplied herself: and what a 
 secret of influence and superiority is contained in that 
 single phrase ! We so hate him who out-measures 
 us, as we stand side by side before the world ! 
 
 I have in my portfolio several numbers of a manu- 
 script " Gazette," with which the Flemings amused 
 themselves during the deep snows of the winter io 
 which I visited them. It was contributed to by every- 
 body in the house, and read aloud at the breakfast 
 j table on the day of its weekly appearance, and, quit* 
 j apropos to these remarks upon the universality ol 
 I Edith's mind, there is in one of them an essay of hers 
 | on what she calls minute philosophies. It is curiou9 
 ' as showing how, with all her loftiness of speculation 
 j she descended sometimes to the examination of the. 
 j smallest machinery of enjoyment. 
 
 " The principal sources of everyday happiness," (I 
 am copying out a part of the essay, dear reader), "are 
 I too obvious to need a place in a chapter of breakfast- 
 | table philosophy. Occupation and a clear conscience, 
 the very truant in the fields will tell you, are craving 
 necessities. But when these are secured, there are 
 lighter matters, which, to the sensitive and educated 
 at least, are to happiness what foliage is to the tree. 
 They are refinements which add to the beauty of life 
 without diminishing its strength; and, as they spring 
 only from a better use of our common gifts, they are 
 neither costly nor rare. I have learned secrets under 
 the roof of a poor man, which would add to the lux- 
 ury of the rich. The blessings of a cheerful fancy 
 and a quick eye come from nature, and the trailing of 
 a vine may develop them as well as the curtaining of 
 a king's chamber. 
 
 " Riding and driving are such stimulating pleasures, 
 that to talk of any management, in their indulgence 
 seems superfluous. Yet we are, in motion or at rest, 
 equally liable to the caprices of feeling, and, perhaps, 
 the gayer the mood the deeper the shade cast on it by 
 untoward circumstances. The time of riding should 
 never be regular. It then becomes a habit, and hab- 
 its, though sometimes comfortable, never amount to 
 positive pleasure. I would ride when nature prompt- 
 ed — when the shower was past, or the air balmy, or 
 the sky beautiful— whenever and wherever the sig- 
 nificant finger of Desire pointed. Oh! to leap into 
 the saddle when the west wind blows freshly, and gal- 
 lop off" into its very eye, with an undrawn rein, care- 
 less how far or whither ; or, to spring up from a hook 
 when the sun breaks through after a storm, and drive 
 away under the white clouds, through light and shad- 
 ow, while the trees are wet and the earth damp and 
 spicy; or, in the clear sunny afternoons of autumn, 
 with a pleasant companion on the seat beside you, and 
 the glorious splendor of the decaying foliage flushing 
 in the sunshine, to loiter up the valley dreaming over 
 the thousand airy castles that are stirred by such 
 shifting beauty — these are pleasures indeed, and such 
 as he who rides regularly after his dinner knows as 
 little of as the dray-horse of the exultation of the 
 courser. 
 
 " There is a great deal in the choice of a compan- 
 ion. If he is an indifferent acquaintance, or an indis- 
 criminate talker, or has a coarse eye for beauty, or is 
 insensible to the delicacies of sensation or thought — 
 if he is sensual, or stupid, or practical constitutionally 
 — he will never do. He must be a man who can de- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTITRE. 
 
 391 
 
 tect a rare color in a leaf, or appreciate a peculiar 
 passage in scenery, or admire a grand outline in a 
 cloud ; he must have accurate and fine senses, and a 
 heart, noble at least by nature, and subject still to her 
 direct influences ; lie must be a lover of the beautiful 
 in whatever shape it comes; and, above all, he must 
 have read and thought like a scholar, if not like a 
 poet. He will then ride by your side without crossing 
 your humor : if talkative, he will talk well, and if 
 silent, you are content, for you know that the same 
 grandeur or beauty which has wrought the silence, in 
 your own thoughts has given a color to his. 
 
 »• There is much in the manner of driving. I like 
 a capricious rein — now fast through a hollow, and 
 now loiteringly on the edge of a road or by the bank 
 of a river. There is a singular delight in quickening 
 your speed in the animation of a climax, and in 
 coming down gently to a walk with a digression of 
 feeling, or a sudden sadness. 
 
 "An important item in household matters is the 
 management of light. A small room well lighted is 
 much more imposing than a large one lighted ill. 
 Cross lights are painful to the eye, and they destroy 
 besides the cool and picturesque shadows of the fur- 
 niture and figures 1 would have a room always par- 
 tially darkened : there is a repose in the twilight dim- 
 ness of a drawing-room which affects one with the 
 proper gentleness of the place : the out-of-door hu- 
 mor of men is too rude, and the secluded light sub- 
 dues them fitly as they enter. I like curtains — heavy, 
 and of the richest material: there is a magnificence 
 in large crimson folds which nothing else equals, and 
 the color gives everything a beautiful teint as the light 
 streams through them. Plants tastefully arranged are 
 pretty; flowers are always beautiful. I would have my 
 own room like a painter's — one curtain partly drawn ; 
 a double shadow has a nervous look. The effect of a 
 proper disposal of light upon the feelings is by most 
 people surprisingly neglected. I have no doubt (hat 
 as an habitual thing it materially affects the character ; 
 the disposition for study and thought is certainly de- 
 pendant on it in no slight degree. What is more 
 contemplative than the twilight of a deep alcove in a | 
 library / What more awakens thought than the dim 
 interior of an old church with its massive and shadowy 
 pillars ? 
 
 " There may be the most exquisite luxury in furni- 
 ture. A crowded room has a look of comfort, and 
 suspended lamps throw a mellow depth into the fea- 
 tures. Descending light is always the most becoming ; 
 it deepens the eye, and distributes the shadows in the 
 face judiciously. Chairs should be of different and 
 curious fashions, made to humor every possible wea- 
 riness. A spice-lamp should burn in the corner, and 
 the pictures should be colored of a pleasant tone, and 
 the subjects should be subdued and dreamy. It should 
 be a place you would live in for a century without an 
 uncomfortable thought. I hate a neat room. A dozen 
 of the finest old authors should lie about, and a new 
 novel, and the last new prints. I rather like the French 
 fashion of a bonbonniere, though that perhaps is an ex- 
 travagance. 
 
 *" There is a management of one's own familiar in- 
 tercourse which is more neglected, and at the same 
 time more important to happiness, than every other; 
 it is particularly a pity that this is not oftener under- 
 stood by newly-married people ; as far as my own 
 observation goes, I have rarely failed to detect, far too 
 early, signs of ill-disguised and disappointed weariness. 
 It was not the reaction of excitement — not the return 
 to the quiet ways of home — but a new manner — a for- 
 getful indifference, believing itself concealed, and yet 
 betraying itself continually by unconscious and irre- 
 pressible symptoms. I believe it resulted oftenest 
 from the same causes : partly that they saw each 
 other too much, and partly that when the form of eti- 
 
 quette was removed, they forgot to retain its invalua- 
 ble essence — an assiduous and minute disinterested- 
 ness. It seems nonsense tolovers, but absence is the 
 secret of respect, and therefore of affection. Love is 
 divine, but its flame is too del : cate for a perpetual 
 household lamp; it should be burned only for incense, 
 and even then trimmed skilfully. It is wonderful how 
 a slight neglect, or a glimpse of a weakness, or a chance 
 defect of knowledge, dims its new glory. Lovers, mar- 
 ried or single, should have separate pursuits — they 
 should meet to respect each other for new and distinct 
 acquisitions. It is the weakness of human affections 
 that they are founded on pride, and waste with over- 
 much familiarity. And oh, the delight to meet alter 
 hours of absence — to sit down by the evening lamp, 
 and with a mind unexhausted by the intercourse of 
 the day, to yield to the fascinating freedom of conver- 
 sation, and clothe the rising thoughts of affection in 
 i fresh and unhackneyed language ! How richly the 
 I treasures of the mind are colored — not doled out, 
 i counter by counter, as the visible machinery of thought 
 ' coins them, but heaped upon the mutual altar in lavish 
 and unhesitating profusion ! And how a bold fancy as- 
 ; sumes beauty and power — not traced up through all its 
 petty springs till its dignity is lost by association, but 
 j flashing full-grown and suddenly on the sense ! The 
 gifts of no one mind are equal to the constant draught 
 of a lifetime ; and even if they were, there is no one 
 taste which could always relish them. It is an humilia- 
 I ting thought that immortal mind must be husbanded 
 j like material treasure ! 
 
 " There is a remark of Godwin, which, in rather 
 j too strong language, contains a valuable truth: 'A 
 judicious and limited voluptuousness,* he says, ' is ne- 
 cessary to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing 
 ; of the manners, to the refinement of the sentiment, 
 i and to the development of the understanding ; and a 
 woman deficient in this respect may be of use in the 
 government of our families, but can not add to the 
 enjoyment, nor fix the partiality of a man of taste !' 
 Since the days when ' St. Leon' was written, the word 
 by which the author expressed his meaning is grown 
 perhaps into disrepute, but the remark is still one of 
 ! keen and observant discrimination. It refers (at least 
 i so I take it) to that susceptibility to delicate attentions, 
 that fine sense of the nameless and exquisite ten- 
 derness of manner and thought, which constitute in 
 the minds of its possessors the deepest undercurrent 
 of life — the felt and treasured, but unseen and inex- 
 pressible richness of affection. It is rarely found in 
 the characters of men, but it outweighs, when it is, all 
 grosser qualities — for its possession implies a generous 
 nature, purity, fine affections, and a heart open to all 
 the sunshine and meaning of the universe. It belongs 
 more to the nature of woman ; but indispensable as it 
 is to her character, it is oftener than anything else, 
 wanting. And without it, what is she? What is love 
 to a being of such dull sense that she hears only its 
 common and audible language, and sees nothing but 
 what it brings to her feet to be eaten, and worn, and 
 looked upon ? What is woman, if the impassioned 
 language of the eye, or the deepened fulness of the 
 tone, or the tenderness of a slight attention, are things 
 unnoticed and of no value ? — one who answers you 
 when you speak, smiles when you tell her she is grave, 
 assents barely to the expression of your enthusiasm, 
 but has no dream beyond — no suspicion that she has 
 not felt and reciprocated your feelings as fully as you 
 could expect or desire ? It is a matter too little looked 
 to. Sensitive and ardent men too often marry with 
 a blindfold admiration of mere goodness or loveliness. 
 The abandon of matrimony soon dissipates the gay 
 dream, and they find themselves suddenly unsphered, 
 linked indissolubly with affections strangely different 
 from their own, and lavishing their only treasure on 
 those who can neither appreciate nor return it. The 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 after-life of such men is a stifling solitude of feeling. 
 Their avenues of enjoyment are their manifonn sym- 
 pathies, and when these are shut up or neglected, the 
 h^art is dark, and they have nothing to do thencefor- 
 ward but to forget. 
 
 " There are many, who, possessed of the capacity 
 for the more elevated affections, waste and lose it by 
 a careless and often unconscious neglect. It is not a 
 plant to grow untended. The breath of indifference, 
 or a rude touch, may destroy for ever its delicate tex- 
 ture. To drop the figure, there is a daily attention to 
 the slight courtesies of life, and an artifice in detecting 
 ihe passing shadows of feeling, which alone can pre- 
 serve, through life, the first freshness of passion. The 
 easy surprises of pleasure, and earnest cheerfulness of 
 assent to slight wishes, the habitual respect to opin- 
 ions, the polite abstinence from personal topics in the 
 company of others, the assiduous and unwavering at- 
 tention to her comfort, at home and abroad, and, above 
 all, the absolute preservation in private of those pro- 
 prieties of conversation and manner which are sacred 
 before the world — are some of the thousand secrets of 
 that rare happiness which age and habit alike fail to 
 impair or diminish." 
 
 II. 
 
 Vacation was over, but Fred and myself were still 
 lingering at Fleming Farm. The roads were impas- 
 sable with a premature thaw. Perhaps there is noth- 
 ing so peculiar in American meteorology as the phe- 
 nomenon which 1 alone probably, of all the imprisoned 
 inhabitants of Skaneateles, attributed to a kind and 
 " special Providence." Summer had come back, like 
 Napoleon from Elba, and astonished usurping winter 
 in the plenitude of apparent possession and security. 
 No cloud foreboded the change, as no alarm preceded 
 the apparition of" the child of destiny." We awoke 
 on a February morning, with the snow lying chin- 
 deep oil the earth, and it was June ! The air was soft 
 and warm — the sky was clear, and of the milky ceru- 
 lean of chrysoprase — the south wind (the same, save 
 his unpeifumed wings, who had crept off like a sa- 
 tiated lover in October) stole back suddenly from the 
 tropics, and found his flowery mistress asleep and in- 
 sensible to his kisses beneath her snowy mantle. The 
 sunset warmeJ back from its wintry purple to the 
 golden teints of heat, the stars burned with a less 
 vitreous sparkle, the meteors slid once more lambent- 
 ly down the sky, and the house-dove sat on the eaves, 
 washing her breast in the snow-water, and thinking 
 (like a neglected wife at a capricious return of her 
 truant's tenderness) that the sunshine would last for 
 ever ! 
 
 Th air was now full of music. The water trickled 
 away under the snow, and, as you looked around and 
 saw no change or motion in the white carpet of the 
 earth, it seemed as if a myriad of small bells were ring- 
 ing under ground — fairies, perhaps, startled in mid- 
 revel with the (alse alarm of summer, and hurrying 
 about with their silver anklets, to wake up the slum- 
 bering flowers. The mountain-torrents were loosed, 
 and rushed down upon the valleys like the Children 
 of the Mist; and the hoarse war-cry, swelling and fal- 
 ling upon the wind, maintained its perpetual undertone 
 like an accompaniment of bassoons ; and occasionally, 
 in a sudden lull of the breeze, you would hear the 
 click of the undermined snow-drifts dropping upon the 
 earth, as if the chorister of spring were beating time 
 to the reviving anthem of nature. 
 
 The snow sunk perhaps a foot in a day, but it was 
 only perceptible to the eye where you could measure 
 its wet mark against a tree from which it had fallen 
 away, or by the rock, from which the dissolving bank 
 shrunk and separated, as if roclo and snow were as 
 heartless as ourselves and threw off their friends, too, 
 
 in their extremity ! The low-lying lake, meantime, 
 surrounded by melting mountains, received the aban- 
 doned waters upon its frozen bosom, and, spreading 
 them into a placid and shallow lagoon, separate by a 
 crystal plane from its own lower depths, gave them the 
 repose denied in the more elevated sphere in which 
 lay their birthright. And thus — (oh, how full is na- 
 ture of these gentle moralities !) — and thus sometimes 
 do the lowly, whose bosom, like the frozen lake, is at 
 first cold and unsympathetic to the rich and noble, 
 still receive them in adversity, and, when neighbor- 
 hood and dependance have convinced them that they 
 are made of the same common element, as the lake 
 melts its dividing and icy plane, and mingles the strange 
 waters with its own, do they dissolve the unnatural bar- 
 rier of prejudice, and take the humbled wanderer to 
 their bosom ! 
 
 The face of the snow lost its dazzling whiteness as 
 the thaw went on — as disease steals away the beauty 
 of those we love — but it was only in the distance, 
 where the sun threw a shadow into the irregular pits 
 of the dissolving surface. Near to the eye (as the 
 dying one pressed to the bosom), it was still of its 
 original beauty, unchanged and spotless. And now 
 you are tired of my loitering speculations, gentle read- 
 er, and we will return (please Heaven, only on paper!) 
 to Edith Linsey. 
 
 The roads were at last reduced to what is expres- 
 sively called, in New England, slosh (in New York, 
 posh, but equally descriptive), and Fred received a 
 hint from the judge that the mail had arrived in the 
 usual time, and his beaux jours were at an end. 
 
 A slighter thing than my departure would have been 
 sufficient to stagger the tottering spirits of Edith. We 
 were sitting at table when the letters came in, and the 
 dates wete announced that proved the opening of the 
 roads ; and I scarce dared to turn my eyes upon the 
 pale face that I could just see had dropped upon her 
 bosom. The next instant there was a general confu- 
 sion, and she was carried lifeless to her chamber. 
 
 A note, scarce legible, was put into my hand in the 
 course of the evening, requesting me to sit up for her 
 in the library. She would come to me, she said, if 
 she had strength. 
 
 It was a night of extraordinary beauty. The full 
 moon was high in the heavens at midnight, and there 
 had been a slight shower soon after sunset, which, 
 with the clearing-up wind, had frozen thinly into a 
 most fragile rime, and glazed everything open to the 
 sky with transparent crystal. The distant forest looked 
 serried with metallic trees, dazzlingly and unspeakably 
 gorgeous ; and, as the night-wind stirred through them 
 and shook their crystal points in the moonlight — the 
 aggregated stars of heaven springing from their Ma- 
 ker's hand to the spheres of their destiny, or the 
 march of the host of the archangel Michael with their 
 irradiate spear-points glittering in the air, or the dia- 
 mond beds of central earth thrust up to the sun in 
 some throe of the universe — would, each or all, have 
 been well bodied forth by such similitude. 
 
 It was an hour after midnight when Edith was sup- 
 ported in by her maid, and, choosing her own position, 
 sunk into the broad window-seat, and lay with her head 
 on my bosom, and her face turned outward to the glit- 
 tering night. Her eyes had become. I thought, un- 
 naturally bright, and she spoke with an exhausted 
 faintness that gradually strengthened to a tone of the 
 most thrilling and melodious sweetness. I shall never 
 get that music out of my brain ! 
 
 " Philip !" she said. 
 
 " I listen, dear Edith !" 
 
 " I am dying." 
 
 And she looked it, and I believed her; and my heart 
 sunk to its deepest abyss of wretchedness with the 
 conviction. 
 
 She went on to talk of death. It was the subject 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 393 
 
 that pressed most upon her mind, and she could I 
 scarce fail to be. eloquent on any •abject. She was j 
 very eloquent on this. I was so impressed with the j 
 manner in which she seemed almost to rhapsodize ; 
 between the periods of her fainlness, as she lay in ! 
 my arms that night, that every word she uttered is j 
 stdl fresh in my memory. She seemed to forget my 
 presence, and to commune with her own thoughts . 
 aloud. 
 
 m I recollect," she said, " when I was strong and ; 
 well (years ano, dear Philip!), I left my books on a 
 morning in May, and look ids; up to find the course of j 
 the wind, started olf alone for a walk into its very eye. i 
 A moist steady breeze came from the southwest, dri- | 
 ving before it fragments of the dispersed clouds. The ; 
 air was elastic and clear — a freshness that entered free- 
 It at every pore was coming up, mingled with the pro- 
 fuse perfume of gr.iss and flowers — the colors of the 
 new, tender foliage were particularly soothing to an 
 eye pained with close attention — and the just percep- 
 tible murmur of the drops shaken from the trees, and 
 the peculiarly soft rustle of the wet leaves, made as ! 
 much music as an ear accustomed to the silence of 
 solitude could well relish. Altogether, it was one of j 
 those rarely-tempered days when every sense is satis- I 
 fied, and the mind is content to lie still with its com- 
 mon thoughts, and simply enjoy. 
 
 " I had proceeded perhaps a mile — my forehead 
 held up to the wind, my hair blowing back, and the j 
 blood slowing in my cheeks with the most vivid flush j 
 of exercise and health — when I saw coming toward 
 me a man apparently in middle life, but wasted by ill- i 
 ness to (he extreinest emaciation. His lip was color- | 
 less, his skin dry and white, and his sunken eyes had j 
 that expression of inquiring earnestness which comes | 
 always with impatient sickness. He raised his head, j 
 and looked steadily at me as I came on. My lips were ! 
 open, and my whole air must have been that of a per- , 
 son in the most exulting enjoyment of healih. I was \ 
 just against him, gliding; past with an elastic step, j 
 when, with his eye still fixed on me, he half turned, j 
 and in a voice of inexpressible meaning, exclaimed, i 
 ' Merciful Heaven ! how well she is ." I passed on, \ 
 with his voice still ringing in my ear. It haunted me 
 like a tone in the air. It was repeated in the echo of j 
 my tread —in the panting of my heart. I felt it in the j 
 beating of the strong pulse in my temples. As if it j 
 was strange that I should be so well ! I had never 
 before realized that it could be otherwise. It seemed j 
 impossible, to me that my strong limbs should fail me, 
 or the pure blood I felt bounding so bravely through j 
 my veins could be reached and tainted by disease. 
 How should it come ? [f I ate, would it not nourish j 
 me ? If I slept, would it not refresh me ? If I came 
 out in the cool, free air, would not my lungs heave, j 
 and my muscles spring, and my face feel its grateful I 
 freshness ? I held out my arm, for the first time in my ! 
 life, with a doubt of its strength. I closed my hand 
 unconsciously, with a fear it would not obey. I drew | 
 a deep breath, to feel if it was difficult to breathe ; and j 
 even my bounding step, that was as elastic then as a i 
 fawn's, seemed to my excited imagination already to 
 have become decrepit and feeble. 
 
 " I walked on, and thought of death. I had never; 
 before done so definitely ; it was like a terrible shape ! 
 that had always pursued me dimly, but which I had 
 never before turned and looked steadily on. Strange! 
 that we can live so constantly with that threatening 
 hand hung over us, and not think of italways! Strange! | 
 that we can use a limb, or enter with interest into any j 
 pursuit of time, when we know that our continued 
 life is almost a daily miracle ! 
 
 " How difficult it is to realize death ! How difficult 
 it is to believe that the hand with whose every vein 
 you are familiar, will ever lose its motion and its 
 warmth ? That the quick eye, which is so restless | 
 
 new, will settle and mow dull ? That the refined lip, 
 which now shrinks so sensitively from defilement, wdl 
 not feel the earth lying upon it, and the tooth of the 
 feeding worm ? That the free breath will be choked, 
 and the forehead be pressed heavily on by the decay- 
 ing coffin, and the light and air of heaven be shut quite 
 out ; and this very body, warm, and breathing, and 
 active as it is now, will not feel uneasiness or pain ? 
 I could not help looking at my frame as these thoughts 
 crowded on me; and I confess I almost doubted my 
 own convictions — there was so much strength and 
 quickness in it — my hand opened so freely, and my 
 nostrils expanded with such a satisfied thirst to the 
 moist air. Ah ! it is hard to believe at first that we 
 must die ! harder still to believe and realize the repul- 
 sive circumstances that follow that terrible change ! 
 It is a bitter thought at the lightest. There is little 
 comfort in knowing that the soul will not be there — 
 that the sense and the mind that feel and measure suf- 
 fering, will be gone. The separation is too great a 
 mystery to satisfy fear. It is the body that we krtmo. 
 It is this material frame in which the affections have 
 grown up. The spirit is a mere thought — a presence 
 that we are told of, but do not see. Philosophize as 
 we will, the idea of existence is connected indissolubly 
 with the visible body, and its pleasant and familiar 
 senses. We talk of, and believe, the soul's ascent to 
 its Maker; but it is not ourselves — it is not our own 
 conscious breathing identity that we send up in ima- 
 gination through the invisible air. It is some phantom 
 that is to issue forth mysteriously, and leave us gazing 
 on it in wonder. We do not understand, we can not 
 realize it. 
 
 "At the time I speak of, my health had been always 
 unbroken. Since then, I have known disease in many 
 forms, and have had, of course, more time and occa- 
 sion for the contemplation of death. I have never, 
 till late, known resignation. With my utmost energy 
 I was merely able, in other days, to look upon it with 
 quiet despair; as a terrible, unavoidable evil. Ire- 
 member once, after severe suffering for weeks, I over- 
 heard the physician telling my mother that I must 
 die, and from that moment the thought never left me. 
 A thin line of light came in between the shutters of 
 the south window ; and, with this one thought fasten- 
 ed on my mind, like the vulture of Prometheus, 1 lay 
 and watched it, day after day, as it passed with its 
 imperceptible progress over the folds of my curtains. 
 The last faint gleam of sunset never faded from its 
 damask edge, without an inexpressible sinking of my 
 heart, and a belief that I should see its pleasant light 
 no more. I turned from the window when even ima- 
 gination could find the daylight no longer there, and 
 felt my pulse and lifted my head to try my remaining 
 strength. And then every object, yes, even the mean- 
 est, grew unutterably dear to me ; my pillow, and the 
 cup with which my lips were moistened, and the cool- 
 ing amber which 1 had held in my hand, and pressed 
 to my burning lips when the fever was on me — every- 
 thing that was connected with life, and that would re- 
 main among the living when I was gone. 
 
 " It is strange, but with all this clinging to the world 
 my affection for the living decreased sensibly. I grew 
 selfish in my weakness. I could not bear that they 
 should go from my chamber into the fresh air, and 
 ! have no fear of sickness and no pain. It seemed un- 
 feeling that they did not stay and breathe the close 
 atmosphere of my room — at least till J was dead. — 
 How could they walk round so carelessly, and look 
 on a fellow-creature dying helplessly and unwillingly, 
 and never shed a tear ! And then the passing cour- 
 tesies exchanged with the Aimily at the door, and the 
 quickened step on the sidewalk, and the wandering looks 
 about my room, even while I was answering with my 
 difficult breath their cold inquiries! There was an in- 
 human carelessness in all this that stung me to the soul. 
 
394 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 " I craved sympathy as I did life ; and yet I doubted 
 it all. There was not a word spoken by the friends 
 who were admitted to see me, that I did not ponder 
 over when they were gone, and always with an im- 
 patient dissatisfaction. The tone, and the manner, 
 and the expression of face, all seemed forced ; and 
 often, in my earlier sickness, when I had pondered for 
 hours on the expressed sympathy of some one I had 
 loved, the sense of utter helplessness which crowded 
 on me with my conviction of their insincerity, quite 
 overcame me. I have lain night after night, and 
 looked at my indifferent watchers: and oh how I 
 hated them for their careless ease, and their snatched 
 moments of repose! I could scarce keep from dashing 
 aside the cup they came to give me so sluggishly. 
 
 " It is singular that, with all our experience of sick- 
 ness, we do not attend more to these slight circum- 
 stances. It can scarce be conceived how an ill-man- 
 aged light, or a suppressed whispering, or a careless 
 change of attitude, in the presence of one whose senses 
 are so sharpened, and whose mind is so sensitive as a 
 sick person's, irritate and annoy. And, perhaps, more 
 than these to bear, is the affectedly subdued tone of 
 condolence. 1 remember nothing which I endured so 
 impatiently. 
 
 " Annoyances like these, however, scarcely diverted 
 for a moment the one great thought of death. It be- 
 came at last familiar, but, if possible, more dreadfully 
 horrible from that very fact. It was giving it a new 
 character. I realized it more, The minute circum- 
 stances became nearer and more real — I tried the posi- 
 tion in which I should he in my coffin — I lay with 
 my arms to my side, and my feet together, and with 
 the cold sweat standing in large drops on my lip, com- 
 posed my features into a forced expression of tran- 
 quillity. 
 
 " I awoke ^on the second morning after the hope of 
 my recovery had been abandoned. There was a nar- 
 row sunbeam lying in a clear crimson line across the 
 curtain, and I lay and watched the specks of lint sail- 
 ing through it, like silver-winged insects, and the thin 
 dust, quivering and disappearing on its definite limit, 
 in a dream of wonder. I had thought not to see 
 another sun, and my mind was still fresh with the ex- 
 pectation of an immediate change ; I could not believe 
 that I was alive. The dizzy throb in my temples was 
 done ; my limbs felt cool and refreshed; my mind had 
 that feeling of transparency which is common after 
 healthful and sweet sleep; and an indefinite sensation 
 of pleasure trembled in every nerve. I thought that 
 this might be death, and that, with this exquisite feel- 
 ing of repose, I was to linger thus consciously with 
 the body till the last day ; and I dwelt on it pleasantly 
 with my delicious freedom from pain. I felt no regret 
 for life — none for a friend even : I was willing — quite 
 willing— to lie thus for ages. Presently the physician 
 entered; he came and laid his fingers on my'pulse, 
 and his face brightened. ' You will get well,' he said, 
 and I heard it almost without emotion. Gradually, 
 however, the love of life returned; and as I realized it 
 fully, and all the thousand chords which bound me to 
 it vibrated once more, the tears came thickly to my eyes, 
 and a crowd of delightful thoughts pressed cheerfully 
 and glowingly on me. No language can do justice 
 to the pleasure of convalescence from extreme sick- 
 ness. The first step upon the living grass — the first 
 breath of free air — the first unsuppressed salutation of 
 a frieud — my fainting heart, dear Philip, rallies and 
 quickens even now with the recollection." 
 
 I have thrown into a continuous strain what was 
 murmured to me between pauses of faintness, and with 
 difficulty of breath that seemed overpowered only by 
 the mastery of the eloquent spirit apparently trembling 
 on its departure. I believed Edith Linsey would die 
 that night; I believed myself listening to words spoken 
 almost from heaven ; and if I have wearied you, dear 
 
 reader, with what must be more interesting to me than 
 to you, it is because every syllable was burnt like 
 enamel into my soul, in my boundless reverence and 
 love. 
 
 It was two o'clock, and she still lay breathing pain- 
 fully in my arms. 1 had thrown up the window, and 
 the soft south wind, stirring gently among the tinkling 
 icicles of the trees, came in, warm and genial, and she 
 leaned over to inhale it, as if it came from the source 
 of life. The stars burned gloriously in the heavens ; 
 and, in a respite of her pain, she lay back her head, 
 and gazed up at them with an inarticulate motion of 
 her lips, and eyes so unnaturally kindled, that I thought 
 reason had abandoned her. 
 
 "How beautiful are the stars to night, Edith!" I 
 said, with half a fear that she would answer me in 
 madness. 
 
 " Yes," she said, putting my hand (that pressed her 
 closer, involuntary, to my bosom) first to her lips — 
 "Yes; and, beautiful as they are, they are all accu- 
 rately numbered and governed, and just as they burn 
 now have they burned since the creation, never 'faint 
 in their watches,' aud never absent from their place. 
 Bow glorious they are! How thrilling it is to see them 
 stand with such a constant silence in the sky, un- 
 steadied and unsupported, obeying the great law of 
 their Maker! What pure and silvery light it is! How 
 steadily it pours from those small fountains, giving 
 every spot of earth its due portion ! The hovel and 
 the palace are shone upon equally, and the shepherd 
 gets as broad a beam as the king, and these few rays 
 that are now streaming into my feverish eyes were 
 meant and lavished only for me ! I have often 
 thought — has it never occurred to you, dear Philip ? — 
 how ungrateful we are to call ourselves poor, when 
 there is so much that no poverty can take away ! 
 Clusters of silver rays from every star in these heavens 
 are mine. Every breeze that breaks on my forehead 
 was sent for my refreshment. Every tinkle and ray 
 from those stirring and glistening icicles, and the in- 
 vigorating freshness of this unseasonable and delicious 
 wind, and moonlight, and sunshine, and the glory of 
 the planets, are all gifts that poverty could not take 
 away ! It is not often that I forget these treasures ; for 
 I have loved nature, and the skies of night and day, in 
 all their changes, from my childhood, and they have 
 been unspeakably dear to me ; for in them I see the 
 evidence of an Almighty Maker, and in the excessive 
 beauty of the stars and the unfading and equal splen- 
 dor of their steadfast fires, I see glimpses of an im- 
 mortal life, and find an answer to the eternal question- 
 ing within me ! 
 
 " Three ! The village clock reaches us to night. 
 Nay, the wind can not harm me now. Turn me more 
 to the window, for I would look nearer upon the stars: 
 it is the last time — I am sure of it — the very last! Yet 
 to-morrow night those stars will all be there — not one 
 missing from the sky, nor shining one ray the less be- 
 cause I am dead ! It is strange that this thought 
 should be so bitter — strange that the companionship 
 should be so close between our earthly affections and 
 those spiritual worlds — and stranger yet, that, satis- 
 fied as we must be that we shall know them nearer 
 and better when released from our flesh, we still cling 
 so fondly to our earthly and imperfect vision. I feel, 
 Philip, that I shall traverse hereafter every star in those 
 bright heavens. If the course of that career of knowl- 
 edge, which I believe in my soul it will be the reward 
 of the blessed to run, be determined in any degree by 
 the strong desires that yearn so sickeningly within us, 
 I see the thousand gates of my future heaven shining 
 at this instant above me. There they are! the clus- 
 tering Pleiades, with ' their sweet influences ;' and 
 the morning star, melting into the east with its trans- 
 cendent lambency and whiteness; and the broad gal- 
 axy, with its myriads of bright spheres, dissolving into 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 395 
 
 each other's light, nnd belting the heavens like a gir- 
 dle. J shall see them all ! 1 shall know them and 
 the r inhabitant! as the angels of (iod know them; 
 the mvsiery of their order, and the secret of their 
 wond li'ul harmonv, and the duration of their appoint- 
 ed courses — all will he made clear!" 
 
 J have trespassed again, most indulgent reader, on 
 the limits of these Procrustean papers, i must defer 
 the " change" that " came o'er the spirit of my dream" 
 till another mood an I time. Meanwhile, you may 
 consi ler Edith, if you like, the true heart she thought 
 heiself (and I thought her) during her nine deaths in 
 the library; and you will have leisuie to imagine the i 
 three years over which we shall skip with this finale, j 
 during which 1 made a journey to the north, and danced i 
 out a winter in your own territories at Quebec — a cir- ; 
 cums:ance I allu le to, no less to record the hospitali- j 
 ties ol'ihe garrison of that time (this was in 27' — were 
 you there ?) than to pluck forth from Time's hinder- j 
 most wallet a modest copy of verses 1 addressed thence | 
 to Edith. She sent them back to me considerably 
 mended; but I give you the original draught, scorn- 
 ing her finger in my poesies. 
 
 TO EDITH, FROM THE NORTH. 
 
 As, gazing on the Pleiades, 
 
 We count each fair and starry one, 
 Yet wander from the light of these 
 
 To muse upon the ' Pleiad cone ;' — 
 As, bendhig o'er fresh-g uhered flowers, 
 
 The rose s most enchanting hue 
 Reminds us hut of other hours, 
 
 Whose roses were all lovely, too ; — 
 So, dearest, when I rove among 
 
 The brght ones of this northern sky, 
 And mark the smile, and list the song, 
 
 And watch the dancers gliding by — 
 The fairer still they seem to be, 
 The more it stirs a thought of thee. 
 
 The sad, sweet bells of twilight chime, 
 
 Of many hearts may touch but one, 
 And so this seeming careless rhyme 
 
 Will whisper to thy heart alone. 
 I give it to the winds. The bird, 
 
 Let loose, to his far nest will flee : 
 And love, though breathed but on a word, 
 
 Wid find thee over land and sea. 
 Though clouds across he sky have driven, 
 
 We trust the star at last will shine ; 
 And like the very light of heaven, 
 
 1 trust thy love — trust thou in mine ! 
 
 PART III. 
 
 A DIGRESSION. 
 
 •• B"y. Will you not sleep, sir? 
 
 Knight Fling the window up ! 
 
 I'll look upon the stars. Where twinkle now 
 The I'leiiides? 
 
 Boy. Here, master ! 
 
 K tight. Throw me now 
 
 Mv cioak upon my shou'ders, and good night ! 
 I have no mind to sleep ! * * * 
 * * * * She bade me look 
 Upon hi< band of stars when other eyes 
 Beamed on me brightly, and remember her 
 By the Lost Pleiad. 
 
 Roy. Are you well, sir 1 
 
 Knight. Boy ! 
 
 Love you the stars 7 
 
 Boy. When they first spring: at eva 
 
 Better than near to morning. 
 
 Knight. Fickle child ! 
 
 Are they more fair in twilight ? 
 
 Hoy. Master, no ! 
 
 Brighter as nisht wears on— but I forget 
 Their beauty, looking on thrni long ."' 
 
 * "Sir Fabian," an unpublished Poem. 
 
 It was a September night at the university. On the 
 morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the winner 
 of the first honors of my year. I was the envy— the 
 admiration— in some degree the wender, of the col- 
 
 legiate town in which the university stands; for I had 
 commenced my career as the idlest and most riotous 
 of freshmen. What it was that had suddenly made 
 me enamored of my chambers and my books — that 
 had saddened my manners and softened my voice — that 
 had given me a disgust to champagne and my old al- 
 lies, in favor of cold water and the Platonists — that, in 
 short, had metamorphosed, as Bob Wilding would 
 have said, a gentleman-like rake and vau-rien into so 
 dull a thing as an exemplary academician — was past 
 the divining of most of my acquaintances. Oh, once- 
 loved Edith! hast thou any inkling in thy downward 
 metempsychosis of the philosophy of this marvel ? 
 
 If you were to set a poet to make a town, with 
 carte blanche as to trees, gardens, and green blinds, 
 he would probably turn out very much such a place 
 as New Haven. (Supposing your education in ge- 
 ography to have been neglected, dear reader, this is 
 the second capital of Connecticut, a half-rural, half- 
 metropolitan town, lying between a precipice that 
 makes the fag-end of the (Jreen mountains and a 
 handsome bay in Long-Island sound.) The fust 
 thought of the inventor of New Haven was to lay out 
 the streets in parallelograms, and the second was to 
 plant them from suburb to water-side with the mag- 
 nificent elms of the country. The result is, that at 
 the end of fifty years, the town is buried in leaves, ff 
 it were not for the spires of the churches, a bird flying 
 over on his autumn voyage to the Floridas would 
 never mention having seen it in his travels. It is a 
 glorious tree, the elm — and those of the place I speak 
 of are famous, even in our land of trees, for their sur- 
 prising size and beauty. With the curve of their 
 stems in the sky, the long weepers of their outer and 
 lower branches drop into the street, fanning your face 
 as you pass under wiih their geranium-like leaves; 
 and close overhead, interwoven like the trellice of a 
 vine, they break up the light of the sky into golden 
 flecks, and make you, of the common highway, a 
 bower of the most approved secludedness and beauty. 
 The houses are something between an Italian palace 
 and an English cottage — built of wood, but, in the 
 dim light of those overshadowing trees, as fair to the 
 eye as marble with their triennial coats of paint; aud 
 each stands in the midst of its own encircling grass- 
 plot, half buried in vines and flowers, and facing out- 
 ward from a cluster of gardens divided by slender 
 palings, and filling up with fruit-trees and summer- 
 houses the square on whose limit it stands. Then, 
 like the vari-colored parallelograms upon a chess- 
 board, green openings are left throughout the town, 
 fringed with triple and interweaving elm-rows, the long 
 and weeping branches sweeping downward to the 
 grass, and with their enclosing shadows keeping moist 
 and cool the road they overhang; and fair forms (it is 
 the garden of American beauty — New-Haven) flit 
 about in the green light in primitive security and free- 
 dom, and you would think the place, if you alit upon 
 it in a summer's evening — what it seems to me now 
 in memory, and what I have made it in this Rosa- 
 Matilda description — a scene from Boccacio, or a 
 vision from long-lost Arcady. 
 
 New Haven may have eight thousand inhabitants. 
 Its steamers run to New York in six hours (or did in 
 my time — I have ceased to be astonished on that sub- 
 ject, and should not wonder if they did it now in one 
 — a trifle of seventy miles up the sound), and the 
 ladies go up in the morning for a yard of bobbin and 
 return at night, and the gentlemen the same for a 
 stroll in Broadway ; and it is to this circumstance that, 
 while it preserves its rural exterior, it is a very metro- 
 politan place in the character of its society. The 
 Armaryllis of the petty cottage you admire wears the 
 fashion twenty days from Paris, and her shepherd has 
 a coat from Nugee, the divine peculiarity of which is 
 not yet suspected east of Bond street ; and, in the 
 
396 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 newspaper hanging half out of the window, there is 
 news, red-hot with the velocity of its arrival, from 
 Russia and the Rocky Mountains, from the sources of 
 the Mississippi and the brain of Monsieur Herbault. 
 Distance is an imaginary quantity, and Time, that 
 used to give everything the go-by, has come to a 
 stand-still in his astonishment. There will be a prop- 
 osition in congress ere long to do without him alto- 
 gether — every new thing " saves time" so marvel- 
 lously. 
 
 Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma 
 Mater, however, and gayly as 1 describe it, it is to 
 me, if I may so express it, a picture of memory 
 glazed and put away; if I see it ever again, it will 
 be but to walk through its embowered streets by 
 a midnight moon. It is vain and heart-breaking to go 
 back, after absence, to any spot of earth of which the 
 interest was the human love whose home and cradle it 
 had been. But there is a period in our lives when 
 the heart fuses and compounds with the things about 
 it, and the close enamel with which it overruns and 
 binds in the affections, and which hardens in the 
 lapse of years till the immortal germ within is not 
 more durable and unwasting, warms never again, nor 
 softens; and there is nothing on earth so mournful 
 and unavailing as to return to the scenes which are 
 unchanged, and look to return to ourselves and others 
 as we were when we thus knew them. 
 
 Yet we think (I judge you by my own soul, gentle 
 reader) that it is others — not we — who are changed ! 
 We meet the friend that we loved in our youth, and it 
 is ever he who is cold and altered ! We take the 
 hand that we bent over with our passionate kisses in 
 boyhood, and our raining tears when we last parted, 
 and it is ever hers that returns not the pressure, and 
 her eyes, and not ours — oh, not ours! — that look back 
 the moistened and once familiar regard with a dry lid 
 and a gaze of stone ! Oh God ! it is ever he — the 
 friend you have worshipped — for whom you would 
 have died — who gives you the tips of his ringers, and 
 greets you with a phrase of fashion, when you would 
 rush into his bosom and break your heart with weep- 
 ing out the imprisoned tenderness of years ! I could 
 carve out the heart from my bosom, and fling it with 
 a malison into the sea, when I think how utterly and 
 worse than useless it is in this world of mocking 
 names ! Yet " love" and " friendship" are words 
 that read well. You could scarce spare them in 
 poetry. 
 
 II. 
 
 It was, as I have said, a moonlight night of unpar- 
 alleled splendor. The morrow was the college anni- 
 versary—the day of the departure of the senior class 
 — and the town, which is, as it were, a part of the uni- 
 versity, was in the usual tumult of the gayest and 
 saddest evening of the year. The night was warm, 
 and the houses, of which the drawing-rooms are all 
 on a level with the gardens in the rear, and through 
 which a long hall stretches like a ball-room, were 
 thrown open, doors and windows, and the thousand 
 students of the university, and the crowds of their 
 friends, and the hosts of strangers drawn to the place 
 at this season by the annual festivities, and the fami- 
 lies, every one with a troop of daughters (as the leaves 
 on our trees, compared with those of old countries — 
 three to one — so are our sons and daughters) were all 
 sitting without lamps in the moon-lit rooms, or strol- 
 ling together, lovers and friends, in the fragrant gar- 
 dens, or looking out upon the street, returning the 
 greetings of the passers-by, or, with heads uncovered, 
 pacing backward and forward beneath the elms before 
 the door — the whole scene one that the angels in 
 heaven might make a holyday to see. 
 
 There were a hundred of my fellow-seniors — young 
 
 men of from eighteen to twenty -four — every one of 
 whom was passing the last evening of the four most 
 impressible and attaching years of his life, with the 
 family in which he had been most intimate, in a town 
 where refinement and education had done their ut- 
 most upon the society, and which was renowned 
 throughout America for the extraordinary beauty of 
 its women. They had come from every state in the 
 Union, and the Georgian and the Vermontese, the 
 Kentuckian and the Virginian, were to start alike on 
 I the morrow-night with a lengthening chain for home, 
 each bearing away the hearts he had attached to him 
 I (one or more !) and leaving his own, till, like the mag- 
 i netized needle, it should drop away with the weak- 
 j ened attraction ; and there was probably but one that 
 i night in the departing troop who was no; whispering 
 in some throbbing ear the passionate but vain and 
 j mocking avowal of fidelity in love ! And yet I had 
 I had my attachments too ; and there was scarce a 
 house in that leafy and murmuring paradise of friend- 
 ship and trees, that would not have hailed me with 
 acclamation had I entered the door; and I make this 
 record of kindness and hospitality (unforgotten after 
 long years of vicissitude and travel), with the hope 
 that there may yet live some memory as constant as 
 mine, and that some eye will read it with a warmth in 
 its lid, and some lip — some one at least — murmur, "f 
 remember him!" There are trees in that town whose 
 drooping leaves I could press to my lips with an affec- 
 | tion as passionate as if they were human, though the 
 1 lips and voices that have endeared them to me are as 
 changed as the foliage upon the branch, and would 
 recognise my love as coldly. 
 
 There was one, I say, who walked the thronged 
 pavement alone that night, or but with such company 
 as Uhland's ;* yet the heart of that solitary senior was 
 far from lonely. The palm of years of ambition was 
 in his grasp — the reward of daily self-denial and mid- 
 night watching — the prize of a straining mind and 
 a yearning desire ; and there was not one of the many 
 who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms, 
 either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its at- 
 tainment, who had the shadow of an idea what spirit 
 sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common is 
 this ignorance of human motives ! How distant, and 
 slight, and unsuspected, are the springs often of the 
 most desperate achievement! How little the world 
 knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the 
 politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life ! 
 And how insignificant and unequal to the result would 
 seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back 
 from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty 
 they have waked and exhausted ! It is a startling 
 thing to question even your own soul for its motive. 
 Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one yon are surprised at 
 the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this 
 sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and, 
 as I live, the face that is conjured up at my bidding is 
 of one of whom I have not had a definite thought for 
 years. I would lay my life she thinks at this instant 
 I have forgotten her very name. Yet I know she 
 will read this page with an interest no other could 
 awaken, striving to trace in it the changes that have 
 come over me since we parted. I know (and 1 knew 
 then, though we never exchanged a word save in 
 friendship), that she devoted her innermost soul when 
 we strayed together by that wild river in the West 
 (dost thou remember it, dear friend ? for now I speak 
 to thee !) to the study of a mind and character of which 
 
 * Almost the sweetest thing I remeAber is the German 
 poet's thought when crossing the ferry to his wife and 
 child ;— 
 
 " Take, O boatman ! thrice thy fee, 
 Take, I give it willingly : 
 For, invis/bly to thee, 
 Spirits twain have crossed with m*." 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 397 
 
 she thought better than the world or their possessor; 
 BD d I know— oh, how well I know!— that with hus- 
 band and children around her, whom she loves and 
 10 whom she is devoted, the memory ol me 18 hud 
 away in her heart like a fond hut incomplete dream 
 ol what once seemed possible— the feeling with which 
 the mother looks on her witless boy, and loves him 
 more lor what he wight have been, than his brothers 
 for what they are! 
 
 I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this 
 tm/romta digression (for, like "Opportunity and the 
 
 ..' .. T .. l__l. 1 1, ."*\ 
 
 Hours," I •• never look back :"*) but let us return to 
 the shadow of the thousand elms of New Haven. 
 
 The Gascon thought his own thunder and lightning 
 superior to that ol other countries, but I must run the 
 hazard of your incredulity as well, in preierrmg an 
 American moon. In Greece and Asia Minor, perhaps 
 tngione—ahe was first worshipped there), Cythens 
 shines as brightly; but the Ephesian of Connecticut 
 sees the flaws upon the pearly buckler of the goddess, 
 as does the habitant of no other clime. His eye lies 
 close to the moon. There is no film, and no visible 
 beam in the clarified atmosphere. Her light is less 
 an emanation than a presence— the difference between n 
 the water in a thunder-shower and the depths of | 
 the sea. The moon struggles to you in England— | ; 
 she is all about you, like an element of the air, in jj 
 America 
 
 unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into 
 the rooms. It was the residence of a magnificent 
 girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut 
 beauty — a singular instance in America of what is 
 called in England a fine woman. (With us that word 
 applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large 
 as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters 
 have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She 
 was a "book of beauty" printed with virgin type; 
 and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all 
 my life been trying to express— that some women 
 seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to 
 others who seem mortal rechauffes— as if every limb 
 and feature had been used, and got out of shape in 
 some other person's service. The lady I speak of 
 looked new — and her name was Isidora. 
 
 She was standing just under the lamp, with a single 
 rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb of 
 a classmate of mine with evident pleasure. She was 
 a great fool, (did I mention that before?) but weak, 
 and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she was, 
 Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor Psyche 
 ! (soit elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly 
 '• graceful. Loveliness and fascination came to her as 
 ' dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she obeyed her 
 instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly, and with- 
 out design, the loveliest thing in nature. 1 do not 
 
 see for my part, why all women should not be so. 
 ThTu'ight was breathless, and the fragmented light jj They are as useful as flowers ; they perpetuate our 
 lav on the navement in motionless stars, as clear and < species. . 
 
 SMtelCS£«ifS« "patines of bright gold" I was looking at her with irresistible adm.ra ion 
 ha drop >e through the trees/and lay glittering be- when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree, 
 neat my fee There was a kind of darkness visible and my chum, monster, and ally. Job Smith (of whom 
 In the streets, overshadowed as they were by the massy ;! I have before spoken in these historical papers), laid 
 and leaf-burthened elms, and as I looked through the || his hand on my should- 
 houses, standing in obscurity myself, the gardens 
 
 seemed full of daylight— the unobstructed moon 
 poured with such a flood of radiance on the flowery 
 alleys within, and their gay troops of promenaders. 
 And as I distinguished one and another familiar friend, 
 with a form as familiar clinging to his side, and, with 
 drooping head and faltering step, listening or replying 
 (I well knew), to the avowals of love and truth, I mur- 
 mured in thought to my own far away, but never-for- 
 gotten Edith, a vow as deep— ay, deeper than theirs, 
 as my spirit and hers had been sounded by the pro- 
 founder plummet of sorrow and separation. How the 
 very moonlight— how the stars of heaven— how the 
 balm in the air, and the lahguor of summer night in 
 my indolent frame, seemed, in those hours of loneli- 
 ness, ministers at the passionate altar-fires of my love! 
 Forsworn and treacherous Edith ! do I live to write 
 this for thine eye ? 
 
 I linger upon these trifles of the past — these hours 
 for which I would have borrowed wings when they 
 were here— and, as then they seemed but the flowering 
 promise of happiness, they seem vow like the fruit, 
 enjoyed and departed. Past and future bliss there 
 would seem to be in the world— knows any one of 
 such a commodity in the present 1 I have not seen 
 it in my travels. 
 
 III. 
 
 I was strolling on through one of the most fashion- 
 able and romantic streets (when did these two words 
 ever before find themselves in a sentence together?) 
 when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar, 
 lit, unlike most others on that bright night, by a sus- 
 pended lamp, and crowded with company, attracted 
 my attention for a moment. Between the house and 
 the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a 
 white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion 
 to the low windows without concealing them from the 
 passer-by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, 1 
 • Walter Savage Landor. 
 
 Do you know, my dear Job," I said, in a solemn 
 one of admonition, "that blind John was imprisoned 
 ! for looking into people's windows?" 
 
 But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The 
 light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more 
 haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I 
 never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had 
 loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our 
 sight, since his first year in college ; but that it would 
 ever so master him, or that he could link his mon- 
 strous deformity, even in thought, with that radiant 
 vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as prob- 
 able as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere 
 the moon that kissed Endymion. 
 
 " I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever 
 since you left me," said he. (We had parted three 
 hours "before, at twilight.) 
 
 "And why not go in, in the name of common 
 sense 
 
 "Oh! God, Phil! — with this demon in my heart? 
 Can you see my face in this light ?" 
 
 It was too true, he would have frightened the 
 household gods from their pedestals. 
 
 "But what would you do, my dear Job? Why 
 come here to madden yourself with a sight you must 
 have known you would see. 
 
 "Phil?" 
 
 "What, my dear boy?" 
 
 "Will you do me a kindness?" 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 " Isidora would do anything you wished her to do. 
 
 "Urn! with a reservation, my dear chum !" 
 
 " But she would give you the rose that is m her 
 hair." 
 
 " Without a doubt." 
 
 "And for me— if you told her it was for me. 
 Would she not?" 
 
 "Perhaps. But will that content you ! 
 
 " It will soften my despair. I will never look on 
 her face more ; but I should like my last sight of her 
 to be associated with kindness ?" 
 
398 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 Poor Job! how true it is that " affection is a fire 
 which kindleih as well in the bramble as in the oak, 
 and catchelli hold where it first lighteth, not where it 
 may best burn." ] do believe in my heart that the 
 soul in thee was designed for a presentable body — thy 
 instincts were so invariably mistaken. When didst 
 thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it 
 did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by j 
 conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying simili- j 
 tude it was that was written on every blank page in ! 
 thy Lexicon: ''Larks that mount in the air, build ; 
 their nests below in the- earth; and women that cast 
 their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon | 
 vassals." Apelles must have been better looking than ; 
 Alexander, when Campaspe said that ! 
 
 As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to i 
 break any three of the commandments in your service, I 
 but you should hesitate to require of friendship a vio- 
 lation of etiquette. 1 was in a round jacket and boots, 
 and it was a dress evening throughout New Haven. I : 
 looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me ' 
 to enter a soiree upon his errand, and passed my j 
 thumb and finger around the edge of my white jacket; 
 but I loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for 
 the same reason, with a difference — the imperishable J 
 well-spring he carried in his heart through the desert j 
 of the world, and which I well knew he would give up ! 
 his life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal 
 whose construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably 
 resembled. When I hesitated, and looked down at j 
 my boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse | 
 to evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to 
 beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my [ 
 request. If she had been a woman of sense, 1 should 
 have had no difficulty ; but it requires caution and 
 skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool. 
 
 "Would not the rose do as well," said I, in despe- 
 rate embarrassment, " if she does not know that it is 
 for you, my dear Job?" It would have been very 
 easy to have asked for it for myself. 
 
 Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not 
 comprehend the pang my proposition gave him. 
 
 "Away prop, and down, scaffold," thought I, as I 
 gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door. 
 
 "Mr. Slingsby," announced the servant. 
 
 " Mr. Slingsby ?" inquired the mistress of the house, 
 seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the 
 hall. 
 
 "Mr. Slingsby!!!" cried out twenty voices in 
 amazement, as 1 stepped over the threshold into the 
 
 light. 
 
 It has happened since the days of Thebet Ren Kho- 
 rat, that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was 
 evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all 
 present. (I should observe, that in those days, I rel- 
 ished rather of dandyism.) As I read the suspicion 
 in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went 
 straight up to xMiss Higgins, and, sotto voce, asked her 
 to take a turn with me in the garden. 
 
 " Isidora," 1 said, " i have long known your supe- 
 riority of mind" (when - you want anything of a wo- 
 man, praise her for that in which she is most deficient, 
 says La Bruyere), "and I have great occasion to rely 
 on it in the request I am about to make of you." 
 
 She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravel- 
 walk with heightened majesty. I had not had occa- 
 sion to pay her a compliment before since my fresh- 
 man year. 
 
 " What is it, Mr. Slingsby ?" 
 
 "You know Smith — my chum." 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 " I have just come from him." 
 
 "Well!" 
 
 " He is gone mad !" 
 
 "Mad! Mr. Slingsby?" 
 
 "Stark and furious!" 
 
 " Gracious goodness !" 
 
 "And all for you !" 
 
 " For me ! !" 
 
 "For you !" I thought her great blue eyes would 
 have become what they call in America "sot," at this 
 astounding communication. 
 
 "Now, Miss Higgins," I continued, "pray listen; 
 my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular 
 strength, that seven men can not hold him." 
 
 " Gracious!" 
 
 "And he has broken away, and is here at your 
 door." 
 
 " Good gracious!" 
 
 " Don't be afraid ! He is as gentle as a kitten when 
 I am present. And now hear my request. He leaves 
 town to-morrow, as you well know, not to return. I 
 shall take him home to Vermont with keepers. He 
 is bent upon one thing, and in that you must humor 
 him." 
 
 Miss Higgins began to be alarmed. 
 
 "He has looked through the window and seen you 
 with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his 
 madness of your love, he says, that if you would give 
 him that rose, with a kind word, and a farewell, he 
 should be happy. You will do it, will you not ?" 
 
 " Dear me ! 1 should be so afraid to speak to him!" 
 
 " But will you ? and I 'II tell you what to say." 
 
 Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and 1 passed 
 ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which, 
 with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded 
 like the most interesting thing in the world. I left her 
 in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and 
 returned to Job. 
 
 "You have come without it !" said the despairing 
 lover, falling back against the tree. 
 
 " Miss Higgins' compliments, and begs you will go 
 round by the gate, and meet her in the summer-house. 
 She prefers to manage her own affairs." 
 
 "Good God! are you mocking me?" 
 
 " I will accompany you, my dear boy." 
 
 There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness 
 in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together, 
 whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in 
 the world, the most generous, the most diffident of 
 itself, yet the most self sacrificing and delicate, was 
 at the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate 
 abandonment for a flower and a kind word: and she, 
 a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of 
 kindness of which she could not comprehend the 
 meaning or the worth, but which was to be garnered 
 up by that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid 
 him for years of unrequited affection! She recited it 
 really very well. I stood at the latticed door, and in- 
 terrupted them the instant there was a pause in the 
 dialogue; and getting Job away as fast as possible, I 
 left Miss Higgins with a promise of secrecy, and re- 
 sumed my midnight stroll. 
 
 Apropos — among Job's letters is a copy of verses, 
 which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think 
 were written on this very occasion : — 
 
 Nay — smile not on me — I have borne 
 
 Indifference and repulse from thee ; 
 With my heart sickening 1 have worn 
 
 A brow, as thine own eoldxme, free ; 
 My lip has been as gay as thine, 
 
 Ever thine own light mirth repeating, 
 Though, in this burning brain of mine, 
 
 A throb the while, like death, was beating : 
 My spirit did not shrink or swerve — 
 Thy look — I thank thee ! — froze the nerve ! 
 
 But now again, as when I met . 
 
 And loved thee in my happier days, 
 A smile upon thy bright lip plays, 
 
 And kindness in thine eye is set — 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 399 
 
 And this I can not bear ! 
 It melts the manhood from my pride, 
 It brngs me closer to thy side- 
 Bewilders -chains me there — 
 There — where my dearest hope was crushed and died ! 
 
 Oh, if thou couldsl but know the deep 
 
 Of love that hope has nursed for years, 
 How in the heart's still chambers sleep 
 
 Its hoarded thoughts, its trembling fears — 
 Treasure that love has brooded o'er 
 Till life, than this, has nothing more— 
 
 And couldst thou — but 'tis vain ! — 
 I will not, can not tell thee, how 
 That hoard consumes its coffer now — 
 I may not write of pain 
 That sickens in the heart, and maddens in the brain 
 
 Then smile not on me ! pass me by 
 
 Coldly, and with a careless mien — 
 'Twill pierce my heart, and fill mine eye, 
 But 1 shall be as I have been — 
 Quiet in my despair ! 
 'Tis better than the throbbing fever, 
 That else were in my brain for ever, 
 
 And easier to bear ! 
 I'll not upbraid the coldest look — 
 The bitterest word thou hast, in my sad pride I'll brook ! 
 
 If Job had rejoiced in a more euphonious name, I 
 should have bought a criticism in some review, and 
 started him fairly as a poet. But " Job Smith!" — 
 " Poems by Job Smith !" — It would never do ! If he 
 wrote like a seraph, and printed the book at his own 
 expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown 
 to each person that would take one away, the critics 
 would damn him all the same ! Really, one's father 
 and mother have a great deal to answer for ! 
 
 But Job is a poet who should have lived in the 
 middle ages, no less for the convenience of the nom de 
 guerre, fashionable in those days, than because his 
 poetry, being chiefly the mixed product of feeling and 
 courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule. The 
 philosophical and iron-wire poetry of our day stands 
 an attack like a fortification, and comes down upon 
 the besieger with reason and logic as good as his own. 
 But the more delicate offspring of tenderness and chiv- 
 alry, intending no violence, and venturing out to sea 
 upon a rose -leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond diving- 
 bells by half a breath of scorn. I would subscribe 
 liberally myself to a private press and a court of honor 
 in poetry — critics, if admitted, to be dumb upon a 
 penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce act upon 
 this hint ? Poets now-a-days ate more slaves and 
 felons than your African, or your culprit at the old 
 Bailey ! 
 
 1 would go a great way. privately, to find a genuine 
 spark of chivalry, and Job lit his everyday lamp with 
 it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these 
 verses, which I copied long ago from a lady's album. 
 Yet, you may ridicule them if you like ! — 
 
 There is a story I have met, 
 
 Of a high angel, pure and true, 
 With eyes that tears had never wet, 
 
 And lips that pity never knew ; 
 But ever on his throne he sate, 
 
 With his white pinions proudly furled, 
 And, looking from his high estate, 
 
 Beheld the errors of a world : 
 Yet, never, as they rose to heaven, 
 Plead even for one to be forgiven. 
 
 God looked at last upon his pride, 
 And bade him fold his shining wing, 
 
 And o'er a land where tempters bide, 
 He made the heartless angel king. 
 
 'Tis lovely reading in the tale, 
 
 The glorious spells they tried on him, 
 
 Ere gTew his heavenly birth-star pale, 
 Ere grew his frontlet jewel dim — 
 
 Cups of such rare and ravishing wines 
 
 As even a god might drink and bless, 
 Gems from unsearched and central mines, 
 
 Whose light than heaven's was scarcely less — 
 Gold of a sheen like crystal spars, 
 
 And silver whiter than the moon's, 
 And music like the songs of stars, 
 
 And perfume like a thousand Junes, 
 And breezes, soft as heaven's own air 
 
 Like fingers playing in his hair ! 
 He shut his eyes — he closed his ears — 
 
 He bade them, in God's name, begone ! 
 And, through the yet eternal years, 
 
 Had stood, the tried and sinless one : 
 But there was yet one untried spell — 
 A woman tempted— and he fell ! 
 
 And I — if semblance I may find 
 
 Between such glorious sphere and mine — 
 Am not to the high honor blind, 
 
 Of filling this fair page of thine — 
 Writing my unheard n.ime among 
 Sages and sires and men of song ; 
 
 But honor, though the best e'er given, 
 And glory, though it were a king's, 
 
 And power, though loving it like heaven, 
 Were, to my seeming, lesser things, 
 
 And less temptation, far, to me, 
 
 Than half a hope of serving thee ! 
 
 I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader; 
 for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was 
 worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is 
 a little touch of his quality : — 
 
 I look upon the fading flowers 
 
 Thou gav'st me, lady, in thy mirth, 
 And mourn, that, with the perishing hours 
 
 Such fair things perish from the earth — 
 For thus, I know, the moment's feeling 
 
 Its own light web of life unweaves, 
 The deepest trace from memory stealing, 
 
 Like perfume from these dying leaves — 
 The thought that gave it, anil the flower, 
 Alike the creatures of an hour. 
 
 And thus it better were, perhaps, 
 
 For feeling is the nurse of pain, 
 And joys that linger in their lapse, 
 
 Must die at last, and so are vain ! 
 Could I revive these faded flowers, 
 
 Could 1 call back departed bliss, 
 I would not, though this world of ours 
 
 Were ten times brighter than it is ! 
 They must — and let them— pass away ! 
 We are forgotten — even as they ! 
 
 I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I have 
 no idea why I have digressed this time from the story 
 which (you may see by the motto at the beginning of 
 the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive easily 
 how people, who have nothing to do, betake them- 
 selves to autobiography — it is so pleasant rambling 
 about over the past, and regathering only the flowers. 
 Why should pain and mortification be unsepultured .' 
 The world is no wiser for these written experiences. 
 " The best book," said Southey, " does but little good 
 to the world, and much harm to the author." I shall 
 deliberate whether to enlighten the world as to Edith's 
 metempsychosis, or no. 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 SCENERY AND A SCENE. 
 
 " Truth is no doctoresse ; she takes no decrees at Paris or Oxford, 
 among great clerks, disputants, subtle Aristotles, men nodn.ri mge- 
 nii, ab'e to take Lully by the chin j but oftentimes, to such a one 
 as myself, an idiota or common person, no great things, melanchoii- 
 zing in woods where waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains ; 
 whereas the sillv man, expecting no such matter, thinketh only 
 how best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with na- 
 ture, her pleasaunt scenes, woods, waterfalls: on a sudden the 
 goddess herself, Truth, has appeared with a shining light and a 
 sparkling countenance, so as ye may not b« able lightly to resist 
 her." — Bobtom. 
 
400 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 " Lver thus 
 
 Drop from us treasures one tiy one ; 
 
 They who have been frmn youth with us, 
 Whose every look, whose every tone. 
 
 Is linked to us like leaves to flowers— 
 
 They who have shared our pleasant hours— 
 Whose voices, so familiar grown. 
 They almost seem to us our own— 
 
 The echoes of each breath of ours — 
 They who have ever been our pride, 
 
 Yet in their hours of triumph dearest — 
 They whom we must have known and tried, 
 
 And loved the most when tiied the nearest — 
 They pass from us, like stars that wane, 
 
 The brightest still before, 
 Or gold links broken from a chain 
 
 That can be joined no more !" 
 
 Job Smith and myself were on the return from Ni- 
 agara. It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of 
 June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon 
 its bosom for days; the ragged trees upon its green 
 shore dropping their branches into the stirless water, 
 as if it were some rigid imitation — the lake glass, and 
 the leaves emerald ; the sky was of an April blue, as ! 
 if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness. till you J 
 could see through its clarified depths to the gates of I 
 heaven ; and yet breathless and sunny as was the 
 face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in j 
 the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass — J 
 searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of ex- I 
 istence. 
 
 No one can conceive, who has not had his imagina- 
 tion stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic 
 solitudes of the west, the vastness of the unbroken 
 phases of nature ; where every tree looks a king, and 
 every flower a marvel of glorious form and color — 
 where the rocks are rent every one as by the " tenth" 
 thunderbolt — and lake, mountain, or river, ravine or 
 waterfall, cave or eagle's nest, whatever it may be that 
 feeds the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have 
 shaped and left it — where the sculpture, and the paint- 
 ing, and the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of 
 nature, go on under the naked eye of the Almighty, 
 and by his own visible and uninterrupted hand, and 
 where the music of nature, from the anthem of the 
 torrent and storm, broken only by the scream of the 
 vulture, to the trill of the rivulet with its accompani- 
 ment of singing birds and winds, is for ever ringing its 
 changes, as if for the stars to hear — in such scenes, I 
 say, and in such scenes only, is the imagination over- 
 tasked or stretched to the capacity of a seraph's ; and 
 while common minds sink beneath them to the mere 
 inanition of their animal senses, the loftier spirit takes 
 their color and stature, and outgrows the common and 
 pitiful standards of the world. Cooper and Leather- 
 stocking thus became what they are — the one a high- 
 priest of imagination and poetry, and the other a sim- 
 ple-hearted but mere creature of instinct; and Cooper 
 is no more a living man, liable to the common laws of 
 hum an nature, than Leatherstocking a true and life- 
 like transcript of the more common effect of those 
 overpowering solitudes on the character. 
 
 We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job 
 and myself, seated on the well-cushioned seats, with 
 the blinds half-turned to give us the prospect and ex- 
 clude the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way. 
 He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could 
 argue without losing my temper ; and the reason was, 
 that I always had the last word, and thought myself 
 victorious. 
 
 " We are about to return into the bosom of society, 
 my dear Job," said I, " looking with unctuous good 
 nature on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the 
 first time in a month that morning. (It is an unsen- 
 timental fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on 
 the most poetical spots of earth.) 
 
 " Yes," said Job; " but how superior is the society 
 we leave behind ! Niagara and Erie * What in your 
 crowded city is comparable to these ?" 
 
 " Nothing, for size '. — but for society — you will think 
 
 me a pagan, dear chum — but, on my honor, straight 
 from Niagara as 1 come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearn- 
 ing for the society of Miss Popkins !" 
 
 "Oh, Phil!" 
 
 " On my honor !" 
 
 " You, who were in such raptures at the falls !" 
 
 " And real ones — but I wanted a woman at my el- 
 bow to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have 
 made up my mind on a great principle since we have 
 been on our travels ? Have you observed that 1 was 
 pensive ?" 
 
 " Not particularly — but what is your principle ?" 
 
 " That a man is a much more interesting object than 
 a mountain." 
 
 "A man ! did you say ?" 
 
 " Yes — but I meant a woman !" 
 
 " I don't think so." 
 
 " I do ! — and 1 judge by myself. When did I ever 
 see wonder of nature — tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid, 
 lake, or river — that I would not rather have been talk- 
 ing to a woman the while ? Do you remember the 
 three days we were tramping through the forest with- 
 out seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless 
 aisle of a cathedral?. Do you remember the long morn- 
 ing when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara, 
 and it was a divine luxury only 10 breathe ? Do you 
 remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on Goat 
 island ? Do you remember the ten thousand glorious 
 moments we have enjoyed between weather and scene- 
 ry since the bursting of these summer leaves? Do 
 you ?"' 
 
 " Certainly, my dear boy !" 
 
 " Well, then, much as I love nature and you, there 
 has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks, 
 that, if I coul I have distilled a charming girl out of a 
 mixture of you and any mountain, river, or rock, that 
 I have seen, I would not have flung you, without re- 
 morse, into any witch's caldron that was large enough, 
 and would boil at my bidding." 
 
 " Monster !" 
 
 "And I believe I should have the same feelings in 
 Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures 
 with things you can neither eat nor make love to." 
 
 " Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a 
 day ?" 
 
 " An hour, perhaps, it might ; for I should be study- 
 ing, in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure 
 of some living Musidora — but I should soon tire of it, 
 and long for my lunch or my love ; and I give you my 
 honor I would not lose the three meals of a single day 
 to see Santa Croce and St. Peter's." 
 " Both ?" 
 "Both." 
 
 Job disdained to argue against such a want of sen- 
 timental principle, and pulling up the blind, he fixed 
 his eyes on the slowly-gliding panorama of rock and 
 forest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck. 
 Mephistopheles could hardly have found a more 
 striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three 
 hundred miles in the canal from Lake Erie to the 
 Hudson. As I walked up and down the deck of the 
 packet-boat. I thought to myself, that if it were not 
 for thoughts of things that come more home to one's 
 " business and bosom" (particularly " bosom"), I could 
 be content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and re- 
 turn to Buffalo for amusement. The P>ie canal-boat 
 is a long and very pretty drawing-room afloat. It has 
 a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian 
 blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or per- 
 ceptible motion. It is drawn generally by three horses 
 at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred 
 miles a day, as softly as if you were witched over the 
 ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company 
 (say fifty people) is such as pleases Heaven ; though I 
 must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting 
 the various dear friends I have made and left on that 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 401 
 
 long canal) there are few highways on which you will 
 meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers 
 On this occasion my star was bankrupt — Job Smith 
 being my only civilized companion — and I was left to 
 the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the 
 scenery. 
 
 Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remem- 
 ber, through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly- 
 sown manhood, every moment of that lonely evening. 
 I remember the progression of the sunset, from the 
 lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds, 
 to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star 
 hung over the wilderness. And I remember what I 
 am going to describe — a twilight anthem in the forest 
 — as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition 
 in the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyer- 
 beer. I thought time dragged heavily then, but I 
 wish I had as light a heart and could feel as vividly 
 now ! 
 
 The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles 
 through the heart of the primeval wilderness of 
 America, and the boat was gliding on silently and 
 swiftly, and never sailed a lost cloud through the 
 abyss of space on a course more apparently new and 
 untrodden. The luxuriant soil had sent up a rank 
 grass that covered the horse-path like velvet ; the 
 Erie water was clear as a brook in the winding canal ; 
 the old shafts of the gigantic forest spurred into the 
 sky by thousands, and the yet unscared eagle swung 
 off from the dead branch of the pine, and skimmed the 
 tree-tops for another perch, as if he had grown to 
 believe that gliding spectre a harmless phenomenon 
 of nature. The horses drew steadily and unheard at 
 the end of the long line ; the steersman stood mo- 
 tionless at the tiller, and I lay on a heap of baggage 
 in the prow, attentive to the slightest breathing of na- 
 ture, but thinking, with an ache at my heart, of Edith 
 Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention it?) I was has- 
 tening with a lover's proper impatience. I might as 
 well have taken another turn in my " fool's paradise." 
 
 The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine 
 tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an 
 Ethiop's finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted the 
 first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and the 
 screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced without 
 waiting to be importuned, though we were listening 
 for the nightingale. The air, as I said before, had 
 been all day breathless; but as the first chill of eve- 
 ning displaced the warm atmosphere of the departed 
 sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored bosom of the 
 canal, and then commenced the night anthem of the 
 forest, audible, I would fain believe, in its soothing 
 changes, by the dead tribes whose bones whiten amid 
 the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly yet articu- 
 lately, the suspended and wavering foliage of the birch 
 was touched by the many-fingered wind, and, like a 
 faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves rustled in the low 
 branches ; and, with a moment's pause, when you 
 could hear the moving of the vulture's claws upon 
 the bark, as he turned to get his breast to the wind, 
 the increasing breeze swept into the pine-tops, and 
 drew forth from their fringe-like and myriad tassels a 
 low monotone like the refrain of a far-off dirge; and 
 still as it murmured (seeming to you sometimes like 
 the confused and heart-broken responses of the peni- 
 tents on a cathedral floor), the blast strengthened and 
 filled, and the rigid leaves of the oak, and the swaying 
 fans and chalices of the magnolia, and the rich cups 
 of the tulip-trees, stirred and answered with their dif- 
 ferent voices like many-toned harps ; and when the 
 wind was fully abroad, and every moving thing on the 
 breast of the earth was roused from its daylight repose, 
 the irregular and capricious blast, like a player on an 
 organ of a thousand stops, lulled and strengthened by 
 turns, and from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the 
 whisper of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging 
 
 and groaning branches of the larch and the fir, the 
 anthem went ceaselessly through its changes, and the 
 harmony (though the owl broke in with his scream, 
 and though the over-blown monarch of the wood 
 came crashing to the earth), was still perfect and with- 
 out ajar. It is strange that there is no sound of na- 
 ture out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes 
 into this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment 
 of bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or 
 the scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated 
 croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the out- 
 burst of an octave flute above the even melody of an 
 orchestra ; and it is surprising how the large rain- 
 drops, pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of 
 the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself, 
 sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a 
 low burthen to the general anthem of the earth — as 
 it were, a single voice among instruments. 
 
 I had what Wordsworth calls a " couchant ear" in 
 my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while 
 I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love 
 in the wilderness. 
 
 There will come sometimes in the spring — say in 
 May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butter- 
 flies are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine — 
 there will come, I say, in that yearning and youth- 
 I renewing season, a warm shower at noon. Our tent 
 shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young 
 pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be 
 called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while 
 watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the 
 unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends 
 softly and warm ; but with the sunset the clouds break 
 away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze. 
 The next morning you shall come out with me to a 
 hill-side looking upon the south, and lie down with 
 your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every 
 four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a 
 pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp 
 by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at 
 ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and 
 yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy 
 pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through 
 the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla. 
 There is not much variety in its music, but it is a 
 pleasant monotone for thought, and if you have a 
 restless fever in your bosom (as I had, when I learned 
 to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart 
 and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may 
 lie down with a crooked root under your head in the 
 skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne 
 to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend, 
 or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no grati- 
 tude, and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon 
 the wind. 
 
 Oh, how many of these harmonies there are ! — how 
 many that we hear, and how many that are " too 
 constant to be heard!" 1 could go back to my youth, 
 now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture 
 a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that would 
 bring the blush upon my cheek to think how my senses 
 are dulled since such things could give me pleasure! 
 Is there no " well of Kanathos" for renewing the 
 youth of the soul ? — no St. Hilary's cradle? no elixir 
 to cast the slough of heart-sickening and heart-tar- 
 nishing custom? Find me an alchymy for that, with 
 your alembic and crucible, and you may resolve to 
 dross again your philosopher's stone ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Everybody who makes the passage of the Erie 
 canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica, to visit a 
 wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called 
 Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before 
 mentioning the falls, however, to sing the praises of 
 
402 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants — having 
 received much hospitality from the worthy burghers, 
 and philandered up and down their well-flagged trot- 
 toir very much to my private satisfaction. I should 
 scorn any man's judgment who should attempt to con- 
 vince me that the Erie water, which comes down the 
 canal a hundred and fifty miles, and passes through 
 the market-place of that pleasant town, has not com- 
 municated to the hearts of its citizens the expansion 
 and depth of the parent lake from which it is drawn. 
 I have a theory on that subject with which I intend to 
 surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer 
 draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one 
 tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose 
 like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in 
 vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied 
 their gaze — (that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of 
 melody and soul, alone recalls to me) — that these, and 
 the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius, 
 that were other gifts of the same marvel among wo- 
 men — that these were born of common parentage, and 
 nursed by the air of a demi-metropolis? We were 
 but the kindest of friends, that bright creature and my- 
 self, and I may say, without charging myself with the 
 blindness of love, that I believe in my heart she was 
 the foster-child of the water-spirits on whose wander- 
 ing streamlet she lived — that the thousand odors that 
 swept down from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and 
 the unseen but wild and innumerable influences of 
 nature, or whatever you call that which makes the 
 Indian a believer in the Great Spirit — that these 
 came down with those clear waters, ministering to the 
 mind and watching over the budding beauty of this 
 noble and most high-hearted woman! If you do not 
 believe it, 1 should like you to tell me how else such 
 a creature was "raised," as they phrase it in Virginia. 
 I shall hold to my theory till you furnish me with a 
 more reasonable. 
 
 We heard at the hotel that there were several large 
 parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgment of 
 our toilets in our pockets, Job and I galloped out of 
 Utica about four o'clock of as bright a summer's after- 
 noon as was ever promised in the almanac. We drew 
 rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the 
 wild road more leisurely, Job's Green mountain pro- 
 portions fitting to the saddle something in the manner 
 and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the 
 same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones 
 accommodating itself with singular facility to the 
 irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal be- 
 neath him. 
 
 I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period 
 of my life that will be rather interesting in my biogra- 
 phy (it is my intention to be famous enough to merit 
 that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends 
 to be noting my " little peculiarities"), and with this 
 posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record, 
 that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith 
 Linsey— at this time the lady of my constant love — for 
 whose sake and at whose bidding' I was just conclu- 
 ding (with success I presumed) a probation of three 
 years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals, 
 and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I 
 had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly 
 hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mock- 
 ing paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rain- 
 bow spans not the earth more perfectly than did the 
 love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and the 
 ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds — 
 but I am anticipating my story. 
 
 Job's extraordinary appearance, as he extricated 
 himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire at- 
 tention of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under 
 cover of this, I usually contrived to get into the house 
 and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it 
 could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbor- 
 
 hood of scenery, he was off till Heaven knew when, 
 and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to 
 dine without him, you may imagine the necessity of 
 my hungry manoeuvre. 
 
 We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we 
 had come to see ; and as our host's eldest daughter 
 waited upon us (recorded in Job's journal, in my pos- 
 session at this moment, as " the most comely and gra- 
 cious virgin" he had seen in his travels), we felt bound 
 to adapt our conversation to the purity of her mind, 
 and discussed only the philosophical point, whether 
 the beauty of the stream could be tasted in the flavor 
 of the fish — Job for it, I against it. The argument 
 was only interrupted by the entrance of an apple- 
 pudding, so hot that our tongues were fully occupied 
 in removing it from place to place as the mouth felt 
 its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country 
 of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as 
 Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the Presi- 
 dent's wife, he requested permission to propose her 
 health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to 
 the moonlight. 
 
 III. 
 
 Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton 
 Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Paestum, 
 by a wandering artist, when there was a town of ten 
 thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty- 
 pole, and forty churches, within fourteen miles of it. 
 It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans, 
 that in the "hardness" of character of which travel- 
 lers complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for 
 scenery ; and before the fact of its discovery had got 
 well into the "Cahawba Democrat" and "Go-the- 
 whoIe-hog-Courier," there was a splendid wooden 
 hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French 
 cook, soda-water, and olives, and a law was passed by 
 the Kentucky Travellers' Club, requiring a hanging- 
 bird's nest from the trees " frowning down the awful 
 abysm," (so expressed in the regulation), as a qual- 
 ification for membership. Thenceforward to the pres- 
 ent time it has been a place of fashionable resort 
 during the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in 
 which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun, 
 it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies 
 with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had 
 penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed 
 for tender feet as well — the soft floor of pine-tassels 
 spread under the grassless woods, being considered 
 an improvement upon Turkey carpets and green- 
 sward. . 
 
 Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely 
 know what you would call it. but the wonder of na- 
 ture which bears the name is a tremendous torrent, 
 whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep 
 into the earth — a roaring and dashing stream, so far 
 below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that 
 you would think, as you come suddenly upon the 
 edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some 
 inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer 
 circle of the firmament), and laid open by some 
 Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust 
 of this "shallow earth." The idea is rather assisted 
 if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, 
 a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast 
 depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and 
 rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires, 
 dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon 
 your parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size 
 and distinctness. 
 
 They showed me at Eleusis the well by which 
 ! Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her an- 
 nual visit to the plains of Thessaly — but with the 
 J genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl 
 '■ as lovely as Phryne, my memory reverted to the bared 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 403 
 
 axle of the earth in the bed of this American river, 
 and I was persuaded (looking the while at the fero- 
 niere of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my 
 Katioka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the 
 earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Tren- 
 ton. I confess I have had, since my first descent into 
 those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity 
 of the globe — how the deuse it can hold together with 
 such a crack in its bottom ! 
 
 It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tom- 
 foolery that could be laid to the charge of the moon, 
 for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of 
 moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver. 
 It was a night in which to wish it might never be 
 day again — a night to be enamored of the stars, and 
 bid God bless them like human creatures on their 
 bright journey — a night to love in, to dissolve in — to 
 do everything but what night is made for — sleep ! 
 Oh heaven ! when I think how precious is life in such 
 moments ; how the aroma — the celestial bloom and 
 flower of the soul — the yearning and fast-perishing 
 enthusiasm of youth — waste themselves in the solitude 
 of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air; 
 when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath 
 influences that could inspire me with the elevation of 
 a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that 
 could summon forth and measure my limitless capaci- 
 ty of devotion — when I think this, and feel this, and 
 so waste my existence in vain yearnings — I could ex- 
 tinguish the divine spark within me like a lamp on an 
 unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimila- 
 tion to the animals I walk among ! And that is the 
 substance of a speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a 
 well-meant remark of his own, that " it was a pity 
 Edith Linsey was not there." He took the clause 
 about the " animals" to himself, and I made an apology 
 for the same a year after. We sometimes give our 
 friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our 
 rhapsodies ! 
 
 Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I 
 have haunted it by the week together for its mere 
 loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful 
 chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of 
 the thousand forms and shapes of running water that 
 I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking 
 roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like 
 a black rim on the enclosing precipices; the bed of 
 the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock, 
 and, with the tremendous descent of the stream — 
 forming for miles one continuous succession of falls 
 and rapids — the channel is worn into curves and cavi- 
 ties which throw the clear waters into forms of in- 
 conceivable brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of 
 half twilight below, with here and there a long beam 
 of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy 
 or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating 
 and changing echoes:— 
 
 " Like a ring of bells whose sound the wind still alters," 
 
 maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying 
 at every step with the varying phase of the current. 
 Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which 
 the river flies with a single and hurrying leap (not a 
 drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet,) oc- 
 cur frequently as you ascend; and it is from these 
 that the place takes its name. But the falls, though 
 beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and un- 
 equalled rapidity with which the waters come to the 
 leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops waver- 
 ing down into the abysm from trees apparently painted 
 on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing 
 current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it, 
 you would think the vault of the steadfast heavens a 
 flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of 
 beauty that I best remember is a smooth descent of some 
 hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided 
 
 volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of 
 scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mir- 
 ror of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above, 
 there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the 
 water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the 
 rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a 
 cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole 
 mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a 
 flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing like the angel 
 that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine 
 serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last 
 figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his 
 pocket, and had a natural redolence of " Paradise 
 Lost" in his conversation.) 
 
 Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink), 
 I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and 
 waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of 
 
 i the elements. Earth is never tolerable unless dis- 
 
 i guised in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible 
 when she borrows drapery of water ; and Fire is so 
 
 j staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight ; 
 
 i but water! soft, pure, graceful water! there is no 
 shape into which you can throw her that she does not 
 
 ; seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing 
 of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so bril- 
 
 | liant as her own spray- pearls and emeralds; Fire has 
 
 | no rubies like what she steals from the sunset ; Air 
 has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever- 
 
 ! changing drapery of silver. A health (in wine !) to 
 
 ; Watkr ! 
 
 Who is there that did not love some stream in his 
 
 ! youth ? Who is there in whose vision of the past 
 
 j there does not sparkle up, from every picture of child- 
 
 j hood, a spring or a rivulent woven through the darken- 
 ed and torn woof of first affections like a thread of 
 unchanged silver ? How do you interpret the in- 
 stinctive yearning with which you search for the 
 
 : river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature — 
 
 | the clinging unaware to the river's course when a 
 truant in the fields in June — the dull void you find in 
 
 j every landscape of which it is not the ornament and 
 the centre ? For myself, I hold with the Greek : 
 " Water is the first principle of all things : we were 
 
 ! made from it and we shall be resolved into it."* 
 
 IV. 
 
 The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition. 
 I Invention you do not need if you have experience ; 
 ' for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these 
 days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your 
 mouth ; and when you have once begun you can end 
 whenever you like, and leave the sequel to the reader's 
 imagination : but the hinges of a story — the turning 
 gracefully back from a digression (it is easy to turn 
 into one) — is the pas qui coute. My education on that 
 point was neglected. 
 
 It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and 
 Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, " no mind 
 to sleep," followed the fashion and the rest of the com- 
 pany at the inn, and strolled down to see the falls by 
 moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job 
 straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I 
 have described above as my favorite, and, after watch- 
 ing it for a few minutes, we turned back to a dark 
 cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and sat 
 musing in silence. 
 
 Several parties had strolled past without seeing us 
 
 in our recess, when two female figures, with their 
 
 ! arms around each other's waists, sauntered slowly 
 
 | around the jutting rock below, and approached us, 
 
 ! eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to 
 
 the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us, 
 
 and turned to look back at the scene. As the head 
 
 nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to 
 
 * The Ionic philosophy, supported by Thale*. 
 
404 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 my feet : it was Edith ! In the same instant her 
 voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible 
 impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again 
 upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid his 
 hand on my arm. 
 
 "It was his favorite spot!" said Edith. (We had 
 been at Trenton together years before.) "I stood here 
 with him, and I wish he stood here now, that I might 
 tell him what my hand hesitates to write." 
 
 "Poor Philip !" said her companion, whom by the 
 voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings, 
 "I can not conceive how you can resolve so coldly to 
 break his heart." 
 
 I felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listen- 
 ed. Edith went on. 
 
 " Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I 
 loved Philip Slingsby when I thought I was going to 
 die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never 
 thought to need, of the goods of this world, more 
 than a sick chamber and a nurse ; and Phil was kind- 
 hearted and devoted to me, and I lived at home. 
 But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious de- 
 sires have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself 
 admired by whom I will, and every day growing 
 more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and 
 love in a cottage, though very well for you if you 
 like it, would never do for me. I should like him 
 very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and 
 devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him 
 miserable, and so — I think I had better put him out of 
 misery at once — don't you think? 
 
 A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips ; 
 but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith's 
 voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudi- 
 ble to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow 
 of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of 
 my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a 
 crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent, 
 but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with 
 Job's hand clasped tenderly in my own. 
 
 V. 
 
 I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at 
 Saratoga in July — the last month of the probation by 
 which I had won a right to her love. I had not spo- 
 ken to her, or written, or seen her (save, unknown to 
 her, in the moment I have described), in the three 
 long years to which my constancy was devoted. I 
 had gained the usual meed of industry in my profes- 
 sion, and was admitted to its practice. I was on the 
 threshold of manhood ; and she had promised, before 
 heaven, here to give me heart and hand- 
 
 I had parted from her at twelve on that night three 
 years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her 
 side in the crowded ballroom of Saratoga. 
 
 " Good God ! Mr. Slingsby !" she exclaimed, as I 
 put out my hand. 
 
 " Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss 
 Linsey ?" I asked, as she still looked with a wonder- 
 ing gaze into my face— pressing my hand, however, 
 with real warmth, and evidently under the control, 
 for the moment, of the feelings with which we had 
 parted. 
 
 " Changed, indeed ! Why, you have studied your- 
 self to a skeleton ! My dear Philip, you are ill !" 
 
 I was — but it was only for a moment. I asked her 
 hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit 
 and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but, 
 at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay ; and 
 when everybody had congratulated me, in her hear- 
 ing, on the school to which I had put my wits in my 
 long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery 
 looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow 
 and rallied my sinking heart. 
 
 The candles were burning low, and the ball whs 
 
 nearly over, when I entered the room again, and re 
 quested Edith to take a turn with me on the colon- 
 nade. She at once assented, and I could feel by her 
 arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her 
 lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to 
 me what she little thought I could so well anticipate. 
 
 " My probation is over," I said, breaking the si- 
 lence which she seemed willing to prolong, and which 
 had lasted till we had twice measured the long colon- 
 nade. 
 
 " It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we 
 parted." She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as 
 if trying to work out another more prominent thought 
 in her mind. 
 
 " Do you find me changed ?" I asked. 
 
 " Yes — oh, yes ! very !" 
 
 " But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith !" 
 
 She turned to me as if to ask me to explain my- 
 self. 
 
 " Will you listen to me while I tell you how ?" 
 
 " What can you mean ? Certainly." 
 
 " Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself 
 to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned 
 to love you, and when I promised to love you for 
 life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy. 
 I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your 
 living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I 
 was still a child, and knew nothing of the world. I 
 have since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well 
 say at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will 
 easily divine my drift. You are poor, and I find my- 
 self, as you have seen to-night, in a position which 
 will enable me to marry more to my advantage ; and, 
 with these views, I am sure I should only make you 
 miserable by fulfilling my contract with you, and you 
 will agree with me that I consult our mutual happi- 
 ness by this course — don't you think ?" 
 
 At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached 
 and made some sensible remarks about the weather; 
 and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey's 
 arm, and cautioning her against the night air, left her 
 to finish her promenade and swallow her own project- 
 ed speech and mine, and went to bed. 
 
 And so ended my first love ! 
 
 SCENES OF FEAR. 
 
 No. I. 
 
 THE DISTURBED VIGIL. 
 
 " Antonio. — Get me a conjurer, I say ! Inquire me out a man that 
 lets out devils '." Old Play. 
 
 Such a night ! It was like a festival of Dian. A 
 burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or 
 two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating 
 rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and 
 the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and 
 the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight 
 and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night's beau- 
 ty. There was no atmosphere — nothing between the 
 eye and the pearly moon — and she rode through the 
 heavens without a veil, like a queen as she is, giving a 
 glimpse of her nearer beauty for a festal favor to the 
 worshipping stars. 
 
 I was a student at the famed university of Connecti- 
 cut, and the bewilderments of philosophy and poetry 
 were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite natu- 
 ral beauty, and the absence of all other temptation, 
 secure to the classic neophite an almost supernatural 
 wakefulness of fancy. I contracted a taste for the 
 horrible in those days, which still clings to me. I 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 405 
 
 have travelled the world over, with no object but gen- 
 eral observation, and have dawdled my hour at courts 
 and operas with little interest, while the sacking and 
 drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus, the impale- 
 ment of a robber on the Nile, and the insane hospitals 
 from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in my capri- 
 cious journal with the vividness of the most stirring 
 adventure. 
 
 There is a kind of crystallization in the circum- 
 stances of one's life. A peculiar turn of mind draws 
 to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is 
 frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets 
 with more remarkable things than another, when it is 
 owing merely to a difference of natural character. 
 
 It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty. 
 T was watching a corpse. In that part of the United 
 States, the dead are never left alone till the earth is 
 thrown upon them ; and, as a friend of the family, I 
 had been called upon for this melancholy service on 
 the night preceding the interment. It was a death 
 which had left a family of broken hearts ; for, beneath 
 the sheet which sank so appallingly to the outline of 
 a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness 
 whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened 
 the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching 
 loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only 
 a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my 
 memory even yet, and mingles with every conception 
 of female beauty. 
 
 Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share 
 my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having read 
 them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed 
 my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the 
 corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled 
 into the garden to enjoy the quiet of the summer night. 
 The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops, and 
 the air was breathless. 
 
 The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden 
 flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from 
 the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room, 
 and my own predisposition to invest death with a su- 
 pernatural interest, had raised my heart to my throat. 
 I walked backward and forward in the garden-path ; 
 and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even 
 the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed 
 weird and fearful. 
 
 The clock struck, and I re-entered. My compan- 
 ions still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber. 
 I trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the 
 white heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow 
 of the curtains ; and my blood seemed to freeze. At 
 the moment when I was turning away with a strong 
 effort at a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter 
 of wings, followed by a rush and a sudden silence, 
 struck on my startled ear. The street was as quiet as 
 death, and the noise, which was far too audible to be a 
 deception of the fancy, had come from the side toward 
 an uninhabited wing of the house. My heart stood 
 still. Another instant, and the fire-screen was dashed 
 down, and a white cat rushed past me, and with the 
 speed of light sprang like an hyena upon the corpse. 
 The flight of a vampyre into the chamber would not 
 have more curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder 
 ran cold over me, but recovering my self-command, I 
 rushed to the animal (of whose horrible appetite for 
 the flesh of the dead I had read incredulously), and at- 
 tempted to tear her from the body. With her claws 
 fixed in the breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infer- 
 nal spirit, she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the 
 stains already upon the sheet convinced me that it 
 would be impossible to remove her without shockingly 
 disfiguring the corpse. I seized her by the throat, in 
 the hope of choking her ; but with the first pressure 
 of my fingers, she flew into my face, and the infuriated 
 animal seemed persuaded that it was a contest for life. 
 Half blinded by the fury of her attack, I loosed her 
 
 for a moment, and she immediately leaped again upon 
 the corpse, and had covered her feet and face with 
 blood before I could recover my hold upon her. The 
 body was no longer in a situation to be spared, and I 
 seized her with a desperate grasp to draw her of! ; but 
 to my horror, the half-covered and bloody corpse rose 
 upright in her fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat 
 with drooping arms, and head fallen with ghastly help- 
 lessness over the shoulder. Years have not removed 
 that fearful spectacle from my eyes. 
 
 The corpse sank back, and I succeeded in throttling 
 the monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the 
 window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid 
 the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead, 
 and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the 
 violated remains, and left them again to their repose. 
 My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I paced 
 the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible 
 relief, dawned over the mountains. 
 
 No. II. 
 
 THE MAD SENIOR. 
 
 I was called upon in my senior year to watch with 
 an insane student. He was a man who had attracted 
 a great deal of attention in college. He appeared in 
 an extraordinary costume at the beginning of our 
 freshman term, and wrote himself down as Washing- 
 ton Greyling, of , an unheard-of settlement 
 
 somewhere beyond the Mississippi. His coat and oth- 
 er gear might have been the work of a Chickasaw 
 tailor, aided by the superintending taste of some white 
 huntsman, who remembered faintly the outline of ha- 
 biliments he had not seen for half a century. It was 
 a body of green cloth, eked out with wampum and 
 otter-skin, and would have been ridiculous if it had 
 not encased one of the finest models of a manly frame 
 that ever trod the earth. With close-curling black 
 hair, a fine weather-browned complexion, Spanish fea- 
 tures (from his mother — a frequent physiognomy in 
 the countries bordering on Spanish America), and 
 the port and lithe motion of a lion, he was a figure to 
 look upon in any disguise with warm admiration. 
 He was soon put into the hands of a tailor-proper, 
 and, with the facility which belongs to his country- 
 men, became in a month the best-dressed man in col- 
 lege. His manners were of a gentleman-like mildness, 
 energetic, but courteous and chivalresque, and, unlike 
 most savages and all coins, he polished without " losing 
 his mark." At the end of his first term, he would 
 have been called a high-bred gentleman at any court 
 in Europe. 
 
 The opening of his mind was almost as rapid and 
 extraordinary. He seized everything with an ardor 
 and freshness that habit and difficulty never deadened. 
 He was like a man who had tumbled into a new star, 
 and was collecting knowledge for a world to which he 
 was to return. The first in all games, the wildest in 
 all adventure, the most distinguished even in the ele- 
 gant society for which the town is remarkable, nnd 
 unfailingly brilliant in his recitations and college per- 
 formances, he was looked upon as a sort of admirable 
 phenomenon, and neither envied nor opposed in any- 
 thing. I have often thought, in looking on him, that 
 his sensations at coming fresh from a wild western 
 prairie, and, at the first measure of his capacilies with 
 men of better advantages, finding himself so uniformly 
 superior, must have been stirringly delightful. It is a 
 wonder he never became arrogant ; but it was the last 
 foible of which he could have been accused. 
 
 We were reading hard for the honors in the senior 
 year, when Greyling suddenly lost his reason. He 
 
406 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 had not been otherwise ill, and had, apparently in the 
 midst of high health, gone mad at a moment's warn- 
 ing. The physicians scarce knew how to treat him. 
 The confinement to which he was at first subjected, 
 however, was thought inexpedient, and he seemed to 
 justify their lenity by the gentlest behavior when at 
 liberty. He seemed oppressed by a heart-breaking 
 melancholy. We took our turns in guarding and 
 watching with him, and it was upon my first night of 
 duty that the incident happened which I have thus 
 endeavored to intioduce. 
 
 It was scarce like a vigil with a sick man, for our 
 patient went regularly to bed, and usually slept well. 
 I took my " Lucretius" and the " Book of the Mar- 
 tyrs," which was just then my favorite reading, and 
 with hot punch, a cold chicken, books, and a fire, I 
 looked forward to it as merely a studious night ; and, 
 as the wintry wind of January rattled in at the old 
 college windows, I thrust my feet into slippers, drew 
 my dressing-gown about me, and congratulated my- 
 self on the excessive comfortableness of my position. 
 The Sybarite's bed of roses would have been no temp- 
 tation. 
 
 It had snowed all day, but the sun had set with a 
 red rift in the clouds, and the face of the sky was 
 swept in an hour to the clearness of — I want a com- 
 parison — your own blue eye, dear Mary ! The all- 
 glorious arch of heaven was a mass of sparkling stars. 
 
 Grey ling slept, and I, wearied of the cold philosophy 
 of the Latin poet, took to my " Book of Martyrs." I 
 read on, and read on. The college clock struck, it 
 seemed to me, the quarters rather than the hours. 
 Time flew : it was three. 
 
 "Horrible! most horrible !" I started from my chair 
 with the exclamation, and felt as if my scalp were 
 self-lifted from my head. It was a description in the 
 harrowing faithfulness of the language of olden time, 
 painting almost the articulate groans of an impaled 
 Christian. I clasped the old iron-bound book, and 
 rushed to the window as if my heart was stifling for 
 fresh air. 
 
 Again at the fire. The large walnut fagots had 
 burnt to a bed of bright coals, and I sat gazing into it, 
 totally unable to shake off the fearful incubus from 
 my breast. The martyr was there — on the very hearth 
 — with the stakes scornfully crossed in his body ; and 
 as the large coals cracked asunder and revealed the 
 prightness within, I seemed to follow the nerve-rending 
 instrument from hip to shoulder, and suffer with him 
 pang for pang, as if the burning redness were the pools 
 of his fevered blood. 
 
 "Aha!" 
 
 It struck on my ear like the cry of an exulting fiend. 
 
 "Aha!" 
 
 I shrunk into the chair as the awful cry was re- 
 peated, and looked slowly and with difficult courage 
 over my shoulder. A single fierce eye was fixed upon 
 me from the mass of bed-clothes, and, for a moment, 
 the relief from the fear of some supernatural presence 
 was like water to a parched tongue. I sank back re- 
 lieved into the chair. 
 
 There was a rustling immediately in the bed, and, 
 starting again, I found the wild eyes of my patient 
 fixed still steadfastly upon me. He was creeping 
 stealthily out of bed. His bare foot touched the floor, 
 and his toes worked upon it as if he was feeling its 
 strength, and in a moment he stood upright on his 
 feet, and, with his head forward and his pale face livid 
 with rage, stepped toward me. I looked to the door. 
 He observed the glance, and in the next instant he 
 sprang clear over the bed, turned the key, and dashed 
 it furiously through the window. 
 
 "Now!" said he. 
 
 "Greyling!" I said. 1 had heard that a calm and 
 fixed gaze would control a madman, and with the most 
 difficult exertion of nerve, I met his lowering eye, and 
 
 we stood looking at each other for a full minute, like 
 men of marble. 
 
 " Why have you left your bed ?" I mildly asked. 
 
 " To kill you!" was the appalling answer; and in 
 another moment the light-stand was swept from be- 
 tween us, and he struck me down with a blow that 
 would have felled a giant. Naked as he was, I had 
 no hold upon him, even if in muscular strength I had 
 been his match ; and with a minute's struggle I yielded, 
 for resistance was vain. His knee was now upon my 
 breast and his left hand in my hair, and he seemed 
 by the tremulousness of his clutch to be hesitating 
 whether he should dash my brains out on the hearth. 
 I could scarce breathe with his weight upon my chest, 
 but I tried, with the broken words I could command, 
 to move his pity. He laughed, as only maniacs can, 
 and placed his hand on my throat. Oh God! shall I 
 ever forget the fiendish deliberation with which he 
 closed those feverish fingers? 
 
 " Greyling ! for God's sake ! Greyling !" 
 
 "Die! curse you!" 
 
 In the agonies of suffocation I struck out my arm, 
 and almost buried it in the fire upon the hearth. 
 With an expiring thought, I grasped a handful of the 
 red-hot coals, and had just strength sufficient to press 
 them hard against his side. 
 
 "Thank God!" I exclaimed with my first breath, 
 as my eyes recovered from their sickness, and I looked 
 upon the familiar objects of my chamber once more. 
 
 The madman sat crouched like a whipped dog in 
 the farthest corner of the room, gibbering and moan- 
 ing, with his hands upon his burnt side. I felt that I 
 had escaped death by a miracle. 
 
 The door was locked, and, in dread of another at- 
 tack, I threw up the broken window, and to my 
 unutterable joy the figure of a man was visible upon 
 the snow near the out-buildings of the college. It 
 was a charity-student, risen before day to labor in the 
 wood-yard. I shouted to him, and Greyling leaped 
 to his feet. 
 
 "There is time yet!" said the madman; but as he 
 came toward me again with the same panther-like 
 caution as before, I seized a heavy stone pitcher 
 standing in the window-seat, and hurling it at him 
 with a fortunate force and aim, he fell stunned and 
 bleeding on the floor. The door was burst open at 
 the next moment, and, calling for assistance, we tied 
 the wild Missourian into his bed, bound up his head 
 and side, and committed him to fresh watchers. . . . 
 
 We have killed bears together at a Missouri salt- 
 lick since then; but I never see Wash. Greyling with 
 a smile off his face, without a disposition to look 
 around for the door. 
 
 No. III. 
 
 THE LUNATIC'S SKATE. 
 
 I have only, in my life, known one lunatic — prop- 
 erly so called. In the days when I carried a satchel 
 on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half- 
 lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread 
 about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the 
 farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farm-house 
 on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by 
 the undignified title of Pomp's pond. An old negro, 
 who was believed by the boys to have come over with 
 Christopher Columbus, was the only other human 
 being within anything like a neighborhood of the 
 lake (it took its name from him), and the only ap- 
 proaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost 
 impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp's 
 clearing, and that by our own door. Out of school, 
 Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale, sad- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 407 
 
 faced boy, and, in the first days of our intimacy, he 
 had confided a secret to me which, from its uncom- 
 mon nature, and the excessive caution with which he 
 kept it from every one else, bound me to him with 
 more than the common ties of schoolfellow attach- 
 ment. "We built wigwams together in the woods, had 
 our tomahawks made of the same fashion, united our 
 property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect 
 contentment in each other's approbation. 
 
 I had found out, soon after my arrival at school, 
 that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With 
 the first slender horn that dropped its silver and grace- 
 ful shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced, 
 and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood 
 of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one 
 haunted by a pursuing demon. At early twilight he 
 closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could 
 admit a ray; and then, lighting as many candles as 
 he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat 
 down with his book in moody silence, or paced the 
 room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy 
 in his fine countenance, of which, with all my famil- 
 iarity with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exer- 
 cise seemed the only relief, and when the candles 
 burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the 
 lone farm-house became too absolute to endure, he 
 would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately 
 out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the 
 depths of the wild forest, and walk on with supernatural 
 excitement till the day dawned. Faint and pale he 
 would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to 
 make his very common and always credited excuse of 
 illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I 
 soon became used to his way, ceased to follow him, 
 as I had once or twice endeavored to do, into the 
 forest, and never attempted to break in on the fixed 
 and wrapt silence which seemed to transform his lips 
 to marble. And for all this Larry loved me. 
 
 Our preparatory studies were completed, and, to 
 our mutual despair, we were destined to different 
 universities. Larry's father was a disciple of the great 
 Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal; 
 and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in 
 the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion, 
 and few are the minds that could resist a four years' 
 ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come 
 forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the 
 other; and in the New England states these two sects 
 are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering atmosphere 
 of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely 
 and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere 
 zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, 
 to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but 
 the mysteries of " election and free grace," whether 
 or no. 
 
 Time crept, ambled, and galloped, by turns, as we 
 were in love or out, moping in term-time, or revelling 
 in vacation, and gradually, I know not why, our cor- 
 respondence had dropped, and the four years had 
 come to their successive deaths, and we had never 
 met. I grieved over it; for in those days I believed 
 with a school-boy's fatuity, 
 
 " That two, or one, are almost what they seem ;" 
 and I loved Larry Wynn, as I hope I may never love 
 man or woman again — with a pain at my heart. I 
 wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior 
 years, but his answers were overstrained, and too full 
 of protestations by half; and seeing that absence had 
 done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote 
 an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know, 
 by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for 
 it has nothing to do with my story ; but let it pass as 
 an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of things 
 in real life has not the regular procession of incidents 
 in a tragedy. 
 
 Some two or three years after we had taken " the 
 irrevocable yoke" of life upon us (not matrimony, 
 but money-making), a winter occurred of uncom- 
 monly fine sleighing — sledging, you call it in Eng- 
 land. At such times the American world is all 
 abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads 
 are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse 
 is capable; smooth as ?7ionlagnes Russes, and hard 
 as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is dimin- 
 ished to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter 
 brings down his venison to the cities, the western 
 trader takes his family a hundred leagues to buy 
 calicoes and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the 
 country, drinking mulled wine and "flip," and shaking 
 the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of 
 their horses' bells. You would think death and sor- 
 row were buried in the snow with the leaves of the 
 last autumn. 
 
 I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a 
 journey to the west; certainly not for scenery, for it 
 was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling white- 
 ness, for a thousand unbroken miles. The trees were 
 weighed down with snow, and the houses were 
 thatched and half-buried in it, and the mountains and 
 valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea, 
 congealed with its yesty foam in the wildest hour of a 
 tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it. 
 The " spirit-bird" that spread his refreshing green 
 wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have 
 been an inestimable fellow-traveller. The worth of 
 the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green 
 goggles. 
 
 In the course of a week or two, after skimming over 
 the buried scenery of half a dozen states, each as 
 large as Great Britain (more or less), I found myself 
 in a small town on the border of one of our western 
 lakes. It was some twenty years since the bears had 
 found it thinly settled enough for their purposes, and 
 now it contained perhaps twenty thousand souls. 
 The oldest inhabitant, born in the town, was a youth 
 in his minority. With the usual precocity of new 
 settlements, it had already most of the peculiarities of 
 an old metropolis. The burnt stumps still stood about 
 among the houses, but there was a fashionable circle, 
 at the head of which were the lawyer's wife and the 
 member of Congress's daughter; and people ate their 
 peas with silver forks, and drank their tea with scan- 
 dal, and forgave men's many sins and refused to for- 
 give woman's one, very much as in towns whose his- 
 tory is written in black letter. I dare say there were 
 not more than one or two offences against the moral 
 and Levitical law, fashionable on this side the water, 
 which had not been committed, with the authentic 
 
 aggravations, in the town of ; I would mention 
 
 the name if this were not a true story. 
 
 Larry Wynn (now Lawrence Wynn, Esq.) lived 
 here. He had, as they say in the United States, "hung 
 out a shingle" (Londonice, put up a sign) as attorney- 
 at-law, and to all the twenty thousand innocent in- 
 habitants of the place, he was the oracle and the squire. 
 He was besides colonel of militia, churchwarden, 
 and canal commissioner; appointments which speak 
 volumes for the prospects of " rising young men" in 
 our flourishing republic. 
 
 Larry was glad to see me — very. I was more glad 
 to see him. I have a soft heart, and forgive a wrong 
 generally, if it touches neither my vanity nor my 
 ! purse. I forgot his neglect, and called him " Larry." 
 By the same token he did not call me " Phil." (There 
 are very few that love me, patient reader ; but those 
 who do, thus abbreviate my pleasant name of Philip. 
 I was called after the Indian sachem of that name, 
 whose blood runs in this tawny hand.) Larry looked 
 upon me as a man. I looked on him, with all his 
 dignities and changes, through the sweet vista of 
 memory — as a boy. His mouth had acquired the 
 
408 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 pinched corners of caution and mistrust common to 
 those who know their fellow-men ; but I never saw it 
 unless when speculating as I am now. He was to me 
 the pale-faced and melancholy friend of my boyhood ; 
 and I could have slept, as I used to do, with my arm 
 around his neck, and feared to stir lest I should wake 
 him. Had my last earthy hope lain in the palm of 
 my hand, I could have given it to him, had he needed 
 it, but to make him sleep ; and yet he thought of me 
 but as a stranger under his roof, and added, in his 
 warmest moments, a "Mr." to my name! There is 
 but one circumstance in my life that has wounded me 
 more. Memory avaunt ! 
 
 Why should there be no unchangeableness in the 
 world ? why no friendship ? or why am I, and you, 
 gentle reader (for by your continuing to pore over 
 these idle musings, you have a heart too), gifted with 
 this useless and restless organ beating in our bosoms, 
 if its thirst for love is never to be slaked, and its ach- 
 ing self-fulness never to find flow or utterance ? I 
 would positively sell my whole stock of affections for 
 three farthings. Will you say " two?" 
 
 " You are come in good time," said Larry one morn- 
 ing, with a half-smile, " and shall be groomsman to 
 me. I am going to be married." 
 
 "Married?" 
 
 " Married." 
 
 I repeated the word after him, for I was surprised. 
 He had never opened his lips about his unhappy luna- 
 cy since my arrival, and I had felt hurt at this ap- 
 parent unwillingness to renew our ancient confidence, 
 but had felt a repugnance to any forcing of the topic 
 upon him, and could only hope that he had outgrown 
 or overcome it. I argued, immediately on this infor- 
 mation of his intended marriage, that it must be so. 
 No man in his senses, I thought, would link' an im- 
 pending madness to the fate of a confiding and lovely 
 woman. 
 
 He took me into his sleigh, and we drove to her 
 father's house. She was a flower in the wilderness. 
 Of a delicate form, as all my countrywomen are, and 
 lovely, as quite all certainly are not, large-eyed, soft 
 in her manners, and yet less timid than confiding and 
 sister-like, with a shade of melancholy in her smile, 
 caught, perhaps, with the " trick of sadness" from him- 
 self, and a patrician slightness of reserve, or pride, 
 which Nature sometimes, in very mockery of high 
 birth, teaches her most secluded child — the bride elect 
 was, as I said before, a flower in the wilderness. She 
 was one of those women we sigh to look upon as they 
 pass by, as if there went a fragment of the wreck of 
 some blessed dream. 
 
 The day arrived for the wedding, and the sleigh- 
 bells jingled merrily into the village. The morning 
 was as soft and genial as June, and the light snow on 
 the surface of the lake melted, and lay on the breast 
 of the solid ice beneath, giving it the effect of one white 
 silver mirror, stretching to the edge of the horizon. 
 It was exquisitely beautiful, and I was standing at the 
 window in the afternoon, looking off upon the "shining 
 expanse, when Larry approached, and laid his hand 
 familiarly on my shoulder. 
 
 "What glorious skating we shall have," said I, "if 
 this smooth water freezes to-night !" 
 
 I lurned the next moment to look at him ; for we 
 had not skated together since I went out, at his earnest 
 entreaty, at midnight, to skim the little lake where we 
 had passed our boyhood, and drive away the fever from 
 his brain, under the light of a full moon. 
 
 He remembered it, and so did I; and I put my arm 
 behind him, for the color fled from his face, and I 
 thought he would have sunk to the floor. 
 
 " The moon is full to-night," said he, recovering in- 
 stantly to a cold self-possession. 
 
 I took hold of his hand firmly, and, in as kind a 
 tone as I could summon, spoke of our early friend- 
 
 ship, and apologizing thus for the freedom, asked if he 
 had quite overcome his melancholy disease. His face 
 worked with emotion, and he tried to withdraw his 
 hand from my clasp, and evidently wished to avoid an 
 answer. 
 
 " Tell me, dear Larry," said I. 
 
 " Oh God ! No /" said he, breaking violently from 
 me, and throwing himself with his face downward upon 
 the sofa. The tears streamed through his fingers upon 
 the silken cushion. 
 
 " Not cured ? And does she know it ?" 
 
 " No ! no ! thank God ! not yet !" 
 
 I remained silent a few minutes, listening to his 
 suppressed moans (for he seemed heart-broken with 
 the confession), and pitying while I inwardly con- 
 demned him. And then the picture of that lovely and 
 fond woman rose up before me, and the impossibility 
 of concealing his fearful malady from his wife, and 
 the fixed insanity in which it must end, and the whole 
 wreck of her hopes and his own prospects and happi- 
 ness — and my heart grew sick. 
 
 I sat down by him, and, as it was too late to remon- 
 strate on the injustice he was committing toward her, 
 I asked how he came to appoint the night of a full 
 moon for his wedding. He gave up his reserve, calm- 
 ed himself, and talked of it at last as if he were relieved 
 by the communication. Never shall I forget the 
 doomed pallor, the straining eye, and feverish hand, 
 of my poor friend during that half hour. 
 
 Since he had left college he had striven with the 
 whole energy of his soul against it. He had plunged 
 into business — he had kept his bed resolutely night 
 after night, till his brain seemed on the verge of phrensy 
 with the effort — he had taken opium to secure to him- 
 self an artificial sleep ; but he had never dared to con- 
 fide it to any one, and he had no friend to sustain him 
 in his fearful and lonely hours ; and it grew upon him 
 rather than diminished. He described to me with the 
 most touching pathos how he had concealed it for 
 years — how he had stolen out like a thief to give vent 
 to his insane restlessness in the silent streets of the city 
 at midnight, and in the more silent solitudes of the 
 forest — how he had prayed, and wrestled, and wept 
 over it — and finally, how he had come to believe that 
 there was no hope for him except in the assistance and 
 constant presence of some one who would devote life 
 to him in love and pity. Poor Larry ! I put up a silent 
 prayer in my heart that the desperate experiment might 
 not end in agony and death. 
 
 The sun set, and, according to my prediction, the 
 wind changed suddenly to the north, and the whole 
 surface of the lake in a couple of hours became of the 
 lustre of polished steel. It was intensely cold. 
 
 The fires blazed in every room of the bride's pater- 
 nal mansion, and I was there early to fulfil my office 
 of master of ceremonies at the bridal. My heart was 
 weighed down with a sad boding, but 1 shook off at 
 least the appearance of it, and superintended the con- 
 coction of a huge bowl of punch with a merriment 
 which communicated itself in the shape of most joyous 
 hilarity to a troop of juvenile relations. The house 
 resounded with their shouts of laughter. 
 
 In the midst of our noise in the small inner room 
 entered Larry. I started back, for he looked more like 
 a demon possessed than a Christian man. He had walk- 
 ed to the house alone in the moonlight, not daring to 
 trust himself in company. I turned out the turbulent 
 troop about me, and tried to dispel his gloom, for a face 
 like his at that moment would have put to flight the 
 rudest bridal party ever assembled on holy ground. 
 He seized on the bowl of strong spirits which I had 
 mixed for a set of hardy farmers, and before I could 
 tear it from his lips had drank a quantity which, in an 
 ordinary mood, would have intoxicated him helplessly 
 in an hour. He then sat down with his face buried in 
 his hands, and in a few minutes rose, his eyes spark- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 409 
 
 ling with excitement, and the whole character of his 
 face utterly changed. I thought he had gone wild. 
 
 " Now, Phil," said he ; " now for my bride !" And 
 with an unbecoming levity he threw open the door, 
 and went half dancing into the room where the friends 
 were already assembled to witness the ceremony. 
 
 I followed with fear and anxiety. He took his place 
 by the side of the fair creature on whom he had placed 
 his hopes of life, and, though sobered somewhat by 
 the impressiveness of the scene, the wild sparkle still 
 danced in his eyes, and I could see that every nerve 
 in his frame was excited to the last pitch of tension. 
 If he had fallen a gibbering maniac on the floor, I 
 should not have been astonished. 
 
 The ceremony proceeded, and the first tone of his 
 voice in the response startled even the bride. If it had 
 rung from the depths of a cavern, it could not have 
 been more sepulchral. I looked at him with a shud- i 
 der. His lips were curled with an exulting expres- 
 sion, mixed with an indefinable fear; and all the blood 
 ia his face seemed settled about his eyes, which were 
 so bloodshot and fiery, that I have ever since wondered 
 he was not, at the first glance, suspected of insanity. 
 But oh ! the heavenly sweetness with which that love- ; 
 liest of creatures promised to love and cherish him, in 
 sickness and in health ! I never go to a bridal but it 
 half breaks my heart ; and as the soft voice of that 
 beautiful girl fell with its eloquent meaning on my 
 ear, and I looked at her, with lips calm and eyes moist- 
 Med, vowing a love which I knew to be stronger than ; 
 death, to one who, I feared, was to bring only pain and 
 sorrow into her bosom, my eyes warmed with irrepres- 
 sible tears, and I wept. 
 
 The stir in the room as the clergyman closed his 
 prayer, seemed to awake him from a trance. He 
 looked around with a troubled face for a moment ; and 
 then, fixing his eyes on his bride, he suddenly clasped 
 his arms about her, and straining her violently to his 
 bosom, broke into an hysterical passion of tears and 
 laughter. Then suddenly resuming his self-command, 
 he apologized for the over-excitement of his feelings, 
 and behaved with forced and gentle propriety till the j 
 guests departed. 
 
 There was an apprehensive gloom over the spirits 
 of the small bridal party left in the lighted rooms ; and , 
 as they gathered round the fire, I approached, and en- ' 
 deavored to take a gay farewell. Larry was sitting 
 with his arm about his wife, and he wrung my hand in 
 silence as 1 said, " Good-night," and dropped his head 
 upon her shoulder. I made some futile attempt to 
 rally him, but it jarred on the general feeling, and I 
 ieft the house. 
 
 It was a glorious night. The clear piercing air had 
 a vitreous brilliancy, which I have never seen in any 
 other climate, the rays of the moonlight almost visi- j 
 bly splintering with the keenness of the frost. The \ 
 moon herself was in the zenith, and there seemed 
 nothing between her and the earth but palpable and , 
 glittering cold. 
 
 I hurried home : it was but eleven o'clock ; and, ! 
 heaping up the wood in the large fireplace, I took a ' 
 volume of" Ivanhoe," which had just then appeared, ! 
 and endeavored to rid myself of my unpleasant j 
 thoughts. I read on till midnight ; and then, in a j 
 pause of the story, I rose to look out upon the night, I 
 hoping, for poor Larry's sake, that the moon was j 
 buried in clouds. The house was near the edge of i 
 the lake ; and as I looked down upon the glassy waste, ! 
 spreading away from the land, I saw the dark figure j 
 of a man kneeling directly in the path of the moon's j 
 rays. In another moment he rose to his feet, and j 
 the tall, slight form of my poor friend was distinctly 
 visible, as, with long and powerful strokes, he sped 
 away upon his skates along the shore. 
 
 To take my own Hollanders, put a collar of fur I 
 around my mouth, and hurry after him, was the work | 
 
 of but a minute. My straps were soon fastened ; and, 
 following in the marks of the sharp irons at the top of 
 my speed, I gained sight of him in about half an hour, 
 and with great effort neared him sufficiently to shout 
 his name with a hope of being heard. 
 
 " Larry ! Larry !" 
 
 The lofty mountain-shore gave back the cry in re- 
 peated echoes — but he redoubled his strokes, and 
 sped on faster than before. At my utmost speed I 
 followed on ; and when, at last, I could almost lay 
 my hand on his shoulder, I summoned my strength 
 to my breathless lungs, and shouted again — " Larry ! 
 Larry !" 
 
 He half looked back, and the full moon at that in- 
 stant streamed full into his eyes. I have thought 
 since that he could not have seen me for its dazzling 
 brightness ; but I saw every line of his features with 
 the distinctness of daylight, and I shall never forget 
 them. A line of white foam ran through his half- 
 parted lips ; his hair streamed wildly over his forehead, 
 on which the perspiration glittered in large drops; and 
 every lineament of his expressive face was stamped with 
 unutterable and awful horror. He looked back no 
 more ; but, increasing his speed with an energy of 
 which I did not think his slender frame capable, he 
 began gradually to outstrip me. Trees, rocks, and 
 hills, fled back like magic. My limbs began to grow 
 numb ; my fingers had lost all feeling, but a strong 
 northeast wind was behind us, and the ice smoother 
 than a mirror : and I struck out my feet mechanically, 
 and still sped on. 
 
 For two hours we had kept along the shore. The 
 branches of the trees were reflected in the polished 
 ice, and the hills seemed hanging in the air, and float- 
 ing past us with the velocity of storm-clouds. Far 
 down the lake, however, there glimmered the just 
 visible light of a fire, and I was thanking God that 
 we were probably approaching some human succor, 
 when, to my horror, the retreating figure before me 
 suddenly darted off to the left, and made swifter than 
 before toward the centre of the icy waste. Oh, God ! 
 what feelings were mine at that moment ! Follow him 
 far I dared not ; for, the sight of land once lost, as it 
 would be almost instantly with our tremendous speed, 
 we perished, without a possibility of relief. 
 
 He was far beyond my voice, and to overtake him 
 was the only hope. I summoned my last nerve for* 
 the effort, and keeping him in my eye, struck across 
 at a sharper angle, with the advantage of the wind full 
 I in my back. I had taken note of the mountains, and 
 knew that we were already forty miles from home, a 
 distance it would be impossible to retrace against the 
 wind ; and the thought of freezing to death, even if 
 I could overtake him, forced itself appallingly upon 
 me. 
 
 Away I flew, despair giving new force to my limbs, 
 and soon gained on the poor lunatic, whose efforts 
 seemed flagging and faint. I neared him. Another 
 struggle ! I could have dropped down where I was, 
 and slept, if there were death in the first minute, so 
 stiff and drowsy was every muscle in my frame. 
 
 " Larry !" I shouted. " Larry !" 
 
 He started at the sound, and I could hear a smoth- 
 ered and breathless shriek, as, with supernatural 
 strength, he straightened up his bending figure, and, 
 leaning forward again, sped away from me like a 
 phantom on the blast. 
 
 I could follow no longer. I stood stiff on my skates, 
 still going on rapidly before the wind, and tried to 
 look after him, but the frost had stiffened my eyes, 
 and there was a mist before them, and they felt like 
 glass. Nothing was visible around me but moonlight 
 and ice, and dimly and slowly I began to retrace the 
 slight path of semicircles toward the shore. It was 
 painful work. The wind seemed to divide the very 
 fibres of the skin upon my face. Violent exercise no 
 
410 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 longer warmed my body, and I felt the cold shoot |j 
 sharply into my loins, and bind across my breast like 
 a chain of ice; and, with the utmost strength of mind 
 at my command, I could just resist the terrible incli- 
 nation to lie down and sleep. I forgot poor Larry. 
 Life — dear life ! — was now my only thought! So self- 
 ish are we in our extremity ! 
 
 With difficulty I at last reached the shore, and then, 
 unbuttoning my co-it, and spreading it wide for a sail, 
 I set my feet together, and went slowly down before 
 the wind, till the fire which I had before noticed be- 
 gan to blaze cheerily in the distance. It seemed an 
 eternity in my slow progress. Tree after tree threw 
 the shadow of its naked branches across the way ; hill 
 after hill glided slowly backward ; but my knees 
 seemed frozen together, and my joints fixed in ice ; 
 and if my life had depended on striking out my feet, 
 I should have died powerless. My jaws were locked, 
 my shoulders drawn half down to my knees, and in a 
 few minutes more, I am well convinced, the blood 
 would have thickened in my veins, and stood still, for 
 ever. 
 
 I could see the tongues of the flames — I counted 
 the burning fagots — a form passed between me and 
 the fire — I struck, and fell prostrate on the snow ; and 
 I remember no more. 
 
 The sun was darting a slant beam through the trees 
 when I awoke. The genial warmth of a large bed of 
 embers played on my cheek, a thick blanket enveloped 
 me, and beneath my head was a soft cushion of with- 
 ered leaves. On the opposite side of the fire lay four 
 Indians wrapped in their blankets, and, with her head 
 on her knees, and her hands clasped over her ankles, 
 sat an Indian woman, who had apparently fallen asleep 
 upon her watch. The stir I made aroused her, and, 
 as she piled on fresh fagots, and kindled them to a 
 bright blaze with a handful of leaves, drowsiness came 
 over me again, and I wrapped the blanket about me 
 more closely, and shut my eyes to sleep. 
 
 I awoke refreshed. It must have been ten o'clock 
 by the sun. The Indians were about, occupied in va- 
 rious avocations, and the woman was broiling a slice 
 of deer's flesh on the coals. She offered it to me as I 
 rose ; and having eaten part of it with a piece of a cake 
 made of meal, 1 requested her to call in the men, and, 
 with offers of reward, easily induced them to go with 
 •me in search of my lost friend. 
 
 We found him, as 1 had anticipated, frozen to death, 
 far out on the lake. The Indians tracked him by the 
 marks of his skate-irons, and from their appearance 
 he had sunk quietly down, probably drowsy and ex- 
 hausted, and had died of course without pain. His | 
 last act seemed to have been under the influence of 
 his strange madness, for he lay on his face, turned 
 from the quarter of the setting moon. 
 
 We carried him home to his bride. Even the In- 
 dians were affected by her uncontrollable agony. I 
 can not describe that scene, familiar as I am with pic- 
 tures of horror. 
 
 I made inquiries with respect to the position of his 
 bridal chamber. There were no shutters, and the 
 moon streamed broadly into it : and after kissing his 
 shrinking bride with the violence of a madman, he 
 sprang out of the room with a terrific scream, and she 
 saw him no more till he lay dead on his bridal bed. 
 
 INCIDENTS ON THE HUDSON. 
 
 M. Chabert, the fire-eater, would have found New 
 York uncomfortable. I would mention the height of 
 the thermometer, but for an aversion I have to figures. 
 Broadway, at noon, had been known to fry soles. 
 
 I had fixed upon the first of August for my annua 
 trip to Saratoga — and with a straw hat, a portmanteau, 
 and a black boy, was huddled into the " rather-faster- 
 than-lightning" steamer, " North America," with about 
 seven hundred other people, like myself, just in time. 
 Some hundred and fifty gentlemen and ladies, thirty 
 seconds too late, stood " larding" the pine chips upon 
 the pier, gazing after the vanishing boat through show- 
 ers of perspiration. Away we " streaked" at the rate 
 of twelve miles in the hour against the current, and 
 by the time I had penetrated to the baggage-closet, 
 and seated William Wilberforce upon my portmanteau, 
 with orders not to stir for eleven hours and seven min- 
 utes, we were far up the Hudson, opening into its hills 
 and rocks, like a witches' party steaming through the 
 Hartz in a caldron. 
 
 A North-river steamboat, as a Vermont boy would 
 phrase it, is another guess sort o' thing from a Brit- 
 isher. A coal-barge and an eight-oars on the Thames 
 are scarce more dissimilar. Built for smooth water 
 only, our river boats are long, shallow, and graceful, 
 of the exquisite proportions of a pleasure-yacht, and 
 painted as brilliantly and fantastically as an Indian 
 shell. With her bow just leaning up from the surface 
 of the stream, her cut-water throwing off a curved and 
 transparent sheet from either side, her white awnings, 
 her magical speed, and the gay spectacle of a thousand 
 well-dressed people on her open decks, I know noth- 
 ing prettier than the vision that shoots by your door 
 as you sit smoking in your leaf-darkened portico on 
 the bold shore of the Hudson. 
 
 The American edition of Mrs. Trollope (several 
 copies of which are to be found in every boat, serving 
 the same purpose to the feelings of the passengers as 
 the escape-valve to the engine) lay on a sofa beside 
 me, and taking it up, as to say, " I will be let alone," 
 I commenced dividing my attention in my usual quiet 
 way between the varied panorama of rock and valley 
 flying backward in our progress, and the as varied 
 multitude about me. 
 
 For the mass of the women, as far as satin slippers, 
 hats, dresses, and gloves, could go, a Frenchman might 
 have fancied himself in the midst of a transplantation 
 from the Boulevards. In London, French fashions are 
 in a manner Anglified : but an American woman looks 
 on the productions of Herbault, Boivin, and Maneuri, 
 as a translator of the Talmud on the inspired text. The 
 slight figure and small feet of the race rather favor the 
 resemblance; and a French milliner, who would prob- 
 ably come to America expecting to see bears and buf- 
 faloes prowling about the landing-place, would rub her 
 eyes in New York, and imagine she was still in France, 
 and had crossed, perhaps, only the broad part of the 
 Seine. 
 
 The men were a more original study. Near me sat 
 a Kentuckian on three chairs. He had been to the me- 
 tropolis, evidently for the first time, and had " looked 
 round sharp." In a fist of no very delicate propor- 
 tions, was crushed a pair of French kid-gloves, which, 
 if they fulfilled to him a glove's destiny, would flatter 
 " the rich man" that "the camel" might yet give him 
 the required precedent. His hair had still the traces 
 of having been astonished with curling-tongs, and 
 across his Atlantean breast was looped, in a compli- 
 cated zig-zag, a chain that must have cost him a wil- 
 derness of rackoon-skins. His coat was evidently the 
 production of a Mississippi tailor, though of the finest 
 English material; his shirt-bosom was ruffled like a 
 swan with her feathers full spread, and a black silk 
 cravat, tied in a kind of a curse-me-if-I-care-sort-of-a- 
 knot, flung out its ends like the arms of an Italian 
 improvisatore. With all this he was a man to look 
 upon with respect. His under jaw was set up to its 
 fellow with an habitual determination that would 
 throw a hickory-tree into a shiver ; but frank good- 
 nature, and the most absolute freedom from suspi-. 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 411 
 
 cion, lay at large on his Ajacean features, mixed with 
 an earnestness that commended itself at once lo your 
 liking. 
 
 In a retired corner, near the wheel, stood a group 
 of Indians, as motionless by the hour together as 
 figures carved in rosso antico. They had been on 
 their melancholy annual visit to the now-cultivated 
 shores of Connecticut, the burial-place, but unforgot- 
 ten and once wild home of their fathers. With the 
 money given them by the romantic persons whose 
 sympathies are yearly moved by these stern and poet- 
 ical pilgrims, they had taken a passage in the "fire- 
 canoe," which would set them two hundred miles on 
 their weary journey back to the prairies. Their 
 Apollo-like forms loosely dressed in blankets, their 
 gaudy wampum-belts and feathers, the muscular arm 
 and close clutch upon the rifle, the total absence of 
 surprise at the unaccustomed wonders about them, 
 and the lowering and settled scorn and dislike ex- 
 pressed in their copper faces, would have powerfully 
 impressed a European. The only person on whom 
 they deigned to cast a glance was the Kentuckian, 
 and at him they occasionally stole a look, as if, through 
 all his metropolian finery, they recognised metal with 
 whose ring they were familiar. 
 
 There were three foreigners on board, two of them 
 companions, and one apparently alone. With their 
 coats too small for them, their thick-soled boots and 
 sturdy figures, collarless cravats, and assumed uncon- 
 sciousness of the presence of another living soul, they 
 were recognisable at once as Englishmen. To most 
 of the people on board they probably appeared equally 
 well-dressed, and of equal pretensions to the character 
 of gentlemen; but any one who had made observations 
 between Temple Bar and the steps of Crockford's, 
 would easily resolve them into two Birmingham bag- 
 men "sinking the shop," and a quiet gentleman on a 
 tour of information. 
 
 The only other persons I particularly noted were a 
 southerner, probably the son of a planter from Ala- 
 bama, and a beautiful girl, dressed in singularly bad 
 taste, who seemed his sister. I knew the "specimen" 
 well. The indolent attitude, the thin but powerfully- 
 jointed frame, the prompt politeness, the air of superi- 
 ority acquired from constant command over slaves, the 
 mouth habitually flexible and looking eloquent even 
 in silence, and the eye in which slept a volcano of vio- 
 lent passions, were the marks that showed him of a 
 race that I had studied much, and preferred to all the 
 many and distinct classes of my countrymen. His 
 sister was of the slightest and most fragile figure, 
 graceful as a fawn, but with no trace of the dancing 
 master's precepts in her motions, vivid in her attention 
 to everything about her, and amused with all she saw ; 
 a copy of Lalla Rookh sticking from the pocket of 
 her French apron, a number of gold chains hung out- 
 side her travelling habit, and looped to her belt, and a 
 glorious profusion of dark curls broken loose from her 
 combs and floating unheeded over her shoulders. 
 
 Toward noon we rounded West Point, and shot 
 suddenly into the overshadowed gorge of the moun- 
 tains, as if we were dashing into the vein of a silver 
 mine, laid open and molten into a flowing river by a 
 flash of lightning. (The figure should be Mont- 
 gomery's; but I can in no other way give an idea of 
 the sudden darkening of the Hudson, and the under- 
 ground effect of the sharp over-hanging mountains as 
 you sweep first into the highlands.) 
 
 The solitary Englishman, who had been watching 
 the southern beauty with the greatest apparent in- 
 terest, had lounged over to her side of the boat, and, 
 with the instinctive knowledge that women have of 
 character, she had shrunk from the more obtrusive 
 attempts of the Brummagems to engage her in con- 
 versation, and had addressed some remark to him, 
 which seemed to have advanced them at once to ac- 
 
 quaintances of a year. They were admiring the stu- 
 pendous scenery together a moment before the boat 
 stopped for a passenger, off a small town above the 
 point. As the wheels were checked, there was a sud- 
 den splash in the water, and a cry of " a lady over- 
 board !" I looked for the fair creature who had been 
 standing before me, and she was gone. The boat was 
 sweeping on, and as I darted to the railing I saw the 
 gurgling eddy where something had just gone down; 
 and in the next minute the Kentuckian and the 
 youngest of the Indians rushed together to the stern, 
 and clearing the taffrail with tremendous leaps, dived 
 side by side into the very centre of the foaming circle. 
 The Englishman had coolly seized a rope, and, by the 
 time they reappeared, stood on the railing with a coil 
 in his hand, and flung it with accurate calculation 
 directly over them. With immovably grave faces, and 
 eyes blinded with water, the two divers rose, holding 
 high between them — a large pine fagot ! Shouts of 
 laughter pealed from the boat, and the Kentuckian, 
 discovering his error, gave the log an indignant fling 
 behind, and, taking hold of the rope, lay quietly to be 
 drawn in; while the Indian, disdaining assistance, 
 darted through the wake of the boat with arrowy 
 swiftness, and sprang up the side with the agility of a 
 tiger-cat. The lady reappeared from the cabin as 
 they jumped dripping upon the deck ; the Kentuckian 
 shook himself, and sat down in the sun to dry; and 
 the graceful and stern Indian, too proud even to put 
 <he wet hair away from his forehead, resumed his 
 place, and folded his arms, as indifferent and calm, 
 save the suppressed heaving of his chest, as if he had 
 never stirred from his stone-like posture. 
 
 An hour or two more brought us to the foot of the 
 Catskills, and here the boat lay alongside the pier to 
 discharge those of her passengers who were bound to 
 the house on the mountain. A hundred or more 
 moved to the gangway at the summons to get ready, 
 and among them the southerners and the Kentuckian. 
 I had begun to feel an interest in our fair fellow-pas- 
 senger, and I suddenly determined to join their party 
 — a resolution which the Englishman seemed to come 
 to at the same moment, and probably for the same 
 reason. 
 
 We slept at the pretty village on the bank of the 
 river, and the next day made the twelve hours' ascent 
 through glen and forest, our way skirted with the 
 most gorgeous and odorent flowers, and turned aside 
 and towered over the trees whose hoary and moss- 
 covered trunks would have stretched the conceptions 
 of the " Savage Rosa." Everything that was not 
 lovely was gigantesque and awful. The rocks were 
 split with the visible impress of the Almighty power 
 that had torn them apart, and the daring and dizzy 
 crags spurred into the sky, as if the arms of a buried 
 and phrensied Titan were thrusting them from the 
 mountain's bosom. It gave one a kind of maddening 
 desire to shout and leap — the energy with which it 
 filled the mind so out-measured the power of the frame. 
 
 Near the end of our journey, we stopped together 
 on a jutting rock, to look back on the obstacles we 
 had overcome. The view extended over forty or fifty 
 miles of vale and mountain, and, with a half-shut eye, 
 it looked, in its green and lavish foliage, like a near 
 and unequal bed of verdure, while the distant Hudson 
 crept through it like a half-hid satin riband, lost as if 
 in clumps of moss among the broken banks of the 
 highlands. I was trying to fix the eye of my com- 
 panion upon West Point, when a steamer, with its 
 black funnel and retreating line of smoke, issued as if 
 from the bosom of the hills into an open break of the 
 river. It was as small apparently as the white hand 
 that pointed to it so rapturously. 
 
 "Oh!" said the half-breathless girl, "is it not like 
 some fairy bark on an eastern stream, with a spice- 
 lamp alight in its prow?" 
 
412 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 " More like an old shoe afloat, with a cigar stuck in 
 it," interrupted Kentucky. 
 
 As the sun began to kindle into a blaze of fire, the 
 tumultuous masses, so peculiar to an American sky, 
 turning every tree and rock to a lambent and rosy 
 gold, we stood on the broad platform on which the 
 house is built, braced even beyond weariness by the 
 invigorating and rarified air of the mountain. A hot 
 supper and an early pillow, with the feather beds and 
 blankets of winter, were unromantic circumstances, 
 but I am not aware that any one of the party made 
 any audible objection to them; I sat next the Ken- 
 tuckian at table, and can answer for two. 
 
 A mile or two back from the mountain-house, on 
 nearly the same level, the gigantic forest suddenly 
 sinks' two or three hundred feet into the earth, forming 
 a tremendous chasm, over which a bold stag might 
 almost leap, and above which the rocks hang on 
 either side with the most threatening and frowning 
 grandeur. A mountain-stream creeps through the 
 forest to the precipice, and leaps as suddenly over, as 
 if, Arethusa-like, it fled into the earth from the pur- 
 suing steps of a satyr. Thirty paces from its brink, 
 you would never suspect, but for the hollow rever- 
 beration of the plunging stream, that anything but a 
 dim and mazy wood was within a day's journey. It 
 is visited as a great curiosity in scenery, under the 
 name of Cauterskill Falls. 
 
 We were all on the spot by ten the next morning, 
 after a fatiguing tramp through the forest; for the 
 Kentuckian had rejected the offer of a guide, under- 
 taking to bring us to it in a straight line by only the 
 signs of the water- course. The caprices of the little 
 stream had misled him, however, and we arrived half- 
 dead with the fatigue of our cross-marches. 
 
 I sat down on the bald edge of the precipice, and 
 suffered my more impatient companions to attempt 
 the difficult and dizzy descent before me. The Ken- 
 tuckian leaped from rock to rock, followed daringly 
 by the southerner; and the Englishman, thoroughly 
 enamored of the exquisite child of nature, who knew 
 no reserve beyond her maidenly modesty, devoted 
 himself to her assistance, and compelled her with 
 anxious entreaties to descend more cautiously. I lay 
 at my length as they proceeded, and with my head 
 over the projecting edge of the most prominent crag, 
 watched them in a giddy dream, half-stupified by the 
 grandeur of the scene, half-interested in their motions. 
 
 They reached the bottom of the glen at last, and 
 shouted to the two who had gone before, but they had 
 followed the dark passage of the stream to find its 
 vent, and were beyond sight or hearing. 
 
 After sitting a minute or two, the restless but over- 
 fatigued girl rose to go nearer the fall, and I was re- 
 marking to myself the sudden heaviness of her steps, 
 when she staggered, and turning toward her compan- 
 ion, fell senseless into his arms. The closeness of the 
 air below, combined with over-exertion, had been too 
 much for her. 
 
 The small hut of an old man who served as a guide 
 stood a little back from the glen, and 1 had rushed 
 into it, and was on the first step of the descent with a 
 flask of spirits, when a cry from the opposite crag, in 
 the husky and choking scream of infuriated passion, 
 suddenly arrested me. On the edge of the yawning 
 chasm, gazing down into it with a livid and death-like 
 paleness, stood the southerner. I mechanically fol- 
 lowed his eye. His sister lay on her back upon a flat 
 rock immediately below him, and over her knelt the 
 Englishman, loosening the dress that pressed close 
 upon her throat, and with his face so near to hers as to 
 conceal it entirely from the view. I felt the brother's 
 misapprehension at a glance, but my tongue clung to 
 the roof of my mouth ; for in the madness of his fury 
 he stood stretching clear over the brink, and every 
 instant I looked to see him plunge headlong. Be- 
 
 fore I could recover my breath, he started back, gazed 
 wildly round, and seizing upon a huge fragment of 
 rock, heaved it up with supernatural strength, and 
 hurled it into the abyss. Giddy and sick with horror, 
 I turned away and covered up my eyes. I felt assured 
 he had dashed them to atoms. 
 
 The lion roar of the Kentuckian was the first sound 
 that followed the thundering crash of the fragments. 
 
 " Hallo, youngster ! what in tarnation are you arter ? 
 You've killed the gal, by gosh!" 
 
 The next moment I heard the loosened stones as he 
 went plunging down into the glen, and hurrying after 
 him with my restorative, I found the poor English- 
 man lying senseless on the rocks, and the fainting girl, 
 escaped miraculously from harm, struggling slowly to 
 her senses. 
 
 On examination, the new sufferer appeared only 
 stunned by a small fragment which had struck him 
 on the temple, and the Kentuckian, taking him up in 
 his arms like a child, strode through the spray of the 
 fall, and held his head under the descending torrent 
 till he kicked lustily for his freedom. With a draught 
 from the flask, the pale Alabamian was soon perfectly 
 restored, and we stood on the rock together looking 
 at each other like people who had survived an earth- 
 quake. 
 
 We climbed the ascent and found the brother lying 
 with his face to the earth, beside himself with his 
 conflicting feelings. The rough tongue of the Ken- 
 tuckian to whom 1 had explained the apparent cause 
 of the rash act, soon cleared up the tempest, and he 
 joined us presently, and walked back by his sister's 
 side in silence. 
 
 We made ourselves into a party to pass the remain- 
 der of the summer on the lakes, unwillingly letting off 
 the Kentuckian, who was in a hurry to get back to 
 propose himself for the legislature. 
 
 Three or four years have elapsed, and I find myself 
 a traveller in England. Thickly sown as are the 
 wonders and pleasures of London, an occasional din- 
 ner with a lovely countrywoman in Square, and 
 
 a gossip with her husband over a glass of wine, in 
 which Cauterskill Falls are not forgotten, are mem- 
 orandums in my diary never written but in "red 
 letters." 
 
 THE GIPSY OF SARDIS. 
 
 . . . . " And thou art far, 
 Asia ! who, when my being overflowed, 
 Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine, 
 Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust." 
 
 Shelley's Phombtheus. 
 
 Our tents were pitched in the vestibule of the house 
 of Croesus, on the natural terrace which was once the 
 imperial site of Sardis. A humpbacked Dutch artist, 
 who had been in the service of Lady Hester Stanhope 
 as a draughtsman, and who had lingered about be- 
 tween Jerusalem and the Nile till he was as much at 
 home in the east as a Hajji or a crocodile ; an Eng- 
 lishman qualifying himself for "The Travellers';" 
 a Smyrniote merchant in figs and opium ; Job Smith 
 (my inseparable shadow) and myself, composed a 
 party at this time (August, 1834), rambling about 
 Asia Minor in turbans and Turkish saddles, and pitch- 
 ing our tents, and cooking our pilau, wherever it 
 pleased Heaven and the inexorable suridji who was 
 our guide and caterer. 
 
 I thought at the time that I would compound to 
 abandon all the romance of that renowned spot, for a 
 clean shirt and something softer than a marble frustrum 
 for a pillow ; but in the distance of memory, and my- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 413 
 
 self at this present in a deep morocco chair in the 
 library at " The Travellers' ;" the same scene in the 
 ruins of Sardis does not seem destitute of interest. 
 
 It was about four in the lazy summer afternoon. 
 We had arrived at Sardis at mid-day, and after a 
 quarrel whether we should eat immediately or wait till 
 the fashionable hour of three, the wooden dish con- 
 taining two chickens buried in a tumulus of rice, 
 shaped (in compliment to the spirit of the spot) like 
 the Mound of Alyattis in the plain below, was placed 
 in the centre of a marble pedestal ; and with Job and 
 the Dutchman seated on the prostrate column dislodged 
 for our benefit, and the remainder of the party squatted 
 in the high grass, which grew in the royal palace as if 
 it had no memory of the foot-prints of the kings of 
 Lydia, we spooned away at the saturated rice, and 
 pulled the smothered chickens to pieces with an inde- 
 pendence of knives and forks that was worthy of the 
 M certain poor man in Attica." Old Solon himself, 
 who stood, we will suppose, while reproving the osten- 
 tatious monarch, at the base of that very column now 
 ridden astride by an inhabitant of a country of which 
 he never dreamed — (at least it strikes me there is no 
 mention of the Yankees in hid philosophy) — the old 
 graybeard of the Academy himself, I say, would have 
 been edified at the primitive simplicity of our repast. 
 The salt (he would have asked if it was Attic) was 
 contained in a ragged play-bill, which the Dutchman 
 had purloined as a specimen of Modern Greek, from 
 the side of a house in Corfu ; the mustard was in a 
 cracked powder-horn, which had been slung at the 
 breast of old Whalley the regicide, in the American 
 revolution, and which Job had brought from the Green 
 mountains, and held, till its present base uses, in re- 
 ligious veneration ; the ham (I should have mentioned 
 that respectable entremet before) was half enveloped 
 in a copy of the " Morning Post ;" and the bread, 
 which had been seven days out from Smyrna, and had 
 been kept warm in the suridji's saddle bags twelve 
 hours in the twenty-four, lay in disjecta membra around 
 the marble table, with marks of vain but persevering 
 attacks in its nibbled edges. The luxury of our lar- 
 der was comprised in a flask which had once held Har- 
 vey's sauce, and though the last drop had served as a 
 condiment to a roasted kid some three months before, 
 in the Acropolis at Athens, we still clung to it with 
 affectionate remembrance, and it was offered and re- 
 fused daily around the table for the melancholy pleasure 
 of hearing the mention of its name It was unlucky 
 that the only thing which the place afforded of the 
 best quality, and in sufficient quanities, was precisely 
 the one thing in the world for which no individual of 
 the party had any particular relish — water ! It was 
 brought in a gourd from the bed of the " golden-sand- 
 ed Pactolus," rippling away to the plain within pistol- 
 shot of the dining-room ; but, to the shame of our sim- 
 plicity I must record, that a high-shouldered jug of 
 the rough wine of Samos, trodden out by the feet of 
 the lovely slaves of the JEgean, and bought for a far- 
 thing the bottle, went oftener to the unclassical lips of 
 the company. Methinks, now (the wind east in Lon- 
 don, and the day wet and abominable). I could barter 
 the dinner that I shall presently discuss, with its suite 
 of sherries and anchovy, to kneel down by that golden 
 river in the sunshine, and drink a draught of pure 
 lymph under the sky of effeminate Asia. Yet, when 
 I was there — so rarely do we recognise happiness till 
 she is gone — I wished myself (where I had never been) 
 in " merry England." " Merry," quotha ? Scratch 
 it out, and write comfortable'. I have seen none 
 " merry" in England, save those who have most cause 
 to be sad — the abandoned of themselves and the 
 world ! 
 
 Out of the reach of ladies and the laws of society, 
 the most refined persons return very much to the na- 
 tural instincts from which they have departed in the 
 
 progress of civilization. Job rolled off the marble 
 column when there was nothing more to eat, and went 
 to sleep with the marks of the Samian wine turning 
 up the corners of his mouth like the salacious grin of 
 a satyr. The Dutchman got his hump into a hollow, 
 and buried his head in the long grass with the same obe- 
 dience to the prompting of nature, and idem the suridji 
 and the fig-merchant, leaving me seated alone among 
 the promiscuous ruins of Sardis and the dinner. The 
 dish of philosophy I had with myself on that occasion 
 will appear as a rechavffe in my novel (I intend to 
 write one) ; but meantime I may as well give you the 
 practical inference ; that, as sleeping after dinner is 
 evidently Nature's law, Washington Irving is highly 
 excusable for the practice, and he would be a friend of 
 reason who should introduce couches and coffee at that 
 somnolent period, the digestive nap taking the place 
 of the indigestible politics usually forced upon the com- 
 pany on the disappearance of the ladies. Why should 
 the world be wedded for ever to these bigoted incon- 
 veniences ! 
 
 The grand track from the south and west of Asia 
 Minor passes along the plain between the lofty Acropo- 
 lis of Sardis and the tombs of her kings ; and with 
 the snore of travellers from five different nations in 
 my ear, I sat and counted the camels in one of the 
 immense caravans never out of sight in the valley of 
 the Hermus. The long procession of those brown 
 monsters wound slowly past on their way to Smyrna, 
 their enormous burthens covered with colored trap- 
 pings and swaying backward and forward with their dis- 
 jointed gait, and their turbaned masters dozing on the 
 backs of the small asses of the east, leading each a 
 score by the tether at his back ; the tinkling of their 
 hundred bells swarmed up through the hot air of the 
 afternoon with the drowsiest of monotones ; the native 
 oleanders, slender-leaved and tall, and just now in all 
 their glory, with a color in their bright flowers stolen 
 from the bleeding lips of Houris, brightened the plains 
 of Lydia like the flush of sunset lying low on the earth ; 
 the black goats of uncounted herds browsed along the 
 ancient Sarabat, with their bearded faces turned every 
 one to the faintly coming wind : the eagles (that abound 
 now in the mountains from which Sardis and a hundred 
 silent cities once scared their bold progenitors) sailed 
 slowly and fearlessly around the airy citadel that flung 
 open its gates to the Lacedaemonian ; and, gradually, 
 as you may have lost yourself in this tangled paragraph, 
 dear reader, my senses became confused among the 
 objects it enumerates, and I fell asleep with the speech 
 of Solon in my ears, and my back to the crumbling 
 portico of Croesus. 
 
 The Dutchman was drawing my picture when I 
 awoke, the sun was setting, and Job and the suridji 
 were making tea. I am not a very picturesque object, 
 generally speaking, but done as a wild Arab lying at 
 the base of a column in a white turban, with a stork's 
 nest over my head, I am not so ill-looking as you would 
 suppose. As the Dutchman drew for gelt, and hoped 
 to sell his picture to some traveller at Smyrna who 
 would take that opportunity to affirm in his book that 
 he had been at Sardis (as vide his own sketch), I do 
 not despair of seeing myself yet in lithograph. And, 
 talking of pictures, I would give something now if I 
 had engaged that hump-backed draughtsman to make 
 me a sketch of Job, squat on his hams before a fire in 
 the wall, and making tea in a tin pot with a " malig- 
 nant and turbaned Turk," feeding the blaze with the 
 dry thorn of Syria.* It would have been consolation 
 to his respectable mother, whom he left in the Green 
 mountains (wondering what he could have to do with 
 following such a scapegrace as myself through the 
 
 * It has the peculiarity of a hooked thorn alternating with the 
 straight, and it is difficult to touch it without lacerating the 
 hands. It is the common thorn of the east, and it is supposed 
 that our Savior's crown at his crucifixion was made of it. 
 
414 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 world), to have seen him in the turban of a Hajji tak- 
 ing his tea quietly in ancient Lydia. The green tur- 
 ban, the sign of the Hajji, belonged more properly to 
 myself; for though it was Job who went bodily to 
 Jerusalem (leaving me ill of a fig-fever at Smyrna), the 
 sanctity of the pilgrimage by the Mohammedan law 
 falls on him who provides the pilgrim with scallop-shell 
 and sandals, aptly figured forth in this case, we will sup- 
 pose, by the sixty American dollars paid by myself for 
 his voyage to Jaffa and back. The suridji was a 
 Hajji, too, and it was amusing to see Job, who respect- 
 ed every man's religious opinions, and had a little 
 vanity besides in sharing with the Turk* the dignity of 
 a pilgrimage to the sacred city, washing his knees and 
 elbows at the hour of prayer, and considerately, but 
 very much to his own inconvenience, transferring the 
 ham of the unclean beast from the Mussulman's sad- 
 dle-bags to his own. It was a delicate sacrifice to a 
 pagan's prejudices worthy of Socrates or a Christian. 
 
 II. 
 
 In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of 
 better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers 
 his home — the sea-tost boy his mother and her last 
 words — the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chatter- 
 ing Greek is silent, for the same — the Italian forgets 
 his mustache, and hums la patria — and the English- 
 man delivers himself of the society of his companions, 
 and " takes a walk." It is something in the influences 
 of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day. to 
 maintain that morn, noon, and midnight, have their 
 ministry as well, and exercise each an unobserved but 
 salutary and peculiar office on the feelings. 
 
 We all separated " after tea ;" the Suridji was off to. 
 find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman 
 strolled away by himself to a group of the " tents of 
 Kedar" far down in the valley with their herds and 
 herdsmen ; theSmyrniote merchant sat by the camel- 
 track at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a 
 caravan; the Green-Mountaineer was wandering around 
 the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was 
 sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of 
 Cybele ; and I, with a passion for running water which 
 I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank 
 of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and 
 Alexander, and sometimes of you, dear Mary! 
 
 I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over 
 which the " Angel of the Church of Sardis" kept his 
 brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand 
 not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and 
 nearly in a line between it and the palace of Croesus. I 
 must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I 
 stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the 
 strong and never-wasting under-current of early reli- 
 gious feeling rushed back on me, and I involuntarily 
 uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the 
 spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never with- 
 out the Bible that was his mother's parting gift, sat on 
 the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the 
 sacred volume open at the Revelation in his hand. 
 
 " I think, Philip," said he, as I stood looking at him 
 in silence, " I think my mother will have been told by 
 an angel that I am here." 
 
 He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other 
 feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy. 
 
 " Listen, Philip," said he, "it will be something to 
 tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the 
 Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis." 
 
 I listened with what I never thought to have heard 
 
 * The Mussulmans make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and pray 
 at all the places consecrated to our Savior and the Virein, ex- 
 cept only the tomb of Christ, which they do not acknowledge. 
 They believe that Christ did not die, but ascended alive into 
 heaven, leaving the likeness of his face to Judas, who was 
 «ruein>d for him. 
 
 in Asia — my mother's voice loud at my heart, as I had 
 heard it in prayer in my childhood : — 
 
 " Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have 
 not defiled their garments ; and they shall walk with 
 me in white: for they are worthy." 
 
 I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood 
 the Temple of Cybele. The church to which "He" 
 spoke " who hath the seven spirits of God and the seven 
 stars," was a small and humble ruin of brick and mor- 
 tar ; but, of the temple of the Heathen Mother of the 
 world, remained two fair columns of marble with their 
 curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was 
 strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately 
 even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a 
 moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the 
 eyes of Croesus and the philosopher from Athens; and 
 then I turned to the living nations that I had left to 
 wander among these dead empires, and looking still 
 on the eloquent monuments of what these religions 
 were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread 
 Christendom. 
 
 We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined 
 temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride 
 to ourselves that our imaginations awake the •' spirit 
 of the spot." But the primitive church of Christ, over 
 which an angel of God kept watch — whose undefiled 
 members, if there is truth in Holy Writ, are now 
 " walking with him in white" before the face of the 
 Almighty — a spot on which the Savior and his apos- 
 tles prayed, and for whose weal, with the other church- 
 es of Asia, the sublime revelation was made to John — 
 this, the while, is an unvisited shrine, and the " classic" 
 of pagan idolatry is dearer to the memories of men 
 than the holy antiquities of a religion they profess ! 
 
 III. 
 
 The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the 
 fallen temple were still tinged with rosy light on the 
 side toward the sunset, when the full moon, rising 
 in the east, burnished the other like a shaft of sil- 
 ver. The two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight 
 of opal. 
 
 " Job," said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand 
 as we strolled up the western bank of the river, " can 
 you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this 
 pretty stream the 'golden-sanded Pactolus?' Did you 
 ever see sand of a duller gray ?" 
 
 "As easy as give you a reason," answered Job, 
 " why we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the 
 clearest stream we have forded — why 1 am no more 
 beautiful than before, though I have bathed like Ve- 
 nus in the Scamander — why the pumice of Naxos no 
 longer reduces the female bust to its virgin propor- 
 tions — and why Smyrna and Malta are not the best 
 places for figs and oranges !" 
 
 " And why the old king of Lydia, who possessed 
 the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog's collar, 
 lies quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and 
 his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his suc- 
 cessors. What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have 
 been that invisible ring ! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy 
 finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a 
 mortal ! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us spec- 
 ulate in this bright moonshine on the enormities we 
 would commit !" 
 
 As Job was proceeding, in a cautious periphrasis, 
 to rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the prince of 
 darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened, 
 and my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling far 
 above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green 
 valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and 
 the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong 
 relief against the sky ; and from the mass of shadow be- 
 low peered out, like a star from a cloud-rack, the steady 
 blare of a lamp. 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 415 
 
 "Allons! Job !" said I, making sure of an adven- 
 ture, " let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in 
 the solitude of this ruined city." 
 
 " I could not answer to your honored mother," said 
 my scrupulous friend, " if I did not remind you that 
 this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that 
 probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient 
 altitude." 
 
 I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had 
 served me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent. 
 
 " I could as ill answer to your anxious parent," said 
 Job, following with uncommon alacrity, " if I did not 
 partake your dangers when they are inevitable." 
 
 We scrambled up with some difficulty in the dark- 
 ness, now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling 
 over a block of marble — held fast one moment by the 
 lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought 
 to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood. 
 With a half hour's toil, however, we stood on a clear 
 platform of grass, panting and hot ; and as I was sug- 
 gesting to Job that we had possibly got too high, he 
 laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence, 
 drew me down on the grass beside him. 
 
 In a small fairy amphitheatre, half encircled by a 
 bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the 
 small platform from which we looked, lay six low tents, 
 disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream, 
 and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass, 
 of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round, 
 and laced neatly with wicker-work, with their curtain- 
 doors opening inward upon the circle. In the largest 
 one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small 
 iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in 
 one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it 
 swung a basket-cradle suspended between two stakes, 
 and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about 
 forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive 
 object, would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The 
 other tents were closed and seemed unoccupied, but the 
 curtain of the one into which our eyes were now strain- 
 ing with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to 
 give admission to the cool night air; and, in and out, 
 between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole 
 on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exquisite symme- 
 try and unconscious but divine grace of movement 
 filled my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by 
 the divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the 
 height and mould of the younger water-nymph in 
 Gibson's Hylas,* with limbs and lips that, had I cre- 
 ated and warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should 
 have just hesitated whether or not they wanted anoth- 
 er half-shade of fulness. The large shawl of the east, 
 which was attached to her girdle, and in more guard- 
 ed hours concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose 
 folds from her waist to her heels, leaving her bust and 
 smoothly-rounded shoulders entirely bare ; and, in 
 strong relief even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes 
 of her glossy and raven hair floated over her back, and 
 swept around her with a grace of a cloud in her indo- 
 lent motions. A short petticoat of striped Brusa silk 
 stretched to her knees, and below appeared the full 
 trowser of the east, of the same material, narrowed at 
 the ankle, and bound with what looked in the moon- 
 light an anklet of silver. A profusion of rings on her 
 fingers, and a gold sequin on her forehead, suspended 
 from a colored fillet, completed her* dr*»«», and left 
 nothing to be added by the prude or the painter. She 
 was at that ravishing and divinest moment of female 
 life, when almost the next hour would complete her 
 womanhood — like the lotus ere it lays back to ihe 
 prying moonlight the snowy leaf nearest its heart. 
 
 • A group that will be immortal in the love and wonder of 
 the world, when the divine hand of the English Praxiteles has 
 long passed from the earth. Two more exquisite shapes of 
 women than those lily-crowned nymphs never lay in the womb 
 —of marble or human mother. Rome is brighter for them. 
 
 She was employed in filling a large jar which stood 
 at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus, 
 and as she turned with her empty pitcher, and came 
 under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward, 
 treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of 
 the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round 
 hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual 
 compression of my arm by the bony hand which still / 
 held it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping 
 pulse of admiration found an answering beat in the 
 bosom of my friend. A silent nod from the woman, 
 whose Greek profile was turned to us under the lamp- 
 light, informed the lovely water-bearer that her labors 
 were at an end ; and with a gesture expressive of heat, 
 she drew out the shawl from her girdle, untied the 
 short petticoat, and threw them aside, and then trip- 
 ping out into the moonlight with only the full silken 
 trowsers from her waist to her ankles, she sat down on 
 the brink of the small stream, and with her feet in the 
 water, dropped her head on her knees, and sat as mo- 
 tionless as marble. 
 
 " Gibson should see her now," I whispered to Job, 
 " with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled 
 and polished back, and her almost glittering hair veil- 
 ing about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer !" 
 
 "And those slender fingers clasped over her knees, 
 and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into 
 her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those 
 indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy." 
 
 The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade 
 a little farther up the stream had covered our approach 
 and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job's conjecture 
 was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small 
 encampment of gipsies — the men possibly asleep in 
 those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. Af- 
 ter a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would 
 be impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving 
 on a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved 
 withdrew from our position, and descended to our own 
 tents in the ruins of the palace. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The suridji had given us our spiced coffee in the 
 small china cups and filagree holders, and we sat dis- 
 cussing, to the great annoyance of the storks over our 
 heads, whether we should loiter another day at Sardis, 
 j or eat melons at noon at Casabar on our way to Con- 
 1 stantinople. To the very great surprise of the Dutch- 
 man, who wished to stay to finish his drawings, Job and 
 myself voted for remaining — a view of the subject which 
 was in direct contradiction to our vote of the preceding 
 I evening. The Englishman, who was always in a hur- 
 | ry, flew into a passion, and went off with the phleg- 
 matic suridji to look after his horse ; and having dis- 
 posed of our Smyrniote, by seeing a caravan (which 
 was not to be seen) coming southward from Mount 
 Tmolus, I and my monster started for the encamp- 
 ment of the gipsies. 
 
 As we rounded the battered wall of the Christian 
 church, a woman stepped out from the shadow ; through 
 a tattered dress, and under a turban of soiled cotton set 
 far over her forehead, and throwing a deep shadow into 
 her eyes, I recognised at once the gipsy woman whom 
 we had seen sitting by the cradle. 
 
 " Buon giorno, signori" she said, making a kind of 
 salaam, and relieving me at once by the Italian saluta- 
 tion of my fears of being unintelligible. 
 
 Job gave her the good-morning, but she looked at 
 him with a very unsatisfactory glance, and coming 
 close to my ear, she wished me to speak to her out of 
 the hearing of "il rnio domestico .'" 
 
 "Amicopiu tosfo /" I added immediately with a con- 
 sideration for Job's feelings, which, I must do myself 
 the justice to say, I always manifested, except in very 
 elegant society. I gave myself the greater credit in 
 
416 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 this case, as, in myimpatience to know the nature of 
 the gipsy's communication, I might be excused for 
 caring little at the moment whether my friend was 
 taken for a gentleman or a gentleman's gentleman. 
 
 The gipsy looked vexed at her mistake, and with a 
 half-apologetic inclination to Job, she drew me into 
 the shade of the ruin, and perused my face with great 
 earnestness. " The same to yourself," thought I, as 
 I gave back her glance, and searched for her meaning 
 in two as liquid and loving eyes as ever looked out of 
 the gates of the Prophet's paradise for the coming of 
 a young believer. It was a face that had been divine, 
 and in the hands of a lady of fashion would have still 
 made a hello rifacimenlo. 
 
 " Inglese ?" she said at last. 
 
 " No, madre — Americano." 
 
 She looked disappointed. 
 
 " And where are you going, Jilio mio ?" 
 
 " To Stamboul." 
 
 " Benissimo ."' she answered, and her face bright- 
 ened. " Do you want a servant ?" 
 
 " Unless it is yourself, no !" 
 
 •' It is my son." 
 
 It was on my lips to ask if he was like her daughter, 
 but an air of uneasiness and mystery in her manner put 
 me on the reserve, and I kept my knowledge to myself. 
 She persevered in her suit, and at last the truth came 
 out, thai her boy was bound on an errand to Constan- 
 tinople, and she wished safe conduct for him. The 
 rest of the troop, she said, were at Smyrna, and she 
 was left in care of the tents with the boy and an infant 
 child. As she did not mention the girl, who, from the 
 resemblance, was evidently her daughter — I thought it 
 unwise to allude to our discovery : and promising that, 
 if the boy was mounted, every possible care should be 
 taken of him? I told her the hour on the following 
 morning when we should be in the saddle, and rid my- 
 self of her with the intention of stealing a march on 
 the camp. 
 
 I took rather a circuitous route, but the gipsy was 
 there before me, and apparently alone. She had sent 
 the boy to the plains for a horse, and though I pre- 
 sumed that the loveliest creature in Asia was concealed 
 in one or the other of those small tents, the curtains 
 were closely tied, and I could find no apology for in- 
 truding either my eyes or my inquiries. The hand- 
 some Zingara, too, began to look rather becomingly 
 jiere ; and as I had left Job behind, and was always 
 naturally afraid of a woman, I reluctantly felt myself 
 under the necessity of comprehending her last injunc- 
 tion, and with a promise that the boy should join us 
 before we reached the foot of Mount Sypilus, she fair- 
 ly bowed me oft' the premises. I could have forsworn 
 my complexion and studied palmistry for a gipsy, had 
 the devil then tempted me ! 
 
 We struck our tents at sunrise, and were soon dash- 
 ing on through the oleanders upon the broad plain of 
 the Hermus, the dew lying upon their bright vermeil 
 flowers like the pellucid gum on the petals of the ice- 
 plant, and nature, and my five companions, in their 
 gayest humor. I was' not. My thoughts were of 
 moonlight and the Pactolus, and two round feet 
 ankle-deep in running water. Job rode up to my 
 side. 
 
 " My dear Phil ! take notice that you are nearing 
 Mount Sypilus, in which the magnetic ore was first 
 discovered." 
 
 " It acts negatively on me, my dear chum ! for I 
 drag a lengthening chain from the other direction." 
 
 Silence once more, and the bright red flowers still 
 fled backward in our career. Job rode up again. 
 
 " You must excuse my interrupting your revery,but 
 I thought you would like to know that the town where 
 
 we sleep to-night is the residence of the ' beys of Og- 
 lou,' mentioned in the ' Bride of Abydos.' " 
 
 No answer, and the bright red blossoms still flew 
 scattered in our path as our steeds flew through the 
 coppice, and the shovel-like blades of the Turkish stir- 
 rups cut into them right and left in the irregular gallop. 
 Job rode again to my side. 
 
 " My dear Philip, did you know that this town of 
 Magnesia was once the capital of the Turkish empire — 
 the city of Timour the Tartar ?" 
 
 "Well!" 
 
 "And did you know that when Themistocles was 
 in exile, and Artaxerxes presented him with the tribute 
 of three cities to provide the necessaries of life, Mag- 
 nesia* found him in bread?" 
 
 "And Lampascus in wine. Don't bore me, Job!" 
 
 We sped on. As we neared Casabar toward noon, 
 and (spite of romance) I was beginning to think with 
 complacency upon the melons, for which the town is 
 famous, a rattling of hoofs behind put our horses upon 
 their mettle, and in another moment a boy dashed into 
 the midst of our troop, and reining up with a fine dis- 
 play of horsemanship, put the promised token into 
 my hand. He was mounted on a small Arabian mare, 
 remarkable for nothing but a thin and fiery nostril, 
 and a most lavish action, and his jacket and turban 
 were fitted to a shape and head that could not well 
 be disguised. The beauty of the gipsy camp was 
 beside me ! 
 
 It was as well for my self-command, that I had 
 sworn Job to secrecy in case of the boy's joining us, 
 and that I had given the elder gipsy, as a token, a very 
 voluminous and closely-written letter of my mother's. 
 In the twenty minutes which the reading of so appa- 
 rently "lengthy" a document would occupy, I had 
 leisure to resume my self-control, and resolve on my 
 own course of conduct toward the fair masquerader. 
 My travelling companions were not a little astonished 
 to see me receive a letter by courier in the heart of 
 Asia, but that was for their own digestion. All the 
 information I condescended to give, was that the boy 
 was sent to my charge on his road to Constantinople; 
 and as Job displayed no astonishment, and entered 
 simply into my arrangements, and I was the only per- 
 son in the company who could communicate with the 
 suridji (I had picked up a little modern Greek in the 
 Morea), they were compelled (the Dutchman, John 
 Bull, and the fig-merchant) to content themselves 
 with such theories on the subject as Heaven might 
 supply them withal. 
 
 How Job and I speculated apart on what could be 
 the errand of this fair creature to Constantinople — 
 how beautifully she rode and sustained her character 
 as a boy — how I requested her, though she spoke 
 Italian like her mother, never to open her lips in any 
 Christian language to my companions — how she slept 
 at my feet at the khans, and rode at my side on the 
 journey, and, at the end of seven days, arriving at 
 Scutari, and beholding across the Bosphorus the golden 
 spires of Stamboul, how she looked at me with tears 
 in her unfathomable eyes, and spurred her fleet Arab 
 to his speed to conceal her emotion, and how 1 felt 
 that I could bury myself with her in the vizier's 
 tomb we were passing at the moment, and be fed on 
 rice with a goule's bodkin, if so alone we might not 
 be parted- -all these are matters which would make 
 sundry respectable chapters in a novel, but of which 
 you are spared the particulars in a true story. There 
 was a convenience both to the dramatist and the au- 
 dience in the "cetera inlus agentur" of the Romans. 
 
 VI. 
 
 We emerged from the pinnacled cypresses of the 
 cemetery overlooking Constantinople, and dismount- 
 
 * Not pronounced as in the apothecary's shop. It is a fine 
 large town at th*» foot of Mount Sypilus 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 417 
 
 ing from my horse, I climbed upon the gilded turban 
 crowning the mausoleum of a royal Ichoglan (a sul- 
 tan's page, honored more in his burial than in his life), 
 and feasted my eyes on the desecrated but princely 
 fair birth-right of the Pakeologi. The Nekropolis — 
 the city of the dead — on the outermost tomb of whose 
 gloomy precincts I had profanely mounted, stands 
 high and black over the Bosphorus on one side, while 
 on the other, upon similar eminences, stand the gleam- 
 ing minarets and latticed gardens of the matchless city 
 of the living — as if, while Europe flung up her laugh- 
 ing and breathing child to the sun, expiring Asia, the 
 bereaved emperess of the world, lifted her head to the 
 same heavens in majestic and speechless sorrow. 
 
 But oh ! how fairer than Venice in her waters — 
 than Florence and Rome in their hills and habitations, 
 than all the cities of the world in that which is most 
 their pride and glory — is this fairest metropolis of the 
 Mahomets ! With its two hundred mosques, each 
 with a golden sheaf of minarets laying their pointed 
 fingers against the stars, and encircled with the fretted 
 galleries of the callers to prayer, like the hand of a 
 cardinal with its costly ring — with its seraglio gardens 
 washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by the 
 gentle stream that glides out of the "Valley of Sweet 
 Waters;" men-of-war on one side, flaunting their red 
 pennants over the nightingale's nest which sings for 
 the delight of a princess, and the swift caique on the 
 other gliding in protected waters, where the same im- 
 prisoned fair one might fling into it a flower (so slen- 
 der is the dividing cape that shuts in the bay) — with 
 its Bosphorus, its radiant and unmatched Bosphorus — 
 the most richly-gemmed river within the span of the 
 sun, extending with its fringe of palaces and castles 
 from sea to sea, and reflecting in its glassy eddies a 
 pomp and sumptuousness of costume and architecture 
 which exceeds even your boyish dreams of Bagdad 
 and the califs — Constantinople, I say, with its tur- 
 baned and bright-garmented population — its swarm- 
 ing sea and rivers — its columns, and aqueducts, and 
 strange ships of the east — is impenetrable seraglio, 
 and its close-shuttered harems — its bezestein and its 
 Hippodrome — Constantinople lay before me ! If the 
 star I had worshipped had descended to my hand out 
 of the sky — if my unapproachable and yearning dream 
 of woman's beauty had been bodied forth warm and 
 real — if the missing star in the heel of Serpentarius, 
 and the lost sister of the Pleiades had waltzed back 
 together to their places — if poets were once more 
 prophets, not felons, and books were read for the good 
 that is in them, not for the evil — if love and truth had 
 been seen again, or any impossible or improbable thing 
 had come to pass — I should not have felt more thril- 
 lingly than now the emotions of surprise and wonder! 
 
 While I stood upon the marble turban of the Icho- 
 glan, my companions had descended the streets of 
 Scutari, and I was left alone with the gipsy. She sat 
 on her Arab with her head bowed to his neck, and 
 when I withdrew my eye from the scene I have faintly 
 described, the tear-drops were glistening in the flow- 
 ing mane, and her breast was heaving under her em- 
 broidered jacket with uncontrollable grief. I jumped 
 to the ground, and taking her head between my hands, 
 pressed her wet cheek to my lips. 
 
 "We part here, signor," said she, winding around 
 her head the masses of hair that had escaped from 
 her turban, and raising herself in the saddle as if to 
 go on. 
 
 " I hope not, Maimuna!" 
 
 She bent her moist eyes on me with a look or ear- 
 nest inquiry. 
 
 " You are forbidden to intrust me with your errand 
 to Constantinople, and you have kept your word to 
 your mother. But whatever that errand may be, I 
 hope it does not involve your personal liberty ?" 
 
 She looked embarrassed, hut did not answer. 
 27 
 
 "You are very young to be trusted so far from your 
 mother, Maimuna!" 
 
 "Signor, si!" 
 
 "But I think she can scarce have loved you so well 
 as I do to have suffered you to come here alone !" 
 
 " She intrusted me to you, signor." 
 
 I was well reminded of my promise. I had given 
 my word to the gipsy that I would leave her child at 
 the Persian fountain of Tophana. Maimuna was 
 evidently under a control stronger than the love I half- 
 hoped and half-feared I had awakened. 
 
 " Andiamo!" she said, dropping her head upon her 
 bosom with the tears pouring once more over it like 
 rain ; and driving her stirrups with abandoned energy 
 into the sides of her Arabian, she dashed headlong 
 down the uneven streets of Scutari, and in a few min- 
 utes we stood on the limit of Asia. 
 
 We left our horses in the "silver city,"* crossing to 
 the "golden" in a caique, and with Maimuna in my 
 bosom, and every contending emotion at work in my 
 heart, the scene about me still made an indelible im- 
 pression on my memory. The star-shaped bay, a 
 mile perhaps in diameter, was one swarm of boats of 
 every most slender and graceful form, the caikjis, in 
 their silken shirts, and vari-colored turbans, driving 
 them through the water with a speed and skill which 
 put to shame the gondolier of Venice, and almost the 
 Indian in his canoe; the gilded lattices and belvideres 
 of the seraglio, and the cypresses and flowering trees 
 that mingle their gay and sad foliage above them, 
 were already so near that I could count the roses upon 
 the bars, and see the moving of the trees in the evening 
 wind; the muezzins were calling to sunset-prayer, 
 their voices coming clear and prolonged over the 
 water; the men-of-war in the mouth of the Bosphorus 
 were lowering their blood-red flags; the shore we 
 were approaching was thronged with veiled women, 
 and bearded old men, and boys with the yellow slipper 
 and red scull-cap of the east; and watching our ap- 
 proach, stood apart, a group of Jews and Armenians, 
 marked by their costume for an inferior race, but look- 
 ing to my cosmopolite eye as noble in their black 
 robes and towering caps as the haughty Mussulman 
 that stood aloof from their company. 
 
 We set foot in Constantinople. It was the suburb 
 of Tophana, and the suridji pointed out to Maimuna, 
 as we landed, a fountain of inlaid marble and brass, 
 around whose projecting frieze were traced inscrip- 
 tions in the Persian. She sprang to my hand. 
 
 "Remember, Maimuna!" I said, "that I offer you 
 a mother and a home in another and a happier land. 
 I will not interfere with your duty, but when your 
 errand is done, you may find me if" you will. Fare- 
 well." 
 
 With a passionate kiss in the palm of my hand, and 
 one beaming look of love and sorrow in her large and 
 lustrous eyes, the gipsy turned to the fountain, and 
 striking suddenly to the left around the mosque of 
 Sultan Selim, she plunged into the narrow street run- 
 ning along the water-side to Galata. 
 
 VII. 
 
 We had wandered out from our semi-European, 
 semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our 
 arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way list- 
 lessly over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera, 
 stood at last in the small burying-ground at the sum- 
 mit of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter 
 of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share 
 in the bliss of that June morning. 
 
 "It is a heavenly day," said Job, sitting down un- 
 thinkingly upon a large sculptured turban that formed 
 
 * Galata, the suburb on the European side, was the Chrysop. 
 olis, and Scutari, on the Asian, the Argentopolis of the an- 
 cients. 
 
418 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy 
 pagan, and looking off wistfully toward the green sum- 
 mit of Bulgurlu. 
 
 The difference between Job and myself was a mania, 
 on his part for green fields, and on mine for human 
 faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader 
 to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of 
 the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should 
 enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my never- 
 tiring amusement of wandering in the crowded bazars 
 on the other side of the water. The only way to ac- 
 complish it, was to appear to yield the point, and then 
 rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his 
 feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green 
 mountains at my own expense) never to carry my 
 measures too ostentatiously. 
 
 Job was looking south, and my face was as resolute- 
 ly turned north. "We must take a caique in any case 
 at Galata (lying just below us) but if we turned the 
 prow south in the first instance, farewell at every 
 stroke to the city ! Whereas a northern course took 
 us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear to 
 change my mind at any moment, and land immediate- 
 ly in a street leading to the bazars. Luckily, while 
 I was devising an errand to go up the channel instead 
 of down, a small red flag appeared gliding through the 
 forest of masts around the curve of the water-side at 
 Tophana, and, in a moment more, a high-pooped 
 vessel; with the carved railings and outlandish rigging 
 of the ships from the far east, shot out into the 
 middle of the bay with the strong current of the 
 Bosphorus, and squaring her lateen sail, she rounded 
 a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine, and 
 steered with a fair wind up the channel of the Golden 
 Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed to me a 
 crowd of people, mostly women, standing amid-ships, 
 and the supposition with which I was about inducing 
 Job to take a caique and pull up the harbor after her 
 seemed to me now almost a certainty. 
 
 " It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my 
 dear Job !" 
 
 He slid off the marble turban which he had pro- 
 faned so unscrupulously, and the next minute we 
 passed the gate that divides the European from the 
 commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep 
 and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the 
 slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind, 
 seemed propably little short of madness. Of a hun- 
 dred slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed 
 waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best 
 manned ; and getting Job in with the usual imminent 
 danger of driving his long lea;s through the bottom of 
 the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious 
 Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled 
 our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique, 
 and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver. 
 
 The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing 
 heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navi- 
 gation as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of 
 middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken 
 friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand egg- 
 shells swarming about him in every direction, and his 
 own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra 
 piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and 
 the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets 
 into his neighbors' boats, which is only equalled in bit- 
 terness and profusion by the execrations which follow 
 what is called "speaking your mind." The Jew 
 laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes 
 of his oppressors ; and, in the exercise of his vocation, 
 translated us the oaths as they came in right and left 
 — most of them very gratuitous attacks on those (as 
 Job gravely remarked), of whom they could know very 
 little — our respected mothers. 
 
 The slackening vessel lost her way as she got oppo- 
 site the bazar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came 
 
 down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her 
 towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian 
 craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed 
 appropriately on the stern as the " snow-drop" from 
 Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the 
 next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and 
 my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from 
 Trebizond, with slaves and spices. 
 
 " What would they do if we were to climb up her 
 side ?" I asked the Israelite. 
 
 He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted 
 beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin, and 
 looked through the carved railing very intently. 
 
 " The slaves are Georgians," he answered, after 
 awhile, "and if there were no Turkish purchasers on 
 board, they might simply order you down again." 
 
 " And if there were " 
 
 " The women would be considered damaged by a 
 Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you 
 or pitch you overboard." 
 
 "Is that all?" said Job, evolving his length very 
 deliberately from his coil, and offering me a hand the 
 next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether 
 the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affec- 
 tion for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the 
 fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body 
 and limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside, 
 all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the 
 outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon in- 
 tently occupied in watching the surprise and wonder 
 of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first 
 time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their 
 charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw 
 about them it might be, had no time to pay them very 
 particular attention, and dropping their dirty veils 
 about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and 
 staring — ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with 
 eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid. 
 Their features were all good, their skins without a 
 flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plump- 
 ness — looking, with the exception of their eyes, which 
 were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat, 
 pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees 
 over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see 
 their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the 
 Golden Horn — they from the desert mountains of 
 Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them 
 (mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war, all to- 
 gether), probably the most brilliant and striking in the 
 world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to 
 divine their impressions, when Job seized me by the 
 arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from 
 the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female 
 to mount after him. Half a glance satisfied me that it 
 was the Gipsy of Sardis — the lovely companion of our 
 journey to Constantinople. 
 
 " Maimuna !" I exclaimed, darting forward on the 
 instant. 
 
 A heavy hand struck me back as I touched her, and 
 as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs 
 closed about us, and we were hurried with a most un- 
 ceremonious haste to the side of the vessel. I scarce 
 know, between my indignation and the stunning effect 
 of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique, 
 but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the 
 time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore 
 on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solita- 
 ry ramble up the valley of Sweet Waters. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The art of printing was introduced into the Mo- 
 hammedan empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and 
 Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 419 
 
 ia one I happen to know, and I mention it because the 
 most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am ac- 
 quainted in the world was originally built to contain 
 the first printing-press brought from the court of Ver- 
 sailles by Mehemet Effendi, ambassador from the 
 "Brother of the Sun." It is now a maison de plais- 
 ancc for the sultan's favorite women, and in all the 
 dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have 
 once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from 
 the world. 
 
 The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold and j 
 marble, dropped down unfenced upon the green- j 
 sward in the middle of a long emerald valley, more 
 like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be ! 
 dissolved, than a house to live in, real weather-proof, j 
 and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The [ 
 Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell (a marble 
 cascade sculptured in that pretty device), sending up 
 its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded 
 lattice of the sultana, and following it back with the 
 eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet, 
 it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest 
 verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but 
 shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and I 
 valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices 
 from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their 
 irregular shadows across it at every hour save high 
 noon— sacred in the east to the sleep of beauty and 
 idleness. 
 
 \n the loving month of May it is death to set foot in 
 the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is Stopped 
 in the Golden Horn, and on the point of every hill is 
 stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The 
 Arab steeds of the sultan are picketed on the low-ly- 
 ing grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians 
 come from their perfumed chambers in the seraglio, 
 and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of 
 the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade, 
 twelve miles of greensward (sheltered like a vein of 
 ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after 
 the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the 
 eye of the sun and stars), are sacred in this passion- 
 born month from the foot of man, and, riding in their 
 scarlet arubas with the many-colored ribands floating 
 back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own 
 snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and 
 deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these 
 caged birds of a sultan's delight, longing as wildly 
 (who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into 
 the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without, j 
 to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same 
 world in their bosoms! 
 
 How few are content ! How restless are even the 
 most spoiled children of fortune ! How inevitably 
 the heart sighs for that which it has not, even though 
 its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine ! 
 We were not of those — Job and I — for we were of 
 that school of philosophers* who "had little and 
 wanted nothing ;" but we agreed, as we sat upon the 
 marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over 
 the Barbyses, that the envy of a human heart would 
 poison even the content of a beggar ! He is a fool 
 who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still com- 
 plains of fortune ; but he is only not a slave or a seraph, 
 who feeling on the innermost fibre of his sensibility the 
 icy breath of malice, utters his eternal malison on the j 
 fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided. ' 
 I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine, 
 if envy could be forbidden at the gate ! 
 
 We had walked around the Serai and tried all its 
 entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter 
 of the southern hill, a blood-red flag flying at the top 
 of a small tent of the Prophet's green — doubtless con- 
 cealing the kervas, who kept his lonely guard over the 
 
 # With a difference " Nihil est, nihil deest," was their 
 motto. 
 
 precincts. I sent my friend with a " pinch of piastres" 
 to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and he soon 
 came shuffling in his unmilitary slippers, with keys, 
 which, the month before, were guarded like the lamp 
 of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over the 
 chambers of the chosen houries of the east ; we looked 
 through their lattices, and laid the palms of our hands 
 on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots by the 
 moisture of their cheeks as they slept ; we could see by 
 the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows, where 
 they had pressed to the slender lattices to look forth 
 upon the valley ; and Job, more watchfully alive to 
 the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the dia- 
 mond-shaped bars the marks of their moist fingers and 
 the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had 
 clung and laid their faces against the trellis in the 
 indoient attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison. 
 Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture ; and 
 never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa 
 have been more welcome, than to wave back into 
 those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had 
 lost. 
 
 I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably 
 the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job 
 stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeti- 
 calness on his own thoughts. 
 
 " Do you think, after all," said I, reverting to the 
 matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was para- 
 mount usually to the romantic — " do you think really, 
 Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns 
 pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet 
 were not probably inferior in attraction to the most 
 third-rate belle of New England ? How long would 
 you love a woman that could neither read, nor write, 
 nor think five minutes on any given theme ? The ut- 
 most exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep- 
 eyed Circassians is probably the language of flowers ; 
 and, good Heavens ! think how one of your della 
 Cruscan sentiments would be lost upon her ! And yet, 
 here you are, ready to go mad with romantic fan- 
 cies about women that were never taught even their 
 letters." 
 
 Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song, which 
 was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted 
 of himself. 
 
 " How little women think," said I, proceeding with 
 my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the 
 window, and the kervas smoked his pipe on the sul- 
 tana's ottoman — " how little women think that the 
 birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dog- 
 eared spelling-book (or whatever else more refined tor- 
 ments their tender years in the shape of education), 
 was, after all, the groundwork and secret of their fas- 
 cination over men ! What a process it is to arrive at 
 love! ' D-o-g, dog — c-a-t, catP If you had not 
 learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain 
 Augustus Fitz-Somerset would never have sat. as 1 
 saw him last night, cutting your initials with a dia- 
 mond ring on the purple-claret glass which had just 
 poured a bumper to your beauty !" 
 
 " You are not far wrong," said Job, after a long 
 pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard, 
 of the above practical apostrophe—" you are not far 
 wrong, quoad the women of New England. They 
 would be considerable bores if they had not learned, 
 in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and 
 reason. But, for the women of the softer south and 
 east, I am by no means clear that education would 
 not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take 
 yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two 
 mortal years, you philandered up and down between 
 Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away 
 from the feet of women, and, in all that precious epi- 
 sode of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to pre- 
 sume, of either suggesting or expressing a new thought. 
 And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, bu 
 
420 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these 
 latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit 
 of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body 
 and mind (the latter at the same time lying broad 
 awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable 
 image that passes uncalled before its windows) is the 
 genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What 
 would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight 
 in the Coliseum ? What so ill-bred and atrocious as 
 the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory 
 by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili 1 To live 
 is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to 
 live, in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a 
 rock, with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most 
 passionate intercourse of love in your northern clime, 
 you read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you 
 think it necessary to drive or ride ; but I know nothing 
 that would more have astonished your Venetian Honda 
 than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you 
 might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless 
 night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and 
 read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is 
 why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in 
 Asia than a schoolmaster in Vermont, or, sooner than 
 a judge's ermine in England, to wear a scrivener's 
 rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-let- 
 ters for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics 
 — your only land of equality is that in which to breathe 
 is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open 
 his window for the air that comes to him past the brow 
 of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician's lip in- 
 toxicates less than the water from the fountain that is 
 free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a 
 nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the 
 climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not 
 come by intuition. Men and women should grow 
 wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with 
 sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts 
 like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as lit- 
 tle reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misde- 
 meanor, and desire of action, if it were not too mon- 
 strous to require legislation, should be treason to the 
 -tate." 
 " Long live King Job !" 
 
 PART II. 
 
 I had many unhappy thougnts about Maimuna : the 
 gince I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver 
 lo t in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasi- 
 ness and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well, 
 that there was something in her single step as she 
 came over the gangway which assured me that she 
 wau dispirited and uncertain of her errand. Who was 
 the old Turk who dragged her up the vessel's side 
 with so little ceremony ? What could the child of 
 a gipsy be doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebi- 
 zond ? 
 
 With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of 
 this lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had 
 insensibly made up my mind that she could never be 
 happy without me, and that my one object in Constan- 
 tinople was to get her into my possession. I had a 
 delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design 
 to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take 
 of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a 
 woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my 
 ability to bear this additional demand upon my means. 
 Though entirely dependant himself, Job had that nat- 
 ural contempt for the precions metals, that he could 
 not too freely assist any one to their possession who 
 happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket ; 
 and this, I may say, was the one point which, between 
 my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed 
 
 as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis. 
 The account of his expenditure, which I regularly ex- 
 acted of him before he tied on his bandanna at night, 
 was always more or less unsatisfactory ; and though 
 he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo 
 unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet, 
 he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity 
 of economy to remember it in an argument of any 
 length or importance : and for this and some other 
 reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended 
 addition to my suite. 
 
 Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart 
 of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessa- 
 mine, called Mustapha. Every one who has been at 
 Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian 
 slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to 
 the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to 
 the sultan, but his principal source of profit is the 
 stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpre- 
 ters in his pay ; and to his credit be it said, that, for the 
 courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his 
 extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better 
 hands. 
 
 It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Musta- 
 pha, to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my 
 small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occa- 
 sion, and the call which I made religiously every time 
 I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of 
 friendship. In addition to one or two trifling pres- 
 ents, vv^ich (with a knowledge of human nature) I 
 had returned in the shape of two mortal sins — a keg 
 of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the Eng- 
 lish collier lying in the bay — in addition to his kind 
 presents, I say, my large-trovvsered friend had made 
 me many pressing offers of service. There was little 
 probability, it was true, that I should ever find occa- 
 sion to profit by them ; but I nevertheless believed 
 that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sin- 
 cerity, and in the course of my reflections upon the 
 fate of Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than 
 once that he might be of use in clearing up the mys- 
 tery of her motions. 
 
 " Job !" said I, as we were dawdling along the street 
 of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely 
 morning, "I am going to call at Mustapha's." 
 
 We had started to go to the haunt of the opium- 
 eaters, and he was rather surprised at my proposition, 
 but, with his usual amiableness (very inconvenient 
 and vexatious in this particular instance), he stepped 
 over the gutter without saying a word, and made for 
 the first turning to the right. It was the first time 
 since we had left New England that I wished myself 
 rid of his company. 
 
 "But, Job," said I, calling him back to the shady 
 side of the street, and giving him a great lump of 
 candy from the nearest stall (its oriental name, by the 
 way, is " peace-to-your-throat,") " I thought you were 
 bent on eating opium to-day?" 
 
 My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to 
 comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived 
 by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly 
 in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment 
 it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that, 
 in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of 
 the summary administrators of justice quietly sus- 
 pending a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour 
 from the shutters of a chamber-window — intercourse 
 with a Christian in that country of liberal legislation 
 being punishable without trial or benefit of dervish. 
 From certain observations on my disposition in the 
 course of my adventures, Job had made up his mind, 
 I well knew, that my danger was more from Delilah 
 than the Philistines ; and while these victims of love 
 were kicking their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by 
 the look of tender anxiety he cast upon me, from the 
 bottom of the caique, that the moral in his mind would 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 421 
 
 result in an increased vigilance over my motions. 
 While he stood with his teeth stuck full of " peace- 
 to-your-throat," therefore, forgetting even the instinct 
 of mastication in his surprise and sorrow, I well un- 
 derstood what picture was in his mind, and what con- 
 struction he put upon my sudden desire to solitude. 
 
 "My dear Philip!" he began, speaking with dif- 
 ficulty from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth, 
 
 "your respected mother " 
 
 At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank, 
 jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted 
 Mussulman, with his train of runners and pipe-bearers, 
 came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job's 
 surprise to slip past with the rest, and, turning down 
 an ally, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses 
 standing for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my 
 way alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To 
 dismount and hurry Mustapha into his inner and pri- 
 vate apartment, with aa order to the Nubian to deny 
 me to everybody who should inquire, was the work of 
 a minute, but it was scarcely done before I heard Job 
 breathless at the door. 
 
 "Ha visto il signore?'" he exclaimed, getting to the 
 back of the shop with a single stride. 
 
 " Effcndi, no!" said the imperturbable Turk, and he 
 laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered 
 him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips. 
 
 The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his 
 slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near 
 the door, he took oft' his small gray turban, and was 
 wiping the perspiration from his high and narrow fore- 
 head, when Job darted again into the street with a 
 sign to him to follow. The look of despair and ex- 
 haustion with which he shook out his baggy trowsers 
 and made after the striding Yankee, was too much 
 even for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his 
 pipe, and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar 
 cackle of his race, I joined myself in their merriment 
 with a heartiness to which many a better joke might 
 have failed to move me. 
 
 While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between 
 the puffs of his amber pipe, I had thrown myself along 
 the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the 
 inner apartment in which I had been concealed. A 
 curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred 
 from intrusion in the east as the bolted and barred 
 doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a 
 small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, re- 
 sembled the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious 
 palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady's chamber. 
 The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich car- 
 pets laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were 
 covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa, 
 and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual 
 spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoke to the 
 black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a 
 perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres 
 of the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the 
 eyelids and relaxed the limbs ; and as the eye became 
 more accustomed to the dim light which struggled in 
 from a window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in 
 the luxurious and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich 
 shawls of the east became distinguishable with their 
 sumptuous dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of 
 crystal narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their 
 dim globes of rose-water, while costly pipes, silver- 
 mounted pistols, and a rich Damascus sabre in a 
 sheath of red velvet, added gorgeousness to the apart- 
 ment. 
 
 Mustapha was a bit of a philosopher in his way, and 
 he had made his own observations on the Europeans 
 who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental 
 luxuriousness of the room I have described was one of 
 his lures to that passion for the picturesque which he 
 saw in every traveller; and another was his gigantic 
 Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a 
 
 ! white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always 
 at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by — not to 
 buy essences and pastilles — but to come in and take 
 I sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour 
 i upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or 
 j two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste 
 I and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and pro- 
 ! duces his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which, 
 : with his fat fore-finger, he anoints the palm of your 
 hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your 
 hair, throws a drop into the curl on your temples. 
 i Meanwhile, as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl 
 of your pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf, 
 from which presently arrives to your nostrils a per- 
 fume that might delight a sultan ; and then, from the 
 two black hands which are held to you full of cubical- 
 | edged vials with gilded stoppers, you are requested 
 i with the same bland courtesy to select such as in 
 j size or shape suit your taste and convenience — the 
 smallest of them, when filled with attar, worth near a 
 gold piastre. 
 
 This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation 
 comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer, 
 upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of 
 odorent wood which, with the heat of the coals be- 
 neath, give out a perfume like gums from Araby. 
 This, Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a 
 spell in its spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and 
 is to be burnt in your lady's chamber. It is worth its 
 weight in gold, and for a handful of black chips you 
 are persuaded to pay a price which would freight a 
 caique with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and 
 amulets, and purses, all fragrant and precious, and, 
 while you hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that 
 1 would open the heart of Shylock, and you drink and 
 pnrchase. And when you have spent all your money, 
 you go away delighted with Mustapha, and quite per- 
 I suaded that you are vastly obliged to him. And, all 
 things considered, so you are ! 
 
 When Mustapha had finished his prayers (did I say 
 that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up 
 the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain be- 
 I tween us and the shop, listened patiently to my story 
 I of the gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the 
 beginning. When I arrived at the incident on board 
 the slaver, a sudden light seemed to strike upon his 
 mind. 
 
 "Pekhe, filio mio ! pekhe!" he exclaimed, running 
 
 his fore-finger down the middle of his beard, and 
 
 I pouring out a volume of smoke from his mouth and 
 
 | nostrils which obscured him for a moment from my 
 
 j sight. 
 
 (I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a 
 story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing 
 sentence is as constantly on an eastern lip as the amber 
 of the pipe.) 
 
 He clapped his hands as I finished my narration, 
 and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed 
 between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his 
 girdle, made a salaam, and taking his slippers at the 
 outer door, left the shop. 
 
 " We shall find her at the slave-market," said Mus- 
 tapha. 
 
 I started. The thought had once or twice passed 
 through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as 
 impossible. A freeborn Zingara, and on a confiden- 
 tial errand from her own mother!— I did not see how 
 her freedom, if there were danger, should have been 
 so carelessly put in peril. _ 
 
 "And if she is there!" said I; remembering, first, 
 that it was against the Mohammedan law lor a Christian 
 to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did 
 not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a sit- 
 uation rather to lessen than increase my expenses. 
 " I will buy her for you," said Mustapha. 
 The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at 
 
422 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 my feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took 
 from a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he pro- 
 ceeded to lather my forehead and temples, and after a 
 short argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in 
 vain for two very seducing clusters of curls, those 
 caressed minions dropped into the black hand of the 
 slave, and nothing was left for the petils soins of my 
 thumb and fore-finger in their leisure hours save a 
 well-coaxed and rather respectable mustache. A 
 scull-cap and turban completed the transformation of 
 my head, and then, with some awkwardness, I got 
 into a silk shirt, big trowsers, jacket, and slippers, and 
 stood up to look at myself in the mirror. I was as 
 like one of the common Turks of the street as possi- 
 ble, save that the European cravat and stockings had 
 preserved an unoriental whiteness in my neck and 
 ankles. This was soon remedied with a little brown 
 juice, and after a few cautions from Mustapha as to my 
 behavior, I settled my turban and followed him into 
 the street. 
 
 It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a 
 strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised. 
 I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at 
 the rude manner with which every dirty mussulman 
 took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign 
 lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a 
 stranger, and the species of consequence attached to 
 the person and movements of a traveller, become 
 rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without 
 pain that one finds oneself once more like common 
 people. I have not yet returned to my own land 
 (Slingsby is an American, gentle reader), and can not 
 judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by 
 the pleasures of a recovered home ; but I was vexed 
 not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Con- 
 stantinople, and, amusing as it was to betaken for an 
 Englishman on first arriving in England (different as 
 it is from every land I have seen, and still more differ- 
 ent from my own), I must confess to have experienced 
 again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my 
 first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for 
 an Oxonian, " come up for a lark" in term-time. Per- 
 haps I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those 
 unconfessed reasons why a returned traveller is pro- 
 verbially discontented with his home. 
 
 Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe- 
 bearer to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun 
 enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficul- 
 ties in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I 
 can not precisely say ; but I soon found that we were 
 not going straight to the slave-market. I had several 
 times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the nar- 
 row walk till I stood face to face with the bearded 
 Mussulmans, who were only so much astonished at my 
 audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter ; 
 and passing, in the bazar of saddle-cloths, an Eng- 
 lish officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the 
 corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the 
 temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his 
 sweetheart (which he had confided to me over a bot- 
 tle at Smyrna), though I rather expected to be seized 
 by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant con- 
 sequences of a mob and an exposure. My friend was 
 so thoroughly amazed, however, that I was deep in 
 the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look 
 daily now for his arrival in England (I have not seen 
 him since), with a curiosity to know how he supposes 
 a "blackguard Turk" knew anything of the lock of 
 hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket. 
 
 The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazar, 
 and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his 
 legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian, I 
 who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when ! 
 who should come pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would ' 
 say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha I 
 (probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Ar- | 
 
 menian) had ensconced himself behind a towering 
 heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer 
 had taken his more humble position on the narrow 
 base of one of the chequered columns which are pe- 
 culiar to the bazar devoted to the bibliopolists. As 
 my friend came floundering along " all abroad" with 
 his legs and arms, as usual, 1 contrived, by an adroit 
 insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him 
 over the musty tomes of the Armenian in away calcu- 
 lated to derange materially the well-ordered sequence 
 of the volumes. 
 
 " Allah ! Mashallah !" exclaimed Mustapha, whose 
 spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the 
 Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the 
 fallen pyramid. 
 
 " Bestia Inglese !" muttered the Armenian, as Job 
 put oue hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise, 
 and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on 
 a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum. 
 
 The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked 
 like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers, 
 and quietly asked the Armenian what il signore would 
 be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in 
 his pocket, I calculated safely on his new embarrass- 
 ment to divert his anger from the original cause of his 
 overthrow. 
 
 "Tre colonati," said the bookseller. 
 
 Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural 
 of surprise and delight assured me that I might come 
 out from behind the column and look over his shoul- 
 der. It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a 
 Latin translation — a treasure which his heart had 
 been set upon from our first arrival in the east, 
 and for which I well knew he would sell his coat 
 off his back without hesitation. The desire to give 
 it him passed through my mind, but I could see no 
 means, under my present circumstances, either of 
 buying the book or relieving him from his embar- 
 rassment ; and as he buried his nose deeper between 
 the leaves, and sat down on the low counter, forget- 
 ful alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I nod- 
 ded to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible, 
 and, fortunately slipping past both him and the 
 Jew unrecognised, left him to finish the loves of 
 Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed 
 Armenian. 
 
 II. 
 
 As we entered the gates of the slave- market, Mus- 
 tapha renewed his cautions to me with regard to my 
 conduct, reminded me that, as a Christian, I should see 
 the white female slaves at the peril of my life, and imme- 
 diately assumed, himself, a sauntering and poco-curante 
 manner, equally favorable to concealment and to his 
 interests as a purchaser. I followed close at his heels 
 with his pipe, and, as he stopped to chat with his ac- 
 quaintances, I now and then gave a shove with the bowl 
 between his jacket and girdle, rendered impatient to the 
 last degree by the sight of the close lattices on every 
 side of us, and the sounds of the chattering voices 
 within. 
 
 I should have been interested, had I been a mere 
 spectator, in the scene about me, but Mustapha's unne- 
 cessary and provoking delay, while (as I thought pos- 
 sible, if she really were in the market), Maimuna might 
 be bartered for at that moment within, wound my rage 
 to a pitch at last scarcely endurable. 
 
 We had come up from a cellar to which one of Mus- 
 tapha's acquaintances had taken him to see a young 
 white lad he was about to purchase, and I was hoping 
 that my suspense was nearly over, when a man came for- 
 ward into the middle of the court, ringing a hand-bell, 
 and followed by a black girl, covered with a scant blank- 
 et. Like most of her race (she was an Abyssinian), her 
 head was that of a brute, but never were body and limbs 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 423 
 
 more exquisitely moulded. She gazed about without 
 either surprise or shame, stepping after the crier with 
 an elastic, leopard-like tread, her feet turned in like 
 those of the North American Indian, her neck bent 
 gracefully forward, and her shoulders and hips working 
 with that easy play so lost in the constrained dress and 
 motion of civilized women. The Mercury of Giovanni 
 di Bologna springs not lighter from the jet of the foun- 
 tain than did this ebon Venus from the ground on which j 
 she stood. 
 
 I ventured to whisper to Mustapha, that, under cover i 
 of the sale of the Abyssinian, we might see the white ! 
 slaves more unobserved. 
 
 A bid was made for her. 
 
 " Fifteen piastres !" said the attar-seller, wholly ab- 
 sorbed in the sale, and not hearing a syllable I said to 
 him, " She would be worth twice as much to gild my | 
 pastilles !" And handing me his pipe, he waddled into ! 
 the centre of the court, lifted the blanket from the slave's 
 shoulders, turned her round and round, like a Venus 
 on a pivot, looked at her teeth and hands, and after a 
 conversation aside with the crier, he resumed his pipe, 
 and the black disappeared from the ground. 
 
 " I have bought her !" he said, with a salacious grin, 
 as I handed him his tobacco-bag, and muttered a round , 
 Italian execration in his ear. 
 
 The idea that Maimuna might have become the 
 property of that gross and sensual mousterjustas easily 
 as the pretty negress he had brought, sent my blood 
 boiling for an instant to my cheek. Yet I had seen this 
 poor savage of seventeen sold without a thought, save 
 mental congratulation that she would be better fed and 
 clad. What a difference one's private feelings make 
 in one's sympathies ! 
 
 I was speculating, in a kind of tranquil despair, on I 
 the luxurious evils of slavery, when Mustapha called to 
 him an Egyptian, in a hooded blue cloak, whom I re- j 
 membered to have seen on board the Trebisondian. 
 He was a small-featured, black-lipped, willowy Asiatic, 
 with heavy-lidded eyes, and hands as dry and rusty as j 
 the claws of a harpy. After a little conversation, he 
 rose from the platform on which he had crossed his 
 legs, and taking my pro-tern pore master by the sleeve, 
 traversed the quadrangle to a closed door in the best- 
 looking of the miserable houses that surrounded the 
 court. I followed close upon his heels with a beating 
 heart. It seemed to me as if every eye in the crowded 
 market-place must penetrate my disguise. He knock- 
 ed, and answering to some one who spoke from within, 
 the door was opened, and the next moment I found my- 
 self in the presence of a dozen veiled women, seated in 
 various attitudes on the floor. At the command of our 
 conductor, carpets were brought for Mustapha and him- 
 self; and, as they dropped upon their hams, every veil 
 was removed, and a battery of staring and unwinking 
 eyes was levelled full upon us. 
 
 '• Is she here?" said Mustapha to me in Italian, as 
 I stooped over to hand him his eternal pipe. 
 
 " Dio mio ! no !" 
 
 I felt insulted, that with half a glance at the Circas- 
 sian and Georgian dolls sitting before us, he could ask 
 me the question. Yet they were handsome! Red 
 cheeks, white teeth, black eyes, and youth could scarce 
 compose a plain woman ; and thus much of beauty 
 seemed equally bestowed on all. 
 
 " Has he no more ?" I asked, stooping to Mus- 
 tapha's ear. 
 
 I looked around while he was getting the informa- 
 tion I wanted in his own deliberate way ; and, scarce 
 knowing what I did, applied my eye to a crack in the 
 wall, through which had been coming for some time a 
 strong aroma of coffee. I saw at first only a small dim 
 room, in the midst of which stood a Turkish manghal, 
 or brazier of coals, sustaining the coffee-pot from which 
 came the agreeable prefume I had inhaled. As my 
 eye became accustomed to the light, I could distinguish 
 
 a heap of what I took to be shawls lying in the centre 
 of the floor; and presuming it was the dormitory of one 
 of the slave-owners, I was about turning my head away, 
 when the coffee on the manghal suddenly boiled over, 
 and at the same instant started, from the heap at which 
 I had been gazing, the living form of Maimuna ! 
 
 " Mustapha !" I cried, starting back, and clasping 
 my hands before him. 
 
 Before I could utter another word, a grasp upon my 
 ankle, that drew blood with every nail, restored me to 
 my self-possession. The Circassians began to giggle, 
 and the wary old Turk, taking no apparent notice of 
 my agitation, ordered me, in a stern tone, to fill his 
 pipe, and went on conversing with the Egyptian. 
 
 I leaned with an effort at carelessness against the 
 wall, and looked once more through the crevice. She 
 stood by the manghal, filling a cup with a small fila- 
 gree-holder from the coffee-pot, and by the light of the 
 fire I could see every feature of her face as distinctly 
 as daylight. She was alone, and had been sitting 
 with her head on her knees, and the shawl, which had 
 now fallen to her shoulders, drawn over her till it con- 
 cealed her feet. A narrow carpet was beneath her, 
 and as she moved from the fire, a slight noise drew my 
 attention downward, and I saw that she was chained by 
 the ankle to the floor. I stooped to the ear of Mus- 
 tapha, told him in a whisper of my discovery, and im- 
 plored him, for the love of Heaven, to get admission 
 into her apartment. 
 
 " Pekhe ! pekhe ! filio mio /" was the unsatisfactory 
 answer to my impatience, while the Egyptian rose and 
 proceeded to turn around, in the light of the window, 
 the fattest of the fair Circassians, from whom he had 
 removed every article of dress save her slippers and 
 trousers. 
 
 I returned to the crevice. Maimuna had drunk her 
 coffee, and stood, with her arms folded, thoughtfully 
 gazing on the fire. The expression in her beautiful 
 and youthful face was one I could scarcely read to my 
 satisfaction. The slight lips were firmly but calmly 
 compressed, the forehead untroubled, the eye alone 
 strained, and unnaturally fixed and lowering. I 
 looked at her with the heart beating like a hammer in 
 my bosom, and the impatience in my trembling limbs 
 which it required every consideration of prudence to 
 suppress. She moved slowly away at last, and sink- 
 ing again to her carpet, drew out the chain from be- 
 neath her, and drawing the shawl once more over her 
 head, lav down, and sunk apparently to sleep. 
 
 Mustapha left the Circassian, whose beauties he had 
 risen to examine more nearly, and came to my side. 
 
 " Are you sure that it is she?" he asked, in an al- 
 most inaudible whisper. 
 
 " Si ."' 
 
 He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me, 
 in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop. 
 
 " And Maimuna" 
 
 His only answer was to point to the door, and think- 
 ing it best to obey his orders implicity, I made the 
 best of my way out of the slave-market, and was soon 
 drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listen- 
 ing to the shuffle of every passing slipper for the com- 
 ing of the light step of the gipsy. 
 
 III. 
 
 The rules of good-breeding discountenance in socie- 
 ty what is usually called " a scene." I detest it as 
 well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, f.ppa- 
 rent to me, why my sensibilities should be drawj upon 
 at sight, as I read, any more than when I pie? je myself 
 by following my own devices in company. Violent 
 sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally, 
 ill-bred. They derange the serenitv, fluster the man- 
 ner, and irritate the complexion. It is for this reason 
 that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimu- 
 
424 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 na and myself after she had been bought for forty 
 pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and 
 pastilles — how she fell on ray neck when she discovered 
 that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and mas- 
 ter — how she explained, between her hysterical sobs, 
 that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was 
 a renegade gipsy, and her mother's brother (to whom 
 she had been on an errand of affection) — and how she 
 sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of 
 my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my 
 knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pie- 
 tro — and how I pressed my lips to the starry parting 
 of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head, 
 and blessed the relying child as she slept — are circum- 
 stances, you will allow, my dear madam ! that could 
 not be told passably well without moving your amiable 
 tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph, 
 therefore, less as an ingenious manner of disposing of 
 the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and 
 praise-worthy consideration of your feelings and com- 
 plexion. Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 My confidential interviews with Job began to take 
 rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I 
 had paid for Maimuna's liberty, with the premium to 
 Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to 
 disguise my new companion, and the addition of a 
 third person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather 
 drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little 
 for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and 
 made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop, 
 instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at 
 Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same 
 resignation to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus, 
 and several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking 
 nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully 
 with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat 
 of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem 
 or Mecca, so only I was content. But the morality of 
 the thing ! 
 
 " What will you do with this beautiful girl when 
 you get to Rome? how will you dispose of her in 
 Paris ? how will your friends receive a female, already 
 arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have 
 travelled with you two or three years on the continent ? 
 how will you provide for her? how educate her? how 
 rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of com- 
 passion, when she has become irrevocably attached to 
 you?" 
 
 We were pulling up to the Rymplegades while my 
 plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions, 
 and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom 
 of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that 
 seemed as if they would search my very soul for the 
 cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in 
 her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt 
 excluded from the conversation amounted in her all- 
 expressive features to a look of anguish that made it 
 seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in 
 words, why I was vexed ; but she gathered from Job's 
 tone that there was reproof in what he said, and 
 flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious 
 face, she gently stole her hand under the cloak to 
 mine, and laid the back of it softly in my palm. There 
 was a delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that 
 started a tear into my eye ; and as I smiled through it, 
 and drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her fore- 
 head, I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely 
 creature should choose to eat of my bread, it should 
 be free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need 
 were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my 
 life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world. 
 As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept 
 through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my good 
 
 angel had taken me into favor. Job began to fumble 
 for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot forth mer- 
 rily into the Black sea. 
 
 "My dearest chum!" said I, as we sat round our 
 brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the 
 Symplegades, "you see yourself here at the outer- 
 most limit of your travels." 
 
 His mouth was full, but as soon as he could con- 
 veniently swallow, he responded with the appropriate 
 sigh. 
 
 " Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you 
 and your spectacled and respectable mother; but 
 nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's 
 circumference, extending due east from this paper of 
 cold meat, remain to you untravelled !" 
 
 Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently 
 asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the 
 sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with 
 our boundless wishes. 
 
 "Do you not envy him?" he asked enthusiastically. 
 
 "Yes; for nature pays his travelling expenses, and 
 I would our common mother were as considerate to 
 me ! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond, 
 posting at that courier speed ?" 
 
 " And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cash- 
 mere ! To think how that stupid bird will flyover 
 them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom 
 Moore, have written on the lands that his shadow may 
 glide throught, will return, as wise as he went, to 
 Marmora ! To compound natures with him were a 
 nice arrangement, now!" 
 
 "You would be better looking, my dear Job!" 
 
 " How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby ! But 
 really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and 
 il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with 
 all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into 
 breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under 
 you, and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put 
 off and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a 
 self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed 
 and washed in the common course of nature by wind 
 and rain — no valet to be paid and drilled — no dressing- 
 case to be supplied and left behind — no tooth-brushes 
 to be mislaid — no tight boots — no corns — no passports 
 nor host-horses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I 
 find this 'mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient 
 apparatus!" 
 
 "If you mean your own, I quite agree with you." 
 
 "I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value 
 yourself on knowing what is due from one highly- 
 civilized individual to another, should indulge in these 
 very disagreeable reflections !" 
 
 Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument, 
 but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without 
 ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always 
 taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my 
 neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and 
 put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her 
 clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added 
 visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious 
 visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should 
 scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all, 
 but a kind severity. 
 
 " Do you know, Job," said I (anxious to restore his 
 self-complacency without a direct apology for my ruds- 
 ness), "do you know there is a very deep human truth 
 hidden in the familiar story of ' Beauty and the Beast ?' 
 I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of 
 hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness, 
 there is no face which, after a month's intercourse, 
 does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in 
 other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual) 
 for the admiration it excites. The plainest features 
 become handsome unaware when associated only with 
 kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when 
 linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should re- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 425 
 
 member this when selecting a face which they are to 
 see every morning across the breakfast-table for the re- 
 mainder of their natural lives." 
 
 Job was appeased by the indirect compliment con- 
 tained in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs, 
 we descended to the caique, and pulling around the 
 easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to 
 the orient, and took the first step westward with the 
 smile of conciliation on our lips. 
 
 We were soon in the strong current of the Bospho- 
 rus, and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia, 
 by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the 
 west for our return. It was a golden path homeward. 
 The east looked cold behind ; and the welcome of 
 our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those pur- 
 pling clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling 
 horizon — below that departed sun — lay the fresh and 
 free land of our inheritance. The light of the world 
 seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day 
 had declined, were countries of memory — ours, of 
 hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawn- 
 ing gloriously on ours. 
 
 On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a 
 stave of " Hail Columbia !" after such a burst of pa- 
 triotism. The cloud was on his soul, however. 
 
 "We have turned to go back,'''' he said, in a kind of 
 musing bitterness, " and see what we are leaving be- 
 hind ! In this fairy-shaped boat you are gliding like a 
 dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of 
 Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure- 
 loving inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a 
 life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ram- 
 ble on the edge of these calm waters with their kins- 
 men and children. Is there a picture in the woild 
 more beautiful than that palace-lined shore ? Is there 
 a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it 
 terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills, 
 simpler or better people, to live among, than these ? 
 Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a 'working- 
 day' land. There is no idleness there ! The sweat is 
 ever on the brow, the 'serpent of care' never loosened 
 about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of 
 leisure : I would let no moment of my golden youth 
 go by unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike, 
 and unworthy of the immortal spirit, that should walk 
 unchained through the world. I love these idle orien- 
 tals. Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their 
 flowing and ungirded habiliments, are signs most ex- 
 pressive of their joy in life. Look around, and see 
 how on every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance ; 
 how every hill-side is shelved into those green plat- 
 forms,* so expressive of their habits of enjoyment! 
 Rich or poor, their pleasures are the same. The 
 open air, freedom to roam, a caique at the water-side, 
 and a sairgah on the hill — these are their means of 
 happiness, and they are within the reach of all ; they 
 are nearer Utopia than we, my dear Philip ! We shall 
 be more like Turks than Christians in paradise!" 
 
 " Inglorious Job!" 
 
 "Why? Because I love idleness? Are there 
 braver people in the world than the Turks? Are 
 there people more capable of the romance of heroism ? 
 Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of 
 idleness. All extremes are natural and easy; and the 
 most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in 
 war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sul- 
 tan Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle? 
 Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the 
 boldest measures in history. There is the most per- 
 fect orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty 
 byHafiz:— J 
 
 ' Her heart is full of passion, and her eyes are full of sleep.' 
 
 • All around Constantinople are seen what are called sair- 
 gafts— small greensward platforms levelled in the side of a 
 hill, and usually commanding some lovely view, intended as 
 spots on which those who are abroad for pleasure may spread 
 
 Perhaps nothing would be so contradictory as the true 
 analysis of the character of what is called jan indolent 
 man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my 
 strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for ex- 
 ample, was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my 
 steps. ' Onward ! onward ." is the perpetual cry of 
 my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to 
 land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy 
 will be old to us ; France, Germany, can scarce lure 
 the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we 
 have: and England, though we have not seen it, is so 
 familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem, 
 even on a first visit, a strange country. We have sa- 
 tiety before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate 
 J to go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a 
 I guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia." 
 "Will you go with him, Maimuna?" 
 " Signor, no!" 
 
 I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader ; for I 
 | never get to the end. The truth is, that in these ram- 
 1 bling papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as 
 ! they should be written in a romance, but as they oc- 
 curred in my travels : I write what I remember. There 
 i are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up 
 , sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with 
 idleness, or love; and, to please myself, I must un- 
 ' weave the thread as it was woven. It is strange how, 
 in the memory of a traveller, the most wayside and un- 
 important things are the best remembered. You may 
 have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon 
 , it through the distance of years, a chance word of the 
 j companion who happened to be with you, or the atti- 
 tude of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up 
 more vividly to the recollection than the immortal 
 | sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy 
 j in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander 
 j from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on 
 i something we have discovered ourselves. The child 
 ; in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayer- 
 I book, and "the child is father of the man." If I in- 
 | dulge in the same perversity in story-telling, dear 
 ! reader — if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I 
 I digress to some trifling vein of speculation — if, at the 
 | close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral 
 i vain — I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to 
 truth and nature. Life — real life — is made up of half- 
 finished romance. The most interesting procession of 
 events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the 
 I ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left 
 imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five-act 
 tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax? 
 
 PART III. 
 
 Ten o'clock A. M., and the weather like the prophet's 
 paradise, 
 
 " Warmth without heat, and coolness without cold." 
 
 Madame Josepino stood at the door of her Turco-Ital- 
 
 j ian boarding-house in the nasty and fashionable main 
 
 j street of Pera, dividing her attention between a hand- 
 
 i some Armenian, with a red button in the top of his 
 
 black lamb's-wool cap,f and her three boarders, Job, 
 
 Maimuna, and myself, at that critical moment about 
 
 mounting our horses for a gallop to Belgrade. 
 
 their carpets. I know nothing so expressive as this of the 
 simple and natural lives led by these gentle orientals. 
 
 tThe Armenians at Constantinople are despised by the 
 Turks, and tacily submit, like the Jews, to occupy a degraded 
 position as a people. A few, however, are employed as in- 
 terpreters by the embassies, and these are allowed to wear 
 the mark of a red worsted button in the high black cap of the 
 race — a distinction which just serves to make them the great- 
 est possible coxcombs. 
 
426 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 We kissed our hands to the fat and fair Italian, and 
 with a promise to be at home for supper, kicked our 
 shovel-shaped stirrups into the sides of our horses, and 
 pranced away up the street, getting many a glance of 
 curiosity, and one or two that might be more freely 
 translated, from the dark eyes that are seen day and 
 night at the windows of the leaden-colored houses of 
 the Armenians. 
 
 We should have been an odd-looking cavalcade for 
 the Boulevard or Bond street, but, blessed privilege of 
 the east ! we were sufficiently comme il faut for Pera. 
 To avoid the embarrassment of Maimuna's sex, I had 
 dressed her, from an English "slop-shop" at Galata, 
 in the checked shirt, jacket, and trowsers of a sailor- 
 boy, but as she was obstinately determined that her 
 long black hair should not be shorn, a turban was her 
 only resource for concealment, and the dark and 
 glossy mass was hidden in the folds of an Albanian 
 shawl, forming altogether as inharmonious a costume 
 as could well be imagined. With the white duck 
 trowsers tight over her hips, and the jacket, which was 
 a little too large for her, loose over her shoulders and 
 breast, the checked collar tied with a black silk cravat 
 close round her throat, and the silken and gold fringe 
 of the shawl flowing coquetishly over her left cheek 
 and ear, she was certainly an odd figure on horseback, 
 and, but for her admirable riding and excessive grace of 
 altitude, she might have been as much a subject for a 
 caricature as her companion. Job rode soberly along 
 at her side, in the green turban of a Hajji (which he 
 had persisted in wearing ever since his pilgrimage to 
 Jerusalem), and, as he usually put it on askew, the 
 gaillard and rakish character of his head-dress, and 
 the grave respectability of his black coat and salt-and- 
 pepper trowsers, produced a contrast which elicited 
 a smile even from the admiring damsels at the win- 
 dows. 
 
 Maimuna went caracoling along till the road entered 
 the black shadow of the cemetery of Pera, and then, 
 pulling up her well-managed horse, she rode close to 
 my side, with the air of subdued respect which was 
 more fitting to the spirit of the scene. It was a lovely 
 morning, as I said, and the Turks, who are early risers, 
 were sitting on the graves of their kindred with their 
 veiled wives and children, the marble turbans in that 
 thickly-sown nekropolis less numerous than those of the 
 living, who had come, not to mourn the dead who lay 
 beneath, but to pass a day of idleness and pleasure on 
 the spot endeared by their memories. 
 
 " I declare to you," said Job, following Maimuna's 
 example in waiting till I came up, " that I think the 
 Turks the most misrepresented and abused people on 
 earth. Look at this scene ! Here are whole families 
 seated upon graves over which the grass grows green 
 and fresh, the children playing at their feet, and their 
 own faces the pictures of calm cheerfulness and enjoy- 
 ment. They are the by-word for brutes, and there is 
 not a gentler or more poetical race of beings between 
 the Indus and the Arkansas !" 
 
 It was really a scene of great beauty. The Turkish 
 tombs are as splendid as white marble can make them, 
 with letters and devices in red and gold, and often the 
 most delicious sculptures, and, with the crowded close- 
 ness of the monuments, the vast extent of the burial- 
 ground over hill and dale, and the cypresses (nowhere 
 so magnificent) veiling all in a deep religious shadow, 
 dim, and yet broken by spots of the clearest sunshine, 
 a more impressive and peculiar scene could scarce be 
 imagined. It might exist in other countries, but it 
 would be a desert. To the Mussulman death is not 
 repulsive, and he makes it a resort when he would be 
 happiest. At all hours of the day you find the 
 tombs of Constantinople surrounded by the living. 
 They spread their carpets, and arrange their simple 
 repast around the stone which records the name and 
 virtues of their own dead, and talk of them as they do 
 
 of the living and absent — parted from them to meet 
 again, if not in life, in paradise. 
 
 " For my own part," continued Job, " I see nothing 
 in scripture which contradicts the supposition that we 
 shall haunt, in the intermediate state between death 
 and heaven, the familiar places to which we have been 
 accustomed. In that case, how delightful are the hab- 
 its of these people, and how cheeringly vanish the hor- 
 rors of the grave ! Death, with us, is appalling ! The 
 smile has scarce faded from our lips, the light scarce 
 dead in our eye, when we are thrust into a noisome 
 vault, and thought of but with a shudder and a fear. 
 We are connected thenceforth, in the memories of our 
 friends, with the pestilent air in which we lie, with the 
 vermin that infest the gloom, with dullness, with dark- 
 ness, with disease; and, memento as it is of their own 
 coming destiny, what wonder if they chase us, and the 
 forecast shadows of the grave, with the same hurried 
 disgust from their remembrance. Suppose, for an in- 
 stant (what is by no means improbable), that the 
 spirits of the dead are about us, conscious and watch- 
 ful ! Suppose that they have still a feeling of sympa- 
 thy in the decaying form they have so long inhabited, 
 in its organs, its senses, its once-admired and long- 
 cherished grace and proportion; that they feel the 
 contumely and disgust with which the features we pro- 
 fessed to love are cast like garbage into the earth, and 
 the indecent haste with which we turn away from the 
 solitary spot, and think of it but as the abode of fester- 
 ing and revolting corruption !" 
 
 At this moment we turned to the left, descending to 
 the Bosphorus, and Maimuna, who had ridden a little 
 in advance during Job's unintelligible monologue, came 
 galloping back to tell us that there was a corpse in the 
 road. We quickened our pace, and the next moment 
 our horses started aside from the bier, left in a bend of 
 the highway with a single individual, the grave-digger, 
 sitting cross-legged beside it. Without looking up at 
 our approach, the man mumbled something between 
 his teeth, and held up his hand as if to arrest us in our 
 path. 
 
 "What does he say ?" I asked of Maimuna. 
 
 " He repeats a verse of the Koran," she replied, 
 " which promises a reward in paradise to him who 
 bears the dead forty steps on its way to the grave." 
 
 Job sprang instantly from his horse, threw the bridle 
 over the nearest tombstone, and made a sign to the 
 grave-digger that he would officiate as bearer. The 
 man nodded assent, but looked down the road without 
 arising from his seat. 
 
 " You are but three," said Maimuna, " and he waits 
 for a fourth." 
 
 I had dismounted by this time, not to be behind my 
 friend in the humanities of life, and the grave-digger, 
 seeing that we were Europeans, smiled with a kind 
 of pleased surprise, and uttering the all-expressive 
 " Pekkhe /" resumed his look-out for the fourth 
 bearer. 
 
 The corpse was that of a poor old man. The cof- 
 fin was without a cover, and he lay in it, in his turban 
 and slippers, his hands crossed over his breast, and 
 the folds of his girdle stuck full of flowers. He might 
 have been asleep, for any look of death about him. 
 His lips were slightly unclosed, and his long beard was 
 combed smoothly over his breast. The odor of the 
 pipe and the pastille struggled with the perfume of the 
 flowers, and there was in his whole aspect a life-like- 
 ness and peace, that the shroud and the close coffin, 
 and the additional horrors of approaching death, per- 
 haps, combine, in other countries, utterly to do away. 
 
 " Hitherto," said Job, as he gazed attentively on the 
 calm old man, " I have envied the Scaligers their up- 
 lifted and airy tombs in the midst of the cheerful street 
 of Verona, and, next to theirs, the sunny sarcophagus 
 of Petrarch, looking away over the peaceful Campagna 
 of Lombardy ; but here is a Turkish beggar who will 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 427 
 
 be buried still more enviably. Is it not a paradise of 
 tombs — a kind of Utopia of the dead ?" 
 
 A young man with a load of vegetables for the 
 market of Pera, came toiling; up the hill behind his 
 mule. Sure of his assistance, the grave-digger arose, 
 and as we took our places at the poles, the marketer 
 quietly turned his beast out of the road, and assisted 
 us in lifting the dead on our shoulders. The grave 
 was not far off, and having deposited the corpse on its 
 border, we returned to our horses, and, soon getting 
 clear of the cemetery, galloped away with light hearts 
 toward the valley of Sweet Waters. 
 
 II. 
 
 We were taking breath on the silken banks of the 
 Barbyses — Maimuna prancing along the pebbly bed, 
 up to her barb's girths in sparkling water, and Job and 
 myself laughing at her frolics from either side, when 
 an old woman, bent double with age, came hobbling 
 toward us from a hovel in the hill-side. 
 
 " Maimuna," said Job, fishing out some trumpery 
 paras from the corner of his waistcoat pocket, " give 
 this to that good woman, and tell her that he who gives 
 it is happy, and would share his joy with her." 
 
 The gipsy spurred up the bank, dismounted at a 
 short distance from the decrepit creature, and after a 
 little conversation returned, leading her horse. 
 
 " She is not a beggar, and wishes to know why you 
 give her money ?" 
 
 " Tell her, to buy bread for her children." said my 
 patriarchal friend. 
 
 Maimuna went back, conversed with her again, and 
 returned with the money. 
 
 " She says she has no need of it. There is nohuman 
 creature between her and Allah /" 
 
 The old woman hobbled on, Job pocketed his re- 
 jected paras, and Maimuna rode between us in silence. 
 
 It was a gem of natural poetry that was worthy of 
 the lips of an angel. 
 
 III. 
 
 We kept up the valley of Sweet Waters, tracing 
 the Barbyses through its bosom, to the hills ; and then 
 mounting a steep ascent, struck across to the east, over 
 a country, which, though so near the capital of the 
 Turkish empire, is as wild as the plains of the Hermus. 
 Shrubs, forest-trees, and wild grass, cover the appa- 
 rently illimitable waste, and save a half-visible horse- 
 path which guides the traveller across, there is scarce 
 an evidence that you are not the first adventurer in the 
 wilderness. 
 
 What a natural delight is freedom ! What a bound 
 gives the heart at the sight of the unfenced earth, the 
 unseparated hill-sides, the unhedged and unharvested 
 valleys ! How thrilling it is — unlike any other joy — 
 to spur a fiery horse to the hill-top, and gaze away 
 over dell and precipice to the horizon, and never a 
 wall between, nor a human limit to say " Thus far 
 shalt thou go, and no farther !" Oh, I think we have 
 an instinct, dulled by civilization, which is like the 
 caged eaglet's, or the antelope's that is reared in the 
 Arab's tent ; an instinct of nature that scorns boundary 
 and chain ; that yearns to the free desert ; that would 
 have the earth, like the sea or the sky, unappropriated 
 and open ; that rejoices in immeasurable liberty of foot 
 and dwelling-place, and springs passionately back to 
 its freedom even after years of subduing method and 
 spirit-breaking confinement ! I have felt it on the sea, 
 in the forests of America, on the desolated plains of 
 Asia and Roumelia ; I should feel it till my heart 
 burst, had I the wings of a bird ! 
 
 The house once occupied by Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu stands on the descent of a hill in the little vil- 
 lage of Belgrade, some twelve or fourteen miles from 
 
 Constantinople. It is a common-place two-story affair, 
 but the best house of the dozen that form the village, 
 and overlooks a dell below that reminds one of the 
 "Emerald valleys of Cashmeer." We wandered 
 through its deserted rooms, discussed the clever wo- 
 man who has described her travels so graphically, and 
 then followed Maimuna to the narrow street, in search 
 ofkibaubs. The butcher's shop in Turkey is as open 
 as the trottoir to the street, and with only an entire 
 sheep hanging between us and a dozen hungry beg- 
 gars, attracted by the presence of strangers, we crossed 
 our legs on the straw carpet, and setting the wooden 
 tripod in the centre, waited patiently the movements of 
 our feeder, who combined in his single person the 
 three vocations of butcher, cook, and waiter. One 
 must have travelled east of Cape Colonna to relish a 
 dinner so slightly disguised, but, once rid of European 
 prejudices, there is nothing more simple than the fact 
 that it is rather an attractive mode of feeding — a travel- 
 ler's appetite subauditur. 
 
 Our friend was a wholesome-looking Turk, with a 
 snow-white turban, a black, well-conditioned beard, a 
 mouth incapable of a smile, yet honest, and a most 
 trenchant and janissarcsque style of handling his 
 cleaver. Having laid open his bed of coals with a 
 , kind of conjurer's flourish of the poker, he slapped the 
 ; pendent mutton on the thigh in a fashion of encourage- 
 ment, and waiting an instant for our admiration to sub- 
 ' side, he whipping his knife from its sheath, and had out 
 J a dozen strips from the chine (as Job expressed it in 
 ' Vermontese) " in no time." With the same alacrity 
 these were cut into bits " of the size of a piece of 
 chalk" (another favorite expression of Job's), run 
 j upon a skewer, and laid on the coals, and in three 
 I minutes, more or less, they appeared smoking on the 
 j trencher, half lost in a fine green salad, well peppered, 
 I and of a most seducing and provocative savor. If you 
 have performed your four ablutions A. M., like adevout 
 I Mussulman, it is not conceived in Turkey that you 
 I have occasion for the medium of a fork, and I frankly 
 own, that I might have been seen at Belgrade, cross- 
 legged in a kibaub-shay, betwee« my friend and the 
 gipsy, and making a most diligent use of my thumb 
 and fore-finger. I have dined since at the Rocher de 
 J Cancale and the Traveller's with less satisfaction. 
 
 Having paid something like sixpence sterling for 
 
 our three dinners (rather an overcharge, Maimuna 
 
 thought), we unpicketed our horses from the long 
 
 grass, and bade adieu to Belgrade, on our way to the 
 
 aqueducts. We were to follow down a verdant val- 
 
 \ ley, and, exhilarated by a flask of Greek wine (which 
 
 ; I forgot to mention), and the ever-thrilling circum- 
 
 I stances of unlimited greensward and horses that wait 
 
 not for the spur, we followed the daring little Asiatic 
 
 : up hill and down, over bush and precipice, till Job 
 
 ; cried us mercy. We pulled up on the edge of a sheet 
 
 ' of calm water, and the vast marble wall, built by the 
 
 sultans in the days of their magnificence and crossing 
 
 the valley from side to side, burst upon us like a scene 
 
 of enchantment in the wilderness. 
 
 Those same sultans must have lived a great deal at 
 Belgrade. Save these vast aqueducts, which are splen- 
 did monuments of architecture, there is little in the 
 first aspect to remind you that you are not in the wilds 
 ! of Missouri; but a further search discloses, in the re- 
 \ cesses of the hidden windings of the valley, circular 
 ' staircases of marble leading to secluded baths, now 
 1 filled with leaves and neglected, but evidently on a 
 I scale of the most imperial sumptuousness. From the 
 perishable construction of Turkish dwelling-houses, all 
 traces even of the most costly serai may easily have 
 disappeared in a few years, when once abandoned to 
 ruin; and I pleased myself with imagining, as we 
 slackened bridle, and rode slowly beneath the gigantic 
 trees of the forest, the gilded pavilions, and gay scenes 
 of oriental pleasure that must have existed here in 
 
428 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the days of the warlike yet effeminate Selims. It is a 
 place for the enchantments of the "Arabian Nights" 
 to have been realized. 
 
 I have followed the common error in giving these 
 structures in the forest of Belgrade the name of aque- 
 ducts. They are rather walls built across the deep 
 valleys, of different altitudes, to create reservoirs for 
 the supply of aqueducts, but are built with all the 
 magnificence and ornament of a facade to a temple. 
 
 We rode on from one to the other, 'arriving at last at 
 the lowest, which divides the valley at its wildest part, 
 forming a giddy wall across an apparently bottomless 
 ravine, as dark and impracticable as the glen of the 
 Cauterskill in America. Our road lay on the other 
 side, but though with a steady eye one might venture 
 to cross the parapet on foot, there were no means of 
 getting our horses over, short of a return of half a mile 
 to the path we had neglected higher up the valley. 
 We might swim it, above the embankment, but the 
 opposite shore was a precipice. 
 
 " What shall we do ?" I asked. 
 
 Job made no answer, but pulled round his beast, 
 and started off in a sober canter to return. 
 
 I stood a moment, gazing on the placid sheet of 
 water above, and the abyss of rock and darkness be- 
 low, and then calling to Maimuna, who had ridden 
 farther down the bank, I turned my horse's head after 
 him. 
 
 "Signore!" cried the gipsy from below. 
 
 "What is it, Carissima ?" 
 
 "Maimuna never goes back!" 
 
 "Silly child!" I answered, "you are not going to 
 cross the ravine ?" 
 
 " Yes !" was the reply, and the voice became more 
 indistinguishable as she galloped away. " I will be 
 over before you!" 
 
 I was vexed, but I knew the self-will and temerity 
 of the wild Asiatic, and, very certain that if there 
 were danger it would be run before I could reach 
 her, I drove the stirrups into my horse's sides, and 
 overtook Job at the descent into the valley. We as- 
 cended again, and rod* down the opposite shore to the 
 embankment, at a sharp gallop. Maimuna was not 
 there. 
 
 " She will have perished in the abyss," said Job. 
 
 I sprang from my horse to cross the parapet on foot 
 in search of her, when I heard her horse's footsteps, 
 and the next moment she dashed up the steep, having 
 failed in her attempt, and stood once more where we 
 had parted. The sun was setting, and we had ten 
 miles to ride, and impatient of her obstinacy, I sharply 
 ordered her to go up the ravine at speed, and cross as 
 we had done. 
 
 I think I never shall forget, angry as I was at the 
 moment, the appearance of that lovely creature, as 
 she resolutely refused to obey me. Her horse, the 
 same fiery Arabian she had ridden from Sardis (an 
 animal that, except when she was on his back, would 
 scarce have sold for a gold sequin), stood with head 
 erect and panting nostrils, glancing down with his 
 wild eyes upon the abyss into which he had been 
 urged— the whole group, horse and rider, completely 
 relieved against the sky from the isolated mound they 
 occupied, and, at this instant, the gold flood of the set- 
 ting sun pouring full on them through a break in the 
 masses of the forest. Her own fierce attitude, and 
 beautiful and frowning face, the thin lip curled reso- 
 lutely, and the brown and polished cheek deepened 
 with a rosy glow, her full and breathing bosom swell- 
 ing beneath its jacket, and her hair, which had escaped 
 from the turban, flowing over her neck and shoulders, 
 and mingling with the loosened fringes of red and gold 
 in rich disorder — it was a picture which the pencil of 
 Martin (and it would have suited his genius) could 
 scarce have exaggerated. The stately half Arabic, 
 half Grecian architecture of the aqueducts, and the 
 
 cold and frowning tints of the abyss and the forest 
 around, would have left him nothing to add to it as a 
 composition. 
 
 I was crossing the giddy edge of the parapet, look- 
 ing well to my feet, with the intention of reasoning 
 with the obstinate being, who, vexed at my reproaches 
 and her own failure, was now in as pretty a rage as 
 myself, when I heard the trampling of horses in the 
 forest. I stopped mid-way to listen, and presently 
 there sprang a horseman up the bank in an oriental 
 costume, with pistols and ataghan flashing in the 
 sun, and a cast of features that at once betrayed his 
 origin. 
 
 "A Zingara!" I shouted back to Job. 
 
 The gipsy, who was about nineteen, and as well- 
 made and gallant a figure for a man as Maimuna for a 
 woman, seemed as much astonished as ourselves, and 
 sat in his saddle gazing on the extraordinary figure I 
 have described, evidently recognising one of his own 
 race, but probably puzzled with the mixture of cos- 
 tumes, and struck at the same time with Maimuna's 
 excessive beauty. Lovely as she always was, I had 
 never seen her to such advantage as now. She might 
 have come from fairy-land, for the radiant vision she 
 seemed in the gold of that burning sunset. 
 
 I gazed on them both a moment, and was about 
 finishing my traverse of the parapet, when a troop of 
 mounted gipsies and baggage-horses came up the bank 
 at a quick pace, and in another minute Maimuna was 
 surrounded. I sprang to her bridle, and apprehensive 
 of, I scarce knew what danger, gave her one of the 
 two pistols I carried always in my bosom. 
 
 The gipsy chief (for such he evidently was) meas- 
 ured me from head to foot with a look of dislike, and 
 speaking for the first time, addressed Maimuna in his 
 own language, with a remark which sent the blood to 
 her temples with a suddenness I had never before 
 seen. 
 
 " What does he say ?" I asked. 
 
 " It is no matter, signore, but it is false !" Hei 
 black eyes were like coals of fire, as she spoke. 
 
 " Leave your horse," I said to her, in a low tone, 
 " and cross the parapet. I will prevent his following 
 you, and will join you on your own before you can 
 reach Constantinople. Turn the horses' heads home- 
 ward!" I continued in English to Job, who was crying 
 out to me from the other side to come back. 
 
 Maimuna laid her hand on the pommel to dismount, 
 but the gipsy, anticipating her motion, touched his 
 horse with the stirrup, and sprang with a single leap 
 between her and the parapet. The troop had gath- 
 ered into a circle behind us, and seeing our retreat 
 thus cut off, I presented my pistol to the young chief, 
 and demanded, in Italian, that he should clear the 
 way. 
 
 A blow from behind, the instant that I was pulling 
 the trigger, sent the discharged pistol into the ravine, 
 and, in the same instant, Maimuna dashed her horse 
 against the unguarded gipsy, nearly overturning him 
 into the abyss, and spurred desperately upon the para- 
 pet. One cry from the whole gipsy troop, and then 
 all was as silent as the grave, except the click of her 
 horse's hoofs on the marble verge, as, trembling pal- 
 pably in every limb, the terrified animal crossed the 
 giddy chasm at a half trot, and, in the next minute, 
 bounded up the opposite bank, and disappeared with 
 a snort of fear and delight amid the branches of the 
 forest. 
 
 What with horror and wonder, and the shock of the 
 blow which had nearly broken my arm, I stood mo- 
 tionless where Maimuna had left me, till the gipsy, re- 
 covering from his amazement, dismounted and put his 
 pistol to my breast. 
 
 " Call her back !" he said to me, in very good Ital- 
 ian, and with a tone in which rage and determination 
 were strangely mingled, "or you die where you stand ! 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 429 
 
 Without regarding his threat, I looked at him, with 
 a new thought stealing into my mind. He probably 
 read the pacific change in my feelings, for he dropped 
 his arm, and the frown on his own features moderated 
 to a steadfast and inquisitive regard. 
 
 '•Zingara!" I said, "Maimuna is my slave." 
 
 A clutch of his pistol-stock, and a fiery and impa- 
 tient look from his fine eyes, interrupted me for an in- 
 stant. I proceeded to tell him briefly how I had ob- 
 tained possession of her, while the troop gradually 
 closed around, attracted by his excessive look of in- 
 terest in the tale, though they probably did not under- 
 stand the language in which I spoke, and all fixing 
 their wild eyes earnestly on my face. 
 
 " And now, Zingara," I said, "I will bring her back 
 on one condition — that, when the offer is fairly made 
 her, if she chooses still to go with me, she shall be 
 free to do so. I have protected her, and sworn still 
 to protect her as long as she should choose to eat of 
 my bread. Though my slave, she is pure and guilt- 
 less as when she left the tent of her mother, and is 
 worthy of the bosom of an emperor." 
 
 The Zingara took my hand, and put it to his lips. 
 
 "You agree to our compact, then?" I asked. 
 
 He put his hand on his forehead, and then laid it, 
 with a slight inclination, on his breast. 
 
 " She can not have gone far," I said, and stepping 
 on the mound above the parapet, I shouted her name 
 till the woods rang again with the echo. 
 
 A moment, and Job and Maimuna came riding to 
 the verge of the opposite hill, and with a few words 
 of explanation, fastened their horses to a tree, and 
 crossed to us by the parapet. 
 
 The chief returned his pistols to his girdle, and 
 Btood aside while I spoke to Maimuna. It was a diffi- 
 cult task, but I felt that it was a moment decisive of 
 her destiny, and the responsibility weighed heavily on 
 my breast. Though excessively attached to her — 
 though she had been endeared to me by sacrifices, and 
 by the ties of protection — though, in short, I loved 
 her, not with a passion, but with an affection — as a 
 father more than as a lover — I still felt it to be my duty 
 to leave no means untried to induce her to abandon 
 me, to return to her own people and remain in her own 
 land of the sun. What her fate would be in the state 
 of society to which I must else introduce her, had 
 been eloquently depicted by Job, and will readily be 
 imagined by the reader. 
 
 After the first burst of incredulity and astonishment 
 at my proposal, she folded her arms on her bosom, 
 and, with the tears streaming like rain over her jacket, 
 listened in silence and with averted eyes. I conclu- 
 ded with representing to her, in rather strong colors, 
 the feelings with which she might be received by my 
 friends, and the difficulty she would find in accommo- 
 dating herself to the customs of people, to whom not 
 only she must be inferior in the accomplishments of 
 a woman, but who might find, even in the color of that 
 loveliest cheek, a reason to despise her. 
 
 Her lip curled for an instant, but the grief in her 
 heart was stronger than the scorn for an imaginary 
 wrong, and she bowed her head again, and her tears 
 flowed on. 
 
 I was silent at last, and she looked up into my face. 
 
 41 I am a burthen to you," she said. 
 
 " No, dearest Maimuna ! no ! but if I were to see 
 you wretched hereafter, you would become so. Tell 
 me ! the chief will make you his wife ; will you re- 
 join your people ?" 
 
 She flung herself upon the ground, and wept as if 
 her heart would break. I thought it best to let her 
 feelings have away, and walking apart with the young 
 gipsy, I gave him more of the particulars of her his- 
 tory, and exacted a promise that, if she should finally 
 be left with the troop, he would return with her to the 
 tribe of her mother, at Sardis. 
 
 Maimuna stood gazing fixedly inlo the ravine when 
 we turned back, and there was an erectness in her at- 
 titude, and afierte in the air of her head, that, I must 
 acknowledge, promised more for my fears than my 
 wishes. Her pride was roused, it was easy with half 
 a glance to see. 
 
 With the suddenness of oriental passion, the young 
 chief had become already enamored of her, and, with 
 a feeling of jealousy which, even though I wished him 
 success, I could not control, I saw him kneel at her 
 feet and plead with her in an inaudible tone. She had 
 been less than woman if she had been insensible to 
 that passionate cadence, and the imploring earnest- 
 ness of the noble countenance on which she looked. 
 It was evident that she was interested, though she 
 began with scarce deigning to lift her eyes from the 
 ground. 
 
 1 felt a sinking of the heart which I can not describe 
 when he rose to his feet and left her standing alone. 
 The troop had withdrawn at his command, and Job, 
 to whom the scene was too painful, had recrossed the 
 ; parapet, and stood by his horse's head waiting the re- 
 j suit. The twilight had deepened, the forest looked 
 black around us, and a single star sprang int& the sky, 
 while the west was still glowing in a fast purpling gold 
 and crimson. 
 
 " Signore !" said Maimuna, walking calmly to my 
 hand, which I stretched instinctively to receive her, 
 " I am breaking my heart ; 1 know not what to do." 
 
 At this instant a faint meteor shot over the sky, and 
 drew its reflection across the calm mirror whose verge 
 we were approaching. 
 
 "Stay !" she cried ; " the next shall decide the fate 
 of Maimuna ! If it cross to the east, the will of Al- 
 lah be done ! I will leave you !" 
 
 I called to the gipsy, and we stood on the verge of 
 the parapet in breathless expectation. The darkness 
 \ deepened around us, the abyss grew black and indis- 
 I tinguishable, and the night-birds flitted past like audi- 
 ble shadows. I drew Maimuna to my bosom, and 
 with my hands buried in her long hair, pressed her to 
 my heart, that beat as painfully and as heavily as her 
 ! own. 
 
 A sudden shriek ! She started from my bosom, and 
 as she fell upon the earth, my eye caught, on the face 
 of the mirror from which 1 had forgetfully withdrawn 
 my gaze, the vanishing pencil of a meteor, drawn like 
 a beam of the sunset, from west to east ! 
 
 I lifted the insensible child, impressed one long kiss 
 ! on her lips, and flinging her into the arms of the gipsy, 
 I crossed the parapet, and rode, with a speed that tried 
 I in vain to outrun my anguish, to Constantinople. 
 
 TOM FANE AND I. 
 
 Tom Fane's four Canadian ponies were whizzing 
 his light phaeton through the sand at a rate that would 
 have put spirits into anything but a lover absent from 
 his mistress. The " heaven-kissing" pines towered on 
 every side like the thousand and one columns of the 
 Palseologi at Constantinople ; their flat and spreading 
 tops shutting out the light of heaven almost as effec- 
 tually as the world of mussulmans, mosques, kiosks, 
 bazars, and Giaours, sustained on those innumerable 
 capitals, darkens the subterranean wonder of Stam- 
 boul. An American pine forest is as like a temple, 
 and a sublime one, as any dream that ever entered 
 into the architectural brain of the slumbering Martin. 
 The Vankee methodists in their camp-meetings, have 
 
430 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 but followed an irresistible instinct to worship God in 
 the religious dimness of these interminable aisles of the 
 wilderness. 
 
 Tom Fane and I had stoned the storks together in 
 the palace of Croesus at Sardis. We had read Anas- 
 tasius on a mufti's tomb in the Nekropolis of Scutari. 
 We had burned with fig-fevers in the same caravanse- 
 rai at Smyrna. We had cooled our hot foreheads 
 and cursed the Greeks in emulous Romaic in the dim 
 tomb of Agamemnon at Argos. We had been grave 
 at Paris, and merry at Rome ; and we had pic-nic'd 
 with the beauties of the Fanar in the Valley of Sweet 
 Waters in pleasant Roumelia ; and when, after parting 
 in France, he had returned to England and his regi- 
 ment, and I to New England and law, whom should 
 I meet in a summers trip to the St. Lawrence but 
 
 Captain Tom Fane of the th, quartered at the 
 
 cliff-perched and doughty garrison of Quebec, and 
 ready for any " lark" that would vary the monotony 
 of duty ! 
 
 Having eaten seven mess-dinners, driven to the 
 falls of Montmorenci, and paid my respects to Lord 
 Dalhousie, the hospitable and able governor of the 
 Canadas* Quebec had no longer a temptation: and 
 obeying a magnet, of which more anon, I announced 
 to Fane that my traps were packed, and my heart sent 
 on, a Vavant courier, to Saratoga. 
 
 " Is she pretty ?" said Tom. 
 
 "As the starry-eyed Circassian we gazed at through 
 the grill in the slave-market at Constantinople !" — 
 (Heaven and my mistress forgive me for the compari- 
 son ! — but it conveyed more to Tom Fane than a folio 
 of more respectful similitudes.) 
 
 " Have you any objection to be drawn to your lady- 
 love by four cattle that would buy the soul of Osbal- 
 diston ?" 
 
 "'Objection!' quotha?" 
 
 The next morning, four double-jointed and well- 
 groomed ponies were munching their corn in the bow 
 of a steamer, upon the St. Lawrence, wondering pos- 
 sibly what, in the name of Bucephalus, had set the 
 hills and churches flying at such a rate down the river. 
 The hills and churches came to a stand-still with the 
 steamer opposite Montreal, and the ponies were landed 
 and put to their mettle for some twenty miles, where 
 they were destined to be astonished by a similar flying 
 phenomenon in the mountains girding the lengthening 
 waters of Lake Champlain. Landed at Ticonderoga, 
 a few miles' trot brought them to Lake George and a 
 third steamer, and, with a winding passage among 
 green islands and overhanging precipices loaded like 
 a harvest-wagon with vegetation, we made our last 
 landing on the edge of the pine forest, where our story 
 opens. 
 
 " Well, I must object,'* says Tom, setting his whip 
 in the socket, and edging round upon his driving-box, 
 " I must object to this republican gravity of yours. I 
 should take it for melancholy, did I not know it was 
 the ' complexion' of your never-smiling countrymen." 
 
 " Spare me, Tom ! ' I see a hand you can not see.' 
 Talk to your ponies, and let me be miserable, if you 
 love me." 
 
 " For what, in the name of common sense ? Are 
 you not within five hours of your mistress? Is not 
 this cursed sand your natal soil ? Do not 
 
 ' The pine-boughs sing 
 Old songs with new gladness ?' 
 
 and in the years that we have dangled about, ' here- 
 and-there-ians' together, were you ever before grave, 
 sad, or sulky ? and will you without a precedent, and 
 you a lawyer, inflict your stupidity upon me for the 
 first time in this waste, and being-less solitude ? Half 
 an hour more of the dread silence of this forest, and 
 it will not need the horn of Astolpho to set me irre- 
 mediably mad !" 
 
 " If employment will save your wits, you may in- 
 vent a scheme for marrying the son of a poor gentle- 
 man to the ward of a rich trader in rice and molas- 
 ses." 
 
 " The programme of our approaching campaign, I 
 presume ?" 
 
 " Simply." 
 
 " Is the lady willing ?" 
 
 " I would fain believe so." 
 
 " Is Mr. Popkins unwilling ?" 
 
 "As the most romantic lover could desire." 
 
 "And the state of the campaign ?" 
 
 " Why, thus : Mr. George Washington Jefferson 
 Frump, whom you have irreverently called Mr. Pop- 
 kins, is sole guardian to the daughter of a dead West 
 Indian planter, of whom he was once the agent. I fell 
 in love with Kate Lorimer from description, when she 
 was at school with my sister, saw her by favor of a 
 garden-wall, and after the usual vows — " 
 
 " Too romantic for a Yankee, by half!" 
 
 " — Proposed by letter to Mr. Frump." 
 
 " Oh, bathos !" 
 
 " He refused me." 
 
 " Because " 
 
 "Imprimis, I was not myself in the 'sugar line,' and 
 in secundis, my father wore gloves and ' did nothing 
 for a living' — two blots in the eyes of Mr. Frump, 
 which all the waters of Niagara would never wash from 
 my escutcheon." 
 
 "And what the devil hindered you from running ofl' 
 with her ?" 
 
 " Fifty shares in the Manhattan Insurance Compa- 
 ny, a gold mine in Florida, Heaven knows how many 
 hogsheads of treacle, and a million of acres on the 
 banks of the Missouri." 
 
 " 'Pluto's flame-colored daughter' defend us ! what 
 a living El Dorado !" 
 
 "All of which she forfeits if she marries without old 
 Frump's consent." 
 
 " I see — I see ! And this Io and her Argus are now 
 drinking the waters at Saratoga ?" 
 
 "Even so." 
 
 "I'll bet you my four-in-hand to a sonnet, that I get 
 her for you before the season is over." 
 
 " Money and all ?" 
 
 " Mines, molasses, and Missouri acres !" 
 
 "And if you do, Tom, I'll give you a team of Vir- 
 ginian bloods that would astonish Ascot, and throw you 
 into the bargain a forgiveness for riding over me with 
 your camel on the banks of the Hermus." 
 
 " Santa Maria ! do you remember that spongy foot 
 stepping over your frontispiece ? I had already cast 
 my eyes up to Mont Sypilus to choose a clean niche 
 for you out of the rock-hewn tombs of the kings of 
 Lydia. I thought you would sleep with Alyattis, 
 Phil !" 
 
 We dashed on through dark forest and open clear- 
 ing, through glens of tangled cedar and wild vine, over 
 log bridges, corduroy marshes, and sand hills, till, tow- 
 ard evening, a scattering shanty or two, and an occa- 
 sional sound of a woodman's axe, betokened our vi- 
 cinity to Saratoga. A turn around a clump of tall pines 
 brought us immediately into the broad street of the 
 village, and the flaunting shops, the overgrown, un- 
 sightly hotels, riddled with windows like honeycombs, 
 the fashionable idlers out for their evening lounge to 
 the waters, the indolent smokers on the colonnades, 
 and the dusty and loaded coaches driving from door 
 to door in search of lodgings, formed the usual evening 
 picture of the Bath of America. 
 
 As it was necessary to Tom's plan that my arrival 
 at Saratoga should not be known, he pulled up at a 
 small tavern at the entrance of the street, and drop- 
 ping me and my baggage, drove on to Congress Hall, 
 with my best prayers, and a letter of introduction to 
 my sister, whom I had left on her way to the Springs 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 431 
 
 with a party at my departure for Montreal. Unwil- 
 ling to remain in such a tantalising vicinity, I hired a 
 chaise the next morning, ana despatching a note to 
 Tom, drove to seek a retreat at Barhydt's — a spot that 
 can not well be described in the tail of a paragraph. 
 
 Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the 
 mineral springs of Saratoga were discovered some five 
 miles from his door, was buried in the depth of a forest 
 solitude, unknown to all but the prowling Indian. The 
 sky is supported above him (or looks to be) by a wil- 
 derness of straight, columnar pine shafts, gigantic in 
 girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where 
 they branch out like round tables spread for a banquet 
 in the clouds. A small ear-shaped lake, sunk as deep 
 into the earth as the firs shoot above it, black as Ere- 
 bus in the dim shadow of its hilly shore and the ob- 
 structed light of the trees that nearly meet over it, and 
 clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl-spots 
 of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the 
 blue eye of heaven that peers through the leafy vault, 
 sleeps beneath his window ; and around him, in the 
 forest, lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet 
 of the faded pine tassels, deposited in yearly layers 
 since the continent rose from the flood, and rooted a 
 foot beneath the surface to a rich mould that would 
 fatten the Sympleglades to a flower-garden. With his 
 black tarn well stocked with trout, his bit of a farm 
 in the clearing near by, and an old Dutch bible, Herr 
 Barhydt lived a life of Dutch musing, talked Dutch to 
 his geese and chickens, sung Dutch psalms to the 
 echoes of the mighty forest, and, except on his far- 
 between visits to Albany, which grew rarer and rarer 
 as the old Dutch inhabitants dropped faster away, saw 
 never a white human face from one maple-blossoming 
 to another. 
 
 A roving mineralogist tasted the waters of Saratoga, 
 and, like the work of a lath-and-plaster Aladdin, up 
 sprung a thriving village around the fountain's lip, and 
 hotels, tin tumblers, and apothecaries, multiplied in the 
 usual proportion to each other, but out of all prece- 
 dent, with everything else for rapidity. Libraries, 
 newspapers, churches, livery stables, and lawyers, fol- 
 lowed in their train ; and it was soon established, from 
 the plams of Abraham to the savannahs of Alabama, 
 that no person of fashionable taste or broken constitu- 
 tion could exist through the months of July and Au- 
 gust without a visit to the chalybeate springs and pop- 
 ulous village of Saratoga. It contained seven thou- 
 sand inhabitants before Herr Barhydt, living in his 
 wooded seclusion only five miles off, became aware of 
 its existence. A pair of lovers, philandering about the 
 forest on horseback, popped in upon him one June 
 morning, and thenceforth there was no rest for the 
 soul of the Dutchman. Everybody rode down to eat 
 his trout and make love in the dark shades of his mir- 
 rored lagoon ; and at last, in self-defence, he added a 
 room or two to his shanty, enclosed his cabbage-gar- 
 den, and put a price upon his trout-dinners. The 
 traveller now-a-days who has not dined at Barhydt's 
 with his own champagne cold from the tarn, and the 
 white-headed old settler " gargling" Dutch about the 
 house, in his manifold vocation of cook, ostler, and 
 waiter, may as well not have seen Niagara. 
 
 Installed in the back-chamber of the old man's last 
 addition to his house, with Barry Cornwall and Elia 
 (old fellow-travellers of mine), a rude chair, a ruder, 
 but clean bed, and a troop of thoughts so perpetually 
 from home, that it mattered very little what was the 
 complexion of anything about me, I waited Tom's op- 
 erations with a lover's usual patience. Barhydt's visit- 
 ers seldom arrived before two or three o'clock, and the 
 long, soft mornings, quiet as a shadowy Elysium on the 
 rim of that ebon lake, were as solitary as a melancholy 
 man could desire. Didst thou but know, oh ! gentle 
 Barry Cornwall ! how gratefully thou hast been read 
 and mused upon in those dim and whispering aisles of 
 
 the forest, three thousand and more miles from thy 
 smoky whereabout, methinks it would warm up the 
 flush of pleasure around thine eyelids, though the 
 " golden-tressed Adelaide" were waiting her good- 
 night kisses at thy knee ! 
 
 I could stand it no longer. On the second evening 
 of my seclusion, I made bold to borrow old Barhydt's 
 superannuated roadster, and getting up the steam with 
 infinite difficulty in his rickety engine, higgled away, 
 with a pace to which I could not venture to affix a 
 name, to the gay scenes of Saratoga. 
 
 It was ten o'clock when I dismounted at the stable 
 in Congress Hall, and, giving dcr Teufel, as the old 
 man ambitiously styled his steed, to the hands of the 
 ostler, stole round through the garden to the eastern 
 colonnade. 
 
 I feel called upon to describe " Congress Hall." 
 
 Some fourteen or fifteen millions of white gentlemen 
 
 and ladies consider that wooden and windowed Baby- 
 
 I Ion as the proper palace of Delight — a sojourn to be 
 
 sighed for, and sacrificed for, and economized for — 
 
 the birthplace of Love, the haunt of Hymen, the arena 
 
 ! of fashion — a place without which a new lease of life 
 
 j were valueless — for which, if the conjuring cap of King 
 
 | Erricus itself could not furnish a season ticket, it 
 
 might lie on a lady's toilet as unnoticed as a bride's " 
 ! night-cap a twelvemonth after marriage. I say to my- 
 self, sometimes, as I pass the window at White's, and 
 see a worldsick worldling with the curl of satiety and 
 disgust on his lip, wondering how the next hour will 
 come to its death, " If you but knew, my friend, what 
 a campaign of pleasure you are losing in America — 
 what belles than the bluebell slighter and fairer — what 
 hearts than the dewdrops fresher and clearer — are liv- 
 ing their pretty hour, like gems undived for in the 
 ocean — what loads of foliage, what Titans of trees, 
 what glorious wildernesses of rocks and waters, are 
 lavishing their splendors on the clouds that sail over 
 them, and all within the magic circle of which Con- 
 gress Hall is the centre, and which a circling dove 
 would measure to get an appetite for his breakfast — if 
 you but knew this, my lord, as I know it, you would 
 not be gazing so vacantly on the steps of Crockford's, 
 nor consider « the graybeard' such a laggard in his 
 hours !" 
 
 Congress Hall is a wooden building, of which the 
 size and capacity could never be definitely ascertained. 
 It is built on a slight elevation, just above the strongly- 
 impregnated spring whose name it bears, with little at- 
 tempt at architecture, save a spacious and vine-covered 
 colonnade, serving as a promenade on either side, and 
 two wings, the extremities of which are lost in the dis- 
 tance. A relic or two of the still-astonished forest 
 towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melan- 
 choly group of firs ; and, five minutes' walk from the 
 door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on 
 the village in its primeval grandeur, like the spirits of 
 the wronged Indians, whose tracks are scarce vanished 
 from the sand. In the strength of the summer sol- 
 stice, from five hundred to a thousand people dine to- 
 gether at Congress Hall, and after absorbing as many 
 bottles of the best wines of the world, a sunset prome- 
 nade plays the valve to the sentiment thus generated, 
 and, with a cup of tea, the crowd separates to dress 
 for the nightly ball. There are several other hotels 
 in the village, equally crowded and equally spacious, 
 and the ball is given alternately at each. Congress 
 i Hall is the " crack" place, however, and I expect that 
 | Mr. Westcott, the obliging proprietor, will give me the 
 preference of rooms, on my next annual visit, for this 
 just and honorable mention. 
 
 The dinner-tables were piled into an orchestra, and 
 
 | draped with green baize and green wreaths, the floor 
 
 of the immense hall was chalked with American flags 
 
 and the initials of all the heroes of the Revolution, and 
 
 the band were playing a waltz in a style that made 
 
432 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the candles quiver, and the pines tremble audibly in 
 their tassels. The ballroom was on the ground floor, 
 and the colonnade upon the garden side was crowded 
 with spectators, a row of grinning black fellows edging 
 the cluster of heads at every window, and keeping 
 time with their hands and feet in the irresistible sym- 
 pathy of their music-»loving natures. Drawing my hat 
 over my eyes, I stood at the least-thronged window, 
 and concealing my face in the curtain, waited impa- 
 tiently for the appearance of the dancers. 
 
 The bevy in the drawing-room was sufficiently 
 strong at last, and the lady patronesses, handed in by 
 a state governor or two, and here and there a member 
 of congress, achieved the entree with their usual intre- 
 pidity. Followed beaux and followed belles. Such 
 belles ! Slight, delicate, fragile-looking creatures, ele- 
 gant as Retzsch's angels, warm-eyed as Mohammedan 
 houries, yet timid as the antelope whose hazel orbs 
 they eclipse, limbed like nothing earthly except an 
 American woman — I would rather not go on ! When 
 I speak of the beauty of my countrywomen, my heart 
 swells. I do believe the New World has a newer 
 mould for its mothers and daughters. I think I am 
 not prejudiced. I have been years away. I have 
 sighed in France ; I have loved in Italy ; I have bar- 
 gained for Circassians in an eastern bezestein, and I 
 have lounged at Howell and James's on a sunny day 
 in the season ; and my eye is trained, and my percep- 
 tions quickened : but I do think (honor bright ! and 
 Heath's " Book of Beauty" forgiving me) that there 
 is no such beautiful work of God under the arch of 
 the sky as an American girl in her bellehood. 
 
 Enter Tom Fane in a Stultz coat and Sparding 
 tights, looking as a man who had been the mirror of 
 Bond street might be supposed to look, a thousand 
 leagues from his club-house. She leaned on his arm. 
 I had never seen her half so lovely. Fresh and calm 
 from the seclusion of her chamber, her transparent 
 cheek was just tinged with the first mounting blood, 
 from the excitement of lights and music. Her lips 
 were slightly parted, her fine-lined eyebrows were 
 arched with a girlish surprise, and her ungloved arm 
 lay carelessly and confidingly within his, as white, 
 round, and slender, as if Canova had wrought it in 
 Parian for his Psyche. If you have never seen a 
 beauty of northern blood nurtured in a southern clime, 
 the cold fairness of her race warmed up as if it had 
 been steeped in some golden sunset, and her deep blue 
 eye darkened and filled with a fire as unnaturally re- 
 splendent as the fusion of crysoprase into a diamond, 
 and if you have never known the corresponding con- 
 trast in the character, the intelligence and constancy 
 of the north kindling with the enthusiasm and impulse, 
 the passionateness and the abandon of a more burning 
 latitude — you have seen nothing, let me insinuate, 
 thougli you " have been i' the Indies twice," that 
 could give you an idea of Kate Lorimer. 
 
 She waltzed, and then Tom danced with my sister, 
 and then, resigning her to another partner, he offered 
 his arm again to Miss Lorimer, and left the ballroom 
 with several other couples for a turn in the fresh air 
 of the colonnade. I was not jealous, but I felt un- 
 pleasantly at his returning to her so immediately. He 
 was the handsomest man, out of all comparison, in the 
 room, and he had dimmed my star too often in our 
 rambles in Europe and Asia, not to suggest a thought, 
 at least, that the same pleasant eclipse might occur in 
 our American astronomy. I stepped off the colonnade, 
 and took a turn in the garden. 
 
 Those "children of eternity," as Walter Savage 
 Landor poetically calls " the breezes," performed their 
 soothing ministry upon my temples, and I replaced 
 Tom in my confidence with an heroic effort, and turned 
 back. A swing hung between two gigantic pines, just 
 under the balustrade, and flinging myself into the cush- 
 ioned seat, I abandoned myself to the musings natural 
 
 to a person " in my situation." The sentimentalizing 
 promenaders lounged backward and forward above me, 
 and not hearing Tom's drawl among them, I presumed 
 he had returned to the ballroom. A lady and gentle- 
 man, walking in silence, stopped presently, and leaned 
 upon the railing opposite the swing. They stood a 
 moment, looking into the dim shadow of the pine- 
 grove, and then a voice, that I knew better than my 
 own, remarked in a low and silvery tone upon the 
 beauty of the night. 
 
 She was not answered, and after a moment's pause, 
 as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted, 
 she turned very earnestly to her companion, and asked, 
 "Are you sure, quite sure, that you could venture to 
 marry without a fortune ?" 
 
 " Quite, dear Miss Lorimer !" 
 
 I started from the swing, but before the words of 
 execration that rushed choking from my heart could 
 struggle to my lips, they had mingled with the crowd 
 and vanished. 
 
 I strode down the garden-walk in a phrensy of pas- 
 sion. Should I call him immediately to account ? 
 Should I rush into the ballroom and accuse him of 
 his treachery to her face ? Should I drown myself in 
 old Barhydt's tarn, or join an Indian tribe, and make 
 war upon the whites ? Or should I — could I — be mag- 
 nanimous — and write him a note immediately, offering 
 to be his groomsman at the wedding ? 
 
 I stepped into the punch-room, asked for pen, ink, 
 and paper, and indited the following note : — 
 
 " Dear Tom : If your approaching nuptials are to 
 be sufficiently public to admit of a groomsman, you 
 will make me the happiest of friends by selecting me 
 for that office. 
 
 " Yours ever truly, 
 
 " Phil." 
 
 Having despatched it to his room, I flew to the stable, 
 roused der Teufcl, who had gathered up his legs in the 
 straw for the night, flogged him furiously out of the 
 village, and giving him the rein as he entered the for- 
 est, enjoyed the scenery in the humor of mad old Hie- 
 ronymo in the Spanish tragedy — " the moon dark, the 
 stars extinct, the winds blowing, the owls shrieking, 
 the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock 
 striking twelve !" 
 
 Early the next day Tom's "tiger" dismounted at 
 Barhydt's door, with an answer to my note, as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 " Dear Phil : The devil must have informed you 
 of a secret I supposed safe from all the world. Be as- 
 sured I should have chosen no one but yourself to 
 support me on the occasion ; and however you have 
 discovered my design upon your treasure, a thousand 
 thanks for your generous consent. I expected no less 
 from your noble nature. 
 
 " Yours devotedly, 
 
 " Tom. 
 
 " P. S. — I shall endeavor to be at Barhydt's, with 
 materials for the fifth act of our comedy, to-morrow 
 morning." 
 
 " « Comedy !' call you this, Mr. Fane ?" I felt my 
 heart turn black as I threw down the letter. After a 
 thousand plans of revenge formed and abandoned — 
 borrowing old Barhydt's rifles, loading them deliber- 
 ately, and discharging them again into the air — I flung 
 myself exhausted on the bed, and reasoned myself back 
 to my magnanimity. I would be his groomsman ! 
 
 It was a morning like the burst of a millennium on 
 the world. I felt as if 1 should never forgive the birds 
 for their mocking enjoyment of it. The wild heron 
 swung up fro-m the reeds, the lotuses shook out their 
 dew into the lake as the breeze stirred ihem, and the 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 433 
 
 senseless old Dutchman sat fishing in his canoe, sing- 
 ing one of his unintelligible psalms to a quick measure 
 that half maddened me. I threw myself upon the 
 yielding floor of pine-tassels on the edge of the lake, 
 and with the wretched school philosophy, " Si gravis 
 est, brevis est," endeavored to put down the tempest 
 of my feelings. 
 
 A carriage rattled over the little bridge, mounted the 
 ascent rapidly, and brought up at Barhydt's door. 
 
 " Phil !" shouted Tom, " Phil !" 
 
 I gulped down a choking sensation in my throat, and 
 rushed up the bank to him. A stranger was dismount- 
 ing from his horse. 
 
 " Quick !" said Tom, shaking my hand hurriedly — 
 " there is no time to lose. Out with your inkhorn, 
 Mr. Poppletree, and have your papers signed while I 
 tie up my ponies." 
 
 " What is this, sir ?" said I, starting back as the 
 stranger deliberately presented me with a paper, in 
 which my own name was written in conspicuous let- 
 ters. 
 
 The magistrate gazed at me with a look of aston- 
 ishment. " A contract of marriage, I think, between 
 Mr. Philip Slingsby and Miss Katherine Lorimer, spin- 
 ster. Are you the gentleman named in that instrument, 
 sir?" 
 
 At this moment my sister, leading the blushing girl 
 by the hand, came and threw her arms about my neck, 
 and drawing her within my reach, ran oft" and left us 
 together. 
 
 There are some pure moments in this life that de- 
 scription would only profane. 
 
 We were married by the village magistrate in that 
 magnificent sanctuary of the forest, old Barhydt and 
 his lotuses the only indifferent witnesses of vows as 
 passionate as ever trembled upon human lips. 
 
 I had scarce pressed her to my heart and dashed the 
 tears from my eyes, when Fane, who had looked more 
 at my sister than at the bride during the ceremony, left 
 her suddenly, and thrusting a roll of parchment into 
 my pocket, ran off to bring up his ponies. I was on 
 the way to Saratoga, a married man, and my bride on 
 the seat beside me, before I had recovered from my 
 astonishment. 
 
 " Pray," said Tom, " if it be not an impertinent 
 question, and you can find breath in your ecstasies, 
 how did you find out that your sister had done me 
 the honor to accept the offer of my hand ?" 
 
 The resounding woods rung with his unmerciful 
 laughter at the explanation. 
 
 " And pray," said I, in my turn, " if it is not an im- 
 pertinent question, and you can find a spare breath in 
 your ecstasies, by what magic did you persuade old 
 Frump to trust his ward and her title-deeds in your 
 treacherous keeping ?" 
 
 " It is a long story, my dear Phil, and I will give you 
 die particulars when you pay me the ' Virginia bloods' 
 you wot of. Suffice it for the present, that Mr. Frump 
 believes Mr. Tom Fane (alias Jacob Phipps, Esq., 
 sleeping partner of a banking-house at Liverpool) to 
 be the accepted suitor of his fair ward. In his extreme 
 delight at seeing her in so fair a way to marry into a 
 bank, he generously made her a present of her own 
 fortune, signed over his right to control it by a docu- 
 ment in your possession, and will undergo as agreeable 
 a surprise in about five minutes as the greatest lover 
 of excitement could desire." 
 
 The ponies dashed on. The sandy ascent by the 
 Pavilion Spring was surmounted, and in another min- 
 ute we were at the door of Congress Hall. The last 
 straj^lers from the breakfast-table were lounging down 
 the colonnade, and old Frump sat reading the newspa- 
 per under the portico. 
 
 " Aha ! Mr. Phipps," said he, as Tom drove up — 
 " back so soon, eh ? Why, I thought you and Kitty 
 would be billing it till dinner-time !" 
 28 
 
 " Sir !" said Tom, very gravely, " you have the hon- 
 or of addressing Captain Thomas Fane, of his majesty's 
 — -th Fusileers ; and whenever you have a moment's 
 leisure, I shall be happy to submit to your perusal a 
 certificate of the marriage of Miss Katherine Lorimer 
 to the gentleman I have the pleasure to present to you. 
 Mr. Frump, Mr. Slingsby !" 
 
 At the mention of my name, the blood in Mr. 
 Frump's ruddy complexion turned suddenly to the 
 color of the Tiber. Poetry alone can express the 
 feeling pictured in his countenance : — 
 
 " If every atom of a dead man's flesh 
 Should creep, each one with a particular life, 
 Yet all as cold as ever — 'twas just so : 
 Or had it drizzled needle-points of frost, 
 Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald.'' 
 
 George Washington Jefferson Frump, Esq., left 
 Congress Hall the same evening, and has since ungra- 
 ciously refused an invitation to Captain Fane's wedding 
 — possibly from his having neglected to invite him on 
 a similar occasion at Saratoga. This last, however, I 
 am free to say, is a gratuitous supposition of my own. 
 
 LARKS IN VACATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 DRIVING STANHOPE PRO TEM. 
 
 In the edge of a June evening in the summer vaca- 
 tion of 1827, I was set down by the coach at the gate 
 of my friend Horace Van Pelt's paternal mansion — a 
 large, old-fashioned, comfortable Dutch house, cling- 
 ing to the side of one of the most romantic dells on 
 the North river. In the absence of his whole family 
 on the summer excursion to the falls and lakes (taken 
 by almost every " well-to-do" citizen of the United 
 States), Horace was emperor of the long-descended, 
 and as progressively enriched domain of one of the 
 earliest Dutch settlers — a brief authority which he ex- 
 ercised more particularly over an extensive stud, and 
 bins number one and two. 
 
 The west was piled with gold castles, breaking up 
 the horizon with their burnished pinnacles and turrets, 
 the fragrant dampness of the thunder-shower that had 
 followed the heat of noon was in the air, and in a low 
 room, whose floor opened out so exactly upon the 
 shaven sward, that a blind man would not have known 
 when he passed from the heavily-piled carpet to the 
 grass, I found Horace sitting over his olives and claret, 
 having waited dinner for me till five (long beyond the 
 latest American hour), and, in despair of my arrival, 
 having dined without me. The old black cook was 
 too happy to vary her vocation by getting a second 
 dinner ; and when I had appeased my appetite, and 
 overtaken my friend in his claret, we sat with the 
 moonlight breaking across a vine at our feet, and cof- 
 fee worthy of a filagree cup in the Bezestein, and de- 
 bated, amid a true embarras des richesses, our plans 
 for the next week's amusement. 
 
 The seven days wore on, merrily at first, but each 
 succeeding one growing less merry than the last. By 
 the fifth eve of my sojourn, we had exhausted variety. 
 All sorts of headaches and megrims in the morning, 
 all sorts of birds, beasts, and fishes, for dinner, all sorts 
 of accidents in all sorts of vehicles, left us on the sev- 
 enth day out of sorts altogether. We were two dis- 
 contented Rasselasesin the Happy Valley. Rejoicing 
 as we were in vacation, it would have been a relief to 
 have had a recitation to read up, or a prayer-lull to 
 mark the time. Two idle sophomores in a rambling, 
 
434 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 lonely old mansion, were, we discovered, a very insuf- 
 ficient dramatis persons for the scene. 
 
 It was Saturday night. A violent clap of thunder 
 had interrupted some daring theory of Van Pelt's on 
 the rising of champagne-bubbles, and there we sat, 
 mum and melancholy, two sated Sybarites, silent an 
 hour by the clock. The mahogany was bare between 
 us. Any number of glasses and bottles stood in their 
 lees about the table ; the thrice-fished juice of an 
 olive-dish and a solitary cigar in a silver case had been 
 thrust aside in a warm argument, and, in his father's 
 sacred gout-chair, buried to the eyes in his loosened 
 cravat, one leg on the table, and one somewhere in 
 the neighborhood of my own, sat Van Pelt, the eidolon 
 of exhausted amusement. 
 
 " Phil !" said he, starting suddenly to an erect posi- 
 tion, " a thought strikes me !" 
 
 I dropped the claret-cork, from which I was at the 
 moment trying to efface the " Margaux" brand, and 
 sat in silent expectation. I had thought his brains as 
 well evaporated as the last bottle of champagne. 
 
 He rested his elbows on the table, and set his chin 
 between his two palms. 
 
 " I'll resign the keys of this mournful old den to the 
 butler, and we'll go to Saratoga for a week. What 
 say ?" 
 
 " It would be a reprieve from death by inanition," 
 I answered, " but, as the rhetorical professor would 
 phrase it, amplify your meaning, young gentleman." 
 
 " Thus : To-morrow is Sunday. We will sleep till 
 Monday morning to purge our brains of these cloudy 
 vapors, and restore the freshness of our complexions. 
 If a fair day, you shall start alone in the stanhope, and 
 on Monday night sleep in classic quarters at Titus's 
 in Troy." 
 
 " And you !" I' interrupted, rather ■astonished at his 
 arrangement for one. 
 
 Horace laid his hand on his pocket with a look of 
 embarrassed care. 
 
 " I will overtake you with the bay colts in the 
 drosky, but I must first go to Albany. The circula- 
 ting medium — " 
 
 " I understand." 
 
 II. 
 
 We met on Monday morning in the breakfast-room 
 in mutual spirits. The sun was two hours high, the 
 birds in the trees were wild with the beauty and elas- 
 ticity of the day, the dew glistened on every bough, 
 and the whole scene, over river and hill, was a heaven 
 of natural delight. As we finished our breakfast, the 
 light spattering of a horse's feet up the avenue, and 
 the airy whirl of quick-following wheels, announced 
 the stanhope. It was in beautiful order, and what 
 would have been termed on any pave in the world a 
 tasteful turn-out. Light cream-colored body, black 
 wheels and shafts, drab lining edged with green, dead- 
 black harness, light as that on the panthers of Bac- 
 chus—it was the last style of thing you would have 
 looked for at the " stoup" of a Dutch homestead. 
 And Tempest ! I think I see him now ! — his small in- 
 quisitive ears, arched neck, eager eye, and fine, thin 
 nostril— his dainty feet flung out with the grace' of a 
 flaunted riband — his true and majestic action and his 
 spirited champ of the bit, nibbling at the tight rein with 
 the exciting pull of a hooked trout — how evenly he 
 drew !— how insensibly the compact stanhope, just 
 touching his iron-gray tail, bowled along on the road 
 after him ! 
 
 Horace was behind with the drosky and black boy, 
 and with a parting nod at the gate, I turned north- 
 ward, and Tempest took the road in beautiful style. I 
 do not remember to have been ever so elated. I was 
 always of the Cyrenaic philosophy that " happiness is 
 motion," and the bland vitality of the air had refined 
 
 my senses. The delightful feel of the reins thrilled me 
 to the shoulder. Driving is like any other appetite, 
 dependant for the delicacy of its enjoyment on the 
 system, and a day's temperate abstinence, long sleep, 
 and the glorious perfection of the morning, had put 
 my nerves " in condition." I felt the air as I rushed 
 through. The power of the horse was added to my 
 consciousness of enjoyment, and if you can imagine a 
 centaur with a harness and stanhope added to his liv- 
 ing body, I felt the triple enjoyment of animal exer- 
 cise which would then be his. 
 
 It is delightful driving on the Hudson. The road is 
 very fair beneath your wheels, the river courses away 
 under the bold shore with the majesty inseparable 
 from its mighty flood, and the constant change of out- 
 line in its banks gives you, as you proceed, a constant 
 variety of pictures, from the loveliest to the most sub- 
 lime. The eagle's nest above you at one moment, a 
 sunny and fertile farm below you at the next — rocks, 
 trees, and waterfalls, wedded and clustered as, it 
 seems to me, they are nowhere else done so pictu- 
 resquely — it is a noble river, the Hudson ! And every 
 few minutes, while you gaze down upon the broad 
 waters spreading from hill to hill like a round lake, a 
 gayly-painted steamer with her fringed and white awn- 
 ings and streaming flag, shoots out as if from a sudden 
 cleft in the rock, and draws across it her track of 
 foam. 
 
 Well — I bowled along. Ten o'clock brought me 
 to a snug Dutch tavern, where I sponged Tempest's 
 mouth and nostrils, lunched and was stared at by the 
 natives, and continuing my journey, at one I loosed 
 rein and clashed into the pretty village of , Tem- 
 pest in a foam, and himself and his extempore master 
 creating a great sensation in a crowd of people, who 
 stood in the shade of the verandah of the hotel, as if 
 that asylum for the weary traveller had been a shop for 
 the sale of gentlemen in shirt-sleeves. 
 
 Tempest was taken round to the " barn," and I or- 
 dered rather an elaborate dinner, designing still to go 
 on some ten miles in the cool of the evening, and hav- 
 ing, of course, some mortal hours upon my hands. 
 The cook had probably never heard of more than 
 three dishes in her life, but those three were garnished 
 with all manner of herbs, and sent up in the best 
 china as a warranty for an unusual bill, and what with 
 coffee, a small glass of new rum as an apology for a 
 chasse cafe, and a nap in a straight-backed chair, I 
 killed the enemy to my satisfaction till the shadows of 
 the poplars lengthened across the barnyard. 
 
 I was awoke by Tempest, prancing round to the 
 door in undiminished spirits ; and as I had begun the 
 day en grand seigneur, I did not object to the bill, 
 which considerably exceeded the outside of my calcu- 
 lation, but giving the landlord a twenty-dollar note, 
 received the change unquestioned, doubled the usual 
 fee to the ostler, and let Tempest off with a bend for- 
 ward which served at the same time for a gracious bow 
 to the spectators. So remarkable a coxcomb had prob- 
 ably not been seen in the village since the passing of 
 Cornwallis's army. 
 
 The day was still hot, and as I got into the open 
 country, I drew rein and paced quietly up hill and 
 down, picking the road delicately, and in a humor of 
 thoughtful contentment, trying my skill in keeping the 
 edges of the green sod as it leaned in and out from the 
 walls and ditches. With the long whip I now and 
 then touched the wing of a sulphur butterfly hovering 
 over a pool, and now and then I stopped and gathered 
 a violet from the unsunned edge of the wood. 
 
 I had proceeded three or four miles in this way, 
 when I was overtaken by three stout fellows, gallop- 
 ing at speed, who rode past and faced round with a 
 peremptory order to me to stop. A formidable pitch- 
 fork in the hand of each horseman left me no alterna- 
 tive. I made up my mind immediately to be robbed 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 435 
 
 quietly of my own personals, but to show fight, if ne- 
 cessary, for Tempest and the stanhope. 
 
 " Well, gentlemen," said I, coaxing my impatient 
 horse, who had been rather excited by the clatter of 
 hoofs behind him, " what is the meaning of this ?" 
 
 Before I could get an answer, one of the fellows 
 had dismounted and given his bridle to another, and 
 coming round to the left side, he sprang suddenly into 
 the stanhope. I received him as he rose with a well- 
 placed thrust of my heel which sent him back into the 
 road, and with a chirrup to Tempest, I dashed through 
 the phalanx and took the road at a top speed. The 
 short lash once waved round the small ears before me, 
 there was no stopping in a hurry, and away sped the 
 gallant gray, and fast behind followed my friends in 
 their short sleeves, all in a lathering gallop. A couple 
 of miles was the work of no time, Tempest laying his 
 legs to it as if the stanhope had been a cobweb at his 
 heels ; but at the end of that distance there came a 
 sharp descent to a mill-stream, and I just remember 
 an unavoidable milestone and a jerk over a wall, and 
 the next minute, it seemed to me, I was in the room 
 where I had dined, with my hands tied, and a hundred 
 people about me. My cool white waistcoat was mat- 
 ted with mud, and my left temple was, by the glass 
 opposite me, both bloody and begrimed. 
 
 The opening of my eyes was a signal for a closer 
 gathering around me, and between exhaustion and the 
 close air I was half suffocated. I was soon made to 
 understand that I was a prisoner, and that the three 
 white-frocked highwaymen, as I took them to be, were 
 amoiiir the spectators. On a polite application to the 
 landlord, who, I found out, was a justice of the peace 
 as well, I was informed that he had made out my mit- 
 timus as a counterfeiter, and that the spurious note I 
 had passed upon him for my dinner was safe in his 
 possession ! He pointed at the same time to a placard 
 newly stuck against the wall, offering a reward for the 
 apprehension of a notorious practiser of my supposed 
 craft, to the description of whose person I answered, 
 to the satisfaction of all present. 
 
 Quite too indignant to remonstrate, I seated myself 
 in the chair considerately offered me by the waiter, 
 and listening to the whispers of the persons who were 
 still permitted to throng the room, I discovered, what 
 might have struck me before, that the initials on the 
 panel of the stanhope and the handle of the whip had 
 been compared with the card pasted in the bottom of 
 my hat, and the want of correspondence was taken as 
 decided corroboration. It was remarked also by a by- 
 stander that I was quite too much of a dash for an 
 honest man, and that he had suspected me from first 
 seeing me drive into the village ! I was sufficiently 
 humbled by this time to make an inward vow never 
 again to take airs upon myself if I escaped the county 
 jail. 
 
 The justice meanwhile had made out my orders, 
 and a horse and cart had been provided to take me to 
 the next town. I endeavored to get speech of his 
 worship as I was marched out of the inn parlor, but 
 the crowd pressed close upon my heels, and the digni- 
 tary-landlord seemed anxious to rid his house of me. j 
 I had no papers, and no proofs of my character, and j 
 assertion went for nothing. Besides, I was muddy, I 
 and my hat was broken in on one side, proofs of vil- | 
 lany which appeal to the commonest understanding, j 
 
 I begged for a little straw in the bottom of the cart, j 
 and had made myself as comfortable as my two rustic ] 
 constables thought fitting for a culprit, when the vehi- 
 cle was quickly ordered from the door to make away 
 for a carriage coming at a dashing pace up the road. 
 It was Van Pelt in his drosky. 
 
 Horace was well known on the road, and the stan- 
 hope had already been recognised as his. By this 
 time it was deep in the twilight, and though he was in- 
 stantly known by the landlord, he might be excused 
 
 for not so readily identifying the person of his friend 
 in the damaged gentleman in the straw. 
 
 " Ay, ay! I see you don't know him," said the land- 
 lord, while Van Pelt surveyed me rather coldly ; " on 
 with him, constables ! he wouid have us believe you 
 knew him, sir! walk in, Mr. Van Pelt ! Ostler, look 
 to Mr. Van Pelt's horses ! Walk in, sir !" 
 
 " Stop !" I cried out in a voice of thunder, seeing 
 that Horace really had not looked at me, " Van Pelt ! 
 stop, I say !" 
 
 The driver of the cart seemed more impressed by 
 the energy of my cries than my friends the constables, 
 and pulled up his horse. Some one in the crowd cried 
 out that I should have a hearing or he would " wallup 
 the comitatus," and the justice, called back by this ex- 
 pression of an opinion from the sovereign people, re- 
 quested his new guest to look at the prisoner. 
 
 I was preparing to have my hands untied, yet feel- 
 ing so indignant at Van Pelt for not having recognised 
 me that I would not look at him, when, to my surprise, 
 the horse started off once more, and looking back, I 
 saw my friend patting the neck of his near horse, evi- 
 dently not having thought it worth his while to take 
 any notice of the justice's observation. Choking with 
 rage, I flung myself down upon the straw, and jolted 
 on without further remonstrance to the county town. 
 
 I had been incarcerated an hour when Van Pelt's 
 voice, half angry with the turnkey and half ready to 
 burst into a laugh, resounded outside. He had not 
 heard a word spoken by the officious landlord, till after 
 the cart had been some time gone. Even then, be- 
 lieving it to be a cock-and-bull story, he had quietly 
 dined, and it was only on going into the yard to see 
 after his horses that he recognised the debris of his 
 stanhope. 
 
 The landlord's apologies, when we returned to the 
 inn, were more amusing to Van Pelt than consolatory 
 to Philip Slingsby. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 SARATOGA SPRINGS. 
 
 Jt was about seven o'clock of a hot evening when 
 Van Pelt's exhausted horses toiled out from the Pine 
 Forest, and stood, fetlock deep in sand, on the brow 
 of the small hill overlooking the muslnoom village of 
 Saratoga. One or two straggling horsemen were re- 
 turning late from their afternoon ride, and looked at 
 us, as they passed on their fresher hacks, with the cu- 
 riosity which attaches to new-comers in a watering- 
 place ; here and there a genuine invalid, who had 
 come to the waters for life, not for pleasure, took ad- 
 vantage of the coolness of the hour and crept down 
 the foot-path to the Spring ; and as Horace encour- 
 aged his flagging cattle into a trot to bring up gal- 
 lantly at the door of " Congress Hall," the great bell 
 of that vast caravanserai resounded through the dusty 
 air, and by the shuffling of a thousand feet, audible as 
 we approached, we knew that the fashionable world 
 of Saratoga were rushing down, en ?nasse, " to lea." 
 
 Having driven through a sand-cloud for the prece- 
 ding three hours, and, to say nothing of myself, Van 
 Pelt being a man, who, in his character as the most 
 considerable beau of the University, calculated his first 
 impression, it was not thought advisable to encounter, 
 uncleansed, the tide of fashion at that moment stream- 
 ing through the hall. We drove round to the side- 
 door, and gained our pigeon-hole quarters under cover 
 of the back-staircase. 
 
 The bachelors' wing of Congress Hall is a long, uti- 
 slightly, wooden barrack, divided into chambers six feet 
 by four, and of an airiness of partition which enables 
 
436 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the occupant to converse with his neighbor three rooms 
 off, with the ease of clerks calling out entries to the 
 leger across the desks of a counting-house. The 
 clatter of knives and plates came up to our ears in a 
 confused murmur, and V an Pelt having refused to dine 
 at the only inn upon the route, for some reason best 
 known to himself, I commenced the progress of a long 
 toilet with an appetite not rendered patient by the 
 sounds of cheer below. 
 
 I had washed the dust out of my eyes and mouth, 
 and, overcome with heat and hunger, I knotted a cool 
 cravat loosely round my neck, and sat down in the one 
 chair. 
 
 " Van Pelt !" I shouted. 
 
 " Well, Phil !" 
 
 " Are you dressed ?" 
 
 " Dressed ! I am as pinguid as a pate foie gras — 
 greased to the eyelids in cold cream !" 
 
 I took up the sixpenny glass and looked at my own 
 newly-washed physiognomy. From the temples to the 
 chin it was one unmitigated red — burned to a blister 
 with the sun ! I had been obliged to deluge my head 
 like a mop to get out the dust, and not naturally re- 
 markable for my good looks, I could, much worse than 
 Van Pelt, afford these startling additions to my disad- 
 vantages. Hunger is a subtle excuse-finder, however, 
 and, remembering there were five hundred people in 
 this formidable crowd, and all busy with satisfying their 
 appetites, I trusted to escape observation, and deter- 
 mined to " go down to tea." With the just-named 
 number of guests, it will easily be understood why it 
 is impossible to obtain a meal at Congress Hall, out of 
 the stated time and place. 
 
 In a white roundabout, a checked cravat, my hair 
 plastered over my eyes a la Mawivorm, and a face like 
 the sign of the " Rising Sun," 1 stopped at Van Pelt's 
 door. 
 
 " The most hideous figure my eyes ever looked 
 upon !" was his first consolatory observation. 
 
 " Handsome, or hideous," I answered, " I'll not 
 starve! So here goes for some bread and butter!" 
 and leaving him to his "appliances," I descended to the 
 immense hall which serves the comers to Saratoga, for 
 dining, dancing, and breakfasting, and in wet weather, 
 between meals, for shuttlecock and promenading. 
 
 Two interminable tables extended down the hall, 
 filled by .all the beauty and fashion of the United States. 
 Luckily, I thought, for me, there are distinctions in this 
 republic of dissipation, and the upper end is reserved 
 for those who have servants to turn down the chairs 
 and stand over them. The end of the tables nearest 
 the door, consequently, is occupied by those whose 
 opinion of my appearance is not without appeal, if they 
 trouble their heads about it at all, and I may glide in, 
 in my white roundabout (permitted in this sultry 
 weather), and retrieve exhausted nature in obscurity. 
 
 An empty chair stood between an old gentleman 
 and a very plain young lady, and seeing no remembered 
 faces opposite, I glided to the place, and was soon lost 
 to apprehension in the abysm of a cold pie. The table 
 was covered with meats, berries, bottles of chalybeate 
 water, tea appurtenances, jams, jellies, and radishes, 
 and, but for the absence of the roast, you might have 
 doubted whether the meal was breakfast or dinner, 
 lunch or supper. Happy country ! in which any one 
 of the four meals may serve a hungry man for all. 
 
 The pigeon-pie stood, at last, well quarried before 
 me, the debris of the excavation heaped upon my plate ; 
 and, appetite appeased, and made bold by my half 
 hour's obscurity, I leaned forward and perused with 
 curious attention the long line of faces on the opposite 
 side of the table, to some of whom, doubtless, I was to 
 be indebted for the pleasures of the coming fort- 
 night. 
 
 My eyes were fixed on the features of a talkative 
 woman just above, and I had quite forgotten the fact 
 
 of my dishabille of complexion and dress, when two 
 persons entered who made considerable stir among 
 the servants, and eventually were seated directly op- 
 posite me. 
 
 " We loitered too long at Barhydt's," said one of the 
 most beautiful women I had ever seen, as she pulled 
 her chair nearer to the table and looked around her 
 with a glance of disapproval. 
 
 In following her eyes to see who was so happy as 
 to sympathize with such a divine creature even in the 
 loss of a place at table, I met the fixed and astonished 
 gaze of my most intimate friend at the University. 
 ' "Ellerton!" 
 
 " Slingsby !" 
 
 Overjoyed at meeting him, I stretched both hands 
 across the narrow table, and had shaken his arm nearly 
 off his shoulders, and asked him a dozen questions, be- 
 fore I became conscious that a pair of large wondering 
 eyes were coldly taking an inventory of my person 
 and features. Van Pelt's unflattering exclamation 
 upon my appearance at his door, flashed across my 
 mind like a thunderstroke, and, coloring through my 
 burned skin to the temples, I bowed and stammered I 
 know not what, as Ellerton introduced me to his 
 sister ! 
 
 To enter fully into my distress, you should be ap- 
 prized that a correspondence arising from my long and 
 constant intimacy with Tom Ellerton, had been carried 
 on for a year between me and his sister, and that, being 
 constantly in the habit of yielding to me in manners of 
 taste, he had, I well knew, so exaggerated to her my 
 personal qualities, dress, and manners, that she could 
 not in any case fail to be disappointed in seeing me. 
 Believing her to be at that moment two thousand miles 
 off in Alabama, and never having hoped for the pleas- 
 ure of seeing her at all, I had foolishly suffered this 
 good-natured exaggeration to go on, pleased with seeing 
 the reflex of his praises in her letters, and, Heaven 
 knows, little anticipating the disastrous interview upon 
 which my accursed star would precipitate me ! As I 
 went over, mentally, the particulars of my unbecom- 
 ingness, and saw Miss Ellerton's eyes resting inquisi- 
 tively and furtively on the mountain of pigeon bones 
 lifting their well-picked pyramid to my chin, I wished 
 myself an ink-fish at the bottom of the sea. 
 
 Three minutes after, I burst into Van Pelt's room, 
 tearing my hair and abusing Tom Ellerton's good na- 
 ture, and my friend's headless drosky, in alternate 
 breaths. Without disturbing the subsiding blood in his 
 own face by entering into my violence, Horace coolly 
 asked me what the devil was the matter. 
 
 I told him. 
 
 " Lie down here !" said Van Pelt, who was a small 
 Napoleon in such trying extremities; "lie down on 
 the bed, and anoint your phiz with this unguent. I see 
 good luck for you in this accident, and you have only 
 to follow my instructions. Phil Slingsby, sunburnt, 
 in a white roundabout, and Phil Slingsby, pale and well 
 dressed, are as different as this potted cream and a dan- 
 cing cow. You shall see what a little drama I'll work 
 out for you !" 
 
 I lay down on my back, and Horace kindly anointed 
 me from the trachea to the forelock, and from ear to 
 ear. 
 
 " Egad," said he, warming with his study of his pro- 
 posed plot as he slid his fore-fingers over the bridge of 
 my nose, "every circumstance tells for us. Tall man 
 as you are, you are as short-bodied as a monkey (no 
 offence, Phil !) and when you sit at table, you are rather 
 an under-sized gentleman. I have been astonished 
 every day these three years, at seeing you rise after 
 dinner in Commons' Hall. A thousand to one, Fanny 
 Ellerton thinks you a stumpy man." 
 
 "And then, Phil," he continued, with a patronising 
 tone, "you have studied minute philosophy to little 
 purpose if you do not know that the first step in win- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 437 
 
 ning a woman to whom you have been overpraised, is 
 to disenchant her at all hazards, on your first inter- 
 view. You will never rise above the ideal she has 
 formed, and to sink below it gradually, or to remain 
 stationary, is not to thrive in your wooing." 
 
 Leaving me this precocious wisdom to digest, 
 Horace descended to the foot of the garden to take a 
 warm bath, and overcome with fatigue, and the recum- 
 bent posture, I soon fell asleep and dreamed of the 
 great blue eyes of Fanny Ellerton. 
 
 II. 
 
 The soaring of the octave flute in " Hail Columbia," 
 with which the band was patriotically opening the 
 ball, woke me from the midst of a long apologetic let- 
 ter to my friend's sister, and I found Van Pelt's black 
 boy Juba waiting patiently at the bed-side with curl- 
 ing-tongs and Cologne-water, ordered to superintend 
 my toilet by his master, who had gone early to the 
 drawing-room to pay his respects to Miss Ellerton. ! 
 With the cold cream disappeared entirely from my ' 
 face the uncomfortable redness to which I had been a 
 martyr, and, thanks to my ebony coijfetir, my straight 
 and plastered locks soon grew as different to their i 
 " umquhile guise" as Hyperion's to a satyr's. Hav- j 
 ing appeared to the eyes of the lady, in whose favor I , 
 hoped to prosper, in red and white (red phiz and white 
 jacket), 1 trusted that in white and black (black suit \ 
 and paleviznomy), I should look quite another person, j 
 Juba was pleased to show his ivory in a complimen- ! 
 tary smile at my transformation, and I descended to | 
 the drawing-room, on the best terms with the coxcomb 
 in my bosom. 
 
 Horace met me at the door. 
 
 '■'■Proteus redivivvs /" was his exclamation. " Your 
 new name is Wrongham. You are a gentle senior, 
 instead of a bedeviled sophomore, and your cue is to 
 be poetical. She will never think again of the mon- 
 ster in the white jacket, and I have prepared her for 
 the acquaintance of a new friend, whom I have just 
 described to you. 
 
 I took his arm, and with the courage of a man in a 
 mask, went through another presentation to Miss El- 
 lerton. Her brother had been let into the secret by j 
 Van Pelt, and received me with great ceremony as his I 
 college superior; and, as there was no other person at ! 
 the Springs who knew Mr. Slingsby, Mr. Wrongham 
 was likely to have an undisturbed reign of it. Miss \ 
 Ellerton looked hard at me for a moment, but the ! 
 gravity with which I was presented and received, dis- | 
 sipated a doubt if one had arisen in her mind, and 
 she took my arm to go to the ball-room, with an 
 undisturbed belief in my assumed name and charac- 
 ter. 
 
 I commenced the acquaintance of the fair Alaba- 
 mian with great advantages. Received as a perfect 
 stranger, I possessed, from long correspondence with 
 her, the most minute knowledge of the springs, of her 
 character, and of her favorite reading and pursuits, 
 and, with the little knowledge of the world which she 
 had gained on a plantation, she was not likely to pene- 
 trate my game from my playing it too freely. Her 
 confidence was immediately won by the readiness 
 with which I entered into her enthusiasm and antici- 
 pated her thoughts ; and before the first quadrille was 
 well over, she had evidently made up her mind that 
 she had never in her life met one who so well "under- 
 stood her." Oh ! how much women include in that 
 apparently indefinite expression, "He understands 
 me .'" 
 
 The colonnade of Congress Hall is a long prom- 
 enade laced in with vines and columns, on the same 
 level with the vast ball-room and drawing-room, and 
 (the light of heaven not being taxed at Saratoga) 
 
 opening at every three steps by a long window into 
 the carpeted**floors. When the rooms within are lit 
 in a summer's night, that cool and airy colonnade is 
 thronged by truants from the dance, and collectively 
 by all who have anything to express that is meant for 
 one ear only. The mineral waters of Saratoga are no 
 less celebrated as a soporific for chaperons than as a 
 tonic for the dyspeptic, and while the female Argus 
 dozes in the drawing-room, the fair Io and her Jupi- 
 ter (represented in this case, we will say, by Miss El- 
 lerton and myself) range at liberty the fertde fields of 
 flirtation. 
 
 I had easily put Miss Ellerton in surprised good 
 humor with herself and me during the first quadrille, 
 and with a freedom based partly upon my certainty of 
 pleasing her, partly on the peculiar manners of the 
 place, 1 coolly requested that she would continue to 
 dance with me for the rest of the evening. 
 
 "One unhappy quadrille excepted," she replied, 
 with a look meant to be mournful. 
 
 "May I ask with whom?" 
 
 " Oh, he has not asked me yet ; but my brother has 
 bound me over to be civil to him — a spectre, Mr. 
 Wrongham ! a positive spectre." 
 
 " How denominated ?" I inquired, with a forced in- 
 difference, for I had a presentiment I should hear my 
 own name. 
 
 "Slingsby— Mr. Philip Slingsby— Tom's fidus 
 Achates, and a proposed lover of my own. But you 
 don't seem surprised!" 
 
 "Surprised! E-hem! I know the gentleman !" 
 
 "Then did you ever see such a monster! Tom 
 told me he was another Hyperion. He half admitted 
 it himself, indeed ; for to tell you a secret, I have cor- 
 responded with him a year!" 
 
 "Giddy Miss Fanny Ellerton! — and never saw 
 him!" 
 
 " Never till to-night ! He sat at supper in a white 
 jacket and red face, with a pile of bones upon his plate 
 like an Indian tumulus." 
 
 "And your brother introduced you ?" 
 
 " Ah, you were at table ! Well, did you ever see in 
 your travels, a man so unpleasantly hideous?" 
 
 "Fanny!" said her brother, coming up at the mo- 
 ment, " Slingsby presents his apologies to you for not 
 joining your cordon to-night — but he's gone to bed 
 with a head-ache." 
 
 "Indigestion, I dare say," said the young lady. 
 " Never mind, Tom, I'll break my heart when \ have 
 leisure. And now, Mr. Wrongham, since the spectre 
 walks not forth to-night, I am yours for a cool hour 
 on the colonnade." 
 
 Vegetation is rapid in Alabama, and love is a weed 
 that thrives in the soil of the tropics. We discoursed 
 of the lost Pleiad and the Berlin bracelets, of the five 
 hundred people about us, and the feasibility of boiling 
 a pot on five hundred a year — the unmatrimonial sum 
 total of my paternal allowance. She had as many ne- 
 groes as I had dollars, I well knew, but it was my cue 
 to seem disinterested. 
 
 " And where do you mean to live, when you marry, 
 Mr. Wrongham?" asked Miss Ellerton, at the two 
 hundredth turn on the colonnade. 
 
 "Would you like to live in Italy?" I asked again, 
 as if I had not heard her. 
 
 " Do you mean that as a scquitur to my question, 
 Mr. Wrongham ?" said she, half stopping in her walk ; 
 and though the sentence was commenced playfully, 
 dropping her voice at the last word, with something, I 
 thought, very like emotion. 
 
 I drew her off the colonnade to the small garden 
 between the house and the spring, and in a giddy 
 dream of fear and surprise at my own rashness and 
 success, I made, and won from her, a frank avowal of 
 preference. 
 
 Matches have been made more suddenly. 
 
438 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 hi. 
 
 Miss Ellerton sat in the music-room the next morn- 
 ing after breakfast, preventing pauses in a rather in- 
 teresting conversation, by a running accompaniment 
 upon the guitar. A single gold thread formed a fillet 
 about her temples, and from beneath it, in clouds of 
 silken ringlets, floated the softest raven hair that ever 
 grew enamored of an ivory shoulder. Hers was a 
 skin that seemed woven of the lily-white, but opaque 
 fibre of the magnolia, yet of that side of its cup turned 
 toward the fading sunset. There is no term in paint- 
 ing, because there is no touch of pencil or color, that 
 could express the vanishing and impalpable breath 
 that assured the healthiness of so pale a cheek. She 
 was slight as all southern women are in America, and 
 of a flexible and luxurious gracefulness equalled by 
 nothing but the movings of a smoke-curl. Without 
 the elastic nerve remarkable in the motions of Taglioni, 
 she appeared, like her, to be born with a lighter spe- 
 cific gravity than her fellow-creatures. If she had 
 floated away upon some chance breeze you would only 
 have been surprised upon reflection. 
 
 " I am afraid you are too fond of society," said Miss 
 Ellerton, as Juba came in hesitatingly and delivered 
 her a note in the hand- writing of an old correspondent. 
 She turned pale on seeing the superscription, and 
 crushed the note up in her hand, unread. I was not 
 sorry to defer the denouement of my little drama, and 
 taking up the rema.rk which she seemed disposed to 
 forgel, I referred her to a scrap-book of Van Pelt's, 
 which she had brought home with her, containing 
 some verses of my own, copied (by good luck) in that 
 sentimental sophomore's own hand. 
 
 "Are these yours, really and really?" she asked, 
 looking pryingly into my face, and showing me my 
 own verses, against which she had already run a pen- 
 cil line of approbation. 
 
 "Peccavi!" I answered. "But will you make me 
 in love with my offspring by reading them in your own 
 voice." 
 
 They were some lines written in a balcony at day- 
 break, while a ball was still going on within, and con- 
 tained an allusion (which I had quite overlooked) to 
 some one of my ever-changing admirations. As well 
 as I remember they ran thus : — 
 
 Morn in the east ! How coldly fair 
 
 It breaks upon my fevered eye ! 
 How chides the calm and dewy air I 
 
 How chides the pure and pearly sky ! 
 The stars melt in a brighter fire, 
 
 The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers ; 
 They from their watch, in light retire, 
 
 While we in sadness pass from ours ! 
 
 I turn from the rebuking morn. 
 
 The cold gray sky and fading star, 
 And listen to the harp and horn, 
 
 And see the waltzers near and far : 
 The lamps and flowers are bright as yet, 
 
 And lips beneath more bright than they— 
 How can a scene so fair beget 
 
 The mournful thoughts we bear away. 
 
 'Tis something that thou art not here, 
 
 Sweet lover of my lightest word ! 
 'Tis something that my mother's tear 
 
 By these forgetful hours is stirred ? 
 But I have long a loiterer been 
 
 In haunts where Joy is said to be ; 
 And though with Peace I enter in, 
 
 The nymph comes never forth with me ! 
 
 "And who was this • sweet lover,' Mr. Wrongham ? 
 I should know, I think, before I go farther with so ex- 
 peditious a gentleman." 
 
 " As Shelley says of his ideal mistress — 
 
 ' I loved — oh, no I I mean not one of ye, 
 Or any earthly one— though ye are fair !' 
 
 It was but an apostrophe to the presentiment of that 
 which I have found, dear Miss Ellerton ! But will you 
 read that ill-treated billet-doux, and remember that 
 Juba stands with the patience of an ebon statue wait- 
 ing for an answer ?" 
 
 I knew the contents of the letter, and I watched the 
 expression of her face, as she read it, with no little 
 interest. Her temples flushed, and her delicate lips 
 gradually curled into an expression of anger and scorn, 
 and having finished the perusal of it, she put it into 
 my hand, and asked me if so impertinent a production 
 deserved an answer. 
 
 I began to fear that the eclaircisscment would not 
 leave me on the sunny side of the lady's favor, and felt 
 the need of the moment's reflection given me while 
 running my eye over the letter. 
 
 " Mr. Slingsby," said I, with the deliberation of an 
 attorney, " has been some time in correspondence with 
 you ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " And, from his letters and your brother's commen- 
 dations, you had formed a high opinion of his charac- 
 ter, and had expressed as much in your letters ?" 
 
 " Yes — perhaps I did." 
 
 " And from this paper intimacy he conceives him- 
 self sufficiently acquainted with you to request leave 
 to pay his addresses ?" 
 
 A dignified bow put a stop to my catechism. 
 
 " Dear Miss Ellerton !" I said, " this is scarcely a 
 question upon which I ought to speak, but by putting 
 this letter into my hand, you seemed to ask my opin- 
 ion." 
 
 " I did — I do," said the lovely girl, taking my hand, 
 and looking appealingly into my face ; " answer it for 
 me ! I have done wrong in encouraging that foolish 
 correspondence, and I owe perhaps to this forward 
 man a kinder reply than my first feeling would have 
 dictated. Decide for me — write for me — relieve me 
 from the first burden that has lain on my heart 
 since " 
 
 She burst into tears, and my dread of an explanation 
 increased. 
 
 " Will you follow my advice implicitly ?" I asked. 
 
 " Yes — oh, yes !" 
 
 " You promise ?" 
 
 " Indeed, indeed !" 
 
 " Well, then, listen to me ! However painful the 
 task, I must tell you that the encouragement you have 
 given Mr. Slingsby, the admiration you have expressed 
 in your letters of his talents and acquirements, and the 
 confidences you have reposed in him respecting your- 
 self, warrant him in claiming as a right, a fair trial of 
 his attractions. You have known and approved Mr. 
 Slingsby's mind for years — you know me but for a tew 
 hours. You saw him under the most unfavorable 
 auspices (for I know him intimately), and I feel bound 
 in justice to assure you that you will like him much 
 better upon acquaintance." 
 
 Miss Ellerton had gradually drawn herself up du- 
 ring this splendid speech, and sat at last as erect and 
 as cold as Agrippina upon her marble chair. 
 
 "Will you allow me to send Mr. Slingsby to you," 
 I continued, rising — " and suffer him to plead his own 
 cause ?" 
 
 " If you will call my brother, Mr. Wrongham, I 
 shall feel obliged to you," said Miss Ellerton. 
 
 I left the room, and hurrying to my chamber, dipped 
 my head into a basin of water, and plastered my long 
 locks over my eyes, slipped on a white roundabout, 
 and tied around my neck the identical checked cravat 
 in which I had made such an unfavorable impression 
 on the first day of my arrival. Tom Ellerton was soon 
 found, and easily agreed to go before and announce me 
 by my proper name to his sister ; and treading close- 
 ly on his heels, I followed to the door of the music- 
 room. 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 439 
 
 " Ah, Ellen !" said he, without giving her time for 
 a scene, " I was looking for you. Slingsby is better, 
 and will pay his respects to you presently. And, I 
 sa y — y u will treat him well, Ellen, and — and, don't 
 flirt with Wrongham the way you did last night ! — 
 Slingby's a devilish sight better fellow. Oh, here he 
 is !" 
 
 As I stepped over the threshold, Miss Ellerton gave 
 me just enough of a look to assure herself that it was 
 the identical monster she had seen at the tea-table, 
 and not deigning me another glance, immediately com- 
 menced talking violently to her brother on the state of 
 the weather. Tom bore it for a moment or two with 
 remarkable gravity, but at my first attempt to join in 
 the conversation, my voice was lost in an explosion of 
 laughter which would have been the death of a gentle- 
 man with a full habit. 
 
 Indignant and astonished, Miss Ellerton rose to her 
 full height, and slowly turned to me. 
 
 44 Peccari .'" said I, crossing my hands on my bosom, 
 and looking up penitently to her face. 
 
 She ran to me, and seized my hand, but recovered 
 herself instantly, and the next moment was gone from 
 the room. 
 
 Whether from wounded pride at having been the 
 subject of a mystification, or whether from that female 
 caprice by which most men suffer at one period or 
 other of their bachelor lives, I know not — but I never 
 could bring Miss Ellerton again to the same interest- 
 ing crisis with which she ended her intimacy with Mr. 
 \Vrongham. She proffered to forgive me, and talked 
 laughingly enough of our old correspondence ; but 
 whenever 1 grew tender, she referred me to the " sweet 
 lover," mentioned in my verses in the balcony, and 
 looked around for Van Pelt. That accomplished 
 beau, on observing my discomfiture, began to find out 
 Miss Ellerton's graces without the aid of his quizzing- 
 glass, and I soon found it necessary to yield the pas 
 altogether. She has since become Mrs. Van Pelt, 
 and when I last heard from her was " as well as could 
 be expected." 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON. 
 
 The last of August came sweltering in, hot, dusty, 
 and faint, and the most indefatigable belles of Sarato- 
 ga began to show symptoms of weariness. The stars 
 disappeared gradually from the ballroom; the bar- 
 keeper grew thin under the thickening accounts for 
 lemonades ; the fat fellow in the black band, who 
 " vexed" the bassoon, had blown himself from the 
 girth of Falstaff to an " eagle's talon in the waist ;" 
 papas began to be waylaid in their morning walks by 
 young gentlemen with propositions; and stage-coaches 
 that came in with their baggageless tails in the air, and 
 the driver's weight pressing the foot-board upon the 
 astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the 
 trim of a Venetian gondola — the driver's up-hoisted 
 figure answering to the curved proboscis of that stern- 
 laden craft. 
 
 The vocation of tin-tumblers and water-dippers was 
 gone. The fashionable world {brazen in its general 
 habit) had drank its fill of the ferrugineous waters. 
 Mammas thanked Heaven for the conclusion of the 
 chaperon's summer solstice ; and those who came to 
 bet, and those who came to marry, " made up their 
 books," and walked off (if they had won) with their 
 winnings. 
 
 Having taken a less cordial farewell of Van Pelt 
 than I might have done had not Miss Ellerton been 
 hanging confidingly on his arm, I followed my baggage 
 
 to the door, where that small epitome of the inherit- 
 ance of the prince of darkness, an American stage- 
 coach, awaited me as its ninth inside passenger. As 
 the last person picked up, I knew very well the seat 
 to which I was destined, and drawing a final cool 
 breath in the breezy colonnade, I summoned resolu- 
 tion and abandoned myself to the tender mercies of 
 the driver. 
 
 The " ray of contempt" that " will pierce through 
 the shell of the tortoise," is a shaft from the horn of 
 a new moon in comparison with the beating of an 
 American sun through the top of a stage-coach. This 
 " accommodation," as it is sometimes bitterly called, 
 not being intended to carry outside passengers, has a 
 top as thin as your grandmother's umbrella, black, po- 
 rous, and cracked ; and while intended for a protec- 
 tion from the heat, it just suffices to collect the sun's 
 rays with an incredible power and sultriness, and ex- 
 clude the air that makes it sufferable to the beasts of 
 the field. Of the nine places inside this " dilly," the 
 four seats in the corners are so far preferable that the 
 occupant has the outer side of his body exempt from 
 a perspirative application of human flesh (the ther- 
 mometer at 100 degrees of Fahrenheit), while, of the 
 three middle places on the three seats, the man in the 
 centre of the coach, with no support for his back, yet 
 buried to the chin in men, women, and children, is at 
 the ninth and lowest degree of human suffering. I 
 left Saratoga in such a state of happiness as you 
 might suppose for a gentleman, who, besides fulfilling 
 this latter category, had been previously unhappy in 
 his love. 
 
 I was dressed in a white roundabout and trowsers 
 of the same, a straw hat, thread stockings, and pumps, 
 and was so far a blessing to my, neighbors that 1 looked 
 cool. Directly behind me, occupying the middle of 
 the back seat, sat a young woman with a gratis passen- 
 ger in her lap (who, of course, did not count among 
 the nine), in the shape of a fat and a very hot child 
 of three years of age, whom she called John, Jacky, 
 Johnny, Jocket, Jacket, and the other endearing di- 
 minutives of the namesakes of the great apostle. Like 
 the saint who had been selected for his patron, he was 
 a " voice crying in the wilderness." This little gen- 
 tleman was exceedingly unpopular with his two neigh- 
 bors at the windows, and his incursions upon their legs 
 and shoulders in his occasional forays for fresh air, 
 ended in his being forbidden to look out at either win- 
 dow, and plied largely with gingerbread to content him 
 with the warm lap of his mother. Though I had no 
 eyes in the back of my straw hat, I conceived very 
 well the state in which a compost of soft gingerbread, 
 tears, ai.d perspiration, would soon leave the two un- 
 scrupulous hands behind me ; and as the jolts of the 
 coach frequently threw me back upon the knees of 
 his mother, I could not consistently complain of the 
 familiar use made of my roundabout and shoulders in 
 Master John's constant changes of position. I vowed 
 my jacket to the first river, the moment I could make 
 sure that the soft gingerbread was exhausted — but I 
 kept my temper. 
 
 How an American Jehu gets his team over ten 
 miles in the hour, through all the variety of sand, ruts, 
 clay-pits, and slump-thickets, is a problem that can 
 only be resolved by riding beside him on the box. In 
 the usual time we arrived at the pretty village of Troy, 
 some thirty miles from Saratoga ; and here, having ex- 
 changed my bedaubed jacket for a clean one, I freely 
 forgave little Pickle his freedoms, for I hoped never 
 to set eyes on him again during his natural life. I was 
 going eastward by another coach. 
 
 Having eaten a salad for my dinner, and drank a 
 bottle of iced claret, I stepped forth in my » blanched 
 and lavendered" jacket to take my place in the other 
 coach, trusting Providence not to afflict me twice in 
 
440 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the same day with the evil I had just escaped, and feel- 
 ing, on the whole, reconciled to my troubled dividend 
 of eternity. I got up the steps of the coach with as 
 much alacrity as the state of the thermometer would 
 permit, and was about drawing my legs after me upon 
 the forward seat, when a clammy hand caught me 
 unceremoniously by the shirt-collar, and the voice I 
 was just beginning to forget cried out with a chuckle, 
 "Dada ."' 
 
 " Madam!" I said, picking off the gingerbread from 
 my shirt as the coach rolled down the street, "I had 
 hoped that your infernal child " 
 
 I stopped in the middle of the sentence, for a pair 
 of large blue eyes were looking wonderingly into mine, 
 and for the first time I observed that the mother of 
 this familiar nuisance was one of the prettiest women I 
 had seen since I had become susceptible to the charms 
 of the sex. 
 
 " Are you going to Boston, sir ?" she inquired, with 
 a half-timid smile, as if, in that case, she appealed to 
 me for protection on the road. 
 
 " Yes, madam !" I answered, taking little Jocket's 
 pasty hand into mine, affectionately, as I returned her 
 hesitating look ; " may I hope for your society so 
 far ?" 
 
 My fresh white waistcoat was soon embossed with a 
 dingy yellow, where my enterprising fellow-passenger 
 had thrust his sticky fist into the pockets, and my sham 
 shirt-bosom was reduced incontinently to the complex- 
 ion of a painter's rag after doing a sunset in gamboge. 
 I saw everything, however, through the blue eyes of 
 his mother, and was soon on such pleasant terms with 
 Master John, that, at one of the stopping-places, I in- 
 veigled him out of the coach and dropped him acci- 
 dentally into the horse-trough, contriving to scrub him 
 passably clean before he could recover breath enough 
 for an outcry. I had already thrown the residuum 
 of his gingerbread out of the window, so that his fa- 
 miliarities for the rest of the day were, at least, less 
 adhesive. 
 
 We dropped one or two way-passengers at Lebanon, 
 and I was left in the coach with Mrs. Captain and 
 Master John Thompson, in both whose favors I made 
 a progress that (I may as well depone) considerably 
 restored my spirits — laid flat by my unthrift wooing at 
 Saratoga. If a fly hath but alit on my nose when my 
 self-esteem hath been thus at a discount, I have 
 soothed myself with the fancy that it preferred me — a 
 drowning vanity will so catch at a straw ! 
 
 As we bowled along through some of the loveliest 
 scenery of Massachusetts, my companion (now become 
 my charge), let me a little into her history, and at the 
 same time, by those shades of insinuation of which 
 women so instinctively know the uses, gave me per- 
 fectly to comprehend that 1 might as well economize 
 my tenderness. The father of the riotous young gen- 
 tleman who had made so free with my Valencia waist- 
 coat and linen roundabouts, had the exclusive copy- 
 hold of her affections. He had been three years at 
 sea (I think I said before), and she was hastening to 
 show him the pledge of their affections — come into 
 the world since the good brig Dolly made her last 
 clearance from Boston bay. 
 
 I was equally attentive to Mrs. Thompson after this 
 illumination, though I was, perhaps, a shade less en- 
 amored of the interesting freedoms of Master John. 
 One's taste for children depends so much upon one's 
 love for their mothers ! 
 
 It was twelve o'clock at night when the coach rat- 
 tled in upon the pavements of Boston. Mrs. Thomp- 
 son had expressed so much impatience during the last 
 few miles, and seemed to shrink so sensitively from 
 being left to herself in a strange city, that I offered my 
 services till she should find herself in better hands, 
 and, as a briefer way of disposing of her, had bribed 
 
 the coachman, who was in a hurry with the mail, to 
 turn a little out of his way, and leave her at her hus- 
 band's hotel. 
 
 We drew up with a prodigious clatter, accordingly, 
 at the Marlborough hotel, where, no coach being ex- 
 pected, the boots and bar-keeper were not immediately 
 forthcoming. After a rap "to wake the dead,'' I set 
 about assisting the impatient driver in getting off the 
 lady's trunks and boxes, and they stood in a large 
 pyramid on the sidewalk when the door was opened. 
 A man in his shirt, three parts asleep, held a flaring 
 candle over his head, and looked through the half- 
 opened door. 
 
 " Is Captain Thompson up ?" I asked rather brusque- 
 ly, irritated at the sour visage of the bar-keeper. 
 
 "Captain Thompson, sir!" 
 
 "Captain Thompson, sir!!" I repeated my words 
 with a voice that sent him three paces back into the 
 hall. 
 
 "No, sir," he said at last, slipping one leg into his 
 trowsers, which had hitherto been under his arm. 
 
 " Then wake him immediately, and tell him Mrs. 
 Thompson is arrived." Here's a husband, thought I, 
 as I heard something between a sob and a complaint 
 issue from the coach-window at the bar-keeper's intel- 
 ligence. To go to bed when he expected his wife and 
 child, and after three years' separation ! She might 
 as well have made a parenthesis in her constancy ! 
 
 "Have you called the captain?" I asked, as I set 
 Master John upon the steps, and observed the man 
 still standing with the candle in his hand, grinning 
 from ear to ear. 
 
 " No, sir," said the man. 
 
 " No !" I thundered, " and what in the devil's name 
 is the reason ?" 
 
 "Boots!" he cried out in reply, " show this gentle- 
 man ' forty-one.' Them may wake Captain Thompson 
 as likes! /never hearra of no Mrs. Thompson!" 
 
 Rejecting an ungenerous suspicion that flashed 
 across -my mind, and informing the bar-keeper en pas- 
 sant, that he was a brute and a donkey, I sprang up 
 the staircase after a boy, and quite out of breath, ar- 
 rived at a long gallery of bachelors' rooms on the fifth 
 floor. The boy pointed to a door at the end of the 
 gallery, and retreated to the banisters as if to escape 
 the blowing up of a petard. 
 
 Rat-a-tat-tat! 
 
 " Come in !" thundered a voice like a hailing trum- 
 pet. I took the lamp from the boy, and opened the 
 door. On a narrow bed well tucked up, lay a most 
 formidable looking individual, with a face glowing 
 with carbuncles, a pair of deep-set eyes inflamed and 
 fiery, and hair and eyebrows of glaring red, mixed 
 slightly with gray ; while outside the bed lay a hairy 
 arm, with a fist like the end of the club of Hercules. 
 His head tied loosely in a black silk handkerchief, and 
 on the light-stand stood a tumbler of brandy-and-water. 
 
 " What do you want ?" he thundered again, as I step- 
 ped over a threshold and lifted my hat, struck speech- 
 less for a moment with this unexpected apparition. 
 
 " Have I the pleasure," I asked, in a hesitating 
 voice, "to address Captain Thompson?" 
 
 " That's my name !" 
 
 "Ah! then, captain, I have the pleasure to inform 
 you that Mrs. Thompson and little John are arrived. 
 They are at the door at this moment." 
 
 A change in the expression of Captain Thompson's 
 face checked my information in the middle, and as I 
 took a step backward, he raised himself on his elbow, 
 and looked at me in a way that did not diminish my 
 embarrassment. 
 
 "I'll tell you what, Mr. Milk-and-water," said he, 
 with an emphasis on every word like the descent of a 
 sledge-hammer ; "if you're not out of this room in 
 two seconds with your 'Mrs. Thompson and little 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 441 
 
 John,' I Ml slam you through that window, or the devil 
 take me !" 
 
 I reflected as I took another step backward, that if 
 I were thrown down to Mrs. Thompson from a fifth 
 
 story window I should not he in a state to render her 
 i lie assistance she required; and remarking with an 
 ill-feigned gayety to Captain Thompson that so de- 
 cided a measure would not l)e necessary, I backed 
 expeditiously over the threshold. As I was closing 
 his door, I heard the gulp of his brandy-and-water, 
 and the next instant the empty glass whizzed past my 
 retreating head, and was shattered to pieces on the 
 wall behind me. 
 
 I gave the " boots" a cuff for an untimely roar of 
 laughter as I reached the 6taircase, and descended, 
 very much discomfited and embarrassed, to Mrs. 
 Thompson. My delay had thrown that lady into a 
 very moving state of unhappiness. Her tears were 
 glistening in the light of the street lamp, and Master I 
 John was pulling away unheeded at her stomacher, 
 and crying as if he would split his diaphragm. What 
 to do ? 1 would have offered to take her to my pater- 
 nal roof till the mystery could be cleared up — but I 
 had been absent two years, and to arrive at midnight 
 with a woman and a young child, and such an im- 
 probable story — I did not think my reputation at 
 home would bear me out. The coachman, too, began 
 to swear and make demonstrations of leaving us in the 
 street, and it was necessary to decide. 
 
 "Shove the baggage inside the coach," I said at 
 last, "and drive on. Don't be unhappy Mrs. Thomp- 
 son! Jocket, stop crying, you villain! I'll see that 
 you are comfortably disposed of for the night where 
 the coach stops, madam, and to-morrow I'll try a 
 little reason with Captain Thompson. How the devil 
 can she love such a volcanic specimen !" I muttered 
 to myself, dodging instinctively at the bare remem- 
 brance of the glass of brandy-and-water. 
 
 The coachman made up for lost time, and we rattled 
 over the pavements at a rate that made .locket's hully- 
 baloo quite inaudible. As we passed the door of my 
 own home, 1 wondered what would be the impression 
 of my respectable parent, could he see me whisking 
 by, after midnight, with a rejected woman and her 
 progeny upon my hands ; but smothering the un- 
 worthy doubt that re-arose in my mind, touching the 
 legitimacy of Master John, I inwardly vowed that I 
 would see Mrs. Thompson at all risks fairly out of 
 her imbroglio. 
 
 We pulled up with a noise like the discharge of a 
 load of paving-stones, and I was about saying some- 
 thing botli affectionate and consolatory to my weeping 
 charge, when a tall handsome fellow, with a face as 
 brown as a berry, sprang to the coach-door, and seized 
 her in his arms! A shower of kisses and tender ep- 
 ithets left me not a moment in doubt. There was 
 another Captain Thompson! 
 
 He had not been able to get rooms at the Marl- 
 borough, as he had anticipated when he wrote, and 
 presuming that the mail would come first to the post- 
 office, he had waited for her there. 
 
 As 1 was passing the Marlborough a week or two 
 afterward, I stopped to inquire about Captain Thomp- 
 son. I found that he was an old West India captain, \ 
 who had lived there between his cruises for twenty j 
 years more or less, and had generally been supposed a 
 bachelor. He had suddenly gone to sea, the land- i 
 lord told me, smiling at the same time, as if thereby 
 hung a tale if he chose to tell it. 
 
 " The fact is," said Boniface, when I pushed him a 
 little on the subject, "he was sheared off." 
 
 "What scared him?" I asked very innocently. 
 "A wife and child from some foreign port!" he an- 
 swered laughing as if he would burst his waistband, 
 and taking me into the back parlor to tell me the par- 
 ticulars. 
 
 A LOG IN THE ARCHIPELAGO. 
 
 The American frigate, in which I had cruised as 
 the ward-room guest for more than six months, had 
 sailed for winter quarters at Mahon, and my name was 
 up at the pier of Smyrna, as a passenger in the first 
 ship that should leave the port, whatever her destina- 
 tion. 
 
 The flags of all nations flew at the crowded peaks of 
 the merchantmen lying offthe Marina, and among them 
 lay two small twin brigs, loading with figs and opium 
 for my native town in America. They were owned by 
 an old schoolfellow of my own, one of the most distin- 
 guished and hospitable of the Smyrniote merchants, 
 and, if nothing more adventurous turned up, he had 
 offered to land me from one of his craft at Malta oi 
 Gibraltar. 
 
 Time wore on, and I had loitered up and down the 
 narrow street " in melancholy idleness" by day, and 
 smoked the narghile with those " merchant princes" 
 by night, till I knew every paving-stone between the 
 beach and the bazar, and had learned the thrilling 
 events of the Greek persecution with the particularity 
 of a historian. My heart, too, unsusceptible enough 
 when "packed for travel," began to uncoil with ab- 
 sence of adventure, and expose its sluggish pulses to 
 the "Creek fire," still burning in those Asiatic eyes, 
 and I felt sensibly, that if, Telemachus-like, I did not 
 soon throw myself into the sea, I should yield, past 
 praying for, to the cup of some Smyrniote Circe. 
 Darker eyes than are seen on that Marina swim not in 
 delight out of paradise ! 
 
 I was sitting on an opium-box in the counting-house 
 of my friend L n(the princely and hospitable mer- 
 chant spoken of above), when enter a Yankee "skip- 
 per," whom I would have clapped on the shoulder for 
 a townsman if I had seen him on the top of the minaret 
 of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet. His go-ashore black 
 coat and trowsers, worn only one month in twelve, 
 were of costly cloth, but of the fashion prevailing in 
 the days of his promotion to be second mate of a cod- 
 fisher ; his hat was of the richest beaver, but getting 
 brown with the same paucity of wear, and exposure to 
 the corroding air of the ocean ; and on his hands were 
 stretched (and they had well need to be elastic) a pair 
 of Woodstock gloves that might have descended to 
 him from Paul Jones " the pilot." A bulge just over 
 his lowest rib gave token of the ship's chronometer, 
 and, in obedience to the new fashion of a guard, a fine 
 chain of the softest auburn hair (doubtless his wife's, 
 and, 1 would have wagered my passage-money, as pret- 
 ty a woman as he would see in his v'yage) — a chain, 1 
 say, braided of silken blond ringlets passed around his 
 neck, and drew its glossy line over his broad-breasted 
 white waistcoat — the dewdrop on the lion's mane not 
 more entitled to be astonished. 
 
 A face of hard-weather, but with an expression of 
 care equal to the amount of his invoice, yet honest and 
 fearless as the truck of his mainmast; a round sailor's 
 back, that looked as if he would hoist up his deck if 
 you battered him beneath hatches against his will ; 
 and teeth as white as his new foresail, completed the 
 picture of the master of the brig Metamora. Jolly old 
 
 H 1, 1 shall never feel the grip of an honester hand, 
 
 nor return one (as far as 1 can with the fist you crip- 
 pled at parting) with a more kindly pressure ! A fair 
 wind on your quarter, my old boy, wherever you may 
 be trading ! 
 
 "What sort of accommodations have you, captain?" 
 
 I asked, as my friend introduced me. 
 
 " Why, none to speak of, sir ! There's a starboard 
 birth that a'n't got much in it— a few boxes of figs, and 
 the new spritsail, and some of the mate's traps— but 1 
 could stow away a little perhaps, sir." 
 
 " You sail to-morrow morning ?" 
 
 " Off with the land-breeze, sir." 
 
442 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 I took leave of the kindest of friends, laid in a few 
 hasty stores, and was on board at midnight. The next 
 morning I awoke with the water rippling beside me, 
 and creeping on deck, I saw a line of foam stretching 
 behind us far up the gulf, and the ruins of the primi- 
 tive church of Smyrna, mingled with the turrets of a 
 Turkish castle, far away in the horizon. 
 
 The morning was cool and fresh, the sky of an ori- 
 ental purity, and the small low brig sped on like a 
 nautilus. The captain stood by the binnacle, looking 
 off to the westward with a glass, a, tarpaulin hat over 
 his black locks, a pair of sail-cloth pumps on his feet, 
 and trowsers and roundabout of an indefinable tarri- 
 ness and texture. He handed me the glass, and, obey- 
 ing his direction, I saw, stealing from behind a point of 
 land, shaped like a cat's back, the well-known topsails 
 of the two frigates that had sailed before us. 
 
 We were off Vourla, and the commodore had gone 
 to pay his respects to Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then ly- 
 ing with his fleet in this little bay, and waiting, we 
 supposed, for orders to force the Dardanelles. The 
 frigates soon appeared on the bosom of the gulf, and 
 heading down, neared our larboard bow, and stood for 
 the Archipelago. The Metamora kept her way, but 
 the " United States," the fleetest of our ships, soon 
 left us behind with a strengthening breeze, and, fol- 
 lowing her with the glass till I could no longer distin- 
 guish the cap of the officer of the deck, I breathed a 
 blessing after her, and went below to breakfast. It is 
 strange how the lessening in the distance of a ship in 
 which one has cruised in these southern seas, pulls on 
 the heartstrings ! 
 
 I sat on deck most of the day, cracking pecan-nuts 
 with the captain, and gossiping about schooldays in 
 jur native town, occasionally looking off over the hills 
 of Asia Minor, and trying to realize (the Ixion labor of 
 the imagination in travel) the history of which these 
 barren lands have been the scene. 1 know not wheth- 
 er it is easy for a native of old countries to people these 
 desolated lands from the past, but for me, accustomed 
 to look on the face of the surrounding earth as mere 
 vegetation, unstoried and unassociated, it is with a con- 
 stant mental effort alone that I can be classic on clas- 
 sic ground — find Plato in the desert wastes of the 
 Academy, or Priam among the Turk-stridden and 
 prostrate columns of Troy. In my recollections of 
 Athens, the Parthenon and the Theseion and the sol- 
 emn and sublime ruins by the Fount of Callirhoe stand 
 forth prominent enough ; but when I was on the spot 
 — a biped to whom three meals a day, a washerwo- 
 man, and a banker, were urgent necessities — I shame 
 to confess that I sat dangling my legs over the classic 
 Pelasgicum, not " fishing for philosophers with gold 
 and figs," but musing on the mundane and proximate 
 matters of daily economy. I could see my six shirts 
 hanging to dry, close by the temple of the Winds, and 
 I knew my dinner was cooking three doors from the 
 crumbling capitals of the Agora. 
 
 As the sun set over Ephesus, we neared the mouth 
 of the gulf of Smyrna, and the captain stood looking 
 over the leeward-bow rather earnestly. 
 
 " We shall have a snorter out of the nor'east," he 
 said, taking hold of the tiller, and sending the helms- 
 man forward — " I never was up this sea but once 
 afore, and it's a dirty passage through these islands in 
 any weather, let alone a Levanter." 
 
 He followed up his soliloquy by jamming his tiller 
 hard a-port, and in ten minutes the little brig was run- 
 ning her nose, as it seemed to me, right upon an in- 
 hospitable rock at the northern headland of the gulf. 
 At the distance of a biscuit-toss from the shore, how- 
 ever, the rock was dropped to leeward, and a small 
 passage appeared, opening with a sharp curve into 
 the miniature but sheltered bay of Fourgas. We 
 dropped anchor off a small hamlet of forty or fifty 
 houses, and lay beyond the reach of Levanters in a 
 
 circular basin that seemed shut in by a rim of granite 
 from the sea. 
 
 The captain's judgment of the weather was correct, 
 and, after the sun set, the wind rose gradually to a vi- 
 olence which sent the spray high over the barriers of 
 our protected position. Congratulating ourselves that 
 we were on the right side of the granite wall, we got 
 out our jolly-boat on the following morning, and ran 
 ashore upon the beach half a mile from town, propo- 
 sing to climb first to the peak of the neighboring hill, 
 and then forage for a dinner in the village below. 
 
 We scrambled up the rocky mountain-side, with 
 some loss of our private stock of wind, and considera- 
 ble increase from the nor'easter, and getting under the 
 lee of a projecting shelf, sat looking over toward Les- 
 bos, and ruminating in silence — I, upon the old ques- 
 tion, " an Sappho publica fuerit," and the captain prob- 
 ably on his wife at Cape Cod, and his pecan-nuts, figs, 
 and opium, in the emerald-green brig below us. I 
 don't know why she should have been painted green, 
 by-the-by (and I never thought to suggest that to the 
 captain), being named after an Indian chief, who was 
 as red as her copper bottom. 
 
 The sea toward Mitylene looked as wild as an ea- 
 gle's wing ruffling against the wind, and there was that 
 smoke in the sky as if the blast was igniting with its 
 speed — the look of a gale in those seas when unac- 
 companied with rain. The crazy-looking vessels of 
 the Levant were scudding with mere rags of sails for 
 the gulf; and while we sat on the rock, eight or ten 
 of those black and unsightly craft shot into the little 
 bay below us, and dropped anchor — blessing, no doubt, 
 j every saint in the Greek calendar. 
 
 Having looked toward Lesbos an hour, and come to 
 the conclusion, that, admitting the worst with regard 
 ' to the private character of Sappho, it would have been 
 very pleasant to have known her ; and the captain 
 having washed his feet in a slender tricklet oozing 
 from a cleft in a rock, we descended the hill on the 
 other side, and stole a march on the rear to the town 
 of Fourgas. Four or five Greek women were picking 
 up olives in a grove lying halfway down the hill, and 
 on our coming in sight, they made for us with such 
 speed, that I feared the reverse of the Sabine rape — 
 not yet having seen a man on this desolate shore ; they 
 ran well, but they resembled Atalanta in no other pos- 
 sible particular. We should have taken them for the 
 Furies, but there were five. They wanted snuff and 
 money — making signs easily for the first, but attempt- 
 ing amicably to put their hands in our pockets when 
 we refused to comprehend the Greek for " Give us a 
 para." The captain pulled from his pocket an Amer- 
 ican dollar-note (payable at Nantucket), and offered it 
 to the youngest of the women, who smelt at it and re- 
 turned it to him, evidently unacquainted with the Cape 
 Cod currency. On farther search he found a few of 
 the tinsel paras of the country, which he substituted 
 for his " dollar-bill," a saving of ninety-nine cents to 
 him, if the bank has not broke when he arrives at Mas- 
 sachusetts. 
 
 Fourgas is surrounded by a very old wall, very much 
 battered. We passed under a high arch containing 
 marks of having once been closed with a heavy gate • 
 and, disputing our passage with cows, and men that 
 seemed less cleanly and civilized, penetrated to the 
 heart of the town in search of the barber's shop, cafe 
 and kibaub shop — three conveniences usually united 
 in a single room and dispensed by a single Figaro in 
 Turkish and Greek towns of this description. The 
 word cafe is universal, and we needed only to pio- 
 nounce it to be led by a low door into a square apart- 
 ment of a ruinous old building, around which, upon a 
 kind of shelf, waist-high, sat as many of the inhabit- 
 ants of the town as could cross their legs conveniently. 
 As soon as we were discerned through the smoke by 
 the omnifarious proprietor of the establishment, two 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 443 
 
 of the worst-dressed customers were turned off the 
 shelf unceremoniously to make room for us, the fire 
 beneath the coffeepot was raked open, and the agree- 
 able flavor of the spiced beverage of the east ascended 
 refreshingly to our nostrils. With his baggy frowsers 
 tucked up to his thigh, his silk shirt to his armpits, 
 and his smoke-dried but clean feet wandering at large 
 in a pair of red morocco slippers, our Turkish Gany- 
 mede presented the small cups in their filagree hold- 
 ers, and never was beverage more delicious or more 
 welcome. Thirsty with our ramble, and unaccus- 
 tomed to such small quantities as seem to satisfy the 
 natives of the east, the captain and myself soon became 
 objects of no small amusement to the wondering beards 
 about us. A large tablespoon holds rather more than 
 a Turkish coffee-cup, and one, or, at most, two of 
 these, satisfies the dryest clay in the Orient. To us, 
 a dozen of them was a bagatelle, and we soon ex- 
 hausted the copper pot, and intimated to the aston- 
 ished Gafidji that we should want another. He looked 
 at us a minute to see if we were in earnest, and then 
 laid his hand on his stomach, and rolling up his eyes, 
 made some remark to his other customers which pro- 
 voked a general laugh. It was our last " lark" ashore 
 for some time, however, and spite of this apparent 
 prophecy of a colic, we smoked our narghiles and 
 kept him running with his fairy cups for some time 
 longer. One never gets enough of that fragrant li- 
 quor. 
 
 The sun broke through the clouds as we sat on the 
 high bench, and, hastily paying our Turk, we hurried 
 to the seaside. The wind seemed to have lulled, and 
 was blowing lightly offshore ; and, impatient of loiter- 
 ing on his voyage, the captain got up his anchor and 
 ran across the bay, and in half an hour was driving 
 through a sea that left not a dry plank on the deck of 
 the Metamora. 
 
 The other vessels at Fourgas had not stirred, and 
 the sky in the northeast looked to my eye very threat- 
 ening. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the 
 captain crowded sail and sped on like a sea-bird, 
 though I could see by his face when he looked in the 
 quarter of the wind, that he had acted more from im- 
 pulse than judgment in leaving his shelter. The heavy 
 sea kicked us on our course, however, and the smart 
 little brig shot buoyantly over the crests of the waves 
 as she outran them, and it was difficult not to feel that 
 the bounding and obedient fabric beneath our feet was 
 instinct with self-confidence, and rode the waters like 
 their master. 
 
 I well knew that the passage of the Archipelago was 
 a difficult one in a storm even to an experienced pilot, 
 and with the advantage of daylight ; and I could not 
 but remember with some anxiety that we were enter- 
 ing upon it at nightfall, and with a wind strengthening 
 every moment, while the captain confessedly had made 
 the passage but once before, and then in a calm sea of 
 August. The skipper, however, walked his deck con- 
 fidently, though he began to manage his canvass with a 
 more wary care, and, before dark, we were scudding 
 under a single sail, and pitching onward with the heave 
 of the sea at a rate that, if we were to see Malta at all, 
 promised a speedy arrival. As the night closed in we 
 passed a large frigate lying-to, which we afterward 
 found out was the Superbe, a French eighty-gun ship 
 (wrecked a few hours after on the island of Andros). 
 The two American frigates had run up by Mitylene, 
 and were still behind us : and the fear of being run 
 down in the night, in our small craft, induced the 
 captain to scud on, though he would else have lain-to 
 with the Frenchman, and perhaps have shared his 
 fate. 
 
 I stayed on deck an hour or two after dark, and be- 
 fore going below satisfied myself that we should owe 
 it to the merest chance if we escaped striking in the 
 night. The storm had become so furious that we ran 
 
 with bare poles before it ; and though it set us pretty 
 fairly on our way, the course lay through a narrow 
 and most intricate channel, among small and rocky 
 islands, and we had nothing for it but to trust to a 
 providential drift. 
 
 The captain prepared himself for a night on deck, 
 lashed everything that was loose, and filled the two 
 jugs suspended in the cabin, which, as the sea had 
 been too violent for any hope from the cook, were to 
 sustain us through the storm. We took a biscuit and 
 a glass of Hollands and water, holding on hard by the 
 berths lest we should be pitched through the skylight, 
 and as the captain tied up the dim lantern, I got a 
 look at his face, which would have told me, if I had 
 not known it before, that though resolute and un- 
 moved, he knew himself to be entering on the most 
 imminent hazard of his life. 
 
 The waves now broke over the brig at every heave, 
 and occasionally the descent of the solid mass of water 
 on the quarter-deck seemed to drive her under like a 
 cork. My own situation was the worst on board, for 
 I was inactive. It required a seaman to keep the deck, 
 and as there was no standing in the cabin without great 
 effort, I disembarrassed myself of all that would impede 
 a swimmer, and got into my berth to await a wreck 
 which I considered almost inevitable. Braced with 
 both hands and feet, I lay and watched the imbroglio 
 in the bottom of the cabin, my own dressing-case 
 among other things emptied of its contents and swim- 
 ming with some of my own clothes and the captain's, 
 and the water rushing down the companion-way with 
 j every wave that broke over us. The last voice I heard 
 : on deck was from the deep throat of the captain cal- 
 ! ling his men aft to assist in lashing the helm, and then, 
 : in the pauses of the gale, came the awful crash upon 
 I deck, more like the descent of a falling house than a 
 body of water, and a swash through the scuppers im- 
 i mediately after, seconded by the smaller sea below, in 
 1 which my coat and waistcoat were undergoing a re- 
 ; hearsal of the tragedy outside. 
 
 At midnight the gale increased, and the seas that de- 
 1 scended on the brig shook her to the very keel. We 
 could feel her struck under by the shock, and reel and 
 quiver as she recovered and rose again ; and, as if to 
 distract my attention, the little epitome of the tempest 
 going on in the bottom of the cabin grew more and 
 more serious. The unoccupied berths were packed 
 with boxes of figs and bags of nuts, which " brought 
 away" one after another, and rolled from side to side 
 with a violence which threatened to drive them through 
 the side of the vessel ; my portmanteau broke its lash- 
 ings and shot heavily backward and forward with the 
 roll of the sea ; and if I was not to be drowned like a 
 dog in a locked cabin, I feared, at least, I should have 
 my legs broken by the leap of a fig-box into my berth. 
 My situation was wholly uncomfortable, yet half ludi- 
 crous. 
 
 An hour after midnight the captain came down, pale 
 and exhausted, and with no small difficulty managed 
 to get a tumbler of grog. 
 
 " How does she head ?" I asked. 
 " Side to wind, drifting five knots an hour." 
 "Where are you?" 
 
 "God only knows. I expect her to strike every 
 minute." 
 
 He quietly picked up the wick of the lamp as it 
 tossed to and fro, and watching the roll of the vessel, 
 gained the companion-way, and mounted to the deck. 
 The door was locked, and I was once more a prisoner 
 and alone. 
 
 An hour elapsed— the sea, it appeared to me, 
 strengthening in its heaves beneath us, and the wind 
 howling and hissing in the rigging like a hundred 
 devils. An awful surge then burst down upon the 
 deck, racking the brig in every seam : the hurried 
 tread of feet overhead told me that they were cutting 
 
444 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 the lashings of the helm ; the seas succeeded each 
 other quicker and quicker, and, conjecturing from the 
 shortness of the pitch, that we were nearing a reef, I 
 was half out of my berth when the cabin door was 
 wrenched open, and a deluging sea washed down the 
 companion-way. 
 
 " On deck for your life !" screamed the hoarse voice 
 of the captain. 
 
 I sprang up through streaming water, barefoot and 
 bareheaded, but the pitch of the brig was so violent 
 that I dared not leave the ropes of the companion lad- 
 der, and, almost blinded with the spray and wind, I 
 stood waiting for the stroke. 
 
 " Hard down !" cried the captain in a voice I shall 
 never forget, and as the rudder creaked with the strain, 
 the brig fell slightly off, and rising with a tremendous 
 surge, I saw the sky dimly relieved against the edge 
 of a ragged precipice, and in the next moment, as if 
 with the repulse of a catapult, we were flung back 
 into the trough of the sea by the retreating wave, and 
 surged heavily beyond the rock. The noise of the 
 breakers, and the rapid commands of the captain 
 now drowned the hiss of the wind, and in a few min- 
 utes we were plunging once more through the un- 
 certain darkness, the long and regular heavings of 
 the sea alone assuring us that we were driving from 
 the shore. 
 
 The wind was cold, and I was wet to the skin. 
 Every third sea broke over the brig and added to the 
 deluge in the cabin, and from the straining of the ; 
 masts I feared they would come down with every sue- j 
 ceeding shock. I crept once more below, and regained j 
 my berth, where wet and aching in every joint, I 
 awaited fate or the daylight. 
 
 Morning broke, but no abatement of the storm. 
 The captain came below and informed me (what I had 
 already presumed) that we had run upon the southern- 
 most point of Negropont, and had been saved by a 
 miracle from shipwreck. The back wave had taken 
 us ofl", and with the next sea we had shot beyond it. 
 We were now running in the same narrow channel for 
 Cape Colonna, and were surrounded with dangers. 
 The skipper looked beaten out ; his eyes were protru- 
 ding and strained, and his face seemed to me to have 
 emaciated in the night. He swallowed his grog, and 
 flung himself for half an hour into his berth, and then 
 went on deck again to relieve his mate, where tired of 
 my wretched berth, I soon followed him. 
 
 The deck was a scene of desolation. The bulwarks 
 were carried clean away, the jolly-boat swept off, and 
 the long-boat the only moveable thing remaining. 
 The men were holding on to the shrouds, haggard and 
 sleepy, clinging mechanically to their support as the 
 sea broke down upon them, and, silent at the helm, 
 stood the captain and the second mate keeping the 
 brig stern-on to the sea, and straining their eyes for 
 land through the thick spray before them. 
 
 The day crept on, and another night, and we passed 
 it like the last. The storm never slacked, and all 
 through the long hours the same succession went on, 
 the brig plunging and rising, struggling beneath the 
 overwhelming and overtaking waves, and recovering 
 herself again, till it seemed to me as if I had never 
 known any other motion. The captain came below 
 for his biscuit and grog and went up again without 
 speaking a word, the mates did the same with the same 
 silence, and at last the bracing and holding on to pre- 
 vent being flung from my berth became mechanical, 
 and I did it while I slept. Cold, wet, hungry, and 
 exhausted, what a blessing from Heaven were five 
 minutes of forgetfulness ! 
 
 How the third night wore on I scarce remember. 
 The storm continued with unabated fury, and when 
 the dawn of the third morning broke upon us the cap- 
 tain conjectured that we had drifted four hundred 
 miles before the wind. The crew were exhausted 
 
 with watching, the brig labored more and more heavily, 
 and the storm seemed eternal. 
 
 At noon of the third day the clouds broke up a little, 
 and the wind, though still violent, slacked somewhat 
 in its fury. The sun struggled down upon the lashed 
 and raging sea, and, taking our bearings, we found our- 
 selves about two hundred miles from Malta. With 
 great exertions, the cook contrived to get up a fire in 
 the binnacle and boil a little rice, and never gourmet 
 sucked the brain of a woodcock with the relish which 
 welcomed that dark mess of pottage. 
 
 It was still impossible to carry more than a hand's 
 breadth of sail, but we were now in open waters and 
 flew merrily before the driving sea. The pitching and 
 racking motion, and the occasional shipping of a heavy 
 wave, still forbade all thoughts or hopes of comfort, 
 but the dread of shipwreck troubled us no more, and 
 I passed the day in contriving how to stand long 
 enough on my legs to get my wet traps from my 
 floating portmanteau, and go into quarantine like a 
 Christian. 
 
 The following day, at noon, Malta became visible 
 from the top of an occasional mountain wave; and still 
 driving under a reefed topsail before the hurricane, we 
 rapidly neared it, and I began to hope for the repose 
 of terra firma. The watch towers of the castellated 
 rock soon became distinct through the atmosphere of 
 spray, and at a distance of a mile, we took in sail and 
 waited for a pilot. 
 
 While tossing in the trough of the sea the following 
 half hour, the captain communicated to me some em- 
 barrassment with respect to my landing which had not 
 occurred to me. It appeared that the agreement to 
 land me at Malta was not mentioned in his policy of 
 insurance, and the underwriters of course were not re- 
 sponsible for any accident that might happen to the 
 brig after a variation from his original plan of passage. 
 This he would not have minded if he could have set 
 me ashore in a half hour, as he had anticipated, but 
 his small boat was lost in the storm, and it was now a 
 question whether the pilot-boat would take ashore a 
 passenger liable to quarantine. To run his brig into 
 harbor would be a great expense and positive loss of 
 insurance, and to get out the long-boat with his broken 
 tackle and exhausted crew was not to be thought of. 
 I knew very well that no passenger from a plague port 
 (such as Smyrna and Constantinople) was permitted 
 to land on any terms at Gibraltar, and if the pilot here 
 should refuse to take me off", the alternative was clear, 
 I must make a voyage against my will to America ! 
 
 I was not in a very pleasant state of mind during the 
 delay which followed ; for, though I had been three 
 years absent from my country and loved it well, I had 
 laid my plans for still two years of travel on this side 
 the Atlantic, and certain moneys for my " charges" lay 
 waiting my arrival at Malta. Among lesser reasons, 
 I had not a rag of clothes dry or clean, and was 
 heartily out of love with salt water and the smell of 
 figs. 
 
 As if to aggravate my unhappiness, the sun broke 
 through a rift in the clouds and lit up the white and 
 turreted battlements of Malta like an isle of the blessed 
 — the only bright spot within the limits of the stormy 
 horizon. The mountain waves on which we were 
 tossing were tempestuous and black, the comfortless 
 and battered brig with her weary crew looked more 
 like a wreck than a seaworthy merchantman, and no 
 pilot appearing, the captain looked anxiously seaward, 
 as if he grudged every minute of the strong wind rush- 
 ing by on his course. 
 
 A small speck at last appeared making toward ua 
 from the shore, and, riding slowly over the tremendous 
 waves, a boat manned by four men came within hailing 
 distance. One moment as high as our topmast, and 
 another in the depths of the gulf a hundred feet below 
 us, it was like conversing from two buckets in a well. 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 445 
 
 " Do you want a pilot ?" screamed the Maltese in 
 English, as the American flag blew out to the wind 
 
 "No!" roared the captain, like a thunder-peal, 
 through his tin-trumpet. 
 
 The Maltese, without deigning another look, put 
 up his helm with a gesture of disappointment, and 
 bore away. 
 
 "Boat ahoy!" bellowed the captain. 
 "Ahoy! ahoy!" answered the pilot. 
 " Will you take a passenger ashore ?" 
 "Where from?" 
 " Smyrna !" 
 "No — o — o — o !" 
 
 There was a sound of doom in the angry prolonga- 
 tion of that detested monosyllable that sunk to the 
 bottom of my heart like lead. 
 
 " Clear away the mainsail," cried the captain get- 
 ting round once more to the wind. " I knew how it 
 would be, sir," he continued, to me, as I bit my lips in 
 the effort to be reconciled to an involuntary voyage of 
 four thousand miles ; "it wasn't likely he'd put him- 
 self and his boat's crew into twenty days' quarantine 
 to oblige you and me." 
 
 I could not but own that it was an unreasonable ex- 
 pectation. 
 
 "Never mind, sir," said the skipper, consolingly, 
 " plenty of salt fish in the locker, and I'll set you on 
 Long Wharf in no time !" 
 
 "Brig ahoy!" came a voice faintly across the waves. 
 The captain looked over his shoulder without losing 
 a capful of wind from his sail, and sent back the hail 
 impatiently. 
 
 The pilot was running rapidly down upon us, and 
 had come back to offer to tow me ashore in the brig's 
 jolly-boat for a large sum of money. 
 
 " We've lost our boat, and you're a bloody shark," 
 answered the skipper, enraged at the attempt at extor- j 
 tion. " Head your course !" he muttered gruffly to 
 the man at the helm, who had let the brig fall off that 
 the pilot might come up. 
 
 Irritated by this new and gratuitous disappointment, 
 I stamped on the deck in an ungovernable fit of rage, 
 and wished the brig at the devil. 
 
 The skipper looked at me a moment, and instead of 
 the angry answer I expected, an expression of kind 
 commiseration stole over his rough face. The next 
 moment he seized the helm and put the brig away 
 from the wind, and then making a trumpet of his two 
 immense hands, he once more hailed the returning 
 pilot. 
 
 " I can't bear to see you take it so much to heart, 
 sir," said the kind sailor, "and I'll do for you what I 
 wouldn't do for another man on the face o' the 'arth. 
 All hands there !" 
 
 The men came aft, and the captain in brief words 
 stated the case to them, and appealed to their sense 
 of kindness for a fellow-countryman, to undertake a 
 task, which, in the sea then running, and with their 
 exhausted strength, was not a service he could well 
 demand in other terms. It was to get out the long- 
 boat, and wait off while the pilot towed me ashore and 
 returned with her. 
 
 "Ay, ay! sir," was the immediate response from 
 every lip, and from the chief mate to the black cabin- 
 boy, every man sprang cheerily to the lashings. It 
 was no momentary task, for the boat was as firmly set 
 in her place as the mainmast, and stowed compactly 
 with barrels of pork, extra rigging, and spars — in short, 
 all the furniture and provision of the voyage. In the 
 course of an hour, however, the tackle was rigged on 
 the fore and main yards, and with a desperate effort 
 its immense bulk was heaved over the side, and lay 
 tossing on the tempestuous waters. I shook hands 
 with the men, who refused every remuneration be- 
 yond my thanks, and, following the captain over the 
 side, was soon toiling heavily on the surging waters, 
 
 thanking Heaven for the generous sympathies of home 
 and country implanted in the human bosom. Those 
 who know the reluctance with which a merchant cap- 
 tain lays-to, even to pick up a man overboard in a fair 
 wind, and those who understand the meaning of a for- 
 feited insurance, will appreciate this instance of dif- 
 ficult generosity. I shook the hard fist of the kind- 
 hearted skipper on the quarantine stairs, and watched 
 his heavy boat as she crept out of the little harbor 
 with the tears in my eyes. I shall travel far before I 
 find again a man I honor more heartily. 
 
 THE REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 " Un homme capable de faire des dominos av ec les os do son 
 pere."— Pere Gok:ot. 
 
 It was in the golden month of August, not very 
 long ago, that the steamer which plies between St. 
 Mark's Stairs, at Venice, and the river into which 
 Phaeton turned a somerset with the horses of the sun, 
 started on its course over the lagoon with an unusual 
 God-send of passengers. The moon was rising from 
 the unchaste bed of the Adriatic (wedded every year 
 to Venice, yet every day and night sending the sun 
 and moon from her lovely bosom to the sky), and while 
 the gold of the west was still glowing on the landward 
 side of the Campanile, a silver gleam was brightening 
 momently on the other, and the Arabic domes of St. 
 Mark and the flying Mercury on the Dogana paled to 
 the setting orb and kindled to the rising with the same 
 Talleyrand-esque facility. 
 
 For the first hour the Mangia-foco sputtered on her 
 way with a silent company ; the poetry of the scene, 
 or the regrets at leaving the delicious city lessening 
 in the distance, affecting all alike with a thoughtful 
 incoinmunicativeness. Gradually, however, the dol- 
 phin hues over the Brenta faded away— the marble 
 ' city sank into the sea, with its turrets and bright spires 
 — the still lagoon became a sheet of polished glass — 
 and the silent groups leaning over the rails found 
 ! tongues and feet, and began to stir and murmur. 
 
 With the usual unconscious crystallization of so- 
 ciety, the passengers of the Mangia-foco had yielded 
 one side of the dock to a party of some rank, who had 
 left their carriages at Ferrara in coming from Florence 
 to Venice, and were now upon their return to the city 
 of Tasso, stomaching, with what grace they might, the 
 contact of a vulgar conveyance, which saved them the 
 I hundred miles of posting between Ferrara and the 
 i Brenta. In the centre of the aristocratic circle stood 
 ; a lady enveloped in a cashmere, but with her bonnet 
 hung by the string over her arm — one of those women 
 of Italy' upon whom the divinest gifts of loveliness are 
 showered with a profusion which apparently impover- 
 ishes the sex of the whole nation. A beautiful woman 
 in that land is rarely met ; but when she docs appear, 
 she is what Venus would have been after the contest 
 for beauty on Ida, had the weapons of her antagonists, 
 as in the tournaments of chivalry, been added to the 
 palm of victory. The marchesa del Marmore was ap- 
 parently twenty-three, and she might have been an 
 incarnation of the morning-star for pride and bright- 
 er, the other side of the deck stood a group of 
 vouikt men, who, by their careless and rather shabby 
 dress, but pale and intellectual faces, were of that class 
 met in every public conveyance of Italy. I he port- 
 folios under their arms, ready for a sketch, would have 
 removed a doubt of their profession, had one existed ; 
 and with that proud independence for which the class 
 
446 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 is remarkable, they had separated themselves equally 
 from the noble and ignoble — disqualified by inward 
 superiority from association with the one, and by acci- 
 dental poverty from the claims cultivation might give 
 them upon the other. Their glances at the divine 
 face turned toward them from the party I have alluded 
 to, were less constant than those of the vulgar, who 
 could not offend ; but they were evidently occupied 
 more with it than with the fishing-boats lying asleep 
 on the lagoon : and one of them, half-buried in the 
 coil of rone, and looking under the arm of another, 
 had already made a sketch of her that might some day 
 make the world wonder from what seventh heaven of 
 fancy such an angelic vision of a head had descended 
 upon the painter's dream. 
 
 In the rear of this group, with the air of one who 
 would conceal himself from view, stood a young man 
 who belonged to the party, but who, with less of the 
 paHor of intellectual habits in his face, was much bet- 
 ter dressed than his companions, and had, in spite of 
 the portfolio under his arm, and a hat of the Salvator 
 breadth of rim, the undisguisable air of a person ac- 
 customed to the best society. While maintaining a j 
 straggling conversation with his friends, with whom he | 
 seemed a favorite, Signor Basil employed himself in | 
 looking over the sketch of the lovely marchesa going 
 on at his elbow — occasionally, as if to compare it with 
 the original, stealing a long look from between his 
 hand and his slouched hat at the radiant creature sit- 
 ting so unconsciously for her picture, and in a low 
 voice correcting, as by ihe result of his gaze, the rapid 
 touches of the artist. 
 
 " Take a finer pencil for the nostril, caro mio !" said 
 he ; "it is as thin as the edge of a violet, and its trans- 
 parent curve " 
 
 " Cospetto !" said the youth ; " but you see by this 
 faint light better than I : if she would but turn to the 
 moon " 
 
 The signor Basil suddenly flung his handkerchief 
 into the lagoon, bringing its shadow between the queen 
 of night and the marchesa del Marmore ; and, attract- 
 ed from her revery by the passing object, the lady 
 moved her head quickly to the light, and in that mo- 
 ment the spirited lip and nostril were transferred to the 
 painter's sketch. 
 
 " Thanks, mio bravo !" enthusiastically exclaimed 
 the looker-on ; " Giorgione would not have beaten 
 thee with the crayon !" — and, with a rudeness which 
 surprised the artist, he seized the paper from beneath 
 his hand, walked away with it to the stern, and lean- 
 ing far over the rails, perused it fixedly by the mellow 
 lustre of the moon. The youth presently followed 
 him, and after a few words exchanged in an under- 
 tone, Signor Basil slipped a piece of gold into his 
 hand, and carefully placed the sketch in his own port- 
 folio. 
 
 II. 
 
 It was toward midnight when the Mangia-foco en- 
 tered the Adige, and keeping its steady way between 
 the low banks of the river, made for the grass-grown 
 and flowery canal which connects its waters with the 
 Po. Most of the passengers had yielded to the drowsy 
 influence of the night air, and, of the aristocratic party 
 on the larboard side, the young marchesa alone was 
 waking : her friends had made couches of their cloaks 
 and baggage, and were reclining at her feet, while the 
 artists, all except the signor Basil, were stretched fairly 
 on the deck, their portfolios beneath their heads, and 
 their large hats covering their faces from the powerful 
 rays of the moon. 
 
 " Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night," 
 said the waking artist, in a low and respectful tone, 
 as he rose from her feet with a cluster of tuberoses she 
 had let fall from her hand. 
 
 " It is indeed lovely, Signor Pittore," responded the 
 marchesa, glancing at his portfolio, and receiving the 
 flowers with a gracious inclination ; " have you touched 
 Venice from the lagoon to-night ?" 
 
 The signor Basil opened his portfolio, and replied 
 to the indirect request of the lady by showing her a 
 very indifferent sketch of Venice from the island of 
 St. Lazzaro. As if to escape from the necessity of 
 praising what had evidently disappointed her, she 
 turned the cartoon hastily, and exposed, on the sheet 
 beneath, the spirited and admirable outline of her own 
 matchless features. 
 
 A slight start alone betrayed the surprise of the 
 highborn lady, and raising the cartoon to examine it 
 more closely, she said with a smile, " You may easier 
 tread on Titian's heels than Canaletti's. Bezzuoli has 
 painted me, and not so well. I will awake the mar- 
 quis, and he shall purchase it of you." 
 
 " Not for the wealth of the Medici, madam !" said 
 the young man, clasping his portfolio hastily, " pray 
 do not disturb monsignore ! The picture is dear to 
 me !" 
 
 The marchesa, looking into his face, and with a 
 glance around, which the accomplished courtier be- 
 fore her read better than she dreamed, she drew her 
 shawl over her blanched shoulders, and settled her- 
 self to listen to the conversation of her new acquaint- 
 ance. 
 
 " You would be less gracious if you were observed, 
 proud beauty," thought Basil ; " but while you think 
 the poor painter may while away the tediousness of a 
 vigil, he may feed his eyes on your beauty as well." 
 
 The Mangia-foco turned into the canal, threaded 
 its lily-paved waters for a mile or two. and then, put- 
 ting forth upon the broad bosom of the Po, went on 
 her course against the stream, and, with retarded pace, 
 penetrated toward the sun-beloved heart of Italy. And 
 while the later hours performed their procession with 
 the stars, the marchesa del Marmore leaned sleepless 
 and unfatigued against the railing, listening with min- 
 gled curiosity and scorn to the passionate love-murmui 
 of the enamored painter. His hat was thrown aside, 
 his fair and curling locks were flowing in the night 
 air, his form was bent earnestly but respectfully toward 
 her, and on his lip, with all its submissive tenderness, 
 there sat a shadow of something she could not define, 
 but which rebuked, ever and anon, as with the fierce 
 regard of a noble, the condescension she felt toward 
 him as an artist. 
 
 III. 
 
 Upon the lofty dome of the altar in the cathedral of 
 Bologna stands poised an angel in marble, not spoken 
 of in the books of travellers, but perhaps the loveliest 
 incarnation of a blessed cherub that ever lay in the 
 veined bosom of Pentelicus. Lost and unobserved on 
 the vast floor of the nave, the group of artists, who had 
 made a day's journey from Ferrara, sat in the wicker 
 chairs hired for a baioch during the vesper, and drew 
 silently from this angel, while the devout people of 
 Bologna murmured their Ave Marias around. Signor 
 Basil alone was content to look over the work of his 
 companions, and the twilight had already begun to 
 brighten the undying lamps at the shrine, when he 
 started from the pillar against which he leaned, and 
 crossed hastily toward a group issuing from a private 
 chapel in the western aisle. A lady walked between 
 two gentlemen of noble mien, and behind her, attend- 
 ed by an equally distinguished company, followed that 
 lady's husband, the marchese del Marmore. They 
 were strangers passing through Bologna, and had been 
 attended to vespers by some noble friends. 
 
 The companions of the signor Basil looked on with 
 some surprise as their enamored friend stepped confi- 
 dently before the two nobles in attendance upon the 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 447 
 
 lady, and arrested her steps with a salutation which, 
 though respectful as became a gentleman, was marked 
 with the easy politeness of one accustomed to a favora- 
 ble reception. 
 
 " .May I congratulate miladi," he said, rising slowly 
 from his bow, and fixing his ryes with unembarrassed 
 admiration on her own liquid but now frowning orbs, 
 " upon her safe journey over the marches ! Bologna," 
 he continued, glancing at the nobles with a courteous 
 smile, "welcomes her fittingly." 
 
 The lady listened with a look of surprise, and the 
 Bolognese glanced from the dusty boots of the artist 
 to bis portfolio. 
 
 •'Has the painter the honor to know lasignora?" 
 asked the cavalier on her right. 
 
 " Signor, si !" said the painter, fiercely, as a curl 
 arched the lady's lip, and she prepared to answer. 
 
 The color mounted to the temples of the marchesa, 
 and her husband, who had loitered beneath the ma- 
 donna of Domenichino, coming up at the instant, she 
 bowed coldlv to the signor Basil, and continued down | 
 the aisle. The artist followed to her carriage, and j 
 lifted his hat respectfully as the lumbering equipage | 
 took its way by the famous statue of Neptune, and j 
 then with a confident smile, which seemed to his com- , 
 panions somewhat mistimed, he muttered between his 
 teeth, " Ciascuno son bel' giorno !" and strolled loiter- 
 in"; on with them to the trattoria. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The court of the grand-duke of Florence is perhaps 
 the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access in 
 all Europe- The Austrian-born monarch himself, 
 adopting in some degree the frank and joyous charac- 
 ter of the people over whom he reigns, throws open 
 his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries, to the 
 strangers passing through ; and in the season of gayety 
 almost any presentable person, resident at Florence, 
 may procure the entree to the court balls, and start j 
 fair with noble dames and gentlemen for grace in | 
 courtly favor. The files at the Palazzo Pitti, albeit 
 not always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are al- 
 ways brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the 
 court, though they draw the line distinctly enough to 
 their own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the 
 motley waltz and mazurka, and either from good-na- 
 ture or a haughty conviction of their superiority, never 
 suffer the offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be sus- 
 pected, by the multitude who divert them. The 
 grand-duke, to common eyes, is a grave and rather 
 timid person, with more of the appearance of the 
 scholar than of the sovereign, courteous in public, and 
 benevolent and earnest in his personal attentions to 
 his guests at the palace. The royal quadrille may be 
 shared without permission of the grand chamberlain, 
 and the royal eye, after the first one or two dances of 
 ceremony, searches for partners by the lamp of beauty, 
 heedless of the diamonds on the brow, or the star of 
 nobility on the shoulder. The grand supper is scarce 
 more exclusive, and on the disappearance of the royal 
 cortege, the delighted crowd take their departure, 
 having seen no class more favored than themselves, 
 and enchanted with the gracious absence of pretension 
 in the nobilita of Tuscany. 
 
 Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo 
 Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and 
 sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher sto- 
 ries of the palace open forth on a level with the deli- 
 cious gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of 
 smaller apartments, fitted up with a cost and luxury 
 which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here 
 lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and 
 more sacred by the propinquity of the admitted world 
 in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of roy- 
 alty is enclosed a tide of life as silent and unsuspected 
 
 by the common inhabitant of Florence as the flow of 
 the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian 
 main. Here the invention of the fiery genius of Italy 
 is exhausted in poetical luxury; here the reserved and 
 silent sovereign throws off his maintein of royal conde- 
 scension, and enters with equal arms into the lists of 
 love and wit ; here burn (as if upon an altar fed with 
 spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncal- 
 culating passions of this glowing clime, in senses re- 
 fined by noble nurture, and hearts prompted by the 
 haughty pulses of noble blood ; and here — to the 
 threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure — press all 
 who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it 
 in their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passarc 
 is accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its 
 splendor. 
 
 Some two or three days after the repulse of the 
 signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of 
 travelling artists were on their way from the grand gal- 
 lery at Florence to their noonday meal. Loitering 
 with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via 
 Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and 
 looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft 
 of the Campanile (than which a fairer figure of reli- 
 gious architecture points not to heaven), they took 
 their way toward the church of Santa Trinita, propo- 
 sing to eat their early dinner at a house named, from 
 its excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La 
 Birra. The traveller should be advised, also, that by 
 paying an extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this 
 renowned eating-house an old wine sunned on the 
 southern shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a 
 certain redolence of Boccaccio — scarce remarkable, 
 since it grew in the scene of the Decameron — but of a 
 virtue which, to the Hundred Tales of Love (read 
 drinking), is what the Gracilis ad Parnassum should 
 be to the building of a dithyrambic. The oil of two 
 crazie upon the palm of the fat waiter Giuseppe will 
 assist in calling the vintage to his memory. 
 
 A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining 
 Palazzo arrested the attention of the artists as they 
 were about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of 
 a dark-green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of 
 the duke's breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed 
 and posed on his seat a la d.Orsay, the signor Basil. 
 His coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his 
 gloves were of primrose purity. 
 
 The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality 
 of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their 
 companion at the gate of Florence, as travellers part, 
 without question, and they met without reserve to part 
 as questionless again. The artists were surprised at 
 the signor Basil's transformation, but no follower of 
 their refined art would have been so ill-bred as to ex- 
 press it. He wished them the hon appedto, as a tall 
 chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at 
 home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang 
 through the gateway, and the marble court of the 
 palace rang with his prancing hoofs. 
 
 He who was idle and bought flowers at the Cafe of 
 the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as lie sat 
 in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the 
 richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Pa- 
 lazzo Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The 
 dark old Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye 
 down upon it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight 
 with closed vizor to his unbonneted and laughing 
 page. The crimson curtains of the window opening 
 upon the terrace, at the time of our story, reminded 
 every passing Florentine of the lady who dwelt within 
 —a descendant of one of the haughtiest lines of Eng- 
 lish chivalry— resident in Italy since many years for 
 health, but bearing in her delicate frame and ex- 
 quisitely transparent features, the loftiest type of pa- 
 trician beauty that had ever filled the eye that looked 
 upon her. In the inner heaven of royal exclusiveness 
 
448 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 at the Pitti — in its constellation of rank and wit — the 
 lady Geraldine had long been the worshipped and as- 
 cendant cynosure. Happy in a husband without rank 
 and but of moderate fortune, she maintained the spot- 
 less character of an English wife in this sphere of 
 conventional corruption ; and though the idol of the 
 duke and his nobles, it would have been like a whisper 
 against the purity of the brightest Pleiad, to have 
 linked her name with love. 
 
 With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer 
 cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of 
 silk, and a slight stand within arm's length holding a 
 vase of flowers and the volume from which she had 
 been reading, the lady Geraldine received the count 
 Basil Spiriford, some time attache to the Russian em- 
 bassy at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in 
 her beauty), and at present the newly-appointed sec- 
 retary to the minister of the same monarch near the 
 court of Tuscany. 
 
 Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture 
 of a long absent and favored friend, the count Basil 
 ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster 
 fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaint- 
 ances of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they 
 would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may 
 drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy. 
 The secretary knew his species, and the lady Geral- 
 dine was one of those women for whom the soul is 
 unwilling to possess a secret. 
 
 After the first inquiries were over, the lady ques- 
 tioned her recovered favorite of his history since they 
 had parted. "I left you," she said, "swimming the 
 dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come 
 to shore?" 
 
 " Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made 
 life worth the struggle ! For the two extremes, how- 
 ever, you know what I was at Paris — and yesterday I 
 was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero !" 
 
 Lady Geraldine laughed. 
 
 "Ah! you look at my curls — but Macassar is at a 
 discount ! It is the only grace I cherished in my in- 
 cognito. A resumer — I got terribly out of love by the 
 end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in 
 debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and 
 the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo 
 kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I 
 dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a 
 vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of 
 wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse, 
 have been two years looking at life without spectacles 
 at Venice." 
 
 "And painting?" 
 
 "Painting!" 
 
 " Might one see a specimen ?" asked the lady Geral- 
 dine, with an incredulous smile. 
 
 " I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the 
 possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth 
 floor of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in 
 that fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a 
 drawing or two — " 
 
 He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently 
 brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a wayworn 
 and thinly furnished portfolio. The lady Geraldine 
 turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice, 
 but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start. 
 
 "La Marchesa del Marmore!" she exclaimed, look- 
 ing at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy 
 eye. 
 
 "Is it well drawn?" he asked quietly. 
 
 " Well drawn ? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael. 
 Do you really draw so well as this, or" — she added, 
 after a slight hesitation — "is it a miracle of love?" 
 
 " It is a divine head," soliloquized the Russian, half 
 closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a 
 distance, as if to fill up the imperfect outline from his 
 memory. 
 
 The lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. " My 
 dear Basil," she said seriously, " I should be wretched 
 if I thought your happiness was in the power of this 
 woman. Do you love her?" 
 
 " The portrait was not drawn by me," he answered, 
 " though I have a reason for wishing her to think so. 
 It was done by a fellow-traveller of mine, whom I wish 
 to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it 
 here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons 
 a nos moutons — la marchesa was also a fellow-traveller 
 of mine, and without loving her too violently, 1 owe 
 her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way. 
 Will you assist me to pay it?" 
 
 Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the 
 good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments 
 of gratitude, the lady Geraldine inquired simply how 
 she could serve him. 
 
 " In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Flor- 
 ence," he said, "I have put myself, as you will see, 
 au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks 
 to my Parisian renown, the duke has enrolled me al- 
 ready under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow 
 night I shall sup with you in the saloon of Hercules 
 after the ball is over. La marchesa, as you well know, 
 has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to 
 set foot within those guarded penetralia — soit her ma- 
 licious tongue, soit the interest against her of the men 
 she has played upon her hook too freely. The road 
 to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold, 
 and I would take the toll. Do you understand me, 
 most beautiful lady Geraldine?" 
 
 The count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the 
 fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to 
 put into his hand the following night the illuminated 
 ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too gener- 
 ously, a debt of gratitude ; and plucking a flower from 
 her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at 
 twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the 
 gale, he turned on foot toward the church of San 
 Gaetano, and with an expression of unusual elation in 
 his step and countenance, entered the trattoria, where 
 dined at that moment his companions of the pencil. 
 
 The green lamps glittering by thousands amid the 
 foliage of the Boboli had attained their full brightness, 
 and the long-lived Italian day had died over the distant 
 mountains of Carrara, leaving its inheritance of light 
 apparently to the stars, who, on their fields of deepen- 
 ing blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an un- 
 seen host in the depths of heaven, himself the fore- 
 most and the most radiant. The night was balmy and 
 voluptuous. The music of the ducal band swelled 
 forth from the perfumed apartments on the air. A 
 single nightingale, far back in the wilderness of the 
 garden, poured from his melodious heart a chant of 
 the most passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the 
 body-guard stationed at the limit of the spray of the 
 fountain leaned on his halberd and felt his rude senses 
 melt in the united spells of luxury and nature. The 
 ministers of a monarch's pleasure had done their ut- 
 most to prepare a scene of royal delight, and night and 
 summer had flung in their enchantments when in- 
 genuity was exhausted. 
 
 The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a 
 blaze of light scarce endurable from its deeply-sunk 
 windows, looked like the side of an enchanted moun- 
 tain laid open for the revels of sorcery. The aigrette 
 and plume passed by ; the tiara and the jewel upon 
 the breast ; the gayly-dressed courtiers and glittering 
 dames; and to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed 
 like the realized raving of the improvisatore when he 
 is lost in some fable of Araby. Yet within walked 
 malice and hate, and the light and perfume that might 
 have fed an angel's heart with love, but deepened 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 449 
 
 in many a beating bosom the consuming fires of 
 envy. 
 
 With the gold key of office on his cape, the grand 
 chamberlain stood at the feet of the dowager grand 
 dutchess, and by a sign to the musicians, hidden in 
 a latticed gallery behind the Corinthian capital of the 
 hall, retarded or accelerated the soft measure of the 
 waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the chairs of 
 state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames 
 nearest allied to royal blood ; one solitary and privi- 
 leged intruder alone sharing the elevated place — the 
 lady Geraldine. Dressed in white, her hair wound 
 about her head in the simplest form, yet developing 
 its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary, her 
 eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fring- 
 ed with lashes a shade darker than the light auburn 
 braided on her temples, and the tint of the summer's 
 most glowing rose turned out from the threadlike part- 
 ing of her lips ; she was a vision of loveliness to take 
 into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his soul 
 the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth 
 and age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Ger- 
 aldine ! thou wilt read these passionate words from 
 one whose worship of thy intoxicating loveliness has 
 never before found utterance, but if this truly-told tale 
 should betray the hand that has dared to describe thy 
 beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of pity, breathe 
 from those bright lips a prayer that he may forget 
 thee ! 
 
 By the side of the lady Geraldine, but behind the 
 chair of the grand dutchess, who listened to his con- 
 versation with singular delight, stood a slight young 
 man of uncommon personal beauty, a stranger appa- 
 rently to every other person present. His brilliant uni- 
 form alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diploma- 
 cy ; and the marked distinction shown him, both by the 
 reigning queen of the court, and the more powerful 
 and inaccessible queen of beauty, marked him as an 
 object of keen and universal curiosity. By the time 
 the fifth mazurka had concluded its pendulous refrain, 
 the grand chamberlain had tolerably well circulated 
 the name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the re- 
 nowned wit and elegant of Paris, newly appointed to 
 the court of his royal highness of Tuscany. Fair 
 eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and beating bo- 
 soms hushed their pulses as he passed. 
 
 Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression. 
 Count Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon 
 the first principle he kept his place between the grand 
 dutchess and Lady Geraldine, exerting his deeply- 
 studied art of pleasing, to draw upon himself their ex- 
 clusive attention. Upon the second principle, he was 
 perfectly unconscious of the presence of another hu- 
 man being ; and neither the gliding step of the small- 
 eared princess S in the waltz, nor the stately 
 
 advance of the last female of the Medici in the mazur- 
 ka, distracted his large blue eyes a moment from their 
 idleness. With one hand on the eagle-hilt of his 
 sword, and his side leaned against the high cushion of 
 red velvet honored by the pressure of the lady Geral- 
 dine, he gazed up into that beaming face, when not 
 bending respectfully to the dutchess, and drank stead- 
 fastly from her beauty, as the lotus-cup drinks light 
 from the sun. 
 
 The new secretary had calculated well. In the 
 deep recess of the window looking toward San Minia- 
 to, stood a lady nearly hidden from view by the muslin 
 curtains just stirring with the vibration of the music, 
 who gazed on the immediate circle of the grand dutch- 
 ess with an interest that was not attempted to be dis- 
 guised. On her first entrance into the hall, the mar- 
 chess del Marmore had recognised in the new minion 
 of favor her impassioned lover of the lagoon, her slight- 
 ed acquaintance of the cathedral. When the first shock 
 of surprise was over, she looked on the form which 
 she had found beautiful even in the disguise of pover- 
 20 
 
 ty, and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would 
 have claimed in public the smile she had given him 
 when unobserved, she recalled with delight every syl- 
 lable he had murmured in her ear, and every look she 
 had called forth in the light of a Venetian moon. The 
 man who had burned upon the altar of her vanity the 
 most intoxicating incense — who had broken through 
 the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw 
 his homage at her feet — who had portrayed so incom- 
 parably (she believed) with his love-inspired pencil 
 the features imprinted on his heart — this chance-won 
 worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as she had 
 thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere and 
 become a legitimate object of love ; and, beautified by 
 the splendor of dress, and distinguished by the prefer- 
 ence and favor of those incomparably above her, he 
 seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection of adorable 
 beauty. As she remembered his eloquent devotion to 
 herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman 
 whom she hated and had calumniated — a woman who 
 she believed stood between her and all the light of ex- 
 istence — she anticipated the triumph of taking him 
 from her side, of exhibiting him to the world as a fal- 
 con seduced from his first quarry ; and never doubting 
 that so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman 
 of the paradise she had so long wished to enter, she 
 panted for the moment when she should catch his eye 
 and draw him from his lure, and already heard the 
 chamberlain's voice in her ear commanding her pres- 
 ence after the ball in the saloon of Hercules. 
 
 The marchesa had been well observed from the first 
 by the wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art 
 (so necessary to his profession) of seeing without ap- 
 pearing to see, he had scarce lost a shade of the vary- 
 ing expressions of her countenance ; and while she 
 fancied him perfectly unconscious of her presence, he 
 read her tell-tale features as if they had given utter- 
 ance to her thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph, 
 j the effect of his brilliant position upon her proud and 
 i vain heart ; watched her while she made use of her 
 throng of despised admirers to create a sensation near 
 him and attract his notice; and when the ball wore on, 
 and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance 
 upon the lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a 
 momentary curl of triumph on his lip, as she took up 
 her concealed position in the embayed window, and 
 abandoned herself to the bitter occupation of watching 
 the happiness of her rival. The lady Geraldine had 
 never been so animated since her first appearance at 
 the court of Tuscany. 
 
 It w;is past midnight when the grand-duke, flushed 
 and tired with dancing, came to the side of the lady 
 Geraldine. Count Basil gave place, and, remaining a 
 moment in nominal obedience to the sovereign's polite 
 request which he was too politic to construe literally, 
 he looked down the dance with the air of one who has 
 turned his back on all that could interest him, and, 
 passing close to the concealed position of the marche- 
 sa, stepped out upon the balcony. 
 
 The air was cool, and the fountain played refresh- 
 ingly below. The count Basil was one of those minds 
 which never have so much leisure for digression as 
 when they are most occupied. A love, as deep and 
 profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving thread 
 for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican ; yet, 
 after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he 
 raised himself upon the marble balustrade, and perfect- 
 ly anticipating the interruption to his solitude which 
 presently occurred, began to speculate aloud on the 
 dead and living at that hour beneath the roof of the 
 Pitti. 
 
 " A painter's mistress," he said, " immortal in her 
 touch of her paramour's pencil, is worshipped for cen- 
 turies on these walls by the pilgrims of art ; while the 
 warm perfection of all loveliness— the purest and di- 
 vinest of highborn women — will perish utterly with the 
 
450 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 eyes that have seen her ! The Bella of Titian, the 
 Fornarina of Raffaelle — peasant-girls of Italy — have, 
 at this moment, more value in this royal palace than 
 the breathing forms that inhabit it ! The lady Geral- 
 dine herself, to whom the sovereign offers at this mo- 
 ment his most flattering homage, would be less a loss 
 to him than either ! Yet they despise the gods of the 
 pencil who may thus make them immortal ! The dull 
 blood in their noble veins, that never bred a thought 
 beyond the instincts of their kind, would look down, 
 forsooth, on the inventive and celestial ichor that in- 
 flames the brain, and prompts the fiery hand of the 
 painter! How long will this very sovereign live in the 
 memories of men ? The murderous Medici, the am- 
 bitious cardinals, the abandoned women, of an age gone 
 by, hang in imperishable colors on his walls ; while of 
 him, the lord of this land of genius, there is not a bust 
 or a picture that would bring a sequin in the market- 
 place ! They would buy genius in these days like 
 wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened. 
 Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a pope 
 and his cardinals : Titian was an honored guest for the 
 doge. The stimul us to immortalize these noble friends 
 was in the love they bore them ; and the secret of their 
 power to do it lay half in the knowledge of their char- 
 acters, gained by daily intimacy. Painters were princes 
 then, as they are beggars now; and the princely art is 
 beggared as well !" 
 
 The marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon 
 the balcony, leaning on the arm of the grand 
 chamberlain. The soliloquizing secretary had fore- 
 told to himself both her coming and her compan- 
 on. 
 
 " Monsieur le comte," said the chamberlain, " la 
 marchesa del Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your 
 acquaintance." 
 
 Count Basil bowed low, and in that low and musical 
 tone of respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit, 
 made him irresistible to a woman who had a soul to be 
 thrilled, he repeated the usual nothings upon the beau- 
 ty of the night ; and when the chamberlain returned 
 to his duties, the marchesa walked forth with her 
 companion to the cool and fragrant alleys of the gar- 
 den, and, under the silent and listening stars, implored 
 forgiveness for her pride ; and, with the sudden aban- 
 donment peculiar to the clime, poured into his ear 
 the passionate and weeping avowal of her sorrow and 
 love. 
 
 " Those hours of penitence in the embayed win- 
 dow," thought Count Basil, " were healthy for your 
 soul." And as she walked by his side, leaning heavi- 
 ly on his arm, and half-dissolved in a confiding tender- 
 ness, his thoughts reverted to another and a far sweet- 
 er voioe ; and while the caressing words of the marchesa 
 fell on an unlistening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned 
 back to the lighted hall. 
 
 VI. 
 
 As the daylight stole softly over Vallombrosa, the 
 luxurious chariot of the marchesadel Marmore stopped 
 at the door of Count Basil. The lady Geraldine's suit 
 had been successful ; and the hitherto excluded Flor- 
 entine had received, from the hand of the man she had 
 once so ignorantly scorned, a privilege for which she 
 would have bartered her salvation : she had supped at 
 his side in the saloon of Hercules. With many faults 
 of character, she was an Italian in feeling, and had a 
 capacity, like all her countrywomen, for a consuming 
 and headlong passion. She had better have been born 
 of marble. 
 
 " I have lifted you to heaven," said Count Basil, as 
 her chariot-wheels rolled from his door ; " but it is as 
 the eagle soars into the clouds with the serpent. We 
 will see how you will relish the fall !" 
 
 PART II. 
 
 The grand-duke's carriages, with their six horses 
 and outriders, had turned down the Borg'ognisanti, 
 and the " City of the Red Lily," waking from her 
 noonday slumber, was alive with the sound of wheels. 
 The sun was sinking over the Apennine which kneels 
 at the gate of Florence ; the streets were cool and 
 shadowy ; the old women, with the bambino, between 
 their knees, braided straw at the doors ; the booted 
 guardsman paced his black charger slowly over the 
 jeweller's bridge ; the picture-dealer brought forward 
 his brightest " master" to the fading light ; and while 
 the famous churches of that fairest city of the earth 
 called to the Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gal- 
 lantry and beauty of Tuscany sped through the damp- 
 ening air with their swift horses, meeting and passing 
 with gay greetings amid the green alleys of the Cas- 
 cine. 
 
 The twilight had become gray, when the carriages 
 and horsemen, scattered in hundreds through the in- 
 terlaced roads of this loveliest of parks, turned by com- 
 mon consent toward the spacious square in the centre, 
 and drawing up in thickly-serried ranks, the soiree on 
 wheels, the reunion en plein air, which is one of the 
 most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence, 
 commenced its healthful gayeties. The showy car- 
 riages of the grand-duke and the ex-king of Wurtem- 
 berg (whose rank would not permit them to share in 
 the familiarities of the hour) disappeared by the avenue 
 skirting the bank of the Arno, and with much delicate 
 and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen 
 of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embar- 
 rassed press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together 
 on the southern edge of the piazza. The beaux in the 
 saddle, disembarrassed of ladies and axletrees, enjoyed 
 their usual butterfly privilege of roving, and with light 
 rein and ready spur pushed their impatient horses to 
 the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most power- 
 ful ; the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there 
 over the pawing of restless hoofs ; an occasional scream 
 — half of apprehension, half of admiration— rewarded 
 the daring caracole of some young and bold rider ; 
 and while the first star sprang to its place, and the dew 
 of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of 
 the belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the 
 field (simplicity, like virtue, is its own reward !), the 
 low murmur of calumny and compliment, of love and 
 ligl.Jieartedness, of politeness, politics, puns, and po- 
 etry, arose over that assembly upon wheels : and if it 
 was not a scene and an hour of happiness, it was the 
 fault neither of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions 
 of nature and fortune. The material for happiness 
 was there. 
 
 A showy caleclie with panels of dusky crimson, the 
 hammer-cloth of the same shade, edged with a broad 
 fringe of white, the wheels slightly picked out with the 
 same colors, and the coachman and footman in corre- 
 sponding liveries, was drawn up near the southern edge 
 of the Piazzi. A narrow alley had been left for horse- 
 men between this equipage and the adjoining ones, 
 closed up at the extremity, however, by a dark-green 
 and very plain chariot, placed with a bold violation of 
 etiquetle directly across the line, and surrounded just 
 now by two or three persons of the highest rank lean- 
 ing from their saddles in earnest conversation with the 
 occupant. Not far from the caleclie, mounted upon 
 an English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man 
 had just drawn rein as if interrupted only for a mo- 
 ment on some pressing errand, and with his hat slight- 
 ly raised, was paying his compliments to the venerable 
 Prince Poniatowski, at that time the Ampbytrion of 
 Florence. From moment to moment, as the pauses 
 occurred in the exchange of courteous phrases, the 
 rider, whose spurred heel was close at his saddle- 
 girths, stole an impatient glance up the avenue of 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 451 
 
 carriages to the dark-green chariot, and, excited by 
 the lifted rein and the proximity of the spur, the grace- 
 ful horse fretted on his minion feet, and the bending 
 figures from a hundred vehicles, and the focus of 
 bright eyes radiating from all sides to the spot, would 
 have betrayed, even to a stranger, that the horseman 
 was of no common mark. Around his uncovered tem- 
 ples floated fair and well-cherished locks of the sunni- 
 est auburn ; and if there was beauty in the finely-drawn 
 lines of his lips, there was an inexpressibly fierce spirit 
 as well. 
 
 II. 
 
 The count Basil had been a month at Florence. In 
 that time he had contrived to place himself betwflen 
 the duke's ear and all the avenues of favor, and had 
 approached as near, perhaps nearer, to the hearts of 
 the women of his court. A singular and' instinctive 
 knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, per- 
 fected and concealed by conversance with the consum- 
 mate refinement of life at Paris, remarkable personal 
 beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness for which 
 no one could divine a reason in a character and fate 
 else so happily mingled, but which at the same time 
 added to his fascination, had given Count Basil a com- 
 mand over the varied stops of society, equalled by few 
 players on that difficult and capricious instrument. 
 His worldly ambition went swimmingly on, and the 
 same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures as 
 well. The love of the marchesa del Marmore, as he 
 had very well anticipated, grew with his influence and 
 renown. A woman's pride, he perfectly knew, is diffi- 
 cult to wake after she has once believed herself adored ; 
 and, satisfied that the portrait taken on the lagoon, and 
 the introduction he had given her to the exclusive pen- 
 etralia of the Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was 
 complete, he left her love for him to find its own food 
 in his successes, and never approached her but to lay 
 to her heart more mordently the serpents of jealousy 
 and despair. 
 
 For the lady Geraldine the count Basil had con- 
 ceived a love, the deepest of which his nature was ca- 
 pable. Long as he had known her, it was a passion 
 born in Italy, and while it partook of the qualities of 
 the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and well- 
 founded respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship. 
 At their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely English- 
 woman, newly arrived from the purer moral atmo- 
 sphere of her own country, was moving in the disso- 
 lute, but skilfully disguised society of the Faubourg 
 St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness of the 
 pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally unsus- 
 picious of others. The perfect frankness with which 
 she established an intimacy with the clever and accom- 
 plished attache, had soon satisfied that clear-sighted 
 person that there was no passion in her preference, 
 and, giddy with the thousand pleasures of that me- 
 tropolis of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled 
 admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and con- 
 fiding friendship. He had thus shown her the better 
 qualities of his character only, and, charmed with his 
 wit and penetration, and something flattered, perhaps, 
 with the devotion of so acknowledged an autocrat of 
 fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for 
 him that had all the earnestness of love without its 
 passion. They met at Florence, but the " knowledge 
 of good and evil" had by this time driven the lady 
 Geraldine from her Eden of unconsciousness. Still 
 as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps as pure in 
 heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice 
 had introduced into her manners those ostensible cau- 
 tions which, while they protect, suggest also what is 
 to be feared. 
 
 A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He 
 had left the vitreous and mercurial clime of France, 
 
 with its volatile and superficial occupations, for the 
 voluptuous and indolent air of Italy, and the study of 
 its impassioned deifications of beauty. That which 
 had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure — a 
 pursuit which palled in the first moment of success, 
 and was second to his ambition or his vanity — had be- 
 come, in those two years of a painter's life, a thirst 
 both of the senses and the imagination, which had 
 usurped the very throne of his soul. Like the Hindoo 
 youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood 
 elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his 
 heart to what he held so lightly, and brought the 
 costly sacrifice of time and thought to its altars. He 
 had fed his eyes upon the divine glories of the pencil, 
 and upon the breathing wonders of love in marble, be- 
 neath the sky and in the dissolving air in which they 
 rose to the hand of inspiration ; and with his eye dis- 
 ciplined, and his blood fused with taste and enthusi- 
 asm, that idolatry of beauty, which had before seemed 
 sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires in his mind, 
 and his senses were intoxicated with the incense. 
 There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the 
 atmosphere and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes 
 a warmer hue in its study of the fair models of an- 
 tiquity, the senses in turn become more refined and 
 intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is 
 loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion 
 of instinct, she is happy if she can retain her empire 
 by habit, or the qualities of the heart. That divine 
 form, meant to assimilate her to the angels, has never 
 been recognised by the dull eye that should have 
 seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter 
 or the statuary, or to his who has made himself con- 
 versant with their models, is added the imperishable 
 enthusiasm of a captivating and exalted study. The 
 mistress of his heart is the mistress of his mind. She 
 is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which 
 exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the 
 fine arts, takes another form, and becomes a woman's 
 rival and usurper. She is like nothing in ambition — 
 she is like nothing in science or business — nothing in 
 out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the chase, or the 
 acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling passion, 
 she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart, 
 and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a 
 flagging fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affec- 
 tion, even, that she is his refuge when unfit for that 
 i which occupies him most — in his fatigue, his disap- 
 I pointment, his vacuity of head and heart. He thinks 
 j of her only as she receives him in his most worthless 
 J hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is 
 forgotten with the first thought of his favorite theme — 
 for what has a woman's loveliness to do with that? 
 
 Count Basil had not concluded his first interview 
 with the lady Geraldine, without marvelling at the new 
 feelings with which he looked upon her. He had 
 never before realized her singular and adorable beauty. 
 ! The exquisitely turned head, the small and pearly 
 i ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly moulded chin, the 
 clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy 
 and brightness in the lips, and a throat and bust than 
 which those of Faustina in the delicious marble of the 
 Gallery of Florence might be less envied by the queen 
 of love— his gaze wandered over these, and followed 
 her in the harmony of her motions, and the native and 
 unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pic- 
 tures he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in 
 his mind, and the statues he had half worshipped 
 seemed to descend from their pedestals depreciated. 
 The lady Geraldine, for the first time, felt his eye. 
 For the first time in their acquaintance, she was of- 
 fended with its regard. Her embarrassment was rend 
 by the quick dipfoniate, and at that moment sprang 
 into being a passion, which perhaps had died but for 
 the conscious acknowledgment of her rebuke. 
 
 Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the 
 
452 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 second chapter of this simply true tale commences, 
 but one of the two leading threads in the count Basil's 
 woof had woven well. " The jealous are the damned," 
 and the daily and deadly agony of the marchesa del 
 Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to 
 the lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened 
 relief. His dearest joy forwarded with equal step his 
 dearest revenge ; and while he could watch the work- 
 ing of his slow torture in the fascinated heart of his 
 victim, he was content to suspend a blow to which 
 that of death would be a mercy. " The law," said 
 Count Basil, as he watched her quivering and im- 
 ploring lip, "takes cognizance but of the murder of 
 the body. It has no retribution for the keener dagger 
 of the sowL" 
 
 III. 
 
 The conversation between the Russian secretary 
 and the prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful 
 bow from the former to his horse's neck; and the 
 quicker rattling of the small hoofs on the ground, as 
 the fine creature felt the movement in the saddle and 
 prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more 
 upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of 
 Florence. The narrow lane of carriages, commencing 
 with the showy caleche of the marchesa del Marmore, 
 and closed up by the plain chariot of the lady Geral- 
 dine, was still open, and with a glance at the latter 
 which sufficiently indicated his destination, Count 
 Basil raised his spurred heel, and with a smile of de- 
 light and the quickness of a barb in the desert, gal- 
 loped toward the opening. In the same instant the 
 marchesa del Marmore gave a convulsive spring for- 
 ward, and, in obedience to an imperative order, her 
 coachman violently drew rein and shot the back and 
 forward wheels of the caleche directly across his path. 
 Met in full career by this sudden obstacle, the horse 
 of the Russian reared high in air; but ere the screams 
 of apprehension had arisen from the adjacent carriages, 
 the silken bridle was slacked, and with a low bow to 
 the foiled and beautiful marchesa as he shot past, he 
 brushed the hammer-cloths of the two scarce separa- 
 ted carriages, and at the same instant stood at the 
 chariot window of the lady Geraldine, as calm and 
 respectful as if he had never known danger or emotion. 
 
 A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face 
 as he leaped past the unhappy woman, and the drama 
 of which that look was the key was understood in Flor- 
 ence. The lady Geraldine alone, seated far back in 
 her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for the 
 smile with which she greeted its hero ; and uncon- 
 scious, as well, of the poignant jealousy and open mor- 
 tification she had innocently assisted to inflict, she 
 stretched her fair and transparent hand from the car- 
 riage, and stroked the glossy neck of his horse, and 
 while the marchesa del Marmore drove past with a 
 look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dis- 
 persing nobles and dames took their way to the city 
 gates, Count Basil leaned close to the ear of that love- 
 liest of breathing creatures, and forgot, as she forgot 
 in listening to the bewildering music of his voice, that 
 the stars had risen, or that the night was closing 
 around them. 
 
 The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot 
 of the lady Geraldine took its way to the town, and, 
 with the reins loose upon his horse's neck, Count 
 Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in the revery of a 
 tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed 
 stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose 
 silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping 
 hoofs, and the challenge of the duke's forester, going 
 his rounds ere the gates closed, had its own deep- 
 throated echo for its answer. The Arno rippled 
 among the rushes on its banks, the occasional roll of 
 wheels passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio, 
 
 came faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the 
 pointed cypresses of the convent of Bello Sguardo 
 laid their slender fingers against the lowest stars in the 
 southern horizon, and with his feet pressed, carelessly, 
 far through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his 
 bosom, the softened diplomaie turned instinctively to 
 the left in the last diverging point of the green al- 
 leys, and his horse's ears were already pricked at 
 the tread, before the gate, of the watchful and idle 
 doganieri. 
 
 Close under the city wall on this side Florence, 
 the traveller will remember that the trees are more 
 thickly serried, and the stone seats, for the comfort 
 and pleasure of those who would step forth from the 
 hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are mossy 
 with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst 
 of this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the 
 careless and forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and 
 the next moment starting aside, a female sprang high 
 against his neck, and Count Basil, ere awake from his 
 revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade across his bo- 
 som. 
 
 With the slender wrist that had given the blow 
 firmly arrested in his left hand, the count Basil slowly 
 dismounted, and after a steadfast look, by the dim 
 light, into the face of the lovely assassin, he pressed 
 her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited 
 emotion, to his lips. 
 
 " Twice since the Ave-Maria !" he said in atone of 
 reproachful tenderness, " and against a life that is your 
 own !" 
 
 He could see, even in that faint light, the stern com- 
 pression of those haughty lips, and the flash of the 
 darkest eyes of the Val d'Arno. But leading her gen- 
 tly to a seat, he sat beside her, and with scarce ten 
 brief moments of low-toned and consummate elo- 
 quence, he once more deluded her soul ! 
 
 " We meet to-morrow," she said, as, after a burst 
 of irrepressible tears, she disengaged herself from his 
 neck, and looked toward the end of the avenue, where 
 Count Basil had already heard the pawing of her im- 
 patient horses. 
 
 " To-morrow!" he answered ; " but,m?'a carissima!" 
 he continued, opening his breast to stanch the blood of 
 his wound, "you owe me a concession after this rude 
 evidence of your love." 
 
 She looked into his face as if answer were superflu- 
 ous. 
 
 " Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me 
 till the Ave-Maria." 
 
 For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesi- 
 tated. Though the step he demanded of her was ap- 
 parently without motive or reason — though it was one 
 that sacrificed to a whim her station, her fortune, and 
 her friends — she hesitated but to question her reason 
 if the wretched price of this sacrifice would be paid — 
 if the love, to which she fled from this world and heav- 
 en, was her own. In other countries, the crime of in- 
 fidelity is punished : in Italy it is the appearance only 
 that is criminal. In proportion as the sin is overlook- 
 ed, the violation of the outward proprieties of life is 
 severely visited ; and while a lover is stipulated for iff 
 the marriage-contract, an open visit to that lover'* 
 house is an offence which brands the perpetrator with 
 irremediable shame. The marchesa del Marmore 
 well knew that in going forth from the ancestral pal- 
 ace of her husband on a visit to Count Basil, she took 
 leave of it for ever. The equipage that would bear 
 her to him would never return for her ; the protection, 
 the fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends, 
 would all drop from her. In the pride of her youth 
 and beauty — from the highest pinnacle of rank — from 
 the shelter of fortune and esteem — she would descend, 
 by a single step, to be a beggar for life and love from 
 the mercy of the heart she fled to ! 
 
 " I will come," she said, in a firm voice, looking 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 453 
 
 close into his face, as if she would read in his dim fea- 
 tures the prophetic answer of his soul. 
 
 The count Basil strained her to his bosom, and start- 
 in<* back as if with the pain of his wound, he pleaded 
 the necessity of a surgeon, and bade her a hasty good- 
 night. And while she gained her own carriage in se- 
 crecy, he rode round to the other gate, which opens 
 upon the Borg'ognisanti, and dismounting at the 
 Cafe Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usu- 
 ally assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveller, 
 Giannino Speranza, who had sketched the marchesa 
 upon the lagoon, and made an appointment with him 
 for the morrow. 
 
 IV. 
 
 While the count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily, 
 the just Fates were preparing for him a retribution in 
 his love. The mortification of the marchesa del Mar- 
 more, at the Cascine, had been made the subject of 
 conversation at the prima sera of the lady Geraldine ; 
 and other details of the same secret drama transpiring 
 at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's 
 feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly 
 and fully upon her. His motives for pretending to 
 have drawn the portrait of the lagoon — for procuring 
 her an admission to the exclusive suppers of the Pitti 
 — for a thousand things which had been unaccounta- 
 ble, or referred to more amiable causes — were at once 
 unveiled. Even yet, with no suspicion of the extent 
 of his revenge, the lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity 
 for the unconscious victim, and a surprised disappro- 
 val of the character thus unmasked to her eye. Upon 
 further reflection, her brow flushed to remember that 
 she herself had been made the most effective tool of 
 his revenge ; and as she recalled circumstance after 
 circumstance in the last month's history, the attention 
 and preference he had shown her, and which had grat- 
 ified her, perhaps, more than she admitted to herself, 
 seemed to her sensitive and resentful mind to have 
 been only the cold instruments of jealousy. Incapable 
 as she was of an unlawful passion, the unequalled fas- 
 cinations of Count Basil had silently found their way 
 to her heart, and if her indignation was kindled by a 
 sense of justice and womanly pity, it was fed and 
 fanned unaware by mortified pride. She rang, and 
 sent an order to the gate that she was to be denied for 
 the future to Count Basil Spirifort. 
 
 The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his 
 hand, and before leaving her presence to communi- 
 cate the order, he presented her with a letter. Well 
 foreseeing the eclaircissement which must follow the 
 public scene in the Cascine, the count Basil had left 
 the cafe for his own palazzo ; and, in a letter, of which 
 the following is the passage most important to our 
 story, he revealed to the lady he loved a secret, which 
 he hoped would anticipate the common rumor : — 
 
 ***** "B u t these passionate words will have 
 offended your ear, dearest lady, and 1 must pass to a 
 theme on which I shall be less eloquent. You will 
 hear to-night, perhaps, that which, with all your im- 
 agination, will scarce prepare you for what you will 
 hear to-morrow. The marchesa del Marmore is the 
 victim of a revenge which has only been second in my 
 heart to the love I have for the first time breathed to 
 you. I can never hope that you will either under- 
 stand or forgive the bitterness in which it springs ; yet 
 it is a demon to which I am delivered, soul and body, 
 and no spirit but my own can know its power. When 
 I have called it by its name, and told you of its exas- 
 peration, if you do not pardon, you will pity me. 
 
 " You know that I am a Russian, and you know the 
 station my talents have won me ; but you do not know 
 that I was born a serf and a slave ! If you could rend 
 open my heart and see the pool of blackness and bit- 
 terness that lies in its bottom — fallen, drop by drop, 
 
 from this accursed remembrance — there would be lit- 
 tle need to explain to you how this woman has offend- 
 ed me. Had I been honorably born, like yourself, I 
 feel that I could have been, like you, an angel of light : 
 as it is, the contumely of a look has stirred me to a 
 revenge which has in it, I do not need to be told, the 
 darkest elements of murder. 
 
 " My early history is of no importance, yet I may 
 tell you it was such as to expose to every wind this 
 lacerated nerve. In a foreign land, and holding an 
 official rank, it was seldom breathed upon. I wore, 
 mostly, a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at Ven- 
 ice I had time to brood upon my dark remembrance, 
 and it was revived and fed by the melancholy of my 
 solitude. The obscurity in which I lived, and the oc- 
 casional comparison between myself and some passing 
 noble in the Piazza, served to remind me, could I have 
 forgotten it. I never dreamed of love in this humble 
 disguise, and so never felt the contempt that had most 
 power to wound me. On receiving the letters of my 
 new appointment, however, this cautious humility did 
 not wait to be put off with my sombrero. I started 
 for Florence, clad in the habiliments of poverty, but 
 with the gay mood of a courtier beneath. The first 
 burst of my newly-released feelings was admiration for 
 a woman of singular beauty, who stood n6ar me on 
 one of the most love-awakening and delicious eves 
 that I ever remember. My heart was overflowing, and 
 she permitted me to breathe my passionate adoration 
 in her ear. The marchesa del Marmore, but for the 
 scorn of the succeeding day, would, I think, have been 
 the mistress of my soul. Strangely enough, I had 
 seen you without loving you. 
 
 " I have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse 
 you, my rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in 
 the cathedral of Bologna. The look she gave me 
 there sealed her doom. It was witnessed by the com- 
 panions of my poverty, and the concentrated resent 
 ment of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a 
 man, I must have struck him dead where he stood : 
 she was a woman, and I swore the downfall of her 
 pride." * * * 
 
 Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter, 
 Count Basil returned to the pleading of his love. It 
 was dwelt on more eloquently than his revenge ; but 
 as the lady Geraldine scarce read it to the end, it need 
 not retard the procession of events in our story. The 
 fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan 
 lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow cleared, as if 
 by a sweep from the wing of her good angel, of the 
 troubled dream which had overhung it, and in brief 
 and decided, but kind and warning words, replied to 
 the letter of Count Basil. 
 
 It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini 
 from the hills were settling to their siesta on the steps 
 of the churches, and against the columns of the Piaz- 
 za del Gran' Duca. The artists alone, in the cool gal- 
 lery, and in the tempered halls of the Pitti, shook off 
 the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and 
 thought upon the immortal canvass from which they 
 drew ; while the sculptor, in his brightening studio, 
 weary of the mallet, yet excited by the bolder light, 
 leaned on the rough block behind him, and with list- 
 less body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the last 
 touches upon his marble. 
 
 Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to 
 the wheels of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aris- 
 tocratic sleepers of the Via del Servi, and wnh a lash 
 and jerk of violence, the coachman of the marchesa 
 del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noonday re- 
 pose, brought up her showy caliche at the door of 
 Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxu- 
 
454 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 rious vehicle was pale, but the brightness of joy and 
 hope burned almost fiercely in her eye. 
 
 The doors flew open as the marchesa descended, 
 and following a servant in the count's livery, of whom 
 she asked no question, she found herself in a small sa- 
 loon, furnished with the peculiar luxury which marks 
 the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened like a paint- 
 er's room. The light came in from a single tall win- 
 dow, curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at 
 which, on her first entrance, a young man stood 
 sketching the outline of a female head. As she ad- 
 vanced, looking eagerly around for another face, the 
 artist laid down his palette, and with a low reverence 
 presented her with a note from Count Basil. It in- 
 formed her that political news of the highest impor- 
 tance had called him suddenly to the cabinet of his 
 chef, but that he hoped to be with her soon ; and, 
 meantime, he begged of her, as a first favor in his 
 newly-prospered love, to bless him with the possession 
 of her portrait, done by the incomparable artist who 
 would receive her. 
 
 Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart 
 of the marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read 
 the letter again, and grew calmer; for it was laden with 
 epithets of endearment, and seemed to her written in 
 the most Sudden haste. Never doubting for an instant 
 the truth of his apology, she removed her hat, and 
 with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she 
 shook out from their confinement the masses of her 
 luxuriant hair, she approached the painter's easel, and 
 with a forced cheerfulness inquired in what attitude 
 she should sit to him. 
 
 " If the signora will amuse herself," he replied, 
 with a bow, " it will be easy to compose the picture, 
 and seize the expression without annoying her with a 
 pose." 
 
 Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the un- 
 happy marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios 
 and prints, and while she apparently occupied herself 
 in the examination of these specimens of art, she was 
 delivered, as her tormentor had well anticipated, to the 
 alternate tortures of impatience and remorse. And 
 while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her 
 eyes grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful 
 painter, forgetting everything in the enthusiasm of his 
 art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject, 
 transferred too faithfully to the canvass that picture of 
 agonized expectation. 
 
 The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the 
 gay world of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole, 
 rolled past the Via dei Servi on their circuitous way 
 to the Cascine, and saw, with dumb astonishment, the 
 carriage and liveries of the marchesa del Marmore at 
 the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept by 
 the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there 
 their astonishment redoubled : for in the window of 
 the Casino dei Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and 
 laughing with a group of lounging exquisites, stood 
 Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied and listless 
 of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction to be 
 drawn from this sequence of events ; and when they 
 remembered the demonstration of passionate jealousy 
 on the previous evening in the Cascine, Count Basil, 
 evidently innocent of participation in her passion, was 
 deemed a persecuted man, and the marchesa del Mar- 
 more was lost to herself and the world ! 
 
 Three days after this well-remembered circumstance 
 in the history of Florence, an order was received from 
 the grand-duke to admit into the exhibition of mod- 
 ern artists a picture by a young Venetian painter, an 
 eleve of Count Basil Spirifort. It was called " The 
 Lady expecting an Inconstant," and had been pro- 
 nounced by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private 
 view, to be a masterpiece of expression and color. It 
 was instantly and indignantly recognised as the por- 
 trait of the unfortunate marchesa, whose late aban- 
 
 donment of her husband was fresh on the lips of com- 
 mon rumor ; but ere it could be officially removed, 
 the circumstance had been noised abroad, and the 
 picture had been seen by all the curious in Florence. 
 The order for its removal was given ; but the purpose 
 of Count Basil had been effected, and the name of the 
 unhappy marchesa had become a jest on the vulgar 
 tongue. 
 
 This tale had not been told, had there not been 
 more than a common justice in its sequel. The worst 
 passions of men, in common life, are sometimes in- 
 scrutably prospered. The revenge of Count Basil, 
 however, was betrayed by the last which completed 
 it ; and while the victim of his fiendish resentment 
 finds a peaceful asylum in England under the roof of 
 the compassionate Lady Geraldine, the once gay and 
 admired Russian wanders from city to city, followed 
 by an evil reputation, and stamped unaccountably as a 
 jattatore.* 
 
 LOVE AND DIPLOMACY. 
 
 " Pray pardon me, 
 For I am like a boy that hath found money- 
 Afraid I dream still." 
 
 Ford or Webster. 
 
 It was on a fine September evening, within my time 
 (and I am not, I trust, too old to be loved), that Count 
 
 Anatole L , of the impertinent and particularly 
 
 useless profession of attache, walked up and down be- 
 fore the glass in his rooms at the "Archduke Charles," 
 the first hotel, as you know, if you have travelled, in 
 the green-belted and fair city of Vienna. The brass 
 ring was still swinging on the end of the bell-rope, and, 
 in a respectful attitude at the door, stood the just- 
 summoned Signor Attilio, valet and privy councillor 
 to one of the handsomest coxcombs errant through 
 the world. Signor Attilio was a Tyrolese, and, like 
 his master, was very handsome. 
 
 Count Anatole had been idling away three golden 
 summer months in the Tyrol, for the sole purpose, 
 as far as mortal eyes could see, of disguising his fine 
 Phidian features in a callow mustache and whiskers. 
 The crines ridentes (as Eneas Sylvius has it) being now 
 in a condition beyond improvement, Signor Attilio had 
 for some days been rather curious to know what course 
 of events would next occupy the diplomatic talents of 
 his master. 
 
 After a turn or two more, taken in silence, Count 
 Anatole stopped in the middle of the floor, and eying 
 the well-made Tyrolese from head to foot, begged to 
 know if he wore at the present moment his most be- 
 coming breeches, jacket, and beaver. 
 
 Attilio was never astonished at anything his master 
 did or said. He simply answered, "Si, signore." 
 
 " Be so kind as to strip immediately, and dress your- 
 self in that travelling suit lying on the sofa." 
 
 As the green, gold-corded jacket, knee-breeches, 
 buckles, and stockings, were laid aside, Count Anatole 
 threw off his dressing-gown, and commenced encasing 
 his handsome proportions in the cast-off habiliments. 
 He then put on the conical, slouch-rimmed hat, with 
 the tall eagle's-feather stuck jauntily on the side, and 
 the two rich tassels pendant over his left eye ; and, the 
 toilet of the valet being completed at the same moment, 
 they stood looking at one another with perfect gravity 
 — rathertransformed, but each apparently quite at home 
 in his new character. 
 
 " You look very like a gentleman, Attilio," said the 
 count. 
 
 " Your excellency has caught to admiration, Varia 
 
 
 * A man with an evil eye. 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 455 
 
 del paese" complimented back again the sometime 
 Tyrolese. 
 
 " Attilio!" 
 " Signore?" 
 
 " Do you remember the lady in the forest of 
 Friuli ?" 
 
 Attilio began to have a glimmering of things. Some 
 three months before, the count was dashing on at a 
 rapid post-pace through a deep wood in the moun- 
 tains which head in the Adriatic. A sudden pull-up 
 at a turning in the road nearly threw him from his 
 britska ; and looking out at the " anima di porco /" of 
 the postilion, he found his way impeded by an overset 
 carriage, from which three or four servants were en- 
 deavoring to extract the body of an old man, killed 
 by the accident. 
 
 There was more attractive metal for the traveller, 
 however, in the shape of a young and beautiful woman, j 
 leaning, pale and faint, against a tree, and apparently j 
 about lo sink to the ground, unassisted. To bring a 
 hat full of water from the nearest brook, and receive j 
 her falling head on his shoulder, was the work of a 
 thought. She had fainted quite away, and taking her, 
 like a child, into his arms, he placed her on a bank by j 
 the road-side, bathed her forehead and lips, and chafed 
 her small white hands, till his heart, with all the dis- I 
 tress of the scene, was quite mad with her perfect ! 
 beauty. 
 
 Animation at last began to return, and as the flush 
 was stealing into her lips, another carriage drove up 
 with servants in the same livery, and Count Anatole, 
 thoroughly bewildered in his new dream, mechanically 
 assisted them in getting their living mistress and dead 
 master into it, and until they were fairly out of sight, 
 it had never occurred to him that he might possibly 
 wish to know the name and condition of the fairest 
 piece of work he had ever seen from the hands of his 
 Maker. 
 
 An hour before, he had doubled his bono mano to 
 the postilion, and was driving on to Vienna as if to sit 
 at a new congress. Now, he stood leaning against the 
 tree, at the foot of which the grass and wild flowers 
 showed the print of a new-made pressure, and the 
 postilion cracked his whip, and Attilio reminded him 
 of the hour he was losing, in vain. 
 
 He remounted after a while ; but the order was to 
 go back to the last post-house. 
 
 Three or four months at a solitary albergo in the 
 neighborhood of this adventure, passed by the count 
 in scouring the country on horseback in every direc- 
 tion, and by his servant in very particular ennui, brings 
 up the story nearly to where the scene opens. 
 " I have seen her!" said the count. 
 Attilio only lilted up his eyebrows. 
 "She is here, in Vienna!" 
 "Felice lei!" murmured Attilio. 
 " She is the princess Leichstenfels, and, by the 
 death of that old man, a widow." 
 
 " VcramentcV responded the valet, with a rising 
 inflexion ; for he knew his master and French morals 
 too well not to foresee a damper in the possibility of 
 matrimony. 
 
 " Veramenle .'" gravely echoed the count. "And 
 now listen. The princess lives in close retirement. 
 An old friend or two, and a tried servant, are the only 
 persons who see her. You are to contrive to see this 
 servant to-morrow, corrupt him to leave her, and rec- 
 ommend me in his place, and then you are to take 
 him as your courier to Paris ; whence, if I calculate 
 well, you will return to me before long, with impor- 
 tant despatches. Do you understand me ?" 
 " Signor, si !" 
 
 In the small boudoir of a masio de plaisancc, be- 
 longing to the noble family of Leichstenfels, sat the 
 widowed mistress of one of the oldest titles and finest 
 estates of Austria. The light from a single long win- 
 
 dow opening down to the floor and leading out upon 
 a terrace of flowers, was subdued by a heavy crimson 
 curtain, looped partially away, a pastille lamp was 
 sending up from its porphyry pedestal a thin and just 
 perceptible curl of smoke, through which the lady 
 musingly passed backward and forward one of her 
 slender fingers, and, on a table near, lay a sheet of 
 black-edged paper, crossed by a small silver pen, and 
 scrawled over irregularly with devices and discon- 
 nected words, the work evidently of a fit of the most 
 absolute and listless idleness. 
 
 The door opened, and a servant in mourning livery 
 stood before the lady. 
 
 " I have thought over your request, Wilhelm," she 
 said. " I had become accustomed to your services, 
 and regret to lose you; but I should regret more to 
 stand in the way of your interest. You have my per- 
 mission." 
 
 Wilhelm expressed his thanks with an effort that 
 showed he had not obeyed the call of mammon with- 
 out regret, and requested leave to introduce the person 
 he had proposed as his successor. 
 " Of what country is he ?" 
 "Tyrolese, your excellency." 
 
 "And why does he leave the gentleman with whom 
 he came to Vienna?" 
 
 "II est amoureux d'une Viennaise, madamc," an 
 swered the ex-valet, resorting to French to express 
 what he considered a delicate circumstance. 
 
 "Pauvre enfant!" said the princess, with a sigh 
 that partook as much of envy as of pity ; let him 
 come in!" 
 
 And the count Anatole, as the sweet accents reached 
 his ear, stepped over the threshold, and in the coarse 
 but gay dress of the Tyrol, stood in the presence of 
 her whose dewy temples he had bathed in the forest, 
 whose lips he had almost "pried into for breath," 
 whose snowy hands he had chafed and kissed when the 
 senses had deserted their celestial organs— the angel 
 of his perpetual dream, the lady of his wild and un- 
 controllable, but respectful and honorable love. 
 
 The princess looked carelessly up as he approached, 
 but her eyes seemed arrested in passing over his fea- 
 tures. It was but momentary. She resumed her 
 occupation of winding her taper fingers in the smoke- 
 curls of the incense-lamp, and with half a sigh, as if 
 she had repelled a pleasing thought, she leaned back 
 in the silken fauteuil, and asked the new-comer his 
 name. 
 
 "Anatole, your excellency." 
 
 The voice again seemed to stir something in her 
 memory. She passed her hand over her eyes, and 
 was for a moment lost in thought. 
 
 "Anatole," she said (oh, how the sound of his own 
 name, murmured in that voice of music thrilled 
 through the fiery veins of the disguised lover!) 
 "Anatole, I receive you into my service. Wilhelm 
 will inform you of your duties, and — I have a fancy 
 for the dress of the Tyrol— you may wear it instead 
 of my livery, if you will." 
 
 And with one stolen and warm gaze from under his 
 drooping eyelids, and heart and lips on fire, as he 
 thanked her for her condescension, the new retainer 
 took his leave. 
 
 Month after month passed on— to Count Anatole in 
 a bewildering dream of ever deepening passion. Jt 
 was upon a soft and amorous morning oi April, that a 
 dashing equipage stood at the door of the proud palace 
 
 of Leichstenfels. The arms of E blazed on the 
 
 panels, and the insoucianls chasseurs leaned against 
 [he marble columns of the portico, waiting for their 
 master, and speculating on the gayety likely to ensue 
 from the suite he was prosecuting within. How could 
 
 a prince of E be supposed to sue in vain ? 
 
 The disguised footman had ushered the gay and 
 handsome nobleman to his mistress' presence. 
 
 After 
 
456 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 rearranging a family of very well-arranged flower- 
 pots, shutting the window to open it again, changing 
 the folds of the curtains not at all for the better, and 
 looking a stolen and fierce look at the unconscious 
 visiter, he could find no longer an apology for remain- 
 ing in the room. He shut the door after him in a 
 tempest of jealousy. 
 
 "Did your excellency ring?" said he, opening the 
 door again, after a few minutes of intolerable torture. 
 
 The prince was on his knees at her feet ! 
 
 " No, Anatole ; but you may bring me a glass of 
 water." 
 
 As he entered with a silver tray trembling in his 
 hand, the prince was rising to go. His face expressed 
 delight, hope, triumph — everything that could mad- 
 den the soul of the irritated lover. After waiting on 
 his rival to his carriage, he returned to his mistress, 
 and receiving the glass upon the tray, was about 
 leaving the room in silence, when the princess called 
 to him. 
 
 In all this lapse of time it is not to be supposed that 
 Count Anatole played merely his footman's part. His 
 respectful and elegant demeanor, the propriety of his 
 language, and that deep devotedness of manner which 
 wins a woman more than all things else, soon gained 
 upon the confidence of the princess; and before a 
 week was passed she found that she was happier when 
 he stood behind her chair, and gave him, with some 
 self-denial, those frequent permissions of absence from 
 the palace which she supposed he asked to prosecute 
 the amour disclosed to her on his introduction to her 
 service. As time flew on, she attributed his earnest- 
 ness and occasional warmth of manner to gratitude; 
 and, without reasoning much on her feelings, gave 
 herself up to the indulgence of a degree of interest in 
 him which would have alarmed a woman more skilled 
 in the knowledge of the heart. Married from a con- 
 vent, however, to an old man who had secluded her 
 from the world, the voice of the passionate count in 
 the forest of Friuli was the first sound of love that had 
 ever entered her ears. She knew not why it was that 
 the tones of her new footman, and now and then a look 
 of his eyes, as he leaned over to assist her at table, 
 troubled her memory like a trace of a long-lost dream. 
 
 But, oh, what moments had been his in these fleet- 
 ing months! Admitted to her presence in her most 
 unguarded hours — seeing her at morning, at noon, at 
 night, in all her unstudied and surpassing loveliness — 
 for ever near her, and with the world shut out — her 
 rich hair blowing with the lightest breeze across his 
 fingers in his assiduous service — her dark full eyes, 
 unconscious of an observer, filling with unrepressed 
 tears, or glowing with pleasure over some tale of love 
 — her exquisite form flung upon a couch, or bending 
 over flowers, or moving about the room in all its native 
 and untrammelled grace — and her voice, tender, most 
 tender to him, though she knew it not, and her eyes, 
 herself unaware, ever following him in his loitering 
 attendance — and he, the while, losing never a glance 
 nor a motion, but treasuring all up in his heart with 
 the avarice of a miser— what, in common life, though 
 it were the life of fortune's most favored child, could 
 compare with it for bliss? 
 
 Pale and agitated, the count turned back at the call 
 of his mistress, and stood waiting her pleasure. 
 
 "Anatole!" 
 
 "Madame!" 
 
 The answer was so low and deep it startled even 
 himself. 
 
 She motioned him to come nearer. She had sunk 
 upon the sofa, and as he stood at her feet she leaned 
 forward, buried her hands and arms in the long curls 
 which, in her retirement, she allowed to float luxuri- 
 antly over her shoulders, and sobbed aloud. Over- 
 
 come and forgetful of all but the distress of the lovely 
 creature before him, the count dropped upon the cush- 
 ion on which rested the small foot in its mourning 
 slipper, and taking her hand, pressed it suddenly and 
 fervently to his lips. 
 
 The reality broke upon her! She was beloved — 
 but by whom? A menial ! and the appalling answer 
 drove all the blood of her proud race in a torrent upon 
 her heart, sweeping away all affection as if her nature 
 had never known its name. She sprang to her feet, 
 and laid her hand upon the bell. 
 
 "Madame!" said Anatole, in a cold proud tone. 
 
 She stayed her arm to listen. 
 
 "I leave you for ever." 
 
 And again, with the quick revulsion of youth and 
 passion, her woman's heart rose within her, and she 
 buried her face in her hands, and dropped her head in 
 utter abandonment on her bosom. 
 
 It was the birthday of the emperor, and the courtly 
 nobles of Austria were rolling out from the capital to 
 offer their congratulations at the royal palace of 
 Schoenbrunn. In addition to the usual attractions 
 of the scene, the drawing-room was to be graced by 
 the first public appearance of a new ambassador, 
 whose reputed personal beauty, and the talents he had 
 displayed in a late secret negotiation, had set the whole 
 court, from the queen of Hungary to the youngest 
 dame d'honneur, in a flame of curiosity. 
 
 To the prince E there was another reason for 
 
 writing the day in red letters. The princess Leich- 
 stenfels, by an express message from the emperess, 
 was to throw aside her widow's weeds, and appear 
 once more to the admiring world. She had yielded \ 
 to the summons, but it was to be her last day of splen- 
 dor. Her heart and hand were plighted to her Ty- 
 rolese minion ; and the brightest and loveliest ornament 
 of the court of Austria, when the ceremonies of the 
 day were over, was to lay aside the costly bauble 
 from her shoulder, and the glistening tiara from her 
 brow, and forget rank and fortune as the wife of his 
 bosom ! 
 
 The dazzling hours flew on. The plain and kind 
 old emperor welcomed and smiled upon all. The 
 wily Metternich, in the crime of his successful man- 
 hood, cool, polite, handsome, and winning, gathered 
 golden opinions by every word and look ; the young 
 duke of Reichstadt, the mild and gentle son of the 
 struck eagle of St. Helena, surrounded and caressed 
 by a continual cordon of admiring women, seemed for- 
 getful that opportunity and expectation awaited him, 
 like two angels with their wings outspread ; and haugh- 
 ty nobles and their haughtier dames, statesmen, schol- 
 ars, soldiers, and priests, crowded upon each other's 
 heels, and mixed together in that doubtful podrida, 
 which goes by the name of pleasure. I could moralize 
 here had I time ! 
 
 The princess of Leichstenfelshad gone through the 
 ceremony of presentation, and had heard the murmur 
 of admiration, drawn by her beauty, from all lips. Diz- 
 zy with the scene, and with a bosom full of painful and 
 conflicting emotions, she had accepted the proffered 
 
 arm of Prince E to breathe a fresher air upon 
 
 the terrace. They stood near a window, and he was 
 pointing out to his fair but inattentive companion the 
 various characters as they- passed within. 
 
 " I must contrive," said the prince, " to show you 
 the new envoy. Oh ! you have not heard of him. 
 Beautiful as Narcissus, modest as Pastor Corydon, 
 clever as the prime minister himself, this paragon of 
 diplomatists has been here in disguise these three 
 months, negotiating about — Metternich and the devil 
 knows what — but rewarded at last with an ambassa- 
 dor's star, and — but here he is : Princess Leichsten- 
 fels, permit me to present " 
 
 She heard no more. A glance from the diamond 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 457 
 
 \ 
 
 star on his breast to the Hephaestion mouth and keen 
 dark eye of Count Anatole, revealed to her the mys- 
 tery of months. And as she leaned against the win- 
 dow for support, the hand that sustained her in the 
 forest of Friuli, and the same thrilling voice, in almost 
 the same never-forgotten cadence, offered his impas- 
 sioned sympathy and aid — and she recognised and re- 
 membered all. 
 
 I must go back so far as to inform you, that Count 
 Anatole, on the morning of this memorable day, had 
 sacrificed a silky but prurient mustache, and a pair 
 of the very sauciest dark whiskers out of Coventry. 
 
 Whether the prince E recognised in the new 
 
 envoy the lady's gentleman who so inopportunely 
 broke in upon his tender avowal, I am not prepared to 
 say. I only know (for I was there) that the princess 
 Leichstenfels was wedded to the new ambassador in 
 
 the " leafy month of June ;" and the prince E , 
 
 unfortunately prevented by illness from attending the 
 nuptials, lost a very handsome opportunity of singing 
 with effect — 
 
 " If she be not fair for me" — 
 
 supposing it translated into German. 
 
 Whether the enamored ambassadress prefers her 
 husband in his new character, I am equally uncertain ; 
 though from much knowledge of German courts and 
 a little of human nature, I think she will be happy if 
 at some future day she would not willingly exchange 
 her proud envoy for the devoted Tyrolese, and does 
 not sigh that she can no more bring him to her feet 
 with a pull of a silken string. 
 
 THE MADHOUSE OF PALERMO, 
 
 He who has not skimmed over the silvery waters of 
 the Lipari, with a summer breeze right fro* Italy in 
 his topsails, the smoke of Stromboli alone staining the 
 unfathomable-looking blue of the sky, and, as the sun 
 dipped his flaming disk in the sea, put up his helm for 
 the bosom of La Concha cVOro, the Golden Shell, as 
 they beautifully call the bay of Palermo : he who has 
 not thus entered, I say, to the fairest spot on the face 
 of this very fair earth, has a leaf worth the turning in 
 his book of observation. 
 
 In ten minutes after dropping the anchor, with sky 
 and water still in a glow, the men were all out of the 
 rigging, the spars of the tall frigate were like lines pen- 
 cilled on the sky, the band played inspiringly on the 
 poop, and every boat along the gay Marina was freight- 
 ed with fair Palermitans on its way to the stranger 
 ship. 
 
 I was standing with the officer-of-the-deck by the 
 capstan, looking at the first star which had just sprung 
 into its place like a thing created with a glance of the 
 eye. 
 
 " Shall we let the ladies aboard, sir ?" said a smiling 
 middy, coming aft from the gangway. 
 
 " Yes, sir. And tell the boatswain's mate to clear 
 away for a dance on the quarter-deck." 
 
 In most of the ports of the Mediterranean, a ship-of- 
 war, on a summer cruise, is as welcome as the breeze 
 from the sea. Bringing with her forty or fifty gay 
 young officers overcharged with life and spirits, a band 
 of music never so well occupied as when playing for a 
 dance, and a deck whiter and smoother than a ball- 
 room floor, the warlike vessel seems made for a scene 
 of pleasure. Whatever her nation, she no sooner 
 drops her anchor, than she is surrounded by boats from 
 the shore ; and when the word is passed for admission, 
 her gangway is crowded with the mirth-loving and 
 warm people of these southern climes, as much at 
 
 home on board, and as ready to enter into any scheme 
 of amusement, as the maddest-brained midshipman 
 could desire. 
 
 The companion-hatch was covered with its grating, 
 lest some dizzy waltzer should drop his partner into the 
 steerage, the band got out their music-stand, and the 
 bright buttons were soon whirling round from larboard 
 to starboard, with forms in their clasp, and dark eyes 
 glowing over their shoulders, that might have tempted 
 the devil out of Stromboli. 
 
 Being only a passenger myself, I was contented with 
 sitting on the slide of a carronade, and with the music 
 in my ear, and the twilight flush deepening in the fine- 
 traced angles of the rigging, abandoning myself to the 
 delicious listlessness with which the very air is pregnant 
 in these climates of paradise. 
 
 The light feet slid by, and the waltz, the gallopade, 
 and the mazurka, had followed each other till it was 
 broad moonlight on the decks. It was like a night 
 without an atmosphere, the radiant flood poured down 
 with such an invisible and moonlike clearness. 
 
 " Do you see the lady leaning on that old gentle- 
 man's arm by the hammock-rail ?" said the first lieu- 
 tenant, who sat upon the next gun — like myself, a 
 spectator of the scene. 
 
 I had remarked her well. She had been in the ship 
 five or ten minutes, and in that time, it seemed to me, 
 I had drunk her beauty, even to intoxication. The 
 frigate was slowly swinging round to the land breeze, 
 and the moon, from drawing the curved line of a gip- 
 sy-shaped capella di jtaglia with bewitching conceal- 
 ment across her features, gradually fell full upon the 
 dark limit of her orbed forehead. Heaven ! what a 
 vision of beauty! Solemn, and full of subdued pain 
 as the countenance seemed, it was radiant with an al- 
 most supernatual light of mind. Thought and feeling 
 seemed steeped into every line. Her mouth was large 
 — the only departure from the severest model of the 
 Greek — and stamped with calmness, as if it had been 
 a legible word upon her lips. But her eyes — what can 
 I say of their unnatural lightning — of the depth, the 
 fulness, the wild and maniac-like passionateness of their 
 every look ? 
 
 My curiosity was strongly moved. I walked aft to 
 the capstan, and throwing off my habitual reserve with 
 some effort, approached the old gentleman on whose 
 arm she leaned, and begged permission to lead her out 
 for a waltz. 
 
 " If you wish it, carissima mia /" said he, turning to 
 her with all the tenderness in his tone of which the 
 honeyed language of Italy is capable. 
 
 But she clung to his arm with startled closeness, and 
 without even looking at me, turned her lips up to his 
 ear, and murmured, " Mai piu .'" 
 
 At my request the officer on duty paid them the com- 
 pliment of sending them ashore in one of the frigate's 
 boats; and after assisting them down the ladder, I stood 
 upon the broad stair on the level of the water, and 
 watched the phosphoric wake of the swift cutter till 
 the bright sparkles were lost amid the vessels nearer 
 land. The coxswain reported the boat's return ; but 
 all that belonged to the ship had not come back in her. 
 My heart was left behind. 
 
 The next morning there was the usual bustle in the 
 gunroom preparatory to going ashore. Glittering uni- 
 forms lay about upon the chairs and tables, sprinkled 
 with swords, epaulettes, and cocked hats ; very well- 
 brushed boots were sent to be rebrushed, and very 
 nice coats to be made, if possible, to look nicer ; the 
 ship's barber was cursed for not having the hands of 
 Briareus, and no good was wished to the eyes of the 
 washerwoman of the last port where the frigate had 
 anchored. Cologne-water was in great request, and 
 the purser had an uncommon number of " private in- 
 terviews." 
 
 Amid all the bustle : .'he question of how to pass th» 
 
458 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 day was busily agitated. Twenty plans were proposed ; 
 but the sequel — a dinner at the Hotel Anglais, and a 
 
 stroll for a lark" after it — was the only point on which 
 the speakers were quite unanimous. 
 
 One proposition was to go to Bagaria, and see the 
 palace of Monsters. This is a villa about ten miles 
 from Palermo, which the owner, Count Pallagonia, an 
 eccentric Sicilian noble, has ornamented with some 
 hundreds of statues of the finest workmanship, repre- 
 senting the form of woman in every possible combina- 
 tion, with beasts, fishes, and birds. It looks like the 
 temptation of St. Anthony on a splendid scale, and is 
 certainly one of the most extraordinary spectacles in 
 the world. 
 
 Near it stands another villa, the property of Prince 
 Butera (the present minister of Naples at the court of 
 France), containing, in the depths of its pleasure- 
 grounds, a large monastery, with wax monks, of the 
 size and appearance of life, scattered about the pas- 
 sages and cells, and engaged in every possible uncleri- 
 cal avocation. It is a whimsical satire on the order, 
 done to the life. 
 
 Another plan was to go to the Capuchin convent, 
 and see the dried friars — six or eight hundred bearded 
 old men, baked, as they died, in their cowls and beards, 
 and standing against the walls in ghastly rows, in the 
 spacious vaults of the monastery. A more infernal 
 spectacle never was seen by mortal eyes. 
 
 A drive to Monreale, a nest of a village on the moun- 
 tain above the town — a visit to the gardens of a noble- 
 man who salutes the stranger with a jet tVeau at every 
 turning — and a lounge in the public promenade of 
 Palermo itself — shared the honors of the argument. 
 
 I had been in Sicily before, and was hesitating which 
 of these various lions was worthy of a second visit, 
 when the surgeon proposed to me to accompany him 
 on a visit to a Sicilian count living in the neighborhood, 
 who had converted his chateau into a lunatic asylum, 
 and devoted his time and a large fortune entirely to 
 this singular hobby. He was the first to try the sys- 
 tem, now, thank God, generally approved, of winning 
 back reason to these most wretched of human suffer- 
 ers by kindness and gentle treatment. 
 
 We jumped into one of the rattling calesini standing 
 in the handsome corso of Palermo, and fifteen minutes 
 beyond the gates brought us to the Casa dei Pazzi. 
 My friend's uniform and profession were an immediate 
 passport, and we were introduced into a handsome 
 court, surrounded by a colonnade, and cooled by a 
 fountain, in which were walking several well-dressed 
 people, with books, drawing-boards, battledores, and 
 other means of amusement. They all bowed politely 
 as we passed, and at the door of the interior we were 
 met by the count. 
 
 " Good God !" I exclaimed — " she was insane, 
 then !" 
 
 It was the old man who was on board the night be- 
 fore! 
 
 "E ella ?" said I, seizing his arm, before he had 
 concluded his bow, quite sure that he must under- 
 stand me with a word. 
 
 " Era pazza." He looked at me as he answered, 
 with a scrutiny, as if he half suspected my friend had 
 brought him a subject. 
 
 The singular character of her beauty was quite ex- 
 plained. Yet what a wreck ! 
 
 I followed the old count around his establishment 
 in a kind of dream, but I could not avoid being inter- 
 ested at every step. Here were no chains, no whips, 
 no harsh keepers, no cells of stone and straw. The 
 walls of the long corridors were painted in fresco, rep- 
 resenting sunny landscapes, and gay dancing figures. 
 Fountains and shrubs met us at every turn. The 
 people were dressed in their ordinary clothes, and all 
 employed in some light work or amusement. It was 
 like what it might have been in the days of the count's 
 
 ancestors — a gay chateau, filled with guests and de- 
 pendants, with no more apparent constraint than the 
 ties of hospitality and service. 
 
 We went first to the kitchen. Here were tsn 
 people, all, but the cook, stark mad ! It was one of 
 the peculiarities of the count's system, that his pa- 
 tients led in his house the lives to which they had pre- 
 viously been accustomed. A stout Sicilian peasant 
 girl was employed in filling a large brasier from the 
 basin of a fountain. While we were watching her 
 task, the fit began to come on her, and after a fierce 
 look or two around the room, she commenced dashing 
 the water about her with great violence. The cook 
 turned, not at all surprised, and patting her on the 
 back, with a loud laugh, cried, " Brava, Pepina! 
 brava /" ringing at the same moment a secret bell. 
 
 A young girl of sixteen with a sweet, smiling coun- 
 tenance, answered the summons, and immediately 
 comprehending the case, approached the enraged 
 creature, and putting her arms affectionately round her 
 neck, whispered something in her ear. The expres- 
 sion of her face changed immediately to a look of de- 
 light, and dropping the bucket, she followed the young 
 attendant out of the room with peals of laughter. 
 
 " VeniteV said the count, "you shall see how we 
 manage our furies." 
 
 We followed across a garden filled with the sweet- 
 est flowers to a small room opening on a lawn. From 
 the centre of the ceiling was suspended a hammock, 
 and Pepina was already in it, swung lightly from side 
 to side by a servant, while the attendant stood by, and, 
 as if in play, threw water upon her face at every ap- 
 proach. It had all the air of a frolic. The violent 
 laughter of the poor maniac grew less and less as the 
 soothing motion and the coolness of the water took 
 effect, and in a few minutes her strained eyes gently 
 closed, the hammock was swung more and more 
 gently, and she fell asleep. 
 
 " This," said the count, with a gratified smile, " is 
 my substitute for a forced shower-bath and chains; 
 and tbis,'i kissing his little attendant on the forehead, 
 " for the whip and the grim turnkey." I blessed him 
 in my heart. 
 
 " Come !" said he, as we left the sleeper to her re- 
 pose, "I must show you my grounds." 
 
 We followed him to an extensive garden, opening 
 from the back of the chateau, laid out originally in the 
 formal style of an Italian villa. The long walks had 
 been broken up, however, by beautiful arbors with 
 grottoes in their depths, in which wooden figures, of 
 the color and size of life, stood or sat in every attitude 
 of gayety or grotesqueness. It was difficult, in the 
 deep shadow of the vines and oleanders, not to believe 
 them real. We walked on through many a winding 
 shrubbery, perfumed with all the scented flowers of 
 the luxuriant climate, continually surprised with little 
 deceptions of perspective, or figures half concealed in 
 the leaves, till we emerged at the entrance of a charm- 
 ing summer theatre, with sodded seats, stage, orches- 
 tra, and scenery, complete. Orange-trees, roses, and 
 clematis, were laced together for a wall in the rear. 
 
 "Here," said the old man, bounding gayly upon the 
 stage, "here we act plays the summer long." 
 
 "What! not with your patients?" 
 
 " Si, signore ! Who else?" And he went on to 
 describe to us the interest they took in it, and the sin- 
 gular power with which the odd idea seized upon their 
 whimsied intellects. We had been accompanied from 
 the first, by a grave, respectable looking man, whom I 
 had taken for an assistant. While we were listening 
 to the description of the first attempt they had made 
 at a play, he started out from the group, and putting 
 himself in an attitude upon the stage, commenced 
 spouting a furious passage in Italian. 
 
 The count pointed to his forehead, and made a sign 
 to us to listen. The tragedian stopped at the end of 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 459 
 
 his sentence, and after a moment's delay, apparently 
 in expectation of a reply, darted suddenly off and dis- 
 appeared behind the scenes. 
 
 "Poveretto!" said the count, "it is my best actor!" 
 
 Near the theatre stood a small chapel, with a circu- 
 lar lawn before it, on which the grass had been lately 
 much trodden. It was surrounded partly by a green 
 bank, and here the count seated us, saying with a sig- 
 nificant look at me, that he would tell us a story. 
 
 I should like to give it you in his own words — still 
 more with his own manner; for never was a tale told 
 with more elegance of language, or a more natural 
 and pleasant simplicity. But a sheet of " wire-wove" 
 is not a Palermitan cavaliere, and the cold English 
 has not the warm eloquence of the Italian. He laid 
 aside his hat, ordered fruit and wine, and proceeded. 
 
 "Almost a year ago I was called upon by a gen- 
 tleman of a noble physiognomy and address, who in- 
 quired very particularly into my system. I explained 
 it to him at his request, and he did me the honor, as 
 you gentlemen have done, to go over my little establish- 
 ment. He seemed satisfied, and with some hesitation 
 informed me that he had a daughter in a very des- 
 perate state of mental alienation. Would I go and 
 see her? 
 
 " This is not, you know, gentlemen, a public insti- 
 tution. I am crazy," he said it very gravely, "quite 
 crazy — the first of my family of fools, on this particular 
 theme — and this asylum is my toy. Of course it is 
 only as the whim seizes me that I admit a patient; for 
 there are some diseases of the brain seated in causes 
 with which I wish not to meddle. 
 
 "However, I went. With the freedom of a physi- 
 cian I questioned the father, upon the road, of the 
 girl's history. He was a Greek, a prince of the Fanar, 
 who had left his degraded people in their dirty and 
 dangerous suburb at Constantinople, to forget oppres- 
 sion and meanness in a voluntary exile. It was just 
 before the breaking out of the last Greek revolution, 
 and so many of his kinsmen and friends had been sac- 
 rificed to the fury of the Turks, that he had renounced 
 all idea of ever returning to his country. 
 
 "'And your daughter?' 
 
 "'My dear Katinka, my only child, fell ill upon re- 
 ceiving distressing news from the Fanar, and her 
 health and reason never rallied after. It is now several 
 years, and she has lain in bed till her limbs are with- 
 ered, never having uttered a word, or made a sign 
 which would indicate even consciousness of the pres- 
 ence of those about her.' 
 
 " I could not get from him that there was any disap- 
 pointment of the heart at the bottom of it. It seemed 
 to be one of those cases of sudden stupefaction, to 
 which nervously sensitive minds are liable after a vio- 
 ent burst of grief; and I began, before I had seen her, 
 lo indulge in bright hopes of starting once more the 
 sealed fountains of thought and feeling. 
 
 " We entered Palermo, and passing out at the other 
 gate, stopped at a vine-laced casino on the lip of the 
 bay, scarcely a mile from the city wall. It was a 
 pretty, fanciful place, and, on a bed in its inner cham- 
 ber, lay the most poetical-looking creature I had ever 
 seen out of my dreams. Her head was pillowed in an 
 abundance of dark hair, which fell away from her fore- 
 head in masses of glossy curls, relieving with a striking 
 effect, the wan and transparent paleness of a face which 
 the divinest chisel could scarce have copied in alabas- 
 ter. Dio mio ! — how transcendant was the beauty of 
 that poor girl !" 
 
 The count stopped and fed his memory a moment 
 with closed eyes upon the image. 
 
 " At the first glance I inwardly put up a prayer to 
 the Virgin, and determined, with her sweet help, to 
 restore reason to the fairest of its earthly temples. I 
 took up her shadow of a hand, and spread out the thin 
 fingers in my palm, ard as she turned her large wan- 
 
 dering eye toward me, I felt that the blessed Mary 
 had heard my prayer, ' You shall see her well again,' 
 said I confidently. 
 
 " Quite overcome, the prince Ghika fell on the bed 
 and embraced his daughter's knees in an agony of 
 tears. 
 
 "You shall not have the seccatura, gentlemen, of 
 listening to the recital of all my tedious experiments 
 for the first month or two. I brought her to my house 
 upon a litter, placed her in a room filled with every 
 luxury of the east, and suffered no one to approach 
 her except two Greek attendants, to whose services 
 she was accustomed. I succeeded in partially re- 
 storing animation to her benumbed limbs by friction, 
 and made her sensible of music, and of the perfumes 
 of the east, which I burned in a pastille-lamp in 
 her chamber. Here, however, my skill was baffled. 
 I could neither amuse nor vex. Her mind was beyond 
 me. After trying every possible experiment, as it 
 seemed to me, my invention was exhausted, and I 
 despaired. 
 
 "She occupied, however, much of my mind. 
 Walking up and down yonder orange-alley one sweet 
 morning, about two months ago, I started off suddenly 
 to my chamber with a new thought. You would 
 have thought me the maddest of my household, to 
 have seen me, gentlemen. I turned out by the shoul- 
 ders the regazza, who was making my bed, washed 
 and scented myself, as if for a ball, covered my white 
 hairs with a handsome brown wig, a relic of my cox- 
 combical days, rouged faintly, and, with white gloves, 
 and a most youthful appearance altogether, sought 
 the chamber of my patient. 
 
 "She was lying with her head in the hollow of her 
 thin arm, and", as I entered, her dark eyes rested full 
 upon me. I approached, kissed her hand with a re- 
 spectful gallantry, and in the tenderest tones of which 
 my damaged voice was susceptible, breathed into her 
 ear a succession of delicately-turned compliments to 
 her beauty. 
 
 "She lay as immovable as marble, but I had not 
 calculated upon the ruling passion of the sex in vain. 
 A thin flush on her cheek, and a flutter in her temple, 
 only perceptible to my practised eye, told me that the 
 words had found their way to her long-lost conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 "I waited a few moments, and then took up a ring- 
 let that fell negligently over her hand, and asked per- 
 mission to sever it from the glossy mass in which the 
 arm under her head was literally buried. 
 
 " She clutched her fingers suddenly upon it, and 
 glancing at me with the fury of a roused tigress, ex- 
 claimed in a husky whisper, • Lasciate me, signore ." 
 
 " I obeyed her, and, as I left the room, 1 thanked 
 the Virgin in my heart. It was the first word she had 
 spoken for years. 
 
 " The next day, having patched myself up more 
 successfully in my leisure, in a disguise so absolute 
 that not one even of my pets knew me as I passed 
 through the corridor, I bowed myself up once more to 
 her bedside. 
 
 " She lay with her hands clasped over her eyes, and 
 took no notice of my first salutation. I commenced 
 with a little raillery, and under cover of finding fault 
 with her attitude, contrived to pay an adroit compli- 
 ment to the glorious orbs she was hiding from admira- 
 tion. She lay a moment or two without motion, but 
 the muscles of her slight mouth stirred just percepti- 
 bly, and presently she drew her fingers quickly apart, 
 and looking at me with a most confiding expression 
 in her pale features, a full sweet smile broke like sud- 
 den sunshine through her lips. I could have wept for 
 
 "I soon acquired all the influence over her I could 
 wish. She made an effort at my request to leave her 
 bed, and in a week or two walked with me in the gar- 
 
460 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 den. Her mind, however, seemed to have capacity 
 but for one thought, and she soon began to grow un- 
 happy, and would weep for hours. I endeavored to 
 draw from her the cause, but she only buried her face 
 in my bosom, and wept more violently, till one day, 
 sobbing out her broken words almost inarticulately, I 
 gathered her meaning. She was grieved that I did not 
 marry her ! 
 
 " Poor girl !" soliloquized the count, after a brief 
 pause, "she was only true to her woman's nature. In- 
 sanity had but removed the veil of custom and restraint. 
 She would have broken her heart before she had be- 
 trayed such a secret, with her reason. 
 
 " I was afraid at last she would go melancholy mad, 
 this one thought preyed so perpetually on her brain — 
 and I resolved to delude her into the cheerfulness ne- 
 cessary to her health by a mock ceremony. 
 
 " The delight with which she received my promise 
 almost alarmed me. I made several delays, with the 
 hope that in the convulsion of her feelings a ray of 
 reason would break through the darkness; but she 
 took every hour to heart, and I found it was inevi- 
 table. 
 
 " You are sitting, gentlemen, in the very scene of our 
 mad bridal. My poor grass has not yet recovered, you 
 see, from the tread of the dancers. Imagine the spec- 
 tacle. The chapel was splendidly decorated, and at 
 the bottom of the lawn stood three long tables, cov- 
 ered with fruits and flowers, and sprinkled here and 
 there with bottles of colored water (to imitate wine), 
 sherbels, cakes, and other such innocent things as I 
 could allow my crazy ones. They were all invited." 
 
 " Good God !" said the surgeon, " your lunatics ?" 
 
 "All — all! And never was such a sensation pro- 
 duced in a household since the world was created. 
 Nothing else was talked of for a week. My worst pa- 
 tients seemed to suspend for the time their fits of vio- 
 lence. I sent to (own for quantities of tricksy stuffs, 
 and allowed the women to deck themselves entirely 
 after their own taste. You can conceive nothing like 
 the business they made of it ! Such apparitions ! — 
 Santa Maria ! shall I ever forget that Babel ? 
 
 " The morning came. My bride's attendants had 
 dressed her from her Grecian wardrobe ; and with her 
 long braid parted over her forehead, and hanging back 
 from her shoulders to her very heels, her close-fitted 
 jacket, of gorgeous velvet and gold, her costly brace- 
 lets, and the small spangled slippers upon her unstock- 
 inged feet, she was positively an angelic vision of beau- 
 ty. Her countenance was thoughtful, but her step was 
 unusually elastic, and a small red spot, like a rose-leaf 
 under the skin, blushed through the alabaster paleness 
 of her cheek. 
 
 " My maniacs received her with shouts of admira- 
 tion. The women were kept from her at first with 
 great difficulty, and it was only by drawing their at- 
 tention to their own gaudier apparel, that their anx- 
 iety to touch her was distracted. The men looked at 
 her, as she passed along like a queen of love and 
 beauty, and their wild, gleaming eyes, and quickened 
 breaths, showed the effect of such loveliness upon the 
 unconcealed feelings. I had multiplied my attend- 
 ants, scarce knowing how the excitement of the scene 
 might affect them ; but the interest of the occasion, 
 and the imposing decencies of dress and show, seemed 
 to overcome them effectually. The most sane guests 
 at a bridal could scarce have behaved with more pro- 
 priety. 
 
 " The ceremony was performed by an elderly friend 
 of mine, the physician to my establishment. Old as I 
 am, gentlemen, I could have wished that ceremony to 
 have been in earnest. As she lifted up her large liquid 
 eyes to heaven, and swore to be true to me till death, I 
 forgot my manhood, and wept. If I had been younger 
 — ma che porcheria ! 
 
 " After the marriage the women were invited to sa- 
 
 lute the bride, and then all eyes in my natural party 
 turned at once to the feast. I gave the word. Fruits, 
 cakes, and sherbets, disappeared with the rapidity of 
 magic, and then the music struck up from the shrub- 
 bery, and they danced — as you see by the grass. 
 
 " I committed the bride to her attendants at sunset, 
 but I could with difficulty tear myself away. On the 
 following day I called at her door, but she refused to 
 see me. The next day and the next I could gain no 
 admittance without exerting my authority. On the 
 fourth morning I was permitted to enter. She had re- 
 sumed her usual dress, and was sad, calm, and gentle. 
 She said little, but seemed lost in thought to which 
 she was unwilling or unable to give utterance. 
 
 " She has never spoken of it since. Her mind, I 
 think, has nearly recovered its tone, but her memory 
 seems confused. I scarce think she remembers her 
 illness, and its singular events, as more than a troubled 
 dream. On all the common affairs of life she seems 
 quite sane, and I drive out with her daily, and have 
 taken her once or twice to the opera. Last night we 
 were strolling on the Marina when your frigate came 
 into the bay, and she proposed to join the crowd and 
 go off to hear the music. We went on board, as you 
 know ; and now, if you choose to pay your respects 
 to the lady who refused to waltz with you, take an- 
 other sip of your sherbet and wine, and come with 
 me." 
 
 To say more would be trespassing perhaps on the 
 patience of my readers, but certainly on my own feel- 
 ings. I have described this singular case of madness 
 and its cure, because I think it contains in itself the 
 seeds of much philosophy on the subject. It is only 
 within a very few years that these poor sufferers have 
 been treated otherwise than as the possessors of in- 
 carnate devils, whom it was necessary to scourge out 
 with unsparing cruelty. If this literal statement of a 
 cure in the private madhouse of the eccentric conte 
 of Palermo, induce the friends of a single un- 
 
 fortunate maniac to adopt a kind and rational system 
 for his restoration, the writer will have been repaid for 
 bringing circumstances before the public which have 
 since had much to do with his own feelings. 
 
 MINUTE PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 " Nature there 
 Was with thee ; she who loved us both, she still 
 Was with thee ; and even so didst thou become 
 A silent poet ; from the solitude 
 Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart 
 Still couchant, an inevitable ear, 
 And an eye practised like a blind man's touch." 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 A summer or two since, I was wasting a college va- 
 cation among the beautiful creeks and falls in the 
 neighborhood of New York. In the course of my 
 wanderings, up-stream and down-stream, sometimes 
 on foot, sometimes on horseback, and never without 
 a book for an excuse to loiter on the mossy banks and 
 beside the edge of running water, I met frequently a 
 young man of a peculiarly still and collected eye, and 
 a forehead more like a broad slab of marble than a hu- 
 man brow. His mouth was small and thinly cut ; his 
 chin had no superfluous flesh upon it; and his whole 
 appearance was that of a man whose intellectual na- 
 ture prevailed over the animal. He was evidently a 
 scholar. We had met so frequently at last, that, on 
 passing each other one delicious morning, we bowed 
 and smiled simultaneously, and, without further intro- 
 duction, entered into conversation. 
 
 It was a temperate day in August, with a clear but 
 not oppressive sun, and we wandered down a long 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 461 
 
 creek together, mineralizing here, botanizing there, 
 and examining the strata of the ravines, with that sort 
 >f instinctive certainty of each other's attainments 
 which scholars always feel, and thrusting in many a 
 .ittle wayside parenthesis, explanatory of each other's 
 \istory and circumstances. I found that he was one 
 of those pure and unambitious men, who, by close 
 application and moderate living while in college, be- 
 come in love with their books ; and, caring little for 
 anything more than the subsistence, which philosophy 
 .ells them is enough to have of this world, settle down 
 for life into a wicker-bottomed chair, more content- 
 edly than if it were the cushion of a throne. 
 
 We were together three or four days, and when I 
 left him, he gave me his address, and promised to write 
 to me. I shall give below an extract from one of his 
 letters. I had asked him for a history of his daily 
 habits, and any incidents which he might choose to 
 throw in — hinting to him that I was a dabbler in lit- 
 erature, and would be obliged to him if he would do it 
 minutely, and in a form of which I might avail myself 
 in the way of publication. 
 
 After some particulars, unimportant to the reader, 
 he proceeds : — 
 
 " I keep a room at a country tavern. It is a quiet, 
 out-of-the-way place, with a whole generation of elms 
 about it ; and the greenest grass up to the very door, 
 and the pleasantest view in the whole country round 
 from my chamber-window. Though it is a public 
 house, and the word 4 hotel' swings in golden capi- 
 tals under a landscape of two hills and a river, painted 
 for a sign by some wandering Tinto, it is so orderly a 
 town, that not a lounger is ever seen about the door ; 
 and the noisiest traveller is changed to a quiet man, as 
 if it were by the very hush of the atmosphere. 
 
 44 Here, in my pleasant room, upon the second floor, 
 with my round table covered with choice books, my 
 shutters closed just so much as to admit light enough 
 for a painter, and my walls hung with the pictures 
 which adorned my college chambers, and are there- 
 fore linked with a thousand delightful associations — I 
 can study my twelve hours a day, in a state of mind 
 sufficiently even and philosophical. I do not want for 
 excitement. The animal spirits, thanks to the Crea- 
 tor, are enough at all times, with employment and 
 temperate living, to raise us above the common shad- 
 ows of life ; and after a day of studious confinement, 
 when my mind is unbound, and I go out and give it 
 up to reckless association, and lay myself open unre- 
 servedly to the influences of nature — at such a time, 
 there comes mysteriously upon me a degree of pure 
 joy, unmingled and unaccountable, which is worth 
 years of artificial excitement. The common air seems 
 to have grown rarer; my step is strangely elastic ; my 
 sense of motion full of unwonted dignity ; my thoughts 
 elevated ; my perceptions of beauty acuter and more 
 pleasurable ; and my better nature predominant and 
 sublime. There is nothing in the future which looks 
 difficult, nothing in my ambition unattainable, nothing 
 in the past which can not be reconciled with good : I 
 am a purer and a better man; and though I am ele- 
 vated in my own thoughts, it will not lead to vanity, 
 for my ideas of God, and of my fellow-men, have been 
 enlarged also. This excitement ceases soon ; but it 
 ceases like the bubbling of a fountain, which leaves 
 the waters purer for the influence which has passed 
 through them — not like the mirth of the world, which 
 ebbs like an unnatural tide, and leaves loathsomeness 
 and disgust. 
 
 " Let no one say that such a mode of life is adapted 
 to peculiar constitutions, and can be relished by those 
 only. Give me the veriest worldling — the most de- 
 voted, and the happiest of fashionable ephemera, and 
 it he has material for a thought, and can take pride 
 in the improvement of his nature, I will so order his 
 daily round, that, with temperance and exercise, he 
 
 shall be happier in one hour spent within himself, 
 than in ten wasted on folly. 
 
 " Few know the treasures in their own bosoms — 
 very few the elasticity and capacity of a well-regulated 
 mind for enjoyment. The whole world of philoso- 
 phers, and historians, and poets, seem, to the secluded 
 student, but to have labored for his pleasure ; and as 
 he comes to one new truth and beautiful thought after 
 another, there answers a chord of joy, richer than 
 music, in his heart — which spoils him for the coarser 
 pleasures of the world. I have seen my college chum 
 — a man, who, from a life of mingled business and 
 pleasure, became suddenly a student — lean back in his 
 chair, at the triumph of an argument, or the discovery 
 of a philosophical truth, and give himself up for a few 
 moments to the enjoyment of sensations, which, he 
 assured me, surpassed exceedingly the most vivid 
 pleasures of his life. The mind is like the appetite — 
 when healthy and well-toned, receiving pleasure from 
 the commonest food ; but becoming a disease, when 
 pampered and neglected. Give it time to turn in upon 
 itself, satisfy its restless thirst for knowledge, and it 
 will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to every- 
 thing which invigorates the body, while it is advan- 
 cing by every step the capacities of the soul. Oh ! if 
 the runners after pleasure would stoop down by the 
 wayside, they might drink waters better even than 
 those which they see only in their dreams. They will 
 not be told that they have in their possession the gold- 
 en key which they covet ; they will not know that the 
 music they look to enchant them, is sleeping in their 
 own untouched instruments ; that the lamp which 
 they vainly ask from the enchanter, is burning in 
 their own bosoms ! 
 
 " When I first came here, my host's eldest daughter 
 was about twelve years of age. She was, without be- 
 ing beautiful, an engaging child, rather disposed to be 
 contemplative, and, like all children, at that age, very 
 inquisitive and curious. She was shy at first, but soon 
 became acquainted with me ; and would come into 
 my room in her idle hours, and look at my pictures 
 and read. She never disturbed me, because her nat- 
 ural politeness forbade it ; and I pursued my thoughts 
 or my studies just as if she were not there, till, by-and- 
 by, I grew fond of her quiet company, and was hap- 
 pier when she was moving stealthily around, and look- 
 ing into a book here and there in her quiet way. 
 
 "She had been my companion thus for some time, 
 when it occurred to me that I might be of use to her 
 in leading her to cultivate a love for study. I seized 
 the idea enthusiastically. Now, thought I, I will see 
 the process of a human mind. I have studied its phi- 
 losophy from books, and now I will take a single 
 original, and compare them, step by step. I have 
 seen the bud, and the flower full blown, and I am told 
 that the change was gradual, and effected thus — leaf 
 after leaf. Now I will watch the expansion, and while 
 I water it and let in the sunshine to its bosom, detect 
 the secret springs which move to such beautiful re- 
 sults. The idea delighted me. 
 
 "I was aware that there was great drudgery in the 
 first steps, and I determined to avoid it, and connect 
 the idea of my own instruction with all that was de- 
 lightful and interesting to her mind. For this pur- 
 pose I persuaded her father to send her to a better 
 school than she had been accustomed to attend, and, 
 by a little conversation, stimulated her to enter upon 
 her studies with alacrity. 
 
 » She was now grown to a girl, and had begun to 
 assume the naive, womanly airs which girls do at her 
 age. Her figure had rounded into a flowing sym- 
 metry, and her face, whether from associating princi- 
 pally with an older person, or for what other reason I 
 know not, had assumed a thoughtful cast, and she 
 was really a girl of most interesting and striking per- 
 sonal appearance. 
 
462 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 " I did not expect much from the first year of my 
 experiment. I calculated justly on its being irksome 
 and common-place. Still I was amused and interested. 
 I could hear her light step on the stair, always at the 
 same early hour of the evening, and it was a pleasure 
 to me to say ' Come in,' to her timid rap, and set her 
 a chair by my own, that I might look over her book, 
 or talk in a low tone to her. I then asked her about 
 her lessons, and found out what had most attracted her 
 notice, and I could always find some interesting fact 
 connected with it, or strike off into some pleasant as- 
 sociation, till she acquired a habit of selection in her 
 reading, and looked at me earnestly to know what I 
 would say upon it. You would have smiled to see 
 her leaning forward, with her soft blue eye fixed on 
 me, and her lips half parted with attention, waiting for 
 my ideas upon some bare fact in geography or his- 
 tory ; and it would have convinced you that the nat- 
 ural, unstimulated mind, takes pleasure in the simplest 
 addition to its knowledge. 
 
 " All this time I kept out of her way everything 
 that would have a tendency to destroy a taste for mere 
 knowledge, and had the pleasure to see that she 
 passed with keen relish from her text books to my ob- 
 servations, which were as dry as they, though recom- 
 mended by kindness of tone and an interested manner. 
 She acquired gradually, by this process, a habit of 
 reasoning upon everything which admitted it, which 
 was afterward of great use in fixing and retaining the 
 leading features of her attainments. 
 
 " I proceeded in this way till she was fifteen. Her 
 mind had now become inured to regular habits of in- 
 quiry, and she began to ask difficult questions and 
 wonder at common things. Her thoughts assumed a 
 graver complexion, and she asked for books upon sub- 
 jects of which she felt the want of information. She 
 was ready to receive and appreciate truth and instruc- 
 tion, and here was to begin my pleasure. 
 
 " She came up one evening with an air of embar- 
 rassment approaching to distress. She took her usual 
 seat, and told me that she had been thinking all day 
 that it was useless to study any more. There were so 
 many mysterious things — so much, even that she could 
 see, which she could not account for, and, with all her 
 efforts, she got on so slowly, that she was discouraged. 
 It was better, she said, to be happy in ignorance, than 
 to be constantly tormented with the sight of knowledge 
 to which she could not attain, and which she only knew 
 enough to value. Poor child ! she did not know that 
 she was making the same complaint with Newton, and 
 Locke, and Bacon, and that the wisest of men were 
 only ' gatherers of pebbles on the shore of an illimita- 
 ble sea !' I began to talk to her of the mind. I spoke 
 of its grandeur, and its capacities, and its destiny. I 
 told her instances of high attainment and wonderful 
 discovery— sketched the sublime philosophies of the 
 soul— the possibility that this life was but a link in a 
 chain of existences, and the glorious power, if it were 
 true, of entering upon another world, with a loftier ca- 
 pacity than your fellow-beings for the comprehension 
 of its mysteries. I then touched upon the duty of self- 
 cultivation — the pride of a high consciousness of im- 
 proved time, and the delicious feelings of self-respect 
 and true appreciation. 
 
 " She listened to me in silence, and wept. It was 
 one of those periods which occur to all delicate minds, 
 of distrust and fear; and when it passed by, and her 
 ambition stirred again, she gave vent to her feelings 
 with a woman's beautiful privilege. I had no more 
 trouble to urge her on. She began the next day with 
 the philosophy of the mind, and I was never happier 
 than while following her from step to step in this de- 
 lightful study. 
 
 " I have always thought that the most triumphant 
 intellectual feeling we ever experience, is felt upon the 
 lirst opening of philosophy. It is like the interpreta- 
 
 tion of a dream of a lifetime. Every topic seems to 
 you like a phantom of your own mind, from which a 
 mist has suddenly melted. Every feature has a kind 
 of half-familiarity, and you remember musing upon it 
 for hours, till you gave it up with an impatient dissat- 
 isfaction. Without a definite shape, this or that very 
 idea has floated in your mind continually. It was a phe- 
 nomenon without a name — a something which you 
 could not describe to your friend, and which, by-and- 
 by, you came to believe was peculiar to yourself, and 
 would never be brought out or unravelled. You read 
 on, and the blood rushes to your face in a tumultu- 
 ous consciousness — you have had feelings in pecu- 
 liar situations which you could not define, and here 
 are their very features — and you know, now, that it was 
 jealousy, or ambition, or love. There have been mo- 
 ments when your faculties seemed blinded or reversed. 
 You could not express yourself at all when you felt 
 you should be eloquent. You could not fix your 
 mind upon the subject, of which, before, you had been 
 passionately fond. You felt an aversion for your very 
 partialities, or a strange warming in your heart toward 
 people or pursuits that you had disliked ; and when 
 the beauty of the natural world has burst upon you, 
 as it sometimes will, with an exceeding glory, you 
 have turned away from it with a deadly sickness of 
 heart, and a wish that you might die. 
 
 " These are mysteries which are not all soluble even 
 by philosophy. But you can see enough of the ma- 
 chinery of thought to know its tendencies, and like 
 the listener to mysterious music, it is enough to have 
 seen the instrument, without knowing the cunning 
 craft of the player. 
 
 " I remembered my school-day feelings, and lived 
 them over again with my beautiful pupil. I entered 
 with as much enthusiasm as she, into the strength and 
 sublimity which I had wondered at before ; and I be- 
 lieve that, even as she sat reading by herself, my blood 
 thrilled, and my pulses quickened, as vividly as her 
 own, when I saw, by the deepening color of her cheek, 
 or the marked passages of my book, that she had found 
 a noble thought or a daring hypothesis. 
 
 " She proceeded with her course of philosophy rap- 
 idly and eagerly. Her mind was well prepared for its 
 relish. She said she felt as if a new sense had been 
 given her — an inner eye which she could turn in upon 
 herself, and by which she could, as it were, stand aside 
 while the process of thought went on. She began to 
 respect and to rely upon her own mind, and the eleva- 
 tion of countenance and manner, which so certainly 
 and so beautifully accompanies inward refinement, 
 stole over her daily. I began to feel respectful in her 
 presence, and when, with the peculiar elegance of a 
 woman's mind, she discovered a delicate shade of ' 
 meaning which I had not seen, or traced an associa- 
 tion which could spring only from an unsullied heart, 
 I experienced a sensation like the consciousness of an 
 unseen presence — elevating, without alarming me. 
 
 " It was probably well that with all this change in 
 her mind and manner, her person still retained its 
 childish grace and flexibility. She had not grown 
 tall, and she wore her hair yet as she used to do — fall- 
 ing with a luxuriant fulness upon her shoulders. 
 Hence she was still a child, when, had she been taller 
 or more womanly, the demands upon her attention, 
 and the attractiveness of mature society, might have 
 divided that engrossing interest which is necessary to 
 successful study. 
 
 " I have often wished I was a painter; but never so 
 much as when looking on this beautiful being as she 
 sat absorbed in her studies, or turned to gaze up a 
 moment to my face, with that delicious expression of 
 inquiry and affection. Every one knows the elevation 
 given to the countenance of a man by contemplative 
 habits. Perhaps the natural delicacy of feminine fea- 
 tures has combined with its rarity, to make this ex- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 463 
 
 pression less observable in woman ; but, to one famil- 
 iar with the study of the human face, there is, in the 
 look of a truly intellectual woman, a keen subtlety of 
 refinement, a separation from everything gross and 
 material, which comes up to our highest dream of the 
 angelic. For myself, I care not to analyze it. I leave 
 it to philosophy to find out its secret. It is enough 
 for me that I can see and feel it in every pulse of my 
 being. It is not a peculiar susceptibility. Every man 
 who approaches such a woman feels it. He may not 
 define it ; he may be totally unconscious what it is 
 that awes him ; but he feels as if a mysterious and in- 
 visible veil were about her, and every dark thought is 
 quenched suddenly in his heart, as if he had come 
 into the atmosphere of a spirit. I would have every 
 woman know this. I would tell every mother who 
 prays nightly for the peculiar watchfulness of good 
 spirits over the purity of her child, that she may weave 
 round her a defence stronger than steel — that she may 
 place in her heart a living amulet whose virtue is like 
 a circle of fire to pollution. I am not ' stringing pearls.' 
 I have seen, and I know, that an empty mind is not a 
 strong citadel; and in the melancholy chronicle of 
 female ruin, the instances are rare of victims distin- 
 guished for mental cultivation. I would my pen were 
 the 'point of a diamond,' and I were writing on living 
 hearts ! for when I think how the daughters of a house 
 are its grace and honor — and when I think how the 
 father and mother that loved her, and the brother that 
 made her his pride, and the sister in whose bosom she 
 slept, are all crushed, utterly, by a daughter's degra- 
 dation, I feel, that if every word were a burning coal, 
 my language could not be extravagant ! 
 
 "My pupil, had, as yet, read no poetry. I was un- 
 certain how to enter upon it. Her taste for the beau- 
 tiful in prose had become so decided, that I feared for 
 the first impression of my poetical world. I wished it 
 to burst upon her brilliantly — like the entrance to an 
 inner and more magnificent temple of knowledge. I 
 hoped to dazzle her with a high and unimagined 
 beauty, which should exceed far the massive but plain 
 splendors of philosophy. We had often conversed on 
 the probability of a previous existence, and, one eve- 
 ning, I opened Wordsworth, and read his sublime 
 'Ode upon Intimations of Immortality.' She did not 
 interrupt me, but 1 looked up at the conclusion, and 
 she was in tears. I made no remark, but took Byron, 
 and read some of the finest passages in Childe Harold, 
 and Manfred, and Cain— and, from that time, poetry 
 has been her world ! 
 
 " It would not have been so earlier. It needs the 
 simple and strong nutriment of truth to fit us to relish 
 and feel poetry. The mind must have strength and 
 cultivated taste, and then it is like a language from 
 Heaven. We are astonished at its power and mag- 
 nificence. We have been familiar with knowledge as 
 with a person of plain garment and a homely presence 
 — and he comes to us in poetry, with the state of a 
 king, glorious in purple and gold. We have known 
 him as an unassuming friend who talked with us by 
 the wayside, and kept us company on our familiar 
 paths — and we see him coming with a stately step, and 
 a glittering diadem on his brow; and we wonder that 
 we did not see that his plain garment honored him 
 not, and his bearing were fitter for a king! 
 
 "Poetry entered to the very soul of Caroline Grey. 
 It was touching an unreached string, and she felt as 
 if the whole compass of her heart were given out. I 
 used to read to her for hours, and it was beautiful to 
 see her eye kindle, and her cheek burn with excite- 
 ment. The sublimed mysticism and spirituality of 
 Wordsworth were her delight, and she feasted upon 
 the deep philosophy and half-hidden tenderness of 
 Coleridge. 
 
 " I had observed, with some satisfaction, that, in the 
 rapid development of her mental powers, she had not 
 
 found time to study nature. She knew little of the 
 character of the material creation, and I now com- 
 menced walking constantly abroad with her at sunset, 
 and at all the delicious seasons of moonlight and star- 
 light and dawn. It came in well with her poetry. I 
 can not describe the effect. She became, like all who 
 are, for the first time, made sensible of the glories 
 around them, a worshipper of the external world. 
 
 " There is a time when nature first loses its famil- 
 iarity, and seems suddenly to have become beautiful. 
 This is true even of those who have been taught early 
 habits of observation. The mind of a child is too 
 feeble to comprehend, and does not soon learn, the 
 scale of sublimity and beauty. He would not be sur- 
 prised if the sun were brighter, or if the stars were 
 sown thicker in the sky. He sees that the flower is 
 beautiful, and he feels admiration at the rainbow ; but 
 he would not wonder if the dyes of the flower were 
 deeper, or if the sky were laced to the four corners 
 with the colors of a prism. He grows up with these 
 splendid phenomena at work about him, till they have 
 become common, and, in their most wonderful forms, 
 cease to attract his attention. Then his senses are 
 suddenly, as by an invisible influence, unsealed, and, 
 like the proselyte of the Egyptian pyramids, he finds 
 himself in a magnificent temple, and hears exquisite 
 music, and is dazzled by surpassing glory. He never 
 recovers his indifference. The perpetual changes of 
 nature keep alive his enthusiasm, and if his taste is not 
 dulled by subsequent debasement, the pleasure he re- 
 ceives from it flows on like a stream — wearing deeper 
 and calmer. 
 
 " Caroline became now my constant companion. 
 The changes of the natural world have always been 
 my chief source of happiness, and I was curious to 
 know whether my different sensations, under different 
 circumstances, were peculiar to myself. I left her, 
 therefore, to lead the conversation, without any ex- 
 pression of my feelings, and, to my surprise and de- 
 light, she invariably struck their tone, and pursued the 
 same vein of reflection. It convinced me of what I 
 had long thought might be true— that there was, in 
 the varieties of natural beauty, a hidden meaning, and 
 a delightful purpose of good ; and, if I am not de- 
 ceived, it is a new and beautiful evidence of the pro- 
 portion and extent of God's benevolent wisdom. 
 Thus, you may remember the peculiar effect of the 
 early dawn — the deep, unruffled serenity, and the per- 
 fect collectedness of your senses. You may remem- 
 ber the remarkable purity that pervades the stealing 
 in of color, and the vanishing of the cold shadows of 
 gray — the heavenly quiet that seems infused, like a 
 visible spirit, into the pearly depths of the east, as the 
 light violet tints become deeper in the upper sky, and 
 the morning mist rises up like a veil of silvery film, 
 and softens away its intensity ; and then you will re- 
 member how the very beatings of your heart grew 
 quiet, and you felt an irresistible impulse to pray! 
 There was no irregular delight, no indefinite sensa- 
 tion, no ecstacy. It was deep, unbroken repose, and 
 your pulses were free from the fever of life, and your 
 reason was lying awake in its chamber. 
 
 "There is a hush also at noon; but it is not like 
 the morning. You have been mingling in the business 
 of the world, and you turn aside, weary and distracted, 
 for rest. There is a far depth, in the intense blue of 
 the sky which takes in the spirit, and you are content 
 to lie down and sleep in the cool shadow, and forgec 
 even your existence. How different from the cool 
 wakefulness of the morning, and yet how fitted for the 
 necessity of the hour! 
 
 "The day wears on and comes to the sunsetting. 
 The strong light passes off from the hills, and the 
 leaves are mingled in golden masses, and the tips of the 
 long grass, and the blades of maize, and the luxuriant 
 graiii, are all sleeping in a rich glow, as if the daylight 
 
464 
 
 INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 had melted into gold and descended upon every living 
 thing like dew. The sun goes down, and there is a 
 tissue of indescribable- glory floating upon the clouds, 
 and the almost imperceptible blending of the sunset 
 color with the blue sky, is far up toward the zenith. 
 Presently the pomp of the early sunset passes away ; 
 and the clouds are all clad in purple, with edges of 
 metallic lustre; and very far in the west, as if they 
 were sailing away into another world, are seen spots 
 of intense brightness, and the tall trees on the hilly 
 edge of the horizon seem piercing the sky, on fire with 
 its consuming heat. There is a tumultuous joy in 
 the contemplation of this hour which is peculiar to 
 itself. You feel as if you should have had wings; for 
 there is a strange stirring in your heart to follow on — 
 and your imagination bursts away into that beautiful 
 world, and revels among the unsubstantial clouds till 
 they become cold. It is a triumphant and extravagant 
 hour. Its joyousness is an intoxication, and its pleas- 
 ure dies with the day. 
 
 H The night, starry and beautiful, comes on. The 
 sky has a blue, intense almost to blackness, and the 
 stars are set in it like gems. They are of different 
 glory, and there are some that burn, and some that 
 have a twinkling lustre, and some are just visible and 
 faint. You know their nature, and their motion ; and 
 there is something awful in so many worlds moving on 
 through the firmament so silently and in order. You 
 feel an indescribable awe stealing upon you, and your 
 imagination trembles as it goes up among them. You 
 gaze on, and on, and the superstitions of olden time, 
 and the wild visions of astrology, steal over your mem- 
 ory, till, by-and-by, you hear the music which they 
 ' give out as they go,' and drink in the mysteries of 
 their hidden meaning, and believe that your destiny is 
 woven by their burning spheres. There comes on 
 you a delirious joy, and a kind of terrible fellowship 
 with their sublime nature, and you feel as if you could 
 go up to a starry place and course the heavens in com- 
 pany. There is a spirituality in this hour, a separa- 
 tion from material things, which is of a fine order of 
 happiness. The purity of the morning, and the noon- 
 tide quietness, and the rapture of the glorious sunset, 
 are all human and comprehensible feelings ; but this 
 has the mystery and the lofty energy of a higher world, 
 and you return to your human nature with a refreshed 
 spirit and an elevated purpose : see now the wisdom 
 of God ! — the collected intellect for the morning pray- 
 er and our daily duty — the delicious repose for our 
 noontide weariness — and the rapt fervor to purify us 
 by night from our worldliness, and keep wakeful the 
 eye of immortality ! They are all suited to our need ; 
 and it is pleasant to think, when we go out at this or 
 that season, that its peculiar beauty is fitted to our pe- 
 culiar wants, and that it is not a chance harmony of our 
 hearts with nature. 
 
 "The world had become to Caroline a new place. 
 No change in the season was indifferent to her— noth- 
 ing was common or familiar. She found beauty in 
 things you would pass by, and a lesson for her mind or 
 her heart in the minutest workmanship of nature. Her 
 character assumed a cheerful dignity, and an elevation 
 above ordinary amusements or annoyances. She was 
 equable and calm, because her feelings were never 
 reached by ordinary irritations ; and, if there were no 
 other benefit in cultivation, this were almost argument 
 enough to induce it. 
 
 " It is now five years since I commenced my tutor- 
 ship. I have given you the history of two of them. In 
 the remaining three there has been much that has in- 
 terested my mind — probably little that would interest 
 yours. We have read together, and, as far as possible, 
 9tudied together. She has walked with me, and shared 
 all my leisure, and known every thought. She is now a 
 woman of eighteen. Her childish graces are matured, 
 and her blue eye would send a thrill through you. You 
 
 might object to her want of fashionable tournure, and 
 find fault with her unfashionable impulses. I do not. 
 She is a high-minded, noble, impassioned being, with 
 an enthusiasm that is not without reason, and a com- 
 mon sense that is not a regard to self-interest. Her 
 motion was not learned at schools, but it is unembar- 
 rassed and free ; and her tone has not been educated 
 to a refined whisper, but it expresses the meaning of 
 her heart, as if its very pulse had become articulate. 
 The many might not admire her — I know she would 
 be idolized by the few. 
 
 " Our intercourse is as intimate still ; and it could 
 not change without being less so — for we are constant- 
 ly together. There is — to be sure — lately — a slight 
 degree of embarrassment — and — somehow — we read 
 more poetry than we used to do — but it is nothing at 
 all — nothing." 
 
 My friend was married to his pupil 'a few months 
 after writing the foregoing. He has written to me 
 since, and I will show you the letter if you will call, 
 any time. It will not do to print it, because there are 
 some domestic details not proper for the general eye ; 
 but, to me, who am a bachelor, bent upon matrimony, 
 it is interesting to the last degree. He lives the same 
 quiet, retired life, that he did before he was married. 
 His room is arranged with the same taste, and with 
 reference to the same habits as before. The light 
 comes in as timidly through the half-closed window, 
 and his pictures look as shadowy and dim, and the 
 rustle of the turned leaf adds as mysteriously to the 
 silence. He is the fondest of husbands, but his affec- 
 tion does not encroach on the habits of his mind. Now 
 and then he looks up from his book, and, resting his 
 head upon his hand, lets his eye wander over the pale 
 cheek and drooping lid of the beautiful being who sits 
 reading beside him ; but he soon returns to his half- 
 forgotten page, and the smile of affection which had 
 stolen over his features fades gradually away into the 
 habitual soberness of thought. There sits his wife, 
 hour after hour, in the same chair which she occupied 
 when she first came, a curious loiterer to his room; 
 and though she does not study so much, because other 
 cares have a claim upon her now, she still keeps pace 
 with him in the pleasanter branches of knowledge, and 
 they talk as often and as earnestly as before on the 
 thousand topics of a scholar's contemplation. Her 
 cares may and will multiply ; but she understands the 
 economy of time, and I have no doubt that, with every 
 attention to her daily duties, she will find ample time 
 for her mind, and be always as well fitted as now for 
 the companionship of an intellectual being. 
 
 I have, like all bachelors, speculated a great deal 
 upon matrimony. I have seen young and beautiful 
 women, the pride of gay circles, married — as the world 
 said — well ! Some have moved into costly houses, and 
 their friends have all come and looked at their fine 
 furniture and their splendid arrangements for happi- 
 ness, and they have gone away and committed them to 
 their sunny hopes, cheerfully, and without fear. It is 
 natural to be sanguine for the young, and, at such 
 times, I am carried away by similar feelings. I love to 
 get unobserved into a corner, and watch the bride in 
 her white attire, and with her smiling face and her soft 
 eyes moving before me in their pride of life, weave a 
 waking dream of her future happiness, and persuade 
 myself that it will be true. I think how they will sit 
 upon that luxurious sofa as the twilight falls, and build 
 gay hopes, and murmur in low tones the now unfor- 
 bidden tenderness, and how thrillingly the allowed kiss 
 and the beautiful endearments of wedded life, will 
 make even their parting joyous, and how gladly they 
 will come back from the crowd and the empty mirth 
 of the gay, to each other's quiet company. I picture 
 to myself that young creature, who blushes, even now, 
 at his hesitating caress, listening eagerly for his foot- 
 
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 465 
 
 steps as the night steals on, and wishing that he would 
 come ; and when he enters at last, and, with an affec- 
 tion as undying as his pulse, folds her to his bosom, I 
 can feel the very tide that goes flowing through his 
 heart, and gaze with him on her graceful form as 
 she moves about him for the kind offices of affec- 
 tion, soothing all his unquiet cares, and making him 
 forget even himself, in her young and unshadowed 
 beauty. 
 
 I go forward for years, and see her luxuriant hair 
 put soberly away from her brow, and her girlish graces 
 ripened into dignity, and her bright loveliness chast- 
 ened with the gentle meekness of maternal affection. 
 Her husband looks on her with a proud eye, and 
 shows the same fervent love and delicate attention 
 which first won her, and fair children are growing 
 up about them, and they go on, full of honor and 
 untroubled years, and are remembered when they 
 die! 
 
 I say I love to dream thus when I go to give the 
 young bride joy. It is the natural tendency of feel- 
 ings touched by loveliness that fears nothing for itself, 
 and, if I ever yield to darker feelings, it is because the 
 light of the picture is changed. I am not fond of 
 dwelling on such changes, and I will not, minutely, 
 now. 1 allude to it only because I trust that my sim- 
 ple page will be read by some of the young and beau- 
 tiful beings who move daily across my path, and I 
 would whisper to them as they glide by, joyously and 
 confidingly, the secret of an unclouded future. 
 
 The picture I have drawn above is not peculiar. It 
 is colored like the fancies of the bride ; and many — oh 
 many an hour will she sit, with her rich jewels lying 
 loose in her fingers, and dream such dreams as these. 
 She believes them, too — and she goes on, for a while, 
 undeceived. The evening is not too long while they 
 talk of their plans for happiness, and the quiet meal is 
 still pleasant with the delightful novelty of mutual re- 
 liance and attention. There comes soon, however, a 
 time when personal topics become bare and wearisome, 
 
 and slight attentions will not alone keep up the social 
 excitement. There are long intervals of silence, and 
 detected symptoms of weariness, and the husband, first 
 in his impatient manhood, breaks in upon the hours 
 they were to spend together. I can not follow it cir- 
 cumstantially. There come long hours of unhappy 
 listlessness, and terrible misgivings of each other's worth 
 and affection, till, by-and-by, they can conceal their 
 uneasiness no longer, and go out separately to seek 
 relief, and lean upon a hollow world for the support 
 which one who was their "lover and friend" could not 
 give them ! 
 
 Heed this, ye who are winning, by your innocent 
 beauty, the affections of highminded and thinking 
 beings ! Remember that he will give up the brother 
 of his heart with whom he has had, ever, a fellowship 
 of mind — the society of his contemporary runners in 
 the race of fame, who have held with him a stern 
 companionship — and frequently, in his passionate love, 
 he will break away from the arena of his burning am- 
 bition, to come and listen to the "voice of the charm- 
 er." It will bewilder him at first, but it will not long ; 
 and then, think you that an idle blandishment will 
 chain the mind that has been used, for years, to an 
 equal communion ? Think you he will give up, for a 
 weak dalliance, the animating themes of men, and the 
 search into the fine mysteries of knowledge ? — Oh no, 
 lady ! — believe me — no ! Trust not your influence to 
 such light fetters ! Credit not the old-fashioned ab- 
 surdity that woman's is a secondary lot — ministering 
 to the necessities of her lord and master ! It is a 
 higher destiny I would award you. If your immor- 
 tality is as complete, and your gift of mind as capable 
 as ours of increase and elevation, I would put no wis- 
 dom of mine against God's evident allotment. I 
 would charge you to water the undying bud, and give 
 it healthy culture, and open its beauty to the sun — 
 and then you may hope, that when your life is bound 
 up with another, you will go on equally, and in a 
 fellowship that shall pervade every earthly interest ' 
 
 END OF INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE. 
 
 30 
 
LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL 
 
 LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " What wouid it pleasure me to have my throat cut 
 With diamonds ? or to be smothered quick 
 With cassia, or be shot to death with pearls V 
 
 Dutchess of Malfy. 
 
 " I've been i' the Indies twice, and seen strange things— 
 But two honest women '.—One, I read of once !" 
 
 Rule a Wife. 
 
 It was what is called by people on the continent a 
 " London day." A thin, gray mist drizzled down 
 through the smoke which darkened the long cavern 
 of Fleet street ; the sidewalks were slippery and clam- 
 my ; the drays slid from side to side on the greasy 
 pavement, creating a perpetual clamor among the 
 lighter carriages with which they came in contact ; 
 the porters wondered that "gemmen" would carry 
 their umbrellas up when there was no rain, and the 
 gentlemen wondered that porters should be permitted 
 on the sidewalks ; there were passengers in box-coats, 
 though it was the first of May, and beggars with bare 
 breasts, though it was chilly as November ; the boys 
 were looking wistfully into the hosier's windows who 
 were generally at the pastry-cook's ; and there were 
 persons who wished to know the time, trying in vain 
 to see the dial of St. Paul's through the gamboge at- 
 mosphere. 
 
 It was twelve o'clock, and a plain chariot with a 
 simple crest on the panels, slowly picked its way 
 through the choked and disputed thoroughfare east 
 of Temple Bar. The smart glazed hat of the coach- 
 man, the well-fitted drab greatcoat and gaiters of the 
 footman, and the sort of half-submissive, half-con- 
 temptuous look on both their faces (implying that they 
 were bound to drive to the devil if it were miladi's or- 
 ders, but that the rabble of Fleet street was a leetle too 
 vulgar for their contact), expressed very plainly that 
 the lady within was a denizen of a more privileged 
 quarter, but had chosen a rainy day for some compul- 
 sory visit to " the city." 
 
 At the rate of perhaps a mile an hour, the well- 
 groomed night-horses (a pair of smart, hardy, twelve- 
 mile cabs, all bottom, but little style, kept for night- 
 work and forced journeys) had threaded the tortuous 
 entrails of London, and had arrived at the arch of a 
 dark court in Throgmorton street. The coachman 
 put his wheels snug against the edge of the sidewalk, 
 to avoid being crushed by the passing drays, and set- 
 tled his many-caped benjamin about him ; while the 
 footman spread his umbrella, and making a balustrade 
 of his arm for his mistress's assistance, a closely-veiled 
 lady descended and disappeared up the wet and ill- 
 paved avenue. 
 
 The green-baize door of Firkins and Co. opened on 
 its silent hinges and admitted the mysterious visiter, 
 who, inquiring of the nearest clerk if the junior part- 
 ner were in, was shown to a small inner room contain- 
 ing a desk, two chairs, a coal fire, and a young gentle- 
 man. The last article of furniture rose on the lady's 
 entrance, and as she threw off her veil he made a low 
 bow, with the air of a gentleman, who is neither sur- 
 prised nor embarrassed, and pushing aside the door- 
 check, they were left alone. 
 
 There was that forced complaisance in the lady's 
 manner on her first entrance, which produced the 
 slightest possible elevation in a very scornful lip owned 
 by the junior partner, but the lady was only forty-five, 
 highborn, and very handsome, and as she looked at 
 the fine specimen of nature's nobility, who met her 
 with a look as proud and yet as gentle as her own, the 
 smoke of Fleet street passed away from her memory, 
 and she became natural and even gracious. The 
 effect upon the junior partner was simply that of re- 
 moving from his breast the shade of her first impres- 
 sion. 
 
 " I have brought you," said his visiter, drawing a 
 card from her reticule, " an invitation to the dutchess 
 of Hautaigle's ball. She sent me half a dozen to fill 
 up for what she calls ' ornamentals' — and I am sure I 
 shall scarce find another who comes so decidedly under 
 her grace's category." 
 
 The fair speaker had delivered this pretty speech 
 in the sweetest and best-bred tone of St. James's, 
 looking the while at the toe of the small brodequin 
 which she held up to the fire— perhaps thinking only 
 of drying it. As she concluded her sentence, she 
 turned to her companion for an answer, and was sur- 
 prised at the impassive politeness of his bow of ac- 
 knowledgment. 
 
 " I regret that I shall not be able to avail myself of 
 vour ladyship's kindness," said the junior partner, in 
 the same well-enunciated tone of courtesy. 
 
 " Then," replied the lady with a smile, " Lord Au- 
 gustus Fitz-Moi, who looks at himself all dinner-time 
 in a spoon, will be the Apollo of the hour. What a 
 pity such a handsome creature should be so vain ! — 
 By-the-way, Mr. Firkins, you live without a looking- 
 glass, I see." 
 
 " Your ladyship reminds me that this is merely a 
 place of business. May I ask at once what errand 
 has procured me the honor of a visit on so unpleasant 
 a day ?" 
 
 A slight flush brightened the cheek and forehead 
 of the beautiful woman, as she compressed her lips, 
 and forced herself to say with affected ease, " The 
 want of five hundred pounds." 
 
 The junior partner paused an instant, while the lady 
 tapped with her boot upon the fender in ill-dissembled 
 anxiety, and then, turning to his desk, he filled up the 
 
LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 467 
 
 check without remark, presented it, and took his hat 
 to wait on her to her carriage. A gleam of relief and 
 pleasure shot over her countenance as she closed her 
 small jewelled hand over it, followed immediately by a 
 look of embarrassed inquiry into the face of the un- 
 questioning banker. 
 
 " I am in your debt already." 
 
 " Thirty thousand pounds, madam !" 
 
 "And for this you think the securities on the estate 
 of Rockland — " 
 
 "Are worth nothing, madam ! But it rains. I re- 
 gret that your ladyship's carriage can not come to the 
 door. In the old-fashioned days of sedan-chairs, now, 
 the dark courts of Lothbury must have been more at- 
 tractive. By-the-way, talking of Lothbury, there is 
 Lady Roseberry's fete champetre next week. If you 
 should chance to have a spare card " 
 
 " Twenty, if you like — I am too happy — really, Mr. 
 Firkins " 
 
 " It's on the fifteenth ; I shall have the honor of 
 seeing your ladyship there ! Good-morning ! Home, 
 coachman !" 
 
 " Does this man love me ?" was Lady Ravelgold's 
 first thought, as she sank back in her returning char- 
 iot. " Yet no ! he was even rude in his haste to be 
 rid of me. And I would willingly have stayed too, for 
 there is something about him of a mark that I like. 
 Ay, and he must have seen it — a lighter encourage- 
 ment has been interpreted more readily. Five hun- 
 dred pounds ! — really five hundred pounds ! And thir- 
 ty thousand at the back of it ! What does he mean ? 
 Heavens ! if he should be deeper than I thought ! If 
 he should wish to involve me first !" 
 
 And spite of the horror with which the thought was 
 met in the mind of Lavy Ravelgold, the blush over 
 her forehead died away into a half smile and a bright- 
 er tint in her lips ; and as the carriage wound slowly 
 on through the confused press of Fleet street and the 
 Strand, the image of the handsome and haughty young 
 banker shut her eyes from all sounds without, and she 
 was at her own door in Grosvenor square before she 
 had changed position or wandered half a moment from 
 the subject of those busy dreams. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The morning of the fifteenth of May seemed to 
 have been appointed by all the flowers as a jubilee of 
 perfume and bloom. The birds had been invited, and 
 sang in the summer with a welcome as full-throated 
 as a prima donna singing down the tenor in a duet ; 
 the most laggard buds turned out their hearts to the 
 sunshine, and promised leaves on the morrow ; and 
 that portion of London that had been invited to Lady 
 Roseberry's fete, thought it a very fine day ! That 
 portion which was not, wondered how people would 
 go sweltering about in such a glare for a cold dinner ! 
 
 At about half past two, a very elegant dark-green 
 cab without a crest, and with a servant in whose slight 
 figure and plain blue livery there was not a fault, 
 whirled out at the gate of the Regent's Park, and took 
 its way up the well-watered road leading to Hamp- 
 stead. The gentlemen whom it passed or met turned 
 to admire the performance of the dark-gray horse, and 
 the ladies looked after the cab as if they could see the 
 handsome occupant once more through its leather 
 back. Whether by conspiracy among the coach- 
 makers, or by an aristocracy of taste, the degree of 
 elegance in a turn-out attained by the cab just de- 
 scribed, is usually confined to the acquaintances of 
 
 Lady — ; that list being understood to enumerate 
 
 all " the nice young men" of the West End, beside 
 the guardsmen. (The ton of the latter, in all matters 
 hat affect the style of the regiment, is looked after by 
 
 the club and the colonel.) The junior Firkins seemed 
 an exception to this exclusive rule. No " nice man" 
 could come from Lothbury, and he did not visit Lady 
 
 ; but his horse was faultless, and when he turned 
 
 into the gate of Rose-Eden, the policeman at the 
 porter's lodge, though he did not know him, thought 
 it unnecessary to ask for his name. Away he spat- 
 tered up the hilly avenue, and giving the reins to his 
 groom at the end of a green arbor leading to the re- 
 ception-lawn, he walked in and made his bow to Lady 
 Roseberry, who remarked, " How very handsome ! 
 Who can he be ?" — and the junior partner walked on 
 and disappeared down an avenue of laburnums. 
 
 Ah ! but Rose-Eden looked a paradise that day ! 
 Hundreds had passed across the close-shaven lawn, 
 with a bow to the lady-mistress of this fair abode. Yet 
 the grounds were still private enough for Milton's pair, 
 so lost were they in the green labyrinths of hill and 
 dale. Some had descended through heavily-shaded 
 paths to a fancy dairy, built over a fountain in the bot- 
 tom of a cool dell ; and here, amid her milk-pans of 
 old and costly china, the prettiest maid in the country 
 round pattered about upon a floor of Dutch tiles, and 
 served her visiters with creams and ices — already, as it 
 were, adapted to fashionable comprehension. Some 
 had strayed to the ornamental cottages in the skirts 
 of the flower-garden — poetical abodes, built from a 
 picturesque drawing, with imitation roughness ; thatch, 
 lattice-window, and low paling, all complete; and in- 
 habited by superannuated dependants of Lord Rose- 
 berry, whose only duties were to look like patriarchs, 
 and give tea and new cream-cheese to visiters on fete- 
 days. Some had gone to see the silver and gold pheas- 
 ants in their wire-houses, stately aristocrats of the game 
 tribe, who carry their finely-pencilled feathers like 
 " Marmalet Madarus," strutting in hoop and farthin- 
 gale. Some had gone to the kennels, to see setters 
 and pointers, hounds and terriers, lodged like gentle- 
 men, each breed in its own apartment — the puppies, as 
 elsewhere, treated with most attention. Some were 
 in the flower-garden, some in the greenhouses, some 
 in the graperies, aviaries, and grottoes ; and at the side 
 of a bright sparkling fountain, in the recesses of a fir- 
 grove, with her foot upon its marble lip, and one hand 
 on the shoulder of a small Cupid who archly made a 
 drinking-cup of his wing, and caught the bright water 
 as it fell, stood Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the loveliest 
 girl of nineteen that prayed night and morning within 
 the parish of May Fair, listening to very passionate 
 language from the young banker of Lothbury. 
 
 A bugle on the lawn rang a recall. From every 
 alley, and by every path, poured in the gay multitude, 
 and the smooth sward looked like a plateau of ani- 
 mated flowers, waked by magic from a broidery on 
 green velvet. Ah ! the beautiful demi-toilcttcs ! — so 
 difficult to attain, yet, when attained, the dress most 
 modest, most captivating, most worthy the divine grace 
 of woman. Those airy hats, sheltering from the sun, 
 yet not enviously concealing a feature or a ringlet that 
 a painter would draw for his exhibition-picture ! 
 Those summery and shapeless robes, covering the 
 person more to show its outline better, and provoke 
 more the worship, which, like all worship, is made 
 more adoring by mystery ! Those complexions which 
 but betray their transparency in the sun ; lips in which 
 the blood is translucent when between you and the 
 light ; cheeks finer-grained than alabaster, yet as cool 
 in their virgin purity as a tint in the dark corner of a 
 Ruysdael : the human race was at less perfection in 
 Athens in the days of Lais— in Egypt in the days of 
 Cleopatra— than that day on the lawn of Rose- Eden. 
 
 Cart-loads of ribands, of every gay color, had been 
 laced through the trees in all directions: and amid 
 every variety of foliage, and every shade of green, the 
 tulip-iints shone vivid and brilliant, like an American 
 forest after the first frost. From the left edge of the 
 
468 
 
 LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 lawn, the ground suddenly sunk into a dell, shaped 
 like an amphitheatre, with a level platform at its bot- 
 tom, and all around, above and below, thickened a 
 shady wood. The music of a delicious band stole up 
 from the recesses of a grove, draped as an orchestra 
 and green-room on the lower side, and while the 
 audience disposed themselves in the shade of the up- 
 per grove, a company of players and dancing-girls 
 commenced their theatricals. — Imogen Ravelgold, 
 who was separated, by a pine tree only, from the junior 
 partner, could scarce tell you, when it was finished, 
 what was the plot of the play. 
 
 The recall-bugle sounded again, and the band 
 wound away from the lawn, playing a gay march. 
 Followed Lady Roseberry and her suite of gentlemen, 
 followed dames and their daughters, followed all who 
 wished to see the flight of my lord's falcons. By a 
 narrow path and a wicket-gate, the long music-guided 
 train stole out upon an open hill-side, looking down 
 on a verdant and spreading meadow. The band play- 
 ed at a short distance behind the gay groups of spec- 
 tators, and it was a pretty picture to look down upon 
 the splendidly-dressed falconer and his men, holding 
 their fierce birds upon their wrists, in their hoods and 
 jesses, a foreground of old chivalry and romance ; 
 while far beyond extended, like a sea over the horizon, 
 the smoke-clad pinnacles of busy and every-day Lon- 
 don. There are such contrasts of the eyes of the 
 rich ! 
 
 The scarlet hood was taken from the trustiest 
 falcon, and a dove, confined, at first, with a string, 
 was thrown up, and brought back, to excite his alten- 
 tion. As he fixed his eye upon him, the frightened 
 victim was let loose, and the falcon flung off; away 
 skimmed the dove in a low flight over the meadow, 
 and up to the very zenith, in circles of amazing swift- 
 ness and power, sped the exulting falcon, apparently 
 forgetful of his prey, and bound for the eye of the sun 
 with his strong wings and his liberty. The falconer's 
 whistle and cry were heard ; the dove circled round 
 the edge of the meadow in his wavy flight ; and down, 
 with the speed of lightning, shot the falcon, striking 
 his prey dead to the earth before the eye could settle 
 on his form. As the proud bird stood upon his 
 victim, looking around with a lifted crest and fierce eye, 
 Lady Imogen Ravengold heard, in a voice of which 
 her heart knew the music, " They who soar highest 
 strike surest ; the dove lies in the falcon's bosom." 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The afternoon had, meantime, been wearing on, 
 and at six the " breakfast" was announced. The 
 tents beneath which the tables were spread were in 
 different parts of the grounds, and the guests had 
 made up their own parties. Each sped to his ren- 
 dezvous, and as the last loiterers disappeared from 
 the lawn, a gentleman in a claret coat and a brown 
 study, found himself stopping to let a lady pass who 
 had obeying the summons as tardily as himself. In 
 a white chip hat, Hairbault's last, a few lilies of the 
 valley laid among her raven curls beneath, a simple 
 white robe, the chef-d'muvre of Victotine in style and 
 tournure, Lady Ravelgold would have been the belle 
 of the fete, but for her daughter. 
 
 "Well emerged from Lothbury !" she said, court- 
 esying, with a slight flush over her features, but im- 
 mediately taking his arm ; " I have lost my party, and 
 meeting you is opportune. Where shall we breakfast?" 
 
 There was a small tent standing invitingly open on 
 the opposite side of the lawn, and by the fainter rattle 
 of soup-spoons from that quarter, it promised to be 
 less crowded than the others. The junior partner 
 would willingly have declined the proffered honor, but 
 
 he saw at a glance that there was no escape, and sub- 
 mitted with a grace. 
 
 "You know very few people here," said his fair 
 creditor, taking the bread from her napkin. 
 
 "Your ladyship and one other." 
 
 " Ah, we shall have dancing by-and-by, and I must 
 introduce you to my daughter. By the way, have 
 you no name from your mother's side ? ' Firkins' 
 sounds so very odd. Give me some prettier word to 
 drink in this champagne." 
 
 " What do you think of Tremlet?" 
 
 " Too effeminate for your severe style of beauty — 
 but it will do. Mr. Tremlet, your health ! Will you 
 give me a little of the pate, before you? Pray, if it 
 is not indiscreet, how comes that classic profile, and 
 more surprising still, that distinguished look of yours, 
 to have found no gayer destiny than the signing of 
 ' Firkins and Co.' to notes of hand ? Though I thought 
 you became your den in Lothbury, upon my honoryou 
 look more at home here." 
 
 And Lady Ravengold fixed her superb eyes upon 
 the beautiful features of her companion, wondering 
 partly why he did not speak, and partly why she had 
 not observed before that he was incomparably the 
 handsomest creature she had ever seen. 
 
 " I can regret no vocation," he answered after a 
 moment, " which procures me an acquaintance with 
 your ladyship's family." 
 
 " There is an arriere penste in that formal speech, 
 Mr. Tremlet. You are insincere. I am the only 
 one in my family whom you know, and what pleas- 
 ure have you taken in my acquaintance ? And, now 
 I think of it, there is a mystery about you, which, but 
 for the noble truth written so legibly on your features, 
 I should be afraid to fathom. Why have you suffered 
 me to over-draw my credit so enormously, and without 
 a shadow of a protest ?" 
 
 When Lady Ravelgold had disburdened her heart 
 of this direct question, she turned half round and 
 looked her companion in the face with an intense 
 interest, which produced upon her own features an 
 expression of earnestness very uncommon upon their 
 pale and impassive lines. She was one of those per- 
 sons of little thought, who care nothing for causes or 
 consequences, so that the present difficulty is removed, 
 or the present hour provided with its wings ; but the 
 repeated relief she had received from the young banker, 
 when total ruin would have been the consequence of 
 his refusal, and his marked coldness in his manner to 
 her, had stimulated the utmost curiosity of which she 
 was capable. Her vanity, founded upon her high rank 
 and great renown as a beauty, would have agreed that 
 he might be willing to get her into his power at that 
 price, had he been less agreeable in his own person, 
 or more eager in his manner. But she had wanted 
 money sufficiently to know, that thirty thousand pounds 
 are not a bagatelle, and her brain was busy till she dis- 
 covered the equivalent he sought for it. Meantime 
 her fear that he would turn out to be a lover, grew 
 rapidly into a fear that he would not. 
 
 Lady Ravelgold had been the wife of a dissolute 
 earl, who had died, leaving his estate inextricably in- 
 volved. With no male heir to the title or property, 
 and no very near relation, the beautiful widow shut 
 her eyes to the difficulties by which she was sur- 
 rounded, and at the first decent moment after the 
 death of her lord, she had re-entered the gay society 
 of which she had been the bright and particular star, 
 and never dreamed either of diminishing her establish- 
 ment, or of calculating her possible income. The 
 first heavy draft she had made upon the house of 
 Firkins and Co., her husband's bankers, had been re- 
 turned with a statement of the Ravelgold debt and 
 credit on their books, by which it appeared that Lord 
 Ravelgold had overdrawn four or five thousand pounds 
 before his death, and that from some legal difficulties, 
 
LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 469 
 
 nothing could be realized from the securities given 
 on his estates. This bad news arrived on the morning 
 of a fete to be given by the Russian ambassador, at 
 which her only child. Lady Imogen, was to make her 
 debut in society. With the facility of disposition 
 which was peculiar to her, Lady Ravelgold thrust the 
 papers into her drawer, and determining to visit her 
 banker on the following morning, threw the matter 
 entirely from her mind and made preparations for the 
 ball. With the Russian government the house of 
 Firkins and Co. had long carried on very extensive 
 fiscal transactions, and in obedience to instructions 
 from the emperor, regular invitations for the embassy 
 fetes were sent to the bankers, accepted occasionally 
 by the junior partner only, who was generally sup- 
 posed to be a natural son of old Firkins. Out of the 
 banking-house he was known as Mr. Tremlet, and it 
 was by this name, which was presumed to be his 
 mother's, that he was casually introduced to Lady 
 Imogen on the night of the fete, while she was separa- 
 ted from her mother in the dancing-room. The con- 
 sequence was a sudden, deep, ineffaceable passion in 
 the bosom of the young banker, checked and silenced, 
 but never lessened or chilled by the recollection of 
 the obstacle of his birth. The impression of his sub- 
 dued manner, his worshipping, yet most respectful 
 tones, and the bright soul that breathed through his 
 handsome features with his unusual excitement, was, 
 to say the least, favorable upon Lady Imogen, and they 
 parted on the night»of the fete, mutually aware of each 
 other's preference. 
 
 On the following morning Lady Ravelgold made 
 her proposed visit to the city ; and inquiring for Mr. 
 Firkins, was shown in as usual to the junior partner, 
 to whom the colloquial business of the concern had 
 long been intrusted. To her surprise she found no 
 difficulty in obtaining the sum of money which had 
 been refused her on the preceding day — a result which 
 she attributed to her powers of persuasion, or to some 
 new turn in the affairs of the estate ; and for two years 
 these visits had been repeated at intervals of three or 
 four months, with the same success, though not with 
 the same delusion as to the cause. She had discover- 
 ed that the estate was worse than nothing, and the 
 junior partner cared little to prolong his tetes-d-teles 
 with her, and, up to the visit with which this tale 
 opened, she had looked to every succeeding one with 
 iucreased fear and doubt. 
 
 During these two years, Tremlet had seen Lady 
 Imogen occasionally at balls and public places, and 
 every look they exchanged wove more strongly be- 
 tween them the subtle threads of love. Once or twice 
 she had endeavored to interest her mother in conver- 
 sation on the subject, with the intention of making 
 •a confidence of her feelings ; but Lady Ravengold, 
 when not anxious, was giddy with her own success, 
 and the unfamiliar name never rested a moment on her 
 ear. With this explanation to render the tale in- 
 telligible, " let us," as the French say, " return to our 
 muttons." 
 
 Of the conversation between Tremlet and her moth- 
 er, Lady Imogen was an unobserved and astonished 
 witness. The tent which they had entered was large, 
 with a buffet in the centre, and a circular table waited 
 on by servants within the ring ; and, just concealed 
 by the drapery around the pole, sat Lady Imogen 
 with a party of her friends, discussing very seriously 
 the threatened fashion of tight sleeves. She had half 
 risen, when her mother entered, to offer her a seat by 
 her side, but the sight of Tremlet, who immediately 
 followed, had checked the words upon her lip, and to 
 her surprise they seated themselves on the side that 
 was wholly unoccupied, and conversed in a tone in- 
 audible to all but themselves. Not aware that her 
 lover knew Lady Ravelgold, she supposed that they 
 might have been casually introduced, till the earnest- 
 
 ness of her mother's manner, and a certain ease be- 
 tween them in the little courtesies of the table, assured 
 her that this could not be their first interview. Trem- 
 let's face was turned from her, and she could not 
 judge whether he was equally interested ; but she 
 had been so accustomed to consider her mother as 
 irresistible when she chose to please, that she supposed 
 it of course ; and very soon the heightened color of 
 Lady Ravelgold, and the unwavering look of mingled 
 admiration and curiosity which she bent upon the 
 handsome face of her companion, left no doubt in her 
 mind that her reserved and exclusive lover was in the 
 dangerous toils of a rival whose power she knew. 
 From the mortal pangs of a first jealousy, Heaven send 
 thee deliverance, fair Lady Imogen ! 
 
 " We shall find our account in the advances on 
 your ladyship's credit ;" said Tremlet, in reply to the 
 direct question that was put to him. " Meantime 
 permit me to admire the courage with which you look 
 so disagreeable a subject in the face." 
 
 " For ' disagreeable subject,' read ' Mr. Tremlet.' 
 
 I show my temerity more in that. Apropos of faces, 
 
 yours would become the new fashion of cravat. The 
 
 ! men at Crockford's slip the ends through a ring of 
 
 ■ their lady-love's, if they chance to have one — thus !" 
 
 j and untying the loose knot of his black satin cravat, 
 
 Lady Ravelgold slipped over the ends a diamond of 
 
 small value, conspicuously set in pearls. 
 
 M The men at Crockford's," said Tremlet, hesita- 
 ting to commit the rudeness of removing the ring, 
 " are not of my school of manners. If I had been so 
 fortunate as to inspire a lady with a preference for me, 
 I should not advertise it on my cravat." 
 
 " But suppose the lady were proud of her preference 
 as dames were of the devotion of their knights in the 
 days of chivalry — would you not wear her favor as 
 conspicuously as they ?" 
 
 A flush of mingled embarrassment and surprise 
 shot over the forehead of Tremlet, and he was turning 
 the ring with his fingers, when Lady Imogen, at- 
 tempting to pass out of the tent, was stopped by her 
 mother. 
 
 "Imogen, my daughter! this is Mr. Tremlet. La- 
 dy Imogen Ravelgold, Mr. Tremlet!" 
 
 The cold and scarce perceptible bow which the 
 wounded girl gave to her lover, betrayed no previous 
 acquaintance to the careless Lady Ravelgold. With- 
 out giving a second thought to her daughter, she held 
 her glass for some champagne to a passing servant, 
 and as Lady Imogen and her friends crossed the lawn 
 to the dancing-tent, she resumed the conversation 
 which they had interrupt3d; while Tremlet, with his 
 heart brooding on the altered look he had received, 
 listened and replied almost unconsciously ; yet from 
 this very circumstance, in a manner which was in- 
 terpreted by his companion as the embarrassment of a 
 timid and long-repressed passion for herself. 
 
 While Lady Ravelgold and the junior partner were 
 thus playing at cross purposes over their champagne 
 and bons-bons, Grisi and Lablanche were singing a 
 duet from / Puritani, to a full audience in the saloon ; 
 the drinking young men sat over their wine at the 
 nearly-deserted tables ; Lady Imogen and her friends 
 waltzed to Collinet's band, and the artisans were busy 
 below the lawn, erecting the machinery for the fire- 
 works. Meantime every alley and avenue, grot and 
 labyrinth, had been dimly illuminated with colored 
 lamps, showing like vari-colored glow-worms amid 
 the foliage and shells; and if the bright scenery of 
 Rose-Eden had been lovely by day, it was fay-land 
 and witchery by night. Fatal impulse of our nature, 
 that these approaches to paradise in the "delight of 
 the eye," stir only in our bosoms the passions upon 
 which law and holy writ have put ban and bridle ! 
 
 "Shall we stroll down this alley of crimson lamps?" 
 said Lady Ravelgold, crossing the lawn from the tent 
 
470 
 
 LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 where their coffee had been brought to them, and put- 
 ting her slender arm far into that of her now pale and 
 silent companion. 
 
 A lady in a white dress stood at the entrance of that 
 crimson avenue, as Tremlet and his passionate ad- 
 mirer disappeared beneath the closing lines of the 
 long perspective, and, remaining a moment gazing 
 through the unbroken twinkle of the confusing lamps, 
 she pressed her hand hard upon her forehead, drew 
 up her form as if struggling with some irrepressible 
 feeling, and in another moment was whirling in the 
 waltz with Lord Ernest Fitzantelope, whose mother 
 wrote a complimentary paragraph about their per- 
 formance for the next Saturday's Court Journal. 
 
 The bugle sounded, and the band played a march 
 upon the lawn. From the breakfast tents, from the 
 coffee-rooms, from the dance, from the card-tables, 
 poured all who wished to witness the marvels that lie 
 in saltpetre. Gentlemen who stood in a tender attitude 
 in the darkness, held themselves ready to lean the 
 other way when the rockets blazed up, and mammas 
 who were encouraging flirtations with eligibles, whis- 
 pered a caution on the same subject to their less ex- 
 perienced daughters. 
 
 Up sped the missiles, round spun the wheels, fair 
 burned the pagodas, swift flew the fire-doves off and 
 back again on their wires, and softly floated down 
 through the dewy atmosphere of that May night the 
 lambent and many-colored stars, flung burning from 
 the exploded rockets. Device followed device, and 
 Lady Imogen almost forgot, in her child's delight at 
 the spectacle, that she had taken into her bosom a 
 green serpent, whose folds were closing like suffoca- 
 tion about her heart. 
 
 The finale was to consist of a new light, invented 
 by the pyrotechnist, promised to Lady Roseberry to 
 be several degrees brighter than the sun — compara- 
 tively with the quantity of matter. Before this last 
 flourish came a pause ; and while all the world were 
 murmuring love and applause around her, Lady 
 Imogen, with her eyes fixed on an indefinite point in 
 the darkness, took advantage of the cessation of light 
 to feed her serpent with thoughts of passionate and 
 uncontrollable pain. A French attache., Phillipiste to 
 the very tips of his mustache, addressed to her ear, 
 meantime, the compliments he had found most effect- 
 ive in the Cfiaussee d 1 Antin. 
 
 The light burst suddenly from a hundred blazing 
 points, clear, dazzling, intense — illuminating, as by 
 the instantaneous burst of day, the farthest corner of 
 Rose-Eden. And Monsieur Mangepoire, with a 
 French contempt for English fireworks, took advan- 
 tage of the first ray to look into Lady Imogen's eyes. 
 
 "Mais, Miladi!" was his immediate exclamation, 
 after following their direction with a glance, "ce nest 
 qu'un tableau vivant,cela! Help, gentlemen! Elle 
 s'evanomt. Some salts! Misericorde ! Mon Dicu! 
 Mon Dieu /" And Lady Imogen Ravelgold was car- 
 ried fainting to Lady Roseberry's chamber. 
 
 In a small opening at the end of a long avenue of 
 hlacs, extended from the lawn in the direction of 
 Lady Imogen's fixed and unconscious gaze, was pre- 
 sented, by the unexpected illumination, the tableau 
 vivant, seen by her ladyship and Monsieur Mange- 
 poire at the same instant — a gentleman drawn up to 
 his fullest height, with his arms folded, and a lady 
 kneeling on the ground at his feet with her arms 
 stretched up to his bosom. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 A little after two o'clock on the following 
 Wednesday, Tremlet's cabriolet stopped near the 
 perron of Willis's rooms in King street, and while he 
 
 sent up his card to the lady patronesses for his ticket 
 to that night's Almack's, he busied himself in looking 
 into the crowd of carriages about him, and reading on 
 the faces of their fair occupants the hope and anxiety 
 to which they were a prey till John the footman 
 brought them tickets or despair. Drawn up on the 
 opposite side of the street, stood a family- carriage of 
 the old style, covered with half the arms of the herald's 
 office, and containing a fat dowager and three very over- 
 dressed daughters. Watching them, to see the effect 
 of their application, stood upon the sidewalk three or 
 four young men from the neighboring club-house, and 
 at the moment Tremlet was observing these circum- 
 stances, a foreign britscka, containing a beautiful wo- 
 man of a reputation better understood than expressed 
 in the conclave above stairs, flew round the corner of 
 St. James's street, and very nearly drove into the open 
 mouth of the junior partner's cabriolet. 
 
 "I will bet you a Ukraine colt against this fine bay 
 of yours," said the Russian secretary of legation, ad- 
 vancing from the group of dandies to Tremlet, "that 
 miladi, yonder, with all the best blood of England in 
 her own and her daughters' red faces, gets no tickets 
 this morning." 
 
 "I'll take a bet upon the lady who has nearly 
 extinguished me, if you like," answered Tremlet, 
 gazing with admiration at the calm, delicate, child- 
 like looking creature, who sat before him in the 
 britscka. 
 
 " No !" said the secretary, " for Almack's is a re- 
 public of beauty, and she'll be voted in without either 
 blood or virtue. Par exemple, Lady Ravelgold's 
 voucher is good here, though she does study tableaux 
 in Lothbury — eh, Tremlet?" 
 
 Totally unaware of the unlucky discovery by the 
 fireworks at Lady Roseberry's fete, Tremlet colored 
 and was inclined to take the insinuation as an affront; 
 but a laugh from the dandies drew off his companion's 
 attention, and he observed the dowager's footman 
 standing at her coach window with his empty hands 
 held up in most expressive negation, while the three 
 young ladies within sat aghast, in all the agonies of 
 disappointed hopes. The lumbering carriage got into 
 motion — its ineffective blazonry paled by the mortified 
 blush of its occupants — and, as the junior partner 
 drove away, philosophizing on the arbitrary opinions 
 and unprovoked insults of polite society, the britscka 
 shot by, showing him, as he leaned forward, a lovely 
 woman who bent on him the most dangerous eyes in 
 London, and an Almack's ticket lying on the unoccu- 
 pied cushion beside her. 
 
 The white relievo upon the pale blue wall of Al- 
 mack's showed every crack in its stucco flowers, and 
 the faded chaperons who had defects of a similar de- 
 scription to conceal, took warning of the walls, and 
 retreated to the friendlier dimness of the tea-room. 
 Collinet was beginning the second set of quadrilles, 
 and among the fairest of the surpassingly beautiful 
 women who were moving to his heavenly music, was 
 Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the lovelier to-night for the 
 first heavy sadness that had ever dimmed the roses 
 in her cheek. Her lady-mother divided her thoughts 
 between what this could mean, and whether Mr. 
 Tremlet would come to the ball; and when, presently 
 after, in the dos-a-dos, she forgot to look at her daugh- 
 ter, on seeing that gentleman enter, she lost a very 
 good opportunity for a guess at the cause of Lady 
 Imogen's paleness. 
 
 To the pure and true eye that appreciates the 
 divinity of the form after which woman is made, it 
 would have been a glorious feast to have seen the per- 
 fection of shape, color, motion, and countenance, shown 
 that night on the bright floor of Almack's. For the 
 young and beautiful girls whose envied destiny is to 
 commence their woman's history in this exclusive 
 
LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 471 
 
 hall, there exists aids to beauty known to no other 
 class or nation. Perpetual vigilance over every limb 
 from the cradle up ; physical education of a perfec- 
 tion, discipline, and judgment, pursued only at great 
 expense and under great responsibility ; moral educa- 
 tion of the highest kind, habitual consciousness of 
 rank, exclusive contact with elegance and luxury, and 
 a freedom of intellectual culture which breathes a soul 
 through the face before passion has touched it with a 
 line or a shade — these are some of the circumstances 
 which make Almack's the cynosure of the world for 
 adorable and radiant beauty. 
 
 There were three ladies who had come to Almack's 
 with a definite object that night, each of whom was 
 destined to be surprised and foiled : Lady Ravelgold, 
 who feared she had been abrupt with the inexperienced 
 banker, but trusted to find him softened by a day or 
 two's reflection; Mrs. St. Leger, the lady of the 
 britscka, who had ordered supper for two on her ar- 
 rival at home from her morning's drive, and intended 
 to have the company of the handsome creature she 
 had nearly run over in King street; and Lady Imogen 
 Ravelgold as will appear in the sequel. 
 
 Tremlet stood in the entrance from the tea-room a 
 moment, gathering courage to walk alone into such a 
 dazzling scene, and then, having caught a glimpse of 
 the glossy lines of Lady Imogen's head at the farthest 
 end of the room, he was advancing toward her, when he 
 was addressed by a lady who leaned against one of the 
 slender columns of the orchestra. After a sweetly- 
 phrased apology for having nearly knocked out his 
 brains that morning with her horses' fore feet, Mrs. St. 
 Leger took his arm, and walking deliberately two or 
 three times up and down the room, took possession, at 
 last, of a banquette on the highest range, so far from any 
 other person, that it would have been a marked rude- 
 ness to have left her alone. Tremlet took his seat by 
 her with this instinctive feeling, trusting that some of 
 her acquaintances would soon approach, and give him 
 a fair excuse to leave her; but he soon became 
 amused with her piquant style of conversation, and, 
 not aware of being observed, fell into the attitude of a 
 pleased and earnest listener. 
 
 Lady Ravelgold's feelings during this petit entre- 
 tlen, were of a very positive description. She had 
 an instinctive knowledge, and consequently a jealous 
 dislike of Mrs. St. Leger's character; and, still under 
 the delusion that the young banker's liberality was 
 prompted by a secret passion for herself, she saw her 
 credit in the city and her hold upon the affections of 
 Tremlet (for whom she had really conceived a violent 
 affection), melting away in every smile of the dangerous 
 woman who engrossed him. As she looked around 
 for a friend, to whose ear she might communicate 
 some of the suffocating poison in her own heart, Lady 
 Imogen returned to her from a galopade ; and, like a 
 second dagger into the heart of the pure-minded girl, 
 went this second proof of her lover's corrupt principle 
 and conduct. Unwilling to believe even her own eyes 
 on the night of Lady Roseberry's fete, she had sum- 
 moned resolution on the road home to ask an explana- 
 tion of her mother. Embarrassed by the abrupt ques- 
 tion, Lady Ravelgold felt obliged to make a partial 
 confidence of the state of her pecuniary affairs ; and 
 to clear herself, she represented Tremlet as having 
 taken advantage of her obligations to him, to push a 
 dishonorable suit. The scene disclosed by the sud- 
 den blaze of the fireworks being thus simply explain- 
 ed, Lady Imogen determined at once to give up 
 Tremlet's acquaintance altogether; a resolution which 
 his open flirtation with a woman of Mrs. St. Leger's 
 character served to confirm. She had, however, one 
 errand with him, prompted by her filial feelings and 
 favored by an accidental circumstance which will ap- 
 pear. 
 
 "Do you believe in animal magnetism?" asked 
 
 Mrs. St. Leger, "for by the fixedness of Lady Ravel- 
 gold's eyes in this quarter, something is going to happen 
 to one of us." 
 
 The next moment the Russian secretary approach- 
 ed and took his seat by Mrs. St. Leger, and with 
 diplomatic address contrived to convey to Tremlet's 
 ear that Lady Ravelgold wished to speak with him. 
 The banker rose, but the quick wit of his companion 
 comprehended the manoeuvre. 
 
 " Ah ! I see how it is," she said, " but stay — you'll 
 sup with me to-night ? Promise me — parole iVhon- 
 neur /" 
 
 " Parole /" answered Tremlet, making his way 
 out between the seats, half pleased and half embar- 
 
 " As for you, Monsieur le Secretaire," said Mrs. 
 St. Leger, "you have forfeited my favor, and may 
 sup elsewhere. How dare you conspire against me ?" 
 
 While the Russian was making his peace, Trem- 
 let crossed over to Lady Ravelgold ; but, astonished 
 at the change in Lady Imogen, he soon broke in 
 abruptly upon her mother's conversation, to ask her 
 to dance. She accepted his hand for a quadrille; 
 but as they walked down the room in search of a vis- 
 a-i'is, she complained of heat, and asked timidly if he 
 would take her to the tea-room. 
 
 " Mr. Tremlet," she said, fixing her eyes upon the 
 cup of tea which he had given her, and which she 
 found some difficulty in holding, " I have come here 
 to-night to communicate to you some important in- 
 formation, to ask a favor, and to break off an acquaint- 
 ance which has lasted too long." 
 
 Lady Imogen stopped, for the blood had fled from 
 her lips, and she was compelled to ask his arm for a 
 support. She drew herself up to her fullest height 
 the next moment, looked at Tremlet, who stood in 
 speechless astonishment, and with a strong effort, com- 
 menced again in a low, firm tone — 
 
 " I have been acquainted with you some time, sir, 
 and have never inquired, nor knew more than your 
 name, up to this day. I suffered myself to be pleased 
 too blindly — " 
 
 " Dear Lady Imogen !" 
 
 "Stay a moment, sir ! I will proceed directly to 
 my business. I received this morning a letter from 
 the senior partner of a mercantile house in the city, 
 with which you are connected. It is written on the 
 supposition that I have some interest in you, and in- 
 forms me that you are not, as you yourself suppose, 
 the son of the gentleman who writes the letter." 
 
 " Madam !" 
 
 "That gentleman, sir, as you know, never was 
 married. He informs me that in the course of many 
 financial visits to St. Petersburgh, he formed a friend- 
 ship with Count Manteuffel, then minister of finance 
 to the emperor, whose tragical end, in consequence 
 of his extensive defalcations, is well known. In 
 brief, sir, you were his child, and were taken by this 
 English banker, and carefully educated as his own, in 
 happy ignorance, as he imagined, of your father's mis- 
 fortunes and mournful death." 
 
 Tremlet leaned against the wall, unable to reply 
 to this astounding intelligence, and Lady Imogen 
 went on. 
 
 "Your title and estates have been restored to you 
 at the request of your kind benefactor, and you are 
 now the heir to a princely foitune, and a count of 
 the Russian empire. Here is the letter, sir, which 
 is of no value to me now. Mr. Tremlet ! one word 
 more, sir." 
 
 Lady Imogen grasped for breath. 
 
 " In return, sir, for much interest given you here- 
 tofore — in return, sir, for this information — " 
 
 " Speak, dear Lady Imogen !" 
 
 " Spare my mother !" 
 
 " Mrs. St. Leger's carriage stops the way !" shout- 
 
472 
 
 LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 ed a servant at that moment, at the top of the stairs ; 
 and as if there were a spell in the sound to nerve her 
 resolution anew, Lady Imogen Ravelgold shook the 
 tears from her eyes, bowed coldly to Tremlet, and 
 passed out into the dressing-room. 
 
 "If you please, sir," said a servant, approaching the 
 amazed banker, " Mrs. St. Leger waits for you in her 
 carriage." 
 
 " Will you come home and sup with us ?" said 
 Lady Ravelgold at the same instant, joining him in 
 the tea-room. 
 
 " I shall be only too happy, Lady Ravelgold." 
 
 The bold coachman of Mrs. St. Leger continued 
 to " stop the way," spite of policemen and infuriated 
 footmen, for some fifteen minutes. At the end of 
 that time Mr. Tremlet appeared, handing down 
 Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who walked to 
 their chariot, which was a few steps behind ; and 
 very much to Mrs. St. Leger's astonishment, the 
 handsome banker sprang past her horses' heads a 
 minute after, jumped into his cabriolet, which stood 
 on the opposite side of the street, and drove after 
 the vanishing chariot as if his life depended on over- 
 taking it. Still Mrs. St. Leger's carriage " stopped 
 the way." But, in a few minutes after, the same 
 footman who had summoned Tremlet in vain, re- 
 turned with the Russian secretary, doomed in blessed 
 unconsciousness to play the pis ailer at her tete-a-tete 
 supper in Spring Gardens. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 If Lady Ravelgold showed beautiful by the un- 
 compromising light and in the ornamented hall of 
 Almack's, she was radiant as she came through the 
 mirror door of her own loved-contrived and beauty- 
 breathing boudoir. Tremlet had been showed into 
 this recess of luxury and elegance on his arrival, and 
 Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who preceded her 
 by a minute or two, had gone to their chambers, the 
 first to make some slight changes in her toilet, and 
 the latter (entirely ignorant of her lover's presence in 
 the house), to be alone with a heart never before in 
 such painful need of self-abandonment and solitude. 
 
 Tremlet looked about him in the enchanted room 
 in which he found himself alone, and, spite of the 
 prepossessed agitation of his feelings, the voluptuous 
 beauty of every object had the effect to divert and 
 tranquillize him. The light was profuse, but it came 
 softened through the thinnest alabaster; and while 
 every object in the room was distinctly and minutely 
 visible, the effect of moonlight was not more soft and 
 dreamy. The general form of the boudoir was an 
 oval, but within the pilasters of folded silk with their 
 cornices of gold, lay crypts containing copies exquisite- 
 ly done in marble of the most graceful statues of an- 
 tiquity, one of which seemed, by the curtain drawn 
 quite aside and a small antique lamp burning near it, 
 to be the divinity of the place — the Greek Antinous, 
 with his drooped head and full, smooth limbs, the 
 most passionate and life-like representation of voluptu- 
 ous beauty that intoxicates the slumberous air of 
 Italy. Opposite this, another niche contained a few 
 books, whose retreating shelves swung on a secret 
 door, and as it stood half open, the nodding head of a 
 snowy magnolia leaned through, as if pouring from 
 the lips of its broad chalice the mingled odors of the 
 unseen conservatory it betrayed. The first sketch in 
 crayons of a portrait of Lady Ravelgold by young 
 Lawrence, stood against the wall, with the frame half 
 buried in a satin ottoman ; and, as Tremlet stood be- 
 fore it, admiring the clear, classic outline of the head 
 and bust, and wondering in what chamber of his brain 
 the gifted artist had found the beautiful drapery in 
 
 which he had drawn her, the dim light glanced faintly 
 on the left, and the broad mirror by which he had 
 entered swung again on its silver hinges, and admitted 
 the very presentment of what he gazed on. Lady 
 Ravelgold had removed the jewels from her hair, and 
 the robe of wrought lace, which she had worn that 
 night over a boddice of white satin laced loosely below 
 the bosom. In the place of this she had thrown upon 
 her shoulders a flowing wrapper of purple velvet, 
 made open after the Persian fashion, with a short and 
 large sleeve, and embroidered richly with gold upon 
 the skirts. Her admirable figure, gracefully defined 
 by the satin petticoat and boddice, showed against the 
 gorgeous purple as it flowed back in her advancing 
 motion, with a relief which would have waked the very 
 soul of Titian ; her complexion was dazzling and 
 faultless in the flattering light of her own rooms ; and 
 there are those who will read this who know how the 
 circumstances which surround a woman — luxury, 
 elegance, taste, or the opposite of these — enhance or 
 dim, beyond help or calculation, even the highest order 
 of woman's beauty. 
 
 Lady Ravelgold held a bracelet in her hand as she 
 came in. 
 
 " In my own house," she said, holding the glitter- 
 ing jewel to Tremlet, " 1 have a fancy for the style 
 antique. Tasseline, my maid, has gone to bed, and 
 you must do the devoir of a knight, or an abigail, and 
 loop up this Tyrian sleeve. Stay — look first at the 
 model — that small statue of Cytheris, yonder ! Not 
 the shoulder — for you are to swear mine is prettier — 
 but the clasp. Fasten it like that. So! Now take 
 me for a Grecian nymph the rest of the evening." 
 
 " Lady Ravelgold!" 
 
 " Hermione or Aglae, if you please ! But let us 
 ring for supper !" 
 
 As the bell sounded, a superb South American 
 trulian darted in from the conservatory, and, spread- 
 ing his gorgeous black and gold wings a moment 
 over the alabaster shoulder of Lady Ravelgold, as if 
 he took a pleasure in prolonging the first touch as 
 he alighted, turned his large liquid eye fiercely on 
 Tremlet. 
 
 " Thus it is," said Lady Ravelgold, " we forget our 
 old favorites in our new. See how jealous he is !" 
 
 " Supper is served, miladi !" said a servant entering. 
 
 " A hand to each, then, for the present," she said, 
 putting one into Tremlet's, and holding up the trulian 
 with the other. " He who behaves best shall drink 
 first with me." 
 
 " I beg your ladyship's pardon," said Tremlet, 
 drawing back, and looked at the servant, who im- 
 mediately left the room. " Let us understand each 
 other! Does Lady Imogen sup with us to-night ?" 
 
 " Lady Imogen has retired," said her mother, in 
 some surprise. 
 
 " Then, madam, will you be seated one moment and 
 listen to me ?" 
 
 Lady Ravelgold sat down on the nearest ottoman, 
 with the air of a person too high bred to be taken by 
 surprise, but the color deepened to crimson in the 
 centre of her cheek, and the bird on her hand be- 
 trayed by one of his gurgling notes that he was held 
 more tightly than pleased him. With a calm and de- 
 cisive tone, Tremlet went through the explanation 
 given in the previous parts of this narration. He de- 
 clared his love for Lady Imogen, his hopes (while he 
 had doubts of his birth) that Lady Ravelgold's increas- 
 ing obligations and embarrassments and his own wealth 
 might weigh against his disadvantages ; and now, his 
 honorable descent being established, and his rank en- 
 titling him to propose for her hand, he called upon 
 Lady Ravelgold to redeem her obligations to him by 
 an immediate explanation to her daughter of his con- 
 duct toward herself, and by lending her whole influ- 
 i ence to the success of his suit. 
 
LADY RAVELGOLD. 
 
 473 
 
 Five minutes are brief time to change a lover into a 
 son-in-law ; and Lady Ravelgold, as we have seen in 
 the course of this story, was no philosopher. She 
 buried her face in her hands, and sat silent for a while 
 after Tremlet had concluded : but the case was a very 
 clear one. Ruin and mortification were in one scale, 
 mortification and prosperity in the other. She rose, 
 pale but decided, and requesting Monsieur le conte 
 Manteuffel to await her a few minutes, ascended to 
 her daughter's chamber. 
 
 " If you please, sir," said a servant, entering in about 
 half an hour, " miladi and Lady Imogen beg that you 
 will join them in the supper-room." 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The spirit of beauty, if it haunt in such artificial at- 
 mospheres as Belgrave square, might have been pleased 
 to sit invisibly on the vacant side of Lady Ravelgold's 
 table. Tremlet had been shown in by the servant to a 
 small apartment, built like a belvidere over the garden, 
 half boudoir in its character, yet intended as a supper- 
 room, and at the long window (opening forth upon 
 descending terraces laden with flowers, and just now 
 flooded with the light of a glorious moon) stood Lady 
 Imogen, with her glossy head laid against the case- 
 ment, and the palm of her left hand pressed close upon 
 her heart. If those two lights — the moon faintly shed 
 off from the divine curve of her temple, and the stained 
 rose-lamp pouring its mellow tint full on the heavenly 
 shape and whiteness of hershoulder and neck — if those 
 two lights, I say, could have been skilfully managed, 
 Mr. Lawrence ! what a picture you might have made 
 of Lady Imogen Ravelgold ! 
 
 " Imogen, my daughter ! Mr. Tremlet !" said her 
 mother as he entered. 
 
 Without changing her position, she gave him the 
 hand she had been pressing on her heart. 
 
 " Mr. Tremlet !" said Lady Ravelgold, evidently 
 entering into her daughter's embarrassment, " trouble 
 yourself to come to the table and give me a bit of this 
 pheasant. Imogen, George waits to give you some 
 champagne." 
 
 " Can you forgive me ?" said the beautiful girl, be- 
 fore turning to betray her blushing cheek and suffused 
 eyes to her mother. 
 
 Tremlet stopped as if to pluck a leaf from the ver- 
 bena at her feet, and passed his lips over the slight fin- 
 gers he held. 
 
 " Pretty trulian !" murmured Lady Ravelgold to her 
 bird, as he stood on the edge of her champagne-glass, 
 and curving his superb neck nearly double, contrived 
 to drink from the sparkling brim — " pretty trulian ! 
 you will be merry after this ! What ancient Sybarite, 
 think you, Mr. Tremlet, inhabits the body of this 
 bright bird ? Look up, mignon, and tell us if you were 
 Hylas or Alcibiades ! Is the pheasant good, Mr. Trem- 
 let ?" 
 
 " Too good to come from Hades, miladi. Is it true 
 thai you have your table supplied from Crockford's ?" 
 
 " Tout bonnement ! I make it a principle to avoid all 
 great anxieties, and I can trust nobody but Ude. He 
 sends my dinners quite hot, and if there is a particular 
 dish of game, he drives round at the hour and gives it 
 the last turn in my own kitchen. I should die, to be 
 responsible for my dinners. I don't know how people 
 get on that have no grand artiste. Pray, Mr. Trem- 
 let (I beg pardon — Monsieur le conte, perhaps I should 
 say ?") 
 
 " No, no, I implore you ! ' Tremlet' has been spoken 
 too musically to be so soon forgotten. Tremlet or 
 Charles, which you will !" 
 
 Lady Ravelgold put her hand in his, and looked 
 from his face to her daughter's with a smile, which as- 
 
 sured him that she had obtained a victory over herself. 
 Shrinking immediately, however, from anything like 
 sentiment (with the nervous dread of pathos so pecu- 
 liar to the English), she threw off her trulian, that 
 made a circle and alighted on the emerald bracelet of 
 Lady Imogen, and rang the bell for coffee. 
 
 "I flatter myself, Mr. Tremlet," she said, "that I, 
 have made a new application of the homoeopathic phi- 
 losophy. Hahnemann, they say, cures fevers by ag- 
 gravating the disease ; and when I can not sleep, I 
 drink coffee. J' en suis passablement Jiere ! You did 
 not know I was a philosopher ?" 
 
 " No, indeed !" 
 
 " Well, take some of this spiced mocha. I got it of 
 the Turkish ambassador, to whom I made beaux yeux 
 on purpose. Stop ! you shall have it in the little tin- 
 sel cups he sent me. George, bring those filagree 
 things ! Now, Mr. Tremlet, imagine yourself in the 
 serail du Bosphore — Imogen and I two lovely Circas- 
 sians, par exemple! Is it not delicious ? Talking of 
 the Bosphorus, nobody was classical enough to under- 
 stand the device in my coiffure to-night." 
 
 "What was it?" asked Tremlet, absently, gazing 
 while he spoke, with eyes of envy at the trulian, who 
 was whetting his bill backward and forward on the 
 clear bright lips of Lady Imogen. 
 
 " Do you think my profile Grecian ?" asked Lady 
 Ravelgold. 
 
 " Perfectly !" 
 
 " And my hair is coiffed a la Grec ?" 
 
 " Most becomingly." 
 
 " But still you won't see my golden grasshopper ! 
 Do you happen to know, sir, that to wear the golden 
 grasshopper was the birthright of an Athenian ? I saw 
 it in a book. Well ! I had to explain it to everybody. 
 By-the-way, what did that gambler, George Heriot, 
 mean, by telling me that its legs should be black ? — 
 'All Greeks have black legs,' said he, yawning in his 
 stupid way. What did he mean, Mr. Tremlet ?" 
 
 " ' Greeks' and blacklegs are convertible terms. He 
 thought you were more aufait of the slang dictionary. 
 Will you permit me to coax my beautiful rival from 
 your hand, Lady Imogen ?" 
 
 She smiled, and put forward her wrist, with a bend 
 of its slender and alabaster lines which would have 
 drawn a sigh from Praxiteles. The trulian glanced 
 his fiery eyes from his mistress's face to Tremlet's, 
 and as the strange hand was put out to take him from 
 his emerald perch, he flew with the quickness of light- 
 ning into the face of her lover, and buried the sharp 
 beak in his lip. The blood followed copiously, and 
 Lady Imogen, startled from her timidity, sprang from 
 her chair and pressed her hands one after the other 
 upon the wound, in passionate and girlish abandon- 
 ment. Lady Ravelgold hurried to her dressing-room 
 for something to stanch the wound, and, left alone 
 with the divine creature who hung over him, Tremlet 
 drew her to his bosom and pressed his cheek long and 
 closely to hers, while to his lips, as if to keep in life, 
 clung her own crimsoned and trembling fingers. 
 
 " Imogen !" said Lady Ravelgold, entering, " take 
 him to the fountain in the garden and wash the wound ; 
 then put on this bit of gold-beater's skin. I will come 
 to you when I have locked up the trulian. Is it pain- 
 ful, Mr. Tremlet ?" 
 
 Tremlet could not trust his voice to answer, but 
 with his arm still around Lady Imogen, he descended 
 by the terrace of flowers to the fountain. 
 
 They sat upon the edge of the marble basin, and 
 the moonlight striking through the jet of the fountain, 
 descended upon them like a rain of silver. Lady Imo- 
 gen had recovered from her fright, and buried her face 
 in her hands, remembering into what her feelings had 
 betrayed her; and Tremlet, sometimes listening to the 
 clear bell-like music of the descending water, some 
 times uttering the broken sentences which are most 
 
474 
 
 PALETTO'S BRIDE. 
 
 eloquent in love, sat out the hours till the stars began 
 to pale, undisturbed by Lady Ravelgold, who, on the 
 upper stair of the terrace, read by a small lamp, which, 
 in the calm of that heavenly summer night, burned 
 unflickeringly in the open air. 
 
 It was broad daylight when Tremlet, on foot, saun- 
 tered slowly past Hyde Park corner on his way to the 
 Albany. The lamps were still struggling with the 
 brightening approach to sunrise, the cabmen and their 
 horses slept on the stand by the Green Park, and with 
 cheerful faces the laborers went to their work, and with 
 haggard faces the night-birds of dissipation crept wea- 
 rily home. The well-ground dust lay in confused heel- 
 marks on the sidewalk, a little dampened by the night- 
 dew ; the atmosphere in the street was clear, as it never 
 is after the stir of day commences ; a dandy, stealing 
 out from Crockford's, crossed Piccadilly, lifting up his 
 head to draw in long breaths of the cool air, after the 
 closeness of over-lighted rooms and excitement ; and 
 Tremlet, marking none of these things, was making 
 his way through a line of carriages slowly drawing up 
 to take off their wearied masters from a prolonged fete 
 at Devonshire house, when a rude hand clapped him 
 on the shoulder. 
 
 " Monsieur Tremlet !" 
 
 "Ah, Baron! bien bonjour!" 
 
 " Bien rencontre, Monsieur ! You have insulted a 
 lady to-night, who has confided her cause to my hands. 
 Madam St. Leger, sir, is without a natural protector, 
 and you have taken advantage of her position to insult 
 her — grossly, Mr. Tremlet, grossly!" 
 
 Tremlet looked at the Russian during this extraor- 
 dinary address, and saw that he was evidently highly 
 excited with wine. He drew him aside into Berkeley 
 street, and in the calmest manner attempted to explain 
 what was not very clear to himself. He had totally 
 forgotten Mrs. St. Leger. The diplomate, though 
 quite beyond himself with his excitement, had suffi- 
 cient perception left to see the weak point of his state- 
 ment ; and infuriated with the placid manner in which 
 he attempted to excuse himself, suddenly struck his 
 glove into his face, and turned upon his heel. They 
 had been observed by a policeman, and at the moment 
 that Tremlet, recovering from his astonishment, sprang 
 forward to resent the blow, the gray-coated guardian 
 of the place laid his hand upon his collar and detained 
 him till the baron had disappeared. 
 
 More than once on his way to the Albany, Tremlet 
 surprised himself forgetting both the baron and the in- 
 sult, and feeding his heart in delicious abandonment 
 with the dreams of his new happiness. He reached 
 his rooms and threw himself on the bed, forcing from 
 his mind, with a strong effort, the presence of Lady 
 Imogen, and trying to look calmly on the unpleasant 
 circumstance before him. A quarrel which, the day 
 before, he would have looked upon merely as an in- 
 convenience, or which, under the insult of a blow, he 
 would have eagerly sought, became now an almost in- 
 supportable evil. When he reflected on the subject 
 of the dispute — a contention about a woman of doubt- 
 ful reputation taking place in the same hour with a 
 first avowal from the delicate and pure Lady Imogen — 
 when he remembered the change in his fortunes, 
 which he had as yet scarcely found time to realize — 
 on the consequences to her who was so newly dear to 
 him, and on all he might lose, now that life had be- 
 come invaluable — his thoughts were almost too painful 
 to bear. How seldom do men play with an equal stake 
 in the game of taking life, and how strange it is that 
 equality of weapons is the only comparison made ne- 
 cessary by the laws of honor ! 
 
 Tremlet was not a man to be long undecided. He 
 rose, after an hour's reflection, and wrote as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 " Baron : Before taking the usual notice of the oc- 
 currence of this morning, I wish to rectify one or two 
 points in which our position is false. I find myself, 
 since last night, the accepted lover of Lady Imogen 
 Ravelgold, and the master of estates and title as a 
 count of the Russian empire. Under the etourdisse- 
 ment of such sudden changes in feelings and fortune, 
 perhaps my forgetful ness of the lady, in whose cause 
 you are so interested, admits of indulgence. At any 
 rate, I am so newly in love with life, that I am willing 
 to suppose for an hour that had you known these cir- 
 cumstances, you would have taken a different view of 
 the offence in question. I shall remain at home till 
 two, and it is in your power till then to make me the 
 reparation necessary to my honor. Yours, etc., 
 
 " Tremlet." 
 
 There was a bridal on the following Monday at St. 
 George's church, and the Russian secretary stood be- 
 hind the bridegroom. Lady Ravelgold had never been 
 seen so pale, but her face was clear of all painful feel- 
 ing ; and it was observed by one who knew her well, 
 that her beauty had acquired, during the brief engage- 
 ment of her daughter, a singular and undefinable ele- 
 vation. As the carriages with their white favors turned 
 into Bond street, on their way back to Belgrave square, 
 the cortege was checked by the press of vehicles, and 
 the Russian, who accompanied Lady Ravelgold in her 
 chariot, found himself opposite the open britscka of a 
 lady who fixed her glass full upon him without recog- 
 nising a feature of his face. 
 
 " I am afraid you have affronted Mrs. St. Leger, 
 baron !" said Lady Ravelgold. 
 
 " Or I should not have been here !" said the Rus- 
 sian ; and as they drove up Piccadilly, he had just time 
 between Bond street and Milton Crescent to tell her 
 ladyship the foregone chapter of this story. 
 
 The trulian, on that day, was fed with wedding-cake, 
 and the wound on Mr. Tremlet's lip was not cured by 
 letting alone. 
 
 PALETTO'S BRIDE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " As a fish will sometimes gather force, and, with a longing, per- 
 haps, for the brightness of upper air, leap from its prescribed ele- 
 ment, and glitter a moment among the birds, so will there be found 
 men whose souls revolt against destiny, and make a fiery pluck at 
 things above them. But, like the fish, who drops, panting, with 
 dry scales, backward, the aspiring man oftenest regrets the native 
 element he has left ; and, with the failure of his unnatural effort, 
 drops back, content, to obscurity."— Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 " Mr daughter!" said the count Spinola. 
 
 The lady so addressed threw off a slight mantle and 
 turned her fair features inquiringly to her father. Heed- 
 less of the attention he had arrested, the abstracted 
 count paced up and down the marble pavement of his 
 hall, and when, a moment after, Francesca came to 
 him for his good-night kiss, he imprinted it silently 
 on her forehead, and stepped out on the balcony to 
 pursue, under the aiding light of the stars, thoughts 
 that were more imperative than sleep. 
 
 There had been a fete of great splendor in the ducal 
 gardens of the Boboli, and Francesca Spinola had 
 shown there, as usual, the most radiant and worship- 
 ped daughter of the nobilita of Florence. The mel- 
 ancholy duke himself (this was in the days of his first 
 marriage) had seemed even gay in presenting her with 
 flowers which he had gathered at her side, with the 
 dew on them (in an alley glittering with the diamonds on 
 noble bosoms, and dewdrops on roses that would slum- 
 ber, though it was the birth-night of a princess), and 
 
PALETTO'S BRIDE. 
 
 475 
 
 marked as was the royal attention to the envied beauty, 
 it was more easily forgiven her than her usual tri- 
 umphs — for it cost no one a lover. True to his con- 
 jugal vows, the sad-featured monarch paid to beauty 
 onfy the homage exacted alike by every most admira- 
 ble work of nature. 
 
 The grand-duke Leopold had not been the only ad- 
 mirer whose attentions to Francesca Spinola had been 
 remarked. A stranger, dressed with a magnificence 
 that seemed more fitted for a masquerade than a court- 
 ball, and yet of a mieu that promised danger to the 
 too inquisitive, had entered alone, and, marking out the 
 daughter of the haughty count from the first, had 
 procured an introduction, no one knew how, and 
 sought every opportunity which the intervals of the 
 dance afforded, to place himself at her side. Occu- 
 pied with the courtly devoirs of his rank, the count 
 was, for a while, unaware of what struck almost every 
 one else, and it was only when the stranger's name 
 was inquired of him by the duke, that his dark and 
 jealous eye fell upon a face whose language of kindling 
 and undisguised admiration a child would have inter- 
 preted aright. It was one of those faces that are of 
 no degree — that may belong to a barbaric king, or to 
 a Greek slave — that no refinement would improve, and 
 no servile habits degrade; faces which lake their 
 changes from an indomitable and powerful soul, and 
 are beyond the trifling impression of the common usages 
 of life. Spinola was offended with the daring and 
 passionate freedom of the stranger's gaze upon his 
 daughter; but he hesitated to interrupt their conver- 
 sation too rudely. He stayed to exchange a compli- 
 ment with some fair obstruction in his way across the 
 crowded saloon, and, in the next moment, Francesca 
 stood alone. 
 
 " Who left you this moment, my Francesca?" asked 
 the count, with affected unconcern. 
 "I think, a Venetian," she answered. 
 "And his name?" 
 " I know not, my father !" 
 The count's face flashed. 
 
 "Who presented him to my darling?" he asked, 
 again forcing himself to composure. 
 
 Francesca colored ; and, with downcast eyes, an- 
 swered : — 
 
 "No one, my father! He seemed to know me, and 
 I thought I might have forgotten him." 
 
 Spinola turned on his heel, and, after a few vain in- 
 quiries, and as vain a search for the stranger, ordered 
 his attendants, and drove silently home. 
 
 It was close upon the gray of the morning, and the 
 count still leaned over the stone-railing of his balcony. 
 Francesca had been gone an hour to her chamber. 
 A guitar-string sounded from the street below, and, a 
 moment after, a manly and mellow voice broke into a 
 Venetian barcarole, and sang with a skill and tender- 
 ness which a vestal could scarce have listened to un- 
 moved. Spinola stepped back and laid his hand upon 
 his sword ; but, changing his thought, he took a lamp 
 from the wall within, and crept noiselessly to his I 
 daughter's chamber. She lay within her silken cur- 
 tains, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and from 
 her parted lips came the low breath of innocent and 
 untroubled sleep. Reassured, the count closed her 
 window and extinguished his lamp; and, when the 
 guitar was no longer heard echoing from the old 
 palace walls, and the rich voice of the serenader had 
 died away with his footsteps, the lord of the Palazzo 
 Spinola betook himself to sleep with a heart somewhat 
 relieved of its burden. 
 
 On the following day, the count pleaded the early- 
 coming heats of summer; and, with slight prepara- 
 tion, left Florence for his summer-palace in the Ap- 
 ennines. When Francesca joined him cheerfully, and 
 even gayly, in his sudden plan, he threw aside the 
 jealous fears that had haunted his breast, and forgot 
 
 the stranger and his barcarole. The old trees of his 
 maison tie plaisance were heavy with the leaves of the 
 Italian May; the statues stood cool in the shade; the 
 mountain rivulets forgot their birth in the rocky 
 brooks, and ran over channels of marble, and played 
 up through cactus-leaves and sea-shells, and nereids' 
 horns, all carved by the contemporaries of Donatello. 
 " And here," thought the proud noble, " I am a Vecart 
 of the designs of adventurers, and the temptations and 
 dangers of gayety, and the child of my hopes will re- 
 fresh her beauty and her innocence, under the watchful 
 eye, ever present, of my love. 
 
 Francesca Spinola was one of those Italian natures 
 of which it is difficult for the inhabitants of other 
 climes to conceive. She had no feelings. She had 
 passions. She could love — but it sprang in an instant 
 to its fullest power — and maidenly reserve and hesita- 
 tion were incompatible with its existence. She had 
 listened, unmoved, to all the adulation of the duke's 
 court, and had been amused with the devotion of all 
 around her — but never touched. The voice of the 
 stranger at the fete of the Boboli — the daring words 
 he had addressed to her — had arrested her attention ; 
 and it needed scarce the hour — which flew like a mo- 
 ment at his side — to send a new sensation, like a tem- 
 pest, through her heart. She reasoned upon nothing 
 — asked nothing ; but, while she gave up her soul 
 wholly to a passion hitherto unfelt, the deep dissimula 
 tion which seems a natural part of the love of that 
 burning clime, prompted her, by an unquestioned im 
 pulse, to conceal it entirely from her father. She had 
 counterfeited sleep when nearly surprised in listening 
 to the barcarole, and she had little need to counterfeit 
 joy at her departure for the mountains. 
 
 The long valley of the Arno lay marked out upon 
 the landscape by a wreath of vapor, stealing up as if 
 enamored of the fading color of the clouds ; and far 
 away, like a silver bar on the rim of the horizon, shone 
 the long line of the Mediterranean. The mountain 
 sides lay bathed in azure; and, echoing from the 
 nearest, came the vesper-bells of Vallombrosa. Peace 
 and purity were stamped upon the hour. 
 
 "My child," said the softened count, drawing Fran- 
 cesca to his bosom, as they stood looking off upon 
 this scene from the flowery terrace beneath the por- 
 tico ; "does my child love me?" 
 
 Francesca placed her hands upon his shoulders and 
 kissed him for reply. 
 
 "I feel impelled," he continued, "to talk to you 
 while this beautiful hour is around us, of an affection 
 that resembles it." 
 
 " Resembles the sunset, my father ?" 
 
 " Yes ! Shall I tell you how ? By affecting with 
 its soft influence every object under the bend of the 
 sky ! My Francesca ! there are parents who love 
 their children, and love them well, and yet find feel- 
 ings for other attachments, and devotion for every 
 other interest in life. Not so mine! My love for 
 my child is a whole existence poured into hers. 
 Look at me, Francesca! I am not old. I am capa- 
 ble, perhaps, of other love than a parent's. There are 
 among the young and beautiful who have looked on 
 me with favoring eyes. My blood runs warm yet, and 
 my step is as full of manhood — perhaps my heart as 
 prompt to be gay— as ever. I mean to say that I am 
 not too old for a lover. Hoes my daughter think so ?" 
 
 " I have been long vain of your beauty, dear fa- 
 ther," said Francesca, threading her hand in his dark 
 curls. . , . 
 
 "There are other things that might share your 
 empire in my heart— politics, play, the arts— a hun- 
 dred passions which possess themselves of men whose 
 fortune or position gives them means and leisure. 
 Now listen, my daughter! You have supplanted all 
 these! You have filled my heart with yourself. 
 
476 
 
 PALETTO'S BRIDE. 
 
 T. am tempted to love — my heart is my daughter's. 
 I am asked to play — my thoughts are with my child. 
 I have neither time for politics, nor attention for the 
 arts — my being breathes through my child. I am 
 incapable of all else. Do you hear me, Francesca ?" 
 
 "I do, dear father !" 
 
 "Then, one moment more ! I can not conceal my 
 thoughts from you, and you will pardon love like mine 
 for ungrounded fears. I liked not the stranger at the 
 duke's palace." 
 
 Francesca stole a quick look at her father, and, 
 with the rapidity of light, her dark eye resumed its 
 tranquillity. 
 
 " I say I liked him not ! No one knew him ! He 
 is gone, no one knows whither! I trust he will never 
 be seen more in Florence. But I will not disguise 
 from you that I thought you — pleased with him !" 
 
 "Father!" 
 
 " Forgive me if I wrong you — but, without pursu- 
 ing the subject, let your father implore you, on his 
 knees, for the confidence of your heart. Will you 
 tell me your thoughts, Francesca ? Will you love 
 me with but the thousandth part of my adoration, my 
 devotion, for my child?" 
 
 "Father! I will !" 
 
 The count rose from the knee on which he had 
 fallen, gave his daughter a long embrace, and led her 
 in. And that night she fled over the Tuscan border, 
 into neighboring Romagna, and, with the stranger at 
 her side, sped away, under the cover of night, toward 
 the shores of the Brenta. 
 
 Like a city of secrets, sleeps silent Venice. Her 
 sea-washed foundations are buried under the smooth 
 glass of the tide. Her palace-entrances are dark cav- 
 erns, impenetrable to the eye. Her veiled dames are 
 unseen in their floating chambers, as they go from 
 street to street ; and mysteriously and silently glide to 
 and fro those swift gondolas, black as night, yet carry- 
 ing sadness and mirth, innocence and guilt, alike 
 swiftly, mysteriously, and silently. Water, that be- 
 trays no footstep, and covers all with the same mantle 
 of light, fills her streets. Silence, that is the seal of 
 secrecy, reigns day and night over her thousand 
 palaces. 
 
 For an hour the smooth mirror of the broad canal 
 that sweeps under the Rialto, had not been divided by 
 the steel prow of a gondola. Francesca Spinola stood 
 at the window of a chamber in a palace of gorgeous 
 magnificence, watching that still water for the coming 
 of her husband. The silver lines of the moon stole 
 back imperceptibly, as her full orb sailed up the 
 heavens, and the turrets of the old architecture of 
 Venice, drawn clearly on the unruffled bosom of the 
 canal, seemed retiring before a consuming sheet of 
 silver. The silence seemed painful. To the ear of 
 the beautiful Florentine, the want of the sound of a 
 footstep, of the echo of some distant wheel, the utter 
 death of all sound common to even the stillest hour of 
 a paved city, seemed oppressive and awful. Behind 
 her burned lamps of alabaster, and perfumes filled the 
 chamber, and on a cushion of costly velvet lay a mean 
 and unornamented guitar. Its presence in so costly a 
 palace was a secret yet withheld. She wished to 
 touch its strings, if only to disperse the horror of si- 
 lence. But she raised her fingers, and again, without 
 touching it, leaned out and watched the dark arch of 
 the Rialto. 
 
 A gondola, with a single oar, sped swiftly from its 
 black shadow. It could not be Paletto. He had 
 gone with his two faithful servants to St. Mark's. 
 The oar ceased — the bark headed in — the water 
 splashed on the marble stair — and the gondolier step- 
 ped on shore. Ah, who but Paletto had such a form 
 as stood there in the moonlight? 
 
 " Are we to be married again," said Francesca, as 
 her husband entered the chamber, " that you have 
 once more disguised yourself as a fisherman ?" 
 
 Paletto turned from the light, and took up the 
 mysterious guitar. " It is no night to be in-doors, my 
 Francesca! Come with me to the lagoon, and I will 
 tell you the story of this despised instrument. Will 
 you come ?" he pursued, as she stood looking at him 
 in wonder at his strange dress and disturbed look. 
 " Will you come, my wife?" 
 
 " But you have returned without your gondoliers!" 
 she said, advancing a step to take his hand. 
 
 "I have rowed a gondola ere now," he answered; 
 and, without further explanation, he led her down the 
 lofty staircase, and seating her in the stern of the bark 
 which he had brought with him, stepped upon the 
 platform, and, with masterly skill and power, drove it 
 like a shadow under the Rialto. 
 
 He who has watched the horn of a quarter-moon 
 gliding past the towers, pinnacles and palaces of the 
 drifting clouds, and in his youthful and restless brain, 
 fancied such must be the smooth delight and chang- 
 ing vision of a traveller in strange lands — one who has 
 thus dreamed in his boyhood will scarce shoot though 
 Venice for the first time in a gondola, without a 
 sense of familiarity with the scene and motion. The 
 architecture of the clouds is again drifting past, and 
 himself seems borne onward by the silver shallop of 
 the moon. 
 
 Francesca sat on the low cushion of the gondola, 
 watching and wondering. How should her luxurious 
 Paletto have acquired the exquisite skill with which 
 he drove the noiseless boat like a lance-fly over the 
 water. Another gondola approached or was left be- 
 hind, the corner of a palace was to be rounded, or the 
 black arch of a bridge to be shot under, and the 
 peculiar warning-cry of the gondoliers, giving notice 
 of their unheard approach, fell from his lips so me- 
 chanically, that the hireling oarsmen of the city, mar- 
 velling at his speed, but never doubting that it was a 
 comrade of the Piazza, added the "fratello mio" to 
 their passing salutation. She saw by every broad 
 beam of light, which, between the palaces, came down 
 across them, a brow clouded and a mind far from the 
 oar he turned so skilfully. She looked at the gondola 
 in which she sat. It was old and mean. In the prow 
 lay a fisher's net, and the shabby guitar, thrown upon 
 it, seemed now, at least, not out of place. She looked 
 up at Paletto once more, and, in his bare throat and 
 bosom, his loose cap and neglected hair, she could 
 with difficulty recognise the haughty stranger of the 
 Boboli. She spoke to him. It was necessary to 
 break the low-born spell that seemed closing around 
 her. Paletto started at her voice, and suspending his 
 oar, while the gondola still kept way as if with its own 
 irresistible volition, he passed his hand over his eyes, 
 and seemed waking from some painful dream. 
 
 The gondola was now far out in the lagoon. — 
 Around them floated an almost impalpable vapor, 
 just making the moonlight visible, and the soft click 
 of the water beneath the rising and dropping prow was 
 the only sound between them and the cloudless heaven. 
 In that silence Paletto strung his guitar and sang to 
 his bride with a strange energy. She listened and 
 played with his tangled locks, but there seemed a spell 
 upon her tongue when she would ask the meaning of 
 this mystery. 
 
 "Francesca!" he said at last, raising his head from 
 her lap. 
 
 "What says my fisherman?" she replied, holding 
 up his rough cap with a smile. 
 
 Paletto started, but recovering his composure, in- 
 stantly took the cap from her jewelled fingers and 
 threw it carelessly upon his head. 
 
 " Francesca ! who is your husband ?" 
 
 "Paletto?" 
 
PALETTO'S BRIDE. 
 
 477 
 
 " And who is Paletto ?" 
 
 " I would have asked sometimes, but your kisses 
 have interrupted me. Yet I know enough." 
 
 " What know you?" 
 
 " That he is a rich and noble seignior of Venice !" 
 
 " Do I look one to-night ?" 
 
 " Nay — for a masquerade, I have never seen a 
 better! Where learned you to look so like a fisher- 
 man and row so like a gondolier ?" 
 
 Paletto frowned. 
 
 " Francesca !" said he folding his arms across his 
 bosom, " I am the son of a fisherman, and 1 was bred 
 to row the gondola beneath you !" 
 
 The sternness of his tone checked the smile upon 
 her beautiful lip, and when she spoke it was with a 
 look almost as stern as his own. 
 
 "You mock me too gravely, Paletto ! But come! 
 I will question you in your own humor. Who educa- 
 ted the fisherman's son?" 
 
 " The fisherman." 
 
 " And his palace and his wealth — whence came 
 they, Signor Pescatore?" 
 
 The scornful smile of incredulity with which this 
 question was asked, speedily fled from her lip as Pal- 
 etto answered it. 
 
 " Listen ! Three months since I had never known 
 other condition than a fisherman of the lagoon, nor 
 worn other dress than this in whichyou see me. The 
 first property I ever possessed beyond my day's earn- 
 ings, was this gondola. It was my father's, Giannotto 
 the fisherman. When it became mine by his death, 
 I suddenly wearied of my tame life, sold boat and nets, 
 and with thoughts which you can not understand, 
 but which have brought you here, took my way to 
 the Piazza. A night of chance, begun with the whole 
 of my inheritance staked upon a throw, left me mas- 
 ter of wealth I had never dreamed of. I became a 
 gay signore. It seemed to me that my soul had gone 
 out of me, and a new spirit, demoniac if you will, had 
 taken possession. I no longer recognised myself. I 
 passed for an equal with the best-born, my language 
 altered, my gait, my humor. One strong feeling alone 
 predominated — an insane hatred to the rank in which 
 you were born, Francesca ! It was strange, too, that 
 I tried to ape its manners. I bought the palace you 
 have just left, and filled it with costly luxuries. And 
 then there grew upon me the desire to humiliate that 
 rank — to pluck down to myself some one of its proud 
 and cherished daughters — such as you !" 
 
 Francesca muttered something between her teeth, 
 and folded her small arms over her bosom. Paletto 
 went on. 
 
 " I crossed to Florence with this sole intention. 
 Unknown and uninvited, I entered the palace at the 
 fete of the Boboli, and looked around for a victim. 
 You were the proudest and most beautiful. I chose 
 you and you are here." 
 
 Paletto looked at her with a smile, and never sun- 
 beam was more unmixed with shadow than the smile 
 which answered it on the lips of Spinola's daughter. 
 
 " My Paletto !" she said, " you have the soul of a 
 noble, and the look of one, and I am your bride. Let 
 us return to the palace !" 
 
 " I have no palace but this !" he said, striking his 
 hand like a bar of iron upon the side of the gondola. 
 " You have not heard out my tale." 
 
 Francesca sat with a face unmoved as marble. 
 
 "This night, at play, I lost all. My servants are 
 dismissed, my palace belongs to another, and with 
 this bark which I had repurchased, I am once more 
 Paletto the fisherman!" 
 
 A slight heave of the bosom of the fair Florentine 
 was her only response to this astounding announce- 
 ment. Her eyes turned slowly from the face of the 
 fisherman, and fixing apparently on some point far out 
 in the Adriatic, she sat silent, motionless, and cold- 
 
 " I am a man, Francesca !" said Paletto after a pause 
 which, in the utter stillness of the lagoon around them, 
 seemed like a suspension of the breathing of nature, 
 and "I have not gone through this insane dream with- 
 out some turning aside of the heart. Spite of my- 
 self, I loved you : and I could not dishonor you. We 
 are married, Francesca !" 
 
 The small dark brows of the Florentine lowered 
 till the silken lashes they overhung seemed starting 
 from beneath her forehead. Her eyes flashed fire 
 below. 
 
 " Bene .'" said Paletto, rising to his feet ; " one 
 word more while we have silence around us and are 
 alone. You are free to leave me, and I will so far re- 
 pair the wrong I have done you, as to point out the 
 way. It will be daylight in an hour. Fly to the 
 governor's palace, announce your birth, declare that 
 you were forced from your father by brigands, and 
 claim his protection. The world will believe you, and 
 the consequences to myself I will suffer in silence." 
 
 With a sudden, convulsive motion, Francesca thrust 
 out her arm, and pointed a single finger toward Venice. 
 Paletto bent to his oar, and quivering in every seam 
 beneath its blade, the gondola sped on his way. The 
 steel prow struck fire on the granite steps of the 
 Piazza, the superb daughter of Spinola stepped over 
 the trembling side, and with a half-wave of her hand, 
 strode past the Lion of St. Mark, and approached the 
 sentinel at the palace-gate. And as her figure was 
 lost among the arabesque columns shaded from the 
 moon,Paletto's lonely gondola shot once more silently 
 and slowly from the shore. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The smooth, flat pavement of the Borg'ognisanti 
 
 had been covered since morning with earth, and the 
 
 windows and balconies on either side were flaunting 
 
 with draperies of the most gorgeous colors. The 
 
 ' riderless horse-races, which conclude the carnival in 
 
 Florence, were to be honored by the presence of the 
 
 j court. At the far extremity of the street, close by the 
 
 I gate of the Cascine, an open veranda, painted in fresco, 
 
 i stood glittering with the preparations for the royal party, 
 
 and near it the costlier hangings of here and there a 
 
 window or balustrade, showed the embroidered crests 
 
 of the different nobles of Tuscany. It was the people's 
 
 place and hour, and beneath the damask and cloth of 
 
 gold, the rough stone windows were worn smooth by 
 
 the touch of peasant hands, and the smutched occu- 
 
 ! pants, looking down from the balconies above, upon 
 
 the usupers of their week-day habitations, formed, to 
 
 the stranger's eye, not the least interesting feature of 
 
 the scene. 
 
 As evening approached, the balconies began to 
 show their burden of rank and beauty, and the street 
 below filled with the press of the gay contadini. 
 The ducal cortege, in open carriages, drove down 
 the length of the course to their veranda at the gate, 
 but no other vehicle was permitted to enter the ser- 
 ried crowd; and, on foot like the peasant -girl, the 
 noble's daughter followed the servants of her house, 
 who slowly opened for her a passage to the balcony 
 she sought. The sun-light began to grow golden. 
 The convent-bell across the Arno rang the first peal 
 of vespers, and the horses were led in. 
 
 It was a puzzle to any but an Italian how that race 
 was to be run. The entire population of Florence 
 was crowded into a single narrow street — men, women, 
 and children, struggling only for a foothold. The sig- 
 nal was about to be given for the start, yet no attempt 
 was made to clear a passage. Twenty high-spirited 
 horses fretted behind the rope, each with a dozen 
 spurs hung to his surcingales, which, at the least mo- 
 
478 
 
 PALETTO'S BRIDE. 
 
 tion, must drive him onward like the steed of Mazep- 
 pa. Gay ribands were braided in their manes, and the 
 bets ran high. All sounded and looked merry, yet it 
 would seem as if the loosing of the start-rope must be 
 like the letting in of destruction upon the crowd. 
 
 In a projecting gallery of a house on the side next 
 the Arno, was a party that attracted attention, some- 
 what from their rank and splendid attire, but more 
 from the remarkable beauty of a female, who seemed 
 their star and idol. She was something above the 
 middle height of the women of Italy, and of the style 
 of face seen in the famous Judith of the Pitti — dark, 
 and of melancholy so unfathomable as almost to af- 
 fray the beholder. She looked a brooding prophet- 
 ess ; yet through the sad expression of her features 
 there was a gleam of fierceness, that to the more criti- 
 cal eye betrayed a more earthly gleam of human pas- 
 sion and suffering. As if to belie the maturity of years 
 of which such an expression should be the work, an 
 ungloved hand and arm of almost childlike softness 
 and roundness lay on the drapery of the railed gallery ; 
 and stealing from that to her just-perfected form, the 
 gazer made a new judgment of her years, while he 
 wondered whal strange fires had forced outward the 
 riper lineaments of her character. 
 
 The count Fazelli, the husband of this fair dame, 
 stood within reach of her hand, for it was pressed on 
 his arm with no gentle touch, yet his face was turned 
 from her. He was a slight youth, little older, appa- 
 rently, than herself, of an effeminate and yet wilful cast 
 of countenance, and would have been pronounced by 
 women (what a man would scarce allow him to be) 
 eminently handsome. Effeminate coxcomb as he was, 
 he had power over the stronger nature beside him, and 
 of such stuff, in courts and cities, are made sometimes 
 the heroes whose success makes worthier men almost 
 forswear the worship due to women. 
 
 There were two other persons in the balconies of 
 the Corso, who were actors in the drama of which this 
 was a scene. The first was the prima donna of the 
 Cocomero, to whose rather mature charms the capri- 
 cious Fazelli had been for a month paying a too open 
 homage ; and the second was a captain in the duke's 
 guard, whose personal daring in the extermination of 
 a troop of brigands, had won for him some celebrity 
 and his present commission. What thread of sympa- 
 thy rested between so humble an individual and the 
 haughty countess Fazelli, will be shown in the sequel. 
 Enough for the present, that, as he stood leaning 
 against the pillar of an opposite gallery, looking care- 
 lessly on the preparations for the course, that proud 
 dame saw and remembered him. 
 
 A blast from a bugle drew all eyes to the starting- 
 post, and in another minute the rope was dropped, and 
 the fiery horses loosed upon their career. Right into 
 the crowd, as if the bodies of the good citizens of 
 Florence were made of air, sprang the goaded troop, 
 and the impossible thing was done, for the suffocating 
 throngs divided like waves before the prow, and united 
 again as scathless and as soon. The spurs played 
 merrily upon the flanks of the affrighted animals, and 
 in an instant they had swept through the Borg'ogni- 
 eanti, and disappeared into the narrow lane leading to 
 the Trinita. It was more a scramble than a race, yet 
 there must be a winner, and all eyes were now occu- 
 pied in gazing after the first glimpse of his ribands as 
 he was led back in triumph. 
 
 Uncompelled by danger, the suffocating crowd made 
 way with more difficulty for the one winning horse 
 than they had done for the score that had contended 
 with him. Yet, champing the bit, and tossing his 
 ribands into the air, he came slowly back, and after 
 passing in front of the royal veranda, where a small 
 flag was thrown down to be set into the rosette of his 
 bridle, he returned a few steps, and was checked by 
 the groom under the balcony of the prima donna. A 
 
 moment after, the winning flag was waving from the 
 rails above, and as the sign that she was the owner of 
 the victorious horse was seen by the people, a shout 
 arose which thrilled the veins of the fair singer more 
 than all the plaudits of the Cocomero. It is thought 
 to be pleasant to succeed in that for which we have 
 most struggled — that for which our ambition and our 
 efforts are known to the world — to be eminent, in 
 short, in our metier, our vocation. I am inclined to 
 think it natural to most men, however, and to all pos- 
 sessors of genius, to undervalue that for which the 
 world is most willing to praise them, and to delight 
 more in excelling in that which seems foreign to their 
 usual pursuits, even if it be a trifle. It is delightful to 
 disappoint the world by success in anything. Detrac- 
 tion, that follows genius to the grave, sometimes ad- 
 mits its triumph, but never without the " back-water" 
 that it could do no more. The fine actress had won a 
 shout from assembled Florence, yet off the scene. She 
 laid one hand upon her heart, and the other, in the 
 rash exultation of the moment, ventured to wave a 
 kiss of gratitude to the count Fazelli. 
 
 As that favored signor crossed to offer his congratu- 
 lations, his place beside the countess was filled by a 
 young noble, who gave her the explanatory informa- 
 tion — that the horse was Fazelli's gift. Calmly, almost 
 without a sign of interest or emotion, she turned her 
 eyes upon the opposite balcony. A less searching and 
 interested glance would have discovered, that if the 
 young count had hitherto shared the favor of the ad- 
 mired singer with his rivals, he had no rival now. 
 There was in the demeanor of both an undisguised 
 tenderness that the young countess had little need to 
 watch long, and retiring from the balcony, she accept- 
 ed the attendance of her communicative companion, 
 and was soon whirling in her chariot over the Ponte 
 St. Angelo, on her way to the princely palace that 
 would soon cease to call her its mistress. 
 
 Like square ingots of silver, the moonlight came 
 through the battlements of the royal abode of the 
 Medici. It was an hour before day. The heavy heel 
 of the sentry was the only sound near the walls of the 
 Pitti, save, when he passed to turn, the ripple of the 
 Arno beneath the arches of the jeweller's bridge broke 
 faintly on the ear. The captain of the guard had 
 strolled from the deep shadow of the palace into the 
 open moonlight, and leaned against a small stone shrine 
 of the Virgin set into the opposite wall, watching mu- 
 singly the companionable and thought-stirring em- 
 peress of the night. 
 
 " Paletto !" suddenly uttered a voice near him. 
 
 The guardsman started, but instantly recovered his 
 position, and stood looking over his epaulet at the 
 intruder, with folded arms. 
 
 " Paletto !" she said again, in a lower and more ap- 
 pealing tone — " will you listen to me ?" 
 
 " Say on, Countess Fazelli !" 
 
 " Countess Fazelli no longer, but Paletto's wife !" 
 
 " Ha ! ha !" laughed the guardsman bitterly, " that 
 story is old, for so false a one." 
 
 " Scorn me not ! I am changed." The dark eyes 
 of Francesca Cappone lifted up, moist and full, into 
 the moonlight, and fixing them steadfastly on the sol- 
 dier's, she seemed to demand that he should read her 
 soul in them. For an instant, as he did so, a troubled 
 emotion was visible in his own features, but a new 
 thought seemed to succeed the feeling, and turning 
 away with a cold gesture, he said, " I knew you false, 
 but till now I thought you pure. Tempt me not to 
 despise as well as hate you !" 
 
 " I have deserved much at your hand, "she answered, 
 with a deeper tone, " but not this. You are my hus- 
 band, Paletto !" 
 
 " One of them !" he replied, with a sneer. 
 
 Francesca clasped her hands in agony. " I have 
 come to you," she said, "trusting the generous nature 
 
VIOLANTA CESARINI. 
 
 479 
 
 which I have proved so well. I can not live unloved. 
 I deserted you, for I was ignorant of myself. I have 
 tried splendor and the love of my own rank, but one 
 is hollow and the last is selfish. Oh, Paletto ! what 
 love is generous like yours?" 
 
 The guardsman's bosom heaved, but he did not turn 
 to her. She laid her hand upon his arm : " I have 
 come to implore you to take me back, Paletto. False 
 as I was to you, you have been true to me. I would 
 be your wife again. I would share your poverty, if 
 you were once more a fisherman on the lagoon. Are 
 you inexorable, Paletto ?" 
 
 Her hand stole up to his shoulder : she crept closer 
 to him, and buried her head, unrepelled, in his bosom. 
 Paletto laid his hand upon the mass of raven hair 
 whose touch had once been to him so familiar, and 
 while the moon drew their shadows as one on the 
 shrine of the Virgin, the vows of early love were re- 
 peated with a fervor unknown hitherto to the lips of 
 Cappone's daughter, and Paletto replied, not like a 
 courtly noble, but like that which was more eloquent 
 — his own love-prompted and fiery spirit. 
 
 The next day there was a brief but fierce rencontre 
 between Count Fazelli and the guardsman Paletto, at 
 the door of the church of Santa Trinita. Francesca 
 had gone openly with her husband to vespers, attend- 
 ed by a monk. When attacked by the young count 
 as the daring abducer of his wife, he had placed her 
 under that monk's protection till the quarrel should be 
 over, and, with the same holy man to plead his cause, 
 he boldly claimed his wife at the duke's hands, and 
 bore her triumphantly from Florence. 
 
 I heard this story in Venice. The gondolier Pa- 
 letto, they say, still rows his boat on the lagoon : and 
 sometimes his wife is with him, and sometimes a daugh- 
 ter, whose exquisite beauty, though she is still a child, 
 is the wonder of the Rialto as he passes under. I 
 never chanced to see him, but many a stranger has 
 hired the best oar of the Piazza, to pull out toward the 
 Adriatic in the hope of finding Paletto's boat and get- 
 ting a glimpse of his proud and still most beautiful 
 wife — a wife, it is said, than whom a happier or more 
 contented one with her lot lives not in the " city of 
 ;he sea." 
 
 VIOLANTA CESARINI. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " When every feather sticks in its own wing, 
 Lord Timon will be left a naked gull." 
 
 It was an eve fit for an angel's birthnight (and we 
 know angels are born in this loving world), and while 
 the moon, as if shining only for artists' eyes, drew the 
 outlines of palace and chapel, stern turret and sere- 
 naded belvidere, with her silver pencil on the street, 
 two grave seniors, guardians in their own veins of the 
 blood of two lofty names known long to Roman story, 
 leaned together over a balcony of fretted stone, jutting 
 out upon the Corso, and affianced a fair and noble 
 maid of seventeen summers to a gentleman whose 
 character you shall learn, if we come safe to the se- 
 quel. 
 
 " The cardinal has offered me a thousand scudi for 
 my Giorgione, said the old count Malaspina, at last, 
 changing his attitude and the subject at the same 
 time. 
 
 " Anima diporco .'" exclaimed the other, " what stirs 
 the curtain ? The wind is changing, Malaspina. Let 
 us in ! So, he offers but a thousand ! I shall feel my 
 
 Bui a thou- 
 
 rheumatism to-morrow with this change, 
 sand ! — ha ! ha ! Let us in, let us in !" 
 
 " Let us out, say I!" murmured two lips that were 
 never made of cherries, though a bird would have 
 pecked at them ; and stealing from behind the curtain, 
 whose agitation had persuaded her father that the wind 
 was rising, Violanta Cesarini, countess in her own right, 
 and beautiful by Heaven's rare grace, stepped forth 
 into the moonlight. 
 
 She drew a long breath as she looked down into the 
 Corso. The carriages were creeping up and down at 
 a foot-pace, and the luxurious dames, thrown back on 
 their soft cushions, nodded to the passers-by, as they 
 recognised friends and acquaintances where the moon- 
 light broke through; crowds of slowpromenaders loi- 
 tered indolently on, now turning to look at the berry- 
 brown back of a contadini, with her stride like a tra- 
 gedy-queen, and her eyes like wells of jet, and now 
 leaning against a palace wall, while a wandering harp- 
 girl sung better for a baiocco than noble ladies for the 
 praise of a cardinal; at one corner stood an artist with 
 his tablet, catching some chance effect perhaps in the 
 drapery of a marble saint, perhaps in the softer dra- 
 pery of a sinner; the cafes, far up and dawn, looked 
 like festas out of doors, with their groups of gayly- 
 dressed idlers, eating sherbets and buying flowers ; a 
 gray friar passed now with his low-toned benedicite ; 
 and again a black cowl with a face that reddened the 
 very moonbeam that peeped under; hunchbacks con- 
 tended testily for the wall, and tall fellows (by their 
 lone hair and fine symmetry, professed models for 
 sculptors and painters) yielded to them with a gibe. 
 And this is Rome when the moon shines well, and on 
 this care-cheating scene looked down the countess 
 Violanta, with her heart as full of perplexity as her 
 silk boddice-lace would bear without breaking. 
 
 I dare say you did not observe, if you were in Rome 
 that night, and strolling, as you would have been in 
 the Corso (this was three years ago last May, and if 
 you were in the habit of reading the Diario di Roma, 
 the story will not be new to you) ; you did not observe, 
 I am sure, that a thread ran across from the balcony I 
 speak of, in the Palazzo Cesarim, to a high window 
 in an old palace opposite, inhabited, as are many 
 palaces in Rome, by a decayed family and several ar- 
 tists. On the two sides of this thread, pressed, while 
 she mused, the slight fingers of Violanta Cesarini; 
 and, as if it descended from the stars at every pull 
 which the light May-breeze gave it in passing, she 
 turned her soft blue eyes upward, and her face grew 
 radiant with hope— not such as is fed with star-gazing ! 
 Like a white dove shooting with slant wings down- 
 ward a folded slip of paper flew across on this invisible 
 thread, and, by heaven's unflickering lamp, Violanta 
 read some characters traced with a rough crayon, but 
 in most sweet Italian. A look upward, and a nod, as 
 if she were answering the stars that peeped over her, 
 and the fair form had gone with its snowy robes from 
 the balcony, and across the high window from which 
 the messenger had come, dropped the thick and im- 
 penetrable folds of the gray curtain of an artist. 
 
 It was a large upper room, such as is found in the 
 vast houses of the decayed nobility of Rome, and of 
 its two windows one was roughly boarded up to ex- 
 clude the light, while a coarse gray cloth did nearly 
 the same service at the other, shutting out all but an 
 artist's modicum of day. The walls of rough plaster 
 were covered with grotesque drawings, done apparently 
 with bits of coal, varied here and there with scraps of 
 unframed canvass, nailed carelessly up, and covered 
 with the study of some head, by a famous master. A 
 large table on one side of the room was burdened with 
 a confused heap of brushes pa.nt-bags, and discolored 
 cloths, surmounted with a clean palette ; and not far 
 off stood an easel, covered with thumb-marks of all 
 
480 
 
 VIOLANTA CESARINI. 
 
 dyes, and supporting a new canvass, on which was 
 outlined the figure of a nymph, with the head finished 
 in a style that would have stirred the warm blood of 
 Raphael himself with emulous admiration. A low 
 flock bed, and a chair without a bottom, but with a 
 large cloak hung over its back, a pair of foils and a 
 rapier, completed so much of the furniture of the 
 room as belonged to a gay student of Corregio's art, 
 who wrote himself Biondo Amieri. 
 
 By the light of the same antique lamp, hung on a 
 rusty nail against the wall, you might see a very good 
 effect on the face of an unfinished group in marble, 
 of which the model, in plaster, stood a little behind, 
 representing a youth with a dagger at his heart, ar- 
 rested in the act of self-murder by a female whose 
 softened resemblance to him proclaimed her at the first 
 glauce his sister. A mallet, chisels, and other im- 
 plements used in sculpture, lay on the rough base of 
 the unfinished group, and half-disclosed, half-con- 
 cealed, by a screen covered with prints by some curi- 
 ous female hand, stood a bed with white curtains, and 
 an oratory of carved oak at its head, supporting a 
 clasped missal. A chair or two, whose seats of worked 
 satin had figured one day in more luxurious neighbor- 
 hood, a table covered with a few books and several 
 drawings from the antique, and a carefully-locked 
 escritoire, served, with other appearances, to distin- 
 guish this side of the room as belonging to a separate 
 occupant, of gentler taste or nurture. 
 
 While the adventurous Violanta is preparing her- 
 self to take advantage of the information received by 
 her secret telegraph, I shall have time, dear reader, 
 to put you up to a little of the family history of the 
 Cesarini, necessary no less to a proper understanding 
 of the story, than to the heroine's character for dis- 
 cretion. On the latter point, I would suggest to you, 
 you may as well suspend your opinion. 
 
 It is well known to all the gossips in Rome, that, 
 for four successive generations, the marquises of 
 Cesarini have obtained dispensations of the pope for 
 marrying beautiful peasant-girls from the neighbor- 
 hood of their castle, in Romagna. The considerable 
 sums paid for these dispensations, reconciled the holy 
 see to such an unprecedented introduction of vulgar 
 blood into the veins of the nobility, and the remarkable 
 female beauty of the race (heightened by the addition 
 of nature's aristocracy to its own), contributed to main- 
 tain good will at a court, devoted above all others to 
 the cultivation of the fine arts, of which woman is the 
 Eidolon and the soul. The last marquis, educated 
 like his fathers, in their wild domain among the moun- 
 tains, selected, like them, the fairest wild-flower that 
 sprung at his feet, and after the birth of one son, ap- 
 plied for the tardy dispensation. From some un- 
 known cause (possibly a diminished bribe, as the mar- 
 quis was less lavish in his disposition than his prede- 
 cessors), the pope sanctioned the marriage, but re- 
 fused to legitimatize the son, unless the next born 
 should be a daughter. The marchioness soon after 
 retired (from mortification it is supposed) to her home 
 in the mountains, and after two years of close seclu- 
 sion, returned to Rome, bringing with her an infant 
 daughter, then three months of age, destined to be the 
 heroine of our story. No other child appearing, the 
 young Cesarini was legitimatized, and with his infant 
 sister passed most of his youth at Rome. Some three 
 or four years before the time when our tale com- 
 mences, this youth, who had betrayed always, a coarse 
 and brutal temper, administered his stiletto to a gen- 
 tleman on the Corso, and flying from Rome, became 
 a brigand in the Abruzzi. His violence and atrocity 
 in this congenial life, soon put him beyond hope of 
 pardon, and on his outlawry by the pope, Violanta be- 
 came the heiress of the estates of Cesarini. 
 
 The marchioness had died w'hen Violanta was be- 
 tween seven and eight years of age, leaving her, by a 
 
 death-bed injunction, in the charge of her own con- 
 stant attendant, a faithful servant from Romagno, sup- 
 posed to be distant kinswoman to her mistress. "With 
 this tried dependant, the young countess was permit- 
 ted to go where she pleased, at all hours when not at- 
 tended by her masters, and seeing her tractable and 
 lovely, the old marquis, whose pride in the beauty ot 
 his family was the passion next to love of money in 
 his heart, gave himself little trouble, and thought him- 
 self consoled for the loss of his son in the growing at- 
 tractions and filial virtues of his daughter. 
 
 On a bright morning in early spring, six years before 
 the date of our lale, the young countess and her at- 
 tendant were gathering wild flowers near the fountain 
 of Egeria (of all spots of earth, that on which the wild 
 flowers are most profuse and sweetest), when a de- 
 formed youth, who seemed to be no stranger to Donna 
 Bettina, addressed Violanta in a tone of voice so mu- 
 sical, and with a look so kindly and winning, that the 
 frank child took his hand, and led him oft' in search of 
 cardinals and blue-bells, with the familiarity of an es- 
 tablished playfellow. After this day, the little countess 
 never came home pleased from a morning drive and 
 ramble in which she had not seen her friend Signor 
 Giulio; and the romantic baths of Caracalla, and the 
 many delicious haunts among the ruins about Rome, 
 had borne witness to the growth of a friendship, all 
 fondness and impulse on the part of Violanta, all ten- 
 derness and delicacy on that of the deformed youth. 
 By what wonderful instinct they happened always to 
 meet, the delighted child never found time or thought 
 to inquire. 
 
 Two or three years passed on thus, and the old 
 marquis had grown to listen with amused familiarity 
 to his daughter's prattle about the deformed youth, 
 and no incident had varied the pleasant tenor of their 
 lives and rambles, except that, Giulio once falling ill, 
 Bettina had taken the young countess to his home, 
 where she discovered that, young as he was, he made 
 some progress in moulding in clay, and was destined for 
 a sculptor. This visit to the apartment of an obscure 
 youth, however, the marquis had seen fit to object to ; 
 and though, at his daughter's request, he sent the 
 young sculptor an order for his first statue, he per- 
 emptorily forbade all further intercourse between him 
 and Violanta. In the paroxysm of her grief at the 
 first disgrace she had ever fallen into with her master, 
 Bettina disclosed to her young mistress, by way of 
 justification, a secret she had been bound by the 
 most solemn oaths to conceal, and of which she now 
 was the sole living depository — that this deformed 
 youth was born in the castle of the Cesarini, in Ro- 
 magna, of no less obscure parentage than the castle's 
 lord and lady, and being the first child after the dis- 
 pensation of marriage, and a son, he was consequently 
 the rightful heir to the marquisate and estates of Cesa- 
 rini; and the elder son, by the terms of that dispen- 
 sation, was illegitimate. 
 
 This was astounding intelligence to Violanti, who, 
 nevertheless, child as she was, felt its truth in the 
 yearnings of her heart to Giulio ; but it was with no 
 little pains and difficulty on Bettina's part, that she was 
 persuaded to preserve the secret from her father. The 
 Romagnese knew her master's weakness ; and as tht 
 birth of the child had occurred during his long ab- 
 sence from the castle, and the marchioness, proud of 
 her eldest-born, had determined from the first that he 
 alone should enjoy the name and honors of his father, 
 it was not very probable that upon the simple word of 
 a domestic, he would believe a deformed hunchback 
 to be his son and heir. 
 
 The intermediate history of Giulio, Bettina knew 
 little about, simply informing her mistress, that dis- 
 gusted with his deformity, the unnatural mother had 
 sent him to nurse in a far-off village of Romagna, and 
 that the interest of a small sum which the marquis 
 
VIOLANTA CESAR1NL 
 
 481 
 
 supposed had been expended on masses for the souls 
 of his ancestors, was still paid to his foster-parents for 
 his use. 
 
 From the time of this disclosure, Violanta's life had 
 been but too happy. Feeling justified in contriving 
 secret interviews with her brother; and possessing the 
 efficient connivance of Bettina, who grew, like her- 
 self, almost to worship the pure-minded and the gentle 
 Giulio, her heart and her time were blissfully crowded 
 with interest. So far, the love that had welled from 
 her heart had been all joyous and untroubled. 
 
 It was during the absence of the marquis and his 
 daughter from Rome, and in an unhealthy season, 
 that Giulio, always delicate in health and liable to ex- 
 cessive fits of depression, had fallen ill in his solitary 
 room, and, but for the friendly care of a young artist 
 whom he had long known, must have died of want 
 and neglect. As he began to recover, he accepted the 
 offer of Amieri, his friend, to share with him a lodging 
 in the more elevated air of the Corso, and, the more 
 readily, that this room chanced to overlook the palace 
 of Cesarina. Here Violanta found him on her return, 
 and though displeased that he was no longer alone, 
 she still continued, when Amieri was absent, to see 
 him sometimes in his room, and their old haunts 
 without the walls were frequented as often as his 
 health and strength would permit. A chance meeting 
 of Violanta and Amieri in his own studio, however, 
 made it necessary that he should be admitted to their 
 secret, and the consequence'of that interview, and 
 others which Violanta found it impossible to avoid, 
 was a passion in the heart of the enthusiastic painter, 
 which consumed, as it well might, every faculty of 
 his soul. 
 
 We are thus brought to an evening of balmy May, 
 when Giulio found himself alone. Biondo had been 
 painting all day on the face of his nymph, endeavoring 
 in vain to give it any other features than those of the 
 lady of his intense worship, and having gone out to 
 ramble for fresh air and relaxation in the Corso, 
 Giulio thought he might venture to throw across his 
 ball of thread and send a missive to his sister, promising 
 her an uninterrupted hour of his society. 
 
 With these preliminaries, our story will now run 
 smoothly on. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 " Come in, carissima .'"' said the low, silver-toned 
 voice of the deformed sculptor, as a female figure, in 
 the hood and cloak of an old woman, crossed the 
 threshold of his chamber. 
 
 " Dear Giulio !" And she leaned slightly over the 
 diminutive form of her brother, and first kissing his 
 pale forehead, while she unfastened the clasp of 
 Bettina's cloak of black silk, threw her arms about 
 him as the disguise fell oft', and multiplied, between 
 her caresses, the endearing terms in which the lan- 
 guage of that soft clime is so prodigal. 
 
 They sat down at the foot of his group in marble, 
 and each told the little history of the hours they had 
 spent apart. They grew alike as they conversed ; 
 for theirs was that resemblance of the soul, to which 
 the features answer only when the soul is breathing 
 through. Unless seen together, and not only together, 
 but gazing on each other in complete abandonment 
 of heart, the friends that knew them best would have 
 said they were unlike. Yet Amieri's nymph on the 
 canvass was like both, for Amieri drewfromthe picture 
 burnt on his own heart by love, and the soul of Violanta 
 lay breathing beneath every lineament. 
 
 "You have not touched the marble to-day!" said 
 the countess, taking the lamp from its nail, and shed- 
 ding the light aslant on the back of the statue. 
 31 
 
 " No ! I have lifted the hammer twenty times to 
 break it in pieces." 
 
 " Ah ! dearest Giulio ! talk not thus ! Think it is 
 my image you would destroy !" 
 
 " If it were, and truly done, I would sooner strike 
 the blessed crucifix. But, Violanta! there is a link 
 wanting in this deformed frame of mine ! The sense 
 of beauty, or the power to body it forth, wants room in 
 me. I feel it — I feel it !" 
 
 Violanta ran to him and pressed the long curls that 
 fell over his pallid temples to her bosom. There was 
 a tone of conviction in his voice that she knew not how 
 to answer. 
 
 He continued, as if he were musing aloud : — 
 
 " I have tried to stifle this belief in my bosom, and 
 have never spoken of it till now — but it is true. 1 
 Look at that statue ! Parts of it are like nature— 
 but it wants uniformity — it wants grace — it want9 
 what i" want — proportion! I never shall give it that, 
 because I want the sense, the consciousness, the emo- 
 tion, of complete godlike movement. It is only the 
 well formed who feci this. Sculptors may imitate 
 gods ! for they are made in God's image. But oh, 
 Violanta ! / am not !" 
 
 " My poor brother !" 
 
 " Our blessed Savior was not more beautiful than 
 the Apollo," he passionately continued, " but could j 
 feel like the Apollo! Can /stand before the clay and 
 straighten myself to his attitude, and fancy, by the 
 most delirious effort of imagination, that I realize in 
 this frame, and could ever have conceived and moulded 
 his indignant and lofty beauty ? No — no — no !" 
 
 "Dear — dear Giulio." He dropped his head again 
 and she felt his tears penetrate to her bosom. 
 
 " Leave this melancholy theme," she said, in an 
 imploring tone, " and let us talk of other things, I have 
 something to tell you, Giulio !" 
 
 " Raphael was beautiful," he said, raising himself 
 up, unconscious of the interruption, " and Giorgione, 
 and Titian, both nobly formed, and Michael Angelo 
 had the port of an archangel ! Yes, the soul inhabits 
 the whole body, and the sentiment of beauty moves 
 and quickens through it all. My tenement is cramp- 
 ed ! — Violanta !" 
 
 " Well, dear brother !" 
 
 "Tell me your feelings when you first breathe the 
 air in a bright morning in spring. Do you feci grace- 
 ful ? Js there a sensation of beauty? Do you lilt 
 yourself and feel swan-like and lofty, and worthy of 
 the divine image in which you breathe. Tell me 
 truly, Violanta." 
 
 " Yes, brother!" 
 
 " I knew it ! I have a faint dream of such a feel- 
 ing — a sensation that is confined to my brain somehow 
 which I struggle to express in motion — but if I lilt 
 my finger, it is gone. I watch Amieri sometimes, 
 when he draws. He pierces my very soul by as- 
 suming, always, the attitude on his canvass. Violanta! 
 how can / stand like a statue that would please the 
 eye ?" 
 
 " Giulio ! Giulio !" 
 
 "Well, I will not burden you with my sadness. 
 Let us look at Biondo's nymph. Pray the Virgin, he 
 come not in the while — for painting, by lamp-light, 
 shows less fairly than marble." 
 
 He took the lamp, and while Violanta shook the 
 tears from her eyes, he drew out the pegs of the easel, 
 and lowered the picture to the light. 
 
 " Are you sure Amieri will not come in, Giulio ?" 
 inquired his sister, looking back timidly at the door 
 while she advanced. 
 
 "I think he will not. The Corso is gay to night, 
 and his handsome face and frank carriage, win greet- 
 ings, as the diamond draws light. Look at his pic- 
 ture, Violanta! With what triumph he paints! How 
 different from my hesitating hand ! The thought that 
 
482 
 
 VIOLANTA CESAR1NI. 
 
 is born in his fancy, collects instant fire in his veins 
 and comes prompt and proportionate to his hand. It 
 looks like a thing born, not wrought ! How beautiful 
 you are, my Violanta ! He has done well — brave 
 Biondo !" 
 
 " It is like me, yet fairer." 
 
 " I wish it were done! There is a look on the lips 
 that is like a sensation 1 feel sometimes on my own I 
 almost feel as if I should straighten and grow fair as it 
 advances. Would it not be a blessed thing, Violanta ?'* 
 
 " I love you as you are, dear Giulio !" 
 
 "But I thirst to be loved like other men ! I would 
 pass in the street and not read pity in all eyes. I 
 would go out like Biondo, and be greeted in the street 
 with t Mio bravo !' « Mio bello !' I would be beloved 
 by some one that is not my sister, Violanta! I would 
 have my share — only my share — of human joy and re- 
 gard. I were better dead than be a hunchback. I 
 would die, but for you — to-night — yes, to night." 
 
 With a convulsive hand he pulled aside the curtain, 
 and sent a long, earnest look up to the stars. Violanta 
 had never before heard him give words to his melan- 
 choly thoughts, and she felt appalled and silenced by 
 the inexpressible poignancy of his tones, and the fever- 
 ish, tearless, broken-heartedness of his whole manner. 
 As she took his hand, there was a noise in the street 
 below, and presently after, a hurried step was heard 
 on the stair, and Amieri rushed in, seized the rapier 
 which hung over his bed and without observing Vio- 
 lanta, was flying again from the apartment. 
 
 " Biondo !" cried a voice which would have stayed 
 him were next breath to have been drawn in heaven. 
 
 " Contessa Violanta !" 
 
 "What is it, Amieri? Where go you now?" 
 asked Giulio, gliding between him and the door. 
 Biondo's cheek and brow had flushed when first ar- 
 rested by the voice of the countess, but now he stood 
 silent and with his eyes on the floor, pale as the statue 
 before him. 
 
 " A quarrel, Giulio !" he said at length. 
 
 "Biondo!" The countess sprang to his side with 
 the simple utterance of his name, and laid her small 
 hand on his arm. " You shall not go! You are dear 
 to us — dear to Guilio, Signor Amieri! If you love us 
 — if you care for Giulio — nay, I will say it — if you 
 care for me, dear Biondo, put not your life in peril." 
 
 " Lady !" said the painter, bowing his head to his 
 wrist, and kissing lightly the small white fingers that 
 pressed it, " if I were to lose my life this hour, I should 
 bless with my dying lips the occasion which had drawn 
 from you the blessed words I hear. But the more 
 life is valuable to me by your regard, the more need 
 you should not delay me. I am waited for. Fare- 
 well!" 
 
 Disengaging himself from Violanta's grasp, quickly 
 but gently, Amieri darted through the door, and was 
 gone. 
 
 CHAPTER IIT. 
 
 Biondo had readily found a second in the first 
 artist he met on the Corso, and after a rapid walk 
 they turned on the lonely and lofty wall of the Pala- 
 tine, to look back on the ruins of the Forum. — At a 
 fountain side, not far beyond, he had agreed to find 
 his antagonist; but spite of the pressing business of 
 the hour, the wonderful and solemn beauty of the ruins 
 that lay steeped in moonlight at his feet, awoke, for 
 an instant, all of the painter in his soul. 
 
 " Is it not glorious, Lenzoni ?" he said, pointing with 
 his rapier to the softened and tall columns that carried 
 their capitals among the stars. 
 
 " We have not come out to sketch, Amieri !" was 
 
 the reply. 
 
 "True, caro! but my fingers work as if the pencil 
 was in them, and I forget revenge while 1 see what I 
 shall never sketch again!" 
 
 Lenzoni struck Ins hand heavily on Amieri's shoul- 
 der, as if to wake him from a dream, and looked close 
 into his face. 
 
 "If you fight in this spirit, Biondo " 
 
 "I shall fight with heart and soul, Lenzoni; fear 
 me not! But when I saw, just now, the beVeffelto of 
 the sharp-drawn shadows under the arch of Constan- 
 tine, and felt instinctively for my pencil, something 
 told me, at my heart's ear — you will never trace line 
 again, Amieri!" 
 
 "Take heart, caro amico!" 
 
 My heart is ready, but my thoughts come fast! 
 What were my blood, I can not but reflect, added to 
 the ashes of Rome? We fight in the grave of an 
 empire! But you will not philosophize, dull Len- 
 zoni! Come on to the fountain!" 
 
 The moon shone soft on the greensward rim of the 
 neglected fountain that once sparkled through the 
 "gold palace" of Nero. The white edges of half- 
 buried marble peeped here and there from the grass, 
 I and beneath the shadow of an ivy-covered and totter- 
 ! ing arch, sang a nightingale, the triumphant posses- 
 sor of life amid the forgotton ashes of the Caesars. 
 Amieri listened to his song. 
 
 "You are prompt, signor!" said a gay-voiced gen- 
 tleman, turning the corner of the ruined wall, as 
 Biondo, still listening to the nightingale, fed his heart 
 with the last sweet words of Violanta. 
 
 "' Sempre pronto,' is a good device," answered Len- 
 zoni, springing to his feet. " Will you fight, side to 
 the moon, signors, or shall we pull straws for the 
 choice of light?" 
 
 Amieri's antagonist was a strongly-made man of 
 thirty, costly in his dress, and of that class of features 
 eminently handsome, yet eminently displeasing. The 
 origin of the quarrel was an insulting observation, 
 coupled with the name of the young countess Cesa- 
 rini, which Biondo, who was standing in the shadow 
 of a wall, watching her window from the Corso, acci- 
 dentally overheard. A blow on the mouth was the 
 first warning the stranger received of a listener's 
 neighborhood, and after a momentary struggle they 
 exchanged cards, and separated to meet in an hour, 
 with swords, at the fountain, on the Palatine. 
 
 Amieri was accounted the best foil in the ateliers of 
 Rome, but his antagonist, the count Lamba Malas- 
 pina had just returned from a long residence in France, 
 and had the reputation of an accomplished swordsman. 
 Amieri was slighter in person, but well-made, and 
 agile as a leopard; but when Lenzoni looked into the 
 cool eye of Malaspina, the spirit and fire which he 
 would have relied upon to ensure his friend success in 
 an ordinary contest, made him tremble now. 
 
 Count Lamba bowed, and they crossed swords. 
 Amieri had read his antagonist's character, like his 
 friend, and, at the instant their blades parted, he broke 
 down his guard with the quickness of lightning, and 
 wounded him in the face. Malaspina smiled as he 
 crossed his rapier again, and in the next moment 
 Amieri's sword flew high above his head, and the 
 count's was at his breast. 
 
 "Ask for your life, mio bravo!" he said, as calmly 
 as if they had met by chance in the Corso. 
 
 "A'morte! villain and slanderer!" cried Amieri, and 
 striking the sword from his bosom, he aimed a blow 
 at Malaspina, which by a backward movement, was 
 received on the point of the blade. Transfixed through 
 the wrist, Amieri struggled in vain against the supe- 
 rior strength and coolness of his antagonist, and falling 
 on his knee, waited in silence for his death-blow. 
 Malaspina drew his sword gently as possible from the 
 wound, and recommending a tourniquet to Lenzoni 
 till a surgeon could be procured, washed the blood 
 
VIOLANTA CESARINI. 
 
 483 
 
 from bis face in the fountain, and descended into the 
 Forum, humming the air of a new song. 
 
 Faint with loss of blood, and with his left arm 
 around Lenzoni's neck, Biondo arrived at the sur- 
 geon's door. 
 
 " Can you save his hand ?" was the first eager ques- 
 tion. 
 
 Amieri held up his bleeding wrist with difficulty, 
 and the surgeon shook his head as he laid the help- 
 less fingers in his palm. The tendon was entirely 
 parted. 
 
 " I may save the hand." he said, " but he will never 
 use it more .'" 
 
 Amieri gave his friend a look full of anguish, and 
 fell back insensible. 
 
 "Poor Biondo!" said Lenzoni, as he raised his 
 pallid head from the surgeon's pillow. " Death were 
 less misfortune than the loss of a hand like thine. 
 The foreboding was too true, alas! that thou never 
 wouldst use pencil more!' 1 '' 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Thk frowning battlements of St. Angelo were 
 brightened with the glare of lamps across the Tiber, 
 and the dark breast of the river was laced with bars of 
 gold like the coat of a captain of dragoons. Here and 
 there lay a boat in mid-stream, and while the drift of 
 the current was counteracted by an occasional stroke 
 at the oar, the boatman listened to the heavenly strains 
 of a waltz, dying and triumphing in alternate cadences 
 upon the breath of night and the pope's band. A 
 platform was built out over the river, forming a con- 
 tinuation of the stage; the pit was floored over, and 
 all draped like a Persian harem ; and thus began a 
 masquerade at the Teatro della Pergola at Rome, 
 which stands, if you will take the trouble to remem- 
 ber, close by the bridge and castle of St. Angelo upon 
 the bank of the "yellow Tiber." 
 
 The entrance of the crowd to the theatre was like a 
 procession intended to represent the things of which 
 we are commanded not to make graven images, nor 
 to bow down and worship them. There was the like- 
 ness of everything in heaven above and on the earth ' 
 beneath, and in the waters under the eaith. There 
 were angels, devils, serpents, birds, beasts, fishes, and j 
 fair women — of which none except the last occasioned 
 much transgression of the commandment. Oddly j 
 enough, the fishes waltzed — and so did the beasts and 
 fair women, the serpents and birds — pairing off as they j 
 came within sound of the music, with a defiance of j 
 natural antipathies which would have driven a natural- 
 ist out of his senses. 
 
 A chariot drove up with the crest of the Cesarini 
 on the panne], and out of it stepped rather a stiff figure 
 dressed as a wandering palmer, with serge and scallop- 
 shells, followed by a masked hunchback whose cos- 
 tume, even to the threadbare spot on the ridge of his 
 deformity, was approved, by the loungers at the door, 
 in a general "bravissimo." They entered the dress- 
 ing-room, and the cloak-keeper was not surprised 
 when the lump was withdrawn in the shape of a pad 
 of wool, and by the aid of a hood and petticoat of 
 black silk, the deformed was transformed into a slender 
 domino, undistinguished but for the grace and elas- j 
 ticity of her movements. The attendant was sur- j 
 prised, however, when having stepped aside to deposite J 
 the pad given in charge to her, she turned and saw the ! 
 domino flitting from the room, but the hunchback 
 with his threadbare hump still leaning on the palmer's 
 arm! 
 
 "Santissima Vergine!" she exclaimed, pulling out 
 her cross and holding it between herself and Oiulio, i 
 "the fiend— the unholy fiend!" 
 
 Donna Bettina laughed under her palmer's cowl, 
 and drawing Giulio's arm within her own, they min- 
 gled in the masquerade. 
 
 The old count Cesarini arrived a few minutes after 
 in one of the equipages of the Malaspina, accompanied 
 by a red-cross knight in a magnificent armor, his 
 sword-hilt sparkling with diamonds, and the bars of 
 his visor half-drawn, yet showing a beard of jetty and 
 curling black, and a mouth of the most regular, yet 
 unpleasant beauty. The upper part of his face was 
 quite concealed, yet the sneer on his lips promised a 
 cold and unfeeling eye. 
 
 "As a hunchback, did you say. count?" 
 
 " It was her whim," answered Cesarini. " She has 
 given alms to a poor sculptor with that deformity till 
 her brain is filled with it. Pray the saints to affect 
 not your offspring, Lamba!" 
 
 Malaspina surveyed himself in the long mirror at 
 the entrance of the saloon, and smiled back incredu- 
 lously with his white teeth. 
 
 " I gave Bettina strict orders not to leave her side," 
 said Cesarini. " You will find the old donna by her 
 palmer's dress. The saints speed your suite, Lamba ! 
 I will await you in the card-room when the dance 
 wearies you !" 
 
 It was not for some time after the two old nobles 
 had affianced their children, that Cesarini had found 
 a fitting opportunity to break the subject to his daugh- 
 ter. When he did so, somewhat to his embarrass- 
 ment, Violanta listened to it without surprise; and 
 after hearing all he had to say upon the honorable de- 
 scent, large fortune, and courtly accomplishments of 
 the young count Lamba, she only permitted her fa- 
 ther to entertain any future hope on the subject, upon 
 the condition, that, till she was of age, her proposed 
 husband should not even be presented to her. For 
 this victory over the most cherished ambition of the 
 old count, Violanta was indebted partly to the holy 
 see, and partly to some qualities in her own character, 
 of which her father knew the force. He was aware 
 with what readiness the cardinal would seize upon the 
 slightest wish she might express to take the veil and 
 bring her possessions into the church, and he was 
 sufficiently acquainted with the qualities of a Cesa- 
 rini, not to drive one of their daughters to extremity. 
 
 With some embarrassment the old count made a 
 clean breast to Malaspina and his son, and was ex- 
 hausting language in regrets, when he was relieved by 
 an assurance from Lamba that the difficulty increased 
 his zest for the match, and that, with Cesarini's per- 
 mission, he would find opportunities to encounter her 
 in her walks as a stranger, and make his way after the 
 romantic taste which he supposed was alone at the bot- 
 tom of her refusal For success in this, Count Lamba 
 relied on his personal beauty and on that address in 
 the arts of adventure which is acquired by a residence 
 in France. 
 
 Since his duel, Amieri had been confined to his 
 bed with a violent fever, dangerously aggravated by 
 the peculiar nature of his calamity. The love of the 
 pencil was the breath of his soul, and in all his 
 thoughts of Violanta, it was only as a rival of the 
 lofty fame of painters who had made themselves the 
 companions of kings, that he could imagine himself a 
 claimant for her love. It seemed to him that his 
 nerveless hand had shut out heaven's entire light. 
 
 Giulio had watched by his friend with the faithful 
 fondness of a woman, and had gathered from his mo- 
 ments of delirium, what Biondo had from delicacy to 
 Violanta never revealed to his second, Lenzoni— the 
 cause of his quarrel with Malaspina. Touched with 
 this chivalric tenderness toward his sister, the kind 
 Giulio hung over him with renewed affection, and 
 when, in subsequent ravings, the maimed youth be- 
 trayed the real sting of his misfortune — the death of 
 bis hopes of her love — the unambitious brother re- 
 
484 
 
 V10LANTA CESARINI. 
 
 solved in his heart that if he could aid him by service 
 or sacrifice, by influence with Violanta, or by making 
 the almost desperate attempt to establish his own 
 claims to the name and fortunes of Cesarini, he would 
 devote himself to his service heart and soul. 
 
 During the confinement of Amieri to his room, the 
 young countess had of course been unable to visit her 
 brother, and as he scarce left the patient's side for a 
 moment, their intercourse for two or three weeks had 
 been entirely interrupted. On the first day the con- 
 valescent youth could walk out, she had stolen to the 
 studio, and heard from Giulio the whole history of 
 the duel and its consequences. When he had finished 
 his narrative, Violanta sat, for a few minutes, lost in 
 thought. 
 
 " Giulio !" she said at last, with a gayety of tone j 
 which startled him. 
 " Violanta !" 
 
 " Did you ever remark that our voices are very 
 much alike?" 
 
 "Biondo often says so." 
 
 "And you have a foot almost as small as mine." 
 " I have not the proportions of a man, Violanta !" 
 " Nay, brother, but I mean that — that — we might 
 pass for each other, if we were masked. Our height 
 is the same. Stand up, Giulio '" 
 
 " You would not mock me !" said the melancholy 
 youth with a faint smile, as he rose and set his bent 
 back beside the straight and lithe form of his sister. 
 
 "Listen to me, amaio-bene /" she replied, sitting 
 down and drawing him upon her knee, after satisfying 
 himself that there was no perceptible difference in 
 their height. "Put your arm about my neck, and 
 ■ ove me while 1 tell you of my little plot." 
 
 Giulio impressed a kiss upon the clear, alabaster 
 forehead of the beautiful girl, and looked into her face 
 inquiringly. 
 
 " There is to be a masquerade at La Pergola," she 
 said — "a superb masquerade given to some prince! 
 And I am to go, Giulio mio .'" 
 
 "Well," answered the listener, sadly. 
 "But do you not seem surprised that I am permitted 
 to go! Shall I tell you the reason why papa gave me 
 permission ?" 
 
 "If you will, Violanta!" 
 
 " A little bird told me that Malaspina means to be 
 there !" 
 
 " And you will go to meet him ?" 
 " You shall go to meet him, and I " she hesi- 
 tated and cast down the long dark fringes of her eyes; 
 "I will meet Biondo !" 
 
 Giulio clasped her passionately to his heart. 
 " I see ! — I see!" he cried, springing upon his feet, 
 as he anticipated the remaining circumstances of the 
 plot. " We shall be two hunchbacks — they will little 
 think that we are two Cesarini. Dear, noble Violanta ! 
 you will speak kindly to Biondo. Send Bettina for 
 the clothes, carina mia! You will get twin masks in 
 the Corso. And, Violanta?" 
 " What, Giulio ?" 
 
 " Tell Bettina to breathe no word of our project to 
 Amieri! I will persuade him to go but to see you 
 dance ! Poor Amieri ' Dear, dear sister ! Farewell 
 now ! He will be returning, and you must be gone. 
 The Holy Virgin guard you, my Violanta!" 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The reader will long since have been reminded, by 
 the trouble we have to whip in and flog up the lagging 
 and straggling members of our story, of a flock of 
 sheep driven unwillingly to market. Indeed, to stop 
 at the confessional (as you will see many a shepherd 
 of the Campagna, on his way to Rome), this tale of 
 
 many tails should have been a novel. You have, in 
 brief, what should have been well elaborated, embar- 
 rassed with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped 
 with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait 
 of the author. We are sacrificed to the spirit of the 
 age. The eighteenth century will be known in 
 hieroglyphics by a pair of shears. But, " to return to 
 our muttons." 
 
 The masquerade went merrily on, or, if there were 
 more than one heavy heart among those light heels, 
 it was not known, as the newspapers say, " to our re- 
 porter." One, there certainly was — heavy as Etna on 
 the breast of Enceladus. Biondo Amieri sat in a cor- 
 ner of the gallery, with his swathed hand laid before 
 him, pale as a new statue, and with a melancholy in 
 his soft dark eyes, which would have touched the exe- 
 cutioners of St. Agatha. Beside him sat Lenzoni, 
 who was content to forego the waltz for a while, and 
 keep company for pity with a friend who was too busy 
 with his own thoughts to give him word or look, but 
 still keeping sharp watch on the scene below, and 
 betraying by unconscious ejaculations how great a 
 penance he had put on himself for love and charity. 
 
 " Ah, la bella musica, Biondo!" he exclaimed 
 drumming on the banquette, while his friend held 
 up his wounded hand to escape the jar, " listen to that 
 waltz, that might set fire to the heels of St. Peter. 
 Corpo di Bacco ! look at the dragon! — a dragon 
 making love to a nun, Amieri! Ah! San Pietro ! 
 what a foot ! Wait till I come, sweet goblin ! That 
 a goblin's tail should follow such ankles, Biondo ! 
 Eh ! bellissimo ! the knight ! Look at the red-cross 
 knight, Amieri! and — what? — il gobbo, by St. An- 
 thony ! and the red-cross takes him for a woman ! 
 It is Giulio, for there never were two hunchbacks so 
 wondrous like ! Ecco, Biondo !" 
 
 But there was little need to cry "look" to Amieri, 
 now. A hunchback, closely masked, and leaning on 
 a palmer's arm, made his way slowly through the 
 crowd, and a red-cross knight, a figure gallant enough 
 to have made a monarch jealous, whispered with courte- 
 ous and courtly deference in his ear. 
 
 " Cielo ! it is she!" said Biondo, with mournful 
 earnestness, not heeding his companion, and laying 
 his hand upon his wounded wrist, as if the sight he 
 looked on gave it a fresher pang. 
 
 '■'She?" answered Lenzoni, with a laugh. " If it 
 is not he — not gobbo Giulio — I'll eat that cross-hilted 
 rapier ! What '■she'' should it be, caro Biondo !" 
 
 " I tell thee," said Amieri, " Giulio is asleep at the 
 foot of his marred statue ! I left him but now, he is 
 too ill with his late vigils to be here — but his clothes, 
 I may tell thee, are borrowed by one who wears them 
 as you see. Look at the foot, Lenzoni!" 
 
 " A woman, true enough, if the shoe were all ! 
 But I'll have a close look! Stay for me, dear Amieri! 
 I will return ere you have looked twice at them '" 
 
 And happy, with all his kind sympathy, to find a 
 fair apology to be free, Lenzoni leaped over the 
 benches and mingled in the crowd below. 
 
 Left alone, Biondo devoured with his eyes, every 
 movement of the group in which he was so deeply 
 interested, and the wound in his hand seemed burn- 
 ing with a throb of fire, while he tried in vain to de- 
 tect, in the manner of the hunchback, that coyness 
 which might show, even through a mask, dislike or 
 indifference. There was even, he thought (and he 
 delivered his soul over to Apollyon in the usual phrase 
 for thinking such ill of such an angel) ; there was 
 even in her manner a levity and freedom of gesture 
 for which the mask she wore should be no apology. 
 He was about to curse Malaspina for having spared 
 his life at the fountain, when some one jumped lightly 
 over the seat, and took a place beside him. It was 
 a female in a black domino, closely masked, and 
 through the pasteboard mouth protruded the bit of 
 
VIOLANTA CESARINI. 
 
 485 
 
 ivory, commonly held in the teeth by maskers, to dis- 
 guise the voice. 
 
 " Good evening to you. fair signor !" 
 
 " Good even to you, lady ."' 
 
 " I am come to share youf melancholy, signor !" 
 
 " I have none to give away unless you will take all ; 
 and just now, my fair one. it is rather anger than sad- 
 ness. If it please you. leave me '" 
 
 " What if I am more pleased to stay "' 
 
 "Briefly, I would be alone . I am not of the festa. 
 I but look on, here !" And Biondo turned his shoulder 
 to the mask, and fixed his eyes again on the hunch- 
 back, who having taken the knight's arm, was talking 
 and promenading most gayly between him and the 
 palmer. 
 
 " You have a wounded hand, signor !" resumed his 
 importunate neighbor. 
 
 "A useless one, lady. Would it were well!" 
 
 " Signor Melancholy, repine not against providence. 
 I that am no witch, tell thee that thou wilt yet bless 
 Heaven that this hand is disabled." 
 
 Biondo turned and looked at the bold prophetess, 
 but her disguise was impenetrable. 
 
 " You are a masker, lady, and talk at random !" 
 
 " No ! I will tell you the thought uppermost in your 
 bosom!" 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 " A longing for a pluck at the red-cross, yonder!" 
 
 " True, by St. Mary !" said Biondo, starting ener- 
 getically : " but you read it in my eyes !" 
 
 " I have told you your first thought, signor, and I will 
 give you a hint of the second Is there a likeness 
 between a nymph on canvass, and a gobbo in a mask !" j 
 
 " Giulio !" exclaimed Amieri, turning suddenly 
 round; but the straight back of the domino met his | 
 eye, and totally bewildered, he resumed his seat, and 
 slowly perused the stranger from head to foot. 
 
 " Talk to me as if my mask were the mirror of your 
 soul, Amieri," said the soft but disguised voice. 
 " You need sympathy in this mood, and I am your 
 good angel. Is your wrist painful to-night ?" 
 
 " I can not talk to you," he said, turning to resume 
 his observation on the scene below. " If you know 
 the face beneath the gobbo's mask, you know the 
 heaven from which I am shut out. But I must gaze 
 on it still." 
 
 " Is it a woman ?" 
 
 "No ! an angel." 
 
 " And encourages the devil in the shape of Ma- 
 laspina ? You miscall her, Amieri !" 
 
 The answer was interrupted by Lenzoni, who ran 
 into the gallery, but seeing his friend beset by a mask, 
 he gave him joy of his good luck, and refusing to in- 
 terrupt the tete-a-tete, disappeared with a laugh. 
 
 " Brave, kind Lenzoni !" said the stranger. 
 
 " Are you his good angel, too ?" asked Amieri, 
 surprised again at the knowledge so mysteriously dis- 
 played. 
 
 " No ! Little as you know of me you would not be 
 willing to share me with another ! Say, Amieri! love 
 you the gobbo on the knight's arm ?" 
 
 " You have read me riddles less clear, my fair in- 
 cognita ! I would die at rnorn but to say farewell to 
 her at midnight!" 
 
 " Do you despair of her love ?" 
 
 " Do I despair of excelling Raphael with these 
 unstrung fingers ? I never hoped — but in my dreams, 
 lady!" 
 
 " Then hope, waking ! For as there is truth in 
 heaven, Violanta Cesarini loves you, Biondo !" 
 
 Laying his left hand sternly on the arm of the 
 stranger, Biondo raised his helpless wrist and pointed 
 toward the hunchback, who, seated by the red-cross 
 knight, played with the diamond cross of his sword- 
 hilt, while the palmer turned his back, as if to give 
 two lovers an opportunity. 
 
 With a heart overwhelmed with bitterness, he then 
 turned to the mocking incognito. Violanta sat be- 
 side him ! 
 
 Holding her mask between her and the crowd be- 
 low, the maiden blush mounted to her temples, and 
 the long sweeping lashes dropped over her eyes their 
 veiling and silken fringes. And while the red-cross 
 knight still made eloquent love to Giulio in the saloon 
 of the masquerade, Amieri and Violanta, in their un- 
 observed retreat, exchanged vows, faint and choked 
 with emotion on his part, but all hope, encouragement, 
 and assurance, on hers 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 " Will you waltz ?" said a merry-voiced domino 
 to the red-cross knight, a few minutes after tapping 
 him smartly on the corslet with her black fan, and 
 pointing, for the first step, a foot that would have 
 tempted St. Anthony. 
 
 "By the mass !" answered Malaspina, "I should 
 pay an ill compliment to the sweetest voice that ever 
 enchanted human ear" (and he bowed low to Guilio), 
 " did 1 refuse invitation so sweetly toned. Yet my 
 Milan armor is not light !" 
 
 "I have been refusing his entreaties this hour," 
 said Giulio, as the knight whirled away with Violanta, 
 " for though I can chatter like a woman, I should 
 dance like myself. He is not unwilling to show his 
 grace to 'his lady-mistress!' Ha! ha! It is worth 
 while to sham the petticoat for once to see what fools 
 men are when they would please a woman ! But, 
 close mask ! Here comes the count Cesarini !" 
 
 "How fares my child?" said the old noble, leaning 
 over the masked Giulio, and touching with his lips the 
 glossy curl which concealed his temple. Are you 
 amused, idolo mioV 
 
 A sudden tremor shot through the frame of poor 
 Giulio at the first endearment ever addressed to his 
 ear by the voice of a parent. The tears coursed down 
 under his mask, and for all answer to the question, he 
 could only lay his small soft hand in his father's and 
 return his pressure with irresistible strength and emo- 
 tion. 
 
 " You are not well, my child !" he said, surprised at 
 not receiving an answer, "this ugly hump oppresses 
 you ! Come to the air! So — lean on'me, caro tesoro! 
 We will remove the hump presently. A Cesarini with 
 a hump indeed ! Straighten yourself, my life, my 
 child, and you will breathe more freely !" 
 
 Thus entered, at one wound, daggers and balm into 
 the heart of the deformed youth; and while Bettina, 
 trembling in every limb, grew giddy with fear as they 
 made their way through the crowd, Giulio, relieved 
 by his tears, nerved himself with a strong effort and 
 prepared to play out his difficult part with calmness. 
 
 They threaded slowly the crowded maze of waltzers, 
 and, emerging from the close saloons, stood at last in 
 the gallery overhanging the river. The moon was 
 rising, and touched with a pale light the dark face of 
 the Tiber; the music came faintly out to the night 
 air, and a fresh west wind, cool and balmy from the 
 verdant campagna, breathed softly through the lat- 
 tices. 
 
 Refusing a chair, Giuho leaned over the balustrade, 
 and the count stood by his side and encircled his waist 
 with his arm. 
 
 " I can not bear this deformity, my Violanta !" he 
 said, " you look so unlike my child with it ; I need 
 this little hand to reassure me." 
 
 " Should you know that was my hand, father?" said 
 Giulio. 
 
 " Should I not ! I have told you a thousand times 
 that the nails of a Cesarini were marked — let me see 
 
486 
 
 PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE. 
 
 you again — by the arch of this rosy line! See, my 
 little Gobbo ! They are like four pink fairy shells of 
 India laid over rolled leaves of roses. What was the 
 poet's name who said that of the old countess Giulia 
 Cesarini — la bella Giulia?" 
 
 " Should you have known my voice, father ?" asked 
 Giulio, evading the question. 
 
 " Yes, my darling, why ask me?" 
 
 "But, father! — if I had been stolen by brigands 
 from the cradle — or you had not seen me for many, 
 many years — and I had met you to-night as a #0660 
 and had spoken to you — only in sport — and had 
 called you 'father, dear father ." should you have 
 known my voice? would you have owned me for a 
 Cesarini?" 
 
 " Instantly, my child !" 
 
 "But suppose my back had been broken — suppose 
 1 were a gobbo — a deformed hunchback indeed, in- 
 deed — but had still nails with a rosy arch, and the 
 same voice with which I speak to you now — and 
 pressed your hand thus — and loved you — would you 
 disown me, father?" 
 
 Giulio had raised himself while he spoke, and taken 
 his hand from his father's with a feeling that life or 
 death would be in his answer to that question. Cesa- 
 rini was disturbed, and did not reply for a moment. 
 
 " My child !" said he at last, " there is that in your 
 voice that would convince me you are mine, against 
 all the evidence in the universe. I can not imagine 
 the dreadful image you have conjured up, for the 
 Cesarini are beautiful and straight by long inheritance. 
 But if a monster spoke to me thus, I should love 
 him ! Come to my bosom, my blessed child ! and 
 dispel those wild dreams ! Come, Violanta !" 
 
 Giulio attempted to raise his arms to his father's 
 neck, but the strength that had sustained him so well, 
 began to ebb from him. He uttered some indistinct 
 words, lifted his hand to his mask as if to remove it 
 for breath, and sunk slowly to the floor. 
 
 "It is your son, my lord!" cried Bettina. "Lift 
 him, Count Cesarini ! Lift your child to the air be- 
 fore he dies !" 
 
 She tore off his mask and disclosed to the thunder- 
 stricken count the face of the stranger ! As he stood 
 pale and aghast, too much confounded for utterance or 
 action, the black domino tripped into the gallery, follow- 
 ed by the red-cross knight, panting under his armor. 
 
 " Giulio ! my own Giulio !" cried Violanta, throw- 
 ing herself on her knees beside her pale and insensible 
 brother, and covering his forehead and lips with kisses. 
 "Is he hurt? Is he dead? Water! for the love 
 of Heaven ! Will no one bring water?" And tear- 
 ing away her own mask, she lifted him from the 
 ground, and, totally regardless of the astonished group 
 who looked on in petrified silence, fanned and caressed 
 him into life and consciousness. 
 
 " Come away, Violanta !" said her father at last, in 
 a hoarse voice. 
 
 "Never, my father ! he is our own blood! How 
 feel you now, Giulio?" 
 
 " Better, sweet ! where is Biondo ?" 
 
 "Near by! But you shall go home with me. 
 Signor Malaspina, as you hope for my favor, lend my 
 brother an arm. Bettina, call up the chariot. Nay, 
 father ! he goes home with me, or I with him, we 
 never part more !" 
 
 The red-cross knight gave Giulio an arm, and lean- 
 ing on him and Violanta, the poor youth made his 
 way to the carriage. Amieri sat at the door, and re- 
 ceived only a look as she passed, and helping Giulio 
 tenderly in, she gave the order to drive swiftly home, 
 and in a few minutes they entered together the palace 
 of their common inheritance. 
 
 It would be superfluous to dwell on the incidents 
 of the sequel, which were detailed in the Diario di 
 
 Roma, and are known to all the world. The hunch- 
 back Count Cesarini has succeeded his father in his 
 title and estates, and is beloved of all Rome. The 
 next heir to the title is a son (now two years of age) 
 of the countess Amieri, who is to take the name of 
 Cesarini on coming to his majority. They live to- 
 gether in the old palazzo, and all strangers go to see 
 their gallery of pictures, of which none are bad, except 
 some well intended but not very felicitously executed 
 compositions by one Lenzoni. 
 
 Count Lamba Malaspina is at present in exile, having 
 been convicted of drawing a sword on a disabled gentle- 
 man, on his way from a masquerade at La Pergola. 
 His seclusion is rendered the more tolerable by the 
 loss of his teeth, which were rudely thrust down his 
 throat by this same Lenzoni (fated to have a finger in 
 every pie) in defence of the attacked party on that oc- 
 casion. You will hear Lenzoni's address (should you 
 wish to purchase a picture of his painting) at the Caffe 
 del Gioco, opposite the trattoria of La Bella Donna 
 in the Corso. 
 
 PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Giannino Pasquali was a smart tailor some five 
 years ago, occupying a cool shop on one of the smaller 
 canals of Venice. Four pairs of suspenders, a print 
 of the fashions, and a motley row of the gay-colored 
 trousers worn by the gondoliers, ornamented the win- 
 dow looking on the dark alley in the rear, and, attach- 
 ed to the post of the water-gate on the canal side. 
 floated a small black gondola, the possession of which 
 afforded the same proof of prosperity of the Venetian 
 tailor which is expressed by a horse and buggy at the 
 door of a snip in London. The place-seeking travel- 
 ler, who, nez en iair, threaded the tangled labyrinth 
 of alleys and bridges between the Rialto and St. 
 Mark's, would scarce have observed the humble shop- 
 window of Pasquali, yet he had a consequence on the 
 Piazza, and the lagoon had seen his triumphs as an 
 amateur gondolier. Giannino was some thirty years 
 of age, and his wife Fiametta, whom he had married 
 for her zecchini, was on the shady side of fifty. 
 
 If the truth must be told, Pasquali had discovered 
 that, even with a bag of sequins for eye-water, Fi- 
 ametta was not always the most lovely woman in 
 Venice. Just across the canal lived old Donna 
 Bentoccata, the nurse, whose daughter Tutturilla 
 was like the blonde in Titian's picture of the Marys ; 
 and to the charms of Turturilla, even seen through 
 the leaden light of poverty, tlie unhappy Pasquali was 
 far from insensible. 
 
 The festa of San Antonio arrived after a damp week 
 of November, and though you would suppose the at- 
 mosphere of Venice not liable to any very sensible in- 
 crease of moisture, Fiametta, like people who live on 
 land, and who have the rheumatism as a punishment 
 for their age and ugliness, was usually confined to her 
 brazero of hot coals till it was dry enough on the Lido 
 for the peacocks to walk abroad. On this festa, how- 
 ever, San Antonio being, as every one knows, the 
 patron saint of Padua, the Padovese were to come 
 down the Brenta, as was their custom, and cross over 
 the sea to Venice to assist in the celebration ; and 
 Fiametta once more thought Pasquali loved her for 
 herself alone when he swore by his rosary that unless 
 she accompanied him to the festa in her wedding dress, 
 he would not turn an oar in the race, nor unfasten his 
 gondola from the door-post. Alas ! Fiametta was 
 
PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE. 
 
 487 
 
 married in the summer solstice, and her dress was 
 permeable to the wind as a cobweb or gossamer. Is 
 it possible you could have remembered that, oh, wick- 
 ed Pasquali ? 
 
 It was a day to puzzle a barometer; now bright, 
 now rainy ; now gusty as a corridor in a novel, and 
 now calm as a lady after a fit of tears. Pasquali was 
 up early and waked Fiametta with a kiss, and, by way 
 of unusual tenderness, or by way of ensuring: the wed- 
 ding dress, he chose to play dressing maid, and ar- 
 ranged with his own hands hereupon and fezzoletta. 
 She emerged from her chamber looking like a slice 
 of orange-peel in a flower-bed, but smiling and nod- I 
 ding, and vowing the day warm as April, and the sky [ 
 without a cloud. The widening circles of an occa- 
 sional drop of rain in the canal were nothing but the j 
 bubbles bursting after a passing oar, or perhaps the last | 
 flies ofsummer. Pasquali swore it was weather to win j 
 down a peri. 
 
 As Fiametta stepped into the gondola, she glanced 
 her eyes overlhe way and saw Turturilla, with a face ] 
 as sorrowful as the first day in Lent, seated at her 
 window. Her lap was full of work, and it was quite 
 evident that she had not thought of being at the festa. j 
 Fiametta's heart was already warm, and it melted quite 
 at the view of the poor girl's loneliness. 
 
 " Pasquali mio !" she said, in a deprecating tone, 
 as if she were uncertain how the proposition would 
 be received, " I think we could make room for poor 
 Turturilla !" 
 
 A gleam of pleasure, unobserved by the confiding 
 sposa, tinted faintly the smooth olive cheek of Pasquali. ] 
 
 " Eh ! diavolo /" he replied, so loud that the sor- | 
 rowful seamstress heard, and hung down her head | 
 still lower; "must you take pity on every cheese- | 
 paring of a regezza who happens to have no lover! I 
 Have reason ! have reason ! The gondola is narrower j 
 than your brave heart my fine Fiametta !" And away \ 
 he pushed from the water-steps. 
 
 Turturilla rose from her work and stepped out upon ' 
 the rusty gratings of the balcony to see them depart. ; 
 Pasquali stopped to grease the notch of his oar, and 
 between that and some other embarrassments, the 
 gondola was suffered to float directly under her 
 window. The compliment to the generous nature , 
 of Fiametta, was, meantime, working, and as she was 
 compelled to exchange a word or two with Turturilla 
 while her husband was getting his oar into the socket, 
 it resulted (as he thought it very probable it would), 
 in the good wife's renewing her proposition, and ma- [ 
 king a point of sending the deserted girl for her holy- ; 
 day bonnet. Pasquali swore through all the saints 
 and angels by the time she had made herself ready, 
 though she was but five minutes gone from the window, 
 and telling Fiametta in her ear that she must consider ; 
 it as the purest obligation, he backed up to the steps of 
 old Donna Jientoccata, helped in her daughter with a 
 better grace than could have been expected, and with 
 one or two short and deep strokes, put forth into the 
 grand canal with the velocity of a lance-fly. 
 
 A gleam of sunshine lay along the bosom of the 
 broad silver sheet, and it was beautiful to see the 
 gondolas with- their gay colored freights all hastening 
 in one direction, and with swift track to the festa. 
 Far up and down they rippled the smooth water, here 
 gliding out from below a palace-arch, there from a nar- 
 row and unseen canal, the steel beaks curved and flash- 
 ing, the water glancing on the oar-blades, the curtains 
 moving, and the fair women of Venice leaning out and 
 touching hands as they Beared neighbor or acquaint- 
 ance in the close-pressing gondolas. It was a beauti- 
 ful sight, indeed, and three of the happiest hearts in 
 that swift gliding company were in Pasquali's gondola, 
 though the bliss of Fiametta, I am compelled to say, 
 was entirely owing to the bandage with which love is 
 so significantly painted. Ah ! poor Fiametta! 
 
 From the Lido, from Fusina, from under the Bridge 
 of Sighs, from all quarters of the lagoon, and from all 
 points of the floating city of Venice, streamed the fly- 
 ing gondolas to the Giudecca. The narrow walk 
 along the edge of the long and close-built island was 
 thronged with booths and promenaders, and the black 
 barks by hundreds bumped their steel noses against 
 the pier as the agitated water rose and fell beneath 
 them. The gondolas intended for the face pulled 
 slowly up and down, close to the shore, exhibifrag 
 their fairy-like forms and their sinewy and gayly dress- 
 ed gondoliers to the crowds on land and water ; the 
 bands of music, attached to different parties, played 
 here and there a strain ; the criers of holy pictures 
 and gingerbread made the air vocal with their lisping 
 and soft Venetian ; and all over the scene, as if it was 
 the light of the sky or some other light as blessed but 
 less common, shone glowing black eyes, black as 
 night, and sparkling as the stars on night's darkest 
 bosom. He who thinks lightly of Italian beauty 
 should have seen the women of Venice on St. An- 
 tonio's day '32, or on any or at any hour when their 
 pulses are beating high and theireyes alight — for they 
 are neither one nor the other always. The women 
 of that fair clime, to borrow the simile of Moore, are 
 like lava-streams, only bright when the volcano kindles. 
 Their long lashes cover lustreless eyes, and their blood 
 shows dully through the cheek in common and listless 
 hours. The calm, the passive tranquillity in which 
 the delicate graces of colder climes find their element 
 are to them a torpor of the heart when the blood scarce 
 seems to flow. They are wakeful only to the ener- 
 getic, the passionate, the joyous movements of the 
 soul. 
 
 Pasquali stood erect in the prow of his gondola, and 
 stole furtive glances at Turturilla while he pointed 
 away with his finger to call off the sharp eyes of Fi- 
 ametta ; but Fiametta was happy and unsuspicious. 
 Only when now and then the wind came up chilly 
 from the Adriatic, the poor wife shivered and sat 
 closer to Turturilla, who in her plainer but thicker 
 dress, to say nothing of younger blood, sat more com- 
 fortably on the black cushion and thought less about 
 the weather. An occasional drop of rain fell on the 
 nose of poor Fiametta, but if she did not believe it was 
 the spray from Pasquali's oar, she at least did her best 
 to believe so ; and the perfidious tailor swore by St. 
 Anthony that the clouds were as dry as her eyelashes. 
 1 never was very certain that Turturilla was not in the 
 secret of this day's treacheries. 
 
 The broad centre of the Giudecca was cleared, and 
 the boats took their places for the race. Pasquali 
 ranged his gondola with those of the other spectators, 
 and telling Fiametta in her ear that he should sit on 
 the other side of Turturilla as a punishment for their 
 malapropos invitation, he placed himself on the small 
 remainder of the deep cushion on the farthest side 
 from his now penitent spouse, and while he complain- 
 ed almost rudely of the narrowness of his seat, he 
 made free to hold on by Turturilla's waist which no 
 doubt made the poor girl's mind more easy on the 
 subject of her intrusion. 
 
 Who won and who lost the race, what was the 
 device of each flag, and what bets and bright eyes 
 changed owners by the result, no personage of this 
 tale knew or cared, save Fiametta. She looked on 
 eagerly. Pasquali and Turturilla, as the French say, 
 trouvaient autress chats a /roller. 
 
 After the decision of the grand race, St. Antonio 
 being the protector, more particularly of the humble 
 (" patron of pigs" in the saints' calendar), the seignoria 
 and the grand people generally, pulled away for St. 
 Mark's, leaving the crowded Giudecca to the people. 
 Pasquali, as was said before, had some renown as a 
 gondolier. Something what would be called in other 
 countries a scrub race, followed the departure of the 
 
488 
 
 PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE. 
 
 winning boat, and several gondolas, holding each one 
 person only, took their places for the start. The 
 tailor laid his hand on his bosom, and, with the smile 
 that had first stirred the heart and the sequins of 
 Fiametta, begged her to gratify his love by acting as 
 his make-weight while he turned an oar for the pig of 
 St. Antonio. The prize roasted to an appetizing 
 crisp, stood high on a platter in front of one of the 
 booths on shore, and Fiametta smacked her lips, 
 ovfrcame her tears with an effort, and told him, in 
 accents as little as possible like the creak of a dry oar 
 in the socket, that he might set Turturilla on shore. 
 
 A word in her ear, as he handed her over the gun- 
 wale, reconciled Bonna Bentoccata's fair daughter to 
 this conjugal partiality, and stripping his manly figure 
 of its upper disguises, Pasquali straightened out his 
 fine limbs, and drove his bark to the line in a style that 
 drew applause from even his competitors. As a mark 
 of their approbation, they offered him an outside place 
 where his fair dame would be less likely to be spatter- 
 ed with the contending oars ; but he was too generous 
 to take advantage of this considerate offer, and crying 
 out as he took the middle, " ben pronto, signori V gave 
 Fiametta a confident look and stood like a hound in 
 the leash. 
 
 Off they went at the tap of the drum, poor Fiametta 
 holding her breath and clinging to the sides of the 
 gondola, and Pasquali developing skill and muscle — 
 not for Fiametta's eyes only. It was a short, sharp 
 race, without jockeying or management, all fair play 
 and main strength, and the tailor shot past the end of 
 the Giudecca a boat's length ahead. Much more ap- 
 plauded than a king at a coronation or a lord-mayor 
 taking water at London stairs, he slowly made his way 
 back to Turturilla, and it was only when that demure 
 damsel rather shrunk from sitting down in two inches 
 of water, that he discovered how the disturbed element 
 had quite filled up the hollow of the leather cushion 
 and made a peninsula of the uncomplaining Fiametta. 
 She was as well watered, as a favorite plant in a flower- 
 garden. 
 
 " Pasquali mio /" she said in an imploring tone, 
 holding up the skirt of her dress with the tips of her 
 thumb and finger, " could you just take me home 
 while I change my dress." 
 
 " One moment, Fiametta cara ! they are bringing 
 the pig !" 
 
 The crisp and succulent trophy was salemnly placed 
 in the prow of the victor's gondola, and preparation 
 was made to convoy him home with a triumphant 
 procession. A half hour before it was in order to 
 move — an hour in first making the circuit of the grand 
 canal, and an hour more in drinking a glass and ex- 
 changing good wishes at the stairs of the Rialto, and 
 Donna Fiametta had sat too long by two hours and a 
 half with scarce a dry thread on her body. What 
 afterward befell will be seen in the more melancholy 
 sequel. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The hospital of St. Girolamo is attached to the 
 convent of that name, standing on one of the canals 
 which put forth on the seaward side of Venice. It is 
 a long building, with its low windows and latticed 
 doors opening almost on the level of the sea, and the 
 wards for the sick are large and well aired ; but, ex- 
 cept when the breeze is stirring, impregnated with a 
 saline dampness from the canal, which, as Pasquali 
 remarked, was good for the rheumatism. It was not 
 so good for the patient. 
 
 The loving wife Fiametta grew worse and worse 
 after the fatal festa, and the fit of rheumatism brought 
 on by the slightness of her dress and the spattering he 
 
 had given her in the race, had increased by the end of 
 the week, to a rheumatic fever. Fiametta was old 
 and tough, however, and struggled manfully (woman 
 as she was) with the disease, but being one night a 
 little out of her head, her loving husband took occa- 
 sion to shudder at the responsibility of taking care of 
 her, and jumping into his gondola, he pulled across to 
 St. Girolamo and bespoke a dry bed and a sister of 
 charity, and brought back the pious father Gasparo 
 and a comfortable litter. Fiametta was dozing when 
 they arrived, and the kind-hearted tailor willing to 
 spare her the pain of knowing that she was on her way 
 to the hospital for the poor, set out some meat and 
 wine for the monk, and sending over for Turturilla 
 and the nurse to mix the salad, they sat and ate away 
 the hours till the poor dame's brain should be wander- 
 ing again. 
 
 Toward night the monk and Dame Bentoccata were 
 comfortably dozing with each other's support (having 
 fallen asleep at table), and Pasquali with a kiss from 
 Turturilla, stole softly up stairs. Fiametta was mut- 
 turingunquietly, and working her fingers in the palms 
 of her hands, and on feeling her pulse he found the 
 fever was at its height. She took him, besides, for the 
 prize pig of the festa, for he knew her wits were fairly 
 abroad. He crept down stairs, gave the monk a strong 
 cup of coffee to get him well awake, and, between the 
 four of them, they got poor Fiametta into the litter, 
 drew the curtains tenderly around and deposited her 
 safely in the bottom of the gondola. 
 
 Lightly and smoothly the winner of the pig pulled 
 away with his loving burden, and gliding around the 
 slimy corners of the palaces, and hushing his voice 
 as he cried out "right!" or "left!" to guard the 
 coming gondoliers of his vicinity, he arrived, like a 
 thought of love to a maid's mind in sleep, at the door 
 of St. Girolamo. The abbess looked out and said, 
 " Benedicite .'" and the monk stood firm on his brown 
 sandals to receive the precious burden from the arms 
 of Pasquali. Believing firmly that it was equivalent 
 to committing her to the hand of St. Peter, and of 
 course abandoning all hope of seeing her again in 
 this world, the soft-hearted tailor wiped his eye as 
 she was lifted in, and receiving a promise from Father 
 Gasparo that he would communicate faithfully the 
 state of her soul in the last agony, he pulled, with 
 lightened gondola and heart, back to his widower's 
 home and Turturilla. 
 
 For many good reasons, and apparent as good, it is 
 a rule in the hospital of St. Girolamo, that the sick 
 under its holy charge shall receive the visit of neither 
 friend nor relative. If they recover, they return to 
 their abodes to earn candles for the altar of the restor- 
 ing saint. If they die, their clothes are sent to their 
 surviving friends, and this affecting memorial, besides 
 communicating the melancholy news, affords all the 
 particulars and all the consolation they are supposed 
 to require upon the subject of their loss. 
 
 Waiting patiently for Father Gasparo and his bundle, 
 Pasquali and Turturilla gave themselves up to hopes, 
 which on the tailor's part (we fear it must be admitted), 
 augured a quicker recovery from grief than might be 
 credited to an elastic constitution. The fortune of 
 poor Fiametta was sufficient to warrant Pasquali in 
 neglecting his shop to celebrate every festa that the 
 church acknowledged, and for ten days subsequent to 
 the committal of his wife to the tender mercies of St. 
 Girolamo, five days out of seven was the proportion of 
 merry holydays with his new betrothed. 
 
 They were sitting one evening in the open piazza 
 of St. Mark, in front of the most thronged cafe of 
 that matchless square. The moon was resting her 
 silver disk on the point of the Campanile, and the 
 shadows of thousands of gay Venetians fell on the 
 immense pavement below, clear and sharply drawn 
 as a black cartoon. The four extending sides of the 
 
THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 489 
 
 square lay half in shades half in light, wiih their 
 innumerable columns and balconies and sculptured 
 work, and, frowning down on all, in broken light and 
 shadow, stood the arabesque structure of St. Mark's 
 itself dizzying the eyes with its mosaics and confused 
 devices, and thrusting forth the heads of her four 
 golden-collared steeds into the moonbeams, till they 
 looked on that black relief, like the horses of Pluto 
 issuing from the gates of Hades. In the centre of 
 the square stood a tall woman, singing, in rich con- 
 tralto, an old song of the better days of Venice ; and 
 against one of the pillars, Polichinello had backed 
 his wooden stage, and beat about his puppets with 
 an energy worthy of old Dandolo and his helmeted 
 galley-men. To those who wore not the spectacles 
 of grief or discontent, the square of St. Mark's that 
 night was like some cozening tableau. I never saw 
 anything so gay. 
 
 Everybody who has " swam in a gondola," knows 
 how the cafes of Venice thrust out their checkered 
 awnings over a portion of the square, and filled the 
 shaded space below with chairs and marble tables. 
 In a corner of the shadow thus afforded, with ice and 
 coffee on a small round slab between them, and the 
 flat pavement of the public promenade under their feet, 
 sat our two lovers. With neither hoof nor wheel to 
 drown or interrupt their voices (as in cities whose 
 streets are stones, not water), they murmured their 
 hopes and wishes in the softest language under the 
 sun, and with the sotto voce acquired by all the inhabi- 
 tants of this noiseless city. Turturilla had taken ice to 
 cool her and coffee to take off the chill of her ice, and 
 a bicchiere del pcrfetto amme to reconcile these two 
 antagonists in her digestion, when the slippers of a 
 monk glided by, and in a moment the recognised 
 Father Gasparo made a third in the shadowy corner. 
 The expected bundle was under his arm, and he was 
 on his way to Pasquali's dwelling. Having assured 
 the disconsolate tailor that she had unction and wafer 
 as became the wife of a citizen of Venice like himself, 
 he took heart and grew contenithat she was in heaven. 
 It was a better place, and Turturilla for so little as a 
 gold ring, would supply her place in his bosom. 
 
 The moon was but a brief week older when Pas- 
 quali and Turturilla stood in the church of our lady 
 of grief, and Father Gasparo within the palings of the 
 altar. She was as fair a maid as ever bloomed in the 
 garden of beauty beloved of Titian, and the tailor was 
 nearer worth nine men to look at, than the fraction of 
 a man considered usually the exponent of his profes- 
 sion. Away mumbled the good father upon the mat- 
 rimonial service, thinking of the old wine and rich 
 pastries that were holding their sweetness under cork 
 and crust only till he had done his ceremony, and 
 quicker by some seconds than had ever been achieved 
 before by priest or bishop, he arrived at the putting on 
 of the ring. His hand was tremulous, and (oh un- 
 lucky omen !) he dropped it within the gilden fence 
 of the chancel. The choristers were called, and 
 Father Gasparo dropped on his knees to look for it — 
 but if the devil had not spirited it away, there was no 
 other reason why that search was in vain. Short of 
 an errand to the goldsmith on the Rialto, it was at 
 last determined the wedding could not proceed. Fa- 
 ther Gasparo went to hide his impatience within the 
 restiary, and Turturilla knelt down to pray against the 
 arts of Sathanas. Before they had settled severally 
 to their pious occupations, Pasquali was half way to 
 the Rialto. 
 
 Half an hour elapsed, and then instead of the light 
 grazing of a swift-sped gondola along the church 
 stairs, the splash of a sullen oar was heard, and Pas- 
 quali stepped on shore. They had hastened to the 
 door to receive him — monk, choristers and bride — 
 and to their surprise and bewilderment, he waited to 
 hand out a woman in a strange dress, who seemed dis- 
 
 posed, bridegroom as he was, to make him wait her 
 leisure. Her clothes fitted her ill, and she carried in 
 her hand a pair of shoes, it was easy to see were never 
 made for her. She rose at last, and as her face be- 
 came visible, down dropped Turturilla and the pious 
 father, and motionless and aghast stood the simple 
 Pasquali. Fiametta stepped on shore ! 
 
 In broken words Pasquali explained. He had 
 landed at the stairs near the fish market, and with two 
 leaps reaching the top, sped off past the buttress in 
 the direction of the goldsmith, when his course was 
 arrested by encountering at full speed, the person of 
 an old woman. Hastily raising her up, he recognised 
 his wife, who, fully recovered, but without a gondola, 
 was threading the zig-zag alleys on foot, on her way 
 to her own domicil. After the first astonishment was 
 over, her dress explained the error of the good father 
 and the extent of his own misfortune. The clothes 
 had been hung between the bed of Fiametta and that 
 of a smaller woman who had been long languishing 
 of a consumption. She died, and Fiametta's clothes, 
 brought to the door by mistake, were recognised by 
 Father Gasparo and taken to Pasquali. 
 
 The holy monk, chop-fallen and sad, took his soli- 
 tary way to the convent, but with the first step he felt 
 something slide into the heel of his sandal. He sat 
 down on the church stairs and absolved the devil from 
 theft — it was the lost ring, which had fallen upon his 
 foot and saved Pasquali the tailor from the pains of 
 bigamy. 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 I " Affection is a fire which kindleth as well in the bramble as in 
 
 I the oak, and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it may 
 
 best burn. Larks that mount in the air build their nests below in 
 
 the earth ; and women that cast their eyes upon kings, may place 
 
 their hearts upon vassals." — Marlowe. 
 
 " Vagrement est arbitraire : la beaute est quclque chose de plus reel 
 1 et de plus independent du gout et de I 'opinion ."—La. Bruyere. 
 
 Fast and rebukingly rang the matins from the 
 : towers of St. Etienne, and, though unused to wake, 
 i much less to pray, at that sunrise hour, I felt a com- 
 punctious visiting as my postillion cracked his whip 
 and flew past the sacred threshold, over which trip- 
 ped, as if every stroke would be the last, the tardy yV. 
 light-footed mass-goers of Vienna. It was my firsv 
 entrance into this Paris of Germany, and I stretched 
 my head from the window to look back with delight 
 upon the fretted gothic pile, so cumbered with orna- 
 ment, yet so light and airy — so vast in the area it 
 covered, yet so crusted in every part with delicate de- 
 j vice and sculpture. On sped the merciless postillion, 
 and the next moment we rattled into the court-yard of 
 the hotel. 
 
 I gave my keys to the most faithful and intelligent 
 of valets— an English boy of sixteen, promoted from 
 white top-boots and a cabriolet in London, to a plain 
 coat and almost his master's friendship upon the con- 
 tinent—and leaving him to find rooms to my taste, 
 make them habitable and get breakfast, I retraced my 
 way to ramble a half hour through the aisles of St. 
 Etienne. . . , 
 
 The lingering bell was still beating its quick and 
 monotonous call, and just before me, followed closely 
 by a female domestic, a veiled and slightly-formed lady 
 stepped over the threshold of the cathedral, and took 
 her way by the least-frequented aisle to the a tar. I 
 gave a passing glance of admiration at the small ankle 
 and dainty chaussure betrayed by her hurried step; 
 k..» w^oinhArim/ with a slight effort that I had sought 
 
 but remembering with a slight 
 
490 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 the church with at least some feeble intentions of re- 
 ligious worship, I crossed the broad nave to the oppo- 
 site side, and was soon leaning against a pillar, and 
 listening to the heavenly-breathed music of the volun- 
 tary, with a confused, but I trust, not altogether un- 
 profitable feeling of devotion. 
 
 The peasants, with their baskets standing beside 
 them on the tesselated floor, counted their beads upon 
 their knees ; the murmur, low-toned and universal, 
 rose through the vibrations of the anthem with an ac- 
 companiment upon which I have always thought the 
 great composers calculated, no less than upon the 
 echoing arches, and atmosphere thickened with in- 
 cense ; and the deep-throated priest muttered his 
 Latin prayer, more edifying to me that it left my 
 thoughts to their own impulses of worship, unde- 
 meaned by the irresistible littleness of criticism, and 
 unchecked by the narrow bounds of another's com- 
 prehension of the Divinity. Without being in any 
 leaning of opinion a son of the church of Rome, I 
 confess my soul gets nearer to heaven ; and my re- I 
 ligious tendencies, dulled and diverted from improve- i 
 menf by a life of travel and excitement, are more ! 
 gratefully ministered to, in the indistinct worship of I 
 the catholics. It seems to me that no man can pray ! 
 well through the hesitating lips of another. The i 
 inflated style or rhetorical efforts of many, addres- j 
 sing Heaven with difficult grammar and embarrass- 
 ed logic — and the weary monotony of others, re- 
 peating without interest and apparently without 
 thought, the most solemn appeals to the mercy of 
 the Almighty — are imperfect vehicles, at least to 
 me, for a fresh and apprehensive spirit of worship. 
 The religious architecture of the catholics favors the 
 solitary prayer of the heart. The vast floor of the 
 cathedral, the far receding aisles with their solemn 
 light, to which penetrate only the indistinct murmur 
 of priest and penitent, and the affecting wail or tri- 
 umphant hallelujah of the choir; the touching atti- 
 tudes and utter abandonment of all around to their 
 unarticulated devotions; the freedom to enter and de- 
 part, unquestioned and unnoticed, and the wonderful 
 impressiveness of the lofty architecture, clustered 
 with mementoes of death, and presenting through 
 every sense, some unobtrusive persuasion to the duties 
 of the spot— all these, I can not but think, are aids, 
 not unimportant to devout feeling, nor to the most 
 careless keeper of his creed and conscience, entirely 
 without salutary use. 
 
 My eye had been resting unconsciously on the 
 drapery of a statue, upon which the light of a painted 
 oriel window threw the mingled dyes of a peacock. 
 It was the figure of an apostle ; and curious at last to 
 see whence the colors came which turned the saintly 
 garb into a mantle of shot silk, I strayed toward the 
 eastern window, and was studying the gorgeous dyes 
 and grotesque drawing of an art lost to the world, when 
 I discovered that I was in the neighborhood of the 
 pretty figure that had tripped into church so lightly 
 before me. She knelt near the altar, a little forward 
 from one of the heavy gothic pillars, with her maid 
 beside her, and, close behind knelt a gentleman, who 
 I observed at a second glance, was paying his devo- 
 tions exclusively to the small foot that peeped from 
 the edge of a snowy peignoir, the dishabille of which 
 was covered and betrayed by a lace-veil and mantle. 
 As I stood thinking what a graceful study her figure 
 would make for a sculptor, and what an irreligious im- 
 pertinence was visible in the air of the gentleman be- 
 hind, he leaned forward as if to prostrate his face upon 
 the pavement, and pressed his lips upon the slender 
 sole of (I have no doubt) the prettiest shoe in Vienna. 
 The natural aversion which all men have for each 
 other as strangers, was quickened in my bosom by a 
 feeling much more vivid, and said to be quite as natu- 
 ral — resentment at any demonstration by another of 
 
 preference for the woman one has admired. If I have 
 not mistaken human nature, there is a sort of imagina- 
 ry property which every man feels in a woman he has 
 looked upon with even the most transient regard, 
 which is violated malgre lui, by a similar feeling on 
 the part of any other individual. 
 
 Not sure that the gentleman, who had so suddenly 
 become my enemy, had any warrant in the lady's con- 
 nivance for his attentions, I retreated to the shelter 
 of the pillar, and was presently satisfied that he was as 
 much a stranger to her as myself, and was decidedly 
 annoying her. A slight advance in her position to 
 escape his contact gave me the opportunity I wished, 
 j and stepping upon the small space between the skirt 
 of her dress and the outpost of his ebony cane, I began 
 to study the architecture of the roof with great serious- 
 ness. The gothic order, it is said, sprang from the 
 first attempts at constructing roofs from the branches 
 of trees, and is more perfect as it imitates more closely 
 the natural wilderness with its tall tree-shafts and in- 
 terlacing limbs. With my eyes half shut I endeavor- 
 ed to transport myself to an American forest, and con- 
 vert the beams and angles of this vast gothic structure 
 into a primitive temple of pines, with the sunshine 
 coming brokingly through; but the delusion, other- 
 wise easy enough, was destroyed by the cherubs roost- 
 ing on the cornices, and the apostles and saints perch- 
 ed as it were in the branches; and, spite of myself, I 
 thought it represented best Shylock's "wilderness of 
 monkeys." 
 
 " S'iL vous plait, monsieur /" said the gentleman, 
 pulling me by the pantaloons as I was losing myself 
 in these ill-timed speculations. 
 I looked down. 
 " Vous me genez, monsieur .'" 
 
 "J'en suis Men sure, monsieur /" — and I resumed my 
 study of the roof, turning gradually round till my heels 
 were against his knees, and backing peu-d-peu. 
 
 It has often occurred to me as a defect in the system 
 of civil justice, that the time of the day at which a 
 crime is committed is never taken into account by judge 
 or jury. The humors of an empty stomach act so ener- 
 getically on the judgment and temper of a man, and 
 the same act appears so differently to him, fasting and 
 full, that I presume an inquiry into the subject would 
 prove that few offences against law and human pity 
 were ever perpetrated by villains who had dined. In 
 the adventure before us, the best-disposed reader will 
 condemn my interference in a stranger's gallantries as 
 I impertinent and quixotic. Later in the day, I should 
 as soon have thought of ordering water-cresses for the 
 j gentleman's dindon aux. trvffes. 
 
 j . I was calling myself to account something after the 
 j above fashion, the gentleman in question standing near 
 i me, drumming on his boot with his ebony cane, when 
 I the lady rose, threw her rosary over her neck, and 
 | turning'to me with a graceful smile, courtesied slight- 
 ly and disappeared. 1 was struck so exceedingly with 
 ! the intense melancholy in the expression of the face — 
 an expression so totally at variance with the elasticity 
 of the step, and the promise of the slight and riante 
 figure and air — that I quite forgot I had drawn a 
 j quarrel on myself, and was loitering slowly toward the 
 door of the church, when the gentleman I had offend- 
 ed touched me on the arm, and in the politest manner 
 possible requested my address. We exchanged cards, 
 and I hastened home to breakfast, musing on the 
 facility with which the current of our daily life may be 
 thickened. I fancied I had a new love on my hands, 
 and I was tolerably sure of a quarrel — yet I had been 
 in Vienna but fifty-four minutes by Breguet. 
 
 My breakfast was waiting, and Percie had found 
 time to turn a comb through his brown curls, and get 
 the dust off his gaiters. He was tall for his age, and 
 (unaware to himself, poor boy !) every word and action 
 reflected upon the handsome seamstress in Cianbourne 
 
THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 491 
 
 Alley, whom he called his mother— for he showed 
 blood. His father was a gentleman, or there is no 
 truth in thorough-breeding. As I looked at him, a 
 difficulty vanished from my mind. 
 « Percie!" 
 
 "Get into your best suit of plain clothes, and if a 
 foreigner calls on me this morning, come in and forget 
 that you are a valet. I have occasion to use you for 
 a gentleman." 
 m Yes, sir !" 
 
 " My pistols are clean, I presume ?" 
 "Yes, sir!" 
 
 I wrote a letter or two, read a volume of " Ni 
 jamais, ni toujours" and about noon a captain of 
 dragoons was announced, bringing me the expected 
 cartel. Percie came in, treading gingerly in a pair 
 of tight French boots, but behaving exceedingly like 
 a gentleman, and after a little conversation, managed on 
 his part strictly according to my instructions, he took 
 his cane and walked off with his friend of the steel 
 scabbard to become acquainted with the ground. 
 
 The gray of a heavenly summer morning was 
 brightening above the chimneys of the fair city of j i 
 Vienna as I stepped into a caliche, followed by Per- 
 cie. With aspecial passport (procured by the polite- 
 nessof my antagonist) we made our sortie at that early 
 bour from the gates, and crossing the glacis, took the 
 road to the banks of the Danube. It was but a mile 
 from the city, and the mist lay low on the face of the 
 troubled current of the river, while the towers and j 
 pinnacles of the silent capital cut the sky in clear and ' 
 sharp lines — as if tranquillity and purity, those im- 
 maculate hand-maidens of nature, had tired of inno- 
 cence and their mistress — and slept in town ! 
 
 I had taken some coffee and broiled chicken before 
 starting, and (removed thus from the category of the 
 savage unbreakfasted) I was in one of those moods of 
 universal benevolence, said (erroneously) to be pro- 
 duced only by a clean breast and milk diet. I could 
 have wept, with Wordsworth, over a violet. 
 
 My opponent was there with his dragoon, and Per- 
 cie, cool and gentlemanlike, like a man who " had 
 served," looked on at the loading of the pistols, and 
 gave me mine with a very firm hand, but with a mois- 
 ture and anxiety in his eye which I have remembered j 
 since. We were to fire any time after the counting 
 of three, and having no malice against my friend, j 
 whose impertinence to a lady was (really!) no business ' 
 of mine, I intended, of course, to throw away my fire. 
 
 The first word was given and I looked at my an- [ 
 tagonist, who, I saw at a glance, had no such gentle 
 intentions. He was taking deliberate aim, and in the 
 four seconds that elapsed between the remaining two 
 words, I changed my mind (one thinks so fast when 
 his leisure is limited !) at least twenty times whether I 
 should fire at him or no. 
 
 " Trois .'" pronounced the dragoon, from a throat 
 like a trombone, and with the last thought, up flew 
 my hand, and as my pistol discharged in the air, my 
 friend's shot struck upon a large turquoise which I 
 wore on my third finger, and drew a slight pencil-line 
 across my left organ of causality. It was well aimed 
 for my temple, but the ring had saved me. 
 
 Friend of those days, regretted and unforgotten ! 
 days of the deepest sadness and heart-heaviness, yet 
 somehow dearer in remembrance than all the joys I 
 can recall — there was a talisman in thy parting gift thou 
 didst not think would be, one day, my angel ! 
 
 " You will be able to wear your hair over the scar, 
 sir!" said Percie, coming up and putting his finger on 
 the wound. 
 
 "Monsieur!" said the dragoon, advancing to Per- 
 cie after a short conference with his principal, and 
 looking twice as fierce as before. 
 
 " Monsieur !" said Percie, wheeling short updn him. 
 
 " My friend is not satisfied. He presumes that 
 monsieur V Anglais wishes to trifle with him." 
 
 " Then let your friend take care of himself," said I, 
 roused by the unprovoked murderousness of the feel- 
 ing. Load the pistols, Percie ! In my country," I 
 continued, turning to the dragoon, " a man isdisgraced 
 who fires twice upon an antagonist who has spared 
 him ! Your friend is a ruffian, and the consequences 
 be on his own hand !" 
 
 We took our places and the first word was given, 
 when a man dashed between us on horseback at top- 
 speed. The violence with which he drew rein brought 
 his horse upon his haunches, and he was on his feet in 
 half a breath. 
 
 The idea that he was an officer of the police was 
 immediately dissipated by his step and air. Of the 
 finest athletic form I had ever seen, agile, graceful, 
 and dressed pointedly well, there was still an inde- 
 finable something about him, either above or below 
 a gentleman — which, it was difficult to say. His 
 features were slight, fair, and, except a brow too 
 heavy for them and a lip of singular and (I thought) 
 habitual defiance, almost feminine. His hair grew 
 long and had been soigne, probably by more cares- 
 sing fingers than his own, and his rather silken mus- 
 tache was glossy with some odorent oil. As he 
 approached me and took my hand, with a clasp like a 
 smith's vice, I observed these circumstances, and could 
 have drawn his portrait without ever seeing him again 
 — so marked a man was he, in every point and feature. 
 His business was soon explained. He was the 
 husband of the lady my opponent had insulted, and 
 that pleasant gentleman could, of course, make no ob- 
 jection to his taking my place. I officiated as tbnoin, 
 and, as they took their position, 1 anticipated for the 
 dragoon and myself the trouble of carrying them toth 
 off the field. 1 had a practical assurance of my friend's 
 pistol, and the stranger was not the looking man to 
 miss a hair's breadth of his aim. 
 
 The word was not fairly off my lips when both 
 pistols cracked like one discharge, and high into the 
 air sprang my revengeful opponent, and dropped like 
 a clod upon the grass. The stranger opened his 
 waistcoat, thrust his fore-finger into a wound in his 
 left breast, and slightly closing his teeth, pushed a 
 bullet through, which had been checked by the bone 
 and lodged in the flesh near the skin. The surgeon 
 who had accompanied my unfortunate antagonist, left 
 the body, which he had found beyond his art, and 
 readily gave his assistance to stanch the blood of my 
 preserver; and jumping with the latter into my caliche, 
 I put Percie upon the stranger's horse, and we drove 
 back to Vienna. 
 
 The market people were crowding in at the gate, 
 
 the merry peasant girls glanced at us with their blue, 
 
 German eyes, the shopmen laid out their gay wares 
 
 I to- the street, and the tide of life ran on as busily and 
 
 ! as gayly, though a drop had been extracted, within 
 
 ! scarce ten minutes, from its quickest vein. I felt a 
 
 ! revulsion at my heart, and grew faint and sick. Is a 
 
 human life — is my life worth anything, even a thought, 
 
 I to my fellow-creatures ? was the bitter question forced 
 
 | upon my soul. How icily and keenly the unconscious 
 
 ! indifference of the world penetrates to the nerve and 
 
 ! marrow of him who suddenly realizes it. 
 
 We dashed through the kohl-market, and driving 
 into the porte-cochere of a dark-looking house in one 
 of the cross streets of that quarter, were ushered into 
 apartments of extraordinary magnificence. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 " What do you want, Percie ?" 
 He was walking into the room with all the deli- 
 berate politeness of a " gold-stick-in-waiting." 
 
492 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 " I beg pardon, sir, but I was asked to walk up, and 
 I was nol sure whether I was still a gentleman." 
 
 It instantly struck me that it might seem rather 
 infra dig to the chevalier (my new friend had thus 
 announced himself) to have had a valet for a second, and 
 as he immediately after entered the room, having step- 
 ped below to give orders about his horse, I presented 
 Percie as a gentleman and my friend, and resumed my 
 observation of the singular apartment in which I found 
 myself. 
 
 The effect on coming first in at the door, was that 
 of a small and lofty chapel, where the light struggled 
 in from an unseen aperture above the altar. There 
 were two windows at the farther extremity, but cur- 
 tained so heavily, and set so deeply into the wall, that 
 I did not at first observe the six richly-carpeted steps 
 which led up to them, nor the luxuriously cushioned 
 seats on either side of the casement, within the niche, 
 for those who would mount thither for fresh air. The 
 walls were tapestried, but very ragged and dusty, and 
 the floor, though there were several thicknesses of the 
 heavy-piled, small, Turkey carpets laid loosely over it, 
 was irregular and sunken. The corners were heaped 
 with various articles I could not at first distinguish. 
 My host fortunately gave me an opportunity to gratify 
 my curiosity by frequent absences under the house- 
 keeper's apology (odd I thought for a chevalier) of 
 expediting breakfast ; and with the aid of Percie, I 
 tumbled his chattels about with all necessary freedom. 
 
 " That," said the chevalier, entering, as I turned out 
 the face of a fresh colored picture to the light, " is a 
 capo d'opera of a French artist, who painted it, as you 
 may say, by the gleam of the dagger." 
 
 " A cool light, as a painter would say !" 
 
 " He was a cool fellow, sir, and would have handled 
 a broa'dsword better than a pencil." 
 
 Percie stepped up while I was examining the ex- 
 quisite finish of the picture, and asked very respect- 
 fully if the chevalier would give him the particulars 
 of the story. It was a full-length portrait of a young 
 and excessively beautiful girl, of apparently scarce 
 fifteen, entirely nude, and lying upon a black velvet 
 couch, with one foot laid on a broken diadem, and her 
 right hand pressing a wild rose to her heart. 
 
 " It was the fancy, sir," continued the chevalier, 
 " of a bold outlaw, who loved the only daughter of a 
 noble of Hungary." 
 
 " Is this the lady, sir?" asked Percie, in his politest 
 valet French. 
 
 The chevalier hesitated a moment and looked over 
 his shoulder as if he might be overheard. 
 
 |* This is she — copied to the minutest shadow of a 
 hair ! He was a bold outlaw, gentlemen, and had 
 plueked the lady from her father's castle with his 
 own hand." 
 
 "Against her will?" interrupted Percie, rather 
 energetically. 
 
 " No !" scowled the chevalier, as if his lowering 
 brows had articulated the word, " by her own will and 
 connivance; for she loved him." 
 
 Percie drew a long breath, and looked more close- 
 ly at the taper limbs and the exquisitely-chiselled 
 features of the face, which was turned" over the 
 shoulder with a look of timid shame inimitably true 
 to nature. 
 
 " She loved him," continued our fierce narrator, 
 who, I almost began to suspect was the outlaw him- 
 self, by the energy with which he enforced the tale, 
 '• and after a moonlight ramble or two with him in the 
 forest of her father's domain, she fled and became his 
 wife. You are admiring the hair, sir ! It is as 
 luxuriant and glossy now !" 
 
 " If you please, sir, it is the villain himself!" said 
 Percie in an undertone. 
 
 "Bref," continued the chevalier, either not under- 
 standing English or not heeding the interruption, "an 
 
 adventurous painter, one day hunting the picturesque 
 in the neighborhood of the outlaw's retreat, surprised 
 this fair creature bathing in one of the loneliest moun- 
 tain-streams in Hungary. His art appeared to be his 
 first passion, for he hid himself in the trees and drew 
 her as she stood dallying on the margin of the small 
 pool in which the brook loitered; and so busy was he 
 with his own work, or so soft was the mountain moss 
 under its master's tread, that the outlaw looked, un- 
 perceived the while, over his shoulder, and fell in love 
 anew with the admirable counterfeit. She looked 
 like a naiad, sir, new-born of a dew-drop and a violet." 
 
 I nodded an assent to Percie. 
 
 "The sketch, excellent as it seemed, was still un- 
 finished when the painter, enamored as he might 
 well be, of these sweet limbs, glossy with the shining 
 water, flung down his book and sprang toward her 
 The outlaw " 
 
 " Struck him to the heart ? Oh Heaven !" said 
 Percie, covering his eyes as if he could see the 
 murder. 
 
 " No ! he was a student of the human soul, and de- 
 ferred his vengeance." 
 
 Percie looked up and listened, like a man whose 
 wits were perfectly abroad. 
 
 " He was not unwilling since her person had been 
 seen irretrievably, to know how his shrinking Iminild 
 (this was her name of melody) would have escaped, 
 had she been found alone." 
 
 " The painter" — prompted Percie, impatient for 
 the sequel. 
 
 " The painter flew over rock and brake, and sprang 
 into the pool in which she was half immersed ; and 
 my brave girl " 
 
 He hesitated, for he had betrayed himself. 
 
 " Ay — she is mine, gentlemen ; and I am Yvain, 
 the outlaw — my brave wife, I say with a single bound, 
 leaped to the rock where her dress was concealed, 
 seized a short spear which she used as a staff in her 
 climbing rambles, and struck it through his shoulder 
 as he pursued !" 
 
 " Bravely done !" I thought aloud. 
 
 " Was it not ? I came up the next moment, but the 
 spear stuck in his shoulder, and I could not fall upon 
 a wounded man. We carried him to our ruined 
 castle in the mountains, and while my Iminild cured 
 her own wound, I sent for his paints, and let him 
 finish his bold beginning with a difference of my own. 
 You see the picture." 
 
 " Was the painter's love cured with his wound !" 
 I asked with a smile. 
 
 "No, by St. Stephen! He grew ten times more 
 enamored as he drew. He was as fierce as a welk 
 hawk, and as willing to quarrel for his prey. I could 
 have driven my dagger to his heart a hundred times 
 for the mutter of his lips and the flash of his dark eyes 
 as he fed his gaze upon her ; but he finished the pic- 
 ture, and I gave him a fair field. He chose the broad- 
 sword, and hacked away at me like a man." 
 
 "And the result" — 1 asked. 
 
 " I am here !" replied the outlaw significantly. 
 
 Percie leaped upon the carpeted steps, and pushed 
 back the window for fresh air; and, for myself, 1 scarce 
 knew how to act under the roof of a man, who, though 
 he confessed himself an outlaw and almost an assassin, 
 was bound to me by the ties of our own critical ad- 
 venture, and had confided his condition to me with so 
 ready a reliance on my honor. In the midst of my 
 dilemma, while I was pretending to occupy myself 
 with examining a silver mounted and peaked saddle, 
 which I foundbehind the picture in the corner, a deep 
 and unpleasant voice announced breakfast. 
 
 "Wolfen is rather a grim chamberlain," said the 
 chevalier, bowing with the grace and smile of the 
 softest courtier, " but he will usher you to breakfast 
 and I am sure you stand in need of it. For myself, 
 
THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 493 
 
 I could eat worse meat than my grandfather with this 
 appetite." . . . ■, 
 
 Percie gave me a look of inquiry and uneasiness 
 when he found we were to follow the rough domestic 
 through the dark corridors of the old house, and 
 through his underbred politeness of insisting on fol- 
 lowing his host, I could see that he was unwilling to 
 trust "the outlaw with the rear ; but a massive and 
 broad door, flung open at the end of the passage, let 
 in upon us presently the cool and fresh air from a 
 northern exposure, and, stepping forward quickly to 
 the threshold, we beheld a picture which changed the 
 current and color of our thoughts. 
 
 In the bottom of an excavated area, which, as 
 well as I could judge, must be forty feet below the 
 level of the court, lay a small and antique garden, 
 brilliant with the most costly flowers, and cooled by 
 a fountain gushing from under the foot of a nymph in 
 marble. The spreading tops of six alleys of lindens 
 reaching to the level of the street, formed a living 
 roof to the grot-like depths of the garden, and con- 
 cealed it from all view but that of persons descend- 
 ing like ourselves from the house ; while, instead of 
 walls to shut in this paradise in the heart of a city, 
 sharply inclined slopes of green-sward leaned in 
 under the branches of the lindens, and completed the 
 fairy-like enclosure of shade and verdure. As we 
 descended the rose-laden steps and terraces, I ob- 
 served, that, of the immense profusion of flowers in 
 the area below, nearly all were costly exotics, whose 
 pots were set in the earth, and probably brought 
 away from the sunshine only when in high bloom; 
 and as we rounded the spreading basin of the foun- 
 tain which broke the perspective of the alley, a table, 
 which had been concealed by the marble nymph, 
 and a skilfully-disposed array of rhododendrons lay 
 just beneath our feet, while a lady, whose features 
 1 could not fail to remember, smiled up from her 
 couch of crimson cushions and gave us a graceful 
 welcome. 
 
 The same taste for depth which had been shown 
 in the room sunk below the windows, and the garden 
 below the street, was continued in the kind of mar- 
 ble divan in which we were to breakfast. Four steps 
 descending from the pavement of the alley introduc- 
 ed us into a circular excavation, whose marble seats, 
 covered with cushions of crimson silk, surrounded a 
 table laden with the substantial viands which are 
 common to a morning meal in Vienna, and smoking 
 with coffee, whose aroma (Percie agreed with me) 
 exceeded even the tube roses in grateful sweetness. 
 Between the cushions at our backs and the pave- 
 ments just above the level of our heads, were piled cir- 
 cles of thickly-flowering geraniums, which enclosed 
 us in rings of perfume, and, pouring from the cup of 
 a sculptured flower, held in the hand of the nymph, 
 a smooth stream like a silver rod supplied a channel 
 grooved around the centre of the marble table, through 
 which the bright water, with the impulse of its descent, 
 made a swift revolution and disappeared. 
 
 It was a scene to give memory the lie if it could 
 have recalled the bloodshed of the morning. The 
 green light flecked down through the lofty roof upon 
 the glittering and singing water ; a nightingale in a 
 recess of the garden, gurgled through his wires as if 
 intoxicated with the congenial twilight of his prison ; 
 the heavy-cupped flowers of the tropics nodded with 
 the rain of the fountain spray; the distant roll of 
 wheels in the neighboring streets came with an 
 assurance of reality to this dream-land, yet softened 
 by the unreverberating roof and an air crowded with 
 flowers and trembling with the pulsations of falling 
 water; the lowering forehead of the outlaw cleared 
 u]) like a sky of June after a thunder-shower, and his 
 • voice grew gentle and caressing ; and the delicate 
 mistress of all (by birth, Countess Iininilrl), a crea- 
 
 ture as slight as Psyche, and as white as the lotus, 
 whose flexile stem served her for a bracelet, wel- 
 comed us with her soft voice and humid eyes, and 
 saddened by the event of the morning, looked on her 
 husband with a tenderness that would have assoiled 
 her of her sins against delicacy, I thought even in the 
 mind of an angel. 
 
 " We live, like truth, here, in the bottom of a well," 
 said the countess to Percie, as she gave him his cof- 
 fee ; " how do you like my whimsical abode, sir?" 
 
 " I should like any place where you were, Miladi !" 
 he answered, blushing and stealing his eyes across at 
 me, either in doubt how far he might presume upon 
 his new character, or suspecting that I should smile 
 at his gallantry. 
 
 The outlaw glanced his eyes over the curling head 
 of the boy, with one of those just perceptible smiles 
 which developed, occasionally, in great beauty, the 
 gentle spirit in his bosom ; and Iminild, pleased with 
 the compliment or the blush, threw off her pensive 
 mood, and assumed in an instant, the coquettish air 
 which had attracted my notice as she stepped before 
 me into the church of St. Etienne. 
 
 "You had hard work," she said, "to keep up 
 with your long-legged dragoon yesterday, Monsieur 
 Percie !" 
 
 " Miladi ?" he answered, with a look of inquiry. 
 " Oh, I was behind you, and my legs are not much 
 longer than yours. How he strided away with his 
 long spurs, to be sure ! Do you remember a smart 
 young gentleman with a blue cap that walked past 
 you on the glacis occasionally." 
 
 " Ah, with laced boots, like a Hungarian ?" 
 " I see I am ever to be known by my foot," said 
 she, putting it out upon the cushion, and turning it 
 about with naive admiration ; " that poor captain of 
 the imperial guard paid dearly for kissing it, holy 
 virgin !" and she crossed herself and was silent for a 
 moment. 
 
 « If I might take the freedom, chevalier," I said, 
 " pray how came I indebted to your assistance in this 
 affair ?" 
 
 "Iminild has partly explained," he answered. 
 " She knew, of course, that a challenge would follow 
 your interference, and it was very easy to know that 
 an officer of some sort would take a message in the 
 course of the morning to Le Prince Charles, the only 
 hotel frequented by the English d'un certain gens. 
 I bowed to the compliment. 
 
 " Arriving in Vienna late last night, I found Iminild 
 (who had followed this gentleman and the dragoon 
 unperceived) in possession of all the circumstances ; 
 and, but for oversleeping myself this morning, I should 
 have saved your turquoise, man seigneur /" 
 
 " Have you lived here long, Miladi ?" asked Per- 
 cie, looking up into her eyes with an unconscious 
 passionateness which made the countess Iminild color 
 slightly, and bite her lips to retain an expression of 
 pleasure. 
 
 » I have not lived long, anywhere, sir!" she answer- 
 ed half archly, "but I played in this garden when not 
 much older than you !" 
 
 Percie looked confused and pulled up his cravat. 
 " This house said the chevalier, willing apparently 
 to spare the countess a painful narration, " is the 
 property of the old count Ildefert, my wile's lather. 
 He has long ceased to visit Vienna, and has lelt it, he 
 supposes, to a stranger. When Iminild tires of the 
 forest, she comes here, and I join her if I can find 
 time. I must to the saddle to-morrow, by St. Jacques. 
 
 The word had scarce died on his lips when the door 
 by which we had entered the garden was flung open, 
 and the measured tread of gens-cParmes resounded in 
 the corridor. The first man who stood out upon the 
 upper terrace was the dragoon who had been second 
 to mv opponent. 
 
494 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 " Trailer and villain !" muttered the outlaw between 
 his teeth, " I thought I remembered you ! It is that 
 false comrade Berthold, Iminild !" 
 
 Yvain had risen from the table as if but to stretch 
 his legs ; and drawing a pistol from his bosom he 
 cocked it as he quietly stepped up into the garden. 
 I saw at a glance that there was no chance for his 
 escape, and laid my hand on his arm. 
 
 " Chevalier !" I said, " surrender and trust to op- 
 portunity. It is madness to resist here." 
 
 " Yvain !" said Iminild, in a low voice, flying to his 
 side as she comprehended his intention, " leave me 
 that vengeance, and try the parapet. I'll kill him be- 
 fore he sleeps! Quick ! Ah, Heavens !" 
 
 The dragoon had turned at that instant to fly, and 
 with suddenness of thought the pistol flashed, and 
 the traitor dropped heavily on the terrace. Spring- 
 ing like a cut up the slope of green sward, Yvain stood 
 an instant on the summit of the wall, hesitating where 
 to jump beyond, and in the next moment rolled heavily 
 back, stabbed through and through with a bayonet 
 from the opposite side. 
 
 The blood left the lips and cheek of Iminild ; but 
 without a word or a sign of terror, she sprang to the 
 side of the fallen outlaw and lifted him up against 
 her knee. The gens-d' armes rushed to the spot, but 
 the subaltern who commanded them yielded instantly 
 to my wish that they should retire to the skirts of the 
 garden ; and, sending Percie to the fountain for water, 
 we bathed the lips and forehead of the dying man and 
 set him against the sloping parapet. With one hand 
 grasping the dress of Iminild and the other clasped in 
 mine, he struggled to speak. 
 
 " The cross !" he gasped, " the cross !" 
 
 Iminild drew a silver crucifix from her bosom. 
 
 "Swear on this," he said, putting it to my lips and 
 speaking with terrible energy, " swear that you will 
 protect her while you live !" 
 
 " I swear!" 
 
 He shut our hands together convulsively, gasped 
 slightly as if he would speak again, and, in another 
 instant sunk, relaxed and lifeless, on the shoulder of 
 Iminild. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The fate and history of Yvain, the outlaw, became, 
 on the following day, the talk of Vienna. He had 
 been long known as the daring horse-stealer of Hun- 
 gary ; and, though it was not doubted that his sway 
 was exercised over plunderers of every description, 
 even pirates upon the high seas, his own courage and 
 address were principally applied to robbery of the well- 
 guarded steeds of the emperor and his nobles. It was 
 said that there was not a horse in the dominions of 
 Austria whose qualities and breeding were not known 
 to him, nor one he cared to have which was not in his 
 concealed stables in the forest. The most incredible 
 stories were told of his horsemanship. He would so 
 disguise the animal on which he rode, either by forcing 
 him into new paces or by other arts only known to him- 
 self, that he would make the tour of the Glacis on the 
 emperor's best horse, newly stolen, unsuspected even 
 by the royal grooms. The roadsters of his own troop 
 were the best steeds bred on the banks of the Danube; 
 but, though always in the highest condition, they 
 would never have been suspected to be worth a florin 
 till put upon their mettle. The extraordinary escapes 
 of his band from the vigilant and well-mounted gens- 
 cVarmes were thus accounted for ; and, in most of the 
 villages in Austria, the people, on some market-day 
 or other, had seen a body of apparently ill-mounted 
 peasants suddenly start off with the speed of lightning 
 at the appearance of gens-d'armes, and, flying over 
 
 fence and wall, draw a straight course for the mount- 
 ains, distancing their pursuers with the ease of swal- 
 lows on the wing. 
 
 After the death of Yvain in the garden, I had been 
 forced with Percie into a carriage, standing in the 
 court, and accompanied by a guard, driven to my 
 hotel, where I was given to understand that I was to 
 remain under arrest till further orders. A sentinel at 
 the door forbade all ingress or egress except to the 
 people of the house : a circumstance which was only 
 distressing to me, as it precluded my inquiries after 
 the countress Iminild, of whom common rumor, the 
 servants informed me, made not the slightest mention. 
 
 Four days after this, on the relief of the guard at 
 noon, a subaltern, entered my room and informed me 
 that I was at liberty. I instantly made preparations to 
 go out, and was drawing on my boots, when Percie, 
 who had not yet recovered from the shock of his 
 arrest, entered in some alarm, and informed me that 
 one of the royal grooins was in the court with a letter, 
 which he would deliver only into my own hands. He 
 had orders beside, he said, not to leave his saddle. 
 Wondering what new leaf of my destiny was to turn 
 over, I went below and received a letter, with apparent- 
 ly the imperial seal, from a well-dressed groom in the 
 livery of the emperor's brother, the king of Hungary. 
 He was mounted on a compact, yet fine-limbed horse, 
 and both horse and rider were as still as if cut in 
 marble. 
 
 I returned to my room and broke the seal. It was 
 a letter from Iminild, and the bold bearer was an out- 
 law disguised ! She had heard that I was to be re- 
 leased that morning, and desired me to ride out on the 
 road to Gratz. In a postscript she begged I would 
 request Monsieur Percie to accompany me. 
 
 I sent for horses, and, wishing to be left to my own 
 thoughts, ordered Percie to fall behind, and rode 
 slowly out of the southern gate. If the countess 
 Iminild were safe, I had enough of the adventure for 
 my taste. My oath bound me to protect this wild and 
 unsexed woman, but farther intercourse with a band 
 of outlaws, or farther peril of my head for no reason 
 that either a court of gallantry orof justice would rec- 
 ognise, was beyond my usual programme of pleasant 
 events. The road was a gentle ascent, and with, the 
 bridle on the neck of my hack I paced thoughtfully on, 
 till, at a slight turn, we stood at a fair height above 
 | Vienna. 
 
 " It is a beautiful city, sir," said Percie, riding up. 
 
 " How the deuce could she have escaped ?" said I, 
 thinking aloud. 
 
 " Has she escaped, sir ? Ah, thank Heaven !" ex- 
 claimed the passionate boy, the tears rushing to his 
 eyes. 
 
 " Why, Percie !" I said with a tone of surprise 
 which called a blush into his face, " have you really 
 found leisure to fall in love amid all this imbroglio ?'' 
 
 " I beg pardon, my dear master !" he replied in a 
 confused voice, "I scarce know what it is to fall in 
 love ; but I would die for Miladi Iminild." 
 
 " Not at all an impossible sequel, my poor boy ! 
 But wheel about and touch your hat, for here comes 
 some one of the royal family !" 
 
 A horseman was approaching at an easy canter, 
 over the broad and unfenced plain of table-land which 
 overlooks Vienna on the south, attended by six mount- 
 ed servants in the white kerseymere frocks, braided 
 with the two-headed black eagle, which distinguish the 
 members of the imperial household. 
 
 The carriages on the road stopped while he passed, 
 the foot-passengers touched their caps, and, as he came 
 near, I perceived that he was slight and young, but 
 rode with a confidence and a grace not often attained. 
 His horse had the subdued, half-fiery action of an 
 A.rab, and Percie nearly dropped from his saddle when 
 the young horseman suddenly drove in his spurs, 
 
THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 495 
 
 and with almost a single vault stood motionless be- 
 fore us. 
 
 " Monsieur /" 
 
 " Madame la Contesse .'" 
 
 I was uncertain how to receive her, and took refuge 
 in civility. Whether she would be overwhelmed with 
 the recollection of Yvain's death, or had put away the 
 thought altogether with her masculine firmness, was 
 a dilemma for which the eccentric contradictions of 
 her character left me no probable solution. Motion- 
 ing with her hand after saluting me, two of the party 
 rode back and forward in different directions, as if 
 patrolling; and giving a look between a tear and a 
 smile at Percie, she placed her hand in mine, and 
 shook off her sadness with a strong effort. 
 
 " You did not expect so large a suite with your 
 protegee" she said, rather gayly, after a moment. 
 
 41 Do I understand that you come now to put your- 
 self under my protection?" I asked in reply. 
 
 " Soon, but not now, nor here. I have a hundred 
 men at the foot of Mount Semering, whose future 
 fate, in some important respects, none can decide but 
 myself. Yva'm was always prepared for this, and 
 everything is en train. I come now but to appoint a 
 place of meeting. Quick ! my patrole comes in, and 
 some one approaches whom we must fly. Can you 
 await me at Gratz ?"' 
 
 " I can and will !" 
 
 She put her slight hand to my lips, waved a kiss 
 at Percie, and away with the speed of wind, flew her 
 swift Arab over the plain, followed by the six horse- 
 men, every one of whom seemed part of the animal 
 that carried him — he rode so admirably- 
 
 The slight figure of Iminild in the close fitting dress 
 of a Hungarian page, her jacket open and her beauti- 
 ful limbs perfectly defined, silver fringes at her ankles 
 and waist, and a row of silver buttons gallonne down 
 to the instep, her bright, flashing eyes, her short curls 
 escaping from her cap and tangled over her left temple, 
 with the gold tassel, dirk and pistol at her belt and 
 spurs upon her heels — it was an apparition I had 
 scarce time to realize, but it seemed painted on my 
 eyes. The cloud of dust which followed their rapid 
 flight faded away as f watched it, but I saw her still. 
 
 " Shall I ride back and order post-horses, sir !" 
 asked Percie standing up in his stirrups. 
 
 "No ; but you may order dinner at six. And Per- 
 cie !" he was riding away with a gloomy air ; " you 
 may go to the police and get our passports for Venice." 
 
 " By the way of Gratz, sir!" 
 
 " Yes, simpleton !" 
 
 There is a difference between sixteen and twenty- 
 six, I thought to myself, as the handsome boy flogged 
 his horse into a gallop. The time is gone when I 
 could love without reason. Yet 1 remember when a 
 feather, stuck jauntily into a bonnet, would have made 
 any woman a princess; and in those days. Heaven help 
 tis ! I should have loved this woman more for her 
 galliardize than ten times a prettier one with all the 
 virtues of Dorcas. For which of my sins am I made 
 guardian to a robber's wife, I wonder ! 
 
 The heavy German postillions, with their cocked 
 hats and yellow coats, got us over the ground after a 
 manner, and toward the sunset of a summer's evening 
 the tall castle of Gratz, perched on a pinnacle of rock 
 in the centre of a vast plain, stood up boldly against 
 the reddening sky. The rich fields of Styria were 
 ripening to an early harvest, the people sat at their 
 doors with the look of household happiness for which 
 the inhabitants of these "despotic countries" are so 
 remarkable ; and now and then on the road the rattling 
 of steel scabbards drew my attention from a book or a 
 revery, and the mounted troops, so perpetually seen 
 on the broad roads of Austria, lingered slowly past 
 with their dust and baggage-trains. 
 
 It had been a long summer's day, and, contrary to 
 my usual practice, I had not mounted, even for half a 
 post, to Percie's side in the rumble. Out of humor 
 with fate for having drawn me into very embarrassing 
 circumstances — out of humor with myself for the 
 quixotic step which had first brought it on me — and a 
 little of out humor with Percie (perhaps from an un- 
 acknowledged jealousy of Iminild's marked preference 
 for the varlet), I left him to toast alone in the sun, 
 while I tried to forget him and myself in " Le Marquis 
 de Pontangos." What a very clever book it is, by 
 the way ! 
 
 The pompous sergeant of the guard performed his 
 office upon my passport at the gate — giving me at 
 least a kreutzer worth of his majesty's black sand in 
 exchange for my florin and my English curse (I said 
 before I was out of temper, and he was half an hour 
 writing his abominable name), and leaving my carriage 
 and Percie to find their way together to the hotel, I 
 dismounted at the foot of a steep street and made my 
 way to the battlements of the castle, in search of scene- 
 ry and equanimity. 
 
 Ah ! what a glorious landscape ! The precipitous 
 rock on which the old fortress is built seems dropped 
 by the Titans in the midst of a plain, extending miles 
 i in every direction, with scarce another pebble. Close 
 at its base run the populous streets, coiling about it 
 like serpents around a pyramid, and away from the 
 walls of the city spread the broad fields, laden, as far 
 as the eye can see, with tribute for the emperor! The 
 tall castle, with its armed crest, looks down among the 
 reapers. 
 
 " You have not lost your friend and lover, yet you 
 are melancholy !" said a voice behind me, that I was 
 scarce startled to hear. 
 
 "Is it you, Iminild ?" 
 
 " Scarce the same — forlmiuild was never before so 
 
 sad. It is something in the sunset. Come away while 
 
 the woman keeps down in me, and let us stroll through 
 
 the Plaza, where the band is playing. Do you love 
 
 ; military music ?" 
 
 I looked at the costume and figure of the extra 
 
 ordinary creature before I ventured with her on s 
 
 public promenade. She was dressed like one of thf 
 
 travelling apprentices of Germany, with cap and bleuzcr. 
 
 and had assumed the air of the craft with a succes? 
 
 absolutely beyond detection. I gave her my arm and 
 
 we sauntered through the crowd, listening to the 
 
 thrilling music of one of the finest bands in Germany. 
 
 i The privileged character and free manners of the 
 
 wandering craftsmen whose dress she had adopted, 
 
 i I was well aware, reconciled, in the eyes of the in- 
 
 1 habitants, the marked contrast between our conditions 
 
 in life. They would simply have said, if they had 
 
 made a remark at all, that the Englishman was bon 
 
 enfant and the craftsman bon camarade. 
 
 " You had better look at me, messieurs !" said the 
 dusty apprentice, as two officers of the regiment passed 
 and gave me the usual strangers' stare ; "lam better 
 worth your while by exactly five thousand florins." 
 
 " And pray how ?" I asked. 
 
 " That price is set on my head !" 
 
 "Heavens! and you walk here !" 
 
 " They kept you longer than usual with your pass 
 j port, I presume ?" 
 
 "At the gate? yes." 
 
 " I came in with my pack at the time. They have 
 orders to examine all travellers and passports with 
 ! unusual care, these sharp officials! But I shall get 
 j out as easily as I got in !" 
 
 " My dear countess!" I said, in a tone of serious 
 | remonstrance, "do not trifle with the vigilance of the 
 I best police in Europe ! I am your guardian, and you 
 owe my advice some respect. Come away from the 
 I square and let us talk of it in earnest." 
 ' -Wise seignior! suffer me to remind you how 
 
496 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 deftly I slipped through the fingers of these gentry 
 after our tragedy in Vienna, and pay my opinion some 
 respect! It was my vanity that brought me, with 
 my lackeys, to meet you a la prince royale so near 
 Vienna ; and hence this alarm in the police, for 1 was 
 seen and suspected. I have shown myself to you 
 in my favorite character, however, and have done 
 with such measures. You shall see me on the road 
 to-morrow, safe as the heart in your bosom. Where 
 is Monsieur Percie !" 
 
 " At the hotel. But stay ! can I trust you with 
 yourself?" 
 
 " Yes, and dull company, too ! A revoir .'" 
 And whistling the popular air of the craft she had 
 assumed, the countess Iminild struck her long staff 
 on the pavement, and with the gait of a tired and 
 habitual pedestrian, disappeared by a narrow street 
 leading under the precipitory battlements of the 
 castle. 
 
 Percie made his appearance with a cup of coffee 
 the following morning, and, with the intention of post- 
 ing a couple of leagues to breakfast, I hurried through 
 my toilet and was in my carriage an hour after sun- 
 rise. The postillion was in his saddle and only waited 
 for Percie, who, upon inquiry, was nowhere to be 
 found. I sat fifteen minutes, and just as I was be- 
 ginning to be alarmed he ran into the large court of 
 the hotel, and, crying out to the postillions that all 
 was right, jumped into his place with an agility, 
 it struck me, very unlike his usual gentlemanlike 
 deliberation. Determining to take advantage of the 
 first up-hill to catechize him upon his matutinal ram- 
 bles, I read the signs along the street till we pulled 
 up at the gate. 
 
 Iminild's communication had prepared me for un- 
 usual delay with my passport, and I was not surprised 
 when the officer, in returning it to me, requested me 
 as a matter of form, to declare, upon my honor, that 
 the servant behind my carriage was an Englishman, 
 and the person mentioned in my passport. 
 
 " Foi d'honneur, monsieur," I said, placing my hand 
 politely on my heart, and off trotted the postillion, 
 while the captain of the guard, flattered with my civili- 
 ty, touched his foraging-cap, and sent me a German 
 blessing through his mustache. 
 
 It was a divine morning, and the fresh and dewy 
 air took me back many a year, to the days when 1 
 was more familiar with the hour. We had a long 
 Irajet across the plain, and unlooping an antivibration 
 tablet, for the invention of which my ingenuity took 
 great credit to itself (suspended on caoutchouc cords 
 from the roof of the carriage — and deserving of a 
 patent I trust you will allow !) I let off my poetical 
 vein in the following beginning to what might have 
 turned out, but for the interruption, a very edifying 
 copy of verses : — 
 
 ' Ye are not what ye were to me, 
 
 Oh waning night and morning star ! 
 Though silent still your watches flee 
 
 Though hang yon lamp in heaven as far— 
 
 Though live the thoughts ye fed of yore 
 
 I'm thine, oh starry dawn, no more ! 
 Yet to that dew-pearled hour alone 
 
 I was not folly's blindest child ; 
 It came when wearied mirth had flown, 
 
 And sleep was on the gay and wild ; 
 And wakeful with repentant pain, 
 
 I lay amid its lap of flowers, 
 And with a truant's earnest brain 
 
 Turned back the leaves of wasted hours. 
 The angels that by day would flee, 
 Returned, oh morning star ! with thee ! 
 Yet now again * * * * 
 
 A foot thrust into my carriage-window rudely broke 
 the thread of these delicate musings. The postillion 
 
 was on a walk, and before I could get my wits back 
 from their wool-gathering, the countess Iminild, in 
 Percie's clothes, sat laughing on the cushion beside 
 me. 
 
 "On what bird's back has your ladyship descended 
 from the clouds?" I asked with unfeigned astonish- 
 ment. 
 
 " The same bird has brought us both down — c'est 
 a dire, if you are not still en /'air," she added, looking 
 from my scrawled tablets to my perplexed face. 
 
 "Are you really and really the countess Iminild ?" 
 I asked with a smile, looking down at the trowsered 
 feet and loose-fitting boots of the pseudo-valet. 
 
 " Yes, indeed ! but I leave it to you to swear, 
 l foi d'honneur,'' that a born countess is an English 
 valet !" And she laughed so long and merrily that 
 the postillion looked over his yellow epaulets in as- 
 tonishment. 
 
 " Kind, generous Percie !'* she said, changing her 
 tone presently to one of great feeling, " I would scarce 
 believe him last night when he informed me, as as in- 
 ! ducement to leave him behind, that he was only a ser- 
 vant ! You never told me this. But he is a gentle- 
 J man, in every feeling as well as in every feature, and, 
 | by Heavens! he shall be a menial no longer!" 
 
 This speech, begun with much tenderness, rose, 
 toward the close, to the violence of passion ; and 
 folding her arms with an air of defiance, the lady- 
 outlaw threw herself back in the carriage. 
 
 " I have no objection," I said, after a short silence, 
 " that Percie should set up for a gentleman. Nature 
 has certainly done her part to make him one ; but till 
 you can give him means and education, the coat which 
 you wear, with such a grace, is his safest shell. 'Ants 
 live safely till they have gotten wings,' says the old 
 proverb." 
 
 The blowing of the postillion's horn interrupted the 
 argument, and, a moment after, we were rolled up, 
 with German leisure, to the door of the small inn where 
 I had designed to breakfast. Thinking it probable 
 that the people of the house, in so small a village, 
 would be too simple to make any dangerous comments 
 upon our appearance, I politely handed the countess 
 out of the carriage, and ordered plates for two. 
 
 " It is scarce worth while," she said, as she heard 
 the order, "for I shall remain at the door on the look 
 out. The eil-waggen, for Trieste, which was to leave 
 Gratz an hour after us, will be soon here, and (if my 
 friends have served me well), Percie in it. St. Mary 
 speed him safely!" 
 
 She strode away to a small hillock to look out for the 
 lumbering diligence, with a gait that was no stranger 
 to, "doublet and hose." It soon came on with its 
 usual tempest of whip-cracking and bugle-blasts, and 
 nearly overturning a fat burgher, who would have 
 proffered the assistance of his hand, out jumped a 
 petticoat, which I saw, at a glance, gave a very em- 
 barrassed motion to gentleman Percie. 
 
 " This young lady," said the countess, dragging 
 the striding and unwilling damsel into the little parlor 
 where I was breakfasting " travels under the charge of 
 a deaf old brazier, who has been requested to protect her 
 modesty as far as Laybach. Make a courtesy, child !" 
 
 "I beg pardon, sir!" began Percie. 
 
 " Hush, hush! no English .' Walls have ears, and 
 your voice is rather gruffish, mademoiselle. Show 
 me your passport? Cunegunda Von Krakenpate, 
 eighteen years of age, blue eyes, nose and chin mid- 
 dling, etc ! Thereis the conductor's horn ! Allez 
 vite ! We meet at Laybach. Adieu, charwante 
 femme! Adieu!" 
 
 And with the sort of caricatured elegance which 
 women always assume in their imitations of our sex, 
 Countess Iminild, in frock-coat and trowsers, helped 
 into the diligence, in hood and petticoat, my " tiger' 
 from Cranbourne-alley ! 
 
THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 497 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Spite of remonstrance on my part, the imperative 
 countess, who had asserted her authority more than 
 once on our way to Laybach, insisted on the com- 
 pany of Miss Cunegunda Von Krakenpate, in an 
 evening walk around the town. Fearing that Per- 
 cie's masculine stride would betray him, and object- 
 in" to lend myself to a farce with my valet, I opposed 
 the freak as long as it was courteous — but it was not 
 the first time I had learned that a spoiled woman 
 would have her own way, and too vexed to laugh, I 
 soberly promenaded the broad avenue of the capital 
 of Styria, with a valet en demoiselle, and a dame en 
 valet. 
 
 It was but a few hours hence to Planina, and Iminild, 
 who seemed to fear no risk out of a walled city, waited 
 on Percie to the carriage the following morning, and 
 in a few hours we drove up to the rural inn of this 
 small town of Littorale. 
 
 I had been too much out of humor to ask the 
 countess, a second time, what errand she could have 
 in so rustic a neighborhood. She had made a mystery 
 of it, merely requiring of me that I should defer all 
 arrangements for the future, as far as she was concern- 
 ed, tiil we had visited a spot in Littorale, upon which 
 her fate in many respects depended. After twenty 
 fruitless conjectures, 1 abandoned myself to the course 
 of circumstances, reserving ODly the determination, if it 
 should prove a haunt of Yvain's troop, to separate at 
 once from her company and await her at Trieste. 
 
 Our dinner was preparing at the inn, and tired of 
 the embarrassment Percie exhibited in my presence, 
 I walked out and seated myself under an immense 
 linden, that every traveller will remember, standing 
 in the centre of the motley and indescribable clusters 
 of buildings, which serve the innkeeper and black- 
 smith of Planina for barns, forge, dwelling, and out- 
 houses. The tree seems the father of the village. 
 It was a hot afternoon, and I was compelled to dis- 
 pute the shade with a congregation of cows and double- 
 jointed posthorses ; but finding a seat high up on the 
 root, at last I busied myself with gazing down the 
 road, and conjecturing what a cloud of dust might con- 
 tain, which, in an opposite direction from that which 
 we had come, was slowly creeping onward to the inn. 
 
 Four roughly-harnessed horses at length, appeared, 
 with their traces tied over their backs — one of them 
 ridden by a man in a farmer's frock. They struck me 
 at first as fine specimens of the German breed of 
 draught-horses, with their shaggy fetlocks and long 
 manes ; but while they drank at the trough which 
 stood in the shade of the linden, the low tone in which 
 the man checked their greedy thirst, and the instant 
 obedience of the well-trained animals, awakened at 
 once my suspicions that we were to become better 
 acquainted. A more narrow examination convinced 
 me that, covered with dust and disguised with coarse 
 harness as they were, they were four horses of such 
 bone and condition, as were never seen in a farmer's 
 stables. The rider dismounted at the inn door, and 
 very much to the embarrassment of my suppositions, 
 the landlord, a stupid and heavy Boniface, greeted him 
 with the familiarity of an old acquaintance, and in an- 
 swer, apparently to an inquiry, pointed to my carriage, 
 and led him into the house. 
 
 " Monsieur Tyrell," said Iminild, coming out to 
 me a moment after, " a servant whom I had expected 
 has arrived with my horses, and with your consent, 
 they shall be put to your carriage immediately." 
 " To take us where?" 
 " To our place of destination." 
 " Too indefinite, by half, countess ! Listen to me! 
 I have very sufficient reason to fancy that, in leaving 
 the post-road to Trieste, I shall leave the society of 
 honest men. You and your l minions of the moon' 
 32 
 
 may be very pleasant, but you are not very safe com- 
 panions ; and having really a wish to die quietly in 
 my bed — " 
 
 The countess burst into a laugh. 
 
 " If you will have the character of the gentleman 
 you are about to visit from the landlord here — " 
 
 " Who is one of your ruffians himself, I'll be sworn !" 
 
 " No, on my honor ! A more innocent old beer- 
 guzzler lives not on the road. But I will tell you 
 thus much, and it ought to content you. Ten miles 
 to the west of this dwells a country gentleman, who, 
 the landlord will certify, is as honest a subject of his 
 gracious majesty as is to be found in Littorale. He 
 lives freely on his means, and entertains strangers 
 occasionally from all countries, for he has been a 
 traveller in his time. You are invited to pass a day 
 or two with this Mynheer Krakenpate (who, by the 
 way, has no objection to pass for father of the young 
 lady you have so kindly brought from Laybach), 
 and he has sent you his horses, like a generous host, 
 to bring you to his door. More seriously, this was 
 a retreat of Yvain's, where he would live quietly and 
 play bon citoyen, and you have nothing earthly to fear 
 in accompanying me thither. And now will you wait 
 and eat the greasy meal you have ordered, or will you 
 save your appetite for la fortune de pot at Mynheer 
 Krakenpate's, and get presently on the road !" 
 
 I yielded rather to the seducing smile and capti- 
 vating beauty of my pleasing ward, than to any con- 
 fidence in the honesty of Mynheer Krakenpate ; and 
 Percie being once more ceremoniously handed in, we 
 left the village at the sober trot becoming the fat steeds 
 of a landholder. A quarter of a mile of this was quite 
 sufficient for Iminild, and a word to the postillion 
 changed, like a metamorphosis, both horse and rider. 
 From a heavy unelastic figure, he rose into a gallant 
 and withy horseman, and, with one of his low-spoken 
 words, away flew the four compact animals, treading 
 lightly as cats, and. with the greatest apparent ease, 
 putting us over the ground at the rate of fourteen 
 miles in the hour. 
 
 The dust was distanced, a pleasant breeze was 
 created by the motion, and when at last we turned 
 from the main road, and sped off to the right at the 
 same exhilarating pace, I returned Iminild's arch 
 look of remonstrance with my best-humored smile 
 and an affectionate je me fie a vous! Miss Krakenpate, 
 I observed, echoed the sentiment by a slight pressure 
 of the countess's arm, looking very innocently out of 
 the window all the while. 
 
 A couple of miles, soon done, brought us round the 
 face of a craggy precipice, forming the brow of a hill, 
 and with a continuation of the turn, we drew up at the 
 gate of a substantial-looking building, something be- 
 tween a villa and a farm-house, built against the rock, 
 as if for the purpose of shelter from the north winds. 
 Two beautiful Angora hounds sprang out at the noise, 
 and recognised Iminild through all her disguise, and 
 presently, with a look offorced courtesy, as if not quite 
 sure whether he might throw oft' the mask, a stout 
 man of about fifty, hardly a gentleman, yet above a 
 common peasant in his manners, stepped forward from 
 the garden to give Miss Krakenpate his assistance in 
 alighting. 
 
 "Dinner in half an hour!" was Iminild's brief 
 greeting, and, stepping between her bowing dependant 
 and Percie, she led the way into the house. 
 
 I was shown into a chamber, furnished scarce above 
 the common style of a German inn, where I made a 
 hungry man's despatch in my toilet, and descended 
 at once to the parlor. The doors were all open upon 
 the ground floor, and, finding myself quite alone, I 
 sauntered from room to room, wondering at the scanti- 
 ness of the furniture and general air of discomfort, and 
 scarce able to believe that the same mistress presided 
 over this and the singular paradise in which I had 
 
498 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 first found her at Vienna. After visiting every corner 
 of the ground floor with a freedom which I assumed in 
 my character as guardian, it occurred to me that I 
 had not yet found the dining-room, and I was making 
 a new search, when Iminild entered. 
 
 I have said she was a beautiful woman. She was 
 dressed now in the Albanian costume, with the addi- 
 tional gorgeousness of gold embroidery, which might 
 distinguish the favorite child of a chief of Suli. It 
 was tlie male attire, with a snowy white juktanilla 
 reaching to the knee, a short jacket of crimson velvet, 
 and a close-buttoned vest of silver cloth, fitting ad- 
 mirably to her girlish bust, and leaving her slender and 
 pearly neck to rise bare and swan-like into the masses 
 of her clustering hair. Her slight waist was defined 
 by the girdle of fine linen edged with fringe of gold, 
 which was tied coquettishly over her left side and fell 
 to her ankle, and below the embroidered leggin appear- 
 ed the fairy foot, which had drawn upon me all this 
 long train of adventure, thrust into a Turkish slipper 
 with a sparkling emerald on its instep. A. feroniere 
 of the yellowest gold sequins bound her hair back 
 from her temples, and this was the only confinement 
 to the dark brown meshes which, in wavy lines and 
 in the richest profusion, fell almost to her feet. The 
 only blemish to this vision of loveliness was a flush 
 about her eyes. The place had recalled Yvain to her 
 memory. 
 
 " I am about to disclose to you secrets," said she, 
 laying her hand on my arm, " which have never been 
 revealed but to the most trusty of Yvain's confederates. 
 To satisfy those whom you will meet you must swear 
 to me on the same cross which he pressed to your lips 
 when dying, that you will never violate, while I live, 
 the trust we repose in you." 
 
 " I will take no oath," I said ; " for you are leading 
 me blindfolded. If you are not satisfied with the 
 assurance that I can betray no confidence which honor 
 would preserve, hungry as I am, I will yet dine in 
 Planina." 
 
 " Then I will trust to the faith of an Englishman. 
 And now I have a favor, not to beg, but to insist upon 
 — that from this moment you consider Percie as dis- 
 missed from your service, and treat him, while here 
 at least, as my equal and friend." 
 
 " Willingly!" I said; and as the word left my lips, 
 enter Percie in the counterpart dress of Iminild, with 
 a silver-sheathed ataghan at his side, and the bluish 
 muzzles of a pair of Egg's hair-triggers peeping from 
 below his girdle. To do the rascal justice, he was as 
 handsome in his new toggery as his mistress, and carried 
 it as gallantly. They would have made the prettiest 
 tableau as Juan and Haidee. 
 
 " Is there any chance that these ' persuaders' may 
 be necessary," I asked, pointing to his pistols which 
 awoke in my mind a momentary suspicion. 
 
 " No— none that I can foresee— but they are loaded. 
 A favorite, among men whose passions are profession- 
 ally wild," she continued with a meaning glance at 
 Percie ; " should be ready to lay his hand on them, 
 even if stirred in his sleep !" 
 
 I had been so accustomed to surprises of late, that 
 I scarce started to observe, while Iminild was speak- 
 ing, that an old-fashioned clock, which stood in a 
 niche in the wall, was slowly swinging out upon 
 hinges. A narrow aperture of sufficient breadth to 
 admit one person at a time, was disclosed when it 
 had made its entire revolution, and in it stood, with 
 a lighted torch, the stout landlord Von Krakenpate. 
 Iminild looked at me an instant as if to enjoy my 
 surprise. 
 
 " Will you lead me in to dinner, Mr. Tyrell?" she 
 said at last, with a laugh. 
 
 " If we are to follow Mynheer Von Krakenpate," I 
 replied, " give me hold of the skirt of your juktanilla, 
 rather, and let me follow ! Do we dine in the cellar ?" 
 
 I stepped before Percie, who was inclined to take 
 advantage of my hesitation to precede me, and fol- 
 lowed the countess into the opening, which, from 
 the position of the house, I saw must lead directly 
 into the face of the rock. Two or three descending 
 steps convinced me that it was a natural opening en- 
 larged by art ; and after one or two sharp turns, and 
 a descent of perhaps fifty feet, we came to a door 
 which, suddenly flung open by our torch-bearer, 
 deluged the dark passage with a blaze of light which 
 the eyesight almost refused to bear. Recovering 
 from my amazement, I stepped over the threshold 
 of the door, and stood upon a carpet in a gallery of 
 sparkling stalactites, the dazzling reflection of innu- 
 merable lamps flooding the air around, and a long 
 snow-white vista of the same brilliancy and effect 
 stretching downward before me. Two ridges of 
 the calcareous strata running almost parallel over 
 our heads, formed the cornices of the descending 
 corridor, and from these, with a regularity that 
 seemed like design, the sparkling pillars, white as 
 alabaster, and shaped like inverted cones, dropped 
 nearly to the floor, their transparent points resting on 
 the peaks of the corresponding stalagmites, which, of 
 a darker hue and coarser grain, seemed designed as 
 bases to a new order of architectural columns. The 
 reflection from the pure crystalline rock gave to this 
 singular gallery a splendor which only the palace of 
 Aladdin could have equalled. The lamps were hung 
 between in irregular but effective ranges, and in our 
 descent, like Thalaba, who refreshed his dazzled eyes 
 in the desert of snow by looking on the green wings of 
 the spirit bird, I was compelled to bend my eyes per- 
 petually for relief upon the soft, dark masses of hair 
 which floated upon the lovely shoulders of Iminild. 
 
 At the extremity of the gallery we turned short to 
 the right, and followed an irregular passage, some- 
 times so low that we could scarce stand upright, but 
 all lighted with the same intense brilliancy, and formed 
 of the same glittering and snow-white substance. We 
 had been rambling on thus far perhaps ten minutes, 
 when suddenly the air, which I had felt uncomfort- 
 ably chili, grew warm and soft, and the low reverbera- 
 tion of running water fell delightfully on our ears. 
 Far ahead we could see two sparry columns standing 
 close together, and apparently closing up the way. 
 
 " Courage! my venerable guardian !" cried Iminild, 
 laughing over her shoulder ; " you will see your dinner 
 presently. Are you hungry, Percie ?" 
 
 " Not while you look back, Madame la Comtesse !" 
 answered the callow gentleman, with an instinctive 
 tact at his new vocation. 
 
 We stood at the two pillars which formed the ex- 
 tremity of the passage, and looked down upon a scene 
 of which all description must be faint and imperfect. 
 A hundred feet below ran a broad subterraneous river, 
 whose waters sparkling in the blaze of a thousand 
 torches, sprang into light from the deepest darkness, 
 crossed with foaming rapidity the bosom of the vast 
 illuminated cavern, and disappeared again in the same 
 inscrutable gloom. Whence it came or whither it 
 fled was a mystery beyond the reach of the eye. The 
 deep recesses of the cavern seemed darker for the in- 
 tense light gathered about the centre. 
 
 After the first few minutes of bewilderment, I en- 
 deavored to realize in detail the wondrous scene be- 
 fore me. The cavern was of an irregular shape, but 
 all studded above with the same sparry incrustation, 
 thousands upon thousands of pendent stalactites glit- 
 tering on the roof, and showering back light upon the 
 clusters of blazing torches fastened everywhere upon 
 the shelvy sides. Here and there vast columns, 
 alabaster white, with bases of gold color, fell from the 
 roof to the floor, like pillars left standing in the ruined 
 aisle of a cathedral, and from corner to corner ran 
 their curtains of the same brilliant calcareous spar. 
 
THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 499 
 
 shaped like the sharp edge of a snow-drift, and almost 
 while. It was like laying bare the palace of some 
 king-wizard of the mine to gaze down upon it. 
 
 '• What think you of Mynheer Krakenpate's taste 
 in a dining-room, Monsieur Tyrell I" asked the count- 
 ess, who stood between Percie and myself, with a '. 
 hand on the shoulder of each. 
 
 I had scarce found time, as yet, to scrutinize the I 
 artificial portion of the marvellous scene, but, at the i 
 question of Iminild, I bent my gaze on a broad plat- 
 form, rising high above the river on its opposite bank, 
 the rear of which was closed in by perhaps forty ir- 
 regular columns, leaving between them and the sharp 
 precipice on the river-side, an area, in height and ex- ! 
 tent of about the capacity of a ball-room. A rude 
 bridge, of very light construction, rose in a single 
 arch across the river, forming the only possible access j 
 to the platform from the side where we stood, and, j 
 following the path back with my eye, I observed a 
 narrow and spiral staircase, partly of wood and partly j 
 cut in the rock, ascending from the bridge to the galle- j 
 ry we had followed hither. The platform was carpet- I 
 ed richly, and flooded with intense light, and in its 
 centre stood a gorgeous array of smoking dishes, j 
 served after the Turkish fashion, with a cloth upon 
 the floor, and surrounded with cushions and ottomans 
 of every shape and color. A troop of black slaves, j 
 whose silver anklets, glittered as they moved, were 
 busy bringing wines and completing the arrangements : 
 for the meal. 
 
 " Allons, mignon /"cried Iminild, getting impatient 
 and seizing Percie's arm, " let us get over the river, 
 and perhaps Mr. Tyrell will look down upon us with 
 his grands yeux while we dine. Oh, you will come 
 with us ! Suivcz done!" 
 
 An iron door, which I had not hitherto observed, 
 let us out from the gallery upon the staircase, and [ 
 Mynheer Von Krakenpate carefully turned the key j 
 behind us. We crept slowly down the narrow stair- i 
 case and reached the edge of the river, where the 
 warm air from the open sunshine came pouring through 
 the cavern with the current, bringing with it a smell 
 of green fields and flowers, and removing entirely the 
 chill of the cavernous and confined atmosphere I had 
 found so uncomfortable above. We crossed the 
 bridge, and stepping upon the elastic carpets piled 
 thickly on the platform, arranged ourselves about the 
 smoking repast, Mynheer Von Krakenpate sitting down 
 after permission from Iminild, and Percie by order of 
 the same imperative dictatress, throwing his graceful 
 length at her feet. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 " Take a lesson in flattery from Percie, Mr. Tyrell, 
 and be satisfied with your bliss in my society without 
 asking for explanations. I would fain have the use 
 of my tongue (to swallow) for ten minutes, and I see 
 you making up your mouth for a question. Try this 
 pilau ! It is made by a Greek cook, who fries, boils, 
 and stews, in a kitchen with a river for a chimney." 
 
 •' Precisely what I was going to ask you. 1 was 
 wondering how you cook without smoking your snow- 
 white roof." 
 
 " Yes, the river is a good slave, and steals wood as 
 well. We have only to cut it by moonlight and com- 
 mit it to the current." 
 
 " The kitchen is down stream, then ?" 
 "Down stream; and down stream lives jolly Per- 
 dicaris the cook, who having lost his nose in a sea- 
 fiiht, is reconciled to forswear sunshine and mankind, 
 and cook rice for pirates." 
 
 " Is it true then that Yvain held command on the 
 
 "No, not Yvain, but Tranchcoeur — his equal in 
 command over this honest confederacy. By the way, 
 he is your countryman, Mr. Tyrell, though he fights 
 under a nom de guerre. You are very iikely to see 
 him, too, for his bark is at Trieste, and he is the only 
 human being besides myself (and my company here) 
 who can come and go at will in this robber's paradise. 
 He is a lover of mine, parbleu ! and since Yvain's 
 death, Heaven knows what fancy he may bring hith- 
 er in his hot brain! I have armed Percie for the 
 hazard?" 
 
 The thin nostrils of my friend from Cranbourne- 
 alley dilated with prophetic dislike of a rival thus 
 abruptly alluded to, and there was that in his face 
 which would have proved, against all the nurses' 
 oaths in Christendom, that the spirit of a gentleman's 
 blood ran warm through his heart. Signor Tranch- 
 coeur must be gentle in his suit, I said to myself, 
 or he will find what virtue lies in a hair-trigger! 
 Percie had forgot to eat since the mention of the 
 pirate's name, and sat with folded arms and his right 
 hand on his pistol. 
 
 A black slave brought in an omelette soufflee, as 
 light and delicate as the chef-d'eeuvre of an artiste in 
 the Palais Royal. Iminild spoke to him in Greek, as 
 he knelt and placed it before her. 
 
 "I have a presentiment," she said, looking at me 
 as the slave disappeared, " that Tranchcoeur will be 
 here presently. I have ordered another omelette on the 
 strength of the feeling, for he is fond of it, and may be 
 soothed by the attention." 
 
 "You fear him, then ?" 
 
 " Not if I were alone, for he is as gentle as a woman 
 when he has no rival near him — but I doubt his relish 
 of Percie. Have you dined ?" 
 
 " Quite." 
 
 " Then come and look at my garden, and have a 
 peep at old Perdicaris. Stay here, Percie, and finish 
 your grapes, mon-mignon ! I have a word to say to 
 Mr. Tyrell." 
 
 We walked across the platform, and passing be- 
 tween two of the sparry columns forming its bound- 
 ary, entered upon a low passage which led to a large 
 opening, resembling singularly a garden of low shrubs 
 turned by some magic to sparkling marble. 
 
 Two or three hundred of these stalagmite cones, 
 formed by the dripping of calcareous water from the 
 roof (as those on the roof were formed by the same 
 fluid which hardened and pondered), stood about in 
 the spacious area, every shrub having an answering 
 cone on the roof, like the reflection of the same mar- 
 ble garden in a mirror. One side of this singular 
 apartment was used as a treasury for the spoils of the 
 band, and on the points of the white cones hung 
 pitchers and altar lamps of silver, gold drinking-cups. 
 and chains, and plate and jewellery of every age and 
 description. Farther on were piled, in unthrifty con- 
 fusion, heaps of velvets and silks, fine broadcloths, 
 French gloves, shoes, and slippers, brocades of Genoa, 
 pieces of English linen, damask curtains still fasten- 
 ed to their cornices, a harp and mandolin, cases of 
 damaged bons-bons, two or three richly-bound books, 
 and (last and most valuable in my eyes), a miniature 
 bureau, evidently the plunder of some antiquary's 
 treasure, containing in its little drawers antique gold 
 coins of India, carefully dated and arranged, with a 
 list of its contents half torn from the lid. 
 
 "You should hear Tranchcoeur's sermons on 
 these pretty texts," said the countess, trying to thrust 
 open a bale of Brusa silk with her Turkish slipper. 
 
 "He will beat oft" the top of a stalagmite with his 
 sabre-hilt, and sit down and talk over his spoils and the 
 adventures they recall, till morning dawns." 
 
 " And how is that discovered in this sunless cave ?" 
 
 " By the perfume. The river brings news of it, 
 and fills the cavern with the sun's first kisses. Those 
 
500 
 
 THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA. 
 
 violets ' kiss and tell,' Mr. Tyrell ! Apropos des 
 bottes, let us look into the kitchen." 
 
 We turned to the right, keeping on the same level, 
 and a few steps brought us to the brow of a consider- 
 able descent forming the lower edge of the carpeted 
 platform, but separated from it by a wall of close 
 stalactites. At the bottom of the descent ran the 
 river, but just along the brink, forming a considerable 
 crescent, extended a flat rock, occupied by all the 
 varied implements of a kitchen, and lighted by the 
 glare of two or three different fires blazing against 
 the perpendicular limit of the cave. The smoke of 
 these followed the inclination of the wall, and was 
 swept entirely down with the current of the river. 
 At the nearest fire stood Perdicaris, a fat, long-haired 
 and sinister-looking rascal, his noseless face glowing 
 with the heat, and at his side waited, with a silver 
 dish, the Nubian slave who had been sent for Tranch- 
 coeur's omelette. 
 
 " One of the most bloody fights of my friend the 
 rover," said Iminild, " was with an armed slaver, from 
 whom he took these six pages of mine. They have 
 reason enough to comprehended an order, but too 
 little to dream of liberty. They are as contented as 
 tortoises, za-6as." 
 
 " Is there no egress hence but by the iron door ?" 
 
 " None that I know of, unless one could swim up 
 this swift river like a salmon. You may have sur- 
 mised by this time, that we monopolize an unexplored 
 part of the great cave of Adelsberg. Common report 
 says it extends ten miles under ground, but common 
 report has never burrowed as far as this, and I doubt 
 whether there is any communication. Father Kraken- 
 pate's clock conceals an entrance, discovered first by 
 robbers, and handed down by tradition, Heaven knows 
 how long. But — hark ! Tranchcceur, by Heaven! 
 my heart foreboded it !" 
 
 I sprang after the countess, who, with her last ex- 
 clamation, darted between twoof the glitteringcolumns 
 separating us from the platform, and my first glance 
 convinced me that her fullest anticipations of the 
 pirate's jealousy were more than realized. Percie 
 stood with his back to a tall pillar on the farther side, 
 with his pistol levelled, calm and immoveable as a 
 stalactite; and, with his sabre drawn and his eyes 
 flashing fire, a tall powerfully-built man in a sailors 
 dress, was arrested by Iminild in the act of rushing on 
 him. "Stop! or you die, Tranchcceur!" said the 
 countess, in a tone of trifling command. " He is my 
 guest!" 
 
 " He is my prisoner, madame !" was the answer, as 
 the pirate changed his position to one of perfect repose 
 and shot his sabre into his sheath, as if a brief delay 
 could make little difference. 
 
 " We shall see that," said the countess, once inore, 
 with as soft a voice as was ever heard in a lady's 
 boudoir; and stepping to the edge of the platform, 
 she touched with her slipper a suspended gong, which 
 sent through the cavern a shrill reverberation heard 
 clearly over the rushing music of the river. 
 
 In an instant the click of forty muskets from the 
 other side fell on our ears ; and, at a wave of her 
 hand, the butts rattled on the rocks, and all was still 
 again. 
 
 " I have not trusted myself within your reach, 
 Monsieur Tranchcceur," said Iminild, flinging herself 
 carelessly on an ottoman, and motioning to Percie to 
 keep his stand, " without a score or two of my free- 
 riders from Mount Semering to regulate your con- 
 science. I am mistress here, sir! You may sit 
 down !" 
 
 Tranchcceur had assumed an air of the most gen- 
 tlemanly tranquillity, and motioning to one of the 
 slaves for his pipe, he politely begged pardon for 
 smoking in the countess's presence, and filled the 
 enamelled bowl with Shiraz tobacco. 
 
 "You heard of Yvain's death ?" she remarked after 
 a moment passing her hand over her eyes. 
 
 " Yes, at Venice." 
 
 " With his dying words, he gave me and mine in 
 charge to this Englishman. Mr. Tyrell, Monsieur 
 Tranchcceur." 
 
 The pirate bowed. 
 
 " Have you been long from England ?" he askea 
 with an accent and voice that even in that brief 
 question, savored of the nonchalant English of the 
 west end. 
 
 " Two years 1" I answered. 
 
 " I should have supposed much longer from your 
 chivalry in St.Etienne, Mr. Tyrell. My countrymen 
 generally are less hasty. Your valet there," he con- 
 tinued, looking sneeringly at Percie, "seems as quick 
 on the trigger as his master." 
 
 Percie turned on his heel, and walked to the edge 
 of the platform as if uneasy at the remark, and Iminild 
 rose to her feet. 
 
 "Look you, Tranchcceur! I'll have none of your 
 sneers. That youth is as well-born and better bred 
 than yourself, and with his consent, shall have the 
 authority of the holy church ere long to protect my 
 property and me. Will you aid me in this, Mr. 
 Tyrell ?" 
 
 " Willingly, countess !" 
 
 " Then, Tranchcceur, farewell ! I have withdrawn 
 from the common stock Yvain's gold and jewels, and 
 I trust to your sense of honor to render me at Venice 
 whatever else of his private property may be concealed 
 in the island." 
 
 " Iminild !" cried the pirate, springing to his feet. 
 "I did not think to show a weakness before this 
 stranger, but I implore you to delay !" 
 
 His bosom heaved with strong emotion as he spoke, 
 and the color fled from his bronzed features as if he 
 were struck with a mortal sickness. 
 
 " I can not lose you, Iminild ! I have loved you 
 too long. You must " 
 
 She motioned to Percie to pass on. 
 
 " By Heaven, you shall !" he cried, in a voice sud- 
 denly become hoarse with passion ; and reckless of 
 consequences, he leaped across the heaps of cushion, 
 and, seizing Percie by the throat, flung him with 
 terrible and headlong violence into the river.' 
 
 A scream from Iminild, and the report of a musket 
 from the other side, rang at the same instant through 
 the cavern, and as I rushed forward to seize the pistol 
 which he had struck from Percie's hand, his half- 
 drawn sabre slid back powerless into the sheath, and 
 Tranchcceur dropped heavily on his knee. 
 
 " I am peppered, Mr. Tyrell !" he said, waving me 
 off with difficult effort to smile, " look after the boy, 
 if you care for him ! A curse on her German wolves !" 
 
 Percie met me on the bridge, supporting Iminild, 
 who hung on his neck, smothering him with kisses. 
 
 " Where is that dog of a pirate ?" she cried, sud- 
 denly snatching herataghan from the sheath and flying 
 across the platform. " Tranchcceur !" 
 
 Her hand was arrested by the deadly pallor and 
 helpless attitude of the wounded man, and the weapon 
 dropped as she stood over him. 
 
 "I think it is not mortal," he said, groaning as he 
 pressed his hand to his side, " but take your boy out 
 of my sight ! Iminild !" 
 
 " Well, Tranchcceur !" 
 
 " I have not done well — but you know my nature 
 — and my love ! Forgive me, and farewell ! Send 
 Bertram to stanch this blood — I get faint! A little 
 wine, Iminild !" 
 
 He took the massive flagon from her hand, and 
 drank a long draught, and then drawing to him a cloak 
 which lay near, he covered his head and dropped on 
 his side as if to sleep. 
 
 Iminild knelt beside him and tore open the shirt 
 
OONDER-HOOFDEN. 
 
 501 
 
 beneath his jacket, and while she busied herself in 
 stanching the blood, Perdicaris, apparently well pre- 
 pared for such accidents, arrived with a surgeon's 
 probe, and, on examination of the wound, assured 
 Iminild that she might safely leave him. Washing 
 her hands in the flagon of wine, she threw a cloak over 
 the wet and shivering Percie, and, silent with horror 
 at the scene behind us, we made our way over the 
 bridge, and in a short time, to my infinite relief, stood 
 in the broad moonlight on the portico of Mynheer 
 Krakenpate. 
 
 My carriage was soon loaded with the baggage and 
 treasure of the countess, and with the same swift 
 horses that had brought us from Planina, we regained 
 the post-road, and sped on toward Venice by the 
 Friuli. We arrived on the following night at the fair 
 city so beloved of romance, and with what haste I 
 might, I procured a priest and married the Countess 
 Iminild to gentleman Percie. 
 
 As she possessed now a natural guardian, and a 
 sufficient means of life, I felt released from my death 
 vow to Yvain, and bidding farewell to the •' happy 
 couple," I resumed my quiet habit of travel, and three 
 days after my arrival at Venice, was on the road to 
 Padua by the Brenta. 
 
 OONDER-HOOFDEN, OR THE UNDERCLIFF. 
 
 A TALE OF THE VOYAGE OF HENDRICK HUDSON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 •• It is but an arm of the sea, as I told thee, skip- 
 per," said John Fleming, the mate of the " Halve- 
 Mane," standing ready to jam down the tiller and bring- 
 to, if his master should agree with him in opinion. 
 
 Hudson stood by his steersman, with folded arms, 
 now looking at the high-water mark on the rocks, 
 which betrayed a falling tide, now turning his ear 
 slightly forward to catch the cry of the man who stood 
 heaving the lead from the larboard bow. The wind 
 drew lightly across the starboard quarter, and, with a 
 counter-tide, the little vessel stole on scarce percepti- 
 bly, though her mainsail was kept full — the slowly 
 passing forest trees on the shore giving the lie to the 
 merry and gurgling ripple at the prow. 
 
 The noble river, or creek, which they had followed 
 in admiring astonishment for fifty miles, had hitherto 
 opened fairly and broadly before them, though, once 
 or twice, its widening and mountain-girt bosom had 
 deceived the bold navigator into the belief, that he 
 was entering upon some inland lake. The wind still 
 blew kindly and steadily from the southeast, and the 
 sunset of the second day — a spectacle of tumultuous 
 and gorgeous glory which Hudson attributed justly 
 to the more violet atmospheric laws of an unsettled 
 continent — had found them apparently closed in by 
 impenetrable mountains, and running immediately on 
 the head shore of an extended arm of the sea. 
 
 " She'll strike before she can follow her helm," 
 cried the young sailor in an impatient tone, yet still 
 with habitual obedience keeping her duly on her 
 course. 
 
 " Port a little !" answered the skipper, a moment 
 after, as if he had not heard the querulous comment 
 of his mate. 
 
 Fleming's attention was withdrawn an instant by 
 a low guttural sound of satisfaction, which reached 
 his ear as the head of the vessel went round, and, 
 casting his eye amidships, he observed the three 
 Indians who had come off to the Half-Moon in a 
 
 canoe, and had been received on board by the master, 
 standing together in the chains, and looking forward 
 to the rocks they were approaching with countenances 
 of the most eager interest. 
 
 •« Master Hendrick !" he vociferated in the tone of 
 a man who can contain his anger no longer, "will you 
 look at these grinning red-devils, who are rejoicing to 
 see you run so blindly ashore?" 
 
 The adventurous little bark was by this time within 
 a biscuit toss of a rocky point that jutted forth into 
 the river with the grace of a lady's foot dallying with 
 the water in her bath ; and, beyond the sedgy bank 
 disappeared in an apparent inlet, barely deep enough, 
 it seemed to the irritated steersman, to shelter a 
 canoe. 
 
 As the Half-Moon obeyed her last order, and headed 
 a point more to the west, Hudson strode forward to 
 the bow, and sprang upon the windlass, stretching his 
 gaze eagerly into the bosom of the hills that were now 
 darkening with the heavy shadows of twilight, though 
 the sky was still gorgeously purple overhead. 
 
 The crew had by this time gathered with uncon- 
 scious apprehension at the halyards, ready to let go 
 at the slightest gesture of the master, but, in the slow 
 progress of the little bark, the minute or two which 
 she took to advance beyond the point on which his 
 eye was fixed, seemed an age of suspense. 
 
 The Half-Moon seemed now almost immoveable, 
 for the current, which convinced Hudson there was 
 a passage beyond, set her back from the point with 
 increasing force, and the wind lulled a little with the 
 sunset. Tnch by inch, however, she crept on, till at 
 last the silent skipper sprang from the windlass upon 
 the bowsprit, and running out with the agility of a 
 boy, gave a single glance ahead, and the next mo- 
 ment had the tiller in his hand, and cried out with a 
 voice of thunder, " Stand by the halyards! helm's- 
 a-lee !" 
 
 In a moment, as if his words had been lightning, 
 the blocks rattled, the heavy boom swung round like 
 a willow spray, and the white canvass, after fluttering 
 an instant in the wind, filled and drew steadily on the 
 other lack. 
 
 Looks of satisfaction were exchanged between the 
 crew, who expected the next instant an order to take 
 in the sail and drop anchor ; but the master was at the 
 helm, and to their utter consternation, he kept her 
 steadily to the wind, and drove straight on, while a 
 gorge, that, in the increasing darkness, seemed the 
 entrance to a cavern, opened its rocky # sides as they 
 advanced. 
 
 The apprehensions of the crew were half lost in 
 their astonishment at the grandeur of the scene. The 
 cliffs seemed to close up behind them; a mountain, 
 that reached apparently to the now colorless clouds, 
 rose up gigantic, in the increasing twilight, over the 
 prow ; on the right, where the water seemed to bend, 
 a craggy precipice extended its threatening wall ; and 
 in the midst of this round bay, which seemed to them 
 to be an enclosed lake in the bottom of an abyss, the 
 wind suddenly took them aback, the Halve-Mane lost 
 her headway, and threatened to go on the rocks with 
 the current, and audible curses at his folly reached 
 the ears of the determined master. 
 
 More to divert their attention than with a prognos- 
 tic of the direction of the wind, Hudson gave the 
 order to tack, and, more slowly this time, but still 
 with sufficient expedition, the movement was execu- 
 ted, and the flapping sails swung round. The hal- 
 yards were not belayed before the breeze, rush- 
 ing down a steep valley on the left, struck full on 
 the larboard quarter, and, running sharp past the face 
 of the precipice over the starboard bow, Hudson 
 pointed out, exultingly, to his astonished men, the 
 broad waters of the mighty river, extending far through 
 the gorge beyond — the dim purple of the lingering 
 
502 
 
 OONDER-HOOFDEN. 
 
 day, which had been long lost to the cavernous and 
 overshadowed pass they bad penetrated, tinting its far 
 bosom like the last faint hue of the expiring dolphin. 
 
 The exulting glow of triumph suffused the face 
 of the skipper, and relinquishing the tiller once more 
 to the mortified Fleming, he walked forward to look 
 out for an anchorage. The Indians, who still stood 
 in the chains together, and who had continued to 
 express their satisfaction as the vessel made her way 
 through the pass, now pointed eagerly to a little 
 bay on the left, across which a canoe was shooting 
 like the reflection of a lance in the air, and, the wind 
 dying momently away, Hudson gave the order to 
 rouud to, and dropped his anchor for the night. 
 
 In obedience to the politic orders of Hudson the 
 men were endeavoring, by presents and signs, to 
 induce the Indians to leave the vessel, and the mas- 
 ter himself stood on the poop with his mate, gazing 
 back on the wonderful scene they had passed through. 
 
 " This passage," said Hudson, musingly, "has been 
 rent open by an earthquake, and the rocks look still as 
 if they felt the agony of the throe." 
 
 "It is a pity the earthquake did its job so raggedly, 
 then !"' answered his sulky companion, who had not 
 yet forgiven the mountains for the shame their zig-zag 
 precipices had put upon his sagacity. 
 
 At that instant a sound, like that of a heavy body 
 sliding into the water, struck the ear of Fleming, 
 and looking quickly over the stern, he saw one of 
 the Indians swimming from the vessel with a pillow 
 in his hand, which he had evidently stolen from the 
 cabin window. To seize a musket, which lay ready 
 for attack on the quarter-deck, and fire upon the poor 
 savage,, was the sudden thought and action of a man on 
 the watch, for a vent to incensed feelings. 
 
 The Indian gave a yell which mingled wildly with 
 the echoes of the report from the reverberating hills, 
 and springing waist-high out of the water, the gurgling 
 eddy closed suddenly over his head. 
 
 The canoe in which the other savages were already 
 embarked shot away, like an arrow, to the shore, and 
 Hudson, grieved and alarmed inexpressibly at the fool- 
 hardy rashness of his mate, ordered all hands to arms, 
 and established a double watch for the night. 
 
 Hour after hour, the master and the non-repent- 
 ant Fleming paced fore and aft, each in his own 
 quarter of the vessel, watching the shore and the 
 dark face of the water with straining eyes: but no 
 sound came from the low cliff round which the fly- 
 ing canoe had vanished, and the stars seemed to 
 wink almost audibly in the dread stillness of nature. 
 The men alarmed at the evident agitation of Hudson, 
 who, in these pent-up waters, anticipated a most ef- 
 fective and speedy revenge from the surrounding 
 tribes, drowsed not upon their watch, and the gray 
 light of the morning began to show faintly over the 
 mountains before the anxious master withdrew his 
 aching eyes from the still and star waters. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Like a web woven of gold by the lightning, the 
 sun's rays ran in swift threads from summit to sum- 
 mit of the dark green mountains, and the soft mist 
 that slept on the breast of the river began to lift like 
 the slumberous lid from the eye of woman, when her 
 dream is broken at dawn. Not so poetically were 
 these daily glories regarded, however, by the morning 
 watch of the Half- Moon, who, between the desire to 
 drop asleep with their heads on the capstan, and the 
 necessity of keeping sharper watch lest the Indians 
 should come off through the rising mist, bore the 
 double pains of Tantalus and Sysiphus — ungratified 
 desire at their lips and threatening ruin over their heads. 
 
 After dividing the watch at the break of day, Hud- 
 son, with the relieved part of his crew, had gone be- 
 low, and might have been asleep an hour, when Flem- 
 ing suddenly entered the cabin and laid his hand upon 
 his shoulder. The skipper sprang from his berth 
 with the habitual readiness of a seaman, and followed 
 his mate upon deck, where he found his men standing 
 to their arms, and watching an object that, to his first 
 glance, seemed like a canoe sailing down upon them 
 through the air. The rash homicide drew close to 
 Hendrick as he regarded it, and the chatter of his 
 teeth betrayed that, during the long and anxious 
 watches of the night, his conscience had not justified 
 him for the hasty death he had awarded to a fellow- 
 creature. 
 
 " She but looms through the mist !" said the skip- 
 per, after regarding the advancing object for a moment. 
 " It is a single canoe, and can scarce harm us. Let 
 her come alongside!" 
 
 The natural explanation of the phenomenon at once 
 satisfied the crew, who had taken their superstitious 
 fears rather from Fleming's evident alarm than from 
 their own want of reflection ; but the guilty man him- 
 self still gazed on the advancing phantom, and when 
 a slight stir of the breeze raised the mist like the cor- 
 ner of a curtain, and dropped the canoe plain upon 
 the surface of the river, he turned gloomily on his 
 heel, and muttered in an undertone to Hudson, " It 
 brings no good, Skipper Hendrick !" 
 
 Meanwhile the canoe advanced slowly. The single 
 paddle which propelled her paused before every turn, 
 and as the mist lifted quite up and showed a long 
 green line of shore between its shadowy fringe and 
 the water, an Indian, highly-painted, and more orna- 
 mented than any they had hitherto seen, appeared 
 gazing earnestly at the vessel, and evidently approach- 
 ing with fear and caution. 
 
 The Half-Moon was heading up the river with 
 the rising tide, and Hudson walked forward to the 
 bows to look at the savage more closely. By the 
 eagle and bear, so richly embroidered in the gay- 
 colored quills of the porcupine on his belt of wam- 
 pum, he presumed him to be a chief; and glancing 
 his eye into the canoe, he saw the pillow which had 
 occasioned the death of the plunderer the night before, 
 and on it lay two ears of corn, and two broken arrows. 
 Pausing a moment as he drew near, the Indian pointed 
 to these signs of peace, and Hudson, in reply, spread 
 out his open hands and beckoned him to come on 
 board. In an instant the slight canoe shot under the 
 starboard bow, and with a noble confidence which the 
 skipper remarked upon with admiration, the tall savage 
 sprang upon the deck and laid the hand of the com- 
 mander to his breast. 
 
 The noon arrived, hot and sultry, and there was no 
 likelihood of a wind till sunset. The chief had been 
 feasted on board, and had shown, in his delight, the 
 most unequivocal evidence of good feeling; and even 
 Fleming, at last, who had drank more freely than usual 
 during "the morning, abandoned his suspicion, and 
 joined in amusing the superb savage who was their 
 guest. In the course of the forenoon, another canoe 
 came off, paddled by a single young woman, whom 
 Fleming, recoguised as having accompanied the plun- 
 derers the night before, but in his half-intoxicated 
 state, it seemed to recall none of his previous bodings, 
 and to his own surprise, and that of the crew, she 
 evidently regarded him with particular favor, and by 
 pertinacious and ingenious signs, endeavored to in- 
 duce him to go ashore with her in the canoe. Tho 
 particular character of her face and form would have 
 given the mate a clue to her probable motives, had he 
 been less reckless from his excitement. She was 
 taller than is common for females of the savage tribes, 
 and her polished limbs, as gracefully moulded in their 
 
OONDER-HOOFDEN. 
 
 503 
 
 dark hues as those of the mercury of the fountain, 
 combined, with their slightness, a nerve and steadi- 
 ness of action which betrayed strength and resolution 
 of heart and frame. Her face was highly beautiful, 
 but the voluptuous fulness of the lips was contradicted 
 by a fierce fire in her night-dark eyes, and a quickness 
 of the brow to descend, which told of angry passions 
 habitually on the alert. It was remarked by Hans 
 Christaern, one of the crew, that when Fleming left 
 her for an instant, she abstracted herself from the 
 other joyous groups, and, with folded arms and looks 
 of brooding thoughtfulness, stood looking over the 
 stern; but immediately on his reappearance, her j i 
 snowy teeth became visible between her relaxing lips, 
 and she resumed her patient gaze upon his counten- 
 ance, and her occasional efforts to draw him into the 
 canoe. 
 
 Quite regardless of the presence of the woman, the 
 chief sat apart with Hudson, communicating his ideas 
 by intelligent signs, and after a while, the skipper 
 called his mate, and informed him that, as far as he 
 could understand, the chief wished to give them a 
 feast on shore. "Arm yourselves well," said he, L 
 " though I look for no treachery from this noble pagan ; j 
 and if chance should put us in danger, we shall be 
 more than a match for the whole tribe. Come with 
 me, Fleming," he continued, after a pause, "you are 
 too rash with your firearms to be left in command. | 
 Man the watch, four of you, and the rest get into the 
 long-boat. We'll while away these sluggish hours, 
 though danger is in it " 
 
 The men sprang gayly below for their arms, and 
 were soon equipped and ready, and the chief, with an 
 expression of delight, put off in his canoe, followed j! 
 more slowly by the heavy long-boat, into which Hud- j 
 son, having given particular orders to the watch to let 
 DO savages on board during his absence, was the last 
 to embark. The woman, whom the chief had called 
 to him before his departure by the name of Kihyalee, 
 ■ped oft* before in her swift canoe to another point of 
 the shore, and when Fleming cried out from the bow 
 of the boat, impatiently motioning her to follow, she 
 smiled in a manner that sent a momentary shudder- 
 through the veins of the skipper who chanced to ob- 
 serve the action, and by a circular movement of her 
 arm conveyed to him that she should meet him from 
 the other side of the hill. As they followed the chief, j; 
 they discovered the wigwams of an Indian village be- | 
 hind the rocky point for which she was making, and 
 understood that the chief had sent her thither on some 
 errand connected with his proposed hospitality. 
 
 A large square rock, which had the look of having 
 been hurled with some avalanche from the mountain, 
 lay in the curve of a small beach of sand, surrounded 
 by the shallow water, and, on the left of this, the chief 
 pointed out to the skipper a deeper channel, hollowed 
 by the entrance of a mountain-torrent into the river, 
 through which he might bring his boat to land. At 
 the edge of this torrent's bed, the scene of the first act 
 of hospitality to our race upon the Hudson, stands at 
 this day the gate to the most hospitable mansion on 
 the river, as if the spirit of the spot had consecrated it 
 to its first association with the white man. 
 
 The chief led the way when the crew had disem- 
 barked, by a path skirting the deep-worn bed of the 
 torrent, and after an ascent of a few minutes, through 
 a grove of tall firs, a short turn to the left brought 
 them upon an open table of land, a hundred and fifty 
 feet above the river shut in by a circle of forest-trees, 
 and frowned over on the east by a tall and bald cliff, 
 which shot up in a perpendicular line to the height 
 of three hundred feet. From a cleft in the face of 
 •his precipice a natural spring oozed forth, drawing 
 a darker line down the sun-parched rock, and feeding 
 a small stream that found its way to the river on the 
 northern side of the platform just mentioned, creating 
 
 between itself and the deeper torrent to the south, a 
 sort of highland peninsula, now constituting the estate 
 of the hospitable gentleman above alluded to. 
 
 Hudson looked around him with delight and sur- 
 prise when he stood on the highest part of the broad 
 natural table selected by the chief for his entertain- 
 ment. The view north showed a cleft through the 
 hills, with the river coiled like a lake in its widening 
 bed, while a blue and wavy line of mountains form- 
 ed the far horizon at its back ; south, the bold eminen- 
 ces, between which he had found his adventurous 
 way, closed in like the hollowed sides of a bright- 
 green vase, with glimpses of the river lying in its 
 bottom like crystal; below him descended a sharp 
 and wooded bank, with the river at its foot, and 
 directly opposite rose a hill in a magnificent cone to 
 the very sky, sending its shadow down through the 
 mirrored water, as if it entered to some inner world. 
 The excessive lavishness of the foliage clothed these 
 bold natural features with a grace and richness al- 
 together captivating to the senses, and Hudson long 
 stood, gazing around him, believing that the tales of 
 brighter and happier lands were truer than he had 
 deemed, and that it was his lucky destiny to have been 
 the discoverer of a future Utopia. 
 
 A little later, several groups of Indians were seen 
 advancing from the village, bearing the materials for 
 a feast, which they deposited under a large tree, indi- 
 cated by the chief. It was soon arranged, and Hud- 
 son with his men surrounded the dishes of shell and 
 wood, one of which, placed in the centre, contained a 
 roasted dog, half buried in Indian-corn. While the 
 chief and several of his warriors sat down in company 
 with the whites, the young men danced the calumet- 
 dance to the sound of a rude drum, formed by drawing 
 a skin tightly over a wooden bowl, and near them, in 
 groups, stood the women and children of the village, 
 glancing with looks of curiosity from the feats of the 
 young men to the unaccustomed faces of the strangers. 
 
 Among the women stood Kihyalee, who kept her 
 large bright eyes fixed almost fiercely upon Fleming, 
 yet when he looked toward her, she smiled and turned 
 as if she would beckon him away — a bidding which he 
 tried in vain to obey, under the vigilant watch of his 
 master. 
 
 The feast went on, and the Indians having produced 
 gourds, filled with a slight intoxicating liquor made 
 from the corn, Hudson offered to the chief, some 
 spirits from a bottle which he had intrusted to one 
 of the men to wash down the expected roughness of 
 the savage viands. The bottle passed in turn to the 
 mate, who was observed to drink freely, and, a few 
 minutes after, Hudson rising to see more nearly a trial 
 of skill with the bow and arrow, Fleming found the 
 desired opportunity, and followed the tempting Kihyalee 
 into the forest. 
 
 The sun began to throw the shadows of the tall 
 pines in gigantic pinnacles along the ground, and the 
 youths of the friendly tribe, who had entertained the 
 great navigator, ceased from their dances and feats 
 of skill, and clustered around the feast-tree. Intend- 
 ing to get under weigh with the evening breeze and 
 proceed still farther up the river, Hudson rose to col- 
 lect his men, and bid the chief farewell. Taking the 
 hand of the majestic savage and putting it to his 
 breast, to express in his own manner the kind feel- 
 ings he entertained for him, he turned toward the path 
 by which he came, and was glancing round at his men, 
 when Hans Christaern inquired if he had sent the 
 mate back to the vessel. 
 
 " Der teufel, no !" answered the skipper, missing 
 him for the first time; "has he been long gone ?" 
 
 " A full hour !" said one of the men. 
 
 Hudson put his hand to his head, and remembered 
 the deep wrong Fleming had done to the tribe. Re- 
 
504 
 
 THE PICKER AND PILER. 
 
 tribution, he feared, had over-taken him — but how was 
 it done so silently? How had the guilty man been 
 induced to "leave his comrades, and accelerate his 
 doom by his own voluntary act ? 
 
 The next instant resolved the question. A distant 
 and prolonged scream, as of a man in mortal agony, 
 drew all eyes to the summit of the beetling cliff, which 
 overhung them. On its extremest verge, outlined 
 distinctly against the sky, stood the tall figure of Kih- 
 yalee, holding from her, yet poised over the precipice, 
 the writhing form of her victim, while in the other 
 hand, flashing in the rays of the sun, glittered the 
 bright hatchet she had plucked from his girdle. In- 
 furiated at the sight, and suspecting collision on the 
 part of the chief, Hudson drew his cutlass and gave 
 the order to stand to arms, but as he turned, the gigan- 
 tic savage had drawn an arrow to its head with incredi- 
 ble force, and though it fell far short of its mark, there 
 was that in the action and in his look which, in the 
 passing of a thought, changed the mind of the skipper. 
 In another instant, the hesitating arm of the widowed 
 Kihyalee descended, and loosening her hold upon the 
 relaxed body of her victim, the doomed mate fell 
 heavily down the face of the precipice. 
 
 The chief turned to Hudson, who stood trembling 
 and aghast at the awful scene, and plucked the re- 
 maining arrows from his quiver, he broke them and 
 threw himself on the ground. The tribe gathered 
 around, their chief, Hudson moved his hand to them 
 in token of forgiveness, and in a melancholy silence 
 the crew took their way after him to the shore. 
 
 THE PICKER AND PILER. 
 
 The nature of the strange incident I have to relate 
 forbids me to record either place or time. 
 
 On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever 
 been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a 
 snowdrift breast high, to the door of a small tavern in 
 the western country. The host turned out unwilling- 
 ly at the knock of my whip handle on the outer door, 
 and, wading before the tired animals to the barn, which 
 was nearly inaccessible from the banks of snow, he 
 assisted me in getting off their frozen harnesses, and 
 bestowing them safely for the night. 
 
 The " bar-room" fire burnt brightly, and never was 
 fire more welcome. Room was made for me by four 
 or five rough men who sat silent around it, and with a 
 keen comprehension of »• pleasure after pain," I took 
 off my furs and moccasins, and stretched my cold con- 
 tracted limbs to the blaze. When, a few minutes 
 after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought me, with a 
 corn cake and a mug of " flip" hissing from the poker, 
 it certainly would have been hard to convince me that 
 I would have put on my coats and moccasins again to 
 have ridden a mile to paradise. 
 
 The faces of my new companions, which I had not 
 found time to inspect very closely while my supper 
 lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine 
 knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord, and their 
 grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind, for the first 
 time since I had entered the room, of my errand in 
 that quarter of the country. 
 
 The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the rivers 
 of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado of every 
 description, a resource from want and (in their own 
 opinion) from crime, which is seized upon by all at 
 least who are willing to labor. The owners of the ex- 
 tensive forests, destined to become so valuable, are 
 mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, who, 
 satisfied with the constant advance in the price of 
 
 lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable to nothing 
 but the laws of nature, and leave them unfenced and 
 unprotected, to increase in size and value till the land 
 beneath them is wanted for culture. It is natural 
 enough that solitary settlers, living in the neighbor- 
 hood of miles of apparently unclaimed land, should 
 think seldom of the owner, and in time grow to the 
 opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit gave the 
 land, the air, and the water, to all his children, and 
 they are free to all alike. Furnishing the requisite 
 teams and implements, therefore, the inhabitants of 
 these tracts collect a number of the stragglers through 
 the country, and forming what is called a " bee," go 
 into the nearest woods, and for a month or more, work 
 laboriously at selecting, and felling the tallest and 
 straightest pines. In their rude shanty at night they 
 have bread, pork, and whiskey, which hard labor makes 
 sufficiently palatable, and the time is passed merrily 
 till the snow is right for sledding. The logs are then 
 drawn to the water sides, rafts are formed, and the 
 valuable lumber, for which they paid nothing but their 
 labor is run to the cities for their common advantage. 
 The only enemies of this class of men are the agents 
 who are sometimes sent out in the winter to defect 
 them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and 
 in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this 
 as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods. 
 They soon brightened and grew talkative when they 
 discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and 
 burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a talk 
 of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my inquiries, 
 that all the " men people" in the country were busy 
 
 " lumbering for themselves," unless it were 
 
 the " Picker and Piler." 
 
 As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh 
 outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new-comer. 
 "Talk of the devil" — said the man in a lower tone, 
 and without finishing the proverb he rose with a 
 respect which he had not accorded to me, to make 
 room for the Picker and Piler. 
 
 A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to 
 drive back his horse, who had followed him nearly in. 
 I observed that the animal had neithersaddle nor bridle. 
 Shutting the door upon him without violence, he ex- 
 changed nods with one or two of the men, and giving 
 the landlord a small keg which he had brought, he 
 pleaded haste for refusing the offered chair, and stood 
 silent by the fire. His features were blackened with 
 smoke, but I could see that they were small and regu- 
 lar, and his voice, though it conveyed in its deliberate 
 accents an indefinable resolution, was almost feminine- 
 ly soft and winning. 
 
 " That stranger yonder has got a job for you," said 
 the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and received 
 the money. 
 
 Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a very 
 eager scrutiny of himself, and for a moment I was 
 thrown too much off my guard to address him. 
 
 " Is it you, sir ?" he asked, after waiting a moment. 
 " Yes, — I have some work to be done hereabouts, 
 but — you seem in a hurry. Could you call here to- 
 morrow." 
 
 "I may not be here again in a week." 
 " Do you live far from here ?" He smiled. 
 " I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a 
 piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you 
 would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give 
 you — " 
 
 That personage decided the question for me by 
 telling me in so many words that I had better go. 
 His beds were all taken up, and my horses should be 
 taken care of till my return. I saw that my presence 
 had interrupted something, probably the formation of 
 a " bee," and more willingly than I would have be- 
 lieved possible an hour before, I resumed my furs and 
 wrappers, and declared that I was ready. The Picker 
 
THE PICKER AND PILER. 
 
 505 
 
 and Piler had inspired me, and I knew not why, with 
 an involuntary respect and liking. 
 
 •• It is a rough night, sir," said he, as he shouldered 
 a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by a 
 leather strap over the neck of his horse, " but I will 
 soon show you a better climate. Come, sir, jump on !" 
 " And you ?" I said inquisitively, as he held his 
 horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a Cana- 
 dian pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog. 
 
 " I am more used^to the road, sir, and will walk. 
 Come ?" 
 
 It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if it 
 had been possible to resist the strange tone of authori- 
 ty with which he spoke. So without more ado, I 
 sprang upon the animal's back, and holding on by the j 
 long tuft upon his withers, suffered him passively to 
 plunge through the drift after his master. 
 
 Wondering at the readiness with which I had en- j 
 tered upon this equivocal adventure, but never for an | 
 instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my eyes l 
 to the blinding cold, and accommodated my limbs as 
 well as I could to the bare back and scrambling paces 
 of the Canadian. The Picker and Piler strode on 
 before, the pony following like a spaniel at his heels, ! 
 and after a half hour's tramp, during which I had 
 merely observed that we were rounding the base of a 
 considerable hill, we turned short to the right, and 
 were met by a column of smoke, which, lifting, the 
 moment after, disclosed the two slopes of a consider- 
 able valley enveloped in one sea of fire. A red, lurid 
 cloud, overhung it at the tops of the tallest trees, and 
 far and wide, above that, spread a covering of black 
 smoke, heaving upward in vast and billowy masses, and 
 rolling away on every side into the darkness. 
 
 We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire J 
 to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk, and : 
 its pitchy knots distributed likethe eyes of the lamprey, 
 burning pure and steady amid the irregular flame. I 
 had once or twice, with an instinctive wish to draw 
 rein, pulled hard upon the tangled tuft in my hand, 
 but master and horse kept on. This burning tree, 
 however, was the first of a thousand, and as the pony j 
 turned his eyes away from the intense heat to pass be- ( 
 tween it and a bare rock, I glanced into the glowing 
 labyrinth beyond, and my faith gave way. I jumped 
 from his back and hailed the Picker and Piler, with a | 
 halloo scarcely audible amid the tumult of the crack- j 
 ling branches. My voice did not evidently reach his j 
 ear, but the pony, relieved from my weight, galloped 
 to his side, and rubbed his muzzle against the unoc- j 
 cupied hand of his master. 
 
 He turned back immediately. " I beg pardon," he 
 said, "I have that to think of just now which makes 
 me forgetful. I am not surprised at your hesitation, 
 but mount again and trust the pony." 
 
 The animal turned rather unwillingly at his mas- 
 ter's bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown 
 fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again on 
 his back. 
 
 " If you find the heat inconvenient, cover your face." 
 And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Piler 
 turned on his heel, and once more strode away be- 
 fore us. 
 
 Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the 
 corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned 
 myself to the horse. He overtook his master with a 
 shuffling canter, and putting his nose as close to the 
 ground as he could carry it without stumbling, fol- 
 lowed closely at his heels. I observed, by the green 
 logs lying immediately along our path, that we were 
 following an avenue of prostrate timber which had been 
 felled before the wood was fired ; but descending 
 presently to the left, we struck at once into the deep 
 bed of a brook, and by the lifted head and slower gait 
 of the pony, as well as my own easier respiration, I 
 found that the hollow through which it ran, contained 
 
 a body of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains 
 of smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents 
 above. The pony now picked his way leisurely along 
 the brookside, and while my lungs expanded with the 
 relief of breathing a more temperate atmosphere, I 
 raised myself from my stooping posture in a profuse 
 perspiration, and one by one disembarrassed myself 
 from my protectives against the cold. 
 
 I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker 
 and Piler, and presumed by the pony's desultory 
 movements that lie was near the end of his journey, 
 when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood sud- 
 denly upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where the 
 brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken dell, and 
 after describing a half circle on a rocky platform, re- 
 sumed its onward course in the same direction as be- 
 fore. This curve of the brook and the platform it 
 enclosed lay lower than the general level of the forest, 
 and the air around and within it, it seemed to me, was 
 as clear and genial as the summer noon. Over one 
 side, from the rocky wall, a rude and temporary roof 
 of pine slabs drooped upon a barricade of logs, forming 
 a low hut, and before the entrance of this, at the mo- 
 ment of my appearance, stood a woman and a showily- 
 dressed young man, both evidently confused at the 
 sudden apparition of the Picker and Piler. My eyes 
 had scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing 
 ! at his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat 
 I the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed his stoop- 
 ing and quiet mien, set his rifle against the rock, and 
 came forward to give me his hand. 
 
 " My daughter!" he said, more in the way of ex- 
 planation than introduction, and without taking fur- 
 ther notice of the young man whose presence seemed 
 so unwelcome, he poured me a draught from the keg 
 he had brought, pointed to the water falling close at 
 my hand, and threw himself at his length upon the 
 I ground. 
 
 The face and general appearance of the young man, 
 now seated directly opposite me, offered no temptation 
 i for more than a single glance, and my whole attention 
 | was soon absorbed by the daughter of my singular 
 host, who, crossing from the platform to the hut, 
 i divided her attention between a haunch of venison 
 roasting before a burning log of hickory, and the ar- 
 rangement of a few most primitive implements for our 
 coming supper. She was slight, like her father, in 
 form, and as far as 1 had been able to distinguish his 
 blackened features, resembled him in the general out- 
 line. But in the place of his thin and determined 
 mouth, her lips were round and voluptuous, and 
 though her eye looked as if it might wake, it ex- 
 pressed, even in the presence of her moody father, a 
 drowsy and soft indolence, common enough to the 
 Asiatics, but seldom seen in America. Herdress was 
 coarse and careless, but she was beautiful with every 
 possible disadvantage, and, whether married or not, 
 evidently soon to become a mother. 
 
 The venison was placed before us on the rock, and 
 the young man, uninvited, and with rather an. air of 
 bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch and 
 broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter kept 
 as near him as her attention to her father's wants would 
 permit, but neither joined us in eating, nor encouraged 
 my attempts at conversation. The Picker and Piler 
 ate in silence, leaving me to be my own carver, and 
 finishing his repast by a deep draught from the keg 
 which had been the means of our acquaintance, he 
 sprang upon his feet and disappeared. 
 
 " The wind has changed," said the daughter, look- 
 ing up at the smoke, » and he has gone to the western 
 edge to start a new fire. It's a full half mile, and he 11 
 be gone an hour." 
 
 This was said with a look at me which was any- 
 thing but equivocal. I was de trop. 1 took up the 
 rifle of the Picker and Piler, forgetting that there wa. 
 
506 
 
 THE PICKER AND PILER. 
 
 probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood, and re- 
 marking that I would have a look for a deer, jumped 
 up the water-fall side, and was immediately hidden by 
 the rocks. 
 
 I had no conception of the scene that lay around 
 me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which the 
 hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area of per- 
 haps an acre, which had been felled in the heart of the 
 wood before it was set on fire. The forest encircled 
 it with blazing columns, whose capitals were ap- 
 parently lost in the sky, and curtains of smoke and 
 flame, which flew as if lashed into ribands by a whirl- 
 wind. The grandeur, the violence, the intense bright- 
 ness of the spectacle, outran all imagination. The 
 pines, on fire to the peak, and straight as arrows, 
 seemed to resemble, at one moment the conflagration 
 of an eastern city, with innumerable minarets aban- 
 doned to the devouring element. At the next moment, 
 the wind, changing its direction, swept out every 
 vestige of smoke, and extinguished every tongue of 
 flame, and the tall trees, in clear and flameless igni- 
 tion, standing parallel in thousands, resembled some 
 blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of 
 miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the 
 day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into aisles 
 of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest, and the 
 next instant, like a tremendous surge alive with ser- 
 pents of fire, the smoke and flame swept through it, 
 and it seemed to me as if some glorious structure had 
 been consumed in the passing of a thought. For a 
 minute, again, all would be still except the crackling 
 of the fibres of the wood, and with the first stir of the 
 wind, like a shower of flashing gems, the bright coals 
 rained down through the forest, and for a moment the 
 earth glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were 
 alive with one bright ignition. 
 
 With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and the 
 variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I found my 
 eyes and brain growing giddy. The brook ran cool 
 below, and the heat had dried the leaves in the small 
 clearing, and with the abandonment of a man overcome 
 with the sultriness of summer, I lay down on the 
 rivulet's bank, and dipped my head and bathed my 
 eyes in the running water. Close to its surface there 
 was not a particle of smoke in the air, and, exceeding- 
 ly refreshed with its temperate coolness, 1 lay for some- 
 time in luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the 
 winter that howled without. Frost and cold were 
 never more difficult to realize in midsummer, though 
 within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man would 
 freeze to death in an hour. 
 
 " I have a better bed for you in the shanty," said the 
 Picker and Piler, who had approached unheard in the 
 noise of the fires, and suddenly stood over me. 
 
 He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a 
 prostrate log, and looked anxiously toward the descent 
 to the hut. 
 
 " I am little inclined for sleep," I answered, " and 
 perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation here. 
 The scene is new to me" — 
 
 " I have another guest to dispose of," he answered, 
 " and we shall be more out of the smoke near the 
 shanty." 
 
 I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the platform, 
 to find him angrily separating his daughter and the 
 stranger. The girl entered the hut, and with a de- 
 cisive gesture, he pointed the young man to a "shake- 
 down" of straw in the remotest corner of the rocky 
 enclosure. 
 
 "With your leave, old gentleman," said the in- 
 truder, after glancing at his intended place of repose, 
 ' I'll find a crib for myself." And springing up the 
 craggy rock opposite the door of the shanty he gather- 
 ed a slight heap of brush, and threw it into a hollow 
 left in the earth by a tree, which, though full grown 
 and green, had been borne to the earth and partly 
 
 uprooted by the falling across it of an overblown and 
 gigantic pine. The earth and stones had followed the 
 uptorn mass, forming a solid upright wall, from which, 
 like struggling fingers, stretching back in agony to 
 the ground from which they had parted, a few rent 
 and naked roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel 
 will show why I am so particular in this description. 
 
 " When peace was declared between England and 
 this country," said the Picker and Piler (after an 
 hour's conversation, which had led insensibly to his 
 own history), I was in command of a privateer. Not 
 choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the cruise, 
 I was set ashore in the West Indies by a crew in open 
 mutiny. My property was all on board, and I was 
 left a beggar. I had one child, a daughter, whose 
 mother died in giving her birth. 
 
 " Having left a sufficient sum for her education in 
 the hands of a brother of my own, under whose roof 
 she had passed the first years of her life, I determined 
 to retrieve my fortunes before she or my friends should 
 be made acquainted with my disaster. 
 
 " Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer 
 and a beggar. 
 
 " I determined to see my child, and came back 
 like one from the dead, to my brother's door. He had 
 forgotten me, and abused his trust. My daughter, 
 then seventeen, and such as you see her here, was the 
 drudge in the family of a stranger — ignorant and friend- 
 less. My heart turned against mankind with this last 
 drop in a bitter cup, and, unfitted for quiet life, I look- 
 ed around for some channel of desperate adventure. 
 But my daughter was the perpetual obstacle. What 
 to do with her ? She had neither the manners nor 
 the education of a lady, and to leave her a servant was 
 impossible. I started with her for the west, with the 
 vague design of joining some tribe of Indians, and 
 chance and want have thrown me into the only mode 
 of life on earth that could now be palatable to me." 
 
 " Is it not lonely," I asked, " after your stirring ad- 
 ventures ?" 
 
 " Lonely ! If you knew the delight with which I 
 live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut out 
 the world ! The labor is hard it is true, but I need it, 
 to sleep and forget. There is no way else in which I 
 could seclude my daughter. Till lately, she has been 
 contented, too. We live a month together in one 
 place — the centre like this of a burning wood. I can 
 bear hardship, but I love a high temperature — the 
 climate of the tropics — and I have it here. For weeks 
 I forget that it is winter, tending my fires and living 
 on the game I have stored up. There is a hollow or 
 a brook — a bed or a cave, in every wood, where the 
 cool air, as here, sinks to the bottom, and there I can 
 put up my shanty, secure from all intrusion — but such 
 as I bring upon myself." 
 
 The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the 
 sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last clause 
 unnecessary. He thought not of me. 
 
 " Some months since," continued the Picker and 
 Piler, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, " I 
 met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I 
 met you. He is the owner of this land. After 
 engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I 
 did yourself, from a momentary fever for company 
 which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go with 
 me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered in the 
 neighborhood awhile, under pretext of hunting, and 
 twice on my return from the village, I found that my 
 daughter had seen him. Time has betrayed the 
 wrong he inflicted on me. 
 
 The voice of the agitated father sank almost to a 
 whisper as he pronounced the last few words, and, 
 rising from the rock on which we were sitting, he 
 paced for a few minutes up and down the platform in 
 silence. 
 
 The reader must fill up from his own imagination 
 
KATE CREDIFORD. 
 
 507 
 
 the drama of which this is but the outline, for the 
 Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned, and 
 lean tell but what I saw and heard. In the narration 
 of his story he seemed but recapitulating the promi- 
 nent events for his own self-converse, rather than at- 
 tempting to tell a tale to me, and it was hurried over 
 as brokenly and briefly as I have put it down. I sat in 
 a listening attitude after he concluded, but he seemed 
 to have unburthened his bosom sufficiently, and his 
 lips were closed with stern compression. 
 
 " You forget," he said, after pacing awhile, "that I 
 offered you a place to sleep. The night wears late. 
 Stretch yourself on that straw, with your cloak over 
 you. Good night!" 
 
 I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling 
 heavily into the sky till I slept. 
 
 I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me 
 from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the 
 hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the 
 morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke. I 
 I looked around for a place to warm myself. The j 
 hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire had been 
 kindled under the overblown pine, and its pitchy heart 
 was now flowing with the steady brilliancy of a torch. 
 I took up one of its broken branches, cracked it on my 
 knee, and stirring up the coals below, soon sent up a : 
 merry blaze, which enveloped the whole trunk. 
 
 Turning my back to the increasing heat, I started, 
 for, creeping toward me, with a look of eagerness for 
 which I was at a loss to account, came the Picker and 
 Piler. 
 
 " Twice doomed !" he muttered between his teeth, 
 " but not by me !" 
 
 He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots, laid \ 
 his axe against a burning tree, and with a branch of ! 
 hemlock, swept off the flame from the spot where the 
 Ire was eating through, as if to see how nearly it was ! 
 divided. 
 
 I began to think him insane, for I could get no 
 answer to my questions, and when he spoke, it was j 
 half audible, and with his eyes turned from me fixedly. : 
 I looked in the same direction, but could see nothing ! 
 remarkable. The seducer slept soundly beneath his 
 matted wall, and the rude door of the shanty was be- 
 hind us. Leaving him to see phantoms in the air, as j 
 I thought, I turned my eyes to the drips of the water- 
 fall, and was absorbed in memories of my own, when 
 I saw the girl steal from the shanty, and with one j 
 bound overleap the rocky barrier of the platform. 1 
 laid my hand on the shoulder of my host, and pointed 
 after her, as with stealthy pace looking back occa- 
 sionally to the hut, where she evidently thought her 
 father slept, she crept round toward her lover. 
 
 "He dies!" cried the infuriated man: but as he, 
 jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched ; 
 out of sight, and my own first thought was to awake 
 the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked back, for | 
 I heard no footstep. 
 
 "Stand clear!" shouted a voice of almost super- i 
 natural shrillness! and as I caught sight of the Picker 
 and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burn- , 
 ing tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth flash- 
 ed on me. 
 
 Down came the axe into the very heart of the pitchy 
 flame, and trembling with the tremendous smoke, the 
 trunk slowly bent upward from the fire. 
 
 The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne 
 ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness in 
 my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper. 
 
 One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth, 
 "md the shock startled him from his sleep. A whole 
 age seemed to me elapsing while the other rose with 
 the slow lift of the ash. \s it slid heavily away, the 
 vigorous tree righted, like a giant springing to his 
 feet. I saw the root pin the hand of the seducer to 
 the earth — a struggle — a contortion and the leafless 
 
 and waving top of the recovered and upright tree 
 rocked with its effort, and a long, sharp cry had gone 
 out echoing through the woods, and was still. I felt 
 my brain reel. 
 
 Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved about 
 in the sickly daylight, when I recovered ; but the 
 Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I had yet 
 seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath the remnants 
 of the pine. 
 
 KATE CREDIFORD. 
 
 I found myself looking with some interest at the 
 back of a lady's head. The theatre was crowded, and 
 I had come' in late, and the object of my curiosity, 
 whoever she might be, was listening very attentively to 
 the play. — She did not move. I had time to build a 
 life-time romance about her before Thad seen a feature 
 of her face. But her ears were small and of an ex- 
 quisite oval, and she had that rarest beauty of woman 
 — the hair arched and joined to the white neck with 
 the same finish as on the temples. Nature often 
 slights this part of her masterpiece. 
 
 The curtain dropped, and I stretched eagerly for- 
 ward to catch a glimse of the profile. — But no ! she 
 sat next one of the slender pilasters, and with her head 
 leaned against it, remained immovable. 
 
 I left the box, and with some difficulty made my 
 way into the crowded pit. Elbowing, apologizing, 
 persevering, I at last gained a point where I knew I 
 could see my incognita at the most advantage. I 
 turned — pshaw ! — how was it possible I had not recog- 
 nised her? 
 
 Kate Crediford ! 
 
 There was no getting out again, for a while at least, 
 without giving offence to the crowd I had jostled so 
 unceremoniously. I sat down — vexed — and commen- 
 ced a desperate study of the figure of Shakspere on 
 the drop-curtain. 
 
 Of course I had been a lover of Miss Crediford's, 
 or I could not have turned with indifference from the 
 handsomest woman in the theatre. She was very 
 beautiful — there was no disputing. But we love wo- 
 men a little for what we do know of them, and a great 
 deal more for what we do not. I had love-read Kate 
 Crediford to the last leaf. We parted as easily as a 
 reader and a book. Flirtation is a circulating library, 
 in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume, 
 and I gave up Kate to the next reader, feeling no 
 property even in the marks I had made in her perusal. 
 A little quarrel sufficed as an excuse for the closing of 
 the book, and both of us studiously avoided a recon- 
 ciliation. 
 
 As I sat in the pit, I remembered suddenly a mole 
 on her left cheek, and I turned toward her with the 
 simple curiosity to knew whether it was visible at that 
 distance. Kate looked sad. She still leaned immove- 
 able against the slight column, and her dark eyes, it 
 struck me, were moist. Her mouth, with this pecu- 
 liar expression upon her countenance, was certainly 
 inexpressibly sweet— the turned-down corners ending 
 in dimples, which in that particular place, I have al- 
 ways observed, are like wells of unfathomable melan- 
 choly. Poor Kate ! what was the matter with her ? 
 
 As I turned back to my dull study of the curtain a 
 little pettish with myself for the interest with which 1 
 had looked at an old flame, I detected half a sigh 
 under my white waistcoat ; but instantly persuading 
 myself that it was a disposition to cough, coughed, and 
 began to hum "suoni la tromba." The curiam rose 
 and the play went on. 
 
508 
 
 KATE CREDIFORD. 
 
 It was odd that I never had seen Kate in that humor 
 before. I did not think she could be sad. Kate 
 Crediford sad ! Why, she was the most volatile, light- 
 hearted, care-for-nothing coquette that ever held up 
 her fingers to be kissed. I wonder, has any one really 
 annoyed you, my poor Kate ! thought I. Could I, 
 by chance, be of any service to you — for, after all, I 
 owe you something! I looked at her again. 
 
 Strange that I had ever looked at that face without 
 emotion ! The vigils of an ever-wakeful, ever-passion- 
 ate, yet ever-tearful and melancholy spirit, seemed set, 
 and kept under those heavy and motionless eyelids. 
 And she, as I saw her now, was the very model and 
 semblance of the character that I had all my life been 
 vainly seeking ! This was the creature I had sighed 
 for when turning away from the too mirthful tender- 
 ness of Kate Crediford ! There was something new, 
 or something for the moment miswritten. in that 
 familiar countenance. 
 
 I made my way out of the pit with some difficulty, 
 and returned to sit near her. After a few minutes, a 
 gentleman in the next box rose and left the seat vacant 
 on the other side of the pilaster against which she 
 leaned. I went around while the orchestra were play- 
 ing a loud march, and, without being observed by the 
 thoughtful beauty, seated myself in the vacant place. ! 
 
 Why did my eyes flush and moisten, as I looked 
 upon the small white hand lying on the cushioned J 
 barrier between us ! I knew every vein of it, like the i 
 strings of my own heart. — I had held it spread out in j 
 my own, and followed its delicate blue traceries with 
 a rose-stem, for hours and hours, while imploring, and 
 reproaching, and reasoning over love's lights and 
 shadows. I knew the feel of every one of those ex- 
 quisite fingers — those rolled up rose-leaves, with nails 
 like pieces cut from the lip of a shell ! Oh, the 
 promises I had kissed into oaths on that little chef- 
 d'ceuvre of nature's tinted alabaster! the psalms and 
 sermons I had sat out holding it, in her father's pew ! 
 the moons I had tired out of the sky, making of it a 
 bridge for our hearts passing backward and forward ! 
 And how could that little wretch of a hand, that knew 
 me better than its own other hand (for we had been 
 more together), lie there, so unconscious of my pres- 
 ence ? How could she — Kate Crediford — sit next to 
 me as she was doing, with only a stuffed partition be- 
 tween us, and her head leaning on one side of a pilaster, 
 and mine on the other, and never start, nor recognise, 
 nor be at all aware of my neighborhood ? She was 
 not playing a part, it was easy to see. Oh, I knew 
 those little relaxed fingers too well ! Sadness, indolent 
 and luxurious sadness, was expressed in her counten- 
 ance, and her abstraction was unfeigned and contem- 
 plative. Could she have so utterly forgotten me — 
 magnetically, that is to say?— Could the atmosphere 
 about her, that would once have trembled betrayingly 
 at my approach, like the fanning of an angel's invisi- 
 ble wing, have lost the sense of my presence ? 
 
 I tried to magnetize her hand. I fixed my eyes on 
 that little open palm, and with all the intensity I could 
 summon, kissed it mentally in its rosy centre. I re- 
 proached the ungrateful little thing for its dulness and 
 forgetfulness, and brought to bear upon it a focus of 
 old memories of pressures and caresses, to which a 
 stone would scarce have the heart to be insensible. 
 
 But I belie myself in writing this with a smile. I 
 watched those unmoving fingers with a heart. I could 
 not see the face, nor read the thought, of the woman 
 who had once loved me, and who sat near me, now, so 
 unconsciously — but if a memory had stirred, if a pulse 
 had quickened its beat, those finely-strung fingers I 
 well know would have trembled responsively. Had 
 she forgotten me altogether? Is that possible ? Can 
 a woman close the leaves of her heart over a once-loved 
 and deeply-written name, like the waves over a vessel's 
 track — like the air over the division of a bird's flight ? 
 
 I had intended to speak presently to Miss Crediford, 
 but every moment the restraint became greater. I felt 
 no more privileged to speak to her than the stranger 
 who had left the seat I occupied. I drew back, for 
 fear of encroaching on her room, or disturbing the 
 folds of her shawl. I dared not speak to her. And, 
 while I was arguing the matter to myself, the party 
 who were with her, apparently tired of the play, arose 
 and left the theatre, Kate following last, but unspoken 
 to, and unconscious altogether of having been near 
 any one whom she knew. 
 
 I went home and wrote to her all night, for there was 
 no sleeping till I had given vent to this new fever at my 
 heart. And in the morning, I took the leading thoughts 
 from my heap in incoherent scribblings, and embodied 
 them more coolly in a letter : — 
 
 " You will think, when you look at the signature, 
 that this is to be the old story. And you will be as 
 much mistaken as you are in believing that I was ever 
 your lover, till a few hours ago. I have declared love 
 to you, it is true. I have been happy with you, and 
 wretched without you ; I have thought of you, dream- 
 ed of you, haunted you, sworn to you, and devoted to 
 you all and more than you exacted, of time and out- 
 ward service and adoration ; but I love you now for 
 | the first time in my life. Shall I be so happy as to 
 ! make you comprehend this startling contradiction ? 
 " There are many chambers in the heart, Kate ; and 
 the spirits of some of us dwell, most fondly and secret- 
 ly, in the chamber of tears — avowedly, however, in the 
 outer and ever-open chamber of mirth. Over the 
 sacred threshold, guarded by sadness, much that we 
 select, and smile upon, and follow with adulation in 
 the common walks of life, never passes. We admire 
 the gay. They make our melancholy sweeter by con- 
 trast, when we retire within ourselves. We pursue 
 them. We take them to our hearts — to the outer 
 vestibules of our hearts — and if they are gay only, they 
 are content with the unconsecrated tribute which we 
 pay them there. But the chamber within is, mean- 
 time, lonely. It aches with its desolation. The echo 
 of the mirthful admiration without jars upon its 
 mournful silence. — It longs for love, but love toned 
 with its own sadness — love that can penetrate deeper 
 than smiles ever came — love that, having once entered, 
 can be locked in with its key of melancholy, and 
 brooded over with the long dream of a life-time. But 
 that deep-hidden and unseen chamber of the heart 
 may be long untenanted. And, meantime, the spirit 
 becomes weary of mirth, and impatiently quenches the 
 fire even upon its outer altar, and in the complete 
 loneliness of a heart that has no inmate or idol, gay 
 or tearful, lives mechanically on. 
 
 " Do you guess at my meaning, Kate ? — Do you 
 remember the merriment of our first meeting ? Do 
 you remember in what a frolic of thoughtlessness you 
 first permitted me to raise to my lips those restless 
 fingers ? Do you remember the mock condescension, 
 the merry haughtinsss, the rallying and feigned in- 
 credulity, with which you first received my successive 
 steps of vowing and love-making — the arch look when 
 it was begun, the laugh when it was over, the untiring 
 follies we kept up, after vows plighted, and the future 
 planned and sworn to ? That you were in earnest, as 
 much as you were capable of being, I fully believe. 
 You would not else have been so prodigal of the sweet 
 bestowings of a maiden's tenderness. But how often 
 have I left you with the feeling, that in the hours I 
 had passed with you, my spirit had been alone ! How 
 often have I wondered if there were depths in my heart, 
 which love can never reach ! How often mourned 
 that in the procession of love there was no place allot- 
 ted for its sweetest and dearest followers — tears and 
 silence ! Oh, Kate ! sweet as was that sun-gleam of 
 early passion, I did not love you .' I tired of your 
 
FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. 
 
 509 
 
 smiles, waiting in vain for your sadness. I left you, 
 and thought of you no more ? 
 
 "But now (and you will be surprised to know that 
 I have been so near to you unperceived)— I have drank 
 an intoxication from one glance into your eyes, which 
 throws open to you every door of my heart, subdues 
 to your control every nerve and feeling of my exis- 
 tence. Last night, 1 sat an hour, tracing again the 
 transparent and well-remembered veins upon your 
 hand, and oh! how the language written in those 
 branching and mystic lines had changed in meaning 
 and power. — You were sad. I saw you from a dis- 
 tance, and, with amazement at an expression upon 
 your face which I had never before seen. I came and 
 sat near you. It was the look I had longed for when 
 I knew you, and when tired of your mirth. It was 
 the look I had searched the world for, combined with 
 such beauty as yours. It was a look of tender and 
 passionate melancholy, which revealed to me an un- 
 suspected chamber in your heart — a chamber of tears. 
 Ah, why were you never sad before ? Why have we 
 lost— why have I lost the eternity's worth of sweet 
 hours when you love me with that concealed treasure 
 in your bosom ? — Alas ! that angels must walk the 
 world, unrecognised, till too late ! Alas, that I have 
 held in my arms and pressed to my lips, and loosed 
 again with trifling and weariness, the creature whom 
 it was my life's errand, the thirst and passionate long- 
 ing of my nature, to find and worship ! 
 
 " Oh, Heaven ! with what new value do I now 
 number over your adorable graces of person ! How 
 spiritualized is every familiar feature, once so deplor- 
 ably misappreciated ! — How compulsive of respectful 
 adoration is that flexible waist, that step of aerial light- 
 ness, that swan-like motion, which I once dared to 
 praise triflingly and half-mockingly, like the tints of a 
 flower or the chance beauty of a bird ! And those 
 bright lips ! How did I ever look on them, and not 
 know that within their rosy portal slept voiceless, for 
 a while, the controlling spell of my destiny — the tear- 
 ful spirit followed and "called in my dreams, with per- 
 petual longing ? Strange value given to features and 
 outward loveliness by qualities within ! Strange 
 witchery of sadness in a woman! Oh, there is, in 
 mirth and folly, dear Kate, no air for love's breathing, 
 still less of food for constancy, or of holiness to con- 
 secrate and heighten beauty of person. 
 
 » What can I say else, except implore to be per- 
 mitted to approach you — to offer my life to you — to 
 begin, thus late, after being known so long, the wor- 
 ■hip which till death is your due ? Pardon me if I 
 have written abruptly and wildly. I shall await your 
 answer in an agony of expectation. I do not willingly 
 breathe till 1 see you — till I weep at your feet over my 
 blindness and forgetfulness. Adieu ! but let it not be 
 for long I pray you !" 
 
 I despatched this letter, and it would be difficult to 
 embody in language the agony I suffered in waiting 
 for a reply. I walked my room, that endless morning, 
 with a death-pang in every step — so fearful was I — so 
 prophetically fearful — that I had forfeited for ever the 
 heart I had once flung from me. 
 
 It was noon when a letter arrived. It was in a hand- 
 writing new to me. But it was on the subject which 
 possessed my existence, and it was of final import. 
 It follows : — 
 
 " Dear Sir : My wife wishes me to write to you, 
 and inform you of her marriage, which took place a 
 week or two since, and of which she presumes you 
 are not aware. She remarked to me, that you thought 
 her looking unhappy last evening, when you chanced 
 to see her at the play. As she seemed to regret not 
 being able to answer your note herself, I may perhaps 
 convey the proper apology by taking upon myself to 
 
 mention to you, that, in consequence of eating an im- 
 prudent quantity of unripe fruit, she felt ill before go- 
 ing to the theatre, and was obliged to leave early. 
 To day she seems seriously indisposed. I trust she 
 will be well enough to see you in a day or two — and 
 remain, " Yours, truly, 
 
 " Samuel Smithers." 
 
 But I never called on Mrs. Samuel Smithers. 
 
 FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. 
 
 " The only heart that I have known of late, has been an easy, 
 excitable sort of gentleman, quickly roused and quickly calmed— 
 sensitive enough to confer a great deal of pleasure, and not sensi- 
 tive enough to give a moment's pain. The heart of other days was 
 a very different person indeed." — Bulwer. 
 
 I was moping one day in solitary confinement in 
 quarantine at Malta, when, in a turn between my stone 
 window and the back wall I saw the yards of a vessel 
 suddently cross the light, and heard the next moment 
 the rattle of a chain let go, and all the bustle of a 
 merchantman coming to anchor. 1 had the privilege 
 of promenading between two ring-bolts on the wharf 
 below the lazaretto, and with the attraction of a new- 
 comer to the sleepy company of vessels under the 
 yellow flag, I lost no time in descending the stone 
 stairs, and was immediately joined by my vigilant sen- 
 tinel, the guardiano, whose business it was to prevent 
 my contact with the other visiters to the wharf. The 
 tricolor flew at the peak of the stranger, and we easily 
 made out that she was a merchantman from Marseilles, 
 subject therefore to a week's quarantine on ac- 
 count of the cholera. I had myself come from a 
 i plague port, Smyrna, and was subjected to twenty 
 j days' quarantine, six of which had passed ; so that the 
 Frenchman, though but beginning his imprisonment, 
 i was in a position comparatively enviable. 
 
 I had watched for an hour the getting of the vessel 
 
 | into mooring trim, and was beginning to conclude 
 
 that she had come without passengers, when a gentle- 
 
 ; man made his appearance on deck, and the jolly-boat 
 
 ! was immediately lowered and manned. A traveller's 
 
 I baggage was handed over the side, the gentleman took 
 
 leave of the captain, and, in obedience to directions 
 
 | from the quarantine officer on the quarterdeck, the 
 
 ! boat was pulled directly to the wharf on which I stood. 
 
 ; The guardiano gave me a caution to retire a little, as 
 
 the stranger was coming to take possession of the next 
 
 apartment to my own, and must land at the stairs near 
 
 by; but, before I had taken two steps backward, I 
 
 began to recognise features familar to me, and with a 
 
 turn of the head as he sprang on the wharf the identity 
 
 was established completely. Tom Berryman, by all 
 
 that was wonderful ! I had not seen him since we 
 
 were suspended from college together ten years before. 
 
 Forgetting lazaretto and guardiano, and all the salt 
 
 water between New Haven and Malta, I rushed up to 
 
 Tom with the cordiality of other days (a little sharpen- 
 
 ■ ed by abstinence from society), and we still had hold 
 
 ! of hands with a firm grip, when the quarantine master 
 
 1 gravely accosted us, and informed my friend that he 
 
 had incurred an additional week by touching me— in 
 
 short, that he must partake of the remainder of my 
 
 ' quarantine. 
 
 Aghast and chap-fallen as Berryman was at the con- 
 sequences of our rencontre (for he had fully calculated 
 on getting into Malta in time for the carnival), he was 
 soniewhat reconciled to his lot by being permitted to 
 share my room and table instead of living his week in 
 solitude ; and, by enriching our supplies a little from 
 
510 
 
 FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. 
 
 town, sleeping much, and chatting through the day in 
 the rich sunshine of that climate of Paradise, we con- 
 trived to shove off the fortnight without any very in- 
 tolerable tedium. 
 
 My friend and I had begun our travels differently — 
 he taken England first, which I proposed visiting last. 
 It is of course the bonne bouche of travel to everybody, 
 and I was very curious to know Tom's experiences ; 
 and, as I was soon bound thitherward, anxious to pick 
 out of his descriptions some chart of the rocks and 
 shoals in the " British channel" of society. 
 
 I should say, before quoting my friend, that he was 
 a Kentuckian. with the manner (to ladies) of mingled 
 devotion and nonchalance so popular with the sex, 
 and a chivalric quality of man altogether. His father's 
 political influence had obtained for him personal letters 
 of introduction from the president, and, with this ad- 
 vantage, and his natural air of fashion, he had found 
 no obstacle to choosing his society in England ; 
 choosing the first, of course, like a true republican ! 
 
 We were sitting on the water-steps with our feet 
 immersed up to the ankles (in January too), and in 
 reply to some question of mine as to the approacha- 
 bility of noble ladies by such plebeian lovers as him- 
 self, Tom told me the story which follows. I take the 
 names at random, of course, but, in all else, I shall try 
 to " tell the tale as 'twas told to me." 
 
 Why, circumstances, as you know, sometimes put 
 people in the attitude of lovers whether they will or no; 
 and it is but civil in such a case, to do what fate ex- 
 pects of you. I knew too much of the difference be- 
 tween crockery and porcelain to enter English society 
 with the remotest idea of making love within the red 
 book of the peerage, and though I've a story to tell, I 
 swear I never put a foot forward till I thought it was 
 knightly devoir; inevitable, though ever so ridiculous. 
 Still, I must say, with a beautiful and unreserved 
 woman beside one, very much like other beautiful and 
 unreserved woman, a republican might be pardoned for 
 forgetting the invisible wall. " Right honorable" love- 
 liness has as much attraction about it, let me tell you, 
 and is quite as difficult to resist, as loveliness that is 
 honored, right or wrong, and a man must be brought 
 up to it, as Englishmen are, to see the heraldric dragons 
 and griffins in the air when a charming girl is talking 
 to him. 
 
 11 Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, 
 Sit like (her) grandsire cut in alabaster ?" 
 
 Eh ? But to begin with the " Tityre tu patulaa." 
 I had been passing a fortnight at the hunting lodge 
 
 of that wild devil, Lord , in the Scotch Highlands, 
 
 and what with being freely wet outside every day, and 
 freely wet inside every night, I had given my principle 
 of life rather a disgust to its lodgings, and there were 
 some symptoms of preparation for leave-taking. Un- 
 willing to be ill in a bachelor's den, with no solace 
 tenderer than a dandy lord's tiger, I made a twilight 
 flit to the nearest post-town, and tightening my life- 
 screws a little with the aid of the village apothecary, 
 started southward the next morning with four posters. 
 I expected to be obliged to pull up at Edinboro', but 
 the doctor's opiates, and abstinence, and quiet did 
 more for me than I had hoped, and I went on very 
 comfortably to Carlisle. I arrived at this place after 
 nightfall, and found the taverns overflowing with the 
 crowds of a fair, and no bed to be had unless I could 
 make one in a quartette of snoring graziers. At the 
 same time there was a great political meeting at 
 Edinboro', and every leg of a poster had gone north 
 — those I had brought with me having been trans- 
 hitched to a return chaise, and gone off while I was 
 looking for accommodations. 
 
 Regularly stranded, I sat down by the tap-room 
 fire, and was mourning my disaster, when the horn 
 of the night-coach reached my ear, and in the minute 
 
 of its rattling up to the door, I hastily resolved that it 
 was the least of two evils, and booked myself accord- 
 ingly. There was but one vacant place, an outsider ! 
 With hardly time enough to resolve, and none to re- 
 pent, I was presently rolling over the dark road, chilled 
 to the bone in the first five minutes, and wet through 
 with a " Scotch mist" in the next half hour. Some- 
 where about daybreak we rolled into the little town 
 
 of , five miles from the seat of the earl of Trese- 
 
 then, to whose hospitalities I stood invited, and I went 
 to bed in a most comfortable inn and slept till noon. 
 
 Before going to bed I had written a note to be des- 
 patched to Tresethen castle, and the earl's carriage 
 was waiting for me when I awoke. I found myself 
 better than I had expected, and dressing at once for 
 dinner, managed to reach the castle just in time to 
 hand in Lady Tresethen. Of that dinner 1 but re- 
 member that I was the only guest, and that the earl 
 regretted his daughter's absence from table, Lady 
 Caroline having been thrown that morning from her 
 horse. I fainted somewhere about the second remove, 
 and recovered my wits some days after, on the safe side 
 of the crisis of a fever. 
 
 I shall never forget that first half hour of conscious 
 curiosity. An exquisite sense of bodily repose mingled 
 with a vague notion of recent relief from pain, made 
 me afraid to speak lest I should awoke from a dream, 
 yet, if not a dream, what a delicious reality ! A lady 
 of most noble presence, in a half-mourning dress, sat 
 by the sideof a cheerful fire, turning her large dark eyes 
 on me, in the pauses of a conversation with a gray- 
 headed servant. My bed was of the most sumptuous 
 luxury; the chamber .was hung with pictures and 
 draped with spotless white ; the table covered with 
 the costliest elegancies of the toilet ; and in the gentle 
 and deferential manner of the old liveried menial, and 
 the subdued tones of inquiry by the lady, there was a 
 refinement and tenderness which, with the keen sus- 
 ceptibility of my senses, "lapt me in Elysium." I was 
 long in remembering where 1 was. The lady glided 
 from the room, the old servant resumed his seat by 
 my bedside, other servants in the same livery came 
 softly in on errands of service, and, at the striking of 
 the half hour by a clock on the mantelpiece, the lady 
 returned, and I was raised to receive something from 
 her hand. As she came nearer, I remembered the 
 Countess Tresethen. 
 
 Three days after this I was permitted to take the 
 air of a conservatory which opened from the countess's 
 boudoir. My old attendant assisted me to dress, and, 
 with another servant, took me down in a fauteuil. I 
 was in slippers and robe-de-chambre, and presumed 
 that I should see no one except the kind and noble 
 Lady Tresethen, but I had scarce taken one turn up 
 the long alley of flowering plants, when the countess 
 came toward me from the glass door beyond, and on 
 her arm a girl leaned for support, whose beauty 
 
 (Here Tom dabbled his feet for some minutes in 
 the water in silence.) 
 
 God bless me ! I can never give you an idea of it! 
 It was a new revelation of woman to me; the opening 
 of an eighth seal. In the minute occupied by her 
 approach, my imagination (accelerated, as that faculty 
 always is, by the clairvoyance of sickness), had gone 
 through a whole drama of love — fear, adoration, des- 
 peration, and rejection — and so complete was it, that 
 in after moments when these phases of passion came 
 round in the proper lapse of days and weeks, it seemed 
 to me that I had been through with them before ; that 
 it was all familiar; that I had met and loved in some 
 other world, this same glorious creature, with the 
 same looks, words, and heart-ache ; in the same con- 
 servatory of bright flowers, and faith, myself in the 
 same pattern of a brocade dressing-gown ! 
 
 Heavens! what a beautiful girl was that Lady Caro- 
 line ! Her eyes were of a light gray, the rim of the 
 
FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING. 
 
 511 
 
 lids perfectly inky with the darkness of the long sweep- 
 ing lashes, and in her brown h;iir there was a gold 
 lustre that seemed somehow to illuminate the curves 
 of her small head like a halo. Her mouth had too 
 much character for a perfectly agreeable first impres- 
 sion. It was nobility and sweetness educated oyer 
 native high spirit andscornfulness — the nature shining 
 through °the transparent blood, like a flaw through 
 enamel. She would have been, in other circumstan- 
 ces, a maid of Saragossa or a Gertrude Von Wart ; 
 a heroine ; perhaps a devil. But her fascination was 
 resistless ! 
 
 "My daughter," said Lady Tresethen (and in that 
 beginning was all the introduction she thought neces- 
 sary), " is, like yourself, an invalid just escaped from 
 the doctor ; you must congratulate each other. Are 
 you strong enough to lend her an arm, Mr. Berry- 
 man ?" 
 
 The countess left us, and with the composure of a 
 sister who had seen me every day of my life, Lady 
 Caroline took my arm and strolled slowly to and fro, 
 questioning me of my shooting at the lodge, and talk- 
 ing to me of her late accident, her eyes sometimes 
 fixed upon her little embroidered slippers, as they 
 peeped from her snowy morning dress, and sometimes 
 indolently raised and brought to bear on my flushed 
 cheek and trembling lips; her singular serenity opera- 
 ting on me as anything but a sedative ! I was taken 
 up stairs again, after an hour's conversation, in a fair 
 way for a relapse, and the doctor put me under em- 
 bargo again for another week, which, spite of all the 
 renewed care and tenderness of Lady Tresethen, 
 seemed to me an eternity ! I'll not bother you with 
 what I felt and thought all that time ! 
 
 It was a brilliant autumnal day when I got leave to 
 make my second exodus, and with the doctor's per- 
 mission I prepared for a short walk in the park. I 
 declined the convoy of the old servant, for I had heard 
 Lady Caroline's horse gallop away down the avenue, 
 and I wished to watch her return unobserved. I had 
 just lost sight of the castle in the first bend of the path, 
 when I saw her quietly walking her horse under the 
 trees at a short distance, and the moment after she 
 observed and came toward me at an easy canter. I 
 had schooled myself to a little more self-possession, 
 but I was not prepared for such an apparition of splen- 
 did beauty as that woman on horseback. She rode an 
 Arabian bay of the finest blood; a lofty, fiery, match- 
 less creature, with an expression of eye and nostril 
 which I could not but think a proper pendant to her 
 own, limbed as I had seldom seen a horse, and his 
 arched neck, and forehead, altogether, proud as a steed 
 for Lucifer. She sat on him as if it were a throne 
 she was born to, and the flow of her riding-dress 
 seemed as much a part of him as his mane, lie ap- 
 peared ready to bound into the air, like Pegasus, but 
 one hand calmly stroked his mane, and her face was 
 as tranquil as marble. 
 
 " Well met !" she said ; " I was just wishing for a 
 cavalier. What sort of a horse would you like, Mr. 
 Berryman? Ellis!" (speaking to her groom), "is old 
 Curtal taken up from grass ?" 
 
 " Yes, miladi!" 
 
 " Curtal is our invalid horse, and as you are not 
 trery strong, perhaps his easy pace will be best for you. 
 Bring him out directly, Ellis. We'll just walk along 
 the road a little way ; for I must show you my Ara- ] 
 bian ; and we'll not go back to ask mamma's permis- 
 sion, for we shouldn't get it ! You won't mind riding 
 a little way, will you?" 
 
 Of course I would have bestrided a hippogriff at 
 her bidding, and when the groom came out, leading 
 a thorough-bred hunter, with apparently a very elastic 
 and gentle action, I forgot the doctor and mounted 
 with great alacrity. We walked our horses slowly 
 down the avenue and out at the castle gate, followed 
 
 by the groom, and after trying a little quicker pace on 
 the public road, I pronounced old Curtal worthy of 
 her ladyship's eulogium, and her own Saladin worthy, 
 if horse could be worthy, of his burthen. 
 
 We had ridden perhaps a mile, and Lady Caroline 
 was giving me a slight history of the wonderful feats 
 of the old veteran under me, when the sound of a horn 
 made both horses prick up their ears, and on rising 
 a little acclivity, we caught sight of a pack of hounds 
 coming across the fields directly toward us, followed 
 by some twenty red-coated horsemen. Old Curtal 
 trembled and showed a disposition to fret, and I ob- 
 served that Lady Caroline dexterously lengthened 
 her own stirrup and loosened the belt of her riding- 
 dress, and the next minute the hounds were over the 
 hedge, and the horsemen, leap after leap, after them, 
 and with every successive jump, my own steed reared 
 and plunged unmanageably. 
 
 " Indeed, I can not stand this !" cried Lady Caro- 
 line, gathering up her reins, " Ellis ! see Mr. Berry- 
 man home !" and away went the flying Arabian over 
 the hedge with a vault that left me breathless with 
 astonishment. One minute I made the vain effort to 
 control my own horse and turn his head in the other 
 direction, but my strength was gone. I had never 
 leaped a fence in my life on horseback, though a 
 tolerable rider on the road ; but before I could think 
 how it was to be done, or gather myself together for 
 the leap, Curtal was over the hedge with me, and 
 flying across a ploughed field like the wind — Saladin 
 not far before him. With a glance ahead I saw the 
 red coats rising into the air and disappearing over 
 another green hedge, and though the field was crossed 
 iu twenty leaps, I had time to feel my blood run cold 
 with the prospect of describing another parabola in 
 the air, and to speculate on the best attitude for a 
 projectile on horseback. Over went Saladin like a 
 greyhound, but his mistress's riding-cap caught the 
 wind at the highest point of the curve, and flew back 
 into my face as Curtal rose on his haunches, and over 
 I went again, blinded and giddy, and, with the cap 
 held flat against my bosom by the pressure of the air, 
 flew once more at a tremendous pace onward. My 
 feet were now plunged to the instep in the stirrups, 
 and my back, too weak to support me erect, let me 
 down to my horse's mane, and one by one, along the 
 skirt of a rising woodland, I could see the red coats 
 dropping slowly behind. Right before me like a 
 meieor, however, streamed back the loosened tresses 
 of Lady Caroline, and Curtal kept close on the track 
 of Saladin, neither losing nor gaining an inch apparent- 
 ly, and nearer and nearer sounded the baying of the 
 hounds, and clearer became my view of the steady and 
 slight waist riding so fearlessly onward. Of my horse 
 I had neither guidance nor control. He needed none. 
 The hounds had crossed a morass, and we were round- 
 ing a half-circle on an acclivity to come up with them, 
 and Curtal went at it too confidently to be in error. 
 Evenly as a hand-gallop on a green sward his tremen- 
 dous pace told off, and if his was the ease of muscular 
 power, the graceful speed of the beautiful creature 
 moving before me seemed the aerial buoyancy of a 
 bird. Obstructions seemed nothing. That flowing 
 dress and streaming hair sailed over rocks and ditches, 
 and over them, like their inseparable shadow, glided 
 I, and, except one horseman who still kept his dis- 
 tance ahead, we seemed alone in the field. 1 he 
 clatter of hoofs, and the exclamations of excitement 
 had ceased behind me, and though I was capable of 
 no exertion beyond that of keeping my seat, I no 
 longer feared the leap nor the pace, and began to an- 
 ticipate a safe termination to my perilous adventure. 
 A slight exclamation from Lady Caroline reached my 
 ear and I looked forward. A small river was before 
 us, and, from the opposite bank, of steep clay, the 
 rider who had preceded us was falling back, his horsed 
 
512 
 
 THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 
 
 forefeet high in the air, and his arms already in the 
 water. I tried to pull my reins. I shouted to my 
 horse in desperation. And with the exertion, my 
 heart seemed to give way within me. Giddy and faint 
 1 abandoned myself to my fate. I just saw the flying 
 heels of Saladin planted on the opposite bank and the 
 streaming hair still flying onward, when, with a bound 
 that, it seemed to me, must rend every fibre of the 
 creature beneath me, I saw the water gleam under 
 my feet, and still I kept on. We flew over a fence 
 into a stubble field, the hounds just before us, and over 
 a gate into the public highway, which we followed for 
 a dozen bounds, and then, with a pace slightly mode- 
 rated, we successively cleared a low wall and brought 
 up, on our horses' haunches, in the midst of an uproar 
 of dogs, cows, and scattering poultry — the fox having 
 been run down at last in the enclosure of a barn. I 
 had just strength to extricate my feet from the stirrups, 
 take Lady Caroline's cap, which had kept its place 
 between my elbows and knees, and present it to her 
 as she sat in her saddle, and my legs gave way under 
 me. I was taken into the farmhouse, and, at the close 
 of a temporary ellipse, I was sent back to Tresethen 
 Castle in a post-chaise, and once more handed over to 
 the doctor ! 
 
 Well, my third siege of illness was more tolerable, 
 for I received daily, now, some message of inquiry or 
 some token of interest from Lady Caroline, though I 
 learned from the countess that she was in sad disgrace 
 for her inveiglement of my trusting innocence. I also 
 received the cards of the members of the hunt, with 
 many inquiries complimentary to what they were 
 pleased to consider American horsemanship, and I 
 found that my seizure of the flying cap of Lady Caro- 
 line and presentation of it to her ladyship at "the 
 death," was thought to be worthy, in chivalry of 
 Bayard, and in dexterity of Ducrow. Indeed, when 
 let out again to the convalescent walk in the conser- 
 vatory, I found that 1 was counted a hero even by the 
 stately earl. There slipped a compliment, too, here 
 and there, through the matronly disapprobation of 
 Lady Tresethen — and all this was too pleasant to put 
 aside with a disclaimer — so I bid truth and modesty 
 hold their peace, and took the honor the gods chose 
 to provide ! 
 
 But now came dangers more perilous than my ride 
 on Curtal. Lady Caroline was called upon to be kind 
 to me ! Daily as the old servant left me in the alley 
 of japonicas, she appeared from the glass door of her 
 mother's boudoir and devoted herself to my comfort — 
 walking with me, while I could walk, in those fragrant 
 and balmy avenues of flowers, and then bringing me 
 into her mother's luxurious apartment, where books, 
 and music, and conversation as frank and untrammelled 
 as man in love could ask, wiled away the day. Wiled 
 it away ? — winged it — shod it with velvet and silence, 
 for I never knew how it passed ! Lady Caroline had 
 a mind of the superiority stamped so consciously on 
 her lip. She anticipated no consequences from her 
 kindness, therefore she was playful and unembarrassed. 
 She sang to me, and I read to her. Her rides were 
 given up, and Saladin daily went past the window to 
 his exercise, and with my most zealous scrutiny I 
 could detect in her face neither impatience of con- 
 finement nor regret at the loss of weathar fitter for 
 pleasures out of doors. Spite of every caution with 
 which hope could be chained down, I was flattered. 
 
 You smile — (Tom said, though he was looking 
 straight into the water, and had not seen my face for 
 half an hour) — but, without the remotest hope of 
 taking Lady Caroline to Kentucky, or of becoming 
 English on the splendid dowry of the heiress of Trese- 
 then, I still felt it impossible to escape from my lover's 
 attitude — impossible to avoid hoarding up symptoms, 
 encouragements, flatteries, and all the moonshine of am- 
 atory anxiety. I was in love — and who reasons in love? 
 
 One morning, after I had become an honorary 
 patient — an invalid only by sufferance — and was slow- 
 ly admitting the unwelcome conviction that it was 
 time for me to be shaping my adieux — the conversa- 
 tion took rather a philosophical turn. The starting 
 point was a quotation in a magazine from Richter : 
 " Is not a man's unirerse within his head, whether a 
 king's diadem or a torn scullcap be without ?" — and I 
 had insisted rather strenuously on the levelling privilege 
 we enjoyed in the existence of a second world around 
 us — the world of revery and dream — wherein the tyran- 
 ny, and check, and the arbitrary distinctions of the 
 world of fact, were never felt — and where he, though 
 he might be a peasant, who had the consciousness in 
 his soul that he was a worthy object of love to a prin- 
 cess, could fancy himself beloved and revel in imagin- 
 ary possession. 
 
 " Why," said I. turning with a sudden flush of self- 
 confidence to Lady Caroline, " Why should not the 
 passions of such a world, the loving and returning of 
 love infancy, have the privilege of language ? Why 
 should not matches be made, love confessed, vows ex- 
 changed, and fidelity sworn, valid within the realm of 
 dream-land only ? Why should I not say to you, for 
 example, I adore you, dear lady, and in my world of 
 thought you shall, if you so condescend, be my bride 
 and mistress ; and why, if you responded to this and 
 listened to my vows of fancy, should your bridegroom 
 of the world of fact feel his rights invaded ?" 
 
 " In fancy let it be then !" said Lady Caroline, with 
 a blush and a covert smile, and she rang the bell for 
 luncheon. 
 
 Well, I still lingered a couple of days, and on the 
 last day of my stay at Tresethen, I became sufficiently 
 emboldened to take Lady Caroline's hand behind the 
 fountain of the conservatory, and to press it to my lips 
 with a daring wish that its warm pulses belonged to 
 the world of fancy. 
 
 She withdrew it very kindly, and (1 thought) sadly, 
 aud begged me to go to the boudoir and bring her a 
 volume of Byron that lay onher work-table. 
 
 I brought it, and she turned over the leaves a mo- 
 ment, and, with her pencil, marked two lines and gave 
 me the book, bidding me an abrupt good morning. 
 I stood a few minutes with my heart beating and my 
 brain faint, but finally summoned courage to read ■ — 
 
 " I can not lose a world for thee — 
 But would not lose thee for the world !" 
 
 I left Tresethen the next morning, and 
 
 "Hold on, Tom !" cried I — " there comes the boat 
 with our dinner from Valletta, and we'll have your 
 sorrows over our Burgundy." 
 
 " Sorrows !" exclaimed Tom, " I was going to tell 
 you of the fun I had at her wedding !" 
 
 " Lord preserve us !" 
 
 "Bigamy — wasn't it? — after our little nuptials in 
 dream-land ! She told her husband all about it at the 
 wedding breakfast, and his lordship (she married the 
 
 Marquis of ) begged to know the extent of my 
 
 prerogatives. I was sorry to confess that they did not 
 interfere very particularly with his .'" 
 
 THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 
 
 The moon shone like glorified and floating dew on 
 the bosom of the tranquil Pei-ho, and the heart of the 
 young poet Le-pih was like a cup running over with 
 wine. It was no abatement of his exulting fulness 
 that he was as yet the sole possessor of the secret of 
 his own genius. Conscious of exquisite susceptibility 
 to beauty, fragrance and music (the three graces of 
 
THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 
 
 513 
 
 the Chinese), he was more intent upon enjoying his 
 gilts than upon the awakening of envy for their posses- 
 sion the latter being the second leaf in the book of 
 
 genius, and only turned over by the finger of satiety. 
 Thoughtless of the acquisition of fame as the youth- 
 ful poet may be, however, he is always ready to an- 
 ticipate its fruits, and Le-pih committed but the poet's 
 error, when, having the gem in his bosom which 
 could buy the favor of the world, he took the favor 
 for granted without producing the gem. 
 
 Kwonfootse had returned a conqueror, from the wars 
 with the Hwong-kin, and this night, on which the 
 moon shone so gloriously, was the hour of his triumph, 
 for the Emperor Tang had condescended to honor 
 with his presence, a gala given by the victorious gene- 
 ral at his gardens on the Pei-ho. Softened by his 
 exulting feelings (for though a brave soldier, he was 
 as haughty as Lnykong the thunder-god, or Hwuyloo 
 the monarch of fire), the warlike mandarin threw open 
 his gardens on this joyful night, not only to those who 
 wore in their caps the gold ball significant of patrician 
 birth, but to all whose dress and mien warranted their 
 appearance in the presence of the emperor. 
 
 Like the realms of the blest shone the gardens of 
 Kwonfootse. Occupying the whole valley of the 
 Pei-ho, at a spot where it curved like the twisted 
 cavity of a shell, the sky seemed to shut in the grounds 
 like the cover of a vase, and the stars seemed but the 
 garden-lights overhead. From one edge of the vase 
 to the other — from hill-top to hill-top — extended a 
 broad avenue, a pagoda at either extremity glittering 
 with gold and scarlet, the sides flaming with colored 
 lamps and flaunting with gay streamers of barbarian 
 stuffs, and the moonlit river cutting it in the centre, the 
 whole vista, at the first glance, resembling a girdle of 
 precious stones with a fastening of opal. Off from 
 this central division radiated in all directions alleys of 
 camphor and cinnamon trees, lighted with amorous 
 dimness, and leading away to bowers upon the hill- 
 side, and from every quarter resounded music, and in 
 every nook was seen feasting and merriment. 
 
 In disguise, the emperor and imperial family mingled 
 in the crowd, and no one save the host and his daugh- 
 ters knew what part of the gardens was honored with 
 their presence. There was, however, a retreat in the 
 grounds, sacred to the privileged few, and here, when 
 fatigued or desirous of refreshment, the royal person- 
 ages laid aside disguise and were surrounded with 
 the deferential honors of the court. It was so con- 
 trived that the access was unobserved by the people, 
 and there was, therefore, no feeling of exclusion to 
 qualify the hilarity of the entertainment, Kwonfootse, 
 with all his pride, looking carefully to his popularity. 
 At the foot of each descent, upon the matted banks 
 of the river, floated gilded boats with lamps burning in 
 their prows, and gayly-dressed boatmen offering con- 
 veyance across to all who required it; but there were 
 also, unobserved by the crowd, boats unlighted and 
 undecorated holding oft' from the shore, which, at a 
 sign given by the initiated, silently approached a mar- 
 ble stair without the line of the blazing avenue, and tak- 
 ing their freight on board, swiftly pulled up the moonlit 
 river, to a landing concealed by the shoulder of the hill. 
 No path led from the gardens hither, and from no point 
 of view could be overlooked the more brilliant scene 
 of imperial revel. 
 
 It was verging toward midnight when the unknown 
 poet, with brain floating in a celestial giddiness of delight, 
 stood on the brink of the gleaming river. The boats 
 plied to and fro with their freights of fair damsels and 
 gayly-dressed youths, the many-colored lamps throw- 
 ing a rainbow profusion of tints on the water, and 
 many a voice addressed him with merry invitation, for 
 Le-pih's beauty, so famous now in history, was of no 
 forbidding stateliness, and his motions, like his coun- 
 tenance, were as franklv joyous as the gambols of a 
 33 
 
 young leopard. Not inclined to boisterous gayety at 
 the moment, Le-pih stepped between the lamp-bearing 
 trees of the avenue, and folding his arms in his silken 
 vest, stood gazing in revery on the dancing waters. 
 After a few moments, one of the dark boats on which 
 he had unconsciously fixed his gaze drew silently 
 toward him, and as the cushioned stern was brought 
 round to the bank, the boatman made a reverence to 
 his knees and sat waiting the poet's pleasure. 
 
 Like all men born to good fortune, Le-pih was 
 prompt to follow the first beckoningsof adventure, and 
 asking no questions, he quietly embarked, and with a 
 quick dip of the oars the boat shot from the shore and 
 took the descending current. Almost in the next in- 
 stant she neared again to the curving and willow-fringed 
 margin of the stream, and lights glimmered through 
 the branches, and sweet, low music became audible, 
 and by rapid degrees, a scene burst on his eye, which 
 the first glimpse into the gate of paradise (a subsequent 
 agreeable surprise, let us presume) could scarcely have 
 exceeded. 
 
 Without an exchange of a syllable between the 
 boatman and his freight, the stern was set against a 
 carpeted stair at the edge of the river, and Le-pih dis- 
 embarked with a bound, and stood upon a spacious 
 area lying in a lap of the hill, the entire surface carpeted 
 smoothly with Persian stuffs, and dotted here and there 
 with striped tents piched with poles of silver. Gar- 
 lands of flowers hung in festoons against the brilliant- 
 colored cloths, and in the centre of each tent stood a 
 low tablet surrounded with couches and laden with 
 meats and wine. The guests, for whom this portion 
 of the entertainment was provided, were apparently 
 assembled at a spot farther on, from which proceeded 
 the delicious music heard by the poet in approaching ; 
 and, first entering one of the abandoned tents for a 
 goblet of wine, Le-pih followed to the scene of attrac- 
 tion. 
 
 Under a canopy of gold cloth held by six bearers, 
 stood the imperial chair upon a raised platform — not 
 occupied, however, the august Tang reclining more at ' 
 his ease, a little out of the circle, upon cushions 
 canopied by the moonlight. Around upon the steps 
 of the platform and near by, were grouped the noble 
 ladies of the court and the royal princesses (Tang 
 living much in the female apartments and his daugh- 
 ters numbering several score), and all, at the moment 
 of Le-pih's joining the assemblage, turning to observe 
 a damsel with a lute, to whose performance the low 
 sweet music of the band had been a prelude. The 
 first touch of the strings betrayed a trembling hand, 
 and the poet's sympathies were stirred, though from 
 her bent posture and her distant position he had not 
 yet seen the features of the player. As the tremulous 
 notes grew firmer, and the lute began to give out a 
 flowing harmony, Le-pih approached, and at the same 
 time, the listening groups of ladies began to whisper 
 and move away, and of those who remained, none 
 seemed to listen with pleasure except Kwonfootse and 
 the emperor. The latter, indeed, rivalled the intruding 
 bard in his interest, rolling over upon the cushions 
 and resting on the other imperial elbow in close at- 
 tention. 
 
 Gaining confidence evidently from the neglect of 
 her auditory, or, as is natural to women, less afraid of 
 the judgment of the other sex, who were her only 
 listeners, the fair Taya (the youngest daughter of 
 Kwonfootse), now joined her voice to her instrument, 
 and sang with a sweetness that dropped like a plum- 
 met to the soul of Le-pih. He fell to his knee upon 
 a heap of cushions and leaned eagerly forward. As 
 she became afterward one of his most passionate 
 themes, we are enabled to reconjure the features that 
 were presented to his admiring wonder. The envy 
 of the princesses was sufficient proof that Taya was of 
 rare beauty; she had that wonderful perfection of 
 
514 
 
 THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 
 
 feature to which envy pays its bitterest tribute, which 
 is apologized for if not found in the poet's ideal, which 
 we thirst after in pictures and marble, of which loveli- 
 ness and expression are but lesser degrees — fainter 
 shadowings. She was adorably beautiful. The outer 
 corners of her long almond-shaped eyes, the dipping 
 crescent of her forehead, the pencil of her eyebrow 
 and the indented corners of her mouth — all these 
 turned downward ; and this peculiarity which, in faces 
 of a less elevated character, indicates a temper morose 
 and repulsive, in Taya's expressed the very soul of 
 gentle and lofty melancholy. There was something 
 infantine about her mouth, the teeth were so small 
 and regular, and their dazzling whiteness, shining be- 
 tween lips of the brilliant color of a cherry freshly 
 torn apart, was in startling contrast with the dark 
 lustre of her eyes. Le-pilrs poetry makes constant 
 allusion to those small and snowy teeth, and the turn- 
 ed-down corners of the lips and eyes of his incompar- 
 able mistress. 
 
 Taya's song was a fragment of that celebrated 
 Chinese romance from which Moore has borrowed so ! 
 largely in his loves of the angels, and it chanced to 
 be particularly appropriate to her deserted position | 
 (she was alone now with her three listeners), dwelling as j 
 it did upon the loneliness of a disguised Peri, wander- j 
 ing in exile upon earth. The lute fell from her hands | 
 when she ceased, and while the emperor applauded, j 
 and Kwonfootse looked on her with paternal pride, j 
 Le-pih modestly advanced to the fallen instrument, j 
 and with a low obeisance to the emperor and a hesita- j 
 ting apology to Taya, struck a prelude in the same J 
 air, and broke forth into an impulsive expression of 
 his feelings in verse. It would be quite impossible to 
 give a translation of this famous effusion with its I 
 oriental load of imagery, but in modifying it to the 
 spirit of our language (giving little more than its thread , 
 of thought), the reader may see glimpses of the ma- 
 terial from which the great Irish lyrist spun his woof 
 of sweet fable. Fixing his keen eyes upon the bright i 
 lips just closed, Le-pih sang : — 
 
 " When first from heaven's immortal throngs 
 
 The earth-doomed angels downward came, 
 And mourning their enraptured songs, 
 
 Walked sadly in our mortal frame ; 
 To those, whose lyres of loftier string 
 
 Had taught the myriad lips of heaven, 
 The song that they tor ever sing, 
 
 A wondrous lyre, 'tis said, was given. 
 ' And go,' the seraph warder said, 
 
 As from the diamond gates they flew, 
 ' And wake the songs ye here have led 
 In earthly numbers, pure and new ! 
 And yours shall be the hallowed power 
 
 To win the lost to heaven again. 
 And when earth's clouds shall darkest lower 
 
 Your lyre shall breathe its holiest strain ! 
 Yet, chastened by this inward fire, 
 
 Your lot shall be to walk alone, 
 I Save when, perchance, with echoing lyre, 
 
 You touch a spirit like your own ; 
 And whatsoe'er the guise your wear, 
 
 To him, 'tis given to know you there.' " 
 
 The song over, Le-pih sat with his hands folded 
 across the instrument and his eyes cast down, and 
 Taya gazed on him with wondering looks, yet slowly, 
 and as if unconsciously, she took from her breast a 
 rose, and with a half-stolen glance at her father, threw 
 it upon the lute. But frowningly Kwonfootse rose 
 from his seat and approached the poet. 
 
 "Who are you?" he demanded angrily, as the bard 
 placed the rose reverently in his bosom. 
 
 " Le-pih !" 
 
 With another obeisance to the emperor, and a deeper 
 one to the fair Taya, he turned, after this concise an- 
 swer, upon his heel, lifting his cap to his head, which, 
 to the, rage of Kwonfootse, bore not even the gold ball 
 of aristocracy. 
 
 " Bind him for the bastinado !" cried the infuriated 
 mandarin to the bearers of the canopy. 
 
 The six soldiers dropped their poles to the ground, 
 but the emperor's voice arrested them. 
 
 " He shall have no violence but from you, fair 
 Taya," said the softened monarch ; " call to him by 
 the name he has just pronounced, for I would hear 
 that lute again !" 
 
 " Le-pih ! Le-pih !" cried instantly the musical 
 voice of the fair girl. 
 
 The poet turned and listened, incredulous of his 
 own ears. 
 
 " Le-pih! Le-pih!" she repeated, in a soft tone. 
 
 Half-hesitating, half-bounding, as if still scarce be- 
 lieving he had heard aright, Le-pih flew to her feet, 
 and dropped to one knee upon the cushion before her, 
 his breast heaving and his eyes flashing with eager 
 wonder. Taya's courage was at an end, and she sat 
 with her eyes upon the ground. 
 
 " Give him the lute, Kwonfootse !" said the em- 
 peror, swinging himself on the raised chair with an 
 abandonment of the imperial avoirdupois, which set 
 ringing violently the hundred bells suspended in the 
 golden fringes. 
 
 " Let not the crow venture again into the nest of 
 the eagle," muttered the mandarin between his teeth 
 as he handed the instrument to the poet. 
 
 The sound of the bells brought in the women and 
 courtiers from every quarter of the privileged area, 
 and, preluding upon the strings to gather his scattered 
 senses, while they were seating themselves around 
 him, Le-pih at last fixed his gaze upon the lips of 
 Taya, and commenced his song to an irregular harmo- 
 ny well adapted to extempore verse. We have tried 
 in vain to put this celebrated song of compliment into 
 English stanzas. It commenced with a description 
 of Taya's beauty, and an enumeration of things she 
 resembled, dwelling most upon the blue lily, which 
 seems to have been Le-pilrs favorite flower. The 
 burthen of the conclusion, however, is the new value 
 everything assumed in her presence. "Of the light 
 in this garden," he says, "there is one beam worth all 
 the glory of the moon, for it sleeps on the eye of Taya. 
 Of the air about me there is one breath which my soul 
 drinks like wine— it is from the lips of Taya. Taya 
 looks on a flower, and that flower seems to me, with 
 its pure eye, to gaze after her for ever. Taya's jacket 
 of blue silk is my passion. If angels visit me in my 
 dreams, let them be dressed like Taya. I love the 
 broken spangle in her slipper better than the first star 
 of evening. Bring me, till I die, inner leaves from 
 the water-lily, since white and fragrant like them are 
 the teeth of Taya. Call me, should I sleep, when 
 rises the crescent moon, for the blue sky in its bend 
 curves like the drooped eye of Taya," &c, &c. 
 
 "By the immortal Fo !" cried the emperor, raising 
 himself bolt upright in his chair, as the poet ceased, 
 "you shall be the bard of Tang ! Those are my sen- 
 timents better expressed ! The lute, in your hands, 
 is my heart turned inside out ! Lend me your gold 
 chain, Kwonfootse, and, Taya ! come hither and put 
 it on his neck !" 
 
 Taya glided to the emperor, but Le-pih rose to his 
 feet, with a slight flush on his forehead, and stood 
 erect and motionless. 
 
 " Let it please your imperial majesty," he said, 
 after a moment's pause, "to bestow upon me some 
 gift less binding than a chain." 
 
 "Carbuncle of Budha! What would theyouth have!" 
 exclaimed Tang in astonishment. " Is not the gold 
 chain of a mandarin good enough for his acceptance ?" 
 
 "My poor song," replied Le-pih, modestly casting 
 down his eyes, " is sufficiently repaid by your majesty's 
 praises. The chain of the mandarin would gall the 
 neck of the poet. Yet — if I might have a" reward 
 more valuable — " 
 
THE POET AND THE MANDARIN. 
 
 515 
 
 " In Fo's name what is it ?*' said the embarrassed 
 emperor. 
 
 Kwonfootse laid his hand on his cimeter, and his 
 daughter blushed and trembled. 
 
 " The broken spangle on the slipper of Taya !" said 
 Le-pih, turning half indifferently away. 
 
 Loud laughed the ladies of the court, and Kwon- 
 footse walked from the bard with a look of contempt, 
 but the emperor read more truly the proud and deli- 
 cate spirit that dictated the reply : and in that moment 
 probably commenced the friendship with which, to the 
 end of his peaceful reign, Tang distinguished the most 
 gifted poet of his time. 
 
 The lovely daughter of the mandarin was not behind 
 the emperor in her interpretation of the character of 
 Le-pih, and as she stepped forward to put the detach- 
 ed spangle into his hand, she bent on him a look full 
 of earnest curiosity and admiration. 
 
 " What others give me," he murmured in a low 
 voice, pressing the worthless trifle to his lips, " makes 
 me their slave; but what Taya gives me is a link that 
 draws her to my bosom." 
 
 Kwonfootse probably thought that Le-pih's audi- 
 ence had lasted long enough, for at this moment the 
 sky seemed bursting into flame with a sudden tumult 
 of fireworks, and in the confusion that immediately 
 succeeded, the poet made his way unquestioned to 
 the bank of the river, and was reconveyed to the spot 
 of his first embarkation, in the same silent manner with 
 which he had approached the privileged area. 
 
 During the following month, Le-pih seemed much 
 in request at the imperial palace, but, to the surprise 
 of his friends, the keeping of "worshipful society" 
 was not followed by any change in his merry manners, 
 nor apparently by any improvement in his worldly 
 condition. His mother still sold mats in the public 
 market, and Le-pih still rode, every few days, to the 
 marsh, for his panniers of rushes, and to all comers, 
 among his old acquaintances, his lute and song were 
 as ready and gratuitous as ever. 
 
 All this time, however, the fair Taya was consuming 
 with a passionate melancholy which made startling 
 ravages in her health, and the proud mandarin, whose 
 affection for his children was equal to his pride, in vain 
 shut his eyes to the cause, and eat up his heart with 
 mortification. When thefull moon came round again, 
 reminding him of the scenes the last moon had shone 
 upon, Kwonfootse seemed suddenly lightened of his 
 care, and his superb gardens on the Pei-ho were sud- 
 denly alive with preparations for another festival. Kept 
 in close confinement, poor Taya fed on her sorrow, 
 indifferent to the rumors of marriage which could 
 concern only her sisters ; and the other demoiselles 
 Kwonfootse tried in vain, with fluttering hearts, to pry 
 into their father's secret. A marriage it certainly was 
 to be, for the lanterns were painted of the color of 
 peach-blossoms — but whose marriage ? 
 
 It was an intoxicating summer's morning, and the 
 sun was busy calling the dew back to heaven, and the 
 birds wild with entreating it to stay (so Le-pih de- 
 scribes it), when down the narrow street in which the 
 poet's mother piled her vocation, there came a gay 
 procession of mounted servants with a led horse richly 
 caparisoned, in the centre. The one who rode before 
 held on his pommel a velvet cushion, and upon it lay 
 the cap of a noble, with its gold ball shining in the sun. 
 Out flew the neighbors as the clattering hoofs came 
 on, and roused by the cries and the barking of dogs, 
 forth came the mother of Le-pih, followed by the 
 poet himself, but leading his horse by the bridle, for 
 he had just thrown on his panniers, and was bound 
 out of the city to cut his bundle of rushes. The poet 
 gazed on the pageant with the amused curiosity of 
 others, wondering what it could mean, abroad at so 
 early an hour; but, holding back his sorry beast to 
 let the prancing horsemen have all the room they re- 
 
 quired, he was startled by a reverential salute from 
 the bearer of the velvet cushion, who, drawing up his 
 followers in front of the poet's house, dismounted and 
 requested to speak with him in private. 
 
 Tying his horse to the door-post, Le-pih led the 
 way into the small room, where sat his mother braid- 
 ing her mats to a cheerful song of her son's making, 
 and here the messenger informed the bard, with much 
 circumstance and ceremony, that in consequence of 
 the pressing suit of Kwonfootse, the emperor had been 
 pleased to grant to the gifted Le-pih, the rank ex- 
 pressed by the cap borne upon the velvet cushion, and 
 that as a noble of the celestial empire, he was now a 
 match for the incomparable Taya. Fnthermore the 
 condescending Kwonfootse had secretly arranged the 
 ceremonial for the bridal, and Le-pih was commanded 
 to mount the led horse and come up with his cap and 
 gold ball to be made forthwith supremely happy. 
 
 An indefinable expression stole over the features of 
 the poet as he took up the cap, and placing it on his 
 head, stood gayly before his mother. The old dame 
 looked at him a moment, and the tears started to her 
 eyes. Instantly Le-pih plucked it off and flung it on 
 ' the waste heap at her side, throwing himself on his 
 knees before her in the same breath, and begging her 
 forgiveness for his silly jest. 
 
 " Take back your bauble to Kwonfootse !" he said, 
 rising proudly to his feet, "and tell him that the em- 
 peror, to whom I know how to excuse myself, can 
 easily make a poet into a noble, but he can not make 
 a noble into a poet. The male bird does not borrow 
 its brighter plumage from its mate, and she who mar- 
 ries Le-pih will braid rushes for his mother!" 
 
 Astonished, indeed, were the neighbors, who had 
 learned the errand of the messenger from his attendants 
 without, to see the crest-fallen man come forth again 
 with his cap and cushion. Astonished much more 
 were they, ere the gay cavalcade were well out of sight, 
 to see Le-pih appear with his merry countenance and 
 plebeian cap, and, mounting his old horse, trot briskly 
 away, sickle in hand, to the marshes. The day passed 
 in wondering and gossip, interrupted by the entrance 
 of one person to the house while the old dame was 
 gone with her mats to the market, but she returned 
 duly before sunset, and went in as usual to prepare 
 supper for her son. 
 
 The last beams of day were on the tops of the 
 pagodas when Le-pih returned, walking beside his 
 heavy-laden beast, and singing a merry song. He 
 threw off his rushes at the door and entered, but his 
 song was abruptly checked, for a female sat on a low 
 seat by his mother, stooping over a half-braided mat, 
 and the next moment, the blushing Taya lifted up her 
 brimming eyes and gazed at him with silent but plead- 
 ing love. 
 
 Now, at last, the proud merriment and self respect- 
 ing confidence of Le-pih were overcome. His eyes 
 I grew flushed and his lips trembled without utterance. 
 j With both his hands pressed on his beating heart, he 
 stood gazing on the lovely Taya. 
 
 " Ah !" cried the old dame, who sat with folded 
 hands and smiling face, looking on at a scene she did 
 not quite understand, though it gave her pleasure, 
 " Ah ! this is a wife for my boy, sent from heaven ! 
 i No haughty mandarin's daughter she ! no proud minx, 
 j to fall in love with the son and despise the mother. 
 [I Let them keep their smart caps and gift-horses (or 
 ' those who can be bought at such prices ! My son is 
 a noble by the gift of his Maker— better than an em- 
 peror's gold ball ! Come to your supper, Le-pih . 
 Come, my sweet daughter !" 
 
 Taya placed her finger on her lip, and Le-pih 
 agreed that the moment was not yet come to enlighten 
 his mother as to the quality of her guest. She was 
 not long in ignorance, however, for before they could 
 seat themselves at table, there was a loud knocking at 
 
516 
 
 MEENA DIMITY. 
 
 the door, and before the old dame could bless herself, 
 an officer entered and arrested the daughter of Kvvon- 
 footse by name, and Le-pih and his mother at the 
 same time, and there was no dismissing the messenger 
 now. Oft' they marched, amid the silent consterna- 
 tion and pity of the neighbors — not toward the palace 
 of justice, however, but to the palace of the emperor, 
 where his majesty, to save all chances of mistake, 
 chose to see the poet wedded, and sit, himself, at the 
 bridal feast. Tang had a romantic heart, fat and 
 voluptuous as he was, and the end of his favor to Le- 
 pih and Taya was the end of his life. 
 
 MEENA DIMITY; 
 
 OR, WHY MR. BROWN CRASH TOOK THE TOUR. 
 
 Fashion is arbitrary, we all know. What it was 
 that originally gave Sassafras street the right to de- 
 spise Pepperidge street, the oldest inhabitant of the 
 village of Slimford could not positively say. The 
 courthouse and jail were in Sassafras street; but the 
 orthodox church and female seminary were in Pep- 
 peridge street. Two directors of the Slimford bank 
 lived in Sassafras street — two in Pepperidge street. 
 The Dyaper family lived in Sassafras street — the 
 Dimity family in Pepperidge street ; and the fathers 
 of the Dyaper girls and the Dimity girls were worth 
 about the same money, and had both made it in the 
 lumber line. There was no difference to speak of in 
 their respective mode of living — none in the educa- 
 tion of the girls — none in the family gravestones or 
 church-pews. Yet, deny it who liked, the Dyapers 
 were the aristocracy of Slimford. 
 
 It may be a prejudice, but I am inclined to think 
 there is always something in a nose. (I am about to 
 mention a trifle, but trifles are the beginning of most 
 things, and I would account for the pride paramount 
 of the Dyapers, if it is any way possible.) The most 
 stylish of the Miss Dyapers — Harriet Dyaper — had a 
 nose like his grace the Duke of Wellington. Nei- 
 ther her father nor mother had such a feature ; but 
 there was a foreign umbrella in the family with ex- 
 actly the same shaped nose on the ivory handle. Old 
 Dyaper had once kept a tavern, and he had taken this 
 umbrella from a stranger for a night's lodging. But 
 that is neither here nor there. To the nose of Har- 
 riet Dyaper, resistlessly and instinctively, the Dimity 
 girls had knocked under at school. There was au- 
 thority in it ; for the American eagle had such a nose, 
 and the Duke of Wellington had such a nose; and 
 when, to these two warlike instances, was added the 
 nose of Harriet Dyaper, the tripod stood firm. Am 
 I visionary in believing that the authority introduced 
 into that village by a foreigner's umbrella (so unac- 
 countable is fate) gave the dynasty to the Dyapers? 
 
 I have mentioned but two families— one in each of 
 the two principal streets of Slimford. Having a little 
 story to tell, I can not afford to distract my narrative 
 with unnecessary "asides;" and I must not only 
 omit all description of the other Sassafrasers and 
 Pepperidgers, but I must leave to your imagination 
 several Miss Dyapers and several Miss Dimitys — Har- 
 riet Dyaper and Meena Dimity being the two exclu- 
 sive objects of my hero's Sunday and evening atten- 
 tions. 
 
 For eleven months in the year, the loves of the 
 ladies of Slimford were presided over by indigenous 
 Cupids. Brown Crash and the other boys of the vil- 
 lage had the Dyapers and the Dimitys for that respect- 
 ive period to themselves. The remaining month, 
 when their sun of favor was eclipsed, was during the 
 
 falling of the leaf, when the " drummers" came up to 
 dun. The townish clerks of the drygoods merchants 
 were too much for the provincials. Brown Crash 
 knocked under and sulked, owing, as he said, to the 
 melancholy depression accompanying the fall of the 
 deciduous vegetation. But I have not yet introduced 
 you to my hero. 
 
 Brown Crash was the Slimford stage-agent. He 
 was the son of a retired watch-maker, and had been 
 laughed at in his boyhood for what they called his 
 "airs." He loved, even as a lad, to be at the tavern 
 when the stage came in, and help out the ladies. 
 With instinctive leisureliness he pulled off his cap 
 as soon after the " whoa-hup" as was necessary (and 
 no sooner), and asked the ladies if they would "alight 
 and take dinner," with a seductive smile which began, 
 as the landlord said, " to pay." Hence his promotion. 
 At sixteen he was nominated stage-agent, and thence- 
 forward was the most conspicuous man in the village; 
 for " man" he was, if speech and gait go for any- 
 thing. 
 
 But we must minister a moment to the reader's 
 inner sense ; for we do not write altogether for Slim- 
 ford comprehension. Brown Crash had something 
 in his composition "above the vulgar." If men's 
 qualities were mixed like salads, and I were giving a 
 " recipe for Brown Crashes," in Mrs. Glass's style, 1 
 should say his two principal ingredients were a dic- 
 tionary and a dunghill cock — for his language was as 
 ornate as his style of ambulation was deliberate 
 and imposing. What Brown Crash would have been, 
 born Right Honorable, I leave (with the smaller Dy- 
 apers and Dimitys) to the reader's fancy. My object 
 is to show what he was, minus patrician nurture and 
 valuation. Words, with Brown Crash, were suscep- 
 tible of being dirtied by use. He liked a clean tow- 
 el — he preferred an unused phrase. But here stopped 
 his peculiarities. Below the epidermis he was like 
 other men, subject to like tastes and passions. And 
 if he expressed his loves and hates with grandiloquent 
 imagery, they were the honest loves and hates of a 
 week-day world — no finer nor flimsier for their be- 
 decked plumage. 
 
 To use his own phrase, Brown frequented but two 
 ladies in Slimford — Miss Harriet Dyaper and Miss 
 Meena Dimity. The first we have described in 
 describing her nose, for her remainder was compara- 
 tively inconsiderable. The latter was "a love," and 
 of course had nothing peculiar about her. She was 
 a lamp — nothing till lighted. She was a mantle — 
 nothing, except as worn by the owner. She was a 
 mirror — blank and unconscious till something came 
 to be reflected. She was anything, loved — unloved, 
 nothing! And this (it is our opinion after half a 
 life) is the most delicious and adorable variety of 
 woman that has been spared to us from the museum 
 of specimen angels. (A remark of Brown Crash's, 
 by the way, of which he may as well have the credit.) 
 
 Now Mr. Crash had an ambitious weakness for the 
 best society, and he liked to appear intimate with the 
 Dyapers. But in Meena Dimity there was a secret 
 charm which made him wish she was an ever-to-be- 
 handed-out lady-stage-passenger. He could have 
 given her a hand, and brought in her umbrella and 
 bandbox, all day long. In his hours of pride he 
 thought of the Dyapers — in his hours of affection of 
 Meena Dimity. But the Dyapers looked down upon 
 the Dimitys; and to play his card delicately between 
 Harriet and Meena, took all the diplomacy of Brown 
 Crash. The unconscious Meena would walk up 
 Sassafras street when she had his arm, and the scorn- 
 ful Harriet would be there with her nose over the 
 front gate to sneer at them. He managed as well as 
 he could. He went on light evenings to the Dya- 
 pers — on dark evenings to the Dimitys. He took 
 town-walks with the Dyapers — country-walks with 
 
MEENA DIMITY. 
 
 517 
 
 the Dimitys. But his acquaintance with the Dyapers 
 hung by the eyelids. Harriet liked him ; for he was 
 the only beau in Slimford whose manners were not 
 belittled beside her nose. But her acquaintance with 
 him was a condescension, and he well knew that he 
 could not "hold her by the nose" if she were offend- 
 ed. Oh no! Though their respective progenitors 
 were of no very unequal rank — though a horologist 
 and a " boss lumberman" might abstractly be equals — 
 the Dyapers had the power! Yes — they could lift 
 him to themselves, or dash him down to the Dimitys; 
 and all Slimford would agree in the latter case that 
 he was a "slab" and a "small potato !" 
 
 But a change came o'er the spirit of Brown Crash's 
 dream ! The drummers were lording it in Slimford, 
 and Brown, reduced to Meena Dimity (for he was too 
 proud to play second fiddle to a town dandy), was 
 walking with her on a dark night past the Dyapers. 
 The Dyapers were hanging over the gate unluckily, 
 and their Pearl-street admirers sitting on the top rail 
 of the fence. 
 
 "Who is it ?" said a strange voice. 
 
 The reply, sent upward from a scornfully pro- 
 jecting under lip, rebounded in echoes from the tense 
 nose of Miss Dyaper. 
 
 "A Mr. Crash, and a girl from the back street !" 
 
 It was enough. A hot spot on his cheek, a warm 
 rim round his eyes, a pimply pricking in his skin, 
 and it was all over ! His vow was made. He coldly 
 bid Meena good night at her father's door, and went 
 home and counted his money. And from that hour, 
 without regard to sex, he secretly accepted shillings 
 from gratified travellers, and "stood treat" no more. 
 ******* 
 
 Saratoga was crowded with the dispersed nuclei of 
 the metropolises. Fashion, wealth, and beauty, were 
 there. Brown Crash was there, on his return from a 
 tour to Niagara and the lakes. 
 
 " Brown Crash, Esq.," was one of the notabilities 
 of Congress Hall. Here and there a dandy " could 
 not quite make him out;" but there was evidently 
 something uncommon about him. The ladies thought 
 him " of the old school of politeness," and the pol- 
 iticians thought he had the air of one used to influ- 
 ence in his county. His language was certainly very 
 choice and peculiar, and his gait was conscious dig- 
 nity itself. He must have been carefully educated ; 
 yet his manners were popular, and he was particularly 
 courteous on a first introduction. The elegance and 
 ease with which he helped the ladies out of their 
 carriages were particularly remarked, and a shrewd 
 observer said of him, that " that point of high breed- 
 ing was only acquired by daily habit. He must have 
 been brought up where there were carriages and la- 
 dies." A member of congress, who expected to run 
 for governor, inquired his county, and took wine 
 with him. His name was mentioned by the letter- 
 writers from the springs. Brown Crash was in his 
 perihelion! 
 
 The season leaned to its close, and the following 
 paragraph appeared in the New York American : — 
 
 " Fashionable Intelligence. — The company at the 
 Springs is breaking up. We understand that the 
 Vice-President and Brown Crash, Esq., have already 
 left for their respective residences. The latter gen- 
 tleman, it is understood, has formed a matrimonial 
 engagement with a family of wealth and distinction 
 from the south. We trust that these interesting 
 bonds, binding together the leading families of the 
 far-divided extremities of our country, may tend to 
 strengthen the tenacity of the great American Union !" 
 
 It was not surprising that the class in Slimford who 
 knew everything — the milliners, to-wit — moralized 
 somewhat bitterly on Mr. Crash's devotion to the 
 Dyapers after his return, and his consequent slight to 
 
 Meena Dimity. " If that was the effect of fashion 
 and distinction on the heart, Mr. Crash was welcome 
 to his honors! Let him marry Miss Dyaper, and 
 they wished him much joy of her nose; but they 
 would never believe that he had not ruthlessly broken 
 the heart of Meena Dimity, and he ought to be 
 ashamed of himself, if there was any shame in such 
 a dandy." 
 
 But the milliners, though powerful people in their 
 way, could little affect the momentum of Brown 
 Crash's glories. The paragraph from the "Ameri- 
 can" had been copied into the " Slimford Advertiser," 
 and the eyes of Sassafras street and Pepperidge street 
 were alike opened. They had undervalued their in- 
 digenous "prophet." They had misinterpreted and 
 misread the stamp of his superiority. He had been 
 obliged to go from them to be recognised. But he 
 was returned. He was there to have reparation 
 made — justice done. And now, what office would he 
 like, from Assessor to Pathmaster, and would he be 
 good enough to name it before the next town-meet- 
 ing. Brown Crash was king of Slimford ! 
 
 And Harriet Dyaper ! The scorn from her lip had 
 gone, like the blue from a radish ! Notes for " B. 
 Crash, Esq.," showered from Sassafras street — bouquets 
 from old Dyaper's front yard glided to him, per black 
 boy — no end to the endearing attentions, undisguised 
 and unequivocal. Brown Crash and Harriet Dyaper 
 were engaged, if having the front parlor entirely given 
 up to them of an evening meant anything — if his 
 being expected every night to tea meant anything — 
 if his devoted (though she thought rather cold) at- 
 tentions meant anything. 
 
 They did n't mean anything ! They all did n't 
 mean anything ! What does the orthodox minister 
 do, the third Sunday after Brown Crash's return, but 
 read the banns of matrimony between that faithless 
 man and Meena Dimity ! 
 
 But this was not to be endured. Harriet Dyaper 
 had a cousin who was a " strapper." He was boss of 
 a sawmill in the next county, and he must be sent for. 
 
 He was sent for. 
 ******* 
 
 The fight was over. Boss Dyaper had undertaken 
 to flog Brown Crash, but it was a drawn battle — for 
 the combatants had been pulled apart by their coat- 
 tails. They stepped into the barroom and stood re- 
 covering their breath. The people of Slimford 
 crowded in, and wanted to have the matter talked 
 over. Boss Dyaper bolted out his grievance. 
 
 "Gentlemen !" said Brown Crash, with one of his 
 irresistible come-to-dinner smiles, " I am culpable, 
 perhaps, in the minutiae of this business— justifiable, 
 I trust you will say, in the general scope and tendency. 
 You, all of you, probably, had mothers, and some of 
 you have wives and sis'ters; and your 'silver cord' 
 naturally sympathizes with a worsted woman. But, 
 gentlemen, you are republicans ! You, all of you, 
 are the rulers of a country very large indeed ; and 
 you are not limited in your views to one woman, nor 
 to a thousand women— to one mile, nor to a thousand 
 miles. You generalize ! you go for magnificent prin- 
 ciples, gentlemen ! You scorn high-and-mightmess, 
 and supercilious aristocracy !" 
 
 " Hurra for Mr. Crash !" cried a stagednver from 
 the outside. „ , , T , 
 
 "Well, gentleman ! In what I have done, I have 
 deserved well of a republican country ! True— it has 
 been my misfortune to roll my Juggernaut of prin- 
 ciple over the sensibilities of that gentleman s re- 
 spectable female relative. But, gentlernen, she of- 
 fended, remedilessly and grossly, one ol the sovereign 
 neonle ' She scorned one of earth's fairest daughters, 
 who lives in a back street ! Gentlemen, you know 
 that pride tripped up Lucifer ! Shall a tiptop angel fall 
 for it, and a young woman who is nothing particular 
 
518 
 
 THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK. 
 
 be left scornfully standing? Shall Miss Dyaper have 
 more privileges than Lucifer ? I appreciate your in- 
 dignant negative ! 
 
 " But, gentlemen, I am free to confess, I had also 
 my republican private end. You know my early his- 
 tory. You have witnessed my struggles to be respect- 
 ed by my honorable contemporaries. If it be my 
 weakness to be sensitive to the finger of scorn, be it 
 so. You will know how to pardon me. But I will 
 be brief. At a particular crisis of my acquaintance 
 with Miss Dyaper, I found it expedient to transfer my 
 untrammelled tendernesses to Pepperidge street. My 
 heart had long been in Pepperidge street. But, 
 gentlemen, to have done it without removing from 
 before my eyes the contumelious finger of the scorn 
 of Sassafras street, was beyond my capabilities of en- 
 durance. Injustice to my present ' future,' gentle- 
 men, I felt that I must remove ' sour grapes' from my 
 escutcheon — that I must soar to a point, whence, 
 swooping proudly to Meena Dimity, I should pass 
 the Dyapers in descending ! 
 
 (Cheers and murmurs.) 
 
 " Gentlemen and friends ! This world is all a fleet- 
 ing show. The bell has rung, and 1 keep you from 
 your suppers. Briefly. I found the means to travel 
 and test the ring of my metal among unprejudiced 
 strangers. I wished to achieve distinction and return 
 to my birthplace; but for what? Do me justice, 
 gentlemen. Not to lord it in Sassafras street. Not 
 to carry off a Dyaper with triumphant elation! 
 Not to pounce on your aristocratic No. 1, and 
 link my destiny with the disdainful Dyapers! No! 
 But to choose where I liked, and have the credit 
 of liking it ! To have Slimford believe that if I 
 preferred their No. 2, it was because I liked it bet- 
 ter than No. 1. Gentlemen, I am a republican! I 
 may find my congenial spirit among the wealthy — I 
 may find it among the humble. But I want the lib- 
 erty to choose. And I have achieved it, I trust you 
 will permit me to say. Having been honored by the 
 dignitaries of a metropolis — having consorted with a 
 candidate for gubernatorial distinction — having been 
 recorded in a public journal as a companion of the 
 Vice-President of this free and happy country — you 
 will believe me when I declare that I prefer Pepper- 
 idge street to Sassafras — you will credit my sincerity, 
 when, having been approved by the Dyapers' betters, 
 1 give them the go-by for the Dimitys ! Gentlemen, 
 I have done." 
 
 The reader will not be surprised to learn that Mr. 
 Brown Crash is now a prominent member of the 
 legislature, and an excessive aristocrat — Pepperidge 
 street and very democratic speeches to the contrary 
 notwithstanding. 
 
 THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK." 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 1 HAD a sort of candle-light acquaintance with Mr. 
 Philip McRueit when we were in college. I mean to 
 say that I had a daylight repugnance to him, and never 
 walked with him, or talked with him, or rode with 
 him, or sat with him; and, indeed, seldom saw him — 
 expect as one of a club oyster-party of six. He was 
 a short, sharp, satirical man (nicknamed " my cruet," 
 by his cronies — rather descriptively!) but as plausible 
 and as vindictive as Mephistopheles before and after 
 the ruin of a soul. In some other state of existence 
 
 I had probably known and suffered by Phil. McRueit 
 — for I knew him like the sleeve of an old coal, the 
 first day I laid eyes on him ; though other people 
 seemed to have no such instinct. Oh, we were not 
 new acquaintances — from whatever star he had been 
 transported, for his sins, to this planet of dirt. I think 
 he was of the same opinion, himself. He chose be- 
 tween open warfare and conciliation in the first five 
 minutes — after seeing me as a stranger — chose the 
 latter. 
 
 Six or seven years after leaving college, I was fol- 
 lowing my candle up to bed rather musingly, one night 
 at the Astor, and on turning a corner, I was obliged to 
 walk round a short gentleman who stood at the head 
 of the stairs in an attitude of fixed contemplation. As 
 I weathered the top of his hat rather closely, I caught 
 the direction of his eye, and saw that he was regard- 
 ing, very fixedly, a pair of rather dusty kid slippers, 
 which had been set outside the door, probably for 
 cleaning, by the occupant of the chamber opposite. 
 As the gentleman did not move, I turned on the half 
 landing of the next flight of stairs, and looked back, 
 breaking in, by my sudden pause, upon his fit of ab- 
 straction. It was McRueit, and on recognising me, 
 he immediately beckoned me to his side. 
 
 "Does it strike you," said he, " that there is any- 
 thing peculiar in that pair of shoes ?" 
 
 " No — except that they certify to two very small 
 feet on the other side of the door." 
 
 "Not merely 'small,' my dear fellow! Do you 
 see where the pressure has been in those slender shoes, 
 how straight the inside line, how arched the instep, 
 how confidingly flat the pressure downward of the 
 little great toe ! It's a woman of sweet and relying 
 character who wore that shoe to-day, and I must know 
 her. More, sir, I must marry her ! Ah, you laugb 
 — but I will .' There's a magnetism in that pair of 
 shoes addressed to me only. Beg your pardon — good 
 night — I'll go down stairs and find out her number— 
 '74!' I'll be well acquainted with '74' by this time 
 to-morrow !" 
 
 For the unconscious young lady asleep in that room, 
 I lay awake half the night, troubled with foreboding 
 pity. I knew the man so well, I was so certain that 
 he would leave nothing possible undone to carry out 
 this whimsical purpose! I knew that from that mo- 
 ment was levelled, point-blank, at the lady, whoever 
 she might be (if single) a battery of devilish and per- 
 tinacious ingenuity, which would carry most any 
 small fort of a heart, most any way barricaded and 
 defended. He was well off; he was well-looking 
 enough; he was deep and crafty. But if he did win 
 her, she was gone! gone, I knew, from happiness, 
 like a stone from a sling. He was a tyrant — subtle 
 in his cruelties to all people dependant on him— and 
 her life would be one of refined torture, neglect, be- 
 trayal, and tears. 
 
 A fit of intermittent disgust for strangers, to which 
 all persons living in hotels are more or less liable, 
 confined my travels, for some days after this rencontre, 
 to the silence-and-slop thorough-fare of the back 
 stairs, " Coming to my feed" of society one rainy 
 morning, I went into the drawing-room after breakfast, 
 and was not surprised to see McRueit in a posture of 
 absorbed attention beside a lady. His stick stood on 
 the floor, and with his left cheek rested on the gold 
 head, he was gazing into her face, and evidently keep- 
 ing her perfectly at her ease as to the wants and gaps 
 of conversation, as he knew how to do — for he was the 
 readiest man with his brick and mortar whom I ever 
 had encountered. 
 
 " Who is that lady ?" I asked of an omni-acquainted 
 old bachelor friend of mine. 
 
 " Miss Jonthee Twitt — and what can be the secret 
 of that rather exclusive gentleman's attention to her. 
 I can not fancy." 
 
THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK." 
 
 519 
 
 I pulled a newspaper from my pocket, and seating 
 myself in one of the deep windows, commenced rather 
 a compassionate study of Miss Twitt— intending fully, 
 if I should find her interesting, to save her from the 
 clutches of my detestable classmate. 
 
 She was a slight, hollow-chested, consumptive- 
 looking girl, with a cast of features that any casual 
 observer would be certain to describe as "interesting." 
 With the first two minutes' gaze upon her, my sym- 
 pathies were active enough for a crusade against a 
 whole army of connubial tyrants. I suddenly paused, 
 however. Something McRueit said made a change 
 in the lady's countenance. She sat just as still ; she 
 did not move her head from its negligent posture; her 
 eyebrows did not contract; her lips did not stir; but 
 the dull, sickly-colored lids descended calmly and 
 fixedly till they hid from sight the upper edges of the 
 pupils ! and by this slight but infallible sign 1 knew 
 — but the story will tell what I knew. Napoleon was 
 nearly, but not quite right, when he said that there 
 was no reliance to be placed on peculiarities of feature 
 or expression. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 In August of that same year, I followed the world 
 to Saratoga. In my first reconnoitre of the drawing- j 
 room of Congress Hall, I caught the eye of Mr. Mc- 
 Rueit, and received from him a cordial salutation. | 
 As I put my head right, upon its pivot, after an easy j 
 nod to my familiar aversion, my eyes fell upon Miss j 
 Jonthee Twitt — that was — for I had seen, in the 
 newspapers of two months before, that the resolve I 
 (born of the dusty slipper outside her door), had been 
 brought about, and she was now on the irrevocable 
 side of a honeymoon sixty days old. 
 
 Her eyelid was down upon the pupil — motionless, 
 concentrated, and vigilant as a couched panther — and 
 from beneath the hem of her dress curved out the 
 high arched instep of a foot pointed with desperate 
 tension to the carpet ; the little great toe (whose rely- 
 ing pressure on the soiled slipper Mr. McRueit had 
 been captivated by),-riow rigid with as strong a pur- 
 pose as spiritual homeopathy could concentrate in so 
 small a tenement. 1 thought I would make Mr. and 
 Mrs. McRueit the subject of quiet study while I re- 
 mained at Saratoga. 
 
 But I have not mentioned the immediate cause of 
 Mrs. McRueit's resentment. Her bridegroom was 
 walking up and down the room with a certain Mrs. 
 Wanmaker, a widow, who was a better woman than 
 she looked to be, as I chanced to know, but as nobody 
 could know without the intimate acquaintance with 
 Mrs. Wanmaker upon which I base this remark. 
 With beauty of the most voluptuous cast, and a 
 passion for admiration which induced her to throw 
 out every possible lure to men any way worth her 
 time as victims, Mrs. Wanmaker's blood was as 
 " cold as the flow of Iser," and her propriety, in fact, 
 wholly impregnable. I had been myself "tried on" 
 by the widow Wanmaker, and twenty caravan-marches 
 might have been made across the Desert of Sahara, 
 while the conviction I have just stated was " getting 
 through my hair." It was not wonderful, therefore, 
 that both the bride and her (usually) most penetratious 
 bridegroom, had sailed over the widow's shallows, un- 
 conscious of soundings. She was a "deep" woman, 
 too — but in the love line. 
 
 I thought McRueit singularly off his guard, if it 
 were only for " appearances." He monopolized the 
 widow effectually, and she thought it worth her while 
 to let the world think him (a bridegroom and a rising 
 young politician), mad for her, and, truth to say, they 
 
 carried on the war strenuously. Perfectly certain as I 
 was that " the whirligig of time" would " bring about 
 the revenges" of Mrs. McRueit, I began to feel a 
 meantime pity for her, and had myself presented duly 
 by McRueit the next morning after breakfast. 
 
 It was a tepid, flaccid, revery-colored August morn- 
 ing, and the sole thought of the universe seemed to 
 be to sit down. The devotees to gayety and mineral 
 water dawdled out to the porticoes, and some sat on 
 chairs under the trees, and the dandies lay on the 
 grass, and the old ladies on the steps and the settees, 
 and here and there, a man on the balustrade, and, in 
 the large swing, vis-a-vis, sat McRueit and the widow 
 Wanmaker, chattering in an undertone quite inaudi- 
 ble. Mrs. McRueit sat on a bench, with her back 
 against one of the high-shouldered pine trees in the 
 court-yard, and I had called McRueit out of his swing 
 to present me. But he returned immediately to the 
 widow. 
 
 I thought it would be alieviative and good-natured 
 to give Mrs. McRueit an insight to the harmlessness 
 of Mrs. Wanmaker, and I had done so very nearly to 
 my satisfaction, when I discovered that the slighted 
 wife did not care sixpence about the fact, and that, 
 unlike Hamlet, she only knew seems. The more I 
 developed the innocent object of the widow's outlay 
 of smiles and confidentialities, the more Mrs. McRueit 
 placed herself in a posture to be remarked by the 
 loungers in the court-yard and the dawdlers on the 
 portico, and the more she deepened a certain look — 
 you must imagine it for the present, dear reader. It 
 would take a razor's edge of analysis, and a Flemish 
 paint-pot and patience, to carve that injured look into 
 language, or paint it truthfully to the eye ! Juries 
 would hang husbands, and recording angels "ruthless- 
 ly overcharge," upon the unsupported evidence of 
 such a look. She looked as if her heart must have 
 suffocated with forbearance long before she began to 
 look so. She looked as if she had forgiven and wept, 
 and was ready to forgive and weep again. She looked 
 as if she would give her life if she could conceal "her 
 feelings," and as if she was nerving soul, and heart, 
 and eyelids, and lachrymatory glands— all to agony— 
 to prevent bursting into tears with her unutterable 
 anguish ! It was the most unresisting, unresentful, 
 patient, sweet miserableness! A lamb's willingness 
 to "furnish forth another meal" of chops and sweet- 
 bread, was testy to such meek endurance ! She was 
 evidently a martyr, a victim, a crushed flower, a "poor 
 thing !" But she did, now and then— unseen by any- 
 body but me— give a glance from that truncated orb 
 of a pupil of hers, over the top of her handkerchief, 
 that, if incarnated, would have made a hole in the hide 
 of a rhinoceros ! It was triumph, venom, implacabili- 
 ty — such as I had never before seen expressed in hu- 
 man glances. 
 
 There are many persons with but one idea, and that 
 a good one. Mrs. McRueit, I presume, was inca- 
 pable of appreciating my interest in her. At any rate 
 she played the same game with me as with other 
 people, and managed her affairs altogether with per- 
 fect unity. It was in vain that I endeavored to hear 
 from her tongue what I read in the lowering pupil of 
 her eye. She spoke of McRueit with evident re- 
 luctance, but always with discretion— never blaming 
 him, nor leaving any opening that should betray re- 
 sentment, or turn the current of sympathy from her- 
 self. The result was immediate. The women in the 
 house began to look black upon McRueit. 
 
 'sent him to Coventry" more unwillingly, for lie was 
 amusing and popular- but "to Coventry he went! 
 
 to Coventry' 
 AnTatlast'the widow Wanmaker became aware that 
 she was wasting her time on a man whose attentions 
 were not wanted elsewhere— and she (the unkmdest 
 cut of all) found reasons fi^looking another way when 
 he approached her. 
 
 He had became aware, during 
 
520 
 
 THE POWER OF AN "INJURED LOOK. 
 
 this process, what was " in the wind," but he knew 
 too much to stay in the public eye when it was in- 
 flamed. With his brows lowering, and his face 
 gloomy with feelings I could easily interpret, he took 
 the early coach on the third morning after my intro- 
 duction to Mrs. McRueit, and departed, probably for 
 a discipline trip, to some place where sympathy with 
 his wife would be less dangerous. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 I think, that within the next two or three years, I 
 heard McRueit's name mentioned several times, or 
 saw it in the papers, connected with strong political 
 movements. I had no very definite idea of where he 
 was residing, however. Business called me to a 
 western county, and on the road I fell into the com- 
 pany of a great political schemer and partisan — one 
 of those joints (of the feline political body), the next 
 remove from the " cat's paw." Finding that I cared 
 not a straw for politics, and that we were going to the 
 same town, he undertook the blandishment of an over- 
 flow of confidence upon me, probably with the remote 
 possibility that he might have occasion to use me. I 
 gave in to it so far as courteously to receive all his 
 secrets, and we arrived at our destination excellent 
 friends. 
 
 . The town was in a ferment with the coming election 
 of a member for the legislature, and the hotel being 
 very crowded, Mr. Develin (my fellow-traveller) and 
 myself were put into a double-bedded room. Busy 
 with my own affairs, I saw but little of him, and he 
 seemed quite too much occupied for conversation, till 
 the third night after our arrival. Lying in bed with 
 the moonlight streaming into the room, he began to 
 give me some account of the campaign, preparing for, 
 around us, and presently mentioned the name of 
 McRueit — (the name, by the way, that I had seen 
 upon the placards, without caring particularly to in- 
 quire whether or not it was " mine aucient" aversion). 
 
 " They are not aware," said Mr. Develin, after 
 talking on the subject awhile, "that this petty election, 
 is, in fact, the grain of sand that is to turn the presi- 
 dential scale. If McRueit should be elected (as 1 
 am sorry to say there seems every chance he will be), 
 Van Buren's doom is sealed. I have come a little 
 too late here. I should have had time to know some- 
 thing more of this man McRueit — " 
 
 " Perhaps I can give you some idea of him," inter- 
 rupted I, " for he has chanced to be more in my way 
 than I would have bargained for. But what do you 
 wish to know particularly?" (1 spoke, as the reader 
 will see, in the unsuspecting innocence of my heart.) 
 
 " Oh—anything— anything ! Tell me all you know 
 of him !" 
 
 Mr. Develin"s vividness rather surprised me, for he 
 raised himself on his elbow in bed — but I went on and 
 narrated very much what I have put down for the 
 reader in the two preceding chapters. 
 
 "How do you spell Mrs. Wanmaker's name?" 
 asked my imbedded vis-d-vis, as I stopped and turned 
 over to go to sleep. 
 
 I spelt it for him. 
 
 He jumped out of bed, dressed himself and left the 
 room. Will the reader permit me to follow him, like 
 Asmodeus, giving with Asmodean brevity the knowl- 
 edge I afterward gained of his use of my involuntary 
 revelation? 
 
 Mr. Develin roused the active member of the Van 
 Buren committee from his slumber, and in an hour 
 had the printers of their party paper at work upon a 
 placard. A large meeting was to be held the next 
 
 day in the town-hall, during which both candidates, it 
 was supposed, would address the people. Lacries 
 were to occupy the galleries. The hour came round. 
 Mrs. McRueit's carriage drove into the village a few 
 minutes before eleven, and as she stopped at a shop 
 for a moment, a letter was handed her by a boy. She 
 sat still and read it. She was alone. Her face turned 
 livid with paleness alter its first flush, and forgetting 
 her errand at the shop, she drove on to the town-hall. 
 She took her seat in a prominent part of the gallery. 
 The preliminaries were gone through with, and her 
 husband rose to speak. He was a plausible orator, 
 an eloquent man. But there was a sentiment circula- 
 ting in the audience — something whispered from man 
 to man — that strangely took off' the attention of the 
 audience. He could not, as he had never before found 
 difficulty in doing, keep their eyes upon his lips. 
 Every one was gazing on his wife ! And there she 
 sat — with her injured look ! — pale, sad, apparently 
 striving to listen and conceal her mental suffering. It 
 was as convincing to the audience of the truth of the 
 insinuation that was passing from mouth to mouth — 
 as convincing as would have been a revelation from 
 Heaven. McRueit followed the many upturned eyes 
 at last, and saw that they were bent on his wife, and 
 that — once more — after years of conciliation, she wore 
 that injurkd look ! His heart failed him. He 
 evidently comprehended that the spirit that had driven 
 him from Saratoga, years before — -popular sympathy 
 with women — had overtaken him and was plotting 
 against him once more. His speech began to lose 
 its concentration. He talked wide. The increasing 
 noise overpowered him, and he descended at last from 
 the platform in the midst of a universal hiss. The 
 other candidate rose and spoke; and at the close of 
 his speech the meeting broke up, and as they dis- 
 persed, their eyes were met at every corner with a 
 large placard, in which " injured wife." "unfaithful 
 husband," "widow W — n — k — r," were the words in 
 prominent capitals. The election came on the next 
 day, and Mr. McRueit being signally defeated, Mr. 
 Van Buren's election to the Presidency (if Mr. Develin 
 knew anything) was made certain — brought about by 
 a woman's injured look. 
 
 My business in the county was the purchase of land, 
 and for a year or two afterward, I was a great deal 
 there. Feeling that I had unintentionally furnished 
 a weapon to his enemies, I did penance by cultivating 
 McRueit. I went often to his house. He was at 
 first a good deal broken up by the sudden check to 
 his ambition, but he rallied with a change in his 
 character for which I was not prepared. He gave up 
 all antagonism toward his wife. He assumed a new 
 manner to her. She had been skilfully managed be- 
 fore — but he took her now confidingly behind his 
 shield. He felt overmastered by the key she had to 
 popular sympathy, and he determined wisely to make 
 it turn in his favor. By assiduity, by tenderness, 
 childlikeness, he succeeded in completely convincing 
 her that he had but one out-of-doors wish — that of 
 embellishing her existence by his success. The effort 
 on her was marvellous. She recovered her health, 
 gradually changed to a joyous and earnest promoter 
 of her husband's interests, and they were soon a mark- 
 ed model in the county for conjugal devotion. The 
 popular impression soon gained ground that Mr. Mc- 
 Rueit had been shamefully wronged by the previous 
 prejudice against his character as a husband. The 
 tide that had already turned, soon swelled to a flood, 
 and Mr. McRueit now — but Mr. McRueit is too power- 
 ful a person in the present government to follow any 
 farther. Suffice it to say that he might return to Mrs. 
 Wanmaker and his old courses if he liked — for his 
 wife's injured look is entirely fattened out of possi- 
 bility by her happiness. She weighs two hundred, and 
 couid no more look injured than Sir John Falstaff. 
 
BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. 
 
 521 
 
 BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. 
 
 The birds that flew over County Surrey on the 
 twelfth of June, 1835, looked down upon a scene of 
 which manv a "lord of creation," travelling only by 
 the roads, might well have envied them the seeing. 
 For, ever so merry let it be within the lordly parks of 
 England, the trees that look over the ring fence upon 
 the world without, keep their countenance — aristocrats 
 that they are! Round and round Beckton Park you 
 might have travelled that sunny day, and often within 
 arrow-shot of its hidden and fairy lawn, and never 
 suspected, but by the magnetic tremor in your veins, 
 that beautiful women were dancing near by, and " mar- 
 vellous proper men," more or less enamored, looking 
 on — every pink and blue girdle a noose for a heart, 
 of course, and every gay waistcoat a victim venturing 
 near the trap (though this last is mentioned entirely 
 on my own responsibility). 
 
 But what have we to do with the unhappy exiles 
 without this pretty paradise ! You are an invited 
 guest, dear reader. Pray walk in ! 
 
 Did you ask about the Becktons? The Becktons 
 are people blessed with money and a very charming 
 acquaintance. That is enough to know about them. 
 Yet stay ! Sir Thomas was knighted for his behavior 
 at some great crisis in India (for he made his fortune 
 in India) — and Lady Beckton is no great beauty, but 
 she has the mania of getting handsome people together, 
 and making them happier than belongs properly to 
 handsome people's destiny. And this, I think, must 
 suffice for a first introduction. 
 
 The lawn, as you see, has the long portico of the 
 house on one side of it, a bend of the river on two 
 other sides, and a thick shrubbery on the fourth. 
 The dancing-floor is in the centre, inlaid at the level 
 of the smooth sward, and it is just now vibrating to 
 the measured step of the mazurka — beautifully danced, 
 we must say ! 
 
 And now let me point out to you the persons most 
 concerned in this gossip of mine. 
 
 First, the ladies. 
 
 Miss Blakeney — (and she was never called anything 
 but Miss Blakeney — never Kate, or Kitty, or Kathleen, 
 I mean, though her name was Catherine) — Miss 
 Blakeney is that very stylish, very striking, very 
 magnificent girl, I think I may say, with the white 
 chip hat and black feather. Nobody but Miss Blake- 
 ney could venture to wear just the dress she is sport- 
 ing, but she must dash, though she is in half-mourn- 
 ing, and, faith ! there is nothing out of keeping, artisti- 
 cally speaking, after all. A white dress embroidered 
 with black flowers, dazzling white shoulders turned 
 over with black lace, white neck and forehead (brilliant- 
 ly white), waved over and kissed by luxuriant black 
 ringlets (brilliantly black). And very white temples 
 with very black eyes, and very white eyelids with long 
 black lashes, and, since those dazzling white teeth 
 were without a contrast, there hung upon her neck a 
 black cross of ebony — and now we have put her in 
 black and white, where she will " stay put." Scripta 
 verba manent, saith the cautionary proverb. 
 
 Here and there, you observe, there is a small Per- 
 sian carpet spread on the sward for those who like to 
 lounge and look at the dancers, and though a score of 
 people, at least, are availing themselves of this oriental 
 luxury, no one looks so modestly pretty, half-couched 
 on the richly-colored woof, as that simply dressed 
 blonde, with a straw hat in her lap, and her light 
 auburn curls taking their saucy will of her blue-veined 
 neck and shoulders. That lady's plain name is Mabel 
 Brown, and, like yourself, many persons have wished 
 to change it for her. She is half-married, indeed, to 
 several persons here present, for there \sone consenting 
 party. Mais Vautrc nc veut pas, as a French novelist 
 
 laments, it stating a similar dilemma. Meantime, Miss 
 Brown is the adopted sister of the black and white Miss 
 Blakeney. 
 
 One more exercise of my function of cicerone ! 
 
 Lying upon the bank of the river, with his shoulder 
 against that fine oak, and apparently deeply absorbed 
 in the fate of the acorn-cups which he throws into the 
 current, you may survey the elegant person of Mr. 
 Lindsay Maud — a gentleman whom I wish you to take 
 for rather more than his outer seeming, since he will 
 show you at the first turn of his head, that he cares 
 nothing for your opinion, though entitled, as the 
 diplomatists phrase it, to your " high consideration." 
 Mr. Maud is twenty-five, more or less — six feet, or 
 thereabouts. He has the sanguineous tint, rather 
 odd for so phlegmatic a person as he seems. His 
 nose is un petit pen retrousse, his lips full, and his 
 smile easy and ready. His eyes are like the surface 
 of a very deep well. Curling brown hair, broad and 
 calm forehead, merry chin with a dimple in it, and 
 i mouth expressive of great good humor, and quite 
 | enough of fastidiousness. If this is not your beau 
 ideal, I am very sorry — but experience went to show 
 that Lindsay Maud was a very agreeable man, and 
 j pleased generally where he undertook it. 
 
 And now, if you please, having done the honors, I 
 will take up the story en simple conteur. 
 
 The sky was beginning to blush about the sun's 
 going to bed, and the dancers and archers were pair- 
 ing off, couple by couple, to stroll and cool in the dim 
 shrubberies of Beckton Park. It was an hour to 
 breakfast, so called, for breakfast was to be served in 
 the darker edge of the twilight. With the afore- 
 named oak-tree between him and the gay company, 
 Mr. Lindsay Maud beguiled his hunger (for hungry 
 he was), by reading a volume of that very clever novel, 
 " Le Pere Goriot," and, chapter by chapter, he 
 " cocked up his ear," as the story-books say, hoping 
 to hear the cheerful bell of the tower announce the 
 serving of the soup and champagne. 
 
 "Well, Sir Knight Faineant !" said Lady Beckton, 
 stepping in suddenly between his feet and the river 
 brink, " since when have you turned woman-hater, 
 and enrolled among the unavailables ? Here have you 
 lain all day in the shade, with scores of nice girls 
 dancing on the other side of your hermit tree, and not 
 a sign of life — not a look even to see whether my 
 party, got up with so much pains, flourished or lan- 
 guished ! I'll cross you out of my little book, recreant!" 
 
 Maud was by this time on his feet, and he penitent- 
 ly and respectfully kissed the fingers threateningly 
 held up to him — for the unpardonable sin in a single 
 man is to appear unamused, let alone failing to amuse 
 others — at a party sworn to be agreeable. 
 
 " 1 have but half an apology," he said, " that of 
 knowing that your parties go swimmingly off, whether 
 I pull an oar or no ; but I deserve not the less to be 
 crossed out of your book. Something ails me. lam 
 growing old, or my curiosity has burnt out, or I am 
 touched with some fatal lethargy. Upon my word 1 
 would as lief listen to a Latin sermon as chat for the 
 next half hour with the prettiest girl at Beckton ! 
 There's no inducement, my dear Lady Beckton ! 
 I'm not a marrying man, you know, and flirtation — 
 flirtation is such tiresome repetition — endless reading 
 of prefaces, and never coming to the agreeable first 
 chapter. Hut I'll obey orders. Which is the destitute 
 woman ? You shall see how I will redeem my dam- 
 aged reputation !" 
 
 But Lady Beckton, who seldom refused an offer 
 from a beau to make himself useful at her parties, 
 seemed hardly to listen to Maud's justification. She 
 placed her arm in his, and led him across the bridge 
 which spanned the river a little above, and they were 
 presently out of hearing in one of the cool and shaded 
 avenues of the park. 
 
522 
 
 BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. 
 
 "A penny for your thought!" said Mauri, after 
 walking at her side a few minutes in silence. 
 
 " It is a thought, certainly, in which pennies are 
 concerned," replied Lady Beckton, " and that is why 
 I find any trouble in giving expression to it. It is 
 difficult enough to talk with gentlemen about love, but 
 that is easy to talking about money." 
 
 "Yet they make a pretty tandem, money on the 
 lead!" 
 
 "Oh! are you there ?" exclaimed Lady Beckton, 
 with a laugh ; " I was beginning too far back, al- 
 together ! My dear Lindsay, see how much better I 
 thought of you than you deserved! I was turning 
 over in my mind with great trepidation and embarrass- 
 ment how'lshould venture to talk to you about amoney- 
 and-love match!" 
 
 " Indeed ! for what happy man ?" 
 
 u Toi mime, man ami.'" 
 
 " Heavens! you quite take away my breath! Spare 
 yourself the overture, my dear Lady Beckton! I 
 agree ! I am quite ready — sold from this hour if you 
 can produce a purchaser, and possession given im- 
 mediately !" 
 
 " Now you go too fast ; for 1 ha^e not time to banter, 
 and I wish to see my way in earnest before I leave you. 
 Listen to me. I was talking you over with Beckton 
 this morning. I'll not trouble you with the discus- 
 sion — it would make you vain, perhaps. But we ar- 
 rived at this : Miss Blakeney would be a very good 
 match for you, and if you are inclined to make a dem- 
 onstration that way, why, we will do what we can to 
 make it plain sailing. Stay with us a week, for in- 
 stance, and we will keep the Blakeneys. It's a sweet 
 month for pairing, and you are an expeditious love- 
 maker, I know. Is it agreed ?" 
 
 " You are quite serious!" 
 
 "Quite!" 
 
 " I'll go back with you to the bridge, kindest of 
 friends, and return and ramble here till the bell rings, 
 by myself. I'll find you at table, by-and-by, and ex- 
 press my gratitude at least. Will that be time enough 
 for an answer ?" 
 
 " Yes — but no ceremony with me ! Stay and 
 ponder where you are ! Au revoir ! I must see after 
 my breakfast !" 
 
 And away tripped the kind-hearted Lady Beckton. 
 
 Maud resumed his walk. He was rather taken 
 aback. He knew Miss Blakeney but as a waltzing 
 partner, yet that should be but little matter; for he 
 had long ago made up his mind that, if he did not 
 marry rich, he could not marry at all. 
 
 Maud was poor — that is to say, he had all that -an 
 angel would suppose necessary in this hungry and cold 
 world — assurance of food and clothing — in other words, 
 three hundred a year. He had had his unripe time 
 like other youths, in which he was ready to marry for 
 love and no money ; but his timid advances at that 
 soft period had not been responsibly met by his first 
 course of sweethearts, and he had congratulated him- 
 self and put a price on his heart accordingly. Mean- 
 time, he thought, the world is a very entertaining 
 place, and the belonging to nobody in particular, has 
 its little advantages. 
 
 And very gayly sped on the second epoch of Mr. 
 Lindsay Maud's history. He lived in a country where, 
 to shine in a profession, requires the " audace, patience 
 et volonte de quoi renverser le mondc" and having turn- 
 ed his ambition well about, like a strange coin that 
 might perhaps have passed current in other times, he 
 laid it away with romance and chivalry, and other 
 things suited only to the cabinets of the curious. He 
 was well born. He was well bred. He was a fair 
 candidate for the honors of a "gay man about town" 
 — that untaxed exempt — that guest by privilege — that 
 irresponsible denizen of high life, possessed of every 
 luxury on earth except matrimony and the pleasures 
 
 of payment. And, for a year or two, this was very 
 delightful. He had a half dozen of those charming 
 female friendships which, like other ephemera in this 
 changing world, must die or turn into something else 
 at the close of a season, and, if this makes the feelings 
 very hard, it makes the manners very soft ; and Maud 
 was content with the compensation. If he felt, now 
 and then, that he was idling life away, he looked about 
 him and found countenance at least ; for all his friends 
 were as idle, and there was an analogy to his condi- 
 tion in nature (if need were to find one),' for the but- 
 terfly had his destiny like the bee, and was neither 
 pitied nor reproached that he was not a honey-maker. 
 But Maud was now in a third lustrum of his exist- 
 ence, and it was tinted somewhat differently from the 
 rose-colored epochs precedent. The twilight of 
 | satisfied curiosity had fallen imperceptibly around 
 j him. The inner veils of society had one by one lifted, 
 and there could be nothing new for his eye in the 
 world to which he belonged. 
 
 A gay party, which was once to him as full of un- 
 ; attained objects as the festal mysteries of Eleusinia to 
 | a rustic worshipper of Ceres, was now as readable at 
 I a glance as the stripes of a backgammon-board. He 
 knew every man's pretensions and chances, every wo- 
 ; man's expectations and defences. Not a damsel whose 
 | defects he had not discovered, whose mind he had not 
 sounded, whose dowry he did not know. Not a beauty, 
 married or single, whose nightly game in society he 
 could not perfectly foretell ; not an affection unoccupied 
 of which he could not put you down the cost of en- 
 gaging it in your favor, the chances of constancy, the 
 dangers of following or abandoning. He had no stake 
 in society, meantime, yet society itself was all his 
 world. He had no ambitions to further by its aid. 
 And until now, he had looked on matrimony as a 
 closed door — for he had neither property, nor profes- 
 sion likely to secure it, and circumstances like these, 
 in the rank in which he moved, are comprehended 
 among the " any impediments." To have his own 
 way, Maud would have accepted no invitations except 
 to dine with the beaux esprits, and he would have con- 
 centrated the remainder of his leisure and attentions 
 upon one agreeable woman (at a time) — two selfish- 
 nesses very attractive to a blase, but not permitted to 
 any member of society short of a duke or a Croesus. 
 
 And now, with a new leaf turning over in his dull 
 book of life — a morning of a new day breaking on 
 his increasing night — Lindsay Maud tightly screwed 
 his arms across his breast, and paced the darkening 
 avenue of Beckton Park. The difference between 
 figuring as a fortune-hunter, and having a fortune 
 hunted for him by others, he perfectly understood. 
 In old and aristocratic societies, where wealth is at 
 the same time so much more coveted and so much 
 more difficult to win, the eyes of " envy, malice, and 
 all uncharitableness," are alike an omnipresent argus, 
 in their watch over the avenues to its acquisition. No 
 step, the slightest, the least suspicious, is ever taken 
 toward the hand of an heiress, or the attainment of 
 an inheritance, without awakening and counter-work- 
 ing of these busy monsters ; and, for a society-man, 
 better to be a gambler or seducer, better to have all 
 the fashionable vices ticketed on his name, than to 
 stand qffiched as a fortune-hunter. If to have a for- 
 tune cleverly put within reach by a powerful friend, 
 however, be a proportionate beatitude, blessed was 
 Maud. So thought he, at least, as the merry bell of 
 Beckton tower sent its summons through the woods, 
 and his revery gave place to thoughts of something 
 more substantial. 
 
 And thus far, oh adorable reader ! (for I see what 
 unfathomable eyes are looking over my shoulder) thus 
 far, like an artist making a sketch, of which one part 
 is to be finished, I have dwelt a little on the touches 
 of my pencil. But, by those same unfathomable eyes 
 
BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING. 
 
 523 
 
 I know (for in those depths dwell imagination), that 
 if the remainder be done ever so lightly in outline, 
 even then there will be more than was needed for the 
 comprehension of the story. Thy ready and bound- 
 less faucy, sweet lady, would supply it all. Given, 
 the characters and scene, what fair creature who has 
 loved, could fail to picture forth the sequel and its 
 more minute surroundings, with rapidity and truth 
 daguerreotypical ? 
 
 Sketchily, then, touch we the unfinished denouement 
 of our story. 
 
 The long saloon was already in glittering progress 
 wken Maud entered. The servants in their blue and 
 white liveries were gliding rapidly about with the ter- 
 restrial nutriment for eyes celestial — to-wit, wines and 
 oysters. 
 
 Half blinded with the glare of the numberless 
 lights, he stood a moment at the door. 
 
 " Lady Beckton's compliments, and she has re- 
 served a seat for you!" said a footman approaching 
 him. 
 
 He glanced at the head of the table. The vacant 
 chair was near Lady Beckton and opposite Miss Blake- 
 ney. "Is a vis-a-vis better for love-making than a 
 seat at the lady's ear ?" thought Maud. But Lady 
 Beckton's tactics were to spare his ear and dazzle his 
 eye, without reference especially to the corresponding 
 impressions on the eyes and ear of the lady. And 
 she had the secondary object of avoiding any betrayal 
 of her designs till they were too far matured to be de- 
 feated by publicity. 
 
 " Can you tell me, Mr. Maud," said the sweet 
 voice of Mabel Brown as he drew his chair to the 
 table, "what is the secret of Lady Beckton's putting 
 you next me so pertinaciously ?" 
 
 " A greater regard for my happiness than yours, 
 probably," said Maud; "but why 'pertinaciously?' 
 Has there been a skirmish for this particular chair ?" 
 
 " No skirmish, but three attempts at seizure by 
 three of my admirers." 
 
 " If they admire you more than I, they are fitter 
 companions for a tete-a-tete than a crowded party," 
 said Maud. " I am as near a lover as I can be, and 
 be agreeable !" 
 
 To this Maud expected the gay retort due to a bag- 
 atelle of gallantry ; but the pretty Mabel was silent. 
 The soup disappeared and the entremets were served. 
 Maud was hungry, and he had sent a cutlet and a 
 glass of Johannisberg to the clamorous quarter be- 
 fore he ventured to look toward his hostess. 
 
 He felt her eye upon him. A covert smile stole 
 through her lips as they exchanged glances. 
 
 "Yes ?" she asked, with a meaning look. 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 And in that dialogue of two monosyllables Lady 
 Beckton presumed that the hand and five thousand a 
 year of Miss Catherine Blakeney, were virtually made 
 over to Mr. Lindsay Maud. And her diplomacy 
 made play to that end without farther deliberation. 
 
 Very unconscious indeed that she was under the 
 eye of the man who had entered into a conspiracy to 
 become her husband, Miss Blakeney sat between a 
 guardsman and a diplomatist, carrying on the war in 
 her usual trenchant and triumphant fashion. She 
 looked exceedingly handsome — that Maud could not 
 but admit. With no intention of becoming respon- 
 sible for her manners, he would even have admired, 
 as he often had done, her skilful coquetries and adroit 
 displays of the beauty with which nature had en- 
 dowed her. She succeeded, Maud thought, in giving 
 both of her admirers the apparent preference (appa- 
 rent to themselves, that is to say), and considering her 
 vis-a-vis worth a chance shaft at least, she honored 
 that very attentive gentleman with such occasional 
 notice, as, under other circumstances, would have 
 been far from disagreeable. It might have worn a 
 
 better grace, however, coming from simple Miss 
 Blakeney. From the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud, he 
 could have wished those pretty inveiglements very 
 much reduced and modified. 
 
 At his side, the while, sweet Mabel Brown carried 
 on with him a conversation, which to the high tone 
 of merriment opposite, was like the intermitted mur- 
 mur of a brook heard in the pauses of merry instru- 
 ments. At the same time that nothing brilliant or 
 gay seemed to escape her notice, she toned her own 
 voice and flow of thought so winningly below the ex- 
 citement around her, that Maud, who was sensible of 
 every indication of superiority, could not but pay her 
 a silent tribute of admiration. " If this were but the 
 heiress !" he ejaculated inwardly. But Mabel Brown 
 was a dependant. 
 
 Coffee was served. 
 
 The door at the end of the long saloon was sud- 
 denly thrown open, and as every eye turned to gaze 
 into the blazing ballroom, a march with the full power 
 of the band burst upon the ear. 
 
 The diplomatist who had been sitting at the side 
 
 | of Miss Blakeney was a German, and a waltzer comme 
 
 \\ily en a peu. At the bidding of Lady Beckton, he 
 
 | put his arm around the waist of the heiress, and bore 
 
 ||her away to the delicious music of Strauss, and, by 
 
 ! general consent, the entire floor was left to this pair 
 
 i: for a dozen circles. Miss Blakeney was passionately 
 
 i; fond of waltzing, and built for it, like a Baltimore 
 
 clipper for running close to the wind. If she had a 
 
 fault that her friends were afraid to jog her memory 
 
 about, it was the wearing her dresses a flounce too 
 
 short. Her feet and ankles were Fenella's own, while 
 
 her figure and breezy motion would have stolen En- 
 
 dymion from Diana. She waltzed too well for a 
 
 lady — all but well enough for a premiere danseuse de 
 
 Vopera. Lady Beckton was a shrewd woman, but 
 
 she made a mistake in crying " encore /" when this 
 
 single couple stopped from their admired pas de deux. 
 
 She thought Maud was just the man to be captivated 
 
 by that display. But the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud 
 
 must not have ankles for general admiration. Oh, no ! 
 
 Maud wished to efface the feeling this exhibition 
 had caused by sharing in the excitement. 
 
 " Miss Brown," he said, as two or three couples 
 went off, "permit me the happiness of one turn!" 
 and, scarce waiting for an answer, he raised his arm 
 to encircle her waist. 
 
 Mabel took his hands, and playfully laid them 
 across each other on his own breast in an attitude of 
 resignation. 
 
 " I never waltz," she said. "But don't think me 
 a prude ! I don't consider it wrong in those who 
 think it right." 
 
 "But with this music tugging at your heels!" said 
 Maud, who did not care to express how much he ad- 
 mired the delicacy of her distinction. 
 
 "Ah, with a husband or a brother, I should think 
 one could scarce resist bounding away; but I can 
 not — " 
 
 " Can not what ? — can not take me for either ?" in- 
 terrupted Maud, with an air of affected malice that 
 covered a very strong desire to ask the question in 
 earnest. 
 
 She turned her eyes suddenly upon him with a rapid 
 look of inquiry, and, slightly coloring, fixed her at- 
 tention silently on the waltzers. 
 
 Lady Beckton came, making her way through the 
 crowd/ She touched Maud on the arm. 
 
 •"Hold hook and line!'— is it not?" she said, in a 
 whisper. 
 
 After an instant's hesitation, Maud answered> 
 "Yes!" — but pages, often, would not suffice to ex- 
 press all that passes through the mind in "an instant's 
 hesitation." All Lindsay Maud's prospects and cir- 
 i cumstances were reviewed in that moment ; all his 
 
524 
 
 THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 
 
 many steps by which he had arrived at the conclusion 
 that marriage with him must be a matter of convenance 
 merely ; all his put-down impulses and built-up reso- 
 lutions ; all his regrets, consolations, and offsets; all 
 his better and worser feelings ; all his former loves 
 (and in that connexion, strangely enough, Mabel 
 Brown) ; all his schemes, in short, for smothering his 
 pain in the sacrifice of his heart, and making the 
 most of the gain to his pocket, passed before him in 
 that half minute's review. But he said " Yes !" 
 
 The Blakeney carriage was dismissed that night, 
 with orders to bring certain dressing-maids and cer- 
 tain sequents of that useful race, on the following 
 morning to Beckton Park, and the three persons who 
 composed the Blakeney party, an old aunt, Miss 
 Blakeney, and Mabel Brown, went quietly to bed un- 
 der the hospitable roof of Lady Beckton. 
 
 How describe (and what need of it, indeed !) a week 
 at an English country-house, with all its age of 
 chances for loving and hating, its eternity of oppor- 
 tunities for all that hearts can have to regulate in this 
 shorthand life of ours? Let us come at once to the 
 closing day of this visit. 
 
 Maud lay late abed on the day that the Blakeneys 
 were to leave Beckton Park. Fixed from morning 
 till night in the firm resolution at which he had ar- 
 rived with so much trouble and self-control, he was 
 dreaming from night till morning of a felicity in 
 which Miss Blakeney had little share. He wished 
 the marriage could be all achieved in the signing of a 
 bond. He found that he had miscalculated his phi- 
 losophy in supposing that he could venture to loose 
 thought and revery upon the long-forbidden subject 
 of marriage. In all the scenes eternally being con- 
 jured up to his fancy — scenes of domestic life — the 
 bringing of Miss Blakeney into the picture was an 
 after effort. Mabel Brown stole into it, spite of him- 
 self — the sweetest and dearest feature of that enchant- 
 ing picture, in its first warm coloring by the heart. 
 But, day by day, he took the place assigned him by 
 Lady Beckton at the side of Miss Blakeney, riding, 
 driving, dining, strolling, with reference to being near 
 her only, and still scarce an hour could pass in which, 
 spite of all effort to the contrary, he did not betray 
 his passionate interest in Mabel Brown. 
 
 He arose and breakfasted. Lady Beckton and the 
 young ladies were bonneted and ready for a stroll in 
 the park woods, and her ladyship came and whispered 
 in Maud's ear, as he leaned over his coffee, that he 
 must join them presently, and that she had prepared 
 Miss Blakeney for an interview with him, which she 
 would arrange as they rambled. 
 
 " Take no refusal !" were her parting words as she 
 stepped out upon the verandah. 
 
 Maud strolled leisurely toward the rendezvous in- 
 dicated by Lady Beckton. He required all the time 
 he could get to confirm his resolutions and recover 
 his usual maintien of repose. With his mind made 
 up at last, and a face in which few would have read 
 the heart in fetters beneath, he jumped a wicker- 
 fence, and, by a cross path, brought the ladies in 
 view. They were walking separately, but as his foot- 
 steps were heard, Lady Beckton slipped her arm into 
 Miss Brown's, and commenced apparently a very ear- 
 nest undertone of conversation. Miss Blakeney 
 turned. Her face glowed with exercise, and Maud 
 confessed to himself that he rarely had seen so beau- 
 tiful a woman. 
 
 "You are come in time, Mr. Maud," she said, "for 
 something is going on between my companions from 
 which I am excluded." 
 
 "En revanche, suppose we have our little exclusive 
 secret!" said Maud, offering his arm. 
 
 Miss Blakeney colored slightly, and consented to 
 obey the slight resistance of his arm by which they 
 fell behind. A silence of a few moments followed, 
 
 for if the proposed secret were a proposal of mar- 
 riage, it had been too bluntly approached. Maud felt 
 that he must once more return to indifferent topics, 
 and lead on the delicate subject at his lips with more 
 tact and preparation. 
 
 They rose a slight elevation in the walk which over- 
 looked the wilder confines of the park. A slight 
 smoke rose from a clump of trees, indicating an in- 
 trusion of gipsies within, and the next instant, a deep- 
 mouthed bark rang out before them, and the two la- 
 dies came rushing back in violent terror, assailed at 
 every step of their flight by a powerful and infuriated 
 mastiff. Maud ran forward immediately, and suc- 
 ceeded in driving the dog back to the tents; but on his 
 return he found only the terrified Mabel, who, lean- 
 ing against a tree, and partly recovered from her 
 breathless flight, was quietly awaiting him. 
 
 " Here is a change of partners as my heart would 
 have it !" thought Maud, as he drew her slight arm 
 within his own. " The transfer looks to me like the 
 interposition of my good angel, and I accept the 
 warning!" 
 
 And in words that needed no management to bring 
 them skilfully on — with the eloquence of a heart re- 
 leased from fetters all but intolerable, and from a 
 threatened slavery for life — Lindsay Maud poured 
 out the fervent passion of his heart to Mabel Brown. 
 The crust of a selfish and artificial life broke up in 
 the tumult of that declaration, and he found himself 
 once more natural and true to the instincts and better 
 impulses of his character. He was met with the 
 trembling response that such pure love looks for 
 when it finds utterance, and without a thought of 
 worldly calculation, or a shadow of a scheme for their 
 means and manner of life, they exchanged promises 
 to which the subsequent ceremony of marriage was 
 but the formal seal. 
 
 And at the announcement of this termination to 
 her matrimonial schemes, Lady Beckton seemed 
 much more troubled than Miss Blakeney. 
 
 But Lady Beckton's disappointment was somewhat 
 modified when she discovered that Miss Blakeney had 
 long before secretly endowed her adopted sister Ma- 
 bel with the half of her fortune. 
 
 THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 
 
 The Emperor Yuentsoong, of the dynasty Chow, 
 was the most magnificent of the long-descended suc- 
 cession of Chinese sovereigns. On his first accession 
 to the throne, his character was so little understood, 
 that a conspiracy was set on foot among the yellow- 
 caps, or eunuchs, to put out his eyes, and place upon 
 the throne the rebel Szema, in whose warlike hands, 
 they asserted, the empire would more properly main- 
 tain its ancient glory. The gravity and reserve which 
 these myrmidons of the palace had construed into 
 stupidity and fear, soon assumed another complexion, 
 however. The eunuchs silently disappeared ; the 
 mandarins and princes whom they had seduced from 
 their allegiance, were made loyal subjects by a gen- 
 erous pardon ; and in a few days after the period fixed 
 upon for the consummation of the plot, Yuentsoong 
 set forth in complete armor at the head of his troops 
 to give battle to the rebel in the mountains. 
 
 In Chinese annals this first enterprise of the youth- 
 ful Yuentsoong is recorded with great pomp and par- 
 ticularity. Szema was a Tartar prince of uncommon 
 ability, young like the emperor, and, during the few 
 last imbecile years of the old sovereign, he had gath- 
 ered strength in his rebellion, till now he was at the 
 head of ninety thousand men, all soldiers of repute 
 
THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 
 
 525 
 
 and tried valor. The historian has unfortunately 
 dimmed the emperor's fame to European eyes, by at- 
 tributing his wonderful achievements in this expe- 
 dition to his superiority in arts of magic. As this ac- 
 count of his exploits is only prefatory to our tale, we 
 will simply give the reader an idea of the style of the 
 historian, by translating literally a passage or two of 
 his description of the battle : — 
 
 "Szema now took refuge within a cleft of the 
 mountain, and Yuentsoong, upon his swift steed, out- 
 stripping the body-guard in his ardor, dashed amid 
 the paralyzed troops with poised spear, his eyes fixed 
 only on the rebel. There was a silence of an instant, 
 broken only by the rattling hoofs of the intruder, and 
 then, with dishevelled hair and waving sword, Szema 
 uttered a fearful imprecation. In a moment the wind 
 rushed, the air blackened, and with the suddenness of 
 a fallen rock, a large cloud enveloped the rebel, and 
 innumerable men and horses issued out of it. Wings 
 flapped against the eyes of the emperor's horse, hel- 
 lish noises screamed in his ears, and, completely be- 
 yond control, the animal turned and fled back through 
 the narrow pass, bearing his imperial master safe into 
 the heart of his army. 
 
 "Yuentsoong, that night, commanded some of his 
 most expert soldiers to scale the beetling heights of 
 the ravine, bearing upon their backs the blood of 
 Bwine, sheep, and dogs, with other impure things, and 
 these they were ordered to shower upon the combat- 
 ants at the sound of the imperial clarion. On the fol- 
 lowing morning, Szema came forth again to offer bat- 
 tie, with flags displayed, drums beating, and shouts 
 of triumph and defiance. As on the day previous, the 
 bold emperor divided, in his impatience, rank after 
 rank of his own soldiery, and, followed closely by his 
 body-guard, drove the rebel army once more into their 
 fastness. Szema sat upon his warhorse as before, in- 
 trenched amid his officers and ranks of the tallest Tar- 
 tar spearmen, and as the emperor contended hand to 
 hand with one of the opposing rebels, the magic im- 
 precation was again uttered, the air again filled with 
 cloudy horsemen and chariots, and the mountain sha- 
 ken with discordant thunder. Backing his willing 
 steed, the emperor blew a long sharp note upon his 
 silver clarion, and in an instant the sun broke through 
 \he darkness, and the air seemed filled with paper men, 
 Oorses of straw, and phantoms dissolving into smoke. 
 Yuentsoong and Szema now stood face to face, with 
 only mortal aid and weapons." 
 
 The historian goes on to record that the two armies 
 suspended hostilities at the command of their leaders, 
 and that the emperor and his rebel subject having en- 
 gaged in single combat, Yuentsoong was victorious, 
 and returned to his capital with the formidable enemy, 
 whose life he had spared, riding beside him like a 
 brother. The conqueror's career, for several years 
 after this, seems to have been a series of exploits of 
 personal valor, and the Tartar prince shared in all his 
 dangers and pleasures, his inseparable friend. It was 
 during this period of romantic friendship that the 
 events occurred which have made Yuentsoong one of 
 the idols of Chinese poetry. 
 
 By the side of a lake in a distant province of the 
 empire, stood one of the imperial palaces of pleasure, 
 seldom visited, and almost in ruins. Hither, in one 
 of his moody periods of repose from war, came the 
 conqueror Yuentsoong, for the first time in years sep- 
 arated from his faithful Szema. In disguise, and 
 with only one or two attendants, he established him- 
 self in the long silent halls of his ancestor Tsinche- 
 mong, and with his boat upon the lake, and his spear 
 in the forest, seemed to find all the amusement of 
 which his melancholy was susceptible. On a certain 
 day in the latter part of April, the emperor had set 
 his sail to a fragrant south wind, and reclining on the 
 cushions of his bark, watched the shore as it softly 
 
 and silently glided past, and, the lake being entirely 
 encircled by the imperial forest, he felt immersed in 
 what he believed to be the solitude of a deserted par- 
 adise. After skirting the fringed sheet of water in 
 this manner for several hours, he suddenly observed 
 that he had shot through a streak of peach-blossoms 
 floating from the shore, and at the same moment he 
 became conscious that his boat was slightly headed 
 off by a current setting outward. Putting up his 
 helm, he returned to the spot, and beneath the droop- 
 ing branches of some luxuriant willows, thus early in 
 leaf, he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which, but 
 for the floating blossoms it brought to the lake, would 
 have escaped the notice of the closest observer. The 
 emperor now lowered his sail, unshipped the slender 
 mast, and betook him to the ours, and as the current 
 was gentle, and the inlet wider within the mouth, he 
 sped rapidly on, through what appeared to be but a 
 lovely and luxuriant vale of the forest. Still, those 
 blushing betrayers of some flowering spot beyond, 
 extended like a rosy clue before him, and with im- 
 pulse of muscles swelled and indurated in warlike ex- 
 ercise, the swift keel divided the besprent mirror wind- 
 ing temptingly onward, and, for a long hour, the royal 
 oarsman untiringly threaded this sweet vein of the 
 wilderness. 
 
 Resting a moment on his oars while the slender 
 bark still kept her way, he turned his head toward 
 what seemed to be an opening in the forest on the 
 left, and in the same instant the boat ran, head on, to 
 the shore, the inlet at this point almost doubling on 
 its course. Beyond, by the humming of bees, and 
 the singing of birds, there should be a spot more open 
 than the tangled wilderness he had passed, and disen- 
 gaging his prow from the alders, he shoved the boat 
 again into the stream, and pulled round a high rock, 
 by which the inlet seemed to have been compelled to 
 curve its channel. The edge of a bright green mead- 
 ow now stole into the perspective, and, still widening 
 with his approach, disclosed a slightly rising terrace 
 clustered with shrubs, and studded here and there 
 with vases ; and farther on, upon the same side of the 
 stream, a skirting edge of peach-trees, loaded with the 
 gay blossoms which had guided him hither. 
 
 Astonished at these signs of habitation in what was 
 well understood to be a privileged wilderness, Yuent- 
 soong kept his boat in mid-stream, and with his eyes 
 vigilantly on the alert, slowly made headway against 
 the current. A few strokes with his oars, however, 
 traced another curve of the inlet, and brought into 
 view a grove of ancient trees scattered over a gently 
 ascending lawn, beyond which, hidden by the river 
 till now by the projecting shoulder of a mound, lay a 
 small pavilion with gilded pillars, glittering like fairy 
 work in the sun. The emperor fastened his boat to a 
 tree leaning over the water, and with his short spear 
 in his hand, bounded upon the shore, and took his 
 way toward the shining structure, his heart beating 
 with a feeling of wonder and interest altogether new. 
 On a nearer approach, the bases of the pillars seemed 
 decayed by time, and the gilding weather-stained and 
 tarnished, but the trellised porticoes on the southern 
 aspect were laden with flowering shrubs, in vases of 
 porcelain, and caged birds sang between the pointed 
 arches, and there were manifest signs of luxurious 
 taste, elegance, and care. 
 
 A moment, with an indefinable timidity, the em- 
 peror paused before stepping from the green sward 
 upon the marble floor of the pavilion, and in that 
 moment a curtain was withdrawn from the door, and 
 a female, with step suddenly arrested by the sight of 
 the stranger, stood motionless before him. Ravished 
 with her extraordinary beauty, and awe-struck with 
 the suddenness of the apparition and the novelty of 
 the adventure, the emperor's tongue cleaved to his 
 mouth, and ere he could summon resolution, even 
 
526 
 
 THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 
 
 for a gesture of courtesy, the fair creature had fled 
 within, and the curtain closed the entrance as before. 
 
 Wishing to recover his composure, so strangely 
 troubled, and taking it for granted that some other in- 
 mate of the house would soon appear, Yuentsoong 
 turned his steps aside to the grove, and with his head 
 bowed, and his spear in the hollow of his arm, tried 
 to recall more vividly the features of the vision he 
 had seen. He had walked but a few paces, when 
 there came toward him from the upper skirt of the 
 grove, a man of unusual stature and erectness, with 
 white hair, unbraided on his shoulders, and every sign 
 of age except infirmity of step and mien. The em- 
 peror's habitual dignity had now rallied, and on his 
 first salutation, the countenance of the old man soft- 
 ened, and he quickened his pace to meet and give him 
 welcome. 
 
 "You are noble?" he said, with confident inquiry. 
 
 Yuentsoong colored slightly. 
 
 " I am," he replied, " Lew-melin, a prince of the 
 empire." 
 
 "And by what accident here ?" 
 
 Yuentsoong explained the clue of the peach-blos- 
 soms, and represented himself as exiled for a time to 
 the deserted palace upon the lakes. 
 
 " I have a daughter," said the old man, abruptly, 
 "who has never looked on human face, save mine." 
 
 " Pardon me !" replied his visiter ; " I have thought- 
 lessly intruded on her sight, and a face more heavenly 
 fair — " 
 
 The emperor hesitated, but the old man smiled en- 
 couragingly. 
 
 "It is time," he said, "that I should provide a 
 younger defender for my bright Teh-leen, and Heaven 
 has sent you in the season of peach-blossoms, with 
 provident kindness.* You have frankly revealed to 
 me your name and rank. Before I offer you the hos- 
 pitality of my roof, I must tell you mine. I am 
 Choo-tseen, the outlaw, once of your own rank, and 
 the general of the Celestial army." 
 
 The emperor started, remembering that this cele- 
 brated rebel was the terror of his father's throne. 
 
 " You have heard my history," the old man con- 
 tinued. " I had been, before my rebellion, in charge 
 of the imperial palace on the lake. Anticipating an 
 evil day, I secretly prepared this retreat for my fami- 
 ly ; and when my soldiers deserted me at the battle of 
 Ke-chow, and a price was set upon my head, hither I 
 fled with my women and children ; and the last alive 
 is my beautiful Teh-leen. With this brief outline of 
 my life, you are at liberty to leave me as you came, 
 or to enter my house, on the condition that you be- 
 come the protector of my child." 
 
 The emperor eagerly turned toward the pavilion, 
 and, with a step as light as his own, the erect and 
 stately outlaw hastened to lift the curtain before him. 
 Leaving his guest for a moment in the outer apart- 
 ment, he entered to an inner chamber in search of his 
 daughter, whom he brought, panting with fear, and 
 blushing with surprise and delight, to her future lover 
 and protector. A portion of an historical tale so deli- 
 cate as the description of the heroine is not work for 
 imitators, however, and we must copy strictly the por- 
 trait of the matchless Teh-leen, as drawn by Le-pih, 
 the Anacreon of Chinese poetry, and the contempo- 
 rary and favorite of Yuentsoong. 
 
 " Teh-leen was born while the morning star shone 
 upon the bosom of her mother. Her eye was like 
 the unblemished blue lily, and its light like the white 
 gem unfractured. The plum-blossom is most fra- 
 grant when the cold has penetrated its stem, and the 
 mother of Teh-leen had known sorrow. The head 
 of her child drooped in thought, like a violet over- 
 laden with dew. Bewildering was Teh-leen. Her 
 
 * The season of peach-blossoms was the only season of 
 marriage in ancient China. 
 
 mouth's corners were dimpled, yet pensive. The 
 arch of her brows was like the vein in the tulip's 
 heart, and the lashes shaded the blushes on her cheek. 
 With the delicacy of a pale rose, her complexion put 
 to shame the floating light of day. Her waist, like a 
 thread in fineness, seemed ready to break ; yet was it 
 straight and erect, and feared not the fanning breeze ; 
 
 j and her shadowy grace was as difficult to delineate, as 
 the form of the white bird rising from the ground by 
 moonlight. The natural gloss of her hair resembled 
 
 j the uncertain sheen of calm water, yet without the 
 false aid of unguents. The native intelligence of her 
 mind seemed to have gained strength by retirement, 
 
 i and he who beheld her, thought not of her as human. 
 Of rare beauty, of rarer intellect was Teh-leen, and 
 her heart responded to the poet's lute." 
 
 We have not sp<ice, nor could we, without copying 
 directly from the admired Le-pih, venture to describe 
 the bringing of Teh-leen to court, and her surprise at 
 finding herself the favorite of the emperor. It is a 
 romantic circumstance, besides, which has had its 
 parallels in other countries. But the sad sequel to 
 the loves of poor Teh-leen is but recorded in the cold 
 page of history; and if the poet, who wound up the 
 climax of her perfections, with her susceptibility to 
 his lute, embalmed her sorrows in verse, he was prob- 
 ably too politic to bring it ever to light. Pass we to« 
 these neglected and unadorned passages of her history. 
 Yuentsoong's nature was passionately devoted and 
 confiding; and, like two brothers with one favorite 
 sister, lived together Teh-leen, Szema, and the emper- 
 or. The Tartar prince, if his heart knew a mistress 
 before the arrival of Teh-leen at the palace, owned 
 afterward no other than her; and fearless of check 
 or suspicion from the noble confidence and generous 
 
 | friendship of Yuentsoong, he seemed to live but for 
 her service, and to have neither energies nor ambition 
 except for the winning of her smiles. Szema was of 
 great personal beauty, frank when it did not serve him 
 to be wily, bold in his pleasures, and of manners al- 
 most femininely soft and voluptuous. He was re- 
 nowned as a soldier, and, for Teh-leen, he became a 
 poet and master of the lute ; and, like all men formed 
 for ensnaring the heart of women, he seemed to forget 
 himself in the absorbing devotion of his idolatry. His 
 friend, the emperor, was of another mould. Yuent- 
 soong's heart had three chambers — love, friendship, 
 and glory. Teh-leen was but a third in his existence, 
 yet he loved her — the sequel will show how well! In 
 person he was less beautiful than majestic, of large 
 stature, and with a brow and lip naturally stern and 
 lofty. He seldom smiled, even upon Teh-leen, whom 
 he would watch for hours in pensive and absorbed de- 
 light ; but his smile, when it did awake, broke over 
 his sad countenance like morning. All men loved and 
 honored Yuentsoong, and all men, except only the 
 emperor, looked on Szema with antipathy. To such 
 natures as the former, women give all honor and ap- 
 probation ; but for such as the latter, they reserve 
 their weakness ! 
 
 Wrapt up in his friend and mistress, and reserved 
 in his intercourse with his counsellors, Yuentsoong 
 knew not that, throughout the imperial city, Szema 
 was called " the liieu" or robber-bird, and his fair 
 Teh-leen openly charged with dishonor. Going out 
 alone to hunt as was his custom, and having left his 
 signet with Szema, to pass and repass through the 
 private apartments at his pleasure, his horse fell with 
 him unaccountably in the open field. Somewhat 
 superstitious, and remembering that good spirits some- 
 times " knit the grass," when other obstacles fail to 
 bar our way into danger, the emperor drew rein and 
 returned to his palace. It was an hour after noon, 
 and having dismissed his attendants at the city gate, 
 he entered by a postern to the imperial garden, and 
 bethought himself of the concealed couch in a cool 
 
THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS. 
 
 527 
 
 grot by a fountain (a favorite retreat, sacred to him- 
 self and Teh-leen), where he fancied it would be re- 
 freshing to sleep away the sultriness of the remaining 
 hours till evening. Sitting down by the side of the 
 murmuring fount, he bathed his feet, and left his slip- 
 pers on the lip of the basin to be unencumbered in 
 his repose within, and so with unechoing step entered 
 the resounding grotto. Alas! there slumbered the 
 faithless friend with the guilty Teh-leen upon his 
 bosom ! 
 
 Grief struck through the noble heart of the em- 
 peror like a sword in cold blood. With a word he 
 could consign to torture and death the robber of his 
 honor, but there was agony in his bosom deeper than 
 revenge. He turned silently away, recalled his horse 
 and huntsmen, and, outstripping all, plunged on 
 through the forest till night gathered around him. 
 
 Yuentsoong had been absent many days from his 
 capitol, and his subjects were murmuring their fears 
 for his safety, when a messenger arrived to the coun- 
 sellors informing them of the appointment of the 
 captive Tartar prince to the government of the pro- 
 vince of Szechuen, the second honor of the Celestial 
 empire. A private order accompanied the announce- 
 ment, commanding the immediate departure of Szema 
 for the scene of his new authority. Inexplicable as 
 was this riddle to the multitude, there were those who 
 read it truly by their knowledge of the magnanimous 
 soul of the emperor; and among these was the crafty 
 object of his generosity. Losing no time, he set for- 
 ward with great pomp for Szechuen, and in their joy 
 to see him no more in the palace, the slighted princes 
 of the empire forgave his unmerited advancement. 
 Yuentsoong returned to his capitol ; but to the terror 
 of his counsellors and people, his hair was blanched 
 white as the head of an old man ! He was pale as 
 well, but he was cheerful and kind beyond his wont, 
 and to Teh-leen untiring in pensive and humble at- 
 tentions. He pleaded only impaired health and rest- 
 less slumbers as an apology for nights of solitude. 
 Once, Teh-leen penetrated to his lonely chamber, but 
 by the dim night lamp she saw that the scroll over her 
 window* was changed, and instead of the stimulus to 
 glory which formerly hung in golden letters before 
 his eyes, there was a sentence written tremblingly in 
 black :— 
 u The close wing of love covers the death-throb of honor." 
 
 Six months from this period the capitol was thrown 
 into a tumult with the intelligence that the province 
 of Szechuen was in rebellion, and Szema at the head 
 of a numerous army on his way to seize the throne 
 of Yuentsoong. This last sting betrayed the serpent 
 even to the forgiving emperor, and tearing the reptile 
 at last from his heart, he entered with the spirit of 
 other times into the warlike preparations. The im- 
 perial army was in a few days on its march, and at 
 Keo-yang the opposing forces met and prepared for 
 encounter. 
 
 With a dread of the popular feeling toward Teh- 
 leen, Yuentsoong had commanded for her a close 
 litter, and she was borne after the imperial standard in 
 the centre of the army. On the eve before the battle, 
 ere the watch-fires were lit, the emperor came to 
 her tent, set apart from his own, and with the delicate 
 care and kind gentleness from which he never varied, 
 inquired how her wants were supplied, and bade her, 
 thus early, farewell for the night ; his own custom of 
 
 •The most common decorations of rooms, halls, and tem- 
 ples, in China, arc ornamental scrolls or labels of colored paper, 
 or wood, painted and gilded, and hunsr over doors or windows, 
 and inscribed with a line or couplet conveying some allusion 
 to the circumstances of the inhabitant, or some pious or phi- 
 losophical axiom. For instance, a poetical one recorded by 
 Dr. .Morrison : — 
 
 " From the pine forest the azute dragon awrnds to the milky way," 
 
 typical of the prosperous man arising to wealth and honors. 
 
 passing among his soldiers on the evening previous to 
 an engagement, promising to interfere with what was 
 usually his last duty before retiring to his couch. 
 Teh-leen on this occasion seemed moved by some 
 irrepressible emotion, and as he rose to depart, she fell 
 forward upon her face, and bathed his feet with her 
 tears. Attributing it to one of those excesses of feel- 
 ing to which all, but especially hearts ill at ease, are 
 j liable, the noble monarch gently raised her, and, wiih 
 repeated efforts at reassurance, committed her to the 
 j hands of her women. His own heart beat far from 
 I tranquilly, for, in the excess of his pity for her grief 
 he had unguardedly called her by one of the sweet 
 names of their early days of love — strange word now 
 upon his lip — and it brought back, spite of memory 
 and truth, happiness that would not be forgotten ! 
 It was past midnight, and the moon was riding high 
 j in heaven, when the emperor, returning between the 
 j lengthening watch-fires, sought the small lamp which, 
 i suspended like a star above his own tent, guided him 
 l back from the irregular mazes of the camp. Paled 
 i by the intense radiance of the moonlight, the small 
 globe of alabaster at length became apparent to his 
 weary eye, and with one glance at the peaceful beauty 
 of the heavens, he parted the curtained door beneath 
 it, and stood within. The Chinese historian asserts 
 that a bird, from whose wing Teh-leen had once 
 plucked an arrow, restoring it to liberty and life, and 
 in grateful attachment to her destiny, removed the 
 lamp from the imperial tent, and suspended it over 
 hers. The emperor stood beside her couch. Startled 
 j at his inadvertent error, he turned to retire ; but the 
 lifted curtain let in a flood of moonlight upon the 
 sleeping features of Teh-leen, and like dew-drops, the 
 | undried tears glistened in her silken lashes. A lamp 
 j burned faintly in the inner apartment of the tent, and 
 her attendants slept soundly. His soft heart gave 
 way. Taking up the lamp, he held it over his beau- 
 tiful mistress, and once more gazed passionately and 
 unrestrainedly on her unparalleled beauty. The 
 past — the early past — was alone before him. He for- 
 ! gave her — there, as she slept, unconscious of the 
 throbbing of his injured, but noble heart, so close 
 beside her — he forgave her in the long silent abysses 
 of his soul ! Unwilling to wake her from her tran- 
 quil slumber, but promising to himself, from that hour, 
 such sweets of confiding love as had well nigh been 
 lost to him for ever, he imprinted one kiss upon the 
 parted lips of Teh-leen, and sought his couch for 
 slumber. 
 
 Ere daybreak the emperor was aroused by one of 
 his attendants with news too important for delay. 
 Szema, the rebel, had been arrested in the imperial 
 camp, disguised, and on his way back to his own 
 forces, and like wildfire, the information had spread 
 among the soldiery, who, in a state of mutinous 
 excitement, were with difficulty restrained from rush- 
 ing upon the tent of Teh-leen. At the door of his 
 tent, Yuentsoong found messengers from the alarmed 
 princes and officers of the different commands, implo- 
 ring immediate aid and the imperial presence to allay 
 the excitement, and while the emperor prepared to 
 mount his horse, the guard arrived with the Tartar 
 prince, ignominiously tied, and bearing marks of 
 rough usage from his indignant captors. 
 
 " Loose him !" cried the emperor, in a voice of 
 thunder. 
 
 The cords were severed, and with a glance whose 
 ferocity expressed no thanks, Szema reared himself 
 up to his fullest height, and looked scornfully around 
 him. Daylight had now broke, and as the group 
 stood upon an eminence in sight of the whole army, 
 shouts began to ascend, and the armed multitude, 
 breaking through all restraint, rolled in toward the 
 centre. Attracted by the commotion, Yuentsoong 
 turned to give some orders to those near him, when 
 
528 
 
 THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY. 
 
 Szema suddenly sprang upon an officer of the guard, 
 wrenched his drawn sword from his grasp, and in an 
 instant was lost to sight in the tent of Teh-leen. A 
 sharp scream, a second of thought, and forth again 
 rushed the desperate murderer, with his sword flinging 
 drops of drops of blood, and ere a foot stirred in the 
 paralyzed group, the avenging cimeter of Yuentsoong 
 had cleft him to the chin. 
 
 A hush, as if the whole army was struck dumb by 
 a bolt from heaven, followed this rapid tragedy. 
 Dropping the polluted sword from his hand, the 
 emperor, with uncertain step, and the pallor of death 
 upon his countenance, entered the fatal tent. 
 
 He came no more forth that day. The army was 
 marshalled by the princes, and the rebels were routed 
 with great slaughter; but Yuentsoong never more 
 wielded sword. " He pined to death," says the histo- 
 rian, " with the wane of the same moon that shone 
 upon the forgiveness of Teh-leen." 
 
 THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY; 
 
 OR, THE DARING LOVER. 
 
 A grisette is something else beside a "mean girl" 
 or a "gray gown," the French dictionary to the contra- 
 ry notwithstanding. Bless me ! you should see the 
 griset'es of Rochepot ! And if you wished to take a 
 lesson in political compacts, you should understand 
 the grisette confederacy of Rochepot ! They were 
 working-girls, it is true — dressmakers, milliners, shoe- 
 binders, tailoresses, flowermakers, embroideresses — 
 and they never expected to be anything more aristo- 
 cratic. And in that content lay their power. 
 
 The grisettes of Rochepot were a good fourth of 
 the female population. They had their jealousies, 
 and little scandals, and heart-burnings, and plottings, 
 and counterplottings (for they were women) among 
 themselves. But they made common cause against 
 the enemy. They would bear no disparagement. 
 They knew exactly what was due to them, and what 
 was due to their superiors, and they paid and gave 
 credit in the coin of good manners, as can not be done 
 in countries of "liberty and equality." Still there 
 were little shades of difference in the attention shown 
 them by their employers, and they worked twice as 
 much in a day when sewing for Madame Durozel, 
 who took her dinner with them, sans f aeon in the 
 work-room, as for old Madame Chiquette, who dined 
 all alone in her grand saloon, and left them to eat by 
 themselves among their shreds and scissors. But 
 these were not slights which they seriously resented. 
 Wo only to the incautious dame who dared to scan- 
 dalize one of their number, or dispute her dues, or 
 encroach upon her privileges ! They would make 
 Rochepot as uncomfortable for her, parhleu ! as a 
 kettle to a slow-boiled lobster. 
 
 But the prettiest grisette of Rochepot was not often 
 permitted to join her companions in their self-chap- 
 eroned excursions on the holydays. Old Dame 
 Pomponney was the sexton's widow, and she had the 
 care of the great clock of St. Roch, and of one only 
 daughter; and excellent care she took of both her 
 charges. They lived all three in the belfry — dame, 
 clock, and daughter — and it was a bright day for 
 Thenais when she got out of hearing of that " lick, 
 tick, tick," and of the thumping of her mother's 
 cane on the long staircase, which always kept time 
 with it. 
 
 Not that old Dame Pomponney had any objection 
 to have her daughter -convenably married. She had 
 been deceived in her youth (or so it was whispered) 
 
 by a lover above her condition, and she vowed, by thi 
 cross on her cane, that her daughter should have no 
 sweetheart above a journeyman mechanic. Now tht 
 romance of the grisettes (parlons bas .') was to have 
 one charming little flirtation with a gentleman before 
 they married the leather-apron — just to show that, 
 had they by chance been born ladies, they could have 
 played their part to the taste of their lords. But it 
 was at this game that Dame Pomponney had burnt her 
 fingers, and she had this one subject for the exercise 
 of her powers of mortal aversion. 
 
 When I have added that, four miles from Roche 
 pot, stood the chateau de Brevanne, and that the old 
 Count de Brevanne was a proud aristocrat of the an 
 cien regime, with one son, the young Count Felix, 
 whom he had educated at Paris, I think I have pre- 
 pared you tolerably for the little romance I have to 
 tell you. 
 
 It was a fine Sunday morning that a mounted hus- 
 sar appeared in the street of Rochepot. The grisettes 
 were all abroad in their holyday parure, and the gay 
 soldier soon made an acquaintance with one of them 
 at the door of the inn, and informed her that he had 
 been sent on to prepare the old barracks for his troop. 
 The hussars were to be quartered a month at Roche- 
 pot. Ah ! what a joyous bit of news ! And six offi- 
 cers beside the colonel! And the trumpeters were 
 miracles at playing quadrilles and waltzes ! And not 
 a plain man in the regiment — except always the 
 speaker. And none, except the old colonel, had ever 
 been in love in his life. But as this last fact required 
 to be sworn to, of course he was ready to kiss the 
 book — or, in the absence of the book, the next most 
 sacred object of his adoration. 
 
 " Finissez done, Monsieur .'" exclaimed his pretty 
 listener, and away she ran to spread the welcome in- 
 telligence with its delightful particulars. 
 
 The next day the troop rode into Rochepot, and 
 formed in the great square in front of St. Roch; and 
 by the time the trumpeters had played themselves red 
 in the face, the hussars were all appropriated, to a 
 man — for the grisettes knew enough of a marching 
 regiment to lose no time. They all found leisure to 
 pity poor Thenais, however, for there she stood in 
 one of the high windows of the belfry, looking down 
 on the gay crowd below, and they knew very well 
 that old Dame Pomponney had declared all soldiers 
 to be gay deceivers, and forbidden her daughter to 
 stir into the street while they were quartered at 
 Rochepot. 
 
 Of course the grisettes managed to agree as to each 
 other's selection of a sweetheart from the troop, and 
 of course each hussar thankfully accepted the pair of 
 eyes that fell to him. For, aside from the limited 
 duration of their stay, soldiers are philosophers, and 
 know that "life is short," and it is better to " take the 
 goods the gods provide." But " after everybody was 
 helped," as they say at a feast, there appeared another 
 short jacket and foraging cap, very much to the re- 
 lief of red-headed Susette, the shoebinder, who had 
 been left out in the previous allotment. And Susette 
 made the amiable accordingly, but to no purpose, for 
 the lad seemed an idiot with but one idea — looking 
 for ever at St. Roch's clock to know the time of day ! 
 The grisettes laughed and asked their sweethearts his 
 name, but they significantly pointed to their foreheads 
 and whispered something about poorRobertin's being 
 a privileged follower of the regiment and a protege of 
 the colonel. 
 
 Well, the grisettes flirted, and the old clock of St. 
 Roch ticked on, and Susette and Thenais, the plain- 
 est and the prettiest girl in the village, seemed the 
 only two who were left out in the extra dispensation 
 of lovers. And poor Robertin still persisted in oc- 
 cupying most of his leisure with watching the time 
 of day. 
 
THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY. 
 
 529 
 
 It was on the Sunday morning after the arrival of 
 the troop that old Dame Pomponney went up, as 
 usual, to do her Sunday's duty in winding up the 
 clock. She had previously locked the belfry door to 
 be sure that no one entered below while she was 
 above ; but— the Virgin help us ! — on the top stair, 
 gazing into the machinery of the clock with absorbed 
 attention, sat one of those devils of hussars ! " Thief," 
 " vagabond," and " house-breaker," were the most 
 moderate epithets with which Dame Pomponney ac- 
 companied the enraged beating of her stick on the 
 resounding platform. She was almost beside herself 
 with rage. And Thenais had been up to dust the 
 wheels of the clock ! And how did she know that 
 that scclerat of a trooper was not there all the time! 
 
 But the intruder, whose face had been concealed 
 till now, turned suddenly round and began to gibber 
 and grin like a possessed monkey. He pointed at the 
 clock, imitated the "tick, tick, tick," laughed till the 
 big bell gave out an echo like a groan, and then sud- 
 denly jumped over the old dame's stick and ran down 
 stairs. 
 
 "Eh, Sainte Viei ge .'" exclaimed the old dame, " it's 
 a poor idiot after all ! And he has stolen up to see 
 what made the clock tick ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! Well ! — 
 well ! I can not come up these weary stairs twice a 
 day, and I must witid up the clock before I go down 
 to let him out. • Tick, tick, tick!' — poor lad ! poor 
 ad! They must have dressed him up to make fun 
 of him — those vicious troopers ! Well ! — well !" 
 
 And with pity in her heart, Dame Pomponney hob- 
 bled down, stair after stair, to her chamber in the 
 square turret of the belfry, and there she found the 
 poor idiot on his knees before Thenais, and Thenais 
 was just preparing to put a skein of thread over his 
 thumbs, for she thought she might make him useful 
 and amuse him with the winding of it till her mother 
 came down. But as the thread got vexatiously en- 
 tangled, and the poor lad sat as patiently as a wooden 
 reel, and it was time to go below to mass, the dame 
 thought she might as well leave him there till she 
 came back, and down she stumped, locking the door 
 very safely behind her. 
 
 Poor Thenais was very lonely in the belfry, and 
 Dame Pomponney, who had a tender heart where her 
 duty was not involved, rather rejoiced when she re- 
 turned, to find an unusual glow of delight on her 
 daughter's cheek ; and if Thenais could find so much 
 pleasure in the society of a poor idiot lad, it was a 
 sign, too, that her heart was not gone altogether after 
 those abominable troopers. It was time to send the 
 innocent youth about his business, however, so she 
 gave him a holyday cake and led him down stairs and 
 dismissed him with a pat on his back and a strict in- 
 junction never to venture again up to the " tick, tick, 
 tick." But as she had had a lesson as to the acces- 
 sibility of her bird's nest, she determined thenceforth 
 to lock the door invariably and carry the key in her 
 pocket. 
 
 ' While poor Robertin was occupied with his re- 
 searches into the " tick, tick, tick," never absent a 
 day from the neighborhood of the tower, the more 
 fortunate hussars were planning to give the grisettes 
 a fete champetre. One of the saints' days was coining 
 round, and, the weather permitting, all the vehicles 
 of the village were to be levied, and, with the troop- 
 horses in harness, they were to drive to a small wood- 
 ed valley in the neighborhood of the chateau de 
 Brevanne, where seclusion and a mossy carpet of 
 grass were combined in a little paradise for such en- 
 joyment. 
 
 The morning of this merry day dawned, at last, 
 and the grisettes and their admirers were stirring be- 
 times, for they were to breakfast sur Vherbe, and they 
 were not the people to turn breakfast into dinner. The 
 sky was clear, and the dew was not verv heavy on the 
 34 
 
 grass, and merrily the vehicles rattled about the town, 
 picking up their fair freights from its obscurest cor- 
 ners. But poor Thenais looked out, a sad prisoner, 
 from her high window in the belfry. 
 
 It was a half hour after sunrise and Dame Pompon- 
 ney was creeping up stairs after her matins, thanking 
 Heaven that she had been firm in her refusals — at 
 least twenty of the grisettes having gathered about 
 her, and pleaded for a day's freedom for her imprison- 
 ed daughter. She rested on the last landing but one 
 to take a little breath — but hark ! — a man's voice talk- 
 ing in the belfry ! She listened again, and quietly 
 slipped her feet out of her high-heeled shoes. The 
 voice was again audible — yet how could it be ! She 
 knew that no one could have passed up the stair, for 
 the key had been kept in her pocket more carefully 
 than usual, and, save by the wings of one of her own 
 pigeons, the belfry window was inaccessible, she was 
 sure. Still the voice went on in a kind of pleading 
 murmur, and the dame stole softly up in her stock- 
 ings, and noiselessly opened the door. There stood 
 Thenais at the window, but she was alone in the room. 
 I At the same instant the voice was heard again, and 
 j sure now that one of those desperate hussars had 
 climbed the tower, and unable to control her rage at 
 ! the audacity of the attempt, Dame Pomponney clutch- 
 It ed her cane and rushed forward to aim a blow at the 
 military cap now visible at the sill of the window. 
 But at the same instant the head of the intruder was 
 | thrown back, and the gibbering and idiotic smile of 
 poor Robertin checked her blow in its descent, and 
 turned all her anger into pity. Poor, silly lad ! he 
 had contrived to draw up the garden ladder and place 
 it upon the roof of the stone porch below, to climb 
 and offer a flower to Thenais ! Not unwilling to have 
 her daughter's mind occupied with some other thought 
 than the forbidden excursion, the dame offered her 
 hand to Robertin and drew him gently in at the win- 
 dow. And as it was now market-time she bid The- 
 nais be kind to the poor boy, and locking the door 
 behind her, trudged contentedly off with her stick and 
 basket. 
 
 I am sorry to be obliged to record an act of filial 
 disobedience in the heroine of my story. An hour 
 after, Thenais was welcomed with acclamations as she 
 suddenly appeared with Robertin in the midst of the 
 merry party of grisettes. With Robertin — not as he 
 had hitherto been seen, his cap on the back of his 
 head and his under lip hanging loose like an idiot's — 
 but with Robertin, gallant, spirited, and gay, the hand- 
 somest of hussars, and the most joyous of companions. 
 And Thenais, spite of her hasty toilet and the cloud 
 of conscious disobedience which now and then shaded 
 her sweet smile, was, by many degrees, the belle of 
 the hour; and the palm of beauty, for once in the 
 world at least, was yielded without envy. The gri- 
 settes dearly love a bit of romance, too, and the cir- 
 cumventing of old Dame Pomponney by his ruse of 
 idiocy, and the safe extrication of the prettiest girl 
 of the village from that gloomy old tower, was quite 
 enough to make Robertin a hero, and his sweetheart 
 Thenais more interesting than a persecuted princess. 
 And, seated on the ground while their glittering 
 cavaliers served them with breakfast, the light-hearted 
 grisettes of Rochepot were happy enough to be en- 
 vied by their betters. But suddenly the sky darkened, 
 and a slight gust murmuring among the trees, an- 
 nounced the coming up of a summer storm. Sauve 
 qui peut ! The soldiers were used to emergencies, 
 and they had packed up and reloaded their cars and 
 were under way for shelter almost as soon as the 
 grisettes, and away they all fled toward the nearest 
 grange— one of the dependancies of the chateau de 
 Brevanne. 
 
 But Robertin, now, had suddenly become the di- 
 rector and ruling spirit of the festivities. The soldiers 
 
530 
 
 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 treated him with instinctive deference, the old farmer 
 of the grange hurried out with his keys and unlocked 
 the great storehouse, and disposed of the horses un- 
 der shelter ; and by the time the big drops began to 
 fall, the party were dancing gayly and securely on the 
 dry and smooth thrashing-floor, and the merry har- 
 mony of the martial trumpets and horns rang out far 
 and wide through the gathering tempest. 
 
 The rain began to come down very heavily, and the 
 clatter of a horse's feet in a rapid gallop was heard in 
 one of the pauses in the waltz. Some one seeking 
 shelter, no doubt. On went the bewitching music 
 again, and at this moment two or three couples ceased 
 waltzing, and the floor was left to Robertin and The- 
 nais, whose graceful motions drew all eyes upon them 
 in admiration. Smiling in each other's faces, and 
 wholly unconscious of any other presence than their 
 own, they whirled blissfully around — but there was 
 now another spectator. The horseman who had been 
 heard to approach, had silently joined the party, and 
 making a courteous gesture to signify that the dan- 
 cing was not to be interrupted, he smiled back the 
 courtesies of the pretty grisettes — for, aristocratic as 
 he was, he was a polite man to the sex, was the Count 
 de Brevanne. 
 
 "Felix !" he suddenly cried out, in a tone of sur- 
 prise and anger. 
 
 The music stopped at that imperative call, and 
 Robertin turned his eyes, astonished, in the direction 
 from which it came. 
 
 The name was repeated from lip to lip among the 
 grisettes, " Felix !" " Count Felix de Brevanne !" 
 
 But without deigning another word, the old man 
 pointed with his riding-whip to the farm-house. The 
 disguised count respectfully bowed his head, but held 
 Thenais by the hand and drew her gently with him. 
 
 "Leave her! disobedient boy!" exclaimed the 
 father. 
 
 But as Count Felix tightened his hold upon the 
 small hand he held, and Thenais tried to shrink back 
 from the advancing old man, old Dame Pomponney, 
 streaming with rain, broke in unexpectedly upon the 
 scene. 
 
 " Disgrace not your blood," said the Count de Bre- 
 vanne at that moment. 
 
 The offending couple stood alone in the centre of 
 the floor, and the dame comprehended that her daugh- 
 ter was disparaged. 
 
 "And who is disgraced by dancing with my daugh- 
 ter?" she screamed with furious gesticulation. 
 
 The old noble made no answer, but the grisettes, 
 in an under tone, murmured the name of Count 
 Felix ! 
 
 " Is it he — the changeling ! the son of a poor gar- 
 dener, that is disgraced by the touch of my daughter ?" 
 
 A dead silence followed this astounding exclama- 
 tion. The old dame had forgotten herself in her rage, 
 and she looked about with a terrified bewilderment— 
 but the mischief was done. The old man stood aghast. 
 Count Felix clung still closer to Thenais, but his 
 face expressed the most eager inquisitiveness. The 
 grisettes gathered around Dame Pomponney, and the 
 old count, left standing and alone, suddenly drew his 
 cloak about him and stepped forth into the rain ; and 
 in another moment his horse's feet were heard clat- 
 tering away in the direction of the chateau de Bre- 
 vanne. 
 
 We have but to tell the sequel. 
 
 The incautious revelation of the old dame turned 
 out to be true. The dying infant daughter of the 
 Marchioness de Brevanne had been changed for the 
 healthy son of the count's gardener, to secure an heir 
 to the name and estates of the nearly extinct family 
 of Brevanne. Dame Pomponney had assisted in 
 this secret, and but for her heart full of rage at the 
 moment, to which the old count's taunt was but the 
 
 last drop, the secret would probably have never been 
 revealed. Count Felix, who had played truant from 
 bis college at Paris, to come and hunt up some of his 
 childish playfellows, in disguise, had remembered and 
 disclosed himself to the little Thenais, who was not 
 sorry to recognise him, while he played the idiot in 
 the belfry. But of course there was now no obstacle 
 to their union, and united they were. The old count 
 pardoned him, and gave the new couple a portion of 
 his estate, and they named their first child Robertin, 
 as was natural enough. 
 
 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 KEPT ON A LATE VISIT TO ENGLAND. 
 
 Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight, 
 Evening of June 9th, 1839. 
 
 The bullet which preserves the perpendicular of 
 my cabin-lamp is at last still, 1 congratulate myself; 
 and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and 
 steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatet- 
 ic teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling wash- 
 basins and et-ceteras, have returned to a quiet life. 
 The creaking bulk-heads cry no more. I sit on a 
 trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and 
 paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety 
 and attention. I have no apology for not writing to 
 you, except want of event since we parted. There is 
 not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred 
 miles I have travelled. " Travelled !" said I. I am 
 as unconscious of having moved from the wave on 
 which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in 
 the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and 
 rolled from my left cheek to my right ; but as to any 
 feeling of having gone onward I am as unconscious 
 of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a 
 dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever 
 well upon it, can find material for thought. But for 
 one, I will sell, at sixpence a month, all copyhold 
 upon so much of my life as is destined "to the deep, 
 the blue, the black" (and whatever else he calls it) of 
 my friend the song-writer. 
 
 Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a 
 sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory 
 with a smile. Here and there a thought has come 
 to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the 
 elements — here and there a word has been said which 
 on shore should have been wit or good feeling — here 
 and there a good morning, responded to with an effort, 
 has, from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression 
 which will make to-morrow's parting phrases more 
 earnest than 1 had anticipated. — With this green isle 
 to windward, and the smell of earth and flowers com- 
 ing to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an in- 
 terest in several who have sailed with me. Humanity, 
 killed in me invariably by salt water, revives, I think, 
 with this breath of hawthorn. 
 
 The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed 
 ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel, 
 and that we have brought with us the first west wind 
 they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not 
 know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on 
 board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable 
 Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an 
 abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted 
 to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amuse- 
 ment of the passengers he met the steward's usual 
 demand for a fee with an application for a contribu- 
 tion to the funds of his society ! His expectations 
 
PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 531 
 
 from British sympathy are large, for he is accom- 
 panied by a lay brother " used to keeping accounts," 
 whose sole errand is to record the golden results of 
 his friend's eloquence. Bul"eigbl bells" warn me 
 to bed ; so when I have recorded the good qualities 
 of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her 
 captain, which are more, I will put out my sea-lamp 
 for the last time, and get into my premonitory " six 
 feet by two." 
 
 The George Inn, Portsmouth. — This is a morning 
 in which (under my circumstances) it would be diffi- 
 cult not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair 
 day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of 
 seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through 
 rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleas- 
 ant day/ Determined not to put myself in the way 
 of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest 
 hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an 
 elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to 
 stand between me and all" my annoyances of the 
 morning. He was to get my baggage through the 
 customs, submit for me to all the inevitable imposi- 
 tions of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach, 
 bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up 
 his services, all in one short phrase of I. s. d. So 
 putting my temper into my pocket, and making up 
 my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one i 
 day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts , 
 of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air 
 from iny stomach, and admire everything that came 
 in my way. I would recommend to all newly-landed 
 passengers from the packets to step up and accept of | 
 the sympathy of the oaks of the " king's bastion" in j 
 their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees, ! 
 leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their 
 boughs as usual to the landward, present to the sea- 
 ward exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea 
 and disgust, which is as expressive to the commonest ; 
 observer as a sick man's first look at his bolus. I ] 
 have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly 
 that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleas- 
 mt to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here 
 as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive 
 are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea; but 
 it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up its 
 nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively 
 every oak on the " king's bastion." 
 
 The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one 
 long alley of ornamented cottages — wood-bine creep- 
 ing and roses flowering over them all. If there were 
 but two between Portsmouth and London — two even 
 of the meanest we saw — a traveller from any other 
 land would think it worth his while to describe them 
 minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less), 
 they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I became 
 conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural para- 
 dises ; and I record it as the first point in which 1 find 
 myself worse for having become a " dweller in the 
 shade." I was envious. Formerly, in passing a 
 tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, " What 
 a bright lawn ! What a trim and fragrant hedge ! 
 What luxuriant creepers ! I congratulate their 
 fortunate owner!" Now it is, "How I wish I had 
 that hedge at Glenmary ! How I envy these people 
 their shrubs, trellices, and flowers!" I wonder not 
 a little how the English emigrant can make a home 
 among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a 
 forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities. 
 
 After the first few miles, I discovered that the two 
 windows of the coach were very limited frames for 
 the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye, 
 and changing places with William, who was on the 
 top of the coach, I found myself between two tory 
 politicians, setting forth to each other most eloquently 
 
 the maladministrations of the whigs, and the queen's 
 mismanagement. As I was two months behind the 
 English news, 1 listened with some interest. They 
 made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was 
 a silly gill ; that she had been caught in a decided 
 fib about Sir Robert Peel's exactions with respect to 
 the household ; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seem- 
 ed to be a sturdy grazier, said that " in 'igh life the 
 queen-dowager's 'ealth was now received uniwersally 
 with three times three, while Victoria's was drank in 
 solemn silence." Her majesty received no better 
 treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of 
 the seat ; and as we whirled under the long park fence 
 of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the 
 Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian 
 king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between 
 whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in 
 a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered 
 by the readers of D'Israeli's novels, is the original of 
 the picture of the luxurious maison de plaisance, drawn 
 in the young duke. 
 
 We got glimpses of the old palace at Esher, of 
 Hampton court, of Pitt's country seat at Putney, and 
 of Jane Porter's cottage at Esher, and in the seventh 
 hour from leaving Portsmouth (seventy-four miles) 
 we found the vehicles thickening, the omnibuses 
 passing, the blue-coated policemen occurring at short 
 intervals, and the roads delightfully watered— symp- 
 toms of suburban London. We skirted the privileged 
 paling of Hyde Park ; and I could see, over the rails, 
 the flying and gay-colored equipages, the dandy horse- 
 men, the pedestrian ladies followed by footmen with 
 their gold sticks, the fashionable throng, in short, 
 which, separated by an iron barrier from all contact 
 withunsightliness and vulgarity, struts its hour in this 
 green cage of aristocracy. 
 
 Around the triumphal arch opposite the duke of 
 Wellington's was assembled a large crowd of carriages 
 and horsemen. The queen was coming from Buck- 
 ingham palace through the Green park, and they 
 were waiting for a glimpse of her majesty on horse- 
 back. The regulator whirled mercilessly on; but 
 far down, through the long avenues of trees, I could 
 see a movement of scarlet liveries, and a party coming 
 rapidly toward us on horseback. We missed the 
 queen by a couple of minutes. 
 
 It was just the hour when all London is abroad, 
 and Piccadilly was one long cavalcade of splendid 
 equipages on their way to the park. I remembered 
 many a face, and many a crest ; but either the faces 
 had beautified in my memory, or three years had 
 done time's pitiless work on them all. Near Devon 
 shire house I saw, fretting behind the slow-moving 
 press of vehicles, a pair of magnificent and fiery blood 
 horses, drawing a coach, which, though quite new, 
 was of a color and picked out with a peculiar stripe 
 thai was familiar to my eye. The next glance con- 
 vinced me that the livery was that of Lady B. ; but, 
 for the light chariot in which she used to drive, here 
 was a stately coach — for the one tall footman, two — 
 for the plain but elegant harness, a sumptuous and 
 superb caparison — the whole turn-out on a scale of 
 splendor unequalled by anything around us. Another 
 moment decided the doubt— for as we came against 
 the carriage, following, ourselves, an embarrassed 
 press of vehicles, her ladyship appeared, leaning back 
 in the corner with her wrists crossed, the same in the 
 grace of her attitude and the elegance of her toilet, 
 but stouter, more energetic, and graver m the expres- 
 sion of her face, than I ever remembered to have seen 
 her. From the top of the stage-coach 1 looked, 
 unseen, directly down upon her, and probably got, by 
 chance, a davlight and more correct view of her 
 countenance than 1 should obtain to a year of opera 
 and drawing-room observation. 
 
 Tired and dusty, we were turned from hotel to ho- 
 
532 
 
 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 tel, all full and overflowing ; and finding at last a cor- 
 ner at Raggett's, in Dover street, we dressed, dined, 
 and posted to Woolwich. Unexpected and mournful 
 news closed our first day in England with tears. 
 
 ****** 
 
 I drove up to London the second day after our ar- 
 rival, and having a little " Grub-street" business, made 
 my way to the purlieus of publishers in Paternoster 
 row. If you could imagine a paper mine, with a very 
 deep-cut shaft laid open to the surface of the earth, 
 you might get some idea of Ivy lane. One walks 
 along through its dim subterranean light, with no idea 
 of breathing the proper atmosphere of day and open 
 air. A strong smell of new books in the nostrils, and 
 one long stripe of blue sky much farther off than usu- 
 al, are the predominant impressions. 
 
 From the dens of the publishers, I wormed my way 
 through the crowds of Cheapside and the Strand, tow- 
 ard that part of London which, as Horace Smith says, 
 is "open at the top." Something in the way of a 
 ship's fender, to save the hips and elbows, would sell 
 well I should think to pedestrians in London. What 
 crowds, to be sure ! On a Sunday in New York, 
 when all the churches are pouring forth their congre- 
 gations at the same moment, you have seen a faint 
 image of the Strand. The style of the hack cabriolets 
 is very much changed since I was in London. The 
 passenger sits about as high up from the ground as he 
 would in a common chair — the body of the vehicle 
 suspended from the axle instead of being placed upon 
 it, and the wheels very high. The driver's seat would 
 suit a sailor, for it answers to the ship's tiller, well astern. 
 He whips over the passenger's head. I saw one or 
 two private vehicles built on this principle, certainly 
 one of safety, though they have something the beauty 
 of a prize hog. 
 
 The new National Gallery in Trafalgar square, not 
 finished when I left England, opened upon me as I 
 entered Charing Cross, with what I could not but feel 
 was a very fine effect, though critically, its " pepper- 
 boxity" is not very creditable to the architect. Fine 
 old Northumberland house, with its stern lion atop on 
 one side, the beautiful Club house on the other, St. 
 Martin's noble church and the Gallery — with such a 
 fine opening in the very cor cordium of London, could 
 not fail of producing a noble metropolitan view. 
 
 The street in front of the gallery was crowded with 
 carriages, showing a throng of visiters within ; and 
 mounting the imposing steps (the loftiness of the ves- 
 tibule dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance), 
 I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pil- 
 lars ran through the entire length of the building, 
 offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off 
 from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries 
 of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were 
 crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the 
 equipages without. You will not care to be bothered 
 with criticisms on pictures, and mine was a cursory 
 glance — but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble 
 lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise 
 in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh 
 among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of 
 Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume, with her pretty 
 feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickers- 
 gill, are among those I remember. I found a great 
 many acquaintances in the gallery ; and I was sitting up- 
 on a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait 
 of 'Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor's wig and robes 
 — a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts. 
 Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a per- 
 son with his back to me, cutting oft' my view very pro- 
 vokingly. " When this dandy gets out of the way with 
 his eyeglass," said I, "I shall be able to see the pic- 
 ture." My friend smiled. " Who do you take the 
 dandy to be ?" It was a well-formed man, dressed in 
 the top of the fashion, with a very straight back, curl- 
 
 ing brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years 
 of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I 
 saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself. 
 
 ****** 
 
 I had not seen Taglioni since the first representa- 
 tion of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris 
 Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La 
 Gitana ; and except that her limbs are the least in the 
 world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely 
 unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could 
 then (when opera dancing was new to me), what it is 
 that gives this divine woman the right to her proud 
 title of La Deesse de la Dame. It is easy for the 
 Ellslers, and Augusta, and others, who are said to be 
 only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even 
 to produce, by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect 
 of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without be- 
 ing indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alone 
 finishes the step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound 
 over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly, 
 as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if, 
 instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by 
 it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of 
 trying herself and a plonib (as is seen in all other dan- 
 cers, by their effort to recover composure), it had been 
 the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed. 
 The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own 
 grace, which steals over Taglioni's lips when she closes 
 a difficult step, seems communicated, in an indefina- 
 ble languor, to her limbs. You can not fancy her fa- 
 tigued when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she 
 courtesies to the applause of the enchanted audience, 
 and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive 
 that she has undertaken too much. You never de- 
 tect, as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred 
 over adroitly, and movements that, from their antici- 
 pating the music of the ballet, are known by the criti 
 cal eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness 
 or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears 
 the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace re- 
 places her companions in the ballet ! Whether the 
 motion seems born of the music, or the music floats 
 out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might 
 be almost embarrassed to know. 
 
 In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based 
 upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the 
 child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and re- 
 covered by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing 
 over her of a recollection of music she had heard in 
 her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic act- 
 ing I ever saw. But there is one dance, the Cachucha, 
 introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni 
 has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done 
 by herself; for there is a succession of flying move- 
 ments expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she 
 alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet, 
 with a look over her shoulder of ficrte and animation 
 possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It 
 was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and 
 neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of 
 his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of 
 swiftness embodied in a look ! How can I describe it 
 to you ? 
 
 ****** 
 
 My last eight hours have been spent between Bed- 
 lam and the opera — one of those antipodal contrasts 
 of which London life affords so many. Thanks to 
 God, and to the Howards who have arisen in our time, 
 a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that 
 it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melan- 
 choly imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the 
 humane as imprisonment can be made by care and 
 kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are in- 
 mates of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and 
 content, some playing at ball in the spacious court- 
 yards, some lying on the grass, and some working vol- 
 
PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 533 
 
 untarily at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water 
 to their rooms. 
 
 On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite 
 apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came 
 up two hundred miles from the country to marry the 
 queen ! You will remember the story of his forcing 
 himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout, 
 sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps 
 twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes 
 on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even 
 an eyelash while we were there. There was a very 
 gentlemanlike man working at the watervvheel, or 
 rather walking round, with his hand on the bar, in a 
 gait that would have suited the most finished exquis- 
 ite of a drawing-room — Mr. Davis, who shot (I think) 
 at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we 
 saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the 
 queen's face when she went to the city — really a most 
 officer-like and handsome fellow ; and in the next 
 room, poor old Hatfield, who shot at George the Third, 
 and has been in Bedlam for forty years — quite sane! 
 He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with 
 scars got in battle before his crime. He employs him- 
 self with writing poetry on the death of his birds and 
 cats whom he has outlived in prison — all the society 
 he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He 
 received us very courteously, and called our attention 
 to his favorite canary showed us his poetry, and all 
 with a sad, mild, subdued resignation, that quite 
 moved me. 
 
 In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, ex- 
 cept one very noble-looking woman who was standing 
 at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the 
 Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending 
 melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for 
 years under the terrible belief that she has committed 
 14 the unpardonable sin," and though quiet all the day, 
 her agony at night becomes horrible. What a com- 
 ment on a much-practised mode of preaching the mild 
 and forgiving religion of our Savior ! 
 
 As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman 
 of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very po- 
 lite courtesy, and said, " Will you be so kind as to 
 have me released from this dreadful place ?" "I am 
 afraid I can not," said I. " Then," she replied, lay- 
 ing her hand on my arm, with a most appealing ear- 
 nestness, " perhaps you will on Monday — you know 
 I've nothing to pack !" The matron here interposed, 
 and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the | 
 door closed. She was confined there for the murder 
 of her child. 
 
 We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c, 
 &c. — all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our 
 names on the visiters' book, quite of the opinion of a 
 Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had 
 written under his own name this expressive praise : — 
 44 J'ai visite certains palais moins beaux et moins bien 
 entretenus que cette maison de la folie." 
 
 Two hours after, I was listening to the overture of 
 La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance to the op- 
 era of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the 
 house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does 
 always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exalta- 
 tion of brain and spirit — but how different from that 
 exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour, 
 by creatures of the same human family, at the opera ! 
 It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of 
 allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat 
 the queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious 
 singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister stand- 
 ing behind her chair, and her maids of honor around 
 — herself the smiling, youthful, and admired sovereign 
 of the most powerful nation on earth ! I thought of 
 the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring 
 release. 
 
 The queen's face has thinned and grown more oval 
 
 since I saw her at a drawing-room, four years ago, as 
 Princess Victoria. She has been compelled to think 
 since then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life, 
 work out the expression of the face. She has now 
 what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual 
 countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns 
 to speak, but, on the whole, quite beautiful enough 
 for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed 
 paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less 
 gayly than many others around her. Her box was at 
 the left side of the house/undistinguished by any mark 
 of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected 
 her presence. 
 
 Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possi- 
 ble for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She 
 has her sister's look about the forehead and eyes, and 
 all her sister's soul and passionateness in her style of 
 singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain 
 as it is, and young as she is, the opera-going pubiic 
 prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful 
 Grisi. The latter long triumphant prima donna is 
 said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new fa- 
 vorite ; and it is curious enough to hear the hundred 
 and one faults found in the declining songstress by 
 those who once would not admit that she could be 
 transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom 
 I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi 
 the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers 
 in her box last night that she had always said that 
 Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was 
 a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune; 
 but soul or sentiment she never had ! Poor Grisi ! 
 Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have 
 been much admired. " Le monde ne hdit rien aulant 
 que ses idoles quand Us sont a terrc" said the wise La 
 Bruyere. 
 
 # * * * * * 
 
 Some of the most delightful events in one's travels 
 ; are those which afford the least materiel for descrip- 
 I tion, and such is our sejour of a few days at the vicar- 
 
 : age of B It was a venerable old house with 
 
 pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with 
 panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand, 
 \ low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected 
 i rooms, and creepers outside, trellised and trained to 
 ' every corner and angle. Then there was the modern 
 j wing, with library and dining-room, large windows, 
 ■ marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going 
 , from your bedroom to breakfast, you might fancy 
 yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth's time to 
 Queen Victoria's. A high hedge of holly divided the 
 smoothly-shaven lawn from the churchyard, and in 
 the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray 
 old church with four venerable towers, one of the most 
 picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old Eng- 
 lish architecture that I have ever seen. The whole 
 group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine- 
 covered and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap 
 of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were 
 spread landscapes of the finished and serene character 
 peculiar to England— rich fields framed in flowering 
 hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant 
 parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the 
 horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more dis- 
 tinct than the banks of low-lying clouds ret.-rmg alter 
 a thunderstorm in America. , , 
 
 Earlv on Sunday morning we were awakened by 
 the melody of the bells in the old triers; and with 
 brief pauses between the tunes, the; were played upon 
 most musically, till the hour for *1e morning services 
 We have little idea in Amen* ° 4 he perfect,™ to 
 which the chiming of bells fs carried in England. In 
 the towers of this small raral church are hung eight 
 bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them 
 by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring 
 hamlet are varied endlessly. 1 lay and listened to the 
 
534 
 
 PASSAGES FROxM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a 
 pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was 
 serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and 
 jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the cur- 
 tains of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned 
 with the audible worship and palpable incense of na- 
 ture. We were told at breakfast that the chimes had 
 been unusually merry, and were a compliment to our- 
 selves, the villagers always expressing thus their con- 
 gratulations on the arrival of guests at the vicarage. 
 The compliment was repeated between services, and a 
 very long peal rang in the twilight — our near relation- 
 ship to the vicar's family authorizing a very special 
 rejoicing. 
 
 The interior of the church was very ancient look- 
 ing and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the 
 massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The con- 
 gregation was small, perhaps fifty persons, and the 
 men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet 
 carters' frocks, and most of them in leather leggins. 
 The children sat on low benches placed in the centre 
 of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were 
 in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod 
 with iron like horses' hoofs, and their little legs button- 
 ed up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather. 
 They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended 
 to wear but one suit in this world. 
 
 I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and 
 the decorous attention of men, women, and children, 
 to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of 
 simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the 
 name of their farm or place of residence printed on 
 the back of the pew, with the number of seats to 
 which they were entitled, probably in proportion to 
 their tithes. The " living" is worth, if I remember 
 right, not much over a hundred pounds — an insuffi- 
 cient sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is 
 appended to it ; but, happily for the people, the vicar 
 chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his 
 excellent character the exemplary pastor with the 
 
 physician and lord of the manor. I left B with 
 
 the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happi- 
 ness, inhabit one spot more than all others in a world 
 whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the 
 vicarage'in the bosom of that rural upland. 
 
 ****** 
 
 We left B at twelve in the Brighton "Age" — 
 
 the "swell coach" of England. We were to dine 
 
 thirty miles nearer London, at Park, and we did 
 
 the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop 
 of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all 
 travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road ; but 
 what stage-coach in the United States ever limited 
 its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American 
 dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever despatch- 
 ed so briefly ? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of 
 the better class ; and whose who were my fellow- 
 passengers the day I refer to were particularly well 
 dressed and gentlemanly— yet all of them achieved a 
 substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid 
 their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within 
 the quarter of an hour. John Bull's blindness to the 
 beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the fact that 
 this lusty meal is sometimes called a " lunch !" 
 
 The tvjo places beside our own in the inside were 
 occupied '»y a lady and her maid and two children — 
 an interpretation of the number two to which I would 
 not have agree&if I could have helped it. We can not 
 always tell at fint sight what will be most amusing, 
 however ; and the ohild of two years, who sprawled 
 oyer my rheumatic k^ees with her mother's permis- 
 sion, thereby oceasionihg on my part a most fixed 
 look out of the window, furnished me after a while 
 with a curious bit of observation. At one of the 
 commons we passed, the children running out from a 
 gipsy encampment flung buoches of heath flowers 
 
 i into the coach, which the little girl appropriated, and 
 j commenced presenting rather graciously to her mother, 
 the maid, and Mrs. W., all of whom received them 
 | with smiles and thanks. Having rather a sulky face 
 I of my own when not particularly called on to be 
 pleased, the child omitted me for a long time in he> 
 i distributions. At last, after collecting and re-distribu 
 j ting the flowers for about an hour, she grew suddenly 
 j grave, laid the heath all out upon her lap, selected the 
 j largest and brightest flowers, and made them into a 
 nosegay. My attention was attracted by the serious- 
 ness of the child's occupation ; and I was watching 
 her without thinking my notice observed, when she 
 raised her eyes to me very timidly, turned her new 
 ; bouquet over and over, and at last, with a blush, 
 deeper than I ever saw before upon a child, placed 
 j the flowers in my hand and hid her face in her mother's 
 bosom. My sulkiness gave way, of course, and the 
 little coquette's pleasure in her victory was excessive. 
 j For the remainder of the journey, those who had 
 given her their smiles too readily were entirely neg- 
 ! lected, and all her attentions were showered upon the 
 only one she had found it difficult to please. I thought 
 it as pretty a specimen of the ruling passion strong in 
 baby-hood as I ever saw. It was a piece of finished 
 i coquetry in a child not old enough to speak plain. 
 
 The coachman of " the age" was a young man of 
 j perhaps thirty, who is understood to have run through 
 j a considerable fortune, and drives for a living — but he 
 j was not at all the sort of looking person you would 
 fancy for a "swell whip." He drove beautifully, and 
 helped the passengers out and in, lifted their baggage, 
 &c, very handily, but evidently shunned notice, and 
 had no desire to chat with the " outsides." The ex- 
 cessive difficulty in England of finding any clean way 
 of making a living after the initiatory age is passed — 
 a difficulty which reduced gentlemen feel most keen- 
 ly — probably forced this person as it has others to 
 take up a vocation for which the world fortunately 
 finds an excuse in eccentricity. He touches his hat 
 for the half crown or shilling, although probably if it 
 were offered to him when the whip was out of his 
 hand he would knock the giver down for his imperti- 
 nence. I may as well record here, by the way, for 
 the benefit of those who may wish to know a compari- 
 son between the expense of travelling here and at 
 i home, that for two inside places for thirty miles the 
 I coach fare was two pounds, and the coachman's fee 
 j five shillings, or half-a-crown each inside. To get 
 
 from the post town to Park (two miles) cost me 
 
 five-and-sixpence for a " fly," so that for thirty-two 
 | miles travel I paid 21. 10s. 6d., a little more than 
 twelve dollars. 
 
 And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful 
 lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try a be- 
 ginning at getting a living in England. I was never 
 at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and 
 salt for a young man, till I had occasion lately to en- 
 deavor to better the condition of a servant of my own 
 — a lad who has been with me four or five years, and 
 whose singular intelligence, good principles, and high 
 self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any con- 
 fidential trust or place whatever. His own ideas, too 
 (I thought, not unreasonably), had become somewhat 
 sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to con- 
 tinue longer as a servant. He went home to his 
 mother, a working-woman of London, and I did my 
 utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all 
 classes of my friends, advertising, &c, to find him any 
 possible livelihood above menial service. I was met 
 everywhere with the same answer : " There are 
 hundreds of gentlemen's sons wearing out their youth 
 in looking for the same thing." I was told daily that 
 it was quite in vain — that apprenticeships were as 
 much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to 
 the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inac- 
 
PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 535 
 
 cessible. My boy and his mother at last came to 
 their senses ; and, consenting to apply once more for 
 a servant's place, he was fortunate enough to engage 
 as valet to a bachelor, and is now gone with his new 
 master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter 
 said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip, 
 "England is a great place to take the nonsense out of 
 
 P eo Pj e -" * 
 
 When London shall have become the Rome or 
 Athens of a fallen empire (qu. will it ever ?) the ter- 
 mini of the railways will be among its finest ruins. 
 That of the Birmingham and Liverpool track is al- 
 most as magnificent as that flower of sumptuousness, 
 the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples. It is really 
 an impressive scene simply to embark for " Brum- 
 magem ;" and there is that utility in all this showy 
 expenditure for arch, gateway, and pillar, that no one 
 is admitted but the passenger, and you are refreshing- 
 ly permitted to manage your baggage, &c, without 
 the assistance of a hundred blackguards at a shilling 
 each. Then there are " ladies' waiting-rooms," and 
 "gentlemen's waiting-rooms," and attached to them 
 every possible convenience, studiously clean and order- 
 ly. I wish the president and directors of the Utica 
 and other American railroads would step over and 
 
 The Adelphi is the Astor house of Liverpool, a 
 very large and showy hotel near the terminus of the 
 railway. We were shown into rather a magnificent 
 parlor on our arrival ; and very hungry with rail-road- 
 ing since six in the morning, we ordered dinner at 
 their earliest convenience. It came after a full hour, 
 and we sat down to four superb silver covers, anticipa- 
 ting a meal corresponding to the stout person and 
 pompous manners of the fattest waiter I have seen in my 
 travels. The grand cover was removed with a flourish 
 and disclosed— divers small bits of second-hand beef- 
 steak, toasted brown and warped at the corners by a 
 second fire, and on the removal of the other three 
 silver pagodas, our eyes were gratified by a dish of 
 peas that had been once used for green soup, three 
 similarly toasted and warped mutton chops, and three 
 potatoes. Quite incredulous of the cook's intentions, 
 I ventured to suggest to the waiter that he bad proba- 
 bly mistaken the tray and brought us the dinner of 
 some sportsman's respectable brace of pointers; but 
 on being assured that there were no dogs in the cellar, 
 I sent word to the master of the house that we had 
 rather a preference for a dinner new and hot, and 
 would wait till he could provide it. Half an hour 
 more brought up the landlord's apologies and a fresh 
 and hot beef-steak, followed by a tough-crusted apple- 
 pie, custard, and cheese— and with a bottle of Moselle, 
 which teas good, we finished our dinner at one of the 
 
 The 
 
 <e a sumptuary hint. 
 
 The cars are divided into stalls, t. e. each passenger 
 
 cushioned off by a stuffed partition from his neigh- most expensive and showy hotels in England. Ih 
 
 r's shoulder, an/sleeps without offence or encroach- manners and fare at the American hotels being ■ .Iway 
 
 bor's shoulder, and sleep 
 
 ment. When they are crowded, that is an admirable 
 arrangement ; but I have found it very comfortable in 
 long journeys in America to take advantage of an j 
 empty car, and stretch myself to sleep along the 
 vacant seat. Here, full or empty, you can occupy 
 but your upright place. In every car are suspended 
 lamps to give light during the long passages through 
 the subterranean tunnels. 
 
 We rolled from under the Brobdignag roof of the 
 terminus, as the church of Mary-le-bone (Cockney 
 for Marie-la-bonne, but so carved on the frieze) struck 
 six. Our speed was increased presently to thirty 
 miles in the hour ; and with the exception of the 
 slower rate in passing the tunnels, and the slackening 
 and getting under way at the different stations, this 
 rate was kept up throughout. We arrived at Liver- i 
 pool (205 miles or upward) at three o'clock, our 
 stoppages having exceeded an hour altogether. 
 
 I thought, toward the end, that all this might be 
 very pleasant with a consignment of buttons, or an 
 errand to Gretna Green. But for the pleasure of the 
 thing, I would as lief sit in an arm-chair and see bales 
 of striped green silk unfolded for eight hours, as travel 
 the same length of time by the railroad. (I have de- 
 scribed in this simile exactly the appearance of the 
 fields as you see them in flying past.) The old wo- 
 men and cabbages gain by it, perhaps, for you can not 
 tell whether they are not girls and roses. The washer- 
 woman at her tub follows the lady on the lawn so 
 quickly that you confound the two irresistibly — the 
 thatched cottages look like browsing donkeys, and the 
 browsing donkeys like thatched cottages— you ask the 
 name of a town, and by the time you get up your 
 finger, your point at a spot three miles off — in short, 
 the salmon well packed in straw on the top of the 
 coach, and called fresh-fish after a journey of 200 
 miles, sees quite as much of the country as his most 
 intellectual fellow-passenger. I foresee in all this a 
 new distinction in phraseology. " Have you travel- 
 led in England?" will soon be a question having no 
 reference to railroads.- The winding turnpike and 
 cross-roads, the coaches and post-carriages, will be 
 resumed by all those who consider the sense of sight | 
 as useful in travel, and the bagmen and letter-bags 
 will have almost undisputed possession of the rail- 
 cars. 
 
 described as exponents of civilization by English 
 travellers, I shall be excused for giving a counter- 
 picture of one of the most boasted of their own. 
 
 Regretting exceedingly that the recent mourning 
 of my two companions must prevent their presence 
 at the gay festivities of Eglinton, I put them on board 
 the steamer, bound on a visit to relatives in Dublin, 
 and returned to the Adelphi to wait en garcon for the 
 Glasgow steamer of Monday. My chamber is a large 
 and well-furnished room, with windows looking out 
 on the area shut in by the wings of the house ; and I 
 must make you still more contented at the A.stor, by 
 describing what is going on below at this moment. 
 It is half-past eight, and a Sunday morning. All the 
 bells of the house, it seems to me, are ringing, most 
 of them very impatiently, and in the area before the 
 kitchen windows are six or eight idle waiters, and four 
 or five female scullions, playing, quarrelling, scolding, 
 and screaming; the language of both men and women 
 more profane and indecent than anything I have ever 
 before chanced to hear, and every word audible in 
 every room in this quarter of the hotel. This has 
 been going on since six this morning; and I seriously 
 declare I do not think I ever heard as much indecent 
 conversation in my life as for three mortal hours must 
 have " murdered sleep" for every lady and gentleman 
 lodged on the rear side of the " crack hotel" of Liver- 
 pool. 
 
 Sick of the scene described above, I went out just 
 now to take a turn or two in my slippers in the long 
 entry. Up and down, giving me a most appealing 
 stare whenever we met, dawdled also the fat waiter 
 who served up the cold victuals of yesterday. He 
 evidently had some errand with me, but what 1 did 
 not immediately fathom. At last he approached— 
 " You — a — got your things, sir ?" 
 " What things?" . . . . 
 
 "The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bed- 
 room, sir." , ,, 
 " Yes, thank you," and I resumed my walk. 
 The waiter resumed his, and presently approached 
 
 ag l 'you— a— Jon't intend to use the parlor again, sir ?" 
 " No ■ I have explained to the master of the house 
 that I shall breakfast in the coffee-room " And agam 
 I walked on. 
 
536 
 
 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 My friend began again at the next turn. 
 
 "You — a — pay for those ladies' dinner yourself, 
 sir?" 
 
 "Yes." I walked on once more. 
 
 Once more approaches my fat incubus, and with a 
 twirl of the towel in his hand looks as if he would fain 
 be delivered of something. 
 
 " Why the d — 1 am I badgered in this way ?" I 
 stormed out at last, losing patience at his stammering 
 hesitation, and making a move to get round the fat 
 obstruction and pursue my walk. 
 
 "Will you — a — remember the waiter, if you please, 
 sir 7" 
 
 " Oh ! I was not aware that I was to pay the waiter 
 at every meal. I generally do it when I leave the 
 house. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to let me 
 finish my walk, and trust me till to-morrow morning?" 
 
 P. S. Evening in the coffee-room. — They say the 
 best beginning in love is a decided aversion, and badly 
 as I began at Liverpool, I shall always have a tender 
 recollection of it for the admirable and unequalled 
 luxury of its balks. A long and beautiful Grecian 
 building crests the head of George's pier, built by the 
 corporation of Liverpool, and devoted exclusively to 
 salt-water baths. I walked down in the twilight to 
 enjoy this refreshing luxury, and it being Sunday 
 evening, I was shown into the ladies' end of the 
 building. The room where I waited till the bath 
 was prepared was a lofty and finely proportioned 
 apartment, elegantly furnished, and lined with superb- 
 ly bound books and pictures, the tables covered with 
 engravings, and the whole thing looked like a central 
 apartment in a nobleman's residence. A boy showed 
 me presently into a small drawing-room, to which was 
 attached a bath closet, the two rooms lined, boudoir 
 fashion, with chintz, a clock over the bath, a nice 
 carpet and stove, in short, every luxury possible to 
 such an establishment. I asked the boy if the gentle- 
 men's baths were as elegant as these. " Oh yes," he 
 said: "there are two splendid pictures of Niagara 
 Falls and Catskill." "Who painted them ?" "Mr. 
 Wall." " And whose are they?" " They belong to 
 our father, sir !" I made up my mind that " our 
 father" was a man of taste and a credit to Liverpool. 
 ******* 
 
 I have just returned from the dinner given to Mac- 
 ready at the Freemason's tavern. The hall, so cele- 
 brated for public " feeds," is a beautiful room of a 
 very showy style of architecture, with three galleries, 
 and a raised floor at the end usually occupied by the 
 cross table. It accommodated on this occasion four 
 hundred persons. 
 
 From the peculiar object of the meeting to do 
 honor to an actor for his intellectual qualities, and for 
 his efforts to spiritualise and elevate the stage, there 
 probably never was collected together in one room so 
 much talent and accomplishment. Artists, authors, 
 critics, publishers, and amateurs of the stage — a large 
 body in London — made up the company. My atten- 
 tion was called by one of my neighbors to the singu- 
 larly superior character of the heads about us, and I 
 had already observed the striking difference, both in 
 head and physiognomy, between this and a common 
 assemblage of men. Most of the persons connected 
 with the press, it was said, were present; and perhaps 
 it would have been a worthy service to the world had 
 some shorn Samson, among the authors, pulled the 
 temple upon the heads of the Philistines. 
 
 The cry of " make way !" introduced the duke of 
 Sussex, the chairman of the meeting — a stout, mild- 
 looking, dignified old man, wearing a close black scull- 
 cap and the star and riband. He was followed by 
 Lord Conyngham, who, as grand chamberlain, had 
 done much to promote the interests of the drama; by 
 Lord Nugent (whom I had last seen sailing a scampavia 
 in the bay of Corfu), by Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr. 
 
 Sheil, Sir Martin Shee, Young, the actor, Mr. Milnes, 
 the poet, and other distinguished men. I should 
 have said, by the way Mr. Macready followed next 
 his royal highness. 
 
 The cheering and huzzas, as this procession walked 
 up the room, were completely deafening. Macready 
 looked deadly pale and rather overcome ; and amid 
 the waving of handkerchiefs and the stunning uproat 
 of four hundred " gentlemen and scholars," the duke 
 placed the tragedian at his right hand, and took his 
 seat before the turbot. 
 
 The dinner was an uncommonly bad one; but of 
 this I had been forewarned, and so had taken a provi- 
 sory chop at the club. I had leisure, therefore, to 
 look about me, and truly there was work enough for 
 
 the eyes. M 's head interested me more than 
 
 any one's else, for it was the personification of his 
 lofty, liberal, and poetic genius. His hair, which 
 was long and profuse, curled in tendrils over the 
 loftiest forehead ; but about the lower part of the face 
 lay all the characteristics which go to make up a 
 voluptuous yet generous, an enthusiastic and fiery, 
 yet self-possessed and well directed character. He was 
 excessively handsome ; yet it was the beauty of 
 Masaniello, or Salvator Rosa, with more of intellect 
 than both together. All in all, I never saw a finer 
 face for an artist; and judging from his looks and 
 from his works (he is perhaps twenty-four), I would 
 stake my sagacity on a bold prophecy of his greatness. 
 
 On the same side were the L s, very quiet-look- 
 ing men, and S the portrait-painter, a merry- 
 looking grenadier, and L B the poet, with a 
 
 face like a poet. Near me was L , the painter, 
 
 poet, novelist, song and music writer, dramatist, and 
 good fellow — seven characters of which his friends 
 scarce know in which he is most excellent — and he 
 has a round Irish face, with a bright twinkle in his 
 eye, and a plump little body which carries off all his 
 gifts as if they were no load at all. — And on my left 
 
 was S , the glorious painter of Venice, of the 
 
 battle of Trafalgar, the unequalled painter of the sea 
 in all its belongings; and you would take him for a 
 gallant lieutenant of the navy, with the fire of a score 
 of battles asleep in his eye, and the roughening of a 
 hundred tempests in his cheek. A franker and more 
 manly face would not cross your eye in a year's travel. 
 
 Mr. J was just beyond, a tall, sagacious-look- 
 ing, good humored person of forty-five. He was a 
 man of very kind manners, and was treated with great 
 marks of liking and respect by all about him. But 
 directly opposite to me sat so exact a picture of Paul 
 Pry as he is represented on the stage, particularly of 
 my friend Finn in that character, that it was difficult 
 not to smile in looking at him. To my surprise, I 
 heard some one behind me point him out, soon after, 
 as the well-known original in that character — the 
 gentleman, whose peculiarities of person, as well as 
 manners, were copied in the farce of Mr. Poole. — 
 " That's my name — what's yours ?" said he the mo- 
 ment after he had seated himself, thrusting his card 
 close to the nose of the gentleman next him. I took 
 it of course for a piece of fun between two very old 
 friends, but to my astonishment the gentlemen next 
 him was as much astonished as I. 
 
 The few servants scaltered up and down were deaf 
 to everything but calls for champagne (furnished only 
 at an extra charge when called for — a very mean 
 system for a public dinner, by the way), and the 
 wines on the table seemed selected to drive one to 
 champagne or the doctor. Each person had four 
 plates, and when used, they were to be put under the 
 bench, or on the top of your head, or to be sat upon, 
 or what you would, except to be taken away, and the 
 soup and fish, and the roast and boiled and all, having 
 been put on together, was all removed at one fell 
 swoop — the entire operation of dinner having lasted 
 
PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 537 
 
 just twenty-five minutes. Keep this fact till we are re- 
 corded by some new English traveller as the most ex- 
 peditious eaters in Christendom. 
 
 Here end my croakings, however, for the speeches 
 commenced directly, and admirable they were. To 
 the undoing of much prejudice got by hearsay, I 
 listened to Bulwer. He is, beyond all comparison, 
 the most graceful and effective speaker I ever heard 
 in England. All the world tells you that he makes 
 signal failures in oratory — yet he rose, when his health 
 was drank, and, in self-possessed, graceful, unhesita- 
 ting language, playful, yet dignified, warm, yet not 
 extravagant, he replied to the compliments of his 
 royal highness, and brought forward his plan (as you 
 have seen it reported in the papers) for the erection 
 of a new theatre for the legitimate drama and Mac- 
 ready. I remember once hearing that Bulwer had a 
 belief in his future eminence as an orator — and I would 
 warrant his warmest anticipations in that career of 
 ambition. He is a better speaker than Sheil, who follow- 
 ed him, and Sheil is renowned as an orator. Really 
 there is nothing like one's own eyes and ears in this 
 world of envy and misrepresentation. 
 
 D sat near Sheil, at the cross table, very silent, 
 
 as is his custom and that of most keen observers. 
 The courtly Sir M S was near B , look- 
 ing like some fine old picture of a wit of Charles the 
 
 second's time, and he and Y the actor made two 
 
 very opposite and gentlemanlike speeches. 1 believe 
 I have told you nearly all that struck me, except what 
 was reported in the gazettes, and that you have no 
 need to read over again. I got away at eleven, and 
 reached the opera in time to hear the last act of the 
 Puritani, and see the Elsslers dance in the ballet, and 
 with a look-in at a ball, I concluded one of those ex- 
 hausting, exciting, overdone London days, which are 
 pleasanter to remember than to enjoy, and pleasanter 
 to read about than either. 
 ♦ **###* 
 
 One of the most elegant and agreeable persons I 
 ever saw was Miss P , and I think her conversa- 
 tion more delightful to remember than any person's 
 I ever knew. A distinguished artist told me that he 
 remembered her when she was his beau-ideal of female 
 beauty; but in those days she was more "fancy-rapt," 
 and gave in less to the current and spirit of society. 
 Age has made her, if it may be so expressed, less 
 selfish in her use of thought, and she pours it forth, 
 like Pactolus — that gold which is sand from others. 
 She is still what I should call a handsome woman, or, 
 if that be not allowed, she is the wreck of more than 
 a common allotment of beauty, and looks it. Her 
 person is remarkably erect, her eyes and eyelids (in 
 this latter resembling Scott) very heavily moulded, 
 and her smile is beautiful. It strikes me that it always 
 is so — where it ever was. The smile seems to be the 
 work of the soul. 
 
 I have passed months underthe same roof with .Miss 
 
 P , and nothing gave me more pleasure than to 
 
 find the company in that hospitable house dwindled 
 to a "fit audience though few," and gathered around 
 the figure in deep mourning which occupied the 
 warmest corner of the sofa. In any vein, and a-propos 
 to the gravest and the gayest subject, her well-stored 
 mind and memory flowed forth in the same rich cur- 
 rent of mingled story and reflection, and I never saw 
 an impatient listener beside her. I recollect, one even- 
 ing a lady's singing "Auld Robin Gray," and some 
 one remarking (rather unsentimentally), at the close, 
 
 " By-the-by, what is Lady (the authoress of the 
 
 ballad) doing with so many carpenters. Berkeley 
 square is quite deafened with their hammering !" 
 
 "A-propos of carpenters and Lady ," said Miss 
 
 P- , " this same charming ballad-writer owes some- 
 
 thin S [° the craft. She was better-born than provided 
 with the gifts of fortune, and in her younger days was 
 
 once on a visit to a noble house, when to her dismay 
 a large and fashionable company arrived, who brought 
 with them a mania for private theatricals. Her ward- 
 robe was very slender, barely sufficient for the ordinary 
 events of a week-day, and her purse contained one 
 solitary shilling. To leave the house was out of the 
 question, to feign illness as much so, and to decline 
 taking a part was impossible, for hor talent and spright- 
 liness were the hope of the theatre. A part was cast 
 for her, and, in despair, she excused herself from the 
 gay party bound to the country town to make purcha- 
 ses of silk and satin, and shut herself up, a prey to 
 mortified low spirits. The character required a smart 
 village dress, and it certainly did not seem that it could 
 come out of a shilling. She sat at her window, biting 
 her lips, and turning over in her mind whether she 
 could borrow of some one, when her attention was at- 
 tracted to a carpenter, who was employed in the con- 
 struction of a stage in the large hall, and who, in the 
 court below, was turning off from his plane broad and 
 long shavings of a peculiarly striped wood. It struck 
 her that it was like riband. The next moment she 
 was below, and begged of the man to give her half-a- 
 dozen lengths as smooth as he could shave them. He 
 performed his task well, and depositing them in her 
 apartment, she set off alone on horseback to the vil- 
 I lage, and with her single shilling succeeded in pur- 
 chasing a chip hat of frhe coarsest fabric. She carried 
 it home, exultingly, trimmed it with her pine shavings, 
 and on the evening of the performance appeared with 
 a white dress, and hat and belt-ribands which were 
 the envy of the audience. The success of her inven- 
 tion gave her spirits and assurance, and she played to 
 admiration. The sequel will justify my first remark. 
 She made a conquest on that night of one of her titled 
 auditors, whom she afterward married. You will al- 
 low that Lady may afford to be tolerant of car- 
 penters." 
 
 An eminent clergyman one evening became the sub- 
 ject of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that 
 he had never married. "That wonder," said Miss 
 P , " was once expressed to the reverend gentle- 
 man himself in my hearing, and he told a story in an- 
 swer which 1 will tell you — and perhaps, slight as it 
 may seem, it is the history of other hearts as sensitive 
 and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination, 
 he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in 
 a small village not twenty miles from London. Among 
 his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a 
 young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and 
 whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him 
 an object of thought and pleasure. She left the 
 church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced 
 that he went on for a year without knowing her name; 
 but his sermon was never written without many a 
 thought how she would approve it, nor preached with 
 satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face. 
 Gradually he came to think of her at other times than 
 when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other 
 days than Sundays ; but the weeks slipped on, and 
 though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he 
 never brought himself to the resolution either to ask 
 her name or to seek to speak with her. By these 
 silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart, 
 and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaint- 
 ance and marry her, if possible, when one day he was 
 sent for to minister at a funeral. The face of the 
 corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sun- 
 day after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part 
 of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform 
 the service, and another clergyman present officiated ; 
 and after she was buried, her father took him aside and 
 begged his pardon for giving him pain — but he could 
 not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter 
 had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he 
 was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hur 
 
538 
 
 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 ried her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman 
 in question, my heart has been dead within me, and I 
 Iooa forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven." 
 
 London is wonderfully embellished within the last 
 three years — not so much by new buildings, public or 
 private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists 
 among the tradesmen to outsbow each other in the ex- 
 pensive magnificence of their shops. When I was in 
 England before, there were two or three of these pal- 
 aces of columns and plate-glass — a couple of shawl- 
 shops, and a glass warehouse or two, but now the 
 west end and the city have each their scores of estab- 
 lishments of which you would think the plate-glass 
 alone would ruin anybody but Aladdin. After an ab- 
 sence of a month from town lately, I gave myself the 
 always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among 
 the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neigh- 
 borhood, and to my surprise, found four new wonders 
 of this description — a shawl-house in the upper Re- 
 gent Circus, a silk-mercer's in Oxford street, a whip- 
 maker's in Regent street, and a fancy stationer's in the 
 Quadrant — either of which establishments fifty years 
 ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The 
 first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of 
 the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford 
 street with what seems but one window — a series of 
 glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from 
 the ground to the roof — window-panes twelve feet high, 
 and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which 
 this immense transparency of front gives for the dis- 
 play of goods is proportionately improved ; and in the 
 mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there 
 is evidently no small degree of art — so harmonious are 
 the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that 
 several more renovations are taking pkice in different 
 parts of both " city" and " town ;" and London prom- 
 ises, somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its 
 emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which 
 eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed. 
 
 If I may judge by my own experience and by what 
 I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of 
 doors empties the play-houses — for I would rather 
 walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine 
 plays in a hundred ; and so think, apparently, multi- 
 tudes of people, who stroll up and down the clean and 
 broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous 
 succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright 
 glare of the illumination exchanging nods and smiles 
 — the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable 
 evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and de- 
 lightful. There are large classes of society, who find 
 the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient 
 homes, and who must go somewhere ; and while the 
 streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the 
 play-house was the only resort where they could be- 
 guile their cares with splendor and amusement, and 
 in those days theatricals flourished, as in these days 
 ' of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evi- 
 dently languish. I will lend a hint to the next essay- 
 ist on the " Decline of the Drama." 
 
 The increased attractiveness of London, from thus 
 disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compen- 
 sates in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me 
 — the distastefulness of the country, from the forbid- 
 ding and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden-walls, 
 impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance 
 for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but 
 the road. What should we say in America to travel- 
 ling miles between two brick walls, with no prospect 
 but the branches of overhanging trees from the invis- 
 ible park lands on either side, and the alley of cloudy 
 sky overhead ? How tantalizing to pass daily by a 
 noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its 
 centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and 
 some miles of the tops of trees over a paling ! All 
 
 this to me is oppressive — I feel abridged of breathing- 
 room and eyesight — deprived of my liberty — robbed 
 of my horizon Much as I admire high preservation 
 and cultivation, I would compromise for a " snake- 
 fence" all over England. 
 
 On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the 
 neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long 
 walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-grav- 
 elled and secluded path, which commanded what the 
 proprietor's fence enviously shut from the road — a 
 noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed 
 to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in 
 America without question, as suits their purpose, and 
 tired of the bricks, hedges and placards of blacking 
 and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of 
 great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my im- 
 agination in the beautiful grounds of my friend's op- 
 ulent neighbor. The Thames with its innumerable 
 steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships — a 
 vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the 
 soft green meadows of Kent and Essex — formed a de- 
 licious picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which 
 I gazed upon with great delight for — some ten minutes. 
 
 ! In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B 's 
 
 gardener, who, with a very pokerish-looking stick in 
 
 i his hand, came running toward me, evidently, by his 
 
 ; pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit of the audacious 
 
 ; intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of 
 
 breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick, 
 
 what business I had there. I was not very well pre- 
 
 f pared with an answer, and short of beating the man 
 
 for his impudence (which in several ways might have 
 
 ; been a losing job), I did not see my way very clearly 
 
 j out of Mr. B 's grounds. My first intention, to 
 
 j call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion 
 while I complained of the man's insolence, was defeat- 
 ed by the information, evidently correct, that Mr. 
 
 B was not resident at the place, and so I was walk- 
 
 J ed out of the lodge-gate with a vagabond's warning — • 
 j never to let him " catch me there again !" So much 
 | for my liberal translation of a park-fence! 
 
 This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more dis- 
 agreeably felt where a gentleman's paling chances to 
 include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as 
 well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth, is 
 the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is 
 interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the 
 orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let 
 through a gate by an old man, who received a 
 douceur ; we crossed a newly-reaped field, and came 
 to another gate; another person opened this, and we 
 paid another shilling. We walked on toward the 
 glen, and in the middle of the path, without any ob- 
 ject apparently but the loll, there was another locked 
 gate, and another porter to pay ; and when we made 
 our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds, 
 after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a 
 fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I 
 remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the 
 other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan, 
 who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as 
 a tribute to his father's memory, or to the beauty of 
 Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever 
 ground he pockets it, the mode of assessment is, to say 
 the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself 
 to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think 1 may 
 say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very 
 much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling 
 the perch — paying the money and taking the look. I 
 should think no sum lost which was expended in 
 bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle ; but 
 it should be levied somewhere else than within sound 
 of its wild waterfall — somewhere else than midway 
 between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tin- 
 nehinch. 
 
PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 539 
 
 The fish most "out of water" in the world is cer- 
 tainly a Frenchman in England without acquaint- 
 ances. The illness of a friend has lately occasioned 
 me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being 
 abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies 
 of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not 
 a little with watching the ennui of one of these unfor- 
 tunate foreigners, who was evidently there simply to 
 qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton 
 in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by my- 
 self at one of the small tables, when, without looking 
 up, I became aware that some one at the other end of 
 the room was watching me very steadily. The place 
 was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the 
 dinner-hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound 
 that disturbed the digestion of the eight or ten per- 
 sons present, when the unmistakeable call of" Vaitare !" 
 informed me that if I looked up 1 should encounter 
 the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the 
 call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite 
 neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an 
 apologetic tone, " Beg pardon, sir, but the shevaleer 
 wishes to know if your name is Coopair. ,f Not very 
 much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation 
 in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite 
 answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and 
 took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long 
 sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing 
 his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a pro- 
 found study of the grain of the mahogany. 
 
 What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading 
 half-a-dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till 
 ten o'clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier, 
 who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to 
 the last extremity. One person after another called 
 for a bed-room candle, and exit finally the French- 
 man himself, making me, however, a most courteous 
 bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen 
 left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy, 
 the other a short portly gentleman of fifty or there- 
 abouts, both quite bald. They rose together and 
 came to the fire near which I was sitting. 
 
 "That last man who went out calls himself a cheva- 
 lier," said the thin gentleman. 
 
 "Yes," said his stout friend — "he took me for a 
 Mr. Cooper he had travelled with." 
 
 " The deuce he did," said the other — " why he 
 took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very 
 much alike." 
 
 " I beg pardon, gentlemen," said I — "he took me 
 for this Mr. Cooper too." 
 
 The Frenchman's ruse was discovered. It was in- 
 stead of a snuff-box — a way he had of making ac- 
 quaintance. We had a good laugh at our triple re- 
 semblance (three men more unlike it would be diffi- 
 cult to find), and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper 
 good night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up 
 stairs. 
 
 The next morning I came down rather late to break- 
 fast, and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to 
 pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the 
 night before. He rose immediately with a look of 
 radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elabo- 
 rate apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper 
 (whom I was so like, cependant, that we should be 
 mistaken for each other by our nearest friends), and 
 in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had en- 
 tered by chance, would have returned the compliment, 
 and taken me for the chevalier's most intimate friend 
 and fellow-traveller. 
 
 1 remained three or four days at Brighton, and 
 never discovered in that time that the chevalier's ruse 
 succeeded with any other person. I was his only 
 successful resemblance to " Monsieur Coopair." He 
 always waited breakfast for me in the coffee-room, 
 and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he 
 
 dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London 
 — and at what hour — and if I would be so obliging as 
 to take a place for him in the same coach. 
 
 It was a remarkably fine day ; and with my friend 
 
 j by my side outside of " the Age," we sped on toward 
 London, the sun getting; dimmer and dimmer, and the 
 fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from 
 
 i the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of 
 
 ; spirits — let alone the ever-depressed bosom of a stran- 
 ger in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant 
 and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and in- 
 formed my friend, for the first time, that I was bound 
 j to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce 
 know how I had escaped telling him of it before, but 
 ;j his "impossible mon ami!" was said in a tone and 
 accompanied with a look of the most complete sur- 
 
 i prise and despair. I was evidently his only hope in 
 
 : London. 
 
 I went up to town a day or two after ; and in ma- 
 king my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on 
 the opposite side of the strand, with his hands thrust 
 up to the wrists in the pockets of his "Taglioni," and 
 his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the 
 shop windows without much distinction between the 
 trunkmaker's and the printsellers — evidently miser- 
 able beyond being amused at anything. I was too 
 much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office 
 of escape-valve to his ennui, and I soon outwalked his 
 slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he 
 
 I had to the "chevalier" (and he was decidedly too 
 deficient in address to belong to the order "d'in- 
 
 i dustrie"), he had no letter of recommendation in his 
 ; personal appearance, and as little the air of even a 
 ! Frenchman of "quality" as any man I ever saw in 
 i the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the per- 
 I son who would first occur to me if I were to see a 
 paragraph in the times headed "suicide by a for- 
 jj eigner." 
 
 Revenons un peu. Brighton at this season (Novem- 
 j! ber) enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the 
 heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely 
 exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of 
 my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a 
 feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I 
 was beginning to forget the very existence, in the 
 eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland. 
 I do not wonder at the passion of the English for 
 Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the 
 air, both a magnificent city and the most advantageous 
 ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy, 
 " winter and rough weather." The miles of broad 
 gravel-walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so 
 hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five 
 minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are alone no 
 small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers 
 and invalids. I was never tired of sauntering along 
 this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The 
 beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all 
 weathers (and what children on earth are half as 
 beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant 
 source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and 
 
 II by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay 
 throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splen- 
 did shops and all the features of a metropolis, while 
 midway between the sea and this crowded sidewalk 
 pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horse- 
 back, and vehicles of every description, all subservient 
 to exercise and pleasure. 
 
 My first visit to Brighton was made in a very cold 
 day in summer, and I saw it through most unfavorable 
 spectacles. But 1 should think that along the cliffs, 
 where there are no trees or vendure to be seen, there 
 is very little apparent difference between summer and 
 winter; and coming here with the additional clothing 
 of a severer season, the temperature of the elastic and 
 saline air is not even chilly. The most delicate chil- 
 
540 
 
 PASSAGES FROxM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 dren play upon the Beach in days when there is no 
 sunshine; and invalids, wheeled out in these conve- 
 nient bath chairs, sit for hours by the seaside, watch- 
 ing the coming and retreating oi" the waves, apparently 
 without any sensation of cold — and this in December. 
 In America (in the same latitudes with Leghorn and 
 Venice), an invalid sitting out of doors at this season 
 would freeze to death in half an hour. Yet it was as 
 cold in August, in England, as it has been in Novem- 
 ber, and it is this temperate evenness of the weather 
 throughout ihe year which makes English climate, 
 on the whole, perhaps the healthiest in the world. 
 
 In the few days I was at Brighton, I became very | 
 fond of the perpetual ioud beat of the sea upon the 
 shore. Whether, like the " music of the spheres," i 
 it becomes at last " too constant to be heard," I did [ 
 not ask — but I never lost the consciousness of it ex- , 
 cept when engaged in conversation, and I found it 
 company to my thoughts when I dined or walked 
 alone, and a most agreeable lullaby at night. This j 
 majestic monotone is audible all over Brighton, in- 
 doors and out, and nothing overpowers it but the 
 wind in a storm ; it is even then only by fits, and the 
 alternation of the hissing and moaning of the blast 
 with the broken and heavy plash of the waters, is so ' 
 like the sound of a tempest at sea (the whistling in the 
 rigging, and the burst of the waves), that those who j 
 have beeD at Brighton in rough weather have realized 
 all of a storm at sea but the motion and the sea-sick- 
 ness — rather a large but not an undesirable diminution , 
 of experience. 
 
 Calling on a friend at Brighton, I was introduced 
 casually to a Mr. Smith. The name, of course, did 
 not awaken any immediate curiosity, but a second 
 look at the gentleman did — for I thought 1 had never j 
 seen a more intellectual or finer head. A fifteen j 
 minutes' conversation, which touched upon nothing 
 that could give me a clue to his profession, still satis- 
 fied me that so distinguished an address, and so keen 
 an eye, could belong to no nameless person, and I was ! 
 scarcely surprised when I read upon his card at part- 
 ing — Horace Smith. I need not say it was a very 
 great pleasure to meet him. I was delighted, too, 
 that the author of books we love as much as " Zillah," 
 and " Brambletye-House," looks unlike other men. 
 It gratifies somehow a personal feeling — as if those j 
 who had won so much admiration from us should, for j 
 our pride's sake, wear the undeniable stamp of supe- I 
 riority — as if we had acquired a property in him by I 
 loving him. How natural it is, when we have talked i 
 and thought a great deal about an author, to call him ! 
 "ours." "What Smith? Why our Smith — Horace 
 Smith" — is as common a dialogue between persons 
 who never saw him as it is among his personal friends. 
 
 These two ren.arkable brothers, James and Horace 
 Smith, are both gifted with exteriors such as are not 
 often possessed with genius — yet only James is so 
 fortunate as to have stumbled upon a good painter. 
 Lonsdale's portrait of James Smith, engraved by 
 Cousens, is both the author and the man — as fine a 
 picture of him, with his mind seen through his features, 
 as was ever done. But there is an engraved picture 
 extant of the author of Zillah, that, though it is no 
 likeness of the author, is a detestable caricature of the 
 man. Really this is a point about which distinguish- 
 ed men, in justice to themselves, should take some 
 little care. Sir Thomas Lawrence's portraits, and 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds's, are a sort of biography of the 
 eminent men they painted. The most enduring 
 history, it has been said, is written in coins. Certain- 
 ly the most effective biography is expressed in por- 
 traits. Long after the book and your impressions of 
 the character of which it treats have become dim in 
 your memory your impression of the features and 
 mien of a hero or a poet, as received from a picture, 
 remains indelible. How often does the face belie the 
 
 biography — making us think better or worse of the 
 man, after forming an opinion from a portrait in words, 
 that was either partial or malicious ! I am persuaded 
 the world would think better of Shelley, if there were 
 a correct and adequate portrait of his face, as it has 
 been described to me by one or two who knew him. 
 How much of the Byronic idolatry is born and fed 
 from the idealized pictures of him treasured in every 
 portfolio ! Sir Thomas Lawrence, Chalon, and Par- 
 ris, have composed between them a biography of Lady 
 Blessington, that have made her quite independent 
 of the " memoirs" of the next century. And who, I 
 may safely ask, even in America, has seen the nice, 
 cheerful, sensible, and motherly face which prefaces 
 the new edition of " The Manners of the American 
 Domestics" (I beg pardon for giving the title from my 
 Kentucky copy), without liking Mrs. Trollope a great 
 deal better, and at once dismissing all idea of "the 
 bazar" as a libel on that most lady-like countenance ? 
 * * * * * * * 
 
 1 think Lady S had more talent and distinction 
 
 crowded into her pretty rooms, last night, than I ever 
 before saw in such small compass. It is a bijou of a 
 house, full of gems of statuary and painting, but all 
 its capacity for company lies in a small drawing-room, 
 a smaller reception-room, and a very small, but very 
 exquisite boudoir — yet to tell you who were there 
 would read like Colburn's list of authors, added to a 
 paragraph of noble diners-out from the Morning Post. 
 
 The largest lion of the evening certainly was the 
 new Persian ambassador, a man six feet in his slippers; 
 a height which, with his peaked calpack, of a foot and 
 a half, superadded, keeps him very much among the 
 chandeliers. The principal article of his dress does 
 not diminish the effect of his eminence — a long white 
 shawl worn like a cloak, and completely enveloping 
 him from beard to toe. From the twisted shawl 
 around his waist glitters a dagger's hilt, lumped with 
 diamonds — and diamonds, in most dazzling profu- 
 sion, almost cover his breast. 1 never saw so many 
 together except in a cabinet of regalia. Close behind 
 this steeple of shawl and gem, keeps, like a short 
 shadow when the sun is high, his excellency's secre- 
 tary, a dwarfishly small man, dressed also in cashmere 
 and calpack, and of a most ill-favored and bow-stringish 
 countenance and mien. The master and man seem 
 chosen for contrast, the countenance of the ambassa- 
 dor expressing nothing but serene good nature. The 
 ambassador talks, too, and the secretary is dumb. 
 
 T H stood bolt upright against a mirror- 
 door, looking like two T H s trying to see 
 
 which was taller. The one with his face to me looked 
 like the incarnation of the John Bull newspaper, for 
 which expression he was indebted to a very hearty 
 face, and a very round subject for a buttoned-up coat; 
 
 while the H with his back to me looked like an 
 
 author, for which he was indebted to an exclusive view 
 
 of his cranium. I dare say Mr. H would agree 
 
 with me that he was seen, on the whole, at a most en- 
 viable advantage. It is so seldom we look, beyond the 
 ■man, at the author. 
 
 I have rarely seen a greater contrast in person and 
 
 expression than between H and B , who stood 
 
 near him. Both were talking to ladies — one bald, 
 burly, upright, and with a face of immovable gravity, 
 the other slight, with a profusion of curling hair, rest- 
 less in his movements, and of a countenance which 
 lights up with a sudden inward illumination. H— — 's 
 partner in the conversation looked into his face with a 
 ready-prepared smile for what he was going to say, 
 
 B 's listened with an interest complete, but without 
 
 effort. H was suffering from what I think is the 
 
 common curse of a reputation for wit — the expectation 
 of the listener had outrun the performance. 
 
 H B , whose diplomatic promotion goes on 
 
 much faster than can be pleasing to " Lady Qievdty" 
 
PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 541 
 
 has just received his appointment to Paris— the object 
 of his first wishes. He stood near his brother, talking 
 to a very beautiful and celebrated woman, and I 
 thought, spite of her ladyship's unflattering descrip- 
 tion, I had seldom seen a more intellectual face, or a 
 more gentlemanly and elegant exterior. 
 
 Late in the evening came in his royal highness the 
 
 duke of C -, and I wondered, as I had done many 
 
 times before, when in company with one of these royal 
 brothers, at the uncomfortable etiquette so laboriously 
 observed toward them. Wherever he moved in the 
 crowded rooms, everybody rose and stood silent, and 
 by giving way much more than for any one else, left 
 a perpetual circular space around him, in which, of 
 course, his conversation had the effect of a lecture to 
 a listeukig audience. A more embarrassed manner 
 and a more hesitating mode of speech than the duke's, 
 I can not conceive. He is evidently gene to the last 
 degree with this burdensome deference; and one 
 would think that in the society of highly-cultivated 
 and aristocratic persons, such as were present, he 
 would be delighted to put his highness into his pocket 
 when the footman leaves him at the door, and hear no 
 more of it till he goes again to his carriage. There 
 was great curiosity to know whether the duke would 
 think it etiquetical to speak to the Persian, as in con- 
 sequence of the difference between the .shah and the 
 British envoy the tall minister is not received at the 
 court of St. James. Lady S— — introduced them, 
 however, and then the duke again must have felt his 
 rank nothing less than a nuisance. It is awkward 
 enough, at any time, to converse with a foreigner who 
 has not forty English words in his vocabulary, but 
 what with the duke's hesitating and difficult utterance, 
 the silence and attention of the listening guests, and 
 the Persian's deference and complete inability to com- 
 prehend a syllable, the scene was quite painful. 
 
 There was some of the most exquisite amateur sing- 
 ing I ever heard after the company thinned oft* a little, 
 and the fashionable song of the day was sung by a 
 most beautiful woman in a way to move half the com- 
 pany to tears. It is called "Ruth," and is a kind of 
 recitative of the passage in Scripture, " Where thou 
 goest I will go," Sec. 
 
 ****** 
 
 I have driven in the park several days, admiring the 
 queen on horseback, and observing the changes in the 
 fashions of driving, equipages, &c, &c. Her majesty 
 seems to me to ride very securely and fearlessly, 
 though it is no wonder that in a country where every- 
 body rides, there should be bolder and better horse- 
 women. Miss Quentin, one of the maids of honor, 
 said to be the best female equestrian in England, 
 •« takes the courage out" of the queen's horse every 
 morning before the ride — so she is secured against one 
 class of accidents. I met the royal party yesterday in 
 full gallop near the centre of Rotten Row, and the two 
 grooms who ride ahead had brief time to do their work 
 of making the crowd of carriages give way. On came 
 the queen upon a dun-colored, highly-groomed horse, 
 with her prime minister on one side of her and Lord 
 Byron upon the other, her cortege of maids of honor 
 and ladies and lords in waiting checking their more 
 spirited horses, and preserving always a slight distance 
 between themselves and her majesty. Victoria's round 
 and plump figure looks extremely well in her dark- 
 green riding-dress, but I thought the man's hat un- 
 becoming. Her profile is not sufficiently good for 
 that trying style, and the cloth riding-cap is so much 
 prettier, that I wonder she does not remember that 
 " nice customs courtesy to great queens," and wear 
 what suits her. She ro'de with her mouth open, and 
 looked exhilarated with the exercise. Lord Melbourne, 
 it struck me, was the only person in her party whose 
 face had not the constrained look of consciousness of 
 observation. 
 
 I observe that the " crack men" ride without mar- 
 tingals, and that the best turnouts are driven without 
 a check-rein. The outstretched neck which is the 
 consequence, has a sort of Arab or blood look, proba- 
 ; bly the object of the change; but the drooping head 
 when the horse is walking or standing seems to me 
 ugly and out of taste. All the new carriages are built 
 | near the ground. The low park-phaeton, light, as a 
 j child's plaything, and drawn by a pair of ponies, is the 
 j fashionable equipage. I saw the prettiest thing con- 
 ! ceivable of this kind yesterday in the park — a lady 
 driving a pair of small cream-colored horses of great 
 beauty, with her two children in the phaeton, and two 
 grooms behind mounted on cream-colored saddle- 
 horses, all four of the animals of the finest shape and 
 action. The new street cabs (precisely the old-fash- 
 ioned sedan-chair suspended between four wheels, a 
 foot from the ground) are imitated by private carriages, 
 and driven with two horses — ugly enough. The cab- 
 phaeton, is in great fashion, with either one or two 
 horses. The race of ponies is greatly improved since 
 I was in England. They are as well-shaped as the 
 [ large horse, with very fine coats and great spirit. The 
 ' children of the nobility go scampering through the 
 ! park upon them, looking like horsemen and horse- 
 women seen through a reversed opera-glass. They 
 ; are scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog, but they 
 patter along with great speed. There is one fine lad 
 of about eight years, whose parents seem to have very 
 little care for his neck, and who, upon a fleet, milk- 
 white, long-tailed pony, is seen daily riding at a rate 
 : of twelve miles an hour through the most crowded 
 streets, with a servant on a tall horse plying whip and 
 spur to keep up with him. The whole system has the 
 droll effect of a mixture of Lilliput and Brobdignag. 
 
 We met the king of Oude a few days since at a party, 
 and were honored by an invitation to dine with his 
 majesty at his house in the Regent's park. Yester- 
 day was the appointed day ; and with the pleasant an- 
 ticipation of an oriental feast, we drove up at seven, 
 and were received by his turbaned ayahs, who took 
 shawl and hat with a reverential salaam, and introduced 
 us to the large drawing-room overlooking the park. 
 The king was not yet down; but in the corner sat 
 three parsees or fire-worshippers, guests like ourselves, 
 who in their long white linen robes, bronze faces, and 
 high caps, looked like anything but " diners-out" iu 
 London. To our surprise they addressed us in ex- 
 I cellent English, and we were told afterward that they 
 I were all learned men — facts not put down to the credit 
 of the Ghebirs in Lalla Rookh. 
 
 We were called out upon the balcony to look at a 
 i balloon that was hovering over the park, and on step- 
 ! ping back into the drawing-room, we found the com- 
 pany all assembled, and our royal host alone wanting. 
 There were sixteen English ladies present, and five 
 white gentlemen beside myself. The Orient, how- 
 ! ever, was well represented. In a corner, leaning si- 
 lently against a table, stood Prince Hussein Mirza, the 
 king's cousin, and a more romantic and captivating 
 specimen of Hindoo beauty could scarcely be im- 
 agined. He was slender, tall, and of the clearest olive 
 complexion, his night-black hair falling over his 
 shoulders in profusion, and his large antelope eyes 
 fixed with calm and lustrous surprise upon the half- 
 denuded forms sitting in a circle before him. We 
 heard afterward that he has conceived a most uncon- 
 trollable and unhappy passion for a high-born and 
 I beautiful English girl whom he met in society, and 
 j that it is with difficulty he is persuaded to come out 
 of his room. His dress was of shawls most gracefully 
 draped about him, and a cap of gold cloth was thrown 
 carelessly on the side of his head. Altogether he was 
 like a picture of the imagination. 
 
 A middle-aged stout man, ashy black, with Grecian 
 
542 
 
 PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL. 
 
 features, and a most determined and dignified expres- 
 sion of mouth, sat between Lady and Miss Por- 
 ter, and this was the waked or ambassador of the 
 prince of Sutara, by name Afzul Ali. He is in Eng- 
 land on business for his master, and if he does not suc- 
 ceed it will be no fault of his under lip. His secretary, 
 Keeram Ali, stood behind him — the wakeel dressed in 
 shawls of bright scarlet, with a white cashmere turban, j 
 and the scribe in darker stuffs of the same fashion. 
 Then there was the king's physician, a short, wiry, 
 merry-looking, quick-eyed Hindoo, with a sort of quiz- 
 zical angle in the pose of his turban: the high-priest, 
 also a most merry-looking Oriental, and Ali Acbar, a 
 Persian attache. I think these were all the Asiatics. 
 
 The king entered in a few minutes, and made the 
 circuit of the room, shaking hands most cordially with 
 all his guests. He is a very royal-looking person in- 
 deed. Perhaps you might call him too corpulent, if 
 his fine height (a little over six feet), and very fine 
 proportions, did not give his large size a character of j 
 majesty. His chest is full and round, and his walk | 
 erect and full of dignity. He has the Italian olive j 
 complexion, with straight hair, and my own remark at 
 first seeing him was that of many others, "How like 
 a bronze cast of Napoleon !" The subsequent study 
 of his features remove this impression, however, for 
 he is a most " merry monarch," and is seldom seen 
 without a smile. His dress was a mixture of oriental 
 and English fashions — a pair of baggy blue pantaloons, 
 bound around the waist with a rich shawl, a splendid 
 scarlet waistcoat buttoned close over his spacious 
 chest, and a robe of very fine snuff-colored cloth some- 
 thing like a loose dressing-gown without a collar. A 
 cap of silver cloth, and a brilliant blue satin cravat 
 completed his costume, unless in his covering should 
 be reckoned an enormous turquoise ring, which al- 
 most entirely concealed one of his fingers. 
 
 Ekbal-ood-Doivlah, Nawaub of Oude (his name and 
 title), is at present appealing to the English against 
 his uncle, who usurps his throne by the aid and counte- 
 nance of the East India company. The Mohamme- 
 dan law, as I understand, empowers a king to choose 
 his successor from his children without reference 
 to primogeniture, and the usurper, though an elder 
 brother, having been imbecile from his youth, Ekbal's 
 father was selected by the then king of Oude to suc- 
 ceed him. The question having been referred to 
 Lord AYellesley, however, then governor of India, he 
 decided that the English law of primogeniture should 
 prevail, or in other words (as the king's friends say) 
 preferred to have for the king of a subject province an 
 imbecile who would give him no trouble. So slipped 
 from the Nawaub's hands a pretty kingdom of six 
 millions of faithful Mohammedans ! I believe this is 
 the "short" of the story. I wonder (we are reproach- 
 ed so very often by the English for our treatment of 
 the Indians) whether a counter-chapter of " expedient 
 wrong" might not be made out from the history of the 
 Indians under British government in the east ? 
 
 Dinner was announced with a Hindostanee salaam, 
 
 and the king gave his arm to Lady . The rest 
 
 of us "stood not upon the order of our going," and 
 I found myself seated at table between my wife and a 
 Polish countess, some half dozen removes from the 
 Nawaub's right hand. His highnesscommenced help- 
 ing those about him most plentifully from a large 
 pillau, talking all the while most merrily in broken 
 English, or resorting to Hindostanee and his inter- 
 preter whenever his tongue got into trouble. With 
 the exception of one or two English joints, all the 
 dishes were prepared with rice or saffron, and (wine 
 being forbidden by the Mahommedan law) iced water 
 was served round from Indian coolers freely. For 
 one, I would have compounded for a bottle of wine 
 by taking the sin of the entire party on my soul, for, 
 what with the*exhaustion of a long London day, and 
 
 the cloying quality of the Nawaub's rich dishes, I 
 began to be sorry I had not brought a flask in my 
 pocket. His majesty's spirits seemed to require no 
 aid from wine. He talked constantly, and shrewdly, 
 and well. He impresses every one wifrh a high 
 estimate of his talents, though a more complete and 
 undisguised child of nature I never saw. Good sense, 
 with good humor, frankness, and simplicity, seem to 
 be his leading qualities. 
 
 We were obliged to take our leave early after din- 
 ner, having other engagements for the evening, but 
 while coffee was serving, the Hindostanee cook, a 
 funny little old man, came in to receive the compli- 
 ments of the company upon his dinner, and to play 
 and dance for his majesty's amusement. He had at 
 his back a long Indian drum, which he called his 
 "turn turn," and playing himself an accompaniment 
 upon this, he sang two or three comic songs in his 
 own language to a sort of wild yet merry air, very 
 much to the delight of all the orientals. Singer, 
 dancer, musician, and cook, the king certainly has a 
 jewel of a servant in him. 
 
 One moment bowing ourselves out from the pres- 
 ence of a Hindoo king, and the next beset by an Irish- 
 man with " Heaven bless your honor for the sixpence 
 you mean to give me !" what contrasts strike the travel- 
 ler in this great heart of the world ! Paddy lighted 
 us to our carriage with his lantern, implored the coach- 
 man to " dhrive carefully," and then stood with his 
 head bent to catch the sound upon the pavement of 
 another sixpence for his tenderness. Wherever there 
 is a party in the fashionable quarters of London, these 
 Tantaluses flit about with their lanterns — for ever at 
 the door of pleasure, yet shivering and starving for 
 ever in their rags. What a life ! 
 
 ****** 
 
 One of the most rational and agreeable of the fashion- 
 able resorts in London is Kensington Gardens, on the 
 days when the royal band plays from five to seven 
 near the bridge of the Serpentine. Some twenty of 
 the best instrumental musicians of London station 
 themselves under the trees in this superb park (for 
 though called " gardens," it is but a park with old 
 trees and greensward), and up and down the fine silky 
 carpet stroll hundreds of the fashionables of " May 
 fair and Belgrave square," listening a little perhaps, 
 and chattering a great deal certainly. It is a good 
 opportunity to see what celebrated beauties look like 
 by daylight; and, truth to say, one comes to the con- 
 clusion there, that candle-light is your true kalydor. 
 It is very ingeniously contrived by the grand chamber- 
 lain that this public music should be played in a far 
 away corner of the park, inaccessible except by those 
 who have carriages. The plebeians, for whose use 
 and pleasure it seems at first sight graciously con- 
 trived, are pretty well sifted by the two miles walk, 
 and a very aristocratic and well-dressed assembly in- 
 deed is that of Kensington gardens. 
 
 Near the usual stand of the musicians runs a bridle- 
 path for horsemen, separated from the greensward by 
 a sunk fence, and as I was standing by the edge of the 
 ditch yesterday, the queen rode by, pulling up to listen 
 to the music, and smile right and left to the crowd of 
 cavaliers drawn up in the road. I pulled off my hat 
 and stood uncovered instinctively, but looking around 
 to see how the promenades received her, I found to 
 my surprise that with the exception of a bald-headed 
 nobleman whem I chanced to know, the Yankee stood 
 alone in his homage to her. 
 
 I thought before I left America that I should find 
 the stamp of the new reign on manners, usages, con- 
 versation, and all the outer form and pressure of socie- 
 ty. One can not fancy England under Elizabeth to 
 have struck a stranger as did England under James. 
 We think of Shakspere, Leicester, and Raleigh, and 
 conclude that under a female sovereign chivalry at 
 
MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
 
 543 
 
 least shines brighter, and poetry should. A good 
 deal to my disappointment, 1 have looked in vain for 
 even a symptom of the queen's influence on anything. 
 She is as completely isolated in England, as entirely 
 above and out of the reach of the sympathies and 
 common thoughts of society, as the gilt grasshopper 
 on the steeple. At the opera and play, half the 
 audience do not even know she is there ; in the park, 
 she rides among the throng with scarcely a head 
 turned to look after her; she is unthought of, and 
 almost unmentioned at balls, routes, and soirees ; in 
 short, the throne seems to stand on glass — with no one 
 conductor to connect it with the electric chain of hu- 
 man hearts and sympathies. 
 
 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
 
 That Irish Channel has, as the English say, " a 
 nasty way with it." I embarked at noon on the 2Gth, 
 in a magnificent steamer, the Royal Sovereign, which 
 had been engaged by Lord Eglinton (as per advertise- 
 ment) to set down at Ardrossan all passengers bound 
 to the tournament. This was a seventeen hours' job, 
 including a very cold, blowy, and rough night ; and 
 of the two hundred passengers on board, one half 
 were so blest as to have berths or settees — the others 
 were unbtest, indeed. 
 
 I found on board several Americans ; and by the 
 time I had looked at the shape of the Liverpool har- 
 bor, and seen one or two vessels run in before a slap- 
 ping breeze, the premonitory symptom (which had : 
 already sent many to their berths) sent me to mine. 
 The boat was pitching backward and forward with a 
 sort of handsaw action that was not endurable. By : 
 foregoing my dinner and preserving a horizontal posi- 
 tion, I escaped all sickness, and landed at Ardrossan 
 at six the next morning, with a thirty-six hours' fast 
 upon me, which I trusted my incipient gout would re- 
 member as a per contra to the feast in the promised 
 " banquet." 
 
 Ardrossan, built chiefly, I believe, by Lord Eglin- 
 ton's family, and about eight miles from the castle, is 
 a small but very clean and thrifty-looking hamlet on 
 that part of the western coast of Scotland which lies 
 opposite the Isle of Arran. Ailsa Rock, famous in 
 song, slumbers like a cloud in the southwestern hori- 
 zon. The long breakers of the channel lay their lines 
 of foam almost upon the street, and the harbor is 
 formed by a pier jutting out from a little promontory 
 on the northern extremity of the town. The one 
 thoroughfare of Ardrossan is kept clean by the broom 
 of every wind that sweeps the Irish sea. A cleaner or 
 bleaker spot I never saw. 
 
 A Gael, who did not comprehend a syllable of such 
 English as a Yankee delivers, shouldered my port- 
 manteau without direction or request, and travelled 
 away to the inn, where he deposited it and held out 
 his hand in silence. There was certainly quite enough 
 said between us ; and remembering the boisterous ac- 
 companiment with which the claims of porters are 
 usually pushed upon one's notice, I could well wish 
 that Gaelic tide-waiters were more common. 
 
 " Any room, landlord ?" was the first question — 
 " Not a cupboard, sir," was the answer. — " Can you 
 give me some breakfast?" asked fifty others in a breath. 
 — " Breakfast will be put upon all the tables presently, 
 gentlemen," said the dismayed Boniface, glancing at 
 the crowds who were pouring in, and, Scotchmanlike, 
 making no promises to individuals. — " Landlord !" 
 vociferated a gentleman from the other side of the 
 
 hall — "what the devil does this mean? Here's the 
 room I engaged a fortnight ago occupied by a dozen 
 people shaving and dressing !" — " I canna help it, sir ! 
 Ye're welcome to turn 'em a' out — if ye can .'" said 
 the poor man, lifting up his hands in despair, and re- 
 treating to the kitchen. The hint was a good one, 
 and taking up my own portmanteau, I opened a door 
 in one of the passages. It led into a small apartment, 
 which in more roomy times might have been a pantry, 
 but was now occupied by three beds and a great varie- 
 ty of baggage. There was a twopenny glass on the 
 mantel-piece, and a drop or two of water in a pitcher, 
 and where there were sheets I could make shift for a 
 towel. I found presently, by the way, that I had had 
 a narrow escape of surprising some one in bed, for 
 the sheet which did duty as a napkin was still warm 
 with the pressure of the newly-fled occupant. 
 
 Three or four smart-looking damsels in caps looked 
 in while I was engaged in my toilet, and this, with one 
 or two slight observations made in the apartment, con- 
 vinced me that I had intruded on the dormitory of the 
 ladies' maids belonging to the various parties in the 
 house. A hurried " God bless us!" as they retreated, 
 however, was all either of reproach or remonstrance 
 that I was troubled with; and I emerged with a 
 smooth chin in time for breakfast, very much to the 
 envy and surprise of my less-enterprising compan- 
 ions. 
 
 There was a great scramble for the tea and toast ; 
 but, uniting forces with a distinguished literary man 
 whose acquaintance I had been fortunate enough to 
 make on board the steamer, we managed to get places 
 at one of the tables, and achieved our breakfasts in 
 tolerable comfort. We were still eight miles from 
 Eglinton, however, and a lodging was the next matter 
 of moment. My friend thought he was provided for 
 nearer the castle, and I went into the street, which I 
 found crowded with distressed-looking people, flying 
 from door to door, with ladies on their arms and wheel- 
 barrows of baggage at their heels, the townspeople 
 standing at the doors and corners staring at the novel 
 spectacle in open-mouthed wonder. Quite in a di- 
 lemma whether or not to go on to Irvine (which, being 
 within two miles of the castle, was probably much 
 more over-run than Ardrossan), I was standing at the 
 corner of the street, when a Liverpool gentleman, 
 whose kindness I must record as well as my pleasure 
 in his society for the two or three days we were to- 
 gether, came up and offered me a part of a lodging he 
 had that moment taken- The bed was what we call 
 in America a bunk, or a kind of berth sunk into the 
 wall, and there were two in the same garret, but the 
 sheets were clean ; and there was a large bible on the 
 table — the latter a warrant for civility, neatness, and 
 honesty, which, after many years of travel, I have 
 never found deceptive. I closed immediately with 
 my friend ; and whether it was from a smack of au- 
 thorship or no, I must say I took to my garret very 
 kindly. 
 
 It was but nine o'clock, and the day was on my 
 hands. Just beneath the window ran a railroad, built 
 to bring coal to the seaside, and extending to within 
 la mile of the castle; and with some thirty or forty 
 | others, I embarked in a horse-car for Eglinton to see 
 the preparations for the following day's tournament. 
 We were landed near the park gate, after an hour s 
 drive through a flat country blackened with coal-pits; 
 and it was with no little relief to the eye that I en- 
 tered upon a smooth and gravelled avenue eading by 
 a mile of shaded windings to the castle. 1 he day was 
 heavenly; the sun-flecks lay bright as "patines of 
 gold" on the close-shaven grass beneath the trees ; 
 and I thought that nature had consented for once to 
 remove her eternal mist-veil from Scotland, and let 
 pleasure and sunshine have a holydav together. The 
 sky looked hard and deep; and I had no more appre- 
 
544 
 
 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
 
 hension of rain for the morrow than I should have had 
 under a July sun in Asia. 
 
 Crossing a bright little river (the Lugton, 1 think 
 it is called), whose sloping banks, as far as I could see 
 up and down, were shaven to the rich smoothness of 
 " velvet of three-pile," I came in sight of the castle 
 towers. Another bridge over a winding of the same 
 river lay to the left, a Gothic structure of the most 
 rich and airy mould, and from either end of this ex- 
 tended the enclosed passage for the procession to the 
 lists. The castle stood high upon a mound beyond. Its 
 round towers were half concealed by some of the finest 
 trees I ever saw ; and though less antique and of a less 
 frowning and rude aspect than I had expected, it was 
 a very perfect specimen of modern castellated archi- 
 tecture. On ascending to the lawn in front of the 
 castle, I found that it was built less upon a mound 
 than upon the brow of a broad plateau of table-land, 
 turned sharply by the Lugton, close under the castle 
 walls — a natural sight of singular beauty. Two Sara- 
 cenic-looking tents of the gayest colors were pitched 
 upon the bright-green lawn at a short distance, and 
 off to the left, by several glimpses through the trees, 
 I traced along the banks of the river the winding en- 
 closures for the procession. 
 
 The large hall was crowded with servants ; but pre- 
 suming that a knight who was to do his devoir so con- 
 spicuously on the morrow would not be stirring at so 
 early Ml hour, I took merely a glance of the armor 
 upon the walls in passing, and deferring the honor of 
 paying my respects, crossed the lawn and passed over 
 the Lugton by a rustic foot-bridge in search of the 
 lists. A cross-path (leading by a small temple en- 
 closed with wire netting, once an aviary, perhaps, but 
 now hung around in glorious profusion with game, 
 venison, a boar's head, and other comestibles), brought 
 me in two or three minutes to a hill-side overlooking 
 the chivahic arena. It was a beautiful sight of itself 
 without plume or armor. In the centre of a verdant 
 plain, shut in by hills of an easy slope, wooded richly, 
 appeared an oblong enclosure glittering at either end 
 with a cluster of tents, striped with the gayest colors 
 of the rainbow. Between them, on the farther side, 
 stood three galleries, of which the centre was covered 
 with a Gothic roof highly ornamented, the four front 
 pillars draped with blue damask, and supporting a can- 
 opy over the throne intended for the queen of beauty. 
 A strongly-built barrier extended through the lists; 
 and heaps of lances, gay flags, and the heraldic orna- 
 ments, still to be added to the tents, lay around on 
 the bright grass in a picture of no little richness. I 
 was glad afterward that I had seen thus much with 
 the advantage of an unclouded sun. 
 
 In returning, I passed in the rear of the castle, and 
 looked into the temporary pavilions erected for the 
 banquet and ball. They were covered exteriorly with 
 rough board and sails, and communicated by an en- 
 closed gallery with one of the larger apartments of the 
 castle. The workmen were still nailing up the drapery, 
 and arranging lamps and flowers; but with all this dis- 
 advantage, the effect of the two immense halls, lined as 
 they were with crimson and white in broad alternate 
 stripes, resembling in shape and fashion two gigantic 
 tents, was exceedingly imposing. Had the magnificent 
 design of Lord Eglinton been successfully carried out, 
 it would have been a scene, with the splendor of the 
 costumes, the lights, music, and revelry, unsurpassed, 
 probably, by anything short of enchantment. 
 
 PRINCIPAL DAY. 
 
 I was awakened at an early hour the morning after 
 my arrival at Ardrossan by a band of music in the 
 street. My first feeling was delight at seeing a bit of 
 
 blue sky of the size of my garret skylight, and a daz- 
 zling sunshine on the floor. " Skirling" above all the 
 other instruments of the band, the Highland bagpipe 
 made the air reel with " A' the blue bonnets are over 
 the border," and, hoisting the window above my head, 
 I strained over the house-leads to get a look at the 
 performer. A band of a dozen men in kilt and bonnet 
 were marching up and down, led by a piper, something 
 in the face like the heathen representations of Boreas; 
 and on a long line of roughly-constructed rail-cars 
 were piled, two or three deep, a crowd resembling, at 
 first sight, a crushed bed of tulips. Bonnets of every 
 cut and color, from the courtier's green velvet to the 
 shepherd's homely gray, struggled at the top ; and 
 over the sides hung red legs and yellow legs, cross- 
 barred stockings and buff boots, bare feet and pilgrim's 
 sandals. The masqueraders scolded and laughed, the 
 boys halloed, the quiet people of Ardrossan stared in 
 grave astonishment, and, with the assistance of some 
 brawny shoulders, applied to the sides of the over- 
 laden vehicles, the one unhappy horse got his whim- 
 sical load under way for the tournament. 
 
 Train followed train, packed with the same motley 
 array ; and at ten o'clock, after a clean and comforta- 
 ble Scotch breakfast in our host's little parlor, we sal- 
 lied forth to try our luck in the scramble for places. 
 ! After a considerable fight we were seated, each with a 
 | man in his lap, when we were ordered down by the 
 . conductor, who informed us that the chief of the 
 Campbells had taken the car for his party, and that, 
 with his band in the succeeding one, he was to go in 
 state (upon a railroad!) to Eglinton. Up swore half- 
 a-dozen Glasgow people, usurpers like ourselves, that 
 they would give way for no Campbell in the world ; 
 and finding a stout hand laid on my leg to prevent my 
 yielding to the order to quit, I gave in to what might 
 be called as pretty a bit of rebellious republicanism as 
 you would find on the Mississippi. The conductor 
 stormed, but the Scotch bodies sat firm; and as Scot 
 met Scot in the fight, I was content to sit in silence 
 and take advantage of the victory. I learned after- 
 ward that the Campbell chieftain was a Glasgow man- 
 ufacturer; and though he undoubtedly had a right to 
 gather his clan, and take piper and eagle's plume, there 
 might, possibly, be some jealous disapprobation at the 
 bottom of his townsmen's rudeness. 
 
 Campbell and his party presently appeared, and a 
 dozen or twenty very fine looking men they were. One 
 of the ladies, as well as I could see through the black 
 lace veil thrown over her cap and plumes, was a re- 
 markably handsome woman ; and I was very glad when 
 the matter was compromised, and the Campbells were 
 distributed among our company. We jogged on at a 
 slow pace toward the tournament, passing thousands 
 of pedestrians, the men all shod, and the women all 
 barefoot, with their shoes in their hands, and nearly 
 every one, in accordance with Lord Eglinton's printed 
 request, showing some touch of fancy in his dress. A 
 plaid over the shoulder, or a Glengary bonnet, or, per- 
 haps, a goose-feather stuck jauntily in the cap, was 
 enough to show the feeling of the wearer, and quite 
 enough to give the crowd, all in all, a most festal and 
 joyous aspect. 
 
 The secluded bit of road between the rail-track and 
 the castle lodge, probably never before disturbed by 
 more than two vehicles at a time, was thronged with a 
 press of wheels, as closely jammed as Fleet street at 
 noon. Countrymen's carts piled with women and 
 children like loads of market-baskets in Kent; post- 
 chaises with exhausted horses and occupants straining 
 their eyes forward for a sight of the castle ; carriages 
 of the neighboring gentry with " bodkins" and over- 
 packed dickeys, all in costume ; stout farmers on 
 horseback, with plaid and bonnet; gingerbread and 
 ale-carts, pony-carts, and coal-carts; wheelbarrows 
 with baggage, and porters with carpet-bags and hat- 
 
MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT 
 
 545 
 
 boxes, were mixed up in merry confusion with the 
 most motley throng of pedestiians it has ever been my 
 fortune to join. The van-colored tide poured in at 
 the open gate of the castle; and if [ had seen no other 
 procession, the Jong-extended mass of caps, bonnets, 
 and plumes, winding through that shaded and beautiful 
 avenue, would have repaid me for no small proportion 
 of my subsequent discomfort. I remarked, by the 
 way, that I did not see a hat in the entire mile between 
 the porter's lodge and the castle. 
 
 The stables, which lay on the left of the approach 
 (a large square structure with turret and clock, very 
 like four methodist churches, dos-d-dos), presented 
 another busy and picturesque scene — horses half- 
 caparisoned, men-at-arms in buff and steel, and the 
 gay liveries of the nineteenth century paled by the re- 
 vived glories of the servitude of more knightly times. 
 And this part of the scene, loo, had its crowd of laugh- 
 ing and wondeiing spectators. 
 
 On reaching the Gothic bridge over the Lugton, 
 we came upon a cordon of police who encircled the ; 
 castle, turning the crowd off by the bridge in the di- i 
 rection of the lists. Sorry to leave my merry and 
 motley fellow-pedestrians, 1 presented my card of in- | 
 vitation and passed on alone to the castle. The sun 
 was at this time shining with occasional cloudings- 
 over ; and the sward and road, after the two or three 
 fine days we had had, were in the best condition for 
 every purpose of the tournament. 
 
 Two or three noble trees with their foliage nearly 
 to the ground stood between me and the front of the 
 castle, as I ascended the slope above the river ; and 
 the lifting of a stage curtain could scarce be more 
 sudden, or the scene of a drama more effectively com- 
 posed, than the picture disclosed by the last step upon 
 the terrace. Any just description of it, indeed, must 
 read like a passage from the " prompter's book." I 
 stood for a moment, exactly where you would have 
 placed an audience. On my left rose a noble castle 
 with four round towers, the entrance thronged with 
 men-at-arms, and busy comers and goers in every 
 variety of costume. On the greensward in front of the 
 castle lounged three or four gentlemen archers in 
 suits of green silk and velvet. A cluster of grooms 
 under an immense tree on the right were fitting two 
 or three superb horses with theirarmorand caparisons, 
 while one beautiful blood palfrey, whose fine limbs 
 and delicately veined head and neck were alone visible | 
 under his embroidered saddle and gorgeous trappings 
 of silk, was held by two " tigers" at a short distance. 
 Still farther on the right, stood a cluster of gayly dec- 
 orated tents; and in and out of the looped-up curtain 
 of the farthest passed constantly the slight forms of 
 lady archers in caps with snowy plumes, kirtles of 
 green velvet, and petticoats of white satin, quivers at 
 their backs and bows in their hands — one tall and 
 stately girl (an Ayrshire lady of very uncommon 
 beauty, whose name I took some pains to inquire), 
 conspicuous by her grace and dignity above all. 
 
 The back-ground was equally well composed — the 
 farther side of the lawn making a sharp descent to the 
 small river which bends around the castle, the opposite 
 shore thronged with thousands of spectators watching 
 the scene 1 have described ; and in the distance be- 
 hind them, the winding avenue, railed in for the pro- 
 cession, hidden and disclosed by turns among the 
 noble trees of the park, and alive throughout its whole 
 extent with the multitudes crowding to the lists. 
 There was a chivalric splendor in the whole scene, 
 which I thought at the time would repay one for a 
 long pilgrimage to see it — even should the clouds, 
 which by this time were coming up very threatening- 
 ly from the horizon, put a stop to the tournament al- 
 together. 
 
 On entering the castle hall, a lofty room hung 
 round with arms, trophies of the chase, ancient 
 35 
 
 shields, and armor of every description, I found my- 
 self in a crowd of a very merry and rather a motley 
 character— knights half armed, esquires in buff', pal- 
 mers, halberdiers, archers, and servants in modern 
 livery, here and there a lady, and here and there a 
 spectator like myself, and in a corner by one of the 
 Gothic windows — what think you? — a minstrel? — a 
 gray-haired harper? — a jester? Guess again — a re- 
 porter for the Times! With a "walking dictionary" 
 at his elbow, in the person of the fat butler of the 
 castle, he was inquiring out the various characters in 
 the crowd, and the rapidity of his stenographic jot- 
 tings-down (with their lucid apparition in print two 
 days after in London) would-, in the times represented 
 by the costumes about him, have burnt him at the 
 stake for a wizard with the consent of every knight in 
 Christendom. 
 
 I was received by the knight-marshal of the lists, 
 who did the honors of hospitality for Lord Eglinton 
 during his preparation for the " passage of arms ;" 
 and finding an old friend under the gray beard and 
 scallop shell of a venerable palmer, whose sandal and 
 bare toes I chanced to stumble over, we passed in 
 together to the large dining-room of the castle. 
 " Lunch" was on the long table, and some two hun- 
 dred of the earl's out-lodging guests were busy at 
 knife and fork, while here and there were visible some 
 of those anachronisms which, to me, made the zest 
 of the tournament — pilgrims eating Perigord pics, 
 esquires dressing after the manner of the thirteenth 
 century diving most scientifically into the richer veins 
 of pates defoie-gras, dames in ruff and farthingale dis- 
 cussing blue blanc-mange, and a knight with an over- 
 night headache calling out for a cup of tea ! 
 
 On returning to the hall of the castle, which was 
 the principal place of assemblage, I saw with no little 
 regret that ladies were coming from their carriages 
 under umbrellas. The fair archers tripped in doors 
 from their crowded tent, the knight of the dragon, 
 who had been out to look after his charger, was being 
 wiped dry by a friendly pocket handerckief, and all 
 countenances had fallen with the barometer. It was 
 time for the procession to start, however, and the 
 knights appeared, one by one, armed cap-a-pie, all 
 save the helmet, till at last the hall was crowded with 
 steel-clad and chivalric forms ; and they waited only 
 for the advent of the queen of beauty. After admiring 
 not a little the manly bearing and powerful " thewes 
 and sinews" displayed by the array of modern English 
 nobility in the trying costumes and harness of olden 
 time, I stepped out upon the lawn with some curiosity 
 to see how so much heavy metal was to be got into a 
 demipique saddle. After one or two ineffectual at- 
 tempts, foiled partly by the restlessness of his horse, 
 the first knight called ingloriously for a chair. Another 
 scrambled over with great difficulty ; and I fancy, 
 though Lord Waterford and Lord Eglinton, and one 
 other whom I noticed, mounted very gallantly and 
 gracefully, the getting to saddle was possibly the most 
 difficult feat of the day. The ancient achievement 
 of leaping on the steed's back from the ground in 
 complete armor would certainly have broken the 
 spine of any horse present, and was probably never 
 | done but in story. Once in the saddle, however, 
 English horsemanship told well ; and one of the finest 
 : sights of the day I thought was the breaking away of 
 a powerful horse from the grooms, before his rider had 
 gathered up his reins, and a career at furious speed 
 through the open park, during which the steel-encum- 
 bered horseman rode as safely as a fox-hunter, and 
 subdued the affrighted animal, and brought him back 
 in a style worthy of a wr-ath from the queen of 
 beautv. 
 
 Driven in by the rain, I v is standing at the upper 
 side of the hall, when a movement in the crowd and 
 an unusual " making-way" announced the coming of 
 
546 
 
 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
 
 the "cynosure of all eyes." She enteied from the 
 interior of the castle with her train held up by two 
 beautiful pages of ten or twelve years of age, and at- 
 tended by two fair and very young maids of honor. 
 Her jacket of ermine, her drapery of violet and blue 
 velvet, the collars of superb jewels which embraced 
 her throat and bosom, and her sparkling crown, were 
 on her (what they seldom are. but should be only) 
 mere accessaries to her own predominating and radiant 
 beauty. Lady Seymour's features are as nearly fault- 
 less as is consistent with expression ; her figure and 
 face are rounded to the complete fulness of the mould 
 for a Juno ; her walk is queenly, and peculiarly un- 
 studied and graceful, yet (I could not but think then 
 and since) she was not well chosen for the queen of a 
 tournament. The character of her beauty, uncom- 
 mon and perfect as it is, is that of delicacy and loveli- 
 ness — the lily rather than the rose — the modest pearl, 
 not the imperial diamond. The eyes to flash over a 
 crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance, 
 to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public 
 award of honor, should be full of command, dark, 
 lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and 
 most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene 
 heaven of a happy hearth — eyes to love, not wonder 
 at, to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for. 
 At the distance at which most of the spectators of the 
 tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble's 
 stormy orbs would have shown much finer, and the 
 forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head 
 and figure would have been more applauded than the 
 quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace lost to all but 
 those immediately round her. J had seen the Queen 
 of Beauty in a small society, dressed in simple white, 
 without an ornament, when she was far more becom- 
 ingly dressed and more beautiful than here, and I have 
 never seen, since, the engravings and prints of Lady 
 Seymour which fill every window in the London 
 shops, without feeling that it was a profanation of a 
 style of loveliness that would be 
 
 "prodigal enough 
 
 If it unveiled its beauty to the moon." 
 
 The day wore on, and the knight-marshal of the 
 lists (Sir Charles Lamb, the stepfather of Lord 
 Eglinton, by far the most knightly looking person at 
 the tournament), appeared in his rich surcoat and 
 embossed armor, and with a despairing look at the in- 
 creasing torrents of rain, gave the order to get to 
 horse. At the first blast of the trumpet, the thick- 
 leaved trees around the castle gave out each a dozen 
 or two of gay colored horsemen who had stood almost 
 unseen under the low-hanging branches — mounted 
 musicians in silk and gay trappings, mounted men-at- 
 arms in demi-suits of armor, deputy marshals and 
 halberdiers; and around the western tower, where 
 their caparisons had been arranged and their horse- 
 armor carefully looked to, rode the glittering and 
 noble company of knights, Lord Eglinton in his armor 
 of inlaid gold, and Lord Alford, with his athletic 
 frame and very handsome features, conspicuous above 
 all. The rain, meantime, spared neither the rich 
 tabard of the pursuivant, nor the embroidered saddle- 
 cloths of the queen's impatient palfrey ; and after a 
 half-dozen of dripping detachments had formed and 
 led on, as the head of the procession, the lady-archers 
 (who were to go on foot) were called by the marshal i 
 with a smile and a glance upward which might have ' 
 been construed into a tacit advice to stay in doors. I 
 Gracefully and majestically, however, with quiver at 
 her back, and bow in hand, the tall and fair archer of 
 whose uncommon beauty I have already spoken, 
 stepped from the castle loor ; and, regardless of the 
 rain which fell in drops ; s large as pearls on her un- 
 protected forehead and suowy shoulders, she took her 
 place in the procession with her silken-booted troop 
 
 picking their way very gingerly over the pools behind 
 her. Slight as the circumstance may seem, there 
 was in the manner of the lady, and her calm disregard 
 of self in the cause she had undertaken, which would 
 leave me in no doubt where to look for a heroine 
 were the days of Wallace (whose compatriot she is) 
 to come over again. The knight-marshal put spurs 
 to his horse, and re-ordered the little troop to the 
 castle ; and regretting that I had not the honor of the 
 lady's acquaintance for my authority, I performed my 
 only chivalric achievement for the day, the sending a 
 halberdier whom I had chanced to remember as the 
 servant of an old friend, on a crusade into the castle 
 for a lady's maid and a pair of dry stockings! Whether 
 they were found, and the fair archer wore them, or 
 where she and her silk-shod company have the tourna- 
 ment consumption, rheumatism, or cough, at this 
 hour, I am sorry I can not say. 
 
 The judge of peace, Lord Saltoun, with his wand, 
 and retainers on foot bearing heavy battle-axes, was 
 one of the best figures in the procession ; though, as 
 he was slightly gray, and his ruby velvet cap and sat- 
 urated ruff were poor substitutes for a warm cravat 
 and hat-brim, I could not but associate his fine horse- 
 manship with a sore throat, and his retainers and their 
 battle-axes with relays of nurses and hot flannels. The 
 flower of the tournament, in the representing and 
 keeping up of the assumed character, however, was its 
 king, Lord Londonderry. He, too, is a man, I should 
 think, on the shady side of fifty, but of just the high 
 preservation and embonpoint necessary for a royal pres- 
 ence. His robe of red velvet and ermine swept the 
 ground as he sat in his saddle; and he managed to 
 keep its immense folds free of his horse's legs, and 
 yet to preserve its flow in his prancing motion, with a 
 grace and ease, I must say, which seemed truly im- 
 perial. His palfrey was like a fiery Arabian, all ac- 
 tion, nerve, and fire; and every step was a rearing 
 prance, which, but for the tranquil self-possession and 
 easy control of the king, would have given the specta- 
 tors some fears for his royal safety. Lord Londc 
 derry's whole performance of his part was without a 
 fault, and chiefly admirable, I thought, from his s 
 taining it with that unconsciousness and entire freedom 
 from mauvaise honte which the English seldom can 
 command in new or conspicuous situations. 
 
 The queen of beauty was called, and her horse led 
 to the door; but the water ran from the blue saddle- 
 cloth and housings like rain from a roof, and the storm 
 seemed to have increased with the sound of her name. 
 She came to the door, and gave a deprecating look 
 upward which would have mollified anything but a 
 Scotch sky, and, by the command of the knight mar- 
 shal, retired again to wait for a less chivalric but drier 
 conveyance. Her example was followed by the other 
 ladies, and their horses were led riderless in the pro- 
 cession. 
 
 The knights were but half called when I accepted 
 a friend's kind offer of a seat in his carriage to the lists. 
 The entire park, as we drove along, was one vast ex- 
 panse of umbrellas ; and it looked from the carriage- 
 window, like an army of animated and gigantic mush- 
 rooms, shouldering each other in a march. I had no 
 idea till then of the immense crowd the occasion had 
 drawn together. The circuitous route railed in for 
 the procession was lined with spectators six or seven 
 deep, on either side, throughout its whole extent of a 
 mile ; the most distant recesses of the park were 
 crowded with men, horses, and vehicles, all pressing 
 onward ; and as we approached the lists we found the 
 multitude full a quarter of a mile deep, standing on all 
 the eminences which looked down upon the enclosure, 
 as closely serried almost as the pit of the opera, and 
 all eyes bent in one direction, anxiously watching the 
 guarded entrance. I heard the number of persons 
 present variously estimated during the day, the esti 
 
MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
 
 547 
 
 mates ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand, but 
 I should think the latter was nearer the mark. 
 
 We presented our tickets at the private door, in the 
 rear of the principal gallery, and found ourselves intro- 
 duced to a very dry place among the supports and 
 rafters of the privileged structure. The look-out was 
 excellent in front, and here I proposed to remain, de- 
 clining the wet honor of a place above stairs. The 
 gentleman-usher, however, was very urgent for our 
 promotion ; but as we found him afterward chatting 
 very familiarly with a party who occupied the seats 
 we had selected, we were compelled to relinquish the 
 flattering unction that he was actuated by an intuitive 
 sense of our deservings. On ascending to the covered 
 gallery, I saw, to my surprise, that some of the best 
 seats in front were left vacant, and here and there, 
 along the different tiers of benches, ladies were crowd- 
 ing excessively close together, while before or behind 
 them there seemed plenty of unoccupied room. A 
 second look showed me small streams of water coming 
 through the roof, and I found that a dry seat was 
 totally unattainable. The gallery held about a thou- 
 sand persons (the number Lord Eglinton had invited 
 to the banquet and ball), and the greater part of these 
 were ladies, most of them in fancy dresses, and the re- 
 mainder in very slight demi-toilette — everybody having 
 dressed apparently with a full reliance on the morn- 
 ing's promise of fair weather. Less fortunate than 
 the multitude outside, the earl's guests seemed not to 
 have numbered umbrellas among the necessities of a 
 tournament; and the demand for this despised inven- 
 tion was sufficient (if merit were ever rewaided) to 
 elevate it for ever after to a rank among chivalric ap- 
 pointments. Substitutes and imitations of it were 
 made of swords and cashmeres ; and the lenders of 
 veritable umbrellas received smiles which should in- 
 duce them, one would think, to carry half-a-dozen to 
 all future tournaments in Scotland. It was pitiable 
 to see the wreck going on among the perishable ele- | 
 gancies of Victorine and Herbault — chip hats of the 
 most faultless lournure collapsing with the wet ; 
 starched ruffs quite flat ; dresses passing helplessly 
 from " Lesbia's" style to "Nora Creina's;" shawls, 
 tied by anxious mammas over chapeau and coiffure, 
 crushing pitilessly the delicate fabric of months of in- 
 vention ; and, more lamentable still, the fair brows and 
 shoulders of many a lovely woman proving with rain- 
 bow clearness that the colors of the silk or velvet com- 
 posing her head-dress were by no means " fast." The 
 Irvine aichers, by the way, who, as the queen's body- 
 guard, were compelled to expose themselves to the 
 rain on the grand staircase, resembled a troop of Nevv- 
 Zealanders with their faces tattooed of a delicate 
 green ; though, as their Lincoln bonnets were all 
 made of the same faithless velvet, they were fortunately 
 streaked so nearly alike as to preserve their uniform. 
 
 After a brief consultation between the rheumatisms 
 in my different limbs, it was decided (since it was vain 
 to hope for shelter for the entire person) that my cloth- 
 cap would be the best recipient for the inevitable wet; 
 and selecting the best of the vacated places, I seated 
 myself so as to receive one of the small streams as ; 
 nearly as possible on my organ of firmness. Here I 
 was undisturbed, except that once I was asked (my 
 seat supposed to be a dry one) to give place to a lady 
 newly arrived, who, receiving my appropriated rivulet 
 in her neck, immediately restored it to me with many 
 acknowledgments, and passed on. Jn point of posi- 
 tion, my seat, which was very near the pavilion of the 
 queen of beauty, was one of the best at the tourna- 
 MU'iit; and diverting my aqueduct, by a little manage- 
 ment, over my left shoulder, I contrived to be more 
 comfortable, probably, than most of my shivering and 
 melancholy neighbors. 
 
 A great agitation in the crowd, and a dampish sound 
 i)f coming trumpets, announced the approach of the 
 
 procession. As it came in sight, and wound along the 
 curved passage to the lists, its long and serpentine line 
 of helmets and glittering armor, gonfalons, spear- 
 points, and plumes, just surging above the moving sea 
 of umbrellas, had the effect of some gorgeous and 
 bright-scaled dragon swimming in troubled waters. 
 The leaders of the long cavalcade pranced into the 
 arena at last, and a tremendous shout from the multi- 
 tude announced their admiration of the spectacle. On 
 they came toward the canopy of the queen of beauty, 
 men-at-arms, trumpeters, heralds, and halberdiers, and 
 soon after them the king of the tournament, with his 
 long scarlet robe flying to the tempest, and his rearing 
 palfrey straining every nerve to 6how his pride and 
 beauty. The first shout from the principal gallery 
 was given in approbation of this display of horseman- 
 ship, as Lord Londonderry rode past ; and consider- 
 ing the damp state of the enthusiasm which prompted 
 it, it should have been considered rather flattering. 
 Lord Eglinton came on presently, distinguished above 
 all others no less by the magnificence of his appoint- 
 ments than by the ease and dignity with which he 
 rode, and his knightly bearing and stature. His 
 golden armor sat on him as if he had been used to 
 wear it ; and he managed his beautiful charger, and 
 bowed in reply to the reiterated shouts of the multitude 
 and his friends, with a grace and chivalric courtesy 
 which drew murmurs of applause from the spectators 
 long after the cheering had subsided. 
 
 The jester rode into the lists upon a <rray steed, 
 shaking his bells over his head, and dressed in an odd 
 costume of blue and yellow, with a broad-flapped hat, 
 asses' ears, &c. His character was not at first under- 
 stood by the crowd, but he soon began to excile mer- 
 riment by his jokes, and no little admiration by his 
 capital riding. He was a professional person, I think 
 it was said, from Astley's, but as he spoke with a most 
 excellent Scotch "burr," he easily passed for an in- 
 digenous " fool." He rode from side to side of the 
 lists during the whole of the tournament, borrowing 
 umbrellas, quizzing the knights, A:c. 
 
 One of the most striking features of the procession 
 was the turn-out of the knight of the Gael, Lord 
 Glenlyon, with seventy of his clansmen at his back 
 in plaid and philibeg, and a finer exhibition of calves 
 (without a joke) could scarce be desired. They fol- 
 lowed their chieftain on foot, and when the procession 
 separated, took up their places in line along the 
 palisade, serving as a guard to the lists. 
 
 After the procession had twice made the circuit of 
 the enclosure, doing obeisance to the queen of beauty, 
 the jester had possession of the field while the knights 
 retired to don their helmets (hitherto carried by their 
 esquires), and to await the challenge to combat. All 
 eyes were now bent upon the gorgeous clusters of 
 tents at either extremity of the oblong area ; and in a 
 very few minutes the herald's trumpet sounded, and 
 the knight of the swan rode forth, having sent his de- 
 fiance to the knight of the golden lion. At another 
 blast of the trumpet they set their lances in rest, se- 
 lected opposite sides of the long fence or barrier run- 
 ning lengthwise through the lists, and rode furiously 
 past each other, the fence of course preventing any 
 contact except that of their lances. This part of the 
 tournament (the essential part, one would think) was, 
 from the necessity of the case, the least satisfactory of 
 all. The knights, though they rode admirably, were 
 so oppressed by the weight of their armor, and so em- 
 barrassed in their motions by the ill-adjusted joints, 
 that they were like men of wood, unable apparently 
 even to raise the lance from the thigh on which it 
 rested. I presume no one of them either saw where 
 he should strike his opponent, or had any power of 
 directing the weapon. As they rode close to the 
 fence, however, and a ten-foot pole sawed nearly off 
 in two or three places was laid crosswise on the legs 
 
548 
 
 MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT. 
 
 of each, it would be odd if they did not come in con- 
 tact; and the least shock of course splintered the lance 
 — in other words, finished what was begun by the car- 
 penter's saw. The great difficulty was to ride at all 
 under such a tremendous weight, and manage a horse 
 of spirit, totally unused both to the weight and the 
 clatter of his own and his rider's armor. I am sure 
 that Lord Eglinton's horse, for one, would have 
 bothered Ivanhoe himself to "bring to the scratch ;" 
 and Lord Waterford's was the only one that, for all 
 the fright he showed, might have been selected (as 
 they all should have been) for the virtue of having 
 peddled tin-ware. These two knights, by the way, ran 
 the best career, Lord Eglinton, malgrc his bolter, 
 coming off the vicior. 
 
 The rain, meantime, had increased to a deluge, the 
 queen of beauty sat shivering under an umbrella, the 
 jester's long ears were water-logged, and lay fiat on 
 his shoulders, and everybody in my neighborhood had 
 expressed a wish for a dry seat and a glass of sherry. 
 The word "banquet" occurred frequently right and 
 left; hopes for " mulled wine or something hot be- 
 fore dinner" stole from the lips of a mamma on the 
 seat behind ; and there seemed to be but one chance 
 for the salvation of health predominant in the minds 
 of all, and that was drinking rather more freely than 
 usual at the approaching banquet. Judge what must 
 have been the astonishment, vexation, dread, and de- 
 spair, of the one thousand wet, shivering, and hungry 
 candidates for the feast, when Lord Eglinton rode up 
 to the gallery unhelmeted, and delivered himself as 
 follows: — 
 
 " Ladies and gentlemen, I had hoped to have given 
 you all a good dinner; but to my extreme mortifica- 
 tion and regret, I am just informed that the rain has 
 penetrated the banqueting pavilions, and that, in con- 
 sequence, I shall only be able to entertain so many of 
 my friends as can meet around my ordinary table." 
 
 About as uncomfortable a piece of intelligence, to 
 some nine hundred and sixty of his audience, as they 
 could have received, short of a sentence for their im- 
 mediate execution. 
 
 To comprehend fully the disastrous extent of the 
 disappointment in the principal gallery, it must be 
 taken into consideration that the domicils-, fixed or 
 temporary, of the rejected sufferers, were from five to 
 twenty miles distant — a long ride at best, if begun on 
 the point of famishing, and in very thin and well- 
 saturated fancy dresses. Grievance the first, however, 
 was nothing to grievance the second; viz., that from 
 the tremendous run upon post-horses and horses of all 
 descriptions, during the three or four previous days, 
 the getting to the tournament was the utmost that 
 many parties could achieve. The nearest baiting- 
 place was several miles off; and in compassion to the 
 poor beasts, and with the weather promising fair on 
 their arrival, most persons had consented to take 
 their chance for the quarter of a mile from the lists to 
 the castle, and had dismissed their carriages with 
 orders to return at the close of the banquet and ball 
 — daylight the next morning ! The castle, everybody 
 knew, was crammed, from " donjon-keep to turret- 
 top," with the relatives and intimate friends of the 
 noble earl, and his private table could accommodate 
 no more than these. To get home was the inevitable 
 alternative. 
 
 The rain poured in a deluge. The entire park was 
 trodden into a slough, or standing in pools of water — 
 carts, carriages, and horsemen, with fifty thousand 
 flying pedestrians, crowding every road and avenue. 
 How to get home with a carriage ! How the deuce 
 to get home without one ! 
 
 A gentleman, who had been sent out on the errand 
 of Noah's dove by a lady whose carriage and horses 
 were ordered at four the following morning, came 
 back w ; th the mud up to his knees, and reported that 
 
 there was not a wheel-barrow to be had for love or 
 money. After threading the crowd in every direction, 
 he had offered a large sum, in vain, for a one-horse 
 cart ! 
 
 Night was coming on, meantime, very fast ; but 
 absorbed by the distresses of the shivering groups 
 around me, I had scarce remembered that my own in- 
 vitation was but to the banquet and ball — and my 
 dinner, consequently, nine miles off, at Ardrossan. 
 Thanking Heaven, that, at least, I had no ladies to 
 share my evening's pilgrimage, I followed the queen 
 of beauty down the muddy and slippery staircase, and, 
 when her majesty had stepped into her carriage, I 
 stepped over ankles in mud and water, and began my 
 luade toward the castle. 
 
 Six hours of rain, and the trampling of such an im- 
 mense multitude of men and horses, had converted 
 the soft and moist sod and soil of the park into a deep 
 and most adhesive quagmire. Glancing through the 
 labyrinth of vehicles on every side, and seeing men 
 and horses with their feet completely sunk below the 
 surface, I saw that there was no possibility of shying 
 the matter, and that wade was the word. I thought, 
 at first, that I had a claim for a little sympathy on the 
 score of being rather slenderly shod (the impalpable 
 sole of a pattern leather-boot being all that separated 
 me from the subsoil of the estate of Eglinton); but 
 overtaking, presently, a party of four ladies who had 
 lost several shoes in the mire, and were positively 
 wading on in silk stockings, I took patience to myself 
 from my advantage in the comparison, and thanked 
 fate for the thinnest sole with leather to keep it on. 
 The ladies I speak of were under the charge of a most 
 despairing-looking gentleman, but had neither cloak 
 nor umbrella, and had evidently made no calculations 
 for a walk. We differed in our choice of the two 
 sides of a slough, presently, and they were lost in the 
 crowd ; but I could not help smiling, with all my pity 
 of their woes, to think what a turning up of prunella 
 shoes there will be, should Lord Eglinton ever plough 
 the chivalric field of the Tournament. 
 
 As I reached the castle, I got upon the Macadamised 
 road, which had the advantage of a bottom somewhere, 
 though it was covered with a liquid mud, of which 
 every passing foot gave you a spatter tp the hips. My 
 exterior was by this time equally divided between 
 water and dirt, and I trudged on in comfortable fellow- 
 ship with farmers, coal-miners, and Scotch lasses — ■ 
 envying very much the last, for they carried their 
 shoes in their hands, and held their petticoats, to say 
 the least, clear of the mud. Many a good joke they 
 seemed to have among them, but as they spoke in 
 Gaelic, it was lost on my Sassenach ears. 
 
 I had looked forward with a faint hope to a ginger- 
 bread and ale-cart, which I remembered having seen 
 in the morning established near the terminus of the 
 railroad, trusting to refresh my strength and patience 
 with a glass of anything that goes under the generic 
 appellation of " summat ;" but though the cart was 
 there, the gingerbread shelf was occupied by a row of 
 Scotch lasses, crouching together under cover from 
 the rain, and the pedlar assured me that "there wasna 
 a drap o' speerit to be got within ten mileo' the castle." 
 One glance at the railroad, where a car with a single 
 horse was beset by some thousands of shoving and 
 fighting applicants, convinced me that I had a walk 
 of eight miles to finish my " purgation by" tourna- 
 ment ; and as it was getting too dark to trust to any 
 picking of the way, I took the middle of the rail-track, 
 and set forward. 
 
 " Oh. but a weary wight was he 
 When he reached the foot of the dogwood tree." 
 
 Eight miles in a heavy rain, with boots of the con- 
 sistence of brown paper, and a road of alternate deep 
 mud and broken stone, should entitle one to the green 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 549 
 
 turban. I will make the pilgrimage of a Hadji from 
 the " farthest inn" with half the endurance. 
 
 I found my Liverpool friends over a mutton-chop 
 in the snug parlor of our host, and with a strong brew 
 of hot toddy, and many a laugh at the day's adventures 
 by land and water, we got comfortably to bed " some- 
 where in the small hours." And so ended the great 
 day of the tournament. 
 
 After witnessing the disasters of the first day, the 
 demolition of costumes, and the perils by water, of 
 masqueraders and spectators, it was natural to fancy 
 that the tournament was over. So did not seem to 
 think several thousands of newly-arrived persons, 
 pouring from steamer after steamer upon the pier of 
 Ardrossan, and in every variety of costume, from the 
 shepherd's maud to the courtier's satin, crowding to 
 the rail-cars for Eglinton. It appeared from the 
 chance remarks of one or two who came to our lodg- 
 ings to deposite their carpet-bags, that it had rained 
 very little in the places from which the steamers had 
 come, and that they had calculated on the second as 
 the great day of the joust. No dissuasion had the 
 least effect upon them, and away they went, bedecked 
 and merry, the sufferers of the day before looking out 
 upon them, from comfortable hotel and lodging, with 
 prophetic pity. 
 
 At noon the sky brightened ; and as the cars were 
 running by this time with diminished loads, I parted 
 from my agreeable friends, and bade adieu to my 
 garret at Ardrossan. I was bound to Ireland, and my 
 road lay by Eglinton to Irvine and Ayr. Fellow- 
 passengers with me were twenty or thirty men in 
 Glengary bonnets, plaids, &c. ; and I came in for my 
 share of the jeers and jokes showered upon them by 
 the passengers in the return-cars, as men bound on a 
 fruitless errand. As we neared the castle, the crowds 
 of people with disconsolate faces waiting for convey- 
 ances, or standing by the reopened gingerbread carts 
 in listless idleness, convinced my companions, at last 
 that there was nothing to be seen, for that day at least, 
 at Eglinton. I left them sitting in the cars, undecided 
 whether to go on or return without losing their places ; 
 and seeing a coach marked " Irvine" standing in the 
 road, 1 jumped in without question or ceremony. It 
 belonged to a private party of gentlemen, who were to 
 visit the castle and tilting-ground on their way to 
 Irvine ; and as ihey very kindly insisted on my re- 
 maining after I had apologised for the intrusion, I 
 found myself "booked" for a glimpse of the second 
 day's attractions. 
 
 The avenue to the castle was as crowded as on the 
 day before ; but it was curious to remark how the 
 general aspect of the multitude was changed by the 
 substitution of disappointment for expectation. The 
 lagging gait and surly silence, instead of the elastic 
 step and merry joke, seemed to have darkened the 
 scene more than the withdrawal of the sun, and I was 
 glad to wrap myself in my cloak, and remember that 
 I was on the wing. The banner flying at the castle 
 tower was the only sign of motion I could see in its 
 immediate vicinity ; the sail-cloth coverings of the 
 pavilion were dark with wet; the fine sward was every- 
 where disfigured with traces of mud, and the whole 
 scene was dismal and uncomfortable. We kept on to 
 the lists, and found them, as one of my companions 
 expressed it, more like a cattle-pen after a fair than a 
 scene of pleasure — trodden, wet, miry, and deserted. 
 The crowd, content to view them from a distance, 
 were assembled around the large booths on the ascent 
 of the rising ground toward the castle, where a band 
 was playing some merry reels, and the gingerbread 
 and ale venders plied a busy vocation. A look was 
 enough; and we shaped our course for Irvine, sympa- 
 thizing deeply with the disappointment of the high- 
 spirited and generous lord of the Tourney. I heard 
 at Irvine, and farther on, that the tilting would be re- 
 
 newed, and the banquet and ball given on the succeed- 
 ing days ; but after the wreck of dresses and peril of 
 health I had witnessed, I was persuaded that the best 
 that could be done would be but a slender patching 
 up of the original glories, as well as a halting rally of 
 the original spirits of the tournament. So I kept on 
 my way. 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 There is an inborn and inbred distrust of "foreign- 
 ers" in England — continental foreigners, I should say 
 — which keeps the current of French and Italian so- 
 ciety as distinct amid the sea of London, as the blue 
 Rhone in Lake Leman. The word " foreigner," in 
 England, conveys exclusively the idea of a dark-com- 
 plexioned and whiskered individual, in a frogged coat 
 1 and distressed circumstances; and to introduce a 
 srnooth-cheeked, plainly-dressed, ^wje^-looking person 
 | by that name, would strike any circle of ladies and 
 ; gentlemen as a palpable misnomer. The violent and 
 | unhappy contrast between the Parisian's mode of life 
 i in London and in Paris, makes it very certain that few 
 ! of those bien nes et convert ablement riches will live in 
 I London for pleasure; and then the flood of political 
 |i emigres, for the last half century, has monopolised 
 hair-dressing, &c., &c, to such a degree, that the 
 word Frenchman is synonymous in English ears with 
 | barber and dancing-master. If a dark gentleman, 
 ; wearing either whisker or mustache, chance to of- 
 j fend John Bull in the street, the first opprobrious lan- 
 ! guage he hears — the strongest that occurs to the fel- 
 
 j low's mind — is, " Get out, you Frenchman !" 
 
 All this, malgre the rage for foreign lions in London 
 ; society. A well-introduced foreigner gets easily into 
 this, and while he keeps his cabriolet and confines 
 himself to frequentingsoir&* and accepting invitations 
 to dine, he will never suspect that he is not on an 
 equal footing with any "milor" in London. If he 
 wishes to be disenchanted, he has only to change his 
 lodgings from Long's to Great Russell street, or (bit- 
 ' terer and readier trial) to propose marriage to the 
 honorable Augusta or Lady Fanny. 
 
 Everybody who knows the society of Paris, knows 
 something of a handsome and very elegant young 
 baron of the Faubourg St. Germain, who, with small 
 fortune, very great taste, and greater credit, contrived 
 to go on very swimmingly as an adorable roue and 
 vaurien till he was hard upon twenty-five. At the 
 first crisis in his affairs, the ladies, who hold all the 
 politics in their laps, got him appointed consul to 
 Algiers, or minister to Venezuela, and with this pretty 
 pretext for selling his horses and dressing-gowns, these 
 cherished articles brought twice their original value, 
 saved his loyaute, and set him up in fans and monkeys 
 at his place of exile. A year of this was enough for 
 the darling of Paris, and not more than a day before 
 his desolate loves would have ceased to mourn for 
 hi« ae galloped into his hotel with a new fashion of 
 whiskers, a black female slave, and the most delicious 
 histories of his adventures during the ages he had 
 been exiled. Down to the earth and their previous 
 obscurity dropped the rivals who were just beginning 
 to usurp his glories. A new stud, an indescribable 
 vehicle, a suite of rooms d VAfncaine, and a mystery, 
 preserved at some expense, about his negress, kept all 
 Paris, including his new creditors, in admiring aston- 
 
550 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 ishment for a year. Among the crowd of his worship- 
 pers, not the last or least fervent, were the fair-haired 
 and glowing beauties who assemble at the levees of 
 their ambassador in the Rue St. Honore, and upon 
 whom le beau Adolphe had looked as pretty savages, 
 whose frightful toilets and horrid French accent 
 might be tolerated one evening in the week — vu le 
 souper ! 
 
 Eclipses will arrive as calculated by insignificant 
 astronomers, however, and debts will become due as 
 presumed by vulgar tradesmen. Le beau Adolphe 
 began to see another crisis, and betook himself to his 
 old advisers, who were dcsoles to the last degree; but 
 there was a new government, and the blood of the 
 Faubourg was at a discount. No embassies were to 
 be had for nothing. With a deep sigh, and a gentle 
 tone, to spare his feelings as much as possible, his 
 friend ventures to suggest to him that it will be neces- 
 sary to sacrifice himself. 
 " Ahi ! mais comment/" 
 
 " Marry one of these betes Anglaises, who drink 
 you up with their great blue eyes, and are made of 
 gold !" 
 
 Adolphe buried his face in his gold-fringed oriental 
 pocket-handkerchief; but when the first agony was 
 passed, his resolution was taken, and he determined to 
 go to England. The first beautiful creature he should 
 see, whose funds were enormous and well-invested, 
 should bear away from all the love, rank, and poverty 
 of France, the perfumed hand he looked upon. 
 
 A flourishing letter, written in a small, cramped 
 hand, but with a seal on whose breadth of wax and 
 dazon all the united heraldry of France was inter- 
 woven, arrived, through the ambassador's despatch 
 
 box, to the address of Miladi , Belgrave square, 
 
 announcing, in full, that le beau Adolphe was coming 
 to London to marry the richest heiress in good socie- 
 ty ; and as Paris could not spare him more thau a 
 week, he wished those who had daughters to marry, 
 answering the description, to be Men prevenus of his 
 visit and errand. With the letter came a compend of 
 his genealogy, from the man who spoke French in the 
 confusion of Babel to le dit Baron Adolphe. 
 
 To London came the valet of le beau baron, two 
 days before his master, bringing his slippers and dres- 
 sing-gown to be aired after their sea-voyage across the 
 channel. To London followed the irresistible youth, 
 cursing, in the politest French, the necessity which 
 subtracted a week from a life measured with such 
 "diamond sparks" as his own in Paris. He sat him- 
 self down in his hotel, sent his man Porphyre with his 
 card to every noble and rich house, whose barbarian 
 tenants he had ever seen in the Champs Elysees, and 
 waited the result. Invitations from fair ladies, who 
 remembered him as the man the French belles were 
 mad about, and from literary ladies, who wanted his 
 whiskers and black eyes to give their soirees the neces- 
 sary foreign complexion, flowed in on all sides, and 
 Monsieur Adolphe selected his most mignon cane and 
 his happiest design in a stocking, and " rendered him- 
 self" through the rain like a martyr. 
 
 No offers of marriage the first evening ! 
 
 None the second ! ! 
 
 None the third! ! ! 
 
 Le beau Adolphe began to think either that English 
 papas did not propose their daughters to people as in 
 France ; or, perhaps, that the lady whom he had com- 
 missioned to circulate his wishes had not sufficiently 
 advertised him. She had, however. 
 
 He took advice, and found it would be necessary to 
 take the first step himself. This was disagreeable, 
 
 and he said to himself, "Le jeu ne vaut pas le chan- 
 delle ;" but his youth was passing, and his English 
 fortune was at interest. 
 
 He went to Almack's and proposed to the first 
 authenticated fortune that accepted his hand for a 
 
 waltz. The young lady first laughed, and then told 
 her mother, who told her son, who thought it an in- 
 sult, and called out le beau Adolphe, very much to the 
 astonishment of himself and Porphyre. The thing 
 was explained, and the baron looked about the next 
 day for one pas si bete. Found a young lady with 
 half a million sterling, proposed in a morning call, 
 and was obliged to ring for assistance, his intended 
 having gone into convulsions with laughing at him. 
 The story by this time had got pretty well distributed 
 through the different strata of London society ; and 
 when le beau Adolphe convinced that he would not 
 succeed with the noble heiresses of Belgrave square, 
 condescended, in his extremity, to send his heart by 
 his valet to a rich little vulgarian, who " never had a 
 grandfather," and lived in Harley street, he narrowly 
 escaped being prosecuted for a nuisance, and, Paris 
 being now in the possession of the enemy, he buried 
 his sorrows in Belgium. After a short exile his friends 
 procured him a vice-consulate in some port in the 
 north sea, and there probably at this moment he sor- 
 rowfully vegetates. 
 
 This is not a story founded upon fact, but literally 
 true. Many of the circumstances came under my own 
 observation ; and the whole thus affords a laughable 
 example of the esteem in which what an English fox- 
 hunter would call a " trashy Frenchman" is held in 
 England, as well as of the travestie produced by trans- 
 planting the usages of one country to another. 
 
 Ridiculous as any intimate mixture of English and 
 French ideas and persons seems to be in London, the 
 foreign society of itself in that capital is exceedingly 
 spiritual and agreeable. The various European em- 
 bassies and their attaches, with their distinguished 
 travellers, from their several countries, accidentally 
 belonging to each ; the French and Italians, married 
 to English noblemen and gentry, and living in Lon- 
 don, and the English themselves, who have become 
 cosmopolite by residence in other countries, form a 
 very large, society in which mix, on perfectly equal 
 terms, the first singers of the opera, and foreign musi- 
 cians and artists generally. This last circumstance 
 gives a peculiar charm to these reunions, though it 
 imparts a pride and haughty bearing to the prima 
 donna and her fraternity, which is, at least, sometimes 
 very inconvenient to themselves. The remark recalls 
 to my mind a scene I once witnessed in London, 
 which will illustrate the feeling better than an essay 
 upon it. 
 
 I was at one of those private concerts given at an 
 enormous expense during the opera season, at which 
 " assisted" Julia Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini, 
 and Ivanhoff. Grisi came in the carriage of a foreign 
 lady of rank, who had dined with her, and she walked 
 into the room looking like an empress. She was 
 dressed in the plainest white, with her glossy hair put 
 smooth from her brow, and a single white japonica 
 dropped over one of her temples. The lady who 
 brought her chaperoned her during the evening, as if 
 she had been her daughter, and under the excitement 
 of her own table and the kindness of her friends, she 
 sung with a rapture and a freshet of glory (if one may 
 borrow a word from the Mississippi) which set all 
 hearts on fire. She surpassed her most applauded 
 hour on the stage — for it was worth her while. The 
 audience was composed, almost exclusively, of those 
 who are not only cultivated judges, but who some- 
 times repay delight with a present of diamonds. 
 
 Lablache shook the house to its foundations in his 
 turn ; Rubini ran through his miraculous compass 
 with the ease, truth, and melody, for which his singing 
 is unsurpassed ; Tamburini poured his rich and even 
 fulness on the ear, and Russian Ivanhoff, the one 
 southern singing-bird who has come out of the north, 
 wire-drew his fine and spiritual notes, till they who had 
 been flushed, and tearful, and silent, when the others 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 551 
 
 had sang, drowned his voice in the poorer applause 
 of exclamation and surprise. 
 
 The concert was over by twelve, the gold and silver 
 paper bills of the performance were turned into fans, and 
 every one was waiting till supper should be announced 
 — the prima donna still sitting by her friend, but sur- 
 rounded by foreign attaches, and in the highest elation 
 at her own success. The doors of an inner suite of 
 rooms were thrown open at last, and Grisi's cordon of 
 admirers prepared to follow her in and wait on her at 
 supper. At this moment, one of the powdered menials 
 of the house stepped up and informed her very respect- 
 fully that supper icas prepared in a separate room for 
 the sinners ! 
 
 Medea, in her most tragic hour, never stood so 
 absolutely the picture of hate as did Grisi for a single 
 instant, in the centre of that aristocratic crowd. Her 
 chest swelled and rose, her lips closed over her snowy 
 teeth, and compressed till the blood left them, and, for 
 myself, I looked unconsciously to see where she would 
 strike. I knew, then, that there was more than fancy 
 
 there was nature and capability of the real — in the 
 
 imaginary passions she plays so powerfully. A laugh 
 of extreme amusement at the scene from the high- 
 born woman who had accompanied her, suddenly- 
 turned her humor, and she stopped in the midst of a 
 muttering of Italian, in which I could distinguish 
 only the terminations, and, with a sort of theatrical 
 quickness of transition, joined heartily in her mirth. 
 It was immediately proposed by this lady, however, 
 that herself and their particular circle should join the 
 insulted prima donna at the lower table, and they suc- 
 ceeded by this manoeuvre in retaining Rubini and the 
 others, who were leaving the house in a most un- 
 equivocal Italian fury. 
 
 I had been fortunate enough to be included in the 
 invitation, and, with one or two foreign diplomatic 
 men, 1 followed Grisi and her amused friend to a 
 small room on a lower floor, that seemed to be the 
 housekeeper's parlor. Here supper was set for six 
 (including the man who had played the piano), and 
 on the side-table stood every variety of wine and fruit, 
 and there was nothing in the supper, at least, to make 
 us regret the table we had left. With a most im- 
 perative gesture and rather an amusing attempt at 
 English, Grisi ordered the servants out of the room, 
 and locked the door, and from that moment the con- 
 versation commenced and continued in their own 
 musical, passionate, and energetic Italian. My long 
 residence in that country had made me at home in it ; 
 every one present spoke it fluently ; and I had an 
 opportunity I might never have again, of seeing with 
 what abandonment these children of the sun throw 
 aside rank and distinction (yet without forgetting it). 
 and join with those who are their superiors in every 
 circumstance of life, in the gayeties of a chance hour. 
 Out of their own country these singers would prob- 
 ably acknowledge no higher lank than that of the kind 
 and gifted lady who was their guest ; yet, with the 
 briefest apology at finding the room too cold after the 
 heat of the concert, they put on their cloaks and hats 
 as a safeguard to their lungs (more valuable to them 
 than to others) ; and as most of the cloaks were the 
 worse for travel, and the hats opera-hats with two 
 corners, the grotesque contrast with the diamonds of 
 one lady, and the radiant beauty of the other, may 
 easily be imagined. 
 
 Singing should be hungry work, by the knife and 
 fork they played ; and between the excavations of 
 truffle pies, and the bumpers of champagne and bur- 
 gundy, the words were few. Lablache appeared to be 
 an established droll, and every syllable he found time 
 to utter was received with the most unbounded laughter. 
 Rubini could not recover from the slight he conceived 
 put upon him and his profession by the separate table; 
 and he continually reminded Grisi, who by this time 
 
 had quite recovered her good humor, that, the night 
 before, supping at Devonshire house, the duke of 
 Wellington had held her gloves on one side, while his 
 grace, their host attended to her on the other. 
 
 " E vero /" said Ivanhoff, with a look of modest ad- 
 miration at the prima donna. 
 
 "E vero, e bravo.'" cried Tamburini, with his sepul- 
 chral-talking tone, much deeper than his singing. 
 " Si, si, si, bravo /" echoed all the company; and 
 j the haughty and happy actress nodded all round with 
 i a radiant smile, and repeated, in her silver tones, 
 | " Grazit ! cari amid ! grazie /" 
 
 As the servants had been turned out, the removal 
 of the first course was managed in jnc-nic fashion ; 
 and when the fruit and fresh bottles of wine were set 
 upon the table by the attaches, and younger gentle- 
 men, the health of the princess who honored them by 
 | her presence was proposed in that language, which, it 
 seems to me, is more capable than all others of ex- 
 pressing affectionate and respectful devotion. All un- 
 covered and stood up, and Grisi, with tears in her eyes, 
 kissed the hand of her benefactress and friend, and 
 j drank her health in silence. 
 
 It is a polite and common accomplishment in Italy 
 to improvise in verse, and the lady I speak of is well 
 , known among her immediate friends for a singular 
 facility in this beautiful art. She reflected a moment 
 i or two with the moisture in her eyes, and then com- 
 menced, low and soft, a poem, of which it would be 
 I difficult, nay impossible, to convey, in English, an 
 idea of its music and beauty. It took us back to Italy, 
 to its heavenly climate, its glorious arts, its beauty and 
 its ruins, and concluded with a line of which 1 remem- 
 ' ber the sentiment to have been, " out of Italy every 
 \ land is exile .'" 
 
 The glasses were raised as she ceased, and every 
 one repeated after her, " Fuori d' Italia tutto e esilio .'" 
 " Ma .'" cried out the fat Lablache, holding up his 
 glass of champagne, and looking through it with one 
 I eye, " siamo ben esiliali qua .'" and, with a word of 
 drollery, the party recovered its gayer tone, and the 
 humor and wit flowed on brilliantly as before. 
 
 The house had long been still, and the last carriage 
 belonging to the company above stairs had rolled from 
 the door, when Grisi suddenly remembered a bird that 
 she had latelv bought, of which she proceeded to give 
 ' us a description, that probably penetrated to every 
 corner of the silent mansion. It was a mocking-bird, 
 that had been kept two years in the opera-house, and 
 between rehearsal and performance had learned parts 
 of everything it had overheard. It was the property 
 of the woman who took care of the wardrobes. Grisi 
 ' had accidentally seen it, and immediately purchased 
 i it for two guineas. How much of embellishment there 
 ' was in her imitations of her treasure I do not know; 
 ! but certainly the whole power of her wondrous voice, 
 j passion, and knowledge of music, seemed drunk up at 
 ! once in the wild, various, difficult, and rapid mixture 
 of the capricious melody she undertook. First came, 
 without the passage which it usually terminates, the 
 long, throat-down, gurgling, water-toned trill, in which 
 ! Rubini (but for the bird and its mistress, it seemed to 
 1 me) would have been inimitable : then, right upon it, 
 j as if it were the beginning of a bar, and in the most 
 unbreathing continuity, followed a brilliant passage 
 from the Barber of Seville, run into the passionate 
 prayer of Anna Bolena in her madness, and lollowed 
 by the air of » Suoni la tromba intrepida," the tremen- 
 dous duet in the Puritani, between Tamburini and 
 Lablache. Up to the sky, and down to the -earth 
 again— away with a note of the wildest gladness, and 
 back upon a note of the most touching melancholy— 
 if the bird but half equals the imitation ot his mistress, 
 he were worth the jewel in a sultan's turban. 
 
 "Giulia"' "Giulietta!" "Giuliettina!" cried out 
 one and another, as she ceased, expressing in their 
 
552 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had in- 
 spired by her incomparable execution. 
 
 The stillness of the house in the occasional pauses 
 of conversation reminded the gay party, at last, that it 
 was wearing late. The door was unlocked, and the 
 half-dozen sleepy footmen hanging about the hall were 
 despatched for the cloaks and carriages; the drowsy 
 porter was roused from his deep leathern dormeuse, 
 and opened the door — and broad upon the street lay 
 the cold gray light of a summer's morning. I declined 
 an offer to be set down by a friend's cab, and strolled 
 off to Hyde Park to surprise myself with a sunrise ; 
 balancing the silent rebuke in the fresh and healthy 
 countenances of early laborers going to their toil, 
 against the effervescence of a champagne hour, which, 
 since such come so rarely, may come, for me, with 
 what untimeliness they please. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE STREETS OF LONDON. 
 
 It has been said, that "few men know how to take 
 a walk." In London it requires some experience to 
 know where to take a walk. The taste of the peram- 
 bulator, the hour of the day, and the season of the 
 year, would each affect materially the decision of the 
 question. 
 
 If you are up early — I mean early for London — say 
 ten o'clock — we would start from your hotel in Bond 
 street, and hastening through Regent street and the 
 Quadrant (deserts at that hour), strike into the zigzag 
 of thronged alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry 
 street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cab- 
 stand in the Haymarket "are at this hour asleep." 
 The late supper-eaters at Dubourg's and the Cafe de 
 l' Europe were the last infliction upon their galled 
 withers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find 
 an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget 
 gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning. 
 The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless 
 of the custom of " them as pays only their fare," and 
 quite sure not to get "a gemman to drive" at that un- 
 seasonable hour. The "waterman" (called a " loater- 
 man," as he will tell you, "because he gives hay to 
 the 'orses") leans against the gas-lamp at the corner, 
 looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the 
 splendid coach with its four blood bays just starting from 
 the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The side- 
 walk of Coventry street, usually radiant with the 
 flaunting dresses of the fail and vicious, is now sober 
 with the dull habiliments of the early-stirring and the 
 poor. The town (for this is town, not city) beats its 
 more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad. 
 
 Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby- 
 genteel poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal 
 the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in con- 
 fined and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes, 
 they eat their mutton-chop and potato, unseen of their 
 gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay of- 
 ficer, whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife 
 and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry 
 and over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables] 
 recall, as well as he may in imagination, the gay din- 
 ners at mess, and the companions now grown cold in 
 
 death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out 
 of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here 
 comes many a "gay fellow about town," who will dine 
 to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of 
 unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street 
 at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his 
 own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here 
 are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter 
 — the closely-measured wine, and the more closely- 
 
 measured attention — the silent and shrinking compa- 
 ny, the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for 
 the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value 
 the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embar- 
 rassing recognition and the objectless saunter through 
 the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that 
 wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass hero 
 with their victims. It is the last step within tho 
 bounds of respectability. They still live " at the West 
 end," while they dine in Rupert street. They may 
 still linger in the park, or stroll in Bond street, till 
 their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the club's, 
 and within a stone's throw of the luxurious tables and 
 the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to 
 an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in 
 silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life 
 are darker for the light that shines so near them! 
 How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with 
 the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative 
 comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood 
 like this! 
 
 Come through this narrow lane into Leicester 
 square. You cross here the first limit of the fashion- 
 able quarter. The Sabloniere hotel is in this square; 
 but you may not give it as your address unless you 
 are a foreigner. This is the home of that most mis- 
 erable fish out of water — a Frenchman in London. 
 A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable 
 French restaurants, make this spot of the metropolis 
 the most habitable to the exiled habitue of the Palais 
 Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, iu 
 any possible degree, is better than the nacre biflek, or 
 the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato! 
 Here he comes forth, if the sunshine perchance for 
 one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the side- 
 walk, trying to get. the better of his bile and his bad 
 breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby, 
 but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for 
 as much as would support him a month in Paris. 
 Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird- 
 fanciers, showmen, and generally for every foreign 
 novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there 
 is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, or a 
 learned pig, you will see one or all in that building, so 
 radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars. 
 
 Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes, 
 second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and 
 ladies' articles of ornamental wear generally : cheap 
 straw-bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery ! 
 Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin 
 cape ! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these 
 dingy flowers were new — when this fine lace-edging 
 bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work 
 on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property 
 of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or vir- 
 tuous, and by what hard necessity came it here ? Ten 
 to one, could it speak, its history would keep us stand- 
 ing at this shop window, indifferent alike to the curi- 
 ous glances of these passing damsels and the gentle 
 eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us 
 the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improve- 
 ment in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn 
 habiliments he exposes. 
 
 I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of 
 Venice. The half-daylight between the high and 
 overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and 
 occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of 
 hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the 
 absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the 
 damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to 
 those close passages in the rear of the canals between 
 St. Mark's and the Rialto. Then I like studying a 
 pawnbroker's window, and I like ferreting in the old 
 book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in 
 humility for an author to see what he can be bought 
 for in Cranbourne alley. Some "gentle reader," who 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 553 
 
 has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you 
 for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may 
 have the three volumes, " as good as new," and the 
 shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the 
 terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy 
 Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity 
 with the eighteen-pence of the remainder. 
 
 The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent 
 Garden, are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In 
 crossing St. Martin's lane, life appears to have be- 
 come suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent 
 and dirty women are everywhere visible through the 
 open windows; the half-naked children at the doors 
 look already care-worn and incapable of a smile ; and 
 the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and re- 
 pulsive. Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast 
 body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand. 
 
 You would think London Strand the main artery j 
 of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on 
 the face of the earth where the stream of human life 
 runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other 
 street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by. j 
 In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid 
 bodv, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe 
 nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of 
 your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages, 
 wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. News- 
 paper-hawkers, pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers, 
 and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk. ■ 
 If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window, 
 you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately 
 walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend, 
 who by chance has run his nose against yours rather 
 than another man's, you impede the way, and are 
 made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you 
 would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by 
 half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once, and after j 
 using all your physical strength and most of your dis- j 
 crimination, you are most probably embarked in the t 
 wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to [ 
 Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A 
 Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit 
 mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory 
 journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any 
 man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years 
 of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the 
 Cura^oa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties 
 with cads and coach-drivers. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely 
 any questions you may be rash enough to put to him 
 about "the city." Talk to him of "town," and he 
 would rather miss seeing St. Peter's, than appear ig- 
 norant of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, con- 
 cerning whom or which you might have a curiosity. 
 It is understood all over the world that the "city" of 
 London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and 
 cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England 
 which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable 
 country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and 
 Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of 
 these lies what is called "the town." A transit from 
 one to the other by an inhabitant of either is a matter 
 of some forethought and provision. If milord, in 
 Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to 
 visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders — not the 
 blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to 
 (hive in the morning — but the crop roadster in the 
 cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in 
 plain hat and gaiters. If the banker in Lombard 
 
 street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of 
 his counting-house to make a morning call on the 
 wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the 
 Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in 
 the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor, 
 but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the 
 west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last 
 fashion at Crockford's, a fresh hat from New Bond 
 street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots 
 from the Rue St. Honore. He sits very clear of his 
 neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing 
 at Farrance's, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges 
 in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his 
 rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irre- 
 vocably if practised a mile to the eastward. The dif- 
 ference between the two migrations is, simply, that 
 though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city, 
 he would not for the world be taken for a citizen; 
 while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and 
 Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not 
 supposed to be a member of the clubs, lounging to a 
 late breakfast. 
 
 There is a " town" manner, too, and a " city" man- 
 ner, practised with great nicety by all who frequent 
 both extremities of London. Nothing could be in 
 more violent contrast, for example, than the manner 
 of your banker when you dine with him at his coun- 
 try-house, and the same person when you meet him 
 on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you 
 had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would 
 wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare- 
 nothing sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself 
 to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you 
 met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you 
 would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment, 
 how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave 
 of mammon could ever, by any license of interpreta- 
 tion, be called a gentleman. And when you have 
 seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is 
 a favorable specimen of his class, you will be aston- 
 ished still more to see how completely he will sustain 
 both characters — giving you the cold shoulder, in a 
 way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning, 
 and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants, 
 completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon. 
 Two souls inhabit the banker"s body, and each is ap- 
 parently sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early 
 coach turns the corner by St. Giles's, on its way to 
 the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of 
 the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the 
 same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentle- 
 manly inhabitants. Between those hours, look to 
 Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written 
 upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no 
 courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the 
 junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul's. 
 With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the 
 returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tot- 
 tenham Court road, the angel of port wine and green 
 fields passes his finger across Firkins's brow, and 
 presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long 
 and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor's 
 pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he 
 criticises the livery and riding of the jiroom trotting 
 past, says some very true things of the architecture of 
 the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the 
 end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous- 
 looking a fellow as you would meet on that side of 
 London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and 
 as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to 
 dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the sta- 
 bles, which you are welcome to drive to the devil if 
 you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or him- 
 self; or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins's 
 two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger. 
 Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has 
 
554 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she 
 proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home 
 to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to 
 Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at 
 Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least 
 twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and 
 says — " By Jove, it's a bright thought ! touch up the 
 near pony, Mrs. Firkins." And away you go, Firkins 
 amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to 
 Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook 
 and butler when nobody comes to dine. 
 
 There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and 
 Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day 
 whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The 
 situation of that lady with respect to her society is 
 (she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing. 
 There are many very worthy persons, she will say, 
 who represent large sums of money or great interests 
 in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge, 
 but who are far from being ornamental to her new 
 blue satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Fir- 
 kins to have them labelled in tens and thousands ac- 
 cording to their fortunes ; that if, by any unpleasant 
 accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he 
 might respect them like = in algebra, for what they 
 stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in cal- 
 culating on a societe choisie to dine or sup. When 
 Hook or Smith is just beginning lo melt out, or Lady 
 Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr. 
 Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and j 
 Co. — " unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run 
 down without ceremony to call on his respectable cor- 
 respondent." 
 
 " Isn't it tiresome ?" 
 
 "Very, my dear madam ! But then you have the 
 happiness of knowing that you promote very essen- 
 tially your husband's interests, and when he has made 
 a plum " 
 
 " Yes, very true ; and then, to be sure, Firkins has 
 had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred 
 a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and 
 fit out my youngest brother Bob to India ; and when I 
 think of what he does for my family, why I don't mind 
 making now and then a sacrifice ; but, after all, it's a 
 great evil not to be able to cultivate one's own class 
 of society." 
 
 And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest 
 and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves 
 the husband she married for his fortune ; but as the 
 prosperity of Haman was nothing while Mordecai sat 
 at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her fa- 
 ther lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned 
 oft', and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and 
 pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son, and Co., 
 may at any moment break in upon the charade of 
 Lady Priscilla ! 
 
 There is a class of business people in London, 
 mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves 
 independent of the West End, and live in a style of 
 their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Ex- 
 change, but with a luxury not exceeded even in the 
 silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes 
 meet at the opera a young man of decided style, un- 
 exceptionable in his toilet, and quiet and gentleman- 
 like in his address, who contents himself with the side 
 alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beau- 
 ty and fashion about him with an indifference it is dif- 
 ficult to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance, 
 and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on 
 the best springs Long Acre can turn out ; and while 
 you are speculating where, in the name of the prince 
 of darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to, 
 you are introduced through a small door into saloons, 
 perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup 
 with the prima donna, or la premiere danseuse, but 
 certainly with the most polished persons of your own 
 
 sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a 
 life in London, you ever met in society before. There 
 are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of 
 small circles of society, composed thus of persons 
 refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence is 
 unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End, 
 but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost 
 as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord 
 Sefton or the " member for Finsbury." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 You return from your ramble in "the city" by two 
 o'clock. A bright day " toward," and the season in 
 its palmy time. The old veterans are just creeping 
 out upon the portico of the United Service club, hav- 
 ing crammed "The Times" over their late breakfast, 
 and thus prepared their politics against surprise for 
 the day ; the broad steps of the Athenaeum are as yet 
 unthronged by the shuffling feet of the literati, whose 
 morning is longer and more secluded than that of idler 
 men, but who will be seen in swarms, at four, entering 
 that superb edifice in company with the employes and 
 politicians who affect their society. Not a cab stands 
 yet at the "Travellers," whose members, noble or 
 fashionable, are probably at this hour in their dres- 
 sing-gowns of brocade or shawl of the orient, smoking 
 a hookah over Balzac's last romance, or pursuing at 
 this (to them) desert time of day some adventure which 
 waited upon their love and leisure. It is early yet for 
 the park; but the equipages you will see by-and-by 
 "in the ring" are standing now at Howell and James's, 
 and while the high-bred horses are fretting at the 
 door, and the liveried footmen lean on their gold- 
 headed sticks on the pavement, the fair creature whose 
 slightest nod these trained minions and their fine- 
 limbed animals live to obey, sits upon a three-legged 
 stool within, and in the voice which is a spell upon al< 
 hearts, and with eyes to which rank and genius turn 
 like Persians to the sun, discusses with a pert clerk 
 the quality of stockings ! 
 
 Look at these equipages and their appointments ! 
 Mark the exquisite balanceof that claret-bodied chariot 
 upon its springs — the fine sway of its sumptuous ham- 
 mer-cloth in which the un-smiling coachman sits 
 buried to the middle — the exact fit of the saddles, set- 
 ting into the curve of the horses' backs so as not break, 
 to the most careless eye, the fine lines which exhibit 
 action and grace! See how they stand together, 
 alert, fiery, yet obedient to the weight of a silken 
 thread ; and as the coachman sees you studying his 
 turn-out, observe the imperceptible feel of the reins 
 and the just-visible motion of his lips, conveying to 
 the quick ears of his horses the premonitory, and, to 
 us, inaudible sound, to which, without drawing a 
 hair's breadth upon the traces, they paw their fine 
 hoofs, and expand their nostrils impatiently ! Come 
 nearer, and find a speck or a raised hair, if you can, 
 on these glossy coats ! Observe the nice fitness of 
 the dead-black harness, the modest crest upon the 
 panel, the delicate picking out of white in the wheels, 
 and, if you will venture upon a freedom in manners, 
 look in through the window of rose-teinled glass, and 
 see the splendid cushions and the costly and perfect 
 adaptation of the interior. The twinmated footmen 
 fly to the carriage-door, and the pomatumed clerk who 
 has enjoyed a tete-a-tete for which a prince-royal might 
 sigh, and an ambassador negotiate in vain, hands in 
 his parcel. The small foot presses on the carpeted 
 step, the airy vehicle yields lightly and recovers from 
 the slight weight of the descending form, the coach- 
 man inclines his ear for the half-suppressed order 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 555 
 
 from the footman, and oft' whirls the admirable struc- 
 ture, compact, true, steady, but magically free and 
 
 ( asl as if horses, footmen, and chariot were but the 
 
 parts of some complicated centaur — some swift-moving 
 monster upon legs and wheels ! 
 
 Walk on a little farther to the Quadrant. Here 
 commences the most thronged promenade in London. 
 These crescent colonnades are the haunt of foreigners 
 on the lookout for amusement, and of strangers in the 
 metropolis generally. You will seldom find a town- 
 bred man there, for he prefers haunting his clubs; or, 
 if he is not a member of them, he avoids lounging 
 much in the Quadrant, lest he should apj>ear to have 
 no other resort. You will observe a town dandy 
 getting fidgety after his second turn in the Quadrant, 
 while you will meet* the same Frenchman there from 
 noon till dusk, bounding his walk by those columns as 
 if they were the bars of a cage. The western side 
 toward Piccadilly is the thoroughfare of the honest 
 passer-by ; but under the long portico opposite, you 
 will meet vice in every degree, and perhaps more 
 beauty than on any other pave in the world. It is 
 given up to the vicious and their followers by general 
 consent. To frequent it, or to be seen loitering there 
 at all, is to make but one impression on the mind of 
 those who may observe you. 
 
 The two sides of Regent street continue to partake 
 of this distinction to the end. Go up on the left, and 
 you meet the sober citizen perambulating with his 
 wife, the lady followed by her footman, the grave and 
 the respectable of all classes. Go up on the other, 
 and in color and mien it is the difference between a 
 grass-walk and a bed of tulips. What proof is here 
 that beauty is dangerous to its possessor ! It is said 
 commonly of Regent street, that it shows more beauty 
 in an hour than could be found in all the capitals of 
 the continent. It is the beauty, however, of brilliant 
 health — of complexion and freshness, more than of 
 sentiment or classic correctness. The English features, 
 at least in the middle and lower ranks, are seldom 
 good, though the round cheek, the sparkling lip, the 
 soft blue eyes and hair of dark auburn, common as 
 health and youth, produce the effect of high and al- 
 most universal beauty on the eye of the stranger. The 
 larest thing in these classes is a finely-turned limb, 
 and to the clumsiness of their feet and ankles must be 
 attributed the want of grace usually remarked in their 
 movements. 
 
 Regent street has appeared to me the greatest and 
 most oppressive solitude in the world. In a crowd of 
 business men, or in the thronged and mixed gardens 
 of the continent, the pre-occupation of others is less 
 attractive, or at least, more within our reach, if we 
 would share in it. Here, it is wealth beyond com- 
 petition, exclusiveness and indifference perfectly un- 
 approachable. In the cold and stern mien of the 
 practised Londoner, it is difficult for a stranger not to 
 read distrust, and very difficult for a depressed mind 
 not to feel a marked repulsion. There is no solitude, 
 after all, like the solitude of cities. 
 
 " O dear, dear London" (says the companion of 
 Asmodeus on his return from France), "dear even in 
 October ! Regent street, I saluteyou ! Bond street, 
 my good fellow, how are you ? And you, oh, beloved 
 Oxford street, whom the opium-eater called ' stony- 
 hearted,' and whom I, eating no opium, and speaking 
 as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and ma- 
 ternal of all streets — the street of the middle classes — 
 busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation. 
 Ah, the pretty ankles that trip along thy pavement ! 
 Ah ! the odd country-cousin bonnets that peer into 
 thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls, 
 price one pound four shillings, marked in the corner ! 
 Ah ! the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quar- 
 ters at the back of Holborn ! Ah ! the quiet old ladies, 
 living in Duchess street, and visiting thee with their 
 
 eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain ! Ah, the 
 
 bumpkins from Norfolk just disgorged by the Bull and 
 
 Month — the soldiers — the milliners — the Frenchmen 
 
 — the swindlers — the porters with four-post beds on 
 
 their backs, who add the excitement of danger to that of 
 
 amusement! The various shifting, motley group that 
 
 belong to Oxford street, and Oxford street alone ! What 
 
 thoroughfares equal thee in the variety of human 
 
 i specimens ! in the choice of objects for remark, satire, 
 
 admiration ! Besides, the other streets seem chalked 
 
 out for a sect — narrow-minded and devoted to ^coterie. 
 
 Thou alone art catholic — all-receiving. Regent street 
 
 belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk, 
 
 I whose characters are above scandal. Bond street be- 
 
 j longs to dandies and picture-dealers. St. James's 
 
 I street to club loungers and young men in the guards, 
 
 | with mustaches properly blackened by the cire of 
 
 j Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford street, what class can 
 
 ; especially claim thee as its own ? Thou mockest at 
 
 | oligarchies ; thou knowest nothing of select orders ! 
 
 I Thou art liberal as air — a chartered libertine; accept- 
 
 j ing the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of 
 
 'none. And to call thee 'storfy-hearted !' — certainly 
 
 j thou art so to beggars — to people who have not the 
 
 | wherewithal. But thou wouldst not be so respect- 
 
 ' able if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to 
 
 paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all conscience, 
 
 to those who have a shilling in their pocket — those 
 
 who have not, why do they live at all ?" 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 It is near four o'clock, and in Bond street you 
 might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants — ■ 
 at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies 
 and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for 
 the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood- 
 horses " marking time," the coachman watchful for 
 his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her 
 silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the 
 passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the 
 delay, for she came there on purpose. Between the 
 swaying bodies of the carriages, hesitating past, she 
 receives the smiles and recognitions of all her male 
 acquaintances ; while occasionally a female ally (for 
 allies against the rest of the sex are as necessary in 
 society to women, as in war to monarchs) — occasion- 
 ally, I say, a female ally announced by the crest upon 
 the blinker of an advancing horse, arrives opposite her 
 window, and, with only the necessary delay in passing, 
 they exchange, perhaps, inquiries for health, but, cer- 
 tainly, programmes, comprehensive though brief, for 
 the prosecution of each other's loves or hates. Occa- 
 sionally a hack cab, seduced into attempting Bond 
 street by some momentary opening, finds itself closed 
 in, forty deep, by chariots, butckas, landaus, and fam- 
 ily coaches ; and amid the imperturbable and unan- 
 swering whips of the hammercloth, with a passenger 
 who is losing the coach by the delay, he must wait, 
 will-he-nill-he, till some "pottering" dowager has 
 purchased the old lord his winter flannels, or till the 
 countess of Loiter has said all she has to say to the 
 guardsman whom she has met accidentally at Pluck- 
 rose, the perfumer's. The three tall fellows, with 
 gold sticks, would see the entire plebeian population 
 of London thrice-sodden in vitriol, before they would 
 advance miladi's carriage a step, or appear to possess 
 eyes or ears for the infuriated cabman. 
 
 Bond street, at this hour, is a study for such ob- 
 servers, as, having gone through an apprenticeship of 
 criticism upon all the other races and grades of men 
 and gentlemen in the world, are now prepared to study 
 
556 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 their species in its highest fashionable phase — that of 
 "nice persons" at the West End. The Oxford-street 
 "swell," and the Regent-street dandy, if seen here, 
 are out of place. The expressive word "quiet" (with 
 its present London signification), defines the dress, 
 manner, bow, and even physiognomy, of every true 
 denizen of St. James's and Bond street. The great 
 principle among men of the clubs, in all these partic- 
 ulars, is to subdue — to deprive their coats, hats, and 
 manners, of everything sufficiently marked to be cari- 
 catured by the satirical or imitated by the vulgar. 
 The triumph of style seems to be that the lines which 
 define it shall be imperceptible to the common eye — 
 that it shall require the difficult education which cre- 
 ates it to know its form and limit. Hence an almost 
 universal error with regard to English gentlemen — 
 that they are repulsive and cold. With a thousand 
 times the heart and real politeness of the Frenchman, 
 they meet you with the simple and unaffected address 
 which would probably be that of shades in Elysium, 
 between whom (we may suppose) there is no longer 
 etiquette or concealment. The only exceptions to I 
 
 this rule in London, are, first and alone, Count , | 
 
 whose extraordinary and original style, marked as it 
 is, is inimitable by any man of less brilliant talents ' 
 and less beauty of person, and the king's guardsmen, | 
 who are dandies by prescriptive right, or, as it were, j 
 professionally. All other men who are members of i 
 Brooks's and the Traveller's, and frequent Bond street 
 in the flush of the afternoon, are what would be called 
 in America, plain, unornamental, and, perhaps, ill- 
 dressed individuals, who would strike you more by the j 
 absence than the possession of all the peculiarities ! 
 which we generally suppose marks a " picked man of 
 countries." In America, particularly, we are liable to 
 error on this point, as, of the great number of our 
 travellers for improvement, scarce one in a thousand 
 remains longer in London than to visit the tower and 
 the Thames tunnel. The nine hundred and ninety- 
 nine reside principally, and acquire all they get of for- 
 eign manner and style, at Paris — the very most artifi- 
 cial, corrupt, and affected school for gentlemen in the 
 polite world. 
 
 Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal 
 feeling, which common reflection should, and which 
 enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove. 
 There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in 
 almost all countries, but more particularly in ours, 
 which blinds its entertainers to much that is admira- 
 ble, and deprives them of the good drawn from the 
 best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class 
 of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds, 
 and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities, 
 are barriers which an educated mind may well over- 
 look, and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best 
 examples of true civilization and refinement the world 
 ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we 
 should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to 
 the park, with all the fashion of Bond street and Mav 
 Fair. J 
 
 May Fair ! what a name for the core of dissipated 
 and exclusive London ! A name that brings with it 
 only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a 
 pole wreathed with rose, booths crowded with dancing 
 
 peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This to 
 
 express the costly, the courtlike, the so-called " heart- 
 less" precinct of fashion and art, in their most authen- 
 tic and envied perfection. Mais, les extremes se tou- 
 chent, and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair 
 than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge. 
 
 We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chester- 
 field and Curzon streets to the park gate. What an 
 aristocratic quiet reigns here ! How plain are the ex- 
 teriors of these houses : how unexpressive these doors, 
 without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride 
 within ! At the open window of the hall sit the butler 
 
 and footman, reading the morning paper, while they 
 wait to dispense the "not at home" to callers not dis- 
 appointed. The rooks are noisy in the old trees of 
 Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of 
 the probably still-slumbering Count , in his bach- 
 elor's den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour 
 place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots, 
 drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther ex- 
 tremity, announce to you the residence of one whose 
 morning and evening levees are alike thronged by dis- 
 tinction and talent — the beautiful Lady . 
 
 This short turn brings us to the park, which is rap- 
 idly filling with vehicles of every fashion and color, 
 and with pedestrians and horsemen innumerable. No 
 hackney-coach, street-cab, cart, or pauper, is allowed 
 to pass the porters at the several # gates : the road is 
 macadamized and watered, and the grass within the 
 ring is fresh and verdant. The sun here triumphs 
 partially over the skirt of London smoke, which sways 
 backward and forward over the chimneys of Park lane, 
 and, as far as it is possible so near the dingy halo of 
 the metropolis, the gay occupants of these varied con- 
 veyances " take the air." 
 
 Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what 
 comes by. This is the field of display for the coach- 
 man, who sits upon his sumptuous hamrnercloth, 
 and takes more pride in his horses than their owner, 
 and considers them, if not like his own honor and 
 blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate 
 handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of 
 his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how 
 beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily 
 and well follows the compact carriage ! Within (it is 
 a dark-green caliche, and the liveries are drab, with 
 red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual 
 face of a banker's wife, the daughter of a noble race, 
 who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in " mar- 
 rying into the finance," and who soars up into the sky 
 of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has es- 
 caped the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny 
 could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows? 
 D'Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy, 
 disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing 
 his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like 
 and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst 
 at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of 
 his " tiger" is neglected, and he drives like a man who 
 has to choose between running and being run against, 
 and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for re- 
 flection. Poor D'Israeli ! With a kind and generous 
 heart, talents of the most brilliant order, an ambition 
 which consumes his soul, and a father who expects 
 everything from his son ; lost for the want of a tact 
 common to understandings fathoms deep below his 
 own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years 
 hence, if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment, 
 no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times 
 more melancholy. 
 
 An open barouche follows, drawn by a pair of dark 
 bays, the coachman and footman in suits of plain gray, 
 and no crest on the panels. A lady, of remarkable 
 small person, sits, with the fairest foot ever seen, just 
 peeping from under a cashmere, on the forward cush- 
 ion, and from under her peculiarly plain and small 
 bonnet burn, in liquid fire, the most lambent and 
 spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the 
 world. She is a niece of Napoleon, married to an 
 English nobleman ; and beside her sits her father, 
 who refused the throne of Tuscany, a noble-looking 
 man, with an expression of calm and tranquil resigna- 
 tion in his face, unusually plain in his exterior, and 
 less alive than most of the gay promenaders to the 
 bright scene passing about him. " He will play in the 
 charade at his daughter's soiree in the evening, how- 
 ever, and forget his exile and his misfortunes ; for he 
 is a fond father and a true philosopher. 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 557 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 If you dine with all the world at seven, you have 
 still an hour or more for Hyde Park, and " Rotten 
 Row;" this half mile between Oxford street and Pic- 
 cadilly, to which the fashion of London confines itself, 
 as if the remainder of the bright green park were for- 
 bidden ground, is now fuller than ever. There is the 
 advantage in this condensed drive, that you are sure to 
 see your friends here, earlier or later, in every day — 
 (for wherever you are to go with horses, the conclu- 
 sion of the order to the coachman is, " home by the 
 park") — and then if there is anything new in the way 
 of an arrival, a pretty foreigner, or a fresh face from 
 the country, some dandy's tiger leaves his master at 
 the gate, and brings him at his club, over his coffee, 
 all possible particulars of her name, residence, con- 
 dition, and whatever other circumstances fall in his 
 
 way. By dropping in at Lady 's soiree in the 
 
 evening, if you were interested in the face, you may i 
 inform yourself of more than you would have drawn 
 in a year's acquaintance from the subject of your cu- | 
 riosity. Malapropos to my remark, here comes a 
 turn-out, concerning which and its occupant I have 
 made many inquiries in vain — the pale-colored chariot, j 
 with a pair of grays, dashing toward us from the Sey- | 
 mour gate. As it comes by you will see, sitting quite ■ 
 in the corner, and in a very languid and elegant atti- \ 
 tude, a slight woman of perhaps twenty-four, dressed ; 
 in the simplest white cottage-bonnet that could be ! 
 made, and, with her head down, looking up through 
 heavy black eyelashes, as if she but waited till she had j 
 passed a particular object, to resume some engrossing ! 
 revery. Her features are Italian, and her attitude, 
 always the same indolent one, has also a redolence of ! 
 that land of repose ; but there has been an English 
 taste, and no ordinary one, in the arrangement of that ] 
 equipage and its dependants ; and by the expression, 
 never mistaken in London, of the well-appointed me- ; 
 nials, you may be certain that both master and mis- J 
 tress (if master there be), exact no common deference. J 
 She is always alone, and not often seen in the park ; \ 
 and whenever I have inquired of those likely to know, 
 I found that she had been observed, but could get no I 
 satisfactory information. She disappears by the side j 
 toward the Regent's park, and when once out of the 
 gate, her horses are let off at a speed that distances j 
 all pursuit that would not attract observation. There 
 is a look of " Who the deuce can it be ?" in the faces ; 
 of all the mounted dandies, wherever she passes, for 
 it is a face which once seen is not easily thought of 
 with indifference, or forgotten. Immense as London 
 is, a woman of anything like extraordinary beauty 
 would find it difficult to live there incognito a week ; 
 and how this fair incomprehensible has contrived to 
 elude the curiosity of Hyde-park admiration, for nearly 
 two years, is rather a marvel. There she goes, how- 
 ever, and without danger of being arrested for a flying 
 highwayman you could scarcely follow. 
 
 It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the 
 clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable 
 comers to the park. Here is a horseman, surrounded 
 with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of Eng- 
 land. He rides a light bay horse with dark legs, 
 whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken 
 threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose 
 small, animated head seems to express the very es- 
 sence of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful 
 park horse in England ; and behind follows a high- 
 bred milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly- 
 dressed groom, who sits the spirited and fretting crea- 
 ture as if he anticipated every movement before the 
 fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably, 
 
 but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of 
 black curls escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar 
 hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like 
 profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as 
 the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but 
 for the muscular neck and broad chest from which 
 the head rises, and the indications of great personal 
 strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat 
 would disguise the proportions of a less admirable 
 figure ; but, au reste, his dress is without fold or 
 wrinkle, and no figurante of the ballet ever showed 
 finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one 
 of the most daring in this country of bold riders ; but 
 modifies the stiff English school of equestrianism, 
 with the ease and grace of that of his own country. 
 His manner, though he is rather Angtomane, is in 
 striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his com- 
 panions; and between his recognitions, right and left, 
 to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses 
 himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a 
 child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to pos- 
 sess splendid talents, this " observed of all observers" 
 is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite — content 
 to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advan- 
 tages of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment. 
 He seems exempt from all the usual penalties of such 
 a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him 
 — care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the dis- 
 approbation of the heavy-handed opinion of the world. 
 Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any 
 moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse 
 an hour, one wonders how and where such an un- 
 wonted meteor will disappear. 
 
 But here comes a carriage without hammercloth or 
 liveries; one of those shabby-genteel conveyances, 
 hired by the week, containing three or four persons in 
 the highest spirits, all talking and gesticulating at once. 
 
 As the carriage passes the " beau-knot" (as , and 
 
 his inseparable troop are sometimes called), one or 
 two of the dandies spur up, and resting their hands on 
 the windows, offer the compliments of the day to the 
 only lady within, with the most earnest looks of ad- 
 miration. The gentlemen in her company become 
 silent : and answer to the slight bows of the cavaliers 
 with foreign monosyllables, and presently the coach- 
 man whips up once more, the horsemen drop off, and 
 the excessive gayety of the party resumes its tone. 
 You must have been struck, as the carriage passed, 
 with the brilliant whiteness and regularity of the lady's 
 teeth, and still more with the remarkable play of her 
 lips, which move as if the blood in them were im- 
 prisoned lightning. (The figure is strong, but nothing 
 else conveys to my own mind what 1 am trying to de- 
 scribe.) Energy, grace, fire, rapidity, and a capabili- 
 ty of utter abandoment to passion and expression, live 
 visibly on those lips. Her eyes are magnificent. Her 
 nose is regular, with nostrils rimmed round with an 
 expansive nerve, that gives them constantly the kind 
 of animation visible in the head of a fiery Arab. Her 
 complexion is one of those which, dark and wanting 
 in brilliance by day, light up at night with an alabaster 
 fairness ; and when the glossy black hair, which is 
 now put away so plainly under her simple bonnet, 
 falls over her shoulders in heavy masses, the contrast 
 is radiant. The gentlemen in that carriage are Rubini, 
 Lablache, and a gentleman who passes for the lady'* 
 uncle ; and the lady is Julia Grisi. 
 
 The smoke over the heart of the city begins to 
 thicken into darkness, the gas-lamps are shooting up, 
 bright and star-like, along the Kensington road, and 
 the last promenaders disappear. And now the world 
 of London, the rich and gay portion of it at least, 
 that which compensates them tor the absence 
 
 enjoy ... 
 
 of the bright nights and skies ot Italy — a climate 
 within doors, of comfort and luxury, unknown under 
 brighter heavens. 
 
558 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ISLE OF WIGHT RYDE. 
 
 "Instead of parboiling you with a soiree or a din- 
 ner," said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us 
 at Ryde, " I shall make a pic-nic to Netley." And on 
 a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of 
 some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of 
 Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the 
 swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for South- 
 ampton. 
 
 Ryde is the most American-looking town I have 
 seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery 
 villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the 
 sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It 
 is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of 
 damaged constitutions, with very select society, and 
 quiet and rather primitive habits. The climate is de- 
 liciously soft, and the sun seems always to shine 
 there. 
 
 As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting 
 the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful 
 ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh track, 
 caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to 
 start like an apparition from the sea. 
 
 "She's a Liner, sir!'' said the bronzed boatman, sus- 
 pending his haul to give her a look of involuntary ad- 
 miration. 
 
 "An American packet, you mean?" 
 
 "They're the prettiest ships afloat, sir," he contin- 
 ued, " and the smartest handled. They're out to New 
 York, and back again, before you can look round, 
 a'most. Ah, I see her flag now — stars and stripes. 
 Can you see it, sir?" 
 
 "Are the captains Englishmen, principally?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "No, sir! all ' calculators ;' sharp as a needle!" 
 
 " Thank you," said I ; " I am a calculator too !" 
 
 The conversation ceased, and I thought from the 
 boatman's look, that he had more respect than love 
 for us. The cloud of snowy sail traversed the breadth 
 of the channel with the speed of a bird, wheeled again 
 upon her opposite tack, and soon disappeared from 
 view, taking with her the dove of my imagination to 
 return with an olive-branch from home. It must be 
 a cold American heart whose strings are not swept by 
 that bright flag in a foreign land, like a harp with the 
 impassioned prelude of the master. 
 
 Cowes was soon upon our lee, with her fairy fleet 
 of yachts lying at anchor— Lord Yarborough's frigate- 
 looking craft asleep amid its dependant brood, with all 
 its fine tracery of rigging drawn on a cloudless sky, the 
 picture of what it is, and what all vessels seem to me 
 a thing for pleasure only. Dinting about like a swal- 
 low on the wing, a small, gayly-painted sloop-yacht, 
 as graceful and slender as the first bow of the new 
 moon, played off the roadstead for the sole pleasure 
 of motion, careless whither ; and meantime the low- 
 fringed shoves of the Southampton side grew more 
 and more distinct, and before we had well settled upon 
 our cushions, the old tower of the abbey lay sharp 
 over the bow. 
 
 We enjoyed the first ramble through the ruins the 
 better, that to see them was a secondary object. The 
 first was to select a grassy spot for our table. Thread- 
 ing the old unroofed vaults with this errand, the pause 
 of involuntary homage exacted by a sudden burst upon 
 an arch or a fretted window, was natural and true; and 
 for those who are disturbed by the formal and trite 
 enthusiasm of companions who admire by a prompter, 
 this stalking-horse of another pursuit was not an in- 
 different advantage. 
 
 The great roof over the principal nave of the abbey 
 has fallen in, and lies in rugged and picturesque masses 
 
 within the Gothic shell — windows, arches, secret stair- 
 cases, and gray walls, all breaking up the blue sky 
 around, but leaving above, for a smooth and eternal 
 roof, an oblong and ivy-fringed segment of the blue 
 plane of heaven. It seems to rest on those crumbling 
 corners as you stand within. 
 
 We selected a rising ba-nk under the shoulder of a 
 rock, grown over with moss and ivy, and following the 
 suggestion of a pretty lover of the picturesque, the 
 shawls and cloaks, with their bright colors, were 
 thrown over the nearest fragments of the roof, and every- 
 body unbonneted and assisted in the arrangements. An 
 old woman who sold apples outside the walls was em- 
 ployed to build a fire for our teakettle in a niche 
 where, doubtless, in its holier days, had stood the 
 effigy of a saint ; and at the pedestals of a cluster of 
 slender columns our attendants displayed upon a table 
 a show of pasties and bright wines, that, if there be 
 monkish spirits who walk at Netley, we have added a 
 poignant regret to their purgatories, that their airy 
 stomachs can be no more vino ciboque gravati. 
 
 We were doing justice to a pretty shoulder of lamb, 
 with mint sauce, when a slender youth who had been 
 wandering around with a portfolio, took up an artist's 
 position in the farther corner of the ruins, and began 
 to sketch the scene. I mentally felicitated him on the 
 accident that had brought him to Netley at that par- 
 ticular moment, for a prettier picture than that before 
 him an artist could scarce have thrown together. The 
 inequalities of the floor of the abbey provided a mossy 
 table for every two or three of the gayly-dressed ladies, 
 and there they reclined in small and graceful groups, 
 their white dresses relieved on the luxuriant grass, 
 and between them, half buried in moss, the sparkling 
 glasses full of bright wines, and an air of ease and 
 grace over all, which could belong only to the two 
 extremes of Arcadian simplicity, or its high-bred im- 
 itation. We amused ourselves with the idea of ap- 
 pearing, some six months after, in the middle ground 
 of a landscape, in a picturesque annual ; and I am 
 afraid that I detected, on the first suggestion of the 
 idea, a little unconscious attitudinizing in some of the 
 younger members of the party. It was proposed that 
 the artist should be invited to take wine with us : but 
 as a rosy-cheeked page donned his gold hat to carry 
 our compliments, the busy draughtsman was joined 
 by one or two ladies not quite so attractive-looking as 
 himself, but evidently of his own party, and our mes- 
 senger was recalled. Sequitur — they who would find 
 adventure should travel alone. 
 
 The monastic ruins of England derive a very pecu- 
 liar and touching beauty from the bright veil of ivy 
 which almost buries them from the sun. This con- 
 stant and affectionate mourner draws from the moist- 
 ure of the climate a vividness and luxuriance which is 
 found in no other land. Hence the remarkable love- 
 liness of Netley — a quality which impresses the visit- 
 ers to this spot, far more than the melancholy usually 
 inspired by decay. 
 
 Our gayety shocked some of the sentimental people 
 rambling about the ruins, for it is difficult for those 
 who have not dined to sympathize with the mirth of 
 those who have. How often we mistake for sadness 
 the depression of an empty stomach ! How differently 
 authors and travellers would write, if they commenced 
 the day, instead of ending it, with meats and wine! 1 
 was led to these reflections by coming suddenly upon 
 a young lady and her companion (possibly her lover), 
 in climbing a ruined staircase sheathed within the 
 wall of the abbey. They were standing at one of the 
 windows, quite unconscious of my neighborhood, and 
 looking down upon the gay party of ladies below, who 
 were still amid the debris of the feast arranging their 
 bonnets for a walk. 
 
 " What a want of soul," said the lady, "to be eat- 
 ing and drinking in such a place!" 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 559 
 
 " Some people have no souls," responded the gentle- 
 After this verdict, I thought the best thing I could 
 do was to take care of my body, and I very carefully 
 backed down the old staircase, which is probably more 
 hazardous now than in the days when it was used to 
 admit damsels and haunchesof venison to the reverend 
 fathers. 
 
 I reached the bottom in safety, and informed my 
 friends that they had no souls, but they manifested 
 the usual unconcern on the subject, and strolled away 
 through the echoing arches, in search of new points 
 of view and fresh wild-Mowers. " Commend me at 
 least,"' I thought, as I followed on, "to those whose 
 pulses can be quickened even by a cold pie and a glass 
 of champagne. Sadness and envy are sown thickly 
 enough by any wayside." 
 
 We were embarked once more by the middle of the 
 afternoon, and with a head wind, but smooth water and 
 cool temperature, beat back to Ryde. If the young 
 lady and her lover have forgiven or forgotten us, and 
 the ghosts of Netley, frocked or petticoated, have 
 taken no umbrage, 1 have not done amiss in marking 
 the day with a stone of the purest white. How much 
 more sensible is a party like this, in the open air, and 
 at healthy hours, than the untimely and ceremonious 
 civilities usually paid to strangers. If the world would 
 mend by moralising, however, we should have had a 
 Utopia long ago. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OF EUROPE AND 
 AMERICA. 
 
 One of Hazlitt's nail-driving remarks is to the effect 
 that he should like very well to pass the whole of his life 
 in travelling, if he could anywhere borrow another life 
 to spend afterward at home. How far action is neces- 
 sary to happiness, and how far repose — how far the 
 appetite for novelty and adventure will drive, and how 
 far the attractions of home and domestic comfort will 
 recall us — in short, what are the precise exactions of 
 the antagonist principles in our bosoms of curiosity 
 and sloth, energy and sufferance, hope and memory — 
 are questions which each one must settle for himself, 
 and which none can settle but he who has passed his 
 life in the eternal and fruitless search after the happi- 
 est place, climate, and station. 
 
 Conteutment depends upon many things within our 
 own control, but, with a certain education, it depends 
 partly upon things beyond it. To persons delicately 
 constituted or delicately brought up, and to all idle 
 persons, the principal ingredient in the cup of enjoy- 
 ment is climate ; and Providence, that consults "the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number," has made 
 the poor and the roughly-nurtured independent of the 
 changes of the wind. Those who have the misfortune 
 to be delicate as well as poor — those, particularly, for 
 whom there is no hope but in a change of clime, but 
 whom pitiless poverty compels to languish in vain 
 after the reviving south, are happily few ; but they 
 have thus much more than their share of human ca- 
 lamity. 
 
 In throwing together my recollections of the cli- 
 mates with which I have become acquainted in other 
 lands, I am aware that there is a greater difference of 
 opinion on this subject than on most others. A man 
 who has agreeable society about him in Montreal, but 
 who was without friends in Florence, would be very 
 likely to bring the climate in for its share of the dif- 
 ference, and prefer Canada to Italy; and health and 
 circumstances of all kinds affect, in no slight degree, 
 our susceptibility to skies and atmosphere. But it is 
 
 sometimes interesting to know the impressions of oth- 
 ers, even though they agree not with our own ; and I 
 will only say of mine on this subject, that they are so 
 far likely to be fair, as I have been blessed with the 
 same perfect health in all countries, and have been 
 happy alike in every latitude and season. 
 
 It is almost a matter of course to decry the climate 
 of England. The English writers themselves talk of 
 the suicidal months ; and it is the only country where 
 part of the livery of a mounted groom is his master's 
 great-coat strapped about his waist. It is certainly a 
 damp climate, and the sun shines less in England than 
 
 j in most other countries. But to persons of full habit 
 this moisture in the air is extremely agreeable ; and 
 the high condition of all animals in England, from 
 man downward, proves its healthfulness. A stranger 
 who has been accustomed to a brighter sky, will, at 
 
 I first, find a gloom in the gray light so characteristic of 
 
 I an English atmosphere; but this soon wears off, and 
 he finds a compensation, as far as the eye is con- 
 cerned, in the exquisite softness of the verdure, and 
 
 | the deep and enduring brightness of the foliage. The 
 effect of this moisture on the skin is singularly grate- 
 ful. The pores become accustomed to a healthy ac- 
 tion, which is unknown in other countries ; and the 
 bloom by which an English complexion is known all 
 over the world is the index of an activity in this im- 
 portant part of the system, which, when first experi- 
 enced, is almost like a new sensation. The transition 
 to a dry climate, such as ours, deteriorates the condi- 
 tion and quality of the skin, and produces a feeling, 
 if I may so express it, like that of being glazed. It is 
 a common remark in England, that an officer's wife 
 and daughters follow his regiment to Canada at the 
 expense of their complexions ; and it is a well-known 
 fact that the bloom of female beauty is, in our coun- 
 try, painfully evanescent. 
 
 The climate of America is, in many points, very 
 different from that of France and Great Britain. In 
 the middle and northern states, it is a dry, invigora- 
 ting, bracing climate, in which a strong man may do 
 more work than in almost any other, and which makes 
 continual exercise, or occupation of some sort, abso- 
 lutely necessary. With the exception of the " Indian 
 summer," and here and there a day scattered through 
 the spring and the hot months, there is no weather 
 tempered so finely that one would think of passing 
 the day in merely enjoying it, and life is passed, by 
 those who have the misfortune to be idle, in continual 
 and active dread of the elements. The cold is so 
 acrid, and the heat so sultry, and the changes from 
 one to the other are so sudden and violent, that no 
 enjoyment can be depended upon out-of-doors, and 
 no system of clothing or protection is good for a day 
 together. He who has full occupation for head and 
 hand (as by far the greatest majority of our country- 
 men have) may live as long in America as in any por- 
 tion of the globe— vide the bills of mortality. He 
 whose spirits lean upon the temperature of the wind, 
 or whose nerves require a genial and constant atmo- 
 sphere, may find more favorable climes ; and the hab- 
 its and delicate constitutions of scholars and people 
 of sedentary pursuits generally, in the United States, 
 prove the truth of the observation. 
 
 The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which 
 is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely pos- 
 sible in America. It is said, and said truly, of the 
 first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may 
 not ride comfortably on horseback ; but with us, the 
 extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous char- 
 acter of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a deli- 
 cate person, anything like regularity in exercise. The 
 consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the 
 high and glowing health so common in England, and 
 consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of 
 the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently 
 
560 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 rare to excite remark. "Very English-looking," is a 
 common phrase, and means very healthy-looking. 
 Still our people last — and though I should define the 
 English climate as the one in which the human frame 
 is in the highest condition, I should say of America, 
 that it is the one in which you could get the most 
 work out of it. 
 
 Atmosphere, in England and America, is the first 
 of the necessaries of life. In Italy, it is the first of its 
 luxuries. We breathe in America, and walk abroad, 
 without thinking of these common acts but as a means 
 of arriving at happiness. In Italy, to breathe and to 
 walk abroad are themselves happiness. Day after day 
 — week after week — month after month — you wake 
 with the breath of flowers coming in at your open 
 window, and a sky of serene and unfathomable blue, 
 and mornings and evenings of tranquil, assured, heav- 
 enly purity and beauty. The few weeks of the rainy 
 season are forgotten in these long halcyon months of 
 sunshine. No one can have lived in Italy a year, who 
 remembers anything but the sapphire sky and the 
 kindling and ever-seen stars. You grow insensibly to 
 associate the sunshine and moonlight only with the 
 fountain you have lived near, or the columns of the 
 temple you have seen from your window, for on no 
 objects in other lands have you seen their light so 
 constant. 
 
 I scarce know how to convey, in language, the effect 
 of the climate of Italy on mind and body. Sitting 
 here, indeed, in the latitude of thirty-nine, in the 
 middle of April, by a warm fire, and with a cold wind 
 whistling at the window, it is difficult to recall it, even 
 to the fancy. I do not know whether life is pro- 
 longed, but it is infinitely enriched and brightened, by 
 the delicious atmosphere of Italy. You rise in the 
 morning, thanking Heaven for life and liberty to go 
 abroad. There is a sort of opiate in the air, which 
 makes idleness, that would be the vulture of Prome- 
 theus in America, the dove of promise in Italy. It is 
 delicious to do nothing — delicious to stand an hour 
 looking at a Savoyard and his monkey — delicious to 
 sit away the long, silent noon, in the shade of a col- 
 umn, or on the grass of a fountain — delicious to be 
 with a friend without the interchange of an idea — to 
 dabble in a book, or look into the cup of a flower. 
 You do not read, for you wish to enjoy the weather. 
 You do not visit, for you hate to enter a door while 
 the weather is so fine. You lie down unwillingly for 
 your siesta in the hot noon, for you fear you may 
 oversleep the first coolness of the long shadows of 
 sunset. The fancy, meantime, is free, and seems lib- 
 erated by the same languor that enervates the severer 
 faculties ; and nothing seems fed by the air but 
 thoughts, which minister to enjoyment. 
 
 The climate of Greece is very much that of Italy. 
 The Mediterranean is all beloved of the sun. Life 
 has a value there, of which the rheumatic, shivering, 
 snow-breasting, blue-devilled idler of northern regions 
 has no shadow, even in a dream. No wonder Dante 
 mourned and languished for it. No wonder at the 
 sentiment I once heard from distinguished lips — Fuori 
 d' Italia lutto e esilio. 
 
 This appears like describing a Utopia ; but it is 
 what Italy seemed to me. I have expressed myself 
 much more to my mind, however, in rhyme, for a 
 prose essay is, at best, but a cold medium. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 
 
 " One-p'un'-five outside, sir, two p'un' in." 
 It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, prom- 
 ising nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn, 
 
 when I stepped in at the " White Horse Cellar," in 
 Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for 
 Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the 
 coach, at least by as much as the difference in the 
 prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest 
 for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down 
 for the outside, and deposited my two pounds in the 
 horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the 
 box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and 
 portmanteaus. Supposing my business concluded, I 
 stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten, 
 cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to rec- 
 oncile his ideas of "retirement from office" with those 
 of his almost next door neighbor, the hero of Strath- 
 fieldsaye. 
 
 I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when 
 a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip 
 — a technical "reminder," which probably came easier 
 to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a 
 "gemman" — recalled me to the cellar. 
 
 " Fifteen shillin', sir," said he laconically, pointing 
 with the same expressive exponent of his profession 
 to the change for my outside place, which I had left 
 lying on the counter. 
 
 " You are at least as honest as the duke," I solilo- 
 quised, as I pocketed the six bright and substantial 
 half-crowns. 
 
 I was at the " White Horse Cellar" again the fol- 
 lowing morning at six, promising myself with great 
 sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an 
 English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside 
 places were all taken, and with twelve fellow-outsides, 
 J mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw 
 by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my um- 
 brella, abandoned my knees with a single effort of 
 mind to the drippings of the driver's weather-proof 
 upper Benjamin, and away we sped. 1 was "due" at 
 the house of a hospitable catholic baronet, a hundred 
 and two miles from London, at the dinner-hour of that 
 day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is 
 to expect the millennium. 
 
 London in the morning — I mean the poor man's 
 morning, daylight — is to me matter for the most 
 speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in 
 the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with 
 equipages and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank 
 and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial quali- 
 ties of the blood trippingly through the veins. But 
 Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through 
 fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who 
 has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispirit- 
 ing and dreary. To remember that behind the barri- 
 caded and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the 
 hero of Waterloo — that under these crowded and fog- 
 wrapped houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing 
 of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly- 
 moulded creatures who preserve for the aristocracy 
 of England the palm of the world's beauty — to remem- 
 ber this, and a thousand other associations linked with 
 the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen, 
 the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the 
 deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ball- 
 room, the loneliness of a frequented promenade in 
 untimely hours — any scene, in short, of gayety gone 
 by but remembered — oppresses and dissatisfies the 
 heart ! One would think memory should re-brighten 
 and re-populate such places. 
 
 The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the 
 Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small 
 hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick 
 and monotonous beat on the ear; the silent driver kept 
 his eye on the traces, and "reminded" now and then 
 with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler 
 or leader, and the complicated but compact machine 
 of which the square foot that I occupied had been so 
 nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 561 
 
 with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, and as in- 
 dependent of clouds and rain. 
 
 "Est ce que monsieur parte Francois!" asked at the 
 end of the first stage my right-hand neighbor, a little 
 gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that I 
 he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with 
 great tenacity. 
 
 Having admitted in an evil moment that J had been 
 in France, I was first distinctly made to understand 
 that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham 
 purely for pleasure, and without the most distant ob- 
 ject of business — a point on which he insisted so long, | 
 and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in 
 persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for 
 the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons. 
 After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rash- i 
 ness of committing one's life to an English stage- j 
 coach, with scarce room enough for the perch of a j 
 parrot, and a velocity so diablement dangercux, I tired I 
 of my Frenchman ; and, since I could not have my j 
 own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a 
 straw-bonnet and shawl on my left — the property, I 
 soon discovered, of a very smart lady's maid, very in- ! 
 - dignant at having been 'made to change places with 
 Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress, 
 were dry and comfortable inside. She "would not 
 have minded the outside place,'' she said, " for there 
 were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the out- 
 side, very ! — but she had been promised to go inside, 
 and had dressed accordingly ; and it was very pro- 
 voking to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just 
 because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that 
 would damage chose not to ride in the rain." 
 
 " Very provoking, indeed !" I responded, letting in 
 the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my 
 umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of 
 the wind. 
 
 " Wc should have gone down in the carriage, sir," 
 she continued, edging a little closer to get the full ad- 
 vantage of my umbrella ; " but John the coachman 
 has got the Irinjluenzy, and my missis wo'n't be driven 
 by no other coachman ; she's as obstinate as a mule, 
 sir. And that isn't all I could tell, sir; but 1 scorns 
 to hurt the character of one of my own sex." And 
 the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked 
 determined not to destroy her mistress's character — 
 unless particularly requested. 
 
 I detest what may be called a proper road-book — 
 even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on 
 a country so well conned as England. 
 
 I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which 
 looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen 
 through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remember 
 is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and 
 my knees saturated with rain. All England is lovely 
 to the wild eye of an American unused to high cultiva- 
 tion ; and though my enthusiasm was somewhat damp, 
 I arrived at the bridge over the Avon, blessing England 
 sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed 
 of its coaches. 
 
 The Avon, above and below the bridge, ran brightly 
 alonn between low banks, half sward, half meadow; 
 and on the other side lay the native town of the im- 
 mortal wool-comber— a gay cheerful-looking village, 
 natrowing in the centre to a closely-built street, across 
 which swung, broad and fair, the sign of the " Red 
 horse." More ambitious hotels lay beyond, and 
 broader streets; but while Washington living is re- 
 membered (and that will be while the language lasts), 
 the quiet inn in which the great Geoffrey thought 
 and wrote of Shakspere will be the altar of the pil- 
 grim's devotions. 
 
 My baggage was set down, the coachman and guard 
 
 tipped their hats for a shilling, and, chilled to the bone, 
 
 I raised my hat instinctively to the courtesy of a slender 
 
 gentlewoman in black, who, by the kevs at her girdle, 
 
 3G 
 
 should be the landlady. Having expected to see a 
 rosy little Mrs. Boniface, with a brown pinafore and 
 worsted mittens, I made up my mind at once that the 
 inn had changed mistresses. On the right of the old- 
 fashioned entrance blazed cheerily the kitchen fire, 
 and with my enthusiasm rather dashed by my disap- 
 pointment, 1 stepped in to make friends with the cook, 
 and get a little warmth and information. 
 
 " So your old mistress is dead, Mrs. Cook," said I, 
 rubbing my hands with great satisfaction between the 
 fire and a well-roasted chicken. 
 
 " Lauk, sir, no, she isn't !" answered the rosy lass, 
 pointing with a dredging-box to the same respectable 
 lady in black who was just entering to look after me. 
 
 "I beg pardon, sir," she said, dropping a cour- 
 tesy ; " but are you the gentleman expected by Sir 
 Charles ?" 
 
 "Yes, madam. And can you tell me anything of 
 your predecessor who had the inn in the days of 
 Washington Irving?" 
 
 She dropped another courtesy, and drew up her 
 thin person to its full height, while a smile of gratified 
 vanity stole out at the corners of her mouth. 
 
 "The carriage has been waiting some time for you, 
 sir," she said, with a softer tone than that in which 
 she had hitherto addressed me; " and you will hardly 
 
 be a t C in time for dinner. You will be coming 
 
 over to-morrow or the day after, perhaps, sir; and 
 then, if you would honor my little room by taking a 
 cup of tea with me, I should be pleased to tell you all 
 about it, sir." 
 
 I remembered a promise I had nearly forgotten, 
 that I would reserve my visit to Stratford till 1 could 
 
 be accompanied by Miss J. P , whom I was to 
 
 have the honor of meeting at my place of destination ; 
 and promising an early acceptance of the kind land- 
 lady's invitation, I hurried on to my appointment over 
 the fertile hills of Warwickshire. 
 
 I was established in one of those old Elizabethan 
 country-houses, which, with their vast parks, their 
 self-sufficing resources of subsistence and company, 
 and the absolute deference shown on all sides to the 
 lord of the manor, give one the impression rather of a 
 little kingdom with a castle in its heart, than of an 
 abode for a gentleman subject. The house itself 
 (called, like most houses of this size and consequence 
 in Warwickshire, a "Court,") was a Gothic, half- 
 castellated square, with four round towers, and in- 
 numerable embrasures and windows; two wings in 
 front, probably more modern than the body of the 
 house, and again two long wings extending to the rear, 
 at right angles, and enclosing a flowery and formal 
 parterre. There had been a trench about it, now 
 filled up, and at a short distance from the house stood 
 a polyangular and massive structure, well calculated 
 for defence, and intended as a strong-hold for the re- 
 treat of the family and tenants in more troubled times. 
 One of these rear wings enclosed a catholic chapel, 
 for the worship of the baronet and those of his tenants 
 who professed the same faith ; while on the northern 
 side, between the house and the garden, stood a large 
 protestant stone church, with a turret and spire, both 
 chapel and church, with their clergyman and priest, 
 ' dependant on the estate, and equally favored by the 
 liberal and high-minded brronet. The tenantry form- 
 ed two considerable congregations, and lived and wor- 
 shipped side by side, with the most perfect harmony 
 —an instance of real Christianity, in my opinion, which 
 the angels of heaven might come down to see. A 
 lovely rural graveyard for the lord and tenants, and a 
 secluded lake below the garden, in which hundreds of 
 wild ducks swam and screamed unmolested, completed 
 the outward features of C c ° urt ; , . . . 
 
 There are noble houses in England, with a door 
 communicating from the dining-room to the stables, 
 that the master and his friends may see their favorites, 
 
562 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 after dinner, without exposure to the weather. In the 
 place of this rather bizarre luxury, the oak-panelled 
 
 and spacious dining-hall of C is on a level with 
 
 the organ loft of the chapel, and when the cloth is re- 
 moved, the large door between is thrown open, and 
 the noble instrument pours the rich and thrilling 
 music of vespers through the rooms. When the 
 service is concluded, and the lights on the altar ex- 
 tinguished, the blind organist (an accomplished musi- 
 cian, and a tenant on the estate), continues his volun- 
 taries in the dark until the hall-door informs him of 
 the retreat of the company to the drawing-room. 
 There is not only refinement and luxury in this 
 beautiful arrangement, but food for the soul and 
 heart. 
 
 I chose my room from among the endless vacant 
 but equally luxurious chambers of the rambling old 
 house ; my preference solely directed by the portrait 
 of a nun, one of the family in ages gone by — a picture 
 full of melancholy beauty, which hung opposite the 
 window. The face was distinguished by all that in 
 England marks the gentlewoman of ancisnt and pure 
 descent ; and while it was a woman with the more 
 tender qualities of her sex breathing through her fea- 
 tures, it was still a lofty and sainted sister, true to her 
 cross, and sincere in her vows and seclusion. It was 
 the work of a master, probably Vandyke, and a picture 
 in which the most solitary man would find company 
 and communion. On the other walls, and in most of 
 the other rooms and corridors, were distributed por- 
 traits of the gentlemen and soldiers of the family, most 
 of them bearing some resemblance to the nun, but 
 differing, as brothers in those wild times may be sup- 
 posed to have differed, from the gentle creatures of the 
 same blood, nursed in the privacy of peace. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON SHAKSPERE. 
 
 One of the first visits in the neighborhood was nat- 
 urally to Stratford-on-Avon. It lay some ten miles 
 south of us, and I drove down, with the distinguished 
 literary friend I have before mentioned, in the car- 
 riage of our kind host, securing, by the presence of 
 his servants and equipage, a degree of respect and at- 
 tention which would not have been accorded to us in 
 our simple character of travellers. The prim mistress 
 of the "Red Horse," in her close black bonnet and 
 widow's weeds, received us at the door with a deeper 
 courtesy than usual, and a smile of less wintry formal- 
 ity; and proposing to dine at the inn, and "suck the 
 brain" of the hostess more at our leisure, we started 
 immediately for the house of the wool-comber— the 
 birthplace of Shakspere. 
 
 Stratford should have been forbidden ground to 
 builders, masons, shopkeepers, and generally to all 
 people of thrift and whitewash. It is now rather a 
 smart town, with gay calicoes, shawls of the last pat- 
 tern, hardware, and millinery, exhibited in all their 
 splendor down the' widened and newer streets; and 
 though here and there remains a glorious old gloomy 
 and inconvenient abode, which looks as if Shakspere 
 might have taken shelter under its eaves, the gayer 
 features of the town have the best of it, and flaunt their 
 gaudy and unrespected newness in the very windows 
 of that immortal birthplace. I stepped into a shop to 
 inquire the way to it. 
 
 " Shiksper's 'ouse, sir? Yes, sir!" said a dapper 
 clerk, with his hair astonished into the most impossi- 
 ble directions by force of brushing; "keep to the 
 right, sir! Shiksper lived in the wife 'ouse, sir — the 
 'ouse, you see beyond, with the windy swung up, sir." 
 
 A low, old-fashioned house, with a window sus- 
 
 pended on a hinge, newly whitewashed and scrubbed, 
 stood a little up the street. A sign over the door in- 
 formed us in an inflated paragraph, that the immortal 
 Will Shakspere was born under this roof, and that an 
 old woman within would show it to us for a considera- 
 tion. It had been used until very lately, I had been 
 told, for a butcher's shop. 
 
 A "garrulous old lady" met us at the bottom of the 
 narrow stair leading to the second floor, and began — 
 not to say anything of Shakspere — but to show us the 
 names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, &c, written among 
 thousands of others on the wall ! She had worn out 
 Shakspere ! She had told that story till she was tired 
 of it! or (what, perhaps, is more proballe) most 
 people who go there fall to reading the names of the 
 visiters so industriously, that she has grown to think 
 some of Shakspere's pilgrims greater than Shakspere. 
 
 "Was this old oaken chest here in the days of 
 Shakspere, madam?" I asked. 
 
 "Yes, sir, and here's the name of Byron — here with 
 a capital B. Here's a curiosity, sir." 
 
 "And this small wooden box?" 
 
 " Made of Shakspere's mulberry, sir. I had sich a 
 time about that box, sir. Two young geminen were 
 here the other day — just run up, while the coach was 
 changing horses, to see the house. As soon as they 
 were gone I misses the box. Off scuds my son to the 
 ' Red Horse,' and there they sat on the top looking as 
 innocent as may be. ' Stop the coach,' says my son. 
 'What do you want?' says the driver. ' My mother's 
 mulberry-box ! — Shakspere's mulberry-box ! — One of 
 them 'ere young men's got it in his pocket.' And 
 true enough, sir, one on 'em had the imperence to 
 take it out of his pocket, and flings it into my son's 
 face ; and you know the coach never stops a minnit for 
 nothing, sir, or he'd a' smarted for it." 
 
 Spirit of Shakspere ! dost thou not sometimes walk 
 alone in this humble chamber ! Must one's inmost 
 soul be fretted and frighted always from its devotion 
 by an abominable old woman ? Why should not such 
 lucrative occupations be given in charity to the deaf 
 and dumb ? The pointing of a finger were enough in 
 such spots of earth ! 
 
 I sat down in despair to look over the book of visit- 
 ers, trusting that she would tire of my inattention. 
 As it was of no use to point out names to those who 
 would not look, however, she commenced a long story 
 of an American who had lately taken the whim to 
 sleep in Shakspere's birth-chamber. She had shaken 
 him down a bed on the floor, and he had passed the 
 night there. It seemed to bother her to comprehend 
 why two thirds of her visiters should be Americans— 
 a circumstance that was abundantly proved by the 
 books. 
 
 It was only when we were fairly in the street that I 
 began to realize that I had seen one of the most glori- 
 ous altars of memory — that deathless Will Shakspere, 
 the mortal, who was, perhaps (not to speak profanely), 
 next to his Maker, in the divine faculty of creation, 
 first saw the light through the low lattice on which 
 we turned back to look. 
 
 The single window of the room in which Scott died 
 at Abbotsford, and this in the birth-chamber of Shak- 
 spere, have seemed to me almost marked with the 
 touch of the fire of those great souls — for I think we 
 have an instinct which tells us on the spot where 
 mighty spirits have come or gone, that they came and 
 went with the light of heaven. 
 
 We walked down the street to see the house where 
 Shakspere lived on his return to Stratford. It stands 
 at the corner of a lane, not far from the church where 
 he was buried, and is a newish un-Shaksperian looking 
 place — no doubt, if it be indeed the same house, most 
 profanely and considerably altered. The present pro- 
 prietor or occupant of the house or site took upon 
 himself some time since the odium of cutting down 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 563 
 
 the famous mulberry-tree planted by the poet's hand 
 in the garden. 
 
 I forgot to mention in the beginning of these notes 
 that two or three miles before coming to Stratford we 
 passed through Shottery, where Anne Hathaway lived. 
 A nephew of the excellent baronet whose guests we 
 were occupies the house. I looked up and down the 
 green lanes about it, and glanced my eye round upon 
 the hills over which the sun has continued to set and 
 the moon to ride in her love-inspiring beauty ever 
 since. There were doubtless outlines in the landscape 
 which had been followed by the 'eye of Shakspere 
 when coming, a trembling lover, to Shottrey — doubt- 
 less, teints in the sky, crops on the fields, smoke- 
 wreaths from the old homesteads on the high hill- 
 sides, which are little altered now. How daringly the 
 imagination plucks back the past in such places ! 
 How boldly we ask of fancy and probability the thou- 
 sand questions we would put, if we might, to the magic 
 mirror of Agrippa ? Did that great mortal love timid- 
 ly, like ourselves? Was the passionate outpouring 
 of his heart simple, and suited to the humble condition 
 of Anne Hathaway, or was it the first fiery coinage of 
 Homeo and Othello ? Did she know the immortal 
 honor and light poured upon woman by the love of 
 genius ? Did she know how this common and often- 
 est terrestrial passion becomes fused in the poet's bo- 
 som with celestial fire, and, in its wondrous elevation 
 and purity, ascends lambently and musically to the 
 very stars? Did she coy it with him? Was she a 
 woman to him, as commoner mortals find woman — ca- 
 pricious, tender, cruel, intoxicating, cold — everything 
 by changes impossible to calculate or foresee ? Did 
 he walk home to Stratford, sometimes, despairing, in 
 perfect sick-heartedness, of her alfection, and was he 
 recalled by a message or a lover's instinct to find her 
 weeping and passionately repentant? 
 
 How natural it is by such questions and specula- 
 tions to betray our innate desire to bring the lofty 
 spirits of our common mould to our own inward level — 
 to seek analogies between our affections, passions, appe- 
 tites, and theirs — to wish they might have been no more 
 exalted, no more fervent, no more worthy of the adora- 
 ble love of woman than ourselves! The same temper 
 that prompts the depregiation, the envy, the hatred, 
 exercised toward the poet in his lifetime, mingles, not 
 inconsiderably, in the researches so industriously prose- 
 cuted after his death into his youth and history. To 
 be admired in this world, and much more to be beloved 
 for higher qualities than his fellow-men, insures to 
 genius not only to be persecuted in life, but to be 
 ferreted out with all his frailties and imperfections 
 from the grave. 
 
 The church in which Shakspere is buried stands 
 near the banks of the Avon, and is a most picturesque 
 and proper place of repose for his ashes. An avenue 
 of small trees and vines, ingeniously overlaced, ex- 
 tends from the street to the principal door, and the 
 interior is broken up into that confused and accidental 
 medley of tombs, pews, cross-lights, and pillars, for 
 which the old churches of England are remarkable. 
 The tomb and effigy of the great poet lie in an inner 
 chapel, and are as described in every traveller's book. 
 I will not take up room with the repetition. 
 
 It gives one an odd feeling to see the tomb of his 
 wife and daughter beside him. One does not realize 
 before, that Shakspere had wife, children, kinsmen, 
 like other men — that there were those who had a right 
 to lie in the same tomb; to whom he owed the chari- 
 ties of life ; whom he may have benefited or offended ; 
 who in. iv have influenced materially his destiny, or 
 he theirs ; who were the inheritors of his household 
 good*, his wardrobe, his books — people who looked 
 an him — on Shakspere — as a landholder, a renter of a 
 pew, a townsman : a relative, in short, who had claims 
 upon them, not for the eternal homage due to celestial 
 
 inspiration, but for the charity of shelter and bread 
 had he been poor, for kindness and ministry had he 
 been sick, for burial and the tears of natural affection 
 when he died. It is painful and embarrassing to the 
 mind to go to Stratford — to reconcile the immortality 
 and the incomprehensible power of genius like Shak- 
 spere's, with the space, tenement, and circumstance 
 of a man ! The poet should be like the sea-bird, seen 
 only on the wing — his birth, his slumber, and his 
 death, mysteries alike. 
 
 I had stipulated with the hostess that my baggage 
 should be put into the chamber occupied by Wash- 
 ington Irving. I was shown into it to dress for dinner 
 — a small neat room, a perfect specimen, in short, of 
 an English bedroom, with snow-white curtains, a look- 
 ing-glass the size of the face, a well-polished grate 
 and poker, a well-fitted carpet, and as much light as 
 heaven permits to the climate. 
 
 Our' dinner for two was served in a neat parlor on 
 the same floor — an English inn dinner — simple, neat, 
 and comfortable, in the sense of that word unknown in 
 other countries. There was just fire enough, in the 
 grate, just enough for two in the different dishes, a 
 servant who was just enough in the room, and just 
 civil enough — in short, it was, like everything else in 
 that country of adaptation and fitness, just what was 
 ordered and wanted, and no more. 
 
 The evening turned out stormy, and the rain pat- 
 tered merrily against the windows. The shutters were 
 closed, the fire blazed up with new brightness, the 
 well-fitted wax lights were set on the table ; and when 
 the dishes were removed, we replaced the wine with a 
 tea-tray, and sent for the hostess to give us her com- 
 pany and a little gossip over our cups. 
 
 Nothing could be more nicely understood and de- 
 fined than the manner of English hostesses generally 
 in such situations, and of Mrs. Gardiner particularly 
 in this. Respectful without servility, perfectly sure 
 of the propriety of her own manner and mode of ex- 
 pression, yet preserving in every look and word the 
 proper distinction between herself and her guests, she 
 insured from them that kindness and ease of commu- 
 nication which would make a long evening of social 
 conversation pass, not only without embarrassment on 
 either side, but with mutual pleasure and gratification. 
 
 "I have brought up, mem," she said, producing a 
 well-polished poker from under her black apron, be- 
 fore she took the chair set for her at the table — "I 
 have brought up a relic for you to see, that no money 
 would buy from me." 
 
 She turned it over in my hand, and I read on one 
 of the flat sides at the bottom — "gkoffrey crayon's 
 
 SCEPTRE." 
 
 " Do you remember Mr. Irving," asked my friend, 
 "or have you supposed, since reading his sketch of 
 Stratford-on-Avon, that the gentleman in number 
 three might be the person ?" 
 
 The hostess drew up her thin figure, and the ex- 
 pression of a person about to compliment herself stole 
 into the corners of her mouth. 
 
 " Why, you see, mem, I am very much in the habit 
 of observing my guests, and I think I may say I knows 
 a superior gentleman when I sees him. If you re- 
 member, mem" (and she took down from the mantle- 
 piece a much-worn copy of the Sketch-15ook), " Geof- 
 frey Crayon tells the circumstance of my stepping in 
 when it was getting late, and asking if he had rung. 
 I knows it by that, and then the gentleman I mean 
 was an American, and I think, mem, besides" (and she 
 hesitated a little, as if she was about to advance an 
 I original and rather venturesome opinion)— " I think 
 I can see that gentleman's likeness all through this 
 book." . ... 
 
 A truer remark or a more just criticism was per- 
 haps never made on the Sketch-Book. We smiled, 
 and Mrs. Gardiner proceeded : — 
 
564 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 " I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he 
 arrived, mem, and I sees directly by his modest ways 
 and timid look that he was a gentleman, and not fit 
 company for the other travellers. They were all young 
 men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem, 
 ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and af- 
 ter their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So, I 
 says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, ' That nice 
 gentleman can't get near the fire, and you go and light 
 a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it 
 shan't cost him nothing, for I like the look on him.' 
 Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after 
 his tea, he puts his legs up over the grate, and there 
 he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o'clock. 
 The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house 
 was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate 
 now and then in number three, and every time I heard 
 it, I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting 
 very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for 
 a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still 
 no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I, 
 4 Go into number three, and upset something, for 1 am 
 sure that gentleman has fallen asleep.' — ' La, ma'am,' 
 says Sarah, 'I don't dare.' — 'Well, then,' says I, 'I'll 
 go.' So I opens the door, and I says, 'If you please, 
 sir, did you ring ?' — little thinking that question would 
 ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem. 
 He sat with his feet on the fender poking the fire, and 
 a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was 
 in his mind. 'No, ma'am,' says he, 'I did not.' I 
 shuts the door, and sits down again, for I hadn't the 
 heart to tell him that it was late, for he was a gentle- 
 man not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past 
 twelve o'clock, when the bell did ring. 'There,' says 
 I to Sarah, ' thank Heaven he has done thinking, and 
 we can go to bed.' So he walked up stairs with his 
 light, aud the next morning he was up early and off 
 to the Shakspere house, and he brings me home a box 
 of the mulberry-tree, and asks me if I thought it was 
 genuine, and said it was for his mother in America. 
 And I loved him still more for that, and I'm sure I 
 prayed she might live to see him return." 
 
 "I believe she did, Mrs. Gardiner; but how soon 
 after did you set aside the poker ?" 
 
 " Why, sir, you see there's a Mr. Vincent that 
 comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day — 
 • So, Mrs. Gardiner, you're finely immortalized. Read 
 that.' So the minnit I read it, I remembered who it 
 was, and all about it, and I runs and gets the number 
 three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by- 
 and-by I sends it to Brummagem, and has his name 
 engraved on it, and here you see it, sir — and I wouldn't 
 take no money for it." 
 
 I had never the honor to meet or know Mr. Irving, 
 and I evidently lost ground with the hostess of the 
 "Red Horse" for that misfortune. I delighted her, 
 however, with the account which I had seen in a late 
 newspaper, of his having shot a buffalo in the prairies 
 of the west ; and she soon courtesied herself out, and 
 left me to the delightful society of the distinguished 
 lady who had accompanied me. Among all my many 
 loitenngs in many lands, I remember none more in- 
 tellectually pure and gratifying, than this at Stratford- 
 on-Avon. My sleep, in the little bed consecrated by 
 the slumbers of the immortal Geoffrey, was sweet and 
 light ; and I write myself his debtor for a large share 
 of the pleasure which genius like his lavishes on the 
 world. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 CHARLECOTE. 
 
 Once more posting through Shottery and Stratford- 
 on-Avon, on the road to Kenilworth and Warwick, I 
 
 felt a pleasure in becoming an habitue in Shakspere's 
 town — in being recognised by the Stratford post-boys, 
 known at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the 
 toll-gates. It is pleasant to be welcomed by name 
 anywhere ; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a recogni- 
 tion by those whose fathers or predecessors were the 
 companions of Shakspere's frolics. Every fellow in 
 a slouched hat — every idler on a tavern bench — every 
 saunterer with a dog at his heels on the highway — 
 should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would 
 almost ask him, " Was Will Shakspere with you last 
 night ?" 
 
 The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized 
 by a varlet poacher who was tried before old Sir 
 Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an 
 apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too 
 free with the family history, under cover of an im- 
 aginary account of the trial. I thought, as we drove 
 along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park 
 and majestic trees — very much as it stood in the 
 days of Sir Thomas, I believe — that most probably 
 the descendants of the old justice look even now upon 
 Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws 
 than as a writer of immortal plays. I venture to say, 
 it would be bad tact in a visiter to Charlecote to felici- 
 tate the family on the honor of possessing a park in 
 which Shakspere had stolen deer — to show more in- 
 terest in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in 
 the family portraits. 
 
 On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford 
 to Charlecote) Shakspere had been dragged as a cul- 
 prit. What were his feelings before Sir Thomas ! 
 He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire 
 of genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact 
 with his fellow-men, that he was too much their supe- 
 rior to be angry. The humor in which he has drawn 
 Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more 
 amused then displeased with his own trial. But was 
 there no vexation at the moment? A reflection, it 
 might be, from the estimate of his position in the 
 minds of those who were about him — who looked on 
 him simply as a stealer of so much venison. Did he 
 care for Anne Hathaway's opinion then ? 
 
 How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the 
 relation between judge and culprit on that trial ! How 
 little did he dream he was sitting for his picture to the 
 pestilent varlet at the bar ; that the deer-stealer could 
 better afford to forgive him than he the deer-stealer ! 
 Genius forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in 
 ignorance of its immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson 
 made a wilful jest on a line in his new play, it would 
 have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for 
 deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample 
 upon men of genius in the common walk of life ; who 
 cheat them, misrepresent them, take advantage of their 
 inattention or their generosity in worldly matters, are 
 sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not them- 
 selves, are forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might 
 as well have held malice against Roland Graeme for 
 the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of Mis- 
 rule. 
 
 Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph 
 gone before, it is probably not easy to put conscious 
 and secret superiority entirely between the mind and 
 the opinions of those around who think differently. 
 It is one reason why men of genius love more than 
 the common share of solitude — to recover self-respect. 
 In the midst of the amusing travesty he was drawing 
 in his own mind of the grave scene about him, Shak- 
 spere possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit 
 as he seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It 
 is a small penalty to 1 pay for the after worship of the 
 world ! The ragged and proverbially ill-dressed 
 peasants who are selected from the whole campagna, 
 as models to the sculptors of Rome, care little what 
 is thought of their good looks in the Corso. The 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 565 
 
 disguised proportions beneath their rags will be ad- 
 mired in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce 
 deigns their possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust 
 under his stone scutcheon. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 WARWICK CASTLE. 
 
 Were it not for the " out-heroded" descriptions in 
 the guide-books, one might say a great deal of War- j 
 wick castle. It is the quality of overdone or ill-ex- 
 pressed enthusiasm to silence that which is more | 
 rational and real. Warwick is, perhaps, the best kept • 
 of all the famous old castles of England. It is a superb j 
 and admirably-appointed modern dwelling, in the shell, 
 and with all the means and appliances preserved, of 
 an ancient stronghold. It is a curious union, too. My 
 lady's maid and my lord's valet coquet upon the bar- 
 tizan, where old Guy of Warwick stalked in his coat- 
 of-mail. The London cockney, from his two days' 
 watering at Leamington, stops his pony-chaise, hired . 
 ai half-a-crown the hour, and walks Mrs. Popkins 
 over the old draw-bridge as peacefully as if it were the 
 threshold of his shop in the Strand. Scot and French- ; 
 man saunter through fosse and tower, and no ghost of , 
 the middle ages stalks forth, with closed visor, to J 
 challenge these once natural foes. The powdered 
 butler yawns through an embrasure, expecting "mila- 
 di," the countess of this fair domain, who in one day's j 
 posting from London seeks relief in Warwick Castle j 
 from the routs and soirees of town. What would old j 
 Guy say, or the " noble imp" whose effigy is among I 
 the escutcheoned tombs of his fathers, if they could ; 
 rise through their marble slabs, and be whirled over the j 
 drawbridge in a post-chaise ? How indignantly they j 
 would listen to the reckoning within their own port- j 
 cullis, of the rates for chaise and postillion. How j 
 astonished they would be at the butler's bow, and the 
 proffered officiousness of the valet. " Shall I draw 
 off your lordship's boots ? Which of these new vests 
 from Staub will your lordship put on for dinner ?" 
 
 Among the pictures at Warwick, I was interested 
 by a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (the best of that sov- 
 ereign I ever saw) ; one of Machiavelli, one of Essex, 
 and one of Sir Philip Sidney. The delightful and 
 gifted woman whom I had accompanied to the castle 
 observed of the latter, that the hand alone expressed 
 all his character. I had often made the remark in 
 real life, but I had never seen an instance on painting 
 where the likeness was so true. No one could doubt, 
 who knew Sir Philip Sidney's character, that it was a 
 literal portrait of his hand. In our day, if you have j 
 an artist for a friend, he makes use of you while you 
 call, to "sit for the hand" of the portrait on his easel. 
 Having a preference for the society of artists myself, 
 and frequenting their studios habitually, I know of 
 some hundred and fifty unsuspecting gentlemen on 
 canvass, who have procured for posterity and their 
 children portraits of their own heads and dress-coats 
 to be sure, but of the hands of other persons ! 
 
 The head of Machiavelli is, as is seen in the marble 
 in the gallery of Florence, small, slender, and visibly 
 " made to creep into crevices." The face is impassive 
 and calm, and the lips, though slight and almost femi- 
 nine, have an indefinable firmness and character. Es- 
 sex is the bold, plain, and blunt soldier history makes 
 him, and Elizabeth not unqueenly, nor (to my think- | 
 ing) of an uninteresting countenance; but, with all j 
 the artist's flattery, ugly enough to be the abode of | 
 the murderous envy that brought Mary to the block. I 
 
 We paid our five shillings for having been walked 
 through the marble hall of Castle Warwick, and the 
 dressing-room of its modern lady, and, gratified much 
 
 more by our visit than I have expressed in this brief 
 description, posted on to Kenilworth. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 KENILWORTH. 
 
 On the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought 
 more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and 
 her proud earls. Edward's gay favorite was tried at 
 Warwick, and beheaded on Blacklow hill, which we 
 passed soon after leaving the town. He was executed 
 in June; and I looked about on the lovely hills and 
 valleys that surround the place of his last moments, 
 and figured to myself very vividly his despair at ihis 
 hurried leave-taking of this bright world in its bright- 
 est spot and hour. Poor Gaveston! It was not in 
 his vocation to die ! He was neither soldier nor prel- 
 ate, hermit nor monk. His political sius, for which 
 he suffered, were no offence against good-fellowship, 
 and were ten times more venial than those of the 
 "black dog of Arden," who betrayed and helped to 
 murder him. He was the reckless minion of a king, 
 but he must have been a merry and pleasant fellow ; 
 and now that the world (on our side the water at least), 
 is grown so grave, one could go back with Old Mor- 
 tality, and freshen the epitaph of a heart that took life 
 more gayly. 
 
 As we approached the castle of the proud Leices- 
 ter, I found it easier to people the road with the flying 
 Amy Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lam- 
 bourne, Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop 
 of mummurs and players, than with the more real 
 characters of history. To assist the romance, a little 
 Italian boy, with his organ and monkey, was fording 
 the brook on his way to the castle, as if its old towers 
 still held listeners for the wandering minstrel. I 
 tossed him a shilling from the carriage window, and 
 while the horses slowly forded the brook, asked him 
 in his own delicious tongue, where he was from. 
 
 " Son' di Firenze, signore .'" 
 
 " And where are you going ?" 
 
 " Li ! at castello." 
 
 Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth ! 
 Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge, 
 to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms 
 like these ? I have seen many a beggar in Italy, 
 whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that de- 
 licious clime I could have found it in my heart to 
 envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty 
 and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed 
 child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon 
 his back, travelling from one land to another, and loiter- 
 ing wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without 
 a friend or a care ; and, upon my life, I could have 
 donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful 
 heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ, 
 put my trust in iforestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth. 
 There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no 
 profit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement 
 and toil ; no moss ever gathered by the unturned 
 stone, that repavs, by a thousandth part, the loss of 
 even this poor boy's share of the pleasures of change. 
 What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to 
 exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and 
 furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain 
 regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits, 
 and the redeemable, yet not oppressive poverty of this 
 Florentine reeazzo ! The irrecoverable gem of youth 
 is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a 
 cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon 
 
 tne 1'P- „, .. . , . . 
 
 The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon 
 my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni 
 
 p 
 
566 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer 
 tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington, 
 makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort ; and the 
 beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your 
 traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-at- 
 home. Some dozens of pony-chaises and small, crop 
 saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us 
 that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of 
 Elizabeth's princely gift to her favorite. We passed 
 into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in 
 which Edward was confined, now the only habitable 
 part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to 
 an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably 
 stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a 
 prompter ; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves 
 now for a passport. 
 
 Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably dis- 
 enchant almost any one of the gorgeous dreams con- 
 jured up by reading Scott's romance. Yet it is one 
 of the most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce 
 be complete to a novel-reader, naturally, without a 
 warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point 
 and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A 
 horseman in armor should pace over the draw-bridge, 
 and a squire be seen polishing his cuiras through 
 the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should 
 be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, philander- 
 ing with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and 
 rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenil- 
 worth as I have already described, and stepping out 
 into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him, 
 a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud- 
 castle on the sky ; the bright blue plane of the western 
 heavens shining through window and broken wall, 
 flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the 
 crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry 
 and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the 
 foundations upon which they were laid, one would 
 still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling 
 root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base, 
 and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree 
 (sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the 
 key-stone of the next ; and so perish castles and repu- 
 tations, the masonry of the human hand, and the 
 fabrics of human forethought ; not by the strength 
 which they feared, but by the weakness they despised ! 
 Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudely- 
 hewn blocks were heaved into their seat by his hercu- 
 lean workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they 
 would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-ten- 
 dril and a sparrow ! 
 
 Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the 
 castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed 
 for the aquatic spots of Kenilworth, stands an antique 
 and highly ornamental fireplace, which belonged, 
 doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on 
 either side looking forth upon the fields below, must 
 have been those from which Elizabeth and her train 
 observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all 
 times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the 
 castle's first occupation to its last, must have been the 
 centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its 
 guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and 
 between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed 
 my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I con- 
 trived to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the 
 personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenil- 
 worth, without the deceptions of fancy, would be as 
 disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the 
 subject as from any other scene with which it had no 
 relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot, 
 is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the 
 cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination ; 
 and it is only after the real recollection has taken root 
 and ripened — after months, it may be — that we can 
 fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to 
 
 inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike 
 Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern 
 which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish, 
 but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its 
 hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my 
 brain. 
 
 I had wandered away from my companion, Miss 
 Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall, 
 rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and 
 from my elevated position I caught an accidental view 
 of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic 
 window, with a background of broken architecture and 
 foliage — presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fit- 
 ting and admirable picture of the authoress of the 
 Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour 
 could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and 
 striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee 
 to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau 
 ideal of the female features than any other, and still 
 possessing the remains of uncommon beauty), is at all 
 times a person whom it would be difficult to see with- 
 out a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing, 
 as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in 
 the morning dress, with dark feathers, which she has 
 worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister, 
 her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful 
 eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her 
 nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and 
 benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her, 
 lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she 
 had held the first great mastery — it was a tableau 
 vivant which I was sorry to be alone to see. 
 
 Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked 
 the spirits of the ruins she stood among — a mind in 
 which (by Sir Walter's own c^u *ssion) she had first 
 bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely 
 for the world's delight ? Were the visions which 
 sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity 
 through the imagination of genius — visions of which 
 the millionth portion is probablyscarce communicated 
 to the world in a literary lifetime — were Elizabeth's 
 courtiers, Elizabeth's passions, secret hours, inter- 
 views with Leicester — were the imprisoned king's 
 nights of loneliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant, 
 but unheeded thoughts — were all the possible circum- 
 stances, real or imaginary, of which that proud castle 
 might have been the scene, thronging in those few 
 moments of revery through her fancy ? Or was her 
 heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the 
 beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought 
 of one who was most wont to number with her the 
 sands of those brighter hours ? 
 
 Who shall say ? The very question would perhaps 
 startle the thoughts beyond recall — so elusive are even 
 the most angelic of the mind's unseen visitants ? 
 
 I have recorded here the speculations of a moment 
 while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as 1 
 descended by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude 
 laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and 
 I could not but speculate on the difference between 
 the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot. 
 The distinguished mind that conceives a romance 
 which enchants the world, comes in the same guise 
 and is treated but with the same respect as theirs. 
 The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of 
 half-a-crown, and the grocer's wife who sucks an 
 orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and 
 plain exterior — her only standards — and thinks herself 
 as well dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the 
 tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself on a 
 day's pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other, 
 and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and 
 the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspect- 
 ed, before our very eyes, does genius gather its gold- 
 en fruit, and while we walk in a plain and common- 
 place world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 567 
 
 and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a 
 world of their own— a world of which we see distant 
 glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what 
 unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered ! 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 A VISIT TO DUBLIN ABOUT THE TIME OF THE QUEEN'S 
 MARRIAGE. 
 
 The usual directions for costume, in the corner of 
 the court card of invitation, included, on the occasion 
 of the queen's marriage, a wedding favor, to be worn 
 by ladies on the shoulder, and by gentlemen on the 
 left breast. This trifling addition to the dress of the 
 individual was a matter of considerable importance to 
 the milliners, hatters, etc., who, in a sale of ten or 
 twelve hundred white cockades (price from two dollars 
 to five) made a very pretty profit. The power of giv- 
 ing a large ball to the more expensive classes, and or- 
 dering a particular addition to the costume — in other 
 words, of laying a tax on the rich for the benefit of 
 the poor, is exercised more frequently in Ireland than 
 in other countries, and serves the double purpose of 
 popularity to the lord lieutenant, and benefit to any 
 particular branch of industry that may be suffering 
 from the decline of a fashion. 
 
 The large quadrangular court-yard of the castle 
 rattled with the tramp of horses' feet and the clatter of 
 sabres and spurs, and in the uncertain glare of torches 
 and lamps, the gay colors and glittering arms of the 
 mounted guard of lancers had a most warlike appear- 
 ance. The procession which the guard was stationed 
 to regulate and protect, rather detracted from the ro- 
 mantic effect — the greater proportion of equipages 
 being the covered hack cars of the city — vehicles of 
 the most unmitigated and ludicrous vulgarity. A 
 coffin for two, set on its end, with the driver riding on 
 the turned-down lid, would be a very near resemblance ; 
 and the rags of the driver, and the translucent leanness 
 of his beast, make it altogether the most deplorable 
 of conveyances. Here and there a carriage with 
 liveries, and here and there a sedan-chair with four 
 stout Milesian calves in blue stockings trotting under 
 the poles, rather served as a foil than a mitigation of 
 the effect, and the hour we passed in the line, edging 
 slowly toward the castle, was far from unfruitful in 
 amusement. I learned afterward that even those who 
 have equipages in Dublin go to court in hack cars as 
 a matter of economy — one of the many indications of 
 that feeling of lost pride which has existed in Ireland 
 since the removal of the parliament. 
 
 A hall and staircase lined with files of soldiers is not 
 quite as festive an entrance to a ball as the more com- 
 mon one of alleys of flowering shrubs ; but with a 
 waltz by a military band resounding from the lofty 
 ceiling, I am not sure that it does not temper the blood 
 as aptly for the spirit of the hour. It was a rainy 
 night, and the streets were dark, and the effect upon 
 myself of coming suddenly into so enchanted a scene 
 — arms glittering on either side, and a procession of 
 uniforms and plumed dames winding up the spacious 
 stairs — was thrilling, even with the chivalric scenes of 
 Eglinton fresh in my remembrance. 
 
 At the head of the ascent we entered a long hall, 
 lined with the private servants of Lord Ebrington, and 
 the ceremony of presentation having been achieved the 
 week before, we left the throne-room on the right, and 
 passed directly to St. Patrick's Hall, the grand scene 
 of the evening's festivities. This, I have said before, 
 is the finest ball-room I remember in Europe. Twelve 
 hundred people, seated, dancing, or promenading, 
 were within its lofty walls on the night whose festivi- 
 ties I am describing ; and at either end a gallery, sup- 
 
 ported by columns of marble, contained a band of 
 music, relieving each other with alternate waltzes and 
 quadrilles. On the long sides of the hall were raised 
 tiers of divans, filled with chaperons, veteran officers, 
 and other lookers-on, and at the upper end was raised 
 a platform with a throne in the centre, and seats on 
 either side for the family of the lord lieutenant and the 
 more distinguished persons of the nobility. Lord 
 Ebrington was rather in his character of a noble host 
 than that of viceroy, and I did not observe him once 
 seated under his canopy of state ; but with his aids 
 and some one of the noble ladies of his family on his 
 arm, he promenaded the hall conversing with his ac- 
 quaintances, and seemingly enjoying in a high degree 
 the brilliant gayety of the scene. His dress, by the 
 way, was the simple diplomatic dress of most conti- 
 nental courts, a blue uniform embroidered with gold, 
 the various orders on his breast forming its principal 
 distinction. I seldom have seen a man of a more 
 calm and noble dignity of presence than the lord lieu- 
 tenant, and never a face that expressed more strongly 
 the benevolence and high purity of character for which 
 he is distinguished. In person, except that he is 
 taller, he bears a remarkably close resemblance to the 
 Duke of Wellington. 
 
 We can scarcely conceive, in this country of black 
 coats, the brilliant effect of a large assembly in which 
 there is no person out of uniform or court-dress — 
 every lady's head nodding with plumes, and every 
 gentleman in military scarlet and gold or lace and 
 embroidery. I may add, too, that in this country of 
 care-worn and pale faces, we can as little conceive the 
 effect of an assembly rosy with universal health, 
 habitually unacquainted with care, and abandoned with 
 the apparent child-like simplicity of high breeding, to 
 the inspiring gayety of the hour. The greater con- 
 trast, however, is between a nation where health is the 
 first care, and one in which health is never thought 
 of till lost; and light and shade are not more con- 
 trasted than the mere general effect of countenance 
 in one and in the other. A stranger travelling in our 
 country, once remarked to me that a party he had at- 
 tended seemed like an entertainment given in the con- 
 valescent ward of a hospital — the ladies were so pale 
 and fragile, and the men so unjoyous and sallow. And 
 my own invariable impression, in the assemblies I 
 have first seen after leaving my own country was a 
 corresponding one — that the men and women had the 
 rosy health and untroubled gnyety of children round a 
 May-pole. That this is not the effect of climate, I do 
 most religiously believe. It is over-much care and over- 
 much carelessness — the corroding care of an avid temer- 
 ity in business, and the carelessness of all the functions 
 of life till their complaints become too imperative to 
 be disregarded. But this is a theme out of place. 
 
 The ball was managed by the grand chamberlain 
 (Sir William Leeson), and the aids-de-camp of the 
 lord lieutenant, and except that now and then you 
 were reminded by the movement around you that you 
 stood with your back to the representative of royalty, 
 there was little to draw your attention from the attrac- 
 tions of the dance. Waltz, quadrille, and gallop, fol- 
 lowed each other in giddy succession, and "what do 
 you think of Irish beauty?" had been asked me as 
 often as "how do you like America /" was ever mum- 
 bled through the trumpet of Miss Martineau, when I 
 mounted with a frieud to one of the upper divans, and 
 tried, what is always a difficult task, and nowhere so 
 difficult as in Ireland, to call in the intoxicated fancy, 
 and anatomize the charm of the hour. 
 
 Moore's remark has been often quoted— " there is 
 nothing like an Irish woman to take a man of! his 
 feet;" but whether this figure of speech was suggested 
 by the little bard's common soubriquet of "Jump-up- 
 and-kiss-me* Tom Moore," or simply conveyed his 
 • The name of a small flower, common in Ireland 
 
568 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 idea of the bewildering character of Irish beauty, it 
 contains, to any one who has ever travelled (or waltzed) 
 in that country, a very just, as well as realizing descrip- 
 tion. Physically, Irish women are probably the finest 
 race in the world — I mean, taller, better limbed and 
 chested, larger eyed, and with more luxuriant hair, 
 and freer action, than any other nation I have ob- 
 served. The Phoenician and Spanish blood which 
 has run hundreds of years in their veins, still kindles 
 its dark fire in their eyes, and with the vivacity of the 
 northern mind and the bright color of the nor hern 
 skin, these southern qualities mingle in most admira- 
 ble and superb harmony. The idea we form of Ital- 
 ian and Grecian beauty is never realized in Greece and 
 Italy, but we find it in Ireland, heightened and ex- 
 ceeded. Cheeks and lips of the delicacy and bright 
 teint of carnation, with snowy teeth, and hair and eye- 
 brows of jet, are what we should look for on the palette 
 of Appelies, could we recall the painter, and reanimate 
 his far-famed models ; and these varied charms, united, 
 fall very commonly to the share of the fair Milesian 
 of the upper classes. In other lands of dark eyes, the 
 rareness of a fine-grained skin, so necessary to a bru- 
 nette, makes beauty as rare — but whether it is the 
 damp softness of the climate or the infusion of Saxon 
 blood, a coarse skin is almost never seen in Ireland. 
 I speak now only of the better-born ranks of society, 
 for in all my travels in Ireland, I did not chance to 
 see even one peasant-girl of any pretensions to good 
 looks. From north to south, they looked, to me, 
 coarse, ill-formed, and repulsive. 
 
 I noticed in St. Patrick's Hall what 1 had remarked 
 ever since I had been in the country, that with all 
 their beauty, the Irish women are very deficient in 
 what in England is called style. The men, on the 
 contrary, were particularly comme ilfaut, and as they 
 are a magnificent race (corresponding to such mothers 
 and sisters), I frequently observed I had never seen 
 so many handsome and elegant men in a day. When- 
 ever I saw a gentleman and lady together, riding, 
 driving, or walking, my first impression was, almost 
 universally, that the man was in attendance upon a 
 woman of an inferior class to his own. This differ- 
 ence may be partly accounted for by the reduced cir- 
 cumstances of the gentry of Ireland, which keeps the 
 daughters at home, that the sons may travel and im- 
 prove ; but it works differently in America, where, 
 spite of travel and every other advantage to the con- 
 trary, the daughters of a family are much oftener 
 lady-like than the sons are gentleman-like. After 
 wondering for some time, however, why the quick- 
 witted women of Ireland should be less apt than those 
 of other countries in catching the air of high breeding 
 usually deemed so desirable, I began to like them bet- 
 ter for the deficiency, and to find a reason for it in the 
 very qualities which make them so attractive. Noth- 
 ing could be more captivating and delightful than the 
 manners of Irish women, and nothing, at the same 
 time, could be more at war with the first principles of 
 English high breeding— coldness and relenu. The 
 frank, almost hilarious "how are you?" of an Irish 
 girl, her whole-handed and cordial grasp, as often in 
 the day as you meet her, the perfectly un-missy-ish, 
 confiding, direct character of her conversation, are all 
 traits which would stamp her as somewhat rudely bred 
 in England, and as desperately vulgar in New York 
 or Philadelphia. 
 
 Modest to a proverb, the Irish woman is as unsus- 
 pecting of an impropriety as if it were an impossible 
 thing, and she is as fearless and joyous as a midship- 
 man, and sometimes as noisy. In a ball-room she 
 looks ill-dressed, not because her dress was ill-put-on, 
 but because she dances, not gHdes, sits down without 
 care, pulls her flowers to pieces, and if her head-dress 
 incommodes her, gives it a pull or a push — acts which 
 would be perfect insanity at Almack's. If she is of- 
 
 fended, she asks for an explanation. If she does not 
 understand you, she confesses her ignorance. If she 
 wishes to see you the next day, she tells you how and 
 when. She is the child of nature, and children are 
 not "stylish." The niminy-piminy, eye-avoiding, 
 finger-tipped, drawling, don't-touch-me manner of 
 some of the fashionable ladies of our country, would 
 amuse a cold and reserved English woman sufficiently, 
 but they would drive an Irish girl into hysterics. 1 
 have met one of our fair country-people abroad, whose 
 "Grecian stoop," and exquisitely subdued manner, 
 was invariably taken for a fit of indigestion. 
 
 The ball-supper was royally sumptuous, and served 
 in a long hall thrown open at midnight ; and in the 
 gray of the morning, I left the floor covered with 
 waltzers, and confessed to an Irish friend, that I never 
 in my life, not even at Almack's, had seen the half as 
 much true beauty as had brightened St. Patrick's Hall 
 at the celebration of the queen's marriage. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT WASHINGTON. 
 
 The paradox of" the more one does, the more one 
 can do," is resolved in life at Washington with more 
 success than I have seen it elsewhere. The inexora- 
 I ble bell at the hotel or boarding-house pronounces the 
 I irrevocable and swift transit of breakfast to all sleepers 
 j after eight. The elastic depths of the pillow have 
 ! scarcely yielded their last feather to the pressure of 
 the sleeper's head, before the drowse is rudely shaken 
 from his eyelids, and with an alacrity which surprises 
 i himself, he finds his toilet achieved, his breakfast over, 
 and himself abroad to lounge in the sunshine till the 
 \ flag waves on the capitol. He would retire to his 
 I chamber to read during these two or three vacant 
 j hours, but the one chair in his pigeon-hole creaks, ot 
 has no back or bottom, or his anthracite fire is out, or 
 is too hot for the size of the room : or, in short, Wash- 
 ington, from whatever cause, is a place where none 
 read except those who stand up to a padlocked news- 
 1 paper. The stars and stripes, moving over the two 
 ! wings of the capitol at eleven, announce that the two 
 J chambers of legislation are in session, and the hard- 
 i working idler makes his way to the senate or the 
 I house. He lingers in the lobby awhile, amused with 
 1 the button-hole seizers plying the unwilling ears of 
 | members with their claims, or enters the library, 
 | where ladies turn over prints, and enfilade, with their 
 ' battery of truant eyes, the comers-in at the green 
 ! door. He then gropes up the dark staircase to the 
 j senate gallery, and stifles in the pressure of a hot 
 gallery, forgetting, like listeners at a crowded opera, 
 that bodily discomfort will unlink the finest harmonies 
 of song or oratory. Thence he descends to the rotunda 
 to draw breath and listen to the more practical, but 
 quite as earnest eloquence of candidates for patents; 
 and passes, after while, to the crowded gallery of the 
 house, where, by some acoustic phenomena in the 
 construction of the building, the voicesof the speakers 
 comes to his ear as articulate as water from a narrow- 
 necked bottle. "Small blame to them !" he thinks, 
 however : for behind the brexia columns are grouped 
 all the fair forms of Washington ; and in making his 
 bow to two hundred despotic lawgivers in feathers and 
 velvet, he is readily consoled that the duller legislators 
 who yield to their sway are inaudible and forgotten. 
 To this upper house drop in, occasionally, the younger 
 or gayer members of the lower, bringing, if not politi- 
 cal scandal, at least some slight resumer of what Mr. 
 Somebody is beating his desk about below ; and thus, 
 crammed with the day's trifles or the day's business, 
 and fatigued from heel to eyelid, our idler goes home 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 569 
 
 at five to dress for dinner and the night's campaign, 
 having been up and on his legs for ten mortal hours. 
 
 Cold water and a little silence in his own room have 
 rather refreshed him, and he dines at six with a party 
 of from fifteen to tweuty-five persons. He discusses 
 the vital interests of fourteen millions of people over 
 a glass of wine with the man whose vote, possibly, 
 will decide their destiny, and thence hurries to a ball- 
 room crammed like a perigord-pie, where he pants, 
 efoows, eats supper, and waltzes till three in the 
 morning. How human constitutions stand this, and 
 stand it daily and nightly, from the beginning to the 
 end of a session, may well puzzle the philosophy of 
 those who rise and breakfast in comfortable leisure. 
 
 I joined the crowd on the twenty-second of Februa- 
 ry, to pay my respects to the president, and see the J 
 cheese. Whatever veneration existed in the minds of j 
 the people toward the former, their curiosity in ref- i 
 erence to the latter predominated, unquestionably. 
 The circular pave, extending from the gate to the 
 White House, was thronged with citizens of all classes, I 
 those coming away having each a small brown paper j 
 parcel and a very strong smell; those advancing mani- j 
 festing, by shakings of the head and frequent exclama- 
 tions, that there may be too much of a good thing, j 
 and particularly of a cheese. The beautiful portico ; 
 was thronged with boys and coach-drivers, and the j 
 odor strengthened with every step. We forced our 
 way over the threshold, and encountered an atmo- 
 sphere, to which the mephitic gas floating over Aver- 
 nus must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the i 
 hall hung a rough likeness of the general, emblazoned [ 
 with eagle and stars, forming a background to the 
 huge tub in which the cheese had been packed ; and , 
 in the centre of the vestibule stood the "fragrant gift," j 
 surrounded with a dense crowd, who, without crackers, [ 
 or even *' malt to their cheese," had, in two hours, 
 eaten and purveyed away fourteen hundred pounds ! 
 The small segment reserved for the president's use 
 counted for nothing in the abstractions. 
 
 Glad to compromise for a breath of cheeseless air, 
 we desisted from the struggle to obtain a sight of the 
 table, and mingled with the crowd in the east room. 
 Here were diplo mates in their gold coats and officers 
 in uniform, ladies of secretaries and other ladies, 
 soldiers on volunteer duty, and Indians in war-dress 
 and paint. Bonnets, feathers, uniforms, and all — it 
 was rather a gay assemblage. I remembered the de- 
 scriptions in travellers' books, and looked out for 
 millers and blacksmiths in their working gear, and for 
 rudeness and vulgarity in all. The offer of a mam- 
 moth cheese to the public was likely to attract to the 
 presidental mansion more of the lower class than would 
 throng to a common levee. Great-coats there were, 
 and not a few of them, for the day was raw, and unless 
 they were hung on the palings outside, they must re- 
 main on the owners' shoulders ; but, with a single ex- 
 ception (a fellow with his coat torn down his back, 
 possibly in getting at the cheese), I saw no man in a 
 dress that was not respectable and clean of its kind, 
 and abundantly fit for a tradesman out of his shop. 
 Those who were much pressed by the crowd put their 
 hats on ; but there was a general air of decorum 
 which would surprise any one who had pinned his 
 faith on travellers. An intelligent Englishman, very 
 much inclined to take a disgust to mobocracy, ex- 
 pressed to me great surprise at the decency and proper 
 behavior of the people. The same experiment in 
 England, he thought, would result in as pretty a riot 
 as i paragraph-monger would desire to see. 
 
 The president was down stairs in the oval reception 
 room, and, though his health would not permit him 
 to stand, he sat in his chair for two or three hours, and 
 received his friends with his usual bland and dignified 
 courtesy. By his side stood the lady of the mansion, 
 dressed in full court costume, and doing the honors 
 
 of her place with a grace and amenity which every one 
 felt, and which threw a bloom over the hour. Gene- 
 ral Jackson retired, after a while, to his chamber, and 
 the president elect remained to support his relative, 
 and present to her the still thronging multitude, and 
 by four o'clock the guests were gone, and the " ban- 
 quet hall" was deserted. Not to leave a wrong im- 
 pression of the cheese, I dined afterward at a table to 
 which the president had sent a piece of it, and found 
 it of excellent quality. It is like many other things, 
 more agreeable in small quantities. 
 
 Some eccentric mechanic has presented the presi- 
 dent with a sulkey, made entirely (except the wheels) 
 of rough-cut hickory, with the bark on. It looks 
 rude enough, but has very much the everlasting look 
 of old Hickory himself; and if he could be seen dri- 
 ving a high-stepping, bony old iron-gray steed in it, 
 any passer by would see that there was as much fitness 
 in the whole thing as in the chariot of Bacchus and 
 his reeling leopards. Some curiously-twisted and 
 gnarled branches have been very ingeniously turned 
 into handles and whip-box. and the vehicle is compact 
 and strong. The president has left it to Mr. Van 
 Buren. 
 
 In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by, 
 the elegant phaeton, made of the wood of the old 
 frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a 
 driver's box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and 
 set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are 
 low. and there are bars for baggage behind ; altogeth- 
 er, for lightness and elegance, it would be a creditable 
 turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively 
 beautiful — a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high 
 degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a co<n 
 of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but 
 strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capa- 
 ble of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Con- 
 stitution, under full sail, is painted on the panels. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE INAUGURATION. 
 
 While the votes for president were being counted 
 in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren, 
 with courteous significance : — 
 
 " It is a cloudy day, sir !" 
 
 " The sun will shine on the fourth of March!" was 
 the confident reply. 
 
 True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven 
 without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air 
 was cold, but clear and life-giving ; and the broad 
 avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large 
 for the thronging population. The crowds who had 
 been pouring in from every direction for several days 
 before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the 
 night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks ; and 
 the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin 
 sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange 
 faces. The sun shone alike on the friends and oppo- 
 nents of the new administration, and, as far as one 
 might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made 
 cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another 
 augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended 
 fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In 
 a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes 
 and parties, I heard no remark that the president would 
 have been unwilling to hear. 
 
 I was at the capitol a half hour before the proces- 
 sion arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for 
 I which I was not at all prepared. The noble starrcase 
 of the east front of the building leaps over three 
 i arches, under one of which carriages pass to the base- 
 ' meut door; and, as you approach from the gate, the 
 
570 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken 
 Dy a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath. 
 Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corre- 
 sponding projections ; and from the upper platform rise 
 the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of col- 
 umns three deep extending back to the pilasters. I 
 had often admired this front with its many graceful 
 columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the 
 finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect 
 of the assembled population of Rome waiting to re- 
 ceive the blessing before the front of St. Peter's, how- 
 ever, the assembled crowd on the steps and at the 
 base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the gran- 
 deur of the design. They were piled up like the 
 people on the temples of Babylon in one of Martin's 
 sublime pictures — every projection covered, and an 
 inexpressible soul and character given by their pres- 
 ence to the architecture. Boys climbed about the 
 bases of the columns, single figures stood on the posts 
 of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against 
 the sky ; and the whole thing was exactly what Paul 
 Veronese would have delighted to draw. I stood near 
 an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one 
 of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope 
 he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his 
 subject. 
 
 The republican procession, consisting of the presi- 
 dents and their families, escorted by a small volunteer 
 corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and 
 Mr. Van Buren were in the constitution phaeton, 
 drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they 
 both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage 
 at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them 
 through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of 
 the old chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up 
 through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity 
 from all around it. 
 
 I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of 
 the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this 
 imposing drama, till they returned from the senate 
 chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and 
 railed in on the broad stair which supports the por- 
 tico, and, for all preparation to one of the most impor- 
 tant and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on 
 earth — for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a 
 republic of fifteen millions of freemen — the whole ad- 
 dition to the open air, and the presence of the people, 
 was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impres- 
 sive simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of 
 a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and 
 hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event 
 in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the 
 moral sublime was here — that a transaction so impor- 
 tant, and of such extended and weighty import, could 
 borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that 
 the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating 
 the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the 
 trumpets of a thousand heralds. 
 
 The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear 
 of the columns made way, and the ex-president and 
 Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A 
 murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass be- 
 low, and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick- 
 chamber, which his physician had thought it impossi- 
 ble he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still 
 uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the 
 portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a 
 voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read 
 his address to the people. The air was elastic, and 
 the day still ; and it is supposed that near twenty thou- 
 sand persons heard him from his elevated position dis- 
 tinctly. I stood myself on the outer limit of the 
 crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from 
 the interruption near by, his words came clearly ar- 
 ticulated to my ear. 
 
 When the address was closed, the chief justice ad- 
 
 vanced and administered the oath. As the book 
 touched the lips of the new president, there arose a 
 general shout, and expression of feeling common 
 enough in other countries, but drawn with difficulty 
 from an American assemblage. The sons, and the 
 immediate friends of Mr. Van Buren, then closed 
 about him ; the ex-president, the chief justice, and 
 others, gave him the hand of congratulation, and the 
 ceremony was over. They descended the steps, the 
 people gave one more shout as they mounted the con- 
 stitution carriage together, and the procession returned 
 through the avenue, followed by the whole population 
 of Washington. 
 
 Mr. Van Buren held a levee immediately afterward, 
 but I endeavored in vain to get my foot over the 
 threshold. The crowd was tremendous. At four, 
 the diplomatic body had an audience ; and in replying 
 to the address of Don Angel Calderon, the president 
 astonished the gold coats, by addressing them as the 
 democratic corps. The representatives of the crowned 
 heads of Europe stood rather uneasily under the 
 epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to 
 say diplomatic. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION. 
 
 Thkrk is a sagacity acquired by travel on the sub- 
 ject of forage and quarters, which is useful in all other 
 cities in the world where one may happen to be a 
 stranger, but which is as inapplicable to the emergen- 
 cies of an arrival in Washington as waltzing in a ship- 
 wreck. It is a capital whose peculiarities are as much 
 sui generis as those of Venice; but as those who have 
 become wise by a season's experience neither remain 
 on the spot to give warning, nor have recorded thei 
 experiences in a book, the stranger is worse off* in a 
 coach in Washington than in a gondola in the "city 
 of silver streets." 
 
 It is well known, I believe, that when the future 
 city of Washington was about being laid out, there 
 were two large lot-buyers or land-owners, living two 
 miles apart, each of whom was interested in having 
 the public buildings upon the centre of his own do- 
 main. Like children quarrelling for a sugar horse, 
 the subject of dispute was pulled in two, and one got 
 the head, the other the tail. The capitol stands on a 
 rising ground in solitary grandeur, and the president's 
 house and department buildings two miles off on an- 
 other. The city straddles and stretches between, 
 doing its best to look continuous and compact; but 
 the stranger soon sees that it is, after all, but a "city 
 of magnificent distances," built to please nobody on 
 earth but a hackney-coachman. 
 
 The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will 
 drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that 
 nearest the capitol — supposing, of course, that, as 
 Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the 
 most central part will naturally be near the scene of 
 action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby's, and, 
 at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he 
 engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that 
 boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby's, however, 
 he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and 
 wonders, for two or three days, why the deuce the 
 hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the 
 foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might 
 have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars 
 a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and 
 foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and 
 dinner-giving people shower upon him the " small 
 rain" of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth 
 day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 571 
 
 of his friends (which they never write on their cards, 
 because, if they did, it would be no guide), and is told 
 it is impossible to direct him, but the hackney-coachmen | 
 all know! He calls the least ferocious-looking of the 
 most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has 
 ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into 
 his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two 
 miles away from the capitol. He passes the presi- 
 dent's house, and getting oft' the smooth road, begins j 
 to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots, , 
 laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of 
 geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends liv- 
 ing in houses that want nothing of being in the coun- 
 try, but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had j 
 rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and 
 each occupant had made a street with reference to his '■ 
 own front door. The much-shaken and more-aston- ' 
 ished victim consumes his morning and his temper, 
 and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty 
 calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and 
 wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geogra- 
 phy. 
 
 A fortnight's experience satisfies the stranger that 
 this same journey is worss at night than at morning; 
 and that, as he leaves his dinner which he pays for at 
 home, runs the risk of his neck, passes an hour or 
 two on the road, and ruins himself in hack-hire, it 
 must be a very — yes, a very pleasant dinner-party to 
 compensate him. Consequently, he either sends a 
 *' p. p. c." to all his acquaintances, and lives incog., 
 or, which is a more sensible thing, moves up to the 
 other settlement, and abandons the capitol. 
 
 Those who live on the other side of the president's 
 house are the secretaries, diplomatists, and a few 
 wealthy citizens. There is no hotel in this quarter, 
 but there are one or two boarding-houses, and (what 
 we have been lucky enough to secure ourselves) fur- 
 nished lodgings, in which you have everything but 
 board. Your dinner is sent you from a French cook's 
 near by, and your servant gets your breakfast — a plan 
 which gives you the advantage of dining at your own 
 hour, choosing your own society, and of having covers 
 for a friend or two whenever it suits your humor, and 
 at half an hour's warning. There are very (ew of 
 these lodgings (which combine many other advantages 
 over a boarding-house), but more of them would be a 
 good speculation to house-owners, and I wish it were 
 suggested, not only here, but in every city in our 
 country. 
 
 Aside from society, the only amusement in Wash- 
 ington is frequenting the capitol. If one has a great 
 deal of patience and nothing better to do, this is very 
 well ; and it is very well at any rate till one becomes 
 acquainted with the heads of the celebrated men in 
 both the chambers, with the noble architecture of the 
 building, and the routine of business. This done, it 
 is time wearily speut for a spectator. The finer orators 
 seldom speak, or seldom speak warmly, the floor is 
 oftenest occupied by prosing and very sensible gentle- 
 men, whose excellent ideas enter the mind more 
 agreeably by the eye than the ear, or, in other words, 
 are better delivered by the newspapers, and there is a 
 great deal of formula and etiquetical sparring which 
 is not even entertaining to the members, and which 
 consumes time " consumedly." Now and then the 
 senate adjourns when some one of the great orators 
 has taken the floor, and you are sure of a great effort 
 the next morning. If you are there in time, and can 
 sit, like Atlas with a world on your back, you may en- 
 joy a front seat and hear oratory, unsurpassed, in my 
 opinion, in the world. 
 
 The society in Washington, take it all in all, is by 
 many degrees the best in the United States. One is 
 prepared, though I can not conceive why, for the con- 
 trary. We read in books of travels, and we are told 
 by everybody, that the society here is promiscuous, 
 
 rough, inelegant, and even baibarous. This is an 
 untrue representation, or it has very much changed. 
 
 There is no city, probably no village in America, 
 where the female society is not refined, cultivated, and 
 elegant. With or without regular advantages, woman 
 attains the refinements and the tact necessary to polite 
 intercourse. No traveller ever ventured to complain 
 of this part of American society. The great deficiency 
 is that of agreeable, highly-cultivated men, whose pur- 
 suits have been elevated, and whose minds are pliable 
 to the grace and changing spirit of conversation. 
 Every man of talents possesses these qualities naturally, 
 and hence the great advantage which Washington en- 
 joys over every other city in our country. None but 
 a shallow observer, or a malicious book-maker, would 
 ever sneer at the exteriors or talk of the ill-breeding 
 of such men as form, in great numbers, the agreeable 
 society of this place — for a man of great talents never 
 could be vulgar; and there is a superiority about most 
 of these which raises them above the petty standard 
 which regulates the outside of a coxcomb. Even 
 compared with the dress and address of men of similar 
 positions and pursuits in Europe, however (members 
 of the house of commons, for example, or of the cham- 
 ber of deputies in France), it is positively the fact that 
 the senators and representatives of the United States 
 have a decided advantage. It is all very well for Mr. 
 Hamilton, and other scribblers whose books must be 
 spiced to go down, to ridicule a Washington soiree for 
 English readers; but if the observation of one who 
 has seen assemblies of legislators and diplomatists in 
 all the countries of Europe may be fairly placed 
 against his and Mrs. Trollope's, 1 may assert, upon 
 my own authority, that they will not find, out of May 
 Fair in England, so well-dressed and dignified a body 
 of men. I have seen as yet no specimen of the rough 
 animal described by them and others as the " western 
 member;" and if David Crockett (whom I was never 
 so fortunate as to see) was of that description, the race 
 must have died with him. It is a tiling 1 have learned 
 since I have been in Washington, to feel a wish that 
 foreigners should see congress in session. We are 
 so humbugged, one way and another, by travellers' 
 lies. 
 
 I have heard the observation once or twice from 
 strangers since I have been here, and it struck myself 
 on my first arrival, that I had never seen within the 
 same limit before, so many of what may be called 
 "men of mark." You will scarce meet a gentleman 
 on the sidewalk in Washington who would not attract 
 your notice, seen elsewhere, as an individual possess- 
 ing in his eye or general features a certain superiority. 
 Never having seen most of the celebrated speakers of 
 the senate, 1 busied myself for the first day or two in 
 examining the faces that passed me in the street, in 
 the hope of knowing them by the outward stamp 
 which, we are apt to suppose, belongs to greatness. 
 I gave it up at last, simply from the great number I 
 met who might be (for all that features had to do with 
 it) the remarkable men I sought. 
 
 There is a very simple reason why a congress of the 
 United States should be, as they certainly are, a much 
 more marked body of men than the English house of 
 commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies 
 in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in 
 either case, they come by their honors. In England 
 and France the lords and peers are legislators by hered- 
 itary right, and the members of the commons and 
 deputies from the possession of extensive property or 
 family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in 
 most cases, no great personal talent in the individual. 
 They are legislators, but they are devoted v.iry often 
 much more heartily to other pursuits— hunting or 
 farming, racing, driving, and similar out-ot-door pas- 
 sions common to English gentlemen and lords, or the 
 I corresponding penchants of French peers and deputies 
 
572 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote 
 themselves to politics exclusively. With us every 
 one knows it is quite the contrary. An American 
 politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pur- 
 suit. He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in 
 subservience to his aim. He can not afford to have 
 another passion of any kind till he has reached the 
 point of his ambition — and then it has become a 
 mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is, 
 that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our 
 country, who has not had occasion for more than ordi- 
 nary talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of 
 his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals 
 leave their marks, and they who have thought, and 
 watched, and struggled, and contended with the pas- 
 sions of men as an American politician inevitably 
 must, can not well escape the traces of such work. 
 It usually elevates the character of the face — it always 
 strongly marks it. 
 
 A-propos of " men of mark ;" the dress circle of the 
 theatre, at Power's benefit, not long since, was graced 
 by three Indians in full costume — the chief of the 
 Foxes, the chief of the Ioways, and a celebrated war- 
 rior of the latter tribe, called the Sioux-killer. The 
 Fox is an old man of apparently fifty, with a heavy, 
 aquiline nose, a treacherous eye, sharp as an eagle's, 
 and a person rather small in proportion to his head 
 and features. He was "dressed in a bright scarlet 
 blanket, and a crown of feathers, with an eagle's plume, 
 standing erect on the top of his head, all dyed in the 
 same deep hue. His face was painted to match, ex- 
 cept his lips, which looked of a most ghastly sallow, 
 in contrast with his fiery nose, forehead, and cheeks. 
 His tomahawk lay in the hollow of his arm, decked 
 with feathers of the same brilliant color with the rest 
 of his drapery. Next him sat the Sioux-killer, in a 
 dingy blanket, with a crown made of a great quantity 
 of the feathers of a pea-hen, which fell over his face, 
 and concealed his features almost entirely. He is 
 very small, but is famous for his personal feats, having, 
 among other things, walked one hundred and thirty 
 miles in thirty successive hours, and killed three Sioux 
 (hence his name) in one battle with that nation. He 
 is but twenty-three, but very compact and wiry-looking, 
 and his eye glowed through his veil of hen-feathers 
 like a coal of fire. 
 
 Next to the Sioux-killer sat "White Cloud," the 
 chief of the Ioways. His face was the least warlike 
 of the three, and expressed a good nature and freedom 
 from guile, remarkable in an Indian. He is about 
 twenty-four, has very large features, and a fine, erect 
 person, with broad shoulders and chest. He was 
 painted less than the Fox chief, but of nearly the same 
 color, and carried, in the hollow of his arm, a small, 
 glittering tomahawk, ornamented with blue feathers. 
 His head was encircled by a kind of turban of silver- 
 fringed cloth, with some metallic pendents for earrings, 
 and his blanket, not particularly clean or handsome, 
 was partly open on the breast, and disclosed a calico 
 shirt, which was probably sold to him by a trader in 
 the west. They were all very attentive to the play, 
 but the Fox chief and White Cloud departed from the 
 traditionary dignity of Indians, and laughed a great 
 deal at some of Power's fun. The Sioux-killer sat 
 between them, as motionless and grim as a marble 
 knight on a tomb-stone. 
 
 The next day I had the pleasure of dining with 
 Mr. Power, who lived at the same hotel with the In- 
 dian delegation ; and while at dinner he received a 
 message from the Ioways, expressing a wish to call on 
 him. We were sitting over our wine when White 
 Cloud and the Sioux-killer came in with their inter- 
 preter. There were several gentlemen present, one 
 of them in the naval undress uniform, whose face the 
 Sioux-killer scrutinized very sharply. They smiled 
 in bowing to Power, but made very grave inclinations 
 
 to the rest of us. The chief took his seat, assuming 
 a very erect and dignified attitude, which he preserved 
 immoveable during the interview ; but the Sioux-killer 
 drew up his legs, resting them on the round of the 
 chair, and, with his head and body bent forward, 
 seemed to forget himself, and give his undivided atten- 
 tion to the study of Power and his naval friend. 
 
 Tumblers of champagne were given them, which 
 they drank with great relish, though the Sioux-killer 
 provoked a little ridicule from White Cloud, by cough- 
 ing as he swallowed it. The interpreter was a half- 
 breed between an Indian and a negro, and a most in- 
 telligent fellow. He had been reared in the Ioway 
 tribe, but had been among the whites a great deal for 
 the last few years, and had picked up English very 
 fairly. He told us that White Cloud was the son of 
 old White Cloud, who died three years since, and 
 that the young chief had acquired entire command 
 over the tribe by his mildness and dignity. He had 
 paid the debts of the Ioways to the traders, very much 
 against the will of the tribe; but he commenced by 
 declaring firmly that he would be just, and had carried 
 his point. He had come to Washington to receive a 
 great deal of money from the sale of the lands of the 
 tribe, and the distribution of it lay entirely in his own 
 power. Only one old warrior had ventured to rise in 
 council and object to his measures; but when White 
 Cloud spoke, he had dropped his head on his bosom 
 and submitted. This information and that which 
 followed was given in English, of which neither of the 
 Ioways understood a word. 
 
 Mr. Power expressed a surprise that the Sioux- 
 killer should have known him in his citizen's dress. 
 The interpreter translated it, and the Indian said in 
 answer: — 
 
 " The dress is very different, but when I see a man's 
 eye I know him again." 
 
 He then told Power that he wished, in the theatre, 
 to raise his war-cry and help him fight the three bad- 
 looking men who were his enemies (referring to the 
 three bailiffs in the scene in Paddy Carey). Power 
 asked what part of the play he liked best. He said 
 that part where he seized the girl in his arms and ran 
 off the stage with her (at the close of an Irish jig in 
 the same play). 
 
 The interpreter informed us that this was the first 
 time the Sioux-killer had come among the whites. 
 He had disliked them always till now, but he said he 
 had seen enough to keep him telling tales all the rest 
 of his life. Power offered them cigars, which they 
 refused. We expressed our surprise ; and the Sioux- 
 killer said that the Indians who smoked gave out 
 soonest in the chase ; and White Cloud added, very 
 gravely, that the young women of his tribe did not 
 like the breaths of the smokers. In answer to an in- 
 quiry I made about the comparative size of Indians 
 and white men, the chief said that the old men of the 
 whites were larger than old Indians, but the young 
 whites were not so tall and straight as the youths of 
 his tribe. We were struck with the smallness of the 
 chief's hands and feet ; but he seemed very much 
 mortified when the interpreter translated our remark to 
 him. He turned the little sallow fingers over and over, 
 and said that old White Cloud, his father, who had 
 been a great warrior, had small hands like his. The 
 young chief, we were told by the interpreter, has never 
 yet been in an engagement, and is always spared from 
 the heavier fatigues undergone by the rest of the 
 tribe. 
 
 They showed great good nature in allowing us to 
 look at their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White 
 ; Cloud wore a collar of bear's claws, which marked 
 i him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great 
 ; cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of 
 I which he explained the use very energetically. It 
 ! was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 573 
 
 he fi^ht, to let the tribe know he had killed him. 
 After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose 
 to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand 
 gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused, 
 however, with the Sioux-killer's more characteristic 
 adieu. He looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave 
 us each a <*rip of his iron fist, that made the blood 
 tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward 
 customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very 
 much belie him. 
 
 CHA*PTER XVIII. 
 
 WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION. 
 
 The leaf that is lodged in some sunny dell, after 
 drifting on the whirlwind — the Indian's canoe, after it 
 has shot the rapids — the drop of water that has strug- 
 gled out from the Phlegethon of Niagara, and sleeps 
 on the tranquil bosom of Ontario — are faint images 
 of contrast and repose, compared with a Washingtoni- 
 an after the session. I have read somewhere, in an 
 oriental tale, that a lover, having agreed to share his 
 life with his dying mistress, took her place in the 
 grave six months in the year. In Bagdad it might 
 have been a sacrifice. In Washington I could con- 
 ceive such an arrangement to make very little dif- 
 ference. 
 
 Nothing is done leisurely in our country ; and, by 
 the haste with which everybody rushes to the rail- 
 road the morning after the rising of congress, you 
 would fancy that the cars, like Cinderella's coach, 
 would be changed into pumpkins at the stroke of 
 twelve. The town was evacuated in a day. On the 
 fifth of March a placard was sent back by the inn- 
 keepers at Baltimore, declaring that there was not so 
 much as a garret to be had in that city, and imploring 
 gentlemen and ladies to remain quietly at Washington 
 for twenty-four hours. The railroad engine, twice a 
 day. tugged and puffed away through the hills, draw- 
 ing after it, on its sinuous course, a train of brick-color- 
 ed cars, that resembled the fabulous red dragon trailing 
 its slimy length through the valley of Crete. The 
 gentlemen who sit by the fire in the bar-room at 
 Gadsby's. like Theodore Hook's secretary, who could 
 hear his master write " Yours faithfully" in the next | 
 room, learned to distinguish " Received payment" j 
 from " Sundries," by listening to the ceaseless scratch ! 
 of the bookkeeper. The ticket-office at the depot j 
 was a scene of struggle and confusion between those ! 
 who wanted places ; while, looking their last on these 
 vanishing paymasters, stood hundreds of tatterdema- \ 
 lions, white, yellow, and black, with their hands in j 
 their pockets, and (if sincere regret at their departure 
 could have wrung it forth) a tear in their eye. The i 
 bell rang, and the six hundred departures flocked to 
 their places — young ladies, with long faces, leaving 
 the delights of Washington for the dull repose of the \ 
 country — their lovers, with longer faces, trying, in vain, I 
 to solve the X quantity expressed by the aforesaid 
 " Sundries" in their bill — and members of congress I 
 with long faces, too — for not one in twenty has " made 
 the impression" he expected ; and he is moralizing 
 on the decline of the taste for eloquence, and on the < 
 want of " golden opportunity" for the display of indig- 
 nant virtue! 
 
 Nothing but an army, or such a concourse of people 
 as collects to witness an inauguration, could ever make 
 Washington look populous. But when congress, and 
 its train of ten thousand casual visiters are gone, and 
 only the official and indigenous inhabitants remain, 
 Balbec, or Palmyra, with a dozen Arabs scattered 
 among its ruins, has less a look of desolation. The 
 few stragglers in the streets add to its loneliness — pro- 
 
 ducing exactly the effect sometimes given to a wood- 
 land solitude by the presence of a single bird. The 
 vast streets seem grown vaster and more dispropor- 
 tionate — the houses seem straggling to greater distan- 
 ces — the walk from the presidents house to the capitol 
 seems twice as long — and new faces are seen here and 
 there, at the doors and windows — for cooks and inn- 
 keepers that had never time to lounge, lounge nov/, 
 and their families take quiet possession of the unrented 
 front parlor. He who would be reminded of his de- 
 parted friends should walk down on the avenue. The 
 carpet, associated with so many pleasant recollections 
 — which has been pressed by the dainty feet of wits 
 and beauties — to tread on which was a privilege and 
 a delight — is displayed on a heap of old furniture, and 
 while its sacred defects are rudely scanned by the curi- 
 ous, is knocked down, with all its memories, under the 
 hammer of the auctioneer. Tables, chairs, ottomans 
 — all linked with the same glowing recollections— go 
 for most unworthy prices ; and while, humiliated with 
 the sight, you wonder at the artificial value given to 
 things by their possessors, you begin to wonder wheth- 
 er your friends themselves, subjected to the same 
 searching valuation, would not be depreciated too! 
 Ten to one, if their characters were displayed like 
 their carpets, there would come to light defects as un- 
 suspected ! 
 
 The person to whom this desolation is the »« un- 
 kindest cut" is the hackney-coachman. "His voca- 
 tion" is emphatically gone ! Gone is the dollar made 
 every successive half hour! Gone is the pleasant sum 
 in compound addition, done "in the head," while wait- 
 ing at the doors of the public offices! Gone are the 
 short, but profitable, trips to the theatre ! Gone the 
 four or five families, all taken the same evening to par- 
 ties, and each paying the item of" carriage from nine 
 till twelve !" Gone the absorbed politician, who would 
 rather give the five-dollar bill than wait for his change ! 
 the lady who sends the driver to be paid at "the bar;" 
 the uplifted fingers, hither and thither, which embar- 
 rass his choice of a fare — gone, all! The chop-fallen 
 coachy drives to the stand in the morning and drives 
 home at noon; he creeps up to Fuller's at a snail- 
 pace, and, in very mockery of hope, asks the home- 
 ward-bound clerk from the department if he wants a 
 coach! Night comes on, and his horses begin to be- 
 lieve in the millenium — and the cobwebs are wove 
 over his whip-socket. 
 
 These changes, however, affect not unpleasantly the 
 diplomatic and official colony extending westward from 
 the president's. The inhabitants of this thin-sprinkled 
 settlement are away from the great thoroughfare, and 
 do not miss its crowds. The cessation of parties is to 
 them a relief from night-journeys, colds, card-leavings, 
 and much wear and tear of carriage-horses. They 
 live now in dressing-gowns and slippers, read the re- 
 views and the French papers, get their dinners com- 
 fortably from the restaurateurs, and thank Heaven that 
 the capitol is locked up. The attaches grow fat, and 
 the despatches grow thin. 
 
 There are several reasons why Washington, till the 
 month of May, spite of all the drawbacks in the pic- 
 ture delineated above, is a more agreeable residence 
 than the northern cities. In the first place, its climate 
 is at least a month earlier than that of New York, and, 
 in the spring, is delightful. The trees are at this mo- 
 ment (the last week in March) bursting into buds; 
 open carriages are everywhere in use ; walking in the 
 i sun is oppressive ; and for the last fortnight, this has 
 ! been a fair chronicle of the weather. Boston and 
 I New York have been corroded with east winds, mean- 
 i time, and even so near as Baltimore, they are still 
 I wrapped in cloaks and shawls. To those who, in 
 I reckoning the comforts of life, agree with me in making 
 j climate stand for nine tenths, this is powerful attrac- 
 ' tion. 
 
574 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 Then the country about Washington, the drives 
 and rides, are among the most lovely in the world, 
 the banks of Rock creek are a little wilderness of 
 beauty. More bright waters, more secluded bridle- 
 paths, more sunny and sheltered hill-sides, or finer 
 mingling of rock, hill, and valley, I never rode among. 
 Within a half hour's gallop, you have a sylvan retreat 
 of every variety of beauty, and in almost any direction ; 
 and from this you come home (and this is not the 
 case with most sylvan rides) to an excellent French 
 dinner and agreeable society, if you like it. You have 
 all the seclusion of a rural town, and none of its petty 
 politics and scandal — all the means and appliances of 
 a large metropolis, and none of its exactions and lim- 
 itations. That which makes the charm of a city, and 
 that for which we seek the country, are equally here, 
 and the penalties of both are removed. 
 
 Until the reflux of population from the Rocky 
 mountains, I suppose Washington will never be a me- 
 tropolis of residence. But if it were an object with 
 the inhabitants to make it more so, the advantages I 
 have just enumerated, and a little outlay of capital and 
 enterprise, would certainly, in some degree, effect it. 
 People especially who come from Europe, or have 
 been accustomed to foreign modes of living, would be 
 glad to live near a society composed of such attractive 
 materials as the official and diplomatic persons at the 
 seat of government. That which keeps them away is, 
 principally, want of accommodation, and, in a less de- 
 gree, it is want of comfortable accommodation in the 
 other cities which drives them back to Europe. In 
 Washington you must either live at an hotel or a 
 boarding-house. In either case, the mode of life is 
 only endurable for the shortest possible period, and 
 the moment congress rises, every sufferer in these de- 
 testable places is off for relief. The hotels are crowd- 
 ed to suffocation ; there is an utter want of privacy in 
 the arrangement of the suites of apartments ; the ser- 
 vice is ill-ordered, and the prices out of all sense or 
 reason. You pay for that which you have not, and 
 you can not get by paying for it that which you want. 
 
 The boarding-house system is worse yet. To pos- 
 sess but one room in privacy, and that opening on a 
 common passage; to be obliged to come to meals at 
 certain hours, with chance table companions, and no 
 place for a friend, and to live entirely in your bedroom 
 or in a public parlor, may truly be called as abominable 
 a routine as a gentleman could well suffer. Yet the 
 great majority of those who come to Washington are 
 in one or the other of these two categories. 
 
 The use of lodgings for strangers or transient resi- 
 dents in the city does not, after all the descriptions in 
 books, seem at all understood in our country. This 
 is what Washington^wants, but it is what every city in 
 the country wants generally. Let us describe it as if 
 it was never before heard of, and perhaps some en- 
 lightened speculator may advance us half a century in 
 some of the cities, by creating this luxury. 
 
 Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally 
 consist of the apartments on one floor. The house, 
 we will suppose, consists of three stories above the 
 basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom, 
 and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This 
 arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger 
 family occupies two floors.) These three suites of 
 apartments are neatly furnished; bed-clothes, table- 
 linen, and plate, if required, are found by the proprie- 
 tor, and in the basement story usually lives a man and 
 his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers ; 
 i. e., bring water, answer the door-bell, take in letters, 
 keep the rooms in order, make the fires, and, if it is 
 wished, do any little cookery in case of sickness. 
 These people are paid by the proprietor, but receive a 
 fee for extra service, and a small gratuity, at departure, 
 from the lodger. It should be added to this, that it is 
 not infra, dig. to live in the second or third story. 
 
 In connexion with lodgings, there must be of course 
 a cook or restaurateur within a quarter of a mile. 
 The stranger agrees with him for his dinner, to consist 
 of so many dishes, and to be sent to him at a certain 
 hour. He gives notice in the morning if he dines out 
 buys his own wine of the wine-merchant, and thus 
 saves two heavy items of overcharge in the hotel or 
 boarding-house. His own servant makes his tea or 
 coffee (and for this purpose has access to the fire in 
 the basement), and does all personal service, such as 
 brushing clothes, waiting at table, going on errands, 
 &c, &c. The stranger comes in, in short, at a mo- 
 ment's warning, brings nothing but his servant and 
 baggage, and finds himself in five minutes at home, 
 his apartments private, and every comfort and con- 
 venience as completely about him as if he had lived 
 there for years. 
 
 At from ten to fourteen dollars a week, such apart- 
 ments would pay the proprietor handsomely, and af- 
 ford a reasonable luxury to the lodger. A cook would 
 make a good thing of sending in a plain dinner for a 
 dollar a head (or more if the dinner were more expen- 
 sive), and at this rate, a family of two or more persons 
 might have a hundred times the comfort now enjoyed 
 at hotels, at certainly half the cost. 
 
 We have been seduced into a very unsentimental 
 chapter of "ways and means," but we trust the sug- 
 gestions, though containing nothing new, may not be 
 altogether without use. The want of some such thing 
 as we have recommended is daily and hourly felt and 
 complained of. 
 
 THE FOUR RIVERS. 
 
 THE HUDSON — TnE MOHAWK THE CHENANGO — THE 
 
 SUSQTJEHANNAH. 
 
 Some observer of nature offered a considerable re- 
 ward for two blades of striped grass exactly similar. 
 The infinite diversity, of which this is one instance, 
 exists in a thousand other features of nature, but in 
 none more strikingly than in the scenery of rivers. 
 What two in the world are alike ! How often does 
 the attempt fail to compare the Hudson with the Rhine 
 — the two, perhaps, among celebrated rivers, which 
 are the nearest to a resemblance ? Yet looking at the 
 first determination of a river's course, and the natural 
 operation of its search for the sea, one would suppose 
 that, in a thousand features, their valleys would scarce 
 be distinguishable. 
 
 I think, of all excitements in the world, that of the 
 first discovery and explanation of a noble river, must 
 be the most eager and enjoyable. Fancy " the bold 
 Englishman," as the Dutch called Hendrich Hudson, 
 steering his little yacht, the Halve-Mane, for the first 
 time through the Highlands ! Imagine his anxiety 
 for the channel forgotten as he gazed up at the tower- 
 ing rocks, and round upon the green shores, and on- 
 ward, past point and opening bend, miles away into the 
 heart of the country; yet with no lessening of the 
 glorious stream beneath him, and no decrease of 
 promise in the bold and luxuriant shores ! Picture 
 him lying at anchor below Newburgh, with the dark 
 pass of the " Wey-Gat" frowning behind him, the 
 lofty and blue Catskills beyond, and the hill-sides 
 around covered with the red lords of the soil, exhibit- 
 ing only less wonder than friendliness. And how 
 beautifully was the assurance of welcome expressed, 
 when the "very kind old man" brought a bunch of 
 arrows, and broke them before the stranger, to induce 
 him to partake fearlessly of his hospitality! 
 
SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 575 
 
 The qualities of the Hudson are those most likely 
 to impress a stranger. It chances felicitously that the 
 traveller's first entrance beyond the sea-board is usually 
 made by the steamer to Albany 
 
 The grand and im 
 ies of rock and horizon answer to his an- 
 
 ticipations of the magnificence of a new world ; and if 
 he finds smaller rivers and softer scenery beyond, it 
 strikes him but as a slighter lineament of a more en- 
 larged design. To the great majority of tastes, this, 
 toot is the scenery to live among. The stronger lines 
 of natural beauty affect most tastes ; and there are 
 few who would select country residence by beauty at 
 all, who would not sacrifice something to their prefer- , 
 ence for the neighborhood of sublime scenery. The 
 quiet, the merely rural— a thread of a rivulet instead 
 of a broad river— a small and secluded valley, rather 
 than a wide extent of view, bounded by bold moun- 
 tains, is the choice of but few. The Hudson, there- 
 fore, stands usually foremost in men's aspirations for 
 escape from the turmoil of cities; but to my taste, 
 though there are none more desirable to see, there 
 are sweeter rivers to live upon. 
 
 I made one of a party, very lately, bound upon a 
 rambling excursion up and down some of the river- 
 courses of New York. We had anticipated empty 
 boats, and an absence of all the gay company usually 
 found radiating from the city in June, and had made 
 up our minds for once to be contented with the study 
 of inanimate nature. Never were wiseheads more 
 mistaken. Our kind friend, Captain Dean, of the j 
 Stevens, stood by his plank when we arrived, doing his | 
 best to save the lives of the female portion of the 
 crowd rushing on board ; and never, in the most palmy ; 
 days of the prosperity of our country, have we seen a j 
 greater number of people on board a boat, nor a strong- j 
 er expression of that busy and thriving haste, which 
 is thought to be an exponent of national industry. 
 How those varlets of newsboys contrive to escape in 
 time, or escape at all, from being crushed or carried 
 off; how everybody's baggage gets on board, and 
 everybody's wife and child ; how the hawsers are | 
 slipped, and the boat got under way, in such a crowd 
 and such a crush, are matters understood, I suppose, 
 by Providence and the captain of the Stevens — but 
 they are beyond the comprehension of the passenger. 
 Having got out of hearing of "fere's the Star !" 
 "Buy the old major's paper, sir?" "Here's the Ex- 
 press !" " Buy the New-En/ ?" " Would you like a 
 New-Era, sir ?" " Take a Sun, miss ?" and a hun- 
 dred such deafening cties, to which New York has of 
 late years become subject, we drew breath and com- 
 parative silence off the green shore of Hoboken, thank- 
 ing Heaven for even the repose of a steamboat, after 
 the babel of a metropolis. Stillness, like all other 
 things, is relative. 
 
 The passage of the Hudson is doomed to be be-writ- 
 ten, and we will not again swell its great multitude of 
 describers. Bound onward, we but gave a glance, in 
 passing, to romantic Undercliffand Cro'-Nest, hallow- 
 ed by the sweetest poetry our country has yet com- 
 mitted to immortality ; gave our malison to the black 
 smoke of iron-works defacing the green mantle of 
 nature, and our benison to every dweller on the shore 
 who has painted his fence white, and smoothed his 
 lawn to the river ; and sooner than we used to do by 
 some five or six hours (ere railroads had supplanted 
 the ploughing and crawling coaches to Schenectady), 
 we fed our eyes on the slumbering and broad valley 
 of the Mohawk. 
 
 How startled must be the Naiad of this lovely river 
 to find her willowy form embraced between railroad 
 and canal ! one intruder on either side of the bed so 
 sacredly overshaded ! Pity but there were a new 
 knight of La Mancha to avenge the hamadryads and 
 water-nymphs of their wrongs from wood-cutters and 
 contractors ! Where sleep Pan and vengeful Oread, 
 
 when a Yankee settler hews me down twenty wood- 
 nymphs of a morning ! There lie their bodies, limb- 
 less trunks, on the banks of the Mohawk, yet no Dutch- 
 man stands sprouting into leaves near by, nor woollen 
 jacket turning into bark, as in the retributive olden 
 time! We are abandoned of these gods of Arcady ! 
 They like not the smoke of steam funnels ! 
 
 Talking of smoke reminds me of ashes. Is there 
 no way of frequenting railroads without the loss of 
 one's eyes. Must one pay for velocity as dearly as 
 Cacus for his oxen ? Really this new invention is .1 
 blessing — to the oculists ! Ten thousand small crystals 
 of carbon cutting right and left among the fine vessels 
 and delicate membranes of the eye, and all this amid 
 glorious scenery, where to go bandaged (as needs 
 must), is to slight the master-work of nature ! Either 
 run your railroads away from the river courses, gentle- 
 men contractors, or find some other place than your 
 passengers' eyes to bestow your waste ashes ! I have 
 heard of " lies in smiles," but there's a lye in tears, 
 that touches the sensibilities more nearly ! 
 
 There is a drowsy beauty in these German flats that 
 seems strangely profaned by a smoky monster whisk- 
 ing along twenty miles in the hour. The gentle canal- 
 boat was more homogeneous to the scene. The hills 
 lay off from the river in easy and sleepy curves, and 
 the amber Mohawk creeps down over its shallow gravel 
 with a deliberateness altogether and abominably out 
 of tune with the iron rails. Perhaps it is the rails out 
 of tune with the river — but any way there is a discord. 
 I am content to see the Mohawk, canal, and railroad 
 inclusive, but once a year. 
 
 We reached the head waters of the Chenango river, 
 by what Miss Martineau celebrates as an " exclusive 
 extra," in an afternoon's ride from Utica. The latter 
 thrifty and hospitable town was as redolent of red 
 bricks and sunshine as usual ; and the streets, to my 
 regret, had grown no narrower. They who laid out 
 the future legislative capital of New York, must have 
 been lovers of winter's wind and summer's sun. They 
 forgot the troubles of the near-sighted— (it requires 
 spectacles to read the signs or see the shops from one 
 side to the other); they forgot the perils of old women 
 and children in the wide crossings ; they forgot the 
 pleasures of shelter and shade, of neighborly vis-a-vis, 
 of comfortable-lookingness. I maintain that Utica is 
 ■not a comfortable-looking town. ]t affects me like the 
 clown in the pantomime, when he sits down without 
 bending his legs— by mere straddling. I would not 
 say anything so ungracious if it were not to suggest a 
 remedy— a shady mall upand down the middle ! What 
 a beautiful town it would be — like an old-fashioned 
 shirt bosom, with a frill of elms! Your children 
 would walk safely within the rails, and your country- 
 neighbors would expose their " sa'ace," and cool their 
 tired oxen in the shade. We felt ourselves compen- 
 sated for paying nearly double price for our " extra," 
 by the remarkable alacrity with which the coach came 
 to the door after the bargain was concluded, and the 
 politeness with which the " gentleman who made out 
 the way-bill," acceded to our stipulation. He bowed 
 us off, expressed his happiness to serve us, and away 
 we went. 
 
 The Chenango, one of the largest tributaries to the 
 Susquehannah, began to show itself, like a small brook, 
 some fifteen or twenty miles from Utica. Its course 
 lay directly south— and the new canal kept along its 
 bank, as deserted, but a thousand times less beautiful 
 in its loneliness than the river, whose rambling curves 
 it seemed made to straighten. We were not in the 
 best humor, for our double-priced » extra" turned out 
 to be the regular stage ; and while we were delivering 
 and waiting for mails, and taking in passengers, the 
 troop of idlers at tavern-doors amused themselves with 
 reading the imaginative production called our "extra 
 way-bill," as it was transferred, with a sagacious wink. 
 
576 
 
 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL. 
 
 from one driver's hat to the other. I thought of 
 Paddy's sedan-chair, with the bottom out. "If it 
 were not for the name of the thing," said he, as he 
 trotted along with a box over his head. 
 
 I say we were not in the best of humors with our 
 prompt and polite friend at Utica, but even through 
 these bilious spectacles, the Chenango was beautiful. 
 Its valley is wide and wild, and the reaches of the 
 capricious stream through the farms and woods along 
 which it loiters, were among the prettiest effects of 
 water scenery I have ever met. There is a strange 
 loneliness about it ; and the small towns which were 
 sprinkled along the hundred miles of its course, seem 
 rather the poineers into a western wilderness, than 
 settlements so near the great thoroughfare to the lakes. 
 It is a delicious valley to travel through, barring 
 "corduroy." Tre-men-dous ! exclaims the traveller, 
 as the coach drops into a pit between two logs, and 
 surges up again — Heaven only knows how. And, as 
 my fellow-passenger remarked, it is a wonder the road 
 does not echo — '• iree-mcnd-us .'" 
 
 Five miles before reaching the Susquehannah, the 
 road began to mend, the hills and valleys assumed the 
 smile of cultivation, and the scenery before us took a 
 bolder and broader outline. The Chenango came 
 down full and sunny to her junction, like the bride, 
 who is most lovely when just losing her virgin name, 
 and pouring the wealth of her whole existence into 
 the bosom of another; and, untroubled with his new 
 burden, the lordly Susquehannah kept on his majestic 
 way, a type of such vainly-dreaded, but easily-borne 
 responsibilities. 
 
 At Binghamton, we turned our course down the 
 Susquehannah. This delicious word, in the Indian 
 tongue, describes its peculiar and constant windings, 
 and I venture to say that on no river in the world are 
 the grand and beautiful in scenery so gloriously mixed. 
 The road to Owego follows the course of the valley 
 rather than of the river, but the silver curves are con- 
 stantly in view; and, from every slight elevation, the 
 majestic windings are seen — like the wanderings of a 
 vein, gleaming through green fringes of trees, and 
 circling the bright islands which occasionally divide 
 their waters. It is a swift river, and singularly living 
 and joyous in its expression. 
 
 At Owego there is a remarkable combination of bold 
 scenery and habitable plain. One of those small, 
 bright rivers, which are called "creeks" in this coun- 
 try, comes in with its valley at right angles, to the vale 
 and stream of the Susquehannah, forming a star with 
 
 three rays, or a plain with three radiating valleys, or a 
 city (in the future, perhaps), with three magnificent 
 exits and entrances. The angle is a round mountain, 
 some four or five hundred feet in height, which kneels 
 fairly down at the meeting of the two streams, while 
 another round mountain, of an easy acclivity, lifts 
 gracefully from the opposite bank, as if rising from 
 the same act of homage to Nature. Below the town 
 and above it, the mountains, for the first time, give in 
 to the exact shape of the river's short and capricious 
 course ; and the plain on which the town stands, is 
 enclosed between two amphitheatres of lofty hills, 
 shaped with the regularity and even edge of a coliseum, 
 and resembling the two halves of a leaf-lined vase, 
 struck apart by a twisted wand of silver. 
 
 Owego creek should have a .prettier name — for its 
 small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A 
 meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and sprink- 
 led with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its swift 
 windings ; and from the edge of this new tempe, on 
 the southern side, rise three steppes, or natural ter- 
 races, over the highest of which the forest rears its 
 head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers, 
 while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the small 
 streamlets from the mountain-springs, forming each 
 again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of 
 Nature. 
 
 There are more romantic, wilder places than this 
 in the world, but none on earth more habitably beauti- 
 ful. In these broad valleys, where the grain-fields, 
 and the meadows, and the sunny farms, are walled in 
 by glorious mountain sides, not obtrusively near, yet 
 by their noble and wondrous outlines, giving a per- 
 petual refreshment, and an hourly-changing feast to 
 J the eye — in these valleys, a man's household gods 
 j yearn for an altar. Here are mountains that, to look 
 on but once, "become a feeling" — a river at whose 
 grandeur to marvel — and a hundred streamlets to lace 
 about the heart. Here are fertile fields, nodding with 
 grain ; " a thousand cattle" grazing on the hills — here 
 is assembled together, in one wondrous centre, a spe- 
 cimen of every most loved lineament of Nature. Here 
 would I have a home ! Give me a cottage by one of 
 these shining streamlets — upon one of these terraces, 
 that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over 
 these mountain Aies, while my flowers are growing, 
 and my head silvering in tranquil happiness. He 
 wfcfose Penates would not root ineradicably here, has 
 no heart for a home, nor senses for the glory of Na- 
 ture ! 
 
 END OF LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL. 
 
DASHES AT LIFE 
 
 WITH A FREE PENCIL. 
 
 PART III; 
 
 EPHEMERA 
 
 37 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 FROM SARATOGA. 
 
 TO THE JULIA OF SOME YEARS AGO. 
 
 Augusts, 1843. 
 
 I have not written to you in your boy's lifetime — 
 that fine lad, a shade taller than yourself, whom T 
 sometimes meet at my tailor's and bootmaker's. I 
 am not very sure, that after the first month (bitter 
 month) of your marriage, I have thought of you for 
 the duration of a revery — fit to be so called. I loved 
 you — lost you — swore your ruin and forgot you — 
 which is love's climax when jilted. And I never ex- 
 pected to think of you again. 
 
 Beside the astonishment at hearing from me at all, 
 you will be surprised at receiving a letter from me at 
 Saratoga. Here where the stars are, that you swore 
 by — here, where the springs and colonnades, the 
 woodwalks and drives, the sofas and swings, are all 
 coated over with your delicious perjuries, your "pro- 
 tested" protestations, your incalculable bankruptcy of 
 sighs, tears, caresses, promises! Oh, Julia — amis, 
 retiens (oi, ma plume! 
 
 I assure you I had not the slightest idea of ever 
 coming here again in the world — not the slightest ! 
 I had a vow in heaven against it, indeed. While I 
 hated you — before I forgot you, that is to say — I 
 would not have come for your husband's million — 
 (your price, Julia !) I had laid Saratoga away with 
 a great seal, to be reopened in the next star I shall 
 inhabit, and used as a lighthouse of warning. There 
 was one bannister at Congress Hall, particularly — 
 across which we parted nightly — the next object my 
 hand touched after losing the warm pressure of 
 yours — the place I leaned over with a heart under my 
 waistcoat which would have scaled Olympus to be 
 nearer to you, yet was kept back by that mahogany 
 and your "no" — and I will believe that devils may 
 become dolls, and ghosts play around us like the 
 smoke of a cigar, since over that bannister I have 
 thrown my leg and sat thinking of the past without 
 phrensy or emotion ! And none have abetter right 
 than we to laugh now at love's passionate eternities! 
 For we were lovers, Julia — I, as I know, and you, as I 
 believe — and in that entry, when we parted to dream, 
 write, contrive for the blissful morrow — anything but 
 sleep and forget — in that entry and over that bannister 
 were said words of tenderness and devotion, from as 
 deep soundings of two hearts as ever plummet of this 
 world could by possibility fathom. You did love me — 
 monster of untruth and forgetfulness as you have 
 since been bought for — you did lovr. me! And that 
 you can ride in your husband's carriage and grow 
 fat, and that I can come here and make a mock of it, 
 are two comments on love worthy of the common- 
 place-book of Mephistophiles. Fie ou us' 
 
 II T came to Saratoga as I would look at a coat that i 
 had worn twenty years before — with a sort of vacant 
 I curiosity to see the shell in which I had once figured. 
 
 j A friend said, "Join me at Saratoga !" and it sounded 
 like, "Come and see where Julia was adorable." I 
 came in a railcar, under a hot sun. and wanted my 
 dinner, and wished myself where Julia, indeed, sat 
 fat in her fauteuil — wished it, for the good wine in the 
 cellar and the French cook in the kitchen. And I 
 did not^ go down to "Congress Hall," the old palais 
 d 1 amour — but in the modern and comfortable parlor 
 of the " United States," sat down by a pretty woman 
 of these days, and chatted about the water-lily in her 
 bosom and the boy she had up stairs — coldly and ev- 
 ery-day-ishly. I had been there six hours, and you 
 had not entered my thoughts. Please to believe 
 that, Julia! 
 
 But in the evening there was a ball at Congress 
 Hall. And though the old house is unfashionable 
 now, and the lies of love are elsewhere told and lis- 
 tened to, there was a movement among the belles in 
 its favor, and I appended myself to a lady's arm and 
 went boldly. ] say boldly, for it required an effort. 
 The twilight had fallen, and with it had come a mem- 
 ory or two of the Springs in our time. I had seated 
 myself against a pillar of the colonnade of the "Uni- 
 ted States," and looked down toward Congress Hall — 
 and you were under the old vineclad portico, as I 
 should have seen you from the same spot, and with 
 the same eye of fancy, sundry years ago. So it was 
 not quite like a passionless antiquary that I set foot 
 again on that old-time colonnade, and, to say truth, 
 as the band struck up a waltz, I might have had in 
 my lip a momentary quiver, and some dimness in my 
 world-weary eye. But it passed away. 
 
 The ball was comme ca, and I found sweet women 
 (as where are they not — given, candles and music?) 
 and aired my homage as an old stager may. I danced 
 without thinking of you uncomfortably, though the 
 ten years* washing of that white floor has not quite 
 washed out the memory of your Arab instep with 
 
 t its embracing and envied sandal, gliding and bound- 
 
 I ing, oh how airily! For you had feet, absolute in 
 their perfection, dear Julia! — had you not ? 
 
 But I went out for fresh air on the colonnade, in 
 an evil and forgetful moment. I strolled alone tow- 
 ard the spring. The lamp burned dim, as it used to 
 
 I burn, tended by Cupid's minions. And on the end 
 of the portico, by the last window of the music-room, 
 
 : under that overhanging ivy, with stars in sight that I 
 would have sworn to for the very same— sat a lady in 
 
 ' a dress like yours as I saw you last, and black eyes, 
 like jet lamps framed in velvet, turning indolently tow- 
 
 | ard me. I held by the railing, for I am superst.tM.us, 
 and it seemed to me that I had only to ask why you 
 were there— for, ghostly or bodily, there I saw you ! 
 Back came your beauty on my memory with yester- 
 
580 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 day's freshness of recollection. Back came into my 
 heart the Julia of my long-accursed adoration! I 
 saw your confiding and bewildering smile, your fine- 
 cut teeth of pearl, your over-bent brow and arch look 
 from under, your lily shoulders, your dimpled hands. 
 You were there, if my senses were sufficient evidence, 
 if presence be anything without touch — bodily there ! 
 Of course it was somebody else, I went in and 
 took a julep. But I write to tell you that for a min- 
 ute — a minute of enormous capacity — I have loved 
 you once more. For one minute, while you probably 
 were buried deep in your frilled pillow — (snoring, per- 
 haps — who knows ?) — for one minute, fleeting and 
 blissful, you have been loved again — with heart, brain, 
 blood, all on fire with truth, tenderness, and passionate 
 adoration — by a man who could have bought you 
 (you know I could!) for half the money you sold for! 
 And I thought you would like to know this, Julia! 
 And now, hating you as before, in your fleshy forget- 
 fulness, Yours not at all. 
 
 Did it ever strike you how much more French than 
 English we are in many of the qualities, especially the 
 superficies and physiognomy, of our national charac- 
 ter? In dressing, dancing, congregating — in chivalry 
 to women, facility of adaptation to new circumstances, 
 inflammability of excitement, elasticity of recupera- 
 tion from trouble — in complexion and figu« even, 
 how very French! The remark, perhaps, is more 
 particularly true of New York. Where in the world 
 is there such a copy of the sweeter features of the 
 jour de Van at Paris, as to day in the hons-bons shops 
 of Broadway ? Here, as there, ingenuity and art are 
 taxed to their utmost to provide gay and significant 
 presents of confectionary for children and friends, and 
 the shops are museums of curiosities. Everybody 
 has a child or two by the hand ; everybody is abroad, 
 and alive to the spirit and baby-supremacy of the 
 hour; everybody abandons his mouotone of daily life, 
 to strike into the general diapason, a full octave 
 higher, for Christmas. But Christmas has not these 
 superficial features in England. This is the way they 
 keep Christmas in France ; and the French extrava- 
 gance of confectionary is one of the outer indices of 
 the original from which we copy, and points us 
 directly to Paris. 
 
 Were the language of the three countries the same, 
 we should seem to a traveller's eye, I am inclined to 
 think, much more like a nation of French origin than 
 English. Although our communication with England 
 is much more intimate, we hardly copy anything 
 English except its literature and religion. Our fash- 
 ions in dress, male as well as female, are principally 
 Parisian. The style of cookery in our hotels, and at 
 all private tables of any pretension, is French. Our 
 houses are furnished a la Francaise ; our habits of 
 society, our balls, private concerts, and places of en- 
 tertainment for the idlers about town, are all French. 
 We have a hundred French bootmakers to one Eng- 
 lish. We have a large colony of Americans in Paris 
 engaged in the business of exporting French fabrics, 
 elegancies, and conveniences, for this country, and 
 almost none of the same class in England. In fact, 
 if England is our mother-country, France is the 
 foster-nurse from whom we draw the most of our 
 nourishment, of the tasteful and ornamental order. 
 
 In the society of New York I think the predomi- 
 nance of Gallicism over Anglicism is still more stri- 
 king. The French language is heard all over a 
 crowded drawing-room ; and with costume entirely, 
 and furniture mainly, French, it is difficult sometimes 
 at a party in this city, not to fancy one's self on the 
 other side of the Atlantic. Frenchmen are quite at 
 home in New York, while no Frenchman is at home 
 
 in England. And lately the fashion of soirees, begin- 
 ning with music and ending with a dance, another 
 Parisian usage, has followed on the heels of the 
 matinees which I referred to in a previous letter. We 
 certainly have not inherited, with our English blood, 
 the English reluctance to copy even an excellence, if 
 it be French; and it is a curious mark of the differ- 
 ence made in such matters by national antipathy, that, 
 with a separation of only twenty miles from the 
 French coast, the English assimilate not at all, even to 
 the acknowledged superiorities of French life, while 
 we, at a distance of three thousand miles, copy them 
 with the readiness of a contiguous country. 
 
 There was, of course, a period when every work on 
 the country was English ; and it would be a curious 
 chapter in a historical memoir to trace back our Gal- 
 licism to its incipient point, and give its rise and prog- 
 ress in detail. And, apropos of suggestions, which 
 sometimes travel like the seed in the migrating bird, 
 what an interesting book might be written (and by no 
 man living so admirably and ably as by your corres- 
 pondent, Mr. Walsh) tracing the influences that have 
 spread from our country eastward ; and to what de- 
 gree our institutions, opinions, and discoveries, have 
 affected European countries, and paid back our debt 
 of literature and refinement ! 
 
 The snow-storm of Wednesday cleared up at night- 
 fall with an old-fashioned frosty and sparkling north- 
 wester. While the south wind was disputing his 
 ground, however, the sun found a chink to creep 
 through, and quietly took to himself the scanty re- 
 mainder of the city's mantle of snow. I chanced to 
 look down upon the Park while the ground was cov- 
 ered, and I wished that the common council might 
 see it with my eyes, for the fountain was playing beau- 
 tifully in a basin of spotless white, which, if exactly 
 imitated in marble, would be better worthy of that 
 radiant column than the mingled mud and greensward 
 that commonly surround it. I have been surprised to 
 notice the complete satiety of public curiosity to this 
 superb object. A column of water, fifty or sixty feet 
 high, is continually playing in the most thronged 
 thoroughfare of the city, and it already attracts as 
 little attention as the trees in the Park, or the liberty- 
 cap on Tammany hall. Seldom a passer-by stops to 
 gaze at it; and I have watched in vain, in my daily 
 stroll through Broadway, for the turning toward it of 
 the refined eyes of shoppers and danglers. I under- 
 stand there is to be another jet in the Bowling-Green, 
 and another on the Battery — though this last will be 
 bringing the rural water-nymph into very close con- 
 tact with the uproarious Neptune. 
 
 The joy of New York comes to Broadway as color 
 comes with the same impulse to the cheek. The ex- 
 citement of shoving off the old year and helping in 
 the new, was made visible by a pave as thronged on 
 Saturday night at twelve, as it commonly is on a holy- 
 day at noon. Sunday (the superseded first) was pretty 
 gayly infringed upon by sleighing parties ; for even in 
 Broadway the sleighing was tolerable, and, out of 
 town, said to be excellent. To-day is " black Mon- 
 day" for horse-flesh ! Such ringing of sleigh-bells 
 and plunging of runners through the mud-holes, and 
 laughing, and whipping, and hurrying by, is enough 
 to give inexperienced Forty-three a most confused 
 impression of the world he is called upon to govern. 
 It is snowing slightly at this moment, and gives prom- 
 ise of a violent storm by noon. 
 
 The temperance people have made a strong effort 
 to discountenance, this year, the giving of wine and 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 581 
 
 other stimulants to visiters on New Year's day. But 
 there is a much more powerful principle at work in 
 the same cause, or rather in a cause which covers 
 this — the destroying of the custom of New dear's 
 visiting altogether — and that principle is omnipotent 
 fashion. The aristocratic feeling now is against the 
 receiving on that day ; and some of the leading fash- 
 ionables have reduced their observance of the custom 
 to a matter of pasteboard — a servant standing at the 
 door to take in cards. The truth is, the good feeling 
 of the day has been abused of late years. The hilar- 
 ity amounted to a general saturnalia, in which every- 
 body went anywhere and everywhere to drink and 
 shake hands, and exclusiveness was very much of- 
 fended, and so, very often were propriety and deli- 
 cacy — three very implacable members of society ! 
 Once well understood that fashionable people do not 
 receive — -presto! the custom will vanish like a ghost at 
 cock-crowing. If this formidable gun could be 
 brought to bear upon some other things, now ? 
 
 A score at least of the aristocratic dames in the 
 upper part of Broadway have adopted the fashion of a 
 matinee — receiving visits one morning only in the 
 week. This is rather a usage en prince, but, ambi- i 
 tious as it seems, it is a novelty which common sense 
 might father if it had been disowned by fashion. In 
 the first place, it leaves to those who thus entertain, 
 six mornings in the week, if they please, of excusable j 
 closed doors — a very available privilege for very many 
 important uses. In the second place, it saves much 
 outlay of time consumed in ineffectual attempts to see \ 
 people ; it times your visit when the ladies are in a j 
 dress-humor to receive ! and (last, though perhaps ' 
 least important) the class of gregarious idlers, so fast 
 increasing in our country, are provided with a resource 
 against ennui, which may profitably take the place of j 
 less innocent amusement. It may be put down as an I 
 accidental advantage, also, that ladies may dress very 
 gayly with propriety to pass two or three hours in a 
 reception-room, and, with this compensation, perhaps j 
 our fair countrywomen may be willing to forego that 
 •how mess of street costume which has been so often i 
 objected to. The most becoming toilet (which is 
 undoubtedly that of out-doors, at least to all women I 
 past seventeen) must have its field of display, and this 
 necessity has been amply proved by the fashion pecu- i 
 liar to our country of dressing highly for steamboat- 
 decks and street promenades — the only opportunities 
 for showing the hat and iis accompaniments. In Eng- 
 land, ladies dress plainly in the street, but they dress 
 showily for Hyde park and the opera. In default of a 
 Hyde park and an opera, our persevering country- 
 women have adopted the matinee. Sequitur — Broad- 
 way will be shorn of the genteeler rays of its splen- 
 dor; ladies will heighten the style of their visiting 
 toilets till they can not visit without equipages, and 
 so the aristocracy of money takes another long stride 
 toward exclusiveness and empire. 
 
 An advertisement of '■'■fifteen Indians and squaws to 
 be seen at the American Museum in their native cos- 
 tume," drew me into this place of popular resort last 
 evening. I found a crowd of five or six hundred peo- 
 ple collected in the upper story, and the performances 
 of a small theatre going on, with the Indians sitting, 
 in full costume, on the stage ; not " native costume," 
 certainly, unless they are born in wampum and feath- 
 ers. There were only nine Indians upon the stage, 
 and several of these seemed to have bad coughs; and 
 I was told that those who were not visible were con- 
 fined to their skins with severe colds and fevers. I am 
 not surprised that these hardy sons of the forest suc- 
 
 cumb under the delicacies (?) of civilization. They 
 all sleep in one small room in the museum building, 
 their buffalo-skins spread around a stove — heated to 
 an insufferable degree with anthracite coal — and they 
 ascend to the terrace-roof of the house to smoke their 
 pipes, and are regaled with a daily sleigh-ride, 
 changing their temperature continually from ninety 
 to zero. The old chief who " has killed with his own 
 hand one hundred Osages, three Mohawks, two 
 Sioux, and one Pawnee," and " No-chee, or the Man 
 of Fire," are the principal victims to the luxury of 
 anthracite. I saw but one of the squaws, '• Do-hum- 
 me, or the Productive Pumpkin," a handsome and 
 benign looking woman, who was married a few days 
 ago to Cow-kiclc-ke, son of the principal chief of the 
 lowas. The bride and bridegroom sat together, she 
 leaning very affectionately upon her husband ; but I 
 observed that the " Productive Pumpkin" modestly 
 turned her eyes away during the pirouettes of La 
 Petite Celeste, a savage niaiserie which will, of course, 
 wear away with civilization. Still, I could wish that 
 some of the " daughters of the pale faces," in this 
 respect, at least, were more like " Productive Pump- 
 kin." These Indians, I believe, are well authenti- 
 cated as the first people of their important tribes ; and 
 the question arises whether, in becoming a shilling 
 show at the museum, they have entered civilized so- 
 ciety upon a stratum parallel to their own. Is "No- 
 nos-ee, the She-Wolf" (a niece of Blackhawk, and, 
 of course, an Indian princess), on a level, as to rank, 
 with the dancing and singing girls of a museum ? But 
 this question of comparative rank would lead a great 
 way, and, as it stands, it makes a very pretty topic of 
 discussion for your female readers. 
 
 You will have seen mentioned in the papers the 
 death of the young squaw at the museum. She had 
 been married but six weeks, and was a very beautiful 
 creature. I saw her, a few days ago, at the Park 
 theatre, with a circlet of jewels around her head, and 
 thought her by far the prettiest woman in the house. 
 She was the survivor of the two females of the party, 
 the other squaw having died a few weeks since. The 
 immediate cause of her death was a violent cold, 
 taken in coming home a night or two before from a 
 ball at the Tivoli. The omnibus in which they were 
 returning broke down in Hudson street, and they were 
 obliged to walk a mile through a light snow falling at 
 the time. Their thin moccasins were no protection, 
 and four or five of the Indians were ill the next morn- 
 ing, the bride worst of all. She died in dreadful 
 agony, of congestion of the blood, on the third day, 
 spite of the best medical attendance and every care on 
 the part of the ladies of the neighborhood. The In- 
 dians were all standing around her, and on being told 
 that she was dead, they tore the rings from their ears, 
 and stood for some minutes in silence, with the blood 
 streaming upon their cheeks. Their grief afterward 
 became quite uncontrollable. They washed off all the 
 paint with which they have been so gayly bedecked 
 while here, and painted the dead bride very gaudily 
 for burial. She was interred in the Greenwood ceme- 
 tery. The most passionate affection existed between 
 her and her husband. He is a magnificent fellow, the 
 handsomest Indian we have ever had in the cities, and 
 a happier marriage was never celebrated. She fol- 
 lowed close at his heels wherever he went, and had 
 scarce been separated from him five minutes at a time 
 since her marriage. The poor fellow is an object of 
 great commiseration now, for he seems completely in- 
 consolable. His wife was the idol of the party. They 
 are very impatient to be away since this melancholy 
 event, and will start westward as soon as the sick 
 recover. 
 
582 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Public opinion, which is notoriously unkind to the 
 misdoings of old men, has at last taken up the matter 
 of— 
 
 " Winter lingering in the lap of May." 
 
 There are strong symptoms (in everything but the in- 
 flexible thermometer) that the spring is universally 
 believed to have arrived. A steamboat made its way 
 on Wednesday as far as Poughkeepsie, ploughing up 
 the ice where it was at least eighteen inches thick. 
 People were running out from every side to meet her, 
 and many climbed up her sides while she was making 
 way. Some heavily-laden sleighs were obliged to 
 whip up to get out of her course, and altogether the 
 skirmish between hot and cold water (both a Vou- 
 trance) is said to have been very daringly fought. 
 
 The " town" is " verdant." The enchanting spring- 
 hats of the ladies are breezily exposed in the plate- 
 glass windows of the milliners. The airy, delicate, 
 daisy-mead patterns for ladies' wear in the transition 
 month make every shop-window like a landscape of 
 May in Arcady ; the men-tailors " turn out for lining 
 to the sun" the light woofs of the " demme !" tribe 
 for the demi-senson ; the Ctoton pipers water the 
 streets ; the small wooden signs hang on every leafless 
 tree in the park, warning you to " keep off the grass;" 
 people are beginning to discuss the resorts of the sultry 
 season ; and, in fact, everything is here but the month 
 itself. The table is set, and the hour and the appe- 
 tite come, but the dinner is not served. 
 
 " Oh ! ever thus from childhood's hour !" &c. 
 
 Apropos of Croton water — there has been a great 
 overturn lately of " mill-privileges" in some of the 
 cellars of New York. The authorities have ferreted 
 out, it is said, an incredible quantity of usurped water- 
 power, applied to almost every branch of mechanism, 
 and drawn very quietly from the main "race" down 
 Broadway. One scratches one's head and wonders 
 he never thought of it before, the adaptation seems 
 so simple ; but as the Common Council will hear no 
 argument about "natural privileges" and "backwater," 
 the interloping wheels will easily be stopped turning. 
 
 As I presume you are interested in the one portion 
 of New York made classic by a foreign pen, let me 
 jot you down a mem. or two from my first visit to 
 Dickens's Hole at the Five Points, made one evening 
 last week with a distinguished party under the charge 
 of the Boz officer. 
 
 I had had an idea that this celebrated spot was on 
 the eastern limit of the city, at the end of one of the 
 omnibus-routes, and was surprised to find that it was 
 not more than three minutes' walk from Broadway, 
 and in full view from one of the fashionable corners. 
 It lies, indeed, in a lap between Broadway and the 
 Bowery, in what was once a secluded valley of the 
 island of Manhattan, though to believe it ever to have 
 been green or clean, requires a powerful effort of im- 
 agination. We turned into Anthony street at half- 
 past ten, passed " the Tombs," and took the down- 
 ward road, as did Orpheus and Dickens before us. It 
 was a cold night, but women stood at every door with 
 bare heads and shoulders, most of them with some- 
 thing to say, and, by their attitudes, showing a com- 
 plete insensibility to cold. In everything they said, 
 they contrived to bring in the word " shilling." There 
 were very i'ew men to be seen, and those whom we 
 met skulked past as if avoiding observation — possibly 
 ashamed to be there, possibly shrinking from any fur- 
 ther acquaintance with officer Stevens, though neither 
 
 of these feelings seemed to be shared by the females 
 of the community. A little turn to the left brought 
 us up against what looked to me a blind, tumble-down 
 board fence; but the officer pulled a latch and opened 
 a door, and a flight of steps was disclosed. He went 
 down first and threw open a door at the bottom, let- 
 ting up a blaze of light, and we followed into the 
 grand subterranean Almack's of the Five Points. 
 And really it looked very clean and cheerful. It was 
 a spacious room with a low ceiling, excessively white- 
 washed, nicely sanded, and well lit, and the black pro- 
 prietor and his " ministering spirits" (literally fulfilling 
 their vocation behind a very tidy bar) were well-dress- 
 ed and well-mannered people, and received Mr. Ste- 
 vens and his friends with the politeness of grand 
 chamberlains. We were a little early for the fashion- 
 able hour, the "ladies not having arrived from the 
 theatres;" and, proposing to look in again after making 
 the round of the other resorts, we crept up again to 
 the street. 
 
 Our next dive was iDto a cellar crowded with ne- 
 groes, eating, drinking, and dancing, one very well 
 made mulatto-girl playing the castinets, and imitating 
 Elssler in what she called the cracoveragain. In their 
 way, these people seemed cheerful, dirty, and com- 
 fortable. We looked in afterward at several drinking- 
 places, thronged with creatures who looked over their 
 shoulders very significantly at the officer; found one 
 or two barrooms kept by women who had preserved 
 the one virtue of neatness (though in every clean 
 place the hostess seemed a terrible virago), and it was 
 then proposed that we should see some of the dor- 
 mitories of this Alsatia. And at this point must end 
 all the cheerfulness of my description. This is called 
 " murdering alley," said our guide. We entered be- 
 tween two high brick walls, with barely room to pass, 
 and by the police-lantern made our way up a broken 
 and filthy staircase, to the first floor of a large building. 
 Under its one roof the officer thought there usually 
 slept a thousand of these wretched outcasts. He 
 knocked at a door on the left. It was opened unwil- 
 lingly by a woman who held a dirty horse-blanket 
 over her breast, but at the sight of the police-lantern 
 she stepped back and let us pass in. The floor was 
 covered with human beings asleep in their rags ; and 
 when called by the officer to look in at a low closet 
 beyond, we could hardly put our feet to the ground, 
 they lay so closely together, black and white, men, 
 women, and children. The doorless apartment be- 
 yond, of the size of a kennel, was occupied by a wo- 
 man and her daughter, and the daughter's child, lying 
 together on the floor, and covered by rags and cloths 
 of no distinguishable color, the rubbish of bones and 
 dirt only displaced by their emaciated limbs. The 
 sight was too sickening to endure, but there was no 
 egress without following close to the lantern. Anoth- 
 er door was opened to the right. It disclosed a low 
 and gloomy apartment, perhaps eight feet square. 
 Six or seven black women lay together in a heap, all 
 sleeping except the one who opened the door. Some- 
 thing stirred in a heap of rags, and one of the party 
 removing a dirty piece of carpet with his cane, dis- 
 covered a newborn child. It belonged to one of the 
 sleepers in the rags, and had had an hour's experience 
 of the tender mercies of this world ! But these de- 
 tails are disgusting, and have gone far enough when 
 they have shown those who have the common com- 
 forts of life how inestimably, by comparison, they are 
 blessed ! For one, I had never before any adequate 
 idea of poverty in cities. I did not dream that hu- 
 man beings, within reach of human aid, could be 
 abandoned to the wretchedness which I there saw— 
 and I have not described the half of it, for the deli- 
 cacy of your readers would not bear it, even in de- 
 scription. And all these horrors of want and aban- 
 donment lie almost within sound of your voice, as 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 583 
 
 you pass Broadway ! The officers sometimes make a 
 descent, and carry off swarms to Blackwell's Island — 
 for all the inhabitants of the Five Points are supposed 
 to be criminal and vicious — but still thousands are 
 there, subjects for tears and pity, starving, like rats 
 and dogs, with the sensibilities of human beings ! 
 
 As we returned we heard screams and fighting on 
 every side, and the officers of the watch were carry- 
 ing off a party to the lock-up-house. We descended 
 once more to the grand ballroom, and found the dance 
 going on very merrily. Several very handsome mu- 
 latto women were in the crowd, and a few "young 
 men about town," mixed up with the blacks; and al- 
 together it was a picture of " amalgamation," such 
 as I had never before seen. I was very glad to get 
 out of the neighborhood, leaving behind me, I am 
 free to confess, all discontent with my earthly allot- 
 ment. One gentleman who was with us left behind 
 him something of more value, having been robbed at 
 Almack's of his keys, pencilcase, and a few dollars, 
 the contents of two or three pockets. I wind up my 
 " notes" with the hope that the true picture I have 
 drawn may touch some moving-spring of benevolence 
 in private societies, or in the Common Council, and 
 that something may be soon done to alleviate the hor- 
 rors of the Five Points. 
 
 I took a stroll or two while in Boston, and was 
 struck with the contrast of its physiognomy to that 
 of New York. There is a look of staid respectabil- 
 ity and thrift in everything that strikes the eye in Bos- 
 ton. The drays, carts, omnibuses, and public vehicles, 
 are well horsed and appointed, and driven by respect- 
 able-looking men. The people are all clad very 
 warmly and very inelegantly. The face of every pe- 
 destrian in the street has a marked errand in it — gen- 
 tlemen holding their nerves to the screw till they 
 have achieved the object of being out of doors, and 
 ladies undergoing a "constitutional" to carry out a 
 system. There are no individuals in Boston — they 
 are all classes. It is a cohesive and gregarious town, 
 and half a dozen portraits would give you the entire 
 population. Every eye in Boston seems to move in 
 its socket with a check — a fear of meeting something 
 that may offend it — and all heads are carried in a pos- 
 ture of worthy gravity, singularly contagious. It 
 struck me the very loaves in the bakers' windows had 
 a look of virtuous exaction, to be eaten gravely, if at 
 all. 
 
 New York seems to me to differ from all this, as a 
 dish of rice, boiled to let every grain fall apart, differs 
 from a pot of mush. Every man you meet with in 
 our city walks with his countenance free of any sense 
 of observation or any dread of his neighbor. He has 
 evidently dressed to please himself, and he looks about 
 with an eye wholly at ease. He is an integer in the 
 throng, untroubled with any influence beyond the 
 risks of personal accident. There is neither restraint 
 nor curiosity in his look, and he neither expects to be 
 noticed by the passers-by, nor to see anything worthy 
 of more than half a glance in the persons he meets. 
 The moving sights of the city have all the same inte- 
 gral and stand-alone character. The drays, instead 
 of belonging to a company, are each the property of 
 the man who drives it; the hacks and cabs are under 
 no corporate discipline, every ragged whip doing as 
 he likes with his own vehicle; and all the smaller 
 trades seem followed by individual impulse, respons- 
 ible to nothing but police-law. Boston has the ad- 
 vantage in many things, but a man who has any taste 
 for cosmopolitism would very much prefer New York. 
 
 Wednesday was a long warm summer's day, with 
 no treachery in it to the close ; and the rivulet of 
 
 Croton, which ripples round the sidewalk of the park, 
 and goes down the great throat of the drain, seemed 
 giving the dry city to drink. The pavement of 
 Broadway burst into flower. Birds were hung out at 
 the windows ; hyacinths were put out to breathe ; 
 and open casements and doors, lounging footsteps and 
 cheerful voices in the street, all gave sweet token of 
 summer. Thursday was a fine day, too, with a little 
 soupcon of east wind in its blandishments, and the 
 evening set in with a gentle summer rain, welcome as 
 most things are after their opposites, for the dust was 
 a nuisance; and to-day, Friday, it rains mildly and 
 steadily. 
 
 March made an expiring effort to give us a spring- 
 day yesterday. The morning dawned mild and bright, 
 and there was a voluptuous contralto in the cries of 
 the milkmen and the sweeps, which satisfied me, be- 
 fore I was out of bed, that there was an arrival of a 
 south wind. The Chinese proverb says, "when thou 
 hast a day to be idle, be idle for a day ;" but for that 
 very elusive " time when," I irresistibly substitute the 
 day the wind sweetens after a sour northeaster. Oh, 
 the luxury (or curse, as the case may be!) of break- 
 fasting leisurely with an idle day before one ! 
 
 I strolled up Broadway between nine and ten, and 
 encountered the morning tide down; and if you never 
 have studied the physiognomy of this great thorough- 
 fare in its various fluxes and refluxes, the differences 
 would amuse you. The clerks and workies have 
 passed down an hour before the nine o'clock tide, and 
 the sidewalk is filled at this time with bankers, brokers, 
 and speculators, bound to Wall street ; old merchants 
 and junior partners, bound to Pearl and Water; and 
 lawyers, young and old, bound for Nassau and Pine. 
 Ah, the faces of care ! The day's operations are 
 working out in their eyes; their hats are pitched for- 
 ward at the angle of a stagecoach with all the load on 
 the driver's seat, their shoulders are raised with the 
 shrug of anxiety, their steps are hurried and short, 
 and mortal face and gait could scarcely express a 
 heavier burden of solicitude than every man seems to 
 bear. They nod to you without a smile, and with a 
 kind of unconscious recognition ; and, if you are un- 
 accustomed to walk out at that hour, you might fancy 
 that, if there were not some great public calamity, 
 your friends, at least, had done smiling on you. 
 Walk as far as Niblo's, stop at the greenhouse there, 
 and breathe an hour in the delicious atmosphere of 
 flowering plants, and then return. There is no longer 
 any particular current in Broadway. Foreigners com- 
 ing out from the cafes, after their late breakfast, and 
 idling up and down, for fresh air; country-people 
 shopping early; ladies going to their dress-makers in 
 close veils and demi-toilets; errand-boys, news-boys, 
 duns, and doctors, make up the .throng. Toward 
 twelve o'clock there is a sprinkling of mechanics go- 
 ing to dinner — a merry, short-jacketed, independent- 
 looking troop, glancing gayly at the women as they 
 pass, and disappearing around corners and up alleys, 
 and an hour later Broadway begins to brighten. The 
 omnibuses go along empty, and at a slow pace, for 
 people would rather walk than ride. The side-streets 
 are tributaries of silks and velvets, flowers and feath- 
 ers, to the great thoroughfare; and ladies, whose 
 proper mates (judging by the dress alone) should be 
 lords and princes, and dandies, shoppers, and loungers 
 of every description, take crowded possession of the 
 pave. At nine o'clock you look into the troubled 
 faces of men going to their business, and ask your- 
 self " to what end is all this burden of care?" and at 
 two, you gaze on the universal prodigality of exterior, 
 and wonder what fills the multitude of pockets that 
 pay for it! The faces are beautiful, the shops are 
 thronged, the sidewalks crowded far an hour, and 
 
584 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 then the full tide turns, and sets upward. The most 
 of those who are out at three are bound to the upper 
 part of the city to dine; and the merchants and law- 
 yers, excited by collision and contest above the de- 
 pression of care, join, smiling, in the throng. The 
 physiognomy of the crowd is at its brightest. Din- 
 ner is the smile of the day to most people, and the 
 hour approaches. Whatever has happened in stocks 
 or politics, whoever is dead, whoever ruined since 
 morning, Broadway is thronged with cheerful faces 
 and good appetites at three ! The world will prob- 
 ably dine with pleasure up to the last day — perhaps 
 breakfast with worldly care for the future on dooms- 
 day morning ! And here I must break off my Da- 
 guerreotype of yesterday's idling, for the wiud came 
 round easterly and raw at three o'clock, and I was 
 driven in-doors to try industry as an opiate. 
 
 The first day of freedom from medical embargo is 
 equivalent, in most men's memories, to a new first im- 
 pression of existence. Dame Nature, like a provident 
 housewife, seems to take the opportunity of a sick 
 man's absence to whitewash and freshen the world he 
 occupies. Certainly, I never saw the bay of New 
 York look so beautiful as on Sunday noon; and you 
 may attribute as much as you please of this impres- 
 sion to the "Claude Lorraine spectacles" of conva- 
 lescence, and as much more as pleases you to the 
 fact that it was an intoxicating and dissolving day of 
 spring. 
 
 The Battery on Sunday is the Champs-Elysees of 
 foreigners. I heard nothing spoken around me but 
 French and German. Wrapped in my cloak and 
 seated on a bench, I watched the children and the 
 poodle-dogs at their gambols, and it seemed to me as 
 if I were in some public resort over the water. They 
 bring such happiness to a day of idleness — these for- 
 eigners — laughing, talking nonsense, totally uncon- 
 scious of observation, and delighted as much with the 
 passing of a rowboat, or a steamer, as an American 
 with the arrival of his own " argosy" from sea. They 
 are not the better class of foreigners who frequent the 
 Battery on Sunday. They are the newly-arrived, the 
 artisans, the German toymakers and the French boot- 
 makers — people who still wear the spacious-hipped 
 trousers and scant coats, the gold rings in the ears, 
 and the ruffled shirts of the lands of undandyfied 
 poverty. They are there by hundreds. They hang 
 over the railing and look off upon the sea. They sit 
 and smoke on the long benches. They run hither 
 and thither with their children, and behave as they 
 would in their own garden, using and enjoying it just 
 as if it were their own. And an enviable power they 
 have of it ! 
 
 There had been a heavy fog on the water all the 
 morning, and quite a fleet of the river-craft had drift- 
 ed with the tide close on to the Battery. The soft 
 south wind was lifting the mist in undulating sweeps, 
 and covering and disclosing the spars and sails with a 
 phantom effect quite melo-dramatic. By two o'clock 
 the breeze was steady and the bay clear, and the ho- 
 rizon was completely concealed with the spread of can- 
 vass. The grass in the Battery plots seemed to be 
 growing visibly meantime, and to this animated sea- 
 picture gave a foreground of tender and sparkling 
 green ; the trees look feathery with the opening buds; 
 the children rolled on the grass, and the summer 
 seemed come. Much as Nature loves the country, 
 she opens her green lap first in the cities. The val- 
 leys are asleep under the snow, and will be for weeks. 
 
 1 think I may safely announce to you the opening of 
 a new channel for literature. Mr. Stetson, mine host 
 
 of the Astor,asyou are aware, is a man of genius, whose 
 advent, like Napoleon's, was the answer to a demand 
 in the national character. The peculiarly American 
 passion for life in hotels, and the mammoth size to which 
 these luxurious caravansaries have grown, demanded 
 some mind capable of systematizing and generalizing, 
 and of bringing these Napoleonic qualities to bear upon 
 the confused details of comfort and comestibles. I 
 need not enlarge upon the well-known military disci- 
 pline of the Johns and Thomases at the Astor, as most 
 of your readers have witnessed their matutinal drill, 
 and seen the simultaneous apparition of the smoking 
 joints, when the hundred and ten covers have been 
 whisked off by the word of command, like the heads 
 of so many Paynim knights decapitated in their hel- 
 mets. It has been reserved for this epoch to take and 
 digest beef and pudding by platoon, in martinet obe- 
 dience to a controlling spirit in white apron and car- 
 ving-knife ; but, as I said before, it was the exigency 
 of the era, and the historian who records the national 
 trait will emblazon the name of Stetson as its interpre- 
 ter and moulding genius. I am wandering a little 
 from my design, however, which was simply to make 
 an admiring comment on the tact and adaptation of 
 Mr. Stetson, and to show how such minds open the 
 doors to important changes and innovations. Mr. 
 Stetson's observing eye had long since detected, that, 
 if there was any point in which his table d'hote suf- 
 fered by comparison with private and princely ban- 
 quets, it was in the poverty of conversation and the 
 absence of general hilarity. This, of course, was ow- 
 ing partly to the temperance reform, but more partic- 
 ularly to the want of topics common to the guests, 
 the persons meeting there being but slightly acquaint- 
 ed. Music would have furnished a good diapason for 
 ! harmonizing the animal spirits of the company, but 
 this was too expensive; and the first tentative to the 
 present experiment was the introduction of a very fa- 
 cetious wine list on the back of the carte. When 
 people no longer smiled at " Wedding Wine," " Wan- 
 ton Madeira, exceedingly delicate," &c, the French 
 carte was suddenly turned into English (explaining 
 many a sphinx riddle to faithful believers in the cook), 
 and a postscript was added, containing a list of the times 
 of arrival and departure of the mails, and information 
 relative to steamboats and railroads. And with the 
 spring, I understand, this is to be extended into a 
 " Daily Prandial Gazette," and a copy to be furnished 
 to each guest with the soup, containing the arrivals 
 of the day at the hotel, the range of the thermometer, 
 the prospect of rain, " burstings-up" in Wall street, 
 and general advice as to the use of the castors — the 
 whole adapted to the meridian of a table d'hote, and 
 the ascertained demand of subjects for conversation. 
 
 In this improvement your prophetic eye will see, 
 probably, a new field for the ambition of authors (the 
 addition of one poem per diem, for example, coming 
 quite within the capacity of such a gazette), and, if I 
 might venture to saddle Mr. Stetson with advice, I 
 should recommend that it be confined as long as pos- 
 sible to the debuts of young poets, the genial criticism 
 with which they would be read at such time and place 
 being an " aching void" in their present destiny. 
 
 The City Hotel re-opens to-morrow under the care 
 of the omni-recognisant Willard and his partner of 
 the olden time. The building has been entirely re- 
 freshed, refitted, and refurnished, and I am told that 
 in comfort and luxury it far exceeds any hotel in this 
 country. The advances in the commodiousness and 
 elegance of these public houses, their economy com- 
 pared with housekeeping, and the difficulty of ob 
 taining tolerable servants, combine to make an inroad 
 upon the Lares and Penates of the metropolis, which 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 585 
 
 may have an influence upon national character at 
 least worth the noting. Hundreds of persons who, up 
 to these disastrous times, have nursed their domestic 
 virtues in the privacy of their own firesides, are now 
 living at these gregarious palaces, passing their even- 
 U>g* in such society as chance brings together, and | 
 subjecting their children to such influences of body j 
 and mind as belong more properly to a community of ! 
 Owen. Other more obvious objections aside, these ! 
 collections of families are not the most harmonious 
 communities in the world, and the histories of the 
 conflicting dignities and jostling interests of these 
 huddled masses will yet furnish most amusing mate- 
 rial to some future Pickwickian writer. The ladies 
 of the Carlton have lately sent in a remonstrance 
 against the admission of errandless bachelors into their 
 privileged drawing-room, and the brawls of the Gu- 
 elphs and Ghibellines are but a faint type of the con- 
 tentions in the ladies' wing of the Astor for places at 
 table, &cc, &c. I should like to have the opinion of 
 some such generalizing mind as Dr. Channing's or 
 Mr. Adams's as to whether the peculiar gregarious- 
 ness of Americans is a crudity of national character 
 which will refine away, or is only a kind of bolder 
 crystallization characteristic of the freer nuclei of our 
 institutions. Channing long ago fastened the re- 
 proach upon us of having weaker domestic ties than 
 the nations of Europe, though he did not see in it a 
 possible adaptation of Providence to the wants of a 
 wide country waiting for emigrants from families 
 easily dismembered ; and it would not require much 
 ingenuity, perhaps, to find a special Providence in the 
 fact commented on above. But this is getting to be 
 a seriuon. 
 
 Since commencing this letter, 1 have taken a stroll 
 up Broadway, and looked in at the City hotel. Wil- 
 lard was in his place behind the bar, a little fatter than of 
 old, and somewhat gray with cabbage-growing, but his 
 wonderful memory of names and (aces seemed in full 
 vigor ; and, what with the tone of voice, the dexterity 
 of furnishing drinks, the off-hand welcome to every 
 comer-in, and the mechanical answering of questions 
 and calling to servauts, he seemed to have begun pre- 
 cisely where he left oft", and his little episode of farm- 
 ing must seem to him scarcely better than a dream. 
 A servant showed us over the house. A new gentle- 
 men's dining-room, lighted from the roof, has been 
 built in the area behind, and the old dining-room is 
 cut up into a reading-room and private parlors. The 
 famous assembly-room in the second story is also di- 
 vided up into parlors and ladies' dining-room ; but the 
 garnishing and furnishing of the public and private 
 parlors are quite beyond anything I know of short of 
 the houses of nobility and royal palaces. The car- 
 pets are of the finest Wilton and Brussels; the paper 
 upon the walls of the latest Parisian pattern ; a new 
 piano in every parlor ; and the beds and their belong- 
 ings of the most enticing freshness and comfortability. 
 The proprietors have not seen fit, however, to adopt 
 the fashion of " prices to suit the times," but have 
 begun, plump and bold, at two dollars a day, and a 
 shilling a drink. Until the fine edge of all this nov- 
 elty wears off", they may reap a harvest which will re- 
 pay them for their outlay in paint and garnish. One 
 remark might be dropped into Willard's ear to some j 
 advantage — that while he has been resting on his oars 
 at Dorchester, the people "on the town" have become 
 over-epicurean in their exactions of luxuries at hotels, 
 .and it will take some " sharp practice" to beat the 
 "United States" at Philadelphia, and the Astor here. 
 People, at first, who have been accustomed to live at 
 the latter place, will find a certain relief at not being 
 helped to fish and pudding by fire of platoon, but in 
 the long run the systematic service of the Astor 
 achieves comfort. The Atlantic hotel, opposite the 
 Bowling Green, is also in progress of rifarimento ; and 
 its old landlord, Anderson, who made a fortune in it 
 
 once, and kept one of the best houses in the country, 
 opens with it again on the 1st of May. 
 
 I am happy to announce to you that the leaves of 
 the trees in Trinity churchyard have fairly come to 
 light. The foliage in this enclosure is always a week 
 in advance of all others in the city, possibly from ca- 
 daverous stimulus ("to such base uses may we come 
 at last"), and perhaps accelerated particularly, this 
 year, by the heat of the steam-engine, which, with 
 remorseless travestie, perpetually saws stone for the 
 new building over the " requiescat in pace .'" I read 
 the names on desecrated tombstones every day in pas- 
 sing, and associate them in my mind with the people ag- 
 grieved (of whom one always has a list, longer or short- 
 er). Poor ghosts ! as if there was no other place for a 
 steam-engine and a stonecutter's saw than a-top of the 
 sod which (if hymn and prayer go for anything) is ex- 
 pected to "lie lightly on the dead man's breast!" 
 There is many a once wealthy aristocrat, powdered 
 over with the pumice of that abominable saw, who, if 
 he could rise and step down into Wall street, would 
 make sharp reckoning with heirs and executors for 
 suffering his small remainder of this world's room and 
 remembrance to be so robbed of its poetry and re- 
 spect ! Meantime, this exquisitely-conceived piece 
 of architecture (Trinity church) is rising with admira- 
 ble effect, and, when completed, it will doubtless be 
 the first Gothic structure in America. 
 
 We had rather a novel turn-out of a four-in-hand 
 yesterday in Broadway — a vehicle drawn by four ele- 
 phants. There was some grandeur in the spectacle, 
 and some drollery. These enormous specimens of 
 the animal, most like us in intellect and least like us 
 in frame, are part of a menagerie ; and they drew, in 
 the wagon to which they were attached, a band of mu- 
 sic belonging to the concern. They were, all four, 
 en chemise — covered with white cotton cloths to the 
 knees— but, Elssler-like, making great display of their 
 legs and ivory. The ropes were fastened to their 
 tusks, and they were urged by simple pounding on 
 the rear — which was very like flogging the side of a 
 hill, for they were up to the second stories of the 
 houses. To walk round one of these animals in a 
 tight fit of a booth is a very different thing from see- 
 ing him paraded under the suitable ceiling of the sky. 
 I had no idea they could go over the ground so swim- 
 mingly. They glided along with the ease of scows 
 going down with the tide, and, with their trunks play- 
 ing about close to the pavement, seemed to be walk- 
 ing Broadway like some other loafers — looking for 
 something green! 
 
 The Battery, or, as it has been called in England, 
 the "Marine Parade," is never lovelier than in the 
 early freshness of the morning. The air is yet unim- 
 paired by the myriad fires of the city — the dew is un- 
 trodden, and the velvet sheensparkles in the sunshine — 
 the walks are all neatly swept; and, treading pleas- 
 antly upon the elastic earth, invigorated by the fresh 
 breeze from the sea, we cast our eyes over a scene of 
 beauty and enchantment unsurpassed in the world. 
 The correspondent of the Intelligencer says: I have 
 been out on the Battery this morning enjoying life, 
 and everything I saw was in the same humor — trees, 
 children, ladies, and ships-of-war. The very port- 
 holes of the Warspite seemed pleased to have their 
 eyelids up. The Battery is a good deal thronged 
 before breakfast, and really I do not remember a prom- 
 enade in Europe which contains so much that is 
 beautiful. Just now we have three men-of-war lying 
 
586 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 on the stream — the majestic North Carolina and the 
 Independence having come round to their summer 
 moorings. Jersey shore looks fringed with willows, 
 and the islands and Brooklyn heights are bright and 
 verdant. The Croton river is bubbling up in a superb 
 fountain in Castle Garden. The craft in the bay 
 always seem doing a melo-drama — they cross and 
 mingle so picturesquely ; and the trees are always 
 there; and the grass grows better for the children's 
 playing on it. Many thanks to fashion for having 
 taken the rich up-town and left their palaces and the 
 Battery to those who "board." 
 
 I have spent an afternoon, since I wrote to you, in 
 the " animal kingdom" of Herr Driesbach. Four ele- 
 phants together were rather an uncommon sight, to 
 say nothing of the melo-drama performed by the lion- 
 tamer. There was another accidental feature of in- 
 terest, too — the presence of one or two hundred deaf 
 and dumb children, whose gestures and looks of aston- 
 ishment quite divided my curiosity with the show. 
 Spite of the repulsiveness of the thought, it was 
 impossible not to reflect how much of the difference 
 between us and some of the brute animals lies merely 
 in the gift of speech, and how nearly some human 
 beings, by losing this gift, would be brought to their 
 level. I was struck with the predominating animal- 
 look in the faces of the boys of the school, though 
 there were some female children with countenances of 
 a very delicate and intellectual cast. 
 
 I was an hour too early for the " performances," 
 and I climbed into the big saddle worn by " Siam," 
 and made a leisurely study of the four elephants and 
 their keepers and visiters. I had not noticed before 
 that the eyes of these huge animals were so small. 
 Those of" Hannibal," the nearest elephant to me, re- 
 sembled the eyes of Sir Walter Scott ; and I thought, 
 too, that the forehead was not unlike Sir Walter's. 
 And, as if this was not resemblance enough, there was 
 a copious issue from a bump between his forehead and 
 his ear! (What might we not expect if elephants 
 had " eaten paper and drunk ink ?") The resemblance 
 ceased with the legs, it is but respectful to Sir Walter 
 to say ; for Hannibal is a dandy, and wears the fash- 
 ionable gaiter-trowser, with a difference — the gaiter 
 fitted neatly to every toe! The warlike name of this 
 elephant should be given to Siam, for the latter is the 
 great warrior of the party, and in a fight of six hours 
 with " Napoleon," some three months since, broke off 
 both his tusks. He looks like a most determined 
 bruise. " Virginius" (the showman told me) killed 
 his keeper, and made an escapade into the marshes of 
 Carolina, not long ago ; and, after an absence of six 
 weeks, was subdued and brought back by a former 
 keeper, of whose discipline he had a terrific recollec- 
 tion. There are certainly different degrees of amia- 
 bility in their countenances. I looked in vain for 
 some of the wrinkles of age, in the one they said was 
 much the oldest. Unlike us, their skins grow smoother 
 with time — the enviable rascals! I noticed, by-the- 
 way, that though the proboscis of each of the others 
 was as smooth as dressed leather, that of Siam resem- 
 bled, in texture, a scrubbing-brush, or the third day of 
 a stiff beard. Why he should travel with a " hair- 
 trunk," and the others not, I could not get out of the 
 showman. The expense of training and importing 
 these animals is enormous, and they are considered 
 worth a great deal of money. The four together con- 
 sume about two hundred weight of hay and six bush- 
 els of oats per diem. Fortunately they do their own 
 land transportation, and carry their own trunks. 
 
 At four o'clock Siam knelt down, and four or five 
 men lifted his omnibus of a saddle upon his back. 
 The band then struck up a march, and he made the 
 circuit of the immense tent; but the effect of an ele- 
 phant in motion, with only his legs and trunk visible 
 (his body quite covered with the trappings), was 
 
 singularly droll. It looked like an avenue taking a 
 walk, preceded by a huge caterpillar. I could not 
 resist laughing heartily. After one round, Siam 
 stopped, and knelt again to receive passengers. The 
 wooden steps were laid against his eyebrow, and 
 thence the children stepped to the top of his head, 
 though here and there a scrambler shortened the step 
 by putting his foot into the ear of the patient animal 
 The saddle was at last loaded with twelve girls ; and 
 with this " fearful responsibility" on his back, the ele- 
 phant rose and made his rounds, kneeling and renew- 
 ing his load of " innocence" at every circuit. 
 
 The lion-tamer presently appeared, and astonished 
 the crowd rather more than the elephant. A prologue 
 was pronounced, setting forth that a slave was to be 
 delivered up to wild beasts, etc., etc. A green cloth 
 was spread before the cages in the open tent (" parlous 
 work," I thought, among such tender meat as two 
 hundred children), and out sprung suddenly a full- 
 grown tiger, who seized the gentleman in flesh-colored 
 tights by the throat. A struggle ensues, in which 
 they roll over and over on the ground, and finally, the 
 victim gets the upper hand, and drags out his devourer 
 by the nape of his neck. I was inclined to think once 
 or twice that the tiger was doing more than was set 
 down for him in the play ; but as the Newfoundland 
 dog of the establishment looked on very quietly, I 
 reserved my criticism. 
 
 The Herr next appeared in the long cage with all 
 his animals — lions, tigers, leopards, etc. He pulled 
 them about, put his hands in their mouths, and took 
 as many liberties with his stock of peltry as if it was 
 already made into muffs and tippets. They growled 
 and showed their teeth, but came when they were 
 called, and did as they were bid, very much to my 
 astonishment. He made a bed of them, among other 
 things — putting the tiger across the lion for a pillow, 
 stretching himself on the lion and another tiger, and 
 then pulling the leopard over his breast for a " com- 
 forter !" He then sat down, and played nursery. The 
 tiger was as much as he could lift, but he seated him 
 upright on his knees, dandled and caressed him, and 
 finally rocked him apparently asleep in his arms ! He 
 closed with an imitation of Fanny Elssler's pirouette, 
 with a tiger standing on his back. I was very glad, for 
 one, when I saw him go out and shut the door. 
 
 A man then brought out a young anaconda, and 
 twisted him round his neck (a devil of a boa it looked), 
 and, after enveloping himself completely in other 
 snakes, took them off again like cravats, and vanished. 
 And so ended the show. Herr Driesbach stood at the 
 door to bow us out, and a fine, handsome, determined- 
 looking fellow he is. 
 
 Pardon us, ladies — those riding-hats let the sun 
 look in upon your alabaster foreheads — ay, and ever? 
 cross the bridge of your delicate noses ! Take ad- 
 vice ! Wear your hats with a pitch forward rather, 
 like the dames in Charles the Second's time. You 
 look very charmingly on Roulstone's well-broken and 
 well-trained horses, but take not your pleasure at the 
 expense of the bright complexions which we admire. 
 " Sun-burnt," in old English, was an epithet of contu- 
 mely, and 
 
 " The chariest maid is prodigal enough, 
 If she unveil her beauty to the moon," 
 
 let alone the sun. 
 
 We have been paid for letting the world know a 
 great many things that were of no consequence to the 
 world whatever — and, among other nothings, a certain 
 metropoliphobia of our own, on which we have ex- 
 pended a great deal of choice grammar and punctua- 
 tion. We trust the world believes, by this, that, ca- 
 pable as we are of loving our entire species (one at a 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 587 
 
 time), we hate a city collectively. Having a little 
 moan to make, with a little moral at the close, we put 
 this private prejudice once more into type, trusting to 
 your indulgence, good reader. 
 
 This is June — and "where are you going this sum- 
 mer?" though a pertinent question enough, and sea- 
 sonable, and just what anybody says to everybody he 
 meets, has to our ear a little offence in it. If it were 
 asked for information — a la bonne heure .' — we are 
 willing to tell any friend where we are going — this side 
 the Styx. But though the question (asked with 
 most affectionate earnestness by your friend) is merely 
 a preface to enlightening youas to his own "watering- 
 place," there must still bean answer! And suppose 
 that answer, though not a whit attended to, touches 
 upon your secret sorrow — your deucedest bore ! Sup- I 
 
 pose but you see our drift ! You understand, that 
 
 we are to sweat out the summer solstice within the 
 " bills of mortality !" You see that we are to comfort 
 our bucolic nostrils as we best may, with municipal 
 grass — picking here and there a clover-top or an ag- 
 gravating dandelion 'twixt postoffice and city-hall. 
 Heaven help us ! 
 
 True, New York is " open at the top." We are 
 prepared to be thankful for what comes down to us — 
 air, light, and dew. But alas! Earth is our mother! — 
 Earth, who sends all her blessings upward — Earth, 
 who, in the city, is stoned over and hammered down, 
 paved, flagged, suffocated — her natural breath quite 
 cut off, or driven to escape by drain and gas-pipe — her 
 flowers and herbs prevented — her springs shut down 
 from gushing ! This arid pavement, this hot smell of 
 dust, this brick-color and paint — what are they to the 
 fragrant lap of our overlaid mother, with her drapery 
 of bright colors and tender green ? Answer, oh 
 omnibus-horse! Answer, oh worky-editor ! 
 
 But there be alleviations! It is to these that hangs 
 "the moral of our tale." We presume most men 
 think themselves more worthy than "sparrows" of the 
 attention of Providence, and of course most men be- 
 lieve in a special Providence for themselves. We do. 
 We believe that we shall not "fall to the ground with- 
 out" (a) "notice." (But this, let us hope, is antici- 
 pating.) We wish to speak now of the succedaneum 
 thrown in our path for our pastoral deprivations — for , 
 the lost brook whose babbling current turned the 
 wheel of our idleness. Sweet brook, that never 
 robbed the pebbles of a ray of light in running over 
 them! It became a type to us — that brook. Our 
 thoughts ran brook-wise. Bright water, braiding its 
 ripples as its ran, became our vehicle of fancy. We 
 lagged, we dragged, we were " gravelled for lack of 
 matter" without it. And now mark ! — Providence has 
 supplied it — (through his honor the mayor). A 
 brook — a clear brook — not pellucid, merely, but trans- 
 parent — a brook with a song, tripping as musically 
 (when the carts are not goin^ by) as the beloved brook 
 now sequestered to the Philistines — trips daily before I 
 us! Our daily walk is along its border — for (say) a I 
 rod and a half. Meet us there if you will, oh conge- 
 nial spirit ! As we go to the postoffice, we span its 
 fair current at the broadest, and take a fillip in our 
 fancy for the day. Would you know its geography 
 more definitely ? Stand on the steps of the Astor, 
 and gaze over to the sign of " P. Pussedu, wig-maker, 
 from Italy." Drop then the divining-rod to the left, 
 and a much frequented pump will become apparent, 
 perched over a projecting curb-stone, around which 
 the dancing and bright water trips with sparkling feet, 
 and a murmur audible at least to itself. It is the 
 outlet of the fountain in the Park, and, as Wordsworth 
 says, 
 
 " Parching summer hath no warrant 
 To consume this crystal well,'' 
 
 as an order is first necessary from the corporation. 
 
 Oh ! (if it were not for being taken to the watch- 
 house) we could sit by this brook in the moonlight, 
 and pour forth our melancholy moan! But the cab- 
 men wash their wheels in it now, and the echo would 
 be, "Want a cab, sir?" Metropolises, avaunt ! 
 
 Lady Sale's Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan 
 impresses us somewhat with the idea that her ladyship 
 was a Tartar; and she was, perhaps, as "well bestow- 
 ed" in the army as anywhere else, in a world so gene- 
 rally peaceful. It is a roughly-written book, too, in 
 point of style. Indeed she avows : " I do not attempt 
 to shine in rounded periods, but give everything that 
 occurs as it comes to my knowledge." It appears, 
 however, that some injustice to officers, committed, as 
 she acknowledges, "in the heat of temper," have 
 awakened a little censure in England, and have been 
 apologized for by her ladyship. This allowed, there 
 is much to admire — her manly modesty, among other 
 things. Toward the close of her journal, she re- 
 marks : " Nothing can exceed the folly I have seen in 
 the papers regarding my wonderful self — how I headed 
 the troops, &c. Certainly I have headed the troops, 
 for the chiefs told me to come on with them for safety 
 sake ; and thus I certainly did go far in advance of the 
 column; but it was no proof of valor, though one of 
 prudence." We can readily believe that the qualities 
 which gained her ladyship such general admiration, 
 were not of a showy order. As a " soldier's wife," 
 the title she gives herself, she esteemed it her duty to 
 take her part in danger, hardship, and captivity, with- 
 out complaint — to oppose a brave resistance to the foe 
 when others thought only of base submission, and to 
 set an example of invincible fortitude to the host of 
 meaner spirits in the camp. In the extremity of peril 
 and suffering she never murmurs, except when the 
 weakness of the commanders wrings from her some 
 expression of disgust and contempt. Of all the per- 
 sons attached to the army, she had the most real cause 
 of alarm, yet manifested the least. Unlike the other 
 ladies, she was separated from her husband, and heard 
 continually of his battles, his exposure, his wounds. 
 Her son-in-law dies in her arms, and she is left with 
 her widowed daughter in the hands of a band of mer- 
 ciless savages, without one male relative to support 
 her. She is harassed by continual marches in the 
 depth of winter among mountain passes, where the 
 path is so thickly strewn with the mangled corpses of 
 her countrymen, that the hoofs of her horse tread 
 them into the earth ; yet these multiplied ills fail to 
 quell her spirits or conquer her presence of mind. A 
 bullet pierces her arm ; but when the ball is extracted, 
 she treats the wound as a scratch. This kind of for- 
 titude is the only courage which appears estimable or 
 becoming in a woman, and shines with as much lustre 
 in the conduct of Lady Sale throughout those trying 
 transactions, as in any character of which history 
 makes mention. It is scarcely necessary to add, that 
 few books published of late years have such strong 
 claims upon the attention of the public as the present. 
 The author evidently does not desire display; but her 
 courage and magnanimity will secure, in the annals of 
 heroic women, a foremost place for the name of Flor- 
 entine Sale. 
 
 Porcelain and crockery, champagne and cider, sun- 
 shine and candlelight, silver cup and tin dipper, are 
 not of more different quality to our apprehension, than 
 people beautiful and people plain. We do not be- 
 lieve they are to have the same destiny. We believe 
 that the plain and the beautiful are to be reproduced 
 in their own likeness in another world, and that 
 beauty must be paramount alike among men and an- 
 
588 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 gels. We believe everything should be given to 
 beauty that beauty wants — everything forgiven if 
 beauty err. We have no limit to our service of 
 beauty — no imaginable bound to our devotion. We 
 are secondary —subject — born thrall to beauty. And 
 in this faith we shall die. 
 
 But beauty in America is a very differently prized 
 commodity from beauty in England. Let us keep 
 clear of making an essay of this, and show what we 
 mean by parallel examples. Take two beautiful girls, 
 of the same comparative station — Miss Smith, of Lon- 
 don, daughter of a master-in-chancery, and Miss 
 Brown, of New York, daughter of a master-carpenter: 
 — for the former gentleman is about as far below an 
 earl as the latter is below any aristocrat of New York, 
 supposed or acknowledged. 
 
 Miss Brown, of the Bowery, is a lovely creature. 
 She excites curiosity in Broadway. She hinders de- 
 votion, right and left, when she turns round in church. 
 In the best society of New York there is not a pret- 
 tier girl, and nature has made her elegant in her man- 
 ners, and education has done as much for her as was 
 at all necessary. Her father delights in her beauty, 
 and her mother is very proud of her, and she carries 
 her heart in her bosom to do what she pleases with it 
 — but neither Mr. Brown, nor Mrs. Brown, nor Miss 
 Brown, ever dream that her beauty will advance their 
 condition in life one peg. They love her for it — she 
 controls the family by it — she exercises influence as 
 a belle in their own circle of acquaintance — but that 
 is all. She lives a very gay and pleasant life, hears 
 of balls in more fashionable parts of the town without 
 dreaming that, for her beauty, she should be there, 
 and continues a Bowery belle till she marries a Bow- 
 ery beau. And beauty, once married, in that class 
 of our country, is like a pair of shoes once sold — 
 never inquired for again. 
 
 Miss Smith, of London, is a superb girl. Her fa- 
 ther was of dark complexion and her mother a blonde ; 
 and jet and pearl have done their daintiest in her dark 
 eyes and radiant skin. At twelve she is considered a 
 beauty past accident. Her sisters, who were either 
 "all father" or " all mother," grimy dark, or parsnip 
 blonde, are married off to such husbands as would un- 
 dertake them. But for the youngest there is a differ- 
 ent destiny — for she is a beauty. The father wishes 
 for advancement and a title. The mother wishes to 
 figure in high life before she dies. And Miss Smith, 
 young as she is, is taught the difference between a 
 plain young lord in a cab and a handsome lawyer's 
 clerk with a green bag. Beauty, well managed, may 
 be made to open every door in England. Masters — 
 the best of masters for Miss Smith ! More money 
 is spent in " finishing" her than was given to all her 
 sisters for dowries. She is permitted to form few 
 acquaintances of her own sex, none of the other. 
 And when Miss Smith is sixteen, Mrs. Smith makes 
 her first strong push at Lady Frippery (for Mr. Smith 
 has put Lord Frippery under obligations, which make 
 it inevitable that the first favor asked should be grant- 
 ed), and out comes Miss Smith, chaperoned by Lady 
 Frippery at a mixed subscription ball. It is for the ben- 
 efit of the Poles, and the liberal nobility are all there ; 
 and all the beaux of St. James's street, of course, for they 
 like to see what novelty will turn up in such places. 
 One hour after the ball opens, Miss Smith's beauty has 
 been pronounced upon by half the noble eyes of Lon- 
 don, and Lady Frippery is assailed for introductions. 
 The beauty turns out high-bred. Lord George and 
 Lord Frederick torment their Right Honorable mam- 
 mas into calling on Mrs. Smith, and having the 
 beauty at their next ball ; and so climbs Miss Smith 
 to a stratum of society unattainable by her father's 
 law or her mothers wealth, or anything in the world 
 but beauty. She is carefully watched, keeps herself 
 chary, and by-and-by chooses between Lord Freder- 
 
 ick and Lord George, and elevates her whole family 
 by an alliance with the peerage — for in England there 
 is no mesalliance if the lady descended to be of great 
 beauty, as well as virtuous, modest, and well edu- 
 cated. 
 
 But — as we would show by these examples — per- 
 sonal beauty is undervalued in America. At least, it 
 is less valued than in England and older countries. 
 An eminent English artist, recently returned home, 
 expressed his surprise that he had so few beauties 
 among his sitters. " The motive to have a miniature 
 done," said he, " seems, in America, to be affection. 
 In England it is pride. Most of my sitters" (and he 
 had a great many at a very high price) " have been 
 old people or invalids, or persons going away ; and 
 though they wished their pictures made as good-look- 
 ing as possible, their claim to good looks was no part 
 of the reason for sitting. It was only to perpetuate 
 that which was loved and would soon be lost." 
 
 Pray take notice, madam, that we give no opinion 
 as to the desirableness of the English value of beauty. 
 Whether beauty and worldly profit should be kept 
 separate, like church and state — whether it is desecra- 
 ted by aiding the uses of ambition — whether it should 
 be the loadstar of affection or pride — we leave with 
 you as an open question. 
 
 We know nothing of a more restless tendency than 
 a fine, old-fashioned June day — one that begins with 
 a morning damp with a fresh south wind, and gradu- 
 ally clears away in a thin white mist, till the sun 
 shines through at last, genial and luxurious, but not 
 sultry, and everything looks clear and bright in the 
 transparent atmosphere. We know nothing which so 
 seduces the very eye and spirit of a man, and stirs in 
 him that gipsy longing, which, spite of disgrace and 
 punishment, made him a truant in his boyhood. 
 There is an expansive rarity in the air of such a day 
 — a something that lifts up the lungs, and plays in the 
 nostrils with a delicious sensation of freshness and 
 elasticity. The close room grows sadly dull under it. 
 The half-open blind, with its tempting glimpse of the 
 sky, and branch of idle leaves flickering in the sun. 
 has a strange witchery. The poor pursuits of this 
 drossy world grow passing insignificant ; and the 
 scrawled and blotted manuscripts of an editor's table 
 — pleasant anodyne as they are when the wind is in 
 the east — are, at these seasons, but the " Diary of an 
 Ennuyee" — the notched calendar of confinement and 
 unrest. The commendatory sentence stands half- 
 completed; the fate of the author under review, with 
 his two volumes, is altogether of less importance than 
 five minutes of the life of that tame pigeon that sits 
 on the eaves washing his white breast in the spout ; 
 and the public good-will, and the cause of literature, 
 and our own precarious livelihood, all fade into dim 
 shadow, and leave us listening dreamily to the creep- 
 ing of the sweet south upon the vine, or the far-off 
 rattle of the hourly, with its freight of happy bowlers 
 and gentlemen of suburban idleness. 
 
 What is it to us, when the sun is shining, and the 
 winds bland and balmy, and the moist roads with theii 
 fresh smell of earth tempting us away to the hills — 
 what is it, then, to us, whether a poor-devil-author 
 has a flaw in his style, or our own leading article a 
 "local habitation and a name?" Are we to thrust 
 down our heart like a reptile into its cage, and close 
 our shutter to the cheerful light, and our ear to all 
 sounds of out-door happiness ? Are we to smother 
 our uneasy impulses, and chain ourselves down to a 
 poor, dry thought, that has neither light, nor music, 
 nor any spell in it, save the poor necessity of occu- 
 pation ? Shall we forget the turn in the green lane 
 where we are wont to loiter in our drive, and the cool 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 589 
 
 claret of our friend at the Hermitage, and the glorious 
 golden summer sunset in which we bowl away to the 
 c i t y_ mU sing and refreshed? Alas— yes! the heart 
 must be closed, and the green lane and the friend that 
 is happier than we (for he is idle) must be forgotten, 
 and the dry tboafht must be dragged up like a wilful 
 steer and yoked to its fellow, and the magnificent sun- 
 set, with all its glorious dreams and forgetful hap- 
 piness, must be seen in the pauses of articles, and 
 the "bleared een" of painful attention — and all this 
 in June — prodigal June — when the very worm is all 
 day out in the sun, and the birds scarce stop their 
 singing from the gray light to the dewfall ! 
 
 What an insufferable state of the thermometer! 
 We knock under to Heraclitus, that fire is the first 
 principle of all things. Fahrenheit at one hundred 
 degrees in the shade ! Our curtain in the attic 
 unstirred ! Our japonica drooping its great white 
 flowers lower and lower. It is a fair scene, indeed ! 
 not a ripple from the pier to the castle, and the sur- 
 face of the water, as Shelley says, " like a plane of 
 glass spread out between two heavens" — and there is 
 a solitary sloop, with the light and shade flickering on 
 its loose sail, positively hung in the air — and a gull, it 
 is refreshing to see him, keeping down with his white 
 wings close to the water, as if to meet his own snowy 
 and perfect shadow. Was ever such intense, unmiti- 
 gated sunshine ? There is nothing on the hard, 
 opaque sky, but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handker- 
 chief on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the 
 shadow of that tall chimney is as definite as a hair, 
 and the young elm that leans over the fence is copied 
 in perfect and motionless leaves like a very painting 
 on the broad sidewalk. How delightful the night 
 will be after such a deluge of light ! How beautiful 
 the modest rays of the starlight, and the cool dark 
 blue of the heavens will seem after the dazzling clear- 
 ness of this sultry noon ! It reminds one of that ex- 
 quisite passage in Thalaba, where the spirit-bird 
 comes, when his eyes are blinded with the intense 
 brightness of the snow, and spreads her green wings 
 before him ! 
 
 I went to the Opera last night for the first time. 
 The theatre was filled half an hour before the rising 
 of the curtain, and with a very fashionable audience. 
 The ladies had not quite made up their minds whether 
 it was a full-dress affair, but the pit and boxes had a 
 very pari. look. The neighborhood of the orchestra, 
 particularly, looked very Parisian and dressy, as the 
 French beaux (whose heads are distinguishable from 
 Yankee heads by their soigne trimness and polish) 
 crystallize to the beau-nucleus of foreign theatres — 
 the stalies between stage and pit! One of the drop- 
 curtains was a view of Paris; and the principal cur- 
 tain, though representing, I believe, the Croton res- 
 ervoirs, had a foreground of figures such as are never 
 to be seen on this side of the Atlantic. 
 
 The opera was " L'Ambassadrice, by Auber," and 
 the orchestra played the overture with a spirit and fin- 
 ish of execution which was quite enchanting. It 
 was much the highest treat in music which I have 
 yet had in this country. The story of the opera has 
 been the rounds of the papers — an actress marrying 
 an ambassador, trying the mortifications and vexations 
 of sudden elevation to high-life, and returning to her 
 profession. As a play, it was very indifferently per- 
 formed, with the exception only of the part of the 
 duenna by Madame Mathieu. As an actress of com- 
 edy (if I may judge after seeing her once) we have no 
 one in our theatres at all comparable to this lady. 
 Madame Lecourt was next best, and the rest, as play- 
 ers, were not worth criticising. As an opera, the mu- 
 sic rested entirely on the orchestra and the prima don- 
 na, the tenor being good for nothing, and the rest 
 
 mere stopgaps. The great attraction put forward in 
 the advertisements was Mademoiselle Calve\ the pri- 
 ma donna, and, seeing and hearing her over such very 
 large capitals, I was somewhat disappointed. Mad- 
 emoiselle Calve has had a very narrow escape of be- 
 ing a remarkably pretty person. Indeed, filled out to 
 her model — plump as Nature intended her to be — she 
 would be very handsome; and to be what every young 
 Frenchwoman is, is far on the road to beauty — grace 
 and manner, which are common to them all, having 
 so much to do with the effect of the celestial gift. 
 But though she trips charmingly across the stage, 
 gives charming glances, dresses charmingly, and would 
 probably be a very charming acquaintance, she is an 
 inanimate and inexpressive actress. When, for ex- 
 ample, she discovers suddenly that her old lover is in 
 her presence (she becomes a dutchess and he still in 
 his profession as first tenor), she exclaims, " Bene- 
 dict!" as quietly as if she were calling her brother to 
 bring her a chair. There is no interest in her acting 
 — far less any enthusiasm or passion. She sings, 
 however, with great sweetness and correctness, and, 
 if she were not over-advertised, she would probably 
 surprise most persons agreeably. After all, she is a 
 great acquisition to the amusements of the city, and 
 I hope, for one, that she and the "troop" may find it 
 worth their while to do pendulum regularly between 
 this and New Orleans. 
 
 Niblo's Garden opened last week for the season, 
 and to compare it to "a scene of enchantment" would 
 be doing great injustice to its things to drink. I spe- 
 cify this because public gardens are commonly very 
 slipslop in what they term their " refreshments," and 
 (as it was a very exhausting night for the bodily 
 juices) we had an opportunity of testing the quality 
 of ices and " coblers." This aside, there is a great 
 deal about Niblo's, probably, that is very like enchant- 
 ment. The ticket (price fifty cents) admits you to a 
 brilliantly-illuminated hall, opening on one side to a 
 delicious conservatory full of the rarest plants, and on 
 the other to a labyrinthine garden glittering with 
 lights and flowers ; large mirrors at either end of the 
 hall make it look interminable, and the walks are so 
 ingeniously twisted around fountains and shrubberies, 
 as to seem interminable too; and in the immense hall 
 of refreshment there is a bifrons bar, which effectu- 
 ally embarrasses you as to the geography of your ju- 
 lep — all very mystical and stimulative. Thus far, 
 however, it is only tributary to the French theatre, 
 which is completely open on one side to the garden, 
 with half the audience out of doors, and the lobby as 
 cool and summery as a garden-alley. Between the 
 acts the audience go out and air and ice themselves, 
 and a resounding gong gives notice to the stragglers 
 in the labyrinths that the curtain is rising. I have 
 seen no public place so well appointed as this — waiters 
 badged and numbered — seats commodious, and ser- 
 vice prompt — and, above all, a very strict watch at the 
 door for the exclusion of miscellany. 
 
 The play was "Z,e Vicomle de Peturieres" — a kind 
 of Frenchification of Don Juan. The young vaurien 
 was played by Madame Lecourt, and played with a 
 charm of talent and vivacity for which her personifi- 
 cation of Charlotte, in " L , Ambassadrice, ,, had not 
 prepared me. She is the very soul of witching espie- 
 glerie, and made love and did mischief in her hose 
 and doublet to the perfect delight of the audience. 
 The other members of the French company have 
 very much improved on the public liking since their 
 first appearance, and, with more or less excellence, 
 they all belong to a good school of acting. The pri- 
 ma donna, Mademoiselle Calve, is too ill to appear. 
 
 One likes to see every best thing of its kind in the 
 world, and never having been pretent at any of the 
 
590 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Fashion's races, I took a cold ride to Long Island 
 to see her gallop over the course. On the way I 
 picked up some of the statistics of milk, from a com- 
 municative fellow-passenger "who knew," and it 
 may or may not surprise you to know that there are 
 three qualities in this supposed innocent simple of na- 
 ture. There is milk — milk once watered, and milk 
 twice watered ; and sold as such, with three prices, by 
 the owners of the dairies, to the venders in the city. 
 A friend of my companion is a dairyman, he told me, 
 and supplies the American hotel with milk No. 1, at 
 a high price ; so that in the milk line, at least, we 
 may certify that Mr. Cozzens cozens us not. Un- 
 luckily for the Long Island cowmongers, the long arm 
 of the Erie railroad has taken to milking Orange 
 county for the New York market, and the profits of 
 milk and water have very much diminished with the 
 competition. 
 
 It was the great day of the Union races, but the 
 course presented a very dreary sight. There were 
 just people enough to make solitude visible, and the 
 "timer" in the stand looked as bleak as a bell-ringer 
 setting the clock on a cold day in a country belfry. 
 Here and there one of the jockey-club walked about 
 with bis blue badge forlorn in his buttonhole, and 
 here and there an unhappy-looking pie-seller set down 
 his full baskets to blow his fingers; and there were a 
 few sporting trotters in sulkies, and two turnouts such 
 as are common at races, and a wight or two like my- 
 self wondering who enjoyed the " sport" except the 
 riders. All of a sudden a single horse was discovered 
 half round the course, and before I could find out 
 what it was, Fashion had made one of her two-hun- 
 dred-dollar rounds. To take the eight hundred (un- 
 contested sweepstakes), she was obliged to go around 
 four times, and I had a good opportunity to see her 
 movement. She is smaller than I expected, and runs 
 less like a horse and more like a greyhound than any 
 racer I have seen. Sorrel is a color I dislike in beard 
 or horsehair, and her complexion suited me not; but, 
 in make, action, and particularly in expression of face, 
 Fashion is an admirable creature. Of course it takes 
 a sporting-eye to admire the tension of muscle in 
 high training, and the queen of the course would be 
 a better model for a sculptor after a month's grass ; 
 but she is a beautiful sight, and even with the little I 
 have seen of her, I should know her again among a 
 thousand horses — so marked is superiority, in horse or 
 man. 
 
 The other races were nothing very extraordinary. 
 I started for home, cold and sorry. On the road our 
 jarvey stopped to " water horses and liquor passen- 
 gers," and I got sight of a dance calculated to soften 
 my next criticism of the Park ballet. A ferret-eyed 
 fiddler struck up a tune, and an old farmer with gray 
 hairs and one "hermit tooth," jumped into the mid- 
 dle of the barroom and commenced a jig. As the 
 spring of his instep had gone with his teeth, he did 
 the work on his unmitigated heels, and a more sturdy 
 performance I never saw. He danced in greatcoat 
 and hat, with whip in hand, and, after ending his 
 dance by jumping up into a chair and dropping down 
 from it like a pavior's beetle, he paid for amusing the 
 spectators (and this was not a la Fanny the "divine") 
 by giving the fiddler half a dollar. With a look 
 round at the company, and an inquiry whether any- 
 body would like "something wet," he took his drink 
 and got into his wagon. This is one man's taste in a 
 flare-up. 
 
 There is a great change in the "surface of society" 
 within the last two days — straw and white hats having 
 become nearly universal. As we are a nation of black 
 coats (the English call Broadway a procession of un- 
 dertakers), this somewhat brightens up the superficial 
 
 aspect of the city. Summer came upon us with a 
 jump out of a raw easterly fog, and what with the 
 lack of premonition, and the natural incredulity of 
 flannel waistcoats, people went about yesterday clad 
 for cold weather and looking uncomfortably hot. To- 
 day the surprised clouds are gathering for a thunder- 
 storm. 
 
 I see by the papers that the snow prophesied for 
 June by Lorenzo Dow, has fallen in several parts of 
 the country. The other two horns of his triple 
 prophesy for June, 1843, have also come true, for 
 there is "no king in England," and "no president 
 over the United States" — strictly speaking. 
 
 I quite longed yesterday for a magnetic eye, to 
 look into the heads of two or three Chinese who 
 were let loose in the vestibule of the Astor, newly 
 landed from a Canton trader. Their " first impres- 
 sions" of New York, fully daguerreotyped, would be 
 amusing. I understand they have come over in the 
 suite of the Rev. Mr. Boone, missionary from Ku- 
 lang-sa (wherever that is). 
 
 During the summer solstice, the guests at the gen- 
 tleman's ordinary at the Astor are to be furnished 
 with linen jackets to dine in — one on the back of ev- 
 ery chair, "without respect of (the size of) persons." 
 I am told privately that half the expense of these airy 
 furnishings is borne by the venders of fancy suspend- 
 ers, as it is presumed that no gentleman will be willing 
 to " shift himself" before company who is not daintily 
 provided in this line. 
 
 Fond, as we are reproached with being, of foreign- 
 ers in the ornamental walks of society, I observe, by 
 the general tenor of advertisements, that we prefer the 
 indigenous worky. " Wanted," says an advertiser in 
 the True Sun, " a smart American woman xcho can go 
 right through with the work of a small religious fam- 
 ily." Vague as this specification would seem to an 
 English eye, the advertiser's want is most definitely 
 expressed to an American. 
 
 You will have seen with regret the accounts of the 
 sudden death of Mr. Abbott — one of the few remain- 
 ing actors of the Kemble school. He was, in private 
 life, one of the most agreeable and cultivated of men, 
 and is deeply regretted. I understand that his widow 
 is entitled to a pension from the Theatrical Fund of 
 London, of about seven hundred dollars per annum. 
 She was married to him a few months since — a Miss 
 Buloid of the Park theatre. Abbott is said to have 
 been, in his youth, one of the gay associates of the 
 Prince of Wales. 
 
 The Broughams have returned from Boston, and 
 commenced an engagement at the Park Theatre. 
 We are likely to have no more theatrical importations 
 for some time, I think, the late declension of the 
 drama having somewhat damped the repute in Lon- 
 don of American starring. Actors coming out, now, 
 require an advance, and an insurance of a certain de- 
 gree of success, and this our managers are not in a 
 condition to pay. The sufferers by theatrical depres- 
 sion in this country are the actors, who do not get 
 their money unless they draw it. In England the 
 manager must pay his company, by the law of rigor- 
 ous usage, and he is the sufferer till his theatre closes. 
 Booth has been playing wonderfully well at the 
 Park of late, and I understand that the prelty Mrs. 
 Hunt has been cast in one or two new characters, 
 which have drawn out her abilities, very much to the 
 pleasure and surprise of the theatre-goers. 
 
 Broadway has a very holyday aspect now from the 
 competition in the splendor of omnibuses. Several 
 new ones of mammoth size have been turned out, 
 drawn by four and six horses, and painted in the gay- 
 est colors. The handsomest one I have seen is called 
 "The Edwin Forrest." 
 
 The Scotch, who have formed themselves into a 
 military company, and dress in the uniform of the 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 591 
 
 highland regiments of the British army, came out 
 yesterday in philebig and tartan, making a most im- 
 posing and gallant appearance. The bare legs looked 
 rather cool in Broadway, but nature suits the animal 
 to his native climate, and Scotch legs are very com- 
 fortably hair*" 2 observed that a physician, with no 
 distinctive dress except a plaid scarf over his shoul- 
 der, walked with the lieutenant — ready for minister- I 
 ing to any member of the corps who might find the ! 
 exposure unsalutary. He should be skilled in curing | 
 rheumatism, I should say. Apropos of adaptations of ; 
 the physiological features to climate, it is said, I know 
 not with how much truth, that there are islands north i 
 of Great Britain where the females are web-footed. I 
 Hence, perhaps, Grace Darling's heroic self-confidence j 
 on the water. 
 
 New York is all alive with a new musical prodigy — j 
 Mr. Wallace. There is no doubt that he is so far the ] 
 best pianist we have ever heard in this country, as to | 
 dwarf all others in comparison. The musical people j 
 all allow this with enthusiasm. As a violinist, those 
 who should know say he is equal to Paganini. I have j 
 not heard him, but I understand he is a most uncon- i 
 scions man of genius, very eccentric, and is on his 
 way back to Ireland, after having traversed South and [ 
 North America on foot. His pedestrian and musical \ 
 passions are strangely compounded. He has set to a j 
 magnificent air a national anthem, which has been 
 sung by the class under the direction of Mr. George 
 Loder, of this city, with immense eflfect. In this an- 
 them Mr. Wallace has made a remarkable contribu- 
 tion to the musical stores of this country. 
 
 Editors have a very sublime way of lumping Eu- 
 rope, Asia, Africa, and America, and under the dimin- 
 ished monosyllable of the "world," spanning it with 
 their reflections as they would shade an ant-hill with 
 an umbrella. We tell you with becoming coolness 
 what the " gay world" is about, viz. : that a few fami- 
 lies up-town have taken to giving matinees. By the 
 "pious world," we convey the Broadway Tabernacle — 
 by the " mercantile world," Wall street or Pearl. The 
 English have become tired of the phrase, and call the 
 world "Mrs. Grundy." What will be said about any- 
 thing, anywhere between the antipodes, is, " what will 
 Mrs. Grundy say?" And we like this — (as we like I 
 anything which aggrandizes the editorial individual) — 
 only there is the little inconvenience, that when we 
 wish to speak of the world, as defined in the diction- 
 ary, we are subjected to a periphrasis which cumbers 
 our style, or we have to explain that we really mean 
 Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. 
 
 The world is getting on — wrote we at the head of 
 this article, and scratched it out again till we had made 
 a comment on the phrase. We were going into a 
 little disquisition on the evident approach of a new 
 order of things under the sun, as shown by wonderful 
 changes and discoveries all over the world — apropos, 
 however, of a very interesting book which has just 
 fallen into our hands, and of which we wish to give the 
 essence to the reader, in brief. We will omit the dis- 
 quisition on the approach of the millenium (to write 
 which, to say the truth, we sat down this morning), 
 for the weather is too hot, on second thoughts, to do 
 more than allude to a subject connected with a gen- 
 eral conflagration. Let us come at once to the book 
 in question. 
 
 Elevation by hemp has been considered a sovereign 
 remedy for low spirits, and indeed for most of the in- 
 tolerable evils of life — subject, however, to the draw- 
 back that the remedy could be used but once. Will our 
 readers believe that this drawback is entirely removed 
 by a late discovery ? 
 
 Intoxication has been long known to be a state of very 
 considerable happiness, subject to a " tariff which 
 amounts to a prohibition," viz. : complete destruction 
 of the physical man by the residuum. Will the 
 reader believe that, by this same discovery, the resid- 
 uous penalty is removed ? 
 
 By the same discovery, the hydrophobia is changed 
 to a death of physical pleasure — acute and chronic 
 rheumatism are first modified into ecstasy, then 
 cured — a " persuasion of high rank" is engendered in 
 the bosom of the humblest, a " feeling as if flying" is 
 communicated to the dullest and most plethoric. And 
 all this with no penalty, no subsequent physical pros- 
 tration, none of the long train of evils which, till now, 
 have been the inseparable pursuers of intoxication. 
 
 In telling our readers thus much, we have given 
 them the butt-end of one of the most curious subjects 
 we have for a long time been called upon to handle. 
 What we have said is far from a joke. A drug has 
 been discovered by the English in India, which has 
 these wonderful properties ; and the mode in which it 
 is gathered, which we will tell with the same butt- 
 endity, is as novel as the drug. " Men clad in leathern 
 dresses run through the fields, brushing through the 
 plant with all possible violence; the soft resin adheres 
 to the leather, and is subsequently scraped off, and 
 kneaded into balls. In Nipal the leathern attire is 
 dispensed with, and the resin is gathered on the skins 
 of naked natives." 
 
 The plant from which this extraordinary drug is ex- 
 tracted, is Indian hemp ; differing from the hemp of 
 this and other northern countries only by the presence 
 of this narcotic stimulant. There are several prepara- 
 tions of it — one for smoking, one for sweetmeats, and 
 others for beverages and medical compounds — but the 
 effects are, with slight variations, the same. "From 
 the beverage, intoxication ensues in half an hour. 
 The inebriation is of the most cheerful kind, causing 
 the person to sing and dance, to eat food with great 
 relish. The intoxication lasts about three hours, 
 when sleep supervenes. No nausea or sickness of the 
 stomach succeeds, nor are the bowels at all affected." 
 
 The preparation for smoking is called gunjah, the 
 confection is called majoon, and the resin is called 
 churrus. Gunjah is used for smoking only. One 
 hundred and eighty grains, and a little dried tobacco, 
 are rubbed in the palm of the hand, with a few drops 
 of water. This suffices for three persons. A little 
 tobacco is placed in the pipe first, then a layer of the 
 prepared gunjah, then more tobacco, and the fire 
 above all. 
 
 Four or five persons usually join in this debauch. 
 The hookah is passed round, and each person takes a 
 single draught. Intoxication ensues almost instantly; 
 and from one draught to the unaccustomed, within 
 half an hour; and after four or five inspirations to 
 those more practised in the vice. The effects differ 
 from those occasioned by the sidhee. Heaviness, la- 
 ziness, and agreeable reveries, ensue ; but the person 
 can be readily roused, and is able to discharge routine 
 occupations, such as pulling the punkah, waiting at 
 table, &c. We add the following passages from the 
 treatise : — 
 
 " The fourth case of trial was an old muscular 
 cooley, a rheumatic malingerer, and to him half a 
 grain of hemp resin was given in a little spirit. The 
 first day's report will suffice for all : In two hours the 
 old gentleman became talkative and musical, told sev- 
 eral stories, and sang songs to a circle of highly-de- 
 lighted auditors, ate the dinners of two persons sub- 
 scribed for him in the ward, sought also for other lux- 
 uries we can scarcely venture to allude to, and finally 
 fell soundly asleep, and so continued till the following 
 morning. On the noonday visit, he expressed himself 
 free from headache or any other unpleasant sequel, 
 and begged hard for a repetition of the medicine, in 
 
592 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 which he was indulged for a few days and then dis- 
 charged. 
 
 "While the preceding case was under treatment, 
 and exciting the utmost interest in the school, several 
 pupils commenced experiments on themselves to as- 
 certain the effects of the drug. In all, the state of the 
 pulse was noted before taking a dose, and subsequently 
 the effects were observed by two pupils of much intel- 
 ligence. The result of several trials was, that in as 
 small doses as a quarter of a grain the pulse was 
 increased in fulness and frequency ; the surface of 
 the body glowed; the appetite became extraordinary ; 
 vivid ideas crowded the mind ; unusual loquacity oc- 
 curred ; and, with scarcely any exception, great aph- 
 rodisia was experienced. 
 
 " In one pupil, Dinonath Dhur, a retiring lad of 
 excellent habits, ten drops of the tincture, equal to a 
 quarter of a grain of the resin, induced in twenty 
 minutes the most amusing effects I ever witnessed. A. 
 shout of laughter ushered in the symptoms, and a 
 transitory state of cataleptic rigidity occurred for two 
 or three minutes. Summoned to witness the effects, 
 we found him enacting the part of a rajah giving or- 
 ders to his courtiers. He could recognise none of his 
 fellow-students or acquaintances; all, to his mind, 
 seemed as altered as his own condition. He spoke 
 of many years having passed since his student's days ; 
 described his teachers and friends with a piquancy 
 which a dramatist would envy; detailed the adventures 
 of an imaginary series of years, his travels, his attain- 
 ment of wealth and power. He entered on discus- 
 sions on religious, scientific, and political topics, with 
 astonishing eloquence, and disclosed an extent of 
 knowledge, reading, and a ready, apposite wit, which 
 those who knew him best were altogether unprepared 
 for. For three hours, and upward, he maintained the 
 character he at first assumed, and with a degree of 
 ease and dignity perfectly becoming his high situation. 
 A scene more interesting, it would be difficult to ima- 
 gine. It terminated nearly as suddenly as it com- 
 menced, and no headache, sickness, or other unpleas- 
 ant symptom, followed the innocent excess." 
 
 The treatise on this subject, from which we have 
 made the foregoing extracts, is a reprint from the 
 Transactions of the Medical Society of Calcutta, and 
 written by a surgeon in the Bengal army, Mr. 
 O'Shaughnessy, now in this country. It is, as our 
 readers will have seen by the extracts, a very able 
 treatise ; and the experiments, of which we had only 
 room to quote here and there an exponent passage, 
 are described with most lucid clearness. We may 
 refer to this interesting topic again. 
 
 On the day the president arrived, the be-windowed 
 houses of New York seemed to have none too many 
 windows, and if all the men on the tiles had been Ty- 
 ler men, the president's party might for once have 
 been declared formidably uppermost. We know sev- 
 eral things since Mr. Tyler's visit: how many people 
 roofs will hold ; how many heads can look out of one 
 window ; for how little ladies will wave their pocket- 
 handkerchiefs ; " what swells the soldier's warlike 
 breast" (or, rather, what becomes of all the cotton) ; 
 how much extra horse hair it takes to make a dra- 
 goon ; how unanimous a prayer may be put up by 
 four hundred thousand people, for the cutting of the 
 hair of a "prince royal ;" how the devils may be cast 
 out of a barouche and four, commonly used to take 
 frailty to the races, and how a chief magistrate and his 
 suite may innocently enter in ; how gayly a city may 
 be dressed with flags, partly for the president of fif- 
 teen millions of freemen, and partly for the " fat girl" 
 of the museum ; what endurance of horses' hoofs lies 
 in the toes of female "freemen;" and how long and 
 
 far, at a "sink-a-pace," will last the smile of Mr 
 Tyler. 
 
 I presume the entire sanitary and locomotive popu. 
 lation of New York turned out to the show, and a very 
 fine show it was altogether. The military companies 
 would alone have made a sight worth coming far to see, 
 for (by the measurement on Broadway) their brilliant 
 uniforms cover a mile and a half — an expanse of tail- 
 oring (with the exception of the trouserless High- 
 landers) that should make politicians deal kindly with 
 " cross-legs." I remarked, by the way, that, though 
 all the officers of the companies are not fat men, all 
 the fat men among them are officers — a tribute to 
 avoirdupois which should delight the ghost of Sir 
 John Falstaff, spite of his " give me the spare men, 
 and spare me the great ones." I saw one of the 
 plethoric captains rubbing the calf of his leg, after his 
 march of five or six miles over the round stones, and 
 I presume he might have said to the "prince royal," 
 as Sir John did at Gadshill, " S'blood ! I'll not bear 
 mine own flesh as far afoot again, for all the coin in 
 thy father's exchequer." 
 
 Some English friends who were with me, expressed 
 continual wonder at the total absence of raggedness or 
 poverty in the dress of the populace. We can hardly 
 realize how striking is this feature of our country to 
 the eye of a European. They were a good deal 
 amused, too, with the republican license given to a 
 fellow on horseback, either drunk or saucy, who chose 
 to ride in the staff of one of the generals with his coat 
 off, and with the good-nature and forbearance mani- 
 fested by the crowd in their occasional resistings of the 
 encroachments of mounted constables. 
 
 I was told that not only the president, but his 
 friends and suite, were exceedingly surprised' at the 
 reception given him. It was certainly, in every way, 
 calculated to show the honor paid by the people to 
 the office of the chief magistrate ; and Mr. Tyler can 
 not but feel, that while hedged in with the dignity of 
 his office, he is an object of interest and attention 
 with which mere politics conld have but little to do. 
 
 The president having got through with the weather 
 of New York, it was at liberty to rain next day, and it 
 rained. The clouds parenthesised his visit, laying the 
 dust the night before he arrived, and holding up till the 
 night after his departure. I presume it did not rain in 
 Boston next morning — King Lucky having occasion for 
 a dry day. I have heard of but one partial exception 
 to the accurate culmination of the Tyler star. The 
 officer in command on the Battery, finding that he 
 could uot see through the walls of Castle Garden, re- 
 quested to have a flag raised, or some other sign giv- 
 en, to make the movement for the salute, when the 
 president should land. " Oh !" said the marshal, 
 " you needn't bother about that. You'll know by 
 the cheers." The cheers not being audible, however, 
 the artillery rather " hung fire," letting off their con- 
 gratulatory welcome as the president landed — from 
 the high flight of his oration. He had been landed 
 from the steamboat some time before ! Perhaps the 
 congratulation was well timed, and so, very likely, 
 his star (which must be a planet) intended to plan it. 
 A man should be felicitated when he touches terra 
 firma once more, after most public speeches. 
 
 There seems to be a finger pointing the way, even 
 in the picking of flowers by the wayside, for his happy 
 "Accidency." Some pleasurable surprise has been 
 expressed at the careful zeal with which the president 
 kissed the ladies twice round on several occasions, 
 where a limited number had been introduced to him. 
 I was at a loss to know how a man, bred in a state 
 distinguished for the deferential proprieties, should 
 have jumped, ready-armed, to such an act of popular- 
 ity, when a visit to the presidential parlor at How- 
 ard's explained the " starry influence." A French 
 painting, with figures of the size of life, representing 
 
KPHEMERA. 
 
 59* 
 
 Don Juan giving Haidee a most realizing kiss, had 
 been introduced into the apartment by the sumptuary 
 committee! There it stood, a silent indication to 
 thought during his hours of revery, and as the mys- 
 tic intimation occupied, frame and all, one entire 
 wall of the room, the lesson was inevitable. Sequitur 
 the above-mentioned liberal dispensation of kisses. 
 
 I am told that a game of chess is child's play to the 
 diplomacy at work, during the president's visit, for the 
 control of his movements. Office-seekers and office- 
 holders, "authorities," private friends, Spartans, re- 
 pealers, whigs, and locofocos, tugged at his ear and 
 button continually. I trust, if he is fond of contrast, 
 that his ex-excellency will try a second first impres- 
 sion of New York a year or two hence. 
 
 The president's departure was most felicitous as to 
 weather — the loveliness of the sunset, and the beauty 
 of the bay, making up for him the finest of back- 
 ground effects. Some hundreds of people were on 
 the Battery, and the steamboat-wharf was crowded 
 with spectators. As the boat started, the crews of the 
 men-of-war ran up the rigging like disturbed ants, and 
 saluted her as she passed with three cheers. He went 
 out of the harbor with relays of " Hail Columbia," 
 the band on board the boat beginning with it, and the 
 two ships taking it up as he went along. So Colum- 
 bia is decidedly hailed — if it will do it any good ! 
 
 t saw an amusing resurrection of a horse yesterday. 
 One of the military companies were marching gayly 
 down the street on their way to embark for Boston, 
 when a blind horse in a swill-cart, whose calamity was 
 forgotten for the instant by his occupied master, 
 walked deliberately into one of the Croton excava- 
 tions. The harness was just strong enough to break 
 his fall, the cart was left above ground, and he stood 
 on the bottom, as comfortably out of the way as 
 '• truth in a well." The driver was a man for an 
 emergency, and, indeed, acted so much as if it was 
 " part of the play," that a Chinese traveller would 
 probably have recorded it as a melo-dramatic accom- 
 paniment to the show. He took off his coat very qui- 
 etly, picked up one of the shovels of the absent work- 
 men, and commenced filling up the ditch. The loose 
 dirt went in very fast, and the horse, with an in- 
 stinct against being buried alive, rose with the sur- 
 face. From being some inches below the pavement, 
 his head was getting above ground when I left him; 
 and as the old man was still piling on very industri- 
 ously, I presume he soon had him once more at the 
 level of cock-crowing. 
 
 There have been various definitions of "a gentle- 
 man," but the prettiest and most poetic is that given 
 by a young lady of this city the other day: " A gen- 
 tleman," said she, " is a human being, combining a 
 woman's tenderness with a man's courage." 
 
 " Cheap literature" is shaking in its shoes. I un- 
 derstand the publishers "see the expediency" of ma- 
 king their editions more costly, and accommodating 
 them to the smaller sales. The great American maw 
 is surfeited with " new novels" at last. I trust that 
 booksellers and authors will now become slightly ac- 
 quainted. 
 
 What shall it be ? If we understand you rightly, 
 you would prefer on this last page, some well-con- 
 trived nonsense — to wind off trippingly, as it were. 
 Wisdom is respectable. Pictures, poetry, prose, pa- 
 thos, and puffery, are all very well — but after being 
 instructed, you wish to be let out of school. Js 
 that it? 
 
 Something about " town," of course. Folly lives 
 here, all the year round. Fashion is exclusively ur- 
 han. And when we have mentioned these two, we 
 have named the persons in our acquaintance about 
 •vliom there is, by much, the liveliest curiosity. What 
 38 
 
 Folly is doing in town, and what is the last antic of 
 Fashion, are departments of news that are read before 
 the deaths and marriages — " as nobody can deny." 
 Fashion be our theme, then, "for the nonce." We 
 would devote this page to it eternally, if we dared. 
 That we should please you by so doing, we very well 
 know. But the owl is the king of types, and wisdom 
 has, of print, a chartered monopoly — hang her! 
 
 Well, madam, the fashions. Let us begin at the 
 small end of the horn, and touch first upon the crock- 
 ery sex — winding off with the china and porcelain. 
 
 The gentlemen, who had been previously let up, 
 have been lately let down. Straps were abandoned by 
 the cognoscenti last autumn — with the first "slosh." 
 Suspenders were abandoned with the first intimation 
 of the present summer solstice. There is at present 
 no unnatural restraint upon trousers. They are pre- 
 vented from coming up by their natural gravity — from 
 coming down by being "caught on the hip." Shoul- 
 ders are emancipated from the caprices of genuflec- 
 tion. The hollow of the foot suffers no longer from 
 the shrug of incredulity. The nether man, in short, 
 is free, sovereign, and independent. 
 
 Among the advantages of this revolution is the 
 cleanly circumstance that the boot, in its nightly exit, 
 is no longer compelled to make a thoroughfare of the 
 leg of the pantaloon. This is an " inexpressible" re- 
 lief. Buttons, also, are subjected no longer to the 
 severe trials of stooping. Boots, unhappily, can no 
 longer conceal their " often infirmities" — high polish 
 and indifference to surprise and exposure being indis- 
 pensable accompaniments to their present loose asso- 
 ciations. As an offset to the expensiveness of this, 
 the pantaloons themselves will not be so frequently 
 in-kneed. 
 
 Frock-coats are going out of fashion, and Newmar- 
 ket cut-aways are worn for the morning. Very well 
 for those who have small hips, as the latter are rather 
 spready. This exacts also great tidiness in the cut of 
 the "continuations." Waistcoats are made longer, 
 and with drooping wings, to conceal any little vagaries 
 in the newly emancipated trousers. But this, too, 
 exaggerates unbecomingly the apparent size of the 
 hips. " The pyramid inverted" is our model, by the 
 laws of art, as the " pyramid proper" is that of the 
 ladies. Gaiters are the mode — but they require a 
 neat pastern. Your greyhound breed of man looks 
 well in them. They should be made separate from 
 the shoe, for they require washing, and your unscru- 
 pulous dingy shoe is an abomination. Patent leather, 
 of course, till death. 
 
 Hats are a delicate subject. There should be as 
 many fashions of them as there are varieties of human 
 faces. Indeed, hats should be destined and allotted 
 to men, as irrevocably as noses and hair — suitable by 
 infallible harmonies of physiognomy. We should be 
 born in hats — hats that would grow without materially 
 altering in shape or expression. We would as soon 
 let a barber choose us a nose as a hatter a hat. And 
 as to a fashion in hats — one fashion for all men — 
 where is thy rebuke, oh Nature, tortured and traves- 
 tied ! But still, fashions there be ! John Bull is at 
 present wearing his hat very small — the Frenchman is 
 wearing his very large. The Yankee wears his very 
 peaked — the German wears his very flat. We scorn 
 to give the encouragement of print to any one of 
 these. Suit yourself— since Nature has left you un- 
 finished. Take counsel of an artist or of a woman. 
 Buy no hat rashly. 
 
 As to the ladies, we would not, like 
 
 " Fools, rush in where angels fear to tread," 
 but we must be permitted to record our little private 
 distress and apprehension at the utter cessation of all 
 novelty in their fashions. The one new stuff of 
 "Balzarine," unless we are in a most benighted state 
 of ignorance, comprises the entire variety of the sea- 
 
594 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 son. We meet our few sins of idolatry in the very 
 bonnets, the very boddices, the very namelessnesses 
 of last year's product and admiration ! Are the brains 
 of milliners subject to drought ? Is invention dried up 
 — fancy, imagination, quite squeezed dry? Are we to 
 be subjected to sameness in angels — one eternal and 
 unchanging exterior ? Forbid it, while the world 
 continues sinful, oh sumptuary powers! We could 
 not bear, in our present state of mind, the angelic liv- 
 ery of one eternal gown (wings, if you like to call it 
 so), with no new hat, no ravishing garniture for the 
 shoulders! Oh no ! Immolate the milliners for their 
 dull brains ! Turn your genius into this seemingly 
 exhausted channel, oh, unemployed painters! Show 
 us woman — like the opal or the cloud — dressed in 
 new colors whenever she comes into the sun ! Adora- 
 bly sweet as she is, she is sweeter for the outer spice 
 of variety ! 
 
 If to lack classes of society which another nation 
 possesses, be a falling behind that nation in refine- 
 ment (query, whether !), we are behind England, at 
 least, in this degree, that we possess no class of table- 
 talkers. Dinner-parties in this country are gather- 
 ings-together of friends, chiefly to eat, and to chat, 
 as it may happen. The host has been at great pains 
 to procure a haunch of venison, but he has not 
 thought of " the wit" for dinner. He has neither 
 overlooked the olives nor the currant-jelly — but, alas! 
 the attic salt is forgotten ! The tomatoes will flank 
 the roast, and the celery-sauce the boiled — but who 
 is to listen to Doctor Gabble, or draw out Alderman 
 Mumchance ? There will be two misses and no " el- 
 igible," or two eligibles and no miss. The dinner is 
 arranged with studied selection, but the guests are in- 
 vited by the alphabet. The eating will be zealous and 
 satisfactory, but the " entertainment" as the god of 
 dulness pleases. 
 
 So provides not his dinner, this gentleman's foreign 
 correspondent (we take one of the same class), in 
 Russell square. Mr. Mordaunt Figgins (large trader 
 and small banker, of Throgmorton street) wishes, we 
 will say for example, to give a very smart and impres- 
 sive dinner to Mr. Washington, Wall street, just ar- 
 rived with a travelling credit from New York. The 
 butler sees to the dinner — ca va sans dire. Who 
 shall be asked ? Smith, of course. His jokes will be | 
 all new to the Yankee, and it will look spirituelle to 
 have an author. He will be sure to come — for Fig- 
 gins discounts his bills. Put down Smith. Who 
 next? We must have a lord. Smith won't show off 
 without a lord, and the American will all but go into 
 fits to meet one at dinner. Let's see ! There's old 
 Lord Fumble, always wanting to borrow ten pounds. 
 Put down Lord Fumble. So— a lord and a wit. Now, 
 two good listeners. They must be ladies, of course. 
 We shall have too many black-coats. What, ladies 
 listen, Mrs. Figgins? The Pimpkinsons. Well— they 
 are poor and stylish-looking, and the Yankee knows 
 nothing of the blue-book. Say the Pimpkinsons. 
 Now for a dandy or two, and one handsome woman 
 that flirts, in case Jonathan is a gay man. And, I 
 say, Mrs. Figgins, there'll be a spare seat, and you 
 may ask your mother — only she must dress well and 
 say nothing of "the shop." And duly at eight 
 o'clock Mr. Figgins's guests arrive — Smith wishing 
 bills could be discounted without black-mail interest— 
 my Lord Fumble turning up his (inward) nose, but 
 relieved to meet Smith — the dandies hungry and su- 
 percilious — the Misses P. delighted and frisky — and 
 the Yankee excessively well-dressed and dumbfound- 
 ed to meet Smith and a live lord. Smith talks to the 
 lord and at the Yankee, the rest play their parts "as 
 cast in the bill," and everybody goes off delighted. 
 The dinner was a hit, and Smith was " never so bril- 
 
 liant" — if Mrs. Figgins and Mr. Washington, Wall 
 street, can be relied on. 
 
 Let us glance at another phase of the "life of thf 
 diner-out." Mr. Smith has accepted one of his mos 
 agreeable invitations — a west-end dinnei, with a no- 
 bleman for his host. Mr. Smith is the son of a music- 
 master, and of course was born with an indisputable 
 claim to the supreme contempt of his noble convives. 
 By his talents, and more particularly by his agreenbla 
 powers, however, he has uncurled the lip of scorn, 
 and moves in aristocratic society, a privileged intru- 
 der. In the drawing-room, before dinner, Mr. Smith 
 is ceremoniously polite — he is the one man in the com- 
 pany who dare not venture to be at his ease. Dinner 
 is announced. The ladies are handed down by those 
 who are born his betters, and he follows, silent and 
 alone. He takes the seat that is left, wherever it be, 
 and feels that he must be agreeable to his neighbor, 
 whoever it be — at least till the conversation becomes 
 general, when he is expected to shine. Meantime 
 his brain is busier than his stomach, for he is watch- 
 ing for an opening to a pun, and studying the guests 
 around him to arm his wit and lay traps for his sto- 
 ries. If, by chance, he is moody or ill at ease, he 
 has not the noble privilege of reserve or silence. 
 Not to talk — Smith not to be funny — were outrageous! 
 " What was the man asked for ?" would have been 
 the first exclamation after his departure. Oh, no ! he 
 must be brilliant, route quHlcoute; and as he is ex- 
 pected to extemporize verses at the piano after dinner, 
 he must be cudgelling his invention at the same time 
 to get together the material, and weave in the current 
 news of the day, and the current scandal of the hour, 
 with, of course, the proper seasoning of compliment 
 to lords and ladies present. Hie, labor, hie opus est! 
 The dishes are removed and the desert is set on the 
 table, and Mr. Smith,- who hrfjj hitherto kept up a 
 small fire of not very old puns on the meats and their 
 concomitants, becomes the object of general, but im- 
 passive and supercilious expectation. His listeners 
 are waiting to be amused, without feeling the slightest 
 obligation to draw out his wit by their own, and after 
 this wet blanket has made his efforts hang fire for 
 some time, the master of the house calls for "that 
 very droll story" — the same song and story having 
 been not only told often before, but expanded and em- 
 bellished in the New Monthly or the John Bull. 
 Wishing lords would tell stories of their own (which 
 they never do), and dreading lest the company are al- 
 ready familiar with his story, Smith affects to select 
 one listener to whom it is quite new, and to tell it for 
 his individual amusement. In the midst of his narra- 
 tion, he discovers by some maladroit interruption that 
 this person knows the story by heart, and, obliged to 
 finish it without the zest of novelty, he makes a 
 failure, and concludes amid a general silence. We 
 have seen this happen once, and, from the nature of 
 things, it must happen often. Who would wear such 
 laurels ? Who would wish this state of society intro- 
 duced — this yet unforged link added to the social 
 chain of America ? 
 
 It is the common argument with the advocates of a 
 monarchical form of government, that the arts and 
 literature would be better fostered — that the wealth 
 of which 'patronage is a growth, is only accumulated 
 by primogeniture and entail. Heaven defend us from 
 such fostering, say we ! Heaven defend us from such 
 patronage ! No, no ! Genius is proud ! Genius is 
 humbled and cowed, damped and degraded by pat- 
 ronage — " patronage" so called, we mean. The man 
 gifted by his God with superiority to his fellows, does 
 not, without an anguish of shame, yield precedence 
 to the nobility of a king's patent. He is self-humbled 
 when he does it. He loses the sense of superiority, 
 without which he is no more noble in genius than the 
 knight is noble in the field when his spurs are hacked 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 595 
 
 off by the herald. There is no equality, felt or un- 
 derstood, between lord and author in England. It 
 pleases authors so to represent it in books, but they 
 never felt it. We have seen the favorites of the day 
 in their hour of favor, and heard enough said of them 
 to show us how much more would be said to ears 
 more confidential. Through all the abandon, through 
 all the familiarity of festive moments, when there is 
 nothing which could be named which marks a distinc- 
 tion between noble and simple, there is an invisible 
 arm for ever extended, with reversed hand, which the 
 patronized author feels on his breast like a bar of iron. 
 He never puts it aside. He never loses the remem- 
 brance of his inferiority. He is always a parasite— 
 always a belier of God's mark of greatness, the no- 
 bility of mind. 
 
 If we are remarkable for anything worth putting 
 your finger on, it is for a kind of divining-rod faculty 
 that we have — useful to everybody but ourself. We 
 can point to hidden treasure with a dip infallible — if 
 it be for another man'a benefit. In our own case, and 
 for our own profit, we are, like all enchanted rods 
 when dropped from the hand of the enchanter — a 
 manifest and incapable stick. In the exercise of this 
 vicarious faculty, we are about to take a walk up 
 Broadway (on paper), and by pointing to undiscovered 
 values, show to several persons how they can make 
 their fortunes. 
 
 Here we are at the Battery — the most popular re- 
 sort in town, and the most beautiful promenade in the 
 known world. Within three minutes' walk of this 
 lovely spot reside at least two or three thousand for- 
 eigners, the lower part of Broadway being their cho- 
 sen and favorite quarter, and the " marine walk" their 
 constant lounge. Bachelors innumerable of our own 
 nation herd hereabout. The great baths of the city 
 are near by, and any additional inducement would be 
 the last drop in the bucket of attraction, and would 
 double the number of Battery-frequenters. Where 
 in the world beside, is there — unoccupied — such a 
 place for a cafe ? 
 
 Dispossess yourself, dear reader, of all impressions 
 of cafes as you see them now, and of all idea of cof- 
 fee and other friandises such as are commonly served 
 to you in places so called. We speak of a Parisian 
 cafe, — a palace of cushions, gilding and mirrors, sump- 
 tuous as a thing rubbed out of the lamp of Aladdin, 
 and presided over by a queen of the counter in the 
 shape of a lady only less pretty than respectable. 
 We speak of a luxurious and fashionable saloon, 
 where, in the neighborhood of a lovely promenade, 
 gentlemen and their dames and daughters can find 
 faultless coffee, and faultless ices and fruits— a place 
 to resort to in the slow hours, to rest in after a walk, to 
 find refreshment after a bath, to meet friends and ac- 
 quaintances. Why, in any city of Europe there 
 would be dozens of cafes around a spot so enchanting. 
 And we are fast overtaking Europe in the taste for 
 these approved luxuries, and, in our opinion, the pub- 
 lic is quite ready for this ! In the month of April 
 just gone by, there were placards " to let" upon the 
 doors of the two houses facing the Battery between 
 Greenwich street and Broadway. What an opportu- 
 nity lost! What safer investment of capital could 
 there be than to have expended a few thousand dol- 
 lars upon the lower story and basement of this block, 
 making of it a grand cafe? What in Europe could ex- 
 ceed the beauty of the prospect from its windows and 
 doors, the freshness of its unpolluted air, the shade 
 upon its sidewalk from the magnificent trees in front, 
 and the charms of scenery and promenade immedi- 
 ately adjoining? We only wonder that to such a 
 "call" of opportunity, a cafe did not spring through the 
 
 ground like a mushroom, ready furnished with coffee 
 and curacoa, silver spoons and a lady at the counter! 
 
 Since we are not a Frenchman, nor a German, no. 
 an "adult alien" of any description, we are sorry to 
 saythat these ultra-marine dwellers among us have 
 more taste than we for fine scenery, elegant resorts, 
 and fresh air. Foreigners monopolize the bright spot 
 of Manhattan. The Battery is their nucleus. Fash- 
 ion, indigenous fashion, has gone up town — an " up- 
 town" hedged off from the rivers on either side by 
 streets unfootworthy, and neighborhoods never pene- 
 trated to the water-side on any errand but business 
 — leaving to foreigners the only spot in this vast 
 island-city where the view and fresh air of the sea are 
 decently accessible. On this string we have harped 
 before, and we leave it now with a little suggestion 
 that we can not so well bestow elsewhere — that while 
 this cafe project is in process of incubation, the au- 
 thorities would oblige us and the remainder of the 
 public by giving us a comfortable seat or two with 
 backs to "them in the shady avenues of the Battery. 
 
 And now, to come up Broadway a little. In all 
 countries but this, rooms commanding advantages of 
 vierv have a proportionate high value as lodgings, and 
 are furnished and let accordingly. Without stopping 
 at the buildings whose value as residences are so much 
 increased by the oppositeness of the superb structure 
 and its leafy surroundings in Trinity churchyard, let 
 us come at once to the Park. From the corner of 
 the American Museum to the church in Beekman 
 street extends a line of buildings, the advantages of 
 which as to neighborhood and prospect would com- 
 mand the highest price, as lodgings, in any other city 
 in the world. The superb fountain — the trees and 
 grass of the enclosure — the views of the magnificent 
 church and hotels, and the thronged pavement of 
 Broadway opposite, are all visible from those desirable 
 chambers. The large company of single gentlemen 
 who occupy rooms similarly situated in other cities — 
 gentlemen who want lodging-rooms and breakfast, and 
 dine wherever they like — are compelled to dive into 
 the dark side-streets, and either live in pent-up quar- 
 ters quite away from this centre of attraction, or un- 
 dertake the life of hotels which has, for many of 
 them, serious objections. Luxuriously fitted and 
 furnished, with a housekeeper and the usual appli- 
 ances of English lodging-houses, this line of build- 
 ings would be unequalled in attractions to bachelors. 
 Everything they desire in a residence would be there 
 attained — centrality, comfort, and accessibility. We 
 recommend to the landlords who now let rooms, com- 
 manding such advantages, for cheap lodgings, bar- 
 ber's shops, and lumber-rooms, to turn their attention 
 forthwith to this obviously better account, and at the 
 same time embellish and improve the most conspic- 
 uous part of the city. 
 
 We were going into various other details of the un- 
 improved capabilities of New York, but verbum sap. 
 Our drift is visible, and it is only necessary in refer- 
 ence to such subjects to set the wide-awake to think- 
 ing. 
 
 The extreme heats of the last week or two have 
 depopulated country-seats, and driven thousands from 
 the open glare and thin roofs of rural resorts, to the 
 shady sidewalks and stone walls of the more temperate 
 city. The dim and cool vestibules of the large hotels 
 are thronged with these driven-in strangers; ftlfl in 
 the refreshing atmosphere of the manifold iced drinks 
 and their varied odors of mint and pine-apple, they 
 bless Heaven for the cooling luxuries of cities, pitying 
 all those whose destiny or poverty confines them to 
 the unmitigated country. Enjoying, as we do, the 
 blessings of metropolitan protection in July, we feel 
 called upon to express our deep sympathy with those 
 
596 
 
 EPHEMERA 
 
 unfortunate beings, who, in places of public resort, or 
 in private cottages, are fulfilling their sad destiny of 
 sultry exposure. The once porous hill-sides and val- 
 leys, baked by the sun to the induration of a paved 
 street, lack the delicious sprinklings of Croton water- 
 pipes. The warm milestones, few and far between, 
 do but remind the scorched passer-by of the gushing 
 hydrants of Broadway. The tepid spruce-beer and 
 chalky soda-water of the country-inns only deepen the 
 agony of absence from "juleps" and "cobblers." 
 What would not these poor sufferers give for a brick 
 block between them and the sun ! How would they 
 not bless Heaven for the sight of the cold sweat on a 
 wall of unheated and impermeable granite ! What 
 celestial bliss would it not be, to see, on a country j 
 road, at every few yards' distance, black boys, unpaid 
 and unthanked, directing, like benign angels, streams 
 of the pellucid element across their sultry way ! Ah! 
 the luxury, in the summer-heats, of city-walls and 
 city refrigerations ! 
 
 It has been unreflectingly thought that there were 
 two classes of human beings overworked and uncared 
 for. It has been said that there was no Providence j 
 for housemaids and editors. The predecessors of 
 these laborious animals, it was supposed, had, in some j 
 previous metempsychosis, committed sins which 
 doomed their posterity to perpetual toil. It is true, I 
 theirs is a destiny of crash, in a world, for others, of j 
 comparative diaper and dimity. But, mark the alle- j 
 viations ! The first of July comes round, and Heaven 
 inflicts upon the task-masters and mistresses of these \ 
 oppressed maids, a locomotive insanity. With toil 
 and sweat they pack up their voluminous traps, and 
 embarking in a seething boat they depart, prating and 
 red-faced, on their demented travels. They go from 
 place to place, packing and unpacking, fretting and j 
 sweating from day to day, and arriving at last at the 
 grand fool-doni of Saratoga, they take up their lodg- i 
 ing for a month in chambers of pill-box dimensions, 
 pitiably persuaded that the smell of pine partitions, ; 
 and the pitchy closeness of shingled roofs reeking in 
 the sun, are the fragrance of the fields, and a blessed 
 relief from the close air of the city ! So, for weeks, 
 they absent themselves, deluded. The housemaid, j 
 meantime, has possession of the cool and spacious j 
 dwellings deserted for her use. The dragged muscles 
 relax over her collar-bone and shoulders, for she has 
 now no water to carry up-stairs and down. She re- 
 covers the elasticity in the small of her back, and the 
 natural distribution of red and white in her flushed 
 and overheated complexion. The well-contrived blinds, 
 closed in the freshness of the morning-hours, keep the 
 house cool and dim for her noontide repose. The spa- 
 cious drawing-rooms are hers, in which to wander at 
 will, barefoot if she likes, on the luxurious carpets. 
 The bath-rooms are near her bed, and the ice-man 
 comes daily to the door, and unless she choose to step 
 out upon the sidewalk at noon, she scarce need know 
 it is summer. Ah, the still coolness of thick brick 
 walls and ample rooms within ! Her worn-out frame 
 recovers its powers, and in the goodness of her heart 
 she can afford to send pitying thoughts after the exiled 
 and infatuated sufferers at Saratoga! 
 
 Negatively blessed is her fellow-sufferer, the editor, 
 meantime — liable as he is to this same locomotive lu- 
 nacy, and kept within reach of enjoyable and health- 
 preserving luxuries by the un-let-up-able nature of his 
 vocation. Nor this alone. He has his minor reliefs. 
 Omfri-acquainted as he necessarily is, and mostly with 
 the unhappy class self-exiled to the inclement coun- 
 try, his weary arm now lies supine in delicious indo- 
 lence at his side. The habitual five hundred visits, 
 per diem, of his right hand to the rim of his hat, are 
 no more exacted. The two hundred and fifty sugges- 
 tions, per diem, as to the conduct of his paper, the 
 course of his politics, and his private morals, are no 
 
 longer to be thankfully received. The city is full, but 
 full of strangers, charmingly unconscious of his ex- 
 treme need of counsel. He walks to and fro at 
 ease, looking blandly at the hydrants, blandly at the 
 strange faces, blandly at the deliciously unfamiliar 
 contents of the omnibuses. He dwells in a crowd, in 
 heavenly solitude. He is like a magnetized finger on 
 the body of a man with a toothache — apart from the 
 common pulse, sequestered from the common pain — 
 yet in his habitual place and subject to no separation. 
 He has no engagements to meet gentlemen or com- 
 mittees, for the better manufacture of public opinion. 
 He can shilling it to Staten Island for sea-air, or six- 
 pence it to Harlem for an evening sight of the blood- 
 warm grass, in blessed silence! And so fly the sum- 
 mer months, like three leaves of the book of paradise 
 turned back by chance ; and, refreshed with new cour- 
 age, the doomed editor renews, in September, the 
 multitudinous extras of his vocation. Oh kindly 
 Providence, even for housemaids and editors ! 
 
 A true leaf from the thoughts of a woman of genius 
 on the subject of woman's love, is stuff to dwell upon 
 in the reading. We totally differ from one of the 
 sweetest writers of the time, Mrs. Seba Smith, on the 
 following disparaging passage touching the love of a 
 gentle and confiding woman as contrasted with that 
 of a proud one. Let our readers judge. The pas- 
 sage occurs, by-the-way, in a story which is the gem 
 of the whole year of monthlies, called "The Proud 
 Ladye" — in Godey's Lady's Book. "The love of a 
 gentle and confiding woman, with its perpetual ap- 
 peals to tenderness and protection, must be dear, very 
 dear to a manly heart ; but then it too often lacketh 
 that exclusive and earnest devotion which imparts a 
 last toucli of value, its sympathies are too readily ex- 
 cited, and the images of others, faint and shadowy it 
 may be, yet still images, too often sit, side by side, with 
 the beloved. But the love of a proud woman, with 
 its depths of untold tenderness, rarely stirred, yet, 
 when once awakened, welling up a perpetual fountain 
 of freshness and beauty, its concentred and earnest 
 faith, its unmingled sympathies, its pure shrine, raised 
 to the beloved, burning no incense upon strange altars, 
 and admitting no strange oblations, the love of such a 
 one should invest manhood with tenfold dignity — 
 should make him fee) as a priest in the very presence 
 of the divinity." 
 
 " Things lost in air" are not always unproductive, 
 Signora Castellan having received, last night, about 
 two thousand dollars for singing four songs. Signor 
 Giampietro, her husband, may well say that " a sweet 
 voice is a most excellent thing in woman." I made 
 one of the twenty-five hundred who composed the 
 audience of this successful cantatrice last evening, and 
 having missed her introductory concert, this was the 
 first time I had seen her. I should take Madame 
 Castellan to be about twenty-three. She is a plump 
 little Jewess, with an advantage not common to plump- 
 titude — a very uppish and thoroughbred neck, charm- 
 ingly set on. A portrait of her dimpled shoulders 
 and the back of her head would be a fit subject for 
 Titian. Her countenance expresses an indolent sweet- 
 ness, with none of the wide-awakity so common to her 
 tribe — and, indeed, the description of the Persian 
 beauty by Hafiz occurred to me in looking at her: — 
 " Her heart is full of passion and her eyes are full of sleep." 
 
 A most amiable person I am sure she is — but, unless 
 I am much mistaken, there is none of Malibran's 
 intellectual volcano in the "crayther," and the molten 
 lava is what is wanting to make her equal or compar- 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 597 
 
 able to that wonderful woman. I certainly do not 
 think we have heard a voice in this country, not even 
 Malibran's, of more astonishing compass tlian Ma- 
 dame Castellan's. There is not a chamber in her 
 throat where a cobweb could remain unswept for a 
 moment. Her contralto notes are far beyond the plum- 
 met of ordinary "soundings," and as rich and effort- 
 less as the gurgle of a ringdove, while her soprano 
 tones go up with the buoyancy of a lark, and raise on 
 tiptoe all the audience who are not fortunate enough 
 to obtain seats. Still, in ascending and descending on 
 this angel's ladder, she misses a round now and then. 
 There are transitions which catch, somehow. She 
 wants fusion. In her trills more particularly, the bal- 
 ance is one-sided, and there is a nerve in the listener's 
 besoin which is not reached by the warble. Give her 
 more practice, however, more passionateness or brandy 
 and water, and she would melt over these trifling 
 flaws, without a doubt. So near perfection as she is, 
 it seems almost impertinent to criticise her. 
 
 New York has some radii to its outer periphery 
 which are well worth the stranger's following in the 
 way of excursions. The promontory which makes 
 the jumping-off" place at the seaward end of the Nar- 
 rows, is one of these, and upon it (next door to the 
 fishing-huts of Galway), stands one of the most luxu- 
 rious hotels in this country. A friend gave me a 
 delightful drive to it the other day, via a little flourish 
 among the knolls of Long Island, and, as it chanced 
 to be the hottest day of the season, I can speak advi- 
 sedly of the ocean air of Fort Hamilton. To be 
 handed over from the Battery to such a cool place, in 
 half an hour, by the long arm of a steamer, is one of 
 the possibilities that make New York very habitable. 
 
 The marvel of New York just now is"tiik Al- 
 hamra" — an ice-cream resort lately opened a little 
 below Niblo's. The depth of the building on Broad- 
 way is pierced for a corridor entrance, and this is lined 
 with counters tended by the prettiest Hebes of their 
 class. Traversing this alley of temptation, you de- 
 scend to a marble-paved circular court, tented with 
 gayly-striped awnings and gorgeous colors of barbaric 
 architecture. The seats are around a fountain, and a 
 statue of a water-nymph stands in the centre, holding 
 above her head a horn, from which issues the water, 
 in a jet resembling a glass umbrella. The basin is 
 rimmed with flowers, the falling water makes the con- 
 stant murmur which is needful for a tete-a-tete, the sky 
 looks in through the lacings of the blue and white awn- 
 ing, and " the ices are made of pure cream." The 
 whole scene is more oriental than Spanish, and would 
 have been better named a serail or a kiosk than the 
 Alhamra, but it is a "fairy-spot" (as well as a man 
 can judge who has not seen fairy-land), and, for the 
 price of an ice-cream, it gives the untravelled a new 
 idea of luxury. 
 
 Great as the difference is between the scents of 
 moist earth and splashed dust, the latter, faule de 
 mieux, comes up to your nostrils very agreeably, as 
 you sit at your summer morning's work in a city win- 
 dow. It is a day to be thankful for "wet" in almost 
 any shape. Yet it shows of what accommodating 
 stuff we are made, when, instead of the gentle minis- 
 try of the exhaling dews, we feel prepared to bless a 
 fat negro with a leathern pipe, dispensing, as it were, 
 the city branch of nature's distribution of moisture. 
 The sable vicegerent of the Croton, whom I have in 
 my eye (hight Jackson) — now brushing the boots of 
 Mr. Stopintown, the poor scribbler, now directing at 
 will the prodigal oulgush of water that comes forty 
 miles to do his bidding — stands, as well he may, pet- 
 rified with astonishment at the zealous activity with 
 which the obedient element follows the turn of his 
 
 finger. Negro amazement is evidently taken in at the 
 mouth. My friendly moistener airs his trachea very 
 fixedly from the beginning to the end of his easy 
 function. Thanks to his influence, the thermometer 
 beside me, 1 observe, has sunk two degrees with the 
 tepid abatement of the morning air. 
 
 Whatever else may be left unfinished at the end of 
 the world, we are quite sure that there has been 
 enough written ! The " bow of promise" was no se- 
 curity against a deluge of books — and it has come! 
 
 " Oh, for a perch on Ararat with Noah'' — 
 the waves of this great flood receding, and nothing 
 visible but the " unwritten" mud ! We would fain 
 have books "done away." We would begin again 
 with "two of" every kind," and wait with patience for 
 a posthumous work by Ham, Shem, or Japhet! 
 " Our eyes are sick of this perpetual flow 
 Of (Extras)— and our heart of (things to read !)" 
 
 which, we believe are Shelley's "sentiments better 
 expressed." 
 
 And, by-thc-way, it is a marvel where all these 
 books go to. We do not mean, of course, the type 
 
 I and paper. We mean the spirit, black, or white, or 
 gray, that on this bridge of print passes from the au- 
 thor's heart into the reader's and there abides — more 
 difficult to cast out than the devils exiled into pork 
 three thousand years ago, and still guarded against by 
 the abhorrent synagogue. Fifteen millions of peo- 
 
 j pie, all ductile, imitative, and plastic — all, at some 
 
 | moment or other, waiting for a type upon which to 
 mould their characters — and all supplied, helter-skel- 
 ter, at a shilling the pair, with heroes and heroines 
 
 I made to sell — the creatures God has first created in 
 his own image, taken soft from his hand, and shaped, 
 moulded, and finished by De Kock and Bulwer ! Who 
 is there, high or low, that is not reached by these pos- 
 sessing and enchanting spirits? We are sure we do 
 not overrate their power. In our own case, a novel of 
 Bulwer's, read in a day, possesses us exclusively and 
 irresistibly for a week, and lingers in our brain for 
 many a day after. Like or dislike the character he 
 draws — we can not resist the fascination. Yet you 
 would think the reading of a book, by an editor, would 
 be like sweeping out the water from a brook. What 
 must it be to the farmer who reads it by his pine-knot 
 fire in the country, and thinks of it all day over his 
 plough — to the apprentice who reads it on Sunday and 
 ponders on it for a week over his bench. We are only 
 looking at them as infusions - into the fountains of 
 opinion and impulse; and, if we had time, we should 
 like to trace them till they appeared in classes of 
 event--, or in features of national character. To do 
 this in detail would require the space of a lecture or 
 an essay. But, at a glance — to what do we owe the 
 fact, that, throughout all the middle and lower classes 
 of American life, everything except toil and daily 
 bread is looked at through the most sentimental and 
 romantic medium ? In their notions, affections, and 
 views of life, the Americans are really the most ro- 
 mantic people on earth. We do not get this from our 
 English forefathers — the English are as much the 
 contrary as is possible. We do not get it from 
 our pursuits — what can be tnore unromantic than the 
 daily cares of an American ? We do not get it from 
 our climate — it is a wonder how romance, fled from 
 the soft skies of Spain and Italy, can stay among us. 
 We get it from books — from the hoisting of the flood- 
 gates of copyright — from the inundation of works of 
 fiction. There are few, we venture to say — few below 
 the more intellectual classes, whose views of life are 
 not shaped and modelled, and whose ambitions are not 
 aimed by characters and impulses found in the attrac- 
 
598 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 tive pages of "cheap literature." We do not con- 
 demn this, we repeat — we do not know that we would 
 stop it if we could. At any rate, we prefer it to the 
 inoculation of English low life — the brutality of the 
 Jack Sheppard school of novels; and we vastly prefer 
 it to the voluptuousness of the literature most popular 
 in France. Thieves are not heroes among us, and 
 woman is enshrined in respect and honor; and with 
 these respective differences from England and France, 
 we can almost rest content under the influences that 
 make us what we are. 
 
 Sit back in your chair, and let me babble! I like 
 just to pull the spiggot out of my discretion, and let 
 myself run. No criticisms if you please, and don't 
 stare! Eyelids down, and stand ready for slip-slop. 
 
 I was sitting last night by the lady with the horn 
 and the glass umbrella, at the Alhamra — I drinking a 
 julep, she (my companion) eating an ice. The water 
 dribbled, and the moon looked through the slits in the 
 awning, and we chatted about Saratoga. My com- 
 panion has a very generalizing mind, situated just in 
 the rear of a very particularly fine pair of black velvet 
 eyes, and her opinions usually come out by a little 
 ivory gate witli a pink portico— charming gate, charm- 
 ing portico, charming opinions. I must say I think 
 more of intellect when it is well lodged. 
 
 I am literally at a dead loss to know whether she 
 said it, or I said it — what my mind runs on at this mo- 
 ment. It's all one, for if I said it, it was with the vel- 
 vet approbation of her ineffable eyes, and before such 
 eyes I absorb and give back, like the mirror that I am. 
 These, then, are her reflections about Saratoga. 
 
 Why, in mamma's time, it was a different affair. 
 There was a cabinet of fashion in those days, and the 
 question was settled with closed doors. Giants have 
 done being born, and so have super-beautiful women — 
 such women as used to lay down hearts like blocks in 
 the wooden pavement, and walk on nothing else. 
 There were about three in each city — three belles of 
 whom every baptized person in the country knew the 
 name, style, and probable number of victims. Their 
 history should have been written while they lasted — for 
 of course the gods loved them, and " whom the gods 
 love die first,'' and they are dead, and have left no 
 manuscripts nor models. Well, these belles were 
 leagued, and kept up their dynasty by correspondence. 
 New York was the seat of government, and the next 
 strongest branch was at Albany (where the women at 
 one time were lovelier than at any known place and 
 period since the memory of woman). In New York 
 alone, however, were married ladies admitted to the 
 councils. Here and there a renowned beau was kept 
 in the antechamber for advice. April came, and then 
 commenced a vigorous exchange of couriers. "The 
 Springs," of course, but which? Saratoga, or Leba- 
 non, or Ballston ? What carried it, or who decided it, 
 was enshrined in the most eternal mystery — but it was 
 decided and known to a few beaux and the proprietors 
 of the hotels by the middle of May. Wine and 
 Johnson's band were provided accordingly. The sum- 
 mer was more punctual in those days, and July par- 
 ticularly was seldom belated. After the fourth, the 
 cabinet started, and then commenced a longitudinal 
 radiation from north to south — after what, and to fol- 
 low whom, was only a secret to the uninitiated. And 
 such times — for then the people had fortunes, and the 
 ladies drank champagne! La! how 'ma talks about it! 
 
 But now! — Eheu fugaces ! (Latin for "bless my 
 soul") — change has drank all the spirit of our dream. 
 There is so much aristocracy in New York that there 
 is none at all. Beauty has been scrambled for, and 
 everybody has picked up a little. There must be 
 valleys to make mountains — ugly people before there 
 can be belles — hut everybody being rather pretty, who 
 
 can be divine? Idem, gentility! Who knows who 
 isn't "genteel" in New York? There are fifty circles 
 as like as peas — and not even an argument as to the 
 perihelion. Live where you please, know whom you 
 please, wear what you please, and ride freely in the 
 omnibuses, and nobody makes a remark ! Social 
 anarchy ! 
 
 Why, what a state of things it is when it is as much 
 trouble to find out where the prettiest people have 
 gone to pass the summer as it is to inquire out 
 "good"ness in Wall street! No cherishing, either, 
 of belle or beau descent! The daughters of the 
 charming tyrants of ten or twenty years ago, the boys 
 of the beaux of that time, walk about unpointed at 
 and degenerate. The "good society" of twenty years 
 ago is most indifferent society now. 
 
 " The vase in which roses have once been distilled" 
 
 goes for a crockery pipkin. 
 
 A great pity they don't have coffee at the Alhamra ! 
 And no curacoa — and what is ice-cream without a 
 drop of curacoa ! It's a pretty place — a very pretty 
 place! And there should be nobody to wait on you 
 here but dainty and dapper slaves — such as the Moors 
 had, with golden rings on their ankles, in the veritable 
 Alhambra. That tall, crooked blackamoor hurts my 
 eye. 
 
 So there was no "Mr. Hicks," and no "legacy to 
 Washington Irving." More's the pity ! I wish a 
 Mr. Hicks might be created impromptu, on purpose. 
 And more Mr. Hickses for more authors. Birds that 
 sing should be "provided with cages and full cups. 
 What could be done better with spare moneys than to 
 take the footworn pilgrim of genius and send him 
 softly down from the temple of fame shod with velvet! 
 In every rich man's will there should be at least one 
 line illuminated with a bequest to genius. Heaven 
 give us a million that we may set the glorious ex- 
 ample ! 
 
 And now, lady, who are you that in this gossiping 
 dream has held converse with me ! I have murmured 
 to the black cross, suspended by its braid of hair upon 
 your throat of ivory, without asking your name — con- 
 tent that you listened. But now (if spiritual visiters 
 have arms) — put your arm in mine and come out 
 under a better-devised ceiling ! The night is fra- 
 grant. Heaven is sifting love upon us through the 
 sieve of the firmament — starlight, you took it for! 
 And as much falls in Broadway as elsewhere. And 
 the stars are as sweet, seen from this sidewalk, as they 
 are from the fountain of Egeria. I have sighed in 
 both places, and know. " Allons ! faites moi Vamour — 
 car je suis dans mon humeur des Dimanches." 
 
 We are making a study of this big book of a city 
 we live in. We mean, in good time, to peruse it all — 
 its blotted passages no less than the lines of it which 
 fall in pleasant places. And we'll tell you what we 
 think of it as we go along. Not with shovel and 
 pickaxe. Order is a law of industry, and industry, as 
 the child of sin, we virtuously abhor. We shall read 
 this great book, as we do everything else — in the style 
 of the antelapsarians — idly and paradise-wise. The 
 ant and the "little busy bee" were unknown to Adam 
 and Eve, it may be safely conjectured ; and we scorn 
 to take them for models, as enjoined in the primer. 
 Butterflies for ever! We shall flit from flower to 
 flower, and tilt upon any stem that we fancy will sup- 
 port us — as do these full-dress and faineant gentlemen 
 of no care. Pray expect nothing in particular! 
 Stand ready to hop off. Any perfume that comes 
 down the wind may tempt us to follow its invisible 
 track back — for so butterflies detect the self-betraying 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 599 
 
 flowers of Paradise. (Though, for this zigzagery in 
 our courses it is, that we butterflies are called volatile 
 and capricious — as if we had no right, in our own 
 wav, to follow our more spiritual and finer noses! 
 And to be blamed, too, for imitating, as far as in us 
 lies, the innocent nothing-to-do-ity of angels !) 
 
 But, the animated book of Manhattan. Turn we 
 to a plain passage, on which we were just now pon- 
 dering. 
 
 There seems to us a poor economy of the animal 
 spirits in the mode of life of the New-Yorkers. Let 
 us take a single example, for the convenience of our 
 over-worked adjectives and pronouns. 
 
 Mr. Splitfig, the eminent wholesale grocer, is at the 
 age of virtue — thirty-five. He rises in the morning 
 at half-past seven, makes so much of his toilet as ap- 
 pears above the tablecloth, and makes his breakfast of 
 the morning paper, a nibble at a roll, and coffee at 
 discretion. He is too newly up to eat — too recently 
 arrived from the spiritual land of dreams, as my ado- 
 rable friend Lyra would express it. He is grave and 
 quiet. The sobriety of a fifteen hours' fast is upou 
 him — for he has not eaten meat since yesterday at 
 three. Refreshed by sleep, however, and cheerful 
 alter his coffee, he draws on his walking seldom-allu- 
 ded-tos, and goes out to be gone till dinner. At elev- 
 en, or thereabout, his spirits begin to flag. He would 
 rather not see a friend, except on business, for he 
 hates the trouble of talking. Debts and peccadilloes 
 lie at the bottom of the stomach, and his heart drops 
 down to them for want of a betweenity of beefsteak. 
 He begins to be faintish, but he is principled against 
 lunching or drinking before dinner, and by one o'clock 
 his animal spirits have sunk into his boots, and, from 
 that time till three, he is a dispirited fag, going through 
 with his habitual routine of business, but, of a civil 
 word or a smile as incapable as Caliban. It is while 
 the chambers of his head are thus unlighted and un- 
 tenanted, however, that the most of his friends and 
 acquaintances see him and judge of his capacity for 
 entertainment. He speaks to fifty people in the 
 course of those two exhausted hours, and speaks sul- 
 lenly and coldly, and, of these fifty, not one considers 
 that 
 
 " The very road into his kindness" 
 
 lies over a floating bridge of comestibles which has 
 sunk with an unnatural ebbtide. What says Mene- 
 nius, the rough and wise ? — 
 
 " He had not dined : 
 The veins unfilled, the blood is cold, and then 
 We pout upon the morning ; are unapt 
 To give or to forgive ; but when we have stuffed 
 These pipes and these conveyances of our blood 
 With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls 
 Than in our priest-like fasts." 
 
 But, at three, Mr. Splitfig dines — and as he gives 
 them something to stand on, his spirits jump up and 
 look out of his eyes. His tongue feels the inoisture 
 at its root, and grows flowery, and the one man who 
 sits opposite to the unctuous grocer at table thinks 
 him the best of fellows. 
 
 Splitfig keeps a trotter, and, after dinner, happy and 
 agreeable, he jumps into his wagon, and distributes, 
 along the milestones and hedges of the Bloomingdale 
 road, smiles and good-natured glances, that were much 
 more wisely got up four hours earlier in the day, and 
 sown among his friends for a crop of popularity. To 
 change the similitude, Splitfig makes his day's voy- 
 age with a cold boiler, and gets up the steam on ar- 
 riving at the wharf! 
 
 Not so Monsieur Toutavous, the French importer. 
 Toutavous takes a cup of coffee at waking, and on 
 the strength of it, dresses, reads the papers, and writes 
 the two or three business-letters which require the 
 coolest head. He keeps for his own society exclu- 
 
 sively the melancholy hour or two of every day, du- 
 ring which " the stomach is apprehensive that the 
 throat is cut" — the communication is so interrupted. 
 Yet as these unsmiling hours are excellent for 
 thought and calculation, he so shapes his business 
 that he can pass them, alone, without inconvenience. 
 He has taken his coffee, observe, but he has not break- 
 fasted. At eleven he goes to Delmonico's on his way 
 to the " shop." A beefsteak and a pint of claret dress 
 his countenance in smiles, and invigorate his fingers 
 for the friendly clasp exacted by courtesy. He gets to 
 his counting-house a little before twelve, enters upon 
 the hard work of the day with a system alert and lively, 
 and impresses everybody whom he sees with the idea 
 that he is born to good fortune, and has the look of 
 it, and is a good fellow, with no distrust of his credit 
 nor of himself. Sensible of Toutavous — is it not ? 
 
 Pity, we say again, that the personal, physical econ- 
 omies are so little regarded among us. The ladies 
 lack also a little " fernseed in their ears," but we 
 would not put them off with the tail of a paragraph. 
 We have, for them, a chapter in lavender; not of our 
 own devising altogether ! A superb female Machia- 
 vel whom we once knew, who came always to a ball 
 at three in the morning, fresh as a rosebud after a 
 night's sleep, entrancing you with her dewy coolness 
 when everybody else was hot and weary — she, capa- 
 ble of this brilliant absurdity, once discoursed to us 
 on the economies of heart-breaking. We will show 
 you the trick some day. Meantime, salaam) 
 
 " As much good stay with thee as go with me "' 
 
 The first visiter to the bay of New York, and the 
 writer of the first description on record, was John 
 de Verrazzano, a Florentine, in the service of Fran- 
 cis the First. This bold navigator had been for some 
 time in command of four ships, cruising against the 
 Spaniards. But his little fleet being separated in a 
 storm, Verrazzano determined, with one of them, the 
 Dauphin, to take a voyage in search of new countries. 
 He arrived on the American coast, somewhere near 
 North Carolina, and first proceeded south as far as 
 " the region of palm-trees," probably Florida. He 
 then turned, and proceeded north till he entered a 
 harbor, which he describes thus, in a passage of a let- 
 ter addressed by him to his royal master : — 
 
 "This land is situated in the paralele of Rome, in 
 forty-one degrees and two terces; but somewhat more 
 colde by accidental! causes. The mouth of the ha- 
 ven lieth open to the south, half a league broad; and 
 being entred within it, between the east and the north, 
 it stretcheth twelve leagues, where it wareth broader 
 and broader, and maketh a gulfe about twenty leagues 
 in compass, wherein are five small islands, very fruit- 
 full and pleasant, full of hie and broad trees, among 
 the which islands any great navie may ride without 
 any lea re of tempest or other danger." 
 
 In this harbor Verrazzano appears to have remained 
 about fifteen days. He and his men frequently went 
 on shore to obtain supplies and see the country. He 
 says, in another part of his letter : " Sometimes our 
 men stayed two or three daies on a little island neere 
 tin: ship for divers necessaries. We were oftentimes 
 within the land five or six leagues, which we found as 
 pleasant as is possible to declare, very apt for any 
 kind of husbandry, of corne, wine, and ayle. We 
 entered aflerward into the woods, which we found so 
 thicke that any army, were it never so great, might 
 have hid itself therein ; the trees whereof are okes, 
 cypress-trees, and other sorts unknown in Europe." 
 
 These were probably the first European feet that 
 ever trod on any part of the territory now included iu 
 the state of New York. Verrazzano and his crew 
 
600 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 seem to have had considerable intercourse with the 
 natives, and generally to have been treated well, 
 though by his own account he did not always deserve 
 it. Speaking of an excursion made by his men some- 
 where on the coast, he says : " They saw only one 
 old woman, with a young maid of eighteen or twenty 
 yeeres old, which, seeing our companie, hid them- 
 selves in the grasse for feare. The old woman car- 
 ried two infants on her shoulders, and the young 
 woman was laden with as many. As soon as they 
 saw us, to quiet them and win their favors, our men 
 gave them victuals to eate, which the old woman re- 
 ceived thankfully, but the young woman threw them 
 disdainfully on the ground. They took a child from 
 the old ivoman to bring into France ; and going about 
 to take the young ivoman, tvhich teas very beautiful, 
 and of tall stature, they could not possibly, for the 
 great outcries that she made, bring her to the sea ; 
 and especially having great woods to pass thorow, and 
 being far from the ship, we proposed to leave her be- 
 hind, bearing away the child only." 
 
 In a subsequent part of this narrative, Verrazzano 
 presents a very favorable picture, not only of the ame- 
 nity, but of the discretion of the aborigines: "They 
 came in great companies of their small boats unto the 
 ship, with their faces all bepainted with divers colors, 
 and bringing their wives with them, whereof they 
 were very jealous; they themselves entering aboard 
 the ship, and staying there a good space, but causing 
 their wives to stay in their boats ; and for all the en- 
 treatie that we could make, offering to give them di- 
 vers things, we could never obtaine that they would 
 suffer them to come aboard the ship. And oftentimes 
 one of the two kings coming with his queene, and j 
 many gentlemen for their pleasure to see us, they all j 
 stayed on shore, two hundred paces from us, sending [ 
 us a small boat to give us intelligence of their com- | 
 ing ; and as soon as they had answere from us they 
 came immediately, and wondered at hearing the cries 
 and noyses of the mariners. The queene and her 
 maids stayed in a very light boat at an island a quarter 
 of a league off, while the king abode a long space in 
 our ship, uttering divers conceits with gestures, view- 
 ing with great admiration the furniture of the shippe. 
 And sometimes our men staying one or two days on 
 a little island near the ship, he returned with seven or 
 eight of his gentlemen to see what we did ; then the 
 king drawing his bow, and running up and down with 
 his gentlemen, made much sport to gratify our men." 
 
 The sail-studded bay of New York at this day pre- 
 sents another scene; and one of these same "gentle- 
 men" is now almost as great a curiosity here as was 
 John de Verrazzano, only three centuries ago, to the 
 rightful lords of this fair land and water. 
 
 If we are not "qualifying" for the doom of Sodom 
 and Gomorrah, we must look elsewhere for the causes 
 of the accelerated pace at which goes on our national 
 demoralization. How many pegs down we have 
 dropped within three or four years, in political prin- 
 ciple, how many in mercantile honor and credit, how 
 many in the demand and consequent quality of litera- 
 ture, and how many in the dignity of the periodical 
 press, are four very pregnant texts for sermons, as 
 well as questions for political economy. But more 
 striking than any of these changes for the worse, 
 seems to us the demoralization of private life — the 
 increase of scenes of bloodshed, of shocking immor- 
 raliiies, of violence toward the unprotected, of calum- 
 nies, revenges, sabbath-breakings, and all the abomi- 
 nations common to more corrupt and older countries. 
 When is this unnaturally rapid tide to ebb, and to 
 what is it tending ? 
 
 In the comparative idleness of Americans at pres- 
 ent — the stagnation of business and the food for bad 
 passions, which always lies under misfortune and des- 
 peration — we may doubtless find the immediate causes 
 
 of these evil changes, and in this there lies a hope, 
 that, with the country's reviving prosperity and indus- 
 try, its morals, public and private, will mend. But 
 there are other and more permanent principles of evil 
 at work among us, which will grow with our growth 
 and strengthen with our strength — as they have grown 
 and strengthened with the progress and prosperity of 
 every country under the sun. In a most philosoph- 
 ical and able letter on the condition of the different 
 countries of Europe, which appeared lately in the 
 National Intelligencer, the writer (President Durbin) 
 remarks upon the gradual diminution of the middle 
 classes in England, and the "widening separation be- 
 tween the rich, who are becoming; richer, and the 
 poor, who are becoming poorer." This middle class 
 — which is the population without its extremes of aris- 
 tocracy and beggary — constitutes the body and 
 strength of England, and when its wealth has been 
 drawn to the aristocracy, and its wants to the beggary 
 of that country, she will be ready for the next stages 
 of national history — revolution and downfall. Amer- 
 ica, however, has as yet neither extreme to any con- 
 siderable extent. Our population are almost entirely 
 persons of such means and pursuits as would place 
 them within the pale of the middle class in England. 
 There is no well-defined aristocracy — no inevitable 
 and irremediable beggary. But the tendency is tow- 
 ard these extremes, and in that tendency — irritated 
 and strengthened just now by the peculiar prostration 
 of "the times" — we see the causes of no small por- 
 tion of the evils we have alluded to. The first step 
 taken toward the formation of an aristocracy is the 
 adoption of its vices, as the first result of inevitable 
 or impending beggary is the contemplation of crime. 
 The refined pursuits of a man born to a certainty of 
 wealth and station, can not be adopted in a moment, 
 nor can suffice for the desires of a man suddenly 
 grown rich. Nor are the higher pleasures of taste 
 and intellect at all satisfying, except after a youth of 
 high culture and ennobled association. The result is, 
 that the corrupted or vacant mind of the fortunate 
 possessor of wealth turns to the pursuit of pleasure, 
 and pleasure in such minds soon degenerates into vice. 
 A virtuous aristocracy, if it ever exist at all, is the 
 slow creation of pride of ancestry, and a well-instilled 
 conviction of the true path of distinction and honor — 
 but meantime the beginners at luxury and power are 
 established as a class of ostentatious and unprincipled 
 members of society, and the license and indulgence 
 they exact is yielded them with exasperation on the 
 part of those they displace and injure. Seduction 
 and intrigue, hushed up, winked at, paid for with 
 money, in European countries, is here resented with 
 the murder of the offender. Public opinion, which, 
 in Europe, under such circumstances, would forgive 
 the offence, and sympathise only with the seducer, 
 takes, in this country, as yet, the other side. To be 
 idle, which was formerly a reproach, is becoming a 
 merit here, as it is in countries where none are gen- 
 tlemen but the idle. But gambling by night for the 
 means of extravagant idleness takes the place of in- 
 dustry by day, and the heart-burnings, jealousies, and 
 unemployed passions of this class, lead almost cer- 
 tainly to scenes of violence and bloodshed. The 
 presence in our community of a large body of idlers 
 (such as exists in all the countries of Europe), whose 
 whole occupation in life is profligacy, is an evil very 
 fast coming upon this country, and one which should 
 at least be guarded against by a total change in the 
 education and guardianship of women. 
 
 If you have never been on the Beacon course at 
 Hoboken, you have never seen the opening lips of 
 the Hudson river to advantage. As if nature was of 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 601 
 
 the same opinion, the long city, with the dot of Gov- 
 ernor's island below it, looks like a note of admira- 
 tion jotted down on the other side. This high table 
 of hind in so near neighborhood to New York is a su- 
 perb natural esplanade, and T marvel much that such 
 unequalled sites for villas can be monopolized by a 
 racecourse. I will spare you the " fine writing" with 
 which the view inspired me while there. It cools too 
 rosy for prose. 
 
 I went over in the suite of a choice " Spirit of the 
 Times," to see the great match between saddle and 
 wheels — the Oneida Chief, a pacer in harness, against 
 Lady Suffolk and Beppo, two trotters, under jockeys 
 in stirrups. It was rather a new mode of racing — 
 new to me, at least — and I expected a great crowd, 
 but the spectators were in scores instead of thousands. 
 On the way, and in the stand, I was amused with the 
 physiognomy and phraseology of the persons drawn 
 from the city by the sporting nucleus. There was a 
 sprinkling of nobodies, like myself, of course, and 
 some strangers from the hotels; but the remainder 
 had a peculiarity which marked them as a class, and 
 at which I can only fling a conjecture in the way of a 
 definition. Every sense and faculty about them 
 seemed abandoned to jollity, except the eye. The 
 eye looked cool and unsympathetic. In the heartiest 
 laugh, the lids did not relax. The sharp scrutinizing 
 wrinkle and the brow pressed down, remained im- 
 movable while the sides were shaking. I am not sure 
 that the whole expression lay in this; but there was 
 an expression, very decided, about them of a reserva- 
 tion from fun somewhere, and, with all their frolic and 
 nonsense, they looked as cool and ready as a slate 
 and pencil. Sharp boys, I should take them to be, 
 seen singly anywhere. 
 
 The horses were breathed a little before the race, 
 and as they went to and fro before the stand, I had a 
 fair look at them. Lady Suffolk has all the showi- 
 ness of the trio, and she looks more like a narrow es- 
 cape of beauty than beauty itself. She is a large dap- 
 pled gray mare, with a tail fit for a pacha's standard, 
 legs not particularly blood-like, stiff walking gait, and 
 falls off behind and slopes under the hamstrings like a 
 corn-crib built to shed rain. Cover her head up 
 (which looks knowing enough for a Wall street bro- 
 ker's), and she would not sell, standing still at a coun- 
 try market, for a hundred dollars. A little study of 
 her structure, however, shows you that she is made 
 for something or other very extraordinary, and when 
 she starts from you with a rider on her back, she goes 
 off like something entirely different from any velocity 
 of leg that you are acquainted with. The speed of 
 two passing steamers going at twenty miles an hour — 
 you on one and a horse on the deck of the other — 
 would give you the same sensation of unnatural go- 
 away-ness. Seen coming, from a little distance, she 
 rocks like a pendulum swinging from the rider's head, 
 and when she goes by at full speed, a more poker- 
 ish, awkward, and supernatual gait could scarce be 
 got out of a cross between a steam-paddle and an 
 ostrich. Every time her haunches draw up, she 
 shoots ahead as if she was hit behind with an in- 
 visible beetle. Nothing in the way of legs seems to 
 explain it. 
 
 The Oneida Chief is not half so fine an animal 
 to look at as his driver, Hiram Woodruff, the great 
 whip of the turf. He is as fine a specimen of the 
 open-air man, born for a field open to all comers, as I 
 have met with in my life. He has a fine frank coun- 
 tenance, a step like a leopard, a bold eye, and a most 
 compact, symmetrical, and elastic frame, fit for a 
 gladiator. In his sulky, he looked as all riders in 
 those ugly contrivances do, like an animal with an 
 axletree through him, and wheels to his hips, but he 
 drove so beautifully as to abate the usual ridicule of 
 the vehicle. The Oneida Chief is a sorrel, and a 
 
 wonderful pacer, but, as he was beaten, I will say no 
 more about him. 
 
 Beppo, the second best horse, is the most comical 
 little animal I have ever seen. His color is like a 
 shabby brown plush, and he looks, at a first glance, as 
 if he might have been a cab-horse, or a baker's horse, 
 or in some other mnch-abused line, but retaining, 
 withal, a sort of cocked-pistol expression of eye and 
 limb, and a most catgut extension of muscle. His 
 loins are like a greyhound, and every hair on him seems 
 laid in the most economical way to to, and when he 
 does go there is no outlay for any other purpose. A 
 more mere piece of straightforward work than Beppo's 
 action I could never imagine. Whatever balk there 
 was in starting, he was just at the mark, and he nei- 
 ther broke nor bothered, but did it all in round honest 
 trotting, coming up on the last quarter stretch like a 
 whipped-up arrow. As he only lost the first heat by 
 a head, he of course did his mile, as Lady Suffolk 
 did, in two minutes twenty-six seconds — the fastest 
 trotting on record. 
 
 " How d'ye do ! — how d'ye do !" as greetings, have 
 passed away. Those two never-answered interrogato- 
 ries have yielded to the equally meaning salutations, 
 " Eh, back !" "Where?" In your autumn trip to 
 the city remember to salute your friends and acquaint- 
 ances. For some three weeks this has been the 
 vogue, and (grown a gravity with use) people now 
 shake hands over "Eh back!" " Where ?" with all 
 the sober earnestness which attended the habitual 
 " how d'ye do ?" "how d'ye do ?" I give it you by 
 way of early report of the prevailing fashion. 
 
 Since I wrote to you I have aired my magnetic 
 circle with a trip into the solitude of the Highlands. 
 " Retiring from the crowd" is an impoverished phrase 
 for the withdrawal of one's ten thousand spiritual feel- 
 ers from the interlaced contact and influence of four 
 hundred thousand neighbors. We can get used to 
 anything — thanks to the adaptability of our natures — 
 and my four hundred thousandth part of the space, 
 light, air, and locomotion of the island of Manhattan, 
 had grown by habit to be a comfortable allowance; 
 but it was no less a relief to send up my breath to the 
 sky without mixture, and to look about without tan- 
 gling my retina with the optic nerves of other peo- 
 ple. The ordinary accompaniments of departure from 
 town give the fullest effect to the contrast. The pel- 
 let of potato, crowded into the quill of a boy's pop- 
 gun, does not escape with a more sudden relief than 
 the passenger departing by the North river steamer. 
 The crowd grows closer and tighter as you get to the 
 wharf, and the last five minutes before casting off are 
 as close a pressure of flesh, blood, and personal atmo- 
 sphere, as can well be endured with any prospect of 
 recovered elasticity. Suddenly there is a rush ashore, 
 and you shoot out into the calm and open bay, and 
 dropping into a chair, instantly commence the peru- 
 sal of a rural shore, gliding stilly athwart your eye like 
 the lines of a pastoral poem : — no people between you 
 and it, no eyes looking at you from the Palisades, no 
 hats on the trees, no bows from the ripples as you pass, 
 no jostle in the fresh air, no greeting, no beggar, no 
 bore. As a sudden release of mind and body from a 
 tight place, I know nothing (short of death at the 
 Five Points) to exceed it. 
 
 I was on board "the Swallow," the stillest skimmer 
 of the waters in which I have yet travelled, and I trust 
 the green trees, and indented bays, nooks, and knolls 
 of Hoboken and Westchester, were sensible of the 
 fresh intensity of my admiration, as we glided, dream- 
 like and un-steamer-like, by. I made one or two 
 mundane and gregarious observations, by-the-by, on 
 the voyage, and the principal one was the watchful 
 and delicate attention of the captain of the boat to the 
 
602 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 comfort of the ladies and children on board, and, 
 apropos of that, the superiority of this class in our 
 country over those of every other. I could wish the 
 foreign travellers among us might take our steamboat 
 captains on the Hudson as specimens of our habits 
 and manners, and, for the three whom I have the 
 pleasure to know (the captains of the Troy, Swallow, 
 and Empire), I am quite sure that no gentleman could 
 desire, for wife or daughter, more courteous and well- 
 bred care than they habitually bestow on the passen- 
 gers who embark with them. As an instance (which 
 I noticed and think worth recording), Captain McLean 
 chanced to discover, at the moment a lady was going 
 ashore with a child and a nurse at nine o'clock at 
 night, that her destination was on the other side of the 
 river, near a landing where the boats do not regularly 
 touch. As it looked like rain, and she was to cross in 
 a row-boat, he stopped the baggage on the plank, 
 begged her to be seated for a few minutes, and ran 
 " The Swallow" across, landing her almost at her 
 own door, very much to her delight and relief. It 
 should be set down in his honor, and long may devo- 
 tion to women be, as it certainly is now, a national 
 and peculiar feature of the Americans. 
 
 When I stated to you that Mr. Morse would prob- 
 ably be the biographer of Allston, I had for the mo- 
 ment forgotten that the great artist married a sister of 
 Richard Dana, who, by every claim and qualification, 
 is, of course, the proper person to undertake it. I 
 trust it will not be a " cold abstraction." It is true, 
 the personal and familiar character of all men of ge- 
 nius will not bear posthumous unveiling — but All- 
 ston's will. He was, in the phraseology of the old 
 dramatists, " a sweet gentleman." God never wove 
 the woof and warp of taste, feeling, and intellect, un- 
 der a more clear and transparent surface than in the 
 " Paint King" of our country. You read his mind 
 first, in seeing him. His frame was but the net that 
 held it in. Everybody loved him. Everybody did 
 homage to him — as a man no less than as an artist. 
 Mr. Dana would write for his family circle the kind of 
 memoir we want for the world. He lives in an atmo- 
 sphere of cold, un-cosmopolite, provincial observance, 
 in Boston, and I am afraid his book will smack of the 
 place and climate. I wish he would go to Florence 
 and write it — off, among the artists, at a proper per- 
 spective distance, and with his blood warmed up with 
 the climate and his kinsman's far-off praises. The 
 biography of Allston should embrace the history of 
 the first cycle of American art — from the beginning 
 to Allston's death. It is truly a rare chance for a 
 model biography, and Dana has it in him — minus 
 fusion. But he will think " the schoolmaster is 
 abroad," and I will say no more. 
 
 If you are uot particularly acquainted with us, dear 
 reader, pray consider this last page in the light of a 
 private letter — inviolable if not addressed simply to 
 yourself. We have tried to convey this for some 
 weeks past by caption — as " More Particularly," 
 "Confidentially," "Just you and I," etc., etc. — but 
 with no apparent success. We are evidently read. 
 Our private slip-slop, ''twaddled under the secrecy 
 of this page en dishabille, comes back to us, com- 
 mented on with full-dress criticism by the pasto- 
 ral editors. Now (courage, while we administer a 
 slice of the dictionary!) our idiosyncracy is a pas- 
 sion for individual proximity. We would fain be fa- 
 miliar — with one at a time. We write and compile 
 fifteen mortal pages, addressed to the universe. We 
 know by education that it is proper to do so. The 
 snail comes out occasionally from his suitable house, 
 
 and walks in the open globe. But we are a-cold out 
 of our privacy. We want something between us and 
 the promiscuous points of compass. We yearn to be 
 personal and particular — tele-d-tete. And on this six- 
 teenth page we indulge our little weakness. , If you 
 do not love us — you that have turned over this leaf 
 — pardon us, but you intrude ! 
 
 If there be a time for all things, there is a time to 
 cease to be gregarious. To measure age by years is 
 to weigh gems against paving-stones — but there is a 
 point in middle age — (from thirty to fifty, as you wear) 
 — when the card-case should be burnt in solemn hol- 
 ocaust. For acquaintances you have no more time. 
 The remainder of life is little enough for friends, and, 
 between friends, pasteboard is superfluous. We have 
 I ripened to that point — we! In our pyramid of life 
 | the base was broad and sympathetic. We spread 
 j ourselves as far as we could reach- — but with the rise 
 of the pyramid of years the outer edges have dropped 
 away, and the planes have lessened. We are limited 
 to friends, now. Our mind runs friendship-wise. We 
 tu-toi, as the French say. We like to chat familiarly 
 — with the world shut out — indulged and slip-shod. 
 
 We have knocked our head against this corner of 
 speculation, while making threescore or more bows of 
 acknowledgment to editors kind and complimentary. 
 Somebody loves us, there is no doubt. We are 
 wished well in our vocation. And that is much in 
 a world where it is so difficult to butter the dry crust 
 of industry. But, with no design to annoy or rebuke 
 us, there is a leaning, in these friendly notices, to find 
 fault with our frivolity. We are too frisky for break- 
 fast reading. " The spirits of the wise sit in the 
 clouds and mock us." And for this we are sorry. 
 
 That the following (from the New Bedford Bulle- 
 tin) was written by a man who loves us, nobody will 
 doubt — yet see the word we have underlined ! — 
 
 " The New Mirror for last week is an exquisite number. 
 Willis has scattered his gems of humor, wit, and puppyism, 
 all over it, mating it odorous and sparkling as a fountain 
 playing rose-water. Willis is the best American prose-writer 
 of a certain class now living. He is as delicious as Tom 
 Moore, and a great deal more decent." 
 
 Now, what is " puppyism?" That it is "odorous," 
 we may venture to take upon our friend's authority. 
 But, if "sparkling as a fountain playing rose-water," 
 Heaven bless the puppy-most, still say we ! Would 
 you have us graver ? Is there not gravity enough in 
 the world that you can forego our little contribution? 
 Have you no funerals, no false friends, no leaden pol- 
 itics, and no notes to pay — that you must come for our 
 gravity to eke you out ? Or do you find fault with 
 our dabble in the superfineries? Is that it ? Mustn't 
 we mention " patent leather" and " velvet eyes ?" 
 Can't we call the mouth of a charming woman a 
 " pink portico with an ivory door" — without offending 
 you ? Come, come, you are not quite the anchorite 
 you would label yourself, and, while flowers will 
 bloom, horlus siccus be hanged — say you not so ? Let 
 us talk about the things we like. Life is too short for 
 hypocrisy. Try the trick yourself. Write a para- 
 graph or two in our flummery way, and see how trip- 
 pingly it comes off, and what an uncoiling from your 
 heart it is of the dull serpent of care! 
 
 Put this French proverb in your pipe and smoke it 
 — " Ne pouvoir tolerer les faiblesses d'autrui, voila la 
 faiblesse." If you never thought of that, thank us 
 for a new precept, and slip a copy of it under your 
 friendships. It keeps out moths like camphor. 
 
 Not quite one hundred years after Verrazzano's dis- 
 covery of the bay of New York, during all which 
 period we have no account of its having been visited 
 by a European vessel, Hudson made the capes of 
 Virginia on his third cruise in search of the northwest 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 603 
 
 passage. Standing still on a northward course, he 
 arrived in sight of the Narrows, distinguishing from a 
 great distance the highlands of Neversink, which his 
 mate, Robert Juet, described in the journal he kept as 
 a " very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to 
 see." 
 
 The most interesting peculiarity of our country to 
 a European observer, is the freshness of its early his- 
 tory, and the strong contrast it presents of most of the 
 features of a highly-civilized land, with the youth and 
 recent adventures of a newly-discovered one. The 
 details of these first discoveries are becoming every 
 day more interesting; and that part of the journal of 
 the great navigator which relates to his first view of 
 them is very interesting. The following extracts de- 
 scribe the Narrows as they were two hundred years ago : 
 
 "At three of the clock in the afternoone we came 
 to three great rivers. So we stood along to the nor- 
 thernmost, thinking to have gone into it, but we found 
 it to have a very shoald barre before it, for we had but 
 ten foot water. Then we cast about to the southward, 
 and found two fathoms, three fathoms, and three and 
 a quarter, till we came to the souther side of them, 
 then we had five or six fathoms, and anchored. So we 
 sent in our boat to sound, and they found no less water 
 than foure, five, six, and seven fathoms, and returned 
 in an hour and a halfe. So we weighed and went in, 
 and rode in five fathoms, ose ground, and saw many 
 salmons, and mullets, and rayes, very great. 
 
 " The fourth, in the morning, as soone as the day 
 was light, we saw that it was good riding farther up. 
 So we sent our boate to sound, and found that it was a 
 very good harbour; then we weighed and went in with 
 our ship. Then our boat went on land with our net 
 to fish, and caught ten great mullets, of a foot and a 
 half long apeece, and a ray as great as foure men could 
 hale into the ship. So we trimmed our boat, and 
 rode still all day. At night the wind blew hard at the 
 northwest and our anchor came home, and we drove 
 on shore, but took no hurt, thanked bee God, for the 
 ground is soft sand and ose. This day the people of 
 the country came aboard of us, seeming very glad of 
 our comming, and brought greene tobacco, and gave 
 us of it for knives and beads. They go in deere 
 skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper. 
 They desire cloathes, and are very civil!. They have 
 great store of maise, or Indian wheate, whereof they 
 make good bread. The country is full of great and 
 tall oaks. 
 
 " The fifth, in the morning, as soone as the day was 
 light, the wind ceased; so we sent our boate in to 
 sound the bay. Our men went on land there and saw 
 great store of men, women, and children, who gave 
 them tobacco at their coming on land. So they went 
 up into the woods, and saw great store of very goodly 
 oakes, and some currants. 
 
 " The sixth, in the morning, was faire weather, and 
 our master sent John Colman with foure other men in 
 our boat over to the north side, to sound the other 
 river" (the Narrows). "They found very good riding 
 for ships, and a narrow river to the westward" (probably 
 what is now called the Kills, or the passage between 
 Bergen Neck and Staten Island), " between two 
 islands. The lands, they told us, were as pleasant, 
 with grasse and flowers, and goodly trees, as they ever 
 had seen, and very sweet smells came from them. So 
 they went in two leagues and saw an open sea, and 
 returned ; and as they came backe they were set upon 
 by two canoes, the one having twelve, the other four- 
 teen men. The night came on, and it began to raine, 
 so that their match went out ; and they had one man 
 slain in the fight, which was an Englishman, named 
 John Colman, with an arrow shot into his throat, and 
 two more hurt. It grew so dark that they could not 
 find the shippe that night, but laboured to and fro on 
 their oares. 
 
 "The seventh was fair, and they returned aboard 
 the ship, and brought our dead man with them, whom 
 we carried on land and buried." 
 
 On the eighth, Hudson lay still, to be more sure of 
 
 the disposition of the natives before venturing farther 
 
 ! in. Several came on board, but no disturbance oc- 
 
 ; curred, and on the ninth he got under weigh, passed 
 
 \ the Narrows, and proceeded by slow degrees up the 
 
 river destined to bear his name. 
 
 The current of life seems to be too rapid in Amer- 
 ica to allow time for reflection upon anything which 
 can possibly be deferred. The monuments are left 
 unfinished on our battle-field ; the tombs of great men 
 become indistinguishable before marked with a stone ; 
 and the sacred places where patriotism has dwelt, are 
 rated by the value of their material, and left to decay. 
 It is difficult to visit Mount Vernon, and feel, from 
 any mark of care or respect visible about it, that 
 America owes anything to the sacred ashes it entombs. 
 The family tomb at Mount Vernon has once been 
 ' robbed by a sacrilegious ruffian, whose ignorance 
 alone preserved for us the remains of Washington. It 
 has been proposed to Congress to buy Mount Vernon, 
 and establish a guard over relics so hallowed. Why 
 should not this be done, and a sufficient sum be ap- 
 propriated to enclose and keep in order the whole 
 estate, improve the execrable road leading to it from 
 : Alexandria, and employ persons to conduct strangers 
 over the place? 
 
 The vault in which the ashes of Washington re- 
 I pose, is at the distance of, perhaps, thirty rods from 
 I the house, immediately upon the bank of the river. 
 | A more romantic and picturesque site for a tomb can 
 scarcely be imagined. Between it and the Potomac 
 is a curtain of forest-trees, covering the steep declivity 
 to the water's edge, breaking the glare of the pros- 
 pect, and yet affording glimpses, of the river, where 
 the foliage is thickest. The tomb is surrounded by- 
 several large native oaks, which are venerable by their 
 years, and which annually strew the sepulchre with 
 autumnal leaves, furnishing the most appropriate dra- 
 pery for the place, and giving a still deeper impression 
 to the memento mori. Interspersed among the oaks, 
 and overhanging the tomb, is a copse of red cedar, 
 whose evergreen boughs present a fine contrast to the 
 hoary and leafless branches of the oak ; and while the 
 deciduous foliage of the latter indicates the decay of 
 the body, the eternal verdure of the former furnishes 
 a fitting emblem of the immortal spirit. The sacred 
 and symbolic cassia was familiar to Washington, and, 
 perhaps, led to the selection of a spot where the ever- 
 green flourished. 
 
 One of the most interesting associations with the 
 tomb of Washington, is Lafayette's visit to it, as 
 related by Levasseur: — 
 
 " After a voyage of two hours, the guns of Port 
 Washington announced that we were approaching the 
 last abode of the father of his country. At this 
 solemn signal, to which the military band accompa- 
 nying us responded by plaintive strains, we went on 
 deck, and the venerable soil of Mount Vernon was be- 
 fore us. At this view an involuntary and spontaneous 
 movement made us kneel. We landed in boats, and 
 trod upon the ground so often trod by the feet of 
 Washington. A carriage received General Lafayette; 
 and the other visiters silently ascended the precipitous 
 path which conducted to the solitary habitation of 
 Mount Vernon. In re-entering beneath this hospit- 
 able roof, which had sheltered him when the reign of 
 terror tore him violently from his country and family, 
 George Lafayette felt his heart sink within him, at no 
 more finding him whose paternal care had softened his 
 misfortunes ; while his father sought with emotion for 
 everything which reminded him of the companion of 
 his glorious toils. 
 
 " Three nephews of General Washington took La- 
 
604 
 
 EPHExMERA. 
 
 fayette, his son, and myself, to conduct us to the tomb 
 of their uncle ; our numerous companions remained 
 in the house. In a few minutes the cannon, thunder- 
 ing anew, announced that Lafayette rendered homage 
 to the ashes of Washington. Simple and modest as 
 he was during life, the tomb of the citizen hero is 
 scarcely perceived among the sombre cypresses by 
 which it is surrounded. A vault, slightly elevated and 
 dotted over — a wooden door without inscriptions — 
 some withered and green garlands, indicate to the trav- 
 eller who visits the spot where rest in peace the puis- 
 sant arms which broke the chains of his country. As 
 we approached, the door was opened. Lafayette de- 
 scended alone into the vault, and a few minutes after 
 reappeared, with his eyes overflowing with tears. He 
 took his son and me by the hand, and led us into the 
 tomb, where, by a sign, he indicated the coffin. We 
 knelt reverentially, and rising, threw ourselves into 
 the arms of Lafayette, and mingled our tears with 
 his." 
 
 There are manifest signs that the summer is here. 
 The ladies who are on their travels, and the ladies who 
 are not, wear alike the toilet of transit — dust-proof; 
 dresses and green veils. " Bound for the Springs" is j 
 palpably intended to be expressed by every apparition ! 
 of beauty in Broadway. The gentlemen, in the ab- 
 sence of the more approved targets at which their | 
 irresistiblenesses are aimed, go about in calico coats, j 
 ungloved, unwaistcoated, unstrapped, and uncravatted. I 
 Hot corn is cried at midnight. Raspberries are j 
 treacherous. Green apples and pears grace the tables 
 of the hucksters. The daily papers show signs of the 
 rustication of the leading editors. Hotels crammed, 
 and a pervading odor of the fruity drinks extending a 
 hundred yards from them in every direction. The 
 summer has arrived, I believe — but I feel called upon 
 to admit that count D'Orsay and Lady Blessington 
 have not. Colonel Stone's virtuous horrification at j 
 the mention of such improper people by your corres- 
 pondent has probably driven them into an incognitude 
 which has cost the count his whiskers, at least. With- 
 out them, Niagara itself would not recognise him — 
 brother wonder as he is — and, if in the land of Boz- 
 worship at all, they probably pass for a big Kentuck- 
 ian and his handsome mother. Keep a look out ars 
 you travel, however, amis voyageurs ! 
 
 Kissing has no longer the drawback of wear and 
 tear. I see that Dr. Ellsworth of Hartford has suc- 
 ceeded in restoring a lost upper lip. The paper 
 which describes it says : " Upon the red facing may 
 possibly be detected the point of connexion between 
 the two halves. The lip is really a handsome 
 one — quite equal to the best cures of hare-lip. No 
 one would for a moment suspect that it had travelled 
 from the cheeks to its present location, which it 
 graces as well as the original, except that it has not 
 quite as free and easy a motion, although enough for 
 all common purposes." 
 
 Passengers up the Hudson who wish to take the 
 early trains west, embark at present on the forward 
 deck of the "Empire." Those who are not in a 
 hurry take passage in the after cabin, and on the 
 mooring of the boat at Albany, pay their respects to 
 the ex-president at Kinderhook, from the stern taffrail. 
 She is commanded by Captain Roe, who, in the extent 
 of his jurisdiction, ranks with the governor of Rhode 
 Island, and is a potentate to be propitiated in politics. 
 Seriously, this noble steamer is a very great curiosity. 
 The saloon on her promenade deck is nearly three 
 hundred feet long, and, with four or five hundred peo- 
 ple on board, she seems to have few passengers. The 
 sight of her engine at work is an imposing affair. 
 Some of the state-rooms above are small drawing- 
 rooms to accommodate parties, and she is furnished 
 
 and managed with a luxury and tact worth making a 
 trip to see. 
 
 I understand it has lately occurred to some gentle- 
 men with open eyes, that anchorage is cheaper than 
 ground-rent — that a ship-of-war is but a spacious 
 hotel upside-down, and that the most desirable site for 
 a summer residence, as to pure air, neighborhood, 
 novelty, and economy, is now occupied by the "Inde- 
 pendence" and "North Carolina," the men-of-war 
 just off the Battery. The latter ship being unsea- 
 worthy, it is proposed to purchase her of the govern- 
 ment for the experiment. It is estimated that she can 
 accommodate comfortably three hundred persons. The 
 immense upper-deck is to be covered with a weather- 
 proof awning, blue and white, in the style of the Al- 
 hamra, and given up entirely to dining, dancing, 
 lounging, and the other uses of hotel drawing-rooms. 
 A more magnificent promenade than this immense 
 deck, cleared of guns and lumber fore-and-aft, and 
 surrounded entirely by luxurious sofas, could scarcely 
 be imagined. The kitchens and offices are to occupy 
 the forward part of the second deck, or, if the vessel 
 is crowded, to be transferred to a small tender along- 
 side. The port-holes are to be enlarged to spacious 
 windows, and the two decks below, which are above 
 the water-line, will be entirely occupied by splendid 
 rooms, open to the entire breadth of the bay, and fur- 
 nished in the oriental and cushioned style, suitable to 
 the luxurious wants of hot weather. Minute-barges 
 will ply to and from the shore, connected with the 
 Waverley line of omnibuses ; bath-houses will be 
 anchored just astern; a cafe and ice-cream shop will 
 be established in the main and mizen-tops (to be 
 reached by a covered staircase) ; and sofas, for the 
 accommodation of smokers, will be put under a peril- 
 house roof, outside the vessel, in the main-chains. 
 The cockpit and hold will of course unite the uses of 
 a hotel-garret and cellar. It will have the advantage 
 of other hotels, in swinging round with the tide, so 
 that the lodgers on both sides of the ship will see, by 
 turns, from the windows, the entire panorama of the bay. 
 When lightened of her guns, and her upper spars and 
 rigging, it is thought she will float so much higher as 
 to bear piercing for another line of port-hole windows, 
 affording some bachelor's rooms at the water-line, cor- 
 responding in price and convenience with the sky- 
 chambers of the Astor. An eccentric individual, I 
 am told, has bargained for a private parlor, to be sus- 
 pended under the bowsprit, in imitation of the nest of 
 the hanging-bird. Altogether, the scheme seems 
 charming and feasible. The name of the hotel, by- 
 the-way, is to be " Saratoga Afloat;" the waiters are 
 to be dressed in the becoming toggery of tars ; and 
 the keeper of the house is to wear a folded napkin, 
 epaulet fashion, on either shoulder, and to be called 
 invariably " commodore." 
 
 This seems to be the age of invention. Several 
 houses in the city are being made rather higher, by 
 raising them ten feet on screws, and building a story 
 under them — a great economy of the loins of hod- 
 
 As a metropolis of wealth and fashion, New York 
 has one great deficiency — that of a driving j)ark. 
 Rome has ils Pincian Hill, Florence its Cascine, 
 Paris its Bois de Bologne, and London its Hyde Park; 
 and most other capitals have places of resort-on- 
 wheels, where fresh air and congenial society may 
 be met in the afternoon hours. Such a place is 
 only not considered indispensable in New York, be- 
 cause it has never been enjoyed. It is, for the rich, 
 the highest of luxuries. The Cascine of Florence, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 605 
 
 for example, is a park of two miles square, laid out in 
 wooded avenues; and to its winding roads and forest 
 glades resort, every afternoon, the entire equipaged 
 population of the court and city. At sunset, the car- 
 riages meet in an open square in the centre, and the 
 "lords and ladies'' pass the two hours of the delicious 
 twilight in visiting from vehicle to vehicle, forming 
 parties for the evening, flirting, making acquaintances, 
 talking scandal, and other dainty diversions — breaking 
 up in time to go to the opera or dress for a ball. There 
 is enough room for such a park in the neighborhood 
 of Union square, or on the East or North river ; and 
 the importance of such spaces, left open for lungs to 
 a crowded city, has been long inculcated by physicians. 
 I think it possible such an exclusive resort might be at 
 first a little unpopular (remembering that some three 
 years ago a millionaire was stoned for riding through 
 Broadway with a mounted servant in livery behind 
 him), but, as one of the hand-to-mouth class, I do 
 not care how soon the rich get richer and the poor 
 poorer — leaving a comfortable middle class, in which 
 ambition might stop to breathe. 
 
 I notice the introduction of the Italian verandah 
 curtains to New York — the sort of striped demi-um- j| 
 brella, put out from the top of the window with falling 
 side folds, which are so common in Venice and Na- \ 
 pies. Two or three shops in Broadway have them, ! 
 and Cozzens has lately fitted them on to the windows | 
 of his ladies' dining-room — and most showy and pic- I 
 turesque luxuries they are. 
 
 Howard has chosen, for the decoy of his hotel, an j 
 intermittent relay of governors. The immense flag 
 which sweeps the top of the omnibuses in Broadway ! 
 on the arrival of such functionaries, seems to have no 
 sinecure of it, and his house is, in consequence, con- j 
 tinually overrun. He keeps a table suitable to a court 
 hotel, and seems to be the only one of his class who j 
 is independent of "travelling seasons." 
 
 I observe that the paviors are at work in the upper 
 part of Broadway, removing the wooden pavement, 
 and substituting the broad, flat stones, such as are laid 
 in the streets of Florence. The wooden blocks were 
 certainly in a deplorable condition, but I do not think 
 they have had fair play as an experiment. They were 
 badly laid, and were left to annoy the public long after 
 thty should have been repaired. 
 
 A periodical journal in Boston gives the name and 
 true history of Tom Thumb, the dwarf now at the 
 Museum. He was christened Charles Stratton. His j 
 parents were of the usual size, and he has two sisters 
 of the usual proportions. General Thumb has not 
 grown since he was six months old, and he is now ' 
 eleven, and twenty-two inches tall. He is perfectly 
 formed, very athletic for his size, and in perfect health 
 ind spirits. In mind he remains childish and un- 
 changed, as in body. 
 
 You may have noticed in the New York papers, 
 ately, a great abundance of essays upou bathing. 
 Since the Croton facilities, public attention has been 
 urned a good deal that way, and the prices of baths j 
 Mave been universally diminished, while new bathing | 
 establishments have been advertised in various parts of 
 ihe city. The new one lately opened by Stoppani in : 
 Broadway, near the Apollo rooms, exceeds in splendor ! 
 anything we have yet seen in this line. A sumptuous i 
 refectory is part of it; and the long, arched- passages 
 of bathing-rooms remind one of the Roman establish- 
 ments in the way of baths. These were, anciently, 
 the centres around which luxuries of every description 
 were clustered ; and Stoppani seems to have built this 
 with B view to sumptuous idling and enjoyment. 
 
 The most comprehensive view of Niagara is, no 
 doubt, that from the galleries of Clifton house; 
 
 but it is, at the same time, for a first view, one of the 
 most unfavorable. Clifton house stands nearly op- 
 posite the centre of the irregular crescent formed by 
 the Falls; but it is so far back from the line of the 
 arc, that the height and grandeur of the two cataracts, 
 to an eye unacquainted with the scene, are deceptively 
 diminished. After once making the tour of the points 
 of view, however, the distance and elevation of the 
 hotel are allowed for by the eye, and the situation 
 seems most advantageous. This is the only house at 
 Niagara where a traveller, on his second visit, would 
 be content to live. 
 
 Clifton house is kept in the best style of hotels in 
 this country ; but the usual routine of such places, 
 going on in the very eye of Niagara, weaves in very 
 whimsically with the eternal presence and power of 
 the cataract. We must eat, drink, and sleep, it is 
 true, at Niagara, as elsewhere ; and indeed, what with 
 the exhaustion of mind and fatigue of body, we re- 
 quire at the Falls perhaps more than usual of these 
 three " blessed inventions." The leaf that is caught 
 away by the rapids, however, is not more entirely pos- 
 sessed by this wonder of nature, than is the mind and 
 imagination of i»he traveller; and the arrest of that 
 leaf by the touch of the overhanging tree, or the 
 point of a rock amid the breakers, is scarce more mo- 
 mentary than the interruption to the traveller's en- 
 chantment by the circumstances of daily life. He 
 falls asleep with its surging thunders in his ear, and 
 wakes — to wonder, for an instant, if his yesterday's 
 astonishment was a dream. With the succeeding 
 thought, his mind refills, like a mountain channel, 
 whose torrent has been suspended by the frost, and he 
 is overwhelmed with sensations that are almost pain- 
 ful, from the suddenness of their return. He rises 
 and throws up his window, and there it flashes, and 
 thunders, and agonizes — the same almighty miracle 
 of grandeur for ever going on; and he turns and won- 
 ders — what the deuce can have become of his stock- 
 ings! He slips on his dressing-gown and commences 
 his toilet. The glass stands in the window, and with 
 his beard half achieved, he gets a glimpse of the foam- 
 cloud rising majestically over the top of the mahog- 
 any frame. Almost persuaded, like Queen Christina 
 at the fountains of St. Peter's, that a spectacle of 
 such splendor is not intended to last, he drops his 
 razor, and with the soap drying unheeded on his chin, 
 he leans on his elbows, and watches the yesty writhe 
 in the abysm, and the solemn pillars pf crystal eter- 
 nally falling, like the fragments of some palace-crested 
 star, descending through interminable space. The 
 white field of the iris forms over the brow of the cat- 
 aract, exhibits its radiant bow, and sails away in a van- 
 ishing cloud of vapor upon the wind; the tortured 
 and convulsed surface of the caldron below shoots out 
 its frothy and seething circles in perpetual torment ; 
 the thunders are heaped upon each other, the earth 
 trembles, and — the bell rings for breakfast! A vision 
 of cold rolls, clammy omelets, and tepid tea, succeeds 
 these sublime images, and the traveller completes his 
 toilet. Breakfast over, he resorts to the colonnade, 
 to contemplate untiringly the scene before him, and 
 in the midst of a calculation of the progress of the 
 fall toward Lake Erie — with the perspiration standing 
 on his forehead, while he struggles to conceive the 
 junction of its waters with Lake Ontario— the rocks 
 rent, the hills swept away, forests prostrated, and the 
 islands uprooted in the mighty conflux— some one's 
 child escapes from its nurse, and seizing him by the 
 legs, cries out, " Da-da." 
 
 The ennui attendant upon public houses can never 
 be felt at Clifton house. The most common mind 
 finds the spectacle from its balconies a sufficient and 
 untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited 
 parlors, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the 
 dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and bar- 
 
606 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 rooms filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of 
 travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half- 
 hour to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that 
 sickening yearning for society, which sometimes 
 comes upon a stranger in a strange land, like the cal- 
 enture of a fever — the eternal marvel going on with- 
 out is more engrossing than friend or conversation, 
 more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in 
 carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch 
 the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified 
 freight of adventurers, one moment gliding; swiftly 
 down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next, 
 lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up 
 from the scoop of a giant's hand beneath the water; 
 to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract, 
 to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the 
 shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and 
 endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of 
 the tremendous waters — is amusement and occupa- 
 tion enough to draw the mind from anything — to cure 
 madness or create it. 
 
 I met Weir, the painter, at West Point, and he 
 was kind enough to give me a look at his just-finished 
 picture for the Rotundo at Washington. It was but 
 a glimpse of five minutes, while I was waiting for the 
 boat, but I have remembered every line of the pic- 
 ture so distinctly since, that I can speak confidently, 
 at least, of its effect and power of possessing the 
 spectator. Let me transcribe for you the historical 
 passage taken for illustration : — 
 
 " And the time being come that they must depart, 
 they were accompanied with most of their brethren 
 out of the city to a town called Delft-Haven, where 
 the ship lay ready to receive them. The next day 
 the wind ^eing fair, they went on board, and their 
 friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight 
 of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs 
 and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them, what 
 tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches 
 pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch 
 strangers that stood on the key as spectators could 
 not refrain from tears; yet comfortable and sweet it 
 was to see such lively and true expressions of dear 
 and unfeigned love. But the tide, which stays for no 
 man, calling them away that were thus loath to depart, 
 their reverend .pastor falling down on his knees, and 
 they all with him, with watery cheeks commended 
 them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and his 
 blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many 
 tears, they took their leave one of another, which 
 proved to be the last leave to many of them. Thus 
 hoisting sail, with a prosperous gale of wind, they 
 came in a short time to Southampton, where they 
 found the bigger ship come from London." 
 
 It would be a curious subject of thought to a man 
 unfamiliar with the wardrobe of the imagination, if 
 he would keep this plain and simple passage of histo- 
 ry in his mind while he looks at the gorgeous inves- 
 titure in which it is clad by the genius of the painter — 
 to compare the picture in his mind while he read it 
 with the picture made of it on this canvass. I will 
 not attempt here — indeed I could not attempt, with- 
 out seeing it again — anything like a criticism on this 
 painting — but may say what I feel while it deepens in 
 my memory, that I have seen no such glorious work 
 of art in this country, and I have not been more filled 
 and wrought upon by any of the great chefs d'ceuvre 
 of the masters in Europe. The effect on the mind 
 is that of expanding the capacity to embrace it. 
 Weir has drawn his figures on a scale larger than 
 life, and the immense canvass is filled with groups of 
 the most exquisite naturalness of posture and rela- 
 tion to each other, but at the same time finished with 
 
 a breadth and strength of effect that looks done with 
 a hand accustomed to minister only to power without 
 limit. The coloring in the two wings of the picture 
 is exceedingly gorgeous, but the centre, around the 
 kneeling pastor, is admirably subdued in middle teints 
 appropriate to the objects they envelope, and the pas- 
 tor himself, in face, attitude, and costume, is the most 
 masterly embodiment of hallowed piety and devotion 
 which it is possible for poet to conceive. The pres- 
 ence, on board of the vessel, of Mr. and Mrs. Wins- 
 low (the new-married people of fortune, who, while 
 travelling for pleasure, fell in with and joined the emi- 
 grants for conscience sake), gives the artist the neces- 
 sary liberty to enrich the costume of his picture, and 
 there are two or three other female figures very splen- 
 didly drawn and colored — among them the wife of 
 Miles Standish, whose soldierly form in the foreground 
 is one of the most conspicuous objects. Of the 
 twenty-odd figures in this grand picture, there is not 
 one about which a great deal might not be written, 
 even with my transiently impressed memory of it, but 
 I reserve it for a more detailed description after anoth- 
 er visit. Weir has flung his soul upon this work with 
 the complete abandonment of inspiration, and he has 
 wrought out of it, for his country as well as himself, 
 honor imperishable. 
 
 I think it is some thirty miles from Albany to Sar- 
 atoga, and we did it at the respectable leisure of five 
 hours — rather more time than it took formerly on 
 wheels. True, we did not "devour the way" as we 
 used to do, and it was a comfort to arrive without a 
 lining of dust in one's mouth, but I missed the blow 
 ing of the horn, the chirrup and crack of the whip 
 with which we used to dash through the sandy hoi 
 low of Congress Spring and pull up at Congress Hall 
 and I missed the group in the portico, and the greet 
 ings and the green vines, and I missed — alas, for all 
 the misses of the past ! The cars stop in the rear of 
 the "United States," and the outstretched arms of 
 that new caravansary, in the shape of two yellow 
 wings extending to the depot, embrace you as you 
 come to the ground. My friends were all there, and 
 Congress Hall was down hill, in fact and in figure of 
 speech, and casting poetry and the past behind me, [ 
 rattled to the rising sun and took lodgings with the 
 Marvins. The ex-president was there, with the thir- 
 ty or forty pounds of flesh that would not be recog- 
 nised by the presidential chair, and from five to six 
 hundred of his former subjects sat down with him to 
 dine. Mr. Van Buren has stuck to the "United 
 States," till fashion has gone over to him, for he fre- 
 quented the house when the belles were on the other 
 side of the street. Whether in the dance of politics, 
 the democracy "chassez across," and leave him on 
 the fashionable side, remains to be seen. 
 
 I had not been at "The Springs" for some years, 
 and between the changes in the place and the changes 
 in myself, I was, for a while (as the French charmingly 
 express it) desoriente. In the times that were, a gen- 
 tleman, on arriving at Saratoga, made his submission 
 to one or two ladies in whom was vested the gyndcra- 
 cy of the season — the mother of a belle, or an ex- 
 belle well preserved, or some marvellous old maid, 
 witty and kindly. Through this door, and this only, 
 ; could the society of the place be reached, and to this 
 authority the last appeal was made in all cases of doubt 
 and difficulty. The beaux and belles conformed and 
 submitted, exchanged hearts and promised hands, and 
 ; drove and danced, fished and picnicked, in obedience 
 to this administration — Coventry the dreadful alter- 
 I native. There were fashionable old-bachelor beaux 
 I in those days who were the masters of ceremony, and 
 I there were belles, upon whom, individually, was con- 
 : centrated the beauty now distributed in small parcels 
 j over the female population of a state. Every girl is 
 | tolerably pretty now. Everybody is, to the extent of 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 607 
 
 his natural capacity, a beau. There is no authority 
 higher than every young lady's mamma. Sent to 
 Coventry by one party, you may stay " at court" with 
 another. Flirts are let flirt without snaflie or martin- 
 gal. Fortunes are guarded only by the parental 
 dragon. Nabobs and aristocrats are received upon 
 their natural advantages without prestige or favor, and 
 everybody knows everybody, particularly if not from 
 the same city. Having been happiest myself under 
 the old regime, this agrarian anarchy somewhat of- 
 fended me; and the more, perhaps, that among the 
 company at the "United States," naturally secluding 
 herself somewhat from the crowd, is one of the con- 
 centrations of the beauty of ten years ago — a most 
 magnificent woman whom that lustrum of time has 
 passed over as lightly as a night's sleep. 
 
 Still, there is beauty at Saratoga — enough, indeed, 
 for all purposes of dreaming or waking. The ball at 
 the " United States" on Friday evening was exceed- 
 ingly brilliant, and at the concert of Castellan on Sat- 
 urday, when the more serious beauties of Union Hall i 
 were added to the assembly, the large saloon was 
 Bought to be very thickly spangled with loveliness. 
 At this last-named hotel, by the way, they have intro- ! 
 duced family prayers at nine o'clock, and at another 
 less-frequented house they give tea with the dinner — 
 little differences which seem to classify the patronage 
 very effectively. This is the great season of Saratoga, j 
 more persons being now at its different hotels than i 
 were ever recorded in any previous season. I must 
 not omit to mention the charming improvements by 
 Mr. Clark in the gem of a valley above Congress 
 spring (by walks, shrubbery, etc.), nor the elegance 
 of Marvin's grounds and embellishments at the United 
 States — a superb hotel indeed, in all its appointments. 
 This is "hop-night" at the Astor, and among the 
 crowd of ladies in the house are a few on their return 
 from Saratoga. The beaux tire of " The Springs" 
 sooner than the belles, and in Broadway yesterday I 
 saw a thick sprinkling of the desirables. Indeed, the 
 weather has been temperate enough to make the city 
 agreeable, and the southerners prefer enjoying Niblo's 
 and the comfortable hotels, when the thermometer 
 ranges below ninety. The boats down the river are 
 very full just now. I came down from West Point in 
 the Empire on Thursday, and found her crowded 
 with presentable company ; and with the elegance of 
 the saloons and decks, looking very drawing-rooms- 
 ical and gay. There is a great deal of gammon in the 
 reasons given for going and for not going to the Springs ; 
 and it is the fashion now for those who are not there 
 to ascribe their absence to a horror of the letter-wri- 
 ters, as if any would be mentioned at all by those im- 
 mortality-bestowing gentry who did not, by flirting 
 and display, show an appetite for notoriety, and in a 
 crowd, too, quite as promiscuous as the reading pub- 
 lic ! It would surprise a believing Judeus, after lis- 
 tening to the indignation current in the saloon of Sar- 
 atoga in the evening, on the subject of the penny pa- 
 pers, to see with what eagerness they are read the 
 next morning, and with what manifest pleasure each 
 lady mentioned shows to her admirers the paragraph 
 peccant. That such letters as 1 refer to are a very 
 great evil no man who respects the delicacy of private 
 life can doubt ; but one half of the mischief, at least, 
 lies in the unwomanly passion for notoriety to which 
 they minister. 
 
 Those who linger longest at Saratoga are the fami- 
 lies of resident New-Yorkers, their return to town be- 
 ing the return to the solitude of a house to themselves. 
 For " mineral waters" read " society in large doses ;" 
 and the real object of attraction is as easily found at 
 the " Astor" or the "American" as at Saratoga. The 
 sea air of Rockaway may stand for a tenth of its at- 
 tractions, and the other nine parts lie in the necessity 
 of some excusable resort in the neighborhood of the 
 
 city, which shall supply to the New-Yorkers what the 
 hotels (as a sequel to the Springs) are to travelling 
 strangers. From about the twentieth of this month 
 to the first cool weather, Rockaway will be thronged 
 with excellent society, mostly from this city ; and 
 there is a nucleus of half a dozen of the most delight- 
 ful women in any country, summering there regularly ; 
 three admirably lively and accomplished ladies of one 
 family the leading constellation. It is a part of the 
 commonplacery of fashionable chat to fret at the 
 crowd, and wish for more suitable privacy ; but it is 
 amusing to observe what a difference of opinion there 
 seems to be between the feet and tongue of the fair 
 exclusive. The belle at Saratoga rises at six and 
 walks to Congress spring. The ostensible object is 
 to drink the waters, which she might have in quite as 
 salutary a state by ringing the bell of her apartment. 
 The platform around the spring is crowded with fash- 
 ionables ; and, elbowed and stared at rather freely, and 
 complaining of both very feelingly, she remains in the 
 crowd till breakfast — solitary walks of the most sha- 
 ded coolness though there be, hard by and accessible. 
 She breakfasts with five hundred persons, and from 
 the table comes to the drawing-room, where she 
 promenades, and is elbowed as before, till eleven. At 
 that hour she goes with a party to the bowling-alleys, 
 where she amuses herself till the dressing-bell for din- 
 ner. And after dinner she mingles in the full-dress crowd 
 once more till tea-time (with perhaps the parenthesis 
 of a drive with a party to the lake), and from tea-time 
 till midnight she is in the same crowd, and goes to 
 bed late to get up again early, and so, burning her 
 candle at both ends, finds Saratoga enchanting. But 
 it is not the less " dreadfully crowded," and " horridly 
 mixed." 
 
 The music at Saratoga was one of its pleasures to 
 me. The band plays at the spring from six to eight 
 in the morning, and the morning hours (anacreon- 
 tics to the contrary notwithstanding) are the part 
 of the day when the senses are most acutely sensitive 
 to pleasure. If I am to see a fine picture with the 
 clearest eye, or read a page of poetry with the subtlest 
 appreciation, or listen to the sweet divisions of music 
 with the nicest and most interpreting ear, or hear a 
 deep-found thought of love, friendship, or philosophy, 
 give it me in the early morning of midsummer. The 
 perturbed blood flows evenly, and the perceptions 
 have settled over-night like a roiled well ; and (if in 
 temperate health) the heart is softer and more sus- 
 ceptible. To express a plain fact poetically — the mar- 
 ble lid is lifted from the fountain of tears at that hour, 
 and though the waters do not " well forth," they are 
 open to the dropping in of those pearls of attendant 
 angels — love, beauty, and music. Yet, " before 
 breakfast" is said commonly to be the prose of the day. 
 One hour of music after dinner is made tributary to 
 the smokers. The ladies and the tobacco escheweis 
 are out of its reach in the drawing-room, but the pa- 
 pas and the inveterates bring their chairs out to the 
 grassy area of the " United States," and smoke under 
 the shade, listening to the German band contentedly 
 and contemplatively. And that is a very pleasant 
 hour; and taken advantage of by those who, like my* 
 self, find comfort in the ellipses of conversation. 
 
 As to living at Saratoga, no reasonable person would 
 expect a comfortable dinner, sitting down with five or 
 six hundred persons. The meats get cold in the 
 spreading. But, to those who are drinking the wa- 
 ters, any check upon the appetite is not unsalutary, 
 and, for the gourmet, the Lake House, and one or two 
 other resorts in the neighborhood, offer game and fish 
 dinners in compensatory perfection. 1 went over to 
 Barhydt's dark lake, the scene of the loves of the lus- 
 trum gone by, and found it looking neglected and for- 
 saken. The old Dutchman is dead, and his quiet 
 successors look out with repelling surprise upon the 
 
608 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 gay and intruding visiters. It has ceased to be fre- 
 quented. 
 
 I saw at the engraver's yesterday a portrait of 
 Halleck, engraved for Graham's Magazine, which ex- 
 ceeds anything I have before seen, as a worthy and 
 truthful representation of a poet. It is to be published 
 in the September number, I believe, and is one of the 
 well-conceived series of portraits in progress of publi- 
 cation in that magazine. The keen, joyous, analyti- 
 cal gusto which give such a " sauce Robert" to Hal- 
 leck's poetry is admirably conveyed in this picture, 
 and a more faithful likeness was never drawn. The 
 original is by Inman. 
 
 Broadway in August is like a pocket-full of change 
 with the gold and silver picked out of it; and like the 
 disrespectful finger thrust by its owner into its scarce 
 diminished bulk, Mr. Stopintown, the lounger, con- 
 temptuously threads the crowd, of which he knows 
 the less precious and residual quality. But let us try 
 again — for this beginning is too Jeremy-Taylor-ous. 
 
 Have you ever started at Niblo's, dear reader, and, 
 with your eyes particularly open, walked down the 
 "shilling side" of Broadway to the Park? You 
 must have done this, and with speculation in your 
 eyes too, before you can detect, on the fashionable 
 side of Broadway in August, a certain class of prome- 
 naders visible there in no other month, by gas or day- 
 light. Now it occurs to us, that, in the spiritual geog- 
 raphy of this shop-and-show land, we can very possi- 
 bly give you a lesson. 
 
 Few people live more in the eye of the world than 
 than those who are in transition from poverty to rich- 
 es, bound upward. None are so invisible as those 
 who are going over the same road, downward. The 
 eye, in the city, acquires a habit of selecting what it 
 shall see. Glimpse, the porter (to put it figuratively), 
 sits in the outer vestibule of sight, and passes his 
 judgment on all comers before they are admitted 
 to the presence of consciousness. Prosperity has a 
 color of its own, and a coat with a needy pocket in its 
 skirt is as invisible as the sick heart it is buttoned 
 over. You walk Broadway from the Battery to Bond 
 street (on the golden side), and you remark every flip- 
 pery-flirt and boy-beau, and could recal upon oath 
 their respective riband and waistcoat ; yet a man of 
 genius has gone by, with a thought in his brain new 
 from God, but under a hat set distrustfully on, and 
 you would swear in a witness-box that he never 
 crossed your eye. Visible is an arbitrary word in 
 large cities. 
 
 But it is a devilish truth that in proportion as the 
 poverty-stricken become invisible, their consciousness 
 of being seen becomes painfully sensitive. They feel 
 pointed at with the finger when they are as totally un- 
 observed as the driver of an omnibus. The prosper- 
 ous and gay, too— the very persons who are blindest 
 to their presence— seem to them their most vigilant 
 and insulting observers. And as there is a side of the 
 street proper to the rich and the happy, the poor and 
 Wretched walk on the other. The great haunt of the 
 distressed — the Alsatia of poverty and crime — the lair 
 of the outcast of hope and pity — borders Broadway 
 on the east. In their recoil from the abyss they hang 
 over — turning back in terror from the fiendish aban- 
 donment of the Five Points, the last platform between 
 despair and death — the unhappy come to that limit of 
 Broadway and look across. And up and down, be- 
 tween Prince street and Chamber, they walk, with a 
 shunning gait, and shoulders shrinking at your look 
 as from a blow, and watch the happy on the other 
 side — wretched men of all degrees of desperation, 
 from the first downward step to the last. 
 
 Oh, you should walk there, now and then ! You 
 
 roiil walk there — perhaps you have, with unconscious 
 selection, already — when in want of money. With 
 the same olothes you wore when you had enough — 
 with a cravat as saucily expensive — gloved and booted 
 comme il faut — you will instinctively take the other 
 side of the street if out of pocket — if a five-dollar bill, 
 that is to say — unconsidered rag not long before — cov- 
 ers now as much void as the zodiac ! Oh, most com- 
 parative five-dollar bill ! 
 
 But the faces on the "shilling side" of Broadway ! 
 If you want a heart-ache, to be succeeded by content 
 with your lot and a prayer to God, cross over and look 
 at one or two. The eyelid unrelaxed — the mouth 
 shut up within, and the lips bloodless with the com- 
 pression of the tongue matted to the teeth — the livid 
 pits beneath the eyes, and the veins blood-shot round 
 the pupil — the rigid neck — the jaw set up with despe- 
 rate endurance — the contracted nostril, and the com- 
 plexion set and dead. And this is the countenance 
 of only poverty— only the agony of one man want- 
 ing a little of what another has too much of — of 
 which the church, building for the God of mercy at 
 the head of Wall street, has millions more than it can 
 spend without ingenuity of extravagance ! Are you 
 and I parts of a world like this, dear reader ! 
 
 But in August the gay and prosperous go ofT, and 
 the golden-side of Broadway is left to the mechanical 
 and the stranger. Of these the shabby and unhappy 
 have no dread, and they come over and walk, with 
 only their despair, in the haunts they once frequented. 
 You will see them in Broadway now — your attention 
 once directed to them — and if it be on Saturday, preach 
 who will on Sunday, you will have profited the day 
 before by a better sermon. 
 
 In looking down on the valley of Wyoming, made 
 memorable by savage barbarity and famous by the 
 poet's wand of enchantment, it is natural to indulge 
 in resentful feeling toward the sanguinary race whose 
 atrocities make up its page in story. It is a pity, how- 
 ever, that they, too, had not a poet and a partial chron- 
 j icier. Leaving entirely out of view the ten thousand 
 ! wrongs done by the white man to the Indian, in the 
 | corruption, robbery, and rapid extinction of his race, 
 there are personal atrocities, on our own records ex- 
 ercised toward that ill-fated people, which, in impar- 
 tial history hereafter, will redeem them from all charge 
 except that of irresistible retaliation. The brief story 
 of the famous Cornstalk, sachem of the Shawanees, 
 and king of the northern confederacy, is sermon 
 enough on this text. 
 
 The northwestern corner of Virginia, and that part 
 of Pennsylvania contiguous, on the south, was the 
 scene of some of the bloodiest events of Indian war- 
 fare. Distinguished over all other red men of this 
 this region, was Cornstalk. He was equally a terror 
 to the men of his own tribe (whom he did not hesitate 
 to hew down with his tomahawk if they showed any 
 cowardice in fight), and a formidable opponent to our 
 troops, from his military talents and personal daring. 
 He was, at the same time, more than all the other 
 chiefs of the confederacy, a friend to the whites ; and, 
 energetic as he was when once engaged in battle, 
 never took up arms willingly against them. After the 
 bloody contest at Point Pleasant, in which Cornstalk 
 had displayed his generalship and bravery, to the ad- 
 miration of his foes, he came in to the camp of Lord 
 Dunmore, to make negotiations for peace. Colonel 
 Wilson, one of the staff, thus describes his oratory : 
 " When he arose, he was nowise confused or daunted, 
 but spoke in a distinct and audible voice, without 
 stammering or repetition, and with peculiar emphasis. 
 His looks, while addressing Dunmore, were truly 
 grand and majestic, yet graceful and attractive. I have 
 
EPHEMERA 
 
 609 
 
 heard many celebrated orators, but never one whose 
 powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on 
 this occasion." 
 
 In the spring of 1777, it was known that an exten- 
 sive coalition was forming among the tribes, and that 
 it only waited the consent and powerful aid of the 
 Shawanees, to commence war upon the whites. At 
 this critical time, Cornstalk, accompanied by Red 
 Hawk, came on a friendly visit to the fort at Point 
 Pleasant, communicated the intentions of the tribes, 
 and expressed his sorrow that the tide set so strongly 
 against the colonists, that he must go with it in spite 
 of all his endeavors. 
 
 Upon receiving this information, given by the noble 
 savage in the spirit of a generous enemy, the com- 
 mander of the garrison seized upon Cornstalk and his 
 companion as hostages for the peaceful conduct of his 
 nation, and set about availing himself of the advan- 
 tage he had gained by his suggestions. During his 
 captivity, Cornstalk held frequent conversations with 
 the officers, and took pleasure in describing to them 
 the geography of the west, then little known. One 
 afternoon, while he was engaged in drawing on the 
 floor a map of the Missouri territory, its water-courses 
 and mountains, a halloo was heard from the forest, 
 which he recognised as the voice of his son Ellinip- 
 eico, a young warrior, whose courage and address 
 were almost as celebrated as his own. Ellinipsico en- 
 tered the fort, and embraced his father most affection- 
 ately, having been uneasy at his long absence, and 
 come hither in search of him. 
 
 The day after his arrival, a soldier went out from 
 the fort on a hunting excursion, and was shot by In- 
 dians. His infuriated companions instantly resolved 
 to sacrifice Cornstalk and his son. They charged 
 upon Ellinipsico that the offenders were in his com- 
 pany, but he declared that he had come alone, and 
 with the sole object of seeking his father. When the 
 soldiers came within hearing, the young warrior ap- 
 peared agitated. Cornstalk encouraged him to meet 
 his fate composedly, and said to him, " My son, the 
 Great Spirit has sent you here that we may die to- 
 gether!" He turned to meet his murderers the next 
 instant, and receiving seven bullets in his body, 
 expired without a groan. 
 
 When Cornstalk had fallen, Ellinipsico continued 
 still and passive, not even raising himself from his 
 seat. He met death in that position with the utmost 
 calmness. "The other Indian," says the chronicle, 
 •'was murdered piecemeal, and with all those circum- 
 stances of cruelty with which the savage wreaks his 
 vengeance on his enemy." 
 
 The day before his death, Cornstalk had been pres- 
 ent at a council of the officers, and had spoken to 
 them on the subject of the war, with his own peculiar 
 eloquence. In the course of his remarks, he expres- 
 sed something like a presentiment of his fate. " When 
 I was young," he said, "and went out to war, I often 
 thought each would be my last adventure, and I 
 should return no more. I still lived. Now I am in 
 the midst of you, and, if you choose, you may kill 
 me. I can die but once. It is alike to me whether 
 now or hereafter!" 
 
 His atrocious murder was dearly expiated. The 
 Shawanees, the most warlike tribe of the west, became 
 thenceforward the most deadly and implacable foes to 
 the white man. 
 
 Nine o'clock — an A ugust morning — and every breath 
 out of doors like a bird's life pressed into a minute ! 
 The breast of the earth naked to the sun — the air in 
 a trance— the river breathless with the beauty of the 
 sky it mirrors— and at such an hour to see the ghost 
 of a mended pen and a stubborn resolution ! Out 
 upon the art of writing! Is there no honest wood- 
 39 
 
 chopper, no dog, no squirrel, no anything out of 
 doors, that will change lives with me ! Down, school- 
 boy heart! and come hither, since thou must, pen, 
 ink, and paper! — stationary, indeed! 
 
 Close the shutters now, and bring candles! If I am 
 to sit at this table till noon, I will have it night. Slip- 
 pers, Thomas! And then shut the stable-door ; my 
 horse neighs; lock up the saddle and lose the key ! 
 And, Thomas! lend old Peter my boat, and break the 
 fishing-rod, and scare away the birds from the win- 
 dow. Has a skylark possessed my soul or no — 
 that I so hate the roof over my head this radiant 
 morning. 
 
 Play to me ere I begin ! Music is creative ! What 
 a benefactor to the world is John Chickering ! How 
 exquisitely balanced are those octaves, and how glo- 
 riously (with that touch) the rich instrument revels 
 through the music ! The builder of these caves of 
 harmony has a poet's vocation. What rs poetry but 
 the vehicle of man's enthusiasm — the element in 
 which float fancy and feeling — the suggestive awakener 
 of intellect — the soother of care and pain ! He who 
 writes a poem that is read and loved by a thousand 
 hearths, links himself with an angel's round of delight 
 and sympathy ; and the builder of a thousand harmo* 
 nious instruments follows in the same bright orbit of 
 influence. It has been said that " he who can not find 
 happiness can not find an easy-chair." For easy-chair 
 I read one of the evenly-balanced, rich, true, round- 
 toned and incomparable instruments of John Chicker- 
 ing. I have erected mine into a household god! 
 
 Play me those " Hope Waltzes" again. They 
 come off like Ariel's spiriting. But to bewitch the 
 heels and stir the brain the " Flower Waltzes" against 
 the world ! I have made out their language by daily 
 listening to them, and if I can not divine the compo- 
 ser's thought when they were born, I can tell what 
 they express, as I can what all music expresses that I 
 love and hear often. It is the difference between good 
 and bad music, that one is an articulate thought, and 
 the other mere jingle and gibberish. Among the 
 " coming events" that "cast their shadows before," is, 
 I think, a musical era, in which the intellectual quali- 
 ties of harmony in sounds will be studied and under- 
 stood. For one of the most powerful levers on the 
 human heart, singly or in mass, music has been 
 strangely undervalued, and its professors and masters 
 have been as strangely stigmatized as an idle and unin- 
 tellectual class of people. A revolution has begun in 
 church music, and in Boston (by the efforts of one 
 educated and enthusiastic man, Mr. Mason) the 
 church choirs have become as effective and eloquent 
 as the sermon. The perfection to which Chickering 
 has brought the structure of that universal instru- 
 ment, the piano; this musical reform in Boston; the 
 introduction of singing into the systems of education 
 for children, and last (not least surprising), the adop- 
 tion of music as a political engine, and its powerful 
 operation, are " signs of the times" which would war- 
 rant a musical man of genius in creating a new liberal 
 profession — the adaptation of expression to sound, 
 and the marriage of emotion to music. Moore under- 
 stands this mystery, and when in Spain (I once heard 
 him say) wrote several of his most pathetic songs to 
 the gayest airs of the peasantry. We have tried re- 
 wording old songs with some effect, and it is like 
 bringing notes to their right mind and making them 
 talk sense. There is a delicious thing by Topliff— 
 " Consider the lilies how I hey grow"— which makes 
 one feel as if the whole Bible should be chanted ; and 
 the " Six Songs from Scripture," by Moore, are very 
 beautiful. But admirably as Moore's words are al- 
 ways married to his music, there is one song of his 
 set to an air of Bellini's, which seems to me the mas- 
 terpiece of sense linked to corresponding harmony. I 
 can not at this moment name the opera from which 
 
610 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 the air is taken, nor the volume of Moore which con- 
 tains the poetry. It commences 
 
 " Is it not sweet to think, hereafter, 
 When the spirit leaves this sphere," 
 
 and is published in a book called " Kingsley's Choir." 
 It is a song to " lap you in Elysium." 
 
 From Memnon to Helicon is but to "jump Jim 
 Crow." Who is writing poetry? Nobody in Eng- 
 land, I think, but Mrs. Norton, and out of her sorrows 
 this beautiful woman is beginning to weave herself an 
 immortality. The allusion to her mother in one of 
 her late fugitive pieces, and the frequent mention of 
 her children, are touched in the very deepest truth of 
 nature as well as in the finest skill of the poet. It was 
 necessary for the world that this fine genius should be 
 " tried by fire." With her remarkable beauty, natu- 
 rally gay spirits, and unequalled powers of fascination, 
 Mrs. Norton, had the course of her life and love run 
 smooth, would never have sounded those sorrowful 
 depths of her heart from which wells out the bitter- 
 ness so sweet in song. Happy — we should have 
 heard but of her beauty. Wronged, persecuted, and 
 robbed of her children and her good name — we 
 build her an altar in our hearts as the most gifted poet- 
 ess of her time, and posterity will perpetuate the wor- 
 ship. Is this compensation or no ? 
 
 By that blast upon the farmer's dinner-horn, twelve 
 o'clock ! Avaunt, quill ! " sweat of my brow !" In 
 how many shapes comes the curse of the fall upon us ! 
 This horn, which calls in my farmer to repose from 
 his course in his chair, releases me from mine to let me 
 amuse myself with his labor. My curse is worked 
 out indoors — his in the field. The literal "sweat of 
 the brow" is my greatest happiness, and his heavy ful- 
 filment of the anathema. Light sits his curse, how- 
 ever, to my thinking, who bears it out of doors ! The 
 yearning for physical action, impatience of confine- 
 ment, dislike of the cobweb niceties of life, seem to 
 me feelings which grow into passions with increasing 
 years. Will no one invent a daguerreotype for the 
 mind, that our thoughts may record themselves — let- 
 ting us walk where we list? The pencil is to be done 
 away with — why not the pen ? 
 
 Weir, the painter, is moving his glorious picture to 
 Boston, for exhibition. It will be opened to visiters 
 there by the first of September. It is to be exhibited, 
 afterward, at the National Academy in New York — the 
 first home of the pilgrims having, very properly, the 
 honor of the first sight of it. Weir will steep himself 
 in his countrymen's hearts, as his picture shows them 
 how honestly, as well as with what splendor of genius, 
 he has executed their commission. I understand that 
 Vanderlyn's picture is very fine. There are several 
 persons employed in filling up his design, but Mr. 
 Vanderlyn's own pencil is to harmonize and finish it. 
 Mr. Morse has given up his palette and brushes, to 
 devote himself to his electro-galvanic telegraph, which 
 is now being laid down. The visit of Inman, the 
 painter, to England, is partly an errand for the study 
 of costume and data required for his picture for the 
 rotunda. 
 
 There seems to be a lull in literature, which I hope 
 is the precursor of a storm on the subject of copy- 
 right. No new books of any description since the 
 " Last of the Barons." The "Change for American 
 Notes" is not by Miss Sedgwick, and I presume that 
 the editor of the Enquirer, who must be acquainted, 
 as well as anybody, with her propriety "thrice bolted 
 o'er," had not looked into the free-and-easy pages of 
 the book when he pronounced her the authoress. 
 There is some dispute over julep-straws about the 
 authorship of " Philip in Search of a Wife." It is 
 
 "by a Gentleman Butterfly," and is a sequel to " Kate 
 in Search of a Husband," by Lady Chrysalis. But 
 public rumor, which was foiled in striving to identify 
 the lady chrysalis with the brightest of the callow 
 divinities of Broadway, has covered the wings of the 
 gentleman butterfly with the same attractive petticoat. 
 Having no eyesight to spare, I wait for an Appleton 
 edition before reading the book. I think that the two 
 or three tricks practised upon title-pages not long ago, 
 have materially hurt the credit of those respectable 
 old truth-tellers, and at the same time have dampened 
 the interest in new publications. 
 
 TO MISS VIOLET MABY, AT SARATOGA. 
 
 Astor House, August, 1843. 
 
 Start fair, my sweet Violet ! This letter will lie on 
 your table when you arrive at Saratoga, and it is in- 
 tended to prepare you for that critical campaign. You 
 must know the ammunition with which you go into 
 the field. I have seen service, as you know, and, 
 from my retirement (on half-pay), can both devise 
 strategy and reconnoitre the enemy's weakness, with 
 discretion. Set your glass before you on the table, 
 and let us hold a frank council of war. 
 
 You never were called beautiful, as you know ; and 
 at home you have not been a belle — but that is no im- 
 pediment. You are to be beautiful, now, or at least 
 to produce the result of beauty, which is the same 
 thing ; and of course you are to be a belle — the belle, 
 if I mistake not, of the season. Look in your mir- 
 ror, for a moment, and refresh your memory with the 
 wherewithal. 
 
 You observe that your mouth has blunt corners — 
 which, properly managed, is a most effective feature. 
 Your complexion is rather darkly pale, your forehead 
 is a shade lower than is thought desirable, your lips 
 are full, sweet, and indolent, and your eyes are not 
 remarkable unless when well handled. The lids have 
 a beauty, however, which a sculptor would understand, 
 and the duskiness around them may intensify, exceed- 
 ingly, one particular expression. Your figure is ad- 
 mirably perfect, but in this country, and particularly 
 among the men you are to control, this large portion 
 of female beauty is neither studied nor valued. Your 
 hair is too profuse to be dressed quite fashionably, but 
 it is a beauty not to be lost, so it must be coiffed a 
 V abandon — a very taking style to a man once brought 
 to the point of studying you. 
 
 There are two phases in your character, Violet — 
 earnestness and repose. The latter shows your fea- 
 tures to the most advantage, besides being a most cap- 
 tivating quality in itself. I would use it altogether for 
 the first week. Gayety will never do. A laugh on a 
 face like yours is fatal. It spreads, into unmeaning 
 platitude, the little wells in the corners of your mouth 
 (the blunt corners I spoke of above), and it makes 
 your eyes smaller — which they can not well bear. 
 Your teeth are minion and white, it is true, but they 
 show charmingly when you speak, and are excellent, 
 as reserved artillery, to follow an introduction. Save 
 your mirth till the game is won, my dear Violet! 
 
 Of course you will not appear at breakfast the first 
 morning after your arrival. The mental atmosphere 
 of the unaired hours is too cold and questioning for a 
 first appearance. So is the hungry half-hour till the 
 soup is removed. Go down late to dinner. Till after 
 the first glass of wine, the heart of man is a shut 
 book — opened then for entries, and accessible till shut 
 again by sleep. You need no table-lesson. You eat 
 elegantly, and, with that swan's-neck wrist, curving 
 and ivory-fair, your every movement is ammunition 
 well-bestowed. But there may, or may not, be a vic- 
 tim on the other side of the table. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 611 
 
 After dinner is the champ de bataille ! The men 
 are gallant, the ladies melted out, impulses a-top, the 
 key of conversation soprano, and everybody gay and 
 trivial. So be not you. It is not your style. Seat 
 yourself where you will have a little space for a fore- 
 ground, lean your light elbow on your left wrist, and 
 support your cheek languidly in the hollow of your 
 gloved thumb and forefinger. Excuse the particular- 
 ity, but try the attitude as you sit, now. Pretty — is it 
 not? 
 
 Look only out of the tops of your eyes ! If women's 
 glances were really the palpable shafts the poets paint 
 them, the effective ones would cut through the eye- 
 brows. Stupid ones slide over the under lid. Try 
 this! How earnest the glance with the head bent 
 downward ! — how silly the eyes with the chin salient ! 
 And move your eye indolently, my charming Violet! 
 It traverses the frippery gayety-woof of the hour with 
 a pretty thread of contrast that looks like superiority. 
 Men have a natural contempt for themselves when in 
 high spirits, and repose comes over them like a star 
 left in heaven after the turn of a rocket. 
 
 Nothing is prettier in woman than a leaning head ! 
 Bow without removing the supporting hand from your 
 cheek when a man is introduced to you ; smile tran- 
 quilly, and look steadfastly in his eyes and hear what 
 he has to say. Lucky for you — it is his devoir to 
 commence conversation ! And in whatever tone he 
 speaks, ^ite/i your reply a note lower! Unutterably 
 sweet is the contralto tone of woman, and the voices 
 of two persons, conversing, are like the plummets of 
 their hearts — the deeper from the deeper — so felt, and 
 so yielded. If you think it worth your while to har- 
 monise with his tone afterward, either in argument or 
 tenderness, the compliment is only less subtle than 
 overpowering. 
 
 There is a great deal of promenading at Saratoga, 
 and natural instinct will teach you most of its over- 
 comingnesses; but I will venture a suggestion or two. 
 If you are bent on damage to your man, lay your 
 wrist forward, to his, and let you hand drop over it, 
 when you take his arm. No mortal eye would think j 
 it particular, nor would he — but there is a kind of un- I 
 conscious aff'ectionateness about it which is electric. ! 
 Of course you would not resort to manifest pressure, ! 
 or leaning heavily, except you were carrying on the I 
 war a Voulrance. Walk with your head a little 
 drooped. If you wish to walk more slowly, tell him 
 so, but don't hang hack. It is enchanting to have a j 
 woman " head you off," as the sailors say, as if she 
 were trying to wind around you — and it has the charm, 
 too, of not looking particular ! 
 
 As to conversation, the trick is born with woman. 
 If her person is admired to begin with, this is the 
 least of her troubles. But though you are sweet sub- 
 jects, and men like to hear you talk about yourselves, 
 there is a sweeter subject, which they like better than 
 you — themselves. And lean away from merriment, 
 V r iolet ! No man ever began to love, or made any 
 progress in loving, while a woman was laughing. 
 There is a confidingness in subdued tones and sad 
 topics which sinks through the upper-crust of a man 
 like a stone through the thin ice of a well. And if 
 he is a man of natural sentiment or feeling, though a 
 worldling himself, the less worldliness in you, the bet- 
 ter. Piety, in those who are to belong to us, is a 
 spell that, in any but mythological days, would have 
 superseded the sirens. 
 
 I believe that is all, Violet. At least it is all I need 
 harp upon, to you. Dress, you understand to a mir- 
 acle. I see, by the way, that they are wearing the 
 nair now, like the chains on the shoulder of a hussar — 
 three or four heavy curls swung from the temples to 
 he back-knot. And that will be pretty for you, as 
 your jaw is not Napoleonesque, and looks better for 
 partial hiding. Ruin your father, if necessary, in 
 
 gloves and shoes. Primroses should not be fresher. 
 And whatever scarfs are made for, wear nothing to 
 break the curves from ear-tip to shoulder — the sculp- 
 ture lines of beauty in woman. Keep calm. Blood 
 out of place is abominable. And last, not least, for 
 Heaven's sake don't fall in love ! If you do, my pre- 
 cepts go for nothing, and your belleship is forgotten 
 by all but " the remainder biscuit." 
 
 Your affectionate uncle, Cinna Beverley. 
 
 The above curious letter was left in the dressing- 
 table drawer of No. , United States Hotel. It 
 
 was not generally known that the young lady who had 
 occupied the room before a certain respectable spin- 
 ster (who handed us the letter, taking the responsibil- 
 ity of its publication as a warning), eloped after the 
 third day of her belleship— as was to be expected. 
 The result of such pestilent advice is its own proper 
 moral. 
 
 Nextto-eating, drinking, loving, and money-making, 
 the greatest desire of human beings seems to be to 
 discover the lining of each other's brains; and the 
 great difference between authors and other people 
 seems mainly to consist in the faculty of turning out 
 this lining to the view. But in this same lining there 
 are many plaits, wrinkles, and corners, which even au- 
 thors scarce think it worth their while to expand, but 
 which, if accidentally developed, create an interest, 
 either by their correspondence with other people's 
 wrinkles, or by their intrinsic peculiarity. 
 
 Let us see if we can give a sketchy idea of the rise 
 and progress of literary celebrity in London ; or, in 
 other words, the climbing into society, and obtaining 
 of notice by men who have a calling to literature. 
 Sterne's method of generalizing, by taking a single 
 instance, is a very good one, and we will touch here 
 and there upon the history of an individual whom we 
 know, and who, after achieving several rounds of the 
 ladder of society, is still, we believe, slowly making 
 his way upward — or downward. Let us call him 
 Snooks, if you please, for we can not give his real 
 name, and still speak as freely as we wish to do of his 
 difficulties in mounting. Snooks was a Manchester 
 boy of good birth, brought up to business — his posi- 
 tion at home about equal to that of a merchant's son 
 in New York. He began writing verses for the coun- 
 try papers, and at last succeeded in getting an article 
 into the London New Monthly, and with this encour- 
 agement came up to town to follow literature for a 
 livelihood. With a moderate stipend from his father, 
 he lived a very quiet life for a couple of years, finding 
 it rather difficult to give away his productions, and 
 quite impossible to sell them. There was no open- 
 ing at the same time through which he could even 
 make an attempt to get a footing in desirable society. 
 In the third year he became proof-reader to one of 
 the publishers, and being called upon to write antici- 
 patory puffs of works hehad examined in manuscript, 
 he came'under the notice of the proprietor of one of 
 the weeklies, and by a lucky chance was soon after 
 employed as sub-editor. This was his first available 
 foothold. It was his business, of course, to review 
 new books, and, as a "teller" in the bank of fame, he 
 was a personage of some delegated importance. His 
 first agreeable surprise was the receipt of a parcel in 
 scented paper, containing the virgin effusions of a 
 right honorable lady, who, in a little note, with her 
 compliments to Mr. Snooks (for she had inquired the 
 name of her probable critic through a literary friend), 
 begged a notice of her little book, and a call from 
 Mr. Snooks when he should have committed his crit- 
 icisms to paper. 
 
 Snooks was a man of very indiffer- 
 
 „..bles, his hair of an unmitigated red, and 
 
 hia voice of a very hair-splitting treble; but he had a 
 
 ent person 
 
612 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 violent taste for dress, and a born passion for count- 
 esses ; and he wrote most unexceptionable poetry, 
 that would pass for anybody's in the world, it was so 
 utterly free from any peculiarity. This last quality 
 made him an excellent verse-tinker, and he was the 
 man of all others best suited to solder over the cracks 
 and chasms of right honorable poetry. He wrote a 
 most commendatory criticism of her ladyship's book, 
 quoting some passages, with here and there an emen- 
 dation of his own, and called at the noble mansion 
 with the critique in his pocket. By this bridge of 
 well-born vanity, paying the humiliating toll of insin- 
 cere praise, he crossed the repelling barrier of aristo- 
 cratic life, and entered it as the necessary incumbrance 
 in her ladyship's literary fame. Her ladyship was " at 
 home" on Thursday evenings, and Snooks became 
 the invariable first comer and last goer-away; but his 
 happiness on these Thursday evenings could only be 
 called happiness when it was 'reconnoitred from the 
 distance of Manchester. He went always in an irre- 
 proachable waistcoat, fresh gloves, and varnished shoes, 
 but his social performances for the evening consisted 
 in his first bow to her ladyship, and her ladyship's 
 "How d'ye do, Mr. Snooks?" After this exciting 
 conversation, he became immediately interested in 
 some of the bijoux upon the table, striding off from 
 that to look at a picture in the corner, or to procure 
 the shelter of a bust upon a pedestal, behind which 
 he could securely observe the people, so remarkably 
 unconscious of his presence. Possibly, toward the 
 latter part of the evening, a dandy would level his 
 glass at him and wonder how the devil he amused 
 himself, or some purblind dowager would mistake him 
 for the footman, and ask him for a glass of water; 
 but these were his nearest approaches to an intimacy 
 with the set in which he visited. After a couple of 
 years of intercourse with the nobility on this footing, 
 he becomes acquainted with one or two other noble 
 authors at the same price, frequents their parties in 
 the same way, and having unequivocal evidence (in 
 notes of invitation) that he visits at the West End, he 
 now finds a downward door open to society in Russell 
 square. By dint of talking authentically of my lady 
 this, and my lord the other, he obtains a vogue at the 
 East End which he could only get by having come 
 down from a higher sphere, and through this vesti- 
 bule of aristocratic contempt he descends to the high- 
 est society in which he can ever be familiar. Mr. 
 Snooks has written a novel in three volumes, and con- 
 siders himself fully established as one of the notabil- 
 ities of London; but a fish out of water is happy in 
 comparison with Snooks when in the society of the 
 friends he talks most about, and if he were to die to- 
 morrow, these very "friends" would with difficulty re- 
 member anything but his red head, and the exemplary 
 patience with which he submitted to his own society. 
 The fact is, that the position of a mere literary 
 man in England, in any circle above that to which he 
 is born, is that of a jackall. He is invited for what 
 he contributes to the entertainment of the aristocratic 
 lions and lionesses who feed him. He has neither 
 power nor privilege in their sphere. He dare not in- 
 troduce a friend, except as another jackall, and it 
 would be for very extraordinary reasons that he would 
 ever name at the tables where he is most intimate, his 
 father or mother, wife, sister, or brother. The foot- 
 man, who sometimes comes to him with a note or 
 book, knows the difference between him and the other 
 guests of his master, and by an unpunishable differ- 
 ence of manner, makes the distinction in his service. 
 The abandon which they feel in his presence, lie never 
 feels in theirs; and we doubt whether Thomas Moore 
 himself, the pet of the English aristocracy for forty 
 years, ever forgot, in their company, that he was in 
 the presence of his superiors, and an object of conde- 
 scension. 
 
 Now we have many people in this country, Ameri- 
 cans born, who are monarchists, and who make no 
 scruple in private conversation of wishing for a de- 
 fined aristocracy, and other infrangible distinctions be- 
 tween the different classes of society. In the picture 
 they draw, however, they themselves figure as the 
 aristocrats; and we must take the liberty, for the mo- 
 ment, of putting them "below the salt," and setting 
 forth a few of their annoyances. Take the best-re- 
 ceived Americans in London — yourself, for example, 
 Mr. Reader ! You have no fixed rank, and therefore 
 you have nothing to keep you down, and can rise to 
 any position in the gift of your noble entertainer. As 
 a foreigner, you circulate freely (as many well-intro- 
 duced Americans do) through all the porcelain pene- 
 tralia of the West End. You are invited to dine, we 
 will say, with his grace, the Duke of Devonshire. 
 There are ten or twelve guests, all noble except your- 
 self; and when you look round upon the five other 
 gentlemen, it is possible that, without vanity, you may 
 come to the conclusion, that in dress, address, spirit, 
 and natural gifts, you are at least the equal of those 
 around you. Dinner is late in being announced, and 
 meantime, as you know all the ladies, and are particu- 
 larly acquainted with the youngest and prettiest, you 
 sit down by the latter, and promise yourself the pleas- 
 ure of giving her an arm when the doors are thrown 
 open, and sitting by her at dinner. The butler makes 
 his appearance at last, and the lady willingly takes 
 your arm — when in steps my Lord Flummery, who 
 is a terrible "spoon," but undoubtedly "my lord" 
 takes the lady from you, and makes his way to the 
 dinner-table. Your first thought is to follow and se- 
 cure a place on the other side of her, but still another 
 couple or two are to take precedence, and you are left 
 at last to walk in alone, and take the seat that is left — 
 perhaps between two men who have a lady on the 
 other side. Pleasant — isn't it? 
 
 Again. You are strolling in Regent street or the 
 park with an Englishman, whose acquaintance you 
 made on your travels. He is a man of fortune, and 
 as independent in his character as any man in Eng- 
 land. On the continent he struck you as particularly 
 high-minded and free from prejudice. You are chat- 
 ting with him very intimately, when a young noble- 
 man, not remarkable for anything but his nobility, 
 slips his arm into your friend's and joins the prom- 
 enade. From that moment your friend gives you 
 about as much of his attention as he does to his walk- 
 ing-stick, lets your questions go unanswered, let them 
 be never so clever, and enjoys with the highest zest 
 the most remote spoonyosities of my lord. You, 
 perhaps, as a stranger, visit in my lord's circle of so- 
 ciety, and your friend does not ; but he would as soon 
 think of picking my lord's pocket as of introducing 
 you to him, and, if you begin to think you are Mon- 
 sieur de Trop, and say "good morning," your friend, 
 who never parted from you before without making an 
 engagement to see you again, gives you a nod with- 
 out turning his head from his lordship, and very dryly 
 echoes your "good morning." And this, we repeat, 
 the most independent man in England will do, for he 
 is brought up to fear God and honor a lord, and it is 
 bred in his bone and brain. 
 
 We could give a thousand similar instances, but 
 the reader can easily imagine them. The life of a 
 commoner in England is one of inevitable and daily 
 eclipse and mortification — nothing but the force of 
 early habits and education making it tolerable to the 
 Englishman himself, and nothing at all making it in 
 any way endurable to a republican of any pride or 
 spirit. You naturally say, "Why not associate with 
 the middle classes, and let the aristocracy go to the 
 devil ?" but individually sending people to the devil 
 is of no use, and the middle classes value yourself 
 and each other only as your introduction to them is 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 613 
 
 aristocratic, or as their friends are approvnble by an 
 aristocratic eye. There is no class free from this hu- 
 miliating weakness. The notice of a lord will at any 
 time take the wind out of your sails when a lady is in 
 the case; your tailor will leave you half-measured to 
 run to my lord's cab in the street; your doctor will 
 neglect your fever for my lord's cold ; your friend will 
 breakfast with my lord, though engaged particularly 
 to you ; and the out-goings and in-comings, the say- 
 ings and doings, the stupidities, impudencies, man- 
 ners, greetings, and condescensions of lords and la- 
 dies, usurp the conversation in all places, and to the 
 interruption or exclusion of the most grave or per- 
 sonal topics. 
 
 Understand us, we grudge no respect to dignities or 
 authorities. Even to wealth as power, we are willing to 
 yield the wall. But we say again, that a republican 
 spirit must rebel against homage to anything human with 
 which it never can compete, and in this lies the only 
 distinction (we fervently hope) which will ever hedge 
 in an American aristocracy. Let who will get to 
 windward of us by superior sailing — the richer, the 
 handsomer, the cleverer, the stronger, the more be- 
 loved and gifted — there was fair play at the start, and 
 we will pay deference and duty with the prompt- 
 est. But no lords and ladies, Mr. President, if you 
 love us. 
 
 I am very sorry to record a good piece of news for 
 the coachmakers : — that the ladies are beginning to 
 get superfine about riding in omnibuses. The omni- 
 bus convenience has been upon an excellent footing 
 for the last few years, used, indeed, with a freedom 
 and propriety peculiar to this country, and somewhat 
 characteristic of its deference to the sex. From the 
 longitudinal shape of New York, it is easy to go any- 
 where by omnibus, at any moment, and even if a car- 
 riage could be kept for a shilling a day, the trouble 
 and delay attending a private equipage, would induce 
 many to give them up, and spend their shilling in the 
 " Broadway lines." The gentility of the custom, too, 
 has induced the proprietors to embellish and enlarge 
 their vehicles, and for sixpence you may ride two or 
 three miles in a very elegant conveyance, and mostly 
 with very elegant people. Of late, however, it has 
 become a habit with an improper class of persons to 
 ride backward and forward, instead of walking Broad- 
 way, and propriety has very naturally taken a fright. 
 I am very much afraid, from the symptoms, that om- 
 nibuses will become in New York, what they are in 
 England and Paris — useful only to the un-ornamental 
 classes of society. If so, it will be another step 
 (among many I have noticed lately) toward separating 
 the rich from the middle classes by barriers of ex- 
 pense. With an errand, or an acquaintance two 
 miles off, a lady must ride, at some cost, as a habit, if 
 omnibuses are tabooed. 
 
 I understand, by inquiry, that there are one hun- 
 dred and fifty omnibuses plying in New York city. 
 The receipts amount to about eight dollars per diem 
 for each one, and the expense wear and tear, &c, 
 substract five from this sum, leaving a profit of three 
 dollars a day on each vehicle. Yet some of them go 
 a course of three miles for the invariable sixpence. 
 There are certain parts of the day when it is difficult 
 to get a place in an omnibus — wishing to ride up 
 Broadway, for instance, at the dinner hour or at dusk. 
 There are several drawn by four horses, which con- 
 tain twenty odd persons. One named for Forrest, the 
 tragedian, with "Edwin Forrest" splendidly embla- 
 zoned on the body, is particularly magnificent. I saw 
 one last night for the first time on three wheels — with 
 two rows of seats, like two omnibuses put lengthwise 
 together. The change from hackney-roaches to cabs 
 
 I is very unsatisfactory to passenger as well as horse. 
 The old New York jarveys were the best in the 
 world, with the offset of the most abominable imposi- 
 tion in the known world, in the charges of drivers. 
 I Cabs were introduced to remedy this; and now one 
 horse draws the load of two. and reduces the owner's 
 j expenses one half, while the imposition is in no way 
 I lessened. There are laws, but as ninety-nine persons 
 ; in a hundred would rather be fleeced than prosecute 
 | or bully, the extortion goes on very swimmingly. 
 
 I was honored yesterday by being called in to a pri- 
 vate view of the fall fashion of hats, lying at present 
 j perdu in tissue paper, and not to be visible to the pro- 
 I miscuous eye till the first of September. I ventured 
 I modestly to suggest an improvement, but was told, 
 j with the solemnity of conviction, that the hatters had 
 ; decided upon the fashion, and the blocks were cut, 
 and the hats made, and there was no appeal. It is 
 ! rather a lower crown than has been worn — slightly 
 bell, brim a thought wider, and very much arched un- 
 derneath. The English hat that comes over now is 
 very small, and narrow brimmed, and the Parisian is 
 shaped like an inverted rone, truncated at the base. 
 Of course we have a right to a fashion of our own, but 
 a hat is, more than any article of dress, a matter of 
 whimsey, and any inexorable style, without reference 
 to particular physiognomy, seems to me somewhat in 
 the line of the bed of Procrustes. I recollect hearing 
 the remark made abroad, that Americans could always 
 be known by their unmitigated newness of hat. Cer- 
 tain it is, that the hatters in this country are a richer 
 class, and many pegs higher in tradesman dignity, 
 than those of France or England — tant mieux, of 
 I course. Apropos — in some slight research yesterday 
 for material to refresh the thread bareness of my outer 
 man, I looked in at one or two of the crack shops, and 
 was quite taken by surprise with the splendor and vari- 
 ety of masculine toggeries. The waistcoat patterns, 
 I the scarfs, the pantaloon stuffs, and dressing-gowns, 
 j are sumptuous beyond all modern precedent. A man 
 | must have a gentleman's means, now, to allow carte 
 I blanche to his tailor. I was about to turn aside some 
 j rich stuffs, as being, I was sorry to say, quite beyond 
 my style and condition, when the tailor forestalled me, 
 by the assurance that by the next packet, he should 
 receive something much more splendid and worthy 
 my attention! As I have remarked once or twice be- 
 fore, those who live on literary profits will soon find 
 themselves stranded on the middle class — the rich eb 
 bing from their reach in one direction, and the poor 
 in the other. I have an aversion to the clerk's salt- 
 and-pepper, but I should be content with any other 
 outward mark of my means and belongings. 
 
 We had a very melo-dramatic out-of-doors exhibi- 
 tion the other evening, iu the illumination of the Bowl- 
 ing Green fountain. An illuminated waterfall is a 
 very phantom-like affair, and the eight ghostly gas- 
 burners, set round the rim of the basin in green hoods, 
 looked as much like demons, popping their heads 
 above water to gaze at the white spirit, as would have 
 been at all necessary for diabolical pantomime. The 
 fountain grows upon the public liking, I think, and 
 certainly, when lighted by red and blue fires (which is 
 part of the Friday evening show) it is a magnificent 
 object. The private fountains in the court-yards of 
 the hotels are very handsome. Bunker, in the rear 
 of his well-kept and most comfortable mansion, has 
 a fine jet under the noble old trees ; and Cozzens 
 has opened an ornamental fountain in the rear of 
 the American— great luxuries, both, to the respective 
 
614 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 hotels. I am told, by the way, that the Croton water 
 does not keep at sea. 
 
 The literary arena is now unoccupied, and it could 
 be wished that some of our own knights out of prac- 
 tice would don their armor for a tilt — that Wetmore 
 would come away from his crockery, and Halleck 
 from his leger, Bryant from his scissors and politics, 
 and Sprague from his cerberus post at the Hades of 
 Discount — and give us some poetry. Another sea or 
 forest novel by Cooper would be most welcome now, 
 or a volume of prose by Longfellow, and these two, I 
 think, as the only American authors not regularly har- 
 nessed in the car of Mammon, should have store laid 
 away for such exigencies of famine. Kendall's Rec- 
 ollections of the chain round his neck in Mexico, and 
 Brantz Myer's, of his gold coat and court experience 
 at the same place and time, will come out pretty 
 nearly in the same week, and be excellent sauce to 
 each other. Epes Sargent is somewhere in the high 
 grass, rusticating and writing a book, and I hope, if it 
 is not a tragedy for Forrest, it is a novel of good soci- 
 ety — either of which would come out from under his 
 raven locks with little trouble, and of most excellent 
 quality. Placide, who has a scribli-phobia on his own 
 account, has offered his " Life and Times" to a friend, 
 to be delivered verbally over woodcock and sherry, 
 and several of the first chapters are uncorked and di- 
 gested. Mr. Richard Willis, younger brother of one 
 of the editors of the New Mirror, is residing at Frank- 
 fort, in Germany, and preparing a book on the land of 
 beer and the domestic virtues. Mrs. Ellet's mascu- 
 line pen is nearly idle. Simms, the novelist, is in 
 New York, residing with his literary friend Lawson, 
 but not coquetting with the publishers to our knowl- 
 edge. Morris will not " die and leave the world no 
 copy," as he has half a dozen songs about being mar- 
 ried to music — the banns shortly to be published. I 
 do not hear that Hoffman is doing anything except 
 the looking after his bread and butter. Mrs. Embury 
 is editing "The Ladies' Companion," and the author- 
 ess of " The Sinless Child" editing " The Rover," 
 and Mrs. Stephens editing " The Ladies' World ;" 
 and these are three ladies worthy the binding and 
 gilding of less ephemeral volumes. Neal and Snow 
 edit " The Brother Jonathan," Neal living at Port- 
 land, and snow being "on the ground." Witty and 
 racy " Mrs. Mary Clavers" is about returning to "the 
 settlements" from her seclusion in Michigan — an event 
 to be rejoiced over like the return of the Lost Pleiad. 
 She is an accomplished linguist, and with her pure, 
 classic, and flowing style, she might occupy, here, the 
 position of Mary Howitt or Mrs. Austin in England- 
 gaining all the honors of authorship by eminence in 
 translation. 
 
 I understand a great enthusiasm is about to make 
 itself manifest on the subject of the State Monu- 
 ment to Washington. The association is now in- 
 corporated by the legislature, and the design, as it 
 stands formed at present, is one of unequalled magnifi- 
 cence, worthy (and no more than worthy) of the sub- 
 ject. Four hundred and twenty-five feet is the pro- 
 posed height; and this, one of the New York papers 
 states, will make it the highest building in the world 
 — not quite correctly, as the pyramid of Cheops is six 
 hundred feet high. To realize this prodigious eleva- 
 tion, however, one must remember that the steeple of 
 the new Trinity church, which is to be the tallest in 
 this country, will only reach to two hundred and sev- 
 enty-five feet. It is not to be merely a monument, 
 but an immense public building, containing halls, 
 libraries, and other appropriate apartments. The 
 
 shape is to be a pentagon, and the style a florid Goth- 
 ic. Union square is named as the site ; but the im- 
 mense size of the base, I should suppose, would re- 
 quire an area of much greater extent — and it would 
 be a pity, besides, to break up the salutary fountain 
 and open park, already ornamental enough, in that 
 part of the city. The placing of this noble monu- 
 ment on the central elevation now occupied by the 
 Tabernacle, and the opening of a new square, extend- 
 ing back to the Bowery and the Five Points, would, in 
 the first place, turn that festering sink into lungs for 
 this crowded metropolis, and in the next place cen- 
 tralize, in the neighborhood of the City Hall, the 
 prominent public buildings. This great monument 
 is to be built by subscriptions of one dollar each. 
 Fifty thousand dollars were collected some time since, 
 and are now at interest; and there is a sum of one 
 hundred thousand dollars in the treasury at Washing- 
 ton, which it is hoped will be given to this. The ob- 
 ject is one which every American must feel interested 
 in ; and there is no citizen, 1 presume, who would not 
 give his dollar toward it. Let it be, if Mr. Dickens 
 ! chooses so to call it, a " dollar" monument to Wash- 
 ington — showing that, devoted to dollars as we are 
 (and yet not more than Englishmen to pounds, shil- 
 lings, and pence), our dollar-patriotism can raise to the 
 first patriot of history, the grandest monument of 
 modern times. 
 
 The respectable and zealous spinster who sent u* 
 for publication, as a salutary warning, the very worldly 
 and trappy epistle, addressed to Miss Violet Maby, at 
 Saratoga, and published on a previous page, has laid 
 her fingers on another specimen of the same gentle- 
 man's correspondence, which we give, without com- 
 ment or correction, as follows : — 
 
 Astor House, August 10, 1843. 
 
 My dear widow: For (he wear and tear of your 
 bright eyes in writing me a letter you are duly cred- 
 ited. That for a real half-hour, as long as any or- 
 dinary half-hour, such well-contrived illuminations 
 should have concentrated their mortal using on me 
 only, is equal, I am well aware, to a private audience 
 of any two stars in the firmament — eyelashes and pet- 
 ticoats (if not thrown in) turning the comparison a 
 little in your favor. Thanks — of course — piled high 
 as the porphyry pyramid of Papantla ! 
 
 And you want "a pattern for a chemisette." Let 
 me tell you, my dear widow, you have had a narrow 
 escape. Had you unguardedly written to your mil- 
 liner for an article so obsolete — but I'll not harrow up 
 your feelings. Suffice it, that that once-privileged 
 article has passed over, with decayed empires, to his- 
 tory — an aristocracy of muslin too intoxicated to last. 
 
 "Fuitr 
 
 The truth is, shams are tottering. The linen cuff 
 which was a shallow representation of the edge of a 
 linen sleeve, and the linen collar or embroidered che- 
 misette, which as faintly imagined forth the spotless 
 upper portion of the same investiture, are now boha- 
 fide continuations of a garment, "though lost to sight 
 to memory dear !" The plait on the throat and wrist is 
 scrupulously of the same fineness, and simply emerges 
 from the neck and sleeve of the dress without turn- 
 ing over. 
 
 The hem of the skirt is beyond my province of ob- 
 servation, but as the plaited edge would be pretty 
 (spread over the instep when sitting), the unity is prob- 
 ably preserved. 
 
 Apropos of instep — the new discovery of a steel 
 spring in the shoe to arch the hollow of the foot, has 
 directed attention to the curves of those bewitching 
 locomotives, and heels are coming into fashion. This 
 somewhat improves the shapeliness of the pastern, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 615 
 
 lifts the sex a half inch nearer heaven — more out of 
 reach than ever, of course. Adieu in time— should 
 you lose sight of me ! 
 
 And now — (for I believe you may trust "The La- 
 dy's Book" for the remainder of the chronicle of 
 fashion) — how comes on, oh, charming widow, the lit- 
 tle property 1 have in your empire of alabaster ? 
 Shall 1 recall the title-deed to your recollection ? Did 
 you not, on a summer's night, having the full posses- 
 sion of your senses, lay a rose-leaf wetted with dew on 
 your left temple ? Did you not, without mental res- 
 ervation, scratch it round with a thorn of the same 
 rose, and then and there convey to me the territory 
 so bounded, to have and to hold for my natural life, to 
 be guarded, at your peril, from trespass or damage ? 
 Did you not, at the same place and time, with blood 
 taken from your pricked finger, write me out, to this 
 effect, a rosy conveyance, of which, if needful, I can 
 send you, in red ink, a paler copy? Of course I do 
 not ask for information, i'ou know you did. And 
 you know you had for it a consideration — of such im- 
 mortality as was in my power to bestow : — 
 
 '•' Where press this hour those fairy feet ?" &c. 
 
 You married — and with so prying a neighbor as 
 your remainder's husband, I did not very frequently 
 visit my little property. You had the stewardship 
 over it, and I presume that you respected, and made 
 others respect, the rights of the proprietor. I never 
 heard that your husband was seen invading the prem- 
 ises. I have every reason to believe that he was uni- 
 formly directed to plant his tulips elsewhere than in 
 my small garden. It was to me a slumbering invest- 
 ment — and the interest, I must be permitted to advise 
 you, has accumulated upon it ! 
 
 And now that my prying neighbor is dead, and the 
 property in the opposite temple and the remainder of the 
 demesne, has reverted to the original proprietor, I may 
 be permitted to propose myself as an occupant of my 
 own territory, pro tern., with liberty to pluck fruit from 
 the opposite garden as long as it remains untenanted. 
 Take care how you warn me off. That peach upon 
 your cheek would make a thief of a better man. 
 
 You disdain news, of course. China is taken by 
 the English, and the Down-Town-Bard has recovered 
 his appetite for champagne, and writes regularly for 
 the New Mirror. The Queen's Guards have done 
 coming over ; the town dull ; and bonnets (I forgot to 
 mention) are now worn precipitated over the nose at 
 an angle of forty-five degrees. 
 
 Adieu, my dear widow. Command me till you lose 
 your beauty. Yours at present, 
 
 Cinna Beverley. 
 
 CINNA BEVERLEY, ESQ., TO ALEXIS VON PHUHL. 
 
 Astor House, Sept. 1, 1843. 
 
 My dear neph-ling : I congratulate you on the 
 attainment of your degree as " Master of Arts." In 
 other words, [ wish the sin of the Faculty well re- 
 pented of, in having endorsed upon parchment such a 
 barefaced fabrication. Put the document in your poc- 
 ket, and come away ! There will be ho occasion to 
 air it before doomsday, probably, and fortunately for 
 you, it will then revert to the Faculty. Quiescat ad- 
 huc — as I used to say of my tailor's bills till they came 
 through a lawyer. 
 
 And now, what is to become of you ? I do not 
 mean as to what your grandmother calls your " tem- 
 poral welfare." You were born to gold-dust like a 
 butterfly's wing. Ten thousand a year will ooze into 
 your palm like insensible perspiration — (principally 
 from investments in the " Life and Trust"). But 
 your style, my dear boy — your idiosyncrasy of broad- 
 cloth and beaver, satin and patent-leather — your outer 
 type — your atmosphere — your cut ! Oh, Alexis ! 
 
 But let us look this momentous matter coolly in 
 the face. 
 
 America has now arrived at that era of civilized ag- 
 grandizement when it is worth a gentleman's while to 
 tie his cravat for the national meridian. We can 
 afford to wish St. James street " Ion voyage''' in its 
 decline from empire. We dress better than Great 
 Britain. Ilium fuit. The last appeal of the universe, 
 as to male toggery, lies in the approval of forty eyes 
 lucent beneath twenty bonnets in Broadway. In the 
 decision of twenty belles or thereabout, native in New 
 York, resides, at this present crisis, the eidolon of the 
 beau supreme. Homage a la mode Manhaltanesque ! 
 
 But, to the sanctum of fashion there is no thor- 
 oughfare. Three persons, arriving at it by the same 
 road, send it flying like " Loretto's chapel through the 
 air." Every man his own guide thither, and his path 
 trackless as a bird's alley to his nest! I can but give 
 you some loose data for guidance, and pray that " by 
 an instinct you have" you may take a "bee-line" of 
 your own. 
 
 Of course you know that during the imitative era 
 just past, there have been two styles of men's dress — 
 the Londonish and the Parisian— pretty equally pop- 
 ular, I should say. The London man dresses loose 
 above, the Paris man loose below — tight hips and 
 baggy coat in St. James street — baggy trousers and 
 pinched coat on the Boulevard. The Englishman 
 puts on his cravat with summary energy and a short 
 tie — the Frenchman rejoices in a voluptuous waterfall 
 of satin ; and each, more particularly in this matter of 
 neckcloth, abhors the other. John Bull shows his 
 shirt-collar till death — Monsieur sinks it with the same 
 pertinacity. English extravagance, fine linen — French 
 extravagance, primrose kids. 
 
 Something is due, of course, to the settled princi- 
 ples of art. By the laws of sculpture, the French- 
 man is wrong — the beauty of the male figure consist- 
 ing in the breadth of the shoulders and the narrow- 
 ness of the hips; and this formation shows blood and 
 breeding, moreover, as to have small hips, a man's 
 progenitors must not have carried burdens. So — for 
 me — trousers snug to the barrel, and coat scant of 
 skirt, but prodigal above. Decide for yourself, not- 
 withstanding. There is a certain je ne scais quoi in 
 bagginess of continuation — specially on a tall man. It 
 only don't suit my style ! 
 
 And, as to cravat, I have the same weak leaning 
 toward Bond street. The throat looks poulticed in 
 those heavy voluminousnesses. Black diminishes the 
 apparent size, too, and the more shirt-bosom visible, 
 the broader the apparent chest. It depends on the 
 stuff, somewhat. Very rich billows of flowered satin 
 look ruinous — and that the ladies love. But in every 
 other particular, if you will wear these eclipsers of 
 linen, you must be as lavendered as a lily at dawn — 
 compensatory, as it were ! And if you show your 
 collar, for Heaven's sake let it follow the curve of your 
 jawbone, and not run athwart it like a rocket aimed at 
 the corner of your eyebrow ! 1 am sensitive as to this 
 last hint. The reform was my own. 
 
 One caution — never be persuaded that there is such 
 a thing as a fashion of hat ! Believe me, the thing is 
 impossible! Employ an artist. George Flagg has a 
 good eye for a gentleman's belongings, and he'll make 
 a drawing of you with reference to a hat. No hat is 
 endurable that will not look well in a picture. Ponder 
 the brim. Study how the front curve cuts the line of 
 the eyebrow. Regulate it by the expressmn of face 
 common to you when dawdling. See if you require 
 lengthening or crowding down— physiognomically, I 
 
 lengthening or crowding 
 
 mean. Low crowns are monstrous 
 
 crowns are dressy— white hats rowdy. And, 
 
 vindictive. 
 
 Bell 
 once 
 
 I fixed in your taste by artistical principles, be pretty 
 
 constant through life to that hat. Have it reproduced 
 
 I (rigidly without consultation with your hatter), and 
 
616 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 give it a shower-bath befor.e wearing. Unmitigated 
 new hat is truly frightful. Orlando Fish takes your 
 idea cleverly, touching a tile of your own. 
 
 As to the Castaly of coats, I am driven to believe 
 that the true fount is at Philadelphia. One marvel- 
 lous coat after another arrived at Saratoga while I was 
 there, and to my astonished research as to their ori- 
 gin, and there was but one reply — " Carpenter." 
 What may be the address of this Carpenter of coats, 
 I know not yet. But J shall know, and soon — for he 
 builds to a miracle. Trousers, as you know, are sent 
 home in the rough, and adapted by perseverance. 
 They are a complex mystery, on the whole. Few 
 makers know more than a part in the science of cut- 
 ting them, and you must supply the rest by clear ex- 
 pounding and pertinacious experiment. The trade is 
 trying, and should be expiative of crime in the "suf- 
 ferer." 
 
 There is but one simple idea in boots — patent- 
 leather and straight on the inside. But, by-the-way, 
 to jump abruptly to the other extremity, how do you 
 wear your hair? For Cupid's and the Grace's sake, 
 don't be English in that .' Short hair on a young man 
 looks to me madhousey. Ugh ! Straight or curly, 
 leave it long enough to make a bootlace for a lady ! 
 And see that it looks threadable by slight fingers — for 
 if you should chance to be beloved, there will be fin- 
 gers unemployed but for that little endearment. So 
 at least I conjecture — bald myself, and of course, not 
 experienced authority. 
 
 But, whatever you decide, don't step into the street 
 rashly! Keep yourself "on private view" for a few 
 days after you are made up, and call in discreet judges 
 for the benefit of criticism — an artist or two among 
 them for the general effects. First impressions are 
 irrevocable. 
 
 Adieu, my boy ! Caution ! — and ponder on Balzac's 
 dictum: "Lesfemmes aiment les fats, par ceque lesfats 
 sont les seuls hommes qui eussent soin cfeuz-memes." 
 Your affectionate uncle, 
 
 Cinna Beverley. 
 
 P. S. A short cane — say as long as your arm — is 
 rather knowing, now. Nobody carries a long stick, 
 except to poke at snakes in the country. 
 
 MOORE AND BARRY CORNWALL. 
 
 Well — how does Moore write a song ? 
 
 In the twilight of a September evening he strolls 
 through the park to dine with the marquis. As he 
 draws on his white gloves, he sees the evening star 
 looking at him steadily through the long vista of the 
 avenue, and he construes its punctual dispensation of 
 light into a reproach for having, himself a star, passed 
 a day of poetic idleness. " Damme," soliloquizes the 
 little fat planet, " this will never do ! Here have I 
 hammered the whole morning at a worthless idea, 
 that, with the mere prospect of a dinner, shows as 
 trumpery as a 'penny fairing.' Labor wasted ! And 
 at my time of life, too! Faith!— it's dining at home 
 these two days with nobody to drink with me ! It's 
 eyewater I want ! Don 
 for me, brother 
 come back ! 
 
 ! Don't trouble yourself to sit up 
 Hesper! I shall see clearer when I 
 
 ' Bad are the rhymes 
 That scorn old wine,' 
 
 as my friend Barry sings. Poetry? hum! Claret? 
 Prithee, call it claret !" 
 
 And Moore is mistaken ! He draws his inspiration, 
 it is true, with the stem of a glass between his thumb 
 and finger, but the wine is the least stimulus to his 
 brain. He talks and is listened to admiringly, and 
 that is his Castaly. He sits next to Lady Fanny at 
 
 dinner, who thinks him " an adorable little love," and 
 he employs the first two courses in making her in 
 love with herself, i. e., blowing everything she says up 
 to the red heat of poetry. Moore can do this, for the 
 most stupid things on earth are, after all, the begin- 
 nings of ideas, and every fool is susceptible of the 
 flattery of seeing the words go straight from his lips 
 to the "highest heaven of invention." And Lady 
 Fanny is not a fool, but a quick and appreciative wo- 
 man, and to almost everything she says, the poet's 
 trump is a germ of poetry. " Ah !" says Lady Fanny 
 with a sigh, "this will be a memorable dinner — not 
 to you, but to me; for you see pretty women every 
 day, but I seldom see Torn Moore !" The poet looks 
 into Lady Fanny's eyes and makes no immediate an- 
 swer. Presently she asks, with a delicious look of 
 simplicity, "Are you as agreeable to everybody, Mr. 
 Moore?" — "There is but one Lady Fanny," replies 
 the poet ; "or, to use your own beautiful simile, 'The 
 moon sees many brooks, but the brook sees but one 
 moon!'" (Mem. jot that down.) And so is treas- 
 ured up one idea for the morrow, and when the mar- 
 chioness rises, and the ladies follow her to the draw- 
 ingroom, Moore finds himself sandwiched between a 
 couple of whig lords, and opposite a past or future 
 premier — an audience of cultivation, talent, scholar- 
 ship, and appreciation ; and as the fresh pitcher of 
 claret is passed round, all regards radiate to the Anac- 
 reon of the world, and with that suction of expecta- 
 tion, let alone Tom Moore. Even our " Secretary 
 of the Navy and National Songster" would "turn out 
 his lining" — such as it is. And Moore is delightful, 
 and with bis "As you say, my lord!" he gives birth 
 to a constellation of bright things, no one of which is 
 dismissed with the claret. Every one at the table, 
 except Moore, is subject to the hour — to its enthusi- 
 asm, its enjoyment — but the hour is to Moore a pre- 
 cious slave. So is the wine. It works for him ! It 
 brings him money from Longman ! It plays his trum- 
 pet in the reviews! It is his filter among the ladies! 
 Well may he sing its praises! Of all the poets, 
 Moore is probably the only one who is thus master of 
 his wine. The glorious abandon with which we fancy 
 him, a brimming glass in his hand, singing "Fly nor 
 yet!" exists only in the fancy. He keeps a cool head 
 and coins his conviviality; and to revert to my former 
 figure, they who wish to know what Moore's elec- 
 tricity amounts to ivithout the convivial friction, may 
 read his History of Ireland. Not a sparkle in it, from 
 the landing of the Phenicians to the battle of Vine- 
 gar Hill ! He wrote that as other people write — with 
 nothing left from the day before but the habit of la- 
 bor — and the the travel of a collapsed balloon on a 
 man's back, is not more unlike the same thing, infla- 
 ted and soaring, than Tom Moore, historian, and Tom 
 Moore, bard ! 
 
 Somewhere in the small hours the poet walks 
 home, and sitting down soberly in his little library, he 
 puts on paper the half-score scintillations that col- 
 lision, in one shape or another, has struck into the 
 tinder of his fancy. If read from this paper, the 
 world would probably think little of their prospect of 
 ever becoming poetry. But the mysterious part is done 
 — the life is breathed into the chrysalis— and the do- . 
 thing of these naked fancies with winged words, Mr. 
 Moore knows very well can be done in very uninspired 
 moods by patient industry. Most people have very 
 little idea what that industry is — how deeply language 
 is ransacked, how often turned over, how untiringly 
 rejected and recalled with some new combination, 
 how resolutely sacrificed when only tolerable enough to 
 pass, how left untouched day after day in the hope of a 
 fresh impulse after repose. The vexation of a Chinese 
 puzzle is slight, probably, to that which Moore has 
 expended on some of his most natural and flowing 
 single verses. The exquisite nicety of his ear, though 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 617 
 
 :t eventually gives his poetry its honeyed fluidity, 
 gives him no quicker choice of words, nor does more, 
 in any way, than pass inexorable judgment on what 
 his industry brings forward. Those who think a song 
 dashed oft" like an invitation to dinner, would be ed- 
 ified by the progressive phases of a " Moore's Melo- 
 dy." Taken with all its re-writings, emendations, &c, 
 1 doubt whether, in his most industrious seclusion, 
 Moore averages a couplet a day. Yet this persevering, 
 resolute, unconquerable patience of labor is the se- 
 cret of his fame. Take the best thing he ever wrote, 
 and translate its sentiment and similitudes into plain 
 prose, and do the thing by a song of any second-rate 
 imitator of Moore, one abstract would read as well as 
 the other. Yet Moore's song is immortal, and the 
 other ephemeral as a paragraph in a newspaper, and 
 the difference consists in a patient elaboration of lan- 
 guage and harmony, and in that only. And even 
 thus short, seems the space between the ephemeron and 
 the immortal. But it is wider than they think, oh, 
 glorious Tom Moore ! 
 
 And how does Barry Cornwall write? 
 
 I answer, from the efflux of his soul ! Poetry is 
 not labor to him. He works at law — he plays, re- 
 laxes, luxuriates in poetry. Mr. Proctor has at no 
 moment of his life, probably, after finishing a poetic 
 effusion, designed ever to write another line. No 
 more than the sedate man, who, walking on the edge 
 of a playground, sees a ball coming directly toward 
 him, and seized suddenly with a boyish impulse, jumps 
 aside and sends it whizzing back, as he has not done 
 for twenty years, with his cane — no more than that 
 unconscious schoolboy of fourscore (thank God there 
 are many such live coals under the ashes) thinks he 
 shall play again at ball. Proctor is a prosperous bar- 
 rister, drawing a large income from his profession. 
 He married the daughter of Basil Montague (well 
 known as the accomplished scholar, and the friend of 
 Coleridge, Lamb, and that bright constellation of 
 spirits), and with a family of children of whom, the 
 world knows, he is passionately fond, he leads a more 
 domestic life, or, rather, a life more within himself and 
 his own, than any author, present or past, with whose 
 habits I am conversant. He has drawn his own por- 
 trait, however, in outline, and as far as it goes, nothing 
 could be truer. In an epistle to his friend Charles 
 Lamb, he says : — 
 
 " Seated beside this Sherris wine, 
 And near to books and shapes divine, 
 Which poets and the painters past 
 Have wrought in line that aye shall last, — 
 E'en I, with Shakspere's self beside me, 
 And one whose tender talk can guide me 
 Through fears and pains and troublous themes, 
 Whose smile doth fall upon my dreams 
 Like sunshine on a stormy sea, **•**• 
 
 Proctor slights the world's love for his wife and 
 books, and, as might be expected, the world only plies 
 him the more with its caresses. He is now and then 
 seen in the choicest circles of London, where, though 
 love and attention mark most flatteringly the rare 
 pleasure of his presence, he plays a retired and silent 
 part, and steals early away. His library is his Para- 
 dise. His enjoyment of literature should be men- 
 tioned as often in his biography as the " feeding among 
 the lilies'* in the Songs of Solomon. He forgets him- 
 self, he forgets the world in his favorite authors, and 
 that, I fancy, was the golden link in his friendship 
 with Lamb. Surrounded by exquisite specimens of 
 art (he has a fine taste, and is much beloved by ar- 
 tists), a choice book in his hand, his wife beside him, 
 and the world shut out, Barry is in the meridian of 
 his true orbit. Oh, then, a more loving and refined 
 spirit is not breathing beneath the stars ! He reads 
 and muses; and as something in the page stirs some 
 distant association, suggests some brighter image than 
 
 its own, he half leans over to the table, and scrawls it 
 in unstudied but inspired verse. He thinks no more 
 of it. You might have it to light your cigar. But 
 there sits by his side one who knows its value, and it 
 is treasured. Here, for instance, in the volume I have 
 spoken of before, are some forty pages of "fragments" 
 — thrown in to eke out the volume of his songs. I 
 am sure, that when he was making up his book, per- 
 haps expressing a fear that there would not be pages 
 enough for the publisher's design, these fragments 
 were produced from their secret hiding-place to his 
 great surprise. The quotations I have made were all 
 from this portion of his volume, and, as I said before, 
 they are worthy of Shakspere. There is no mark of 
 labor in them. I do not believe there was an erasure 
 in the entire manuscript. They bear all the marks 
 of a sudden, unstudied impulse, immediately and un- 
 hesitatingly expressed. Here are several fragments. 
 How evident it is that they were suggested directly 
 by his reading : — 
 
 " She was a princess — but she fell ; and now 
 Her shame goes blushing through a line of kings. 
 
 Sometimes a deep thought crossed 
 My fancy, like the sullen bat that flies 
 Athwart the melancholy moon at eve. 
 
 Let not thy tale tell but of stormy sorrows ! 
 She — who was late a maid, but now doth lie 
 In Hymen's bosom, like a rose grown pale, 
 A sad, sweet wedded wife — why is she left 
 Out of the story ? Are good deeds— great griefs, 
 That live but ne'er complain— naught ? What are tears ?— 
 Remorse ? — deceit ? at best weak water drops 
 Which wash out the bloom of sorrow. 
 »»#****»•♦ 
 
 Is she dead ? 
 Why so shall I be — ere these autumn blasts 
 Have blown on the beard of winter. Is she dead ? 
 Aye, she is dead— quite dead ! The wild sea kissed her 
 With its cold, white lips, and then — put her to sleep : 
 She has a sand pillow, and a water sheet, 
 And never turns her head, or knows 'tis morning ! 
 
 Mark, when he died, his tombs, his epitaphs ! 
 
 Men did not pluck the ostrich for his sake, 
 
 Nor dyed 't in sable. No black steeds were there, 
 
 Caparisoned in wo ; no hired crowds ; 
 
 No hearse, wherein the crumbling clay (imprisoned 
 
 Like ammunition in a tumbril) rolled 
 
 Rattling along the street, and silenced grief; 
 
 No arch whereon the bloody laurel hung ; 
 
 No stone ; no gilded verse ; — poor common shows ! 
 
 But tears and tearful words, and sighs as deep 
 
 As sorrow is — these were his epitaphs ! 
 
 Thus — (fitly graced) — he lieth now, inurned 
 
 In hearts that loved him, on whose tender sides 
 
 Are graved his many virtues. When they perish, 
 
 He's lost .'—and so't should be. The poet's name 
 
 And hero's — on the brazen book of Time, 
 
 Are writ in sunbeams, by Fame's loving hand ; 
 
 But none record the household virtues there. 
 
 These better sleep (when all dear friends are fled) 
 
 In endless and serene oblivion. 
 
 The lighthouse near Caldwell's Landing is seen to 
 great effect by the passenger in the evening boat from 
 New York to Newburgh. Leaving the city at five in 
 the summer afternoon, she makes the intervening forty 
 miles between that hour and twilight ; and while the 
 last tints of the sunset are still in the sky, the stars 
 just beginning to twinkle through the glow of the 
 west, the bright light of this lofty beacon rises up 
 over the prow of the boat, shining apparently on the 
 very face of the new-starred heaven. As he ap- 
 proaches, across the smooth and still purpled mirror 
 of the silent river is drawn a long and slender line of 
 light, broken at the foot of the beacon by the wild 
 shrubbery of the rock on which it stands ; and as he 
 rounds the point, and passes it, the light brightens 
 and looks clearer against the darker sky of the east, 
 
018 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 while the same cheering line of reflection follows him 
 on his way, and is lost to sight as he disappears 
 among the mountains. 
 
 The waters of the river at this point were the scene 
 of the brief and tragic drama enacted so fatally to 
 poor Andre. Four or five miles below stands Smith's 
 house, where he had his principal interview with 
 Arnold, and where the latter communicated to him 
 his plans for the delivery of West Point into the hands 
 of the English, and gave him the fatal papers which 
 proved his ruin. 
 
 At Smith's house Mrs. Arnold passed a night on 
 her way to join her husband at West Point, soon after 
 he had taken command. The sufferings of this lady 
 have excited the sympathy of the world, as the first 
 paroxysms of her distress moved the kind but firm 
 heart of Washington. There seems to have arisen a 
 doubt, however, whether her long and well-known 
 correspondence with Andre had not so far undermined 
 her patriotism, that she was rather inclined to further 
 than impede the treason of Arnold ; and consequently 
 could have suffered but little after Washington gener- 
 ously made every arrangement for her to follow him. 
 In the "Life of Aaron Burr," lately published, are 
 some statements which seem authentic on the subject. 
 It is well known that Washington found Mrs. Arnold 
 apparently frantic with distress at the communication 
 her husband had made to her the moment before his 
 flight. Lafayette, and the other officers in the suite 
 of the commander-in-chief, were alive with the most 
 poignant sympathy; and a passport was given her by 
 Washington, with which she immediately left West 
 Point to join Arnold in New York. On her way she 
 stopped at the house of Mrs. Prevost, the wife of a 
 British officer, who subsequently married Colonel 
 Burr. Here "the frantic scenes of West Point were 
 renewed," says the narrative of Burr's biographer, 
 "and continued so long as strangers were present. As 
 soon as she and Mrs. Prevost were left alone, however, 
 Mrs. Arnold became tranquillized, and assured Mrs. 
 Prevost that she was heartily sick of the theatrics she 
 was exhibiting. She stated that she had corresponded 
 with the British commander; that she was disgusted 
 with the American cause, and those who had the man- 
 agement of public affairs; and that, through great 
 persuasion and unceasing perseverance, she had ulti- 
 mately brought the general into an arrangement to 
 surrender West Point to the British. Mrs. Arnold 
 was a gay, accomplished, artful, and extravagant wo- 
 man. There is no doubt, therefore, that, for the pur- 
 pose of acquiring the means of gratifying her vanity, 
 she contributed greatly to the utter ruin of her hus- 
 band, and thus doomed to everlasting infamy and dis- 
 grace all the fame he had acquired as a gallant soldier, 
 at the sacrifice of his blood." 
 
 It is not easy to pass and repass the now peaceful 
 and beautiful waters of this part of the Hudson, with- 
 out recalling to mind the scenes and actors in the 
 great drama of the Revolution, which they not long 
 ago bore on their bosom. The busy mind fancies the 
 armed guard-boats, slowly pulling along the shore; 
 the light pinnace of the Vulture plying to and fro on 
 its errands of conspiracy ; and not the least vivid pic- 
 ture to the imagination, is the boat containing the 
 accomplished, the gallant Andre, and his guard, on 
 his way to his death. It is probable that he first ad- 
 mitted to his own mind the possibility of a fatal result, 
 while passing this very spot. A late biographer of 
 Arnold gives the particulars of a conversation between 
 Andre and Major Tallmadge, the officer who had him 
 in custody, and who brought him from West Point 
 down the river to Tappan, the place of his subsequent 
 execution. 
 
 "Before we reached the Clove" (a landing just be- 
 low the beacon), " Major Andre became very inquisi- 
 tive to know my opinion as to the result of his capture. 
 
 When I could no longer evade his importunity, I re- 
 marked to him as follows ; ' I had a much-loved class- 
 mate in Yale college, by the name of Hale, who en- 
 tered the army in 1775. Immediately after the battle 
 of Long Island, Washington wanted information 
 respecting the strength of the enemy. Hale tendered 
 his services, went over to Brooklyn, and was taken, 
 just as he was passing the outpost of the enemy on 
 his return.' Said I, with emphasis, 'Do you remem- 
 ber the sequel of this story?' — 'Yes,' said Andre, 'he 
 was hanged as a spy. But you surely do not consider 
 his case and mine alike?' I replied, 'Yes, precisely 
 similar; and similar will be your fate.' He endeav- 
 ored to answer my remarks, but it was manifest he 
 was more troubled in spirit than I had ever seen him 
 before." 
 
 Sconcia's " Preceptor for the Pianoforte," just pub- 
 lished by Christman, of this city, is a curious and val- 
 uable work. Mr. Sconcia is a thorough musician, 
 and he has compiled the edition before us with much 
 labor and a clear understanding of the beautiful sci- 
 ence of which it treats. Mr. S. is also the author of 
 a valuable scientific work, entitled "An Introduction 
 to the Art of Singing," which is universally popular 
 among the profession. 
 
 The Messrs. Appleton have sent us a volume of 
 delicious poetry, entitled the "Wife of Leon" and 
 other metrical effusions, by two sisters of the west. 
 We know nothing of these delightful authors beyond 
 their writings ; but that they are gifted, true-hearted, 
 and accomplished girls, is apparent in every line of 
 their beautiful productions. The west has cause to 
 be proud of these sweet "sisters," and so has the 
 country, to whose literary stores the volume before us 
 is a graceful and valuable contribution. If this is the 
 authors' first appearance in print, it is the most favor- 
 able one we have ever witnessed in our whole edito- 
 rial career, and we shall place the book in our library, 
 on the same shelf with the works of Mrs. Hemans, to 
 be referred to frequently in hours stolen from severer 
 duties. The Messrs. Appleton — ever 
 
 (" The first true merit to defend— 
 
 His praise is lost who waits till all commend ") 
 
 deserve the thanks of the public for the elegant edi- 
 tion of the poems before us. 
 
 I saw two very distinguished gentlemen sitting vis- 
 a-vis at the Astor house table a day or two since — 
 striking exceptions, both, to the physique of the cli- 
 mates from which they severally come. The Hon. 
 Mr. Choate, of Massachusetts, was one, with his pale 
 but intellectual countenance, and Judge Wayne was 
 the other, as glowing a specimen of rosy health and 
 vigor as ever came from the more florescent nurture 
 of the north. It is painful to see the precious accu- 
 mulation of a great mind's treasure intrusted to so 
 fragile a casket as ill-health, and the contrary is pro- 
 portionably agreeable. Judge Wayne is at present at 
 West Point. 
 
 It is a pretty literal fulfilment of the penalty of 
 Adam's transgression to do more than breathe to-day, 
 and I have chopped down and chopped up many a 
 tree of twice my age with half the " sweat of the 
 brow" brought out by the harnessing of this first sen- 
 tence to grammar. A gentleman is walking up Broad- 
 way, fanning himself, as I look out of the window. 
 The omnibus horses drip. What an Eden would 
 come about again (for me, at least) if this penitential 
 sweat would trickle itself into these inky traceries 
 without the medium of brain and finger-work! One 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 (.•19 
 
 would be almost content to become a black man to 
 facilitate the miracle. 
 
 Three successive boys have gone under my window, 
 whistling, "Dance, boatman, dance!" The air is one 
 that sticks in the popular memory, and, like some 
 other of these negro melodies, it is probably suscep- 
 tible of transmutation into a gem of music. I have 
 recorded somewhere else a remark Moore once made 
 in my presence, that one of the most pathetic of his 
 songs stole its air from a merry ballad of Spain, rep- 
 resenting a girl complaining of the wind's blowing her 
 petticoats about, and the change in its character was 
 effected by only playing it slower. No song was ever 
 more popular in this country than " On the lake where 
 drooped the willow," which was a transfer of the ne- 
 gro song "As I was a gwyin down Shinbone alley." 
 Horn, who adapted it to a pathetic song by Morris, 
 took his hint from the pathos with which a black boy 
 at Natchez sang one of the songs peculiar to his race 
 and region. " The Northern Refrain," another very 
 popular song by Morris and Horn, is based upon the 
 carol of the sweeps in New York city. Mr. Horn 
 says that "God save the King" was taken from an air 
 sung about the streets of London, and that "Di tanti 
 palpiti" was suggested to Rossini by hearing a fish- 
 woman sing it in the market while attending her stall. 
 "The Marseillaise" had an origin equally obscure. 
 The first attempt to dislocate these airs from their 
 ludicrous words creates a smile, of course, but it is 
 surprising how quickly the better clothing of music 
 throws its long-worn beggar-rag into forgetfulness. 
 Horn relates in one of his prefaces, that when Mrs. 
 Horn commenced singing before an audience, " Long 
 time ago," with a serious air, there was a general 
 smile; but when the song was ended she left her au- 
 ditors with tears in their eyes. There is no end to 
 tracing back to their origin airs that are afloat among 
 a people, and if Moore's melodies are built upon 
 "Irish airs," without going back to Milesian imagina- 
 tion, these negro melodies may be called American, 
 without giving credit to Guinea or Timbuctoo. I 
 should think it worth a composer's while to travel lei- 
 surely in the south, and bring away all the melodies 
 that inhabit the banjo of the slave, and better still 
 worth Morris's while to devote his singular tact and 
 delicacy of taste and ear to the clothing them with 
 appropriate poetry. He has been so successful in the 
 attempts he has already made, that the warrant is 
 good. 
 
 A German gentleman, residing at the Astor house, 
 has translated for me an account of a visit to Frederika ! 
 Bremer, by the Countess Von Hahn-Hahn, and a few j 
 of its more personal particulars will not be uninterest- 
 ing. The countess is a celebrated person in the fash- | 
 ionable world, and has just published her travels in 
 Sweden. She found Miss Bremer at a small country | 
 estate near Stockholm, where she resides with her 
 mother and a younger sister. She says : " I had 
 formed some idea about her person from her books. I 
 figured to myself a quiet, serious person, with some 
 humoristic touches. I found her indeed thus in 
 reality, with an addition of an extraordinary degree 
 of sweetness in all her bearing." — " I was offered a 
 promenade. I preferred to remain in the house, 
 though passionately fond of nature, open air, walking. 
 All the attraction for me was within — everything so 
 pleasant, so comfortable ! I could comprehend how 
 * Home' 1 here could be made so attractive. I desired 
 Miss Frederika to show me her own room. It was 
 arranged with the greatest simplicity — almost a cell. 
 It would- not do for me at all. Besides, it was a cor- 
 ner-room, with windows on two sides, consequently a 
 double supply of light. There were three square 
 tables, covered with books, papers, and writing-mate- 
 
 rials; a sofa in a severe style (I mean one that coolly 
 and merely invites you to sit down without lolling, 
 which is my favorite position). On the walls there 
 were several pictures. 'This is a genuine Teniers, 
 but I know you will not like it,' she said, laughing, 
 pointing to a beautiful little picture of a countryman 
 filling his pipe. I answered honestly, 'no!' and in 
 general I found that I said 'no' when she said 'yes.' 
 Such a difference of opinion is only disagreeable when 
 you have a dislike to a person. I triei] to persuade 
 her to make a voyage to Italy. We would go togeth- 
 er. But she would not. She does not like travel- 
 ling. She thinks that one may soon become over- 
 powered, carried away, get confused — and what to do 
 with all these foreign impressions! I said, 'You will 
 soon conquer them — that is just the pleasantest thing, 
 I think.' She still took a lively interest in all I told 
 her of foreign countries, what I had seen, and what I 
 had written about them. 1 was naturally well-pleased 
 at this. Our conversation was carried on in French 
 and German. She expressed herself with great sim- 
 plicity and decision. She has beautiful, thinking 
 eyes; a clear, firm, I may almost say, a solid forehead, 
 under which the strongly-delineated eyebrows move 
 very much when she speaks. This becomes her very 
 much, particularly when an idea labors to shape itself 
 into words. She has a light and small figure, and was 
 dressed in black silk. In the parlor there were two 
 large bookcases. Miss Bremer paints beautifully in 
 miniature, and she has a collection of heads, done by 
 herself, to which was added mine. I generally get 
 sleepy when sitting to artists; therefore J do not like 
 to have my picture taken, as it hurts my vanity that 
 all my portraits look so immensely sheepish! This 
 time, however, the sitting went better off, for the 
 Countess Rosen was singing the whole time, with her 
 fine voice, some beautiful Swedish songs." 
 
 By this extract the Countess Hahn-Hahn herself 
 seems a nice, natural creature enough. 
 
 I have been pleased to find that I rather under than 
 over-colored my slight description of Mr. Weir's pic- 
 ture for the rotunda. The Bostonians have received 
 it with a full measure of enthusiasm; and Mr. Weir 
 has himself returned to West Point, laden not merely 
 with bountiful commendations, but with employment 
 for years in commissions for pictures. He will, prob- 
 ably, realize a small fortune from the exhibition, alone, 
 of his great painting in the different cities ; and alto- 
 gether, this is the best exemplification that has 
 occurred in my time of the jwlici/ (to say no more) 
 of a faithful discharge of a commission, which, 
 because intrusted literally to conscience and honor, 
 may be slighted with impunity. Mr. Weir, I under- 
 stand, has not yet drawn the price of his picture from 
 the treasury, intending to lay it by as an investment 
 for his children, unconscious, probably, how much 
 they will value the father's glory invested in the pic- 
 ture. Oo it the painter has flung his soul prostrate ; 
 and there is a circumstance connected with its work- 
 ing upon his mind while painting it. which we do not 
 feel quite at liberty to mention here, but which will be 
 a thread of the purest gold to weave into the mingled 
 woof of his posthumous biography. By the first of 
 October, I understand, we are to have a view of the 
 " Embarkation" in New York. 
 
 I was among the liquesced victims of the buffalo- 
 hunt at Hoboken, and gathered little to compensate 
 me for "larding the lean earth" of the Messrs 
 Stevens, except a strong impression of the peculiar 
 good-nature of a republican crowd. As our down- 
 
620 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 laden ferry-boat reached the shore, another one, heav- 
 ily overfreighted, was starting to return. Some one 
 on our wheelhouse inquired in a stentorian voice, 
 " How did you like it?" and was answered by the five 
 hundred disappointed and roasted dupes with a general 
 shout of good-natured laughter. The Courier esti- 
 mates the crowd at twenty or thirty thousand, and cer- 
 tainly the whole Jersey side was black with people, all 
 feeling humbugged and laughing merrily. I thought 
 I would ride up to the ground to see the embroidery 
 of so many moving figures on the green meadows, and 
 this was a fine sight. The lasso-rider, in a fantastical 
 costume, was galloping hard after his shadow, and 
 tossing his long rope into the air; and one of the buf- 
 faloes was quietly munching a hollyhock in the small 
 enclosure of an Irish cabin on the roadside. The rest 
 of the herd, I was told, had made their escape to the 
 woods, offering the proprietor a real hunt for a sham. 
 The morning papers give accounts of some serious 
 accidents during the day. 
 
 The copyright club is organized with a most active 
 and efficient secretary in Mr. Mathews, and there has 
 been a general summoning of aid and counsel. Bry- 
 ant, the high-priest of American poetry, is very prop- 
 erly chosen president. In addition to the fact which 
 I mentioned in my last as one that should be "kept 
 before the people," viz., that the increase of price on 
 new publications would be very trifling and go to the 
 author — in addition to this, I say, another should be 
 mentioned. The worthless edition that is bought for 
 a shilling, and read with straining eyes from its bad 
 print, is perused and thrown away. Would it not be 
 as well to subscribe to a reading-club, and get the 
 book well-printed for less money, and return it at the 
 end of the week? The hint is worth considering — 
 and this is the way that reading is managed cheaply 
 in England. 
 
 Macready is to be here in October, and will be ac- 
 companied by Miss Phillips (formerly of the National), 
 and Mr. Ryder — a unicorn team of his own breaking. 
 They both know the leader's paces. Conti Damoreau 
 follows later — but there is nothing very spicy on rec- 
 ord with regard to this prima donna ; and the popular 
 telescope of expectation is fixed exclusively on the 
 charming Mrs. Nesbitt. Before I have had time to 
 be bribed by my share of the spell of this enchantress, 
 I may as well give you an honest inventory of her 
 attractions and professional merits. She is, imprimis, 
 a widow; that is to say, if she be not married within 
 a year or two, as is said, to the famous Mr. Feargus 
 O'Conner, keeping her previous name for theatrical 
 eclat. Mr. Nesbitt was a dashing guardsman (son of 
 Lady Nesbitt, well known in the gay world), who 
 broke his neck driving tandem, and left his widow the 
 idol of the dandies. She is rather above the middle 
 size, with blue eyes, meant to pass for black, black 
 hair, Greek nose, upper lip half scornful, half playful, 
 and a mouth made by none of the Graces' journey- 
 men. This last article is indeed delicious, as seen 
 from any part of the theatre, though, like Madame 
 George Sands, the owner smokes ! But her charm lies 
 mainly in "the way she has with her." Nobody that 
 sees her cares whether she plays well or ill. She 
 ministers at another door. Hang your head — she 
 plays to your heart .' And it is one of her ways to 
 play very unevenly ; and when she thinks you have 
 pouted long enough at her carelessness, to burst sud- 
 denly upon you with a bewitching rally, and "bring the 
 house down," as they alarmingly phrase it. A great 
 actress she probably is not — an enchanting woman she 
 
 certainly is. It is to be hoped that she will bring over 
 the pieces that have been written expressly for her, as 
 her every peculiarity of look, tone, and gesture, has 
 been most accurately measured and fitted by the dra- 
 matic tailors of London. 
 
 The world looks disagreeable to us to-day. We are 
 " under the weather ;" and, for to-day at least (and it 
 is odd how rare the wish is), we may say, we wish 
 ourselves fairly above the weather — that is, in heaven ; 
 in heaven, where there are no Saturdays, and of 
 course, no expectations of New Mirrors. 
 
 For you forgive the dinner's not forthcoming, if the 
 cook be ill. And your washerwoman has her little 
 indulgences — hand scalded, or child sick. And you 
 forego your drive if your horse be ailing or off his 
 feed. What have we done, we should be pleased to 
 know, to be treated less kindly than the other three of 
 your quadruple necessities ? We should like very 
 much to drop our head into our hand, and mope. But 
 you wouldn't like it. 
 
 No — you want us to chatter. You say as the child 
 says, when the story is done : "Tell us some more." 
 And if we must, we must! But we're sick and sav- 
 age, and we'll rake up something that we can gnaw as 
 we tell it — some old resentment or other — and if we 
 don't feel better after it, we'll go to bed. 
 
 One of the morning papers, a week ago or more, 
 told a fib about us. In an article on American authors, 
 it is said that we (one of "we") made more money by 
 our writings than any other American author, and 
 were fast growing rich! And out of that, a Boston 
 paper picks the reason that we "write so jauntily!" 
 As if a man were not always gayer as his pockets were 
 lighter, and as if our good humor were drawn with a 
 check — bankable ! 
 
 Now we are not willing to submit to the odium of 
 prosperity. That we have made some thousands of 
 unnameables by two or three weeks' work, as this 
 writer asserts, we freely own — but it was not in this 
 country. We have sold, for a large price, in England, 
 books for which we tried in vain to find a publisher in 
 America. We can not now find a publisher in Amer- 
 ica who will give us anything for a work, though we 
 have been looking for one these three years ; and we 
 never found but one publisher who would give us, for 
 half-a-dozen works in a lump, money worth shutting 
 thumb and finger upon ; and he gave it in notes, pay- 
 able by ourself — after the little privilege of a discount. 
 We don't complain of this — oh no ! The worth of a 
 thing is, no doubt, what it will bring. But we are not 
 going to be lifted between human envy and the sun, 
 and be hated for throwing a shadow when we have no 
 substance! Not "we!" 
 
 That three meals a day come punctually round to 
 us, we consider no more a marvel than the arrange- 
 ments for the keeping in motion of any other " heav- 
 enly body." For that much we have safely trusted 
 hitherto, and we shall trust hereafter the crank, what- 
 ever it may be. that turns our mortal orrery. We are 
 fed, and we don't care who envies us for it — for we 
 think we do work enough to earn it — but the posses- 
 sion, at any time, for any considerable portion of an 
 hour, of one unbespoken dollar, we indignantly deny ! 
 We are poor enough (either of us "we") to please 
 the most fastidious, on the contrary. And so, fellow- 
 paupers, take us back to your affections ! 
 
 But we have hopes (as who has not ?) of living to 
 be " rich and envied !" We shall be less loved. That 
 is the tariff, and we are busy laying up love to pay it. 
 But we should like to know how it feels to berich, and 
 whether for more love, one ever sighs to be poor 
 again ! Please Heaven, we will know, some day — if 
 the Mirror keep prospering. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 621 
 
 Two Sistkrs of the West. — I have done, almost 
 unawares, within the last twenty-four hours, what I 
 would not willingly have undertaken to do, viz., the 
 reading of two hundred and fifty pages of new poetry. 
 It was a book which came to my hand in the livery 
 of a di'lnd — cream-colored binding, most daintily let- 
 tered—and when I opened it my anticipations extend- 
 ed very little beyond the pleasure of rubbing my 
 thumb and finger on the seductive smoothness of the 
 cover. It is entitled, " The Wife of Leon, and other 
 Poems, by Two Sisters of the West," written, as the 
 preface states, to "while away time and gratify a taste 
 for poetry," and published " to gratify a parent to 
 whom they could refuse nothing." With much of 
 the book I think you would be delighted. It seems 
 to me a careless exercise of very uncommon powers 
 —a kind of loitering into dream-land with no particu- 
 lar errand, and here and there plucking a phantom 
 forth to the light as would be done by a concentrated 
 mind gone thither with disciplined determination for 
 the purpose. I speak, of course, now only of the 
 purely imaginative parts of the book. The affections 
 are, with women, no phantoms, and can scarcely be 
 written upon, except well, by any woman of talent; 
 and in this book the touches of feeling are exquisitely 
 true and well expressed. But in verse, which is here 
 and there very incompact and wordy, you will find 
 some bold conceptions, partially done justice to, which 
 show in these sisters a very unusual walk of fancy. 
 •A piece called the "Death of the Master Spirit," 
 seems to me particularly strong and unsuggested. 
 And in some lines beginning — 
 
 " Never, as I have loved thee, 
 Shalt thou be loved again," 
 
 there is a most refreshing novelty and meaningness. 
 On the whole, I look upon this as rather a memorable 
 advent in poetry-world, and I hope we shall soon find 
 out who the " Sisters" are. 
 
 Percival has put forth a new volume, after a very 
 long silence as a poet. If poetry were nothing but an 
 exercise of imagination, Percival would doubtless be 
 the first of American poets. In the art of poetry, 
 probably he is — the art, I mean, as exemplified in this 
 very volume, in which there are no less than " one 
 hundred and fifty modifications of stanza." But Per- 
 cival's poetry is singularly deficient in the very mun- 
 dane quality flesh and blood. His veins seem filled 
 with ether, and his Pegasus uses his wings always, 
 his legs never. I mention it less as a fault than a pe- 
 culiarity, for there may be a school of this quality 
 of poetry, and perfect in its way — but it is a pecu- 
 liarity which accounts fully for the inadequate effect 
 it has produced. Nothing of Percival's is popu- 
 larly known, except one or two pieces, which will 
 live for ever by the very flesh and blood pathos which 
 he has touched by chance, and which he probably 
 thinks beneath him. The poem beginning, 
 
 " lie comes not. I have watched the moon go down," 
 
 the mournful plaint of a deserted wife, is one of these, 
 and a most exquisite effusion of feeling. But here is 
 his idea of the harness with which a poet must go into 
 the arena, in a passage of his preface to his new 
 book : — 
 
 — " An art [poetry] which requires the mastery of 
 the riches and niceties of a language ; a full knowl- 
 edge of the science of versification, not only in its own 
 peculiar principles of rhythm and melody, but in its 
 relations to elocution and music, with that delicate 
 natural perception and that facile execution which 
 render the composition of verse hardly less easy than 
 that of prose ; a deep and quick insight into the na- 
 
 ture of man, in all his varied faculties, intellectual and 
 emotive: a clear and full perception of the power and 
 beauty of nature, and of all its various harmonies with 
 our own thoughts and feelings; and, to gain a high 
 rank in the present age, wide and exact attainments 
 in literature and art in general. Nor is the posses- 
 sion of such faculties and attainments all that is neces- 
 sary ; but such a sustained and self-collected state of 
 mind as gives one the mastery of his genius, and at 
 the same time presents to him the ideal as an imme- 
 diate reality, not as a remote conception." 
 
 Now, acknowledged, as Percival must be, to pos- 
 sess these high requirements, 1 have no doubt that 
 the book I have spoken of above will be more read 
 than his own — though, probably, the alarm with which 
 " The Two Sisters" would have looked on this for- 
 midable statement of requisites for poetry, presented 
 to them before they had so unconsciously achieved 
 the task, would have quite equalled the surprise of 
 the gentleman who found that he had all his life been 
 talking grammar without learning it. Percival's is a 
 great mind, however, wonderfully stored with learn- 
 ing, and his poetry is a rich treat to the scholar and 
 the purely imaginative reader. 
 
 The Public Fountains. — The largest audiences 
 we see in the city, assemble on the advertised nights 
 of the illumination of the Bowling Green fountain. 
 The lower part of the city is rendered completely im- 
 passable by the packed assemblages. With the aid 
 of the many-colored fires burned around it, it is cer- 
 tainly a splendid fountain ; but it would be beautiful 
 by day, and alone, as well as much more beautiful by 
 night, if the same volume of water sprang from some 
 ornamental structure instead of a huge heap of rocks. 
 In all countries but this, an artist would have been 
 employed to make a design for so costly and public a 
 fountain — a man whom peculiar genius and study had 
 qualified for the task. But the designer of this is an 
 engineer, and the designer of the Park fountain, if it 
 had one, was probably a well-digger or a mason. By 
 the way, as the Park is the most frequented part of 
 the city, and much used by persons wishing to get out 
 of the street for a moment's conversation, the plan of 
 the fountain of Lerna, at Corinth, would be a good 
 one. It was encircled by a beautiful portico, under 
 which were seats for the public to sit upon during 
 the extreme heats of summer, to enjoy the cool air 
 from the falling waters. The Park jet would be su- 
 perb seen between the marble columns of a portico 
 like this, and the seats would be certainly a great lux- 
 ury, situated as the Park is. For want of an original 
 idea of our own for a smaller fountain, Michael Ange- 
 lo's conception were a good one to copy — a sturdy 
 woman wringing a bundle of clothes, whence the 
 water issues that supplies the basin. 
 
 First Night of the Season. — The all-a-gogery 
 of the city on the reopening of the Park theatre, 
 drew me in from the country, contrary to my Mon- 
 day's wont, and as I am bound to ride to your eye on 
 the top wave of the morning talk, I must jot you down 
 the memorabilia of the first night. The wooden 
 Shakspere, by the way, has been hoisted to its niche 
 in the facade of the house, and shows well among the 
 very composite order of the new architectural embel- 
 lishments. A traveller, aiming simply at the graphic, 
 would probably describe our principal theatre as one 
 long shed put on top of another, with a figure ol 
 Shakspere standing in the door of the uppermost. 
 The new paint makes it all right, however. I can not 
 think Mr. Simpson farmed out Mr. Wallack to the 
 
622 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 best advantage, for the first night of the new embel- 
 lishments would have filled the house without Wal- 
 lack. And very sufficient attraction it were too — for 
 the interior is most tasteful and elegant; except that 
 the seats in the boxes are calculated for dwarfs and 
 children, and the grown-up people sit between the 
 knees of the person behind. I see no objection that 
 can be made to the interior of the bouse. The new 
 drop curtain is admirably painted, and represents 
 Shakspere and two or three of the muses, tributary to 
 the glory of Macready, who sits with a volume in his 
 hand, the most dignified and conspicuous figure of 
 the group. The design, I understand, is taken from 
 a piece of plate presented to the actor in England, and 
 the use it is put to in the Park fairly out-Barnums 
 Barnum. The house was crammed, and the band 
 opened with "Hail Columbia"— (immense applause) 
 — followed by "Yankee Doodle" — (immense ap- 
 plause). The gas was let on — (immense applause) — 
 the curtain was drawn up, and discovered Mrs. Slo- 
 man (disinterred after many years of respected histri- 
 onic sepulture) in the character of Elvira — (immense 
 applause). Sombody came on as Valverde — (im- 
 mense applause). Mr. Barry came on as Pizarro — 
 (immense applause). Mrs. Hunt came on looking 
 very handsome — (immense applause). The curtain 
 dropped on the first act and rose again — (two im- 
 mense applauses). Mr. Wallack came on as Rolla 
 — (immense applause). The high-priest of the Sun 
 sung his hymn — (immense applause) — and so the play 
 went on, and, wherever the actors left pauses, there 
 were immense applauses. And all the actors and su- 
 pernumeraries got as much applause as Mr. Wallack. 
 All charmingly levelling and republican. It was quite 
 evident, indeed, that the pleasure and interest in the 
 new lining and reopening of the house was, by much, 
 the predominant sentiment of the evening, and, as I said 
 before, Simpson might well have shelved Wallack till 
 he was more wanted. There were quite enough of 
 his special admirers present to have "brought the 
 house down," it is true; but it was "down" all the 
 time, and nothing but an outbreak of pipes and French 
 horns could have emphasized the acclamations any 
 where in the course of the play. And if Wallack's 
 attraction depended at all on opportuneness, the ma- 
 jority of his fashionable friends are out of the city. So 
 that, altogether, we shall hardly have a fair test of 
 his success till his second engagement, after Macready. 
 Meantime, he is barred from all the parts in which 
 the latter is to appear (" Benedict," among others, in 
 which Wallack is far better than Macready), and 
 driven into the melodrame and farce, in which his 
 versatility makes him almost as " good a card." His 
 " Rolla" was superbly played, and in "Dick Dashall" 
 it is well known he is unsurpassed. A plan was struck 
 out by a clever friend of mine, in conversation, of 
 combining the management of a New York and Lon- 
 don theatre, and of transferring the "gettings-up" in 
 the way of dresses and the more extensive stage prop- 
 erties. The splendors of costume and scenery with 
 which Macready has represented plays within the last 
 year or two in England, could never be produced here 
 except by some such transfer, and the communication 
 by steam is now so rapid and punctual, that it might 
 be done with economy and convenience. By some 
 such combination we may stand a chance of renewing 
 the splendors of theatres in Borne in Nero's time, 
 though, I fear, the perfuming of the lobbies with 
 "Sicilian saffron," and the leading of urine and water 
 all over the house, by pipes concealed within the 
 walls, are luxuries gone irrevocably over Lethe's 
 wharf. 
 
 We wish some of our friends knew how much 
 easier it is to go to the ship-chandler for a cable than 
 
 to find a new cobweb in a much-swept upper-story. 
 "Waste time upon trifles," quotha! We do waste 
 time upon them, indeed, if they are not more accepta- 
 ble to our readers than twice the bulk of disinterred 
 "information." We thought this was settled long 
 ago, and that the " cap and bells" in which we indus- 
 triously labor at folly were considered a part of our 
 working livery — the least enviable and the most meri- 
 torious. Few things are easier or more stupid than 
 to be wise — on paper. Nothing is easier, and few 
 tasks sooner done, than to cram, on any subject, and 
 astonish the world with "reading" — astonish without 
 delighting it, that is to say. Give us nothing to do 
 but to be wise, oh, "approved good masters," and we 
 have leisure enough at once for some additional voca- 
 tion — clerk in a bank, or principal in a female semi- 
 nary~-(the two trustworthy offices, we beg leave to 
 record, which have been thought suitable to our abil- 
 ities). Why, there is information enough on any con- 
 ceivable subject, and all within ten minutes walk of 
 where we sit and write, to stupify Minerva ; and it is 
 as easy to unshelf, pick out, and embroider it upon 
 an editorial, as it is to buy grapes at Bininger's. It is 
 a very great mistake to suppose that anybody but a 
 donkey makes a packhorse of his memory, carrying 
 about the rubbish intended only for a storehouse of 
 reference. Let who likes 
 
 " break his fast 
 With Aristotle, dine with Tully, take 
 His watering with the Muses, sup with Livy, 
 Then walk a turn or two in Via Lactea, 
 And after six hours' conference with the stars 
 Sleep with old Erra Pater ;" 
 
 we do not believe he would sell to the newsboys — 
 which is our noble ambition. So, if you please (or if 
 you don't please), most worthy critic, we shall go on 
 "wasting our time upon trifles." And, by way of a 
 Parthian fling, let us toss under your nose what Ad- 
 dison says on this subject : "Notwithstanding pedants 
 of a pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the 
 writings of a polite author as flash and froth, they all 
 of them show, upon occasion, that they would spare 
 no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they 
 seem to despise." And (Parthian arrow No. 2) what 
 that esteemed model Lord Foppington says : " To 
 mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self 
 with the forced product of another man's brain. Now 
 I think a man of quality and breeding may be much 
 amused with the natural sprouts of his own." And if 
 that is not a brace of quotations pungent and apt, we 
 know as little about quoting as our rebukers aver. 
 
 But we have been more specifically snubbed by a 
 morning paper, and we must say a word specifically 
 in reply — for the notice, done by no means in an 
 unfriendly spirit, was wind in our sail, for which 
 we are grateful, now and always. The writer objects 
 to our mentioning the nearest thing to woman — 
 apropos, as the allusion was, of a late change in the 
 fashion of it. He calls this frivolous ! We are not 
 prepared to go the philosopher's length, that "there 
 is no such thing as a trifle in the world" — but we put 
 it point blank to issue, in any man's judgment, if this 
 be a trifle ! Now we are called an unread ignoramus, 
 but we have read Ovid and Juvenal, and we well re- 
 member blushing over the epithet " linen-wearing," 
 applied frequently to the high-priests in the Egyptian 
 ceremonies — no poor precedent for the like of us, let 
 us modestly say, and the worthier the precedent the 
 more you disparage us. Sacred from the earliest 
 ages was held " cloth of flax," and sacred in any def- 
 erential mind is, to this day, the mention of linen. 
 But, history and precedent apart, how have we become 
 so consecrated, that anything, the least, which apper- 
 tains to woman, is too " frivolous" to be wrapt up in 
 our rhetoric ? The particular aim of the peccant al- 
 lusion was to diffuse the knowledge of a new embel- 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 G23 
 
 lishment for the sex— to give our poor aid to a wor- 
 thier clothing of beauty, which, after religion, is quite 
 the divinest vouchsafe from our Maker. If this be a 
 trifle, show us your importances ! It is no trifle to 
 devote half a column of a newspaper to a new dahlia 
 
 no trifle to bring to bear a fine-art criticism on a 
 
 satin skirt in a painting — no trifle to write for months 
 about the jet of a fountain. Yet what are these and 
 a thousand similar topics — what in worthiness and el- 
 evation — even to the outlined shadow of a woman, if 
 (as it can not) that sweet shadow could be improved? 
 No ! no ! — We are not to be driven from our many- 
 years' worship by such unconsidered taking of excep- 
 tions. We write not, besides, to please any critic — 
 (male). The New Mirror shall be masculine enough, 
 but all-tributary to the ladies — God bless them ! We 
 are their slave — bound to bring to their use and knowl- 
 edge all that can please, and especially all that can 
 embellish them. We are here 
 
 " To answer their best pleasure ; be't to fly, 
 To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride 
 On the curled clouds ;" 
 
 and "if any man take exception, let him turn the 
 buckle of his girdle." 
 
 Saunders, the excellent miniature-painter, went 
 home in the Great Western. He was in this coun- 
 try about three years, and, though his prices were 
 much higher than any of our own painters, he had full 
 occupation from first to last. His delicious miniatures 
 (some of which you will have seen at Washington) 
 are scattered through our principal cities, and the 
 "fleeting show" of some beauty and much worth and 
 talent is preserved in them. He is a very observing 
 mnn, and he made a remark that interested me. He 
 said that the motive for sitting for a picture in this 
 country was almost always affection — in England it 
 was almost always pride. Though among his sitters 
 were a few of the loveliest women he had ever seen, 
 the majority were invalids, or old persons who might 
 soon die, or persons about going on far journeys — 
 those, in short, who were loved and might soon be 
 lost. In England, the subject of a miniature is usu- 
 ally good-looking. It is a young girl the year she 
 comes out, or a beautiful child before his curls are 
 shorn to send him to a public school, or a young man, 
 in his first uniform after entering the army. Pride 
 appears somewhere in the reason for the doing of the 
 picture. And Mr. Saunders's remark confirms a pre- 
 vious impression of my own — that personal beauty is 
 vastly inore valued in countries over the water. 
 
 Some years since, Mr. Saunders was appointed 
 miniature-painter to the king of Hanover, and resided 
 some time at the royal palace, painting the different 
 members of the family. I met him subsequently in 
 Italy (ten years ago), where several noble ladies of 
 England were sitting to him. His success in this 
 country should be a stimulus to our own artists, for 
 he has proved that, spite of the depression of the 
 times, there is patronage enough for the high degrees 
 of art. He thought very highly, by-the-way, of Mr. 
 Hite, the miniature-painter, of this city, who is doubt- 
 less the legitimate heir to his mantle. 
 
 Apropos of high prices for the arts, Mr. Cather- 
 wood has opened a subscription, which appeals only 
 to the rich and liberal ; and he is very likely to suc- 
 ceed in his enterprise, I think. His splendid draw- 
 ings in seppia of the ruins of Central America are to 
 be engraved of the size of the originals, and the price 
 of one copy is to be a hundred dollars. I saw one 
 subscription-paper with several names upon it. But 
 a book of drawings by Catherwood at a hundred dol- 
 lars, and a novel of Bulwer's at a shilling, and both 
 successful, leave at least a wide field of betweenity. 
 
 Catherwood is an unsurpassed artist in his line, and I 
 trust we shall show our appreciation of his genius 
 while he honors us by residing among us. 
 
 The city is somewhat closer packed by the addition 
 to its contents of Thomas Thumb, jun., Esq., who 
 has returned from the south in time to escape the 
 "fell moscheto." He occupies the American Muse- 
 um as before. Mr. Barnum, who is unsurpassed for 
 felicity of trap, has hit upon an amusing mode of 
 drawing attention to Mr. Thumb, and giving a "real- 
 
 j izing sense" of his diminutive proportions. On a 
 pole outside the Museum is placed a well-appointed 
 
 i mansion, two feet square, with " T. Thumb, jun." on 
 the brass-plate of the door. A pair of leather breech- 
 
 j es, about the size of a double opera-glass, hang out- 
 
 ! side to dry; a pair of white-topboots of the same pro- 
 portions on another nail, and Mr. T.'s hat and coat on 
 another. The fun lies in all these articles being well- 
 
 \worn. They are a little shabby indeed ; and, in the 
 boots, the leather is represented as worn a little red 
 by the straps of his trousers ! Whoever got them up 
 
 i is an artist. Fit as Tommy is to be a "tiger" to 
 
 ; Queen Mab, his boots and breeches would require 
 
 \ stretching. 
 
 There is no end to the rivalry of hotels. Cozzens, 
 i of the "American," is making the attractive show of 
 | Broadway tributary to his house. The former smo- 
 king-room and reading-room on the corner of the sec- 
 j ond story are being converted into a superb ladies' 
 parlor, with a charming look-out over the park and 
 the new fountain; while the ground floor, formerly a 
 tailor's shop, is to be demoted to the loungers who 
 wish to sit in their chairs and see Broadway without 
 the trouble of walking. As a hotel, from which to 
 see what is going on to the best advantage, the " Amer- 
 ican" will now be the best in the city; and, as mine 
 host is famous for his table, he may soon gather his 
 " plum." 
 
 I see by the report of a late trial that an editor, in 
 the eyes of a counsellor-at-law, is considered " a me- 
 i chanic who carries on a newspaper" — the plea being 
 that a man in this condition of life should be taxed 
 with but small alimony for a divorced wife. It would 
 be convenient to some of the tribe to come down to 
 this classification, though most editors will probably 
 resist it, as ambitious boys sometimes object to being 
 let into a show for half-price. I wish the counsellor 
 had defined the luxuries proper to gentlemen that are 
 not proper for " mechanics." 
 
 The races between the " Empire"' and the other 
 boats on the Hudson occupy the city talk. I trust 
 they will have done their uttermost before anybody I 
 am very fond of has occasion to embark in them — for 
 I presume it is like the proving of guns. If the 
 boilers stand this, they will stand anything. The Em- 
 pire beats, but not by so much as was anticipated. 
 She is unmatched for comfort and beauty, however, 
 and a trip to Albany in her, a month hence, will be a 
 treat worth looking forward to. She runs as a day- 
 boat hereafter. 
 
 One of the papers announces Count D'Orsay U 
 already arrived in New York. It is a mistake ; and 
 
624 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 so, I believe, is the announcement that he is coming 
 at all. He resisted strong inducements to come out 
 in the suite of his intimate friend, Lord Durham 
 (late governor of Canada), and if he had ever con- 
 templated a visit to America, he would have availed 
 himself of that opportunity. 
 
 Brough, the vocalist, had a concert recently of 
 renaissance, well-attended and rapturously applauded. 
 He sung better than ever. Mr. Frank Brown assisted 
 him — a very promising young singer, who is about 
 trying his musical fortune in Italy. He has a hand- 
 some person and good talents, as well as an excellent 
 quality of voice, and will be heard of favorably here- 
 after, I have little doubt. 
 
 Previous to the last six months, New York has 
 only been to me a place of transit, and for the benefit 
 of transitory travellers, it is perhaps worth while lo 
 mention what I have missed till I became a resident. 
 Like the new Sunday-school pupil who was surprised 
 with the sight of "A," of which he had often heard, 
 though he had never seen it before, I am quite full of 
 raptures about Hoboken — new to me till a day or two 
 since. Its extent, beauty, and particularly its near- 
 ness to Broadway, were all surprises. With the ex- 
 ception of the ferry, it lies at the foot of Barclay 
 street, which you know runs down from the Astor, 
 and if the proprietors of that hotel chose to advertise 
 the proximity of the " Elysian fields" as an attraction 
 to their establishment, the only objection would lie in 
 the dread of alarming the apoplectic. The stile over 
 which you step into these grounds is at the ferry- 
 landing, and you are immediately under the shade of 
 avenues leading to covert and winding walks, and to 
 a park which covers the beautiful promontory of Ho- 
 boken, and which can not be surpassed in the world 
 for union of glade and distant view. Who keeps 
 these walks so smooth and trim, who laid them out 
 and gave them to the public, and who lives in the en- 
 viable residence adjoining them, 1 do not know. But 
 the New-Yorkers may be satisfied that they have at 
 their service, and close at hand, grounds which equal 
 those of any nobleman in England. On week-days 
 they seem little frequented, too ; though on Sundays, 
 I am told, the avenues are thronged. 
 
 1 observed a new fashion in ladies' boots, which 
 would take, I should think, among the Orientals. The 
 Arabs, as you know, judge of aristocracy by the test 
 of a hollow under the instep — that if water will run 
 under the naked foot when standing on marble, the 
 ancestors of the owner could not have borne burdens. 
 Mr. Dick, ladies' bootmaker in Broadway, inserts a 
 steel spring into the sole to keep it snug under the 
 instep, supporting the foot very comfortably in walk- 
 ing, and adding very much to its beauty. The amal- 
 gamationists will probably oppose the fashion, as the 
 negro foot is entirely excluded from its advantages. 
 
 I think there was what is commonly called " an 
 opening" for a fashionable summer-theatre up town. 
 Gayety in private circles ceases very much by the first of 
 May; strangers, travelling for pleasure, and inclined to 
 bestow themselves for the evenings in the resorts of " silk 
 attire," begin to arrive; few leave the city for touring 
 till August, and the great majority of the better clas- 
 ses do not leave it at all except for country-seats in 
 the neighborhood, or for short periods; the other the- 
 atres are shut ; and the patrician complexion given to 
 a place by inducements like the foregoing, is the best 
 trap for what the manager would call " miscellaneous 
 patronage ;" or, to express it by a maxim of theat- 
 rical economy, white gloves in the first circle will in- 
 sure dirty hands in the third. 
 
 Mr. Niblo has cleverly stepped into this opening. 
 His pretty theatre is newly done up in gilding and 
 blue maroon* (an ill-omened stuff for theatrical lining) ; 
 it is brilliantly lighted ; the scenery is peculiar and 
 new, and he begins with addressing his entertainment 
 solely to those who have either aired their manners 
 •with travel, or " fed of the dainties that are bred in a 
 book." The French company might as well deliver 
 themselves in pantomime as sing in French to most 
 of the ordinary frequenters of our theatres, but the 
 boxes understand ; and it is worth the gallery's time 
 and money to have a three hours' perusal of the un- 
 bonneted attractions of the boxes — the opera aside. 
 
 An "Admirable Crichton" of music, equally won- 
 derful on the piano-forte and the violin, has appeared 
 among us, in the person of Mr. Wm. Vincent Wal- 
 lace, Director of the Dublin Anacreontic Society. 
 Those who have heard Paganini and Thalberg, pro- 
 nounce decidedly that he is unsurpassed even by those 
 hitherto unequalled maestros ! He performs upon the 
 piano a grand introduction and variations on the theme 
 of the Cracovienne, composed by himself. The in- 
 strument becomes a full orchestra, under his hands, 
 which seems multiplied into a dozen ; while, in the 
 rapid passages, his fingers are invisible as the spokes 
 of a locomotive-wheel in full career. He has no left 
 hand, but two right ones, equally independent of each 
 other. The brilliancy and power of his execution 
 set off admirably the delicate morceaux of melody in- 
 terspersed, and all unite to produce an effect before 
 unknown to us. But his performance on the violin 
 surpasses, if possible, that upon the piano. He exe- 
 cutes on this the Carnival of Venice, and the Witches' 1 
 Dance of Benevento, and several other difficult compo- 
 sitions, as originally performed by Paganini, and never 
 before heard in this country; and the effect is most 
 startling and thrilling. In his hands, the violin does 
 more than speak — it sings, shrieks, supplicates, re- 
 proaches, dies, revives, and realizes the fancy of Bal- 
 zac, that a soul is imprisoned within it. With his 
 bow he scatters a bright shower of melody through 
 the air, and rasps diamond-sparkles from the strings. 
 Our language may seem extravagant, but it falls far 
 short of the reality. Musicians are in raptures with 
 the fulness and purity of his tones, the decision and 
 accuracy of his stopping, his left-handed pizzicato, 
 and his double notes on the fourth string. We re- 
 joice that such an artist bears an English name, and 
 proves that wonderful musical genius is not confined 
 to foreign nations. 
 
 At the London Opera, no gentleman is admitted 
 who is not in full dress. Ladies go there jewelled, 
 decolletees, and unbonneted of course. It is a dress- 
 place. 
 
 Ladies must have a place to "dress." 
 
 The New York ladies have ceased to dress gayly 
 in the street. 
 
 Private parties are not a sufficient vent for the pas- 
 sion of dress among ladies. 
 
 Now, Mr. Niblo, do you see your way? 
 
 The above is a literal copy of a memorandum we 
 made for an article, while sitting out the expectant 
 half hour before the rising of the curtain, a night or 
 two ago, at the French Opera. We pitch it at you 
 head foremost, dear reader, because you are some- 
 times willing to take us in the lump, or seriatim, as it 
 is convenient for us to deliver ourselves — but more 
 particularly because the printer is clamorous for copy, 
 and, hurried or not hurried, copied we like to be. 
 
 But, to our text. A dress-opera is happily entailed 
 upon us by the change of the sumptuary character 
 of Broadway. Ladies now (and very likely we are 
 
 "Marooning, the act of leaving a person ashore where 
 there are no inhabitants. — Johnson. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 625 
 
 telling our country-friends a bit of news) are under 
 I be necessity of having two bonnets. There must be 
 a plain straw with a green veil, to soften down and 
 properize any appearance in the street, on foot and 
 unattended. There must be a dress-bonnet for mom- 
 ma calls, matinees, breakfast-parties, wedding-visits, 
 and, »enerally, for all daylight departures from home, 
 on errands of ceremony or pleasure. This dress-bon- 
 net requires other concomitants in keeping — lace, 
 feathers, flowers — whatever is required for a full pa- 
 rure. And a full parure requires a carriage, of course. 
 And a carriage requires a fortune. And as all this is 
 the fashion, nobody can be fashionable who is not 
 rich. And so comes in the dynasty of the aristocracy 
 of money ! 
 
 Now we like all this — offensive as it seems, at the 
 first blush, to a republican eye. Part the extremes- 
 widen the distance between wealth and poverty — and 
 you make room for a middle class, which is not yet 
 recognised in our country — everybody who is not 
 absolutely poor, striving to seem absolutely rich. Of i 
 this middle class, literary men are a natural part and 
 parcel. So are many of the worthiest and most intel- j 
 ligent people of this country — people who are now | 
 occupying a station in life like Mohammed's coffin, j 
 neither on the earth of poverty nor in the heaven of j 
 riches, and in sad lack of a resting-place between, j 
 Once recognise that station in society — once make it | 
 respectable to set aside certain extravagances in dress j 
 and living as not proper for a condition in life which 
 is still far above poverty — and you set at ease thou- 
 sands of families that are now subjected to endless 
 uncertainties and mortifications. It requires, now, 
 both judgment and vigilance for many ladies not to 
 dress far above their condition in life — yet what more 
 distasteful than to have seen the husband in his place 
 of business, careworn and distressed, and the next 
 minute to meet his wife in Broadway, dressed out of all 
 keeping with his gains, and of course with no sympathy 
 for his troubles! We believe that, in fact, the ladies 
 are of our way of thinking in this matter. It is un- 
 comfortable for pride to be always "treading water," 
 as the swimmers say. Better sink, and sink, and 
 sink, till you come to your true level — anybody will 
 say. 
 
 Of course we follow nature, however, and of course 
 we except beauty from all homely precepts and econ- 
 omies. The peacock and the butterfly pay no pen- 
 alty that we know of for their extra-furnishings from 
 the shop of Rainbow & Co. Their business on earth 
 is to delight the eye; and that, we religiously believe, 
 is the errand of human beauty as well. No! Let 
 there be no "condition in life" for beautiful women! 
 Nature's princesses they are by the instinctive consent 
 of human nature ; and the homage we can not but pay, 
 let us be bold enough to acknowledge. As to beau- 
 ty's being, "when unadorned, adorned the most," it 
 is true of nothing but a statue. In real life, we think 
 flowers and gems are the natural belongings and orna- 
 ments of personal loveliness. All beauty should be 
 so furnished — even if ugliness be compelled to "ser- 
 vice dure" to procure them. 
 
 But to return to the opera. Ladies should be re- 
 minded that nothing adds more to the cheerfulness of 
 the scene, and its consequent attraction, than light 
 and bright colors. A dark dress has no business at 
 the opera, though indeed the dress itself may be 
 anything, so that the bust and head, which are alone 
 seen, are dressed gayly. No bonnets, and least of all, 
 veils! Let us have a dress place of amusement. Let 
 there be a resort in the long and vacant hours after 
 business, where we can seem to enter a brighter cham- 
 ber of this dingy world, and be compelled (we men) 
 to dress ourselves, and feel in a more holyday and lib- 
 eral atmosphere. 
 
 40 
 
 In the window of a Broadway shop we noticed, the 
 other day, a China dinner-set, otherwise magnificent, 
 but deformed by a representation on each plate of 
 "The great fire in New York." Thus, on every fes- 
 tive occasion, the guests would have their gayety 
 dampened by the suggestion of that scene of loss, 
 danger, and suffering. Such bad taste is too frequent. 
 It would be equally easy to impress devices calcula- 
 ted to arouse cheerful and enlivening associations; 
 but, as a people, we are too careless of such matters. 
 Trifles in themselves they may be; but such little 
 items of enjoyment — such grains of pleasure — make 
 up in time quite a mountain of happiness. 
 
 Theodore Hook. — Good dinners will not make a 
 man immortal. The prince of diners-out is dead. It 
 would seem as if " good living" meant long living 
 too — for who ever thought Theodore Hook could 
 die! — "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent 
 fancy." " Where be your gibes now ? your gambols? 
 your songs ? your flashes of merriment that were wont 
 to set the table in a roar ? Not one now, to mock 
 your own grinning!" We have carried out the quo- 
 tation somewhat with a feeling of bitterness — not 
 aaainst the dead, but for him. We could have begun 
 the passage with Hamlet — " Alas, poor Yorick ! — I 
 knew him, Horatio !" Everybody knew Theodore 
 Hook, who has been " summered and wintered" in 
 London, and we knew him as others did, with that 
 far-reaching and half-pitying admiration which is 
 given to a wit of all work — a joker never out of har- 
 ness — a " funny man" by profession, as the children 
 thought Mathews. We have seen Theodore Hook 
 make excellent hits, and we have seen him make des- 
 perate failures — many failures to one hit, indeed. But 
 so it must be, as every one knows who has thought 
 twice on wit as a " good continuer." 
 
 Hook was the editor of the "John Bull" newspa- 
 per, and his portrait would have served for its imprint. 
 He was the personification of John Bull, as the French 
 fancy him, and as he is represented on the stage. 
 Above the middle height, he looked short, from being 
 corpulent and short-necked. His person was "stocky" 
 altogether — thick legs, high chest, short arms, and 
 bluff, rubicund, and rather defying features. We have 
 not heard of what he died; but, we presume, of apo- 
 plexy, for he looked of that habit, and lived in a way 
 to produce and feed it. Over his brows, however, 
 there seemed to be a region, like the sun above clouds 
 on a mountain-side, brighter than that below. His 
 forehead was ample and white, his head smoothly bald, 
 and, if the observer had seen but that portion of The- 
 odore Hook, he would have formed of him a far higher 
 opinion than in following him downward. To that 
 tablet of intellect his works of imagination, we be- 
 lieve, never did justice. His novels are third-rate, 
 while his native powers were first-rate, and against 
 those two unattained steps on the ladder of immortal- 
 ity, Hook's poor offset was his very mortal celebrity as 
 a table-wit — the diner-out, par excellence, of his day. 
 
 We believe in omens. In the days of Charlemagne 
 large possessions were transferred, not with wax and 
 paper, but with a ring. A ring has been given us by 
 a well-wishing stranger, and we here signify our be- 
 lief that, in it is transferred to us the prosperity of 
 the former proprietor— dead two thousand years ago 
 at the very least, but undeniably a most prosperous 
 gentleman. Let us look a little at the evidence. 
 
 It is generally supposed, we believe, that the mum- 
 mies preserved to this day are, in all human probabil- 
 
626 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 ity, from two to three thousand years old. Some time 
 before the advent of our Savior, Egypt had become a 
 Roman province, and the more costly usages of the 
 Egyptians had been done away — the embalming of 
 the bodies of the rich and great being among the 
 most costly. Those which have defied time and cor- 
 ruption, through two thousand years, of course were 
 such as were embalmed with the most cost and care, 
 and the poor, the antiquarians tell us, were merely 
 dried by salt and laid away in the catacombs. The 
 rings and other ornaments of the mummied great 
 were wrapped up with them. 
 
 The ring that was given us three days ago is of 
 silver, holding a stone covered with Arabic charac- 
 ters, and was taken from the finger of a mummy, 
 bought at a great price for exhibition, and partly 
 opened. It is of rude work, and if Egypt's jewellers 
 did their best upon it, we can but say that our friend 
 Tenney, of Broadway, was only born too late to aston- 
 ish the Pharaohs. We have not yet found an Arabic 
 scholar to decipher it, but, if we had not known it to 
 be Arabic (or Coptic), we should have said it was a 
 device of three stars, a wrench, and two streaks of light- 
 ning — very properly expressive of our three selves 
 (the editors and publisher), our manner of work, and 
 the way the Mirror is to go. And, on the whole, we 
 shall let it rest at that — without further translation. 
 
 We are not sure that, if the former proprietor of 
 this silver ring could wake, he would think his finger- 
 ornament handed down in the same line of life. The 
 classifications of society under the Ptolemies would 
 have put us down low (priests, soldiers, shepherds, 
 swineherds, mechanics, interpreters, and fishermen — 
 the literary profession being the last but one), yet, 
 after all, there is a resemblance between us, and I am 
 happy to say (no offence to the mummy) that it is not 
 in our personal appearance! It was necessary, to 
 embalm this gentleman, that his brains should first be 
 extracted through his nostrils. We trust to be em- 
 balmed by letting ours ooze from our fingers' ends — 
 and, on the whole, we may say, we prefer our way of 
 doing it. But that is all. We see no other resem- 
 blance. The Egyptian was circumcised. He was 
 gloomy and superstitious. He increased his poultry 
 by artificially hatching eggs. The husband had the 
 charge of the domestic concerns ; the wife of buy- 
 ing and selling, and all affairs that were not of a do- 
 mestic character. He hated songs and dances. He 
 was a stranger to gayety, and he drank nothing 
 stronger than barley-beer. We trust that it is no 
 vanity on our part to congratulate his ring on conver- 
 sance for the future with a more pleasant state of 
 things — aristocratic comparisons apart. 
 
 Prosperous the Mirror is to be — thanks to the lib- 
 eral giver of the ring that foreshadows it! But (to 
 "out with a secret") we should feel easier if the en- 
 yious would begin to manifest their displeasure. We 
 have a dread of "the primrose way to the everlasting 
 bonfire," aud should feel safer in a thornier path than 
 we tread now. This pushing all of one side makes 
 us fancy we topple. We would try our friends at op- 
 position. Feathers that go down with one wind 
 mount with a counter-current. We "cotton" to old 
 King Osymandyas, who caused to be graven on his 
 Colossus: "I am King Osymandyas — if any man will 
 know my greatness let him destroy one of my works." 
 And of that jolly old monarch, the first owner of our 
 ring was possibly a subject — conjunctive omen of our 
 road to prosperity. 
 
 Beards in New York. — It is odd how a fashion 
 creeps from one country to another, unaware. Has 
 it occurred to you what a bearded nation we have be- 
 come within the last year or two — imitating La Jeune 
 France in that and other accompanying particulars? 
 
 My attention was called to it yesterday by a friend just 
 returned from a long residence in Europe. He was 
 expressing very emphatically his annoyance at the 
 loss of his mustache. On coming in sight of land 
 he had gone below and sacrificed it, as a thing " most 
 tolerable and not to be endured," among the sober 
 friends to whom he was returning ; when lo ! on land- 
 ing — every second man in a full suit of beard ! His 
 mustache and imperial chanced to be very becoming 
 to him, and his mortification, at being compelled to 
 put them again into nascent stubble, was unbounded. 
 
 Two schools of dress have prevailed in France for 
 the last six or seven years — the classic and the ro- 
 mantic; the former with the Brutus head, short hair 
 and apparel of severe simplicity, and the other with 
 flowing locks, fanciful beard, and great sumptuous- 
 ness of cravat and waistcoat. The "romantic" is the 
 only one which has "come over," and it prevails at 
 present in New York, with (to use the popular phrase) 
 "a perfect looseness." Almost every man below forty 
 has tried his beard on, and most of the young men 
 about town show their fancy in something beyond the 
 mere toothbrush-whisker of the military." The latter, 
 by-the-way, is the only beard "let out" by the Lon- 
 don men whom the packets bring over, and in Eng- 
 land the synonyme is rigorous between " mustache" 
 and " adventurer." It seems to me, however, that the 
 principles of taste which should affect the fashion of 
 a beard are but little regarded among us, and I rather 
 wonder that some ambitious barber has not set him- 
 self up as an authority — to decide their shape by pri- 
 vate consultation, according to feature and complex- 
 ion. Perhaps I may feed a want of the era by put- 
 ting down what I have gathered on the subject of 
 beards by reading and travel. 
 
 In a country where all the hair which nature has 
 planted on the face is permitted to grow, a shaved 
 man certainly looks very silly. After a short passage 
 from Asia Minor to Malta, the clean-shaved English 
 officers struck me as a very denuded and inexpressive- 
 looking race, though much more athletic and hand- 
 some than the Orientals I had left. The beards of 
 old men, particularly, are great embellishments, cov- 
 ering as they do, the mouth, which most shows age 
 and weakness, by loss of teeth and feebleness of 
 muscle. When the mouth is covered, the whole ex- 
 pression of the face is concentrated in the eyes, and 
 it is surprising how much the eyes gain in character 
 and brilliancy by a full mustache. A luxuriant and 
 silky beard on a young and clear skin is certainly very 
 beautiful, though, according to medical observation, 
 the faculties are much better matured when the beard 
 comes late. In bearded countries, the character is 
 very much judged of by the beard. There is an old 
 Irish proverb which says : — 
 
 " Trust not that man, although he were your brother, 
 Whose hair's one color and his beard another." 
 
 In irritable persons, the beard grows thin and dry. 
 In those of milder temper it is thick and slightly 
 curling. The beard is affected very sensibly by the 
 nature of a man's nourishment; and this explains 
 why they know an aristocrat in the East by the luxu- 
 riance of this appendage — poor food deteriorating its 
 quality. Diplomatists should always wear the mus- 
 tache, as it is much easier to control the expression 
 of the eye than of the mouth — useful to card-players 
 and stock-brokers, for the same reason. Shaving 
 among the ancients was a mark of mourning — though 
 at the era when beards were out of fashion, they were 
 let grow, by those who had lost friends. When a 
 man's mouth is beautiful and expressive, the beard 
 which covers it is a disadvantage, and we may guess 
 that Scipio Africanus (the first Roman who shaved 
 every day) wore on his lips the tenderness and mag- 
 nanimity which he displayed toward the bride of the 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 627 
 
 captive Allucius. The first shaving barber was one 
 Ticinius Maenas, who came from Sicily to Rome 
 about three hundred years before Christ, and then 
 commenced an era of smooth chins, interrupted, for a 
 short while only, by the emperor Adrian, who wore his 
 beard to conceal warts on his chin. With most nations 
 the beard has been considered an ornament. Moses 
 commanded the Jews not to shave, and the ancient 
 Germans, and the Asiatics of a later day, have consid- 
 ered no insult so mortal as the cutting off of one man's 
 beard by another. In France, shaving came into 
 fashion during the reigns of Louis XIII. and XIV., 
 both of these monarchs having ascended the throne 
 when beardless, and their subjects imitating them, of 
 course. And as France gave the law of fashion to all 
 Europe, the sacrifice of part of the beard grew to be 
 common, though it is only since the beginning of the 
 last century that the shaving of the whole beard be- 
 came universal. 
 
 I have noticed, in New York, that men, who had for- 
 merly no pretensions to good looks, have become very 
 handsome by the wearing of mustache and imperial, 
 and I have seen handsome men disfigured by adopting 
 the same fashion. The effect of a mustache and full 
 beard is to make the face more masculine, graver, and 
 coarser, and this is, of course, an improvement to one 
 whose features are over-delicate, or whose expression 
 is too frivolous. On a dapper man, it is quite out of 
 place, and he should wear a clipped whisker, if any 
 beard at all. The beard, I think, gives a middle-aged 
 look, and makes a man of twenty look older, and a 
 man of forty younger. The ladies like a beard — natu- 
 rally thinking faces effeminate which are as smooth 
 as their own, and not objecting to the distinctions 
 which nature has made between the sexes. When 
 the beard is but partially worn, some/jtrtistical knowl- 
 edge should be called in, as a short face may be, made 
 longer, and a broad face narrower, a gay face graver, 
 and an undecided chin put in domino. But of all 
 abominations in this way, I think, the goat's beard, 
 growing under the chin only, is the most brutal and 
 disgusting, though just now, in New York, rather the 
 prevailing fashion. The mistake in taste is very com- 
 mon, of continuing to wear a high shirt collar and 
 cravat, with a beard on the cheek and throat — the 
 beauty of a curling beard depending very much on its 
 freedom and natural adaptation to the mould of the 
 face. There are more people than Beatrice, of course, 
 who are willing to let a man's beard be "of the color 
 that God pleases," but there are others who have 
 aversions to red beards and yellow, and there is great 
 trade in cirages and gums for the improvement of color 
 and texture. Most of the beards you meet in Broad- 
 way glitter in the sun like steel filings. Altogether, I 
 think the fashion of wearing the beard a desirable one, 
 and I particularly wish it would prevail among old 
 men. A bearded senate would make a wiser and more 
 reverend show in congress, and anything which con- 
 ceals the decrepitude of age and moves respect (as 
 beards certainly do, both), is most desirable. 
 
 Macready's first Night. — Macready had a full, 
 not an overflowing house, to witness his debut last 
 night, and there were more of his own profession 
 among the audience than I ever before saw together 
 — (partly, perhaps, from curiosity to hear the " read- , 
 ings" of Shakspere which the drop curtain represents 
 Macready as giving to the Muses). The play was 
 Macbeth, and Mr. Ryder, who accompanies Mr. Mac- 
 ready, came on first as Macduff, and was very warmly 
 received — applauded, indeed, throughout the play, as 
 his playing deserved. He is a very correct actor, and 
 a " fine figure of a man." Macready's appearance 
 brought the hou«e " down" of course. He went at his 
 
 interview with the witches most artistically, and the 
 witches did their bedevilments more artistically than 
 we have seen them done before, and so of all the trick 
 and machinery of the play — for Macready is master 
 of " stage business," and the scenery and supernumer- 
 aries had been effectually cleared of cobwebs. The 
 play went on — with a beautiful procession of effects, 
 particularly by Macready in his exits and entrances, 
 his salutations and surprises — and to the theatre-go- 
 ing people present it was an exhibition of drama-pano- 
 rama curiously managed, and all as clean and neat as 
 machinery — and just as moving. The attention was 
 close, but the applause grew less and less. I never 
 saw so cold a house. The most stormy and passion- 
 ate outbreaks of Macbeth's mingled ambition and re- 
 morse were received like the catastrophes in a pup- 
 pet-show — with an unexcited smile of surprise. Each 
 " point" the actor made was looked at like the wheel 
 of a clock shown piecemeal. There was no passion 
 in the audience, no illusion, no general interest in the 
 progress of the story of the play — in short, no feeling. 
 My own sensations during the evening were those 
 of pain and annoyance. Mr. Macready is so accom- 
 plished an artificer in his profession — everything he 
 does is so admirably "studied up" — 
 
 u So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn" — 
 
 that a cold reception of so much pains seems most 
 ungracious. When he came in and knelt to the king 
 — when he entered Duncan's chamber to murder him 
 — when he received the first suggestions of crime from 
 Lady Macbeth — I could have shouted myself hoarse 
 with admiration of the artist — it was all done so differ- 
 ently from another man, and so skilfully in a high 
 and finished conception of the character. Every step 
 he took on the stage was a separate study. Every 
 look, gesture, movement, was consummate. As pan- 
 tomime it would have been absolutely faultless. Yet, 
 strange to say, he walks the stage like a transparent 
 man — showing all his anatomy. He wants clothing 
 with natural flesh and blood. His voice wants nature. 
 It sounds like the breaking of crockery in a dry well. 
 He feels no passion and he moves none. What a pity 
 that scholarship, study, labor, patience, and taste, 
 should fall short, in their result, of the most unla- 
 bored off-throwing of genius ! 
 
 Italian Opera. — I saw only the first act of " Lu- 
 cia de Lammermoor ," and found little to admire ex- 
 cept the performance of the orchestra. Signor An- 
 tognini certainly did not come up to his reputation as 
 a tenor, and he is the great star of the company. He 
 is a curious-looking man to play the lover. The mus- 
 cles of his face pull, every one, upon his nostrils, like 
 " taut halliards," and with eyebrows pointing fiercely 
 at the bridge of his nose, and the mouth like an angry 
 dash of a pen under an emphasized word, he looks as 
 Mephistophilish as one of Retzch's drawings. Mad- 
 ame Majocchi, the prima donna, is a fat woman with 
 a fat voice. She has a good contralto footing in her 
 throat, but her soprano notes are painfully tiptoe, and 
 you are glad when she is comfortably at the bottom 
 of her cadenza. The company appears pretty well 
 drilled, but they want a prima donna, and if they could 
 find a prima donna in want of them (Castellan, for in- 
 stance) we might have good opera. They say that 
 Antoiinini's voice is only grass-grown from neglect, 
 and that he would do brilliantly after a little practice. 
 Considering the certain fortune that waits upon a fine 
 tenor, it is surprising that there should continue to be 
 so few aspirants for the honors of the Rubini; for it 
 can not be that there are only half a dozen (if so 
 many) of human voices possessing his capabilities of 
 tone and cultivation. There is probably "full many 
 
628 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 a" postillion of Lonjumeau "born to" "waste his 
 sweetness on the desert air," and it would be a good 
 speculation to look them up and buy a life-interest in 
 their thoracic capabilities. 
 
 Dr. Howe. — It will be a curious piece of news to 
 you that our countryman, Dr. Howe (lately married 
 and gone abroad) has been stopped on the borders of 
 Prussia by a cabinet order, and of course is shut out 
 from so much of the Rhine as lies (if my geography 
 serves me) between Coblentz and Cologne. This 
 special edict on the part of a king with a standing 
 army of two hundred thousand men is no small com- 
 pliment to Dr. Howe's consequence; but perhaps it 
 would interest you to be made acquainted with the 
 cetera intus. 
 
 About ten years ago I had the honor (and as such 
 I shall always treasure the memory) of sharing Dr. 
 Howe's lodgings at Paris for some months. He was 
 then employed in learning that system of instruction 
 for the blind upon which he has since grafted im- 
 provements that have made him a separate fame 
 among philanthropists. Philanthropy seems to be 
 his engrossing and only mission in life, however; for, 
 though giving the most of his day to the objects of 
 his special errand, he found time to make himself the 
 most serviceable man in France to the cause of Po- 
 land. The disasters of Warsaw had filled Paris with 
 destitute refugees, and distinguished men who had 
 shared in that desperate battle were literally house- 
 less in the streets. Our common breakfast-room was 
 thronged with these unfortunate patriots, and, with 
 noble liberality, Dr.Howe kept open table for all who 
 came to him — many of them, to my knowledge, get- 
 ting no food elsewhere, and, among others, Lelewel, 
 the distinguished poet and patriot, coming in one 
 morning to ask a breakfast, as I well recollect, after 
 having slept out a winter's night in the street. La- 
 fayette was at that time at the head of the Polish 
 committee, and Fenimore Cooper (whose generosity 
 to the Poles should be chronicled, as well as the de- 
 votion of his time and talents to the cause) shared 
 with Dr. Howe the counsel and most efficient agency 
 of the benevolent old man. At this time a sum of 
 money was raised to be sent, with some important and 
 secret despatches, to the Poles who had fled into 
 Prussia, and Dr. Howe offered to be the bearer. I 
 went with him to the Mesagerie and saw him off in 
 the diligence, very little suspecting the dangerous 
 character of his errand. He arrived at Berlin, and, 
 after passing the evening abroad, returned to his 
 hotel, and found a couple of gens-d'armes in his 
 room. They informed him that he must accompany 
 them to the police. The doctor understood his po- 
 sition in a moment. By a sudden effort he succeeded 
 in pitching both the soldiers out of the room and clo- 
 sing the door, for it was all-important that he should 
 gain time to destroy papers that he had about him. 
 The gens-d 'armes commenced a parley with him 
 through the bolted door, which resulted in a compact 
 that he should be let alone till morning, on condition 
 of his agreeing to go witfi them peaceably at day- 
 light — they keeping sentry outside. He had no light, 
 but he passed the night in tearing into the smallest 
 possible fragments the important papers, and soaking 
 them in water. Among his papers, however, were 
 two or three letters from Lafayette to himself which 
 he wished to preserve, and after examining the room 
 he secreted these in the hollow of a plaster cast of the 
 king which chanced to be there, and so saved them ; 
 for, though the minute fragments were picked out 
 and put together again (as he subsequently discovered), 
 he wrote to a friend at Berlin, six months after, who 
 went to the hotel and found the secreted letters safe 
 in the plaster king's keeping! 
 
 At dawn Dr. Howe opened his door, and was 
 marched immediately to prison. By chance, on the 
 evening of his arrival, he had met an American in the 
 entry of the hotel, who had recognised him, and the 
 next day came to call. From the mysterious manner 
 in which the people of the house denied all knowledge 
 of what had become of him, this gentleman suspected 
 an arrest, and wrote to Mr. Rives, our then minister 
 to France, stating his suspicion. Mr. Rives immedi- 
 ately demanded him of the Prussian government, and 
 was assured, in reply, that they knew nothing of the 
 person in question. Mr. Rives applied a second time. 
 Dr. Howe had now been six weeks in solitary con- 
 finement, and at the end of this period he was taken 
 out in silence and put into a carriage with closed win- 
 dows. They drove off, and it was his own terrible 
 belief for the first day that he was on his way to Si- 
 beria. By the light through the covering of the car- 
 riage, however, he discovered that he was going west- 
 ward. 
 
 The sudden transition from close confinement to 
 the raw air, threw him into a fever, and on the third 
 day of his silent journey he begged to be allowed to 
 stop and consult a physician. They refused. On 
 the next morning, while changing horses, a physician 
 was brought to the carriage-door, who, after seeing 
 the prisoner, wrote a certificate that he was able to 
 proceed, and they again drove on. That day they 
 crossed a corner of the Hanoverian dominions, and, 
 while stopping for a moment in a village, Dr. Howe 
 saw the red coats of some officers, and by a bold at- 
 tempt escaped from his guards and threw himself on 
 their protection. They quietly restored him to the 
 Prussians, and the carriage drove on once more — his 
 guard finally setting him down at Metz, on the bor- 
 ders of Prussia, with orders never to enter again the 
 Prussian dominions. At present he is at Baden-Ba- 
 den, tfnd Mr. Everett is engaged in a negotiation, 
 through the Prussian minister at London (Chevalier 
 Bunsen), for the revocation of the cabinet order, and 
 permission for a simple citizen of the United States 
 to show his bride the Rhine! Mr. Greene, our con- 
 sul at Rome, who is now in New York, informs me 
 that Dr. Howe is also on the black list of the king 
 of Naples — of course as a general champion of lib- 
 erty. 
 
 Dr. Howe's first reputation, as is well known, was 
 made as a Philhellene in the Greek revolution. He 
 left this country entirely without means, having just 
 completed his studies in surgery, and worked his pas- 
 sage to Greece. He entered the service as surgeon, 
 and soon gained the highest promotion — serving part 
 of the time on board the armed steamer commanded 
 by Hastings — the only fault found with him being (as 
 a Hanoverian comrade of his told me at Paris) that he 
 would be in the fight, and was only a surgeon when 
 the battle was over. His whole career in Greece was 
 one of gallant acts of bravery, generosity, and self- 
 sacrifice, as represented by his companions there — and 
 if he could ever be made to overcome the unwilling- 
 ness with which he speaks of himself, his history of 
 personal adventure would, without doubt, be one of 
 the most curiously-interesting naratives in the world. 
 Dr. Howe's slight person, delicate and beautiful fea- 
 tures, and soft voice, would give one the impression 
 that he was more at home in his patient labor of wind- 
 ing light through the labyrinth of the sense-imprisoned 
 Laura Bridgman ; but a more fiery spirit, and one 
 more reluctant to submit to the details of quiet life, 
 does not exist, and the most trying service he has ever 
 done in the cause of philanthropy, I sincerely believe, 
 is this discipline of his tumultuous energies to the 
 patient teaching of the blind. He is still a young 
 man — not yet forty, I believe. I could not trust my 
 admiration and affection to say more of his character 
 than the giving of this simple statement of facts. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 629 
 
 The New York American, after quoting from what 
 the editor calls " the agreeably gossiping New York cor- 
 respondent of the National Intelligencer," remarks that 
 " this correspondence is not, to be sure, very reliable for j 
 matters of fact" — which isvery like disparaging a hasty J 
 pudding for not being a rump-steak. This style of j 
 criticising things by telling what they are not, suits the j 
 " American" in the two respects, that it is both easy i 
 and oracular. But I should prefer to be tried rather ' 
 by what I undertake to do, which is certainly not to j 
 send you simply " matters of fact." To wait for the j 
 winnowing of error and exaggeration from truth, would j 
 be to send you a correspondence as stale as some of j 
 the columns in which I am found fault with. I pro- | 
 fess nothing of the kind. I send you the novelty and 
 gossip of the hour, and you, and all others (except 
 those who are "nothing if not critical," and must find 
 a fault) take it as they take what they hear in their : 
 day's walk — as material for conversation and specula- ! 
 tion, which may be mere rumor, may be truth. I am j 
 happy to amuse a New York editor, but I do not write i 
 for one so near my sources of information. I write 
 with only such of your subscribers in my eye as are I 
 not resident in New York — who want a gay daguerre- I 
 otype of the floating news and chit-chat of the hour, j 
 such as they would have gathered by observation and i 
 conversation, if they had passed in New York the day j 
 on which I write. Loose as is all this ministry to the ! 
 love of news, however, I will lay any bet which I could j 
 have the conscience to take from that editor, that, I 
 comparing paragraph by paragraph with his own pa- 
 per, for twenty columns, I will find more misstate- 
 ments in his than in my own — though you would 
 think by his criticism that he never committed an 
 error in his life. 
 
 And apropos of my sins of correspondence, I find 
 that propriety begins to require that all words signify- j 
 ing exhilarating drinks must henceforth be decently 
 
 disembowelled — that cobblers must be written c s, 
 
 and julaps j s, slings s s, and punches p s. 
 
 I have had three letters and one poetic appeal ad- J 
 dressed to me, remonstrative against my shameless 
 mention of these iniquitous beverages in so exemplary • 
 a paper as the Intelligencer. I consider this an expo- 
 nent of the leading enthusiasm of the era, and wil- ] 
 lingly give way. One of my rebukers attacked me 
 more particularly for what he considered a slighting 
 allusion to the coming of Father Mathew to America. 
 To this, in intention at least, I plead not guilty. I 
 revere the character of that great reformer, and I con- 
 sider his mission sacred and salutary. My submission 
 shall be more emphatic, if necessary. 
 
 Macready draws well, and the town is fully occupied 
 in discussing why he only astonishes and never moves 
 the feelings of his audience. He is a most accom- 
 plished player, and in these days, when theatrical 
 criticism can neither help nor harm an actor, he can 
 pursue the even tenor of his style with little inter- 
 ruption. 
 
 Longfellow, a poet who combines genius and work- 
 manlike finish, is in New York, under the care of 
 Elliot, the oculist. I trust he will keep an undamaged 
 pair of eyes, though the loss of sight would turn a 
 great deal of new light inward upon his mind — as it 
 did upon Milton's — and be a gain to the glory of his 
 country. 
 
 I am ministered to while writing to-day by the most 
 deliciously-tempered autumn air that ever intoxicated 
 the heart of a ripening grape. I only lament that the 
 
 distinct pleasure I feel in every pore and fibre will not 
 be channelled into the nib of my pen and flow to you 
 in rhetoric. The wind is a little northerly, however, 
 and it may bring you a sample. 
 
 To the Ladies. — We have nothing to write about 
 this morning, ladies! — quite nothing. We presume 
 you know that the crocus yellow and the blue of your 
 own eyes are the fashionable colors ; that Middleton 
 cuts his slippers low behind for such ladies as know 
 what is becoming to the foot ; that the late strain after 
 economy is yielding to a rebound of extravagance 
 (consequently, this winter you can wear nothing too 
 gorgeously sumptuous) ; that ruinous bracelets are ut- 
 terly indispensable to wrists with a swan's neck in them, 
 and that the New Mirror (pardon us!) is of the fash- 
 ionable crocus teint without, and as " blue" within as is 
 bearable by the copyrighted and intoxicating benight- 
 edness of beauty. If you had sent for us to your 
 boudoir and ordered our memory spread out upon a 
 silk cushion, we could tell you no more. 
 
 If you are interested at all in us — we are having, 
 this morning, our little private mope, with no possible 
 flight of fancy beyond the ends of our fingers. We 
 have been sitting here two hours making caryatides to 
 hold up some spilt ink on our blotting-paper — (rather 
 nicely drawn, one of them, and looks like a Greek girl 
 we saw at Egina). Then we have had a revery on po- 
 litical economy — musing, that is to say, whether we 
 should wear a ring on our right hand (which belongs 
 to the working-classes) or on the left, which is purely 
 an ornamental idler, born but to be gloved and kept 
 gentlemanly. Now, what do you think on that sub- 
 ject? Here is this most virtuous and attached right 
 hand of ours, an exemplary and indefatigable provider 
 for himself and the other members of our family, who 
 has never failed to bring bread to our mouths since we 
 placed our dependance on him, and why should he 
 not be ornamented and made trim and respectable, 
 first and foremost. He is not defiled by his work. He 
 is clean when he is washed. He is made on the same 
 model as the idle dangler opposite, and though he 
 could do very well without that same Mr. Sinister 
 Digits, there would be no "living" for Mr. Sinister 
 Digits without him ! Most meritorious worky ! Put 
 the ring on his forefinger! 
 
 Um ! it does not look so well on that hand ! There 
 is a dingy groove on the inside of the second finger 
 (which you would not remark, perhaps, but for the 
 conspicuousness of the jewel) — a nasty soil of an 
 ill-effaced ink-spot, made by a quill. Faith ! it calls 
 attention to " the shop," and would do so in good 
 company ! He must work in gloves if he is to be ob- 
 served! And the ring is not so becomingly carried as 
 by that other plumper and more taper gentleman, 
 whose joints, with less dexterity, look supple, and, 
 truth to own, more suitable ! 
 
 No — no ! " Take back the ring !" The bee works 
 hard enough to have his pick of wings, but he would 
 only be cumbered with the butterfly's. Indulgence 
 for ever to the ornamentals! Money to the ladies 
 whether you have it or no! Credit to the dandies! 
 And, befitting brown bread and plain blessings for the 
 labor-stained right hands of society— our own among 
 the worky-most and least complaining ! 
 
 We have been ring-mad since the mummy's ring 
 (mentioned on a previous page) was slipped upon our 
 finger, and we have pulled out from our store of relics 
 a huge emerald (in whose light is locked up a history) 
 and it was of the wearing of it that we mused in this 
 morning's mope of idleness. The world is set in a 
 solid emerald, says the Mohammedan — " the emerald 
 stone Sakhral, the agitations of whose light cause 
 earthquakes." We would make a pilgrimage (if our 
 
630 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 "travels" would sell) to see the great " mother of em- 
 eralds" worshipped by the Peruvians in the valley of 
 Manta— big as a gourd and luminous at murk mid- 
 night (or so they say). Excuse us, when we meet 
 you, if we proffer our left hand for courtesy, for, on 
 the forefinger of that sits our agitated emerald — the 
 right hand kept, unrewarded by your touch, to serve 
 you only. Adieu — till they are dead who are to die 
 (one a minute) ere another Saturday — for, at the close 
 of our overflowings into your cup, this sad thought 
 runs over ! And if, in the midst of our trifling, Prov- 
 idence ministers such thoughts to us, they can scarce 
 be unseasonable, passed on, in the same company, to 
 you. 
 
 Mrs. Flimson. — Few women had more gifts than 
 Mrs. Flimson. She was born of clever parents, and 
 was ladylike and good-looking. Her education was 
 that of a female Crichton, careful and universal ; and 
 while she had more than a smattering of most lan- 
 guages and sciences, she was up to any flight of fash- 
 ion, and down to every secret of notable housewifery. 
 She piqued herself, indeed, most upon her plain ac- 
 complishments (thinking, perhaps, that her more un- 
 common oues would speak for themselves) ; and it 
 was a greater triumph, to her apprehension, that she 
 could direct the country butcher to the sweet-bread 
 in slaughtering his veal, and show a country-girl how 
 to send it to table with the proper complexion of a riz 
 de veau, than that she could entertain any manner of 
 foreigner in his own language, and see order in the 
 stars and diamonds in backlogs. Like most female 
 prodigies, whose friends expect them to be matched 
 as well as praised, Mrs. Flimson lost the pick of the 
 market, and married a man very much her inferior. 
 The pis aller, Mr. Flimson, was a person of excel- 
 lent family (after the fashion of a hill of potatoes — 
 the best part of it under ground), and possessed of a 
 moderate income. Near the meridian sun of a me- 
 tropolis, so small a star would of course be extin- 
 guished ; and as it was necessary to Mrs. Flimson's 
 existence that she should be the cynosure of some- 
 thing, she induced her husband to remove to the 
 sparser field of a distant country-town, where, with 
 her diplomatic abilities, she hoped to build him up 
 into a member of congress. And here shone forth 
 the genius of Mrs. Flimson. To make herself per- 
 fectly au fait of country habits, usages, prejudices, 
 and opinions, was but the work of a month or two of 
 stealthy observation. At the end of this short period, 
 she had mastered a manner of rustic frankness (to be 
 put on at will); she had learned the secret of all rural 
 economies; she had found out what degree of gentil- 
 ity would inspire respect without offending, or exci- 
 ting envy, and she had made a near estimate of the 
 influence, consequence, and worth-trouble-ness of 
 every family within visiting distance. 
 
 AVith this ammunition, Mrs. Flimson opened the 
 campaign. She joined all the sewing-circles of the 
 village, refusing steadily the invidious honor of man- 
 ager, pattern-cutter, and treasurer; she selected one 
 or two talkative objects for her charity, and was stu- 
 diously secret in her manner of conveying her bene- 
 factions. She talked with farmers, quoting Mr. Flim- 
 son for her facts. She discoursed with the parson, 
 quoting Mr. Flimson for her theology. She was 
 intelligent and witty, and distributed plentiful scraps 
 of information, always quoting Mr. Flimson. She 
 managed the farm and the household, and kept all the 
 accounts — Mr. Flimson was so overwhelmed with 
 other business ! She talked politics, admitting that 
 she was less of a republican than Mr. Flimson. She 
 produced excellent plans for charitable associations, 
 town improvements, and the education of children — 
 all the result of Mr. Flimson's hours of relaxation. 
 
 She was — and was only — Mr. Flimson's humble vice- 
 gerent and poor representative. And everything would 
 seem so much better devised if he could have ex- 
 pressed it in person ! 
 
 But Mr. Flimson was never nominated for con- 
 gress, and Mrs. Flimson was very well understood 
 from the first by her country neighbors. There was 
 a flaw in the high polish of her education — an erroi 
 inseparable from too much consciousness of porcelain 
 in this crockery world. To raise themselves suffi- 
 ciently above the common level, the family of Mrs. 
 Flimson habitually underrated vulgar human nature, 
 and the accomplished daughter, good at everything 
 else, never knew where to find it. She thinks herself 
 in a cloud, floating far out of the reach of those 
 around her, when they are reading her at arm's length 
 like a book. She calculates her condescension for 
 " forty fathom deep," when the object of it sits beside 
 her. She comes down graciously to people's capa- 
 city, and her simplicity is set down for trap. And still 
 wondering that Mr. Flimson is allowed by his country 
 to remain in obscurity, and that stupid rustics will not 
 fuse and be moulded by her well-studied congenial- 
 ities, she begins to turn her attention to things more 
 on her own level, and on Sundays looks like a saint 
 distressed to be out of heaven. But for that one 
 thread of contempt woven into the woof of her edu- 
 cation, Mrs. Flimson might have shone as a star in 
 the world where she glimmers like a taper. 
 
 I think that a walk in New York to-day, if you had 
 been absent a year, would impress you very strongly 
 with the outbreak of showiness in costume. What- 
 ever spirit it is that presides over the fashions we take 
 so implicitly from France, he (this spirit of woof and 
 color) has well suited the last and newest invoice to a 
 moment of reaction from economy. Or (what may 
 better define the present era, perhaps) the moment 
 after prosperity has almost universally changed hands. 
 The stuffs in the shop-windows of Broadway are of a 
 splendor that would scarce be ventured upon (in the 
 street at least) by the severity of last year's aristocratic 
 taste ; but the eruption has spread from the shop-win- 
 dows over the sidewalk, and the ladies are verily rain- 
 bow clad ! The prevailing colors are yellow and blue ; 
 the most of the dresses put all the prismatic colors 
 under contribution, and the wearers would make Chi- 
 nese figures for Gobelin tapestry. It would be a fine 
 speculation in upholstery, indeed, to buy the cast-off 
 dresses of this period, and lay them up to sell for 
 window-curtains to the *next generation. But the 
 ladies have it by no means to themselves. They are 
 only bolder and more consistent in their " bravery of 
 suits." The waistcoats and cravats have taken a long 
 stride into splendor, leaving the coats and trousers in 
 their accustomed sobriety of hue. Jennings's great 
 emporium, opposite the Park, might furnish the 
 knights and courtiers for a new "field of cloth of 
 gold," so effulgent are the velvets and satins; though 
 the bold youths who have ventured to put forth into 
 Broadway with their glittering waistcoats look like 
 butterflies half-born, the dull broadcloth worm still 
 adhering. For one, I should like the age of gauds 
 and such matters to come round again, for I do not 
 see why the lords of nature should leave all the orna- 
 ment to the birds and flowers, and servants in livery ; 
 but let it be consistent, and entire, and when it is that, 
 it will be time to compound a gentleman of "a man, 
 a sword, and an equipage," and to settle the sixty de- 
 grees of precedence which are established in the 
 court of England. But as this will not all be in my 
 time, I think I shall not venture on the more luminous 
 stratum, to say the least, of Jennings's waistcoats. 
 The Americanism of the matter is the much more 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 631 
 
 violent array of these gorgeous stuffs in Chatham 
 street and the Bowery. The small tailors' shops in 
 these Alsatian quarters are quite in a glow with the 
 display of cravats and waistcoats, and their catering 
 for the taste of their customers is, of course, careful 
 and well-considered. The age is, perhaps, for ever gone 
 by, when a privileged class could monopolize finery of 
 garb; and, of all the civilized nations, it were least pos- 
 sible in ours. I have seen already a dozen at least of 
 cheap-booted apprentices wearing velvet waistcoats 
 which, a few years ago, would have delighted D'Orsay. 
 This last lustrum of our history, by-the-way, corre- 
 sponds somewhat, as to sumptuary matters, with the 
 year 1759, and after, of French history. The nine 
 months' ministry of Silhouette (whose immortality 
 rests on the accident of giving his name to profiles) 
 was a temporary suspension of French extravagance, 
 somewhat similar to ours of the last year or two, 
 during which coats were worn without folds, snuff- 
 boxes made of plain wood, and painting portraits were 
 discarded for outlines in profile; every fashion, in 
 short, giving way to extreme parsimony. This period 
 was succeeded, as our economical days seem prom- 
 ising to be, by a powerful reflux of the suspended ex- 
 travagance. The parallel must end here, thank 
 Heaven! 
 
 Brooklyn is as much a part of New York, for all 
 purposes of residence and communication, as "the 
 Borough" is of London. The steam ferry-boats cross 
 the half-mile between it and New York every five 
 minutes : and in less time than it usually takes to 
 thread the press of vehicles on London Bridge, the 
 elegant equipages of the wealthy cross to Long Island 
 for the afternoon drive ; morning visits are interchanged 
 between the residents in both places — and, indeed, the 
 East river is now hardly more of a separation than the 
 same distance in a street. Brooklyn is the shire-town 
 of King's county, and is second in population only to 
 New York. It has become the fashion for business- 
 men of New York to build and live on the fine and 
 healthy heights above the river, where they are nearer 
 their business, and much better situated than in the 
 outskirts of this city itself. Brooklyn is built on the 
 summit and sides of an elevation springing directly 
 from the bank of the river, and commanding some of 
 the finest views in America. The prospect embraces 
 a large part of East river, crowded with shipping, and 
 tracked by an endless variety of steamers, flying 
 through the channel in quick succession ; of the city 
 of New York, extending, as far as the eye can see, in 
 closely-piled masses of architecture ; of the Hudson, 
 and the shore of Jersey, beyond ; of the bay and its 
 bright islands; and of a considerable part of Long 
 and Staten islands, and the Highlands of Neversink. 
 
 This is "sodgering week," ladies, and the general 
 has gone to the wars Provided there be no Banquo 
 to sit in his leather-rcttomed chair, I am quite alone, 
 and of course, immeasurably more than usual at your 
 service. Walk in, and make no ceremony — that is to 
 say, draw your foot under you, and sit on your heel. 
 Leave the general's chair unoccupied, if you please. 
 [t will remind us that "we" are out, and that /am at 
 home. Sit on that ream of paper, and let's be private 
 and personal. 
 
 A little scandal would be appetizing, this cloudy 
 morning. Suppose we put the general on the grid- 
 iron and "do him brown!" Poets are so much better 
 \"or toasting.' — (reason why: the first lyre was made 
 'jy the toasting of the sun — the tortoise-shell, found 
 by Hermes on the Nile, drawn tight by the contracted 
 '.endons — or "so they say"). His health in a glass of 
 
 Elsinore cherry ! And now, general, come over the 
 coals ! 
 
 What has he to do (a poor various author, tucked 
 away in the " appendix" of the " Poetry of America") — 
 I say, what has he to do with a lodging in the brain 
 and memory of every man, and in the heart and music- 
 making of every woman in the country ! What has a 
 "various author" to do with as much popularity as a 
 baker's dozen of the big-bugs with their biographies. 
 What business has a "various author" to get his own 
 price for every scrap of a song, and be the only poet- 
 father in the country whose poetical daughters are run 
 after to be married to music! There is more of him 
 abroad "by heart," than of anybody else! He is more 
 quoted, more sung, more trolled, more parodied, more 
 plucked at on his pedestal, than anybody else ! He 
 uses his brevet as if he were full poet! If it weren't 
 for the " damnable iteration" of a cockatoo critic or 
 two, the world would never suspect — never — that 
 Morris is not a song-writer — the song-writer — and the 
 most sung and the best One of all the "Poets and 
 Poetry of America." And, la! — to be sure! — what 
 a mistaken world we live in — that never knows what it 
 likes till it is told in a book ! 
 
 It is something to be universal, as a poet — some- 
 thing to get that far — it must be confessed. The 
 worth of a thing is (partly, at least) what it will bring — 
 particularly in the way of a long-winded popularity. 
 There is some bedevilment or other about Morris's 
 poetry that makes it stick in people's minds, and 
 answer people's want, in the way of an expression of 
 their poetical feelings — something that music jumps 
 to, and women remember and love him for — some- 
 thing that satisfies the nine hundred and ninety-nine, 
 and displeases the nil admirari thousandth. 
 
 Let's try this varlet of" a popularity-thief— you judge 
 and jury, and / the aggrieved plaintiff" — one of the 
 robbed. Hand me up that big book, on the floor by 
 you, and let's see the law. He's a lyric poet if there's 
 any truth in the definition of that commodity : — 
 
 " Lyric poetry is that species of poetry by which 
 the poet directly expresses his emotions. It is neces- 
 sary that the feeling represented should be itself poet- 
 ical, and not only worthy to be preserved, but accom- 
 panied by a variety of ideas, beauty of imagery, and a 
 musical flow of language. One distinct feeling should 
 predominate, giving tone to the whole; the feeling 
 must be worthy of the subject which caused it, cor- 
 responding to the same both in degree and kind, and 
 must be so exhibited as to give a living picture of the 
 poet's mind; while at the same time, what is merely 
 individual and accidental must be excluded, so that 
 the poet shall be truly the representative of his race, 
 and awaken the sympathy of all. But this requires 
 genius of a high order." 
 
 Quash the suit and turn the plaintiff' out of court ! — 
 there never was a more literal inventory of goods than 
 this of the peculiarities of Morris's poetry ! Lyrist he 
 is, if that describe lyric poetry, and he has come hon- 
 estly by his popularity, and the world is right, that 
 said so before the trial. Court's adjourned. 
 
 We have sat down once or twice to criticise Weirds 
 picture of the Embarkation— but a criticism of it 
 would be but a recapitulation of its beauties, and as 
 these are quite apparent, and everybody will see the 
 picture, we think it not worth while. We have already 
 described the feeling with which it is seen for the first 
 time, and as we have seen it a dozen times with the 
 same glow, and as that description has been quoted, as 
 just, by many of the critics who have since seen the 
 picture, we can well stop where we are— recording 
 only the present thronging to the exhibition-room in 
 New York, and the universal delight the picture gives 
 
632 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 to the public, 
 man. 
 
 Weir may well be a proud and happy 
 
 We should be very happy to polish " M.'s" verses, 
 but as we have seldom seen a penknife that was sharp 
 after it was sharpened, so we never saw verses that 
 were good after being bettered — by anybody but the 
 original maker. Beside, it is not our vocation to 
 mend poets — though we might make one — Heaven 
 Help us ! 
 
 A " friend who knew us when a boy" (as if any- 
 thing but the crust of us be adult-erated), wishes us 
 to " write something for posterity." Tut ! — posterity 
 is welcome to all we write — though, if posterity will 
 pay us, or if anybody will " down with the dust," as j 
 posterity's " paying-teller," we will write something j 
 which posterity can publish as "entirely original." | 
 For the present we do not hold with the Apotactitre, I 
 that " property, wine, meat, and matrimony, are j 
 things to be renounced" — and though the three last 
 seem to be the only ones to which our destiny has a 
 free copyhold, we are digging away at prose and po- 
 etry, and would peddle pins or pottery to compass the 
 other. 
 
 One of the most curious and amusing resorts for a 
 man of taste, idle in New York, is the antiquarian 
 book-shop* of Bartlett & Welford, under the Astor. 
 The catalogue of rare and valuable books for sale at 
 this repository, numbers nearly four thousand, and 
 most of these are such works as are found only in 
 choice libraries, or in the possession of scholars. 
 Far from being interesting to antiquarians exclusively, 
 the curiosities of this choice shop would amuse the 
 most general reader, and a lounge at the well-stocked 
 counter of B. & W. is no indifferent relief to the 
 fatiguing idleness of a man stranded on the beach of 
 a hotel between the far-apart .tides of breakfast and 
 dinner. Most courteous bibliopoles are these two 
 gentlemen, by-the-way, and happy to gratify the curi- 
 osity of visiters. 
 
 Villanous editions, villanous cheap, are the fruits 
 of our present law of copyright, and if we had an 
 American language all to ourselves, we should have 
 no such thing as beauty in a book. Fortunately, 
 England has the same brick from Babel, and we can 
 corrupt, mutilate, defile, and misprint works of genius, 
 and still import, from our more liberal and appreciative 
 fatherland, a purer and worthier copy. Still it seems 
 to me surprising, that, of the publishers who have 
 grown rich with pirating in this country, no one has 
 felt inclined to distinguish himself by a school of fine 
 editions.f One would think that the example of Al- 
 dus, who made himself as famous as the authors he 
 printed, would be stuff for emulation ; and there are 
 some men, probably, even among publishers, who 
 agree with Charles Edwards, that "it is the devil to 
 be growing old as a person of no peculiarity." Al- 
 dus's press lasted eminent for near a hundred years, 
 and it is recorded in history that his ink was excellent! 
 his types beautiful, his paper invariably strong and 
 white, and above all, that his press was next to infal- 
 lible for correctness. Celebrity among bookbinders 
 probably sprung from this renown of a printer, and in 
 
 • Store, a warehouse. Shop, a place for sale of wares. 
 We call shops " stores" in this country, and it is well to re- 
 cord these Panglossiana as they occur. 
 
 tTicKNOR, of Boston, expends a praiseworthy carefulness 
 on the correctness and beauty of his reprints, and should be 
 excepted from the disparagement of American booksellers. 
 But every press should have a scholar attached to it, and an 
 artist within reach. 
 
 England there were famous names in this trade also. 
 Roger Payne received from twenty to thirty guineas 
 for binding a single volume, and he is much better re- 
 membered than any lord-mayor of his time. There 
 has been a mania in bookbinding, however, and the 
 world is too poetical for such matters now. Jeffrey, 
 a London bookseller, had Fox's History bound in fox- 
 skin; and an eccentric bibliomaniast named (descrip- 
 tively) Askew, had a book bound in a human skin. 
 In the library at Konigsberg there are twenty books 
 bound in silver. Very far short of all this, however, 
 there is in this country an unreached point of excel- 
 lence in binding, and great opening for an ambitious 
 bookbinder to distinguish himself. Sat Verbum sapi- 
 enti. 
 
 Rarity in books is such a difficult thing to define, 
 that a taste for it easily degenerates into absurdity. 
 The mania is very common, but there is a mania fo> 
 books according to their rare value to read, and a 
 mania for books valuable by accidental circumstances 
 — such as coming from a particular press, being made 
 of singular materials, having once belonged to a cele- 
 brated library, or being the only ones of their kind. 
 In Italy they used to print valuable books on blue pa- 
 per; in France on rose-colored paper, and in Germany 
 on yellow or green ; and copies of these are much 
 sought after now. Bibliomaniacs value those printed 
 on large paper with wide margin. In the advertise- 
 ment of rare books, you often see the phrase, " a tall 
 copy." Longman had a single copy printed of 
 "Strutt's Dictionary of Engravers," illustrated and 
 embellished at the cost of ten thousand dollars ! The 
 copy sold, I do not know to what book-madman — but 
 his name should be linked in history to that of the 
 priest in Spain, who murdered three men to get pos 
 session of their libraries! 
 
 By a turn of fortune not worth describing, Mr. 
 Goggins, a shipchandler, became suddenly a million- 
 aire. His half-score of grown-up children spread 
 themselves at once to their new dimensions, and after 
 a preliminary flourish at home, the whole family em- 
 barked for foreign travel. They remained but a fort- 
 night in England — none in that land walking often in- 
 visible. Germany seemed to the shipchandler a 
 "rubbishy" country, and Italy "very small beer," and, 
 after a short residence in Paris, that gay capital was 
 pronounced the Paradise of money's worth, and there 
 the Gogginses took up their abode. To the appre- 
 hension of most of their acquaintance, Mr. Goggins 
 was now in a speedy and fair way to return to his 
 blocks and oakum, poorer for his fortune. No stint 
 seemed put upon the extravagance of sons or daugh- 
 ters, and in dress and equipage their separate displays 
 and establishments became the marvel of Paris. In 
 Goggins himself there was for awhile no great change 
 of exterior. His constitutional hardness of character 
 seemed in no way disturbed or embellished by the 
 splendors he controlled. He gave way to usages and 
 etiquette with patient facility, bowed through the re- 
 ceptions at his first parties with imperturbable propri- 
 ety, and was voted stolid and wooden by the gay 
 world flaunting at his expense. 
 
 In the second year of his Parisian life, however, 
 Goggins took the reins gradually into his own hands. 
 He dismissed his sharp French butler, who had made 
 hitherto all the household bargains, and, promoting 
 to the servile part of his office an inferior domestic, 
 dull and zealous, he took the accounts into his own 
 hands, and exacted, of all the tradespeople he patron- 
 ized, schedules of their wares in English, and their 
 bills made equally comprehensible. Pocketing thus 
 the butler's perquisite, he reduced the charges of that 
 department one half, beside considerably improving 
 the quality of the articles purchased. Rejecting, 
 
EPHExMEltA. 
 
 633 
 
 then, the intermediate offices of lease-agents and 
 hommes d'affaires, he advertised in Galignani, in good 
 'plain English, for the most luxurious house in a cer- 
 tain fashionable quarter, conducted the bargain by a 
 correspondence in {English, and finally procured it at 
 a large abatement, at least, from prices paid by mil- 
 lionaires. He advertised in the same way for propo- 
 sals to furnish his house on the most sumptuous 
 scale, and in the prevailing fashion, and by dint of sit- 
 ting quietly in his office and compelling everything to 
 reach him through the medium of English manu- 
 script, he created a palace fit for an emperor, by fair 
 competition among the tradesmen and upholsterers, 
 and at a cost by no means ruinous. He advertised in 
 the same way for a competent man of taste to oversee 
 the embellishments in progress, and, when complete, 
 the "Hotel Goggins" was quite the best thing of its 
 kind in Paris, and was looked upon as the "folly" of 
 the ruined lessee. With this groundwork for display, 
 Mr. Goggins turned his attention to the ways and j 
 means of balls and dinners, concerts and breakfast, I 
 and having acquired a name for large expenditure, he 
 profited considerably by the emulation of cooks and j 
 purveyors for the material, and privately made use of 
 the savoirfaire of a reduced count or two who, for a 
 "trifling consideration," willingly undertook the man- 
 ner of the entertainments. He applied the same sa- 
 gacious system of commissariat to the supplying of 
 the multifarious wants of his children, economizing 
 at the same time that he enhanced the luxury of their 
 indulgences, and the Gogginses soon began to excite 
 other feelings than contempt. Their equipages (the 
 production of the united taste, of ruined spendthrifts) 
 outshone the most sumptuous of the embassies; their 
 balls were of unexceptionable magnificence, their din- 
 ners more recherche than profuse. How they should 
 come by their elegance was a mystery that did not les- 
 sen their consequence, and so the Gogginses mount- 
 ed to the difficult eminence of Parisian fashion — the 
 plain business-tact of a shipchandler their mysterious 
 stepping-stone. 
 
 Perhaps we should give more credit to this faculty 
 in Goggins. It is possibly not far removed from the 
 genius of a great financier or eminent state-treasurer. 
 It is the power of coming directly at values and rid- 
 ding them of their "riders" — of getting for less, what 
 others, from want of penetration, get for more. I am 
 inclined to think Goggins would have been quite as 
 successful in any other field of calculation, and one 
 instance of a very different application of his reason- 
 ing powers would go to favor the belief. 
 
 While in Italy, he employed a celebrated but im- 
 provident artist to paint a picture, the subject of 
 which was a certain event of rather an humble char- 
 acter, in which he had been an actor. The picture 
 was to be finished at a certain time, and at the urgent 
 plea of the artist, the money was advanced. The 
 time expired and the picture was not sent home, and 
 the forfeited bond of the artist was accordingly put in 
 suir. The delinquent, who had not thought twice of 
 the subject, addressed one or two notes of remon- 
 strance to his summary employer, and receiving no 
 reply, and the law crowding very closely upon his 
 heels, he called upon Goggins and appealed, among 
 other arguments, to the difference in their circum- 
 stances, and the indulgent pity due from rich to poor. 
 
 "Where do you dine to day ?" asked Goggins. 
 
 " To-day— let me see— Monday— I dine with La- 
 dy ." 
 
 (The artist, as Goggins knew, was a favorite in the 
 best society in Florence.) 
 
 " And where did you dine yesterday?" 
 
 " Yesterday— hum— yesterday I dined with Sir 
 
 George . No ! I breakfasted with Sir George, 
 
 and dined with the grand chamberlain. Excuse me! 
 I have so many engagements " 
 
 "Ah!— and you are never at a loss for a dinner or 
 a breakfast !" 
 
 The artist smiled. " No !" 
 
 "Are you well lodged?" 
 
 " Yes — on the Arno." 
 
 "And well clad, I see." 
 
 (The painter was rather a dandy, withal.) 
 
 " Well, sir!" said Goggins, folding up his arms, and 
 looking sterner than before, "you have, as far as I 
 can understand it, every luxury and comfort which a 
 fortune could procure you, and none of the care and 
 trouble of a fortune, and you enjoy these advantages 
 by a claim which is not liable to bankruptcy, nor to 
 be squandered, nor burnt — without the slightest anx- 
 iety, in short." 
 
 The artist assented. 
 
 " So far, there is no important difference in our 
 worldly condition, except that 1 have this anxiety and 
 trouble, and am liable to these very casualties." 
 
 Goggins paused, and the painter nodded again. 
 
 "And now, sir, over and above this, what would 
 you take to exchange with me the esteem in which 
 we are severally held — you to become the rich, uned- 
 ucated, and plain Simon Goggins, and I to possess 
 your genius, your elevated tastes, and the praise and 
 fame which these procure you?" 
 
 The artist turned uneasily on his heels. 
 
 " No, sir !" continued Goggins, " you are not a man 
 to be pitied, and least of all by me. And I don't pity 
 you, sir. And what's more, you shall paint that pic- 
 ture, sir, or go to prison. Good morning, sir!" 
 
 And the result was a painting, finished in three 
 days, and one of the master-pieces of that accom- 
 plished painter, for he embodied, in the figure and 
 face of Goggins, the character which he had struck 
 outso unexpectedly — retaining the millionaire's friend- 
 ship and patronage, though never again venturing to 
 trifle with his engagements. 
 
 Music seems to be the passion of the hour in New- 
 York. Wallack had a house that would hardly pay 
 expenses last night — even the Ravels have somewhat 
 fallen off as they were going off— while Damoreau, 
 Wallace, and the " Hutchinson family," draw well. 
 The latter are four children of a New Hampshire 
 patriarch — (four out of fifteen, as they say in an auto- 
 biographical medley which they sing) — and having 
 been born with a singular natural talent for music, 
 they are turning it to account in a musical tour. 
 There are three brothers under twenty years of age, 
 and a very young sister. Their voices are good (par- 
 ticularly the girl's, who is about fourteen), and they 
 confine themselves to simple melody, such as would 
 suit the least practised ear, while it can not fail, from 
 the truth and expression with which they sing, to 
 please the most fastidious. Their concerts are ex- 
 ceedingly enjoyable. 
 
 Mrs. Sutton, well known everywhere as a most 
 charming singer, is about to perform a short engage- 
 ment as a prima donna to the Italian company at Nib- 
 lo's. I wish the success of the experiment might 
 bring Castellan and Cinti Damoreau upon the stage. 
 The latter, by the way, is the daughter of a French 
 door-porter, and might easily have been " the grave 
 of her deserving," but for her perseverance and ambi- 
 tion. Maroncelli is preparing a memoir of her, under 
 her own direction. 
 
 There is a particular season of the year (this is it) 
 when, as most people know, the law forbids the killing 
 and vending of certain game — the zest of illegality, of 
 course, giving great flavor to the birds, and, of course, 
 more than nullifying the law. Not the least in con- 
 
634 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 nexion with this remark — I was very much astonished 
 a day or two since, dining with a friend at a neighbor- 
 ing hotel, to find fairly printed in the bill of fare, 
 " Second Course— Roast Owls." On the succeeding 
 day, at another table, I was startled with the enrol- 
 ment of a dish called "Just Try Me"— which, on ex- 
 periment, I found to be a bird — (with an egg-shaped 
 breast, and a very long bill thrust through it)— decently 
 laid on its back, and covered with a pork apron ! The 
 latter name seemed very much to the point, and ex- 
 plained the bird's errand. The former I was puzzled 
 with— but knowing the landlord of that hotel to be 
 very much ultra crepidam, I was induced to look into 
 ornithology for his meaning. I find that the peculi- 
 arity of the owl is " an external toe which can be turned 
 behind at pleasure"— symbolical of the perverted beak 
 of the woodcock (as well as the makinf of false tracks 
 to evade the law), and serving in the same manner to 
 prepare an orifice for the sauce of lemon-juice and 
 cayenne. When this man cozens, you see, he cozens 
 with edifying knowledge and discretion. 
 
 Appleton is publishing a very neat and handsome 
 edition of valuable religious books. Among them is 
 the Disce Vivere of Sutton, prebend of Westminster, 
 in 1626 — one of the choicest specimens of rich and 
 pregnant English that I have lately seen. Two sen- 
 tences from his preface will give you an idea of his 
 style, in which every word seems to drive a nail: — 
 
 "If to live were for no other but to draw in and to 
 breathe out the soft air, as the wise man speaketh, a 
 needless labor were it, good Christian reader, to lay 
 down any instructions to the world of ' learning to 
 live ;' for this is done naturally, both of men and 
 beasts, without any teaching or learning. 
 
 " If to live were no other but to cast about for 
 the favor and riches of the world, as some men are 
 wont to call it, the way to live, then would it soon fol- 
 low, the greater Machiavellians, the better livers. 
 Somewhat more than is required to live Christianly j 
 than so, and that all shall one day find, than either ' 
 drawing in and breathing out the soft air, or the plot- 
 ting to compass the pleasures and profits of the world." 
 
 A cold-water procession is going under my window 
 at this moment, in a very propitious shower of rain. 
 From my elevated look-out, the long line of umbrel- 
 las, two and two, gives the street the dress look of a 
 
 imitation of the qualities of that same poem of Don 
 Juan — and Mr. Simms, who has talent enough when 
 he stumbles on his right vein, has made a woful mis- 
 take as to his capabilities for this. Two extracts will 
 show his idea of the slap-dash-ery vein : — 
 
 " One moment grows she most abruptly willing. 
 The next— she slaps the chaps that think of billing." 
 
 And, speaking of woman again : — 
 
 " Ev'n from his weakness and abandonment 
 
 Had woman her first being. Thus hath grown 
 
 Her power of evil since ; — still uncontent 
 
 Hath she explored his weakness and o'erthrown ; 
 
 And, in the use of arts incontinent, 
 No longer pacified by one poor vein, 
 
 She grapples the whole man, brawn, beef, and muscle, 
 
 Helped by the same old snake, that flings him in the tussle." 
 
 We should have disclaimed, in giving the portrai.. 
 of the most ornate man of modern times, all approba- 
 tion of dandyism — (as yet) — on this side the water. 
 Dandyism, in the abstract, we delight in, glorify, and 
 rejoice over. But it has its scenery and its appertain- 
 ages. A dandy, in place, is the foreground to a pic- 
 ture — the forward star of a troop untelescoped by the 
 vulgar — the embroidered flower on the veil before a 
 life of mystery. His superior elegance is like the 
 gold edge of a cloud unfathomable ; or (to come to 
 earth) like the soldier's uniform — tinsel but for its 
 association with force and glory. What were the 
 dandies of the firmament, for example — (comets) — 
 without those uninterpretable tails ! 
 But — to alight in Broadway. 
 
 A dandy indigenous to New York has no back- 
 ground — no untelescoped associations or connexions 
 — no power and glory — and no uninterpretable tail. 
 He is like a docked comet. He is like Tom Fool in 
 a uniform bought at the pawnbroker's. He is a label 
 on an empty bottle. Count D'Orsay drives by you in 
 the park, and a long ancestry of titled soldiers and 
 courtiers, and a present life of impenetrable scenery 
 and luxury untold, arise up for background to his cab 
 j and tiger. Mr. James Jessamy drives by you in 
 i Broadway, and you know at what trade his glory was 
 i manufactured, and you know " what he does of an 
 : evening," and you know his "mechanical rogues" of 
 j relations, the tailor who made him, the hatter who 
 thatched him, and the baker who sold him gingerbread 
 ! when a boy. You admire, or envy, D'Orsay, as you 
 I happen to be constituted — but you laugh, you scarce 
 i know why, at Mr. Jessamy. The latter, perhaps, has 
 fashionable Taglioni coat, with two rows of big but- ! the better right to his toggery and turn-out; but still 
 tons down the middle. I noticed yesterday, by the you laugh! 
 
 way, a most stalwart and gallant-looking company of \\ Very far short of dandyism, however, lies the point 
 firemen, in an undress military uniform, marching out ij of dressing judiciously — dressing, that is to say, so as 
 for exercise at the target. Everything about them |j to make the most of your personal advantages. The 
 was all right, except that their guests of honor were j favor of women is of course the first of lifetime ambi- 
 placed before instead of behind — making of it a pris- \'. tions, and the dear tyrants have a weakness for the ex- 
 oner's guard instead of a military escort. ; terior. " Tu as du remarquer" says Balzac; "si 
 
 j toutefois tu es capable d. observer un fait moral, que la 
 ; femme aime lefat. Sais tu pourquoi lafemme aime le 
 j fat ? Mon ami ! les fats sont les seuls homines qui 
 ; aient soin d'eux memes /" And there are ladies, even 
 
 I see criticised, in one or two papers, a poem which 
 was sent to me some time since as "printed, not pub- 
 lished," called "Donna Florida," by Mr. Simms, the 
 author of Southern Passages, &c. Jt is in the stanza, 
 and intended as an imitation of " Don Juan." The || 
 author says, in his preface, that he fancied " he might 
 imitate the grace and exceeding felicity of expression 
 
 in that unhappy performance — its playfulness, and \\ and can a/ford, for a consideration he has, to let " the 
 possibly its wit — without falling into its licentious- , spirits of the wise sit in the clouds," &c Had Count 
 ness of utterance and malignity of mood. How he D'Orsay been born in Common-Council-dom and 
 has succeeded in this object, it would not be becom- \\ gone home, sometimes by the Waverley line, some- 
 ing in him to inquire." One of the easiest things fan- jj times by the Knickerbocker, he never would have 
 cied possible, and one of the most difficult to do, is an 1 1 been a dandy — (except, at least, for a motive para- 
 
 on this plain side of the water, who adore a dandy, and 
 of course there are cases where the dread laugh (men- 
 tioned at the close of the preceding paragraph) must 
 be braved to aid a particular magnetism. If your 
 dandy be a sensible man, and past the moulting age, 
 depend upon it he is ticketed for some two eyes only, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 635 
 
 mount to ridicule)— though, with his superb person, 
 he could hardly have dressed cleanly without being 
 called a fop by the shallow. D'Orsay is a man of 
 sense, and knows too much to open the public oyster 
 with his private razor. So don't come to America, 
 dear D'Orsay ! Stay among your belongings — your 
 
 " Tapestries of India ; Tyrian canopies ; 
 Heroic bronzes ; pictures half divine — 
 Apelles' pencil ; statues that the Greek 
 Has wrought to living beauty ; amethyst urns 
 And onyx essenced with the Persian rose ; 
 Couches of mother-pearl, and tortoise-shell ; 
 Crystalline mirrors : tables in which gems 
 Make the mosaic ; cups of argentry 
 Thick with immortal sculptures." 
 
 Stay where 
 
 " Your meat shall all come in, in Indian shells — 
 Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded 
 With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies ; 
 Your foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmon, 
 Knots, godwits, lampreys. And yourself shall have 
 The beards of barbels served instead of salads, 
 Oiled mushrooms and the swelling unctuous paps 
 Of a fat pregnant sow newly cut off, 
 Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce." 
 
 Yet, if you should take the whim to come over the 
 water, count, I need scarce suggest to your good 
 sense that you had best come with a consignment of 
 buttons from Brummagem ! 
 
 A gentleman in Saco has taken upon himself some 
 pains and postage to ask "our" two portraits served 
 up in two plates. We don't think the public would 
 stand it. That bold man, Mr. Graham, is to show an 
 outline of one of us in his February number, and then 
 anybody can have us, tale and all, for two shillings — a 
 cheap article, we must say ! But we are surprised to 
 get this petition from Saco! We "come from"close- 
 by-there, and it strikes us our likeness would go east 
 with the welcome of coals to Newcastle. Doubtless 
 there are more like us in the same soil. We remem- 
 ber hanging over a bridge in Saco half one moonlight 
 night (somewhere in our fourteenth year), and if riv- 
 ers have any memory or gratitude lor admiration, our 
 likeness will be found in the water where we left it. 
 
 We wish our contributors would do us the favor 
 to baptize their own bantlings. Their delegation of 
 godfathership costs us sometimes a five minutes' 
 thought over a proofsheet while the press is waiting, 
 and time is " tin." But, by the*way, be particular in 
 naming your articles! Old Burton, in his Anatomy 
 of Melancholy, gives, by way of satire, what we think 
 an excellent rule ("experto crede Roberto"), and we 
 will lend it you for your uses : " It is a kind of policy 
 in these days to prefix a fantastical title to a book 
 which is to be sold ; for, as larks come down to a day- 
 net, many vain readers will stand gazing like silly pas- 
 sengers at an antic picture in a painter's shop, that will 
 not look at a judicious piece." 
 
 I observe, looking from my window, that the Park 
 theatre hangs out a large American flag with a tri- 
 color banner appended to each of the two lower cor- 
 ners (looking altogether very much like a pair of ori- 
 ental • ousers), symbolical, probably, of the two arri- 
 vals from France which made yesterday memorable. 
 The more interesting- of these twin events, of course, 
 was General Bertrand's advent by the Boston boat at 
 Beven; but the one which excited the more interest was 
 the opening of the winter fashions at " Madame Law- 
 
 son's, in Park place," at eight. The latter ceremo- 
 nial had been duly heralded for some days previous 
 by notes addressed to the leaders of fashion, and (as 
 far as can be known) the secrets of the Graces' uno- 
 pened cases hud been impartially and unexceptiona- 
 bly kept. Having " a friend at court," I had been for 
 some days invited to witness the effulguration, but 
 was privately advised that there would be a rush, and 
 that six in the morning would not be too early to take 
 a stand upon the steps of the grand milliner in Park 
 place. Some unfinished business in dream-land obliged 
 me to waive to the sun the privilege of rising first, 
 however, and to my misfortune I did not arrive at Park 
 place till the premices de la mode had been ravished by 
 the most intrepid first-comers. The street was lined 
 with carriages, and the house was thronged. On the 
 staircase we met||ro or three ladies descending, flushed 
 with excitement, and murmuring millinery ; and on 
 arriving at the landing on the second floor, the sharp 
 soprano of the hum within betrayed how even the 
 sweetest instruments may outrun modulation, played 
 on with a crescendo troppo furioso. The two saloons of 
 the second floor were crowded with the ladies of fash- 
 ion, and the walls lined all around with a single shelf 
 covered with snowy damask, on which stood the white 
 rods supporting the (as yet) brainless, though already 
 fashionable bonnets. And (begging pardon of Green- 
 wich and William streets) they were unapproachably 
 exquisite ! There were some forced marriages of 
 colors among them — some juxtapositions Heaven 
 would not have ventured upon in bird-millinery — but 
 the results were happy. The bonnets are small, and 
 would probably divide, for the nose, a perpendicular 
 rain-drop ; and the shape of the front edge would be 
 defined by the shadow on the wall of an egg trunca- 
 ted at the smaller end — the choice of colors riotously 
 uncontrollable. Feathers, ruinous feathers, are abso- 
 lutely indispensable. No fashion this winter in a bon- 
 net without feathers — dyed feathers harmonious with 
 the satin. The plush bonnets were the first seized 
 on. Drab satin with very gay fineries, was the color 
 most complimented. The prices varied from twenty- 
 two dollars to fifty. It was very charming to see so 
 many pretty women trying on so many pretty bonnets, 
 and I feared that the two or three venturesome gen- 
 tlemen present might be seized upon as intruders 
 upon vestal mysteries; but, thanks to the " vestalis 
 maxima," Miss Lawson, we escaped with credit. 
 
 I have seen General Bertrand several times. He is 
 of a very noble presence, though, like Napoleon, be- 
 low the middle height. His features express honesty, 
 firmness, and rapid intelligence — the latter expression 
 aided by eyes of unusual brilliancy. His hair is 
 quite white. He is a man of few words, very collect- 
 ed, but withal very courteous. These, at least, are 
 my impressions of him. 
 
 It is curious to remark, how the burning of our fin- 
 gers with Dickens makes us hold back from the fire 
 of enthusiastic receptions. If the general had been 
 ante instead of £>os£-Dickens, he would have been 
 overwhelmed with popular acclamation. As it is, the 
 dues of honor are only paid a rigeur. One or two 
 brigades of artillery are ordered out to-moirow to es- 
 cort the general on his rounds to visit the objects of 
 curiosity, and the different staff's accompany him to 
 the theatre in the evening. This morning he is visit- 
 ing the fair of the Institute. The beautiful company 
 of the Life Guards made him a guest of honor at 
 their dinner last evening. Mr. Stetson, of the Astor 
 (who gave the dinner on his appointment as an officer 
 in the corps), complimented General Bertrand very 
 felicitously in his speech, and the applause was rap- 
 turous. Stetson is naturally an " orator, as Brutus 
 
636 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 is," and has acquitted himself on several such occa- 
 sions with great credit. 
 
 I visited, the other evening, the beautiful rooms of 
 the Mercantile Library Association, and was exceed- 
 ingly interested in the history of its foundation and 
 progress. An advertisement expressing " a call for a 
 meeting of clerks" was the first germ. The paper 
 containing this was preserved and presented to the as- 
 sociation by William Wood, of Canandaigua, a very 
 zealous benefactor of the institute. It has at present 
 a library of nearly twenty thousand volumes, and it 
 has four thousand members. The late report of the 
 librarian shows that eight times the number of volumes 
 is annually taken from the library — aj^ activity of use 
 for a library almost unparalleled. It is, without doubt, 
 one of the most useful institutions of the country, and 
 donations to it of books or money would be admirably 
 well bestowed. 
 
 Dr. Lardner has grown very much on the public 
 esteem in his last visit to New York. His clear, sim- 
 ple, graphic talent, making abstruse science easy and 
 comprehensible, has never been equalled by another 
 lecturer. 
 
 Much honor and glory to the Boston publishers for 
 the beauty of their editions, and the credit (not small) 
 which that brings to this country. The most exquis- 
 ite edition of the exquisite songs of inspired Barry 
 Cornwall, published by Ticknor, should be between 
 every four walls where resides the relish for poetry or 
 taste in a book. It is a gem of poetry set in a gem 
 of printing, and most fit for a loving man's gift to a 
 sensible woman. 
 
 1 find that "doctors differ" about Macready; and 
 the graphic and gay correspondent of the Providence 
 Journal, more particularly, gives as his great excel- 
 lence, that you forget the man in the character he 
 plays — just what I do not think. Heaven, it seems to 
 me, has done so little, and Macready so much, in 
 making himself the actor he is, that he deserves infin- 
 ite credit, and, as a piece of mechanism, his playing 
 is a fine thing to me, though more curious than over- 
 coming. Young Wheatley has turned over quite a 
 golden leaf of opinion with his personation of Ulric, 
 a very fine part in Byron's play of Werner. 
 
 I saw yesterday, among the daguerreotypes of 
 Chilton & Edwards, a most perfect one of Dr. Linn, 
 whose death was mentioned in a late paper. The val- 
 ue of these things struck me forcibly — for to any one 
 who had ever seen the fine countenance of Dr. Linn, 
 this is a perfect remembrancer. They color them 
 skilfully now, and the gentlemen 1 speak of particu- 
 larly (Chilton & Edwards, who are to have a room in 
 the Capitol this winter), are daily making improve- 
 ments in the art. Some witty man corrupts the word 
 into derogatory-types, but they are derogatory no 
 longer. 
 
 We are likely to know something of Mexico be- 
 tween the three authors who are about publishing 
 books on the subject, and the charming book of Mad- 
 ame Calderon. Mr. Prescott's Mexico will of course 
 be a classic. Brantz Mayer and Kendall are up to 
 their elbows in proofsheets — both producing works 
 on Mexico, and both excellent writers. 
 
 I never saw, in New York, an audience of better 
 quality, for so large a quantity, than was assembled to 
 welcome the perfected Cinti. I presume there were 
 few " ears polite" anywhere else. At a dollar the 
 pair (long and short alike), Madame must have de- 
 
 lighted these fastidious organs to the amount of five 
 thousand francs, to be diminished only by the expense 
 of room-light and accompaniment — a transmutation 
 of "evening wind," that throws Bryant's coinage of 
 that commodity quite into the shade. 
 
 Mr. Timm (as is wise and usual) played the audi- 
 ence into tune with an overture, and then the screen 
 gave up its prima donna — Madame Cinti Damoreau 
 in pink satin — three large roses on her breast — the 
 dress, air, and graces of Veens, the composure, plen- 
 titude, and, alas ! the parenthesized smile of 'ties. 
 Madame Cinti has been a good animal resemblance 
 of the beautiful Mrs. Norton. The general mould 
 of the face, and the low forehead, the dark hair, and 
 the unfathomable dark eyes, are like in each to the 
 other. 
 
 With a trepidation which lasted only through the 
 first bar, she commenced the aria of "Fatal Goffre- 
 do" (from Donisette's opera of Torquato Tasso), and 
 sang it to the breathless delight of the audience. No 
 such finished music has ever been breathed before 
 upon American air, I am persuaded. With not a 
 fourth of the power and volume of Castellan, and 
 none of the passion-lava of Malibran, she reaches a 
 finer fibre of the ear than either. The quality of her 
 voice is exceedingly sweet, and the mingled liquid- 
 ness and truth of her chromatics could never have 
 been exceeded. The ladder of harmony seemed 
 built a round or two nearer to heaven by her delicious 
 music. 
 
 Madame Damoreau, in the beginning of her career, 
 was hissed from the French stage for singing false — a 
 lesson in study and perseverance which I wish could 
 be laid softly into the memory of Castellan. The lat- 
 ter wonderfully-organized creature, with anything like 
 the same skill, would be the world's queen of song. 
 The New Orleans people, by-the-way, who are Pa- 
 risians in their nice appreciation of operatic talent, 
 consider Castellan a remarkable actress ; and so great 
 was the enthusiasm for her there, that the necessary 
 sum to engage her was made up by private subscrip- 
 tion. It is several thousand pities, at least, that, in 
 the first capital of the country, there is not operatic 
 enthusiasm enough to bring this dormant genius upon 
 the stage. 
 
 Monsieur Artot, who accompanies Madame Dam- 
 oreau in her tour, alternated performances with her. 
 He is a very gentlemanly-looking young man, with a 
 figure that would make a very good case for his own 
 violin — a very long neck and a very small waist — and 
 he plays with execution enough for all practical pur- 
 poses, but with taste unsurpassed. Wallace knows 
 several heavens of the violin to which Monsieur Artot 
 has not yet ascended, hut the latter knows enough to 
 give all the pleasure which that instrument can give 
 to ordinary listeners. The audience applauded Mon- 
 sieur Artot very long and loudly. I think, by-the- 
 way, that a series of musical contentions between 
 Wallace and Castellan "on the first part," and Artot 
 and Cinti "on the second," would be a most charm- 
 ing and exciting tournament. 
 
 Madame Damoreau had the good sense not to de- 
 sire a musical contention with a performance on the 
 paving-stones by cabs and omnibuses, and the street 
 in front of Washington Hall was coated with tan. 
 
 There seems to be a kind of appendix-dawn of lit- 
 erature in Italy. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella 
 is about being published at Florence in the Italian 
 translation. Sparks's Life of Washington, translated 
 by a young Neapolitan, is also nearly ready. A so- 
 ciety has been formed at Florence, called Societa Ed- 
 itrice Florentine, for the publication of translations of 
 the best foreign works, including those of American 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 637 
 
 literature. The Marquis Gino Capponi, one of the 
 most prominent names in Florentine history, has put 
 our country under obligation by his enthusiasm for 
 our literature, and his aid to the publication of the 
 works I have just mentioned. He is himself a re- 
 markable scholar. Our consul at Rome, Mr. George 
 Greene, has had a large agency in the same cause. 
 Mr. Greene, by-the-way, has devoted a labor of some 
 years to a history of Italy, which is still in progress. 
 He, as is known very well, is a credit to the talent 
 and scholarship of our country. The Marquis Cap- 
 poni has furnished Mr. Prescott with materials for 
 his history of Philip II. 
 
 Weir's picture of the "Embarcation" is now ex- 
 hibiting to throngs of admirers at the Society Libra- 
 ry. Its wonderful ingenuity and beauty of grouping, 
 and the variety and individuality of the faces of the 
 pilgrim company, are the excellences most dwelt upon. 
 I really must venture to record an opinion expressed 
 of this picture by Inman — who (as the artist of a ri- 
 val-panel in the Rotunda, and hindered in his work 
 by ill-health and other obstacles) is in a position to 
 speak invidiously, if he were capable of envy. In- 
 man was asked what he thought of it. " It is a glo- 
 rious picture," he replied, "and its faults, if it has 
 them, are comparatively so trifling, that it would be 
 ungenerous to mention them." And if that speech 
 did not come from a noble heart, I have read of such 
 things with slender profit to my judgment. 
 
 Dear reader: A volume of poems goes from us 
 in an extra of the Mirror this week, which leaves us 
 with a feeling — we scarce know how to phrase it — a 
 feeling of timidity and dread — like a parent's appre- 
 hensiveness, giving his child into the hands of a stran- 
 ger. It is not Pliny's " quam sit magnum dare aliquid 
 in manus hominum" nor is it, what the habitual avoid- 
 ance of grave themes looks like, sometimes — a pref- 
 erence 
 
 " to let the serious part of life go by 
 Like the neglected sand." 
 
 We are used to buttering curiosity with the ooze of 
 our brains — careful more to be paid than praised — 
 and we have a cellar, as well as many stories, in our 
 giddy thought-house; and it is from this cave of priv- 
 acy that we have, with reluctance, and consentings far 
 between, drawn treasures of early feeling and impres- 
 sion, now bound and offered to you for the first time 
 in one bundle. Oh, from the different stories of the 
 mind — from the settled depths, and from the efferves- 
 cent and giddy surface — how different looks the world ! 
 — of what different stuff and worth the link that binds 
 us to it ! In looking abroad from one window of the 
 soul, we see sympathy, goodness, truth, desire for us 
 and our secrets, that we may be more loved ; from 
 another, we see suspicion, coldness, mockery, and ill- 
 will — the evil spirits of the world — lying in wait for 
 us. At one moment — the spirits down, and the heart 
 calm and trusting — we tear out the golden leaf nearest 
 the well of life, and pass it forth to be read and wept 
 over. At another, we bar shutter and blind upon pry- 
 ing malice, turn key carefully on all below, and, 
 mounting to the summit, look abroad and jest at the 
 very treasures we have concealed — wondering at our 
 folly in even confessing to a heartless world that we 
 had secrets, and would share them. We are not al- 
 ways alike. The world does not seem always the 
 same. We believe it is all good sometimes. We be- 
 lieve sometimes, that it is but a place accursed, given 
 to devils and their human scholars. Sometimes we 
 are all kindness — sometimes aching only for an an- 
 
 tagonist, and an arena without barrier or law. And 
 oh what a Procrustes's bed is human opinion — trying 
 a man's actions and words, in whatever mood com- 
 mitted and said, by the same standard of rigor ! How 
 often must the angels hovering over us reverse the 
 sentence of the judge — how oftener still the rebuke 
 of the old maid and the Pharisee. 
 But — a martingale on moralizing! 
 
 Yours affectionately, Doubleyou. 
 
 P. S. These poems, dear reader (if you are one of 
 those who 
 
 " can not spare the luxury of believing 
 That all things beautiful are what they seem") — 
 
 these poems, we may venture to say to you, are chick- 
 ens of ours that still come home to roost. They 
 have not been turned out to come back to a locked 
 door and a strange face at the postern. We still put 
 such eggs under our hen of revery. We cherish the 
 breed — but privately — privately ! Take these, and 
 come to us for more. 
 
 Mr. " Newbegin" must excuse us. We like gram- 
 mar even in a pun. His night-ride in the omnibus is 
 pretty fair, but it wont do to jolt pronouns out of 
 place. That 
 
 " Dark as winter was the flow 
 Of 7, sir, rolling rapidly," 
 
 would shock our friend Wright into a new edition of 
 " Exercises." 
 
 There is but one good couplet in " Tiskins's" com- 
 munication : — 
 
 " His whiskers were like night, coal-black, 
 His hair like morn, coal-red'' — 
 
 but his rhythm grounds at the overslaugh. He must 
 throw over his ballast of consonants, before his metre- 
 craft will swim buoyant enough to pass. 
 
 One of the Sunday critics (we hope he "got to 
 press" soon enough to have leisure for confession) 
 sneers at "one of us" for "quoting nothing" of Mor- 
 ris's in our critique of his songs. As if it were neces- 
 sary in a periodical where Morris makes, of every- 
 thing he writes, a Corinthian capital for a column ! 
 Truly the public are not likely to die in igngrance of 
 songs which stand on every piano-rack in the country, 
 and are sung in every concert-room and theatre, and 
 are being endlessly copied. Besides, we believe we 
 can tell "what manner of thing is your crocodile," 
 without bringing the monster bodily in. How the 
 folks find fault with us! We shall really have to pro- 
 claim ourselves an "object," and 
 
 " boast of nothing else 
 But that we are a journeyman to grief!" 
 
 or, better still, we shall be driven to get up a crusade 
 against the whip-poor-willises, and " bring up those 
 that shall try what mettle there is in orange-tawny." 
 
 To the kind old lady who "knit us a pair of stock- 
 | ings after reading some poetry" of ours, but " was 
 J afraid to send them, and gave them to a beggar," we 
 I must say, in the words of the old ballad, 
 
 " 'Twere better give a thing, 
 I A sign of love, unto a mighty person or a king. 
 
 Than to a rude or barb'rous swain, but bad or basely born, 
 I For gently takes the gentleman what oft the clown will scorn." 
 
 ! So, thanks for the good will, dear madam, and pray 
 j knit us a pair of mittens against we make our fortune 
 I and turn farmer. 
 
(338 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 " Aunt Charity" wishes us to write an article on 
 the "love of the intellect, and the possibility of a ten- 
 der affection for the old." We will tell you a little 
 story out of an old book: "It is reported of Magda- 
 len, queen of France, that walking forth, an evening, 
 with her ladies, she spied Monsieur Alanus, one of 
 the king's chaplains, an old hard-favored man. fast 
 asleep in a bower, and kissed him sweetly. When 
 the ladies laughed at her for it, she replied that it was 
 not his person she did embrace, but, with a Platonic 
 love, the divine beauty of his soul." 
 
 The up-town door-plates and bell-handles are shi- 
 ning once more, and open shutters, clean windows, 
 and parted curtains, acknowledge, at last, the reluc- 
 tant truth, that the fashionables have returned from 
 travel, and are open to pasteboard and personal call. 
 The ice has been broken with a "jam," echoed by 
 one musical soiree, and now — vogue la galere till the 
 ice melts again! There is a talk that this is to be 
 more an intellectual winter than the last — more reci- 
 tations, more tableaux vivants, more conversaziones, 
 more finding and producing of new lions in the lamb- 
 kingdom of poetry. There is also a murmur — a 
 "shadow cast before" — of the "coming out" of a 
 very extraordinary beauty, whose name and educa- 
 tional cocoon are wrapt in profound mystery. As the 
 rumor started about a week since, and as "pretty 
 moths" are but twenty days in their chrysalis, we may 
 expect the emergence of her bright wings to light in 
 about a fortnight. She is said to be moulded after 
 the (supposed) lost type of the seven belles of Phila- 
 delphia, whose culmination occurred under the au- 
 tocracy of Jackson — eyes furnished by Juno, mouth 
 by Hebe, and teeth and feet by the smaller fairies. 
 No corresponding Hyperion that I can hear of. 
 
 There is great fluttering and dismay among the 
 Bowery girls and the less alert followers of the fash- 
 ions. The remarkable splendor of the "spring goods," 
 and the really beautiful and becoming style of the 
 new fabrics, left no doubt in most minds that these 
 were to be "the mode." The autumn pin-moneys 
 of all the moderately "established" ladies and their 
 daughters "went the way of all" earnings accordingly, 
 and Broadway grew as splendid as a tulip-bed, bright 
 as the bazar of Smyrna. The exclusives were at 
 their invisible period meanwhile, but, from their car- 
 riages, they probably saw "what was worn." Down 
 dropped the mercury of the mode-ometer to extreme 
 simplicity ! The few ladies who appeared, crossing 
 the pavement from their equipages to the shops, were 
 dressed in quiet silks, costly and neat, and the name- 
 less and the " unnamed," at the same moment, seemed 
 to flaunt by in the choicest and gayest of the new 
 patterns. Studied simplicity, out of doors at least, is 
 high fashion now, and those who can not afford to 
 convert their new purchases into chair-covers and 
 bed-curtains, are left stranded, as it were, on a petri- 
 fied rainbow. 
 
 Ten thousand copies of the " Mysteries of Paris" 
 have been poured into our caldron of morals by a 
 single press in this city, and probably fifty thousand 
 will be circulated altogether. It is a very exciting 
 book, and at this moment making a great noise. The 
 translators are busily at work on other saleables of 
 French literature, and there will soon be little left un- 
 known of the arcana of vice. Eugene Sue, the au- 
 thor of the " Mysteries of Paris," is a connoisseur of 
 pleasure; and when I saw him, ten years ago, was an 
 elegant voluptuary of the first water. He was just 
 then creeping through the crust of the Chaussee 
 d'Antin into the more exclusive sphere of the Fau- 
 
 bourg St. Germain — fat, good-looking, and thirty-two. 
 He is, by this time, "sloped" from his meridian, and 
 apparently turning his experiences into commodity. 
 I observe that he borrows my name for a wicked Flor- 
 ida planter, who misuses a lady of color — a reproach 
 which I trust will not stick to " us." 
 
 The publishers hang back from American fictions 
 now-a-days, possibly finding the attention of the read- 
 ing-public occupied with the more highly-spiced pro- 
 ductions of the class just alluded to, and it is impos- 
 sible to induce them to give anything for — hardly, in- 
 deed to look at — an indigenous manuscript. Acci- 
 dent threw into my hands, a few days ago, a novel 
 which had lain for some time unread in a publisher's 
 drawer, and after reading a few chapters I became 
 convinced that it was far above the average of modern 
 
 ; English novels, and every way worthy of publication. 
 
 I It was entitled "The Domine's Daughter," by Adam 
 
 | Mundiver, Esq., and would have lain forgotten and 
 unexamined till doomsday, but for a friendly Orpheus 
 
 ! who made it his Eurydice and went to Lethe after it. 
 Such a book should surely represent money in a 
 
 | country where literature is acknowledged. 
 
 I very seldom can find it in my backbone to sit out 
 a five-act play, but I saw Macready's "Richelieu," 
 and I have seen Forrest's, throughout. Forrest be- 
 gan rather ineffectively, probably disturbed by the de- 
 fence he was obliged to make against an aspersion, 
 before the play commenced. He soon warmed into it, 
 however, and, to my thinking, played the character 
 far better than Macready. The details — the imita- 
 tion of decrepitude — the posturing and walking the 
 stage — were better done by Macready ; but the pas- 
 sion of the play, the expression, the transfusion of 
 actor to character, the illusion, the effect — these were 
 all vastly better achieved by Forrest. A line drawn 
 across the tops of Macready's "points" would leave 
 Forrest below in all matters of detail, but it would 
 only cut the base of the latter's pyramids of passion. 
 Forrest runs sometimes into the melo-dramatic, se- 
 duced by the "way it takes,"' but he has fiue genius, 
 and if he played only to audiences of "good discre- 
 tion," he would (or could) satisfy the most fastidious. 
 
 Wallack's friends, myself among the number, have 
 been annoyed at the many contretemps which have 
 conspired to make his latter engagement at the Park 
 so unsatisfactory. In genteel comedy, of which he 
 is the master-player now on the stage, he was unable 
 to do anything, from the lack of materials in that 
 stock-company for a cast; and, indeed, he played al- 
 ways at the disadvantage of the one free horse in a 
 slow team. Mr. and Mrs. Brougham (both first-rate 
 players of high comedy, and the latter a very beauti- 
 ful and effective woman, into the bargain) might have 
 been engaged at the Park for the winter with great 
 ease, and then we might have seen (what is the most 
 agreeable kind of theatricals) comedies well cast and 
 played. I hope there will be some combination 
 among the actors to give us a "go," with a wheel 
 with more than one spoke in it, and then we might 
 have Wallack as he should be — a dramatic gem in 
 proper setting. 
 
 I am not sure that I shall be able to make out a let- 
 ter this morning, or, if I do, it will be in spite of an 
 accompaniment of military music. My friend Gen- 
 eral Morris has his battalions in arms for review, and 
 my pen "marks time," as if its forked nib were under 
 the General's orders — (and as, perhaps, it should be, 
 coming from a very military bird, whose father's feath- 
 ers have seen service under him). 
 
 Apropos of procession, by-the-wny, T have h'id n 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 639 
 
 moderate laugh at the effect of a typographical blun- 
 der in Dr. Julius's German edition of his travels in 
 this country. The doctor is giving an account of an 
 abolition procession in Cincinnati, and he records in 
 English the inscriptions on the banners. One, he 
 says, had the reproachful and pathetic sentiment : 
 " Although our shins are black our souls are white.'''' 
 For "shins" read s&ins. 
 
 The sultan of the Comoro islands has addressed a 
 letter to a gentleman in Wall street, a translation of 
 which by a very accomplished and self-taught linguist 
 (Mr. Cotheal), may be amusing to your readers. 
 The Comoro isles, as you know, lie in the Indian 
 ocean, off the north end of Madagascar, and are in- I 
 habited by a very friendly race of Mohammedan ! 
 Arabs. The king resides in Johanna, the largest of i 
 the islands, and (in London slang) he is a slap-up old ! 
 trader, getting ivory and gold-dust from Madagascar, 
 and swapping these and his cows, pigs, and poultry, 
 for Lowell factory-stuffs, or any other freight of 
 American vessels. He writes a very worshipful let- 
 ter:— 
 
 " To the American city of New York : For the be- 
 loved sheikh Aaron H. Palmer, No. 49 Wall street. 
 May Allah be his guide! Amen! Badooh! 
 
 "By the grace of the Most High: 
 
 "To the dearest, the most glorious, the most gen- 
 ererous sheikh Aaron H. Palmer, the honored, the ex- 
 alted, the magnificent, the contented. May Allah, 
 the Most High, be his guide! Amen! 
 
 " Now, after offering thee honor and protection from 
 the Henzooanee city (Johanna) and its inhabitants, 
 this is what I tell thee. Thy noble letter arrived and 
 we read it. Thy friend understood its contents. May 
 Allah reward thee well ! Thou sayest in thy letter 
 that thou desirest selling and buying in our land, and 
 that thou wishest friendship with us. Thou art wel- 
 come. We thank thee, and accept thy offer. Thou 
 didst tell us that we should advise thee of anything that 
 we should need from thee. Again we thank thee, 
 and inform thee that thou mayest send to us a person 
 on thy part that shall dwell in the Henzooanee coun- 
 try. In order that thy business may be complete, a 
 shop of the merchants, and everything that there is 
 in the country, shall be made ready, on our part, if it 
 please God. Whatever shall be wanted in these re- 
 gions shall be paid for on delivery. 
 
 "I and all my Henzooanee tribes request that thou 
 unite us with the American tribes in fri<>nd-ship and 
 good-fellowship, like as we are united with the Eng- 
 lish, and we will serve you all as we serve them. 
 Now, we have conceived here a great desire for the 
 American tribes. Tell them to send as their letters, 
 or a man-of-war-ship* on their part, and we will bind 
 ourselves by a binding treaty. Now, the thing we 
 need and want from thee are sealed letters of advice 
 for our assurance ; and in order that thou mayest 
 know that this letter is from us, we stamp it with oar 
 seal. We request that thou send us all kinds of linen 
 goods and cottons, both white, and brown, and fine 
 stripes, and all kinds of woollen cloths; and ten bed- 
 steads and sixty chairs; all kinds of glass; lamps, 
 large and small, and some for placing on the table; 
 and fine silk handkerchiefs. This is what we tell 
 thee. Now salutation and prosperity be with thee for 
 ever! 
 
 " Dated the 10th of the month of Dool Heggeh, 
 1252 (corresponding to about the lGth of March, 
 1837). 
 
 "From thy friend the sooltan the sublime, son of 
 the sooltan, Abd-Allah the sublime, Shirazy." 
 
 • It is refreshing to know that there is an island where " let- 
 ters" and a " man-of-war-ship" arc convertible equivalent*. 
 
 As a long lesson of civilization, I have advised my 
 friend Palmer, "the magnificent, the contented," to 
 send out to his friend, the sultan of the Comoros, a 
 youth accomplished in compounding the following 
 drinks (copied from the bill of fare of a new restaurant 
 in Boston) : — 
 
 " Plain mint-julep, fancy do., mixed do., peach do., 
 orange do., pineapple do., claret do., capped do., 
 strawberry do., arrack do., racehorse do. Sherry- 
 cobbler, rochelle do., arrack do., peach do., claret do., 
 Tip-and-Ty, fiscal agent, veto, I. O. U., Tippe-Na- 
 Pecco, moral suasion, vox-populi, ne-plus-ultra, 
 Shambro, pig-and-whistle, citronella jam, egg-nog, 
 Sargent, silver-top, poor-man's punch, arrack-punch, 
 iced punch, spiced punch, epicure's punch, milk- 
 punch, peach-punch, Jewett's fancy, deacon, ex- 
 change, stone-wall, Virginia fancy, Knickerbocker, 
 smasher, floater, sifter, soda-punch, soda, mead, mul- 
 led wines of all descriptions." 
 
 After this array of compounds, I think the vexed 
 question of the ingredients of FalstafFs sack must 
 sink into insignificance. I understand that a shop is 
 opened in the Strand, London, for the sale of these 
 potations — one instance, at least, of a vice of civiliza- 
 tion going eastward. We must wear it for our feath- 
 er — since our drinks are the only feature of our coun- 
 try for which Dickens gives us unqualified praise. 
 
 The " life-preserving coffin," lately exhibited at the 
 fair of the Institute, is so constructed as to fly open 
 with the least stir of the occupant, and made as com- 
 fortable within as if intended for a temporary lodging. 
 The proprietor recommends (which, indeed, it would 
 be useless without) a corresponding facility of exit 
 from the vault, and arraugements for privacy, light, 
 and fresh air — in short, all that would be agreeable to 
 the revenant on first waking. Not being, myself, a 
 person wholly incapable of changing my mind, I felt, 
 for the first time in my life, some little alarm as to the 
 frequency of trance or suspended animation, and see- 
 ing a coffin-shop near Niblo's, I ventured to call on 
 the proprietor (Mr. D , a most respectable under- 
 taker) and make a few inquiries. Mr. D. buries from 
 one to three persons a day, averaging from six to eight 
 hundred annually. He has never been called upon to 
 inter the same gentleman twice, in a professional 
 practice of many years. He has seen a great number 
 of coffins reopened, and never a sign of the person's 
 having moved, except by sliding in bringing down 
 stairs. I mentioned to him an instance that came to 
 my own knowledge, of a young lady, who was found 
 turned upon her face — disinterred the day after her 
 burial, to be shown to a relative. But even this, he 
 thought, was the result of rude handling of the coffin. 
 Mr. D. seemed incredulous as to any modern instance 
 of burial alive. He had spent much time and money, 
 however, in experiments to keep people dead. He 
 thought that in an exhausted receiver, made of an iron 
 cylinder, to resist the pressure of the air, the body 
 could be kept unchanged for fifty years, and that, im- 
 mersed in spirits and enclosed in lead, the face would 
 be recognisable after twenty years. (The process 
 seems both undesirable and contradictory, by-the-way, 
 for the posthumous drowning of a man makes his 
 death sure, and he is kept in spirits to prevent his vege- 
 tating — as he would naturally after decay.) 
 
 Incidentally, Mr. D. informed me that a respectable 
 funeral in New York costs from two hundred to eight 
 hundred dollars, being rather more expensively done 
 in New York and Boston than in any other city except 
 New Orleans (where they say a man may afford to live 
 who can not afford to die). In Philadelphia they 
 make the coffin with a sloping roof, which, he re- 
 marked, is inconvenient for packing in vaults, though 
 
640 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 it seems accommodated to the one epitaph of the 
 Romans — sit ULi terra levis. They line their coffins 
 more expensively in Philadelphia than elsewhere — 
 with satin or velvet instead of flannel — and bury the 
 dead in silk stockings and white gloves. We have 
 not yet arrived at the ceremony of hired mourners, as 
 in England, nor of plumes to the hearse and horses. 
 
 Notwithstanding the incredulity of my friend the 
 undertaker, however, asphyxia, or a suspension of life, 
 with all the appearance of death, is certified to in 
 many instances, and carefully provided for in some 
 countries. In Frankfort, Germany, the dead man is 
 laid in a well-aired room, and his hand fastened for 
 three days to a bell-pull. The Romans cut off one 
 of the fingers before burning the corpse, or otherwise 
 bestowing it out of sight. The Egyptians made sure 
 by embalming, and other nations by frequent washing 
 and anointing. Medical books say we should wait at 
 least three days in winter and two in summer, before 
 interring the dead. It has been suggested that there 
 should be a public officer who should carefully ex- 
 amine the body and give a certificate, without which 
 the burial should be illegal. 
 
 The embellishment of burial-grounds is one of the 
 most beautiful and commendable features of our time 
 and country. There always seemed to me far too 
 much horror connected with the common idea of 
 death and burial. The Moravians make flower-gar- 
 dens of their graveyards, and inscribe upon the stone 
 at the head of the buried man the "day he came 
 hither and the day he went home" — his birthday and 
 time of death. This is clothing with the proper as- 
 pect an event which is only an unlinking of a chain, 
 no part of which can decay — the spirit to return to its 
 fountain and the body to be reproduced in other 
 forms of life — and it is a curious thing that most 
 Christians represent death as a frightful skeleton, 
 while the Greeks, who had no happiness in their here- 
 after, painted him as a sleeping child or a beautiful 
 youth. Death in the East was formerly attributed to 
 the attachment of a particular deity, who took his 
 favorite to a better world ; to the love of Aurora, if 
 the death happened in the morning ; of Selene, if it 
 happened at night; of the water-nymphs, if drowned; 
 of Jupiter, if killed by lightning. The caverns where 
 the martyrs were laid were called "chambers of re- 
 pose." And this, surely, is the better impression to 
 give of death to those whose minds are forming. 
 Query — whether a society for the purpose of embel- 
 lishing cemeteries and brightening all the common 
 surroundings of death and burial would not be worthy 
 the attention of some philanthropic enthusiast? The 
 solemnities connected with a future life need not make 
 the gate to it always so dreadful; and, for one, I 
 should be content to put the separation of soul and 
 body on a level with the unlinking of a friendship or 
 a change of opinion— erecting a cenotaph for either 
 of the three changes, as the Pythagoreans did to the 
 memory of those who left their sect. But this is 
 more an essay than an epistle. 
 
 A beautiful printed copy of a " Translation of ten 
 cantos of Dante's Inferno" has been sent me. The 
 translator is Mr. Parsons, of Boston. It is done with 
 a great deal of scholarship and labor, and an uncommon 
 felicity of language — all of which, expended on an 
 original poem, might, with his talent, have produced 
 something as good as his translation, though not as 
 good as Dante's Inferno. It strikes me that any 
 transfer of a work of genius from one language to an- 
 other — professing more than a simple rendering of the I 
 meaning and yet giving a deteriorated copy — is a loss • 
 of time and an injury to the original author. Mr. j 
 Parsons has done his translation in double rhyme, 
 
 depriving Dante of the beauty of the terza rima, and 
 at the same time weakening the literalness of the 
 translation by the fetters of rhyme, and this seems to 
 me ill-advised. There is no medium, I think, between 
 a translation of absolute fidelity, and a refusion and 
 recasting of the subject-matter by a genius almost 
 equal to the original author ; and, after the compara- 
 tive failure of Byron at this, Mr. Parsons might hesi- 
 tate. I hope he will try something of his own. 
 
 A gentleman in New Jersey has sent us some 
 " Lines on the death of a young lady," and they ex- 
 press very natural feelings ; but with neither novelty 
 nor force enough to entitle them to print. He should 
 be aware, that while grief is new, the most common- 
 place expression of it seems forcible to the sufferer. 
 The ear to which 
 
 " The pine-boughs sing 
 Old songs with new gladness," 
 
 has the gladness in itself, as the wounded heart has in 
 its wound the eloquence of an old monotone of grief. 
 If he is disposed to sooth his sorrow by an exercise of 
 the imagination, however, he should brood upon such 
 pictures as Shelley draws in the Witch of Atlas : — 
 
 " For, on the night that they were buried, she 
 
 Restored the embalmer's ruining, and shook 
 The light out of the funeral lamps to be 
 
 A mimic day within that deathy nook. 
 And there the body lay, age after age, 
 
 Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying, 
 Like one asleep in a green hermitage, 
 
 With gentle dreams upon its eyelids playing." 
 
 " T.," a Virginian, has one good touch in his " Re- 
 miniscence," 
 
 " That fascinating, lustrous eye 
 Which lighted up a shady spot," 
 
 that is to say, if he meant to express the beauty of a 
 bright eye set in a dusky eyelid — a thing we exceed- 
 ingly admire. But the remainder is of a quality 
 inferior to what he sent us before, and we " put on the 
 break," rather than let him go down hill. 
 
 " A friend" wishes us to " do our part" toward put- 
 ting down the abuses and perversions of criticism. 
 La! man ! you can't reform the age ! Besides, criti- 
 cism has killed itself by overdoing the matter. Who 
 judges of a book by a criticism upon it ! The best 
 way is to keep overdoing it — to knock down the bull 
 the way he is going, not to keep him on his legs by 
 ineffectual opposition. Nobody is hurt by criticism 
 now — nobody mended. And what Utopia could 
 make it better? Coleridge was over-sensitive on the 
 subject, though he laments the degradation of authors 
 very eloquently.' " In times of old," he says, " books 
 were as religious oracles ; as literature advanced, they 
 next became venerable preceptors; they then de- 
 scended to the rank of instructive friends ; and, as 
 their numbers increased, they sunk still lower to that 
 of entertaining companions; and, at present, they 
 seem degraded into culprits, who hold up their hands 
 at the bar of every self-elected judge who chooses to 
 write from humor or interest, enmity or arrogance." 
 
 That our leaf 
 
 By some o'erhasty angel was misplaced 
 In Fate's eternal volume," 
 
 we have long known and often lamented. There was 
 
 | a good horse-jockey spoiled, in the making a poet of 
 
 us. and we took to the swing of an axe like a tadpole 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 641 
 
 to swimming. But we were not aware that we were 
 appreciated. Some man, who sees through our poetic 
 visor, writes thus to the " Ohio Statesman" : — 
 
 " The Rev. Mr. Maffit is in town, exhorting sinners 
 to repentance. N. P. Willis has taken up his quarters 
 at the Astor house lor the winter, I suppose. 1 think 
 Willis would do better in the backwoods than at the 
 Astor, for he is a stout, ablebodied man, and could 
 mall his hundred rails a day like a knife. 1 have no 
 notion of these overgrown, lazy fellows, laying around 
 the flash hotels, idling away their precious time." 
 
 First correcting this gentleman's facts and cacol- 
 ogy (as we do not " lay" either eggs or wagers, and 
 are not " overgrown," being six feet high to a hair) — 
 we entirely agree with him as to our original destina- 
 tion. We are a crack chopster, and for several win- 
 ters have fulfilled our destiny with delight — chopping 
 an avenue through some woods that we thought 
 belonged to us (which avenue we finished, for some- 
 body else, before we discovered our mistake), and 
 never so happy as when up to the knees in snow, and 
 letting it into the hickories with a woodman's empha- 
 sis and discretion ! No steam-boiler ever rejoiced in 
 its escape-valve, no hawser in the captain's " let go !" 
 as we have done in swinging our heart round and bang- 
 ing it into a tree — for the axe was but a vicar and a 
 vent ! " Woodman, spare that tree !" was the bitterest 
 veto ever laid upon our pleasures. 
 
 But we didn't make money at it. We saved almost 
 three shillings a day (as to a " penny saved" being 
 "equal to a penny got," we scorn the improbability), 
 and the principal profit was the willingness it gave us 
 to sit still in our chair and scribble. No! we loved 
 our axe with a passion. We feared it might somehow 
 turn out to be a sinful indulgence, it was so tempting 
 and pleasurable — but alas ! we make more with a quill — 
 
 ( i( would half our wealth 
 Might buy this for a lie !") 
 
 and while that is the case, the " correspondent of the 
 Ohio Statesman" must pity, not blame, our exile from 
 the woods to the Astor. Set us up — give us a clean 
 deed of Glenmary and its woods, a horse and saddle, 
 and our old axe — and never boy watched the darkening 
 of his beard with the delight with which we shall see 
 thicken again the vanished calluses in our palm ! Fie 
 on a life with neither resistance nor antagonism — with 
 close air, pent lungs, arms aching, and muscles mana- 
 cled and numb ! Horses to break and trees to chop 
 down are Paradise to it — we chance to know — but our 
 axe is rusty and our quill is busy. Invicem cedunt 
 dolor et voluntas. 
 
 Drums are beating in the Park, and the time and 
 finery of the industrial classes, who form the indus- 
 trious "forces" of New York, are under contribution 
 to glorify the killer of Tecumseh. Of those who see 
 the show, probably few will turn over a thought which 
 the ghost of the old warrior would not consider com- 
 plimentary to himself, and so perhaps it is one of those 
 cases in which two birds are killed with one stone — as 
 the drum, covered with Zisca's skin, both incited to 
 battle and commemorated Zisca. Tecumseh, though 
 a brigadier-general in the British service, should figure 
 as an honored American ghost, and doubtless will be ! 
 so appropriated in poetry, especially should there be 
 written a poem on moral courage, of which his run- 
 ning away in his first fight, and being indomitable ever 
 after, shows, 1 think, a very natural and striking ex- 
 ample. There is another poetical feature in his his- 
 tory — his being persuaded, against his will, to marry a 
 beautiful girl, after mature age, and making so good a 
 husband. Altogether he is a fine hero for an epic, 
 and a great deal more glorious for not surviving to en- 
 gage in a political campaign. 
 
 : One of the most approvable novelties that I have seen 
 ! of late is a library of six volumes, upon Needlework. 
 j It is a set of miniature hand-books for the use of 
 I schools and families, most neatly printed and illustra- 
 1 ted, and letting the reader into all the mysteries of 
 " baby-linen, plain and fancy needlework, embroidery, 
 ! knitting, netting, and tatting, millinery, and diess- 
 ! making," and all very cheap and portable. Redfield, 
 of Clinton Hall, is the publisher, and the admirers of 
 the notable in woman-worth should be the purchasers. 
 
 Mr. Riker has issued the first of his series of an- 
 nuals called "The 0])al," of which Mr. Willis is to be 
 the editor. The present volume, which contains some 
 fine gems of literature, and is beautifully illustrated by 
 Chapman, was prepared by Mr. Griswold, though con- 
 tributed to and prefaced by the editor subsequently 
 employed for the series. The character of the work 
 is religious, and the preface states truly, that "the 
 mirth and the playful elegancies of poetry and descrip- 
 tive writing are as truly within the paths of religious 
 reading as anything else which shows the fulness and 
 variety of the provision made for our happiness when at 
 I peace with ourselves. Nothing gay, if innocent (the 
 j preface continues), is out of place in an annual in- 
 tended to be used as a tribute of affection by the good ; 
 and in this annual, hereafter, that view will be kept 
 before the eye. Its contents will be opal-hued — re- 
 flecting all the bright lights and colors which the prod- 
 igality of God's open hand has poured upon the path- 
 way of life." 
 
 Edward S.Gould, one of the most distinguished of 
 the merchant-author class so honorable to our country, 
 has put forth an abridgment of "Alison's History of 
 Europe.''' In a terse and strongly-written preface, he 
 gives a resumer of the whole work, with a pungent 
 criticism on its faults and injustices, showing that he 
 (Gould) has not done his work " like a horse in a bark- 
 mill," but with a proper spirit and with a clear insight. 
 Of Alison's chapter on the American war he says, very 
 justly, that "it is destined to a most unenviable noto- 
 riety as a tissue of misrepresentation. As it has no 
 legitimate connexion with the history of Europe, it 
 is a gratuitous libel on the people and institutions of 
 the United States, and as it could not be admitted into 
 an American book without alterations contradictory to 
 the title-page of this volume, it has been wholly 
 omitted." Mr. Gould is the son of the eminent jurist, 
 Judge Gould, of Connecticut, and is happy in having 
 the energy (in addition to his business pursuits) to 
 turn to account his fine natural powers and good edu- 
 cation. He is one of the best of our translators, also, 
 and the author of the new and humorous work, ".The 
 Sleep-Rider in the omnibus." 
 
 A great deal of fun, and as much genius and pri- 
 vate worth, have just left the city in the person of 
 Harry Placide, bound to New Orleans for a winter 
 engagement. The people of the cis-Atlantic Paris 
 are to be congratulated with all emphasis thereupon. 
 It is equal to a day's allowance of sunshine to see him 
 play at night. He knows humor, from elegant high 
 comedy to irresistible farce — from a hair-line delinea- 
 tion of the ridiculous to a charcoal sketch — and fails 
 in nothing he undertakes. With the exception of 
 Farren, who is only his equal, Placide is unrivalled on 
 the English or American stage. I wish him well, and 
 well back again. God bless him! 
 
 I see copied into the "Literary Gazette and Quar- 
 terly Advertiser" an article on "Macauley's Miscella- 
 nies," which appeared some time since in a Boston 
 
642 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 periodical, and struck me at the time as somewhat re- 
 markable. A lecture on the habits and characters of 
 literary men, which was quoted from in the Boston 
 papers, has also attracted great attention by its bril- 
 liancy and originality of view, and both these are by a 
 very young business-man in Boston, Mr. E. P. Whip- 
 ple. His mind is of the cast and calibre of the wri- 
 ters for the English magazines often years ago, and I 
 consider him a mine to be worked with great profit by 
 the proprietors of the reviews. His kind is rare. 
 
 I see that Jules Janin "fobs off" another annual 
 upon us under the name of " The American in Paris." 
 It is written in his sparkling vein, and translated, as 
 sparkle always is translated, with a loss. The truth 
 is, that an American gentleman of New York fell into 
 Janin's company in Paris, and showed him some notes 
 he had made of his Parisian amusements ; that the 
 idea struck the great feuilletoniste of making this small 
 diary the cover for a more detailed description of Paris 
 than would otherwise seem " knowing," and the first 
 having taken and sold, the second of a series has now 
 appeared. Between Eugene Sue's real " Mysteries 
 of Paris," and Janin's presentable drawing-room pic- 
 tures of it, we may get a very fair idea of the gay 
 capital. Janin's preface is written with the intention 
 of being believed. He says : "Our American appears 
 before you once more. Last year, at the same period, 
 he described to you, in the best way he could, Paris- 
 ian life during the brilliant months of winter. He had 
 then arrived at the great city at the very moment when 
 the closing days of autumn were disappearing beneath 
 the yellow leaves. A traveller without affectation, he 
 asked nothing more than to take his part in the sweet 
 joys, lively emotions, and noisy pleasures of this world 
 of the powerful and the rich ; he endured as well as 
 he could the intoxications and the delirium of the 
 masked ball — the thousand cross-fires of Parisian con- 
 versation — the paradoxes, the slanders, and even the 
 innocent calumnies that he saw around him — he en- 
 tered into all ; he wished to see everything, and he 
 fulfilled his wish. Not that he advanced very far into 
 the mysteries of the good city ; but he stood, as one 
 may say, on the edge of the wood, and thence he 
 threw his curious and attentive look upon those gay 
 and quickly-changing lights and shades. For a fellow- 
 countryman of Franklin, our Yankee is certainly 
 somewhat of an acute observer. What he did not see 
 he guessed ; not sometimes without a certain discrim- 
 ination and pertinence. That which we specially ad- 
 mire in him, and which will not displease the reader, 
 is a great fund of benevolence, a happy good-humor 
 which has nothing affected about it, and an indiscri- 
 bable entrain and rapture, which the greater part of 
 the time keeps the reader awake. This is all that we 
 can say in his favor, for we are not of the number of 
 those tiresome editors who are always saying, 'Come 
 and see a masterpiece ; come and salute a great man; 
 the great man and the masterpiece were both invented 
 by me.' We hope never to fall into this enthusiasm, 
 which is very unbecoming in him who is its object. 
 All our duty as editor we have faithfully fulfilled, and 
 now it is for the book to defend itself. If by chance 
 it is a good book, depend upon it the public will re- 
 ceive it with favor. All our ambition is, that after 
 having thoroughly admired the embellishments of 
 Lami, you will read a few of those pages in which the 
 translator has endeavored to reproduce somewhat of 
 the grace, the vivacity, and the interest of the original 
 book." I have made a long extract from the preface, 
 but I thought it would amuse you to see how the cel- 
 ebrated critic can talk about himself, with a transpa- 
 rent mask over his face. 
 
 A club howling-alley has been established in Broad- 
 way, near Franklin street, most luxurious in all its ap- 
 pointments — carpets, ottomans, dressing-rooms, &c. 
 The families subscribing are of the most fashionable 
 cliques, and no male foot is suffered to enter this gyne- 
 sian gymnasium — the pins being set up by girls, and 
 the attendance exclusively feminine. The luxuries 
 remaining to our sex, up to the present time, are 
 fencing and boxing — the usurpation of which is 
 probably under consideration. The fashion, you 
 would suppose, would scarcely gain by masculinify- 
 ing, but the ladies are wearing broadcloth cloaks — for 
 a beginning. There is another article of male attire 
 which they have long been said to wear occasionally, 
 but I am incredulous. Seeing would be believing. 
 
 Mr. Kendall, the popular and adventurous editor of 
 the Picayune, has been " Lucy-Long"-ing it some- 
 what over his eagerly-expected book on Mexico, but 
 has lately discovered that his celebrity would stand 
 any halt in the trumpeting. He purchased recently a 
 copy of Captain Marryat's new book, "Monsieur Vi- 
 olet," to go to bed with of a rainy afternoon, and had 
 the pleasure of lying on his back and reading his own 
 adventures amplified in the best style.by the author 
 of Peter Simple. Kendall's letters in the Picayune 
 were, of course, the basis of the extended and illus- 
 trated work he has in press, and this basis, Captain 
 Marryat (who is a subscriber to the Picayune) has ta- 
 ken bodily, and thereupon built his romance with but 
 a small outlay of his own clapboards and shingles. An 
 action of replevin for half the price of the captain's 
 copyright would " he," I should think — at least in the 
 court of equity. Mr. Kendall, I had nearly forgotten 
 to say, is spoken ill of in one portion of the captain's 
 book, and his rejoinder has appeared in the Courier. 
 
 I have been looking through the new publication 
 called " Etiquette, by Count D'Orsay." That D'Or- 
 say revised the book and lent it his name " for a con- 
 sideration," I think very possible, but there is, to my 
 thinking, internal evidence in its style that he did 
 not write it. There is an acquaintance with vulgarity, 
 and a facility of " hitting it on the raw," which could 
 only have been acquired by a conversance of fellowship 
 with vulgar people, and D'Orsay knows as much of 
 such matters as the thistle-down while afloat knows 
 of the mud it floats over. Besides, the vulgarities are 
 dwelt upon with a kind of unction totally foreign to 
 D'Orsay's nature. He is a most kindly, as well as 
 delicate and fastidious man, and his mind would in- 
 stinctively avoid the knowledge of such matters, let 
 alone the qualifying himself to describe them graphi- 
 cally. From one or two little anecdotes told in the 
 book, I trace its authority to a Mr. Abraham Hay- 
 ward, a frequenter of many different strata of London 
 society, and probably the best judge in England of 
 what is "genteel," by knowing better than anybody 
 in England what is vulgar. It is undoubtedly an in- 
 valuable book, and circulated in one of these mam- 
 moth editions at the shilling price, it will prepare 
 Americans of all classes, if they sin against good man- 
 ners at all, to sin with knowledge — taking away at 
 least the ridicule of the matter. 
 
 Dear pastoral-minded, centrifu gaily -bent, and mod- 
 erately-well-off Reader, I address you "with all the 
 honors," to be quite sure that my letter be not mis- 
 applied. We, the parties in this correspondence, are 
 neither rich nor poor — as they express it elegantly in 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 643 
 
 the mother-country, " neither nob nor snob." I would 
 the critics had not the trick of calling the having one's 
 own way " affectation;" else would I (simple though 
 I am), coin for my own use, since the language is de- 
 ficient in them, some of those epithets, descriptive of 
 a class, which are at the same time so crisp, definite, 
 and expressive. For instance : were I to address a 
 letter to a young man of a certain style (a very preva- 
 lent style indeed), and wish to convey from the first 
 word my appreciation of the character at which I 
 aimed, I should be compelled to use the following cir- 
 cumlocution : My dear universally-benevolent — i. e. — 
 spending-all-the-money-you-can-get-and-making-love- 
 to-all-the-women-you-see, young man. Now, the French 
 have a gracious and modest dissyllable for all this. 
 The word erpansif expresses it all. How much 
 briefer, and more courteous, in the case just supposed, 
 could T commence in English with, My dear expansive ! 
 Again : in English we should say, Oh, you-all-thin gs- 
 to-all-men — ivho-say-you-have-no-prejudices — but-are- 
 understood-by-your-friends-to-mean-no-principles ! but 
 in German they phrase it, quite short, Oh, many-sided ! 
 Understand me not as leaning at all to Carlyle's sys- 
 tem of personification and word-linking. Two and 
 three are five is better than Two and. Three died when 
 Five was born, though this is but a moderate illustra- 
 tion of Carlylism. I would introduce no new epithet 
 that is not the essence of a phrase, no new-linked 
 words that are not the chord of a circumlocutory arc. 
 
 Touching my trade : — 
 
 In the matter of pen-craft, I confess to a miserly 
 disposition, yearly increasing. It is natural, I sup- 
 pose, to tuck up close the skirts of those habits in 
 which we run for our lives (or livings), and it is not in- 
 consistent, I would fain hope, with prodigality of other 
 belongings. In my college days, ere 1 discovered that 
 a bore in my brains would produce any better metal 
 than brass (bored since for " tin"), I had a most 
 spendthrift passion for correspondence. Now — paid 
 duly for my blotted sheet — I think with penitential 
 avarice of the words I have run through ! 
 
 People are apt to fancy it is a natural amusement — 
 laborum dulce lenimen — for an author to write letters, 
 epitaphs, &c. But there are two animals at least, who 
 might differ from that opinion — the author, and the 
 baker's horse, out on a Sunday's excursion, in the ba- 
 ker's pleasure-wagon. The truth is, that the tax on 
 authors, in this particular, is a disease in the literary 
 system, and since it is not likely to be cured while the 
 human race want autographs, epitaphs, epithalamia, 
 and opinions on MSS., the solace seems to lie in the 
 expediency of fat Jack — we should " turn the disease 
 into commodity." If every third epitaph in the grave- 
 yards of this country be not by the author of , 
 
 &c, &c, all I can say is, there must be a very con- 
 siderable number of gravestones; and I am only sorry 
 that I did not take out copyrights from the start, and 
 serve injunctions on plagiarizing stonecutters. Here 
 is a letter now from a gentleman in Arkansas (whose 
 grammar, by the way, is not very pellucid), informing 
 me that his wife is dead, and giving me an inventory of 
 her virtues ; and I am requested to write the lady's 
 epitaph, and send it on in time for the expectant mar- 
 ble. Of course I am extremely sorry the lady is dead, 
 and since she was " such a pagoda of perfection," as 
 Mrs. Ramsbottom would sny, very sorry I had not the 
 pleasure of her acquaintance ; but my " head" is not 
 " waters" (nor am I teetotaller enough to wish it 
 were), and I can not weep for all the nice women who 
 die, though grieved to think this particular style of 
 person should diminish. Ours is a most romantic 
 nation, for it would seem that there are few who do 
 not think their private sorrows worthy of poetry, and 
 the distinction between meurn and tuum (as to authors) 
 having long ago been broken down by our copyright 
 robberies, the time and brains of poets are considered 
 
 common property. People, accustomed to call for 
 poetry when they want it, look upon the poet, quoad 
 hoc, as they do upon the town-pump, and would be as 
 much surprised at a charge for poetry as for water. 
 Possibly it is one of the features of a new country. I 
 have lived in a neighborhood where the stopping of a 
 man who should be taking what fruit he wanted from 
 your garden, or what fuel he wanted from your 
 woods, would surprise him as much as stopping his 
 nostrils with corks, till he was off your premises ; 
 and with fruit and fuel, perhaps, time and brains may 
 assume a value. At present (it may as well be re- 
 corded among the statistics of the country), poets, 
 lumber, and watermelons, are among the " inaliena- 
 ble rights of freemen." 
 
 One of the lesser evils of this appetite for sympa- 
 thy in rhyme, is the very natural forgetfulness of a 
 man absorbed in grief, touching the trifle of postage. 
 Reading a death in the newspaper affects me, now, 
 like seeing myself charged with eighteen and three 
 quarters cents at the grocer's. If I were writing from 
 the " palace of truth," to one of my " bereaved hus- 
 bands," I should still stoutly assure him of my sym- 
 pathy, having lost one and sixpence by the same mel- 
 ancholy event. My bill of mortality (postage, they 
 call it) would frank me for boiled oysters at Flor- 
 ence's, the year round, and, begging pardon of the 
 survivors (not the oyster-shells), I should like it in 
 that shape quite as well. 
 
 Hereafter, I shall make an effort to transfer the ci- 
 pher to the other side of the unit. If called upon to 
 mourn (in black and white) for people I never before 
 heard of, I propose to send my effusion as " commod- 
 ity," to the first " enterprising publisher" who pays. 
 Honor bright as to by-gones — let them be by-gones ! 
 Indeed, they are mostly too personal to interest the 
 public, one of the most felicitous of my elegies turn- 
 ing (by request) on the deceased's "fascinating and 
 love-inspiring lisps." But in all composed, after this 
 date, I shall contrive so to generalize on the virtues 
 and accomplishments commemorated, that the eulogy 
 will apply promiscuously to all overrated relatives — 
 , of course, forming, for a literary magazine, an attrac- 
 tion which comes home to everybody's business and 
 bosom. I may premise, by the way, that my adver- 
 tisement to this effect would be addressed only to 
 mourners of my own sex, and that ladies, as is hardly 
 i necessary to mention, are supplied with epitaphs on 
 ; their husbands, without publicity or charge ; though 
 j it is a curious fact that my customers, in the epitaph 
 | line, have hitherto been widowers only ! Whether 
 widows choose usually some other vehicle for the 
 I expression of their grief, preferring that it should be 
 | recorded on tablets less durable than marble (pardon 
 j me ! more durable !) I have no data for deciding. I 
 merely contribute this fact also to statistics. 
 
 "Pray, how does that face deserve framing and gla- 
 zing ?" asked a visiter, to-day. The question had 
 J been asked before. It is a copy from a head in some 
 old picture — one of a series of studies from the ancient 
 masters, lithographed in France. It represents a peas- 
 ant of the campagna, and certainly, in Broadway, she 
 | would pass for a coarse woman, and not beautiful for 
 a coarse one. I have been brought to think the head 
 coarse and plain, however, by being often called on to 
 defend it. I did not think so when I bought it in a 
 print-shop in London. I do not now, unless under 
 catechism. 
 
 To me, the whole climate of Italy is expressed in 
 I the face of that Contadina. It is a large, cubical- 
 I edged, massy style of feature, which, born in Scot- 
 I land, would have been singularly harsh and inflexible. 
 ! There is no refinement in it now, and, to he sure, lit- 
 
644 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 tie mobility or thought — but it is a face iu which there 
 is no resistance. That is its peculiarity. The heavy 
 eyelid droops in indolent animal repose. The lips are 
 drowsily sweet. The nostrils seem never to have 
 been distended nor contracted. The muscles of the 
 lips and cheeks have never tingled nor parched. It is 
 a face on which a harsh wind never blew. If the 
 woman be forty, those features have been forty years 
 sleeping in balm — enjoying only — resisting, enduring, 
 never. No one could look on it and fancy it had ever 
 suffered or been uncomfortable, or dreaded wind or 
 sun, summer or winter. A picture of St. Peter's — a 
 mosaic of Paestum — a print of Vesuvius or the Cam- 
 panile — none of the common souvenirs of travel would 
 be to me half so redolent of Italy. 
 
 By special favor I got a sight, while in Boston, of 
 Crawford's statue of Orpheus, not yet open for public 
 exhibition. As I stated in a former letter, the Athe- 
 nceuni has, most appreciatively, erected anew building 
 expressly for this work of art, and nothing remains to 
 De done but the finishing of the walls of the interior. 
 It is a lofty room, and the statue is placed on a pedes- 
 tal of masonry (rather oddly I thought) in the corner. 
 It was, unfortunately, badly packed at Florence, and 
 when taken from the box, in Boston, the legs were 
 found to be both broken off. Mr. Dexter, a young 
 sculptor of singular mechanical dexterity, as well as 
 promising genius (the author of the admirable bust of 
 Dickens), was employed to restore it, and has done it 
 wonderfully. It requires close examination to per- 
 ceive the fracture, and the discoloration might easily 
 be taken, even then, for stains in the marble, so evi- 
 dently are the statuary lines preserved as the artist 
 designed them. 
 
 The statue is of the size of life — nude, with the 
 exception of a short mantle, and sandals upon the 
 feet. Orpheus is represented as just emerging from 
 hell, and passing Cerberus, whom he has put to sleep 
 with his music. The three-headed dog is " nid, nid, 
 nodding" with his three heads, and either has two 
 tails (which was not down in my mythology) or his 
 unicaud is carefully combed away, madonna-wise, into 
 two parts. The figure is bent over, like a man emer- 
 ging from a cavern, and the right hand is held over 
 the eyes as if to protect them from the sudden blaze 
 of daylight, while the mantle is lifted from the back 
 by the current of air rushing in, leaving the body and 
 limbs, by this natural and poetical contrivance, nude 
 for sculpture. The face of Orpheus, like the action 
 and feeling of the limbs, expresses intent, but soft and 
 subdued earnestness. It is an exquisitely beautiful 
 youth, on the verge of manhood — slight, graceful, and 
 bloomingly filled out; and I thought the body one of 
 the most life-like and perfect representations of nature 
 I had ever seen in marble. I presume the artist 
 intended to represent Orpheus at the moment before 
 he sends his wife back to hell by looking prematurely 
 after her. (Query— moral ?) He holds the lyre, with 
 which he has just charmed the infernals, upon his left 
 hip, and the eager action, expressing the instant pre- 
 ceding the completion of a desperate undertaking, is 
 finely conceived, and breathed into sculpture. The 
 only objection I could make to the statue was one 
 that is simply a difference of conception, and, to his 
 own, the artist is quite entitled. I expected a less 
 effeminate person and countenance. Orpheus was an 
 " old married man," and a reformer and lawgiver before 
 Eurydice's fatal flirtation with Aristseus ; and his char- 
 acter, both in fact and fable, in tradition and in Virgil's 
 verse, was one of the most masculine and self-denying 
 energy. He was a Grahamite, too (the only man of 
 that age who would not eat flesh and eggs), and was 
 finally torn in pieces by the women because he was an 
 
 incorrigible widower — both which evince rather harsh 
 qualities, and are not expressed in the Cupidon figure 
 of Crawford's Orpheus. I am glad I have such trouble 
 to find a fault, however, and I rejoice in the work al- 
 together, as a most triumphant effort of American 
 genius. 
 
 I saw another fine piece of art in Boston — Harding's 
 full-length portrait of Governor Seward. It carries 
 conviction, at a first glance, that it is true to the life, 
 and, indeed, a finer piece of work than the head can 
 not be found in the portrait-painting of this country. 
 It is breathing with character and individuality, and an 
 absolute likeness, besides being faultless in color. The 
 figure is correctly done, no doubt, but Jupiter himself 
 in black coat and trousers would be unpicturesque, 
 and Harding has done his possible, redeeming the hor- 
 rors of modern costume a little by an ingenious and 
 graceful disposition of the cloak. Beside this picture 
 stood the most capital portrait of the country, I 
 think — Harding's Allston. This "other self" of the 
 departed poet-artist is about to be engraved in the best 
 style of the art, I am happy to hear. 
 
 Speaking of Allston, I was told in Boston that his 
 funeral was by torch-light, after nine in the evening, 
 and one of the most impressive and befitting ceremo- 
 nies ever witnessed. He was laid on the bier, simply 
 wrapt in his shroud and covered with a pall, and was 
 borne on men's shoulders to the tomb, and there cof- 
 fined. These differences from ordinary burial were ot 
 his own directing some time before death. The wish 
 to be excepted from the commonplace horrors of 
 burial would be very natural to a mind like Allston's. 
 
 The lecturing system, which the Evening Post 
 thinks is dying by surfeit in New York, is in full vigor 
 in Boston, and it was thought that Macready would 
 have made more money at it than by theatricals. I 
 think myself that lecturers should be rather differ- 
 ently chosen, and that the object should be rather to 
 come amusingly at the anatomy of society, than to 
 hear the preaching-and-water of which the lectures 
 are now delivered. Why not specify the subjects and 
 choose the lecturer accordingly. If Sprague the 
 cashier would lecture on the pathos of discount and 
 the anxieties of investment; if the head-clerk in a 
 retail dry-goods shop would unfold the inveiglements 
 used for cheapening and getting credit (life across the 
 counter, that is to say) ; if a fireman would give us the 
 pros and cons of excitement and combination, esprit 
 de corps, and what stimulant there would be in putting 
 out fires for charity were other stimulants to fail ; if 
 any intelligent business-man or mechanic would lec- 
 ture simply on the threads of society and common life 
 which he lives by pulling — why, then, it seems to me, 
 lectures would be entertaining, and in no danger of 
 being thinly attended. The greatest mysteries of life 
 are the common linings of common brains, and since 
 people are tired of the "turning out to the sun" of 
 the satin and velvet of refinement and education, it 
 would be well to come to the plainer stuffs without 
 ceremony. A lecturer hired to pick each trade and 
 profession of its mysteries, by diligent inquiry, and to 
 embody these mysteries in presentable elocution, 
 might do a thriving business. 
 
 I was talking of pictures just now. A Boston mer- 
 chant told me that he had made a considerable spec- 
 ulation lately by sending fifty "copies of the old mas- 
 ters" (imported Italian pictures) to California ! He 
 chanced to be passing a shop where they were to be 
 put up at auction, and bought the lot, fifty paintings, 
 at ten dollars each, frame and all. They sold to the 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 645 
 
 CalifomiUers at a great profit. But the original faith 
 in the speculation is the miracle of the business. 
 
 The influenza is raging in Boston, everybody talking 
 thick through the nose. I never saw such universality 
 of grippe. The air in New York is as pitiless and 
 penetrating as a search-warrant, but it seems to have 
 the wholesomeness of the " Etesian breezes," and a 
 bad cold I started with from Boston left me somewhere 
 in the Sound, for I arrived without it. Perhaps, like 
 Eurydice, it turned back at Hellgate. 
 
 The pulse of Broadway is accelerated to fever-beat. 
 There is good sleighing in the white margins of that 
 long page of black-letter, and the astonished coal and 
 smoke at weathercock level is doubtless agitated vio- 
 lently with the change from the contralto monotone of 
 wheels to the "frightful tintamarre" of bell-metal. 
 Sidewalks wet and slippery. 
 
 A very short absence from a great city unhinges 
 one's metropolitan habitude, and on returning, one 
 looks at the placards on the walls as one does at the 
 features of a long-absent friend, doubtful of what de- 
 gree of change these superficial lines may be the ex- 
 ponents. None but your diurnal cit reads playbills 
 with indifference and incredulity ! The writing on 
 the walls just now is, more than usual, flowery in its 
 promises of amusement, and though " promising is the 
 very air o' the time," and " performance is ever the dul- 
 ler for his act," I wanted last night a Mephistophilian 
 ubiquity — the temptations were so many. Niblo's 
 equestrian pageants are glowingly advertised, and said 
 to be very splendid. New dancing-girls at the Chat- 
 ham — new fun at Mitchell's Olympic — concerts in all 
 directions — lectures more than plenty — fortune-tellers 
 and jugglers, dwarfs and fat children, new oyster pal- 
 aces, and all manner of balls, bewilder the eye of the 
 street passenger with their rhetoric of placard. 
 
 Macready was playing Werner at the Park last 
 night, and I looked in for a few moments. The house 
 was about half full. As I entered he was commencing 
 the long passage of reproach to Ulric, which he utters 
 throughout at the tip-toe agony scream. A smart 
 friction of the tympanum of the ear with a nutmeg- 
 grater would be an emollient in comparison. Why 
 should this accomplished actor aggravate his defects 
 so painfully ! That pipe of his would have been a 
 disqualification for any viva-voce vocation to the mind 
 of a less persevering man, but it seems to me that its 
 dissonance might be abated by the degree of disci- 
 pline he is willing to practise on other capabilities. He 
 was well supported, by the way, by Miss Cushman. 
 Mrs. Sloman has given place to this lady and returned 
 to the shades of the past generation. Her Orpheus, 
 Mr. Simpson, will not go after her again, it is to be 
 hoped. 
 
 A sudden impulse, as I came out of the theatre, led 
 me to the discovery of a new milliners'-land in New 
 York, the existence of which, "minion of the lamps" 
 as I have been, I had not suspected. I jumped into 
 an omnibus that was passing, with a mere curiosity to 
 see how far into the orient the brilliant shops of East 
 Broadway extended. "We passed by the terra cognita 
 of Catharine street and Chatham, and their pictu- 
 resque sellers of chestnuts by torch-light, and kept up 
 the well-lighted avenue of the Bowery, when (to my 
 momentary disappointment) the omnibus turned 
 suddenly to the right, down Grand street. As the 
 brilliancy of the lamps and shop-windows did not 
 diminish, however, I kept my seat, and, to my sur- 
 
 prise, rode on through a new Broadway which seemed 
 to me interminable. I got out at last to walk back 
 and look at it more leisurely. The shops on the 
 south side were nearly all those of milliners and fancy- 
 article dealers, differing from those of Greenwich 
 street, on the other side of the city, in being smaller, 
 brighter-colored in the array of goods (as if minister- 
 ing to a gaudier taste), and more in the style of street 
 stalls, such as are common in small Italian towns. 
 There was another primitive peculiarity in the appa- 
 rent custom in that region, for the whole family to 
 wait behind the counter. In one very crowded and 
 low-raftered shop, the sign of which was " Cheap 
 Jemmy," the mother and half a dozen stout daugh- 
 ters were all busy waiting on customers, while a child 
 in arms was dandled by a little girl sitting by the stove. 
 Everything about the shop was of the strictest school 
 of the thrifty primitive. Seeing a pretty and intelligent- 
 looking milliner with her hands crossed over the glass 
 case on her counter, a few doors from "Cheap Jem- 
 my," I went in and bought a pair of gloves, for the 
 sake of asking a question or two. She said rents 
 were much cheaper in Grand street than in the other 
 shopping streets of the city, and goods proportionally 
 cheaper. The colored people do their shopping prin- 
 cipally there. She was not acquainted s»t all in Grand 
 street. When she wanted to go out she got into an 
 omnibus and went down town. Altogether, the Grand 
 street shops are unlike the other parts of the city — 
 gayer and more picturesque — and life seems to be 
 centralized and crowded together there, as if it were a 
 suburb across a river. I must give you some notion 
 of the geography of this quarter. Imagine Manhat- 
 tan to be a man-with-a-hat-on (Union square the hat), 
 lying on his back, with Castle Garden for a bunnion 
 on his great toe, Broadway would be his spine and 
 intestinal canal, Chelsea and Greenwich his right arm, 
 Grand street his outstretched left arm, the Tabernacle 
 and Tombs, City Hall and Park, his rotund corpora- 
 tion, spleen, liver, &c. In ancient times the resem- 
 blance would have been seized upon at once for a 
 deification. 
 
 A chef d'auvre of daguerreotype is in preparation. 
 The senate-chamber is to be engraved after photo- 
 graphs in the best style of Apollo, Chilton, and 
 Edwards ! These gentlemen (the god of light not the 
 least enterprising and efficient of the three) have in 
 preparation a magnificent engraving of the senators in 
 appropriate positions, after the manner of some of the 
 finest English prints. This is a bold and beautiful 
 undertaking, and from the" known skill 3nd enterprise 
 of these gentlemen, will doubtless be successfully 
 accomplished. Whether an adequate recompense 
 can be realized in this country remains to be seen. 
 Most of the miniatures for this engraving were ob- 
 tained at the daguerreotype gallery of these gentle- 
 men, and theirs is an art particularly suited to the 
 transfer of the strong lineaments of senatorial faces. 
 The engraving will be a curiosity. A celebrated 
 artist is to be employed for the grouping. 
 
 Late last night, the Norwegian, Ole Bull (pro- 
 nounced Olay Bull), did the magnanimous, and yield- 
 ed the use of one of the world's entire evenings to 
 his rival, Vieux-lemps, whose concert comes off", there- 
 fore, as announced, this evening. I shall go to hear 
 him, and will tell you all I can fathom in what I hear. 
 
 I do not believe that the leaven of cognoscenti, 
 which " leavens the whole lump" into rapture with 
 these performers, amounts to more than three people 
 in an audience of three thousand, and I think that 
 even those three would be puzzled to distinguish be- 
 
646 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 tween Wallace, Ole Bull, and Vieux-temps, if they 
 played the same pieces behind a screen. (I do not 
 mention Artot, because he plays to the heart exclu- 
 sively.) 
 
 Nobody with nerves can sit out a concert, it is true, 
 without having the keys of tears occasionally swept 
 over, as a child, thrumming a piano, will occasionally 
 produce a sweet or mournful combination of sounds 
 by accident. But because our eyes are once or twice 
 moistened, and because we occasionally feel that the 
 corner of the veil is twitched which separates us from 
 the chainless articulation we ache after, it is no sign 
 that we at all comprehend the drift of the player's 
 meaning, or see into the world of complex harmony 
 whither he gropes but confusedly himself. I have 
 not heard the violin of Ole Bull, but I have talked with 
 him for an hour or two, and I think he is one of the 
 most inspired creatures (and I should have thought 
 so if I had met him as a savage in the woods) whose 
 conversation I have ever listened to. He talks a 
 braided language of French, Italian, and English, 
 plucking expression to himself with a clutch; and 
 though he moulds every idea with a powerful origi- 
 nality, he evidently does not give birth to more than a 
 fraction of what is writhing in his brain. If there 
 were a volcano missing in Norway, I should fancy we 
 had encountered it on its travels — the crater not pro- 
 vided for in its human metempsychosis. Probably 
 Ole Bull finds his violin a much more copious vent 
 than language, for his imprisoned lava — but to coin 
 that lava into language as he pours it out in tangled 
 chromatics, would be to comprehend his music, and 
 that, I say again, is not done by more than three in 
 three thousand, if done at all! I told him I should 
 like to hear him play a I'improvista, after he had seen 
 Niagara, and upon that he gave me a description of 
 wild Norwegian scenery, describing how he had tried 
 to utter in music the effect it had produced upon 
 him — gave it me with a " fine phrensy," that pulled 
 hard (and I should like to know the philosophy of 
 that) upon the roots of my hair. There is something 
 weird and supernatural about the man. 
 
 Mechanical dexterity on the violin has as much to 
 do with music, I believe, as drawing a bank-check has 
 to do with credit at the bank — a very necessary part 
 of the matter, but owing its value entirely to what 
 has gone before. Music is mind expressed in one of 
 the half-dozen languages we possess — and as capable 
 of logic and transfer into words, as painting or poetry, 
 or expression of feature and gesture. Ole Bull, when 
 playing, has (or ought to have) an explainable argu- 
 ment in his mind, and the bridge wanting between 
 him and his audience is a translation of his musical 
 argument into language — given before or after the 
 performance. This he could easily do. At present, 
 it is, to the audience, like a most eloquent oration in 
 an unknown tongue— comprehensible only to the or- 
 ator. 
 
 I have elsewhere mentioned, that while at Vien- 
 na, 1 saw a self-educated philosopher at the institute, 
 who was discovering the link between music and ge- 
 ometry. He took a pane of glass and covered it 
 sparsely with dry sand, and then, by drawing a par- 
 ticular note upon the edge with a fiddle-bow, he 
 drove the sand by the vibration into a well-defined 
 circle, or triangle, or square — whichever we chose of 
 half-a-dozen geometrical figures. I have looked ever 
 since, to hear of an advancement in this phase of da- 
 guerreotype. Once reduced to a grammar, music 
 would be as articulate as oratory, and we should be 
 able to distinguish its sense from its gibberish. 
 
 In person, Ole Bull is a massive, gladiator-like 
 creature, rather uncouth, passionately impulsive in 
 his manners, and with a confused face, which only 
 becomes legible with extreme animation. Wide- 
 awake, he is often handsome — fast-asleep, he is doubt- 
 
 less as plain as a Norwegian boulder-stone. If he 
 ever work his musical logic up to his musical impulse 
 and execution, he will hang the first lamp in the dark- 
 est chamber of human comprehension. 
 
 I have two more steps to announce to you in the 
 advance of the gynocracy. There is a gymnasium 
 in the upper part of Broadway, where the ladies don 
 the Turkish costume, and are taught sparring and 
 climbing in jackets and loose trousers. Greatcoats 
 with a snug fit to the back are superseding cloaks for 
 ladies' out-of-door wear. "Merciful heavings!" as 
 Dick Swiveller would say. 
 
 I have been looking over a file of English papers, 
 published at Canton, China, in which I find that the 
 interpreter to the French consulate has obtained a 
 copy of the famous Chinese dictionary, which is an 
 encyclopedia of the history, sciences, arts, habits, and 
 usages of the Chinese, composed at the commence- 
 ment of the eighteenth century by order of the em- 
 peror Ram-hi. A very small number of these was 
 printed, for the emperor and principal functionaries 
 of the empire only. It is to be reprinted immediately, 
 with a French and English translation. Mr. Cushing 
 goes there in a good time for finding the material he 
 will want for researches, literary and political. 
 
 It is curious how much may be born of "a scrape" 
 between catgut and horsehair! We have had two 
 nights of violin-phrensy, and applause, for a trick 
 with a fiddle-bow, that would have embalmed the 
 heart of Demosthenes within him. The beau monde 
 has given a fair hearing to the rival elbows, and, by ac- 
 clamation, at least, Ole Bull has it. As it is the rage, 
 and, as even sages take interest in rages, perhaps I 
 had better "make a clean breast," and tell you all I 
 know about it — albeit, like barley-water, if the fever 
 were cured, it would be unpalatable slop. 
 
 The conversation of the town, of course, is largely 
 embroidered with the concernings of these fiddle- 
 monsters, and news, as you know, is stripped, like 
 corn, of much of its picturesque outer husk and silk- 
 en lining before it is ground into paragraph-cakes sent 
 to be devoured at a distance. Ole Bull is not simply 
 Ole Bull, but a star with four satellites — his grim 
 keeper, his handsome secretary, his messenger, and 
 his lacquey. The door of his parlor at the Astor is 
 beset, antechamber-fashion, from morning till night, 
 with orchestra-people, people from the music-shops, 
 and all the tribe who get fat upon the droppings o( 
 enthusiasm. What he says is made into anecdotes, 
 and wherever he goes follows the digito monstrari. 
 There is an aristocracy of catgut, however, and Artot 
 and Vieux-temps look upon Ole Bull as the house 
 of lords look upon O'Connell, and greet him as the 
 rocks do the rising tide. Artot has been a king's 
 page, and Vieux-temps is, I believe, a chevalier decore, 
 and both of them have the porcelain air. The French 
 population of New York make a " white-and-red- 
 rose" business of it; and it was remarked last night 
 that there was not a Frenchman to be seen at Ole 
 Bull's concert. Artot is quite a minion of popularity 
 with the fashionables — his expressive eyes and senti- 
 mental elegance probably the raison pourquoi. 
 
 Vieux-temps's first concert on Monday night was a 
 very stylish jam. He is a small, pony-built man, with 
 gold rings in his ears, and a face of genteel ugliness, 
 but touchingly lugubrious in its expression. With 
 his violin at his shoulder, he has the air of a husband 
 undergoing the nocturnal penance of walking the 
 room with "the child" — and performing it, too, with 
 unaffected pity. He plays with the purest and cold 
 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 647 
 
 est perfection of art, and is doubtless more learned on 
 the violin than either of the rival performers, but 
 there is a vitreous clearness and precision in his notes 
 that would make them more germaine to the humor 
 of before breakfast than to the warm abandon of ves- 
 per-tide. His sister travels with him (a pretty blonde, 
 very unlike him), and accompanies him on the piano. 
 
 Ole Bull's concert was deferred till last evening, 
 and the immense capacity of the Tabernacle was filled 
 to suffocation. He appeared after the usual appetiser 
 of an overture, and was received with a tumult. Ver- 
 ily, he is made for a "tribune of the people!" The 
 angel who "makes men politic" never moulded a 
 creature more native to the central plane of popular- 
 ity. A splendid animal — herculean and graceful — a 
 faculty of looking, at the same time, overpowered and 
 self-possessed — an unlimited suavity full of reserve — 
 calm lips and wild eyes — cool dexterity and desperate 
 abandonment to his theme — he would have done as 
 well at anything else as at music. He is what Mrs. 
 Ramsbottom would call a " natural pagoda." 
 
 It is presumptuous in a layman of the religion of 
 music to attempt a critical distinction between these 
 two or three first violinists of the world. Anybody 
 can see differences in their playing, but only a mu- 
 sician can define the degrees in which they differ. 
 016 Bull's violin seems to have been made where 
 horses and cats were of a wilder breed. He gets out 
 of it a peculiar quality of note, not at first quite satis- 
 factory to the ear, but approaching articulate language 
 as it departs from the glassy melody drawn from the 
 instrument by others. [ have no doubt that, to him- 
 self, the instrument is as good as articulate. He ex- 
 pects it to talk intelligibly to others; and it would, 
 possibly, to those who knew music and heard him 
 often. I proposed to him in conversation, what I 
 think would test the expression of his music very 
 fairly — the transfer of Collins's Ode on the Passions 
 to the violin. The audience could then follow him, 
 as they do an opera by a translated libretto. 
 
 Wallace is about to enter the field against the vio- 
 linists, many of the musical people here being quite 
 persuaded that he plays as well as any of them. He 
 is certainly the greatest pianist we ever had in Amer- 
 ica, and he is really embarrassed between the two in- 
 struments — the very highest degree of excellence re- 
 quiring complete devotion to one only. He and Ole 
 Bull met one evening at the duke of Devonshire's in 
 London, but without hearing each other play, and 
 they have run together, here, like drops of water — 
 similar in quality and degree of genius, as well as in 
 impulsive and poetical disposition. They met in 
 Bull's room an evening or two since and played du- 
 ets on the piano and violin, solos, &c, till morning. 
 Wallace likes New York so well that he has deter- 
 mined to make it his residence, publishing his exquis- 
 ite musical compositions here, &c. He is a great ac- 
 cession to the musical world, as he is a large essen- 
 tial drop added to the soul resident in this great mass 
 of human life. I offer him one man's welcome. 
 
 I understand the piano rage is the next thing to 
 come off, and that Lizst and Thalberg are positively 
 coming over. Taking musical accomplishment in 
 such large slices as we do, our vast country is likely 
 to become the main body-corporate of the music of 
 the world. It pays better than any other field of mu- 
 sical enterprise now. 
 
 Happy New-tear! — Shake hands! Exchange 
 congratulations! Be merry ! Be happy! Another 
 year is gone! It is poetry to regret the past — only 
 poetry. Rejoice that the incumbrance of another 
 year is thrust behind — that another gate onward is 
 flung open — that though this youth is passing or past, 
 
 you are by so much nearer to a new youth beyond — ■ 
 and better and brighter, as well as beyond. There is 
 no instinct of regret for the past. Spite of Heath 
 brought nearer, and the shroud unfolded to receive 
 us — spite of Decrepitude and Neglect and Pain rising 
 up like phantoms in the way — ice are happy to grow 
 old. The soul rejoices. New-year! New-year! 
 Death closer, but something the soul yearns after 
 coming at his heels! Who, upon impulse, would re- 
 tard time ! Who would — instinct only consulted — 
 go back! Eternal progress is the thirst of life, as it 
 is of the whole eternity of which life is a part. The 
 world says so by acclamation. The old year's death 
 is the festival of universal instinct. Visit your friends! 
 Brighten the links between you ! Forgive slights, 
 neglects, injuries! Go laughing through the gate of 
 the new year! 
 
 The Hebrew Benevolent Society had a very bril- 
 liant dinner on Thursday, I understand, and drew a 
 large contribution for its excellent objects from the 
 present possessors of the "divining-rod" — the violin- 
 ists. Ole Bull, whose heart is as prodigal as his ge- 
 nius, and who gives money to street-beggars by the 
 handful, gave a hundred dollars, and Vieux-temps and 
 Wallace agreed to combine in a charity-concert. The 
 other contributions, I understand, were correspond- 
 ingly liberal. 
 
 One of the essays, the most ad rem that I have 
 lately seen, is an address on the "Prevention of Pau- 
 perism," by a relative of the late Dr. Channing. The 
 preface has a certain bold resignation about it which 
 is very idiosyncratic. Mr. Channing says that he 
 was desired to read a discourse before a society for 
 the prevention of pauperism, and agreed to try to do 
 so — but he did not know to what he had pledged him- 
 self. He then defines very philosophically what he 
 found, upon reflection, was to be his task, and goes on 
 to say : — 
 
 "I went to work. That which might, in the read- 
 ing, be endured forty minutes, grew to twice that al- 
 lotted time, or more ; and when the day came for the 
 anniversary, 1 found I could not read the half I had 
 set down. The auditory was very small; and the 
 few, at first, were less before the forty minutes were 
 up. The contribution-boxes came- to the church- 
 altar with little weight of metal, and few bills — say 
 about twenty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents, all 
 told. Thus was my work accounted little and paid 
 harmoniously. But some, a very few, have asked me 
 to print my writing. From so small a company a 
 large request could hardly come. I have done what 
 those few friends have asked me to." 
 
 The address is very philosophic, though tinctured 
 with peculiar views of the social system. The lead- 
 ing propositions, which are very eloquently illustra- 
 ted, are worthy the room they will take in these col- 
 umns, if it were only as a skeleton map of the sub- 
 ject carefully laid out, and available for the guidance 
 of inquirers : — 
 
 "1st. That every social institution, or custom, 
 which separates man from man — which produces dis- 
 tinct classes in the community, having distinct priv- 
 ileges — which is daily occupied to build higher and 
 stronger the partition-walls between men — such insti- 
 tution, or custom, I say, produces and continues pov- 
 erty. 
 
 "2d. That the political institutions of society, or 
 their administration, frequently become causes of the 
 extremest and widest national poverty. 
 
 "3d. That the spirit of party, so widely and deeply 
 cherished as it is by society, does, by its exclusiveness^ 
 
648 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 its selfishness, and its intolerance, minister directly to I 
 the production and continuance of poverty. 
 
 "4th. That such employment of capital by society, 
 as in its products ministers only to the most debasing 
 habits, does directly produce and continue crime and 
 poverty. 
 
 "5th. The sudden reduction of wages, extended 
 to large numbers, is not only directly injurious to 
 wide interests, but produces pauperism. 
 
 "6th. That in a country like ours, in which the 
 law of entail does not exist to make property a per- 
 manent possession in families, a system of education 
 which has regard only to simple mental culture, and 
 which leaves the physical powers uncultivated — in 
 which manual labor, a practical knowledge of farm- 
 ing, or the mechanic arts, forms no part — I say that 
 such a system of early education favors the produc- 
 tion of pauperism." 
 
 Apropos of beggars — the system of ingenious beg- 
 gary, so curiously described in Grant's "Great Me- 
 tropolis," is beginning to be tried on in New York. 
 There is one young lady (of very correct habits, I 
 believe, in point of fact) who maks a living by means 
 that wear a somewhat questionable complexion, out of 
 "distinguished strangers." A member of congress, 
 or a diplomatist in transit, for example, receives a 
 note, the day after his arrival is advertised, in a hand- 
 writing of singular beauty. In the most graceful lan- 
 guage, and with the daintiest use of French phrases, 
 he is informed that a young lady who has long watch- 
 ed his career with the deepest interest — who has a 
 feeling for him which is a mystery to herself — who 
 met him accidentally in a place she will recall to his 
 memory, should she be so fortunate as to see him 
 again — who is an unhappy creature of impulse, all too 
 fondly tender for this harsh world and its construc- 
 tions — would like to see him on a certain sidewalk 
 between eight and nine. By holding his hand across 
 his left breast, he will be accosted at that time and 
 place. The ladylikeness and good taste of the note, 
 so different from the usual tentatives of that descrip- 
 tion, breed a second thought of curiosity, and the 
 victim is punctual. After a turn or two on the ap- 
 pointed sidewalk, he encounters a tall young lady, 
 deeply veiled, who addresses him by name, takes his 
 arm, and discourses to him at first on his own am- 
 bitious history, contriving to say the true and flatter- 
 ing thing, for which she has duly informed herself. 
 She skilfully evades his attempts to make her talk of 
 things more particular, and regretting feelingly that 
 she can only see him on the sidewalk, appeals to his 
 "well-known generosity" for ten dollars to keep her 
 and her dear mother from being turned out of doors. 
 She takes it with tremulous pathos, demands of his 
 honor that he will not follow her, and slips round the 
 corner to meet another "distinguished stranger" with 
 whom she has appointed an interview fifteen minutes 
 later in the next street ! I was in a company of stran- 
 gers at a hotel not long ago, when one of these dainty 
 notes was produced, and it so happened that every 
 man present had one in his pocket from the same 
 hand! Among the party there were four appoint- 
 ments proposed by the same lady, to come off on the 
 four sides of a certain square, for that evening ! She 
 is probably doing a good business. 
 
 There has been a certain most eligible shop, with a 
 most impracticable rent (3 Astor house, rent $1,000), 
 for a long time vacant. Yesterday the broad doors 
 were thrown open, and an effulgent placard announced 
 it as the depot of the Columbian Magazine. The 
 new periodical lay upon the counter in a most Chap- 
 man-esque cover, lettered gorgeously in vermillion 
 and azure, with a device of Columbus on his pedestal, 
 
 John Inman, editor, in the blue of the scroll, and Is- 
 rael Post, publisher, in the vermilion of the supporting 
 tablet. (This arrangement is wrong, if there be any 
 meaning in colors, for the ingredients of vermilion are 
 sulphur and quicksilver — stuff of better prophecy for 
 an editor than a publisher.) I understand that' the 
 foundations of this new magazine are thirty thousand 
 dollars deep, and as there is great store of experience 
 in both publisher and editor, it is likely to crowd Gra- 
 ham and Godey — though it will require almost an 
 "avatar of Vishnu" to crush those giants of monthly 
 literature. We are to see whether magazine-popu- 
 larity is like the oil from the glass tomb of Belus — 
 which, once exhausted, never could be refilled. 
 
 The history of the monthlies, for the last few years, 
 forms a chapter by itself of American progress. It is 
 but a very short time since the "dolhr-a-page" of the 
 North American Review was magnificent pay, and 
 considered quite sufficient for articles by Edward Ev- 
 erett ! The old New York Mirror paid five hundred 
 dollars a year for the original "Pencillings by the 
 Way" — the republication of which has paid the au- 
 thor five thousand. Nathaniel Greene, of the Boston 
 Statesman, was the only man I could hear of, in 1827, 
 who paid regularly for poetry, and I have heard that 
 Percival was kept from starving in New York by sel- 
 ling his splendid poem on the plague for five dollars!' 
 I lost some of the intermediate steps of literary valu- 
 ation, but I think the burst on author-land of Gra- 
 ham's and Godey's liberal prices was like a sunrise 
 without a dawn. They commenced at once paying 
 their principal contributors at the rate of twelve dol- 
 lars a page — nearly three times the amount paid by 
 English magazines to the best writers, and paying it, 
 too, on the receipt of the manuscript, and not, as in 
 London, on the publication of the article. We owe 
 to these two gentlemen the bringing out of a host of 
 periodical talent, which, but for their generous and 
 prompt pay, would have remained dormant, or em- 
 ployed in other channels; and they should be record- 
 ed as the true and liberal pioneers of progress in this 
 branch of literature. They have done very much the 
 same thing with regard to engraving and the encour- 
 agement of the arts, and I believe the effect they have 
 produced on the refinement of the country has been 
 worthy of note — their beautiful books having been 
 sent into its remotest corners by their unprecedented 
 circulation. 
 
 The prices paid now to acceptable magazine-wri- 
 ters are very high, though the number of writers has 
 increased so much that there are thousands who can 
 get no article accepted. There are so many people, 
 too, who, like the Ancient Mariner, are under the dire 
 compulsion to tell their tale — paid or not paid — that 
 any periodical, with a good furbisher and mender, 
 may fill its pages, for nothing, with very excellent 
 reading. A well-known editor once told me that he 
 could make a \ery good living by the sums people 
 were willing to pay to see themselves in print. The 
 cacoethes scribendi would doubtless support — does 
 doubtless support — a good many periodicals. 
 
 Ole Bull played to another crammed audience at 
 the Park last night, but the angel or demon impris- 
 oned in this violin was not tractable. If it had been 
 his first appearance, be would have made a losing trip 
 to America. There was a tone in the applause which 
 showed very clearly that his music was turned back 
 at the inner vestibule of the ear. He will probably 
 redeem himself to-night at the Tabernacle — his clo- 
 sing concert. 
 
 I hear great complaints that the canvass-back ducks 
 are not of as good flavor as usual this year. Will 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 649 
 
 you tell us the pourquoi— or whether it is that the 
 wild-celery is not in perfection this season? My own 
 experience goes the other way— for such delicious 
 ducks, so deliciously dressed, 1 never saw, as lately at 
 "Guy's Monument house," in Baltimore. He is a 
 fit cook for Apicius, it is true, and perhaps his sauce 
 deceived me. But the canvass-back is part of our 
 national honor, and the causes of falling off should 
 be looked after. 
 
 I am delighted to see that our great comedian, 
 Harry Placide, is up to the lips in success and popu- 
 larity in INew Orleans. God bless those southern 
 people — they know a good thing when they see it! 
 The theatres there are a kind of last appeal — confirm- 
 ing just appreciation, and reversing very often the cold 
 injustice of the north. Wallack is gone there now, 
 and he will come away with warm pockets. Burton, 
 the comedian, is also in migration — a man of genius 
 with his pen, and a most attractive actor. I wish we 
 could have a good rollicking season of good acting at 
 the Park, and go in deep for old-fashioned close criti- 
 cism. 
 
 I sent you a paragraph yesterday which T am anx 
 ious to overtake with another — though the paragraph- 
 chase, especially if the pursuer be a correction of an 
 error, is much more desperate than the shadow's hope 
 of overtaking the substance. Ole Bull, to my think- 
 ing (corroborated since by the opinions of some mu- 
 sical people), played without his inspiration the last 
 night he played at the Park, and so I stated. At the 
 Tabernacle on Tuesday night, his violin-fiend (or an- 
 gel) was at home, and so completely did he search 
 every chamber of my sense of musical delight, and so 
 triumphantly drive out all unbelief, and fill me with 
 passionate admiration and wonder at his skill and 
 power, that I feel a certain compunctious reproach 
 for ever having qualified my homage. One of his 
 themes was a rhapsody of religious music, composed 
 by himself, and, without irreverence, it seemed to me 
 that St. John, in the Apocalyptic vision, could scarcely 
 have been within the compass of music more rapt and 
 unearthly. More than four thousand people held 
 their breath in ravished ecstacy with this performance, 1 
 and the only drawback to my own rapture was the I 
 conviction that, transparent and articulate as was the ( 
 meaning of every note, to translate it into language 
 the poet must first be himself translated — to the sphere 
 and capabilities of an angel. You will think that I, 
 too, am " bit by the dipsas" — but I, at least, gave up 
 my soul to this Ole Bull madness with some reluc- 
 tance. Genius-like, the Norse magician is journalier, 
 as the French say ; but I pray that when he shall play 
 at Washington he may " give a rise" to the embodied 
 intellect of the capital which will show them a heaven 
 above politics. 
 
 The Hibernia has brought me a gossiping letter 
 or two from England ; and, by way of letting you 
 down softly from the balloon-flight of the paragraph 
 foregoing, I will quote you a passage from the clever 
 
 hand of our friend S , the artist, now resident in 
 
 London, and fully employed in transferring aristo- 
 cratic beauty to ivory. Buckwheat and molasses, it 
 should be premised, are undiscovered luxuries to the 
 Londoners, and it is pleasant and apposite, at this par- 
 ticular season, when these friandises are in conjunc- 
 tive culmination, to see how they loom in the travel- 
 ler's memory. Says our friend : — 
 
 "So you have taken up your abode at the Astor. 
 You have done well. There are many good things 
 it the Astor; above all. the buckwheats; and I can 
 
 fancy you at this moment, while I am breaking my 
 fast upon a flabby ' French roll' (so called because no 
 bread of the kind was ever seen in France), with a 
 pile of them smoking before you, and pouring over 
 them, with a liberal hand, copious libations of that 
 exquisite, delicate, transparent molasses which the As- 
 tor alone provides, and which has always reminded me 
 of the wine of the veiled prophet — 
 
 'No juice of earth is here, 
 But the pure treacle of that upper sphere 
 Whose rills o'er ruby beds and topaz flow, 
 Catching the gem's bright color as they go.' " 
 
 A letter from a literary friend in London informs 
 me that Lady Blessington is suffering from a lethargy 
 from which she finds it next to impossible to arouse 
 herself for literary labor. The society she lives in 
 draws very exhaustingly upon her powers of atten- 
 tion, and she has been all her life one of those who 
 " crowd a year's life into a day." My friend adds: — 
 
 " You had some expectation of seeing D'Orsay in 
 America, but he never had any intention of going out. 
 He has been a prisoner for the last two years in Lady 
 Blessington's house, at Kensington. There is an 
 acre or two of garden, as you know, in the rear, shut 
 in with a wall high enough to keep out creditors, and 
 here D'Orsay takes his exercise on horseback. He 
 devotes himself entirely to painting, making portraits 
 of his friends and receiving money for them — in short, 
 making a profession of it. Every Saturday night, at 
 twelve o'clock, precisely, his cab is at the door, and 
 he drives to his club, and on Sundays he is to be seen 
 in the park, driving with Lady Blessington and her 
 two exquisitely beautiful nieces (the Misses Power) — 
 taking care to be home again, like Cinderella, before 
 twelve o'clock at night. Not long ago, a meeting of 
 his friends took place, and an effort was made to re- 
 lieve him. They subscribed twenty thousand pounds, 
 which would have given his creditors four shillings in 
 the pound. The proposal was made, and the credit- 
 ors refused to accept. The subscription was conse- 
 quently abandoned." 
 
 There is an article afloat upon the raft of fugitive 
 literature ("a stick of timber among the flood ( — ) 
 trash," as they say on the Susquehannah) which is 
 worth hauling ashore and preserving — Parke God- 
 win's Essay on Shelley, in the Democratic Review. It 
 comes from a mind of the finest powers of analysis 
 and the warmest glow of poetical appreciation, and if 
 we had in our country the class of well -patronized 
 sober magazines which they have in England, this 
 writer's pen and Whipple's would be the two best 
 worth paying in the country, for that kind of article. 
 
 Ticknor cf Co. have republished a volume of devo- 
 tional poetry by Dr. Bowring, called Matins and Ves- 
 pers. It is pure, even, moderately-inspired, and schol- 
 ar-like poetry — of the best quality for family reading. 
 The doctor's pursuits are all on a lofty level — philan- 
 thropy, patriotism, emancipation, and religion — and if 
 his other faculties (all of which are of more than re- 
 spectable calibre) were as largely developed as his 
 veneration, he would be the moral Washington of his 
 era. The last time I saw him he was in a great rage 
 with a certain Yankee, who, upon very cool acquaint- 
 ance, had drawn at sight upon his hospitality, by hav- 
 ing himself and his baggage set down in the doctor's 
 entry, and sending in the servant to borrow money to 
 pay his coach-fare from Liverpool ! With the ex- 
 
650 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 ception of this private-life " repudiator," however, he 
 is a great admirer of America and Americans. 
 
 The Langleys have got up a most presentable and 
 elegant edition of the poems of Eliza Cook — the most 
 fireside and home-like of modern poets. There is a 
 great deal in this volume that will touch the " busi- 
 ness and bosoms" of the many. Mrs. Osgood (her- 
 self a poetess of the affections, and wanting nothing 
 but a little earth in her mixture) gives a sketch of 
 Miss Cook in the preface, which is as good as a per- 
 sonal introduction. 
 
 "When the " last page" morning arrives, dear read- 
 er, we, for the first time in the week, pull the •* stop 
 politic" in our many-keyed organ of livelihood-ma- 
 king, and muse a little on expediency while the ink 
 dries upon our pen. This morning — this particular 
 morning — we chance to have "belayed," as the sail- 
 ors say, " a loose halliard" in our rigging, and in cast- 
 ing an eye " a-low and aloft," to see how it draws 
 upon the canvass, we have determined to alter a little 
 our trim and ballast. You are our passenger, dear 
 reader, and our object is to make the voyage agreea- 
 ble to you, and the query is, therefore, how much you 
 would be interested in these same details of trim, bal- 
 last, and rigging. Our coffee stands untasted (for we 
 write and breakfast, as an idle man breakfasts and 
 dawdles, all along through the up-hill of the morning), 
 and our omelet must cool while we amputate one 
 horn of this dilemma. 
 
 "We have never explained (have we ?) that as an ar- 
 tist needs a "lay-figure" whereon to adjust drapery 
 and prepare effects, an editor in the fancy line (our 
 line) requires a personification, from the mouth of 
 which he may speak with the definite identity of an 
 individual. There are a thousand little whims and 
 scraps of opinion kicking about the floor of common- 
 place, which, like bits of cloth and riband, might be 
 pinned on to a drapery with effect, though worthless 
 if simply presented to you in a bundle. A periodical 
 needs to be an individual — with a physiognomy that 
 is called up to the mind of the subscriber, and ima- 
 gined as speaking, while he reads. An apple given 
 to you by a friend at table is not like an apple taken 
 from the shelf of a huckster. An article on the lead- 
 ing topic of the day, in a paper you are not accustomed 
 to, is not read as the same article would be in your 
 favorite periodical. The friend's choice alters the 
 taste and value of the apple, as the individual editor's 
 selection or approbation gives weight and value to the 
 article. The more you are acquainted with your 
 editor — even though, in that acquaintance, you find 
 out his faults — the more interest you feel in his 
 weekly visit, and the more curiosity you feel in what 
 he offers you to read. What made the fortune of 
 Blackwood but " Christopher North's" splendid ego- 
 tism ! A magazine without a distinct physiognomy 
 visible through the type of every page, has no more 
 hold on its circulation than an orchard on the eaters 
 of apple-tarts. And if the making of this physiogno- 
 my visible be egotism, then is egotism in an apothe- 
 cary's sign, or in the maker's name in your boot-leg. 
 
 There is, of course, a nice line to be drawn between 
 the saying that of editorial self which every reader 
 would like to know, and the incurring the deserved 
 charge of egotism ; and it was by that line exactly 
 that we were trying to navigate in the dilemma with 
 which we started. Should we — or should we not — 
 bother the reader's brain with what was bothering our- 
 selves ? To a limited and bearable degree, then, we will. 
 
 We determined to live by periodical literature, and 
 we came to New York prepared, of course, to unship 
 the wings of our Pegasus and let him trot — if trotting 
 is "the go" — quite sure that if he is worth keeping, 
 
 his legs are as sound as his feathers. It is one thing 
 to be " willing to come to the scratch," however, and 
 another thing to find out definitely where the scratch 
 is. We were prepared to turn owl and armadillo — to 
 be indefatigable in our cage, and abroad only by night 
 — to live on one meal a day — to be editor, proof-reader, 
 foreman, and publisher, and as many other things as 
 we could get out of life, limb, and twenty-four hours 
 — prepared for any toil and self-denial — in short, to 
 quash debt and keep up the Mirror. Excellent vir- 
 j tue entirely thrown away ! The Mirror rose as easy 
 j as the moon, went on its way rejoicing, and is now out 
 of the reach of kites, rockets, and steeples ! Which way 
 lay — then — the dragons to vanquish ? This brings us 
 to the head and front of our dilemma. Personal slan- 
 der is the only obstacle in American literature. 
 
 So be it ! "We do not complain of it. We have 
 not the presumption to be above our country. Araer- 
 | ica demands of her literary children that they should 
 ! submit to calumny — demands it in the most emphatic 
 J of all voices, by her support of the presses which in- 
 j flict it. "We agree. We can not make shoes, though 
 ; to that trade there is no such penalty. We should 
 throw away our apprenticeship, if we attempted to 
 live, now, by any but the one trade whose household 
 gods are outlawed. We honor our country. We will 
 live by American literature, with its American draw- 
 back. We can suffer as much as another man. We 
 are no coward. We will step into the arena, and let 
 the country, that looks on, decide upon the weapons 
 and terms of combat. Yet still there is a dilemma. 
 
 We have Iried for fifteen years the silent system — 
 the living dozen slanders, as the watchman wakes 
 down the stars that rise again in twelve hours. The 
 only exception to our rule occurred in England, 
 where an English pen assumed a few American mis- 
 statements — and being "among the Romans," we did 
 as they do in such cases — got the necessary retraction 
 through the " law of honor." Lately, as perhaps the 
 reader knows, we have taken a fancy to see whether 
 there was any difference between public opinion and 
 the law, as to the protection of literary men against 
 slander. The author of a particular set of slanders 
 we chanced to light upon for the experiment, is, we 
 ' understand, a clergyman and an abolitionist, and, 
 ! though we have literally proved that he published 
 j seven or eight direct lies against our private char- 
 acter, we are condemned by many of the press for 
 what they call " Coopering an editor," and one paper 
 in Philadelphia attacks our defence of our own char- 
 acter as a shallow piece of ostentation, got up for 
 effect! We humbly ask which is most agreeable to 
 the public ? Do they like it submitted to silently, or 
 do they prefer it defended, by dragging our private 
 life with all its details into the street? We will ac- 
 commodate them — for we must live in the country we 
 were born in, and live by literature ! 
 
 One of the most beautiful sights I have lately seen 
 was the spread for the New England dinner in the 
 large dining-room of the Astor. It wonld have given, 
 even to a " picked man of countries," a heightened 
 standard of sumptuousness in banquet — in fact (and 
 republicans may as well know it), royal entertainments 
 in Europe beat it by nothing but the intrinsic value of 
 the table service. Galleries were erected for ladies 
 behind the columns at either end of the hall, and "all 
 went merry as a marriage bell." 
 
 It struck me that the " old Plymouth rock" was a 
 little too much hammered upon, and, indeed, I thought, 
 during the dinner, that the fragment of it (which was 
 set upon the table) had better be used for the weight 
 and countenance it could give to objects worthy of 
 the pilgrim spirit, than as an anvil for self-glorification. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 651 
 
 There are interests constantly arising of a philan- 
 thropic character general enough for all parties to 
 partake in, and to the sluggish movement of which 
 the steam of local patriotism might worthily be ap- 
 plied. Without the bugbear of a contribution at the 
 time, a fine orator and philanthropist like Horace 
 Mann might have been invited by the committee to 
 delight and instruct the picked audience with elo- 
 quence on oneof his apostolic schemes of benevolence. 
 As it was, the predominance of one political party 
 made it a whig dinner instead of a New England din- 
 ner. Admiring Mr. Webster as I do, and willing as I 
 am to do more to see the other remaining Titan of 
 our country (Mr. Clay) in the presidential chair than 
 for any other object not personal to myself, I wished 
 that he had replied to the " common-school" toast 
 instead of the one he selected, and kept to the spirit 
 of New England exclusively in the determination of 
 his "thunder." Mr. Bellows took up this just-men- 
 tioned topic, and compared the red school-houses 
 (more graphically than felicitously) to an eruption on 
 the face of New England ! He is a great pulpit orator, 
 but a man who is accustomed to steer by the sober 
 rudder of a pen runs adrift in trusting himself to ex- 
 temporaneous impulse. The best-judged and most 
 nicely-turned speech of the evening, 1 thought, was 
 by Mr. Colden — and quite the most applauded. 
 
 The overflow of the city's fountain of curiosity 
 pours just now into the fancy-stores and curiosity- 
 shops — the stockings of Santaclaus gaping wide for 
 " gratifications." The new bazar, with the negroes 
 in cocked hats for " sticks in waiting," is thronged 
 like a levee, and, truly, the variety of new nonsenses 
 is marvellous and bewildering. Tiffany's carries the 
 palm, and you would think, to walk around that mu- 
 seum of elegancies, that the fine arts had turned their 
 whole force and ingenuity into the invention of trifles. 
 It would be curious to trace back the genius that in- 
 vents these things to its home and condition in life. 
 
 One of the new books that will most interest you 
 and the members of congress is " Simcoe's Military 
 Journal ; a history of the operations of a partisan corps 
 called the Queen's Rangers, commanded by Lieuten- 
 ant-Colonel Simcoe, during the war of the Revolution, 
 illustrated by engraved plans of action," &c. Bartlett 
 & Welford, the great bibliologistsof New York, found 
 a copy of the work in their researches in foreign libra- 
 ries, and Mr. Bartlett, who is a scholar, thus prefaces 
 the American republication : — 
 
 " The military journal of Lieutenant-Colonel Simcoe, 
 now first published, was privately printed by the author 
 in 1787 for distribution among a few of his personal 
 friends. The production has hitherto, it would seem, 
 entirely escaped the attention of those who are curious in 
 the history of our revolutionary war. As a record of 
 some interesting particulars and local occurrences of 
 that memorable struggle, and as a well-written docu- 
 mentary illustration of the times and the circumstan- 
 ces of the American rebellion, it deserves circulation 
 and favor. The fortunate procurement of a copy of 
 the work in London enables the publishers to present 
 it in an edition securing its preservation, and facilita- 
 ting a general knowledge of its contents. A memoir 
 of so much of the author's life as is not exhibited in 
 his journal, it is thought, will interest the reader and 
 increase the permanent value of the volume. Accord- 
 ingly, such a memoir has been prepared from available 
 and authentic materials, and, by the way of introduc- 
 tion, may serve to fill out the history of the command- 
 er of the Queen's Rangers, presenting also a few facts 
 
 concerning the corps, not otherwise appearing. Not 
 to extend that portion of the publication too far, how- 
 ever, various relevant quotations from different sources, 
 interesting essentially and expletive in their character, 
 are thrown into the appendix, in addition to what the 
 journalist has given in that form himself." 
 
 There is a very well-conducted paper in New York 
 called the " Mirror of Fashion," the avowed object 
 of which is to furnish plates and descriptions of gentle- 
 men's fashions in dress — this feature taking the place, 
 in a sheet of general interest, which politics or religion 
 take in others. One sentence of the advertisement 
 runs thus : — 
 
 " I shall strive my utmost to make the Mirror of 
 Fashion reflect all the important changes in styles of 
 dress, whether in cut, color, or make, that may from 
 month to month be adopted in this metropolis, always 
 eschewing the freaks and follies of foreign fancy. I 
 shall, as I ever have done, recommend only that 
 which is strictly consonant with American feelings 
 and predilections." 
 
 The motto of the paper, very properly, is taken from 
 Carlyle's, " Sartor Resartus." Thus, in the one preg- 
 nant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included 
 all that men have thought, dreamed, done, or been ; 
 the whole external universe, and what it holds, is but 
 clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the 
 philosophy of clothes. There is evidently a man of 
 reading and talent at the head of this paper, and the 
 subject touches men's " business and bosom" so close- 
 ly and widely that it may well be considered a qua- 
 trieme etat, and have its organ to represent it. 
 
 If May be the season for " the raging calenture of 
 love," this is the calenture of the social affections — 
 the fever-crisis of the year, when the heat that is in 
 the system comes to the surface. Most quiet men 
 go to a ball or two in the holydays — dance a quadrille 
 or two to show the old year that they are not of its 
 party in going out — pay a compliment or two more 
 flowery than their wont ; in short, put on the outer 
 seeming which would befit them in a Utopia. I have 
 tried on, like others, for the last week or two, this holy- 
 day humor; and, though I shall be accused of " keep- 
 ing a sharp eye to business," I must jot down for you 
 a thought or two that has occurred to me, critical and 
 comparative, or the present condition of New York 
 society. 
 
 It strikes me that there is no provision in the gay 
 society of New York for people of middle age. A 
 man between thirty-five and forty is invited to a large 
 party. He goes too early if he arrives before eleven. 
 He finds the two principal rooms stripped of carpets 
 and of most of the sitting-down furniture, and the re- 
 ception-room entirely lined with the mammas and 
 chaperons of the young ladies on the floor. How- 
 ever he might be a "dancing man" in Europe, where 
 people dance till their knees fail them, he knows that 
 in this haste-to-grow-old country it would be com- 
 mented harshly upon, especially if he has a wife, for 
 whom it is expected his overflow of spirits should be 
 reserved. As he don't dance, he would like to con- 
 verse. The old ladies talk of nothing but their daugh- 
 ters, and the daughters, if not dancing, think it would 
 repel a probable partner to seem much occupied iu 
 conversation. He looks around for a sofa and a lady 
 who don't dance. Sofa there is none, and in a chair 
 in the corner perhaps there is one lady who is neither 
 young nor old — rara avis! He approaches her, and, 
 well nigh jammed against the wall, undertakes a con- 
 versation not audible (he standing and she sitting) un- 
 
652 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 less kept up at a scream. After a half hour of this, 
 the lady, if she be discreet, remembers that "it looks 
 particular" to be engrossed more than half an hour by 
 one gentleman, and looks or says so. The middle- 
 aged man slides along the wall, gets back into the 
 crowded reception-room, talks a little to the chaperons, 
 comes back and looks on at the waltz, and so passes 
 the three hours till supper — on his legs. The ladies 
 take an hour to sup, and, about three o'clock, he gels 
 a corner for some oysters and champagne, and between 
 that and four o'clock gets home to bed. He is a busi- 
 ness man and rises at eight, and by three o'clock the 
 next day he looks and feels as a man naturally would 
 who had burnt his candle at both ends— -for nothing! 
 
 It is not wonderful that there are no conveniences 
 for conversation in society, for there really is no con- 
 versation to provide for. The want would create the 
 supply. It is one of the most peculiar of our country's 
 features that conversation is not cultivated as a pleasure. 
 When American women leave off dancing they think 
 they have done with society till they reappear to bring 
 out their daughters. All the agreeableness of their 
 middle life — the most attractive and delightful portion 
 of like too, perhaps — is expended on an appreciative 
 husband who wants and uses it all ! Not at all as a 
 disparagement to this state of things, perhaps you will 
 allow me to mention a case, that may be somewhat par- 
 allel, which has turned up in my zoological reading : 
 " These little insects (the coccus, of the family gal- 
 insecta) are remarkable for many peculiarities in their 
 habits and conformation. The inales have long large 
 wings ! The females have no wings, but at a certain 
 period of their life attach themselves to the plant or 
 tree which they inhabit, and remain thereon immove- 
 able during the rest of their existence. As soon as 
 the eggs are produced, they pass immediately under 
 the female parent, whose body becomes their stationa- 
 ry covering and guard. By degrees her body dries up 
 and flattens, and forms a sort of a shell, and, when life 
 is quite extinct, the young insects leave their hiding- 
 place." Whether society has not some claim on them 
 — whether their minds would not be kept from narrow- 
 ing by conversation with agreeable men — whether the 
 one exclusive errand of the loveliest portion of humani- 
 ty is to rear children, are questions which in this 
 country must be handled very gingerly — at least in 
 print. I may be permitted to go on and say " how 
 they do in Spain," however. 
 
 A middle-aged man in London may or may not be 
 a dancer. There is no comment either way — but he 
 must be something — dancer or good conversationist, or 
 he is dropped as " lumbering up the party." Few 
 men can afford to be seen by the mistress of the house 
 to be unamused and unamusing. A cultivated man, 
 then, who don't dance, gets an hour or two of pleas- 
 ant society in the early part of the evening at the 
 opera. If there is a small party afterward he prefers 
 it to a ball ; but if he goes to the ball he finds that the 
 pleasantest people there are the married women. 
 They do not sit together without room for a gentle- 
 man between them, but every lady is bodily approach- 
 able, and with a little management he can get a com- 
 fortable seat beside any one whom he may know and 
 prefer. If he find her interesting, and talk to her the 
 whole evening, there is no scandal, unless there are 
 other corroborating circumstances ; indeed, the open- 
 ness of the attention would rather discredit any unfa- 
 vorable comment. If there is a new lion present, or 
 any attraction peculiar to one person, a small circle is 
 formed in a corner, or a group stand around and let 
 the conversation be managed by the persons most 
 interested, like listening to music. You could seldom 
 go to a party in London without hearing something 
 worth telling to a person not there, and society (not the 
 newspapers) has the first use and enjoyment of all 
 news and novelties of every description. Newspapers 
 
 are stale to a man actively conversant in the best 
 society of London. People collect news, and see 
 sights, and invent theories, and study and think — to 
 have material for being brilliant in society, and for no 
 other purpose. A habitue of the best houses grows 
 well-informed by absorption only — if he keep his ears 
 open. And this entire stage of society is wanting in 
 New York. 
 
 An intelligent gentleman remarked lately upon the 
 absurdity of copying English hours for gayety, with- 
 out copying the compensating English hours for repose. 
 It is the aim of aristocracy to have such habits as to 
 distinguish aristocrats from the working-classes, and 
 lords and ladies please themselves with going home to 
 sleep when the clowns are getting up to toil. * Until 
 we can afford to lie abed like a lord, till noon, we are 
 fools to lose the clown's slumber, and a fashionable 
 lady would deserve well of her country who would 
 tacitly acknowledge her husband to be a man of busi- 
 ness, by giving her party at hours when he and his 
 merchant-friends could attend without loss of needful 
 sleep. Who would not be glad to go to a ball at seven 
 instead of eleven ? This change, and the introduction 
 of comforts and accommodations for conversible wall- 
 flowers, would, in my opinion, improve even the 
 charming circles of grown-up children who now con- 
 stitute New York society. 
 
 1 see no very marked differences in the dress or 
 usages of the ball-room. Rather more waltzing and 
 less quadrilling, if anything — but still " marvellous 
 few" tolerable waltzers. Could most of the waltzing 
 men in New York "see themselves as others see 
 them," they would practise the difficult ease of this 
 accomplishment elsewhere for a while. The lower 
 classes of Germans have balls in their peculiar haunts 
 which it would be good practice to attend. 
 
 HOW TO MAKE A PARADISE IN THE COUNTRY. 
 
 The back of the winter is broke, dear reader, and it is 
 down-hill to spring. Those who have not our brick 
 and mortar destiny, are chatting, over their evening 
 table, of gardens and fruit-trees, crops and embellish- 
 ments, and longing the snow off their lawns and fields, 
 and the frost out of their furrows. We have been 
 passing a leisure (not an idle) hour in reading our 
 friend Downing's elegant and tempting book on rural 
 architecture — a book which, with others by the same 
 scholarlike and tasteful pen, we commend to your pos- 
 session — and it brings to our mind a long letter we 
 wrote during our last year's residence on the Susque- 
 hannah, on the subject of economical and comeatable 
 paradise-making in the country. For a change — let 
 us turn over for you this leaf of our common-sense 
 book. Thus runs the body of it : — 
 
 Landscape-gardening is a pleasant subject to expand 
 into an imaginative article, and I am not surprised that 
 men, sitting amid hot editorials in a city (the month 
 of July), find a certain facility in creating woods and 
 walks, planting hedges and building conservatories. 
 So may the brain be refreshed, I well know, even with 
 the smell of printing-ink in the nostrils. But land- 
 scape-gardening, as within the reach of the small 
 farmer people, is quite another thing, and to be man- 
 aged (as brain-gardening need not be, to be sure) with 
 economy and moderation. Tell us in the quarterlies, 
 if you will, what a man may do with a thousand acres 
 and plenty of money ; but we will endeavor to show 
 what may be done with fifty acres and a spare hour in 
 the evening — by the tasteful farmer, or the tradesman 
 retired on small means. These own their fifty acres 
 (more or less), up to the sky and down to the bottom 
 of their "diggings," and as nature lets the tree grow 
 and the flower expand for a man, without reference to 
 his account at the bank, they have it in their power to 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 653 
 
 embellish, and most commonly, they have also the 
 inclination. Beginners, however, at this as at most 
 other things, are at the mercy of injudicious counsel,' 
 and lew books can be more expensively misapplied 
 than the treatises on landscape-gardening. 
 
 The most intense and sincere lovers of the country 
 are citizens who have fled to rural life in middle age, 
 and old travellers who are weary, heart and foot, and j 
 long for shelter and rest. Both these classes of men 
 are ornamental in their tastes — the first because the 
 country is his passion, heightened by abstinence; and 
 the latter because he remembers the secluded and ij 
 sweet spots he has crossed id travel, and yearns for j 
 something that resembles them, of his own. To begin I 
 at the beginning, I will suppose such a man as either i 
 of these in search of land to purchase and build upon, j 
 His means are moderate. 
 
 Leaving the climate and productiveness of soil I 
 out of the question, the main things to find united are | 
 shade, water, and inequality of surface. With these j 
 three features given by nature, any spot may be made 
 beautiful, and at very little cost; and, fortunately for 
 purchasers in this country, most land is valued and I 
 sold with little or no reference to these or other capa- 
 bilitiea for embellishment. Water, in a country so 
 laced with rivers, is easily found. Yet there are hints 
 worth giving, perhaps, obvious as they seem, even in the 
 selection of water. A small and rapid river is prefer- |.| 
 able to a large river or lake. The Hudson, for in- 
 stance, is too broad to bridge, and beautiful as the 
 sites are upon its banks, the residents have but one 
 egress and one drive — the country behind them. If 
 they could cross to the other side, and radiate in every 
 direction in their evening drives, the villas on that 
 noble river would be trebled in value. One soon tires 
 of riding up and down one bank of a river, and with- 
 out a taste for boating, the beautiful expanse of water 
 soon becomes an irksome barrier. Very much the | 
 same remark is true of the borders of lakes, with the 
 additiooal objection, that there is no variety to the 
 view. A small, bright stream, such as hundreds of 
 nameless ones in these beautiful northern slates, ; 
 spanned by bridges, at every half mile, followed always 
 by the roads which naturally seek the level, and wind- 
 ing into picturesque surprises, appearing and disap- 
 pearing, continually, is, in itself, an ever-renewing 
 poem, crowded with changeable pictures, and every 
 day tempting you to follow or trace back its bright I 
 current. Small rivers, again, insure to a degree the 
 other two requisites — shade and inequality of surface — 
 the interval being proportionately narrow, and backed j 
 by slopes and alluvial soil, usually producing the 
 various nut and maple trees, which, for their fruit and 
 sap, have been spared by the inexorable axes of the 
 first settlers. If there is any land in the country, the 
 price of which is raised from the supposed desirable- 
 ness of the site, it is upon the lakes and larger rivers, 
 leaving the smaller rivers, fortunately, still within the 
 scale of the people's means. 
 
 One more word as to the selection of a spot. The 
 rivers in the United States, more than those of older 
 countries, are variable in their quantity of water. The 
 banks of many of the most picturesque, present, at 
 the season of the year when we most wish it other- j 
 wise (in the sultry heats of August and September), | 
 bared rocks or beds of ooze, while the stream runs 
 slujjsjishly and uninvitingly between. Those which 
 are fed principally by springs, however, are less liable 
 to the effects of drought than those which are the 
 outlets of large bodies of water; and indeed, there is 
 great difference in rivers in this respect, depending on 
 the decree in which their courses are shaded, and ; 
 other causes. It will be safest, consequently, to select 
 a site in August, when the water is at the lowest, pre- > 
 ferring, of course, a bold and high bank as a protec- 
 tion against freshets and flood-wood. The remotest! 
 
 chance of a war with water, damming against wash 
 and flood, fills an old settler with economical alarm. 
 
 It was doubtless a "small chore" for the deluge to 
 heave up a mound or slope a bank, but with one spade 
 at a dollar a day, the moving of earth is a discour- 
 aging job, and in selecting a place to live it is well to 
 be apprized what diggings may become necessary, and 
 how your hay and water, wood, visiters, and lumber 
 generally, are to come and go. A man's first fancy 
 is commonly to build on a hill ; but as he lives on, 
 year after year, he would like his house lower and 
 lower, till, if the fairies had done it for him at each 
 succeeding wish, he would trouble them at last to dig 
 his cellar at the bottom. It is hard mounting a hill 
 daily, with tired horses, and it is dangerous driving 
 down with full-bellied ones from the stable-door, and 
 your friends deduct from the pleasure of seeing you, 
 the inconvenience of ascending and descending. The 
 view, for which you build high, you soon discover is 
 not daily bread, but an occasional treat, more worth, as 
 well as better liked for the walk to get it, and (you 
 have selected your site, of course, with a southern 
 exposure) a good stiff hill at your back, nine months 
 in the year, saves several degrees of the thermometer, 
 and sundry chimney-tops, barn-roofs, and other furni- 
 ture peripatetic in a tempest. Then your hill-road 
 washes with the rains, and needs continual mending, 
 and the dweller on the hill needs one more horse and 
 two more oxen than the dweller in the valley. One 
 thing more. There rises a night-mist (never un- 
 wholesome from running water), which protects fruit- 
 trees from frost to a certain level above the river, at 
 certain critical seasons, and so end the reasons for 
 building low. 
 
 I am supposing all along, dear reader, that you have 
 had no experience of country-life, but that, sick of a 
 number in a brick block, or (if a traveller) weary of 
 "the perpetual flow of people," you want a patch of 
 the globe's surface to yourself, and room enough to 
 scream, let off champagne-corks, or throw stones, 
 without disturbance to your neighbor. The intense 
 yearning for this degree of liberty has led some seek- 
 ers after the pastoral rather farther into the wilderness 
 than was necessary; and while writing on the subject 
 of a selection of rural sites, it is worth while, perhaps, 
 to specify the desirable degree of neighborhood. 
 
 In your own person, probably, you do not combine 
 blacksmith, carpenter, tinman, grocer, apothecary, 
 wet-uurse, dry-nurse, washerwoman, and doctor. 
 Shoes and clothes can wait your convenience for 
 mending; but the little necessities supplied by the 
 above list of vocations are rather imperative, and they 
 can only be ministered to in any degree of comfortable 
 perfection, by a village of at least a thousand inhabit- 
 ants. Two or three miles is far enough to send your 
 horse to be shod, and far enough to send for doctor or 
 washerwoman, and half the distance would be better, 
 if there were no prospect of the extension of the vil- 
 lage limits. But the common diameter of idle boys' 
 rambles is a mile out of the village, and to be just 
 beyond that is very necessary, if you care lor your 
 plums and apples. The church-bell should be within 
 hearing, and it is mellowed deliciously by a mile or 
 two of hill and dale, and your wife will probably 
 belong to a " sewing-circle," to which it is very much 
 for her health to walk, especially if the horse is wanted 
 for ploughing. This suggests to me another point 
 which I had nearly overlooked. 
 
 The farmer pretends to no "gentility;" I may be 
 permitted to say, therefore, that neighbors are a lux- 
 ury, both expensive and inconvenient. The necessity 
 you feel for society, of course, will modify very much 
 the just-stated considerations on the subject of vicin- 
 age. He who has lived only in towns, or passed his 
 life (as travellers do) only as a receiver of hospitality, 
 is little aware of the difference hetween a country and 
 
654 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 city call, or between receiving a visit and paying one. 
 In town, " not at home," in any of its shapes, is a 
 great preserver of personal liberty, and gives no 
 offence. In the country you are " at home," will-you, 
 nill-you. As a stranger paying a visit, you choose the 
 time most convenient to yourself, and abridge the call 
 at pleasure. In your own house, the visiter may find 
 you at a very inconvenient hour, stay a very inconve- 
 nient time, and as you have no liberty to deny your- 
 self at your country door, it may (or may not, 1 say, 
 according to your taste) be a considerable evil. This 
 point should be well settled, however, before you de- 
 termine your distance from a closely-settled neighbor- 
 hood, for many a man would rather send his horse 
 two miles farther to be shod than live within the con- 
 venience of "sociable neighbors." A resident in a 
 city, by-the-way (and it is a point which should be 
 kept in mind by the retiring metropolitan) has, prop- 
 erly speaking, no neighbors. He has friends, chosen 
 or made by similarity of pursuit, congeniality of taste, 
 or accident, which might have been left unimproved. 
 His literal neighbors he knows by name — if they keep 
 a brass plate, but they are contented to know as little 
 of him, and the acquaintance ends, without offence, 
 in the perusal of the name and number on the door. 
 In the city you pick your friends. In the country 
 you "take them in the lump." 
 
 True, country neighbors are almost always desirable 
 acquaintances — simple in their habits, and pure in 
 their morals and conversation. But this letter is ad- 
 dressed to men retiring from the world, who look for- 
 ward to the undisturbed enjoyment of trees and fields, 
 who expect life to be filled up with the enjoyment of 
 dew at morn, shade at noon, and the glory of sunset 
 and starlight, and who consider the complete repose 
 of the articulating organs, and release from oppressive 
 and unmeaning social observances, as the fruition of 
 Paradise. To men who have experience or philosophy 
 enough to have reduced life to this, I should recom- 
 mend a distance of five miles from any village or any 
 family with grown-up daughters. In my character of 
 dollar, I may be forgiven for remarking, also, that this 
 degree of seclusion doubles an income (by enabling a 
 man to live on half of it), and so, freeing the mind 
 from the care of pelf, removes the very gravest of the 
 obstacles to happiness. I refer to no saving which in- 
 fringes on comfort. The housekeeper who caters for 
 her own family in an unvisited seclusion, and the 
 housekeeper who provides for her family with an eye 
 to the possible or probable interruption of acquaintan- 
 ces not friends, live at very different rates ; and the 
 latter adds one dish to the bounty of the table, per- 
 haps, but two to its vanity. Still more in the comfort 
 and expensiveness of dress. The natural and most 
 blissful costume of man in summer, all told, is shirt, 
 slippers, and pantaloons. The compulsory articles of 
 coat, suspenders, waistcoat, and cravat (gloves would 
 be ridiculous), are a tribute paid to the chance of visi- 
 ters, as is also, probably, some dollars' difference in 
 the quality of the hat. 
 
 I say nothing of the comfort of a bad hat (one you 
 can sit upon, or water your horse from, or bide the 
 storm in, without remorse), nor of the luxury of hav- 
 ing half a dozen, which you do when they are cheap, 
 and so saving the mental burthen of retaining the 
 geography of an article so easily mislaid. A man is 
 a slave to anything on his person he is afraid to spoil 
 — a slave (if he is not rich, as we are not, dear reader!) 
 to any costly habiliment whatever. The trees nod no 
 less graciously (it is a pleasure to be able to say), be- 
 cause one's trousers are of a rational volume over the 
 portion most tried by a sedentary man, nor because 
 one's hat is of an equivocal shape — having served as 
 a non-conductor between a wet log and its proprietor; 
 but ladies do — especially country ladies; and even if 
 they did not, there is enough of the leaven of youth, 
 
 even in philosophers, to make them unwilling to ap- 
 pear to positive disadvantage, and unless you are quite 
 at your ease as to even the ridiculous shabbiness of 
 your outer man, there is no liberty — no economical 
 liberty, I mean — in rural life. Do not mislead your- 
 self, dear reader! I am perfectly aware that a Span- 
 ish sombrero, a pair of large French trousers plaited 
 over the hips, a well made English shoe, and a hand- 
 some checked shirt, form as easy a costume for the 
 country as philosopher could desire. But I write for 
 men who must attain the same comfort in a shirt of a 
 perfectly independent description, trousers, oftenest, 
 that have seen service as tights, and show a fresher 
 dye in the seams, a hat, price twenty-five cents (by the 
 dozen), and shoes of a remediless capriciousness of 
 outline. 
 
 I acknowledge that such a costume is a liberty with 
 daylight, which should only be taken within one's own 
 fence, and that it is a misfortune to be surprised in it 
 by a stranger, even there. But I wish to impress upon 
 those to whom this letter is addressed, the obligations 
 of country neighborhood as to dress and table, and the 
 expediency of securing the degree of liberty which 
 may be desired, by a barrier of distance. Sociable 
 country neighbors, as I said before, are a luxury, but 
 they are certainly an expensive one. Judging by data 
 within my reach, I should say that a man who could 
 live for fifteen hundred dollars a year, within a mile of 
 a sociable village, could have the same personal com- 
 forts at ten miles distance for half the money. He 
 numbers, say fifteen families, in his acquaintance, and 
 of course pays at the rate of fifty dollars a family for 
 their gratification. Now it is a question whether you 
 would not rather have the money in board fence or 
 Berkshire hogs. You may like society, and yet not 
 like it at such a high price. Or (but this would lead 
 me to another subject) you may prefer society in a 
 lump ; and with a house full of friends in the months 
 of June and July, live in contemplative and economi- 
 cal solitude the remainder of the year. And this latter 
 plan I take the liberty to recommend more particular- 
 ly, to students and authors. 
 
 Touching " grounds." The first impulses of taste 
 are dangerous to follow, no less from their blindness to 
 unforeseen combinations, than from their expensive- 
 ness. In placing your house as far from the public 
 road as possible (and a considerable distance from dust 
 and intrusion, seems at first a sine qua non) you entail 
 upon yourself a very costly appendage in the shape of 
 a private road, which of course must be nicely gravel- 
 led and nicely kept. A walk or drive, within your 
 gate, which is not hard and free from weeds, is as 
 objectionable as an untidy white dress upon a lady, 
 and as she would be better clad in russet, your road 
 were better covered with grass. I may as well say 
 that a hundred yards of gravel-walk, properly " scored," 
 weeded, and rolled, will cost five dollars a month — a 
 man's labor reckoned at the present usage. Now no 
 person for whom this letter is written can afford to 
 keep more than one man servant for " chores." A 
 hundred yards of gravel-walk, therefore, employing 
 half his time, you can easily calculate the distribution 
 of the remainder, upon the flower-garden, kitchen- 
 garden, wood-shed, stable, and piggery. (The female 
 " help" should milk, if I died for it !) My own opin- 
 ion is, that fifty yards from the road is far enough, and 
 twenty a more prudent distance, though, in the latter 
 case, an impervious screen of shrubbery along your 
 outer fence is indispensable. 
 
 The matter of gravel-walks embraces several points 
 of rural comfort, and, to do without them, you must 
 have no young ladies in your acquaintance, and, 
 especially, no young gentlemen from the cities. It 
 may not have occurred to you in your sidewalk life, 
 that the dew falls in the country with tolerable regu- 
 laritv ; and that, from sundown to ten in the forenoon, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 655 
 
 you are as much insulated in a cottage surrounded 
 with high grass, as on a rock surrounded with forty 
 fathom water— shod a la mode, I mean. People talk j 
 of being " pent up in a city" with perhaps twenty ; 
 imlcs of flagged sidewalk extending from their door- j 
 stone ! They are apt to draw a contrast, favorable to j 
 the liberty of cities, however, if they come thinly shod | 
 to the country, and must either wade in the grass or . 
 •tumble through the ruts of a dusty road. If you | 
 wish to see bodies acted on by an " exhausted receiver" \ 
 /giving out their "airs" of course), shut up your! 
 young city friends in a country cottage, by the com- 
 pulsion of wet grass and muddy highways. Better 
 gravel your whole farm, you say. But having reduced 
 you to this point of horror, you are prepared to listen 
 without contempt, while 1 suggest two humble suc- 
 ccdanca. 
 
 First : On receiving intimation of a probable visit j 
 from a city friend, write by return of post for the size ] 
 of her foot (or his). Provide immediately a pair of 
 India-rubber shoes of the corresponding number, and 
 on the morning after your friend's arrival, be ready ! 
 with them at the first horrified withdrawal of the damp 
 foot from the grass. Your shoes may cost you a 
 dollar a pair, but if your visiters are not more than j 
 ten or twelve in the season, it is a saving of fifty per , 
 cent., at least in gravelling and weeding. 
 
 Or, Second : Enclose the two or three acres imme- 
 diately about your house with a ring fence, and pasture 
 within it a small flock of sheep. They are clean and 
 picturesque (your dog should be taught to keep them 
 from the doors and porticoes), and by feeding down the 
 grass to a continual greensward, they give the dew a 
 chance to dry off early and enlarge your cottage 
 " liberties" to the extent of their browsings. 
 
 I may as well add, by the way, that a walk with the 
 sod simply taken off, is, in this climate, dry enough, j 
 except for an hour or two after a heavy rain ; and be- 
 sides the original saving in gravel, it is kept clean with ! 
 a quarter of the trouble. A weed imbedded in stones j 
 is a much more obstinate customer than a score of j 
 them sliced from the smooth ground. At any rate, 
 out with them ! A neglected walk indicates that | 
 worst of country diseases, a mind grown slovenly and ' 
 slip-slop! Your house may go unpainted, and your! 
 dress (with one exception) submit to the course of , 
 events — but be scrupulous in the whiteness of your j 
 linen, tenacious of the neatness of your gravel-walks; j 
 and, while these points hold, you are at a redeemable 
 remove from the lapse (fatally prone and easy), into 
 barbarianism and misanthropy. 
 
 Before I enter upon the cultivation of grounds, let 
 me lay before the reader my favorite idea of a cottage 
 — not a collage ornce but a collage insoucieuse, if I may \ 
 coin a phrase. In the valley of Sweet Waters, on the 
 banks of the Barbyses, there stands a small pleasure I 
 palace of the sultan, which looks as if it was dropped 
 into the green lap of nature, like a jewel-case on a 
 birth-day, with neither preparation on the part of the 
 bestower, nor disturbance on the part of the receiver. 
 From the balcony's foot on every side extends an un- 
 broken sod to the horizon. Gigantic trees shadow 
 the grass here and there, and an enormous marble 
 vase, carved in imitation of a sea-shell, turns the silver 
 Barbyses in a curious cascade over its lip; but else, 
 it is all Nature's lap, with its bauble resting in velvet 
 — no gardens, no fences, no walls, no shrubberies — a 
 beautiful valley with the sky resting on its rim, and 
 nothing in it save one fairy palace. The simplicity 
 of the thing enchanted me, and, in all my yearnings 
 after rural seclusion, this vision of old travel has, more 
 or less, colored my fancy. You see what I mean, 
 with half an eye. Gardens are beautiful, shrubberies 
 ornamental, summer-houses and alleys, and gravelled 
 paths, all delightful — but they are, each and all, taxes 
 —heavy taxes on mind, time, and "dollar/' Perhaps 
 
 you like them. Perhaps you want the occupation. 
 But some men, of small means, like a contemplative 
 idleness in the country. Some men's time never 
 hangs heavily under a tree. Some men like to lock 
 their doors (or to be at liberty to do so), and be gone 
 for a month, without dread of gardens plundered, 
 flowers trod down, shrubs browsed off by cattle. Some 
 men like nothing out of doors but that which can take 
 care of itself — the side of a house or a forest-tree, or 
 an old horse in a pasture. These men, too, like that 
 which is beautiful, and for such I draw this picture 
 of the collage insoucieuse. What more simply elegant 
 than a pretty structure in the lap of a green dell ! 
 What more convenient ! What so economical ! 
 Sheep (we may " return to muttons") are cheaper 
 "help" than men, and if they do not keep your green- 
 sward so brightly mown, they crop it faithfully and 
 turn the crop to better account. The only rule of 
 perfect independence in the country is to make no 
 "improvement" which requires more attention than 
 the making. So — you are at liberty to take your wife 
 to the springs. So— you can join a coterie at Niagara 
 at a letter's warning. So — you can spend a winter in 
 Italy without leaving half your income to servants who 
 keep house at home. So — you can sleep without 
 dread of hail-storms on your graperies or green-houses, 
 without blunderbuss for depredators of fruit, without 
 distress at slugs, cut-worms, drought, or breachy cattle. 
 Nature is .prodigal of flowers, grapes are cheaper bought 
 than raised, fruit idem, butter idem (though you mayn't 
 think so), and as for amusement — the man who can 
 not find it between driving, fishing, shooting, strolling, 
 and reading (to say nothing of less selfish pleasures), 
 has no business in the country. He should go back 
 to town. 
 
 We have a pleasant and welcome correspondent 
 who signs himself " r. h. d.," and we have a treasured 
 and admired friend known to the world as Richard H. 
 Dana — and they are two different persons. We must 
 beg our friend of the three disembodied initials to give 
 way to the embodied three of the poet, though, as we 
 well know, the three first letters of a man's name may 
 be as momentous to him as the three legs to the 
 " moving tripods" seen in the Indian temples by Apol- 
 lonius. His miracle may be in them ! We ourself 
 have been un-phcenixed of late (we thought there was 
 but one of our kind !) by the discovery that there was 
 another N. P. Willis — (not a quill-pincher, we are 
 pleased to understand). 
 
 "Florian" wishes us to "draw the portrait of a man 
 fitted by nature to be an editor." A model editor 
 would be very difficult to describe, but among other 
 things, he should answer to the description given in 
 the sporting books of the dunghill cock : " The best 
 cocks should be close hitters, deadly heelers, steady 
 fighters, good mouthers, and come to every point." 
 
 The poem sent us without a signature, " on a lady 
 with a sweet breath," implies rather too close quarters 
 for print. Poetry for these days must beat arms' length. 
 The new epithet " pimento breath" ought not to be 
 lost, however— quite the spiciest new word that has 
 lately been rolled under our tongue. It never occur- 
 red to us before that there was one word to express 
 cinnamon, nutmegs, and cloves. We wish we could 
 manufacture more of these single triplicates. Does 
 our nameless correspondent know, by the way, that 
 bad breath in Prussia is good ground for divorce ? 
 We recommend him to write a parody on " Knowst 
 thou the land," &c. 
 
656 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 The Boston papers are glorifying (as was to be ex- 
 pected) the new volume of poems by Russell Lowell. 
 We wish for a sight of it, for we are his self-elected 
 trumpeter, and haste to know the key for a new blast. 
 By the way. we have taken the liberty (as the immor- 
 tality he is bound for is a long race) to drop the en- 
 cumbrance of James from his musical name, and here- 
 after we shall economize breath, type, and harmony, 
 by calling him Russell Lowell. 
 
 An editor is not supposed (as the world and subscri- 
 bers to newspapers know) to require or possess the 
 luxury of sleep. We sleep with one eye open — we 
 scorn to deny. We see all that is going on about us, 
 daylight or dark, and Washington being the fountain 
 of law, order, and information, we duly give the alarm 
 
 like the geese who saved the capitol. Our readers 
 
 have, from week to week, read our lucubrations in 
 this wise, and here are are some more of them. We 
 send them forth as daguerreotypes of the present — 
 sent as records of matters as they fly. We think 
 they are worth preserving bodily — and we so preserve 
 them. 
 
 The first day of '44 came in like a specimen num- 
 ber of a magazine, and the open doors of New York 
 had at least one unexpected visiter in a veritable Oc- 
 tober sun. The day was mild enough to make over- 
 coats uncomfortable in walking — the pavement was dry 
 and summery — and all the male world seemed abroad. 
 The household gods of Manhattan were probably unan- 
 imous in their happiness — as all the ladies were " at 
 home," and all the ladies' lords were bound to be 
 41 out." This morning the weather is still softer — 
 October, possibly, like other popular persons, not find- 
 ing one day to suffice for its visits. 
 
 I have a headache on the top of my pen, and can 
 not venture any further description of new-year's day 
 than the above facts, though yesterday I thought I 
 could make you a tip-top gossipy letter out of the 
 day's hilarities. The hosts of the Astor wound up the 
 excitement for their guests by a superb dinner at can- 
 dlelight, with champagne and sweetmeats " a discre- 
 tion" and altogether, I think January one must be 
 marked with a white stone. 
 
 You have read, of course, and loved (much more, 
 of course) Leigh Hunt's poem of The Rimini. Tick- 
 nor & Co., of Boston, have republished it in one of 
 their beautiful boudoir editions, and along with it, in 
 the same neat volume, the half dozen other poems, 
 most famed, of Hunt's prolific pen. The story (of the 
 lady who married one brother and loved the other) is 
 told with a sort of entire neiv-ness of style and lan- 
 guage, as if it were the one admirable work of a natu- 
 ral but unpractised poet, and it sticks to the memory 
 after it is read like Moore's rose-scent to the vase. 
 Leigh Hunt is a born poet, but one of the most un- 
 happy citizens of the world that the world holds. 
 With all the mental capabilities (the wit, the delicacy, 
 the imagination, and the desire) to be the carpet-poet 
 of aristocracy that Moore is, he has a most wo-begone 
 person, and a most marvellous lack of tact and relia- 
 bility- He never can stay acquainted with the only 
 people who, by refinement and talent, are alone capa- 
 ble of making friendship comfortable to him; and he 
 has quarrelled with most other of his great contempo- 
 raries, as he did with Byron. And, by the way, he is 
 dead — by epigram ! Moore's felicitously-witty verses 
 on Hunt's Life of Byron killed him quite out of con- 
 temporary respect. The ludicrous image of the pup- 
 py-dog desecrating the body of the dead lion follows 
 him into every drawing-room and walks behind him 
 
 in every street. He will never recover from that epi- 
 gram. Indeed, he has never been like himself since 
 it was written. It is the most signal extinction of a 
 great genius by ridicule that I know of on record — 
 more enduring, from the fact that the English, among 
 their other conservative peculiarities, have none of our 
 marvellous alacrity at public forgetting. Had Leigh 
 Hunt been born with a little thicker skin, somewhat 
 a cooler head, and the inestimable power of catching 
 the snowballs of ridicule in his bosom, and keeping 
 them there till they could be thrown back hardened 
 into ice, he might have been something between Fon- 
 blanque and Moore, Thiers and Janin, and equal at 
 least to either of these powerful "penditti." As it is, 
 he is uncomfortably poor, and more uncomfortably 
 i<n-complacent. With two lines, very Leigh-Hunt- 
 ish, I cut my paragraph short. He is describing 
 Apollo's revery while resolving upon the Feast of the 
 Poets : — 
 
 " ' I think,' said the god, recollecting (and then 
 He fell twiddling a sunbeam as I would a pen) ." 
 
 A very superb book of drawings is being subscribed 
 for in New York — " Forty Atmospheric Views of 
 American Scenery," from water-color drawings by 
 George Harvey. The engravings ere to be in aqua- 
 tint, and to be beautifuly and artistically colored, so as 
 closely to resemble the original designs. The views 
 consist of different atmospheric effects at different 
 times of day, beginning at daybreak and ending at 
 midnight — each view a complete landscape, and the 
 subjects emblematic of the progress of civilization, 
 from the log-cabin to the highest achievement in ar- 
 chitecture. Mr. Harvey is one of the leading artists 
 of the new water-color school, and this will probably 
 be the most superb work of its kind ever published. 
 A letter from Washington Allston to Mr. Harvey 
 says : — 
 
 "I am unwilling that you should leave Boston with- 
 out knowing how much I have been gratified by your 
 beautiful drawings of American scenery. To me it 
 appears that you have not only been successful in giv- 
 ing the character of our scenery, but remarkably 
 happy in clothing it with an American atmosphere, 
 which you have expressed with great truth and va- 
 riety." 
 
 By the thermometer, the winter has commenced 
 this day, the 5th of January. People pass under my 
 window with their backs shrugged up to their bump 
 of philoprogenitiveness, and even the coats of the hard- 
 working omnibus horses " stare" — as the jockeys say. 
 I wish the physiologists would explain why horses' 
 coats do not lie closer when it is cold, and why men, 
 with the same sensation, raise their arms instinctively 
 from their sides. Cats and dogs seem to economize 
 their bodily heat better — lying down when cold in 
 such an attitude as to expose as little surface to the 
 
 Our thoughts are entirely occupied this morning 
 with two poets. It must be a pleasant book that we 
 take for company the first hour after waking, and to- 
 day, with his new volume of poems open on our dres- 
 sing-table, we dressed and read Lowell. Thence he 
 went with us to a tete-a-tete breakfast (for we chanced, 
 else, to be breakfasting alone), and we were reading 
 him with a cup of coffee in one hand and his book in 
 the other, when the letters came in from the post — 
 and one letter was from a poet new-plumaged, of 
 whom we had never heard, and who had probably 
 never heard of himself (as a poet), but still indnbita- 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 657 
 
 bly a poet — albeit "an apprentice-boy in a printing 
 office" in a small village in Pennsylvania. We read 
 his timid letter and two sweet pieces of poetry enclosed 
 within it, marked the poetry " good" for the Mirror, 
 and then reverted to our breakfast and book. But, 
 so early in the moruing, a little reading is enough for 
 a brainful of thought, and from pondering on Low- 
 ell's "Shepherd King of Admetus," we fell to think- 
 ing over the probable position and destiny of these two 
 poets. 
 
 Lowell is the best-launched poet of his time, and 
 the defect of his poetry is an advantage to his go- 
 along-ery. He is stern and strong enough to "take 
 the wall" of Envy and Misfortune, but not yielding 
 and soft enough to bend to the unconscious and impul- 
 sive abandonments of love. Love with him is sound 
 sense, not beautiful madness... He is too bold and ab- 
 stract for the 
 
 " levia affectuum vestigia 
 Gracilesque sensus lineas ;" 
 
 and, if he knows, he has a contempt for, the 
 
 " quibus 
 Vehantur alis blanduli Cupidines." 
 
 The way Lowell handles the word love makes one 
 start like seeing Rolla pick up Cora's baby with one 
 hand. The fact is, he is a strong-minded, tough-sin- 
 ewed, defying poet, fit to be a martyr to opinion or a 
 partisan soldier, and if his love be not an excellent 
 lamp not yet lighted (which is possible), he has never ! 
 experienced its first timidity, nor is he likely to know j 
 its ultimate phrensy and prodigality. He has drawn : 
 his own portrait, however, in a "Sonnet written on 
 his Twenty-fourth Birthday," and let us read his 
 character from it : — 
 
 " Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If 
 That darkened the wild hope of boyish days, 
 When first I launched my slender-sided skiff 
 Upon the wide sea's dim, unsounded ways ; 
 Now doth Love's sun my soul uith splendor fill, 
 And hope hath struggled upward unto Power ; 
 Soft Wish is hardened into sinewy Will, 
 And longing unto certainty doth tower ; 
 The love of beauty knoweth no despair : 
 My heart would break if " 
 
 What should you think would naturally follow this 
 " if," dear reader ? He is twenty-four — in the full 
 tide of blood and youth, and "Love's sun has filled 
 his soul with splendor." In building up a climax of 
 his feelings at this impetuous and passionate age, 
 what should you fancy would rush up to crown it like 
 flame to a volcano ? What would his " heart break" 
 for at passionate twenty-four? 
 
 " if] I should dare to doubt 
 That from the wrong, which makes its dragon's lair 
 Here on the Earth, fair Truth shall wander out 
 Teaching mankind that Freedom 's held in fee 
 Only by those who labor to set free." 
 
 Tn another poem on " Love," he describes " true 
 love" as 
 
 " A love that doth not kneel for what it seeks, 
 But faces Truth and Beauty as their peer, 
 Showing its worthiness of noble thoughts 
 By clear sense of inward nobleness : 
 A* love that in its object findeth not 
 All grace Mid beauty, and enough to sate 
 Its thirst of blessing, but, in alf of good 
 Found there, it sees but heaven-granted types 
 Of good and beauty in the soul of man, 
 And traces in the simplest heart that beats 
 A family-likeness to its chosen one 
 That claims of it the rights of brotherhood." 
 
 This is a cold description of " true love," and it is 
 not half so warm as the " love" which Lowell exhibits 
 in his preface, for his friend William Page. Com- 
 pare the above description, in poetrv, of true love for 
 42 
 
 a woman, with the following confession, in prose, of 
 love for a man : — 
 
 " My dear friend : The love between us, which can 
 now look back upon happy years of still enlarging con- 
 fidence, and forward with a sure trust in its own pioph- 
 ecy of yet deeper and tenderer sympathies, as long as 
 life shall remain to us, stands in no need. I am well 
 aware, of so poor a voucher as an Epistle Dedicatory. 
 True, it is one of love's chiefest charms that it must 
 still take special pains to be superfluous in seeking 
 out ways to declare itself — but for these it demands no 
 publicity and wishes no acknowledgment. But the 
 admiration which one soul feels for another loses 
 half its worth, if it slip any opportunity of making 
 itself heard and felt," etc. 
 
 Lowell is one kind of poet, and it is the worst man- 
 ner of criticism to tell what a poet is not, except more 
 clearly to define what he is. Though his sexual heart 
 never swims in his inkstand, he is warm enough in his 
 enthusiasm for all generous sentiments, and both dar- 
 ing and delicate enough in his powers of imagination. 
 Truth, good sense, and fancy, were seldem more 
 evenly braided together than in his poem of "The 
 Heritage," and Rosaline (though it never could have 
 been conceived by a man who had passionately loved) 
 is the very finest cobweb of fancy. Nobody could 
 help loving the truth, honesty, fearlessness, and ener- 
 gy, stamped on all his poetry, and, as we said before, 
 he has the "w'm" to carve out for himself any destiny 
 he pleases. He has determined to live by literature, 
 but we do not believe he will long remain a poet only. 
 He will wish to take the world by the beard in some 
 closer clutch than poetry gives room for, and his good 
 judgment as to the weight of heavy English words, 
 will try itself before long on more serious matter than 
 sonnets. At least, that is what we think while admi- 
 ring him over our breakfast. 
 
 As to the other poet, Bayard Taylor, we had a 
 great deal to say to him — sympathy, encouragement, 
 promise of watchfulness over his fame, etc., etc. But 
 he will need no special kindness yet awhile. Love is 
 plenty for new-found poets. Many people love little 
 chickens who are insensible to the merits of cocks 
 and hens, and we reserve our friendship till he is ma- 
 tured and envied. Meantime, if he wants our opinion 
 that he is a poet, and can be, with toil and study — im- 
 mortal—he has it. His poetry is already worthy of 
 long preserving — apprentice-boy though he be. 
 
 I had quite a summery trip to Philadelphia on the 
 second day of the new year, sitting at the open win- 
 dow of the railcar and snuffing the fragrance of the 
 soft, sun-warmed fields with as good comfort as I ever 
 found in April. But for the rudeness and incivility 
 of all the underlings employed upon the line (and I 
 am too old a traveller, and was in too sunny a humor, 
 to find fault unnecessarily), I should have given the 
 clerk of happiness credit for five hours "bankable" 
 satisfaction. It tells ill for the manners of the "Direc- 
 tors of the Philadelphia and New York Railroad Line," 
 that their servants are habitually insolent and profane — 
 servants being usually what their masters look on 
 without reproof. 
 
 Philadelphia makes an impression of great order, 
 comfort, and elegance, upon a stranger, and there is 
 no city in the country where I like better to "loiter 
 by the way." Not feeling very " gregarious" the day 
 I was there, and having heard much mention of San- 
 derson's restaurant— (moreover, having found a new 
 book at Lea & Blanchard's. a look into winch prom- 
 ised excellent dinner-company)— 1 left my hotel and 
 dined a la Francaise—I and my new book. I never 
 had a more capital dinner in France than this im- 
 promptu one at Sanderson's, and I wish the book had 
 
658 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 been American as well as the dinner — for the glory it 
 is to the country that produced it. It was to me 
 much more enchanting and captivating than a novel, 
 yet the subject was, " The Education of Mothers, or 
 the Civilization of Mankind" — a subject you would 
 naturally expect to find treated with somewhat trite 
 morality. This work, however (which gained the 
 prize offered by the French Academy), is written with 
 complete novelty and freshness, and — to define it in a 
 way that every thinking man will comprehend — it is a 
 most delightfully suggestive book — full of thoughts 
 and sentences that make you stop and close the vol- 
 ume till you have fed awhile on what they convey to 
 you. If this book were properly presented to the ap- 
 preciation of the public, it would circulate widely on 
 the two levels of amusement and instruction, and be 
 as delightful in one field as it would be eminently use- 
 ful in the other. I commend it to every one who is 
 in want of enjoyable reading. The motto, by-the- 
 way, is that true sentiment from Rousseau: " Les 
 homines seront toujours ce qu'il plaira aux femmes. Si 
 vous voulez quHls deviennent grands et verlueux, ap- 
 ■prenez aux femmes ce que c'est que grandeur et vertu." 
 
 The New Mirror has published No. 3 of what a 
 morning paper calls "aristocratic shilling literature," 
 an extra containing " The Lady Jane, and other Hu- 
 morous Poems," by N. P. Willis. The Lady Jane 
 is a daguerreotype sketch of the London literary so- 
 ciety in which Moore, Bulwer, D'Israeli, Proctor, and 
 others of that class habitually live, and it is, at least, 
 done with the utmost labor limce of the author. By- 
 ron, in a manner, monopolized the Don Juan stanza 
 (in which this poem is written), and no one could now 
 attempt the stanza, however different the story and 
 style of thought, without being criticised inevitably 
 as an imitator. Still, it is the only stanza susceptible, 
 to any high degree, of mingled pathos and humor, 
 philosophy and fun, and it is likely to be used for such 
 purposes until the monopoly is lost sight of — a hun- 
 dred years hence. There is a great deal in "The 
 Lady Jane" which is truer and newer than most 
 sketches of society published in books of travel — a 
 great deal that could only be told in such a poem, or 
 in the rattle of familiar gossip. 
 
 I met just now, in the corridor of the Astor, Cap- 
 tain Chadwick, of the London packet-ship Welling- 
 ton, just arrived in twenty-two days from England. 
 At this season of the year, and up-hill (as the sailors 
 call it, westerly winds always predominating on the 
 Atlantic), this is a remarkable passage, and could only 
 have been made by a fine ship, well sailed. I have 
 made two remarkably short passages across the water 
 with Captain Chadwick, and a more agreeable com- 
 panion, or a better "skipper," I believe, never tight- 
 ened a halliard. He is one of those happy men fa- 
 mous for "good luck," which commonly means, "ta- 
 king good care." This is the ship on board of which 
 the duke of Wellington made a speech (at a break- 
 fast given to him by the captain) very complimentary 
 to America and Americans. 
 
 There is a considerable outbreak lately in the way 
 of equipages in New York. Several four-horse ve- 
 hicles have made their appearance, driven by the 
 young men who own them. I have noticed also a 
 new curricle in beautiful taste (driven with a steel bar 
 over the horses' backs), and a tilbury with two ser- 
 vants in livery, one on the seat with his master, and 
 
 another on horseback, following as an outrider. We 
 are to have a masked ball this evening, and a steeple- 
 chase is to come off on the twentieth (Viscount Ber- 
 trand one of the riders, and each competitor entering 
 a thousand-dollar stake for the winner). I shall be at 
 the ball, not at the steeple-chase — for a horse must 
 have iron legs to run over frozen ploughed fields, and 
 a man must have less use for his life than I, who 
 would risk a fall upon a surface like broken stones. 
 The viscount has won several steeple-chases in Eng- 
 land, and has had some rough riding after the Arabs 
 in Algiers — so I would bet on him, unless there hap- 
 pened to be a fox-hunting Irishman among the com- 
 petitors. There are six riders, I understand, and one 
 of them will win six thousand dollars, of course, and 
 probably six horses will be ruined, and one or two 
 necks broken. Fortunately, there is a superfluity of 
 horses and young men. 
 
 The story goes that " there is a skeleton in every 
 man's closet," and there is, of course (in a country 
 as independent as ours is of les prestiges), a phantom 
 following every man who is conspicuous, and point- 
 ing at his drawback. The drawback to any elaborate 
 novelty of luxury is at once read legibly in Broadway. 
 Seeing a new and very costly equipage in England, 
 you merely know that the owner had money enough 
 to buy it. The contrivance of it, the fitting of the 
 harness, the matching and breaking in of the horses, 
 are matters attended to by those who make these de- 
 tails their profession. The turn-out is brought per- 
 fect to the owner's door, and he pays, simply, money 
 | for it. In this country, on the contrary, the purchaser 
 j and driver of such a vehicle pays for it money, contri- 
 vance, constant thought, and almost his entire attention. 
 The classes are yet wanting who purvey for luxuries 
 out of the ordinary course. There is no head-groom 
 whose business it is to save his master from all 
 thought and trouble as to his turn-out. The New 
 York " Glaucus" must go every day for a month to 
 the coachmaker's, to superintend the finishing of his 
 new " drag." He must hurry his breakfast to go to 
 the stable to look after his irresponsible grooms. He 
 spends hours at the harness-maker's. He racks his 
 thought to contrive compact working-room for his 
 wheelers, and get the right pull on his leaders. He 
 becomes learned in harness-blacking and wheel-grease, 
 horse-shoes and horse-physic, and, in short, entirely 
 occupies what philosophers are pleased to call " an im- 
 mortal mind" in the one matter of a vehicle to drive. 
 (He could be conveyed, of course, the same distance 
 each day in an omnibus for sixpence — but he does not 
 believe the old satire of " aliquis in omnihus, nihil in 
 singulis.'" Quite the contrary!) A man who is not 
 content, in this country, to be provided for with the 
 masses, and like the masses, becomes his own provider 
 — like a man who, to have a coat different from other 
 people, should make it himself, and, of course, be lit- 
 tle except an amateur tailor. We shall have these 
 supplementary links of society in time. There will 
 be, doubtless, the class of thought-savers. But, until 
 then, the same amount of thought that would serve a 
 constituency in Congress, will be employed in keep- 
 ing a " slap-up turn-out," and rich young men will 
 at least have the credit of choosing between stable 
 knowledge and legislative ambition. 
 
 I had thought that the revenue which foreign the- 
 atres derive from selling to young men, at large prices, 
 keys for the season to the behind-scenes, and the so- 
 ciety of the goddesses of the ballet while off the 
 stage, was not yet discovered in this country. The 
 following paragraph, from the True Sun, would seem 
 to show that the coulisses are visited for their society, 
 at least, and might be made "to pay :" — 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 659 
 
 "Among the cases which are set down for trial next 
 term, is one which will lift the curtain which conceals 
 the affairs of a certain cheap theatre in this city, and 
 give the public a bird's-eye view of what has been re- 
 cently going on behind the scenes. The develop- 
 ments, if not prevented by an amicable arrangement, 
 will be rich and rare — showing the procedure by 
 which a luminary of the law has run out of his orbit, 
 displacing, in his new and erratic course, a luminary 
 of literature /" 
 
 The fine writing of this paragraph, by-the-way, is 
 rather piquant. 
 
 The belle of the Olympic, pretty Miss Taylor, 
 could scarce have a better advertisement for attrac- 
 tion than a paragraph which announces that she "has 
 been robbed of six hundred dollars worth of jewelry," 
 and that "many heavy articles of plate, rich dresses, 
 Ar., were left undisturbed !" I am inclined to 
 think that this is a covert puff from Mitchell's ge- 
 nius — for he is a genius, and quite capable of knowing 
 that everybody will go to have a look at an actress 
 who had "six hundred dollars' worth of jewelry and 
 many heavy articles of plate left undisturbed !" Peo- 
 ple, like pictures, are made to "stand out" by a 
 well-contrived background! Ah, vou bright fellow, 
 Mitchell! 
 
 The event ahead which Jias the most rose-colored 
 promise, just now, is the Annual Ball of the City 
 Guard — to be given at Niblo's on the twenty-fourth. 
 Niblo's finely-proportioned hall has been, for some 
 time, undergoing a transformation into a model of the 
 ancient Alhambra for the purpose, and Smith, the ex- 
 cellent scene-painter of the Park, and a troop of dec- 
 oraters and upholsterers under his direction, are do- 
 ing all that taste and money can do to conjure up a 
 scene of enchantment "for one night only." The 
 supper is to make the gods hungry and envious on 
 Olympus — so sumptuous, they say, are the prepara- 
 tions. The City Guard, as you may know, is what 
 the English army-men call the "crack corps'' of New 
 York. The probability is, that its members repre- 
 sent more spirit, style, and character, than belong to 
 any other combination of young men in the state. 
 They have a great deal of fashion, as well as esprit du 
 corps, and, what with their superb uniform, uppish 
 carriage, superior discipline, and high-spirited union 
 of purpose, they constitute a power of no little weight 
 and consideration. Their ball will probably be the 
 most showy festivity of the season. 
 
 The masked ball which comes oft" to-night is, I am 
 told, got up by a party of literary ladies, to promote 
 tase in conversation! I can hardly fancy anything 
 more easy than the "freedoms of the press," and, I 
 im told, most of the gentlemen of the press are in- 
 'ited, myself among the number. A man is a block, 
 of course, who is not open to improvement. 
 ******* 
 
 I went to the masked ball without any very clear 
 idea of who were its purposers, or what were its 
 purposes. I found to my surprise that it was the 
 celebration of the opening of the Ladies' Club in 
 the upper part of Broadway. A fine house has been 
 taken and furnished, and the reading-room goes im- 
 mediately into operation, I understand. Like the 
 frolic they gave (in some country of which I have 
 read and desire to know more) to the nuns before 
 taking the irrevocable veil, the carpets were taken up 
 and music and men introduced to make the gynocras- 
 tic seclusion hereafter more marked and positive. 
 
 Being "an early man," I stayed but an hour, listen- 
 ing to the band and looking on; but I saw beauty 
 there which might make one almost envy the news- 
 papers that are to be perused by a "club" of such, 
 and a general air enjoue more lovely than literary. 
 The masks were few, and the fun of them was quite 
 destroyed by the fact that every one seemed to know 
 who they were. Indeed, the pleasure of reputable 
 masking lies in the momentary breaking down of bar- 
 riers that in this country do not exist — in giving low 
 degree and high degree a chance to converse freely, 
 that is to say — and till we have unapproachable lords 
 and princes, and ladies weary of the thin upper air of 
 exclusiveness, masquerading will be dull work to us. 
 At present the mask makes rather than removes an ob- 
 stacle to intercourse. Anybody who is there in a 
 mask, would be just as glad to see you tete-a-tete by 
 daylight, the next morning in her parlor, as to chat 
 with you through pasteboard and black crape. Most 
 of the ladies at this literary ball were in fancy dresses, 
 however, and doubtless with their pastoral attractions 
 displayed to the best advantage; and this part of it 
 was commendable. If women knew what was attrac- 
 tive, I think they would make every ball a '■'■fancy 
 ball. 1 ' " Medora" jackets and " Sultana" trousers are 
 choses entrainantes. 
 
 I think you would agree with me, after reading it, 
 that Brantz Mayer's work on Mexico, recently 
 published, is as agreeably spiced with wit, humor, and 
 other pleasant metal pimento, as any book of travels 
 written within new-book memory. I have run through 
 it within a day or two with some suspense, as well as 
 great amusement — for so racy and sketchy a power 
 of description should be in the corps of professed, 
 not amateur authors. His descriptions of the outer 
 features of Mexican life, of Mexican character, Mex- 
 ican women, beggars, priests, and gamblers, are ad- 
 mirably spirited and entertaining. There is also a 
 good deal of statistical matter industriously and care- 
 fully got together, and the publisher has done justice 
 to it all in the printing and getting up. There will 
 be elaborate reviews of it elsewhere; but meantime I 
 express my pleasurable surprise and admiration in a 
 paragraph- — commending it for the purchase of readers. 
 
 The fourth extra of the New Mirror has appeared, 
 embodying Morris's popular songs and melodies, 
 which have heretofore only been published with mu- 
 sic, or in a very expensive embellished edition of his 
 works. The hundred thousand lovers of married po- 
 etry (music the wife, or husband, I don't know which) 
 will be glad to get these " winged words" in a lump 
 for a shilling. Morris's popularity will send this ex- 
 tra to every corner of the land. 
 
 The betting upon the riders in the proposed hur- 
 dle-race (not steeple-chase, as I mentioned before) goes 
 on vigorously. I rather doubt, however, whether it 
 will ultimately come off. There was a steeple-chase 
 got up on Long Island, last year, in which an Irish- 
 man and an Englishman, whose fames had followed 
 them, as great hunters, were the competitors, and 
 after getting over two fences by pushing them down 
 with their horses' breasts, they got imprisoned in a 
 clover-lot, from which they were extricated with great 
 difficulty by the owner's letting down the bars and 
 leading the horses over ! There is a compact, jockey- 
 built American among the competitors, who has great 
 skill as a horseman, and should there be snow on the 
 ground, his light weight and superior practice will 
 
660 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 win the race for him without a doubt. The Viscount 
 Bertrand, though doubtless the boldest of riders, is 
 over six feet high, and a heavy man. 
 
 The Statistics of Puffing. — We have been in- 
 duced lately to look a little into the meum and tuum 
 of puffing— partly from having been untruly (qu. pre- 
 maturely?) accused of " receiving consideration for 
 the same," but more to see whether the consideration 
 were worth the having, in case conscience (" John Tet- 
 zel, vender of indulgences," being dead) could be 
 brought to countenance it. We pique ourselves on 
 looking things in the face, and having and allowing 
 as few concealments as possible — so, first, for a clean 
 breast on the subject — say up to January 1, 1844. 
 
 We are not particular, as "Mrs. Grundy" knows, 
 as to the subject we write upon, nor the harness in 
 which we are put to work, nor the style, rhythm, or 
 rhyme, we are called upon to write in. We go alto- 
 gether for metallic magnetism. It is our duty (on 
 our way to Heaven) to try for a "plum" — in other 
 words, to be "diligent in business." We write what 
 in our judgment is best calculated to sell. But, in 
 the course of this policy, it falls in our way to speak 
 of things to eat, and things to wear — very capable 
 topics, both, as to piquancy and interest. We have 
 had occasion to describe glowingly Florence's crus- 
 taceous cave, and the ice-cream Alhamra, and to 
 pronounce Carpenter the ne plus ultra of coat- 
 builders, and Jennings's the emporium of "bang-up" 
 toggery, and for these and similar serviceable " first- 
 rate notices," we have, in no shape,* received " con- 
 sid-e-ra-tion." The gentlemen who have said so 
 ("the hawks" who would "pick out hawks' een") 
 will please make an early meal of their little fictions. 
 
 As to literary puffs, we would as soon sell our tears 
 for lemon-drops, as to defile one of God's truthful 
 adjectives with a price for the using it. We never 
 asked for a literary puff in our life, nor made interest 
 for it in any shape, nor would we sell one for the 
 great emerald Sakhral. But if we love a man (as we 
 do many, thank God, whom we are called upon to 
 criticise), we pick out the gold that is inlaid in his 
 book, and leave to his enemies to find the brass and 
 tinsel. And if that's not fair, we don't very much care 
 —for we scorn to be impartial. 
 
 But let us hop off this high horse, and come down 
 to the trade part of it once more. 
 
 In England, all influences that aid business are 
 priced and paid. The puffs of new books in the 
 newspapers are invariably sent, ready-written, by the 
 publishers, and paid for at a much higher price than 
 avowed advertisements. The continued effect of this 
 abuse of the public ear is based upon the phlegmatic 
 dulness of perception in the English public, and their 
 consequent chronic humbuggability. It could never 
 "answer" in our country after being once fairly ex- 
 posed. It is, to a certain degree, practised, however 
 — as is pay for concert-puffing, music-puffing, theat- 
 rical-puffing, etc. 
 
 Having confessed that we are willing to admit an 
 entering wedge of iniquity in this line — in other 
 words, that we are willing to know whether it be hon- 
 est to serve a man and contemplate his thanks in 
 lucre — let us " run the line," as the surveyors say, 
 and see how our new territory of tribute may be vir- 
 tuously bounded. 
 
 Authors have "the freedom" of us, of course. 
 They are welcome to all we can do for them — if they 
 
 • One exception — a hat ! We had been somewhat emphatic 
 in avowing Orlando Fish the nonpn v =;il of hat-shapers, and 
 (knowing the measure of our ; .a — critical man !) he did 
 send us a charming hat with a i the disenchantment of a bill. 
 Peccavimus ' 
 
 publish on their own account. Actors, singers, and 
 painters, are " chartered libertines" for whom we have 
 a weakness ; and, besides, we can not feed on the 
 wages of pleasure-makers. All other pursuits, trades, 
 professions, we are half inclined to admit, will be at 
 liberty to make us such acknowledgments as they 
 choose for any furtherance to their merchandise (in 
 bales or brains) which may come legitimately in our 
 way. We shall, in any case, preserve the value of 
 our commendation by keeping it honest, and we shall 
 never commend any farther than is entertaining and 
 readable — but there is a choice between subjects to 
 write about, and a preference as to giving attention to 
 things about town, and it is for this choice and pref- 
 erence that we may make up our mind to be suscep- 
 tible of corruption. We write this in the cool of the 
 morning. We don't know what we shall think in the 
 more impulsive hours. Meantime — send it to the 
 printer, and see what the governor says of it in the 
 proof-sheet. 
 
 A few gentlemen (Mr. Philip Hone apparently the 
 mover of the project) have combined to raise a sub- 
 scription for the purchase of Clevenger's statue of a 
 North American Indian. The circular addresses the 
 business-men of the city, and the statue, if purchased, 
 will be presented to the Mercantile Library Associa- 
 tion. Three thousand dollars is the sum fixed upon, 
 five hundred of which are to be appropriated to the 
 immediate relief of Mrs. Clevenger and her children. 
 It would strike, perhaps, even some of the subscribers 
 to this fund with surprise to tell them that the statue 
 they are to purchase is possibly still lying unquarried 
 in the mountains of Carrara. Clevenger is dead, but 
 his genius stands pointing its finger to a rude block of 
 marble, in which lies, unseen, a complete and immor- 
 tal statue, waiting only for the chisel of mechanical 
 workmen to remove the rough stone that encumbers 
 it. That finger is seen and obeyed three thousand 
 miles away (by the committee with Mr. Philip Hone 
 at its head), and the reluctant money will be forth- 
 coming and on its way to Italy in a month, and the 
 statue will be found and finished., imported, and ex- 
 hibited at Clinton Hall ! (Plain matter-of-fact, all 
 this, and yet it sounds very like poetry !) I was told 
 by Thorwalsden, when at Rome, that there were sev- 
 eral of his statues he had never seen. They were fin* 
 ished, as far as he was concerned, when they were 
 moulded in clay. They were then cast in plaster by 
 the mechanics who make a trade of it, and the plaster 
 models were sent to Carrara, where there is a large 
 village of copyists in marble living near the marble 
 quarries. From Carrara the statues were sent, when 
 finished, to Copenhagen, their ultimate destination, 
 and Thorwalsden, on his subsequent visit to his native 
 country, saw them for the first time. The cost of de- 
 livering Clevenger's statue from the womb of the 
 mountain impregnated by his genius will be about one 
 thousand dollars — a round fee for the accouchement of 
 the stony mother of " a North American Indian!" 
 
 Burns's Letters to Clarinda have disappointed many 
 people, who expected, naturally, to find a poet's love- 
 letters better written than another man's. I think the 
 contrary would naturally be true. Fine writing is an 
 arm's-length dexterity, and the heart works only at 
 close quarters. I should suspect the sincerity of a 
 poet's love-letter if it were not far within his habitual 
 tact and grace. Besides, in strong emotion, the heart 
 flies from the much-used channels of language, and 
 tries for something newer to its own ear, and, while an 
 ordinary man would find this novelty in poetical lan- 
 guage, a poet would seek to roughen, and simplify. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 661 
 
 and break up the habitual art and melody of his pe- 
 riods. By-the-way, the name of Burns reminds me 
 of a little anecdote I heard told with some humor by 
 Campbell, at a dinner-party in London. Count 
 D'Orsay and Barry Cornwall were present, and they 
 were drawing out the veteran bard as to his recollec- 
 tions of the great men who were setting stars when he 
 was rising. " I was dining one day with Burns," said 
 Campbell, " who, like Dr. Johnson and other celebri- 
 ties, had his Bozzy worshipper, a friend who was 
 always in his company. I have forgotten his name. 
 Bums left the room for a moment, and passing the 
 bottle to his friend, I proposed to drink the health 
 of Mr. Burns. He gave me a look of annihilation. 
 ' Sir,' said he, ' you will always be known as Mr. 
 Campbell, but posterity will talk of Burns !'" Such 
 an anecdote makes one look around in alarm, to see if 
 there are not some unrecognised mononoms \nour time, 
 whom we are profaning, unaware, with our Mister-y. 
 
 It rains in Broadway — as it has often done before, it 
 is true ; but it seems to me a particularly wet rain, for 
 there is an old black beggar standing in front of St. 
 Paul's, holding out his hat for what must be, at any 
 rate, a diluted charity. At a fair calculation (and I 
 have watched him while writing, for the last two 
 hours), every tenth passenger put something into his 
 hat. His gray wool must hold more water than his 
 leaky hat, and, at least, it acts like a sponge — on the 
 passers-by. Begging, as yet, is a good trade in 
 America, and I think that New York, particularly, is 
 a place where money has little adhesiveness — easily 
 made and readily given away. 
 
 I have noticed in history and real life that reformers, 
 great enthusiasts, and great philosophers, produce 
 effects quite commensurate with their ambitions, but 
 seldom by success in the exact line they had marked 
 out. Providence does not allow "steam" to be wasted. 
 Jn the search after the "elixir of life," and the "phi- 
 losopher's stone," for example, the alchymists have 
 stumbled over some of the most important discoveries 
 of chymistry. This is rather an essayish beginning to 
 a hasty-pudding letter, but I have been looking over 
 Brisbane's book on Fourierism, while eating my break- 
 fast, and it struck me how poorly the direct objects of 
 "socialism" succeeded, while combination, to produce 
 great and small results, seems to me to be the most 
 prominent novelty in the features of the time. Mer- 
 cantile houses are establishing partners in all the prin- 
 cipal capitals — new publications are circulated almost 
 wholly by a lately-arranged system of combined agen- 
 cies — information, formerly got by individual reading, 
 is new fed out to large societies; and the rumor just 
 now is, of a grand experiment of combining all the qual- 
 ities of half a dozen newspapers in one — establishing 
 something like the London Times, for instance, in 
 which the subscriber would be sure to find "every- 
 thing; that is going." 
 
 I went on Wednesday evening to the temperance 
 tea-party, at Washington Hall, given in honor of the 
 birthday of Franklin. Here was combination again — 
 tea-party, prayer-meeting, lecture, concert, prome- 
 nade, and tableau vivant (a printing-press worked in the 
 room), all given in one entertainment. There were 
 seven or eight long tables, with alleys between, and from 
 a thousand to twelve hundred ladies and gentlemen 
 seated " at tea," and listening to the singing, praying, 
 instrumental music, and speech-making, with a great 
 appearance of comfort. I did not stay for the " prom- 
 enade all round," but I am told that it was very 
 agreeable, and that the party did not separate till two 
 
 in the morning ! The temperance combination has 
 been a great lesson as to the power of numbers united 
 for one end ; though I fear the action of it has been 
 somewhat like the momentary sweeping dry of a 
 river's channel by a whirlwind, so strikingly seems 
 intemperance, of late, to have resumed its prevalence 
 in the streets. 
 
 I find that, by my hasty observations on New York 
 society in a late letter, I have given voice to a feeling 
 that has been for some time in petto publico, and I 
 have heard since a great deal of discussion of the 
 quality of New York gayety. It seems to be the 
 opinion of good observers, that the best elements of 
 society are not organized. The intellect and refine- 
 ment of the population (of which there is quite 
 enough for a fair proportion) lies " around in spots," 
 it is thought, waiting only for some female Napoleon 
 to concentrate and combine them. Exclusively liter- 
 ary parties would be as unattractive as exclusively 
 dancing or juvenile parties, and indeed variety is the 
 spice of agreeable social intercourse. In London, 
 beauty is, with great pains, dug out from the mine of 
 unfashionable regions, and made to shine in an aristo- 
 cratic setting; and talent of all kinds, colloquial, lit- 
 erary, artistical, theatrical, is sought out, and mingled 
 with rank, wealth, and elegance, in the most perfect 
 society of Europe. Any sudden attempt to discredit 
 fashionable parties, and ruu an opposition with a 
 "blue" line, would be covered with ridicule. But I 
 think enough has been said, in a community as mer- 
 curial and sympathetic of news as is the population of 
 New York, to induce the Amphytrions of gayety to 
 look a little into their social mixtures, and supply the 
 sweets or acids that are wanting. At the most fash- 
 ionable party lately given, Madame Castellan was the. 
 guest of honor, and not called upon to sing — and this 
 is somewhat more Londonish than usual. It is one 
 of the newnesses of our country that we have no 
 grades in our admiration, and can only see the merits 
 of extreme lions. Second, third, and fourth-rate celeb- 
 rities, for whom in Europe there is attention justly 
 measured, pass wholly unnoticed through our cities. 
 It must be a full-blooded nobleman, or the first singer 
 or danseuse of the world, or the most popular author, 
 or the very first actor, or the miraculous musician, if 
 there is to be any degree whatever of appreciation or 
 enthusiasm. This lack of a scale of tribute to merit is 
 one reason why we so ridiculously overdo our wel- 
 comes to great comets, as in the case of Dickens — 
 leaving very respectable stars, like Emerson, Longfel- 
 low, Cooper, Sully, and all our own and some foreign 
 men of genius, to pass through the city, or remain 
 here for weeks, unsought by party-givers, and unwel- 
 comed except by their personal friends. To point 
 this out, fortunately, is almost to correct it, so ready 
 are we to learn; but I think, by the shadow cast 
 before, that the avatar of some goddess of fashion may 
 be soon looked for, who will shut her doors upon stu- 
 pidity and inelegance, rich or poor, and create a gay- 
 ety that will be enjoyable, not barely endurable 
 
 I am very sorry to see by the English papers that 
 Dickens has been "within the rules of the Queen's 
 bench"— realizing the prophecy of pecuniary rum 
 I which has, for some time, been whispered about for 
 1 him. His splendid genius did not need the melan- 
 I choly proof of improvidence, and he has had wealth 
 so completely within his grasp that there seems a par- 
 ticular and unhappy Heedlessness in his rum. The 
 ' most of his misfortune is, he has lived so closely at 
 I the edge of his flood-tide of prosperity, that the ebb 
 i leaves him at high-water mark, and not in the con- 
 
662 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 tented ooze of supplied necessity where it first took 
 him up. And by-the-way, it was in that same low- 
 water period of his life — just before he became cele- 
 brated — that I first saw Dickens; and I will record 
 this phase of his chrysalis (" the tomb of the cater- 
 pillar and the cradle of the butterfly," as Linnaeus 
 calls it), upon the chance of its being as interesting to 
 future ages as such a picture would now be of the 
 anle-bulterjlicity of Shakspere. I was following a 
 favorite amusement of mine one rainy day, in the 
 Strand, London — strolling toward the more crowded 
 thoroughfares with cloak and umbrella, and looking at 
 people and shop-windows. I heard my name called 
 from a passenger in a street-cab. From out the 
 smoke of the wet straw peered the head of my pub- 
 lisher, Mr. Macrone (a most liberal and noble-hearted 
 fellow, since dead). After a little catechism as to my 
 damp destiny for that morning, he informed me that 
 he was going to visit Newgate, and asked me to join 
 him. I willingly agreed, never having seen this famous 
 prison, and after I was seated in the cab, he said he 
 was going to pick up, on the way, a young paragraph- 
 ist for the Morning Chronicle, who wished to write a 
 description of it. In the most crowded part of Hol- 
 born, within a door or two of the "Bull and Mouth" 
 inn (the great starting and stopping-place of the stage- 
 coaches), we pulled up at the entrance of a large 
 building used for lawyers' chambers. Not to leave 
 me sitting in the rain, Macrone asked me to dismount 
 with him. I followed by long flights of stairs to an 
 upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted 
 and bleak-looking room, with a deal table and two 
 or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and 
 Mr. Dickens — for the contents. I was only struck at 
 first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it 
 that evening, as the strongest instance I had seen of 
 English obsequiousness to employers) — the degree to 
 which the poor author was overpowered with the 
 honor of his publisher's visit ! I remember saying to 
 myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair, " My good 
 fellow, if you were in America, with that fine face and 
 your ready quill, you would have no need to be con- 
 descended to by a publisher !" Dickens was dressed 
 very much as he has since described "Dick Swivel- 
 ler" — minus the " swell" look. His hair was cropped 
 close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily 
 cut, and after changing a ragged office-coat for a 
 shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and but- 
 toned up, the very personification, I thought, of a 
 close sailer to the wind. We went down and crowded 
 into the cab (one passenger more than the law allowed, 
 and Dickens partly in my lap and partly in Macrone's) 
 and drove on to Newgate. In his works, if you re- 
 member, there is a description of the prison, drawn 
 from this day's observation. We were there an hour 
 or two, and were shown some of the celebrated mur- 
 derers confined for life, and one young soldier waiting 
 for execution; and in one of the passages we chanced 
 to meet Mrs. Fry, on her usual errand of benevolence. 
 Though interested in Dickens's face, I forgot him 
 naturally enough after we entered the prison, and I do 
 not think I heard him speak during the two hours. I 
 parted from him at the door of the prison, and con- 
 tinued my stroll into the city. 
 
 Not long after this, Macrone sent me the " sheets 
 of Sketches by Boz," with a note saying that they 
 were by the gentleman who went with us to Newgate. 
 I read the book with amazement at the genius display- 
 ed in it, and in my note of reply assured Macrone that 
 I thought his fortune was made as a publisher if he 
 could monopolize the author. 
 
 Two or three years afterward, I was in London, and 
 present at the complimentary dinner given to Mac- 
 ready. Samuel Lover, who sat next me, pointed out 
 Dickens. I looked up and down the table, but was 
 wholly unable to single him out without getting my 
 
 friend to number the people who sat above him. He 
 was no more like the same man I had seen than a tree 
 in June is like the same tree in February. He sat 
 leaning his head on his hand while Bulwer was speak- 
 ing, and with his very long hair, his very flash waist- 
 coat, his chains and rings, and withal a much paler 
 face than of old, he was totally unrecognisable. The 
 ; comparison was very interesting to me, and I looked 
 j at him a long time. He was then in his culmination 
 | of popularity, and seemed jaded to stupefaction. Re- 
 membering the glorious works he had written since I 
 had seen him, I longed to pay him my homage, but 
 had no opportunity, and I did not see him again till 
 he came over to reap his harvest and upset his hay- 
 cart in America. When all the ephemera of his im- 
 prudences and improvidences shall have passed away 
 — say twenty years hence — I should like to see him 
 again, renowned as he will be for the most original and 
 remarkable works of his time. 
 
 A friend lent me yesterday a late file of " The 
 Straits Messenger," an English newspaper published 
 at Singapore. The leader of one number commences 
 with, " We have always had a hatred for republican- 
 ism, and holding it to be the fosterer of every rascality 
 in public life, and every roguery in private, we are not 
 at all surprised when instances turn up to prove our 
 theory true." This is apropos of some news of 
 " repudiation." The advertisements in this paper 
 amused me somewhat, and this consist principally of 
 dissolutions of native partnership. Here are three of 
 them : — 
 
 " Notice. The interest and responsibility of Kim 
 Joo Ho in our firm ceased from the 8th January. 
 (Signed) Yep Hun Ho." 
 
 " Notice. The interest and responsibility of the 
 undersigned in the firm of Chop Tyho ceased from 
 this date. (Signed) Chee Ong Seang, Chee Jin 
 Seo." 
 
 " Notice. The interest and responsibility of Mr. 
 See Eng San in our firm ceased from the 5th January. 
 (Signed Boonteeong & Co." 
 
 In the old English of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" 
 there is wrapped up a little germ of wisdom which 
 you would hardly look for in the metaphysics of love, 
 but which contains the hand-over-hand, boiling-pot 
 principle of most of the make-money-ries of our 
 country : — 
 
 " My sonne, yet there is the fifte, 
 
 Which is conceived of enuie, 
 
 And 'cleped is suppi.anterie ; 
 
 Thro' whose compassement and guile 
 
 Full many hath lost his while 
 
 In love, as well as other wise." 
 
 In England nobody gets ahead but by shoving on 
 all those who are before him, but a hundred instances 
 will occur to you of leap-frog experiment in our coun- 
 try, by which all kinds of success in business is super- 
 seded. The most signal and successful jump that I 
 have noticed lately is that of the periodical agents, over 
 the heads of the old publishers — (the trick, indeed, 
 which has hocus-pocused the old pirates into chang- 
 ing their views on the subject of copyright !) Three 
 years ago the great apparatus for the circulation of 
 books, was entirely a secret in the hands of the trade, 
 and a man might as well have attempted to run a rail- 
 car across the fields by hand as an author to have at- 
 tempted to circulate his own book without the con- 
 sent of publishers. The names and terms of book- 
 selling correspondents, the means of transportation of 
 books, and the amount of profits on them, were matters 
 of inaccessible knowledge. The publisher kept the 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 663 
 
 gate of the public eye, and demanded his own toll — 
 two thirds of the commodity, if not all ! The first 
 " little pin" that " bored through this castle wall," 
 was the establishment of the mammoth newspaper, by 
 Day and Wilson, and the publication of entire novels 
 in one sheet; and, upon their agencies for the circu- 
 lation of these, is now built a scheme of periodical 
 agency totally separate from publishers, and comparing 
 with these as the expresses of Hale and Harnden and 
 Pomeroy do with the general post-office — cheaper, 
 more expeditious and open to competition. 
 
 It is, perhaps, not generally known, that any author, 
 vow, can publish his own book, and get all the profits ! 
 Any printer will tell him how to get it printed and 
 bound in paper covers— for which he pays simply what 
 publishers do. Stored up in his own room or a ware- 
 house, he has only to furnish it to the periodical agents, 
 who will take of him, at their wholesale price, all that 
 will sell — (bringing the risk directly on the proper 
 shoulders, those of the author) — and returning to him 
 very promptly the money or the unsaleable copies. 
 There are no " six months publishers' notes" in the 
 business; no cringing or making interest. The author 
 is on a blessed level with the gingerbread bakers and 
 blacking sellers he has often envied — salesman of his 
 own commodity, if saleable it be, and made aware, to 
 a certainty, in a very brief time, whether he has mis- 
 taken his vocation. Let but congress give us a law 
 which shall prevent English books from coming, not 
 into the market, but into the publishers' hands, for 
 nothing, and the only remaining obstacle to a world- 
 wide competition will be gloriously removed. And, 
 books will be no dearer than at present — as the me- 
 morials to congress sufficiently show. 
 
 There are some delicious works of art now ex- 
 hibiting opposite the hospital, in Broadway— Harvey's 
 Atmospheric Effects of American Scenery. Those 
 who have not been observers in other countries are 
 scarcely aware how peculiar our country is in its at- 
 mospheric phenomena — how much bolder, brighter, 
 and more picturesque. There is scarce a scene pictur- 
 ed in this beautiful gallery which could be at all true 
 of any other country ; but to the American eye they 
 are enchantingly faithful and beautiful. The artist 
 gives in his prospectus for engraving these works the 
 following interesting bit of autobiography : — 
 
 " In 1827 1 entered upon the line of portrait-paint- 
 ing in miniature; I pursued it for nine years with an 
 assiduity that impaired my health. Country air and 
 exercise being recommended me, I purchased a tract 
 of land on the majestic Hudson ; built a cottage after 
 my own plan ; amused myself by laying out grounds, 
 and gained health and strength by the employment. 
 These exercises in the open air led me more and more 
 to notice and study the ever-varying atmospheric effects 
 of this beautiful climate. I undertook to illustrate 
 them by my pencil, and thus almost accidentally, 
 commenced a set of atmospheric landscapes. The 
 number had reached twenty-two, and as yet 1 had no 
 thought of publication when business called me to 
 Europe. I carried them with me, and, while in Lon- 
 don, occasionally attended the Conversazione of Artists. 
 At one of these I accidentally heard a gentleman, on 
 leaving a little knot of connoisseurs assembled round 
 my portfolio, pass a most flattering eulogium on its 
 contents. 1 felt the more elated by his praise on 
 learning that he was Professor Farrady, the able suc- 
 cessor of Sir Humphrey Davy. At Paris, while par- 
 taking of the courteous hospitality of the American 
 minister, Governor Cass, my portfolio was sent for and 
 received the approbation of that gentleman and his 
 guests. Governor Cass retained my drawings for a 
 week ; on returning them to me he recommended 
 
 that I should have them engraved, and suggested that 
 it might be done at once, while I was in Pans. I was 
 too diffident, however, of their popular merit, to risk 
 so extensive an undertaking. On my return to New 
 York my personal friends encouraged me in the proj- 
 ect, and at last I made up my mind to lay the original 
 drawings before the Boston public; conceiving that I 
 owed it to that city, where I had received liberal en- 
 couragement in my previous pursuits to give to them 
 the <^<>portunity of originating the work of publica- 
 tion." 
 
 Mr. Harvey went afterward to London to find print- 
 colorists who could execute the work to his satisfac- 
 tion, and, while there, Mr. Murray, who was formerly 
 in this country, and is now attached to her majesty's 
 household, showed to the queen the first number. 
 The royal subscription was immediately given to the 
 work at a munificent price. It is worth every one's 
 while to see this delicious work of art, and every per- 
 son of easy means should subscribe for a copy of the 
 engravings. 
 
 The sleighs flying very briskly up and down Broad- 
 way this morning' remind me that Miss Howitt, in her 
 late preface to one of Miss Bremer's works, mentions, 
 among other phrases, our use of the words " sleighs, 
 slec/s, and sleighing, for sledges and sledging," — calling 
 them " Americanisms which all well-educated persons 
 will be careful not to introduce into their families." 
 Miss Howitt might allow, to a continent of the size 
 of ours, the privilege of coining a word without the 
 tariff of her contempt ; but she forgets that sled is a 
 I good English word, and derived from the very lan- 
 guage of the book she has translated — from the Swedish 
 word slrcda. Thomson says in his Seasons : — 
 
 " Eager on rapid sleds 
 Their vigorous youth in bold contention wheel 
 The long resounding course." 
 
 And Fletcher says, in a fine passage of his Eclogue: — 
 
 " From thence he furrowed many a churlish sea, 
 The viny Rhene and Volga's self did pass, 
 Who sleds doth surfer on his wat'ry lea, 
 And horses trampling on his icy face." 
 
 The cold weather of the last week has justified 
 another Americanism, for it has been literally " a cold 
 spell" — dimming parlor lights, and arresting the flow 
 of thought. The gas-lights burn dim because water 
 freezes in the gasometers, and " whole stacks of new 
 publications" (as a periodical agent told me yesterday) 
 are " books and stationary," from the interrupted navi- 
 gation. 
 
 Palmo's hew opera has been voted fashionable, 
 nem. con. (as I have been fashionably assured), and 
 the long ellipse of other theatricals will give it a flow- 
 ing launch. It is a small and beautiful edifice, and is 
 toT>e brilliantly lighted, and made every way conform- 
 able to the exactions of white kid and cashmere. Its 
 situation is admirable— far enough up Chamber street 
 to be away from the noises of Broadway, and accessi- 
 ble easilv from all parts of the city. This evening 
 comes off the preparatory rehearsal, to which the 
 connoisseurs and gentlemen of the press are invited as 
 guests. The printed invitation by the way, makes 
 Mr. Palmo out to be (very properly) a fellow-cihzcn 
 of the Muses, and is altogether an amusing production 
 A copy of it, filled up with the name of a friend of 
 ours, lies by me, running thus: "The honor of the 
 
 ,1 company of N. P- W , Grand Scr.be, are respect- 
 
 i fully invited to attend the first public rehearsal of the 
 i Italian Opera, on Friday evening. The house will 
 | be brilliantly illuminated, and the connoisseur in music 
 
664 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 will have an opportunity of beholding an edifice erected 
 and dedicated to the Muses, by their fellow-citizen, 
 F. Palmo." 
 
 This making " fellow-citizens" of the Muses re- 
 minds me of a police report in the " True Sun," 
 announcing that a namesake of the great Roman 
 emperor who was " Amor et delicice generis humanV 
 — a Mr. Titus — was " arrested and committed for 
 stealing a door-mat !" How a man with so great a 
 name could steal so little, is a psychological marvel. 
 
 In looking over a western paper, a day or two since, 
 my eye fell on an advertisement in very comical verse. 
 Here are a couple of stanzas — to the tune of " the 
 cork leg :" — 
 
 " You all have in the papers read, 
 That Kibbe has caps for every head, 
 Which are marked so very low, 'tis said, 
 The price can scarcely be cred-i-ted. 
 Ritu-rinu-ri-iditti-i-do-da. 
 
 " You'll be well pleased to hear the news, 
 That Kibbe has got new boots and shoes ; 
 They're sold so cheap that it beats the Jews ; 
 He'll exchange for hides, if you do choose. 
 Ritu-rinu," etc. 
 
 I think there should be a committee sent out to in- 
 vite Mr. Kibbe to become a poet. 
 
 " The Rococo" is the quaint, but, in fact, most 
 descriptive name of one of the " extras of the New 
 Mirror." Those of our readers who have been lately 
 in France will be familiar with the word. The ety- 
 mology of rococo has been matter of no little fruitless 
 inquiry. It came into use about four or five yeats ago, 
 when it was the rage to look up costly and old-fashion- 
 ed articles of jewelry and furniture. A valuable stone, 
 for example, in a beautiful but antique setting, was 
 rococo. A beauty, who had the kind of face oftenest 
 painted in the old pictures, was rococo. A chair, or a 
 table, of carved wood, costly once, but unfashionable 
 for many a day, was rococo. Articles of vertu were 
 looked up and offered for sale with a view to the pre- 
 vailing taste for rococo. Highly carved picture-frames, 
 old but elaborately-made trinkets, rich brocades, etc., 
 etc. — things intrinsically beautiful and valuable, in 
 short, but unmeritedly obsolete, were rococo. The 
 extra published by the proprietors of the New Mirror 
 answers this description exactly. It comprises the 
 three most exquisite and absolute creations of pure 
 imagination (in my opinion) that have been produced 
 since Shakspere : « Lillian" by Praed, " The Culprit 
 Fay" by Drake, and » St. Agnes' Eve" by Keats— all 
 three of which have been overlaid and in a measure 
 lost sight of in the torrent of new literature— but all 
 three now to be had altogether in fair type, price one 
 shilling! The man who could read these poems 
 without feeling the chamber of his brain filled with 
 incense — without feeling his heart warm, his blood 
 moved, and his inmost craving of novelty and melody 
 deliciously ministered to, does not love poetry enough 
 to " possess a rose-teint for his russet cares." I de- 
 clare I think it is worth the outlay of a fever to get 
 (by seclusion and depletion) the delicacy of nerve and 
 perception to devour and relish with intellectual nice- 
 ty, these three subtly-compounded feasts of the ima- 
 gination. 
 
 We are indebted for many beautiful things not so 
 much to accident as to the quickness of genius to ap- 
 preciate and appropriate accident. I was pleased with 
 an instance that came to my knowledge last night. 
 
 Wallace (the omni-dexterous) was playing the piano 
 in my room, and, among others of his own inimitable 
 waltzes, he played one called the Midnight Waltz, in 
 which twelve strokes of the clock recur constantly 
 with the aria. In answer to an inquiry of mine, he 
 told me he was playing, one night, to some ladies in 
 Lima, when a loud silvery-toned clock in the room 
 struck twelve. He insensibly stopped, and beat the 
 twelve strokes on an accordant note on the piano, 
 and in repeating the passage, stopped at the same 
 place and beat twelve again. The effect was particu- 
 larly impressive and sweet, and he afterward composed 
 a waltz expressly to introduce it — one of the most 
 charming compositions I ever heard. Wallace is the 
 most prodigal of geniuses, and most prodigally en- 
 dowed. He has lived a life of adventure in the East In- 
 dies, South America, New South Wales, and Europe, 
 that would fill satisfactorily the life-cups of a dozen 
 men, and how he has found time to be what he proba- 
 bly is, as great a violinist and as great a pianist as the 
 greatest masters on those instruments, is certainly a 
 wonder. But this is not all. He was rehearsing for 
 a concert not long since in New York, when the clari- 
 onet-player, in reply to some correction, said that 
 " if Mr. Wallace wished it played better he might 
 play it himself." Wallace took the clarionet from 
 the hand of the refractory musician, and played the 
 passage so exquisitely as quite to electrify the orches- 
 tra. He is the most modest of men, and how many 
 more instruments he is master of (beside the human 
 voice, which he plays on in conversation very attrac- 
 tively), it would be wild to guess.* By the way, it 
 would be worth the while of a music-publisher to 
 send for the music he has literally soivn the world with 
 — for he has written over three hundred waltzes, of 
 most of which he has no copy, though they have been 
 published and left in the cities he has visited. He 
 composes many hours every day. I think Wallace 
 one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. 
 
 On Saturday night I was at the opening of the new 
 opera — the beginning, as I think, of a regular supply 
 of a great luxury. The bright, festal look of Palmo's 
 exquisite little theatre struck every one with surprise 
 on entering, and the cozy, sympathy-sized construc- 
 tion, and pleasant arrangement of seats, etc., seemed 
 to leave nothing to be wished for. With a kindly fos- 
 tering for a while, on the part of the press and the 
 public, Palmo's theatre may become the most enjoya- 
 ble and refined resort of the city. 
 
 The new prima donna made a brilliant hit. New 
 York is, at this moment, in love with Signorina Bor- 
 ghese. She dresses a-merveille, has a very intellectual 
 and attractive want of beauty, is graceful, vivid, a cap- 
 ital actress, and sings with a bird-like abandon, that 
 enchants you even with her defects. Nature has giv- 
 en her quite her share of attractiveness, and she uses 
 it all. 
 
 The opera was " I puritani" — Bellini's last, and 
 the one that was playing, for only the third time, the 
 night he died — (at the age of twenty-seven). It was 
 well selected for the opening opera — being full of in- 
 telligible and expressive melody, and not compelling 
 the musically uninitiated to get on tiptoe to compre- 
 hend it. These same uninitiateds, however, are the 
 class to cater for, in any country, and especially in 
 ours. It is a great mistake to fancy that, in the ap- 
 preciation of an opera, criticism goes before. On the 
 contrary, feeling goes before and criticism follows 
 very slowly. The commonest lover of music feels, 
 for instance, that Bellini's operas are marked by sim- 
 plicity and sameness— but, after having felt that, the 
 
 * A friend has since told me that Wallace plays every in- 
 strument of the orchestra, and most of them like a master. 
 
EPHExMERA. 
 
 665 
 
 the critic comes in and follows up the idea like an 
 ink-fish, expressing that plain fact in cloudy techni- 
 calities this-wise : "Bellini rather multiplies the rep- 
 etitions of the chord than gives distinct business to 
 the several components of the score !" Who cares 
 to know, when in tears at Rossini's exquisite harmony, 
 that it is produced by a " profuse use of the dimin- 
 ished seventh," or that one of his most electrical ef- 
 fects is done by "an harmonic atrocity of consecutive 
 fifths." To have one's tear shed on a piece of paper, 
 and thus analyzed, may be curious, once, but not very 
 necessary always, and I wish, with all my heart, that 
 the humbug of technicalities in this, as in many other 
 things, might be exposed. It would be a capital sub- 
 ject for a popular lecture. ] lend the suggestion to 
 Mr. Emerson — the man best capable of using it. 
 
 Supper is a natural sequence to music, and I must 
 mention a pair of canvass-backs that were sent me by 
 a Baltimore friend, and feasted on last night after " I 
 Puritani" — for the sake of giving you and "your pub- 
 lic" some valuable and toothsome directions for the 
 cooking of these birds, contained in a passage of my 
 friend's letter : "I have some anxiety," he says, "about 
 the cooking of these ducks. Pray don't put them in 
 the power of a Frenchman ! Get hold of a good Eng- 
 lish or American cook, knowing in roasts. Let this 
 cook erect a strong, blazing fire, before which he (or 
 she) must tend the birds for about twenty-five or 
 thirty minutes. To determine if they are done, have 
 them held up by the feet, and if the gravy runs out of 
 the necks, of a proper color, they don't require another 
 turn. Serve them up with their oivn gravy. 'Tis 
 safer than a chafing-dish and made gravy. Eat them 
 with hommony patties, between which and the ducks 
 there is a delicate affinity. Beware, I conjure you 
 once more, of a Frenchman — except in the shape of 
 a glass of Chablis. May they prove luscious as those 
 we ate together at Guy's." 
 
 Here is an epigram on the turning of Grenough's 
 Washington out of the capitol : — 
 
 Ye sages who work for eight dollars a day, 
 And are patriots, heroes, and statesmen, for pay — 
 Who of Washington prattle in phrases so sweet, 
 Pray why did you tumble him into the street ? 
 
 Young Poets. — An old man with no friend but 
 his money — a fair child holding the hand of a Magda- 
 len — a delicate bride given over to a coarse-minded 
 bridegroom — were sights to be troubled at seeing. We 
 should bleed at heart to see either of them. But 
 there is something even more touching to us than 
 these — something, too, which is the subject of heart- 
 less and habitual mockery by critics — the first timid 
 offerings to fame of the youthful and sanguine poet. 
 We declare that we never open a letter from one of 
 his class, never read a preface to the first book of one 
 of them, never arrest our critical eye upon a blemish 
 in the immature page, without having the sensation of 
 a tear coined in our heart — never without a passion- 
 ate though inarticulate " God help you !" We know 
 bo well the rasping world in which they are to jostle, 
 with their "fibre of sarcenet !" We know so well the 
 injustices, the rebuffs, the sneers, the insensibilities, 
 from without, the impatiences, the resentments, the 
 choked impulses and smothered heart-boundings with- 
 in. And yet it is not these outward penances, and 
 inward scorpions, that cause us the most regret in the 
 fate of the poet. Out of these is born the inspired ex- 
 pression of his anguish— like the plaint of the singing 
 bird from the heated needle which blinds him. We 
 mourn more over hh fatuous imperviousness to counsel 
 
 — over his haste to print, his slowness to correct — over 
 his belief that the airy bridges he builds over the 
 chasms in his logic and rhythm are passable, by avoir- 
 dupois on foot, as well as by Poesy on Pegasus. That 
 the world is not as much enchanted — (that we our- 
 selves are not as much touched and delighted) — with 
 the halting flights of new poets as with the broken 
 and short venturings in air of new-fledged birds — 
 proves over again that the world we live in were a 
 good enough Eden if human nature were as loveable 
 as the rest. We wish it were not so. We wish it 
 were natural to admire anything human-made, that 
 has not cost pain and trial. But, since we do not, and 
 can not, it is a pity, we say again, that beginners in 
 poetry are offended with kind counsel. Of the great 
 many books and manuscript poems we receive, there 
 is never one from a young poet, which we do not 
 long, in all kindness, to send back to him to be re- 
 studied, rewritten, and made, in finish, more worthy 
 of the conception. To praise it in print only puts 
 his industry to sleep, and makes him dream he has 
 achieved what is yet far beyond him. We ask the young 
 poets who read this, where would be the kindness in 
 such a case ? 
 
 A young lady in Brooklyn who signs herself " Short 
 and Sweet," writes to us to say that she is very tired 
 of her name, and seeing no prospect of getting an- 
 other (with an owner to it), wishes to know whether 
 she may lawfully abandon the unsentimental preno- 
 men inflicted on her at baptism, and adopt one of her 
 own more tasteful selection. By an understanding 
 with all the people likely to put her name in their 
 wills, we should think she might. Names are a mod- 
 ern luxury, and if she chose to be rococo, she might 
 do without one, or be known as the ancients were, by 
 some word descriptive of her personal peculiarities. 
 (So came into use the names of Brown, Long, Broad- 
 head, etc.) " Short and Sweet" would not be a bad 
 name. Or — if the lady chooses to follow the Arabian 
 custom, she (supposing her father's name to be a 
 well-sounding one— say Tiskins) would be called 
 "Tiskins's Short and Sweet daughter" — people in 
 Arabia being only designated as brown or fair, short 
 or tall, children of such and such parents. There 
 was a Roman fashion, too, that might help her out — 
 that of adding to the name any quality or exploit for 
 which the bearer was remarkable — Miss Short and 
 Sweet Heartbreaker, for example, or Miss " Noli-me- 
 Tangere," or (after the favorite flower of the Irish), 
 Miss " Jump-up-and-kiss me." (The Irish designate 
 Tom Moore by this pretty prenomen.) Our compli- 
 ments to the lady, and we are sorry she should want 
 a name — sorry she has a want we can not supply. It 
 happens to be the one thing we are out of. 
 
 The opera gets more crowded, more dressy, and 
 more fashionable, nightly. Some malicious person 
 started a rumor that the building was unsafe, and 
 many stayed away till it was tested. There are many, 
 too, who wait for the stamp of other people's appro- 
 bation before they venture upon even a new amuse- 
 ment. The doubtfuls have now gone over, however, 
 and the opera is " in the full tide," etc., etc. Some 
 of the first families have taken season-tickets in the 
 opera-boxes (there are but two private boxes, and 
 those very inconvenient and undesirable), and the best 
 seats in the pit are sold out, like the stalls at the 
 Italian opera in London, to bachelors in the market. 
 The prima donna, Borghese. improves with every 
 repetition, and what with dressing, singing, and act- 
 ing—all exceedingly well— she is a very enjoyable 
 rechauffee of Grisi. whose style she follows. 
 
666 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 This is a day of such sunshine and air that those 
 
 " Who can not spare the luxury of believing 
 That all things beautiful are what they seem,'' 
 
 must be in love with the sunny sidewalk of Broadway. 
 And this recalls to my mind a little book of poems, 
 better described by their title than any book whose 
 name I ever knew — " Droppings from the Heart," by 
 Thomas Mackeltar, lately published in Philadelphia. 
 Everybody must love the man who reads his book, 
 though its simplicity would sometimes make you 
 smile. He thus apostrophizes the city of New Y"ork : — 
 
 •< New York ! I love thy sons, beyond compare 
 
 Ennobled — not by empty words of kings, 
 But by ennobling acts, by virtues rare, 
 
 And charities unbounded. These the things 
 That crown their names with honor. Peerless all 
 
 Thy lovely daughters, warm with sympathy, 
 Swift to obey meek mercy's moving call, 
 
 To heal the heart and dry the weeping eye, 
 And hush the plaint that fears no comforter is nigh." 
 
 The credulity of this stanza is not weak-minded- 
 ness, by any means — as the strength of expression and 
 beauty of poetry in the other parts of the book suffi- 
 ciently prove. The writer's only vent seems to be the 
 expression of affection. He loves everything. He 
 believes good of everything and everybody. I do not 
 know that, in my life, I ever saw a more complete pic- 
 ture than this book of a heart overrunning with ten- 
 derness. The lines to his "Sleeping Wife," are as 
 beautiful as anything of Barry Cornwall's. The piece 
 called " The Heart-Longings," too, is finely expressed. 
 A little infusion of distrust, bitterness, and contempt, 
 would make Mackellar a poet of the kind most ad- 
 mired by critics, and most read and sympathized with 
 by the world. He is, I understand, a printer in Phil- 
 adelphia, and enjoys the kindly friendship of Mr. 
 Chandler, of the United States Gazette, to whom is 
 addressed one of the sonnets in his book. For family 
 reading, among people of simple lives and pure tastes, 
 the "Droppings from the Heart" is the best-adapted 
 book of poetry I have lately seen. 
 
 One of the most charming resuscitations from the 
 trance of oblivion that have come about lately, is the 
 republication (in the " Mirror Library") of Pinckney's 
 Poems. Mr. Pinckney, your readers will perhaps 
 know, was the son of the Hon. William Pinckney, our 
 minister in 1802 at the court of St. James, and was 
 born in London during the diplomatic residence there 
 of his father. He was partly educated at college, 
 entered the navy, gave it up for the law, and, after 
 much disappointment and suffering, died at twenty- 
 five. With discipline and study, he might, I think, 
 have written as well as Moore. What poetry would 
 be in a world where Toil were not the Siamesed twin 
 of Excellence (in other words, where man had not 
 fallen), *• is a curious question, coz !" The wild horse 
 runs very well in the prairie, but we give a preference 
 of admiration to the " good-continuer" by toilsome 
 training. Whether (he faineant angels who "sit in the 
 clouds," admire more the objectless careerings of the 
 wild steed, or the " wind and bottom" of the winner 
 of the sweepstakes — whether fragmentary poetry, 
 dashed off while the inspiration is on, and thrown 
 aside ill-finished, when the whim evaporates, be more 
 celestial than the smooth and complete product of 
 painful toil and disciplined concentration — I have had 
 my luxurious doubts. Pinckney's genius, as evidenced 
 on paper, has all the impulsive abandonment which 
 marks his biography. He was a born poet — with all 
 needful imagination, discrimination, perception, and 
 sensibility; and he had, besides, the flesh-and-blood- \ 
 fulness necessary to keep poetry on terra-firma. Sev- i 
 
 eral of his productions have become common air — 
 known and enjoyed by everybody, but without a name. 
 The song beginning — 
 
 " I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone, 
 A woman of her gentie sex the seeming paragon," &c. 
 
 — this, and two or three others of Pinckney's " entire 
 and perfect chrysolites," should be regraven with his 
 name, for the world owes his memory a debt for them. 
 The small volume of his poetry from which the Mir- 
 ror Library edition is copied, was printed in 1825, and 
 has been long lost sight of. It contains — not the stuff 
 for a classic — but a delicious bundle of heart-reaching 
 passages, fresh and peculiar, and invaluable especially 
 to lovers, whose sweetest and best interpreter Pinckney 
 was. Every man or woman who has occasion to em- 
 broider a love-letter with the very essence-flowers of 
 passionate verse, should pay a shilling for Pinckney's 
 poems. 
 
 The chair and pen of an editor should be assumed 
 with as binding vows and as solemn ceremony as were 
 the sword and war-horse of knighthood — for the edi- 
 tor, like the armed and mounted knight, is an aggrega- 
 tion of more power than nature properly allots to the 
 individual. Indeed, it is because the power has not 
 been well considered by law and by public opinion, 
 that the penalties of maleficent pen and ink are not 
 more formidable than those of fist and dagger. Take 
 the consideration of this thought for a wile-time in 
 your next omnibus-ride, dear reader, and if you 
 chance to be young and have a lust for power, write 
 down editorship for your second choice — the 
 church, of course, number one, and politics, possi- 
 bly, number three. 
 
 The temptation to the abuse of pen-power is greater 
 as the mind of the editor is more little. It is so easy 
 to do brilliant tilting in the editorial lists, by slashing 
 alike at the offending and unoffending ! Abuse is the 
 easiest, as courtesy is the most difficult kind of wri- 
 ting to make readable, and as it is a relief for the 
 smooth-faced card-player to vent, before he sleeps, his 
 pent-up malice upon his wife, so a heart naturally 
 ill-willed makes a purulent bile-spigot of a pen — 
 relieved, so the venom is spent, no matter upon what. 
 There is so seldom good cause to be ill-natured in 
 print, that it would be safe, always, when reading an 
 ill-natured criticism, to "smell the rat" of a bad heart 
 near by. 
 
 If perversion of pen and ink be very blameable, for- 
 bearance should be laudable, and we claim credit for 
 much pains-taking in this latter way. The reputa- 
 tions, ready-spitted, that are sent us for roasting, 
 would alone (did we publish them) sell our paper to 
 the ten thousand malicious, who may be counted on 
 as a separate stratum of patronage to periodicals. 
 This is some temptation. Then we are often attacked, 
 and we could demolish the assailant very amusingly, 
 and we resist this temptation, though, if his pin be not 
 winced at, puny impunity will prick again. There is 
 much that is ludicrous, much that is pervertible to 
 sport, in new books and new candidates to fame; and 
 by fault-finding only, or by abusing the author instead 
 of his book (easy and savory), the review is made read- 
 able without labor in writing — and this tempts both 
 malice and idleness. No man can live, elbow to 
 elbow, with competitors in love, life, and litera- 
 ture, without his piques and his resentments, and to 
 " turn" these pleasantly "to commodity," with a laugh 
 that outstabs a dagger, is very tempting — very — to 
 those who can do it dexterously. 
 
 Now that you have read the three foregoing para- 
 graphs, dear reader, you are prepared to know the 
 value of your acquittal, if you acquit the Mirror of 
 ill-nature, of which it has been accused. We do not 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 667 
 
 remember that, in its pages, we have ever, intention- 
 ally, wounded feelings or trenched upon delicacy. 
 
 The Rococo No. 1, is ready for your shilling, dear 
 reader — one shilling for the three purest gems ever 
 crystallized into poetry — three narrative fairy-tales in 
 verse, exquisitely full of genius. The book, too, is 
 beautifully printed, as are all the works of the Mirror 
 Library — suitable for company at a lavender-fingured 
 breakfast, or for the drawing-room table of your lady 
 fair. 
 
 Rococo No. 2, is also ready, containing Pinckney's 
 long-neglected and delicious poems, and you should 
 pay a shilling if it were only to know what the coun- 
 try has to be proud of among its poetical dead. The 
 author of 
 
 " I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone," 
 had a smoothness in his touch of a thought like the 
 glide of a cloud-edge just under a star. For quaint 
 and sweet couplets of love-makery there are few books 
 like it. Witness this verse: — 
 
 " We break the glass, whose sacred wine 
 
 To some beloved health we drain, 
 Lest future pledges, less divine, 
 
 Should e'er the hallowed toy profane ; 
 And thus I broke a heart, that poured 
 
 Its tide of feelings out for thee, 
 In draughts, by after-times deplored, 
 
 Yet dear to memory." 
 
 The following Bryant-like, finished, and high- 
 thoughted poetry was written by a young lady of 
 seventeen, and her first published production. She is 
 the daughter of one of our oldest and best families, 
 resident on the Hudson. If the noon be like the 
 promise of the dawn of this pure intellect, we have 
 here the beginning of a brilliant fame: — 
 
 11 Thou beautiful cloud, a glorious hue is thine ! 
 I can not think, as thy bright dyes appear 
 To my enraptured gaze, that thou wert born 
 Of evening exhalations ; more sublime, 
 Light-giver ! is thy birthplace, than of earth. 
 Art ihou not formed to herald in the day, 
 And clothe a world in thy unborrowed light ? 
 Or art thou but a harbinger of rains 
 To budding May < Or, in thy subtle screen, 
 Nursest the lightnings that affright the world? 
 Or wert thou born of the ethereal mist 
 That shades the sea, or shrouds the mountain's brow ? 
 Spread thy wings o'er the empyrean, and away — 
 Fleetly athwart the untravelled wilds of space, 
 To where the sunlight sheds his earliest beams, 
 And blaze the stars, that vision vainly scans 
 In distant regions of the universe ! 
 Tell me, air- wanderer ! in what burning zone 
 Thou wilt appear, when from the azure vault 
 Of our high heaven thy majesty shall fade ? 
 Tell me, winged vapor, where hath been thy home 
 Through the unchangeable serene of noon ? 
 Whate'er thy garniture— where'er thy course — 
 Would I could follow thee in thy fair flight, 
 When the south wind of eve is low and soft, 
 And my thought rises to the mighty Source 
 Of all sublimity ! O, fleeting cloud, 
 Would I were with thee in the solemn night !" 
 
 February 14. — This is the day, says the calendar, 
 " for choosing special loving friends" — as if there 
 were room for choice in a world where 
 
 " He who has one is blest beyond compare !" 
 
 The Lupercalian custom of keeping Valentine's i 
 day (putting the names of all the marriageable girls 
 in the community into a box, and making the bache- 
 lors draw lots for wives) would make a droll imbroglio 
 of " New York society." By-the-way, if you know 
 a working poet out of employ, recommend to his no- 
 
 tice the literature of valentines. Never till this year 
 have the copies of amatory verses, for sale in the fancy 
 shops, been comparably so well embellished, and the 
 prices of single valentines have ranged from two shil- 
 lings to two dollars — fine ptices to build a trade upon ! 
 The shops, for two or three evenings last past, have 
 been crowded with young men purchasing these, and 
 probably a little better poetry would turn the choice 
 in favor of any particular manufacture of such lovers* 
 wares. The favorite device seems to be stolen from 
 Mercury's detention of Mars and Venus — a paper net, 
 which, when raised, discloses a tableau of avowal. 
 
 Editorial skirmishing strikes a light into the people's 
 tinder sometimes, and there is a paragraph this morn- 
 ing which explains the difference between paid puffs 
 and literary notices. The True Sun says: "The 
 man who edits the Hagerstown News can not, it 
 seems, distinguish between an editorial article and an 
 advertisement. He mistakes the long advertisement 
 of Verplanck's Shakspere, which appears in our 
 paper, for the production of the editors of the True 
 Sun, and declines inserting it in the News for less 
 than forty-five dollars. What does the man mean ? 
 It is only surprising than an editor should be ignorant 
 that puffs paid are set in minion type, and puffs of vo- 
 lition are set in brevier — a distinction not 'plain' (as 
 yet) 'to the commonest understanding.'" The Lon- 
 don papers print the word "advertisement" over all 
 their puffs paid for, and, by using different type, the 
 True Sun has taken one step toward making the vol- 
 unteer distinguishable. 
 
 Mr. Verplanck's project, by-the-way, is a very no- 
 ticeable one. We have never had (to my knowledge) 
 an American annotator upon Shakspere, and Shaks- 
 pere is as much ours as England's. Very many of 
 the Shaksperian words are obsolete in England, but in 
 use here, and put down as Americanisms by travellers. 
 I do not know whether Mr. Verplanck promises to 
 show any new readings of Shakspere, but he is a man 
 of much higher education, and more cultivated and 
 scholarlike "pursuits than Mr. Knight (whose edition 
 of Shakspere has lately been so popular in England), 
 beside being a man of productive original genius, 
 which Mr. Knight has no claim to be. The commen- 
 taries upon works of genius by different men of genius 
 can never be repetitions, and are always interesting — 
 so I look with some interest for Mr. Verplanck's pref- 
 ace and first number. As he is a man of large for- 
 tune and entire leisure, there is no obstacle to his 
 doing it well. 
 
 The discovery of a gem in a dark mine is a poet- 
 ical matter, but (to my present thinking) it is even 
 a prosaic similitude for the sudden finding out of 
 a work of genius progressing in one of the houses of 
 a brick block. I had often passed Durand's house 
 in one of the retired close-built streets of New York, 
 without suspecting that it contained anything but the 
 domestic problem of felicity and three meals a day ; 
 but a chance errand lately led me to knock at his 
 door. My business over, he placed upon the easel (in 
 a charming studio built in the rear of his house) a 
 large landscape to which he had just given the finish- 
 ing touch. I sat down before it, and (to use a good 
 word that is staled and blunted from overusing) it 
 absorbed me. My soul went into it. I was, it is true, 
 in good pictorial appetite. It was my studious time 
 of day, and I had seen no pictures out of my own 
 rooms for a week ; but it seemed to me as if that land- 
 scape alone would be a retreat, a seclusion,. a world by 
 itself to retreat into from care or sad thoughts— so 
 mellow and deep was the distance, so true to nature 
 
668 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 the coloring and drawing, so sweetly poetical the com- 
 position, and so single-thoughted the conception of 
 the effect. The roofs of a comfortable farmhouse and 
 outbuildings were the subordinate life of the picture, 
 seen over a knoll on the right. The centre of the 
 foreground, and the brightest spot in the picture, was a 
 high grass-bank on which glanced a golden beam of 
 the setting sun. On it was a group of cattle in well- 
 fed repose, and over it stood the finest oak-tree I ever 
 saw painted. Twenty miles of landscape lay below, 
 enveloped in the veil of coming twilight, and a river 
 wound gracefully away from the eye and was lost in 
 the distance. It was indeed a glorious picture, and I 
 stake my judgment upon the opinion that no living 
 artist could surpass it. Durand, as you probably 
 know, has turned painter, after having long been the 
 first engraver of our country. He is patient of labor, 
 and has approached landscape-painting by a peculiar 
 education of hand and eye, and the probability is, that 
 if he live twenty years, he will have no equal in this 
 department of the arts. If you remember, I men- 
 tioned my great surprise at the excellence of two of 
 his landscapes in the last exhibition of the academy 
 here. To see pictures with an appetite in the eye, one 
 should see them singly, however, and but two or three, 
 at farthest, in a day. Artists who would be deliberately 
 appreciated, should make their houses morning- 
 resorts, as they are, and very fashionable ones, in 
 France and Italy. There are people (and those, too, 
 who cm afford to buy pictures) who yawn for some 
 such round of occupation during the summer morn- 
 ings of the travelling season. 
 
 The want of an excuse to put on bonnet, and go 
 out somewhere in the evening with father, husband, 
 brother, or lover, is doubtless the secret of most au- 
 diences, whether in church or lecture-room. I ar- 
 rived at this conclusion sitting and watching the com- 
 ing in of an audience at a popular lecture a night or 
 two ago. The subject was of a character that would 
 only draw listeners (one would think) from the more 
 intellectual and cultivated classes — dry and of remote 
 interest — and one, too, that could be "read up," to 
 perfect mental satisfaction, by sending a shilling to a 
 library, or buying a bit of the cheap literature of the 
 day. It was a cold, raw night, the lecturer was no 
 orator, and the benches of the lecture-room had no 
 cushions. With these premises, you would look to 
 see anything but a pleasure-loving and youthful audi- 
 ence. Yet this was just the quality of the comers-in 
 till the room was crowded. There was scarce an un- 
 appropriated-looking damsel among them, and not one 
 bald head or "adust" visage. That the young men 
 would have been there without the ladies, I do not 
 believe— nor that the ladies came there with any spe- 
 cial desire to know more of the subject of the lecture. 
 
 On this necessity for ladies to go somewhere of an 
 evening is based, of course, most of the popular en- 
 thusiasms of the day — for they are never got up by 
 individual reading, and would fail entirely, but for the 
 opportunity to give, in one moment, one thought to 
 many people. This fact seems to me to indicate in 
 what way the inducements should be heightened 
 when audiences fall off; and, instead of cheapening 
 tickets, or spending more money in placards, I think 
 it would be better to treat the ladies to an interlude 
 of coffee and conversation, or to minister in some way 
 directly to the tastes of those in whom resides the 
 primum mobile of attendance. 
 
 I presume there are thousands of families in New 
 York that are not linked with any particular round of 
 acquaintance — very worthy and knowledge-loving peo- 
 ple, who can afford only a few friends, and shun ac- 
 quaintances as expensive. People in this rank are too 
 
 moderate-minded to be theatre-goers; but the wife 
 and daughters of the family must go somewhere of an 
 evening. Parties are costly, public balls both costly 
 and unadvisable, and there are eight months in the 
 year when it is too cold for icecream-gardens and 
 walks on the Battery. Lecture-tickets for a family 
 are cheap, the company there is good, the room is 
 warm, and so well lighted as to show comeliness or 
 dress to advantage, and the apparent object of being 
 there is creditable and reputable. I say again, that to 
 add to the social inducements of this attraction, would 
 be to make of the lecture system a great gate to the 
 public heart. I add this gratuitous mite of specula- 
 tion to the unused data that have been long waiting 
 for a compiler of the statistics of metropolitan mo- 
 menta. 
 
 We have had a week of spring-weather, and the 
 upper part of New York (all above the pavements, ca 
 va dire) has been truly enjoyable. Most persons who 
 do not wear their beards for a protection to the glands 
 of the throat, have got the mumps — on dit. Writing 
 in a warm room with the throat pressed down upon a 
 thick cravat, and going into the open air with the 
 head raised and the throat of course suddenly left ex- 
 posed — is one of those provoking risks that "stand to 
 , reason." By the elaborate inventions to keep the 
 feet dry, there seems to be a "realizing sense" of the 
 danger of wet feet also.* Mr. Lorin Brooks's inven- 
 tion for expeditiously throwing an iron bridge over 
 every small puddle — (that is to say, of making boots 
 with a curved metallic shank under the hollow of the 
 foot) — has the advantage of adding to the beauty as 
 well as the protection of the exposed extremities. 
 
 Signor Palmo continues to pay his way and his 
 prima donna, and not much more — for the upper gal- 
 lery is so constructed that, though you can see the 
 stage from every part of it, you can only see the dress- 
 circle from the front row; and people goto plays a 
 little to see and hear, and a great deal to be seen and 
 heard of. The price of places being the same all over 
 the house, few will take tickets except for the lower 
 tier. The best evidence that the opera is growing on 
 the public liking is the degree to which the piques 
 and tracasseries of the company are talked about in 
 society. Quite a Guelph and Ghibelline excitement 
 was raised, a few nights ago, by the basso's under- 
 taking indignantly to sing as the critics advised him — 
 with more moderation. Signor Valtellina is a great 
 favorite, and has a famous ypice, ben marlellato. He 
 is a very impassioned singer, and when excited, loses 
 his flessibilita, and grows harsh and indistinct — (as 
 he himself does not think). By way of pleasing the 
 carpers for once, he sang one of the warmest passages 
 of the opera with a moping lamentivole that brought 
 out a hiss from the knowing ones. His friends, who 
 were in the secret, applauded. Valtellina laid his 
 hand on his heart and retired — but came back, as the 
 millers say, "with a head on," and sang once more 
 passionately and triumphantly. Excuse the fop's al- 
 ley slang with which I have told this momentous 
 matter — quite equal in importance (as a subject of 
 conversation) to any couple of events eligible by 
 Niles's Register. 
 
 Our Library Parish. — Our heart is more spread 
 and fed than our pocket, dear reader, with the new 
 
 * I have somewhere seen waggish mention of an approved 
 water-proof shoe made of the skin of a drunkard's mouth — 
 warranted never to let in water ! 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 possession of this magic long arm by which we are 
 handing you, one after another, the books we have 
 long cherished. Almost the first manifestation of the 
 poet's love, is the sending of his favorite books to his 
 mistress, and no commerce of tenderness is more like 
 the conversance of angels (probably), than the sym- 
 pathies exchanged through the loopholes of starry 
 thoughts — (so like windows twixt soul and soul are 
 the love-expressing conceptions of poetry!) The 
 difference between an hour passed with friends and an 
 hour passed with strangers, will be some guide to you 
 in forming an estimate of the difference between wri- 
 ting for our readers wilJwut, and writing for them rvith 
 the sympathy of books in common. The Mirror be- 
 comes, in a manner, our literary parish — we the in- 
 dulged literary vicar, with whose tastes out of the 
 pulpit you are as familiar as with his sermons of crit- 
 icism when in ; and you, dear reader, become our 
 loved parishioner, for whom we cater, at fountains of j 
 knowledge and fancy to which you have not our fa- I 
 cility of access, and whose face, turned to us on Sat- j 
 urday, inspires us like the countenance of a familiar 
 friend. This charming literary parish (now rising of 
 eleven thousand) we would not exchange for a bish- 
 opric, nor for the constituency of a congress-member; || 
 and we hold our responsibility to be as great as the 
 bishop's, and our chair better worth having than "a 
 seat" in the Capitol. Few things gratify us more 
 than the calls we occasionally get from subscribers 
 who have a wish to see us after reading our paper for 
 a while — and this feeling of friendly and personal ac- 
 quaintance is what we most aim at producing between 
 ourselves and our readers. We shall seldom be more 
 pleased hereafter than in taking one of our parish by 
 the hand — relying more upon the sympathy between 
 us, by common thoughts, than upon any possible cer- 
 emony of introduction. 
 
 Let us beg our readers to have the different num- 
 bers of the Rococo bound with blank letter-paper be- 
 tween the leaves, and to read always with a pencil in 
 hand. There are such chambers within chambers of 
 comprehension and relish in repeated readings of such 
 sweet creations, and the thoughts they suggest are so 
 noteworthy and so delightful to recal ! "We have sent 
 a poem to the printer this morning (to be published 
 in the same shilling number with The Rimini), which 
 we do not believe ten of our readers ever saw — (a po- 
 em never reprinted in this country, and apparently 
 quite lost sight of in England) — but which exercised 
 upon our imagination, when in college, an influence 
 tincturing years of feeling and revery. An English 
 copy was given us by an old man curious in books, 
 and it was soon so covered with pencil-marks that we 
 were obliged to rebind it with alternate leaves of white 
 paper, and we carried it with us for a travelling com- 
 panion through Europe, and re-read it (once again, 
 we well remember) sitting on the ruins of the church 
 of Sardis in Asia. R is a narrative-poem of inex- 
 pressible richness and melody, and of the loftiest walk 
 of inventive imagination. It is so sweet a story, too, 
 that it would entertain a child like a fairy-tale. We 
 could go on writing about it for hours — for it brings 
 back to us days spent with it in the woods, green 
 banks where we have lain and mused over it, lovely 
 listeners who have held their breaths to hear it, and 
 oh, a long, long chain of associations steeped in love, 
 indolence, and sunshine! And this it is to have a fa- 
 vorite author — to have a choice and small library of 
 favorite authors. It makes a wreath wherein to weave 
 for memory the chance flowers of a lifetime ! It gives 
 Memory a sweet companion. It enables you to with- 
 draw yourself at any time from the world, or from 
 care, and recover the dreams built over these books 
 in the rare hours dream-visited. More valuable 
 still, it gives you — when yon begin to love, and want ! 
 the words and thoughts that have fled affrighted away j 
 
 — a thread to draw back the truants, and an instant 
 and eloquent language to a heart otherwise dumb. 
 
 " Sybilla" wants a poetical color given to the " tran- 
 sition state" from the " uncertain age" to the "sad 
 certainty of youth gone by." We can only give her 
 a verse from a piece of poetry written to a delightful 
 and fascinating old maid whom we once had a passion 
 for:— 
 
 What though thy years are getting on, 
 
 They pass thee harmless by, 
 I can not count them on thy cheek, 
 
 Nor miss them in thine eye. 
 The meaner things of earth grow old, 
 
 And feel the touch of Time, 
 But the moon and the stars, though old in heaven, 
 
 Are fresh as in their prime. 
 
 Spring is close behind us, dear reader. What think 
 you of this bit of poetry, touching spring flowers? — 
 
 The flowers are nature's jewels, with whose wealth 
 She decks her summer beauty ; — Primrose sweet, 
 With blossoms of pure gold ; enchanting rose, 
 That like a virgin queen, salutes the sun, 
 Dew-diademed ; the perfumed pink that studs 
 The earth with clustering ruby ; hyacinth, 
 The hue of Venus' tresses ; myrtle green, 
 That maidens think a charm for constant love, 
 And give night-kisses to it, and so dream ; 
 Fair lily ! woman's emblem, and oft twined 
 Round bosoms, where its silver is unseen — 
 Such is their whiteness ;— downcast violet, 
 Turning away its sweet head from the wind, 
 As she her delicate and startled ear 
 From passion's tale. • 
 
 A country subscriber writes to know who " Mrs. 
 Grundy" is. She is the lady who lives next door, 
 madam — the lady at whose funeral there will be but 
 one mourner — the last man ! We are not sorry that 
 we know her, but very sorry that she must needs know 
 us, and have her "say" about us. 
 
 February should be called the month of hope, for it 
 is invariably more enjoyable than the first nominal 
 fruition — more spring-like than the first month of 
 spring. This is a morning that makes the hand open 
 and the fingers spread — a morning that should be con- 
 secrated to sacred idleness. I should like to exchange 
 work with any out-of-doors man — even with a driver 
 of an omnibus — specially with the farmer tinkering 
 his fences. Cities are convenient places of refuge 
 from winter and bad weather, but one longs to get out 
 into the country, like a sheep from a shed, with the 
 first warm gleam of sunshine. 
 
 I see that Moore has virtually turned to come down 
 from his long ladder of fame — his publishers, Long- 
 mans, having made a final collection of his works 
 in an elaborate edition, and prefixed thereto a picture 
 of an old man— Tom Moore as he is! It is melan- 
 choly to see this portrait. The sparse hair, made-the- 
 most-of— the muscles of the face retreating from the 
 habitual expression— the lamp within still uncon- 
 scious of losing brightness, yet the glass over it stained 
 and cracked. Moore should never have been painted 
 after thirty. This picture is like a decrepit cupid — 
 wholly out of character. His poetry is all youth, its 
 very faults requiring youthful feeling for an apology; 
 and to know that he has grown old— that he is bald 
 
670 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 wrinkled, venerable — is like some unnatural hocus- 
 pocus — some hideous metamorphosis we would ratber 
 not have seen even in melodrame. Moore has not 
 sobered away, twilight-wise, as he might have done. 
 His wit and song have kept admiration so warm around 
 him, that he has forgotten his sun was setting — that 
 it was time the shadows of his face grew longer — time 
 that his pen leaned toward life's downward horizon. 
 The expression on this face of frisky sixty, is of a 
 flogged-up hilarity that is afraid to relax. Moore will 
 look facetious and dining-out-ish in his coffin. 
 
 I see that Wallack has added lecturing, as a new 
 branch, to his profession, and is very successful. Mr. 
 Barry, the stage-manager of the Park, is to try on the 
 same experiment to-night at the Society Library. 
 " Two strings to your bow" is a good economy in any 
 profession, and there are sundry professions, the du- 
 ties of which do not interfere, for instance, with au- 
 thorship. A man who should read two hours before 
 going to bed, and write for the first two hours after 
 sunrise, would give time and attention enough to any 
 literary pursuit, while the business part of the day, 
 and a good part of the evening, would be still left un- 
 occupied. Actors particularly (so capricious is for- 
 tune with them) should have a brace of vocations, 
 and a poet, with an honest trade besides, is more likely 
 to have his " lines fall in pleasant places." 
 
 It appears by the English papers that Madame Cat- 
 alani indignantly denies being dead ! She is still liv- 
 ing, and capable of enjoying "good living," at her 
 villa, near Florence. The American story, which 
 went the rounds of the papers some time since, of a 
 man whose capacious throat had "swallowed a plan- 
 tation and fifty negroes," finds its counterpart in the 
 villa and its dependants, which have come out of the 
 throat of Madame Catalani. I was fortunate enough 
 to enjoy much of her hospitality when in Italy, and 
 there are few establishments that I have seen where 
 the honors were done with a more princely liberality 
 and good taste. She was then, as she is probably 
 still, a well-preserved and handsome woman, of majes- 
 tic mien, and most affable manners, and at her own 
 little parties she sang, whenever asked, as well as ever 
 she had done in public. She seemed to me never to 
 have been intoxicated with her brilliant successes, and 
 to have had no besoin of applause left like a thirst in 
 her ears — as is the case with popular favorites too of- 
 ten. Her husband, M. Valabreque, was a courteous 
 man and a fond husband, and their children were on 
 an equal footing of social position with the young no- 
 bility of Florence. Most strangers who see anything 
 of the society of that delightful city, come away with 
 charming remembrances of Madame Catalani. 
 
 Washington's Birthday is growing into a tem- 
 perance anniversary, probably much to the pleasure 
 and a little to the surprise of the distinguished ghost 
 There was a grand temperance celebration at the Tab- 
 ernacle last evening, at which the eloquent author of 
 the Airs of Palestine, Rev. John Pierpont, delivered 
 an address. By-the-way, it is an overlooked feather 
 in the cap of temperance, that we owe to it the pleas- 
 ant invention of kissing. In the course of my read- 
 ing I have fallen in with the historical fact, that, when 
 wine was prohibited by law to the women of ancient 
 Rome, male relatives had the right of ascertaining, 
 by tasting the lips of their sisters and cousins, wheth- 
 er the forbidden liquor had passed in. The investi- 
 
 gations of this lip-police, it is said, were pushed with 
 a rigor and vigilance highly creditable to the zeal 
 of the republic, and for a time intemperance was 
 fairly kissed away. Subsequently, female intoxica- 
 tion became fashionable again (temperance kisses not- 
 withstanding), and Seneca (in his Epistolce) is thus 
 severe upon the Roman ladies : " Their manners have 
 altogether changed, though their faces are as cap- 
 tivating as ever. They make a boast of their ex- 
 ploits in drinking.* They will sit through the night 
 with the glass in their hands, challenging the men, 
 and often outdoing them." Now, by restoring the 
 much-abused and perverted kiss to its original mis- 
 sion, and making of it the sacred apostle of inquiry 
 that it was originally designed for, it strikes me that 
 the temperance-committees would have many more 
 "active members," and the cause would assuredly 
 grow on public favor. I submit the hint to that ad- 
 mirable enthusiast, Mrs. Child. 
 
 There are two establishments in the city of New 
 York which should be visited by those who require 
 stretchers to their comprehension of luxury- -Meeks's 
 furniture-warehouse, behind the Astor, and Tiffany's 
 bijou-shop, at the corner of Warren street and Broad- 
 way. In a search I have lately made for a bookcase 
 of a particular fancy, 1 have made the round of fur- 
 niture-warehouses, and, as a grand epitome of all of 
 them — a seven-story building, crammed with furni- 
 ture on every floor — I should recommend the mere 
 idle sight-seer to spend a morning at Meeks's for his 
 amusement. Upon the simple act of sitting down 
 has been expended as much thought (in quantity) as 
 would produce another Paradise Lost. Some of the 
 chairs, indeed, are poems — the beautiful conception 
 and finish of them, taken into the mind with the same 
 sensation, at least, and the same glow of luxury. 
 The fancies of every age and country are represented, 
 those of the Elizabethan era and the ornate fashion 
 of Louis XIV. predominant, though tables and sofas 
 on Egyptian models are more sumptuous. At so 
 much cost, they ought to put the mind at ease as well 
 as the body. And, by-the-way, the combining of 
 couch and chair in one (now so fashionable) would 
 have pleased the Roman dames, whose husbands kept 
 chairs for women and mourners — a man's sitting upon 
 a chair (in preference to a couch) being considered a 
 received sign of deep mourning or poverty. Few 
 people can trust their taste to go into such an im- 
 mense warehouse as Meeks's and select (in one style, 
 and that style suitable to their house, condition, and 
 manner of living) the furniture for an establishment. 
 It would be a good vocation for a reduced gentleman 
 to keep taste to let, holding himself ready to take or- 
 ders, and execute them at discretion, according to the 
 suitabilities of the employer. 
 
 Tiffany's is a fashionable pleasure-lounge already, 
 his broad glass doors and tempting windows being at 
 one of the most thronged corners of Broadway. It 
 is better than a museum, in being quite as well stocked 
 with surprises, and these all ministering to present 
 and fashionable wants. Where resides the prodigious 
 ingenuity expended on these superb elegances and 
 costly trifles, it would be hard to discover. And the 
 seductive part of it is, that there are articles for all 
 prices, and you may spend a dollar, or five hundred, 
 in the same dainty line of commodity ! 
 
 The times are " easy," if we can judge by the ar- 
 ticles that find plenty of buyers. I heard yesterday 
 
 * They also became the cause of tippling in others, for it 
 grew into a common practice at Roman suppers to drink a 
 glass to every letter of a beauty's name— the longer the mor« 
 toasted. 
 
 " Nsevia sex cyaihis, septem Justina bibntur ." 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 671 
 
 that a shopkeeper in Broadway had imported several 
 ladies' dresses, priced at one thousand dollars each, 
 and had no difficulty in selling them- Mr. Meeks in- 
 formed ma that, of a certain kind of very costly chair, 
 he could not keep one unsold. It was certainly a su- 
 perb article, made of carved rosewood and purple vel- 
 vet ; price (for a single chair) one hundred and fifty 
 dollars! We have not yet adopted, in this country, 
 the French custom of ornamenting dinner-tables very 
 expensively with silver vases and artificial flowers, nor 
 has the old Roman custom ever been resumed, I 
 think, of placing the "household gods"' upon the ta- 
 ble. The aspect of a supper-table in Cicero's time, 
 indeed, must have been beyond the show even of 
 Bourbon sybarites ; the guests in white and scarlet 
 robes, with chaplets of roses, myrtle, or ivy on their 
 heads, lying by threes on couches covered with pur- 
 ple or embroidered with gold and silver — a crowd of 
 slaves, chosen for their beauty, waiting within the 
 square formed by the tables, and dressed in tunics of 
 the brightest colors — over all a canopy of purple cloth, 
 giving the room the appearance of a superb tent — 
 the courses brought in with a regular procession 
 marching to music — last (not least heightening to the 
 effect), the custom, borrowed of the Egyptians, of 
 bringing in a skeleton, in the midst of the feast, to 
 furnish a foil to the enjoyment. All these were com- 
 mon features of Roman luxury at the time when 
 Rome had the treasures of the earth at her disposal, 
 and probably will never be reproduced in the same 
 splendor, unless we rebarbarize and make war upon 
 Europe under a military chieftain. 
 
 The February rehearsal of spring is over — the pop- 
 ular play of April having been well represented by 
 the reigning stars and that pleasant company of play- 
 ers, the Breezes. The drop-curtain has fallen, repre- 
 senting a winter-scene, principally clouds and snow, 
 and the beauties of the dress-circle have retired (from 
 Broadway) discontented only with the beauty of the 
 piece. By-the-way, the acting was so true to nature, 
 that several trees in Broadway were affected to — bud- 
 ding ! 
 
 "Ah, friends, methinks it were a pleasant sphere, 
 
 If, like the trees, we budded every year ! 
 
 If locks grew thick again, and rosy dyes 
 
 Returned in cheeks, a raciness in eyes, 
 
 And, all around us vital to their tips, 
 
 The human orchard laughed with rosy lips." 
 
 So says Leigh Hunt. 
 
 The Land of Intermezzo. — If spring be cognate 
 to one poetical subject more than all others, it is to 
 the single dreamy fable upon which are founded three 
 immortal poems — one by Thomas Moore, one by 
 Lord Byron, and the third (quite as beautiful as either) 
 by the Rev. George Croly. The last — "The Angel 
 of the World," by Croly, and the first, "The 
 Loves of the Angels," by Moore, are issued in ex- 
 tras of the Mirror. The other, Byron's " Heaven 
 and Earth" (so universal are the works of the noble 
 bard), we took for granted was already within the 
 reach of every reader. Apart from the excessive 
 beauty of these poems, it is curious to peruse them 
 with a view to comparison— to read first the short and 
 simple story of " Haruth and Maruth," and then study 
 the different shapes into which it is cast by the ka- 
 leidoscope imaginations of three of the master-min- 
 strels of the time. 
 
 [Stay — do you live in the country, dear reader? 
 Have you a nook near by — (natural) — or can you go 
 to one in imagination, or will you come to ours— 
 where our spirit is likely to be— that is to say, while 
 
 scribbling this page, this glorious morning? For 
 spring makes a madhouse of a city's brick walls, and 
 we must think in the country to-day — live, bodily, 
 where we will.] 
 
 Here we are, then, in a deep down dell — the appa- 
 rent horizon scarce forty feet from us — nothing visible 
 that has been altered since God made it — and a col- 
 umn of clear space upward, topped by the zenith, 
 like a cover to a well — this dell the bottom of it. 
 (The zenith off, we should see heaven, of course!) 
 In my pocket are the three poems abovementioned, and 
 a few editorial memoranda — but we will bind ourselves 
 to nothing — not even to talk about these poems un- 
 less we like, nor to remember the memoranda. Idle- 
 ness was part of Paradise, and with the weather of 
 j Paradise it comes over us, irresistibly. 
 
 To bring heaven and earth together — to make beav- 
 ! en half earth, and earth half heaven — is the doomed 
 labor and thirst of poetry; and of these three poems, 
 the desire for this pleasant intermezzo is the exclusive 
 under-tow, the unexpressed, yet predominating stim- 
 ulus. To Byron (with his earthly mind unmodified), 
 complete heaven would doubtless have been as unpal- 
 atable as were evidently the mere realities of earth. 
 He, and Moore, and Croly, have seized upon the east- 
 ern fable, of angels made half human and mortals 
 half divine, to give voice to the dumb ache of their 
 imaginations — an ache as native to the bosoms of the 
 "Mirror parish," as to these three immortal subjects 
 of mortal Victoria. (She ought, by-the-way, to wear 
 a separate crown for her loyal immortals — the undy- 
 ing men of genius who are her subjects exclusively, 
 and whose fame is, at least, ws^ue-millenial and a 
 thousand years over.) Each of these has pulled 
 down angels to the love of flesh and blood — (the hap- 
 piness each would least like to lose, probably, in be- 
 coming an angel) — but there are differences in the 
 other particulars of their half-and-half Paradise, most 
 characteristic of the qualities of the different poets, 
 and pleasant stuff for your idle hour's unravelling, oh 
 reader, rich in leisure! 
 
 But this land of Intermezzo — this kingdom of Mid- 
 dlings— this beatific, and poet-loved half and half! 
 Let us talk of it some more ! 
 
 We are inclined to think that half way, in most 
 things, is where happiness dwells. We say so timidly, 
 for we live in a country famous for extremes. It must 
 be Heaven "No. I," to tempt the Yankee! Paradise, 
 which lies between earth and heaven, would be poor 
 stock in Wall street! The best — only the best and 
 most exciting, in the way of pleasure, for this market 
 — Rags, or the best broadcloth, the only wear: — Sullen 
 privation or sudden luxury, the only living : — Stars, 
 or no actors : — Millions, or hand-to-mouth : — Perfect- 
 ly obscure, or highly fashionable ! Medium — inter- 
 mezzo — there is (quasi) none in America ! 
 
 In this sweet land of Intermezzo we find ourself, 
 of latter years, laying up treasure. Quiet lives there. 
 Revery is native there. Content dwells nowhere else. 
 Modesty retires there when she would escape envy, 
 for there envy never sets foot. St. Paul saw that land 
 when he said — "Give me neither poverty nor riches." 
 " Something I must like and love," says old Feltham, 
 " but nothing so violently as to undo myself with 
 wanting it." Travel where you will, up to middle 
 age (says a certain Truth-angel, who sometimes stoops 
 to our ear), but abide, ever after, in the land of Inter- 
 mezzo ! 
 
 But, in the land of Intermezzo does not live fame! 
 It is a land with an atmosphere of sober gray, and 
 fame is the shadow of one living in the sun. If we 
 may preach to the poets among our flock of parishion- 
 ers, we should say, forego this shadow ! Think of it 
 as it is — only a shadow. Value it as you do the 
 shadow of your friend — nothing, but for the substance 
 that goes before. Live in the land of Intermezzo, 
 
672 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 and let fame find you — taking for it no more care than 
 for your shadow when you walk abroad. Write — for 
 the voice the soul wants — the utterance without which 
 the heart seems over-full — but be not eager for the 
 world's listening ! Fame is sweet when it comes un- 
 beckoned. The world gives, more willingly than it 
 pays on demand. In the quiet fields of Intermezzo, 
 pluck flowers, to dry unseen in your bosom, and if, 
 by chance, years after, they are unloaded in the sun, 
 they will be thrice fragrant for their shaded keeping. 
 Amen! 
 
 When books were scarcer and scholars given to 
 longer incubation, a pocket companion called a Go- 
 with-me, was the fashion — {Vade-mecum, it you like 
 it better in Latin). It was commonly a favorite author, 
 sometimes a volume of maxims, oftener yet a book of 
 devotion. The monks profess to entertain themselves 
 in all odd hours and quiet places with their pocket 
 breviary — the concentrated and vital essence of 
 missal and prayer-book. We liked better, in our 
 youth (Heaven assoil us !) a self-compiled breviary 
 of beloved poetry — a book half scrap, half manuscript, 
 picked from newspapers and copied from readings — 
 and, in a protracted youth (enriched with a most 
 plentiful lack of anything-to-do), we struck together, 
 with pin and paste, sundry consecutive volumes which 
 had their consecutive day. Various were their uses ! 
 There have occurred deserts, in our travels though 
 most of our loves and friendships, which could only 
 be pleasantly crossed in the company of such caravans 
 of poetry. There have been thoughts born without 
 words to them, aptly fitted to a vehicle by this varied 
 repository. We have been fed through many a famine 
 of hope, supplied through many a drought of tears 
 and memory, by these timely resources. We have 
 them yet. The longer poems we are giving to our 
 friends in the numbers of the Rococo. The shorter 
 ones we purpose giving in the Mirror, or possibly in a 
 sort of mosaic extra — imparting thus, piece-meal, the 
 whole of our Breviary of Idleness. Here and 
 there, it is possible, we may give something you have 
 seen before, but that will not happen often — for we 
 have frequented most, the least known shelves of 
 libraries, and loved most the least-famed authors. 
 Here is a stray passage upon roses ; — (but we don't 
 give you the best first !) 
 
 " We are blushing roses, bending with our fulness, 
 Midst our close-copped sister-buds warming the green cool- 
 ness. 
 Whatsoever beauty wears, when it reposes, — 
 Blush, and bosom, and sweet breath — took a shape in roses. 
 Hold one of us lightly ; — see from what a slender 
 Stalk we bow in heavy blooms, and roundness rich and 
 
 tender : 
 Know you not our only vital flower— the human ? 
 Loveliest weight on lightest foot, joy-abundant woman?" 
 
 What we like about that is the well-contrived en- 
 tanglements compelling you to stop and re-read it, 
 and so find a new beauty— like the wheel of your car- 
 riage coming off amid scenery you are travelling 
 through too rapidly. 
 
 The Vesuvius of new books has naturally its Pom- 
 peii, in which merit, among other things, is buried 
 quietly under the cinders and remains long trodden 
 over and forgotten. Upon the excavations and disinter- 
 ments in this city of literary oblivion is founded, in a 
 great measure, the New Mirror project of a library 
 of favorite authors, and perhaps the most interesting 
 of its restorations to light, as yet, is the delicious 
 poem by Croly, " The Angel of the World." 
 I hardly think there are ten people in the United 
 
 States who know this sweet book, though it is founded 
 on the same eastern fable as Moore's " Loves of the 
 Angels," and, to my thinking, a finer expansion of 
 that splendid story. Byron's " Heaven and Earth," 
 and the two poems just named are all founded on this 
 same tradition, and it is curious to read them with a 
 view to comparison, and see of what varieties of com- 
 bination the kaleidoscope of genius is capable. Byron 
 makes his the vehicle of his audacious defiance tow- 
 ard sacred things, while Moore's is all love aud 
 flowers, perfume and gems. Croly's is more a poem 
 of strong human passion and character, and comes 
 II home more to the human " business and bosom." It 
 jj is written (the latter) with wonderful splendor of dic- 
 j; tion and imagery. Few poetical works will be more 
 popular in this country, I think — profoundly as it has 
 slept in Lethe for the last twenty years. Croly is a 
 clergyman (the Rev. George), and, having a fat living 
 from the church of England, his Pegasus has never 
 been in hack harness, and, I think, shows the ease of 
 pasture-gambol in his verse. 
 
 Tammany Hall is graced to-day with a showy trans- 
 parency representing a huge owl sitting in a Gothic 
 window, and a Latin motto beneath, declaring that 
 "the countenance is the index of the mind." I can 
 not see, by the morning papers, any explanation of 
 the objects of the club whose celebration comes off 
 under these ominous auspices; but if it be a physiog- 
 nomical society, as the motto would purport, they have 
 chosen well. It were a good symbol also for a club 
 of "minions of the moon," if they were less fond of a 
 lark — better still for a society of poets, if poets were 
 ever (which is doubtful) fond of poetical society. It 
 is the poet's cue to look wise and say little, to get his 
 victual by night, to differ altogether in his habit, as 
 owls do, from birds of other feather. Virgil, indeed, 
 makes the owl a poet : — 
 
 " And oft the owl with rueful song complained 
 From the house-top,* drawing long doleful tunes." 
 
 Professor Bronson, whose lectures are " going on" 
 and still "come off," draws a very attractive picture 
 in his advertised prospectus. " The lectures," he 
 says, "will be comparatively free, an admission of 
 twenty-five cents only being required." For this, 
 among many other things, he promises that "a key 
 shall be given to the connexion of natural and spiritual 
 things by which all mysteries may be explained !" 
 " The true source of our ideas on the sublime and 
 beautiful will be explained, together with the true 
 principles of taste and criticism." — " The French 
 baquet, or grand mesmeric reservoir, will be exhibited, 
 and minerals, vegetables, animals, and several persons 
 at a time magnetized ; the German rotary magnetic 
 machine for similar purposes ; also three or four hun- 
 dred engravings pertaining to physiology, &c. and 
 each auditor furnished with them gratuitously, with the 
 evening programme ; also several hundred paintings 
 (many expressly imported from London), to illustrate 
 the subjects of mineralogy, botany, natural history, 
 and astronomy. A common rose will be shown, as 
 developing from the bud to full bloom, appearing four 
 or five feet high, in all its glory ; a butterfly in the 
 same manner several feet square, passing through its 
 three stages of development ; and all the phenomena 
 of the natural heavens, to wit, the sun, moon, and 
 stars." As a list of articles to be had for twenty-five 
 cents, I think you will allow the professor's advertise- 
 ment to be worthy of statistical preservation. 
 
 * Probably not called an attic in Virgil's time. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 673 
 
 The girdle put around the earth by the English is, 
 to my mind, less powerfully figured forth in their 
 drum-beat (so finally alluded to by Webstkr) than 
 in the small colonial-looking newspaper — the same 
 article, whether it come from the pagodas of India or 
 the snows of Canada, the sheep-hills of New South 
 Wales, or the plantations of the Bermudas. By the j 
 kindnes*s of my friend Aaron Palmkr, Esq. (who j 
 does business with arms as long as the world's axis, 
 and has correspondences and exchanges newspapers j 
 with every corner of the globe), I have by me, at this 
 moment a file of English papers published at the seat i 
 of the Great Mogul, Delhi, and another published at I 
 Bermuda. You would think them all edited by the | 
 same man and supplied by the same contributors. 
 They are filled principally, of course, with old English j 
 news, but the Delhi paper (only ninety days from the i 
 heart of Hindostan !) has some strictures on Lady 
 Sale and her book, which show she is not to be a' 
 heroine without the usual penalty of envy and malice. 
 An officer-contributor to the Gazette says : — 
 
 " We were nearly as much on the tiptoe of expecta- 
 tion for Lady Sale's book as the good folks of Eng- 
 land, though the secret of its origin was here better 
 known. It would be amusing to print, in parallel | 
 columns, the opinions on her production given by the j 
 press of India and England ; c'est a dire, of those who 
 know what they are writing about and those who do 
 Dot. I am safe in asserting that, for every eulogium '' 
 her ladyship has received in England, she has got at 
 least one set down in India." 
 
 The same writer says, in another part of his letter: — 
 
 " We look forward to the notice of our Scinde 
 doings in England. Let not the profit of the acquisi- 
 tion blind you to the iniquity. Our late dealings with 
 that country commenced in perfidy, and went on in 
 blood and rapine. May they not end in retribution !" 
 
 We have commonly two sweet hours of idleness in i 
 the afternoon — two hours that are the juice of our 
 much-squeezed twenty-four hours — two hours that 
 (to borrow a simile from the more homely and tooth- 
 some days of authorship) are "as sweet as a pot of 
 lambalive electuary with a stick of licorice." At 
 four o'clock, 
 
 " Taking our hat in our hand, a remarkably requisite practice," 
 we button our coat over our resignation (synonym for 
 'dinner), and with some pleasant errand that has been 
 laid aside for such opportunity, stroll forth. It is 
 sometimes to an artist's room, sometimes to a print- 
 shop, sometimes to an unexplored street, sometimes 
 to look off upon the bay, or take a ride in an omnibus | 
 
 now and then to refresh our covetous desires at 
 
 Tiffany's. We have lately been the subject of a pas- 
 sion for pawnbrokery, and taken the precaution to j 
 leave our little pocket-money at home, we have tamper- j 
 ed with exploring and price-asking in these melan- j 
 choly museums of heart-ache. 
 
 " Twiddling" our pen, this morning (as Leigh | 
 Hunt represents Apollo doing with a sunbeam), we j 
 fell to speculating on what it was that made us think, \ 
 whether we would or no, of the pyramids ! This is ! 
 last-page-day, and we had forty things to write about, 
 but there! — there! ("in my mind's eye, Horatio!") 
 Btands the " wedge sublime" of a pyramid ! Doubt- 
 less the ghost of some word, deed, or similitude of the 
 day before — but why such pertinacity of apparition ? 
 We did, nor noted, nothing pyramidal yesterday. We 
 watched the general; hanging up, in his new-garnish- 
 ed office, Dick's fine print of Sir Walter's monument, 
 and that, it is true, is a pyramid in Gothic. We 
 bought yesterday, in our pawnbroking researches, a 
 bust of a man of genius whom we admired because he 
 43 
 
 found leisure to be a gentleman — the accomplished 
 victim of circumstances, just dead at Andalusia — and 
 a pyramid, truncated by a thunderbolt near the sum- 
 mit, were an emblem of his career that may well have 
 occurred to us. We were talking and thinking much 
 yesterday of Moore's confessed completion of his litera- 
 ry lifetime ; and what is his toil, just finished, but 
 the building of an imperishable pyramid for the memo- 
 ry of his finished thoughts. 
 
 Stay ! —an anecdote of Moore occurs to us. He is 
 dead, " by brevet," having seen to (and got the money 
 for), his own " last words ;" and when, by the sythe 
 of the relentless mower, Tom Moore shall be no more, 
 to know more of his more personal qualities (what an 
 echo there is to the man's name !) will add spices to 
 his embalming. An old lady in Dublin, who was one 
 of Moore's indigenous friends (he was only aristocratic 
 as an exotic, perhaps you know), told us the story. 
 It is not likely to get into print except by our telling 
 for it records a virtue ; and Moore is a man to have 
 selected his biographer with a special caveat against 
 all contributions to his " life" from its grocery source 
 — his respectable father, the Dublin grocer, probably 
 caring little for his " brilliant successes," and only 
 cherishing in his brown-paper memory the small 
 parcel of his virtues. But — to the story — (which 
 Moore told the old lady, by the way, on one of his 
 reluctant Irish visits). 
 
 Moore had just returned from his government-office 
 in the West Indies, a defaulter for eight thousand 
 pounds. Great sympathy was felt for him among his 
 friends, and three propositions were made to him to 
 cancel the debt. Lord Lansdowne offered simply to 
 pay it. Longman and Murray offered to advance it 
 on his future works, and the noblemen at White's 
 offered the sum to him in a subscription. This was 
 at the time subscriptions were on foot for getting 
 Sheridan out of his troubles; and while Moore was 
 considering the three propositions just named, he 
 chanced to be walking down St. James street with two 
 noblemen when they met Sheridan. Sheridan bowed 
 to them with a familiar " how are you ?" — " D — n the 
 fellow," said one of the noblemen, "he might have 
 touched his hat ! I subscribed a hundred pounds for 
 him last night !" — " Thank God ! you dare make no 
 such criticism on a bow from me /" said Moore to 
 himself. The lesson sank deep. He rejected all the 
 offers made to relieve him — went to Passy, and lived 
 in complete obscurity, in that little suburb of Paris, 
 till he had written himself out of debt. Under the 
 spur of that chance remark were written some of the 
 works by which Moore will be best known to posterity. 
 This reminds us (and if we don't nab it now, it may 
 never again be nabable), of a laugh at Moore's expense 
 in a company of very celebrated authors. They were 
 talking him over, and one of the company quoted 
 Leigh Hunt's simile for him — "a young Bacchus 
 snuffing up the vine." " Bah !" said another, " don't 
 quite deify the little worldling ! He is more like a 
 cross between a toad and a cupid !" 
 
 We have got hold of a string and we may as well 
 pull away to see what will come of it. We had long 
 forgotten two or three trifles tied together, of which this 
 last paragraph is one, and we remember now, another 
 anecdote told by the caustic person whose comparison 
 we have just quoted. He said that Byron would never 
 have gone to Greece but for a tailor in Genoa. The 
 noble bard, he went on to say, was very economical, 
 as was well known, in small matters. He had hired a 
 villa at Genoa and furnished it, with the intention of 
 making it a permanent residence. Lord and Lady 
 Blessington and a large society of English people of 
 good style were residing there at the time. In the 
 fullest enjoyment of his house and his mode of life, 
 Byron wanted a new coat ; and, having some English 
 cloth, he left it with his measure in the hands of a 
 
674 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Genoese tailor, with no particular instructions as to 
 the making. The tailor, overcome with the honor of 
 making a coat for an Eccellenza Inglese, embroidered 
 it from collar to tail, and sent it home with a bill as 
 thickly embroidered as the coat ! Byron kept the 
 coat for fear of its being sold, as his, to an actor of 
 English parts on the stage, but resolutely refused to 
 pay for more than the making of a plain and plebeian 
 garment. The tailor threatened an attachment, and 
 Byron assigned over his furniture to his banker, and 
 finally quitted Genoa in disgust — ready of course, as 
 he would not otherwise have been, for a new project. 
 From indignation at an embroidered coat-tail the 
 transition to "liberty or death," "wo to the Moslem!" 
 or any other vent for his accumulated bile, was easy 
 and natural ! He embarked in the Greek cause soon 
 after, and the embroidered coat was not (as it should 
 have been) " flung to the breeze at Salamis" — the 
 banner of inspired heroism ! 
 
 So was the tale told- So tell we it to you, dear 
 reader. It is no damage to the gods or demigods to 
 unpedestal them sometimes. The old Saturnalia, 
 when masters and slaves changed places for a while, 
 was founded on the principle in nature that all high- 
 strung-itudes are better for occasional relaxing. 
 
 We have not done what we sat down to do — which 
 was to run a pretty parallel between a fame and a 
 pyramid — apropos of some trifles bought of a pear- 
 shaped pawnbroker. Pity that ideas once touched are 
 like uncorked claret — good for one draught only ! 
 We shall never dare to take up the figure again, so 
 we may as well hand you the gold thread we meant to 
 have woven into it — a little figurative consolation to 
 the unappreciated poet. To him who is building a 
 pyramid of poetical fame, a premature celebrity is like 
 the lop-stone laid on his back and carried till he has 
 built up to it. We wish those of our contributors 
 whom we neither publish nor praise, would apply this 
 " parmeceti" to their " inward bruise." 
 
 We take the vital centre of New York to be a cer- 
 tain lamp-post from which radiate five crossings — one 
 pointing to the Astor, one to the American Museum, 
 one up Broadway, one up the Bowery, and the fifth 
 (dead east) to the office of the New Mirror — the 
 which office is clearly visible from the palm of the 
 spread hand upholding this medio-metropolitan lamp- 
 post. Having conceived — (you have — have you not, 
 dear reader?) — the laudable purpose of subscribing 
 for the Mirrors second year (now on the eve of com- 
 mencing), your first inquiry is the geography of 
 "Ann street," — upon which money-welcoming spot 
 shines nightly this central lamp of the municipality. 
 You arrive safely at the Astor. You glide past its 
 substratum of apothecaries, perfumers, goldsmiths, 
 and hatters, and arrest your footsteps at the triple cor- 
 ner studded with three of the notable structures of 
 Manhattan— the imperial Astor, the goodly St Paul's, 
 and the marvellous museum with the " fifty thousand 
 curiosities." You now face due southward. Helm 
 down (coat-skirt down Vesey street, that is to say), 
 and you head east southeast, laying your course ex- 
 actly. Before you lies a crossing of flags by which 
 you may safely reach the islanded palm of the spread 
 hand (holding two granite posts guarding a lamp-post), 
 and, once there, you luff a little to the right, and 
 follow the pointed forefinger of that same hand to 
 the opening lips of Ann street. Cross over, keep 
 down a few doors to the right, and " there you are" — 
 (there we are !) — walk in ! 
 
 And now, dear sir ! (besides your receipt and the 
 benign smile of the Brigadier) what will you have ? 
 Our visibilities to the naked eye are small, but there 
 be caves and storehouses of our primrose-colored 
 
 | wares, and if we affect the Turkish fashion of a speci- 
 ! men shop, with room only for one purchaser at a 
 j time, it is for another reason besides saving the rent. 
 Philosophic, like us, is the French Amphytrion, who 
 ! does not show to his delicate guest the pieces de re- 
 | sislance. The roasted joints stand upon a side-table, 
 | removed from view, and if slices are handed you over 
 your shoulder, it is with an apposite comnfendation 
 j which the sight of the whole dish would fatally 
 j smother. Small as the shop is, however (parva, sed 
 apta mihi !) the welcome is spacious ! All who come 
 there, come with a parishioner's regard, self-chosen 
 to our literary flock, and none turn the latch without 
 unlocking our heart with the same door-handle. 
 (" Qualis rex, talis grex!" Having found comfort in 
 loving ourselves, we venture the more easily to love 
 those who are like us.) 
 
 Touching this shop (of which we have now given 
 you the pictorial chart), we shall have more to say 
 ; hereafter. It has its history. Our landlord is a 
 \ " picked man of countries," and has written his pleas- 
 ant book. Around us "volcanoes belch their fires" 
 of prodigal literature, and opposite us there is a deep- 
 door by which the modest wits about town descend to 
 j Windust's, for news and things more succulent. 
 j There sometimes dives the brigadier, to lunch with 
 needful celerity on the busy Saturday, and thence 
 emerge daily and shiny-ly (after their pot of ale) re- 
 freshed, the manufacturers of public opinion. Oh, from 
 our modest window, we see sights! But, enough for 
 
 I had a half-hour's interview with the talking 
 machine this morning, and found him a more enter- 
 taining android than most of my wooden acquaintan- 
 ces — (the man who thinks for him being a very supe- 
 rior person). I must first give you a tableau of the 
 room. A German woman takes your half dollar at 
 the door, and points you to a semi-boxed-up Turk 
 (query : Why are all automata dressed in turbans ?) 
 — a Turk seated in a kind of low pulpit, with a green 
 shirt, a good complexion, a very fine beard, and a 
 pearl breastpin. Out from under his shoulder issues 
 a bunch of wooden sticks, arranged like a gamut of 
 pump-handles, and behind this, ready to play on his 
 Turk, sits Mr. Faber, the contriver. (I immediately 
 suggested to Mr. F., by the way, that the costume 
 and figure had better have been female, as the bustle 
 would have given a well-placed and ample conceal- 
 ment for all the machinery now disenchantingly 
 placed outside — the performer sitting down natu- 
 rally behind, and playing on her like a piano.*) The 
 Turk was talking to several ladies and gentlemen 
 when I entered, and my name being mentioned by 
 one of the party, he said, " How do you do, Mr. 
 
 ?" with perfect distinctness. There was a small 
 
 musical organ in the room, and one of the visiters 
 played " Hail Columbia !" the automaton singing the 
 words "like a man." There was no slighting or 
 slurring of diphthong or vowel, sybillate or aspirate. 
 Duty was done by every letter with a legitimate claim 
 to be sounded — the only fault being a strong German 
 accent (which of course will wear off with travel), and 
 a few German peculiarities, such as pronouncing v's 
 like w's, gargling the gutturals, &c, &c. 
 
 I understood Mr. Faber to say that he was seven 
 years contriving the utterance of the vowel e. Mr. F. 
 has a head and countenance fit for a speech-maker 
 (maker of the gift of speech, I mean) — a head of the 
 
 * A suspicion has since crossed my mind that I may here 
 have stumbled on an explanation of the great mystery of this 
 supernatural addition to the figure, the supernatural continu- 
 ance of articulation in the female requiring, perhaps, some 
 androidal assistance to the lungs. If so, it would appear that 
 woman, like " the church, can not do without a bishop." 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 675 
 
 finest model, and a mouth strongly marked with intel- 
 ligence and feeling. He is simple, naif, and enthusi- 
 astic in his manners. The rude musical organ in the 
 room was his own handiwork, and at the request of 
 one of the ladies he sat down to it and played a beau- 
 tiful waltz of his own composing. He may well be 
 completely absorbed, as he seems to be, in his an- 
 droides. It says anything, in any language. It can 
 not cough— not being liable to bronchitis; nor laugh 
 —being a Turk. But it can sing, and has a sweet 
 breath and well-governed tongue. In short, it is what 
 would pass in the world for " a very fine man." Be- 
 sides those whom God has made (Boyle, the philoso- 
 pher, calls the world "an automaton of God's ma- 
 king"), I know of but one or two attempts before this 
 to make a talking-machine— the famous one by Von 
 Kempelen, and the celebrated brazen head constructed 
 by Friar Bacon. What could be uttered by this un- 
 thinking brass has not come down to us. The statue 
 of Memnon could utter musical sounds, and MaelzePs 
 chess-player could say "echec." A much more use- 
 ful automaton than any of these, Mr. Faber's inclu- 
 ded, was one invented by one of the brothers Droz— 
 «'a child, sitting at a desk, who dipped his pen in the 
 ink and wrote in French whatever was dictated to 
 him" (the inventor, of course, somewhere concealed). 
 It struck me as a great pity, indeed, that the ad- 
 mirable ingenuity and perseverance of Mr. Faber 
 should have been wasted on a superfluity — (for there 
 is more talking than enough). Albertus Magnus in- 
 vented, with thirty years' labor, an automaton servant, 
 who would open the door when any one knocked, and 
 salute the visiter — capable, of course, of being able to 
 say " not at home," and so saving the conscience of 
 the domestic; aud this was, perhaps, worth the labor. 
 Less meritorious, again, was the automaton fly made 
 of iron by Regiomontanus, in the 14th century, which 
 would make the circuit of the room with a buz, and 
 return to its master. Something in the Pygmalion 
 line has been attempted within a few years by a Swiss 
 mechanician, Maillardet, who constructed a female 
 with a "bosom that would heave for an hour," once 
 wound up. She would also play forty tunes on the 
 piano with her fingers, and look languishingly by cast- 
 ing her eyes down — almost enough for one woman to 
 do! I think these are facts enough for a very specu- 
 lative essay on the value of such offices as may be 
 performed by the body without the aid of brains. 
 
 I have been prevented, of late, from going about as 
 much as my wont, and have hardly seen or heard 
 more of the city doings than the country readers of 
 your paper. This will account, if not apologize, for 
 some lack of variety in my letters. 1 broke through 
 my fireside habits last night, and went to the Metho- 
 dist chapel in Madison street, to hear the Rev. Mr. 
 Maffit's diatribe against "Boz" — admittance twenty- 
 five cents. My surprise on being called on for money 
 at the door was pleasurable, for I rejoice in an injus- 
 tice turned by its victims " to commodity." Two 
 hundred people were well amused, and religion (per 
 one of its ministers) was profited fifty dollars in pock- 
 et. Except in this light, however, I should call the 
 using of "Boz" for a pulpit text a decided case of le 
 jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle. (The church gas-lights 
 seemed to be of that opinion, for they suddenly paled 
 their fires teu minutes before the conclusion of the 
 lecture!) 
 
 While I think of it — Dickens has contradicted the 
 report, published in the London papers, touching his 
 durance for debt. I am glad it was not true. Mis- 
 takes of positive assertion and of this personal charac- 
 ter are so rare in the respectable English papers, that 
 I mentioned it in my letter to you with no suspicion 
 
 of its being an error — the assertion supported, moreo- 
 ver, by the rumors, rife to the same purport, when I 
 was last in London. The reports, doubtless, were 
 born of the coupling of two well-known facts — the de- 
 crease of the prices paid for his books by publishers, 
 and the increase of his " pledges," with no corre- 
 sponding reductions apparent in his style of living. 
 The statement having once appeared in the papers of 
 his own country, an expression of sympathy (as far 
 off as the other shoulder of the world) was but com- 
 plimentary to Mr. Dickens. 
 
 Mr. Maffit's discourse was more of an event to me 
 than to most of his audience, probably ; for his elo- 
 quence made a great impression upon me when I was 
 a boy between ten and twelve years of age, and I had 
 not seen him since. He preached at that time in the 
 Bromfield chapel, Boston (in the next street to the 
 one in which I lived), and was then a " new light" in 
 the methodist church, and drew crowds after him. I 
 left my play eagerly to hear him, and I have often 
 since wished for an opportunity to analyze the pecu- 
 liar delight he gave me — for it was all pleasure, with- 
 out the slightest effect in the way of religious impres- 
 sion. I could fill my letter with what came to me 
 upon the turned-back leaf of seeing Mr. Maffit in the 
 pulpit again, but the comparison between the effects 
 of oratory upon tastes mature and immature, though 
 interesting elsewhere, would be out of place here. 
 He was not so much changed as I anticipated. Mac- 
 ready has always reminded me of him, and they are 
 still alike. Mr. Maffit did not use to shave his tem- 
 ! pies, and from this peculiar tonsure, his forehead looks 
 \ higher and his hair less Hyperian and more oratorical 
 I than formerly. 
 
 He commenced with some general remarks as to 
 the charm of variety in customs and manners, and the 
 common English weakness of condemning pitilessly 
 every departure from the cockney standards and pecu- 
 liarities, trying, by this test only, every country under 
 the sun. This part of the oration was written in lam- 
 bent and oily-hinged periods, and delivered— really, in 
 I music absolute ! "" 1 felt the spell over again. It is in 
 the voice and accent of Mr. Maffit that the philtre 
 lies hid. So sweet a tone no other man has, in my 
 knowledge. His inflexions, so long as he remains 
 unexcited, are managed with the skill of the subtlest 
 \ rhetorician. He hides the meaning of his sentences 
 under the velvet words that are sweetest to linger 
 upon, and to press with emphasis, and in this depart- 
 ment of oratory he seems to me unsurpassed. He 
 | soon broke the spell, however. As he left generali- 
 ! zing, and got from poetry to analysis, he began to 
 show bad taste and clumsy discrimination, and fell 
 into a kind of grimalkin sputter of sarcasm, that let 
 down his dignity sadly. The audience began to ap- 
 | plaud, and, with their applause, he grew inflated, both 
 ! in matter and manner, and for the last half hour of his 
 ! discourse was entirely off his feet— trashy, inconse- 
 ! quent, and absurd— most applauded, however, when 
 | most incomprehensible. (And this ill-bestowed ap- 
 plause may easily have been the reverend orator s De- 
 lilah.) I remember little of what he said after the 
 first fifteen minutes. There was a good deal of illus- 
 tration to show that the "Yankees could whip the 
 British," and much more of such clap-trap, and Dick- 
 < ens and Mrs. Trollope were each served out with as 
 much pulpit-pounding and bitter epithet as is com- 
 monly given the devil, at a dose, 
 testimony given by the orator 
 on both sides with authority. 
 
 One comparative 
 duable, as he speaks 
 He assured us that the 
 from the 
 
676 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 and had been treated everywhere as a son and brother, 
 and spoke advisedly. I could wish this Irish and 
 celestial evidence in our favor might be put (for smo- 
 king) into the pipe of the London Quarterly. 
 
 I have discovered lately that the household-gods 
 have a vocabulary of their own. Search after a tri- 
 fling invention led me to Windle's furnishing-shop in 
 Maiden lane, and after spending an hour in marvelling 
 at the mind that has been expended upon the inven- 
 tion of household conveniences, I asked for a cata- 
 logue of the shop's wares. A pamphlet of twenty- 
 one pages was handed me, and I give yon, for your 
 despair, a few of the names of the necessary utensils 
 by which your comfort is ministered to: "Pope's 
 heads and eyes," " Shakers' swifts," " beefsteak pound- 
 ers," " faucets and bungstarts," " bootjacks and leg- 
 resters," "salt and spit-boxes," "Chinese swings," 
 "Chinese punk in boxes," "sillabub-sticks," " oven- 
 peels," " allblaze-pans," " ice-cream pagodas," " paste- 
 jaggers and cutters," " crimping and goffering ma- 
 chines," "sugar-nippers and larding-pins," "bread- 
 rasps and sausage-stuffers," etc, etc., etc. This is ver- 
 nacular, of course, to the ladies, but Greek to us. 
 
 Apropos of words — there should be a replevin (by 
 poetry upon vulgar usage) to restore the word diaper 
 to its original meaning. Ford says in one of his plays 
 (The Sun's Darling) :— 
 
 " Whate'er the wanton spring, 
 When she doth diaper the ground with beauties, 
 Toils for, comes home to autumn." 
 
 Diaper means literally, to embroider with raised 
 work — after a stuff which was formerly called d'fyre, 
 from the town of Jpre in Flanders, where it was man- 
 ufactured. There is such a load of descriptiveness 
 in the word that it is a shame it should be lost to 
 poetry. 
 
 Moore's carefully revised and corrected edition of 
 his works is republished in this country at the price 
 of three dollars and a half. Half of it, at least, is 
 uninteresting to the general reader, consisting of his 
 satires (with names left in unexplained blanks), local 
 poetry, translations from the classics, and a mass of 
 labored notes. The popular portions, consisting of 
 "The Loves of the Angels," "The Irish Melodies 
 and Sacred Songs," and the "National Airs, Ballads, 
 and Miscellaneous Poems," have been published in 
 three extras of the Mirror — five shillings for all of 
 them. This will form as beautiful an edition of the 
 enjoyable part of Moore's poetry as could be wished, 
 and as cheap as beautiful. 
 
 Charles Dibdin, " The Bard of Poor Jack," as 
 he is commonly called, is one of those authors less 
 known than his works, particularly in this country, 
 where his songs are familiar to every lip, and his name 
 hardly recognised. General Morris has made a col- 
 lection of all the songs of Dibdin that are universal 
 in their popularity, and has added others which from 
 their bold and graphic excellence have been com- 
 monly attributed to him. This shilling extra of the 
 Mirror will become, I think, the sailor's classic, embod- 
 ying, as it does, all their most remarkable songs. 
 
 Montgomery's " World before the Flood," one of 
 the sweetest poems in the English language, is also in 
 press for the " Mirror Library." On looking over the 
 biography of this good man and true poet, I find, by- 
 the-way, the following passage, referring, I believe, to 
 the father of one of the editors of the intelligencer: 
 "Mr. Montgomery removed to Sheffield (England) in 
 1792, and engaged himself with Mr. Gales, the pub- 
 lisher of a very popular newspaper, at that time known 
 by the title of the Sheffield Register. Mr. Mont- | 
 
 gomery became a useful correspondent to this paper, 
 and gained so far the good opinion and affection of 
 Mr. Gales and his family, that they vied with each 
 other in demonstrating their respect and regard for 
 him. In 1794, when Mr. Gales left England to avoid 
 a political prosecution, Montgomery, with the assist- 
 ance of another gentleman, became the editor of the 
 Register." Critics have unanimously agreed that 
 "The World before the Flood" is the best production 
 of Montgomery's muse, and it certainly is a noble and 
 pure structure of elevated imagination. Among the 
 sacred classics, Montgomery, I think, will rank first. 
 
 Sorrow's Reluctant Gate. — This last-turned 
 leaf, dear reader, seems to us always like a door shut 
 behind us, with the world outside. We have ex- 
 pressed this thought before, when it was a prelude to 
 being gayer than in the preceding pages. With the 
 closed door, now, we would throw off restraint, but it 
 is to be sadder than before. It is so with yourself, 
 doubtless. You sometimes break into singing on en- 
 tering your chamber and finding yourself alone — 
 sometimes you burst into tears. 
 
 There is nothing for which the similitudes of poetry 
 seem to us so false and poor, as for affliction by the 
 death of those we love. The news of such a calam- 
 ity is not "a blow." It is not like "a thunderbolt," 
 or " a piercing arrow;" it does not " crush and over- 
 whelm" us. We hear it, at first, with a kind of mourn- 
 ful incredulity, and the second feeling is, perhaps, a 
 wonder at ourselves — that we are so little moved. 
 The pulse beats on as tranquilly — the momentary tear 
 dries from the eye. Weeo on, about the errand in 
 which we were interrupted! We eat, sleep, at our 
 usual time, and are nourished and refreshed ; and if a 
 friend meet us and provoke a smile, we easily and for- 
 getfully smile. Nature does not seem to be conscious 
 of the event, or she does not recognise it as a calamity. 
 
 But little of what is taken away by death is taken 
 from the happiness of one hour, or one day. We 
 live, absent from beloved relatives, without pain. Days 
 pass without our seeing them — months — years. They 
 would be no more absent in body if they were dead. 
 But, suddenly, in the midst of our common occupa- 
 tions, we hear that they are one remove farther from 
 us — in the grave. The mind acknowledges it true. 
 The imagination makes a brief and painful visit to the 
 scene of the last agony, the death-chamber, the 
 burial — and returns weary and dispirited, to repose. 
 For that hour perhaps we should not have thought of 
 the departed, if they were living — nor for the next. 
 The routine we had relied upon to fill up those hours 
 comes round. We give it our cheerful attention. 
 The beloved dead are displaced from our memory, and 
 perhaps we start suddenly, with a kind of reproachful 
 surprise, that we can have been so forgetful — that the 
 world, with its wheels of minutes and trifles, can thus 
 untroubled go round, and that dear friend gone 
 from it. 
 
 But the day glides on, and night comes. We lie 
 down, and unconsciously, as we turn upon our pillow, 
 commence a recapitulation that was once a habit of 
 prayer — silently naming over the friends whom we 
 should commend to God — did we pray — as those most 
 dear to us. Suddenly the heart stops — the breath 
 hushes — the tears spring hot to the eyelids. We miss 
 the dead ! From that chain of sweet thoughts a link 
 is broken, and for the first time we feel that we are 
 bereaved. It was in the casket of that last hour before 
 sleeping — embalmed in the tranquillity of that hours 
 unnamed and unreckoned happiness — that the mem- 
 ory of the dead lay hid. For that friend, now, we 
 can no longer pray! Among the living — among our 
 blessings — among our hopes — that sweet friend is 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 677 
 
 nameable no more ! We realize it now. The list of 
 those who love us — whom we love — is made briefer. 
 With face turned upon our pillow — with anguish and 
 f ears — we blot out the beloved name, and begin the 
 slow and nightly task of unlearning the oft-told sylla- 
 bles from our lips. 
 
 And this is the slow-opening gate by which sorrow 
 enters in ! We wake on the morrow and remember 
 our tears of the past night ; and as the cheerful sun- 
 shine streams in at our window, we think of the kind 
 face and embracing arms, the soft eyes and beloved 
 lips, lying dark and cold, in a place — oh how pitiless 
 in its coldness and darkness! We choke with a suf- 
 fused sob, we heave the heavy thought from our bosom 
 with a painful sigh, and hasten abroad — for relief in 
 forgetfulness! 
 
 But we had not anticipated that this dear friend 
 would die, and we have marked out years to come 
 with hopes in which the dead was to have been a 
 sharer. Thoughts, and promises, and meetings, and 
 gifts, and pleasures, of which hers was the brighter 
 half, are wound like a wreath of flowers around the 
 chain of the future, and as we come to them — to the 
 places where these looked -for flowers lie in ashes upon 
 the inevitable link — oh, God! with what agonizing 
 vividness they suddenly return! — with what grief, made 
 intenser by realizing, made more aching by prolonged 
 absence, we call up those features beloved, and re- 
 member where they lie, uncaressed and unvisited ! 
 Years must pass — and other affections must " sweep, 
 and garnish, and enter in" to the void chambers of the 
 heart — and consolation and natural forgetfulness must 
 do their slow work of erasure — and meantime grief 
 visits us, in unexpected times and places, its parox- 
 ysms imperceptibly lessening in poignancy and tena- 
 city, but life in its main current, flowing, from the 
 death to the forgetting of it, unchanged on ! 
 
 And now, what is like to this, in nature (for even the 
 slight sympathy in dumb similitudes is sweet) ? It is 
 not like the rose's perishing — for that robs only the 
 hour in which it dies. It were more like the removal 
 from earth of that whole race of flowers, for we should 
 not miss the first day's roses, hardly the first season's, 
 and should mourn most when the impoverished spring 
 came one more round without them. It were like 
 stilling the music of a brook for ever, or making all 
 singing-birds dumb, or hushing the wind-murmur in 
 the trees, or drawing out from nature any one of her 
 threads of priceless repetition. We should not mourn 
 for the first day's silence in the brook, or in the trees — 
 nor for the first morning's hush after the birds were 
 made voiceless. The recurrent dawns, or twilights, or 
 summer noons, robbed of their accustomed music, 
 would bring the sense of its loss — the value of what 
 was taken away increasing with its recurrent season. 
 But these are weak similitudes — as they must needs 
 be, drawn from a world in which death — the lot alike 
 of all living creatures that inhabit it — is only a calam- 
 ity to man ! 
 
 Spring is here, and, with its earliest sunshine, 
 Broadway puts out its first flowers in bright colors 
 and gay drapery. It is a lounge we should love were 
 we idle. We do not write for Autolycus, nor for 
 Timon. (Thieves and misanthropes do not common- 
 ly take the papers.) And as all other classes of man- 
 kind yield to the gregarious instincts of our race, we 
 feel free to discourse of Broadway as a place beloved. 
 Beloved it is — by the philanthropist, interested in the 
 peccant varieties of his fellow-creatures ; by the old, 
 who love to look upon the young ; and by the young, 
 who love to look upon each other; (ah ! the celestial 
 quality of youth!) — by the serious, for whom there 
 would seem to be resorts less thronged with sinners 
 (if need were), and by sinners, who are at least spared 
 
 the sin of hypocrisy, for, with little disguise, they 
 "love one another." Now, if beautiful women are 
 not laudable objects of contemplation and curiosity, 
 as St. Anthony avers (and he is welcome to let them 
 alone), we are not warned against beautiful children, 
 nor beautiful horses, nor the bright sunshine, nor the 
 gay product of the silkworm, nor the "stuffs from 
 Colchis and Trebizond." 
 
 Very handsome — isn't she ? And apparently in a 
 very great hurry, and apparently very much disgusted 
 at being seen in the street at all! You would think, 
 now, that that lady's coachman was ill and that she 
 was, for this once in her life, walking alone to her 
 mother's. But she is more amused at this moment 
 than she will be again to-day — and to-morrow she will 
 take the same walk to be happy again. She has a 
 husband, however, and a beautiful house, and not a 
 wish (that money can gratify) ungratified. And her 
 drawing-rooms are full of exquisite objects of art. 
 She might stay contentedly at home, you think ? No ! 
 She was a belle, pampered with admiration when she 
 married, and she married a cynical and cold-blooded 
 parsnip, who sits like a snarling ogre among his statues 
 and pictures — a spot on his own ottoman — a blemish 
 in the elegance of his own house. She married him 
 for an establishment, but forgot he was a part of it — 
 dazzled with the frame, she overlooked the hideous- 
 ness of the picture. And he knows this — and likes 
 her, with his statues, as his property — and is pleased 
 to have her seen as his wife — though she is the wife 
 to but one part of him, his vanity ! She finds it hard 
 to feel beautiful at breakfast, with her husband on the 
 other side of the table, and he finds it hard to be very 
 bland with a wife who looks at his acrid physiognomy 
 I with a shudder. 
 
 A superb house with him in it, is like a fine tulip 
 with an adder in it. But she is a woman, and whether 
 she has a heart or no, she has a well-cultivated vanity, 
 and unluckily, the parents who taught her to secure 
 luxury in wedlock, taught her no foresight as to her 
 more needful supply of admiration. Love, she would 
 like very well — but admired she must be .' And too 
 I cold and worldly to be imprudent, and too proud to be 
 willing to seem pleased with the gaze of Broadway 
 idlers, she still thirsts after this very stare which is 
 given to her beauty by the passers-by, and has very 
 little happiness beyond her daily hurried walk on the 
 crowded pave. She'll make a match of sentiment if 
 she gets another chance, or, at any rate, will marry 
 for some love and less money. 
 
 Heaven help her through with her present chrysalis! 
 
 " How are you V 
 
 " How are you ?" 
 
 What would a new-dropped angel think of these 
 two unanswered questions? Indeed, what would an 
 angel think of that smiling fellow who exchanged this 
 nonsense with me. He is one of a thousand in the 
 city who, " like the prodigal, squeezed through a 
 horn," are happy from having got through the tightest 
 place of this mortal Me. Though his dimensions are 
 immeasurably smaller than they were not long ago', they 
 are so mucb easier than they grew to be after, that 
 he feels as if, like Uncle Toby's fly, there was room 
 enough in the world for him now. He is easy with the 
 rebound after being broke with overstraining. He was 
 a merchant, reputed to have made money enough. 
 Sensitive and punctilious in all the relations of life, 
 he was particularly soigne of his commercial honor. 
 Never a breath sullied that clear escutcheon ! For 
 this he was supposed to be over-careful— for this he 
 was inflexible where his heart would have prompted 
 him to be indulgent— for this, it was soberly believed, 
 he would sacrifice his life. His wife was (and has 
 since proved herself by trial) an admirable woman, 
 and with fine children and good looks of his own, he 
 was one of those fallacious contradictions of the equal 
 
678 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 distribution of mortal happiness. Well — his star be- 
 gan to descend from its apogee, and he courageously 
 lugged out his philosophy and retrenched his expen- 
 diture. And then began an agony of mind which 
 could be increased, even hereafter, by the increased 
 capacity of the mind — for, short of reason overturned, 
 he could suffer no more. A thousand years of a com- 
 mon tenor of life would seem shorter than those six 
 terrible months of sinking into bankruptcy. But now 
 comes the curious part of it ! He suddenly took the 
 benefit of the bankrupt law. And instead of lying 
 still prostrate upon the ground, crushed and humiliated 
 — instead of hiding his head, as he longed to do while 
 he still promised to pay, degraded, spiritless, lost, to 
 the enjoyment of life — instead of still seeming an ob- 
 ject of pity to the most ruthless sufferer by his fall — 
 up, like a snapped spring, he bounds to the empyrean ! 
 He could not be gayer with his debts paid and his 
 fortune in his hands again ! He walks the street, 
 smiling, and with a light step. He is a little smarter 
 than he used to be in this dress. He eats well, and 
 the wrinkles have retreated, and his eyes have thrown 
 open their windows, and (as you saw when he passed) 
 there is not a merrier or more fortunate-looking idler 
 in this merry Broadway ! Now, quere ? — Is there a 
 provision in nature for honor to cast its skin ? Be- 
 comes it new, scarless and white, after a certain wear, 
 tear, and suffering ? Does a man remember, till, with 
 the anguish of remembering, he forgets ? Has God, 
 in our construction, provided a recuperative, to guard 
 us against over self infliction ? Can we use up our 
 sense of shame with over-working it, and do we come 
 then to a stratum of self-approval and self-glorifica- 
 tion? Enfin — is this inward whitewashing confined 
 only to money-spots, and is nature hereby provided 
 with a corrective check to our implacabilities of 
 pocket ? 
 
 TO OUR ONE WITHDRAWING SUBSCRIBER. 
 
 Sir : A French writer wittily turns the paradox : 
 "iZ faut de far gent meme pour se passer d' argent" — 
 (is it necessary to have money to be able to do without 
 it) — and we please ourselves with suspecting that it is 
 only amid the forgetful ease of possession that you can 
 have made, up your mind to forego us. If so, and 
 your first se'ennight of unmirrored solitude prove 
 heavier to bear than the aching three dollar void 
 balanced against it — so ! The pathos of this parting 
 will have been superfluous. 
 
 Our connexion, sir, though born of a " promise to 
 pay," has been a matter of friendship ; and in dissolving 
 a friendship, it is desirable, on both sides, to have back 
 again the secrets safe only in a friend's keeping. It 
 is common and easy, as you well know, for one man 
 to " give" another " a piece of his mind," and we ask 
 that piece of yours upon which we have stitched the 
 lining of ours. For the goods and chattels we have 
 sent you, that are yours, of course, bach third-person 
 matters as stories and poesies, pictures, drolleries, 
 gossipries and novelties — the visible contents of our 
 primrose cover — are — like the three dollars paid for 
 them — like the ear of rye up a schoolboy's sleeve — ir- 
 revertible ! They are yours. The money is (was) 
 ours. We would not willingly change back ! But 
 other values have passed to your keeping, that are not 
 strictly commodities of barter. We have vent-pegs, 
 that are, as it may chance to turn out, largesses or 
 weaknesses. We are known, favorably or unfavorably, 
 for an incontinence of ourself — a certain need to ex- 
 pand upon our neighbor. If we are happy it runs 
 over the brim — if we are sad, prodigal, too, with our 
 tears. Withal, we have a natural incredulity of break - 
 ings-off — walking upright upon all manner of eternities 
 
 till we have tumbled over the end. Do you see how 
 subject we were to improvident confidences ? 
 
 To fix upon the wares we would have back, you 
 have only to ask what a stranger could buy of us, and 
 subtract it from what you know of us. Could you 
 stop us in the street, for example, and buy the fulness 
 of our heart from us — such as has overflowed upon 
 our last page often and unaware — for sixpence? Could 
 you send to us for a thought that has sailed out of our 
 bosomupon our private tear, and enclose a shilling for 
 two copies through the village postmaster? Could 
 you point us out to a dirty newsboy, and tell him 
 " that gentleman had last week some pangs and some 
 pleasures, and I will give you sixpence to see them in 
 a Mirror, with their expressed gall or honey ?" Could 
 you touch us upon the shoulder in Broadway and say, 
 "Sir, I should like to have sent to me, weekly, the 
 thoughts which are stirred by all you enjoy or suffer, 
 expressed in choice rhetoric and printed on fine paper; 
 and you may throw me in a fine steel plate, a new 
 story or two, all the gossip of the week, some criticisms 
 and any fine poetry that has come to your hand — for 
 which I will pay you sixpence per weekly copy ?" 
 Oh, there is much that you have bought of us with 
 which you have no business, ceasing to be our friend! 
 And when you have sent that part back, your money's- 
 worth will still stretch its long legs comfortably under 
 the covering blanket of the remainder! 
 
 Well, sir, adieu ! There is some machinery, of 
 one kind and another, that will now cease to labor, 
 at sixpence per week, for your gratification — sundry 
 male printers and engravers, sundry female folders and 
 stitchers, our post-office boy and wheelbarrow, such 
 trifling rail-roads and steamers as have been built to 
 convey the Mirror to you — these and we, with our 
 best brains and contributors, we are sorry to say, will 
 now cease to minister to you — but you will have, in- 
 stead, weekly, an unspent sixpence ! Of this sixpence, 
 much foregone for, we wish you joy in the overbalan- 
 cing value of possession ! And so, sir, drawing back 
 our complicated machinery that you may lift this 
 small silver bridge from between us, we bid you once 
 more, over the chasm of removed equivalent, a re- 
 spectful adieu ! 
 
 TO OUR PUNCTUAL FIRMAMENT OF FIXED STARS. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen : In the eleven thousand 
 shining sixpences which duly rise and dispense their 
 silver light upon our way, we see of course the 
 "Heaven of eternal change" toward whose " patines 
 of bright gold" we have been long stretching with 
 tiptoe expectation. We trust that, like the unpocket- 
 able troop whose indefatigable punctuality you emu- 
 late, there are still comers to your number unarrived, 
 and that the " Lost Pleiad" (the single heavenly body 
 upon whose discontinuance to rise we indited the 
 foregoing epistle), will come round again in his erratic 
 orbit, and take his place in the constellation he has 
 deserted. We give notice here, however, that, at 
 eleven thousand, we shall, like the nuns of St. Ursula, 
 stop numbering. There have been virgins since the 
 shelving of the bones of the " eleven thousand virgins 
 of Cologne," yet the oft-told number is still told, 
 without increase, in the holy tradition. We believe 
 with the sainted sisterhood that human credence can 
 go no farther — that 'twixt millions and billions of 
 virgins the disciple's mind would not be likely to dis- 
 criminate. You will still permit us, therefore, to cast 
 our horoscope upon this nominal number. As other 
 starry sixpences fall into the chinks of boundless space, 
 the perceptible increase of our brightness will alone 
 tell the tale— but they will be marked and welcomed 
 I in the careful astronomy of our leger. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 679 
 
 You are ours, oh pleasant eleven thousand ! The 
 vain astronomer casts over the sky his net of parallels 
 and meridians and calls the caught heavens his own, 
 but the stars he numbers are not, like ours, convertible 
 to things to eat. We will envy Herschel when he 
 can change sixteen of his entrapped stars for a dollar 
 — when he can dabble with their shining faces as we 
 with our constellated' " fips " You are ours, and 
 therefore we will care for you. 
 
 It occurred to me in an omnibus to-day, that it 
 would be curious to know with what eyes angels watch 
 us. My opinion as to the importance of" every hair 
 of our head" had been somewhat modified within the 
 previous half-hour by a look at one or two of my own 
 (hairs) through a solar microscope, and the thought 
 naturally suggested itself, that if the eyes of our spir- 
 itual guardians were microscopic (as they may easily 
 be), there was no so great marvel in the care they 
 take of us. It was a warm, pleasant morning, and I 
 was letting myself ramble and look into windows. An 
 exhibition of a solar microscope came in my way, and I 
 went in. The wall of a large room was apparently 
 .swarming with rats and mud-turtles when I opened 
 the door, and this was some of the dust from a fig, 
 held on the point of a pin, and magnified five million 
 times. I had seen many of these experiments in col- 
 lege, of course, but one hears so many wonderful 
 things, when one is growing, that I do not remember 
 being much astonished in those days. It was differ- 
 ent now, for I really never was more amused and 
 amazed then at the snakes in the drop of vinegar, and 
 the formidable apparatus of a certain un-nameable lit- 
 tle customer, whose like I had occasion to slay in 
 great numbers in the poetical Orient. To bring the 
 thing home to my own business and bosom, however 
 (the microscope, not the pediculus !) I begged the 
 exhibitor to show me, magnified, one or two of my 
 own hairs. I plucked one from my bump of ima- 
 gination and another from my bump of acquisitive- 
 ness, and gave them both to him, with some curiosity 
 to know if the roots would show the difference in the 
 soil. Somewhat to my surprise there was a differ- 
 ence. He placed them carefully on his instrument, 
 and the root of the imaginative hair was shaped like a 
 claret bottle (and about its size), while that of the ac- 
 quisitive hair was like a short fat porter bottle — the 
 hairs themselves being, to the roots, in about the pro- 
 portions of the necks to the bottles. I must say I was 
 truly delighted at the discovery of this analogy, and 
 seldom have bought so good a fact for twelve and a 
 half cents. As I said before, " the hairs of our heads" 
 being "all numbered," my guardian angel knows how 
 many dozen I have remaining of my imaginative clar- I 
 et, and how my acquisitive porter improves by age, and | 
 he looks after it all like one of Bininger's clerks, let- I 
 ting none "fall to the ground" without careful putting ' 
 down. The exhibitor asked me to try another, but a I 
 man thinks twice of plucking out a hair, impressed with ' 
 the idea that it will leave a hole in his head as big as 
 a claret-bottle ! I declined. 
 
 But if every hair of my head be as big (to a micro- 
 scopic eye) as a bottle of porter with a neck a mile 
 long, and my body in proportion, at what a very mod- 
 erate charge (thought I, as I rode down) am I carried 
 a mile in the unmagnified omnibus ! What would have 
 become of us if God had inflicted upon us a Babel of 
 the eye instead of the ear, making different men see 
 things through different lenses, diminishing and mi- 
 croscopic ! What work for the lawyers ! I was be- 
 ginning to turn my mind to the quantity of magnified 
 body that one unmagnified soul could properly in- 
 habit (as a house may easily be expanded till one ten- 
 ant is an absurdity), when the omnibus stopped. It is 
 
 a very good subject for an extravaganza in Thomas 
 Hood's vein. 
 
 There is a certain curiosity to know "how the thing 
 went off," even though the show in question was a 
 bore to the spectator. Perked up people think that 
 only such curiosity as would sit well upon George 
 Washington should be catered for in print, but I in- 
 cline to think that almost any matter which would be 
 talked about by any two people together would be en- 
 tertaining to one man reading by himself. So I think 
 1 may put down what I saw at a show that was adver- 
 tised as an "Exhibition of Laughing Gas." 
 
 My younger readers may perhaps require to be 
 told that nitrate of ammonia, like himself, has a soul 
 that fire will burn out of it. When the lamp over 
 which it is held gets too hot " to be stood" any long- 
 er, up rises a little whitish cloud which has most of 
 the properties of common air, but which has a sweet 
 taste and an agreeable odor, and will pass into any hu- 
 man soul's body upon very slight invitation. Once 
 in, however, it abuses the hospitality extended to it, 
 by immediately usurping all the functions of the body, 
 and behaves, in short, extremely like another more 
 notorious enemy, who, " when admitted into your 
 mouth steals away your brains." The stimulus of 
 this intoxicating gas to the nervous system is very sur- 
 prising. Sir Humphrey Davy administered it to 
 Southey the poet, whose feelings are thus described: 
 " He could not distinguish between the first effects 
 and a certain apprehension, of which he was unable 
 to divest himself. His first definite sensations were a 
 fulness and dizziness in the head, such as to induce 
 the fear of falling. This was succeeded by a laugh 
 which was* involuntary, but highly pleasurable, ac- 
 companied by a peculiar thrilling in the extremities — 
 a sensation perfectly new and delightful. For many 
 hours after this experiment, he imagined that his 
 taste and smell were more acute, and is certain that 
 he felt unusually strong and cheerful. In a second 
 experiment he felt pleasure still superior, and has 
 since poetically remarked, that he supposes the atmo- 
 sphere of the highest of all possible heavens to be com- 
 posed of (his gas /" 
 
 There were between three and four thousand peo- 
 ple assembled in the Tabernacle. A platform in the 
 centre was hemmed in with benches, and it was adver- 
 tised that " twelve strong men" would be there to pre- 
 vent injury to the spectators. It was mentioned in the 
 advertisement, also, that the gallery would be reserved 
 for ladies, though 1 thought that the inviting of ladies 
 to be present at the removal of all restraint from 
 men's tongues and actions, was a strong mark of con- 
 fidence in the uppermost qualities of our sex. After 
 some impatience on the part of the audience, the pro- 
 fessor appeared with his specimen of " the highest 
 possible heaven" in an India-rubber bag. The can- 
 didates for a taste of it were many and urgent, crowd- 
 ing up from below like the applicants to St. Peter, 
 and the professor seemed somewhat embarrassed as to 
 a selection. A thick-necked and bony youth got pos- 
 session of the bag, however, and applied his mouth to 
 the stopper. After inhaling its contents for a minute 
 or two, he squared away and commenced pummelling 
 the professor in the most approved butcher-boy style 
 — which was possibly his idea of the "highest pos- 
 sible heaven." The " twelve strong men" rushed 
 to the rescue, the audience applauded vociferously, 
 and the lad returned to his senses, having been 
 out of them perhaps three minutes. A dozen others 
 took their turn, and were variously affected. I was 
 only very much delighted with one young man, who 
 coolly undertook a promenade over the the close- 
 packed heads of the audience. The impertinence of 
 the idea seemed to me in the highest degree brilliant 
 
680 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 and delightful. There was one corsair-looking man 
 who rushed up and down the stage, believing himself 
 on the deck of some vessel in pursuit of another, and 
 that was perhaps the best bit of acting. One silly 
 youth went to and fro, smirking and bowing, and an- 
 other did a scene in " Richard the Third," and a tall, 
 good-looking young man laughed heartily, and sud- 
 denly stopped and demanded of the audience, in in- 
 dignant rage, what they were laughing at! There 
 was nothing else worth even putting down among tri- 
 fles, and I was glad when it was over. The only ima- 
 ginable entertainment in such an exhibition would 
 be to watch the effect of self-abandonment on those 
 whose characters we know when under restraint. 
 Among acquaintances it would be charming — particu- 
 larly if the subjects were ladies. I should recom- 
 mend to the professor to advertise himself as open to 
 invitations to administer his " highest possible heav- 
 en" to small and select parties. It would be better 
 than a masquerade and not so unlawful. 
 
 The etymology of April lies in dispute between 
 aperire, the Latin word for open (because at this time 
 the earth is preparing to open and enrich us with its 
 gifts), and Aphrodite, one of the names of the god- 
 dess of love, to whom the month is especially 
 consecrated. By either derivation, it is the month 
 of promise, and like the trees, we feel the juices 
 lovingly ascending to our top, and we can venture to 
 enter upon that "promising" which is the very "air 
 o' the time," without fearing that " performance" will 
 be "the duller for the act." And, by-the-way, while 
 we think of it, we have been beset by a friendly let- 
 ter to cut short Ihe present year, and commence a 
 new volume with January 1, 1845. We must be ex- 
 cused for preferring, altogether, a commencement in 
 April, accident and convenience quite aside. There 
 is a fitness in commencing (putting out our first 
 leaves) with nature. After nature's example, we may 
 venture, with our first issue, to promise a prodigal 
 summer of flowers and a harvest of fruits, though 
 there we trust the parallel will stop, for we do not pro- 
 pose with nature to "take our leaves''' in October and 
 fall presently to decay! No, sir! Let us com- 
 mence our primrose-colored series in primrose-time. 
 Our hopes are April-ish, as looks our cover. We 
 hope to swell, not dwindle, from April into May — to 
 give out our products more lavishly in June, and 
 have a "harvest home" of prosperity in August. 
 What says old Drayton of the order of such matters ? — 
 
 " The primrose placing first, because that in the spring 
 Tt is the first appears, then sweetly flourishing, 
 The azure harebell, next, with them they neatly mixed ; 
 r allay whose luscious smell they woodbine placed be- 
 twixt ; 
 And 'mong those things of scent there pricked they in the 
 
 —a fair picture of the art we mean to make manifest 
 in our medley of literary flowers. There are some 
 productions whose " luscious smell" requires the " al- 
 laying" of common sense; and, now and then, a lily 
 of plain truth and simplicity, "pricked in" between 
 high-wrought prose and gorgeous poetry, makes 
 charming harmony. The periodical-writers of all 
 times have practised this trick of diversity. " If a 
 magaziner be dull" (says Goldsmith) "upon the Span- 
 ish war, he soon has us up again with the ghost in 
 Cock-lane." 
 
 A writer 
 
 (" but nameless he, for blameless he shall be") 
 complains of us for taking liberties with the queen's 
 English. He does not specify his instances. Mr. 
 King, of the American (we were not aware before 
 
 that he was the proprietor of the " King's English!") 
 makes an outcry like Milton's stall-reader,* at the 
 title of the "Rococo." If Mr. King will give us one 
 of his newspaper-words that conveys, like the single 
 word Rococo, the entire periphrasis of "intrinsically 
 valuable and beautiful, but accidentally and unjustly 
 obsolete,''' 1 we will send the offensive word back to 
 France, where we got it. Meantime, as Costard said 
 of his new word "remuneration," we "will not buy 
 nor sell out of it." But, withal, we confess to great 
 responsibility, in the adoption of new words and the 
 restoration of old, and we do not spare, upon every 
 instance, careful consideration. It is due to the liter- 
 ature of our country, that those who write for popu- 
 lar prints should sanction no corruptions of the coun- 
 try's language ; but it is also due to the dignity of 
 America, since she has come of age, that her popular 
 writers should claim her share of improving and em- 
 bellishing her inherited language, and even the right 
 of departing from the usage of the old country, if the 
 inevitable changes, which there creep in, should not 
 be conformable to American taste, customs, climate, 
 or scenery. We would not further, but we certainly 
 would not hinder, the having a language of our own, 
 for we think one language little enough for a repub- 
 lic of fifteen or twenty millions. But, dependence 
 upon England apart, the language of a country is a 
 garden that requires looking after, and it needs graft- 
 ing and transplanting as much as weeding and pru- 
 ning. Who is to be the gardener? One man? One 
 Mr. King of the American? No — but fifty men, if 
 there be fifty popular writers. There are no trustees 
 of the language appointed by congress. There is no 
 penally for the launching of words new and unfreight- 
 worthy. Professors of colleges (unless accidentally 
 men of genius like Longfellow) have no power over 
 the uses or abuses of language. With whom lies the 
 responsibility ? we ask again — for, upon its language, 
 much of the repute and credit of the commonwealth 
 is inevitably adrift. And we say again, with American 
 popular writers lies the burden of it. Mr. Irving's 
 administration of his trust in the country's language 
 is worth to us any two common years of Washington 
 legislation, and will tell with more favorable weight 
 upon our history than any two sessions of our late 
 congresses. We claim to have our small share of 
 this same responsibility, and our small privilege of 
 suggestion and appropriation. The language has 
 owed much to exotic introduction in other days, and 
 it may still be lawfully enriched by the same process; 
 and if we, in our reading, or in our travel, have stum- 
 bled on more compact vehicles for meaning, and can 
 bring them effectively into common use at home, we 
 shall venture to claim praise for it. Indeed, we have 
 long had half a mind to devote a corner of the Mirror 
 to a record of the births and disinterments of the 
 words new and prematurely buried. Whom would 
 that horrify, besides Mr. King? Why, for example, 
 should not the beautiful old English word summer- 
 sunstead (descriptive of the season of the sun's stay 
 or stead in summer) be restored to poetry — its relapse 
 into Latin by the word summer-solstice being wholly 
 unavailable from its technical inelegance? This is 
 rather a forced instance, no other occurring to us at 
 the moment ; but our readers will remember pausing 
 with regret, as we have, over the sweet passages 
 which are the graves of lost words. 
 
 To the invariable question of " What's the news ?" 
 the invariable answer is, "Nothing at all!" — yet he 
 who answers delivers his budget in the same breath— 
 a death and a marriage perhaps the least of his 
 
 * " Cries the stall-reader, ' Bless me, what a word on 
 A title-page is this ." » Milton to Sir Harry Vane, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 ,681 
 
 announcements. I (the diarist) have no news — none ! 
 I could " swear the gods into agues" that 1 have none ! 
 Vet to entertain a visiter— to divert a country-cousin 
 — to bridge over an awful pause— what would one nat- 
 urally say ? I ask for information. 
 
 The Park theatre is open— (very open — being near- 
 ly empty !) — Mitchell's, on the contrary, is very close 
 
 being nightly full. But I do not know that any one 
 
 cares about theatricals — to have them written or 
 talked about, that is to say. Critics, both of the 
 drama and of literature, I think, have, of late, been 
 shoved aside. The public are tired of interpreters to 
 their taste, and express their opinions, now, by accla- 
 mation, not by one man's pen. Who cares now (as 
 the Aurora said a day or two ago) for a column of 
 criticism on a personation of Hamlet? If there is to 
 be a play, or a concert, it is pretty fairly understood, 
 in the Bowery as in Broadway, in Hyperborean Chel- 
 sea as in the tropics of the Battery, what will be the 
 quality of the goer's money's-worth. And three lines 
 in the morning-paper, when it i9 over, is all that 
 is needful or advisable to be written on the perform- 
 ance. So, God speed the decline of criticism! Apro- 
 pos, Miss Turnbull, the danseuse, has now become 
 one of the regular Povey-dom of the Park — engaged 
 ♦'since the memory of the oldest inhabitant." 
 
 The cutaneous epidemic of the season has attacked 
 the museum with great violence — a breaking out of 
 its inside humors covering at present the entire sur- 
 face. In plainer phrase, Mr. Barnum has completely 
 covered the prominent and spacious fronts of the 
 American museum with oval paintings of the beasts, 
 birds, fishes, and Indians "on show" within, and a 
 more holyday-looking castle of curiosity could scarce- 
 ly be invented. The "Kentucky Minstrels" are the 
 allure just now, and the pictures of the four ebon 
 bards, large as life, over the balcony, and the remain- 
 der of the be-windowed and be-pictured building, 
 with its indefatigable flags, its lantern steeple-high, 
 and its lofty windmill of Punch and Judy, must all 
 fall very gayly, to say the least, on the sober eye of 
 a Johnny Newcome. 
 
 The funny little hat, small as Mercury's, which was 
 laughed at upon the bagmen's heads six months ago, 
 has fairly prevailed, and is the mode, nem. con. Truly, 
 " every time serves for the matter (of hat) that is born 
 in it." The eye can be argued with, and convinced. 
 It was stoutly maintained, three months ago, by one 
 who is well known as "the complete varnish of a 
 man," that this fashion of hat was but a porringer 
 thing, and would never thrive in Broadway. And 
 now nothing but that scant porringer looks tip-top and 
 jaunty ! Orlando Fish (who, as tiler number one, is a 
 man of more potent function, for my politics, than 
 Tyler the first) is making money out of the blocks 
 which my facetious dandy friend recommended him 
 rather to make tops of than tops on. Well — fashion 
 goes by "jerks of invention," and as Holofernes says, 
 "the gift is good in those in whom it is acute." 
 
 Reception is raging up town. All ladies may be 
 said to be " in a parlous state," who have not a speci- 
 fied morning to "receive." Six months ago, the six 
 profane mornings of the week were the property of 
 six privileged ladies by right of first seizure. Such 
 pretenders to "society" as did not visit the week 
 through in this established succession were as "damn- 
 ed" as Touchstone's friend, the uncourtly shepherd. 
 This was a vexatious invention, for, in the stereotyped 
 innumerableness of fashionable houses, a man might 
 blissfully visit nowhere, and yet go undetected for a 
 
 culprit "not in society." Heaven be praised, how- 
 ever, for the "safety in numbers," and especially for 
 the imitative gregariousness of our country. There 
 are now five hundred families who "receive !" Not 
 quite, as yet, in inextricable confusion, however. A 
 man of a generalizing mind may still comprehend his 
 morning's work, and with fast horses and invariable 
 French leave, may still refresh all necessary memo- 
 ries as to its existence. There is the Monday set, 
 and the Tuesday set, and the Wednesday set, and so 
 on through the week — crystallized according to neigh- 
 borhood, with one or two supercilious and recusant 
 exceptions. The engravers are in full cry, however, 
 and every week brings out new cards, " at home on 
 Monday," "at home on Tuesday," etc., etc., and we 
 shall soon be 
 
 " Blissfully havened both from joy and pain," 
 
 by a general acknowledgment of the fact that nobody 
 is more intensely at home than before, and everybody 
 who has a house is simply " at home" whenever those 
 who wish to see them can find leisure to ring the bell. 
 
 I don't know, by-the-way, that the compliment has 
 been paid our country by foreign naturalists, of rank- 
 ing us with the more virtuous wild-fowl, esteemed for 
 their gregariousness. The Rev. Sydney Smith shows 
 his lack of zoological learning in not modifying his 
 abuse of us by remembering that "no birds of prey 
 are gregarious." — "Of wild-fowl," says Grew, " those 
 which are the most useful fly not singly as other 
 birds, but are commonly gregarious." — "Then for 
 birds of prey and rapacious animals," says Ray, "it 
 is remarkable what Aristotle observes, that they are 
 solitary and go not in flocks." Long live our multi- 
 tudinous hotels, our animated extinguishment of dis- 
 tinction by imitation, our altogetherness of lordship 
 and ladyship! The danger is in the stiffening of this 
 fluidity of rank and condition before the scoria are 
 recognised, and before the mould of aristocracy can be 
 dexterously handled. We shall have lords and ladies 
 or their catamounts tantamounts (bother! which is 
 the word ?) a few days, at least, before the millenium. 
 This big orchard of green fruit is too large not to be 
 destined to ripe and rot, reasonably and seasonably. 
 
 Apropos — I observe a spot advertised for sale that I 
 have always looked upon as the most beautiful and 
 aristocratic property in this country — an island cra- 
 dled by the Niagara, and in itself the best cradle na- 
 ture could possibly form for the family of a luxurious 
 exclusive. It is about eleven miles above the falls, 
 an arrow-shot from the American shore (with Grand 
 island between it and the Canadas), and contains a 
 I hundred acres of land, charmingly wooded and va- 
 ried, which have been turned into a paradise by one 
 I of the most refined gentlemen of this country. A 
 beautiful villa crowns it, and baths, hot-houses, and 
 all appliances to luxury, are there, and all fenced in 
 by the bright water about to rush over Niagara. The 
 island is called Tonawanda — a delicious word for the 
 I name of a home. One sighs to think that a little 
 money could buy such a paradise for one's own. 
 
 I observe a new fashion of cap, which gives the la- 
 dies an air 
 
 " As pert as bird, as straight as bolt, 
 As fresh as flower in May,"— 
 
 a cap that would fit a child's double-fist, worn perched 
 upon the summit of the organ of self-esteem, looking 
 like an apple-blossom on the top-knot of a French 
 chicken. It is one of those fashions whose worth de- 
 pends upon the wearer— very telling upon a pretty 
 coquette, and very ludicrous, topping dignity or sen- 
 timent. 
 
682 
 
 EPHExMERA. 
 
 Original literature in the lump is sadly at a discount 
 in this country. Miss Sedgwick, in the plenitude of 
 her intellectual power, has taken to school-keeping. 
 Another authoress, very superior to Miss Sedgwick in 
 the qualities necessary to saleable writing, Mrs. Mary 
 Clavers, is employed in the same ill-suited drudgery. 
 Cooper, I understand, makes nothing by his Ameri- 
 can editions, and thinks of publishing only in England 
 and importing a few copies at English prices. Amer- 
 ican literature has nearly ceased, or it is scattered in 
 such small rills of periodical-writing that it will make 
 no mark upon the time. Prescott is an exception, 
 it is true, but Prescott is a man of fortune, and writes 
 for fame, not bread and butter. Why should not a 
 subscription be raised by the patriotic to give fair play 
 and studious leisure to the original and poetic genius 
 of Mrs. Child — wasted now on ephemera for news- 
 papers ! Money left for such uses, or given by the 
 living, would better embalm the memory of the giver 
 than many a common charity. What is to be the 
 effect on the national character of the present hiatus 
 of original American literature, and how long is it to 
 last ? For how long are we to take our mental ward- 
 robe second-hand from England, and read to the 
 world as all wearers of unfitting garments seem — out of 
 harmony with our shape and model from nature? 
 
 It is stated in the Boston Daily Advertiser (in an 
 article headed " The greatest American author"), 
 that, in a work of no small authority and importance 
 in Germany, a continuation of Frederick Schlegel's 
 "History of Literature," a writer by the name of 
 Sealsfield is put at the head of American literature, 
 and defined as "the great national painter of the char- 
 acteristics of his native land, who has unfolded the 
 poetry of American life and its various relations yet 
 better than Cooper and Irving." The editor of the 
 Advertiser remarks that the critical opinion of this 
 work will be taken implicitly on this subject by half 
 Europe, and no American authority, at least, will be 
 able to gainsay it. He continues : " We have, there- 
 fore, taking shame to ourselves for past ignorance, 
 made all reasonable inquiries in this matter. We have 
 applied at the principal bookstores and libraries in the 
 neighborhood, but to our surprise neither books or 
 author have as yet been heard of. The Athenaeum, 
 Burnham, Little and Brown, and Redding and Co., 
 are all in ignorance. We have applied to all literary 
 circles to which the humble conductors of diurnal 
 publications have the entree, but a hearty laugh has 
 been the only answer to our anxious queries. 
 
 "We are yet unwilling to let this sin of ingratitude 
 rest upon American readers. We call upon the pub- 
 lic to assist us and solve the question, ' Where is 
 Sealsfield ?' and absolve our country from the shame 
 of ignoring an author, who has been crowned with 
 the laurels of trans-Atlantic criticism. We trust the 
 subject may seem as important to the public as to our- 
 selves, and that if, as seems probable, some publisher 
 who lives by stealing the brains of foreign authors, 
 lias added to his crimes by incarcerating in the dun- 
 geons of Cliff street, or Ann street, or Water street, 
 this hero of our literature, let that public, or the 
 'American copyright club' have him disinterred im- 
 mediately." 
 
 The probability is that better information than I can 
 give will be brought out by this " call upon the pub- 
 lic," but meantime I will record, that th\s great Amer- 
 ican author, Sealsfield, is a German, who has resided 
 in this country for some years, returned to Germany a 
 few years since, and could probably be heard of in 
 the neighborhood of his intrepid reviewer and nomen- 
 clator. He probably "furnished the facts" for the 
 review himself. He is ("to give the devil his due") 
 
 a good writer, and while in this country contributed 
 some excellent articles to the old Mirror. 
 
 Leaving to other people my share of curiosity as to 
 the source of the Niger, I should like to know the 
 author of now and then a joke that goes the round of 
 the newspapers. Genius is the most promiscuous of 
 animals, and is found in all sorts of disreputable places, 
 dress, and company — in quack, advertisements and 
 negro wit, as often as in patented inventions and pub- 
 lications of gilt-edge. There is a kind of unlabelled 
 genius, which is wholly incapable of being turned to 
 any profit, but which how and then starts out from an 
 unsuspected quarter and takes probability by the beard 
 with a delicious intrepidity. This morning's paper 
 has an instance — a three-line story of a Yankee who 
 bought a bushel of shoe-pegs, and finding they were 
 made of rotten wood, sharpened the other ends and 
 sold them for oats ! Quite aside from the fun of that, 
 it is worth analyzing as an absurdity of the most bril- 
 liant audacity of invention. Will the respectable 
 author oblige me with his autograph ? 
 
 Confab in the Cloister. — Not a small part of 
 our brain-twisting, dear reader, is the exercise of an 
 office that, at Roman feasts, was delegated to i par- 
 ticular servant called the nomenclator. His business 
 was to inform the guests of the names and ingredients 
 of the dishes set before them. Simple as it seems when 
 well done, there are few things more difficult to do 
 well. It is to describe a book, or a series of books, in 
 the compass of a phrase, and that phrase attractive to 
 eye and ear, piquant, novel, and provocative of curi- 
 osity ! Try your hand at expressing the contents of a 
 charcoal-cart in the compass of a diamond ! 
 
 It would amuse the reader to be present sometimes 
 when No. 4, Ann street, is resolved into a committee 
 of two for the finding of a good name. (Witlings, 
 avaunt!) The firm is called together by a significant 
 motion of the forefinger of the brigadier founder of 
 the concern — called into the cloister, that is to say, 
 a room of the proportions of a lady's shoe, extending 
 to our (No. 4's) immediate rear. The door being 
 closed, and the window-curtain dropped to exclude 
 the uninspiring view of the clothes-lines of No. 4, 
 up-stairs — the one chair having become occupied by 
 his Serenity, and the remainder of the committee 
 being seated upon the upright end of a ream of paper, 
 the business in hand is forthwith put. Let no one 
 imagine, because he may have assisted at naming a 
 friend's child, that he has any, the most vague, idea of 
 the embarrassments that ensue ! We have a passably 
 fertile invention. We have whiled away the dull 
 transit of what is commonly called " a liberal educa- 
 tion" by a diligent search after such knowledge as was 
 above being "turned to account." We have been a 
 profligate of verbal intemperance, we mean to say, and 
 are likely to know the bin where lies in cobweb your 
 old word, toothsome and tasteable. But for all this, it 
 is no easier. Like the search after happiness, ten to 
 one the thing sought lies near home — overstepped at 
 starting ! But let us particularize. 
 
 The Brigadier. — My dear boy (a facetious way he 
 has of addressing the rest of the committee !) — my 
 dear boy, stop looking out of that back window, and 
 give your mind to business! Cast your eye over 
 these four incomparable tales ! Irving's " Wife" — 
 
 Committee. — You don't say he's married, general ! 
 
 Brigadier. — Tales, my dear boy, I speak of tales— 
 a new series of tales that want a good name ! Come, 
 think of it, now ! 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 683 
 
 Committee. — Describe me the article, brigadier ! 
 What is the purpose, plot, character? Is it one book 
 or a series? "Open up," as Bulwer says, and let us 
 know definitively what is wanted ! 
 
 Brigadier. — You know how many men of genius 
 there are who are only capable of brief inspirations — 
 
 Committee. — Inspired to the length of a short tale. 
 Well ! 
 
 Brigadier. — You know that long tales are now out 
 of fashion. People are tired of them. 
 
 Committee.— Indeed ? Well ! 
 
 Brigadier. — You know that such men as Brougham, 
 Canning, Macauley — statesmen who are scholars and 
 men of genius, and might have been authors — have 
 occasionally given vent to their pent-up imaginations 
 by a tale for the magazines. 
 
 Committee. — I do — witness Brougham's magnificent 
 6tory of the "man in the bell." Well ! 
 
 Brigadier. — We know what is good, that goes by 
 with the flood, don't we ? 
 
 Committee. — We are professed tasters. Yes. 
 
 Brigadier. — For experiment, then, I have put to- 
 gether^ in one number, four tales that delighted me — 
 in more than one enchanted perusal. You shall select 
 the next. It will go, my dear boy ! — people will give 
 their couple of shillings, if it were only for the rescue 
 we make, for them, of things they remember and have 
 lost sight of. There are g — 1 — o — rious things hit off, 
 here as I there, at a heat, by periodical writers — one 
 hit in a thousand failures, it is true, but still enough 
 of them for a brilliant collection — and these we want 
 to gather into our beautiful library, and embalm 
 from perishing. See here ! " Judith, or the Opera 
 Box, by Eugene Scribe"— (great, my boy, great!)— 
 "The Beggar-Girl of the Pont des Arts," by a 
 German man, Hauff (ah ! what a rich bit to read over 
 and over!) — "The Picnic Party," by Horace Smith 
 (you know all about that?)— and "The Wife," by 
 Irving — a worthy companion for them ; and now, what 
 shall we call the series ? 
 
 Committee.— Hm— m— m. How do you like "fan- 
 noms and fopperies?" 
 
 Brigadier. — Bah ! 
 
 Committee. — " Diapasms ?" 
 
 Brigadier. — Poh ! 
 
 Committee. — The "pomander-chain ?" 
 
 Brigadier. — My dear boy, let it be English and 
 honest! You distress me with these affectations! 
 What have cataplasms and pomatum-chains to do 
 with a course of light reading ? Don't waste time ! 
 
 Committee. — A diapasm, my charming brigadier, 
 was a bunch of aromatic herbs made into a ball with 
 sweet water, and, in Ben Johnson's time, worn in a 
 lady's pocket. Gallants wore these scented balls strung 
 in a necklace under the shirt, and so worn, it was 
 called a pomander-chain. Pardon me, but these 
 would be good names, for want of better ! 
 
 Brigadier. — Mr. King would be down upon us, and 
 the definition would never get through his hair ! No, 
 my dear boy! We must be ostriches, and feel the 
 ground while we fly. Keep out of the clouds till 
 you're " sent for !" 1 like 
 
 " The russet yeas, and honest kersey noes," 
 
 and so does my regiment — I mean the public. Ima- 
 gine a good name, now, that would suit a plain man ! 
 
 Committee. — Faith, it takes imagination to come at 
 that, sure enough ! Hark ! I have it ! 
 
 Brigadier. — Come to my arms ! What is it ? Speak 
 quick, or it'll die in delivery ! 
 
 Committee. — Did you ever hear of a river in Asia 
 called Pactolus? 
 
 Brigadier. — To be sure. An ass dipped his head 
 into it to be able to stop making money. 
 
 Committee. — That's the fable. And ever since there 
 have been gold sands in the river — " or so they say." 
 
 Brigadier. — And that you think is like fugitive 
 literature ? 
 
 Committee. — I do. I was there ten years ago, and 
 the gold sands were as scarce as good things in the 
 magazines. 
 
 Brigadier. — You'll swear to that? 
 
 Committee. — With a reservation, I will. I went to 
 the Pactolus one moonlight night, and filled my pock- 
 ets with sand to look at in the morning. I was travel- 
 ling with a caravan, and we were off before day, but 
 there was no gold in my pocket, come daylight — sifted 
 out, most likely! 
 
 Brigadier. — Shouldn't be surprised! "Sands of 
 Gold," then, you think would be a good name. 
 
 Committee. — Sands of Gold, sifted from the flood 
 of fugitive literature. 
 
 Brigadier. — Good ! passable good ! Let the com 
 mittee rise. 
 
 You see how it is done, dear reader, and you will the 
 better comprehend, from this specimen, how we came 
 upon another — a name for a series of sacred poetry, of 
 which we are about to issue the first number. We 
 have called this series "The Sacred Rosary"— a 
 musical word that, in old English, meant a plantation 
 of roses, but which was afterward used to define the 
 verses of a church-psalter, strung together with beads 
 for an aid to memory. In either signification, it 
 figures forth what we enrol beneath it — for a more 
 beautiful collection of hallowed verse was never col- 
 lected than this we have to offer. We have always 
 especially loved poetry on sacred themes, and have 
 garnered up specimens of it, and let us assure the 
 reader that in this field of poetry there is a rich har- 
 vest ungathered. Let him look at this first number 
 for a specimen of the mind and taste scattered abroad 
 in these stray leaves of poetry. 
 
 It will cut up for a fact, when you have done using 
 it as a pun, that " the first sign of spring in the city is 
 the prevalence of spring-cart*." (I borrow this of 
 the author, and lend him, in return, an analogy of my 
 own discovering — between sidewalks and green pas- 
 tures — the simultaneous outbreak of dandy-lions with 
 the first warm weather.) Oh, the moving! But it 
 should be remembered by those who groan over the 
 universal exposure of household gods and shabby fur- 
 niture on May-day, that when it ceases, our now mo- 
 bile republic will harden into a monarchy. The 
 " moss" of aristocracy is not " gathered" by the " roll- 
 ing stone." People must live long iu one place to 
 establish superiority for themselves or to allow it in 
 others. Mrs. Splitfig, the grocer's wife, is but just 
 beginning to submit patiently to the airs of Mrs. In- 
 gulphus, the banker's wife, when May-day comes 
 round, and away she goes with her tin and crockery 
 on a spring-cart, to start fair again with some other 
 pretender, in some other neighborhood. " Old fam- 
 ilies" are of little use without old neighbors to keep 
 the record. The subduing of neighborhoods is (at 
 present) the battle of pretension with a hydra— one 
 sot of heads sliced off, a new set is ready to come on. 
 So, long live our acquaintance with the shabby sides 
 of easy-chairs, and the humilities of bedding and 
 crockery. Some fifty May-days hence, we shall be 
 ready to stop shaking the sugar-bowl, satisfied that the. 
 big lumps are all at the top. 
 
 The most courted value in New York at the pres- 
 ent time is unquestionably the "nimble sixpence." 
 The new omnibuses that have been put upon the dif- 
 ferent lines within a week or two, are of a costliness 
 and splendor that would have done for a sovereign's 
 
684 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 carriage in the golden age. Claret bodies, silver- 
 plated hubs, and yellow wheels, cut-velvet linings and 
 cushions, and all to tempt the once-unconsidered six- 
 pence to get up and ride! (Query — as to the supe- 
 riority of the " mirror held up to nature," over the 
 New Mirror held up to sixpence ?) 
 
 The racing of omnibuses seems to be agreeable to 
 inside passengers, since it might always be prevented 
 by pulling the checkstring — but to those who have 
 the temerity or the dangerous necessity to cross 
 Broadway, it is become a frightful evil. King Six- 
 pence could regulate it very easily, if he had his wits 
 about him. As was said before, the checkstring is 
 always obeyed. Terrified ladies, who chance to have 
 no fancy for riding races in Broadway, should be 
 reminded of this leather preservative. 
 
 Those who have the bold wish to tamper with their 
 standard of human nature can now be gratified, as 
 there are giants at one museum and a dwarf at the 
 other. Mr. and Mrs. Anak, at the American museum, 
 are certainly two very tall people — more tall than 
 comely. The flat-chested and gaunt lady looks as if 
 she had been lengthened with a rolling-pin — her length 
 entirely at the expense of her intermediate belongings. 
 Not so the husband, who is a thick-lipped, big-eyed, 
 double-fisted, knoll-backed, and thick-tongued over- 
 growth. For one, I do not like to have my notions 
 of human stature unsettled, and I abhor giants. Sir- 
 feet stature is undervalued by familiarity with seven — 
 as diamonds would be ruined by the discovery of a 
 few as large as potatoes. I am happy to console the 
 eclipsed six-footers and under, by the information that 
 this large vessel of human nature does not seem 
 intended to hold more soul. He looks like as " regu- 
 lar a spoon" as could be wished by those who are com- 
 pelled to look up to him — his wife, apparently, of the 
 same utensil capacity. 
 
 The dwarf at Peale's museum, Rado Scauf {that he 
 should ever have been thought worth baptizing!) is a 
 sweet-faced minion, with feet in boots looking like 
 two cockroaches with heels to them. A two-fingered 
 lady's glove would make him an ample pair of trou- 
 sers, and his walking-stick is a sizeable toothpick. He 
 has fine eyes, and would look like a nice lad, through 
 a magnifying-glass. If such bijous were plenty, 
 ladies would carry them in their pockets — portable 
 garter-claspers and glove-buttoners. Fancy the lux- 
 ury ! It were worth a Yankee's while to send a ven- 
 ture to Lilliput, to import them. 
 
 The Cloister.— Four o'clock and the Pomeridian 
 of an April day. The brigadier's audiences are sus- 
 pended to make room for a session of the committee, 
 and the door is closed— printers, poets, engravers, 
 stitchers and folders (these female), advertisers, car- 
 riers, agents, stereotypers, ruthlessly excluded. Truly, 
 as Shakspere says, "every man hath business and de- 
 sire" (for the brigadier's society), "such as it is." 
 Long last his " suaviler in modo," his "fortiter in re /" 
 
 Brigadier. — To business, my boy ! "What lies in 
 that fourth pucker of your eyelid? Smile and let it 
 drop away easy ! 
 
 Committee. — Thirteen letters by to-day's mail, con- 
 taining propositions to publish immortal works by 
 living and mortal American authors, most of them 
 never before heard of — postage nine and sixpence, of 
 which please make a memorandum in my favor. 
 
 Brigadier. — Fifty-nine cents each to the cause of 
 unbaptized literature ! Are we not involuntary martyrs, 
 my boy ! Why the mischief don't you last-page the 
 fact that we publish exclusively for the trans-Atlantics 
 
 and the trans-Styxians! — never for those who can 
 cross the water to " settle !" 
 
 Committee. — It shall be done, but there is one ap- 
 plicant who deserves a hearing. One of the most 
 gifted women now living has employed her leisure in 
 compiling a book to be used as a round game played 
 with forfeits, or as a parlor fortune-teller." The book 
 is to be called " Oracles from the Poets." Ques- 
 tions are proposed, and by the choice of a number the 
 inquirer is referred to an answer, in a passage selected 
 from the poets. The selections are made with great 
 taste, so as not only to convey apposite answers, but 
 to make the reader familiar with the most beautiful 
 passages of poetry. What say to that ? 
 
 Brigadier. — Worth lots of money to Biker or Ap- 
 pleton, my boy, but we are in the rapid line, and that 
 sort of work takes time. Besides (and here the 
 Brigadier looked modestly at his nails), we couldn't 
 bring our minds to make money out of the sex, my 
 boy ! Fancy a lovely woman calling on us to fork out, 
 as her publisher ! Odious word, "publisher !" It has 
 been too long a synonym for " pirate," and "Philistine." 
 A few of us immortal bards have washed and donned 
 the gaberdine of late, but we must let it air, my boy, 
 we must let it air, before wearing it abroad — at least 
 into a lady's presence ! Think of the maid's asking 
 you to "step into the back room," if you called on a 
 lady and sent up your name as her " publisher !" 
 
 Committee. — Ah! my illustrious friend and song- 
 builder, dignity is a Minerva that needs no nurse. It 
 jumps out of your head and walks alone. I would not 
 only publish, but peddle from two tiu boxes, if my 
 wants would not bear diminishing, and if only this 
 would supply them ! We're earthy ants, not charter- 
 ed butterflies ! 
 
 Brigadier. — Ha ! ha ! rny boy ! my dear boy ! 
 
 " That all the sweetness of the world in one — 
 
 The youth and virtue that would tame wild tigers — 
 Should thus be cloistered up '." 
 
 Who else wants to gild a gold leaf in the Mirror 
 Library ? 
 
 Committee. — Seven and two are nine — seven poet- 
 esses and two frebardlings — pleading for print! We are 
 
 " Loath to refuse, but loather for to grant ;" 
 
 — will you write the declinatures, dear brigadier ? 
 
 Brigadier. — Make a regret-circular, my boy ! Say 
 that we are are a partnership of posterity. They must 
 die, to qualify. The " Home Library," and the " Par- 
 lor Library," and the " Drawing-Room Library," and 
 the " Knickerbocker Library," and many more — (for 
 whose names, see puffs and advertisements) — these 
 publish for the equivocal immortals now living. We 
 publish only for the immortal dead, or for the buried 
 alive, disinterred with our own pick and shovel. Write 
 that out, and I'll have it lithographed to save time. 
 What next ? 
 
 Committee. — We want a new head. 
 
 Brigadier. — Speak for yourself, my boy ! 
 
 Committee A new caption, then (if you ivill be 
 
 critical) in the Mirror. Where can I praise things, 
 now? There's Headley's new book on Italy, worth 
 the best laurel-sprig of my picking. There's "Ame- 
 lia," of the Lousiville Journal, who has written some 
 poetry about hearing a sermon, that traverses your 
 back-bone like electricity, and where to praise that ! 
 George Flagg has painted a delicious sketch of my 
 Glenmary-born Imogen, and I icill praise him! I want 
 a place to praise — 
 
 Brigadier. — Hire a pew ! 
 
 Committee — Will you give me a column ? 
 
 Brigadier — To your memory, I will. 
 
 Committee. — Well, my memory wants a column, to 
 record the good things I should not forget to praise. 
 
 Brigadier. — Take it — take it — but for Heaven's 
 sake be pert and pithy, crisp and critical ! Nothing 
 
EPHEMERA 
 
 685 
 
 so dull as praise to everybody but the praiseg. Any- 
 thing more ? 
 
 Committee. — Yes — 
 
 " The loving mother that nine months did bear 
 In the dear closet of her painful side 
 Her tender babe, it seeing safe appear 
 Doth not so much rejoice,' - 
 
 as I to inform you of the approaching delivery, from 
 the press, of " Pencilliugs by the Way." My travels 
 nave seemed interminable. 
 
 Brigadier. — Well, as 1 assisted at their birth once 
 before, 1 can certify now to their being "born again." 
 Is that what you want ? 
 
 Committee. — No — for, half the book was never a 
 book before, not having been published except in the 
 old Mirror. I want you to make it trip 
 
 " as merry as a trri<r ; 
 And brisk as bottled ale," 
 
 that I may hurry into " calf" all I have written up to 
 last year, and start fresh from my meridian with 
 "Dashes at Life," and gossips in the cloister. For, 
 as says old Wotton in the " Reliquice," "Though I 
 am a cloistered man in the condition of my present 
 life, yet, having spent so much of mine age among 
 noise abroad, there still doth hang upon me, I know 
 not how, a certain concupiscence of novelty." 
 
 Brigadier. — Verbum sap. sat. Shall the committee 
 rise — by getting down off the table ? 
 
 Committee — Yes ! — oue minute ! Have you read 
 (he proof-sheets of that glorious — glorious — say 
 " glorious!" — 
 
 Brigadier — Glorious. 
 
 Committee. — Hood's " Midsummer Fairies" — the 
 most delicious "Rococo" conceivable? Yes? Be off! 
 
 From the window in which I spin my cobweb, I 
 look directly on the most frequented portion in Broad- 
 way— the sidewalk in front of St. Paul's. You walk 
 over it every day. Familiarity with most things alters 
 their aspect, however. Let me, after a long acquaint- 
 ance with this bit of sidewalk, sketch how it looks to 
 me at the various hours of the day. I may jot down, 
 also, one or two trifles 1 have observed while looking 
 into the street in the intervals of writing. 
 
 Eight in the morning. — The sidewalk is compara- 
 tively deserted. The early clerks have gone by, and 
 the bookkeepers and youngerpartners not being abroad, 
 the current sets no particular way. A vigorous female 
 exerciser or two may be seen returning from a smart 
 walk to the Battery, and the orange-women are getting 
 their tables ready at the corners. There is to be a 
 funeral in the course of the day in St. Paul's church- 
 yard, and one or two boys are on the coping of the 
 iron fence, watching the grave-digger. Seamstresses 
 and schoolmistresses, with veils down, in impenetra- 
 ble incognito, hurry by with a step which says unmis- 
 •akeably. " don't look at me in this dress !" The re- 
 turn omnibuses come from Wall street empty, on a 
 walk. ' J 
 
 Nine and after.— A rapid throng of well-dressed 
 men, all walking smartly, and all bound Mammon- 
 ward. Glanced at vaguely, the sidewalk seems like a 
 floor with a swarm of black beetles running races 
 across it. The single pedestrians who are struggling 
 up stream, keep close to the curbstone or get rudely 
 jostled. The omnibuses all stop opposite St. Paul's 
 at this hour, letting out passengers, who invariably 
 start on a trot down Ann street or Fulton. The 
 museum people are on the top of the building drawing 
 their flags across Broadway and Ann bv pulleys fasten* 
 ed to trees and chimneys. Burgess and Stringer hang- 
 ing out their literary placards with a listless delibera- 
 
 tion, as if nobody was abroad yet who had leisure to 
 read them. The "brigadier" dismounting from an 
 up-town 'bus with a roll of manuscripts sticking from 
 his pocket, and hands and handkerchiefs waved to him 
 from the omnibus windows. 
 
 Tirrlrr and affr-r.— Discount-seekers crowding into 
 the Chemical Bank with hats over their eyes. Flower- 
 merchants setting their pots of roses and geraniums 
 ; along the iron fence. The blind beggar arrived, and 
 set with his back against the church gate by an old 
 woman. And now the streaks, drawn across my side 
 vision by the passers under, glide at a more leisurely 
 j pace, and are of gayer hues. The street full of sun- 
 shine. Omnibuses going slowly, both ways. Female 
 ! exclusives gliding to and fro in studiously plain dresses 
 j and with very occupied air — (never in Broadway with- 
 out " the carriage" of course, except to shop). Stran- 
 | gers sprinkled in couples, exhausting their strength 
 and spirits by promenading before the show hour. 
 I The grave dug in St. Paul's, and the grave-digger 
 | gone home to dinner. Woman run over at the Ful- 
 j ton crossing. Boys out of school. Tombs' bell ring- 
 ing fire in the third district. 
 
 One and after. — The ornamentals are abroad. A 
 crowd on St. Paul's sidewalk watching the accom- 
 plished canary-bird whose cage hangs on the fence. 
 He draws his seed and water up an inclined plane in 
 a rail-car, and does his complicated feeding to the 
 great approbation of his audience. The price is high 
 —his value being in proportion (aristocracy-wise) to 
 his wants ! It is the smoothest and broadest sidewalk 
 in Broadway — the frontage of St. Paul's— and the 
 ladies and dandies walk most at their ease just here, 
 loitering a little, perhaps, to glance at the flowers for 
 sale. My window, commanding this pave, is a par- 
 ticularly good place, therefore, to study street habits, 
 and I have noted a trifle or so, that, if not new, may 
 be newly put down. I observe that a very well-dressed 
 woman is noticed by none so much as by the women 
 themselves. This is the week for the first spring 
 dresses, and, to-day, there is a specimen or two of 
 Miss Lawson's April avatar, taking its first sun on the 
 promenade. A lady passed, just now, with a charm- 
 ing straw hat and primrose shawl — not a very pretty 
 woman, but, dress and all, a fresh and sweet object to 
 look at — like a new-blown cowslip, that stops you in 
 your walk though it is not a violet. Not a male eye 
 observed her, from curb-stone in Vesey to curb-stone 
 in Fulton, but every woman turned to look after her ! 
 Query, is this the notice of envy or admiration, and, 
 if the former, is it desirable or worth the pains and 
 money of toilet ? Query, again — the men's notice 
 being admiration (not envy) what will attract it, and 
 is that (whatever it is) worth while ? I query what I 
 should, myself, like to know. 
 
 Half past three. — The sidewalk is in shade. The 
 orange-man sits on a lemon-box, with his legs and 
 arms all crossed together in his lap, listening to the 
 band who have just commenced playing in the mu- 
 seum balcony. The principal listeners, who have 
 stopped for nothing but to listen, are three negro-boys 
 (one sitting on the Croton hydrant, and the other two 
 leaning on his back), and to them this gratuitous mu- 
 sic seems a charming dispensation. (Tune, "Ole 
 Dan Tucker.") The omnibus-horses prick up their 
 ears in going under the trumpets, but evidently feel 
 that to show fright would be a luxury beyond their 
 means. Saddle-horse, tied at the bank, breaks bridle 
 and runs away. Three is universal dinner-time for 
 bosses — (what other word expresses the head men of 
 all trades and professions?) — and probably not a sin- 
 gle portly man will pass under my window in this 
 hour. 
 
 Four to five. — Sidewalk more crowded. Hotel 
 boarders lounging along with toothpicks. Stout men 
 going down toward Wall street with coats unbuttoned. 
 
686 
 
 EPHEMERA 
 
 Hearse stopped at St. Paul's, and the museum band 
 playing " Take your time, Miss Lucy," while the 
 mourners are getting out. A gentleman, separated 
 from two ladies by the passing of the coffin across the 
 sidewalk, rejoins them, apparently with some funny 
 remark. Bell tolls. No one in the crowd is inter- 
 ested to inquire the age or sex of the person breaking 
 the current of Broadway to pass to the grave. Hearse 
 drives off on a trot. 
 
 Five and after. — Broadway one gay procession. 
 Few ladies accompanied by gentlemen — fewer than 
 in the promenades of any other country. Men in 
 couples and women in couples. Dandies strolling 
 and stealing an occasional look at their loose demi- 
 saison pantaloons, and gaiter-shoes, newly sported with 
 the sudden advent of warm weather. No private car- 
 riage passing except those bound to the ferries for a 
 drive into the country. The crowd is unlike the 
 morning crowd. There is as much or more beauty, 
 but the fashionable ladies are not out. You would 
 be puzzled to discover who these lovely women are. 
 Their toilets are unexceptionable, their style is a very 
 near approach to comme il faut. They look perfectly 
 satisfied with their position and with themselves, and 
 they do (what fashionable women do not) — meet the 
 eye of the promenader with a coquettish confidence he 
 will misinterpret — if he be green or a puppy. Among 
 these ladies are accidents of feature, form, and man- 
 ner — charms of which the possessor is unconscious — 
 that, if transplanted into a high-bred sphere of society 
 abroad, would be bowed to as the stamp of lovely aris- 
 tocracy. Possibly — probably, indeed — the very wo- 
 man who is a marked instance of this is not called pretty 
 by her friends. She is only spoken to by those whose 
 taste is common-place and unrefined. She walks 
 Broadway, and has a vague suspicion that the men of 
 fashion look at her more admiringly than could be 
 accounted for by any credit she has for beauty at 
 home. Yet she is not likely to be enlightened as to 
 the secret of it. When tired of her promenade, she 
 disappears by some side street leading away from the 
 great thoroughfares, and there is no clue to her un- 
 less by inquiries that would be properly resented as 
 impertinence. I see at least twenty pass daily under 
 my window who would be ornaments of any society, 
 yet who, I know (by the men J see occasionally with 
 them), are unacknowledgable by the aristocrats up 
 town. What a field for a Columbus ! How charming 
 to go on a voyage of discovery and search for these un- 
 prized pearls among the unconscious pebbles ! How 
 delightful to see these rare plants without hedges 
 about them — exquisite women without fashionable 
 affectations, fashionable hinderances, penalties, exac- 
 tions, pretensions, and all the wearying nonsenses 
 that embarrass and stupefy the society of most of our 
 female pretenders to exclusiveness ! 
 
 Half-past six and after. — The flower-seller loading 
 up his pots into a fragrant wagon-load. Twilight's 
 rosy mist falling into the street. Gas-lamps alight 
 here and there. The museum band increased by two 
 instruments, to play more noisily for the night-cus- 
 tom. The magic wheel lit up, and ground rather 
 capriciously by the tired boy inside. The gaudy 
 transparencies one by one illuminated. Great differ- 
 ence now in the paces at which people walk. Busi- 
 ness-men bound home, apprentices and shop-boys car- 
 rying parcels, ladies belated — are among the hurrying 
 ones. Gentlemen strolling for amusement take it 
 very leisurely, and with a careless gait that is more 
 graceful and becoming than their mien of circumspect 
 daylight. And now thicken the flaunting dresses of 
 the unfortunate outlaws of charity and pity. Some 
 among them (not many) have a remainder of ladylike- 
 ness in their gait, as if, but for the need there is to 
 attract attention, they could seem modest — but the 
 most of them are promoted to fine dress from sculle- 
 
 ries and low life, and show their shameless vulgarity 
 through silk and feathers. They are not at all to be 
 pitied. The gentleman cit passes them by like the rails 
 in St. Paul's fence — wholly unnoticed. ]f he is vicious, 
 it is not those in the street who could attract him. 
 The " loafers" return their bold looks, and the boys 
 pull their dresses as they go along, and now and then 
 a greenish youth, well-dressed, shows signs of being 
 attracted. Sailors, rowdies, country-people, and 
 strangers who have dined freely, are those whose steps 
 are arrested by them. It is dark now. The omni- 
 buses, that were heavily-laden through the twilight, 
 now go more noisily because lighter. Carriages make 
 their way toward the Park theatre. My window shows 
 but the two lines of lamps and the glittering shops, 
 and all else vaguely. 
 
 I have repeatedly taken five minutes, at a time, to 
 pick out a well-dressed man, and see if he would walk 
 from Fulton street to Vesey without getting a look at 
 his boots. You might safely bet against it. If he is 
 an idle man, and out only for a walk, two to one he 
 would glance downward to his feet three or four times 
 in that distance. Men betray their subterfuges of 
 toilet — women never. Once in the street, women 
 are armed at all points against undesirable observa- 
 tion — men have an ostrich's obtusity, being wholly 
 unconscious even of that battery of critics, a passing 
 omnibus ! How many substitutes and secrets of dress 
 a woman carries about her, the angels know! — but 
 she looks defiance to suspicion on that subject. Sit 
 in my window, on the contrary, and you can pick out 
 every false shirt-bosom that passes, and every pair of 
 false wristbands, and the dandy's economical half- 
 boots, gaiter-cut trousers notwithstanding. 
 
 Indeed, while it is always difficult, sometimes im- 
 possible, to distinguish female genuine from the imi- 
 tation, nothing is easier than to know at sight the 
 " glossed (male) worsted from the patrician sarsnet." 
 The " fashion" of women, above a certain guide, can 
 seldom be guessed at in the street street except by the 
 men who are with them. 
 
 You should sit in a window like mine, to know how 
 few men walk with even passable grace. Nothing 
 so corrupts the gait as business — (a fact that would be 
 offensive to mention in a purely business country, if it 
 were not that the "unmannerly haste" of parcel-bear- 
 ing and money-seeking, may be laid aside with low- 
 heeled boots and sample cards.) The bent-kneed ce- 
 lerity, learned in dodging clerks and jumping over 
 boxes in Cedar and Pearl, betrays its trick in the 
 gait, as the face shows the pucker of calculation and 
 the suavity of sale. I observe that the man used 
 to hurry, relies principally on his heel, and keeps his 
 foot at right angles. The ornamental man drops his 
 toe slightly downward in taking a step, and uses, for 
 elasticity, the spring of his instep. Nature has pro- 
 vided muscles of grace which are only incorporated 
 into the gait by habitually walking with leisure. All* 
 women walk with comparative grace who are not 
 cramped with tight shoes, but there are many degrees 
 of gracefulness in women, and oh, what a charm is 
 the highest degree of it ! How pleasurable even to 
 see from my window a woman walking like a queen ! 
 
 The magnetic threads of Saratoga begin to pull upon 
 the calculating bumps of foreseeing papas, and many a 
 hair whitens in these spring months that would have ta- 
 ken another lease of youth but for the trip to Saratoga. 
 Ah, the contrivance ! Ah, the calculation! Ah, the sa- 
 ving, upon things undreamed of! — for extravagance is 
 like the lengthening of the Indian's blanket — the piece 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 687 
 
 cut from one end that is sewed on to the other ! But, 
 out on monotony, and hey for Saratoga ! If there be 
 an approach to a gayety-paradise on earth — if there be 
 a place where the mortifications of neighborhood are 
 forgotten, and " people's natural advantages" are prom- 
 inent and undisputed— if there be, this side Heaven, 
 a place where it is worth while to dress, worth while 
 to be pretty, worth while to walk, talk, and particu ( 
 larly and generally outdo > 
 
 " The snowy swans that strut on Isca's sands," 
 
 it is sandy Saratoga — Marvin's United States Hotel ! 
 Take your papa there, " for his health," my dear 
 belle! "And tell him, too," that it was the well- 
 expressed opinion of the philosopher Bacon, that 
 "money, like manure, is offensive if not spread." 
 Tell your mamma to tell him how pale he is when he 
 wakes in the morning! Tell the doctor to prescribe 
 Congress water without the taste of the cork! Tell 
 him, if he does not, and you are not let go with a 
 chaperon, you will do something you shudder to 
 think of— bolt, slope, elope, with the first base 
 
 " Arimaspian who, by stealth, 
 Will from his wakeful custom purloin 
 The guarded gold" 
 
 to which you are the heiress ! For it is credibly and 
 currently reported " in high circles," that the coming 
 season at Saratoga is to be of a crowded uncomforta- 
 bleness of splendor that was reserved for the making 
 fashionable, by Mr. Van Buren, of the " United 
 States" and its dependant colonies. 
 
 Among the alleviations to passing a summer in 
 town (misericordia pro nobis !) is the completion of 
 Mr. Stevens's Gothic cottage at the lip of the Elysian 
 Hoboken, where are to be had many good things, of 
 course, but where (I venture to suggest) it would be a 
 bliss ineffable to be able to get a good breakfast! What 
 a pleasure to cross the ferry, and, after a morning 
 ramble in that delicious park, to sit down in the fresh 
 air volant through the galleries of that sweet cottage, 
 and eat (if nothing more) a nice roll with a good cup 
 of French coffee ! A restaurateur there would make 
 a fortune, I do think. Bring it about, Mr. "Person 
 Concerned," and you shall lack neither our company 
 nor a zealous trumpeter. 
 
 THE CLOISTER. 
 
 Committee — (solus). — Oh, most beset of brigadiers! 
 Most civil of military men ! (for half a firm, the most 
 yielding partner of my acquaintance!) when, oh re- 
 sponsible general, will you get through with your^ar- 
 ticular callers and come to confab? True, I have 
 dined, and can wait! True, there are joint letters to 
 answer! True, I can listen, and look out into the 
 back yard ! Hark ! Syphax, my black boy, loquitur. 
 
 Syphax — (to the general). — Shall I cut out them 
 favorable notices from the exchanges, sir? 
 
 Brigadier. — Those favorable notices, Syphax! 
 
 Heavens! what an unfeeling man! For the love 
 of pity, corrupt not the innocent grammar of the lad, 
 my dear brigadier! Out of seven black boys sent me 
 for trial by the keeper of an intelligence-office, six, to 
 my disgust, spoke with the painful accuracy of Doc- 
 tor Pangloss. The last, my inestimable Syphax, 
 whom that finished brigadier would fain bring to his 
 own level of heartless good grammar — was ignorant 
 (virtuous youth !) even of the sexes of pronouns ! He 
 came to me innocent; and, I need not say to any 
 writer — to any slave of the rule-tied pen — to any man 
 
 cabined, cribbed, confined, as are public scribblers 
 to case and number, gender and conjugation, participle 
 present, and participle past — I need not say, to such 
 a victim, what an oasis in the desert of perfection was 
 the green spot of a black boy's cacology ! Oh, to 
 the attenuated ear of the grammar-ridden! — to the 
 tense mood of unerring mood and tense — what a lux- 
 ury is an erring pronoun — what a blessed relief from 
 monotony is a too-yielding verb, seduced, from its sin- 
 gular antecedent, by a contiguity of plural! Out on 
 perfectionists! Out on you, you flaw-less brigadier! 
 Correct your own people, however! Inveigle not my 
 Syphax into rhetoric! Ravish not from my use the 
 one variation, long-sought and chance-found, from the 
 maddening monotone of good grammar! 
 
 And this brings to my mind (if I get time to jot it 
 down before the brigadier comes to cloister) a long- 
 settled conviction of my own, that the corrections in 
 American manners brought about by the criticisms of 
 Trollope and others, have been among the worst in- 
 fluences ever exercised upon the country. Gracious 
 heaven ! are we to have our national features rasped 
 off by every manner-tinker who chooses to take up a 
 file ! See how it affects the English to laugh at their 
 bloat of belly and conceit, their cockney ignorance 
 and their besotted servility to rank. Do they brag 
 less, and drink less beer ? Do they modify their Bow- 
 bell dialect one hair, or whip off their hats with less 
 magical celerity when spoken to by a lord? Not a 
 bit ! They will be English till they are smothered 
 with Russians — English ghosts (those who die before 
 England is conquered by Russia), with English man- 
 ners, at doomsday. They are not so soft as to be 
 moulded into American pottery, or German pottery, 
 or French pottery, because an American, or a Ger- 
 man, or a Frenchman, does not find them like his own 
 country's more common utensils ! Where do national 
 features exist? Not among well-bred people! Not 
 where peas are eaten with a fork and soup-plates left 
 untilted by the hungry! All well-bred people are 
 monotonously alike — whatever their nation and what- 
 ever the government they have lived under. Differ- 
 ences of manners are found below this level, and the 
 mistake — the lamentable mistake — lies in submitting 
 to correct this low level by the standard of coxcombs! 
 What a picture would be without shade — what music 
 would be without discords — what life would be with- 
 out something to smile at — what anything would be 
 without contrast — that are ice becoming by our sensi- 
 tiveness to criticism. Long live our (BM-judice) 
 " abominations." Long live some who spit and whit- 
 tle, some who eat eggs out of wine-glasses and sit on 
 four chairs, some who wear long naps to their hats, 
 some who eat peas with a knife, some who pour out 
 their tea into saucers, and some who are civil to un- 
 protected ladies in stage-coaches! Preserve some- 
 thing that is not English, oh, my countrymen ! 
 
 [Enter the brigadier.] 
 
 Brigadier. — Forgive me, my dear boy — what is that 
 I see written on your paper about Russia ? 
 
 '• The Russie men are round of bodies, fully-faced, 
 The greatest part with bellies that overhang the waist, 
 Flat-headed for the most, with faces nothing faire, 
 But brown by reason of the stoves and closeness of the aire." 
 
 So says old Tuberville, the traveller — and now to busi- 
 ness. Jot ! 
 
 Committee. — What ? 
 
 Brigadier. — Jot — that we are glad to offer to the 
 patrons of the "Mirror Library" a book they will 
 thank us for, at every line—" The Plea of the Min- 
 summer Fairies," and other admirable poems, preg- 
 nant with originality and richness, by Thomas Hood. 
 His poetry is the very attar, the aroma, the subtlest 
 extract of sweet imagination. " Eugene Aram" is 
 one of those included in this volume. 
 
 Committee.— What else are you glad of? 
 
d88 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Brigadier. — Glad to be sorry that Parke Godwin's 
 fine analytical mind and bold foundry of cast-iron 
 English are not freighted with a more popular sub- 
 ject than Fourierism — worthy though the theme be 
 of the regard of angels whose approbation don't pay. 
 Politics should be at a lift to deserve the best ener- 
 gies of such a writer — but they are not, and so he 
 turns to philosophy. 
 
 Committee. — But he should play Quintus Curtius, 
 and write up politics to his level, man! The need is 
 more immediate than the need of Fourierism. 
 
 Brigadier. — My dear boy, give away nothing but 
 what is saleable. Gifts, that would not otherwise have 
 been money in your purse, are not appreciated — par- 
 ticularly advice. We love Godwin — let us love his 
 waste of ammunition, if it please him to waste it. 
 
 Committee. — 
 
 " Then let him weep, of no man mercified," 
 
 if his brains be not coinable to gold, /would make 
 a merchant of genius! The world has need of brains 
 like Godwin's, and need makes the supply into com- 
 modity, and commodity is priceable. That's the logic 
 by which even my poor modicum is made to thrive. 
 Apropos — what do you think of these lines on "bells," 
 by Duganne? A poet, I should say: — 
 
 M Ye melancholy bells, 
 Ye know not why ye're. ringing: — 
 See not the tear-drops springing 
 From sorrows that ye bring to mind, 
 Ye melancholy bells. 
 
 " And thus ye will ring on — 
 To-day, in tones of sadness ; 
 To morrow, peals of gladness ; 
 Ye'll sound them both, yet never feel 
 A thrill of either one. 
 
 " Ye ever-changing bells ! 
 Oh many ye resemble, 
 Who ever throb and tremble, 
 Yet never know what moves them so — 
 Ye ever-changing bells." 
 
 Brigadier. — Kernel-ish and quaint. But, my dear 
 boy, 
 
 " twilight, soft arbiter 
 'Twixt day and night," 
 
 is beginning to blur the distinctness of the cheeks on 
 that apron drying upon the line in the back yard. 
 Shall we go to tea? 
 
 The opening of the exhibition at the National Acad- 
 emy is like taking a mask from one of the city's most 
 agreeable features. And it is only those who live in 
 the city habitually, and ioho live as fast as the city does, 
 who are qualified to enjoy it with the best apprecia- 
 tion. Did you ever notice, dear reader, how behind 
 the tide you feel, on arriving in town, even after an 
 absence of a week — how whirling and giddy your sen- 
 sations are — how many exciting things there seem for 
 you to do — how " knowing" and " ahead-of-you" seem 
 all the takers-coolly whom you meet — how incapable 
 you are of any of the tranquil pleasures of the me- 
 tropolis, and with what impatient disgust you pass any 
 exhibition which would subtract you, mind and body, 
 from the crowd. It is not for strangers, then, that the 
 exhibition is the highest pleasure. It is for those who 
 have laid behind them the bulk of the city excite- 
 ments in a used-up heap — to whom balls are nuisances, 
 theatres satiety, concerts a bore, Broadway stale, 
 giants, dwarfs, and six-legged cows, "familiar as your 
 hand." It is only such who have the cool eye to look 
 critically and enjoyingly at pictures. It is for such 
 that Durand has laid into his landscape the touch that 
 was preceded by despair — for such that Ingham elab- 
 orates, and Page strains invention, and Sully woos the 
 
 coy shade of expression. And, truth to say, it is not 
 one of the least of the gratuitous riches of existence, 
 that while we are sifting away the other minutes of 
 the year in commonplace business or pleasure, forget- 
 ful of art and artists, these gifted minds are at work, 
 producing beautiful pictures to pamper our eyes with 
 in spring ! If you never chanced to think of that 
 before, dear reader, you are richer than you thought! 
 Please enclose us the surplus in bankable funds ! 
 Ehem ! 
 
 There are more portraits in the exhibition than will 
 please the dilettanti — but hang the displeased ! We 
 would submit to a thousand indifferent portraits, for the 
 accident of possessing a likeness of one friend unex- 
 pectedly lost. For Heaven's sake, let everybody be 
 painted, that, if perchance there is a loved face 
 marked, unsuspected by us, for heaven, we may have 
 its semblance safe before it is beyond recall ! How 
 bitter the regret, the self-reproach, when the beautiful 
 joy of a household has been suddenly -struck into the 
 grave, that we might have had a bright image of her 
 on canvass — that we might have retnoved, by holding 
 converse wiih her perpetuated smile, the dreadful 
 image of decay that in sad moments crowds too closely 
 upon us! For the sake of love and friendship, let 
 that branch of the art, now in danger of being dispar- 
 aged by short-sighted criticism — let it be ennobled, for 
 the sacred offices it performs ! Is an art degrading to 
 its follower which does so much — which prolongs the 
 presence of the dead, which embellishes family ties, 
 which brightens the memory of the absent, which 
 quickens friendship, and shows the loved, as they were 
 before ravage by sadness or sickness ? There should 
 rather be a priesthood of the affections, and portrait- 
 painters its brotherhood — holy for their ministering 
 pencils. 
 
 We have a customer in Andover, to whose attention 
 particularly we commend the truly delicious poetry of 
 " The Sacred Rosary,'''' as some atonement for having 
 inveigled him into the purchase of the "Songs of the 
 Bard of Poor Jack." That mis-spent shilling troubled 
 our friend, and he wrote us a letter and paid eighteen 
 pence postage to complain of it! — but non omnia pos- 
 sum-us omnes (we can't play 'possum with all our sub- 
 scribers), and we humbly beg our kind friend (who 
 lives where we learned our Latin) to refresh his piety 
 with the "Rosary," and forgive the Dibdin. The 
 apology over, however, wc must make bold to say that 
 of all the pnblications of the " Mirror Library," this 
 collection of Dibdin's songs has sold the best. It has 
 been indeed what our Andover friend scornfully calls 
 " a catch-penny affair," and we wish there were (what 
 there never will be) another catch-penny like it. No— 
 by Castaly ! such a book will never again be written ! 
 If ever there was honest, hearty, natural, manly feel- 
 ing spliced to rhyme, it is in these magnificent songs. 
 England's naval glory — her esprit-de-man-o'-ivar — het 
 empire of the sea — lies spell-bound in that glorious 
 song-book ! She owes more to Dibdin than to Chat- 
 ham or Burke — as much as to Howard or Wilber- 
 force! Ah, dear Anonym of Andover, you have 
 never hung your taste out to salt over the gunwale ! 
 Y"ou don't know poor Jack. Find out when your 
 lease of life is likely to run out— go first to sea — read 
 Dibdin understanding!)', e poi mori /" 
 
 The proprietor of the " Connecticut pie depot" 
 (corner of Beekman and Nassau), writes us that he 
 will be happy to have us " call and taste his pies when 
 we are sharp-set," and that he hails from Boston and 
 takes a pride in us. So we do in him, though, for a 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 689 
 
 pvff, our pen against his rolling-pin for a thousand 
 pound ! He evidently thinks us " the cheese," for he 
 says he wishes to be noticed in our " dairy of town 
 trifles." Well, sir, we don't " fill Our belly with the 
 east wind," nor eat pies, since we left Boston, but we 
 rejoice in your pie-ous enterprise, and agree, with you, 
 to consider ourselves mutually the flour of the city we 
 come from. Apropos — we can do our friend a service 
 which we hope he will reciprocate by opening a sub- 
 scription-book in his pie-magazine, and procuring us 
 five hundred subscribers (payments invariably in ad- 
 vance). A young lady has written to us, imploring 
 the Mirror's aid in reforming the prog at fashionable 
 boarding-schools. There are symptoms of a " strike" 
 for something better to eat in these coops of chicken- 
 angels, and the establishment of a "Connecticut pie 
 depot" seems (seems, madam, nay, it is !) beautifully 
 providential ! We can not trace our anonymous note 
 to any particular school, but we hereby recommend 
 to the young ladies in every " establishment," " nun- i 
 nery," and "seminary," to "hang their aprons on the ] 
 outer wall," and hoist in our friend's pastry, on trial. ! 
 The French pockets will be filled the first day gratis, I 
 we undertake to promise. The second day and after, j 
 of course, the bill will be presented to tante or the 
 music-master. 
 
 There are poems which the world "does not wil- 
 lingly let die," but which this same go-to-bed world, 
 tired of watching, covers quietly up with the ashes of 
 neglect, and leaves to grow as black as the poker and j 
 tongs of criticism that stand unused beside them 
 Stop the first twenty men (gentlemen, even) whom you j 
 see in the street, and probably not one can tell you 
 even the argument of Goldsmith's great poem ! And 
 the " pourquoy Sir Knight" is simply that " The 
 English Poets," in six formidable volumes, are too 
 much for cursory readers to encounter ! The poems 
 and passages they would "thumb." if they could light 
 readily on them, are buried up in loads of uninterest- 
 ing miscellany. They want the often-quoted, unde- 
 niable, pure fire, raked out of this heap of embers. 
 Our last number of the Mirror Library begins a sup- 
 ply of this want, under the title of " Livk Coals, 
 raked from the Embers of English Poetry." 
 
 The following advertisement is cut from " The 
 Sun:"— 
 
 "Notice — To the gentleman that pushed the man 
 over the curbstone in Broadway, at the corner of Lis- 
 penard street, with his dinner-kettle in his hand, from 
 this time forth never to lay his hand on David Brown 
 again." 
 
 Now, what other country than America would do 
 for David Brown ? God bless the land where a man 
 can pour his sorrows into the sympathizing bosom of 
 a newspaper! Query — does not this seventy -five cent 
 vent supersede altogether the use of that dangerous 
 domestic utensil, a friend! Add to this the invention 
 of an unexpressive substitute for gunpowder, and the 
 world will be comparatively a safe place. 
 
 Point of fact — we delight in all manner of old tilings 
 made young again, particularly in all kinds of vene- 
 rable and solemn humbug "showing green." If ever 
 there was a monster, grown out of sight of its natural 
 and original intention — a bloated, diseased, wen-cov- 
 ered, abate-worthy nuisance of a monster, it is the 
 newspaper. The first newspaper ever published in 
 France was issHed by a physician to amuse his pa- 
 tients. "To this complexion" would we reduce it 
 once more. Fill them with trifles, or with important 
 news (the same thing as to amusement), and throw a 
 
 wet blanket, and keep it wet, over congressional twad 
 die, polemical fubbery, tiresome essays, political cob- 
 webberies— yes, especially politics ! People some- 
 times cease to talk when there are no listeners, and ir 
 might be hoped, with God's blessing and help ("Ave 
 Maria! ora pro nobis!") that, congress members would 
 cease to put us to shame as well as to bore us to ex- 
 tinction, if there were no newspapers to fan their 
 indignant eloquence. It is a query worth sticking a 
 pin in — how many nuisances would die (beside con- 
 gress) if newspapers were restored to their original 
 use and purpose ? Any symptom of this regenera- 
 tion inexpressibly refreshes us. Hence our delight at 
 the advertisement of David Brown. Who would not 
 rather know that a man had run against David Brown 
 at the corner of Lispenard street, with a dinner-kettle 
 in his hand (and had better not do it again), than to 
 read the next any ten speeches to be delivered on the 
 rowdy floor of congress ! We have said enough to 
 give you a thinking-bulb, dear reader, and now to our 
 next — but 
 
 Apropos — we wish our friend Russell Jarvis, or any 
 analytically-minded and strong writer half as good, 
 would prepare us a speculative essay on the query 
 which is the natural inference of the late Washing- 
 ton doings, viz. : how curious must be the process 
 of mind by which a gentleman (there are one or 
 two in congress) could be brought to consent to 
 stay there — hail from there — frank from there — have 
 his letters addressed there — in any way or shape take 
 upon himself a member's share of this lustrum's ob- 
 loquy and abomination ? Not but what we think it 
 wholesome — we do ! You can not cure festers with- 
 out bringing them to a head. The wonder is, how 
 gentlemen are willing to be parts of a congress that is 
 only the nation's pustule — the offensive head and vent 
 of all the purulent secretions of the body politic ! 
 Thank God, they are coming to a head — to this head, 
 if need be (it is rather conspicuous, it is true — like 
 a pimple on a lady's nose, which might be better situ- 
 ated) — to have the worst issue of our national shame 
 on the floor of Congress ; but better so than pent 
 up — better so than an inward mortification precursory 
 of dissolution ! For our own part (though we are no 
 politician, except when stung upon our fifteen mil- 
 lionth of national feeling), we think we could do very 
 well without a congress. We believe the supreme 
 court capable of doing all the legislative grinding ne- 
 cessary for the country, or, if that would not do, we 
 think a congress convened only for the first three 
 months of every administration, in which speaking 
 was prohibited, would answer all wise ends. We are 
 over-governed. The reign of grave outrages and 
 solemn atrocities is at its height, and Heaven overturn 
 it, and send us, next after, a dynasty of laws " left to 
 settle," and trifles paramount. Amen. 
 
 We are not of the envious and discontented nature 
 of a muttou candle, blackest at the wick — that is to 
 say, we do not think every spot brighter than the one 
 we live in. We'seek means to glorify New York — 
 since we live here. Pat to our bosom and business, 
 therefore, comes a letter " from a gentleman to his 
 sister," apotheosistic (we will have our long word if we 
 like) of this same pleasant municipality. Our friend 
 and anonymous correspondent does not go quite 
 enough into detail, and we cut oft" his long peroration, 
 in which he compares himself very felicitously to "a 
 bottle of soda-water, struggling for vent."— " Now 
 then," he continues, "to uncork (off hat) and let my 
 exuberant contents be made manifest : — 
 
 " Once more in New York— dear, delightful New 
 York ! the spot of all spots and the place of all places ! 
 the whereabout which the poet dreamed of when he 
 
690 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 spoke of • the first flower of the earth and first gem of 
 the sea ;' and once more here, too, not to look upon 
 it for a moment, and then depart, but to stay, lo live, 
 to be, to exist, and to enjoy. You do not know the 
 love I bear New York ; it is, beyond all others, the 
 place where existence is ; where time passes, not like 
 a summer's dream, but as time should pass, in a suc- 
 cession (constant) of employments and enjoyments. 
 
 " I love the city, as I love everything loveable, with 
 a full and abiding joyousness. There is nothing pas- 
 sing, or in still life, but goes to make up the sum. The 
 very odor of the atmosphere, which might shock your 
 delicate, country-bred olfactories, is more to me than 
 all the fragrance of all the green fields that were ever 
 babbled of. 
 
 "The country is all very well, in its way. I love 
 that also — at a distance, or in moderate quantities. 
 Homeopathetically, as it were — as, for instance, the 
 Battery. I love to walk there, to inhale the sea- 
 breeze, and enjoy the sweet smell of the growing 
 grass and the budding trees; and to look over to Long 
 Island or New Jersey, and see the country blooming 
 (afar off) under the loving smiles of spring. Yes, the 
 country is, no doubt, very desirable — for a few days in 
 the summer — for a change, or to come back from with 
 a new relish for the real life that awaits one on his 
 return. 
 
 "I love to stand on the docks, of a still evening:, and 
 hear the tide rush past. The very rime of the sea 
 drifts in music to my ear. The rushing of the free 
 and ever-changing waters, the glad dancing of its 
 waves, the glowing reflex of the stars in their bosom, 
 the rifting foam, and the swift gushing sound, like a 
 continuous echo, stir up the dormant poetry of one's 
 soul, and send him, with a glowing heart, back to his 
 lonely home, happier for the sweet communion. 
 
 "All the time, too, is thought-filled; there is no 
 standing still here. Business is part of life, perhaps 
 life itself, and it is constantly going on around and 
 with us. If I choose a walk, Broadway is full of 
 life — never-ending, never-tiring. So all over the city. 
 One can not stroll anywhere but he meets with some- 
 thing new, something strange, something interesting; 
 some chapter opens, which has till then been to him 
 as a dead letter. 
 
 " Somebody, who wanted to express in strong lan- 
 guage that nature might be improved by art, has said 
 that « God made the country, man made the town.' 
 How true it is! And, beyond that, here are congre- 
 gated hundreds of thousands of ' featherless bipeds' 
 (men and women), of whom, perhaps, you know not 
 a dozen, but every one of whom, in your walks, is to 
 you a study. 
 
 " Then, again, the very situation — the form, struc- 
 ture, and appliances — of New York, are delightful 
 and fascinating beyond compare. Such a beautiful 
 promontory, swelling up from two magnificent rivers, 
 rising from either, gently, to the palace-lined thor- 
 oughfare on its crown ; and crossbarred with a thou- 
 sand avenues to both rivers — inlets for pure air, ever 
 fresh rising from the sea, blowing over and into every 
 habitation, and freighted with health, like the gales 
 of Araby the blest. • 
 
 "Nature has been wonderfully prodigal of her be- 
 stowments on this spot, and the hand of man has not 
 been niggardly in completing what the fair dame com- 
 menced, by putting a worthy superstructure on her 
 noble foundation. I have often thought of the remark 
 made by some one, that the man who first stood on 
 Manhattan island, and looked around him with an eye 
 and a mind that could comprehend and appreciate its 
 wonderful beauties and advantages, must have ' h£ld 
 his very breath' in wonder and admiration. 
 
 "And then more of its present beauties to the 
 dwellers therein. Should one, in hot and dusty 
 weather, choose to change the scene, how joyous a 
 
 trip to Sandy Hook ! Often have I stood on the 
 heights, and looked off on old Ocean, holding in my 
 gaze one of the most glowing scenes that this world 
 shows. The wide and boundless view — the noble 
 Hudson and the city above, the green beauties of 
 Long island before, and the heaven ocean below, spread 
 out in its grand sublimity; the sails of all nations 
 flashing on its breast and blending in its glory, 
 
 ; like a mirror where the Almighty's form 
 
 Glasses itself'.' 
 
 "Oh who, with such a prospect before him, feels 
 not his soul elevated and his thoughts sublimated! 
 Thoughts, indeed, too wild for utterance, are born, 
 not for others, but to sink deep in the heart and leave 
 him a wiser if not a better man. 
 
 "This, you will say is the country — ah, but it is the 
 country of New York, close by, and part of city life 
 | itself. Then there is another country (yours is only 
 i one) over the other shoulder, where the moderate 
 sum of sixpence will waft us to the delightful walks, 
 | the green lawns, the shady groves, and cool zephyrs 
 j of dear, charming Hoboken. Doubly dear to a New- 
 Yorker. Fresh smelling and fragrant in the spring, 
 cool and breezy in the hot days of summer ; and, with 
 the rustling leaf of autumn, dear in its remembered 
 beauties, its fading foliage, and the ever-sounding sur- 
 ges that beat with melancholy moan at the foot of its 
 beetling crags and sloping lawns. Ah, lovely Hobo- 
 ken, 
 
 ' None know thee but to love thee, 
 Nor name thee but to praise !' 
 
 " Mr. Stevens, we owe you much ; and we can af- 
 ford to owe ; but we pay you a large annual interest 
 in gratitude and praise. ''Tis all we have, we can no 
 more.' " 
 
 We also cut off the irrelevant tail of our friend's 
 letter (tipped with a " G."), and beg another from him 
 with a finer nib to his pen — going more into the individ- 
 ualities. If you would like a subject suggested (exem- 
 pli gratia) give us the hopes, trials, temptations, and 
 aspirations of a Broadway shop-tender. They seem 
 fine youths, those silk-and-suavity venders. "Who 
 knows what is their pay and prospects ? How can 
 they afford such good manners and fine waistcoats ? 
 What is the degree of friendly acquaintance bred be- 
 tween them and the ladies in the course of a bargain ? 
 Have they legs (below the counter) ? — Do they mar- 
 ry ? — Have they combinations, and esprit de corps ? — 
 Which are the honorablest goods to sell? — As to the 
 " beating down" of grass-cloth and stockings — is it 
 interesting, or more so than the cheapening of calico? 
 When do they eat ? Do handsomer ones get higher 
 wages? May their "cousins" come to see them? 
 How do they look with hats on ? What is the dura- 
 tion of their chrysalis — the time of metamorphosis 
 from boy to." boss" — and what are their several sta- 
 ges of mental discipline ? The most saleable book in 
 the world would be the autobiography of a Broadway 
 clerk — (dry goods, retail). Let this " verbum" be 
 " sat" to a sapienti. 
 
 We have undertaken to make ourselves acquainted 
 with the island on which we live. We mean to give 
 our readers, bit by bit, the results of our observations 
 upon the customs, manners, geography, and morals 
 of the island of New York, as noted down in our ram- 
 bles. We do not take our walks in chapters, howev- 
 er, and we shall, therefore, be equally miscellaneous 
 and disorderly in our arrangement of topics. It is a 
 curious island, and sortie of the inhabitants are curi- 
 ous islanders. Those who only walk up the city's 
 backbone (Broadway) know very little of its bow r els 
 and extremities. Little by little, we hope to make 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 691 
 
 out its truthful anatomy— veins, pulses, functions, and 
 arteries. , , . 
 
 We should like to know, among other things, why 
 the broadest, most accessible, most convenient street 
 in New York, the noble avenue of Wkst Broadway, 
 is entirely given up to negroes? The rage is to move 
 up town — but there are people who are not rajahs, 
 who are willing to pay high rents— people who don't 
 care where the fashionable people go to (while they 
 live), and who simply desire to reside in broad streets 
 for air and light, and above all, to be near, if possible, 
 to their business. Now the narrowest part of this be- 
 streeted island is of course the most wholesome, as the 
 air from the two rivers comes over fewer chimneys 
 and gutters. The broader the street the better, both 
 for health and show. The access to a street should 
 be good, and West Broadway, in its whole length, is 
 parallel to Broadway, and approachable by Chambers 
 street, Murray, Warren, and all the best short ave- 
 nues of the city. It has. besides, near by, the beau- 
 tiful " lungs" of St. John's park, the hospital grounds, 
 and College Green, and is crossed at its upper end by 
 the broad ventilator of Canal street. Where, on the 
 island, is there a street more calculated to be whole- 
 some — dirty as it now is from the character of its oc- 
 cupants ? It would require, it is true, an entire renova- 
 tion, before any one person, desirous of good neigh- 
 borhood, could live there — but that renovation (we 
 prophesy it) will be done. Some speculator will buy 
 lots in it, and call a meeting of proprietors to suggest 
 a general turn-out and improvement, or some one of 
 the Wall street Astor-hood will buy the street, from 
 lamp-post to lamp-post, and fill it with fashionable 
 dwelling-houses. The up-town tide will partly ebb, 
 the natural advantages of the Battery and Lower 
 Broadway will regain their ascendency, and the san- 
 dalled foot of the island will again wear jewels on its 
 instep. 
 
 Pearl street (if Manhattan lie on his back) would be 
 the main artery of his left leg, and Franklin square, 
 which occupies a natural knoll, would be his knee- 
 pan. This gives you some idea of its geography, 
 though, probably, dear reader, if you are not in the 
 dry-goods line, you have never visited it. It is a cu- 
 rious place historically, and was once the aristocratic 
 centre of the city. There are still two famous houses 
 in it — one the old Walton mansion, and the other a 
 building that was once the headquarters of Washing- 
 ton. In the yard of the latter house is a pear-tree of 
 Washington's planting. And, by the way, our com- 
 panion (in a first visit which we made to Franklin 
 square a day or two since) told us a story that may be 
 new or old, touching an attempt made to poison 
 Washington. A dish of some vegetables from a for- 
 cing-bed was put upon the table for dinner, and the 
 general, remarking that growths so much earlier than 
 was natural were not wholesome, threw them out of 
 the window. Some pigs in the yard were poisoned 
 by eating them. Colonel Stone can tell us if the 
 story be true — always presuming it is not in some 
 veritable history of New York.* The Walton house 
 is still a noble-looking mansion, with its English mould- 
 ings in good preservation, and is now occupied as a 
 lodging-house. The headquarters of Washington are 
 tenanted by a pianoforte builder, and all around looks 
 trafficky and dull. 
 
 One of the favorite spring amusements of the peo- 
 ple of New York — (of course of the silly people, of 
 whom there are at least several) — is to attend the auc- 
 tion sales at private houses. We heard of one silly 
 
 • A recollection has come back to us very reluctantly (on 
 its way to bed with Lethe), that of having seen this anecdote 
 in Dunlap's History. 
 
 but honest woman (they are often honest) who, on be- 
 ing rallied a day or two since at having so passed the 
 last fortnight, said, " La! it's so amusing to see how 
 people live !" And, truly enough, you may find out 
 by this process how every class "furnishes," which is 
 a considerable feature in living, and it is wonderful 
 with how little ceremony and reluctance the house- 
 hold gods are stripped to the skin and exposed to the 
 gaze of a public invited in by the red flag of an auc- 
 tion ! It is possibly a very natural feature of a new 
 country to have no respect for furniture ; but to our 
 notion it comes close after " honor thy father and 
 mother" to honor the chairs and tables at which they 
 have eaten and prayed, counselled and blessed. And 
 even this were easier got over — the selling of the mere 
 mahogony and damask— if the articles were removed 
 to a shop and disassociated from the places where 
 they had become hallowed. But to throw open 
 sacred boudoirs, more sacred bedrooms, breakfast- 
 rooms, bath-rooms, in which (as has been the case 
 once or twice lately) lovely and cherished women 
 have lived, and loved, and been petted, and secluded, 
 and caressed — to let in vulgar and prying curiosity to 
 sit on the damask seats and lounge on the silken so- 
 fas, and breathe the air impregnated with perfume 
 that could betray the holiest secrets if it had a tongue 
 — and then to stand by while an auctioneer charters, 
 and describes, and tempts the vulgar appetite to buy ! 
 Why, it seems to us scarce less flagrant and atrocious 
 than the ride of Lady Godiva— desecrating to those 
 who sell out, and a profanity and license in those who 
 go to see ! 
 
 It is a famous time, now, to buy cheap second-hand 
 furniture, by the way — for the fashion of French fur- 
 niture has come in lately, with a rush, and the nabobs 
 are selling out from sideboard to broom, and furnish- 
 ing anew a la Francaise, from skylight to basement. 
 By a year from this time there will be more houses in 
 New York above a certain cost and up to a marquis's 
 taste and wants, than either in Paris or London. 
 (And this estimate is not extravagant, for only " the 
 few" abroad spend money as"//je many" do here.) 
 There is a drygoods retailer in Broadway, -who has a 
 house furnished as sumptuously, and in as good taste, 
 as the most extravagant nobleman's house in London. 
 The thing is done very simply. The dimensions of 
 the house, and an accurate description of the way it is 
 | lighted and arranged, are sent out to the first uphol- 
 sterers of Paris — men who are artists in their way, 
 and who have furnished for royalty and rank all over 
 Europe. Carte hlanche as to expense, and out comes 
 your " interior," complete, lustrous, and as good as 
 his majesty's— wanting only (really only) the society 
 suitable to enjoy it — which is like (something like) a 
 very fine play without a symptom of an audience. 
 
 So marked is this change of taste, and the new 
 school of furnishing, that the oldest and most wealthy 
 of the cabinet warehouse-men in this city has com- 
 pletely abandoned the making of English furniture. 
 He has sold out an immense stock of high-priced arti- 
 cles at auction, and sent to France for models and 
 workmen to start new with the popular taste. It is a 
 great chance, by the way, to establish the European 
 fashion of hotels garnis for strangers— giving them the 
 temporary hire of houses ready furnished, by the 
 week or month— their meals sent to them from a res- 
 taurateur. Such investments bring large profits ; and 
 the convenience of the custom, to families goming 
 from the south or west, and wishing for greater priva- 
 cy and more room than they can get at a hotel, is very 
 great. So may good come out of an extravagant loily. 
 
 The Antique Cabinet.— Whether it is a perverse 
 pleasure in seeing costly things out of place, or an 
 aversion we have to new things (except new thoughts, 
 
692 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 new toothpicks, and new ladies' gear), or the natural 
 love for miscellany common to all mankind — whether 
 it is for one of these reasons, or for a lit tie of each — 
 we are in the habit of bestowing the loose ends of our 
 idleness upon the warehouses of second-hand furniture. 
 Nothing grows upon a man like a habit of choice 
 between such entertainment and any society merely 
 tolerable — the preference given, of course, to the 
 shabby but more suggestive damask and mahogany. 
 Ah, the variety of things people sell to get money ! 
 What curious places shops are, where they will buy 
 anything that is "sacrificed!" How entertaining to 
 mousle about among old portraits, broken ornaments, 
 miniatures soiled by wearing in the bosom, unstrung 
 harps, battered statuary, and furniture that has kept 
 proud company! How curious-minded must become 
 at last these dealers in nothing with a gloss on! How 
 exactly they must know the duration and value of 
 fashionable newness ! How well they must under- 
 stand the pitiless transit from ornament to lumber — 
 how well the sudden chill of the money-test to arti- 
 cles valued, till then, only by affection ! But we can 
 not afford a digression here. 
 
 Resting our umbrella on the steps to a high bed 
 the other day, and our chin on our umbrella (a 
 posture taken for the leisurely perusal of a crowded 
 corner of an old furniture shop), we began to pick out 
 from the mass, an outline of an old cabinet secretary. 
 Now we have been that degree of vagabond, that we 
 have to confess having fairly topped our meridian with- 
 out the knowledge of more luxury in writing-tools than 
 any table, any pen, and any conceivable vagary of ink- 
 holder. It is true, that while travelling we got ac- 
 customed to fastening the other end of our thought- 
 string to an old black trunk — a companion to our 
 hithering and thithering for seven long years — and, by 
 dint of habit in many a far country, we could ill write, 
 at last, where that old portmanteau was not ready to 
 receive our eyes as they came off the paper. But, in 
 reforming our baggage for matrimony, the old trunk 
 was degraded to a packing-box, and at present it 
 peacefully reposes, smelling of quinces, and holding 
 the modest Sunday-clothes of our farmer's dame at 
 Glenmary. Save and since this, our travelled and 
 " picked pen of countries" has been without appanage 
 or equipage, wearing all its honors upon its bare 
 plume of service, and, like a brave and uncomplaining 
 soldier, scorning to claim the dignities which should 
 have been plucked down by its deservings. Well — 
 well ! " the whirligig of time !" " Pen !" we mentally 
 ejaculated, as we made out the odd corners and 
 queer angles of the antique cabinet — " thy proper 
 honors are in flower! Thou shalt do thy work in 
 luxury after this! What pigeon-holes can do to 
 make thee comfortable — what drawers, what slits, 
 what niches and nooks — is as good as done! Rise 
 to-morrow rich and glorious!" 
 
 We had the advantage to be favorably known to the 
 furniture-dealer. He was a man who rejoiced in our 
 promotions. We bought the old secretary without 
 chaffer, " at the lowest figure," and requested that it 
 might be dug out from its unsold neighbors, and sent 
 home, not too vigorously dusted. Here it is. We 
 are writing upon its broad let-down leaf, and our pen 
 struts like a knight wearing for the first hour his well- 
 earned spurs. It is an old chamberer — the secretary 
 
 — brown-black mahogany, inlaid with sandal-wood 
 
 and has held money, and seen frowns and smiles. In 
 its experience (for which we would give a trifle) we 
 ourself are but a circumstance. The hand that first 
 wrote at it is cold ; and, for the hands that are to 
 write at it hereafter, nature may not yet have sorted 
 out the nails. Our own hand will give over its cun- 
 ning and turn to ashes, meantime. One man's life 
 and using are but of the duration of a coat of varnish, 
 to this old cabinet's apprehension. Ah " we !" 
 
 "By the pricking of our thumbs," the brigadier is 
 mounting the stairs. Since the possession of our 
 first operative luxury, we have taken a disgust to the 
 cloister— conceiting that the smell of soap, from the 
 lavendering in the back yard, gave a stain to such 
 flowers of imagination as were born there. The brig- 
 adier says we grow superfine. Soit! It is time — 
 after " taking it as it comes" for so many years. Be- 
 sides, we must have something to set off against his 
 epaulettes ! Glory in your staff, dear brigadier, but 
 leave us our cabinet ! 
 
 Brigadier — (entering out of breath). — Paff ! paff! 
 How the breath of life flutters with this vicinity to 
 heaven! Paff! paff! — prophetic nature! How are 
 you, my dear upster? 
 
 Committee. — You see the ink wet in my pen — I was 
 just about to dash into a critique. That straw-colored 
 volume of poems, by Mrs. Lewis, shows feather? 
 from Pegasus; though, as usual with lady-poems, 
 without any parings from the hoof — any trace of that 
 part of the old steed that touches earth. It takes 
 wrongs and sufferings — like those of Mrs Norton, 
 L. E. L., and Mrs. Hemans — to compound a poetess 
 of any reality and strength. Soil, that, if torn up with 
 a ploughshare, may yield the heavy grain of anguish, 
 will yield nothing but daisies and white clover, lying 
 undisturbed in the sunshine. Yet this same white 
 clover is very sweet grazing, and Mrs. Lewis's is a very 
 sweet book. May she never write a better one — by 
 having suffered enough to "qualify!" 
 
 Brigadier. — Amen ! I say, my boy, what a clever 
 thing Inman is making of his magazine ! The May 
 number is beautiful. What a good pick he has 
 among the magazine-writers ! 
 
 Committee. — Excellent — but he uses himself up 
 with making his correspondents work, and sets too 
 little value on his own writings. He wants a sub. for 
 drudgery. He could, with his strong fabric of good 
 sense (which is genius), and his excellent critical pow- 
 ers, make all the rest of the " Columbian" subser- 
 vient to his own articles. 
 
 Brigadier. — Tell him so. 
 
 Committee. — Will he stand it — as your firm ally ? 
 
 Brigadier. — Bless your soul, he has told you many 
 a plainer thing in print. 
 
 Committee. — Has he ? Here goes, then : — 
 
 " For Jove's right hand, with thunder cast from sky, 
 Takes open vengeance oft for secret ill." 
 
 But now we think of it, you are bound to be particu- 
 larly good-natured, my dear brigadier. With what 
 enthusiasm they received your song the other night 
 at the Tabernacle — " The Pastor's Daughter !" 
 That, and " Boatman haste," and " Cheerly o'er the 
 mountains," are three songs, that, skilfully built, as 
 they are, upon three of our most exquisite national 
 melodies, and intrinsically beautiful in words and mu- 
 sic, will be classics. A twill has published them charm- 
 ingly, too. What lots of money you ought to make 
 out of these universalities ! 
 
 Brigadier. — My dear boy, stop praising me at a ju- 
 dicious place — for praise, like " heat, hath three de- 
 grees : first, it indurateth or maketh strong; next, 
 it maketh fragile ; and lastly, it doth encinerate or 
 calcinate, or crumble to pieces." 
 
 Committee. — Subtle tactician ! How you have cor- 
 rupted my rural simplicity! Mff — mff — mff! I 
 think I sniff mint ! The wind sets this way from 
 Windust's. How it exhausts the juices to talk pleas- 
 antly with a friend ; and, by-the-way, soft crabs are in 
 the market. What say to a dish of water-cresses, 
 and such other things as may suggest themselves — 
 we two — over the way ! We are in too good humor 
 to dine in public to-day. We should seem to lack 
 modesty, with this look of exultation on our faces. 
 
 Brigadier. — To dinner, with all my heart — for the 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 693 
 
 Mirror lias an appetite — the philosopher's tranquil 
 appetite — idem contemptui el admirationi habitus. 
 
 Committee. — I go to shave off this working face, 
 my dear general ! Please amuse yourself with my 
 warm pen. Our correspondents, " Y." and " E. K." 
 — two " treasures trove," if such periodical ever had — 
 should be gracefully and gratefully thanked. Do it 
 while f am gone, with your usual suaviter. 
 
 [Brigadier writes.] 
 
 I gave in to a friend's proposition to " poke about," 
 lately, one afternoon, and, by dint of turning every 
 corner that we had never turned before, we zigzagged 
 ourselves into a somewhat better acquaintance with 
 the Valley of Poverty lying between Broadway and 
 the Bowery. On our descent we stopped at the Tombs, 
 making, however (as many do), rather an unsatisfacto- I 
 ry visit. We lacked an Old Mortality to decipher the j 
 names and quality of the tenants. It is a gloomy ac- j 
 cess to Justice, up the dark flight of steps frowned over 
 by these Egyptian pillars ; and the resolute-looking 
 constables, and the anxious-looking witnesses and 
 prisoners' friends who lean and group at the bases of 
 the columns, or pace up and down the stony pave- 
 ment, show, with gloomy certainty, that this is not the 
 dwelling of " I^ope, with eyes so fair." We turned 
 out of the dark portico into the police court — a dingy 
 apartment with the dust on the floor — not like other 
 unswept apartments, but ground into circles of fine 
 powder by hurried and twisting footprints. No culprit 
 was before the court, and the judge's terrors were laid 
 on the desk with his spectacles. We looked about in 
 vain for anything note-worthy. Even the dignity of 
 " the presence" was unrecognised by us, for (not be- 
 ing in the habit of uncovering where there is neither 
 carpet, lady, nor sign of holy cross) we were obliged 
 to be notified by the " hats off, gentlemen," of the one 
 other person in the room — apparently a constable on 
 duty. 
 
 A side door led us downward to the watch-house, 
 which occupies the basement of the Egyptian struc- 
 ture. It is on a level with the street, and hither are 
 brought newly-caught culprits, disturbers of the peace, 
 and, indeed (so easy is disgrace), anybody accused by 
 anybody ! It is not an uncommon shape of malice 
 (so the officer told us in answer to my query) for the 
 aggressor in a quarrel to give the sufferer in charge 
 to the watchman and have him locked up ! The 
 prisoner is discharged, of course, the next morning, 
 the complainant not appearing, to prosecute ; but 
 passing a night in a cell, even on false accusation, is 
 an infliction which might fall with some weight on an 
 honest man, and the power to inflict it should not be 
 quite so accessible — " thinks I to myself." (I made 
 a mental promise to get better information on the sub- 
 ject of arrests, and generally on the subject of the draw- 
 ing of the first line between " ourselves" and the 
 guilty. With Miss Lucy Long's privilege, I shall 
 duly produce what I can gather.) 
 
 On application at the door of the prisons, we were 
 informed nonchalantly (and figuratively, I presume) 
 that it was "all open," and so indeed it seemed, for 
 there was no unlocking, though probably the hinges 
 would have somehow proved reluctant had a prisoner 
 tried the swing of them. We walked in to the prison- 
 yard unattended, and came first to the kitchens. A 
 very handsome woman, indeed, was singing and washing 
 at a tub, and up and down, on either side of the large 
 boilers, promenaded a half-dozen men in couples — 
 sailors and loafers, " in for a month," as we were after- 
 ward informed. They looked as happy as such men 
 do elsewhere, I thought, and wearing no prison-dress, 
 they seemed very little like prisoners. It is consider- 
 ed quite a privilege, by the way, to be employed in 
 the kitchen. 
 
 The inner prison-door looked more like one's idea 
 of a " Tolbooth," and by it we gained the interior of 
 the Tombs. Gadsby's Hotel at Washington is a very 
 correct model of it, on a somewhat large scale. The 
 cells all open upon a quadrangle, and around each of 
 the four stories runs a light gallery. In the place of 
 Gadsby's fountain is a stove and the turnkey's desk, 
 and, just as we entered, one of the prisoners was cook- 
 ing his mess at the fire with quite an air of comfort 
 and satisfaction. It chanced to be the time of day 
 when the cell-doors are thrown open, and the tenants 
 were mostly outside, hanging over the railings, smo- 
 king, chatting with each other and the keepers, and 
 apparently not at all disturbed at being looked at. 
 Saunders, the absconding clerk, whose forgery made 
 so much noise not long ago, was pointed out to us, 
 and a more innocent-looking fair-haired mother's boy 
 you could scarce pick out of a freshman class. He 
 has grown fat in the Tombs. His accomplice, Raget, 
 the Frenchman, is not much older, but he looked 
 rather more capable of a clever bad trick, and French- 
 man-like, he preserved, even in prison, the dandy air, 
 and wore his velvet dressing-cap with as jaunty an air 
 of assurance as if just risen to an honest man's break- 
 fast. He is handsome, and his wife still voluntarily 
 shares his cell. A very worthy-looking old gentle- 
 man leaned at his cell-door, a celebrated passer of 
 counterfeit money; and a most sanctimonious and 
 theological-student-looking young man was pacing 
 one of the galleries, and he had been rather a success- 
 ful swindler. Truly " looks is nuffin," as Sam. Weller 
 was shrewd enough to discover. 
 
 We looked into one or two of the cells. To a man 
 who has ever suited his wants to the size of a ship's 
 state-room, they are very comfortable lodgings, and 
 probably a sailor would think quarters in the Tombs 
 altogether luxurious. Punishment of this kind must 
 be very unequal, until it is meted out by what a man 
 has been used to. (Till then, at least, it is better not 
 to steal !) Two or three of the cells were carpeted 
 and decked with pictures, and the walls of one I look- 
 ed into were covered with drawings. Friends are 
 permitted, of course, to bring to prisoners any luxuries 
 except liberty ; and on the small shelf of another cell 
 we saw a pyramid of giugerbread — the occupant, prob- 
 ably, still a youth. 
 
 We passed over to the female prison. The cell- 
 doors were all open as in the other wards. But here 
 were strong symptoms that, however "it is not good 
 for man to be alone," it is much more unpalatable to 
 woman. A poor girl who had just been brought in, 
 and was about to be locked up, was pleading piteously 
 with the keeper not to be shut up alone. Seven others 
 who had just been sentenced and were " waiting for 
 their carriage" to go to Sing-Sing, sat around the 
 stove in the passage, and a villanous-looking set they 
 were. It is a pity women ever sin. They look so 
 much worse than we — (probably from falling so much 
 farther) — and degradation in dress is so markedly un- 
 becoming ! Most of the female cells were double- 
 bedded, 1 observed; and in one, whicli was very nice- 
 ly furnished, stood a tall and well-dressed, but ill- 
 favored woman, who gave back our look of curiosity 
 with a ferocious scowl. It struck me as curious, that, 
 out of nineteen or twenty women whom we saw in the 
 Tombs, two thirds had scratched faces! 
 
 One of the police-officers joined us in the latter part 
 of our rounds, but too late for the thorough inquiries 
 I wished to make; and promising myself another visit 
 to the Tombs, accompanied by some one in authority, 
 I made my envied and unobstructed exit. 
 
 It was a sunny spring afternoon, the kind of weather 
 in which, before all other blessings, to thank God for 
 
694 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 liberty. With a simultaneous expression of this 
 feeling as we cleared the prison steps, my friend and 
 I crossed the rail-track which forms the limit of the 
 New York Alsatia, and were presently in the heart 
 of the Five Points — very much in the same " circle" 
 of society as we had just left, the difference probably 
 consisting in scarce more than cleanly restraint with- 
 out want, and dirty liberty with it. Luckily for the 
 wretched, the open air is very nearly as pleasant for 
 half the year as the inside of a millionaire's palace, and 
 the sunshine is kept bright and the sky clear, and the 
 wind kept in motion — alike for the pauper setting on 
 his wooden door-step and the rich man on the silk 
 ottoman in his window. Possibly, too, there is not 
 much difference in the linings of their content, and if 
 so, the nominal value of the distinctions between rich 
 and poor should be somewhat modified. At the Five 
 Points, to all appearance, nobody goes in doors except 
 to eat and sleep. The streets swarm with men, wo- 
 men, and children, sitting down. The negro-girls with 
 their bandanna turbans, the vicious with their gay- 
 colored allures, the sailors tired of pleasures ashore, 
 the various " minions of the moon" drowsing the day 
 away — they are all out in the sun, idling, jesting, 
 quarrelling, everything but weeping, or sighing, or 
 complaining. The street is dirty, but no offence to 
 their nostrils ! The police officers are at the watch- 
 house door, always on the alert, but (probably from 
 possessing little imagination) the culprits of to-morrow 
 have no apprehension till apprehended. A viler place 
 than the Five Points by daylight you could not find, 
 yet to the superficial eye, it is the merriest quarter of 
 New York. I am inclined to think Care is a gentle- 
 man, and frequents good society chiefly. There is 
 no print of his crow's-foot about the eyes of these out- 
 casts. Who knows how much happiness there is in 
 nothing to dread — the downfall well over ? 
 
 We strolled slowly around the triangular area which 
 is the lungs of the Five Points, and, spoken to by 
 some one in every group we passed, escaped without 
 anything like a rudeness offered to us. The lower 
 story of every second house is a bar-room, and every 
 bench in them had a sleeper upon it. There are 
 some houses in this quarter that have been pretentious 
 in their day, large brick buildings with expensive cor- 
 nice and mouldings — one particularly at the corner of 
 the famous " Murdering Alley," which would bring 
 a six-hundred-dollar rent, "borne like Loretto's 
 chapel through the air" to a more reputable neighbor- 
 hood. 
 
 We wound our way into the German quarter, which 
 occupies the acclivity between the Five Points and 
 the Bowery; but as I wish to connect, with a descrip- 
 tion of this, some notices of the habits and resorts of 
 foreigners generally in New York, I shall drop the 
 reader at the corner. 
 
 It is right and wholesome that anew country should 
 be the paradise of the working-classes, and that ours is 
 so may be seen very readily. A wealthy merchant, 
 whose family is about leaving the city, sold out his 
 household furniture last week, and among other very 
 expensive articles, a magnificent piano. It was bid 
 off at a very fair price, and the purchaser turned out 
 to be the carman usually employed at the merchant's 
 warehouse! He bought it for his daughters. The 
 profits of this industrious man's horse and cart were 
 stated by this gentleman to approach three thousand 
 dollars a year ! 
 
 A drygoods palace is now going up in Broadway, 
 which will probably exceed in splendor even the cele- 
 
 brated shops which are the prominent features of 
 London and Paris. " Stuart" is the projecter, and 
 when it is completed, he will leave the low-browed 
 and dingy long-room in which he has amassed a 
 fortune, and start fresh in this magnificent " bezes- 
 tein." Extending back to a great depth, the new 
 structure is to open by a right angle on another 
 street, giving the facility of two entrances. "Shop- 
 ping" is to be invested with architectural glories — 
 as if its Circean cup was not already sufficiently 
 seductive ! 
 
 Even this chrysalis-burst of Stuart's, however, is a 
 j less forcible exponent of the warrant for the importa- 
 tion of luxuries, than the brilliant curiosity shop of 
 Tiffany and Young. No need to go to Paris now 
 for any indulgence of taste, any vagary of fancy. It 
 is as well worth an artist's while as a purchaser's, 
 however, to make the round of this museum of luxu- 
 ries. The models of most of these fancy articles have 
 been the perfected work approached with slow degrees, 
 even by genius. Those faultless vases, in which not 
 a hair line is astray from just proportion, are not the 
 chance work of a potter ! Those intricate bronzes 
 were high achievements., of art ! Those mignon gems 
 of statuary are copies of the most inspired dreams and 
 revelations of human beauty ! The arts are all there 
 — their best triumphs mocked in luxurious trifles. 
 Poetry is there, in the quaint and lovely conception 
 of keepsakes and ornaments. Even refinements upon 
 rural simplicity are there, in the simple and elegant 
 basket furniture of Germany. The mechanic arts are 
 still more tributary in the exquisite enamel of port- 
 folios, the contrivance of marvellous trinkets, the fine 
 carving and high finish of the smithery of precious 
 metals. And then, nowhere such trim shape and 
 dainty color in gloves — nowhere such choice dandy 
 appointments in the way of chains and canes — nowhere 
 such mollifiers of the hearts of sweethearts in the way 
 of presents of innumerable qualities, kinds, values, and 
 devices. I think that shop at the corner of Broadway 
 and Warren is the most curious and visit-worthy spot 
 in New York — money in your pocket or no money. 
 And — (left out of ourenumeration) — these enterprising 
 luxurifers have lately opened a second story, where 
 they show such chairs and work-tables as are last in- 
 vented — things in their way gorgeous and unsurpassa- 
 ble. If the gods have any design of making me rich, 
 I wish it might be done before Tiffany and Young 
 get too old to be my caterers. 
 
 The theatrical astronomers have been mucli inter- 
 ested in the birth of a new star — lovely Mrs. Hunt of 
 the Park — who has suddenly found her sphere and 
 commenced shining brilliantly in a range of characters 
 seemingly written for the express purpose of develop- 
 ing her talent. Her arch, half-saucy, and yet natural 
 and earnest personation of Fortunio has "taken the 
 town." She had made the success also of a very in- 
 different piece — a poor transfer of the celebrated 
 Gamin de Paris — in which she played the character 
 of a young rascal with a very good heart. The in- 
 creasing applause with which Mrs. Hunt is nightly 
 greeted, after having had her light so long " hidden 
 under the bushel" of a stock actress, must be a high 
 gratification to " Strong-back," her husband. Indeed, 
 his undisguised enjoyment of her clever acting (as he 
 plays with her in Fortunio), is as " good as a play" 
 and much more edifying. Success to her, pray I! 
 
 The Cabinet. — With difficult and analytical de 
 liberation, we have, at last, duly distributed, to the 
 slits, pigeon-holes, drawers, and cavities of our an- 
 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 695 
 
 tique cabinet, their several and appropriate offices and 
 functions. It was a discipline of our talent at strategy, 
 was this job of office-giving— for, to confess a weak- 
 ness, we have become superstitious touching this ven- 
 erable piece of furniture. It seems to us haunted ! 
 We have harbored it, now, some three weeks, and 
 have attempted with it, in that time, certain liberties 
 of arrangement which have been mysteriously cross- 
 purposed. Nothing about it would stay arranged. 
 We put our approved contributions into one pigeon- 
 hole, and our doubtfuls into another, our to-he- noticed 
 into the upright slits, and our damned into the hori- 
 zontal. We had a topic-drawer, and a drawenafor 
 memoranda — an oblivion-hole and a cave of ridicule. 
 We committed the proper documents to each, and 
 thanking Heaven for a tried secretary, commenced our 
 tranquil reign. A week had not glided by, before all 
 was in confusion. Every hole seemed to have kicked 
 out its tenant. The " approved" had scrambled in 
 with the "doubtfuls," and the "damned" into the 
 " noticed-hole," and " things to be written about," 
 " things to be laughed at," and " things to be forgot- 
 ten," had changed places with marvellous and deci- 
 sive celerity! We tried to restore order, but the con- 
 fusion increased. Nothing would stay put. It was 
 manifestly a Tyler cabinet — the doomed victim of dis- 
 arrangement. 
 
 How order has been restored — by what spirit-fin- 
 gers our labels have been changed — what intimations 
 as to the occupancy of each particular pigeon-hole 
 we have been compelled to regard — is more than a 
 cabinet secret. We have had (to make a confession) 
 enough of telling ghost-stories. We have been called 
 on by all manner of men and women for our facts as 
 to the only glimpse into the spirit-world which we 
 ever described. It has cost us any quantity of brass 
 (in the wear of our knocker) to satisfy curiosity on 
 that subject. Enough that our pigeon-holes are la- 
 belled with supernatural certainty. Our contributors, 
 now, will go to their appointed niche by a selective 
 destiny of which the responsibility is not ours. The 
 rejecteds will be kind enough to note this, and curse 
 the cabinet — not us! If their manuscripts lodge in 
 the upright slits of the " damned," it is because the 
 " accepted" would not hold, keep, or harbor them. 
 We wash our hands. 
 
 Our first three pulls from the topic-drawers are let- 
 ters of complaint against postmasters for the postage 
 on the Mirror. According to the interpretation of the 
 law by some village postmasters, the government may 
 charge more for carrying the light weight of the Mir- 
 ror than we for editing, printing, embellishing, and 
 wrapping it! The dunce in the Charlestown post- 
 office has compelled our subscribers to have their pa- 
 pers sent to Boston, the nearest office presided over 
 by a gentleman. Another pig's head has control of 
 the Dedham office, and by-the-way, we clipped from 
 a Dedham paper, the following results of his readings 
 of the postage law : — 
 
 Tweedledum.— The postage at the Dedham office 
 for the New World newspaper of 32 pages, is " one 
 and 4-8ths of a cent." 
 
 Tweedledee. — The postage for the New Mirror 
 newspaper of 16 pages, smaller in size, with a plate, is 
 "3 and 12-16ths, or twenty -four thirty-twoths of a 
 cent .'" 
 
 Tweedledum second.— The postage of a New Mir- 
 ror extra, of 32 pages of smaller size, is five cents ! 
 
 There are one or two offices in the interior of this 
 state where the postage on a single copy of the Mir- 
 ror has been charged fifteen cents — of course leaving 
 it unredeemed in the office for the postmaster's use — 
 as he expected ! 
 
 Now, pray (we ask of our friend the town-pump), 
 what is the use of the much-vaunted blessing of 
 • cheap literature," if the government, or its petty 
 
 officials, are to stand between the publishers and the 
 people, making it dear by charging as much as its 
 whole value for carrying it ! Ought the government 
 to favor the circulation of intelligence or not? Is it 
 proper to put the 7>wst oppressive, or the least oppres- 
 sive construction, on all cases which affect the spread 
 of art and literature ? // is a fact, that revenue suffi- 
 cient has been received at the port of New York in 
 the last two months to pay the whole expenses of the 
 government of the United States for one year. (So 
 we were authentically informed yesterday.) But, if 
 government must have more revenue, should not liter- 
 ature (we scarce have patience to ask it) be the last 
 thing taxed ? Should not luxuries, vanities, goods 
 and chattels, be levied upon, to the crack of endurance, 
 for the support of authority, before one ray of light is 
 stopped on its way to the public mind — stopped to be 
 converted into a perquisite for the pocket of a petty 
 despot ? Of the postmasters in the larger cities there 
 is no complaint. They are generally enlightened 
 men. Mr. Graham here— Mr. Green in Boston- 
 throw no obstacles in the way of literature. On the 
 contrary, they do all in their power to promote and to 
 facilitate it. It is the petty, ignorant, peppercorn post- 
 master of a small village, who, clothed with a little 
 brief authority, and knowing that his oppressions 
 leaves the disputed article in his hands, reads the law 
 perversely, and at last shuts his whole neighborhood 
 against everything but newspapers ! 
 
 It is rather a reproach to a country whose boast and 
 whose reliance for the perpetuity of its free institu- 
 tions is the superior intelligence of its population, that 
 monarchical countries (England and France) should 
 J be before us in the reduction of taxes on the convey- 
 ance of intelligence. It has struck us as extraordi- 
 I nary, too, that in the revising of postage laws, the in- 
 crease of facilities for carrying the mails should not 
 have suggested a reduction of postage! But at any 
 ra te — leaving the laws as oppressive as they are— we 
 call upon on enlightened statesman like Mr. Wick- 
 liffe to insist upon the most lenient and most favorable 
 interpretation of them — instead of having his admin- 
 istration of the department distinguished, as it has 
 been and is, for more postoffice oppressions than were 
 ever known before. The postage on the Mirror, lor 
 one instance — never before charged higher than the 
 newspapers which it scarce equals in weight— now 
 varies (in some of the country postoffices) from five 
 to fifteen cents— -a gross " sliding-scale" of oppression 
 which must put a stop to our enterprise, if persevered 
 in, or cause us to give up cover and embellishment, 
 and circulate only the newspaper sheet, suited to the 
 petty letter of the law ! The great majority of post- 
 masters, however, we are happy to add, charge mere 
 newspaper postage for the Mirror, " as the law" (prop- 
 erly understood) " directs." 
 
 Our favorite adversary of the American finds pala- 
 table fault with us for not appending Leigh Hunt's 
 name to such good things as we have copied from him. 
 Why should we ? We do not claim them as origi- 
 nal, nor are they leaded, as original contributions are 
 wont to be. The original object of giving the author s 
 name is lost (we conceive) at the distance ot this 
 country from England. Leigh Hunt collects and 
 publishes in volumes all he writes, and his good things 
 are well labelled and guarded in his own country. 
 Neither his fame, his profit, nor his consequence (the 
 three ends he aims at), could be affected by adding his 
 name to what we occasionally take from him. Be- 
 8ides-<a>-taMcally considered-the English steal 
 our articles by the down, and no only leave out our 
 name but appropriate them, by other initials, as their 
 own They have at this moment a cheap edition of 
 our poems in the press without our leave or license 
 and we have helped swell most of the collections of 
 English poetry, with no clue left for posterity to dis- 
 
696 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 cover that the author had also the honor of the 
 '' American's" frequent notice. Besides again, there 
 is a precedent in nature. The rice-birds of the south 
 are the bobolinks of the north — losing their name and 
 copyright altogether by emigration. But now, having 
 defended our castle, we would fain express our pleas- 
 ure at the tone and quality of the "American's" 
 fault-findings, invariably done in good taste, and con- 
 fined always within legitimate critical bounds. This, 
 which in a Utopia, would be like praising water for 
 running down hill, is great praise in an unmitigated 
 republic. Fault found with our writings, without a 
 smutch on ourself, is " a thing to thank God on" — as 
 things go. In the same breath let us laud the Boston 
 Atlas, who says of us, with something between a 
 pickle and a sweetmeat, that " he has one fault — he 
 caters for his readers as for himself, and novelty or 
 eccentricity of expression sometimes usurps the place 
 which should only be accorded to thoughts of real 
 value." We kiss the rod. 
 
 (Enter the Brigadier.) 
 
 Brigadier. — My dear boy, what could have pos- 
 sessed you to get up so early ? Ten o'clock, and the 
 last page all written, and not a subject touched, I'll 
 wager a julep, out of forty that were indispensable ! 
 Have you said no word of the " Mirror Library ?" 
 
 Cabinet. — Supererogatory, brigadier! Why add 
 perfume to the violet ! Our selections for the Library 
 are appreciated — they sell ! They advertise them- 
 selves. They breathe sweetness. 
 
 Brigadier. — Like the lady's breath, which made all 
 men exclaim, " Hereof be scent-bags made!" Eh, 
 my boy ? 
 
 Cabinet. — The " Rubric of Love" — that bundle of all 
 the delicious things ever written on the exciting sub- 
 ject of love — what but its very name and purpose is 
 wanting to make that universal ? Everybody, whose 
 lease of love is not quite run out, must have a copy 
 of it! 
 
 Brigadier. — They must! they must ! It is a book, 
 charming and cheap at any price. But — 
 
 Cabinet.— I'll stave oft' your " but" with a passage 
 from Milton's Comus, for I'll talk of work no more. 
 Did you know that the julep was to Milton what gin 
 was to Byron ? Listen! — « 
 
 " And first behold this cordial julep here, 
 With spirits of balm and fragrant syrups mixed ! 
 Not that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone 
 In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena, 
 Is of such power to stir up joy as this, 
 To life so friendly, or so cool to thirst !" 
 
 Let us to this " Nepenthe" — for we thirst with 
 Milton. 
 
 It would probably flabbergast most barn-door fowl 
 to be asked the meaning of eccalobeon, though, call it 
 the hatching of eggs, and they would laugh at being 
 acquainted with anything else. This big word has 
 mystified the posts and corners for a fortnight, and 
 yesterday my curiosity came to a head. I looked at 
 the bottom of the placard to see where the Eccalobeon 
 was to be exhibited, and soon found myself at a small 
 boy, keeping door opposite Washington Hall. (The 
 lad was so small and pale, by the way, that I thought 
 it warrantable to inquire whether he was produced by 
 eccalobeon. It appeared that he was not. He had a 
 regular mother, who " knew he was out.") 
 
 The chirruping of chickens saluted our ears as we 
 opened the door, and we observed that a corner of the 
 room was picketed off, where a dozen or two of these 
 pseudo-orphans (who had lost their mother by not j 
 having been suffered to have one), were pecking at ! 
 gravel and evidently doing well. Very good manners, i 
 for chickens, though, as the man in the menagerie i 
 
 says, " where they got them 'mity knows." It began 
 to look very much as if mothers were a superfluity. 
 
 The centre of the room was occupied by the artifi- 
 cial mother — a square brick structure, containing 
 ovens in which lay the eggs in different stages of prog- 
 ress. Pieces of carpet were suspended before the 
 openings, and, on raising them and putting in the 
 hand, the temperature within seemed to be at about 
 blood-heat. The keeper took out an egg that was 
 about to enter upon its new destiny of skewer and 
 gravy. The chicken had been twenty days on the 
 road from spoon-victual land, and its little beak was 
 jusf. hardened sufficiently to prick a hole into the 
 world in which it was to be eaten. It lay in a heap, 
 rather confusedly packed, its thigh bone close at its 
 beak (apparently ready to be used as a fulcrum in pry- 
 ing the crack open), and its downy fealhers, wet and 
 forlorn, just lifted by respiration. This premature 
 removal of the shell, however, the man said, would be 
 fatal. The destiny of that little well-contrived heart, 
 as far as this world was concerned, was to furnish 
 material fortius sigh and paragraph! 
 
 In dishes upon the table were eggs, without shells, 
 in all the different stages of formation. In some the 
 veins were just reddening, and the vessels filling around 
 the heart, and in one, just opened, the newly-formed 
 heart, a red globule of the size of a pin's head, was 
 playing backward and forward, like a shuttle in a 
 miniature loom. With a glass, every phase of the 
 process of chicken-making could be distinctly seen. 
 The yolk, I was surprised to learn, does not contribute 
 to the material of the body — the most valuable portion 
 of its existence, as an egg, being, therefore, of no value 
 to it in its after-life of chicken ! The provision is 
 certainly a wise one by which winged creatures, that 
 could not well fly if gravid like other animals, are 
 provided with a removable womb in the shape of an 
 egg, so that their parturition can be carried on outside 
 the body, and their buoyancy of locomotion is not in- 
 terfered with. The comparison between the incuba- 
 tion of fowls and human gestation immediately suggests 
 itself, and the superior convenience of the former to 
 the shape-destroying, beauty-marring, and painful ma- 
 ternity of our race, seems a blessing to be envied, at 
 least by the beautiful. How long might women con- 
 tinue ornamental, and to what age would their person- 
 al loveliness be undiminished, if the care and suffering 
 of maternity could be delegated to a brick oven ! 
 
 I am inclined to think it is not peculiar to myself 
 to have a sabbath taste for the water-side. There is 
 an affinity, felt I think by man and boy, between the 
 stillness of the day and the audible hush of boundaries 
 to water. Premising that it was at first with the turn- 
 ed-up nose of conscious travestie, I have to confess 
 the finding of a sabbath ramble, to my mind, along 
 the river-side in New York — the first mile toward 
 Albany on the bank of the Hudson. Indeed, if quiet 
 be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the 
 walk on Sunday. You would think, to cross the city 
 anywhere from river to river, that there was a general 
 hydrophobia — the entire population crowding to the 
 high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen 
 on either the East river or the Hudson. But, with a 
 little thoughtful frequenting, those deserted river-sides 
 become contemplative and pleasant rambling-places, 
 and, if some whim of fashion do not make the bank 
 of the Hudson like the Marina of Smyrna, a fashion- 
 able resort, I have my Sunday afternoons provided for, 
 during the pigritude of city durance. 
 
 Yesterday (Sunday) it blew one of those unfolding 
 west winds, chartered expressly to pull the kinks out 
 of the belated leaves — a breeze it was delightful to set 
 the face to — strong, genial, and inspiriting, and smell 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 697 
 
 ing (in New York) of the snubbed twigs of Hoboken. 
 The Battery looked very delightful, with the grass 
 laying its cheek to the ground, and the trees all astir 
 and trinkling, but on Sunday this lovely resort is full 
 of smokers of bad cigars — unpleasant gentlemen to 
 take the wind of. I turned the corner with a look 
 through the fence, and was in comparative solitude 
 the next moment. 
 
 The monarch of our deep water-streams, the gigantic 
 " Massachusetts," lay at her wharf, washed by the 
 waving hands of the waters taking leave of the Hudson. 
 The river ends under the prow — or, as we might say 
 with a poetic license, joins on, at this point, to Ston- 
 ington — so easy is the transit from wharf to wharf in 
 that magnificent conveyance. From this point up, 
 extends a line of ships, rubbing against the pier the 
 fearless noses that have nudged the poles and the 
 tropics, and been breathed on by spice-islands and ice- 
 bergs — an array of nobly-built merchantmen, that, 
 with the association of their triumphant and richly- 
 freighted comings and goings, grows «pon my eye 
 with a certain majesty. It is a broad street here, of 
 made land, and the sidewalks in front of the new stores 
 are lumbered with pitch and molasses, flour and red 
 ochre, bales, bags, and barrels, in unsightly confusion 
 — but the wharf-side, with its long line of carved figure- 
 heads, and bowsprits projecting over the street, is an 
 unobstructed walk — on Sundays at least — and more 
 suggestive than many a gallery of marble statues. 
 The vessels that trade to the North sea harbor here, 
 unloading their hemp and iron; andthesuperb French 
 packet-ships, with their gilded prows ; and, leaning 
 over the gangways and tafferails, the Swedish and 
 Norwegian sailors jabber away their Sunday's idle 
 time ; and the negro-cooks lie and look into the pud- 
 dles, and altogether it is a stiangely-mixed picture — 
 Power reposing and Fret and Business gone from the 
 six-days' whip and chain. I sat down on a short 
 hawser-post, and conjured the spirits of ships around 
 me. They were as communicative as would naturally 
 be expected in a tete-a-tete when quite at leisure. 
 Things they had seen and got wind of in the Tndian 
 seas, strange fishes that had tried the metal of their 
 copper bottoms, porpoises they had run over asleep, 
 wrecks and skeletons they had thrown a shadow across 
 when under prosperous headway — these and particu- 
 lars of the fortunes they had brought home, and the 
 passengers coming to look through one more country 
 to find happiness, and the terrors and dangers, heart- 
 aches and dreams, that had come and gone with each 
 bill of lading — the talkative old bowsprits told me all. 
 I sat and watched the sun setting between two out- 
 landish-looking vessels, and, at twilight, turned to go 
 home, leaving the spars and lines drawn in clear trace- 
 ry on a sky as rosy and fading as a poet's prospects 
 at seventeen. 
 
 Postoffice Abuses. — " It will none otherwise be," 
 says Sir Thomas More, "but that some stumblinge 
 blockes will always bee, by malicious folk, laid in good 
 people's way." Upon this text we propose to preach 
 a little sermon. 
 
 We have given in to the rage of the day, which is 
 the cheapening of brain-work, not very willingly at 
 first, but heartily when our mind was made up to it. 
 The author is depreciated, and that is, perhaps, not 
 well — but the public is benefited, and that is, very 
 certainly, good. Millions are touched by the length- 
 ened wand of literature, who were beyond its reach 
 till it was eked out by cheapness. 
 
 The old Mirror, at five dollars per annum, occasion- 
 ally embellished by a plate, was considered, by the 
 successive postmasters-general for twenty years, as a 
 popular good, which it was well worth their while to 
 favor and foster. It throve accordingly. Had Mr. 
 
 Wickliffe been postmaster-general when it was started, 
 it would not have lived a year ! With or without its 
 plate, with or without its cover, it went rigorously to 
 all parts of the country, at newspaper postage. No 
 village postmaster would have ventured to charge 
 more upon it; and if one had been pragmatical enough 
 to twist the law into a new reading for that purpose, 
 the very first complaint would have set it right, or re- 
 moved him. The editors had no trouble on the sub- 
 ject, and they went on, pioneering the way into the 
 fields of art and elegant literature, and setting an ex- 
 ample which has been followed by the large troop of 
 tasteful periodicals now in existence, to the no small 
 i diffusion of taste and intelligence. 
 
 Literature began to cheapen. It was proposed to 
 l bring refinement, delicate sentiment, the ennobling 
 ! love of poetry, and an acquaintance with heroic mod- 
 els through song and story, within reach of the hum- 
 | bier classes. New periodicals were started on this 
 j basis. The old Minor was superseded by cheaper 
 ' works — works which, for three dollars, gave as much 
 or more matter, but without embellishment, and of 
 | very inferior typography and paper. That rage had 
 j its day. The circulation of light literature was very 
 I much enlarged, and the people, of all classes, became 
 interested in the current writing of the eventful pres- 
 ent hour. This sudden spread of taste (we may say 
 in passing) was an ingredient thrown into the national 
 character which no doubt powerfully furthered — what 
 ; it seems Mr. Wicklifl'e's sole mission to retard — the 
 refinement and growing intelligence of the American 
 people. 
 
 But there was one more effort to be made. Com- 
 plaints began to be heard that these cheap publica- 
 tions were inelegant; that, sent forth damp, impressed 
 and unembellished, they became smutched and grew 
 unsightly and hurtful to the eyes; and that more 
 careful workmanship and better type and paper were 
 desirable. The founder of the old Mirror took the 
 subject into examination and study. He made the 
 closest calculations of the cost of fair print and em- 
 bellishment, and after much thought and inquiry, aid- 
 ! ed by twenty years of experience and success, he ma- 
 tured the plan of the present "New Mirror." It 
 was the plan of a periodical to be suited to the now 
 refined taste of the "greatest number," as well as 
 i adapted to the means of the greatest number, and the 
 | uniting of these two desirable extremes brought its 
 I price within a hair's breadth of its cost, and left the 
 feasibility of the project dependant wholly on the 
 I chance of sailing at once, and smoothly, into an enor- 
 I mous circulation. The item of postage was not over- 
 looked — but as the New Mirror, cover and plate in- 
 cluded, would scarce weigh half as much as the Al- 
 bion, Spirit of the Times, and other weekly papers 
 which went for newspaper-postage, and it was no 
 heavier than the old Mirror, which went for the same 
 postage, the subject was not thought worth a doubt. 
 Well — the New Mirror made its appearance. A 
 type worthy of the choicest library, a cover conve- 
 ! nient and elegant, a beautiful steel plate, and sixteen 
 pages of matter edited with careful experience and 
 labor, were offered to the public for this same man- 
 ageable price of " three dollars a year !" The poor- 
 est citizen need not now be without his fair share of 
 knowledge of the arts and literature. Nothing seemed 
 to stand in the way. The manifest high order of 
 style and spirit in the design of the work, combined 
 with its accessibility by cheapness, sent it abroad like 
 day-rising. Its circulation became, as it well needed 
 to be, enormous. And now, you ask, what is the 
 matter ? And we will tell you, and we wish Mr. 
 Wickliffe to listen. 
 
 A gentleman called at our office a week or two 
 since," and bought a copy or two of the " Mirror Li- 
 brary," expressing his regret that it was not conve- 
 
698 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 nient for him to take the Mirror. He lived in Ver- 
 non. Oneida county, New York, and the postage 
 charged him by Mr. J. W. Jenkins, the postmaster 
 of that place, was fourteen cents on each copy — 
 bringing the cost of the Mirror up to ten dollars twen- 
 ty-eight cents a year! We immediately addressed a 
 letter to Mr. J. W. Jenkins, inquiring respectfully 
 into the reason of this exorbitant charge, and that 
 letter Mr. J. W. Jenkins has never answered. The 
 gentleman assured us that several persons of his ac- 
 quaintance in Vernon had been deterred from subscri- 
 bing to the Mirror by Mr. J. W. Jenkins's overcharge 
 of postage. Again : we have discovered, in many in- 
 stances, that our subscribers, after paying their sub- 
 scriptions, have let their papers lie in the postofhee 
 rather than submit to the extortionate charge of post- 
 age, and the postmasters have never notified us of the 
 fact. Again : the Mirrors miscarry, to a degree that 
 shows more than neglect on the part of the postmas- 
 ters or their subordinates. The complaints and stop- 
 pages for this last reason are out of all precedent and 
 proportion. Again: the postage charged on the New 
 Mirror varies, as we have said before, from one cent 
 to fifteen, in some of the country postoffices, more or 
 less, according to the whim or tyranny of the dull of- 
 ficial. The postmaster of Great Barrington is one 
 of those pigheaded dunces, charging postage on the 
 Mirror sent to the "Berkshire Courier" — in direct vi- 
 olation of the law which exempts papers from postage 
 on exchanges. 
 
 What is the remedy for these abuses ? We have 
 complained to Mr. Wickliffe of the irregularity and 
 extortion in regard to the postage on the Mirror, and 
 have received in turn a letter of sesquipedalian flum- 
 mery, the compounding of which required the edu- 
 cation of a Virginia politician; and, our letter once 
 answered, the abuse was probably never thought of 
 in the department. Yet it was a matter serious 
 enough to be worth Mr. Wickliffe's attention. These 
 petty tyrants with their "little brief authority," stand 
 between the public and the supply for public refinement 
 and intelligence. They change the cost of the cheap- 
 est and most elegant publication of the day from 
 $3.52 (postage and all) to $10.28! They strangle 
 literary enterprise in the cradle. And for whose ad- 
 vantage ? Not the government's — for subscribers will 
 rather leave their Mirrors in the office than pay the ex- 
 tortionate charge. For the benefit of the postmasters 
 themselves — who, by this indirect fraud, obtain a nice 
 handful of periodicals weekly, to dispose of as one of 
 the perquisites of their office! This is surely a mat- 
 ter worth Mr. Wickliffe's while to look after. 
 
 To the majority of postmasters we owe thanks rather 
 than reproaches. ' They have rightly judged that the 
 spirit of the law did not intend a difference of two 
 cents between a paper stitched and a paper not stitched 
 — (a difference made by some of the Dogberry post- 
 masters). They feel justly that if there is a question 
 as to the intention of a postage-law, the cause of in- 
 telligence and literature is to have the benefit of the 
 most favorable interpretation. No law can exactly 
 describe every periodical likely to be started. No 
 senate, in making a law, intends to charge more for 
 carrying three printed pieces that weigh one ounce, 
 than one printed piece that weighs two or three ounces 
 — yet so, again, do these petty Dogberrys interpret 
 the law. 
 
 There is another point about which we would in- 
 quire of the committee now engaged on the revised 
 postage-laws. Why should literary papers of the same 
 iveight be more taxed than newspapers ? Is the circu- 
 lation of moral and refining influences twice as tax- 
 able as the circulation of scandal and politics, rapes 
 and murders, amusements and advertisements ? Sure- 
 ly the intelligence that enlightens the community is 
 as much contained in the weeklies and monthlies as in 
 
 the daily papers. Yet in the bill now before the 
 house, the former are taxed at twice the price of the 
 latter! This, we suppose, is some of Mr. Wickliffe's 
 handiwork. 
 
 We give up the postmaster-general — leave him to 
 be bewildered with the technicalities of his office — 
 careful of the husks while the grain sifts away from 
 him. We make an appeal to the fountain of his of- 
 ficial power — public opinion! Let this matter be un- 
 derstood, and let every petty postmaster who plays 
 the tyrant, or misuses his authority, be memorialized 
 out of office. The government ought not to be one 
 penny richer for carrying the mails. No revenue 
 should be derivable to the treasury from the carrying 
 of intelligence. The cheapest postage-rate possible 
 should be set by law, and the law should be bent to 
 suit circumstances in all cases where the cost of car- 
 rying is not thereby made greater. Public opinion 
 should so instruct the public servant. The postmas- 
 ter-general, and the lesser postmasters who obey his 
 dictum, should be made to feel that the least pretence 
 for extortion or oppression on their part, or any want 
 of accommodation and liberal conduct, would be 
 promptly punished. We write freely on this subject, 
 for our enterprise is at stake, and we speak somewhat, 
 too, for other interests than our own. To offer a pe- 
 riodical for three dollars a year, that is made to cost 
 ten by the oppression of postmasters, is to advertise a 
 misnomer. Let the Wickliffe dynasty prevail, and 
 we shall be obliged to leave off cover, plate, and 
 stitching, and change the Mirror to a simple printed 
 sheet, without protection from wear and tear, and 
 without embellishment or capability of binding and 
 preservation. 
 
 We have always felt great sympathy for the blind. 
 We have felt also great curiosity to know exactly how 
 much of human knowledge is forbidden to go in at 
 the ear — and how much that is turned aside, as inad- 
 missible at that one portal, can be smuggled in after- 
 ward under the cloak of explanation and description. 
 The accounts of Laura Bridgman interested us pro- 
 portionably more from her greater deprivations. It 
 is putting this curiosity in a much more spicy vein of 
 gratification, however, to know that a poet is impris- 
 oned in one of these windowless temples, and to dis- 
 cover how he lives without light and color — as well 
 as how much he is the purer and better from escaping 
 all that offends the eye, which, by-the-way, is not a 
 little. The poems of Miss Frances Jane Crosby, 
 a pupil of the New York Institution for the Blind, 
 lie before us, and we have read them with great mod- 
 ification of our pity for the blind. Eyes could scarce 
 do more. 
 
 No one in reading the miscellaneous poems oy 
 Miss Crosby would suspect that she was blind. She 
 seems to forget it herself. She talks of " crimson 
 teints" and "purple west" and "stars of mildest hue," 
 with quite the familiarity of those who see. But it 
 is evident that her ear has more than a common share 
 of nicety and susceptibility to measure, for in no early 
 poems that we remember is there such smooth ele- 
 gance of rhythm. 
 
 The volume is composed principally of poems of 
 the affections, and well-expressed, musical, and cred- 
 itable to the authoress, are all the pieces. The price 
 of such a volume should be nominal merely, and the 
 kindly-disposed should give for it what their benevo- 
 lence prompts. We would suggest to the publishers 
 to send it round by agents with this view. 
 
 There are things in the world better than poetry 
 and things written without genius that more "stir th 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 699 
 
 soul of it man than would some things ticketed for 
 immortality. Now we do not make sure that we are 
 Dot "weak" on the subject of young children. We 
 always thought them quite eligible to any possible 
 choir of cherubim. But we will venture to unmask 
 our foible, if foible it be, by declaring that we have 
 read the following downright, homely, truthful, and 
 funny verses — (sent to us by some charming mother) 
 
 read them with delight. It is good honest poetry, 
 
 with a foothold to it, and we should like to see the 
 baby, since reading it : — 
 
 1 She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, 
 Her mouth's not a rosebud, her eyes not like jet, 
 Her nose far from Grecian, her skin not like snow, 
 She is not a beauty, dear me ! no, no, do ! 
 But then she is winsome, this bird of my bower, 
 And she grows on my heart every minute and hour. 
 
 1 She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, 
 On dimples more witching my eyes have been set ; 
 Her mouth, I must tell you, is large like mama's, 
 While her chin, to-be-sure, is just like her papa's ! 
 But when she smiles trustingly, what can compare 
 With this gem of my casket, bright, sparkling, and fair? 
 
 ' She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, 
 Far handsomer babies each day can be met ; 
 Her brows are not arching— indeed, they're too straight, 
 Yet time will work wonders, with patience I'll wait. 
 But if she's not handsome, it matters not — no ! 
 This bud of my bosom is pure as the snow. 
 
 ' She is not a beauty, my sweet little pet, 
 That her forehead is too low I can not forget ; 
 No, no, she's not beautiful I must confess, 
 (Between you and I, would her mouth had been less) 
 But she loves me so dearly, oh, how could I part 
 With this light of my pilgrimage, joy of my heart, c. u." 
 
 We are fortunate in a troop of admirable contribu- 
 tors who write for love, not money — love being the 
 only commodity in which we can freely acknowledge 
 ourselves rich. We receive, however, all manner of 
 tempting propositions from those who wish to write 
 for the other thing — money — and it pains us griev- 
 ously to say "No," though, truth to say, love gets II 
 for us as good things as money would buy — our read- j 
 era will cheerfully agree. But, yesterday, on open- I 
 ing at the office a most dainty epistle, and reading it 
 fairly through, we confess our pocket stirred within I 
 us! More at first than afterward — for, upon reflec- j 
 tion, we became doubtful whether the writer were not j 
 old and "blue" — it was so exceedingly well done! j 
 We have half a suspicion, now, that it is some sharp 
 old maid in spectacles — some regular contributor to j 
 Godey and Graham, who has tried to inveigle us j 
 through our weak point — possibly some varlet of a ; 
 man-scribbler. But no ! it is undeniably feminine. 
 Let us show you the letter — the latter part of it, at j 
 least, as it opens rather too honeyedly for print: — 
 
 "You know that the shops in Broadway are very j 
 tempting this spring. Sucli beautiful things! Well, 
 you know (no, you don't know that, but you can guess) 
 what a delightful thing it would be to appear in one 
 of those charming, head-adorning, complexion-soften- 
 ing, hard-feature-subduing Neapolitans; with a little 
 gossamer veil dropping daintily on the shoulder of one 
 of those exquisite balzarines, to be seen any day at 
 Stewart's and elsewhere. Well, you know (this you 
 must know) that shopkeepers have the impertinence 
 to demand a trifling exchange for these things, even 
 of a lady; and also that some people have a remark- 
 ably small purse, and a remarkably small portion of 
 the yellow ' root' in that. And now, to bring the mat- 
 ter home, / am one of that class. I have the most 
 beautiful little purse in the world, but it is only kept 
 for show: I even find myself under the necessity of 
 
 counterfeiting — that is, filling the void with tissue-pa- 
 per in lieu of bank-notes, preparatory to a shopping 
 expedition ! 
 
 " Well, now to the point. As 'Bel' and I snuggled 
 down on the sofa this morning, to read the New Mir- 
 ror (by-the-way, cousin 'Bel' is never obliged to put 
 tissue-paper in her purse), it struck us that you would 
 be a friend in need, and give good counsel in this 
 emergency. 'Bel', however, insisted on my not tel- 
 ling what I wanted the money for; she even thought 
 that I had better intimate orphanage, extreme suffer- 
 ing from the burdens of some speculating bubble, ill- 
 ness, etc., etc. ; but did not I know you better! Have 
 I read the New Mirror so much (to say nothing of the 
 graceful things coined 'under a bridge,' and a thou- 
 sand other pages flung from the inner heart), and not 
 learned who has an eye for everything pretty? Not 
 so stupid, Cousin 'Bel' — no, no! 
 
 "However, this is not quite the point, after all; but 
 here it is. I have a pen — not a gold one (I don't 
 think I could write with that), but a nice little feath- 
 er-tipped pen, that rests in the curve of my fore-finger 
 as contentedly as on its former pillow of down. 
 (Shocking! how that line did run down hill ! and this 
 almost as crooked! dear me!) Then I have little 
 messengers racing 'like mad' through the galleries of 
 my head, spinning long yarns, and weaving fabrics 
 rich and soft as the balzarine which I so much covet, 
 until 1 shut my eyes and stop my ears and whisk away 
 with the ' wonderful lamp' safely hidden in my own 
 brown braids. Then I have Dr. Johnson's diction- 
 ary — capital London edition, etc., etc.; and, after I 
 use up all the words in that, I will supply myself with 
 Webster's wondrous quarto, appendix and all. Thus 
 prepared, think you not I should be able to put some- 
 thing in the shops of the literary caterers — something 
 that, for once in my life, would give me a real errand 
 into Broadway ? Maybe you of the New Mirror pay 
 for acceptable articles — maybe not. Comprcnez-vous! 
 "O I do hope that beautiful balzarine like 'Bel's 
 will not be gone before another Saturday ! You will 
 not forget to answer me in the next Mirror; but pray, 
 my dear editor, let it be done very cautiously, for 
 'Bel' would pout all day if she should know what I 
 have written. Till Saturday, your anxiously-waiting 
 friend, "Fanny." 
 
 Well — we give in ! On condition that you are un- 
 der twenty-five, and that you will wear a rose (recog- 
 nisably) in your boddice the first day you appear in 
 Broadway with the hat and "balzarine," we will pay 
 j the bills. Write us thereafter a sketch of " 'Bel' " and 
 yourself as cleverly done as this letter, and you may 
 "snuggle down" on the sofa and consider us paid and 
 the public charmed with you. 
 
 In the days when we were "possessed" with horses, 
 and horse-racing, we were sadly well-acquainted with 
 a jockey who lost his wits in the excitement of losing 
 a race. He hung about race-courses for some years 
 after becoming an idiot, and by dint of always denying 
 a horse's good qualities in the stable, and of never 
 speaking well of one except at the winning moment, 
 he contrived to preserve, through all his idiocy, some 
 influence in the judgment of horseflesh. We have 
 been reminded of our old friend Spavin (call him 
 Spavin — "m£ mortuis") by certain of our critical 
 brother editors, and their very kindly-intended (pos- 
 sibly) critiques on the Mirror. Come a week (as such 
 weeks will come) when our health is queasy, and when 
 our spirits are gathering violets in dells where a pa- 
 ving-stone would be stoned to death as a monster (and 
 I there are dells incapable of a paving-stone) — come 
 such a week, we say, and let the Mirror go forth, 
 I without such quantity of our own work as strains our 
 
700 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 extremest fibre to the crack, and down comes this 
 vigilant critic upon us with a cry of "no go," " falling 
 off," " idle," and " better formerly" — disparagements 
 that would take the conceit out of a church steeple ! 
 And why does he do this ? Why should we not be 
 better at some times than at others, without being 
 criticised like a steam-engine — a thing incapable of 
 mood, humor, and caprice ? Simply because this 
 sort of critique is easy to write, and so favors, in the 
 writer, the very idleness he criticises in us. But, good 
 heavens ! are we not entitled to our worser, as well as 
 our better moments ! Shall we always be at tiptop 
 speed, and never have freedom from disparagement 
 except when winning a race ? 
 
 We boldly lay claim to more industry than rightly 
 falls to us. as our share of the curse ! Supposing, for 
 the moment, that our writings are better for the Mir- 
 ror than what takes their place occasionally (a flatter- 
 ing inference from our critic's critique), we do more in 
 quantity, in the course of the year, than one editor in 
 a hundred. There is more copied from the Mirror 
 (we have often had occasion to observe) than from any 
 two periodicals in the country. The truth is, we are 
 too famous for comfort ! 
 
 " Oh mediocrity, 
 Thou priceless jewel only mean men have 
 But never value — like the precious gem 
 Found in the muck-hill by the ignorant cock." 
 
 You see what troubles us, dear reader ! 
 
 The flowering into glory of such a century-plant 
 of excellence as our worthy friend and fellow-publish- 
 er, James Harper, has in it, with all our willing ac- 
 clamation, some occasional provocation to a smile. 
 The sudden call for "his picture" — the eager litho- 
 graph of his fun-bestridden nose and money-making 
 spectacles — the stir he has made among the abuses, 
 with his Cliff-street way of doing business, and the 
 salutary feel we get of the wand of power in his 
 clutch, while we still see him in his accustomed 
 haunts, busy and unpedestaled as before — there is 
 something in the contrast which makes us say, with 
 Prince Hal, " Ned, come out of that fat room and 
 give us thy hand to laugh a little," though, with all 
 our heart, we rejoice in his authority. The Courier, 
 speaking of the' likeness just published of Mr. Har- 
 per, says : " The new mayor's pleasant, shrewd, and 
 half-quizzical countenance is cleverly hit off, and he 
 is peering through the official eye-glasses in a manner 
 that portends trouble to all municipal delinquents. 
 Let them look to their ways, and let all subordinate 
 official functionaries look to the streets ; for this por- 
 trait would convince us, even if we were not acquaint- 
 ed with the original, that the chief magistrate has an 
 eye upon them." 
 
 This bit of speculation as a preface to our lauda- 
 mus of Mayor Harper's administration, as felt particu- 
 larly in two or three abated nuisances. The hack- 
 men are no longer permitted to devour passengers on 
 their arrival in steamboats, nor to make a chcvaux-dc- 
 frise of their whips at the landing-piers, but must sit 
 quietly on their coach-boxes till called for. The 
 omnibus-racing is to be put a stop to, we understand, 
 and that should really be celebrated in an appropriate 
 "northern refrain.' 1 '' There are two refrains more 
 that we would suggest to our city Harper — that hose- 
 boys should be made to refrain from flooding the 
 sidewalks under the thin shoes of ladies, and that gen- 
 tlemen who must smoke in the street should refrain 
 from the windward side of ladies, particularly those 
 who prefer air that has not been used. 
 
 And apropos — (it will be seen that we were born to 
 make a world) — we wish to suggest to enterprise an- 
 other abatement of the nuisances of Broadway. It | 
 
 is desirable to reduce the number of omnibuses in 
 this great thoroughfare, for many very cogent rea- 
 sons — but as long as they pay — that is to say, as long 
 as the public require them — they must even go on — 
 deafening promenaders, and endangering private car- 
 riages and the lives of people crossing the street. But 
 who that is down town in a summer's day, and wishes 
 to go anywhere to the western side of the city, would 
 not prefer to take a ferry-boat (if there were one) 
 from the foot of Maiden lane round the Battery to 
 Chelsea ? How preferable the fresh air, and beautiful 
 scenery of the rivers and bay, to a crowded omnibus 
 in hot weather ! How much more desirable would be 
 a residence in Chelsea, if there were such a conveni- 
 ence ! The boats might touch at the foot of Cort- 
 land street and the Battery, and, indeed, extend their 
 course up the East river to the foot of Pike street — 
 plying, say, every ten minutes, from Pike street to 
 Chelsea, and back — rounding the Battery, and touch- 
 ing wherever it was convenient. Who would not pre- 
 fer this to omnibussing ? Let this line communicate 
 with Stevens's upper ferry to Hoboken, and the line 
 would be continuous from that beautiful spot, all 
 round the city. Qrrtte aside from its utility, this 
 would be one of the prettiest pleasure trips that could 
 be invented. Pensez-y, Messrs. Stevens. 
 
 If any charitable person has an old man or woman 
 whom he would like to set up in an easy and profita- 
 ble business, we have a plan to suggest. Give them 
 half a dozen light chairs, and send them to the Bat- 
 tery or the Park. In all public promenades in France 
 there are chairs to be hired for two cents an hour, and 
 besides being a good trade for the lame and old, this 
 convenience is wanted. 
 
 By the way, where are the good things, clever 
 couplets, and flings of wit, that used to fly about at 
 the municipal elections ? Squibs grow dull. Where 
 is that witty conservative whig who, when " Forest 
 and Liberty" was placarded by the democrats, put up 
 a rival bill of " Povey and the Constitution?" Wit 
 and poetry (we might have remembered) seem to 
 have gone into advertisements. When people have 
 done with "Who is Seatsfield ?" we shall start a new 
 query — " Who is the bard of Stoppani ?" Moore's 
 oriental flow of melting stanza and balmy imagery is 
 quite paled in its glory by Stoppani's advertisement: — 
 
 ' Will you come to the Baths in Broadway, 
 Where the genius of luxury presides, 
 And the glorious Croton, by night and by day, 
 Through the conduits silently glides 1 
 
 " The ceiling al fresco, the beautiful bar, 
 Rich drapery, and sumptuous screens, 
 The marble as white as a Persian Cymar, 
 The painting — of Italy's scenes," etc. 
 
 Mellifluously musical! Who is the distinguished au- 
 thor ? 
 
 The advertisement of a hatter plausibly sets forth 
 that the Miller prophecy being exploded, and the 
 world really not coming to an end (at least within a 
 hat's-wear of time), the prospects of the globe's con- 
 tinuance justifies the venture of a new hat! We 
 think we see a hat bought on that hypothesis ! 
 
 We are happy to see that our imported word, rococo, 
 is coming into general use. A critic in the Herald, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 701 
 
 noticing the opera, says : " This concert-piece has 
 been rococo for some time, and, like an old maid, is 
 getting, every year, two years older." This is a clever 
 critic, by the way, though in the sentence we have 
 quoted he reminds us of a bit of dialogue in an old 
 play : — 
 
 " Manes.— Didst thou not find that I did quip thee ? 
 
 p S y. — No, verily. What is a quip 1 
 
 Manes. — A short saying of a sharp wit, with a bit- 
 ter sense in a sweel word." 
 
 The True Sun quotes, with a clincher, from the 
 Buffalo Commercial, " The common use of the word 
 lady, instead of the definite honored term wife, is 
 an atrocious vulgarism that should be universally 
 
 scouted." We think the ladies should be informed produced under the meridian of the country it is to 
 of the etymological meaning of the two words, and supply. Who will pretend that any periodical in this 
 take their"choice%fter. Wife is derived from the An- country is edited with half the ability of the London 
 glo-Saxon word signifyingto weave, and means the j magazines and reviews? The leading intellects of 
 person who weaves for the family. Lady originally j the age— men who in this country would be eminent 
 meant a woman raised to the rank of her husband — \\ lawyers and pol 
 
 not from any falling off in their character. The Eng- 
 lish pictorial papers (for one example) have rather im- 
 proved in merit, but a publisher informed us a day or 
 two since that they do not now sell ten where they 
 sold a hundred a month or two ago. Such, enter- 
 prises used to begin small, and grow into favor gradu- 
 ally. Now, the cornucopia of their prosperity is re- 
 versed — the small end turned from the publisher. 
 Copyrighted American books, and American periodi- 
 cals, though dearer than reprints, sell much better, 
 and in our opinion the American public, in three 
 months more, will give a preference so decided to 
 home literature, and home periodicals, that, as far as 
 protection to our native authors is concerned, the in- 
 ternational copyright will be useless. The truth is, 
 that literature, to be permanently popular, must be 
 
 from the Saxon word signifying elevated. The pro- 
 priety of calling a man's better half his lady, depends, 
 of course, on the fact whether she was made more 
 respectable by the match; aud the propriety of calling 
 her his wife, hangs upon her expertness and industry 
 at the loom. Which will the fair sex prefer ? 
 
 Nkw Literary Epoch. — We have been, for the 
 last year, not only working among, but watching; " the 
 signs of the times" in the way of literature. We have 
 been trying, not only to make out a living, but to 
 make out head and tail to our epoch — to see what 
 way the transition was tending, and when there was 
 likely to be any reliable shape and form to American 
 literature ; or (to change the figure) whether the lit- 
 erary boatmen, who stand with their barques hauled 
 ashore, uncertain of the current, and employing them- 
 selves meantime in other vocations, could be called 
 upon to launch and dip their oars, sure at last of tide 
 and channel. 
 
 International copyright has died a natural death. 
 There was not a statesman in the country who had the 
 courage to take the chance of making or marring his 
 .political fortunes by espousing the question. At the 
 "same time — palpably just, honorable, and expedient, 
 as would be the giving of copyright to English au- 
 thors — there was some excuse for shying the subject, 
 in the violent abuse that was indiscreetly showered 
 upon us by Dickens and the Reviews, at the very 
 moment when general public attention had been 
 called to the subject, and when there was every 
 prospect of its turning the crisis favorably. R would 
 have taken the statesmanship and eloquence of Clay 
 or Webster to have made the discussion at all endura- 
 ble to congress, and we are quite sure that it will be 
 ten years before the public irritation against English 
 travellers and critics will have sufficiently abated to 
 tolerate any measure in their favor. Dickens, and his 
 friend, the critic of the Foreign Quarterly, therefore, 
 have sanded their own bread and butter in throwing 
 dirt at us. 
 
 But the great end of international copyright is com- 
 ing about without the aid of legislation. The abuse 
 has been that American authors were thrown out of 
 
 liticians, devote themselves to maga- 
 i zine-writing abroad, and, besides, they are a trained 
 : class of professed authors, such as we have no idea of 
 j in America. Our contributors are men who dash off 
 an article as by-play, and make no investment of 
 thought or money in it — and of course it can not com- 
 pare to the carefully-written and well-considered arti- 
 cles of English weeklies and monthlies. But look at 
 the difference of circulation. See how periodicals 
 languish that are made up of the cream of these Lon- 
 don magazines, and see how Graham and Godey, In- 
 man of the Columbian, and ourselves, quadruple them 
 in vogue and prosperity ! R was to be expected— it 
 is the most natural thing in the world — that America 
 should grow American, at last! What more natural 
 than that we should lire of having our thinking done 
 in London, our imaginations fed only with food tlgit 
 is Londonish, and our matters of feeling illustrated 
 and described only by London associations, tropes, 
 and similitudes ? This weariness of going to so dis- 
 tant a well for better water, we do say, is to be relied 
 upon as a sign of the literary times. The country is 
 tired of being be-Brilished. R wants its own indige- 
 nous literature, and we think we should be safe to- 
 morrow in issuing a replevin upon law, politics, and 
 commerce, for the men of genius draughted for their 
 employ, during the want of a literary market. Give 
 up the blood horses harnessed into your dull drays, 
 oh, Wall street and Pearl ! Untie your fetters of red 
 tape, and let loose your enslaved poets and novelties, 
 oh, Nassau and Pine ! Discharge Halleck, oh, Astor; 
 and give up Wetmore, oh, crates of crockery ! Lead 
 off with a new novel, Mr. Cooper, and let the public 
 give us a five years' benefit of their present disgust 
 with imported literature, to recover from the numb- 
 ness of inaction and discouragement. Give us five- 
 years of the home tide of sympathy that is now setting 
 westward, and we will have an American literature 
 that will for ever prevent the public taste and patron- 
 age from ebbing back again to England. 
 
 Things as they come— We know of a matter we 
 mean to write about, somewhere between this and the 
 bottom of the next column— somewhere within this 
 half-cent's-worth, that is to say— (this page costs you 
 not quite half a cent, dear reader !)— but we must 
 
 the market by English works that were to be had for , —. M 
 
 nothing— (justice to the English author, of course, a haul out two or three things that lie a-top ot it in our 
 secondary consideration). But this abuse is losing; fact-drawer: (acts being, as everybody knows, obstinate 
 strength by surfeit. The publishers and periodical as nails in a keg, when you want a particular one iron, 
 agents are aghast, at this very moment, of the falling underneath. 
 
 off of interest in the most attractive publications. The We have whims (this lies a-top), about the Jace of 
 zest for novelty has been so pampered, that only the I newspaper type. There are some most worthy and 
 first number or two, of anything new, sells well. And i ! able periodicals that we could not read our own obitua- 
 
702 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 ry in, without an effort — the type is so unexplainably 
 anti-pathetic. Every editor who turns over exchange 
 papers will know precisely what we mean. There is 
 no necessity for naming those which we should never 
 open if we had them in our pocket "forty days in the 
 wilderness," but we can, without offence, name an op- 
 posite example — the Picayune — which, from the 
 mere witchery of type, a man would like to take out 
 of the postoffice on his way to execution. The Bos- 
 ton Transcript is another — (fact No. 2) — which we 
 fatuitously read, and should read, even if it were edited 
 by that broken mustard-spoon, the Portland Thersites. 
 The type is captivating — a kind of insinuating, piquant, 
 well-bred brevier, that catches the eye like a coquette 
 in a ball-room. And this, be it noted, spite of the 
 " burnt child's" prejudice, for the fair editress does 
 not always put on her gloves, before taking a tweak at 
 our immortality! And, apropos — there is an editor 
 " down south" who sympathises with this typical 
 weakness of ours — declaring in a late paper that the 
 reputation of our letters to the Intelligencer " was 
 entirely owing to the large type in which they were 
 printed." And this we not only believe, but if we 
 ever get rich, we will " fork over the swindle" to our 
 deluded employers. 
 
 The reader will see that we are trying to apologise 
 for our dissipation in reading — newspapers being such 
 very loose mental company, and we, as news-ivriter, 
 having, no more business with the luxury of news 
 written, than a shoemaker with wearing the patent 
 leathers he makes for his gentlemen customers. But 
 we have read an article in the seductive type of the 
 Transcript which led us to philosophise a little touch- 
 ing a point of contrast between Boston and New 
 York ; and as we grew up in Boston, but were dug 
 up, and trimmed, and watered into flowering, in New 
 York, we claim to know both places well enough to 
 r*n a parallel with fairish fidelity. 
 
 The article we speak of was a letter, containing, 
 among other things, a touch-up of the Astor house ; 
 but the Astor is so much the best hotel in the world, 
 that fault-finding, merited as it may be, will send no- 
 body from its door in search of a better. Without 
 alluding farther to the letter, let us jot down the specu- 
 lation it suggested. 
 
 New York is far more vicious than Boston, without 
 a doubt. But it is not much more vicious than it was, 
 when it was of Boston's size. We have often wished 
 to preach a sermon to the Bostonians from 1 Corin- 
 thians iv. 7: "For who maketh thee to differ from 
 another ? And what hast thou, that thou didst not 
 receive?" Up to the present time, the Puritan obedi- 
 ence to authority, and the " power paramount" of 
 good principles, have never been sapped or shaken in 
 Boston. It is but one community, with one class of 
 leading prejudices, and worked by one familiar set of 
 moral, social, and political wires. The inhabitants 
 are nearly all Americans, all church-goers of some 
 sect or other, implicitly subject to general and time- 
 honored principles, and as controllable by mayor and 
 aldermen as an omnibus by passengers and driver. 
 Indeed, the municipal history of Boston for the last 
 twenty years, is a Utopian beau-ideal of efficiency and 
 order, which will never herepeated. The authoritative 
 break-up of the first formidable symptom of mob- 
 ocracy two years ago, for example — when bold mayor 
 Elliott quietly took the /ire-engines from their turbu- 
 lent companies, and put them into the hands of a paid 
 fire-police — could never have been done in any other 
 city of this country ; and ten years hence (Boston 
 continuing to increase and vitiate), a similar pluck at 
 the beard of mob license would be a dangerous experi- 
 ment. 
 
 But look at New York in comparison. There are 
 at least a hundred thousand Irish in this city, twenty 
 thousand French, sixty thousand Germans, and a 
 
 miscellany of other nations, that probably leaves scarce 
 one fourth of the population (say a hundred thousand), 
 for indigenous and home- spirited New- Yorkers. One 
 quarter too, of the general population, is in a condition 
 that is scarce known in Boston — that of desperate ex- 
 tremity of livelihood, and readiness to do anything for 
 the moment's relief, vicious, turbulent, or conspirative. 
 The municipal government of New York is, unfor- 
 tunately, in some measure, a political tool, and com- 
 pelled to shape its administration somewhat with a 
 view to politics. Harsh measures, used in Boston 
 upon the first germ or symptom of license, are reserved 
 in New York for such signal instances as are melo- 
 dramatically flagrant — such as can not be perverted, 
 by the party out of power, into a counter-current of 
 sympathy and resentment. What there is now remain- 
 ing of the Knickerbocker influence in New York, is the 
 degree in which New York can compare with Boston 
 — and this small remainder of the old Dutch character 
 is, as to power and check, about equal to what will be 
 left of Puritan character in Boston, when Boston, by 
 aid of railroads and inducements for foreign residence, 
 shall have four hundred thousand inhabitants. Look 
 at the difference in the observance of Sunday in the 
 two places ! At least twenty thousand people cross 
 to Hoboken alone, to pass the sabbath in the fields — 
 foreigners, mostly, who have been in the habit of 
 making it a holyday at home. The Bostonians would 
 suppress the ferry, without the slightest hesitation ' 
 There are four or five Sunday newspapers in New 
 York, and Boston will not support one. There are 
 German balls in various places in this city, on Sunday 
 evening ; and oyster-shops, and bar-rooms, and the 
 drinking-places, in all directions in the suburbs, have 
 overflowing custom on that day. The governmen* 
 of the city is, of course, in some degree, a reflex of 
 this large proportion of the sovereign voters, and when 
 public opinion countenances a degree of license, it is 
 next to impossible to bring in a city government that 
 can control it. We have not room to follow out this 
 comparison in detail — but we wished to outline it, as 
 a reply to the condemnations of New York (for the 
 sale of vicious publications, etc., etc.), made from 
 time to time, by our more virtuous brethren in the 
 north. We shall take another opportunity to enlarge 
 upon it. 
 
 We have received several truly delightful and grati- 
 fying letters from eminent clergymen of different per- 
 suasions, thanking us for the Sacred Numbers of the 
 Mirror Library, and sending us the choice poems 
 which they had severally laid aside, to add to another 
 collection. We had no idea there was so much beauti- 
 ful religious poetry in existence ! This rich vein of 
 literature has been unworked and overlooked, and we 
 assure the religious world, confidently, that we are 
 doing a most important work in the collection of these 
 gems of piety and poetry in a cheap and accessible 
 form. '• Songs for the Sabbath," falls behind 
 none of them in interest, and will be a classic in re- 
 ligious books, as long as religious literature exists. 
 
 We do not know whether we were particularly in a 
 mood to be pleased on the night of Simpson's benefit 
 at the Park, but several things pleased us more than 
 they seemed to please other people — the dancing, for 
 example, both of Korponat, and of Desjardins. 
 (Of the acting we do not speak, and by-the-way, we 
 may as well say, here, that the stage is so much bet- 
 ter kept in hand by the theatrical critic of the Albion 
 than we could possibly do it, that we generally shie 
 that part of criticism, from a sort of consciousness 
 that it will be done for the public by abler hands. We 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 703 
 
 love good criticism, and we love " honor to whom ; 
 honor is duo.") We did not see Korponay at his j 
 debut at Palmo's — but a friend pronounced his dan- 
 cing a failure. As an attempt at anything in Vestris's j 
 line, it certainly was a failure. But that is not the 
 dish to which the well-made Pole invites us. He is, 
 among dancers, what olives are at a feast — " bad i 
 pickles" to the vulgar, but artful appetisers to the \ 
 refined. Korponay seemed to us like a symmetrical | 
 and dashing nobleman, doing gracefully a difficult and j 
 grotesque dance for the amusement and admiration of j 
 a court — leaning as far away as possible from the airs 
 of a professed dancer, and intent only on showing the ■ 
 superb proportion of his figure and the subtle com- i 
 mand over his limbs. His face expressed exactly this || 
 role of performance. It was full of mock solemnity 
 and high-bred assurance. He seemed to us exactly 
 the sort of noble masquer that, at a Venetian festival 
 of old time, would have "topped the jaunty part," and 
 carried away the flower, the ladies' favor. 
 
 But the untrumpeted deservings of Monsieur Kor- 
 ponay are less surprising than the want of apprecia- 
 tion of Mademoiselle Desjardins. We never saw her 
 before, though she has been dancing in town for some 
 time, and, considering how easily most any hook and 
 line of public amusement catches us, it is very plain 
 that the bait has not been skilfully angled. In the 
 first place, as to qualifications, we never have seen, in 
 all our travels from Niagara to the Black sea (the two 
 poles of our "inky orbit"), so well-bridged an instep, 
 and so Dianesque a pair of serviceable ankles. She 
 should have stood to John of Bologna for his poised 
 Mercury ! There is not a woman's heart better 
 mounted, we venture to say, between Ontario and the 
 Euxine. And she uses these communicators with 
 earth deftly and Ariel-wise! We only saw her in the 
 Polacca, which is a kind of attitudinizing dance, and 
 possibly, better suited to her abilities than a more dif- 
 ficult pas. But she walked and acted it with spirit I 
 and grace enough to be charming, and though she is j 
 not to be named with Ellsler, she is enough of a dan- 
 seuse. in Ellsler's absence, to give one's eyes their 
 night's rations very satisfactorily. Underrated she is ! 
 
 We see, by one of the careful and elaborate reports 
 of the Republic, that the Mercantile Library Associ- 
 ation have had a report from a despair-committee, on 
 the subject of the decline of lectures. Eloquence 
 don't pay for the candle, it seems. This excellent 
 association, however, shrinks the wrong way from the 
 plague they have had with it. The taste for eloquence 
 is no more dead or torpid in New York than the love 
 of war or the relish for lions. While people have 
 brains and hearts they will love a true orator. But 
 they are tired (and reasonably enough) of the bald and 
 ungamislied style in which oratory is served up to 
 them. To go moping into the dark and silent Taber- 
 nacle — the gas economized till the rise of the orator, 
 and a deathly and gloomy silence maintained for an 
 hour (more or less) before the commencement of the 
 lecture — to have the orator's first opening addressed 
 to chilled, oppressed, and unelevated minds, and all 
 this in a house of such structure, that unless seated 
 clear of the pent-house galleries, the hearer loses 
 everything but the emphatic words in a sentence — to 
 sit an hour amid these disadvantages, and then hear a 
 chance speaker, for whom they are not prepared by 
 any previous information except the name of his sub- 
 
 iect — this, we say, is indeed " lenten entertainment." 
 t is making of eloquence what the ascetic makes of 
 religion — a dry crust instead of a relishing loaf. No, 
 no! Religion should be adorned with its proper and 
 consistent graces, as woman should be beautifully 
 attired; and eloquence has its natural ornaments and 
 
 accompaniments as well. See how eloquence was 
 made a pleasure in the gardens of the academy of 
 Athens! Instead of treating our orators as we do the 
 fountain in the Park (giving them a broad margin of 
 bare ground), we should surround their oratory with 
 tributary ornament. The audiences noiv, at lectures, 
 are that passionless and abstract portion of the com- 
 munity that can stand anything in the shape of an in- 
 tellectual bore — the Grahamites of amusement. But 
 give us orators on popular subjects, at Palmo's, with 
 dress circle, bright lights, opera-music, scenery, and 
 interludes for conversation and change of place, and 
 eloquence, from being a jewel dulled with the dirt of a 
 mine, will be a gem in the fit setting of a sparkling 
 tiara. This would be, beside, a kind of premium 
 upon eloquence, that would foster it into a national 
 I excellence. There are men at the bar, in the press, 
 land iu business, who have the " volcano of burning 
 ! words" within them, and would make eloquence a 
 study, were it a source of renown and profit. What 
 say to a new niche for oratory, oh, amiable public ! 
 Let us get a new screw upon public feeling, to use 
 with effect when we have patriotism to arouse, or 
 abuses to overthrow — passions to awake for good pur- 
 poses. Let us have a power at the public car that will 
 be a check-balance to newspapers, that have a monop- 
 oly of the jmblic eye. Let music, oratory, and paint- 
 ing, combine in a tripod to support each other — a fine 
 orchestra, a glowing oration, and beautiful scenery — 
 and we shall have public amusement in which the 
 serious classes will join with the gay, and in which 
 instruction shall be dressed, as it always may be, and 
 should be, with captivating flowers. 
 
 And while we have this thread in our loom, let us 
 express the delight with which we listened, not long 
 since, to oratory in a silk gown — an oration on con- 
 tempt, that was linked naturally enough to a text and 
 a pulpit, but which would have been a noble piece of 
 intellectual oratory in a public hall or theatre. The 
 orator was Rev. Henrt Giles, and the sermon was 
 delivered in a place that is used to eloquence— the 
 pulpit of Mr. Dewey. There were passages in this 
 discourse that were worked up, both in fervor of lan- 
 guage and concentrated fire of delivery, to a pitch 
 that we should call truly Demosthenian. Mr. Giles 
 is a natural orator— a man of expanded generalizing 
 powers. It is a treat to hear him, such as would not 
 be second in interest to any dramatic entertainment, 
 and properly combined with other things as agreeable 
 to the taste, there would be an attraction in such ora- 
 tory that would draw better than a play. We really 
 wish that some " manager" would undertake the get- 
 ting up of the scenery and musical accessories to ora- 
 tory, and let secular eloquence take leave of the pul- 
 pit where it does not properly belong, and come into 
 a field more natural to its aims and uses. 
 
 We had a June May, and a May June, and the brick 
 world of Manhattan has not, as yet, become too hot to 
 hold us. This is to be our first experiment at pas- 
 sing the entire summer in the city, and we had laid up 
 a few alleviations which have as yet kept the shelf, 
 with our white hat, uncalled for by any great rise in 
 the thermometer. There is no knowing, however, 
 when we shall hear from Texas and the warm "girdle 
 round the earth" (the equator— no reference to 
 English dominion), and our advice to the stayers in 
 town may be called for by a south wind before it is 
 fairly printed. First-owr substitute for a private yacht. 
 Not having twenty thousand dollars to defray our 
 aquatic tendencies-having, on the contrary an occa- 
 sional spare shilling— we take our moonlight trip on 
 the river— dividing ihe cool breezes, 'twixt shore and 
 shore— in the Jersey ferry-boat. Smile those who have 
 
704 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 private yachts ! We know no pleasanter trip, after 
 the dusk of the evening, than to stroll down to the 
 ferry, haul a bench to the bow of the ferry-boat, 
 and " open up" the evening breeze for two miles and 
 back, for a shilling ! After eight o'clock, there are, 
 on an average, ten people in the boat, and you have 
 the cool shoulder under the railing as nearly as possi- 
 ble to yourself. The long line of lamps on either 
 shore makes a gold flounce to the " starry skirt of 
 heaven" — the air is as pure as the rich man has it in 
 his grounds, and all the money in the world could not 
 mend the outside of your head, as far as the horizon. 
 (And the horizon, at such place and hour, becomes a 
 substitute for the small hoop you have stepped out of.) 
 No man is richer than we, or could be better off — till 
 we reach the Jersey shore — and we are as rich going 
 back. Try this, of a hot evening, all who prefer 
 coolness and have a mind that is good company. 
 
 Then, there is our substitute for an airing. There 
 is a succession of coaches, lined with red velvet, that, 
 in the slope of the afternoon, ply, nearly empty, the 
 whole length of Broadway — two or three miles, at an 
 easy pace, for sixpence. We have had vehicles, or 
 friends who had vehicles, in most times and places 
 that we remember, and we crave our ride after dinner. 
 We need to get away from walls and ceiling stuck 
 over with cares and brain-work, and to be amused 
 without effort — particularly without the effort of walk- 
 ing or talking. So — 
 
 " Taking our hat in our hand, that remarkably requisite 
 practice," 
 
 we step out from our side street to the brink of Broad- 
 way, and presto, like magic, up drives an empty coach 
 with two horses, red velvet lining, and windows open; 
 and by an adroit slackening of the tendons of his left 
 .eg, the driver opens the door to us. With the lei- 
 surely pace suited to the hour and its besoin, our car- 
 riage rolls up Broadway, giving us a sliding panorama 
 of such charms as are peculiar to the afternoon of the 
 great thoroughfare (quite the best part of the day, for 
 a spectator merely). Every bonnet we see wipes off a 
 care from our mental slate, and every nudge to our 
 curiosity shoves up our spirits a peg. Easily and 
 uncrowded, we are set down for our sixpence at 
 M Fourteenth street," and turning our face once more 
 toward Texas, we take the next velvet-lined vehicle 
 bound down. The main difference betwixt us and 
 the rich man, for that hour, is, that he rides in a 
 green lane, and we in Broadway — he sees green leaves 
 and we pretty women— he pays much and we pay 
 little. The question of envy, therefore, depends upon 
 which of these categories you honestly prefer. While 
 Providence furnishes the spare shilling, ice, at any 
 rate, will not complain. Such of our friends as are 
 prepared to condole with us for our summer among 
 the bricks, will please credit us with the two foregoing 
 
 alleviations. 
 
 The postoffice irregularities of which we have so 
 often complained, have drawn from one of our good- 
 natured subscribers, a lament in poetry. We wish all 
 our friends would take it as kindly, but 
 it as expressively : — 
 
 give voice to 
 
 " No Mirror to-day — 
 
 No price, no pay ; 
 No chance to spend a sixpence all day Ions • 
 
 No work at all to do, 
 
 No help for feeling blue ; 
 No plate, no tale, no ' trifle,' and no song ! 
 
 No why and no because ; 
 
 No faith in the whole race of editors • 
 
 No remedy, 'tis true ; ' 
 
 No seeing exactly what it's best to do ; 
 
 No chance of being heard, 
 
 No profit in a word ; 
 No grumbling at the keepers of the keys ; 
 No hope of men who do just what they please ; 
 
 No chance to raise a breeze : 
 
 No hope, no sign, 
 
 No promise that I can divine ; 
 No faith to-day in high humanity ; 
 
 No doubt that life is vanity ; 
 No dawn, no rising of a better day ; 
 
 No faint foreshadowing of a golden way i 
 No knowing when Wickliffe will be turned away ; 
 
 No last resort but a vile parody. 
 No Mirror " 
 
 We very seldom buy a volume of new poetry, but 
 the portrait on the first leaf of Mrs. Butler's book, a 
 portrait by the admirable and spiritualizing pencil of 
 Sully, and engraved by the as admirable and spirituali- 
 zing burin of Cheney, was worth quite the price of the 
 volume. We have since read the poetry. The pic- 
 ture bears a slight resemblance to the poetess, Mrs. 
 Norton, and the poetry is very like Mrs. Norton's in 
 its intention. But both in features and verse, Mrs. 
 Butler is very far that glorious woman's inferior. We 
 have been vexed to see how narrow an escape Mrs. 
 Butler has had. of being a fine poetess, however— how 
 easily with a little consistent labor, and some little 
 unity of sentiment and purpose, she might have filled 
 out the penumbra which provokingly shows what she 
 might have been— but for the eclipse of caprice or 
 carelessness. We have struck a word in this last 
 sentence which seems to us to be the master-chord 
 of all her poetry— caprice .' She begins nobly and 
 goes evenly and beautifully half through her strain, 
 and then falters and winds weakly or inconsequently 
 off. We could quote passages from this book as fine 
 as anything of Mrs. Norton's, but there is no one fin- 
 ished poem in it worth reprinting. In all this, we 
 are looking at it with the world's eye. To a poet, 
 who judges of a fragment, as the connoisseur knows 
 the statue of Hercules, by the foot, this volume is full 
 of genius. There is a massy fulness in the use of 
 epithets and figures that shows a Sapphic prodigality 
 of fervor and impulse, and there is, moreover, a mas- 
 culine strength of passionateness in the moulding and 
 flinging off of emotion, that, well carried out, would 
 have swept the public heart like a whirlwind. We had 
 marked many passages of Mrs. Butler's book for ex- 
 tract, but on looking at them again, we find the best 
 and most creditable blemished with flaws, and, with 
 strong admiration for what the authoress might have 
 been, we lay the book aside. 
 
 Our readers will remember a very clever letter, 
 written to us by an anonymous lady who wished to 
 conjure a new bonnet and dress out of her inkstand. 
 The inveiglement upon ourselves (to induce us to be 
 her banker), was so adroit and fanciful that we sus- 
 pected the writer of being no novice at rhetorical trap 
 — one, indeed, of the numerous sisterhood who, denied 
 the concentrated developments of maternity, scatter 
 their burthensome ammunition of contrivance and re- 
 source upon periodical literature. We "gave in," 
 however — walking willingly into the lady's noose— on 
 a condition, that she should wear a rose recognisably 
 in Broadway the day she first sported the balzarine 
 and Neapolitan, and afterward send us a sketch of 
 herself and her cousin. The " sketch" we have re- 
 ceived, and when we have seen the rose we shall not 
 hesitate to acknowledge the debt. In the following 
 parts of the letter which accompanied the sketch, the 
 reader will see that the authoress feels (or feigns mar- 
 vellously well) some resentment at our suspicions as 
 to her age and quality :— 
 
 " Have you never heard, my de— (pardon ! I fear it 
 is a habit of mine to write too 'honeyedly') — but have 
 you not heard that 'suspicion is a heavy armor, which, 
 with its own weight impedes more than it protects.' 
 Suspicion is most assuredly a beggarly virtue. It 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 705 
 
 may, now and then, prevent you from being ' taken in,' 
 but it nips you in the costs most unmercifully. Oh ! 
 sharpsightednessis the most extravagantly dear whistle 
 that poor humans ever purchased ! That you should 
 suspect me too, when I was opening my heart away 
 down to the core. How could you ? • Inveigle !' no 
 inveigling about it! I want a bonnet and dress, and 
 said so, frankly and honestly. And I never wrote a 
 line for Graham in my life, no ! nor for Godey either. 
 As for le couleur des bas, your keen-eyed hawk pounced 
 on less than a phantom there. From the day that I 
 stood two mortal hours with my finger poked into my 
 eye, and a fool's-cap on my head, because I persisted 
 in spelling ' b-a-g, baker,' to the notable morning of 
 christening my cousin by her profession, I have been 
 voted innocent of all leaning toward the uncelestial. 
 Indeed it is more than suspected by my friend (cousin 
 'Bel' excepted) that I affect dame Nature's carpet, 
 rather than her canopy. Maybe I am ' some varlet 
 of a man scribbler' — Oh! you are such a Yankee at 
 guessing ! ' Old !' ah, that is the unkindest cut of all ! 
 You an editor, and the son of an editor, and not know 
 that ' old maids' are a class extinct at the present day, 
 save in the sewingsocieties, etc., of some western village, 
 subject only to the exploring expeditions of the in- 
 defatigable ' Mary Clavers !' Have you never heard 
 of five-and-twenty's being a turning point, and ken ye j 
 not its meaning ? Why, /aire maydens then reverse 
 the hour-glass of old gray-beard ; and, one by one, 
 drop back the golden sands that he has scattered, till, 
 in five years, they are twenty again. Of course, then, 
 I must be ' under twenty-five ;' but, as a punishment 
 for your lack of gallantry, you shall not know whether 
 the sands are dropping in or out of my glass. One 
 thing, however, is indisputable : 1 am not ' sharp,' my 
 face has not a single sharp feature, nor my temper (it 
 is I, who know, that say it), a sharp corner, nor my 
 voice a sharp tone. So much in self-justification, and 
 now to the little package which you hold in the other 
 hand. 
 
 " I send my sketch in advance, because I am afraid 
 cousin 'Bel' and I might not interest you and the pub- 
 lic so much as we do ourselves; and then how are we 
 to 'consider you paid.' In truth, I can not write 
 clever things. 'Bel' might, but she never tries. Some- 
 times she plans for me ; but, somehow, I never can 
 find the right words for her thoughts. They come into 
 my head like fixed-up visiters, and ' play tea-party' 
 with their baby neighbors, until I am almost as much 
 puzzled by their strange performances as the old 
 woman of the nursery rhyme, who was obliged to call 
 on her 'little dog at home' to establish her identity. 
 No, no ! 1 can not write clever things, and particularly 
 on the subject to which I am restricted ; but if it is 
 the true sketch that you would have for the sake of 
 the information, why here it is. You will perceive 
 that I have been very particular to tell you all. 
 
 " Pray, do you allow us carte blanche as far as the hat 
 and dress are concerned ? You had better not, for 
 'Bel' never limits herself. How soon may we have 
 them ? The summer, is advancing rapidly, and my 
 old muslin and straw are unco' shabby. Yours with 
 all due gratitude, " Fanny Forester." 
 
 Whoever our fair correspondent may be, old or 
 young, naive or crafty, we can tell her that talent like 
 hers need never want a market. We commend her, 
 thus in print, to those princes of literary paymasters, 
 Graham and Godey, with our assurance that no more 
 entertaining pen strides a vowel in this country. The 
 sketch of " The Cousins," which we shall give here- 
 after, has a ticirt-tear-and-smile-fulness which shows 
 the writer's heart to be as young as a school-girl's 
 satchel, whatever kind of wig she wears, and whatever 
 the number of her spectacles. And she will be as 
 young forty years hence — for genius will be a child, 
 eternity through, in Heaven. If, by chance, the lady 
 45 
 
 is a sub-twenty -fivily, she is a star rising, and we should 
 like to visit her before she culminates. 
 
 The rest of what we have to say. — There is a 
 circulation that beats newspapers — beats them particu- 
 larly in this — the Tuesday's paper overtakes the Mon- 
 day's, but the lie of Monday is never overtaken by the 
 truth of Tuesday. Some time since a sketch appeared 
 in the Mirror, written by a correspondent, which was 
 seized upon immediately by some of the busy-bodies of 
 society, as an intentional attack upon one of the first 
 families in this city. A week or two after its publica- 
 tion, a friend informed us of the rumor, and we read the 
 sketch over again to see what was objectionable in it. 
 With the exception of a correction made by the proof- 
 reader, and one accidental circumstance, invented by 
 the writer to round a sentence, there was nothing in 
 it that could possibly apply to the family in question, 
 and we were amazed at the interpretation put upon it. 
 Subsequent knowledge of the writer and her object 
 has completely removed from our mind, and that of 
 the family alluded to, all shadow of suspicion that any 
 particular person or persons were in her mind while 
 writing it. The story has again come round to us, 
 however, and in so bold a shape that we think it worth 
 while to nail it again with a denial. There never has 
 been in the Mirror, and there never will be, any offen- 
 sive allusion to individuals in private life. Descriptive 
 ' writers constantly describe classes, and, if they describe 
 them well, they will apply as the essays in the Specta- 
 tor do. to hundreds of persons. The amiable Miss 
 Sedgwick, utterly incapable of an intentional wound 
 1 to the feelings of any one, has lived in constant hot 
 water, from the offence taken at the supposed person- 
 ; alities of her descriptions. It is very easy for a mali- 
 cious person to take any sketch of character, and find 
 i for it a most plausible original. But there should be a 
 watch kept for those who first name these discoveries — 
 the first finders of the key to a mischievous allusion. 
 The first time you hear a malicious story, mark the 
 teller of it — for ten to one, in that person, male or 
 female, lies the whole malice of the invention and ap- 
 plication. Such people do not work in the dark, 
 however. Mischief-making is a most unprofitable 
 trade, and we trust that, in the future school of Ameri- 
 can morals, the certain infamy of being the first teller 
 of a malicious tale, will be a predominant feature. It 
 can easily be made so. by " keeping the subject be- 
 fore the people." 
 
 One of the most curious features of New York is 
 ! the gradual formation of a Paternoster Row— or 
 the making of Arm street to correspond with that 
 famous book-mine and fame-quarry of London. Our 
 enterprising and thrifty friends and neighbors, Bur- 
 gess, Stringer, &Co., are the "Longmans" of this 
 publishing Row, and truly, the activity of their sales, 
 and the crowds leaning continually over their counter, 
 give a new aspect to the hitherto contemplative current 
 of merchandise in literature. Their central and spa- 
 cious shop on the corner of Broadway, is a thronged 
 book-market, as vigorously tended and customered as 
 the sales of pork and grain. They have lately added 
 to their establishment two stores intervening between 
 them and us, and, with the office of our friends of the 
 " Nfw World" farther down the street, and several 
 intermediate publishing and forwarding offices, we of 
 the Mirror are in the midst of a formidable literary 
 mart that seems destined to concentrate the book- 
 trade, and make, of Ann street as we said just now, a 
 Paternoster Row. The Turks (who, by the way, 
 have many other sensible notion, besides washing 
 themselves instead of their shirts), devote each differ- 
 
706 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 ent lane of their grand bazar to a single commodity 
 — no shoemakers to be found out of Shoemaker-lane, 
 and no books out of Book-alley. The convenience 
 of this arrangement, to the public, is very great, and 
 it would be, in this city, a prodigious saving of labor, 
 in cartage and traffic, to the booksellers themselves. 
 We have a faint hope of seducing over, to our Row, 
 the agreeable clique of our friend Porter of the 
 •' Spirit," and we hope Inman of the Columbian will 
 follow alter (to save rent), and in this way, we shall 
 have a morning lounge in Ann street for the beaux 
 esprits, that will enable us to combine into a literary 
 social order and have some fun and more weight. 
 Nothing like combination, oh, feilow-pensmen ! Why 
 should we not have a head, and wag it, like the cham- 
 ber of commerce and the powerful presbytery ? For 
 a class that keeps the key of the city's to-morrow, the 
 press in New York is as strangely unorganized and 
 segregate a body as anarchy of public opinion could 
 possibly desire. But we are trenching here on some- 
 thing we have in petto, to write upon more gravely 
 hereafter. 
 
 We seldom read a novel. We can not afford the 
 sympathy, even when we have the time. But, some- 
 what liquefied on a warm afternoon of last week, our 
 resolution would not hold, and we took up "The 
 Rose of Thistle Island," a Swedish novel by Em- 
 ilie Carlen, just published by Winchester. The story 
 took hold of us immediately, and we read the book 
 through before going to bed, charmed with its earnest 
 and graphic truth of narration and char ter, and par- 
 ticularly w,ith the entire fusion of the style, betraying 
 no thumb-spot from the dictionary-cover, and no 
 smack of haste or clumsiness in the transfer. It reads 
 like a book original in English, and that, to our pro- 
 fessional superfinery of noun and pronoun, is no small 
 difference from ordinary translations. 
 
 The Remainder. — One of the greatest pleasures 
 of living in our free country, is the unceasing satis- 
 faction one feels at not having died last week — fortu- 
 nately surviving to put down one more lie that, if you 
 had been dead, would be as durable as your tomb- 
 stone. Another peculiarity of our country — good or 
 bad as you chance to feel about it — is the necessity to 
 talk a great deal about yourself, if you would keep 
 up a lively popularity. With these two patriotic 
 promptings, let us say a word of a trip we made lately 
 to Albany. 
 
 It is not perhaps generally known that Albany was 
 our birthplace. We were born once before, it is true, 
 in Portland, somewhere about half a life ago— a 
 "man-child." But in Albany, in 1827, we first open- 
 ed our eyes, as an adult lion. Up to that period we 
 had been under tutors, and had known only boy- 
 friends. By a fortunate chance we suddenly acquired 
 the friendship of a man of great talent and accom- 
 plishment, and on a visit to this, our first man-friend 
 at Albany, we stood, for the first time, clear of the 'j 
 imprisoning chalk-lines of boyhood. Those who hav* ' 
 "hived the honey" of their summers of the heart IJ 
 know well how intoxicatingly sweet was the first gar- i 
 den of life in which they walked as men. Still a chila | 
 at home, and still a college-boy at New Haven, we ) 
 were, at Albany, a man who had written a book, and as l| 
 the companion and guest of our fashionable and popu- 
 lar friend,* we saw beauty enough, and received kind- 
 
 * I trust it will not be considered mistimed or unnatural if 
 I follow the impulse of my heart, and put, into a note to so 
 worldly a theme, the substance of a tearful and absorbing 
 revery, which, for the last half hour, has suspended my pen 
 over the paper. The name of the gentleman f have just al- 
 
 ness enough, to have whipped a less leathery brain into 
 syllabub. The loveliness of the belles of Albany at 
 that time, and the brilliancy of its society, are perpet- 
 uated in a remembrance that will become a tradition; 
 and we have never since seen, in any country or so- 
 ciety of the world, an equal proportion of elegant men 
 and beautiful and accomplished women. It was so 
 acknowledged over the whole country. The regency 
 of fashion, male and female, was confessedly at Alba- 
 ny. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, 
 were provinces to this castle of belle-dom! We have 
 an object in showing what Albany was, at the time 
 we were in the habit of visiting it, and how inevitably, 
 from a combination of circumstances, it became and 
 has remained, to us, a paradise of enchanting associa- 
 tions. There is no spot in this country which we re- 
 member with equal pleasure. It was the first leaf 
 turned over in our book of manhood. 
 
 We went to Albany with these memories upon us, 
 a week or more ago, to lecture. We spent the morn- 
 ing in finding old friends and reviving old associations, 
 and in the evening we had an audience much larger 
 than we looked for, and as brilliant as hope born of 
 such memories could have prefigured it; and we re- 
 turned to the city the morning after, gratified and de- 
 lighted. But (and here comes the matter in hand) 
 there seems to have been a gentleman in Albany who 
 was unwilling we should be delighted. We have not 
 seen the article he wrote, but, as condensed in another 
 paper, it goes to show that the reasons why we were 
 unsuccessful at Albany were, first, that we have been 
 in the habit of abusing its Dutch aristocracy, and 
 second, that two years ago we "insulted a lady there 
 and refused a challenge from her friend !" Now here 
 are four items of absolute news to us: 1, that we did 
 not succeed — 2, that we ever insulted a lady any- 
 | where — 3, that we ever declined any fight that was 
 ever proposed to us — 4, that we ever abused the 
 Dutch at Albany. 
 
 On the fourth count of the indictment, alone, a 
 friend has thrown a little light. We did once, inad- 
 vertently, use an adjective, in a way which has been 
 remembered fifteen years! We said of the swine in 
 the streets of Albany (in some trifling article for a 
 newspaper), that they were a nuisance " more Dutch 
 than decent." The alliteration seduced us somewhat, 
 but there was provocation as well — for, the night 
 
 luded to, John Bi.eecker Van Schaick, will call up, at once, 
 to the memory of the Albanians, as well as to the prominent 
 men of all parts of the country, a loss, by early death, of 
 one of our most accomplished gentlemen, and most admira- 
 bly-gifted minds. The proportion — the balance of character 
 and intellect, in Mr. Van Schaick — the fine sense of honor, 
 and the keen discrimination of wit, the manliness and the del- 
 icacy, the common sense and the strong poetical perception 
 — made him, to me, one of the most admirable of studies, as 
 well as the most winning and endearing of friends. I loved 
 and honored him, till his death, as few men have ever won 
 from mc love and honor. It was a matter of continual urging 
 on my part, to induce him to devote his leisure, given him by 
 ample means, to literature. Some of his poetry appeared in 
 the magazines, and is now collected in a volume of the Amer- 
 ican poets. But he had higher studies and more vigorous 
 aims than light literature, and he had just broken ground as a 
 brilliant orator and statesman, when disease unnerved and 
 prostrated him. Mr. Van Schaick had, however, another 
 quality which would have made him the idol of society iu 
 England — (though, comparatively, little appreciated here)— 
 unequalled wit and brilliancy of convers»ar>".. I say une- 
 qualled — for I have lived long in the so<~i''.y of the men of 
 w:t most celebrated in London, and I ha^d *>/er thought that 
 ibis countryman of my own was their ^equivocal superior. 
 His wonderful quickness and fineness of perception, and the 
 ready facility of his polished language, combined with his 
 universal reading and information, made his society in the 
 highest degree delightful and fascinating ; and though, as rny 
 first friend of manhood, I gave him warm and impulsive ad- 
 miration, my subsequent knowledge of mankind has con- 
 stantly enhanced this admiring appreciation. In all qualities 
 of the heart he was uprightly noble J and, altogether, we 
 think that in him died the best-balanced and most highly 
 gifted character we have ever intimately known. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 707 
 
 before writ in g it, strolling home from a party in Al- 
 bany, we had been brought from the seventh heaven 
 to the sidewalk, tripped up by a pig! Now, to us, 
 the pig was Dutch. We had lived only in New Eng- 
 land, where this animal, from some prejudice against 
 his habits, has not the freedom of the city. Visiting 
 two Dutch cities, New York and Albany, we found 
 the pig master of the pave, and the offending adjec- 
 .ive, lubricated by our disaster, slipped into its place 
 with inevitable facility. We have heard from time to 
 time, of this perversion of the word Dutch, as a thing 
 remembered against us. We had hoped that the 
 great fire in Wall street, the death of Harrison, the 
 Miller-prophecy, and the other events of the last fif- 
 teen years, would have wiped that small adjective out. 
 We do not know why it should outlive the poets who 
 have written and been forgotten in that time — the 
 steamboats that have been built and used up — the 
 politicians who have flourished and fallen — the com- 
 ets that have glittered and gone — the newspapers that 
 have started and stopped. The secret of that little 
 adjective's imperishableness is worth analyzing — 
 especially by poets and the patentees of "asbestos 
 safes." We wish we could stumble upon as long- 
 lived a conjunction ! 
 
 Seriously, we are annoyed and hurt at the discov- 
 ery of a hostility that could make itself heard, in a 
 place we owe so much to for past happiness. We 
 beg the Albanians to forgive us for the unintentional 
 offence, and to take us and our Mirror into that favor 
 of which we have always been ambitious. 
 
 The spot where all the winds of heaven turn the 
 corner — the coolest and most enjoyable spot in the 
 hottest and least enjoyable summer's day — is the out- 
 side bastion of Castle Garden. We made our way 
 there a few days ago, when the streets were fairly in 
 a swoon with the breathless heat, and it was as cool 
 and breezy, outside the round castle, as a hill-top on 
 a May morning. For children — for happy idlers with 
 a book — for strangers who wish to study the delicious 
 panorama of the bay — there is no place comparable 
 to the embrasures, parapets, and terraces of Castle 
 Garden. 
 
 TWO OR THREE LITTLE MATTERS. There is 110 
 
 struggling against it — we have a need to pass the sum- 
 mer in some place that God made. We have argued 
 the instinct down — every morning since May-day — 
 while shaving. It is as cool in the city as in the 
 country, we believe. We see as many trees, from 
 our window (living opposite St. Paul's churchyard), 
 and as much grass, as we could take in at a glance. 
 The air we breathe, outside the embrasures of Castle 
 Garden, every afternoon, and on board the Hoboken 
 and Jersey boats, every warm evening, are entire rec- 
 ompenses to the lungs for the day's dust and stony 
 heat. And then God intends that somebody shall live 
 in the city in summer-time, and why not we? By 
 the time this argument is over, our chin and our re- 
 bellious spirit are both smoothed down. Breakfast is 
 ready — as cool fruit, as delicious butter under the ice, 
 and as charming a vis-d-vis over the white cloth and 
 coffee-tray as we should have in the country. We 
 go to work after breakfast with passable content. The 
 city cries, and the city wheels, the clang of the char- 
 coal cart and the importunities of printer's imp — all 
 blend in the passages of our outer ear as unconsciously 
 and fitly as brook-noises and breeze-doings. We are 
 well enough till two. An hour to dinner — passed in 
 varnished boots and out-doors-inesses — somewhat a 
 weary hour, we must say, with a subdued longing for 
 some earth to walk upon. Dinner — pretty well ! 
 
 Discontent and sorrow dwell in a man's throat, and go 
 abroad while it is watered and swept. The hour after 
 dinner has its little resignations also — coffee, music, 
 and the "angel-visit" from the nursery. Five o'clock 
 comes round, and with it nature's demand for a pair 
 of horses. (Alas ! why are we not centaurs, to have 
 a pair of horses when we marry ?) We get into an 
 omnibus, and as we get toward the porcelain end of 
 the city, our porcelain friends pass us in their car- 
 riages, bound out where the earth breathes and the 
 grass grows. An irresistible discontent overwhelms 
 us! The paved hand of the city spreads out beneath 
 us, holding down the grass and shutting off the salu- 
 tary earth-pores, and we pine for balm and moisture! 
 The over-worked mind offers no asylum of thought. 
 It is the out-door time of day. Nature calls us to 
 her bared bosom, and there is a floor of impenetrable 
 stone between us and her! At the end of the omni- 
 bus-line we turn and go back, and resume our paved 
 and walled-up existence, and all the logic of philoso- 
 phy, aided by icecreams and bands of music, would 
 fail to convince us, that night, that we are not vic- 
 tims and wretches. For Heaven's sake, some kind old 
 man give us an acre off the pavement, and money 
 enough to go and lie on the outside of it of summer 
 afternoons! 
 
 Let us out of this great stone oven ! The city is 
 intolerable ! Oh, from these heated bricks and stones, 
 what moistureless, what wilted, what fainting air comes 
 to the nostrils ! The two river-breezes doing their best 
 to meet across the island, swoon in Broadway. The 
 pores gasp, the muscles droop, the mind is blank and 
 nerveless. Let us out somewhere ! 
 
 We had such a fever upon us as is expressed above, 
 when a friend offered to drive us to Rockaway. With 
 a mental repetition of the affecting prayer of the poor 
 woman in the ballad, 
 
 (" Take a white napkin, and wrap my head softly, 
 And then throw me overboard, me and my baby !") 
 
 we crept into his wagon, and bowled away silently on 
 the road to Jamaica. It was a hot evening, but the 
 smell of the earth, and the woods, and the dairy-farms, 
 roused our drooping petals a little. Jamaica lies 
 somewhat in the island's lap, however, and it was not 
 till we began to sniff the salt of the open Atlantic, that 
 we were once more " capable creatures." But what 
 a revivification as we approached Rockaway ! The 
 sea-breeze nudged up our drooping eyebrows, gave a 
 pull to the loose halliards of our let-go smiles, crisped 
 our pores, and restored everything to its use and its ac- 
 tivity — the irrevocable starch in our shirt-collars alone 
 incapable of rally. Rockaway (we write only for 
 those who know nothing of it) is part of the snowy 
 edge of the Atlantic — St. George's hotel, at Ports- 
 mouth, England, being all but next door to the Rock- 
 away pavilion. Of course there is nothing to take the 
 saline coolness out of the breeze (unless by chance 
 it has come across St. Helena or the Azores), and the 
 difference between the "entire quadruped" in the 
 way of a sea-breeze, and the mixtures they get in 
 some other sea-side places, is worth taking pains for. 
 But let us tell, in plain language, what sort of place 
 Rockaway is— for the benefit of those who are choos- 
 ing a month's resort for health or pleasure. 
 
 The pavilion of Rockaway is an immense hotel, 
 whose majestic portico forms the centre of a curving 
 beach of two or three miles in the bend, on the south- 
 ern shore of Long Island. From this portico, and 
 from the windows of the hotel, the delightful sight 
 and sound of the beating surf are visible and audible 
 —eternal company to eye and ear. The beach ex- 
 tends for miles either way— a broad floor as smooth as 
 marble, and so hard that a carriage wheel scarce 
 
708 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 leaves a print, and this, as a drive, we presume to be 
 the most delightful and enjoyable in the world. The 
 noiseless tread of the horse, and the unheard progress 
 of the wheels, the snowy surf along the edge of which 
 you keep your way, and the high exhilaration given 
 to the spirits by the sea-breeze, and the enlivening 
 beat of the waves upon the sand at your feet, form, 
 altogether, an enchantment to which, in the way of 
 out-door pleasure, we scarce know a parallel. And, 
 as a tvalk, the pure hard floor of that interminable 
 beach is, of course, equally delightful. 
 
 The arrangements for bathing are very well man- 
 aged. There are some twenty bathing-houses on the 
 beach, near the house, and, between the hours of ten 
 and twelve in the forenoon, the ocean-side is guarded 
 and kept exclusive to the ladies and their attendants. 
 An omnibus constantly plies between the bathing- 
 houses and the hotel, and to ladies and children, to 
 old men and young, the hour spent in the invigorating 
 surf is the pleasure of the day. All, alike, come back 
 elated and animated, and the society of the place 
 shows very markedly the fillip given by the sea-bath- 
 ing to health and spirits. Children, more especially, 
 who have drooped in the city, pluck up appetite and 
 vigor immediately at Rockaway. 
 
 As the favorite and regular resort of many of the 
 best families of the city, the society of the pavilion has 
 always been acknowledged to be of a more refined 
 quality and on a more agreeable footing than that of 
 any other watering-place. It is equally removed from 
 useless ceremony and undesirable freedom. Those 
 who wish to combine gayety with the pursuit of 
 health and the enjoyment of luxury, have facilities for 
 all these at Rockaway, in a degree as desirable as it is 
 unusual. The table is not surpassed by that of any 
 hotel even in the city, and this, in a watering-place, is 
 a peculiarity ! Mr. Cranston, the keeper of the house, 
 thoroughly understands his business. 
 
 As to facilities for getting to Rockaway, the railroad 
 from Brooklyn ferry takes you to Jamaica in half an 
 hour ; from Jamaica, on the arrival of the cars, starts 
 regularly a mammoth omnibus with six horses, and 
 other roomy conveyances are supplied if necessary, 
 which bring you to Rockaway in an hour. All de- 
 lays included, it is about two hours from the city. 
 
 Certain coolness and certainly-improved health thrown 
 into the scale, the desirableness of Rockaway, as a 
 summer resort, far outweighs that of every other wa- 
 tering-place in the country. 
 
 A late number of the Southern Literary Messenger 
 contains two poems of uncommon merit for the drift 
 of a periodical. One is by Mr. Gilmore Simms 
 (whose much-worked mine has now and then a very 
 golden streak of poetry), and the other is by H. B. 
 Hirst — a poem of fifty-seven stanzas on the subject of 
 Endtmion. This latter is after Keats. It is very 
 highly studied, very carefully finished, and very airily 
 and spiritually conceived. Its faults are its conceits, 
 which are not always defensible— for instance, the one 
 in italics, in the following beautiful description of Di- 
 ana as she descended to Endymion : — 
 
 " A crescent on her brow — a brow whose brightness 
 Darkened the crescent ; and a neck and breast 
 On which young love might rest 
 Breathless with passion ; and an arm whose whiteness 
 Shadowed the lily's snow ; a lip the bee 
 Might dream in, and a knee 
 Round as a period ; while her white feet glancing 
 Between her sandals, shed a twilight light 
 Athwart the purple night. 
 Cycling her waist a zone, whose gems were dancing 
 With rainbow rays, pressed with a perfect grace, 
 Her bosom's ivory space." 
 
 Now we know as well as anybody what the " round of 
 a period" is, and we have seen, here and there, a god- 
 
 dess's knee, and we declare there is no manner or 
 shape of likeness that justifies the comparison ! With 
 the exception of two or three of these lapses away 
 from nature, however, it is a beautiful poem — this 
 "Endymion" — and will read well in a volume. By 
 the way, let us wonder whether the sweet poetess by 
 the same name is a sister of Mr. Hirst. 
 
 We consider Niblo's garden one of the chief 
 "broideries" upon our woof of probation in this dirty 
 planet, and if there are to be offsets for good things 
 enjoyed this side of Cocytus, we expect to pay for 
 Mitchell. Oh, thou pleasant Mitchell ! And he to 
 iirow fat under the exercise of such a wand of indus- 
 trious enchantment ! What is the man made of, be- 
 sides brains! 
 
 We sat through the " Revolt of thk Harem," a 
 night or two ago, and saw all its funny sights, seriatim. 
 The ballet, as intended to be seen, was excellent — for 
 the time and material, indeed, quite wonderful. But 
 we had our little pleasures (not down in the bill), and 
 one of them was to see pretty Miss Taylor, the clever 
 opera-singer, figuring as an Odalisque danseuse ! If 
 that pretty actress be not abducted, and sold to the 
 sultan within a year, we shall think less of the enter- 
 prise of Salem privateers! She only wants to forget 
 that she is Miss Taylor, indeed, to dance uncommonly 
 well — the consciousness of her silk stockings being at 
 present something of a damper to the necessary aban- 
 don. But, modesty and all, she is very charming in 
 this ballet, and one wonders what Mitchell will make 
 of her next ! Korponay, too — the elegant Korponay 
 — figuring as an Abyssinian eunuch ! That, truth to 
 say, had for us a dash of displeasure ! He entered 
 into it with all his might, it is true, and played the 
 nigger with Jim Crow facility ; but the part, for him, 
 was out of character, and we shall not be content till 
 he is dis-niggered by appearing once more in the role 
 of a gentleman. The bath-scene was well arranged, 
 though the prettiest girls were not in the water — (pray 
 why, Master Mitchell ?) And the military evolutions 
 of the revolted ladies were very well done, and will be 
 better done — with a little more practice, and the mend- 
 ing of that corporal's stocking with a hole in it. The 
 town seemed pleased, we thought. 
 
 We have not yet mentioned the premiere danseuse, 
 Mademoiselle Desjardins, who did very well in the 
 way of her vocation, but from whose feet have de- 
 parted, with the boots she wore, the exquisite symme- 
 try we admired at Simpson's benefit. Ah, ladies, you 
 should wear boots! Here were two feet in tightly- 
 sandalled shoes, looking like two tied-up parcels from 
 Beck's, which, a night or two before, in brodequir 
 bieii faits, looked models of Arabian instep! Ca 
 boots do that? We hereby excommunicate, from the 
 church of true love, all husbands, fathers, and guard- 
 ians, who shall rebel against the preference, by wife, 
 ward, or daughter, of Nunn's boots at S3 50, over 
 Middleton's slippers at ten shillings. The embellish- 
 ment is worth the difference! 
 
 We have received a very testy letter from some old 
 gentleman, requesting us to reform the gait of the 
 New York ladies. He manages to convey what pecu- 
 liarity it is that offends his eye, but he is mistaken as 
 to the stoop. The lady within stands straight enough ! 
 If he knows this, and means covertly to attack the ar- 
 tificial portion of the outline, we can tell him that he 
 rashly invades, not merely a caprice of fashion (which 
 in itself were formidable enough), but the most jealous 
 symbol and citadel of female domination ! There are 
 ihousands of ladies who would resign carriages and 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 709 
 
 Batin without a sigh, but who would die by fire and 
 fagot rather than yield the right to mount on horse- 
 back in the masculine riding habit! " Wearing the 
 breeches" is a worn-out figure of speech, but does 
 anybody in his senses believe that the usurpation has 
 not taken refuge in a new shape ? Need we open our 
 correspondent's eyes any further ? What bird is the 
 most pronounced and unequivocal type of martial and 
 masculine bravery ? What bird is the farthest re- 
 move, in shape, air, and habits, from his female part- 
 ner ? What bird lives up systematically to woman's 
 ideal of a hero — a life of fighting and making love? 
 Draw the outline from the comb of a fighting-cock to 
 the feather-tip of his bustle, and you have the eidolon 
 of male carriage — and the dressmaker's ne plus ultra! 
 We warn off our correspondent! 
 
 LETTER FROM CINNA BEVERLET, ESQ., TO N. P. 
 WILLIS. 
 
 Saratoga, U. S. Hotel, August 1. 
 
 You are feeding the news-hopper of your literary 
 mill, my dear poet, and I am trying on the old trick 
 of gayety at Saratoga. Which of us should write 
 the other a letter ? You, if you say so— though as I 
 get older, I am beginning to think well of the town, 
 even in August. You have your little solaces, my fast 
 liver ! 
 
 Well— what shall I tell you ? This great khan in 
 in the desert of dulness is full, to the most desirable 
 uncomfonableness. Shall [ begin with the men ? 
 God made them first, and as it is a test of the ultimate 
 degree of refinement to reapproach nature, why. let 
 men have the precedence ! Less American than phi- 
 losophical, you will say ! — but men first, let it be ! I 
 must have my way in my post-meridian. 
 
 There used to be dandies! That was in the time 
 when there was an aristocracy in the country. With 
 the levelling (from the middle to the top) that has been 
 going on for the last ten or twelve years, the incentive, 
 somehow, seems gone, or, account for it how you 
 will — there are no dandies! I am inclined to think 
 that two causes may have contributed to it — the indis- 
 cretion of tailors in using gentlemen's ideas promis- 
 cuously, and the attention paid to dress by all classes — 
 everybody who can buy a coat at all, being within one 
 degree of comme ilfaut ! The other side of that degree 
 is not far enough off from the mob, and so dandyism 
 is discouraged. Needlessly, it is true, for the differ- 
 ence is marked enough; but the possibility of a 
 woman's being beautiful enough to adore, and yet not 
 wise enough to know that degree of difference ! Ah, 
 my dear Willis, that an angel may " walk unrecog- 
 nised !" It has killed the class ! 
 
 There is one dandy only, at Saratoga, and he is but 
 the dovetail upon the age gone by — a better-dressed 
 man ten years ago than this morning at breakfast. 
 One dandy among three thousand "fashionables!" It 
 is early in the season, it is true, and (as a youth said 
 to me yesterday, with a clever classification) " all Car- 
 penters coats are gone this year to Newport." But, 
 still, there are those here — done into stereotype, and 
 reckless of the peculiarities in themselves which are 
 susceptible of piquant departures from the fashion — 
 who would have been, twenty years ago, each 
 one a phenix unresembled ! How delightful the 
 springs were, in those days of marked men! How 
 adored they were by the women ! How generously 
 (by such petting as is now unknown) their anxieties 
 of toilet were repaid and glorified ! How the arrival 
 of each " particular star" was hailed by the rushing 
 out of the white dresses upon the portico of Congress 
 hall, the acclamations, the felicitations, the inquiries 
 tender and uproarious ! There was a joyous recipro- 
 
 city of worship between men and women in those 
 days! — and as innocent as joyous ! Compare it with 
 the arms'-length superfinery, and dangerous pent-up- 
 itude of noic ! 
 
 And now, my dear Willis, a cautious word or two 
 about the women. There are " belles" at Saratoga, 
 well-born, well-moulded, and well-dressed — five or six 
 of the first degree of perilous loveliness, none of the 
 second degree (I don't know why) and fifty or sixty 
 with beauty enough to make, each one, a dull man 
 happy. The rest are probably immortal creatures, 
 and have angels to look after them — but, as they make 
 no sacrifices in proportion to their mortal plainness, 
 they are ciphers, at least till doomsday. I will not 
 "mpair my advantages by telling, to an enterprising 
 admirer like yourself, even the names of the adorables, 
 for as I slide into the back-swath of the great mower, 
 I am jealous of opportunity — but there is one woman 
 here who was the electric light of the court of France 
 when I was abroad, a creature of that airy stateliness 
 that betrays the veiled symmetry 
 
 " Of the fair form that terminates so well !" 
 
 and she is as beautiful now as then, for a kind of tender 
 and maternal mournfulness of eye has more than made 
 up for the fainter roses and more languishing lilies of 
 lip and cheek. (God be praised for compensations !) 
 But, without specifying more to you, I must hold back 
 a bit of speculation that I have in reserve, while I 
 make you marvel at a triumph of toilet — achieved by 
 the kind of short gown, or kirtle,* never before seen 
 but at a wash-tub, but promoted now to be the lode- 
 star of the drawing-room ! There are articles of dress, 
 you know, which are intensijiers — making vulgarity 
 more vulgar, aristocracy more aristocratic — and the 
 lady who comes kirtled to breakfast at Saratoga, is of 
 Nature's daintiest fabric, only less proud than win- 
 ning — but fancy a butloned-up frock-coat over a 
 snowy petticoat, and you can picture to yourself the 
 saucy piquancy of the costume. Titania in the 
 laundry! 
 
 I was going to philosophize upon the changes in 
 lady-tactics within the last few years, but I will just 
 hint at a single point that has impressed me. The 
 primitive confidingness of American girlhood (the 
 loveliest social phase that ever ascended from the 
 shepherd's fold to the drawing-room) has been aban- 
 doned for the European mamma-dom and watchful 
 restraint, but without some of the compensatory Eu- 
 ropean concomitants. I will not "lift the veil" by 
 telling what those concomitants are. It would be a 
 delicate and debateable subject. But the effect of 
 this partial adaptation is, in my opinion, far more dan- 
 gerous than what it seeks to supplant or remedy, and 
 among other evils is that of making culpable what was 
 once thought innocent. I shudder at the manufac- 
 ture of new sins in a world where enough, for all 
 needful ruin, grows wild by the road-side. I do not 
 believe we shall grow purer by Europeanizing. 
 
 What else would you like to know ? The water 
 tastes as metallic as of old, though the beauties around 
 the rim of the fountain are an increased congregation. 
 The Marvins keep their great caravansary admirably 
 well, as usual, though, surviving amid such a cataract 
 of travel, they should rather call their hotel "Goat 
 Island" than "United States." Union hall is 
 making a fortune out of the invalid saints, and Con- 
 gress hall looks romantic and flirt-wise as ever ; and 
 by-the-way, they are about to enlarge it, with a portico 
 overlooking the spring. Delicious dinners can be had 
 at the lake? and an omnibus runs there regularly, and 
 in all matters, Saratoga enlarges. It serves a needful 
 
 •I have since discovered that this promoted article of dress 
 was « dug up" by the spirited belles of Carolina, and is called 
 at the south a " Jib-along-josey." 
 
710 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 purpose in this gregarious country; and on the whole, 
 no place of escape is pleasanter to man or woman. 
 
 How is the joyous brigadier? Make my homage 
 acceptable to his quill and his epaulets, and ask him, 
 in his next hour of inspired song, to glorify proud 
 beauty in humble kirtle. 
 
 Come to Saratoga, my dear Willis, and let me tell 
 your how sincerely I am yours, 
 
 Cinna Beverley. 
 
 The time will come, perhaps, when we shall be a 
 connoisseur in snuff-boxes, insects, or-autographs — 
 but, meantime, we are curious in the cultivation of 
 the rarer kinds of friendship. The ingenious idea oc- 
 curred to us, some ten years ago, of turning the waste 
 overflow of our heart into some such special and 
 available irrigation, and the result we shall leave to be 
 published posthumously, under the title of Amicul- 
 ture, or a Trkatise on Love-Waste. Our proper 
 channels of affection being first supplied to the point 
 of overflow, we have felt free to venture upon very 
 bold experiments with the remainder, and some of our 
 specimens, of course, are simply curiosities ; but we 
 have them (friends) of every quality, form, and condi- 
 tion, male and female, preserved with studious care 
 and industry — guardedly confining ourselves to only I 
 one of a kind. Some of the humbler specimens are ' 
 of great beauty, but will show better preserved and 
 pressed in a posthumous amibarium. We can only 
 venture, in our lifetime, to give specimens of the 
 more ornamental varieties ; and our object now is to 
 introduce a leaf of the species "callow dandy" — in 
 other words, to give you a letter from a very elegant 
 lad with a nascent mustache, a prized friend of ours, 
 now, for the first time, at Saratoga. He writes about 
 trifles, but in hot weather we (for one) like trifles best; 
 and as he writes, after all, with a dash of philosophy, 
 we have not thought it worth while to omit' or alter. 
 Here is his letter, written in the vanishing legibility of 
 a once good school-hand : — 
 
 U. S. Hotel, Aug. — . 
 
 Dear Willis: Your kind note to St. John, of the 
 Knickerbocker, got me the state-room with the pic- 
 ture of " Glenmary" on the panel, and I slept under 
 the protection of your household gods — famously, of 
 course. The only fault I found with that magnificent 
 boat, was the right of any "smutched villain" to walk 
 through her. It is a frightful arrangement that can 
 sell.to a beauty and a blackguard, for the same money, 
 the right to promenade on the same carpet, and go to j 
 sleep with the same surroundings on the opposite 
 sides of a pine partition ! Give me a world where I 
 antipodes slay put! But what a right-royal, "slap- 
 up" supper they give in the Knickerbocker! They'll 
 make the means better than the end— travelling better 
 than arriving— if they improve any more ! I had a I 
 great mind to go back the next day, and come up j 
 again. 
 
 Saratoga's great fun. I had no idea there were so 
 many kinds of people — beasts and beauties. Five 
 hundred men and women in one house is a lumping 
 of things that shoves aside a great many secrets 
 there's no room for. Old women popping out of their 
 rooms, with their wigs off, to call a waiter — lazy men 
 coming to breakfast unshaved — cross people that can 
 not be smiling all day long — lovers besieging, when 
 the lady would prefer cracker and cheese— jealous 
 people looking daggers while they pretend to blow 
 their noses — bustles flattened by dinner-chairs into 
 upright pianos — ladies spreading their nostrils at un- 
 expected introductions — old maids in calm disgust, 
 and just-outs in " sweet confusion" — a Turk in the 
 portico selling attars, and a Jew in the drawing-room, 
 shining in patent leather — all pretty good sights, as 
 
 the world goes, and stuff for moralizing — eh, old 
 Willis ? 
 
 The charm of society at Saratoga lies in getting 
 the thing without paying for it. To see a pretty 
 woman in town, one has to resolve at breakfast, shape 
 his arrangements, stick three hours to his resolve, trav- 
 el a mile, ring a bell, run the chance of intruding or 
 "not at home," talk to some bore in the way of aunt 
 or brother, and two to one, after all, you light upon 
 an undress humor in the lady visited. In the great 
 drawing-room of the United States, on the contrary, 
 the whole visitable world is reduced to the compass of 
 a gamut, and you have it all within the spread of your 
 hand, and all in tune ! You dress, breakfast, and sit 
 on a sofa, and in ten minutes your entire female ac- 
 quaintance passes within three feet of your nose, and 
 every one as ready to be talked to as if you had ridden 
 three miles, and wasted patience and a forenoon to 
 have that pleasure. You leave her when you like, 
 without the trouble of an adieu, see and talk to twenty 
 more with the same charming economy of time and 
 labor, and having got through your duty-talks by 
 eleven, you select your favorite and devote yourself to 
 her for the remaining twelve or fourteen hours — "a 
 month's love in a day !" This, if you please, is letting 
 
 M the serious part of life go by 
 Like the neglected sand," 
 
 and very glad to be rid of it! Now, don't you think, 
 my paternal Willis, that society in town has too many 
 hinderances, obstructions, cross-purposes, exactions, 
 mystifications, and botherations — considering that a 
 plague slices off just as much life as a pleasure! I 
 wish the Marvins would take a lease of New Y"ork, 
 roof it in, knock away walls, and make a "Springs" 
 of it ! It is so very cumbrous, letting people have 
 whole houses to themselves ! 
 
 Have you anatomized this new fashion of gaiter- 
 boots, my dear dandy ? Do you observe what a break- 
 down they give to the instep, and how shamble-footed, 
 and down at the heel the men seem who wear them ? 
 After all, there is a " blood look" to a man's leg as 
 well as a horse's, and no dandy can look "clean- 
 limbed" with unstrapped trousers and his apparent foot 
 cut in two by shoes of two colors. The eye wants a 
 clean line from the point of the toe to the swearing- 
 place of the patriarchs, and an unblemished instep 
 rising to the pantaloon. The world's tailors have 
 been ever since breeches-time learning the proper ad- 
 justment of straps, and now it is perfected, the capri- 
 cious world condemns it to disuse ! Write an article 
 about it, my dear Willis! And then these gathered 
 French trousers — making a man into a " big-hipped 
 humble-bee" — as if we needed to be any more like 
 women ! I see, too, that here and there a youth has 
 a coat padded over the hips ! Though, apropos of 
 coats, there is a well-dressed man here with a new cut 
 of Carpenter's. He's a Prometheus, that Carpenter — 
 heating his goose by undoubted "fire from heaven!" 
 The skirts of the last inspiration cross slightly behind, 
 aiding the Belvidere " pyramid inverted" (from the 
 shoulders down) and of course promoting the fine arts 
 of tailoring. Allowing freely the tip-toppiness of 
 Jennings in trousers, waistcoats, and overcoats, there 
 is nobody like this Philadelphia man for coats! You 
 might as well restore the marble chips to the nose of 
 a statue as suggest an improvement to him. And what 
 a blessing this is, my dear Willis'! Do you remem- 
 ber the French dandy's sublime sentiment: " Si Von 
 rencontrait un habit parfait dans toute sa vie, on pour- 
 rait presque se passer d' 'amour /" 
 
 Ah! such an interminable letter as I am writing! 
 Your friend " Jo. Sykes," the puller of the big wires, 
 is here, handsome and thoughtful, with a daughter 
 who is to be the belle of 1860 — the loveliest child I 
 have seen in my travels. The beautiful women I will 
 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 711 
 
 tell you about over our olives and tinta. No events 
 that I can trust to the indiscretion of pen and ink. 
 Ever yours, Augustus Iliho. 
 
 Of course there was a postscript, but that we must 
 reserve for posterity. Our friend 'Gus Iliho is not a 
 man to write altogether upon third person topics. But 
 we have another friend at Saratoga — a female speci- 
 men — and we hope to hear from her, 'twixt this and 
 the season over. Our readers will please expect it. 
 
 THE CABINET. 
 
 (" The Committee" trimming pencil in the Eastern-most 
 bathin g-house on Rockaway beach. Enter the briga- 
 dier with nostrils inflated.) 
 
 Brig. — Fmff! fmff! God bless the Atlantic ocean ! 
 Fmff! "Salt sea" indeed! I never smelt a breeze 
 fresher. Fmff! fmff! fmff! You got the start of 
 me, my dear boy ! (pulls his last high heel out of the 
 deep sand and sits down on the threshold.) What say 
 to a strip and dip before we come to business ? 
 
 Com. — Fie ! — general, fie ! Look through your 
 fingers at the other end of the beach ! It is the hour 
 of oceanic beatitude — the la lies bathing ! The mur- 
 muring waters will be purer for the interview. Bathe 
 we in the first wave after ! 
 
 Brig. — How can you 
 
 " Play in wench-like words with that 
 Which is so serious ?" 
 
 Did you bring a towel, mi-boy? 
 
 Com. — Tut ! — would you offend the south wind, that 
 proffers the same office so wooingly ? Walk on the 
 beach, man, and let the sun peruse you, whileyoudry! 
 
 Brig. — So should I be more red, with a vengeance ! 
 But I don't like this dry-salting, mi-boy ! It's too 
 sticky ! Ye gods ! look at the foam upon that wave ! 
 What is that like, my poet ? 
 
 Com. — Like the unrolling of a bale of lace on a 
 broad counter! The "tenth wave" is the head clerk, 
 and the clams and soft crabs are the ladies shopping! 
 How 1 love the affinities of Art and Nature! 
 
 Brig. — Poh ! Where's Nature's twine and brown 
 paper? Don't be transcendental ! 
 
 Cum. — How ignorant you are, not to know eel-grass 
 and devil's apron — Nature's twine and brown paper! 
 My dear general, were you ever introduced to the 
 Atlantic? Is this your first visit? Stand up in the 
 doorway ! 
 
 (Brigadier rises and the surf boxes to the ground.) 
 
 General Morris ! the Atlantic ocean. Atlantic 
 ocean ! General Morris. I am happy to bring two 
 such distinguished " swells" together. Though (apro- 
 pos, Mr. "Heaving Main !") the general is a gay man! 
 Look out for your " pale Cynthia !" The moon is 
 not famed for her constancy ! 
 
 Brig. — What are you mumbling there, mi-boy! 
 1 wish, under the tender influence of these suggesting 
 waters, to express a wish that you would write some 
 poetry, or give us a new tale, or dash us off a play, or — 
 
 Com. — Or, in some other way make rubbish for 
 posterity! No, sir! There are no pack-horses in 
 Posthumousland, and, as much as will ride in a ghost's 
 knapsack, with his bread and cheese, is as much, in 
 quantity, as any man should write who has pity for his 
 pedestrian soul on its way to dooms-day ! Why, 
 general, the tales which I am about to publish (in- 
 cluding " Inklings," "Loiterings" etc., etc.), will 
 make, of themselves, a most adult-looking octavo. 
 My poems and plays have tonnage enough to carry, 
 at least, all the bulk necessary to a fame; my miscel- 
 lanies, yet to be collected, will make a most sizeable 
 
 volume of slip-slop; pencillings is no pamphlet; and 
 Letters from under a Bridge, and other epistolary 
 
 production do you see how beautifully the sand 
 
 immortalizes the industrious waves that write succes- 
 sively their sparkling lines on the beach ! 
 
 Brig. — Don't malign your "eternal fame, mi-boy !" 
 Com — More eternal, I believe, than the love of the 
 impertinent Lothario in the sonnet : — 
 
 (" But say, my all ! my mistress ! and my friend ! 
 What day next week th' eternity shall end?") 
 
 but how much more eternal it would be, if they would 
 make the genesis of a man's works like that of the 
 patriarchs — dateable from the first satisfactory off-shoot 
 of his manhood ! Do you remember the expressive 
 genealogy of Shem ? 
 
 12. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years and begat 
 Salah : 
 
 13. And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred 
 and three years and begat sons and daughters. 
 
 14. And Eber lived jour and thirty years and begat Peleg: 
 
 15. And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and 
 thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. 
 
 And so on, up to Abraham, whose father was seven- 
 ty years old when he was born. But don't you sup- 
 pose these boys did anything before they were thirty- 
 odd ? Their history begins with their first creditable 
 production ! Eber was nothing till he begat Peleg, 
 though, very likely, the critics of that time "preferred 
 very much his earlier productions." 
 
 Brig. — And you think you could begin, now, with 
 your first Peleg and Salah ? 
 
 Com. — You have said it. But, as I hinted before, 
 my posthumous knapsack is already full of rubbish, 
 and a thought strikes me ! 
 
 Brig. — " Call it out !" 
 
 Com. — I'll change my style and start a new reputa- 
 tion, incog! 
 
 Brig. — Famous ! 
 
 Com. — And sell some man the glory of it for an 
 annuity ! 
 
 Brig. — Good ! 
 
 Com. — (Thoughtfully) — The old countess of Des- 
 mond shed her teeth three times. 
 
 Brig. — A precedent in nature. 
 
 Com. — (Firmly) — Soit! Done! So be it! Hang 
 me if I don't ! You'll hear of a new author before 
 long — one that beats me hollow ! Look me up a 
 purchaser, my dear brigadier ! Literary fame furnish- 
 ed at — say, three thousand dollars per annum ! 
 
 Brig.— Mi-boy, the ladies have left the beach — 1 
 wonder if the sea would condescend to us, now ! 
 
 Com. — Peltry after roses and ivory ! — I don't know! 
 
 Brig. — Talking of Esau — he should have lived in 
 cravat-time. Well-drest, your hirsute customers looks 
 not amiss ! (No pun, you villain !) Stand back, my 
 unclad-boy ! Here comes a wagon load of women ! 
 
 Com. — Chambermaids and nurses; who, by the 
 way they flock to the beach in the male hours, must 
 either have eyes with a nictitating membrane, or a 
 modesty that is confined to what they hear. I wish to 
 heaven that all females were patricians — undesecrated 
 by low taste and servitude ! It's like classifying owls 
 with angels because they are both feathered, to call 
 these rude creatures icomen .' What's that scar on 
 your breast, brigadier ? 
 
 Brig.— Slide down your " nictitating membrane," 
 mi-boy, and don't be too observing! Here goes! 
 Hup! (The brigadier rushes into the surf, takes a 
 stitch through three frills of the island's shirt, and rises 
 like a curly-headed sun from the ocean.) 
 
 Com (solus).— There he swims! God bless him 
 for a buoyant brigadier ! How the waves tumble over 
 his plump shoulders, delighted to feel the place where 
 ride his epaulets and his popularity! * Look out for 
 sharks, my dear general ! They snuff a poet afar off ! 
 
712 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Natural victims we are to them — on land or water ! 
 Hear him laugh as he shakes the brine out of his 
 whiskers ! Was ever such a laugh ! His heart gives 
 that " ha ! ha !" a fillip as it sets out ! I must swim 
 off to him ! Clear the beach, soft crab and sand-bird! 
 Morris and Willis must swim together ! 
 
 Brig. (Sitting down to dry.) — This salting freshens 
 a man, and this wetting makes him dry. Oh for a 
 drink and the asp of Cleopatra — a cobbler and a wiper ! 
 Shake yourself, mi-boy ! 
 
 Com. — Suppose we roll in the sand and take a 
 wrestle, like the athletse of old — eh ? How do you 
 propose to get the sand and gravel out from your 
 doigts dupied, general ? 
 
 Brig. — " Gravelled," we are, mi-boy, but not " for 
 lack of matter !" Let's dress first, and then go down 
 and rinse our feet with the aid of the moon's lover — 
 lacking a servant to bring a pail ! Are you dry ? 
 
 Com. — Inner and outer man — very ! What's this — 
 dropped out of your pocket ! 
 
 Brig. — A song* that I wrote for Brown to set to 
 music. Shall I read it to you ? 
 
 (Brigadier reads with his hand on his breast.) 
 
 'tis now the promised hour. 
 
 u The fountains serenade the flowers. 
 
 Upon their silver lute — 
 And, nestled in their leafy bowers 
 
 The forest-birds are mute : 
 The bright and glittering hosts above, 
 
 Unbar their golden gates, 
 While nature holds her court of love, 
 
 And for her client waits'. 
 Then, lady, wake — in beauty rise ! 
 
 'Tis now the promised hour, 
 When torches kindle in the skies 
 
 To light thee to thy bower. 
 
 " The day we dedicate to care — 
 
 To love the witching night ; 
 For all that's beautiful and fair 
 
 In hours like these unite. 
 E'en thus the sweets to flowerets given — 
 
 The moonlight on the tree — 
 And all the bliss of earth and heaven — 
 
 Are mingled, love, in thee. 
 Then, lady, wake — in beauty rise ! 
 
 'Tis now the promised hour, 
 When torches kindle in the skies 
 
 To light thee to thy bower." 
 
 Com. — True and smooth as a locomotive on a "T" 
 rail! Is it sold and set? 
 
 Brig. — Beautifully set to music by Brown, and sold 
 to Atwill, who will publish it immediately. 
 
 Com — It's a delicious song, my happy troubadour, 
 and destined to tumble over bright lips enough to make 
 a sunset. That we should so envy the things we 
 make ! My kingdom for a comb ! I shall never get 
 the salt out of my hair — I'm 
 
 " briny as the beaten mariner, 
 Oft soused in swelling Tethys' saltish tears." 
 
 Tf you want a curl to keep, now's your time ' 
 
 Brig.— Willis ? 
 
 Com.— My lord ? 
 
 Brig. — I hear you were voted in to the " Light 
 Guard" last week. 
 
 Com. —Yes, sir, an honorary private ! I feel the 
 compliment, for they are a set of tip-top capables, joy- 
 ous and gentlemanly — but, my dear martinet, what the 
 devil do they want of a man's dura mater? 
 
 Brig. — A. man's what ? 
 
 Com. — The weary membrane of an author's brain. 
 
 Brig. — They want it, you say ? 
 
 Com — With the official announcement came an 
 order to equip, myself according to directions, and 
 
 • This song, set to music, has been purchased and copv 
 righted by Mr. Atwill. 
 
 ! ! " deposite my fatigue-jacket" in the armory of the 
 corps ! What fatigue-jacket have I, but the jacket of 
 
 1 1 my brain ? 
 
 Brig. — True ! Pick up your boots and come 
 along ? 
 (Exit the brigadier barefoot, and the cabinet adjourns.) 
 
 Half an hour later — room No. 300, Rockaway Pavil- 
 ion. Two sherry cobblers on the table, with two 
 straws, erect in the ice.) 
 
 Brig. — How like this great structure on the sand 
 must be, to a palace amid the ruins of Persepolis ! 
 
 Com. — The palace of Chilminar with forty columns 
 and stairs for ten horses to go up abreast ! — very like 
 indeed — especially the sand ! Somewhat like, in 
 another respect, by the way — that the palaces of 
 Persepolis were the tombs of her kings, and Rock- 
 away is the place of summer repose for the indignant 
 aristocracy of Manhattan. 
 
 Brig. — True, as to the aristocracy, but why " indig- 
 nant ?" 
 
 Com — That there can be fashion without them at 
 Saratoga (which there could not be once), and that 
 " aristocratic" and " fashionable" are two separate 
 estates, not at all necessary to be combined in one 
 individual. Rockaway is full, now, of the purest 
 porcelain — porcelain fathers, porcelain mothers, porce 
 lain daughters ! 
 
 Brig — Then why is not the society perfect at Rock 
 away? 
 
 Com. — Because the beaux go after the crockery al 
 Saratoga. The rush, the rowdydow, the flirtations 
 and game suppers, are all at Saratoga ! Aristocracy 
 likes to have the power of complaining of these things 
 as nuisances inseparable from its own attraction. Aris- 
 tocracy builds high walls, but it likes to have them 
 pertinaciously overleaped. The being let alone within 
 their high walls, as they are now at their exclusive 
 watering-places, was not set down in the plans of aris- 
 tocratic campaigns ! 
 
 Brig. — But they are charming people here, mi- boy? 
 
 Com. — The best-bred and most agreeable people in 
 the world, but the others give a beau more for his 
 money. In all countries, but ours, people make ac- 
 quaintances for life. But the hinderances and obstacles 
 which are not minded at the beginning of a lifetime 
 acquaintance, are intolerable in an acquaintance for a 
 week (the length of most summer acquaintances with 
 us), and the floating beaux from the south, the west, 
 the Canadas, and the West Indies, go where they can 
 begin at the second chapter — omitting the tedious 
 preface and genealogical introduction. 
 
 Brig. — Rockaway is stupid, then. 
 
 Com. — Quiet, not stupid. The lack of beaux and 
 giddy times is only felt by the marriageable girls, and 
 there are a great many people in the world besides 
 marriageable girls. And upon this same " many 
 people," will depend the prosperity of the Pavilion. 
 When it is known that it is a delightful place for 
 everything but flirting, it will be a centre for sober 
 people to radiate to, and a paradise for penserosos like 
 you and me, general — eh? I suppose Cranston would 
 as lief (liefer, indeed) that his rooms should be filled 
 with tame people as wild. 
 
 Brig. — How's your cobbler ? 
 
 Com — Fit to immortalize the straw that passes it ! 
 
 Brig. — What birds are those, my Willis ? 
 
 Com. — Shore birds that build in the sedge and feed 
 on molluscous animals — death on the soft crabs ! 
 And, general, do you know that the male of this bird 
 (called the phalarope), is a most virtuous example to 
 our sex ? What do you think he does ? 
 
 Brig. — Feeds the little-uns ? 
 
ETHKMEllA. 
 
 713 
 
 Com.— Hatches them, half and half, with the she- 
 bird, and helps bring thetn up ! 
 
 Brig.— la the gender shown in the plumage ? 
 
 Com. — No. 
 
 Brig.— So 1 thought. Your handsome peacock, 
 now, leaves it all to the hen. The domestic virtues 
 are their own reward — remarkably so ! Is that the 
 dinner-bell ? 
 
 Com. — Yes, it is that music ! 
 
 " Give me excess of it— that, surfeiting, 
 The appetite may sicken, and so die." 
 
 I'll meet you below, my dear general ! Adieu ! 
 
 {Cabinet adjourns for the day.) 
 
 That I 
 
 feelings in common than the pulpit admits, 
 believe. 
 
 Com. — The chasm between them in this world 
 should be narrowed, for they have many sympathies. 
 The bigot makes the separation unnaturally wide. 
 Who is the one man* mentioned in Scripture as 
 "loved" by the Savior? The "young ruler" who 
 could not give up his " great possessions" "to inherit 
 eternal life !" Is not this tender interest in one " out 
 of the fold," a lesson — a most unheeded lesson, to the 
 ? I talk feelingly of this, for I have an ad- 
 
 strict sect 
 
 THE CABINET. 
 
 miration of goodness and purity that has never sepa 
 
 I rated itself from my love of beauty. I love a simple 
 
 1 and unobtrusive piety, and am drawn irresistibly 
 
 ! toward the possessor. Yet this better part of my 
 
 nature is excluded with the rest, when 1 am denied 
 
 ! Christian sympathy. Come out of dream-land, 
 
 brigadier, and observe the tender violet in that upper 
 
 , j cloud! 
 
 (Rockaway beach, Sunday evening. The brigadier and \ Brig.— I was thinking whether the wave that falls 
 committee seated on their boot-legs, after walking two j) upon tne beach is to be congratulated or pitied— com- 
 mies, barefoot, on the hard sand.) paring its arrival, that is to say, with its "swell" time 
 .-Boots are durance vile, mi-boy! How "^^h , upon^se^^^^ f ^^ ^ ^ 
 
 locks with which it approaches the beach, though 
 they are breakers ahead when seen from the sea, are 
 beautiful when seen from the shore— as the head, 
 whitened with the dreaded troubles of life, grows 
 more beautiful in the eyes of angels, as it is more 
 whitened and troubled, approaching heaven ! But 
 what hypocrites these shore-birds are, with their 
 
 we lose in not keeping our feet open to female assidu- || 
 ities ! Fancy one of those apostolic washings—a 
 sweet woman kneeling before you, and, with her hair 
 breathing perfumes over your ankles, performing it as 
 an office of tenderness and hospitality! Can patent 
 leather be weighed against desuetude so melancholy ! 
 Com. — I am satisfied that the tender pink in your 
 toe-nails was intended by nature to be admired, my 
 
 dear brigadier ! And there is nature 
 eloquent in a corn — against the airle 
 boot and stocking ! Why is a poet like a sandal ? 
 
 Brig. — Philosophize, my dear boy, don't quibble ! 
 
 Com. — Because he's a soul kept under with a thong ! 
 
 Brig. — Willis, 1 love the sea ! 
 
 Com. — So sung Barry Cornwall, "the open sea." 
 As if Pharaoh had not yet passed over! To me the 
 sea seems, on the contrary, for ever slamming down 
 trap-doors of surf, and carefully covering the " treas- 
 ures of the deep" with cold water. I never saw any- 
 thing less "open!" 
 
 Brig. — There goes the sun down ! as red as — what 
 shall 1 compare it to ? 
 
 Com.—K wafer, sealing up this 17th of August for 
 the doomsday postoffice. Happy they who have not 
 forgotten the P. S. of repentance ! 
 
 Brig.— Ah, mi-boy! that pious infancy of yours! 
 It oozes through the after-crust of your manhood in 
 drops of poetry ! Pity you are less of a saint than 
 you were at seventeen ! ( 
 
 Com.— Less of a saint I am not, though more of a 
 sinner lam .' All I had seen at seventeen was beauty 
 and goodness, and with an innate sense of beauty and 
 goodness, I worshipped the Maker, my youth through, 
 with a poet's adoration ! The heart melts and drops 
 upon its knees within a man, at any sudden revelation 
 of unusual loveliness; and I have worshipped God, 
 and loved one of his angelic creatures, with the white 
 quivering lip of the same rush of blood inward. If to 
 look often and adoringly " through nature up to na- 
 ture's God" be devotion, I am still devout. No sun- 
 set, no morning's beauty, no rich and sudden sight of 
 loveliness in scenery, goes by without the renewal of 
 that worship in my heart that was once religion. I 
 praise God daily. Worldling as I am, and hardly as I 
 dare claim any virtue as a Christian, there is that 
 within me which sin and folly never reached or tainted. 
 The unprompted and irresistible thoughts, upsprings 
 in my mind in any scene of beauty, would seem 
 prayers, and pure ones, to many an humble Christian. 
 Pardon me for reading to you this inner leaf, my dear 
 brigadier ! 
 
 Brig. — Thank you, on the contrary, for its philos- 
 ophy, my dear boy ! Saints and worldlings have more 
 
 remonstrance— I whitest plumes turned earthward; 
 confinement of backed snipe on the beach, with hi 
 
 See that dark- 
 white breast and 
 
 belly. 
 
 Brig. — Rather what knowledge of mankind they 
 have— preferring to keep their darker side for the 
 more forgiving eye of Heaven! 
 
 Com.— True— the better reading! Do you like 
 snipe? 
 
 Brig. — With a pork shirt they are fairish — that is, 
 if you can't get woodcock. But, mi-boy, it isn't you 
 that need ever eat snipe ! 
 
 Com. — As how ? 
 
 Brig.— (Pulling out the Sunday Mercury and read- 
 ing)— " Willis, it" is said, has profited $5,000 by the 
 sale of the last edition of ' Pencillings by the Way.'" 
 
 Com.— The mischief he has! — for "has" read would 
 be pleased to. Perhaps the editor of the Mercury 
 will be kind enough to fork over the difference be- 
 tween fact and fiction ! By-the-way, I have read the 
 book, myself, for the first time in eight years, and I 
 have been both amazed and amused with the difference 
 between what I saw then, and what I know now ! And 
 I am going to give the public the same amazement 
 and amusement, by writing for the Mirror a review of 
 " Pencillings" with my new eyes— showing the inter- 
 esting difference between first impressions and after 
 familiarity. 
 
 £ n 'g.— They'll want to read " Pencillings ' over 
 again, mi-boy! 
 
 Com.— For a hasty pudding it has held out surpri- 
 singly already. The fifth edition, embellished with 
 engravings, is still selling well in England, and in the 
 most stagnant literary month of the year we have sold 
 two editions, as you know. I an. inclined to fear that 
 1 shall be less known by my careful writings than by 
 this unrevised book-written between fat.gue and 
 sleep, by roadsides and in most unstudyhke places, 
 and republished, in the Mirror edition, exactly as first 
 written ! There is a daguerreotypity in literal first 
 impressions, my dear general, and a man would write 
 an interesting letter, the first moment after seeing the 
 Colosseum for the first time, though a descr.pt.on from 
 memory, a month after, would be very stupid. Did 
 vou ever feel posthumous, brigadier? 
 Brig.— No. I never was dead. 
 
714 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Com. — Nor I, except "in trespasses and sins" — but 
 a letter I received to-day has given me a most pos- 
 thumous sensation. It was sent me to publish, by a 
 lady who has lived several years abroad, and has lately 
 revisited Saratoga. It will "rub my brass" as the 
 maids say, to publish the passage about myself (quoted 
 from the letter of a German baron), but it may make 
 somebodies buy " Pencillings" to know that it has 
 passed abroad into a vade-mecum for travellers. So, 
 down modesty and swell pocket! Who knows but 
 that the " Sunday Mercury," that " lighted on the 
 heaven-kissing hill" of $5,000, may be a better 
 prophet than historian ! Set your heels comfortably 
 into the sand, general, and listen to this letter. There 
 are some sweet lines at the close, written by the same 
 lady after visiting the home of the young poetess Da- 
 vidson, whose precocious genius and premature death 
 have been so feelingly written upon : — 
 
 " When you and I, my dear sir, met so pleasantly 
 some weeks since at Saratoga, I forgot to give you an 
 extract from a letter which I had received from Ger- 
 many. No one can be insensible to deserved praise 
 from a far land, and I know you will read with gratifi- 
 cation these few lines from a distinguished friend of 
 mine : ' I remember with pleasure our visit to your 
 splendid frigate, the United States, in the bay of Na- 
 ples. We met Mr. N. P. Willis on board, and after 
 his cruise I met him again at Lady Parley's. He will j 
 not remember me, but if you ever see him, tell him ! 
 that a person who has visited almost all the spots i 
 described in his "Pencillings by the Way," feels the 
 greatest pleasure in reading his book at least twice a | 
 year. It accompanies him regularly from Dresden to 
 hit estates in the spring, and back to the city in the 
 autumn.' 
 
 " Not having seen Saratoga for many years, I was 
 curious to perceive what changes time had made. Of 
 course, its outward condition is greatly improved, and 
 the remarkable change of all is the transition of the 
 fashion and gayety from Congress hall to the United 
 States hotel. It would be unwise to compare this 
 latter establishment with any other that we have seen 
 in Europe, inasmuch as the whole order of arrange- 
 ment is entirely different ; but this must be conceded, 
 that for a fortnight, no place in the world offers more 
 amusement. One may remain months at Carlsbad, 
 Baden-Baden, &c, without fatigue, in consequence 
 of the entirely independent manner of living; but 
 Saratoga must be taken, to be enjoyed, in homeopathic 
 doses of the beforementioned fourteen days. It is 
 really extraordinary how well-ordered and conducted 
 is the United States hotel, when we remember the 
 crowds that dwell within its four walls and its colo- 
 nies; and assuredly the brothers* who bring about 
 this state of things, deserve great commendation. 
 Having been repeatedly told, since my return from a 
 long absence, that Saratoga had deteriorated, I con- 
 fess to having seen nothing of the sort. I had the 
 good fortune to meet some of the most remarkable 
 men of my country, and many of the fairest of its 
 daughters, and to enjoy their society. I hold that 
 Saratoga must be visited upon broad American prin- 
 ciples — no cliques (like will come to like) — but a gra- 
 cious word for all. At Carlsbad, and all other conti- 
 nental watering-places, the government provides a 
 master of ceremonies, who introduces, regulates the 
 balls, &c. The voice of the people gives this posi- 
 tion, at the United States hotel, to a citizen of Balti- 
 more, and allow me to say, that those who look upon 
 him as a mere manager of balls, totally mistake his 
 character; for a kinder and better heart never beat 
 within a human breast than he possesses. Indeed, Bal- 
 timore seems to have been singularly well represented 
 this year — the incomparable beauty of its women 
 
 * Messrs. Marvin — excellent hosts and most worthy men. 
 
 eclipsing all, and the wit alone of one finished gentle- 
 man of that town being sufficient to leaven a ' mass 
 meeting.' 
 
 "I think the visits of clergymen to watering-places 
 a signal benefit, when they resemble the Rev. Dr. 
 Bethune, engaging in pleasing conversation with 
 young and old, whom he enlivened by his eloquence. 
 He never lost sight of the great aim of his existence — 
 their improvement. Ever surrounded by eager listen- 
 ers, he left them better, wiser. On the whole, I think 
 we must consider Saratoga as a great public good — a 
 neutral ground, where the south discovers that the 
 north is not a Mont Blanc, and the north perceives 
 that the south is not a Vesuvius ! 
 
 " My last visit at Saratoga wasto the late home of the 
 gifted Davidsons. Their brother kindly accompanied 
 me, and presented me to his bereaved father. It 
 seemed, as I lingered amidst their remains, a very home 
 of shadows'* — a wondrous contrast to the surrounding 
 scenes. I considered myself quite fortunate in hiving 
 paid this visit, as Dr. Davidson leaves Saratoga 
 shortly, and the establishment will thereby be entrHy 
 dismembered. 
 
 * " A home of shadows ! mid the din 
 
 Of fashion's gay and glittering scene 
 So calm, so purely calm within 
 Breathing of holiness serene. 
 
 " A home of shadows ! where the twain, 
 Who dwelt within its hallowed core, 
 Are sought with wondering eyes in vain, 
 Alas ! to bless its walls no more .' 
 
 " The pair have winged their glorious flight, 
 And, borne by angels through the air, 
 To realms of everlasting light, 
 Are linked with cherubs bright and fair. 
 
 " Some student, yet, in time untold, 
 Star-seeking in the dark blue sky, 
 Will, midst its silver lamps, behold 
 These joyous Pleiads wandering by. 
 
 " Back, back to earth — its pleasures, cares — 
 Must thou, my soul, my thoughts be given, 
 But, bless the spot, that, midst its snares, 
 Called for a lingering look to heaven." 
 
 Brig. — Charming verses, and she must be a fresh 
 hearted and impressible woman who wrote them. Do 
 you remember the first thought of " Pencillings,' 
 mi-boy — the oysters at Sandy Welsh's, over which 1 
 offered to send you abroad ? 
 
 Com. — Theodore Fay, you, and I, supping together! 
 
 Brig. — You have a way of knowing opportunity 
 when you see it! I little dreamed of so long a leass 
 of you! Dear Theodore! howl should like to eat 
 that supper over again ! 
 
 Com. — I am very glad it agreed with you (presuming 
 it is me and Theodore you want over again — not the 
 oysters !) They say Fay has grown fat, handsome 
 and diplomatic. When shall we have that sweet fel 
 low back among us? 
 
 Brig. — When they want the place for a green sec 
 retary, who knows nothing of the court or court Ian 
 guage. As soon as a man has been long enough 
 attached to a legation to be presentable and useful, 
 they recall him ! What is that other letter I brought 
 you ? 
 
 Com. — From a lady at Fishkill, who is dazzled with 
 the upshoot of "Fanny Forester." She thinks Fan- 
 ny's offhand piquancy is easy to do, and the lettet 
 shows how much she is mistaken. I would fain say 
 an encouraging word, however, for she seems to have 
 the best of motives for wishing to be literary. Now, 
 is it kinder to discourage such beginners at once, or to 
 encourage them good-naturedly into a delusion? 
 
 Brig. — Always discourage, mi-boy, for if they have 
 genius, they will prosper 
 
 " like a thunder-cloud, against the wind," 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 715 
 
 and if they have none, they are better stopped where 
 they are. How many heart-aching authoresses do we 
 know at this moment, who can write just well enough 
 to be wofully distressed with the reluctance of the 
 market! The only style saleable is the spicy but dif- 
 ficult vein of bright Fanny Forester, and yet, to a 
 neophyte, that very woof seems the easiest woven ! 
 A woman who is more intelligent than the people 
 around her, is very apt to believe that she might be 
 famous, and make money with her pen; and unless 
 
 " Fair politure walk all her body over, 
 And symmetry rejoice in every part," 
 
 she endeavors in this way to compensate herself for 
 the lack of belleship. Better raise flowers and sell 
 bouquets, dear Rosalie Beverly ! 
 
 Com. — The gray lace of twilight's star-broidered 
 veil has fallen over the sea, brigadier. Let us paddle 
 back through the surf-edge to the bathing-houses, boot, 
 and reappear to a world (1 don't think) disconsolate 
 without us. 
 
 THE CABINET. 
 
 (Shop-door, Ann street. The Brigadier and Commit- 
 tee standing, sphinx-wise, outside.) 
 
 Brig. — The "devil" was here just now for " copy," 
 my dear boy ! 
 
 Com. — The devil here and no Fanny Forester! 
 We have given our readers a taste of this charming 
 incognito, brigadier, and now they'll not feast with- 
 out her! I wonder whether she's pretty? 
 
 Brig. — So would she be over-endowed. No, mi- 
 boy ! I warrant that, with all her cleverness, she has 
 envied, many a time, the doll of the village! 
 
 Com. — A woman is, sometimes, wholly unadmired, i 
 who would become enchanting by a change of her i 
 surroundings. That playful wit of Fanny Forester's, j 
 what-like shell soever it inhabits, would make her the 
 idol of a circle of appreciators — for its work is in her \ 
 face, somewhere ! Do you remember George Sand's 
 description of one of her heroines ? "Elle etait jolie 
 par juxta-position. Heureuse, elle eut ete ravissante. ! 
 Le bonheur est la poesie des femmes, comme la toi- 
 lette en est le fard. Si la joi d'un bal eut reflete ses 
 teints rosees sur ce visage pale, si les douceurs d'une 
 vie elegante eussent rempli, eussent vermillione ses 
 joues deja legerement creusees, si l'amour eut ranime 
 ses yeux tristes, elle aurait pu lutter avec les plus 
 belles jeunes filles. II lui manquait ce qui cree une 
 sccondefois la femmc : — les chiffons el les billet-doux.'" 
 Brig. — (who had gone in to escape the French quo- 
 tation, and returned as the last word lingered on the 
 committee's lips).— Write a " billetdoux" to the next 
 unrisen star, mi-boy, and ask her — (him, it, or her) — 
 to shine first, like Fanny Forester, in the columns of 
 the Mirror. I love the baptism of genius, and (mod- 
 estly speaking) I have been the St. John in the wil- 
 derness of new writers. 
 
 Com. — Apostolic brigadier! You do know a star, 
 even " at the breast" — though, from sucking poets de- 
 liver me mostly, oh, kind Heaven ! They exact a 
 faith in their call and mission that precludes every- 
 thing but the blindest and most acquiescent admira- 
 tion. I remember my own difficult submissions to 
 the corrections of the kind, but truthful and consist- 
 ent critic of my youth, Buckingham of the Boston 
 Courier. He was always right, but it is hard, when 
 your feathers are once smoothed down, to pluck out 
 and re-stick them in your poetical peacockery ! Ah, 
 juvenilities ! We build bridges over chasms of mean- 
 ing, but they drop away behind us, as we pass over! 
 In Heaven, where there will be no grammar and dic- 
 tionary, we shall have a new standard of excellence — 
 
 thought. Here, it is thought's harness — language! 
 What makes these people throw their potato-parings 
 into the gutter, my dear general ? 
 
 Brig. — Ann street, mi-boy, calls for the attention 
 of Mayor Harper. The Mirror has a dainty nostril 
 or two, and there are flower-pots in the windows op- 
 posite, and Burgess <fc Stringer keep the choicest of 
 literary conservatories, yet we reside upon a rivulet 
 of swill ! The simple enforcement of the law would 
 ' sweeten things, but there is no police except for crim- 
 inals in this land of liberty. Look at that brace of 
 turtle-doves coming up-street! What loving friend- 
 ships women have, at an age when boys are perfect 
 Ishmaelites. 
 
 Com. — Pardon me, my dear general, if I correct 
 your cacology. The sportsmen call two turtles a 
 ! dule of turtles, not a brace. Though, by-the-way, 1 
 have not long been in possession of my learning upon 
 that point. Let me read you a chapter on the nomen- 
 I clature of such matters from this book in my hand. 
 Will you listen? The book is "Goodman's Social 
 History of Great Britain" — a gem of delightful read- 
 ing: — 
 
 "The stags which ran wild in the king's forests 
 were named as early (if not earlier) as Edward III. 
 (1307), from their antlers; thus the first year the male 
 is called a calf, second year a brocket, third year a 
 spayer, fourth year a stag, fifth year a great stag, sixth 
 year a hart of the first head. 
 
 "In the notes of Sir Walter Scott's 'Lady of the 
 Lake,' is a curious account of the brytling, breaking 
 up, or quartering of the stag. 'The forester had his 
 portion, the hounds theirs, and there is a little gristle, 
 called the raven's bone, which was cut from the bris- 
 ket, and frequently an old raven was seen perched 
 upon a neighboring tree waiting for it. 
 
 " The fallow-deer, which are kept in the English 
 parks, have also names, but not exactly the same as 
 for stags. The males and the females the first year 
 are called fawns, second year the females are called 
 does, which name she always retains; but the male 
 is called a prickett; third year he is called a shard; 
 fourth year, a sword ; fifth year, a sword-ell, or sor- 
 ! rell; sixth year, a buck of first head; seventh year, 
 a buck; eighth year, a full buck; he is then fit for 
 killing, and not before : and in the summer is very fat, 
 which he loses in winter. Buck-venison is not fit to 
 eat in winter, and ought not to be killed. 
 
 "When beasts went together in companies, there 
 , was said to be a pride of lions, a lepe of leopards, a 
 herd of harts, of bucks, and all sorts of deer; a bevy 
 ! of roes, a sloth of bears, a singular of boars, a sowndes 
 i of swine, a dryfte of tame swine, a route of wolves, a 
 harass of horses, a .rag of colts, a stud of mares, a 
 pace of asses, a barren of mules, a team of oxen, a 
 drove of kine, a flock of sheep, a tribe of goats, a 
 sculk of foxes, a cete of badgers, a richess of mar- 
 tins, a fessynes of ferrets, a huske or a down of hares, 
 a nest of rabbits, a clowder of cats, a kendel of young 
 cats, a shrewdness of apes, and a labor of moles. 
 
 "When animals are retired to rest, a hart was said 
 to be harbored; a buck lodged; a roebuck bedded ; a 
 fox kennelled; a badger earthed; a hare formed; and 
 a rabbit seated. 
 
 " Dogs which run in packs are enumerated by 
 couples. If a pack of fox-hounds consists of thirty- 
 j six, which is an average number, it would be said to 
 I contain eighteen couples. 
 
 "Dogs used for the gun, or for coursing, two of 
 
 them are called a brace, three a leash; but two span- 
 
 l| iels, or harriers, are called a couple. They also say 
 
 I a mute of hounds, for a number; a kennel of raches, 
 
 ! a cowardice of curs, and a litter of whelps. 
 
 " ' The seasons for alle sortes of venery' were regu- 
 lated in the olden time as follows: The 'time of 
 grace' begins at midsummer, and lasteth to holy-rood ; 
 
716 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 the fox may be hunted from the nativity to the an- 
 nunciation of our lady; the roebuck from Easter to 
 Michaelmas; the roe from Michaelmas to Candlemas; 
 the hare from Michaelmas to midsummer; the wolf, 
 as the fox and the boar, from the nativity to the pu- 
 rification of our lady. 
 
 " So for birds there is a vocabulary ; and first, for 
 aquatic birds: a herd of swans, of cranes, and of 
 curlews, a dropping of sheldrakes, a spring of teals, 
 a serges of herons and bitterns, a covert of cootes, gag- 
 gles of geese, sutes of mallards, baddylynges of ducks. 
 Now for meadow and upland birds : a congregation 
 of plovers, a walk of snipes, a fall of woodcocks, a 
 muster of peacocks, a nye of pheasants, a dule of 
 turtles, a brood of hens, a building of rooks, a numer- 
 ation of starlings, a flight of swallows, a watch of 
 nightingales, a charm of goldfinches, flights of doves 
 and wood-pigeons, coveys of partridges, bevies of 
 quails, and exaltations of larks. 
 
 " When a sportsman inquires of a friend what he 
 has killed, the vocabulary is still varied ; he does not 
 use the word pair — but a brace of partridges, or 
 pheasants, a couple of woodcocks ; if he has three 
 of any sort, he says a leash. 
 
 " If a London poulterer was to be asked for a pair 
 of chickens, or a pair of ducks, by a female, he 
 would suppose he was talking to some fine finicking 
 lady's maid, who had so puckered up her mouth into 
 small plaits before she started, that she could not open 
 it wide enough to say couple. 
 
 "As the objects sportsmen pursue are so various, 
 and as the English language is so copious, various 
 terms have been brought into use : so that the ever- 
 lasting term pair, this pairing of anything (except in 
 the breeding-season) sounds so rude, uninstructive, 
 and unmusical, upon the ears of a sportsman, that he 
 would as soon be doomed to sit for life by the side of 
 a seat-ridden cribbage-player as to hear it. 
 
 "It is the want of this knowledge which makes the 
 writings of Howitt and Willis, when they write upon 
 this ever-interesting national subject, appear so tame; 
 the sportsman peruses their pages with no more zest 
 than he listens to the babble of a half-bred hound, or 
 •a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees — 
 leaving his game."' 
 
 Mr. Goodman adds, in a note, the explanation of 
 my blunders in dog-nomenclature: — 
 
 "Mr. Willis, in vol. iii., p. 203, 'Pencillings by the 
 Way,' gives the following information, speaking of 
 the duke's greyhounds (at Gordon Castle): '"Dinna 
 tak' pains to caress them, sir," said the huntsman, 
 "they'll only be hanged for it." I asked for an expla- 
 nation. He then told me that a hound was hung the 
 moment he betrayed attachment to any one, or in any 
 way showed superior sagacity. In coursing the hare, 
 if the dog abandoned the scent, to cut across or inter- 
 cept the animal, he was considered as spoiling the 
 sport. If greyhounds leave the track of the hare, 
 either by their own sagacity, or to follow the master 
 n intercepting it, they spoil the pack, and are hung 
 without mercy.' Perhaps Mr. Willis will excuse me 
 if I show how unsportsman-like this is. In the first 
 place, there are no packs of greyhounds; in the next 
 place, those who attend on them are not called hunts- 
 men ; in the next place, they never ruu by scent : if 
 they did, they ought to be destroyed. As to the ca- 
 ressing, no dog ought ever to be caressed without he 
 had first performed some extraordinary feat, and then 
 it should be done instantly. The everlasting petting 
 or patting a dog, spoils it in its nature, its disposition, 
 its temper, and its habits. It becomes worthless, ex- 
 cept as a lapdog, and that is the most contemptible 
 and worthless thing in all God's creation. 
 
 " Many years' close observation has convinced me, 
 that where the dog is once admitted into the house, 
 and petted, the dogs rule the children, and the chil- 
 
 dren rule the rest; bringing in its train all the usual 
 concomitants of turbulence, filth, and frowsiness; and 
 turning the room into a dog-kennel. 
 
 " ' If men transact like brutes, 'tis equal then 
 For brutes to claim the privilege of men.' " 
 
 The correction is very right — thanks to Mr. Good- 
 man. My attention was called to the blunder, by the 
 duke of Gordon himself, soon after the publication 
 of the book in England; and I should have corrected 
 it in this new edition, but for determining not to read 
 the proofs, that the letters might be published literally 
 from the first copy. But what beautifully descriptive 
 words are those in the nomenclature of birds, my 
 dear general : " A watch of nightingales ! — a charm of 
 goldfinches! — a numeration of starlings, and exalta- 
 tions of larks!" How pretty it would be, instead of 
 "Here come two pretty women!" to say, "Here 
 comes a charm of women!" Instead of, "There 
 stand Morris and Willis!" to have the shoemaker op- 
 posite say, " Look at that pride of lions," or that 
 "exaltation of editors!" 
 
 Brig. — A "muster of peacocks" hits my fancy — de- 
 scriptive, say, of two loungers in uniform! Aha! 
 mi-boy! — fine! 
 
 Com. — Most brigadierish of brigadiers! You 
 would rather be the sodger men have made you than 
 the poet God made you ! So would not I! 
 
 Brig. — you rejoice in a destiny fulfilled, then? 
 
 Com. — Quite the contrary. I mean to say that God 
 made me a natural idler and trifler, and want made me 
 a poet and a worky ; and unlike you, I would rather 
 be what God made me. By-the-way, do you know 
 the trouble there was in the first composing of a 
 horse? This same amusing book quotes from Fitz- 
 herbert's old book on agriculture : "Ahorse has fif- 
 ty-four properties, viz. : two of a man, two of a bad- 
 ger, four of a lion, nine of an ox, nine of a hare, nine 
 of a fox, nine of an ass, and ten of a woman. This 
 description has been somewhat altered, but perhaps 
 not improved upon, viz. : three qualities of a woman, 
 a broad breast, round hips, and a long mane ; three 
 of a lion, countenance, courage, and fire ; three of a 
 bullock, the eye, the nostrils, and joints ; three of a 
 sheep, the nose, gentleness, and patience : three of a 
 mule, strength, constancy, and good feet; three of a 
 deer, head, legs, and short hair; three of a wolf, 
 throat, neck, and hearing ; three of a fox, ear, tail, 
 and throat; three of a serpent, memory, sight, and 
 cunning; and three of a hare or cat, cunning, walk- 
 ing, and suppleness." 
 
 THE CABINET. 
 
 (Committee's private study. Brigadier lounging in a 
 fauteuil.) 
 
 Com. — My dear general, what do you think, ab 
 stractly, of industry ? Does no shuddering con 
 sciousness of awful platitude creep over you, in this 
 dreadfully exemplary career that we are pursuing ? I 
 feel as if the very nose on my face were endeavoring 
 to " dress," as you military men say — striving to come 
 down to the dull, cheek-bone level of tedious uni- 
 formity ! I declare I should be pleased to " hear 
 tell" of something out of the " way of business" — 
 sentiment of some sort ! 
 
 Brig. — Listen to a song that I have just written. 
 There is a background of truth to it — the true sadness 
 of a lovely living woman — that would supply your 
 need of a sensation, if your imagination could picture 
 her. 
 
 Com. — It shall ! Bead away, my friend ! 
 (Brigadier reads.) 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 717 
 
 Com. — That is a peculiarly musical and engaging 
 measure, and you have hung it upon hinges of honey. 
 It smacks of the days when poets wrote a song a 
 year, finishing, to the last vanishing point of perfec- 
 tion. What do the women say to you for translating 
 their prose into angel-talk ? 
 
 Brig. — They love poetry, mi-boy ! The more po- 
 etical you can make their life, the more they love life 
 and you ! They would rather suffer than live monot- 
 onously. So, beware the "even tenor!" 
 
 Com. — Even of prosperity, eh ? I'll beware when 
 1 see it coming ! 
 
 Brio. — Ah, mi-boy, you have no idea of the intense 
 abstraction of mind necessary to bring a poetical ima- 
 gination down to habits of business. 
 
 Com. — Do you really wish to know what is to be 
 the new rage in society this winter? 
 
 Brig.— What ? 
 
 Com. — Married belles .' The 'teens dynasty is pas- 
 sing away ! The talk, this summer, at all the water- 
 ing-places, has been of beautiful women, who (if, per- 
 chance, they have loved out their love) have not shone 
 out their shine ! Heavens ! — how many there are 
 completely shelved in American society, who have 
 never had more than two winters of vogue in the 
 world, and who are compelled to believe that, out of 
 thirty years of loveliness, only two are to be rescued 
 from the nursery — only two to intervene between the 
 nursery filial and the nursery maternal! What a 
 utensil woman is, in this way ! For what did Heaven 
 give them their other powers ? Heaven did not put 
 the smile of woman under her arm! No! it was 
 placed where it could not be covered without suffoca- 
 tion, and, doubtless, with a purpose: — that the lips 
 and their outgoing should be kept open to society! 
 Till those lips fade — till the mind that speaks through 
 them loses its playfulness and attraction, woman can 
 not be monopolized without a manifest waste of the 
 gifts of nature — making that bloom for two years only, 
 that was constructed to bloom for forty ! Besides — 
 these very charms are withdrawn from the world be- 
 fore ripening — flowers permitted only to bud ! There 
 never was a belle who was not more agreeable after 
 marriage than before. An unripe mind is far less 
 agreeable than a ripe one. The elegant repose of 
 lovely married women is far more enchanting than the 
 hoydenish romping or inexperienced sentiment of I 
 girls. Speak up, brigadier ! What say ? 
 
 Brig. — It is highly natural, mi-boy, that this change i 
 should be coming about, now! But it was both nat- 
 ural and necessary that, hitherto — in the unorna- 
 mental foundation of American society, woman should 
 be reduced to her simple primitive mission — shining, i 
 like the glow-worm, only long enough to attract the i 
 male. When married, she passed into the condition 
 of an operative in a nation-factory — a working mother, | 
 a working educatress, a working patriot-maker. Her 
 whole time was then needed for offices that are now 
 performed — (all but the first) — by schools, moral teach- 
 ers, surrounding example, and national routine. Lu- 
 bricate the child now with money, and it will slide on 
 to manhood over an inevitable railroad of education 
 and good influences. Of course, the mother is now 
 at liberty to shine as long as nature feeds the lamp ; 
 and, indeed, it is in this way, only, that she can fulfil 
 her destiny — dispensing elsewhere the sweet influ- 
 ences no longer needed exclusively by her chil- 
 dren. 
 
 Com. — Statesmanlike and pellucid ! Well, sir, this 
 great national metamorphosis is now coming about ! 
 It has been secretly resolved, among the young mar- 
 ried men of New York, that there shall exist, this 
 winter, a post- connubial belle-ocracy; and that mar- 
 ried belles shall, accordingly, have the pas, in wall/., 
 quadrille, promenade, and conversation. How deli- 
 cious ! — isn't it ? It enlarges the field so ! I believe. 
 
 general, that I, for one, shall " cast my slough," and 
 try my youth on again ! 
 
 " For when the life is quickened, out of doubt, 
 The wits that were defunct and dead before, 
 Break up their drowsy grave, and newly move 
 With casted slough and fresh legerity," 
 
 and who knows ? I may be agreeable in the re- 
 formed baby-house of society ! 
 Brig. — " Hope on — hope ever !" 
 
 THE CABI.NET. 
 
 (Committee and Brigadier in confidential session.) 
 
 Com. — My dear general, it won't do ! Read these 
 two letters ! 
 
 Brig. — I won't waste my eyes with them ! It must 
 do ! who says it won't do ? 
 
 Com. — One Noggs. 
 
 Brig. — Who's Noggs ? 
 
 Com. — By Jove, he writes a capital letter! Hear 
 this, my incensed brigadier ! — (reads.) 
 
 " Dear Willis : You frightened me to-day, terri- 
 bly, in the hint you threw out in the course of con- 
 versation with the • brigadier,' to wit : ' Shall we 
 make it into a monthly ?' 
 
 " Make the Weekly Nkw Mirror into a monthly ! 
 God forbid ! /forbid, anyhow. 'Who are you?' I 
 am a live Yankee, at your service, who lives in the 
 land of soles and codfish, whig pow-wows and demo- 
 cratic clam-bakes — one who has not been so ' deco- 
 rously brought up,' perhaps as some of your readers, 
 but ' a man for a' that' — a constant reader of the Mir- 
 ror, at any rate — proof of my manhood, eh ? 
 
 Well, sir, I, Newman Noggs, Esq., of Lynn, coun- 
 ty of Essex, etc., etc., do hereby seriously and ar- 
 dently protest against any such nonsense as is implied 
 in the above question. Excuse me, sir, but I couldn't 
 help it. I feel so worked up at the bare idea of the 
 visits of the Mirror coming only monthly, that I can 
 hardly stick to decency. Why, sir, I shouldn't be in 
 trim for my sabbath-day meeting — albeit a pious man 
 am I — were it not for the ' preparatory' study in the 
 Mirror, Saturday nights. Not that you are so dread- 
 fully religious, but there is always sure to be some- 
 thing in you that makes me feel belter, and when 1 
 feel ' better' I want to go to church, of course, to let 
 myself and the world know that I'm getting kind o' 
 good. As for the literary merits of the Mirror, it 
 don't become the like o' me to be offering an opinion. 
 All I've got to say is, that I ' individually' like it first- 
 rate. There's a sort of racy, spicy, off-hand, unstudied 
 wittiness about it that takes my eye amazingly. So, 
 for God's sake, or more particularly for my sake, dear 
 Willis, don't ye change it. Suppose it does cost 
 some folks a little more for postage than it would for 
 something else — what o' that ? Who's afraid of a 
 cent or two ? I'm a poor man 'long side o' some folk, 
 and yet I rather pay letter-postage than have it stop 
 So, Willis dear, just tell your postage friends to econ 
 omize in some other department, or, if they can't d« 
 that, tell 'em I'll make it up to 'em. 
 
 " No, no, friend of my early youth, don't think or 
 any such thing, that is, if ye love me— for I could 
 better spare — something better, than the piquant dish 
 of conversation which weekly (oh, let it be ever week- 
 ly) occurs between ' mi-boy' and our dearly-beloved 
 general, the 'brigadier.' 
 
 " Mrs. Noggs, too — a strong woman, by the way — 
 is, nevertheless, weekly on this point, very. She says 
 she'll never forgive you if you change the fair form 
 of the Mirror. Think o' that ! Though not a vain 
 woman, she has a passion for looking into the Mirror 
 
718 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 that is very affecting. On the other hand, she says 
 if you'll give up the horrid notion of changing the 
 form of the Mirror, she'll fry you 'a nipper' 1 as 
 brown as a nut, with her own fair hands, when next 
 you come Bostonward, and will visit our humble 
 cottage near the sea. I have ye now ! For my well- 
 tried friends, Gentleman Charles (him of the Astor 
 house, I mean) and his handsome partner, tell me 
 you are a gallant youth and well affected toward the 
 ladies. 
 
 " We shall look anxiously in the next Mirror to find 
 our anxious hopes confirmed, and, if not disappointed, 
 shall henceforth, as in duty bound, ever pray for your 
 everlasting welfare, world without end. 
 
 " Yours till then, "Noggs." 
 
 Com. — I have had twenty letters the last week 
 (none as good as that, but) all to the same purpose ! 
 I am inclined to think, general, that Heaven's first pe- 
 riodical (Sunday) was arranged in accordance with 
 some revolution of our mental nature, and that once 
 in seven days, as it is good to rest, so it is good to 
 read, or grieve, or go love-making. Friends dine to- 
 gether once a week, making friendship a weekly peri- 
 odical. Lovers of nature in cities ride to the coun- 
 try once a week. We eat a boiled dinner once a 
 week. Everybody in New England needs beans once 
 a week. The weather comes round once a week — 
 fair Sundays and wet Sundays coming in successive 
 dozens. There is nothing agreeable in nature that is 
 monthly, except the moon, and the very sight of that 
 periodical puts people to sleep.' 
 
 Brig. — There is the monthly rose, mi-boy ! 
 
 Com. — The poorest rose that blows! 
 
 Brig. — But here is a point 1 should like to make 
 clear to the public. With an enormous subscription 
 every day increasing, we are every day making less 
 money. 
 
 Com. — How, oh, business man ? 
 
 Brig. — Thus: For Mirrors that we sell through 
 agents in cities, we get but four cents each. For 
 Mirrors that we send to subscribers by mail, we get the 
 full price — sixpence each. The irregular and exor- 
 bitant postage has nearly killed our mail subscription, 
 on which we chiefly depended, while in cities, where 
 our patrons get them from the agents without postage, 
 we have a sale growing daily more enormous. The 
 dense of it is, that the Mirror at sixpence is as cheap 
 as it can possibly be sold with anything like profit, and 
 selling it to agents literally at cost, the increase of the 
 agency circulation does us no manner of good ! 
 
 Com. — Why sell to agents at cost? 
 
 Brig. — It was a necessary evil in the beginning — 
 lacking capital to hire the doing of what agents do. 
 
 Com. — And we must go on as we begun ? 
 
 Brig — Short of a six months' paralysis, which we 
 could not afford, there is no help for it ! But the 
 postage is the great block in our way ! Most people 
 would subscribe and have it sent to their houses by 
 mail, if the postage were not more than the subscrip- 
 tion. 
 
 Com. — How would that be helped in the monthly 
 form. 
 
 Brig. — Ah ! now you come to the matter. The 
 monthly Mirror goes for seven cents postage, and most 
 of our mail subscribers who remain, have the Mirror 
 sent in the monthly form, by mail — and I wish all who 
 value the Mirror, or care for us, would do the same. To 
 take it weekly from an agent, does not bring back to 
 you a single leaf of Glenmary, my dear boy ! 
 
 Com. — Ah, my dear friend — Glenmary! Some 
 villain — some wanton and unfeeling villain — has de- 
 stroyed a vine I planted, which had completely em- 
 bowered that sweet cottage. In an Ithaca paper, sent 
 to me yesterday, I find a letter — here it is — from some 
 Owego gentleman to the editor. Let me read you 
 part of it : — 
 
 " The cottage you know, like a bird's nest, is al- 
 | most hid in the foliage. On one side is the road pas- 
 | sing over 'the bridge,' and all around a sweet lawn,, 
 sloping away to ' Owego creek.' The bridge was 
 once white, and neat in its outward appearance. But 
 how Willis, even in the ' summer months,' made his 
 ' bridge-gipsying delicious,' is now a mystery. The 
 ' groundwork' is flood-wood, and reptiles crawl where 
 1 swallows peeped out from their nests against the 
 sleepers,' while every five minutes a baptism of dust 
 comes down from above, as a benediction from the 
 passing traveller. But the pruning hand of a man of 
 taste has been wanting to all this rural spot for two 
 years past, which may account for the blemishes we 
 find in the picture so beautifully drawn in ' A I'Abri. 
 Some Caligula among shrubbery has cut the root of a 
 luxuriant vine, which spread itself over the collage 
 front, making a delightful arbor of the piazza ; and, 
 its leaves and tendrils, already changed in hue, are 
 folding themselves to die. As through it the night- 
 breeze rustled, it seemed to breathe of the desolation 
 that had stolen upon this garden, sacred to the mem- 
 ory of a lovely exotic which made it a paradise, and 
 the fadeless light of genius." 
 
 That is written by some kind man, who understood 
 how a heartstring might be cut through with a vine 
 one had planted and cherished. Whoever may be 
 the perpetrator of that needless outrage, I commend 
 him to the notice of my friendly neighbors, adding a 
 petition from me, which may thus reach them, that 
 only Time's hand may be suffered to ravage my lost 
 paradise. 
 
 Brig — The subject troubles me, mi-boy! Let us 
 change it. I've a funny communication here, from a 
 Rip Van Winkle, who dates fifty years hence, and — 
 
 Com. — Keep it till next week, general, and let us 
 get into the fresh air. I'm manuscript sick. Allonsl 
 Stay — while I mend my outer man a little, read this 
 funny letter, sent me by the lady to whom it was 
 written. She thinks her friend, young " Cinna Bev- 
 erley," is a genius. 
 
 (Brigadier reads, with an occasional laugh.) 
 
 "TO MISS PHffiBE LORN. 
 
 " Dear Bel-Piuebe : I have been ' twiddling my 
 sunbeam' (you say my letters are ' perfect sunshine') 
 for some time, more or less, in a quandary as to what 
 is now resolved upon as ' Dear Bel-Phcebe' — the be- 
 ginning of this (meant-to-be) faultless epistle. I 
 chanced to wake critical this morning, and, ' dear 
 Phoebe,' as the beginning of this letter of mine, looked 
 both vulgar and meaningless. I inked it out as you 
 see. A reference to my etymological dictionary, 
 however, restored my liking for that ' dear' 1 word. It 
 is derived from the Anglo-Saxon verb Der-ian, which 
 means to do mischief. Hence dearth, which, by doing 
 mischief, makes what remains more precious, and 
 hence dear, meaning something made precious by hav- 
 ing escaped hurting. ' Dear Phoebe,' therefore (mean- 
 ing unhurt Phozbe), struck me as pretty well — you be- 
 ing one of those delicious, late-loving women, destined 
 to be ' hurt' first at thirty. Still, the sacred word 
 ' Phoebe' was too abruptly come upon. It sounded 
 familiar, and familiarity should be reserved for the 
 postscript. I should have liked to write 'dear Lady 
 Phoebe,' or 'dear Countess Phoebe' — but we are not 
 permitted to 'read our title clear,' in this hideously- 
 simple country. Might I invent an appellative? We 
 say char-woman and horse-man — why not put a de- 
 scriptive word before a lady's name, by way of re- 
 spectful distance. Phoebe Lorn is a belle — why not 
 say i?e/-Phcebe ? Good! It sounds authentic. This 
 
 i letter, then, is to Plmbe, unhurt and beautiful (alias), 
 
 j • Dear Bel-Phoebe !' 
 
 " You are an ephemeron of a month — the month 
 at Saratoga, in which you get wings to come forth 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 719 
 
 from your eleven months' chrysalis in the country— 
 and you are now once more 'gathered to your fathers,' 
 and mourning over the departed summer! Your 
 Arabian mare feels your thrilling weight again, and 
 you astonish your pet cow with sponge-cake over the 
 lawn fence, and give caraways to your top-knot hens, 
 and say ' Sir' to your greyhound, and make-believe 
 care for your dahlias and tube-roses — but the pleas- 
 aniest part of the day, after all, is its heavenly twilight 
 of closed eyelids, when you can live over again that 
 month at Saratoga— myself, perhaps, then, cursorily 
 remembered ! For you rejoice in the perils of love, 
 unhurt and and adorable Phoebe ! 
 
 "But you know enough about yourself and you wish 
 to hear about the town ! Well !— the (lies are numb 
 with the first frost, the window-blinds are open nearly 
 to Union square, somebody has been seen with a 
 velvet waistcoat, starch is ' looking up,' and the town 
 is full of palmetto-hatted andready-made-clothing-ized 
 southerners. By these data judge of the epoch. I, 
 myself, am among my dusted household gods, and, 
 at this moment (writing in my bed-room) see my boots 
 phalanxed in their winter parade. 1 must say it is, so 
 far, pleasant! Perhaps — but you want news, not the 
 philosophy of boots in repose. 
 
 "You heard of the marriage of one of our wild In- 
 dians to an English girl, not long ago in London. 
 She has been at the Waverley some days, and has 
 excited no little curiosity. She is moderately hand- 
 some, but in such an unusual style of beauty that she 
 out-magnetizes many a more strictly beautiful woman. 
 My vaurien friend, F., the artist (who chanced to dine 
 opposite the chief and chief-ess at the table- d 'hote a 
 day or two since), declares the face to be wholly 
 unique, and a sufficient explanation of the extraordi- 
 nary whim of her marriage. I have never, myself, 
 wondered at it. The crust, impenetrable upward, of 
 English middle life, is enough to drive genius of any 
 kind more mad than this ! What hell like inevitable 
 mediocrity in anything ! This fine woman, now going 
 to live a dog's life with an Indian in the wilderness, 
 would have spent her days in a brick row, and grown 
 idiotic with looking out upon the same sidewalk till 
 death. Which would you rather ? 
 
 "Do you remember (for beautiful women don't al- 
 ways remember beautiful women) the adorable Mrs. 
 C.. at Saratoga — that charming specimen of a healthy 
 and practicable angel ? She has been here a week on 
 her return from Niagara, and Fiagg, the beauty-painter, 
 has stolen a copy of her on canvass. Ah, Bel-Phoebe! 
 You have a loss in not realizing what it is to a man 
 when an exquisite face holds still to be critically ad- 
 mired ! You can see the grain of the velvet in her 
 brown eye, now, and trace by what muscle her heart 
 pulls, to keep down that half-sad cornerof her delicious 
 mouth ! He is an appreciator, that Flagg, and paints 
 a woman as she looks to appreciators— differently from 
 the butchers'-meat estimation of common gazers on 
 beauty. Mrs. C, has gone to Baltimore, where 
 beauty is an indigenous drug — belles of that 'city 
 rich in women' being never valued till transplanted. 
 But heavens! how tired you will be of reading this 
 long female paragraph ! Hasten to speak of some- 
 thing with a man in it ! 
 
 "One of the most fascinating men in England is 
 ekeing out an exile from May fair, by singing and 
 lecturing on songs to the delighted Croton drinkers. 
 He is a man of that quiet elegance of address that 
 seems nothing in a woman's way till she has broken 
 her neck over it, and he sings as such a man shouldn't 
 — to be a safe man, that is to say ! Fancy Moore's 
 songs any more bewitched than Moore intended ! 
 Mr. McMichael's voice glides under your heart like 
 a gondola under a balcony — Moore's melody represent- 
 ing the embellished and enriched moonlit water. It 
 is the enchanted perfection of lover-like, and gentle- 
 
 man-like song-singing. I heard Moore sing his own 
 songs in England, and Mr. McMichael sings them in 
 the same style — only in apotheosis ! (Ask your papa 
 to translate that big word.) 
 
 "Do you care about theatres? We have a new 
 tragedian, about whose resemblance to Macready the 
 critics are quarrelling, and a new tragedian-ess who 
 has put the boxes into fits by coming on the stage 
 
 without a bustle! (Fancy Desdemona without a 
 
 bustle !) Of course you are surprised, for this is one 
 of these ' coming events' that could not possibly ' cast 
 their shadows before,' but fashion is imperative, and 
 
 ' Where ruled the (bustle) Nature broods alone !' 
 
 I understand the omnibuses are to be re-licensed to 
 carry fourteen inside, and the shops in Broadway are 
 petitioning (so Alderman Cozzens told me to-day) to 
 put out bow-windows, in expectation of the vacated 
 space. 
 
 " Seriously, there has been a growing mistrust 
 (Pearl-street'mgly speaking) of the article woman, as 
 shown to customers ! Thank fashion, there is more 
 chance now of a poor youth's knowing the ('ground 
 covered by the imposing obligations of matrimony !'J 
 
 "As to the fault found with Anderson — his resem- 
 blance to Macready — I see it in no objectionable 
 particular, unless it be theincorrigible one, of a mutual 
 brevity of nose. He was educated to his profession 
 by Macready, and of course lias his master's severe 
 taste, and smacks somewhat of his school, which is a 
 good one. I like him much better than I do Mac- 
 ready, however, for. though he has most of his ex- 
 cellences, he has none of his defects, and, in voice 
 and pliancy of action, he is much that artificial man's 
 superior. Criticism aside, Anderson plays agreeably 
 and makes you like him, whereas Macready, playing 
 ever so well, does it disagreeably, and makes you dis- 
 like him ! But I am no judge — for I would rather sit 
 on a sofa by most any woman than sit in a box during 
 most any play. Pity me ! 
 
 " Hast thou great appetite, and must I vouchsafe 
 thee still another slice of news ? The new hotel up- 
 town is waxing habitable, and the proprietor is in a 
 quandary what to call it. The natural inquiry as to 
 what would be descriptive, has suggested a look at the 
 probabilities of custom, and it is supposed that it will 
 be filled partly with that class of fashionables who feel 
 a desire to do something in life besides laboriously 
 ' keep house,' partly by diplomatists and dandies wish- 
 ing to be ' convaynient' to balls and chez-elles, and 
 partly by such Europeanized persons as have a distaste 
 for American gregariousness, and desire a voice as to 
 the time and place of refreshing and creature. The 
 arrangements are to surpass any previous cis-Atlantic 
 ! experience, and the whole project is considered as the 
 i first public flower of the transplanted whereabout of 
 i aristocracy. It has been proposed to call it May Fair 
 Hotel — ' May Fair' being the name of the fashion- 
 able nucleus of London. Hautevillk Hotkl has 
 been suggested, descriptive of its position up-town. 
 Hotel Recherche, Hotel Choisi, are names pro- 
 posed also, but more liable to criticism. I, myself, 
 proposed A l'abi— as signifying a house aside from 
 the rush of travel and business. Praise that, if you 
 please ! Billings, the lessee, is a handsome man, of a 
 I very up-town address, with the finest teeth possible for 
 i the welcome to new-comers— this last no indifferent 
 I item ! He is young— but young people are the 
 | fashion. 'Young England' and '\ oung h ranee 
 ' wield the power. I have not mentioned the system 
 of the hotel, by the way, which is that of Meunce's 
 at Paris— a table-d'hote and a restaurant, and dinner in 
 I public, or private, or not at all, at your option. Charm- 
 , i n g — wont it be ? ' ' 
 
 ' " Crawford, the sculptor. has come home from Italy, 
 
720 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 and, as he is the American, par excellence, in whom 
 resides the sense of beauty, I trust he may see you. 
 
 "What else had I to say? Something — but I'll 
 write it on a slip, for it will be personal, and you like 
 to show all your letters to ' the governor.' 
 
 " Adieu, dear Bel-Phoebe, and pray tear up the slip 
 enclosed as soon as you have recovered from fainting. 
 Yours at discretion. " Cinna Beverley, jr." 
 
 "Fanny Forester." — We have been accused, face 
 to face, several times, and by letter once or twice, of 
 being, ourself, that bewitching masquerader. We have 
 conjured some variety out of our workyday quill, it is 
 true, and have an unfulfilled and recorded vow of a 
 new alias — but in " Fanny Forester" there resides a 
 dimpled youthfulness and elasticity that is not found 
 so many miles on the road as our present sojourn ! 
 Oh no, sweet Fanny ! they slander you and do too 
 much credit to our industry and versatility ! Those 
 who wish to know more of Fanny Forester, may hear 
 of her, now, among the high-priced contributors of 
 Graham and Godey. 
 
 Dr. Lardner's Lecture. — We did not chance to 
 hear Dr. Lardner's excellent and amusing lecture on 
 the " London literati,''' 1 etc., but the report of it in the 
 " Republic" has scraped the moss from one corner of 
 our memory, and we may, perhaps, aid in the true 
 portraiture of one or two distinguished men by show- 
 ing a shade or two in which our observation of them 
 differed from that of the doctor. We may remark 
 here, that Dr. Lardner has been conversant with all 
 the wits and scholars of England for the last two or 
 three lustrums, and we would suggest to him that, 
 with the freedom given him by withdrawal from their 
 sphere, he might give us a book of anecdotical biogra- 
 phy that would have a prosperous sale and be both 
 instructive and amusing. We shall not poach upon 
 the doctor's manor, by the way, if we give our im- 
 pression of one of these literati — himself — as he ap- 
 peared to us, once in very distinguished company, in 
 England. We were in a ball in the height of the 
 season, at Brighton. Somewhere about the later 
 hours, we chanced to be in attendance upon a noble 
 lady, in company with two celebrated men. Mr. 
 Ricardo and Horace Smith (the author of Brambletye 
 House, and Rejected Addresses), Lady Stepney, 
 authoress of the " New Road to Ruin," approached 
 our charming centre of attraction with a proposition 
 to present to her the celebrated Dr. Lardner. " Yes, 
 my dear ! I should like to know him of all things !'" 
 was the reply, and the doctor was conjured forthwith 
 into the magic circle. He bowed " with spectacles 
 on nose," but no other extraneous mark of philosopher 
 or scholar. We shall not offend the doctor by stating 
 that, on this evening, he was a very different looking 
 person from his present practical exterior. With j 
 showy waistcoat, black tights, fancy stockings and I 
 small patent-leather shoes, he appeared to us an ele- J 
 gant of very bright water, smacking not at all, in man- I 
 ner no more than in dress, of the smutch and toil of I 
 the laboratory. We looked at and listened to him, | 
 we remember, with great interest and curiosity. He 
 left us to dance a quadrille, and finding ourself acci- 
 dentally in the same set, we looked at his ornamental 
 and lover-like acquittalof himself with a kindofwonder 
 at what Minerva would say ! This was just before the 
 doctor left England. We may add our expression of 
 pleasure that the Protean facility of our accomplished 
 and learned friend has served him in this country — I 
 making of him the best lecturer on all subjects, and 
 the carver out of prosperity under a wholly new > 
 meridian. 
 
 But, to revert to the report of the lecture : — 
 
 " The doctor gave some very amusing descriptions 
 of the personal peculiarities of Bulwer and D'Israeli, 
 the author of ' Coningsby,' observing that those who 
 have read the works of the former, would naturally 
 conclude him to be very fascinating in private society. 
 Such, however, was not the case. He had not a 
 particle of conversational facility, and could not utter 
 twelve sentences free from hesitation and embarrass- 
 ment. Iu fact, Bulwer was only Bulwer when his 
 pen was in his hand and his meerschaum in his mouth. 
 He is intimate with Count D'Orsay, one of the hand- 
 somest men of the day, and in his excessive admira- 
 tion of that gentleman has adopted his style of dress, 
 which is adapted admirably to the figure of the second 
 Beau Brummell, but sits strangely on the feeble, rick- 
 ety and skeleton form, of the man of genius." 
 
 Now it struck us, on the contrary, that there was no 
 more playful, animated, facile creature in London 
 society than Bulwer. He seemed to have a horror 
 of stilted topics, it is true, and never mingled in gene- 
 ral conversation unless merrily. But at Lady Bles- 
 sington's, where there was but one woman present 
 (herself), and where, consequently, there could be no 
 tetes-d-tetes, Bulwer's entrance was the certain precur- 
 sor of fun. He was a brilliant rattle, and as to any 
 " hesitation and embarrassment," we never saw a 
 symptom of it. At evening parties in other houses, 
 Bulwer's powers of conversation could scarce be fairly 
 judged, for his system of attention is very concentra- 
 tive, and he was generally deep in conversation with 
 some one beautiful woman whom he could engross. 
 We differ from the doctor, too, as to his style of dandy- 
 ism. Spready upper works, trousers closely fitting to 
 the leg, a broad-brimmed hat, and cornucopial whisk- 
 ers, distinguished D'Orsay, while Bulwer wore al- 
 ways the loose French pantaloon, a measurable hat- 
 brim, and whiskers carefully limited to the cheek. We 
 pronounce the doctor's astrology (as to these stars) 
 based upon an error in "observation." 
 
 The reporter adds : — 
 
 " D'Israeli he described as an affected coxcomb, 
 with a restless desire to appear witty ; yet he never 
 remembered him to have said a good thing in his life 
 except one, and that was generally repeated with the 
 preface, 'D'Israeli has said a good thing at last.'" 
 
 That D'Israeli is not a " bon-mot" man, is doubtless 
 true. It never struck us that he manifested a " desire 
 to appear witty." He is very silent in the general 
 melee of conversation, but we have never yet seen him 
 leave a room before he had made an impression by 
 some burst in the way of monologue — eitheran eloquent 
 description or a dashing new absurdity, an anecdote 
 or a criticism. He sits indolently with his head on 
 his breast, taking sight through his eyebrows till he 
 finds his cue to break in, and as far as our observation 
 goes, nobody was ever willing to interrupt him. The 
 doctor calls him an "affected coxcomb," but it is only 
 of his dress that this is any way true. No schoolboy 
 is more frank in his manners. This is true, even since 
 DTsraeli's " gobble up" of the million with a widow. 
 When we were first in London, he was the immortal 
 tenant of one room and a recess, and with manners 
 indolently pensive. Three years after, returning to 
 England, we found him master of a lordly establish- 
 ment on Hyde Park, and, except that he looked of a 
 less lively melancholy, his manners were as untroubled 
 with affection as before. We do not in the least 
 doubt the sincerity of the doctor's report, but it shows 
 how even acute observers (we two are that, doctor !) 
 will see the same thing with different eyes. This 
 article is too long. 
 
 New York has an unsupplied want — no less a thing 
 than a fashionable promenade. Broadway, that 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 721 
 
 used to be the parade of all that was feminine, fashion- 
 able and fair, has been, for some time, only a walk of 
 plain-dress-necessity to the noli-me-tangeries, and it 
 will soon be left entirely to the deaf and the humble j 
 
 so intolerable is the Bedlam racket of its abominable 
 
 omnibuses ! (To get an audible answer to the " How 
 do you do ?" one has need to take one's friend into a 
 Btore.) 
 
 Our ladies have done like the English, in giving up ] 
 shopping and walking the street in full dress, and now, | 
 where is to be the English or Erench substitute — j 
 our Hyde park or our Bois de Boulogne ? Ladies, I 
 in London, are supposed to be so incapable of walk- \ 
 ing at all in the street, that, if they do so, it is rather ■ 
 well-bred not to recognise them in passing. But j 
 after shopping in disguise in Regent street (their 
 Broadway) they go home and " dress for the carriage," j 
 and drive out to meet all the world in the " Rotten j 
 row" of the park. Up and down this half mile they J 
 follow in slow procession, meeting as slow a procession j 
 going the other way, and bowing at every carriage | 
 length, and, no public hack being admitted into the 
 park, those who have no carriages have no promenade ! 
 
 Don't let us improve with our eyes shut ! We have 
 taken off our foot of fashion from one round of the 
 ladder. How long is it to be suspended in the air — 
 for, a. driving park is the next inevitable step upward ? 
 
 Odd Enough.— The best view of Trinity steeple and 
 almost the only view of Trinity church, is across some 
 old one-story wooden groceries in Greenwich street, 
 the spectator standing upon the opposite sidewalk ! 
 "We never know to whom we look best," said we to 
 the steeple, when we discovered it ! To Broadway- 
 gazers, Trinity steeple is a Gothic column. The body 
 of the church is wholly lost as to effect, and it was a 
 great mistake not to set it sideicise upon the street. 
 But, let us suggest something to the enormously 
 wealthy vestry of that church. There is not a valua- 
 ble building, nor scarce a lot unoccupied by a nuisance, 
 between this splendid fabric and Greenwich street, j 
 How easy to buy this advantageous slope, and make j 
 of it an ascending foreground, unequalled except by 
 the ascent to the capitol at Washington! Besides J 
 the addition to the beauty of the city, it would give | 
 another "lungs" to the neighborhood of Wall street, j 
 and grace, fitly and with additional beauty, the resting- | 
 place of the gallant and lamented Lawrence. 
 
 Change in New York Habits. — The great pecu- j 
 Iiarity of America — our gregariousness, as shown in i 
 our populous hotels — has taken a large stride on its \ 
 way to the exclusivism of Europe. The office of the 
 lessee of the new hotel up-town has been overrun with 
 applicants, and most of them, we understand, with a 
 view of availing themselves of its privileges as a hotel 
 garni — or furnished house where the meals are dis- 
 cretionary, as to place, time, and price. Let us look 
 a little into this. 
 
 A gentleman arrives at a London hotel. He alights 
 at the door of what resembles a private house. He is 
 shown to a small parlor and bed-room, and left alone j 
 with his baggage and the peculiarly neat and unsoci- 
 able chairs and table. He orders his dinner and tea, | 
 and it is served to him alone. He is as much alone 
 the remainder of the day and evening, and from that I 
 time to doomsday, if he stay so long ; and there is no j 
 place about the house where he can vary this loneli- i 
 ness, except the coffee-room, where the parlor class 
 of lodgers have no errand and rarely go. His engage- i 
 ment with the landlord is to pay so much, by the day, | 
 for his rooms, and for whatever else he chooses to order. I 
 46 
 
 What with the absence of books, and all the comforts 
 and trifles that give a look of home, and, on the other 
 hand, the lack of the American compensations, such 
 as reading-room, ladies' drawing-room, sitting-rooms, 
 and thronged halls and entries, the solitude and gloom 
 of a hotel in the heart of London could scarce be 
 exceeded. 
 
 But, admirably suited as is the American system of 
 hotel to the relief and pleasure of the stranger and 
 traveller, there is a class of hotel-lodgers who would 
 be more comfortable in New York were there a hotel 
 after the European fashion — and it is with a view to 
 this class, mainly, that the new hotel up-town has 
 been designed. We refer to the class who wish a 
 luxurious home, but can not afford time, trouble, or 
 money, to be housekeepers. There are many families 
 of this description — families who pass the summer in 
 the country, but in the winter reside in town, and, 
 dreading the trouble and expense of a town house, 
 would still prefer a private table and drawing-room. 
 For such, a hotel garni, with elegant suites of apart- 
 ments and a restaurant on the floor before, is the well- 
 adapted provision, and this class is sufficiently large 
 to more than warrant the enterprise of the hotel up- 
 town. 
 
 The great mass, however, even of families (and 
 certainly of bachelors), prefer the gregarious hotel, 
 where two or three hundred people form almost one 
 family, where eating and dancing and social pleasures 
 are all enjoyed in common, and where business and 
 amusement are closely, and without foresight or 
 trouble, closely intermingled. This style of living 
 best suits the great mass of a business community, and 
 it will not be till we have a ruling proportion of aris- 
 tocratic idlers, that the gregarious hotel will go out of 
 fashion. That may be fifty years hence, or our "gre- 
 gariousness" may become a national peculiarity, and 
 the Astor " stay put" for a century. 
 
 We speak the Tuscan, and lively Mr. Palmo is 
 betrayed by his soft c to be a Piedmontese or a Vene- 
 tian — else we should venture to give him the ideas 
 here-below embodied, in his own lingua de belleza. 
 We beg his worthy and eloquent legal counsellor, 
 however (whom we have the pleasure to know), to 
 translate to him, through some medium more pellucid 
 than the last, the nicer shades of our meaning. We 
 put up our prayer for its happy voyage to the mana- 
 ger's harbor of comprehension. 
 
 An opera, like a woman, is never to be taken liter- 
 ally. It is not, exclusively or mainly, a place wherein 
 to hear good music. If the music be the best that 
 can be procured (though it were only the best in 
 Ethiopia), the uncrowned but very executive King 
 Public is content. " Our" ear is merciful ! But the 
 opera is a place for the advancing of two ends more — 
 human tenderness and human vanity. Ten go thither 
 to flirt, and forty to be seen, where one goes to pamper 
 his auricular nerve upon a cadenza. We don't see 
 that this requires enlarging upon. 
 
 We wish to enlighten those who have hitherto been 
 proudly content with their own country (haven't trav 
 elled, and tint's the reason), as to the true uses of the 
 opera abroad— the way it is truly used, that is to say, 
 where sing Rubini and his starry troupe. J irst, as to 
 construction. The London opera-house (like the 
 Parisian) is composed of a hundred or more private 
 boxes, and a pit. The private boxes are used by their 
 lady-proprietors to receive company duung the evening, 
 and the pit is used to reconnoitre the boxes, to lounge, 
 to chat and to be visible in white gloves and opera- 
 glass (this last a most necessary demonstration by 
 those who would not otherwise be considered " men 
 about town"). We have not yet mentioned the lis- 
 
722 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 tening to the opera. This very subordinate part of the 
 evening's entertainment commences at the signal 
 "sh!" "sh!" from the connoisseurs, indicating that 
 some favorite aria is commencing which is worth lis- 
 tening to, or a duett or quartette, or fine point, of 
 action, coming off, and, till this is past, the audience, 
 above and below, is breathlessly still and attentive. At 
 all other times during the performance of the opera, 
 it is rather green than otherwise to pay attention to 
 the stage, and anybody who should request that his 
 neighbors would not converse during the recitativo 
 secco, would be smiled at as " capital fun !" The 
 opera, in short, is considered as a help, an accompani- 
 ment (or, if you like, a stop-gap) to conversation, and 
 the consequence is that nowhere are people so much at 
 their ease, and nowhere are so many bright and merry 
 things said as at the opera! We'll mend our pen, 
 dear reader, while you compare this with the quaker- 
 meeting attention so tediously given at Palmo's. 
 
 But this is to be mended (the practice, we mean — 
 the pen does pretty well), and the first thing we wish 
 to suggest to Mr. Pal mo is an improvement in the 
 "fop's alley" part of it. To go round behind the 
 boxes, as the house is constructed now, is formidably 
 conspicuous, unless one has a direct errand to the lady 
 next the stage; yet this, with the exception of having 
 a seat in the pit, and silling in it, is the only way to 
 get a look at the house and " see who is there." Let 
 Mr. Pal mo drop a staircase, passing under the stage- 
 box to the front of the pit, and there would he an ex- 
 cusable lounge of observation all round the house — a 
 prodigious difference in the attraction for the dan- 
 dies, let us assure you, signor ! You need the dan- 
 dies! You wish to make it among the necessities of 
 a "man about town," that he should have a season- 
 ticket to the opera. But it is no pleasure to sit 
 cramped and silent in one seat, and no pleasure to 
 come in and stand behind the. audience for the whole 
 evening, or for an hour. It would be a pleasure to 
 see the audience from the front, and that can not be 
 done now, without a pretty " cool" walk to the or- 
 chestra and back. Now could it? 
 
 We have two or three other propositions to make 
 for the improvement of the social opportunities of 
 the opera, but this will do for to-day. Addio, signore! 
 
 We cordially approve of the reason for, and the 
 feeling which prompted the following paragraph. 
 We have the pleasure of knowing the three gentle- 
 men mentioned in it, particularly the urbane captain, 
 and we wish the Howards a happy retirement, and 
 Captain Roe ^.-bounding prosperity — but this done, 
 we wish to note a nationality as it passes ; and first, 
 to quote a paragraph: — 
 
 "It has been announced in various quarters that 
 the Messrs. Howard, who have established the hotel 
 so extensively and favorably known as Howard's Ho- 
 tel, have disposed of that establishment to Captain 
 Roe, of the "Empire" steamboat. * * * 
 
 As for the Howards, we are glad that they have done 
 so well. We presume that, being relieved now from 
 the labor of keeping such a large establishment, they 
 will retire to some of those beautiful retreats with 
 which their native state, Vermont, abounds." 
 
 It will be seen at once that a traveller who should 
 measure this trio by the European scale of condition 
 in life — (rank these gentlemen, that is to say. with 
 " mine host" in any other part of the world) — would 
 make a blunder. The difference between an Ameri- 
 can hotel-proprietor, and a London Boniface, is not 
 merely that our hotels are six times as large. It is 
 not merely that he is six times as great a " proprie- 
 tor." The vocation is almost wholly different — and 
 the difference is a result of the totally different hab- 
 
 its of the two countries. In London, you may, by 
 chance, see the " land-lady," daily, but you may be 
 months in the house without seeing the " land-lord." 
 (Two terrible misnomers, by-the-way, for the hostess, 
 though she has no land, is not a lady but as a land- 
 lady, and mine host is far enough from a lord with 
 land, though he is no lord except as a land-lord !) 
 The English host, therefore, is never an acquaintance 
 of his guest, and the guest knows his hostess only in 
 the quality of an upper servant. The reader will 
 have recognised the difference we wish to point to. 
 The American hotel-keeper has charge, not of twenty 
 or thirty people living wholly in their own private 
 rooms, but of two or three hundred, whose habits are 
 all gregarious, and to almost every one of them he (the 
 landlord) is a personal and familiar friend. The ex- 
 tent of this friendly intercourse with persons mostly 
 of the better class, gives to the hotel-proprietor a 
 mass of influence, direct and indirect, which makes 
 him a very important person in the community. He 
 is continually appealed to for knowledge on popular 
 subjects, such as is got only by great facilities of hear- 
 say. He is often made a reference in disputes, from 
 his necessary habit of impartiality. He is intrusted 
 with deposites of great value by his guests, and is the 
 confidant-general of the secrets and difficulties of 
 strangers, and of travelling lovers and mourners. 
 Ladies and families are committed to his charge. 
 Public entertainments are given by his advice and di- 
 rection; and, in short, he has so much harm, and so 
 much good influence, in his power, that he is, neces- 
 sarily, a person of high moral character, superior 
 judgment, discretion, and information — without all 
 which public opinion would not tolerate him in his 
 place — and, with which, while in the full exercise of 
 his vocation, he naturally holds a high station of re- 
 publican social rank. It is in tacit obedience to this 
 scale of valuation, that the change of masters in a 
 public hotel is made the subject of newspaper an- 
 nouncement and comment — a notice of the fact which 
 would seem to a London editor wholly beyond its con- 
 sequence and value. 
 
 We are aware that it is rather Utopian to give nom- 
 inal rank to people according to their actual worth 
 and influence; but let us have our little bit of fancy 
 now and then ! We should be afraid to call public 
 attention to the rank of editors — measuring it by their 
 power ! 
 
 Olk Bull and his missing " spot." — As we pre- 
 dicted, this great luminary took the light of the 
 world to himself on Saturday night, and became vis- 
 ible above the horizon of the footlights precisely at 
 eight, 
 
 " Bright as a god, but punctual as a slave !" 
 
 Mrs. Child (the moon who reflects the masculine 
 gold of his music in the feminine silver of language) 
 sat in the stage-box, somewhat obscured in the pe- 
 numbra of a shocking cap. (We rely upon Miss 
 Dorsey to invent a "silver cloud," or, at any rate, 
 some headdress more becoming for the waxing glory 
 of this charming reflector.) The Memnonian music 
 awoke, of course, with the appearance of Ole-Apollo, 
 and the crammed world of fashion sat breathless. 
 By the time the first piece was played, however, it 
 was felt that there was something wrong. The audi- 
 ence was irresponsive. The ivory inside edge of the 
 moon's disk (disclosed by the tranquil smile at first), 
 became less and less visible, and disappeared. The 
 applause was mechanical. Madame Burkhardt arose 
 like a morning vapor, and clouded the horizon with 
 an abominable song. Ole Bull broke out again, and 
 though the shadows had shortened somewhat before 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 723 
 
 lie finished his second piece, there was still a lack — jl 
 still but a dull acknowledgment of his glory. 
 
 We presently discovered the cause. A heavy fore- 
 lock of hair, which used to drop over the forehead 
 of the inspired Norwegian, descending "with the 
 linked sweetness long drawn out" of a cadenza, and ! 
 then tossed back like an absorbed comet with the re- '.' 
 vulsive sweep of R return to the jlon-flon of the air — 
 this expressive forelock, with the steeped sweetness 
 of the Niagara it had overheard, and the dreams of 
 
 melody it had stirred to, was gone to " and scis- ; 
 
 sors." The "sun was (the day before) shorn of his 
 beams" — by Cristadoro! Mingled with the hair of 
 the uninspired, that magic lock had been swept into 
 Broadway from the floor of the undiscriminating bar- 
 ber, and, fallen from the heaven of harmony, is now 
 Sticking to the wheels of omnibuses in a purgatory 
 of Sysiphus. Those in other cities who remember 
 the toss back of that wild lock of hair in the convul- 
 sive transitions of Ole Bull's music, will understand 
 that there must have been, emphatically, a spot mis- 
 sins; on his luminous face. 
 
 Spite of politics and attractions elsewhere, the 
 house was crammed; and in spite of the missing 
 lock, Ole Bull recovered his power over the audi- 
 ence. The last piece he played was electric, and the 
 curtain fell amid unlimited plaudits. 
 
 The pay for Periodical-Writing. — What a 
 butcher would think of veal, as a marketable article, 
 if everybody had an ambition to raise calves to give 
 away, is very near the conclusion that a merely busi- 
 ness-man would arrive at, on inquiring into the sale- 
 ableness of fugitive literature. It is as pleasant for 
 people not hackneyed in authorship to see their 
 thoughts transferred to print, as it is for beauties to 
 see their faces transferred to canvass; and, if custom- 
 ary, most contributors to periodicals would pay the 
 publisher as willingly as women pay the portrait- 
 painter. Another thing. Females are naturally fa- 
 cile writers, and the attention paid to the mental cul- 
 ture of women in our day, has set their thoughts 
 a-flow upon paper, as the letting in of sunshine upon j 
 the dark floor of the forest draws to the surface new j 
 springs of water. These facts to begin with, the j 
 reader will easily understand the pourquoi of the un- j 
 promising literary market we have to "open up*' to 
 him. 
 
 There are several of the magazines that pay for 
 articles, but no one of them, we believe, pays for all j 
 its contents. Graham and Gocfey (two men of noble 
 liberality to authors) pay prices to some of their con- j 
 tributors that would far outbid the highest rates of 
 magazine-payment in England. Their prose-writers j 
 receive from two to twelve dollars a page, and their 
 poets from five to fifty dollars an article. The Co- i 
 lumbian and the Ladies' Magazine also pay well, j 
 The North American Review used to think it liberal I 
 enough to pay Edward Everett a dollar a page. All j 
 the paying magazines and reviews, however, reject 
 fifty articles to one that they accept, and they pay 
 nobody whose " name" would not enrich their table 
 of contents. In point of fact, but for the necessity of 
 a brag, and the misfortune that a writer, once made 
 famous, esteems pay a desirable manner of compli- 
 ment (whether he wants the money or not), the liter- 
 ary periodicals in this country might do well, relying 
 only on the editor's pen and the epidemic " cacoethes." 
 The Mirror did so — and was as cleverly contributed 
 to, we think, as any periodical in the country. The 
 rejected articles (offered to us, of course, as a gratu- 
 ity) would have filled, at least, a barrel a month! 
 
 Newspapers pay for reporting and editing, but sel- 
 dom or never for " articles." The favor, on the con- 
 
 trary, of giving room and circulation to another man's 
 ideas, is growing into a saleable commodity — the ed» 
 itor (on the ground that he risks the popularity of 
 his paper by relinquishing the chance of a better ar- 
 ticle) charging rent for his columns instead of hiring 
 a tenant. To every scheme of public interest — to 
 every society — to everything which newspapers can 
 binder or further — there is attached some person who 
 is both desirous and able to present the subject 
 forcibly on paper; and, quite as readily and zealously, 
 if there be an objectionable side to it, springs up a 
 pen-and-ink caviller in opposition. Between them, 
 and with the desire to figure in print which besets 
 very many able men, newspaper-editors need pay for 
 little aid except eyewater and scissors, and they get 
 credit for a world of zeal in good causes by articles 
 they neither write nor pay for. We have got to the 
 footboard of our Procrustes bed. 
 
 Authors' Pay in America. — We have hot coals 
 smouldering in the ashes of " things put off," which 
 we poke reluctantly to the surface just now — reluc- 
 tantly only because we wish to light beacons for an 
 author's crusade, and we have no leisure to be more 
 than its Peter the Hermit. We solemnly summon 
 Edgar A. Poe to do the devoir of Coeur de Lion — 
 no man's weapon half so trenchant! And now let 
 us turn the subject round, small end foremost. 
 
 These are days when gentlemen paint their own 
 boots, and we have latterly been our own publisher. 
 We have thereby mastered one or two statistics which, 
 we know not well why, never looked us in the face 
 before, and which we proceed to hold up by the nape 
 of the neck for the encouragement of the less stuffy 
 or less inquiring. Authors who can not find publish- 
 ers, and authors who, having found them, have been 
 as much respected by them as pig-iron by the razor- 
 maker, are invited to " lend us their ears"— on interest. 
 What proportion should an author have of the net 
 profits of a book? This seems a shallow question 
 enough! but there is a deep hole in it. Remember, 
 in the first place, that the author wrote the book — 
 that God gave him the monopoly of the vein from 
 which it is worked— that he has been at the expense 
 and toil of an education, and to other expenses and 
 toils — (as in travel)— that his mind's lease is far shorter 
 than his lease of life— and that thoughtsmiths should 
 be better paid than blacksmiths or goldsmiths (that is 
 to say, if the credit the work does to the country goes 
 for anything in the valuation). The question of the 
 division of profit is between author and publisher, and 
 the publisher gives his uneducated mental attention 
 to the sale, a brief use of his credit for the printing 
 and binding, and runs a most partial risk as to the re- 
 sult — for he need not purchase the book except in 
 obedience to his own judgment and his readers', and 
 the cost is paid, of course, before there are any "net 
 receipts." (There is great capital made of this 
 "risk," but ninety-nine books in a hundred more than 
 clear expenses!) Now, taking a stereotyped dollar- 
 book for example, the plates, worth four or five hun- 
 dred dollars, are paid for, with a moderate sale, in Uie 
 first month. Suppose it to be three months. 1 lie 
 use of the publisher's credit for S500 for ninety days 
 has been his only outlay of consequence; but the 
 author has had his outlay of brain-work, time, genius, 
 and years of education. The printing and getting 
 up, after the plates are paid for, cost about one 
 fifth of the retail price-twenty cents on a dollar. To 
 charge ten cent, more on each copy for the absolute 
 expense of selling and circulating, is more than lib- 
 eral • and now, how shall the remaining seventy cents— 
 the 'net profit— be divided between author and pub- 
 lisher ? 
 
724 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 We should like to have a watchmaker's answer to 
 that question, ilow much ought the jeweller to have 
 for buying it from the maker, warranting it "to go" 
 after examining it, for advertising it, and for selling it 
 across a counter? Suppose the watch to sell for a 
 hundred dollars, and seventy dollars to be the net 
 profit above cost of material. What would you say, 
 if the maker got but ten or twenty dollars, and the 
 retailer fifty or sixty ? Yet that is the proportion at 
 which author and bookseller are paid for literary pro- 
 duction — the seller of the book being paid from tioice 
 to five times as much as the author of it! 
 
 Certainly, the readiest-minded man we ever knew, 
 as well as one of the most brilliant and highly culti- 
 vated conversationists, is Major Davezac, the subject 
 of the anecdote below. Never was a man more out 
 of place as a stump-orator and agitator, well as he 
 acquits himself in these turbulent vocations. It is 
 none of our business to discuss that point, however. 
 We were only about to roll the anecdotical snow-ball 
 a little larger, by recording a Ion mot'of the major's, 
 at the birth of which we chanced to be present. 
 Davezac was charge at Naples in eighteen hundred 
 and some time ago, and French being the language 
 he was born in, his wit of course played freely in the 
 court vernacular. He was quite the idol of the diplo- 
 matic corps, and an "indispensable" at all dances and 
 masquerades. We were dining one evening in his 
 company during the carnival. The major sat oppo- 
 site to us, next to a very pretty German countess. 
 During the procession and the pelting of sugar-plums 
 which had occupied the early part of the day, the 
 countess had received a slight bruise upon her cheek. 
 Davezac wore court-plaster on his lip — a hit also from 
 the sugared ammunition. They were both complain- 
 ing. "Eh, Monsieur Davezac," said the countess, 
 mournfully, " il faut reunir nos douleurs !" — " Oui, 
 madam, et nos blessures /" replied the major instantly, 
 placing his lip upon the cheek of the surprised suf- 
 ferer. 
 
 Cosmopolite Attraction in Broadway. — With- 
 in a few doors, in the neighborhood of Prince street, 
 are collected accidentally, at present, four most vivid 
 representations of four very distant and different 
 countries — Spain, India, Paris, and Constantinople — 
 the " Alhamra," the "Panorama of Madras," the 
 "Panorama of Paris," and the new shop of " Turk- 
 ish curiosities." He who wishes to realize what bal- 
 loons are to do for us in '55, can astonish and con- 
 fuse his geographical impressions to his entire satis- 
 faction, by a visit to all these in one morning. 
 
 The Turkish shop has articles for sale that could 
 seldom before be obtained except by a voyage to the 
 Orient. We brought some curiosities from Constan- 
 tinople, but we have a thousand times regretted, since, 
 that we had not quadrupled our purchases in the bazars 
 and bezestein — so much were the articles admired, 
 and so impossible was it, even in the curiosity-shops 
 of Europe, to find specimens of them. No person 
 who is luxurious in personal habits would willingly 
 be, for example, without the Turkish shirts — having 
 once seen them. They are the poetry of neglige 
 costume — the idealized romance of the drapery of 
 dishabille. Those who have time to make a luxury 
 of dressing-room or boudoir — the beautiful and idle 
 of either sex — should take a look at the gossamer 
 shirts from Constantinople. But there are all man- 
 ner of things in this shop beside. There are beauti- 
 ful gold-embroidered slippers, small carpets and otto- 
 man-cloths, attars in gold bottles, gold-embroidered 
 handkerchiefs and gilded pastilles — everything, in 
 
 short, that one buys of old Mustapha, near the Hip- 
 podrome in Stamboul, confectionary included. We 
 inquired after old Mustapha yesterday, and the Greek 
 who keeps the shop (who was himself a confectioner 
 in Constantinople) delighted us with talking of him, 
 as if he had seen him yesterday! Picturesque and 
 'jolly old turbaned Mustapha! — what fun it was to 
 have the curtain lifted by his grinning Abyssinian in 
 anklets and wristlets, and step into the back shop to 
 take coffee and try his essences! It quite came over 
 us like a dream yesterday — the chat with this Broad- 
 way Constantinopolitan. If you have any curiosity, 
 dear reader, call and taste the confectionary at this 
 shop, and look at the translucent shirts, and see the 
 Persian inkstands, and handle the graceful cimeters, 
 and look at the Brusa silks and seraglio slippers — in 
 short, see Constantinople — for that is a palpable slice 
 of it ! 
 
 Jumping the Pew. — We were once in the gallery 
 of a country church when an address was to be de- 
 livered to a Sunday school. The body of the house 
 was reserved for the adult audience, and the boys were 
 confined to one of the side aisles. There was evident- 
 ly an understanding, however, that if not otherwise 
 wanted, the well-cushioned seat facing the chancel 
 was to be given up to as many lads as could occupy if. 
 It would hold, perhaps, twenty, and a hundred of 
 them were packed in the aisle like figs, waiting till the 
 class leader at the head should " open up." Looking 
 on with some amusement, we found our eye arrested 
 by the bright face of a lad, half way down, who bore 
 the keeping back very impatiently. His struggles to 
 pass the other boys were vehement, but of no use. 
 He was slight, and his neighbors were bold and sturdy. 
 Presently he bit his lips, entered a pew, jumped the 
 partition into the central aisle, and walked round to 
 the front. There was a murmur of indignation among 
 the boys, and a general smile among the spectators, 
 but he secured his pick of seals. The clergyman, in 
 the course of his address, thought proper to get up 
 an impromptu colloquy, and, to the evident annoyance 
 of the other boys, selected the pew-jumper, who sat 
 just before him, for the honor. The lad arose, when 
 questioned, and surprised the whole audience with 
 the clearness of his replies. He sat down amid gene- 
 ral applause, and (whatever reproof he got in private 
 for his daring) he was the envied hero of the day. We 
 have often since had the successful boldness of this 
 lad recalled to our memory by the class of things it 
 illustrates, and our mental reply, after reading a let- 
 ter to which this was the preface, was — " Better jump 
 the pew !" 
 
 Our correspondent can not get a hearing from the 
 public ! Few things are more difficult. We have 
 not read his book, but it may be excellent snuff to 
 keep a fame going, and yet not the stuff to start one. 
 Genius is expected " never to go into the water till it 
 knows how to swim" — never to expect to be read but 
 for having been read before ! With any degree of 
 ability, more or less, it is easy to be almost hopelessly 
 overlaid. We, ourself, are a very humble example. 
 We "jumped the pew" unconsciously, in England, 
 with our furiously abused " Pencillings," and imme- 
 diately sold, for the highest price, an edition of " Ink- 
 lings of Adventure" — a series of tales that bad fallen 
 still-born into the lap of Boston, and for the first print- 
 ing of which we paid more than a thousand dollars on 
 our return to their birth-place. Instances of "jump- 
 ing the pew" will occur to every observer of men — 
 every reader of biography. It is the shabby door to 
 many a path of glory. Almost every profession begins 
 with a dilemma — hope deferred, or a pew to jump ! 
 The starving lawyer in the west, who flogged his 
 neighbor to have a case to plead, jumped the pew ! 
 
EPHEMERA 
 
 725 
 
 The veteran Buckingham, one of the most judicious, 
 able and respected editors in the country, was starving 
 in Boston, when he "jumped the pew" with the abu- 
 sive " Galaxy" — making himself read from terror till 
 he was famous enough to be read for merit. The 
 game is dangerous, however, and the principle lies 
 in most questionable neighborhood. For one who 
 would succeed in it there are ninety-nine who would 
 fail, and failure is hopeless extinction ! The pew can 
 be jumped but once. The attention of the public can 
 be but once summoned by a rude pluck at its beard ; 
 and, to keep attention long enough to have the rude- 
 ness forgotten, there must be merit that the public 
 would regret overlooking — merit, indeed, of xchich the 
 neglect was injury enough, to justify violent extrication. 
 
 The Mirror Steam-Press. — It would be curious 
 not to lose sight of the Latin word, dropped for transla- 
 tion into the scholar's ear, till it re-appears in English 
 on his tongue, but a half-hour's watching of the steam- 
 press on which the Mirror is printed would be hardly 
 a less instructive spectacle of contrivance. To com- 
 plete the assimilation of the second process to the 
 first, it would have been necessary, till lately, to em- 
 ploy a boy to pull the word oft' the scholar's tongue ; 
 but, by the ingenuity of R. Hoe & Co., the great 
 organ of public opinion is endowed with a happy de- 
 livery of its own — laying oft" the sheet that was printed 
 and ready for utterance, that is to say, and drawing in 
 its iron tongue, unaided, to be laden with the mean- 
 time coinage of another. 
 
 The improvements in printing-presses within the 
 last ten or fifteen years are probably far less remark- 
 able than some other progresses of mechanic inven- 
 tion, yet they are wonderful enough to use up quite 
 as much curiosity as it is comfortable to find epithets 
 for, in a day. The difference between the old Ramage 
 press, and the steam-miracle in our present office, is 
 peculiarly impressive to ourself. There is a small 
 bar of iron in this press which fulfils precisely the 
 Bame destiny to which we were at one time devoted. 
 We were considered in an exemplary line of life while 
 performing exactly its office — that of inking the type 
 — during a long year of disgust with Latin — (when a 
 sensible papa took us at our word, and allowed us to 
 prefer a trade to a satchel !) 
 
 The ink was in those days kept in a wooden box, 
 and, with two stuffed leather balls, a boy or man, be- 
 side the press, distributed it over the face of the type, 
 while the pressman was fixing the sheet for the impres- 
 sion. We remember balling an edition of " Watts's 
 Psalms and Hymns,"' which it took weeks to print, 
 and, by the same token, there are lines in that good 
 book of which we caught glimpses on the "frisket," 
 that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the 
 ink-balls while conning them over ! Reviving ambi- 
 tion sent us back to school, however, and invention 
 soon after superseded the ink-boy's elbows (encum- 
 bered with a stomach), by a bit of machinery that 
 neither required to be fed, nor committed verses to 
 memory while inking the type ! This getting rid of 
 the boy was the peculiarity of the Smith press, and 
 then followed the Napier press, which dispensed with 
 the man, and needed only the tending of two girls or 
 boys; and now (thanks to Mr. Hoe), we have a steam- 
 press, which puts up three iron fingers for a sheet of 
 white paper, pulls it down into its bosom, gives it a 
 squeeze that makes an impression, and then lays it into 
 the palm of an iron hand which deposiles it evenly on a 
 heap — at the rate of two thousand an hour ! We often 
 stop with curiosity to look at the little arrangement 
 which does the work our elbows have ached with, and 
 we think the Mirror press altogether is a sight worth 
 your coming to see, dear reader ! 
 
 The First Day of the World's New Lease 
 was clasped upon the last yesterday of the completed 
 j series, by as glorious a retiring moon, and as brilliant 
 a rising sun, as were ever coveted by the " old gray- 
 beard," at whose funeral they are to be the expiring 
 candles. A finer night than last night— a finer day 
 than to-day — never relieved watch upon the " tented 
 heavens." We stood looking up a steeple from our 
 bed-room window at midnight (having first finished 
 ! an article for to-day's paper, upon the venture of its 
 | being wanted), and we stood shaving at the same 
 j window when the gold smile of the unexpected sun- 
 ; rise called upon the surprised weather-cock to look 
 about him as usual! We, therefore, certify to the 
 world's coming honestly by its "situation." Go about 
 your business, oh, mankind ! 
 
 Coming down the front steps of the Astor, at half- 
 
 j past six, we naturally enough took a look up Broad- 
 
 ! way, to see if, perchance, some blessed change in the 
 
 j pavement might not give the first sign of anew Jcrusa- 
 
 '. lem. But if the sapphire paviors had called upon 
 
 ! Mayor Harper, he had struck at something in the 
 
 contract. The old holes were there, with stones of 
 
 the accustomed complexion — (chafed " trap," minera- 
 
 : logically speaking)— and the mud evidently unaware 
 
 of a miracle. But, hey ! how ! WHAT ! a rainbow 
 
 j across Broadway? ? Could we believe our eyes? — 
 
 t a many-colored arch completely spanning the street, 
 
 hung with flowers, and men walking over it! ! ! Was 
 
 an advent forthcoming, after all ? 
 
 While we write, that Advent is in progress ! It is 
 the Advent of Youth — Juvenocracy in thi as- 
 cendant ! A flowery arch spans the breadth of 
 Broadway, and under it winds, at this moment, the 
 procession in honor of first maturity — manhood in 
 youth '. It scarce needed, it is true, that the world 
 should be born again before its new monarch should 
 make formal entry. It was, ten years ago, discovered 
 in France — two years ago in England — last year in 
 America — that the gray head teas only the wisest while 
 there were no books but experience ! That which men 
 once waited to know till the hair was silvered, is now 
 taught the child at school — conned in the ambitious 
 dream of the youth in his puberty. The world has 
 " hung fire" in other ages, from the damp of burnt- 
 out enthusiasm spread like a blanket over its brain- 
 powder. Improvement lias gone upon crutches. 
 Action waited for enterprise to cough. Courage 
 stayed to fumble for spectacles. The forenoon 
 shadows of the sun of human intellect were of un- 
 trustworthy measure, and the dial to begin to ivork by 
 was shadowed till post-meridian ! 
 
 Without touching upon the political articulation in 
 " the roar of the Y~oung Lion," we mark the epoch 
 —the epoch of "Young France," " Young England," 
 " Young America!" We could show, had we time, 
 how strikingly the peculiar habits of our land have 
 more prepared us than other countries, for the sover- 
 eignty of Youth ! We have no time now. We must 
 go" forth with the crowd and see the bright cheek and 
 curling beard of the Young Monarch in his hour of 
 triumph. The cannon are pealing ! The drums 
 shake upon the prophetic sunshine in the air! 
 " Hail to the" YOUTH " that in triumph advances !" 
 
 12 o'clock— We have been to Broadway. The 
 procession is soon to form. The mounted marshals 
 of the day are galloping to and fro with their ribanded 
 insignia— the pictorial outside of the Museum is per- 
 fectly embroidered with petticoats (a charming relief!) 
 —the windows on both sides of Broadway are cram- 
 med with gayly-dressed spectators— the 500 Boston 
 young men (fine, wholesome-looking fellows, who 
 certainly do credit to their " parsley bed"), are assem- 
 bled with their badges in front of the Astor— the town 
 is full of what the ladies would call " handsome young 
 
726 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 strangers" — the omnibuses carry flags — tbe whole 
 street, from the triumphal arch to the pinnacles of 
 Trinity, looks impassable with the glittering crowd. 
 We never saw comparable preparation for a festal 
 march. It will be a day to be remembered — mocked 
 at, perhaps, as the first after a millenial crisis, but 
 glorified as the first in the great era of Youth fulhood ! 
 
 Mass Meeting of Newsboys. — We may be per- 
 mitted, perhaps, to please our friends with the an- 
 nouncement that we at least stand well upon the side- 
 walk ! The exhaustion of our large edition at four 
 o'clock, yesterday afternoon, and a general return of 
 the newsboys from their routes with eager demands 
 for more, occasioned a multitudinous holding of 
 counsel among those piping potentates, and to the as- 
 tonishment of our corner and the neighborhood, the 
 assembled varlets actually gave the Evening Mirror 
 three cheers! We bow to the tattered vox populi, and 
 own the soft impeachment. Gentlemen newsboys ! 
 give us your hand (with a newspaper between !) and 
 permit us to offer you a business suggestion. Aston- 
 ish one of your insinuating number with a white shirt, 
 and try the new trick of selling us with a smile to the 
 ladies ! Call him the ladies' boy, and treat him deli- 
 cately when he is dressed and can't afford the results 
 of your familiarity ! Your powerful body amounts at 
 present to some three or four hundred, and your 
 profits will soon tempt the competition of older gen- 
 tlemen, unless you find more worlds to conquer. 
 Hurrah for the ladies, gentlemen (waving whatever 
 you have to represent a pocket-handkerchief) — and 
 now, if you will graciously withdraw your attention, 
 we would speak to those over whom you have the ad- 
 vantage of youth. 
 
 We have to thank the press all over the country for 
 the most flattering mention and the kindest encour- 
 agement. Our own craft seem to love us. We thought 
 of quoting some of their felicitous notices, but our 
 grateful pride would thus fall into a shape used for 
 puffing, and we shrink from the medium. Thanks to 
 our friends — simply but fervently. 
 
 Gold Inkstand to the Authoress of the Scot- 
 tish Chiefs. — The works of Jane Porter have 
 probably brought more money into the hands of 
 booksellers than those of any writer except, per- 
 haps, Scott, and at this moment steam-presses are 
 employed in printing large editions of her delight- 
 ful novels. An enthusiastic man, a great admirer 
 of Miss Porter, has, for the second time, started a 
 subscription among the booksellers of this city to pre- 
 sent her with a gold inkstand, and the Harpers, Ap- 
 pletons, Langleys, and others, have subscribed with 
 enthusiastic liberality. Perhaps a description of Jane 
 Porter with a little of her hitherto unwritten history may 
 not be unacceptable. 
 
 Miss Porter was the daughter of a gallant English 
 officer, who died, leaving a widow, and three children, 
 then very young, but all destined to remarkable fame 
 Sir Robert Ker Porter, Jane Porter, and Anna 
 Maria Porter. Sir Robert, as is well known, was 
 the celebrated historical painter, traveller in Persia, 
 soldier, diplomatist, and author, lately deceased. He 
 went to Russia with one of his great pictures when 
 very young, married a wealthy Russian princess, and 
 passed his subsequent years between the camp and 
 diplomacy, honored and admired in every station and 
 relation of his life. The two girls were playmates 
 and neighbors of Walter Scott. Jane published her 
 "Scottish Chiefs" at the age of eighteen, and became 
 immediately the great literary wonder of her time. 
 
 Her widowed mother, however, withdrew her imme- 
 diately from society to the seclusion of a country 
 town, and she was little seen in the gay world of Lon- 
 don before several of her works had become classics. 
 Anna Maria, the second sister, commenced her admi- 
 rable series of novels soon after the first celebrity of 
 Jane's works, and they wrote and passed the brightest 
 years of their life together in a cottage retreat. The 
 two sisters were singularly beautiful. Sir Thomas 
 Lawrence was an unsuccessful suitor to Anna Maria, 
 and Jane (said by Sir Martin Shee to have been the 
 handsomest woman he ever saw) was engaged to a 
 young soldier who was killed in the Peninsula. She 
 is a woman to have but one love in a lifetime. Her 
 betrothed was killed when she was twenty years of 
 age, and she has ever since worn mourning, and re- 
 mained true to his memory. Jane is now the only 
 survivor of her family, her admirable mother and her 
 sister having died some twelve or fourteen years ago, 
 and Sir Robert having died lately, while revisiting 
 England after many years' diplomatic residence in 
 Venezuela. 
 
 Miss Porter is now near sixty. She has suffered 
 within the last two or three years from ill-health, but 
 she is still erect, graceful, and majestic in person, and 
 still possessed of admirable beauty of countenance. 
 Her large dark eyes have a striking lambency of lus- 
 tre, her smile inspires love in all who see her, and her 
 habit of mind, up to the time we last saw her (three 
 or four years ago), was that of reflecting the mood of 
 others in conversation, thinking never of herself, and 
 endeavoring only to make others shine, and all this 
 with a tact, a playfulness and simplicity, an occasional 
 unconscious brilliancy and penetration, which have 
 made her, up to sixty years of age, a most inter- 
 esting, engaging, and lovely woman. We have had 
 the good fortune to pass several months, at different 
 times, under different hospitable roofs, with Jane 
 Porter, and, considering the extent of her charm, 
 over old and young, titled and humble, masters and 
 servants, we sincerely think we never have seen a 
 woman so beloved and so fascinating. She is the 
 idol of many different circles of very high rank, and 
 passes her time in yielding, month after month, to 
 pressing invitations from the friends who love her. 
 The dowager queen Adelaide is one of her warmest 
 friends, the highest families of nobility contend for 
 her as a resident guest, distinguished and noble for- 
 eigners pay court to her invariably on arriving in 
 England, she has been ennobled by a decree of the 
 king of Prussia, and with all this weight of honor on 
 her head, you might pass weeks with her (ignorant of 
 her history) without suspecting her to be more than 
 the loveliest of women past their prime, and born but 
 to grace a contented mediocrity of station. 
 
 This is an impartial and truthful sketch of the cele- 
 brated person for whom the above-mentioned compli- 
 ment is intended. We trust it may find her alive, and 
 with her accustomed bright smile upon her lips — God 
 guard and preserve her ! 
 
 RocKiNG-CHAiROTcelNKSTANDresig-fte<f. We gave, 
 " by authority," an account of a subscription paper, 
 the purpose of which was to present to Jane Porter 
 an inkstand of gold. Our publisher-mayor Air. Har- 
 per, headed the list with $40. We wrote a paragraph 
 on the subject, and the same evening were called to 
 see a rocking-chair into which the inkstand had been 
 suddenly converted by a rub against the Aladdin's lamp 
 of propriety. We went into Meeks's museum of 
 sumptuous furniture, and the chair was disrobed, for 
 us, of a beautiful chintz cover presented to Miss Por- 
 ter by Messrs. Meeks, the makers. The chair is a 
 bijou. The model is appropriately Elizabethan — (a 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 727 
 
 chair for the virgin queen of English romance, made 
 in the style of the virgin queen of English history) — 
 the carving in rosewood relief, and the lining of crim- 
 son velvet. The exact model of the chair was sent 
 to Queen Victoria not long since, as a specimen of 
 American furniture, by a club of English gentlemen. 
 The cadeuu goes out consigned by the mayor of New 
 York to the iord-mayor of London, for his worshipful 
 presentation, Mr. Griswold, the packet owner, giving 
 it an honorary passage. The following letter, written 
 on parchment and sealed with the city arms, accom- 
 panies it : — 
 
 " New York, October 28, 1844. 
 " Dear Madam : The undersigned, booksellers, 
 publishers, and authors, of the city of New York, 
 have long felt desirous of transmitting to you a me- 
 morial of the high and respectful admiration which 
 they entertain for one to whose pen we are indebted 
 for some of the purest and most imaginative produc- 
 tions in the wide range of English literature. As the 
 authoress of ' Thaddeus of Warsaw,' the 'Scottish 
 Chiefs,' &c, your name has spread over the length 
 and breadth of our land, and the volumes of your de- 
 lightful works may be found gracing alike the abodes 
 of the wealthy, and the humble dwellings of the 
 poor. And deservedly so — for if purity of sentiment, 
 felicity of expression, and the constant inculcation of 
 the noblest lessons of religion and morality, be any 
 passport to literary fame, then will the name of Miss 
 Porter rank high on the list of those whom the present 
 age delights to honor, and for whom coming ages 
 will entertain a deep feeling of reverential esteem. 
 
 " Regarding you, therefore, as that one among the 
 writers of our time who first opened up the path that 
 has been since further embellished by the kindred 
 genius of a Scott, we take the liberty, as well on our I 
 own behalf as in the name of thousands of American 
 readers to whom your charming productions have 
 taught, in so graceful and captivating a manner, the 
 lessons of true virtue, of presenting you with the ac- 
 companying testimonial of our sincere and grateful 
 esteem. 
 
 "We have the honor to remain, dear madam, 
 " Your obedient servants, 
 '•James Harper, Mayor of New York, 
 W. H. Appleton, Daniel Appleton, 
 Chas. S. Francis, S. B. Collins, 
 Harper & Brothers." 
 We have still another light to throw upon this fa- 
 mous chair. The Wood, without which it might not 
 have been built, did not come from the West Indies 
 in planks of amyris balsamifera (rosewood), but from 
 Canandaigua, in the shape of a gentleman whose 
 heart distils a better balsam — of courtesy! We first 
 heard of Mr. Wood and the proposed presentation of 
 an inkstand, from Miss Porter herself. She inquired 
 whether we knew Mr. Wood, and gave us the history 
 of his project to compliment her, apropos of promis- 
 ing us a sight of barrels of presents which had show- 
 ered upon her from all parts of the world. She ex- 
 pressed a most simple-hearted delight in the extent 
 of her American reputation, and wished to see a copy 
 of one of the American editions. 
 
 On our return to this country we found a small 
 copy of the "Scottish Chiefs," almost illegible with 
 grease and thumbing, in the kitchen of a remote tav- 
 ern in Pennsylvania. We sent it to her with a little 
 water added unintentionally to its romance — having 
 fallen overboard with it in our pocket while ferrying a 
 skiff across the Susquehannah. By the way, let us 
 here record an act of liberality in an p]nglish pub- 
 lisher, which is apropos of this present from the 
 American bibliopoles. We were one day requested 
 by Mr. George Virtue, the enterprising publisher of 
 the American Scenery, to be the bearer of a message 
 to Miss Porter. He wished to publish her Scottish 
 
 Chiefs in a beautifully-embellished edition. The copy- 
 right, by English law limiting duration, had long since 
 expired — but Mr. Virtue wished to give Miss Porter 
 d£200 — one thousand dollars — for her formal con- 
 sent. The check was sent the next day, and the 
 edition, one of the most superb specimens of embel- 
 lished edition in the language, is since completed. 
 The old proverb says of a burn, 
 
 " Rub it to Wood, 
 It will come to good," 
 
 and we had a burn at our fingers' end as to the real 
 mover's getting his share of the credit of this compli- 
 ment to Miss Porter. There is little enough enthu- 
 siasm for others' glory in the world — little enough to 
 prevent all fear of surfeit by mention. We have re- 
 corded, therefore, against his express orders, the dis- 
 interested zeal of William Wood in this matter. 
 
 The Overcoat Dilemma. — We have received a 
 note from a dismayed tailor in a thriving inland town 
 of Massachusetts, begging us, " for charity's sake," 
 to inform him "what is the fashion for overcoats." 
 He protests that the models sent him from the city 
 are inelegant and unbecoming — and he begs us to in- 
 quire of some dandy, regnant or ci-devant, as to the 
 existence, among knowing men, of some outer habili- 
 ment more becoming than the prevailing type. This 
 is our summing up of his wishes as expressed in a let- 
 ter of three pages. 
 
 Before venturing to tamper with so ticklish a sub- 
 ject, let us fortify the ground by an extract from a 
 very grave and well-considered lecture on the " Changes 
 of the Fashions," lately delivered before a lyceum in 
 Portsmouth : — 
 
 Although the inventors of new fashions and the 
 leaders in them are highly culpable for the injury 
 they do society— yet nine tenths of those whom we 
 see in fashionable attire are persons on whom no im- 
 putation can be cast : neither is there one in a hun- 
 dred of their dressmakers or tailors, hatters or cord- 
 vvainers, who are deserving a breath of censure for do- 
 in"- their work in a fashionable style. So powerful 
 an & impetus has been moving the fashionable world, 
 that no individual can with safety hold up a resisting 
 hand. Nothing but a combined strength can over- 
 come it. 
 
 Common sense asks — why is it that a coat of a few 
 years' standing, with a broad back and long waist, 
 which the prudent man has kept for his holyday 
 wear, is not as really valuable as one in which the 
 seams are more nearly allied, or the buttons placed in 
 a different position ? 
 
 Public opinion replies — the man is not in fashion. 
 The observers point him out among the multitude — 
 " There is a sample of old times"—" There goes a 
 miser who can't afford a new coat :" and a soft voice 
 whispers as he passes—" I wonder who would have 
 that old-fashioned man !" How frequently is the 
 public sympathy excited for an adroit rogue in fash- 
 ionable attire, who has received the just sentence of 
 th e law— while the poorly-clad culprit by his side, 
 not more guilty, passes almost unpitied to the gal- 
 
 Thus to be out of fashion a man is generally re- 
 garded as wanting in spirit or purse ; and it becomes 
 a matter of necessity for a modest man, who wishes 
 to elude the notice of the world, to follow along in 
 the wake of fashion. However much a person in 
 common life may be disgusted with its fluctuat.ons, 
 he must bear the imputation of vamty, and in some 
 degree lose his influence in society, if he either has a 
 new dress made in an old style, or for convenience 
 appears in any new clothing which is made more 
 
728 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 with a view to general utility than in subservience to 
 fashion. 
 
 With this warrant for giving a grave opinion on the 
 subject, we proceed to huddle together our kersey- 
 mere ideas as follows: — 
 
 The sack-coat belongs to the climate of England, 
 and is wholly desoriente in this country. It was in- 
 vented as a kind of body-umbrella in which elegant 
 men could pass unvvet from club to cab, in that cli- 
 mate of eternal moisture, and was never meant to be 
 used but as a garment of transit. A dandy bicn poinlu 
 in his kid and varnish extremities, may certainly walk 
 the street safely in a sack-coat, as his quality would be 
 known by his gloves and boots only, were he other- 
 wise parenthesized in a barrel. But, unless redeema- 
 ble by the point of his boot or a finger of his glove, no 
 man is " dressed" in a sack. By universally making 
 sack-coats of coarse cloth in England, they class them 
 very definitely with hackney-coaches and umbrellas — 
 temporary conveniences of which the material is by 
 no means a point of honor. 
 
 In England, however, dandies dress to drive, and in 
 this country they dress to walk, and, of course, it is 
 more important here that the street coat should be be- 
 coming to the shape than is thought necessary in Eng- 
 land. The paletot (for a description of which see 
 " Scott's" authentic " Mirror of Fashion") is becom- 
 ing to men of fine carriage, and the " Taglioni," when 
 cut into the back adroitly, is becoming to slender fig- 
 ures. In the present anarchy of overcoat, however, 
 every man can choose for himself, and our pastoral 
 querist of the shears, we venture to assure him, is 
 perfectly safe in first suiting his customers, and then 
 swearing it to be the fashion. We would just hint, 
 in conclusion, that there is a mixture of cloak and 
 overcoat that we have seen on a " slap-up" man lately 
 from Paris, and this chanced to hit our weakness. 
 Any man who has genius in his shears will require no 
 broader hint of what the combination looks like ! 
 
 Young Men's Procession — The procession of 
 yesterday, was less remarkable for its numbers (esti- 
 mated at 3,000) than for the unusual interest taken in 
 it by the spectators — the enthusiasm of the ladies and 
 more quiet lookers-on, and the boundless heartiness 
 of the cheers by the people in the streets. The quali- 
 ty of the general feeling, to our thinking, was more 
 nearly up to the warmth of the Lafayette Ovation, 
 than any procession that has taken place since. We 
 remarked, also, that in the escorts and cavalcade, there 
 was a large mixture of fashionable young men, which 
 is a new feature in the public processions of this city. 
 There were also more clergymen, who had errands in 
 town and about the streets, than usual — the white 
 cravat in rather uncommon proportion. Altogether, 
 we think the bed of this new party has a longer and 
 broader blanket — covering higher toward the fastidious 
 public head, and falling more kindly upon the service- 
 able public feet — than any new- party blanket spread 
 within our recollection. Youth is beloved. Its hopes 
 are contagious. Its opinions are supposed free from 
 selfishness. Its ardor is credited with inspiration. 
 The party of youth, whenever it is combined for one 
 object, must triumph, it seems to us — for it carries 
 with it an outside atmosphere of electric sympathies 
 exclusively its own, while, within, it has the energy 
 of enthusiastic first manhood, and confidence unsub- 
 dued by experience. 
 
 Opening of the Railroad to White Plains. — 
 The first rush of blood through the heart of Pygma- 
 lion's statue, and the first rush of a rail-car, on Satur- 
 day, through the bosom of the Bronx valley, would 
 
 seem to us a well-matched fable and fact, were not the 
 fact, both as a surprise and a change, more electric 
 than the fable. To realize it, one must get at the way 
 it is looked at by the rustic dwellers in the plains be- 
 yond. They were called upon to believe that a city 
 which has, all their lives, been four hours distant, 
 " good driving," would, after the forthcoming celebra- 
 tion, be slid up to within one hour, " easy going." 
 Their potatoes are to glide to market, and coal and 
 groceries to glide back, with magical facility — their 
 women-folks are to go to town, stop and get home be- 
 tween dinner and supper — the morning newspapers 
 are to arrive from New York a little after breakfast — 
 the citizens are to come out by hundreds for an after- 
 noon walk — New York, in short, is four times as near 
 as it used to be, only the land \snot knocked away be- 
 tween ! A gentleman told us, just before the cars 
 started on their return, from White Plains, that the 
 country-people, around, were not only incredulous as 
 to the completion of the road, up to the time of the 
 arrival of the cars, but that they still (6 o'clock 
 P. M.) looked upon the whole affair — celebration, 
 train, music and guns — as a humbug that could never 
 hold out — got up for some Millerite or political hocus- 
 pocus, and to end only in the ruin of their credulous 
 neighbors ! 
 
 To start fair, however. We were invited to join 
 the worshipful society of aldermen, bank-directors, 
 stockholders, and judiciary, who, on Saturday after- 
 noon, were to invade, for the first time, by public rail- 
 road, the virgin seclusion of the White Plains. The 
 access, through the valley of theBronx, promised some- 
 thing attractive in the way of landscape, and there 
 was a pull out of town in the soft air of the morning. 
 We were at the cars punctually at one, found a friend 
 inside, and a band of music a-top, and rolled away 
 from the City Hall with a double momentum — steam 
 to draw the cars, and the gentlemen in the cars who 
 are drawn on for the steam ! We went on our musi- 
 cal way through Centre street, embellishing it (by the 
 beauty attracted to the chamber-windows) as the moon 
 brightens the clouds in passing through, and with a 
 momentary chill from the deserted propriety of streets 
 up-town, were soon in the fields — fields by the way, 
 which are secured to Nature and shorn of their chief 
 value (nearness to town) by the railroad which makes 
 fields beyond quite as come-at-able. 
 
 We gave Harlem an outbreak of music in passing 
 through, stopped a moment at Williams' bridge, where 
 the road has hitherto terminated, and then proceeded 
 upon the new track through the Bronx valley.* The 
 scenery for the next twelve miles was as primitive and 
 fresh as if a three-days' journey lay between it and a 
 great city — the most unconscious looking old water- 
 mills on the stream, the woods and hill-sides with a 
 look most innocent of snob and suburb, and a univer- 
 sal gape of amazement on the faces of cottagers and 
 their cows. The seclusion and thorough country of 
 the whole twelve miles were enchanting, and we prom- 
 ised ourselves a ramble to twenty successive nooks 
 that we saw (and twenty successive times of course 
 had occasion to remember that we had* become a 
 utensil of daily use, labelled " never to be taken out 
 of the kitchen !" We are sorry to say the grass will 
 probably do pretty well without us, now, till we disturb 
 it to ask leave to pass under.) 
 
 The hill-sides suddenly fell back and we glided into 
 an open plain, where two or three hundred rustic- 
 looking people were assembled — six or seven of them 
 
 * The road, from a few miles above the Harlem river, fol- 
 lows the valley of the Bronx, a small stream, taking its rise 
 near Rye, and sometimes dignified by the name of a river. 
 We believe that it was contemplated by the British govern- 
 ment, at one time, to form a court of inquiry, to try the 
 British admiral for not ascending the Bronx river with his 
 fleet, and destroying the army of General Washington, then 
 lying near White Plains. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 729 
 
 busy on a knoll near by, ramming a welcome up a gun. 
 
 The report rang as the engine stopped, and White 
 
 Plains was cosmopolized ! Out jumped Wall street 
 and City Hall. An old negro and his very old wife 
 commenced furiously opening oysters at a bench near 
 by. The cars stood in the middle of a corn-field. 
 The country people gathered around and looked hard 
 at the boots of the company. Two or three barrels 
 of crackers were rolled over the corn-hills to a new 
 stable building in the field. Everybody from the city 
 seemed exclusively occupied with smelling the plough- 
 ed ground. Horses were tied to the fences all about. 
 The landscape (breasted with fine, fertile hills, and 
 having the While Plains for its lap), was slumbering 
 in a soft haze, with just sunshine enough to content 
 a man who would be contented without it, and al- 
 together the scene was simple and fresh near by, and 
 the distance more picturesque than the name of 
 "White Plains" had suggested. 
 
 On the floor of the new barn, half boarded and 
 nearly shingled, were spread four long tables, laden 
 with a very profuse and substantial repast, and, in 
 fifteen minutes after arrival, the president was in his 
 place, and the stockholders and their guests seated 
 and " in a fair way" to be enthusiastic. After a round 
 or two of champagne, the president's health was drank 
 and his report called for — but we will give the statistics 
 in another paragraph. 
 
 Pretty sure of hearing the report and reading the 
 speeches " in the way of business," we accepted the 
 invitation of Mr. Lyon, and drove to his beautiful 
 residence, near by — a Gothic cottage of most absolute 
 taste, a sketch of which we had seen in the new edi- 
 tion of " Downing's Rural Architecture." It is 
 enough to make one doubt all the ills of life to see 
 such a place to pass it in. The table-land of the 
 White Plains lies behind the house, and a valley — 
 folded slope over slope, and sunk, knoll below knoll- 
 drops away from the lawn in front, showing miles of 
 wild-wood and fertile fields, with a shady glen leading 
 away to the left — the whole combination, for an inland 
 view, unsurpassed in variety and beauty. The cottage 
 is in the Tudor style, faultless within and without. 
 We wish we had time and space to say more of it and 
 its surroundings. We should add that Mr. Lyon has 
 been the zealous apostle of the road, and that a pro- 
 cession was formed after the collation to make him a 
 complimentary visit. They went to his house, pre- 
 ceded by the band, but were unfortunately missed by 
 Mr. Lyon, who was conducting his friends back by a 
 shorter path across the fields. 
 
 The White Plains moon rose to see us off, and, as 
 we got under way with music and cheers, she added 
 another full face to the gazing rustics, and, when last 
 seen, was apparently climbing up on a barrel to look 
 over the spectators' shoulders. As she was in town 
 when we arrived at half past nine, and as there were 
 no ladies invited by the directors, she must have got 
 a ride somehow behind, and whatever the conductor 
 may say (for we know her well !) the paying her pas- 
 sage was probably " all moonshine." 
 
 Labor and Brains. — We hear much about " pro- 
 tection for labor," and very little about protection for 
 brains — (except in the way of a hat). The working 
 men, those who use their hands skilfully and industri- 
 ously, have many advocates of their claims. The 
 politicians and the law-makers and the newspaper 
 press, take up their cause loudly and sincerely, but 
 those who " can not dig," who are " ashamed to beg" 
 and have nothing but their brains — their intellect, to 
 depend upon — are whistled down the wind, "the prey 
 to fortune." 
 
 One class of these luckless personages, is that of 
 
 editors and assistant editors, and their remuneration is 
 not only inadequate, generally speaking, to their sup- 
 port, but far below their real merit. What would the 
 newspaper press of this city be but for these men ? 
 Nothing ! They are the indirect means of giving a 
 livelihood to thousands, and are never thanked for it. 
 For example. We know of a newspaper in this city 
 which owes its success to a small corps of editors, 
 whose whole pay is about two thousand dollars per 
 annum. If they should withdraw their aid, the paper 
 would stop beyond a question. 
 
 Let us see what their brains do for others. The 
 paper-makers receive from the establishment. 818,000 
 a year. The compositors receive about $10,000 more 
 —the reporters and clerks about 83,000 more. The 
 type-makers and ink-manufacturers about $2,000 more. 
 And this expenditure goes on from year to year. It 
 I would be utterly impossible for this $32,000 to be re- 
 ceived and expended in this way, but for the talent and 
 tact of two or three persons connected with the paper. 
 A large number of persons is actually supported by 
 their brains, and yet there is not one among the num- 
 ber thus supported, who does not think his own person- 
 al labor and toil, far more important and praiseworthy 
 than that of the men who actually furnish them with 
 employment! This is the justice of the world ! This 
 is the result of the ridiculous notions prevailing, that 
 the lifting of the sledge-hammer is more deserving of 
 reward than the skill which guides its blows. Me- 
 chanical labor of all kinds is better paid than literary 
 labor, and it is time that just impressions prevailed on 
 this subject. Let us honor the working men, but 
 when they are aided by talent and literary industry, 
 they should honor them in return. 
 
 The editorial corps are making the fortunes of many 
 newspaper and magazine establishments in this country, 
 and yet many men of talent are starving under the 
 effort. 
 
 Portrait of Wordsworth by Henry Inman — 
 Without wishing to compare our great painter to a 
 worm— except as having used up one system (of artis- 
 tic ideas) and being fairly on wing in a new one— we 
 think the worm in chrysalis and its emergent new 
 creature very fair types of the Inman that teas, in 
 America, and the Inman that is, in England. Before 
 this time we think he would have gone abroad prema- 
 turely. Genius requires to complete its first identity 
 — to ripen fully — to acquire the perfection of com- 
 mand over, and familiarity with, its in-born peculiari- 
 ties—before trusting itself in a sphere which is both 
 removed from habit and aids to concentration, and 
 i bewildering with the glitter and supremacy of other 
 i models. No matter what the pursuit, there is a 
 j natural mental chrysalis— a time after completed man- 
 hood, when a change of scene, change of habits, 
 change of influences, external and internal, renew the 
 life of both mind and body, open chambers in the soul 
 hitherto unseen, and incredibly beautify and enrich 
 the whole existence. How many painters have we 
 seen confirmed into tame copyists— crushed by the 
 weight of the masters above them— by going abroad 
 with a new-born style just struggling into shape and 
 seeming of its own! In a minor way, how many 
 characters are smothered by being forced into a too 
 trying element of society before completing their 
 natural idiosyncrasy ! 
 
 Power went abroad at the r.ght stage of his exis- 
 tence as a sculptor-Grenough, perhaps, too early 
 Inman might, possibly, have gone earher, with equal 
 advantage. He has been, for some time, gaining little 
 in his art The easily-given and ill-weighed praise 
 of our country had long ago satiated him. He had 
 little stimulus beyond the profit of his pencil. But 
 the mind that lies fallow under such torpor, ripens and 
 
730 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 collects richness under the surface, and ploughed 
 again, before it is mastered by weeds and tangle, it 
 shows wondrous fertility and vigor. 
 
 "We have put down, now, what passed through our 
 mind while looking yesterday at a head of Words- 
 worth, which is just received from Inman. It is a 
 masterly piece of work, though but a sketch. The 
 truth to nature convinces you that it is an infallible 
 portrait, without your ever having seen the original. 
 It is Wordsworth. It is the shell of the meat in his 
 books. His feeblenesses and his philosophic sim- 
 plicities are there. You see how he came to write 
 what we have read. He has done his own portrait — 
 a faithful copy, in poetry, of the same as this on can- 
 ass. Majestic and weak, wise and silly, far-sighted 
 and credulous old man ! He looks like his poetry, 
 and to a man who could read characters as some do, 
 there would be nothing new in his books after seeing 
 Inman's picture, nor any surprise in Inman's picture, 
 after seeing his books. 
 
 What will Broadway be like, with omnibuses exclu- 
 ded, and two lines of railcars plying its entire length ? 
 Where will the tracks be?— both in the middle, 
 or one on each side? If the latter, how will car- 
 riages stand by the sidewalk with safety? If the 
 former, will there be room left for two carriages to 
 pass each other on either side ? Will not the fre- 
 quent taking-up and setting-down of passengers, and 
 the consequent hinderance of cars behind, make the 
 passage up and down tediously slow? These are 
 questions that, with sundry others on the same sub- 
 ject, will furnish table-talk to the city for the ensuing 
 week — the announcement of the corporation's inten- 
 tion to have a railroad there being yesterday made 
 public. Let us mumble about it a little. The slow- 
 ness of the motion would justify a very narrow track. 
 By placing the seats lengthwise, and back to back, 
 the cars themselves might be made very narrow, and 
 with a roof overhead, and no sides (or sides remova- 
 ble in fair weather), passengers might easily jump on 
 and off, and be sufficiently protected. They will 
 probably stop for passengers at the crossings only. 
 The fare will be taken by a boy inside, as soon as the 
 passenger is seated, to prevent delay. We shall have 
 the comfort (sitting back to back) of not becoming so 
 compulsively acquainted with anybody's face, breath, 
 knees, and umbrella. Our chances of being the sub- 
 ject of a coroner's inquest will be diminished 100 per 
 cent. — the present rate and manner of omnibus-driving 
 having (we presume) nearly doubled the cost of life-in- 
 surance to those who live in the upper part of the city. 
 There will probably be fast lines established in the 
 streets nearly parallel to Broadway, and the great tide 
 of human life, now concentrated in one thoroughfare, 
 will be divided into three. McNair & Scarpa, and 
 other sellers of "acoustic oil," will languish under 
 the suspended deafening of Broadway, and that charm- 
 ing lounge will be once more susceptible of enjoy- 
 ment by walk and talk. The danger of prying off a 
 wheel upon the railtrack, or coming in contact with 
 the cars, will deter the timid from taking their car- 
 riages into Broadway, and we shall meet all the pretty 
 shopperesses on foot (the greatest Amelia-ration)! 
 The "Kipp& Brown" 'buses will be obliged to come 
 down Church street, and have their terminus at the 
 corner of Fulton street and Broadway — or (query ?) 
 will the lower part of Broadway, between the Park 
 and Bowling-green, be necessarily left open to the 
 converging lines from east and west? 
 
 "Taglioni is coming to this country." So say the 
 papers; and if it prove true, we shall see the differ- 
 
 ence between the apparent efforts of a football and a 
 balloon — between common and rarefied air (in manner 
 as well as in motion) — between a smile which, beauti- 
 fully dissected from the muscles that might else move 
 it, is left stereotyped upon the face, and a smile timid, 
 natural, and impulsive — in short, the difference be- 
 tween the "divine p'anny" and the womanly Taglioni. 
 (We prefer a woman to "a divinity" any day !) Like 
 all women permitted to be desirably famous, Taglioni 
 paid the inexorable penalty of being undesirably 
 mated. She has amassed a fortune or "two from the 
 "gold dust" at the toe of her white slipper — dissipa- 
 ted, they say, without pity, by her husband, and she 
 has at last cut him {in toto), and goes entirely upon 
 her own legs. We hope they and the Cunard pad- 
 dles will, indeed, bring her to this country. In see- 
 ing any other stage-exhibition, one is conscious of 
 the seat he sits on and the trouble of holding his hat. 
 To see Taglioni is to be in a trance, during which 
 one might almost be content with the seat of St. 
 Lawrence— on a gridiron. We shall remember (talk- 
 ing of seats), "while memory holds her seat" (and 
 has any pleasure in sitting on it), the first performance 
 of La Sylphide at Paris — by far the most entrancing 
 and intoxicating spectacle we ever witnessed. We 
 venture to refer the reader to our description of it in 
 " Pencillings." We wonder whether Taglioni will 
 come ! Echo — " come !" 
 
 Major Noah and his Apology for the Cruci- 
 fixion. — Our friend, the lecturer on the Restoration, 
 has written us a letter, phrased with great forbearance 
 and kindness, but finding grievous fault with our yes- 
 terday's notice of his discourse at the Tabernacle. 
 His letter is too long to publish, as he requests, but 
 we will give its substance, and leave out only his ex- 
 pressions of good will. He says he "understood 
 from a friend that we were fast asleep before the lec- 
 ture commenced, and slept throughout the whole of 
 it." With his letter, the major sent us a copy of 
 the Mirror with the objectionable passages of our re- 
 port underlined. Here they are : — 
 
 " Major Noah arose and commenced with an apolo- 
 gy for the Jews as to the crucifixion of our Savior." 
 
 "With the exception of his very adroit disparage- 
 ment of the Savior," &c, &c. 
 
 Some extracts from the lecture, copied from his 
 MS. into the Express, were also sent us by the ma- 
 jor, and we extract the page which, in. the delivery, 
 impressed us as represented in our objectionable sen- 
 tences. 
 
 "The Jews were amazed, perplexed, and bewil- 
 dered at all they saw and heard. They knew Jesus 
 from his birth : he was their neighbor; they knew his 
 father Joseph, and Mary his mother, his brothers, 
 James and Judas; he was in constant intercourse 
 with his brethren in their domestic relations, and sur- 
 rounded by their household gods; they remembered 
 him a boy, disputing, as was the custom, most learn- 
 edly with the doctors in the temple; as a man pursu- 
 ing to the age of thirty, the modest and laborious 
 calling of his profession; and yet he proclaimed him- 
 self the Son of God, and performed most wonderful 
 miracles, was surrounded by a number of disciples, 
 poor, but extraordinary gifted men, who sustained his 
 doctrines, and had an abiding faith in his mission; 
 he gathered strength and followers as he pro- 
 gressed ; he denounced the whole nation, and proph- 
 ecied its destruction, with their altars and temples; 
 he preached against whole cities, and proscribed 
 their leaders with a force which, even at this day, 
 would shake our social systems. The Jews became 
 alarmed at his increasing power and influence, and 
 the Sanhedrim resolved to become his accuser, and 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 731 
 
 bring him to trial under the law as laid down in the 
 13th of Deuteronomy. 
 
 "In reflecting deeply on all the circumstances of 
 this, the most remarkable trial and judgment in his- 
 ory, I am convinced, from the whole tenor of the 
 proceedings, that the arrest, trial, and condemnation 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, was conceived and executed un- 
 der a decided panic" 
 
 Now it seemed to us, and it seems to us (for we are 
 wide awake now), that to represent the Son of God, 
 while on a mission from Jehovah for the salvation of 
 a world, made the victim of a "decided panic'" — the 
 "earth quaking, the rocks rent, the sun darkened, the 
 graves opened, and the veil of the temple rent in 
 twain," as the consequence of a "decided panic," un- 
 der the influence of which the Jews had crucified one 
 whom they "knew as a boy," and as an industrious 
 laborer — this does seem to us a "disparagement of the 
 Savior," and of the dignity of his mission, and it 
 does seem to us as intended to "apologise for the 
 Jews." What other aim or relevancy has this very 
 new and original reason for the crucifixion, but to 
 apologise for the act? 
 
 As this is the "first time for centuries" that the 
 Jews have had an apologist, our readers will be inter- 
 ested to know more particularly how the crucifixion 
 is defended. We therefore yield to our own wish, 
 and give the following more extended extract from 
 Major Noah's lecture, underlining {hose passages 
 
 timidity, their hesitation, without even a ray of hope; 
 a people so venerable for their antiquity, so beloved 
 and protected for their fidelity, on the very threshold 
 of political destruction. 
 
 • " It is not my duty to condemn Uie course of our an- 
 cestors, nor yet to justify the measures they adopted 
 in that dire extremity ; but if there are mitigating cir- 
 cumstances, I am bound by the highest considerations 
 which a love of truth and justice dictates, to spread 
 them before you, at the same time to protest against 
 any entailing upon us, the responsibility of acts com- 
 mitted eighteen hundred years ago by our fathers, and 
 thus transmit to untold generations the anger and ha- 
 tred of a faith, erroneously taught to believe us the 
 aggressors. 
 
 " The Jews, my friends, were but the instruments 
 of a higher power, and in rejecting Jesus of Nazareth, we 
 have a great and overwhelming evidence of the infinite 
 wisdom of the Almighty. Had they acknowledged him 
 | as their Messiah at that fearful crisis, the whole na- 
 tion would have gradually sunk under the Roman 
 [ yoke, and we should have had at this day paganism 
 i and idolatry, with all their train of terrible evils, and 
 I darkness and desolation would have spread over the 
 earth. But the death of Jesus was the birth of 
 Christianity ; the Gentile church sprang from the ru- 
 ins which surrounded its primitive existence; its 
 march was onward, beset with darkness and difficul- 
 ties, with oppression and persecution, until the Sun 
 
 which we offendingly described as "adroit disparage- of Reformation rose upon it, dissipating the clouds 
 
 ment," and " apology for the Jews:'' — 
 
 " The title of God was a title of power and domin- 
 ion, and frequently was conferred by the Almighty 
 himself on earthly rulers. ' See, I have made thee a 
 God to Pharaoh,' as God supreme said to Moses. 
 Son of God was a title frequently conferred on those of 
 distinguished piety and learning, and on those posses- 
 sing the emanations of the divinity, and this title the 
 apostles themselves carry out in their writings. 
 
 "'The Son,' 'My Son,' not the Father; the hu- 
 manity, not the divinity, the image of the invisible 
 God, not ihe invisible God himself; and as Paul said, 
 there is one God and one mediator between God and 
 man. Could the Almighty delegate a mediatorial 
 character to any one on earth? Who can doubt it? 
 God said to Moses, 'Behold, 1 send an angel before 
 thee to keep thee in the way; provoke him not, for he 
 will not pardon your transgressions, for my name is 
 in him; my spirit is in him.' It was not therefore al- 
 together on the charge of Jesus having called himself 
 Son of God, that the Sanhedrim accused and con- 
 demned him ; political considerations mingled them- 
 selves, and in a measure controlled the decision of the 
 council, and this is demonstrable from the declaration 
 of Caiaphas himself, as stated in the Gospel : ' Better 
 that one man should die than that the nation should 
 be destroyed.' 
 
 " It icas the sedition, and not altogether the blasphe- 
 my, the terror and apprehension of political overthrow, 
 which led to conviction, and this political and national 
 characteristic teas maintained throughout ; it was that 
 consideration which induced the Jews to urge upon Pi- 
 late a confirmation of the sentence. It was the charge 
 of assuming the prerogatives of Cesar, not the name 
 of the Divinity, which overcame the well-founded ob- 
 jections of the Roman governor, and crucifixion itself 
 was a Roman and not a Jewish punishment. The 
 opprobrious insults heaped upon the master came 
 from the Roman soldiers, and that mixed rabble, 
 which, even in our day, desecrate all that is held sa- 
 cred. 
 
 " I place these most absorbing events before you, 
 my countrymen, not to contrast things sacred with 
 those which are profane, but that you should under- 
 stand the exact position of the Jews at that time; 
 their painful situation, their prostrate condition, their 
 
 of darkness which had obscured its beauties, and it 
 1 shone forth with a liberal and tolerant brightness, 
 ! such as the Great Master had originally designed it. 
 ! Had not that event occurred, how would you have been 
 ! saved from your sins? The Jews in this did nothing 
 | but what God himself ordained, for you will find it 
 ' written in the Acts of the Apostles, 'And now, breth- 
 i ren, I know that through ignorance ye did it, as did 
 also your rulers !'" 
 
 We leave it to any Gentile (saved by the " decided 
 political panic" of the Jews under Caiaphas), whether 
 it was not reasonable enough — at least for a man 
 "fast asleep" — to fancy he could detect in the above 
 argument, an "apology for the Jews," and a "dispar- 
 agement of the Savior." We were quite too fast 
 asleep to detect anything else! 
 
 No, dear major, we were not " asleep" when this 
 was delivered! Our head was down — for you had 
 two unshaded lamps, looking like blazing earrings, on 
 either side of your benevolent head, and our eyes are 
 as weak as your heartstrings — but we went to the 
 Tabernacle, not only with the interest of friendship 
 for yourself, but with high excitement in the unpar- 
 alleled background of your theme ! We could not tell 
 you, without a seeming rhapsody — we could not trust 
 ourself to record, out of blank verse — the scope your 
 subject seemed to possess, the tragic sublimity of 
 your position, the climax of events you wished to be 
 instrumental in bringing to a close, and the interest 
 that might be awakened in the Christian world by an 
 eloquent, life-devoted, fervent apostle of the restora- 
 tion ! There is no theme for eloquence with a thou- 
 sandth part of the pathos, depth, splendor, and pres- 
 ent convergence of this ! Heavens! what a theme! 
 The key of the whole Christian era! The winding 
 up of a cycle of two thousand years numbered from 
 the crucifixion! The close of the one expiation 
 which is the theme of scripture-prophecy, and with 
 the closing of which comes in the millenial glory, 
 and the renewal of Paradise on earth ! This theme, 
 on the lips of genius, one would think — genius ac- 
 cursed eighteen hundred years ago, and to be one of 
 the forgiven at the second coming of the Messiah — 
 might burn like the fire upon the lips of Paul, and 
 turn all eyes toward waiting Jerusalem. This was 
 the view of the subject with which we went to the 
 
732 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Tabernacle, dear major! — almost envying you your 
 qualification by birth for the using of it. We meant 
 no disrespect in our notice. We were only a liitle 
 disappointed and annoyed that you did not kindle into 
 a crusader, or try on Peter the Hermit, till we gazed 
 at you, spite of your earrings ! 
 
 And now — (" to step out of the carriage and see 
 ourselves go by") — you are wrong if you are right, 
 major, and right if you are wrong ! If your Jewish 
 creed be right, you are wrong to deny its manifest de- 
 duction. If your Jewish creed be wrong, you are 
 right in wishing to explain it away. But you can 
 not have your cake and eat it, too. You can not rec- 
 oncile the church with the synagogue, nor can you 
 lecture palatably and frankly from the synagogue to 
 Christians. The time, at least, is not come. "At 
 the end of the toorld" (says a commentator on the Bi- 
 ble), " Christ will unite the church with the syna- 
 gogue, the Jew with the Christian, the Christian with 
 the Gentile ; then all things will be restored to a per- 
 fect union, and there will be but one shepherd and 
 one flock." 
 
 Pkices of Women — cold and warm. — A lovely 
 female slave, warm from the mountains of Circassia, 
 and warranted not to be second-hand, may be bought 
 at Constantinople for three hundred dollars. A lovely 
 female statue, cold from the marble mountains of Car- 
 rara (and spotless as the snow, without a doubt), was 
 lately sold by Mr. Power to the Hon. William Pres- 
 ton, for three thousand dollars. Something would 
 seem to be wrong here — the " cte/-tariflf" — or the Ot- 
 toman "protection" — or something ! Various ques- 
 tions arise. Is an original woman a favorite article ? 
 Is the imitation by Power of the fabrics of Nature & Co. 
 an improvement upon the model ? Is the presence of 
 the faculty of speech in the cheaper article any special 
 indication of a preference that can be relied upon in 
 the buyer ? Perhaps some extensive dealer in both 
 articles will oblige us with a solution of this mercan- 
 tile problem. 
 
 We had a bonne bouche of opera last night at Niblo's 
 which made us long for the whole feast — a hint of a 
 ballet which provoked great desire for more — and just 
 such a sprinkling of judicious white gloves as satisfied 
 the cognoscents that there was something in the bill 
 that had a pull upon the town's fashion. Then, as 
 if it were to be nothing but an appetizer, Madame 
 Pico appeared in a private box, and the audience saw, 
 that, whatever the warble might be, the throat it would 
 come from was of the most capable fulness of beauty. 
 We have had our suspicions, from the quietness with 
 which she "bides her time," that Madame Pico is a 
 star conscious of the swing for a large orbit, and very 
 sure of "putting a circle round the" town, whenever 
 she rises. It is a considerable spoke in the wheel of 
 this same orbit that she is a very superb woman. She 
 has the adorable low Greek forehead, like Mrs. Nor- 
 ton's (the poetess), and a certain mainlien of bust and 
 neck which shows the kind of passionate uppishness 
 the old gods used to be fond of. (Fide the gods' 
 old pictures.) We were not surprised last night to 
 overhear a foreigner telling one of his countrymen 
 that Madame Pico would make more impression in 
 New York than any prima donna since Malibran. 
 What say, Corbyni ! Light up your dress-circle with 
 a little more gas, and give us ballet and opera with 
 Borghese and Pico on alternate nights ! 
 
 in every civilized country but this, the government 
 backs up the opera, as an important public refinement. 
 The royal treasurer is always half a stage manager. 
 With us, the people are the sovereign, but Chancellor 
 Bibb, not having, as far as we know, offered terms to 
 
 Madame Pico, we, as one of the royal pores, do our 
 part of the insensible perspiration, and express the 
 warm desire of the public, that Madame Pico should 
 appear. It is manifest dulness of enterprise, to have 
 no opera now. There are no parties, the autumn 
 weather is moderate, the strangers hang about town, 
 till after the Indian summer, and there is no room for 
 doubt that the thing would be supported. 
 
 There was a demonstration of enthusiasm, last night, 
 which appeared to be quite a I'improvista, at the per- 
 formance of the Polka, by " Master Wood and la 
 Petite Carline." These two little miniatures — of 
 the size of children six years old — danced, to our 
 thinking, quite wonderfully. We are likely to have 
 no grown-up dancers, this year at least, who, reduced 
 to the same size by an inverted opera-glass, would do 
 the Polka any better. The necessary air of galliar- 
 dise, the precision, combined with abandon, the look 
 and gesture, were all capitally well done. They are 
 charming little people, and a good deal of a " good 
 card" for any theatre. Query, for Corbyn — Would 
 not a ballet, by these Lilliputians, got up for children, 
 to commence at four o'clock in the afternoon, and last 
 about one hour, be a paying enterprise? 
 
 One hint more : Is there not the making of a fine 
 actress and singer in Miss Rosina Shaw ? She has 
 beauty, remarkable voice, grace and confidence — four 
 " pretty wells." Keep an eye on her, Mr. Manager! 
 
 The Day after the Ballot. — The contention 
 for the favors of Mrs. Vox Populi is over. The diffi- 
 cult dame has made her election. The future presi- 
 dent is in the ballot-box, and that womb of authority 
 is now silently waited upon by the paternal majority. 
 God bless whatever is to be brought forth ! 
 
 Thank Heaven the town is stiller ! There is more 
 noise upon the blacksmith's anvil and the shoemaker's 
 lap-stone — more clatter upon the tinman's vice and 
 the coppersmith's rivet — but the town's heart beats 
 less audibly, to-day, and the town's pulse less feverish- 
 ly and wildly. The political bully is looking around 
 unwillingly but peacefully for work. The club 
 wrangler's vocation is gone. The working-man will 
 give less of his evening to the bar-room and caucus. 
 Wives rejoice. Children are glad. 
 
 Considering only individuals, the immediate tumult 
 and recoil of politics seem only evil and violence. 
 The pore and the pediculus will complain of blood- 
 letting and blister. We believe the country at large 
 is benefited by the bringing of these bad humors to 
 the surface, however. We are sure at least that we 
 see all there is, in our body popular, that is dangerous. 
 There is evil disposition, antagonism, discontent, cra- 
 ving for excitement, love of combination, dormant 
 energy, and ambition — qualities everywhere distribu- 
 ted, and hungering, every one, for a field of action. 
 Where belter would they break out, than in politics ? 
 How, easier, should we know our neighbor's length 
 of conscience-string and proneness to trick and unfair- 
 ness, than by watching him when his passions are 
 roused and his cautiousness forgotten ? What man 
 in a political committee knows too little of his fellows 
 for future living with them ? 
 
 But, thank God, the tumult once over, the city re- 
 turns to peace, industry, and prosperity. Injury and 
 calumny stand no more behind the editor's chair — 
 literature and cominerce, instead, look promptingly 
 over his shoulder. The merchant is relieved from 
 anxiety, and knows how to shape his venture. The 
 mechanic " hangs" politics for a plague and a bother. 
 The republic has set up its master, and is content to 
 be governed while it toils and prospers. 
 
 There is one feature of the late contest, however, 
 for which we can find no philosophical offset. We 
 
EPHEMKK A 
 
 733 
 
 refer to the unparallelled and insane extent to which 
 betting lias been carried. Of any good this practice 
 does we do not see even a shadowing. Of its intoler- 
 able evil* we hear mournful accounts at every turn. 
 It seems to have infected, with a gambling mania, 
 those who never before hazarded money on a question 
 of chance or uncertainty. We have heard several 
 really most lamentable instances of fatuity and disaster { 
 in this new demon-shape of party-spirit. Families 
 are ruined, creditors robbed, children deprived of edu- j 
 cation and bread — by men who would as soon cut off j 
 their hands as throw a stake at a gaming-table ! Is 
 there no power in the law to put a stop to this new j 
 evil of politics ? We ask this question to provoke, if j 
 possible, an answer. 
 
 And now — as politics walk out from the public mind, 
 and there is room for something else to walk in — let 
 us mention a great evil in this country of ours, and 
 tell some news that has an example by which to 
 mend it. 
 
 We toil too much! 
 
 Ladies' Dictionary — the word Alpaca. The Al- 
 paca is a South American animal, much used as a 
 beast of burden by the Indians, with long hair, princi- 
 pally black, but slightly grizzled. It is an excessive- 
 ly irritable animal, and indomitable till soothed. The 
 importance of this animal has already been considered 
 by the English, in their hat, woollen, and stuff trade, 
 and an essay on the subject has been published by 
 Dr. Hamilton of London. The wool is so remarkable, 
 being a jet black, glossy, silk-like hair, that it is fitted 
 for the production of texile fabrics differing from all 
 others, occupying a medium position between the 
 wool and the silk. It is now mingled with other ma- 
 terials in such a singular manner, that while a par- 
 ticular dye will affect those, it will leave the Alpaca 
 wool with its original black color, thus giving rise to 
 great diversity. 
 
 Who wants a Dress-Opera ? — There is a large 
 class in every metropolis who are fond of gayety, 
 dress, and " a place to go to," but who do not like 
 private parties for three or more reasons: 1st, the 
 lateness of the hours; 2d, the trouble of making the 
 agreeable; 3d, the card-and-visit nuisance, the man- 
 agement and ceremony, necessary to keep up fashion- 
 able vogue. The part of the evening between eight 
 and eleven is, to this class, the time of the twenty-four 
 hours in which they wish to be abroad, to be admired, 
 to be amused. The less trouble with it the better; 
 and they would rather give a dollar and think no more 
 about it, than leave a card at an expense of memory, 
 time, equipage, and politic calculation. They want a 
 place where everybody dresses ; where it is light ; 
 where they will see beauty, and be seen themselves 
 by appreciative eyes ; where there is music to hear 
 and a show to look at if they like to be silent, or 
 friends in a box near by if they wish to converse — a 
 place where they can hear the gossip, have singers 
 to criticise, and "see the world" — in short.Ais Opera. 
 To the great majority of ball-goers— particularly to 
 the men— the time from eight to eleven hangs heavily. 
 They would gladly dress early and go first to the 
 opera, if it were habitually a dress-resort. 
 
 There are many well-off people to whom a dress- 
 opera is the only tolerable amusement — lame people ; 
 ladies who only look well sitting, or look best in shawls 
 and opera-dress ; foreigners who do not speak the 
 language ; timid persons, who wish to see the gay 
 world without encountering it ; and the many fami- 
 lies who have a competency to live and can afford 
 amusement, but want a handle to the door of society. 
 The first object of strangers in town (of whom there 
 
 are always several thousands), is to go where they can 
 j see the well-dressed and fashionable people. Most 
 i strangers, in a large city, would rather see the exclu- 
 I sives in an opera-box, than the Croton reservoirs, or 
 the monsters in a menagerie. 
 
 People in ceremonious mourning find a great relief 
 in seeing the gay world from an opera-box. 
 
 Last (not least, unless you please!) some people 
 would frequent the opera, the season through, for the 
 music. It "soothes" our "savage breast" — for one, 
 and we think the " hang" of opera-music in the town 
 hum and whistle is a desirable and refining variety. 
 
 Now, with all this desirableness and frequentability, 
 ! is it not wonderful that no larger capitalist than Signor 
 Palmo (pocket edition), should have ventured to em- 
 bark in a scheme for an opera-house! It is not a 
 scheme to prosper — doneby halves. It must be a splen- 
 did affair, or a failure. There must be comfort in the 
 seats, breadth in the alleys, boundless prodigality in 
 the lights, luxury in the saloons and entrances, and 
 Alhambrian excellence in the refreshments. The 
 manager should be a mixture of Caesar, Talleyrand, 
 and Bluebeard — awful, politic, punctual in pay. and 
 I relentless to the caprices of primadonnas. Two slash- 
 ing critics should be employed to annihilate each other 
 daily, in opposing preferences for the performers. 
 The exaction of full dress for all comers should be 
 rigidly enforced. The names of the belles at every 
 last night's opera should be disembowelled and para- 
 graphed every morning. Prestige, celebrity, show, 
 humbug, and ceremony, should be added to the most 
 indefatigable real merit in the management, and then 
 the shareholders would make money. 
 
 Then, too, we should have a dress-resort — what 
 no theatre now is or ever has been in New York, but 
 what, of all refinements and resources, is the most 
 delightful and indispensable. We could write a 
 column about the blessing of beauty seen in public, 
 the chastening and refining influences of music, the 
 restraining proprieties of dress and observance, etc, 
 etc., etc. — but we confine ourself to tangibilities. One 
 more fact— the existence of such an opera-house, so 
 conducted, would link New York in the operatic chain 
 of star-travel; and Grisi, Lablache, and the rest, would 
 as certainly come here from Loudon and Paris, as go 
 to Vienna and St. Petersburg!!, Berlin and Naples. 
 Our readers in Wall street will please consider this 
 as a " money article.''' 
 
 PROMISCUOUS REPLIES TO LETTERS. 
 
 Dear Jack: Since my compulsory budding, flower- 
 ing, and bearing fruit, have been accelerated to one 
 season per diem, to feed a daily paper, you will easily 
 understand that I found it necessary at first to work 
 all my sap into something useful — omitting as it were, 
 the gum deposite of superfluous correspondence. I 
 accordingly left you off. Your last letter was slipped 
 into the no- more-bother hole, without the usual en- 
 dorsement of " answered," and I considered you like 
 a trinket laid aside before a race— not to encumber 
 me. Imiss the writing of trumpery, however. I miss 
 the sweeping out of the corners of my mind— full of 
 things fit only for the dust-pan, but still very possibly 
 hiding a silver-spoon. 
 
 Do you want any more explanation of why you get 
 a letter from me for one cent, printed, instead of a 
 written one at eighteen and three quarters? It rs 
 wonderful how much cheaper printing is than writing ! 
 
 I left off my envy of your country life as usual wnh 
 my summer trowsers, not caring to see the death of 
 anything— even the resigned summer. As soon as I 
 
 I have occasion to button my coat to keep out the air, 
 I I am content with that part of the earth's breast that 
 
 II is paved over. The town is honored now by the pres- 
 
734 
 
 EPHEMERA 
 
 ence of those who could go away if they wished, and, 
 as, human-like, the town values those who can do 
 without it, " New York is gay." Shopping is this 
 month's pastime, however. The ladies have no need 
 of parties while they can yield reluctant dollars to in- 
 sidious temptation. It was in competition with the 
 " fall goods" that the opera failed a month ago — open- 
 ed on the supposition that people had nothing to amuse 
 them! A manager, and not know the sex ! Kech! 
 Pal mo ! 
 
 The town is to be illuminated on Monday next by 
 the apparition of a new base and a brace of prima- 
 donnas. Madame Pico has been biding her time like 
 game in the larder, and the town is quite ready to 
 sweeten her with the current condiment and devour 
 her. She is a beautiful woman, and though I never 
 could get my sentiment over the foot-lights, I love to 
 see the town fascinated. Pray Heaven she sings well 
 — after all the heralding I have done for her! If that 
 well-chiselled throat should have an awkward corner 
 in it, we should have to restore to Borghese her divi- 
 ded throne and go back to our worship of her toilet 
 and other utmost-possibles, with an indifferent grace. 
 Happy queen of Sheba, who ordained that no woman 
 should reign after her ! 
 
 Well, sir, what do you want to know ? There are 
 few things above ground that I do not hear of, some 
 hundreds of newspapers doing their best to make news 
 and send it to me — to cook to your liking ! He who 
 subscribes to the Mirror appoints me his fashioner of 
 things palatable to know, and though, like other cooks, 
 I pass under my nose a vast deal I should not choose 
 for my own relishing, I do my best to give it with due 
 spice and proportion. Indeed, what with serving so 
 many people with so many different kinds of knowl- 
 edge, 1 feel like the omnificent man called for in Ben 
 Jonson's " Staple of news :" — 
 
 u Where is my fashioner, my feather-man, 
 My linener, perfumer, barber, all !" 
 
 When Saturday comes round with the life, business, 
 fun, and literature of the whole week in one — a mir- 
 ror'd E Pluribus Unum — it seems wonderful to me 
 how so much, and of such endless variety, could have 
 been gathered into one week's history ! That weekly 
 Mirror is worth binding and keeping, if it were only 
 as a choice record of the events of the buyer's times 
 — set down, point by point, with the life he lived 
 amidst their occurrings. There is nothing good, 
 brilliant, or important, that is not recorded in it, and, 
 if a man wants to forget as he goes along, that pack- 
 horse will take the load off his memory, and for three 
 dollars a year bring it safe after him ! 
 
 And now, dear Jack, assuring you that this letter 
 is wholly confidential, and that you are not at liberty 
 to give it away as an autograph, I record myself, 
 
 As usual, Yours, . 
 
 To John Esq., 
 
 (a friend in the country). 
 
 ETIQUETTE OF WEDDING-CARDS. 
 
 Messrs. Editors: My friend John Smith is to be 
 married to Lucy Jones. She issues a card of invita- 
 tion like this : — 
 
 MXTND^MTsTTOll^SMTfH > 
 
 j AT HOME, 
 
 ! No. 59 B street, Tuesday Evening, < 
 
 November 14th. 
 i Johx Smith, i 
 \ Lucy Jones. \ 
 
 Now he intends to use this for inviting to the cere- 
 tnony ; but I tell him it is wrong, and can only be used 
 
 to invite to the party after the ceremony. He con- 
 tends that this is the usual form — so the engraver 
 tells him, etc. 
 
 Please give us the law in these matters (we can ap- 
 peal to no higher authority in matters of etiquette 
 and fashion) ; let us have the two customary forms, 
 for wedding and party, for the enlightenment of in- 
 experienced candidates who wish to follow the fash- 
 ions, and much oblige, 'Custom. 
 
 P. S. — We wait for your infallible decision. 
 
 Wednesday morning. 
 
 Dear Custom : Your friend is wrong, from the 
 egg to the apple. Miss Lucy Jones has a mother, or 
 father, guardian, or friend, at whose house she is to be 
 married. The invitation should come from the per- 
 son under whose protection she is given away — (sent, 
 if you please, to Mr. Smith's friends, with Mr. Smith's 
 card, but understood by Miss Lucy Jones's friends, 
 without card or explanation). It is tampering with 
 serious things, very dangerously, to circulate the three 
 words, "and Mrs. John Smith," one minute before 
 the putting on of the irrevocable ring. The law 
 which permits ladies (though not gentlemen) to 
 change their minds up to the last minute before wed- 
 lock, exacts also that the privileged angels should not 
 be coerced by the fear of seeing the escaped name 
 afterward on a wedding card ! Besides, such a card, 
 so issued, would be received from Mrs. Smith before 
 there was any such person. 
 
 The first proper use of the wedded name is to send 
 it with parcels of wedding-cake, the morning after the 
 ceremony, to friends and persons desired as visiting 
 acquaintances. This is considered an excusable ad- 
 vance on the part of persons entering newly upon life, 
 and the promptness with which a return-card is left 
 upon the bride is an indication of the degree of pleas- 
 ure with which the proposition of acquaintance is re- 
 ceived. Another advantage of cake and card : — the 
 etiquette of (exacting that a new nail should be thus 
 driven in all acquaintances that are to be kept up) en- 
 ables bride and bridegroom to drop, without offence, 
 such acquaintances of each as are respectively unde- 
 sirable — persons inseparable from the set in which the 
 lady has lived, who are not agreeable to the bride- 
 groom, and bachelor acquaintances of the bridegroom, 
 who may be thought too free for the fireside. Wed- 
 ded life is thus begun with a "culled posy of friend- 
 ship," the door of society open before, and mischief- 
 makers shut out behind. 
 
 Our compliments to Miss Jones, and we remain, 
 Very truly 
 
 Open to card and cake, 
 
 Mirror Triplet. 
 
 Unmarried People four times as liable to insanity 
 as Married People. — The " Concord Freeman," in 
 a statistical article made up from hospital reports, 
 shows, that if a man is, perhaps, oftener out of pocket 
 when married, he is not so often out of his head. The 
 editor says: Few people are aware how much more 
 insanity prevails among bachelors and unmarried la- 
 dies than among the married of both sexes. We 
 learn from the examination of very many reports, that 
 of every five of all lunatics sent to American hospitals, 
 three are unmarried, and only two are married, and 
 that almost all of them are over twenty-one years old. 
 On the other hand, it is pretty certain that in all the 
 community over twenty-one years of age, there are 
 more than three times as many in as out of wedlock. 
 If this be the case, then the unmarried are more than 
 four times as liable to become insane as married 
 people. 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 735 
 
 The Herald seems to think we have bought the 
 m Republic." We are sorry that a republic is a mar- 
 ketable commodity, but at any rate we have bought 
 nothing of that name or description. Our ambition, 
 somehow, does not seem to stumble upon things re- 
 publican. In this world we desire a farm, on which 
 we can be " monarch of all we survey," and in the 
 next, we pray for a citizenship in the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 " Up-Town" and " Down-Town." — We see that 
 these names of the different halves of the city are be- 
 Boming the common language of advertisements, etc. 
 A person advertises in one of the papers a " Dcnon- 
 town singing school," and another a "Down-town 
 dancing academy." We think our friend Billings 
 would better stick to " Up-town Hotel" as the better 
 designation of the new brick khan. 
 
 The new Sequel to Theatrical Intelligence. 
 — Since the bishops and deacons have taken to in- 
 dicting each other for falliugs-away of which the pub- 
 lic like to read the Scan. Mag., we observe that the 
 particular column of newspapers which is devoted to 
 spicy news, theatricals, police incidents, etc., has 
 silently become the locality for brief paragraphs an- 
 nouncing where distinguished preachers are to hold 
 forth. In the salad column of one of the papers there 
 is one announcement of a play followed by six an- 
 nouncements of sermons! And in another paper 
 there are very nearly two columns of sketches of ser- 
 mons, from a specific " reporter! !" 
 
 We saw yesterday, for the first time in this coun 
 try, an equipage of full ceremonial splendor, faultless | 
 in taste, and evidently not at all modified by any I 
 dread of democratic prejudices. We admired the J 
 " bravery" of the turn-out, and the courage of using i 
 it. The ice broken, there will soon be conjured oth- j 
 ers from the vaults in Wall street — but meantime, let j 
 us look a little at the necessity for a promenade drive j 
 in New York, and its probable locality. 
 
 In or near every capital of Europe there is a spot | 
 which serves, for those who have carriages, the same \ 
 purpose which Broadway serves for promenaders on j 
 foot. In London it is the Mayfair side of Hyde park ; 
 in Paris it is the Champs Elysees and Bois de Bou- 
 logne; in Florence it is the Cascine; in Rome the 
 Pincian hill ; in Naples the Strada Nuova. In all of 
 these capitals the titled and wealthy avoid driving in 
 the crowded streets except upon errands of necessity, 
 and in London it is the custom to keep a plainer ve- 
 hicle with cob-horses expressly for use at night and 
 errands in the city. Ladies who have occasion to go 
 out in the morning, do so on foot and in the plainest 
 dress, followed invariably by a servant. They return 
 to lunch at one or two, and immediately after dress for 
 the shoiv part of the day's out-door occupation. The 
 carriage comes round in full livery at the specified 
 hour, and, the shopping and business-errands having 
 been despatched in the forenoon, the equipage starts 
 upon the afternoon destination of ceremony or pleas- 
 ure. 
 
 An hour before sunset or the dinner hour, the 
 principal drive is over, and the scattered equipages 
 meet, as upon a fashionable exchange, for a prome- 
 nade of display. This conventional assembling is re- 
 lied upon for recognition of acquaintance, for arrange- 
 ments as to the evening, for keeping advised of the 
 fashions, for seeing straugers, and for contests of style 
 in equipage and personal attire. The dandies must 
 
 be seen there, in cab or mounted ; the women of " po- 
 sition" must refresh there the memories of forgetful 
 tributaries; the new candidate for fashion must there 
 display that taste in " belongings" which can only be 
 guessed at in a ball-room ; there are seen all whose 
 means make them eligible to expensive circles of so- 
 ciety, and who (by something that trill and does tell, 
 in the equipage, or the mode of dressing for, and ap- 
 pearing in, it) there make claim to fitness for, at least, 
 a ceremonious conversance with the haute volte. 
 
 Of course, there is a postern of society in all cities, 
 through which are admitted certain classes, who keep 
 no equipages — those who are to amuse, instruct, or 
 embellish the gay world — poets, parsons, and pretty 
 women ; but the promenade on wheels is, to all oth- 
 ers, the inexorable vestibule, and, as far at least as this 
 gate, the ordinary seekers of the heaven beyond must 
 come with horses. Cowper only mentioned the barest 
 essentials when he said, 
 
 " Well-drest, well-bred, 
 Well-equipaged, is ticket good enough 
 To pass us readily through every door." 
 
 In New York, however undesirable to the mass, this 
 formidable gulf is about to be sunk, between wealth 
 and competency. At present there is no distinction 
 among the upper ten thousand of the city. There is 
 no place where equipages are exclusively looked for. 
 There are five or ten thousand young men who dress 
 as well as the millionare's son; five or ten thousand 
 ladies for whom milliners and mantua-makers do their 
 b«st; ten or twenty thousand who can show as well 
 on foot, and walk as well without heart-burnings, in 
 Broadway — one as another. New York is (at this 
 critical moment, before the shoot of the centripetal 
 particles to a new nucleus) the largest republic of 
 "first quality" people that the world ever saw. 
 
 There is one spot which has been talked of as a 
 promenade drive, and we believe some endeavor has 
 been made to purchase it for the purpose — the beau- 
 tiful wood on the right of the Third avenue. That 
 charming spot would stand to New York very much 
 ' as the Cascine to Florence. We doubt, however, 
 ] whether, yet awhile at least, the object would warrant 
 the purchase. 
 
 The first probable promenade drive, we should say, 
 
 1 would be the Fifth avenue, from Washington 
 
 | square to the Croton reservoir. The splendor of the 
 
 houses on this broad highway is far beyond that of 
 
 j any other portion of the city ; it is no thoroughfare 
 
 : for omnibuses ; it leads from the wealthiest neighbor- 
 
 I hood to a prominent public work ; it is on the return 
 
 ! route from the loveliest drives on the island ; and, 
 
 should the summit of the rising ground on which the 
 
 reservoir stands be fixed upon, as proposed, for the 
 
 Washington monument, and planted and decorated, 
 
 that limit would be a convenient turning-place, and a 
 
 charming and airy spot for a sunset soiree en voiture- 
 
 A Story for tour Son, Sir. — The present king 
 of France, one very cold evening, was riding from 
 Boston to Salem on the outside of the stage. He 
 was entirely without money to pay for a lodging that 
 night, and he began to make friends with the driver to 
 get part of his bed. After a while the driver's com- 
 passion was aroused. " You are not a very clean 
 looking chap," said he to the poor Frenchman, "but 
 my bed is in the harness-room, where there's a stove, 
 and if you'll keep your trowsers on, and sleep outside, 
 / don't mind /" 
 
 The Republic of Broadway. — Eyes were con- 
 trived at some trouble; the great sun shows only the 
 
736 
 
 EPHExMERA. 
 
 outside of things; the present and visible (Carlyle- 
 ically speaking) is the world God adapted our senses 
 to; and though some people like to live the life of a 
 sundial under ground, we prefer to throw to-day's 
 9hadow from whatever we do — writing about what we 
 see, and thinking most about what jostles our elbow. 
 This explained, 
 
 We have a loose slip-slop or two for the young men 
 about town — not as to their invisible minds and morals, 
 but as to their visible walking and dressing. Having 
 " bought our doublet in Italy, our round hose in 
 France, our bonnet in Germany, and our behavior 
 everywhere," we may perhaps excusably scale a ped- 
 estal to give our opinion; though the credit we take 
 to ourselves may be granted in the spirit of Falstaff's 
 to Doll Tearsheet, "We catch of you, Doll, we catch 
 of you !" 
 
 There is nothing so republican as a dressy popula- 
 tion. We are no "leveller," but we like to see things 
 level themselves; and the declaration of independence 
 is impotent in comparison with the tailor's goose. A 
 young man about town slips his miniature into five 
 thousand eyes per diem. Fifty of the five thousand 
 who see him know whether his father is a mechanic 
 or a rich man; and it depends wholly upon his dress 
 and mien whether the remaining four thousand nine 
 hundred and fifty take him to be a rich man's son or 
 a mechanic's son. It is reasonable, of course, to let 
 the fifty who know think what pleases them, and to 
 dress for the very large majority who don't know. 
 This is apparently the tacit philosophy of the young 
 men of New York. There is no telling, by any dif- 
 ference in dress, whether the youth going by has, 
 probably, a sister who is an heiress, or a sister who is 
 a sempstress. There is no telling the merchant from 
 his bookkeeper — no guessing which is the diner on 
 eighteen pence, and which the gourmet of Delmon- 
 ico's — no judging whether the man in the omnibus, 
 whom you vaguely remember to have seen some- 
 where, was the tailor who tried on your coat, or your 
 vis-a-vis last night at a ball. 
 
 As we said above, this is a true republic. A young 
 man whose appearance is four-story-housy, can very 
 well afford to let a few people know that he sleeps 
 over the shop. If he is more elegant than a rich 
 man's son, he gets as nearly the full value of the dif- 
 ference as ordinary vanity would require. Every 
 young man finds means to dress to his liking, and of 
 course every young man starts fair, each morning, 
 with all of his age, for the day's competition in bright 
 eyes. 
 
 We shall be understood, now, in our republican ef- 
 fort to add still another levelling to this of the tailor's 
 goose — to bring the attractions of plain men up to 
 those of the "aristocracy of nature." The hints we 
 have to throw out will be slighted by the good-look- 
 ing; taken advantage of by the plain — thus levelling, 
 in another respect, upward. 
 
 The rarest thing seen in Broadway is a young man 
 who walks well. A stoop in the back is almost na- 
 tional; and an upright, graceful, gentlemanlike gait 
 is as rare as it is singularly striking. If you can af- 
 ford the time to walk slowly, high-heeled boots are a 
 great improvement. With time enough, you drop 
 the foot insensibly from a high heel, like an actor 
 walking down the slope of the stage. Beside, it 
 makes the instep look high, which implies that your 
 father did not carry a hod. 
 
 Avoid a broadcloth shirt, in the shape of a shape- 
 less garment with sleeves (one of the new fashions). 
 It looks colic-y, with the wind bellying it out in all 
 directions as you walk along. 
 
 Leave long cloaks to the clergy. The broad velvet 
 collar, turning over, diminishes your apparent breadth 
 of shoulders, and it should be worn with careful dra- 
 matic propriety, not to be very awkward and inelegant. 
 
 If you are about to have an overcoat made, get a 
 fat friend to go and be measured for it. At any rate, 
 let not your diaphragm be so imprisoned, that the 
 first heroic sentiment will tear off a button. One of 
 Jenning's cutters is the apostle of a reform in this 
 : matter — measuring- you (if you request it) by a mag- 
 nifying-glass, from the waist upward. 
 
 These are not King Canute's days, when " none 
 under the rank of gentlemen dare presume to have a 
 greyhound to follow him." The outward symbols, 
 once peculiar to elegance, are pretty well levelled up 
 to, as we said before — but, by careful observation, 
 you will now and then see a something that nice men 
 do, or do not do, which has not yet got through the 
 hair of the promiscuous. As an example, and in the 
 hope that it will not be generally understood, we will 
 mention, that very particular men, for the last year, 
 have walked the street invariably with a kind of 
 grieved look — very expressive and distinguishing. 
 
 We will resume this republican theme. 
 
 The Designation of the Lady Presidentfss. — 
 If it had not been for a certain ante-expiatory " white 
 horse," we should have prayed for the miraculous re- 
 turn to this world of "John Tetzel, Vender of Indul- 
 gences." The editor of the Morning News did jus- 
 tice to his Irish blood a day or two ago, by giving 
 back, to the loser's wife, a saddle-horse he had won 
 in a bet; but how, in the name of all the gallant pro- 
 prieties, can he justify himself to the ladies of the de- 
 mocracy for making no distinction between their queen 
 and the (of course) less glorious queen of any coun- 
 try on earth? The promiscuousness of two "Mrs. 
 P's!" 
 
 " White-House. — Among other consequences of 
 the election of Mr. Polk, it is said, will be to locate 
 in the White-house at Washington the handsomest 
 and perhaps the most accomplished lady that ever 
 presided in its stately halls. Mrs. P. has, for some 
 years, been remarkable not only for personal beauty, 
 but for that greater charm, graceful manners, and a 
 highly-cultivated mind." 
 
 If, in this democratic country, one may venture to 
 say a word for the other " Mrs. P.," we think that 
 Louis Philippe's having slept with a stagedriver in 
 this country (vide a late anecdote) might have pro- 
 cured for his wife the easy privilege of at least one 
 distinguishing initial. It surely would not seriously 
 invade the simplicity of our court circular to add a 
 "J." to the single-letter title of the lady presidentess 
 of fifteen millions and Texas! Be generous, gentle- 
 men people! Let us have some distinction in the 
 Queen " P.'s" of the two countries. The editor of 
 the Morning News will be some day minister to 
 France. Fancy his being called on to present " Mrs. 
 American P." to " Mrs. French P." 
 
 Overhaul of Sailing Orders. — The sails draw 
 — the freight sits trim in the hold — the ship minds 
 her helm, and the wind strengthens on the quarter 
 with a freshness that strains rope and spar. It is per- 
 haps the best moment that will occur, in the long 
 voyage before us, to overhaul our signals and sailing- 
 papers, and understand how we are to communicate 
 with the fleet, and go straightest and most prosperous- 
 ly to our destined haven. 
 
 (Whoa, Pegasus! We have been as poetical as 
 will have been expected of us at one day's notice. 
 Drop to the ground and let us go off on a plain trot!) 
 
 We have always looked upon the gentlemen of the 
 daily press as among the enviably unlabelled poten- 
 tates of this country of King Everybody-nobody — 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 737 
 
 enviably as having enormous power and little responsi- 
 bility as to the using of it. The power will doubtless 
 remain as large and the responsibility as small. "A 
 free press" is the lesser of two evils. In the perpet- 
 uation of this state of things, however, lies our future 
 vocation, and— while we have it yet in our power to 
 " make a clean breast," and avow what we have ob- 
 jected to in the exercise, by others, of the spells by 
 which we are to conjure — let us name at least the one 
 blot which most smirches the forward face of the pro- 
 fession. 
 
 It were of little use for one editor to declare that he 
 would make war freely upon opinions — never upon 
 persons. And the disadvantage is not merely that of 
 throwing away the dagger in battle, because the sword 
 is more gentlemanly — not merely a lessening of one's 
 fonnidabieness to an opponent. The evil is in Ike 
 greater curiosity to watch the stabler, felt by the look- 
 ers-on. The temptation to be personally abusive lies 
 in the diseased appetite of the crowd that will follow 
 the abuser — leaving the scrupulous man alone with 
 his decency. Living as editors do, by the favor of 
 the crowd, if many are willing to minister to this dis- 
 eased appetite, decency in the few is a kind of slow, 
 business-suicide. 
 
 It would almost require a Utopian fancy to picture 
 the beauty of a press from which personalities and 
 illwilled abuse were wholly excluded. No personal- 
 ities in literature, and none in politics — the author, 
 editor, and statesman, alike intrenched in 
 
 " that credent bulk 
 That no particular scandal once can touch, 
 But it confounds the breather," 
 
 — how completely the envy of malignant mediocrity 
 would be deprived of its now easy sting, and how 
 completely ruffianism and brutality would be confined 
 to the bully-club and dram-shop! Scholars would 
 wait on public opinion, at the editor's table, busied 
 only with embellishing, and not engrossed with de- 
 fending their fair fame ; and gentlemen of sensitive 
 honor, who are now appalled at the calumnious gaunt- 
 let of politics, would come forward to serve their 
 country at the small posts occupied now only by men 
 senseless to defamation. 
 
 To the coming about of this paradise of letters, 
 editorial consent is alone wanting. No one man could 
 live long, the only calumniator of the press. No one 
 man would dare to hold the only pen deficient in 
 courtesy and gentlemanlike regard to private charac- 
 ter. Complete silence from the rest of the press 
 toward the one offender, after a unanimous publica- 
 tion of his disgrace — refusal, without exception, to 
 exchange papers with him from that time forward — 
 any combination, in short, which should make the os- 
 tracism of such an individual, by his brethren of the 
 press, universally known — would suffice to purge the 
 press of him. One year of such united self-censor- 
 ship would so purify the public habit of news-read- 
 ing, that, an offence against propriety would at least 
 startle and alarm the public sense; and, arrived at that 
 point, a very moderate apostleship might complete the 
 reform. 
 
 We do not anticipate this. Oh, no ! We are 
 
 '< — in this earthly world, where to do harm 
 Is often laudable ; to good sometimes 
 Accounted dangerous lolly ;'' 
 
 but, at the risk of being the "grave of our deserv- 
 ing," we shall do the leaning of one to the better side. 
 We shall have harder work for it. Nothing is easier 
 than to be popular by habitual illwill. Trashy minds 
 write most readable satire, and, with the mood on or 
 off— the industry willing or reluctant — fault-finding is 
 fecund production. But if good nature can be spiced 
 — if courteous treatment of our brother editors, 
 47 
 
 brother authors, and all nameable men, can be made 
 palatable to the public — if a paper wholly incapable 
 of an unkindness, but capable of all things pleasurable 
 else, can be fairly tested — we trust to do without the 
 price of giving pain, and we trust that the money so 
 turned out of our hand will not be like the lost oil of 
 the tomb of Belus — irreplaceable. 
 
 The Cost of Fashion. — From a pamphlet sent us, 
 we learn that five hundred millions of dollars are spent 
 annually in the United States for such articles of 
 dress as are subject to the fluctuations of fashion. 
 Of this sum, it ir computed that sixteen millions are 
 spent for hats, probably about twenty millions for caps 
 and bonnets, and for other articles of dress not less 
 than four hundred millions ! 
 
 So that not far from a million and a half dollars are 
 spent daily for clothing; of which, if the calls of 
 fashion claim but ten per cent, (but probably she re- 
 ceives double that sum), one hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand dollars are sacrificed daily at the footstool of the 
 fickle goddess, by the enlightened citizens of the 
 United States ! 
 
 Is it not time that some standard of national dress 
 was established ? We certainly have had sufficient 
 experience to know what kinds of clothing are the 
 most convenient, and one good reason can not be pro- 
 duced for the unmeaning changes which are every 
 day taking place. 
 
 It is not to be expected that in a free country, where 
 it is proverbial that " every man is at liberty to wear 
 shoes or go without," an association to fix upon 
 a general standard of dress would lead all to adopt it. 
 No — there would be those still found who, lacking 
 other points to recommend them to public notice, 
 would act the cameleon still. But no small portion 
 of the community would recommend that course 
 which would most evidently be for the public good. 
 The number, if large and respectable, would exert 
 a sufficient influence by their example to prevent the 
 standard fashion from ever appearing out of date. 
 The ladies' bonnets would then be new at the end of 
 three years, instead of being old-fashioned at the end 
 of one. The gentlemen's hats would be fashionable 
 until worn out; and the wedding coat, which is saved 
 for holyday occasions, might descend from father to 
 son, a fashionable garment. 
 
 A HUMBUG FAME. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle. — We have nowhere seen a just- 
 er view of this much-talked-of writer than is given in 
 the October number of the Biblical Repository, a 
 journal conducted with great ability by an association 
 of divines. The writer (Prof. J. T. Smith, of New- 
 ton Theological Institute, Mass.) allows Carlyle to be 
 a " most vigorous, unique, and original thinker and 
 writer," and that his "Past and Present" is "certainly 
 worth reading." He allows further, that that work 
 contains many noble and truthful sentiments, uttered 
 with commanding energy. This, however, is the ex- 
 tent of his commendation. " We must, on the whole 
 says the writer, " characterize it as a book, m style, 
 barbarous; in politics, incendiary; in philosophy, du- 
 bious ; and in theology, execrable." This opm.on 
 the reviewer supports by an analysis of the work, and 
 by a specification of particulars. 
 
 The barbarity of the style no one doubts, and no 
 one except a few very warm admirers, defends. This 
 very barbarity seems to us only another manifestation 
 of that arrogance which characterizes all Carlyle's 
 
738 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 attempts. A man who condemns everybody must 
 needs be an inventor. 
 
 The work is said to "breathe an overweening, mor- 
 bid admiration of the past." Nothing of the present 
 satisfies Mr. Carlyle; nothing of the past but elicits 
 his commendation, and among other things, Scandi- 
 navian savagery, Mohammedanism, twelfth century 
 Catholicism, the fighting barons of feudal times, Popes 
 Gregory and Hildebrand, and other personages of like 
 stamp, each and all present to him some phase worthy 
 of special notice and admiration. The religion and 
 the systems of government of the present day, have 
 very hard fare at his hands, since the former is all 
 cant, hypocrisy, and quackery, and the latter nothing 
 better, to say the least. We are, in truth, recom- 
 mended to go back to the twelfth century for models 
 of religion and government. The hero must be found 
 by some means — or he must find himself. A fighting 
 aristocracy like that of the twelfth century is no longer 
 possible ; but a working aristocracy must take its 
 place, and the system ot'villanage be restored. In- 
 deed, American slavery seems essentially the system 
 recommended by this practical preacher. 
 
 The sum and substance of our own view of the 
 whole matter is, that while we sympathize to some ex- 
 tent with Mr. Carlyle in his dissatisfaction with the 
 present state of things, the remedies he proposes in 
 his deep-mouthed and most oracular tone, are abso- 
 lutely naught — the mere dreams of a mind well-inten- 
 tioned enough, but half-crazed with overweening self- 
 estimation. 
 
 He insists much on the necessity of a "French 
 revolution*' in England. "There will be two, if 
 needed ; there will be twenty, if needed. . . — The 
 laws of nature will have themselves fulfilled," and 
 much more to the same purpose. Yet this inevitable 
 fulfilment of the laws of nature which is to work all 
 good, seems, according to the seer's estimate, as yet 
 to have wrought nothing but ill. His final hope is a 
 hero-king: "Yes, friends: hero-kings and a whole 
 world not unheroic — there lies the port and happy 
 haven," &c. In fine, if Carlyle's words mean any- 
 thing (which, the more we read the more we doubt), 
 the whole people are to be roused to violent revolt, 
 and plunged into all sorts of horrors, as a preparation 
 for a better state of things ! 
 
 Carlyle speaks of the last two centuries as godless 
 centuries — and that in contrast with the long ages 
 that went before them. What is this but to shock 
 the common sense of history ? And his remedy is 
 hero-hood. What is this but inane twaddle ? Mon- 
 strous, unblushing egotism, is one of Carlyle's stri- 
 king characteristics. Great and learned men, astrono- 
 mers, philosophers, and others, are " poor scientific 
 babblers ;" he alone, it would seem, discerns the re- 
 ality of things, and has the key to the mysteries of 
 nature. " Insight" has been granted to no other. 
 
 One of the wonders of the age to us is, that such a 
 monstrosity as Carlyle should have attained so high a 
 place in its estimation. His merits are so overloaded 
 by the most shocking and unbounded affectation and 
 egotism, that we rise from the perusal of much that 
 he has written with no other sensations than those of 
 weariness and disgust. 
 
 The poems of the Kentucky Sappho, Amelia, have 
 been published in a very elegant gift-book volume, by 
 Tompkins, of Boston. We have expressed our almost 
 unqualified admiration of this lady's poems, as they 
 separately appeared. She has a mind fed equally 
 from a full heart and a prodigal imagination. 
 
 It was once remarked to us, by a critic as candid as 
 he is discerning, that there is a great development of; 
 the poetic sentiment in this country ; thai many of our 
 
 collections, which, in their brief existence, resemble 
 the flowers that seem to be born only to die, like those 
 delicate, odorous, and lovely objects in nature, have 
 often a character of sweetness, purity, and freshness, 
 grateful to refined taste and a feeling heart. The 
 pieces contained in this volume are worthy of such 
 praise. A loving heart, and a soul in harmony with 
 the beauty of the world and the divine spirit which 
 informs it, dictated these poems. 
 
 We might make many beautiful selections from this 
 handsome volume; but we must content ourselves, 
 for the present, with naming one, " The Little Step- 
 son," which, in its earnest simplicity, and its ringing 
 music, reminds us of that favorite translation, " My 
 ear-rings! my ear-rings! they've dropped into the 
 well !" Not merely that the measure is the same, but 
 that the whole tone seems the echo of far off and 
 primitive manners — the voice of untutored affection. 
 
 Miff between John Bull and Brother Jona- 
 than — The offensive club exclusion by which Eng- 
 lish aristocrats have undertaken to make Ameri- 
 cans pay their debts, does, unquestionably, put the 
 screw upon a national weakness. We are not sorry 
 for it — but there could have been nothing in worse 
 taste or showing a more ignorant lack of discrimina- 
 tion — setting aside the fact of its being done by a class 
 of men, who are themselves, notoriously bad paymas- 
 ters. We do not believe, however, all that is in the 
 papers on the subject. The " Reform-Club," in 
 which it originated, is a new combination of ill-ballast- 
 ed politicians, and the movement will be disclaimed 
 in some authoritative shape, before a month is over. 
 Trifling as the matter abstractly is, it would act very 
 pungently on any questionof war-makingwhich should 
 arise among us within a year. 
 
 Perhaps some of our readers would like to know 
 how far an exclusion from the clubs affects America 
 in England. The fact of not having the honorary 
 privilege of admission to the two principal clubs, was 
 (before this national exclusion) sufficient evidence 
 tbat a gentleman had not come well introduced. One 
 of the first and most natural questions addressed to a 
 stranger in London is, " What club are you in ?" — 
 the intention being to ask you to a tete-d-tete club 
 dinner, if you turn out agreeable. This is almost the 
 only courtesy that a literary man in England has it in 
 his power to show you. He can give you a dinner 
 for a few shillings at his club (if you are a member of 
 it and not otherwise), which in point of style and cor 
 fort is equal to a nobleman's entertainment. Or 
 (which is more common) he can say, "I dine at the 
 Athenaeum to-day at six. If you have no better en- 
 gagement, we'll put our chairs together" — each man 
 in this case paying his own bill. An invitation to 
 club privilege is only got up by high interest, however. 
 It requires some person of consequence to play the 
 applicant, and the number of strangers in each club, 
 at one time, is seldom more than twenty or thirty. 
 The following are the formulas of invitation to the 
 two principal clubs : — 
 
 " Pall Mall, 28M January, 1835. 
 " Dear Sir • I am directed by the committee of the ' Travel- 
 lers' to inform you that they have great pleasure in admit- 
 ting you as a visiter to the club for the ensuing month, and 
 that they hope to be favored with your frequent attendance. 
 " I have the honor to be, sir, 
 
 " Your most obed't and humble serv't, 
 " J. W. SINGER, Secretary." 
 
 " Athenjeum, London, 19th February, 1835. 
 " Sir : I am directed to inform you that the committee of 
 the 'Athenaeum' have ordered your name to be placed on 
 the list of distinguished foreigners residing in London, who 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 739 
 
 ject to the same regulations as the members are required to 
 observe. 
 
 " la ease your stay should be prolonged beyond that period, 
 and it should be your wish to have this invitation renewed, it 
 will be necessary that an application be made to the commit- 
 tee to that effect. 
 
 M I have the honor to be, sir, 
 
 " Your very obedient, humble servant, 
 " EDWARD MAGRATH, Sec'y." 
 
 It is rather important to a man making his way in j 
 London society, that he should be seen at the clubs. 
 The formidable " Who is he ?" is always satisfactorily j 
 snswered by, "Don't know, but I saw him at the club." | 
 It influences all manner of introductions, breaking \ 
 down scores of invisible walls between the new-comer J 
 and desirable things and people. A call at the clubs 
 is an invariable part of the routine of a fashionable [ 
 man's morning. He goes there to meet friends, to I 
 hear the news, to bet, to smoke, to make engagements j 
 — to prepare for the out-door part of the day, in short, j 
 All notes, requiring a very private delivery, are ad- 
 dressed to a man at his club. Men who have no li- 
 braries of their own, do the most of their reading 
 there. It is the place to see great men, fashionable 
 men, famous men ; and to see them without their 
 masks — for the security, as to the proper introduction 
 of all present, throws an atmosphere of marked laisser- 
 aller around sensitive greatness. 
 
 We sat down, however, to comment upon the igno- 
 rance as to our country, shown by the late narrow- 
 viewed movement of club-exclusion — the evident igno- 
 rance of any distinction between state responsibility 
 and national responsibility. To mention it is enough, 
 however; and we turn to that which will show the 
 out-lying proof of English ignorance of us. 
 
 One of the dullest, most arrogant, and unscrupulous 
 of travellers is commended in the last foreign quarter- 
 ly, by one of the most unfair and ignorant of critics. 
 If all travellers and critics were like this well-matched 
 pair, the subject of British tourists and reviewers, and 
 their opinions and statements concerning us would not 
 be worth a thought. Of the capacity and information 
 of the reviewer, take one or two specimens. " The 
 unanimity of whigs, tories, and radicals, upon the one 
 topic of American society (i. e., in condemnation) is a 
 thing to wonder at and reflect upon." Two of the 
 most readable works of this class within the last ten 
 years are decidedly favorable — those of Miss Martineau, 
 and the Hon. Charles Augustus Murray. A more 
 striking instance still of the reviewer's utter ignorance 
 or most shameful falsification is his representing the 
 internal traffic in slaves as publicly repudiated, and 
 
 founding on that a charge of duplicity, since "men 
 
 are ready to swear there is no such thing from one end 
 of America to the other as a trade in slaves." A very 
 suitable person this to write comments on American 
 travels ! With such endorsements Mr. Featherston- 
 haugh's statements can not but pass current! We 
 did not suppose there was, in the obscurest corner of 
 Europe, one dabbler in ink so profoundly and inex- 
 cusably ignorant as not to know that slaves were 
 openly bought and sold in the slave states of this 
 country. That such Cimmerian darkness (to make 
 the most charitable supposition) should envelope the 
 brain of a British reviewer is a marvel indeed ! 
 
 It was not, however, to expose such ignorance that 
 we took up the pen, nor to draw the very natural con- 
 clusion of the amount of information, which Mr. F.'s 
 book conveyed to his countrymen at large, since, not- 
 withstanding the title "slave states," his reviewer con- 
 cluded there was no acknowledged slavery — for with- 
 out purchase and sale the system is of course knocked 
 on the head. 
 
 But such are not all British tourists, nor such all 
 British reviewers; and it is worth while to inquire why 
 it is, that, placing out of the account writers of this 
 
 class, there is still so large a proportion of our well- 
 informed and sensible visitants, who get an unfavor- 
 able impression of our institutions and of our state of 
 society. 
 
 We ought to give up the idea of a prevalent ill- 
 feeling toward us in the fatherland of our ancestors, 
 or a wish to put us down, because we are on the wrong 
 side of the water. Few Englishmen like us the less 
 because we are Americans, and not French or German 
 or Russians. Thousands of us when abroad have ex- 
 perienced the contrary. 
 
 Nor ought we to suppose that envy, jealousy, or 
 ancient gzudges, are at the bottom of the hard measure 
 meted out to us by tourists. True, we have met in 
 war as enemies, and in peace as commercial rivals, 
 and have in both held our own; but meanness and spite 
 form no part of the character of John Bull. He has 
 tremendous faults, but he keeps tolerably clear of 
 pettinesses. 
 
 One fault shows itself with the English abroad, 
 wherever they are. Though the greatest travellers, 
 they are the least cosmopolitan. The island mania 
 attends them everywhere, except at home. Like 
 some mistresses to some lovers, old England seems 
 the dearer the farther they get away from her. Gold- 
 smith's Traveller's lengthening chain is no fiction. 
 Across the ocean it is often insupportable. Some- 
 times, also, this distance has, at the outset of the 
 voyage, " lent enchantment to the view," which, when 
 dispelled, leads to a bitter, though unreasonable dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 The very resemblance which we bear to the Eng- 
 lish — and must bear, from our origin, our language,' 
 our literature, and our continued intercourse ever 
 since the ocean rolled between us — is unfavorable to a 
 just, and still more to a partial judgment of us, on 
 the part of those honestly disposed to do us justice. 
 To other people the British traveller can apply, in 
 some measure, the true standard — i. e., to each its 
 own; but for us, he can have only the home standard. 
 Weighed by this, we are, of course, found wanting. 
 He find us nine tenths English, and scolds that the 
 other tenth is not English too. 
 
 It is needless to discuss the point, whether that 
 tenth is better or worse — the English blood renforces 
 
 (as some Frenchman has pronounced, justly we 
 
 hope) or not — it is enough that it is not English for 
 
 the genuine John Bull to pronounce it ridiculous or 
 
 insufferable ; to laugh or rail at it according to his 
 
 humor. The general resemblance he can not deny, 
 
 but he unreasonably demands an exact likeness. In 
 
 the points where this is not perceptible, he of course 
 
 considers us shockingly degenerate, altered altogether 
 
 for the worse. Now there are various points which 
 
 we should not expect him to appreciate justly, for we 
 
 j know he is a creature full of prejudices and contra- 
 
 I dictions, and he must see witli his own eyes or not see 
 
 ! at all. 
 
 Another real difficulty is, that no mere passing 
 : traveller can realize the crowning glory of our country 
 and of our institutions — the general diffusion of com- 
 I fort and intelligence. A traveller is looking out for 
 ! the salient points — something striking or marvellous 
 j —something that will tell in his book and his memory. 
 A thousand comfortable or even elegant private dwel- 
 lings that he might pass, would not make upon him 
 so vivid an impression as one splendid palace— while 
 I the former would indicate a thousand families living 
 ' in comfort and abundance, and the latter that there 
 1 was one family of over-grown wealth with a presump- 
 tion against its possessing the average worth of the 
 former, or even enjoying their average happiness. 
 
 We contribute to the severity ol the judgments 
 against us by our own fault. Our sensitiveness lays 
 us peculiarly open to attack, and none reply to such 
 attacks with more violence. The foreigner who 
 
740 
 
 EPHExMERA. 
 
 knows this and who can not perhaps conscientiously 
 grant us all we ask, sharpens his weapons beforehand 
 for the encounter, and deals harder blows in anticipa- 
 tion of those which he knows he is about to bring 
 down upon himself. 
 
 To this must be added our national vanity — a 
 characteristic which the candid among us own. From 
 demanding too indiscriminate praise, we do not get 
 that which we really deserve, as the trader, who praises 
 his wares extravagantly, is sure to have them under- 
 valued. If our claims were more moderate, they 
 would be oftener acknowledged. If we exacted less, 
 more would be voluntarily given. If we did not rise 
 up against deserved reproof, we should b'e oftener 
 spared that which we did not deserve. 
 
 When we claim the eloquence of a Chatham for 
 every stump orator, and then apply the same phrases 
 to our really great and eloquent men, the latter are 
 sufferers. If we claim for our every-day life or even 
 for our soirees recherchees the grace and polish of a 
 court, where they have nothing to do but to kill time 
 agreeably, the assertion is simply ridiculous. Some 
 traveller (Dickens we believe) says of the factory-girls 
 of Lowell, that they have the port and bearing (or 
 something to that effect) of well-bred ladies. Pretty 
 complimentary we should think! But an annotator 
 somewhere (but where we know not), is not satisfied. 
 He adds, that if Mr. Dickens should meet these per- 
 sons in private circles, he would find they had the 
 corresponding elegance and manners. As if any good 
 factory-girl at Lowell would pass muster at Queen 
 Victoria's drawing-room ! 
 
 The new Prima Donna. — The haste with which 
 it is the fashion to write about prima-donnas, giving 
 them a cornucopial criticism, on their debut, and drop- 
 ping directly after into very brief notices, reminds us 
 of a lady's reproach to her lover, in the old play of the 
 Spanish friar : " You men are like watches, wound 
 up for striking twelve immediately ; but after you are 
 satisfied, the very next that follows is the solitary 
 sound of single one." We should like very much to 
 defer expressing an opinion of Madame Pico, till she 
 had a little recovered from the embarrassment of a 
 first performance, and (more important still in critici- 
 sing) till we had steeped our tympanum a little longer 
 in the honey the bees of Italy have shed upon her 
 lips; but 
 
 The audience at Palmo's, last night, was, probably, 
 the best ever assembled since Malibran's time, as to 
 the capability of judging of a cantatrice by taste and 
 comparison. Madame Pico, even in Italy, would 
 scarce have dropped her golden cadences into more 
 judicious ears. Fortunately, too, the unripeness of 
 an entirely new opera was corrected by the predomi- 
 nance of natural melody in the composer's style— ma- 
 king it all come to the ear with the impromptu wel- 
 come sometimes refused to the best music. By the 
 way— without knowing whether this opera will grow 
 upon us, and allowing, at once, that it has none of 
 Beethoven's under-song, nor any of the supernatural 
 combinations of Mozart— we must express our almost 
 passionate delight in its main burthen and character. 
 We write, it is true, by a past-time-to-go-to-bed candle, 
 and with the graciles-quc sensus still reeling under the 
 intoxication of the cup of bewitched sound ; but if 
 this gets to press (and we shall look it over before 
 breakfast, to-morrow morning), we congratulate the 
 every-day-ear of the city we five in, upon a opera that 
 is natural as a bird's song, and that can be enjoyed 
 with as simple a taste for music— at the same "time, 
 no more to be disparaged, for its simplicity, than the 
 bird's throat for not having the harp-stop "of a piano. 
 But let us go on, story-fashion. 
 
 The curtain drew up, and after the appearance of 
 the usual precedent foil of chorus-singers, Sanquirico, 
 the ben amatoof the company, came on as a postillion 
 After making a bow, with the good-will of a waterfall, 
 in acknowledgment of the applause with which he 
 was met, he went on playing his part, and (to dismiss 
 him with this brief notice) most admirably to the 
 last. The make-way motions of the guard and the 
 aspettando impatience of the music, now prepared us 
 for the prima-donna. She was to represent a young 
 girl, under the protection of the prince and princess, 
 whose escape from ruin by a villain is the story of the 
 opera. "Chiara!" trilled the "cue" and in glided 
 Chiara ! 
 
 Madame Pico has a look in her face as if " Sorrow 
 had passed that way." She has had a narrow escape 
 of being superbly handsome, and, as it is, she could 
 personate, with small call upon the imagination, tbe 
 part of "Mrs. Helpless Ingulfus," on the stage or off 
 it. Tho' not near so beautiful, she is a strong likeness 
 of Mrs. Norton — the same low, concentrative forehead, 
 the same something-or-other in the sweep of the dark 
 hair, the same caressing inwardness in the white round 
 of the shoulder. There is rather too much of a caden- 
 za in her bust, and her under lip does not always come 
 up with the alacrity we like in a woman, but we may 
 change our opinion. She was very much frightened, 
 and these matters are 
 
 " now high, now low again, 
 Like a ring of bells that the wind's wooing alters." 
 
 The welcome of applause ceased, and the expected 
 voice trembled on the silence. It was listened to with 
 pricked ears, nodded to by the cognoscenti at the first 
 pause — approved, applauded. It was a rich, clouded 
 contralto, its depths hidden by a soprano part, like a 
 dark well impoverished by a slant beam of sunshine. 
 As she went on, gathering a little more control, her voice 
 sank to the inner sound-chamber where the heart sits 
 to listen, and the audience, instead of louder applaud- 
 ing, began to murmur their admiration. Evident as 
 it was that the delicious home of her voice was never 
 reached, or borrowed from, by the notes of that soprano 
 part, there was a kind of full forth-shadowing of reser- 
 ved power which made, even what she did sing, satisfy 
 the ear. And then, occasionally, where the lower 
 notes approached her treasury of un-used power, she 
 flung out a contralto cadence upon the air with an ef- 
 fect the audience waited impatiently to hear repeated. 
 We feel bespoken to be enchanted with a fair develop- 
 ment of that full throat's capabilities. Artistic com- 
 parison apart, we have a passion for a contralto — noth- 
 ing that can pass the portal of an ear touching with 
 half the delicacy our levia affectuum vestigia. Thos6 
 who take our criticisms will, if they like, make allow- 
 ance for this weakness. 
 
 Borghese was in one of the avant-scene boxes, lend- 
 ing her captive town to her rival with the best grace 
 imaginable. She well may — for a smiling rivalry be- 
 tween her and Pico will give each new attraction, 
 particularly since their voices are of totally opposite 
 quality. The little soprano comme-il-faut has her 
 advantages, and Madame Pico has hers. Neither of 
 them is quite the " horn of Astolpho, at the sound 
 of which the hearer went mad," but while hearing 
 either, as Esdras says, "a man remembereth neither 
 sorrow nor debt." May they pull together " like 
 Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable !" 
 
 The footrace we have seen this afternoon " car- 
 ried the town" more completely than any excitement 
 we have yet been abroad in — politics not excepted. 
 We were late, but a thousand people were on the 
 road with us, and when we arrived, the first race was 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 741 
 
 just over, Jackson the winner. The weather was 
 Indian summer, in its most bracing smile — good 
 omen, a punster would say, for the red-skinned com- 
 petitor! The roads had been dried pretty well 
 by the sharp wind of yesterday, the grass looked 
 glussv, and King Pluribus was in unusual good hu- 
 mor—as he generally is on the first bright day after 
 bad weather. 
 
 The stands looked like stacks of noses and hats, 
 and after a vain attempt to find room in the principal 
 ones, we descended to the course to take our chance 
 witli the great company of the jostled. As it was an 
 object to get a near view of the runners at the end of 
 the first quarter of a mile, we crossed the area of the I 
 field to the less thronged side of the course, and 
 awaited their coming. Several loads of undisguised ! 
 sinners were near us, one of whom, a professed ma- 
 tron, apparently, coolly sat with a pair of pistols, wait- 
 ing some expected attack from a crowd of ruffians 
 wlio had surrounded them. She looked quite capa- 
 ble of a tragedy; but the striking of the bell at the 
 stand drew off the rowdies to the ring-fence, and the 
 pistols in the gloved hands gave place to a bouquet. 
 We had been thinking that there should be a compet- j 
 itrix in the race to inherit the honors of Atalanta, 
 and a female, by a pull of the forefinger, might easily 
 have taken the day's notoriety from the competitors 
 in the race. 
 
 A stroke of the bell — a shout from twenty thou- 
 sand throats — a sudden radiation, to one point, of all 
 the loose vagrants in the field — and around came the 
 horse-fence, that in single file kept pace with the run- 
 ners, hemming them in from the crowd. The gro- 
 tesque-looking pedestrians hugged the wooden railing 
 very closely as they came alonsr, Barlow ahead, the 
 Indian close on his heels, and Gildersleeve, the victor ■ 
 of the last race, quietly consenting to be number 
 three. The foremost man was simply "diapered," as 
 the nurses say, exhibiting his white Saxon skin in 
 strong contrast to the smoked hams of the Indian be- 
 hind him, and if the race had depended on muscle 
 merely, a good anatomist might have picked out the 
 winner, by points fairly displayed, as easily as a horse's 
 capabilities are seen by the jockey. 
 
 They ran very differently. A plumbline, dropped 
 from the forehead of each, would have fallen afoot in 
 advance of Barlow's body, and eighteen inches in ad- 
 vance of the Indian's, while it would have lain close 
 to the breast of the erect little Gildersleeve. Barlow 
 never took his eyes from the ground, and kept his 
 lower jaw relaxed in a kind of shame-faced smile. 
 We observed that his make was in exceeding good 
 distribution, and though he was slightly knock-kneed, 
 he made play as straight ahead as a pendulum, losing 
 nothing by sideling. Gildersleeve's natural ballast, 
 on the contrary, rounded him to, slightly, at every 
 step, and his shoulders were partly employed in coun- 
 teracting the swing. McCabe, who was compact all 
 over, trotted along like a stiff little pig, giving no- 
 where, and the Indian, a long, stringy six-footer, 
 seemed to follow his head like a kite's bobs — the near- 
 est way for a wave. Gildersleeve, it struck us, was 
 lividly pale, the Indian ready to cry with anxiety, 
 McCabe spunky, and Barlow slyly confident of suc- 
 cess. 
 
 We crossed over to the stands, where, we presume, 
 upon four acres of ground, there were twenty-five 
 thousand men. It was a peculiar-looking crowd — 
 sprinklings excepted, very gamc-y. We presume no 
 pick of New York city could have brought out of it, 
 so completely, the stuff it holds for an army. The 
 betting was going on vigorously — Barlow and Steep- 
 rock the favorites, but every man talking up his coun- 
 tryman. The Irish swore up McCabe as he came 
 along, the English applauded Barlow, the New-York- 
 ers encouraged Gildersleeve and the Indian. Mean- 
 
 time, the horse-fence-men rode open the crowd with 
 striking and shouting; betting-books were whipped 
 out at every completed mile; boys cried ci«ars; row- 
 dies broke down barriers and climbed into the stands ; 
 the men on the roofs pointed after the runners, and 
 hallooed the gainings and losings; and every third 
 minute the naked white shoulders came round ahead, 
 and it was manifest that Barlow gained constantly, 
 and, unless the little Yankee or the Indian could over- 
 haul him by a miraculous push, he was sure to win. 
 
 They came along for the tenth mile, and the crowd 
 were almost still with anxiety. The overtaking rush, 
 by which Gildersleeve won in the last race, was now 
 expected of him by his backers. Barlow passed, a 
 hundred feet ahead; Steeprock strained after, with a 
 sponge at his lips, and his knees tottering; Gilder- 
 sleeve came third, a spectacle of pallor and exhaus- 
 tion; Greenhalgh, another Englishman, was evidently 
 making more speed — and that was the last we saw of 
 them in motion. 
 
 With the thousands rushing in from all sides we 
 were swept toward the judges' stand. The horsemen 
 came on, in the midst of a sea of heads keeping pace 
 with thorn, whips going, shouts pealing, boys and bul- 
 lies screaming, swearing, and crowding. "Barlow!" 
 "Barlow!" "Barlow!" arose from hundreds of wild 
 voices, and the tumult of inquiry as to the others 
 grew deafening. We backed out a little to hear the 
 victor called oil by the judges. A moment's stillness 
 was procured, and the competitors were named from 
 the stand in the order in which they had come in : 
 Barlow, Steeprock, Greenhalgh, Gildersleeve. The 
 time made by the winner was ten miles in fifty-four 
 minutes twenty-one seconds. 
 
 As we turned away, Gildersleeve was brought along 
 by two men, with his eyes half closed and his tongue 
 loose in his lips; and he seemed just able to place his 
 feet, one after the other, mechanically, as he was 
 lifted over the ground. A sicker-looking man we 
 never saw. A minute after, Barlow appeared above 
 the crowd, on a man's shoulders, waving his hand and 
 smiling quite composedly, and the shouts, apparently 
 from every voice, hailed him victor. 
 
 P. S. We had nearly forgotten a good conundrum 
 the race gave birtlr to : — 
 
 Question. — Why did Barlow run so like a locomo- 
 tive yesterday ? 
 
 Answer. — Because he had behind him an Indian- 
 near. 
 
 New Trial of Culprit Poets. — Mrs. Gilman 
 has invented a new kind of book ("Oracles from the 
 Poets," of which we gave a uotice a few days ago), 
 and the opening preface, very charmingly written, 
 tries the poets by new standards altogether. She had 
 occasion to ransack all the popular authors for an- 
 swers to the fate-questions of her Fortune-Teller, and 
 of course she discovered where lay the most thought 
 and feeling of a peculiar character. She begins by 
 finding out that poets are benevolent. She had great 
 difficulty in finding sixty answers to the question, 
 " To what have you a distaste or aversion /" while 
 " What gratifies your taste or affections?" was stud as 
 common as clover. She says that in Shakspere there 
 is a singular lack of mention of places of residence, and 
 there seems not to be even a fair proportion of pas- 
 sages descriptive of musical sounds, hours, seasons, 
 and (except in the Winter's Tale) of flowers. In 
 Wordsworth, scarcely a flower or musical sound is de- 
 scribed. They are alluded to, but not painted out. 
 The poetry of Crabbe, though abounding in numer- 
 ous characters, could furnish almost nothing for her 
 purpose, on account of their being woven into the 
 general strain of his narrations. Shelley, Landoti, 
 and Howitt, are eminently the poets of flowers, while 
 
742 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Darwin, with a whole "Botanic Garden" before him, 
 and Mason, in his "English Garden," gave none 
 fairly entitled to selection. Few passages of any sort, 
 except those hackneyed into adages, could be gained 
 from Milton, on account of the abstract, lofty, and 
 continuous flow of his diction. Coleridge has cor- 
 responding peculiarities. Keats and Shelley are the 
 poets of the heavens. Byron, with faint exceptions, 
 does not describe a flower, or musical sound, or place 
 of residence. The American poets, in contradis- 
 tinction to their elder and superior brethren of the 
 fatherland, display a more marked devotion to nature, 
 with which a continued glow of religious sentiment 
 aptly harmonizes. 
 
 Apropos — as the living American poets are in pro- 
 cess of 'broidery, would it not be well to know where 
 their worsteds are deficient, that they may shop up 
 their lacking threads in the Broadway of contempla- 
 tion? Will not some of our several sleeping female 
 geniuses (intellectual dolce-far-nientes, of whom we 
 know at least a capable dozen) take up the American 
 poets and go through them with a discriminating bod- 
 kin, showing what colors lack replenishing ? It would 
 serve the poetry of Bryant-dom — the present passing 
 age in which this faultless poet is the flower in most 
 palpable relief. Come, ladies! tell us what Lowell 
 (whose fame is being worked just now) had better 
 thread his inspired needle with! Tell us what Long- 
 fellow is out of. Tell us whether Halleck has done 
 enough to cover the pattern, and whether some oth- 
 ers hadn't better unravel and work it all over again ! 
 At any rate, turn up their frames of immortality and 
 show us the wrong side! Let them mend, if they 
 like, 
 
 " Ere the worm pierce their tapestry, and the spider 
 Weave his thin curtain o'er unfinished dreams." 
 
 The Upper Ten Thousand of New York City. — 
 The first three of the following paragraphs are from 
 the True Sun of November 22, and the last is from 
 the same paper of a day or two previous: — 
 
 "Politically, we are all republicans — socially, we 
 are divided into classes on the 'European plan.' 
 There is a certain class, for instance, that lakes exer- 
 cise only on one side of Broadway — the west side. 
 The 'canaille,' to-be-sure, may walk there too, be- 
 cause, fortunately, our aristocracy, with all its pride 
 and vanity, has no power; but what perfumed and 
 ringleted exquisite would ever think of sporting his 
 white kids, mustaches, and goatee, on the east side 
 of our great thoroughfare? That would be literally 
 wasting his sweetness on the desert air. We under- 
 stand, by-the-by, that Stewart is severely censured 
 for choosing the site of Washington Hall as the lo- 
 cation of his new temple of taste and fashion, merely 
 because it is situated on the east side of Broadway. 
 However, if the pavement in front is sprinkled thrice 
 a day with eau de Cologne, and Mr. Stewart doubles 
 the price of his goods, in order to give ton to the lo- 
 cation, it may do away with the fashionable prejudice 
 against the promenade of the nobodies, and thereby 
 equalize the value of the property on the two sides 
 of the street. At present there is a very material 
 difference in the price of the brick and mortar which 
 borders the two pavements." 
 
 "The Opera. — That this is a refined and elegant 
 amusement, no one can doubt; but to exaggerate its 
 consequence, to make it a grand controlling feature 
 in our society, is, in our judgment, giving it undue 
 importance. With regard to its being a very 'aristo- 
 cratic' affair in New York, we can only say, that a 
 complete refutation of such an idea may be easily had 
 3t any time by a glance at the dress-circle habitues.'' 
 
 "The Aristocracy. — We must confess we do not 
 
 | think that wealth is the only essential necessary to 
 place one in 'good society.' We can imagine many 
 refined, intellectual, and charming people, who do 
 not drive equipages lined with silk, and who have nei- 
 ther coachman nor footman bedizened with lace. 
 What would be thought of the elegance of a leader 
 of the ton, who could take a peculiarly-dressed par- 
 tridge from a dinner-table, and place it in his hat, in 
 order to carry it home with him ? We do not imagine 
 that such an attempt (for it was unsuccessful) marks 
 any very superior degree of refinement!" 
 
 "There are some, again, who study a profound re- 
 serve, or rather adopt an appearance of hauteur. 
 They are stiff, quiet, and unapproachable. These 
 are the dandies of the cities, who adopt the Horatian 
 sentiment of 
 
 " ' Odi profanum vulgus,' &c. 
 
 You must not come 'between the wind and their no- 
 bility.' They wear the last productions of Watson, 
 or Jennings, or Carpenter, and display a clean pair of 
 kid gloves, with the last fashion of wrist-buttons. 
 You might, if uninitiated, suppose them some dis- 
 tinguished foreigners on their travels. In nine cases 
 out of ten they belong to the parvenu order of the 
 aristocracy. Whiskey or codfish has taken a rise, 
 and their honored father has made a fortune. The 
 family-mansion in a back lane has been abandoned for 
 some fashionable quarter, and visits — on one side — 
 have been paid throughout the neighborhood. If 
 they choose, they could astonish, but they would not 
 condescend. The railroad-car does not shake down 
 their consequence. They regret this progress of one 
 art, which makes so many other arts useless. They 
 are delighted when they escape from the crowd and 
 seek the hotel, where the extravagant charges prevent 
 the danger of further collision." 
 
 We received yesterday an anonymous letter, re- 
 proving us, in sober bad English, for ministering to 
 the vanity of the rich, by an article in the Mirror on 
 the selection of " a promenade drive." This, the re- 
 proof also given us a day or two since by a political 
 paper for an article on the prima-donna, and the fore- 
 going paragraphs from a neutral paper, aimed princi- 
 pally at popularity with the working classes, are suf- 
 ficient indications, we think, that some bitter weed, 
 passing for an aristocracy-nettle, is rolled up in the 
 present cud of the reposing people. 
 
 We commence taking exceptions to the tone of 
 these articles, by stating what seems to us a fact of 
 general notoriety — that the ten thousand people up- 
 permost in this city — (aristocrats, if wealth and po- 
 sition make them so) — are the most moral and scru- 
 pulous ten thousand in the four hundred thousand of 
 the population. There is probably about this num- 
 ber — ten thousand — who are rich enough, if they 
 choose, to keep a carriage. Two thirds of them, we 
 presume, were poor men a few years ago, and the 
 children of three fourths of them will be obliged to 
 work for a living (a flying-fish aristocracy, who are 
 hardly long enough out of the water, one would 
 think, to give offence by their brief airs to those left in 
 the element below them). There is a smaller class — 
 perhaps two thousand families — who have been respect- 
 able and well off for two or more generations. There is 
 a third class, still — perhaps one or two hundred — whose 
 display is offensive, from no one's knowing where 
 their money comes from, or from their being sup- 
 posed to live dishonestly above their means, or from 
 being notoriously vicious. 
 
 Of these three classes — an " aristocracy" of ten 
 thousand — one half, at least, are religious, and the 
 remainder seek refined pleasures, and attend the- 
 atres and operas ; but, with the exception of the third 
 and smallest class last named, we venture to repeat, 
 that the upper ten thousand are by much the most 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 743 
 
 exacting of moral character iu their friends, the most 
 rigid in the support of moral opinions and charities, 
 and the most exemplary in their individual private 
 life. This is true of the upper ten thousand of no other 
 country in the world. It would sound Utopian in Eng- 
 land to assert this to be true of the upper classes of 
 any city on the face of the earth. Look at the dif- 
 ference of the standards in ordinary matters. To 
 make a good match, here, it is necessary that a young 
 man should be moral; and if he be of high character 
 in this respect (and the lady willing), public opinion 
 will not suffer his pretensions to be slighted by the 
 richest man! In every other country the lover's mo- 
 rality is altogether a secondary consideration — family 
 and fortune far before it. Morality is a young man's 
 best card in New York ; whether his object be influ- 
 ence, matrimony, good business-connexion, appoint- 
 ments from societies, or general position in the best 
 circles. This truth needed only to be put in print to 
 make people wonder it had not been said before ! 
 
 It is a wretched trick caught from English papers 
 and English plays, to talk of the rich as certainly 
 vicious, and of the poor as necessarily virtuous. We 
 live in a country where the sovereignty (that part of 
 society which vice commonly noses and follows close 
 after) resides at the opposite end from the sovereignty 
 of England. The more virtuous class, here as there, is 
 comparatively poicerless at the ]}olls. The rowdy 
 drunkard and the gambler do as much toward presi- 
 dent-making and the selection of lawgivers, as the 
 thrifty merchant, and the rich father of a family of 
 virtuous daughters; and, as there are a hundred hus- 
 bands, of either of the first-named classes, to one of 
 either of the others, virtue and order keep company 
 with sovereignty — in this country as little as in Eu- 
 rope! Power is at the surface of a country, and the 
 scum rises to it. We are quite aware, that the pen 
 and inkstand with which we write these sentiments 
 will not be, to all readers, " a pot of lambative elec- 
 tuary with a stick of licorice." 
 
 Rivalry at the Opera. — The musical tilt, to de- 
 cide which was the more prime of the prima-donnas, 
 came off last night, to the very great entertainment 
 of the town's ornamentals. It reminded us very 
 strongly of the contention between the lute and the 
 nightingale, in the old play of the " Lover's Melan- 
 choly." Borghese drops dead in the last act, very 
 soon after a glorious and triumphant outbreak by 
 Pico; and we will quote a passage to show how this 
 resembles the poetic story — premising, by-the-way, 
 that a musician, playing in the woods, is overheard by 
 a bird, who mocks him till the lute-player gets angry 
 at the excellence of the rivalry: — 
 
 " To end the controversy, in a rapture, 
 Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly — 
 So many voluntaries and so quick — 
 That there was curiosity and cunning, 
 Concord in discord, lines of difFering method, 
 Meeting in one full centre of delight. 
 
 the bird (ordained to be 
 
 Music's first martyr) strove to imitate 
 These several sounds ; which, when her warbling throat 
 Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute, 
 And broke her heart." 
 
 But, to tell the other story — "after the manner of 
 men." 
 
 The opera was "Lucrezia Borgia." Signorina 
 Borghese represents (as well as we could understand 
 the story) a bad mother, who, in poisoning a large 
 party of youths, half rakes, half conspirators, for hav- 
 ing insulted her sign over the door, poisons one too 
 many — her son. Madame Pico represents the leader 
 of the set, and does the noise aud the jollification. 
 She descends upon the stage the first thing after the 
 
 rising of the curtain, dressed in a very modest suit of 
 male attire, and figures about as a Roman Captain 
 Rynders, bandying dialogue here and there, but with 
 no chance of display in the three or four first acts. 
 Borghese, we began to think, was to have the best of 
 it all the way through. She was exquisitely dressed, 
 sang with as little of the split-straw in her soprano as 
 we ever heard her sing with, and acted to her singing 
 (as she always does) with what the Greeks called ono- 
 matopcia — movement linked with sound indivisibly. 
 The applause was pretty well, but not overpowering. 
 
 The fourth act represented the youths at the fatal 
 supper, Pico the principal customer. After a little 
 hobnobbing on the other side of the table, she glides 
 round, upon her plumptitudinous locomotives, and 
 dashes into a song, rich, rollicking, and risveglialo ! 
 Down went the bucket for the first time into her well 
 of contralto, and up came the liquid and golden mu- 
 sic, of a round, true fulness, that made the ear's thirst 
 a luxury. It was a passage full of involutions, abrupt, 
 startling, and bacchanal; but her skill in flinging her 
 voice from point to point, with the capricious surpri- 
 ses of the music, was wonderfully subtle. The au- 
 dience was, for the first time in the evening, fairly 
 lifted clear of the ground. On the part of the stage- 
 company, no encore was looked for at this point of the 
 opera. The closing of Pico's song is the signal for a 
 death-bell and the disclosing of a hearse apiece for 
 the jolly junketers. The audience were not ready, 
 however. The applause kept on till the hearses 
 backed out, and the song was sung over again. Oh, 
 how deliciously it was sung! No voice, however 
 large its compass, was ever sweeter, rounder, mellow- 
 er in its quality, than Madame Pico's. The audience 
 murmured, and leaned forward, and ejaculated, and 
 with one unhesitating accord, it seemed to us, gave 
 over the palm to the contralto. The chorus-singers 
 seemed surprised — she herself forgot her male attire, 
 and courtesied (the first time we ever saw how it was 
 done, by-the-by), a tributary bouquet flew over the 
 footlights, and Lucrezia Borgia rose up once more, 
 like an apparition amid the hearses in waiting. 
 
 The last act, like the first three, was all Borghese's. 
 It is deep tragedy, and she played it well. The young 
 man, poisoned by mistake, held his stomach till lie 
 was done for, and his letting go was the signal for 
 Borghese to give her " C sharp," and go after him. 
 The curtain dropped, and the applause rose imme- 
 diately. Borghese came out and was cheered till she 
 courtesied out, but still the applause continued. No 
 reply. The canes began to rap, and the audience 
 seemed not beginning to go. " Pico !" shouted some- 
 body. "Pico!" shouted everybody. Still no an- 
 swer. The deafening uproar at last lifted the cur- 
 tain, and there was Borghese! led forward by Peroz- 
 zi, and courtesying again ! And presently, all alone, 
 with her hair down her back, her mustache gone, and 
 a loose dressing-gown about her, the real queen by 
 acclamation took the honors there was no longer any 
 denying her. The will of the audience, and the will 
 of the Italian corps, were two entirelydifferent matters. 
 
 We really do not see why these fine-throated peo- 
 ple can not consent to do their best, and let the pub- 
 lic like which they please. The two singers are both 
 admirable, each unrivalled in her way : and, because 
 we admire the new-comer, it is no reason why we 
 should not still appreciate our former favorite. But 
 see how unlike musical people in prose are to musical 
 people in poetry. We will quote the conclusion of 
 the pretty story we began our criticism with, for a 
 lesson of magnanimity, after the bird dropped, broken- 
 hearted, upon the lute. 
 
 " It was the quaintest sadness 
 To see the conqueror, upon her hearse, 
 Weeping a funeral elegy of tears. 
 He looks upon the trophies of his art, 
 
744 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed and cried, 
 
 ' Alas ! poor creature, I will soon revenge 
 
 This cruelty upon the author of it. 
 
 Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood, 
 
 Shall never more betray a harmless peace 
 
 To an untimely end :' and, in that sorrow, 
 
 As he was poshing it against a tree, 
 
 I suddenly stepped in." 
 
 Another night we trust to see Borghese submitting 
 resignedly, like the bird, to be beaten ; though if the 
 conquering Pico undertakes, in consequence, to "pash 
 herself against a tree," we trust the manager will 
 "suddenly step in." 
 
 The Historical Society Dinner. — "We went to 
 the dinner of the Historical Society last evening, with 
 a mood in our mental pocket, which was as useless to 
 us as the wrong mask for a night of carnival. We 
 went to indulge in relaxation and gratify curiosity. 
 We decided in the midst of confusing avocations, that 
 it would be delightful to see Mr. Adams and Mr. Gal- 
 latin, pleasant to listen to the voices whose words we 
 should read in the next morning's papers, and curious 
 to see the first menu of the opening hotel up-town. 
 We presumed there would be some dull talking, 
 which the dinner and the friends around would keep 
 off with the by-play of conviviality, and that we 
 should, at any rate, hear wit, get our cares jostled 
 from astride us, and store up, for illustration to future 
 thought and reading, two pictures of men who are 
 soon to pass over to history. 
 
 But — (the two great statesmen who were to be 
 present set aside for the moment) — it is not easy to 
 come at all into the presence of a large number of 
 men of superior intellect, without feeling the dormant 
 thunder of the cloud about us. This is partly a moral 
 magnetism, we presume, but there is a physiognomy 
 in crowds; and, to the eye accustomed to see men 
 " as they come," the look of an assemblage of master- 
 intellects is the laying of a spirit-hand upon the be- 
 holder. There were present the leading minds of 
 this great metropolis— able divines, merchant princes, 
 formidable politicians, brilliant lawyers, scheming cap- 
 italists, influential citizens, philanthropists, scholars, 
 poets, and journalists — none of them common men, 
 and none without the sympathy-read print upon the 
 forehead— distinction's philactery of pain.* Seated at 
 table, we looked about upon the men we knew, and 
 followed back into their bosoms the visible thread of 
 which we knew the knot at the heart-strings. We 
 have no time here— (our hasty thoughts gomg from 
 us, sentence by sentence, into irrevocable print, as we 
 record them)— no time to separate and describe the 
 crowding influences that changed our careless pre- 
 paratory mood into an overshadowed aud attentive 
 silence. We passed an evening of resistless revery— 
 much of it homage, much of it quickening to ambi- 
 tion, and in part a coveting of fellowship and sympa- 
 thy. But we can not go on with this misplaced rec- 
 ord of emotions. 
 
 There are weighty and wide influences exercised 
 by an historical society, which, again, we can only 
 hint at. far too hastily. Historical record is the 
 paymaster of the immortality toiled for by greatness- 
 and it is vital to the existence of great motives, that 
 this treasurer's trust should be faithfully discharged, 
 and his accounts chronicled in blazon. Affecting 
 mention was drawn from Mr. Adams of his coming 
 reward from history— the reward of justificatory tri- 
 umph — for having passed through the fire of calumny. 
 It was over these heated plough-shares that he has 
 
 • We may say, in passing, that we have seen the first men 
 of their time in many countries, and many assemblages of 
 distinguished men, but it struck us that we had never seen 
 either a finer collection of intellectual heads, or finer individ- 
 ual specimens, than this occasion had brought together. 
 
 walked to the luminous door by which he is about to 
 pass from the world ; and if he could be sure of no 
 brother-spirits left behind, to see the truth written in 
 characters legible to the world, he would have done 
 his great services to his country, by sufferings, indeed, 
 mournfully thankless. In a republic, especially in an 
 age of free-thinking and irreverence for usage, like 
 ours — the influence of a society which brightens and 
 keeps manifest the coolly-proved wisdom of the past, 
 is more especially all-needful. History forgotten, the 
 present is a ship without chart or compass, trusting to 
 the stars alone in the clouded storm-nights of politics. 
 Ambition, with that watchful dragon asleep — no rec- 
 ord to be dreaded beyond the memory of the living — 
 would be a fiend loosed upon the world. History is 
 our citadel of safety. 
 
 New kind of Hotel up-town. — We have thought 
 that it would, perhaps, interest our readers to go into 
 a detail of the differences between the popular hotel 
 (like the Astor, the American, Howard's, &c.) and 
 what is understood in Europe as the hotel- garni — of 
 which the up-town hotel is the new example in this 
 country. 
 
 The hotel-garni is a furnished house, in which the 
 lodging is the only charge not variable at the option 
 of the guest. A certain price is charged for the 
 rooms occupied, and the other expenses are accord- 
 ing to what is ordered. A popular bachelor, for ex- 
 ample, makes a great economy of this. He pays for 
 his rooms and his breakfast; and, if invited out to 
 dine five times in the week, saves the corresponding 
 items in his bill — five dinners and five bottles of wine. 
 This, in Europe, is considered a fair offset against 
 patent blacking, white gloves, and hack-hire ; and 
 puts society on a level with health, sunshine, reputa- 
 tion, and other plain matters-of-course. A common 
 table and a restaurant are not necessary parts of a ho- 
 tel-garni, but they serve to increase its eligibility. 
 There is a certain price for a dinner at the table d'hote, 
 charged separately every day ; but in Europe few 
 dine at the common table except strangers in town. 
 A fashionable man avoids it as an implied confession, 
 1st, that he has not been invited out that day, and, 2d, 
 that he can content himself with everybody's dinner 
 and company. For families, particularly if there are 
 unmarried daughters, it is irreconcilable with position, 
 if not with propriety, to live at the public table. The 
 rooms in these hotels are arranged so as to unite a draw- 
 ing-room with each bedroom, and every person, or fam- 
 ily, respectably lodged, has a private parlor for meals and 
 reception of visits. There is no large common draw- 
 ing-room, of course. The meals are furnished by ex- 
 press order, given each day, to the restaurant below, 
 and sent up with tablecloth, silver, glass, &c — all 
 at the appointed hour, and all removed together when 
 dinner is over — giving the lodger no trouble, except 
 to wait on himself while dining, or provide a servant 
 to do so. As each dish is for one person only, how- 
 ever (or one family), the expense of such a dinner is 
 much greater than where the dishes are cooked in 
 larger quantities for a hundred people. To dine in 
 private on as many dishes as you may taste for fifty 
 cents at a public table, would cost, probably, from two 
 to five dollars. 
 
 The ordinary hotel is, of course, described by 
 specifying the peculiarities of the other. It will 
 be seen at once that the hotel-garni must prevail 
 with the increase of exclusiveism in this country. It 
 is only in new countries that families can do without 
 household gods ; and it is only where the whole male 
 society of a country is only unharnessed for sleep 
 from the eternal drag of money-making, that the do- 
 mestic virtues can be left safely without private altars 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 745 
 
 and locked doors, single roof-trees, and four-walled 
 simplicity. Twenty years hence, we venture to say, 
 the Astor's splendid drawing-room will be occupied 
 by some nabob of a lodger — needed no longer as a 
 common parlor — and its long galleries will be but 
 suites of apartments, every third bedroom converted 
 into a cosy saloon, and the occupants seeing as little 
 of each other as neighbors in a " block." 
 
 There are some very republican advantages in our 
 present system of hotels, which the country is not 
 yet ready to forego. Tell a country lady in these 
 times that when she comes to New York she must 
 eat and pass the evening in a room by herself, and she 
 would rather stay at home. The going to the Astor, 
 and dining with two hundred well-dressed people, and 
 sitting in full dress in a splendid drawing-room with 
 plenty of company — is the charm of going to the city ! 
 The theatres are nothing to that ! Broadway, the 
 shopping, and the sights, are all subordinate — poor 
 accessories to the main object of the visit. A large 
 company as cheap as none at all — a hundred dishes 
 as cheap as one — a regal drawing-room at her service, 
 with superb couches, piano, and drapery, and costing 
 no more than if she stayed in her bedroom — plenty of 
 eyes to dress for if not to become acquainted with, 
 and very likely a " hop" and a band of music — bless 
 my soul, says the country lady, I hope they'll never 
 think of improving away all that! 
 
 And, there lies the pinch ! The senator now on his 
 way to congress, dines with his family at the public 
 table. The gentleman who does not choose to keep 
 house, invites his friends to dine with him at the pub- 
 lic table. The man who prefers to dine in a private 
 parlor is satirically made welcome to his own society 
 — if he prefers it ! The distinguished, the fashiona- 
 able, the dressy, and handsome, may all dine, without 
 peril of style, at the public table. But — since so may 
 the opposites of all these, and anybody else who is 
 tolerably dressed and well-behaved — the public table 
 is the tangible republic — the only thing palpable and 
 agreeable that we have to show, in common life, as 
 republican. And when the exclusivism of the hotel- 
 garni draws its dividing line through this promiscu- 
 ous community of habits, the cords will be cut which 
 will let some people up, out of reach, and drop some 
 people down, out of all satisfactory supposible contact 
 with society. 
 
 Growth of "Western Literature. — We are 
 happy to notice that seven out of the seventeen arti- 
 cles with the names of the authors, in the last two 
 numbers of the Biblical Repository, are from persons 
 connected with literary institutions west of the mount- 
 ains. Among the subjects of the western writers are, 
 The Writings of Martin Luther ; Evidences from 
 Nature for the Immortality of the Soul ; and the 
 Natural History of Man in his Spiritual Relations. 
 Another article contains an able defence of presbyte- 
 rianism. So far as we can judge from a hasty view, 
 these subjects, some of which are the greatest that 
 can employ the pen anywhere, are treated with tact 
 and ability, and give us a favorable opinion of the con- 
 dition of our western seminaries of learning. The 
 remaining contributions are from New England, with 
 the exception of one from Virginia. New York does 
 not appear in the list of contributors' names. 
 
 The Opera — The " stars" of the opera are just 
 through their night's work and the stars of heaven are 
 half way through theirs. We have not the pleasure 
 of a personal acquaintance with a single individual in 
 either company — knowing neither Venus nor Pico, 
 Lyra nor Borghese, " off the stage." We are about 
 
 to announce an astrological conjunction, however, 
 and, as "many an inhumane thought hath arisen from 
 a man's sitting uncomfortably in his chamber," we 
 have sent for an emollient to our arm chair, in the 
 shape of cold duck and champagne — expecting there- 
 by to achieve our nearest perihelion to the calm clear- 
 sightedness of Copernicus. 
 
 Up-town New York, a week ago, was in the situa- 
 tion the starry firmament was in, about two hundred 
 years before the Christian era. Pythagoras recorded 
 his conviction at that time that there were hco stars 
 wanting to complete the harmony of a certain portion 
 of the heavens, and, in the very spots named by the 
 great philosopher, Mars and Jupiter did soon after 
 make their first appearance. In like manner a Daily 
 Pythagoras, of this city (we think it was Mr. King of 
 the American), darkly hinted in a late evening paper, 
 that there were two stars necessary — contralto and 
 soprano — to complete harmony of the Palmospheric 
 constellation ; and, in that very troop, Pico and Bor- 
 ghese did soon after take their places in similarly har- 
 morious conjunction. We trust history will do us 
 | justice for linking together these two marked fore- 
 ' shadowings of stars' " doing something for their fami- 
 lies." 
 
 [Your health, dear reader, in a glass of Cordon- 
 bleu m — m — mplck ! delicious !] 
 
 And now we have to beg the discreet portion of 
 the public to step with us behind the curtain — not 
 that (representing the rosy dawn) which drops before 
 Mars and Jupiter, but that (representing Jupiter feel- 
 ing the pulse of Minerva) which drops before Bor- 
 ghese and Pico. There has been a terrible rowdydow 
 in the operatic green-room. Borghese has been 
 hitherto queen of the zodiac, and her orbit was only 
 intersected by nebula? of nameless supernumeraries. 
 The breaking of Pico upon the gaze of the impartial 
 star-worshippers, however, and their undeniable prefer- 
 ence, of the star at fifty dollars a night to the star at 
 double the money, sent Borghese sick to her bed ; 
 and she is said to have vowed (with the spunk of the 
 Lost Pleiad, who died for jealousy of her six brighter 
 
 sisters) that she would never rise again if papa 
 
 would excuse her. 
 
 [Our astronomy is used up, dear reader, but the 
 champagne still holds out. A glass to Borghese's 
 better resignation, and let us go on, in terrestiial 
 phraseology. — M-m-mplck !] 
 
 Borghese commenced making p>osition, a year or 
 more ago, and has pursued it very skilfully, and, 
 therefore, very creditably to herself. For a winter, 
 or more, before showing herself as an admirable ac- 
 tress, she revolved in the japonica circles up-town, 
 as a singer at parties, and made acquaintances and 
 friendships exclusively among the forced-plant cus- 
 tomers of Hogg and Thorburn. Her manners were 
 of that well-studied, eager unconsciousness, which 
 is the modesty of nature in a hot-house school ; and 
 her tact, elegance, and musical science, were leaved 
 like a rose-bud tied up with a string — showing what 
 the prima-donna might be, if the young lady were 
 loosed and expanded. As the parent-stem required 
 to be relieved of her, she prepared to throw herself 
 on the public; and when she did, she was, of course, 
 plucked from neglect, and cherished in the protect- 
 ing bosom of the society that had secluded her. She 
 has been worn in triumph, as the first flower of the 
 opera, for a couple of seasons— as you know, dear 
 public ! 
 
 But nature exacts an equilibrium; and where there 
 is more public harmony, there will be more private 
 discord. The children of the " boot on the map," 
 kick against authorities, and every tuneful rehearsal 
 had its offset in a quarrel. Signor Borghese (the 
 star-father), not being of the sect of the Apotactita?, 
 who renounce property, took advantage of a tight 
 
746 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 place in the treasury, and bought in, " for a song," 
 the theatrical weapons and wardrobe. Of course, 
 whatever solvent might separate the other parts of the 
 company, they, crystallized, agaiu, around their only 
 possible nucleus — the prima-donna who had the tog- 
 gery ! And, at this stage of the Borghese monocracy 
 — came Pico ! 
 
 Months passed away. The story of Pico's errand 
 — her husband a political prisoner at Venice, and her 
 voice the only probable conjurer of the gold key to 
 release or relieve him — was told and apparently for- 
 gotten. We heard it, and reserved our republican 
 sympathy till she should appear. The Mirror suggest- 
 ed a concert — knowing nothing of her powers — but 
 her friends' thought she had better bide her time with 
 the opera. She has done so. At half the pay of 
 Borghese, she played to-night for the second time, in 
 the opera of Lucrezia Borgia. 
 
 We have come home from hearing her — "posses- 
 sed" (as this undevoured cold duck is our witness) — 
 our capacity for delight plummeted — our cistern of 
 unshed tears strangely and pleasurably troubled — our 
 pen as gushing with welcome to Pico as the miraculous 
 oil-spring of old Rome that welcomed home the con- 
 quering Augustus. 
 
 [Her health in this last glass of champagne — God 
 bless her !] 
 
 The house was crowded. Borghese sang beauti- 
 fully, and played as no other female in America can 
 play. She was heartily applauded — but — as on the 
 last opera night — the tumult of the house was reserved 
 for the drinking song of Pico. It is her first chance 
 to unchain soul and voice after nearly a whole opera 
 of subservient by-play. Oh how the first swooping 
 away into those clear silver caverns of her throat — 
 dropping through unfathomable love-depths with her 
 fearless down-c&&&nc&s, and turning with an easy up- 
 lift again toward the summit-perch of the careless 
 altissimo — how like an eagle's swoop it careered ! 
 overtaking the dew falling, and the perfume rising 
 into the sky, and, with all its fierce swiftness, robbing 
 the cleft air of nothing but fragrance and softness. 
 
 [We are getting poetical — but champagne after 
 Pico, is, as the Venetians say, tanto amorevolc ! We'll 
 go to bed and sum up in the morning.] 
 
 Thursday Morning. — Our friend of the " Morning 
 News," expresses, in his paper of to-day, a regret that 
 "a feeling of rivalry is encouraged between Borghese 
 and Pico." We are surprised at this discouragement, 
 on his knowing part, of the great secret of good opera 
 and good everything else. When are they ever so 
 likely to sing so well, and to draw so well, as when 
 
 " their souls come upward to their lips 
 Like neighboring monarchs at their borders meeting ?" 
 
 He adds, that " Pico fairly out-Pico'd Pico," and we 
 should say the same of Borghese, if the name would 
 come as pat. 
 
 No ! no ! let them he rivals ! What could be pret- 
 tier ? — more gracefully done, and more touchingly 
 enlisting to the feelings— than Borghese's picking 'up 
 the wreath again, last night, and giving it generously 
 to Pico? We broke a new malacca stick in applaud- 
 ing that action alone. Viva Borghese ! Viva Pico ! 
 You are two halves of a scissors, dear ladies, and 
 rivalry is your rivet. Divide the public — since both 
 halves are your own, after they are divided ! 
 
 Pico and Borghese. — These two ladies are certain- 
 ly most poculent commodities, and the town drinks 
 their delicious music with unquestionable intoxica- 
 tion. The crammed opera-house was as breathless 
 with absorbed attention last night as if Pico's rosy- 
 lipped cup ministered to every heart's measure of ful- 
 
 ness — one palate common to all. For ourself, we con- 
 fess immeasurable delight in Pico. Her voice has a 
 road to the heart upon which criticism takes no toll 
 — the gate-opening facility of music going home. One 
 listens to it as Shelley seems to have listened to the 
 witch of Atlas — 
 
 u Her voice was like the voice of his own soul 
 Heard in the calm of thought," 
 
 — the very inmost tenant of your bosom, somehow, 
 seeming to have " expected it, all along." 
 
 Borghese is a treasure to a town — an uncommon 
 creature — such an actress and artist as we shall not 
 see again until we deserve a benefit from the gods — 
 but Pico! oh, Pico is ot quite another invoice of goods 
 from paradise. Borghese is the most ingenious har- 
 mony-pump that, for many a year, has offered patron- 
 age a handle — the other is a natural-well spring of 
 passionate and careless music, that would flow as 
 bountifully, for a bird to drink, as for an emperor to 
 stoop to. Pico's voice would cut up like a polypus 
 — not a fragment without the making of a woman in 
 it. She neither sings, nor moves, nor smiles, as if 
 she remembered ever doing it before ; and if she has 
 not the great " art of concealing art" (of which we 
 have had our half a suspicion), she is one of those 
 helpless irresistibles that could as soon become invisi- 
 ble as not bewitch. 
 
 The drinking song (Pico's only good chance in the 
 whole opera), was stunningly applauded last night, 
 and, at the close, a wreath was thrown to her from a 
 very select company in a private box, and thrown with 
 a pretty good aim — for she caught it upon her bosom. 
 Out of it — (or the place where she caught it — we 
 could not tell which) — dropped a sealed note, which 
 we trust contained a check payable in favor of the im- 
 prisoned husband at Venice. 
 
 If we had a moderate thought during the opera of 
 last night, it was that there could be no question of 
 a keen taste for music in New York — for here was a 
 crowded audience, attentive, appreciative, measuring 
 its applause most judiciously, and leaving the house 
 delighted. We are sure a large opera-house would do 
 — with more inducements to foreign subordinates, 
 more enterprise to procure visits from the Parisian 
 and London operatics, better regulations for private 
 boxes, etc., etc. We think, for one, that there is no 
 greater pleasure, away from a man's hearth, than a 
 good opera. 
 
 Envy of the Rich, or, the Flying-fish Aris- 
 tocracy, and the No. 1 Passenger left behind. 
 — In the hurry of composition, yesterday, we stum- 
 bled upon a similitude (a "flying-fish aristocracy") 
 which, we think, expresses that transitory duration of 
 American "up-in-the-world," which should make the 
 greater number of rich people looked upon with in- 
 dulgent affection by those left temporarily below. Of 
 such short-lease wings as most American " first fami- 
 lies" fly with, there need be little envy, one would 
 think — in the democratic element they drip with till 
 they drop again. There are families, however — a 
 small number — who hold their own for three or four 
 generations ; and, in the " measureless content" of 
 these with their position, the democrats find offence ; 
 but one of the most curious social problems we know 
 of, is the manner in which the old families of New 
 York are let alone, and tacitly eclipsed by the more 
 newly prosperous; and we must offer to our readers 
 a descriptive similitude for this also. (Our object, it 
 will be seen, is to take away the offence of aristocracy, 
 if possible, and induce King Public to let us cater for 
 them, as for all other classes, with level editorial re- 
 publicanism!) 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 747 
 
 A half hour before the starting of the Oxford night 
 mail, a fat gentleman was discovered fast asleep in the 
 coach, which was still under the shed. He occupied 
 the back scat, and his enormous bulk filled it so com- 
 pletely that there was no room for the usual fourth 
 inside passenger. But four seats were taken and paid 
 for, and the last man booked insisted on his right to a 
 place — fat man, or no fat man! The stout gentleman 
 was waked, and requested to come out till the other 
 three were seated. 
 
 " He [however] knew his rights, and knowing dared main- 
 tain ;" 
 
 and having mentioned his name.and inquired whether 
 it was not first on the book, settled his chin into his 
 cravat, and speedily snored again! "Is this Oxford? 
 — bless me, how'I have slept!" said the fat man, rub- 
 bing his eyes, when the coach door was opened the 
 next morning — in the same place where it stood ivhcn 
 he went to sleep .' The driver had hitched his team to 
 another coach, and the three unprivileged customers 
 last booked were probably breakfasting in Oxford ! 
 
 It strikes us that the people who are last booked, in 
 this community, may very well monopolize the envy 
 — (success in arriving at their destination of conspicu- 
 ousness being, of course, the chief matter of envy) — 
 and the fat sleepers, upon the usurped seats, once left 
 out of the proscription, the charity for " flying-fish" 
 easily forgives the remainder. 
 
 If the above does not please our friend "Cheap 
 Jemmy," we will never do a good-natured thing again 
 as long as we live. If he knew Latin, we should 
 send him in a bill for a diaphoretic. 
 
 AFTER THE OPERA. 
 
 (Supper in 184's room at the Astor — the brigadier here 
 " on business'' — a poulct pique, and a bottle of cham- 
 pagne in silver tissue paper, also here " on busi- 
 ness" — Eleven O'clock, Esq., just parting from the 
 bell of St. Paul's, with a promise to be " round in the 
 morning." ) 
 
 Brig, (nodding, and taking up his glass). — Mi-boy ! 
 184 (laying his hand on the general's arm). — Not in 
 such profane haste, my prompt sodger! That glass 
 of wine is the contemporary of bliss — sent to us to be 
 drank to the health of a bride, now three hours past 
 the irrevocable gate. 
 
 Brig. Married at eight ? Do you say that ? God 
 bless her, in a bumper! (gazes abstractedly into the 
 bottom of the glass, and speaks musingly.) — Ten min- 
 utes past eleven ! — Well, who's the lady, and who the 
 happy man? 
 
 184. One of our parish, who, though he does not 
 personally know us, wishes us to be made aware of 
 his happiness. We have written ourselves into his 
 bosom. God bless him for the loving door in his 
 eye — isn't so, my tree-sparer! So may all men take 
 us in ! Try a bit of chicken now, general, or that 
 tear in your eye will fall back on an empty stomach! 
 
 Brig. And what a difference it makes — what it falls 
 back upon, mi-boy ! The salt in a tear is not natu- 
 ral, depend on it, or the in'ards would take to it more 
 kindly. What an etiquette of mercy it would be, 
 now, to make pathos and bad news matters of full- 
 dress — never to be alluded to in good society, till a 
 man has ceased, as Menenius says, " to pout upon the 
 morning !" What's your to-morrow's leader ? 
 
 184. Not coming to business at the second glass, I 
 hope ? Fie on you for a disrespect to the bride. 
 (The brigadier blushes, and covers his confusion by 
 reading the label on the bottle.) How enchantiogly 
 old Belisario and his captive sung their vows of friend- 
 ship to-night ! Ah, music and lights !— things are so 
 
 much finer for embellishing! Our small friendship 
 now, general — brought forward to the prompter's cup- 
 board and foot-lights — do you think it would be en- 
 cored, like that ? 
 
 Brig. As you don't ask for information, mi-boy, 
 let's proceed to business. Can you give me an idea 
 of your to-morrow's editorial ? 
 
 184. No! 
 
 Brig. And the boy is to come for it at seven ! 
 
 184 (seizing a pen). What shall it be ? 
 
 Brig. Why, there's the mud in the streets — and 
 the Bohemian Girl — and the wretched weather — and 
 the menagerie — and Vandenhoff' — and Stuart's candy- 
 shop — and Mrs. Coles — 
 
 184. By — the — by ! — a discovery ! — Tryon ought 
 to head his play-bills with the Marsellois war-cry — 
 " to arms ! — to arms !'' I never saw a pair in my life 
 more exquisitely moulded and polished than Mrs. 
 Coles's, of the Bowery circus — as shown after her 
 third undoing on horseback! It takes a symmetrical 
 woman, of course, to stand tiptoe upon a flying horse, 
 and strip, from a jacketed Cracovienne to a short 
 sleeved evening dress — but ladies of this vocation, well 
 made in all other respects, are usually thin from the 
 elbow to the shoulder. Shall I make a " leader" of 
 Mrs. Coles ? 
 
 Brig. Certainly not, mi-boy ! nor a follower either ! 
 Just indicate, as it were — call attention mysteriously 
 — hint somehow — that there is a part of the equestrian 
 performance that reminds you of things you saw in 
 Italy — statuary or something — delicately, mi-boy — 
 very delicately ! What else have you got down there 
 in your memorandum-book? 
 
 184. Half a dozen topics. Here's a note that 
 smells of "above Bleecker," requesting us to implore 
 of Japonica-dom not to give parties on opera-nights! 
 i Really, they should not ! The opera is a rare luxury, 
 without which a metropolis is like a saloon without a 
 mirror, and there should be a little combination, 
 among refined people — if not to give it extra support, 
 at least to throw no hinderance in its way. They do 
 this in London — (where, by the way, there are but 
 two operas a week, and it would be quite enough here) 
 — Lady Blessington, for one, never " at home" on 
 opera-nights, and dinner-parties are given at an earlier 
 hour to release people in time. The quality of the 
 opera depends, of course, on its enthusiastic support, 
 and those who can appreciate it can do no less, I 
 think, than to go in full dress, and go habitually. It 
 is far pleasanter than a party, is over at bearable bed- 
 time, and, just now, the company at Palmo's is too 
 good to be slighted. And, by the way, have you 
 thought how gloriously Pico has beggared the loud 
 trumpet we blew for her on her first appearance! 
 "Ants," says the old proverb, "live safely till they 
 have gotten wings, and juniper is not thrown away till 
 it hath gotten a high top." She is neither your ant 
 nor your juniper-blossom — is she general ? 
 
 Brig, (who has been dozing). Not my aunt, mi- 
 boy, whoever you're talking of. I never had one — 
 hope I never shall ! 
 
 184. What's that note falling out of your pocket, 
 meantime ? 
 
 Brig. Well thought of— I brought it to you for a 
 paragraph. What do you think it is ? A complaint 
 froin the ladies that the young men waylay them on 
 the staircases ! 
 
 184. Heavens and Sabines ! wait till I dip my pen 
 in the thunder-stand ! Who ? How ? When ? How 
 many ? 
 
 Brig. At parties— at parties— my dear boy— don't 
 be violent ! This lady declares (brigadier opens the 
 note) that it is a " perfect nuisance, the mere descent 
 from the dressing-room to the ball-room" — "a pretty 
 girl has to come down a perfect ladder of boys — every 
 | stair an engagement to dance" — " no chance for a 
 
748 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 pick" — " her mind fatigued with the effort to remem- 
 ber her partners" — " no hope of dancing with a grown- 
 up man from Christmas to April" — "green talk alto- 
 gether" — "dreadful sense of unripeness" — "no sub- 
 ject but Pico and Polka" — " begs we will write the 
 boys off the staircase," etc., etc. You see your sub- 
 ject. 
 
 184. Shall I tell you why that was not written by a 
 woman ? Don't you see that if this system of long 
 lists of engagements were done away, a lady would 
 have no escape from a disagreeable partner — no plea 
 of too many engagements — no chance for a lie whiter 
 than many a truth ? Don't you see, that (now duel- 
 ling is laughed at) a lady can leave out an early part- 
 ner on the list, or slip a tardy one in, with perfect 
 ease and comfort — distressing nobody's mamma with 
 fears of Hoboken ! Leave the ladies alone for put- 
 ting down troublesome usages ! Your letter was 
 written by some old coxcomb going out of fashion, 
 who can get nobody to dance with him, and lays it to 
 the boys on the staircase ! Tut ! 
 
 Brig. Twelve o'clock, and where's your leader ? 
 Oh, mi-boy, think of to-morrow's paper ! 
 
 184. Hang the leader ! Let's go without it — once 
 in a way ! 
 
 Brig. Gracious! no ! What will the public say ? 
 There goes one o'clock ! Bed-time (for me — not ("or 
 you) — and nothing from you for the boy in the morn- 
 ing ! Oh, mi-boy, sit up ! Go and wash your face, 
 and feel fresh ! Write a paragraph requesting the 
 Mirror brides to send their champagne, hereafter, ex- 
 clusively to the talking partner! Where's my hat ? 
 Get inspired, mi-boy, get inspired ! Good night! 
 
 184. Stay — stay — stay! Listen to this! (184 reads 
 the foregoing dialogue to the brigadier, whose face 
 gradually reassumes its usual serene placidity. He 
 lays down his hat and picks another wing of the 
 chicken.) 
 
 Brig. And you have been writing this down, all the 
 time, with your hand deep in that old cabinet ! Bless 
 me, what a boy you are for expedients! I thought 
 you was scratching autographs, or writing " Pico," 
 or sketching Glenmary, or something ! But you 
 haven't mentioned the weekly ? 
 
 184. Poh ! it doesn't want mentioning. 
 
 Brig. Not more than the sun and moon, and other 
 periodicals — but you trust the world's memory too 
 much, my worky ! They'd forget the sun shone if it 
 wasn't down in the almanac ! Say something! 
 
 184. Well, let's see ! It's our diary of the world's 
 goings-on and what we think of it — published every 
 seventh day. It is a week's corn, ground, sifted, and 
 bagged, for those who can't go to mill every day. It 
 is a newspaper without the advertisements and other 
 trumpery — at half price, in consequence of lumber 
 left out and one postage instead of seven. It is edited 
 every day, and other weeklies are edited once a week. 
 It gives the news, the fashions, the fun, the accidents, 
 the operas, and our all-spice to make it keep, in a 
 handsome, preservable shape — bindable for reference 
 and re-reading — "the times" as it were, "boned and 
 potted." Shall I say any more ? 
 
 Brig. Three dollars a year — 
 
 184. Mum, man ! Never mention money after 
 midnight! What will the angels say! Go to bed ! 
 go to bed ! (Exit brigadier, after a silent embrace.) 
 
 AFTER THE OPERA. 
 
 A FEW GRAVE REMARKS WHILE SUPPER IS COMING. 
 
 The Cinderella-tude of Madame Pico's own situa- 
 tion, in the operatic corps, and her still disputed claim 
 to the "glass slipper" of preference, sent us to Pal- 
 mo's, to-night, with somewhat of an owl upon our 
 
 shoulder. We dreaded Prince Public's final choice 
 between her and the favorite daughter of Don Mag- 
 nifico — for the real- life opera had come to its last act, 
 and, as she should or should not, make the most of 
 the opportunity (of which we had done our best to 
 be the " Pilgrim Alidoro"), she would, or would not, 
 wear to-morrow the crown of Palmo-dom. The cur- 
 tain is down, and 
 
 ENTER SUPPER FOR NO. 181. 
 Before we grow too enthusiastic for the nice distinc- 
 tions of criticism, let us say a word of the general 
 performance of the opera. Why the frisky Signor 
 Antognini, whose conceit, 
 
 " Ploughed by the sunbeams only, would suffice 
 For the world's granary," 
 
 was cast in a part that the unemployed Perozzi would 
 have done so much better, and so much more agree- 
 ably to the public, we have no Italian spectacles to 
 see. And — apropos — if it is the object of the com- 
 pany to please and draic, why did not Borghese (ex- 
 cept that silver is less tractile than gold) take the sec- 
 ond role in this opera, as Pico did in Lucrezia Bor- 
 gia ? The part sustained by Miss Moss has rather 
 more scope in it than that of Orsini, and how vastly 
 more attractive the opera, so cast, would be to the 
 public ! Signor Tomasi showed the vertebras in his 
 voice, to-night, more than he did in Belisario — prob- 
 ably from stooping with difficulty to the comic ; but 
 Sanquirico — what shall we say of his admirable per- 
 sonable of Don Magnifico ? We'll drink his health 
 by way of answer. (A lei, Sanquirico !) And so 
 ends our fault-finding. 
 
 SECOND GLASS. 
 
 This glass of purple Tinta, steeped in the latitude 
 of Italy, tastes, of course, of the climate of Pico's 
 voice ; and we are glad to vary, with this redolent 
 bumper, the avenue to our heart — so breaking up the 
 ear's monopoly of toll. Health to Cinderella tri- 
 umphant ! Her voice has a flavor — (if this wine be 
 like it — and it is the sun s fault if it is not like it — for 
 the same cupful of his mellow light fed the grape 
 from which gushed the wine and the lip from which 
 poured the melody) — worthy of the immortality of 
 Falernian. (For this discovery of homogeneousness 
 of pulp we beg a medal from the Institute.) 
 
 We were afraid, as we said before, that Pico, " like 
 a careless farrier, would lame her well-shod glory 
 with the last nail," but she sang throughout with un- 
 blemished deliciousness, and the " piu ?ncstar," at the 
 close, fairly took the town ! Nothing has been heard 
 like it, in this city, since Malibran, either in voice or 
 execution. We have made up our mind about Pico. 
 Her abandon is like the apparent carelessness of all 
 kinds of genius— -fearless trust after finished study. 
 Of that desperate and intoxicating let-go, Borghese 
 has none. She is artistic and careful in the most pas- 
 sionate extremity, dying, even, "with her wits all 
 about her." Pico fastens each link of the composer's 
 melody in her brain, with workmanlike fidelity ; but 
 when she comes out from her music-smithy, she 
 brings with her no memory of the clink of hammer 
 and rivet. In that relying forgetfulness lies the mys- 
 tery of her charm. It is recognised, by the instinct 
 men have that this is the quality of those who do 
 best — statesmen or soldiers, poets or lovers — the most 
 successful, in all enterprises, throwing themselves on 
 what they have once made up their minds to, as a 
 bird launches from the cliff. Nature prodigally sec- 
 onds the unhesitating trust of Pico's execution. Her 
 voice follows her concerted thought with the certainty 
 of a shadow and the fulness of a floodtide. The 
 plentitude of every shade and semi-tone, insures, 
 in the first five minutes of hearing her, an ab- 
 sence of all dread of flaw or falling ofT— an assurance, 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 749 
 
 that whatever height or depth she stoops her neck to 
 swoop for, it will bring, for the listener, 
 
 " those music-wings 
 Lent to exalt us to the seventh sphere." 
 
 WE DRINK TO THE JACOB'S LADDER OF MUSIC. 
 A new light breaks upon us as to the uses of the 
 opera. As (to the wicked) common speech is a con- 
 venience and swearing a luxury, so poetry is a conve- 
 nience to passion, and music its luxury. An unhar- 
 monized shout — a succession of cries — may mean 
 anything; but a chorus, or a concerted transition of 
 cries, has a meaning to convey floodtides out of the 
 soul. Poetry may fall cold upon the eye, but music 
 must melt in the ear. These premises allowed, the 
 opera becomes (does it not?) a healthful vent to the 
 passions of a metropolis — a chance (for those who 
 long to swear and do violence), by a more innocent 
 •' giving way," 
 
 '•' to wreak 
 Their thoughts upon expression !" 
 
 How common the feeling " to want a spree !" and 
 who that for three hours has choked back tears in his 
 throat, and been enraptured with a contralto across 
 the footlights, is not ready to go to bed like a gentle- , 
 man ? An opera is a blessed succedaneum to the 
 many. To the few it is the loan of a dictionary from 
 Heaven ! Thoughts otherwise mute — feelings whose 
 dumbness is the inner man buried alive, leap to free- 
 breathing utterance with music. It is for this reason 
 that an unknown language is the best vehicle for an 
 opera. We wish to hear the harmony, and let our 
 souls furnish the articulation. Don't you see, now, 
 my dear "Bohemian Girl .'" the plain reason of the 
 platitude of English opera! Italian music has words 
 to it, and so has a dancing-girl a carotid artery — but 
 you wish to feel your orvn heart beat delightfully, and 
 not to count the quickening pulses of Taglioni's — 
 you wish to embark your own thoughts in music's en- 
 chanted boat, and not see how it was first laden with 
 other people's. A man's soul can nave nothing in it 
 unsaid, when he wants a libretto to help him listen 
 understanding^ to Pico ! 
 
 And now, having translated into grammatical Eng- 
 lish, the inarticulate contents of a chicken's breast, 
 and a pint-bottle of Tinta (for the benefit of a public 
 to whom these eloquent midnight companions would 
 otherwise have spoken in vain), let us to bed — apro- 
 pos-imously remarking, that, in the paragraph prece- 
 dent to this, there is a hint as to the uses of an opera, 
 worthy the attention of the society of moral reform. 
 As the clergy are, probably, asleep at this hour (3 
 o'clock), we say no more. 
 
 ( Exit " 184," with a candle.) 
 
 The Mirror held up to the Times. — It is a 
 trick of ours to begin at the other end, when the sub- 
 ject would otherwise open dry — bespeaking attention, 
 as it were, by first naming the inducement. As we 
 have lately been pulled up for not giving credit, we 
 may as well mention, that we took this peculiarity of 
 style from Mother Goose's politic inducement to the 
 five reluctant patrons of the milkpail : — 
 
 " Cushy cow bonny, give clown your milk, 
 And I will give you a gown of silk." 
 
 Silk gown : — we are about to show how we have 
 arrived at the conclusion, that, in the state of the 
 country now "opening up," it will be necessary for 
 every gentleman to be a pugilist. 
 
 We beg to premise, that the state of things we are 
 about to show forth is by no means a sign of repub- 
 lican retrogression. We are about to record no dis- 
 
 paragement to the outline of the republic. It is a 
 pyramid, in fair progression, but refinement sits with- 
 in it like an hourglass. Half-way up the ascent of 
 political perfection, the social diagram within is at its 
 inevitable "tight place ;" and while we remember on 
 what a breadth of polite foundation public opinion 
 built up society at the Revolution, and while we be- 
 lieve that, half a century hence, we shall have as re- 
 fined standards as any country on earth, we believe 
 that, now, there is a squeeze upon good-breeding in 
 this country (less protection for private rights and 
 feelings than there was once, and will be again), and it 
 is as well that those who are to suffer by the tight 
 place should be prepared to stand it. 
 
 To protect that upon which the proprietor has a right 
 to put a value, is the object of law and civilization. 
 Five dollars, paid back, will satisfy a man who has 
 been robbed of five dollars; but the thief goes to 
 prison besides. A wound given to a man is soon 
 healed and forgotten, but the .assailant is condemned 
 for a felon. A newspaper-attack upon a man, for pe- 
 culiarities with which the public have no business, 
 may be a deeper offence to him than the loss of half 
 his fortune, yet the attempt at remedy by law is worse 
 than bearing it in silence. The damages given are 
 trifling and nominal, and the prosecution propagates 
 the evil. 
 
 The above is a skeleton statement, to which the 
 memory of every newspaper-reader will supply the 
 flesh-and-blood illustrations. A late decision in Mas- 
 sachusetts, justifying an unnecessary libel on the 
 ground of its truth, threw off, to our thinking, the last 
 skin of the metamorphosis. There is left, now, no 
 protection, by law or public opinion, to anything but 
 the pocket and the person of the citizen. His private 
 feelings, his domestic peace, his hard-won respect 
 from other men, his consciousness of respectability 
 abroad — commodities of more value to him than 
 money — are outlawed, and, if wronged, left to his in- 
 dividual avenging. 
 
 Few republicans need to be told that the law casts 
 no formidable shadow unless shone upon by public 
 opinion. The law of libel is powerless, because the 
 license of the press is agreeable to the public. If it 
 were not so, the libeller would not find himself, after 
 conviction, still on the sunny side of public favor — 
 nor would judges charge juries with the little emphasis 
 they do — nor would juries give, as they do, damages 
 that turn the plaintiff into ridicule! 
 
 There is another thing that republicans need not be 
 told : that where a just remedy is denied by the law, 
 the individual takes the penalty into his own hands — 
 the same public that left him to adminisler it, kindly 
 warding off the law when he is tried for the retribu- 
 tive assault and battery. A case of this sort lately 
 occurred in the tabernacle city. A family of the 
 most liberal habits and highest private worth — just 
 risen to wealth by two generations of honest industry 
 — chose to marry a daughter with entertainments pro- 
 portionate to their fortune. A malicious editor, avow- 
 edly " to make his paper sell," and for no other rea- 
 son, came out with a foul-mouthed ridicule of the 
 festivities, that completely destroyed the happiness of 
 the brightest domestic event of their lives. One hun- 
 dred thousand dollars would have been no inducement 
 to the family to suffer the pain and mortification that 
 were, and will be for years, the consequences of that 
 unprovoked outrage. But where lay the remedy ? 
 The law would perpetuate the ridicule, without giv- 
 ing damages that would outweigh the additional sale 
 of^the paper. It chanced, in this case, that the in- 
 jured man was of athletic habits and proportions, and 
 the editor was small and puny. The plaintiff (that 
 would have been, had there been public opinion to 
 give power to the law) called on the defendant (that 
 I would have been) and whipped him severely; and 
 
750 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 when tried for the assault and battery, was punished 
 with a fine next to nothing. The public opinion of 
 the city of " broad philacteries" virtually justified 
 both outrages. But where would have been the rem- 
 edy, if the physical superiority had been on the oth- 
 er side, or if the popular blight-monger had been an 
 unassailable cripple ? 
 
 Another case of legal justification of club-law lately 
 occurred in this city. It is so marked an instance, 
 also, of the social impunity of printed injuries (the in- 
 flictor, Mr. Gliddon, being still a popular lecturer, 
 and glorified daily by the model family-newspaper of 
 Boston), that we venture to quote three or four pas- 
 sages from the libel. Mr. Cooley, the fiogger, had 
 described, with humorous ridicule, some people he 
 saw in Egypt, and Mr. Gliddon takes it for granted 
 (though it is denied by Mr. Cooley) that the ridicule 
 was aimed at himself and his father. A pamphlet of 
 thirty or forty pages of abuse of Cooley is the retort 
 to this supposed allusion, and from a notice of the 
 pamphlet in a daily paper, we copy three or four of 
 its quoted sentences: — 
 
 "If, since the publication of ' The American in 
 Egypt,' it be a work of supererogation on his part 
 (Gliddon's) to place upon public record the petulant 
 vagaries of an upstart, to recall the petty shifts of an 
 itinerant miser, to unmask the insidious insipidities of 
 a would-be author, or to refute the falsehoods of a 
 literary abortion, it will be allowed that the deed is 
 none of his seeking, but has been fastened on him, as 
 the only course within the letter of American laws 
 whereby a poltroon can receive chastisement from 
 those who would have gladly vindicated their honor 
 by means to them far more satisfactory." 
 
 "Again Mr. Gliddon says: 'I grieved that, not hav- 
 ing been gifted with prophetic vision. I neglected to 
 apply it [the corbash] in the Thebaid to Mr. Cooley 
 himself, for I may never have such an eligible chance 
 again.' " 
 
 " Had he been in Cairo at the time [of my depar- 
 ture from that city], he should have laid aside all of- 
 ficial character, even at the risk of eventual censure, 
 and Mr. Cooley should not have perpetrated his pas- 
 quinade in 'Arabia Petrea and Palestine,' before he 
 [Gliddon] had hung a 'cowskin on those recreant 
 limbs!' " 
 
 " If he [Gliddon] do not now apply a horsewhip to 
 Mr. Cooley's shoulders, it is solely because, in a com- 
 munity among which both are residing, the satisfac- 
 tion he should derive from a physical expression of 
 his obligations to Mr. Cooley, might prove more ex- 
 pensive than the pleasure is worth." 
 
 " Our relative positions have been, and, so far as 
 may depend on him, will remain perfectly distinct; 
 for possible affluence will never raise Mr. Cooley to 
 the social standing of a gentleman.'" 
 
 " Mr. Cooley's fractiousness is confined to paper 
 pellets. Innate cowardice is a guaranty for his never 
 resorting to a different manifestation of his vicious, 
 though innocuous waspishness." 
 
 The first time Mr. Cooley saw Mr. Gliddon after 
 these expressions of restrained warlike impatience, he 
 gave him a beating. Mr. Gliddon prosecuted him for 
 assault and battery, recovered "five dollars damages," 
 and went on lecturing with high popular favor. What 
 was Mr. Cooley's remedy for being published as " no 
 gentlemen," a "miser," and a "coward," who had 
 three times escaped personal chastisement? Mr. 
 Cooley is not the "loafer" these epithets would seem 
 to make him. He is a man of fortune, and a most 
 excellent citizen, with highly-respectable connexions, 
 and a hearth blessed with the presence of beauty and 
 refinement. A duel would have brought upon him 
 a ridicule more formidable than personal danger — the 
 law on the subject is a cipher — and, to remove the 
 pointed finger from waiting on him at his very table, 
 
 he was obliged to chastise the man who stigmatized 
 him. 
 
 One more proof of the same new state of things, 
 though in a different line. A highly-educated young 
 lawyer in this city, in canvassing for the whigs, during 
 the late political contest, was severely whipped by 
 three members of the leading democratic club. He 
 lay a-bed a week, recovering from his bruises, and, at 
 the end of that time, walked into a meeting of the 
 club referred to and demanded a hearing. Order was 
 called, and he stated his case, and demanded of the 
 president of the club that a ring should be formed, 
 and his antagonists turned in to him — one after the 
 other. It was enthusiastically agreed to, and the 
 three bullies being present, were handed over to him 
 and handsomely flogged, one after the other. Of 
 course this is not all we are to hear of such a man; 
 but who will deny, that when he comes to stand for 
 congress, he will not have counterbalanced, by this 
 act, the disadvantage of belonging to one of the most 
 aristocratic families of the city ? 
 
 We are expressing no discontent with our country. 
 We are playing the Mirror only — showing the public 
 its face, that it may not forget " what manner of man" 
 it is. We have shown by facts, that there is no more 
 remedy among us, for the deepest injuries that can 
 be inflicted, than there is among wild beasts in the 
 forest. Duelling is as good as abolished, we rejoice 
 with all our hearts — but it owes its abolition to the 
 country's having sunk below the chivalric level at 
 which that weed could alone find nourishment. We 
 leave to others to draw conclusions and suggest rem- 
 edies. We are not reformers. We submit. But we 
 should think a man as improvident, not forthwith to be 
 rubbing up his sparring, as a gentleman would have 
 been in Charles the Second's time, to have walked 
 abroad without his sword. They have a saying in 
 the Mediterranean (from the custom of yoking a hog 
 with a donkey together for draught), "You must 
 plough with a hog if you stay in Minorca!" 
 
 Rev. Sidney Smith's description of Imnself from a 
 letter to a correspondent of the Neiv York American. — 
 "I am seventy-four years old; and being a canon of 
 St. Paul's, in London, and rector of a parish in the 
 country, my time is equally divided between town and 
 country. I am living amidst the best society in the 
 metropolis, am at ease in my circumstances, in tolera- 
 ble health, a mild whig, a tolerating churchman, and 
 much given to talking, laughing, and noise. I dine 
 with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the 
 country — passing from the sauces of Dives to the sores 
 of Lazarus. I am, upon the whole, a happy man, 
 have found the world an entertaining world, and am 
 heartily thankful to Providence for the part allotted to 
 me in it." 
 
 We can add a touch or two to the auto-sketch of 
 the witty prebend, who, we think, is one of the men 
 most thought about just now. He is a fat man, 
 weighing probably between two and three hundred 
 pounds, with a head and stomach very church-man -hke 
 — (that is to say in the proportion of a large church 
 with a small belfry) — a most benevolent yet humorous 
 face, and manners of most un-English boisterousness 
 and cordiality. At a party he is followed about, like 
 a shepherd by his sheep, and we remember, once, at 
 his own house, seeing Lord Byron's sister, the Hon. 
 Mrs. Leigh, one of the laughing flock browsing upon 
 the wit that sprung up around him. One would 
 think, to see him and know his circumstances, that 
 the gods had done their best to make one of the Mr. 
 Smiths perfectly happy. 
 
EPHEiMERA. 
 
 751 
 
 JOHN QU1NCY ADAMS. 
 
 (In reply to our respected private correspondent, and the 
 editor with his puddle against every man, and every man's 
 inkstand against him.) 
 
 When is a statesman beyond accusation ? Not while 
 he is still armed in the arena! — .not while he has 
 neither dismounted from the car of ambition, nor, 
 even once, made sign to the world, that he would fain 
 stop and turn his face to his Maker ! 
 
 We are understood as referring to Mr. Adams. 
 We consider this present active member of congress 
 as, beyond competition, the most potent spirit in 
 America. " Venerable" he is — and " his hand trem- 
 hles" — but his venerableness is a cavern of power, and 
 his uplifted forefinger 
 
 " trembles as the granite trembles 
 Lashed by the waves." 
 
 We know there is a level on the mountain of life, 
 where the air is pure and cold — a height at which im- 
 purity can scarce come, more, between the climber 
 and his God — but, it is above tvhere the lightning comes 
 
 f rom it is above the dark cloud where sleeps the 
 
 thunder, collected from below, and charged with in- 
 separable good and harm. This incorrupt level is, at 
 least, one step above the cloud in which Mr. Adams 
 has pertinaciously lingered; and if his friends insist 
 that he has been long enough lost to common scrutiny 
 to have reached the upper side of the cloud of danger- 
 ous power, we must be excused for pointing our con- 
 ductor till he is done stirring in the thunder. 
 
 Persuade us that Mr. Adams is so " venerable" as 
 to have outlived all liability to the license described 
 by the poet : — 
 
 " For now, at last, alone, he sees his might ! 
 Out of the compass of respective awe 
 He now begins to violate all right, 
 While no restraining fear at hand he saw." 
 
 Persuade us that a vindictive man may be safely bowed 
 before, for an angel, with his hand, for the first time, 
 fetterlessly clutched on this world's thunderbolts ! 
 Persuade us that Mr. Adams could not stoop his 
 statesmanship to resent, and that lie is not one of those 
 dreaders of political extinction, who feel that "not to 
 be at all is worse than to be in the miserablest condi- 
 tion of something.'''' Persuade us, in short, that no 
 provocation in argument, no lull of responsibility, no 
 oracular unanswerableness, no appetite for the exercise 
 of power, no 
 
 " injury, 
 The jailer to his pity," 
 
 could tempt Mr. Adams, with his present undiminish- 
 ed mental vigor, to swerve a hair line from good — by 
 weight thrown upon public measure, or by influence 
 wrongfully exercised, over the fair fame of the dead 
 and the private feelings of the living — persuade us 
 of all this, and we will allow that he is beyond — 
 "venerably" beyond — the remindings of human cen- 
 sure ! 
 
 But now — having arms-lengthed it, in reply to a 
 very formal letter we received last evening condemning 
 the admission into our columns of a communication 
 accusatory of Mr. Adams — let us come closer to the 
 reader with a little of our accustomed familiarity. 
 
 We were called upon a day or two since, by one 
 of the first scholars and most intelligent of business- 
 men among us — this communication in his hand. 
 He left us to read it at our leisure. We, at first, 
 were unpleasantly affected by it, and slipped it upon 
 our refusal hook — sorry that so great a man as Mr. 
 Adams should have an unbeliever (and so weighty an 
 unbeliever), in greatness so ready for its closing seal. 
 We should have stopped at this regret, probably, and 
 only thought of the subject again when returning the 
 
 manuscript, but that we had been previously impress- 
 ed with our friend's courage in historical justice — on a 
 wholly different subject. This brought about the 
 sober second thought, and we turned it over somewhat 
 as follows : — 
 
 Of the allowed Upper Triumvirate of this country 
 — Clay, Jackson, and Adams — the peaceful good 
 name of the first is, just now, closed for history, by 
 his willing relinquishment of public action. The 
 world owes him the glorified repose for which he has 
 signified his desire. The second has also retired ; 
 and, though he sometimes has sent his invincible 
 banner to wave again in the political field, it would 
 be a harsh pen that would transmute, and make read- 
 able by judicious eyes, the silly abuses syringed at 
 the venerable old chieftain by the Bedouin squirt of 
 the " Express." 
 
 The third— Mr. Adams— we could not but feel, at 
 once, was off the pedestal where the world had willing- 
 ly placed him, and had come down, once more 
 
 " to dabble in the pettiness of fame." 
 
 (We shall be pardoned, by the way, for quoting what 
 is recalled by this chance-sprung quotation— a com- 
 parison which seems to us singularly to picture Mr. 
 Clay and Mr. Adams as to loftiness of public life and 
 motive.) Dante says : — 
 
 «' The world hath left me, what it found me, pure, 
 And, if I have not gathered yet its praise, 
 I sought it not by any baser lure. 
 
 Man wrongs and time avenges ; and my name 
 May form a monument not all obscure. 
 
 Though such was not my ambition's end and aim — 
 To add to the vain-glorious list of those 
 
 Who dabble in the pettiness of fame, 
 
 And make men's fickle breath the uind that blows 
 
 Their sail." 
 
 We felt, at once, that this latter character— this 
 
 aliquis in omnibus, nihil in singulis— was, as displayed 
 
 in Mr. Adams's career, rather the mettle of invincible 
 
 obstinacy and unrest acting upon strong talent, than 
 
 the ring of the clear metal of human greatness. There 
 
 was nothing in Mr. Adams's life of toil that had not 
 
 fed his innate passion for antagonism. He was a born 
 
 ascetic, in whose nostrils the fiery perils of other men 
 
 were but offensive smoke— who had no temptation to 
 
 softer pleasure than a pasquinade against a political 
 
 ! rival— who had made the most of the morality which 
 
 I came natural to him, and which, in this land, covers 
 
 I more sins than charity. He was not, like Clay and 
 
 ! Jackson, great in spite of the impassioned nature for 
 
 I which we (so inconsistently), love the man and dis- 
 
 ' claim his greatness. He has been the terror of his 
 
 time for wounds worse than murder— yet gave no 
 
 stab that could be "stopped with parsley." He 
 
 needed no shirt of penance to make him remember 
 
 that 
 
 " The virtues of great men, will only show 
 Like coy auriculas, in Alpine snow." 
 
 He has profited by men's not remembering that (in 
 the zoology of the pleasures), the sin of the sloth 
 were a merit in the armadillo-one hating to move, 
 and the other hating to be still, and both tested by 
 their activity of motion. In short Mr. Adams— 
 ou-h he has unquestionably walked to the topmost 
 tone of the temple of statesmanship, and is now the 
 hird greatest man in the country that shakes under 
 him-has exclusively pampered his own desires, op- 
 most and undermost, by the practice of the virtues 
 
 that have shielded him. 
 
 The toils that have advanced 
 
 bra were begun in the past.me of an aristocratic 
 youth and position, up to quite the end of that 
 Second heat" of his ambition-race, was an inheritance 
 nerseveringly thrust on him. Can such a man, while 
 destiny is still hourly hanging on his lips, be 
 erable" beyond the possibility of censure 7 
 
 our 
 "ven 
 
752 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 With this unwilling mental review of the " boiled 
 peas" of Mr. Adams's pilgrimage to greatness — un- 
 willingly, as it was irresistibly and truthfully dispara- 
 ging — we reverted to our first picture of his present 
 position. We had been truly, and even tearfully, af- 
 fected, on seeing the old man, at the late festival of 
 the Historical Society — doubtless very near his grave, 
 but fighting his way determinately backward through 
 the gate of death — and we expressed ourself in terms 
 of high respect and honor, when we wrote of it the 
 morning after. It is a recompensing ordinance of 
 Nature, that the glory and virtues of a great man ac- 
 company his ]7erson and his sins lie where they first 
 fall — in the furrow of history. It is hard to look upon 
 any man's face, and remember ill of him ; and there 
 is many a great man, who has a halo where he comes, 
 and none where he is heard of. 
 
 We remembered nothing disparaging to Mr. Adams 
 that evening. But in our office, wiih a shade drawn 
 over our eyes, to compel a disagreeable decision of 
 duty, we saw that the age and decrepitude, which 
 apparently exacted submission to his will, had left no 
 joint open in his harness, loosened no finger upon his 
 weapons of attack. He can defend himself— he has 
 hundreds to defend him, should he be silent. His 
 much talked-of "diary" lacks no evidence that truth 
 can furnish ; and if the charges against him are " mere 
 cobwebs in a church bell," the best of prayers is, that 
 he may burst them with one stroke of living triumph, 
 and not leave even that slight violence to be done by 
 the knell of his departure. 
 
 The last thought that came to us, and the only one 
 we thought necessary for a preface to the communica- 
 tion, was, that noio would probably be the time chosen 
 by Mr. Adams himself for denying (and they must 
 be denied !) these indictments against his greatness. 
 The five years' silence that will follow his death, had 
 better harden over no ulcer — to be re-opened and 
 cleansed, to the world's offence, hereafter. We took 
 some credit to ourself, for simply saying this, without 
 recording what we have been compelled to record now 
 — the reasons of our thinking gravely of the com- 
 munication. We would have taken the other side 
 
 and entered into the defence quite as willingly but 
 
 the writer, as well as Mr. Adams, is a man not to be 
 denied a hearing. We may perhaps be permitted to 
 close this article — written in a most unwonted vein, 
 for us— with a little editorial comfort from Shak- 
 spere : — 
 
 " What we oft do best, 
 By sick interpreters, or weak ones, is 
 Not ours, or not allowed ; what worst, as oft, 
 Hitting a grosser quality, is cried up 
 For our best act. But if we shall stand still— 
 For fear our motion will be mocked or carped at, 
 We should take root here where we sit. or sit 
 For statues only." 
 
 " Monet Article" on the Opera.— We were de- 
 lighted to hear it whispered about at the opera, last 
 night, that there is a movement among the people of 
 taste and influence to " set up," by a liberal subscrip- 
 tion, the present excellent, but impoverished and 
 struggling operatic company. The first thought that 
 occurs to any one hearing of this, would, probably, be 
 a surprise that, with such full houses as have graced 
 the opera, they have not been thriving to the fullest 
 extent of reasonable expectation. We understand, 
 however, that it is quite the contrary. When the 
 present company commenced their engagement, there 
 was an arrearage of gas expenses to be paid up, the 
 license was to be renewed, at $500; and the house, 
 even when full, gives but a slender dividend over the 
 expenses of the orchestra, scenery, lights, stage prop- 
 erties, and dresses. At the only " division of the 
 
 spoils" that has yet been made, Madame Pico re- 
 ceived but sixty dollars — so insufficient a sum being 
 all that this admirable singer has received for several 
 months' waiting, and one month's playing and singing! 
 Her dresses alone cost her twice the sum ! Borghese 
 received twice this amount, but the other performers, 
 of course, much less even than Pico. 
 
 In the history of the first introduction of Italian 
 music into England, in 1692, it is stated that the sing- 
 ers (an " Italian lady," a basso, and a soprano) were 
 taken up by two spirited women of fashion, wives of 
 noblemen, who arranged benefit concerts at their own 
 houses, for the " charming foreigners," and inviting 
 their friends as if to a ball — demanding five guineas 
 for each invitation! The rage for these expensive 
 concerts is recorded as a curious event of the time, 
 and it was a grievous mark of unfashionableness not 
 to be honored with a ticket. 
 
 The American public is a hard master to these 
 children of the sun. They take no comfort among 
 us, if they lay up no money. Our climate is both 
 dangerous and disagreeable ! Our usages, and preju- 
 dices, and manner of life, all at variance with theirs! 
 Their hearts are bleak here, and their pockets at 
 least should have a warm lining ! And (by the way) 
 see what a difference there is, even between our coun- 
 try and chilly England, in the way society treats 
 them ! We chance to possess an autograph letter of 
 Julia Grisi's, given us by the lady to whom it was 
 addressed — a daughter of Lucien Bonaparte married 
 to an English nobleman. Look at the position this 
 little chance record reveals of a prima donna in Eng- 
 land : — 
 
 U AlMABLE ET TRES CHERE PRINCESSE ! — 
 
 " Je suis vraiment desolee de ne pouvoir aller ce soir chez 
 Lady Morgan. Je dine chez le Prince Esterhazy ou je dois 
 passer la soiree. Demain au soir, j'ai un concert pour M. La- 
 porte, le reste de la semaine je suis libre et tout <). vos ordres. 
 Si vous croyez de combiner quelque-choze avec Lady Morgan, 
 comptez sur moi ! Demain je passerai chez Lady Morgan 
 pour faire mes excuses en personne. 
 
 " Que dirai-je de ce magnifique voile ! Que la generosite e 
 l'amabilite sont innees dans la grande famille. 
 
 u Croyez toujours, madame la princesse, a tout le devoue- 
 ment de votre servante, Julia Grisi. 
 
 " Milady D S " 
 
 We chance to have another dramatic autograph, a 
 note of Leontine Fay's, given us by the same noble 
 lady (and we may say here, apropos, that we should 
 be very happy to show these, and others, to persons 
 curious in autographs) — showing the same necessary 
 reliance on special patronage : — 
 
 " Theatre Francais. 
 " M'lle Leontine Fay a l'honneur de presenter ses humble 
 
 respects a Lady D , et de solliciter sa puissante protection 
 
 pour la soiree qui aura lieu a son benefice Vendredi, 10 Juliet. 
 Le choix des pieces et les noras des artistes qui veulent bien 
 contribuer a son succes liu font esperer que miladi, qui aime 
 a encourager les arts, daignera l'honprer de sa presence." 
 
 This is dated from the French theatre in London, 
 but we treasured up the autograph with no little ava- 
 rice, for Leontine Fay was in the height of her glory, 
 in Paris, when we first went abroad, and, to us, she 
 seemed a new revelation of things adorable. She 
 was made for the stage by nature — as scenery is 
 adapted by coarse lines for distant perspective. Her 
 eyes were dark, luminous, and of a size that gave 
 room for the whole audience to "repose on velvet" in 
 
 them. But we wander ! We resume our subject, 
 
 after saying that we never envied prince or king, till 
 we heard, at that time, that Leontine Fay passion- 
 ately loved the prince royal — the young duke of Or- 
 leans. He is dead, she is grown ugly, and we are left 
 to admire Pico. " Much after this fashion," etc., etc. 
 
 Grave people (though by no means all grave peo- 
 ple) are inclined to bid the opera "stand aside" as a 
 thing unholy. We think this is a mistake. We be- 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 753 
 
 lieve music to be medicinal to body and soul. With 
 entire reverence, we take leave to remind the religious 
 objector of the cure of Saul, and to quote the pas- 
 sage : — 
 
 " But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil 
 spirit from the Lord troubled him. And Saul's servants said 
 unto him, Behold now, an evil spirit troubleth thee. Let our 
 Lord now command thy servants which are before thee, to 
 seek out a man who is a cunninsr player on a harp ; and it 
 shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon 
 thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well. 
 
 " And it came to pass that when the evil spirit from God 
 was upon Saul, that David took a harp and played with his 
 hand : so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil 
 spirit departed from him.' - 
 
 The medicinal value attached to music by the an- 
 cients is also shown in the education of Moses at the 
 court of Pharaoh. Clemens Alexandrinus has re- 
 corded that " Moses was instructed by the Egyptians 
 in arithmetic, geometry, rhythm, harmony, but, above 
 all, in medicine and music." Miriam sang and danced 
 in costume, and David " in his linen ephod," and the 
 only reproach made by Laban to Jacob, for carrying 
 off his two daughters, was, that he did not give him 
 the opportunity to send him away "with mirth and with 
 songs, with tabret and with harp." We refer to these 
 historic proofs, to remind the objecting portion of the 
 community that scenic musical representation was a 
 vent for domestic and religious feeling among the an- 
 cients, and that, in an opera— particularly one unac- 
 companied by modern ballet — there is no offence to 
 moral feeling, but, on the contrary, authorized good. 
 
 To revert to our purpose, in this article — (chrono- 
 logically, somewhat spready !) — We do not know 
 what shape the aroused liberality of the wealthy clas- 
 ses of New York will take, but we should think that 
 Madame Pico — (as she has given us the most pleas- 
 ure, at the greatest expense to herself, and is an un- 
 protected and exemplary woman, alone among us) — 
 should have a special benefit by subscription concert, 
 or some other means as exclusive to herself. We 
 suggest it — but we presume we are not the first it has 
 occurred to. Will the wealthy gentlemen who are 
 nightly seen in the dress-circles, delighted with her 
 exquisite music, turn the subject over at their luxuri- 
 ous firesides? 
 
 To AND ABOUT OUR CORRESPONDENTS. We wish 
 
 to "define our position" with regard to our corre- 
 spondents and their opinions. 
 
 Were an editor to profess an agreement of opinion 
 with every writer for his paper, he would either claim 
 a superhuman power of decision on all possible sub- 
 jects, at first sight, or he would exclude communica- 
 tions on all subjects, except his own mental hobbies 
 and matters of personal study and acquaintance. To 
 avoid both horns of this fool's dilemma, he opens a 
 correspondence column, in which anything (short of an 
 invasion of a cardinal virtue, or violation of a palpable 
 truth) may very properly and irresponsibly appear. 
 The only questions the editor asks himself are, whether 
 it will interest his readers, and whether it is worOi its 
 space in the paper. 
 
 But there are people for whom it is necessary that 
 we should go back to the very catechism of political 
 economy, and show upon what principle is founded 
 the expediency of a free press — a press untrammel- 
 led by a king in a kingdom, and by the sovereign re- 
 publicans in a republic. 
 
 Opinions have been well likened to steam — power- 
 less when diffused abroad, resistless when shut in and 
 denied expansion. The unconscious apostleship of 
 Mr. Adams — procuring an explosion in favor of aboli- 
 tion, by his obstinacy in provoking an undue suppres- I 
 sion of the subject — is a striking illustration of this. ' 
 Nothing makes less impression on the mind than ab- 
 
 [ stract principles to which there is no opposition — 
 ! nothing is dearer to the heart than opinions for which 
 we have been called on to contend and suffer. A 
 free press, therefore, keeping open gate for all sub- 
 jects not prohibited by law and morals, is far safer 
 than a press over-guarded in its admissions to the 
 public eye. 
 
 Having thus repeated, as it were, a page of the 
 
 . very spelling-book of freedom, let us bespeak, of our 
 
 ] subscribers, a let-off, as far as we personally are con- 
 
 ! cerned, for any decent opinions expressed under the 
 
 head of " correspondence." We throw open that part 
 
 of our paper. It is interesting to know what people 
 
 think who do not agree with us. We court variety. 
 
 , We would not (in anything but love) be called a big- 
 
 I ot. New opinions, even the truest, are reluctantly 
 
 received, and, we think, very often culpably distrusted. 
 
 As far, therefore, as the yea or nay may go, on any 
 
 proper subject, we care not a fig which side writes 
 
 first to us, and we hereby disclaim responsibility for 
 
 all articles under "our correspondence," except on the 
 
 score of morals and readableness. 
 
 The Opera. — The Puritani is one of those ope- 
 ras with which musical criticism has little or nothing 
 to do. If only tolerably sung, the feeling of the audi- 
 ence goes on before — making no stay with fault-find- 
 j ing. The applause last night, after a most limping 
 ■ and ill-paced duett between Tomasi and Valtellina, 
 j was tempestuous; and Antognini, in one passage, ran 
 ' off his voice, and was gone for several notes in some 
 i unknown region, and yet, on spreading out his hands 
 | immediately after, there was great approbation by the 
 audience ! Great effort was made by the audience to 
 I encore " Suoni la tromba," but the two bases thought 
 ! more basely of their bases than the audience, and did 
 not repeat it. Is there no way to implore Valtellina 
 to abate a little of his overreaching of voice, in that 
 i superb invocation ? He overdoes it terribly. 
 
 We are not writing in very good humor, we are 
 
 I afraid — but the enthusiasm of a crammed house needs 
 
 i no propping. We would not find fault if they needed 
 
 { our praise. Borghese did well— but will do better at 
 
 ! the next representation. She would sing with fuller 
 
 tone for a little egg beat up with brandy. We longed 
 
 to unreef her voice — in some way crowd a little more 
 
 abandon into it. She acted as she always does— to a 
 
 charm. 
 
 Pico was in one of the proscenium boxes, looking 
 very charming, and evidently enjoying the whole op- 
 era with un-envious enthusiasm. She went with a 
 bouquet for Borghese— so said a bird in our ear. 
 
 OLE BULL'S NIAGARA. 
 (an hour before the performance.) 
 
 Saddle, as, of course, we are, under any very striking 
 event, we find ourselves bestridden, now and then, 
 with a much wider occupancy than the plumb-line 
 of a newspaper column. Ole Bull possesses us over 
 our tea-table; he will possess us over our supper- 
 table— his performance of Niagara equidistant between 
 the two. We must think of him and his violin for 
 this coming Hour. Let us take pen and ink into our 
 confidence. .. , . . . . .. 
 
 The "origin of the harp" has beeu satisfactorily 
 recorded. We shall not pretend to put forward a 
 credible story of the origin of the violin; but we wish 
 to name a circumstance in natural history. 1 he 
 house-cricket that chirps upon our hearth, is well 
 known as belonging to the genus Pneumora. Its in- 
 sect size consists almost entirely of a pellucid abdomen, 
 
754 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 crossed with a number of transverse ridges. This, 
 when inflated, resembles a bladder, and upon its tight- 
 ened ridges the insect plays like a fiddler, by drawing 
 its thin legs over them. The cricket is, in fact, a 
 living violin; and as a fiddler is "scarce himself" 
 without his violin, we may call the cricket a stray 
 portion of a fiddler. 
 
 Ole Bull " is himself" with his violin before him — 
 but without it, the commonest eye must remark that 
 he is of the invariable build of the restless searchers 
 after something lost — the build of enthusiasts — that is 
 to say, chest enormous, and stomach, if anything, 
 rather wanting ! The great musician of Scripture, it 
 will be remembered, expressed his mere mental afflic- 
 tion by calling out "My bowels! my bowels!" and, 
 after various experiments on twisted silk, smeared 
 with the white of eggs, and on single threads of the 
 silk-worm, passed through heated oil, the animal fibre 
 of cat-gut has proved to be the only string that answers 
 to the want of the musician. Without trying to re- 
 duce these natural phenomena to a theory (except by 
 suggesting that Ole Bull may very properly take the 
 cricket as an emblem of his instinctive pursuit), we 
 must yield to an ominous foreboding for this evening. 
 The objection to cat-gut as a musical string is its 
 sensibility to moisture ; and in a damp atmosphere it 
 is next to impossible to keep it in tune. The string 
 comes honestly enough by its sensitiveness (as any 
 one will allow who has seen a cat cross a street after 
 a shower) — but, if the cat of Ole Bull's violin had the 
 least particle of imagination in her, can what is left of 
 her be expected to discourse lovingly of her natural 
 antipathy — a water-fall ? 
 
 But — before we draw on our gloves to go over to 
 Palmo's — a serious word as to what is to be attempted 
 to-night. 
 
 Old Bull is a great creature. He is fitted, if ever 
 mortal man was, to represent the attendant spirit in 
 Milton, who 
 
 " Well knew to still the wild woods when they roared 
 And hush the moaning winds ;" 
 
 but it seems to us that, without a printed programme, 
 showing what he intends to express besides the mere 
 sound of waters, he is trusting far too rashly to the 
 comprehension of his audience and their power of 
 musical interpretation. He is to tell a story by music ! 
 Will it be understood? 
 
 We remember being very much astonished, a year 
 or two ago, at finding ourself able to read the thoughts 
 of a lady of this city, as she expressed them in an ad- 
 mirable improvisation upon the piano. The delight 
 we experienced in this surprise induced us to look 
 into the extent to which musical meaning had been 
 perfected in Europe. We found it recorded that a 
 Mons. Sudre, a violinist of Paris, had once brought 
 the expression of his instrument to so nice a point 
 that he " could convey information to a stranger in 
 another room," and it is added that, upon the evidence 
 thus given of the capability of music, it was proposed 
 to the French government to educate military bands 
 in the expression of orders and heroic encouragements 
 in battle! Hayden is criticised by a writer on music 
 as having failed in attempting (in his great composi- 
 tion " The Seasons") to express " the dawn of day," 
 "the husbandman's satisfaction," "the rustling of 
 leaves," " the running of a brook," " the coming on 
 of winter," "thick fogs," etc., etc. The same writer 
 laughs at a commentator on Mozart, who, by a " sec- 
 ond violin quartette in D minor," imagines himself 
 informed how a loving female felt on being abandoned, 
 and thought the music fully expressed that it was 
 Dido ! Beethoven undertook to convey distinct pic- 
 lures in his famous Pastoral Symphony, but it was 
 thought at the time that no one would have dis- 
 tinguished between his musical sensations on visiting 
 
 the country and his musical sensations while sitting 
 beside a river — unless previously told what was com- 
 ing ! 
 
 Still, Ole Bull is of a primary order of genius, and 
 he is not to wait upon precedent. He has come to 
 our country, an inspired wanderer from a far away 
 shore, and our greatest scenic feature has called oli 
 him for an expression of its wonders in music. He 
 may be inspired, however, and we, who listen, still 
 be disappointed. He may not have felt Niagara as we 
 did. He may have been subdued where a meaner 
 spirit would be aroused — as 
 
 " Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 
 (Seven o'clock, and lime to go.) 
 
 (after tiik performance.) 
 
 We believe that we have heard a transfusion into 
 music — not of " Niagara," which the audience seemed 
 bona-fide to expect, but — of the pulses of the human 
 heart at Niagara. We had a prophetic boding of the 
 result of calling the piece vaguely "Niagara" — the 
 listener furnished with no " argument," as a guide 
 through the wilderness of " treatment" to which the 
 subject was open. This mistake allowed, however, 
 it must be said that Ole Bull has, genius-like, refused 
 to mis- interpret the voice within him — refused to play 
 the charlatan, and " bring the house down" — as he 
 might well have done by any kind of" uttermost,'" from 
 the drums and trumpets of the orchestra. 
 
 The emotion at Niagara is all but mute. It is a 
 " small, still voice" that replies within us to the thun- 
 der of waters. The musical mission of the Norwegian 
 was to represent the insensate element as it teas to 
 him — to a human soul, stirred in its seldom-reached 
 depths by the call of power. It was the answer to 
 Niagara that he endeavored to render in music — not 
 the call ! We defer attempting to read further, or 
 rightly, this musical composition till we have heard 
 it again. It was received by a crowded audience, in 
 breathless silence, but with no applause. 
 
 Miss Julia Northall's first appearance as a public 
 singer was very triumphant. It her heart had not 
 kept beating just under her music-maker, she would 
 have made much better music, however. When we 
 tell the lovely debutante, that persons in besieged 
 fortresses can detect the direction of the enemy's ap- 
 proach under ground, by placing sanded drums on 
 the surface, which betray the strokes of the mining 
 pickaxes by the vibrations of the particles, she will 
 understand how the beating of her heart may disturb 
 the timbre of her voice — to say nothing of the disturb- 
 ance in the air by the accelerated beating of the 
 anxious hearts of her admirers! She has great ad- 
 vantages — a rich voice deep down with an upper 
 chamber in it (what the musicians call a contralto 
 sfogato), and a kind of personal beauty susceptible of 
 great stage embellishments. " Modest assurance" 
 (with a preponderance of assurance if anything), is her 
 great lack. 
 
 Sanquirico sang admirably — but his black coat 
 spoiled it for all but the cognoscenti. 
 
 We came out of the opera-house amid a shower of 
 expressions of disappointment, and we beg pardon of 
 " the town" for remembering what Antigenides of 
 Athens said to a musical pupil who was once too little 
 applauded. " The next time you play," said Anti- 
 genides, "shall be to me and the Muses." 
 
 The two new Fashions, White Cravats and 
 Ladies' Tarpaulins. — Here and there a country 
 reader will, perhaps, require to be informed that no 
 man is stylish, now, " out" in the evening, without a 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 755 
 
 white cravat. To those who frequent the opera this 
 will be no news, of course ; as no eye could have 
 failed to track the " milky way," around the semi- 
 circle, from stage-box to stage-box. The fact thus 
 recorded, however, we proceed to the diagnosis of the 
 fashion (and of another fashion, of which we shall 
 presently speak) — premising only that we are driven 
 to the discussion of these comparatively serious 
 themes, by the frivolous character of other news, and 
 the temporary public surfeit of politics, scandal, and 
 murder. 
 
 The white cravat was adopted two years since, in 
 London, as the mark of a party — " Young England." 
 Our readers know, of course, that for ten years, they 
 have been worn only by servants in that country, and 
 that a black coat and white cravat were the unmis- 
 takable uniform of a family butler. The Cravat hav- 
 ing been first worn as the distinction of a certain re- 
 forming club, in Cromwell's parliament, however, the 
 author of Vivian Grey adopted it as the insignium of 
 the new political party, of which he is the acknowl- 
 edged leader; and, as the king of the white cravats, he 
 has set a fashion for America. The compliment we 
 pay him is the greater, by the way, that we do not 
 often copy the tight-legged nation in our wearables. 
 
 It was established in Brummell's time that a white 
 cravat could not be successfully tied, except upon the 
 critical turn preceding the reaction of a glass of cham- I 
 pagne and a cup of green tea. A felicitous dash of I 
 inspired dexterity is the only thing to be trusted, and ! 
 failure is melancholy! As to dressiness, a white cravat ! 
 is an intensifier— making style more stylish, and the ! 
 lack of it more observable ; but artistically it is only 
 becoming to light complexions — by its superior white- 
 ness, producing an effect of warmth on a fair skin, I 
 but impoverishing the brilliancy of a dark one. As a ' 
 sign of the times, the reappearance of the white era- ! 
 vat is the forerunner of a return to old-fashioned 
 showiness in evening dress, and, as the wheel comes 
 round again, we shall revive tights, buckles, and shoes 
 — expelling the levelling costume of black cravat and 
 boots, and making it both expensive and troublesome 
 to look like a gentleman after candlelight. So tilts 
 the plank in republics — aristocratic luxury going up 
 as aristocratic politics are going down ! 
 
 But what shall we say of trains and tarpaulins for 
 ladies wear! Jack's hat, copied exactly in white satin, 
 is the rage for a head-dress, now — (worn upon the! 
 side of the head with a ruinous feather) — and a velvet 
 train is about becoming indispensable to a chaperon ! j 
 It will be a bold poor man that will dare to marry a \ 
 lady ere long — what with feathers and trains and 
 pages' wages ! We rejoice that we had our fling in j 
 the era of indifferent pocket. Keep the aristocracy 
 unemployed on politics for another administration or 
 two, and we shall drive matrimony to the extremities 
 of society — none but the very rich, or very poor, able 
 to afford the luxury ! 
 
 Merry Christmas. — Our paper of this evening — 
 (Christmas eve)— is to be read by the light of the J 
 " yule log," — or whatever else represents the bright 
 centre around which, dear reader! your family does 
 its Christmas assembling. We shall perhaps amuse 
 you by suggesting a comparison between the elegant 
 lamp, which diffuses its light over your apartment, 
 and the expedient resorted to by your English ances- 
 tors to brighten the hall for their Christmas evening. 
 " I myself," says an old historian, "have seen table- 
 cloths, napkins, and towels, which being taken foul 
 from the table, have been cast into the fire, and there 
 they burned before our faces upon the hearth." This, 
 of course, was by way of illustrating the greasy habits 
 of our ancestors at table, and gives an amusing piquan- 
 
 cy to the injunction of wisdom that we should cherish 
 the " lights of the past." 
 
 There are two points of freedom in which we envy 
 the condition of slaves at the south— freedom from 
 responsibility at all times, and freedom /ro/n all man- 
 ner of work from Christmas to New Year. " The 
 negroes" (says a writer on the festivals, games, and 
 amusements, in the southern states), " enjoy a xoeek's 
 recreation every winter, including Christmas and New 
 Year's ; during which they prosecute their plays and 
 sports in a very ludicrous and extravagant manner, 
 dressing and masking in the most grotesque style, and 
 having, in fact, a complete carnival." We confess 
 this let-up from the pressure of toil is enviable. The 
 distinction between horse and man, in the latter's re- 
 quiring mental as well as bodily rest, should be legis- 
 lated upon — all business barred with penalties, except 
 for the necessaries of life, during the Christmas holy- 
 days and during another week somewhere in June. 
 We are a monotonous people in this country. The 
 festivals of the Jews occupied a quarter of the year, 
 and eighty days were given to festivals among the 
 ancient Greeks! We do not fairly keep more than 
 i one in New York — New Year's day — the only day, 
 , except Sundays, when newspapers are not issued and 
 1 shops are all shut. 
 
 We are sorry we can not paragraph America into 
 I more feeling for holydays, but we may perhaps prevent 
 \ a gradual desuetude of even keeping Christmas, by 
 ; heaping up our regrets when it comes round. We 
 shall join the procession of visiters to the toy-shops 
 ! and confectioners to-night, and we think, by the way, 
 ! that these rounds to the gift-venders, might be made 
 ! exceedingly agreeable. " G uion," " Sands," " Thomp- 
 | son," " Tiffany & Young," " Stuart's Candy 
 i Palace," " Bonfanti's," and "the Alhamra," are 
 j beautiful places for a range of soirees in hat and bon- 
 | net, and we went this round last Christmas eve with 
 great amusement. Happy children are beautiful 
 sights, and we can still see bons-bons with their eyes. 
 
 Reader ! a merry Christmas ! and let us repeat 
 once more to you the old stanza (tho' old Trinity ia 
 no longer what it was when this was written) : — 
 
 " Hark the merry bells chiming from Trinity, 
 
 Charm the ear with their musical din, 
 Telling all, throughout the vicinity, 
 
 Holyday gambols are now to begin ! 
 Friends and relations, with fond salutations, 
 
 And warm gratulations, together appear, 
 While lovers and misses with holyday kisses 
 
 Greet merry Christmas and happy New Year." 
 
 The other side of Broadway. — It is time that 
 the decline of the era of shopping a-foot was fairly an- 
 nounced as at its fall — an epoch gone over to history. 
 Washington Hall has been purchased as a property 
 no longer objectionable from its being the other side 
 of mud, and is to be speedily converted into the most 
 magnificent "ladies store" within the limits of silk 
 and calico. We are credibly assured that this last 
 assertion is fully borne out by the plans of Mr. Stuart, 
 the projector. No shop in London or Paris is to 
 surpass it. But the best part of it remains to be told : 
 — The building is to have a court for carriages in the 
 centre, so that shoppers will thunder in at a porte 
 cochere, like visiters to the grand duke of Tuscany ! 
 There will of course be a spacious door on the street, 
 for those who can cross Broadway without a carriage 
 —(poor zealous things!)— but the building is con- 
 trived for those to whom the crowded side of the street 
 is rather an objection, and who wish their hammer- 
 cloths to stand out of the spatter of omnibuses while 
 they shop ! ! There is a comment on " the times" 
 in this plan of Mr. Stuart's which we commend to the 
 notice of some other parish. 
 
756 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Farther down-town, however (15G) the shilling side 
 of Broadway has been embellished by a new store, in- 
 tended for all comers and customers, and certainly an 
 ornament to the town — occupied by Beebe & Cos- 
 tar, hatters. No more showy and sumptuous saloon 
 could possibly be contrived than this " hatter's shop;" 
 and it is very well that they keep one article of ladies' 
 wear — (riding-hats) — for it is altogether too pretty a 
 place for a monastery. The specimen hats stand on 
 rows of marble tables, and the room is lined with mir- 
 rors and white panels — the effect very much that of a 
 brilliant French cafe. As to the article of merchan- 
 dise, Beebe & Costar have made tributary the " lines 
 of beauty" to a degree which gives their hats a most 
 peculiar elegance of shape, and it is worth the while 
 of those who are nice in their legmen, to " look in." 
 
 Apropos : — The only god who employed a hatter 
 was Mercury — why is not that " English clever" 
 deity, with his winged hat, installed as a hatter's 
 crest ? The propriety of it must have occurred to the 
 hatters. Possibly we are so mercurial a nation, that 
 it was thought impolitic — no man wanting any more 
 mercury in his hat — at least when it is on. We see 
 that the annual hatters' ball comes off on the 26th. 
 May we venture to suggest as topics of discussion in 
 the quadrilles — 1st, Mercury's claims to the arms of 
 the assembly, and, 2d, what peltry was probably used 
 by the hatter of OJympus, and 3d, whether (as it was 
 a winged hat) it must not have been made of the only 
 quadruped that flies fur, the flying squirrel? "Curi- 
 ous questions, coz !" 
 
 France versus England, or the Black Cravat 
 versus the White. — We have received, in a very 
 London-club-y handwriting, a warlike reply to the 
 note we published lately from a French gentleman on 
 the subject of the white cravat. The two nations 
 seem to have separated into hostile array on the sub- 
 ject. Our English correspondent certainly brings 
 cogent arguments in favor of the white, and indeed 
 of English costume generally. After asking very 
 naturally what our French correspondent's phrase, 
 "■perfidious Albion," had to do with it, and suggesting 
 that "black cravat" had better "reflect on the late 
 conduct of the French in the Pacific," he goes on 
 with the matter in question : — 
 
 "The English fashion for gentlemen's dress is never 
 to sacrifice comfort to appearance, which the French 
 fashion invariably does; the clothes of the English 
 are loosely made, so that every limb of the body is 
 free. You see nothing in the dress that can be called 
 effeminate ; they appear to eschew everything that 
 approaches the ' Miss Nancy school ;' no man with 
 them is considered well-dressed, however costly his 
 attire, if he be not manly in his appearance. Now, a 
 Frenchman's clothes are made to fit so tight, that it 
 is impossible for him to look at his ease. A French- 
 man dressed looks as if he had just come out of a 
 band-box ; he looks like a pretty doll which you see 
 in the shop windows in Paris. To hand a lady a 
 chair, he runs the danger of bursting his coat, or 
 cracking his waist-band ; he can not stoop to pick up 
 a lady's fan, without danger to his inexpressibles. 
 The Frenchman dressed is no longer the easy, pliant, 
 laughing man, that we know him to be when in dis- 
 habille — but he is stiff, unnatural, and effeminate. 
 
 "The English fashion abhors display ; the French, 
 on the contrary, invites it. With the Frenchman 
 dress is a great affair, for he intends to make a sensa- 
 tion. With the Englishman it is but secondary, for 
 he does not believe that mere dress can have any in- 
 fluence. You may form an idea of the sentiments 
 of both nations from this national character — the 
 
 English (and Americans) are proud, but not vain; 
 the French are very vain, but have little pride. 
 
 "Again: we like the Englishman's fondness for 
 white linen, and in this we can not imitate him too 
 | closely. It is not only in the evening, as with the 
 j Frenchman, that he puts on his fine linen, but at 
 J rising he must have it. — Though he may wear a 
 ; shaggy morning coat, his under garments must be 
 j spotless. You may know him when travelling on the 
 j continent, by the unrivalled whiteness of his linen. 
 The same cleanliness makes the white cravat prefer- 
 able. It has its recommendation in being a clean 
 t fashion — for no gentleman can wear it more than 
 ; once ; whereas, the black satin cravat, which your 
 j correspondent so much extols, is an exceedingly dirty 
 1 fashion — for, after dancing, the perspiration settles in 
 the satin ; and with the dust in the room, &c, it be- 
 comes unfit to wear more than twice, whereas the 
 French wear their cravats until they are worn out." 
 
 The sun " kept Christmas" yesterday, by appearing 
 "in his best." We never saw a more joyous, kindly, 
 holyday quality of sunshine. All who had hearts to 
 go abroad with, went abroad, and a-Broadwny was a 
 long aisle of beauty in nature's roofless cathedral. 
 God help all who were not happy yesterday ! We 
 picked up a bit of real-life poetry (by-the-way) in a 
 very unexpected place yesterday — a confectioner's 
 shop ! The circumstance is at such a distance from 
 poetry, that the flash comes before the report — a 
 laugh before the eye is moistened. At Thompson's, 
 the best confectioner of the city, we saw a large pound- 
 cake, with a figure of a nun standing on it, dressed in 
 white, and we were told that a cake had just gone to 
 the sisters of the Barclay-street convent, with this lit- 
 tle figure in mourning instead of white — sent by a 
 young catholic lady who had just lost her mother. 
 As a conveyance of a thought, intended to be en- 
 tirely between the mourner and the sympathising sis- 
 ters, we think this was very beautiful. Perhaps we 
 spoil it by giving the coarse-minded a chance to ridi- 
 cule it. 
 
 We wish to introduce to the reader (.he word tonal- 
 ity. Let us show its availableness at once by using 
 it to express the secret of Pico's overwhelming effect 
 upon the audience on Saturday evening. As musical 
 people know, melody is the natural "concord of sweet 
 sounds," and harmony may be tolerably defined as the 
 artificial creation of surprises to vary melody. Mali- 
 bran saw, for instance, that one of her rustic audiences 
 could feel melody, but was incapable of appreciating 
 harmony, when they tumultuously encored her in 
 "Home, Sweet Home," and let her " Di tanli pal- 
 pitV go by without applause ! It takes more than 
 one hearing, for persons not learned in music, to ap- 
 preciate the harmony of an opera, though if there be 
 in it an air of simple melody, a child will listen to 
 it, for the first time, with delight. But there are op- 
 eras, much cried up, where the melody and harmony 
 are not in tone ; and though people may be made to 
 like them against nature (as they like olives), the ma- 
 jority of the audience will feel incredulous as to its 
 being " good music." (We were two or three years 
 opera-going before these unwritten distinctions got 
 through our dura mater, dear reader; and if you are 
 not in a hurry, perhaps you will pay us the compli- 
 ment of reading them over again, while we mend our 
 pen for a new paragraph.) 
 
 Pico sang a part in the opera of Saturday night, 
 which, in our opinion, owed its electric power to three 
 tonalities: tone No. 1, between the harmony and mel- 
 ody of the music — tone No. 2, between the music 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 757 
 
 and her own impression on the public as a woman — 
 and tone No. 3, between the opera and the mood of 
 the public for that evening. 
 
 Tone No. 1 is already explained. Tone No. 3 was, 
 perhaps, a combination of pleasurable accidents — 
 both the donnas in one piece, the house crammed 
 with fashion, and graced with more beauty than usual, 
 and (last, not least) the change in the weather. A sud- 
 den south wind in December, makes even fashion af- 
 fectionate, and, with such influences in the air, mu- 
 sic that is " the food of love," may " piny on" — with 
 entire confidence as to its reception. Of tone No. 2 
 (the pnrt in Donizetti's opera) we wish to speak more 
 at large, but we can uot trust ourself afloat with it in 
 a paragraph already under headway. 
 
 Donizetti is commonly rated as a trite and not very 
 vigorous composer. As a musical convoy, he never 
 drops the slowest sailor below the horizon. But, that 
 he lets his heart steer the music whenever he can per- 
 suade science to give up the helm, everybody must 
 have felt who has embarked a thought in one of his 
 operas. The music written down for Orsini (Pico's 
 part) expresses the character that Shakspere's words 
 give to Mercutio — the prince of thoughtless good 
 fellows, careless, loveable, and amusing. Between 
 this and Pico's personal qualities (as made legible 
 across the footlights), there is a tonality the town has 
 felt — a joyous recognition, by the audience, of a com- 
 plete correspondence between the good-fellow music 
 she sings and the good fellow nature has made her. 
 There is a class of such women — some of them the 
 most captivating of their sex, and every one of them 
 the acknowledged "best creature in the world" of the 
 circle she lives in. Here and there a person will un- 
 derstand better what we mean if we mention that 
 Pico sat in the proscenium-box on the night of Ole 
 Bull's concert, and, with a full house looking at her 
 with eager curiosity, sat and munched her under-lip 
 most unbecomingly, in perfect unconsciousness of 
 any need of forbearing to do in public what she would 
 have done if she were alone! We must say we like 
 women that forget themselves ! 
 
 We heard twenty judicious persons comment on 
 the opera of Saturday, and with but one expression 
 of never, in any country, having enjoyed opera more. 
 The universal tonality, to which we have tried to play 
 the interpreter, is partly a matter of coincidence, and 
 may not happen again; but we assure the two donnas 
 and our friend Signor Sacchi, that with the remem- 
 brance of it, and with them both in the glorious opera 
 of Semiramide, next week, they will want a larger 
 house than Palmo's. 
 
 And, by-the-way, this amiable "Quintius Curtius" 
 of the opera, who has procured us the luxury of a 
 temple of music by jumping into the gulf with his 
 $47,000 — excellent Signor Palmo — claims of the pub- 
 lic a slight return; no more than that they should ac- 
 knowledge the fact of his disaster ! It has been doubt- 
 ed that he has lost money, and some of the world's 
 cruelty has been dealt out to him in the shape of a 
 sneer at his sincerity. We copy (literally) the ex- 
 planation sent us on the subject, and bespeak for him 
 present public regard, and some future more tangible 
 demonstration : — 
 
 "Being attracted by a statement made in the Mir- 
 ror in reference to the Italian company at Palmo's 
 opera-house, showing the receipts and disbursements 
 for twelve nights, leaving but a small amount to be 
 divided by the company, after having as good and bet- 
 ter houses than when under the auspices of Signor 
 Palmo, whose honesty has been imputed to have made 
 money, and made the public and his creditors believe 
 the contrary, now the mystery is solved, and the pub- 
 lic should be satisfied of Signor Palmo's integrity, 
 who is ready to show by bills paid, and his books, that 
 he has lost $47,000 the last four years." 
 
 SUPPER AFTER THE OPERA. 
 
 Private room over the Mirror office, corner of Ann and 
 Nassau— Supper on the round table, and brigadier 
 mixing summat and tcater— Flagg, the artist, fa- 
 tiguing the salad with a paper-folder— Devil in wait- 
 ing—Quarter past ten, and enter « Yours Truly" 
 from the opera. 
 
 Brig. — Here he comes, like a cloud dropping from 
 Olympus— charged with Pico-tricity ! Boy (to the 
 " devil"), stick a steel pen in my hat for a conductor! 
 Now — let him rain ! 
 
 Flagg. — Echo — let him reign ! 
 
 Yours Truly — (looking at the salad-dish). — Less 
 gamboge for me, if you please, my dear artist ! Be 
 merciful of mustard when you mix for public opin- 
 ion ! But, nay! brigadier! 
 
 Brig. — Thank you for not calling on me to bray, 
 mi-boy! What shall I neigh at ? 
 
 Yours Tridy. — How indelicate of you to call on 
 an artist to exercise his profession on a party of pleas- 
 ure ! 
 
 Brig.— Uow 1 
 
 Yours Truly — Setting him to grind colors in a sal- 
 ad-dish! What are you tasting with that wooden 
 ladle, my periodical sodger? 
 
 Brig. — Two of " illicit" to oue of Croton — potheen 
 | from a private still in the mountains of Killarny ! 
 i Knowles sent it to me ! You have no idea what a 
 j flavor of Kate Kearney there is about it ! — (fmflf! fmff!) 
 
 Flagg — (absently). — I smell the color of the heath- 
 flowers in it — crocus-yellow on a brown turf! 
 
 Brig. — Stick a pin there, mi-boy ! — a new avenue 
 j to the brain for things beautiful ! Down with priv- 
 ileged roads in a republic! Why should the colors 
 mixed for a limitless sense of beauty go in only at the 
 eye? 
 
 Flagg. — No reason why. I wish we could hear 
 colors ! 
 
 Brig. — So you can, my inspired simplicity ! and 
 taste them, too ! You can hear things that are read, 
 and you can taste the brown in a turkey! (Turning 
 to Yours Truly) — Was that well said, my dear boy ? 
 
 Yours Truly. — Pardon me if I suggest still an im- 
 provement in the aristocracy of the senses ! The 
 eye has a double door of fringed lids, and the mouth 
 an inner door of fastidious ivory; and, with the power 
 to admit or exclude at will, these are the exclusive or- 
 gans ! The republicans are the nose and ear — open 
 to all comers, and forced to make the best of them ! 
 
 Flagg. — A new light, by Jupiter ! Let us pamper 
 the aristocracy ! An oyster for my ivory gate, if you 
 please, general, and let us spite the ear's monopoly 
 of Pico by drinking her in silence ! ( ) 
 
 Brig.-( ) 
 
 Yours Truly. — ( ) 
 
 Brig. — Touching Pico — is she, or isn't she ? — you 
 know what I want to know, my boy ! Disembowel 
 your mental oyster! What ails Borghese? AVhat 
 is a " contralto ?" Is it anything wrong — or what ? 
 
 Yours Truly. — A contralto, my particular general, 
 is a voice that touches bottom — rubs your heart with 
 its keel, as it were, while floating through you— com- 
 paring with a soprano, as the air on a mountain-top 
 compares with a breeze from lower down. 
 
 Brig. — Best possible description of yourself, mi- 
 boy ! Go on, my contralto ! 
 
 Flagg. — Yes — go on about Borghese — what is the 
 philosophy of Borghese's salary being the double of 
 Pico's ? , , . , 
 
 Yours Truly.— Ah! now you touch the weight 
 that keeps Borghese down ! The public, like your- 
 self, ask why the prima-donna who gives them the 
 more pleasure is the poorer paid! Borghese— but 
 first let me tell you what I think of her, comparison 
 
758 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 apart. (Boy, light a cigar, and keep it going with the 
 bellows, a la pastille ! I like the smoke, but to talk 
 with a cigar in the mouth spoils the delicacy of dis- 
 crimination.) 
 
 Brig. — Spare us the scientific, mi-boy ! 
 
 Yours Truly. — Why, what do you mean? I am as 
 ignorant of music, my dear sodger, as an Indian is of 
 botany — but he knows a weed from a flower, and 7 
 talk of music as the audience judge of it — by what I 
 hear, "mark, and inwardly digest." 
 
 Brig. — But the big words, my dear contralto ! 
 
 Yours Truly. — " Foreign slip-slops," I grant you — 
 but nothing more ! — I lived three years in Italy, and, 
 of course, heard Italian audiences express themselves, 
 and here and there a phrase sticks to me — but if I 
 know "B sharp" from " B flat" (which is more than | 
 some musical critics know), it is the extent of my j 
 knowledge. No, general ! there is no sillier criticism 
 of music than technical criticism. You might as well J 
 paint cannon-balls piebald and then judge of their ; 
 effect by remembering which color showed through \ 
 the touch-hole before priming ! Notes go to the ear ; 
 effects shower the nerves. A musician who is a critic, 
 judges of a prima-donna by the accuracy with which j 
 she imitates what he (the musician) has played on j 
 an instrument — like a tight-rope dancer criticising his 
 brother of the slack-rope, because he don't swing over 
 the pit! Analyze the applause at an opera ! There ] 
 are, perhaps, ten persons in a Palmo audience who are 
 scientific musicians. These ten admire most what 
 they can most exclusively admire — rapid and difficult 
 passages (what the Italians caUfwrituri, or " flourish- 
 es") executed with the most skilful muscular effort 
 of the vocal organs. These ten, however, pass over, 
 as very pleasant accidents of the opera, the part which 
 pleases the rest of the audience — the messa di voce — 
 the tender expression of slower notes which try the 
 sweetness of the voice — the absoluteness of the " art 
 concealing art," and which, more than all, betrays the 
 personal sensibility and quality oj the actress's mind. 
 My dear brigadier, true criticism travels a circle, and 
 ends where it began — with nature- But as the art of 
 the prima-donna brings her to the same point, the un- 
 scientific audience are most with the most skilful pri- 
 ma-donna — nearer to a just appreciation of her than 
 musicians are. 
 
 Brig. — Now I see the reason I am so enchanted 
 with Pico, mi-boy ! I was afraid I had no business to 
 like her — as I didn't know Italian music ! What a 
 way you have of making me feel pleasant ! 
 
 Yours Truly. — Pico has enchanted the town, briga- 
 dier ! and I have endeavored to put the flesh and 
 blood of language to the ghost of each night's enchant- 
 ment. That ghost of remembrance sticks by us 
 through the next day, and I thought it would be 
 agreeable to the Mirror readers to have the impres- 
 sion of the music recalled by our description of it. 
 Have I done it scientifically ? Taste forbid .'—even if 
 I knew how ! I interpret for " the million"— not for 
 " the ten." 
 
 Flagg. — But about Borghese ! 
 
 Yours Truly.— Well— I have a great deal to say 
 about Borghese— I have a great deal of the "flesh 
 and blood" T just spoke of, in reserve for Borghese • 
 but I shall follow a strong public feeling, and not 
 clothe her enchantments with language, till she slacks 
 her hold upon the purse-strings, and shares equally, 
 at least, with the donna whom the public prefer.' 
 There goes the brigadier — fast asleep ! Good night, 
 gentlemen ! (Exit " Yours Truly.") 
 
 Ole Bull's Concert. — We longed last night for 
 one of " Curtis's acoustic chairs," by which all the 
 sound that approaches a man is inveigled into his ear 
 
 and made the most of, for we heard Niagara atten- 
 tively through, and at every change in the music 
 wished it louder. We thought even the "dying fall" 
 too expiring. It occurred to us, by the way, that if 
 the text of this discoursed music had been one of the 
 psalms instead of God's less interpretable voice in the 
 cataract, the room for enthusiasm, as well as the 
 preparation for it, on the part of the audience, would 
 have been vastly greater. In a mixed assembly (of 
 the quality of that at Palmo's last night) no chamber 
 of imagination is furnished or tenanted except that of 
 religion, and the very name of a bible psalm on the vi- 
 olin would have clothed any music of Ole Bull's per- 
 forming with the aggrandizing wardrobe of asso- 
 ciation kept exclusively for " powerful sermons" and 
 "searching prayers." We rather wonder that this 
 ready access to the excitability of the mass has not 
 been taken advantage of by the violinists. 
 
 We confess to a little surprise in Ole Bull's organi- 
 zation. With the 
 
 " Bust of a Hercules — waist of a gnat" — 
 
 a superb build for a gladiator or an athlete — his violin 
 is a woman .' The music he draws from it is all deli- 
 cacy, sentiment, pathos, and variable tenderness — 
 never powerful, masculine, or imposing. " The 
 Mother's Prayer," and the " Solitude of a Prairie," 
 are more effective than " Niagara," for that reason. 
 The audience are prepared for a different sex in a 
 cataract. We know very well that the accordatura of 
 a violin is of all compass, and that Paganini " played 
 the devil" on it, as well as the angel, and we repeat 
 our surprise, that, even in a piece whose name sug- 
 gests nothing but masculine power, the burthen should 
 be wholly feminine ! Fact, as this unquestionably is, 
 we leave it to our readers to reconcile with another fact 
 — that the applause at one of Ole Bull's concerts bears 
 no proportion to the enthusiasm, as the ladies, without 
 exception, are enchanted with him, and the men (who 
 do the applauding) are, almost without exception, dis- 
 satisfied with him. 
 
 " Gentle shepherd, tell us why !" 
 
 Even at the high price of tickets, nobody draws 
 like the Norwegian. A very sensible correspondent 
 of ours proposed to him (through the Mirror) to lower 
 his price, and allow those who could not afford the 
 dollar to have an opportunity of hearing him. He is 
 the soul of kindness and charity, and we should sup- 
 pose this would strike him as a felicitous hint. 
 
 Battle of the Cravats. — The front row of the 
 opera resembles a pianoforte with its white and black 
 keys — the alternation of black and white cravats is so 
 evenly distributed. The Frenchmen are all in black 
 cravats of course, and the English and Americans in 
 white, and a man might stop his ears and turn his 
 back to the orchestra (when the two donnas are on 
 the stage together) and tell who is singing, Pico or 
 Borghese, by the agitation of the black cravats or the 
 white. It is a strong argument in favor of the white 
 cravats, apropos, that the Americans, whose sympa- 
 thy is with the French in almost everything, should 
 have joined the English in this division of opinion. 
 We have received two or three most bellicose letters 
 on each side of this weighty argument, and would 
 publish them if we had a spare page. 
 
 The Opera. — Madame Pico was evidently strug- 
 gling, last evening, against the effects of her late ill- 
 ness; but she delighted the audience as usual, with 
 her impassioned and effective singing. The opera 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 759 
 
 is a very trying one, and, to us, not the most agreea- 
 ble in its general character — particularly in the lach- 
 rymose tone, throughout, of the part allotted to Pico. 
 Sanquirico was a relief to this ennui, and he so 
 charmed one lady in the house, that she threw him a 
 bouquet ! He played capitally well — barring one little 
 touch of false taste in using two English words by 
 way of being funny. It let him down like the falling 
 out of the bottom of a sedan. 
 
 Several of our French friends, by the way, have re- 
 quested us to contradict the on dit we mentioned in 
 the Minor, touching a " cabal to keep Pico subservi- 
 ent to Borghese." A regularly-formed one there 
 doubtless is not — but the French are zealous allies, 
 and every one of them does as much for Borghese as 
 he can, and, of course, as much as he could do in a 
 cabal. On the contrary, there seems to be no one in- 
 dividual taking any pains about Pico — the general en- 
 thusiasm at the opera excepted. Let us state a fact : 
 We have received many visits and more than a dozen 
 letters, to request even our trifling critical preference 
 for Borghese ; and no sign has been given, either by 
 Pico or her friends, that our critical preference was 
 wished for, or otherwise than tacitly acknowledged. 
 This being true of a mere newspaper, what must be 
 probably the difference of appeal to more direct sour- 
 ces of patronage? One or two persons have talked 
 feelingly of pity for Borghese's mortification ! We 
 are watching to see when her mortification will be so 
 insupportable that she will slacken her grasp upon 
 Pico's just share of the profits ! We are not only the 
 true exponent of public opinion in reference to the 
 merits of these ladies, but, if we are not personally 
 impartial, it is because (though we have no acquaint- 
 ance with either of the two ladies) we chance to know 
 most of Borghese's friends. Pico is evidently a kind- 
 hearted person, indolently careless of her pecuniary 
 interests, and it is impossible to see the shadows of 
 mental suffering in her face and not wish to aid her — 
 but we should not sacrifice critical taste to do even 
 that, and we have not written a syllable that her effect 
 on the public has not more that justified. At the 
 same time we have never said a syllable to disparage 
 Borghese, and have only forborne to say as much of 
 her merits as we should otherwise have done, because 
 she was overpaid and strongly hedged in with sup- 
 porters. 
 
 Servants in Livery, Equipages, etc. — There is 
 a stage of civilization at which a country will not — and 
 a subsequent stage at which a country will — tolerate 
 liveried servants. In a savage nation, an able-bodied 
 man who should put on a badge of hopeless and sub- 
 missive servitude for the mere certainty of food and 
 clothing, would be considered a disgrace to his tribe. 
 The further step of making that badge ornamental to 
 the servile wearer, would probably be resented as an 
 affront to the pre-eminence of display which is the 
 rightful prerogative of chiefs and warriors. 
 
 In a crowded and highly-civilized country, it is 
 found convenient for patricians to secure the tacit 
 giving-way of plebeian encounter in thronged places — 
 convenient for them to distinguish their own servants 
 from other people's in a crowd at night — and, more 
 particularly, in large and corrupt cities, it is conveni- 
 ent to have such attendants for ladies as may secure 
 them from insult in public — the livery upon the fol- 
 lower showing that the person he follows is not only re- 
 spectable, but of too much consequence to be annoyed 
 with impunity. The ostentation of servants in livery 
 is scarce worth a comment, as, unless newly assumed, 
 it is seldom thought of by the owner of the equipage, 
 nor is it offensive to the passer-by, except in a coun- 
 try where it is not yet common. 
 
 The question whether a country is ready for liveries 
 — that is to say, whether it has arrived at that stage 
 where the want they imply is felt, and where the dis- 
 tinctions they imply are acknowledged — is the true 
 point at issue. It is a curious point, too, for, in every 
 other nation, liveries may be excused as traditional 
 — as being only modifications of the dresses of feudal 
 retainers — while Americans, without this apology, 
 must defend the abrupt adoption of liveries on the 
 mere grounds of propriety and convenience. 
 
 We certainly have not yet arrived at that point of 
 civilization where liveries are needed — as in England 
 — to protect a lady from insult in the street. A fe- 
 male may still walk the crowded thoroughfares of 
 New York by daylight — as she dare not do in Lon- 
 don — unattended, either by a gentleman or a servant 
 in livery. (We live in hope of overtaking the civiliza- 
 tion of the mother-country!) Neither has a liveried 
 equipage, as yet, the tacit consequence, in America, 
 which secures to it in London the convenient conces- 
 sions of the highway. We are republican enough, 
 thus far, to allow no privileges to be taken for grant- 
 ed ; and he who wishes to ride in a vehicle wholly in- 
 visible to omnibus-drivers, and at the same time to 
 have his lineage looked into and perpetuated without 
 the expense of heraldic parchment, has only to ap- 
 pear in Broadway with liveried equipage! 
 
 We differ from some of our luxurious friends, by 
 thinking, that, as long as the spending of over five 
 thousand dollars a year makes a gentleman odious in 
 the community, liveries are a little premature. It 
 is a pity to be both virtuous and unpopular. The 
 moving about in a cloud of reminded lordship is a 
 luxury very consistent with high morality, but it 
 comes coldly between republicans and the sun — 
 whatever fire of heaven the offending cloud may em- 
 bosom. We wonder, indeed, at the remaining in this 
 country, of any persons ambitious of distinctions in 
 the use of which we are thus manifestly "behind the 
 age." It is so easy to leave the lagging American 
 anno domini of aristocracy, and sail for the next cen- 
 tury — by the Havre packet ! 
 
 That Heaven does not disdain such love of each 
 other as is quickened by personal admiration, is 
 proved by the injunctions to the children of Israel to 
 appear in cheerful and becoming dresses on festal days 
 — those days occupying rather more than a quarter of 
 a year. The Jews also ornamented their houses on 
 holydays, not as we do with evergreens (a custom we 
 have taken from the Druid "mistletoe, cut with the 
 golden knife"), but with such ornaments as would 
 best embellish them for the reception of friends. The 
 French nation is to be admired for supremacy, in this 
 age, in the exhibition of the kindly feelings and the 
 brightening of the links of relationship and friendship. 
 It has been stated (among statistics) that for bons-bons 
 alone, in Paris, on new year's day, were expended 
 one hundred thousand dollars ! We copy the French 
 with great facility in this country, and (until the pro- 
 posed " annexation of Paris") we rejoice in the pros- 
 perity of Stuart's candy quarry in New York, and 
 the myriad cobwebs of affection that stick, each by 
 one thread, to the corner of Chambers and Greenwich 
 streets! If not quite a "pilgrimage to Jerusalem," 
 it is a pilgrimage to our best signs and emblems of 
 Jerusalem usages, to go the rounds of the gift-shops 
 during the holydays; and no kindly Christian parent, 
 who xvishes to throw out an anchor for his children 
 against the storm of political ruffianism, should neg- 
 lect to bind friendship and family by a new tie in the 
 holydays ! We see a use in the skill at temptation 
 shown by such admirable taste-mongers as Tif- 
 
760 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 fant & Young, Woodworth, Guion, and others, 
 which is beyond the gratification of vanity, and far 
 from provocatives to " waste of money." But this is 
 no head under which to write a sermon. 
 
 We have (ourselves) a preference among the half 
 dozen curiosity-shops of the city — a preference which 
 may, perhaps, be called professional — springing from 
 love for the memory of a departed poet. The son of 
 Woodworth, the warm-hearted author of the "Old 
 Oaken Bucket" and other immortal embodiments of 
 the affections, in verse, is the present proprietor of the 
 establishment known as Bonfanti's — (by our just men- 
 tioned theory of the holy ministration of gifts, employed 
 on somewhat the same errand in life as the bard who 
 went before). It may not be improper to mention 
 here, that the last few painful years of the poet's life 
 were soothed with a degree of filial devotion and ten- 
 derness which makes the Woodworths cherished 
 among their friends, and this is a country, thank God, 
 where such virtues bring prosperity in business ! 
 
 BREAKFAST ON NEW TEAR S DAY. 
 
 Aslor house, No. 184 — nine o'clock in tlie morning — 
 breakfast for tioo on the table — enter the brigadier. 
 
 Brig. {Embracing "us").— Mi-boy ! GOD BLESS 
 YOU ! ! ! 
 
 " We." {With his hand to his forehead.)— With 
 what a sculptured and block-y solidity you hew out 
 your benedictions, my dear general! You fairly 
 knock a man over with blessing him ! Sit down and 
 wipe your eyes with that table-napkin ! 
 
 Brig. — Well — how are you? 
 
 " We." — Hungry ! I'll take a wing of the chicken 
 before you — killed probably last year. How many 
 " friends, countrymen, and lovers," are you going to 
 call on to day ? 
 
 Brig. — I wish I knew how many I shall not call on! 
 What is a — (pass the butter if you please) — what is 
 a pat of butter, like me, spread over all the daily bread 
 of my acquaintance ? 
 
 " We."— 
 
 " 'Tis Greece— but living Greece no more !" 
 
 I'll tell you what 1 have done, general. Here is a list 
 of all my circle of pasteboard. It begins with those 
 I love, and ends with those with whom I am cere- 
 monious. Those whom I neither love nor am cere- 
 monious with, form a large betweenity of indifference; 
 and though you may come to love those with whom 
 you are ceremonious, you never can love those you 
 are wholly indifferent to. I have crossed out this be- 
 tweenity. Life is too short to play even a game of 
 acquaintance in which there is no possible stake. 
 
 Brig. — How short life is, to be sure ! 
 
 " We."— Shorter this side the water than the other"! 
 In Europe a man is not bowed out till he is ready to 
 go ! Here, he is expected to have repented and made 
 his will at thirty-seven ! I shall pass my " second 
 childhood" in France, where it will pass for a con- 
 tinuation of the first ! 
 
 Brig. — My dear boy, don't get angry! Eat your 
 breakfast and talk about New Year's. What did the 
 Greeks used to do for cookies? 
 
 " We." — Well thought of— they made presents of 
 dates covered with gold leaf! Who ever gilds a date 
 in this country ? No ! no ! general ! You will see 
 dozens of married women to-day who have quietly 
 settled down into upper servants with high-necked 
 dresses — lovely women still — who would be belles for 
 ten years to come, in France ! Be a missionary, 
 brigadier! Preach against the unbelievers in mulie- 
 
 brity ! It's New Year and time to begin something ! 
 Implore your friends to let themselves be beautiful 
 once more ! (Breast-bone of that chicken, if you 
 please !) I should be content never to see another 
 woman under thirty — their loveable common-sense 
 comes so long after their other maturities .' 
 
 Brig. — What common-place things you do say, to 
 be sure ! Well, mi-boy, we are going to begin another 
 year ! 
 
 " We." — Yes — prosperously, thank God ! And, 
 oh, after the first in-haul of rent from these well- 
 tenanted columns, what a change we shall make in 
 our paper ! Let us but be able to afford the outlay 
 of laborious aid, which other editors pay for, and see 
 how the Mirror will shine all over .' I have a system 
 in my brain for a daily paper — the fruit of practical 
 study for the last three months — which I shall begin 
 upon before this month has made all its icicles; and 
 you shall say that I never before found my true voca- 
 tion ! The most industriously edited paper in the 
 country is but the iron in the razor; and though it is 
 not easy to work that into shape, anybody can hire it 
 done, or do it with industry. The steel edge, we shall 
 find time to put on, when we are not, as now, employed 
 in tinkering the iron ! 
 
 Brig. — Black-and-white-smiths — you and I! 
 
 " We." — No matter for the name, my dear general! 
 — one has to be everything honesty will permit, to 
 get over the gulf we have put behind us. Civilized 
 life is full of the most unbridged abysses. Transitions 
 from an old business to a new, or from pleasure to 
 business, or from amusing mankind to taking care of 
 yourself, would be supposed, by a " green" angel, to 
 be good intentions, easy enough carried out, in a 
 world of reciprocal charities. ** But let them send 
 down the most popular angel of the house of Gabriel 
 & Co., to borrow money for the most brilliant project, 
 without bankable security! And the best of it is, that 
 though your friends pronounce the crossing of a busi- 
 ness-gulf, on your proposed bridge of brains, impossi- 
 ble and chimerical, they look upon it as a matter of 
 course when it is done! You and I are poets — if the 
 money and fuss we have made will pass for evidence 
 — yet nobody thinks it surprising that we have taken 
 off our wings, and rolled up our shirt-sleeves to carry 
 the hod ! Not to die without having experienced all 
 kinds of sensations, I wish to be rich — though it will 
 come to me like butter when the bread is gone to 
 spread it on. Heigho ! 
 
 Brig. — How you keep drawing similitudes from 
 what you see before your eyes ! Let me eat my 
 breakfast without turning it into poetry! It will sour 
 on my stomach, my dear boy ! 
 
 " We." — So you are ordered out to smash the Hel- 
 derbergers, general ! 
 
 Brig. — Ordered to hold myself in readiness — that's 
 all at present. I wish they'd observe the seasons, and 
 rebel in pleasant weather! Think of the summit of 
 a saddle with the thermometer at zero ! Besides, if 
 there is any fighting to do one likes an enemy. This 
 campaign to help the constable, necessary as it is, goes 
 against my stomach. 
 
 " We." — Fortify it, poor thing ! What say to a 
 drop of curacoa before you begin your New Year's 
 round? {Pouring for the general and himself) Burke 
 states, in his " Vindication of Natural Society," that 
 your predecessor, Julius Cesar, was the means of 
 killing two millions one hundred thousand men! How 
 populous is Helderberg — women and all? 
 
 Brig. — Twelve' o'clock, my dear "boy, and time to 
 be shaking hands and wishing. Take the first wish 
 off the top of my heart — a happy New Year to you, 
 and — 
 
 " We." — Gently with that heavy benediction ! 
 
 Brig. — God bless you, mi-boy !■ 
 
 {Exit the brigadier, affected.) 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 761 
 
 i, anu to mem wc «iau iu K< «/..~. « "•>■* »* 7 
 
 hing the usages just now in plastic and manage- 
 transition among the better classes. The follow- 
 
 Themes for the Table.— Among the "upper 
 ten thousand," there are, of course, many persons, not 
 only of really refined taste, but of practical common 
 sense, and to them we wish to proffer a hint or two, 
 toucl 
 
 able transition among 
 
 ing note, received a day or two since, suggests one of 
 the improvements that we had marked down for com 
 ment : — 
 
 "Mb. Editor: I observe that a 'bachelor,' wri- 
 ting in the 'American,' recommends to 'invited 1 
 and ' inciters,' to send invitations and answers, stamp- 
 ed, through the penny-post. This is a capital idea, 
 and I shall adopt it for' one. I perceive that a bachelor 
 in another paper says, ' it will suit him and his fellow- 
 bachelors,' for reasons set forth, and that he will adopt 
 the plan. Now, Mr. Editor, I am a housekeeper, 
 and married, and my wife requires the use of all my 
 servants, and can not spare them to be absent three or 
 four days, going round the city, delivering notes, on 
 the eve of a party. These notes could, by the plan 
 suggested, be delivered in three hours, and insure a 
 prompt answer. I can then know exactly who is 
 coming and who is not— a very convenient point of 
 knowledge ! 
 
 "These reasons induce me to become an advocate 
 of the suggestion. There are other sound arguments 
 that might be urged in its favor, but pray present them j 
 in your own fashion to your readers. 
 
 " Yours, &c." 
 There is another very burthensome matter, the j 
 annoyance of which might be transferred to the penny- j 
 p 03t — card leaving ! When men are busy and ladies 
 ill (the business and the illness equally unlikely to be j 
 heard of by way of apology) it would often be a most 1 
 essential relief to commit to envelopes a dozen cards, j 
 and, with an initial letter or two in the corner,* ex- 1 
 pressive of good-will but inability to call in person, 
 make and return visits without moving from counting 
 house or easy-chair. This, in a country where few 
 keep carriages, and where every man worth knowing 
 has some business or profession, should be an easy 
 matter to bring about ; and, if established into a usage 
 that gave no offence, would serve two purposes— re- 
 lieving the ill or busy, and compelling those, who 
 really wish to keep up an acquaintance, at least to 
 send cards once in a while, as reminders. 
 
 We wish that common sense could be made fashion- 
 able among us — vigorously applied, we mean, to the 
 fashions of the best style of people. Why should not 
 the insufferable nuisance of late parlies be put down 
 in this country by a plot between a hundred of our 
 sensible and distinguished families? In England they 
 are at the dinner-table between six and ten ; but why 
 should we, who seldom dine later than three or four, 
 yawn through a long unoccupied evening before going 
 out, merely because they go to parties at eleven in 
 London ? Why should it not be American, to revise, 
 correct, and adapt to differences of national character, 
 the usages we copy from other countries ? The sub- 
 ject of late parties is constantly talked over, however, 
 and as all are agreed as to the absurdity of the fashion, 
 a hint at it, here, is enough. 
 
 There are other usages which require remodelling 
 by this standard, but while we defer the mention of 
 them at present, we wish to allude to another argu- 
 ment (in favor of common sense applied to fashion) 
 remoter and perhaps weightier than mere convenience. 
 It is simply, that, if an aristocracy is to be formed in 
 this country, the access to its resorts must' be kept 
 convenient for men of sense, or society will be left ex- 
 clusively to fools. Believers in the eternity of de- 
 
 * T. R. M., for instance (meaning this to remind you of 
 me), written in the corner of a card, might imply that the 
 friendly wish had occurred, though the call was overruled by 
 hinderances. 
 
 mocracy might wish fashion kept inconvenient, for this 
 very purpose; but our belief is, that there is no place 
 like a republic for a positive and even violent aristoc- 
 racy, and, if inevitable, it is as well to compound it 
 of good elements in the beginning. Simply, then, no 
 intellectual man, past absolute juvenility, would con- 
 sent to enfeeble his mind by fashionable habits injuri- 
 ous to health. Late hours and late suppers (in a 
 country where we can not well sleep till noon as they 
 do in Europe) are mental suicide. Hours and usages, 
 therefore, which are not accommodated to the conve- 
 nience of the best minds of the country, will drive 
 those minds from the class to which they form the 
 objection, and the result is easily pictured. We 
 shall resume the topic. 
 
 Livebiesand Opeba-Glasses.— There is really no 
 way of foreseeing what the Americans will stand* and 
 what they will not. An aristocratic family or two, 
 unwilling to compete wiOi the working-classes in person- 
 al attire, choose to transfer the splendors of their condi- 
 tion to the hacks of their servants.' They dress plainly 
 themselves and set up a liveried equipage — as- they 
 have an absolute and (one would think) an unoffend- 
 ing right to do. This, however, the American pub- 
 lic will not bear — and the persons so doing are insulted 
 by half the presses in the country. 
 
 But what they will bear is much more remarkable. 
 In the immense theatres of Europe, where the upper 
 classes are all in private boxes, with blinds and curtains 
 to shutout observation if they please, the use of opera- 
 glasses has gradually become sanctioned. It is found 
 convenient lor those classes to diminish the distance 
 across the house, since they have the choice of seclu- 
 sion behind curtains — which those in the pit have not. 
 Abstractly, of course, the giving to a vulgarian the 
 power to draw a lady's face close to him for a half- 
 hour's examination, would be permitting a gross li- 
 cense. This being the custom in Europe, however, 
 it is adopted with no kind of comparisons of reasons 
 why, in New York. We build an opera-house, scarce 
 larger than a drawing-room, and light it so well, and 
 so arrange the seats, that people are as visible to each 
 other as they would be in a drawing-room ; and in 
 this cosy place, allow people to coolly adjust their 
 opera-glasses and turn them full into the faces of those 
 they wish to scrutinize. So near as the glass is, too, 
 j it is utterly impossible not to be conscious of being 
 I looked at, and the embarrassment it occasions to very 
 i young ladies is easy enough shown. We have used 
 I this impertinence ourself (because in Rome we do as 
 Romans do), but we never yet have levelled a glass 
 upon a face without seeing that the scrutiny was at 
 once detected. Since we have preached on the sub- 
 ject, however, we shall " go and sin no more." 
 
 " We ask for information :"— is the difference of 
 reception, for these two European customs, explain- 
 able on the ground that opera-glasses are a luxury 
 within the reach of most persons, and liveries are not ? 
 Do republicans only object to exclusive impertinences? 
 
 Opeba last night — We presume we are safe in 
 saying that no four inhabitants in New York gave as 
 much pleasure last night as Pico, Bobghese, Pe- 
 bozzi, and Valtellina. We certainly would not 
 have missed our share for any emotion set down 
 among the pleasures of Wall street— well as we know 
 the let-up of an opportune discount ! That emperor 
 of Rome who poisoned Britannicus because he was 
 a better tenor than himself, and slept in his imperial 
 bed with a plate of lead on his stomach to improve 
 his voice, knew where music went to, and of what 
 
762 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 recesses, within his empire, he was not monarch with- 
 out it. (We suggest a meeting of gentlemen up-town 
 to erect a monument to Nero, now for the first time 
 appreciated !) 
 
 Let us tell the story of Semiramide — and we must 
 take the liberty, for clearness' sake, to use the names 
 of the performers without the Siamese-ry of the names 
 of the characters. 
 
 Borghese is queen of Babylon. She and Valtel- 
 lina, who is an old lover of hers, have killed her former 
 husband, a descendant of Belus by whom she had a 
 child. This child is Pico, rightful heir to the throne. 
 At the time the curtain rises, Borghese and Valtel- 
 lina suppose that Pico also is killed, and the throne 
 vacant for a new husband to Borghese. Valtellina 
 wishes to be that husband ; but Borghese, partly from 
 dislike of him, and partly from having had enough of 
 matrimony, takes advantage of a thunder-storm to put 
 off her expected decision. Meantime Pico arrives 
 (acquainted only with Mr. Meyer, apparently, who is 
 a high-priest of Belus), and Queen Borghese, not 
 knowing that it is her own child, falls in love with 
 him ! There is a Miss Phillips who is a descendant 
 of this same Belus, and who is to have the throne if 
 Borghese does not marry Valtellina. Pico loves Miss 
 Phillips for some reason only hinted at, and has come 
 to Babylon to see her. Mr. Meyer, who is the only 
 one aware that Pico is the prince supposed to be lost, 
 takes him down into the tomb of the dead king, tells 
 him who he is, gives him his father's " things" in a 
 box, and leaves him there to have a conversation with 
 his mother who happens to drop in. It is all cleared 
 up between them, and they sing a duet together, and 
 go out for a little fresh air. Valtellina, mousing about 
 after the queen, comes afterward to the tomb and 
 meets the high-priest there ; and one after another 
 drops in, till the tomb is full, and the ghost of the old 
 king takes the opportunity to get up and mention 
 what he died of. Great confusion of course ; and, 
 soon after, Pico, feeling called upon to kill the mur- 
 derer of the sleepless old gentleman, stabs at some- 
 body in the dark and kills his mother ! Valtellina is 
 led off by the police, Pico faints in the arms of Mr. 
 Meyer, the satraps and Babylonians rush in, and the 
 curtain falls — leaving Pico to marry Miss Phillips and 
 succeed to the throne. All this of course took place 
 in a city built two generations after Ham (brother of 
 Shem and Japhet) but what with the look of the 
 " tombs," and the way people were stabbed and pois- 
 oned, it was impossible not to wonder what Justice 
 Malsell would have done in the premises. 
 
 We shall hear Semiramide again to-night, and speak 
 more advisedly of the music on Monday. At present, 
 we can not convince ourself that Grisi and Persiani 
 sang any better when we heard them in London. We 
 can never hope for — and we need not wish — a better 
 opera. Borghese is a most accomplished creature, 
 with (among other things) an intoxicating way of 
 crushing her eyes up to express passion (in a way that 
 none but people of genius do) and she does nothing 
 indifferently. Pico, with her wonderful at-home-ative- 
 ness anywhere between the lowest note and the high- 
 est, faultless in her science, and personally of the kind 
 of women most loveable, is enough, of herself, to keep 
 a town together. Perozzi, with his sweet, pure 
 voice, and gentlemanly taste (he was king of Egypt 
 last night, by the way, and a candidate for Borghese's 
 hand), is worthy to be a third star in any such Orion's 
 belt, and the fourth may well be Valtellina, whose 
 thorough base, we have no doubt, first suggested the 
 idea of the forty-horse excavator lately patented by 
 congress. 
 
 But what shall we say of the scenery ? We were 
 taken completely by surprise, with the taste as well as 
 splendor of it, and we think Stanfield himself, the 
 great artist who produces occasionally such marvels 
 
 in the spectacles of Drury Lane, would have taken a 
 pride in claiming it. Certainly no comparable scene- 
 ry has been exhibited, to our knowledge, in this 
 country. The costumes were also admirable. 
 
 Abstaining as we do, for to-day, from musical 
 criticism, we cau not help alluding to the electric ef- 
 fect, upon the audience, of the duet between Pico 
 and Borghese — the well-known " Giorno d'orrore." 
 The house was uncomfortably crammed, but a pin 
 might have been heard to drop, at any moment dur- 
 ing the singing of it. It was a case of complete musi- 
 cal intoxication. The applause was boundless, but 
 unluckily the encore (which we trust will not be foiled 
 again to-night) was defeated by an evident fear on the 
 part of the audience of interrupting a part of the duet 
 not yet completed. If you love your public, dear 
 Semiramide, nod, to-night, to the orchestra, after the 
 bouquets have descended ! 
 
 BEHIND THE CURTAIN. 
 
 Editor's room, toward midnight — Enter the brigadier, 
 as the printers go down stairs — The day over, and 
 the shop shut up under — A pen (too tired to be 
 wiped) drying in peace on the editor's table — Neus- 
 boys done (thank God ! ) — Brigadier collapsed into 
 a chair. 
 
 Brig. — Oh, mi-boy! To think of the trouble of 
 " getting along," and the very small place in which 
 we sleep, when we get there ! I wonder whether a 
 man would be much behind the time at his own fu- 
 neral if he stopped working! I'm tired, Willis! I'll 
 send my ticket for the afterpiece, and " go home," as 
 the Moravians say. 
 
 " We." — You forget ! Editors are on the " free 
 list" in the theatre of life, and " not entitled to a 
 check." 
 
 Brig. — Talk plain to me, my dear boy, and save 
 your heliotropes for the paper! The work I have 
 done this week ! Is it you that say somewhere, 
 "there's no poetry in a steamboat?" Think of the 
 blessed cry of " stop her !" 
 
 " We." — And so you are fairly fagged, my " mar- 
 tial Pyrrhus!" 
 
 Brig. — Fagged and dispirited ! Moving the print- 
 ing office — getting all the advertisements set up in 
 new type — little indispensable nothings plaguing my 
 life out — new arrangements in every corner, and the 
 daily paper going on besides 
 
 " We." — I don't wonder you're dead ! 
 
 Brig. — That is the least of my trouble, I was going 
 to say — (though, to be sure, what we have done this 
 last week, changing office, and renewing type, with- 
 out stopping the daily, is very much like shoeing 
 your horse without slacking his trot) — but the " ben- 
 efit," my dear boy, the benefit. 
 
 " We." — So long since you have had any money to 
 lend — is that what you mean ? You are afraid you 
 have lost the art of making yourself out poorer 
 than the man who comes to borrow. Why, my poor 
 general ! 
 
 Brig. — Doesn't it strike you as a dreadful mortifi- 
 cation, my dear Willis ? 
 
 " We." — The whole business ? 
 
 Brig. — The whole business. 
 
 " We.'' — Inasmuch as for genius to be rich, after 
 being poor, would make a god of the man so en- 
 riched (by the intensity of his enjoyment, and his nat- 
 ural inoculation against catching the canker from his 
 money) — it is wisely ordained by Providence that we 
 shall not receive it in sums larger than $3, city bill, 
 without mental agony. We should else be in heaven 
 
ephemer; 
 
 res 
 
 before our time, my dear general — purgatory omit- 
 ted ! 
 
 Brig. — But isn't your pride wounded for me, my 
 dear boy ? 
 
 " We." — As Cassio says (who, by the way, loved 
 general Othello very much as I do you), 
 
 ' I do attend here on the general, 
 And think it no addition, nor my wish, 
 To have him see me womaned." 
 
 I have no tear to shed on the subject. I have 
 thought it all over, and would have stood in your 
 place and received the painful thousands myself, if I 
 had thought it more than you could bear — but let me 
 tell you how I look at it. 
 
 Brig. — Do, mi-boy, and don't joke more than you 
 can help ! 
 
 " We." — Editors are the pump-handles of charity, 
 always helping people to water, and never thought to 
 be thirsty themselves ! 
 
 Brig. — You funny Willis! — so we are! 
 
 " We." — You, particularly, have not only been 
 bolted to the public cistern for every benefit of the 
 last twenty years, the fag and worky of every possible 
 charitable committee, but your paper has been called 
 upon (and that people think nothing of) to blow wind 
 into the sail of every scheme of benevolence, every 
 device for the good of individuals or the public. Peo- 
 ple see your face on every printed note that comes to 
 them. You are the other-folks-beggar of the town. 
 When you die 
 
 Brie- — No painful allusions now, mi-boy ! 
 
 " We." — I was only going to say, my dear general, 
 that they will wish they had unmuzzled the ox that 
 trod out the corn ! 
 
 Brig, (swallowing something apparently). But I have 
 had so many misgivings about this benefit concert, my 
 dear Willis ! 
 
 "We." — The pump-handle changing places with 
 the pail ! Well— it will be a shower-bath at first, but 
 you'll be full when it's over! 
 
 Brig. — There you go again ! 
 
 " We." — I was letting that simile trickle off" my 
 lips while I fished up, from my practical under-cur- 
 rent, another good reason for your benefit. Suffer 
 me to be tedious a moment! 
 
 Brig. — Be so, mi-boy — be so ! I love you best 
 when you're tedious! 
 
 44 We." — Well, then ! Political economy differs 
 from the common estimates of things, by taking into 
 consideration not only their apparent value at the 
 time of sale, but what it has cost, directly or indi- 
 rectly, to attain that value. Do you understand me ? 
 
 Brig. — No. 
 
 44 We." — For example, then ! — a leg of mountain 
 mutton may weigh no more than a leg of lowland 
 mutton — but as the fibre of the meat is finer from be- 
 ing fed on highland grass, it is reasonable to estimate 
 it by something besides its weight — i. e., the shep- 
 herd's risk of losing it by wild beasts, and the trouble 
 of driving it up and down the mountain. 
 
 Brig.— True. 
 
 44 We." — Thus, a lawyer charges you fifty dollars 
 for an opinion which it takes him but ten minutes to 
 dictate to his clerk. A savage would laugh at the 
 price, and offer to talk twice the time for half the 
 money — but a civilized man pays it, allowing for the 
 education, study, and talent, which it cost to give the 
 opinion value. 
 
 Brig.— True again. Now for our 44 mutton." 
 
 44 We."— You and I, my dear general, are brain- 
 mongers— which is an exceedingly ticklish trade. We 
 start with our goods in supposition, like the capital 
 of a western bank — locked up in a safe, that is to say 
 (the skull), to which the " teller" alone has the key. 
 We are never sure, in point of fact, that the specie is 
 
 there, and we are likely at any moment to be 4i broke" 
 by the critics "making a run upon the bank." 
 
 Brig. — Now that's what I call clear ! 
 
 " We."— Don't interrupt me ! The risks of suc- 
 cess in literature, the outlay for education, the delay 
 in turning it to profit, the endurance of the gauntlets 
 of criticism, and the rarity of the gift of genius from 
 God, should be added to the usually fragile shop in 
 which its wares are embarked for vending. The poet, 
 by constitution least able to endure rude usage, is the 
 common target of coarseness and malice. Here and 
 there, to be sure, a man is born, like me — with brains 
 enough, but more liver than brains — and such men 
 sell thoughts as they would potatoes, and don't break 
 their hearts if customers find specks in them; but the 
 literary profession, generally, is of another make, and 
 44 political economy" should compensate proportion- 
 ally. They do it for clergymen! What clergyman 
 feels it an indignity to be sent abroad by subscription, 
 if his health fails? He considers that he is inade- 
 quately paid unless his parish take the risks of his 
 health ! And you ! — besides the reason you have, 
 wholly apart from our joint business, for needing this 
 benefit — here you are, after passing your life in ser- 
 ving people, with a pair of eyes you can scarce sign 
 your name by, and a prospect of a most purblind view 
 of the City Hall when they make you mayor. 
 
 Brig. — Mi-boy ! oh ! 
 
 44 We." — There's but one pair of well-endorsed eyes 
 between us, and suppose somebody leaves me money 
 enough to unharness me from this omnibus, and turn 
 me out to grass at Glenmary ! What will become of 
 you ? 
 
 Brig. — Heaven indissolubly Siamese us, my dear 
 boy ! 
 
 44 We." — And I have not even named, yet, the os- 
 tensible ground for this concert — the songs you have 
 loaded the women's lips with, and never received 
 even a kiss for your trouble! 
 
 Brig. — What a fellow you are for reasons, Willis! 
 
 44 We." — My dear friend, I am going to state all 
 this to the committee for your benefit! By the way 
 — did you ever hear of Ismenias, the D'Orsay of an- 
 cient Corinth ? 
 
 Brig. — Never. 
 
 "We." — Ismenias commissioned a friend to buy a 
 jewel for him. The friend succeeded in purchasing 
 it at a sum below its value. " Fool!" said Ismenias, 
 44 you have disgraced the gem!" Did you suppose, 
 general, that I was going to give the public the pleas- 
 ure of paying you this tribute without taxing their 
 admiration as well as their pockets .' No ! (Hear 
 him !) No ! I trust every woman who has sung, or 
 heard sung, a song of yours, will be there to wave a 
 handkerchief for you! I hope every man who loves 
 literature, and has a corner in his heart for the poet 
 who has pleased him, will be there to applaud you ! 
 I hope David Hale will give us gas enough to see 
 you on the platform. I hope — God bless me, twelve 
 o'clock ! 
 
 Operatic Party. — As our readers are aware, a 
 private sparkle from the stars of an operatic constella- 
 tion, is one of the luxuries rated as princely in Europe 
 — a proper fitness in the other circumstances of the 
 entertainment requiring a spaciousness of saloons and 
 a magnificence of menu which only the very wealthi- 
 est have to offer. The private dwelling-houses of 
 this city, till within a few years, have been much too 
 small for the introduction of this advanced phase of 
 pleasure. Last night, however, a sumptuous resi- 
 dence, that might compare to advantage with any in- 
 terior in Europe, was thrown open, and its " wilder- 
 ness of beauty" delighted with private performances 
 by the operatic company now in such admirable com- 
 
764 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 bination. As being the head of a new chapter of na- 
 tional refinement, it would, perhaps, be posthumously 
 worth while to depict the scene — not only as to its 
 sumptuary splendors and costumes, but with a de- 
 scription of the " beauty that bewitched the light" — 
 but however posterity might thank us for such an inky 
 Arethusa, we have too much to do with what is above 
 ground, just now, to bury charms for the future. 
 
 Madame Pico remarked, before the commencement 
 of the performance, that it was almost as trying for 
 singers used to a theatre to adapt the voice, impromp- 
 tu, to a saloon, as for an amateur to calculate, at once, 
 the volume of voice necessary to fill a theatre. The 
 first two or three pieces were, notwithstanding this 
 judicious apprehension, a little too loud. Signor 
 Valtellina must have the credit of having been the 
 first to reduce the " fill of • the empyrean" to the ca- 
 pacity of a saloon, and, after the measure was taken, 
 the music was exquisitely enjoyable. After tea 
 (served in an adjoining apartment at the close of the 
 first part) the artists assumed, to a charm, the neces- 
 sary abandon, and the singing between tea and sup- 
 per was, to our ear, faultless. The pianist only, M. 
 Etienne seemed lacking in the magnetism to quicken 
 the movement with the acceleration of Pico's climax, 
 and we wished a younger or more sympathetic hand 
 in the accompaniment ; but this charming cantatrice 
 has too infallible an ear to outrun the instrument, and 
 the effect was sufficiently enchanting. She and Sig- 
 norina Borghese were rapturously encored, and a 
 laughing terzetto between Borghese, SANquiRico, and 
 Perozzi, was called for, a second time, with bound- 
 less delight and enthusiam. 
 
 We had never before seen Madame Pico off" the 
 stage. Care has left no foot-print on the threshold 
 of the gate of music, and her mouth is infantine in 
 texture and expression ; but her eyes have that in- 
 definable look which betrays 
 
 " The thieves of joyance that have passed that way." 
 
 Her person shows to more advantage in a drawing- 
 room than on the stage, and her manners, like those of 
 all gifted Italians, are of a natural sculpture beyond 
 the need of artificial chiseling. Borghese, too, has 
 charming manners, and we were pleased with the cor- 
 dial accueil given to the prima-donnas by the ladies 
 of the party. Altogether, the absolute good taste of 
 the entertainment, and the unusually choice mixture 
 of elements, social, sumptuous, and professional, made 
 the evening one of high enchantment. 
 
 Opera Singers — At the benefit of Mademoiselle 
 Borghese, lately, the centre of the ceiling suddenly 
 gave birth (at the close of the first act) to a shower of 
 billets-doux, which, being immediately followed by the 
 descent of the drop-scene, representing Jupiter feeling 
 the pulse of Juno, was understood by the audience 
 " as well as could be expected." The delivery was 
 rather a relief to the feeling of the house, for the 
 crowd and pressure had been very uncomfortable 
 and some critical event was needed to relieve the en- 
 durance. 
 
 We have been pleased at the example, set by the 
 good authority of the party of Monday evening, of 
 giving a cordial, social welcome to distinguished musi- 
 cal strangers. America profits by having two nations 
 marching immediately before her in civilization — 
 each unwilling to imitate the other, but both open to 
 study, by us, with no impediment as to our selection 
 of points for imitation or rejection. The French and 
 English are wholly at variance on the point we have 
 just alluded to — the social position given to celebrated 
 musicians. In the high circles of France, when a 
 
 party is given at which the operatic singers perform a 
 concert, the reception for the musicians consults only 
 their personal comfort. — Chairs are placed for them, 
 which they rarely leave to mix with the party, and 
 their supper is always separate from that, of the guests. 
 There is no intention shown, of treating them like 
 equals. In England, on the contrary, the operatic 
 company are the pels of society. Pasta, Catalani, 
 Persiani, Grisi, and the male singers, Lablache, 
 Rubini, Ivanhoff, and others, were free of all exclu- 
 sion on the score of rank, and "dined and teted" 
 familiarly like noble strangers from other countries. 
 We have seen the duke of Wellington holding the 
 gloves of Grisi, while she pulled to pieces a bunch of 
 grapes at the supper table of Devonshire house ; and 
 we have a collection of autographs of public singers 
 (two of which we published the other day), addressed 
 to persons of high rank, and expressed in terms of 
 the most confessed feeling of ease as to relative posi- 
 tion. 
 
 We repeat that we rejoice in the power to select 
 footsteps to follow in civilization (from those of two 
 nations gone on before), and we take pride, that, in 
 this latest instance, we have copied the more liberal 
 and kindly-hearted usage. These children of a pas- 
 sionate clime are not justly measured by our severe 
 standards; and we should receive them like airs from 
 a southern sky, without cooling them first by a chymi- 
 cal analysis. They are, commonly, ornaments to 
 society — joyous, genial, free from the "finikin" super- 
 fineries of some of those inclined to abase them — and 
 the difference of the pleasure they give, when their hearts 
 are in it, is offset enough for any sacrifice made in ex- 
 cusing the "low breeding" of their genius ! 
 
 Borghese, whose benefit came off so triumphantly 
 last night, is a woman of very superior mind, of man- 
 ners faultlessly distinguished, and (essential praise to 
 a woman) a model of toilet-ability. She is, besides, a 
 remarkable actress, and a very accomplished musician. 
 This is a pretty good description of an agreeable ac- 
 quaintance ; and, if we were to sketch Madame Pico, 
 it would be in terms still more warmly eulogistic. 
 We leave to the ladies who throw bouquets to San- 
 quirico, to laud the men of the opera, and wind up 
 this essay of political economy, by drawing an instruc- 
 tive example, of the effect of what we preach, from 
 the manufacture of a prima-donna into a queen and 
 goddess, in the days of venerable antiquity. 
 
 "Among the female performers of antiquity, Lamia 
 is certainly the most celebrated ; how much her fame 
 may have been aided by her beauty we can not deter- 
 mine. She was everywhere received with honor, and 
 according to Plutarch, equally admired for her wit, 
 beauty, and musical performance. She was a native 
 of Athens, but travelled into Egypt to hear the cele- 
 brated flute-players of that country. During her resi- 
 dence at the court of Alexandria, Ptolemy Soter was 
 defeated in a naval engagement by Demetrius, and all 
 his wives and domestics fell into the hands of the 
 conqueror. Lamia was among the number; but 
 Demetrius was so attracted by her beauty and skill, 
 that he raised her to the highest rank, and from her 
 solicitations, conferred such benefits on the Athenians, 
 that they gave him divine honors and dedicated a tem- 
 ple to ' Venus Lamia.' " 
 
 Madame Pico's Benefit. — We should be happy 
 if Europe would inform us why this remarkable can- 
 tatrice comes to us " new as a tooth-pick," as to fame, 
 and whether (the same lack of previous trumpeting 
 having given us a surprise in Malibran), we are to 
 have the credit also of the eccalobeion of Pico ! Even 
 without the " deep-sea plummet" of her contralto 
 (which certainly does touch bottom for which most 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 765 
 
 voices lack fathoms of line) she has a compass as a 
 mezzo soprano, which would alone serve for remarka- 
 ble success in her profession. She is a most correct 
 musician too — (the only false note we have heard 
 from her, having been occasioned by her striking her 
 chest too violently while singing defiance to Vallellina) 
 — and, withal, a most gifted and charming woman, 
 every way formed to be an idol for the public. We 
 have written a great deal about Madame Pico, and, 
 her benefit being the last occasion we shall find, to do 
 more than chronicle her movements, we shall send 
 this quill to our friend Kendall of the Picayune (as 
 the Highlanders send the lighted brand), enveloped 
 in a stanza addressed by an Italian poet to Lady 
 Coventry : — 
 
 (( Si tutti gli alberi del mondo 
 
 Fossero penne, 
 
 II cielo fosse carta, 
 
 II mare inchiostro 
 Non basterenno a destrivere 
 La minima parte della'' — 
 
 We leave the rest to the Picayune's prophetic divina- 
 tion. 
 
 Adieu, Pico, l'in-cantatrice ! A clear throat and a 
 plethoric pocket to you ! 
 
 Madame Arnoult's Concert. — It looked very 
 queer (and a little wicked withal) to see opera-glasses 
 and ladies with their heads uncovered, in the pews of 
 the Tabernacle ; and we are not sure that our "way 
 we should go" did not twitch us for a " departure," 
 when we found ourselves applauding with kid gloves 
 in the neighborhood of the altar ! We were applaud- 
 ing Pico ; and the next thought that came to us was, 
 a regret that such voices should not be consecrated to 
 church choirs; for (granting the opera to be a profane 
 amusement, as is thought by the worshippers at the 
 Tabernacle), " it is a pity," as a celebrated divine once 
 said, "that the devil should have all the good music.'' 
 And, apropos — was not this capital remark — (attributed, 
 we believe, to Wesley) — suggested by one, recorded 
 of the pope Gregory of the fifth century ? Britain 
 at that time was, to Rome, what Africa is now to us 
 — a savage country they brought slaves from; and 
 the introduction of Christianity into that heathen land 
 is said to have been prompted by the pope's admira- 
 tion of the beauty of two or three young John Bulls 
 who were for sale in the market-place of Rome. On 
 inquiring of the merchant if they were Christians, 
 and being informed they were pagans, he exclaimed, 
 " Alas, what a pity that the author of darkness should 
 be in possession of men of such fair countenances /" He 
 commissioned Pelagius forthwith to send missionaries 
 to the handsome British pagans, and hence the church 
 of England — probably the only church, the members 
 of which owe their salvation to their personal beauty ! 
 (Pardon this historical digression, dear readers!) 
 
 Madame Arnoult took New York by surprise — 
 she is so much better a singer than was supposed. | 
 With less effort, and in a smaller room than the nave 
 of the Tabernacle, she would, however, appear to much 
 more advantage. Her voice, to our ear, lacked fledg- i 
 ing, or lining, or something to make it warmer or 
 more downy — but it is a clear and most cultivable 
 soprano, and she manages it with wonderful skill for a 
 beginner at public singing. We predict great popu- ' 
 larity for her. Madame Pico sang, with her, the 
 duet from Semiramide, and it was enough to steep 
 even the pulpit cushion in a this world's trance of 
 music. 
 
 Armlets. — We have observed that there is a late 
 fashionable promotion of the jewels of the arm to the 
 more lovely round above the elbow, where, it must 
 
 be confessed, a bracelet sits much more enviably im- 
 bedded. We rather think this renewal of the fashion 
 of armlets is a clean jump from the rape of Helen to 
 1845, for the latest mention we can find of it is in the 
 account of the Trojan nymphs, who laid aside their 
 armlets to dance in the choirs on Mount Ida. It 
 takes an arm, plump and not too plump, to wear this 
 clasp with a grace, but where the arm is really beauti- 
 ful, no ornament could be more fitly and captivatingly 
 located. We were very much struck with the effect 
 upon the dazzling arm on which we lately noticed it. 
 
 Views of Morris's Concert There are few 
 
 buttons on the motley coat of human dependance, to 
 which the button-hole is not serviceably correspondent 
 — the button (conferring the favor) commonly draw- 
 ing the same garment closer by aid of the button-hole 
 (receiving the favor). There is one very striking in- 
 stance however, of constant services unreciprocated, in 
 what editors do for singers and actors. Our attention 
 has been called to this by a series of paragraphs — 
 1 (part silly, part malicious) — expressing surprise that 
 Ole Bull and others, who had never been in any way 
 benefited by Gen. Morris, should have been asked to 
 contribute their services gratuitously to his benefit 
 | concert. 
 
 It is needful, of course, in a newspaper, to make 
 some mention and some critical estimate of all public 
 performers. It may be done favorably or unfavor- 
 ably ; and there is a way of being abundantly paid for 
 cither. " Black mail" is willingly paid where com- 
 mendation is sold in shambles, but the editor is belter 
 paid, still, if, with skilful roasting and dissection of 
 the faults of public performers, he cruelly enriches 
 his paper (like a pate defoie gras with the liver of the 
 goose roasted alive), and so sends it, palatably spiced, 
 to the uninquiring appetite of the public. He who 
 has a hair of his head left undamned, to creep with 
 shame at the "black mail" sale of his approbation — 
 and he who has common human kindness to prevent 
 his murdering the hopes of strangers to make his 
 paper readable — both these are of classes that go un- 
 paid, and commonly unthanked, for services most 
 essential to others, and forbearance most costly to 
 themselves. 
 
 The editor's business is to make his paper readable. 
 The most difficult task he has to do is to be readably 
 good-natured. The easiest writing in the world is 
 criticism amusingly severe. If any one doubts, for 
 example, that with the same pains we have taken, 
 glowingly to interpret between Ole Bull and the pub- 
 lic, we could have ridiculed him into a comparative 
 failure — sending a laugh before him through the 
 country that would have armed every listener with an 
 impenetrable incredulity — if any one doubts our power 
 to have done this, as easily as we have ushered him 
 into hearts we made ready for a believing reception 
 of his music, he does not know either the press or the 
 public — neither the arbitrary license of the press, nor 
 the public's weak memory lor everything but ridicule. 
 Where Ole Bull now stands, the press is compara- 
 tively powerless. He is stamped with success. But, 
 when he stood on the threshold of this country's favor 
 — a musician, whose peculiarities at first seemed tricks, 
 and whom few heard for the first time with a confident 
 appreciation — if, then, ridicule had met him, boldly 
 and unsparingly, even though this one paper had alone 
 opened the cry, he would have had us to thank, we 
 believe, for the tide turned back on which he now rides 
 triumphantly onward. Certain as it is that we could 
 not, all alone, have made his present good fortune, it 
 is quite as certain that we could, all alone, have marred 
 it — and that, too, to the profitable spicing of our some- 
 what praise-ridden columns. We need not stop to 
 
766 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 tell the reader that we are describing the fiend Siam- 
 esed to Liberty — an Irresponsible Press which can not 
 be chained without chaining Liberty too — but we wish 
 to show that there is some merit in not harnessing 
 this fiend to our own slow vehicle of fortune. There 
 never was an opportunity so ready as Ole Bull's ad- 
 veut for amusing ridicule — but we were the first, or 
 among the first, to call fur faith in him,, and aid in his 
 appreciation. We did it from love of the man and 
 belief in his genius, and would as soon have been 
 marked on the brow with a hot iron as bargain for a 
 syllable of it. But — the unforeseen opportunity pre- 
 senting itself, when, apparently, he might return our 
 paper's service by a favor to our associate — he was 
 invited without scruple to do so. Suppose he had 
 played ten minutes on the violin for the benefit of the 
 proprietor of a paper devoted, for a year, invariably to 
 his interests? Would it have been the "act of chari- 
 ty" for which a paragraphist says that " Ole Bull was 
 unreasonably called upon ?" The high-spirited Nor- 
 wegian placed his regret, that he could not be here to 
 comply, upon no such footing. 
 
 While we are calling things by their real names, 
 we may as well change the label of another matter — 
 the motive of the benefit to Gen. Morris. As the 
 public know, our estimable associate, by twenty years 
 of literary labor, amassed a moderate fortune, which, 
 in the disasters of an era of bankruptcy, he suddenly 
 lost. A part of his property was invested in the 
 beautiful country-seat of Undercliff on the Hudson — 
 the residence of his family for several years. His 
 friends — with a provident hope, looking beyond the 
 clouds that enveloped him — fastened, to the transfer 
 of this lovely spot, a condition by which he might, 
 if able, repurchase it at a certain time, and at its then 
 reduced valuation. He has since been suffered to 
 tenant it for a trifling rent. He has improved it, em- 
 bellished it, increased its value. His children have 
 grown up in it. But, meantime, the limit came around 
 — (now only a short time off) — when the purchase 
 must be made or the home lost. His old friends came 
 to inquire into the probable result of their forethought 
 for him. We need not give the particulars of our 
 business — General Morris was partly prepared to re- 
 deem *he property. The lack was a sum that might 
 be covered by a benefit concert — so suggested by one 
 of the parties. It was urged upon him and declined. 
 He was told that Beranger had three subscriptions 
 (one of twenty thousand dollars) — that Campbell 
 had several — that Scott's children were relieved of 
 his debts by a posthumous subscription of two hun- 
 dred thousand dollars — and that private subscrip- 
 tions for literary men were of common occurrence in 
 England. 
 
 The public know the sequel. He refused, till the 
 concert was agreed upon by his friends without him. 
 The Italians, whom our paper had more especially 
 served, sprang, generously and with acclamation, to 
 reciprocate our constant advocacy of their company's 
 attraction. The musicians resident here were all 
 friends of General Morris, for he alone, more than all 
 othei men in New York taken together, had served the 
 dramatic and musical profession. They, too, joyous- 
 ly sprang to the chance of benefiting him. Never 
 was service more eagerly rendered than that by the 
 performers last night at the Tabernacle — never came 
 good purpose before the public, so lamely and dis- 
 paragingly construed. 
 
 In making up our mind to allow the public to be 
 intimate with us, we expect now and then to expose 
 the lining of our gaberdine. We conform to the exi- 
 gences of the latitude we live in — but upon dishabille ex- 
 planations, we hope for dishabille constructions. What 
 we have written here, between five o'clock, A. M., and 
 breakfast (wholly without the knowledge of General 
 Morris), goes to press with the ink undried, and we 
 
 have no security against errors but that of writing as 
 we would talk to our confessor. If the time should 
 ever arise when really good intentions may be trusted 
 to stand, in public opinion : — 
 
 •'' With that credent bulk 
 
 That no unworthy scandal once can touch 
 
 But it confounds the breather," 
 
 we may cease to explain " why our stocking is un- 
 gartered." Meantime, we expect to die. 
 
 The Opera Bereavement. — What is to become 
 of this widower of a town when it has lost its fairly-es- 
 poused Pico, we must leave to the survivor's obituary 
 to record. We may as well have our ears boxed and 
 stowed away ! — Their vocation is as good as gone ! 
 No more Pico ? Faith, it will go hard for the first 
 week or two ! But — by the way — as those " lost from 
 us" are invariably supposed to be crowned in the next 
 place they go to, and as, of course, Pico will be 
 crowned in the presence of St. Charles and the brunet 
 angels of New Orleans, we must take upon ourselves, 
 as her New York " gold slick in waiting," to summon 
 one at least, of her liege subjects to his duty. (We 
 happen, fortunately, to possess an autograph of 
 George the Fourth, signed to the necessary formula.) 
 
 " To G W- K , Marquis of ' Picayune :' 
 
 "Right Trusty and Right Well-beloved 
 Cousin. — We greet you well. Whereas, the 1st day 
 of March next (or thereabouts) is appointed for our 
 coronation. — These are to will and command you (all 
 excuses set apart) to make your personal attendance 
 on us at the time above-mentioned, furnished and ap- 
 pointed as to your rank and quality appertaineth. — 
 There to do and perform all such services as shall be 
 required and belong to you. — Whereof you are not to 
 fail. — And so we bid you heartily farewell. 
 
 "Given at our court at Palmo's, the 21st day of 
 January, 1845, in the first year of our reign. 
 
 "Pico Prima (donna).'" 
 
 Star returning to its Meridian. — Pico has 
 changed her mind! Jubilate! She has declined to 
 go to New Orleans with the Borgheses, and will re- 
 main here to be the nucleus for a new operatic crys- 
 talization. We beg New York and Boston to shake 
 hands in felicitation ! And now that it is settled (as 
 we understand it was, yesterday, by a decisive letter 
 to Signor Borghese), let us splinter a ray or two of 
 light upon the diamond that has so wisely refused re- 
 setting. New Orleans is a French city, with a French 
 opera ; and Mademoiselle Borghese is a French wo- 
 man, with lost laurels to win back from the Italian 
 Pico. This new arena, little likely to have been an 
 impartial one, is a great way off, the journey danger- 
 ous and tedious, and, to go there, Madame Pico must 
 abruptly leave a wave of fortune, which she is now 
 riding "at the flood." and give up three admiring cities 
 for one that might be dubious ! A new opera-house 
 is about to be built here, of which she will be the first 
 predominant star; her concerts, in the meantime, in 
 the different cities, will profitably employ her ; and, 
 as to the company, there is a substitute lying perdu 
 for Borghese, and a tenor might soon be found to re- 
 place Perozzi. Out of these facts, the public can 
 pick the good reasons Madame Pico has for abandon- 
 ing her journey to New Orleans. Let us do our best 
 to show her that she has not made a mistake in pre- 
 ferring us 
 
 Taking the White Veil. — The Undine of the 
 Bowling-green (Miss Undine W g, if named after 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 767 
 
 the gentleman to whose liberality she owes her exist- 
 ence) was shown last evening, with her radiant beau- 
 ty enveloped in aiittering white, to the assembled 
 friends of the author of her being. To alight from 
 the poetry of (he matter: — Mr.W g invited, yester- 
 day, a party of his friends to see an illumination of the 
 superb fountain with which he has embellished that 
 part of the city. The rocky structure through which 
 it leaps, is completely encrusted with ice, and it look- 
 ed like — like more things than we have room to men- 
 tion. The colored light covered the fountain first 
 with a suffused blush of the tenderest pink, and this 
 deepened to crimson, and the glow upon ice and water 
 was really superb beyond any effect of the kind we 
 have ever witnessed. It made even a Dry Dock om- 
 nibus (which chanced to be passing at the moment), 
 look rosily picturesque and fairy-like. The black sky 
 overhead ; the delicate tracery of the naked branches ! 
 of the trees; the enclosure of architecture with lights 
 in the windows (which seemed completely to shut it j 
 in like the court of an illuminated palace), were all 
 striking additions to the effect. We would inquire, 
 by the way, whether this couleur de rose could not be j 
 adapted to the brightening of the ice with which the \ 
 fountains of the mind are sometimes crusted over. J 
 Phlogistic chymists will please explain. 
 
 Improvements on the American Language. — 
 The making an improvement in one's mother's prop- 
 erty is, of course, a praiseworthy filial service, and we 
 find that we have succeeded in enriching our "mother 
 language" by successfully breaking, to new and valu- 
 able service, a pair of almost useless and refractory 
 terminations. " -Dom" and " -tricity" may now be 
 hitched by a single hyphen to any popular word, name, 
 or phrase, and, without the cumbrous harness of a 
 periphrasis, may turn it out in the full equipage of a 
 collective noun ! Our first experiment in this econo- 
 my of parts of speech was the describing a charming 
 class of society by the single word Japonica-dom. 
 This musical substantive could hardly be displaced by 
 a shorter sentence than " the class up town who usu- 
 ally wear in their hair the expensive exotic commonly 
 called a japonica.'''' The second experiment was the 
 word Pico-tricity — a condensation of " the power, 
 brilliancy, and electric effect of the singing of Mad- 
 ame Rosina Pico." We see by the papers that these 
 expediting inventions (for which we liberally refrained 
 from taking out a patent) are freely used already by 
 our brother administrators of the mother language, 
 and we have only respectfully to suggest a proper 
 economy and fitness in their application. 
 
 Early-hours-dom. — Wescaicely need explain, we 
 presume, that we have undertaken the wholesome 
 mission of giving interest, as far as in us lies, to the \ 
 more refined occupancy of that portion of the day coin- 
 prised between twilight and go-to-bcd time — becoming, 
 so to speak, the apostle of fashionable early-hours- 
 dom. Of course we are entirely too practical to dream 
 of " reforming out," by mere force of argument, the 
 four-hours' unprofitable yawn and the night's restitu- 
 tion-less robbery of sleep. Every one knoxcs that the 
 reasons for the late hours of European fashion are 
 wholly rcanting in this country — but everyone consents 
 to follow the fashion without the reasons. The only 
 way to diminish the attraction of late amusements 
 is to anticipate them by more attractive early amuse- 
 ments. It will be remembered that we commenced 
 our vigorous support of the opera with this view of 
 the use of it. It was a well-put though unsuspected 
 blow to the habit of late hours, for many gave up par- 
 
 ties they would otherwise have gone to, from having 
 been sufficiently amused at the opera; and others 
 found out, practically, that to dress and go to the ap- 
 era from seven till ten, gave all the relaxation they re- 
 quired, and their natural night's sleep into the bar- 
 gain ! It is with this ultimate view of making a fash- 
 ionable Kate 
 
 " Conformable as other household Kates" — 
 
 giving us a substitute that shall make late hours more 
 easily dispensed with — that we look upon the plan of 
 this new opera-house as a national benefit. If built 
 luxuriously, lavishly lighted, made to serve all the pur- 
 poses of a sumptuous festal saloon, and give exquisite 
 music besides, it will be a preferable resort to a ball- 
 room ; and we believe that it is only from the lack of 
 a preferable resort in evening dress, that late parties 
 are any way endurable. Early parties on the off 
 nights of the opera, would soon follow, we think — the 
 habit of early hours of gayety, once relished — and so 
 would creep out this servile and senseless imitation of 
 foreign fashion. 
 
 Untilled Field of Literature in New Yore. 
 — The one country we have lived in, without loving 
 a native, is the country that, on the whole, gave us 
 the most to admire — France. We embroidered a 
 year and a half of our memory with the grace and wit 
 of the world's capital of taste, and we have left a heart 
 (travellers' pattern) in every other country between 
 Twenty-second street and the Black sea; but, that 
 we do not even suspect the color of a French heart- 
 ache we solemnly vow — and marvel. We admire the 
 French quite enough, however (perhaps there lies the 
 philosophy of it!) to leave no fuel for sentiment to 
 mourn over as wastage, and now — (apropos des bottes) 
 — why have we no vehicle for French wit in New 
 York — no battery for the friction and sparkle of French 
 electricity? How can the French live without a 
 " Charivari ?" Twenty thousand French inhabitants 
 and no savor in the town, as if the gods had "dined 
 below stairs!" Ten thousand French women (prob- 
 ably), and either no celebrity, of wit or beauty, among 
 them, or no needful newspaper-cloud in which the 
 thunder and lightning of such pervading electricities 
 could be collected ! 
 
 We wonder whether the ^Courrier des Elats Unis'' 
 (the Anchises French paper which we read, as the 
 pious JEneas carried his father on his back, to have 
 something to cherish, out of the city left behind — 
 something French, that is to say) — we wonder wheth- 
 er, on their alternate days, the editors of that sober 
 tri-weekly paper could not give us something spiced 
 a la Parisiennc — and whether such a vehicle, for the 
 French wit that must he here, benumbed or hidden, 
 would not be a profitable speculation ! The "Cour- 
 rier" is the best of useful and grave papers, and en- 
 tirely fulfils its destiny, but it is small pleasure to the 
 ten thousand people in New York, who relish French 
 literature, to re-peruse the matter of the daily papers, 
 rechauffe in a foreign language. If the lack of Paris- 
 ian material, here, were an apparent objection, what a 
 delightful luxury it would be to have a paper made up, 
 
 \ at first, entirely, with the condensed essence of the 
 gay papers of Paris ? A feature of New York chari- 
 vari-ty might be gradually worked in— but, meantime, 
 
 ! a weli-selected bouquet of the prodigal wit and fun of 
 
 I the capital (made comprehensible by a correspond- 
 ence kept up with Paris, which should explain alio- 
 
 I sions, etc.) would be, we should really suppose, most 
 attractive to the better classes of our society, and, to 
 
 | the French of New Orleans and other more remote 
 
 ' cities, an indispensable luxury. 
 
 There is a natural homeopathy for everything French 
 in this city — much stronger than for the same things 
 
768 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 a VAnglaise. We would wish, too, that the barrier 
 of a different language were gradually broken down, 
 s^tbat some of the delightful peculiarities of Paris 
 might ooze into our city manners through a conduit 
 of periodical literature. Heigho !— to think of the 
 brilliant intellectual lamps blazing like noonday in 
 France, while, with the material for the same bright- 
 ness about us, we lit by the glimmer of fire-light! 
 Oh, Jules Janin ! " American in Paris !" — come over 
 with your prodigal brain and be a Parisian in Ameri- 
 ca! Ordain yourself as a missionary of wit, and Ja- 
 nin-ify a continent by a year's exile beyond the Bou- 
 levards! You'll laugh at us when you return, but 
 streams chafe the channels they refresh, and we will 
 take you with your murmur! 
 
 "L'onda, dal mar divisa, 
 Bagna la valle e l'monte, 
 Va passegiara 
 In flume, 
 Va prigionera 
 In fonte, 
 
 Mormora sempre e gem 
 Fin che non torna al mar." 
 
 It would hardly be inferred — but we really sat 
 down to write the following paragraph, and not the 
 foregoing one : — 
 
 The Prima-donnas at Fault. — The "Courrier 
 des Etats Unis" has now and then an ebullition of na- 
 tional spirituality, in the shape of a half column of 
 theatrical gossip, and we have had on our table, for 
 several days, a cut-out paragraph, very well hit off, 
 touching one or two of the town's pleasure-makers. 
 The editor is, of course, behind the curtain, as the 
 natural centre of the foreign circle of New York, and 
 lie writes with knowledge. He gives as a fact that 
 Borghese cleared $550 by her benefit, but he dispara- 
 ges the performance of that evening, and hauls the 
 ladies seriously over the coals for having exhausted 
 themselves at a private party the night before ! He 
 detects an anachronism in Semiramide, and calls Pico 
 to account for appearing before the queen (as Arsace) 
 with his mother's crown on, when the good lady had 
 as yet only promised it to him! The first thing in the 
 succeeding duet, says the " Courrier," should have 
 been a remark from Semiramide (who has promised 
 him the crown as a lover, not knowing it is her son) 
 to this effect : " Vous etes un peu presse, mon bel 
 amoureux!" ou bien, " De quel droit portez-vous 
 cette couronne, que je n'ai fait que vous offrir ?" The 
 crown given him by the high-priest, out of the pater- 
 nal box, was, of course, only symbolic, as the queen 
 was still on the throne. 
 
 Korponat's Fall, from a Faux Pas. — Another 
 matter touched in the same paragraph is the non- 
 rising of the new ballet-star promised for that evening. 
 The leader of the constellation chanced to be taken 
 ill (below the horizon) at Philadelphia, but the Cour- 
 rier states that the illness was owing to a fall, from a 
 faux pas, and that the faux pas was an engagement 
 by the tumbler (Korponay) to go to Philadelphia 
 once a week for twenty-four dollars, when his expen- 
 ses, wife and all, were twenty-six/ The Courrier does 
 not state, what we think highly probable, that Korpo- 
 nay's blood has come through too many generations 
 of gentlemen to be good at a dancing-master's bar- 
 gains. 
 
 The new Danseuse. — A third topic of this same 
 pregnant paragraph is the contention between two 
 dancing-masters, Charruaud and Mons. Korponay, for 
 the honor of having given the finishing grace to the 
 'light fantastic toe" of Miss Brooks, the new won- 
 der. Monsieur Charruaud (Frenchman-like) declares 
 that she is not only his pupil, but by no means the best 
 vf his pupils ! Monsieur Korponay simply advertises 
 her as his; and the star, and the star's mamma, con- 
 fess to her Korponay-tivity. But — 
 
 (" How Alexander's dust may stop a bung !") 
 
 What blood does the public think is running in tho 
 veins of this same " fantastic toe?" — James Brooks — 
 the " Florio," who, ten years ago, was the poetical 
 passion of this country — was the father of this dancing 
 girl ! What would that sensitive poet have written 
 (prophetically) on the first appearance of his daughter 
 in a pas seul ! 
 
 Longfellow's Waif. — A friend, who is a very fine 
 critic, gave us, not long since, a review of this delight- 
 ful new book. Perfectly sure that anything from that 
 source was a treasure for our paper, we looked up 
 from a half-re*\d proof to run our eye hastily over it, 
 and gave it to the printer — not, however, without 
 mentally differing from the writer as to the drift of 
 the last sentence, as follows: — 
 
 "We conclude our notes on the 'Waif with the 
 observation that, although full of beauties, it is in- 
 fected with a moral taint — or is this a mere freak of 
 our own fancy ? We shall be pleased if it be so — but 
 there does appear, in this exquisite little volume, a 
 very careful avoidance of all American poets who may 
 be supposed especially to interfere with the claims of 
 Mr. Longfellow. These men Mr Longfellow can 
 continuously imitate (is that the word?) and yet never 
 even incidentally commend." 
 
 Notwithstanding the haste with which it passed 
 through our attention (for we did not see it in proof), the 
 question of admission was submitted to a principle in 
 our mind; and, in admitting it, we did by Longfellow as 
 we would have him do by us. It was a literary charge, 
 by a pen that never records an opinion without some 
 supposed good reason, and only injurious to Long- 
 fellow (to our belief) while circulating, un-replied-to. 
 in conversation-dom. In the second while we reasoned 
 upon it, we went to Cambridge and saw the poet's 
 face, frank and scholar-like, glowing among the busts 
 and pictures in his beautiful library, and (with, per- 
 haps a little mischief in remembering how we have 
 always been the football and he the nosegay of our con- 
 temporaries) we returned to our printing-office arguing 
 thus : Our critical friend believes this, though we do 
 not; Longfellow is asleep on velvet; it will do him 
 good to rouse him ; his friends will come out and 
 fight his battle ; the charge (which to us would be a 
 comparative pat on the back) will be openly disproved, 
 and the acquittal of course leaves his fame brighter 
 than before — the injurious whisper in conversation- 
 dom killed into the bargain ! 
 
 That day's Mirror commenced its 
 
 " Circle in the water 
 Which only seeketh to expand itself 
 Till, by much spreading, it expand to naught." 
 
 We expected the return mails from Boston to bring 
 us a calmly indignant "Daily Advertiser," a coquet- 
 tishly reproachful "Transcript," a paternally severe 
 " Courier," and an Olympically-denunciatory "Atlas." 
 A week has elapsed, and we are still expecting. Thun- 
 der is sometimes " out to pasture." But, meantime, 
 a friend who thinks it the driver's lookout if stones 
 are thrown at a hackney-coach, but interferes when it 
 is a private carriage — (has loved us these ten years, 
 that is to say, and never objected to our being a tar- 
 get, but thinks a fling at Longfellow is a very different 
 matter) — this friend writes us a letter. He thinks as 
 we do, exactly, and we shall, perhaps, disarm the 
 above-named body-guard of the accused poet by quo- 
 ting the summing-up of his defence : — 
 
 " It has been asked, perhaps, why Lowell was neg- 
 lected in this collection? Might it not as well be 
 asked why Bryant, Dana, and Halleck, were neglect- 
 ed ? The answer is obvious to any one who candidly 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 7G9 
 
 considers the character of the collection. It professed 
 to be, according to the proem, from the humbler poets ; 
 and it was intended to embrace pieces that were anon- 
 ymous, or which were not easily accessible to the gen- 
 eral reader — the waifs and estrays of literature. To 
 put anything of Lowell's, for example, into a collec- 
 tion of waifs, would be a peculiar liberty with pieces 
 which are all collected and christened." 
 
 It can easily be seen how Longfellow, and his 
 friends for him, should have a very different estimate 
 from ourself as to the value of an eruption, in print, of 
 the secret humors of appreciation. The transient j 
 disfiguring of the skin seems to us better than disease 
 concealed to aggravation. But, apart from the intrin- 
 sic policy of bringing all accusations to the light, 
 where they can be encountered, we think that the pe- 
 culiar temper of the country requires it. Our na- 
 tional character is utterly destitute of veneration. 
 There is a hostility to all privileges, except property 
 in money— to all hedges about honors— to all reserves 
 of character and reputation — to all accumulations of 
 value not bankable. There is but one field considered 
 fairly open — money -making. Fame-making, charac- 
 ter-making, position-making, power-making, are priv- 
 ileged arenas in which the " republican many" have 
 no share. 
 
 The distrust with which all distinction, except 
 wealth, is regarded, makes a whispered doubt more 
 dangerous to reputation than a confessed defect. The 
 dislike to inheritors of anything — birthrights of any- 
 thing — family names or individual genius — metamor- 
 phoses the first suspicion greedily into a belief. A 
 clearing-up of a disparaging doubt about a man is a 
 public disappointment. " That fellow is all right 
 again, hang him!" is the mental ejaculation of ninety- 
 nine in a hundred of the readers of a good defence or 
 a justification. 
 
 P. S. We are not recording this view of things by 
 way of assuming to be, ourself, above this every-day 
 level of the public mind — too superfine to be a part 
 of such a public. Not a bit of it. We can not afford 
 superfinery of any kind. We are trying to make a 
 living by being foremost in riding on a coming turn of 
 the tide in these matters. The country is at the low- 
 est ebb of democracy consistent with its intelligence. 
 The taste for refinements, for distinctions, for aristo- 
 cratic entrenchments, is moving with the additional 
 momentum of a recoil. We minister to this, in the 
 way of business, as the milliner makes a crown-shaped 
 head-dress for Mrs. President Tyler. It has its pen- 
 alty, but that was reckoned at starting. We knew, 
 of course, that we could not sell fashionable opinions 
 at our counter without being assailed as assuming to 
 be the representative of fashion* — just as if we could 
 not even name a tribute of libertinism to virtue with- 
 out being sillily called a libertine by the Courier, 
 Commercial, and Express. However, there is some 
 hope, by dint of lifetime fault-culture, thai, in the sod 
 over a man's grave, there will be no slander-seed left 
 to flower posthumously undetected. 
 
 Popularity of Madame Pico. — During the past 
 week we received a letter from a serious writer (a lady), 
 confessing to her own great delight in Madame Pico, 
 
 * Others have recorded this national habit of attacking the 
 individual instead of the opinion. Dr. Reese, in his ''Ad- 
 dress in behalf of the Bible in Schools," thus speaks of the 
 manner of opposition to his philanthropic labors : — 
 
 " I have learned that to tremble in the presence of popular 
 clamor, or desert the post of duty when it be*>mes one of 
 danger, is worthy neither of honor nor manhood ; else I would 
 have gladly retired from the conflict to which I found my first 
 official act exposed me, and the hostile weapons of which were 
 aimed, not at the law under which I was acting, but hurled only 
 against my humble self." 
 
 49 
 
 but wishing us to impress upon our religious readers, 
 by arguments more at length, the sacredness of good 
 music, even by an operatic singer. We remember a 
 passage in Burnet's Records, which shows that even 
 these operatic singers, if enlisted to sing in the choirs 
 of churches, would become the special subjects of 
 prayer. " Also ye shall pray for them that find any 
 light in this church, or give any behests, book, bell, 
 chalice or vestment, surplices, water-cloth or towel, 
 lands, rents, lamp or light, or other aid or service, 
 whereby God's worship is better served, sustained and 
 maintained in reading and singing." It has long been 
 our opinion that to heighten the character of church 
 music would be aiding and giving interest and con- 
 sequence to religious service, and the inviting of pro- 
 fessed singers to the choirs, for the sabbaths they pass 
 in the city, would make them particularly (according 
 to Burnet) special subjects of prayer. 
 
 The four-feet precipice between the carriage wheel 
 and the side walk, and the back slope to the range of 
 racing omnibuses and drunken sleigh-riders, prevent 
 ladies from embarking in carriages at present, and this 
 is one thing that reconciles us to the opera people's 
 having chosen to 
 
 " fold up their tents like the Arab 
 And silently steal away." 
 
 Madame Pico has found a rich oasis in Boston appre- 
 ciation, and we trust the snow will have melted away 
 before the Tabernacle so that it will not bean inacces- 
 sible desert when she returns. Her concert there will 
 be like a dawn after a month's night of music. 
 
 TWO OR THREE NEW FASHIONS IN FRANCE. In a 
 
 French pamphlet handed in to our office a few days 
 ago, purporting to be Monsieur Grousset's justification 
 for having been shot down in Broadway by Monsieur 
 Emeric, Mr. Grousset describes a previous affair with 
 the same gentleman, lately, in France. On that oc- 
 casion, he states, Mr. Emeric went to the field attended 
 by nine persons, one of whom was a lady ! 
 
 We find, also, by a private letter from a friend in 
 Paris, that the now common female practice of smo- 
 king cigars is considered (by connoisseurs in know- 
 ing-dom) as a most engaging addition to the attractions 
 of some particular styles of beauty ! " The play of the 
 mouth upon the cigar, the reddening of the lips by the 
 irritation of the tobacco, and the insouciant air, al- 
 together, which it gives to the smoker, adds to the 
 peculiar quality of a dashing and coquettish woman, as 
 much as it would detract from that of a retiring and 
 timid one." The eyes (he adds) gleam with a peculiar 
 softness, through the smoke. Our correspondent had 
 just returned from a call on a charming American 
 lady, whom he found with a cigar in her rosy mouth ! 
 
 Wellington boots have been sported during the 
 late bad weather for walking, by some of the fashion- 
 able ladies of Paris. They are made of patent leather, 
 reaching to the knee, with a small tassel in front (at 
 least so exhibited in shop-windows) and the leg of the 
 boot rounded and shaped in firm leather, like the 
 fashion of boots twenty years ago. The high heel 
 (keeping the sole of the foot from the wet pavement), 
 is "raved about," in Paris— the ladies wondering how 
 such a sensible thing as a heel should have been so 
 long disused by the sex most in need of its protection. 
 The relief of the ankles from contact with the cold or 
 wet edge of the dress in wet weather is dwelt upon in 
 the description, as is also the increased beauty of the 
 foot from the heightening of the arch of the instep by 
 the high heel. 
 
770 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Fashions for country belles. — The following 
 appeal to our gallantry pulls very hard : — 
 
 "Mr. Editor: One of the greatest treats you 
 could give your country lady readers, would be to 
 furnish them from time to time, with brief hints as to 
 the actual style of fashions in the metropolis. We 
 have, all along, depended for information on this im- 
 portant subject, upon the monthly magazines, all of 
 which piofess to give the fashions as worn, but we find 
 out to our dismay, that they pick up their fashions 
 from the Paris and London prints at random — some 
 of them adopted by our city ladies, some not ! It thus 
 happens that we country people, who like to be in the 
 fashion, are often subjected to great expense and mor- 
 tification — relying too implicitly upon the magazine 
 reports. We cause a bonnet or a dress to be made 
 strictly in accordance with the style prescribed in the 
 fashion plate of the magazine, and when we hie away 
 to the city with our new finery, we discover that our 
 costume is so outre that every one laughs at us! Now, 
 should there not be some remedy for this evil ? 
 
 " We ladies hope you will do something for us in 
 the way of remedying this. You can make up a para- 
 graph, every now and then, on the subject without 
 more trouble than it costs you in writing a critique on 
 a much less important matter. Let us know all about 
 the real changes in the 'outer woman' in Broadway 
 and in drawing-rooms. Tell us all about the New 
 York shawls, and New York handkerchiefs, and New 
 York gloves, etc. And, when the fine weather again 
 appears, tell us about the riding -dresses and riding- 
 caps your friends in the city wear, and do not fail to 
 give us an exact account of the kind of sun-defenders 
 in vogue, whether they be parasols, shades, hoods, or 
 anything else. ****** 
 
 " I subscribe myself, your well-wisher, 
 
 " Kate Salisbury. 
 
 •« Belle Grange, Jan. 29." 
 
 We have omitted the bulk of Miss Kate's letter, 
 giving rather too long an account of two or three ex- 
 pensive disasters from being misguided by magazines 
 as to the fashions — but it is easily to be seen that it is 
 a matter that concerns outlay which " comes home to 
 business and bosom." We shall take it into con- 
 sideration. Our present impression is, that we shall 
 set apart half a column, weekly, bi-weekly, or tri- 
 weekly, devoted to " the fashions by an eye-witness." 
 This, however, immediately suggests a dilemma: 
 There are two schools of taste among the ladies ! 
 Some women dress for men's eyes, and this style is 
 both striking and economical. Other women (most 
 women indeed), dress for ladies' approval only, and 
 this style is studiously expensive, sacrifices becoming- 
 ness to novelty, and is altogether beyond male appre- 
 ciation. — Which style should we shape our report for ? 
 
 Canadian Gossip — The chief of the Scotch clan, 
 McNab, has lately emigrated to Canada with a hun- 
 dred clansman. On arriving at Toronto, he called on 
 his newly illustrious namesake, Sir Allan, and left his 
 card as " The McNab." Sir Allan returned his visit, 
 leaving as his card, " The other McNab." The un- 
 usual relish of this accidental bit of fun, has elevated 
 the definite article into a kind of provincial title, and, 
 in common conversation, the leading individual of a 
 family name is regularly i/ie-ified. Among the officers 
 at Montreal there was lately a son of the late cele- 
 brated " Jack Mytton," the most game-y sportsman 
 in England. Meeting Sir Allan McNab at a mess- 
 dinner, young Mytton sent wine to him with the mes- 
 sage : " The Mytton" would be happy to take wine 
 with " The Other McNab." We should not wonder 
 f this funny use of the definite article became the 
 
 germ of the first American title. The Tyler ! The 
 Mrs. Tyler! 
 
 This same young Mytton, by the way, inherited his 
 father's adventurous temper, and though the first 
 favorite of Montreal society, he alone, of all the offi- 
 cers, could find no lady willing to sleigh-ride with him. 
 They openly declared their fear of his pranks of driving. 
 One fine day, however, when all the town was on run- 
 ners, Mytton was seen with a dashing turn-out, and a 
 lady deeply veiled, sitting beside him, to whose com- 
 fort he was continually ministering, and to whom he 
 was talking with the most merry glee. It was, to all 
 appearance, a charming and charmed auditor, at least. 
 The next day, there was great inquiry as to who was 
 driving with Mr. Mytton. The mystery was not 
 solved for a week. It came out at last, that in a 
 certain milliner's shop in Montreal had stood a wooden 
 "lay figure" for the exhibition of caps and articles 
 of dress. The despairing youth had bought this, had 
 it expensively and fashionably dressed, and still keeps 
 it at his lodgings (under the name of " Ma'm'selle 
 Pis-Aller") for his companion in sleigh-riding! 
 
 WHO ARE THE UPPER TEN THOUSAND ? 
 (In reply to a question of Fanny Forester's.) 
 
 * * * Your postscript, asking "Enlightenment as 
 to the upper ten thousand" can not be answered with 
 a candle-end of attention. From the " sixes and 
 sevens" of our brain, we must draw a whole " dip," 
 new and expensive, to throw light on that matter — 
 expensive, inasmuch as the same length of editorial 
 candle would light us through a paragraph. If ador- 
 able "Cousin 'Bel" chance to be leaning over your 
 chair, therefore, beg her to lift the curtain of her 
 auburn tress-aract from your shoulder, and allow the 
 American public to look over while you read. 
 
 The upper ten thousand, all told, would probably 
 number one hundred thousand, or more: Not in Eng- 
 land, where the upperdorn is a matter of ascertained 
 certainty, but in a republic, where every man has his 
 own idea of what kind are uppermost, and where, of 
 course, there are as many " ten thousands" as there 
 are different claims to position. Probably few things 
 would be funnier than for an angel suddenly to re- 
 quest the upper ten thousand of New York to walk up 
 the let-down steps of a cloud, and record their names 
 and residences, for the convenience of the up-town 
 ministering spirits ! A hundred thousand, we are sure, 
 would be the least number of autographs left in the 
 heavenly directory ! 
 
 But, till we arrive at the "red-book" degree of defi- 
 nite aristocracy, a newspaper addressed to the " upper 
 ten thousand" embraces a sufficient bailiwick for the 
 most ambitious circulation. There are all manner of 
 standards for " the best people." The ten thousand 
 who live in the biggest houses would define New York 
 upperdorn with satisfactory clearness, to some. The 
 ten thousand " safest" men would satisfy others. The 
 educated ten thousand — the religious ten thousand — 
 the ten thousand who had grandfathers — the ten 
 thousand who go to Saratoga and Newport — the 
 liberal ten thousand — the ten thousand who ride in 
 carriages — the ten thousand who spend over a certain 
 sum — the ten thousand "above Bleecker" — the ten 
 thousand "ever heard of" — are aristocracies as others 
 estimate them. And till the really upper ten thousand 
 are indubitably defined, there are ninety thousand, 
 more or less, who are in the enjoyment of a most desi- 
 rable illusion. 
 
 No! no! — republican benevolence — the "greatest 
 happiness of the greatest number" — would stop the 
 march of civilization as to aristocracy, where it is. 
 Its progress is through a reversed cornucopia, and the 
 
EPHEMERA 
 
 771 
 
 extreme end is too small for the comfort of the " na- 
 tion." Meantime, however, the standard of good 
 manners is rather loosely kept, and though the ten 
 " ten-thousands" are all seen to be tolerable, there is 
 a small class who go wholly unappreciated — those 
 who are unconscious of their oion degree from nature, 
 and are only recognisable bij the highest standards. 
 We speak of those who have " no manner" — simply 
 because they would be less refined if they had. There 
 are enchanting women in New York — we ourself 
 know a half-dozen — who are wholly unaware them- 
 selves, wholly unsuspected by others, of carrying a I 
 mark from nature that in Europe would supersede all j 
 questions of origin and circumstances. — English aris- 
 tocratic society is sprinkled throughout with these 
 sealed packets of nobility from God — one of whom I : 
 remember inquiring out with great interest, a single | 
 lady of thirty-six apparently, but looking like a dis- i 
 tilled drop of the " blood of all the Howards." simple : 
 as a tulip on the stem, and said, though obscurely con- ! 
 nected, to have refused a score of the best matches 
 of England. These "no manners" that are better 
 than " good manners" walk a republic quite undetected . 
 as aristocracy; but, as the persons so born are always | 
 beloved (losing only the admiration that is due to j 
 them) their benighted state scarce calls for a mis- 
 sionary ! 
 
 We should not be surprised if there were a pair 
 from this Nature's Upper-dom — 
 
 " Two trusty turtles, truefastest of all true," 
 — in your own village, dear Fanny Forester ! 
 
 THE WEST IN A PETTICOAT. 
 
 (By way of declining a communication in hope of a 
 better one.) 
 
 We have been for years looking at the western 
 horizon of American literature, for a star to rise that 
 should smack of the big rivers, steamboats, alligators, 
 and western manners. We have the down east — 
 embodied in Jack Downing and his imitators. There 
 was wanting a literary embodiment of the out west 
 — not, a mind shining at it, by ridiculing it from a 
 distance, but a mind shining from it, by showing its 
 peculiar qualities unconsciously. The rough-hewn 
 physiognomy of the west, though showing as yet but 
 in rude and unattractive outline, is the profile of a fine 
 giant, and will chisel down to noble features hereafter; 
 but, meantime, there will be a literary foreshadowing 
 of its maturity — abrupt, confiding, dashing writers, 
 regardless of all trammels and fearless of ridicule — 
 and we think we have heard from one of them. 
 
 The letter from which we shall quote presently, is 
 entirely in earnest, and signed with the lady's real 
 name. We at first threw the accompanying com- 
 munication asjde, as very original and amusing, but 
 unfit for print — except with comments which we had 
 no time to make. Taking it up again this morning, 
 we think we see a way to compass the lady-writer's 
 object, and we commence by giving her a fictitious 
 name to make famous (instead of her own), and by in- 
 teresting our readers in her with showing her charac- 
 ter of mind as her letter shows her to us. She is 
 quick, energetic, confident of herself, full of humor, 
 and a good observer, and the " half-horse half-alliga- 
 tor" impulses with which she writes so unconscious- 
 ly, may be trimmed into an admirable and entirely 
 original style by care and labor. 
 
 Miss " Kate Juniper,"* (so we name her), thus 
 
 * The word " Juniper'' is derived from the Latin words 
 "junior and parere" — descriptive of a fruit whidl makes its 
 appearance prematurely. We trust Miss Kate Juniper will see 
 the propriety of using this name till she is ripe enough to re- 
 sume her own. 
 
 western-fashion, in what she has to say 
 
 dashes, 
 to us :- 
 
 " I hate formal introductions. I would speak to you 
 now, and I will see you, when I may, in the Palace 
 of Truth. I am in Godey's Lady's Book with decent 
 compensation, but I want to be published faster than 
 they can do it. I want to write for the Mirror icithout 
 pay, for the sake of 'getting my name up.' I shah 
 ultimately 'put money in my purse' by this course. 
 I have now three manuscript volumes, which good 
 judges tell me are equal to Miss Bremer's. I send you 
 a specimen. I have a series of these sketches, enti- 
 tled 'The Spirits of the Room.' I can sell them to 
 Godey, but he will be for ever bringing them out. I 
 propose to give them to you, if you like them, in the 
 I true spirit of bargain and sale, though not in the let- 
 ter. 1 will give you as many as will serve my purpose 
 of getting my name known; and then, if success 
 1 comes, you will hold me by the chain of gratitude, as 
 you now do by that of reverence and affection. 
 
 " Will you write me immediately and tell me your 
 thoughts of this thing ? Truly your friend." 
 
 We can only give a taste of her literary quality by 
 an extract from her communication, the remainder 
 wanting finish, and this portion sufficing to introduce 
 her to our readers. We give it precisely as written 
 and punctuated. She is describing an interview with 
 a travelling lecturer on magnetism, and gives her own 
 experience in neurological sight-seeing : — 
 
 "Mark the sequel. I had, on going into the room, 
 lost my handkerchief. A gentleman famed for his 
 wisdom, his powder of seeing as far into the future 
 without the gift of second sight, as others can with it, 
 lent me his, protem. I heard the wonderful statements 
 of the ' New School in Psychology' relative to sym- 
 pathy established by means of magnetized or neurolo- 
 ! gized handkerchiefs, letters, etc. I determined to 
 j keep the handkerchief and see if there were enough 
 of the soul aura of my wise-acre friend imprisoned in 
 it, to affect me. I did so ; I returned to my home in 
 t the hotel — to my lonely room ; evening shut in ; the 
 waiter did not bring me a light; my anthracite burned 
 | blue and dimly enough ; I bound the magic handker- 
 chief about my brow and invoked the sight of my 
 | friend to aid my own. What I saw shall be told in 
 the next chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " I gazed into the dimness and vacancy that sur- 
 rounded me — I conjured the guardian spirit of the 
 room to come before me, and communicate some of 
 the secrets of his wards. How many hearts, thought 
 j I, have beat with joy and sorrow, with hope, and with 
 ! anguish unutterable in this room. But no guardian 
 spirit appeared, and I began to think that the tee-total 
 pledge of this hotel had really banished all sorts of 
 i spirits, neurology to the contrary notwithstanding. I 
 closed my eyes, laid my hand on the bewitching 
 ! point in my forehead, and lo ! my eyes were opened, 
 not literally but neurologically. At first a figure was 
 ; revealed dimly and indistinctly — gradually its outlines 
 j grew more defined, and a graceful young man stood 
 I before me. He was enveloped in the folds of an am- 
 ple cloak, a jewelled hand held it in front, and he 
 stood as if waiting to be known and noted. While 
 S gazing on him I found myself endowed with new ;md 
 marvellous powers — every line of his face had its 
 language, and told me a broad history. His attitude, 
 his hand, the manner in which the (olds of his cloak 
 fell about him, constituted a library that J. was skilled 
 to read, if I would. Here was" the signatura rerum. 
 I looked and looked— it was like looking into a libra- 
 ry and determining what you shall read, and what you 
 shall leave unread. Some one has said thai • ibe 
 half is greater than the whole.' This may be a physi- 
 cal, yet not a metaphysical paradox. Here I saw thu 
 
772 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 last occupant of my room standing before me. I 
 said I will first look at one week of his life. In a 
 moment I beheld him pacing fitfully the room — 
 his thoughts came before me — they were such as 
 these," &C, &c. 
 
 Miss Juniper goes on with an account of half a 
 dozen different characters, who (by a very natural 
 vein of revery) she imagines may have occupied the 
 room before her. The specimen we have given sim- 
 ply shows the free dash of her pen, and we think we 
 see in it the capability of better tilings. 
 
 Female Stock Brokers, Etc. — A letter from 
 Paris to the London Times describes the stock ex- 
 change of Paris (the Bourse) as thronged by female 
 speculators — not less than a hundred in attendance on 
 any one day. To do this, too, they are obliged to 
 stand in the open square in front of the building, as 
 they have been excluded from the interior by a spe- 
 cial regulation ! Every five minutes during the sale 
 of stocks, two or three bareheaded agents rush down 
 the steps of the Bourse to announce to the fair spec- 
 ulators the state of the market; and they buy and sell 
 accordingly. 
 
 Fancy a few of the customs of the " most polite na- 
 tion" introduced into New York ! What would "Mrs. 
 Grundy" say of a hundred ladies standing about on 
 the sidewalk in Wall street, speculating in stocks, and 
 excluded by a vote of the stock-brokers from the floor 
 of the Exchange! When will the New York ladies 
 begin to smoke in their carriages, as they do in Par- 
 is ? When will they wear Wellington boots with 
 high heels ? When will they frequent the billiard- 
 rooms and public eating-houses ? When will those who 
 are not rich enough to keep house, use "home" only 
 as birds do their nests, to sleep in — breakfasting, di- 
 ning, and amusing themselves, at all other hours, out 
 of doors, or in cafes and restaurants? When will the 
 more fashionable ladies receive morning calls in the 
 prettiest room in the house — their bed-room — them- 
 selves in bed, with coquettish caps and the most soig- 
 nee demi-toilet any way contrivable? Funny place, 
 France ! Yet in no country that we were ever in, 
 seemed woman so insincerely worshipped — so mocked 
 with the shadow of power over men. ' We should 
 think it as great a curiosity to see a well-bred French- 
 man love-sick (when he supposed himself alone) as to 
 see an angel tipsy, or a marble bust in tears. This 
 condition of the " love of the country," and the dissi- 
 pation of female habits, are mutual consequences — so 
 to speak. Men are constituted by nature to love 
 women, and in proportion as women become man-ified 
 they feel toward them as men do to each other — self- 
 ish and unimpressible. We remember once asking a 
 French nobleman who was very fond of London, what 
 was the most marked point of difference which he (as 
 a professed love-maker) found between French and 
 English women. The reply was an unfeeling one, 
 but it will be a guide to an estimate of the effect of 
 the different national manners on female character. 
 "The expense of a love affair," said he, "falls on the 
 man in France, and on the woman in England. Eng- 
 lish women make you uncomfortable by the quantity 
 of presents they give you, and French women quite 
 as uncomfortable by the quantity they exact from 
 you." We only quote this remark as made by a very 
 great beau and a very keen observer — the fact that a 
 high-bred man weighed women at all in such abomina- 
 ble scales being a good argument (at least) against in- 
 viting the ladies to Wall street and the billiard-rooms ! 
 
 And now let us say a word of what made the letter 
 in the Times more suggestive than it otherwise would 
 have been — Miss Fuller's book on "Woman in the 
 Nineteenth Century." 
 
 This book begins with an emblematic device re- 
 sembling, at first view, the knightly decoration called 
 by our English neighbors a star. On further exami- 
 nation, a garter seems to be included in the figure; 
 but upon still closer view, we discover, within the 
 rays which form the outer border, first an eternal 
 serpent — then the deeper mystery of two triangles — , 
 one of light, the other of darkness and shadow. We 
 should not have been thus particular in describing a 
 new decoration, but we conceive that the figure is 
 very significant of the tone and design of the book. 
 It belongs to what is called the transcendental school 
 — a school which we believe to have mixed up much 
 of what is noble and true with much of what is merely 
 imaginary and fantastic. Truth, freedom, love, light 
 — these are high and holy objects ; and though they 
 may be sought, sometimes, by modes which we may 
 think susceptible of improvement, we honor those 
 who propose to themselves such objects, according to 
 their aims and not according to their ability of ac- 
 complishment. The character and rights of woman 
 form naturally the principal subject of Miss Fuller's 
 book ; and we hope it may have an influence in con- 
 vincing, if not "man," at least some men, that woman 
 was born for better things than to " cook him some- 
 thing good." 
 
 The English Premier. — We see a text for the 
 least-taste-in-life of a sermon, in the following touch- 
 up of Sir Robert Peel by the London Examiner: — 
 
 " Wanted, a Premier's Assistant. — Our friend 
 Punch, who has written some excellent lessons for 
 ministers, 'suited to the meanest capacity,' in words 
 from one syllable to three, by easy upward ascent, 
 should take Sir Robert Peel's education in hand, and 
 teach him how to write a decent note. 
 
 " Notwithstanding the proverb to the contrary, a man 
 may do a handsome thing in a very awkward way. 
 
 " It was quite becoming and right to give a pension 
 of c£20 a year to Miss Brown, but what a note about 
 it is this, with its parenthetical dislocations, and its 
 atrocious style as stiff as buckram : — 
 
 " « Whitehall, Dec. 24. 
 
 " ' Madam : There is a fund applicable, as vacancies 
 may occur, to the grant of annual pensions of very 
 limited amount, which usage has placed at the dispo- 
 sal of the lady of the first minister. On this fund 
 there is a surplus of c£20 per annum. 
 
 " ' Lady Peel has heard of your honorable and suc- 
 cessful exertions to mitigate, by literary acquirements, 
 the effects of the misfortune by which you have been 
 visited; and should the grant of this pension for your 
 life be acceptable to you, Lady Peel will have great 
 satisfaction in such an appropriation of it. 
 
 "'I am, &c. Robert Peel.' 
 
 "If Punch had been over Sir Robert Peel when he 
 wrote this, he would have hit him several sharp raps 
 on the knuckles with his baton, we are quite certain. 
 The model of the note may be in Dilworth, very 
 probably, or even in the Complete Letter-Writer, by 
 the retired butler; but, nevertheless, it is not a true 
 standard of taste. 
 
 " Not to mention the clumsy parenthetical clauses 
 so much better omitted, or the long-tailed words so 
 out of place in a note about a matter of c£20 a year, 
 Sir Robert Peel has to learn that none but he-millin- 
 ers and haberdashers talk of their "ladies." Sir Rob- 
 ert Peel, as a gentleman and a prime minister, needs 
 not be ashamed of writing of his wife. He may rest 
 quite assured that the world will know that his wife is 
 a lady without his studiously telling it so. , 
 
 " Foreigners will ask what is the distinction be- 
 tween a gentleman's lady and his wife; whether they are 
 convertible terms; whether there are minister's wives 
 who are not ladies ; or whether there are ladies who 
 
EPHEMERA 
 
 773 
 
 are not wives; and why the equivocal word is prefer- 
 red to the distinct one; and why the wife is treated if 
 it were the less honorable. 
 
 " Formerly men used to have wives, not ladies ; but 
 in the announcement of births it has seemed finer to 
 Mr. Spruggins and Mr. Wiggins to say that his lady 
 has been delivered than his wife, the latter sounding 
 homely and low. 
 
 "But Sir Robert Peel should not be led away by 
 these examples. He is of importance enough in the 
 world to afford to mention his wife in plain, honest, 
 homely old English. 
 
 •'Any one who is disposed to give lessons in letter- 
 writing can not do better than collect Sir Robert 
 Peel's notes as warning examples. From the Velve- 
 teens to Miss Brown's t £20 a year, they have all the 
 same atrocious offences of style and taste. It is an- 
 other variety of the Yellow Plush school. 
 
 •• It distresses us to see it. We should like to see 
 MissBrown's c £20 a year rendered into plain, gentle- 
 manly English. 
 
 " As prizes are the fashion, perhaps some one will 
 give a prize for the best translation of Sir Robert 
 Peel's notes into the language of ease, simplicity, and 
 with them, good taste." 
 
 Sir Robert's crockery note proves, not that his pre- 
 miership still shows the lint of the spinning-jenny, but 
 that he employed one of his clerks (suitably impressed 
 with his duty to Lady Peel) to write the letter. We 
 wish to call attention, however, to the superior sim- 
 plicity of the taste contended for by the critic, and to 
 the evidence it gives that extremes meet in the usages 
 of good breeding as in other things — the highest re- 
 finement fairly lapping over upon what nature started 
 with. The application of this is almost universal, but 
 perhaps we had better particularize at once, and con- 
 fess to as much annoyance as we have a right to ex- 
 press (in " a free country") at the affected use of the 
 word lady in the United States, and the superfine 
 shrinking from the honest words wife and woman. 
 Those who say " this is my lady, sir !" instead of 
 '• this is my wife, sir !" or those who say "she is a 
 very pretty lady" instead of " she is a very pretty 
 woman,'" should at least know what the words mean, 
 and what they convey to others. 
 
 In common usage, to speak of one's wife as one's 
 lady, smacks of low-breeding, because it expresses a 
 kind of announcement of her rank, as if her rank 
 would not otherwise be understood. It is sometimes 
 used from a dread of plain-spoken-uess, by men who 
 doubt their own manners — but, as it always betrays 
 the doubt, it is in bad taste. The etymology of the 
 plainer words is a better argument in their favor, how- 
 ever. In the Saxon language from which they are 
 derived, waepman signifies that one of the conjugal 
 pair who employed the weapons necessary for the de- 
 fence of the family, and icifman signified the one 
 who was employed at the woof, clothing the family by 
 her industry. (The terms of endearment, of course, 
 were " my fighter," and " my weaver !") instead of 
 this honestly derived word (wife), meaning the one 
 who has the care of the family, the word lady is used, 
 which (also by derivation from the Saxon) signifies 
 one. who is raised to the rank of her conjugal mate ! 
 But, in this country, where the males invariably bur- 
 row in trade, while the females as invariably soar out 
 of their reach in the sunshine of cultivation, few wo- 
 men are raised to the rank of their husbands. It is an 
 injustice to almost any American woman to say as 
 much — by calling her a lady. 
 
 It is one part, though ever so small a part, of patri- 
 otism, to toil for improving the manners of the coun- 
 try. If we can avoid the long round of affectations, 
 and make a short cut to good taste by at once sub- 
 mitting every question of manners to the three ulti- 
 mate standards of high-breediDg — simplicity, disinter- 
 
 estedness, and modesty, it might save us the century 
 or two of bad taste through which older countries 
 have found their way to refinement. Amen! 
 
 LETTER TO FANNY FORESTER. 
 
 Dear Fanny: Would your dark eyes vouchsafe 
 to wonder how I come to write to you? Thus it 
 befell :— 
 
 You live in the country and know what log-haul- 
 ing is like — over the stumps in the woods. You have, 
 many a time, mentally consigned, to condign axe and 
 fire, the senseless trunk that, all its life, had found 
 motion enough to make way for every silly breeze 
 that flirted over it, but lay in unyielding immoveable- 
 ness when poor oxen and horses were tortured to make 
 it stir! If you knew what a condition Broadway is ic 
 — what horses have to suffer to draw omnibuses — and 
 how many pitiless human trunks are willing doggedly 
 to sit still to be drawn home to the fire by brute agony — 
 you would see how, while walking in Broadway, I was 
 reminded of log-hauling — then of the country — and 
 then, of course, of Fanny Forester. 
 
 Before setting the news to trickle from my full 
 pen let me quote from a book (one that is my present 
 passion), a fine thought or two on the cruelty to ani- 
 mals that has, this day, in Broadway, made me — no 
 better than Uncle Toby in Flanders ! 
 
 ' Shame upon creation's lord, the fierce unsanguined despot : 
 What ! art thou not content thy sin hath dragged down 
 
 suffering and death 
 Upon the poor dumb servants of thy comfort, and yet must 
 
 thou rack them with thy spite f 
 For very shame be merciful, be kind unto the creatures thou 
 
 hast ruined ; 
 Earth and her million tribes are cursed for thy sake ; 
 Liveth there but one among the million that shall not bear 
 
 witness against thee, 
 A pensioner of land or air or sea, that hath not whereof it 
 
 will accuse thee ? 
 From the elephant toiling at a launch, to the shrew-mouse 
 
 in the harvest-field, 
 From the whale which the harpooner hath stricken, to the 
 
 minnow caught upon a pin, 
 From the albatross wearied in its flight, to the wren in her 
 
 covered nest, 
 From the death-moth and the lace-winged dragon-fly, to the 
 
 lady-bird and the gnat, 
 The verdict of all things is unanimous, finding their master 
 
 cruel : 
 The dog, thy humble friend, thy trusting, honest friend, 
 The horse, thy uncomplaining slave, drudging from morn 
 
 to even, 
 The lamb, and the timorous hare, and the laboring ox at 
 
 plough, 
 And all things that minister alike to thy life and thy com- 
 fort and thy pride. 
 Testify with one sad voice that man is a cruel master. 
 The galled ox can not complain, nor supplicate a moment's 
 
 respite ; 
 The spent horse hideth his distress, till he panted out his 
 
 spirit at the goal ; 
 Behold, he is faint with hunger ; the big tear standeth m 
 
 his eye ; 
 His skin is sore with stripes, and he tottereth. beneath his 
 
 burden ; . 
 
 His limbs are stiff with age, his sinews have lost their 
 
 And^p^in' is stamped upon his face, while he wrestleth 
 
 unequally with toil ; 
 
 Yet once more mutely and meekly endureth he the crush- 
 ing blow ; . ^, 
 That struggle hath cracked his heart-stnngs-the generous 
 
 brute is dead !" 
 I doubt whether fifty years of jumping toothache 
 would not be a lesser evil, hereafter, than the retr.bu- 
 tion charged this day against each passenger from 
 Wall street to Bleecker. And, as if to aggravate the 
 needlessness of the sin, the sidewalk was like the side- 
 walks in June — dry, sunny, and besprinkled with ador- 
 able shoppers. With the sides of the street thus 
 
774 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 clean and bright, the middle with a succession of pits, 
 each one of which required the utmost strength of a 
 pair of horses to toil out of — the wheels continually 
 cutting in to the axletrees, each sinking of the wheels 
 bringing down the whip on the guilty horses, and, 
 with all the lashing, cursing, toiling and breaking of 
 harness, people (with legs to carry them) remaining 
 heartlessly inside the omnibuses. Oh, for one hour's 
 change of places — horses inside and passengers in 
 harness ! 
 
 But why break your country heart for sins in 
 Broadway ? Think rather of the virtues and the 
 fashions. Large parasols (feminized, from male um- 
 brellas, only by petticoats of fringe and the change- 
 ableness of the silk) are now carried between heaven 
 and bright eyes, to the successful banishment of the 
 former. Ladies sit in the shops smoking camphor 
 cigars while their daughters buy ribands. French 
 lap-dogs, with maids to lead them, are losing singu- 
 larity, as pairs of spectacles. People in the second 
 story are at the level of very fine weather. Literature 
 is at a dead stand-still. The f father of evil" has not 
 yet told us what the next excitement is to grow out 
 of; and meantime (to-night) we are to have an Eng- 
 lish song from Madam Pico at the Tabernacle. 
 
 So you have been ill and are mortal after all ! 
 Well ! I presume — whatever stays to keep the violets 
 company — "Fanny Forester" goes to Heaven; so you 
 must have your reminders, like the rest of us, that 
 the parting guest is to be looked after. What a to- 
 morrow-dom life is! Eve's fault or Adam's — to-day 
 was left in Eden ! we live only for what is to come. I 
 am, for one, quite sick of hoping ; and if I could put 
 a sack of money at my back to keep my heels from 
 tripping, I would face about and see nothing but the 
 to-day of the children behind me. (Bless me, how 
 grave I am getting to be !) 
 
 Write to me, dear Fanny ! As I go to market on 
 this river of ink, write me such a letter as will ride 
 without damage in the two-penny basket that brings 
 this to you. 
 
 And now adieu — or rather au soin de Dieu — for I 
 trust that the first lark that goes up with the spring 
 news will bid the angels not to expect you, yet awhile. 
 Take care of your health. Yours always. 
 
 Madame Pico's Concert. — We should guess that 
 between two and three thousand persons were listeners 
 in the vast hall of the Tabernacle at the concert. The 
 five hundred regular opera-goers, who were apparent- 
 ly all there, were scattered among a mass of graver 
 countenances, and Madame Pico saw combined her 
 two bailiwicks of fashion and seriousness. She seems 
 to be equally popular with both, and her "good-fel- 
 low" physiognomy never showed its honest beauty to 
 more advantage. She wore a Greek cap of gold braid 
 on the right-side organ of conscientiousness, and prob- 
 ably magnetized very powerfully the large gold tassel 
 that fell from it over her cheek. The English song 
 was the qui-vive-ity of the evening, however, and 
 English, from a tongue cradled in a gondola, is cer- 
 tainly very peculiar! But, preservp us, Rossini-Bel- 
 lini ! After hearing exclusively Italian music from a 
 songstress, the descent to Balfe is rather intolerable. 
 A lark starting for its accustomed zenith with "chicken 
 fixings" would represent our soul as it undertook to 
 soar last night with Balfeathered Pico! — What should 
 make that same song popular is beyond our divining. 
 Most of its movement works directly in the joint be- 
 tween the comfortable parts of the voice, and nobody 
 ever tilted through its see-saw transitions, in our hear- 
 ing, without apparent distress. 
 
 Madame Arnoult made a very strong impression on 
 the audience last night. She sang with more dew in 
 
 her throat than when we heard her before, and we 
 fancy that the hard enamel of her tones, at thai time, 
 was from the bracing up against timidity, and not from 
 the quality of the organ. She has only to draw a 
 check for what popularity she wants, we presume. 
 
 Town-Hunger for Poets. — The appetite for live 
 bards (like other scarce meats, commonly liked best 
 when pretty well gone) is probably peculiar to old 
 countries. We have stumbled lately on the follow- 
 ing letter touching Petrarch, written in 1368, by the 
 Seigneury of Florence, to Pope Urban V. : — 
 
 " The celebrity and talent of our fellow-citizen, M. 
 Francesco Petrarca, inspire us with a great desire to 
 attract him back to reside in Florence, for the honor 
 of the city and for his own tranquillity; for he has 
 greatly harassed himself by bodily fatigues and scien- 
 tific pursuits in various countries. But as he has 
 here no patrimony nor means of support, and little 
 fancy for a secular life, be pleased to grant him the 
 favor of the first canonry vacant in Florence ; and this 
 notwithstanding any previous promise, so that no one 
 may be appointed canon in preference to him. And 
 you will ascertain from Pitti in what manner this ap- 
 pointment may be obtained for him in the most ample 
 manner." 
 
 How long it will be before Newburyport will send 
 to the governor of Arkansas for Albert Pike — before 
 New Haven will send to Mayor Harper for Mr. Hal- 
 leck — before Portland will send to President Quincy 
 for Longfellow — before other great cities will send 
 for the now peripatetic ashes of their future honorary 
 urns, and confer on them " appointments in the most 
 ample manner" — we are not prophet enough to know 
 — nor do we know what the locofocos would say to 
 such appointments. We suggest, however, that the 
 poets should combine to vote for Mayor Harper on 
 condition that he inquire what poets New York needs 
 to have back " for the honor of the city and their own 
 tranquillity." 
 
 Japonica-dom in Italy. — We have often thought 
 that it would amuse, and possibly instruct, New- 
 Yorkers, to know exactly what class of Europeans 
 have, as nearly as possible, their own pretensions to 
 aristocracy, and where such persons " stand," in the 
 way of go-to-the-devil-dom, from the titled classes. 
 There is scarce a man of fortune or fashion in New 
 York who is not what they call in Europe a roturier 
 — a man, that is to say, whose position is made al- 
 together by his money. The treatment which a 
 roturier gets, therefore, from those above him, presents 
 a fair opportunity for contrasting his value (measured 
 by this scale) with that of a rich, but grand fatherless 
 New-Yorker. Besides other profit in the comparison, 
 it is as well, perhaps, to form a guess as to what sort 
 of a sore the upper ten thousand will make, when they 
 come to a head in Manhattan. 
 
 A letter to the Foreign Quarterly Review from a cor- 
 respondent in' Italy, gives an account of the celebra- 
 tion of a scientific anniversary which draws together 
 the accessible celebrities of Europe, and which was 
 held this year in Milan. Incidentally the writer 
 speaks of Milanese society — thus : — 
 
 " Yes ! the congress, whatever its other claims to 
 consideration may have been, was deficient in ' quar- 
 terings,' and was therefore, no company for Milanese 
 noblesse. Nowhere, in Europe, is the effete barbar- 
 ism of ' castes' more in vigor than at Milan. The 
 result of course, and of necessity, is, that the exclu- 
 sive there are the least advanced in social and moral 
 civilization of all the great cities of Italy. Will it be 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 775 
 
 believed lhat these noble blockheads have a Casino 
 for themselves and their females, to whose festivities 
 the more distinguished of their non-noble fellow-citi- 
 zens are invited— after what mariner does the civilized 
 nineteenth century Englishman think? Thus : A 
 gallery has been constructed, looking from above into 
 the ball-room. There such more distin guislied roturiers 
 (men of low descent), with their families, as the privi- 
 leged caste may condescend toinvite—not to share— but to 
 witness their festivities, being duly fenced in with an 
 iron grating, may gaze through the bars at the paradise 
 that they can never enter. It is at least something ! 
 They may there see what it is to be ' noble ." The 
 happy ones, thus permitted to feast their eyes, may, 
 at least, boast to their less fortunate fellow-citizens, 
 of the condescension with which they have been 
 honored, and thus propagated, in some degree the 
 blessings of exclusiveness among the ranks of the 
 swinish multitude! In their happy gallery, at the 
 top of the noble ball-room, they may at least inhale the 
 refuse breath streaming up from noble lungs — delicious 
 gales from Araby the blest. Surely this is something. 
 The wealthy citizens of Milan feel that it is; and they 
 value the so-coudescendiugly-granted privilege ac- 
 cordingly. 
 
 "Yes! the roluricr citizens of Milan — incredible 
 as it may seem to those whose more civilized social 
 system has given them the feelings of men in the place 
 of those of slaves— do gratefully and gladly accept 
 these invitations. Yes ■ for one of the curses most 
 surely attendant on the undue separation of a privi- 
 leged caste, is the degradation of both parties — the real 
 abasement of the pariah, as well as the fancied exalta- 
 tion of the noble." 
 
 Our readers' imaginations will easily transfer this 
 stale of things to New York (fancying one class of 
 rich men inviting another class of men, quite as rich, 
 but with not the same sort of grandfathers, to look at 
 a ball through an iron grating !)' but, leaving our friends 
 to pick out the " customers" for the two sides of the 
 grate, we turn to another difference still, between the 
 nether- graters and the mechanics. There is even a 
 more impassable barrier between these, and it is almost 
 as impassable in England and France as in the more 
 monarchical portions of Europe. A letter from abroad 
 in the Ledger of yesterday, states this phase of social 
 distinction very clearly : — 
 
 " The present state of society in France presents, 
 therefore, a new and almost incurable evil — the entire 
 separation of the capitalists, the merchants and manu- 
 facturers, from the laboring portion of the community ; 
 and what is worse, a hostile attitude of these social 
 elements to each other. In Germany, and partly even 
 in England, the interests of the manufacturers and 
 capitalists are parallel with those of the laborers, and 
 kept so by the pressure of a wealthy overbearing aris- 
 tocracy in Great Britain ; while on the continent the 
 industrious pursuits are not yet sufficiently developed 
 to effect the separation. Whenever the laborers (the 
 pariahs) of England make common cause with their 
 employers, or rather, whenever their demands coincide 
 with those of their masters, the aristocracy is gene- 
 rally obliged to yield : but whenever, as in the case 
 of the chartists, the laborers or inferior orders of the 
 industrious section of society demand anything for 
 itself which does not agree with the views of their em- 
 ployers, ihey are perfectly powerless — a mere play-ball, 
 tossed to and fro between the landlords and the cotton- 
 lords. 
 
 "In France, as I have observed, the separation of 
 the higher bourgeoisie from those who help them by 
 their labor to amass wealth, is complete; but so power- 
 less is the latter section that it is not only not repre- 
 sented in the chambers, but not even thought or spo- 
 ken of, except when it is thought necessary to teach 
 it a lesson by putting it down and teaching it obedi- 
 
 ence. The misery of the laboring classes lias not yet 
 found an orator." 
 
 We have given, here-above, an attractive nucleus 
 for table-talk and speculation, and we leave it to om 
 friends. 
 
 Poets and Poetry of America. — An hour's 
 lecture on this subject by Mr. Poe is but a " foot of 
 Hercules," and though one can see what would be 
 the proportions of the whole, if treated with the same 
 scope and artistic minuteness, it is a pity to see only 
 the fragment. What we heard last night convinced 
 us, however, that one of the most readable and sale- 
 able of books would be a dozen of such lectures by 
 Mr. Poe, and we give him a publisher's counsel to 
 print them. 
 
 After some general remarks on poetry and the uses 
 of impartial criticism, Mr. Poe gently waked up the 
 American poetesses. He began with Mrs. Sigourney, 
 whom he considered the best known, and who, he 
 seemed to think, owed her famousness to the same 
 cause as "old boss Richards"— the being " kept before 
 the people." He spoke well of her poetry abstractly, 
 but intimated that it was strongly be-Hemans'd, and 
 that without the Hemanshood and the newspaper 
 iteration, Mrs. Sigourney would not be the first 
 American poetess. He next came to Mrs. Welhy as 
 No. 2, and gave her wholesome muse some very still' 
 laudation. Mrs. Osgood came next, and for her he 
 prophesied a rosy future of increasing power and re- 
 nown. He spoke well of Mrs. Seba Smith, and lie 
 spent some time in showing that the two Miss David- 
 sons, with all their merit, were afloat " on bladders m 
 a sea of glory." The pricking of these bladders, by- 
 the-way, and the letting out of Miss Sedgwick's 
 breath, and Professor Morse's, and Mr. Southey's, 
 was most artistically well done. 
 
 Of the inspired males Mr. Poe only took up the 
 copperplate five — Bryant, Halleck, Longfellow, 
 Sprague, and Dana. These, as having their por- 
 traits^ engraved in the frontispiece of Griswold's 
 "Poets and Poetry of America," were taken to rep- 
 resent the country's poetry, and dropped into the 
 melting-pot accordingly. Mr. Bryant came first as 
 the allowed best poet; but Mr. Poe, after giving him 
 high praise, expressed a contempt for " public opin- 
 ion," and for the opinion of all majorities, in matters 
 of taste, and intimated that Mr. Bryant's universality 
 of approval lay in his keeping within very narrow lim- 
 its, where it was easy to have no faults. Halleck, Mr. 
 Poe praised exceedingly, repeating with great beauty 
 of elocution his Marco Bozzaris. Longfellow, Mr. 
 Poe said, had more genius than any other of the five, 
 but his fatal alacrity at imitation made him borrow, 
 when he had better at home. Sprague, but for 
 one drop of genuine poetry in a fugitive piece, was 
 described by Poe as Pope-and-water. Dana found 
 very little favor. Mr. Poe thought his metre harsh 
 and awkward, his narrative ill-managed, and his con- 
 ceptions eggs from other people's nests. With the 
 copperplate five, the criticisms abruptly broke oft, Mr. 
 Poe concluding his lecture with the recitation of three 
 pieces of poetry which he thought had been mista- 
 kenly nut away, by the housekeeper of the temple of 
 fame, among the empty bottles. Two of them were 
 by authors we did not know, and the third was by an 
 author whom we have been exhorted to know under 
 the Greek name of Seauton ("gnoth. seauton )- 
 ourself ' (Perhaps we may be excused for mentioning 
 that the overlooked bottle of us contained "unseen 
 spirits," and that the brigadier, who gave us twenty 
 dollars for it, thought it by no means "small beer . ) 
 
 Mr Poe had an audience of critics and poets— 
 between two and three hundred of victims and victim- 
 ized—and he was heard with breathless attention. IIo 
 
776 
 
 EPHExMERA. 
 
 becomes a desk, his beautiful head showing like a 
 statuary embodiment of discrimination; his accent 
 drops like a knife through water, and his style is so 
 much purer and clearer than the pulpit commonly 
 gets or requires, that the effect of what he says, beside 
 other things, pampers the ear. Poe's late poem of 
 " The Raven," embroidered him at once on the quilt 
 of the poets ; but as the first bold traverse thread run 
 across the parallelisms of American criticism, he 
 wants but a business bodkin to work this subordinate 
 talent to great show and profit. We admire him none 
 the less for dissenting from some of his opinions. 
 
 Asylum for Indigent Women. — A benevolent 
 friend surprised us, on Saturday, into one of the most 
 agreeable visits we ever made — a visit to an institution 
 of whose existence we were not even aware. We 
 presume that others have shared our ignorance, and 
 that the name we have written above will convey to 
 most readers an idea either vague or entirely novel. 
 Poetry alone would express truly the impression left 
 on our mind by this visit, but we will confine ourself 
 to a brief description in prose. 
 
 Our friend informed us, on the way, that an entrance 
 fee of fifty dollars was required, and that the claims of 
 the proposed inmate (as to respectability and such cir- 
 cumstances as would affect the social comfort of the 
 establishment) were decided upon by the board of 
 management. Once there, she has a home for life, 
 with perfect command of egress, absence for visits, 
 and calls from friends, books, medical attendance, oc- 
 cupation, &c. Each inmate commonly adds some 
 furniture to the simple provision of the room. 
 
 We entered a large building, with two spacious 
 wings, standing on Twentieth street, near the East 
 river. Opposite the entrance, the door opened into a 
 cheerful chapel, and we turned to the left into a 
 drawing-room, which had all the appearance of an 
 apartment in the most comfortable private residence. 
 We descended thence through warm corridors, to the 
 refectory in the basement, and here the ladies (be- 
 tween fifty and sixty of them) chanced to be taking 
 their tea. We really never saw a pleasanter picture 
 of comfort. The several tables were scattered irreg- 
 ularly around the room, and each little party had sep- 
 arate teapot and table furniture, the arrangements 
 reminding one of a cafe in a world grown old. The 
 gay chatting, the passing of cups and plates, the nod- 
 ding of clean caps, and the really unusual liveliness 
 of the different parties, took us entirely by surprise — 
 took away, in fact, all idea of an asylum for sickness 
 or poverty. What with the fragrant atmosphere of 
 souchong, and the happy faces, it would have been a 
 needlessly fastidious person who would not have sat 
 down willingly as a guest at the meal. 
 
 We looked into the kitchen and household arrange- 
 ments for a few minutes, finding everything the model 
 of wholesome neatness, and then, as the ladies had 
 returned to their rooms, we made a few visits to 
 them, chez dies, introduced by the attendant. Here 
 again, the variety of furniture, the comfortable rock- 
 ing-chairs, the curtains, and pictures, and ornamental 
 trifles, removed all idea of hospital or asylum-life, and 
 gave us the feeling of visiters in private families. 
 The ladies were visiting from room to room, and those 
 we conversed with assured us that they had every- 
 thing for their comfort, and were as happy as they well 
 could be — though they laughed very heartily when we 
 expressed some envy of the barrier between them and 
 the vexed world we must return to, and at our wish 
 that we could "qualify" and stay with them. We 
 have rarely had merrier conversation in a call, and we 
 think that this asylum for age holds at least one or 
 two very agreeable women. 
 
 But what charity can the angel of mercy so smile 
 upon, as this waiting upon life to its gloomy retiring- 
 door, lighting the dark steps downward, and sending 
 home the weary guest with a farewell, softened and 
 cheerful ! God bless the founder of this beautiful 
 charity ! Who can hear of it and not wish to aid it ? 
 Who has read thus far, our truthful picture, and does 
 not mentally resolve to be one (though by ever so 
 small a gift) among its blest benefactors. 
 
 We begged a copy of the last report, and we find 
 that the society, which supports the asylum, has some 
 eighty pensioners out of the house, and that there is 
 some fear entertained, from the low state of the funds, 
 as to the ability to continue these latter charities. 
 We can not conceive the treasury of such an institu- 
 tion in want. We are not authorized to make any 
 appeal to the public, but those who- are inclined to 
 give can easily find out the way. 
 
 Sacred Concert. — We have once or twice, when 
 writing of musical performers, given partial expres- 
 sion to a feeling that has since been very strongly 
 confirmed — the expediency of addressing music, in 
 this country, to the more serious instead of the gayer 
 classes, for its best support and cultivation. The 
 high moral tone, this side the water, of all those strata 
 of society to which refined amusement looks for sup- 
 port, gives music rather an American rebuke than an 
 American welcome — coming as a pleasure in which 
 dissipated fashionables are alone interested. Ralian 
 opera, properly labelled and separated from its need- 
 less association with ballet, would rise to the unof- 
 fending moral level of piano-music, sight-seeing, con- 
 cert-going, or what the serious commonly call inno- 
 cent amusements. 
 
 Till lately it has been generally understood that the 
 only hope for patronage of fine music, in New York, 
 was the exclusive class which answers to the court 
 circles of Europe; and, so addressed, the opera has 
 very naturally languished. 
 
 The truth is, that the great mass of the wealthy 
 and respectable population of New York is at a level 
 of strict morality, or of religious feelings rising still 
 higher, and any amusement that goes by a doubtful 
 name among moralists, is at once excluded. But 
 music need never suffer by this exclusion, and as the 
 favor of these stricter classes, once secured, would be 
 of inexhaustible profit to musicians, it would be worth 
 while for some master-spirit among them to undertake 
 the proper adaptation of music to moral favor. 
 
 Why should the best singers be considered almost 
 profane — was the question that naturally enough oc- 
 curred to us the other night on hearing the Taberna- 
 cle fill, to its vast capacity, with the voice of Madame 
 Pico giving entrancing utterance to Scripture ! Here 
 were a thousand lovers of music sitting breathless to- 
 gether, with their most hallowed feelings embarked 
 upon a voice usually devoted to profane uses. Many 
 whose tears flow only at hallowed prompting, listened 
 with moist eyes to the new-clad notes of familiar sa- 
 cred music — perhaps half-sighing with self-reproach 
 that the enchantment of an opera-singer should have 
 reached such sacred fountains of emotion. Why 
 should not the best musical talent, as well as the 
 more indifferent, be made tributary to religion ? Why 
 should not sacred operas be written for our country 
 exclusively ? Why should not the highly dramatic 
 scenes and events of Scripture be represented on the 
 stage, and seen with reverence by the classes who 
 have already seen them in their imaginations, during 
 perusal of the inspired volume. And why should not 
 the events of human life, as portrayed in unobjection- 
 able operas, be alternated with these, and addressed to 
 the moral approbation of our refined serious classes? 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 777 
 
 We believe that this (and not this alone of things com- 
 monly delivered over to the evil spirit among us) 
 would be willingly taken charge of by the angel of 
 good influences. 
 
 We can not give a critical notice of the performances 
 at the sacred concert, as we were unable to remain 
 after the conclusion of the first part, but we heard a 
 single remark which seems to us worth quoting. At 
 the conclusion of Madame Pico's first air, a gentle- 
 man, standing near us, observed that it was very odd 
 a foreigner should sing with perfect articulation, while 
 he could scarce understand a word from those who 
 sang in their native tongue ! The instrumental mu- 
 sic was admirable, and the scenic effect of the female 
 choir (all dressed in white, and getting up with a 
 spontaneous resurrection for the chorus) was at least 
 impressive. 
 
 P. S. Just as we are going to press we have re- 
 ceived a critique of the concert, speaking very glow- 
 ingly of Madame Pico, and the 
 
 " moist melodious hymn 
 From her white throat dim," 
 
 "as Aristophanes hath it," of the " deep clear tones 
 ofBROUGH, so long lost to us," and "Miss Northall 
 and Mr. Meyer," as having " given full satisfaction." 
 
 The Famine at Washington. — The city is alive 
 with laughable stories of the distress for bed and prov- 
 ender during the late descent upon the scene of the 
 inauguration. 
 
 " As the scorched locusts from the fields retire 
 While fast behind them runs the blaze of fire," 
 
 the belles and beaux, politicians and travellers, are 
 crowding back to the regions of steady population, 
 aghast at the risks of famine run in the capital of a 
 land of proverbial abundance. The stories are mostly 
 such as would easily be imagined taking place in any 
 country, under the circumstances, but we heard of one 
 worth recording — a Yankee variation of an expedient 
 tried some years ago by an Englishman at Saratoga. 
 John Bull, in that instance (it may be remembered), 
 after calling in vain to the flying attendants at the 
 crowded table, splashed a handful of silver into his 
 plate and handed it to a waiter with a request for " a 
 clean plate and some soup." A Massachusetts judge, 
 probably remembering this, drew a gold piece from 
 his pocket last week while sitting hungry at the strip- 
 ped table at Washington, and tapping his tumbler 
 with it till he attracted attention, laid it beside his 
 plate and pointed to it while he mentioned what he 
 wanted. He was miraculously supplied of course, 
 but, when he had nothing more to ask, he politely 
 thanked the waiter and — returned the gold piece to 
 his own pocket .' 
 
 The German Concert. — The great wilderness 
 of Pews-y-ism — the boundless Tabernacle — was filled 
 to its remotest " seat for one" on Saturday evening, 
 and a more successful concert could scarcely have 
 been given. The nation cradled away from salt air, 
 showed their naturally fresh enthusiasm for the per- 
 formances, and it seemed to have an effect upon 
 Madame Pico, for her friends thought she never had 
 sung so enchantingly, as in the second of the pieces 
 set down for her—" la casta Diva." She was ap- 
 plauded to the utmost tension of Mr. Hale's roof and 
 rafters. The German chorus by a score of amateurs 
 was admirably given, and Schaft'enburg's piano-music 
 was done to the utmost probable of excellence. 
 
 " Mine Host." — Some time ago, in some specula- 
 tions on American peculiarities, we commented on the 
 hotel-life so much more popular in this country than 
 elsewhere, and the necessity, bred by the manners 
 and habits of our people, that hotel-keepers should be 
 well-bred men, of high character and agreeable man- 
 ners. The trusts reposed in them by their guests, 
 and the courtesy they are called on to exercise, make 
 it almost inevitable that such men should alone be 
 encouraged to assume the direction of hotels. This 
 tendency of fitness has lately put the Howard house 
 into the hands of one of our most courteous, capable, 
 and agreeable friends, Capt. Roe, and the public will 
 find that central hotel all that they can require. 
 
 The Geode. — We remember being pitched for a 
 week into Query-dom, while attending college lec- 
 tures, by Prof. Silliman's astounding story of the 
 mine in (we think) Meriden, Connecticut— a single 
 cave in which had been found a specimen of almost 
 every known precious stone. It was a kind of omnibus 
 geode, and with a boy's imagination, we speculated 
 endlessly on how so many rare gems could have 
 chanced to have come together in this world of loose 
 distribution. We have come, now, however, to the 
 astounding knowledge of a geode of poetesses — the 
 centre of which is Fanny Forester— and though there 
 are astonishing resemblances between the material 
 and spiritual world, we were not prepared for this ! 
 Fanny herself, as a prose writer and poetess, has now 
 an assured fame. But, on St. Valentine's day, we 
 received an original Valentine from one of her in- 
 timate friends, which was as beautiful poetry as fame 
 wants in her trumpet, and two or three weeks ago we 
 published a most delicious poem from another friend 
 of Fanny Forester's, and here comes a fourth gem 
 which seems to hint (and this is too sad a possibility 
 to trjfle upon) that gifted Fanny Forester is beckoned 
 to, from a better world. God send her health with 
 this coming spring — thousands will pray fervently. 
 Here follows a prayer for it, expressed in touching 
 verse by one who seems a familiar friend : — 
 
 " TO « FANNY FORESTER.' 
 
 " BY MISS MARY FLORENCE NOBLE. 
 
 " Saw you ever a purer light 
 
 More still and fair than the harvest moon 
 When day has died in a shadowless night ? 
 
 And the air is still as a summer's noon? 
 No ? — Ah , sweet one, your eyelids shrine 
 A light far purer, and more divine. 
 
 " Heard you ever the silvery gush 
 
 Of a brook, far down in, its rocky dell ; 
 And stilled your breath with a tremulous hush, 
 
 As its mystic murmurs rose and fell ? 
 'Tis thus I list to the liquid flow 
 Of your silvery accents, soft and low. 
 
 " Yet, sweet ' Fanny,' the light that gleams 
 
 'Neath the sweeping fringe of your radiant eyes, 
 
 Too purely chaste, and too heavenly seems 
 To dwell in the glare of our earthly skies ; 
 
 And, too soft and low your tones have birth 
 
 To linger long mid the din of earth 
 
 " The sweet brow shrined in your clustering hair 
 
 Has gathered a shadow wan, and deep, 
 And the veins a darker violet wear, 
 
 Which over your hollow temples creep ; 
 And your fairy foot falls faint and slow, 
 As the feathery flakes of the drifting snow. 
 
 " 'Tis said the eods send swift decay 
 
 To the bright ones they love, of mortal birth ; 
 
 And your angel ' Dora' passed away 
 In her youth's sweet spring-time, from the earth, 
 
 Yet stay, sweet ' Fanny ." your pinions fold, 
 
 ' Till the liearts that love you now, are cold." 
 
778 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 Yankee-Parisian Aristocracy. — Our agreeabfe 
 neighbor of the " Etats-Unis" gives a letter from 
 Paris which states that " another rich American is 
 about taking the place of the retiring Col. Thorn. 
 Mr. Macnamara has opened a superb house in the 
 rue de la Madeleine, and is sending put invitations 
 par milliers. In the commencement of a fashionable 
 career as an entertainer, a thousand invitations will 
 hardly bring persons enough to form a quadrille. 
 Mr. Tudor, another American, is just nowin that stage 
 where he has commenced iveeding his saloons !" 
 
 The same agreeable letter states that two sisters of 
 the Hon. Mrs. Norton, Lady Seymour (the Queen 
 of Beauty at Eglinton), and Lady Dufferin (the Mrs. 
 Blackwood whose songs are well known in this coun- 
 try), have been playing at the English embassy in 
 private theatricals. The characters were nearly all 
 personated by lords and ladies, yet one Baltimore 
 belle sustained the part of " Mary Copp" in the play 
 of Charles the Second — Miss Mactavish. The 
 two sisters of Mrs. Norton and the " Undying One" 
 herself, were by much the three most beautiful wo- 
 men we saw abroad — magnificent graces between 
 whom it was hard to choose the most beautiful. 
 
 Newell's Patent Lock. — Mr. Newell's wonder- 
 ful lock (one of which costs as much as a pianoforte) 
 is not wholly original. On the world's first washing- 
 day, Monday No. 1, a human mind was created on 
 precisely the same principle. Without going into 
 the details either of this lock or a human mind (in 
 either of which we should lose ourself of course) we 
 will simply give the principle of Nature's patent and 
 Mr. Newell's, viz : that the lock is constructed not 
 only to be un-openable to all keys but the right one, 
 but to become just what, that right one makes it. Newell's 
 lock is a chaos of slides, wards, and joints, till the key 
 turns in it ; and it then suddenly springs into order, 
 simplicity, and beauty of construction. Another 
 resemblance to Nature's plastic lock, is this feature 
 of Newell's, that by the slightest change in the key 
 (provided for by bits inserted at will) the whole interior 
 responds differently ; so that a bank director, like a 
 mind director, may change his key every day in the 
 year, and (preserving only the harmony between lock 
 and key) will find the lock every day responsive to the 
 change. Fair dealing required, we think, that the 
 proper credit should have been given to the original 
 inventor, and that the patent should be called " New- 
 elis, after Nature." 
 
 Having shown the way the invention struck us, 
 however, we copy by request what was said of it by 
 the Journal of Commerce: — 
 
 M Mr. Newell denominates this new masterpiece of 
 ingenuity, the Parautoptic Toiken Permutation Lock. 
 Parautoptic, being a Greek word, signifying preven- 
 tive of an internal inspection, and toiken meaning 
 walled, hence the name. This lock has been named 
 after its peculiar properties. Phosphoric or other 
 lis;ht may be introduced into it in vain in order to 
 view its interior construction. The tumblers being 
 separated from the essential actional parts of the lock, 
 which constitute its safety, by a perpendicular wall of 
 solid steel forming two distinct and separate chambers 
 in the same, thus counteracting all burglarious designs. 
 The front chamber will, on close inspection, either by 
 phosphoric light or reflection, exhibit nothing but solid 
 walls of steel or iron. This lock is susceptible of an 
 infinity of changes from thousands to millions, ena- 
 bling the possessor to change or vary it at pleasure, 
 simply by transposing or altering the bits in the key, 
 before using it to lock the door, in a manner 
 which is truly surprising. It therefore follows that 
 a person may make himself a different lock every 
 
 moment of his life, if such be his disposition, thereby 
 frustrating the skill of the maker, and placing him on 
 a footing with the merest novice. We are, therefore, 
 fully persuaded of its being the ultimatum of lockl 
 making, and sincerely congratulate the inventor of 
 this admirable contrivance, in thus being able to 
 counteract so effectually the various plans and schemes 
 of burglars and pick-locks, and we feel warranted in 
 stating that after due inspection, all those connected 
 with banking institutions, and the public generally, 
 will adopt it at once as preferable to all others, for the 
 safe-keeping and protection of their property." 
 
 The New York "Rocher de Cancale."— To 
 dine tete-a-tete with a friend, in Paris, or to give a din- 
 ner party, you must go to the above-named renowned 
 restaurant, where have dined, probably, all the gentle- 
 men now existing. Private room, faultless dinner, 
 apt and prompt service, and reasonable charges, con- 
 stitute the charm, and all this we are to have (or so 
 says that communicative " little bird in the air") at 
 the corner of Reade st., in the new Maison Lafarge. 
 That " unrecognised angel," Signor Bardotte, is to 
 be the chef des details, and, in partnership with him, 
 a gentleman well fatigued with travel and experience 
 is to act as partner. Of course we would much rather 
 record the establishment, at the same corner, of an 
 asylum for unavoidable accomplishments, but since 
 luxury will cut its swarth, we like to see the rake with 
 a clean handle. 
 
 The Misses Rice and the Bears. — The Port- 
 land Advertiser states that in a secluded part of Ox- 
 ford county, called " The Andover Surplus," there 
 reside two female farmers, who occupy a few acres, 
 and "do their own chores," hiring male help only for 
 haying and harvesting. Out in the woods lately with 
 the ox-team, cutting and drawing winter's wood, one 
 of the Misses Rice was attracted by the barking of the 
 dog at a hollow tree. One of the young ladies was 
 absent for the moment, and the other chopped a hole 
 in the tree and came to a bear-skin ! Nothing 
 daunted at the sight, she gave a poke, and out scram- 
 bled bruin, whom she knocked down and despatched. 
 A second bear immediately made his appearance, and 
 she despatched him ! A third bear then crept from 
 the tree, and the same axe finished him! This, 
 Miss Rice considered a good morning's work, for 
 there is a two-dollar bounty on bears, and the skins 
 and grease are worth five dollars, at least. We should 
 like to see Miss Rice, of the " Andover Surplus !" 
 
 Inconstancy made Romantic — " The Countess 
 Faustina" (the new book now in everybody's hands) 
 is the first novel we remember to have read, the whole 
 burthen of which is a glorification of inconstancy in 
 love ! The heroine is charmingly drawn — the model 
 of divine women — but after quite innocently using up 
 all that was most loveable in two men and deserting 
 them, she gets tired of a third, and goes into a con- 
 vent to finish the story ! The lovers are all described 
 as worthy of a deathless passion, and the love on both 
 sides, while it lasts, is of the loftiest lift and devotion, 
 but the countess has the little peculiarity of liking no 
 love except love in progress, and she deserts, of course, 
 at the first premonishing of the halt of tranquillity. 
 The following passage, descriptive of her enlightening 
 her last love as to the coming break-off, will show how 
 neatly she wrapped up the bitter pill : — 
 
 "'Be silent,' she exclaimed, when I was about to 
 answer her, • be silent ! Does not the water-lily 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 r79 
 
 know its time, rises to blossom from the water, and 
 then returns back into its depths, satisfied, tranquil, 
 with a treasure of sweet recollections ? Flowers 
 know when their time is passed, and man tries, all he 
 can, not to be aware of it. This year with you, 
 Mario, was the height of my blossoming !' 
 
 '"You love me no longer,' I exclaimed bitterly. 
 
 ♦"Fool!' she replied, with that ecstatic smile which 
 I never saw on any brow but hers, 'have you not 
 touched the tabernacle of my heart? Is not my son 
 yours? No, Mario! I love you; I have loved 
 nothing so much ; I shall never love anything after 
 you — but, above you, God ! My soul has squandered 
 itself in such transports of love and inspiration with 
 yours, that all it can ever meet in this region will be 
 but a repetition, and perhaps an insipid one. We 
 have so broken up my heart in searching for its treas- 
 ure, that the gold mines are probably exhausted, 
 before the sad certainty comes upon us.' 
 
 ♦"Faustina!' I know not in what tone I said this, 
 but she sank trembling into my arms, and said very, 
 very softly, 
 
 "'Oh, if you are angry, I shall not have the cour- 
 age to open my heart to you !' 
 
 " I knew I ought not to alarm her, and I embraced 
 her tenderly, and inquired what she thought of doing. 
 
 "She replied, 'I will close the mine! If there is 
 any valuable metal within, it may rest quietly in the 
 depths. And above I will plant flowers.' 
 
 "'But what can — what would you do?' I inquired 
 with terrible anxiety. 
 
 "'Belong entirely to God, and enter a convent!' 
 she replied," &c, &c. 
 
 Six months of convent-life sufficed to finish the 
 Countess Faustina, who " discovered too late" (says 
 the narrator) " that, during our life, we can but look, 
 like Moses, toward the promised Canaan" (of a man 
 worth being constant to) " but never reach it !" It 
 strikes us this is a naughtyish book — at least, if, as we 
 read in Spenser : — 
 
 " there is no greater shame 
 Than lightness or inconstancy in love." 
 
 The book is a mark of the times, however. It 
 makes no mention of Fourierism, but we doubt 
 whether its sentiments would have been ventured 
 upon in print, if Fourier principles had not insensibly 
 opened the gates. It is no sign that principles are not 
 spreading, because everybody writes against them, 
 and because few will acknowledge them. We see by 
 various symptoms in literature, that the mere peep 
 into free-and-easy-dom given by the discussion of 
 Fourier tenets, has left a leaning that way. There is 
 no particular Fourierism, that we know of, in the two 
 following pieces of poetry, but they fell from that 
 same leaning, we rather fancy. We copy the first 
 from our sober and exemplary neighbor, "The Al- 
 bion" : — 
 
 " No ! the heaven-enfranchised poet 
 
 Must have no exclusive home, 
 But (young ladies, you should know it) 
 
 Wives in scores his hair to comb. 
 When the dears were first invented, 
 
 One a-piece Fate only gave us, 
 Wiser far two kings demented — 
 
 Solomon— and Hal Octavus. . 
 
 " Doctors' Commons judge severely, 
 
 My belief to reason stands ; 
 Any dolt can prove it clearly, 
 
 With ten fingers on his hands. 
 Smiles and glances, sighs and kisses 
 
 From one wife are sweet — what then ? 
 That amount of wedlock's blisse 
 
 Take, and multiply by ten. 
 
 " Laughing Jane and sparkling Jessy 
 Shall the morning's meal prepare, 
 Brilliant Blanche and bright-eyed Bessy 
 Mid-day's lunch shall spread and share ; 
 
 Ann and Fan shall grace my dinner, 
 
 Rose and Laura pour my tea ; 
 Sue brew grog, while Kate, sweet sinner, 
 
 Lights the bedroom wax for me. 
 
 "Monk ! within thy lonely cell, 
 
 What wouldst give to greet a bride ? 
 Monckton bids thee forth to dwell 
 
 With a dozen by thy side. 
 Poet ! in your crown one wife 
 
 Shines a jewel, past a doubt, 
 But in ten times married life, 
 
 Mind your jewels don't fall out!" 
 
 The next instance comes from the very heart oT 
 holier-than-thou-dom — the exemplary state of Maine 
 The St. Louis Reveille declares it to be a "well-au- 
 thenticated fact which occurred at Holton, in Maine." 
 
 " In old New England, long ago, 
 When all creation travelled slow, 
 And naught but trackless deserts lay, 
 Before the early settlers' way, 
 A youth and damsel, bold and fair, 
 Had cause to take a journey where 
 Through night and day, and day and night, 
 No house would greet their wearied sight ; 
 And, thinking Hymen's altar should 
 Precede their journey through the wood, 
 They straightway to a justice went, 
 By love and circumstatices sent ! 
 The justice — good old honest pate — 
 Said it was quite unfortunate, 
 But at that time he could not bind 
 These two young folks of willing mind, 
 For his commission — sad to say — 
 Had just expired — but yesterday ! 
 Yet, after all, he would not say 
 That single they should go away : 
 And so he bade them join their hands 
 In holy wedlock's happy bands, 
 And 'just a little' he would marry — 
 Enough, perhaps, to safely carry — 
 As they were in connubial mood — 
 ' Enough to do them through the wood." " 
 
 Missionary Eyelids. — At No. 75, Fulton street, 
 a large emporium has lately been opened for the sale 
 of the plant propagated from the cut-off eyelids of the 
 first Christian missionary to China — in other words, 
 for the sale of tea ! One of the partners of this es- 
 tablishment (the Pekin tea company) has written a 
 charming little pamphlet, called a " Guide to Tea- 
 Drinkers," in which he gives the following true origin 
 of the wakeful properties of tea: — 
 
 " Darma, the son of an Indian king, is said to have 
 landed in China in the year 510 of the Christian era. 
 He employed all his care and time to spread through 
 the country a knowledge of God and religion, and, to 
 stimulate others by his example, imposed on himself 
 privations of every kind, living in the open air, in fast- 
 ing and prayer. On one occasion, being worn out 
 with fatigue, he fell asleep against his will, and that he 
 might thereafter observe his oath, which he had thus 
 violated, he cut off his eyelids, and threw them on the 
 ground. The next day passing the same way, he 
 found them changed to a shrub (tea) which the earth 
 never before produced. Having eaten some of its 
 leaves he felt his spirits much exhilarated, and his 
 strength restored. He recommended this aliment to 
 his disciples and followers. The reputation of tea in- 
 creased, and from that time it continued to be gener- 
 ally used." 
 
 The pamphlet goes on to state the properties of the 
 different kinds of tea, describing Pekoe as the best ot 
 teas (qu? — hence the prevailing of the Pico tease over 
 Borghese's), and declares it to be peculiarly agreeable 
 (Pekoe tea) to poets and ladies— as follows : — 
 
 "The warmth conveyed to the stomach of man by 
 tea-drinking at his various meals, becomes essential to 
 him, nor would the crystal steam of the poet suffice 
 for the healthy powers of digestion in the artificial 
 state of existence in which we are placed. A learned 
 
780 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 writer declares that tea is particularly adapted for the 
 ordinary beverage of young women, and the individual 
 who, until the day of her marriage, has never tasted 
 wine or any fermented liquor, is the one who is 
 most likely to fulfil the great end of her existence — 
 the handing down to posterity a strong and well-or- 
 ganized offspring." 
 
 A visit to this emporium is well worth curiosity's 
 while, and tea can there be bought in large or small 
 quantities, and in prices much below those of grocers. 
 
 Women in their June. — The early decay of fe- 
 male beauty, consequent on neglect of physical edu- 
 cation and the corroding dryness of our climate, has 
 given an American value to the immature April and 
 May of female seasons, and a corresponding depreci- 
 ation to the riper June. The article which we copy 
 below, from the Brooklyn Star, expresses, we believe, 
 the opinion of the best judges of these exotics from 
 a better world, and emboldens us to express a long- 
 entertained belief that the most loveable age of un- 
 married woman's life commences, at the earliest, at 
 twenty-jive, and lasts as long after as she shows no dim- 
 inution of sensibility, and no ravages of time. Women 
 improve so much longer than men (improve by the 
 loving and suffering that spoils men), that we wonder 
 they have never found an historic anatomist of their 
 later stages. We suggest it to pens at a loss. Here 
 follow our contemporary's opinions : — 
 
 " My dear sir, if you ever marry, marry an old 
 maid — a good old maid — who is serious, and simple, 
 and true. I hate these double-minded misses, who 
 are all the time hunting after a husband. I tell you 
 that when a woman gets to be twenty-eight, she 
 settles into a calm — rather she " anchors in deep wa- 
 ters, and safe from shore." There never was a set, or 
 class, or community of persons, so belied as these 
 ancient ladies. Look upon it as no reproach to a 
 woman that she is not married at thirty or thirty-five. 
 Above all, fall not into the vulgar notion of romances, 
 and shallow wils — unlearned in women's hearts, be- 
 cause they never had the love of a true woman — that 
 these are continually lying in wait to catch bachelors' 
 hearts. For one woman who has floated into the 
 calm of her years, who is anxious to fix you, I will 
 find you fifty maidens in their teens, and just out, who 
 lay a thousand snares to entrap you, and with more 
 cold-blooded intent — for whether is worse, that one of 
 singleness of purpose should seek to lean on you for 
 life, or that one should seek you as a lover, to excite 
 jealousy in others, or as a last resort. 
 
 " Marry a healthy, well-bred woman, between 
 twenty-eight and thirty-five, who is inclined to love 
 you, and never bewilder your brains with suspicions 
 about whether she has intentions on you or not. This 
 is the rock of vanity upon which many a man has 
 wrecked his best feelings and truest inclinations. Our 
 falseness, and the falseness of society, and more than 
 all, the false and hollow tone of language upon this 
 subject, leave very little courage for a straightforward 
 and independent course in the matter. What matter 
 if a woman likes you, and shows that she does, hon- 
 estly, and wishes to marry you ? — the more reason for 
 self-congratulation but not for vanity. What matter 
 if she be young or not, so she be loveable? I won't 
 say what matter if she be plain or not — for everybody 
 knows that that is no matter where love is, though it 
 may have some business in determining the senti- 
 ment. I don't know what has led me into this course 
 of remark. The last thing I should have expected 
 on sitting down to write, is, that I should have fallen 
 into a lecture on matrimony. I am not an old maid 
 myself, yet ; but I have a clearer eye to their virtues 
 than I have had, and begin to feel how dignified a 
 
 woman may be ' in her loneness — in her loneness — 
 and the fairer for that loneness.' You may think it 
 is bespeaking favor and patience with a vengeance." 
 
 Refined Charities. — Our readers were made 
 aware, a (ew days since, that we had received very 
 great pleasure from a visit to an institution hitherto 
 unknown to us — the "Asylum for Aged and Indigent 
 Ladies." That so beautiful a charity, conducted 
 with so happy a method, should never have come to 
 our knowledge, struck us as probably a singular 
 chance in our own hearsay — but we find that others, 
 as likely to be interested in it as ourself, were equally 
 in the dark, and one lady (quite the most active Dor- 
 cas of our acquaintance) took our account to be an 
 ingenious device to suggest such an institution ! That 
 a large two-winged building, with a sculptured tablet 
 set in front, stating its purpose, and so filled that it 
 might be taken up to heaven by its "knit corners," 
 like the sheet full of living things let down to the 
 apostle on the housetop — that such a building, with 
 such a purpose, should exist unsuspected in one of 
 the streets of New York, is somewhat a marvel. But 
 we were not prepared for two such surprises ! We 
 have since discovered another charity that was wholly 
 unknown to us, as delicate, if not as poetically beau- 
 tiful, and we begin to think that the old saying is 
 true — ministering spirits do walk the earth, unrecog- 
 nised in their tender ministrations, and 
 
 '• The tears that we forget to note, the angels wipe away." 
 
 Our second discovery is of an institution called the 
 " Ladies' Depository — intended for the benefit of 
 those persons who have experienced a reverse of fortune, 
 and who can not come before the public, while, at the 
 same time, they may, from necessity, tvish to dispose of 
 useful and ornamental ivork, if it could be done pri- 
 vately, and to advantage." The institution supports 
 a store for the sale of needlework, &c, and any one 
 of its twenty-five managers may receive an application 
 and give a " permit" to the lady in want — this one 
 manager alone the possessor of the secret of the lady's 
 wants and mode of supplying them. Work, drawings, 
 &c, are thus purchased by the society's funds, and 
 sold by the hired saleswoman of the society, and a 
 veil is thus hung between delicacy and the rude con- 
 tact of open want — a veil which prevents more pain, 
 probably, than the food which prevents only bodily 
 suffering. 
 
 This beautiful charity has now been in existence 
 twelve years, and by its tenth report (we have no later 
 one) we find that fourteen hundred dollars were paid 
 out for work in the twelve months preceding. This 
 sum is not large, and it shows that the subscriptions to 
 the funds of the society are less liberal than could be 
 desired. We should think that the bare knowledge 
 of the existence of such societies as this and the one 
 beforementioned, would start streams of gift-laden 
 sympathy toward them, and we think they but need 
 wider publicity. We are not authorized to mention 
 in print the names of the treasurer or directresses, 
 but the report lies on our table, and we shall be happy 
 to give the information to any individual applying at 
 our office. 
 
 We copy the following astounding intelligence 
 from a Montreal paper: — 
 
 "Annexation of the State of Maine. — After 
 all that has been said of Texas and Oregon, and the 
 desire entertained by the people of tile United States 
 to enlarge their territory by the acquisition of im- 
 mense tracts, it will surprise many, and add much to 
 the protocols that will be issued, to learn that the state 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 781 
 
 of Maine, disgusted with slavery and repudiation, and 
 feeling a community of interests with those of north of 
 forty-Jive degrees, 'has petitioned her majesty Queen 
 Victoria to readmit her to the old family circle of John 
 Bull, where property is respected, and where there is 
 neither vote by ballot, Lynch law, slavery, nor repudia- 
 tion. 
 
 " It 19 generally surmised that his honor, Judge 
 Preble is charged with this delicate mission, and that 
 the petition will be sent through his excellency Lord 
 Metcalfe, by the next steamer, though the ostensible 
 ground of his honor's visit to Montreal is the railroad 
 to Portland ; and it is evident that if the admission is 
 agreed on, and is prompt and immediate, all the stock 
 will be at once subscribed by the home government, 
 and presented to the new confederation. 
 
 " Part of New Hampshire, Vermont, and that por- 
 tion of New York bordering on the St. Lawrence, 
 will, it is thought, follow this laudable example. 
 
 " N. B. No STATE THAT HAS REPUDIATED NEED 
 APPLY." 
 
 We were born in Portland, and by annexation, as 
 above, are likely to turn out a "a Britisher from the 
 provinces!" President Polk is to lose us — Queen 
 Victoria is to have us ! Lucky we were presented to 
 her majesty while we were a republican court-eligible 
 — before we sank, that is to say, from a " distinguished 
 foreigner" into a provincial editor! We should never 
 have had formal certainty of having lodged exclu- 
 sively for the space of a minute, in the queen's eye, 
 had Maine annexed herself before we were brought to 
 the notice of " Gold Stick in Waiting." So much, 
 at least, it was better to have been temporarily a 
 Yankee ! 
 
 There is one other difference to be considered, 
 while we are measuring the matter at the top — we 
 cease to be a competitor for the presidency ! Our 
 glorious fifteen millionth of capability for "No. 1" 
 drops from us as treason to Victoria! We are re- 
 duced to the prospect of dying the inferior of Louis 
 Philippe (!) without the benefit of a doubt. We be- 
 come also, doubtless, the inferior of all the titled gen- 
 tlemen catalogued in the " red book," many of whom, 
 till Maine was annexed, welcomed us to walk into 
 their houses, without mentally seeing us pass under 
 the yoke over the door. We are to unlearn " Yan- 
 kee Doodle," and learn "God save the Queen." We 
 are to call this half-savage country " The States," 
 and keep the birthdays of the queen's annuals. We 
 are to glory in standing armies, national debt, and 
 London fog and porter, and begin to hesitate in our 
 speech, and wear short whiskers. The change in 
 our prayer-book is not much. We are to do our ci- 
 phering in pounds, and that will plague us ! We are 
 to be interested in Canada politics and Lord Met- 
 calfe's erysipelas. We are to belong to a country 
 where births are published, as the first sign that peo- 
 ple know all about you, and that you must stay put. 
 (This last strikes us as the worst part of it.) AVe are 
 to pass for an Englishman on our travels, in the states 
 and elsewhere, and that is agreeable, because our 
 suavity will be unexpected. The larger features of 
 our metamorphosis we omit for future consideration 
 — but, as far as these personal ones go, we fear we 
 had a better chance as a Yankee ! We were what we 
 could make ourselves — we are to be what others make 
 us. Queen Victoria, on the whole, will oblige us by 
 not laying her hands on our Maine! 
 
 A Future Passion, in the Egg. — We have had a 
 book for some time, that is destined to be an Ameri- 
 can passion. Once read, it infatuates — for it expres- 
 ses in a brief and beautiful figure every possible 
 
 poetic feeling, and will do for the heart, what the 
 single japonica does to the dress — give the finishing 
 expression, no way else so felicitously effective. 
 Those who make love before this book gets into use, 
 will work like savages with arrows before the discove- 
 ry of gunpowder. Those whose best thoughts die 
 in birth, for lack of recognition and ready-made cloth 
 ing, will wonder how they were ever comfortable 
 without it. Our Cumberland correspondent spent a 
 whole letter, wondering why we, who were constantly 
 quoting the book, had never written a critique upon 
 it. Our reason for not doing so — or rather for first 
 making our readers thoroughly alive to its beauty by 
 extract — is indirectly given in the book itself, in the 
 chapter called " Indirect Influences." See how ex- 
 quisitely it is done : — 
 
 Behold those broken arches, that oriel all unglazed, 
 
 That crippled line of columns creeping in the sun, 
 
 The delicate shaft stricken midway, and the flying 
 
 buttress, 
 Idly stretching forth to hold up tufted ivy : 
 Thinkest thou the thousand eyes that shi/ie with rapture on 
 
 a ruin, 
 Would have looked with half their wonder on the perfect 
 
 pile ? 
 And wherefore not— but that light hints, suggesting unseen 
 
 beauties, 
 Fill the complacent gazer with self-grown conceits ? 
 And so, the rapid sketch winneth more praise to the 
 
 painter, 
 Than the consummate work elaborated on his easel : 
 And so, the Helvetic lion cavemed in the living rock 
 Hath more of majesty and force, than if upon a marble 
 
 pedestal. 
 
 1 Tell me, daughter of taste, what hath charmed thine ear in 
 music ? 
 
 Is it the labored theme, the curious fugue or cento — 
 
 Nay— rather the sparkles of intelligence flashing from some 
 strange note, 
 
 Or the soft melody of sounds far sweeter for simplicity ? 
 
 Tell me, thou son of science, what hath filled thy mind in 
 reading ? 
 
 Is it the volume of detail where all is orderly set down 
 
 And they that read may run, nor need to stop and think ; 
 
 The book carefully accurate, that counteth thee no better 
 than a fool, 
 
 Gorging the passive mind with annotated notes? — 
 
 Nay— rather the half-suggested thoughts, the riddles thou 
 mayst solve, 
 
 The fair ideas, coyly peeping like young loves out of 
 roses, 
 
 The quaint arabesque conceptions, half-cherub and half- 
 flower, 
 
 The light analogy, or deep allusion, trusted to thy learn- 
 ing, 
 
 The confidence implied in thy skill to unravel meaning 
 mysteries ! 
 
 For ideas are ofttimes shy of the close furniture of words, 
 
 And thought, wherein only is power, may be best conveyed by 
 a suggestion : 
 
 The flash that lighteth up a valley, amid the dark midnight 
 of a storm, 
 
 Cometh the mind with that scene sharper than fifty sum- 
 
 The book of which this exquisite passage is a part, 
 is called "proverbial philosophy." It is by Martin 
 Farquhar Tupper, of Christ church, Oxford, and an 
 American edition of it has lain in the bookstores for 
 two years, wholly unsaleable ! It can afford to " bide 
 its time," and mean-time, we shall enrich our readers 
 with it, bit by bit. 
 
 ARGUMENT FOR SEDAN CHAIRS. 
 
 " Mr Editor : You stand accredited as the ready 
 friend of luxurious elegance, the happy mingler of 
 those foreign ingredients, the utile with the dulct. 
 My dear sir, why have you never said a word in favor 
 of the Sedan-chairs ? The very name carries one 
 hack to the days of Pope and Addison ; to the routs, 
 
782 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 and masquerades and Ranelagh of London, in the 
 •reign of wits.' Even Cowper celebrates it: — 
 
 " ' Possess ye therefore, ye who, borne about 
 In chariot and sedam, know no fatigue 
 But that of idleness.' 
 
 " It is an Italian seggietta ; and thus defined by an 
 old writer : ' a kind of chaire used in Italy to carrie 
 men and women up and downe.' It seems to have 
 emigrated to London from Sedan, the birthplace of 
 Turenne. Dryden used it for the lectica of the Ro- 
 mans : — 
 
 " ' Some beg for absent persons, feign them sick, 
 Close mewed in their sedans for want of air, 
 And for their wives present an empty chair.' 
 
 •« Were you ever in one'? Then you will agree that 
 it is as necessary in Broadway as a gondola in Venice. 
 Think of Pope's ' two pages and a chair.' Our 
 thousand and one idlers, who are too ragged to beg, 
 and too poor to keep a cab, might flourish their poles 
 to some purpose in front of St. Paul's — a better class 
 of chairmen than some we wot of. — They need not 
 have so heavy a load, nor so great a peril, as those 
 who, according to Swift, helped in the Trojan horse: — 
 
 " ' Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed, 
 
 Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed, 
 Tho^e bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do. 
 Instead of paying chairmen, run them through.' 
 
 " The new police would defend the glass from any 
 roystering blood, who, as Prior sings : — 
 
 " ' Breaks watchmen's heads and chairmen's glasses 
 And thence proceeds to nicking sashes.' 
 
 Opposition may be expected : there was such at the 
 cab-epocha. But who can even name a cab, without 
 ignominy. Think of a trundling box — a packing-case 
 on wheels — surmounted by a top-heavy Milesian, 
 enthroned on a remnant of Chatham-street-great-coat, 
 forcing you along sidewise by a series of thumps, and 
 then, with a paroxysm that tries every ball and socket, 
 dumping you on the trottoir! Our semi-tropical 
 climate demands a protection from the sun : some- 
 thing emulating the oriental palanquin ; a parasol 
 which shall preclude fatigue and dust, as well as sun- 
 light — which shall transport the delicate woman with 
 the gentlest conceivable carriage, and into the very 
 hall of the stately mansion. What, prithee, can 
 answer these conditions but the sedan-chair ? I al- 
 ready see you in one, peering through the sky-blue 
 curtain, as you swim through your evening survey. 
 The corporation will at once adjust a bill of rates ; 
 the thing is done. " Lunarius." " 
 
 We have been but in one city where sedans were 
 in use — Dublin. What struck us, in using them (and 
 that is what the reader cares most to know, we pre- 
 sume) was the being shut up where it was warm and 
 dry, and let out where it was warm and dry. The 
 sedan is a small close carriage — an easy chair en- 
 closed by windows — carried on poles by two men. 
 They come into your drawing-room if you wish, shut 
 you up in a carriage by the fireside, and carry you, 
 without the slightest jar or contact with out-of-doors, 
 into the house where you are to dine or dance — no 
 wet sidewalk and no gust of cold wind, snow, or rain ! 
 They are cheaper than carriages because men are 
 easier kept than horses, and as a sedan-chairman can 
 also follow some other trade in the daytime, we 
 should think it would be good economy to introduce 
 them to New York. Many a delicate woman might 
 then go to parties or theatres with a quarter of the 
 present risk — to lungs or head-dress ! 
 
 Prince's Gardens. — We have received an im- 
 mense catalogue of the fruit-trees, plants, flowers, 
 
 vines, and berries, comprised in this ark of vegetation 
 at Flushing, and we should think from the account 
 of Prince's gardens, and the prodigal variety of this 
 catalogue, that the establishment would be better 
 worth visiting than any object of curiosity in the 
 neighborhood. It is now in the hands of the third 
 generation of descendants from the original founder — 
 no slight marvel of constancy of pursuit in this 
 country ! 
 
 But we have found a singular pleasure in this cata- 
 logue — no less than a perfect feast upon the names and 
 descriptions of the fruits and flowers ! It reads like a 
 directory of some city of fairies, with a description of 
 the fairy-citizens written out against their names. 
 We can fancy a delightful visiting-list of people an- 
 swering to these descriptions of fruits and flowers. 
 Here are a few of the characters : — 
 
 Different apples are described as — " flesh stained 
 with red, perfumed;" "snow-white flesh, musky 
 sweet ;" " fair, beautiful, pleasant flavor, sprightly ;" 
 "tender, juicy, keeps well;" "remains juicy till 
 late;" "red flesh, a curiosity," etc., etc. Different 
 pears are described as — " rich, sugary, delicious 
 aroma ;" " most splendid, extra delicious, none more 
 estimable, grows vigorously, bears soon ;" " beautiful, 
 aromatic, bears young, greatly esteemed ;" " rich, 
 musky ;" " excellent, slow to yield fruit ;" " thin skin, 
 sweet, very good ;" " new native variety, estimable, 
 handsome;" "very large, skin shining, flesh crisp, 
 agreeable flavor, excellent," &c. Different peaches 
 are described as — " oval, splendid, luscious;" "estima- 
 ble, foliage curled, peculiar ;" " waxen appearance, 
 globular, delicious flavor," &c. Different grapes are 
 described as — " large, estimable, vigorous;" "sweet, 
 firm, thick skin, hangs long, monstrous clusters ;" 
 " monstrous fox variety;" " Willis's large black ;" (?) 
 " sprightly, pure for wine," etc. Different roses are 
 called by name and described — "formidable red;" 
 "glory of the reds;" "insurmountable beauty;" 
 " new Dutch virgin's blush ;" " sombre agreeable ;" 
 " Watson's blush;" " red prolific ;" " pale rose, deep 
 centre;" "deep rose, very robust;" "bluish violet, 
 superb, singular;" "bright pink, flaked with scarlet;*' 
 "pubescent yellow flowering;" "white quilled;" 
 "extra magnificent;" " splendid, full, double-shaded 
 blush, monstrous size," etc., etc. 
 
 Such names and definitions, of anything, were 
 enough to bring one to Flushing, and Mr. Prince 
 may look out for us very early in May, catalogue in 
 hand, to see beauties he has described so glowingly ! 
 We trust the list of adjectives we have put so venture- 
 somely close together in our cool columns will not 
 explode in type, with spontaneous combustion! 
 
 Letters of Introduction. — The following query 
 may be answered briefly enough by quoting only Eu- 
 ropean usage, but the propriety of an American varia- 
 tion occurs to us, and we will write a line on the sub- 
 ject — first giving the suggestive note : — 
 
 " Sir : My friend N., usually a well-informed, 
 though rather an obstinate individual, is about to 
 travel, and asked me for a letter of introduction to a 
 friend abroad. The letter is written, and is submit- 
 ted to his perusal, after which he hands it back to be 
 sealed, insisting that the rule is inflexible that all let- 
 ters should be sealed. I refuse to affix the wax, 
 holding that a letter of introduction should be open. 
 
 " We leave the question to your decision. As my 
 friend N. can not sail until the question is decided, an 
 early decision will oblige him and your humble ser- 
 vant, " B." 
 
 With very ceremonious people, and ceremonious 
 notes of introduction, it is usual to affix a seal upon 
 the outside of the letter, leaving it to be read and 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 783 
 
 fastened by the bearer, before delivery. If the let- 
 ter extends beyond the mere stating of who the 
 bearer is, and the desire that he should be kindly re- 
 ceived, or if it treats of other matters, it is given 
 sealed. Either mode is perfectly allowable, for if the 
 bearer objects to a sealed letter, he can ask the con- 
 tents when he receives it. It is more common, how- 
 ever, to give it unsealed. 
 
 Briefly, now, to the point we are coming to : let- 
 ters of introduction, in this country, should be ad- 
 dressed to the women and not to the men, and should 
 go more into details of what the bearer is and what is 
 his errand of travel, and therefore should be sealed. 
 We have long been aware of a prevailing impression 
 that Americans treat letters of introduction with a 
 very uncivilized inattention, and so they do — because the 
 etiqnetical and hospitable cares of American families 
 are in charge of the icife, and the husband is very likely 
 to stick the letter into a pigeon-hole of his desk, and 
 forget all about it. The wife in America does all the 
 ornamental. To see a rich man come down the steps 
 of his own house (almost anywhere "up town") you 
 would take him to be a tradesman who had been in to 
 collect a bill. To see the wife follow, you would at 
 once acknowledge that she looked as though she lived 
 in the house, and fancy that she was probably an- 
 noyed to see that man pass out by the front door ! 
 From making himself a slave to keep his wife a god- 
 dess, the American loses all idea of the propriety of 
 looking like a mate for his wife, and he unconsciously 
 ceases to take any care of the civilities to which his 
 own manners give so little value, and neglects all 
 persons who have not had the tact to be presented 
 first to the ornamental moiety. It should be an 
 American usage, therefore, crowing out of the inferi- 
 ority of the husband's breeding to the wife's, that let- 
 ters of introduction should be addressed to the woman. 
 Of course, as she has no opportunity to inquire 
 into the bearer's position or habits, these should be 
 more minutely set down, and the letter should he 
 sealed. 
 
 | character of the ' ten thousand other workies' whom 
 Mr. Willis ' could name.' Some think that he 
 means to be witty, and alludes ironically to the "up- 
 
 i per teny This is a great mystery. 
 
 "The constituent elements of ' japonica-dom' and 
 'dandy-dom' may be seen daily in Broadway, between 
 the hours of twelve and three. All the beauty above 
 Bleecker street wanders at that time down as far as 
 the Park, hazarding even the contamination of the 
 
 i vulgar crowd, in the hope of securing an appetite for 
 
 (dinner. The liveried lacqueys, who oscillate upon a 
 black board behind the carriages of our republican 
 nabobs, sport their gayest trappings: I had the pleas- 
 ure of seeing one yesterday in a drab ' cut-away' with 
 gold lace and yellow facings, and white silk stockings 
 with purple velvet smalls! What is this great coun- 
 try coming to ? We Gothamites do sometimes make 
 ourselves ridiculous, by aping what as a people we 
 profess to despise. It is rumored that a deputation 
 of English 'small-potato' baronets may be expected 
 in this city next summer; and that the object of their 
 transatlantic mission is, to establish an aristocratic 
 nucleus among our '■upper ten thousand.' A 'her- 
 ald's college' has already been set on foot; and I have 
 heard that it enjoys considerable patronage. It is 
 proposed to build wings on either side of ' the up-town 
 opera-house' — the one to be assigned to this ' herald's 
 college,' and the other to the 'university of fashion,' 
 of which Mr. Willis is to be president. Some say 
 
 j that Colonel Webb has applied for the vice-presiden- 
 cy, but I can not vouch for this. 
 
 I "The chief feature of the Broadway Journal is a 
 
 ! defence by Mr. Poe of his attack upon Longfellow, 
 &c. It is as stupid as might be expected from a man 
 who used to 'do up' such very small prosodial criti 
 cisms for Graham's Magazine. Mr. Poe comes down 
 rather severely on Willis — he therefore has probably 
 discontinued his services at the Mirror office." 
 
 One mistake in the above : Mr. Poe left us some 
 time before writing in the Broadway Journal, and to 
 edit that journal ; and he never offended us by a criti- 
 cism, nor could he, except by personalities, in which 
 he never indulges. 
 
 " Findings." — We see advertised continually cer- 
 tain commodities called "findings," which we under- 
 stand are what hatters and shoemakers require be- 
 sides peltry and leather. There are findings for 
 newspapers, too — what the editors require besides 
 leaders and news — and it may gratify our subscribers 
 to know, that out of the weary slip-slop which we 
 commonly scribble after making up the Mirror's lead- 
 ers and news, our contemporaries supply themselves 
 with the greater part of their ornamental " findings." 
 Like every other editor, we are in the habit of giving 
 a line or two occasionally, in the body of our paper, 
 to the wares of our most liberal advertisers, and it ap- 
 pears that even this wastage of business notices is 
 considered spice enough for other papers to be sea- 
 soned with. The Boston Transcript spices its little 
 sheet very often with these parings of our daily apple. 
 Here is part of a letter which contains a touch : — 
 
 "The leading articles in the Mirror and Commer- 
 cial Advertiser for the last day or two have been de- 
 voted to the all-engrossing topic, the spring style of 
 hats. After admitting that ' knowingness could no 
 further go' than Beebe & Costar went, Willis winds 
 up thus : ' For ourself and ten thousand other workies 
 whom we could name, the sadder model of Orlando 
 Fish — timid, proper, and thoughtful — is perhaps more 
 appropriate.' This passage has produced a great 
 sensation in dandy-dom. The Fish party are in rap- 
 tures, and could hug Willis to their very bosoms; 
 •the opposition' is in a fury. Nobody can tell what 
 the result may be. Willis dare not venture out, it is 
 thought without a body-guard of Fishites. There! 
 are. moreover, manv surmises with regard to the ' 
 
 Schiller and Goethe.— Mr. Calvert of Balti- 
 more has given us, as translator, a most agreeable 
 collection of gossippy letters— the undress of two 
 great minds, of the age just closed behind us. What 
 we most wish to comment on, however (the book 
 speaks for itself), i3 Mr. Calvert's own— the preface, 
 in which he indignantly and most properly rebukes 
 the last orator of the " Phi Beta Kappa Society," for 
 a short-sighted and illiberal attack on the memory of 
 Goethe. We found it difficult, at the time, to restrain 
 an outbreak of disgust, but the oration was not pub- 
 lished for some time, and we were unwilling to take 
 ground upon a newspaper report of it. Meantime, 
 our natural alacrity at forgetting disagreeable things 
 dropped it out of memory. We are not sorry that a 
 condemnation of it is now recorded in a book that 
 must live. 
 
 Mr. Calvert puts the truth thus forcibly : " How 
 i little outward testimony survives about Shakspere ; 
 but whoso can read his poetry, may get a knowledge 
 i of the man surer and more absolute than could have 
 j been gotten even from the fullest contemporaneous opin- 
 ions. As the tree is known by its fruit, we know that 
 the parent of the Shaksperian progeny must have 
 been a man in whom, in close alliance with a kingly 
 intellect dwelt, as well the virtues that ennoble, as 
 the graces that beautify and the affections that sweeten 
 life. Into whatever errors an ardent temperament 
 may have drawn him, they dim not the lucent image 
 of him, fixed in our minds by study of his works; 
 nav. we' presume not to with them uncommitted, test 
 
784 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 an attempt to better such a bounteous gift from God, 
 should mar, but by a tittle, the original proportions of 
 one, the sum of ivhose life has been to the world an un- 
 measurable benefaction. When a bad man's brain 
 shall give birth to an Iphiginea, a Clara, a Mignon, 
 you may pluck pomegranates from Plymouth rock, 
 and reap corn on the sands of Sahara. 
 
 "On a formal public occasion (the Phi Beta Kap- 
 pa oration at Cambridge in 1844), a blind and 
 most rude assault has been made on one of the 
 mightiest of the dead, whose soul lives on earth, and 
 will for ages live in the exaltation of the loftiest 
 minds. Out of stale German gossip, out of shallmo 
 waitings of prosaic critics, shallower clamors of pseudo- 
 patriots, uncharitable magnification of common failings, 
 were compounded calumny against one of the fore- 
 most men of the world, and the most honored man of 
 a people rich in virtue and genius." 
 
 Quite aside from the defence of Goethe, we think 
 there is an obvious presentment here of the continual 
 manner of treating all kinds of eminence and celeb- 
 rity, here, in our own country, and at this present hour. 
 As the proverb says : — 
 
 " Thankfully take refuge in obscurity, 
 For, if thou claimest merit, thy sin shall be proclaimed 
 
 upon the housetops ! 
 Consider them of old, the great, the good, the learned ; 
 Did those speed in favor ? were they loved and admired? 
 Was every prophet had in honor ? and every deserving one 
 
 remembered to his praise? 
 It were weariness to count up noble names neglected in 
 
 their lives, 
 The scorned, defamed, insulted, but the excellent of the 
 
 earth. 
 For good men are the health of the world, valued only 
 
 when it perisheth. 
 Living genius is seen among infirmities wherefrom the com- 
 moner are free, 
 And there be many cares, and man knoweth little of his 
 
 brother .' 
 Feebly we appreciate a motive, and slowly keep pace with 
 
 a feeling. 
 Yet, once more, griever at neglect, hear me to thy comfort : 
 Neglect ? O libel on a world, where half that world 
 
 is woman ! 
 No man yet deserved, who found not some to love him ! 
 O, woman ! self-forgetting woman ! poetry of human life ! 
 Many a word of comfort, many a deed of magnanimity, 
 Many a stream of milk and honey pour ye freely on the 
 
 earth I" 
 
 Stewart's Stable Economy. — We covet three 
 things in the Arab's condition — his loose trousers, his 
 country without fences, and his freedom to live with 
 his horse. That we have once had the centaur variety 
 in the human race, men-quadrupeds, and have once 
 known horseflesh as "flesh of our flesh," the natural 
 longing to prance, when we first get into the open air 
 after long confinement, is but one of many evidences. 
 In a mere notice of a book, however, we have no 
 leisure to trace back a problem of physiology. We 
 merely wish to convey to such of our enviable readers 
 as can resume the centaur (by loving and living with a 
 horse in the country), the treasure they have in a book 
 which shows them how to make their life (the horse 
 half of it) a luxury instead of an endurance, and to give 
 our own five years' enjoyment in breaking, petting, and 
 improving horses, by aid of this same book, as expe- 
 rienced commendation. We had the English edition 
 of Stewart's books on horses, but the Appletons have 
 republished the " Stable Economy," with " notes 
 adapting it to American food and climate," by Mr. 
 Allen, the able editor of the Agriculturist, and it is 
 now an invaluable vade-mecum, for all men who have 
 the luxury of a stable. 
 
 We can not help repeating that a visitable stable, 
 with friends in it in the shape of horses— with horses 
 in it one has himself broken and trained— a stable to 
 which the ladies like to go after breakfast, and where 
 
 a gentleman can throw on his own saddle and bridle, 
 
 and gallop off", without needing first to find his groom 
 
 that this is the next best luxury our country affords, 
 after ladies' society. (Horses, that is to say, before 
 politics or stocks, under male discussion.) 
 
 The stable at Gordon castle (approachable by a 
 covered passage, from the principal hall) was a fre- 
 quent resort for the ladies after breakfast ; and we 
 have seen women, the highest in rank at the English 
 court, going in and out of the stalls, patting the favor- 
 ites they were to ride later in the day, and discussing 
 their beauty with the simplicity and frankness of 
 Arabs in the desert. While we are building country- 
 houses and forming habits in America, it is well to 
 know all the luxury we can enjoy in rural life, and no 
 one should build stable, or own horse, without con- 
 sulting the excellent directions for stabling and using 
 the horse, in this book of Stewart's. 
 
 Grund's Letters from Europe. — In Godey's 
 Lady's Book for April we find one of these best 
 epistles of the day, and (to tell the truth) we read 
 them with very little satisfaction, for they leave us 
 with a want to go where they are written. The April 
 number of Godey is principally the work of unwedded 
 quills (no less than ten misses numbered among the 
 contributors !), but we have read it with great satis- 
 faction, and felicitate our old friend upon the bril- 
 liancy of his maiden troop. Godey is the pioneer of 
 magazines, and he has a tact at collection and selec- 
 tion, which has put him where he is — safe at high- 
 water mark in enduring prosperity. Success to him. 
 
 By-the-way — though we have no room to expatiate 
 on the several papers in this number — the " Sketch of 
 Joseph Bonaparte" is capital. Is that by a " miss" 
 too? 
 
 And apropos, Godey ! What a vile word " miss" 
 is, to express the sweetest thing in nature! Why 
 should the idol of mankind be called a "miss?" 
 Why should the charming word heifer be degraded to 
 the use of kine? We say "degraded," for it once 
 served ladies as a synonym for the proudest of virgin 
 sweethearts. Ben Jonson, in his play of the "Silent 
 Woman," thus writes a speech for his hero : — 
 
 " But heare me, faire lady, I do also love her whom 
 I shall choose for my heifer, to be the first and prin- 
 cipal in all fashions." 
 
 The derivation of the word heifer is so complimen- 
 tary ! It comes from two Anglo-Saxon words, which 
 signify "to step superbly," as a young creature who 
 has borne no burthens. With this explanation, we 
 trust our friend Godey will no longer hesitate to ad- 
 vertise his fair contributors as the bright lights of 
 heiferdom — disusing henceforth, forever, the dispar- 
 aging epithet of misses. 
 
 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR'S ROOM. 
 
 New York, Friday, March 21. 
 To a lady-friend in the country : I am up to the 
 knees in newspapers, and write to you under the stare 
 of nine pigeon-holes, stuffed with literary portent. 
 Were there such a thing (in this world of everythings) 
 as papyral magnetism, you would get a letter, not 
 only typical in itself, but typical of a flood in which 
 my identity is fast drowning. Oh, the drown of news, 
 weighed unceasingly — little events and great ones — 
 against little more than the trouble of snipping round 
 with scissors ! To a horrid death — to a miraculous 
 preservation — to a heart-gush of poesy — to a marriage 
 — to a crime — to the turn of a political crisis — to 
 flashing wit and storied agonies — giving but the one 
 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 785 
 
 invariable first thought—" Shall I cut it out ?" Alas, 
 dear beauty-monarch of all you survey ! — your own 
 obituary, were I to read it in a newspaper of to-mor- 
 row, would speak scarce quicker to my heart than to 
 those scissors of undiscriminating circum-cision ! 
 With the knowledge that the sky above me was en- 
 riched, as Florence once was, by the return of its 
 long-lost and best model of beauty, I should ask, 
 with be-paragraphed grief — "will her death do for 
 the Mirror ?" 
 
 But you are alive to laugh at me — alive to be (is 
 your lip all ready for a curl ?) the "straw" for me, 
 drowning, to catch at ! I write to you, to-day, to 
 vary routine ! Happy they who can see but one face 
 when they write ! 1 am trying hard to see only yours 
 — trying hard, by mental recapitulation of eyes like 
 fringed inkstands, passionate nostrils, and chin of in- 
 domitable calm, to forget the vague features of my 
 many-nosed public. Oh, the dread loss of one-at-a- 
 time-ativeness ! Oh, the exile to the sad land of 
 nominative plural! Oh, the unprized luxury of see- 
 ing but little, and seeing that little for yourself! 
 
 But — this is a letter from town, and you want the 
 gossip. Spring is here — getting ready to go into the 
 country. The dust and shutter-banging of the tem- 
 pestuous equinox, have, for three days, banished the 
 damageables from Broadway, and I know not the 
 complexion of the spring fashions, now four days old. 
 I was in a gay circle last night where some things 
 were talked of — hm ! — let me remember — Mrs. Mow- 
 att's forthcoming comedy was one topic. Do you 
 know this Corinne of the temperate latitudes? An 
 exact copy, in marble, of her neck and head, would 
 show you a Sapphic bust of most meaning and clear- 
 lined beauty, and there is inspiration in the color of 
 her living eyes and in the prodigal abundance of her 
 floral hair. All this beauty she wastes and thinks 
 nothing of — busied only with the lining of a head, 
 which some tropical angel fashioned as he would have 
 turned out a magnolia. She has genius, and her 
 lamp burns within. But it takes more than genius to 
 write comedy, and more than beauty (though it should 
 not) to give it success, and I tremble for the lovely 
 dramatist. The excitement about it is great — the 
 actors all like their roles — the stage-manager says it is 
 good — the public are wishing to be pleased and will 
 flock to the experiment — and with all my heart, I 
 pray for a "house" continually "brought down." I 
 enclose you a sketch of the plot from the New World 
 of this morning : — 
 
 " The subject is well chosen. Fashion — that is, 
 the eifort to show off dazzlingly in society — is, in this 
 country, a fact of sufficient body and consistence to 
 afford material for an original comedy — and the inci- 
 dents and peculiarities of manner and character at- 
 tending; the effort, are often abundantly ludicrous and 
 grotesque to make the comedy laughable. The 'glass 
 of fashion,' held fairly up in New York, will show 
 some amusing scenes, quite new to the stage. 
 
 "The characters of the piece are selected and group- 
 ed, we think, with character and judgment. An un- 
 educated woman of fashion, driving her husband into 
 dishonesty and crime by her crime and extravagance — 
 a pretended French count, who knows, at least, all 
 the police courts of Europe very thoroughly — a clever 
 French waiting maid, who finds in the said count an 
 old acquaintance — a negro valet of all work rejoicing 
 in a scarlet livery, and much inclined to grandilo- 
 quence — a rich old farmer, from Cattaraugus, carry- 
 ing the moral of the piece, and no small part of its 
 humor, stoutly on upon his broad shoulders — a Fanny- 
 Forester-like country girl, transplanted into the city 
 from Geneva, to work out the plot, and get the good 
 luck of the catastrophe — these are the main person- 
 ages. An old maid — a small poet — a solemn dandy, 
 styled Fogg — a confidential clerk called Snobson, and 
 50 
 
 clearly belonging to the large family of Snobs— a walk- 
 ing gentleman, and a young coquette, are thrown in 
 as make-weights. Here is certainly a goodly drama- 
 tic array. 
 
 "The dialogue is written with taste and spirit. It 
 has few passages of what is called ' fine writing,' but 
 it embodies enough of wit, and fancy, and observa- 
 tion, to keep the attention of the reader constantly and 
 pleasurably excited. A riged criticism, resolved upon 
 fault-finding, might say that the conclusion of this 
 piece is too clearly apparent from its commencement, 
 and that the action moves too slowly through the 
 first three acts. But admitting all this, the comedy 
 certainly has great merit, and, if well brought out, 
 will have a run. We believe that its first night will 
 be greeted by a large audience, and we most cotdially 
 bespeak for it the favorable consideration to which it 
 is, in every regard, entitled." 
 
 Forrest's fate among the London Philistines is 
 another matter of chat. The Macready critics are 
 down upon him — Foster of the Examiner, Macready's 
 bull-dog, heaviest and foremost. This was to have 
 been expected, of course. The gravelly bottom of 
 Macready's throat has been forced upon the English, 
 for so long, as the only sarcophagus of Shakspere, 
 that the bringing of the dry bones to life, in an open 
 mouth, and the marring of the sexton's vocation, was 
 not submitted to without a grumble. An English 
 critic predicts that Forrest "will play down the grum- 
 blers yet," and I trust he will do so. He is the kind 
 of man to say with old Chapman : — 
 
 " Give me the spirit that on life's rough sea 
 Would have his sails filled with lusty wind, 
 Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, 
 And his rapt ship run on her side so low 
 That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air." 
 
 He is twenty times the man, and the actor, that Mac- 
 ready is, and the English will find out his mark if he 
 stay long enough. Meantime they are enchanted 
 with Miss Cushman, who, the Examiner says, is a 
 " feminized caricature of Macready's physiognomy." 
 I like her, by the way, and rejoice in her success as 
 much as I wish a better appreciation of Forrest. 
 
 What else shall I tell you? The Mirror's won- 
 drous " rise and progress," profitably and firmly seated, 
 after less than six months of industrious existence, is 
 a marvel that even your beauty may rejoice in — for 
 it will bring me to your feet (by paying the expenses 
 of transit) when the summer comes over us. Where 
 are you going to Baden it this summer? At Sara- 
 toga? 1 like that place, because you can there, and 
 there alone, be an island in a sea of people. Where 
 there are fewer, you are added to the continent of 
 sociability, and have no privileges. Shall we say the 
 last week in August ? 
 
 Bottom of the page. Scarce room to write my- 
 self Yours - 
 
 An Idea fob Tattersall's.— There are luxuries 
 which rich men forego, not for the money but for the 
 mind they cost. Hundreds of people in this city for 
 instance, could very well afford a carriage, but they 
 can not afford the trouble of buying horses, the care 
 of looking after grooms, nor the anxieties inseparable 
 from horse-owning in this country of perpetual new 
 servants. In England this want is provided for by the 
 system the livery-stable keepers call jobbing. Lady 
 Blessiugton-s two or three different equipages for in- 
 stance, are allowed to be the prettiest and best ap- 
 pointed in London. Yet she owns ne.ther carnages, 
 horses, nor harness. She pays a certa.n sum per 
 annum to be provided with what she wants in the 
 way of equipages, and keeps only her own coachman 
 
786 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 and footmen. A new carriage is furnished whenever 
 wanted, and of whatever style is wanted (the jobber 
 finding no trouble probably in disposing of the one 
 given up) and a sick or lame horse is replaced imme- 
 diately from a stable where the first blood and shape 
 are alone kept. Her ladyship thus knows precisely 
 what her driving is to cost her for the year, and 
 transfers to the jobber all the risk, anxiety, and 
 trouble. 
 
 A wealthy New-Yorker, a day or two since, made 
 a very handsome offer to a livery-stable keeper to 
 furnish him a carriage on this same plan, and the of- 
 fer was refused. But, though a single customer of 
 this kind might be troublesome, combination (that great 
 secret of luxurious economies) might " make it an- 
 swer." Twenty nice carriages, let out to private 
 gentlemen at $1,000, or Si, 500 a year each, might be 
 looked after by one jobber well versed in horseflesh, 
 and his taste and experience would turn out better 
 equipages than could be got up by private individuals. 
 The twenty stables now kept up would be combined 
 in one (this in itself, no small saving) and the rich 
 man might be driven in better style, for less money 
 than it now costs him, and — better than all — without 
 the vexatious care, vigilance and anxiety of keeping a 
 private carriage. 
 
 P. S. We can safely say that we are entirely disin- 
 terested in the proposed arrangement ! 
 
 Graham for April. — The equinox brought us 
 such detestable weather, that instead of our usual two 
 hours' airing of brains under a hat, we lay on our 
 back yesterday afternoon and read "Graham." How 
 does the man get so many good things! Grund, 
 Fanny Forester, Mrs. C. H. Butler, Win. Lander, 
 Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Osgood, Mr. Peterson — all have 
 written their best for this number. Our friend Fanny's 
 story of "Nickie Ben" seems to us particularly fresh, 
 bright, and original. Mr. Grund's letter from Paris 
 is full of intelligence, and among other things, he thus 
 speaks of Eugene Sue and his two tasters : — 
 
 "He lives now, by the product of his industry, in 
 princely style ; but his enjoyments are troubled by 
 the constant fear of being poisoned by his political 
 and religious adversaries. He has, therefore, con- 
 tracted an intimate friendship with two large, beautiful 
 Newfoundland dogs, who are his constant dinner and 
 breakfast companions, and who always eat first of every 
 dish that is brought on the table. If these judges of 
 gastronomy pronounce in favor of it, by first eating a 
 large quantity, with apparent relish, the author of 
 " The Mysteries" and " The Wandering Jew" him- 
 self partakes of it without farther scruple. He be- 
 lieves dogs much more faithful than men, and the 
 sagacious instincts of a regular Newfoundlander su- 
 perior to the science of chymists and physicians." 
 
 Poor dogs ! Considering that they would doubtless 
 have been wagging iheir tails in Paradise, but for 
 Adam's transgression, it seems hard to make them 
 die, for a human master, besides! 
 
 But, to turn to the first leaf— lo! the brigadier ! There 
 he stands, looking as amiable as if he had just nabbed 
 a flying thought for a song, his smile a little more 
 rigid, however, and his phiz a little thinner than his 
 accommodating wont. The picture is enough like 
 him, notwithstanding, for all " business purposes." 
 We think him better looking than the artist has 
 '■'done" him, and this we request the ladies (who sing 
 his songs) to allow for. The magazine opens with a 
 critical biography, exceedingly well done, and (the 
 brigadier below stairs playing salesman) we see noth- 
 ing to prevent our quoting a note of our own to the 
 writer : — 
 
 New York, Feb. J, 1845. 
 
 My Dear Sir: To ask me for my idea of General 
 Morris is like asking the left hand's opinion of the 
 dexterity of the right. I have lived so long with the 
 " brigadier," known him so intimately, worked so con- 
 stantly at the same rope, and thought so little of ever 
 separating from him (except by precedence of ferriage 
 over the Styx), that it is hard to shove him from me 
 to the perspective distance — hard to shut my own par- 
 tial eyes, and look at him through other people's. I 
 will try, however, and as it is done with but one foot 
 off from the treadmill of my ceaseless vocation, you 
 will excuse both abruptness and brevity. 
 
 Morris is the best known poet of the country by 
 acclamation, not by criticism. He is just what poets 
 would be if they sung, like birds, without criticism ; 
 and it is a peculiarity of bis fame, that it seems as 
 regardless of criticism as a bird in the air. Nothing 
 can stop a song of his. It is very easy to say that 
 they are easy to do. They have a momentum, some- 
 how, that is difficult for others to give, and that speeds 
 them to the far goal of popularity — the best proof 
 consisting in the fact that he can, at any moment, get 
 fifty dollars for a song, unread, when the whole 
 remainder of the American Parnassus could not sell 
 one to the same buyer for a shilling. 
 
 It may, or may not, be one secret of his popularity, 
 but it is a truth — that Morris's heart is at the level of 
 most other people's, and his poetry flows out by that 
 door. He stands breast high in the common stream 
 of sympathy, and the fine oil of his poetic feeling 
 goes from him upon an element it is its nature to float 
 upon, and which carries it safe to other bosoms, with 
 little need of deep diving or high flying. His senti- 
 ments are simple, honest, truthful, and familiar; his 
 language is pure and eminently musical, and he is 
 prodigally full of the poetry of everyday feeling. 
 These are days when poets try experiments ; and 
 while others succeed by taking the world's breath 
 away with flights and plunges, Morris uses his feet to 
 walk quietly with nature. Ninety-nine people in a 
 hundred, taken as they come in the census, would find 
 more to admire in Morris's songs than in the writings 
 of any other American poet ; and that is a parish in 
 the poetical episcopate, well worthy a wise man's nur- 
 ture and prizing. 
 
 As to the man — Morris my friend — I can hardly 
 venture to "burn incense on his mustache," as the 
 French say — write his praises under his very nose — 
 but, as far off as Philadelphia, you may pay the prop- 
 er tribute to his loyal nature and manly excellences. 
 His persona) qualities have made him universally pop- 
 ular, but this overflow upon the world does not impov- 
 erish him for his friends. I have outlined a true 
 poet, and a fine fellow — fill up the picture to your 
 liking. Yours, very truly, 
 
 N. P. Willis. 
 
 We get, from literary fledglings, at least one letter 
 per diem, requesting detailed advice on the quo modo 
 of a first flight in prose or poesy. We really suppose 
 we have, or are to have, an end to our life, and we like 
 to economise time. So we publish a letter, which we 
 once had occasion to write, and which must serve as 
 a circular — a letter which we recorded in our diary 
 when it was written — recorded with the following 
 preface : — 
 
 There lies before me now, upon my table, a letter 
 of three tolerably compact pages, addressed to a 
 
 young gentleman of college, who is " bit by the 
 
 dipsas" of authorship. His mother, a sensible, plain, 
 farmer's widow, chanced to be my companion for a 
 couple of days, in a stage-coach, and while creeping 
 over the mountains between the Hudson and the Sus- 
 quehannah, she paid my common sense the compli- 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 787 
 
 ment of unburthening a very stout heart to me. 
 Since her husband's death, she has herself managed 
 the farm, and by active, personal oversight, has con- 
 trived •« to make both ends so far lap" (to use her own 
 expression), as to keep her only boy at college. By 
 her description, he is a slenderish lad in his constitu- 
 tion, fond of poetry, and bent on trying his fortune 
 with his pen, as soon as he has closed his thumb and 
 finger on his degree. The good dame wished for the 
 best advice I could give him on the subject, leaving it 
 to me (after producing a piece of his poetry from her 
 pocket, published in one of the city papers) to en- 
 courage or dissuade. I apprehended a troublesome 
 job of it, but after a very genial conversation (on the 
 subject of raising turkeys, in which she quite agreed i 
 with me, that they were cheaper bought than raised, 
 when corn was fifty cents a bushel — greedy gobblers !), 
 I reverted to the topic of poetry, and promised to 
 write the inspired sophomore my views as to his pros- 
 pects. Need I record it ? — that long letter affects me j 
 like an unsigned bank-note — like something which 
 might so easily have been money — like a leak in the 
 beer-barrel— like a hole in the meal-bag! It irks me 
 to lose them — three fair pages— a league's drift to lee- 
 ward — a mortal morning's work, and no odor lucri 
 
 thence arising ! I can not stand it, Mrs. , and | 
 
 Mr. Sophomore ! You are welcome to the 
 
 autograph copy, but faith ! I must print it. There is 
 a superfluity of adjectives (intended, as it was, for 
 private perusal), but I will leave them out in the copy. 
 Thus runs the letter: — 
 
 Dear Sir: You will probably not recognise the 
 handwriting in which you are addressed, but by cast- 
 ing your eye to the conclusion of the letter, you will 
 see that it comes from an old stager in periodical lit- 
 erature; and of that, as a profession, I am requested 
 by your mother to give you, as she phrases it, " the 
 cost and yield." You will allow what right you please 
 to my opinions, and it is only with the authority of 
 having lived by the pen, that I pretend to offer any 
 hints on the subject for your guidance. As "the 
 farm" can afford you nothing beyond your education, 
 you will excuse me for presuming that you need in- 
 formation mainly as to the livelihood to be got from 
 literature. 
 
 Your mother thinks it is a poor market for pota- 
 toes, where potatoes are to be had for nothing, and 
 that is simply the condition of American literature (as 
 protected by law). The contributors to the numer- 
 ous periodicals of England, are the picked men of 
 thousands— the accepted of hosts rejected— the flower 
 of a highly-educated and refined people— soldiers, 
 sailors, lords, ladies, and lawyers — all at leisure, all 
 anxious to turn a penny, all ambitious of print and 
 profit ; and this great army, in addition to the hun- 
 dreds urged by need and pure literary zeal — this great 
 army, I say, are before you in the market, offering 
 their wares to your natural customer, at a price for 
 which you can not afford to sell — nothing ! It is true 
 that by this state of the literary market, you have 
 fewer competitors among your countrymen — the best 
 talent of the country being driven, by necessity, into 
 less congenial and more profitable pursuits ; but even 
 with this advantage (none but doomed authors in the 
 field) you would probably find it difficult, within five 
 years after you graduated, to convert your best piece 
 of poetry into a genuine dollar. I allow you, at the 
 same time, full credit for your undoubted genius. 
 
 You naturally inquire how American authors live. 
 I answer, by being English authors. There is no 
 American author who lives by his pen, for whom Lon- 
 don is not the chief market. Those whose books sell 
 only in this country, make scarce the wages of a day- 
 laborer — always excepting religious writers, and the 
 authors of school-books, and such works as owe their 
 popularity to extrinsic causes. To begin on leaving 
 
 college, with legitimate book-making — writing novels, 
 tales, volumes of poetry, &c, you must have at least 
 five years support from some other source, for until 
 you get a name, nothing you could write would pay 
 "board and lodging;" and "getting a name" in 
 America, implies having first got a name in England. 
 Then we have almost no professed, mere authors. 
 They have vocations of some other character, "also. 
 Men like Dana, Bryant, Sprague, Halleck, Kennedy, 
 Wetmore, though, no doubt, it is the first wish of 
 their hearts to devote all their time to literature, are 
 kept, by our atrocious laws of copyright, in paths less 
 honorable to their country, but more profitable to 
 themselves, and by far the greatest number of discour- 
 aged authors are " broken on the wheel" of the pub- 
 lic press. Gales, Walsh, Chandler, Buckingham, and 
 other editors of that stamp, are men driven aside from 
 authorship, their proper vocation. 
 
 Periodical writing seems the natural novitiate to 
 literary fame in our country, and I understand from 
 your mother that through this lies your choseji way. 
 I must try to give you as clear an idea as possible of 
 the length and breadth of it, and perhaps I can best 
 do so by contrasting it with another career, which (if 
 advice were not always useless) I should sooner 
 advise. 
 
 Your mother's farm, then, consisting of near a hun- 
 dred acres, gives a net produce of about five hundred 
 dollars a year — hands paid, I mean, and seed, wear and 
 i tear of tools, team, &c, first subtracted. She has 
 lived as comfortable as usual for the last three or four 
 I years, and still contrived to lay by the two hundred 
 and fifty dollars expended annually on your educa- 
 tion. Were you at home, your own labor and over- 
 sight would add rather more than two hundred dollars 
 to the income, and with good luck you might call 
 | yourself a farmer with five hundred dollars, as the 
 I Irish say, "to the fore." Your vocation, at the same 
 ;| time, is dignified, and such as would reflect favorably 
 | j on your reputation, should you hereafter become in 
 j any way eminent. During six months in the year, 
 you would scarce find more than an hour or two in 
 the twenty-four to spare from sleep or labor; but in 
 the winter months, with every necessary attention to 
 your affairs out of doors, still find as much leisure for 
 study and composition as most literary men devote to 
 those purposes. I say nothing of the pabuluin of 
 rural influences on your mind, but will just hint at 
 another incidental advantage you may not have 
 thought of. viz. : that the public show much more 
 alacrity in crowning an author, if he does not make 
 bread and butter of the laurels ! In other words, if 
 you are a farmer, you are supposed (by a world not 
 very brilliant in its conclusions) to expend the most of 
 your mental energies (as they do) in making your 
 living; and your literature goes for an "aside"— 
 waste-water, as the millers phrase it— a very material 
 premise in both criticism and public estimation. 
 
 At your age, the above picture would have been 
 thrown away on myself, and I presume (inviting as it 
 seems to my world-weary eyes) it is thrown away now 
 upon you. I shall therefore try to present to you the 
 lights and shadows of the picture which seem to you 
 more attractive. 
 
 Your first step will be to select New York as the 
 city which is to be illustrated by your residence, and 
 to commence a search after some literary occupation. 
 You have a volume of poetry which has been returned 
 to you by your " literary agent," with a heavy charge 
 for procuring the refusal of every pubhsher to under- 
 take it, and with your pride quite taken out of you, 
 vou are willing to devote your Latin and Greek, your 
 acquaintance with prosody and punctuation, and a very 
 middling proficiency in chicography (no offence— 
 your mother showed me your autograph list ot bills 
 for the winter term)— all this store of accomplishment 
 
788 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 you offer to employ for a trifle besides meat, lodging, 
 and apparel. These, you say, are surely moderate 
 expectations for an educated man, and such wares, so 
 cheap, must find a ready market. Of such stuff, you 
 know that editors are made, and in the hope of finding 
 a vacant editorial chair, you pocket your MSS., and 
 commence inquiry. At the end of the mouth, you 
 begin to think yourself the one person on earth for 
 whom there seems no room. There is no editor 
 wanted, no sub-editor wanted, no reporter, no proof- 
 reader, no poet ! There are passable paragraphists by 
 scores— educated young men, of every kind, of prom- 
 ising talent, who, for twenty dollars a month, would 
 joyfully do twice what you propose— give twice as 
 much time, and furnish twice as much "copy." But 
 as you design, of course, to "go into society," and 
 gatner your laurels as they blossom, you can not 
 see your way very clearly with less than a hay- 
 maker's wages. You proceed with your inquiries, 
 however, and are, at last, quite convinced that few 
 things are more difficult than to coin uncelebrated 
 brains into current money — that the avenues for the 
 employment of the head, only, are emulously crowd- 
 ed — that there are many more than you had supposed 
 who have the same object as yourself, and that, what- 
 ever fame may be in its meridian and close, its morn- 
 ing is mortification and starvation. 
 
 The "small end of the horn" has a hole in it, how- 
 ever, and the bitter stage of experience T have just 
 described, might be omitted in your history, if, by any 
 other means, you could be made small enough to go 
 in. The most considerable diminution of size, per- 
 haps, is the getting rid, for the time, of all idea of 
 "living like a gentleman" (according to the common 
 acceptation of the phrase). To be willing to satisfy 
 hunger in any clean and honest way, to sleep in any 
 clean and honest place, and to wear anything clean and 
 honestly paid for, are phases of the crescent moon of 
 fame, not very prominently hud down in our imaginary 
 chart; but they are, nevertheless, the first indication 
 of that moon's waxing. I see by the advertisements, 
 that there are facilities now for cheap living, which did 
 not exist "when George the Third was king." A 
 dinner (of beef, bread, and potatoes, with a bottle of 
 wine) is offered, by an advertiser, of the savory name 
 of G for a shilling, and a breakfast, most invi- 
 tingly described, is offered for sixpence. I have no 
 doubt a lodging might be procured at the same mod- 
 est rate of charge. " Society" does not move on this 
 plane, it is true, but society is not worth seeking at 
 any great cost, while you are obscure, and if you'll 
 wait till the first moment when it would be agreeable 
 (the moment when it thinks it worth while to caress 
 you), it will come to you, like Mohammed to the moun- 
 tain. And like the mountain's moving to Mohammed, 
 you will find any premature ambition on the subject. 
 
 Giving up the expectation of finding employment 
 suited to your taste, you will, of course, be " open to 
 offers," and I should counsel you to take any that 
 would pay, which did not positively shut the door 
 upon literature. At the same wages you had better 
 direct covers in a newspaper office, than contribute 
 original matter which costs you thought, yet is not 
 appreciated ; and in fact, as I said before with refer- 
 ence to farming, a subsistence not directly obtained 
 by brain-work, is a material advantage to an author. 
 Eight hours of mere mechanical copying, and two 
 hours of leisurely composition, will tire you less, and 
 produce more for your reputation than twelve hours 
 of intellectual drudgery. The publishers and book- 
 sellers have a good deal of work for educated men — 
 proof-reading, compiling, corresponding, &c, and this 
 is a good step to higher occupation. As you moder- 
 ate your wants, of course you enlarge your chances 
 for employment. 
 
 Getting up in the world is like walking through a 
 
 mist — your way opens as you get on. I should say, 
 that with tolerable good fortune, you might make by 
 your pen, two hundred dollars the first year, and in- 
 crease your income a hundred dollars annually, for "^ 
 five years. This, as a literary "operative." After 
 that period, you would either remain" stationary, a 
 mere " workey," or your genius would discover "by 
 the dip of the divining rod," where, in the well- 
 searched bowels of literature, lay an unworked vein 
 of ore. In the latter case, you would draw that one 
 prize in a thousand blanks of which the other com- 
 petitors in the lottery of fame feel as sure as yourself. 
 
 As a "stock" or "starring" player upon the liter- 
 ary stage, of course you desire a crowded audience, 
 and it is worth your while, perhaps, to inquire (more 
 curiously than is laid down in most advices to authors) 
 what is the number and influence of the judicious, 
 and what nuts it is politic to throw to the groundlings. 
 Abuse is, in criticism, what shade is in a picture, dis- 
 cord in harmony, acid in punch, salt in seasoning. 
 Unqualified praise is the death of Tarpeia. and to be 
 neither praised nor abused is more than death — it is 
 inanition. Query — how to procure yourself to be 
 abused ? In your chymical course next year, you will 
 probably give a morning's attention to the analysis of 
 the pearl, among other precious substances, and you 
 will be told by the professor, that it is the consequence 
 of an excess of carbonate of lime in the flesh of the 
 oyster — in other words, the disease of the sub-aque- 
 ous animal who produces it. Now, to copy this poli- 
 tic invalid — to learn wisdom of an oyster — find out 
 what is the most pungent disease of your style, and 
 hug it 'till it becomes a pearl. A fault carefully 
 studied is the germ of a peculiarity, and a peculiarity 
 is a pearl of great price to an author. The critics 
 begin very justly by hammering at it as a fault, and 
 after it is polished into a peculiarity, they still ham- 
 mer at it as a fault, and the noise they make attracts 
 attention to the pearl, and up you come from the deep 
 sea of obscurity, not the less intoxicated with the sun- 
 shine, because, but for your disease, you would never 
 have seen it. 
 
 With one more very plain piece of counsel, I have 
 done. Never take the note of any man connected 
 with literature, if he will cash it for fifty per cent. 
 
 Breakfasts and the Quarterly. — Mr. Lock- 
 hart can never do harm except indirectly. His asser- 
 tions and his criticisms are taken with more than the 
 "grain of salt." Mr. Cooper may have a private 
 quarrel with him for some of his ungentlemanly 
 phraseology, but for the literary part of the criticism 
 on " England," it will stand in the place of a good ad- 
 vertisement to the book, and there ends all its good 
 and evil. In the following passage, however, a blow 
 (most unwise and most injurious) is struck at one of 
 the pleasantest usages of English hospitality : — 
 
 " We suspect that Mr. Cooper will not think Mr. 
 Rogers's breakfasts quite so admirable, nor the other 
 twenty so transcendantly agreeable, when he learns 
 that it is by no means usual to invite strangers to 
 breakfast in London, and that such breakfasts are 
 generally given when the guest is one about whose 
 manners, character, or social position, there is some 
 uncertainty — a breakfast is a kind of mezzo-termine, 
 between a mere visit and the more intimate hospitality 
 of a dinner. It is, as it were, a state of probation." — 
 Quarterly Review for October. 
 
 As the great organ of the tory party in England, 
 the Quarterly might fairly be taken by a foreigner as 
 an authority upon a point of English manners. The 
 consequence follows, that he can not be invited to break- 
 fast without fair ground to presume it an insult. Shots 
 have been exchanged upon slighter ground. At the 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 789 
 
 best, a suspicion is thrown upon this mode of hospi- 
 tality which deprives it entirely of its easy and confi- 
 dential character; and that it is an injury to society 
 which could only be corrected by the publication of 
 a correct portrait of Mr. Lockhart. No one after 
 seeing it would credit any assertion he might make 
 upon a subject involving a knowledge of good-fellow- 
 ship. 
 
 The editor of the Quarterly looks his vocation bet- 
 ter than any man it has been my fortune to see. In 
 his gait and voice there is a feline resemblance which 
 is remarkable. It is impossible for a human being to 
 be more like a cat. To aid the likeness, he is slightly 
 parry-toed, and when you see him creeping along 
 Pall Mall on his way to the club, you can not avoid 
 the impression that he is mousing. In his person he 
 is extremely thin, and, but for his mouth, Lockhart 
 would look like a gentleman. In that feature lies a 
 whole epitome of the man. The lips are short, and 
 of barely the thickness of the skin, and habitually 
 drawn in close against the teeth. To this feature, 
 which resembles somewhat the mouth of a small 
 purse, all the countenance seems subordinate. The 
 contraction pulls upon every muscle of his face, and 
 upon every muscle is stamped the malice of which 
 his mouth is the living and most legible type. 
 
 This description of the man is very apropos of his 
 opinions of breakfast. I presume he was never asked 
 to an unceremonious breakfast in his life. Would 
 any one in his senses begin his day by sitting down 
 opposite to such a face for a couple of hours ? Not 
 willingly, I should think. 
 
 I presume every Englishman except the editor of 
 the Quarterly will agree that to ask a stranger to 
 breakfast is much more flattering than to invite him 
 to dinner. Engagements to breakfast, indeed, are 
 almost always made at dinner. The reply to a letter 
 of introduction is usually a card and an invitation to 
 dine. If your host is pleased with you, nothing is 
 more common than for him to say at parting, " You 
 have been so engrossed that I have scarce spoken to 
 you — come and breakfast with me to-morrow at nine." 
 You accept, and you improve on acquaintance into a 
 friend. In a snug library, all ceremony put off, the 
 mind tranquil and sincere, you enter upon a different 
 class of subjects, more familiar, more confidential. 
 The attention of your host is more undivided, and 
 your conversation leads you to make engagements for 
 the day, or the evening ; and thus a man with whom 
 you might have discussed the corn-laws or the new 
 opera, forty times, across the glare of a dinner-table, 
 and only known at last as a talker of commonplaces, 
 becomes a pleasant friend, perhaps an intimate com- 
 panion. 
 
 I have not the Quarterly Review by me at this mo- 
 ment, but, if I do not mistake, the breakfasts with the 
 poet Rogers, described by Mr. Cooper, furnish the 
 text for Mr. Lockhart's " new light" upon this sub- 
 ject. I am happy to have it in my power to set our 
 countrymen right upon the estimation in which 
 Cooper is held by that polished and venerable amphyt- 
 rion. It was kindly and complimentarily done of 
 Mr. Rogers to talk a great deal of a compatriot, 
 of whose talents he justly supposed every American 
 should be proud. I was enjoying (according to 
 Mr. Lockhart) the equivocal honor of breakfast- 
 ing with him — an honor which, questionable or not, 
 I shared with one of the most distinguished for- 
 eigners then in England. This latter gentleman pro- 
 fessed the highest enthusiasm for the works of Cooper, 
 and took pains to draw out the venerable poet on the 
 subject of his personal manners, conversation, &c. A 
 handsomer eulogium of an absent author I never 
 heard. Mr. Rogers admired the bold independence 
 of his cast of mind, and spoke in the highest terms of 
 
 him as a gentleman and a friend. I can not, if it 
 were proper, quote the exact words he used ; but, 
 subtract from this praise all you please to fancy might 
 have been said in kindness or compliment to a com- 
 patriot, there was still enough left to gratify the self- 
 love of the most exacting. 
 
 If Mr. Lockhart had ever been similarly honored, 
 he would have excused Mr. Cooper for dwelling com- 
 placently on the " breakfasts in St. James's Place." 
 Rogers has lived in the very core of all that is pre- 
 cious or memorable of two ages of English wit, liter- 
 ature, and politics, himself oftenest the bright centre 
 around which it gathered. His manners are amenity 
 itself, his wit is celebrated, his powers of narration 
 delightful. With all this he seems to forget his own 
 fame and himself, and never to have known envy or 
 ill-will. As he sits at that small breakfast-table, his 
 head silvery white, the bland smile of intellectual en- 
 joyment upon his lips, talking or listening with equal 
 pleasure, and with the greatest tact and delicacy, al- 
 ternately drawing out the resources of his guests, and 
 exhibiting modestly his own, he is a picture of tran- 
 quil, dignified, and green old age, which it were a pity 
 to have travelled far and not seen. I felicitate Mr. 
 Cooper on the possession of his esteem and friend- 
 ship. I please myself with remembering that I have 
 seen him. I pity Mr. Lockhart that the class of en- 
 tertainments of which this is one, is reserved for those 
 whose faces will not "spoil the cream." 
 
 Between butchering for Fraser and dissecting for 
 the Quarterly, Mr. Lockhart may have derived a suf- 
 ficient revenue to " give dinners ;" but he forgets that 
 more amiable literature is not so saleable, and that his 
 brother authors are compelled to entertain strangers at 
 breakfast. Taboo that meal, and, good heavens ! 
 what becomes of the " great army of writers" in Lon- 
 don, who, over " tea and toast," in their quiet lodg- 
 ings, give the admiring pilgrim of literature a feast of 
 reason — one alone worth all the dinners of May fair ? 
 
 What becomes of younger sons, and callow orators, 
 and lawyers in the temple, who, over red herrings and 
 coffee, let the amused guest into the secrets of their 
 menus-plaisirs, and trenching a half-crown, at the 
 most, upon their slender pockets, send him away de- 
 lighted with their gay hospitality. Breakfasts! What 
 would you know of authors and artists without 
 breakfasts ? You see but half the man in his works. 
 Would you rather breakfast with Chantrey in his stu- 
 dio, and hear him criticise his own marble, or dine 
 with him at Lord Lansdowne's, and listen to his bavar- 
 dagc upon fly-fishing? Would you rather see gentle 
 Barry Cornwall, smothered and silent, among wits and 
 lordlings at " miladi's," or breakfast with him in his 
 crammed library in St. John's Wood, and hear him 
 read one of his unpublished songs, with the tears in 
 his eyes, and the children at his knee, breathless with 
 listening ? Would you rather meet Moore, over a 
 cup of tea, in the shop-parlor at Longman's, in Pat- 
 ernoster row, or see him at one of the show-dinners 
 of this publishing Mecenas, at his villa in Hamp- 
 stead ? Out upon the malicious hand that would sow 
 distrust and suspicion in these delightful by-paths of 
 hospitality ! 
 
 An author is always a double existence, and it is 
 astonishing how different may be the intellectual man 
 from his everyday representative. Lockhart, the au- 
 thor of Valerius, Adam Blair, and the Life of Sir 
 Walter Scott, is a splendid and delightful intellect- 
 no one can deny it. Mr. Lockhart, the gentleman 
 who looks as if he had a perpetual inclination to 
 whistle, and who does the bourreau for the Quarterly, 
 is an individual I should rather meet anywhere than— 
 at breakfast. Heaven send him a relaxation of his 
 facial muscles, and a little charity tc leave the world 
 with. 
 
790 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 A Spring Day in Winter. — A spring day some- 
 times bursts upon us in December. One scarcely 
 knows whether the constant warmth of the fire, or the 
 fresh sunny breathings from the open window, are the 
 most welcome. At such a time, the curtains swing 
 lazily to the mild wind as it enters, and the light green 
 leaves of the sheltered flowers stir and erect them- 
 selves with an out-of-door vigor, and the shuffled steps 
 and continued voices of the children in the street, 
 have the loitering and summer-like sound of June. I 
 do not know whether it is not a cockney feeling, but 
 with all my love for the country, fixed as it is by the 
 recollections of a life mostly spent in the "green 
 fields" I sometimes "babble of," there is something in 
 a summer morning in the city, which the wet, warm 
 woods, and the solitary, though lonely haunts of the 
 country do not, after all the poetry that has been 
 "spilt upon them" (as Neal would say), at all equal. 
 Whether it is that we find so much sympathy in the 
 many faces that we meet, made happy by the same 
 sweet influences, or whatever else may be the reason, 
 certes, I never take my morning walk on such a day, 
 without a leaping in my heart, which, from all I can 
 gather by dream or revelation, has a touch in it of 
 Paradise. I returned once, on such a day, from an 
 hour's ramble after breakfast. The air rushed past 
 my temples with the grateful softness of spring, and 
 every face that passed had the open, inhaling expres- 
 sion which is given by the simple joy of existence. 
 The sky had the deep clearness of noon. The clouds 
 were winnowed in light parallel curves, looking like 
 white shells inlaid on the arched heavens ; the smooth, 
 glassy bay was like a transparent abyss opening to the 
 earth's centre, and edging away underneath, with a 
 slope of hills, and spires, and leafless woods, copied 
 minutely and perfectly from the upper landscape, and 
 the naked elms seemed almost clothed as the teeming 
 eye looked on them, and the brown hills took a teint 
 of green — so freshly did the summer fancies crowd 
 into the brain with the summer softness of the sun- 
 shine and air. The mood is rare in which the sight 
 of human faces does not give us pleasure. It is a 
 curious occupation to look on them as they pass, 
 and study their look and meaning, and wonder at the 
 providence of God, which can provide, in this crowded 
 world, an object and an interest for all. With what 
 a singular harmony the great machine of society goes 
 on ! So many thousand minds, and each with its 
 peculiar cast and its positive difference from its fellow, 
 and yet no dangerous interference, and no discord 
 audible above the hum of its daily revolution. I 
 could not help feeling a religious thrill, as I passed 
 face after face, with this thought in my mind, and saw 
 each one earnest and cheerful, each one pressing on 
 with its own object, without waiting or caring for the 
 equally engrossing object of the other. The man of 
 business went on with an absorbed look, caring only 
 to thread his way rapidly along the street. The stu- 
 dent strided by with the step of exercise, his lips 
 parted to admit the pleasant air to his refreshed lungs, 
 and his eye wandering with bewildered pleasure from 
 object to object. The schoolboy looked wistfully up 
 and down the street, and lingered till the last stroke 
 of the bell summoned him tardily in. The woman- 
 ish school-girl, with her veil coquettishly drawn, still 
 flirted with her boyish admirer, though it was " after 
 nine," and the child, with its soiled satchel and shining 
 face, loitered seriously along the sidewalk, making 
 acquaintance with every dog, and picking up every 
 stone on its unwilling way. The spell of the atmo- 
 sphere was universal, and yet all kept on their several 
 courses, and the busy harmony of employment went 
 steadily and unl rokenly on. How rarely we turn 
 upon ourselves, and remember how wonderfully we 
 are made and governed! 
 
 Evanescent Impressions. — I have very often, in 
 the fine passages of society — such as occur some- 
 times in the end of an evening, or when a dinner- 
 party has dwindled to an unbroken circle of choice 
 and congenial spirits, or at any of those times when 
 conversation, stripped of all reserve or check, is 
 poured out in the glowing and unfettered enthusiasm 
 to which convivial excitement alone gives the confi- 
 dence necessary to its flow— I have often wished, at 
 such times, that the voice and manner of the chance 
 and fleeting eloquence about us could be arrested and 
 written down for others beside ourselves to see and 
 admire. In a chance conversation at a party, in the 
 bagatelle rattle of a dance, in a gay hour over coffee 
 and sandwiches en famille, wherever you meet those 
 whom you love or value, there will occur pieces of 
 dialogue, jeux d'esprit, passages of feeling or fun — 
 trifles, it is true, but still such trifles as make eras in 
 the calendar of happiness — which you would give the 
 world to rescue from their ephemeral destiny. They 
 are, perhaps, the soundings of a spirit too deep for 
 ordinary life to fathom, or the gracefulness of a fancy 
 linked with too feminine a nature to bear the eye of 
 the world, or the melting of a frost of reserve from 
 the diffident genius— they are traces of that which is 
 fleeting, or struck out like phosphorus from the sea 
 by it regular chance — and you want something quicker 
 and rarer than formal description to arrest it warm 
 and natural, and detain it in its place till it can be 
 looked upon. 
 
 The First Feeling of Winter. — How delight- 
 fully the first ,feeling of winter comes on the mind! 
 What a throng of tranquillizing and affectionate 
 thoughts accompany its first bright fires, and the 
 sound, out of doors, of its first chilling winds. Oh, 
 when the leaves are driven in troops through the 
 streets, at nightfall, and the figures of the passers-by 
 hurry on, cloaked and stooping with the cold, is there 
 a pleasanter feeling in the world than to enter the 
 closed and carpeted room, with its shaded lamps, and 
 its genial warmth, and its cheerful faces about the 
 evening table ! I hope that I speak your own senti- 
 ment, dear reader, when I prefer to every place and 
 time, in the whole calendar of pleasure, a winter 
 evening at home — the "sweet, sweet home" of child- 
 hood, with its unreserved love and its unchanged and 
 unmeasured endearments. We need not love gayety 
 the less. The light and music and beauty of the 
 dance will always breed a floating delight in the brain 
 that has not grown dull to life's finer influences ; yet 
 the pleasures of home, though serener are deeper, 
 and I am sure that the world may be searched over in 
 vain for a sense of joy so even and unmingled. It is 
 a beautiful trait of Providence that the balance is 
 kept so truly between our many and different bles- 
 sings. It were a melancholy thing to see the sum- 
 mer depart with its superb beauty, if the heart did not 
 freshen as it turned in from its decay to brood upon 
 its own treasures. The affections wander under the 
 enticement of all the outward loveliness of nature, 
 and it is necessary to unwind the spell, that their rich 
 kindness may not become scattered and visionary. 1 
 have a passion for these simple theories, which I trust 
 will be forgiven. I indulge in them as people pun. 
 They are too shadowy for logic, it is true — like the 
 wings of the glendoveer, in. Kehama, gauze-like and 
 filmy, but flying high withal. You may not grow 
 learned, but you surely will grow poetical upon them. 
 I would as lief be praised by a blockhead as be asked 
 the reason. 
 
 The Poet Shelley. — Shelley has a private nook 
 in my affections. He is so unlike all other poets that 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 791 
 
 I can not mate him. He is like his own " skylark" 
 among birds. He does not keep ever up in the thin 
 air with Byron, like the eagle, nor sing with Keats 
 low and sweetly like the thrush, nor, like the dove 
 sitting always upon her nest, brood with Wordsworth 
 over the affections. He begins to sing when the 
 morning wakes him, and as he grows wild with his 
 own song, he mounts upward, 
 
 " And singing ever soars, and soaring ever singeth ;" 
 
 and it is wonderful how he loses himself, like the 
 delirious bird in the sky, and with a verse which may 
 be well compared for its fine delicacy with her little 
 wings, penetrates its far depths fearlessly and full of 
 joy. There is something very new in this mingled 
 trait of fineness and sublimity. Milton and Byron 
 seem made for the sky. Their broad wings always 
 strike the air with the same solemn majesty. But 
 Shelley, near the ground, is a very " bird in a bower,'' 
 running through his merry compass as if he never 
 dreamed of the upward and invisible heavens. Withal, 
 Shelley's genius is too fiery to be moody. He was a 
 melancholy man, but it was because he was crossed 
 in the daily walk of life, and such anxieties did not 
 touch his imagination. It was above — far, far above 
 them. His poetry was not, like that of other poets, 
 linked with his common interests; and if it "un- 
 bound (he serpent of care from his heart," as doubt- 
 less it did, it was by making him forget that it was 
 there. He conceived and wrote in a wizard circle. 
 The illiberal world was the last thing remembered, 
 and its annoying prejudices, gall him as they might in 
 the exercise of his social duties, never followed over 
 the fiery limit of his fancy. Never have we seen 
 such pure abstraction from earlhliness as in the tem- 
 per of his poetry. It is the clear, intellectual lymph, 
 unalloyed and unpolluted. , 
 
 An Author's Judgment of his own Works. — 
 It is a false notion that the writer is no judge of his 
 own book. Verses in manuscript and verses in print, 
 in the first place, are very different things, and the 
 mood of writing and the mood of reading what one 
 lias written, are very different moods. We do not 
 know how it is with others, but we open our own 
 volume with the same impression of strangeness and 
 novelty that we do another's. The faults strike us at 
 once, and so do the beauties, if there are any, and we 
 read coolly in a new garb, the same things which 
 upon paper recalled the fever of composition, and 
 rendered us incapable of judgment. As far as I can 
 discover by others' experience and my own, no writer 
 understands the phenomena of composition. It is 
 impossible to realize, in reading, that which is to him 
 impassioned, the state of feeling which produced it. 
 His own mind is to himself a mystery and a wonder. 
 The thought stands before him, visible to his outward 
 eye, which he does not remember has ever haunted 
 him. The illustration from nature is often one which 
 he does not remember to have noticed — the trait of 
 character, or the peculiar pencilling of a line in beauty 
 altogether new and startling. He is affected to tears 
 or mirth, his taste is gratified or shocked, his fancy 
 amused or his cares beguiled, as if he had never be- 
 fore seen it. It is his own mind, but he does not rec- 
 ognise it. He is like the peasant-child taken and 
 dressed richly ; he does not know himself in his new 
 adornments. There is a wonderful metamorphosis in 
 print. The author has written under strong excite- 
 ment, and with a development and reach of his own 
 powers which would amuse him were he conscious 
 of the process. There are dim and far chambers in 
 the mind which are never explored by reason. Ima- 
 gination in her rapt phrensy wanders blindly there 
 
 sometimes, and brings out their treasures to the light 
 — ignorant of their value, and almost believing that 
 the dreams when they glitter are admired. There 
 are phantoms which haunt the perpetual twilight of 
 the inner mind, which are arrested only by the daring 
 hand of an overwrought fancy, and like a need done 
 in a dream, the difficult steps are afterward but faintly 
 remembered. It is wonderful how the mind accumu- 
 lates by unconscious observation — how the teint of a 
 cloud, or the expression of an eye, or the betrayal of 
 character by a word, will lie for years forgotten in the 
 memory till it is brought out by some searching 
 thought to its owner's wonder. 
 
 Frost. — It is winter — veritable winter — with bona^ 
 fide frost, and cramping cold, and a sun as clear and 
 powerless as moonlight. The windows glitter with 
 the most fantastic frost-work. Cities, with their 
 spires and turrets, ranks of spears, files of horsemen 
 — every gorgeous and brilliant array told of in ro- 
 mance or song, start out of that mass of silvery trace- 
 ry, like the processions of a magic mirror. What a 
 miraculous beauty there is in frost ! What fine work 
 in its radiant crystals ! What mystery in its exact 
 proportions and its maniform varieties ! The feathery 
 snow-flake, the delicate rime, the transparent and 
 sheeted ice, the magnificent ice-berg moving down 
 the sea like a mountain of light — how beautiful are 
 they all, and how wonderful is it, that, break and 
 scatter them as you will, you find under every form 
 the same faultless angles, the same crystalline and 
 sparkling radiation. It sometimes grows suddenly 
 cold at noon. There has been a heavy rnist all the 
 morning, and as the north wind comes sharply in, the 
 air clears and leaves it frozen upon everything, with 
 the thinness of palpable air. The trees are clothed 
 with a fine white vapor, as if a cloud had been arrested 
 and fixed motionless in the branches. They look, in 
 the twilight, like gigantic spirits, standing in broad 
 ranks, and clothed in drapery of supernatural white- 
 ness and texture. On close examination, the crystals 
 are as fine as needles, and standing in perfect parallel- 
 ism, pointing in the direction of the wind. They are 
 like fringes of the most minute threads, edging every 
 twig and filament of the tree, so that the branches are 
 thickened by them, and have a shadowy and mysteri- 
 ous look, as if a spirit foliage had started out from the 
 naked limbs. It is not so brilliant as the common 
 rime seen upon the trees after a frozen rain, but it is 
 infinitely more delicate and spiritual, and to me seems 
 a phenomenon of exquisite novelty and beauty. 
 
 The Closing Year. — It is a melancholy task to 
 reckon with the departed year. To trace back the 
 curious threads of affection through its many-colored 
 woof, and knot anew its broken places — to number 
 the missing objects of interest, the dead and the neg- 
 lected — to sum up the broken resolutions, the defer- 
 red hopes, the dissolved phantoms of anticipation, and 
 the many wanderings from the leading star of duty 
 —this is indeed a melancholy task, but, withal, a 
 profitable, and, it may sometimes be, a pleasant and a 
 soothing one. It is wonderful in what short courses 
 the objects of this world move. They are like arrows 
 feebly shot. A year— a brief year, is full of things 
 dwindled and finished and forgotten. Nothipg keeps 
 evenly on. What is there in the running calendar 
 of the year that has departed, which has kept its place 
 and its magnitude ? Here and there an aspirant for 
 fame still stretches after his eluding shadow — here and 
 there an enthusiast still clings to his golden dream- 
 here and there (and alas ! how rarely) a friend keeps 
 
792 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 his truth, and a lover his fervor — but how many more, 
 that were as ambitious, as enthusiastic, as loving as 
 these, when this year began, are now sluggish, and 
 cold, and false ? You may keep a record of life, and 
 as surely as it is human, it will be a fragmented and 
 disjointed history, crowded with unaccountableness 
 and change. There is nothing constant. The links 
 of life are for ever breaking, but we rush on still. A 
 fellow-traveller drops from our side into the grave — a 
 guiding star of hope vanishes from the sky — a creature 
 of our affections, a child or an idol, is snatched from 
 us — perhaps nothing with which we began the race is 
 left to us, and yet we do not halt. " Onward — still 
 onward" is the eternal cry, and as the past recedes, 
 the broken ties are forgotten, and the present and future 
 occupy us alone. 
 
 There are bright chapters in the past, however. If 
 our lot is capricious and broken, it is also new and 
 various. One friend has grown cool, but we have 
 won another. One chance was less fortunate than 
 we expected, but another was better. We have en- 
 countered one man's prejudices, but, in so doing, we 
 have unexpectedly flattered the partialities of his 
 neighbor. We have neglected a recorded duty, but a 
 deed of charity done upon impulse, has brought up 
 the balance. In an equable temper of mind, memory, 
 to a man of ordinary goodness of heart, is pleasant 
 company. A careless rhymer, whose heart is better 
 than his head, says • — 
 
 " I would not escape from memory's land, 
 
 For all the eye can view ; 
 For there's dearer dust in memory's land, 
 
 Than the ore of rich Peru. 
 I clasp the fetter by memory twined, 
 The wanderer's heart and soul to bind." 
 
 It was a good thought suggested by an ingenious 
 friend of mine, to make one's will annually, and re- 
 member all whom we love in it in the degree of their 
 deservings. I have acted upon the hint since, and 
 truly it is keeping a calendar of one's life. I have 
 little to bequeath, indeed — a manuscript or two, some* 
 half dozen pictures, and a score or two of much- 
 thumbed and choice authors — but, slight as these 
 poor mementoes are, it is pleasant to rate their differ- 
 ence, and write against them the names of our friends, 
 as we should wish them left if we knew we were pres- 
 ently to die. It would be a satisfying thought in sick- 
 ness, that one's friends would have a memorial to 
 suggest us when we were gone — that they would 
 know we wished to be remembered by them, and re- 
 membered them among the first. And it is pleasant, 
 too, while alive, to change the order of appropriation 
 with the ever-varying evidences of affection. It is a 
 relief to vexation and mortified pride to erase the 
 name of one unworthy or false, and it is delightful, 
 as another gets nearer to your heart, with the gradual 
 and sure test of intimacy, to prefer him in your secret 
 register. 
 
 If I should live to be old, I doubt not it will be a 
 pleasant thing to look over these little testaments. 
 It is difficult, now, with their kind offices and pleasant 
 faces ever about one, to realize the changes of feeling 
 between the first and the last — more difficult still to 
 imagine, against any of those familiar names, the 
 significant asterisk which marks the dead — yet if the 
 common chances of human truth, and the still more 
 desperate changes of human life, continue — it is 
 melancholy to think what a miracle it would be if 
 even half this list, brief and youthful as it is, should 
 be, twenty years hence, living and unchanged. 
 
 The festivities of this part of the year always seem- 
 ed to me mistimed and revolting. I know not what 
 color the reflections of others take, but to me it is 
 simply the feeling of escape — the released breath of 
 fear after a period of suspense and danger. Accident, 
 misery, death, have been about us in their invisible 
 
 shapes, and while one is tortured with pain, and 
 another reduced to wretchedness, and another struck 
 into the grave beside us, we know not why orhow, we are 
 still living and prosperous. It is next to a miracle that 
 we are so. We have been on the edge of chasms con- 
 tinually. Our feet have tottered, our bosoms have 
 been grazed by the thick shafts of disease — had our 
 eyes been spirit-keen we should have been dumb with 
 fear at our peril. If every tenth sunbeam were a 
 deadly arrow — if the earth were full of invisible abysses 
 — if poisons were sown thickly in the air, life would 
 hardly be more insecure. We can stand upon our 
 threshold and see it. The vigorous are stricken down 
 by an invisible hand — the active and busy suddenly 
 j disappear — death is caught in the breath of the night 
 j wind, in the dropping of the dew. There is no place 
 I or moment in which that horrible phantom is not 
 | gliding among us. It is natural at each period of 
 | escape to rejoice fervently and from the heart ; but I 
 know not, if others look upon death with the same 
 irrepressible horror that I do, how their joy can be so 
 I thoughtlessly trifling. It seems to me, matter for 
 i deep, and almost fearful congratulation. It should 
 be expressed in religious places and with the solemn 
 I voice of worship ; and when the period has thus been 
 j marked, it should be speedily forgotten lest its cloud 
 I become depressing. I am an advocate for all the 
 I gayety that the spirits will bear. I would reserve no 
 ! particle of the treasure of happiness. The world is 
 | dull enough at the best. But do not mistake its 
 ! temper. Do not press into the service of gay pleasure 
 j the thrilling solemnities of life. I think anything 
 which reminds me of death, solemn ; any time, when 
 j our escape from it is thrust irresistibly upon the mind, 
 I a solemn time; and such is the season of the new 
 year. It should be occupied by serious thoughts. 
 I It is the time to reckon with one's heart — to renew 
 and form resolutions — to forgive and reconcile and 
 redeem. 
 
 Midnight. — The bell struck as the word was writ- 
 ten ! Twelve — and how many-toned in the human 
 ear are the measured strokes that have proclaimed it. 
 The well and contemplative, the sick and restless, the 
 reveller hailing it as the empress of the hours, and the 
 patient and solemn watcher by the dead, counting it 
 on his vigil, and shuddering at the dreadful silence it 
 makes audible — sleepless ambition starting from its 
 waking dream, and sleeping guilt blessedly aroused 
 from its nightmare of detection — with what a different 
 voice and meaning do the tremulous and lengthened 
 cadences of that same bell fall upon the different ears 
 that listen to them ! Yet it is so with everything 
 about us — and the boldest and best lesson of philoso- 
 phy is that which teaches us that outward circum- 
 stances have no color of their own — that the universe 
 is within us — that the eye sees no light or shadow, 
 and the ear hears no music or jar, and the senses re- 
 ceive no impression of pain or pleasure, but as the 
 inward eye is light or shaded, the inward ear attuned 
 or discordant, and the inward sense painful or pleas- 
 urable. It is a glorious creed — for by it, he who 
 governs his own soul holds the key of the universe. 
 Its colors are put on at his bidding, its music wakes 
 at his desire, and its magnificent changes, arbitrary 
 and omnipotent as they seem, take form and pressure 
 from the small, still thought in his bosom ! Yet how 
 difficult it is! How true, that "he who ruleth his 
 own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city." 
 To put down at will the maniform spectres of 
 thought — to suppress fear and discouragement, and 
 sadness that comes up uncalled — to lay a finger on 
 the lip of complaint, and seal up a tear in its cell, and 
 press down, with a stern fetter, the ungovernable 
 nerve of unrest — to " lay commandment" on a throb- 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 793 
 
 bing pulse, and break the wings of a too earnest ima- 
 gination, and smother, in their first rising, the thou- 
 sand impatient feelings that come out of time and 
 season — this it is that the anchorite in his cell, and 
 the master spirit in his career, and the student, wast- 
 ing over his lamp, may pray, and wrestle, and search 
 into many mysteries for — in vain ! 
 
 In my days of idleness (a habit, by-the-by, which 
 should be put down as a nervous complaint in the 
 books) I occupied, for some nine hours in the day, a 
 window opposite a city-clock. It was a tolerable 
 amusement, between breakfast and recitation, to watch 
 the passing of the hours, " hand over hand." 1 thought j 
 then, as I think now, that the great deficiency in the con- i 
 struction of the human mind, is the want of something 
 on the principle of the stop-watch, to suspend its ope- 
 rations at will — but it is no slight relief, since I must 
 think, to have a dial-plate, or a nail in the wall, or any 
 object that it is no trouble to see, to serve as a nu- 
 cleus to thou«ht. By-and-by, with the force of hab- 
 it, the dial became necessary. I could not think 
 tranquilly without it. My pulses beat sixty in the 
 minute. My imagination built by the hour — nine — 
 ten — twelve castles a day, as the lectures interfered 
 more or less with my repose. 
 
 In the course of time, I fell into the habit of mu- 
 sing on the circumstances dependant on the arrival of 
 the hours, and as my mood happened to be gay or 
 gloomy, I pondered, with the strong sympathy of un- 
 occupied feelings, on the happiness or misery they 
 brought. If it was a bright sunny forenoon in May, 
 and the eggs had been well boiled at breakfast, the 
 striking of the clock — say twelve — stirred a thousand 
 images of pleasure. The boys just leaping out of 
 school, the laborer released from his toil, the belle 
 stepping forth for a promenade, the patient in the in- 
 terval of his fever — all came up in my imagination, 
 and their several feelings, with all the heightening of 
 imagination, became my own. If the weather was 
 hot, on the contrary, or the professor had bored me 
 at lecture, or if my claret was pricked at dinner, I 
 Buffered the miseries of an hospital. There goes the 
 clock — say four! Some poor fellow now, at this very 
 moment, is baring his limb to the surgeon — the after- 
 noon is at the hottest, and the sick are getting restless 
 and weary — some hectic consumptive, fallen, per- 
 haps, into a chance sleep, is waked, by the trouble- 
 Bome punctuality of his nurse, to take his potion — it 
 is the hour the dying man is told he can not survive. 
 Every misery imaginable under the sun rose in phan- 
 toms around me, and I suffered and groaned under 
 the concentrated horrors of them all. It serves to 
 show how the mind is its own slave or its own master. 
 And so, having arrived at the moral, with your leave, 
 dear reader, for it is " past one," I will to bed. Good 
 night! 
 
 S.vow. — The black, unsightly pavement, every 
 stone of which you know with as cursed a particular- 
 ity as the chinks in the back of your fireplace, cov- 
 ered with white. The heavy-wheeled carts, which 
 the day before shook the ground under you, and split 
 your ears with their merciless noise, replaced by sleds 
 with musical bells, driven swiftly and skilfully past. 
 The smoked houses, with their provokingly-regular 
 windows and mean doors, that have disturbed the sen- 
 timent of grace in your fancy every walk you have 
 taken for months, all laden, and tipped, and frosted 
 into lines and surfaces of beauty ; faultless icicles 
 hanging from the eaves of the shutters, and sparkling 
 crystals of snow edging every projecting stone — 
 magic could not exceed it ! If the horn of Astol- 
 pho had been blown from the cupola of the state- 
 house, and the whole city had run mad, things could j 
 not have looked more strangely new and delightful. 
 
 And the sleighing— other people like it, and for their 
 sake I blessed Providence for another item. I like it 
 myself— for the first mile. But with the loss of sen- 
 sation in our feet and hands, I have a trick of grow- 
 ing very unhappy. I am content, after one ride, with 
 seeing a sleigh through a parlor-window. 
 
 Eight o'clock — how merrily the sleigh-bells ring 
 to-night! One comes into hearing as another is lost, 
 and the loud, laughing, and merry voices of the gay 
 riders come up to my retired room in the veriest con- 
 trast to my own quiet occupation. How more than 
 solitude it separates one from humanity, to live in the 
 midst of the gay world and take no part in its enjoy- 
 ments ! An eremite in the crowd is the only con- 
 tented solitary. In the midst of the heaviest sadness 
 the heart feels in this wretched world, the form of 
 distant pleasure is beautiful. We must live near that 
 treacherous dame to know how sorrows lurk in her 
 shadow. Break down the imagination as you will, and 
 bind it by the most relentless memories to your sick 
 heart, it will steal away to scenes you had thought 
 forgotten, and come back fired with their false beau- 
 ty, to tempt you to try their winning flatteries once 
 more. It is only by knowing that you can call gay- 
 ety at any moment to your side, that you can quite 
 forget it ; and the studious tenant of a garret, to 
 whose solitude the mingled murmur of a city comes 
 constantly up — who can abandon his books whenever 
 the fancy takes him, for the crowd, and enter and 
 throng on with it after its fleeting lure — is the only 
 man who, with youth and the common gifts of Provi- 
 dence, can heartily despise it. 
 
 And he — if contrast is (as who will deny that has 
 followed after the impossible spirit of contentment, till 
 hope is dead within him) — if contrast is, I say, the 
 only bliss in life — then does he, the scholar in the 
 crowd, live with a most excellent wisdom. He is 
 roused from communion with a spirit whose immor- 
 tal greatness has outlived twenty generations, by the 
 passing mirth of a fool whose best deed will not live 
 in the world's memory an hour. He sits and pores 
 upon an eternal truth, or fires his fancy with heavenly 
 poetry, or winds about him the enchantments of truth- 
 woven fiction, or searches the depths of his own suffi- 
 cient heart for the sublime wisdom of human nature, 
 and from the very midst he is plucked back to this 
 every-day world, and compelled to the use of faculties 
 in which a brute animal equals or surpasses him ! 
 One moment following the employment of an angel, 
 the next contending with meanness and cunning for 
 his daily bread — now kindled to rapture with some 
 new form of beauty, and now disgusted to loathing 
 with some new-developed and unredeemable baseness 
 in his fellow-men. What contrast is there like this ? 
 Who knows so well as a scholar the true sweetness 
 of surprise ? the delightful and only spice of this oth- 
 erwise contemptible life — novel sensation ? 
 
 Change. — How natural it is, like the host in the 
 rhyme, to 
 
 " Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest !" 
 
 How true a similitude it is of every change, not only 
 of time and season, but of feeling and fancy. I have 
 just walked from the window where I stood looking 
 upon the two elms that have refreshed my eye with 
 their lively verdure the summer long, and the adven- 
 turous vine, overtopping our neighbor's chimneys, that 
 was covered but a week ago with masses of splendid 
 crimson and scarlet, and with the irresistible regret I feel 
 always at the decay of nature powerful within me, I have 
 seated myself at the fire, with a gladness in the sup- 
 planting pleasures of winter, that bring9 with it, not 
 only a consolation for the loss, but an immediate for- 
 
794 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 getfulness of the past. " Nothing," says Goethe, "is 
 more delightful than to feel a new passion rising when 
 the flame that burned before is not quite extin- 
 guished, as, when the sun sets, we turn with pleasure 
 to the rising moon." Who would give a fig for 
 friendship ! Who would waste golden hours in win- 
 ning regard ! Who, with this lesson before him, 
 would do aught but look well to his reckoning with 
 heaven, and turn in upon his own soul what time and 
 talents are left to him after ! It is a bitter philosophy 
 to learn. The outward world is my first love, and, 
 with all my disappointment, it is difficult at first to 
 set up a new altar for the inner. I would not be as- 
 cetic ; neither would I be so happy that, like Poly- 
 crates, I must throw my ring into the sea that I may 
 have something to lament; but I believe he has the 
 true savoir vivre, who, believing fully in the world's 
 unprofitableness, is willing to be amused by it, and 
 who, conversant with its paths and people, has better 
 places and friends (solitude and his books) to which 
 he can enter and shut the door to be at peace. 
 
 Winter Trip to Nahant. — The old chronicler, 
 Time, strides on over the holyday seasons as if noth- 
 ing could make him loiter. It may be a hallucina- 
 tion, but a winter's day, spite of the calendar, is as 
 long to me as two summer ones. I do not feel the 
 scene pass. There is no measure kept on my senses 
 by its evenly-told pulse. The damp morning, and the 
 silent noon, and the golden twilight, come and go ; 
 and if I breathe the freshness of the one, and sleep 
 under the repose of the other, and gaze upon the 
 beauties of the third, why, the end of existence seems 
 answered. Labor is not in harmony with it. The 
 thought that disturbs a nerve is an intrusion. Life's 
 rapid torrent loiters in a pool, and its bubbles all break 
 and are forgotten. Indolence is the mother of phi- 
 losophy, and I " let the world slide." I think with 
 Rousseau, that " the best book does but little good to 
 the world, and much harm to the author." I remem- 
 ber Colton's three difficulties of authorship, and Pel- 
 ham's flattering unction to idleness, that " learning is 
 the bane of a poet." The " mossy cell of peace," 
 with its % 
 
 " Dreams that move before the half-shut eye, 
 And its gay castles in the clouds that pass," 
 
 is a very Eden ; and, of all the flowers of the field, 
 that which has the most meaning is your lily that 
 "toils not, neither does it spin;" and of all the herbs 
 of the valley, the 
 
 " Yellow lysimacha that gives sweet rest," 
 
 has the most medicinal balm. I am of the school of 
 Epicurus. I no longer think the "judicious voluptu- 
 ousness" of Godwin dangerous. Like the witch of 
 Atlas, I could " pitch my tent upon the plain of the 
 calm Mere," and rise and fall for ever to its indolent 
 swell. And speaking of idleness (I admire Mochin- 
 go's talent for digression — "Now thou speakest of 
 immortality, how is thy wife, Andrew") — one of the 
 pleasantest ways of indulging that cardinal virtue 
 used to be by an excursion to Nahant. Establishing 
 myself unostentatiously upon the windward quarter 
 of the boat, to avoid the vile volatile oils from the 
 machinery — Shelley in one hand, perhaps, or Elia, or 
 quaint Burton — (English editions, redolent in Russia, 
 and printed as with types of silver) — with one of these, 
 I say, to refresh the eye and keep the philosophic 
 vein breathing freely, the panorama of the bay passes 
 silently before my eye — island after island, sail after 
 sail, like the conjurations of a magic mirror. And 
 this is all quiet, let me tell you — all in harmony with 
 
 the Socratic humor — for the reputable steamer Ousa- 
 tonic (it distresses me daily that it was not spelt with 
 an H) is none of your fifteen-milers — none of your 
 high-pressure cut-waters, driving you through the 
 air, breathless with its unbecoming velocity, and with 
 the fear of the boiler before your eyes — but with a 
 dignified moderation, consistent with a rational doubt 
 of the integrity of a copper-kettle, and a natural ab- 
 horrence of hot water, she glides safely and softly 
 over her half-dozen miles an hour, and lands you, 
 cool and good-humored, upon the rocky peninsula, 
 for a consideration too trifling to be mentioned in a 
 well-bred period. And then if the fates will me an 
 agreeable companion (I wish we had time to describe 
 my beau-ideal), how delightful, as Apple island is 
 neared, with its sweep of green banks and its magnifi- 
 cent elms — every foot of its tiny territory green and 
 beautiful — how delightful to speculate upon the char- 
 acter of its eccentric occupant, and repeat the thou- 
 sand stories told of him, and peer about his solitary 
 cottage to catch a glimpse of his erect figure, and 
 draw fanciful portraits of his daughter, who, the world 
 says, for the sixteen years of her sweet life, has had 
 only the range of those limited lawns, which she may 
 ramble over in an hour — and, as the boat glides by, to 
 watch the fairy isle sleeping, if the bay is calm, with 
 its definite shadow, and looking like a sphere, floating 
 past in the air, covered with luxuriant verdure. It is 
 but a brief twelve miles from Boston to Nahant, and 
 the last four stretch out beyond the chain of islands, 
 upon the open sea. To a city-bred eye and fancy 
 there is a refreshing novelty, added to the expanding 
 influence of so broad a scene, which has in it a vigor- 
 ous and delightful stimulus. The mind gets out of 
 its old track. The back-ground of the mental picture 
 is changed, and it affects the whole. The illimitable 
 sky and water draw out the imagination to its remo- 
 test link, and the far apart and shining sails, each cov- 
 ering its little and peculiar world, and sped with the 
 thousand hopes of those for whom its lonely adven- 
 turers are tracking the uncertain sea, win on the mind 
 to follow them upon their perilous way, and breathe 
 for them the " God speed" of unconscious interest. 
 It is a beautiful and magic sight to see them gliding 
 past each other on their different courses, impelled 
 by the same invisible wind, now dark with shadow, 
 and now turning full to the light, and specking the 
 horizon, like the white birds careering along the edge 
 of its definite line. The sea grows upon you as you 
 see it more. The disappointment felt at first in its 
 extent wears away, as you remember its vast stretch 
 under those blue depths, which your eye can not 
 search ; and the waste of its " untrampled floor," and 
 the different depths at which the different spoils of 
 the sunk ships have balanced and hung, and the innu- 
 merable tribes who range their own various regions 
 of pressure, from the darkest caverns to the thin and 
 lighted chambers at its surface, all come step by step 
 upon the mind, and crowd it with a world of wonder- 
 ing speculation. It is delightful to sit with the 
 agreeable companion spoken of, and with the green 
 waves heaving about us, to indulge in these wayward 
 and unprofitable imaginations. It is a splendid range 
 for a wild-winged thought — that measureless sea ! I 
 love to talk of its strange mysteries. I love to go 
 down with one who will not check me with cold ob- 
 jections, and number and shape out its inhabitants. 
 With such a fellow-wanderer, I have found palaces 
 that surpass Aladdin's, and beings to whom the upper 
 and uncondensed water has a suffocating thinness. 
 But these are idle speculations to the world's eye, 
 gentle reader, and should be reserved for your private 
 ear. We will go, some summer afternoon, and talk 
 them over together on the deck of that same delib- 
 erate steamer. You have no idea how many things 
 are untold of the deep sea — how many dreams of it 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 795 
 
 an idler man than yourself will weave out of its green 
 depths in his after-dinner musings. 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney. — " Gentle Sir Philip Sid- 
 ney," says Tom Nash, in two sweetly-flowing senten- 
 ces of his Pierce Penniless, " thou knewest what be- 
 longed to a scholar ; thou knewest what pains, what 
 toil, what travel, conduct to perfection ; well couldst 
 thou give every virtue his encouragement, every art 
 his due, every writer his desert, 'cause none more 
 virtuous, witty, or learned, than thyself. But thou 
 art dead in thy grave, and hast left too few successors 
 of thy glory; too few to cherish the sons of the mu- 
 ses, or water those budding hopes with their plenty, 
 which thy bounty erst planted." — "He was not only 
 of an excellent wit," relates, in his own confused and 
 rambling way, the eminent antiquarian John Aubrey, 
 who was born not more than forty years after Sidney's 
 decease, " but extremely beautiful ; he much resembled 
 his sister, but his hair was not red, but a little incli- 
 ning, viz., a dark amber color. If I were to find fault 
 in it, methinks it is not masculine enough; yet he 
 was a person of great courage."* " He was, if ever 
 there was one," says another writer, " a gentleman 
 finished and complete, in whom mildness was associa- 
 ted with courage, erudilion mollified by refinement, 
 and courtliness dignified by truth. England will ever 
 place him among the noblest of her sons ; and the 
 light of chivalry, which was his guide and beacon, 
 will ever lend its radiance to illume his memory. He 
 died at the age of thirty-two, and if the lives of Mil- 
 ton and Dryden had not been prolonged beyond that 
 period, where would have been their renown?" 
 
 Glorious Sidney ! It stirs the blood warmly about 
 one's heart to think of him. It is somewhat late in 
 the day, I know, to eulogize him ; but his bright 
 honor and his beautiful career, are among my earliest 
 historical recollections, and I have remembered it 
 since with the passionate interest that in every one's 
 mind burns in, with an enamel of love, some one of 
 the bright images presented in boyhood. You have 
 some such idol of fancy, I dare answer for it, reader 
 of mine — some young (for young he must be, or af- 
 fection stiffens into respect) — some young and famous, 
 and withal courtly, and perhaps " beautiful," winner 
 of a name. It is Gaston de Foix, perhaps, with his 
 fierce thirst for glory (the pictures of him by the old 
 masters are models of manly beauty), or the fourth 
 Henry, with his temper of romance (the handsomest 
 man in his kingdom), or (if you loved your classics) 
 Alcibiades (you forget, of course, that he was a volup- 
 tuary), or the generous Antony (" Shakspere's" rather 
 than the historian's), or Hylas, or Endymion, or 
 Phaeton (he cleared the first few planets in fine style), 
 or some other formosus puer adored and sung by the 
 glorious old bards upon the shores of Tiber or Ilissus. 
 He rises to your mind as I mention it — a figure of 
 graceful youth, the slight and elegant proportions of 
 the boy, just ripening into the muscular fulness of 
 manhood — his neck rising with a free majesty from 
 his shoulders, and his eye kindling with some passing 
 thought of glory, answered by the proud and deliber- 
 ate curving of his lip, and the animated expansion of 
 his nostril. You see him with your mind's eye — the 
 classic model and classic dream of your scholar-days, 
 when the sound of the leaves in the tree over you had 
 the swell of an hexameter in your ear, and your 
 thoughts came in Latin, and a line of Homer sprung 
 to your lips in your involuntary soliloquies. Ah ! 
 those were days for dreams ! Who would not let 
 slip the straining grasp of manhood — be it at wealth, 
 fame, power — anything for which he is flinging his 
 youth and gladness, and all his best treasures, behind 
 • Very much the description of Shelley. 
 
 him — to be once more the careless dreamer that he 
 was — to lie once more upon a hill-side, and forget 
 everything in the unquestioned and unshadowed bles- 
 sedness of a boy ! 
 
 Death-Love and Warning. — It was getting tow- 
 ard midnight when a party of young noblemen came 
 out from one of the clubs of St. James street. The 
 servant of each, as he stepped upon the pavement, 
 threw up the wooden apron of the cabriolet, and 
 sprung to the head of the horse; but, as to the des- 
 tination of the equipages for the evening, there seem- 
 ed to be some dissensions among the noble masters. 
 Between the line of coroneted vehicles, stood a 
 hackney-coach, and a person in an attitude of expectan- 
 cy pressed as near the exhilarated group as he could 
 without exciting immediate attention. 
 
 " Which way?" said he whose vehicle was nearest, 
 standing with his foot on the step. 
 
 " All together, of course," said another. " Let's 
 make a night of it." 
 
 " Pardon me," said the clear and sweet voice of 
 the last out from the club ; " I secede for one. Go 
 your ways, gentlemen !" 
 
 " Now, what the deuse is afoot ?" said the fore- 
 most, again stepping back on the sidewalk. " Don't 
 let him off, Fitz ! Is your cab here, Byron, or will 
 you let me drive you? By Jove, you sha'n't leave us!" 
 
 " But you shall leave me, and so you are not for- 
 sworn, my friend ! In plain phrase, I won't go with 
 you ! And I don't know where I shall go ; so spare 
 yourcuriosity the trouble of asking. I have a presenti- 
 ment that I am wanted — by devil or angel — 
 
 ' I see a hand you can not see.' " 
 
 " And a very pretty hand it is, I dare swear," said 
 the former speaker, jumping into his cab and starting 
 off with a spring of his blood horse, followed by all 
 the vehicles at the club-door, save one. 
 
 Byron stood looking after them a moment, and 
 raised his hat and pressed his hand hard on his fore- 
 head. The unknown person who had been lurking 
 near, seemed willing to leave him for a moment to his 
 thoughts, or was embarrassed at approaching a stran- 
 ger. As Byron turned with his halting step to descend 
 the steps, however, he came suddenly to his side. 
 
 " My lord !" he said, and was silent, as if waiting 
 for permission to go on. 
 
 " Well," replied Byron, turning to him without the 
 least surprise, and lookingly closely into his face by 
 the light of the street-lamp. 
 
 " I come to you with an errand which perhaps — " 
 
 " A strange one, I am sure ; but I am prepared for 
 it — I have been forewarned of it. What do you re- 
 quire of me ? for I am ready !" 
 
 •• This is strange!" exclaimed the man. — "Has 
 another messenger, then — " 
 
 " None except a spirit — for my heart alone told me 
 I should be wanted at this hour. Speak at once." 
 
 '* My lord, a dying girl has sent for you .'" 
 
 " Do I know her ?" 
 
 " She has never seen you. Will you come at once 
 — and on the way I will explain to you what I can of 
 this singular errand ; though, indeed, when it is told 
 you, you know all that I comprehend." 
 
 They were at the door of the hackney-coach, and 
 Byron entered it without further remark. 
 
 "Back again!" said the stranger, as the coachman 
 closed the door, " and drive for dear life, for we shall 
 scarce be in time, I fear !" 
 
 The heavy tongue of St. Paul's church struck 
 twelve as the rolling vehicle hurried on through the 
 now lonely street, and though so far from the place 
 whence they started, neither of the two occupants 
 
796 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 had spoken. Byron sat with bare head and folded 
 arms in the corner of the coacli ; and the stranger, 
 with his hat crowded over his eyes, seemed repressing 
 some violet emotion ; and it was only when they 
 stopped before a low door in a street close upon the 
 river, that the latter found utterance. 
 
 " Is she alive ?" he hurriedly asked of a woman 
 who came out at the sound of the carriage-wheels. 
 
 " She was — a moment since — but be quick !" 
 
 Byron followed quickly on the heels of his com- 
 panion, and passing through a dimly lighted entry to 
 the door of a back-room, they entered. A lamp, 
 shaded by a curtain of spotless purity, threw a faint 
 light upon a bed, upon which lay a girl, watched by 
 a physician and a nurse. The physician had just re- 
 moved a small mirror from her lips, and holding it to 
 the light, he whispered that she still breathed. As 
 Byron passed the edge of the curtain, however, the 
 dying girl moved the fingers of the hand lying on the 
 coverlet, and slowly opened on him her languid eyes 
 — eyes of inexpressible depth and lustre. No one had 
 spoken. 
 
 "Here he is," she murmured. "Raise me, mother, 
 while I have time to speak to him." 
 
 Byron looked around the small chamber, trying in 
 vain to break the spell of awe which the scene threw 
 over him. An apparition from the other world could 
 not have checked more fearfully and completely the 
 worldly and scornful under-current of his nature. 
 He stood with his heart beating almost audibly, and 
 his knees trembled beneath him, awaiting what he 
 prophetically felt to be a warning from the very gate 
 of heaven. 
 
 Propped with pillows, and left by her attendants, 
 the dying girl turned her head toward the proud, 
 noble poet, standing by her bedside, and a slight blush 
 overspread her features, while a smile of angelic 
 beauty stole through her lips. In that smile the 
 face reawakened to its former loveliness, and seldom 
 had he who now gazed breathlessly upon her, looked 
 on such spiritual and incomparable beauty. The 
 spacious forehead and noble contour, still visible, of 
 the emaciated lips, bespoke genius impressed upon a 
 tablet all feminine in its language ; and in the motion 
 of her hand, and even in the slight movement of her 
 graceful neck, there was something that still breathed 
 of surpassing elegance. It was the shadowy wreck 
 of no ordinary mortal passing away — humble as were 
 the surroundings, and strange as had been his sum- 
 mons to her bedside. 
 
 " And this is Byron ?" she said at last, in a voice 
 bewilderingly sweet even through its weakness. 
 "My lord! I could not die without seeing you — 
 without relieving my soul of a mission with which it 
 has long been burthened. Come nearer — for I have 
 no time left for ceremony, and I must say what I 
 have to say — and die! Beautiful," she said, "beauti- 
 ful as the dream of him which has so long haunted 
 me ! the intellect and the person of a spirit of light ! 
 Pardon me, my lord, that, at a moment so important to 
 yourself, the remembrance of an earthly feeling has 
 been betrayed into expression." 
 
 She paused a moment, and the bright color that had 
 shot through her cheek and brow faded, and her 
 countenance resumed its heavenly serenity. 
 
 " I am near enough to death," she resumed — 
 "near enough to point you almost to heaven from 
 where I am ; and it is on my heart like the one errand 
 of my life — like the bidding of God — to implore you 
 to prepare for judgment. Oh, my lord ! with your 
 glorious powers, with your wondrous gifts, be not 
 lost! Do not, for the poor pleasures of a world like 
 this, lose an eternity in which your great mind will 
 outstrip the intelligence of angels. Measure this 
 thought — scan the worth of angelic bliss with the 
 intellect which has ranged so gloriously through the 
 
 universe; do not, on this one momentous subject 
 of human interest — on this alone be not short- 
 sighted !" 
 
 "What shall I do ?" suddenly burst from Byron's 
 lips in a tone of agony. But with an effort, as if 
 struggling with a death-pang, he again drew up his 
 form and resumed the marble calmness of his counte- 
 nance. 
 
 The dying girl, meantime, seemed to have lost 
 herself in prayer. With her wasted hands clasped 
 on her bosom, and her eyes turned upward, the slight 
 motion of her lips betrayed to those around her that 
 | she was pleading at the throne of mercy. The physi- 
 cian crept close to her bedside, but with his hand in 
 his breast, and his head bowed, he seemed but watch- 
 ing for the moment when the soul should take its 
 flight. 
 
 She suddenly raised herself on the pillow. Her 
 long brown tresses fell over her shoulders, and a 
 brightness unnatural and almost fearful kindled in her 
 eyes. She seemed endeavoring to speak, and gazed 
 steadfastly at Byron. Slowly, then, and tranquilly 
 she sank back again upon her pillow, and as her hands 
 fell apart, and her eyelids dropped, she murmured, 
 "Come to Heaven !" and the stillness of death was in 
 the room. The spirit had fled. 
 
 The breaking of the silver cord is the first tone from 
 the life-strings of genius, which is answered only in 
 vibrations of affection. This truth, indeed, is touch- 
 ingly shadowed forth in the accompaniments of death. 
 The dark colors in the drapery of life, are dropped in 
 the weaving of the shroud. The discords of music 
 are rejected in the melody of the dirge. The praise 
 upon the marble is the first tribute written without 
 disparagement, and the first suffered without dissent. 
 It is this new relation of the public to a great name — 
 this completed and lucent phase of a light in litera- 
 ture — which seems to make a posthumous recast of 
 criticism oneof the legitimate departments of a review. 
 Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of 
 criticism toward an author's fame, are essentially 
 changed by his death. His personal character, and 
 the events of his life — the foreground, so to speak, in 
 the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting 
 to the critical perspective; and when the hand to cor- 
 rect is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded 
 is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve 
 in comparison and final estimate, are done way. 
 
 It is time for the reviews to take up, on this ground, 
 the character and writingsof Hillhouse. The author 
 of Hadad, the most finished and lofty poem of its 
 time, should have been followed, within a year after 
 his death, by a new and reverential appreciation, and 
 living, as he did, in a learned and literary circle of 
 friends, a biography, at least, was looked for, out of 
 which criticism might shape a fresh monument to his 
 genius. Such men as Hillhouse are not common, 
 even in these days of universal authorship. In ac- 
 complishment of mind and person, he was probably 
 second to no man. His poems show the first. They 
 are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finish- 
 ed — works for the highest taste to relish, and for the 
 severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model. 
 Hadad was published in 1825, during my second yearin 
 college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven 
 of imagination. The leading characters possessed me 
 for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious lan- 
 guage was, for a long time, constantly in my ears. 
 The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and 
 for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged 
 in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a 
 man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn 
 dignity and elegance of address. His person was very 
 
EPHEMERA. 
 
 797 
 
 finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high- 
 bred, and his countenance purely and brightly intel- 
 lectual. Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high 
 courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular sim- 
 plicity and taste in dress, and you have the portrait 
 of one who. in other days, would have been the mir- 
 ror of chivalry, and the flower of nobles and trou- 
 badors. Hillhouse was no less distinguished in oratory. 
 There was still remembered, at the time of the pub- 
 lication of Hadad, an oration pronounced by him at 
 the taking of his second degree — an oration upon 
 "the Education of a Poet," gloriously written, and 
 most eloquently delivered. His poem of "the Judge- 
 ment," delivered before the " Phi Beta Kappa Socie- 
 ty," added in the same way to his renown, as did a 
 subsequent noble effort of eloquence, to which I listen- 
 ed myself, with irresistible enchantment. 
 
 Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many 
 years of his life which he should have passed either 
 in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were 
 enslaved to the drudgery of business. His constitu- 
 tion seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood, 
 however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and 
 when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to 
 the beautiful and poetic home of " Sachem's Wood," 
 his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a 
 ripe and long enduring career of literature. In har- 
 mony with such a life were all his surroundings — 
 6cenery, society, domestic refinement, and companion- 
 ship — and never looked promise fairer for the realiza- 
 tion of a dream of glory. That he had laid out some- 
 thing of such a field in the future, I chance to know, 
 for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he 
 confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a 
 series of dramas, different from all he had attempted, 
 upon which he designed to work with the first mood 
 and leisure he could command. And with his high 
 scholarship, knowledge of life, taste and genius, what 
 might not have been expected from its fulfilment ? 
 But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light, 
 just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the world. 
 Love and honor to the memory of such a man. 
 
 BACHELOR BOB'S DISCOVERIES. 
 
 " Sad were the lays of merry days, 
 And sweet the songs of sadness." 
 
 " Come !" said Bachelor Bob, as he hitched his 
 chair closer to the table, " quite alone, half past 
 twelve, and two tumblers of toddy for heart-openers, 
 what say you to a little friendly inquisition into your 
 mortal felicity ? You were the gayest man of my 
 acquaintance ten years ago ; you are the gravest 
 now ! Yet you swear by your Lares and Penates, 
 that (up to the lips as you are in care and trouble) 
 you never were so happy as in these latter days. Do 
 you swear this to me from a 4 way you have' of hang- 
 ing out trap for the world, or are you under a little in- 
 nocent delusion ?" 
 
 Bob's hobby is the theory of happiness. Riches 
 and poverty, matrimony and celibacy, youth and age, 
 are subjects of contemplation to Bob, solely with ref- 
 erence to their comparative capacity for bliss. He 
 speculates and talks about little else, indeed, and his 
 intercourse with his friends seems to have no other 
 end or aim than to collect evidence as to their happi- 
 ness and its causes. On this occasion he was addres- 
 sing a friend of mine, Smith, who had been a gay man 
 in his youth (a merry man, truth to say, for he was 
 in a perpetual breeze of high spirits), but who had 
 married, and fallen behindhand in his worldly affairs, 
 and so grown careworn and thoughtful. Smith was 
 rather a poet in a quiet way, though he only used po- 
 etry as a sort of longer plummet when his heart got 
 
 off soundings. I am indebted to Bob for the speci- 
 mens of his verse-making which I am about to give, 
 as well as for the conversation which brought them 
 to light. 
 
 "Why," said Smith, "you have stated a dilemma 
 with two such inevitable horns that argument would 
 scarcely help me out of it. Let me see, what proof 
 can I give you that I am a happier man than I used 
 to be, spite of my chapfallen visage ?" 
 
 Smith mused a moment, and reaching over to a 
 desk near his elbow, drew from its private drawer a 
 book with locked covers. It was a well-filled manu- 
 script volume, and seemed a collection of prose and 
 verse intermixed. The last page was still covered 
 with blotting-paper, and seemed recently written. 
 
 " I am no poet," said Smith, coloring slightly, 
 " but it has been a habit of mine, ever since my cal- 
 low days, to record in verse all feelings that were too 
 warm for prose ; sometimes in the fashion of a solilo- 
 quy {scripta verba), sometimes in verses to the dame 
 or damsel to whom I was indebted for my ignition. 
 Let me see, Bob! we met in Florence, I think ?" 
 
 " For the first time abroad, yes !" 
 
 " Well, perhaps that was my gayest time; certainly 
 I do not remember to have been anywhere more gay 
 or reckless. Florence, 1832, um — here are some lines 
 written that summer : do you remember the beautiful 
 Irish widow you saw at one of the casino balls ? ad- 
 dressed to her, flirt that she was ! But she began all 
 her flirtations with talking of her sorrows, and, if she 
 tried you on, at all — " 
 
 " She didn't !" interrupted Bob. 
 
 " Well, if she had you would have been humbug- 
 ged with her tender melancholy, as I was. Here are 
 the verses, and if ever I 4 turned out my lining to the 
 moon,' thev are true to my inner soul in those days 
 of frolic. Read these, and then turn to the last page 
 and you will find as true a daguerreotype of the inner 
 light of my moping days, written only yesterday." 
 
 'Tis late— San Marc is beating three 
 
 As I look forth upon the night ; 
 The stars are shining tranquilly, 
 
 And heaven is full of silver light ; 
 The air blows freshly on my brow — 
 Yet why should I be waking now ! 
 
 I've listened, lady, to thy tone, 
 
 Till in my ear it will not die ; 
 I've felt for sorrows not my own, 
 
 Till now I can not put them by ; 
 And those sad words and thoughts of thine 
 Have breathed their sadness into mine. 
 
 'Tis long— though reckoned not by years— 
 
 Since, with affections chilled and shocked, 
 I dried a boy's impassioned tears, 
 
 And from the world my feelings locked — 
 The work of but one bitter day, 
 
 In which were crowded years of pain ; 
 
 And then I was as gay, again, 
 And thought that I should be for aye ! 
 The world lay open wide and bright, 
 
 And I became its lightest minion, 
 And flew the wordling's giddy height 
 
 With reckless and impetuous pinion — 
 Life's tide, with me, had turned from shore 
 Ere yet my summers told a score. 
 
 And years have passed, and I have seemed 
 
 Happy to every eye but thine, 
 And they whom most I loved have deemed 
 
 There was no lighter heart than mine ; 
 And, save when some wild passion-tone 
 
 Of music reached the sleeping nerve, 
 Or when in illness and alone 
 
 My spirit from its bent would swerve, 
 My heart uw.» light, my thoughts were free, 
 I was the thing I seemed to be. 
 
 I came to this bright land, and here, 
 
 Where I had thought to nerve my wings 
 
 To soar to a more lofty sphere, 
 
 And train myself for sterner things— 
 
 The land where I had thought to find 
 No spell but beauty hreathed in stone — 
 
798 
 
 EPHEMERA. 
 
 To learn idolatries of mind, 
 
 And leave the heart to slumber on — 
 Here find I one whose voice awakes 
 
 The sad, dumb angel of my breast, 
 And, as the long, long silence breaks 
 
 Of a strong inward lip suppressed, 
 It seems to me as if a madness 
 
 Had been upon my brain alway — 
 
 As if 'twere phrensy to be gay, 
 And life were only sweet in sadness ! 
 Words from my lips to-night have come 
 That have for years been sealed and dumb. 
 
 It was but yesterday we met, 
 
 We part to-morrow. I would fain 
 With thy departing voice forget 
 
 Its low, deep tone, and seal again 
 My feelings from the light of day, 
 To be to-morrow only gay ! 
 
 But days will pass, and nights will creep, 
 And I shall hear that voice of sadness 
 
 With dreams, as now, untouched by sleep, 
 And spirits out of tune with gladness ; 
 And time must wear, and fame spur on ; 
 Before that victory is re-won ! 
 
 And so farewell ! I would not be 
 
 Forgotten by the only heart 
 To which my own breathes calm and free, 
 
 And let us not as strangers part ! 
 And we shall meet again, perhaps, 
 
 More gayly than we're parting now ; 
 For time has, in its briefest lapse, 
 
 A something which clears up the brow, 
 And makes the spirits calm and bright — 
 And now to my sad dreams ! Good night ! 
 
 " What a precious hypocrite you were for the mer- 
 riest dog in Florence !" exclaimed Bob, as he laid the 
 book open on its back, after reading these lines. 
 " You feel that way ! credat Judeeus ! "But there are 
 some other poetical lies here — what do you mean by 
 ' we met but yesterday, and we part to-morrow,' 
 when I know you dangled after that widow a whole 
 season at the baths ?" 
 
 " Why," said Smith, with one of his old laughs, 
 " there was a supplement to such an outpouring, of 
 course. The reply to my verses was an invitation to 
 join their party the next morning in a pilgrimage to 
 Vallambrosa, and once attached to that lady's suite — 
 va pour toujours ! or as long as she chose to keep you. 
 Turn to the next page. Before coming to the verses 
 of my more sober days, you may like to read one 
 more flourish like the last. Those were addressed to 
 the same belle dame, and under a continuance of the 
 same hallucination." 
 
 Bob gravely read : — 
 
 My heart's a heavy one to-night, 
 
 Dear Mary, thinking upon thee — 
 I know not if my brain is right, 
 
 But everything looks dark to me ! 
 I parted from thy side but now, 
 
 I listened to thy mournful tone, 
 I gazed by starlight on thy brow, 
 
 And we were there unseen — alone^ 
 Yet proud as I should be. and blest, 
 I can not set my heart at' rest ! 
 
 Thou lov'st me. Thanks, oh God, for this ! 
 
 If I should never sleep again — 
 If hope is all a mock of bliss — 
 
 I shall not now have lived in vain ! 
 I care not that my eyes are aching 
 
 With this dull fever in my lids — 
 I care not that my heart is breaking 
 
 For happiness that Fate forbids — 
 The one sweet word that thou hast spoken, 
 
 The one sweet look I met and blessed, 
 
 Would cheer me if my heart were broken— 
 
 Would put my wildest thoughts to rest ! 
 I know that I have pressed thy fingers 
 
 Upon my warm lips unforbid— 
 I know that in thy memory lingers 
 
 A thought of me, like treasure hid — 
 Though to my breast I may not press thee, 
 
 Though I may never call thee mine, 
 I know— and, God, I therefore bless thee ? — 
 
 No other fills that heart of thine ! 
 And this shall light my shadowed track ! 
 I take my words of sadness back ! 
 
 " What had that flirting widow to do with the gen- 
 tle name of Mary ?" exclaimed Bob, after laughing 
 very heartily at the point blank take-in confessed in 
 these very solemn verses. " Enough of love-melan- 
 choly, however, my dear Smith ! Let's have a look 
 now at the poetical side of care and trouble. What 
 do you call it ?" — 
 
 THE INVOLUNTARY PRAYER OF HAPPINESS. - 
 
 I have enough, oh God ! My heart, to-night, 
 Runs over with the fulness of content j 
 As I look out on the fragrant stars, 
 And from the beauty of the night take in 
 My priceless portion— yet myself no more 
 Than in the universe a grain of sand — 
 I feel His glory who could make a world, 
 Yet, in the lost depths of the wilderness 
 Leave not a flower imperfect ! 
 
 Rich, though poor ! 
 My low-roofed cottage is, this hour, a heaven ! 
 Music is in it — and the song she sings, 
 That sweet-voiced wife of mine, arrests the ear 
 Of my young child, awake upon her knee ; 
 And, with his calm eye on his master's face, 
 My noble hound lies couchant ; and all here — 
 All in this little home, yet boundless heaven — 
 Are, in such love as I have power to give, 
 Blessed to overflowing ! 
 
 Thou, who look'st 
 Upon my brimming heart this tranquil eve, 
 Knowest its fulness, as thou dost the dew 
 Sent to the hidden violet by Thee ! 
 And, as that flower from its unseen abode 
 Sends its sweet breath up duly to the sky, 
 Changing its gift to incense— so, oh God ! 
 May the sweet drops that to my humble cup 
 Find their far way from Heaven, send back, in prayer, 
 Fragrance at thy throne welcome ! 
 
 Bob paused a moment after reading these lines. 
 
 " They seem in earnest," he said, " and I will 
 sooner believe you were happy when you wrote 
 these, than that you were sad when you wrote the 
 others. But one thing I remark," added Bob, " the 
 devout feeling in these lines written when you are 
 happiest ; for it is commonly thought that tribulation 
 and sadness give the first religious tinge to the ima- 
 gination. Yours is but the happiness of Christian 
 resignation, after all." 
 
 " On the contrary," said Smith, " nothing makes 
 me so wicked as care and trouble. I always had, 
 from childhood, a disposition to fall down on my 
 knees and thank God for everything which made me 
 happy, while sorrows of all descriptions stir up my 
 antagonism, and make me feel rather like a devil than 
 a Christian." 
 
 " In that case," said Bob, taking up his hat, " good 
 night, and God prosper you ! And as to your happi- 
 ness?" 
 
 " Well, what is the secret of my happiness, think 
 you"" 
 
 "Matrimony," replied Bob. 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION: 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW YORK LYCEUM, 
 
 I had thought — as is thought, perhaps, 
 by many who are now before me — that the 
 subject of fashion was one susceptible only 
 of very light handling — to be treated with 
 humor, anecdote, satire, and possibly some 
 moralizing upon its whims and follies. I 
 commenced the preparation of my lecture 
 with scarce more design than this. 
 
 It was suggested, very sensibly, I thought, 
 by one of the gentlemen who waited on me 
 with the invitation to lecture, that the sub- 
 jects were usually too dry; — that it would 
 be worth while to start a new range of 
 popular addresses — if not upon trifling to- 
 pics, at least upon such, as, conveying 
 information, would still bear embroidering 
 with trifles. 
 
 The subject of fashion was instanced and 
 approved. I thought I might easily enter- 
 tain an audience with a history of the follies 
 of fashion in different countries and times, 
 and that in the hearer's keener appreciation 
 of the absurdity of fashionable extremes, 
 from seeing them in the ludicrous light of 
 disuse and distance, might lie the utility of 
 such a lecture. Those who are familiar 
 with the literature of the sixteenth century 
 will remember that the fashions were, at that 
 day, the great target of pulpit eloquence — 
 that, with a vein half humorous, though 
 with violent denunciation, the clergy de- 
 tailed the follies of fashion, and dwelt upon 
 their sinfulness ; and that more particularly 
 in New England, in the Puritan days of 
 Cotton Mather, this great Divine, and others, 
 
 held forth on this subject with the very 
 extremity of wrathful fervor. 
 
 A reference to the serious books and to 
 the sermons of that period would sufficiently 
 show, that, had I followed out my original 
 intention, and taken the fashions themselves 
 for the text and burthen of my lecture, I 
 should not have lacked for grave precedent, 
 nor for material and inference, worth the 
 while of both speaker and hearer. The 
 fashions are not my theme, however. Fash- 
 ion is — and betweenyWaon and the fashions 
 you will at once comprehend the distinc- 
 tion. Of the importance of the subject, in 
 the light in which I view it, you will be the 
 judges when you have heard me to the end 
 — but I may say, by way of bespeaking 
 your favorable attention, that I am inclined 
 to believe few topics — short of religion and 
 constitutional law — to be, at this period of 
 our country's history, of greater importance 
 to us. Before entering upon this generali 
 zing view, however, let me say a few words 
 on the fashions, as to the degree with which 
 they affect the standard of true taste — in this 
 same degree, giving weight and color to 
 fashion, in which taste and elegance are of 
 course prominent features. 
 
 The origin of fashion would probably 
 start even with the history of taste. The 
 fust hour of a community's existence— if 
 created full grown, like the family of Deu 
 calion and Pyrrha— would betray differen- 
 ces in the demeanor of men ; and the most 
 graceful and showy would probably be "the 
 
800 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 fashion," by acclamation. Taste is instinc- 
 tive, and homage is paid irresistibly, by all 
 human beings, to supremacy in elegance. 
 The rise and progress of fashion up to its 
 present condition, however, is not uniform- 
 ly a history of taste. What are more con- 
 tradictory than the caprices of fashion 1 
 There are certain standards of beauty, deci- 
 ded upon by the common instinct — stand- 
 ards which artists irresistibly follow, and 
 which the eye invariably acknowledges 
 true, and these standards are as often vio- 
 lated as adhered to, by the votaries of fash- 
 ion. The ladies very well know, that, be 
 their faces long or short — be their forms 
 queenly or fairy-like, — there is but one in- 
 exorable size and shape for a fashionable 
 bonnet; and, of course, if one style of 
 beauty is favored, all others are unbecom- 
 ingly marred. The male figure, it has 
 been decided by centuries of progressive 
 art, has its laws of beauty, — but in the 
 fashions, of what age of civilized Europe 
 have not these laws been violated. 
 
 Strange to say, and worth speculating 
 on, if we had time for a digression, it is only 
 in the semi-barbarous nations — in modern 
 Greece and Turkey, and among the indolent 
 and unthinking tribes of the Asiatics, that 
 costume, once regulated by art, remains in 
 unchangeable good taste — comfortable and 
 convenient, as well as picturesque and be- 
 coming. But look at the fashions of Eu- 
 rope. Positively the most incredible true 
 books with which I am acquainted are the 
 amusing records of the fashions of the last 
 two hundred years in England. White 
 periwigs of enormous bulk, were, for in- 
 stance, the fashion for ladies in the begin- 
 ning of the seventeenth century. It is an 
 accredited fact, that there died in London 
 in 1756, a white-headed old woman of great 
 age, whose hoary hair, cut off after her 
 death, sold for fifty pounds to a ladies' peri- 
 wig maker. Black patches on the faces of 
 court beauties were the fashion in the same 
 age, and hoops and high heels — utter de- 
 struction 10 grace of form and movement — 
 were worn by all ladies with any pretension 
 to quality 
 
 the male figure, the shoulders should be 
 broad, for beauty, and the hips narrow, 
 and it has been said in support of this 
 standard that it is an aristocratic forma- 
 tion — as those whose ancestors had carried 
 burthens would naturally have large hips, 
 while those whose forefathers had been of 
 warlike habits and taken exercise princi- 
 pally in the saddle, would be more devel- 
 oped in the chest and shoulders. In the 
 teeth of the arts, however, and of these 
 aristocratic objections, padded hips were 
 the fashion in King James's time, while the 
 collarless coat, with seams converging to 
 the throat, narrowed the chest and shoul- 
 ders and gave to the male figure the outline 
 of the female. 
 
 Ridiculous as most fashions, when not 
 based upon legitimate principles of art, seem 
 at a distance, however, it is astonishing how 
 unaware the excesses creep upon us, and 
 how easily and unsuspectingly men of sense 
 pass, from ridiculing a new fashion, to ap- 
 proving and adopting it. It would puz- 
 zle any one present, except perhaps an 
 artist, to tell, in a moment, what are the 
 absurdities of the present fashions. Yet 
 absurdities there are, that will be laugh- 
 ed at fifty years hence, and you can easily 
 detect them, by applying to the present 
 modes the severe test of their utility as 
 heighteners of natural beauty. And here 
 let me, in passing, throw a pebble into the 
 scale of art — hinting at the importance of 
 keeping in view the principles of art and 
 true elegance in adopting the changes of 
 the fashions. If the portraits of men of 
 mark and women of great beauty, in our age, 
 are to be painted for posterity, let it be 
 within the painter's power to make an ar- 
 tistic disposition of drapery, without painting 
 his sitters in the unfitting costume of a clas- 
 sic age, floating them in clouds, or disguis- 
 ing them with cloaks and mantles. We 
 have all laughed at the portraits that have 
 descended to us from the days of periwigs 
 and red-heeled shoes. There have been 
 celebrated painters, who have followed the 
 fashions of the time even in historical pic- 
 tures — gravely representing the apostles and 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 801 
 
 martyrs in bag- wigs, and the Virgin Mary 
 in hoop and farthingale. There is no know- 
 ing how far the habituation of monstrosities 
 in common wear may corrupt the taste even 
 of artists. I am not sure, by the way, that 
 the national style of dress may not have 
 something to do with the heroic in national 
 character. There was pride of country in a 
 Roman toga, that hardly appertains to a hat 
 and frock coat; and Cesar's death might not 
 have descended so dramatically to posterity, 
 if, instead of wrapping his head majestically 
 in his mantle, he had fallen at the base of 
 Pompey's statue — with his overcoat pulled 
 over him ! 
 
 Leaving the fashions with thus much of 
 notice, I come now to the subject of fashion 
 — a term of most elusive and changeable 
 import, and expressive of a condition of life, 
 which it is next to impossible to analyze or 
 define. Fashion is a position in society — 
 attained by different avenues in different 
 countries — but, however arrived at, giving 
 its possessor consequence in common re- 
 port, value in private life, authority in all 
 matters of taste, and influence in every 
 thing. Rightly to appreciate what fashion 
 is, or rather what it is likely to be hereafter 
 in our own country, let us, without denning 
 it further, look a little into what it is abroad. 
 Let us see what fashion is in France, and 
 what it is in England — for it is from these 
 two countries, only, that we borrow any 
 thing in the way of social distinctions — and 
 by contrast with our future models, we can 
 the more easily make out what fashion is 
 in the great metropolis of our own country, 
 if not as to which way it is tending. 
 
 There is wonderful activity of amusement 
 in all the grades of society in Paris, and no 
 one class, or grade, wastes much time in 
 thinking about the other— differing in this 
 respect, (I may say in passing), from Eng- 
 land, where all classes that pretend to socie- 
 ty at all, occupy themselves to any uncom- 
 fortable degree with gazing enviously at the 
 highest. Of necessity, in a monarchical 
 country, rank has its weight, and the an- 
 cient nobility of France can scarcely be said 
 to be out of fashion, though the verbal ho- 
 51 
 
 mage and high consideration with which per- 
 sons of noble family are invariably named, 
 is merely nominal and ceremonious, and the 
 old families, unless fashionable from intrin- 
 sic causes, are practically shelved and for- 
 gotten in the celebrated Faubourg where 
 they reside. Wealth, too, as in all coun- 
 tries, has its weight, and the rich man in 
 Paris may soar, on wings of lavish expense, 
 to the acquaintance of fashionable people ; 
 though, like Icarus with his wings of wax, 
 he drops like a clod when his wings are 
 melted. The court-circle — those who are 
 officially or amicably in habits of inter- 
 course with the family of the king, are 
 not necessarily, the fashion. But beyond 
 the control of either of these three pow- 
 erful grades of society, — rank, wealth and 
 court favor — there exists in Paris a sphere of 
 fashion ; and whatever else may purchase 
 admission to it by outlay of splendor, or 
 come into temporary contact with it by 
 caprice or accident, there is but one homo- 
 geneous and predominating principle in it 
 — but one invariable " open sesame," and 
 that is, intellect! Personal beauty goes far 
 in France, but it must be accompanied by 
 the tact of being agreeable, or, if it were 
 Venus herself, the beauty would soon be 
 ridiculed and neglected. Celebrity, of every 
 description, is a passport to fashion. Cele- 
 brated players and singers, travellers, sol- 
 diers, artists, scholars, statesmen and diplo- 
 matists, range freely through the penetralia 
 of Parisian fashion. Nothing is excluded 
 that is eminent — that is distinguished, that 
 can amuse. All manner of mental superi- 
 ority is unhesitatingly acknowledged. And, 
 intellect being the constituency of this legis- 
 lature of fashion, who are its leaders. The 
 manifest controllers of the tide of thought 
 and of the great interests of the present hour 
 — the living authors, the editors of newspa- 
 pers, active politicians, resident diplomatists, 
 and talented clergy — these are the influen- 
 tial leaders of fashionable society in Paris, 
 and the indispensable guests at all fashion- 
 able entertainments. With all the French 
 passion for dress and elegance, they exact 
 nothing ornamental in the persons of their 
 
802 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 intellectual favorites — in their admired po- 
 ets, and artists. They appreciate eminence 
 in dress and personal accomplishment, for 
 it is a shape of talent, and the consummate 
 dandy has commonly a passport in his tact 
 and wit — but the lions of Paris are as often 
 ill-dressed and awkward as the contrary, 
 and the mere exteriors of men have little 
 to do with making them permanently fash- 
 ionable. A sphere of society so constituted 
 is teeming with power, for, besides standing 
 at the very fountain of respect, which is in- 
 tellect, it is contributed to by all the differ- 
 ent levels of life in that great metropolis — 
 taking to itself the ambitious core and spirit 
 of every class, rank and condition. Its 
 power, too, goes farther than mere opinion. 
 The most conspicuous members of the pre- 
 sent government of France, were first the 
 idols of its fashionable society — as editors of 
 newspapers, poets and men of science. In- 
 tellect like theirs, however manifested, is 
 the road to fashion, and, driven onward by 
 fashionable influence and eclat, it is the 
 easy and flowery road to every thing desi- 
 rable in position and power. Without di- 
 gressing to look for the causes of this in the 
 political and moral revolutions of France, 
 let me say simply of the present hour, that 
 if there be in the world an indisputable re- 
 public of intellect, it is the fashionable so- 
 ciety of witty and giddy Paris ! 
 
 Let us glance now at fashion in England 
 — differing from that of France in some very 
 essential particulars. Rank, is more highly 
 prized in England. A man who is noble- 
 born is already three fourths fashionable — 
 the remaining fourth depending not at all 
 on his fortune, but wholly on his appear- 
 ance and manners. A clownish young lord, 
 or a girl who is Right Honorably plain and 
 awkward, though presentable at court, and 
 invited for form's sake to the sweeping 
 entertainments which embrace the giver's 
 entire acquaintance, can never be fashion- 
 able, and is pointedly overlooked in the 
 invitations to parties more select, and very 
 soon discouraged and mortified out of soci- 
 ety. Wealth has much less influence than 
 in France, in making its possessor fashiona- 
 
 ble. A person who is merely wealthy — not 
 ornamental to society in his own person, is 
 hopelessly shut out from the sphere of the 
 exclusives. A certain competency, it is true, 
 is necessary to fashion. A stylish man in 
 London must spend three times as much as 
 would serve his purpose in France, in hav- 
 ing about him the appointments of a gentle- 
 man, including an equipage. But, beyond 
 what is necessary for his own personal ele- 
 gance, and convenience, he requires no 
 riches to pass freely through all the favor- 
 itism of fashion. The immense number 
 of wealthy people in England has neutrali- 
 zed the distinction of wealth ; and money, 
 nowhere in the world, I think, goes so little 
 way as in that country, beyond providing 
 for personal luxury and comfort. 
 
 Rank and wealth, then, not being inva- 
 riable passports to fashion in London, we 
 come next to the third social estate — that 
 of intellect. Your mind immediately passes 
 in review the politicians, the men of sci- 
 ence, the authors, dramatists, artists — whose 
 names — written at the height they have 
 attained to, are legible at the distance at 
 which we read them — the breadth of the 
 Atlantic ! You ask — has the genius that 
 makes these men immortal, made them the 
 favorites of the hour they illuminate — the 
 fashion in the country on which they shed 
 lustre ! When they are down from the 
 height of inspiration in which their wings 
 were visible to the universe, do the choicest 
 of fair women and nobte men, contend, as 
 in France, to do them honor and give them 
 pleasure 1 No ! The exclusive sphere in 
 England has no such class in its confidence, 
 as men of genius. A man whose star has 
 culminated — who has forced the world to 
 hear of him by some undeniable burst of 
 intellect — finds his way open, it is true, 
 into the houses of the nobility, and into 
 the more common resorts of the fashion- 
 ables. He is the "lion of the season" — and 
 what the position is, of the merely intel- 
 lectual lion in the fashionable circle of 
 England, English writers have honestly 
 enough put down ! It is a hell of in- 
 visible humiliations! Not to offend any 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 803 
 
 living author by sketching his position, 
 suppose Keats, the apothecary's boy, to 
 have returned from Italy, where he died ; 
 and, having outlived the sneer of the high- 
 born critic who counselled him to " return 
 to his gallipots," to have become a lion in 
 London society. He had nothing in birth, 
 or personal appearance, to give him value 
 —nothing but incomparable genius — that 
 which, in all theories and essays on the 
 distinctions of life, is put down as the no- 
 blest aristocracy. He would have been 
 invited every where ! He would have dined 
 and supped and danced, if he liked, in every 
 nobleman's house in London, and would 
 have been, for a season or two, constantly 
 in the presence of the exclusives, male and 
 female. But the entrance to the noble- 
 man's house, and the nobleman's conde- 
 scension at dinner, and the attentive listen- 
 ing of the entire company to his eloquent 
 conversation, would never have broken 
 down the wall of glass between him and 
 the ladies of his host's family and circle ! 
 The belles of Almack's would never have 
 known Mr. Keats. The beauties familiar 
 with the dandies of St. James street, would 
 as soon have thought of feeling a tender- 
 ness for a Chinese juggler who had amused 
 them, as for the literary lion they had list- 
 ened to at dinner. There is an invariable 
 manner of uninterested and polite suffer- 
 ance, cultivated for the express use of a 
 non-conductor between the exclusives and 
 the unprivileged who may have access to 
 their resorts. This has been felt by every 
 self-made celebrated man in England, and 
 as most of them have been content with 
 one or two seasons of such life, men of 
 genius, unless newly risen, are seldom to 
 be found in vogue among the exclusives. 
 
 But the sphere exists — powerful, splen- 
 did, and dazzling to all eyes, — the sphere 
 of high fashion in England, — and what is 
 the key to it, and for whom are its intoxi- 
 cating triumphs 1 
 
 In civilization, as in many other things, 
 extremes meet. The highest possible cul- 
 tivation approaches nearest to the simpli- 
 city of nature, and England, which, at this 
 
 moment, probably, is at a higher point of 
 civilization than was ever before attained, 
 shows, in its most accomplished circle, the 
 nearest approach to nature. The passport 
 to fashion in England is that which would 
 be a passport to pre-eminence in an Indian 
 tribe — beauty of person combined with assu- 
 rance and a natural air of superiority. With 
 a mien of graceful boldness, and such a face 
 and form as would suit a sculptor, or grace 
 a chief, the son of a country curate in Eng. 
 land may pluck fashion from an earl. And 
 the same with the other sex. With no pre- 
 tension to parentage or position, above re- 
 spectability, a girl of remarkable beauty, 
 let it be only such beauty as would sit 
 gracefully upon title, and bear itself proudly 
 among the proud, is marked from her child- 
 hood for high connection. She attracts the 
 regard of her titled neighbors, is taken up 
 as a guest to London, and made the belle 
 of the season, and, if an attachment spring 
 up between her and a man of rank, the 
 passion is fanned and favored by generous 
 acclamation. The exclusives rejoice in an 
 addition of beauty to their set, and the coro- 
 net is more graced from being worn even by 
 plebeian blood, more gracefully. 
 
 I am not sure that this is not a commen- 
 dable aristocracy — at least not sure that the 
 acknowledging and adopting of nature's 
 stamp of superiority is not the best se- 
 cret for the securing of power and in- 
 fluence to the most elevated class. The 
 finest race in the eastern hemisphere — 
 the most gallant and manly in its men, 
 and the most beautiful and high-born 
 looking in its women — is the fashionable 
 aristocracy of England. The requisite 
 loftiness of bearing which accompanies 
 the beauty admired by this class, is not 
 attained without superiority in the natu- 
 ral character, and the successful fashiona- 
 bles of England are the best stuff, I believe 
 — the men for action, and the women for 
 the maternity of nature's noblemen. I am 
 inclined to think, I repeat, that nature's 
 mark of superiority is well and wisely ac 
 knowledged. The balance of the physical 
 and intellectual endowments — the power 
 
804 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 of bold action on a level with other men, 
 and with a superiority that all men can ap- 
 preciate — may be, to the eye of nature, su- 
 perior to what we call genius — superior to the 
 concentration of the whole force upon par- 
 ticular qualities of the brain. There are, 
 doubtless, many men, wholly undistin- 
 guished, who yet, in the harmonious pro- 
 portion of their persons and character — 
 in their sufficiency of brain for all the exi- 
 gences of action, and of spirit and dignity 
 to carry out all the desirable purposes of 
 the brain, are superior to geniuses, born for 
 nothing but to write books of fancy, or 
 made immortal by a disproportioned devel- 
 opment of one faculty only. Upon such 
 men, — upon poets and novelists, artists and 
 musicians — nature has rarely put her legible 
 stamp of u first quality." It has been the 
 complaint of genius, through all ages, that 
 its superiority has not been acknowledged; 
 and it seems to be an invariable instinct in 
 human nature not to acknowledge it, where 
 the writer and his personal qualities are 
 known. May it not be natural therefore, 
 to revolt against disproportion in endow- 
 ment — and may not our great admiration 
 for authors at a distance, and our diminish- 
 ed homage when we know them, lie in the 
 disappointment we feel that they are not as 
 remarkable in other respects as in power of 
 fancy — an instinc.tive feeling that the ex- 
 cess of this quality is at the expense of 
 others as desirable 1 
 
 This is something of a digression — but 
 before leaving the subject of English fash- 
 ion, let me remark upon the prodigious in- 
 fluence of the fashionable class in England, 
 and the likelihood that it works as an im- 
 portant weight in the balance of power in 
 that country. It is time, I think, that like 
 the addition in France, of the Tiers Etat to 
 the political divisions of Church and State. 
 Fashion, in England, should be named as a 
 power, after King, Lords and Commons. 
 It is a combination — a class — an order — form- 
 ed exclusively from no other class — capable, 
 as was shown in Brummel's time, of giving 
 a slight to the blood royal, and in the con- 
 stant habit of putting down rank that does 
 
 mind and person 
 marriage of noble 
 
 not look like rank, and selecting nature's 
 favorites from the people. The Queen 
 fears it — the nobility courts it — the people 
 worship it. It makes and unmakes popu- 
 lar idols. It rules the stage. It puts down 
 pretension. It is always elegant and lofty, 
 even in its oppressions. It fosters taste. It 
 maintains the beautiful against the costly, 
 — and it has for its exclusive use, and with 
 power to direct them alike against over- 
 bearing authority and vulgar wealth, the 
 formidable weapons of contempt and ridi- 
 cule. In all monarchies that ever existed 
 aristocracy have dwindled in 
 by the exclusive inter- 
 blood. England is the 
 first that has made tributary the nobili- 
 ty of nature, taking grafts from the strong 
 and beautiful, wherever grew strength and 
 beauty in the capricious garden of supe- 
 riority. A revolution cannot put down 
 such a class ! There is a natural homage in 
 the high and low-born alike, paid, without 
 stint or scruple, to the stamp of God. The 
 aristocracy of England, with all their pride 
 and superciliousness towards those who 
 crowd upon their skirts, is acknowledged 
 and admired, by the mass of the people, as 
 was never another aristocracy by its plebe- 
 ian countrymen. The existence of such a 
 class, I repeat, is important to the balance 
 of power in England. The tides of opin- 
 ion, that would meet, embattled in oppo- 
 sing floods — the arbitrary dictates of the court 
 on the one hand, and the rebellious spirit 
 of a people never consulted, on the other, 
 — find, in this intermediate class, a break- 
 water, that is a continual check to overflow 
 and devastation. 
 
 The next step in my argument is to get, 
 if possible, the same generalizing view of 
 the great metropolis of this country — to see 
 what it is that gives fashion and conse- 
 quence in New York. Let me premise, 
 however, that my remarks will apply to 
 no other city in this country, nor would 
 they have been true of New York forty 
 years ago. In cities of a certain size — 
 cities with the population of Boston, Phi- 
 ladelphia and Albany — the natural claims 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 805 
 
 to aristocracy have, at least, a hearing ; 
 and combined with wealth and personal 
 worth, they take rank with little opposi- 
 tion. In a metropolis of four hundred 
 thousand inhabitants, these same distinc- 
 tions are lost in the number of claimants ; 
 and, in what I have to say of New York, 
 I confine myself to the period since this 
 state of things has existed — the last fif- 
 teen or twenty years, during which the 
 old aristocracy of the Knickerbockers has 
 been shoved aside, by the enormous in- 
 crease of wealthy and pretentious popu- 
 lation. 
 
 In the particular period at which we live, 
 our country differs from all the nations of 
 the earth in one remarkable feature — that 
 of being in a state of social transition unex- 
 ampled for extent and rapidity — passing, 
 that is to say, by lightning leaps of ambi- 
 tious imitation, from plain to sumptuous, 
 from primitive to luxurious. Study the pro- 
 gresss of innovations upon the manners of 
 older countries. See with what reluctant 
 advance, one by one, the few foreign 
 usages that prevail in England and France 
 have crept respectively upon those compla- 
 cent countries. How little that is French 
 there is in England — how little that is Eng- 
 lish in France! And with what an unnatu- 
 ralized strangeness these few outlandish 
 features are incorrigibly worn. Here, on 
 the contrary, in the cities of America, cus- 
 toms that would be twenty years obtaining 
 foothold in Europe, are adopted at sight — 
 domesticated and made universal in a single 
 season. Our commerce is on the alert, our 
 merchants are novelty-seeking travellers, 
 ready to freight ships with any thing they 
 find that would be new at home, and we 
 have not a single prejudice in our national 
 character which shuts the door upon an 
 innovation. Nothing appears abroad — in 
 dress, equipage, usage of society, style of 
 furniture or mode of amusement, that is not 
 conjured over the water with aeriel quick- 
 ness, copied with marvellous fidelity in 
 New York, and incorporated at once into 
 national habituation. The drawing-rooms 
 of our wealthy classes are types, neither 
 
 faint nor imperfect, of the sumptuous inte- 
 riors of May Fair, and of the exclusive 
 saloons of France. Our ladies are scarce 
 thirty days behind the fashions of Paris. A 
 change in men's dress in St. James street, 
 is adopted in New York before it is detect- 
 ed east of Temple Bar. The stained glass 
 of Bohemia, while still a curiosity in Eng- 
 land, had grown common upon our dinner- 
 tables. The toys of the age of Louis the 
 Fourteenth, Egyptian couches, and the 
 carved furniture of the age of Elizabeth, 
 have been in turn the fashion abroad, and, 
 of either style, there were profuse speci- 
 mens in common wear among us, while the 
 novelty was still fresh in the capitals of Eu- 
 rope. We copy every thing we can hear 
 of — import and imitate instantly every new 
 model of equipage — follow every whim of 
 society, take the new dance, the new by- 
 word, the new public amusement, — and 
 enter heart and soul into every rage that is 
 handed over to us, dramatic, operatic, sump- 
 tuary, and literary. This daguerreotype im- 
 itation is no less improving in its results, 
 however, than it is miraculous for its facile 
 rapidity. We have beaten England and 
 France in progressive civilization and eleva- 
 tion, three centuries in one. At this rate, 
 and with the increasing facilities of com- 
 merce, we shall soon have nothing to learn 
 from Europe, but what transpires between 
 the traverses of packets — and when that 
 period arrives, we shall be, of all countries 
 the most cosmopolite — comparing with other 
 nations as the enlightened and liberal tra- 
 veller compares with the home-keeping vil- 
 lager. I am anticipating, however. Be- 
 fore saying more of the future, let us take 
 our proposed view of the present — as shown 
 in the fashion of this great metropolis. 
 
 Though there is probably a greater mar- 
 ket for the fashions in New- York than in 
 any other capital in the world, (from the 
 fact that all classes, above the lowest, dress 
 as extravagantly here as only the first class 
 does abroad) there is still very little of what 
 can be fairly fixed upon as fashion. No one 
 circle confessedly holds the power. Of 
 rank, we can hardly name the value in 
 
806 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 New York, for, coming to us from abroad, 
 it has the exaggerated value of an exotic — 
 much more worshipped here than where 
 it comes from. It does not strike me, how- 
 ever, that we show any symptoms of relish 
 for the indigenous rank that would natu- 
 rally be now taking root in the families 
 among us most honorably descended. It 
 would require some research to discover, in 
 New York, even the residences of those 
 whose fathers' names are in the page of our 
 history. Wherever they are, they get little 
 position, consequence, or fashion, from the 
 mere eminence of their forefathers — few of 
 them it is certain, being even what the most 
 conspicuous people would call " in socie- 
 ty." I think this will bear putting still 
 more strongly, and that I may venture to 
 say there is an instinctive hostility to the 
 assumption of consequence by old families 
 and somewhat, perhaps, from a feeling 
 on the part of the undistinguished, that 
 there is still a chance for competition with 
 dignities of so recent date, but more from 
 the application of that exacting standard, 
 by which merit in the inheritor alone 
 makes valid an inheritance of glory. 
 
 In the absence of rank, and particularly 
 IB a republic, you would naturally suppose 
 that official power — the appointment by 
 public honor to the highest dignities of the 
 State — would give, to the family of the 
 holder, a deference that would make them 
 the fashion. Yet you all know the value 
 of this claim to consequence ! The Gov- 
 ernor, Secretary, Treasurer of the State, the 
 Senators and Representatives of the Sov- 
 reign People, come and go with no more 
 eclat than other men, and their families are 
 no more sought, imitated or caressed, for 
 their official dignity. It neither makes a 
 man nor his family particularly the fashion 
 in New York, if he be Mayor of the city ; 
 though, in the administration of his office, 
 he exercises a sway as powerful for the 
 time being, as many a crowned head of 
 feudal Europe. Instead of fashionable ho- 
 mage, paid to such dignity as we had a 
 nand in making, we seem on the contrary 
 to feel for it a fashionable indifference. 
 
 Is it here as in France, and does intel- 
 lect give consequence in New York ? Does 
 wit in man, or conversational talent in wo- 
 man, make the possessor an indispensable 
 acquaintance to all givers of fashionable 
 parties. Are the powerful controllers of 
 public opinion, the gentlemen of the press 
 — keepers as they are, or might be, of the 
 key of each momentous to-morrow — are 
 they, in a country where the press, far 
 more than in France, is the citadel of power 
 — are they, as in France, courted for their 
 intellect, and for the influence they could 
 give to the class they particularly belonged 
 to. Are the gentlemen of the bar — the gla- 
 diators of intellect — who, in society, as in 
 courts of justice, have on their armor of wit, 
 and in the absence of any class possessing 
 the leisure to be conversationists only, are 
 the most amusing as well as the most im- 
 proving members of society — are they sought 
 for by the ambitious, and are their houses 
 and resorts made fashionable by their intel- 
 lect'? Are men of science, distinguished 
 artists, poets, authors, politicians and native 
 celebrities generally — is this varied body of 
 men, representing certainly the intellect of 
 the day, sought out for fashionable enter- 
 tainments, courted, and made friends and 
 favorites of, by fashionable women 1 These 
 questions are answered by the reasonable- 
 ness of a doubt — whether one in ten of 
 the most pretentious fashionables of New 
 York, have any definite idea who are the 
 intellectual masters and controllers of that 
 grand vehicle of society to which they 
 themselves are — the incomparable varnish ! 
 
 Is it then as in England 7 Does fashion- 
 able society take pains to secure to itself 
 Nature's mark of aristocracy ? Are the rare 
 accidents of mingled grace and beauty — the 
 lovely and admirable women who do live 
 sometimes in unfashionable neighborhoods, 
 and do belong to families that are only re- 
 spectable, — are such ornaments of their sex 
 sought out for embellishment to fashionable 
 parties, or would they find the way easy if 
 they attempted to rise, by their own exer- 
 tions, to spheres more suitably ornamental 1 
 Is masculine beauty — combined with a look 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 807 
 
 of spirit, and a mien of natural chivalry and 
 superiority — are these attractions, in a youth 
 of unknown family and of no fortune, suffi- 
 cient to give him, in New York as in Eng- 
 land, easy access to fashionable circles, and 
 consequence and influence, the town over, 
 in all matters of taste and elegance 1 These 
 questions, too, are easily answered by a rea- 
 sonable doubt — whether a well-bred stran- 
 ger, thrown into a mixed assembly in New 
 York, would not make blunders, (as he 
 hardly could do in England), in an attempt, 
 to pick out the fashionables by their look 
 of aristocracy. 
 
 Nature's stamp of nobility, then, not be- 
 ing a passport to fashion in New York — 
 nor family name and descent — nor intellect 
 —nor that official dignity, which in theory, 
 you would say, should give rank in a re- 
 public—what is the predominating princi- 
 ple of fashion ? What is it that gives con- 
 sequence and enviable station 1 
 
 There is a condition of life in that city, 
 which without forming a definite and com- 
 bined class, as in France and England, 
 may still be called " the fashion" — a kind 
 of quicksand of conspicuousness and conse- 
 quence, stable hitherto for no footing, but 
 crowded successively by exclusives, few 
 of whom have ever kept their place long 
 enough to be identified by public rumor. 
 The uncertainty as to who the fashiona- 
 bles are, is somewhat increased, too, by 
 their great number, as no recognizable cir- 
 cle ever comes twice together, and no 
 twenty fashionables would agree as to the 
 fashionableness of twenty more. The great 
 secret of vogue in this upper sphere — the 
 passport to its conspicuousness and conse- 
 quence, — is not exactly money — not ex- 
 actly the being rich — but expense, and the 
 dressing, driving and entertaining with 
 lavish expensiveness. Extravagance, here, 
 takes the place that, in France, is given to 
 intellect, and in England, to the nobility 
 of nature. It is true, that even under this 
 dynasty, it has not invariably been as diffi- 
 cult as now to tell who were the leading 
 fashionables of New York. Fashion, from 
 time to time, has made head and taken a 
 
 stand, and within my own memory of New 
 York society, fifteen or twenty years, there 
 have been eight or ten confident and estab- 
 lished aristocracies. They have risen and 
 fallen, duly, with " the stocks" — but never 
 before, after the break up of a Board of 
 Fashionable Directors, has there been so 
 prolonged a state of anarchy as exists at 
 this moment. The great convulsion in 
 Wall street in '36, scattered the last defi- 
 nite combination of " people necessary to 
 know;" and since that time there has 
 never been a circle that was not rivalled 
 by twenty others, nor have there been 
 any leaders of fashion, nameable without 
 a smile to two consecutive believers. 
 Fashion there is — the fashion as I said 
 before of conspicuousness in expense — but 
 it is a commonwealth without govern- 
 ment or centre — without limits or barriers. 
 Any body belongs to it who spends up to 
 the mark, and if there are any two who 
 have combined to be exclusive, or make " a 
 set" — it is by no means generally suspected' 
 This state of promiscuous pomp, how- 
 ever, cannot long exist. It would not have 
 existed till now, if money alone could 
 make, again, a potentate among fashion- 
 ables. The ambition to be, as the French 
 say, "the cream of the cream" is not 
 wanting. It never sleeps. But money — 
 mere money — is omnipotent no more ! The 
 setting up of an equipage, the adopting of 
 crest and livery, and the giving of balls and 
 dinners, can but make a man — now — one of 
 five hundred. Not till this five hundred is 
 decimated to fifty, by some other superi- 
 ority, that, with the aid of money, can make 
 itself paramount, and not till that fifty is 
 decimated, still again, to five, who, by 
 the consent of the fifty, shall be their lea- 
 ders and rulers, will there be a fashion in 
 New York, worth courting or fearing. Is 
 this a consummation to be wished ? I think 
 I can show you that it is ! 
 
 The very core and essence of that which 
 constitutes a republic is the first principle 
 in fashion— rebellion against unnatural au 
 thority. What would be the state of Eng- 
 land at this enlightened day, with no coun- 
 
808 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 terpoise to that nobility which is an acci- 
 dent of birth, and no asylum in society 
 from the overbearing 1 haughtiness of offi- 
 cial and court privilege 1 There would be 
 a tyranny of ill-endowed aristocrats — the 
 more tyrannical in proportion as they were 
 more brutal ; — and a chasm between them 
 and the people — between them and hum- 
 ble-born merit, which, if not crossed by 
 the bridge of a revolution, would engulf 
 them in the darkness of feudal barbarism. 
 Now, there is a republic in the heart of 
 monarchical England— -fashion, ruled by the 
 manifest stamp of superiority. There is a 
 republic in the heart of monarchical France 
 —fashion, ruled by wit and intellect. These 
 are intermediate powers inseparable from 
 a state of high civilization, let the govern- 
 ment be what it will. Under the two 
 hoary monarchies just named, they are 
 a check to the tyranny of rank, the inso- 
 lence of wealth and the pomposity of the 
 court — to all of which intolerable evils the 
 smile or frown of fashion is wholesomely 
 and triumphantly paramount. But have 
 we no work for Fashion to do in America 1 
 Are there no monsters to be put down by 
 a combination of refinement and intellect ? 
 Have we no evils in our system of society, 
 no oppressions, likely to get the upper 
 hand of a republic, and for which we need 
 therefore the well-tried countercheck of 
 fashion 1 
 
 Rank — we have none to contend against. 
 Court favor, as dispensed at Washington, 
 makes no man formidable. The influence 
 of mere wealth, as I have already said, is 
 evidently on the wane — though were it not 
 so, the tyranny of a sordid aristocracy of 
 money might indeed call for a well-armed 
 antagonist. A monster there is, however, 
 reigning over this country, strange to say, 
 in the shape of its greatest blessing— a 
 monster it would scarce be safe to name, 
 without first unmasking and showing his 
 deformity, and, for this monster, we require 
 the check that can alone be given by the 
 combination I speak of as fashion, for it is 
 the only shape and mouth-piece he will 
 not himself usurp and turn to his tyranni- 
 
 cal uses. Look a little into his anatomy. 
 To how many men in a hundred, taken 
 indiscriminately from the miscellaneous 
 population of New York, would you en- 
 trust a decision upon any question that 
 affected your personal position or happi- 
 ness. Count among them the vicious, the 
 wilful, the ignorant and short-sighted, — 
 who are, and must necessarily be, in a 
 great metropolis like this, the majority in 
 numbers. In the capitals of other coun- 
 tries the ignorant and vicious classes have 
 little or no moral power — no power at all, 
 except in the hand to hand conflict of a 
 revolution. In this country every one of 
 them forms part of the constituency of a 
 newspaper and has a voice as loud as your 
 own on all questions that can come to the 
 threshold of public notice. With such a 
 population as America had in '76, this 
 level suffrage of opinion was the heaven 
 of liberty. Taking the country, now, from 
 ocean to ocean, it is so still. But in our 
 great cities — more especially in our great- 
 est city — the proportion of evil in the popu- 
 lation gives danger to its sovereign impulse 
 Free discussion and the vigilance of patri- 
 ots, may control it on great questions, and 
 if every so-called popular impulse were 
 fairly dragged to light, and known by 
 honest counting to be the wish of the ma- 
 jority, it would be still more effectually 
 bridled. But no ! The oracle of the peo- 
 ple finds utterance when the people are 
 asleep. The monster I have not yet na- 
 med is enthroned within it, and it is he, 
 and not the people, speaking oftenest in 
 its voice of thunder. The laws are palsied 
 by his threat — private character trembles in 
 its sanctuary — the arts and all the interests 
 of taste and elegance are benumbed and 
 discouraged, and while the public is a 
 u chartered libertine," the individual is a 
 slave, for no man dare do otherwise than 
 as the mass approve, for fear of detraction 
 and outcry. It is in this monster that envy 
 and ill-will, and the natural hatred of the 
 low and vicious for those above them, find 
 a ready weapon for their malice. Desperate 
 men who have seen better days, and ty- 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 809 
 
 rants without thrones, of whom there is 
 never a lack in any community of the 
 earth, are the ready trumpeters of the will 
 of this many-eyed monster. And now shall 
 I tell you his false name ? Shall I tell you 
 what lurks in the shadow of liberty, like 
 oppression behind a throne of a monarch 1 
 You have anticipated it by my description. 
 It is unexamined, unauthorized, uncontrol- 
 led public opinion — the monster whose false 
 throat claims utterance for the people. The 
 judge on the bench thinks of him in his ! 
 verdict. The criminal at the bar trusts him 
 more than his lawyer. He points his fin- 
 ger, and the representative of the people 
 turns bully in the halls of legislation. 'He 
 stands before the statesman — hiding from 
 him the page of history and posterity's con- \ 
 tempt. Women dreads him on her pillow 
 — for detraction is his most appetizing food. 
 Religion trembles at her altar — for, on the 
 ashes of the house of God he avenges an 
 insult to his myrmidons. 
 
 But it is not alone in shapes so palpable 
 to view that this black shadow of freedom 
 stalks through a republic. There is a tyr- 
 ranny of public opinion, in every grade and 
 hiding-place of this country — worn so ha- 
 bitually as to be thought an inseparable 
 evil of human society — worn like the hair 
 shirt of penance till its irritation has be- 
 come a habit of second nature. It takes 
 twice as bold a man here as in Europe, to 
 be economical — twice as bold a man to pre- 
 fer paying a debt to putting his name to a 
 subscription. We put ourselves to twice 
 the inconvenience here, that people in Eu- 
 rope do, to seem what we are expected to 
 be by our neighbors. The pain and morti- 
 fication of reducing our style of living to 
 suit a reduced prosperity in business, is 
 twice, here, what it is abroad — thrice what 
 it need be. And on the other hand, look 
 at the invidious criticism and malice drawn 
 upon men or women, by any step, however 
 well it can be afforded, toward embellishing 
 their condition of life. We do not live in 
 liberty, here — we do not spend our money 
 or enjoy our firesides in rational freedom. 
 The country is free, the press is free, reli- 
 
 gion is free, and public opinion remarkably 
 free — but the individual is a slave ! The 
 stab of Brutus was struck at nothing half so 
 tyrannical in the bosom of Cesar as our des- 
 potism — despotism of the public of which 
 we, who suffer, severally make one. Since 
 government was first invented, the most 
 dreaded evil has been tyranny in the sove- 
 reign power. In a monarchy the king 
 holds the power, and the people and pri- 
 vate life are to be protected against the 
 king. In a republic the people are the 
 sovereign, and the laws and private life 
 are to be protected against the people. 
 The President is but the subservient prime 
 minister of the sovereign people. His 
 many- headed master never loses him from 
 his sight one hour : and while in a monar- 
 chy there is an appeal, from the oppression 
 of the king to the vengeance of the people, 
 in a republic there is no appeal from op- 
 pression but to God — for who can impeach 
 the sovereign people ! 
 
 You may think, if you have not given 
 me your close attention that I have wan- 
 dered from my subject. But no. It is in 
 my subject — in the influence of a circle of 
 acknowledged fashion — that I see a release 
 from this invisible monster. As Leather- 
 stocking said when the Prairie was burn- 
 ing, " fire shall fight fire." Opinion from 
 a more authentic source, shall stem and 
 countercheck opinion. We are awed, now, 
 by what we vaguely suppose the public to 
 think. Give us a class whose opinion 
 is entitled to undeniable weight — a class 
 whose judgment is made up from elevated 
 standards — a class whose favor is alike valu- 
 able to the ambitious of both sexes — a class 
 it is important to know and propitiate if 
 possible, but at any rate to quote as un- 
 questionable authority — and the evil is at 
 once abated. The most radiant feature as 
 well as the most salutary principle of mo 
 dern civilization is the organizing in France 
 and England of the classes I have descri- 
 bed — umpires between tyranny and the 
 people, — arbiters, that with right on their 
 side are stronger than the despot. As I 
 have endeavored to show, this umpire in 
 
810 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 England is fashion, made potent by the up- 
 holding of nature's aristocracy. In France 
 it is fashion, made all but sovereign in its 
 influence, by the enlisting of intellect. In 
 our country, as you all know, the class that 
 is destined to protect us against our shape 
 of the tyranny universal on earth, is still 
 unorganized, and the locum tenens, the 
 temporary key of fashionable superiority, 
 is showy expensiveness. But this anar- 
 chy is not to last — nor, (I trust you are 
 prepared to agree with me,) is it desirable 
 that it should. I may venture, I think, to 
 predict, by shadows cast before, that it is 
 on the eve, now, of a new and lasting for- 
 mation. 
 
 But, of what stuff is to be built our inner 
 republic 1 Who, in our great metropolis, is 
 to be eligible to that privileged class whose 
 judgment shall rebuke the un weighed opin- 
 ions of the mass, as well as the insolence 
 of overbearing wealth and authority. The 
 material lies about us in prodigal abun- 
 dance. We have intellect, of God's purest 
 kindling, burning before our eyes like stars 
 before our closed windows in the last watch 
 before morning. We have nature's nobility 
 — men of such spirit and bearing, and wo- 
 men of such talent and beauty, as would 
 draw homage alike from the Indian on the 
 Prairie, or the exclusives at Almack's. We 
 have master-spirits — men who possess the 
 unaccountable, but lordly, power of control 
 over popular masses — capable of swaying 
 the most important flood-tides of the politi- 
 cal sea, yet not capable of giving influence 
 or fashion to their families, or the circles 
 they live in. We have every degree, range, 
 and quality, of material for fashion, in as 
 great abundance as any country on earth. 
 And now, of what stuff, I ask again, is to 
 be moulded our fashionable republic — what 
 class of superiority is to be set up for our 
 umpire — counterpoise, to protect the sub- 
 ject individual against the sovereign people 1 
 
 In this question the whole country has a 
 voice. With the rapid and facile inter- 
 course between our cities, and with our 
 singularly gregarious habits— the distin- 
 guished of all the cities of the union, com- 
 
 ing frequently together — every society in 
 the country can influence the character of 
 aristocracy in the metropolis. That me- 
 tropolis is the great throbbing heart in 
 whose pulsations the distant hand and foot 
 have sympathy and influence. It was time 
 — high time — that attention was called to 
 the quality of the blood at this heart of 
 our country. We have kept our vigils on 
 all other subjects — we have slept at our 
 watch over this ! The first beat of this 
 chronic pulse may be regulated, easily and 
 irresistibly, by public volition. The fear is 
 that the wrong elements may creep in- 
 sensibly uppermost, and ossify into power 
 without moulding or controlling! It was 
 time, I say, that it should become a ques- 
 tion of lively agitation, — in the metropolis 
 and in every city in the Union — of what 
 stuff is to be formed the coming American 
 aristocracy? Discussion, enquiry, active 
 ridicule of false pretension, and generous 
 approbation of that which is truly admi- 
 rable, are means — ample means — in our 
 hands, to make it what we will. Let us 
 beware, however — for, choose what we will 
 — do homage to what we may, as worthy of 
 privilege and distinction — whatever we do 
 choose — whatever becomes the fashion, with 
 the consequence that fashion is destined to 
 have, — accumulates power from the mo- 
 ment of taking the lead, and is elevated in 
 character, as well as hedged about with 
 protection and aggrandizement! It is for 
 the general vigilance — for you, on your part 
 — to say, whether high morality shall be 
 indispensable to fashion. It is for you to 
 say, (and these are important questions) 
 whether political rectitude shall give con- 
 sequence to a man in the highest circle, 
 or whether men who value consequence 
 and position, shall dare to meddle with 
 politics at all. In short, whether the "al- 
 mighty dollar" — whether intellect, as shown 
 in wit or conversation, or as shown in 
 the arts, the press and the professions — 
 whether official rank, or manifest superi- 
 ority, as stamped by nature on strength 
 and beauty — whether one, or any com- 
 bination of these, is to be the confessed 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 811 
 
 title to American aristocracy, is yet to 
 be decided. 
 
 I have discoursed more gravely of fashion 
 than was perhaps anticipated — less amuse - 
 mgly and more gravely than I might have 
 done, it is certain. Fashion is a trifling 
 word, and there are those to whom words 
 never change meaning or value. Import- 
 ant as it may become, too, in the aggre- 
 gate, fashion is known, and contributed to, 
 by what the wise call trifles. Trifles they 
 are — and so are the foam-bubbles on the ad- 
 vancing wave ! But that glittering crest is 
 no more certain to be the rider upon a tide, 
 fetterless and resistless, than are the trifles 
 of fashion the precursors of a powerful ele- 
 ment, surging in, at this hour, upon the yet 
 incomplete character of our country. Shall 
 we be indifferent to the beauty or the de- 
 formity, the viciousness or the healthful- 
 ness of this impending aristocracy 1 Is it 
 not worth while — momentously worth while 
 — to arrest its presuming avatar, outside the 
 citadel of power, and challenge its authori- 
 ty from God and reason ! I may give it you 
 as my opinion, that aristocracy in a re- 
 public must needs be more powerful than 
 those of monarchies, limited or despotic — 
 for it must fight the whole battle of superi- 
 ority, unaided by rank, prejudice or long 
 usage. Its formation were inevitable at 
 this stage of our progress, even were we 
 alone in the world — for there is no high 
 civilization without it — but we are borrow- 
 ing, as I said before, the social usages, as 
 
 well as the fashions and luxuries, of the 
 countries over the water — borrowing forms 
 and laws of aristocracy faster than fashions 
 or luxuries. And is not this a matter of 
 interest to the public 1 " Where lies pow- 
 er?" "Where are the combinations that 
 hold power?" are questions for the patriot 
 and statesman — questions answered, wide 
 of the mark, by the hackneyed divisions of 
 political economy. "Church and state," 
 " rich and poor," " King, Lords and Com- 
 mons," give no clue to the power para- 
 mount in England — the well-organized 
 mastery of fashion ! Let no man think it 
 impossible that a class designated by so 
 trifling a word as fashion, may soon crowd 
 mammon from our altars, and become the 
 antagonists of ill-begotten, public opinion, 
 and the oracle of all that affects the indi- 
 vidual. This, I repeat again, is the coming 
 epoch in our social history. Thus far — to 
 this level of preparation for an aristocracy — 
 America has built her pyamid of civiliza- 
 tion — overtaking astonished Europe, cen- 
 turies in a day. To top this pyramid — 
 to complete our broad-based and towering 
 republic, we have a class to create — a 
 summit-stone to lay — to which we can 
 point without shame or hesitation, when 
 it is lifted to the scrutiny of the world. 
 Thank God, we have yet the time and 
 opportunity to decide, from what quarry 
 it shall be hewn, and to what mortar of 
 public sentiment it shall owe its stability! 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 It may amuse the reader to quote a chap- 
 ter from one of the serious works on the 
 fashions referred to in the beginning of the 
 Lecture. « THE SIMPLE COBBLER OF 
 AG AW AM," the work from which it was 
 taken, was a classic of the sixteenth century, 
 written by a New England emigrant clergy- 
 man, Rev. Nathaniel Ward. He thus dis- 
 courses of the lady- fashions of New-England 
 of that day : — 
 
 " Should I not keepe promise in speaking 
 a little to Womens fashions, they would 
 take it unkindly : I was loath to pester bet- 
 ter matter with such stuffe ; I rather thought 
 it meet to let them stand by themselves, like 
 the Qua Genus in the Grammar, being Defi- 
 jcients, or Redundants, not to be brought 
 under any Rule : I shall therefore make bold 
 for this once, to borrow a little of their loose 
 tongued Liberty, and mispend a word or 
 two upon their long-wasted, but short-skirted 
 
812 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 patience : a little use of my stirrup will do 
 no harme. 
 
 Ridentem dicere verum, quid prohibet ? 
 
 Gray Gravity it selfe can well beteam, 
 That Language be adapted to the Theme 
 He that to Parrots speaks, must parrotize : 
 He that instructs a foole, may act th' unwise. 
 
 It is known more then enough that I am 
 neither Nigard, nor Cinick, to the due 
 bravery of the true Gentry : if any man mis- 
 likes a bully mong drossock more then I, let 
 him take her for his labour : I honour the 
 woman that can honour her selfe with her 
 attire ; a good Text alwayes deserves a fair 
 Margent : I am not much offended if I see a 
 trimme, far trimmer than she that wears it : 
 in a word, whatever Christianity or Civility 
 will allow, I can afford with London mea- 
 sure : but when I heare a nugiperous Gentle- 
 dame inquire what dresse the Queen is in 
 this week : what the nudiustertian fashion 
 of the Court is ; I meane the very newest : 
 with egge to be in it in all haste, what ever 
 it be ; I look at her as the very gizzard of a 
 trifle, the product of a quarter of a cypher, 
 the epitome of nothing, fitter to be kickt, if 
 shee were of a kickable substance, than 
 either honour'd or humour'd. 
 
 To speak moderately, I truly confesse, it 
 ie beyond the ken of my understanding to 
 conceive, how those women should have 
 any true grace, or valuable vertue, that have 
 so little wit, as to disfigure themselves with 
 euch exotick garbes, as not only dismantles 
 their native lovely lustre, but transclouts 
 them into gant bar-geese, ill-shapen-shotten- 
 shell-fish, Egyptian Hyeroglyphicks, or at 
 the best into French flurts of the pastery, 
 which a proper English woman should 
 scorne with her heels : it is no marvell they 
 weare drailes on the hinder part of their 
 heads, having nothing as it seems in the 
 fore-part, but a few Squirrils brains to help 
 them frisk from one ill-favour'd fashion to 
 another. 
 
 These whimm' Crown'd shees, these fashion-fancying wits, 
 Are empty thin brain'd shells, and fiddling Kits. 
 
 The very troublers and impoverishers of 
 mankind, I can hardly forbear to commend 
 to the world a saying of a Lady living some- 
 
 time with the Queen of Bohemia, I know 
 not where shee found it, but it is pitty it 
 should be lost. 
 
 The World is full of care, much like unto a bubble , 
 Women and care, and care and women, and women ana 
 care and trouble. 
 
 The Verses are even enough for such odde 
 pegma's. I can make my selfe sicke at any 
 time, with comparing the dazzling splender 
 wherewith our Gentlewomen were embel- 
 lished in some former habits, with the gut- 
 foundred goosdom, wherewith they are now 
 surcingled and debauched. Wee have about 
 five or six of them in our Colony : if I see 
 any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse 
 my phansie of them for a moneth after. I 
 have been a solitary widdower almost twelve 
 yeares, purposed lately to make a step over 
 to my Native Country for a yoke-fellow : 
 but when I consider how women there have 
 tripe-wifed themselves with their cladments, 
 I have no heart to the voyage, least their 
 nauseous shapes and the Sea, should work 
 too sorely upon my stomach. I speak sad- 
 ly; me thinkes it should breake the hearts 
 of Englishmen to see so many goodly Eng- 
 lish-women imprisoned in French Cages, 
 peering out of their hood-holes for some men 
 of mercy to help them with a little wit, and 
 no body relieves them. 
 
 It is a more common then convenient 
 saying, that nine Taylors make a man : it 
 were well if nineteene could make a woman 
 to her minde : if Taylors were men indeed, 
 well furnished but with meer morall princi- 
 ples, they would disdain to be led about like 
 Apes, by such mymick Marmosets. It is a 
 most unworthy thing, for men that have 
 bones in them, to spend their lives in 
 making fidle-cases for futilous womens phan- 
 sies ; which are the very pettitoes of infirmi- 
 ty, the gyblets of perquisquilian to)^es. I 
 am so charitable to think, that most of that 
 mystery would worke the cheerfuller while 
 they live, if they might bee well discharged 
 of the tyring slavery of mis-tyring wome-n : 
 it is no little labour to be continually putting 
 up English-women into Out-landish caskes : 
 who if they be not shifted anew, once in a 
 few moneths, grow too sowre for their Hus- 
 
LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 813 
 
 bands. What this Trade will answer for 
 themselves when God shall take measure 
 of Taylors consciences is beyond my skill to 
 imagine. There was a time when 
 
 The joyning of the Red-Rose with the White, 
 Did set our State into a Damask plight. 
 
 But now our Roses are turned to Flore de 
 lices, our Carnations to Tulips, our Gilli- 
 flowers to Dayzes, our City-Dames, to an 
 indenominable Quaemalry of overturcas'd 
 things. Hee that makes Coates for the 
 Moone, had need take measure every noone ; 
 and he that makes for women, as often, to 
 keepe them from Lunacy. 
 
 I have often heard divers Ladies vent 
 loud feminine complaints of the wearisome 
 varieties and chargable changes of fashions : 
 I marvell themselves preferre not a Bill of 
 redresse. I would Essex Ladies would lead 
 the Chore, for the honour of their County 
 and persons ; or rather the thrice honoura- 
 ble Ladies of the Court, whom it best be- 
 seemes : who may well presume of a Le Roy 
 le veult from our sober King, a Les Seigneurs 
 ont Assentus from our prudent Peers, and the 
 like Jissentus from our considerate, I dare 
 not say wife-worne Commons: who I believe 
 had much rather passe one such Bill, than 
 pay so many Taylors Bills as they are forced 
 to doe. 
 
 Most deare and unparallel'd Ladies, be 
 
 i pleased to attempt it : as you have the pre- 
 cellency of the women of the world for 
 beauty and feature ; so assume the honour 
 to give, and not take Law from any, in mat- 
 ter of attire : if ye can transact so faire a 
 motion among yourselves unanimously, I 
 dare say, they that most renite, will least 
 repent. What greater honour can your 
 Honors desire, then to build a Promontory 
 president to all foraigne Ladies, to deserve 
 so eminently at the hands of all the English 
 Gentry present and to come : and to confute 
 the opinion of all the wise men in the 
 world ; who never thought it possible for 
 women to doe so good a work 1 
 
 If any man think I have spoken rather 
 merrily than seriously he is much mistaken, 
 I have written what I write with all the 
 indignation I can, and no more than I ought. 
 
 I confesse I veer'd my tongue to this kinde 
 of Language de induslria though unwill- 
 ingly, supposing those I speak to are unca- 
 pable of grave and rationall arguments. 
 
 I desire all Ladies and Gentlewomen to 
 understand that all this while I intend not 
 such as through necessary modesty to avoyd 
 morose singularity, follow fashions slowly, a 
 flight shot or two off, shewing by their mo- 
 deration, that they rather draw counter- 
 mont with their hearts, then put on by their 
 examples. 
 
 I point my pen only against the light- 
 heel'd beagles that lead the chase so fast, 
 that they run all civility out of breath, 
 against these Ape-headed pullets, which 
 invent Antique foole-fangles, meerly foi 
 fashion and novelty sake. 
 
 In a word, if I begin once to declaime 
 against fashions, let men and women look 
 well about them, there is somewhat in the 
 businesse ; I confesse to the world, I never 
 had grace enough to be strict in that kinde ; 
 and of late years, I have found syrrope of 
 pride very wholesome in a due Dos, which 
 makes mee keep such a store of that drugge 
 by me, that if any body comes to me for a 
 question-full or two about fashions, they 
 never complain of me for giving them hard 
 measure, or under- weight. 
 
 But I addresse my selfe to those who can 
 both hear and mend all if they please : I 
 seriously feare, if the pious Parliament doe 
 not find a time to state fashions, as ancient 
 Parliaments have done in some part, God 
 will hardly finde a time to state Religion or 
 Peace : They are the surquedryes of pride, 
 the wantonnesse of idlenesse, provoking 
 sins, the certain prodormies of assured judge- 
 ment, Zeph. 1. 7, 8. 
 
 It is beyond all account, how many Gen- 
 tlemens and Citizens estates are deplumed 
 by their feather-headed wives, what usefull 
 supplies the pannage of England would 
 afford other Countries, what rich returnes to 
 it selfe, if it were not slic'd out into male 
 and female fripperies: and what a multi- 
 tude of misimploy'd hands, might be better 
 improv'd in some more manly Manufactures 
 for the publique weale : it is not easily ere- 
 
814 
 
 LECTURE ON FASHION. 
 
 dible, what may be said of the preterplural- 
 ities of Taylors in London : I have heard an 
 honest man say, that not long since there 
 were numbered between Temple-barre and 
 Charing-Crosse, eight thousand of that 
 Trade : let it be conjectured by that propor- 
 tion how many there are in and about Lon- 
 don, and in all England, they will appeare 
 to be very numerous. If the Parliament 
 would please to mend women, which their 
 Husbands dare not doe, there need not so 
 many men to make and mend as there are. 
 I hope the present dolefull estate of the 
 Realme, will perswade more strongly to 
 some considerate course herein, than I now 
 can. 
 
 Knew I how to bring it in, I would speak 
 a word to long haire, whereof I will say no 
 more but this : if God proves not such a 
 Barbor to it as he threatens, unlesse it be 
 amended, Esa. 7. 20. before the Peace of 
 the State and Church be well setled, then 
 let my prophesie be scorned, as a sound 
 minde scornes the ryot of that sin, and more 
 it needs not. If those who are termed Rat- 
 
 tle-heads and Impuritans, would take up a 
 Resolution to begin in moderation of haire, 
 to the just reproach of those that are called 
 Puritans and Round-heads, I would honour 
 their manlinesse, as much as the others god- 
 linesse, so long as I knew what man or 
 honour meant: if neither can find a Bar- 
 bours shop, let them turne in, to Psal. 68. 
 21. Jer. 7. 29. 1 Cor. 11. 14. if it be thought 
 no wisdome in men to distinguish them- 
 selves in the field by the Scissers, let it bee 
 thought no injustice in God, not to distin- 
 guish them by the Sword. I had rather God 
 should know me by my sobriety, than mine 
 enemy not know me by my vanity. He is 
 ill kept, that is kept by his owne sin. A 
 short promise is a farre safer guard than a 
 long lock : it is an ill distinction which God 
 is loth to looke at, and his Angels cannot 
 know his Saints by. Though it be not the 
 mark of the Beast, yet it may be the mark 
 of a beast prepared to slaughter. I am sure 
 men use not to weare such manes ; I am 
 also sure Souldiers use to weare other mark- 
 lets or notadoes in time of battell. 
 
POETICAL WORKS 
 
 N. P. WILLIS. 
 
 I. SACRED POEMS. 
 
 II. POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 III. LADY JANE. 
 
 IV. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. 
 
 V. TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 VI. BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The author puts these poems to press with the knowledge that they should all be rewritten, 
 and with a painful regret that he has no leisure to rewrite them before extending their publicity in 
 a new reprint. The subjects of the poems, and the feelings expressed in them, have given them a 
 popularity independent of criticism, and to that tide he again commits them — to flow as far as they 
 will. He rests his hope of reputation on having the leisure to overtake and pass them at some 
 future day. 
 
 THE HEALING OF THE DAUGHTER OF JAIRUS. 
 
 Freshly the cool breath of the coming eve 
 Stole through the lattice, and the dying girl 
 Felt it upon her forehead. She had lain 
 Since the hot noontide in a breathless trance — 
 Her thin pale fingers clasp'd within the hand 
 Of the heart-broken Ruler, and her breast, 
 Like the dead marble, white and motionless. 
 The shadow of a leaf lay on her lips, 
 And, as it stirr'd with the awakening wind, 
 The dark lids lifted from her languid eyes, 
 And her slight fingers moved, and heavily 
 She turned upon her pillow. He was there — 
 The same loved, tireless watcher, and she look'd 
 Into his face until her sight grew dim 
 With the fast-falling tears ; and, with a sigh 
 Of tremulous weakness murmuring his name, 
 She gently drew his hand upon her lips, 
 And kiss'd it as she wept. The old man sunk 
 Upon his knees, and in the drapery 
 Of the rich curtains buried up his face ; 
 And when the twilight fell, the silken folds 
 Stirr'd with his prayer, but the slight hand he held 
 Had ceased its pressure — and he could not hear, 
 In the dead, utter silence, that a breath 
 Came through her nostrils — and her temples gave 
 To his nice touch no pulse — and, at her mouth, 
 He held the lightest curl that on her neck 
 Lay with a mocking beauty, and his gaze 
 Ached with its deathly stillness. * • • • • 
 
 ****** It was night — 
 And, softly, o'er the Sea of Galilee, 
 Danced the breeze-ridden ripples to the shore, 
 Tipp'd with the silver sparkles of the moon. 
 The breaking waves play'd low upon the beach 
 Their constant music, but the air beside 
 Was still as starlight, and the Saviour's voice, 
 In its rich cadences unearthly sweet, 
 Seem'd like some just-born harmony in the air, 
 Waked by the power of wisdom. On a rock, 
 With the broad moonlight falling on his brow, 
 52 
 
 He stood and taught the people. At his feet 
 Lay his small scrip, and pilgrim's scallop-shell, 
 And staff — for they had waited by the sea 
 Till he came o'er from Gadarene, and pray'd 
 For his wont teachings as he came to land. 
 His hair was parted meekly on his brow, 
 And the long curls from off his shoulders fell, 
 As he lean'd forward earnestly, and still 
 The same calm cadence, passionless and deep — 
 And in his looks the same mild majesty — 
 And in his mien the sadness mix'd with power — 
 Fill'd them with love and wonder. Suddenly, 
 As on his words entrancedly they hung, 
 The crowd divided, and among them stood 
 Jairus the Ruler. With his flowing robe 
 Gather'd in haste about his loins, he came, 
 And fix'd his eyes on Jesus. Closer drew 
 The twelve disciples to their Master's side; 
 And silently the people shrunk away, 
 And left the haughty Ruler in the midst 
 Alone. A moment longer on the face 
 Of the meek Nazarene he kept hi3 gaze, 
 And, as the twelve look'd on him, by the light 
 Of the clear moon they saw a glistening tear 
 Steal to his silver beard; and, drawing nigh 
 Unto the Saviour's feet, he took the hem 
 Of his coarse mantle, and with trembling hands 
 Press'd it upon his lips, and murmur'd low, 
 " Master ! my daughter !" — •••••• 
 
 ****** T ne same silvery light, 
 That shone upon the lone rock by the sea, 
 Slept on the Ruler's lofty capitals, 
 As at the door he stood, and welcomed in 
 Jesus and his disciples. All was still. 
 The echoing vestibule gave back the slide 
 Of their loose sandab, and the arrowy beam 
 Of moonlight, slanting to the marble floor, 
 Lay like a spell of silence in the rooms, 
 As Jairus led them on. With hushing slept 
 He trod the winding stair ; but ere he touch'd 
 The latchet, from within a whisper came, 
 " Trouble the Master not— for she is dead!" 
 
818 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 And his faint hand fell nerveless at his side, 
 And his steps falter'd, and his broken voice 
 Choked in its utterance ; — but a gentle hand 
 Was laid upon his arm, and in his ear 
 The Saviour's voice sank thrillingly and low, 
 " She is not dead — but slcepeth." 
 
 They pass'd in. 
 The spice-lamps in the alabaster urns 
 Burn'd dimly, and the white and fragrant smoke 
 Curl'd indolently on the chamber walls. 
 The silken curtains slumber'd in their folds — 
 Not even a tassel stirring in the air — 
 And as the Saviour stood beside the bed, 
 And pray'd inaudibly, the Ruler heard 
 The quickening division of his breath 
 As he grew earnest inwardly. There came 
 A gradual brightness o'er his calm, sad face; 
 And, drawing nearer to the bed, he moved 
 The silken curtains silently apart, 
 And look'd upon the maiden. 
 
 Like a form 
 Of matchless sculpture in her sleep she lay — 
 The linen vesture folded on her breast, 
 And over it her white transparent hands, 
 The blood still rosy in their tapering nails. 
 A line of pearl ran through her parted lips, 
 And in her nostrils, spiritually thin, 
 The breathing curve was mockingly like life; 
 And round beneath the faintly tinted skin 
 Ran the light branches of the azure veins; 
 And on her cheek the jet lash overlay, 
 Matching the arches pencill'd on her brow. 
 Her hair had been unbound, and falling loose 
 Upon her pillow, hid her small round ears 
 In curls of glossy blackness, and about 
 Her polish'd neck, scarce touching it, they hung, 
 Like airy shadows floating as they slept. 
 'Twas heavenly beautiful. The Saviour raised 
 Her hand from oft' her bosom, and spread out 
 The snowy fingers in his palm, and said, 
 " Maiden ! Jlrise .'" — and suddenly a flush 
 Shot o'er her forehead, and along her lips 
 And through her cheek the rallied color ran; 
 And the still outline of her graceful form 
 Stirr'd in the linen vesture; and she clasp'd 
 The Saviour's hand, and fixing her dark eyes 
 Full on his beaming countenance — arose ! 
 
 THE LEPER. 
 
 " Room for the leper ! Room !" And, as he came, 
 
 The cry pass'd on — " Room for the leper ! Room !" 
 
 Sunrise was slanting on the city gates 
 
 Rosy and beautiful, and from the hills 
 
 The early risen poor were coming in, 
 
 Duly and cheerfully to their toil, and up 
 
 Rose the sharp hammer's clink, and the far hum 
 
 Of moving wheels and multitudes astir, 
 
 And all that in a city murmur swells — 
 
 Unheard but by the watcher's weary ear, 
 
 Aching with night's dull silence, or the sick 
 
 Hailing the welcome light and sounds that chase 
 
 The death-like images of the dark away. 
 
 " Room for the leper !" And aside they stood — 
 
 Matron, and child, and pitiless manhood — all 
 
 Who met him on his way — and let him pass. 
 
 And onward through the open gate he came, 
 
 A leper with the ashes on his brow, 
 
 Sackcloth about his loins, and on his lip 
 
 A covering, stepping painfully and slow, 
 
 And with a difficult utterance, like one 
 
 Whose heart is with an iron nerve put down, 
 
 Crying, " Unclean ! Unclean !" 
 
 'Twas now the first 
 Of the Judean autumn, and the leaves, 
 Whose shadows lay so still upon his path, 
 Had put their beauty forth beneath the eye 
 Of Judah's loftiest noble. He was young, 
 
 And eminently beautiful, and life 
 
 Mantled in eloquent fulness on his lip, 
 
 And sparkled in his glance ; and in his mien 
 
 There was a gracious pride that every eye 
 
 Followed with benisons — and this was he ! 
 
 With the soft airs of summer there had come 
 
 A torpor on his frame, which not the speed 
 
 Of his best barb, nor music, nor the blast 
 
 Of the bold huntsman's horn, nor aught that stirs 
 
 The spirit to its bent, might drive away. 
 
 The blood beat not as wont within his veins; 
 
 Dimness crept o'er his eye ; a drowsy sloth 
 
 Fetter'd his limbs like palsy, and his mien, 
 
 With all its loftiness, seem'd struck with eld. 
 
 Even his voice was changed — a languid moan 
 
 Taking the place of the clear silver key ; 
 
 And brain and sense grew faint, as if the light 
 
 And very air were steep'd in sluggishness. 
 
 He strove with it a while, as manhood will, 
 
 Ever too proud for weakness, till the rein 
 
 Slackened within his grasp, and in its poise 
 
 The arrowy jereed like an aspen shook. 
 
 Day after day, he lay as if in sleep. 
 
 His skin grew dry and bloodless, and white scales, 
 
 Circled with livid purple, covered him, 
 
 And then his nails grew black, and fell away 
 
 From the dull flesh about them, and the hues 
 
 Deepen'd beneath the hard unmoisten'd scales, 
 
 And from their edges grew the rank white hair, 
 
 — And Helon was a leper ! 
 
 Day was breaking, 
 When at the altar of the temple stood 
 The holy priest of God. The incense lamp 
 Burn'd with a struggling light, and a low chant 
 Swell'd through the holiow arches of the roof 
 Like an articulate wail, and there, alone, 
 Wasted to ghastly thinness, Helon knelt. 
 The echoes of the melancholy strain 
 Died in the distant aisles, and he rose up, 
 Struggling with weakness, and bow'd down his head 
 Unto the sprinkled ashes, and put oft' 
 His costly raiment for the leper's garb ; 
 And with the sackcloth round him, and his lip 
 Hid in a loathsome covering, stood still, 
 Waiting to hear his doom : 
 
 Depart ! depart, child 
 Of Israel, from the temple of thy God ! 
 For He has smote thee with his chastening rod ; 
 
 And to the desert-wild, 
 From all thou lov'st, away thy feet must, flee, 
 That from thy plague His people may be free. 
 
 Depart ! and come not near 
 The busy mart, the crowded city, more; 
 Nor set thy foot a human threshold o'er; 
 
 And stay thou not to hear 
 Voices that call thee in the way ; and fly 
 From all who in the wilderness pass by. 
 
 Wet not thy burning lip 
 In streams that to a human dwelling glide; 
 Nor rest thee where the covert fountains hide, 
 
 Nor kneel thee down to dip 
 The water where the pilgrim bends to drink, 
 By desert well or river's grassy brink ; 
 
 And pass thou not between 
 The weary traveller and the cooling breeze; 
 And lie not down to sleep beneath the trees 
 
 Where human tracks are seen; 
 Nor milk the goat that browseth on the plain, 
 Nor pluck the standing corn, or yellow grain. 
 
 And now depart ! and when 
 Thy heart is heavy, and thine eyes are dim, 
 Lift up thy prayer beseechingly to Him 
 
 Who, from the tribes of men, 
 Selected thee to feel His chastening rod. 
 Depart ! O leper ! and forget not God ! 
 
 And he went forth — alone ! not one of all 
 
 The many whom he loved, nor she whose name 
 
 Was woven in the fibres of the heart 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 819 
 
 Breaking within him now, to come and speak 
 Comfort unto him. Yea — he went his way, 
 Sick, and heart-broken, and alone — to die! 
 For God had cursed the leper ! 
 
 It was noon, 
 And Helon knelt beside a stagnant pool 
 In the lone wilderness, and bathed his brow, 
 Hot with the burning leprosy, and touch'd 
 The loathsome water to his fever'd lips, 
 Praying that he might be so blest— to die ! 
 Footsteps approach'd, and, with no strength to flee, 
 He drew the covering closer on his lip, 
 Crying, "Unclean! unclean!" and in the folds 
 Of the coarse sackcloth shrouding up his face, 
 He fell upon the earth till they should pass. 
 Nearer the Stranger came, and bending o'er 
 The leper's prostrate form, pronounced his name — 
 " Helon !" The voice was like the master-tone 
 Of a rich instrument — most strangely sweet ; 
 And the dull pulses of disease awoke, 
 And for a moment beat beneath the hot 
 And leprous scales with a restoring thrill. 
 " Helon ! arise !" and he forgot his curse, 
 And rose and stood before Him. 
 
 Love and awe 
 Mingled in the regard of Helon's eye 
 As he beheld the Stranger. He was not 
 In costly raiment clad, nor on his brow 
 The symbol of a princely lineage wore ; 
 No followers at His back, nor in His hand 
 Buckler, or sword, or spear, — yet in his mien 
 Command sat throned serene, and if He smiled, 
 A kingly condescension graced His lips, 
 The lion would have crouch'd to in his lair. 
 His garb was simple, and His sandals worn; 
 His stature modell'd with a perfect grace ; 
 His countenance the impress of a God, 
 Touch'd with the opening innocence of a child; 
 His eye was blue and calm, as is the sky 
 In the serenest noon; His hair unshorn 
 Fell to His shoulders; and His curling beard 
 The fulness of perfected manhood bore. 
 He look'd on Helon earnestly awhile, 
 As if His heart were moved, and, stooping down, 
 He took a little water in His hand 
 And laid it on his brow, and said, " Be clean !" 
 And lo ! the scales fell from him, and his blood 
 Coursed with delicious coolness through his veins, 
 And his dry palms grew moist, and on his brow 
 The dewy softness of an infant's stole. 
 His leprosy was cleansed, and he fell down 
 Prostrate at Jesus' feet and worshipp'd Him. 
 
 DAVID'S GRIEF FOR HIS CHILD. 
 Twas daybreak, and the fingers of the dawn 
 Drew the night's curtain, and touch'd silently 
 The eyelids of the King. And David woke, 
 And robed himself, and pray'd. The inmates, now, 
 Of the vast palace were astir, and feet 
 Glided along the tesselated floors 
 With a pervading murmur, and the fount 
 Whose music had been all the night unheard, 
 Plav'd as if light had made it audible; 
 And each one, waking, bless'd it unaware. 
 
 The fragrant strife of sunshine with the morn 
 Sweeten'd the air to ecstasy ! and now 
 The king's wont was to lie upon his couch 
 Beneath the sky-roof of the inner court, 
 And, shut in from the world, but not from heaven, 
 Play with his loved son by the fountain's lip ; 
 For, with idolatry confess'd alone 
 To the rapt wires of his reproofless harp, 
 He loved the child of Bathsheba. And when 
 The golden selvedge of his robe was heard 
 Sweeping the marble pavement, from within 
 Broke forth a child's laugh suddenlv, and words- 
 Articulate, perhaps, to his heart onlv— 
 Pleading to come to him. They brought the boy— 
 An infant cherub, leaping as if "used 
 
 To hover with that motion upon wings, 
 And marvellously beautiful ! His brow 
 Had the inspired up-lift of the king's, 
 And kingly was his infantine regard ; 
 But his ripe mouth was of the ravishing mould 
 Of Bathsheba's— the hue and type of love, 
 Rosy and passionate — and oh, the moist 
 Unfathomable blue of his large eyes 
 Gave out its light as twilight shows a star, 
 And drew the heart of the beholder in ! — 
 And this was like his mother. 
 
 David's lips 
 Moved with unutter'd blessings, and awhile 
 He closed the lids upon his moisten'd eyes, 
 And, with the round cheek of the nestling boy 
 Press'd to his bosom, sat as if afraid 
 That but the lifting of his lids might jar 
 His heart's cup from its fulness. Unobserved. 
 A servant of the outer court had knelt 
 Waiting before him ; and a cloud the while 
 Had rapidly spread o'er the summer heaven; 
 And, as the chill of the withdrawing sun 
 Fell on the king, he lifted up his eyes 
 And frown'd upon the servant — for that hour 
 Was hallow'd to his heart and his fair child, 
 And none might seek him. And the king arose. 
 And with a troubled countenance look'd up 
 To the fast-gathering darkness; and, behold, 
 The servant bow'd himself to earth, and said, 
 " Nathan the prophet cometh from the Lord !" 
 And David's lips grew white, and with a clasp 
 Which wrung a murmur from the frighted child, 
 He drew him to his breast, and cover'd him 
 With the long foldings of his robe, and said, 
 " I will come forth. Go now !" And lingeringly, 
 With kisses on the fair uplifted brow, 
 And mingled words of tenderness and prayer 
 Breaking in tremulous accents from his lips, 
 He gave to them the child, and bow'd his head 
 Upon his breast with agony. And so, 
 To hear the errand of the man of God, 
 He fearfully went forth. ****** 
 
 It was the morning of the seventh day. 
 A hush was in the palace, for all eyes 
 Had woke before the morn ; and they who drew 
 The curtains to let in the welcome light, 
 Moved in their chambers with unslipper'd feet, 
 And listen'd breathlessly. And still no stir ! 
 The servants who kept watch without the door 
 Sat motionless; the purple casement-shades 
 From the low windows had been roll'd away. 
 To give the child air; and the flickering light 
 That, all the night, within the spacious court, 
 Had drawn the watcher's eyes to one spot only. 
 Paled with the sunrise and fled in. 
 
 And hush'd 
 With more than stillness was the room where lay 
 The king's son on his mother's breast. His locks 
 Slept at the lips of Bathsheba unstirr'd — 
 So fearfully, with heart and pulse kept down, 
 She watch'd his breathless slumber. The low moan 
 That from his lips all night broke fitfully, 
 Had silenced with the daybreak ; and a smile — 
 Or something that would fain have been a smile — 
 Play'd in his parted mouth; and though his lids 
 Hid not the blue of his unconscious eyes, 
 His senses seem'd all peacefully asleep, 
 And Bathsheba in silence bless'd the morn — 
 That brought back hope to her ! But when the kin* 
 Heard not the voice of the complaining child, 
 Nor breath from out the room, nor foot astir — 
 But morning there — so welcomeless and still- 
 He groan'd and turn'd upon his face. The nights 
 Had wasted; and the mornings come; and days 
 Crept through the sky, unnumber'd by the king, 
 Since the child sicken'd; and, without the door, 
 Upon the bare earth prostrate, he had Iain- 
 Listening onlv to the moans that brought 
 Their inarticulate tidings, and the voice 
 Of Bathsheba, whose pity and caress, 
 
820 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 In loving utterance all broke with tears, 
 
 Spoke as his heart would sneak if he were there, 
 
 And fill'd nis prayer with <tgony. Oh God! 
 
 To thy bright mercy-seat the way is far ! 
 
 How fail the weak words while the heart keeps on ! 
 
 And when the spirit, mournfully, at last, 
 
 Kneels at thy throne, how cold, how distantly 
 
 The comforting of friends falls on the ear — 
 
 The anguish they would speak to, gone to Thee ! 
 
 But suddenly the watchers at the door 
 Rose up, and they who minister'd within 
 Crept to the threshold and look'd earnestly 
 Where the king lay. And still, while Bathsheba 
 Held the unmoving child upon her knees, 
 The curtains were let down, and all came forth, 
 And, gathering with fearful looks apart, 
 Whisper'd together. 
 
 And the king arose 
 And gazed on them a moment, and with voice 
 Of quick, uncertain utterance, he ask'd, 
 " Is the child dead ?" They answer'd, " he is dead." 
 But when they look'd to see him fall again 
 Upon his face, and rend himself and weep — 
 For, while the child was sick, his agony 
 Would bear no comforters, and they had thought 
 His heartstrings with the tidings must give way — 
 Behold ! his face grew calm, and, with his robe 
 Gather'd together like his kingly wont, 
 He silently went in. 
 
 And David came, 
 Robed and annointed, forth, and to the house 
 Of God went up to pray. And he return'd, 
 And they set bread before him, and he ate — 
 And when they marvell'd, he said, " Wherefore mourn? 
 The child is dead, and 1 shall go to him — 
 But he will not return to me." 
 
 THE SACRIFICE OF ABRAHAM. 
 
 Morn breaketh in the east. The purple clouds 
 
 Are putting on their gold and violet, 
 
 To look the meeter for the sun's bright coming. 
 
 Sleep is upon the waters and the wind ; 
 
 And nature, from the wavy forest-leaf 
 
 To her majestic master, sleeps. As yet 
 
 There is no mist upon the deep blue sky, 
 
 And the clear dew is on the blushing bosoms 
 
 Of crimson roses in a holy rest. 
 
 How hallow'd is the hour of morning ! meet — 
 
 Ay, beautifully meet — for the pure prayer. 
 
 The patriarch standeth art: his tented door, 
 
 With his white locks ur.cover'd. 'Tis his wont 
 
 To gaze upon that gorgeous Orient; 
 
 And at that hour the awful majesty 
 
 Of man who talketh often with his God, 
 
 Is wont to come again, and clothe his brow 
 
 As at his fourscore strength. But now, he seemeth 
 
 To be forgetful of his vigorous frame, 
 
 And boweth to his staff as at the hour 
 
 Of noontide sultriness. And that bright sun — 
 
 He looketh at its pencill'd messengers, 
 
 Coming in golden raiment, as if all 
 
 Were but a graven scroll of fearfulness. 
 
 Ah, he is waiting till it herald in 
 
 The hour to sacrifice his much-loved son ! 
 
 Light poureth on the world. And Sarah stands 
 
 Watching the steps of Abraham and her child 
 
 Along the dewy sides of the far hills, 
 
 And praying that her sunny boy faint not. 
 
 Would she have watch'd their path so silently, 
 
 If she had known that he was going up, 
 
 E'en in his fair-hair'd beauty, to be slain 
 
 As a white lamb for sacrifice ? They trod 
 
 Together onward, patriarch and child — 
 
 The bright sun throwing back the old man's shade 
 
 In straight and fair proportions, as of one 
 
 Whose years were freshly number'd. He stood up, 
 
 Tall in his vigorous strength ; and, like a tree 
 
 Rooted in Lebanon, his frame bent not. 
 
 His thin white hairs had yielded to the wind, 
 And left his brow uncover'd ; and his face, 
 Impress'd with the stern majesty of grict" 
 Nerved to a solemn duty, now stood forth 
 Like a rent rock, submissive, yet sublime. 
 But the young boy — he of the laughing eye 
 And ruby lip — the pride of life was on him. 
 He seem'd to drink the morning. Sun and dew, 
 And the aroma of the spicy trees, 
 And all that giveth the delicious East 
 Its fitness for an Eden, stole like light 
 Into his spirit, ravishing his thoughts 
 With love and beauty. Every thing he met, 
 Buoyant or beautiful, the lightest wing 
 Of bird or insect, or the palest dye 
 Of the fresh flowers, won him from his path; 
 And joyously broke forth his tiny shout, 
 As he flung back his silken hair, and sprung 
 Away to some green spot or clustering vine, 
 To pluck his infant trophies. Every tree 
 And fragrant shrub was a new hiding-place; 
 And he would crouch till the old man came by, 
 Then bound before him with his childish laugh, 
 Stealing a look behind him playfully, 
 To see if he had made his father smile. 
 
 The sun rode on in heaven. The dew stole up 
 
 From the fresh daughters of the earth, and heat 
 
 Came like a sleep upon the delicate leaves, 
 
 And bent them with the blossoms to their dreams 
 
 Still trod the patriarch on, with that same step, 
 
 Firm and unfaltering; turning not aside 
 
 To seek the olive shades, or lave their lips 
 
 In the sweet waters of the Syrian wells, 
 
 Whose gush hath so much music. Weariness 
 
 Stole on the gentle boy, and he forgot 
 
 To toss his sunny hair from off his brow, 
 
 And spring for the fresh flowers and light wings 
 
 As in the early morning ; but he kept 
 
 Close by his father's side, and bent his head 
 
 Upon his bosom like a drooping bud, 
 
 Lifting it not, save now and then to steal 
 
 A look up to the face whose sternness awed 
 
 His childishness to silence. 
 
 It was noon — 
 And Abraham on Moriah bow'd himself, 
 And buried up his face, and pray'd for strength 
 He could not look upon his son, and pray; 
 But, with his hand upon the clustering curls 
 Of the fair, kneeling boy, he pray'd that God 
 Would nerve him for that hour. Oh ! man was made 
 For the stern conflict. In a mother's love 
 There is more tenderness; the thousand chords, 
 Woven with every fibre of her heart, 
 Complain, like delicate harp-strings, at a breath; 
 But love in man is one deep principle, 
 Which, like a root grown in a rifted rock, 
 Abides the tempest. He rose up, and laid 
 The wood upon the altar. All was done. 
 He stood a moment — and a deep, quick flush 
 Pass'd o'er his countenance ; and then he nerved 
 His spirit with a bitter strength, and spoke — 
 " Isaac ! my only son !" — The boy look'd up, 
 And Abraham turn'd his face away, and wept. 
 " Where is the lamb, my father ?" — Oh the tones 
 The sweet, the thrilling music of a child ! — 
 How it doth agonize at such an hour ! — 
 It was the last deep struggle. Abraham held 
 His loved, his beautiful, his only son, 
 And lifted up his arm, and call'd on God — 
 And lo ! God's angel staid him — and he fell 
 Upon his face, and wept. 
 
 THE SHUNAMITE. 
 It was a sultry day of summer time. 
 The sun pour'd down upon the ripen'd grain 
 With quivering heat, and the suspended leaves 
 Hung motionless. The cattle on the hills 
 Stood still, and the divided flock were all 
 Laying their nostrils to the cooling roots, 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 821 
 
 And the sky look'd like silver, and it seem'd 
 As if the air had fainted, and the pulse 
 Of nature had run down, and ceased to beat 
 
 " Haste thee, my child ! " the Syrian mother said, 
 
 *• Thy father is athirst" — and, from the depths 
 
 Of the cool well under the leaning tree, 
 
 She drew refreshing water, and with thoughts 
 
 Of God's sweet goodness stirring at her heart, 
 
 She bless'd her beautiful hoy, and to his way 
 
 Committed him. And h<> went lightly on, 
 
 With his soft hands press'd closely to the cool 
 
 Stone vessel, and his littlo naked feet 
 
 Lifted with watchful care; and o'er the hills, 
 
 And through the light gretn hollows where the lambs 
 
 Go for the tender grass, he kept his way, 
 
 Wiling its distance with his simple thoughts, 
 
 Till, in the wilderness of sheaves, with brows 
 
 Throbbing with heat, he » * his burden down. 
 
 Childhood is restless ever, and the boy 
 Stay'd not within the shadow of the tree, 
 But with a joyous industry wont forth 
 Into the reaper's places, and bound up 
 His tiny sheaves, and plaited cunningly 
 The pliant withs out of the shi.iing straw- 
 Cheering their labor on, till they forgot 
 The heat and weariness of their -stooping toil 
 In the beguiling of his playful niirth. 
 Presently he was silent, and his eye 
 Closed as with dizzy pain, and wi h his hand 
 Press'd hard upon his forehead, aiht his breast 
 Heaving with the suppression of a cry, 
 He utter'd a faint murmur, and fell tack 
 Upon the loosen'd sheaf, insonsible 
 
 They bore him to his mother, and he lay 
 Upon her knees till noon — and then I.e died ! 
 She had watch'd every breath, and kept her hand 
 Soft on his forehead, and gazed in upoi\ 
 The dreamy languor of his listless eye, 
 And she had laid back all his sunny curls 
 And kiss'd his delicate lip, and lifted him 
 Into her bosom, till her heart grew strong — 
 His beauty was so unlike death ! She lean'd 
 Over him now, that she might catch the ,'w 
 Sweet music of his breath, that she ha 1 iearn'd 
 To love when he was slumbering at h& - side 
 In his unconscious infancy — 
 
 " —So still ! 
 'Tis a soft sleep ! How beautiful he He*, 
 With his fair forehead, and the rosy veau 
 Playing so freshly in his sunny cheek ! 
 How could they say that he would die ! Ot> Qod ' 
 I could not lose him ! I have treasured ail 
 His childhood in my heart, and even now 
 As he has slept, my memory has been there 
 Counting like treasures all his winning ways— 
 His unforgotten sweetness : — 
 
 " — Yet so still • - 
 How like this breathless slumber is to death I 
 I could believe that in that bosom now 
 There were no pulse — it beats so languidly ! 
 I cannot see it stir ; but his red lip ! 
 Death would not be so very beautiful ! 
 And that half smile — would death have left that U ere t 
 
 -And should I not have felt that he would die? 
 And have I not wept over him ? — and pray'd 
 Morning and night for him? And could he die? 
 
 No— God will keep him ! He will be my pride 
 Many long years to come, and his fair hair 
 Will darken like his father's, and his eye 
 Be of a deeper blue when he is grown ; 
 And he will be so tall, and I shall look 
 With such a pride upon him ! — He to die !" 
 And the fond mother lifted his soft curls, 
 And smiled, as if 'twere mockery to think 
 That such fair things could perish — 
 — Suddenly 
 Her hand shrunk from him, and the color fled 
 From her fix'd lip, and her supporting knees 
 Were shook beneath her child. Her hand had touch'd 
 His forehead, as she dallied with his hair — 
 
 And it was cold— like clay ! Slow, verv slow, 
 Came the misgiving that her child was dead. 
 She sat a moment, and her eyes were closed 
 In a dumb prayer for strength, and then she took 
 
 His little hand and press'd it earnestly 
 
 And put her lip to his— and look'd aiain 
 Fearfully on him— and, then bending low, 
 She whisper'd in his ear, « My son !— my son !" 
 And as the echo died, and not a sound 
 
 Broke on the stillness, and he lay there still 
 
 Motionless on her knee — The truth would come ! 
 And with a sharp, quick cry, as if her heart 
 Were crush'd, she lifted him and held him close 
 Into her bosom — with a mother's thought — 
 As if death had no power to touch him there ! 
 
 The man of God came forth, and led the child 
 Unto his mother, and went on his way. 
 And he was there — her beautiful — her own — 
 Living and smiling on her — with his arms 
 Folded about her neck, and his warm breath 
 Breathing upon her lips, and in her ear 
 The music of his gentle voice once more I 
 
 JEPHTHAH'S DAUGHTER. 
 She stood before her father's gorgeous tent, 
 To listen for his coming. Her loose hair 
 Was resting on her shoulders, like a cloud 
 Floating around a statue, and the wind, 
 Just swaying her light robe, reveal'd a shape 
 Praxiteles might worship. She had clasp'd 
 Her hands upon her bosom, and had raised 
 Her beautiful, dark, Jewish eyes to heaven. 
 Till the long lashes lay upon her brow. 
 Her lip was slightly parted, like the cleft 
 Of a pomegranate blossom ; and her neck, 
 Just where the cheek was melting to its curve 
 With the unearthly beauty sometimes there, 
 Was shaded, as if light had fallen off", 
 Its surface was so polish'd. She was stilling 
 Her light, quick breath, to hear; and the white rose 
 Scarce moved upon her bosom, as it swell'd, 
 Like nothing but a lovely wave of light, 
 To meet the arching of her queenly neck. 
 Her countenance was radiant with love. 
 She look'd like one to die for it — a being 
 Whose whole existence was the pouring out 
 Of rich and deep affections. I have thought 
 A brother's and a sister's love were much ; 
 I know a brother's is — for I have been 
 A sister's idol — and I know how full 
 The heart may be of tenderness to her ! 
 But the affection of a delicate child 
 For a fond father, gushing, as it does, 
 With the sweet springs of life, and pouring on, 
 Through all earth's changes, like a river's course- 
 Chasten'd with reverence, and made more purs 
 By the world's discipline of light and shade— 
 'Tis deeper — holier. 
 
 The wind bore on 
 The leaden tramp of thousands. Clarion notes 
 Rang sharply on the ear at intervals ; 
 And the low, mingled din of mighty hosts 
 Returning from the battle, pour'd from far, 
 Like the deep murmur of a restless sea. 
 They came, as earthly conquerors always come, 
 With blood and splendor, revelry and wo. 
 The stately horse treads proudly — he hath trod 
 The brow "of death, as well, the chariot-wheels 
 Of warriors roll magnificentlv on — 
 Their weight hath crush'd the fallen. Man is there- 
 Majestic, lordly man— with his sublime 
 And elevated brow, and godlike frame ; 
 Lifting his crest in triumph— for his heel 
 Hath trod the dying like a wine-press down ! 
 
 The mighty Jephthah led his warriors on 
 Through Mizpeh's streets. His helm was proudly set. 
 And his stern lip curl'd slightly, as if praise 
 Were for the hero's scorn. His step was firm, 
 But free as India's leopard ; and his mail, 
 
822 
 
 SACRED POEMS 
 
 Whose shekels none in Israel might Lear, 
 Was like a cedar's tassel on his frame. 
 His crest was Judah's kingliest; and the look 
 Of his dark, lofty eye, and bended brow, 
 Might quell the lion. He led on ; but thoughts 
 Seem'd gathering round which troubled him. The veins 
 Grew visible upon his swarthy brow, 
 And his proud lip was press'd as if with pain. 
 He trod less firmly; and his restless eye 
 Glanced forward frequently, as if some ill 
 He dared not meet, were there. His home was near; 
 And men were thronging, with that strange delight 
 They have in human passions, to observe 
 The struggle of his feelings with his pride. 
 He gazed intensely forward. The tall firs 
 Before his tent were motionless. The leaves 
 Of the sweet aloe, and the clustering vines 
 Which half conceal'd his threshold, met his eye, 
 Unchanged and beautiful ; and one by one, 
 The balsam, with its sweet-distilling stems, 
 And the Circassian rose, and all the crowd 
 Of silent and familiar things, stole up, 
 Like the recover'd passages of dreams. 
 He strode on rapidly. A moment more, 
 And he had reach'd his home ; when lo ! there sprang 
 One with a bounding footstep, and a brow 
 Of light, to meet him. Oh how beautiful ! — 
 Her dark eye flashing like a sun-lit gem — 
 And her luxuriant hair ! — 'twas like the sweep 
 Of a swift wing in visions. He stood still, 
 As if the sight had wither'd him. She threw 
 Her arms about his neck — he heeded not. 
 She call'd him •« Father" — but he answer'd not. 
 She stood and gazed upon him. Was he wroth ? 
 There was no anger in that blood-shot eye. 
 Had sickness seized him? She unclasp'd his helm 
 And laid her white hand gently on his brow, 
 And the large veins felt stiff' and hard, like cords. 
 The touch aroused him. He raised up his hands, 
 And spoke the name of God, in agony. 
 She knew that he was stricken, then ; and rush'd 
 Again into his arms; and, with a flood 
 Of tears she could not bridle, sobb'd a prayer 
 That he would breathe his agony in words. 
 He told her — and a momentary flush 
 Shot o'er her countenance ; and then the soul 
 Of Jephthah's daughter waken'd ; and she stood 
 Calmly and nobly up, and said 'twas well — 
 And she would die. * * * * * 
 The sun had well nigh set. 
 The fire was on the altar; and the priest 
 Of the High God was there. A pallid man 
 Was stretching out his trembling hands to Heaven, 
 As if he would have pray'd, but had no words — 
 And she who was to die, the calmest one 
 In Israel at that hour, stood up alone, 
 And waited for the sun to set. Her face 
 Was pale, but very beautiful — her lip 
 Had a more delicate outline, and the tint 
 Was deeper ; but her countenance was like 
 The majesty of angels. 
 
 The sun set — 
 And she was dead— but not by violence. 
 
 ABSALOM. 
 The waters slept. Night's silvery veil hung low 
 On Jordan's bosom, and the eddies curl'd 
 Their glassy rings beneath it, like the still, 
 Unbroken beating of the^leeper's pulse. 
 The reeds bent down the stream ; the willow leaves, 
 With a soft cheek upon the lulling tide, 
 Forgot the lifting winds; and the long 'stems, 
 Whose flowers the water, like a gentle nurse, 
 Bears on its bosom, quietly gave way, 
 And lean'd, in graceful attitudes, to rest. 
 How strikingly the course of nature tells, 
 By its light heed of human suffering, 
 That it was fashion'd for a happier world ! 
 
 King David's limbs were weary. He had fled 
 From far Jerusalem ; and now he stood. 
 
 With his faint people, for a little rest 
 
 Upon the shore of Jordan. The light wind 
 
 Of morn was stirring, and he bared his brow 
 
 To its refreshing breath ; for he had worn 
 
 The mourner's covering, and he had not felt 
 
 That he could see his people until now. 
 
 They gather'd round him on the fresh green bank, 
 
 And spoke their kindly words ; and, as the sun 
 
 Rose up in heaven, he knelt among them there, 
 
 And bow'd his head upon his hands to pray. 
 
 Oh ! when the heart is full — when bitter thoughts 
 
 Come crowding thickly up for utterance, 
 
 And the poor common words of courtesy 
 
 Are such a very mockery — how much 
 
 The bursting heart may pour itself in prayer ! ' 
 
 He pray'd for Israel — and his voice went up 
 
 Strongly and fervently. He pray'd for those 
 
 Whose love had been his shield — and his deep tones 
 
 Grew tremulous. But, oh ! for Absalom — 
 
 For his estranged, misguided Absalom — 
 
 The proud, bright being, who had burst away 
 
 In all his princely beauty, to defy 
 
 The heart that cherish'd him — for him he pour'd, 
 
 In agony that would not be controll'd, 
 
 Strong supplication, and forgave him there, 
 
 Before his God, for his deep sinfulness. 
 
 The pall was settled. He who slept beneath 
 Was straighten'd for the grave ; and, as the folds 
 Sunk to the still proportions, they betray'd 
 The matchless symmetry of Absalom. 
 His hair was yet unshorn, and silken curls 
 Were floating round the tassels as they sway'd 
 To the admitted air, as glossy now 
 As when, in hours of gentle dalliance, bathing 
 The snowy fingers of Judea's daughters. 
 His helm was at his feet : his banner, soil'd 
 With trailing through Jerusalem, was laid, 
 Reversed, beside him : and the jewell'd hilt, 
 Whose diamonds lit the passage of his blade, 
 Rested, like mockery, on his cover'd brow. 
 The soldiers of the king trod to and fro, 
 Clad in the garb of battle ; and their chief, 
 The mighty Joab, stood beside the bier, 
 And gazed upon the dark pall steadfastly, 
 As if he fear'd the slumberer might stir. 
 A slow step startled him. He grasp'd his blade 
 As if a trumpet rang; but the bent form 
 Of David enter'd, and he gave command, 
 In a low tone, to his few followers, 
 And left him with his dead. The king stood still 
 Till the last echo died ; then, throwing off 
 The sackcloth from his brow, and laying back 
 The pall from the still features of his child, 
 He bow'd his head upon him, and broke forth 
 In the resistless eloquence of wo : 
 " Alas ! my noble boy ! that thou should'st die ! 
 
 Thou, who wert made so beautifully fair! 
 That death should settle in thy glorious eye, 
 
 And leave his stillness in this clustering hair! 
 How could he mark thee for the silent tomb ! 
 
 My proud boy, Absalom ! 
 " Cold is thy brow, my son ! and I am chill, 
 
 As to my bosom I have tried to press thee ! 
 How was I wont to feel my pulses thrill, 
 
 Like a rich harp-string, yearning to caress thee, 
 And hear thy sweet ' my father f from these dumb 
 And cold lips, Absalom ! 
 
 " But death is on thee. I shall hear the gush 
 
 Of music, and the voices of the young ; 
 And life will pass me in the mantling blush, 
 
 And the dark tresses to the soft winds flung ; — 
 But thou no more, with thy sweet voice, shalt come 
 
 To meet me, Absalom ! 
 " And oh ! when I am stricken, and my heart, 
 
 Like a bruised reed, is waiting to be broken, 
 How will its love for thee, as I depart, 
 
 Yearn for thine ear to drink its last deep token ! 
 It were so sweet, amid death's gathering gloom, 
 To see thee, Absalom ! 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 823 
 
 «« And now, farewell ! 'Tis hard to give thee up, 
 With death so like a gentle slumber on thee ; — 
 
 And thy dark sin ! — Oh! I could drink the cup, 
 If from this wo its bitterness had won thee. 
 
 May God have call'd thee, like a wanderer, home, 
 My lost boy Absalom !" 
 
 He cover'd up his face, and bow'd himself 
 A moment on his child: then, giving him 
 A look of melting tenderness, he clasp'd 
 His hands convulsively, as if in prayer; 
 And, as if strength were given him of God, 
 He rose up calmly, and composed the pall 
 Firmly and decently — and left him there — 
 As if his rest had been a breathing sleep. 
 
 CHRIST'S ENTRANCE INTO JERUSALEM 
 
 He sat upon the "ass's foal" and rode 
 
 Toward Jerusalem. Beside him walk'd, 
 
 Closely and silently, the faithful twelve, 
 
 And on before him went a multitude 
 
 Shouting Hosannas, and with eager hands 
 
 Strewing their garments thickly in his way. 
 
 Th' unbroken foal beneath him gently stepp'd, 
 
 Tame as its patient dam ; and as the song 
 
 Of " welcome to the Son of David" burst 
 
 Forth from a thousand children, and the leaves 
 
 Of the waved branches touch'd its silken ears, 
 
 It turn'd its wild eye for a moment back, 
 
 And then, subdued by an invisible hand, 
 
 Meekly trode onward" with its slender feet. 
 
 The dew's last sparkle from the grass had gone 
 
 As he rode up Mount Olivet. The woods 
 
 Threw their cool shadows freshly to the west, 
 
 And the light foal, with quick and toiling step, 
 
 And head bent low, kept its unslacken'd way 
 
 Till its soft mane was lifted by the wind 
 
 Sent o'er the mount from Jordan. As he reach'd 
 
 The summit's breezy pitch, the Saviour raised 
 
 His calm blue eye — there stood Jerusalem ! 
 
 Eagerly he bent forward, and beneath 
 
 His mantle's passive folds, a bolder line 
 
 Than the wont slightness of his perfect limbs 
 
 Betray'd the swelling fulness of his heart. 
 
 There stood Jerusalem ! How fair she lookM — 
 
 The silver sun on all her palaces, 
 
 And her fair daughters 'mid the golden spires 
 
 Tending their terrace flowers, and Kedron's stream 
 
 Lacing the meadows with its silver band, 
 
 And wreathing its mist-mantle on the sky 
 
 With the morn's exhalations. There she stood — 
 
 Jerusalem — the city of his love, 
 
 Chosen from all the earth ; Jerusalem — 
 
 That knew him not — and had rejected him ; 
 
 Jerusalem — for whom he came to die ! 
 
 The shouts redoubled from a thousand lips 
 
 At the fair sight ; the children leap'd and sang 
 
 Louder Hosannas ; the clear air was fill'd 
 
 With odor from the trampled olive-leaves — 
 
 But " Jesus wept." The loved disciple saw 
 
 His Master's tears, and closer to his side 
 
 He came with yearning looks, and on his neck 
 
 The Saviour leant with heavenly tenderness, 
 
 And mourn'd — " How oft, Jerusalem ! would 1 
 
 Have gather'd you, as gathereth a hen 
 
 Her brood beneath her wings — but ye would not !" 
 
 He thought not of the death that he should die — 
 
 He thought not of the thorns he knew must pierce 
 
 His forehead — of the buffet on the cheek — 
 
 The scourge, the mocking homage, the foul scorn '.— 
 
 Gethsemane stood out beneath his eye 
 
 Clear in the morning sun, and there, he knew, 
 
 While they who " could not watch with him one hour' 
 
 Were sleeping, he should sweat great drops of blood, 
 
 Praying the "cup might pass." And Golgotha 
 
 Stood bare and desert by the city wall, 
 
 And in its midst, to his prophetic eye, 
 
 Rose the rough cross, and its keen agonies 
 
 Were number'd all — the nails were in his feet — 
 
 Th' insulting sponge was pressing on his lips — 
 
 The blooxi and water gushing from his side — ■ 
 
 The dizzy faintness swimming in his brain— 
 
 And, while his own disciples tied in fear, 
 
 A world's death-agonies all mix'd in his ! 
 
 Ay ! — he forgot all this. He only saw 
 
 Jerusalem, — the chos'n — the loved — the lost! 
 
 He only felt that for her sake his life 
 
 Was vainly giv'n, and, in his pitying love, 
 
 The sufferings that would clothe "the Heavens in black 
 
 Were quite forgotten. Was there ever love, 
 
 In earth or heaven, equal unto this ? 
 
 BAPTISM OF CHRIST. 
 It was a green spot in the wilderness, 
 Touch'd by the river Jordan. The dark pine 
 Never had dropp'd its tassels on the moss 
 Tufting the leaning bank, nor on the gras3 
 Of the broad circle stretching evenly 
 To the straight larches, had a heavier foot 
 Than the wild heron's trodden. Softly in 
 Through a long aisle of willows, dim and cool, 
 Stole the clear waters with their muffled feet, 
 And, hushing as they spread into the light, 
 Circled the edsjes of the pebbled tank 
 Slowly, then rippled through the woods away 
 Hither had come th' Apostle of the wild, 
 Winding the river's course. 'Twas near the flush 
 Of eve, and, with a multitude around, 
 Who from the cities had come out to hear, 
 He stood breast-high amid the running stream, 
 Baptizing as the Spirit gave him power. 
 His simple raiment was of camel's hair, 
 A leathern girdle close about his loins, 
 His beard unshorn, and for his daily meat 
 The locust and wild honey of the wood- 
 But like the face of Moses on the mount 
 Shone his rapt countenance, and in his eye 
 Burn'd the mild fire of love— and a3 he spoke 
 The ear lean'd to him, and persuasion swift 
 To the chain'd spirit of the listener stole. 
 Silent upon the green and sloping bank 
 The people sat, and while the leaves were shook 
 With the birds dropping early to theii nests, 
 And the gray eve came on, within theiv hearts 
 They mused if he were Christ. The rippling stream 
 Still turn'd its silver courses from his breast 
 As he divined their thought. " I but baptize," 
 He said, "with water; but there cometh One, 
 The latchet of whose shoes I may not dare 
 E'en to unloose. He will baptize with fire 
 And with the Holy Ghost." And lo ! while yet 
 The words were on his lips, he raised his eyes, 
 And on the bank stood Jesus. He had laid 
 His raiment off, and with his loins alone 
 Girt with a mantle, and his perfect limbs, 
 In their angelic slightness, meek and bare, 
 He waited to go in. But John forbade, 
 And hurried to his feet and stay'd him there, 
 And said, " Nay, Master ! I have need of thine, 
 Not thou of mine.'" And Jesus, with a smile 
 Of heavenly sadness, met his earnest looks, 
 And answer'd, " Suffer it to be so now; 
 For thus it doth become me to fulfil 
 All righteousness." And, leaning to the stream, 
 He took around him the Apostle's arm, 
 And drew him gentlv to the midst. The wood 
 Was thick with the dim twilight as they came 
 Up from the water. With his clasped hands 
 Laid on his breast, th' Apostle silently 
 Follow'd his Master's steps— when lo! a light. 
 Bright as the tenfold glory of the sun, 
 Yet lambent as the softly burning stars, 
 Envelop'd them, and from the heavens away 
 Parted the dim blue ether like a veil; 
 And as a voice, fearful exceedingly, 
 Broke from the midst, " This is my much mvedSon 
 Ikt whom I am well pleased," a snow-white dove. 
 Floating upon its wings, descended through; 
 And shedding a swift music from its plumes, 
 Circled, and flutter'd to the Saviour's breast 
 
824 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 SCENE IN GETHSEMANE. 
 The moon was shining yet. The Orient's brow, 
 Set with the morning-star, was not yet dim ; 
 And the deep silence which subdues the breath 
 Like a strong feeling, hung upon the world 
 As sleep upon the pulses of a child. 
 'Twas the last watch of night. Gethsemane, 
 With its bathed leaves of silver, seem'd dissolved 
 In visible stillness; and as Jesus' voice, 
 With its bewildering sweetness, met the ear 
 Of his disciples, it vibrated on 
 Like the first whisper in a silent world. 
 They came on slowly. Heaviness oppress'd 
 The Saviour's heart, and when the kindnesses 
 Of his deep love were pour'd, he felt the need 
 Of near communion, for his gift of strength 
 Was wasted by the spirit's weariness. 
 He left them there, and went a little on, 
 And in the depth of that hush'd silentness, 
 Alone with God, he fell upon his face, 
 And as his heart was broken with the rush 
 Of his surpassing agony, and death, 
 Wrung to him from a dying universe, 
 Was mightier than the Son of man could bear, 
 He gave his sorrows way — and in the deep 
 Prostration of his soul, breathed out the prayer, 
 " Father, if it be possible with thee, 
 Let this cup pass from me." Oh, how a word, 
 Like the forced drop before the fountain breaks, 
 Stilleth the press of human agony ! 
 The Saviour felt its quiet in his soul ; 
 And though his strength was weakness, and the light 
 Which led him on till now was sorely dim, 
 He breathed a new submission — " Not my will, 
 But thine be done, oh Father !" As he spoke, 
 Voices were heard in heaven, and music stole 
 Out from the chambers of the vaulted sky 
 As if the stars were swept like instruments. 
 No cloud was visible, but radiant wings 
 Were coming with a silvery rush to earth, 
 And as the Saviour rose, a glorious one, 
 With an illumined forehead, and the light 
 Whose fountain is the mystery of God, 
 Encalm'd within his eye, bow'd down to him, 
 And nerv'd him with a ministry of strength. 
 It was enough — and with his godlike brow 
 Rewritten of his Father's messenger, 
 With meekness, whose divinity is more 
 Than power and glory, he return'd again 
 To his disciples, and awaked their sleep, 
 For " he that should betray him was at hand." 
 
 THE WIDOW OF NAIN. 
 The Roman sentinel stood helm'd and tall 
 Beside the gate of Nain. The busy tread 
 Of comers to the city mart was done, 
 For it was almost noon, and a dead heat 
 Quiver'd upon the fine and sleeping dust, 
 And the cold snake crept panting from the wall, 
 And bask'd his scaly circles in the sun. 
 Upon his spear the soldier lean'd, and kept 
 His idle watch, and, as his drowsy dream 
 Was broken by the solitary foot 
 Of some poor mendicant, he raised his head 
 To curse him for a tributary Jew, 
 And slumberously dozed on. 
 
 'Twas now high noon. 
 The dull, low murmur of a funeral 
 Went through the city— the sad sound of feet 
 Unmix'd with voices — and the sentinel 
 Shook off his slumber, and gazed earnestly 
 Up the wide streets along whose paved way 
 The silent throng crept slowly. They came on, 
 Bearing a body heavily on its bier, 
 And by the crowd that in the burning sun, 
 Walk'd with forgetful sadness, 'twas of one 
 Mourn'd with uncommon sorrow. The broad gat 
 Swung on its hinges, and the Roman bent 
 His spear-point downwards as the bearers pass'd, 
 Bending beneath their burden- There was one- 
 
 Only one mourner. Close behind the bier, 
 
 Crumpling the pall up in her wither'd hands, 
 
 Follow'd an aged woman. Her short steps 
 
 Falter'd with weakness, and a broken moan 
 
 Fell from her lips, thicken'd convulsively 
 
 As her heart bled afresh. The pitying crowd 
 
 Follow'd apart, but no one spoke to her. 
 
 She had no kinsmen. She had lived alone — 
 
 A widow with one son. He was her all — 
 
 The only tie she had in the wide world — 
 
 And he was dead. They could not comfort her. 
 
 Jesus drew near to Nain as from the gate 
 
 The funeral came forth. His lips were pale 
 
 With the noon's sultry heat. The beaded sweat 
 
 Stood thickly on his brow, and on the worn 
 
 And simple latchets of his sandals lay, 
 
 Thick, the white dust of travel. He had come 
 
 Since sunrise from Capernaum, staying not 
 
 To wet his lips by green Bethsaida's pool, 
 
 Nor wash his feet in Kishon's silver springs, 
 
 Nor turn him southward upon Tabor's side 
 
 To catch Gilboa's light and spicy breeze. 
 
 Genesareth stood cool upon the East, 
 
 Fast by the Sea of Galilee, and there 
 
 The weary traveller might bide till eve ; 
 
 And on the alders of Bethulia's plains 
 
 The grapes of Palestine hung ripe and wild ; 
 
 Yet turn'd he not aside, but, gazing on, 
 
 From every swelling mount he saw afar, 
 
 Amid the hills, the humble spires of Nain, 
 
 The place of his next errand ; and the path 
 
 Touch'd not Bethulia, and a league away 
 
 Upon the East lay pleasant Galilee. 
 
 Forth from the city-gate the pitying crowd 
 
 Follow'd the stricken mourner. They came near 
 
 The place of burial, and, with straining hands, 
 
 Closer upon her breast she clasp'd the pall, 
 
 And with a gasping sob, quick as a child's, 
 
 And an inquiring wildness flashing through 
 
 The thin gray lashes of her feve^d eyes, 
 
 She came where Jesus stood beside the way. 
 
 He look'd upon her, and his heart was moved. 
 
 " Weep not ! " he said ; and as they stay'd the bier, 
 
 And at his bidding laid it at his feet, 
 
 He gently drew the pall from out her grasp, 
 
 And laid it back in silence from the dead. 
 
 With troubled wonder the mute throng drew near, 
 
 And gazed on his calm looks. A minute's space 
 
 He stood and pray'd. Then, taking the cold hand, 
 
 He said, " Arise !" And instantly the breast 
 
 Heaved in its cerements, and a sudden flush 
 
 Ran through the lines of the divided lips, 
 
 And with a murmur of his mother's name, 
 
 He trembled and sat upright in his shroud. 
 
 And, while the mourner hung upon his neck, 
 
 Jesus went calmly on his way to Nain. 
 
 HAGAR IN THE WILDERNESS. 
 The morning broke. Light stole upon the clouds 
 With a strange beauty. Earth received again 
 Its garment of a thousand dyes ; and leaves, 
 And delicate blossoms, and the painted flowers, 
 And every thing that bendeth to the dew, 
 And stirreth with the daylight, lifted up 
 Its beauty to the breath of that sweet morn. 
 
 All things are dark to sorrow; and the light 
 And loveliness, and fragrant air were sad 
 To the dejected Hagar. The moist earth 
 Was pouring odors from its spicy pores, 
 And the young birds were singing as if life 
 Were a new thing to them ; but oh ! it came 
 Upon her heart like discord, and she felt 
 How cruelly it tries a broken heart, 
 To see a mirth in any thing it loves. 
 She stood at Abraham's tent. Her lips were press'd 
 Till the blood started ; and the wandering veins 
 Of her transparent forehead were swell'd out, 
 As if her pride would burst them. Her dark eye 
 Was clear and tearless, and the light of heaven, 
 Which made its language legible, shot back, 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 825 
 
 From her long lashes, as it had been flame. 
 
 Her noble boy stood by her, with his hand 
 
 Clasp'd in her own, and his round, delicate feet, 
 
 Scarce train'd to balance on the tented floor, 
 
 Sandall'd for journeying. He had look'd up 
 
 Into his mother's face until he caught 
 
 The spirit there, and his young heart was swelling 
 
 Beneath his dimpled bosom, and his form 
 
 Straighten'd up proudly in his tiny wrath, 
 
 As if his light proportions would have swell'd, 
 
 Had they but match'd his spirit, to the man. 
 
 Why bends the patriarch as he cometh now 
 Upon his staff* so wearily ? His beard 
 Is low upon his breast, and his high brow, 
 So written with the converse of his God, 
 Beareth the swollen vein of agony. 
 His lip is quivering, and his wonted step 
 Of vigor is not there; and, though the morn 
 Is passing fair and beautiful, he breathes 
 Its freshness as it were a pestilence. 
 Oh ! man may bear with suffering : his heart 
 Is a strong thing, and godlike, in the grasp 
 Of pain that wrings mortality ; but tear 
 One chord affection clings to — part one tie 
 That binds him to a woman's delicate love — 
 And his great spirit yieldeth like a reed. 
 
 He gave to her the water and the bread, 
 But spoke no word, and trusted not himself 
 To look upon her face, but laid his hand 
 In silent blessing on the fair-hair'd boy, 
 And left her to her lot of loneliness. 
 
 Should Hagar weep ? May slighted woman turn, 
 And, as a vine the oak hath shaken off", 
 Bend lightly to her leaning trust again ? 
 no ! by all her loveliness — by all 
 That makes life poetry and beauty, no ! 
 Make her a slave ; steal from her rosy cheek 
 By needless jealousies ; let the last star 
 Leave her a watcher by your couch of pain ; 
 Wrong her by petulance, suspicion, all 
 That makes her cup a bitterness — yet give 
 One evidence of love, and earth has not 
 An emblem of devotedness like hers. 
 But oh ! estrange her once — it boots not how — 
 By wrong or silence — any thing that tells 
 A change has come upon your tenderness, — 
 And there is not a feeling out of heaven 
 Her pride o'ermastereth not. 
 
 She went her way with a strong step and slow — 
 Her press'd lip arch'd, and her clear eye undimm'd, 
 As if it were a diamond, and her form 
 Borne proudly up, as if her heart breathed through. 
 Her child kept on in silence, though she press'd 
 His hand till it was pain'd ; for he had caught, 
 As I have said, her spirit, and the seed 
 Of a stern nation had been breathed upon. 
 
 The morning pass'd, and Asia's sun rode up 
 In the clear heaven, and every beam was heat. 
 The cattle of the hills were in the shade, 
 And the bright plumage of the Orient lay 
 On beating bosoms in her spicy trees. 
 It was an hour of re3t ! but Hagar found 
 No shelter in the wilderness, and on 
 She kept her weary way, until the boy 
 Hung down his head, and open'd his parch'd lips 
 For water; but she could not give it him. 
 She laid him down beneath the sultry sky, — 
 For it was better than the close, hot breath 
 Of the thick pines, — and tried to comfort him ; 
 But he was sore athirst, and his blue eyes 
 Were dim and blood-shot, and he could not know 
 Why God denied him water in the wild. 
 She sat a little longer, and he grew 
 Ghastly and faint, as if he would have died. 
 It was too much for her. She lifted him, 
 And bore him further on, and laid his head 
 Beneath the shadow of a desert shrub ; 
 And, shrouding up her face, she went away, 
 And sat to watch, where he could see her not, 
 Till he should die; and, watching him, shemourn'd: — 
 
 " God stay thee in thine agony, my boy ! 
 I cannot see thee die; I cannot brook 
 
 Upon thy brow to look, 
 And see death settle on my cradle joy. 
 How have I drunk the light of thy blue eye ' 
 
 And could I see thee die 1 
 " I did not dream of this when thou wast straying. 
 Like an unbound gazelle, among the flowers; 
 
 Or wiling the soft hours, 
 By the rich gush of water-sources playing, 
 Then sinking weary to thy smiling sleep, 
 
 So beautiful and deep. 
 " Oh no ! and when I watch'd by thee the while. 
 And saw thy bright lip curling in thy dream, 
 
 And thought of the dark stream 
 In my own land of Egypt, the far Nile, 
 How pray'd I that my father's land might be 
 
 An heritage for thee ! 
 " And now the grave for its cold breast hath won thee ! 
 And thy white, delicate limbs the earth will press; 
 
 And oh ! my last caress 
 Must feel thee cold, for a chill hand is on thee. 
 How can I leave my boy, so pillow'd there 
 
 Upon his clustering hair !" 
 
 She stood beside the well her God had given 
 To gush in that deep wilderness, and bathed 
 The forehead of her child until he laugh'd 
 In his reviving happiness, and lisp'd 
 His infant thought of gladness at the sight 
 Of the cool plashing of his mother's hand. 
 
 RIZPAH WITH HER SONS, 
 (The day before they were hanged on Gibeah.) 
 " Bread for my mother !" said the voice of one 
 Darkening the door of Rizpah. She look'd up- 
 And lo ! the princely countenance and mien 
 Of dark-brow'd Armoni. The eye of Saul — 
 The very voice and presence of the king — 
 Limb, port, and majesty, — were present there, 
 Mock'd like an apparition in her son. 
 Yet, as he stoop'd his forehead to her hand 
 With a kind smile, a something of his mother 
 Unbent the haughty arching of his lip, 
 And, through the darkness of the widow's heart 
 Trembled a nerve of tenderness that shook 
 Her thought of pride all suddenly to tears. 
 " Whence comest thou ?" said Rizpah. 
 
 " From the house 
 Of David. In his gate there stood a soldier — 
 This in his hand. I pluck'd it, and I said, 
 « A /ring's son takes it for his hungry mother '* 
 God stay the famine !" 
 ****** As he spoke, a step, 
 Light as an antelope's, the threshold press'd. 
 And like a beam of light into the room 
 Enter'd Mephibosheth. What bird of heaven 
 Or creature of the wild — what flower of earth — 
 Was like this fairest of the sons of Saul ! 
 The violet's cup was harsh to his blue eye. 
 Less agile was the fierce barb's fiery step. 
 His voice drew hearts to him. His smile was like 
 The incarnation of some blessed dream — 
 Its joyousness so sunn'd the gazer's eye ! 
 Fair were his locks. His snowy teeth divided 
 A bow of Love, drawn with a scarlet thread- 
 His cheek was like the moist heart of the rose, 
 And, but for nostrils of that breathing fire 
 That turns the lion back, and limbs as lithe 
 As is the velvet muscle of the pard, 
 Mephibosheth had been too fair for man 
 As if he were a vision that would fade, 
 Rizpah gazed on him. Never, to her eye, 
 Grew his bright form familiar ; but, like stars, 
 That seem'd each night new lit in a new heaven. 
 He was each morn's sweet gift to her. She loved 
 Her firstborn, as a mother loves her child, 
 Tenderly, fondly. But for him— the last— 
 
826 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 What had she done for heaven to be his mother! 
 
 Her heart rose in her throat to hear his voice; 
 
 She look'd at him forever through her tears ; 
 
 Her utterance, when she spoke to him, sank down, 
 
 As if the lightest thought of him had lain 
 
 In an unfathom'd cavern of her soul. 
 
 The morning light was part of him, to her — 
 
 What broke the day for, but to show his beauty ? 
 
 The hours but measured time till he should come ; 
 
 Too tardy sang the bird when he was gone; 
 
 She would have shut the flow'rs — and call'd the star 
 
 Back to the mountain-top — and bade the sun 
 
 Pause at Eve's golden door — to wait for him ! 
 
 Was this a heart gone wild ? — or is the love 
 
 Of mothers like a madness ? Such as this 
 
 Is many a poor one in her humble home, 
 
 Who silently and sweetly sits alone, 
 
 Pouring her life all out upon her child. 
 
 What cares she that he does not feel how close 
 
 Her heart beats after his — that all unseen 
 
 Are the fond thoughts that follow him by day, 
 
 And watch his sleep like angels ? And, when moved 
 
 By some sore needed Providence, he stops 
 
 In his wild path and lifts a thought to heaven, 
 
 What cares the mother that he does not see 
 
 The link between the blessing and her prayer ! 
 
 He who once wept with Mary — angels keeping 
 Their unthank'd watch — are a foreshadowing 
 Of what love is in heaven. We may believe 
 That we shall know each other's forms hereafter, 
 And, in the bright fields of the better land, 
 Call the lost dead to us. conscious heart ! 
 That in the lone paths of this shadowy world 
 Hast bless'd all light, however dimly shining, 
 That broke upon the darkness of thy way — 
 Number thy lamps of love, and tell me, now, 
 How many canst thou re-light at the stars 
 And blush not at their burning ? One — one only — 
 Lit while your pulses by one heart kept time, 
 And fed with faithful fondness to your grave — 
 (Tho' sometimes with a hand stretch'd back from 
 
 heaven,) 
 Steadfast thro' all things — near, when most forgot — 
 And with its finger of unerring truth 
 Pointing the lost way in thy darkest hour — 
 One lamp — thy mother's love — amid the stars 
 Shall lift its pure flame changeless, and, before 
 The throne of God, burn through eternity — 
 Holy — as it was lit and lent thee here. 
 
 The hand in salutation gently raised 
 To the bow'd forehead of the princely boy, 
 Linger'd amid his locks. " I sold," he said, 
 " My Lybian barb for but a cake of meal — 
 Lo ! this — my mother ! As I pass'd the street, 
 I hid it in my mantle, for there stand 
 Famishing mother's, with their starving babes, 
 At every threshold ; and wild, desperate men 
 Prowl, with the eyes of tigers, up and down, 
 Watching to rob those who, from house to house, 
 Beg for the dying. Fear not thou, my mother! 
 Thy sons will be Elijah's ravens to thee !" 
 [unfinished.] 
 
 LAZARUS AND MARY. 
 Jesus was there but yesterday. The prints 
 Of his departing feet were at the door ; 
 His " Peace be with you !" was yet audible 
 In the rapt porch of Mary's charmed ear ; 
 And, in the low rooms, 'twas as if the air, 
 Hush'd with his going forth, had been the breath 
 Of angels left on watch — so conscious still 
 The place seem'd of his presence ! Yet, within, 
 The family by Jesus loved were weeping, 
 For Lazarus lay dead. 
 
 And Mary sat 
 By the pale sleeper. He was young to die. 
 The countenance whereon the Saviour dwelt 
 With his benignant smile — the soft fair lines 
 
 Breathing of hope — were still all eloquent, 
 
 Like life well mock'd in marble. That the voice, 
 
 Gone from those pallid lips, was heard in heaven, 
 
 Toned with unearthly sweetness — that the light, 
 
 Quench'd in the closing of those stirless lids, 
 
 Was veiling before God its timid fire, 
 
 New-lit, and brightening like a star at eve — 
 
 That Lazarus, her brother, was in bliss, 
 
 Not with this cold clay sleeping — Mary knew. 
 
 Her heaviness of heart was not for him ! 
 
 But close had been the tie by death divided. 
 
 The intertwining locks of that bright hair 
 
 That wiped the feet of Jesus — the fair hands 
 
 Clasp d in her breathless wonder while He taught-~ 
 
 Scarce to one pulse thrill'd more in unison, 
 
 Than with one soul this sister and her brother 
 
 Had lock'd their lives together. In this love, 
 
 Hallow'd from stain, the woman's heart of Mary 
 
 Was, with its rich affections, all bound up. 
 
 Of an unblemish'd beauty, as became 
 
 An office by archangels fill'd till now, 
 
 She walk'd with a celestial halo clad ; 
 
 And while, to the Apostles' eyes, it seem'd 
 
 She but fulfilPd her errand out of heaven — 
 
 Sharing her low roof with the Son of God — 
 
 She was a woman, fond and mortal still ; 
 
 And the deep fervor, lost to passion's fire, 
 
 Breathed through the sister's tenderness. In vain 
 
 Knew Mary, gazing on that face of clay, 
 
 That it was not her brother. He was there — 
 
 Swathed in that linen vesture for the grave — 
 
 The same lov'd one in all his comeliness — 
 
 And with him to the grave her heart must go. 
 
 What though he talk'd of her to Angels ? nay — 
 
 Hover'd in spirit near her? — 'twas that arm, 
 
 Palsied in death, whose fond caress she knew! 
 
 It was that lip of marble with whose kiss, 
 
 Morning and eve, love hemm'd the sweet day in 
 
 This was the form by the Judean maids 
 
 Prais'd for its palm-like stature, as he walk'd 
 
 With her by Kedron in the eventide — 
 
 The dead was Lazarus ! * * * * * 
 
 The burial was over, and the night 
 
 Fell upon Bethany — and morn — and noon. 
 
 And comforters and mourners went their way— 
 
 But death stay'd on ! They had been oft alone 
 
 When Lazarus had follow'd Christ to hear 
 
 His teachings in Jerusalem ; but this 
 
 Was more than solitude. The silence now 
 
 Was void of expectation. Something felt 
 
 Always before, and lov'd without a name, — 
 
 Joy from the air, hope from the opening door, 
 
 Welcome and life from off the very walls, — 
 
 Seem'd gone — and in the chamber where he lay 
 
 There was a fearful and unbreathing hush, * 
 
 Stiller than night's last hour. So fell on Mary 
 
 The shadows all have known, who, from their hearts, 
 
 Have released friends to heaven. The parting soul 
 
 Spreads wing betwixt the mourner and the sky ! 
 
 As if its path lay, from the tie last broken, 
 
 Straight through the cheering gateway of the sun ; 
 
 And, to the eye strain'd after, 'tis a cloud 
 
 That bars the light from all things. 
 
 Now as Christ 
 Drew near to Bethany, the Jews went forth 
 With Martha, mourning Lazarus. But Mary 
 Sat in the house. She knew the hour was nigh 
 When He would go again, as He had said, 
 Unto his Father ; and she felt that He, 
 Who loved her brother Lazarus in life, 
 Had chose the hour to bring him home thro' Death 
 In no unkind forgetful ness. Alone — 
 She could lift up the bitter prayer to heaven, 
 " Thy will be done, O God !"— but that dear brother 
 Had fill'd the cup and broke the bread for Christ; 
 And ever, at the morn, when she had knelt 
 And wash'd those holy feet, came Lazarus 
 To bind his sandals on, and follow forth 
 With dropp'd eyes, like an angel, sad and fair- 
 Intent upon the Master's needalone. 
 Indissolubly link'd were they ! And now, 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 827 
 
 To go to meet him — Lazarus not there — 
 And to his greeting answer " It is well !" 
 And without tears, (since grief would trouble Him 
 Whose soul was alway sorrowful,) to kneel 
 And minister alone — her heart gave way ! 
 She cover'd up her face and turn'd again 
 To wait within for Jesus But once more 
 Came Martha, saying, " Lo ! the Lord is here 
 And calleth for thee, Mary ! " Then arose 
 The mourner from the ground, whereon she sate 
 Shrouded in sackcloth, and bound quickly up 
 The golden locks of her dishevell'd hair, 
 And o'er her ashy garments drew a veil 
 Hiding the eyes she could not trust. And still, 
 As she made ready to go forth, a calm 
 As in a dream fell on her. 
 
 At a fount 
 Hard by the sepulchre, without the wall, 
 Jesus awaited Mary. Seated near 
 Were the way-worn disciples in the shade; 
 But, of himself forgetful, Jesus lean'd 
 Upon his staff, and watch'd where she should come 
 To whose one sorrow — but a sparrow's falling — 
 The pity that redeem'd a world could bleed ! 
 And as she came, with that uncertain step, — 
 Eager, yet weak, — her hands upon her breast, — 
 And they who follow'd her all fallen back 
 To leave her with her sacred grief alone, — 
 The heart of Christ was troubled. She drew near, 
 And the disciples rose up from the fount, 
 Moved by her look of wo, and gather'd round; 
 And Mary — for a moment — ere she look'd 
 Upon the Saviour, stay'd her faltering feet,— 
 And straighten'd her veil'd form, and tighter drew 
 Her clasp upon the folds across her breast ; 
 Then, with a vain strife to control her tears, 
 She stagger'd to their midst, and at His feet 
 Fell prostrate, saying, " Lord ! hadst thou been here, 
 My brother had not died !" The Saviour groan'd 
 In spirit, and stoop'd tenderly, and raised 
 The mourner from the ground, and in a voice, 
 Broke in its utterance like her own, He said, 
 " Where have ye laid him ?" Then the Jews who came, 
 Following Mary, answer'd through their tears, 
 " Lord ! come and see !" But lo ! the mighty heart 
 That in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood, 
 Taking for us the cup that might not pass — 
 The heart whose breaking cord upon the cross 
 Made the earth tremble, and the sun afraid 
 To look upon his agony — the heart 
 Of a lost world's Redeemer — overflow^, 
 Touch'd by a mourner's sorrow ! Jesus wept. 
 Calm'd by those pitying tears, and fondly brooding 
 Upon the thought that Christ so loved her brother, 
 Stood Mary there; but that lost burden now 
 Lay on His heart who pitied her; and Christ, 
 Following slow, and groaning in Himself, 
 Came to the sepulchre. It was a cave, 
 And a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, 
 " Take ye away the stone !" Then lifted He 
 His moisten'd eyes to heaven, and while the Jews 
 And the disciples bent their heads in awe, 
 And trembling Mary sank upon her knees, 
 The Son of God pray'd audibly. He ceased, 
 And for a minute's space there was a hush, 
 As if th' angelic watchers of the world 
 Had stay'd the pulses of all breathing things, 
 To listen to that prayer. The face of Christ 
 Shone as He stood, and over Him there came 
 Command, as 'twere the living face of God, 
 And with a loud voice, He cried, " Lazarus ! 
 Come forth !" And instantly, bound hand and foot, 
 And borne by unseen angels from the cave, 
 He that was dead stood with them. At the word 
 Of Jesus, the fear-stricken Jews unloosed 
 The bands from off the foldings of his shroud; 
 And Mary, with her dark veil thrown aside, 
 Ban to him swiftly, and cried, " Lazarus ! 
 My brother, Lazarus!" and tore away 
 The napkin she had bound about his head— 
 And touchM the warm lips with her fearful hand— 
 
 And on his neck fell weeping. And while all 
 Lay on their faces prostrate, Lazarus 
 Took Mary by the hand, and they knelt down 
 And worshipp'd Him who loved them. 
 
 THOUGHTS WHILE MAKING THE GRAVE OF A 
 NEW-BORN CHILD. 
 Room, gentle flowers ! my child would pass to heaven! 
 Ye look'd not for her yet with your soft eyes, 
 
 watchful ushers at Death's narrow door 1 
 But lo ! while you delay to let her forth, 
 Angels, beyond, stay for her ! One long kiss 
 From lips all pale with agony, and tears, 
 Wrung after anguish had dried up with fire 
 The eyes that wept them, were the cup of life 
 Held as a welcome to her. Weep ! oh mother ! 
 But not that from this cup of bitterness 
 
 A cherub of the sky has turn'd away. 
 
 One look upon thy face ere thou depart ! 
 My daughter ! It is soon to let thee go ! 
 My daughter ! With thy birth has gush'd a spring 
 
 1 knew not of — filling my heart with tears, 
 And turning with strange tenderness to thee— 
 A love— oh God ! it seems so— that must flow 
 Far as thou fleest, and 'twixt heaven and me, 
 Henceforward, be a bright and yearning chain 
 Drawing me after thee ! And so, farewell ! 
 'Tis a harsh world, in which affection knows 
 No place to treasure up its loved and lost 
 
 But the foul grave ! Thou, who so late wast sleeping 
 Warm in the close fold of a mother's heart, 
 Scarce from her breast a single pulse receiving 
 But it was sent thee with some tender thought, 
 How can I leave thee— here.' Alas for man ! 
 Tne herb in its humility may fall 
 And waste into the bright and genial air, 
 While we — by hands that minister'd in life 
 Nothing but love to us — are thrust away — 
 The earth flung in upon our just cold bosoms, 
 And the warm sunshine trodden out forever ! 
 
 Yet have I chosen for thy grave, my child, 
 
 A bank where I have lain in summer hours, 
 
 And thought how little it would seem like death 
 
 To sleep amid such loveliness. The brook, 
 
 Tripping with laughter down the rocky steps 
 
 That lead up to thy bed, would still trip on, 
 
 Breaking the dread hush of the mourners gone; 
 
 The birds are never silent that build here, 
 
 Trying to sing down the more vocal waters : 
 
 The slope is beautiful with moss and flowers, 
 
 And far below, seen under arching leaves, 
 
 Glitters the warm sun on rhe village spire, 
 
 Pointing the living after thee. And this 
 
 Seems like a comfort; and, replacing now 
 
 The flowers that have made room for thee, I go 
 
 To whisper the same peace to her who lies — 
 
 Robb'd of her child and lonely. 'Tis the work 
 
 Of many a dark hour, and of many a prayer, 
 
 To bring the heart back from an infant gone. 
 
 Hope must give o'er, and busy fancy blot 
 
 The images from all the silent rooms, 
 
 And every sight and sound familiar to her 
 
 Undo its sweetest link— and so at last 
 
 The fountain— that, once struck, must flow forever - 
 
 Will hide and waste in silence. When the smile 
 
 Steals to her pallid lip again, and spring 
 
 Wakens the buds above thee, we will come, 
 
 And, standing by thy music-haunted grave, 
 
 Look on each other cheerfully, and say: 
 
 A child that we have loved is gone to heaven, 
 
 And by this gate of flowers she pass'd away! 
 
 ON THE DEPARTURE OF REV. MR. WHITE 
 
 FROM HIS PASI9H, WHEN CHOSEIT PRESIDENT OF WABASH COLLEOB 
 
 Leave us not, man of prayer ! Like Paul, hast thot 
 " Serv'd God with all humility of mind," 
 Dwelling among us, and ** with many tears," 
 
828 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 " From house to house," "by night and day not 
 
 ceasing," 
 Hast pleaded thy blest errand. Leave us not ! 
 Leave us not now ! The Sabbath-bell, so long 
 Lirik'd with thy voice — the prelude to thy prayer — 
 The call to us from heaven to come with thee 
 Into the house of God, and, from thy lips, 
 Hear what had fall'n upon thy heart — will sound 
 Lonely and mournfully when thou art gone! 
 Our prayers are in thy words — our hope in Christ 
 Warm'd on thy lips — our darkling thoughts of God 
 Follow'd thy loved call upward — and so knit 
 Is all our worship with those outspread hands, 
 And the imploring voice, which, well we knew, 
 Sank in the ear of Jesus — that, with thee, 
 The angel's ladder seems removed from sight, 
 And we astray in darkness ! Leave us not ! 
 Leave not the dead! They have lain calmly down — 
 Thy comfort in their ears — believing well 
 That when thine own more holy work was done, 
 Thou wouldst lie down beside them, and be near 
 When the last trump shall summon, to fold up 
 Thy flock affrighted, and, with that same voice 
 Whose whisper'd promises could sweeten death, 
 Take up once more the interrupted strain, 
 And wait Christ's coming, saying, " Here am I, 
 And those whom thou hast given me ! " Leave not 
 The old, who, 'mid the gathering shadows, cling 
 To their accustom'd staff, and know not how 
 To lose thee, and so near the darkest hour ! 
 Leave not the penitent, whose soul may be 
 Deaf to the strange voice, but awake to thine ! 
 Leave not the mourner thou hast sooth'd— the heart 
 Turns to its comforter again ! Leave not 
 The child thou hast baptized ! another's care 
 May not keep bright, upon the mother's heart, 
 The covenant seal ; the infant's ear has caught 
 Words it has strangely ponder'd from thy lips, 
 And the remember'd tone may find again, 
 And quicken for the harvest, the first seed 
 Sown for eternity ! Leave not the child ! 
 Yet if thou wilt— if, " bound in spirit," thou 
 Must go, and we shall see thy face no more, 
 " The will of God be done ! " We do not say 
 Remember us — thou wilt — in love and prayer ! 
 And thou wilt be remember'd — by the dead, 
 When the last trump awakes them — by the old, 
 When, of the "silver cord" whose strength thou 
 
 knowest, 
 The last thread fails— by the bereav'd and stricken, 
 When the dark cloud, wherein thou found'st a spot 
 Broke by the light of mercy, lowers again — 
 By the sad mother, pleading for her child, 
 In murmurs difficult, since thou art gone— 
 By all thou leavest, when the Sabbath-bell 
 Brings us together, and the closing hymn 
 Hushes our hearts to pray, and thy loved voice, 
 That all our wants had grown to, (only thus, 
 'Twould seem, articulate to God,) falls not 
 Upon our listening ears — remember'd thus — 
 Remember'd well — in all our holiest hours — 
 Will be the faithful shepherd we have lost ! 
 And ever with one prayer, for which our love 
 Will find the pleading words,— that in the light 
 Of heaven we may behold his face once more ! 
 
 BIRTH-DAY VERSES. 
 " The heart that we have lain near before our birth, is the only one 
 that cannot forget that it has loved us." — Philip SLmGSBr. 
 
 Mi! birth-day ! — Oh beloved mother ! 
 
 My heart is with thee o'er the seas. 
 I did not think to count another 
 
 Before I wept upon thy knees — 
 Before this scroll of absent years 
 Was blotted with thy streaming tears. 
 My own I do not care to check. 
 
 I weep — albeit here alone — 
 As if I hung upon thy neck, 
 
 As if thy lips were on my own, 
 As if this full sad heart of mine, 
 Were beatiwr closely upon thine. 
 
 Four weary years ! How looks she now ? 
 
 What light is in those tender eyes ? 
 What trace of time hath touch'd the brow 
 
 Whose look is borrow'd of the skies 
 That listen to her nightly prayer ? 
 How is she changed since he was there 
 Who sleeps upon her heart alway — 
 
 Whose name upon her lips is worn — 
 For whom the night seems made to pray — 
 
 For whom she wakes to pray at morn — 
 Whose sight is dim, whose heart-strings stir, 
 Who weeps these tears — to think of her! 
 
 I know not if my mother's eyes 
 
 Would find me changed in slighter things ; 
 I've wander'd beneath many skies, 
 
 And tasted of some bitter springs ; 
 And many leaves, once fair and gay, 
 From youth's full flower have dropp'd away — 
 But, as these looser leaves depart, 
 
 The lessen'd flower gets near the core, 
 And, when deserted quite, the heart 
 
 Takes closer what was dear of yore — 
 And yearns to those who lov'd it first — 
 The sunshine and the dew by which its bud was nursed. 
 
 Dear mother ! dost thou love me yet ? 
 
 Am I remember'd in my home ? 
 When those I. love for joy are met, 
 
 Does some one wish that I would come t 
 Thou dost — I am beloved of these ! 
 
 But, as the schoolboy numbers o'er 
 Night after night the Pleiades 
 
 And finds the stars he found before- 
 As turns the maiden oft her token — 
 
 As counts the miser aye his gold — 
 So, till life's silver cord is broken, 
 
 Would I of thy fond love be told. 
 My heart is full, mine eyes are wet — 
 Dear mother ! dost thou love thy long-lost wanderer yet • 
 
 Oh ! when the hour to meet again 
 
 Creeps on — and, speeding o'er the sea. 
 My heart takes up its lengthen'd chain, 
 
 And, link by link, draws nearer thee — 
 When land is hail'd, and, from the shore, 
 
 Comes off the blessed breath of home, 
 With fragrance from my mother's door 
 
 Of flowers forgotten when I come- 
 When port is gain'd, and, slowly now, 
 
 The old familiar paths are pass'd, 
 And, entering — unconscious how — 
 
 I gaze upon thy face at last, 
 And run to thee, all faint and weak, 
 And feel thy tears upon my cheek — 
 
 Oh ! if my heart break not with joy, 
 The light of heaven will fairer seem ; 
 
 And I shall grow once more a boy : 
 And, mother ! — 'twill be like a dream 
 
 That we were parted thus for years — 
 
 And once that we have dried our tears, 
 
 How will the days seem long and bright — 
 To meet thee always with the morn, 
 
 And hear thy blessing every night — 
 Thy " dearest," thy " first-born ! " — 
 And be no more, as now, in a strange land, forlorn 
 
 TO MY MOTHER FROM THE APPENINES 
 
 Mother! dear mother! the feelings nurst 
 As I hung at thy bosom, clung round theejirst. 
 'Twas the earliest link in love's warm chain — 
 'Tis the only one that will long remain : 
 And as year by year, and day by day, 
 Some friend still trusted drops away, 
 Mother ! dear mother ! oh dt,st thou see 
 How the shorten'd chain brings me nearer thee ! 
 
 Early Poem*. 
 
 'Tis midnight the lone mountains on — 
 The East is fleck'd with cloudy bars, 
 
 And, gliding through them one by one, 
 The moon walks up her path of stars — 
 
 The light upon her placid brow 
 
 Received from fountains unseen now 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 829 
 
 And happiness is mine to-night, 
 
 Thus springing from an unseen fount; 
 And broast and brain are warm with light, 
 
 With midnight round me on the mount — 
 Its rays, like thine, fair Dian, flow 
 From far that Western star below. 
 Dear mother ! in thy love I live; 
 
 The life thou gav'st flows yet from thee — 
 And, sun-like, thou hast power to give 
 
 Life to the earth, air, sea, for me! 
 Though wandering, as this moon above, 
 I'm dark without thy constant love. 
 
 LINES ON LEAVING EUROPE. 
 Bright flag at yonder tapering mast ! 
 
 Fling out your field of azure blue; 
 Let star and stripe be westward cast, 
 
 And point as Freedom's eagle flew ! 
 Strain home ! oh lithe and quivering spars ' 
 Point home, my country's flag of stars ! 
 The wind blows fair ! the vessel feels 
 
 The pressure of the rising breeze, 
 And, swiftest of a thousand keels, 
 
 She leaps to the careering sea3 ! 
 Oh, fair, fair cloud of snowy sail, 
 
 In whose white breast 1 seem to lie, 
 How oft, when blew this eastern gale, 
 
 I've seen your semblance in the sky, 
 And long'd with breaking heart to flee 
 On cloud-like pinions o'er the sea! 
 Adieu, oh lands of fame and eld ! 
 
 I turn to watch our foamy track, 
 And thoughts with which I first beheld 
 
 Yon clouded line, come hurrying back ; 
 My lips are dry with vague desire, — 
 
 My cheek once more is hot with joy — 
 My pulse, my brain, my soul on fire ! — 
 
 Oh, what has changed that traveller-boy ! 
 As leaves the ship this dying foam, 
 His visions fade behind — his weary heart speeds home ! 
 Adieu, oh soft and southern shore, 
 
 Where dwelt the stars long miss'd in heaven! — 
 Those forms of beauty seen no more, 
 
 Yet once to Art's rapt vision given ! 
 Oh, still th' enamored sun delays, 
 
 And pries through fount and crumbling fane, 
 To win to his adoring gaze 
 
 Those children of the sky again ! 
 Irradiate beauty, such as never 
 That light on other earth hath shone, 
 Hath made this land her home for ever; 
 
 And could I live for this alone — 
 Were not my birthright brighter far 
 Than such voluptuous slaves' can be — 
 Held not the West one glorious star 
 
 New-born and blazing for the free — 
 Soar'd not to heaven our eagle yet — 
 Rome, with her Helot sons, should teach me to forget ! 
 Adieu, oh fatherland ! I see 
 
 Your white cliffs on th' horizon's rim, 
 And though to freer skies I flee, 
 
 My heart swells, and my eyes are dim ! 
 As knows the dove the task you give her, 
 
 When loosed upon a foreign shore — 
 As spreads the rain-drop in the river 
 
 In which it may have flowed before — 
 To England, over vale and mountain, 
 
 My fancy flew from climes more fair — 
 My blood, that knew its parent-fountain, 
 
 Ran warm and fast in England's air. 
 Dear mother ! in thy prayer, to-night, 
 
 There come new words and warmer tears ! 
 On long, long darkness breaks the light — 
 
 Comes home the loved, the lost for years ! 
 Sleep safe, oh wave-worn mariner ! 
 
 Fear not, to-night, or storm or sea ! 
 The ear of heaven bends low to her ! 
 
 He comes to shore who sails with me ! 
 
 The spider knows the roof unriven, 
 
 While swings his web, though lightnings blaze 
 And by a thread still fast on Heaven, 
 
 I know my mother lives and prays ! 
 Dear mother ! when our lips can speak • 
 
 When first our tears will let us see- - 
 When I can gaze upon thy cheek, 
 
 And thou, with thy dear eyes, on me — 
 'Twill be a pastime little sad 
 
 To trace what weight time's heavy fingers 
 Upon each other's forms have had — 
 
 For all may flee, so feeling lingers ! 
 But there's a change, beloved mother ! 
 
 To stir far deeper thoughts of thine, 
 I come — but with me comes another 
 
 To share the heart once only mine ! 
 Thou, on whose thoughts, when sad and lonely, 
 
 One star arose in memory's heaven — 
 Thou, who hast watch'd one treasure only- 
 Watered one flower with tears at even- 
 Room in thy heart ! The hearth she left 
 
 Is darken'd to lend light to ours ! 
 There are bright flowers of care bereft, 
 
 And hearts — that languigh more than flowers ! 
 She was their light — their very air — 
 
 Room, mother! in thy heart! place for her in thy 
 prayer ! 
 
 A TRUE INCIDENT. 
 Upon a summer's morn, a southern mother 
 Sat at the curtain'd window of an inn. 
 She rested from long travel, and with hand 
 Upon her cheek in tranquil happiness, 
 Look'd where the busy travellers went and came 
 And, like the shadows of the swallows flying 
 Over the bosom of unruffled water, 
 Pass'd from her thoughts all objects, leaving there, 
 As in the water's breast, a mirror'd heaven— 
 For, in the porch beneath her, to and fro, 
 A nurse walk'd singing with her babe in arms 
 And many a passer-by look'd on the child 
 And praised its wondrous beauty, but still on 
 The old nurse troll'd her lullaby, and still, 
 Blest through her depths of soul by light there shining. 
 The mother in her reverie mused on. 
 But lo ! another traveller alighted ! 
 And now, no more indifferent or calm, 
 The mother's breath comes quick, and with the blood 
 Warm in her cheek and brow, she murmurs low 
 " Now, God be praised ! I am no more alone 
 In knowing I've an angel for my child, — 
 Chance he to look on't only !" With a smile - 
 The tribute of a beauty-loving heart 
 To things from God new-moulded — would have pass d 
 The poet, as the infant caught his eye; 
 But suddenly he turn'd, and, with his hand 
 Upon the nurse's arm, he stay'd her steps, 
 And gazed upon her burthen. 'Twas a child 
 In whose large eyes of blue there shone, indeed, 
 Something to waken wonder. Never sky 
 In noontide depth, or softly-breaking dawn — 
 Never the dew in new-born violet's cup, 
 Lay so entranced in purity ! Not calm, 
 With the mere hush of infancy at rest, 
 The ample forehead, but serene with thought ; 
 And by the rapt expression of the lips, 
 They seem'd scarce still from a cherubic hymn, 
 And over all its countenance there breath'd 
 Benignity, majestic as wc dream 
 Angels wear ever, before God. With gaze 
 Earnest and mournful, and his eyelids warm 
 With tears kept back, the poet kiss'd the child; 
 And chasten'd at his heart, as having pass'd 
 Close to an angel, went upon his way. 
 
 Soon after, to the broken choir in heaven 
 This cherub was recalled, and now the mother 
 Bethought her, in her anguish, of the bard — 
 (Herself a far-off stranger, but his heart 
 Familiar to the world,) — and wrote to tell him, 
 The angel he had recognized that morn, 
 Had fled to bliss again. The poet well 
 
830 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 Remember'd that child's ministry to him ; 
 And of the only fountain that he knew 
 For healing, he sought comfort for the mother. 
 And thus he wrote: — 
 Mourn not for the child from thy tenderness riven, 
 
 Ere stain on its purity fell! 
 To thy questioning heart, lo ! an answer from 
 heaven: 
 
 " Is IT WELL WITH THE CHILD ?" " It IS WELL !" 
 
 THE MOTHER TO HER CHILD. 
 They tell me thou art come from a far world, 
 Babe of my bosom ! that these little arms, 
 Whose restlessness is like the spread of wings, 
 Move with the memory of flights scarce o'er — 
 That through these fringed lids we see the soul 
 Steeped in the blue of its remembered home; 
 And while thou sleep'st come messengers, they say, 
 Whispering to thee — and 'tis then I see 
 Upon thy baby lips that smile of heaven ! 
 
 And what is thy far errand, my fair child? 
 Why away, wandering from a home of bliss, 
 To find thy way through darkness home again ' 
 Wert thou an untried dweller in the sky ? 
 Is there, betwixt the cherub that thou wert, 
 The cherub and the angel thou mayst be, 
 A life's probation in this sadder world? 
 Art thou, with memory of two things only, 
 Music and light, left upon earth astray, 
 And, by the watchers at the gate of heaven, 
 Looked for with fear and trembling ? 
 
 God ! who gavest 
 Into my guiding hand this wanderer, 
 To lead her through a world whose darkling paths 
 I tread with steps so faltering — leave not me 
 To bring her to the gates of heaven, alone ! 
 I feel my feebleness. Let these stay on— 
 The angels who now visit her in dreams ! 
 Bid them be near her pillow till in death 
 The closed eyes look upon Thy face once more! 
 And let the light and music, which the world 
 Borrows of heaven, and which her infant sense 
 Hails with sweet recognition, be to her 
 A voice to call her upward, and a lamp 
 To lead her steps unto Thee ! 
 
 THIRTY-FIVE. 
 
 " The years of a man's life are threescore and ten." 
 Oh, weary heart! thou'rt half way home ! 
 
 We stand on Life's meridian height — 
 As far from childhood's morning come, 
 
 As to the grave's forgetful night. 
 Give Youth and Hope a parting tear — 
 
 Look onward with a placid brow — 
 Hope promised but to bring us here, 
 
 And Reason takes the guidance now — 
 One backward look— the'last— the last ! 
 One silent tear — for Youth is past ! 
 Who goes with Hope and Passion back? 
 
 Who comes with me and Memory on? 
 Oh, lonely looks the downward track — 
 
 Joy's music hush'd— Hope's roses gone ! 
 To Pleasure and her giddy troop 
 
 Farewell, without a sigh or tear! 
 But heart gives way, and spirits droop, 
 
 To think that Love may leave us here ! 
 
 Have we no charm whenYouth is flown 
 
 Midway to death left sad and lone ! 
 Yet stay !— as 'twere a twilight star 
 
 That sends its thread across the wave, 
 I see a brightening light, from far, 
 
 Steal down a path beyond the grave ! 
 And now — bless God ! — its golden line 
 
 Comes o'er — and lights my shadowy way — 
 And shows the dear hand clasp'd in mine ! 
 
 But list ! what those sweet voices say! 
 The better land's in sight, 
 And, by its chastening light, 
 All love from life's midicay is driven 
 Sane.hers whose clasped hand will bring thee on to Heaven . 
 
 A THOUGHT OVER A CRADLE. 
 
 I sadden when thou smilest to my smile 
 Child of my love ! I tremble to believe 
 That o'er the mirror of that eye of blue 
 The shadow of my heart will always pass;- 
 A heart that from its struggle with the world, 
 Comes nightly to thy guarded cradle home, 
 And, careless of the staining dust it brings, 
 Asks for its idol ! Strange, that flowers of earth 
 Are visited by every air that stirs, 
 And drink in sweetness only, while the child 
 That shuts within its breast a bloom for heaven, 
 May take a blemish from the breath of love, 
 And bear the blight for ever. 
 
 I have wept 
 With gladness at the gift of this fair child ! 
 My life is bound up in her. But, oh God ! 
 Thou knowest how heavily my heart at times 
 Bears its sweet burthen ; and if thou hast given 
 To nurture such as mine thi3 spotless flower, 
 To bring it unpolluted unto thee, 
 Take thou its love, I pray thee ! Give it light — 
 Though, following the sun, it turn from me ! — 
 But, by the chord thus wrung, and by the light 
 Shining about her, draw me to my child ! 
 And link us close, oh God, when near to heaven ! 
 
 CONTEMPLATION. 
 
 " They are all up — the innumerable stars — 
 And hold their place in Heaven. My eyes have been 
 Searching the pearly depths through which they spring 
 Like beautiful creations, till I feel 
 As if it were a new and perfect world, 
 Waiting in silence for the word of God 
 To breathe it into motion. There they stand, 
 Shining in order, like a living hymn 
 Written in light, awaking at the breath 
 Of the celestial dawn, and praising Him 
 Who made them, with the harmony of spheres. 
 I would I had an angel's ear to list 
 That melody. I would that I might float 
 Up in that boundless element, and feel 
 Its ravishing vibrations, like the pulse 
 Beating in Heaven ! My spirit is athirst 
 For music — rarer music ! I would bathe 
 My soul in a serener atmosphere 
 Than this ; I long to mingle with the flock 
 Led by the • living waters,' and to stray 
 In the « green pastures' of the better land ! 
 When wilt thou break, dull fetter ! When shall I 
 Gather my wings, and like a rushing thought 
 Stretch onward, star by star, up into Heaven!" 
 Thus mused Alethe. She was one to whom 
 Life had been like the witching of a dream, 
 Of an untroubled sweetness. She was born 
 Of a high race, and lay upon the knee, 
 With her soft eyes perusing listlessly 
 The fretted roof, or, on Mosaic floors, 
 Grasped at the tesselated squares inwrought 
 With metals curiously. Her childhood passed 
 Like faery — amid fountains and green haunts — 
 Trying her little feet upon a lawn 
 Of velvet evenness, and hiding flowers 
 In her sweet breast, as if it were a fair 
 And pearly altar to crush incense on. 
 Her youth — oh ! that was queenly ! She was like 
 A dream of poetry that may not be 
 Written or told— exceeding beautiful ! 
 And so came worshippers; and rank bowed down 
 And breathed upon her heart strings with the breath 
 Of pride, and bound her forehead gorgeously 
 With dazzling scorn, and gave unto her step 
 A majesty as if she trod the sea, 
 And the proud waves, unbidden, lifted her! 
 And so she grew to woman — her mere look 
 Strong as a monarch's signet, and her hand 
 The ambition of a kingdom. From all this 
 Turned her high heart away ! She had a mind, 
 Deep, and immortal, and it would not feed 
 On pageantry. She thirsted for a spring 
 
SACRED POEMS. 
 
 831 
 
 Of a serener element, and drank 
 Philosophy, and for a little while 
 She was allayed,— till, presently, it turned 
 Bitter within her, and her spirit grew 
 Faint for undying waters. Then she came 
 To the pure fount of God, and is athirst 
 No more— save when the fever of the world 
 Falleth upon her, she will go, sometimes, 
 Out in the star-light quietness, and breathe 
 A holy aspiration after Heaven. 
 
 ON THE DEATH OF A MISSIONARY. 
 How beautiful it is, for man to die 
 Upon the walls of Zion ! to be call'd, 
 Like a watch-worn, and weary sentinel, 
 To put his armour off, and rest — in heaven! 
 The sun was setting on Jerusalem, 
 The deep blue sky had not a cloud, and light 
 Was pouring on the dome of Omar's mosque, 
 Like molten silver. Everything was fair; 
 And beauty hung upon the painted fanes ; 
 Like a grieved spirit, lingering ere she gave 
 Her wing to air, for heaven. The crowds of men 
 Were in the busy streets, and nothing look'd 
 Like woe or suffering, save one small train 
 Bearing the dead to burial. It pass'd by, 
 And left no trace upon the busy throng. 
 The sun was just as beautiful; the shout 
 Of joyous revelry, and the low hum 
 Of stirring thousands rose as constantly ! 
 Life look'd as winning; and the earth and sky, 
 And everything, seem'd strangely bent to make 
 A contrast to that comment upon life. 
 How wonderful it is that human pride 
 Can pass that touching moral as it does — 
 Pass it so frequently, in all the force 
 Of mournful and most simple eloquence— 
 And learn no lesson ! They bore on the dead, 
 With the slow step of sorrow, troubled not 
 By the rude multitude, save, here and there, 
 A look of vague inquiry, or a curse 
 Half muttered by some haughty Turk whose sleeve 
 Had touch'd the tassel of the Christian's pall. 
 And Israel too passed on— the trampled Jew '. 
 Israel '.—who made Jerusalem a throne 
 For the wide world — pass'd on as carelessly ; 
 Giving no look of interest to tell 
 The shrouded dead was anything to her. 
 Oh that they would be gather'd as a brood 
 Is gather'd by a parent's sheltering wings !— 
 They laid him down with strangers; for his home 
 Was with the setting sun, and they who stood 
 And look'd so steadfastly upon his grave, 
 Were not his kindred ; but they found him there, 
 And lov'd him for his ministry of Christ. 
 He had died young. But there are silver'd heads, 
 Whose race of duty is less nobly run. 
 His heart was with Jerusalem; and strong 
 As was a mother's love, and the sweet ties 
 Religion makes so beautiful at home, 
 He flung them from him in his eager race, 
 And sought the broken people of his God, 
 To preach to them of Jesus. There was one, 
 Who was his friend and helper. One who went 
 And knelt beside him at the sepulchre 
 Where Jesus slept, to pray for Israel. 
 They had one spirit, and their hearts were knit 
 With more than human love. God call'd him home 
 And he of whom I speak stood up alone, 
 And in his broken-heartedness wrought on 
 Until his Master call'd him. 
 Oh is it not a noble thing to die 
 As dies the Christian with his armour on! — 
 What is the hero's clarion, tho' it3 blast 
 Ring with the mastery of a world, to this? — 
 What are the searching victories of mind — 
 The lore of vanish'd ages? — What are all 
 The trumpetings of proud humanity, 
 To the short history of him who made 
 His sepulchre beside the King of kings ? 
 
 ON THE PICTURE OF A " CHILD TIRED OF PLAY ' 
 
 Tired of play ! Tired of play ! 
 
 What hast thou done this livelong day ? 
 
 The birds are silent, and so is the bee ; 
 
 The sun is creeping up steeple and tree; 
 
 The doves have flown to the sheltering eaves, 
 
 And the nests are dark with the drooping leaves; 
 
 Twilight gathers, and day is done — 
 
 How hast thou spent it — restless one ! 
 
 Playing ? But what hast thou done beside 
 
 To tell thy mother at even tide ? 
 
 What promise of morn is left unbroken ? 
 
 What kind word to thy playmate spoken? 
 
 Whom hast thou pitied, and whom forgiven? 
 
 How with thy faults has duty striven ? 
 
 What hast thou learned by field and hill, 
 
 By greenwood path, and by singing rill? 
 
 There will come an eve to a longer day, 
 
 That will find thee tired— but not of play! 
 
 And thou wilt lean, as thou leanest now, 
 
 With drooping limbs and aching brow, 
 
 And wish the shadows would faster creep, 
 
 And long to go to thy quiet sleep. 
 
 Well were it^then if thine aching brow 
 
 Were as free from sin and shame as now ! 
 
 Well for thee, if thy lip could tell 
 
 A tale like this, of a day spent well. 
 
 If thine open hand hath reliev'd distress — 
 
 If thy pity hath sprung to wretchedness— 
 
 If thou hast forgiven the sore offence, 
 
 And humbled thy heart with penitence — 
 
 If Nature's voices have spoken to thee 
 
 With their holy meanings eloquently — 
 
 If every creature hath won thy love, 
 
 From the creeping worm to the brooding dove — 
 
 If never a sad, low-spoken word 
 
 Hath plead with thy human heart unheard — 
 
 Then, when the night steals on, as now, 
 
 It will bring relief to thine aching brow, 
 
 And, with joy and peace, at the thought of rest, 
 
 Thou wilt sink to sleep on thy mother's breast 
 
 A CHILD'S FIRST IMPRESSION OF A STAR 
 She had been told that God made all the stars 
 That twinkled up in heaven, and now she stood 
 Watching the coming of the twilight on, 
 As if it were a new and perfect world, 
 And this were its first eve. She stood alone 
 By the low window, with the silken lash 
 Of her soft eye upraised, and her sweet mouth 
 Half parted with the new and strange delight 
 Of beauty that she could not comprehend, 
 And had not seen before. The purple folds 
 Of the low sunset clouds, and the blue sky 
 That looked so still and delicate above, 
 Filled her young heart with gladness, and the eve 
 Stole on with its deep shadows, and she still 
 Stood looking at the west with that half-smile, 
 As if a pleasant thought were at her heart 
 Presently, in the edge of the last tint 
 Of sunset, where the blue was melted in 
 To the faint golden mellowness, a star 
 Stood suddenly. A laugh of wild delight 
 Burst from her lips, and putting up her hands, 
 Her simple thought broke forth expressively — 
 «« Father ! dear father ! God has made a star '" 
 
 ON WITNESSING A BAPTISM. 
 She stood up in the meekness of a heart 
 Resting on God, and held her fair young child 
 Upon her bosom, with its gentle eyes 
 Folded in sleep, as if its soul had gone 
 To whisper the baptismal vow in heaven. 
 The praver went up devoutly, and the lips 
 Of the good man glowed fervently with taith 
 That it would be, even as he had pray'd, 
 And the sweet child be gather'd to the fold 
 Of Jesus. As the holy words went on 
 
832 
 
 SACRED POEMS. 
 
 Her lips mov'd silently, and tears, fast tears, 
 
 Stole from beneath her lashes, and upon 
 
 The forehead of the beautiful child lay soft 
 
 With the baptismal water. Then I thought 
 
 That, to the eye of God, that mother's tears 
 
 Would be a deeper covenant — which sin 
 
 And the temptations of the world, and death, 
 
 Would leave unbroken — and that she would know 
 
 In the clear light of heaven, how very strong 
 
 The prayer which press'd them from her heart had been 
 
 In leading its young spirit up to God. 
 
 REVERY AT GLENMARY. 
 
 I have enough, O God ! My heart to-night 
 Runs over with its fulness of content ; 
 And as I look out on the fragrant stars, 
 And from the beauty of the night take in 
 My priceless portion — yet myself no more 
 Than in the universe a grain of sand — 
 I feel His glory who could make a world, 
 Yet in the lost depths of the wilderness 
 Leave not a flower unfinish'd ! 
 
 Rich, though poor! 
 My low-roofd cottage is this hour a heaven. 
 Music is in it — and the song she sings, 
 That sweet-voic'd wife of mine, arrests the ear 
 Of my young child awake upon her knee ; 
 And, with his calm eyes on his master's face, 
 My noble hound lies couchant — and all here — 
 All in this little home, yet boundless heaven — 
 Are, in such love as I have power to give, 
 Blessed to overflowing. 
 
 Thou, who look'st 
 Upon my brimming heart this tranquil eve, 
 Knowest its fulness, as thou dost the dew 
 Sent to the hidden violet by Thee; 
 And, as that flower, from its unseen abode, 
 Sends its sweet breath up, duly, to the sky, 
 Changing its gift to incense, so, oh God, 
 May the sweet drops that to my humble cup 
 Find their far way from heaven, send up to Thee 
 Fragrance at thy throne welcome ! 
 
 THE BELFRY PIGEON. 
 
 On the cross beam under the Old South bell 
 The nest of a pigeon is builded well. 
 In summer and winter that bird is there, 
 Out and in with the morning air : 
 I love to see him track the street, 
 With his wary eye and active feet ; 
 And I often watch him as he springs, 
 Circling the steeple with easy wings, 
 Till across the dial his shade has passed, 
 And the belfry edge is gained at last. 
 'Tis a bird I love, with its brooding note, 
 And the trembling throb in its mottled throat; 
 There's a human look in its swelling breast, 
 And the gentle curve of its lowly crest; 
 And I often stop with the fear I feel — 
 He runs so close to the rapid wheel. 
 
 Whatever is rung on that noisy bell — 
 
 Chime of the hour or funeral knell — 
 
 The dove in the belfry must hear it well. 
 
 When the tongue swings out to the midnight moon- 
 
 When the sexton cheerily rings for noon — 
 
 When the clock strikes clear at morning light — 
 
 When the child is waked with " nine at night" — 
 
 When the chimes play soft in the Sabbath air, 
 
 Filling the spirit with tones of prayer — 
 
 Whatever tale in the bell is heard, 
 
 He broods on his folded feet unstirred, 
 
 Or rising half in his rounded nest, 
 
 He takes the time to smooth his breast, 
 
 Then drops again with filmed eyes, 
 
 And sleeps as the last vibration dies. 
 
 Sweet bird ! I would that I could be 
 
 A hermit in the crowd like thee ! 
 
 With wings to fly to wood and gten, 
 Thy lot, like mine, is cast with men ; 
 And daily, with unwilling feet, 
 I tread, like thee, the crowded street; 
 But, unlike me, when day is o'er, 
 Thou canst dismiss the world and soar, 
 Or, at a half felt wish for rest, 
 Canst smooth the feathers on thy breast, 
 And drop, forgetful, to thy nest. 
 
 I would that in such wings of gold 
 I could my weary heart upfold; 
 And while the world throngs on beneath, 
 Smooth down my cares and calmly breathe ; 
 And only sad with others' sadness, 
 And only glad with others' gladness, 
 Listen, unstirred, to knell or chime, 
 And, lapt in quiet, bide my time. 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 It was a pleasant morning, in the time 
 When the leaves fall — and the bright sun shone out 
 As when the morning stars first sang together — 
 So quietly and calmly fell his light 
 Upon a world at rest. There was no leaf 
 In motion, and the loud winds slept, and all 
 Was still. The lab'ring herd was grazing 
 Upon the hill-side quietly — uncall'd 
 By the harsh voice of man, and distant sound, 
 Save from the murmuring waterfall, came not 
 As usual on the ear. One hour stole on, 
 And then another of the morning, calm 
 And still as Eden ere the birth of man, 
 And then broke in the Sabbath chime of bells — 
 And the old man, and his descendants, went 
 Together to the house of God. I join'd 
 The well-apparell'd crowd. The holy man 
 Rose solemnly, and breath'd the prayer of faith — 
 And the gray saint, just on the wing for heaven — 
 And the fair maid — and the bright- haired young man- 
 And child of curling locks, just taught to close 
 The lash of its blue eye the while ; — all knelt 
 In attitude of prayer — and then the hymn, 
 Sincere in its low melody, went up 
 To worship God. 
 
 The white-haired pastor rose 
 And look'd upon his flock — and with an eye 
 That told his interest, and voice that spoke 
 In tremulous accents, eloquence like Paul's, 
 He lent Isaiah's fire to the truths 
 Of revelation, and persuasion came 
 Like gushing waters from his lips, till hearts 
 Unus'd to bend were soften'd, and the eye 
 Unwont to weep sent forth the willing tear. 
 I went my way — but as I went, I thought 
 How holy was the Sabbath-day of God 
 
 DEDICATION HYMN. 
 
 [Written to be sung at the consecration of Hanover-street Church, 
 Boston J 
 
 The perfect world by Adam trod, 
 Was the first temple — built by God — 
 His fiat laid the corner stone, 
 And heav'd its pillars, one by one 
 
 He hung its starry roof on high 
 
 The broad illimitable sky ; 
 
 He spread its pavement, green and bright. 
 
 And curtain'd it with morning light. 
 
 The mountains in their places stood — 
 The sea — the sky — and " all was good ;" 
 And, when its first pure praises rang, 
 The " morning stai-3 together sang." 
 
 Lord ! 'tis not ours to make the sea 
 And earth and sky a house for thee; 
 But in thy sight our ofT'ring stands — 
 A humbler temple, " made with hands " 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 THE DYING ALCHYMIST. 
 
 The night wind with a desolate moan swept by; 
 And the old shutters of the turret swung 
 Screaming upon their hinges ; and the moon, 
 As the torn edges of the clouds flew past, 
 Struggled aslant the stained and broken panes 
 So dimly, that the watchful eye of death 
 Scarcely was conscious when it went and came. 
 • •••**• 
 
 The fire beneath his crucible was low ; 
 Yet still it burned ; and ever as his thoughts 
 Grew insupportable, he raised himself 
 Upon his wasted arm, and stirred the coals 
 With difficult energy, and when the rod 
 Fell from his nerveless fingers, and his eye 
 Felt faint within its socket, he shrunk back 
 Upon his pallet, and with unclosed lips 
 Muttered a curse on death ! The silent room, 
 From its dim corners, mockingly gave back 
 His rattling breath ; the humming in the fire 
 Had the distinctness of a knell ; and when 
 Duly the antique horologe beat one, 
 He drew a phial from beneath his head, 
 And drank. And instantly his lips compressed, 
 And, with a shudder in his skeleton frame, 
 He rose with supernatural strength, and sat 
 Upright, and communed with himself: — 
 
 I did not think to die 
 Till I had finished what I had to do ; 
 I thought to pierce th' eternal secret through 
 
 With this my mortal eye ; 
 I felt — Oh God ! it seemeth even now 
 This can not be the death-dew on my brow ! 
 
 And yet it is — I feel, 
 Of this dull sickness at my heart, afraid ; 
 And in my eyes the death-sparks flash and fade ; 
 
 And something seems to steal 
 Over my bosom like a frozen hand — 
 Binding its pulses with an icy band. 
 
 And this is death ! But why 
 Feel I this wild recoil ? It can not be 
 Th' immortal spirit shuddereth to be free ! 
 
 Would it not leap to fly, 
 Like a chained eaglet at its parent's call ? 
 I feaf — I fear— that this poor life is all ! 
 
 Yet thus to pass away ! — 
 To live but for a hope that mocks at last — 
 To agonize, to strive, to watch, to fast, 
 
 To waste the light of day, 
 Night's better beauty, feeling, fancy, thought — 
 All that we have and are — for this— for naught ! 
 
 Grant me another year 
 God of my spirit ! — but a day — to win 
 Something to satisfy this thirst within ! 
 
 I would know something here ! 
 Break for me but one seal that is unbroken ! 
 Speak for me but one word that is unspoken ! 
 
 Vain — vain ! — my brain is turning 
 With a swift dizziness, and my heart grows sick, 
 And these hot temple-throbs come fast and thick, 
 
 And I am freezing — burning — 
 53 
 
 Dying ! Oh God ! if I might only live ! 
 My phial - Ha ! it thrills me— I revive. 
 
 Ay — were not man to die 
 He were too mighty for this narrow sphere ! 
 Had he but time to brood on knowledge here — 
 
 Could he but train his eye — 
 Might he but wait the mystic word and hour — 
 Only his Maker would transcend his power ! 
 
 Earth has no mineral strange — 
 Th' illimitable air no hidden wings — 
 Water no quality in covert springs, 
 
 And fire no power to change — 
 Seasons no mystery, and stars no spell, 
 Which the unwasting soul might not compel. 
 
 Oh, but for time to track 
 The upper stars into the pathless sky — 
 To see th' invisible spirits, eye to eye — 
 
 To hurl the lightning back — 
 To tread unhurt the sea's dim-lighted halls — 
 To chase Day's chariot to the horizon-walls — 
 
 And more, much more — for now 
 The life-sealed fountains of my nature move — 
 To nurse and purify this human love — 
 
 To clear the god-like brow 
 Of weakness and mistrust, and bow it down 
 Worthy and beautiful, to the much-loved one : 
 
 This were indeed to feel 
 The soul-thirst slaken at the living stream- 
 To live— Oh God ! that life is but a dream ! 
 
 And death Aha ! I reel — 
 
 Dim — dim — I faint— darkness comes o'er my eye — 
 Cover me ! save me ! God of heaven ! I die ! 
 
 'Twas morninsr, and the old man lay alone. 
 No friend had closed his eyelids, and his lips, 
 Open and ashy pale, th' expression wore 
 Of his death-struggle. His long silvery hair 
 Lay on his hollow temples thin and wild, 
 His frame was wasted, and his features wan 
 And haggard as with want, and in his palm 
 His nails were driven deep, as if the throe 
 Of the last agony had wrung him sore. 
 
 The storm was raging still. The shutters swung 
 Screaming as harshly in the fitful wind, 
 And all without went on — as aye it will, 
 Sunshine or tempest, reckless that a heart 
 Is breaking, or has broken, in its change. 
 
 The fire beneath the crucible was out ; 
 The vessels of his mystic art lay round, 
 Useless and cold as the ambitious hand 
 That fashioned them, and the small rod, 
 Familiar to his touch for threescore years, 
 Lay on th' alembic's rim, as if it still 
 Might vex the elements at its master's will. 
 
 And thus had passed from its unequal frame 
 A soul of fire— a sun-bent eagle stricken 
 From his high soaring down— an instrument 
 Broken with its own compass. Oh how poor 
 Seems the rich eift of genius, when it lies, 
 
834 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 Like the adventurous bird that hath out-flown 
 His strength upon the sea, ambition-wrecked— 
 A thing the thrush might pity, as she sits 
 Brooding in quiet on her lowly nest. 
 
 PARRHASIUS. 
 
 "Parrhasius. a painter of Athens, among those Olynthian captives 
 Fhilip of Macedon brought home to sell, bought one very old man ; 
 and when he had him at his house, put him to death with extreme 
 torture and torment, the better, by his example, to express the pains 
 and passions of his J-rornetheus, whom he was then about to paint." 
 —Burton's Anat. of Mel, 
 
 There stood an unsold captive in the mart, 
 
 A grayhaired and majestical old man, 
 
 Chained to a pillar. It was almost night, 
 
 And the last seller from his place had gone, 
 
 And not a sound was heard but of a dog 
 
 Crunching beneath the stall a refuse bone, 
 
 Or the dull echo from the pavement rung, 
 
 As the faint captive changed his weary "feet. 
 
 He had stood there since morning, and borne 
 
 From every eye in Athens the cold gaze 
 
 Of curious scorn. The Jew had taunted him 
 
 For an Olynthian slave. The buyer came, 
 
 And roughly struck his palm upon his breast, 
 
 And touched his unhealed wounds, and with a sneer 
 
 Passed on ; and when, with weariness o'erspent, 
 
 He bowed his head in a forgetful sleep, 
 
 Th' inhuman soldier smote him. and, with threats 
 
 Of torture to his children, summoned back 
 
 The ebbing blood into his pallid face. 
 
 'Twas evening, and the half-descended sun 
 
 Tipped with a golden fire the many domes 
 
 Of Athens, and a yellow atmosphere 
 
 Lay rich and dusky in the shaded street 
 
 Through which the captive gazed. He had borne up 
 
 With a stout heart that long and weary day, 
 
 Haughtily patient of his many wrongs; 
 
 But now he was alone, and from his^nerves 
 
 The needless strength departed, and he leaned 
 
 Prone on his massy chain, and let his thoughts 
 
 Throng on him as they would. Unmarked of him, 
 
 Parrhasius at the nearest pillar stood, 
 
 Gazing upon his grief. Th' Athenian's cheek 
 
 Flushed as he measured with a painter's eye 
 
 The moving picture. The abandoned limbs, 
 
 Stained with the oozing blood, were laced with veins 
 
 Swollen to purple fulness ; the gray hair, 
 
 Thin and disordered, hung about his eyes ; 
 
 And as a thought of wilder bitterness 
 
 Rose in his memory, his lips grew white, 
 
 And the fast workings of his bloodless face 
 
 Told what a tooth of fire was at his heart. 
 
 The golden light into the painter's room 
 
 Streamed richly, and the hidden colors stole 
 
 From the dark pictures radiantly forth, 
 
 And in the soft and dewy atmosphere 
 
 Like forms and landscapes magical they lay. 
 
 The walls were hung with armor, and about 
 
 In the dim corners stood the sculptured forms 
 
 Of Cythens, and Dian, and stern Jove, 
 
 And from the casement soberly away 
 
 Fell the grotesque long shadows, full and true, 
 
 And, like a veil of filmy mellowness, 
 
 The lint-specks floated in the twilight air. 
 
 Parrhasius stood, gazing forgetfully 
 
 Upon his canvass. There Prometheus lay, 
 
 Chained to the cold rocks of Mount Caucasus— 
 
 The vulture at his vitals, and the links 
 
 Of the lame Lemnian festering in his flesh ; 
 
 And, as the painter's mind felt through the dim, 
 
 Rapt mystery, and plucked the shadows forth 
 
 With its far-reaching fancy, and with form 
 
 And color clad them, his fine earnest eye 
 
 Flashed with a passionate fire, and the quick curl 
 
 Of his thin nostril, and his quivering lip, 
 
 Were like the winged God's, breathing from his flight. 
 
 " Bring me the captive now ! 
 My hands feel skilful, and the shadows lift 
 From my waked spirit airily and swift, 
 
 And I could paint the bow 
 
 Upon the bended heavens — around me play 
 Colors of such divinity to-day. 
 
 " Ha ! bind him on his back ! 
 Look ! — as Prometheus in my picture here ! 
 Quick — or he faints I — stand with the cordial near ! 
 
 Now — bend him to the rack I 
 Press down the poisoned links into his flesh ! 
 And tear agape that healing wound afresh ! 
 
 " So — let him writhe ! How long 
 Will he live thus ? Quick, my good pencil, now ! 
 What a fine agony works upon his brow ! 
 
 Ha ! grayhaired and so strong ! 
 How fearfully he stifles that short moan ! 
 Gods ! if I could but paint a dying groan ! 
 
 " ' Pity' thee ! So I do ! 
 I pity the dumb victim at the altar — 
 But does the robed priest for his pity falter ? 
 
 I'd rack thee though I knew 
 A thousand lives were perishing in thine — 
 What were ten thousand to a fame like mine ? 
 
 " < Hereafter !' Ay— hereafter ! 
 A whip to keep a coward to his track ! 
 What gave death ever from his kingdom back 
 
 To check the skeptic's laughter ? 
 Come from the grave to-morrow with that story. 
 And I may take some softer path to glory. 
 
 " No, no, old man ! we die 
 E'en as the flowers, and we shall breathe away 
 Our life upon the chance wind, even as they ! 
 
 Strain well thy fainting eye — 
 For when that bloodshot quivering is o'er, 
 The light of heaven will never reach thee more. 
 
 " Yet there's a deathless name ! 
 A spirit that the smothering vault shall spurn, 
 And like a steadfast planet mount and burn ; 
 
 And though its crown of flame 
 Consumed my brain to ashes as it shone, 
 By all the fiery stars ! I'd bind it on ! 
 
 " Ay— though it bid me rifle 
 My heart's last fount for its insatiate thirst — 
 Though every life-strung nerve be maddened first 
 
 Though it should bid me stifle 
 The yearning in my throat for my sweet child, 
 And taunt its mother till my brain went wild — 
 
 " All— I would do it ail- 
 Sooner than die, like a dull worm, to rot — 
 Thrust foully into earth to be forgot ! 
 
 Oh heavens — but I appal 
 
 Your heart, old man ! forgive ha ! on your lives 
 
 Let him not faint ! — rack him till he revives ! 
 
 "Vain — vain — give o'er ! His eye 
 Glazes apace. He does not feel you now — 
 Stand back I I'll paint the death-dew on his brow ! 
 
 Gods ! if he do not die 
 But for one moment— one — till I eclipse 
 Conception with the scorn of those calm lips ! 
 
 " Shivering ! Hark ! he mutters 
 Brokenly now— that was a difficult breath — 
 Another ? Wilt thou never come, oh Death ! 
 
 Look ! how his temple flutters ! 
 Is his heart still ? Aha ! lift up his head ! 
 He shudders — gasps — Jove help him ! — so — he's dead.'* 
 
 How like a mounting devil in the heart 
 
 Rules the unreined ambition ! Let it once 
 
 But play the monarch, and its haughty brow 
 
 Glows with a beauty that bewilders thought 
 
 And unthrones peace for ever. Putting on 
 
 The very pomp of Lucifer, it turns 
 
 The heart to ashes, and with not a spring 
 
 Left in the bosom for the spirit's lip, 
 
 We look upon our splendor and forget 
 
 The thirst of which we perish ! Yet hath life 
 
 Many a falser idol. There are hopes 
 
 Promising well, and love-touched dreams for some, 
 
 And passions, many a wild one, and fair schemes 
 
 For gold and pleasure — yet will only this 
 
POExMS OF PASSION. 
 
 835 
 
 Balk not the soul — Ambition only, gives, 
 
 Even of bitterness, a beaker full ! 
 
 Friendship is but a slow-awaking dream, 
 
 Troubled at best — Love is a lamp unseen, 
 
 Burning to waste, or, if its light is found, 
 
 Nursed for an idle hour, then idly broken — 
 
 Gain is a grovelling care, and Folly tires, 
 
 And Quiet is a hunger never fed — 
 
 And from Love's very bosom, and from Gain, 
 
 Or Folly, or a Friend, or from Repose — 
 
 From all but keen Ambition — will the soul 
 
 Snatch the first moment of forgetfulness 
 
 To wander like a restless child away. 
 
 Oh, if there were not better hopes than these — 
 
 Were there no palm beyond a feverish fame — 
 
 If the proud wealth flung back upon the heart 
 
 Must canker in its coffers — if the links 
 
 Falsehood hath broken will unite no more — 
 
 If the deep-yearning love, that hath not found 
 
 Its like in the cold world, must waste in tears — 
 
 If truth, and fervor, and devotedness, 
 
 Finding no worthy altar, must return 
 
 And die of their own fulness — if beyond 
 
 The grave there is no heaven in whose wide air 
 
 The spirits may find room, and in the love 
 
 Of whose bright habitants the lavish heart 
 
 May spend itself — what thrice-mocked fools are we ! 
 
 THE SCHOLAR OF THEBET BEX KHORAT.' 
 
 " Influentia cceli morbum hunc movet, interdum omnibus aliis 
 amotis." — Melancthon de Anirna, Cap. de Humoribus. 
 
 Night in Arabia. An hour ago, 
 
 Pale Dian had descended from the sky, 
 
 Flinging her cestus out upon the sea, 
 
 And at their watches now the solemn stars 
 
 Stood vigilant and lone ; and, dead asleep, 
 
 With not a shadow moving on its breast, 
 
 The breathing earth lay in its silver dew, 
 
 And, trembling on their myriad viewless wings, 
 
 Th' imprisoned odors left the flowers to dream, 
 
 And stole away upon the yielding air. 
 
 Ben Khorat's tower stands shadowy and tall 
 
 In Mecca's loneliest street ; and ever there, 
 
 When night is at the deepest, burns his lamp 
 
 As constant as the Cynosure, and forth 
 
 From his looped window stretch the brazen tubes, 
 
 Pointing for ever at the central star 
 
 Of that dim nebula just lifting now 
 
 Over Mount Arafat. The sky to-night 
 
 Is of a clearer blackness than is wont, 
 
 And far within its depths the colored starsf 
 
 Sparkle like gems — capricious Antaresf 
 
 Flushing and paling in the southern arch ; 
 
 And azure Lyra, like a woman's eye, 
 
 Burning with soft blue lustre ; and away 
 
 Over the desert the bright Polar-star, 
 
 White as a flashing icicle; and here, 
 
 Hung like a lamp above th' Arabian sea, 
 
 Mars with his dusky glow; and, fairer yet, 
 
 Mild Sirius,§ tinct with dewy violet, 
 
 Set like a flower upon the breast of Eve; 
 
 And in the zenith the sweet Pleiades, || 
 
 " A famous Arabian astrologer, who is said to have spent forty 
 years in discovering- the motion of the eighth sphere. He had a 
 scholar, a young Bedouin Arab, who, with a singular passion for 
 knowledge, abandoned his wandering tribe, and, applying himself 
 too closely to astrology, lost his reason and died. 
 
 t " Even to the naked eye. the stars appear of palpably different 
 colors ; but when viewed with a prismatic glass, they may be very 
 accurately classed into the red, the yellow, the brilliant white, the 
 dull white, and the anomalous. This is true aUo of the planets, 
 which shine by reflected light ; and of course the difference of color 
 must be supposed to arise from their different powers to absorb and 
 reflect the -ays of the sun. The original composition of the stars, 
 and the diffeient dispersive powers of their different atmospheres, 
 may be supposed to account also for this phenomenon " 
 
 t This star exhibits a peculiar quality— a rapid and beautiful 
 change in the color of its light ; every alternate twinkling being of 
 an intense reddish crimson color, and the answering one of a bril- 
 liant white. 
 
 i When seen with a prismatic glass, Sirius shows a large brush 
 of exceedingly beautiful rays. 
 
 1 The Pleiades are vertical in Arabia 
 
 (Alas— that ev'n a star may pass from heaven 
 And not be missed !)— the linked Pleiades 
 Undimned are there, though from the sister band 
 The fairest has gone down ; and, south away, 
 Hirundo* with its little company ; 
 And white-browed Vesta, lamping on her path 
 Lonely and planet-calm, and, all through heaven, 
 Articulate almost, they troop to-night, 
 Like unrobed angels in a prophet's trance. 
 
 Ben Khorat knelt before his telescope,f 
 Gazing with earnest stillness on the stars. 
 The gray hairs, struggling from his turban folds, 
 Played with the entering wind upon his cheeks, 
 And on his breast his venerable beard 
 With supernatural whiteness loosely fell. 
 The black flesh swelled about his sandal thongs, 
 Tight with his painful posture, and his lean 
 And withered fingers to his knees were clenched, 
 And the thin lashes of his straining eye 
 Lay with unwinking closeness to the lens, 
 Stiffened with tense up-turning. Hour by hour, 
 Till the stars melted in the flush of morn, 
 The old astrologer knelt moveless there, 
 Ravished past pain with the bewildering spheres, 
 And, hour by hour, with the same patient thought, 
 Pored his pale scholar on the characters 
 Of Chaldee writ, or, as his gaze grew dim 
 With weariness, the dark-eyed Arab laid 
 His head upon the window and looked forth 
 Upon the heavens awhile, until the dews 
 And the soft beauty of the silent night 
 Cooled his flushed eyelids, and then patiently 
 He turned unto his constant task again. 
 
 The sparry glinting of the Morning Star 
 Shot through the leaves of a majestic palm 
 Fringing Mount Arafat ; and, as it caught 
 The eye of the rapt scholar, he arose 
 And clasped the volume with an eager haste, 
 And as the glorious planet mounted on, 
 Melting her way into the upper sky, 
 He breathlessly gazed on her : — 
 
 " Star of the silver ray ! 
 Bright as a god, but punctual as a slave — 
 What spirit the eternal canon gave 
 
 That bends thee to thy way ? 
 What is the soul that on thine arrowy light 
 Is walking earth and heaven in pride to-night ? 
 
 "We know when thou wilt soar 
 Over the mount — thy change, and place, and time — 
 'Tis written in the Chaldee's mystic rhyme 
 
 As 'twere a priceless lore ! 
 I knew as much in my Bedouin garb — 
 Coursing the desert on my flying barb ! 
 
 " How oft amid the tents 
 Upon Sahara's sands I've walked alone, 
 Waiting all night for thee, resplendent one ! 
 
 With what magnificence, 
 In the last walches, to my thirsting eye, 
 Thy passionate beauty flushed into the sky ! 
 
 " Oh, God ! how flew my soul 
 Out to thy glory — upward on thy ray — 
 Panting as thou ascendedst on thy way, 
 
 As if thine own control — 
 This searchless spirit that I can not find — 
 Had set its radiant law upon my mind ! 
 
 " More than all stars in heaven 
 I felt thee in my heart ! my love became 
 A phrensy, and consumed me with its flame. 
 
 Ay, in the desert even — 
 My dark-eyed Abra coursing at my side — 
 The star, not Abra, was my spirit's bride ! 
 
 * An Arabic constellation placed instead of the Piscls Australls, 
 because the swallow arrives in Arabia about the time of the heli- 
 acal rising of the Fishes. 
 
 t An anachronism, the author is aware. The telescope was not 
 invented for a century or two aft«r the time of Ben Khorat 
 
836 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 "My Abra is no more ! 
 My * desert-bird' is in a stranger's stall — 
 My tribe, my tent — I sacrificed them all 
 
 For this heart-wasting lore ! — 
 Yet, than all these, the thought is sweeter far — 
 Thou wert ascendant at my birth, bright star ! 
 
 "The Chaldee calls me thine— 
 And in this breast, that I must rend to be 
 A spirit upon wings of light like thee, 
 
 I feel that thou art mine ! 
 Oh, God ! that these dull fetters would give way 
 And let me forth to track thy silver ray !" 
 
 * * * Ben Khorat rose 
 
 And silently looked forth upon the East. 
 
 The dawn was stealing up into the sky 
 
 On its gray feet, the stars grew dim apace, 
 
 And faded, till the Morning Star alone, 
 
 Soft as a molten diamond's liquid fire, 
 
 Burned in the heavens. The morn grew freshlier- 
 
 The upper clouds were faintly touched with gold ; 
 
 The fan palms rustled in the early air ; 
 
 Daylight spread cool and broadly to the hills ; 
 
 And still the star was visible, and still 
 
 The young Bedouin with a straining eye 
 
 Drank its departing light into his soul. 
 
 It faded— melted — and the fiery rim 
 
 Of the clear sun came up, and painfully 
 
 The passionate scholar pressed upon his eyes 
 
 His dusky fingers, and with limbs as weak 
 
 As a sick child's, turned fainting to his couch, 
 
 And slept. * * * * 
 
 * * It was the morning watch once more, 
 
 The clouds were drifting rapidly above, 
 
 And dim and fast the glimmering stars flew through ; 
 
 And as the fitful gust soughed mournfully, 
 
 The shutters shook, and on the sloping roof 
 
 Plashed, heavily, large, single drops of rain — 
 
 And all was still again. Ben Khorat sat 
 
 By the dim lamp, and, while his scholar slept, 
 
 Pored on the Chaldee wisdom. At his feet, 
 
 Stretched on a pallet, lay the Arab boy, 
 
 Muttering fast in his unquiet sleep, 
 
 And working his dark fingers in his palms 
 
 Convulsively. His sallow lips were pale, 
 
 And, as they moved, his teeth showed ghastly through 
 
 White as a charnel bone, and — closely drawn 
 
 Upon his sunken eyes, as if to press 
 
 Some frightful image from the bloodshot balls — 
 
 His lids a moment quivered, and again 
 
 Relaxed, half open, in a calmer sleep. 
 
 Ben Khorat gazed upon the dropping sands 
 Of the departing hour. The last white grain 
 Fell through, and with the tremulous hand of age 
 The old astrologer reversed the glass ; 
 And, as the voiceless monitor went on, 
 Wasting and wasting with the precious hour, 
 He looked upon it with a moving lip, 
 And, starting, turned his gaze upon the heavens, 
 Cursing the clouds impatiently. 
 
 " 'Tis time !" 
 Muttered the dying scholar, and he dashed 
 The tangled hair from his black eyes away, 
 And, seizing on Ben Khorat's mantle-folds, 
 He struggled to his feet, and falling prone 
 Upon the window-ledge, gazed steadfastly 
 Into the East :— 
 
 " There is a cloud between — 
 She sits this instant on the mountain's brow, 
 And that dusk veil hides all her glory now — 
 
 Yet floats she as serene 
 
 Into the heavens ! Oh, God ! than even so 
 
 I could o'ermount my spirit cloud, and go ! 
 
 "The cloud begins to drift ! 
 Aha ! Fling open ! 'tis the star — the sky ! 
 Touch me, immortal mother ! and I fly ! 
 
 Wider ! thou cloudy rift ! 
 
 Let through ! — such glory should have radiant room ! 
 Let through ! — a star-child on its light goes home ! 
 
 "Speak to me, brethren bright ! 
 Ye who are floating in these living beams ! 
 Ye who have come to me in starry dreams ! 
 
 Ye who have winged the light , 
 
 Of our bright mother with its thoughts of flame — 
 (I knew it passed through spirits as it came) — 
 
 " Tell me ! what power have ye ? 
 What are the heights ye reach upon your wings ? 
 What know ye of the myriad wondrous things 
 
 I perish but to see ? 
 Are ye thought-rapid ? — Can ye fly as far — 
 As instant as a thought, from star to star ? 
 
 " Where has the Pleiad gone ? 
 Where have all missing stars* found light and home ? 
 Who bids the Stella Miraf go and come ? 
 
 Why sits the Pole-star lone ? 
 And why, like banded sisters, through the air 
 Go in bright troops the constellations fair ? 
 
 " Ben Khorat ! dost thou mark ? 
 The star! the star? By heaven! the cloud drifts o'er ! 
 Gone — and I live ! nay^will my heart beat more ? 
 
 Look ! master ! 'tis all dark ! 
 Not a clear speck in heaven ? — my eye-balls smother ! 
 Break through the clouds once more ! oh, starry mother ! 
 
 " I will lie down ! Yet stay, 
 The rain beats out the odor from the gums, 
 And strangely soft to-night the spice-wind comes ! 
 
 I am a child alway 
 When it is on my forehead ! Abra sweet ! 
 Would I were in the desert at thy feet ! 
 
 " My barb ! my glorious steed ! 
 Methinks my soul would mount upon its track 
 More fleetly, could I die upon thy back ! 
 
 How would thy thrilling speed 
 Quicken my pulse ! — Oh, Allah ! I get wild ! 
 Would that I were once more a desert-child ! 
 
 " Nay — nay — I had forgot ! 
 My mother ! my star mother ! — Ha ! my breath 
 Stifles ! more air ! Ben Khorat ! this is — death! 
 
 Touch me ! 1 feel you not ! 
 
 Dying ! — Farewell ! good master ! — room ! more room ! 
 Abra ! I loved thee ! star — bright star ! I come !" 
 
 How idly of the human heart we speak, 
 Giving it gods of clay ! How worse than vain 
 Is the school homily, that Eden's fruit 
 Can not be plucked too freely from " the tree 
 Of good and evil." Wisdom sits alone, 
 Topmost in heaven ; — she is its light — its God ! 
 And in the heart of man she sits as high — 
 Though grovelling eyes forget her oftentimes, 
 Seeing but this world's idols. The pure mind 
 Sees her for ever : and in youth we come 
 Filled with her sainted ravishment, and kneel, 
 Worshipping God through her sweet altar-fires, 
 And then is knowledge " good." We come too oft — 
 The heart grows proud with fulness, and we soon 
 Look with licentious freedom on the maid 
 Throned in celestial beauty. There she sits, 
 Robed in her soft and seraph loveliness, 
 Instructing and forgiving, and we gaze 
 Until desire grows wild, and, with our hands 
 Upon her very garments, are struck down, 
 Blasted with a consuming fire from heaven ! 
 
 * " Missing stars" are often spoken of in the old books of astron 
 omy. Hipparchus mentions one that appeared and vanished very 
 suddenly; and in the beginning of the sixteenth century Kepler 
 discovered a new star near the heel of the right foot of Serpenta- 
 rius, "so bright and sparkling that it exceeded anything he had 
 ever seen before." He " took notice that it was every moment 
 changing into some of the colors of the rainbow, except when it 
 was near the horizon, when it was generally white." It disap- 
 peared in the following year, and has not been^een since. 
 
 t A wonderful star in the neck of the Whale, discovered by Fa- 
 bricius in the fifteenth century. It appears and disappears seven 
 times in six years, and continues in the greatest lustre for fifteen 
 days together. 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 837 
 
 Yet, oh ! how full of music from her lips 
 Breathe the calm tones of wisdom ! Human praise 
 Is sweet — till envy mars it, and the touch 
 Of new- won gold stirs up the pulses well; 
 And woman's love, if in a beggar's lamp 
 'T would burn, might light us clearly through theworld; 
 But Knowledge hath a far more 'wildering tongue, 
 And she will stoop and lead you to the stars, 
 And witch you with her mysteries — till gold 
 Is a forgotten dross, and power and fame 
 Toys of an hour, and woman's careless love, 
 Light as the breath that breaks it. He who binds 
 His soul to knowledge steals the key of heaven — 
 But 'tis a bitter mockery that the fruit 
 May hang within his reach, and when, with thirst 
 Wrought to a maddening phrensy, he would taste- 
 It burns his lips to ashes ! 
 
 THE WIFE'S APPEAL. 
 
 " Love borrows greatly from opinion. Pride above all things 
 strengthens affection."— £. L. Bulwer. 
 
 He sat and read. A book with silver clasps, 
 
 All gorgeous with illuminated lines 
 
 Of gold and crimson, lay upon a frame 
 
 Before him. 'Twas a volume of old time ; 
 
 And in it were fine mysteries of the stars 
 
 Solved with a cunning wisdom, and strange thoughts, 
 
 Half prophecy, half poetry, and dreams 
 
 Clearer than truth, and speculations wild 
 
 That touched the secrets of your very soul, 
 
 They were so based on Nature. With a face 
 
 Glowing with thought, he pored upon the book. 
 
 The cushions of an Indian loom lay soft 
 
 Beneath his limbs, and, as he turned the page, 
 
 The sunlifht, streaming through the curtain's fold, 
 
 Fell with a rose-teint on his jewelled hand ; 
 
 And the rich woods of the quaint furniture 
 
 Lay deepening their veined colors in the sun, 
 
 And the stained marbles on the pedestals 
 
 Stood like a silent company— Voltaire, 
 
 With an infernal sneer upon his lips ; 
 
 And Socrates, with godlike human love 
 
 Stamped on his countenance ; and orators, 
 
 Of times gone by that made them ; and old bards, 
 
 And Medicean Venus, half divine. 
 
 Around the room were shelves of dainty lore, 
 
 And rich old pictures hung upon the walls 
 
 Where the slant light fell on them ; and wrought gems. 
 
 Medallions, rare mosaics, and antiques 
 
 From Herculaneum, the niches filled ; 
 
 And on a table of enamel, wrought 
 
 With a lost art in Italy, there lay 
 
 Prints of fair women, and engravings rare, 
 
 And a new poem, and a costly toy ; 
 
 And in their midst a massive lamp of bronze 
 
 Burning sweet spices constantly. Asleep 
 
 Upon the carpet couched a graceful hound, 
 
 Of a rare breed, and, as his master gave 
 
 A murmur of delight at some sweet line, 
 
 He raised his slender head, and kept his eye 
 
 Upon him till the pleasant smile had passed 
 
 From his mild lips, and then he slept again. 
 
 The light beyond the crimson folds grew dusk, 
 
 And the clear letters of the pleasant book 
 
 Mingled and blurred, and the lithe hound rose up, 
 
 And, with his earnest eye upon the door, 
 
 Listened attentively. It came as wont — 
 
 The fall of a light foot upon the stair— 
 
 And the fond animal sprang out to meet 
 
 His mistress, and caress the ungloved hand, 
 
 He seemed to know was beautiful. She stooped 
 
 Gracefully down and touched his silken ears 
 
 As she passed in — then, with a tenderness, 
 
 Half playful and half serious, she knelt 
 
 Upon the ottoman and pressed her lips 
 
 Upon her husband's forehead. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 She rose and put the curtain-folds aside 
 From the high window, and looked out upon 
 The shining stars in silence. " Look they not 
 Like Paradises to thine eye ?" he said — 
 
 But, as he spoke, a tear fell through the light — 
 And — starting from his seat — he folded her 
 Close to his heart, and — with unsteady voice — 
 Asked — if she was not happy. A faint smile 
 Broke through her tears ; and pushing off the hair 
 From his broad forehead, she held back his head 
 With her white hand, and, gazing on his face, 
 Gave to her heart free utterance : — 
 
 Happy ? — yes, dearest ! — blest 
 Beyond the limit of my wildest dream — 
 Too bright indeed, my blessings ever seem ; 
 
 There lives not in my breast, 
 One of Hope's promises by Love unkept, 
 And yet — forgive me, Ernest — I have wept. 
 
 How shall I speak of sadness, 
 And seem not thankless to my God and thee ? 
 How can the lightest wish but seem to be 
 
 The very whim of madness ? 
 Yet, oh, there is a boon thy love beside — 
 And I will ask it of thee— in my pride ! 
 
 List, while my boldness lingers ! 
 If thou hadst won yon twinkling star to hear thee — 
 If thou couldst bid the rainbow's curve bend near 
 thee — 
 
 If thou couldst charm thy fingers 
 To weave for thee the Sunset's tent of gold — 
 Wouldst in thine own heart treasure it untold ? 
 
 If thou hadst Ariel's gift, 
 To course the veined metals of the earth — 
 If thou couldst wind a fountain to its birth — 
 
 If thou couldst know the drift 
 Of the lost cloud that sailed into the sky — 
 Wouldst keep it for thine own unanswered eye ? 
 
 It is thy life and mine ! 
 Thou, in thyself— and I, in thee— misprison 
 Gifts like a circle of bright stars unrisen— 
 
 For thou whose mind should shine, 
 Eminent as a planet's light, art here — 
 Moved with the starting of a woman's tear ! 
 
 I have told o'er thy powers 
 In secret, as a miser tells his gold ; 
 I know thy spirit calm, and true and bold : 
 
 I've watched thy lightest hours, 
 And seen thee, in the wildest flush of youth, 
 Touched with the instinct ravishment of truth. 
 
 Thou hast the secret strange 
 To read that hidden book, the human heart ; 
 Thou hast the ready writer's practised art ; 
 
 Thou hast the thought to range 
 The broadest circles Intellect hath ran — 
 And thou art God's best work— an honest man ! 
 
 And yet thou slumberest here 
 Like a caged bird that never knew its pinions, 
 And others track in glory the dominions 
 
 Where thou hast not thy peer- 
 Setting their weaker eyes unto the sun, 
 And plucking honor that thou shouldst have won. 
 
 Oh, if thou lovedst me ever, 
 Ernest, my husband ! If th' idolatry 
 That lets go heaven to fling its all on thee— 
 
 If to dismiss thee never . 
 
 In dream or praver, have given me aught to claim- 
 Heed me-oh, heed me ! and awake to lame ! 
 
 Her lips 
 Closed with an earnest sweetness and she sat 
 Gazing into his eyes as if her look . 
 
 Searched their dark orbs for answer. The warm blood 
 Into his temples mounted, and across 
 His countenance the flush of passionate thoughts 
 Passed with irresolute quickness. He rose up 
 And paced the dim room rapidly awhile, 
 Calmin- his troubled mind ; and then he cam* 
 And laid his hand upon her orbed brow, 
 And in a voice of heavenly tenderness 
 Answered her : — 
 
838 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION 
 
 Before I knew thee, Mary, 
 Ambition was my angel. I did hear 
 For ever its witched voices in mine ear ; 
 
 My days were visionary — 
 My nights were like the slumbers of the mad — 
 And every dream swept o'er me glory clad. 
 
 I read the burning letters 
 Of warlike pomp, on History's page, alone ; 
 I counted nothing the struck widow's moan ; 
 
 I heard no clank of fetters ; 
 I only felt the trumpet's stirring blast, 
 And lean-eyed Famine stalked unchallenged past ! 
 
 I heard with veins of lightning, 
 The utterance of the Statesman's word of power — 
 Binding and loosing nations in an hour — 
 
 But, while my eye was brightening, 
 A masked detraction breathed upon his fame, 
 And a curst serpent slimed his written name. 
 
 The poet rapt mine ears 
 With the transporting music that he sung. 
 With fibres from his life his lyre he strung, 
 
 And bathed the world in tears — 
 And then he turned away to some muse apart, 
 And Scorn stole after him — and broke his heart ! 
 
 Yet here and there I saw 
 One who did set the world at calm defiance. 
 And press right onward with a bold reliance ; 
 
 And he did seem to awe 
 The very Shadows pressing on his breast, 
 And, with a strong heart, held himself at rest. 
 
 And then I looked again — 
 And he had shut the door upon the crowd, 
 And on his face he lay and groaned aloud — 
 
 Wrestling with hidden pain; 
 And in her chamber sat his wife in tears, 
 And his sweet babes grew sad with whispered fears. 
 
 And so I turned sick-hearted 
 From the bright cup away, and, in my sadness, 
 Searched mine own bosom for some spring of gladness ; 
 
 And lo! a fountain started 
 Whose waters even in death flow calm and fast, 
 And my wild fever-thirst was slaked at last. 
 
 And then I met thee, Mary, 
 And felt how love may into fulness pour, 
 Like light into a fountain running o'er : 
 
 And I did hope to vary 
 My life but with surprises sweet as this — 
 A dream — but for thy waking — filled with bliss. 
 
 Yet now I feel my spirit 
 Bitterly stirred, and — nay, lift up thy brow ! 
 It is thine own voice echoing to thee now, 
 
 And thou didst pray to hear it — 
 I must unto my work and my stern hours ! 
 Take from my room thy harp, and books, and flowers ! 
 
 • • » » • 
 
 * * * * A year — 
 And in his room again he sat alone. 
 
 His frame had lost its fulness in that time ; 
 His manly features had grown sharp and thin, 
 And from his lips the constant smile had faded. 
 Wild fires had burned the languor from his eye : 
 The lids looked fevered, and the brow was bent 
 With an habitual frown. He was much changed. 
 His chin was resting on his clenched hand, 
 And with his foot he beat upon the floor, 
 Unconsciously, the time of a sad tune. 
 Thoughts of the past preyed on him bitterly. 
 He had won power and held it. He had walked 
 Steadily upward in the eye of Fame, 
 And kept his truth unsullied — but his home 
 Had been invaded by envenomed tongues ; 
 His wife — his spotless wife — had been assailed 
 By slander, and his child had grown afraid 
 To come to him — his manner was so stern. 
 He could not speak beside his own hearth freely. 
 His friends were half estranged, and vulgar men 
 
 Presumed upon their services and grew 
 Familiar with him. He'd small time to sleep, 
 And none to pray ; and, with his heart in fetters, 
 He bore deep insults silently, and bowed 
 Respectfully to men who knew he loathed them ! 
 And, when his heart was eloquent with truth, 
 And love of country, and an honest zeal 
 Burned for expression, he could find no words 
 They would not misinterpret with their lies. 
 What were his many honors to him now ? 
 The good half doubted, falsehood was so strong— 
 His home was hateful with its cautious fears — 
 His wife lay trembling on his very breast 
 Frighted with calumny ! — And this is FAME. 
 
 MELANIE. 
 
 I stood on yonder rocky brow,* 
 
 And marvelled at the Sibyl's fane, 
 When I was not what I am now. 
 
 My life was then untouched of pain; 
 And, as the breeze that stirred my hair, 
 
 My spirit freshened in the sky, 
 And all things that were true and fair 
 
 Lay closely to my loving eye, 
 With nothing shadowy between — 
 I was a boy of seventeen. 
 Yon wond'rous temple crests the rock — 
 
 As light upon its giddy base, 
 As stirless with the torrent's shock, 
 
 As pure in its proportioned grace, 
 And seems a thing of air — as then, 
 Afloat above this fairy glen ; 
 
 But though mine eye will kindle still 
 In looking on the shapes of art, • 
 
 The link is lost that sent the thrill, 
 Like lightning, instant to my heart. 
 And thus may break before we die, 
 Th' electric chain 'twixt soul and eye ! 
 
 Ten years — like yon bright valley, sown 
 
 Alternately with weeds and flowers — 
 Had swiftly, if not gayly, flown, 
 
 And still I loved the rosy Hours ; 
 And if there lurked within my breast 
 
 Some nerve that had been overstrung 
 And quivered in my hours of rest, 
 
 Like bells by their own echo rung, 
 I was with hope a masquer yet, 
 
 And well could hide the look of sadness ; 
 And, if my heart would not forget, 
 
 I knew, at least, the trick of gladness ; 
 And when another sang the strain, 
 I mingled in the old refrain. 
 
 'Twere idle to remember now, 
 
 Had I the heart, my thwarted schemes. 
 I bear beneath this altered brow 
 
 The ashes of a thousand dreams — 
 Some wrought of wild Ambition's fingers, 
 
 Some colored of Love's pencil well — 
 But none of which a shadow lingers, 
 
 And none whose story I could tell. 
 Enough, that when I climbed again 
 
 To Tivoli's romantic steep, 
 Life had no joy, and scarce a pain, 
 
 Whose wells I had not tasted deep ; 
 And from my lips the thirst had passed 
 For every fount save one — the sweetest — and the last. 
 
 The last — the last ! My friends were dead, 
 
 Or false ; my mother in her grave ; 
 Above my father's honored head 
 
 The sea had locked its hiding wave ; 
 Ambition had but foiled my grasp, 
 And love had perished in my clasp ; 
 
 And still, I say, I did not slack 
 My love of life, and hope of pleasure, 
 
 But gathered my affections back ; 
 And, as the miser hugs his treasure 
 
 When plague and ruin bid him flee, 
 I closer clung to mine — my loved, lost Melanie ! 
 *The story is told dnrinsr a walk around the Cascatolles of Tivoli 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 839 
 
 The last of the De Brevern race, 
 
 My sister claimed no kinsman's care ; 
 And, looking from each other's face, 
 
 The eye stole upward unaware — 
 For there was naught whereon to lean 
 Each other's heart and heaven between — 
 
 Yet that was world enough for me ; 
 And, for a brief but blessed while, 
 
 There seemed no care for Melanie 
 If she could see her brother smile I 
 
 But life with her was at the flow, 
 And every wave went sparkling higher, 
 
 While mine was ebbing, fast and low, 
 From the same shore of vain desire; 
 
 And knew I, with prophetic heart, 
 That we were wearing, aye, insensibly apart. 
 
 We came to Italy. I felt 
 
 A yearning for its sunny sky; 
 My very spirit seemed to melt 
 
 As swept its first warm breezes by. 
 From lip and cheek a chilling mist, 
 
 From life and soul a frozen rime, 
 By every breath seemed softly kissed — 
 
 God's blessing on its radiant clime ! 
 It was an endless joy to me 
 
 To see my sister's new delight; . 
 From Venice in its golden sea 
 
 To Paestum in its purple light — 
 By sweet Val d'Arno's teinted hills — 
 
 In Vallombrosa's convent gloom — 
 Mid Terni's vale of singing rills — 
 
 By deathless lairs in solemn Rome — 
 In gay Palermo's " Golden Shell" — 
 At Arethusa's hidden well — 
 
 We loitered like th' impassioned sun 
 That slept so lovingly on all, 
 
 And made a home of every one — 
 Ruin, and fane, and waterfall — 
 
 And crowned the dying day with glory 
 If we had seen, since morn, but one old haunt of story. 
 
 We came with Spring to Tivoli. 
 
 My sister loved its laughing air 
 And merry waters, though, for me, 
 My heart was in another key ; 
 
 And sometimes I could scarcely bear 
 The mirth of their eternal play, 
 
 And, like a child that longs for home 
 When weary of its holyday, 
 
 I sighed for melancholy Rome. 
 Perhaps — the fancy haunts me still — 
 'Twas but a boding sense of ill. 
 
 It was a morn, of such a day 
 
 As might have dawned on Eden first, 
 Early in the Italian May. 
 
 Vine-leaf and flower had newly burst, 
 And on the burthen of the air 
 The breath of buds came faint and rare ; 
 
 And far in the transparent sky 
 The small, earth-keeping birds were seen 
 
 Soaring deliriously high ; 
 And through the clefts of newer green 
 
 Yon waters dashed their living pearls; 
 And with a gayer smile and bow 
 
 Trooped on the merry village-girls ; 
 And from the contadino's brow 
 
 The low-slouched hat was backward thrown, 
 
 With air that scarcely seemed his own ; 
 And Melanie, with lips apart, 
 
 And clasped hands upon my arm, 
 Flung open her impassioned heart, 
 
 And blessed life's mere and breathing charm ; 
 And sang old songs, and gathered flowers, 
 And passionately bless'd once more life's thrilling hours, 
 
 In happiness and idleness 
 
 We wandered down yon sunny vale — 
 Oh mocking eyes ! — a golden tress 
 
 Floats back upon this summer gale ! 
 
 A foot is tripping on the grass ! 
 
 A laugh rings merry in mine ear ! 
 I see a bounding shadow pass ! — 
 
 God ! my sister once was here 1 
 Come with me, friend.— We rested yon ! 
 
 There grew a flower she plucked and wore ! 
 She sat upon this mossy stone — 
 
 That broken fountain running o'er 
 With the same ring, like silver bells. 
 
 She listened to its babbling flow, 
 And said, " Perhaps the gossip tells 
 
 Some fountain-nymph's love-story now !" 
 And as her laugh ran clear and wild, 
 A youth — a painter — passed and smiled. 
 
 He gave the greeting of the morn 
 
 With voice that lingered in mine ear. 
 I knew him sad and gentle born 
 
 By those two words — so calm and clear. 
 His frame was slight, his forehead high 
 
 And swept by threads of raven hair, 
 The fire of thought was in his eye, 
 
 And he was pale and marble fair, 
 And Grecian chisel never caught 
 The soul in those slight features wrought. 
 
 1 watched his graceful step of pride, 
 Till hidden by yon leaning tree, 
 
 And loved him ere the echo died ; 
 And so, alas ! did Melanie ! 
 
 We sat and watched the fount awhile 
 
 In silence, but our thoughts were one; 
 And then arose, and, with a smile 
 
 Of sympathy, we sauntered on; 
 And she by sudden fits was gay, 
 And then her laughter died away, 
 
 And in this changefulness of mood 
 (Forgotten now those May-day spells) 
 
 We turned where Varro's villa stood, 
 And gazing on the Cascatelles, 
 
 (Whose hurrying waters wild and white 
 
 Seemed maddened as they burst to light,) 
 I chanced to turn my eyes away, 
 
 And lo ! upon a bank, alone, 
 The youthful painter, sleeping, lay ! 
 
 His pencils on the grass were thrown 
 And by his side a sketch was flung, 
 
 And near him as I lightly crept, 
 
 To see the picture as he slept, 
 Upon his feet he lightly sprung; 
 
 And, gazing with a wild surprise 
 Upon the face of Melanie, 
 
 He said — and dropped his earnest eyes- 
 
 " Forgive me ! but I dreamed of thee !" 
 
 His sketch, the while, was in my hand, 
 And, for the lines I looked to trace — 
 
 A torrent by a palace spanned, 
 
 Half-classic and half fairy-land — 
 I only found — my sister's face ! 
 
 Our life was changed. Another love 
 
 In its lone woof began to twine : 
 But ah ! the golden thread was wove 
 
 Between my sister's heart and mine ! 
 She who had lived for me before — 
 
 She who had smiled for me alone — 
 Would live and smile for me no more ! 
 
 The echo to my heart was gone ! 
 It seemed to me the very skies 
 Had shone through those averted eyes ; 
 
 The air had breathed of balm — the flower 
 Of radiant beauty seemed to be- 
 But as she loved them, hour by hour, 
 And murmured of that love to me ! 
 Oh, though it be so heavenly high 
 
 The selfishness of earth above, 
 That, of the watchers in the sky, 
 
 He sleeps who guards a brother's love — 
 Though to a sister's present weal 
 
 The deep devotion far transcends 
 The utmost that the soul can feel 
 
 For even its own higher ends — 
 
840 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 Though next to God, and more than heaven 
 For his own sake, he loves her, even — 
 
 'Tis difficult to see another, 
 A passing stranger of a day 
 
 Who never hath been friend or brother, 
 Pluck with a look her heart away — 
 
 To see the fair, unsullied brow 
 Ne'er kissed before without a prayer, 
 
 Upon a stranger's bosom now, 
 Who for the boon took little care — 
 
 Who is enriched, he knows not why — 
 Who suddenly hath found a treasure 
 
 Golconda were too poor to buy, 
 And he perhaps, too cold to measure — 
 (Albeit, in her forgetful dream, 
 Th' unconscious idol happier seem), 
 
 'Tis difficult at once to crush 
 The rebel mourner in the breast, 
 
 To press the heart to earth and hush 
 Its bitter jealousy to rest — 
 
 And difficult— the eye gets dim, 
 
 The lip wants power — to smile on him ! 
 
 I thank sweet Mary Mother now, 
 
 Who gave me strength those pangs to hide- 
 And touched mine eyes and lit my brow 
 
 With sunshine that my heart belied. 
 I never spoke of wealth or race 
 
 To one who asked so much from me — 
 I looked but in my sister's face, 
 
 And mused if she would happier be ; 
 And hour by hour, and day by day, 
 
 I loved the gentle painter more, 
 
 And, in the same soft measure, wore 
 My selfish jealousy away : 
 
 And I began to watch his mood, 
 And feel, with her, love's trembling care, 
 
 And bade God bless him as he wooed 
 That loving girl so fond and fair. 
 
 And on my mind would sometimes press 
 
 A fear that she might love him less. 
 
 But Melanie — I little dreamed 
 
 What spells the stirring heart may move — 
 Pygmalion's statue never seemed 
 
 More changed with life, than she with love ! 
 The pearl teint of the early dawn 
 
 Flushed into day-spring's rosy hue — 
 The meek, moss-folded bud of morn 
 
 Flung open to the light and dew — 
 The first and half-seen star of even 
 Waxed clear amid the deepening heaven — 
 
 Similitudes perchance may be ! 
 But these are changes oftener seen, 
 
 And do not image half to me 
 My sister's change of face and mein. 
 
 'Twas written in her very air 
 
 That Love had passed and entered there. 
 
 A calm and lovely paradise 
 
 Is Italy, for minds at ease. 
 The sadness of its sunny skies 
 
 Weighs not upon the lives of these. 
 The ruined aisle, the crumbling fane, 
 
 The broken column, vast and prone — 
 It may be joy — it may be pain — 
 
 Amid such wrecks to walk alone ! 
 The saddest man will sadder be, 
 
 The gentlest lover gentler there — 
 As if, whate'er the spirit's key, 
 
 It strengthened in that solemn air. 
 
 The heart soon grows to mournful things, 
 
 . And Italy has not a breeze 
 „'", t comes on melancholy wings ; 
 „?■ \.nd even her majestic trees 
 B 1S |id ghost-like in the Ccesars' home, 
 rJ s 'a if their conscious roots were set 
 T, he old graves of giant Rome, 
 w ? "jf.id drew their sap all kingly yet ! 
 
 And every stone your feet beneath 
 
 Is broken from some mighty thought 5 
 And sculptures in the dust still breathe 
 
 The fire with which their lines were wrought ; 
 And sundered arch, and plundered tomb, 
 Still thunder back the echo, " Rome !" 
 Yet, gayly o'er Egeria's fount 
 
 The ivy flings its emerald veil, 
 And flowers grow fair on Numa's mount, 
 
 And light-sprung arches span the dale ; 
 And soft, from Caracalla's Baths, 
 
 The herdsman's song comes down the breeze 
 While climb his goats the giddy paths 
 
 To grass-grown architrave and frieze ; 
 And gracefully Albano's hill 
 
 Curves into the horizon's line ; 
 And sweetly sings that classic rill ; 
 
 And fairly stands that nameless shrine ; 
 And here, oh, many a sultry noon 
 And starry eve, that happy June, 
 
 Came Angelo and Melanie ! 
 And earth for us was all in tune — 
 For while Love talked with them, Hope walked apart 
 with me! 
 
 v. 
 I shrink from the embittered close 
 
 Of my own melancholy tale. 
 'Tis long since I have waked my woes — 
 And nerve and voice together fail, 
 The throb beats faster at my brow, 
 
 My brain feels warm with starting tears, 
 And I shall weep — but heed not thou ! 
 
 'Twill sooth awhile the ache of years ! 
 The heart transfixed — worn out with grief- 
 Will turn the arrow for relief. 
 
 The painter was a child of shame ! 
 
 It stirred my pride to know it first, 
 For I had questioned but his name, 
 
 And, thought, alas ! I knew the worst, 
 Believing him unknown and poor. 
 His blood, indeed, was not obscure ; 
 
 A high-born Conti was his mother, 
 But, though he knew one parent's face, 
 
 He never had beheld the other, 
 Nor knew his country or his race. 
 
 The Roman hid his daughter's shame 
 Within St. Mona's convent wall, 
 
 And gave the boy a painter's name — 
 And little else to live withal ! 
 
 And with a noble's high desires 
 For ever mounting in his heart, 
 
 The boy consumed with hidden fires, 
 But wrought in silence at his art ; 
 
 And sometimes at St. Mona's shrine, 
 Worn thin with penance harsh and long, 
 
 He saw his mother's form divine, 
 And loved her for their mutual wrong. 
 I said my pride was stirred — but no ! 
 
 The voice that told its bitter tale 
 Was touched so mournfully with wo, 
 
 And, as he ceased, all deathly pale, 
 He loosed the hand of Melanie, 
 And gazed so gaspingly on me — 
 
 The demon in my bosom died ! 
 " Not thine," I said, " another's guilt ; 
 
 I break no hearts for silly pride; 
 So, kiss yon weeper if thou wilt !" 
 
 VI. 
 
 St. Mona's morning mass was done, 
 
 The shrine-lamps struggled with the day ; 
 And rising slowly, one by one, 
 
 Stole the last worshippers away. 
 The organist played out the hymn, 
 
 The incense, to St. Mary swung, 
 Had mounted to the cherubim, 
 
 Or to the pillars thinly clung; 
 And boyish chorister replaced 
 
 The missal that was read no more, 
 And closed, with half irreverent haste, 
 
 Confessional and chancel door j 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 841 
 
 And as, through aisle and oriel pane, 
 
 The sun wore round his slanting beam, 
 The dying martyr stirred again, 
 
 And warriors battled in its gleam ; 
 And costly tomb and sculptured knight 
 Showed warm and wondrous in the light. 
 
 I have not said that Melanie 
 Was radiantly fair — 
 
 This earth again may never see 
 A loveliness so rare ! 
 
 She glided up St. Mona's aisle 
 That morning as a bride, 
 
 And, full as was my heart the while, 
 I blessed her in my pride ! 
 The fountain may not fail the less 
 
 Whose sands are golden ore, 
 And a sister for her loveliness, 
 
 May not be loved the more; 
 But as, the fount's full heart beneath, 
 
 Those golden sparkles shine, 
 My sister's beauty seemed to breathe 
 
 Its brightness over mine ! 
 
 St. Mona has a chapel dim 
 
 Within the altar's fretted pale, 
 Where faintly comes the swelling hymn, 
 
 And dies half lost the anthem's wail. 
 And here, in twilight meet for prayer, 
 
 A single lamp hangs o'er the shrine, 
 And Raphael's Mary, soft and fair, 
 
 Looks down with sweetness half divine, 
 And here St. Mona's nuns alway 
 Through latticed bars are seen to pray. 
 Ave and sacrament were o'er, 
 
 And Angelo and Melanie 
 Still knelt the holy shrine before : 
 
 But prayer, that morn was not for me ! 
 My heart was locked f The lip might stir, 
 
 The frame might agonize — and yet, 
 Oh God ! I could not pray for her ! 
 
 A seal upon my brow was set — 
 My brow was hot — my brain opprest — 
 And fiends seemed muttering round, " Your bridal is 
 unblest !" 
 
 With forehead to the lattice laid, 
 
 And thin, white fingers straining through, 
 A nun the while had softly prayed. 
 
 Oh, even in prayer that voice I knew ! 
 Each faltering word — each mournful tone — 
 
 Each pleadins; cadence, half-suppressed — 
 Such music had its like alone 
 
 On lips that stole it at her breast ! 
 And ere the orison was done 
 I loved the mother as the son ! 
 
 And now, the marriage vows to hear, 
 
 The nun unveiled her brow — 
 When, sudden, to my startled ear, 
 There crept a whisper, hoarse like fear, 
 
 " De Brevern ! is it thou /" 
 The priest let fall the golden ring, 
 
 The bridegroom stood aghast, 
 While, like some weird and frantic thing, 
 
 The nun was muttering fast ; 
 And as, in dread, I nearer drew, 
 She thrust her arms the lattice through, 
 And held me to her straining view — 
 
 But suddenly begun 
 To steal upon her brain a light 
 That staggered soul, and sense, and sight, 
 And, with a mouth all ashy white, 
 
 She shrieked, " It is his son .' 
 The bridegroom is thy blood— thy brother ! 
 Rodolph de Brevern wronged his mother ! 
 
 And, as that doom of love was heard, 
 My sister sunk — and died — without a sign or word ! 
 
 I shed no tear for her. She died 
 With her last sunshine in her eyes. 
 
 Earth held for her no joy beside 
 
 The hope just shattered— and she lie* 
 
 In a green nook of yonder dell ; 
 
 And near her, in a newer bed, 
 Her lover — brother — sleeps as well ! 
 
 Peace to the broken-hearted dead ! 
 
 LORD IVON AND HIS DAUGHTER. 
 
 " Dost thou despise 
 A love like this ! A lady should not scorn 
 One soul that loves her, howe'er lowly it be." 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 How beautiful it is ! Come here, my daughter ! 
 Is't not a face of most bewildering brightness ? 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 The features are all fair, sir, but so cold — 
 I could not love such beauty ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Yet, e'en so 
 Looked thy lost mother, Isidore ! Her brow 
 Lofty like this— her lips thus delicate, 
 Yet icy cold in their slight vermeil threads — 
 Her neck thus queenly, and the sweeping curve 
 Thus matchless, from the small and " pearl round ear" 
 To the o'er-polished shoulder. Never swan 
 Dreamed on the water with a grace so calm ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 And was she proud, sir ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Or I had not loved her. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Then runs my lesson wrong. I ever read 
 Pride was unlovely. 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Dost thou prate already 
 Of books, my little one ? Nay, then, 'tis time 
 That a sad tale were told thee. Is thy bird 
 Fed for the day ? Canst thou forget the rein 
 Of thy beloved Arabian for an hour, 
 And, the first time in all thy sunny life, 
 Take sadness to thy heart ? Wilt listen, sweet ? 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Hang I not ever on thy lips, dear father ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 As thou didst enter, I was musing here 
 Upon this picture. 'Tis the face of one 
 I never knew; but, for its glorious pride, 
 I bought it of the painter. There has hung 
 Ever the cunning curse upon my soul 
 To love this look in woman. Not the flower 
 Of all Arcadia, in the Age of Gold, 
 Looked she a shepherdess, would be to me 
 More than the birds are. As the astrologer 
 Worships the half-seen star that in its sphere 
 Dreams not of him, and tramples on the lily 
 That flings, unasked, its fragrance in his way, 
 Yet both (as the high-born and the low) 
 Wrought of the same fine Hand — so, daringly, 
 Flew my boy-hopes beyond me. You are here 
 In a brave palace, Isidore ! The gem 
 That sparkles in your hair, imprisons light 
 Drunk in the flaming Orient ; and gold 
 Waits on the bidding of those girlish lips 
 In measures that Aladdin never knew — 
 Yet was I — lowly born ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Lord Ivon ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Ay, 
 You wonder; but I tell you that the Lord 
 Of this tall palace was a peasants child ! 
 And, lookin? sometimes on his fair domain, 
 Thy 'sire bethinks him of a sickly boy, 
 Nursed by his mother on a mountain side, 
 His onlv wealth a book of poetry, 
 With which he daily crept into the sun, 
 
842 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 To cheat sharp pains with the bewildering dream 
 Of beauty he had only read of there. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Have you the volume still, sir 1 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 'Twas the gift 
 Of a poor scholar wandering in the hills, 
 Who pitied my sick idleness. I fed 
 My inmost soul upon the witching rhyme — 
 A silly tale of a low minstrel boy, 
 Who broke his heart in singing at a bridal. 
 
 Loved he the 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 J, sir? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 So ran the tale. 
 
 How well I do remember it ! 
 
 Poor youth ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Alas! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 I never thought to pity him. 
 The bride was a duke's sister ; and I mused 
 Upon the wonder of his daring love, 
 Till my heart changed within me. I became 
 Restless and sad; and in my sleep I saw 
 Beautiful dames all scornfully go by ; 
 And one o'er weary morn I crept away 
 Into the glen, and, flung upon a rock, 
 Over a torrent whose swift, giddy waters 
 Filled me with energy, I swore my soul 
 To better that false vision, if there were 
 Manhood or fire within my wretched frame. 
 I turned me homeward with the sunset hour, 
 Changed — for the thought had conquered even disease ; 
 And my poor mother checked her busy wheel 
 To wonder at the step with which I came. 
 
 Oh, heavens ! that soft and dewy April eve, 
 When, in a minstrel's garb, but with a heart 
 As lofty as the marble shafts upreared 
 Beneath the stately portico, I stood 
 At this same palace door ! t 
 
 A minstrel boy 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Our own ! and you 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Yes — I had wandered far 
 Since I shook off my sickness in the hills, 
 And, with some cunning on the lute, had learned 
 A subtler lesson than humility 
 In the quick school of want. A menial stood 
 By the Egyptian sphinx ; and when I came 
 And prayed to sing beneath the balcony 
 A song of love for a fair lady's ear, 
 He insolently bade me to begone. 
 Listening not, I swept my fingers o'er 
 The strings in prelude, when the base-born slave 
 Struck me ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Impossible ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 I dashed my lute 
 Into his face, and o'er the threshold flew ; 
 And threading rapidly the lofty rooms, 
 Sought vainly for his master. Suddenly 
 A wing rushed o'er me, and a radiant girl, 
 Young as myself, but fairer than the dream 
 Of my most wild imagining, sprang forth, 
 Chasing a dove, that, 'wildered with pursuit, 
 Dropt breathless on my bosom. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Nay, dear father ! 
 Was't so indeed ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 I thanked my blessed star ! 
 And, as the fair, transcendent creature stood 
 
 Silent with wonder, I resigned the bird 
 
 To her white hands ; and, with a rapid thought, 
 
 And lips already eloquent of love, 
 
 Turned the strange chance to a similitude 
 
 Of my own story. Her slight, haughty lip 
 
 Curled at the warm recital of my wrong, 
 
 And on the ivory oval of her cheek 
 
 The rose flushed outward with a deeper red ; 
 
 And from that hour the minstrel was at home, 
 
 And horse and hound were his, and none might cross 
 
 The minion of the noble Lady Clare. 
 
 Art weary of my tale ? 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Dear father ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Well! 
 A summer, and a winter, and a spring, 
 Went over me like brief and noteless hours. 
 For ever at the side of one who grew 
 With every morn more beautiful ; the slave, 
 Willing and quick, of every idle whim ; 
 Singing for no one's bidding but her own, 
 And then a song from my own passionate heart, 
 Sung with a lip of fire, but ever named 
 As an old rhyme that I had chanced to hear; 
 Riding beside her, sleeping at her door, 
 Doing her maddest bidding at the risk 
 Of life — what marvel if at last I grew 
 Presumptuous ? 
 
 A messenger one morn 
 Spurred through the gate—" A revel at the court ! 
 And many minstrels, come from many lands, 
 Will try their harps in presence of the king; 
 And 'tis the royal pleasure that my lord 
 Come with the young and lovely Lady Clare, 
 Robed as the queen of Faery, who shall crown 
 The victor with his bays." 
 
 Pass over all 
 To that bewildering day. She sat enthroned 
 Amid the court ; and never twilight star 
 Sprang with such sweet surprise upon the eye 
 As she with her rare beauty on the gaze 
 Of the gay multitude. The minstrels changed 
 Their studied songs, and chose her for a theme; 
 And ever at the pause all eyes upturned 
 And fed upon her loveliness. 
 
 The last 
 Long lay was ended, and the silent crowd 
 Waited the king's award — when suddenly 
 The sharp strings of a lyre were swept without, 
 And a clear voice claimed hearing for a bard 
 Belated on his journey. Masked, and clad 
 In a long stole, the herald led me in. 
 A thousand eyes were on me ; but I saw 
 The new-throned queen, in her high place, alone; 
 And, kneeling at her feet, I pressed my brow 
 Upon her footstool, till the images 
 Of my past hours rushed thick upon my brain ; 
 Then, rising hastily, I struck my lyre; 
 And, in a story woven of my own, 
 I so did paint her in her loveliness — 
 Pouring my heart all out upon the lines 
 I knew too faithfully, and lavishing 
 The hoarded fire of a whole age of love 
 Upon each passionate word, that, as I sunk 
 Exhausted at the close, the ravished crowd 
 Flung gold and flowers on my still quivering lyrt ; 
 And the moved monarch in his gladness swore 
 There was no boon beneath his kingly crown 
 Too high for such a minstrel ! 
 
 Did my star 
 Speak in my fainting ear ? Heard I the king ? 
 Or did the audible pulses of my heart 
 Seem to me so articulate ? I rose, 
 And tore my mask away ; and, as the stole 
 Dropped from my shoulders, I glanced hurriedly 
 A look upon the face of Lady Clare 
 It was enough ! I saw that she was changed — 
 That a brief hour had chilled the open child 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 843 
 
 To calculating woman — that she read 
 With cold displeasure my o'er-daring thought ; 
 And on that brow, to me as legible 
 As stars to the rapt Arab, I could trace 
 The scorn that waited on me ! Sick of life, 
 Yet, even then, with a half-rallied hope 
 Prompting my faltering tongue, I blindly knelt, 
 And claimed the king's fair promise — 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 For the hand 
 
 Of Lady Clare? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 No, sweet one — for a sword. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 You surely spoke to her ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 I saw her face 
 No more for years. I went unto the wars ; 
 And when again I sought that palace door, 
 A glory heralded the minstrel boy 
 That monarchs might have envied. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Was she there ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Yes— and, O God ! how beautiful ! The last, 
 The ripest seal of loveliness, was set 
 Upon her form ; and the all-glorious pride 
 That I had worshipped on her girlish lip, 
 When her scared dove fled to me, was matured 
 Into a queenly grace ; and nobleness 
 Was bound like a tiara to her brow, 
 And every motion breathed of it. There lived 
 Nothing on earth so ravishingly fair. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 And you still loved her ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 I had periled life 
 In every shape — had battled on the sea, 
 And burnt upon the desert, and outgone 
 Spirits most mad for glory, with this one 
 O'ermastering hope upon me. Honor, fame, 
 Gold, even, were as dust beneath my feet ; 
 And war was my disgust, though I had sought 
 Its horrors like a bloodhound — for her praise. 
 My life was drunk up with the love of her. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 And now she scorned you not ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Worse, Isidore ! 
 She pitied me ! I did not need a voice 
 To tell my love. She knew her sometime minion- 
 And felt that she should never be adoied 
 With such idolatry as his, and sighed 
 That hearts so true beat not in palaces — 
 But I was poor, with all my bright renown, 
 And lowly born : and she— the Lady Clare ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 She could not tell you this ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 She broke my heart 
 As kindly as the fisher hooks the worm — 
 Pitying me the while ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 And you — 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Lived on ! 
 But the remembrance irks me, and my throat 
 Chokes with the utterance ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Dear father ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Nay- 
 Thanks to sweet Mary Mother, it is past : 
 
 And in this world I shall have no more need 
 To speak of it. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 But there were brighter days 
 In store. My mother and this palace — 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 You outrun 
 My tale, dear Isidore ! But 'tis as well, 
 I would not linger on it. 
 
 Twenty years 
 From this heart-broken hour, I stood again 
 An old man and a stranger, at the door 
 Of this same palace. I had been a slave 
 For gold that time ! My star had wrought with me 1 
 And I was richer than the wizard king 
 Throned in the mines of Ind. I could not look 
 On my innumerable gems, the glare 
 Pained so my sun-struck eyes ! My gold was countless. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 And Lady Clare ? 
 
 LORD IVON. * 
 
 I met upon the threshold 
 Her very self — all youth, all loveliness — 
 So like the fresh-kept picture in my brain, 
 That for a moment I forgot all else, 
 And staggered back and wept. She passed me by 
 With a cold look — 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Oh! not the Lady Clare I 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Her daughter yet herself ! But what a change 
 Waited me here ! My thin and grizzled locks 
 Were fairer now than the young minstrel's curls; 
 My sun-burnt visage and contracted eye 
 Than the gay soldier in his gallant mien ; 
 My words were wit, my looks interpreted ; 
 And Lady Clare — I tell you, Lady Clare 
 Leaned fondly — fondly! on my wasted arm. 
 
 God ! how changed my nature with all this I 
 I, that had been all love and tenderness — 
 The truest and most gentle heart, till now, 
 That ever beat — grew suddenly a devil ! 
 
 1 bought me lands, and titles, and received 
 Men's homage with a smooth hypocrisy ; 
 And — you will scarce believe me, Isidore — 
 
 I suffered them to wile their peerless daughter, 
 The image and the pride of Lady Clare, 
 To wed me ! 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Sir! you did not ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Ay ! I saw 
 The indignant anger when her mother first 
 Broke the repulsive wish, and the degrees 
 Of shuddering reluctance as her mind 
 Admitted the intoxicating tales 
 Of wealth unlimited. And when she looked 
 On my age-stricken features, and my form, 
 Wasted before its time, and turned away 
 To hide from me her tears, her very mother 
 Whispered the cursed comfort in her ear 
 That made her what she is ! 
 
 Knowing all this 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 You could not wed her, 
 
 I felt that I had lost 
 My life else. I had wrung, for forty years, 
 My frame to its last withers ; I had flung 
 My boyhood's fire away— the energy 
 Of a most sinless youth— the toil, and fret, 
 And agony of manhood. I had dared, 
 Fought, suffered, slaved — and never for an hour 
 Forgot or swerved from my resolve ; and now — 
 With the delirious draught upon my lips — 
 Dash down the cup ! 
 
844 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 Yet she never wronged you ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Tliou'rt pleading for thy mother, my sweet child ! 
 And angels hear thee. But, if she was wronged, 
 The sin be on the pride that sells its blood 
 Coldly and only for this damning gold. 
 Had I not offered youth first ? Came I not, 
 With my hands brimmed with glory, to buy love— 
 And was I not denied ? 
 
 Yet, dearest father, 
 They forced her not to wed ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 I called her back 
 Myself from the church threshold, and, before 
 Her mother and her kinsmen, bade her swear 
 It was her own free choice to marry me. 
 I showed her my shrunk hand, and bade her think 
 If that was like a bridegroom, and beware 
 Of perjuring her chaste and spotless soul, 
 If now she loved me not. 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 What said she, sir ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Oh ! they had made her even as themselves : 
 And her young heart was colder than the slab 
 Unsunned beneath Pentelicus. She pressed 
 My withered fingers in her dewy clasp, 
 And smiled up in my face, and chid " my lord" 
 For his wild fancies and led on ! 
 
 And no 
 Misgiving at the altar ? 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 None ! She swore 
 To love and cherish me till death should part us, 
 With a voice as clear as mine. 
 
 In mercy tell me so 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 And kept it, father I 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 She lives, my daughter ! 
 • ••••• • 
 
 Long ere my babe was born, my pride had ebbed, 
 
 And let my heart down to its better founts 
 
 Of tenderness. I had no friends — not one I 
 
 My love gushed to my wife. I racked my brain 
 
 To find her a new pleasure every hour — 
 
 Yet not with me— I feared to haunt her eye ! 
 
 Only at night, when she was slumbering 
 
 In all her beauty, I would put away 
 
 The curtains till the pale night-lamp shone on her, 
 
 And watch her through my tears. 
 
 One night her lips 
 Parted as I gazed on them, and the name 
 Of a young noble, who had been my guest, 
 Stole forth in broken murmurs. I let fall ' 
 The curtains silently, and left her there 
 To slumber and dream on ; and gliding forth 
 Upon the terrace, knelt to my pale star, 
 And swore, that if it pleased the God of light 
 To let me look upon the unborn child 
 Lying beneath her heart, I would but press 
 One kiss upon its lips, and take away 
 My life — that was a blight upon her years. 
 
 I was that child ! 
 
 LORD IVON. 
 
 Yes — and I heard the cry 
 Of thy small " piping mouth" as' twere a call 
 From my remembering star. I waited only 
 
 Thy mother's strength to bear the common shock 
 Of death within the doors. She rose at last, 
 And, oh ! so sweetly pale ! And thou, my child ! 
 My heart misgave me as I looked upon thee ; 
 But he was ever at her side whose name 
 She murmured in her sleep ; and, lingering on 
 To drink a little of thy sweetness more 
 Before I died, I watched their stolen love 
 As she had been my daughter, with a pure, 
 Passionless joy that I should leave her soon 
 To love him as she would. I know not how 
 To tell thee more. * * * 
 
 * Come, sweet ! she is not worthy 
 
 Of tears like thine and mine. * * 
 
 * * * She fled and left me 
 The very night ! The poison was prepared — 
 And she had been a widow with the morn 
 Rich as Golconda. As the midnight chimed, 
 My star rose. Gazing on its mounting orb, 
 
 I raised the chalice — but a weakness came 
 Over my heart ; and, taking up the lamp, 
 I glided to her chamber, and removed 
 The curtains for a last, a parting look 
 Upon my child. * * * 
 
 * * * Had she but taken thee, 
 I could have felt she had a mother's heart, 
 And drained the chalice still. I could not leave 
 My babe alone in such a heartless world I 
 
 ISIDORE. 
 
 Thank God ! Thank God ! 
 
 TO ERMENGARDE. 
 I know not if the sunshine waste — 
 
 The world is dark since thou art gone ! 
 The hours are, oh ! so leadcn-paced ! 
 
 The birds sing, and the stars float on, 
 But sing not well, and look not fair — 
 A weight is in the summer air, 
 
 And sadness in the sight of flowers, 
 And if I go where others smile, 
 
 Their love but makes me think of ours, 
 And heavier gets my heart the while. 
 Like one upon a desert isle, 
 
 I languish of the weary hours ; 
 I never thought a life could be 
 So flung upon one hope, as mine, dear love, on thee I 
 
 I sit and watch the summer sky, 
 
 There comes a clond through heaven alone ; 
 A thousand stars are shining nigh — 
 
 It feels no light, but darkles on ! 
 Yet now it nears the lovelier moon ; 
 
 And, flushing through its fringe of snow, 
 There steals a rosier die, and soon 
 
 Its bosom is one fiery glow ! 
 The queen *of light within it lies ! 
 
 Yet mark how lovers meet to part T 
 The cloud already onward flies, 
 
 And shadows sink into its heart, 
 And (dost thou see them where thou art ?) 
 
 Fade fast, fade all those glorious dies ! 
 Its light, like mine, is seen no more, 
 And, like my own, its heart seems darker than before 
 
 Where press this hour those fairy feet, 
 
 Where look this hour those eyes of blue ! 
 What music in thine ear is sweet ! 
 
 What odor breathes thy lattice through ! 
 What word is on thy lip ? What tone — 
 What look — replying to thine own ? 
 Thy steps along the Danube stray — 
 
 Alas it seeks an orient sea ! 
 Thou wouldst not seem so far away 
 
 Flowed but its waters back to me ? 
 I bless the slowly coming moon 
 
 Because its eye looked late in thine ! 
 I envy the west wind of June 
 
 Whose wings will bear it up the Rhine ; 
 The flower I press upon my brow 
 Were sweeter if its like perfumed thy chamber now! 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 845 
 
 THE PITY OF THE PARK FOUNTAIN. 
 
 'Twas a summery day in the last of May — 
 
 Pleasant in sun or shade ; 
 And the hours went by as the poets say, 
 Fragrant and fair on their flowery way; 
 And a hearse crept slowly through Broadway; 
 
 And the Fountain gayly played. 
 
 The Fountain played right merrily, 
 
 And the world looked bright and gay ; 
 And a youth went by, with a restless eye, 
 Whose heart was sick, and whose brain was dry, 
 And he prayed to God that he might die — 
 And the Fountain played away. 
 
 Uprose the spray like a diamond throne, 
 
 And the drops like music rang — 
 And of those who marvelled how it shone, 
 Was a proud man, left in his shame alone, 
 And he shut his teeth with a smothered groan, 
 
 And the Fountain sweetly sang. 
 
 And a rainbow spanned it changefully, 
 
 Like a bright ring broke in twain ; 
 And the pale, fair girl, who stopped to see, 
 Was sick with the pangs of poverty — 
 And from hunger to guilt she chose to flee, 
 
 As the rainbow smiled again. 
 
 And all as gay, on another day, 
 
 The morning will have shone ; 
 And at noon, unmarked, through bright Broadway, 
 A hearse will take its silent way ; 
 And the bard who sings will have passed away — 
 
 And the Fountain will play on ! 
 
 "CHAMBER SCENE." 
 
 (An exquisite picture in the studio of a young artist at Rome.) 
 £he rose from her untroubled sleep, 
 
 And put away her soft brown hair, 
 And in a tone as low and deep 
 
 As love's first whisper, breathed a prayer — 
 Her snow-white hands together pressed, 
 
 Her blue eyes sheltered in the lid, 
 The folded linen on her breast 
 
 Just swelling with the charms it hid — 
 And from her long and flowing dress 
 
 Escaped a bare and slender foot, 
 Whose shape upoa the earth did press 
 
 Like a new snow-flake, white and " mute ;" 
 And there, from slumber pure and warm, 
 
 Like a young spirit fresh from heaven, 
 She bowed her slight and graceful form, 
 
 And humbly prayed to be forgiven. 
 
 Oh God ! if souls unsoiled as these 
 
 Need daily mercy from thy throne — 
 If she upon her bended knees — 
 
 Our loveliest and our purest one — 
 She, with a face so clear and bright 
 We deem her some stray child of light — 
 If she, with those soft eyes in tears, 
 Day after day in her first years, 
 Must kneel and pray for grace from thee — 
 What far, far deeper need have we ? 
 How hardly, if she win not heaven, 
 Will our wild errors be forgiven ! 
 
 TO A STOLEN RING. 
 
 Oh for thy history now ! Hadst thou a tongue 
 
 To whisper of thy secrets, I could lay 
 
 Upon thy jewelled tracery mine ear, 
 
 And dream myself in heaven. Thou hast been worn 
 
 In that fair creature's pride, and thou hast felt 
 
 The bounding of the haughtiest blood that e'er 
 
 Sprang from the heart of woman ; and thy gold 
 
 Has lain upon her forehead in the hour 
 
 Of sadness, when the weary thoughts came fast, 
 
 And life was but a bitterness with all 
 
 Its vividness and beauty. She has gazed 
 
 In her fair girlhood on thy snowy pearls, 
 And mused away the hours, and she has bent 
 On thee the downcast radiance of her eye 
 When a deep tone was eloquent in her ear, 
 And thou hast lain upon her cheek, and prest 
 Back on her heart its beatings, and put by 
 From her veined temples the luxuriant curls, 
 And in her peaceful sleep, when she has lain 
 In her unconscious beauty, and the dreams 
 Of her high heart came goldenly and soft, 
 Thou hast been there unchidden, and hast felt 
 The swelling of the clear transparent veins 
 As the rich blood rushed through them, warm and i 
 
 I am impatient as I gaze on thee, 
 Thou inarticulate jewel ! Thou hast heard 
 With thy dull ear such music ! — the low tone 
 Of a young sister's tenderness, when night 
 Hath folded them together like one flower — 
 The sudden snatch of a remembered song 
 Warbled capriciously — the careless word 
 Lightly betraying the inaudible thought 
 Working within the heart; and more than all, 
 Thou hast been lifted when the fervent prayer 
 For a loved mother, or the sleeping one 
 Lying beside her, trembled on her lip, 
 And the warm tear that from her eye stole out 
 As the soft lash fell over it, has lain 
 Amid thy shining jewels like a star. 
 
 TO HER WHO HAS HOPES FOR ME. 
 Oh stern, yet lovely monitress ! 
 
 Thine eye should be of colder hue, 
 And on thy neck a paler tress 
 
 Should toy among those veins of blue ! 
 
 For thou art to thy mission true — 
 An angel clad in human guise — 
 But sinners sometimes have such eyes, 
 
 And braid for love such tresses too ; 
 And, while thou talkst to me of heaven, 
 I sigh that thou hast not a sin to be forgiven ! 
 
 Night comes, with love upon the breeze, 
 
 And the calm clock strikes, stilly, "ten." 
 
 I start to hear it beat, for then 
 I know that thou art on thy knees — 
 
 And, at that hour, where'er thou be, 
 
 Ascends to heaven a prayer for me ! 
 
 My heart drops to its bended knee — 
 The mirth upon my lip is dumb — 
 Yet, as a thought of heaven would come, 
 
 There glides, before it, one of thee — 
 Thou, in thy white dress, kneeling there ! — 
 I fear I could leave heaven to see thee at thy prayer ! 
 
 I follow up the sacred aisle, 
 
 Thy light step on the Sabbath day, 
 And — as perhaps thou pray'st the while — 
 
 My light thoughts pass away ! 
 As swells in air the holy hymn, 
 My breath comes thick, my eyes are dim, 
 
 And through my tears I pray ! 
 I do not think my heart is stone — 
 But, while for heaven it beats alone — 
 
 In heaven would willing stay — 
 One rustle of thy snow-white gown 
 
 Sends all my thoughts astray ! 
 The preaching dies upon my ear — 
 What " is the better world" when thy dark eyes are here ! 
 
 Yet pray ! my years have been but few — 
 
 And many a wile the tempter weaves, 
 
 And many a saint the sinner grieves 
 
 Ere Mercy brings him through ! 
 
 But oh, when Mercy sits serene 
 
 And strives to bend to me, 
 
 Pray, that the cloud which comes between 
 
 May less resemble thee ! 
 The world that would my soul beguile 
 Teints all its roses with thy smile ! 
 In heaven 'twere well to be ! 
 But — to desire that blessed shore — 
 Oh lady ! thy dark eyes must first have gone before f 
 
846 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 THE DEATH OF HARRISON. 
 What ! soared the old eagle to die at the sun ! 
 Lies he stiff with spread wings at the goal he had won ! 
 Are there spirits, more blest than the "Planet of Even/' 
 Who mount to their zenith, then melt into Heaven — 
 No waning of fire, no quenching of ray, 
 But. rising, still rising, when passing away ? 
 Farewell, gallant eagle I thou'rt buried in light ! 
 God-speed into Heaven, lost star of our night I 
 Death ! Death in the White House ! Ah, never before, 
 Trod his skeleton foot on the President's floor ! 
 He is looked for in hovel, and dreaded in hall— 
 The king in his closet keeps hatchment and pall— 
 The youth in his birth-place, the old man at home, 
 Make clean from the door-stone the path to the tomb ; — 
 But the lord of this mansion was cradled not here — 
 In a churchyard far off stands his beckoning bier ! 
 He is here as the wave-crest heaves flashing on high — 
 As the arrow is stopped by its prize in the sky — 
 The arrow to earth, and the foam to the shore — 
 Death finds them when swiftness and sparkle are o'er — 
 But Harrison's death fills the climax of story- 
 He went with his old stride — from glory to glory ! 
 Lay his sword on his breast ! There's no spot on its blade 
 In whose cankering breath his bright laurels will fade ! 
 'Twas the first to lead on at humanity's call — 
 It was stayed with sweet mercy when " glory" was all ! 
 As calm in the council as gallant in war, 
 He fought for his country, and not its " hurrah !" 
 In the path of the hero with pity he trod — 
 Let him pass— with his sword— to the presence of God ! 
 What more ! Shall we on, with his ashes ! Yet, stay ! 
 He hath ruled the wide realm of a king, in his day ! 
 
 At his word, like a monarch's, went treasure and land 
 
 The bright gold of thousands has passed through his hand- 
 Is there nothing to show of his glittering hoard ? 
 No jewel to deck the rude hilt of his sword- 
 No trappings— no horses ?— what had he, but now ? 
 On !— on with his ashes ! — he left but his plough ! 
 Brave old Cincinnatus ! Unwind ye his sheet ! 
 Let him sleep as he lived — with his purse at his feet ! 
 Follow now, as ye list ! The first mourner to-day 
 Is the nation — whose father is taken away ! 
 Wife, children, and neighbor, may moan at his knell- 
 He was " lover and friend" to his country, as well ! 
 For the stars on our banner, grown suddenly dim, 
 Let us weep, in our darkness— but weep not for him ! 
 Not for him— who, departing, leaves millions in tears ! 
 Not for him— who has died full of honor and years ' 
 Not for him— who ascended Fame's ladder so high 
 From the round at the top he has stepped to the sky ! 
 It is blessed to go when so ready to die ! 
 
 "SHE WAS NOT THERE." 
 
 T , , " The bird 
 
 Let loose, to his far nest will flee, 
 •nrni l °, vf L' thou S h breathed but on a word 
 Will find thee, over land and sea." 
 
 'Tis midnight deep— I came but now 
 
 From the close air of lighted halls ; 
 And while I hold my aching brow 
 
 I gaze upon my dim-lit walls ; 
 And feeling here that I am free 
 
 To wear the look that suits my mood, 
 And let my thoughts flow back to thee, 
 
 I bless my tranquil solitude, 
 And bidding all thoughts else begone, 
 I muse upon thy love alone. 
 
 Yet was the music sweet to-night, 
 
 And fragrant odors filled the air, 
 And flowers were drooping in the light, 
 
 And lovely women wandered there, 
 And fruits and wines with lavish waste 
 
 Were on the marble tables piled ; 
 And all that tempts the eye and taste, 
 
 And sets the haggard pulses wild, 
 And wins from care, and deadens sadness, 
 Were there— but yet I felt no gladness. 
 
 I thought of thee— I thought of thee— 
 
 Each cunning change the music played, 
 Each fragrant breath that stole to me, 
 
 My wandering thought more truant made. 
 The lovely women passed me by, 
 
 The wit fell pow'rless on mine ear, 
 I looked on all with vacant eye, 
 
 I did not see — I did not hear ! 
 The skilled musician's master-tone 
 
 Was sweet — thy voice were sweeter far ! 
 They were soft eyes the lamps shone on — 
 
 The eyes I worship gentler are ! 
 The halls were broad, the mirrors tall, 
 
 With silver lamps and costly wine — 
 I only thought how poor was all 
 
 To one low tone from lips like thine — 
 I only felt how well forgot 
 Were all the stars look on— and thy sweet eyes do not ! 
 
 FAIL ME NOT THOU ! 
 
 " Oh, by that little word 
 How many thoughts are stirred !— 
 The last, the last, the last !" 
 
 The star may but a meteor be, 
 
 That breaks upon the stormy night ; 
 And I may err, believing thee 
 
 A spark of heaven's own changeless light ! 
 But if on earth beams aught so fair, 
 
 It seems, of all the lights that shine, 
 Serenest in its truth, 'tis there, 
 
 Burning in those soft eyes of thine. 
 Yet long-watched stars from heaven have rushed, 
 
 And long-loved friends have dropped away, 
 And mine — my very heart have crushed I 
 
 And I have hoped this many a day, 
 It lived no more for love or pain ! 
 But thou hast stirred its depths again, 
 
 And to its dull, out-wearied ear, 
 Thy voice of melody has crept, 
 
 In tones it can not choose but hear ; 
 And now I feel it only slept, 
 
 And know at ev'n thy lightest smile, 
 It gathered fire and strength the while. 
 Fail me not thou I This feeling past, 
 My heart would never rouse again. 
 Thou art the brightest— but the last ! 
 And if this trust, this love is vain — 
 If thou, all peerless as thou art, 
 Be not less fair than true of heart — 
 My loves are o'er I The sun will shine 
 Upon no grave so hushed as this dark breast of mine. 
 
 SPIRIT-WHISPERS. 
 
 (Spirit-whisper in the poet's ear — morning.) 
 Wake ! poet, wake .'—the morn has burst 
 
 Through gates of stars and dew, 
 And, winged by prayer since evening nursed, 
 Has fled to kiss the steeples first, 
 
 And now stoops low to you ! 
 Oh poet of the loving eye 
 For you is drest this morning sky ! 
 
 (Second whisper— noon.) 
 Oh, poet of the pen enchanted ! 
 
 A lady sits beneath a tree ! 
 At last, the flood for which she panted — 
 The wild words for her anguish wanted, 
 
 Have gushed in song from thee ! 
 Her dark curls sweep her knees to pray : — 
 " God bless the poet far away !" 
 
 (Third whisper — MIDNIGHT.) 
 
 King of the heart's deep mysteries ! 
 
 Your words have wings like lightning wove ! 
 This hour, o'er hills and distant seas, 
 They fly like flower-seeds on the breeze, 
 
 And sow the world with love ! 
 King of a realm without a throne, 
 Ruled by resistless tears alone ! 
 
POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 847 
 
 TO M- 
 
 FROM ABROAD. 
 
 :< The desire of the moth for the star- 
 
 Of the night for the morrow— 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow." 
 
 As, gazing on the Pleiades, 
 
 We count each fair and starry one, 
 Yet wander from the light of these 
 
 To muse upon the Pleiad gone — 
 As, bending o'er fresh gathered flowers, 
 
 The rose's most enchanting hue 
 Reminds us but of other hours 
 
 Whose roses were all lovely too — 
 So, dearest, when I rove among 
 
 The bright ones of this foreign sky, 
 And mark the smile, and list the song, 
 
 And watch the dancers gliding by, 
 The fairer still they seem to be, 
 The more it stirs a thought of thee ! 
 
 The sad, sweet bells of twilight chime, 
 
 Of many hearts may touch but one, 
 And so this seeming careless rhyme 
 
 Will whisper to thy heart alone. 
 I give it to the winds ! The bird 
 
 Let loose, to his far nest will flee, 
 And love, though breathed but on a word, 
 
 Will find thee, over land and sea. 
 Though clouds across the sky have driven, 
 
 We trust the star at last will shine, 
 And like the very light of heaven 
 
 I trust thy love. Trust thou in mine ! 
 
 SUNRISE THOUGHTS AT THE CLOSE OF A BALL. 
 
 Morn in the East ! How coldly fail 
 
 It breaks upon my fevered eye ! 
 How chides the calm and dewy air ! 
 
 How chides the pure and pearly sky ! 
 The stars melt in a brighter fire — 
 
 The dew, in sunshine, leaves the flowers — 
 They, from their watch, in light retire, 
 
 While we, in sadness, pass from ours. 
 
 I turn from the rebuking morn — 
 
 The cold gray sky, a fading star — 
 And listen to the harp and horn, 
 
 And see the waltzers near and far — 
 The lamps and flowers are bright as yet, 
 
 And lips beneath more bright than they — 
 How can a scene so fair beget 
 
 The mournful thoughts we bear away ! 
 
 'Tis something that thou art not here 
 
 Sweet lover of my lightest word ! 
 'Tis something that my mother's tear 
 
 By these forgetful hours is stirred ! 
 But I have long a loiterer been 
 
 In haunts where joy is said to be, 
 And though wifh Peace I enter in, 
 
 The nymph comes never forth with me. 
 
 TO A FACE BELOVED. 
 
 The music of the wakened lyre 
 
 Dies not upon the quivering strings, 
 Nor burns alone the minstrel's fire 
 
 Upon the lip that trembling sings ; 
 Nor shines the moon in heaven unseen. 
 
 Nor shuts the flower its fragrant cells, 
 Nor sleeps the fountain's wealth, I ween, 
 
 For ever in its sparry wells — 
 The spells of the enchanter lie 
 Not on his own lone heart — his own rapt ear and eye. 
 
 I look upon a face as fair 
 
 As ever made a lip of heaven 
 Falter amid its music-prayer ! 
 
 The first-lit star of summer even 
 
 Springs not so softly on the eye, 
 
 Nor grows, with watching half so bright, 
 
 Nor mid its sisters of the sky, 
 
 So seems of heaven the dearest light — 
 
 Men murmur where that face is seen, 
 My youth's angelic dream was of that look and mien. 
 
 Yet though we deem the stars are blest, 
 
 And envy, in our grief, the flower 
 That bears but sweetness in its breast, 
 
 And fear th' enchanter for his power, 
 And love the minstrel for his spell, 
 
 He winds out of his lyre so well — 
 The stars are almoners of light, 
 
 The lyrist of melodious air, 
 The fountain of its waters bright 
 
 And everything most sweet and fair 
 Of that by which it charms the ear, 
 
 The eye of him that passes near — 
 A lamp is lit in woman's eye 
 That souls, else lost on earth, remember angels by. 
 
 UNSEEN SPIRITS. 
 
 The shadows lay along Broadway, 
 'Twas near the twilight-tide — 
 
 And slowly there a lady fair 
 Was walking in her pride. 
 
 Alone walked she ; but, viewlessly, 
 Walked spirits at her side. 
 
 Peace charmed the street beneath her feet, 
 
 And honor charmed the air ; 
 And all astir looked kind on her, 
 
 And called her good as fair — 
 For all God ever gave to her 
 
 She kept with chary care. 
 
 She kept with care her beauties rare 
 
 From lovers warm and true — 
 For her heart was cold to all but gold, 
 
 And the rich came not to woo — 
 But honored well are charms to sell 
 
 If priests the selling do. 
 
 Now walking there was one more fair — 
 
 A slight girl, lily-pale ; 
 And she had unseen company 
 
 To make the spirit quail — 
 'Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn, 
 
 And nothing could avail. 
 
 No mercy now can clear her brow 
 For this world's peace to pray ; 
 
 For as love's wild prayer dissolved in ail, 
 Her woman's heart gave way ! 
 
 But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven 
 By man is curst alway ! 
 
 BETTER MOMENTS. 
 
 My mother's voice ! how often creeps 
 Its cadence on my lonely hours ! 
 
 Like healing sent on wings of sleep, 
 Or dew to the unconscious flowers. 
 
 I can forget her melting prayer 
 While leaping pulses madly fly, 
 
 But in the still, unbroken air, 
 
 Her gentle tone comes stealing by — 
 
 And years, and sin, and manhood flee, 
 And leave me at my mother's knee. 
 
 The book of nature, and the print 
 
 Of beauty on the whispering sea 
 Give aye to me some lineament 
 
 Of what I have been taught to be. 
 My heart is harder, and perhaps 
 
 My manliness hath drank up tears; 
 And there's a mildew in the lapse 
 
 Of a few miserable years — 
 But nature's book is even yet 
 With all my mother's lessons writ. 
 
848 
 
 POEMS OF PASSION. 
 
 I have been out at eventide 
 
 Beneath a moonlight sky of spring, 
 When earth was garnished like a bride, 
 
 And night had on her silver wing — 
 When bursting leaves, and diamond grass, 
 
 And waters leaping to the light, 
 And all that make the pulses pass 
 
 With wilder fleetness, thronged the night- 
 When all was beauty — then have I 
 
 With friends on whom my love is flung 
 Like myrrh on wings of Araby, 
 
 Gazed up where evening's lamp is hung, 
 And when the beautiful spirit there 
 
 Flung over me its golden chain, 
 My mother's voice came on the air 
 
 Like the light dropping of the rain — 
 And resting on some silver star 
 
 The spirit of a bended knee, 
 I've poured out low and fervent prayer 
 
 That our eternity might be 
 To rise in heaven, like stars at night, 
 And tread a living path of light. 
 
 I have been on the dewy hills, 
 
 When night was stealing from the dawn, 
 And mist was on the waking rills, 
 
 And teints were delicately drawn 
 In the gray East — when birds were waking, 
 
 With a low murmur in the trees, 
 And melody by fits was breaking 
 
 Upon the whisper of the breeze, 
 And this when I was forth, perchance 
 As a worn reveller from the dance — 
 
 And when the sun sprang gloriously 
 And freely up, and hill and river 
 
 Were catching upon wave and tree 
 The arrows from his subtle quiver — 
 
 I say a voice has thrilled me then, 
 Heard on the still and rushing light, 
 
 Or, creeping from the silent glen, 
 Like words from the departing night, 
 
 Hath stricken me, and I have pressed 
 On the wet grass my fevered brow, 
 
 And pouring forth the earliest 
 First prayer, with which I learned to bow, 
 
 Have felt my mother's spirit rush 
 Upon me as in by-past years, 
 
 And, yielding to the blessed gush 
 Of my ungovernable tears, 
 
 Have risen up — the gay, the wild — 
 
 As humble as a very child. 
 
 THE ANNOYER. 
 
 Love knoweth every form of air, 
 
 And every shape of earth, 
 And comes, unbidden, everywhere, 
 
 Like thought's mysterious birth. 
 The moonlit sea and the sunset sky 
 
 Are written with Love's words, 
 And you hear his voice unceasingly, 
 
 Like song in the time of birds. 
 
 He peeps into the warrior's heart 
 
 From the tip of a stooping plume, 
 And the serried spears, and the many men, 
 
 May not deny him room. 
 He'll come to his tent in the weary night, 
 
 And be busy in his dream; 
 And he'll float to his eye in morning light 
 
 Like a fay on a silver beam. 
 
 He hears the sound of the hunter's gun, 
 
 And rides on the echo back, 
 And sighs in his ear, like a stirring leaf, 
 
 And flits in his woodland track. 
 The shade of the wood, and the sheen of the river, 
 
 The cloud and the open sky- 
 He will haunt them all with his subtle quiver, 
 
 Like the light of your very eye. 
 
 The fisher hangs over the leaning boat, 
 
 And ponders the silver sea, 
 For Love is under the surface hid, 
 
 And a spell of thought has he ; 
 He heaves the wave like a bosom sweet, 
 And speaks in the ripple low, 
 Till the bait is gone from the crafty line, 
 
 And the hook hangs bare below. 
 
 He blurs the print of the scholar's book, 
 
 And intrudes in the maiden's prayer, 
 And profanes the cell of the holy man, 
 
 In the shape of a lady fair. 
 In the darkest night, and the bright daylight, 
 
 In earth, and sea, and sky, 
 In every home of human thought, 
 
 Will love be lurking nigh. 
 
 ANDRE'S REQUEST TO WASHINGTON 
 
 It is not the fear of death 
 
 That damps my brow, 
 It is not for another breath 
 
 I ask thee now; 
 I can die with a lip unstirred 
 
 And a quiet heart — 
 Let but this prayer be heard 
 
 Ere I depart. 
 
 I can give up my mother's look— 
 
 My sister's kiss ; 
 I can think of love — yet brook 
 
 A death like this ! 
 I can give up the young fame 
 
 I burned to win — 
 All — but the spotless name 
 
 I glory in. 
 
 Thine is the power to give, 
 
 Thine to deny, 
 Joy for the hour I live — 
 
 Calmness to die. 
 By all the brave should cherish, 
 
 By my dying breath, 
 I ask that I may perish 
 
 By a soldier's death ! 
 
 DAWN. 
 
 1 That line I learned not in the old sad song."— Charles Lamb. 
 Throw up the window ! 'Tis a morn for life 
 In its most subtle luxury. The air 
 Is like a breathing from a rarer world ; 
 And the south wind is like a gentle friend. 
 Parting the hair so softly on my brow. 
 It has come over gardens, and the flowers 
 That kissed it are betrayed ; for as it parts, 
 With its invisible fingers, my loose hair, 
 I know it has been trifling with the rose, 
 And stooping to the violet. There is joy 
 For all God's creatures in it. The wet leaves 
 Are stirring at its touch, and birds are singing 
 As if to breathe were music, and the grass 
 Sends up its modest odor with the dew, 
 Like the small tribute of humility. 
 
 I had awoke from an unpleasant dream, 
 And light was welcome to me. I looked out 
 To feel the common air, and when the breath 
 Of the delicious morning met my brow 
 Cooling its fever, and the pleasant sun 
 Shone on familiar objects, it was like 
 The feeling of the captive who comes forth 
 From darkness to the cheerful light of day. 
 Oh ! could we wake from sorrow ; were it all 
 A troubled dream like this, to cast aside 
 Like an untimely garment with the morn ; 
 Could the long fever of the heart be cooled 
 By a sweet breath from nature ; or the gloom 
 Of a bereaved affection pass away 
 With looking on the lively teint of flowers — 
 How lightly were the spirit reconciled 
 To make this beautiful, bright world its home » 
 
THE LADY JANE, AND OTHER POEMS. 
 
 THE LADY JANE, 
 
 A NOVEL IN RHYME. 
 
 There was a lady fair, and forty too. 
 
 There was a youth of scarcely two and twenty. 
 The story of their loves is strange, yet true. 
 
 I'll tell it you ! Romances are so plenty 
 In prose, that you'll be glad of something new. 
 
 And so (in rhyme) for " what the devil meant he ! 
 You think he was too young ! — but tell me whether 
 The moth and humming-bird grow old together ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Nature, that made the ivy-leaf and lily, 
 
 Not of one warp and woof hath made us all ! 
 
 Bent goes the careful, and erect the silly, 
 
 And wear and tear make difference — not small ; 
 
 And he that hath no money — will-he, nill-he — 
 Is thrust like an old man against the wall ! 
 
 Grief out of some the very life-blood washes ; 
 
 Some shed it like ducks' backs and " Mackintoshes.' 
 
 III. 
 
 The Lady Jane was daughter of an Earl — 
 
 Shut from approach like sea-nymph in her shell 
 
 Never a rude breath stirr'd the floating curl 
 Upon her marble temple, and naught fell 
 
 Upon the ear of the patrician girl 
 
 But pride-check'd syllables, all measured well 
 
 Her suitors were her father's and not hers — 
 
 So were her debts at " Storr-and-Mortimer's." 
 
 IV. 
 
 Her health was lady-like. No blood, in riot, 
 Tangled the tracery of her veined cheek, 
 
 Nor seem'd her exquisite repose the quiet 
 Of one by suffering made sweet and meek. 
 
 She ate and drank, and probably lived by it, 
 And liked her cup of tea by no means weak ! 
 
 Untroubled by debt, lovers, or affliction, 
 
 Her pulse beat with extremely little friction. 
 
 Yet was there fire within her soft gray eye, 
 And room for pressure on her lip of rose ; 
 
 And few who saw her gracefully move by, 
 Imagined that her feelings slept, or froze. 
 
 You may have seen the cunning florist tie 
 A thread about a bud, which never blows, 
 
 But, with shut chalice from the sun and rain, 
 
 Hoards up the morn — and such the Lady Jane. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The old Lord had had offers for her hand, 
 The which he answer'd — by his secretary. 
 
 And, doubtless, some were for the lady's land, 
 The men being old and valetudinary; 
 
 But there were others who were all unmann'd, 
 And fell into a life of wild vagary, 
 
 In their despair. To tell his daughter of it, 
 
 The cold Earl thought, would be but little profit. 
 54 
 
 VII. 
 
 And so she bloom'd — all fenced around with care ; 
 
 And none could find a way to win or woo her. 
 When visible at home — the Earl was there ! 
 
 Abroad — her chaperon stuck closely to her ! 
 She was a sort of nun in open air, 
 
 Known to but few, and intimate with fewer : 
 And, always used to conversation guarded, 
 She thought all men talk'd just as her papa did 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Pause while you read, oh, Broadway demoiselle ! 
 
 And bless your stars that long before you marry, 
 You are a judge of passion pleaded well ! 
 
 For you have listen'd to Tom, Dick, and Harry, 
 And, if kind Heaven endow'd you for a belle, 
 
 At least your destiny did not miscarry ! 
 "You've had your fling" — and now, all wise and 
 
 steady, 
 For matrimony's cares you're cool and ready ! 
 
 IX. 
 
 And yet the bloom upon the fruit is fair ! 
 
 And " ignorance is bliss" in teaching love ! 
 And guarding lips, when others have been there, 
 
 Is apt uneasy reveries to move ! 
 I really think mammas should have a care ! 
 
 And though of nunneries I disapprove, 
 'Tis easier to make blushes hear to reason 
 Than to unteach a " Saratoga Season." 
 
 In France, where, it is said, they wiser are, 
 Miss may not walk out, even with her cousin ; 
 
 And when she is abroad from bolt and bar, 
 
 A well-bred man should be to her quite frozen ; 
 
 And so at last, like a high-priced attar 
 Hermetically seal'd in silk and resin, 
 
 She is deliver'd safe to him who loves her ; 
 
 And then — with whom she will she's hand and glove, 
 
 XI. 
 
 I know this does not work well, and that ours 
 
 Are the best wives on earth. They love their spouses, 
 
 Who prize them — as you do centennial flowers, 
 
 For having bloom'd, though not in your green-houses. 
 
 'Tis a bold wooer that dare talk of dowers. 
 And where / live, the milking of the cows is 
 
 Too rude a task for females! Well. 'Twould hurt 
 you, 
 
 Where women are so prized, to sneer at virtue. 
 
 XII. 
 
 " Free-born Americans," they must have freedom ! 
 
 They'll stay — if they have leave to run away. 
 They're ministering angels when you need 'em, 
 
 But 'specially want credit in Broadway. 
 French wives are more particular how you feed 'em. 
 
 The English drag you oftener to the play. 
 But ours we quite enslave — (more true than funny) — 
 With " heav'n-born liberty," and trutt— or money ! 
 
850 
 
 THE LADY JANE. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Upon her thirtieth birth-day, Lady Jane 
 
 Thought sadly on the twenties ! Ev'n the 'teens, 
 
 That she had said farewell to, without pain — 
 
 Leaves falling from a flower that nothing means — 
 
 Seern'd worth re-gathering to live again ; 
 
 But not like Ruth, fares Memory, who gleans 
 
 After the careful Harvester of years : — 
 
 The Lady Jane thought on't with bitter tears ! 
 
 XIV. 
 
 She glided to her mirror. From the air 
 Glided to meet her, with its tearful eyes, 
 
 A semblance sad, but beautifully fair ; 
 
 And gradually there stole a sweet surprise 
 
 Under her lids, and as she laid the hair 
 
 Back from her snowy brow, Madonna-wise, 
 
 " Time, after all," she said, " a harmless flirt is !" 
 
 And from that hour took kindly to her thirties. 
 
 XV. 
 
 And, with his honors not at all unsteady, 
 
 The Decimal elect stept coolly in ; 
 And having all his nights and mornings ready, 
 
 He'd very little trouble to begin. 
 And Twenty was quite popular, — they said he 
 
 Went out of office with so little din ! 
 The old Earl did not celebrate (nor ought he) 
 Her birth-days more. And like a dream came Forty. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 And on the morn of it she stood to dress, 
 
 Mock'd by that flattering semblance, as before, 
 
 And lifted with a smile the raven tress, 
 
 That darkening her white shoulder, swept the floor. 
 
 Time had not touch'd her dazzling loveliness ! 
 " Yet is it time," she said, " that I give o'er — 
 
 I'm an old maid .' — and tho' I suffer by it, I 
 
 Must change my style and leave off gay society." 
 
 XVII. 
 
 And so she did. Her maid by her desire 
 Comb'd her luxuriant locks behind her ears ; 
 
 She had her dresses alter'd to come higher, 
 Tho' it dissolved the dress-maker in tears ! 
 
 And flung a new French hat into the fire, 
 
 Which she had bought, " forgetful of her years." 
 
 This t' anticipate " the world's dread laugh !" 
 
 Most persons think too much of it, by half. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 I do not mean to say that generally 
 
 The " virtuous single" take too soon to tea ; 
 
 But now and then you find one who could rally 
 At forty, and go back to twenty-three — 
 
 A handsome, plump, affectionate " Aunt Sally," 
 With no taste for cats, flannel, and Bohea ! 
 
 And I would have her, spite of " he or she says," 
 
 Up heart, and pin her kerchief as she pleases. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Some men, 'tis said, prefer a woman fat — 
 Lord Byron did. Some like her very spare. 
 
 Some like a lameness. (I have known one that 
 Would go quite far enough for your despair, 
 
 And halt in time.) Some like them delicate 
 As lilies, and with some " the only wear" 
 
 Is one whose sex has spoiled a midshipman. 
 
 Some only like what pleased another man. 
 
 XX. 
 
 / like one that Wees me. But there's a kind 
 
 Of women, very dangerous to poets, 
 Whose hearts beat with a truth that seems like mind- 
 
 A nature that, tho' passionate, will show its 
 Devotion by not being rash or blind ; 
 ^ But by sweet study grows to love. And so it's 
 Not odd if they are counted cold, tho' handsome, 
 And never meet a man who understands 'em. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 By never I mean late in life. But ah ! 
 
 How exquisite their love and friendship then ! 
 Perennial of soul such women are, 
 
 And readers of the hearts of gifted men ; 
 And as the deep well mourns the hidden star, 
 
 And mirrors the first ray that beams again, 
 They — be the lov'd light lost or dimly burning, 
 Feel all its clouds, and trust its bright returning. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 In outward seeming tranquil and subdued, 
 Their hearts beneath beat youthfully and fast. 
 
 Time and imprison'd love make not a prude ; 
 And warm the gift we know to be the last ; 
 
 And pure is the devotion that must brood 
 Upon your hopes alone — for hers are past ! 
 
 Trust me, " a rising man" rose seldom higher, 
 
 But some dear, sweet old maid has pull'd the wire. 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 The Lady Jane, (pray do not think that hers 
 Was quite the character I've drawn above. 
 
 Old maids, like young, have various calibres, 
 And hers was moderate, tho' she was " a love,") 
 
 The Lady Jane call'd on the Dowagers — 
 Mainly her slight acquaintance to improve, 
 
 But partly with a docile wish to know 
 
 What solaces of age were comme il faut. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 They stared at her plain hat and air demure, 
 But answered her with some particularity; 
 
 And she was edified you may be sure, 
 And added vastly to her popularity. 
 
 She found a dozen mad on furniture, 
 
 Five on embroidery, and none on charity ; 
 
 But her last call — the others were but short ones — 
 
 Turn'd out to Lady Jane of some importance. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 The door was open'd by a Spanish page — 
 A handsome lad in green with bullet buttons, 
 
 Who look'd out like a trulian from a cage, 
 
 And deign'd to glance at the tall menial but once, 
 
 Then bent, with earnestness beyond his age, 
 
 His eyes (you would have liked to see them shut once, 
 
 The fringes were so long — ) on Lady Jane. 
 
 The varlet clearly thought her not so plain. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 And bounding up the flower-laden stair, 
 
 He waited her ascent, then open flung 
 A mirror, clear as 'twere a door of air, 
 
 Which on its silver hinge with music swung — 
 Contrived, that never foot should enter there 
 
 Unheralded by that melodious tongue. 
 This delicate alarum is worth while 
 More 'specially with carpets of three-pile. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 Beyond a gallery extended, cool, 
 
 And softly lighted, and, from dome to floor, 
 
 Hung pictures — mostly the Venetian school ; 
 Each " worth a Jew's eye" — very likely more ; 
 
 And drapery, gold-broider'd in Stamboul, 
 Closed the extremity in lieu of door. 
 
 This the page lifted, and disclosed to view 
 
 The boudoir of the Countess Pasibleu. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 It was a small pavilion lined with pink, — 
 
 Mirrors and silk all, save the door and sky-light, 
 
 The latter of stain'd glass. (You would not think 
 How juvenescent is a rosy high light !) 
 
 Upon the table were seen pen and ink, 
 
 (Two things I cannot say have stood in my light) 
 
 Amid a host of trinkets, toys, and fans; 
 
 The table in the style of Louis Quinze. 
 
THE LADY JANE. 
 
 851 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 A singular and fragile little creature 
 
 Upon the cushions indolently lay, 
 With waning life in each transparent feature, 
 
 But youth in her bright lips' etherial play ; 
 In short, the kind of creature that would meet your 
 
 Conception of a transmigrating fay — 
 The dark eyes, not at all worn out or weary, 
 Kindling for transfer to some bain' Peri 1 
 
 XXX. 
 
 The rest used up, past mending. Yet her tones 
 
 Were wildly, deeply, exquisitely clear ; 
 Tho' voice is not a thing of flesh and bones, 
 
 And probably goes up when they stay here. 
 (I do not know how much of Smith and Jones 
 
 Will bear translating to " the better sphere," 
 But ladies, certainly, when they shall climb to't, 
 Will get their dimples back — tho' not the rhyme to't.) 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 Her person was drcss'd very like her soul — 
 
 In fine material most loosely worn. 
 A cobweb cashmere struggled to control 
 
 Ringlets that laugh'd the filmy folds to scorn, 
 And, from the shawls in which she nestled, stole 
 
 The smallest slipper ever soil'd or torn. 
 You would not guess her age by looking at her, 
 Nor, from my sketch, of course. We'll leave that matter. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 " My dear !" the Countess said, (bj^ this time she 
 Had ceased the Weather, poor old man, to hammer — 
 
 He gets it, in these morning calls, pardie .' 
 And Lady Jane hud hinted with a stammer 
 
 Her errand — somewhat delicate, you see,) 
 " My dear, how very odd ! I fear I am a 
 
 " Poor judge of age — (who made that funny bonnet ?) 
 
 " Indeed, I always turn'd my back upon it ! 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 " Time has no business in one's house, my dear ! 
 
 " I'm not at home to any of my creditors. 
 " They send their nasty bills in, once a year, 
 
 " And Time's are like Mortality's — mere ' dead letters. 
 " Besides, what comfort is there living here, 
 
 " If every stupid hour's to throw Death's head at us ? 
 " (Lend me a pin, dear!) Time at last will stop us, 
 " But, come to that — we're free by habeas corpus. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 (" Fie, what a naughty shawl ! No expose, 
 
 " I trust, love, eh >. Hold there, thou virtuous pin !) 
 
 " And so you really have come out to-day 
 " To look you up some suitable new sin !" 
 
 " Oh, Countess !" " Did you never write a play ? 
 " Nor novel ? Well, you really should begin ! 
 
 " For, (hark, my dear !) the publishers are biters, 
 
 " Not at the book's fine title — but the writer's. 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 " You're half an authoress ; for, as my maid says, 
 " ' Begun's half done,' and you've your title writ. 
 
 " I quote from Colburn, and as what ' the trade' says 
 " Is paid for, it is well consider'd wit. 
 
 " Genius, undoubtedly, of many grades is, 
 " But as to us, we do not need a bit. 
 
 " ' Three volumes,' says the bargain, ' not too thin.' 
 
 " You don't suppose I'd throw him genius in !" 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 " But fame, dear Countess !'' At the word there fiush'd 
 
 A color to her cheek like fever's glow, 
 And in her hand unconsciously she crush'd 
 
 The fringes of her shawl, and bending low 
 To hide the tears that suddenly had gush'd 
 
 Into her large, dark eyes, she murmur'd " No ! 
 " Th' inglorious agony of conquering pain 
 " Has drunk that dream up. I have lived in vain ! 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 " Yet have I set my soul upon the string, 
 
 '' Tense with the energy of high desire, 
 " And trembled, with the arrow's quivering spring, 
 
 " To launch upon ambition's flight of fire! 
 " And never lark so hush'd his heart to sing, 
 
 " Or, as he sang, nerved wing to bear it higher, 
 " As I have striven my wild heart to tame 
 " And melt its love, pride, passion — into fame ! 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 " Oh, poor the flattery to call it mine 
 
 " For trifles which beguiled an hour of pain, 
 
 " Or, on the echoing heels of mirth and wine, 
 " Crept thro' the chambers of a throbbing brain. 
 
 " Worthily, have I never written line ! 
 
 "And when they talk to me of fame I gain, 
 
 " In very bitterness of soul I mock it, — 
 
 " And put the nett proceeds into my pocket ! 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 " And so, my dear, — let not the market vary, — 
 " I bid the critics, pro and con, defiance ; 
 
 " And then I'm fond of being literary, 
 
 " And have a tenderness for ' sucking lions.' 
 
 " My friend the Dutchess has a fancy dairy : — 
 " Cheeses or poets, curds or men of science — 
 
 " It comes to the same thing. But, truce to mocking — 
 
 " Suppose you try my color in a stocking !" 
 
 XL. 
 
 I need not state the ratiocination 
 
 By which the Lady Jane had so decided — 
 
 Not quite upon the regular vocation — 
 
 Of course you knew she was too rich, (or / did,) 
 
 To care with Costard for " remuneration ;" 
 But feeling that her life like Lethe glided, 
 
 She thought 'twould be advisable to bag her a 
 
 Few brace of rapids from her friend's Niagara. 
 
 XLI. 
 
 " Well, Countess ! what shall be my premier pas ? 
 
 " Must I propitiate the penny-a-liners ? 
 " Or would a ' sucking lion' stoop so far 
 
 " As to be fed and petted by a dry nurse ? 
 " I cannot shine — but I can see a star — 
 
 " Are there not worshippers as well as shiners ? 
 " I will be ruled implicitly by you :— 
 " My stocking's innocent — how dye it blue ? 
 
 XLII. 
 
 The Countess number'd on her fingers, musing : — 
 " I've several that I might make you over, 
 
 " And not be inconsolable at losing ; 
 
 " But, really, as you've neither spouse nor lover, 
 
 " 'Most any of my pets would be amusing, 
 " Particularly if you're not above a 
 
 " Discreet flirtation. Are you ? How's the Earl ? 
 
 " Does he still treat you like a little girl ? 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 " How do you see your visitors ? Alone ? 
 
 " Does the Earl sleep at table after dinner ? 
 " Have you had many lovers ? Dear me ! None ? 
 
 " Was not your father something of a sinner ? 
 " Who is the nicest man you've ever known ! 
 
 " Pray does the butler bring your letters in, or 
 " First take them to the Earl ? Is he not rather 
 " A surly dog ?— the butler, not your father." 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 To these inquiries the Lady Jane 
 
 Replied with nods, or something as laconic, 
 
 For on the Countess rattled, might and main, 
 With a rapidity Napoleonic ; 
 
 Then mused and said, " 'Twill never do, it's plain— 
 " The poet must be warranted Platonic ! 
 
 « But, query — how to find you such an oddity ? 
 
 " My dear, they all make love ! — it's their commodity 
 
852 
 
 THE LADY JANE. 
 
 XLV. 
 
 " The poet's on the look-out for a scene — 
 
 " The painter for a ' novel situation ;' 
 " And either does much business between 
 
 " The little pauses of a declaration — 
 " Noting the way in which you sob, or lean, 
 
 " Or use your handkerchief in agitation. 
 " I've known one — making love like Roderick Random — 
 " Get off his knees and make a memorandum ! 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 " You see they're always ready for their trade, 
 " And have a speech as pat as a town-crier; 
 
 " And so, my dear, I'm naturally afraid 
 " To trust you with these gentlemen-on-fire. 
 
 " I knew a most respectable old maid 
 
 " A dramatist made love to — just to try her! 
 
 " She hung herself, of course — but in that way 
 
 " He got some pretty touches for his play. 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 " How shall we manage it ? I say with tears, 
 
 " I've only two that are not rogues at bottom ; 
 ' And one of these would soon be ' over ears' 
 " In love with you, — but that he hasn't got 'em ! 
 
 " They were cut off by the New Zealanders — 
 " (As he invariably adds) ' 'od-rot-'em !' 
 
 " (Meaning the savages.) He's quite a poet, 
 
 " (He wears his hair so that you wouldn't know it,) 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 " In his ideas, I mean. (I really am at a 
 
 " Stand-still about you.) Well — this man, one day, 
 
 " Took in his head to own the earth's diameter, 
 " From zenith thro' to nadir .' (They do say 
 
 " He kill'd his wife — or threw a ham at her — 
 " Or something — so he had to go away — 
 
 " That's neither here nor there.) His name is Wieland, 
 
 " And under him exactly lies New Zealand. 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 " I am not certain if his ' seat' 's, or no, 
 
 " In the Low Countries. But the sky above it 
 
 " Of course is his ; and for some way below 
 " He has a right to dig and to improve it ; 
 
 " But under him, a million miles or so, 
 
 " Lies land that's not his, — and the law can't move it. 
 
 " It cut poor Wieland's nadir off, no doubt— 
 
 " And so he sailed to buy the owner out. 
 
 " I never quite made out the calculation — 
 " But plump against his cellar floor, bin 2, 
 
 " He found a tribe had built their habitation, 
 " Whose food was foreigners and kangaroo. 
 
 " They would sell out — but, to his consternation, 
 " They charged him — all the fattest of his crew ! 
 
 " At last they caught and roasted every one — 
 
 " But he escaped by being under-done !" 
 
 LI. 
 
 That such a lion was well worth his feed, 
 Confess'd with merry tears the Lady Jane ; 
 
 But, that he answer'd to her present need, 
 (A literary pet,) was not so plain. 
 
 She thought she'd give the matter up, indeed, 
 Or turn it over and so call again. 
 
 However, as her friend had mention'd two, 
 
 Perhaps the other might be made to do. 
 
 LII. 
 
 " I'm looking," said the Countess, " for a letter 
 " From my old playmate, Isabella Gray. 
 
 " 'Tis Heaven knows how long since I have met her ; 
 " She ran away and married one fine day — 
 
 " Poor girl ! She might have done a great deal better ! 
 " The boy that she has sent to me, they say, 
 
 " Is handsome, and has talents very striking. 
 
 " So young, too — you can spoil him to your liking. 
 
 LIII. 
 
 " Her letter will amuse you. You must know 
 
 " That, from her marriage-day, her lord has shut her 
 
 " Securely up in an old French chateau ; 
 
 " Where, with her children and no woman but her, 
 
 "He plays the old-school gentleman ; and so 
 
 " Her worldly knowledge stopp'd at bread and butter. 
 
 " She thinks I may be changed by time — for, may be, 
 
 " I've lost a tooth or got another baby. 
 
 LIV. 
 
 " Heigho ! — 'tis evident we're made of clay, 
 " And harden unless kept in tears and shade; 
 
 " This fashionable sunshine dries away 
 " Much that we err in losing, I'm afraid' 
 
 " I wonder what my guardian angels say 
 " About the sort of woman I have made ! 
 
 " I wish I could begin my life again ! 
 
 " What think you of Pythagoras, Lady Jane ?" 
 
 LV. 
 
 The Countess, all this while, was running over 
 The pages of a letter, closely cross'd : — 
 
 " I wish," she said, my most devoted lover 
 
 " Took half the trouble that this scrawl has cost! 
 
 " Though some of it is quite a flight above a 
 
 " Sane woman's comprehension. Tut! Where was't! 
 
 " There is a passage here — the name's Beaulevres — 
 
 " His chateau's in the neighborhood of Sevres 
 
 LVT. 
 
 " The boy's called Jules. Ah, here it is ! My child 
 Brings you this letter. I've not much to say 
 
 More than you know of him, if he has smiled 
 When you have seen him. In his features play 
 
 The light from which his soul has been beguiled — 
 The blessed Heaven I lose with him to-day. 
 
 I ask you not to love him — he is there ! 
 
 And you have loved him — without ivish or praye* ' 
 
 LVII. 
 
 His father sends him forth for fame and gold — 
 An angel, on this errand .' I have striven 
 
 Against it — but he is not mine to hold, 
 
 They say 'tis wrong to wish to stay him, even, 
 
 And that my pride 's poor — my ambition cold .' 
 Alas .' to get him only back to Heaven 
 
 Is my one passionate prayer ! Think me not wild— 
 
 'Tis that I have an angel for my child .' 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 They say that he has genius. I but see 
 That he gets wisdom as the fiow'r gets hue, 
 
 While others hive it like the toiling bee ; 
 
 That, with him, all things beautiful keep new, 
 
 And every morn the first mum seems to be — 
 So freshly look abroad his eyes of blue .' 
 
 What he has written seems to me no more 
 
 Than I have thought a thousand times before ! 
 
 LIX. 
 
 Yet not upon his gay career to Fame 
 
 Broods my foreboding tear. I wish it won — 
 
 My prayer speeds on his spirit to its aim — 
 But in his chamber wait I for my son ! — 
 
 When darken'd is ambition's star of fame — 
 When the night's fever of unrest is on — 
 
 With the unbidden sadness, the sharp care, 
 
 I fly from his bright hours, to meet him there ! 
 
 LX. 
 
 Forgive me if I prate .' Is't much — is't wild — 
 To hope — to pray — that you will sometimes creep 
 
 To the dream-haunted pillow of my child, 
 Keeping sweet watch above his fitful sleep? 
 
 Blest lik" his mother, if in dream he smiled, 
 Or, if he wept, still blest with him to weep; 
 
 Rewarded — Oh, for how much more than this '. — 
 
 By his awaking smile — his morning kiss ! 
 
THE LADY JANE. 
 
 853 
 
 LXI. 
 
 J know not how to stop ! He leaves me well; 
 
 Life, spirit, health, in all his features speak; 
 His foot bounds with the spring of a gazelle ; [streak 
 
 But watch him — stay ! well thought on '. — there's a 
 Which the first faltering of his tongue will tell, 
 
 Long ere the bright blood wavers on his cheek — 
 A little bursted vein, that, near his heart, 
 Looks like a crimson thread half torn apart. 
 
 LXII. 
 
 So, trusting not his cheek by morning light, 
 When hope sits mantling on it, seek his bed 
 
 In the more tranquil watches of the night, 
 And ask this tell-tale how his heart has sped. 
 
 If well — its branching tracery shows bright; 
 But if its sanguine hue look cold and dead, 
 
 Ah, Gertrude .' let your ministering be 
 
 As you would answer it, in Heaven, to me .'" 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 Enter the page: — " Miladi's maid is waiting !" — 
 A hint, (that it was tfme to dress for dinner,) 
 
 Which puts a stop in London to all prating. 
 As far as goes the letter, you're a winner, 
 
 The rest of it to flannel shirts relating — 
 
 When Jules should wear his thicker, when his thinner. 
 
 The Countess laughed at Lady Jane's adieu : 
 
 She thought the letter touching. Pray, don't you ? 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 I have observed that Heav'n, in answering prayer, 
 (This is not meant to be a pious stanza — 
 
 Only a fact that has a pious air.) 
 
 (We're very sure, I think, to have an answer :) 
 
 But I've observed, I would remark, that where 
 Our plans are ill-contrived, as oft our plans are, 
 
 Kind Providence goes quite another way 
 
 To bring about the end for which we pray. 
 
 LXV. 
 
 In this connection I would also add, 
 
 That a discreet young angel, (bona fide,) 
 
 Accompanied our amiable lad ; 
 
 And that he walk'd not out, nor stepp'd aside he, 
 
 Nor met with an adventure, good or bad, 
 (Although he enter'd London on a Friday,) 
 
 Nor ate, nor drank, nor closed his eye a minute, 
 
 Without this angel's guiding finger in it. 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 His mother, as her letter seems to show, 
 Expected him, without delay or bother, — 
 
 Portmanteau, carpet-bag, and all — to go [other !) 
 
 Straight to her old friend's house — (forsooth! what 
 
 The angel, who would seem the world to know, 
 Advised the boy to drive to Mivart's rather. 
 
 He did. The angel, (as I trust is plain,) 
 
 Lodged in the vacant heart of Lady Jane. 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 A month in town these gentlemen had been 
 At date of the commencement of my story. 
 
 The angel's occupations you have seen, 
 
 If you have read what I have laid before ye. 
 
 Jules had seen Dan O'Connell and the Queen, 
 And girded up his loins for fame and glory, 
 
 And changed his old integuments for better ; 
 
 And then he call'd and left his mother's letter. 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 That female hearts grow never old, in towns — 
 That taste grows rather young with dissipation — 
 
 That dowagers dress not in high-neck'd gowns — 
 Nor are, at fifty, proof against flirtation — 
 
 That hospitality is left to clowns, 
 
 Or elbow'd from the world by ostentation — 
 
 That a " tried friend" should not be tried again — 
 
 That boys at seventeen are partly men — 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 Arc truths, as pat as paving-stones, in cities. 
 
 The contrary is true of country air ; 
 (Where the mind rusts, which is a thousand pities, 
 
 While still the cheek keeps fresh and debonnair.) 
 But what I'm trying in this verse to hit is, 
 
 That Heav'n, in answering Jules's mother's prayer, 
 Began by thwarting all her plans and suavities ; 
 As needs must — vide the just-named depravities. 
 
 LXX. 
 
 Some stanzas back, we left the ladies going, 
 At six, to dress for dinner. Time to dine 
 
 I always give in poetry, well knowing 
 That,' to jump over it in half a line, 
 
 Looks, (let us be sincere, dear muse !) like showing 
 Contempt we do not feel, for meat and wine. 
 
 Dinner! Ye Gods ! What is there more respectable ! 
 
 For eating, who, save Byron, ever check'd a belle ? 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 'Tis ten — say half-past. Lady Jane has dined, 
 
 And dress'd as simply as a lady may. 
 A card lies on her table ' To Remind' — 
 
 'Tis odd she never thought of it to-day. 
 But she is pleasantly surprised to find 
 
 'Tis Friday night, the Countess's soiree. 
 Back rolls the chariot to Berkely Square. 
 If you have dined, dear reader, let's go there ! 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 We're early. In the cloak-room smokes the urn, 
 The house-keeper behind it, fat and solemn ; 
 
 Steady as stars the fresh-lit candles burn, 
 
 And on the stairs the new-blown what d'ye-call 'em 
 
 Their nodding cups of perfume overturn ; 
 The page leans idly by a marble column, 
 
 And stiffly a tall footman stands above, 
 
 Looking between the fingers of his glove. 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 All bright and silent, like a charmed palace — 
 
 The spells wound up, the fays to come at twelve ; 
 
 The house-keeper a witch, (cum grano salis;) 
 The handsome page, perhaps, a royal elve 
 
 Condemned to servitude by fairy malice ; 
 
 (I wish the varlet had these rhymes to delve !) 
 
 Some magic hall, it seems, for revel bright, 
 
 And Lady Jane the spirit first alight. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 Alas ! here vanishes the foot of Pleasure ! 
 
 She — like an early guest — goes in before, 
 And comes, when all are gone, for Memory's treasure 
 
 But is not found upon the crowded floor ; 
 (Unless, indeed, some charming woman says you're 
 
 A love, which makes close quarters less a bore.) 
 I've seen her, down Anticipation's vista, 
 As large as life — and walk'd straight on, and miss'd hei 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 With a declining taste for making friends, 
 One's taste for the fatigue of pleasure's past ; 
 
 And then, one sometimes wonders which transcende » 
 The first hour of a gay night, or the last. 
 
 (Beginners " burn the candle at both ends," 
 And find the middle brightest— that is fast !) 
 
 But a good rule at parties, (to keep up a 
 
 Mercurial air,) is to come in at supper. 
 
 LXXVI. 
 
 I mean that you should go to bed at nine 
 
 And sleep 'till twelve — take coffee or green tea, 
 
 Dress and go out — (this was a way of mine 
 When looking up the world in '33) — 
 
 Sup at the ball— (it's not a place for wine) — 
 Sleep, or not, after, as the case may be. 
 
 You've the advantage, thus, when all are yawning 
 
 Of growing rather fresher toward morning. 
 
854 
 
 THE LADY JANE. 
 
 LXXVII. 
 
 But, after thirty, here's your best " Elixir :" 
 
 Breakfast betimes. Do something worth your while 
 
 By twelve or one — (this makes the blood run quick, Sir !) 
 Dine with some man or woman who will smile. 
 
 Have little cause to care how politics are, 
 " Let not the sun go down upon your" bile ; 
 
 And, if well-married, rich, and not too clever, 
 
 I don't see why you shouldn't live for ever. 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 Short-lived is your " sad dog" — and yet, we hear, 
 
 " Whom the gods love die young." Of course the ladies 
 Are safe in loving what the gods hold dear ; 
 
 And the result, I'm very much afraid, is, 
 That if he " has his day," it's " neither here 
 
 Nor there !" But it is time our hero made his 
 Appearance on the carpet, Lady Jane — 
 (I'll mend this vile pen, and begin again.) 
 
 LXXIX. 
 
 The Lady Jane walk'd thro' the bright rooms, breaking 
 The glittering silence with her flowing dress, 
 
 Whose pure folds seem'd a coy resistance making 
 To the fond air ; while, to her loveliness 
 
 The quick-eyed mirrors breathlessly awaking, 
 Acknowledged not one radiant line the less 
 
 That not on them she look'd before she faded ! 
 
 Neglected gentlemen don't do as they did : — 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 No ! — for, 'twixt our quicksilver and a woman, 
 Nature has put no glass, for non-conductor, 
 
 And, while she's imaged in their bosoms, few men 
 Can make a calm, cold mirror their instructor ; 
 
 For, when beloved, we deify what's human — 
 
 When piqued, we mock like devils ! But I've pluck'da 
 
 Digression here. It's no use, my contending, — 
 
 Fancy will ramble while the pen is mending ! 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 A small room on the left, (I'll get on faster 
 
 If you're impatient,) very softly lit 
 By lamps conceal'd in bells of alabaster, 
 
 Lipp'd like a lily, and " as white as it," 
 With a sweet statue by a famous master, 
 
 Just in the centre, (but not dress'd a bit !) — 
 This dim room drew aside our early-comer, 
 Who thought it like a moonlight night in summer. 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 And so it was. For, thro' an opening door, 
 Came the soft breath of a conservatory, 
 
 And, bending its tall stem the threshold o'er, 
 Swung in a crimson flower, the tropics' glory •, 
 
 And, as you gazed, the vista lengthen'd more, 
 
 And statues, lamps and flowers — but, to my story ! 
 
 The room was cushion'd like a Bey's divan ; 
 
 And in it — (Heav'n preserve us !) — sat a man ! 
 
 LXXXIII. 
 
 At least, as far as boots and pantaloons 
 
 Are symptoms of a man, there seem'd one there — 
 
 Whatever was the number of his Junes. 
 
 She look'd again, and started ! In a chair, 
 
 Sleeping as if his eyelids had been moons, 
 Reclined, with flakes of sunshine in his hair, 
 
 (Or, what look'd like it,) a fair youth, quite real, 
 
 But of a beauty like the Greek ideal. 
 
 LXXXIV. 
 
 He slept, like Love by slumber overtaken, 
 His bow unbent, his quiver thrown aside ; 
 
 The lip might to a manlier arch awaken— 
 The nostril, so serene, dilate with pride : 
 
 But, now, he lay, of all his masks forsaken, 
 And childhood's sleep was there, and naught 
 
 And his bright lips lay smilingly apart, 
 
 Like a torn crimson leaf with pearly heart. 
 
 LXXXV. 
 
 Now Jules Beaulevres, Esq. — (this was he — ) 
 Had never been " put up" to London hours ; 
 
 And thinking he was simply ask'd to tea, 
 
 Had been, since seven, looking at the flowers — 
 
 No doubt extremely pleasant, — but, you see, 
 A great deal of it rather overpowers ; 
 
 And possibly, that very fine exotic 
 
 He sat just under, was a slight narcotic. 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 
 At any rate, when it was all admired, — 
 
 As quite his notion of a Heav'n polite, 
 (Minus the angels,) — he felt very tired — 
 
 As one, who'd been all day sight-seeing, might! 
 And having by the Countess been desired 
 
 To make himself at home, he did so, quite. 
 He begg'd his early coming might not fetter her 
 And she went out to dine, the old — etcetera. 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 And thinking of his mother — and his bill 
 At Mivart's — and of all the sights amazing 
 
 Of which, the last few days, he'd had his fill — 
 
 And choking when he thought of fame — and gazing 
 
 Upon his varnish'd boots, (as young men will,) 
 
 And wond'ring how the shops could pay for glazing — 
 
 And also, (here his thoughts were getting dim,) 
 
 Whether a certain smile was meant for him — 
 
 LXXXVIII. 
 
 And rnurm'ring over, with a drowsy bow, 
 
 The speech he made the Countess, when he met her, — 
 
 And smiling, with closed eyelids, (thinking how 
 He should describe her in the morrow's letter) — 
 
 And sighing " Good-night !" (he was dreaming now) — 
 Jules dropp'd into a world he liked much better ; 
 
 But left his earthly mansion unprotected, 
 
 Well, Sir ! 'twas robb'd — as might have been expected . 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 The Lady Jane gazed on the fair boy sleeping, 
 And in his lips' rare beauty read his name ; 
 
 And to his side with breathless wonder creeping, 
 Resistless to her heart the feeling came, 
 
 That, to her yearning love's devoted keeping, 
 Was giv'n the gem within that fragile frame. 
 
 And bending with almost a mother's bliss, 
 
 To his bright lips, she seal'd it with a kiss ! 
 
 XC. 
 
 Oh, in that ki.ss how much of Heav'n united ! 
 
 What haste to pity — eagerness to bless ! 
 What thirsting of a heart, long pent and slighted, 
 
 For something fair, yet human, to caress ! 
 How fathomless the love so briefly plighted ! 
 
 What kiss thrill'd ever more — sinn'd ever less 1 
 So love the angels, sent with holy mercies ! 
 And so love poets — in their early verses ! 
 
 XCI. 
 
 If, in well-bred society, ("hear! hear!") 
 
 If, in this " wrong and pleasant" world of ours 
 
 There beats a pulse that seraphs may revere — 
 If Eden's birds, when frighted from its flowers, 
 
 Clung to one deathless seed, still blooming here — 
 If Time cut ever down, 'mid blighted hours, 
 
 A bliss that will spring up in bliss again — 
 
 'Tis woman's love. This I believe. Amen ! 
 
 XCII. 
 
 To guard from ill, to help, watch over, warn — 
 
 To learn, for his sake, sadness, patience, pain- 
 To seek him with most love when most forlorn — 
 
 Promised the mute kiss of the Lady Jane. 
 And thus, in sinless purity is born, 
 
 Alway, the love of woman. So, again, 
 I say, that up to kissing — later even — 
 A woman's love may have its feet in Heaven. 
 
THE LADY JANE. 
 
 855 
 
 XCIII. 
 
 Jules open'd (at the kiss) his large blue eyes, 
 And calmly gazed upon the face above him, 
 
 But never stirr'd, and utter'd no surprise — 
 Although his situation well might move him. 
 
 He seem'd so cool, (my lyre shall tell no lies,) 
 
 That Lady Jane half thought she shouldn't love him ; 
 
 When suddenly the Countess Pasibleu 
 
 Enter'd the room with, " Dear me ! how d'ye do !" 
 
 XCIV. 
 
 Up sprang the boy — amazement on his brow ! 
 
 But the next instant, through his lips there crept 
 A just awakening smile, and, with a bow, 
 
 Calmly he said : " 'Twas only while I slept 
 The angels did not vanish — until now." 
 
 A speech, I think, quite worthy an adept. 
 The Countess stared, and Lady Jane began 
 To fear that she had kiss'd a nice young man. 
 
 xcv. 
 
 Jules had that precious quality call'd tact ; 
 
 And having made a very warm beginning, 
 He suddenly grew grave, and rather back'd ; 
 
 As if incapable of further sinning. 
 'Twas well he did so, for, it is a fact, 
 
 The ladies like, themselves, to do the winning. 
 In female SKakspearcs, Desdemonas shine ; 
 And the Othellos " seriously incline." 
 
 XCVI. [ 
 
 So, with a manner quite reserved and plain, 
 Jules ask'd to be presented, and then made 
 
 Many apologies to Lady Jane 
 
 For the eccentric part that he had play'd. 
 
 Regretted he had slept — confess'd with pain 
 He took her for an angel — was afraid 
 
 He had been rude — abrupt — did he alarm 
 
 Her much ?— and might he offer her his arm ? 
 
 XCVII. 
 
 And as they ranged that sweet conservatory, 
 He heeded not the flowers he walk'd among ; 
 
 But such an air of earnest listening wore he, 
 That a dumb statue must have found a tongue ; 
 
 And like a child that hears a fairy story, 
 His parted lips upon her utterance hung. 
 
 He seem'd to know by instinct, (else how was it ?) 
 
 That people love the bank where they deposit. 
 
 XCVIII. 
 
 And closer, as the moments faster wore, 
 
 The slender arm within her own she press'd ; 
 
 And yielding to the magic spell he bore — 
 The earnest truth upon his lips imprest — 
 
 She lavishly told out the golden ore 
 
 Hoarded a life-time in her guarded breast. 
 
 And Jules, throughout, was beautifully tender — 
 
 Although he did not always comprehend her. 
 
 XCIX. 
 
 And this in him was no deep calculation, 
 
 But in good truth, as well as graceful seeming, 
 
 Abandonment complete to admiration — 
 
 His soul gone from him as it goes in dreaming. 
 
 I wish'd to make this little explanation, 
 
 Misgiving that his tact might go for scheming ; 
 
 I can assure you it was never plann'd ; 
 
 I have it from his angel, (second hand.) 
 
 And from the same authentic source I know, 
 That Lady Jane still thought him but a lad ; 
 
 Tho', why the deuce she didn't treat him so, 
 Is quite enough to drive conjecture mad ! 
 
 Perhaps she thought that it would make him grow 
 To take more beard for granted that he had. 
 
 A funny friend to lend a nice young man to ! 
 
 I'm glad I've got him safely through one Canto. 
 
 CANTO II. 
 
 The Countess Pasibleu's gay rooms were full, 
 Not crowded. It was neither rout nor ball — 
 
 Only " her Friday night." The air was cool ; 
 And there were people in the house of all 
 
 Varieties, except the pure John Bull. 
 
 The number of young ladies, too, was small— 
 
 You seldom find old John, or his young daughters, 
 
 Swimming in very literary waters. 
 
 II. 
 
 Indeed, with rare exceptions, women given 
 
 To the society of famous men, 
 Are those who will confess to twenty-seven ; 
 
 But add to this the next reluctant ten, 
 And still they're fit to make a poet's heaven, 
 
 For sumptuously beautiful is then 
 The woman of proud mien and thoughtful brow ; 
 And one (still bright in her meridian now) 
 
 III. ' 
 
 Bent upon Jules, that night, her lustrous eye. 
 
 A creature of a loftier mould was she 
 Than in liis dreams had ever glided by ; 
 
 And through his veins the blood flew startingly, 
 And he felt sick at heart — he knew not why — 
 
 For 'tis the sadness of the lost to see 
 Angels look on us with a cold regard, 
 (Not knowing those who never left their card.) 
 
 IV. 
 
 She had a low, sweet brow, with fringed lakes 
 Of an unfathom'd darkness couch'd below ; 
 
 And parted on that brow in jetty flakes 
 
 The raven hair swept back with wavy flow, 
 
 Rounding a head of such a shape as makes 
 The old Greek marble with the goddess glow. 
 
 Her nostril's breaching arch might threaten storm — 
 
 But love lay in her lips, all hush'd and warm. 
 
 V. 
 
 And small teeth, glittering white, and cheek whose red 
 Seem'd Passion, there asleep, in rosy nest : 
 
 And neck set on as if to bear a head — 
 May be a lily, may be Juno's crest, — 
 
 So lightly sprang it from its snow-white bed '. 
 So proudly rode above the swelling breast ! 
 
 And motion, effortless as stars awaking 
 
 And melting out, at eve, and morning's breaking ; 
 
 VI. 
 
 And voice delicious quite, and smile that came 
 
 Slow to the lips, as 'twere the heart smiled thro' : — 
 
 These charms I've been particular to name, 
 For they are, like an inventory, true, 
 
 And of themselves were stuff enough for fame ; 
 But she, so wondrous fair, has genius too, 
 
 And brilliantly her thread of life is spun — 
 
 In verse and beauty both, the " Undying One !" 
 
 VII. 
 
 And song — for in those kindling lips there lay 
 Music to wing all utterance outward breaking, 
 
 As if upon the ivory teeth did play 
 
 Angels, who caught the words at their awaking, 
 
 And sped them with sweet melodies away — 
 
 The hearts of those who listen'd with them taking. 
 
 Of proof to this last fact there's little lack ; 
 
 And Jules, poor lad ! ne'er got his truant back ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 That heart stays with her still. 'Tis one of two, 
 (I should premise)— all poets being double, 
 
 Living in two worlds as of course they do, 
 Fancy and fact, and rarely taking trouble 
 
 T' explain in which they're living, as to you ! 
 And this it is makes all the hubble-bubble, 
 
 For who can fairly write a bard's biography, 
 
 When, of his/nncy-world, there's no geography ! 
 
S56 
 
 THE LADY JANE. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Jules was at perfect liberty in fact 
 
 To love again, and still be true in fancy; 
 
 Else were this story at its closing act. 
 Nay, he in fact might wed, and inromance he 
 
 Might find the qualities his sposa lack'd — 
 (A truth that I could easier make a man see,) 
 
 And woman's great mistake, if I may tell it, is 
 
 The calling such stray fancies " infidelities." 
 
 Byron was man and bard, and Lady B., 
 
 In wishing to monopolize him wholly, 
 Committed bigamy, you plainly see. 
 
 She, being very single, Guiccioli 
 Took off the odd one of the wedded three — 
 
 A change, 'twould seem, quite natural and holy. 
 The after sin, which still his fame environs, 
 Was giving Guiccioli both the Byrons. 
 
 XI. 
 
 The stern wife drove him from her. Had she loved 
 With all the woman's tenderness the while, 
 
 He had not been the wanderer he proved. 
 Like bird to sunshine fled he to a smile ; 
 
 And, lightly though the changeful fancy roved, 
 The heart speeds home with far more light a wile. 
 
 The world well tried — the sweetest thing in life 
 
 Is the unclouded welcome of a wife. 
 
 XII. 
 
 To poets more than all — for truthful love 
 
 Has, to their finer sense, a deeper sweetness ; 
 
 Yet she who has the venturous wish to prove 
 The poet's love when nearest to completeness, 
 
 Must wed the man and let the fancy rove — 
 Loose to the air that wing of eager flectness, 
 
 And sinile it home when wearied out — with air. 
 
 But if you scold him, Madam ! have a care 1 
 
 XIII. 
 
 All this time the li Undying One" was singing. 
 
 She ceased, and Jules felt every sound a pain 
 While that sweet cadence in his ear was ringing ; 
 
 So gliding from the arm of Lady Jane, 
 Which rather scem'd to have the whim of clinging, 
 
 He made himself a literary lane — 
 Punching and shoving every kind of writer 
 'Till he got out. (He might have been politer.) 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Free of "the press," he wandcr'd thro' the rooms, 
 Longing for solitude, but studying faces ; 
 
 And, smitten witli the ugliness of Brougham's, 
 He mused upon the cross with monkey races — 
 
 (Hicroglyphick'd on tli' Egyptian tombs 
 
 And shown in France with very striking traces.) 
 
 " Rejected" Smith's he thought a head quite glorious ; 
 
 And Hook, all button'd up, he took for " Boreas." 
 
 XV. 
 
 He noted Lady Stepney's pretty hand, 
 
 And Barry Cornwall's sweet and serious eye ; 
 
 And saw Moore get down from his chair to stand, 
 While a most royal Duke went bowing by — 
 
 Saw Savage Landor, wanting soap and sand — 
 Saw Lady Chatterton take snuff and sigh — 
 
 Saw graceful Bulwer say " good-night," and vanish — 
 
 Heard Crofton Croker's brogue, and thought it Spanish. 
 
 He saw Smith whispering something very queer, 
 And Hayward creep behind to overhear him ; 
 
 Saw Lockhart whistling in a lady's ear, 
 
 (Jules thought so, till, on getting very near him, 
 
 The error — not the mouth — became quite clear ;) 
 He saw " the Duke" and had a mind to cheer him ; 
 
 And fine Jane Porter with her cross and feather, 
 
 And clever Babbage, with his face of leather. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 And there was plump and saucy Mrs. Gore, 
 And calm, old, lily-white Joanna Baillie, 
 
 And frisky Bowring, London's wisest bore ; 
 And there was " devilish handsome" D'Israeli ; 
 
 And not a lion of all these did roar ; 
 
 But laughing, flirting, gossiping so gaily, — 
 
 Poor Jules began to think 'twas only mockery 
 
 To talk of " porcelain" — 'twas a world of crockery. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 ' Tis half a pity authors should be seen ! 
 
 Jules thought so, and I think so too, with Jules. 
 They'd better do the immortal with a screen, 
 
 And show but mortal in a world of fools ; 
 Men talk of " taste" for thunder — but they mean 
 
 Old Vulcan's apron and his dirty tools ; 
 They flock all wonder to the Delphic shade, 
 To know — just how the oracle is made ! 
 
 XIX. 
 
 What we should think of Bulwer's works — without him, 
 His wife, his coat, his curls or other handle ; 
 
 What of our Cooper, knowing naught about him, 
 Save his enchanted quill and pilgrim's sandal ; 
 
 What of old Lardner, (gracious ! how they flout him !) 
 Without this broad — (and Heavy.) side of scandal ; 
 
 What of Will Shakspeare had he kept a " Boz" 
 
 Like Johnson — would be curious questions, coz ! 
 
 XX. 
 
 Jove is, no doubt, a gainer by his cloud, 
 
 (Which ta'cn away, might cause irreverent laughter,) 
 But, out of sight, he thunders ne'er so loud, 
 
 And no one asks the god to dinner after ; 
 And " Fame's proud temple," build it ne'er so proud, 
 
 Finds notoriety a useful rafter. 
 And when you've been abused awhile, you learn 
 All blasts blow fair for you — that blow astern .' 
 
 XXL 
 
 No " pro" without its " con ;" — The pro is fame, 
 Pure, cold, unslander'd, like a virgin's frill ; 
 
 The con is beef and mutton, sometimes game, 
 Madeira, Sherry, claret, what you will ; 
 
 The ladies' (albums) striving for your name ; 
 All, (save the woodcock,) yours without a bill ; 
 
 And " in the gate," an unbelieving Jew, 
 
 Your " Mordecai !" — Why, clearly con's your cuel 
 
 XXII. 
 
 I've " reason'd" myself neatly " round the ring," 
 While Jules came round to Lady Jane once more, 
 
 And supper being but a heavy thing, 
 
 (To lookers-on,) I'll show him to the door, 
 
 And his first night to a conclusion bring ; 
 Not (with your kind permission, sir) before 
 
 I tell you what her Ladyship said to him 
 
 As home to Brook-street her swift horses drew him 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 " You're comfortably lodged, I trust," she said : 
 " And Mrs. Mivart — is she like a mother '! 
 
 " Have you mosquito curtains to your bed ? 
 
 " Do you sleep well without your little brother ? 
 
 " What do you eat for breakfast — baker's bread? 
 " I'll send you some home-made, if you would rather 
 
 " What do you do to-morrow ? — say at five, 
 
 " Or four — "say four — I call for you to drive ? 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 " There's the New Garden, and the Coliseum — 
 " Perhaps you don't care much for Panoramas ? 
 
 " But there's an armadillo — you must see him 1 
 
 " And those big-eyed giraffes and heavenly lamas .' 
 
 " And — are you fond of music ? — the Te Deum 
 " Is beautifully play'd by Lascaramhas, 
 
 " At the new Spanish chapel. This damp air ! 
 
 " And you've no hat on ! — let me feel your hair I 
 
THE LADY JANE. 
 
 857 
 
 XXV. 
 
 " Poor boy !" — but Jules's head was on her breast, 
 Rock"d like a nautilus in calm mid ocean ; 
 
 And while its curls within her hands she press'd, 
 The Lady Jane experienced some emotion : 
 
 For, did he sleep ? or wish to be caress'd ? 
 
 What meant the child ! — she'd not the slightest notion ! 
 
 Arrived at home, he rose, without a shake — 
 
 Trembling and slightly flush'd — but wide awake. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Loose rein i put spur ! and follow, gentle reader ! 
 
 For I must take a flying leap in rhyme ; 
 And be to you both Jupiter and leader, 
 
 Annihilating space, (we all kill time,) 
 And overtaking Jules in Rome, where he'd a 
 
 Delight or two, besides the pleasant clime. 
 The Lady Jane and he, (I scorn your cavils — 
 The Earl was with them, sir !) were on their travels. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 You know, perhaps, the winds are no narcotic, 
 
 As swallow'd 'twixt the Thames and Frith of Forth ; 
 
 And Jules had proved a rather frail exotic — 
 Too delicate to winter so far north ; 
 
 The Earl was breaking, and half idiotic, 
 And Lady Jane's condition little worth ; 
 
 So, thro' celestial Paris, (speaking victual-ly,) 
 
 They sought the sunnier clime of ill-fed Italy. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 Oh Italy !— but no— I'll tell its faults ! 
 
 It has them, tho' the blood so " nimbly capers" 
 Beneath those morning heavens and starry vaults, 
 
 That we forget big rooms and little tapers — 
 Forget how drowsily the Romans waltz — 
 
 Forget they've neither shops nor morning papers — 
 Forget how dully sits, mid ancient glory, 
 This rich man's heaven — this poor man's purgatory ! 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 Fashion the world as one bad man would have it, he 
 Would silence Harry's tongue, and Tom's, and Dick's ; 
 
 And doubtless it is pleasing to depravity 
 
 To know a land where people are but sticks — 
 
 Where you've no need of fair words, flattery, suavity, 
 But spend your money, if you like, with kicks — 
 
 Where they pass by their own proud, poor nobility, 
 
 To welcome golden " Snooks" with base servility. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 Jules was not in the poor man's category — 
 So Rome's condition never spoilt his supper. 
 
 The deuce (for him) might take the Curtian glory 
 Of riding with a nation on his crupper. 
 
 He lived upon a Marquis's first story — 
 The venerable Marquis in the upper — 
 
 And found it pass'd the time, (and so would you.) 
 
 To do some things at Rome that Romans do. 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 The Marquis upon whom he chanced to quarter, 
 (He took his lodgings separate from the Earl,) 
 
 The Marquis had a friend, who had a daughter — 
 The friend a noble like himself, the girl 
 
 A diamond of the very purest water ; 
 (Or purest milk, if you prefer a pearl ;) 
 
 And these two friends, tho' poor, were hand and glove, \ 
 
 And of a pride their fortunes much above. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 The Marquis had not much besides his palace, 
 The Count, beyond his daughter, simply naught ; 
 
 And, one day, died this very Count Pascalis, 
 Leaving his friend his daughter, as he ought ; 
 
 And, tho' the Fates had done the thing in malice, 
 The old man took her, without second thought, 
 
 And married her. " She's freer thus," he said, 
 
 " And will be young to marry when I'm dead." 
 
 Meantime, she had a title, house, and carriage, 
 
 And, far from wearing chains, had newly burst 'em — 
 
 For, as of course you know, before their marriage 
 Girls are sad prisoners by Italian custom — 
 
 Not meaning their discretion to disparage, 
 
 But just because they're sure they couldn't trust 'em. 
 
 When wedded, they are free enough — moreover, 
 
 The marriage contract specifies one lover. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 Not that the Marchioness had one — no, no ! — 
 Nor wanted one. It is not my intention 
 
 To hint it in this tale. Jules lodged below — 
 But his vicinity's not my invention ; 
 
 And, if it seem to you more apropos 
 
 Than I have thought it worth my while to mention, 
 
 Why, you think as the world did — verbum sat — 
 
 But still it needn't be so — for all that. 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 'Most any female neighbor, up a stair, 
 
 Occasions thought in him who lodges under ; 
 
 And Jules, by accident, had walk'd in where 
 
 (A "flight too high" 's a very common blunder.) 
 
 He saw a lady whom he thought as fair 
 
 As "from her shell rose" Mrs Smith of Thunder. 
 
 Tho' Venus, I would say were Vulcan by, 
 
 Was no more like the Marchioness than I. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 For this grave sin there needed much remission ; 
 
 And t' assure it, oft the offender went. 
 The Marquis had a very famous Titian, 
 
 And Jules so often came to pay his rent, 
 The old man recommended a physician, 
 
 Thinking his intellects a little bent. 
 And, pitying, he thought and talk'd about him, 
 Till, finally, he couldn't live without him. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 And, much to the neglect of Lady Jane, 
 
 Jules paid him back his love ; and there, all day, 
 
 The fair young Marchioness, with fickle brain, 
 
 Tried him with changeful mood, now coy, now gay : 
 
 And the old man lived o'er his youth again, 
 Seeing those grown-up children at their play — 
 
 His wife sixteen, Jules looking scarcely more, 
 
 'Twas frolic infancy to eighty-four. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 There seems less mystery in matrimony, 
 With people living nearer the equator ; 
 
 And early, like the most familiar crony, 
 Unheralded by butler, groom, or waiter, 
 
 Jules join'd the Marquis at his macaroni, — 
 The Marchioness at toast and coffee later ; 
 
 And if his heart throbb'd wild sometimes, he hid it ; 
 
 And if her dress required " doing" — did it. 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 Now tho' the Marchioness in church did faint once, 
 And, as Jules bore her out, they didn't group ill ; 
 
 And tho' the spouses (as a pair) were quaint ones — 
 She scarce a woman, and his age octuple — 
 
 'Twas odd, extremely odd, of fheir acquaintance, 
 To call Jules lover with so little scruple ! 
 
 He'd a caressing way — but la ! you know it's 
 
 A sort of manner natural to poets ! 
 
 XL. 
 
 God made them prodigal in their bestowing ; 
 
 And, if their smiles were riches, few were poor ! 
 They turn to all the sunshine that is going — 
 
 Swoop merrily at all that shows a lure — 
 Their love at heart and lips is overflowing — 
 
 Their motto, " Trust the future — now is sure !" 
 Their natural pulse is high intoxication — 
 fSobcr'd by debt and mortal botheration.!* 
 
858 
 
 THE LADY JANE. 
 
 XLI. 
 
 Of such men's pain and pleasure, hope and passion, 
 The symptoms are not read by " those who run ;" 
 
 And 'tis a pity it were not the fashion 
 
 To count them but as children of the sun — 
 
 Not to be baited like the " bulls of Bashan," 
 Nor liable, like clods, for " one pound one" — 
 
 But reverenced — as Indians rev'rence fools — 
 
 Inspired, tho' God knows how. Well — such was Jules. 
 
 XLII. 
 
 The Marquis thought him sunshine at the window — 
 The window of his heart — and let him in ! 
 
 The Marchioness loved sunshine like a Hindoo, 
 And she thought loving him could be no sin ; 
 
 And as she loved not yet as those who sin do, 
 
 'Twas very well — was't not ? Stick there a pin I 
 
 It strikes me that so far — to this last stanza — 
 
 The hero seems a well-disposed young man, sir ! 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 I have not bored you much with his " abilities," 
 
 Tho' I set out to treat you to a poet, 
 The first course commonly is " puerilities" — 
 
 (A soup well pepper'd — all the critics know it !) 
 Brought in quite hot. (The simple way to chill it is, 
 
 For " spoons" to stir, and puffy lips to blow it.) 
 Then, poet stuff 'd, and by his kidney roasted, 
 And last (with " lagrima,") " the devil" toasted. 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 High-scream between the devil and the roast, 
 
 But no Sham-pain .' Hold there ! the fit is o'er. 
 
 Obsta principiis — one pun breeds a host— 
 (Alarmingly prolific for a bore !) 
 
 But he who never sins can little boast 
 
 Compared to him who goes and sins no more ! 
 
 The " sinful Mary" walks more white in Heaven 
 
 Than some who never " sinn'd and were forgiven !" 
 
 XLV. 
 
 Jules had objections very strong to playing 
 
 His character of poet — therefore I 
 Have rather dropp'd that thread, as I was saying. 
 
 But tho' he'd neither frenzy in his eye, 
 Nor much of outer mark the bard betraying — 
 
 (A thing he piqued himself on, by the by — ) 
 His conversation frequently arose 
 To what was thought a goodly flight for prose. 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 His beau ideal was to sink the attic, 
 
 (Tho' not by birth, nor taste, " the salt above" — ) 
 To pitilessly cut the air erratic 
 
 Which ladies, fond of authors, so much love, 
 And be, in style, calm, cold, aristocratic — 
 
 Serene in faultless boots and primrose glove. 
 But th' exclusive's made of starch, not honey ! 
 And Jules was cordial, joyous, frank, and funny. 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 This was one secret of his popularity, 
 
 Men hate a manner colder than their own, 
 
 And ladies — bless their hearts ! love chaste hilarity 
 Better than sentiment — if truth were known ! 
 
 And Jules had one more slight peculiarity — 
 He'd little " approbativeness" — or none — 
 
 And what the critics said concern'd him little — 
 
 Provided it touch'd not his drink and victual. 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 Critics, I say — of course he was in prints — 
 
 " Poems," of course — of course " anonymous" — 
 
 Of course he found a publisher by dint 
 
 Of search most diligent, and far more fuss 
 
 Than chemists make in melting you a flint. 
 Since that experiment he reckons plus 
 
 Better manure than minus for his bays — 
 
 In short, seeks immortality — " that pays." 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 He writes in prose — the public like it better. 
 
 Well — let the public ! You may take a poet, 
 And he shall write his grandmother a letter, 
 
 And, if he's any thing but rhyme — he'll show it 
 Prose may be poetry, without its fetter, 
 
 And be it pun or pathos, high or low wit, 
 The thread will show its gold, however twisted — 
 (I wish the public fiatter'd me that this did !) 
 
 No doubt there's pleasant stuff that ill unravels. 
 
 I fancy most of Moore's would read so-so, 
 Done into prose of pious Mr. Flavel's — 
 
 (That is my Sunday reading — so I know,) 
 Yet there's Childe Harold — excellent good travels — 
 
 And what could spoil sweet Robinson Crusoe ! 
 But tho' a clever verse-r makes a prose-r, 
 About the vice-versa, I don't know, sir ! 
 
 LI. 
 
 Verser 's a better word than versifier, 
 
 (Unless 'tis verse on fire, you mean to say,) 
 
 And I've long thought there's something to desire 
 In poet's nomenclature, by the way. 
 
 It sounds but queer to laud " the well-known lyre" — 
 Call a dog " poet !" he will run away — 
 
 And "songster," "rhymester," "bard," and "poetaster," 
 
 Are customers they're shy of at the Astor. 
 
 LII. 
 
 A " scribbler's" is a skittish reputation, 
 
 And weighs a man down like a hod of mortar. 
 
 Commend a suitor's wit, imagination — 
 
 The merchant may think of hiin for his daughter ; 
 
 But say that " he writes poetry" n ! 
 
 Her " Pa" would rather throw her in the water ! 
 
 And yet when poets wed, as facts will prove, 
 
 Their bills stand all at pa, they much above ! 
 
 LIII. 
 
 Jules had a hundred minds to cut the muses ; 
 
 And sometimes did, " forever !" — (for a week I) 
 He found for time so many other uses. 
 
 His superfluity was his physique ; 
 And exercise, if violent, induces 
 
 Blood to the head and flush upon the cheek ; 
 And, (tho' details are neither here nor there,) 
 Makes a man sit uneasy on his chair; 
 
 LIV. 
 
 Particularly that of breaking horses. 
 
 The rate of circulation in the blood, 
 Best suited to the meditative forces, 
 
 Is quite as far from mercury as mud — 
 That of the starry, not the racing-courses. 
 
 No man can trim his style mid fire and flood, 
 Nor in a passion, nor just after marriage ; 
 And, as to Caesar's writing in his carriage, 
 
 LV. 
 
 Credat Judaeus ! Thought is free and easy ; 
 
 But language, unless wrought with labor lima, 
 Is not the kind of thing, sir, that would please ye ! 
 
 The bee makes honey, but his toil is thymy, 
 And nothing is well done until it tease ye ; 
 
 (Tho' if there's one who would 'twere not so, I'm he !) 
 Now Jules, I say, found out that filly-breaking, 
 Tho' monstrous fun, was not a poet's making. 
 
 LVI. 
 
 True — some drink up to composition's glow ; 
 
 Some talk up to it — vide Neckar's daughter ! 
 But when the temp'rature's a fourth too low, 
 
 Of course you make up the deficient quarter ! 
 Like Byron's atmosphere, which, chemists know 
 
 Required hydrogen — (more gin and water.) 
 And Jules's sanguine humor was too high, 
 So, of the bottle he had need be shy ! 
 
THE LADY JANE. 
 
 859 
 
 LVII. 
 
 And of society, which made him thin 
 With fret and fever, and of sunny sky — 
 
 Father of idleness, the poet's sin ! 
 
 (John Bull should be industrious, by the by, 
 
 If clouds without concentrate thought within,) 
 In short, the lad could fag — (I mean soar high) — 
 
 Only by habits, which (if Heaven let her choose) 
 
 His mother would bequeath as Christian virtues ! 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 Now men have oft been liken'd unto streams ; 
 
 (And, truly, both are prone to run down hill, 
 And seldom brawl when dry, or so it seems !) 
 
 And Jules, when he had brooded, long and still, 
 At the dim fountain of the poet's dreams, 
 
 Felt suddenly his veins with frenzy fill ; 
 And, urged, as by the torrent's headlong force, 
 Ruthlessly rode — if he could find a horse. 
 
 LIX. 
 
 Yes, sir — he had his freshets like a river, 
 And horses were his passion — so he rode, 
 
 When he his prison'd spirits would deliver, 
 
 As if he fled from — some man whom he owed — 
 
 And glorious, to him, the bounding quiver 
 Of the young steed in terror first bestrode ! 
 
 Thrilling as inspiration the delay — 
 
 The arrowy spring — the fiery flight away I 
 
 LX. 
 
 Such riding galls the Muses, (tho' we know 
 Old Pegasus's build is short and stocky,) 
 
 But I'd a mind by these details to show 
 
 What Jules might turn out, were the Muses baulky. 
 
 This hint to his biographer I throw — 
 
 In Jules, the bard, was spoil'd a famous jockey ! 
 
 Tho' not at all to imitate Apollo ! 
 
 Horse him as well, he'd beat that dabster hollow ! 
 
 LXI. 
 
 'Tis one of the proprieties of story 
 
 To mark the change in heroes, stage by stage ; 
 And therefore I have tried to lay before ye 
 
 The qualities of Julcs*s second age. 
 It should wind up witli some memento mori — 
 
 But we'll defer that till we draw the sage. 
 The moral's the last thing, (I say with pain,) 
 And now let's turn awhile to Lady Jane. 
 
 LXII. 
 
 The Earl, I've said, was in his idiocy, 
 
 And Lady Jane not well. They therefore hired 
 
 The summer palace of Rospigliosi, 
 To get the sun as well^as be retired. 
 
 You shouldn't fail, I think, this spot to go see — 
 That's if you care to have your fancy fired — 
 
 It's out of Rome — it strikes me on a steep hill — 
 
 A sort of place to go to with nice people. 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 ft looks affectionate, with all its splendor — 
 
 As lovcable as ever look'd a nest ; 
 A palace I protest, that makes you tender, 
 
 And long for fol de rol, and all the rest. 
 
 Guido's Aurora's there — you couldn't mend her ; 
 
 And Samson, by Caracci — not his best ; 
 But pictures, I can talk of to the million — 
 To you, I'll just describe one small pavilion. 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 It's in the garden just below the palace ; 
 
 I think, upon the second terrace — no— 
 The first — yes, 'tis the first — the orange alleys 
 
 Lead from the first flight down — precisely so ! 
 Well — half-way is a fountain, where, with malice 
 
 In all his looks, a Cupid — 'hem ! you know 
 You needn't notice that — you hurry by, 
 And lo ! a fairy structure fills your eye 
 
 LXV. 
 
 A crescent colonnade folds in the sun, 
 
 To keep it for the wooing South wind only — 
 
 A thing 1 wonder is not oftcner done, 
 
 (The crescent, not the wooing — that's my own lie,) 
 
 For there are months, and January's one, 
 
 When winds are chill, and life in-doors gets lonely, 
 
 And one quite longs, if wind would keep away, 
 
 To sing i' the sunshine, like old King Rene". 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 The columns are of marble, white as light : 
 The structure low, yet airy, and the floor 
 
 A tesselated pavement, curious quite, — 
 Of the same fashion in and out of door. 
 
 The Lady Jane, who kept not warm by sight, 
 Had carpeted this pavement snugly o'er, 
 
 And introduced a stove, (an open Rumford) — 
 
 So the pavilion had an air of comfort. 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 " The frescoes on the ceiling really breathe," 
 
 The guide-books say. Of course they really see : 
 
 And, as I tell you what went on beneath, 
 Of course those naked goddesses told me. 
 
 They saw two rows of dazzling English teeth, 
 
 Employ'd, each morn, on English " toast and tea ;" 
 
 And once, when Jules came in, they strain'd their eyes, 
 
 But didn't see the teeth, to their surprise. 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 The Lady Jane smiled not. Her lashes hung 
 Low to the soft eye, and, so still they lay, 
 
 Jules knew a tear was hid their threads among, 
 And that she fear'd 'twould gush and steal away. 
 
 The kindly greeting trembled on her tongue, 
 
 The hand's faint pressure chill'd his touch like clay, 
 
 And Jules with wonder felt the world all changing, 
 
 W T ith but the cloud of one fond heart's estranging. 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 Oh it is darkness to lose love ! — howe'er 
 
 We little prized the fond heart — fond no more ! 
 
 The bird, dark-wing'd on earth, looks white in air ! 
 Unrecognized are angels, till they soar ! 
 
 And few so rich they may not well beware 
 Of lightly losing the heart's golden ore ! 
 
 Yet — hast thou love too poor for thy possessing ? — 
 
 Loose it, like friends to death, with kiss and blessing 
 
 LXX. 
 
 You're naturally surprised, that Lady Jane 
 
 Loved Mr. Jules. (He's Mr. now — not Master .') 
 
 The fact's abruptly introduced, it's plain ; 
 And possibly I should have made it last a 
 
 Whole Canto, more or less — but I'll explain. 
 Lumping the sentiment one gets on faster ! 
 
 Tho' it's in narrative, an art quite subtle, 
 
 To work all even, like a weaver's shuttle. 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 Good " characters" in tales are " well brought up" — 
 (Tho', by this rule, my Countess Pasibleu 
 
 Is a bad character — yet, just to sup, 
 
 I much prefer her house to a church pew — ) 
 
 But, pouring verse for readers, cup by cup, — 
 So much a week, — what is a man to do ? 
 
 " 'Tis wish'd that if a story you begin, you'd 
 
 Make separate scenes of each ' to he continued.' " 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 So writes plain " Jonathan," who tills my brains 
 
 With view to crop— (the seed being ready money—) 
 
 And if the " small-lot system" bring him gains, 
 He has a right to fence off grave from funny — 
 
 Working me up, as 'twere, in window-panes, 
 
 And, 1 must own, where one has room to run, he 
 
 Is apt, as Cooper does, to spread it thin, 
 
 So now I'll go to lumping it again ! 
 
860 
 
 THE LADY JANE. 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 " Love grows, by what" it gives to feed another, 
 And not by what " it feeds on." 'Tis divine, 
 
 If any thing's divine besides the mother 
 
 Whose breast, self-blessing, is its holy sign. 
 
 Much better than a sister loves a brother 
 
 The Lady Jane loved Jules, and " line by line, 
 
 Precept by precept," furnish'd him advice ; 
 
 Also much other stuff he thought more nice. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 She got him into sundry pleasant clubs, 
 
 By pains that women can take, tho' but few will ! 
 
 She made most of him when he got most rubs ; 
 And once, in an inevitable duel, 
 
 She follow'd him alone to Wormwood Scrubs — 
 But not to hinder ! Faith ! she was a jewel ! 
 
 I wish the star all manner of festivity 
 
 That shone upon her Ladyship's nativity ! 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 All sorts of enviable invitations, 
 
 Tickets, and privileges, got she him ; 
 Gave him much satin waistcoat, work'd with patience, 
 
 (Becoming to a youth so jimp and slim) — 
 Cut for his sake some prejudiced relations, 
 
 And found for him in church the psalm and hymn ; 
 Sent to his " den" some things not found in Daniel's, 
 And kept him in kid gloves, cologne, and flannels. 
 
 LXXVI. 
 
 To set him down, upon her way chez elle, 
 She stay'd unreasonably late at parties ; 
 
 To introduce him to a waltzing belle 
 
 She sometimes made a cessio dignitatis; 
 
 And one kind office more that I must tell — 
 
 She sent her maid, (and very stern your heart is 
 
 If charity like this you find a sin in,) 
 
 In church-time, privately, to air his linen. 
 
 LXXVII. 
 
 Was Jules ungrateful ? No ! Was he obtuse ? 
 
 Did he believe that women's hearts were flowing 
 With tenderness, like water in a sluice, — 
 
 Like the sun's shining, — like the breeze's blowing, — 
 And fancy thanking them was not much use ? 
 
 Had he the luck of intimately knowing 
 Another woman, quite as kind, and nicer ? 
 Had he a " friend" sub rosa ? No, sir ! Fie, sir ? 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 Then why neglect her ? Having said he did, 
 I will explain, as Brutus did his stab, — 
 
 (Tho' by my neighbors I'm already chid 
 For getting on so very like a crab) — 
 
 Jules didn't call, as oft as he was bid, 
 Because in Rome he didn't keep a cab — 
 
 A fact that quite explains why friendships, marriages, 
 
 And other ties depend on keeping carriages. 
 
 LXXIX. 
 
 Without a carriage men should have no card, 
 Nor " owe a call" at all — except for love. 
 
 And friends who need that you the " lean earth lard" 
 To give their memories a pasteboard shove, 
 
 On gentlemen a-foot bear rather hard ! 
 
 It's paying high for Broadway balls, by Jove ! 
 
 To walk next day half way to Massachusett 
 
 And leave your name — on ladies that won't use it. 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 It really should be taught in infant schools 
 That the majority means men, not dollars ; 
 
 And, therefore, that, to let the rich make rules, 
 Is silly in " poor pretty little scholars." 
 
 And this you see is apropos of Jules, 
 
 Who call'd as frequently as richer callers 
 
 While he'd a cab ; — but courtesy's half horse — 
 
 A secret those who ride keep snug, of course. 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 I say while he was Centaur, (horse and man,) 
 Jules never did neglect the Lady Jane ; 
 
 And, at the start, it was my settled plan, 
 (Tho' I've lost sight of it, I see with pain,) 
 
 To show how moderate attentions can, 
 If once she love, a woman's heart retain 
 
 True love is weak and humble, tho' so brittle ; 
 
 And asks, 'tis wonderful how very little ! 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 For instance — Jules's every day routine 
 
 Was, breakfast at his lodgings, rather early ; 
 
 A short walk in the nearest Park, the Green : 
 (Where, if address'd, he was extremely surly ;) 
 
 Five minutes at the club, perhaps fifteen ; 
 
 Then giving his fine silk moustache a curl, he 
 
 Stepp'd in his cab and drove to Belgrave Square, 
 
 Where he walk'd in, with quite a household air 
 
 LXXXIII. 
 
 And here he pass'd an hour — or two, or three — 
 Just as it served his purpose or his whim ; 
 
 And sweeter haunt on earth could scarcely be 
 Than that still boudoir, rose-lit, scented, dim — 
 
 Its mistress, elsewhere all simplicity, 
 
 Drcss'd ever sumptuously there — for him ! 
 
 With all that taste could mould, or gold could buy, 
 
 Pampering fondly his reluctant eye. 
 
 LXXXIV. 
 
 And on the silken cushions at her feet 
 
 He daily dream'd these morning hours away, 
 
 Troubling himself but little to be sweet. 
 Poets are fond of revery, they say, 
 
 But not with ladies whom they rarely meet. 
 And, if you love one, madam, (as you may !) 
 
 And wish his wings to pin as with a skewer, 
 
 Be careful of all manner of toujours ! 
 
 LXXXV. 
 
 " Toujours perdrix," snipe, woodcock, trout, or rabbit 
 
 Offends the simplest palate, it appears, 
 And, (if a secret, I'm disposed to blab it,) 
 
 It's much the same with smiles, sighs, quarrels, tears, 
 The fancy mortally abhors a habit .' 
 
 (Not that which Seraphina's bust inspheres !) 
 E'en one-tuned music-boxes breed satiety, 
 Unless you keep of them a great variety. 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 
 Daily to Jules the sun rose in the East, 
 
 And brought new milk and morning paper daily; 
 
 The " yield," of both the Editor and beast, 
 
 Great mysteries, unsolved by Brown or Paley ; 
 
 But Jules — not plagued about it in the least — 
 Read his gazette, and drank his tea quite gaily: 
 
 And Lady Jane's fond love and cloudless brow 
 
 Grew to be like the Editor and cow. 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 I see you understand it. One may dash on 
 A color here — stroke there — and lo ! the story ! 
 
 And, speaking morally, this outline fashion 
 Befits a world so cramm'd yet transitory. 
 
 I've sketch'd for you a deep and tranquil passion 
 Kindled while nursing up a bard for glory ; 
 
 And, having whisk'd you for that end to London, 
 
 Let's back to Italy, and see it undone. 
 
 LXXXVIII. 
 
 Fair were the frescoes of Rospigliosi — 
 Bright the Italian sunshine on the wall — 
 
 The day delicious and the room quite cozy — 
 And yet were there two bosoms full of gall ! 
 
 So lurks the thorn in paths long soft and rosy 1 
 Jules was not one whom trifles could appal, 
 
 But few things will make creep the lion's mane 
 
 Like ladies in a miff who won't explain ! 
 
THE LADY JANE. 
 
 861 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 Now I have seen a hadji and a cadi — 
 
 Have sojourn'd among strangers, oft and long — 
 
 Have known most sorts of women, fair and shady, 
 And mingled in most kinds of mortal throng — 
 
 But, in my life, I never saw a lady 
 
 Who hud, the least, the air of being wrong ! 
 
 The fact is, there's a nameless grace in evil 
 
 We never caught — 'twas she who saw the devil ! 
 
 XC. 
 
 In pedigree of sin we're mere beginners — 
 
 For what was Adam to the " morning star ?" 
 
 She would take precedence — if sins were dinners, 
 And hence that self-assured " de haut en bas" 
 
 So unattainable by men, as sinners. 
 
 Of course, she plays the devil in a fracas — 
 
 Frowns better, looks more innocent, talks faster, 
 
 And argues like her grandmother's old master ! 
 
 XCI. 
 
 And in proportion as the angel fades — 
 
 As love departs — the crest of woman rises — 
 
 Even in passion's softer, lighter shades, 
 With aristocracy's well-bred disguises ; 
 
 For, with no tragic fury, no tirades, 
 A lady looks a man into a crisis ! 
 
 And, to 'most any animal carnivorous 
 
 Before a belle aggrieved, the Lord deliver us ! 
 
 XCII. 
 
 Jules had one thing particular to say, 
 
 The morn I speak of, but, in fact, was there, 
 
 Vv ith twenty times the mind to be away. 
 Uncomfortable seem'd the stuflfd arm-chair 
 
 In which the Earl would sometimes pass the day ; 
 And there was something Roman in the air ; 
 
 For every effort to express his errand 
 
 Ended in " urn !" — as 'twere a Latin gerund. 
 
 XCIII. 
 
 He had received a little billet-doux 
 
 The night before — as plain as A B C — 
 
 (I mean, it would appear as plain to you, 
 Tho' very full of meaning you'll agree) — 
 
 Informing him that by advice quite new 
 The Earl was going now to try the sea ; 
 
 And begging him to have his passport vised 
 
 For Venice, by Bologna — if he pleased ! 
 
 XCIV. 
 
 Smooth as a melody of Mother Goose's 
 
 The gentle missive elegantly ran — 
 A sort of note the writer don't care who sees, 
 
 For you may pick a flaw in't if you can — 
 But yet a stern experimentum crucis, 
 
 Quite in the style of Metternich, or Van, — 
 And meant—without more flummery or fuss — 
 Stay with your Marchioness — or come with us ! 
 
 XCV. 
 Here was to be " a parting such as wrings [stay 
 
 The blood from out young hearts" — for Jules would 
 The bird she took unfledged had got its wings, 
 
 And, though its cage be gold, it must away ! 
 But this, and similar high-color'd things, 
 
 Refinement makes it difficult to say ; 
 For, higher " high life" is, (this side an attic,) 
 The more it shrinks from all that looks dramatic. 
 
 XCVI. 
 
 Hence, words grow cold as agony grows hot, 
 'Twixt those who see in ridicule a Hades ; 
 
 And tho' the truth but coldly end the plot, 
 (There really is no pathos for you, ladies !) 
 
 Jules cast the die with, simply " I think not !" 
 And her few words were guarded as he made his 
 
 For rank has one cold law of Moloch's making — 
 
 Death, before outcry, while the heart is breaking! 
 
 XCVII. 
 
 She could not tell that boy how hot the tear 
 That seem'd within her eyeball to have died — 
 
 She could not tell him her exalted sphere 
 Had not a hope his boyish love beside : 
 
 The grave of anguish is a human ear — 
 Hers lay unburied in a pall of pride ! 
 
 And life, for her, thenceforth, was cold and lonely, 
 
 With her heart lock'd on that dumb sorrow only! 
 
 XCVIII. 
 
 Calm, in her " pride of place," moves Lady Jane — 
 
 Paler, but beautifully pale, and cold — 
 So cold, the gazer believes joy nor pain 
 
 Has o'er that pulse of marble ever roll'd. 
 She loved too late to dream of love again, 
 
 And rich, fair, noble, and alone, grows old 
 A star, on which a spirit had alighted 
 Once, in all time, were like a life so blighted ! 
 
 XCIX. 
 
 So, from the poet's woof was broke a thread 
 Which we have follow'd in its rosy weaving ; 
 
 Yet merrily, still on, the shuttle sped. 
 
 Jules was not made of stuff to die of grieving , 
 
 But, that an angel from his path had fled, 
 He was not long in mournfully believing. 
 
 And " angel watch and ward" had fled with her — 
 
 For, virtuously loved, 'tis hard to err ! 
 
 C. 
 
 Poets are moths, (or so some poet sings, 
 
 Or so some pleasant allegory goes,) 
 And Jules at many a bright light burnt his wings. 
 
 His first chaste scorching the foregoing shows ; 
 But, while one passion best in metre rings, 
 
 Another is best told in lucid prose. 
 As to the marchioness, I've half a plan, sir '. 
 To limn her in the quaint Spenserian stanza. 
 
 END. 
 
 To the Reader. 
 And now, dear reader ! as a brick may be 
 
 A sample of a house — a bit of glass 
 Of a broad mirror — it has seem'd to me 
 
 These fragments for a tale may shift to pass. 
 (I am a poet much cut tip, pardie !) 
 
 But " shorts" is poor " to running loose to grass." 
 Where there's a meadow to range freely over, 
 You pick to please you — timothy or clover. 
 
 Without the slightest hint at transmigration, 
 I wish hereafter we may meet in calf! 
 
 That you may read me with some variation — [laugh 
 This when you're moody — that when you would 
 
 In that case, I may swell this true narration, 
 And blow off here and there a speech of chaff. 
 
 I trust you think, that, were there more 'twere better, or 
 
 If cetera desunt, decent were the cetera ! 
 
 P. S. I really had forgotten quite 
 
 To say to you, from Countess Pasibleu— 
 
 (Dying, 'tis thought, but quite too ill to write) — 
 Her Ladyship's best compliments to you, 
 
 And she's toujours chez elle on Friday night, 
 (Buckingham Crescent, May Fair, No. 2.) 
 
 This, (as her written missive would have said,) 
 
 Always in case her Ladyship's not dead. 
 
 AN APOLOGY 
 For avoiding, after long separation, a woman once lovtd. 
 See me no more on earth, I pray, 
 
 Thy picture, in my memory now, 
 Is fair as morn, and fresh as May ! 
 Few were as beautiful as thou ! 
 
862 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. 
 
 And still I see that willowy form — 
 And still that cheek like roses dyed — 
 
 And still that dark eye, deep and warm — 
 Thy look of love — thy step of pride ! — 
 
 Thy memory is a star to me, 
 
 More bright as day-beams fade and flee. 
 
 But thou, indeed ! — Ah ! years have fled, 
 
 And thou, like others, changed the while — 
 For joy upon the lip lies dead 
 
 If pain but cloud the sunny smile ! 
 And care will make the roses pale, 
 
 And tears will soil the lily's whiteness, 
 And ere life's lamp begins to fail 
 
 The eye forgets its trick of brightness ! 
 Look for the rose of dawn at noon, 
 And weep for beauty — lost as soon ! 
 
 Cold words that hide the envious thought .' 
 
 I could not bear thy face to see — 
 But oh, 'tis not that time has wrought 
 
 A change in features dear to me ! 
 No ! had it been my lot to share 
 
 The fragrance of the flower decay'd — 
 If I had borne but half the care 
 
 That on thy brow its burden laid — 
 If in my love thou'dst burn'd away, 
 The ashes still had warm'd the heart so cold to-day ! 
 
 TO HELEN IN A HUFF. 
 
 Nay, lady, one frown is enough 
 
 In a life as soon over as this — 
 And though minutes seem long in a huff, 
 
 They're minutes 'tis pity to miss ! 
 The smiles you imprison so lightly 
 
 Are reckon'd, like days in eclipse ; 
 And though you may smile again brightly, 
 
 You've lost so much light from your lips ! 
 Pray, lady, smile ! 
 
 The cup that is longest untasted 
 
 May be with our bliss running o'er, 
 And, love when we will, we have wasted 
 
 An age in not loving before ! 
 Perchance Cupid's forging a fetter 
 
 To tie us together some day, 
 And, just for the chance, we had better 
 
 Be laying up love, I should say ! 
 Nay, lady, smile ! 
 
 CITY LYRICS. 
 
 Argument.— The poet starts from i> 
 
 i\ing Green to take his sweet- 
 
 heart up to Thompson's foran'ice, V(3Tih7V5oelin«J for m ore°) ., CI 
 mse to matters which any everyday man and young 
 
 Come out, love — the night is enchanting! 
 
 The moon hangs just over Broadway ; 
 The stars arc all lighted and panting 
 
 (Hot weather up there, I dare say !) 
 'Tis seldom that " coolness" entices, 
 
 And love is no better for chilling — 
 But come up to Thompson's for ices, 
 
 And cool your warm heart for a shilling ! 
 
 What perfume comes balmily o'er us ? 
 
 Mint juleps from City Hotel ! 
 A loafer is smoking before us — 
 
 (A nasty cigar, by the smell !) 
 Oh Woman ! thou secret past knowing ! 
 
 Like lilachs that grow by the wall, 
 You breathe every air that is going, 
 
 Yet gather but sweetness from all ! 
 
 On, on ! by St. Paul's, and the Astor ! 
 
 Religion seems very ill-plann'd ! 
 For one day we list to the pastor, 
 
 For six days wc list to the band ! 
 The sermon may dwell on the future, 
 
 The organ your pulses may calm — ■ 
 When — pest ! — that remember'd cachucha 
 
 Upsets both the sermon and psalm ! 
 
 Oh, pity the love that must utter 
 
 While goes a swift omnibus by ! 
 (Tho' sweet is / scream* when the flutter 
 
 Of fans shows thermometers high) — 
 But if what I bawl, or I mutter, 
 
 Falls into your ear but to die, 
 Oh, the dew that falls into the gutter 
 
 Is not more unhappy than I ! 
 
 TO THE LADY IN THE CHEMISETTE WITH 
 BLACK BUTTONS. 
 
 I know not who thou art, oh, lovely one! 
 Thine eyes were droop'd, thy lips half sorrowful— 
 Yet thou didst eloquently smile on me 
 While handing up thy sixpence through the hole 
 Of that o'er-freighted omnibus ! Ah me ! 
 The world is full of meetings such as this — 
 A thrill, a voiceless challenge and reply — 
 And sudden partings after ! We may pass, 
 
 And know not of each other's nearness now 
 
 Thou in the Knickerbocker Line, and I, 
 Lone, in the Waverley ! Oh, life of pain ! 
 
 And even should I pass where thou dost dwell 
 
 Nay — see thee in the basement taking tea — 
 
 So cold is this inexorable world, 
 
 I must glide on ! I dare not feast mine eye ! 
 
 I dare not make articulate my love, 
 
 Nor o'er the iron rails that hem thee in 
 
 Venture to fling to thee my innocent card — 
 
 Not knowing thy papa ! 
 
 Hast thou papa ? 
 Is thy progenitor alive, fair girl ? 
 And what doth he for lucre ? Lo again ! 
 A shadow o'er the face of this fair dream ! 
 For thou mayst be as beautiful as Love 
 Can make thee, and the ministering hands 
 Of milliners, incapable of more, 
 Be lifted at thy shapeliness and air, 
 And still 'twixt me and thee, invisibly, 
 May rise a wall of adamant. My breath 
 Upon my pale lip freezes as I name 
 Manhattan's orient verge, and eke the west 
 In its far down extremity. Thy sire 
 May be the signer of a temperance pledge, 
 And clad all decently may walk the earth — 
 Nay — may be number'd with that blessed few 
 Who never ask for discount — yet, alas ! 
 If, homeward wending from his daily cares, 
 He go by Murphy's Line, thence eastward tending 
 Or westward from the Line of Kipp & Brown, — 
 My vision is departed ! Harshly falls 
 The doom upon the ear, " She's not genteel !" 
 And pitiless is woman who doth keep 
 Of " good society" the golden key ! 
 And gentlemen are bound, as are the stars, 
 To stoop not after rising ! 
 
 But farewell, 
 And I shall look for thee in streets where dwell 
 The passengers by Broadway Lines alone ! 
 And if my dreams be true, and thou, indeed, 
 Art only not more lovely than genteel — 
 Then, lady of the snow-white chemisette, 
 The heart which vent'rously cross'd o'er to thee 
 Upon that bridge of sixpence, may remain — 
 And, with up-town devotedness and truth, 
 My love shall hover round thee ! 
 
 Query.— Should this he Ire. cream, or I scream ?— Printer'* Devi/. 
 
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. 
 
 863 
 
 THE LADY IN THE WHITE DRESS, 
 
 Whom I helped into the Omnibus. 
 I know her not ! Her hand has been in mine, 
 And the warm pressure of her taper arm 
 Has thrill'd upon my fingers, and the hem 
 Of her white dress has lain upon my feet, 
 Till my hush'd pulse, by the caressing folds, 
 Was kindled to a fever ! I, to her, 
 Am but the undistinguishable leaf 
 Blown by upon the breeze — yet I have sat, 
 And in the blue depths of her stainless eyes, 
 (Close as a lover in his hour of bliss, 
 And steadfastly as look the twin stars down 
 Into unfathomable wells,) have gazed ! 
 And I have felt from out its gate of pearl 
 Her warm breath on my cheek, and while she sat 
 Dreaming away the moments, I have tried 
 To count the long dark lashes in the fringe 
 Of her bewildering eyes ! The kerchief sweet 
 That enviably visits her red lip 
 Has slumber'd, while she held it, on my knee, — 
 And her small foot has crept between mine own — 
 And yet, she knows me not ! 
 
 Now, thanks to heaven 
 For blessings chainlcss in the rich man's keeping- 
 Wealth that the miser cannot hide away ! 
 Buy, if they will, the invaluable flower — 
 They cannot store its fragrance from the breeze 1 
 Wear, if they will, the costliest gem of Ind — 
 It pours its light on every passing eye ! 
 And he who on this beauty sets his name — 
 Who dreams, perhaps, that for his use alone 
 Such loveliness was first of angels born — 
 Tell him, oh whisperer at his dreaming ear, 
 That I too, in her beauty, sun my eye, 
 And, unrebuked, may worship her in song — 
 Tell him that heaven, along our darkling way, 
 Hath set bright lamps with loveliness alight — 
 And all may in their guiding beams rejoice ; 
 But he — as 'twere a watcher by a lamp — 
 Guard^ut this bright one's shining. 
 
 THE WHITE CHIP HAT. 
 
 I pass'd her one day in a hurry, 
 
 When late for the Post with a letter— 
 I think near the corner of Murray — 
 
 And up rose my heart as I met her ! 
 I ne'er saw a parasol handled 
 
 So like to a dutchess's doing — 
 I ne'er saw a slighter foot sandall'd, 
 
 Or so fit to exhale in the shoeing — 
 Lovely thing ! 
 
 Surprising ! — one woman can dish us 
 
 So many rare sweets up together 1 
 Tournure absolutely delicious — 
 
 Chip hat without flower or feather- 
 Well gloved, and enchantingly boddiced- 
 
 Her waist like the cup of a lily — 
 And an air, that, while daintily modest, 
 
 Repell'd both the saucy and silly — 
 Quite the thing ! 
 
 For such a rare wonder you'll say, sir, 
 
 There's reason in straining one's tether — 
 And, to see her again in Broadway, sir, 
 
 Who would not be lavish of leather ! 
 I met her again, and as you .know 
 
 I'm sage as old Voltaire at Ferney — 
 But I said a bad word — for my Juno 
 
 Look'd sweet on a sneaking attorney — 
 Horrid thing '. 
 
 Away flies the dream I had nourish'd — 
 My castles like mockery fall, sir ! 
 
 And, now, the fine airs that she flourish'd 
 Seem varnish nnd crockery all, sir ! 
 
 The bright cup which angels might handle 
 Turns earthy when finger'd by asses — 
 
 And the star that " swaps" light with a candle, 
 Thenceforth for a pennyworth passes ! — 
 Not the thing ! 
 
 YOU KNOW IF IT WAS YOU. 
 
 As the chill'd robin, bound to Florida 
 Upon a morn of autumn, crosses flying 
 The air-track of a snipe most passing fair- 
 Yet colder in her blood than she is fair — 
 And as that robin lingers on the wing, 
 And feels the snipe's flight in the eddying air, 
 And loves her for her coldness not the less, — 
 But fain would win her to that warmer sky 
 Where love lies waking with the fragrant stars — 
 So I — a languisher for sunnier climes, 
 Where fruit, leaf, blossom, on the trees forever 
 Image the tropic deathlessness of love — 
 Have met, and long'd to win thee, fairest lady, 
 To a more genial clime than cold Broadway ! 
 
 Tranquil and effortless thou glidest on, 
 As doth the swan upon the yielding water, 
 And with a cheek like alabaster cold ! 
 But as thou didst divide the amorous air 
 Just opposite the Astor, and didst lift 
 That veil of languid lashes to look in 
 At Leary's tempting window — lady ! then 
 My heart sprang in beneath that fringed veil, 
 Like an adventurous bird that would escape 
 To some warm chamber from the outer cold ! 
 And there would I delightedly remain, 
 And close that fringed window with a kiss, 
 And in the warm sweet chamber of thy breast, 
 Be prisoner forever ! 
 
 UNSEEN SPIRITS. 
 
 The shadows lay along Broadway — 
 
 'Twas near the twilight-tide — 
 And slowly there a lady fair 
 
 Was walking in her pride. 
 Alone walk'd she; but, viewlessly, 
 
 Walk'd spirits at her side. 
 
 Peace charm 'd the street beneath her feet, 
 
 And Honor charm'd the air ; 
 And all astir look'd kind on her, 
 
 And call'd her good as fair — 
 For all God ever gave to her 
 
 She kept with chary care. 
 
 She kept with care her beauties rare 
 
 From lovers warm and true — 
 For her heart was cold to all but gold, 
 
 And the rich came not to woo — 
 But honor'd well arc charms to sell 
 
 If priests the selling do. 
 
 Now walking there was one more fair— 
 
 A slight girl, lily-pale ; 
 And she had unseen company 
 
 To make the spirit quad— 
 •Twixt Want and Scorn she walk'd forlom, 
 
 And nothing could avail. 
 
 No mercy now can clear her brow 
 For this world's peace to pray ; 
 
 For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, 
 Her woman's heart gave way!— 
 
 But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven 
 By man is curst alway ! 
 
864 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. 
 
 LOVE IN A COTTAGE. 
 
 They may talk of love in a cottage, 
 
 And bowers of trellised vine — 
 Of nature bewitchingly simple, 
 
 And milkmaids half divine ; 
 They may talk of the pleasure of sleeping 
 
 In the shade of a spreading tree, 
 And a walk in the fields at morning, 
 
 By the side of a footstep free ! 
 
 But give me a sly flirtation 
 
 By the light of a chandelier — 
 With music to play in the pauses, 
 
 And nobody very near ; 
 Or a seat on a silken sofa, 
 
 With a glass of pure old wine, 
 And mamma too blind to discover 
 
 The small white hand in mine. 
 
 Your love in a cottage is hungry, 
 
 Your vine is a nest for flies — 
 Your milkmaid shocks the Graces, 
 
 And simplicity talks of pies ! 
 You lie down to your shady slumber 
 
 And wake with a bug in your ear, 
 And your damsel that walks in the morning 
 
 Is shod like a mountaineer. 
 
 True love is at home on a carpet, 
 
 And mightily likes his ease — 
 And true love has an eye for a dinner, 
 
 And starves beneath shady trees. 
 
 His wing is the fan of a lady, 
 His foot's an invisible thing, 
 
 And his arrow is tipp'd with a jewel, 
 And shot from a silver string. 
 
 THE DECLARATION. 
 
 'Twas late, and the gay company was gone, 
 And light lay soft on the deserted room 
 From alabaster vases, and a scent 
 Of orange leaves, and sweet verbena came 
 Through the unshutter'd window on the air, 
 And the rich pictures with their dark old tints 
 Hung like a twilight landscape, and all things 
 Seem'd hush'd into a slumber. Isabel, 
 The dark-eyed, spiritual Isabel 
 Was leaning on her harp, and I had stay'd 
 To whisper what I could not when the crowd 
 Hung on her look like worshippers. I knelt, 
 And with the fervor of a lip unused 
 To the cool breath of reason, told my love. 
 There was no answer, and I took the hand 
 That rested on the strings, and press'd a kiss 
 Upon it unforbidden — and again 
 Besought her, that this silent evidence 
 That I was not indifferent to her heart, 
 Might have the seal of one sweet syllable. 
 I kiss'd the small white fingers as I spoke, 
 And she withdrew them gently, and upraised 
 Her forehead from its resting-place, and looked 
 Earnestly on me— She had been asleep ! 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER, 
 
 DRAMATIS PERSONS. 
 
 Duke of Florence. 
 
 Count Falcone. 
 
 Tortesa — a usui-er. 
 
 Anoelo — a young painter. 
 
 Tomaso — his Servant. 
 
 *»* * * 
 
 Isabella de Falcone. 
 
 Zippa — a Glover's daughter. 
 
 Other characters— a Counsellor, a page, the Count's Secre- 
 tary, a Tradesman, a Monk, Lords, Ladies, Officer, 
 Soldiers, $c. 
 
 ACT I. 
 
 [A drawing-room in Tortesa's house. Servant discovered 
 reading the bill of a tradesman, who is in attendance.] 
 
 Servant (reading). "Silk hose, doublet of white satin, 
 twelve shirts of lawn." He'll not pay it to-day, good 
 mercer ! 
 
 Tradesman. How, master Gaspar ? When I was 
 assured of the gold on delivery ? If it be a credit account, 
 look you, there must be a new bill. The charge is for 
 ready money. 
 
 Servant. Tut — tut — man, you know not whom you serve. 
 My master is as likely to overpay you if you are civil, as to 
 keep you a year out of your money if you push him when 
 he is crossed. 
 
 Tradesman. Why, this is the humor of a spendthrift, 
 not the careful way of a usurer. 
 
 Servant. Usurer! humph. Well, it may be he is — to 
 the rich ! But the heart of the Signor Tortesa, let me tell 
 you, is like the bird's wing — the dark side is turned up- 
 ward. To those who look up to him he shows neither 
 spot nor stain! Hark! I hear his wheels in the court. 
 Step to the ante-room — for he has that on his hands to-day 
 which may make him impatient. Quick ! Give way ! 
 I'll bring you to him if I can find a time. 
 
 Tortesa (speaking without). What ho! Gaspar! 
 
 Servant. Signor ! 
 
 Tortesa. My keys ! Bring me my keys ! 
 
 [Enter Tortesa, followed by Count Falcone.] 
 Come in, count. 
 Falcone. You're well lodged. 
 
 Tortesa. The duke waits for you 
 
 To get to horse. So, briefly, there's the deed ! 
 You have your lands back, and your daughter's mine — 
 So ran the bargain! 
 
 Falcone (coldly). She's betrothed, sir, to you ! 
 Tortesa. Not a half hour since, and you hold the 
 parchment ! 
 A free transaction, see you !— for you're paid, 
 And I'm but promised ! 
 
 Falcone. (Aside — What a slave is this, 
 
 To give my daughter to ! My daughter ? Psha ! 
 I'll think but of my lands, my precious lands !) 
 Sir, the duke sets forth — 
 
 Tortesa. Use no ceremony ! 
 
 Yet stay ! A word ! Our nuptials follow quick 
 On your return ? 
 
 Falcone. That hour, if it so please you ! 
 Tortesa. And what's the bargain if her humor change ? 
 Falcone. The lands are yours again — 'tis understood 
 so. 
 
 55 
 
 Tortesa. Yet, still a word ! You leave her with her 
 maids. 
 I have a right in her by this betrothal. 
 Seal your door up till you come back again ! 
 I'd have no foplings tampering with my wife ! 
 None of your painted jackdaws from the court, 
 Sneering and pitying her ! My lord Falcone ! 
 Shall she be private? 
 
 Falcone. (Aside— Patience ! for my lands !) 
 You shall control my door, sir, and my daughter ! 
 Farewell now ! [Exit Falcone. 
 
 Tortesa. Oh, omnipotence of money ! 
 
 Ha ! ha ! Why, there's the haughtiest nobleman 
 That walks in Florence. He /—whom I have bearded — 
 Checked — made conditions to — shut up his daughter — 
 And all with money ! They should pull down churches 
 And worship it ! Had I been poor, that man 
 Would see me rot ere give his hand to me. 
 I — as I stand here — dressed thus — looking thus — 
 The same in all — save money in my purse — 
 He would have scorned to let me come so near 
 That I could breathe on him ! Yet, that were little — 
 For pride sometimes outdoes humility, 
 And your great man will please to be familiar, 
 To show how he can stoop. But halt you there ! 
 He has a jewel that you may not name*! 
 His wife's above you ! You're no company 
 For his most noble daughter ! You are brave — 
 'Tis nothing ! comely — nothing ! honorable — 
 You are a phoenix of all human virtues — 
 But, while your blood's mean, there's a frozen bar 
 Betwixt yo^and a lady, that will melt — 
 Not with religion — scarcely with the grave — 
 But like a mist, with money ! 
 
 [Enter a Servant.] 
 
 Servant. Please you, sir ! 
 
 A tradesman waits to see you ! 
 
 Tortesa. Let him in ! [Exit Servant. 
 
 What need have I of forty generations 
 To build my name up ? I have bought with money 
 The fairest daughter of their haughtiest line ! 
 Bought her ! Falcone's daughter for so much ! 
 No wooing in't ! Ha ! ha ! I harped on that 
 Till my lord winced ! " My bargain !" still " my bar- 
 gain .'" 
 Naught of my bride ! Ha ! ha ! 'Twas excellent ! 
 
 [Enter Tradesman.] 
 What's thy demand ? 
 
 Tradesman. Ten ducats, please your lordship ! 
 
 Tortesa. Out on "your lordship!" There are twelve 
 for ten ! 
 Does a lord pay like that ? Learn some name sweeter 
 To my ears than " Your lordship !" I'm no lord ! 
 Give me thy quittance ! Now, begone ! Who waits 1 
 
 Servant. The glover's daughter, please you, sir I 
 [Enter Zippa.] 
 
 Tortesa. Come in, 
 
 My pretty neighbor ! What ! my bridal gloves ! 
 Are they brought home ? 
 
 Zippa. The signor pays so well, 
 
 He's well served. 
 
 Tortesa. Um ! why, pertinently answered ! 
 
 And yet, my pretty one, the words were sweeter 
 In any mouth than yours ! 
 
 Zippa. Tkat's easy true ! 
 
866 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 Tortesa. I would 'twere liking that had spurred your 
 service — 
 Not money, Zippa, sweet ! (She presents her parcel to 
 him, with a meaning air.) 
 Zippa. Your bridal gloves, sir ! 
 
 Tortesa. (Aside — What a fair shrew it is !) My 
 gloves are paid for ! 
 And will be thrown aside when worn a little. 
 Zippa. What then, sir ! 
 Tortesa. Why, the bride is paid for, too ! 
 And may be thrown aside, when worn a little ! 
 
 Zippa. You mock me now ! 
 
 Tortesa. You know Falcone's palace, 
 
 And lands, here, by Fiesole ? I bought them 
 For so much money of his creditors, 
 And gave them to him, in a plain, round bargain, 
 For his proud daughter ! What think you of that ? 
 
 Zippa. What else but that you loved her ! 
 
 Tortesa. As I love 
 
 The thing I give my money for — no more ! 
 
 Zippa. You mean to love her ? 
 
 Tortesa. 'Twas not in the bargain ! 
 
 Zippa. Why, what a monster do you make yourself! 
 Have you no heart ? 
 
 Tortesa. A loving one, for you ! 
 
 Nay, never frown ! I marry this lord's daughter 
 To please a devil that inhabits me ! 
 But there's an angel in me — not so strong — 
 And this last loves you ! 
 
 Zippa. Thanks for your weak angel ! 
 
 I'd sooner 'twere the devil ! 
 
 Tortesa. Both were yours ! 
 
 But for the burning fever that I have 
 To pluck at their proud blood. 
 
 Zippa. Why, this poor lady 
 
 Can not have harmed you ! 
 
 Tortesa. Forty thousand times ! 
 
 She's noble-born — there's one wrong in her cradle ! 
 She's proud — why, that makes every pulse an insult — 
 Sixty a minute ! She's profuse in smiles 
 On those who are, to me, as stars to slow-worms — 
 So I'm disparaged ! I have passed her by, 
 Summer and winter, and she ne'er lookedJyi me ! 
 Her youth has been one tissue of contempff 
 Her lovers, and her tutors, and her heart, 
 Taught her to scorn the low-born — that am I ! 
 Would you have more ? 
 
 Zippa. Why, this is moonstruck madness. 
 
 Tortesa. I'd have her mine, for all this— jewelled, 
 perfumed — 
 Just as they've worshipped her at court — my slave! 
 
 They've mewed her breath up in their silken beds 
 
 Blanched her with baths — fed her on delicate food 
 
 Guarded the unsunned dew upon her skin — 
 For some lord's pleasure ! If I could not get her, 
 There's a contempt in that, would make my forehead 
 Hot in my grave ! 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — Now Heaven forbid my fingers 
 Should make your bridal gloves !) Forgive me, signor ! 
 I'll take these back, so please you ! (Takes up the par- 
 cel again.) 
 
 Tortesa (not listening to her). But for this — 
 This devil at my heart, thou shouldst have wedded 
 The richest commoner in Florence, Zippa ! 
 Tell me thou wouldst ! 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — Stay ! stay ! A thought ! If I 
 Could feign to love him, and so work on him 
 To put this match off, and at last to break it — 
 'Tis possible — and so befriend this lady, 
 Whom, from my soul, I pity ! Nay, I will !) 
 Signor Tortesa ! 
 
 Tortesa. You've been dreaming now, 
 
 How you would brave it in your lady-gear ; 
 Was't not so ? 
 
 Zippa. No ! 
 
 Tortesa. What then ? 
 
 Zippa. I had a thought, 
 
 If I dare speak it. 
 
 Tortesa. Nay, nay, speak it out! 
 
 Zippa. I had forgot your riches, and I thought 
 How lost you were ! 
 
 Tortesa. How lost ? 
 
 Zippa. Your qualities, 
 
 Which far outweigh your treasure, thrown away 
 On one who does not love you ! 
 
 Tortesa. Thrown away ? 
 
 Zippa. Is it not so to have a gallant shape, 
 And no eye to be proud on't — to be full 
 Of all that makes men dangerous to women, 
 And marry where you're scorned ? 
 
 Tortesa. There's reason there! 
 
 Zippa. You're wise in meaner riches ! You have 
 gold, 
 'Tis out at interest ! — lands, palaces, 
 They bring in rent. The gifts of nature only 
 Worth to you, signor, more than all your gold, 
 Lie profitless and idle. Your fine stature — 
 
 Tortesa. Why — so, so ! 
 
 Zippa. Speaking eyes — 
 
 Tortesa. Ay, passable ! 
 
 Zippa. Your voice, uncommon musical — 
 
 Tortesa. Nay, there, 
 
 I think you may be honest ! 
 
 Zippa. And you look, 
 
 In all points lofty, like a gentleman ! 
 (Aside — That last must choke him !) 
 
 Tortesa. You've a judgment, Zippa, 
 
 That makes me wonder at you ! We are both 
 Above our breeding — I have often thought so — 
 And loved you — but to-day so more than ever, 
 That my revenge must have drunk up my life, 
 To still sweep over it. But when I think 
 Upon that proud lord and his scornful daughter — 
 I say not you're forgot — myself am lost — 
 And love and memory with me ! I must go 
 And visit her ! I'll see you to the door — 
 Come, Zippa, come! 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — I, too, will visit her ! 
 You're a brave signor, but against two women 
 You'll find your wits all wanted !) 
 
 Tortesa. Come away ! 
 
 I must look on my bargain ! my good bargain ! 
 Ha ! ha ! my bargain .' [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE II. 
 
 [The painter's studio. Angelo painting. Tomaso in the 
 foreground, arranging a meager repast.] 
 
 Tomaso. A thrice-picked bone, a stale crust, and — ex- 
 cellent water ! Will you to breakfast, Master Angelo ? 
 
 Jlngelo. Look on this touch, good Tomaso, if it be not 
 life itself — (draws him before his easel). Now, what 
 thinkest thou ? 
 
 Tomaso. Um — fair ! fair enough ! 
 
 Angelo. No more ? 
 
 Tomaso. Till it mend my breakfast, I will never praise 
 it! Fill me up that outline, Master Angelo! (Takes up 
 the naked bone.) Color me that water ! To what end dost 
 thou dabble there ? 
 
 Angelo. I am weary of telling thee to what end. Have 
 patience, Tomaso ! 
 
 Tomaso (coaxingly). Wouldst thou but paint the gold- 
 smith a sign, now, in good fair letters ! 
 
 Angelo. Have I no genius for the art, thinkst thou ? 
 
 Tomaso. Thou ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 Angelo. By thy laughing, thou wouldst say no ! 
 
 Tomaso. Thou a genius ! Look ! Master Angelo ! Have 
 I not seen thee every day since thou wert no bigger than 
 thy pencil ? 
 
 Angelo. And if thou hast ? 
 
 Tomaso. Do I not know thee from crown to heel ? Dost 
 thou not come in at that door as I do ? sit down in that 
 chair as I do ? eat, drink, and sleep, as I do ? Dost thou 
 not call me Tomaso, and I thee Angelo ? 
 
 Angelo. Well ! 
 
 Tomaso. Then how canst thou have genius ? Are there 
 no marks ? Would I clap thee on the back, and say good 
 morrow ? Nay, look thee ! would I stand here telbng thee 
 in my wisdom what thou art, if thou wert a genius ? Go 
 to, Master Angelo ! I love thee well, but thou art compre- 
 hensible ! 
 
 Angelo. But thinkst thou nev«r of my works. Tomaso ? 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 867 
 
 1'omaso. Thy works ! Do I not grind thy paints ? Do 
 I not see thee take up thy palette, place thy foot thus, and 
 dab here, dab there ? I tell thee thou hast never done 
 stroke yet, 1 could not take the same brush and do after 
 thee. Thy works, truly ! 
 
 Angelo. How thinkst thou would Donatello paint, if he 
 were here ? 
 
 Tomaso. Donatello ! I will endeavor to show thee ! 
 (Takes the palette and brush with a mysterious air.) The 
 picture should be there ! His pencil (throws downAngelo's 
 pencil, and seizes a broom), his pencil should be as long as 
 this broom ! He should raise it thus — with his eyes rolling 
 thus — and with his body thrown back thus ! 
 
 Angelo. What then ? 
 
 Tomaso. Then he should see something in the air — a 
 sort of a hm — ha — r — r — rrrr — (you understand). And he 
 first strides off here and looks ut it — then he strides off 
 there and looks at it — then he looks at his long brush — then 
 he makes a dab ! dash ! flash ! (Makes three strokes across 
 Angela's picture.) 
 
 Angelo. Villain, my picture! Tomaso! (Seizes his 
 svmrd.) With thy cursed broom thou hast spoiled a pic- 
 ture Donatello could ne'er have painted ! Say thy prayers, 
 for, by the Virgin ! — 
 
 Tomaso. Murder! murder! help! Oh, my good mas- 
 ter ! Oh, my kind master ! 
 
 Angelo. Wilt say thy prayers, or die a sinner? Quick! 
 or thou'rt dead ere 'tis thought on ! 
 
 Tomaso. Help ! help ! mercy ! oh, mercy ! 
 [Enter the duke hastily, followed by Falcone and attendants.'] 
 Duke. Who calls so loudly ? What ! drawn swords 
 at mid-day ! 
 
 Disarm him ! Now what mad-cap youth art thou? 
 (To Angelo.) 
 
 To fright this peaceful artist from his toil ? 
 
 Rise up, sir ! (To Tomaso.) 
 
 Angelo. (Aside — Could my luckless star have brought 
 
 The duke here at no other time !) 
 
 Duke (looking round on the pictures). Why, here's 
 
 Matter worth stumblinsj on ! By Jove, a picture 
 
 Of admirable work ! Look here, Falcone ! 
 
 Didst think there was a hand unknown in Florence 
 
 Could lay on color with a skill like this ! 
 
 Tomaso (aside to Angelo). Didst thou hear that ? 
 
 (Duke and Falcone admire the pictures in dumb show.) 
 
 Angelo. (Aside to Tomaso— -The palette's on thy 
 thumb — 
 Swear 'tis thy work !) 
 
 Tomaso. Mine, master ? 
 
 Angelo. Seest thou not 
 
 The shadow of my fault will fall upon it 
 While I stand here a culprit ? The duke loves thee 
 As one whom he has chanced to serve at need, 
 And kindness mends the light upon a picture, 
 I know that well ! 
 
 Falcone (to Tomaso). The duke would know your 
 name, sir ! 
 
 Tomaso (as Angelo pulls him by the sleeve). Tom — 
 Angelo, my lord ! 
 
 Duke (to Falcone). We've fallen here 
 Upon a treasure ! 
 
 Falcone. Twas a lucky chance 
 
 That led you in, my lord ! 
 
 Duke. I blush to think 
 
 That I might ne'er have found such excellence 
 But for a chance cry thus ! Yet now 'tis found 
 I'll cherish it, believe me. 
 
 Falcone. 'Tis a duty 
 
 Your grace is never slow to. 
 
 Duke. I've a thought — 
 
 If you'll consent to it ? 
 
 Falcone. Before 'tis spoken, 
 
 My gracious liege ! 
 
 Duke. You know how well my dutchess 
 
 Loves your fair daughter. Not as maid of honor 
 Lost to our service, but as parting child, 
 We erieve to lose her. 
 
 Falcone. My good lord ! 
 
 Duke. Nay, nay — 
 
 She is betrothed now, and you needs must wed her ! 
 My thought was, to surprise my grieving dutchess 
 
 With a resemblance of your daughter, done 
 
 By this rare hand, here. 'Tis a thought well found, 
 
 You'll say it is ! 
 
 Falcone (hesitating). Your grace is bound away 
 On a brief journey. Were't not best put off 
 Till our return ? 
 
 Duke (laughing). I see you fear to let 
 The sun shine on your rosebud till she bloom 
 Fairly in wedlock. But this painter, see you 
 Is an old man, of a poor, timid bearing, 
 And may be trusted to look close upon her. 
 Come, come ! I'll have my way ! Good Angelo, 
 
 (To Tomaso.) 
 A pen and ink ! And you, my lord Falcone ! 
 Write a brief missive to your gentle daughter 
 T' admit him privately. 
 
 Falcone. I will, duke. [Writes. 
 
 Angelo (Aside — Now 
 
 Shall I go back or forward ? If he writes 
 Admit this Angelo, why I am he, 
 And that rare phoenix, hidden from the world, 
 Sits to my burning pencil. She's a beauty 
 Without a parallel, they say in Florence. 
 Her picture '11 be remembered ! Let the duke 
 Rend me with horses, it shall ne'er be said 
 I dared not pluck at Fortune !) 
 
 Tomaso (aside to Angelo). Signor ! 
 
 Angelo. (Hush ! 
 
 Betray me, and I'll kill thee !) 
 
 Duke. Angelo ! 
 
 Angelo (aside to Tomaso). Speak, or thou diest. 
 
 Tomaso (to the duke). My lord ! 
 
 Duke. Thou hast grown old 
 
 In the attainment of an excellence 
 Well worth thy time and study. The clear touch, 
 Won only by the patient toil of years, 
 Is on your fair works yonder. 
 
 Tomaso (astonished). Those, my lord ! 
 
 Duke. I shame I never saw them until now, 
 But here's a new beginning. Take this missive 
 From Count Falcone to his peerless daughter. 
 I'd have a picture of her for my palace. 
 Paint me her beauty as I know you can, 
 And as you do it well, my favor to you 
 Shall make up for the past. 
 
 Tomaso (as Angelo pulls his sleeve). Your grace is 
 kind ! 
 
 Duke. For this rude youth, name you his punishment! 
 (Turns to Angelo.) 
 His sword was drawn upon an unarmed man. 
 He shall be fined, or, as you please, imprisoned. 
 Speak ! 
 
 Tomaso. If your grace would bid him pay — 
 
 Duke. What sum ? 
 
 Tomaso. Some twenty flasks of wine, my gracious 
 liege, 
 If it so please you. 'Tis a thriftless servant 
 I keep for love I bore to his dead father. 
 But all his faults are nothing to a thirst 
 That sucks my cellar dry ! 
 
 Duke. He's well let off! 
 
 Write out a bond to pay of your first gains 
 The twenty flasks ! 
 
 Angelo. Most willingly, my liege. [Write*. 
 
 Duke (to Tomaso). Are you content ? 
 
 Tomaso. Your grace, I am ! 
 
 Duke. Come then ! 
 
 Once more to horse ! Nay, nay, man, look not black ! 
 Unless your daughter were a wine flask, trust me 
 There's no fear of the painter ! 
 
 Falcone. So I think, 
 
 And you shall rule me. 'Tis the roughest shell 
 Hides the good pearl. Adieu, sir ! (to Tomaso.) 
 
 [Exeunt duke and Falcone. 
 (Angelo seizes the missive from Tomaso, and strides up and 
 down the stage, reading it exultingly. After looking at 
 hi?n a moment, Tomaso does the same with the bond for 
 the twenty f asks. 
 
 Angelo. Give me the letter ! 
 
 Oh, here is golden opportunity— 
 The ladder at my foot, the prize above, 
 And angels beckoning upward. I will paint 
 
868 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 A picture now, that in the eyes of men 
 
 Shall live like loving daylight. They shall cease 
 
 To praise it for the constant glory of it. 
 
 There's not a stone built in the palace wall 
 
 But shall let through the light of it, and Florence 
 
 Shall be a place of pilgrimage for ever 
 
 To see the work of low-born Angelo. 
 
 Oh that the world were made without a night, 
 
 That I could toil while in my fingers play 
 
 This dexterous lightnins, wasted so in sleep. 
 
 I'll out, and muse how I shall paint this beauty, 
 
 So, wile the night away. [Exit. 
 
 Tomaso {coming forward with his bond). Prejudice 
 aside, that is a pleasant-looking piece of paper ! (Holds it 
 off, and regards it with a pleased air.) Your bond to pay, 
 now is an ill-visaged rascal — you would know him across a 
 church — nay — with the wind fair, smell him a good league ! 
 But this has, in some sort, a smile. It is not like other pa- 
 per. It reads mellifluously. Your name is in the right end 
 of it for music. Let me dwell upon it ! (Unfolds it and 
 reads) " I, Tomaso, promise to pay" — stay! " I,Tomaso — 
 I, Tomaso, promise to pay to Angelo, my master, twenty 
 flasks of wine .'" (Rubs his eyes, and turns the note over 
 and over.) There's a damnable twist in it that spoils all. 
 "/ Tomaso" — why that's 1. And "J promise to pay" — 
 Now, I promise no such thing ! (Turns it upside down, and 
 after trying in vain to alter the reading, tears it in two.) 
 There are some men that can not write ten words in their 
 own language without a blunder. Out, filthy scraps. If 
 the plover's daughter have not compassion upon me, I die 
 of thirst ! I'll seek her out ! A pest on ignorance ! 
 (Pulls his hat sulkily over his eyes, and ivalks off.) 
 
 SCENE III. 
 
 [An apartment in the Falcone Palace, Angelo discovered 
 listening.'] 
 
 Angelo. Did I hear footsteps ? (He listens.) Fancy- 
 plays me tricks 
 In my impatience for this lovely wonder ! 
 That window's to the north ! The light falls cool. 
 I'll set my easel here, and sketch her — Stay ! 
 How shall I do that ? Is she proud or sweet ? 
 Will she sit silent, or converse and smile ? 
 Will she be vexed or pleased to have a stranger 
 Pry through her beauty for the soul that's in it? 
 Nay, then I heard a footstep — she is here ! 
 
 (Enter Isabella, reading her father's missive.) 
 
 Isabella. " The duke would have your picture for the 
 dutchess 
 Done by this rude man, Angelo ! Receive him 
 With modest privacy, and let your kindness 
 Be measured by his merit, not his garb." 
 
 Angelo. Fair lady ! 
 
 Isabella. Who speaks ? 
 
 Jlngelo. Angelo ! 
 
 Isabella. You've come, sir, 
 
 To paint a dull face, trust me ! 
 
 -Angelo. (Aside— Beautiful, 
 
 Beyond all dreaming !) 
 
 Isabella. I've no smiles to show you, 
 
 Not ev'n a mock one ! Shall I sit ? 
 
 Jlngelo. ' No, lady ! 
 
 I'll steal your beauty while you move, as well ! 
 So you but breathe, the air still brings to me 
 That which outdoes all pencilling. 
 
 Isabella (walking apart). His voice 
 Is not a rude one. What a fate is mine, 
 When ev'n the chance words on a poor youth's tongue, I 
 Contrasted with the voice which I should love, 
 Seems rich and musical ! 
 
 Jlngelo (to himself as he draws). How like a swan, 
 Drooping his small head to a lily-cup, 
 She curves that neck of pliant ivory ! 
 I'll paint her thus ! 
 
 Isabella. (Aside— Forgetful where he is, 
 He thinks aloud. This is, perhaps, the rudeness 
 My father feared might anger me.) 
 
 Angelo. What color 
 
 Can match the clear red of those glorious lips ? 
 Say it were possible to trace the arches. 
 
 Shaped like the drawn bow of the god of love-- 
 How teint them, after ? 
 
 Isabella. Still, he thinks not of me, 
 
 But murmurs to his picture. 'Twere sweet praise, 
 Were it a lover Avhispering it. I'll listen, 
 As I walk, still. 
 
 Jlngelo. They say, a cloudy veil 
 
 Hangs ever at the crystal-gate of heaven, 
 To bar the issue of its blinding glory. 
 So droop those silken lashes to an eye 
 Mortal could never paint ! 
 
 Isabella. There's flattery, 
 
 Would draw down angels ! 
 
 Jlngelo. Now, what alchymy 
 
 Can mock the rose and lily of her cheek ! 
 I must look closer on't ! (Advancing.) Fair lady, please 
 
 you, 
 I'll venture to vour side. 
 
 Isabella. Sir ! 
 
 Jlngelo (examining her cheek). There's a mixture 
 Of white and red here, that defeats my skill. 
 If you'll lbrgive me, I'll observe an instant, 
 How the bright blood and the transparent pearl 
 Melt to each other ! 
 
 Isabella (receding from him). You're too free, sir. 
 
 Angelo (with surprise). Madam ! 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — And yet, I think not so. He must 
 look on it, 
 To paint it well.) 
 
 Angelo. Lady ! the daylight's precious ! 
 
 Pray you, turn to me ! In my study, here, 
 I've tried to fancy how that ivory shoulder 
 Leads the white light off from your arching neck, 
 But can not, for the envious sleeve that hides it. 
 Please you, displace it ! 
 
 (Raises his hand to the sleeve.) 
 
 Isabella. Sir, you are too bold ! 
 
 Angelo. Pardon me, lady ! Nature's masterpiece 
 Should be beyond your hiding, or my praise! 
 Were you less marvellous, I were too bold j 
 But there's a pure divinity in beauty, 
 Which the true eye of art looks on with reverence, 
 Though, like the angels, it were all unclad ! 
 You have no right to hide it ! 
 
 Isabella. How ? No right ! 
 
 Angelo. 'Tis the religion of our art, fair madam ! 
 That, by oft looking on the type divine 
 In which we first were moulded, men remember 
 The heaven they're born to ! You've an errand here, 
 To show how look the angels. But, as Vestals 
 Cherish the sacred fire, yet let the priest 
 Light his lamp at it for a thousand altars, 
 So is your beauty unassoiled, though I 
 Ravish a copy for the shut-out world ! 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — Here is the wooing that should win 
 a maid ! 
 Bold, yet respectful — free, yet full of honor ! 
 I never saw a youth with gentler eyes ; 
 I never heard a voice that pleased me more ; 
 Let me look on him ?) 
 
 (Enter Tortesa, unperceived.) 
 
 Angelo. In a form like yours, 
 
 All parts are perfect, madam ! yet, unseen, 
 Impossible to fancy. With your leave 
 I'll see your hand ungloved. 
 
 Isabella (removing her glove). I have no heart 
 To keep it from you, signor ! There it is ! 
 
 Angelo (taking it in his own). Oh God! how beauti- 
 ful thy works may be ! 
 Inimitably perfect ! Let me look 
 Close on the tracery of these azure veins ! 
 With what a delicate and fragile thread 
 They weave their subtle mesh beneath the skin, 
 And meet, all blushing, in these rosy nails ! 
 How soft the texture of these tapering fingers ! 
 How exquisite the wrist ! How perfect all ! 
 (Tortesa rushes forward.) 
 Tortesa. Now have I heard enough ! Why, what are 
 you, 
 To palm the hand of my betrothed bride 
 With this licentious freedom ? 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 869 
 
 (Angelo turns composedly to his work.) 
 
 And you, madam ! 
 With a first troth scarce cold upon your lips — 
 Is this your chastity ? 
 
 Isabella. My father's roof 
 
 Is over me ! I'm not your wife ! 
 
 Tortesa. Bought ! paid for ! 
 
 The wedding toward — have I no right in you ? 
 Your father, at my wish, bade you be private ; 
 Is this obedience ? 
 
 Isabella. Count Falcone's will 
 
 Has, to his daughter, ever been a law ; 
 This, in prosperity — and now, when chance 
 Frowns on his broken fortunes, I were dead 
 To love and pity, were not soul and body 
 Spent for his smallest need ! I did consent 
 To wed his ruthless creditor for this ! 
 I would have sprung into the sea, the grave, 
 As questionless and soon ! My troth is yours ! 
 But I'm not wedded yet, and, till I am, 
 The hallowed honor that protects a maid 
 Is round me, like a circle of bright fire ! 
 A savage would not cross it — nor shall you ! 
 I'm mistress of my presence. Leave me, sir ! 
 
 Tortesa. There's a possession of some lordly acres 
 Sold to Falcone for that lily hand ! 
 The deed's delivered, and the hand's my own ! 
 I'll see that no man looks on't. 
 
 Isabelta. Shall a lady 
 
 Bid you begone twice ? 
 
 Tortesa. Twenty times, if't please you ! 
 
 {She looks at Angelo, who continues tranquilly painting.) 
 
 Isabella. Does he not wear a sword ? Is he a coward, 
 That he can hear this man heap insult on me, 
 And ne'er fall on him / 
 
 Tortesa. Lady ! to your chamber ! 
 
 I have a touch to give this picture, here, 
 But want no model for't. Come, come. 
 
 (Offers to take her by the arm.) 
 Isabella. Stand back ! 
 
 Now, will he see this wretch lay hands on me, 
 And never speak ? He can not be a coward ! 
 No, no ! some other reason — not a coward ! 
 I could not love a coward ! 
 
 Tortesa. If you will, 
 
 Stay where you're better missed — 'tis at your pleasure ; 
 I'll hew your kisses from the saucy lips 
 Of this bold painter— look on't, if you will ! 
 And first, to mar his picture ! 
 (He strikes at the canvass, when Angelo suddenly draws, 
 attacks and disarms him.) 
 Angelo. Hold ! What wouldst thou ? 
 
 Fool ! madman ! dog ! What wouldst thou with my pic- 
 ture ? 
 Speak !— But thy life would not bring back a ray 
 Of precious daylight, and I can not waste it ! 
 Begone ! begone ! 
 (Throws Tortesa's sword from the window, and returns to 
 his picture.) 
 I'll back to paradise ! 
 
 'Twas this touch that he marred ! So ! fair again ! 
 Tortesa (going out). I'll find you, sir, when I'm in 
 cooler blood ! 
 And, madam, you ! or Count Falcone for you, 
 Shall rue this scorn ! [Exit. 
 
 Isabella (looking at Angelo). Lost in his work once 
 more! 
 I shall be jealous of my very picture ! 
 Yet one who can forget his passions so — 
 Peril his life, and, losing scarce a breath, 
 Turn to his high, ambitious toil again — 
 Must have a heart for whose belated waking 
 Queens might keep vigil ! 
 
 Angelo. Twilight falls, fair lady ! 
 
 I must give o'er ! Pray Heaven, the downy wing 
 Of its most loving angel guard your beauty ! 
 Good night ! 
 
 (Goes out with a low reverence.) 
 Isabella. Good night ! 
 
 (She looks after him a moment, and then walks thoughtfully 
 off the stage.) 
 
 ACT II. 
 
 [Tomaso discovered silting at his supper, with a bottle of 
 water before him.] 
 
 Tomaso. Water ! (Sips a little with a grimace.) I 
 think since the world was drowned in it, it has tasted of 
 sinners. The pious throat refuses it. Other habits grow 
 pleasant with use — but the drinking of water lessens the 
 liking of it. Now, why should not some rivers run wine ? 
 There are varieties in the eatables — will any wise man 
 tell me why there should be but one drinkable in nature 
 — and that water ? My mind's made up — it's the curse of 
 transgression. 
 
 (A rap at the dooi.) 
 
 Come in ! 
 
 [Enter Zippa, with a basket and bottle.] 
 
 Zippa. Good even, Tomaso ! 
 
 Tomaso. Zippa ! I had a presentiment — 
 
 Zippa. What ! of my coming ? 
 
 Tomaso. . No— of thy bottle ! Look ! I was stinting my- 
 self in water to leave room ! 
 
 Zippa. The reason is superfluous. There would be 
 room in thee for wine, if thou wert drowned in the sea. 
 
 Tomaso. God forbid ! 
 
 Zippa. What— that thou shouldst be drowned ? 
 
 Tomaso. No — but that being drowned, I should have 
 room for wine. 
 
 Zippa. Why, now ? — why ? 
 
 Tomaso. If I had room for wine, I should want it— and 
 to want wine in the bottom of the sea, were a plague of 
 Sodom. 
 
 Zippa. Where's Angelo ? 
 
 Tomaso. What's in thy bottle ? Show ! Show ! 
 
 Zippa. Tell me where he is— what he has done since 
 I yesterday — what thought on— what said— how he has 
 ' iooked, and if he still loves me ; and when thou art thirsty 
 with truth-telling— (dry work for such a liar as thou art), 
 — thou shalt learn what is in my bottle ! 
 
 Tomaso. Nay — learning be hanged ! 
 
 Zippa. So says the fool ! 
 
 Tomaso. Speak advisedly ! Was not Adam blest till lie 
 knew good and evil ? 
 
 Zippa. Right for once. 
 
 Tomaso. Then he lost Paradise by too much learning. 
 
 Zippa. Ha ! ha ! Hadst thou been consulted, we should 
 still be there ! 
 
 Tomaso. Snug ! I would have had my inheritance in a 
 small vineyard ! 
 
 Zippa. Tell me what I ask of thee. 
 
 Tomaso. Thou shalt have a piece of news for a cup of 
 wine — pay and take — till thy bottle be dry ! 
 
 Zippa. Come on, then ! and if thou must lie, let it be 
 flattery. That's soonest forgiven. 
 
 Tomaso. And last forgotten ! Pour out ! (She pours 
 a cup full, and gives him.) The duke was here yester- 
 day. — 
 
 Zippa. Lie the first ! 
 
 Tomaso. And made much of my master's pictures. 
 
 Zippa. Nay— that would have made two good lies. 
 Thou'rt prodigal of stuff! 
 
 Tomaso. Pay two glasses, then, and square the reckon- 
 ing! 
 
 Zippa. Come ! Lie the third ! 
 
 Tomaso. What wilt thou wager it's a he, that Angelo 
 is painting a court lady for the dutchess t 
 
 Zippa. Oh Lord! Take the bottle ! They say there s 
 truth in wine— but as truth is impossible to thee, drink 
 thyself, at least, down to probabilities ! 
 
 Tomaso. Look vou there ! When was virtue encour- 
 raged ? Here have' I been telling God's truth, and it goes 
 for a lie. Hang virtue ! Produce thy cold chicken, and 
 I'll tell thee a lie for the wings and two for the side-bones 
 and breast. (Offers to take the chicken.) .„ . 
 
 Zippa. Slav ! stay ! It's for thy master, thou glutton ! 
 Tomaso. Who's ill a-bed, and forbid meat. (Angelo 
 enters.) I would have told thee so before, but feared to 
 grieve thee. (She would have a lie !) 
 
 Zippa (starting up). Ill ! Angelo ill ! Is he very ill, 
 | good Tomaso ? 
 
870 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 Tomaso. Very ! (Seizes the chicken, as Angelo claps him 
 on the shoulder.) 
 
 jlngelo. Will thy tricks never end ? 
 
 Tomaso. Ehem ! ehem ! (Thrusts the chicken into his 
 pocket.) 
 
 jlngelo. How art thou, Zippa ? 
 
 Zippa. Well, dear Angelo ! (Giving him her hand.) 
 And thou wert not ill, indeed ! 
 
 jlngelo. Never better, by the test of a true hand ! I 
 have done work to-day, I trust will be remembered ? 
 
 Zippa. Is it true it's a fair lady ? 
 
 jlngelo. A lady with a face so angelical, Zippa, that — 
 
 Zippa. That thou didst forget mine ! 
 
 jlngelo. In truth, I forgot there was such a Ihing as a 
 world, and so forgot all in it. I was in heaven ! 
 
 Tomaso. (Aside, as he picks the leg of the chicken — 
 Prosperity is excellent whitewash, and her love is an old 
 score !) 
 
 Zippa (bitterly). I am glad thou wert pleased, Angelo ! 
 — very glad ! 
 
 Tomaso. (Aside — Glad as an eel to be fried.) 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — " In heaven," was he ! If I pay him 
 not that, may my brains rot ! By what right, loving me, 
 is he "in heaven" with another ?) 
 
 Tomaso. (Aside — No more wine and cold chicken from 
 that quarter !) 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — Tortesa loves me, and my false game 
 may be played true. If he wed not Falcone's daughter, he 
 will wed me, and so I am revenged on this fickle Angelo ! 
 I have the heart to do it !) 
 
 Angelo. What dost thou muse on, Zippa ? 
 
 Zippa. On one I love better than thee, signor ! 
 
 Angelo. What, angry ? (Seizes his pencil.) Hold there 
 till I sketch thee ! By Jove, thou'rt not half so pretty when 
 thou'rt pleased ! 
 
 Zippa. Adieu, signor ! your mockery will have an end ! 
 (Goes out with an angry air.) 
 
 Angelo. What! gone? Nay, I'll come with thee, if 
 thou'rt in earnest ! What whim's this ? (Takes up his 
 hat.) Ho, Zippa! (Follows in pursuit.) 
 
 Tomaso (pulls the chicken from his pocket). Come forth 
 last of the chickens ! She will ne'er forgive him, and so 
 ends the succession of cold fowl! One glass to its memory, 
 and then to bed! (Drinks, and takes up the candle.) A 
 woman is generally unsafe — but a jealous one spoils all 
 confidence in drink. [Exit, muttering. 
 
 [An Apartment in the Falcone Palace. Enter Servant, 
 showing in Zippa.] 
 
 Servant. Wait here, here, if 't please you ! 
 
 Zippa. Thanks ! (Exit Servant.) My heart misgives 
 me! 
 Tis a bold errand I am come upon — 
 And I a stranger to her ! Yet, perchance 
 She needs a friend — the proudest does sometimes — 
 And mean ones may be welcome. Look ! she comes ! 
 
 Isabella. You wished to speak with me ? 
 
 Zippa. I did — but now 
 
 My memory is crept into my eyes; 
 I can not think for gazing on your beauty ! 
 Pardon me, lady ! 
 
 Isabella. You're too fair yourself 
 
 To find my face a wonder. Speak ! Who are you? 
 
 Zippa. Zippa, the glover's daughter, and your friend ! 
 
 Isabella. My friend ? 
 
 Zippa. I said so. You're a noble lady 
 
 And I a lowborn maid — yet I have come 
 To offer you my friendship. 
 
 Isabella. This seems strange ! 
 
 Zippa. I'll make it less so, if you'll give me leave. 
 
 Isabella. You'll please me ! 
 
 Zippa. Briefly — for the time is precious 
 To me as well as you — I have a lover, 
 A true one, as I think, who yet finds boldness 
 To seek your hand in marriage. 
 
 Isabella. How ? We're rivals ! 
 
 Zippa Tortesa loves me, and for that I'd wed him. 
 
 Yet I'm not sure I love him more than you — 
 And you must hate him. 
 
 Isabella. So far freely spoken — 
 
 What was your thought in coming to me now ? 
 
 Zippa. To mar your match with him, and so make 
 mine! 
 
 Isabella. Why, free again ! Yes, as you love him not 
 'Tis strange you seek to wed him ! 
 
 Zippa. Oh no, madam ! 
 
 Woman loves once unthinkingly. The heart 
 Is born with her first love, and new to joy, 
 Breathes to the first wind its delicious sweetness, 
 But gets none back ! So comes its bitter wisdom ! 
 When next we think of love, 'tis who loves us I 
 I said Tortesa loved me ! 
 
 Isabella. You shall have him 
 
 With all my heart ! See — I'm your friend already ! 
 And friends are equals. So approach, and tell me, 
 What was this first love like, that you discourse 
 So prettily upon ? 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — Dear Angelo ! 
 
 'Twill be a happiness to talk of him !) 
 I loved a youth, kind madam ! far beneath 
 The notice of your eyes, unknown and poor. 
 
 Isabella. A handsome youth ? 
 
 Zippa. Indeed, I thought him so ! 
 
 But you would not. I loved him out of pity ; 
 No one cared for him. 
 
 Isabella. Was he so forlorn ? 
 
 Zippa. He was our neighbor, and I knew his toil 
 Was almost profitless ; and 'twas a pleasure 
 To fill my basket from our wasteful table, 
 And steal, at eve, to sup with him. 
 
 Isabella (smiling). Why, that 
 
 Was charity, indeed ! He loved you for it — 
 Was't not so ? 
 
 Zippa. He was like a brother to me — 
 
 The kindest brother sister ever had. 
 I built my hopes upon his gentleness : 
 He had no other quality to love. 
 Th' ambitious change— so do the fiery-hearted : 
 The lowly are more constant. 
 
 Isabella. And yet, he 
 
 Was after all, a false one ? 
 
 Zippa. Nay, dear lady ! 
 
 I'll check my story there ! 'T would end in anger, 
 Perhaps in tears. If I am not too bold, 
 Tell me, in turn, of all your worshippers — 
 Was there ne'er one that pleased you ? 
 
 Isabella. (Aside— Now could I 
 
 Prate to this humble maid, of Angelo, 
 Till matins rang again !) My gentle Zippa! 
 I have found all men prompt to talk of love, 
 Save only one. I will confess to you, 
 For that one could I die ! Yet, so unlike 
 Your faithless lover must I draw his picture, 
 That you will wonder how such opposites 
 Could both be loved of women. 
 
 Zippa. Was he fair, 
 
 Or brown ? 
 
 Isabella. In truth, I marked not his complexion. 
 
 Zippa. Tall ? 
 
 Isabella. That I know not. 
 
 Zippa. Well — robust, or slight ? 
 
 Isabella. I can not tell, indeed ! I heard him speak — 
 Looked in his eyes, and saw him calm and angered — 
 And see him now, in fancy, standing there — 
 Yet know not limb or feature ! 
 
 Zippa. You but saw 
 
 A shadow, lady ! 
 
 Isabella. Nay — I saw a soul ! 
 
 His eyes were light with it. The forehead lay 
 Above their fires in calm tranquillity, 
 As the sky sleeps o'er thunder-clouds. His look 
 Was mixed of these — earnest, and yet subdued — 
 Gentle, yet passionate — sometimes half god-like 
 In its command, then mild and sweet again, 
 Like a stern angel taught humility ! 
 Oh ! when he spoke, my heart stole out to him ! 
 There was a spirit-echo in his voice — 
 A sound of thought — of under-playing music — 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 871 
 
 As if, before it ceased in human ears, 
 The echo was caught up in fairy-land ! 
 
 Zippa. Was he a courtier, madam ? 
 
 Isabella. He's as lowly 
 
 In birth and fortunes, as your false one, Zippa ! 
 Yet rich in genius, and of that ambition, 
 That he'll outlast nobility with fame. 
 Have you seen such a man ? 
 
 Zippa. Alas ! sweet lady ! 
 
 My life is humble, and such wondrous men 
 Are far above my knowing. I could wish 
 To see one ere I died ! 
 
 Isabella. You shall, believe me ! 
 But while we talk of lovers, we forget 
 In how brief time you are to win a husband. 
 Come to my chamber, Zippa, and I'll see 
 How with your little net you'll snare a bird 
 Fierce as this rude Tortesa ! 
 
 Zippa. We will find 
 
 A way, dear lady, if we die for it ! 
 
 Isabella. Shall we ? Come with me, then ! 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 [An apartment in the Falcone Palace. Tortesa alone await- ; 
 ing the return of the Count.] 
 
 Tortesa (musing). There are some luxuries too rich i 
 for purchase. 
 Your soul, 'tis said, will buy them, of the devil— 
 Money's too poor ! What would I not give, now, 
 That I could scorn what I can hate and ruin ! 
 Scorn is the priceless luxury ! In heaven, 
 The ansjel's pity. They are blessed to do so ; 
 For, pitying, they look down. We do't by scorn ! 
 There lies the privilege of noble birth ! 
 The jewel of that bloated toad is scorn ! 
 You may take all else from him. You— being mean- 
 May get his palaces — may wed his daughter — 
 Sleep in his bed— have all his peacock menials 
 Watching your least glance, as they did "my lord's;" 
 And, well-possessed thus, you may pass him by 
 On his own horse ; and while the vulgar crowd 
 Gape at your trappings, and scarce look on him — 
 He, in his rass, and starving for a crust — 
 You'll feel his scorn, through twenty coats-of-mail, 
 Hot as a sun-stroke ! Yet there's something for us ! 
 Th' archangel fiend, when driven forth from heaven, 
 Put on the serpent, and found sweet revenge 
 Trailing his slime through Eden ! So will I ! 
 [Enter Falcone booted and spurred.] 
 Falcone. Good morrow, signor, 
 Tortesa. Well-arrived, my lord ! 
 
 How sped your riding ? 
 
 Falcone. Fairly ! Has my daughter 
 
 Left you alone ? 
 
 Tortesa. She knows that I am here. 
 
 Nay— she'll come presently ! A word in private, 
 Since we're alone, my lord ! 
 
 Falcone. I listen, signor ! 
 
 Tortesa. Your honor, as I think, outweighs a bond ? 
 Falcone. 'Twas never questioned. 
 Tortesa. On y° ur simple word, 
 
 And such more weight as hangs upon the troth 
 Of a capricious woman, I gave up 
 A deed of lands to you. 
 
 Falcone. You did. 
 
 Tortesa. - To be 
 
 Forfeit, and mine again — the match not made ? 
 Falcone. How if you marred it ? 
 Tortesa. I? I'm not a boy ! 
 
 What I would yesterday, I will to-day ! 
 I'm not a lover — 
 
 Falcone. How, so near your bridal, 
 
 And not a lover ? Shame, sir ! 
 
 Tortesa. My lord count, 
 
 You take me for a fool ! 
 
 Falcone. Is't like a fool 
 
 To love a high-born lady, and your bride ? 
 
 Tortesa. Yes ; a thrice-sodden fool— if it were I ! 
 I'm not a mate for her— you know I am not ! 
 
 You know, that, in her heart, your haughty daughter 
 Scorns me — ineffably ! 
 
 Falcone. You seek occasion 
 
 To slight her, signor ! 
 
 Tortesa. No ! I'll marry her 
 
 If all the pride that cast down Lucifer 
 Lie in her bridal-ring ! But, mark me still ! 
 I'm not one of your humble citizens, 
 To bring my money-bags and make you rich — 
 That, when we walk together, I may take 
 Your shadow for my own ! These limbs are clay — 
 Poor, common clay, my lord ! And she that weds me, 
 Comes down to my estate. 
 
 Falcone. By this you mean not 
 
 To shut her from her friends ? 
 
 Tortesa. You'll see your daughter 
 
 By coming to my house — not else ! D'ye think 
 I'll have a carriage to convey my wife 
 Where she will hear me laughed at ?— buy fine horses 
 To prance a measure to the mocking jeers 
 Of fools that ride with her ? Nay— keep a table 
 Where I'm the skeleton that mars the feast ! 
 No, no — no, no ! 
 
 Falcone. (Aside— With half the provocation, 
 I would, ere now, have struck an emperor ! 
 But baser pangs make this endurable. 
 I'm poor— so patience !) What was it beside 
 You would have said to me ? 
 
 Torlesa. But this : Your daughter 
 
 Has, in your absence, covered me with scorn ! 
 We'll not talk of it— if the match goes on, 
 I care not to remember it ! (Aside — She shall — 
 And bitterly !) 
 
 Falcone. (Aside— My poor, poor Isabella ! 
 The task was too much !) 
 
 Tortesa. There's a cost of feeling — 
 
 You may not think it much — I reckon it 
 A thousand pounds per day— in playing thus 
 The suitor to a lady crammed with pride ! 
 I've writ you out a bond to pay me for it ! 
 See here !— to pay me for my shame and pains, 
 If I should lose your daughter for a wife, 
 A thousand pounds per day— dog cheap at that ! 
 Sign it, my lord, or give me back my deeds, 
 And traffic cease between us ! 
 
 Falcone. Is this earnest, 
 
 Or are you mad or trifling ? Do I not 
 Give you my daughter with an open hand ? 
 Are you betrothed, or no ? 
 
 [Enter a Servant.] 
 Who's this ? 
 
 Servant. A page 
 
 Sent from the duke. 
 
 Falcone. Admit him ! 
 
 [Enter Page, with a letter.] 
 
 Page. For my lord, 
 
 The Count Falcone. 
 
 Tortesa. (Aside — In a moment more 
 I would have had a bond of such assurance 
 Her father on his knees should bid me take her. 
 
 (Looking at Falcone, who smiles as he reads.) 
 What glads him now ?) 
 
 Falcone. You shall not have the bond ! 
 
 Tortesa. No ? (jlside— Here's a change ! What hint 
 from duke or devil 
 Stirs him to this ?) My lord, 'twere best the bridal 
 Took place upon the instant. Is your daughter 
 Ready within ? . ■ . ..__- . 
 
 Falcone. You'll never wed my daughter ! 
 [Enter Isabella.] 
 
 Tortesa. My lord ! 
 
 Falcone. She's fitlier mated ! Here she comes ! 
 My lofty Isabella ! My fair child ! 
 How dost thou, sweet r 
 
 Isabella (embracing him). Come home, and I not 
 
 Art well ? I see thou art ! Hast ridden hard ? 
 My dear, dear father ! 
 
 Falcone. Give me breath to tell thee 
 
 Some better news, my loved one ! 
 
872 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 Isabella. Nay, the joy 
 
 To see you back again 's enough for now. 
 There can be no news better, and for this 
 Let's keep a holyday twixt this and sunset ! 
 Shut up your letter and come see my flowers, 
 And hear my birds sing, will you '/ 
 
 Falcone. Look, my darling, 
 
 Upon this first ! {Holds up the letter.) 
 
 Isabella. No ! you shall tell me all 
 
 You and the duke did — where you slept, where ate, 
 Whether you dreamed of me — and, now I think on't, 
 Found you no wild-flowers as you crossed the mountain ? 
 
 Falcone. My own bright child ! {Looks fondly upon 
 her.) 
 
 Tortesa. (Jlside — 'Twill mar your joy, my lord ! 
 To see the glover's daughter in your palace, 
 And your proud daughter houseless !) 
 
 Falcone (to Isabella). You'll not hear 
 
 The news I have for you ! 
 
 Tortesa (advancing). Before you tell it, 
 I'll take my own again ! 
 
 Isabella. (Jlside — Tortesa here !) (courtesies.) 
 I crave your pardon, sir ; I saw you not ! 
 (Oh hateful monster ! — Jlside.) 
 
 Falcone. Listen to my news, 
 
 Signor Tortesa ! It concerns you, trust me ! 
 
 Isabella, (jlside — More of this hateful marriage !) 
 
 Tortesa. Tell it briefly, 
 
 My time is precious ! 
 
 Falcone. Sir, I'll sum it up 
 
 In twenty words. The duke has information, 
 By what means yet I know not, that my need 
 Spurs me to marry an unwilling daughter. 
 He bars the match ! — redeems my lands and palace, 
 And has enriched the young Count Julian, 
 For whom he bids me keep my daughter's hand ! 
 Kind, royal master ! (Reads the note to himself.) 
 
 Isabella. (Jlside — Never !) 
 
 Tortesa. (Jlside, with suppressed rage — 'Tis a lie ! 
 He's mad, or plays some trick to gain the time — 
 Or there's a woman hatching deviltry ! 
 We'll see.) (Looks at Isabella.) 
 
 Isabella. (Jlside — I'll die first ! Sold and taken back, 
 Then thrust upon a husband paid to take me ! 
 To save my father I have weighed myself, 
 Heart, hand, and honor, against so much land ! — 
 I — Isabella ! I'm nor hawk nor hound, 
 And, if I change my master, I will choose him ! 
 
 Tortesa. (Jlside — She seems not over-pleased !) 
 
 Page. Your pardon, count ! 
 
 I wait your answer to the duke ! 
 
 Falcone. My daughter 
 
 Shall give it you herself. What sweet phrase have you, 
 Grateful and eloquent, to bear your thanks ? 
 Speak, Isabella ! 
 
 Isabella. (Jlside — There's but one way left ! 
 Courage, poor heart, and think on Angelo !) 
 
 (Advances suddenly to Tortesa.) 
 Signor Tortesa ! 
 
 Tortesa. Madam ! 
 
 Isabella. There's my hand ! 
 
 Is't yours, or no ? 
 
 Tortesa. There was a troth between us ! 
 
 Isabella. Is't broke ? 
 
 Tortesa. I have not broke it ! 
 
 Isabella. Then why stand you 
 
 Mute as a statue, when 'tis struck asunder 
 Without our wish or knowledge ? Would you be 
 Half so indifferent had you lost a horse ? 
 Am I worth having ? 
 
 Tortesa. Is my life worth having ? 
 
 Isabella. Then are you robbed ! Look to it ! 
 
 Falcone. Is she mad ! 
 
 Tortesa. You'll marry me ? 
 
 Isabella. I will ! 
 
 Falcone. By Heaven, you shall not ! 
 
 What, shall my daughter wed a leprosy — 
 A bloated money-canker ? Leave her hand ! 
 Stand from him, Isabella ! 
 
 Isabella. Sir ! you gave me 
 
 This "leper" for a hnsband, three days gone; 
 
 I did not ask my heart if I could love him ! 
 
 I took him with the meekness of a child, 
 
 Trusting my father ! I was shut up for him — 
 
 Forced to receive no other company — 
 
 My wedding-clothes made, and the match proclaimed 
 
 Through Florence ? 
 
 Falcone. Do you love him ? — tell me quickly ! 
 
 Isabella. You never asked me that when I was bid 
 To wed him ! 
 
 Falcone. I am dumb ! 
 
 Tortesa. Ha ! ha ! well put ! 
 
 At him again, 'Bel ! Well ! I've had misgivings 
 That there was food in me for ladies' liking. 
 I've been too modest ! 
 
 Isabella. (Jlside — Monster of disgust !) 
 
 Falcone. My daughter ! I would speak with you in 
 private ! 
 Signor ! you'll pardon me. 
 
 Isabella. Go you, dear father ! 
 
 I'll follow straight. [Exit Falcone. 
 
 Tortesa. (Jlside — She loiters for a kiss ! 
 They're all alike ! The same trick woos them all !) 
 Come to me, 'Bel ! 
 
 Isabella (coldy). To-morrow at this hour 
 You'll find the priest here, and the bridesmaids waiting. 
 Till then, adieu ! [Exit. ' 
 
 Tortesa. Hola ! what, gone ? Why, 'Bella ! 
 Sweetheart ! I say ! So ! She would coy it with me ! 
 Well, well, to-morrow ! 'Tis not long, and kisses 
 Pay interest by seconds ! There's a leg ! 
 As she stood there, the calf showed handsomely. 
 Faith 'lis a shapely one ! I wonder now, 
 Which of my points she finds most admirable ! 
 Something I never thought on, like as not, 
 We do not see ourselves as others see us. 
 'Twould not surprise me now, if 'twere my beard — 
 My forehead ! I've a hand indifferent white ! 
 Nay, I've been told my waist was neatly turned. 
 We do not see ourselves as others see us ! 
 How goes the hour? I'll home and fit my hose 
 To tie trim for the morrow. (Going out.) Hem ! the 
 
 door's 
 Lofty. I like that ! I will have mine raised. 
 Your low door makes one stoop ! [Exit 
 
 ACT III. 
 
 [Jlngelo discovered in his studio, painting upon the picture 
 of Isabella.'] 
 
 Jlngelo. My soul is drunk with gazing on this face, 
 I reel and faint with it. In what sweet world 
 Have I traced all its lineaments before ? 
 I know them. Like a troop of long-lost friends, 
 My pencil wakes them with its eager touch, 
 And they spring up, rejoicing, oh, I'll gem 
 The heaven of Fame with my irradiate pictures, 
 Like kindling planets — but this glorious one 
 Shall be their herald, like the evening star, 
 First-lit, and lending of its fire to all. 
 The day fades — but the lamp burns on within me. 
 My bosom has no dark, no sleep, no change 
 To dream or calm oblivion. I work on 
 When my hand stops. The light teints fade. Good night, 
 Fair image of the fairest thing on earth, 
 Bright Isabella ! 
 (Leans on the rod with which he guides his hand, and 
 remains looking at his picture.) 
 [Enter Tomaso, with two bags of money.] 
 Tomaso. For the most excellent painter, Angelo, two 
 hundred ducats ! The genius of my master flashes upon 
 me. The duke's greeting and two hundred ducats ! If I 
 should not have died in my blindness but for this eye-water, 
 may I be hanged. (Looks at Jlngelo.) He is studying his 
 picture. What an air there is about him — lofty, unlike the 
 vulgar ! Two hundred ducats ! (Observes Jlngelo' s hat on 
 the table.) It strikes me now that I can see genius in 
 that hat. It is not like a common hat. Not like a bought 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 873 
 
 hat. The rim turns to the crown with an intelligence. 
 (Weighs the ducats in his haul.) Good heavy ducats. 
 What it is to refresh the vision ! I have looked round, ere 
 now, in this very chamber, and fancied that the furniture 
 expressed a melancholy dulness. When he hath talked to 
 me of his pictures, I have seen the chairs smile. Nay, as 
 if ashamed to listen, the very table has looked foolish. 
 Now, all about me expresseth a choice peculiarity — as you 
 would say, how like a genius to have such chairs ! What 
 a puinter-like table ! Two hundred ducats ! 
 Angelo. What hast thou for supper ? 
 Tomaso. Two hundred ducats, my great master ! 
 Angelo (absently). A cup of wine ! Wine, Tomaso ! 
 
 [Sits doicn. 
 Tomaso. (So would the great Donatello have sat upon his 
 chair! His less thus ! His hand falling thus !) (Aloud.) 
 There is naught in the cellar but stale beer, my illustrious 
 master! (Now, it strikes me that his shadow is unlike 
 another man's — of a pink tinge, somehow — yet that may be 
 fancy.) 
 Angelo. Hast thou no money ? Get wine, I say ! 
 Tomaso. I saw the duke in the market place, who 
 called me Angelo (we shall rue that trick yet), and with a 
 gracious smile asked me if thou hadst paid the twenty 
 flasks. 
 Angelo (not listening). Is there no wine ? 
 Tomaso. I said to his grace, no ! Pray mark the sequel ; 
 In pity of my thirst, the duke sends me two — ahem ! — one 
 hundred ducats. Here they are ! 
 
 Angelo. Didst thou say the wine was on the lees ? 
 Tomaso. With these fifty ducats we shall buy nothing 
 but wine. (He will be rich with fifty.) 
 Angelo. What saidst thou ? 
 
 Tomiso. I spoke of twenty ducats sent thee by the duke. 
 Wilt thou finger them ere one is spent ? 
 Angelo. I asked thee for wine — I am parched. 
 Tomaso. Of these ten ducats, thinkst thou we might 
 ipend one for a flask of better quality ? 
 
 Angelo. Lend me a ducat, if thou hast one, and buy 
 vine presently. Go ! 
 
 Tomaso. I'll lend it thee, willingly, my illustrious master. 
 .t is my last, but as much mine as thine. 
 Angelo. Go! Go! 
 
 Tomaso. Yet wait ! There's a scrap of news. Fal- 
 tone's daughter marries Tortesa, the usurer ? To-morrow 
 is the bridal. 
 Angelo. How ? 
 
 Tomaso. I learned it in the market-place ! There will 
 be rare doings ! 
 
 Angelo. Dog ! Villain ! Thou hast lied ! Thou dar'st 
 not say it ! 
 
 Tomaso. Hey ! Art thou mad ? Nay — borrow thy 
 ducat where thou canst ! I'll spend that's my own. Adieu, 
 master ! 
 
 (Exit Tomaso, and enter Tortesa with a complacent smile.) 
 Angelo. Ha ! — well arrived ! [Draws his sword. 
 
 Tortesa. Good eve, good Signor Painter. 
 Angelo. You struck me yesterday. 
 
 Tortesa. I harmed your picture — 
 
 For which I'm truly sorry — but not you ! 
 
 Angelo. Myself! myself! My picture is myself ! 
 What are my bones that rot ? Is this my hand ? — 
 Is this my eye ? 
 
 Tortesa. I think so. 
 
 Angelo. No, I say ! 
 
 The hand and eye of Angelo are there ! 
 There — there — (Points to his pictures) — immortal ! 
 
 Wound me in the flesh, 
 I will forgive you upon fair excuse. 
 'Tis the earth round me — 'tis my shell — my house ; 
 But in my picture lie my brain and heart — 
 My soul — my fancy. For a blow at these 
 There's no cold reparation. Draw, and quickly ! 
 I'm in the mood to fight it to the death. 
 Stand on your guard ! 
 
 Tortesa. I will not fight with you. 
 
 Angelo. Coward ! 
 Tortesa. I'm deaf. 
 
 Angelo. Feel then ! 
 
 ^Tortesa catches the blow as he strikes him, and coldly flings 
 back hit han-l.\ 
 
 Tortesa. Nay, strike me not ! 
 
 I'll call the guard, and cry out like a woman. 
 Angelo (turning from him contemptuously). 
 What scent of dog's meat brought me such a cur ! 
 It is a whip I want, and not a sword. 
 
 Tortesa (folding his arms). I have a use for life so 
 far above 
 The stake you quarrel for, that you may choose 
 Your words to please yourself. They'll please me, too. 
 Yet you're in luck. I killed a man on Monday 
 For spitting on my shadow. Thursday's sun 
 Will dry the insult, though it light on me ! 
 Angelo. Oh, subtle coward ! 
 Tortesa. I am what you will, 
 
 So I'm alive to marry on the morrow ! 
 'Tis well, by Jupiter ! Shall you have power 
 With half a breath to pluck from me a wife ! 
 Shall I, against a life as poor as yours — 
 Mine being precious as the keys of heaven — 
 Set all upon a throw, and no odds neither? 
 I know what honor is as well as you ! 
 I know the weight and measure of an insult — 
 What it is worth to take or fling it back. 
 I have the hand to fight if I've a mind; 
 And I've a*heart to shut my sunshine in, 
 And lock it from the scowling of the world, 
 Though all mankind cry " Coward !" 
 
 Angelo. Mouthing braggart ! 
 
 Tortesa. I came to see my bride, my Isabella ! 
 
 Show me her picture ! (Advances to look for it.) 
 
 Angelo. Do but look upon't, 
 
 By heaven's fair light, I'll kill you ! [Draws. 
 
 Tortesa. Soft, she's mine ! 
 
 She loves me ! and with that to make life precious, 
 I have the nerve to beat back Hercules, 
 If you were he ! 
 
 Angelo (attacking him). Out ! Out ! thou shameless 
 
 liar ! 
 Tortesa (retreating on the defence). 
 Thy blows and words fall pointless ! Nay thou'rt mad ! 
 But I'll not harm thee for her picture's sake ! 
 Angelo. Liar ! she hates thee ! 
 (Beats him off the stage and returns, closing the door 
 violently.) 
 So ! once more alone ! 
 (Takes Isabella's picture from the easel, and replaces it with 
 Zippa's.) 
 Back to the wall, deceitful loveliness ! 
 And come forth, Zippa, fair in honest truth ! 
 I'll make thee beautiful ! 
 
 (Takes his pencil and palette to paint.) 
 [A knock is heard.] 
 
 Who knocks ! come in! 
 [Enter Isabella, disguised as a monk.] 
 Isabella. Good morrow, signor ! 
 
 Angelo (turning sharply to the monk). There's a face, 
 old monk, 
 Might stir your blood— ha ? You shall tell me, now, 
 Which of these heavenly features hides the soul ! 
 There is one ! I have worked upon the picture 
 Till my brain's thick — I can not see like you. 
 Where is't ? 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — A picture of the glover's daughter ! 
 What does he, painting her .') Is't for its beauty 
 You paint that face, sir ? 
 
 Angelo. Yes — the immortal beauty ! 
 
 Look here ! What see you in that face ? The skin — 
 Isabella. Brown as a vintage-girl's ! 
 Angelo. The mouth — 
 
 Isabella. A good one 
 
 To eat and drink withal ! 
 
 Angelo. The eye is— 
 
 Isabella. Grey ! 
 
 You'll buy a hundred like it for a penny ! 
 Angelo. A hundred eyes ? 
 Isabella. No. Hazel-nuts ! 
 
 Angelo. The forehead — 
 
 How find you that ? 
 
 Isabella. Why, made to match the rest ! 
 
 I'll cut as good a face out of an apple — 
 For all that's fair in it ! 
 
874 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 Angela. Oh, Heaven, how dim 
 
 Were God's most blessed image did all eyes 
 Look on't like thine ! Is't by the red and white — 
 Is't by the grain and tincture of the skin — 
 Is't by the hair's gloss, or the forehead's arching, 
 You know the bright inhabitant ? I tell thee 
 The spark of their divinity in some 
 Lights up an inward face — so radiant, 
 The outward lineaments are like a veil 
 Floating before the sanctuary — forgot 
 In glimpses of the glory streaming through ! 
 
 Isabella {mournfully). Is Zippa's face so radiant ? 
 
 Angelo. Look upon it! 
 
 You see thro' all the countenance she's true ! 
 
 Isabella. True to you, signor ! 
 
 Jlngelo. To herself, old man ! 
 
 Yet once, to tne too ! (Dejectedly.) 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — Once to him ! Can Zippa 
 Have dared to love a man like Angelo ! 
 I think she dare not. Yet if he, indeed, 
 Were the inconstant lover that she told of — 
 The youth who was " her neighbor !") Please you, sig- 
 nor! 
 Was that fair maid your neighbor ? 
 
 Angelo. Ay — the best ! 
 
 A loving sister were not half so kind ! 
 I never supped without her company. 
 Yet she was modest as an unsunned lily, 
 And bounteous as the constant perfume of it. 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — 'Twas he, indeed ! Oh ! what a fair 
 outside 
 Has falsehood there ! Yet stay ! If it were I 
 Who made him false to her ? Alas, for honor, 
 I must forgive him — tho' my lips are weary 
 With telling Zippa how I thought him perjured ! 
 I can not trust her more — I'll plot alone !) 
 
 (Turns, and takes her own picture from the wall.) 
 
 Isabella. What picture's this, turned to the wall, good 
 signor ? 
 
 Angelo. A painted lie ! 
 
 Isabella. A lie ! — nay — pardon me ! 
 
 I spoke in haste. Methought 'twas like a lady 
 I'd somewhere seen ! — a lady — Isabella ! 
 But she was true ! 
 
 Angelo. Then 'tis not she I've drawn. 
 
 For that's a likeness of as false a face 
 As ever devil did his mischief under. 
 
 Isabella. And yet methinks 'tis done most lovingly ! 
 ^ou musl have thought it fair to dwell so on it. 
 
 Angelo. Your convent has the picture of a saint 
 Tempted, while praying, by the shape of woman. 
 The painter knew that woman was the devil, 
 Yet drew her like an angel ! 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — It is true 
 
 He praised my beauty as a painter may — 
 No more — in words. He praised me as he drew 
 Feature by feature. But who calls the lip 
 To answer for a perjured oath in love ? 
 How should love breathe — how not die, choked for ut- 
 terance, 
 If words were all. He loved me with his eyes. 
 He breathed it. Upon every word he spoke 
 Hung an unuttered worship that his tongue 
 Would spend a life to make articulate. 
 Did he not. take my hand into his own ? 
 And, as his heart sprang o'er that bridge of veins, 
 Did he not call to mine to pass him on it — 
 Each to the other's bosom ! I have sworn 
 To love him — wed him — die with him — and yet 
 He never heard me — but he knows it well, 
 And, in his heart holds me to answer for it. 
 I'll try once more to find this anger out. 
 If it be jealousy — why — then, indeed, 
 He'll call me black, and I'll forgive it him ! 
 For then my errand's done, and I'll away 
 To play the cheat out that shall make him mine.) 
 (Turns to Angelo.) Fair signor, by your leave, I've heard 
 
 it said 
 That in the beauty of a human face 
 The God of Nature never writ a lie. 
 Angelo. 'Tis likely true ! 
 
 Isabella. That howsoe'er the features 
 Seem fair at first, a blemish on the soul 
 Has its betraying speck that warns you of it. 
 
 Angelo. It should be so, indeed ! 
 
 Isabella. Nay — here's a face 
 
 Will show at once if it be true or no. 
 At the first glance 'tis fair! 
 
 Angelo. Most heavenly fair ! 
 
 Isabella. Yet, in the lip, methinks, there lurks a 
 shadow — 
 Something — I know not what — but in it lies 
 The devil you spoke of ! 
 
 Angelo. Ay — but 'tis not there ! 
 
 Not in her lip ! Oh, no ! Look elsewhere for it, 
 'Tis passionately bright — but lip more pure 
 Ne'er passed unchallenged through the gate of heaven. 
 Believe me, 'tis not there '• 
 
 Isabella. How falls the light ? 
 
 I see a gleam not quite angelical 
 About the eye. Maybe the light falls wrong — 
 
 Angelo (drawing her to another position). 
 Stand here ! Dy'e see it now ? 
 
 Isabella. 'Tis just so here ! 
 
 Angelo (sweeps the air with his brush). 
 There's some curst cobweb hanging from the wall 
 That blurs your sight. Now, look again ! 
 
 Isabella. I see it 
 
 Just as before. 
 
 Angelo. What ! still ! You've turned an eyelash 
 Under the lid. Try how it feels with winking. 
 Is't clear ? 
 
 Isabella. 'Twas never clearer ! 
 
 Angelo. Then, old man ! 
 
 You'd best betake you to your prayers apace ! 
 For you've a failing sight, death's sure forerunner — 
 And can not pray long. Why, that eye's a star, 
 Sky-lit as Hesperus, and burns as clear. 
 If you e'er marked the zenith at high noon, 
 Or midnight, when the blue lifts up to God — 
 Her eye's of that far darkness ! 
 
 Isabella (smiling aside). Stay — 'tis gone ! 
 A blur was on my sight, which passing from it, 
 I see as you do. Yes — the eye is clear. 
 The forehead only, now I see so well, 
 Has in its arch a mark infallible 
 Of a false heart beneath it. 
 
 Angelo. Show it to me ! 
 
 Isabella. Between the eyebrows there ! 
 
 Angelo. I see a tablet 
 
 Whereon the Savior's finger might have writ 
 The new commandment. When I painted it 
 I plucked a just-blown lotus from the shade, 
 And shamed the white leaf till it seemed a spot — 
 The brow was so much fairer ! Go ! old man, 
 Thy sight fails fast. Go ! go ! 
 
 Isabella. The nostril's small — 
 
 Is't not ? 
 
 Angelo. No ! 
 
 Isabella. Then the cheek's awry so near it, 
 
 It makes it seem so ! 
 
 Angelo. Out ! thou cavilling fool ! 
 
 Thou'rt one of those whose own deformity 
 Makes all thou seest look monstrous. Go and pray 
 For a clear sight, and read thy missal with it. 
 Thou art a priest, and livest by the altar, 
 Yet dost thou recognise God's imprest seal, 
 Set on that glorious beauty ! 
 
 Isabella. (Aside — Oh, he loves me ! 
 
 Loves me as genius loves — ransacking earth 
 And ruffling the forbidden flowers of Heaven 
 To make celestial incense of his praise. 
 High-thoughted Angelo ! He loves we well ! 
 With what a gush of all my soul I thank him — 
 But he's to win yet, and the time is precious.) 
 (To Angelo.) Signor, I take my leave. 
 
 Angelo. Good day, old man ! 
 
 And, if thou com'st again, bring new eyes with thee, 
 Or thou wilt find scant welcome. 
 
 Isabella. You shall like 
 
 These same eyes well enough when next I come ! 
 
 [Exit. 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 875 
 
 Angelo. A crabbed monk ! (Turns the picture to the 
 wall again.) I'll hide this fatal picture 
 From sight once more, for till he made me look on't 
 I did not know my weakness. Once more, Zippa, 
 I'll dwell on thy dear face, and with my pencil 
 Make thee more fair than life, and try to love thee ! 
 
 (A knock.) 
 Come in ! 
 
 [Enter Zippa.] 
 Zippa. Good day, Signor Angelo ! 
 
 Angelo. "Why, Zippa ! is't thou ? is't thou, indeed ! 
 Zippa. Myself, dear Angelo ! 
 Angelo. Art well ? 
 Zippa. Ay ! 
 Angelo. Hast been well ! 
 Zippa. Ay ! 
 
 Angelo. Then why, for three long days, hast thou not 
 been near me ? 
 
 Zippa. Ask thyself, Signor Angelo ! 
 
 I have — a hundred times since I saw thee. 
 
 And there was no answer ? 
 
 None! 
 
 Then shouldst thou have asked the picture on 
 
 Nay — I understand thee not. 
 
 Did I not find thee feasting thy eyes upon it ? 
 
 True — thou didst ? 
 And art thou not enamored of it — wilt tell n 
 
 Angelo. 
 
 Zippa. 
 
 Angelo. 
 
 Zippa. 
 thy easel ! 
 
 Angelo. 
 
 Zippa. 
 
 Angelo. 
 
 Zippa. 
 truly ? 
 
 Angelo (smiling). 'Tis a fair face! 
 
 Zippa. Oh, unkind Angelo ! 
 
 Angelo. Look on't ! and, seeing its beauty, if thou dost 
 not forgive me, I will never touch pencil to it more. 
 
 Zippa. I'll neither look on't, nor forgive thee. But if 
 thou wilt love the picture of another better than mine, thou 
 shalt paint a new one ! 
 (As she rushes up to dash it from the easel, Angelo catches 
 
 her arm, and points to the picture. She looks at it, and, 
 
 seeing her own portrait, turns and falls on his bosom.) 
 
 My picture ! and I thought thee so false ! Dear, dear 
 Angelo ! I could be grieved to have wronged thee, if joy 
 would give me time. But thou'lt forgive me ? 
 
 Angelo. Willingly ! Willingly ! 
 
 Zippa. And thou lovest me indeed, indeed ! Nay, answer 
 not ! I will never doubt thee more ! Dear Angelo ! 
 
 Yet — (Suddenly turns from Angelo wilh a troubled air.) 
 
 Angelo. What ails thee now ? 
 (Zippa takes a rich veil from under her cloak, throws it 
 
 over her head, and looks on the ground in embarrassed 
 
 silence.) 
 Dost thou stand there for a picture of Silence ? 
 
 Zippa. Alas ! dear Angelo ! When I said I forgave 
 and loved thee, I forgot that I was to be married to-mor- 
 row ! 
 
 Angelo. Married ! to whom ? 
 
 Zippa. Tortesa, the usurer ! 
 
 Angelo. Tortesa, saidst thou ? 
 
 Zippa. Think not ill of me, dear Angelo, till I have 
 told thee all ! This rich usurer, as thou knowest, would for 
 ambition marry Isabella de Falcone. 
 
 Angelo. He would, I know. 
 
 Zippa. But for love, he would marry your poor Zippa. 
 
 Angelo. Know you that ? 
 
 Zippa. He told me so the day you angered me with the 
 praises of the court lady you were painting. What was 
 her name, Angelo? 
 
 Angelo (composedly). I — I'll tell thee presently ! Go on ! 
 Zippa. Well— jealous of this unknown lady, I vowed, 
 if it broke my heart, to wed Tortesa. He had told me 
 Isabella scorned him. I flew to her palace. She heard 
 me, pitied me, agreed to plot with me that I might wed the 
 usurer, and then told me in confidence that there was a 
 poor youth whom she loved and would fain marry. 
 Angelo (in breathless anxiety). Heard you his name ? 
 Zippa. No ! But as I was to wed the richer and she 
 the poorer, she took my poor veil, and gave me her rich 
 one. Now canst thou read the riddle ? 
 
 Angelo. (Aside — A " poor youth !" What if it is I ? 
 
 he " loves and will wed him !" Oh ! if it were I !) 
 Zippa. Nay, dear Angelo! b» not so angry ! I do not 
 love him ! Wny — thou know**! I do noi ' 
 
 Angelo. (Aside— It may be— nay— it must ! But I will 
 know ! If not, I may as well die of that as of this jealous 
 madness.) 
 
 (Prepares to go out.) 
 
 Zippa. Angelo ! where go you ? Forgive me, dear 
 Angelo ! I swear to thee I love him not ! 
 
 Angelo. I'll know who that poor youth is, or suspense 
 will kill me ! 
 
 (Goes out hastily, without a look at Zippa. She stands 
 silent and amazed for a moment.) 
 
 Zippa. Why cares he to know who that poor youth is ! 
 "Suspense will kill him ?" Stay ! a light breaks on me ! 
 If Isabella were the court lady whom he painted ! If it 
 were Angelo whom she loved ! He is a poor youth !— The 
 picture ! The picture will tell all ! 
 (Hurriedly turns round several pictures turned to the wall, 
 
 and- lust of all, Isabella's. Looks at it an instant, and 
 
 exclaims) — 
 
 Isabella ! 
 (She drops on her knees, overcome with grief, and the scene 
 closes.) 
 
 [A Lady's dressing-room in the Falcone Palace. Isabella 
 discovered wilh two vials.] 
 
 Isabella. Here is a draught will still the breath so 
 nearly, 
 The keenest-eyed will think the sleeper dead, — 
 And this kills quite. Lie ready, trusty friends, 
 Close by my bridal veil ! I thought to baffle 
 My ruffian bridegroom by an easier cheat; 
 But Zippa's dangerous, and if I fail 
 In mocking death, why death indeed be welcome ! 
 (Enter Zippa angrily.) 
 
 Zippa. Madam ! 
 
 Isabella. You come rudely ! 
 
 Zippa. If I offend you more, I still have cause — 
 Yet as the "friend" to whom you gave a husband, 
 (So kind you were !) I might come unannounced ! 
 
 Isabella. What is this anger ? 
 
 Zippa. I'm not angry, madam ! 
 
 Oh no ! I'm patient ! 
 
 Isabella. What's your errand, then ? 
 
 Zippa. To give you back your costly bridal veil, 
 And take my mean one. 
 
 Isabella. 'Twas your wish to change. 
 
 'Twas you that plotted we should wed together — 
 You in my place, and I in yours — was't not ? 
 
 Zippa. Oh, Heaven ! you're calm ! Had you no 
 plotting, too ? 
 You're noble born, and so your face is marble — 
 I'm poor, and if my heart aches, 'twill show through. 
 You've robbed me, madam ! 
 
 Isabella. 1 1 
 
 Z ippa . Of gold — of j e wels ! — 
 
 Gold that would stretch the fancy but to dream of, 
 And gems like stars ! 
 
 Isabella. You're mad ! 
 
 Zippa. His love was worth them ! 
 
 Oh, what had you to do with Angelo ? 
 
 Isabella. Nay — came you not to wed Tortesa freely ? 
 What should you do with Angelo ? 
 
 Zippa. You mock me ! 
 
 You are a woman though your brow's a rock, 
 And know what love is. In a ring of fire 
 The tortured scorpion stings himself, to die — 
 But love will turn upon itself, and grow 
 Of its own fang immortal ! 
 
 IsabeUa. Still, you left him 
 
 To wed another ? 
 
 Zippa. 'Tis for that he's mine ! 
 
 What makes a right in anything, but pain ? 
 The diver's a?ony beneath the sea 
 Makes the peril his— pain gets the miser's gold— 
 The noble's coronet won first in battle, 
 Is his by bleeding for't— and Angelo 
 Is ten times mine because I gave him up— 
 Crushing pit heart to do so! 
 
876 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 Isabella. Now you plead 
 
 Against yourself. Say it would kill me quite, 
 If you should wed him? Mine's the greater pain, 
 And so the fairer title ! 
 
 Zippa {falling on her knees). I implore you 
 Love him no more ! Upon my knees I do ! 
 He's not like you ! Look on your snow-white arms ! 
 They're formed to press a noble to your breast — 
 Not Angelo ! He's poor — and fit for mine ! 
 You would not lift a beggar to your lips ! — 
 You would not lean from your proud palace-stairs 
 To pluck away a heart from a poor girl 
 Who has no more on earth ! 
 
 Isabella. I will not answer ! 
 
 Zippa. Think what it is ! Love is to you like 
 music — 
 Pastime ! You think on't when the dance is o'er — 
 When there's no revel — when your hair's unbound, 
 And its bright jewels with the daylight pale — 
 You want a lover to press on the hours 
 That lag till night again ! But I — 
 
 Isabella. Stop there ! 
 
 I love him better than you've soul to dream of! 
 
 Zippa (rising). Tia false ! How can you ? He's 
 to you a lamp 
 That shines amid a thousand just as bright ! 
 What's one amid your crowd of worshippers ? 
 The glow-worm's bright — but oh ! 'tis wanton murder 
 To raise him to the giddy air you breathe, 
 And leave his mate in darkness ! 
 
 Isabella. Say the worm 
 
 Soar from the earth on his own wing — what then ? 
 
 Zippa. Fair reasons can not stay the heart from 
 breaking. 
 You've stolen my life, and you can give it back ! 
 Will you — for Heaven's sweet pity ? 
 
 Isabella. Leave my presence ! 
 
 (Jlside — I pity her — but on this fatal love 
 Hangs my life, too.) What right have such as you 
 To look with eyes of love on Angelo ? 
 
 Zippa. What right ? 
 
 Isabella. I say so. Where's the miracle 
 
 Has made you fit to climb into the sky — 
 A moth — and look with love upon a star ! 
 
 Zippa (mournfully). I'm lowly born, alas ! 
 
 Isabella. Your souPs low born ! 
 
 Forget your anger and come near me, Zippa, 
 For e'er I'm done you'll wonder ! Have you ever, 
 When Angelo was silent, marked his eye — 
 How, of a sudden, as 'twere touched with fire, 
 There glows unnatural light beneath the lid ? 
 
 Zippa. I have — I've thought it strange ! 
 
 Isabella. Have you walked with him 
 
 When he has turned his head, as if to list 
 To music in the air — but you heard none — 
 And presently a smile stole through his lips, 
 And some low words, inaudible to you, 
 Fell from him brokenly. 
 
 Zippa. Ay — many times ! 
 
 Isabella. Tell me once more ! Hast never heard him 
 speak 
 With voice unlike his own — so melancholy, 
 And yet so sweet a voice, that, were it only 
 The inarticulate moaning of a bird, 
 The very tone of it had made you weep ? 
 
 Zippa. 'Tis strangely true, indeed ! 
 
 Isabella. Oh, Heaven ! You say so — 
 
 Yet never dreamt it was a spirit of light 
 Familiar with you ! 
 
 Zippa. How ? 
 
 Isabella. Why, there are seraphs 
 
 Who walk this common world, and want, as we do — 
 Here, in our streets — all seraph, save in wings — 
 The look, the speech, the forehead like a god — 
 And he the brightest ! 
 
 Zippa (incredulously). Nay — I've known him long ! 
 
 Isabella. Why, listen ! There are worlds, thou 
 doubting fool ! 
 Farther to flee to than the stars in heaven, 
 Which Angelo can walk as we do this — 
 And does — while you look on him ! 
 
 Zippa. Angelo ! 
 
 Isabella. He's never at your side one constant minute 
 Without a thousand messengers from thence ! 
 (0 block ! to live with him, and never dream on't !) 
 He plucks the sun's rays open like a thread, 
 And knows what stains the rose and not the lily — 
 He never sees a flower but he can tell 
 Its errand on the earth — (they all have errands — 
 You know not that, oh dulness !) He sees shapes 
 Flushed with immortal beauty in the clouds — 
 (You've seen him mock a thousand on his canvass, 
 And never wondered !) Yet you talk of love ! 
 What love you ? 
 
 Zippa. Angelo — and not a dream ! 
 
 Take you the dream and give me Angelo ! 
 You may talk of him till my brain is giddy — 
 But oh, you can not praise him out of reach 
 Of my true heart. — He's here, as low as I ! — 
 Shall he not wed a woman, flesh and blood ? 
 
 Isabella. See here ! There was a small, earth-creep- 
 ing mole, 
 Born by the low nest of an unfledged lark. 
 They lived an April youth amid the grass — 
 The soft mole happy, and the lark no less, 
 And thought the bent sky leaned upon the flowers. 
 By early May the fledgling got his wings ; 
 And, eager for the light, one breezy dawn, 
 Sprang from his nest, and buoyantly away, 
 Fled forth to meet the morning. Newly born 
 Seemed the young lark, as in another world 
 Of light, and song, and creatures like himself, 
 He soared and dropped, and sang unto the sun, 
 And pitied everything that had not wings — 
 But most the mole, that wanted even eyes 
 To see the light he floated in ! 
 
 Zippa. Yet still 
 
 She watched his nest, and fed him when he came — 
 Would it were Angelo and I indeed ! 
 
 Isabella. Nay, mark ! The bird grew lonely in the 
 sky. 
 There was no echo at the height he flew ! 
 And when the mist lay heavy on his wings 
 His song broke, and his flights were brief and low — 
 And the dull mole, that should have sorrowed with him, 
 Joyed that he sang at last where she could hear ! 
 
 Zippa. Why, happy mole again ! 
 
 Isabella. Not long ! — for soon 
 
 He found a mate that loved him for his icings ! 
 One who with feebler flight, but eyes still on him, 
 Caught up his dropped song in the middle air, 
 And, with the echo, cheered him to the sun ! 
 
 Zippa. (Jside — I see ! I see ! His soul was never 
 mine ! 
 I was the blind mole of her hateful story ! 
 No, no ! he never loved me ! True, we ate, 
 And laughed, and danced together — but no love — 
 He never told his thought when he was sad ! 
 His folly and his idleness were mine — 
 No more ! The rest was locked up in his soul ! 
 I feel my heart grow black !) Fair madam, thank you ! 
 You've told me news ! (She shall not have him neither, 
 If there's a plot in hate to keep him from her ! 
 I must have room to think, and air to breathe — 
 I choke here !) Madam, the blind mole takes leave ! 
 
 Isabella. Farewell ! [Exit Zippa. 
 
 (Takes the vial from the table.) 
 
 And now, come forth, sweet comforter ! 
 I'll to my chamber with this drowsy poison, 
 And from my sleep I wake up Angelo's, 
 Or wake no more ! [Exit. 
 
 ACT IV. 
 
 [Ji sumptuous Drawing-room in the Falcone Palace. 
 Guests assembled for the bridal. Lords and ladies 
 promenading, and a band of musicians in a gallery ai 
 the side of the stage.] 
 
 1st Lord. Are we before the hour ? or does the bride- 
 
 groom 
 Affect this tardiness? 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 877 
 
 2d Lord. We're bid at twelve. 
 
 1*/ Lord. 'Tis now past one. At least we should have 
 music 
 To wile the time. (To the musicians.) Strike up, good 
 fellows ! 
 
 2d Lord. Why, 
 
 A man who's only drest on holydays 
 Makes a long toilet. Now, I'll warrant he 
 Has vexed his tailor since the break of day 
 Hoping to look a gentleman. D'ye know him? 
 
 1st Lord. I've never had occasion ! 
 
 2d Lord. Poor Falcone ! 
 
 He'd give the best blood in his veins, I think, 
 To say as much ! 
 
 1st Lord. How's this ! I see no stir 
 
 Amons; the instruments. Will they not play ? 
 
 2d Lord. Not they! I asked before you, and they're bid 
 To strike up when they hear Tortesa's horses 
 Prance thro' the gateway — not a note till then ! 
 (Music plays.) 
 
 1st Lord. He comes ! 
 
 (Enter Tortesa, dressed over-richly.) 
 
 Tortesa. Good day, my lords ! 
 
 15/ Lord. Good day ! 
 
 2d Lord. The sky 
 
 Smiles on you, signor ! 'Tis a happy omen 
 They say, to wed in sunshine. 
 
 Tortesa. Why, I think 
 
 The sun is not displeased that I should wed. 
 
 1st Lord. We're happy, sir, to have you one of us. 
 
 Tortesa. What have I been till now ! I was a man 
 Before I saw your faces ! Where's the change ? 
 Have I a tail since ? Am I grown a monkey ? 
 
 (Lords whisper together, and walk from him.) 
 Oh for a mint to coin the world again 
 And melt the mark of gentleman from clowns ! 
 It puts me out of patience ! Here's a fellow 
 That by much rubbing against better men, 
 Has, like a penny in a Jew's close pocket, 
 Stolen the color of a worthier coin, 
 And thinks he rings like sterling courtesy! 
 Yet look ! he can not phrase you a good morrow, 
 Or say he's sad, or glad, at anything, 
 But close beneath it, rank as verdigris, 
 Lies an insulting rudeness ! He was "happy" 
 That I should now be one of them. Now! Now ! 
 As if, till now, I'd been a dunghill grab, 
 And was but just turned butterfly ! 
 
 (A Lady advances.) 
 Lady. Fair sir, 
 
 I must take leave to say, were you my brother, 
 You've made the choice that would have pleased me best ! 
 Your bride's as good as fair. 
 
 Tortesa. I thank you, madam ! 
 
 To be your friend, she should be — good and fair ! 
 (The Lady turns, and walks up the stage.) 
 How like a drop of oil upon the sea 
 Falls the apt word of woman ! So ! her " brother !" 
 Why, there could be no contumely there ! 
 I misrht, for all I look, have been her brother, 
 Else her first thought had never coupled us. 
 I'll pluck some self-contentment out of that! 
 
 (Enter suddenly the count's secretary.) 
 How now ! 
 
 Secretary. I'm sent, sir, with unwelcome tidings. 
 Tortesa. Deliver them the quicker ! 
 Secretary. I shall be 
 
 Too sudden at the slowest. 
 
 Tortesa. Pshaw ! what is't ? 
 
 I'm not a girl ! Out with your news at once ! 
 Are my ships lost ? 
 
 Secretary (hesitatingly). The lady Isabella — 
 Tortesa. What ? run away ! 
 
 Secretary. Alas, irood sir ! she's dead ! 
 
 Tortesa. Bah ! just as dead as I ! Why, thou dull 
 blockhead ! 
 Can not a lady faint, but there must be 
 A trumpeter like thee to make a tale on't ? 
 
 Secretary. Pardon me, signor, but — 
 Tortesa. Who sent you hither 1 
 
 Secretary. My lord the count. 
 
 Tortesa (turning quickly aside). He put it in the bond, 
 That if by any humor of my own, 
 Or accident that sprang not from himself, 
 Or from his daughter's will, the match were marred, 
 His tenure stood intact. If she were dead — 
 I don't believe she is — but if she were, 
 By one of those strange chances that do happen 
 If she were dead, I say, the silly fish 
 That swims with safety among hungry sharks 
 To run upon the pin-hook of a boy, 
 Might teach me wisdom ! 
 (The secretary comes forward, narrating eagerly to the 
 company.) 
 
 Now, what says this jackdaw ? 
 Secretary. She had refused to let her bridesmaids in— 
 Lady. And died alone ? 
 
 Secretary. A trusty serving maid 
 
 Was with her, and none else. She dropped away, 
 The girl said, in a kind of weary sleep. 
 1st Lord. Was no one told of it? 
 Secretary. The girl watched by her, 
 
 And thought she slept still ; till, the music sounding, 
 She shook her by the sleeve, but got no answer; 
 And so the truth broke on her! 
 
 Tortesa. (Aside— Oh indeed ! 
 
 The plot is something shallow !) 
 
 2d Lord. Might we go 
 
 And see her as she lies ! 
 
 Secretary. The holy father 
 
 Who should have married her, has checked all comers, 
 And staying for no shroud but bridal dress, 
 He bears her presently to lie in state 
 In the Falcone chapel. 
 
 Tortesa. (Aside — Worse and worse — 
 
 They take me for a fool !) 
 
 1st Lord. But why such haste ? 
 
 Secretary. I know not. 
 
 JU. Let us to the chapel ! 
 
 Tortesa. (Drawing his sword, and stepping beliveen them 
 and the door.) 
 
 Hold! 
 Let no one try to pass ! 
 
 1*/ Lord. What mean you, sir ! 
 
 Tortesa. To keep you here till you have got your 
 story 
 Pat to the tongue — the truth on't and no more ! 
 
 Lady. Have you a doubt the bride is dead, good 
 
 signor ? 
 Tortesa. A palace, see you, has a tricky air! 
 When I am told a tradesman's daughter's dead, 
 I know the coffin holds an honest corse, 
 Sped in sad earnest, to eternity. 
 But were I stranger in the streets to-day, 
 And heard that an ambitious usurer, 
 With lands and money having bought a lady 
 High-born and fair, she died before the bridal, 
 I would lay odds with him that told me of it 
 She'd rise again— before the resurrection. 
 So stand back all ! If I'm to fill to-day 
 The pricking ears of Florence with a lie, 
 The bridal guests shall tell the tale so truly, 
 And mournfully, from eyesight of the corse, 
 That even the shrewdest listener shall believe, 
 And I myself have no misgiving of it. 
 Look ! where they come ! 
 (Door opens to funereal music, and the body of Isabella is 
 borne in, preceded by a monk, and followed by Falcone and 
 mourners. Tortesa confronts the Monk.) 
 
 What's this you bear away ? 
 Monk. Follow the funeral, but stay it not. 
 Tortesa. If thereon lie the lady Isabella, 
 I ask to see her face before she pass ! 
 
 Monk. Stand from the way, my son, it can not be ! 
 Tortesa. What right have you to take me for a stone ? 
 See what you do ! I stand a bridegroom here. 
 A moment since the joyous music playing 
 Which promised me a fair and blushing bride. 
 
878 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 The flowers are fragrant, and the guests made welcome; 
 
 And while my heart beats at the opening door, 
 
 And eagerly I look to see her come, — 
 
 There enters in her stead a covered corse ! 
 
 And when I ask to look upon her face — 
 
 One look before my bride is gone for ever, — 
 
 You find it in your hearts to say me nay ! — 
 
 Shame ! Shame ! 
 
 Falcone (fiercely). Lead on ! 
 
 Tortesa. My lord, by covenant — 
 
 By contract writ and sealed — by value rendered — 
 By her own promise — nay, by all, save taking, 
 This body's mine ! I'll have it set down here 
 And wait my pleasure ! See it done, my lord, 
 Or I will, for you ! 
 
 Monk (to the bearers). Set the body down ! 
 Tortesa (takes the veil from the face). 
 Come hither all ! Nay, father, look not black ! 
 If o'er the azure temper of this blade 
 There come no mist, when laid upon her lips, 
 I'll do a penance for irreverence, 
 And fill your sack with penitential gold ! 
 Look well ! 
 (Puts his sword blade to Isabella's lips, and after watching 
 it with intense interest a moment, drops on his knees beside 
 the bier.) 
 
 She's dead indeed ! Lead on ! 
 
 [The procession starts again to funereal music, and Tortesa 
 
 follows last.) 
 
 {A Street in Florence. The funereal music dxjing away 
 in the distance. Enter Zippa, straining her eyes to look 
 after it.] 
 
 Zippa. 'Tis Angelo that follows close behind, 
 Laying his forehead almost on her bier! 
 His heart goes with her to the grave ! Oh Heaven! 
 Will not Tortesa pluck out of his hand 
 The tassel of that pall ? 
 
 (She hears a footstep.) 
 
 Stay, stay, he's here ! 
 (Enter Tortesa, musing. Zippa stands aside.) 
 
 Tortesa. I've learned to-day a lord may be a Jew, 
 I've learned to-day that grief may kill a lady; 
 Which touches me the most I can not say, 
 For I could fight Falcone for my loss, 
 Or weep, with all my soul, for Isabella. 
 
 (Zippa touches him on the shoulder.) 
 
 Zippa. How is't the signor follows not his bride ? 
 
 Tortesa. I did — but with their melancholy step 
 I fell to musing, and so dropped behind — 
 But here's a sight I have not seen to-day ! 
 (Takes her hand smilingly.) 
 
 Zippa. What's that ? 
 
 Tortesa. A friendly face, my honest Zippa ! 
 
 Art well ? What errand brings thee forth ? 
 
 Zippa. None, signor ! 
 
 But passing by the funeral, I stopped, 
 Wondering to see the bridegroom lag behind, 
 And give his sacred station next the corse 
 To an obtrusive stranger. 
 
 Tortesa. Which is he ? 
 
 Zippa (points after Angelo). Look there ! 
 
 Tortesa. His face is buried in his cloak. 
 Who is't ? 
 
 Zippa. Not know him ? Had I half the cause 
 That you have, to see through that mumming cloak 
 The shadow of it would speak out his name ! 
 
 Tortesa. What mean you ? 
 
 Zippa. Angelo ! What right has he 
 
 To weep in public at her funeral ? 
 
 Tortesa. The painter ? 
 
 Zippa. Ay — the peasant Angelo ! 
 
 Was't not enough to dare to love her living, 
 But he must fling the insult of his tears 
 Betwixt her corse and you ? Are you not moved ? 
 Will you not go and pluck him from your place ? 
 
 Tortesa. No, Zippa ! for my spirits are more apt 
 To grief than anger. I've in this half hour 
 Remembered much I should have thought on sooner, — 
 For, had I known her heart was capable 
 Of breaking for the love of one so low, 
 I would have done as much to make her his 
 As I have done, in hate, to make her mine. 
 She loved him, Zippa ! (Walks back in thought.) 
 
 Zippa, (Aside — Oh to find a way 
 
 To pluck that fatal beauty from his eyes ! 
 'Tis twilight, and the lamp is lit above her, 
 And Angelo will watch the night out there, 
 Gazing with passionate worship on her face. 
 But no ! he shall not !) 
 
 T'ortesa (advancing). Come ! what busy thought 
 Vexes your brain now ? 
 
 Zippa. Were your pride as quick 
 
 As other men's to see an insult, signor ! 
 I had been spared the telling of my thought. 
 
 Tortesa. You put it sharply ! 
 
 Zippa. Listen ! you are willing 
 
 That there should follow, in your place of mourner, 
 A youth, who, by the passion of his grief, 
 Shows to the world he's more bereaved than you ! 
 
 Tortesa. Humph ! well ! 
 
 Zippa. Still follows he without rebuke; 
 
 And in the chapel where she lies to-night, 
 Her features bared to the funereal lamp, 
 He'll, like a mourning bridegroom, keep his vigil, 
 As if all Florence knew she was his own. 
 
 Tortesa. Nay, nay ! he may keep vigil if he will ! 
 The door is never locked upon the dead 
 Till bell and mass consign them to the tomb ; 
 And custom gives the privilege to all 
 To enter in and pray — and so may he. 
 
 Zippa. Then learn a secret which I fain had spared 
 My lips the telling. Question me not how, 
 But I have chanced to learn, that Angelo, 
 To-night, will steal the body from its bier ! 
 
 Tortesa. To-night ! What ! Angelo ! Nay, nay, good 
 Zippa ! 
 If he's enamored of the corse, 'tis there — 
 And he may watch it till its shape decay, 
 And holy church will call it piety. 
 But he who steals from consecrated ground, 
 Dies, by the law of Florence. There's no end 
 To answer in't. 
 
 Zippa. You know not, Angelo ! 
 
 You think not with what wild, delirious passion 
 A painter thirsts to tear the veil from beauty. 
 He painted Isabella as a maid, 
 Coy as a lily turning from the sun. 
 Now she is dead, and, like a star that flew 
 Flashing and hiding thro' some fleecy rack, 
 But suddenly sits still in cloudless heavens, 
 She slumbers fearless in his steadfast gaze, 
 Peerless and unforbidding. O, to him 
 She is no more your bride ! A statue fairer 
 Than ever rose enchanted from the stone, 
 Lies in that dim-lit chapel, clad like life. 
 Are you too slow to take my meaning yet ? 
 He can not loose the silken boddice there! 
 He can not, there, upon the marble breast 
 Shower the dark locks from the golden comb ! 
 
 Tortesa. Hold ! 
 
 Zippa. Are you moved ? Has he no end to compasj 
 In stealing her away from holy ground ? 
 Will you not lock your bride up from his touch ? 
 
 Tortesa. No more ! no more ! I thought not of all this ! 
 Perchance it is not true. But twilight falls, 
 And I will home to doff this bridal gear, 
 And, after, set a guard upon the corse. 
 We'll walk together. Come ! 
 
 Zippa. (Aside — He shall not see her !) 
 
 {Exeunt 
 
 [A Street in front of the Falcone Palace. Night. Enter 
 Isabella in her white bridal dress. She falters to her 
 father's door, and drops exhausted.'] 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 »79 
 
 Isabella. My brain swims round! I'll rest a little 
 here ! 
 The night's cold, chilly cold. Would I could reach 
 The house of Angelo! Alas! I thought 
 He would have kept one night of vigil near me, 
 Thinking me dead. Bear up, good heart ! Alas ! 
 I faint ! Where am I / (Looks around.) 
 
 'Tis my father's door. 
 My undirected feet have brought me home — 
 And I must in, or die ! (foiocks with a painful effort.) 
 So ends my dream ! 
 Falcone (from above). 
 Who's that would enter to a mourning house ? 
 Isabella. Your daughter ! 
 
 Falcone. Ha ! what voice is that I hear ? 
 
 Isabella. Poor Isabella's. 
 
 Falcone. Art thou come to tell me, 
 
 That with unnatural heart I killed my daughter? 
 Just Heaven ! thy retribution follows fast ! 
 But oh, if holy and unnumbered masses 
 Can give thee rest, perturbed and restless spirit ! 
 Haunt thou a weeping penitent no more ! 
 Depart ! I'll in, and pass the night in prayer ! 
 So shalt thou rest ! Depart ! 
 (He closes the window, and Isabella drops with her forehead 
 to the marble stair.) 
 (Enter Tomaso, with a bottle in his hand.) 
 Tomaso. It's like the day after the deluge. Few 
 stirring and nobody dry. I've been since twilight looking 
 for somebody that would drink. Not a beggar athirst in 
 all Florence ! I thought that, with a bottle' in my hand, I 
 should be scented like a wild hoar. I expected drunkards 
 would have come up out of the ground— like worms in a 
 shower. When was I ever so difficult to find by a moist 
 friend ? Two hundred ducats in good wine and no com- 
 panion ! I'll look me up a dry dog. I'll teach him to tip- 
 ple, and give up the fellowship of mankind. 
 Isabella (faintly). Signor ! 
 Toiwiso. Hey! What! 
 Isabella. Help, signor ! 
 
 Tomaso. A woman! Ehem ! (Approaching her.) Would 
 you take somethine to drink by any chance I (Offers her 
 the bottle.) No ? Perhaps you don't like to drink out of 
 the bottle. 
 Isabella. I perish of cold ! 
 
 Tomaso. Stay ! Here's a cloak ! My master's out for 
 the night, and you shall home with me. Come ! Perhaps 
 when you get warmer, you'd like to drink a little. The 
 wine's good ! (Assists her in rising.) By St. Genevieve, 
 a soft hand ! Come ! I'll bring you where there's fire and 
 a clean flagon. 
 
 Isibella. To any shelter, sisrnor ! 
 
 Tomaso. Shelter ! nay, a good house, and two hundred 
 ducats in ripe wine. Steady now ! (This shall pass lor a 
 good action ! If my master smell a rat, I'll face him out 
 the woman's honest !) This way, now! Softly ! That's 
 well stepped ! Come ! 
 
 (Goes out, assisting her to walk.) 
 
 ACT V. 
 
 lAngelo's Studio. A full-length picture, in a large frame, 
 stands on the floor against an easel, placed nearly in the 
 centre of the room. Two curtains, so arranged as to cover 
 the picture u-hen dravm together. Angelo stands in an 
 imploring attitude near the picture, his pencil and palette 
 in his hands, appealing to Isabella, who is partly turned 
 from him in an attitude of refusal. The back wall of the 
 room such as to form a natural ground for a picture.] 
 
 Angelo. Hear me, sweet ! 
 
 Isabella. No, we'll keep a holydav, 
 
 And waste the hours in love and idleness. 
 You shall not paint to-day, dear Angelo ! 
 
 Anzelo. But listen ! 
 
 Isabella. Nay, I'm jealous of my picture ; 
 
 For all you give to that is stolen from me. 
 I like not half a look that turns away 
 Without an answer from the eves it met ! 
 
 I care not you should see my lips' bright color 
 Yet wait not for the breath that floats between ! 
 Angelo. Wilt listen ? 
 
 Isabella. Listen ? Yes ! a thousand years! 
 
 But there's a pencil in those restless fingers, 
 Which you've a trick of touching to your lips— 
 And while you talk, my hand would do as well ! 
 And if it's the same tale you told before 
 Of certain vigils you forgot to keep, 
 Look deep into my eyes^till it is done — 
 For, like the children's Lady-in-the-well, 
 I only hark because you're looking in ! 
 Will you talk thus to me ? 
 
 Angelo. Come night I will ! 
 
 But close upon thy voice, sweet Isabella ! 
 A boding whisper sinks into mine ear 
 Which tells of sudden parting ! If 'tis false, — 
 We shall have still a lifetime for our love, 
 But if 'tis true, oh think that, in my picture, 
 Will lie the footprint of an angel gone! 
 Let me but make it clearer ! 
 
 Isabella. Now. by Heaven ! 
 
 I think thou lov'st the picture, and not me ! 
 So different am I, that, did I think 
 To lose thee presently, by death or parting, 
 For thy least word, or look, or slightest motion — 
 Nay, for so little breath as makes a sigh 
 I would not take, to have it pass untreasured. 
 The empire of a star ! 
 (While she was uttering this reproach. Angelo has lookeu 
 at her with delight, and touched his portrait with a few 
 rapid strokes.) 
 Angelo. My picture's done ! 
 
 (Throws his pencil to the ground.) 
 Break, oh enchanted pencil ! thou wilt never 
 On earth, again, do miracle so fair! 
 Oh Isabella ! as the dusky ore 
 Waits for the lightning's flash to turn to gold — 
 As the dull vapor waits for Hesperus, 
 Then falls in dew-drops, and reflects a star — 
 So waited I that fire upon thy lips, 
 To make my masterpiece complete in beauty ! 
 
 Isabella. This is ambition when I looked for love, 
 The fancy flattering where the heart should murmur. 
 I think you have no heart ! 
 
 Angelo. Your feet are on it ! 
 
 The heart is ever lowly with the famines, 
 Tho' the proud mind sits level with a king ! 
 I gave you long ago both heart and soul, 
 But only one has dared to speak to you ! 
 Yet, if astonishment will cure the dumb, 
 Give it a kiss — 
 Isabella (smiling). Lo ! Where it speaks at last ! 
 (A loud knock is heard.) 
 Hark, Angelo ! 
 
 (He flies to the window, and looks out.) 
 Angelo. Tortesa with a guard ! 
 
 Alas ! that warning voice ! They've traced thee hither ! 
 Lost ! Lost ! 
 Isabella. (Hastily drawing the curtain, and disappearing 
 behind it.) 
 No ! no ! defend thy picture only, 
 And all is well yet ! 
 
 Angelo. Thee and it with life ! 
 
 (Draws his sword, and stands before the curtain in an atti- 
 tude of defiance. Enter Tortesa with officers and guard.) 
 Whal is your errand ? 
 
 Tortesa. I'm afraid, a sad one ! 
 
 For, by your drawn sword and defying air, 
 Your conscious thought foretells it. 
 
 Angelo. Why, — a blow — 
 
 (You took one, si?nor, when you last were here — 
 If you've forgot it, well!) — but, commonly, 
 The giver of a blow needs have his sword 
 Promptly in hand. You'll pardon me ! 
 
 Tortesa. I do ! 
 
 For, if my fears are just, good signor painter ! 
 You've not a life to spare upon a quarrel ! 
 In brief, the corse of a most noble lady 
 Was stolen last night from holy sanctuary. 
 
880 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 I have a warrant here to search your house ; 
 And, should the body not be found therein, 
 I'm bid to see the picture of the lady — 
 Whereon (pray, mark me !) if I find a trace 
 Of charms fresh copied, more than may beseem 
 The modest beauty of a living maid, 
 I may arrest you on such evidence 
 For instant trial ! 
 
 Angelo. Search my house and welcome ! 
 
 But, for my picture, though a moment's glance 
 Upon its pure and hallowed loveliness 
 Would give the lie to your foul thought of me, 
 It is the unseen virgin of my brain ! 
 And as th' inviolate person of a maid 
 Is sacred ev'n in presence of the law, 
 My picture is my own — to bare or cover ! 
 Look on it at your peril ! 
 
 Tortesa (to the guard). Take his sword. 
 (The guards attack and disarm him.) 
 
 Angelo. Coward and villain ! 
 (Tortesa parts the curtains with his sword, and Angelo 
 starts amazed to see Isabella, with her hands crossed on 
 her breast, and her eyes fixed on the ground, standing 
 motionless in the frame which had contained his picture. 
 The tableau deceives Tortesa, who steps back to contem- 
 plate what he supposes to be the portrait of his bride.) 
 
 Tortesa. Admirable work ! 
 
 'Tis Isabella's self! Why, this is wondrous ! 
 The brow, the lip, the countenance — how true ! 
 I would have sworn that gloss upon the hair, 
 That shadow from the lash, were nature's own — 
 Impossible to copy ! (Looks at it a moment in silence.) 
 
 Yet methinks 
 The color on the cheek is something faint! 
 
 Angelo (hurriedly). Step this way farther ! 
 
 Tortesa (changing his position). Ay — 'tis better here ! 
 The hand is not as white as Isabella's — 
 But painted to the life ! If there's a feature 
 That I would touch again, the lip, to me, 
 Seems wanting in a certain scornfulness 
 Native to her ! It scarcely marred her beauty. 
 Perhaps 'tis well slurred over in a picture ! 
 Yet stay ! I see it, now I look again ! 
 How excellently well ! 
 
 (Guards return from searching the house.) 
 
 • What ! found you nothing ? 
 
 Soldier (holding up Isabella's veil). 
 This bridal veil — no more. 
 
 Angelo (despairingly). Oh ! luckless star! 
 
 Tortesa. Signor ! you'll trust me when I say I'm sorry 
 With all my soul ! This veil, I know it well — 
 Was o'er the face of that unhappy lady 
 When laid in sanctuary. You are silent ! 
 Perhaps you scorn to satisfy me here ! 
 I trust you can — in your extremity ! 
 But I must bring you to the duke ! Lead on ! 
 
 Angelo. An instant ! 
 
 Tortesa (courteously). At your pleasure ! 
 
 Angelo (to Isabella, as he passes close to her). 
 
 I conjure you 
 By all our love, stir not ! 
 
 Isabella (still motionless) . Farewell ! 
 (Tortesa motions for Angelo to precede him with the guard, 
 looks once more at the picture, and with a gesture expres- 
 sive of admiration, follows. As the door closes, Isabella 
 steps from the frame.) 
 
 Isabella. I'll follow 
 
 Close on thy steps, beloved Angelo ! 
 And find a way to bring thee home again ! 
 My heart is light, and hope speaks cheerily ! 
 And lo ! bright augury ! — a friar's hood 
 For my disguise ! Was ever omen fairer ! 
 Thanks ! my propitious star ! 
 
 (Envelops herself in the hood, and goes out hastily.) 
 
 [A Street. Enter Tomaso, with his hat crushed and pulled 
 sulkily over his eyes, his clothes dirty on one side, and 
 other marks of having slept in the street. Enter Zippa 
 from the other side, meeting him.~\ 
 
 Zippa. Tomaso ! Is't thou ? Where's Angelo ? 
 
 Tomaso. It is I, and I don't know ! 
 
 Zippa. Did he come home last night ? 
 
 Tomaso. " Did he come home !" Look there ! (Pulls 
 off his hat and shows his dirty side.) 
 
 Zippa. Then thou hast slept in the street ! 
 
 Tomaso. Ay ! 
 
 Zippa. And what has that to do with the coming home 
 of Angelo ? 
 
 Tomaso. What had thy father to do with thy having 
 such a nose as his ! 
 
 (Zippa holds up a ducat to him.) 
 What ! gave thy mother a ducat ? — cheap as dirt ! 
 
 Zippa. Blockhead, no ! I'll give thee the ducat if thou 
 wilt tell me, straight on, what thou know'st of Angelo ! 
 
 Tomaso. I will — and thou shalt see how charity is 
 rewarded. 
 
 Zippa. Begin ! — begin ! 
 
 Tomaso. Last night, having prayed later than usual at 
 vespers 
 
 Zippa. Ehem ! 
 
 Tomaso. I was coming home in a pious frame of mind — 
 
 Zippa. And a bottle in thy pocket. 
 
 Tomaso. No ! — in my hand. What should I stumble 
 over 
 
 Zippa. But a stone. 
 
 Tomaso. A woman ! 
 
 Zippa. Fie! what's this you're going to tell me? 
 
 Tomaso. She was dying with cold. Full of Christian 
 charity — 
 
 Zippa. And new wine. 
 
 Tomaso. Old wine, Zippa ! The wine was old ! 
 
 Zippa. Well ! 
 
 Tomaso. I took her home. 
 
 Zippa. Shame ! — at thy years ? 
 
 Tomaso. And Angelo being out for the night 
 
 Zippa. There ! there ! you may skip the particulars. 
 
 Tomaso. I say my own bed being in the garret 
 
 Zippa. Well, well ! 
 
 Tomaso. I put her into Angelo's. 
 
 Zippa. Oh, unspeakable impudence! Didst thou do that? 
 
 Tomaso. I had just left her to make a wine posset 
 (for she was well nigh dead), when in popped my master, 
 — finds her there — asks no questions, — kicks me into the 
 street, and locks the door ! There's the reward of virtue ! 
 
 Zippa. Did he not turn out the woman, too ? 
 
 Tomaso. Not as I remember. 
 
 Zippa. Oh worse and worse ! And thou hast not seen 
 him since ? 
 
 Tomaso. I found me a soft stone, said my prayers, and 
 went to sleep. 
 
 Zippa. And hast thou not seen him to-day? 
 
 Tomaso. Partly, I have ! 
 
 Zippa. Where ? Tell me quickly ! 
 
 Tomaso. Give me the ducat. 
 
 Zippa (gives it to him). Quick ! say on ! 
 
 Tomaso. I have a loose recollection, that, lying on that 
 stone Angelo called me by name. Looking up, I saw two 
 Angelos, and two Tortesas, and soldiers with two spears 
 each. (He figures in the air with his finger as if trying to 
 remember.) 
 
 Zippa. (Aside— Ha ! he is apprehended for the murder 
 of Isabella! Say that my evidence might save his life! 
 Not unless he love me !) What way went he, Tomaso ? 
 (Tomaso points.) 
 
 This way ? (Then has he gone to be tried before the 
 duke.) Come with me, Tomaso ! Come. 
 
 Tomaso. Where ? 
 
 Zippa. To the duke's palace ! Come ! (Takes his arm.) 
 
 Tomaso. To the duke's palace ? There'll be kicking of 
 heels in the anti-chamber !— Dry work ! I'll spend thy ducat 
 as we go along. Shall it be old wine, or new ? [Exeunt. 
 
 {Hall of judgment in the ducal palace. The duke upon a 
 raised throne on the left. Falcone near his chair, and 
 Angelo on the opposite side of the stage with a guard. 
 Isabella behind the guard, disguised as a monk. Tortesa 
 stands near the centre of the stage, and Zippa and Tomaso 
 in the left comer, listening eagerly. Counsellors at a table, 
 and crowd of spectators at the sides and rear.] 
 
TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 Duke. Are there more witnesses ? 
 Counsellor. No more, my liege ! 
 
 Duke. None for the prisoner ? 
 
 Counsellor. He makes no defence 
 
 Beyond a firm denial. 
 
 Falcone. Is there wanting 
 
 Another proof, my liege, that he is guilty? 
 
 Duke. I fear he stands in deadly peril, count. 
 (To the counsellor.) Sum up the evidence. 
 (He reads.) 
 Counsellor. 'Tis proved, my liege, 
 
 That for no honest or sufficient end, 
 The pris'ner practised on your noble grace 
 And Count Falcone a contrived deceit, 
 Whereby he gained admittance to the lady. 
 (Tomaso exhibits signs of alarm.) 
 Duke. Most true ! 
 
 Counsellor. That, till the eve before her death, 
 
 He had continual access to the palace ; 
 And, having grown enamored of the bride, 
 Essayed by plots that never were matured, 
 And quarrels often forced on her betrothed, 
 To stay the bridal. That, against the will 
 Of her most noble father and the duke, 
 The bride was resolute to keep her troth ; 
 And so, preparing for the ceremony, 
 Upon her bridal morning was found dead. 
 'Tis proved again — that, while she lay in state, 
 The guard, at several periods of the night, 
 Did force the pris'ner from the chapel door ; 
 And when the corse was stolen from sanctuary 
 All search was vain, till, in the pris'ner's hands 
 Was found the veil that shrouded her. To these 
 And lighter proofs of sacrilege and murder 
 
 The prisoner has opposed his firm denial 
 
 No more ! 
 
 Duke. Does no one speak in his behalf? 
 Tortesa. My liege ! so far as turns the evidence 
 Upon the prisoner's quarrels with myself, 
 I'm free to say that they had such occasion 
 As any day may rise 'twixt men of honor. 
 As one of those aggrieved by his offences, 
 You'll wonder I'm a suiter for his pardon — 
 But so I am ! Besides that there is room 
 To hope him innocent, your grace's realm 
 Holds not so wondrous and so rare a painter ! 
 If he has killed the lady Isabella, 
 'Tis some amends that in his glorious picture 
 She's made immortal ! If he stole her corse, 
 He can return, for that disfigured dust, 
 An Isabella fresh in changeless beauty ! 
 Were it not well to pardon him, my lord ? 
 Isabella. (Aside.— Oh, brave Tortesa !) 
 Duke. You have pleaded kindly 
 
 And eloquently, signor ! but the law 
 Can recognise no gift as plea for pardon. 
 For his rare picture he will have his fame ; 
 But if the Isabella he has painted 
 Find not a voice to tell his innocence, 
 He dies at sunset ! 
 
 Isabella (despairingly). He is dead to me ! 
 Yet he shall live ! 
 [She drops the cowl from her shoulders, and with her arms 
 folded, walks slovrty to the feet of the duke.) 
 Falcone (rushing forward). My daughter! 
 Angelo (with a gesture of agony). Lost ! 
 
 Tortesa. Mive ! 
 
 Zippa (energetically). Tortesa '11 have her ! 
 (Isabella retires to the back of the stage with her father, and 
 kneels to him, imploring in dumb show ; the duke and 
 others watching.) . 
 
 Tortesa. (Aside— So ! all's right again ? 
 
 Now for my lands, or Isabella ? Stay ! 
 
 'Tis a brave girl, by Heaven ! 
 
 (Reflects a moment.) 
 
 A sleeping draught, 
 And so to Angelo ! Her love for me 
 A counterfeit to take suspicion off! 
 It was well done ! I feel my heart warm to her ! 
 
 (Reflects again.) 
 Where could he hide her from our search to-day? 
 56 
 
 (Looks round at Isabella.) 
 No ? Yet the dress is like ! It was the picture ! 
 Herself — and not a picture ! Now, by Heaven, 
 A girl like that should be the wife of Caesar ! 
 
 (Presses his hand upon his heart.) 
 I've a new feeling here ! 
 (Falcone comes forward, followed by Isabella with gestures 
 of supplication.) 
 Falcone. I will not hear you ! 
 
 My liege, I pray you keep the prisoner 
 In durance till my daughters fairly wed. 
 He has contrived against our peace and honor, 
 And howsoe'er this marvel be made clear, 
 She stands betrothed, if he is in the mind, 
 To the brave signor, yonder ! 
 
 Duke. This were well — 
 
 What says Tortesa ? 
 
 Tortesa. If my liege permit, 
 
 I will address my answer to this lady. 
 (Turns to Isabella.) 
 For reasons which I need not give you now, 
 Fair Isabella ! I became your suiter. 
 My motives were unworthy you and me — 
 Yet I was true — I never said I loved you ! 
 Your father sold you me for lands and money — 
 (Pardon me, duke ! And you, fair Isabella ! 
 You will — ere I am done !) I pushed my suit ! 
 The bridal day came on, and closed in mourning; 
 For the fair bride it dawned upon was dead. 
 I had my shame and losses to remember — 
 But in my heart sat sorrow uppermost, 
 And pity — for I thought your heart was broken. 
 (Isabella begins to discover interest in his story, and Angelo 
 watches her with jealous eagerness.) 
 I see you here again ! You are my bride ! 
 Your father holds me to my bargain for you ! 
 The lights are burning on the nuptial altar — 
 The bridal chamber and the feast, all ready ! 
 What stays the marriage now ? — my new-born love ! 
 That nuptial feast were fruit from Paradise — 
 I can not touch it till you bid me welcome ! 
 
 That nuptial chamber were the lap of Heaven 
 
 I can not enter till you call me in ! 
 
 (Takes a ring from his bosom.) 
 Here is the golden ring you should have worn. 
 Tell me to give it to my rival there — 
 I'll break my heart to do so ! (Holds it toward Angelo.) 
 Isabella (looking at her father). Would I might ! 
 Tortesa. You shall, if 't please you ! 
 Falcone. I command thee, never ! 
 
 My liege, permit me to take home my daughter ! 
 And, signor, you — if you would keep your troth — 
 To-morrow come, and end this halting bridal ! 
 Home ! Isabella ! (Takes his daughter's hand.) 
 
 Tortesa (taking it from him). Stay ! she is not yours ! 
 My gracious liege, there is a law in Florence, 
 That if a father^ for no guilt or shame, 
 Disown, and shut his door upon his daughter, 
 She is the child of him who succors her ; 
 Who, by the shelter of a single night, 
 Becomes endowed with the authority 
 Lost by the other. Is't not so ? 
 
 Duke. So runs 
 
 The law of Florence, and I see your drift — 
 For, look, my lord (to Falcone), if that dread apparition 
 You saw last night, was this your living daughter, 
 You stand within the peril of that law. 
 Falcone. My liege ! 
 Isabella (looking admiringly at Tortesa). 
 
 Oh noble signor ! 
 Tortesa (to Isabella). Was't well done ? 
 
 Shall I give Angelo the ring ? 
 (As she is about to take it from him. Tomaso steps in behind, 
 and pulls Isabella by the sleeve.) 
 
 Tomaso. f^'^Tl ■> 
 
 What wilt thou do for dowry ? I'm thy father ? 
 But — save some flasks of wine- 
 
 Isabella (sorrowfully). 
 For thy sake, Angelo ! 
 
 Would I were richer 
 
882 
 
 TORTESA, THE USURER. 
 
 (Tortesa looks at her an instant, and then steps to the table 
 and writes.) 
 Jlngelo (coming forward with an effort). 
 
 Look, Isabella ! 
 I stand between thee and a life of sunshine. 
 Thou wert both rich and honored, but for me ! 
 That thou couldst wed me, beggar as I am, 
 Is bliss to think on — but see how I rob thee ! 
 I have a loving heart — but am a beggar ! 
 There is a loving heart — 
 
 (Points to Tortesa.) 
 
 With wealth and honor ! 
 (Tortesa steps between them, and hands a paper to Jlngelo.) 
 Tortesa (to Isabella). Say thou wilt wed the poorer ? 
 Isabella (offers her hand to Jlngelo). So I will ! 
 
 Tortesa. Then am I blest, for he's as rich as I — 
 Yet, in his genius, has one jewel more ! 
 Isabella. What say'st thou ? 
 
 (Jlngelo reads earnestly.) 
 Tortesa. In a mortal quarrel, lady ! 
 
 'Tis thought ill-luck to have the better sword ; 
 For the good angels, who look sorrowing on, 
 In heavenly pity take the weaker side! 
 Isabella. What is it, Angelo ? 
 Jlngelo. A deed to me 
 
 Of the Falcone palaces and lands, 
 And all the moneys forfeit by your father ! — 
 By Heaven, I'll not be mocked ! 
 
 Tortesa. The deed is yours — 
 
 What mockery in that ? 
 
 Isabella (tenderly to Tortesa). It is not kind 
 To make refusal of your love a pain ! 
 
 Tortesa. I would 'twould kill you to refuse me, lady ! 
 So should the blood plead for me at your heart ! 
 Shall I give up the ring ? (offers it.) 
 
 Isabella (hesitatingly). Let me look on it ! 
 Tortesa (withdrawing it). A moment yet ! You'll 
 give it ere you think ! 
 Oh is it fair that Angelo had days, 
 To tell his love, and I have not one hour ? 
 How know you that I can not love as well ? 
 Isabella. 'Tis possible ! 
 Tortesa. Ah! thanks! 
 
 Isabella. But I have given 
 
 My heart to him ! 
 
 Tortesa. You gave your troth to me ! 
 
 If, of these two gifts you must take back one, 
 Rob not the poorer ! Shall I keep the ring ? 
 (Isabella looks down.) 
 Jlngelo. She hesitates ! I've waited here too long ! 
 (Tears the deed in two.) 
 Perish your gift, and farewell Isabella ! 
 
 Isabella (advancing a step with clasped hands). 
 You'll kill me, Angelo ! Come back ! 
 Tortesa (seizing him by the hand as he hesitates, and fling- 
 ing him back with a strong effort). 
 
 He shall ! 
 
 Jlngelo. Stand from my path I Or, if you care to try 
 Some other weapon than a glozing tongue, 
 Follow me forth where we may find the room ! 
 Tortesa. You shall not go. 
 Jlngelo (draws). Have at thee then ! 
 
 (Attacks Tortesa, who disarms him, and holds his sword- 
 point to his breast. Duke and others come forward.) 
 
 Tortesa. 
 
 The bar 
 
 'Twixt me and heaven, boy ! is the life I hold 
 Now at my mercy ! Take it, Isabella ! 
 And with it the poor gift he threw away ! 
 I'll write a new deed ere you've time to marry, 
 So take your troth back with your bridal ring, 
 And thus I join you ! 
 
 (Takes Isabella's hand, but Jlngelo refuses his.) 
 
 Jlngelo (proudly). Never ! But for me, 
 The hand you hold were joyfully your own ! 
 Shall I receive a life and fortune from you, 
 Yet stand 'twixt you and that i 
 
 Isabella (turning from Jlngelo). Thou dost not love me ! 
 
 Tortesa. Believe it not ! He does ! An instant more 
 I'll brush this new-spun cobweb from his eyes. 
 
 (Crosses to Zippa.) 
 Fair Zippa ! in this crossed and tangled world 
 Few wed the one they could have loved the best, 
 And fewer still wed well for happiness ! 
 We each have lost to-day what best we love. 
 But as the drops that mingled in the sky, 
 Are torn apart in the tempestuous sea, 
 Yet with a new drop tremble into one, 
 We two, if you're content, may swim together! 
 What say you ? 
 
 Zippa (giving her hand). I have thought on it before, 
 When I believed you cold and treacherous, 
 Tis easy when I know you kind and noble. 
 
 Tortesa. To-morrow then we'll wed ; and now, fair 
 signor, 
 
 (To Jlngelo.) 
 Take you her hand, nor fear to rob Tortesa ! 
 
 (Turns to the duke.) 
 Shall it be so, my liege ? 
 
 Duke. You please me well. 
 
 And if you'll join your marriage feast together 
 I'll play my part, and give the brides away ! 
 
 Tortesa. Not so, my liege ! I could not see her wed 
 him. 
 To give her to him has been all I could ; 
 For I have sought her with the dearest pulses 
 That quicken in my heart, my love and scorn. 
 She's taught me that the high-born may be true. 
 I thank her for it — but, too close on that 
 Followed the love, whose lightning flash of honor 
 Brightens, but straight is dark again ! My liege, 
 The poor who leap up to the stars for duty 
 Must drop to earth again ! and here, if 't please you, 
 I take my feet for ever from your palace, 
 And, matched as best beseems me, say farewell. 
 (Takes Zippa's hand, and the curtain drops.) 
 
 END OF TORTESA. 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI; 
 
 THE HEART OVERTASKED 
 
 DRAMATIS PERSONS. 
 
 Francesco Sforza— A Condottiero of the Wh century, after- 
 ward Duke of Milan. 
 
 Brunorio — His Lieutenant. 
 
 Sarpellione — Ambassador at Milan from Alfonso, king of 
 Naples. 
 
 Rossano— A Milanese Captain, formerly companion in arms to \ 
 Sforza. 
 
 Pas<iuau. — A whimsical Poet. 
 
 • » 4 * 
 
 Bianca Visconti — Daughter of Philip Visconti* the bed-ridden 
 Duke of Milan, and heiress-apparent to the crown. 
 
 Giulio — Her Page, afterward discovered to be her brother and 
 heir to the crown. 
 
 Fiametta — Waiting Women to Bianca, and partial to Pasquali. 
 Lords of Council, Priest, Messengers, Sentinels, $c. 
 
 ACT 
 
 [Pasquali the poet's chamber. Fiametta mending his hose 
 while he writes.] 
 
 Fiametta. Why dost thou never write verses upon me ? 
 
 Pasquali. Didst thou ever hear of a cauliflower struck 
 by lightning ? 
 
 Fiametta. If there were honesty in verses, thou wouldst 
 sooner write of me than of Minerva thou talkst of. Did 
 she ever mend thy hose for thee ? 
 
 Pasquali, There is good reason to doubt if Minerva 
 ever had hose on her leg. 
 
 Fiametta. There now ! She can be no honest woman ! 
 I thought so when thou saidst she was most willing at 
 night. 
 
 Pasquali. If thy ignorance were not endless, I would 
 instruct thee in the meanings of poetry. But thou'lt call 
 Jupiter a cow driver, till the thunderbolt thou takest for a 
 bunch of twigs, strike thee dead for profanity. This once 
 understand : Minerva is no woman, but wit ; and when the 
 poet speaks of unwilling Minerva, he talks of sluggish wit 
 — that hath nothing to do with chastity. 
 
 Fiametta. Are there two names for all things then, 
 Master Pasquali ? 
 
 Pasquali. Ay — nearly. 
 
 Fiametta. What is the learned name for honest wife ? 
 
 Pasquali. Spouse. 
 
 Fiametta. When shall I be thy spouse then ? 
 
 Pasquali. When thou canst make up thy mind to forego 
 all hope of living in poetry. 
 
 Fiametta. Nay, if I am not to be put in verse, I may as 
 well have a plain man for a husband. 
 
 Pasquali. If thou wouldst be put in verse, thou shalt I 
 have no husband at all. 
 
 Fiametta. Now, wilt thou tell me why — in good com- j 
 mon words, Master Pasquali. 
 
 Pasquali. Thus :— dost thou think Petrarch had e'er 
 made Laura so famous if she had been honestly his wife ? 
 
 Fiametta. An' she were thrifty, I think he might. 
 
 Pasquali. I tell thee no ! His sonnets had then been 
 as dull as the praises of the just. No man would remem- 
 ber them. 
 
 * This eccentric duke, the iast of the Viscontis, passed the latter 
 part of his life in utter seclusion, seen bv no one but his physician. 
 His habits were loathsome, and his character harsh and unnatural. 
 
 Fiametta. Can no honest women be famous then ? 
 
 Pasquali. Virtue disqualifies. There is no hope for 
 her in poetry if she be not a sinner. Mention me the most 
 famous woman in history. 
 
 Fiametta. Helen of Troy, in the ballad, I think. 
 
 Pasquali. Wouldst thou be more virtuous than she ? 
 
 Fiametta. Nay, that were presumption. 
 
 Pasquali. Knowest thou why she is sung in an Iliad ? 
 I will tell thee : being the wife to Menelaus, she ran away 
 with the prince of Troy. 
 
 Fiametta. Then is it a shame to remember her. 
 
 Pasquali. So thou sayest in thy ignorance. Yet for 
 that sin she hath been remembered near three thousand 
 years. Look through all poetry, and thou'lt find it thrives 
 upon making sinners memorable. To be famous, thou 
 must sin. Wilt thou qualify ? 
 
 [Jl rap at the door.'] 
 
 Page. Master Pasquali ! Master Pasquali ! 
 
 Fiametta. Holy Virgin ! it is my mistress's page. An' 
 I be found here now, I were as qualified as Helen of Troy. 
 [She conceals herself. Enter the page.] 
 
 Pasquali. How now, Master Giulio ! Thou'rt impatient. 
 
 Page. Zounds, Pasquali ! If thou hadst been a prince, 
 I had not been kept longer at the door. 
 
 Pasquali. If thou wert of age to relish true philosophy, 
 I could prove to thee that the poet were the better waited 
 for of the two. But what is thy errand ? 
 
 Page. A song — I want a new song! 
 
 Pasquali. To what tune ? 
 
 Page. To a new tune on the old theme. Could I tell 
 thee a secret without danger now ! Hast thou ne'er a cat 
 that will mew it out? 
 
 Pasquali. No ! not even a wall that has ears. What 
 is thy news ? 
 
 Page. My mistress Bianca hath lost all taste for my 
 sin^im; ! 
 
 Pasquali. A pin's head might pay for that news. 
 
 Page. But, good Pasquali, wilt thou not write me a 
 new song ? 
 
 Pasquali. Upon what theme ? 
 
 Page. Sforza — still Sforza ! But it must be melan- 
 choly. 
 
 Pasquali. Why melancholy ? 
 
 Page. Did I not tell thee once in confidence that she 
 loved him ? 
 
 Pasquali. Ay — and I writ a song in his praise. 
 
 Page. I now tell thee in confidence that she hath lost 
 him ; for she is to marry Lionel of Ferrara ! 
 
 Pasquali. Here's news, indeed. 
 
 Page. It's the duke's will, and my lady is grieved to 
 the degree I tell thee. She'll have none of my music. 
 Wilt thou write me the song? 
 
 Pasquali. Must it be mournful, say you ? 
 
 Page. Ay — as the jug-jug of her nightingale. She's 
 full of tears. Wilt thou write it now? Shall I hold the 
 ink while thou writest it ? 
 
 Pasquali. Bless the boy's wits ! Dost thou think songs 
 are made like pancakes, by turning the hand over ? 
 
 Page. Why, is't not in thy head ? 
 
 Pasquali. Ay— it is. 
 
 Page. And how long will it take thee to write eight 
 lines upon parchment ? 
 
 Pasquali. Not long — if Minerva were willing. 
 
884 
 
 BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 Page. Shall I have it by vespers then ? 
 Pasquali. Ay — if thou wilt leave me presently. 
 Page. Farewell then ! Let it be melancholy, good 
 Pasquali. [Exit. 
 
 [Fiametta comes out.] 
 Fiamelta. Now must I hurry to my mistress, ere that 
 monkey-page gets to the palace. 
 
 Pasquali. Stands he well with her ! 
 Fiametta. If he were her born child, she could not love 
 him more. She fancies the puppy-dog has an eye of her 
 color. Good day, Master Pasquali. 
 
 Pasquali. Stay ! will she marry this Lionel, think you ? 
 Fiametta. Can you know anything by tears ? 
 Pasquali. Not so much by a woman's — but doth your 
 lady weep 1 
 
 Fiametta. Ay — like an aqueduct ! 
 Pasquali. Then it's more like she loves than hates him I 
 Fiametta. Now, enlighten me that ! 
 Pasquali. Thus : — a woman, if she be a lady (for 
 clowns like thee, are of a constitution more dull and 
 reasonable) ;— a lady, I say, hath usually in her composition, 
 two spirits— one angelical, the other diabolical. Now, 
 if you stir me up the devil, he will frown— but if you touch 
 me the angel, he will weep ! If your lady weep, therefore, 
 it is more like this match hath waked the angel than stirred 
 the devil— for I never saw woman yet, who, if her heart 
 were crossed, would not play the devil ere she knocked 
 under ! 
 
 Fiametta. How canst thou think such brave thoughts 
 on what does not concern thee ! 
 
 Pasquali. Does it concern me if I shall live for ever ? 
 Fiametta. Surely it doth ! 
 Pasquali. By what shall I live then ? 
 Fiamelta. By faith in the catechism, I think ! 
 Pasquali. By poetry, I tell thee ! And now digest 
 this paradox ! Though poetry be full of lies, it is unworthy 
 to be called poetry if it be not true as prophecy. 
 
 Fiametta. But how can that be true which is false ? 
 Pasquali. I will show thee ! Thy lady's page would 
 have a song, now, full of lamentation for Sforza. In it, I 
 should say, the heavens wept— (which would be a lie) — 
 that the winds whispered mournfully his name (which 
 would be a lie), and that life without him were but music 
 out of tune (which would be a consumed lie) ! Yet if she 
 loved Sforza, see you not that my verses, which are nothing 
 but lies, have a poetic truth. When if she love him not— 
 they are poetically false ! 
 
 Fiametta. 'Tis like thy flatteries then ! When thou 
 sayest my cheek is like a peach, it is true, because it hath 
 down upon it, and so hath a peach— yet it is false— because 
 my cheek hath no stone in it ! 
 
 Pasquali. Let me taste the savor of that peach. Thou 
 art wiser than I thought thee. 
 Fiametta. I must go now. 
 
 Pasquali. Find me out if she love him ! I would fain 
 write no more verses on Sforza— whom I hate that he hath 
 only a brute courage, and no taste for poesy. Now, 
 Lionel's father was Petrarch's friend, and thy lady loving 
 my verses, it were more convenient if she loved Lionel, 
 who would love them too. Go thy ways now. 
 Fiametta. Farewell, Master Pasquali ! 
 Pasquali. Stay— there be rude men in this poor quar- 
 ill come with thee to the piazza. Come along, 
 
 [The Camp before Milan. The tent of Sforza at the side 
 and watchfires in the distance. Enter Sforza and 
 Brunorio.] 
 
 Sforza. Is the guard set ? 
 
 Brunorio. All set, my lord ! 
 
 Sforza And blaze 
 
 1 he watch-fires where I ordered ? 
 
 Brunorio. Every one. 
 
 Hold you your purpose, sir ? 
 
 Sforza. To-nisht, at twelve, 
 
 I will set on ! This fickle Duke of Milan 
 Has changed for the last time. Brunorio ! 
 
 Brunorio. You seem disturbed, sir. 
 
 Sforza. I would have to-night 
 
 The best blood up that ever rose for Sforza. 
 Are your spears resolute ? 
 
 Brunorio. As yourself, my lord ! 
 
 Sforza. We'll sleep in Milan then. By Heaven ! I 
 know not 
 Why I have waited on the changing pleasure 
 Of this old duke so long. 
 
 Brunorio. Twelve years ago 
 
 He promised you his daughter. 
 
 Sforza. Did he not 1 
 
 And every year he has renewed and broken 
 This promise of alliance. 
 
 Brunorio. Can you hold 
 
 Milan against the Florentine, my lord ? 
 'Tis said the fair Bianca is betrothed 
 To their ally Ferrara ! They will join 
 Naples against you, and cry out " usurper !" 
 
 Sforza. Ay— I have thought on't. I'm the second 
 Sibrza ! 
 The first hewed wood ! There lies enough to bar me, 
 Were I another Csesar, from authority ! 
 'Tis by this whip I have been driven so long — 
 'Tis by the bait of this old man's alliance 
 I have for ten years fought the wars of Milan. 
 They've fooled me year by year, and still found meana 
 With their cursed policy, to put me off— 
 And, by the saints, they've reason. Could I point 
 The world to such a thread twixt me and Milan 
 As weaves a spider through the summer air, 
 I'd hang a crown upon it. Once possessed 
 Of a fair seat in Lombardy, my spears 
 Would glisten in St. Mark's ! 
 
 Brunorio. And thence to Naples ! 
 
 Sforza. Ay — with what speed we might ! My brave 
 lieutenant, 
 You echo my own thought ! 
 
 [Enter a sentinel.'] 
 
 Sentinel. A flag of truce 
 
 By torch-light comes from Milan. 
 
 [Enter Sarpellione, in haste.] 
 
 Sarpellione. Noble Sforza ! 
 
 I've rudely used my privilege to seek you ! 
 
 Sforza. By right of office you are ever welcome. 
 
 Sarpellione. If I might speak to you a timely word 
 In haste and privacy ? 
 
 Sforza. Brunorio, leave us ! 
 
 Sarpellione. A flag of truce comes presently from 
 Milan 
 With terms of peace. The duke would give his daughter 
 To save his capital. 
 
 Sforza. The duke does well ! 
 
 Sarpellione. You'll wed her then ! 
 
 Sforza. If fairly offered me, 
 
 Free of all other terms save peace between us, 
 I'll wed her freely. 
 
 Sarpellione. Then I pray you pardon ! 
 
 You're not the Sforza that should be the son 
 Of him who made the name ! 
 
 Sforza. Bold words, ambassador ! 
 
 But you are politic, and speak advisedly. 
 What bars my marriage with Duke Philip's daughter ? 
 
 Sarpellione. Brief— for this herald treads upon my 
 heels — 
 Bianca was not born in wedlock ! 
 
 Sforza. Well ! 
 
 Sarpellione. She's been betrothed to other suitors — 
 
 Sforza. Well! 
 
 Sarpellione. Is't well that you can ne'er through her 
 inherit 
 The ducal crown ? Is't well to have a wife 
 Who has made up her mind to other husbands — 
 Who has been sold to every paltry prince 
 Twixt Sicily and Venice ? 
 
 Sforza. Is that all ? 
 
 Sarpellione. No — nor the best of it. There lives a son, 
 By the same mother to the Duke of Milan. 
 
 Sforza (seizing him by the arm). Said you a son ? 
 
 Sarpellione. A son !— and— had I time— 
 
 Sforza. Without there ! Pray the embassy from Milan 
 To grant me but a moment. 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 [Turning to Sarpellione.] 
 Is it sure ? 
 Sarpellione. Upon the honor of my royal master 
 Who'll make it good. 
 
 Sforza. Have you authority 
 
 For what you say ? 
 
 Sarpellione. In court or camp, Alfonso 
 
 Will prove this story true. His mother fled, 
 
 As the world knows— in peril of her life 
 
 To Naples. 
 
 Sforza. From the jealousy of the duke— 
 I well remember. 
 
 Sarpellione. Ere he could demand her 
 From young Alfonso, newly king, she died; 
 But in her throes brought prematurely forth 
 A son ; whom, fearing for his life, she hid, 
 And reared him, ever like a prince, till now, 
 Sforza. Some fourteen years. 
 
 Sarpellione. Scarce that— but he is forward, 
 
 And feels his blood already. 
 
 Sforza. Say he does— 
 
 What make you out of it to change my purpose ? 
 
 Sarpellione. Seeing you can not thrive by conquering 
 Milan, ° 
 
 Which Milan's allies will pluck back from you 
 
 To put the prince upon his futher's seat 
 
 My royal master wishes you forewarned. 
 Sforza. He's kind— if that is all ! 
 Sarpellione. He'd make a friend 
 
 Ul the best sword in Italv. 
 
 Sforza. ' What scheme 
 
 Lies under this ? 
 
 Sarpellione. No scheme— but your own glory' 
 Your star stoops to the south. Alfonso's army 
 Gathers at Capua to war on Florence ! 
 (Afore earnestly.) He'll add Ravenna to your marquisate 
 For but a thousand spears ! 
 
 Sforza. I'll take Ravenna 
 
 W ithout his leave ! Admit the herald there ! 
 No, count ! your policy has overshot ! 
 The King Alfonso needs no spears of mine — 
 
 But he would have them farther off from Milan 
 
 A blind mole would see that ! 
 
 Sarpellione. My lord ! My lord ! 
 
 Sforza. Hear me, Sarpellione ! I have been 
 Too long the sport of your fine policy ! 
 With promises of power and fair alliance 
 I've fought for every prince in Italy — 
 And against all, in turn ; now leagued with Venice 
 To beat back Florence from the Brenta ; now 
 With Florence against Milan ; then with Milan 
 To drive the Tuscan home again, and all 
 For my own glory, by some politic reason. 
 I'll have a place, or I'll be in the track on't— 
 Where the poor honor that my hand may pluck 
 Shall be well garnered. By Visconti's daughter 
 I set my foot in Milan. My poor laurels, 
 Such as they are, shall root there ! — and, by Heaven, 
 I'll find a way to make their branches flourish! 
 Call in the herald, there ! 
 
 Sarpellione. But Lionel, 
 
 Prince of Ferrara, whom Bianca loves — 
 
 Sforza. Glory has been my mistress many years 
 And will suffice me still. If it should chance 
 Bianca loves another, 'tis an evil 
 To wed with me, which I will recompense 
 With chainless freedom after. In my glory 
 She'll find a bright veil that will hide all errors, 
 Save from the heart that pardons her. 
 
 Sarpellione. Farewell! 
 
 You'll hear o' the young prince soon ! 
 
 Sforza. I'll never wrong him 
 
 If there be one !— Our stars will rise together ! 
 There's room enough ! 
 
 [Exit Sarpellione and enter Rossano.] 
 
 Fair welcome, brave Rossano ! 
 
 i know your news. 
 
 Rossano. The duke sends greeting to you — 
 
 Sforza, And offers me his daughter — is't not so ? 
 Rossano. Seeing your preparations as I came 
 
 I marvel you anticipate so well ! 
 
 Sforza. A bird i' the air brings news, they say— but 
 this 
 Came by a serpent. How's the spear-wound now, 
 You took for me at Pisa ? Brave Rossano ! 
 We'll break a lance once more in company. 
 It warms my blood to find myself again 
 O' the same side. Come out in the open air ! 
 We'll talk more freely, as we used to do, 
 Over a watch-fire. Come out, old comrade ! 
 
 [Exeunt Sforza and Rossano. 
 
 [The apartment of Bianca. Fiametta embroidering, and 
 the page thrumming his guitar.] 
 
 Pa S e - I'd give my greyhound now— gold collar and 
 silken leash — to know why the duke sent for my lady 
 
 Fiametta. Would you, Master Curiosity ? 
 
 Page Mistress Pert, I would— and thy acquaintance 
 into the bargain. 
 
 Fiametta. Better keep the goods you come honestly by. 
 I would you knew as well how your mistress came by you. 
 
 Page. I came to her from heaven— like her taste for 
 my music. (Hums a tune.) 
 
 Fiametta. Did you ! do they make sacks in heaven ? 
 
 Page. There's a waiting woman's question for you • 
 Why sacks ? 
 
 Fiametta. Because I think you came in one, like a 
 present of a puppy-dog. 
 
 Page. Silence, dull pin-woman ! here comes my mis- 
 tress ! ' 
 
 [Takes off his cap as Bianca enters. She walks across the 
 stage without heeding her attendants.'] 
 Bianca. To marry Sforza ! 
 
 My dream come true ! my long, long cherished dream ! 
 The star come out of heaven that Lhad worshipped! 
 The paradise I built with soaring fancy 
 And filled with rapture like a honey-bee 
 Dropped from the clouds at last ! Am I awake ?— 
 Am I awake, dear Giulio ? 
 
 Page (half advancing to her). Noble mistress ! 
 Bianca. Thank God, they speak to me ! It is no 
 dream ? 
 It was this hand my father took to tell me — 
 
 It was with these lips that I tried to speak 
 
 It was this heart that beat its giddy prison 
 As if the exulting joy new-sprung within it 
 
 Would out and fill the world ! 
 
 Wed him to-morrow! 
 
 So suddenly a wife ! Will it seem modest, 
 
 With but twelve hours of giddy preparation 
 
 To come a bride to church ! Will he remember 
 
 I was ten years ago affianced to him ? 
 
 I have had time to think on't ! Oh, I'll tell him— 
 
 When I dare speak, I'll tell him— how I've loved him ! 
 
 And day and night dreamed of him, and through all 
 
 The changing wars treasured the solemn troth 
 
 Broke by my father ! If he listens kindly, 
 
 I'll tell him how I fed my eyes upon him 
 
 In Venice at his triumph — when he walked 
 
 Like a descended god beside the doge, 
 
 Who thanked him for his victories, and the people, 
 
 From every roof and balcony, by thousands 
 
 Shouted out " Sforza ! Live the gallant Sforza !" 
 
 I was a child then— but I felt my heart 
 
 Grow, in one hour, to woman ! 
 
 Page. Would it please you 
 
 To hear my new song, lady ? 
 
 Bianca. No, good Giulio ! 
 
 My spirits are too troubled now for music. 
 Get thee to bed ! Yet stay ! hast heard the news ? 
 Page. Is't from the camp ? 
 
 Bianca. Ay — Sforza's taken prisoner ! 
 
 Page. I'm vexed for that. 
 Bianca. Why vexed ? 
 
 Page. In four years more 
 
 I shall bear sword and lance. There'll be no Sforza 
 To kill when I'm a man ! Who took him, lady ? 
 
 Bianca. A blind boy, scarcely bigger than vourself ; 
 And gave him, bound, to me ! In brief, dear Giulio ! 
 
886 
 
 BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 Not to perplex those winking eyelids more, 
 The wars are done, and Sforza weds to-morrow 
 Your happy mistress ! 
 
 Page. Sforza ! We shall have 
 
 A bonefire then ! 
 
 Bianca. Ay — twenty ! 
 
 Page. And you'll live 
 
 Here in the palace, and have masks and gambols 
 The year round, will you not ? 
 
 Bianca. My pretty minion, 
 
 You know not yet what love is ! Love's a miser, 
 That plucks his treasure from the prying world 
 And grudges e'en the eye of daylight on it ! 
 Another's look is theft — another's touch 
 Robs it of all its value. Love conceives 
 No paradise but such as Eden was 
 With two hearts beating in it. 
 
 [Leaves the Page and walks thoughtfully away.] 
 Oh, I'll build 
 A home upon some green and flowery isle 
 In the lone lakes, where we will use our empire 
 Only to keep away the gazing world. 
 The purple mountains and the glassy waters 
 Shall make a hushed pavilion with the sky, 
 And we two in the midst will live alone, 
 Counting the hours by stars and waking birds, 
 And jealous but of sleep ! To bed, dear Giulio ! 
 And wake betimes. 
 
 Page. Good night, my dearest lady ! 
 
 Bianca. To bed, Fiametta ! I have busy thoughts, 
 That needs will keep me waking. 
 
 Fiametta. Good night, lady. 
 
 Bianca. Good night, good night! The moon has 
 fellowship 
 For moods like mine. I'll forth upon the terrace, 
 And watch her While my heart beats warm and fast. 
 
 ACT II. 
 
 [The square of Milan. The front of the cathedral on the 
 right. People kneeling round the steps, and the organ 
 heard within. Enter Pasquali and Fiametta in haste.] 
 
 Fiametta. Now, Master Pasquali ! said I not we should 
 be too late ? 
 
 Pasquali. Truly, there seems no room ! 
 
 Fiametta. And I her first serving-woman ! If it were 
 my own wedding I should not grieve more to have missed it. 
 You would keep scribbling, scribbling, and I knew it was 
 past twelve. 
 
 Pasquali. Consider, Mistress Fiametta ! I had no news 
 of this marriage till the chimes began ; and the epithala- 
 mium must be writ ! I were shamed else, being the bard 
 of Milan. 
 
 Fiametta. The what, of Milan ? 
 
 Pasquali. The bard, I say ! Come aside, and thou 
 shalt be consoled. I'll read thee my epithalamium. 
 
 Fiametta. Is it something to ask money of the bride- 
 groom ? 
 
 Pasquali. Dost thou think I would beg ? 
 
 Fiametta. Nay, thou'rt very poor ! 
 
 Pasquali. Look thee, Mistress Fiametta ! that's a 
 vulgar error, thou hadst best be rid of. I, whom thou 
 callest poor, am richer than the duke. 
 
 Fiametta. Now if thou'rt not out of thy ten senses, the 
 Virgin bless us. 
 
 Pasquali. I'll prove it even to thy dull apprehension. 
 Answer me truly. How many meals eats the duke in a 
 day? 
 
 Three, I think, if he be well. 
 
 So does Pasquali ! How much covering has 
 
 Fiametta. 
 Pasquali. 
 he? 
 
 Fiametta. 
 isquali. 
 
 Nay — what keeps him warm. 
 So has Pasquali ! How much money carries 
 he on his person. 
 
 Fiametta. None, I think 
 none. 
 
 Pasquali. Even so Pasquali ! He is a poet, and needs 
 none. What good does him the gold in his treasury ? 
 
 He is a.tiuke, and needs 
 
 Fiametta. 
 Pasquali. 
 
 He thinks of it. 
 So can Pasquali ! 
 
 What pleasure hath he in 
 his soldiers ? 
 
 Fiametta. They keep him safe in his palace. 
 
 Pasquali. So they do Pasquali in his chamber. Thus 
 far, thou'lt allow, my state is as good as his — and better — 
 for I can think of his gold, and sleep safe by his soldiers, 
 yet have no care of them. 
 
 Fiametta. I warrant he has troubled thoughts. 
 
 Pasquali. Thou sayst well. Answer me once more, 
 and I'll prove to thee in what I am richer. Thou'st ne'er 
 heard, I dare swear, of imagination. 
 
 Fiametta. Is't a pagan nation or a Christian ? 
 
 Pasquali. Stay — I'll convey it to thee by a figure. 
 What were the value of thy red stockings over black; if it 
 were always night ? 
 
 Fiametta. None. 
 
 Pasquali. What were beauty if it were always dark ? 
 
 Fiametta. The same as none. 
 
 Pasquali. What were green leaves better than brown — 
 diamonds better than pebbles — gold better than brass — if it 
 were always dark ? 
 
 Fiametta. No better, truly. 
 
 Pasquali. Then the shining of the sun, in a manner, 
 dies your stockings, creates beauty, makes gold and 
 diamonds, and paints the leaves green ? 
 
 Fiametta. I think it doth. 
 
 Pasquali. Now mark ! There be gems in the earth, 
 qualities in the flowers, creatures in the air, the duke ne'er 
 dreams of. There be treasuries of gold and silver, temples 
 and palaces of glorious work, rapturous music, and feasts 
 the gods sit at — and all seen only by a sun, which, to the 
 duke, is black as Erebus. 
 
 Fiametta. Lord ! Lord ! Where is it, Master Pasquali ! 
 
 Pasquali. In my head. (Fiametta discovers signs of 
 fear.) All these gems, treasuries, palaces, and fairy har- 
 monies I see by the imagination I spoke of. Am I not 
 richer now ? 
 
 Fiametta (retreating from him). The Virgin help us ! 
 He thinks there's a sun in his head! I thought to have 
 married him, but he's mad. 
 
 [She falls to weeping. 
 [The cathedral is flung open, and the organ plays louder. 
 
 The bridal procession comes out of church and passes 
 
 across the stage. As they pass Pasquali, he offers his 
 
 epithalamium to Sforza.] 
 
 Sforza. What have we here — petitions ? 
 
 Bianca. Nay, my lord ! 
 
 Pasquali's not a beggar. You shall read 
 Something inventive here ! He's a clear fancy, 
 And sings your praises well. Good chamberlain ! 
 Bring him with honor to the palace ! Please you, 
 My lord, wilt on ! 
 
 Page (to Pasquali). You'll come to the feast now, 
 wont you ? 
 We'll sit together, and have songs and stories, 
 And keep the merriest end on't! 
 [Js the procession passes off, Sarpellione plucks Pasquali by 
 by the sleeve, and retains him.] 
 
 Sarpellione. A fair bride, sir ! 
 
 Pasquali. What would you, noble count ? 
 
 Sarpellione. The bridegroom, now, 
 
 Should be a poet, like yourself, to know 
 The worth of such a jewel ! 
 
 Pasquali. Haply so — 
 
 But we are staying from the marriage feast — 
 
 Sarpellione. One word ! (Pulls him aside.) Have 
 you ambition ? 
 
 Pasquali. Like the wings 
 
 Upon a marble cherub — always spread, 
 But fastened to a body of such weight 
 'Twill never rise till doomsday. I would drink 
 Sooner than talk of it ! — Come on ! my lord ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Signor Pasquali — I have marked you oil 
 For a shrewd, rapid wit. As one who looks 
 Oft on the sun, there needs no tedious care 
 Lest the light break too suddenly upon you. 
 Is it not so ? 
 
 Pasquali. Say on ! 
 
 Sarpellione. You know how Naples 
 
 Has over it a sky all poetry. 
 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 887 
 
 Pasquali. I know it well. 
 
 Sarj>ellione. The radiant Giovanna 
 
 Cherished Bocaccio and Petrarch there, 
 And 'tis the quality of the air they breathed — 
 Alphonso feels it ! Brief and to the point ! 
 My royal master sends for you. He'd have 
 A galaxy around him ! 
 
 Pasquali. Noble count ! 
 
 [Enter Page.'] 
 Page. I'm sent to bid you to the feast, sirs ! 
 Sarpellione. Qq j 
 
 We'll follow straight. [Exit Page. 
 
 This leaden-headed soldier 
 Slights you, I see— He took you for a beggar ! 
 
 Pasquali. Humph! 'tis his wedding day, and I for- 
 give him ! 
 Sarpellione. You're used to wrong, I knew. 
 Pasquali. To-day, my lord. 
 
 I'm bent upon a feast— wake not a devil 
 To mar my appettie ! 
 
 Sarpellione. One single word ! 
 
 This brainless spear-head would be duke of Milan. 
 Pasquali. What ! while the duke lives ! 
 Sarpellione. While the duke's son lives, 
 
 For there is one— I'll prove it when you will — 
 And he will murder him to take his crown. 
 Pasquali. How know you that ? 
 Sarpellione. Alfonso, king of Naples, 
 
 Would have this usurpation and this murder 
 In time prevented. 
 
 Pasquali. How ! 
 
 Sarpellione. By Sforza's death. 
 
 There's no way else— but 'tis a dangerous theme 
 To talk on here — come out o' the way a little, 
 Ind you shall have such reasons for the deed — 
 
 Pasquali (flings him from him with contempt). 
 \\ hat " deed !" Dost take me for a murderer ? 
 My lord ! I'm poor. I have a thirst for honors 
 Such as you offered me but now, that burns 
 Like fire upon my lips— I could be tortured 
 Through twenty deaths to leave a name behind me. 
 But nay, I prate— I'll turn not out to thee 
 The golden inside of a soul of honor — 
 (Leaving him.) When next you want a hand for a bad 
 
 deed, 
 Look to your equals— there are those beneath you 
 Who, from their darkling wells, see guiding-stars 
 Far o'er your head, my lord ! [Exit. 
 
 Sarpellione. Such men as this 
 
 Do not betray e'en villains ! I shall find 
 Another and a fitter. To the feast now ! 
 And watch my time and means. [Exit. 
 
 Rossano. I've, in my tent, the sword 
 
 Your father plucked from a retreating soldier 
 To head the fight at Pisa. 'Tis well hacked ! 
 Sforza, I'll come, Rossano ! 
 
 (To Bianca.) Nay, sweet ! by your leave 
 (Takes his helmet.) 
 We'll go abroad a little ! You shall see us 
 Betimes at supper. Keep the revels toward ! 
 We'll taste your wine anon. Come, brave Rossano ! 
 [They go out. Bianca looks after them thoughtfully a few 
 moments, and then walks back slowly to the banquetting 
 room.] * ° 
 
 [Jin ante-room, with a feast seen beyond. Enter Sforza 
 and Rossano.] 
 
 Rossano. I've a new culverin 
 
 Invented here by the duke's armorer; 
 Will you walk forth ? 
 
 Sforza. Most willingly. Within there ! 
 
 My helmet ! 
 
 [Enter Bianca.] 
 
 Bianca. Is there fresh alarm, my lord ? 
 You would not go abroad ? 
 f She takes the helmet from the page as he brings it in.] 
 
 Sforza. A little way, sweet, 
 
 To look at some new arms. 
 
 Bianca. To morrow, surely, 
 
 Will do as well. Here are some loving verses 
 Writ on your marriage ! 
 
 Rossano. p ve the gonfalon 
 
 Your father gave me at the siege of Parma. 
 The rags wave yet ! 
 
 Sforza. I'd rather see a thread on't 
 
 Than feast a hundred years ! 
 
 Bianca. My lord, wil't please you 
 
 Come in, and hear the verses ? There's a wine 
 You did not taste, grown on Vesuvius ; 
 Pray you come in ! 
 
 [The ramparts at night. Enter Sforza and Rossano.] 
 
 Rossano. She's loving in her nature, and methought 
 Seemed grieved when you came forth ! 
 
 Sforza. I should have thought so, 
 
 But that I had some private information 
 She loved another ! 
 
 Rossano. You're perhaps abused ! 
 
 Sforza. Nay— nay— how should she love me ? I'm 
 well on 
 To my meridian, see you ! — a rough soldier — 
 Who never learned the courtly phrase of love. 
 And she— the simplest maiden in a cot, 
 Is not more tender-eyed, nor has a heart 
 Apter to know love's lesson ere 'tis time. 
 She's loved ere now, Rossano ! 
 
 Rossano. Happy so— 
 
 Yet be not rude too rashly. 
 
 Sforza. Rude ! I'll make 
 
 This forced link that policy puts on her 
 Loose as a smoke-curl ! She shall know no master, 
 And be no slave for me ! 
 
 Rossano. You'll not neglect her ! 
 
 Sforza. The sun of woman's world is love, Rossano ! 
 When that sun sets, if no unpitying cloud 
 Trouble her sky, there rises oftentimes 
 A crescent moon of memory, whose light 
 Makes the dark pathway clear again. Bianca's 
 May have gone down for me ! I'll be no cloud 
 To mar the moon as well. 
 
 Rossano. Stand by— there comes 
 
 A footfall this way. (They stand aside.) 
 [Enter Pasquali hiccupping, and talking to himselj.] 
 Pasquali. That wine was grown on Vesuvius. That's 
 the reason it makes such an eruption. If it breaks out o' 
 the top o' my head how— as I think it will— for it gets hot- 
 ter and hotter— I shall know if wit be in the brains or the 
 belly. 
 
 Rossano. (Jlside — Stay— my lord ! This is Pasquali, 
 whose verses Bianca sometimes sings to her lute. Ten to 
 one now but you may gather from his drunkenness if Bianca 
 loves another.) (Rossano comes forward.) Good even, 
 Master Pasquali. 
 Pasquali. That's an everyday phrase — this is holyday ! 
 Rossano. A merry good even then ! 
 Pasquali. Ay, that's belter! For we're all merry— 
 except the bride. And that's the way of it. 
 Rossano. What's the way of it ? 
 
 Pasquali. See here ! Who is it that never weeps at a 
 funeral ? 
 
 Rossano. You shall tell me. 
 Pasquali. The dead man, that hath most cause. 
 Rossano. And what hath that to do with a bridal J 
 Pasquali. A great deal. Of all people at a bridal, 
 who should be most merry ? Why, the bride ! now I have 
 just left a bride that is sad enough for a funeral. 
 Rossano. For what cause, think you ? 
 Pasquali. There are some things which can have but 
 one cause. There's but one cause for drunkenness, and 
 there's but one grief on a wedding-day. 
 Rossano. And what's that ? 
 Pasquali. Wine — causes drunkenness ! 
 Rossano. And what causes grief in a bride 1 
 Pasquali. Want of love for the bridegroom. 
 Rossano. How know you that, sir t 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 Pasquali. Listen to in-spi-ra-tion ! 
 
 "When first young Lionel did catch mine eye, 
 
 "Sforza, the valiant, passed unheeded by!" 
 
 Rossano. Villain ! these are thine own lying verses ! 
 
 Pasquali (pulling out his sword). The figures of speech 
 are lies of verse. But if thou sayest that it is a lie that 
 Bianca loves Lionel best, thou liest in prose, and so, come 
 on ! (Attacks Rossano, and Sforza comes foward, and 
 strikes up their swords.) 
 
 Sforza. Get home, thou drunkard ! Come, away, 
 Rossano. 
 
 He writes what's palatable, and but echoes 
 
 That which is rung at court. She loved this prince — 
 
 Sarpellione told me so before. 
 
 We'll to the field and our old mistress, glory. 
 
 Come on— we'll talk of battles and forget her. 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 Pasquali. Fighting's not my vocation ; but I have an 
 itching that way, and I'll after him. Halloo ! Were there 
 two men ? I think there were two. The last man called 
 me a drunkard ! That's no offence I a poet may be a 
 drunkard! But "villain!" that's incompatible, and must 
 be pricked back. Halloo ! [Exit. 
 
 SCENE IV. 
 
 [Bianca's chamber at midnight. She sits on a couch in \ 
 white undress, and Sforza beside her in his armor.'] 
 
 Bianca. Dost think this ring a pretty one, my lord ? 
 
 Sforza. Ay, 'tis a pretty ring ! I have one here 
 Marancio gave me — Giacomo Marancio. 
 The ring his wife sent — but you've heard the story ? 
 
 Bianca. I think I never heard it. 
 
 Sforza. She's a woman 
 
 The heart grows but to speak of. She was held 
 A hostage by the Milanese (I pray you 
 Pardon the mention), when, twixt them and me 
 Marancio held a pass. Her life was threatened 
 If by his means I crossed the Adige. She — 
 (Brave heart ! I warm to speak of her !) found means 
 To send to him this ring ; wherein is writ 
 " He who loves most, loves honor best." You'll see it 
 Here o' the inside. 
 
 Bianca. Did you see this lady ? 
 
 Sforza. I hazarded a battle three days after 
 With perilous odds, only to bring her off— 
 And would have sold my life for't. 
 
 Bianca. Did you see her ? 
 
 Sforza. I gave her to Marancio when I took 
 The ring of him. 
 
 Bianca. My lord ! speak you so warmly 
 
 Of any other woman ? 
 
 Sforza (rising and taking his helmet). 
 Nay, I know not. 
 There are some qualities that women have 
 Which are less worthy, but which warm us more 
 Than speaking of their virtues. I remember 
 The fair Giovanna in her pride at Naples. 
 Gods ! what a light enveloped her ! She left 
 Little to shine in history — but her beauty 
 Was of that order that the universe 
 Seemed governed by her motion. Men looked on her 
 As if her next step would arrest the world; 
 And as the sea-bird seems to rule the wave 
 
 He rides so buoyantly, all things around her 
 
 The glittering army, the spred gonfalon 
 
 The pomp, the music, the bright sun in heaven — 
 
 Seemed glorious by her leave. 
 
 Bianca (rising and going to the window). 
 
 There's emulation 
 Of such sweet praise, my lord ! Did you not hear 
 The faint note of a nightingale ? 
 
 Sforza. More like 
 
 A far-heard clarion, methousrht ! They change 
 The sentinels perchance. 'Tis time Rossano 
 Awaits me on the ramparts. 
 
 Bianca. Not to-night ! 
 
 Go not abroad again to-night, my lord ! 
 
 Sforza. For a brief hour, sweet ! The old soldier 
 loves 
 To gossip of the fields he's los> and "Won, 
 
 And I, no less, to listen. Get to bed ! 
 I'll follow you anon. 
 
 [Exit Sforza. 
 Bianca. He does not love me ! 
 
 I never dreamed of this ! To be his bride 
 Was all the heaven I looked for ! Not to love me 
 When I have been ten years affianced to him ! — 
 When I have lived for him — shut up my heart, 
 With every pulse and hope, for his use only — 
 Worshipped— oh God ! idolatrously loved him ! 
 
 Why has he sought to marry me ? Why still 
 Renew the broken pledge my father made him ? 
 Why, for ten years, with war and policy, 
 
 Strive for my poor alliance ? 
 
 He must love me, 
 
 Or I shall break my heart ! I never had 
 One other hope in life ! I never linked 
 One thought, but to this chain ! I have no blood — 
 
 No breath — no being — separate from Sforza ! 
 
 Nothing has any other name ! The sun 
 
 Shined like his smile — the lightning was his glory— 
 
 The night his sleep, and the hushed moon watched o'er 
 him ; — 
 
 Stars writ his name — his breath hung on the flowers — 
 
 Music had no voice but to say J love him, 
 
 And life no future, but his love for me ! 
 
 Whom does he love ? Marancio's wife ? He praised 
 
 Only her courage ! Queen Giovanna's beauty ? 
 
 'Tis dust these many years ! There is no sign 
 
 He loves another ; and report said ever 
 
 His glory was his mistress. Can he love ? 
 
 Shame on the doubt ! 'Twas written in the ring 
 
 " He who loves most, loves honor best" — and Sforza 
 
 Is made too like a god to lack a heart. 
 
 And so, I breathe again ! To make him love me 
 
 Is all my life now ! to pry through his nature, 
 
 And find his heart out. That's wrapt in his glory ! 
 
 I'll feed his glory then ! He praised Giovanna 
 
 That she was royal and magnificent — 
 
 Ay — that's well thought on, too ! How should an eye, 
 
 Dazzled with war and warlike pomp, like Sforza's, 
 
 Find pleasure in simplicity like mine ! 
 
 (Looks at her dress.) 
 
 I'm a duke's daughter, and I'll wear the look on't ! 
 Unlock my jewels and my costly robes, 
 And while I keep his show-struck eye upon me, 
 Watch for a golden opportunity 
 
 To build up his renown ! 
 
 • And so farewell 
 
 The gentle world I've lived in ! Farewell all 
 My visions of a world for two hearts only — 
 Sforza's and mine ! If I outlive this change, 
 So brief and yet so violent within me, 
 I'll come back in my dreams, oh, childish world ! 
 If not — a broken heart blots out remembrance. 
 
 [Exit into her bridal chamber, which is seen beyond on 
 opening the door.'] 
 
 ACT III. 
 
 [An ante-chamber of the palace. Brunorio leaning sullenly 
 on his sword by the door. Enter Sarpellione.] 
 
 Sarpellione. What's this ?— the brave Brun orio turned 
 lackey ? 
 
 Brunorio. Nay, count ! I wait my turn. 
 
 Sarpellione. If a civilian 
 
 May have a judgment of a soldier's duty, 
 You're out of place, sir ! This is not the camp ! 
 You're not on guard here ! There's a difference 
 Twixt patience at your post, and kicking heels 
 In my lord's antechamber ! 
 
 Brunorio. By the saints 
 
 My own thought, noble count ! As you came in 
 I brooded on't. 
 
 Sarpellione. (Aside — This blockhead may be turned 
 To a shrewd use now ! I have marked his brows 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 889 
 
 Blackening upon Rossano, who usurps 
 His confidence with Sforza. Could I seize 
 The lightning in this jealous thunder-cloud — 
 I'll see the depth on't.) Sforza knows you're here ? 
 
 Brunorio. I had a message by a varlet page, 
 Who bid me wait here. 
 
 Sarpellione. By a page ? Sacristie ! 
 
 Fair treatment for a soldier ! Say, Brunorio ! 
 What was't I heard of the Pope's standard-bearer 
 Clove to the wrist ? 
 
 Brunorio. Heard you of that, my lord ? 
 
 You see the weapon, here ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Was't thine, i' faith ? 
 
 I thought promotion had been won with service ! 
 Was't thou, indeed ? I heard the King Alfonso 
 Say 'twas the best blow and the bravest followed 
 He'd know in his time. How it came to his ears 
 I know not but he made the court ring with it ! 
 Brunorio. The king ? 
 
 Sarpellione. How long since thou wast made lieu- 
 tenant ? 
 Brunorio. Five years come March ! 
 Sarpellione. Zounds ! how this peasant's son 
 
 Treads merit in the dust ! Sforza keeps back 
 His betters, brave Brunorio ! 
 
 (Rossano passes out.) 
 
 Ay — there ! 
 That man cuts off your sunshine, or I know 
 Nothing of courts ! I, that have no part in it, 
 Have marked how you are slighted for Rossano ! 
 Forgive my touching on't ! 'Tis my respect 
 For a brave soldier makes me speak so freely. 
 But were I of your counsel — 
 
 Brunorio. Noble count, 
 
 My heart speaks through your lips. Since this Rossano 
 Has had my lord's ear, I've been thrust aside 
 Like a disgraced hound. 
 
 Sarpellione. Frankly, brave Brunorio ! 
 
 And between us,— I've heard you lightly mentioned 
 By this ungrateful Sforza ! 
 
 Brunorio. How, my lord ? 
 
 Sarpellione. I would not tell you but to serve you 
 in it — 
 He told Rossano, there, that you had strength, 
 And struck a sharp blow — and so did an axe ! 
 But for your brains — and then he tossed his head — 
 You've seen the scorn upon his lip ? 
 
 Brunorio. Curse on him ! 
 
 I've a sharp blow left yet — and brains enough 
 To find a time to strike it ! Did you say 
 Alfonso had spoke well of me, my lord ? 
 
 Sarpellione. So well, that, on my own authority 
 
 If you'd take service with a better master — 
 You're captain from this hour. 
 
 Brunorio. My lord ! So promptly 
 
 I take your offer, that your commendations 
 Will find no swifter bearer than myself 
 To King Alfonso. 
 
 Sarpellione. Stay — I'm not just now 
 
 On the best terms with Sforza, and you'll see 
 With half a glance, that while he's here in Milan 
 His best sword could not leave him for Alfonso, 
 But it would throw suspicion upon me, 
 And touch my credit here. I'll write your warrant, 
 Which you shall keep, and use it when you please. 
 But for the present shut your bosom up, 
 And bear your wrongs. Sforza awaits you now — 
 Go in. I'll see you as you pass again ! , 
 
 [Exit Brunorio. 
 He's a fit tool ! This o'er-ambitious Sforza 
 Must not be duke— and if I fret this cur 
 Till he will tear his master, why, 'twill save 
 A worthier hand the trouble on't. 
 
 [Exit Sarpellione. 
 
 [Sforza discovered sitting thoughtfully in his apartment. 
 The page curiously examining his sword.] 
 Sforza (yauming). This is dull work ! 
 
 Page- My lord, will't please you, teach me 
 
 A trick of fence ? 
 
 Sforza. Ay— willingly ! Hast thou 
 
 A weapon in that needle-case of thine ? 
 
 Page (drawing). A weapon ! If I had your legs to 
 stand on 
 I'd give you all the odds twixt it and yours ! 
 Look at that blade ! (Bends it.) Damascus ! 
 [Sforza smiles, and unbuckles his scabbard.] 
 
 By the gods 
 
 You shall not laugh at me ! I'll give you odds, 
 
 With anything to stand on ! 
 
 Sforza. Nay— I'll sit— 
 
 And you shall touch me if you can ! Come on ! 
 And see I do not rap you o'er the cockscomb ! 
 Page. Have at you fairly ! Mind ! for I'm in earnest ! 
 
 (They fence.) 
 Sforza. One — two — well thrust, by Jupiter ! Again ! 
 One — two ! 
 Page (makes a lunge). Three ! there you have it ! 
 Sforza (starting up). Zounds ! 
 
 This is no play. 
 
 Page. What ! does the needle prick ? 
 
 (Wipes it with his handkerchief.) 
 Sforza. 'Tis a Damascus if thou wilt ! I'll laugh 
 No more at it or thee. Come here, thou varlet ! 
 Where got thy mistress such a ready hand 
 As thou art ? 
 
 Page (fencing with the chair). 
 
 From an eagle's nest, my lord ! 
 Sforza. I'll swear to it ! Thou hast the eagle's eye ! 
 But tell me — what brave gentleman of Milan 
 Has thy blood in his veins ? 
 
 Page. I'm not of Milan. 
 
 Sarpellione brought me here from Naples. 
 
 Sforza. Thou'rt not his child. I'll answer for't. 
 Page. Not I ! 
 
 I hate him ! Come ! Wilt try another pass ? 
 Sforza. Stay ! is the count thy master then ? 
 Page. My ma3ter ? 
 
 He's an old snake ! But I'll say this for him, 
 Were I a royal prince — (as I may be — 
 Who knows !) — Sarpellione could not treat me 
 With more becoming honor. 
 
 Sforza (starting up suddenly). What if this 
 Should be the duke's son that he told me of? 
 Come hither, sir ! What know you of your father ? 
 (Aside. — 'Tis the Visconti's lip !) 
 
 Page. . I'll tell you all 
 
 I know, my lord. Alfonso sent me here, 
 Five years ago, in quality of page. 
 I was to serve my lady and no other, 
 And to be gently nurtured. The king gave me 
 A smart new feather — bade me bear myself 
 Like a young prince at Milan — 
 
 Sforza (starting away from him). It is he ! — 
 Princely in spirit, and Visconti's impress 
 On every feature ! He'll be duke of Milan ! 
 Page. Heard you the duke was worse to-day, my 
 
 lord? 
 Sforza. What duke ? 
 
 Page. Nay, sir ! you ought to know what duke ! 
 
 I heard the doctor say you'd wear his crown 
 In three days. Never say I told you of it ! 
 He whispered it to old Sarpellione, 
 Who— 
 
 Sforza. What ? 
 
 Page. Looked daggers at him ! 
 
 Sforza. (Aside — Now the devil 
 
 Plucks at my soul indeed ! If the duke die, 
 The crown lies in the gift of my new wife, 
 And I were duke as sure as he were dead — 
 But for this boy ! 
 
 (Walks rapidly up and down.) 
 I'd set my foot in Venice 
 In half a year ! — Ferrara — then Bologna — 
 Florence — and thence to Naples ! I'd be king 
 Of Italy before their mourning's threadbare — 
 
 But for this boy ! 
 
 (The page still fences with the chair.} 
 I'd found a dynasty ! — 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 Be second of the name — but the first king — 
 And there should go, e'en with the news, to France, 
 A bold ambassador from one Francesco, — 
 Sforza by birth and king of Italy — 
 
 But for this boy! 
 
 I would he were a man ! 
 
 I would an army barred me from the crown, 
 Sooner than this boy's right ! But he might die ! 
 He might have run upon my sword just now ! 
 'Twere natural, — and so it were to fall 
 In playing with't, and bleed to death unheard, 
 From a ripped vein. That would be natural ! 
 He might have died in many ways and I 
 Have had no part in't. 
 
 Page. Will you fence, my lord ? 
 
 Sforza (clutches his sword, and suddenly sheaths it, and 
 walks from him. Aside). 
 (Get thee gone, devil ! After all his glory 
 Shall Sforza be the murderer of a child !) 
 No — No ! I'll not fence with thee ! Go and play! 
 I — I — I — (turns from him) . 
 
 Stay ! shall such a grain of sand 
 As a boy's life, check Sforza's bold ambition ! 
 I, who have hewn down thousands in a day 
 For but the play on't — I, upon whose hand 
 Sat slaughter, like a falcon, to let loose 
 At all that flew above me ! I — whose conscience 
 Carries the reckoning of unnumbered souls 
 Sped unto hell or heaven, for this ambition ! — 
 Shall I mar all now with a woman's pity 
 For a fair stripling ! 
 (Draws his sword, and the page, who has been regarding 
 him attentively, comes up and pulls him by his sleeve.) 
 
 Page. Look you here, my lord ! 
 
 If I have harmed you — for you seem so angry 
 I think I have — more than I meant to do — 
 Take my own sword, and wound me back again ! 
 I'll not cry out — and when you see me bleed, 
 You'll pardon me that I was so unhappy 
 As to have chanced to wound you ! 
 (Kneels, opens his bosom, and offers his sword-hilt to Sforza.) 
 
 Sforza. Angels keep me ! 
 
 Give me thy hand, boy ! 
 (Looks at him a moment, and passes his hand across his 
 eyes.) 
 
 Page. You'll forgive me, sir ? 
 
 Letting of blood — when done in fair play, mind you ! 
 Has no offence in't. 
 
 Sforza. Leave me now, sweet boy ! 
 
 I'll see thee at the feast to-night ! Farewell ! 
 
 (Page kisses his hand, and exit.) 
 Shade of my father ! If from heaven thou lookest 
 Upon the bright inheritance of glory 
 I took from thee — pluck from my tortured soul 
 These thoughts of hell — and keep me worthy of thee ! 
 (Walks up and down thoughtfully, and then presses the cru- 
 cifix to his lips.) 
 As I am true to honor and that child, 
 Help me, just Heaven ! [Exit. 
 
 [A bridal feast seen through a glass door in the rear of the 
 stage. Enter from the banqueting room, Bianca, dressed 
 with great magnificence, followed by Sforza, Bossano, 
 Brunorio, and Sarpellione. A raised throne, at the side. 
 Music heard till the door is closed.] 
 
 Bianca. They who love stillness follow us! The 
 brain 
 Grows giddy with the never-wearying dance, 
 And music's pause is sweet as its beginning. 
 Shut the doors, Giulio ! Sarpellione ! enter ! 
 You're welcome to Trophonius' cave ! We'll hold 
 The Court of Silence, unci I'll play the Queen. 
 My brave lord, you shall doff that serious air, 
 And be court favorite — sit you at our feet ! 
 
 Sforza. Too envious a place and office both ! 
 I'll sit here with Rossano. Honor's flower — 
 
 That lifts a bold head in the world — at court, 
 Looks for the lily's hiding-place. 
 
 Sarpellione. (Aside — What trick 
 
 Lies in this new humility.) The lily 
 Is lowly born, and knows its place, my lord ! 
 
 Bianca. Yet is it sought with pains while the rose 
 withers ! 
 
 Sarpellione. The rose lifts to the sun its flowering tree, 
 And all its parts are honored — while the lily 
 Upon one fragile stem rears all its beauty — 
 And its coarse family of leaves are left 
 To lie on the earth they cling to. 
 Sforza (to Rossano, with whom he has been conversing apart). 
 (I've sure news 
 He was worse yesterday !) 
 (Bianca rising with dignity, and descending from the ducal 
 chair.) 
 
 Bianca. Now, since the serpent 
 
 Misled our mother, never was fair truth 
 So subtly turned to error. If the rose 
 Were born a lily, and, by force of heart 
 And eagerness for light, grew tall and fair, 
 'Twere a true type of the first fiery soul 
 That makes a low name honorable. They 
 Who take it by inheritance alone — 
 Adding no brightness to it — are like stars 
 Seen in the ocean, that were never there 
 But for the bright originals in heaven ! 
 
 Sarpellione (sneeringly) . Rest to the gallant soul of 
 the first Sforza ! 
 
 Bianca. Amen ! but triple glory to the second ! 
 I have a brief tale for thine ear, ambassador ! 
 
 Sarpellione. I listen, lady ! 
 
 Bianca. Mark the moral, sir ! 
 
 An eagle once from the Euganean hills 
 Soared bravely to the sky. (To Sf.) (Wilt please my lord 
 List to my story ?) In his giddy track 
 Scarce marked by them who gazed upon the first, 
 Followed a new-fledged eaglet, fast and well. 
 Upward they sped, and all eyes on their flight 
 Gazed with admiring awe, when suddenly, 
 The parent bird, struck by a thunderbolt, 
 Dropped lifeless through the air. The eaglet paused, 
 And hung upon his wings; and as his sire 
 Plashed in the far-down wave, men looked to see him 
 Flee to his nest affrighted ! 
 
 Sforza (with great interest). Did he so? 
 
 Bianca. My noble lord — he had a monarch's heart ! 
 He wheeled a moment in mid air, and shook 
 Proudly his royal wings, and then right on, 
 With crest uplifted and unwavering flight, 
 Sped to the sun's eye, straight and gloriously. 
 
 Page. Lady — is that true ? 
 
 Bianca. Ay — men call those eagles 
 
 Sforza the First and Second ! 
 
 (The bell tolls, and enter a messenger.) 
 
 Messenger. Pardon, madam ! 
 
 For my sad news ! your royal father's dead ! 
 
 Bianca (aside, with great energy). 
 (Sforza'll be duke !) 
 
 (Turning to the messenger.) 
 
 Died he in much pain, know you ? 
 
 Messenger. Madam — 
 
 Bianca. (Aside — The crown is mine ! He will re- 
 member 
 The crown was mine.) 
 
 (Turns to the messenger.) 
 
 Sent he for any one 
 In his extremity ? 
 
 Messenger. Most honored madam — 
 
 Bianca. (Aside — Ingratitude is not the lion's fault — 
 He can not hate me when I make him royal ! 
 It would be monstrous if he did not love me !) 
 
 (To the messenger.) 
 Said you my father sent for me ? 
 
 Messenger. No ! Madam, 
 
 He died as he had lived, unseen of any 
 Save his physician ! 
 
 Bianca. (Aside — Sforza must be crowned 
 And then our mourning will shut out the world ; 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 891 
 
 He'll be alone with me and his new glory — 
 
 All royal, and all mine .') (To Sf.) Please you, my lord, 
 
 Dismiss the revellers ! My father's dead ! 
 
 (jlside. — There are no more Viscontis — Sforza's children 
 
 Shall now be dukes of Milan ! Think on that ! 
 
 He'll think on't, and his heart will come down to me, 
 
 Or there's no truth in nature !) (To Sf.) My brave lord! 
 
 Shall we go in ? 
 
 Sforza. Go you in first ! (hands her in) Rossano 
 
 Will forth with me, to see the funeral 
 Fitly arranged. 
 
 Binnca. You'll come back soon, my lord ! 
 
 Sforza. Ay — presently ! [Exit Bianca. 
 
 Rossano. With what a majesty 
 
 She walks ! 
 
 Sforza. She knows not that she has a brother, 
 And in her port already mocks the dutchess. 
 
 Rossano. She would have made a glorious queen, my 
 lord ! 
 
 Sforza. She should have made one — but I can not 
 talk on't ! 
 Let's forth upon our errand, and forget 
 There was a crown in Milan. [Exeunt. 
 
 ACT IV. 
 
 [Pasquali's chamber. Fiametta sitting with his cap in her 
 hand.] 
 
 Fiametta. What wilt thou do for a black feather, 
 Pasquali ? 
 
 Pasquali. Hast thou no money ? 
 
 Fiametta. No — save my dowry of six pieces. 
 
 Pasquali. Give the pieces to me, and thy dowry will be 
 ten times greater. 
 
 Fiametta. An it be not six times less, I will never trust 
 counting upon fingers. 
 
 Pasquali. Hast thou no dread of dying uncelebrated ? 
 
 Fiametta. If it be sin, I have a dread of it by baptism. 
 
 Pasquali. Is it a sin to neglect thy immortality ? 
 
 Fiametta. Ay — it is. 
 
 Pasquali. Then take heed how thou fallest into sin — 
 for to be the friend of a poet is to be immortal, and thou 
 art no friend of mine if I have not thy six pieces. 
 
 Fiametta. But how shall I have six times more, Master 
 Pasquali ? 
 
 Pasquali. In reputation ! Wouldst thou marry a fool ? 
 
 Fiametta. No, truly. 
 
 Pasquali. Then if thy husband be wise, he will be 
 more proud that thou art famous, than covetous of thy six 
 pieces. 
 
 Fiametta. And shall I be famous? (Gives him the 
 money.) 
 
 Pasquali. Thou wilt live when Sforza is dead ! 
 
 Fiametta. Is not Sforza famous, then ? 
 
 Pasquali. He hath fame while he lives, and so had King 
 Priam of Troy. But if Homer had not written, Priam 
 would have been forgot and Troy too ; and if Sforza live 
 not in poetry, he is as dead in a century — as thou and 
 Laura were, but for thy favors to Petrarch and Pasquali. 
 
 Fiametta. Why does not Sforza give thee six pieces and 
 be immortal ? 
 
 Pasquali. Truly — he pays more for a less matter ! It 
 is the blindness of great men that they slight the poets. 
 Look here now — hath not Sfcrza shed blood, and wasted 
 treasure, and taken a thousand murders on his soul, to 
 leave a name after him ? 
 
 Fiametta. I misdoubt he hath. 
 
 Pasquali. Now will I whom he thinks less worthy than 
 a trumpeter, sit down, and with a scrape of my pen, make 
 a dog's name more known to posterity. 
 
 Fiametta. When thou speakest of a dog, I think of my 
 lady's page. Canst thou tell me why she should love him 
 so out of reason ? 
 
 Pasquali. Canst thou tell me why the moon riseth not 
 every night, as the sun every day ? 
 
 Fiametta. No — truly. 
 
 Pasquali. Neither can I give thee reason for a woman's 
 fancy — which is as unaccountable in its caprice as the moon 
 in its changes. Hence the sun is called "he," the moon 
 "she." 
 
 Fiametta. Holy Virgin — what it is to be learned ! 
 
 Pasquali. Come, Fiametta ! spend thy dowry while thy 
 mind is enlightened ! 
 
 Fiametta. If I should repent now ! 
 
 Pasquali. Think not of it. If thou shouldst repent to- 
 morrow, I shall still go beseemingly to the funeral, and 
 thou wilt be famous past praying for. Come away ! 
 
 [The garden of the palace of Milan. Enter Bianca m 
 mourning, followed by Sarpellione.] 
 
 Bianca. Liar — 'tis not true ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Wil't please you read this letter from the 
 king, 
 Writ when he sent him to you — 
 
 Bianca (plucks it from him, and tears it to pieces). 
 'Tis a lie 
 Writ by thyself— 
 
 Sarpellione (taking up the pieces). 
 
 The king has written here 
 The story of his birth, and that he is 
 Your brother, pledges his most royal honor — 
 
 Bianca. Lie upon lie — 
 
 Sarpellione. And will maintain the same 
 
 With sword and battle ! 
 
 Bianca. Let him ! There's a Sforza 
 
 Will whip him back to Naples ! Tell him so ! 
 There'll be a duke upon the throne of Milan 
 In three days more, whose children will be kings ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Your brother, madam ! 
 
 Bianca. Liar, no ! my husband ! 
 
 The crown is mine, and I will give it him ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Pardon me, lady, 'tis not yours to give ! 
 While a Visconti lives — and one does live — 
 Princely and like his father — 'tis not yours — 
 And Sforza dare not take it. 
 
 Bianca. He has taken it, 
 
 In taking me. Sforza is duke, I say ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Am I dismissed to Naples with this news ? 
 
 Bianca. Ay — on the instant ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Will you give me leave 
 
 To bid the prince make ready for his journey ? 
 
 Bianca. What prince ? 
 
 Sarpellione. Your brother, madam, who'll come back 
 With the whole league of armed Italy 
 To take the crown he's born to. 
 
 Bianca. I've a page 
 
 I love, called Giulio ! If you mean to ask me 
 If he goes with you — lying traitor ! no ! 
 I love him, and will keep him ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Ay — till Milan 
 
 Knows him for prince, and then farewell to Sforza! 
 He's flown too near the sun ! 
 
 Bianca. Foul raven, silence ! 
 
 What dost thou know of eagles who wert born 
 To mumble over carrion ! Hast thou looked 
 On the high front of Sforza ! Hast thou heard 
 The thunder of his voice ? Hast met his eye ? 
 Tis writ ui>on his forehead : " born a king !" 
 Read it, blind liar! 
 
 Sarpellione. Upon your brother's, lady, 
 
 The world shall read it. 
 
 Bianca. Wilt thou drive me mad ? 
 
 They say all breathing nature has an instinct 
 Of that which would destroy it. I of thee 
 Fee] that abhorrence ! If a glistering serpent 
 Hissed in my path, I could not shudder more, 
 Nor would I kill it sooner — so begone ! 
 I'll strike thee dead else ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Madam ! 
 
 (Exit Sarpellione.) 
 
 Bianca. Tis my brother ! 
 
 At the first word with which he broke it to me 
 My heart gave nature's echo ! Tis my brother ! 
 I would that he were dead — and yet I love him — 
 Love him so well, that I could die for him — 
 Yet hate him that he bars the crown from Sforza. 
 He's betwixt me and heaven ! were he but dead ! 
 Sforza and I would, like the sun and moon, 
 Have all the light the world has ! He must die ! 
 
892 
 
 BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 Milan will rise for him — his boyish spirit 
 Is known and loved in every quarter of it. 
 Naples is powerful, and Venice holds 
 Direct succession holy, and the lords 
 Of all the Marches will cry " down usurper !" 
 For Sforza's glory has o'ershadowed theirs. 
 Both can not live, or I must live unloved — 
 And that were hell — or die, and heaven without him 
 Were but a hell — for I've no soul to go there ! 
 Nothing but love ! no memory but that ! 
 No hope ! no sense ! — Heaven were a madhouse to me ! 
 Hark ! who comes here ? 
 {Enter Sarpellione and Brunorio. Bianca conceals herself.) 
 
 Sarpellione. Strike but this blow, Brunorio — 
 And thou'rt a made man ! 
 
 Brunorio. Sforza sleeps not well. 
 
 Sarpellione. Art thou less strong of arm than he who 
 called thee 
 A brainless ass ! 
 
 Brunorio. 'Sdeath, he did call me so ! 
 
 Sarpellione. And more I never told thee. Pay him 
 for it — 
 And thou wilt save a prince who'll cherish thee, 
 And Sforza's soul a murder — for he'll kill him 
 Ere one might ride to Naples. 
 
 Brunorio. Think'st thou so ? 
 
 Sarpellione. Is it not certain ? If this boy were dead 
 Sforza were duke. With Milan at his back 
 He were the devil. Rather than see this, 
 Alfonso would share half his kingdom with thee. 
 
 Brunorio. I'll do it ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Thou wilt save a prince's life 
 
 Whom he would murder. Now collect thy senses. 
 And look around thee ! On that rustic bank, 
 Close by the fountain, with his armor off, 
 He sleeps away the noon. 
 
 Brunorio. With face uncovered ? 
 
 Sarpellione. Sometimes — but oftener with his mantle 
 drawn 
 Quite over him ! But thou must strike so well, 
 That, should he see thee, he will never tell on't. 
 
 Brunorio. I'd rather he were covered. 
 
 Sarpellione. 'Tis most likely — 
 
 But mark the ground well. By this alley here, 
 You'll creep on unperceived. If he's awake — 
 You're his lieutenant, and may have good reason 
 To seek him any hour ? Are you resolved ? 
 
 Brunorio. I am ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Once more look round you ! 
 
 Brunorio. If he sleep 
 
 To-morrow, he'll ne'er wake ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Why, that's well said — 
 
 Come now and try the horse I've chosen for you. 
 We'll fly like birds with welcome news to Naples ! 
 (Exeunt Sarpellione and Brunorio.) 
 
 Bianca. Thank God that I was here ! Can there be 
 souls 
 So black as these — to plot so foul a murder ! 
 Oh unretributive and silent Heavens ! 
 Heard you these men ? Thank God that I can save him ! 
 The sun shone on them — on these murderers — 
 As it shines now on me ! — Would it were Giulio 
 They thought to murder ! — Ha ! what ready fiend 
 Whispered me that ? Giulio instead of Sforza ! 
 Why that were murder — too! — Brunorio's murder ! — 
 Not mine ! — my hands would show no blood for it ! 
 If Giulio were asleep beneath the mantle 
 To-morrow noon, and Sforza in his chamber — 
 What murder lies upon my soul for that ? 
 
 I'll come again to-night, and see the place, 
 
 And think on't in the dark ! [Exit Bianca. 
 
 ACT V. 
 
 [Same scene in the garden. Enter Bianca.] 
 
 Bianca. No ! no ! come hate — come worse indiffer- 
 ence ! 
 
 Come anything — I will not ! He is gone 
 To bring me flowers now, for he sees I'm sad ; 
 Yet, with his delicate thought, asks not the reason, 
 But tries to steal it from me ! — could I kill him 1 
 His eyes grew moist this morn, for I was pale — 
 With thinking of his murder ! could I kill him ! 
 Oh Sforza ! I could walk on burning ploughshares. 
 But not kill pitying Giulio ! I could starve — 
 Or freeze with wintry cold — or swallow fire — 
 Or die a death for every drop of blood 
 Kneeling at my sad heart, but not kill Giulio ! 
 No — no — no ! no ! 
 
 (Sforza comes in dejectedly.) 
 My lord ! My noble lord ! 
 
 Sforza. Give you good day, Bianca ! 
 Bianca. Are you ill, 
 
 That you should drop your words so sorrowfully ? 
 Sforza. I am not ill, nor well ! 
 Bianca. Not well ? 
 
 Sforza. The pulse 
 
 Beats on sometimes, when the heart quite runs down. 
 I'm very well ! 
 
 Bianca. My lord, you married rne — 
 
 The priest said so — to share both joy and sorrow. 
 For the last privilege I've shed sweet tears ! — 
 If I'm not worthy — 
 
 Sforza. Nay — you are ! — I thank you 
 
 For many proofs of gentle disposition, 
 Which, to say truth, I scarcely looked for in you — 
 Knowing that policy, and not your choice, 
 United us ! 
 
 Bianca. My lord ! 
 
 Sforza. I say you're worthy, 
 
 For this, to see my heart — if you could do so, 
 But there's a grief in't now which brings you joy, 
 And so you'll pardon me ! 
 (Giulio comes in with aheap of flowers, which he throws 
 down and listens.) 
 Bianca. That can not be ! 
 
 Sforza. Listen to this. I had a falcon lately, 
 That I had trained, till, in the sky above him, 
 He was the monarch of all birds that flew. 
 I loved him next my heart, and had no joy, 
 But to unloose his feet, and see the eagle 
 Quail at his fiery swoop ! I brought him here ! 
 Sitting one day upon my wrist, he heard 
 The nightingale you love, sing in the tree, 
 While I applauded him. With jealous heart 
 My falcon sprang to kill him ; and with fear 
 For your sweet bird, I struck him to my feet ; 
 And since that hour, he droops. His heart is broke, 
 And he'll ne'er soar again ! 
 
 Page. Why, one such bird 
 
 Were worth a thousand nightingales. 
 
 Bianca. (Aside — Poor boy ! 
 
 He utters his own doom !) (To Sf.) My lord, I have 
 A slight request, which you will not refuse me. 
 Please you, to-day sleep in your chamber. I 
 Will give you reason for't. 
 
 Sforza. Be't as you will ! 
 
 The noon creeps on apace, and in my dreams 
 I may forget this heaviness. (Goes in.) 
 
 Bianca. Be stern, 
 
 Strong heart ! and think on Sforza ! Giulio ! 
 Page. Madam ! 
 
 Bianca. (Aside. — He's hot and weary now, and will 
 drink freely 
 This opiate in his cup, and from his sound 
 And sudden sleep he'll wake in Paradise.) 
 Giulio, I say ! (She mixes an opiate.) 
 
 Page. Sweet lady, pardon me ! 
 
 I dreamed I was in heaven, and feared to stir 
 Lest I should jar some music. Was't your voice 
 I heard sing, 'Giulio?' 
 
 Bianca. (Aside — Oh, ye pitying angels, 
 
 Let him not love me most, when I would kill him.) 
 Drink ! Giulio ! 
 Page. Is it sweet ? 
 
 Bianca. The sweetest cup 
 
 You'll drink in this world ! 
 
 Page. I can make it sweeter — 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 893 
 
 Bianca. And how ? 
 
 Page. With your health in it ! 
 
 Bianca. Drink it not ! 
 
 Not my health ! Drink what other health thou wilt ! 
 Not mine — not mine ! 
 
 Page. Then here's the noble falcon 
 
 That Sforza told us of ! Would you not kill 
 The nightingale that broke his spirit, madam? 
 
 Bianca. Oh Giulio ! Giulio ! ( Weeps.) 
 
 Page. Nay — I did not think 
 
 You loved your singing bird so well, dear lady ! 
 
 Bianca. (He'll break my heart !) 
 
 Page. Say truly ! if the falcon 
 
 Must pine unless the nightingale were dead, 
 Would you not kill it ? 
 
 Bianca. Though my life went with it — 
 
 I must do so ! 
 
 Page. Why— so I think ! And yet 
 
 If I had fed the nightingale, and loved him ; 
 And he were innocent, as, after all 
 He is, you know — I should not like to kill him — 
 Not with my own hands ! 
 
 Bianca. Now, relentless heavens, 
 
 Must I be struck with daggers through and through ! 
 Speaks not a mocking demon with his lips ? 
 I will not kill him ! 
 
 Page. Sforza has gone in — 
 
 May I sleep there, sweet lady, in his place ? 
 
 Bianca. No, boy ! thou shalt not ! 
 
 Page. Then will you ? 
 
 Bianca. Oh God ! 
 
 I would I could ! and have no waking after ! 
 Come hither, Giulio ! nay — nay — stop not there ! 
 Come on a little, and I'll make thy pillow 
 Softer than ever mine will be again ! 
 Tell me you love me ere you go to sleep ! 
 
 Page. With all my soul, dear mistress ! (Drops asleep.) 
 
 Bianca. Now he 
 
 This mantle for his pall — but stay — his shape 
 Looks not like Sforza under it. Fair flowers, 
 (Heaps them at his feet, and spreads the mantle over all.) 
 Your innocence to his ! Exhale together, 
 Pure spirit and sweet fragrance ! So — one kiss ! 
 Giulio ! my brother ! Who comes there ? Wake, Giulio ! 
 Or thou'lt be murdered ! Nay — 'twas but the wind ! 
 
 (Withdraws on tiptoe, and crouches behind a tree.) 
 I will kneel here and pray ! 
 (Brunorio creeps in, followed by Sarpellione at a distance.) 
 Hark! 
 
 Sarpellione. See — he sleeps. 
 
 Strike well, and fear not ! 
 
 Bianca (springing forward as he strikes). 
 
 Giulio ! Giulio ! wake ! 
 Ah God! 
 (She drops on the body, the murderer escapes and Sforza 
 rushes in. As he bends over her the scene closes.) 
 
 [A road outside the walls of Milan. Enter Sarpellione and 
 
 Biunorio, flying from the city, and met by Pasquali.] 
 
 Pasqjiali. What news, sirs ? 
 
 (As they attempt to pass him without answer, he steps before 
 
 Sarpellione.) 
 
 Stay, count, I've a word with you ! 
 Sarpellione. Stand off, and let me pass ! 
 Pasquali. Nay, with your leave 
 
 One single word ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Brunorio ! hasten forward, 
 
 And loose my bridle ! I'll be there o' the instant ! 
 
 (Brunorio hastens on.) 
 What would you say ? 
 
 Pasquali. My lord ! I hear the bell 
 
 Tolling in Milan, that is never heard 
 But at some dread alarm. 
 
 Sarpellione (pressing to go on). Is that all? 
 Pasquali. Stay ! 
 
 I met a flying peasant here just now, 
 Who muttered of some murder, and flew on ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Slave ! let me pass ! 
 (Draws, and Pasquali confronts him with his sword.) 
 
 Pasquali. My lord ! you once essayed 
 
 To tempt me to a murder. Something tells me 
 That this hot haste has guilt upon its heels, 
 And you shall stay till I know more of it. 
 Down with your point ! 
 
 Sarpellione. Villain ! respect my office ! 
 
 Pasquali. No " villain," and no murderer ! In Milan 
 They've soldiers' law, and if your skirts are bloody, 
 You'll get small honor for your coat, ambassador ! 
 Bear back, I say ! 
 (They fight, and Sarpellione falls, disarmed on his knee.) 
 
 Sarpellione. In mercy, spare my life ! 
 
 Pasquali. Up, coward! You shall go before to 
 Milan, 
 And meet the news ! If you are innocent, 
 I'll ne'er believe a secret prompting more. 
 If not, I've done the state a worthy service. 
 On, on, I say ! 
 (Drives Sarpellione out before him at the point of his sword.) 
 
 [A room of state in the palace. Enter Rossano ana a 
 Priest.] 
 
 Rossano. Will she not eat ? 
 
 Priest. She hath not taken food 
 
 Since the boy died ! 
 
 Rossano. Nor slept ? 
 
 Priest. Nor closed an eyelid ! 
 
 Rossano. What does she ? 
 
 Priest. Still, with breathless repetition, 
 
 Goes through the page's murder — makes his couch 
 As he lay down i' the garden — heaps again 
 The flowers upon him to eke out his length ; 
 Then kisses him, and hides to see him killed ! 
 'Twould break your heart to look on't. 
 
 Rossano. Is't the law 
 
 That she must crown him ? 
 
 Priest. If, upon the death 
 
 Of any duke of Milan, the succession 
 Fall to a daughter, she may rule alone, 
 Giving her husband neither voice nor power 
 If she so please. But if she delegate 
 The crown to him, or in extremity 
 Impose it, it is not legitimate, 
 Save he is crowned by her own living hands 
 In presence of the council. 
 (Enter Sforza, hastily, in full armor, except the helmet.) 
 
 Sforza. Ho ! Rossano ! 
 
 Rossano. My lord ! 
 
 Sforza. Send quick, and summon in the council 
 
 To see the crown imposed ! Bianca dies ! 
 My throne hangs on your speed ! Fly ! 
 (Exit Rossano.) 
 
 Sentry, ho ! 
 Despatch a hundred of my swiftest horse 
 Toward Naples ! Bring me back Sarpellione ! 
 Alive or dead, a thousand ducats for him ! 
 Quick ! 
 
 (Exit sentinel, re-enter Rossano.) 
 
 Rossano. I have sped your orders ! 
 (Enter a messenger.) 
 
 4 Please, my lord, 
 
 Lady Bianca prays your presence with her ! 
 
 Sforza. Away ! I'll come ! (To Rossano.) Go, man 
 the citadel 
 With my choice troops ! Post them at every gate ! 
 Send for the Milanese to scout or forage, 
 I care not what, so they're without the wall ! 
 And hark, Rossano ! if you hear a knell 
 Wail out before the coronation peal, — 
 Telling to Milan that Bianca's dead, 
 And there's no duke — down with the ducal banner, 
 And, like an eagle, to the topmost tower 
 Up with my gonfalon ! Away ! 
 
894 
 
 BIANCA VISCONTi. 
 
 {Re-enter the messenger from Bianca.) 
 
 My lord — 
 Sforza. I come ! I come ! 
 Pasquali (without). In, in ! 
 
 (Enter Sarpellione, followed by Pasquali.) 
 Sarpellione (aghast at the sight of Sforza). Alive ! 
 Sforza. Ha, devil ! 
 
 Have you come back to get some fresher news ? 
 Alfonso'd know who's duke ! While you are hanging, 
 I'll ride to Naples with the news myself! 
 Ha ! ha ! my star smiles on me ! 
 (Bianca rushes in and crouches at the side of Sforza, as if 
 hiding from something beyond him.) 
 Bianca. Hark ! I hear them ! 
 
 Come ! come ! Brunorio ! — If you come not quick, 
 My heart will break and wake him ! 
 
 (Presses her hand painfully to her side.) 
 
 Crack not yet ! 
 Nay, think on Sforza ! Think 'tis for his love ! 
 Giulio will be an angel up in heaven, 
 And Sforza will drink glory from my hand ! 
 Come! come! Brunorio! (Screams piercingly.) 
 
 Ah, who murdered Giulio ! 
 Not I !— not I ! not I ! 
 
 Sforza (watching her with emotion). 
 
 Oh God ! how dearly 
 Are bought the proudest triumphs of this world ! 
 Bianca. Will the bell never peal ! 
 Priest (to an attendant). On that string only 
 
 Her mind plays truly now. Her life hangs on it ! 
 The waiting for the bell of coronation 
 Is the last link that holds ! 
 
 Sforza (raising her). My much-loved wife ! 
 Bianca. Is it thee, Sforza ? Has the bell pealed yet ? 
 Sforza. Think not of that, but take some drink, 
 Bianca ! 
 You'll kill me this way ! 
 
 Bianca (dashing down the cup). Think you I'll drink 
 
 fire ! 
 Sforza. Then taste of this ! (Offers her a pomegran- 
 ate.) 
 Bianca (laughing bitterly). I'm not a fool ! I know 
 The fruit of hell has ashes at the core ! 
 Mock me some other way ! 
 Sforza. My poor Bianca ! 
 
 Bianca. Ha ! ha ! that's well done ! You've the 
 shape of Sforza, 
 And you're a devil, and can mock his voice, 
 But Sforza never spoke so tenderly ! 
 You overdo it ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 Sforza. God help me, 
 
 I would her brother had been duke in Milan 
 And I his slave— so she had lived and loved me ! 
 
 Bianca. Can you see heaven from hence ! I thought 
 'twas part 
 Of a soul's agony in hell to see 
 The blest afar off ? Can I not see Giulio ? 
 (Struggles, as if to escape something before her eyes.) 
 Sforza's between ! 
 
 Sforza. Bianca ! sayst thou that ? 
 
 (Struggles with himself a moment.) 
 Nay, then, 'tis time to say farewell Ambition ! 
 
 (Turns to the Priest.) 
 Look, father ! I'm unskilled in holy things, 
 But I have heard, the sacrifice of that 
 Which the repenting soul loved more than heaven, 
 Will work a miracle ! 
 (Takes his sword from his scabbard, and proceeds in a 
 deeper voice.) 
 I love my sword 
 As never mother loved her rosy child ! 
 My heart is in its hilt— my life, my soul, 
 Follow it like the light ! Say thou dost think 
 If I give that up for a life of peace, 
 Heaven will give back her reason — 
 Priest (eagerly). Doubt it not ! 
 
 Sforza. Then— take it ! 
 (Drops the hilt into his hand, and holds it a moment.) 
 Sarpellione (in a hoarse whisper). Welcome news for 
 King Alfonso ! 
 
 Sforza (starting). Fiend! sayest thou so! Nay, 
 then come back my sword. 
 I'll follow in its gleaming track to Naples 
 If the world perish ! 
 
 (Enter Rossano.) 
 
 Now, what news, Rossano ? 
 Rossano. In answer to your wish, the noble council 
 Consent to see the crown imposed in private, 
 Three delegated lords will presently 
 Attend you here ! 
 
 Sforza (energetically). Tell him who strikes the bell, 
 To look forth from his tower and watch this window ! 
 When he shall see a handkerchief wave hence 
 Let him peal out. (Attendant goes out.) 
 
 My gonfalon shall float 
 Over St. Mark's before Foscari dreams 
 There's a new duke in Milan ! Let Alfonso 
 Look to the north ! 
 
 (Enter attendant.) 
 attendant. My lord ! the noble council 
 
 Wait to come in ! 
 
 (Sforza waves his hand, and they enter.) 
 1st Lord. Health to the noble Sforza ! 
 
 Sforza. My lords, the deep calamity we suffer 
 Must cut off ceremony. Milan's heiress 
 Lies there before you failing momently, 
 But holds in life to give away the crown. 
 If you're content to see her put it on me 
 Let it be so as quickly as it may ! 
 Give signal for the bell ! 
 (The handkerchief is waved and the bell peals. Bianca 
 rises to her feet.) 
 Bianca. It peals at last ! 
 
 Where am I ? Bring some wine, dear Giulio ! 
 
 (Looks round fearfully.) 
 Am I awake now ! I've been dreaming here 
 That he was dead ! Oh God ! a horrid dream ! 
 Come hither, Sforza ! I have dreamt a dream, 
 If I can tell it you — will make your hair 
 Stand up with horror ! 
 
 Sforza. Tell it not ! 
 
 Bianca. This Giulio 
 
 Was, in my dream, my brother ! how I knew it 
 I do not now remember — but I did ! 
 And loved him — (that you know must be a dream) 
 Better than you ! 
 
 Sforza. What — better ? 
 
 Bianca. Was't not strange ? 
 
 Being my brother, he must have the crown ! 
 Stay ! — is my father dead — or was't i' the dream too ? 
 Sforza. He's dead, Bianca ! 
 
 Bianca. Well ! you loved me not, 
 
 And Giulio did — and somehow you should hate me 
 If he were duke ; and so I killed him, loving me, 
 For you that loved me not ! Is it not strange 
 That we can dream such things ? The manner of it — 
 To see it in a play would break your heart — 
 It was so pitiless ! Look here ! this boy 
 Brings me a heap of flowers ! — I'll show it you 
 As it was done before me in the dream ! 
 Don't weep ! 'twas but a dream — but I'll not sleep 
 Again till I've seen Giulio — the blood seemed , 
 So ghastly natural ! I shall see it, Sforza, 
 Till I have passed my hand across his side ! 
 
 (Turning to the attendants.) 
 Will some one call my page ? 
 
 Sforza. My own Bianca, 
 
 Will you not drink ? 
 
 (She drops the cup in horror.) 
 Bianca. Just such a cup as that 
 
 Had liquid fire in't when the deed was done — 
 A devil mocked me with it ! 
 
 (Another cup is brought, and she drinks.) 
 This is wine ! 
 Thank God, I wake now ! 
 
 (She turns to an attendant.) 
 
 Will you see if Giulio 
 Is in the garden ? 
 
BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
 895 
 
 Sforza. Strike the bell once more ? 
 
 Bianca. He kissed me ere he slept — wilt listen, 
 
 Sforza ? 
 Sforza. Tell me no more, sweet one ! 
 Bianca. And then I heaped 
 
 The very flowers he brought me, at his feet, 
 To eke his body out as long as yours — 
 Was't not a hellish dream ? 
 (The bell strikes again, and she covers her ears in horror.) 
 
 That bell! Oh God, 
 'Tis no dream — now I know — yes — yes — I know 
 These be the councillors — and you are Sforza, 
 And that's Rossano — and I killed my brother 
 To make you duke ! Yes, yes ! I see it all ! 
 Oh God ! Oh God ! 
 
 (She covers her face, and weeps.) 
 Sforza. My lords ! her reason rallies 
 
 Little by little. With this flood of tears, 
 Her brain's relieved, and she'll give over raving. 
 My wife ! Bianca ! If thou ever lovedst me, 
 Look on my face ! 
 
 Bianca. Oh, Sforza, I have given 
 
 For thy dear love, the eyes I had to see it, 
 The ears to hear it. I have broke my heart 
 In reaching fort. 
 
 Sforza. Ay — but 'tis thine now, sweet one ! 
 
 The life-drops in my heart are less dear to me ! 
 
 Bianca. Too late ! you've crushed the light out of a 
 gem 
 You did not know the price of! Had you spoken 
 But one kind word upon my bridal night ! 
 Sforza. Forgive me, my Bianca ! 
 Bianca. I am parched 
 
 With thirst now, and my eyes grow faint and dim. 
 Are you here, Sforza ! mourn not for me long ! 
 But bury me with Giulio ! (Starts from him.) 
 
 Hark ! I hear 
 His voice now ! Do the walls of Paradise 
 
 Jut over hell ? I heard his voice, I say ! 
 
 (Strikes off Sforza, who approaches her.) 
 Unhand me, devil ! You've the shape of one 
 Who upon earth had no heart ! Can you take 
 No shape but that ? Can you not look like Giulio ? 
 
 (Sforza falls back, struck with remorse.) 
 Hark ! 'tis his low, imploring voice again — 
 He prays for poor Bianca ! And look, see you ! 
 The portals stir ! Slow, slow — and difficult — 
 (Creeps forward with her eyes upward.) 
 Pray on, my brother ! Pray on, Giulio ! 
 I come! (Falls on her face.) 
 
 (Sforza drops on his knee, pale and trembling.) 
 Sforza. My soul shrinks with unnatural fear ! 
 What heard I then ? " Sforza, give up thy sword !" 
 Was it from heaven or hell ! 
 
 (Shrinks as if from some spectre in the air.) 
 I will ! I will ! 
 (Holds out his sword as if to the monk, and Sarpellione, who 
 has been straining forward to watch Bianca, springs 
 suddenly to her side.) 
 Sarpellione. She's dead ! Ha ! ha ! who's duke in 
 Milan now ? 
 
 (Sforza rises with a bound.) 
 Sforza. Sforza ! * 
 
 (He flies to the vnndow, and waves the handkerchief. The 
 bell peals out, and as he rushes to Bianca, she moves, lifts 
 her head, looks wildly around, and struggles to her feet. 
 Rossano gives her the crown — she looks an instant smi- 
 lingly on Sforza, and with a difficult but calm effort pla- 
 ces it on his head. All drop on one knee to do allegiance, 
 and as Sforza lifts himself to his loftiest height, with a 
 look of triumph at Sarpellione, Bianca sinks dead at his 
 feet.) [Curtain falls. 
 
 THE END OP BIANCA VISCONTI. 
 
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