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NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1894 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, to the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of PRESSWORK BY JOHN WILSON AND SON, UNIVERSITY PRESS. CONTENTS. PACK SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES . . . . . . i PHYSICAL COURAGE . 31- A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC ...'... 53 THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS . . . . 'yjf' BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION 105 GYMNASTICS 131 A NEW COUNTERBLAST 177 THE HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS . . . . . 199 APRIL DAYS 223 MY OUT-DOOR STUDY 247 WATER-LILIES .269 THE LIFE OF BIRDS . . . . . . . 293 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS . . . 317 SNOW 339 2136237 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. EVER since the time of that dyspeptic heathen, Plotinus, the saints have been " ashamed of their bodies." What is worse, they have usually had reason for the shame. Of the four famous Latin fathers, Jerome describes his own limbs as misshapen, his skin as squalid, his bones as scarcely holding together; while Gregory the Great speaks in his Epistles of his own large size, as contrasted with his weakness and infirmities. Three of the four Greek fathers Chrysostom, Basil, and Greg- ory Nazianzen ruined their health early, and were invalids for the remainder of their days. Three only of the whole eight were able-bodied men, Ambrose, Au- gustine, and Athanasius ; and the permanent influence of these three has been far greater, for good or for evil, than that of all the others put together. Robust military saints there have doubtless been in the Roman Catholic Church : George, Michael, Sebastian, Eustace, Martin, Hubert the Hunter, and Christopher the Christian Hercules. But these have always held a very secondary place in canonization. Maurice and his whole Theban legion also were sainted together, to the number of six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six; doubtless they were stalwart men, but there never yet has been a chapel 4 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIED erected to one of them. The mediaeval type of sanctity was a strong soul in a weak body ; and it could be inten- sified either by strengthening the one or by further de- bilitating the other. The glory lay in contrast, not in combination. Yet, to do them justice, they conceded a strong and stately beauty to their female saints, Cath- erine, Agnes, Agatha, Barbara, Cecilia, and the rest. It was reserved for the modern Pre-Raphaelites to attempt the combination of a maximum of saintliness with a min- imum of pulmonary and digestive capacity. But, indeed, from that day to this, the saints by spirit- ual laws have usually been sinners against physical laws, and the artists have merely followed the examples they found. Vasari records, that Carotto's masterpiece of painting, " The Three Archangels," at Verona, was criti- cised because the limbs of the angels were too slender, and Carotto, true to his conventional standard, replied, " Then they will fly the better." Saints have been flying to heaven, for the same reason, ever since, and have commonly flown young. Indeed, the earlier some such saints cast off" their bodies the better, they make so little use of them. Chittagutta, the Buddhist recluse, dwelt in a cave in Ceylon. His devout visitors one day remarked on the miraculous beauty of the legendary paintings, representing scenes from the life of Buddha, which adorned the walls. The holy man informed them that, during his sixty years' res- idence in the cave, he had been too much absorbed in meditation to notice the existence of the paintings, but he would take their word for it. And in this non-intercourse with the visible world there has been an apostolical suc- cession, extending from Chittagutta down to the Andover divinity-student who refused to join his companions in SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 5 their admiring gaze on that wonderful autumnal landscape which spreads itself before the Seminary Hill in October, but marched back into the library, ejaculating, " Lord, turn thou mine eyes from beholding vanity ! " It is to be reluctantly recorded, in fact, that the Prot- estant saints have not ordinarily had much to boast of, in physical stamina, as compared with the Roman Catholic. They have not got far beyond Plotinus. It is scarcely worth while to quote Calvin on this point, for he, 33 everybody knows, was an invalid for his whole lifetime. But it does seem hard that the jovial Luther, in the midst of his ale and skittles, should have deliberately censured Juvenal's mens sana in corpora scmo, as a pagan maxim ! If Saint Luther fails us, where are the advocates of the body to look for comfort ? Nothing this side of an- cient Greece, we fear, will afford adequate examples of the union of saintly souls and strong bodies. Pythagoras the sage may or may not have been identical with Py- thagoras the inventor of pugilism, and he was, at any rate, (in the loving words of Bentley,) " a lusty proper man. and built, as it were, to make a good boxer." Cleanthes, whose sublime " Prayer " is, doubtless, the highest strain left of early piety, was a boxer likewise. Plato was a famous wrestler, and Socrates was unequalled for his mil- itary endurance. Nor was one of these, like their puny follower Plotinus, too weak-sighted to revise his own manuscripts. It would be tedious to analyze the causes of this modern deterioration of the saints. The fact is clear. There is in the community an impression that physical vigor and spiritual sanctity are incompatible. Recent ecclesiastical history records that a young Orthodox divine lost his parish by swimming the Merrimac River, and that an- 6 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. other was compelled to ask a dismissal in consequence of vanquishing his most influential parishioner in a game of ten-pins ; it seemed to the beaten party very unclericaL The writer further remembers a match, in a certain sea- side bowling-alley, in which two brothers, young divines, took part. The sides being made up, with the exception of these two players, it was necessary to find places for them also. The head of one bide accordingly picked his man, on the avowed presumption that the best preacher would naturally be the worst bowler. The athletic capaci- ty, he thought, would be in inverse ratio to the sanctity. It is a satisfaction to add, that in this case his hopes were signally disappointed. But it shows which way the pop- ular impression lies. The poets have probably assisted in maintaining the delusion. How many cases of consumption Wordsworth must have accelerated by his assertion that " the good die first"! Happily he lived to disprove his own maxim. Professor Peirce has proved by statistics that the best scholars in our colleges survive the rest ; virtue, like in- tellect, doubtless tends to longevity. The experience of the literary class shows that all excess is destructive, and that we need the harmonious action of all the faculties. Of the brilliant roll of the u young men of 1830," in Paris, Balzac, Soulie*, De Musset, De Bernard, Sue, and their compeers, it is said that nearly every one has already perished, in the prune of life. What is the ex- planation? A stern one: opium, tobacco, wine, and licentiousness. " All died of softening of the brain or spinal marrow, or swelling of the heart." No doubt many of the noble and the pure were dying prematurely at the same time ; but it proceeded from the same essential cause : physical laws disobeyed and bodies exhausted SASVTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 7 The evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned, as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The deli- rium tremens of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than the second childishness of the pure and abstemious Southey. But, happily, times change, and saints with them. Our moral conceptions are expanding to take in that " athletic virtue " of the Greeks, apen) yvpvacrriKT], which Dr. Arnold, by precept and practice, defended. The modern English " Broad Church " aims at breadth of shoulders, as well as of doctrines. Our American saintship, also, is begin- ning to have a body to it, a " Body of Divinity," indeed. Look at our three great popular preachers. The vigor of the paternal blacksmith still swings the sinewy arm of Beecher ; Parker performed the labors, mental and phys- ical, of four able-bodied men, until even his great strength yielded ; and if ever dyspepsia attack the burly frame of Chapin, we fancy that dyspepsia will get the worst of it. This is as it should be. One of the most potent causes of the ill-concealed alienation between the clergy and the people, in our community, is the supposed deficiency, on the part of the former, of a vigorous, manly life. There is a certain moral and physical anhcemia, this bloodless- ness, which separates most of our saints, more effectually than a cloister, from the strong life of the age. What satirists upon religion are those parents who say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, " He is born for a minister," while the ruddy, the brave, and the strong are as promptly assigned to a secular ca- reer ! Never yet did an ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls, without living to repent it in maturity These precocious little sentimen- 8 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. talists wither away like blanched potato-plants in a cellar; and then comes some vigorous youth from his out-dooi work or play, and grasps the rudder of the age, as he grasped the oar, the bat, or the plough. Everybody admires the physical training of military and naval schools. But these same persons never seem to imagine that the body is worth cultivating for any pur- pose, except to annihilate the bodies of others. Yet it needs more training to preserve life than to destroy it. The vernation of a literary man is far more perilous than that of a frontier dragoon. The latter dies, at most but once, by an Indian bullet ; the former dies daily, unless he be warned in time, and take occasional refuge in the sad- dle and the prairie with the dragoon. What battle-piece is so pathetic as Browning's " Grammarian's Funeral " ? Do not waste your gymnastics on the West Point or Annapolis student, whose whole life will be one of active exercise, but bring them into the professional schools and the counting-rooms. Whatever may be the exceptional cases, the stern truth remains, that the great deeds of the world can be more easily done by illiterate men than by sickly ones. Wisely said Horace Mann, " All through the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished, for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds." And yet more elo- quently it has been said by a younger American thinker, Wasson, " Intellect in a weak body is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket, the richer he would be, under other circumstances, by so much the greater his danger now." Of course, the mind has immense control over physical endurance, and every one knows that among soldiers, sail- ors, emigrants, and woodsmen, the leaders, though more SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 9 delicately nurtured, will often endure hardship better than the followers, " because," says Sir Philip Sidney, ''they are supported by the great appetites of honor." But for all these triumphs of nervous power a reaction lies in store, as in the case of the superhuman efforts often made by delicate women. And besides, there is a point beyond which no mental heroism can ignore the body, as, for instance, in sea-sickness and toothache. Can virtue arrest consumption, or self-devotion set free the agonized breath of asthma, or heroic energy defy paralysis ? More for- midable still are those subtle influences of disease, which cannot be resisted, because their source is unseen. Vol- taire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime-minister ; and Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world. But part of the religious press still clings to the objec- tion, that admiration of physical strength belonged to the barbarous ages of the world. So it certainly did, and so the race was kept alive through those ages. They had that one merit, at least ; and so surely as an exclusively intellectual civilization ignored it, the arm of some robust barbarian prostrated that civilization at last. What Sis- mondi says of courage is pre-eminently true of that bodily vigor which it usually presupposes : it is by no means the first of virtues, but its loss is more fatal than that of all others. " Were it possible to unite the advantages of a perfect government with the cowardice of a whole people, those advantages would be utterly valueless, since they would be utterly without security." Physical health is a necessary condition of all perma- nent success. To the American people it has a stupen- dous importance, because it is the only attribute of power 1* 10 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. in which they are losing ground. Guarantee us against physical degeneracy, and we can risk all other perils, financial crises, Slavery, Romanism, Mormonism, Border Ruffians, and New York assassins; "domestic malice, foreign levy, nothing " can daunt us. Guarantee to Amer icans health, and Mrs. Stowe cannot frighten them with all the prophecies of Dred ; but when her sister Catherine informs us that in all the vast female acquaintance of the Beecher family there are not a dozen healthy women, one is a little tempted to despair of the republic. The one drawback to satisfaction in our Public-School System is the physical weakness which it reveals and helps to perpetuate. One seldom notices a ruddy face in the school-room, without tracing it back to a Transatlantic origin. The teacher of a large school in Canada went so far as to declare to me, that she could recognize the chil- dren born this side the line by their invariable appear- ance of ill-health joined with intellectual precocity, stamina wanting, and the place supplied by equations. Look at a class of boys or girls in our Grammar Schools ; a glance along the line of their backs affords a study of geometrical curves. You almost long to reverse the position of their heads, as Dante has those of the false prophets, and thus improve their figures ; the rounded shoulders affording a vigorous chest, and the hollow chest an excellent back. There are statistics to show that the average length of human life is increasing ; and facts to indicate a develop- ment of size and strength with advancing civilization. Indeed, it is generally supposed that any physical deteri- oration is local, being peculiar to the United States. But the " Englishwoman's Journal " asserts that " it is allowed by all, that the appearance of the English peasant, in the SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. U present day, is very different to [from] what it was fifty years ago ; the robust, healthy, hard-looking country- woman or girl is as rare now as the pale, delicate, nervous female of our times would ha\e been a century ago." And the writer proceeds to give alarming illustrations, based upon the appearance of children in English schools, both in city and country. We cannot speak for England, but certainly no one can visit Canada without being struck with the spectacle of a more athletic race of people than our own. One sees a large proportion of rosy female faces and noble manly figures. In the shop-windows, in winter weather, hang snow-shoes, " gentlemen's and ladies' sizes." The street- corners inform you that the members of the " Curling Club" are to meet to-day at " Dolly's," and the " Montreal Fox-hounds" at St. Lawrence Hall to-morrow. And next day comes off the annual steeple-chase, at the "Mile- End Course," ridden by gentlemen of the city with their own horses ; a scene, by the way, whose exciting interest can scarcely be conceived by those accustomed only to " trials of speed " at agricultural exhibitions. Everything indicates out-door habits and athletic constitutions. All this may be met by the alleged distinction between a good idle constitution and a good working constitution, since the latter often belongs to persons who make no show of physical powers. But this only means that there are different temperaments and types of physical organ- ization, while, within the limits of each, the distinction between a healthy and a diseased condition still holds ; and it is that alone which is essential. More specious is the claim of the Fourth-of-July ora- tors, that, health or no health, it is the sallow Americans, and not the robust English, who are really leading thp 12 SAINTS AND THEIR BODIES. world. But this, again, is a question of temperaments. The Englishman concedes the greater intensity, but pre- fers a more solid and permanent power. He justly sets the noble masonry and vast canals of Montreal, against the Aladdin's palaces of Chicago. "I observe," admits the Englishman, "that an American can accomplish more, at a single effort, than any other man on earth ; but I also observe that he exhausts himself in the achievement. Kane, a delicate invalid, astounds the world by his two Arctic winters, and then dies in tropical Cuba." The solution is simple ; nervous energy is grand, and so is muscular power ; combine the two, and you move the world. One may assume as admitted, therefore, the deficiency of physical health in America, and the need of a great amendment. But into the general question of cause and cure it is not here needful to enter. In view of the vast variety of special theories, and the inadequacy of any one, (or any dozen,) it is wiser to forbear. Perhaps the best diagnosis of the universal American disease is to be found in Andral's famous description of the cholera : " Anatomi- cal characteristics, insufficient ; cause, mysterious ; nature, hypothetical ; symptoms, characteristic ; diag- nosis, easy ; treatment, very doubtful." Every man must have his hobby, however, and it is a jpeat deal to ride only one hobby at a time. For the present the writer disavows all minor ones. He forbears giving his pet arguments in defence of animal food, and in opposition to tobacco, coffee, and india-rubbers. He will not criticise the old-school physician whom he once knew, who boasted of not having performed a thorough ablution for twenty-five years ; nor will he question the physiolog- ical orthodoxy of Miss Sedgwick's New England artist, SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 13 who represented the Goddess of Health with a pair of flannel drawers on. Still less is it needful to debate, or to taste, Kennedy's Medical Discovery, or R R. R., or the Cow Pepsin. " The wise for cure on exercise depend," saith Dryden, and that is the argument now in ques- tion. A great physician has said, " I know not which is most indispensable for the support of the frame, food or ex- ercise." But who, in this community, really takes exer- cise ? Even the mechanic commonly confines himself to one set of muscles ; the blacksmith acquires strength in his right arm, and the dancing-master in his left leg. But the professional or business man, what muscles has he at all ? The tradition, that Phidippides ran from Athens to Sparta, one hundred and twenty miles, in two days, seems to us Americans as mythical as the Golden Fleece. Even to ride sixty miles in a day, to walk thirty, to run five, or to swim one, would cost most men among us a fit of ill- ness, and many their lives. Let any man test his physi- cal condition, either, if he likes work, by sawing his own cord of wood, or, if he prefers play, by an hour in the gym- nasium or at cricket, and his enfeebled muscular appara- tus will groan with rheumatism for a week. Or let him test the strength of his arms and chest by raising and low- ering himself a few times upon a horizontal bar, or hang- ing by the arms to a rope, and he will probably agree with Galen in pronouncing it robustum validumque labor em. Yet so manifestly are these things within the reach of common constitutions, that a few weeks or months of ju- dicious practice will renovate his whole system, and the most vigorous exercise will refresh him like a cold bath, 14 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. To a well-regulated frame, mere physical exertion, even for an uninteresting object, is a great enjoyment, which is, of course, qualified by the excitement of games and sports. To almost every man there is joy in the memory of these things ; they are the happiest associations of his boyhood. It does not occur to him, that he also might be as happy as a child, if he lived more like one. What do most men know of the " wild joys of living," the daily zest and lux- ury of out-door existence, in which every healthy boy be- side them revels ? skating, while the orange sky of sun- set dies away over the delicate tracery of gray branches, and the throbbing feet pause in their tingling motion, and the frosty air is filled with the shrill sound of distant steel, the resounding of the ice, and the echoes up the hillsides ? sailing, beating up against a stiff breeze, with the waves thumping under the bow, as if a dozen sea-gods had laid their heads together to resist it? climbing tall trees, where the higher foliage, closing around, cures the dizzi- ness which began below, and one feels as if he had left a coward beneath and found a hero above? the joyous hour of crowded life in football or cricket ? the gallant glories of riding, and the jubilee of swimming? The charm which all have found in Tom Brown's M School Days at Rugby " lies simply in this healthy boy's-life which it exhibits, and in the recognition of physical culture, which is so novel to Americans. But efforts after the same thing begin to creep in among our- selves. A few Normal Schools have gymnasiums (rather neglected, however) ; the " Mystic Hall Female Semina- ry " advertises riding-horses ; and we believe the new " Concord School " recognizes boating as an incidental ; but these are all exceptional cases, and far between. Faint and shadowy in early remembrance are certain &AINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 15 ruined structures lingering Stonehenge-like on the Cam- bridge " Delta," and mysterious pits adjoining, into which Freshmen were decoyed to stumble, and of which it is reported that vestiges still remain. Tradition spoke of Dr. Follen and German gymnastics ; but the benefi- cent exotic was transplanted prematurely, and died. The only direct encouragement of athletic exercises which stands out in my memory of academic life was a certain inestimable shed on the " College Wharf," which was for a brief season the paradise of swimmers, and which, after having been deliberately arranged for their accommoda- tion, was suddenly removed, the next season, to make room for coal-bins. Manly sports were not positively discouraged in those days, but that was all. Yet earlier reminiscences of the same beloved Cam- bridge suggest deeper gratitude. Thanks to thee, Wil- liam Wells, first pioneer, in New England, of true classical learning, last wielder of the old English birch, for the manly British sympathy which encouraged to activity the bodies, as well as the brains, of the numerous band of boys who played beneath the stately elms of that pleasant play-ground ! Who among modern pedagogues can show such an example of vigorous pedestrianism in his youth as thou in thine age ? and who now grants half- holidays, unasked, for no other reason than that the skat- ing is good and the boys must use it while it lasts ? It is safe to cling still to the belief, that the Persian curriculum of studies to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth is the better part of a boy's education. As the urchin is undoubtedly physically safer for havitg learned to turn a somerset and fire a gun, perilous though these feats appear to mothers, so his soul is made healthier, larger, freer, stronger, by hours and days of manly exer- 16 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. cise and copious draughts of open air, at whatever risk oi idle habits and bad companions. Even if the balance is sometimes lost, and play prevails, what matter ? It was a pupil of William Wells who wrote " The hours the idle school-boy squandered The man would die ere he *d forget." Only keep in a boy a pure and generous heart, and, whether he work or play, his time can scarcely be wasted. Which really has done most for the education of Boston, Dixwell and Sherwin, or Sheridan and Braman ? Should it prove, however, that the cultivation of active exercises diminishes the proportion of time given by chil- dren to study, it is only an added advantage. Every year confirms the conviction, that our schools, public and pri- vate, systematically overtask the brains of the rising gen- eration. We all complain that Young America grows to mental maturity too soon, and yet we all contribute our share to continue the evil. It is but a few weeks since the New York newspapers were shouting the praises of a girl's school, in that city, where the appointed hours of study amounted to nine and a quarter daily, and the hours of exercise to a bare unit. Almost all the Students' Man- uals assume that American students need stimulus instead of restraint, and urge them to multiply the hours of study and diminish those of out-door amusements and of sleep, as if the great danger did not lie that way already. When will parents and teachers learn to regard mental precocity as a disaster to be shunned, instead of a glory to be cov- eted ? One could count up a dozen young men who have graduated at Harvard College, during the last twenty years, with high honors, before the age of eighteen ; and SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 17 it is possible that nearly every one of them has lived to regret it. " Nature," says Tissot, in his Essay on the Health of Men of Letters, " is unable successfully to car- ry on two rapid processes at the same time. We attempt a prodigy, and the result is a fool." There was a child in Languedoc who at six years was of the size of a large man ; of course, his mind was a vacuum. On the other hand, Jean Philippe Baratier was a learned man in his eighth year, and died of apparent old age at twenty. Both were monstrosities, and a healthy childhood would be equidistant from either. One invaluable merit of out-door sports is to be found in this, that they afford the best cement for childish friend- ship. Their associations outlive all others. There is many a man, now perchance hard and worldly, whom one loves to pass in the street simply because in meeting him one meets spring flowers and autumn chestnuts, skates and cricket-balls, cherry-birds and pickerel. There is an indescribable fascination in the gradual transference of these childish companionships into maturer relations. It is pleasant to encounter in the contests of manhood those whom one first met at football, and to follow the profound thoughts of those who always dived deeper, even in the river, than one's own efforts could attain. There is a certain governor, of whom I personally can remember only that he found the Fresh Pond heronry, which I vainly sought ; and in memory the august sheriff of a neighboring county still skates in victorious pursuit of me, (fit emblem of swift-footed justice !) on the black ice of the same lovely lake. My imagination crowns the Cam- bridge poet, and the Cambridge sculptor, not with their later laurels, but with the willows out of which they taught me to carve whistles, shriller than any trump of 18 SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. feme, in the happy days when Mount Auburn was Sweet Auburn still. Luckily, boy-nature is too strong for theory. And truth demands the admission, that physical education is not so entirely neglected among us as the absence of pop- ular games would indicate. It is very possible that this last fact proceeds partly from the greater freedom of field- sports in this country. There are few New England boys who do not become familiar with the rod or gun in child- hood. Perhaps, in the mother country, the monopoly of land interferes with this, and that game laws, by a sort of spontaneous pun, tend to introduce games. Again, the practice of match-playing is opposed to our national habits, both as a consumer of time, and as par- taking too much of gambling. Still, it is done in tbe case of " firemen's musters," which are, we believe, a wholly indigenous institution. I have known a few cases where the young men of neighboring country parishes have challenged each other to games of base-ball, as is common hi England ; and there was a recent match at football between the boys of the Fall River and the New Bed- ford High Schools. And within a few years regattas and cricket-matches have become common events. Still, these public exhibitions are far from being a full expo- nent of the athletic habits of our people ; and there is really more going on among us than this meagre " pen- tathlon" exhibits. Again, a foreigner is apt to infer, from the more desul- tory and unsystematized character of our out-door amuse- ments, that we are less addicted to them than we really are. But this belongs to the habit of our nation, impa- tient, to a fault, of precedents and conventionalisms. The English-born Frank Forrester complains of the total in- SAINTS, AND THEIR BODIES. 1tion, lastly, is the faculty evoked by special exigencies, in persons who have before PHYSICAL COURAGE. 41 given no peculiar evidence of daring. It belongs espe- cially to the race of martyrs and enthusiasts, whose per- sonal terrors vanish in the greatness of the object, so that Joan of Arc, listening to the songs of the angels, does not feel the flames. This, indeed, is the accustomed form in which woman's courage proclaims itself at last, unsus- pected until the crisis comes. This has given us the deeds of Flora Macdonald, Jane Lane, and the Countess of Derby ; the rescue of Lord Nithisdale by his wife, and that planned for Montro^e by Lady Margaret Durham ; the heroism of Catherine Douglas, thrusting her arm with- in the stanchions of the doorway to protect James I. of Scotland, till his murderers shattered the frail barrier; and that sublimest narrative of woman's devotion, Ger- trude Van der "Wart at her husband's execution. It is possible that all these women may have been timid and shrinking before the hour of trial ; and every emergency, in peace or war, brings out some such instances. At the close of the troubles of 1856 in Kansas, I chanced to be visiting a lady in Lawrence, who, in opening her work- basket, accidentally let fall a small pistol. She smiled and blushed, and presently acknowledged, that, when she had first pulled the trigger experimentally, six months before, she had shut her eyes and screamed, although there was only a percussion-cap to explode. Yet it after- wards appeared that she was one of the few women who remained in their houses, to protect them by their pres- ence, when the town was entered by the Missourians, and also one of the still smaller number who brought their rifles to aid their husbands in the redoubt, when two hun- dred were all that could be rallied against three thousand, in September of that eventful year. Thus easily is the transition effected ! 42 PHYSICAL COURAGE. This is the courage, also, of Africans, as manifested among ourselves, the courage created by desperate emergencies. Suppled by long slavery, softened by mix- ture of blood, the black man seems to pass at one bound, as women do, from cowering pusillanimity to the topmost height of daring. The giddy laugh vanishes, the idle chat- ter is hushed, and the buffoon becomes a hero. Nothing in history surpasses the bravery of the Maroons of Suri- nam, as described by Sfedman, or of those of Jamaica, as delineated by Dallas. Agents of the "Underground Rail- road " report that the incidents which daily come to their knowledge are beyond all Greek, all Roman fame. These men and women, who have tested their courage in the lonely swamp against the alligator and the bloodhound, who have starved on prairies, hidden in holds, clung to locomotives, ridden hundreds of miles cramped in boxes, head downward, equally near to death if discovered or deserted, and who have then, after enduring all this, gone voluntarily back to risk it over again, for the sake of wife or child, what are we pale faces, that we should claim a rival capacity with theirs for heroic deeds? What matter, if none, below the throne of God, can now identify that nameless negro -in the Tennessee iron-works, who, during the last insurrection, said " he knew all about the plot, but would die before he would tell? He received seven hundred and fifty lashes, and died" Yet where, amid the mausoleums of the world, is there carved an epitaph like that ? The courage of blood, of habit, or of imitation, is not necessarily a very exalted thing. But the courage of self-devotion cannot be otherwise than noble, however wasted on fanaticism or delusion. It enters the domain of conscience. Yet, although the sublimest, it is not PHYSICAL COURAGE. 43 necessarily the most undaunted form of courage. It is vain to measure merit by martyrdom, without reference to the temperament, the occasion, and the aim. There is no passion in the mind of man so weak, said Lord Bacon, but it mates and masters the fear of death. Sinner, as well as saint, may be guillotined or lynched, and endure it well. A red Indian or a Chinese robber will dare the stake as composedly as an early Christian or an aboli- tionist. One of the bravest of all death-scenes was the execution of Simon, Lord Lovat, who was unquestionably one of the greatest scoundrels that ever burdened the earth. We must look deeper. The test of a man is not in the amount of his endurance, but in its motive ; does he love the right, he may die in glory on a bed of down ; is he false and base, the^-i things thrust discord into his hymn of dying anguish, and no crown of thorns can sanc- tify his drooping head. Physical courage is, after all, but a secondary quality, and needs a sublime motive to make it thoroughly sublime. Among all these different forms of courage it is almost equally true that it is the hardest of all qualities to pre- dict or identify, in an individual case, before the actual trial. Many a man has been unable to discover, till the critical moment, whether he himself possessed it or not. It is often denied to the healthy and strong, and given to the weak. The pugilist may be a poltroon, and the book- worm a hero. I have seen the most purely ideal philos- opher in this country face the dark muzzles of a dozen loaded revolvers with his usual serene composure. And on the other hand, I have known a black-bearded back- woodsman, whose mere voice and presence would quell any riot among the lumberers, yet this man, nicknamed by his employes " the black devil," confessed himself to be in secret the most timid of lambs. 44 PHYSICAL COURAGE. One reason of this difficulty of estimate lies in the fact, that courage and cowardice often complicate themselves with other qualities, and so show false colors. For in- stance, the presence or absence of modesty may disguise the genuine character. The unpretending are not al- ways timid, nor always brave. The boaster is not always, but only commonly, a coward. Were it otherwise, how could we explain the existence of courage in Frenchmen or Indians? Barking dogs sometimes bite, as many a small boy, too trustful of the proverb, has found to his cost. " If that be a friend of yours," says Brantome's brave Spanish Cavalier, ''pray for his soul, for he has quarrelled with me." Indeed, the Gascons, whose name is identified with boasting, (gasconade,) were always among the bravest races in Europe. Again, the mere quality of caution is often mistaken for cowardice, while heedlessness passes for daring. A late eminent American sculptor, a man of undoubted courage, is said to have always taken the rear car in a railroad train. Such a spirit of prudence, where well directed, is to be viewed with respect. We ought not to reverence the blind recklessness which sits on the safety- valve during a steamboat-race, but the cool composure which neither underrates a danger nor shrinks from it. The best encomium is that of Malcolm M'Leod upon Charles Edward, " He was the most cautious man, not to be a coward, and the bravest man, not to be rash, that I ever saw " ; or that of Charles VII. of France upon Pierre d'Aubusson, " Never did I see united so much fire and so much wisdom." Still again, men vary as to the form of danger which tests them most severely. The Irish are undoubtedly a brave nation, but their courage is apt to vanish in pres- PHYSICAL COURAGE. 45 ence of sickness. They are not, however, alone in this, if we may judge from the newspaper statements, that, after the recent quarantine riots in New York, a small- pox patient lay all day untended in the Park, because no one dared to go near him. It is said of Dr. Johnson, that he was a hero against pain, but a coward against death. Probably the converse is quite as common. To a believer in immortality, death, even when premature, can scarcely be regarded as an unmitigated evil, but pain enforces its own recognition. One can hardly agree with the frightened recruit in the farce, who thinks " Victory or Death " a forbidding war-cry, but " Victory or Wooden Legs " a more appetizing alternative. Besides these complications, there are those arising from the share which conscience has in the matter. " Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just," and the most resolute courage will sometimes quail in a bad cause, and even die in its armor, like Bois-Guilbert. It was generally admitted, on both sides, in Kansas, that the " Border Ruffians " seldom dared face an equal number ; yet nobody asserted that these men were intrinsically deficient in daring ; it was only conscience which made cowards of them all. But it is, after all, the faculty of imagination which, more than all else, confuses the phenomena of courage and cowardice. A very imaginative child is almost sure to be reproached with timidity, while mere stolidity takes rank as courage. The bravest boy may sometimes be most afraid of the dark, or of ghosts, or of the great mys- teries of storms and the sea. Even the mighty Charle- magne shuddered when the professed enchanter brought before him the vast forms of Dietrich and his Northern companions, on horseback. We once saw a party of boys 46 PHYSICAL COURAGE. tested by an alarm which appealed solely to the imagina- tion. The only one among them who stood the test was the most cowardly of the group, who escaped the conta- gion through sheer lack of this faculty. Any imaginative person can occasionally test this on himself by sleeping in a large lonely house,, or by bathing alone in some solitary place by the great ocean ; there comes a thrill which is not born of terror, and the mere presence of a child breaks the spell, though it would only enhance the actual danger, if danger there were. This explains the effect of darkness on danger. " Let Ajax perish in the face of day." "Who has not shuddered over the description of that Arkansas duel, fought by two naked combatants, with pistol and bowie-knife, in a dark room ? One thrills to think of those first few moments of breathless, sightless, hopeless, hushed expectation, then the confused encounter, the slippery floor, the invisible, ghastly terrors of that horrible chamber. Many a man would shrink from that, who would march coolly up to the cannon's mouth by daylight. It is probably this mingling of imaginative excitement which makes the approach of peril often more terrible than its actual contact. " A true knight," said Sir Philip Sidney, " is fuller of gay bravery in the midst than at the beginning of danger." The boy Conde* was reproached with trembling, in his first campaign. " My body trem- bles," said the hero, " with the actions my soul meditates." And it is said of Charles V., that he often trembled when arming for battle, but in the conflict was as cool as if it were impossible for an emperor to be killed. So Turenne was once asked by M. de Lamoignon, at the dinner-table of the latter, if his courage was never shaken at the com- mencement of a battle ? " Yes," said Turenne, " I some PHYSICAL COURAGE. 41 times undergo great nervous excitement; but there are in the army a great multitude of subaltern officers and soldiers who experience none whatever." To give to any form of courage an available or working value, it is essential that it have two qualities, promptness and persistency. What Napoleon called u two o'clock-iii- the-morning courage " is rare. It requires great enthu- siasm or great discipline to be proof against a surprise. It is said that Suwarrow, even in peace, always slept fully armed, boots and all. When I was lazy," he said, and wanted to enjoy a comfortable sleep, I usually took off one spur." In regard to persistency, history is full of instances of unexpected reverses and eleventh-hour triumphs. The battle of Marengo was considered hopeless, for the first half of the day, and a retreat was generally expected on the part of the French ; when Desaix, consulted by Bonaparte, looked at his watch, and said, The battle is completely lost, but it is only two o'clock, and we shall nave time to gain another." He then made his famous and fatal cavalry-charge, and won the field. It was from a noble appreciation of this quality of persistency, that, when the battle of Cannae was lost, and Hannibal was measuring by bushels the rings of the fallen Roman knights, the Senate of Rome voted thanks to the defeated general, Consul Terentius Varro, for not having despaired of the republic. Thus armed at all points, incapable of being either surprised or exhausted, courage achieves results which seem miraculous. It is an element of inspiration, some- thing superadded and incalculable, when all the other forces are exhausted. When we consider how really formidable becomes the humblest of quadrupeds, cat or lat, when it grows mad and desperate and throws all 48 PHYSICAL COURAGE. personal fear behind, it is clear that there must be a re- served power in human daring which defies computation and equalizes the most fearful odds. Take one man, mad with excitement or intoxication, place him with his back to the wall, a knife in his hand, and the fire of utter frenzy in his eyes, and who, among the thousand bystanders, dares make the first attempt to disarm him ? Desperate courage makes one a majority. Baron Trenck nearly escaped from the fortress of Glatz at noonday, snatching a sword from an officer, passing all the sentinels with a sudden rush, and almost effecting his retreat to the moun- tains ; " which incident will prove," he says, " that ad- venturous and even rash daring will render the most improbable undertakings successful, and that desperate attempts may often make a general more fortunate and famous than the wisest and best-concerted plans." It is this miraculous quality which helps to explain the extraordinary victories of history : as where the army of Lucullus at Tigranocerta slew one hundred thousand bar- barians with .the loss of only a hundred men, or where Colic's conquered Mexico with six hundred foot and six- teen horse. The astounding narratives in the chivalry romances, where the historian risks his Palmerin or Ama- dis as readily against twenty giants as one, secure of bringing him safely through, or the corresponding modern marvels of Alexandre Dumas, seem scarcely exaggerations of actual events. A Portuguese, at the siege of Goa, inserted a burning match in a cask of gun- powder, then grasped it in his arms, and, crying to his companions, " Stand aside, I bear my own and many men's lives," threw it among the enemy, of whom a hun- dred were killed by the explosion, the bearer being left unhurt. John Haring, on a Flemish dike, held a thou- PHYSICAL COURAGE. 45 sand men at bay, saved his army, and finally escaped uninjured. And the motto of Bayard, Vires agminis unus habet, was given him after singly defending a bridge against two hundred Spaniards. Such men appear to bear charmed lives, and to be identical with the laws of Fate. " What a soldier, what a Roman, was thy father, my young bride ! How could they who never saw him have discoursed so rightly upon virtue ? " From popular want of faith in these infinite resources of daring, it is a common thing for persons of eminent courage to be stigmatized as rash. This has been strik- ingly the case, for instance, in modern times, with the Marquis of Wellesley and Sir Charles Napier. When the Duke of Wellington was in the Peninsula in 1810, the City of London addressed the throne, protesting against the bestowal of " honorable distinctions upon a general who had thus far exhibited, with equal rashness and ostentation, nothing but an useless valor." But if bravery is liable to exist in excess, on the one side, it is a comfort to think that it is capabje of cultiva- tion, where deficient. There may be a few persons born absolutely without the power of courage, as without the susceptibility to music, but very few ; and, no doubt, the elements of daring, like those of musical perception, can be developed in almost all. Once rouse the enthu- siasm of the will, and courage can be systematically dis- ciplined. Emerson's maxim gives the best regimen: " Always do what you are afraid to do." If your lot is laid amid scenes of peace, then carry the maxim into the arts of peace. Are you afraid to swim that river ? then swim it. Are you afraid to leap that fence ? then leap it. Do you shrink from the dizzy height of yonder magnificent pine? then climb it, and "throw down the 50 PHYSICAL COURAGE. top," as they do in the forests of Maine. Goethe cured himself of dizziness by ascending the lofty stagings of the Frankfort carpenters. Nothing is insignificant that is great enough to alarm you. If you cannot think of a grizzly bear without a slvidder, then it is almost worth your while to travel to the Rocky Mountains in order to encounter the reality. It is said that Van Amburgh at- tributed all his power over animals to the similar rule given him by his mother in his boyhood, " If anything frightens you, walk up and face it." Applying this maxim boldly, he soon satisfied himself that man pos- sessed a natural power of control over all animals, if he dared to exercise it He said that every animal divined by unerring instinct the existence of fear in his ruler, and a moment's indecision might cost one's life. On being asked, what he should do, if he found himself in the desert, face to face with a lion, he answered, " If I wished for certain death, I should turn and run away." Physical courage may be educated ; but it must be trained for its own sake. We say again, it must not be left to moral courage to include it, for the two faculties have different elements, and what God has joined, human inconsistency may put asunder. The disjunction is easy to explain. Many men, when committed on the right side of any question, get credit for a " moral cour- age," which is, in their case, only an intense egotism, isolating them from all demand for human sympathy. In the best cause, they prefer to belong to a party con- veniently small, and, on the slightest indications of pop- ular approbation, begin to suspect themselves of com- promise. The abstract martyrdom of unpopularity is therefore clear gain to them ; but when it comes to the rack and the thumbscrew, the revolver and the bowie- PHYSICAL COURAGE. 51 knife, the same habitual egotism makes them cowards. These men are annoying in themselves, and still worse because they throw discredit on the noble and unselfish reformers with whom they are identified in position. But even among this higher class there are differences of temperament, and it costs one man an effort to face the brute argument of the slung-shot, while another's fortitude is not seriously tested till it comes to facing the newspaper editors. These are but a few aspects of a rich and endless theme, depicted more by examples than analysis, accord- ing to the saying of Sidney, that Alexander received more bravery of mind by the example of Achilles than by hearing the definition of fortitude. If the illustrations have seemed to be drawn too profusely from the records of battles, it is to be remembered, that, even if war be not the best nurse of heroisms, it is their best historian. The chase, for instance, though perhaps as prolific in deeds of daring as the camp, has found few Cummings and Gerards for annalists, and the more trivial aim of the pursuit diminishes the permanence of its records. The sublime fortitude of hospitals, the bravery shown in in- fected cities, the fearlessness of firemen and of sailors, these belong to those times of peace which have as yet few historians. But the deep foundations and instincts of courage are the same wherever exhibited, and it mat- ters little whence the illustrations come. Doubtless, for every great deed ever narrated, there were a hundred greater ones untold ; and the noblest valor of the world may sleep unrecorded, like the heroes before Homer. But there are things which, once written, the world does not willingly let die ; embalmed in enthusiasm, borne down on the unconquerable instincts of child- 52 PHYSICAL COURAGE. hood, they become imperishable and eternal. We need not travel to visit the graves of the heroes : they are become a part of the common air ; their line is gone out to all generations. Shakespeares are but their servants ; no change of time or degradation of circumstance can debar us from their lesson. The fascination which every one finds in the simplest narrative of daring is the sufficient testimony to its priceless and permanent worth. Human existence finds its range expanded, when Demosthenes describes Philip of Macedon, his enemy : " I saw this Philip, with whom we disputed for empire. I saw him, though covered with wounds, his eye struck out, his collar-bone broken, maimed in his hands, maimed in his feet, still resolutely rush into the midst of dangers, ready to deliver up to Fortune any part of his body she might require, provided he might live honorably and gloriously with the rest." Would it not be shameful, that war should leave us such memories as these, and peace bequeath us only money and repose ? True, " peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war." No less ! but they should be infinitely greater. Esto miles pacificus, " Be the sol- dier of peace," was the priestly benediction of mediaeval knights ; and the aspirations of humaner ages should lead us into heroisms which Plutarch never portrayed, and of which Bayard and Sidney only prophesied, but died without the sight. A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. YES, my dear Dolorosus, I commiserate you. I regard your case, perhaps, with even sadder emo- tions than that excellent family-physician who has been sounding its depths these four years with a golden plum- met, and has never yet touched bottom. From those generous confidences which, in common with most of your personal acquaintances, I daily share, I am satisfied that no description can do justice to your physical disintegration, unless it be the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds with which Mr. Addison winds up Cato's Soliloquy. So far as I can ascertain, there is not an organ of your internal structure which is in its right place, at present, or which could perform any par- ticular service, if it were there. In the extensive library of medical almanacs and circulars which I find daily deposited by travelling agents at my front door, among all the agonizing vignettes of diseases which adorn their covers, and which Irish Bridget daily studies with inexperienced enjoyment in the front entry, there is no case which seems to afford a parallel to yours. I found it stated in one of these works, the other day, that there is iron enough in the blood of twenty-four men to make a broadsword; but I am satisfied that it would be inv 56 A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. possible to extract enough from the veins of yourself and your whole family to construct a crochet-needle for your eldest daughter. And I am quite confident, that, if all the four hundred muscles of your present body were twisted together by a rope-maker, they would not furnish that patient young laborer with a needleful of thread. You are undoubtedly, as you claim, a martyr to Dys- pepsia ; or if you prefer any other technical name for your disease or diseases, I will acquiesce in any, except, perhaps, the word " Neurology," which I must regard as foreign to etymological science, if not to medical. Your case, you think, is hard. I should think it would be. Yet I am impressed by it, I must admit, as was our adopted fellow-citizen by the contemplation of Niagara. He, you remember, when pressed to admire the eternal plunge of the falling water, could only inquire, with serene acquiescence in natural laws, "And what's to hinder ? " I confess myself moved to similar reflections by your disease and its history. My dear Dolorosus, can you acquaint me with any reason, in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, why you should not have dyspepsia ? My thoughts involuntarily wander back to that golden period, five years ago, when I spent one night and day beneath your hospitable roof. I arrived, I remember, late in the evening. The bedroom to which you kindly conducted me, after a light but wholesome supper of doughnuts and cheese, was pleasing in respect to furni- ture, but questionable in regard to physiology. The house was not more than twenty years old, and the cham- ber must therefore have been aired within that distance of time, but not, I should have judged, more recently. A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. 57 Perhaps its close, oppressive atmosphere could not have been analyzed into as many separate odors as Coleridge distinguished in Cologne, but I could easily identify aromatic vinegar, damp straw, lemons, and dyed silk gowns. And, as each of the windows was carefully nailed down, there were no obvious means of obtaining fresh air, save that ventilator said to be used by an eminent lady in railway-cars, the human elbow. The lower bed was of straw, the upper of feathers, whose extreme heat kept me awake for a portion of the night, and whose abundant fluffy exhalations suggested incipient asthma during another portion. On rising from these rather un- refreshing slumbers, I performed my morning ablutions with the aid of some three teacupsful of dusty water, for the pitcher probably held that quantity, availing myself, also, of something which hung over an elegant towel-horse, and which, though I at first took it for a child's handkerchief, proved on inspection to be u Cham- ber Towel, No. 1." I remember, as I entered the breakfast-room, a vague steam as of frying sausages, which, creeping in from the neighboring kitchen, obscured in some degree the five white faces of your wife and children. The breakfast- table was amply covered, for you were always what is termed by judicious housewives " a good provider." I remember how the beefsteak (for the sausages were espe- cially destined for your two youngest Dolorosi, who were just recovering from the measles, and needed something light and palatable) vanished in large rectangular masses within your throat, drawn downward in a maelstrom of coffee ; only that the original whirlpool is, I believe, now proved to have been imaginary ; " that cup was a fiction, but this is reality." The resources of the house 3* 58 A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. also afforded certain very hot biscuits or breadcakes, in a high state of saleratus ; indeed, it must have been from association with these, that certain yellow streaks in Mr. Buskin's drawing of the rock, at the Athenaeum, awak- ened in me such an immediate sense of indigestion ; also fried potatoes, baked beans, mince-pie, and pickles. The children partook of these dainties largely, but with- out undue waste of time. They lingered at table pre- cisely eight minutes before setting out for school ; though we, absorbed in conversation, remained at least ten; af- ter which we instantly hastened to your counting-room, where you, without a moment's delay, absorbed yourself in your ledger, while I flirted languidly with the " Daily Advertiser." You bent over your desk the whole morning, occa- sionally having anxious consultations with certain sickly men whom I supposed to be superannuated bookkeepers, in impoverished circumstances, and rather pallid from the want of nutritious food. One of them, dressed in rusty black, with a flabby white neckcloth, I took for an ex- clergyman ; he was absorbed in the last number of the " Independent," though I observed, at length, that he was only studying the list of failures, a department to which, as it struck me, he himself peculiarly appertained. All of these, I afterwards ascertained from your office-boy, were eminent capitalists ; something had gone wrong in the market, not in the meat-market, as I should have supposed from their appearance, but in the money-mar- ket. I believe that there was some sudden fall in the price of indigo. I know you looked exceedingly blue as we walked home to dinner. Dinner was ready the instant we opened the front door. I expected as much ; I knew the pale, speechless A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. 59 woman who sat at the head of your table would make sure of punctuality, if she died for it. We took our seats without a word. Your eldest girl, Angelina, aged ten, one of those premature little grown women who have learned from the cradle that man is born to eat pastry and woman to make it, postponed her small repast till an indefinite future, and sat meekly ready to attend upon our wants. Nathaniel, a thin boy of eight, also partook but slightly, having impaired his appetite, his mother sus- pected, by a copious luncheon of cold baked beans and vinegar, on his return from school. The two youngest (twins) had relapsed to their couches soon after breakfast, in consequence of excess of sausage. You were quite agreeable in conversation, I remember, after the first onset of appetite was checked. You gave me your whole theory of the indigo crisis, with minute details, statistical and geographical, of the financial condi- tion and supposed present location of your principal ab- sconding debtors. This served for what is called, at public dinners, the intellectual feast ; while the carnal appetite was satisfied with fried pork, more and tougher beefsteak, strong coffee, cucumbers, potatoes, and a good deal of gravy. For dessert, (at which point Nathaniel regained his appetite,) we had mince-pie, apple-pie, and lemon-pie, the latter being a structure of a two-story description, an additional staging of crust being somehow inserted be- tween upper and under. "We lingered long at that noon meal, fifteen minutes, at the very least ; for you hospita- bly said that you did not have these little social festivals very often, owing to frequent illness in the family, and other causes, and must make the most of it. I did not see much of you during that afternoon ; it was a magnificent day, and I said, that, being a visitor, I 60 A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. would look about and see the new buildings. The truth was, I felt a sneaking desire to witness the match-game on the Common, between the Union Base-Ball Club, No. 1, of Ward Eleven, and the Excelsiors of Smithville. I remember that you looked a little dissatisfied, when I came into the counting-room, and rather shook your head over my narrative (perhaps too impassioned) of the events of the game. " Those young fellows," said you, " may not all be shiftless, dissipated characters yet, but see what it comes to ! They a'n't content with wasting their time, they kill it, sir, actually kill it ! " When I thought of the manly figures and handsome, eager faces of my friends of the " Union " and the " Excelsior," the Ex- celsiors won by ten tallies, I should say, the return match to come off at Smithville the next month, and then looked at the meagre form and wan countenance of their critic, I thought to myself, " Dolorosus, my boy, you are killing something besides Time, if you only knew it" However, indigo had risen again, and your spirits also. As we walked home, you gave me a precise exhibit of your income and expenditures for the last five years, and a prospective sketch of the same for the next ten ; wind- ing up with an incidental delineation of the importance, to a man of business, of a good pew in some respectable place of worship. We found Mrs. D., as usual, ready at the table ; we partook of pound-cake (or pound-and-a-half, I should say) and sundry hot cups of a very Cisatlantic beverage, called by the Chinese epithet of tea, and went, immediately after, to a prayer-meeting. The church or chapel was much crowded, and there was a certain some- thing in the atmosphere which seemed to disqualify my faculties from comprehending a single word that was spoken. It certainly was not that the ventilators were A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. 61 dosed, for there were none. The minister occasionally requested that the windows might be let down a little, and the deacons invariably closed them again when he looked the other way. At intervals, females were carried out, in a motionless condition, not, as it appeared, from con- viction of sin, but from faintness. You sat, absorbed in thought, with your eyes closed, and seemed not to observe them. I remember that you were very- much shocked when I suggested that the breath of an average sinner exhausted atmospheric air at the rate of a hogshead an hour, and asked you how much allowance the laws of the universe made for the lungs of church-members? I do not recall your precise words, but I remember that I finally found it expedient, as I was to leave for home in the early train, to spend that night at the neighboring hotel, where I indulged, on an excellent mattress, in a slumber so profound, that it seemed next morning as if I ought, as Dick Swiveller suggested to the single gentle- man, to pay for a double-bedded room. Well, that is all over now. You have given up busi- ness, from ill health, and exhibit a ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five. Your dreams of the forth- coming ten years have not been exactly fulfilled ; you have not precisely retired on a competency, because the competency retired from you. Indeed, the suddenness with which your physician compelled you to close up your business left it closed rather imperfectly, so that most of the profits are found to have leaked out. You are economizing rather strictly, just now, in respect lo everything but doctors' bills. The maternal Dolorosa is hoarding somewhere in the country, where the children certainly will not have more indigestible food than they had at home, and may get less of it in quantity, to say 62 A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. nothing cf more air and exercise to aid digestion. They are not, however, in perfect condition. The twins are just getting up from scarlet fever; Nathaniel has been advised to leave school for a time ; and something is thought to be the matter with Angelina's back. Mean- while, you are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical elec- tricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas. You are learning, through all this, the sagest maxims of resignation, and trying to apply them. " Life is hard, but short," you say ; " Providence is inscrutable ; we must submit to its mysterious decrees." Would it not be better, my dear Dolorosus, to say instead, " Life is noble and immortal ; God is good ; we must obey, his plain laws, or accept the beneficent penalties " ? The rise and fall of health are no more accidental than the rise and fall of indigo ; and it is the duty of those concerned in either commodity to keep their eyes open, and learn the busi- ness intelligently. Of the three proverbial desiderata, it is as easy to be healthy as to be wealthy, and much easier than to be wise, except so far as health and wisdom mean the same thing. After health, indeed, the other necessa- ries of life are very simple, and easily obtained ; with moderate desires, regular employment, a loving home, correct theology, the right politics, and a year's subscrip- tion to the " Atlantic Monthly," I have no doubt that life, in this planet, may be as happy as in any other of the solar system, not excepting Neptune and the fifty-five asteroids. You are possibly aware, my dear Dolorosus, for I remember that you were destined by your parents for the physician of your native seaside village, until you found a more congenial avocation in curing mackerel, that the A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. 63 ancient medals represented the goddess Hygeia with a serpent three times as large as that carried by JEscul*- pius, to denote the superiority of hygiene to medicine, prevention to cure. To seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora, and carried hope at the bottom of his medicine- chest, is really rather unpromising. This perpetual self- inspection of yours, registering your pulse thrice a day, as if it were a thermometer and you an observer for the Smithsonian, these long consultations with the other patients in the dreary parlor of the infirmary, the morn- ing devoted to debates on the nervous system, the after- noon to meditations on the stomach, and the evening to soliloquies on the spine, will do you no good. The more you know, under these circumstances, the worse it will be for you. You will become like Boerhaave's hypo- rhondriacal student, who, after every lecture, believed himself to be the victim of the particular disease just expounded. We may even think too much about health, and certainly too much about illness. I solemnly be- lieve that the very best thing that could be done for you at this moment, you unfortunate individual, would be to buy you a saddle-horse and a revolver, and start you to- morrow for the Rocky Mountains, with distinct instruc- tions to treat any man as a Border Ruffian who should venture to allude to the subject of disease in your pres- ence. But I cannot venture to hope that you will do anything so reasonable. The fascinations of your present life are too overwhelming ; when an invalid once begins to enjoy the contemplation of his own woes, as you appear to do, it is all over with him. Besides, you urge, and perhaps justly, that your case has already gone too far, for so 64 A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. rough a tonic. What, then, can I do for you ? Medi- cine I cannot offer ; for even your respectable family- physician occasionally hints that you need something dif- ferent from that, I suspect that all rational advice for you may be summed up in one prescription : Reverse in- stantly all the habits of your previous physical existence, and there may be some chance for you. But perhaps I had better enter more into detail. Do not think that I am going to recur to the painful themes of doughnuts and diet. I fear my hints, already given, on those subjects, may wound the sensitive nature of Mrs. D., who suffers now such utter martyrdom from your condition that I cannot bring myself to heap further coals of fire on her head, even though the coals be taken from her own very ineffectual cooking-stove. Let me dwell rather on points where you have exclusive jurisdic- tion, and can live wisely or foolishly, at your pleasure. It does not depend on you, perhaps, whether you shall eat bread or saleratus, meat or sole-leather ; but it cer- tainly does depend upon yourself whether you shall wash yourself daily. I do not wish to be personal, but I verily believe, O companion of my childhood! that, until you began to dabble in Hydropathy, you had not bestowed a sincere ablution upon your entire person since the epoch when, twenty years ago, we took our last plunge together, off Titcomb's wharf, in our native village. That in your well-furnished house there are no hydraulic privileges be- yond pint water-pitchers, I know from anxious personal inspection. I know .that you have spent an occasional week at the sea-shore during the summer, and that many people prefer to do up their cleanliness for the year dur- ing these excursions; indeed, you yourself have mentioned to me, at such times, with some enthusiasm, your daily sea- A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTW. 65 bath. But I have been privately assured, by the other boarders, that the bath in question always consisted of putting on a neat bathing-dress and sitting awhile on a rock among the sea-weed, like an insane merman, with the highest waves submerging only your knees, while the younger Dolorosi splashed and gambolled in safe shallows behind you. Even that is better than nothing, but Soul of Mohammed ! is that called bathing ? Verily, we are, as the Turks declare, a nation of " dirty Franks," if this be the accepted definition. Can it be possible that you really hold with the once- celebrated Mr. Walker, " The Original," as he was de- servedly called, who maintained that, by a correct diet, he system became self-purifying, through an active exha- lation which repelled impurity, so that, while walking on dusty roads, his feet, and even his stockings, remained free from dust ? " By way of experiment, I did not wash my face for a week ; nor did any one see, nor I feel, the difference." My deluded friend, it is a fatal error. Mr. Walker, the Original, may have been inwardly a saint and a sage, but it is impossible that- his familiar society could have been desirable, even to fools or sinners. Rather recall, from your early explorations in Lem- priere's Dictionary, how Medea renewed the youth of Pelias by simply cutting him to pieces and boiling him ; whereon my Lord Bacon justly remarks, that " there may be some boiling required in the matter, but the cutting to pieces is not needful." If you find that the water-cure agrees with your constitution, I rejoice in it ; I should think it would ; but, I implore you, do not leave it all behind you when you leave the institution. When you return to your family, use your very first dollars for buy- ing a sponge and a tin-hat, for each member of the 66 A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. household ; and bring up the children to lead decent lives. Then, again, consider the fact that our lungs were cre- ated to consume oxygen. I suppose that never in your life, Dolorosus, did those breathing organs of yours inhale more than one half the quantity of air that they were in- tended to take in, to say nothing of its quality. Yet one would think, that, in the present high prices of food, you would make the most of the only thing you can put into your mouth gratis. Here is Nature constantly urg- ing on us an unexceptionable atmosphere forty miles high, for if a pressure of fourteen pounds to the square inch is not to be called urging, what is ? and yet we not only neglect, but resist the favor. Our children co'mmonly learn to spell much better than they ever learn to breathe, because much more attention is paid to the former depart- ment of culture. Indeed, the materials are better pro- vided ; spelling-books are abundant ; but we scarcely allow them time, in the intervals of school, to seek fresh air out of doors, and we sedulously exclude it from our houses and school-rooms. Is it not possible to impress upon your mind the changes which " modern improve- ments " are bringing upon us ? In times past, if a gen- tleman finished the evening with a quiet cigar in his parlor, (a practice I deprecate, and introduce only for purposes of scientific illustration,) not a trace of it ever lingered to annoy his wife at the breakfast-table ; showing that the draft up the open chimney had wholly disposed of it, the entire atmosphere of the room having been changed during the night. Now, on the other hand, every whiff lingers persistently beside the domestic altar, and betrays to the youngest child, next day, the parental weakness. For the sake of family example, Dolorosus, A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC. 67 correct this state of things, and put in a ventilator. Our natures will not adapt themselves to this abstinence from fresh air, until Providence shall fit us up with new bodies, having no lungs in them. Did you ever hear of Dr. Lyne, the eccentric Irish physician ? Dr. Lyne held that no house was wholesome, unless a dog could get in under every door and a bird fly out at every window. He even went so far as to build his house with the usual number of windows, and no glass in the sashes ; he lived in that house for fifty years, reared a large family there, and no death ever occurred in it. He himself died away from home, of small-pox, at eighty ; his son immediately glazed all the windows of the house, and several of the family died within the first year of the alteration. The story sounds apocryphal, T own. though I dd. Average. 147 6 feet 6| inches. 800 5 ** **^K ** 106 6 " 7| " 80 6 " 81 " 146 140 pounds. 1778 142 106 142$ " 80 148 4869 146| " 2648 148 " 161 * 31 226 86.86 inches. 85.71 " 867 pounds. 416 " 422 " NOTE. The range of strength among the New-Zealanders was from 250 pounds to 420 pounds; among the soldiers, from 850 pounds to 504 pounds. But it is the test of longevity which exhibits the great- est triumph for civilization, because here the life-insurance tables furnish ample, though comparatively recent sta- tistics. Of course, in legendary ages all lives were of enormous length ; and the Hindoos in their sacred books attribute to their progenitors a career of forty million years or thereabouts, what may safely be termed a ripe old age ; for if a man were still unripe after celebrating his forty-millionth birthday, he might as well give it up. But from the beginning of accurate statistics we know that the duration of life in any nation is a fair index of 124 BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION. its progress in civilization. Quetelet gives statistics, mv>re or less reliable, from every nation of Northern Europe, showing a gain of ten to twenty-five per cent during the last century. Where the tables are most carefully pre- pared, the result is least equivocal. Thus, in Geneva, where accurate registers have been kept for three hun- dred years, it seems that from 1560 to 1600 the average lifetime of the citizens was twenty-one years and two months ; in the next century, twenty-five years and nine months ; in the century following, thirty-two years and nine months ; and in the year 1833, forty years and five months ; thus nearly doubling the average age of man in Geneva within those three centuries of social progress. In France, it is estimated, that, in spite of revolutions and Napoleons, human life has been gaining at the rate of two months a year for nearly a century. By a manu- script of the fourteenth century, moreover, it is shown that the rate of mortality in Paris was then one in six- teen, one person dying annually to every sixteen of the inhabitants. It is now one in thirty-two, a gain of a hundred per cent in five hundred years. In England the progress has been far more rapid. The rate of mortality in 1690 was one in thirty-three; in 1780 it was one in forty ; and it stands now at one in sixty, the healthiest condition in Europe, while in half-barbarous Russia the rate of mortality is one in twenty-seven. It would be easy to multiply these statistics to any extent ; but. they all point one way, and no medical statistician now pretends to oppose the dictum of Hufeland, that " a cer- tain degree of culture is physically necessary for man, and promotes duration of life." The simple result is, that the civilized man is physically superior to the barbarian. There is now no evidence that BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION. 125 there exists in any part of the world a savage race who, taken as a whole, surpass or even equal the Anglo-Saxon type in average physical condition ; as there is also none among whom the President elect of the United States and the Commander-in-chief of his armies would not be regarded as remarkably tall men, and Dr. Windship as a remarkably strong one. " It is now well known," says Prichard, " that all savage races have less muscular power than civilized men." Johnstone in Northern Af- rica, and Gumming in Southern Africa, could find no one to equal them in strength of arm. At the Sandwich Islands, Ellis records, that, "when a boat manned by English seamen and a canoe with natives left the shore together, the canoe would uniformly leave the boat be- hind, but they would soon relax, while the seamen, pull- ing steadily on, would pass them, but, if the voyage took three hours, would invariably reach the destination first." Certain races may have been regularly trained by posi- tion and necessity in certain particular arts, as Sand- wich-Islanders in swimming, and our Indians in running, and may naturally surpass the average skill of those who are comparatively out of practice in that speciality ; yet it is remarkable that their greatest feats even in these ways never seem to surpass those achieved by picked specimens of civilization. The best Indian runners could only equal Lewis and Clarke's men, and Indians have been repeatedly beaten in prize-races within the last few years ; while the most remarkable aquatic feat on record is probably that of Mr. Atkins of Liverpool, who recently dived to a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, reappear- ing above water in one minute and eleven seconds. In the wilderness and on the prairies we find a fre- quent impression that cultivation and refinement must 126 BIWARISH AND CIVILIZATION. weaken the race. Not at all ; they simply domesticate it. Domestication is tiot weakness. A strong hand does not become less muscular under a kid glove ; and a man who is a hero in a red shirt will also be a hero in a white one. Civilization, imperfect as it is, has already procured for us better food, better air, and better behavior ; it gives us physical training on system ; and its mental training, by refiqing the nervous organization, makes the same quan- tity of muscular power go much farther. The young English ensigns and lieutenants, who at Waterloo (in the words of Wellington) " rushed to meet death as if it were a game of cricket," were the fruit of civilization. They were representatives, indeed, of the aristocracy of their nation ; and here, where the aim of all institutions is to make, the wholu nation an aristocracy, we must plan to secure the same splendid physical superiority on a grander scale. It is in our power, by using even very moderately for this purpose our magnificent machinery of common schools, to give to the physical side of civilization an ad- vantage which it has possessed nowhere else, not even in England or Germany. It is not yet time to suggest de- tailed plans on this subject, since the public mind is not yet fully awake even to the demand. When the time comes, the necessary provisions can be made easily, at least, as regards boys ; for the physical training of girls is a far more difficult problem. The organization is more delicate and complicated, the embarrassments greater, the observations less carefully made, the successes fewer, the failures f?\r more disastrous. Any intelligent and robust man may undertake the physical training of fifty boys, however delicate their organization, with a reasonable hope of rearing nearly all of them, by easy and obvious methods, into a vigorous maturity ; but what wise man at BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION. 127 woman can expect anything like the same proportion of success, at present, with fifty American girls ? This is the most momentous health-problem with which we have to deal, to secure the proper physical advan- tages of civilization for American women. Without this there can be no lasting progress. The Sandwich Island proverb says, " If strong be the frame of the mother, Her son shall make laws for the people." But in this country it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every man grows to maturity surrounded by a circle of invalid female relatives, that he later finds him- self the husband of an invalid wife and the parent of invalid daughters, and that he comes at last to regard invalidism, as Michelet coolly declares, the normal con- dition of that sex, as if the Almighty did not know how to create a woman. This, of course, spreads a gloom over life. "When I look at the morning throng of school-girls in summer, hurrying through every street, with fresh, young faces, and vesture of lilies, duly curled and straw-hatted and booted, and turned off* as patterns of perfection by proud mammas, it is not sad to me to think that all this young beauty must one day fade and die, for there are spheres of life beyond this earth, I know, and the soul is good to endure through more than one ; the sadness is in the unnatural nearness of the decay, to foresee the living death of disease that is wait- ing close at hand for so many, to know how terrible a proportion of those fair children are walking unconscious- ly into a weary, wretched, powerless, joyless, useless maturity. Among the myriad triumphs of advancing civilization, there seems but one formidable danger, and that is here. 128 BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION. It cannot be doubted, however, that the peril will pass by, with advancing knowledge. In proportion to our national recklessness of danger is the promptness with which remedial measures are adopted, when they at last become indispensable. In the mean time, we must look for proofs of the physical resources of woman into foreign, and even into savage lands. When an American mother tells me with pride, as occasionally happens, that her daughter can walk two miles and back without great fa- tigue, the very boast seems a tragedy ; but when one reads that Oberea, queen of the Sandwich Islands, lifted Captain Wallis over a marsh as easily as if he bad been a little child, there is a slight sense of consolation. Brun- hilde, in the " Nibelungen," binds her offending lover with her girdle and slings him up to the wall. Cym- burga, wife of Duke Ernest of Austria, could crack nuts between her fingers, and drive nails into a wall with her thumb ; whether she ever got her husband under it, is not recorded. Let me preserve from oblivion the renown of my Lady Butterfield, who, about the year 1700, at Wanstead, in Essex, (England,) thus advertised : " This is to give notice to my honored masters and ladies and loving friends, that my Lady Butterfield gives a challenge to ride a horse, or leap a horse, or run afoot, or hollo, with any woman in England seven years young- er, but not a day older, because I won't undervalue my- self, being now 74 years of age." Nor should be left unrecorded the high-born Scottish damsel whose tradition still remains at the Castle of Huntingtower, in Scotland, where two adjacent pinnacles still mark the Maiden's Leap. She sprang from battlement to battlement, a dis- tance of nine feet and four inches, and eloped with her lover. Were a young lady to go through one of our vil- BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION. 129 lages in a series of leaps like that, and were she to re- quire her Covers to follow in her footsteps, it is to be feared that she would die single. Yet the transplanted race which has in two centuries stepped from Delft Haven to San Francisco has no rea- son to be ashamed of its physical achievements, the more especially as it has found time on the way for one feat of labor and endurance which may be matched without fear against any historic deed. When civilization took pos- session of this continent, it found one vast coating of almost unbroken forest overspreading it from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization, that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly, what star- vation, however imminent, what pestilence, however lurking, to a solid obstacle like this ? No mere cour- age could cope with it, no mere subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine with head for hands ; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, the forest has been felled. What were the Pyramids to that? History does not record another athletic feat so aston- ishing. But there yet lingers upon this continent a forest of moral evil more formidable, a barrier denser and darker, a Dismal Swamp of inhumanity, a barbarism upon the soil, before which civilization has thus far been compelled to pause, happy, if it could even check its spread. Checked at last, there comes from it a cry as if the light of day had turned to darkness, when the truth simply is, that darkness is being mastered and surrounded by the light of day. Is it a good thing to " extend the area of freedom " by pillaging some feeble Mexico ? and does the phrase become a bad one only when it means the 6* i 130 BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION. peaceful progress of constitutional liberty within our own borders ? The phrases which oppression teaches become the watchwords of freedom at last, and the triumph of Civilization over Barbarism is the only Manifest Destiny of America. GYMNASTICS GYMNASTICS. SO your zeal for physical training begins to wane a little, my friend ? I thought it would, in your par- ticular case, because it began too ardently and was con- centrated too exclusively on your one hobby of pedes- trianism. Just now you are literally under the weather. It is the equinoctial storm. No matter, you say ; did not Olmsted foot it over all England under an umbrella? did not Wordsworth regularly walk every guest round Windermere, the day after arrival, rain or shine ? So, the day before yesterday, you did your four miles out, on the Northern turnpike, and returned splashed to the waist ; and yesterday you walked three miles out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees. To-day the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to remain so ; exercise is a humbug ; you will give it all up, and go to the Chess-Club. Don't go to the Chess-Club ; come with me to the Gymnasium. Chess may be all very well to tax with tough problems a brain otherwise inert, to vary a monotonous day with small events, to keep one awake during a sleepy evening, and to arouse a whole family next morning for the ad- justment over the breakfast-table of that momentous state-question, whether the red king should have castled 134 GYMNASTICS. at the fiftieth move or not till the fifty-first. But for an average American man, who leaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders, utterly exhausted in the daily effort to put ten dollars more of distance be- tween his posterity and the poor-house, for such a one to kindle up afresh after office-hours for a complicated chess-problem seems much as if a wood-sawyer, worn out with his week's work, should decide to order in his sa AT- horse on Saturday evening, and saw for fun. Surely we have little enough recreation at any rate, and, pray, let us make that little unintellectual. True, something can be said in favor of chess, inasmuch as no money can be made out of it ; but even this is not enough. For this once, lock your brains into your safe, at nightfall, with your other valuables ; don't go to the Chess-Club ; come with me to the Gymnasium. Ten leaps up a steep, worn-out stairway, through a blind entry to another stairway, and yet another, and we emerge suddenly upon the floor of a large lighted room, a mere human machine-shop of busy motion, where Indian clubs are whirling, dumb-bells pounding, swings vibrating, and arms and legs flying in all manner of un- expected directions. Henderson sits with his big propor- tions quietly rested against the weight-boxes, pulling with monotonous vigor at the fifty-pound weights, " the Stationary Engine " the boys call him. For a contrast, Draper is floating up and down between the parallel bars with such an airy lightness, that you think he must have hung up his body in the dressing-room, and is exercising only in his arms and clothes. Parsons is swinging in the rings, rising to the ceiling before and behind ; up and down he goes, whirling over and over, converting himself GYMNASTICS. 135 into a mere tumbler-pigeon, yet still bound by the long, steady vibration of the human pendulum. Another is running a race with him, if sitting in the swing be run- ning ; and still another is accompanying their motion, clinging to the trapeze. Hayes, meanwhile, is spinning on the horizontal bar, now backward, now forward, twen- ty times without stopping, pinioned through his bent arms, like a Fakir on his iron. See how many different waya of ascending a vertical pole these boys are devising ! one climbs with hands and legs, another with hands only, another is crawling up on all-fours in Fiji fashion, while another is pegging his way up by inserting pegs in holes a foot apart, you will see him sway and tremble yet, before he reaches the ceiling. Others are at work with a spring-board and leaping-cord ; higher and higher the cord is moved, one by one the competitors step aside defeated, till the field is left to a single champion, who, like an India-rubber ball, goes on rebounding till he seems likely to disappear through the chimney, like a Ravel. Some sturdy young visitors, farmers by their looks, are trying their strength, with various success, at the sixty-pound dumb-bell, when some quiet fellow, a clerk or a tailor, walks modestly to the hundred-pound weight, and up it goes as steadily as if the laws of gravi- tation had suddenly shifted their course, and worked upward instead of down. Lest, however, they should suddenly resume their original bias, let us cross to the dressing-room, and, while you are assuming flannel shirt or complete gymnastic suit, as you may prefer, let us consider the merits of the Gymnasium. Do not say that the public is growing tired of hearing about physical training. You might as well speak of being surfeited with the sight of apple-blossoms, or bored 136 GYMNASTICS. with roses, for these athletic exercises are, to a healthy person, just as good and refreshing. Of course, any one becomes insupportable who talks all the time of this sub- ject, or of any other ; but it is the man who fatigues you, not the theme. Any person becomes morbid and tedious whose whole existence is absorbed in any one thing, be it playing or praying. Queen Elizabeth, after admiring a gentleman's dancing, refused to look at the dancing-mas- ter, who did it better. " Nay," quoth her bluff Majesty, " 't is his business, I '11 none of him." Professionals grow tiresome. Books are good, so is a boat ; but a librarian and a ferryman, though useful to take you where you wish to go, are not necessarily enlivening as com- panions. The annals of " Boxiana " and " Pedestriana " and "The Cricket-Field" are as pathetic records of monomania as the bibliographical works of Mr. Thomas Dibdin. Margaret Fuller said truly, that we all delight in gossip, and differ only in the department of gossip we individually prefer ; but a monotony of gossip soon grows tedious, be the theme horses or octavos. Not one tenth-part of the requisite amount has yet been said of athletic exercises as a prescription for this community. There was a time when they were not even practised generally among American boys, if we may trust the foreign travellers of a half-century ago, and they are but just being raised into respectability among Ameri- can men. Motley says of one of his Flemish heroes, that " he would as soon have foregone his daily tennis as his religious exercises," as if ball-playing were then the necessary pivot of a great man's day. Some such pivot of physical enjoyment we must have, for no other race in the world needs it so much. Through the immense in- ventive capacity of our people, mechanical avocations are GYMNASTICS. 137 becoming almost as sedentary and intellectual as the pro- fessions. Among Americans, all hand-work is constantly being transmuted into brain-work; Napoleon's wish is being fulfilled, that all trades should become arts ; the intellect gains, but the body suffers, and needs some other form of physical activity to restore the equilibrium. As machinery becomes perfected, all the coarser tasks are constantly being handed over to the German or Irish immigrant, not because the American cannot do the particular thing required, but because he is promoted to something more intellectual. Thus transformed to a mental laborer, he must somehow supply the bodily de- ficiency. If this is true even of mechanics, it is of course true of the merchant, the student, and the professional man. The general statement recently made by Lewes, in England, certainly holds not less in America : " It is rare to meet with good digestion among the artisans of the brain, no matter how careful they may be in food and general habits. The great majority of our literary and professional men could echo the testimony of Washington Irving, if they would only indorse his wise conclusion : " My own case is a proof how one really loses by over- writing one's self and keeping too intent upon a seden- tary occupation. I attribute all my present indisposition, which is losing me time, spirits, everything, to two fits of close application and neglect of all exercise while I was at Paris. I am convinced that he who devotes two hours each day to vigorous exercise will eventually gain those two and a couple more into the bargain." Indeed, there is something involved in the matter far beyond any merely physical necessity. All our natures need something more than mere bodily exertion; they need bodily enjoyment. There is, or ought to be, in all 138 GYMNASTICS. of us a touch of untamed gypsy nature, which should be trained, not crushed. We need, in the very midst of civilization, something which gives a little of the zest of savage life; and athletic exercises furnish the means. The young man who is caught down the bay in a sudden storm, alone in his boat, with wind and tide against him, has all the sensations of a Norway sea-king, sensations thoroughly uncomfortable, if you please, but for the thrill and glow they bring. Swim out after a storm at Dove Harbor, topping the low crests, diving through the high ones, and you feel yourself as veritable a South-Sea Islander as if you were to dine that day on missionary instead of mutton. Tramp, for a whole day, across hill, marsh, and pasture, with gun, rod, or whatever the ex- cuse may be, and camp where you find yourself at even- ing, and you are as essentially an Indian on the Blue Hills as among the Rocky Mountains. Less depends upon circumstances than we fancy, and more upon our personal temperament and will. All the enjoyments of Browning's "Saul," those "wild joys of living" which make us happy with their freshness as we read of them, are within the reach of all, and make us happier still when enacted. Every one, in proportion as he develops his own physical resources, puts himself in harmony with the universe, and contributes something to it ; even as Mr. Pecksniff, exulting in his digestive machinery, felt a pious delight after dinner in the thought that this wonderful apparatus was wound up and going. A young person can no more have too much love of adventure than a mill can have too much water-power ; only it needs to be worked, not wasted. Physical ex- ercises give to energy and daring a legitimate channel, supply the place of war, gambling, licentiousness, high- GYMNASTICS. 139 vay-robbery, and office-seeking. De Quincey, in like manner, fays that Wordsworth made pedestrianism a substitute for wine and spirits ; and Emerson thinks the force of rude periods " can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war." The animal energy cannot and ought not to be suppressed ; if debarred from its natural channel, it will force for itself unnatural ones. A vigorous life of the senses not only does not tend to sensuality in the objectionable sense, but it helps to avert it. Health finds joy in mere existence; daily breath and daily bread suffice. This innocent enjoyment lost, the normal desires seek abnormal satisfactions. The most brutal prize-fighter is compelled to recognize the connection between purity and vigor, and becomes virtu- ous when he goes into training, as the heroes of old observed chastity, in hopes of conquering at the Olympic Games. The very word ascetic comes from a Greek word signifying the preparatory exercises of an athlete. There are spiritual diseases which coil poisonously among distorted instincts and disordered nerves, and one would be generally safer in standing sponsor for the soul of the gymnast than of the dyspeptic. Of course, the demand of our nature is not always for continuous exertion. One does not always seek that " rough exercise " which Sir John Sinclair asserts to be " the darling idol of the English." There are delicious languors, Neapolitan reposes, Creole siestas, " long days and solid banks of flowers." But it is the birthright of the man of the temperate zones to alternate these volup- tuous delights with more heroic ones, and sweeten the reverie by the toil. So far as they go, the enjoyments of the healthy body are as innocent and as ardent as 140 GYMNASTICS. those of Jie soul. As there is no ground of comparison, so there is no ground of antagonism. How compare a sonata and a sea-bath, or measure the Sistine Madonna against a gallop across country ? The best thanksgiv- ing for each is to enjoy the other also, and educate the mind to ampler nobleness. After all, the best ver- dict on athletic exercises was that of the great Sully, when he said, "I was always of the same opinion with Henry IV. concerning them : he often asserted that they were the most solid foundation, not only of discipline and other military virtues, but also of those noble senti- ments and that elevation of mind which give one nature superiority over another." We are now ready, perhaps, to come to the question, How are these athletic enjoyments to be obtained ? The first and easiest answer is, By taking a long walk every day. If people would actually do this, instead of forever talking about doing it, the object might be gained. To be sure, there are various defects in this form of exer- cise. It is not a play, to begin with, and therefore does not withdraw the mind from its daily cares ; the anxious man recurs to his problems on the way ; and each mile, in that case, brings fresh weariness to brain as well as body. Moreover, there are, according to Dr. Grau, " three distinct groups of muscles which are almost totally neglected where walking alone is resorted to^ and which consequently exist only in a crippled state, although they are of the utmost importance, and each stands in close rapport with a number of other functions of the great- est necessity to health and life." These he afterwards classifies as the muscles of the shoulders and chest, hav- ing a bearing on the lungs, the abdominal muscles, bearing on the corresponding organs, and the spinal GYMNASTICS. 141 muscles, which are closely connected with the whole nervous system. But the greatest practical difficulty is, that walking, being the least concentrated form of exercise, requires a larger appropriation of time than most persons are willing to give. Taken liberally, and in connection with exer- cises which are more concentrated and have more play about them, it is of great value, and, indeed, indispensa- ble. But so far as I have seen, instead of these other pursuits taking the place of pedestrianism, they commonly create a taste for it ; so that, when the sweet spring days come round, you will see our afternoon gymnastic class begin to scatter literally to the four winds ; or they look in for a moment, on their way home from the woods, their hands filled and scented with long wreaths of the trailing arbutus. But the gymnasium is the normal type of all muscular exercise, the only form of it which is impartial and comprehensive, which has something for everybody, which is available at all seasons, through all weathers, in all lati- tudes. All other provisions are limited : you cannot row in winter nor skate in summer, spite of parlor-skates and ice-boats ; ball-playing requires comrades ; riding takes money ; everything needs daylight : but the gymnasium is always accessible. Then it is the only thing which trains the whole body. Military drill makes one prompt, patient, erect, accurate, still, strong. Rowing takes one set of muscles and stretches them through and through, till you feel yourself turning into one long spiral spring from finger-tips to toes. In cricket or base-ball, a player runs, strikes, watches, catches, throws, must learn quick- ness of hand and eye, must learn endurance also. Yet, no matter which of these may be your special hobby, you 142 GYMNASTICS. mast, if you wish to use all the days and all the muscles, seek the gymnasium at last. The history of modern gymnastic exercises is easily written : it is proper to say modern, for, so far as apparatus goes, the ancient gymnasiums seem to have had scarcely anything in common with our own. The first institution on the modern plan was founded at Schnep- fenthal, near Gotha, in Germany, in 1785, by Salzmann, a clergyman and the principal of a boys' school. After eight years of experience, his assistant, Gutsmuths, wrote a book upon the subject, which was translated into Eng- lish, and published at London in 1799 and at Philadelphia in 1800, under the name of " Salzmann's Gymnastics." No similar institution seems to have existed in either country, however, till those established by Voelckers, in London, in 1824, and by Dr. Follen, at Cambridge, Mass., in 1826. Both were largely patronized at first, and died out at last. The best account of Voelckers's establish- ment will be found in Hone's " Every-Day Book " ; its plan seems to have been unexceptionable. But Dr. James Johnson, writing his " Economy of Health " ten years after, declared that these German exercises had proved " better adapted to the Spartan youth than to the pallid sons of pampered cits, the dandies of the desk, and the squalid tenants of attics and factories," and also adds the epitaph, " This ultra-gymnastic enthusiast did much injury to an important branch of hygiene by carrying it to excess, and consequently by causing its desuetude." And Dr. Jarvis, in his " Practical Physiology," declares from personal recollection that the result of the American experiment was " general failure." Accordingly, the English, who are reputed kings in all physical exercises, have undoubtedly been far surpassed GYMNASTICS. 143 by the Germans, and even by the French, hi gymnastics. The writer of the excellent little " Handbook for Gym- nastics," George Forrest, M. A., testifies strongly to this deficiency. " It is curious that we English, who possess perhaps the finest and strongest figures of all European nations, should leave ourselves so undeveloped bodily. There is not one man in a hundred who can even raise his toes to a level with his hands, when suspended by the latter members ; and yet to do so is at the very beginning of gymnastic exercises. We, as a rule, are strong in the arms and legs, but weak across the loins and back, and are apparently devoid of that beautiful set of muscles that run round the entire waist, and show to such advantage in the ancient statues. Indeed, at a bathing-place, I can pick out every gymnast merely by the development of those muscles," a statement, by the way, which has a good deal of truth in it. It is the Germans and the military portion of the French nation, chiefly, who have developed gymnastic exercises to their present elaboration, while the working out of their curative applications was chiefly due to Ling, a Swede. In the German manuals, such, for instance, as Eiselen's " Turniibungen," are to be found nearly all the stock exercises of our institutions. Until within a few years, American skill has added nothing to these, except through the medium of the circus; but the present revival of athletic exercises is rapidly placing American gymnasts hi advance of the Turners, both in the feats performed and in the style of doing them. Never yet have I succeeded in seeing a thoroughly light and graceful German gymnast, while again and again I have seen Americans who carried into their severest exercise such an airy, floating elegance of motion, that all the beauty of Greek sculpture appeared 144 GYMNASTICS. to return again, and it seemed as if plastic art might once more make its studio in the gymnasium. The apparatus is not costly. Any handful of young men in the smallest country village, with a very few dol- lars and a little mechanical skill, can put up in any old shed or shoe-shop a few simple articles of machinery, which will, through many a winter evening, vary the monotony of the cigar and the grocery -bench by an end- less variety of manly competitions. Fifteen cents will bring by mail from the publishers of the "Atlantic" Forrest's little sixpenny " Handbook," which gives a sufficient number of exercises to form an introduction to all others ; and a gymnasium is thus easily established. This is just the method of the simple and sensible Ger mans, who never wait for elegant upholstery. A pair of plain parallel bars, a movable vaulting-bar, a wooden horse, a spring-board, an old mattress to break the fall, a few settees where sweethearts and wives may sit with their knitting as spectators, and there is a Turnhalle com- plete, to be henceforward filled, two or three nights in every week, with cheery German faces, jokes, laughs, gutturals, and gambols. But this suggests that you are being kept too long in the anteroom. Let me act as cicerone through this modest gymnastic hall of ours. You will better appre- ciate all this oddly-shaped apparatus, if I tell you in advance, as a connoisseur does in his picture-gallery, precisely what you are expected to think of each partic- ular article. You will notice, however, that a part of the gymnastic class are exercising without apparatus, in a series of rather grotesque movements which supple and prepare the body for more muscular feats : these are calisthenic GYMNASTICS. 145 exercises. Such are being at last introduced, thanks to Dr. Lewis and others, into our common schools. At the word of command, as swiftly as a conjurer twists his puzzle-paper, these living forms are shifted from one odd resemblance to another, at which it is quite lawful to laugh, especially if those laugh who win. A series of wind-mills, a group of inflated balloons, a flock of geese all asleep on one leg, a circle of ballet-dancers, just poised to begin, a band of patriots just kneeling to take an oath upon their country's altar, a senate of tailors, a file of soldiers, a whole parish of Shaker worshippers, a Japanese embassy performing Ko-tow : these all in turn come like shadows, so depart. This complicated attitudinizing forms the preliminary to the gymnastic hour. But now come and look at some of the apparatus. Here is a row of Indian clubs, or sceptres, as they are sometimes called, tapering down from giants of fifteen pounds to dwarfs of four. Help yourself to a pair of dwarfs, at first ; grasp one in each hand, by the handle ; swing one of them round your head quietly, dropping the point behind as far as possible, then the other, and so swing them alternately some twenty times. Now do the same back-handed, bending the wrist outward, and carrying the club behind the head first. Now swing them both together, crossing them in front, and then the same back-handed ; then the same without crossing, and this again backward, which you will find much harder. Place them on the ground gently after each set of processes. Now, can you hold them out horizontally at arm's length, forward and then sideways ? Your arms quiver and qniver, and down come the clubs thumping at last. Take them presently in a different and more difficult 7 j 146 GYMNASTICS. manner, holding oach club with the point erect instead of hanging down , it tries your wrists, you will find, to manipulate them so, yet all the most graceful exercises havn this for a basis. Soon you will gain the mastery of heavier implements than you begin with, and will under- stand how yonder slight youth has learned to handle his two heavy clubs in complex curves that seem to you inex- plicable, tracing in the air a device as swift and tangled as that woven by a swarm of gossamer flies above a brook, in the sultry stillness of the summer noon. This row of masses of iron, laid regularly in order of size, so as to resemble something between a musical in- strument and a gridiron, consists of dumb-bells weighing from four pounds to a hundred. These playthings, suited to a variety of capacities, have experienced a revival of favor within a few years, and the range of exercises with them has been greatly increased. The use of very heavy ones is, so far as I can find, a peculiarly American hobby, though not originating with Dr. Windship. Even he, at the beginning of his exhibitions, used those weighing only ninety-eight pounds ; and it was considered an astonishing feat, when, a little earlier, Mr. Richard Montgomery used to " put up " a dumb-bell weighing one hundred and one pounds. A good many person^, in different parts of the country, now handle one hundred and twenty-five, and Dr. Windship has got much farther on. There is, of course, a knack in using these little articles, as in every other feat, yet it takes good extensor muscles to get be- yond the fifties. The easiest way of elevating the weight is to swing it up from between the knees ; or it may be thrown up from the shoulder, with a simultaneous jerk of the whole body ; but the only way of doing it handsomely is to put it up from the shoulder with the arm alone, GYMNASTICS. 147 without bending the knee, though you may bend the body as much as you please. Dr. Windship now puts up one hundred and forty-one pounds in this manner, and by the aid of a jerk can elevate one hundred and eighty with one arm. This particular movement with dumb-bells is most practised, as affording a test of strength ; but. there are many other ways of using them, all exceedingly in- vigorating, and all safe enough, unless the weight em- ployed be too great, which it is very apt to be. Indeed, there is so much danger of this, that at Cambridge it has been deemed best to exclude all beyond seventy pounds. Nevertheless, the dumb-bell remains the one available form of home or office exercise : it is a whole athletic apparatus packed up in the smallest space ; it is gymnas- tic pemmican. With one fifty-pound dumb-bell, or a pair of half that size, or more or less, according to hia strength and habits, a man may exercise nearly every muscle in his body in half an hour, if he has sufficient in- genuity in positions. If it were one's fortune to be sent to prison, and the access to such retirement is growing more and more facile in many regions of our common country, one would certainly wish to carry a dumb-bell with him, precisely as Dr. Johnson carried an arithmetic in lus pocket on his tour to the Hebrides, as containing the greatest amount of nutriment in the compactest form. Apparatus for lifting is not yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in spite of the recommendations of the Rox- bury Hercules : beside the fear of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus, while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamome- ter has yet come into the market. Running and jumping, also, have as yet been too much neglected in our institu- tions, or practiced spasmodically rather than systemati- 148 GYMNASTICS. cally. It is singular how little pains have been taken t& ascertain definitely what a man can do with his body, far less, as Quetelet has observed, than in regard to any animal which man has tamed, or any machine which he has invented. It is stated, for instance, in Walker's " Manly Exercises," that six feet is the maximum of a high leap, with a run, and certainly one never finds in the newspapers a record of anything higher ; yet it is the English tradition, that Ireland, of Yorkshire, could clear a string raised fourteen feet, and that he once kicked a bladder at sixteen. No spring-board would explain a difference so astounding. In the same way, Walker fixes the limit of a long leap without a run at fourteen feet, and with a run at twenty-two, both being large esti- mates; and Thackeray makes his young Virginian jump twenty-one feet and three inches, crediting George Wash- ington with a foot more. Yet the ancient epitaph of Phayllus the Crotonian claimed for him nothing less than fifty-five feet on an inclined plane. Certainly the story must have taken a leap also. These ladders, aspiring indefinitely into the air, like Piranesi's stairways, are called technically peak-ladders ; and dear banished T. S. K., who always was puzzled to know why Mount Washington kept up such a pique against the sky, would have found his joke fit these lad- ders with great precision, so frequent the disappointment they create. But try them, and see what trivial appen- dages one's legs may become, since the feet are not in- tended to touch these polished rounds. Walk up backward on the under side, hand over hand, then forward ; then go up again, omitting every other round ; then aspire to the third round, if you will. Next grasp a round with both hands, give a slight swing of the body, let go, and grasp GYMNASTICS. 149 the roun above with both, and so on upward ; then the same, omitting one round, or more, if you can, and come down in the same way. Can you walk up on one hand ? It is not an easy thing, but a first-class gymnast will do it, and Dr. Windship does it, taking only every third round. Fancy a one-armed and legless hodman ascend- ing the under side of a ladder to the roof, and reflect on the conveniences of gymnastic habits. Here is a wooden horse ; on this noble animal the Ger- mans say that not less than three hundred distinct feats can be performed. Bring yonder spring-board, and we will try a few. Grasp these low pommels and vault over the horse, first to the right, then again to the left ; then with one hand each way. Now spring to the top and stand ; now spring between the hands forward, now back- ward ; now take a good impetus, spread your feet far apart, and leap over it, letting go the hands. Grasp the pommels again and throw a somerset over it, coming down on your feet, if the Fates permit. Now vault up and sit upon the horse, at one end, knees the same side ; now grasp the pommels and whirl yourself round till you sit at the other end, facing the other way. Now spring up and bestride it ; whirl round till you bestride it the other way, at the other end ; do it once again, and, letting go your hand, seat yourself in the saddle. Now push away the spring-board and repeat every feat without its aid. Next, take a run and spring upon the end of the horse astride ; then walk over, supporting yourself on your hands alone, the legs not touching ; then backward, the same. It will be hard to balance yourself at first, and reu will careen uneasily one way or the other ; no matter, you will get over it somehow. Lastly, mount onco more, kneel in the saddle, and leap to the ground. It 150 GYMNASTICS. appears at first ridiculously impracticable, the knees seem glued to their position, and it looks as if one would fall inevitably on bis face ; but falling is hardly possible. Any novice can do it, if he will only have faith. You shall learn to do it from the horizontal bar presently, where it looks much more formidable. But first you must learn some simpler exercises on this horizontal bar : you observe that it is made movable, and may be placed as low as your knee, or higher than your hand can reach. This bar is only five inches in circum- ference ; but it is remarkably strong and springy, and there- fore we hope secure, though for some exercises our boys prefer to substitute a larger one. Try and vault it, first to the right, then to the left, as you did with the horse ; try first with one hand, then see how high you can vault with both. Now vault it between your hands, forward and backward : the latter will bafHe you, unless you have brought an unusual stock of India-rubber in your frame, to begin with. Raise it higher and higher, till you can vault it no longer. Now spring up on the bar, resting on your palms, and vault over from that position with a swing of your body, without touching the ground ; when you have once managed this, you can vault as high as you can reach : double-vaulting this is called. Now put the bar higher than your head ; grasp it with your hands, and draw yourself up till you look over it ; repeat this a good many times : capital practice this, as is usually said of things particularly tiresome. Take hold of the bar again, and with a good spring from the ground try to curl your body over it, feet foremost. At first, in all proba- bility, your legs will go angling in the air convulsively, and come down with nothing caught; but erelong we shall see you dispense with the spring from the ground GYMNASTICS. . 151 and go whirling over and over, as if the bar were the axle of a wheel and your legs the spokes. Now spring upon the bar, supporting yourself on your palms, as be- fore ; put your hands a little farther apart, with the thumbs forward, then suddenly bring up your knees on the bar and let your whole body go over forward : you will not fall, if your hands have a good grasp. Try it again with your feet outside your hands, instead of be- tween them ; then once again flinging your body off from the bar and describing a long curve with it, arms stiff: this is called the Giant's Swing. Now hang to the bar by the knee?, by both knees; do not try it yet with one; then seize the bar with your hands and thrust the legs still farther and farther forward, pulling with your arms at the same time, till you find yourself sitting un- accountably on the bar itself. This our boys cheeifully denominate " skinning the cat," because the sensations it suggests, on a first experiment, are supposed to resemble those of pussy with her skin drawn over her head ; but, after a few experiments, it seems like stroking the fur in the right direction, and grows rather pleasant. Try now the parallel bars, the most invigorating appa- ratus of the gymnasiifm, and in its beginnings " accessi- ble to the meanest capacity," since there are scarcely any who cannot support themselves by the hands on the bar?, and not very many who cannot walk a few steps upon the palms, at the first trial. Soon you will learn to swing along these bars in long surges of motion, forward and backward ; to go through them, in a series of springs from the hand only, without a jerk of the knees ; to turn round and round between them, going forward or backward all the while ; to vault over them and under them in compli- cated ways ; to turn somersets in them and across them; 152 GYMNASTICS. to roll over and over on them as a porpoise seems to roll in the sea. Then come the " low-standing " exercises, the grasshopper style of business ; supporting yourself now with arms not straight, but bent at the elbow, you shall learn to raise and lower your body, and to hold or swing yourself as lightly in that position as if you had not felt pinioned and paralyzed hopelessly at the first trial ; and whole new systems of muscles shall seem to shoot out from your shoulder-blades to enable you to do what you could not have dreamed of doing before. These bars are magical, they are conduits of power ; you cannot touch them, you cannot rest your weight on them in the slightest degree, without causing strength to How into your body as naturally and irresistibly as water into the aqueduct-pipe when you turn it on. Do you but give the opportunity, and every pulsation of blood from your heart is pledged for the rest These exercises, and such as these, are among the ele- mentary lessons of gymnastic training. Practise these thoroughly and patiently, and you will in time attain evo- lutions more complicated, and, if you wish, more perilous. Neglect these, to grasp at random after everything which you see others doing, and you will fail like a bookkeeper who is weak in the multiplication-table. The older yon begin, the more gradual the preparation must be. A respectable middle-aged citizen, bent on improving his physique, goes into a gymnasium, and sees slight, smooth- faced boys going gayly through a series of exercises which show their bodies to be a triumph, not a drag, and he is assured that the same might be the case with him. Off goes the coat of our enthusiast, and in he plunges ; he gripes a heavy dumb-bell and strains one shoulder, hauls at a weight-box and strains the other, vaults the bar and GYMNASTICS. 153 bruises his knee, swings in the rings once or twice till his hand slips and he falls to the floor. No matter, he thinks the cause demands sacrifices ; but he subsides, for the next fifteen minutes, into more moderate exercises, which he still makes immoderate by his awkward way of doing them. Nevertheless, he goes home, cheerful under diffi- culties, and will try again to-morrow. To-morrow finds him stiff, lame, and wretched ; he cannot lift his arm to his face to shave, nor lower it sufficiently to pull his boots on ; his little daughter must help him with his shoes, and the indignant wife of his bosom must put on his hat, with that ineffectual one-sidedness to which alone the best- regulated female mind can attain, in this difficult part of costuming. His sorrows increase as the day passes ; the gymnasium alone can relieve them, but his soul shudders at the remedy ; and he can conceive of nothing so absurd as a second gymnastic lesson, except a first one. But had he been wise enough to place himself under an expe- i-ienced adviser at the very beginning, he would have leen put through a few simple movements which would have sent him home glowing and refreshed, and fancying himself half-way back to boyhood again ; the slight ache and weariness of next day would have been cured by next day's exercise ; and after six months' patience, by a progress almost imperceptible, he would have found him- self, in respect to strength and activity, a 'transformed man. Most of these discomforts, of course, are spared to boys ; their frames are more elastic, and less liable to ache and strain. They learn gymnastics, as they learn everything else, more readily than their elders. Begin with a boy- early enough, and if he be of a suitable temperament, he can learn in the gymnasium all the feats usually seen in 7* 154 GYMNASTICS. the circus-ring, and could even acquire more difficult ones, if it were worth his while to try them. This is true even of the air-somerset and hand-springs which are not so commonly cultivated by gymnasts ; but it is. especially true of all exercises with apparatus. It is astonishing how readily our classes pick up any novelty brought into town by a strolling company, holding the body out hor- izontally from an upright pole, or hanging by the back of the head, or touching the head to the heels, though this last is oftener tried than accomplished. They may be seen practising these antics, at all spare moments, for weeks, until some later hobby drives them away. From Blondin downward?, the public feats derive a large part of their wonder from the imposing height in the air at which they are done. Many a young man who can swing himself more than his own length on the horizontal lad- der at the gymnasium has yet shuddered at techelle peril- leuse of the Hanlons ; and I noticed that even the simplest of their performances, such as holding by one hand, or hanging by the knees, seemed perfectly terrific when done at a height of twenty or thirty feet in the air, even to those who had done them a hundred times at a lower level. It was the nerve that was astounding, not the strength or skill ; but the eye found it hard to draw the distinction. So when a gymnastic friend of mine, cross- ing the ocean lately, amused himself with hanging by one leg to the mizzen-topmast-stay, the boldest sailors shud- dered, though the feat itself was nothing, save to the imagination. Indeed, it is almost impossible for an inexperienced spectator to form the slightest opinion as to the compara- tive difficulty or danger of different exercises, since it is the test of merit to make the hardest things look easy. GYMNASTICS. 155 Moreover, there may be a distinction between two feats almost imperceptible to the eye, a change, for instance, in the position of the hands on a bar, which may at once transform the thing from a trifle to a wonder. An unpractised eye can no more appreciate the difficulty of a gymnastic exercise by seeing it executed, than an inex- perienced ear can judge of the perplexities of a piece of music by hearing it played. The first effect of gymnastic exercise is almost always to increase the size of the arms and the chest ; and new- comers may commonly be known by their frequent re- course to the tape-measure. The average increase among the students of Harvard University during the first three months of the gymnasium was nearly two inches in the chest, more than one inch in the upper arm, and more than half an inch in the fore-arm. This was far beyond what the unassisted growth of their age would account for ; and the increase is always very marked for a time, especially with thin persons. In those of fuller habit the loss of flesh may counterbalance the gain in muscle, so that size and weight remain the same ; and in all cases the increase stops after a time, and the subsequent change is rather in texture than in volume. Mere size is no in- dex of strength : Dr. Windship is scarcely larger or heavier now than when he had not half his present powers. In the vigor gained by exercise there is nothing false or morbid ; it is as reliable as hereditary strength, except that it is more easily relaxed by indolent habits. No doubt it is aggravating to see some robust, lazy giant come into the gymnasium for the first time, and by hered- itary muscle shoulder a dumb-bell which all your training has not taught you to handle. No matter ; it is by com- 150 GYMNASTICS. paring yourself with yourself that the estimate is to be made. As the writing-master exhibits with triumph to each departing pupil the uncouth copy which he wrote on entering, so it will be enough to you, if you can appre- ciate your present powers with your original inabilities. When you first joined the gymnastic class, you could not climb yonder smooth mast, even with all your limbs brought into service ; now you can do it with your hands alone. When you came, you could not possibly, when hanging by your hands to the horizontal bar, raise your feet as high as your head, nor could you, with any amount of spring from the ground, curl your body over the bar itself; and now you can hang at arm's length and fling yourself over it a dozen times in succession. At first, if you lowered yourself with bent elbows between the parallel bars, you could not by any manoeuvre get up again, but sank to the ground a hopeless wreck ; now you can raise and lower yourself an indefinite number of times. As for the weights and clubs and dumb-bells, you feel as if there must be some jugglery about them, they have grown so much lighter than they used to be. It is you who have gained a double set of muscles to every limb ; that ;s all. Strike out from the shoulder with your clenched hand ; once your arm was loose-joint- ed and shaky ; now it is firm and tense, and begins to feel like a natural arm. Moreover, strength and suppleness have grown together ; you have not stiffened by becom- ing stronger, but find yourself more flexible. When you first came here, you could not touch your fingers to the ground without bending the knees, and now you can place your knuckles on the floor ; then you could scarcely bend yourself backward, and now you can lay the back of your head in a chair, or walk, without crouching forward, GYMNASTICS. 157 under a bar less than three feet from the ground. You have found, indeed, that almost every feat is done origi- nally by sheer strength, and then by agility, requiring very little expenditure of force after the precise motion is hit upon ; at first labor, puffing, and a red face, afterwards ease and the graces. To a person who begins after the age of thirty or there- abouts, the increase of strength and suppleness, of course, comes more slowly ; yet it comes as surely, and perhaps it is a more permanent acquisition, less easily lost again, than in the softer frame of early youth. There is no doubt that men of sixty have experienced a decided gain in strength and health by beginning gymnastic exercises even at that age, as Socrates learned to dance at seventy ; and if they have practised similar exercises all their lives, so much is added to their chance of preserving physical youthfulness to the last. Jerome and Gabriel Ravel are reported to have spent near threescore years on the planet which their winged feet have so lightly trod ; and who will dare to say how many winters have passed over the head of the still young and graceful Papanti ? Dr. Windship's most important experience is, that strength is to a certain extent identical with health, so that every increase in muscular development is an actual protection against disease. Americans, who are ashamed to confess to doing the most innocent thing for the sake of mere enjoyment, must be cajoled into every form of exercise under the plea of health. Joining, the other day, in a children's dance, I was amused by a solemn par- ent who turned to me, in the midst of a Virginia reel, he still conscientious, though breathless, and asked if I did not consider dancing to be, on the whole, a healthy 158 GYMNASTICS. exercise ? Well, the gymnasium is healthy ;" but the less you dwell on that fact, the better, after you have once entered it. If it does you good, you will enjoy it ; and if you enjoy it, it will do you good. With body, as with soul, the highest experience merges duty in pleasure. The better one's condition is, the less one has to think about growing better, and the more unconsciously one's natural instincts guide the right way. When ill, we eat to support life ; when well, we eat because the food tastes good. It is a merit of the gymnasium, that, when prop- erly taken, it makes one forget to think about health or anything else that is troublesome ; M a man remembereth neither sorrow nor debt " ; cares must be left outside, be they physical or metaphysical, like canes at the door of a museum. No doubt, to some it grows tedious. It shares this objection with all means of exercise. To be an Ameri- can is to hunger for novelty; and all instruments and appliances, especially, require constant modification : we are dissatisfied with last winter's skates, with the old boat, and with the family pony. So the zealot finds the gym- nasium insufficient long before he has learned half the moves. To some temperaments it becomes a treadmill, and that, strangely enough, to diametrically opposite tem- peraments. A lethargic youth, requiring great effort to keep himself awake between the exercises, thinks the gymnasium slow, because he is ; while an eager, impetu- ous young fellow, exasperated because he cannot in a fortnight draw himself up by one hand, finds the same trouble there as elsewhere, that the laws of Nature are not fast enough for his inclinations. No one without energy, no one without patience, can find permanent in- terest in a gymnasium ; but with these qualities, and a GYMNASTICS. Io9 modest willingness to live and learn, I do not see why one should ever grow tired of the moderate use of its apparatus. For one, I really never enter it without exhilaration, or leave it without a momentary regret: there are always certain special new things on the docket for trial; and when those are settled, there will be something more. It is amazing what a variety of interest can be extracted from those few bits of wood and rope and iron. There is always somebody in advance, some "man on horseback" on a wooden horse, some India-rubber hero, some slight and powerful fellow who does with ease what you fail to do with toil, some terrible Dr. Windship with an ever-waxing dumb- bell. The interest becomes semi-professional. A good gymnast enjoys going into a new and well-appointed establishment, precisely as a sailor enjoys a well-rigged ship ; every rope and spar is scanned with intelligent in- terest ; u we know the forest round us as seamen know the sea." The pupils talk gymnasium as some men talk horse. A particularly smooth and flexible horizontal pole, a desirable pair of parallel bars, a remarkably elas- tic spring-board, these are matters of personal pride, and described from city to city with loving enthusiasm. The gymnastic apostle rises to eloquence in proportion to the height of the hand-swings, and points his climax to match the peak-ladders. An objection frequently made to the gymnasium, and especially by anxious parents, is the supposed danger of accident. But this peril is obviously inseparable from all physical activity. If a man never leaves his house, the chances undoubtedly are, that he will never break his leg on the sidewalk ; but if he is always to stay in the house, he might as well have no legs at all. Certainly we incur 160 GYMNASTICS. danger every time we go outside the front-door ; but to remain always on the inside would prove the greatest danger of the whole. When a man slips in the street and dislocates his arm, we do not warn him against walk- ing, but against carelessness. When a man is thrown from his horse and gratifies the surgeons by a beautiful case of compound fracture, we do not advise him to avoid a riding-school, but to go to one. Trivial accidents are not uncommon in the gymnasium, severe ones are rare, fatal ones almost unheard of, which is far more than can be said of riding, driving, hunting, boating, skating, or even sliding down hill on a sled. Learning gymnastics is like learning to swim, you incur a small temporary risk for the sake of acquiring powers that will lessen your risks in the end. Your increased strength and agility will carry you past many unseen perils hereafter, and the invigorated tone of your system will make accidents less important, if they happen. Some trifling sprain causes lameness for life, some slight blow brings on wasting disease, to a per- son whose health is merely negative, not positive, while a well-trained frame throws it off in twenty-four hours. It is almost proverbial of the gymnasium, that it cures its own wounds. A minor objection is, that these exercises are not per- formed in the open air. In summer, however, they may be, and in winter and in stormy weather it is better that they should not be. Extreme cold is not favorable to them ; it braces, but stiffens ; and the bars and ropes become slippery and even dangerous. In Germany it is common to have a double set of apparatus, out-doors and in-doors ; and this would always be desirable, but for the increased expense. Moreover, the gymnasium should be taken in addition to out-door exercise, giving, for in- GYMNASTICS. 161 stance, an hour a day to each, one for training, the other for oxygen. I know promising gymnasts whose pallid complexions show that their blood is not worthy of their muscle, and they will break down. But these cases are rare, for the reason already hinted, that nothing gives so good an appetite for out-door life as this in-door activity. It alternates admirably with skating, and seduces irresist- ibly into walking or rowing when spring arrives. My young friend Silverspoon, indeed, thinks that a good trot on a fast horse is worth all the gymnastics in the world. But I learn, on inquiry, that my 'young friend's mother is constantly imploring him to ride in order to air her horses. It is a beautiful parental trait; but for those born horseless, what an economical substi- tute is the wooden quadruped of the gymnasium ! Our Autocrat has well said, that the livery-stable horse is " a profligate animal " ; and I do not wonder that the Cen- taurs of old should be suspected of having originated spurious coin. Undoubtedly it was to pay for the hire of their own hoofs. For young men in cities, too, the facilities for exercise are limited not only by money, but by time. They must commonly take it after dark. It is in every way a bless- ing, when the gymnasium divides their evenings with the concert, the book, or the public meeting. Then there is no time It-ft, and small temptation, for pleasures less pure It gives an innocent answer to that first demand for even ing excitement which perils the soul of the homeless boy in the seductive city. The companions whom he meets at the gymnasium are not the ones whose pursuits of later nocturnal hours will entice him to sin. The honest fatigue of his exorcises calls for honest rest. It is the nervous exhaustion of a sedentary, frivolous, or joyless life which 162 GYMNASTICS. madly tries to restore itself by the other nervous exhaus- tion of debauchery. It is an old prescription, " Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit, Abstinuit venere et vino." There is another class of critics whose cant is simply can't, and who, being unable or unwilling to surrender themselves to these simple sources of enjoyment, are grandiloquent upon the dignity of manhood, and the absurdity of full-grown men iu playing monkey-tricks with their bodies. Full-grown men ? There is not a person in the world who can afford to be a " full-grown man " through all the twenty-four hours. There is not one who does not need, more than he needs his dinner, to have habitually one hour in the day when he throws him- self with boyish eagerness into interests as simple as those of boys. No church or state, no science or art, can feed us all the time ; some morsels there must be of simpler diet, some moments of unadulterated play. But dignity ? Alas for that poor soul whose dignity must be "preserved," preserved in the right culinary sense, as fruits which are growing dubious in their natural state are sealed up in jars to make their acidity presentable ! " There 's beggary in the love that can be reckoned," and degrada- tion in the dignity that has to be preserved. Simplicity is the only dignity. If one has not the genuine article, no affluence of starch, no snow-drift of white-linen decen- cy, will furnish any substitute. If one has it, he will retain it, whether he stand on his head or his heels. Nothing is really undignified but affectation or conceit; and for the total extinction and annihilation of every ves- tige of these, there are few things so effectual as athletic exercises. Still another objection is that o f the medical men, that GYMNASTICS. 163 the gymnasium, as commonly used, is not a specific pre- scription for the special disease of the patient. But set- ting aside the claims of the system of applied gymnastics, which Ling and his followers have so elaborated, it is enough to answer, that the one great fundamental disor- der of all Americans is simply nervous exhaustion, and that for this the gymnasium can never be misdirected, though it may be used to excess. Of course one can no more cure overwork of brain by overwork of body, than one can restore a wasted candle by lighting it at the other end. But by subtracting an hour a day from the present amount of purely intellectual fatigue, and inserting that quantum of bodily fatigue in its place, you begin an imme- diate change in your conditions of life. Moreover, the great object is not merely to get well, but to keep well. The exhaustion of overwork can almo-t always be cured by a water-cure, or by a voyage, which is a salt-water cure ; but the problem is, how to make the whole voyage of life perpetually self-curative. Without this, there is perpetual dissatisfaction and chronic failure. Emerson well says, " Each class fixes its eye on the advantages it has not, the refined on rude strength, the democrat on birth and breeding." This is the aim of the gymnasium, to give to the refined this rude strength, or its better sub- stitute, refined strength. It is something to secure to the student or the clerk the strong muscles, hearty appetite, and sound sleep of the sailor and the ploughman, to enable him, if need be, to out-row the fisherman, and out- run the mountaineer, and lift more than his porter, and to remember headache and dyspepsia only as he recalls the primeval whooping-cough of his childhood. I am one of those who think that the Autocrat rides his hobby of the pavements a little too far ; but it is useless to deny, that, 164 GYMNASTICS. within the last few years of gymnasiums and boat-clubs, the city has been gaining on the country in physical development. Here in our town we had all the city and college boys assembled in July to see the regattas, and all the country-boys in September to see the thousand-dollar base-ball match ; and it was impossible to deny, whatever one's theories, that the guests of the regatta showed the finer physique. The secret is, that, though the country offers to farmers more oxygen than is accessible to anybody in the city, yet not all dwellers in the country are farmers, and even this favored class suffer from other causes, being usually the very last to receive those lessons of food and clothing and bathing and ventilation which have their origin in cities. Physical training is not a mechanical, but a vital process : no bricks without straw ; no good physique with- out good materials and conditions. The farmer knows, that, to rear a premium colt or calf, he must oversee every morsel that it eats, every motion it makes, every breath it draws, must guard against over-work and under-work, cold and heat, wet and dry. He remembers it for the quadrupeds, but he forgets it for his children, his wife, and himself: so his cattle deserve a premium, and his family does not. Neglect is the danger of the country ; the peril of the city is in living too fast. All mental excitement acts as a stimulant, and, like all stimulants, debilitates when taken in excess. This explains the unnatural strength and agility of the insane, always followed by prostration ; and even moderate cerebral excitement produces similar re- sults, so far as it goes. Quetelet discovered that some- times after lecturing, or other special intellectual action, he could perform gymnastic feats impossible to him at GYMNASTICS. 165 other times. The fact is unquestionable ; and it is also certain that an extreme in this direction has precisely the contrary effect, and is fatal to the physical condition. One may spring up from a task of moderate mental labor with a sense of freedom, like a bow let loose ; but after an im- moderate task one feels like the same bow too long bent, flaccid, nerveless, all the elasticity gone. Such fatigue is far more overwhelming than any mere physical exhaus- tion. I have lounged into the gymnasium, after an after- noon's skating, supposing myself quite tired, and have found myself in excellent condition ; and I have gone in after an hour or two of some specially concentrated anx- iety or thought, without being aware that the body was at all fatigued, and found it good for nothing. Such experi- ences are invaluable ; all the libraries cannot so illustrate the supremacy of immaterial forces. Thought, passion, purpose, expectation, absorbed attention even, all feed upon the body's powers ; let them act one atom too in- tensely, or one moment too long, and this wondrous physi- cal organization finds itself drained of its forces to sup- port them. It does not seem strange that strong men should have died by a single ecstasy of emotion too con- vulsive, when we bear within us this tremendous engine whose slightest pulsation so throbs in every fibre of our frame. The relation between mental culture and physical pow- ers is a' subject of the greatest interest, as yet but little touched, because so few of our physiologists have been practical gymnasts. Nothing is more striking than the tendency of all athletic exercises, when brought to per- fection, to eliminate mere brute bulk from the competi- tion, and give the palm to more subtile qualities, agility, quickness, a good eye, a ready hand, in short, superior 166 GYMNASTICS. fineness of organization. Any clown can leani the mili tary manual exercise ; but it needs brain-power to drill with the Zouaves. Even a prize-fight tests streLgth less than activity and " science." The game of base-ball, as played in our boyhood, was a simple, robust, straightfor- ward contest, where the hardest hitter was the best man ; but it is every year becoming perfected into a sleight-of- hand, h'ke cricket ; mere strength is now almost valueless in playing it, and it calls rather for the qualities of the billiard-player. In the last champion-match at Worces- ter, nearly the whole time was consumed in skilful feints and parryings, and it took five days to make fifty runs. And these same characteristics mark gymnastic exercises above all ; men of great natural strength are very apt to be too slow and clumsy for them, and the most difficult feats are usually done by persons of comparatively deli- cate physique and a certain artistic organization. It is this predominance of the nervous temperament which is yet destined to make American gymnasts the foremost in the world. Indeed, the gymnasium is as good a place for the study of human nature as any. The perpetual analqgy of mind and body can be appreciated only where both are trained with equal system. In both departments the great prizes are not won by the most astounding special powers, but by a certain harmonious adaptation. There is a physical tact, as there is a mental tact Every process is accom- plished by using just the right stress at just the right mo- ment ; but no two persons are alike in the length of time required for these little discoveries. Gymnastic genius lies in gaining at the first trial what will cost weeks of perseverance to those less happily gifted. And as the close, elastic costume which is worn by the gymnast, or GYMNASTICS. 167 should be worn, allows no merit or defect of figure to be concealed, so the close contact of emulation exhibits all the varieties of temperament. One is made indolent by success, and another is made ardent; one is discouraged by failure, and another aroused by it; one does every- thing best the first time and slackens ever after, while another always begins at the bottom and always climbs to the top. One of the most enjoyable things in these mimic emu- lations is this absolute genuineness in their gradations of success. In the great world outside, there is no immedi- ate and absolute test for merit. There are cliques and puffings and jealousies, quarrels of authors, tricks of trade, caucusing in politics, hypocrisy among the deacons. We distrust the value of others' successes, they distrust ours, and we all sometimes distrust our own. There are those who believe in Shakespeare, and those who believe in Tup- per. All merit is measured by sliding scales, and each has his own theory of the sliding. In a dozen centuries it will all come right, no doubt. In the mean time there is vanity in one half the world, and vexation of spirit in the other half, and each man joins each half in turn. But once enter the charmed gate of the gymnasium, and you leave shams behind. Though you be saint or sage, no matter, the inexorable laws of gravitation are around you. If you flinch, you fail ; if you slip, you fall. That bar, that rope, that weight, shall test you absolutely. Can you handle it, it is well ; but if not, stand aside for him who can. You may have every other gift and grace, it counts for nothing ; he, not you, is the man for the hour. The code of Spanish aristocracy is slight and flexible com- pared with this rigid precedence. It is Emerson's As- traea ; each registers himself, and there is no appeal. No 108 GYMNASTICS. use to kick and struggle, no use to apologize ; do not say that to-night you are tired, last night you felt ill. These excuses may serve for a day, but no longer. A slight margin is allowed for moods and variations, but it is not great after all. One revels in this Palace of Truth : defeat itself is a satisfaction, before a tribunal of such absolute justice. This contributes to that healthful ardor with which, in these exercises, a man forgets the things which are be- hind and presses forward to fresh achievements. This perpetually saves from vanity ; for everything seems a trifle, when you have once attained to it. The aim which yesterday filled your whole gymnastic horizon you overtake and pass as a boat passes a buoy : until passed, it was an absorbing goal ; when passed, a mere speck in the distance. Yesterday you could swing yourself three rounds upon the horizontal ladder ; to-day, after weeks of effort, you have suddenly attained to the fourth, and instantly all that long laborious effort vanishes, to be formed again between you and the fifth round : five, five is the only goal for heroic labor to-day ; and when five is attained, there will be six, and so on while the Arabic numerals hold out. A childish aim, no doubt ; but is not this what we all recognize as the privilege of childhood, to obtain exaggerated enjoyment from little things ? When you have come to the really difficult feats of the gymnasium, when you have conquered the " barber's curl " and the " peg-pole," when you can draw your- self up by one arm, and perform the " giant's swing " over and over, without changing hands, and vault the horizon- tal bar as high as you can reach it, when you can vault across the high parallel bars between your hands back- ward, or walk through them on your palms with your GYMNASTICS. 169 feet in the vicinity of the ceiling, then you will reap the reward of your past labors, and may begin to call yourself a gymnast. It is pleasant to think, that, so great is the variety of exercises in the gymnasium, even physical deficiencies and deformities do not wholly exclude from its benefits. I have seen an invalid girl, so lame from childhood that she could not stand without support, whose general health had been restored, and her bust and arms made a study for a sculptor, by means of gymnastics. Nay, there are odd compensations of Nature by which even exceptional formations may turn to account in athletic exercises. A squinting eye is a treasure to a boxer, a left-handed bat- ter is a prize in a cricketing eleven, and one of the best gymnasts in Chicago is an individual with a wooden leg, which he takes off at the commencement of affairs, thus economizing weight and stowage, and performing achieve- ments impossible except to unipeds. In the enthusiasm created by this emulation, there is necessarily some danger of excess. Dr. Windship ap- proves of exercising only every other day in the gymna- sium ; but as most persons take their work in a more diluted form than his, they can afford to repeat it daily, unless warned by headache or languor that they are ex- ceeding their allowance. There is no good in excess ; our constitutions cannot be hurried. The law is univer- sal, that exercise strengthens as long as nutrition balances it, but afterwards wastes the very forces it should increase "We cannot make bricks faster than Nature supplies us with straw. It is one good evidence of the increasing interest in these exercises, that the American gymnasiums built during the past year or two have far surpar ^ed all their J70 GYMNASTICS. predecessors in size and completeness, and have probably no superiors in the world. The Seventh Regiment Gvm- nasium in New York, just opened by Mr. Abner S. Brady, is one hundred and eighty feet by fifty-two, in its main hall, and thirty-five feet in height, with nearly a thousand pupils. The beautiful hall of the Metropolitan Gymnasium, in Chicago, measures one hundred and eight feet by eighty, and is twenty feet high at the sides, with a dome in the centre, forty feet high, and the same in diameter. Next to these probably rank the new gymna- sium at Cincinnati, the Tremont Gymnasium at Boston, and the Bunker Hill Gymnasium at Charle>town, all re- cently opened. Of college institutions the most complete are probably those at Cambridge and New Haven, the former being eighty-five feet by fifty, and the latter one hundred feet by fifty, in external dimensions. The ar- rangements for instruction are rather more systematic at Harvard, but Yale has several valuable articles of appa- ratus as the rack-bars and the series of rings which have hardly made their appearance, as yet, in Massa- chusetts, though considered indispensable in New York institutions. Gymnastic exercises are as yet but very sparingly in troduced into our seminaries, primary or professional though a great change is already beginning. Until latel" all our educational plans have assumed man to be > merely sedentary being ; we have employed teachers ot music and drawing to go from school to school to teacV those elegant arts, but have had none to teach the an of health. Accordingly, the pupils have exhibited more complex curves in their spines than they could possibly portray on the blackboard, and acquired such discords in their nervous systems as would hare utterly disgraced GYMNASTICS. 171 their singing. It is something to have got beyond the period when active sports were actually prohibited. I remember when thv.re was but one boat owned by a Cam- bridge student, and that was soon reported to have been suppressed by the Faculty, on the plea that there was a college law against a student's keeping domestic animals, and a boat was a domestic animal within the meaning of the statute. Manual labor was thought less reprehensible ; but schools on this basis have never yet proved satisfactory, because either the hands or the brains have always come off second-best from the effort to com- bine : it is a law of Nature, that after a hard day's work one does not need more work, but play. But in many of the German common schools one or two hours are given daily to gymnastic exercises with apparatus, with some- times the addition of Wednesday or Saturday afternoon ; and this was the result, as appears from Gutsmuth's book, of precisely the same popular reaction against a purely intellectual system which is visible in our community now. In the French military school at Joinville, the degree of Bachelor of Agility is formally conferred ; but Horace Mann's remark still holds good, that it is seldom thought necessary to train men's bodies for any purpose except to destroy those of other men. However, in view of the present wise policy of our leading colleges, we shall have to stop croaking before long, especially as enthusiastic alumni already begin to fancy a visible im- provement in the physique of graduating classes on Commencement Day. It would be unpardonable, in this connection, not to speak a good word for the favorite hobby of the day, Dr. Lewis, and his system of gymnastics, or, more prop- erly, of calisthenics. Dr. Windship had done all that was 172 GYMNASTICS. needed in apostleship of severe exercises, and there was wanting some man with a milder hobby, perfectly safe for a lady to drive. The Fates provided that man, also, in Dr. Lewis, so hale and hearty, so profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own methods and the uselessness of all others, with such a ready invention, and such an inundation of animal spirits that he could flood any com- pany, no matter how starched or listless, with an un- bounded appetite for ball-games and bean-games. How long it will last in the hands of others than the projector remains to be seen, especially as some of his feats are more exhausting than average gymnastics ; but, in the mean time, it is just what is wanted for multitudes of persons who find or fancy the real gymnasium to be unsuited to them. It will especially render service to female pupils, so far as they practise it ; for the accus- tomed gymnastic exercises seem never yet to have been rendered attractive to them, on any large scale, and with any permanency. Girls, no doubt, learn as readily as boys to row, to skate, and to swim, any muscular infe- riority being perhaps counterbalanced in swimming by their greater physical buoyancy, in skating by their dancing-school experience, and in rowing by their music- lessons enabling them more promptly to fall into regular time, though these suggestions may all be fancies rather than facts. The same points help them, perhaps, in the lighter calisthenic exercises ; but when they come to the apparatus, one seldom sees a girl who takes hold like a boy: it, perhaps, requires a certain ready capital of muscle, at the outset, which they have not at command, and which it is tedious to acquire afterwards. Yet there seem to be some cases, as with the classes of Mrs. Moli- neaux at Cambridge, where a good deal of gymnastic GYMNASTICS. 173 enthusiasm is created among female pupils, and it may be. after all, that the deficiency lies thus far in the teachers. Experience is already showing that the advantages of school-gymnasiums go deeper than was at first supposed. It is not to be the whole object of American education to create scholars or idealists, but to produce persons of a solid strength, persons who, to use the most expressive Western phrase that ever was coined into five monosyl- lables, " will do to tie to " ; whereas to most of us it would be absurd to tie anything but the Scriptural mill- stone. In the military school of Brienne, the only report appended lo the name of the little Napoleon Bonaparte was " Very healthy " ; and it is precisely his class of boys for whom there is least place in a purely intellectual in- stitution. A child of immense animal activity and unlim- ited observing faculties, personally acquainted with every man, child, horse, dog, in the township, intimate in the families of oriole and grasshopper, pickerel and turtle, quick of hand and eye, in short, born for practical leadership and victory, such a boy finds no provision for him in most of our seminaries, and must, by his con- stitution, be either truant or torment. The theory of the institution ignores such aptitudes as his, and recognizes no merits save those of some small sedentary linguist or mathematician, a blessing to his teacher, but an object of watchful anxiety to the family physician, and whose career is endangering not only his health, but his humil- ity. Introduce now some athletic exercises as a regular part of the school-drill, instantly the rogue finds his legit- imate sphere, and leads the class ; he is no longer an outcast, no longer has to look beyond the school for com- panions and appreciation ; while, on the other hand, the 174 GYMNASTICS. youthful pedant, no longer monopolizing superiority, Is brought down to a proper level. Presently comes along some finer fellow than either, who cultivates all his facul- ties, and is equally good at spring-board and blackboard ; and straightway, since every child wishes to be a Crich- ton, the whole school tries for the combination of merits, and the grade of the juvenile community is perceptibly raised. What is true of childhood is true of manhood also. What a shame it is that even Kingsley should fall into the cant of deploring maturity as a misfortune, and de- claring that our freshest pleasures come " before the age of fourteen " ! Health is perpetual youth, that is, a state of positive health. Merely negative health, the mere keeping out of the hospital for a series of yeai's, is not health. Health is to feel the body a luxury, as every vigorous child does, as the bird does when it shoots and quivers through the air, not flying for the sake of the goal, but for the sake of the flight, as the dog does when he scours madly across the meadow, or plunges into the muddy blissfulness of the stream. But neither dog nor bird nor child enjoys his cup of physical happiness let the dull or the worldly say what they will with a felicity so cordial as the educated palate of conscious manhood. To " feel one's life in every limb," this is the secret bliss of which all forms of athletic exercise are merely varying disguises ; and it is absurd to say that we cannot possess this when character is mature, but only when it is half developed. As the flower is better than the bud, so should the fruit be better than the flower. We need more examples of a mode of living which shall not alone be a success in view of some ulterior ob- ject, but which shall be, in its nobleness^and healthfulness. GYMNASTICS. 175 successful every moment as it passes on. Navigating a wholly new temperament through history, this Amer- ican race must of course form its own methods and take nothing at second-hand ; but the same triumphant combi- nation of bodily and mental training which made human life beautiful in Greece, strong in Rome, simple and joy- ous in Germany, truthful and brave in England, must yet be moulded to a higher quality amid this varying climate and on these low shores. The regions of the world most garlanded with glory and romance, Attica, Provence, Scotland, were originally more barren than Massachu- setts ; and there is yet possible for us such an harmonious mingling of refinement and vigor, that we may more than fulfil the world's expectation, and may become classic to ourselves A NEW COUNTERBLAST. A NEW COUNTERBLAST. " He that taketh tobacco saith he cannot leave it, it doth bewitch him." KING JAMES'S Counterblast to Tobacco. AMERICA is especially responsible to the whole world for tobacco, since the two are twin-sisters, born to the globe in a day. The sailors first sent on shore by Columbus came back with news of a new con- tinent and a new condiment. There was solid land, and there was a novel perfume, which rolled in clouds from the lips of the natives. The fame of the two great dis- coveries instantly began to overspread the world ; but the smoke travelled fastest, as is its nature. There are many races which have not yet heard of America: there are very few which have not yet tasted of tobacco. A plant which was originally the amusement of a few savage tribes has become hi a few centuries the fancied necessary of life to the most enlightened nations of the earth, and it is probable that there is nothing cultivated by man which is now so universally employed. And the plant owes this width of celebrity to a combi- nation of natural qualities so remarkable as to yield great diversities of good and evil fame. It was first heralded as a medical panacea, " the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use of man," and was seldom mentioned, in the sixteenth century, 180 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. without some reverential epithet. It was a plant divine, a canonized vegetable. Each nation had its own pious name to bestow upon it The French called it herbs sainte, herbe sacree, herbe propre a tous maux, panacee antarctigue, the Italians, herba santa croce, the Germans, hettig wundkraut. Botanists soberly classified it as herba panacea and herba sancta, and Gerard hi his u Herbal " fixed its name finally as sana sancta Indorum, by which title it commonly appears in the professional recipe^ of the time. Spenser, in his " Faerie Queene," bids the lovely Belphoebe gather it as u divine tobacco," and Lilly the Euphuist calls it " our holy herb Nicotian," ranking it between violets and honey. It was cultivated in France for medicinal purposes solely, for hah a cen- tury before any one there used it for pleasure, and till within the last hundred years it was familiarly prescribed, all over Europe, for asthma, gout, catarrh, consumption, headache ; and. in short, was credited with curing more diseases than even the eighty-seven which Dr. Shew now charges it with producing. So vast were the results of all this sanitary enthusiasm, that the use of tobacco in Europe probably reached its climax in a century or two, and has since rather dimin- ished than increased, in proportion to the population. It probably appeared in England in 1586, being first used in the Indian fashion, by handing one pipe from man to man throughout the company ; the medium of communi- cation being a silver tube for the higher classes, and a straw and walnut-shell for the baser sort. Paul Hentz- ner, who travelled in England in 1598, and Monsieur Misson, who wrote precisely a century later, note almost in the same words "a perpetual use of tobacco"; and the latter suspects that this is what makes " the generality A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 181 of Englishmen so taciturn, so thoughtful, and so mel- ancholy." In Queen Elizabeth's time, the ladies of the court " would not scruple to blow a pipe together very socially." In 1614 it was asserted that tobacco was sold openly in more than seven thousand places in London, some of these being already attended by that patient In- dian who still stands seductive at tobacconists' doors. It was also estimated that the annual receipts of these estab- lishments amounted to more than three hundred thousand pounds. Elegant ladies had their pictures painted, at least one in 1650 did, with pipe and box in hand. Roche- fort, a rather apocryphal French traveller in 1672, re- ported it to be the general custom in English homes to set pipes on the table in the evening for the females as well as males of the family, and to provide children's luncheon-baskets with a well-filled pipe, to be smoked at school, under the directing eye of the master. In 1703, Lawrence Spooner wrote that " the sin of the kingdom in the intemperate use of tobacco swelleth and increaseth so daily, that I can compare it to nothing but the waters of Noah, that swelled fifteen cubits above the highest mountains." The deluge reached its height in England so thinks the amusing and indefatigable Mr. Fairholt, author of " Tobacco and its Associations " in the reign of Queen Anne. Steele, in the " Spectator," (1711,) describes the snuff-box as a rival to the fan among la- dies ; and Goldsmith pictures the belles at Bath as enter- ing the water in full bathing costume, each provided with a small floating basket, to hold a snuff-box, a kerchief, and a nosegay. And finally, in 1797, Dr. Clarke com- plains of the handing about of the snuff-box in churches during worship, " to the great scandal of religious peo- ple," adding, that kneeling in prayer was prevented by 182 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. the large quantity of saliva ejected in all directions. In view of such formidable statements as these, it is hardly possible to believe that the present generation surpasses or even equals the past in the consumption of tobacco. And all this sudden popularity was in spite of a vast persecution which sought to unite all Europe against this indulgence, in the seventeenth century. In Russia, its use was punishable with amputation of the nose; in Berne, it ranked next to adultery among offences ; San- dys, the traveller, saw a Turk led through the streets of Constantinople mounted backward on an ass with a to- bacco-pipe thrust through his nose. Pope Urban VIII., in 1624, excommunicated those who should use it in churches, and Innocent XII., in 1690, echoed the same anathema. Yet within a few years afterwards travellers reported that same free use of snuff in Romish worship which still astonishes spectators. To see a priest, during the momentous ceremonial of High Mass, enliven the occasion by a voluptuous pinch, is a sight even more as- tonishing, though perhaps less disagreeable, than the well- used spittoon which decorates so many Protestant pulpits. But the Protestant pulpits did their full share in fight- ing the habit, for a time at least. Among the Puritans, no man could use tobacco publicly, on penalty of a fine of two and sixpence, or in a private dwelling, if strangers were present ; and no two could use it together. That iron pipe of Miles Standish, still preserved at Plymouth, must have been smoked in solitude, or not at all. This strictness was gradually relaxed, however, as the clergy took up the habit of smoking ; and I have seen an old painting, on the panels of an ancient parsonage in New- buryport, representing a jovial circle of portly divines sitting pipe in hand around a table, with the Latin motto, A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 183 u In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." Apparently the tobacco was one of the essen- tials, since there was unity respecting that. Further- more, Captain Underbill, hero of the Pequot War, boasted to the saints of having received his assurance of salvation " while enjoying a pipe of that good creature, tobacco," " since when he had never doubted it, though he should fall into sin." But it is melancholy to relate that this fall did presently take place, in a very flagrant manner, and brought discredit upon tobacco conversions, as being liable to end in smoke. Indeed, some of the most royal wills that ever lived in the world have measured themselves against the tobacco- plant and been defeated. Charles I. attempted to banish it, and in return the soldiers of Cromwell puffed their smoke contemptuously in his face, as he sat a prisoner in the guard-chamber. Cromwell himself undertook it, and Evelyn says that the troopers smoked in triumph at his funeral. Wellington tried it, and the artists caricatured him on a pipe's head with a soldier behind him defying with a whiff that imperial nose. Louis Napoleon is said to be now attempting it, and probably finds his subjects more ready to surrender the freedom of the press than of the pipe. The more recent efforts against tobacco, like most arguments in which morals and physiology are mingled, have lost much of their effect through exaggeration. On both sides there has been enlisted much loose statement, with some bad logic. It is, for instance, unreasonable to hold up the tobacco-plant to general indignation because Linnaeus classed it with the natural order Luridce, since he attributed the luridness only to the color of those plants, not to their character. It is absurd to denounce 184 .4 NEW COUNTERBLAST. it as belonging to the poisonous nightshade tribe, when the potato and the tomato also appertain to that perilous domestic circle. It is hardly fair even to complain of it for yielding a poisonous oil, when these two virtuous plants to say nothing of the peach and the almond will,junder sufficient chemical provocation, do the same thing. Two drops of nicotine will, indeed, kill a rabbit ; but so, it is said, will two drops of solanine. Great are the resources of chemistry, and a well-regulated scientific mind can detect something deadly almost anywhere. Nor is it safe to assume, as many do, that tobacco pre- disposes very powerfully to more dangerous dissipations. The non-smoking Saxons were probably far more intem- perate in drinking than the modern English ; and Lane, the best authority, points out that wine is now far less used by the Orientals than at the time of the " Arabian Nights," when tobacco had not been introduced. And in respect to yet more perilous sensual excesses, tobacco is now admitted, both by friends and foes, to be quite as much a sedative as a stimulant. The point of objection on the ground of inordinate ex- pense is doubtless better taken, and can be met only by Substantial proof that the enormous outlay is a wise one. Tobacco may be " the anodyne of poverty," as somebody has said, but it certainly promotes poverty. This narcotic lulls to sleep all pecuniary economy. Every pipe may not, indeed, cost so much as that jewelled one seen by Dihdin in Vienna, which was valued at a thousand pounds ; or even as the German meerschaum which was passed from mouth to mouth through a whole regiment of soldiers till it was colored to perfection, having never been allowed to cool, a bill of one hundred pounds be- ing ultimately rendered for the tobacco consumed. But yr NEW COUNTERBLAST. 185 how heedlessly men squander money on this pet luxury ! By the report of the English University Commissioners, some ten years ago, a student's annual tobacco-bill often amounts to forty pounds. Dr. Solly puts thirty pounds as the lowest annual expenditure of an English smoker, and knows many who spend one hundred and twenty pounds, and one three hundred pounds a year, on tooacco alone. In this country the facts are hard to obtain, but many a man smokes twelve four-cent cigars a day, and many a man four twelve-cent cigars, spending in either case about half a dollar a day and not far from two hun- dred dollars per annum. An industrious mechanic earns his two dollars and fifty cents a day, or a clerk his eight hundred dollars a year, spends a quarter of it on tobacco, and the rest on his wife, children, and miscellaneous ex- penses. But the impotency which marks some of the stock ar- guments against tobacco extends to most of those in favor of it. My friend assures me that every one needs some narcotic, that the American brain is too active, and that the influence of tobacco is quieting, great is the enjoy- ment of a comfortable pipe after dinner. I grant, on observing him at that period, that it appears so. But I also observe, that, when the placid hour has passed away, his nervous system is more susceptible, his hand more tremulous, his temper more irritable on slight occasions, than during the days when the comfortable pipe chances to be omitted. The only effect of the narcotic appears, therefore, to be a demand for another narcotic ; and there seems no decided advantage over the life of the birds and bees, who appear to keep their nervous systems in toler ably healthy condition with no narcotic at all. The argument drawn from a comparison of races is no 186 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. better. Germans are vigorous and Turks aore long -li veil, and they are all great smokers. But certainly the Ger- mans do not appear so vivacious, nor the Turks so ener- getic, as to afford triumphant demonstrations in behalf of the sacred weed. Moreover, the Eastern tobacco is as much milder than ours, as are the Continental wines than even those semi-alcoholic mixtures which prevail at scru- pulous communion-tables. And as for German health, Dr. Schneider declares, in the London " Lancet/' that it is because of smoke that all his educated countrymen wear spectacles, that an immense amount of consumption is produced in Germany by tobacco, and that English insurance companies are proverbially cautious in insuring German lives. Dr. Carlyon gives much the same as his observation in Holland. These facts may be overstated, but they are at least as good as those which they answer. Not much better is the excuse alleged in the social and genial influences of tobacco. It certainly seems a singu- lar way of opening the lips for conversation by closing them on a pipe-stem, and it would rather appear as if Fate designed to gag the smokers and let the non-smokers talk. But supposing it otherwise, does it not mark a condition of extreme juvenility in our social development, if no resources of intellect can enable a half-dozen intel- ligent men to be agreeable to each other, without apply- ing the forcing process, by turning the room into an imperfectly organized chimney ? Brilliant women can be brilliant without either wine or tobacco, and Napoleon always maintained that without an admixture of feminine wit conversation grew tame. Are all male beings so much stupider by nature than the other sex, that men re- quire stimulants and narcotics to make them mutually endurable ? A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 181 And as the conversational superiorities of woman dis- prove the supposed social inspirations of tobacco, so do her more refined perceptions yet more emphatically pro- nounce its doom. Though belles of the less mature description, eulogistic of sophomores, may stoutly profess that they dote on the Virginian perfume, yet cultivated womanhood barely tolerates the choicest tobacco-smoke, even in its freshness, and utterly recoils from the stale suggestions of yesterday. By whatever enthusiasm mis- led, she finds something abhorrent in the very nature of the thing. In vain did loyal Frenchmen baptize the weed as the queen's own favorite, Herba Catherines Me- diccB ; it is easier to admit that Catherine de' Medici was not feminine than that tobacco is. Man also recognizes the antagonism ; there is scarcely a husband in America who would not be converted from smoking, if his wife resolutely demanded her right of moiety in the cigar-box. No Lady Mary, no loveliest Marquise, could make snuff- taking beauty otherwise than repugnant to this genera- tion. Rustic females who habitually chew even pitch or spruce-gum are rendered thereby so repulsive that the fancy refuses to pursue the horror farther and imagine it tobacco ; and all the charms of the veil and the fan can scarcely reconcile the most fumacious American to the cigarrito of the Spanish fair. How strange seems Par- ton's picv.ure of General Jackson puffing his long clay pipe on one side of the fireplace and Mrs. Jackson puffing hers on the other ! No doubt, to the heart of the chival- rous backwoodsman those smoke-dried lips were yet the altar of early passion, as that rather ungrammatical tongue was still the music of the spheres ; but the unat- tractiveness of that conjugal counterblast is Nature's own protest against smoking. 188 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. The use of tobacco must, therefore, be held to mark a rather coarse and childish epoch in our civilization, if nothing worse. Its most ardent admirer hardly paints it into his picture of the Golden Age. It is difficult to asso- ciate it with one's fancies of the noblest manhood, and Miss Muloch reasonably defies the human imagination to portray Shakespeare or Dante with pipe in mouth. Goethe detested it ; so did Napoleon, save in the form of snuff, which he apparently used on Talleyrand's principle, that diplomacy was impossible without it. Bacon said, " To- bacco-smoking is a secret delight, serving only to steal away men's brains." Newton abstained from it : the contrary is often claimed, but thus says his biographer, Brewster, saying that " he would make no necessities to himself." Franklin says he never used it, and never met with one of its votaries who advised him to follow the example. John Quincy Adams used it in early youth, and after thirty years of abstinence said, that, if every one would try abstinence for three months, it would anni- hilate the practice, and add five years to the average length of human life. In attempting to go beyond these general charges of waste and foolishness, and to examine the physiological results of the use of tobacco, one is met by the contradic- tions and perplexities which haunt all such inquiries. Doctors, of course, disagree, and the special cases cited triumphantly by either side are ruled out as exceptional by the other. It is like the question of the precise de- gree of injury done by alcoholic drinks. To-day's news- paper writes the eulogy of A. B., who recently died at the age of ninety-nine, without ever tasting ardent spirits; to-morrow's will add the epitaph of C. D., aged one hun- dred, who has imbibed a quart of rum a day since reach- A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 189 ing the age of indiscretion ; and yet, after all, both editors have to admit that the drinking usages of society are growing decidedly more decent It is the same with the tobacco argument. Individual cases prove nothing either way ; there is such a range of vital vigor in different individual?, that one may withstand a life of error, and another perish in spite of prudence. The question is of the general tendency. It is not enough to know that Dr. Parr smoked twenty pipes in an evening, and lived to be seventy-eight ; that Thomas Hobbes smoked thirteen, and survived to ninety-two ; that Brissiac of Trieste died at one hundred and sixteen, with a pipe in his mouth ; and that Henry Hartz of Schleswig used tobacco steadily from the age of sixteen to one hundred and forty-two ; nor would any accumulation of such healthy old sinners prove anything satisfactory. It seems rather overwhelm- ing, to be sure, when Mr. Fairholt assures us that his respected father " died at the age of seventy-two : he had been twelve hours a day in a tobacco-manufactory for nearly fifty years ; and he both smoked and chewed while busy in the labors of the workshop, sometimes in a dense cloud of steam from drying the damp tobacco over the stoves ; and his health and appetite were perfect to the day of his death : he was a model of muscular and stomachic energy ; in which his son, who neither smokes, snuffs, nor chews, by no means rivals him." But until we know precisely what capital of health the venerable tobacconist inherited from his fathers, and in what condi- tion he transmitted it to his sons, the statement certainly has two edges. For there are facts equally notorious on the other sideu It is not denied that it is found necessary to exclude to- bacco, as a general rule, from insane asylums, or that it 190 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. produces, in extreme cases, among perfectly sober per sons, effects akin to delirium tremens. Nor is it denied that terrible local diseases follow it, as, for instance, cancer of the mouth, which has become, according to the eminent surgeon. Brouisson, the disease most dreaded in the French hospitals. He has performed sixty-eight op- erations for this, within fourteen years, in the Hospital St. Eloi, and traces it entirely to the use of tobacco. Such facts are chiefly valuable as showing the tendency of the thing. Where the evils of excess are so glaring, the advantages of even moderate use are questionable. Where weak persons are made insane, there is room for suspicion that the strong may suffer unconsciously. You may say that the victim* must have been constitutionally nervous ; but where is the native-born American who 13 not? In France and England the recent inquiries into the effects of tobacco seem to have been a little more syste- matic than our own. In the former country, the newspa- pers state, the attention of the Emperor was called to the fact that those pupils of the Polytechnic School who used this indulgence were decidedly inferior in average attain- ments to the rest. This is stated to have led to its prohi- bition in the school, and to the forming of an anti-tobacco organization, which is said to be making great progress in France. I cannot, however, obtain from any of our medical libraries any satisfactory information as to the French agitation, and am led by private advices to believe that even these general statements are hardly trustworthy. The recent English discussions are, however, more easy of access. " The Great Tobacco Question," as the controversy in England was called, originated in a Clinical Lecture OP A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 191 Paralysis, by Mr. Solly, Surgeon of St. Thomas's Hos- pital, which was published in the "Lancet," December 13, 1856. He incidentally spoke of tobacco as an im- portant source of this disease, and went on to say : " I know of no single vice which does so much harm as smoking. It is a snare and a delusion. It soothes the excited nervous system at the time, to render it more irri- table and feeble ultimately. It is like opium in this re- spect ; and if you want to know all the wretchedness which this drug can produce, you should read the ' Con- fessions of an English Opium-Eater.' " This statement was presently echoed by J. Ranald Martin, an eminent surgeon, " whose Eastern experience rendered his opin- ion of immense value," and who used language almost identical with that of Mr. Solly : "I can state of my own observation, that the miseries, mental and bodily, which I have witnessed from the abuse of cigar-smoking, far exceed anything detailed in the ' Confessions of an Opium-Eater.' " This led off a controversy, which continued for several months, in the columns of the " Lancet,*" a controversy conducted in a wonderfully good-natured spirit, consider- ing that more than fifty physicians took part in it, and that these were almost equally divided. The debate took a wide range, and some interesting facts were elicited : as that Lord Raglan, General Markham, and Admirals Dundas and Napier always abandoned tobacco from the moment when they were ordered on actual service ; that nine tenths of the first-class men at the Universities were non-smokers ; that two Indian chiefs told Power, the actor, that " those Indians who smoked gave out soonest in the chase " ; and so on. There were also American examples, rather loosely gathered : thus, a remark of the 192 A NEW COUNTERBLAS1. venerable Dr. Waterhouse, made many years ago, was cited as the contemporary opinion of " the Medical Pro- fessor in Harvard University " ; also it was mentioned, as an acknowledged fact, that the American physique was rapidly deteriorating because of tobacco, and that coro- ners' verdicts were constantly being thus pronounced on American youths: "Died of excessive smoking." On the other hand, that eminent citizen of our Union, Gen- eral Thomas Thumb, was about that time professionally examined in London, and his verdict on tobacco was quoted to be, that it was " one of his chief comforts " ; also mention was made of a hapless quack who an- nounced himself as coming from Boston, and who, to keep up the Yankee reputation, issued a combined adver- tisement of " medical advice gratis " and " prime cigars.'' But these stray American instances were of course quite outnumbered by the English, and there is scarcely an ill which was not in this controversy charged upon tobacco by its enemies, nor a physical or moral benefit which was not claimed for it by its friends. According to these, it prevents dissension and dyspnoea, inflammation and insanity, saves the waste of tissue and of time, blunts the edge of grief, and lightens pain. " No man was ever in a passion with a pipe in his mouth." There are more female lunatics chiefly because the fumigatory education of the fair sex has been neglected. Yet it is important to notice that these same advocates almost outdo its oppo- nents in admitting its liability to misuse, and the perilous consequences. " The injurious effects of excessive smok- ing," " there is no more pitiable object than the invet- erate smoker," " sedentary life is incompatible with smoking," highly pernicious, general debility, secretions all wrong, cerebral softening. partial pa- A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 193 ralysis, trembling of the hand, enervation and de- pression, great irritability, neuralgia, narcotism of the heart : this Chamber of Horrors forms a part of the very Temple of Tobacco, as builded, not by foes, but by worshippers. " All men of observation and experience," they admit, " must be able to point to instances of disease and derangement from the abuse of this luxury." Yet they advocate it, as the same men advocate intoxicating drinks ; not meeting the question, in either case, whether it be wise, or even generous, for the strong to continue an indulgence which is thus confessedly ruinous to the weak. The controversy had its course, and ended, like most controversies, without establishing anything. The editor of the " Lancet," to be sure, summed up the evidence very fairly, and it is worth while to quote him : " It is almost unnecessary to make a separate inquiry into the pathological conditions which follow upon excessive smok- ing. Abundant evidence has been adduced of the gigan- tic evils which attend the abuse of tobacco. Let it be granted at once that there is such a thing as moderate smoking, and let it be admitted that we cannot accuse to- bacco of being guilty of the whole of Cullen's ' Nosolo- gy '; it still remains that there is a long catalogue of frightful penalties attached to its abuse." He then pro- ceeds to consider what is to be called abuse : as, for instance, smoking more than one or two cigars or pipes daily, smoking too early in the day or too early in life, and in general, the use of tobacco by those with whom it does not agree, which rather reminds one of the early temperance pledges, which bound a man to drink no more rum than he found to be good for him. But the Chief Justice of the Medical Court finally instructs hie jury of readers that young men should give up a dubious 9 M 194 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. pleasure for a certain good, and abandon tobacco alto- gether : " Shun the habit of smoking as you would shun self-destruction. As you value your physical and moral well-being, avoid a habit which for you can offer no ad- vantage to compare with the dangers you incur." Yet, after all, neither he nor his witnesses seem fairly to have hit upon what seem to this present writer the two incontrovertible arguments against tobacco ; one be- ing drawn from theory, and the other from practice. First, as to the theory of the thing. The laws of Nature warn every man who uses tobacco for the first time, that he is dealing with a poison. Nobody denies this attribute of the plant ; it is " a narcotic poison of the most active class." It is not merely that a poison can by chemical process be extracted from it, but it is a poison in its sim- plest form. Its mere application to the skin has often produced uncontrollable nausea and prostration. Chil- dren have in several cases been killed by the mere appli- cation of tobacco ointment to the head. Soldiers have simulated sickness by placing it beneath the ai'mpits, though in most cases our regiments would probably con- sider this a mistaken application of the treasure. Tobac- co, then, is simply and absolutely a poison. Now to say that a substance is a poison, is not to say that it inevitably kills ; it may be apparently innocuous, if not incidentally beneficial. King Mithridates, it is said, learned habitually to consume these dangerous com- modities ; and the scarcely less mythical Du Chaillu, after the fatigues of his gorilla warfare, found decided benefit from two ounces of arsenic. But to say that a substance is a poison, is to say at least that it is a noxious drug, that it is a medicine, not an aliment, that its effects are pathological, not physiological, and that its A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 195 use should therefore be exceptional, not habitual. Not tending to the preservation of a normal state, but at best to the correction of some abnormal one, its whole value, if it have any, lies in the rarity of its application. To apply a powerful drug at a certain hour every day, is like a schoolmaster's whipping his pupil at a certain hour every day the victim may become inured, but undoubt- edly the specific value of the remedy must vanish with the repetition. Thus much would be true, were it proved that tobacco is in some cases apparently beneficial. No drug is bene- ficial, when constantly employed. But, furthermore, if not beneficial, it then is injurious. As Dr. Holmes has so forcibly expounded, every medicine is in itself hurtful. All noxious agents, according to him, cost a patient, on an average, five per cent of his vital power; that is, twenty times as much would kill him. It is believed that they are sometimes indirectly useful ; it is known that they are always directly hurtful. That is, I have a neighbor on one side who takes tobacco to cure his dys- pepsia, and a neighbor on the other side who takes blue pill for his infirmities generally. The profit of the opera- tion may be sure or doubtful ; the outlay is certain, and to be deducted in any event. I have no doubt, my dear Madam, that your interesting son has learned to smoke, as he states, in order to check that very distressing tooth- ache which so hindered his studies ; but I sincerely think it would be better to have the affliction removed by a dentist at a cost of fifty cents, than by a drug at an ex- pense of five per cent of vital power. Fortunately, when it comes to the practical test, the whole position is conceded to our hands, and the very dev- otees of tobacco are false to their idol. It is not merely 196 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. that the most fumigatoiy parent dissuades his sons from the practice ; but there is a more remarkable instance. Tf any two classes can be singled out in the community as the largest habitual consumers of tobacco, it must be the college students and the the city " roughs " or " row- dies," or whatever the latest slang name is, for these roysterers, like oysters, incline to names with an r in. Now the " rough," when brought to a physical climax, becomes the prize-fighter ; and the college student is seen in his highest condition as the prize-oarsman : and both these representative men, under such circumstances of ambition, straightway abandon tobacco. Such a conces- sion, from such a quarter, is worth all the denunciations of good Mr. Trask. Appeal, O anxious mother ! from Philip smoking to Philip training. What your progeny will not do for any considerations of ethics or economy, to save his sisters' olfactories or the atmosphere of the family altar, that he does unflinchingly at one word from the stroke-oar or the commodore. In so doing, he surrenders every inch of the ground, and owns unequivo- cally that he is in better condition without tobacco. The old traditions of training are in some other respects being softened : strawberries are no longer contraband, and the last agonies of thirst are no longer a part of the prescrip- tion ; but training and tobacco are still incompatible. There is not a regatta or a prize-fight in which the bet- ting would not be seriously affected by the discovery that cither party used the beguiling weed. The argument is irresistible, or rather, it is not so much an argument as a plea of guilty under the indict- ment. The prime devotees of tobacco voluntarily abstain from it, like Lord Raglan and Admiral Napier, when they wish to be in their best condition. But are we ever, any A NEW COUNTERBLAST. 197 of us, in too good con iition ? Have all the sanitary con- ventions yet succeeded in detecting one man, in our high- pressure America, who finds himself too well ? If a man goes into training for the mimic contest, why not for the actual one ? If he needs steady nerves and a cool head for the play of life, and even prize-fighting is called " sporting," why not for its earnest ? Here we are all croaking that we are not in the health in which our twen- tieth birthday found us, and yet we will not condescend to the wise abstinence which even twenty practises. Moderate training is simply a rational and healthful life. So palpable is this, that there is strong reason to be- lieve that the increased attention to physical training is operating against tobacco. If we may trust literature, as ha? been shown, its use is not now so great as formerly, in spite of the vague guesses of alarmists. " It is estimated," says Mr. Coles, " that the consumption of tobacco in this country is eight times as great as in France and three times as great as in England, in proportion to the popula- tion " ; but there is nothing in the world more uncertain than "It is estimated." It is frequently estimated, for instance, that nine out of ten of our college students use tobacco ; and yet, by the statistics of the last graduating class at Cambridge, it appears that it is used by only thirty-one out of seventy-six. I am satisfied that the extent of the practice is often exaggerated. In a gym- nastic club of young men, for instance, where I have had opportunity to take the statistics, it is found that less than one quarter use it, though there has never been any agi- tation or discussion of the matter. These things indicate that it can no longer be claimed, as Moliere asserted two centuries ago, that he who lives without tobacco is not wcrthy to live. 198 A NEW COUNTERBLAST. And as there has been some exaggeration in describing the extent to which Tobacco is King, so there has doubt- less been some overstatement as to the cruelty of his des- potism. Enough, however, remains to condemn him. The present writer, at least, has the firmest conviction, from personal observation and experience, that the im- agined benefits of tobacco-using (which have never, perhaps, been better stated than in an essay which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, in August, 1860) are ordinarily an illusion, and its evils a far more solid reality, that it stimulates only to enervate, soothes only to de- press, that it neither permanently calms the nerves nor softens the temper nor enlightens the brain, but that in the end its tendencies are precisely the opposites of these, beside the undoubted incidental objections of costliness and uncleanness. When men can find any other instance of a poisonous drug which is suitable for daily consump- tion, they will be more consistent in using this. When it is admitted to be innocuous to those who are training for athletic feats, it may be possible to suppose it beneficial to those who are out of training. Meanwhile there seems no ground for its supporters except that to which the famous Robert Hall was reduced, as he says, by " the society of Doctors of Divinity." He sent a message to Dr. Clarke, in return for a pamphlet against tobacco, that he could not possibly refute his arguments and could not possibly give up smoking. THE HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS. THE HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS. AMONG the lower animals, so far as the facts have been noticed, there seems no great inequality, as to strength or endurance, between the sexes. In migratory tribes, as of birds or buffaloes, the males are not observed to slacken or shorten their journeys from any gallant def- erence to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience, that among coursing-dogs and race- horses there is no serious sexual inequality. .ZElian say3 that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she cap- tured a lion, but was proud when she took a lioness, the dangers of the feat being far greater. Hunters as will- ingly encounter the male as the female of most savage beasts ; and if an adventurous fowler, plundering an eagle's nest, has his eyes assaulted by the parent-bird, it is no matter whether the discourtesy proceeds from the gentleman or the lady of the household. Passing to the ranks of humanity, it is the general rule, that, wherever the physical nature has a fair chance, the woman shows no extreme deficiency of endurance or strength. Even the sentimental physiology of Michelet is compelled to own that his elaborate theories of lovely invalidism have no application to the peasant-women of 9* 202 THE HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS. France, that is, to nineteen twentieths of the population. Among human beings, the disparities of race and training far outweigh those of sex. The sedentary philosopher, turning from his demonstration of the hopeless inferiority of woman, finds with dismay that his Irish or negro hand- maiden can lift a heavy coal-hod more easily than he. And while the dream is vanishing of the superiority of savage racer, on every other point, it still remains un- questionable that in every distinctive attribute of physical womanhood ihe barbarian has the advantage. The truth is, that in all countries female health and strength go with peasant habits. In Italy, for instance, About says, that, of all useful animals, the woman is the one that the Roman peasant employs with the most profit. " She makes the bread and the cake of Turkish corn ; she spins, she weaves, she sews ; she goes every day three miles for wood and a mile for water ; she carries on her head the load of a mule ; she toils from sunrise to sunset without resisting or even complaining. The chil- dren, which she brings forth in great numbers, and which she nurses herself, are a great resource ; from the age of four years they can be employed hi guarding other animals." Beside this may be placed the experience of Moffat, the African missionary, who, seeing a party of native women engaged in their usual labor of house-building, and just ready to put the roof on, suggested that some of the men who stood by should lend a hand. It was received with general laughter ; but Mahuto, the queen, declared that the plan, though hopeless of execution, was in itself a good one, and that men, though excused from lighter labors, ought to take an equal share in the severer, adding, that she wished the missionaries would give their husbands medicine and make them work. THE HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS. 203 The health of educated womanhood in the different European nations seems to depend mainly upon the de- gree of conformity to these rustic habits of air and exer- cise. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, the women of the upper classes lead secluded and unhealthy lives, and hence their physical condition is not superior to our own. In the Northern nations, women of refinement do more to emu- late the active habits of the peasantry, only substituting out-door relaxations for out-door toil, and so they share their health. This is especially the case in England, which accordingly seems to furnish the representative types of vigorous womanhood. " The nervous system of the female sex in England seems to be of a much stronger mould than that of other nations," says Dr. Merei, a med- ical practitioner of English and Continental experience. " They bear a degree of irritation in their systems, with- out the issue of fits, which in other races is not so easily tolerated." So Professor Tyndall, watching female pedes- trianism among the Alps, exults in his countrywomen " The contrast in regard to energy between the maidens of the British Isles and those of the Continent and of America is astonishing." When Catlin's Indians first walked the streets of London, they reported with wonder that they had seen many handsome squaws holding to the arms of men, " and they did not look sick either " ; a remark which no complimentary savage was ever heard to make in any Cisatlantic metropolis. There is undoubtedly an impression in this country that the English vigor is bought at some sacrifice, that it implies a nervous organization less fine and artistic, fea- tures and limbs more rudely moulded, and something more Coarse and peasant-like in the whole average texture. Making all due allowance for national vanity, it is yet 204 THE HEALTH OF OUR GIHLS. easy to see that superiority may be had more cheaply bj lowering the plane of attainment The physique of a healthy day-laborer is a thing of inferior mould to the physique of a healthy artist. Muscular power needs also nervous power to bring out its finest quality. Lightness and grace are not incompatible with vigor, but are its crowning illustration. Apollo is above Hercules ; Hebe and Diana are winged, not weighty. The physiologist must never forget that Nature is aiming at a keener and subtiler temperament in framing the American, as be- neath our drier atmosphere the whole scale of sounds and hues and odors is tuned to a higher key, and that for us an equal state of health may yet produce a higher type of humanity. To make up the arrears of past neglect, therefore, is a matter of absolute necessity, if we wish this experiment of national temperament to have any chance ; since rude health, however obtuse, will in the end over- match disease, however finely strung. But the fact must always be kept in mind, that the whole problem of female health is most closely inter- twined with that of social conditions. The Anglo-Saxon organization for Ovid evidently meant that Midas to be cured must dive, " Subde caput, corpusque simnl, simul elue crinem," one finds as kindly a reception from the water as in childish days, and as safe a shelter in the green dressing- room afterwards ; and the patient wherry floats near by, in readiness for a re-embarkation. Here a word seems needed, unprofessionally and non- technically, upon boats, these being the sole seats pro- vided for occupant or visitor in my out-door study. When wherries first appeared in this peaceful inland communitv, the novel proportions occasioned remark. Facetious by- standers inquired sarcastically whether that thing were expected to carry more than one, plainly implying by labored emphasis that it would occasionally be seen ten- anted by even less than that number. Transcendental friends inquired, with more refined severity, if the propri- 264 MY OUT-DOOR STUDY. etor expected to meditate in that thing ? This doubt at least seemed legitimate. Meditation seems to belong to sailing rather than rowing ; there is something so gentle and unintrusive in gliding effortless beneath overhanging branches and along the trailing edges of clematis thickets ; what a privilege of fairy-land is this noiseless prow, looking in and out of one flowery cove after another, scarcely stirring the turtle from his log, and leaving no wake behind ! It seemed as if all the process of rowing had too much noise and bluster, and as if the sharp slen- der wherry, in particular, were rather too pert and dapper to win the confidence of the woods and waters. Time has dispelled the fear. As I rest poised upon the oars above some submerged shallow, diamonded with ripple- broken sunbeams, the fantastic Notonecta or water-boat- man rests upon his oars below, and I see that his propor- tions anticipated the wherry, as honeycombs antedated the problem of the hexagonal cell. While one of us rests, so does the other ; and when one shoots away rapidly above the water, the other does the same beneath. For the time, as our motions seem the same, so with our motives, my enjoyment certainly not less, with the conveniences of humanity thrown in. But the sun is declining low. The club-boats are out, and from island to island in the distance these shafts of youthful life shoot swiftly across. There races some swift Atalanta, with no apple to fall in her path but some soft and spotted oak-apple from an overhanging tree ; there the Phantom, with a crew white and ghostlike in the distance, glimmers in and out behind the headlands, while yonder wherry glides lonely across the smooth expanse. The voices of all these oarsmen are dim and almost in- audible, being so far away ; but one would scarcely wish MY OUT-DOOR STUDY. 265 that distance should annihilate the ringing laughter of these joyous girls, who come gliding, in a safe and heavy boat, they and some blue dragon-flies together, around yonder wooded point. Many a summer afternoon have I rowed joyously with these same maidens beneath these steep and garlanded shores ; many a time have they pulled the heavy four-oar, with me as coxswain at the helm, the said patient steersman being ofttimes insulted by classical allusions from rival boats, satirically comparing him to an indolent Venus drawn by doves, while the oarswomen, in turn, were likened to Minerva with her feet upon a tortoise. Many were the disasters in the earlier days of feminine training ; first of toilet, straw hats blowing away, hair coming down, hair-pins strewing the floor of the boat, gloves commonly happening to be off at the precise moment of starting, and trials of speed impaired by some- body's oar catching in somebody's dress-pocket. Then the actual difficulties of handling the long and heavy oars, the first essays at feathering, with a complicated splash of air and water, as when a wild duck, in rising, swims and flies together, and uses neither element handsomely, the occasional pulling of a particularly vigorous stroke through the atmosphere alone, and at other times the compensating disappearance of nearly the whole oar be- neath the liquid surface, as if some Uncle Kuhleborn had grasped it, while our Undine by main strength tugged it from the beguiling wave. But with what triumphant abundance of merriment were these preliminary disasters repaid, and how soon outgrown ! What " time " we sometimes made, when nobody happened to be near with a watch, and how successfully we tossed oars in saluting, when the world looked on from a picnic ! We had our II 266 MY OUT-DOOR STUDY. applauses, too. To be sure, owing to the age and dimen- sions of the original barge, we could not command such a burst of enthusiasm as when the young men shot by us in their race-boat ; but then, as one of the girls justly remarked, we remained longer in sight. And many a day, since promotion to a swifter craft, have they rowed with patient stroke down the lovely lake, still attended by their guide, philosopher, and coxswain, along banks where herds of young birch-trees over- spread the sloping valley, and ran down in a blaze of sunshine to the rippling water, or through the Nar- rows, where some breeze rocked the boat till trailing shawls and ribbons were water-soaked, and the bold little foam would even send a daring drop over the gunwale, to play at ocean, or to Davis's Cottage, where a whole parterre of lupines bloomed to the water's edge, as if relics of some ancient garden-bower of a forgotten race, or to the dam by Lily Pond, there to hunt among the stones for snakes' eggs, each empty shell cut crosswise, where the young creatures had made their first fierce bite into the universe outside, or to some island, where white violets bloomed fragrant and lonely, separated by relentless breadths of water from their shore-born sisters, until mingled in their visitors' bouquets, then up the lake homeward again at nightfall, the boat all decked with clematis, clethra, laurel, azalea, or water-lilies, while purple sunset .clouds turned forth their golden linings for drapery above our heads, and then, unrolling, sent north- ward long roseate wreaths to outstrip our loitering speed, and reach the floating bridge before us. It is nightfall now. One by one the birds grow silent, and the soft dragon-flies, children of the day, are flutter- ing noiselessly to their rest beneath the under sides of MY OUT-DOOR STUDY. 267 drooping leaves. From shadowy coves the evening air is thrusting forth a thin film of mist to spread a white floor above the waters. The gathering darkness deepens the quiet of the lake, and bids us, at least for this time, to forsake it. " De soir fontaines, de matin montaignes" says the ojd French proverb, Morning for labor, even- ing for repose. WATER-LILIES. WATER-LILIES. THE inconstant April mornings drop showers or sun- beams over the glistening lake, while far beneath its surface a murky mass disengages itself from the muddy bottom, and rises slowly through the waves. The tasselled alder-branches droop above it ; the last year's blackbird's nest swings over it in the grape-vine ; the newly-opened Hepaticas and Epigaeas on the neighboring bank peer down modestly to look for it ; the water-skater (Gerris) pauses on the surface near it, casting on the shallow bottom the odd shadow of his feet, like three pairs of boxing-gloves ; the Notonecta, or water-boatman, rows round and round it, sometimes on his breast, some- times on his back ; queer caddis-worms trail their self- made homesteads of leaves or twigs beside it ; the Dytis- cus, dorbug of the water, blunders clumsily against it ; the tadpole wriggles his stupid way to it, and rests upon it, meditating of future frogdom ; the passing wild-duck dives and nibbles at it ; the mink and muskrat brush it with their soft fur ; the spotted turtle slides over it ; the slow larvae of gauzy dragon-flies cling sleepily to its sides and await their change : all these fair or uncouth crea- tures feel, through the dim waves, the blessed longing of spring ; and yet not one of them dreams that within that 272 WATER-LILIES. murky mass there lies a treasure too white and beautiful to be yet intrusted to the waves, and that for many a day the bud mu?t yearn toward the surface, before, aspiring above it, as mortals to heaven, it meets the sunshine with the answering beauty of the Water-Lily. Days and weeks have passed away ; the wild-duck has flown onward, to dive for his luncheon in some remoter lake ; the tadpoles have made themselves legs, with which they have vanished ; the caddis-worms have sealed them- selves up in their cylinders, and emerged again as winged insects ; the dragon-flies have crawled up the water-reeds, and, clinging with heads upturned, have undergone the change which symbolizes immortality ; the world is trans- formed from spring to summer ; the lily-buds are opened into glossy leaf and radiant flower, and we have come for the harvest. We visitors lodged, last night, in the old English phrase, "at the sign of the Oak and Star." Wishing, not, indeed, like the ancient magicians, to gather magic berry and bud before sunrise, but at least to see these treasures of the lake in their morning hour, we camped last night on a little island, which one tall tree almost covers with its branches, while a dense undergrowth of young chestnuts and birches fills all the intervening space, touching the water all around the circular, shelving shore. Yesterday was hot, but the night was cool, and we kin- dled a gypsy fire of twigs, less for warmth than for society. The first gleam made the dark, lonely islet into a cheering home, turned the protecting tree to a starlit roof, and the chestnut-sprays to illuminated walls. To us, lying beneath their shelter, every fresh flickering of the fire kindled the leaves into brightness and banished into dark interstices the lake and sky ; then the fire died WATER-LILIES. 273 into embers, the leaves faded into solid darkness in their turn, and water and heavens showed light and close and near, until fresh twigs caught fire and the blaze came up again. Rising to look forth, at intervals, during the peaceful hours, for it is the worst feature of a night out-doors, that sleeping seems such a waste of time, we watched the hilly and wooded shores of the lake sink into gloom and glimmer into dawn again, amid the low plash of waters and the noises of the night. Precisely at half past three, a song-sparrow above our heads gave one liquid trill, so inexpressibly sudden and delicious, that it seemed to set to music every atom of freshness and fragrance that Nature held ; then the spell was broken, and the whole shore and lake were vocal with song. Joining in this jubilee of morning, we were early in motion ; bathing and breakfast, though they seemed indisputably in accordance with the instincts of the Universe, yet did not detain us long, and we were promptly on our way to Lily Pond. Will the reader join us ? It is one of those summer days when a veil of mist gradually burns away before the intense sunshine, and the sultry morning only plays at coolness, and that with its earliest visitors alone. But we are before the sunlight, though not before the sunrise, and can watch the pretty game of alternating mist and shine. Stray gleams of glory lend their trailing magnificence to the tops of chest- nut-trees, floating vapors raise the outlines of the hills and make mystery of the wooded islands, and, as we glide through the placid water, we can sing, with the Chorus in the " Ion " of Euripides, " immense and brilliant air, resound with our cries of joy ! " Almost every town has its Lily Pond, dear to boys 12* a 274 WATER-LILIES. and maidens, and partially equalizing, by its annual de- lights, the "presence or absence of other geographical advantages. Ours is accessible from the larger lake only by taking the skiff over a narrow embankment, which protects our fairy-land by its presence, and eight distant factories by its dam. Once beyond it, we are in a realm of dark Lethean water, utterly unlike the sunny depths of the main lake. Hither the water-lilies have retreated, to a domain of their own. In the bosom of these shallow waves, there stand hundreds of submerged and dismasted roots, still upright, spreading their vast, uncouth limbs like enormous spiders beneath the surface. They are remnants of border wars with the axe, vegetable Wither- ingtons, still fighting on their stumps, but gradually sink- ing into the soft ooze, and ready, perhaps, when a score of centuries has piled two more strata of similar remains in mud above them, to furnish foundations for a newer New Orleans ; that city having been lately discovered to be thus supported. The present decline in the manufacturing business is clear revenue to the water-lilies, and these ponds art higher than usual, because the idle mills do not draw them off. But we may notice, in observing the shores, that pe- culiar charm of water, that, whether its quantity be greater or less, its grace is the same ; it makes its own boundary in lake or river, and where its edge is, there seems the natural and permanent margin. And the same natural fitness, without reference to mere quantity, extends to its flowery children. Before us lie islands and continents of lilies, acres of charms, whole, vast, unbroken surfaces of stainless whiteness. And yet, as we approach them, every islanded cup that floats in lonely dignity, apart from the multitude, appears as perfect in itself, couched in whit*? WATER-LILIES. 275 expanded perfection, its reflection taking a faint glory of pink that is scarcely perceptible in the flower. . As we glide gently among them, the air grows fragrant, and a stray breeze flaps the leaves, as if to welcome us. Each floating flower becomes suddenly a ship at anchor, or rather seems beating up against the summer wind, in a regatta of blossoms. Early as it is in the day, the greater part of the flowers are already expanded. Indeed, that experience of Tho- reau's, of watching them open in the first sunbeams, rank by rank, is not easily obtained, unless perhaps in a nar- row stream, where the beautiful slumberers are more regularly marshalled. In our lake, at least, they open irregularly, though rapidly. But, this morning, many linger as buds, while others peer up, in half-expanded beauty, beneath the lifted leaves, frolicsome as Pucks or baby-nymphs. As you raise the leaf, in such cases, it is impossible not to imagine that a pair of tiny hands have upheld it, and that the pretty head will dip down again, and disappear. Others, again, have expanded all but the inmost pair of white petals, and these spring apart at the first touch of the finger on the stem. Some spread vast vases of fragrance, six or seven inches in diameter, while others are small and delicate, with petals like fine lace- work. Smaller still, we sometimes pass a flotilla of infant leaves, an inch in diameter. All these grow from the dark water, and the blacker it is, the fairer their whiteness shows. But your eye follows the stem often vainly into those sombre depths, and vainly seeks to behold Sabrina fair, sitting with her twisted braids of lilies, beneath the glassy, cool, but not translucent wave Do not start, when, in such an effort, only your own dreamy face looks back upon you, beyond the gunwale 27(3 WATER-LILIES. of the reflected boat, and you find that you float double self and shadow. Let us rest our paddles, and look round us, while the idle motion sways our light skiff onward, now half em- bayed among the lily-pads, now lazily gliding over inter- vening gulfs. There is a great deal going on in these waters and their fringing woods and meadows. All the summer long, the pond is bordered with successive walls of flowers. In early spring emerge the yellow catkins of the swamp-willow, first ; then the long tassels of the grace- ful alders expand and droop, till they weep their yellow dust upon the water ; then come the birch-blossoms, more tardily ; then the downy leaves and white clusters of the medlar or shad-bush (Amelanchier Canadensis of Gray) ; these dropping, the roseate chalices of the mountain-laurel open; as they fade into melancholy brown, the sweet Azalea uncloses ; and before its last honeyed blossom has trailed down, dying, from the stem, the more fragrant Clethra starts out above, the button-bush thrusts forth its merry face amid wild roses, and the Clematis waves its sprays of beauty. Mingled with these grow, lower, the spiraeas, white and pink, yellow touch-me-not, fresh white arrowhead, bright blue vervain and skullcap, dull snake- head, gay monkey-flower, coarse eupatoriums, milkweeds, golden-rods, asters, thistles, and a host beside. Beneath, the brilliant scarlet cardinal-flower begins to palisade the moist shores; and after its superb reflection has passed away from the waters, the grotesque witch-hazel flares out its narrow yellow petals amidst the October leaves, and so ends the floral year. There is not a week during all these months, when one cannot stand in the boat and wreathe garlands of blossoms from the shores. These all crowd around the brink, and watch, day and WATER-LILIES. 277 night, the opening and closing of the water-lilies. Mean- while, upon the waters, our queen keeps her chosen court, nor can one of these mere land-loving blossoms touch the hem of her garment. In truth, she bears no sister near her throne. There is but this one species among us, Nympfuza odorata. The beautiful little rose-colored Nymphcea sanguined, which once adorned the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, was merely an occasional variety of costume. She has, indeed, an English half-sister, Nymphcea alba, less beautiful, less fragrant, but keeping more fashionable hours, not opening (according to Lin- naeus) till seven, nor closing till four. And she has a humble cousin, the yellow Nuphar, who keeps commonly aloof, as becomes a poor relation, though created from the self-same mud, a fact which Hawthorne has beau- tifully moralized. The prouder Nelumbium, a second- cousin, lineal descendant of the sacred bean of Pythago- ras, has fallen to an obscurer position, and dwells, like a sturdy democrat, in the Far West. But, undisturbed, the water-lily reigns on, with her retinue around her. The tall pickerel-weed (Pontede- ria) is her gentleman-usher, gorgeous in blue and gold through July, somewhat rusty in August. The water- shield (Hydropeltis) is chief maid-of-honor ; a high-born lady she, not without royal blood indeed, but with rather a bend sinister ; not precisely beautiful, but very fastid- ious; encased over her whole person with a gelatinous covering, literally a starched duenna. Sometimes she is suspected of conspiring to drive her mistress from the throne ; for we have observed certain slow watercourses where the leaves of the water-lily have been almost wholly replaced, in a series of years, by the similar, but smaller, leaves of the water-shield. More rarely seen is 278 WATER-LILIES. the slender Utricularia, a dainty maiden, whose light feet scarce touch the water, with the still more delicate floating white "Water- Ranunculus, and the shy Villarsia, whose submerged flowers merely peep one day above the surface and then close again forever. Then there are many humbler attendants, Potamogetons or pond- weeds. And here float little emissaries from the domin- ions of land ; for the fallen florets of the Viburnum drift among the lily-pads, with mast-like stamens erect, sprink- ling the water with a strange beauty, and cheating us with the promise of a new aquatic flower. These are the still life of this sequestered nook ; but it is in fact a crowded thoroughfare. No tropic jungle more swarms with busy existence than these midsummer waters and their bushy banks. The warm and humming air is filled with insect sounds, ranging from the murmur of invisible gnats and midges, to the impetuous whirring of the great Libellulae, large almost as swallows, and hawking high in air for their food. Swift butterflies glance by, moths flutter, flies buzz, grasshoppers and katy- dids pipe their shrill notes, sharp as the edges of the sun- beams. Busy bees go humming past, straight as arrows, express-freight-trains from one blossoming copse to an- other. Showy wasps of many species fume uselessly about, in gallant uniforms, wasting an immense deal of unnecessary anger on the sultry universe. Graceful, stingless Sphexes and Ichneumon-flies emulate their bustle, without their weapons. Delicate lady-birds come and go to the milkweeds, spotted almost as regularly as if Na- ture had decided to number the species, like policemen or hack-drivers, from one to twenty. Elegant little Lep- turae fly with them, so gay and airy, they hardly seem like beetles. Phryganeas (nes caddis- worms), lace-flies, WATER-LILIES. 279 and long-tailed Ephemerae flutter more heavily by. On the large alder-flowers clings the superb Desmocerus pcd- liatus, beautiful as a tropical insect, with his eteel-blue armor and his golden cloak (pallium) above his shoul- ders, grandest knight on this Field of the Cloth of Gold. The countless fire-flies which spangled the evening mist now only crawl sleepily, dayh'ght creatures, with the lustre buried in their milky bodies. More wholly chil- dren of night, the soft, luxurious Sphinxes (or hawk- moths) come not here; fine ladies of the insect world, their home is among gardens and green-houses, late and languid by day, but all night long upon the wing, dancing in the air with unwearied muscles till long past midnight, and supping on honey at last. They come not ; but the nobler butterflies soar above us, stoop a moment to the water, and then with a few lazy wavings of their sumptu- ous wings float far over the oak-trees to the woods they love. All these hover near the water-lily; but its special parasites are an enamelled beetle (Donacia metattica) which keeps house permanently in the flower, and a few smaller ones which tenant the surface of the leaves, larva, pupa, and perfect insect, forty feeding like one, and each leading its whole earthly career on this floating island of perishable verdure. The " beautiful blue dam- sel-flies " alight also in multitudes among them, so fear- less that they perch with equal readiness on our boat or padile, and so various that two adjacent ponds will sometimes be haunted by two distinct sets of species. In the water, among the leaves, little shining whirlwigs wheel round and round, fifty joining in the dance, till, at the slightest alarm, they whirl away to some safer ball-room, and renew the merriment. On every floating 280 WATER-LILIES. log, as we approach it, there is a convention of turtles, sitting in calm debate, like mailed barons, till, as we draw near, they plump into the water, and paddle away for some subaqueous Runnymede. Beneath, the shy and stately pickerel vanishes at a glance, shoals of minnows glide, black and bearded pouts frisk aimlessly, soft water- newts hang poised without motion, and slender pickerel- frogs cease occasionally their submerged croaking, and, darting to the surface with swift vertical strokes, gulp a mouthful of fresh air, and down again to renew the moist soliloquy. Time would fail us to tell of the feathered life around us, the blackbirds that build securely hi these thickets, the stray swallows that dip their wings in the quiet wa- ters, and the kingfishers that still bring, as the ancients fabled, halcyon days. Tender stands, against the shore, a bittern, motionless in that wreath of mist which makes his long-legged person almost as dun as his far-off boom- ing by night. There poises a hawk, before sweeping down to some chosen bough hi the dense forest ; and there fly a pair of blue-jays, screaming, from tree to tree. As for wild quadrupeds, the race is almost passed away. Far to the north, indeed, the great moose still browses on the lily-pads, and the shy beaver nibbles them ; but here the few lingering four-footed creatures only haunt, but do not graze upon, these floating pastures. Eyes more fa- vored than ours may yet chance to spy an otter in this still place ; there by the shore are the small footprints of a mink ; that dark thing disappearing in the waters yon- der, a soft mass of drowned fur, is a " musquash." Later in the season, a mound of earth will be his whiter dwell- ing-place ; and those myriad muscle-shells at the water's edge are the remnant of his banquets, once banquets for the Indians, too. WATER-LILIES. 281 But we must return to our lilies. There is no sense of wealth like floating hi this archipelago of white and green. The emotions of avarice become almost demoral- izing. Every flower bears a fragrant California in its bosom, and you feel impoverished at the thought of leav- ing one behind. But after the first half-hour of eager grasping, one becomes fastidious, rather avoids those on which the wasps and flies have alighted, and seeks only the stainless. But handle them tenderly, as if you loved them. Do not grasp at the open flower as if it were a peony or a hollyhock, for then it will come off, stalkless, hi your hand, and you will cast it blighted upon the water ; but coil your thumb and second finger affection- ately around it, press the extended forefinger firmly to the stem below, and, with one steady pull, you will secure a long and delicate stalk, fit to twine around the graceful head of your beloved, as the Hindoo goddess of beauty- encircled with a Lotus the brow of Rama. Consider the lilies. All over our rural watercourses, at midsummer, float these cups of snow. They are Na- ture's symbols of coolness. They suggest to us the white garments of their Oriental worshippers. They come with the white roses, and prepare the way for the white lilies of the garden. The white doe of Rylstone and Andrew Marvell's fawn might fitly bathe amid their beauties. Yonder steep bank slopes down to the lake-side, one solid mass of pale pink laurel, but, once upon the water, a purer tint prevails. The pink fades into a lingering flush, and the white creature floats peerless, set in green with- out and gold within. That bright circle of stamens is the very ring with which Doges once wedded the Adriatic ; Venice has lost it, but it dropped into the water-lily's bosom, and there it rests forever. So perfect in form, so 232 WATER-LILIES. redundant in beauty, so delicate, so spotless, so fragrant, what presumptuous lover ever dared, in his most en- amored hour, to liken his mistress to a water-lily ? No human Blanche or Lilian was ever so fair as that. The water-lily comes of an ancient and sacred family of white-robed priests. They assisted at the most mo- mentous religious ceremonies, from the beginning of re- corded time. The Egyptian Lotus was a sacred plant ; it was dedicated to Harpocrates and to the god Nofr Atmoo, Nofr meaning good, whence the name of our yellow lily, Nuphar. But the true Egyptian flower was Nymphcea Lotus, though Nymphcea c&rulea, Moore's " blue water-lilies," can be traced on the sculptures also. It was cultivated in tanks in the gardens ; it was the chief ma- terial for festal wreaths ; a single bud hung over the forehead of many a queenly dame ; and the sculptures represent the weary flowers as dropping from the heated hands of belles, in the later hours of the feast. Rock softly on the waters, fair lilies! your Eastern kindred have rocked on the stormier bosom of Cleopatra. The Egyptian Lotus was, moreover, the emblem of the sacred Nile, as the Hindoo species, of the sacred Ganges ; and each was held the symbol of the creation of the world from the waters. The sacred bull Apis was wreathed with its garlands ; there were niches for water, to place it among tombs ; it was carved in the capitals of columns ; it was represented on plates and vases ; the sculptures show it hi many sacred uses, even as a burnt-offering ; Isis holds it ; and the god Nilus still binds a wreath of water-lilies around the throne of Memnon. From Egypt the Lotus was carried to Assyria, and Layard found it among fir-cones and honeysuckles on the later sculptures of Nineveh. The Greeks dedicated it to WATER-LILIES. 283 the nymphs, whence the name Nymphaa. Nor did the Romans disregard it, though the Lotus to which Ovid's nymph Lotis was changed, servato nomine, was a tree, and not a flower. Still different a thing was the en chanted stem of the Lotus-eaters of Herodotus, which prosaic botanists have reduced to the Zizyphus Lotus found by Mungo Park, translating also the yellow Lotus- dust into a mere " farina, tasting like sweet gingerbread." But in the Lotus of Hindostan we find our flower again, and the Oriental sacred books are cool with water- lilies. Open the Vishuu Purana at any page, and it is a Sortes LiliantB. The orb of the earth is Lotus-shaped, and is upborne by the tusks of Vesava, as if he had been sporting in a lake where the leaves and blossoms float. Brahma, first incarnation of Vishnu, creator of the world, was born from a Lotus ; so was Sri or Lakshmu, the Hindoo Venus, goddess of beauty and prosperity, protec- tress of womanhood, whose worship guards the house from all danger. " Seated on a full-blown Lotus, and holding a Lotus in her hand, the goddess Sri, radiant with beauty, rose from the waves." The Lotus is the chief ornament of the subterranean Eden, Patala, and the holy mountain Meru is thought to be shaped like its seed-vessel, larger at summit than at base. When the heavenly Urvasi fled from her earthly spouse, PuruYavas, he found her sporting with four nymphs of heaven, in a lake beautified with the Lotus. When the virtuous Prahlada was burned at the stake, he cried to his cruel father, " The fire burneth me not, and all around I behold the face of the sky, cool and fragrant with beds of Lotus-flowers ! " Above all, the graceful history of the transformations of Krishna is everywhere hung with these fresh chaplets. Every suc- cessive maiden whom the deity wooes is Lotus-eyed, 284 WATER-LILIES. Lotus-mouthed, or Lotus-cheeked, and the youthful hero wears always a Lotus-wreath. Also " the clear sky was bright with the autumnal moon, and the air fragrant with the perfume of the wild water-lily, in whose buds the clustering bees were murmuring their song." Elsewhere we find fuller details. a In the primordial state of the world, the rudimental universe, submerged in water, reposed on the bosom of the Eternal. Brahma, the architect of the world, poised on a Lotus-leaf, floated upon the waters, and all that he was able to discern with his eight eyes was water and darkness. Amid scenes so ungenial and dismal, the god sank into a profound rev- erie, when he thus soliloquized : ' Who am I ? Whence am I ? ' In this state of abstraction Brahma continued during the period of a century and a half of the gods, without apparent benefit or a solution of his inquiries, a circumstance which caused him great uneasiness of mind." It is a comfort, however, to know that subse- quently a voice came to him, on which he rose, " seated himself upon the Lotus in an attitude of contemplation, and reflected upon the Eternal, who soon appeared to him in the form of a man with a thousand heads," a ques- tionable exchange for his Lotus-solitude. This is Brahminism ; but the other great form of Ori- ental religion has carried the same fair symbol with it. One of the Bibles of the Buddhists is named " The White Lotus of the Good Law." A pious Nepaulese bowed in reverence before a vase of lilies which perfumed the study of Sir William Jones. At sunset in Thibet, the French missionaries tell us, every inhabitant of every village prostrates himself in the public square, and the holy invocation, " 0, the gem in the Lotus ! " goes mur- muring over hill and valley, like the sound of many bees. WA TEE-LILIES. 285 It is no unmeaning phrase, but an utterance of ardent desire to be absorbed into that Brahma whose emblem is the sacred flower. This mystic formula or "mani" is imprinted on the pavement of the streets, it floats on flags from the temples, and the wealthy Buddhists main- tain sculptor-missionaries, Old Mortalities of the water- lily, who, wandering to distant lands, carve the blessed words upon cliff and stone. Having got thus far into Orientalism, we can hardly expect to get out again without some slight entanglement in philology. Lily-pads. Whence pads? No other leaf is identified with that singular monosyllable. Has our floating Lotus-leaf any connection with padding, or with a footpad? with the ambling pad of an abbot, or a paddle, or a paddock, or a padlock ? with many-dome'd Padua proud, or with St. Patrick ? Is the name derived from the Anglo-Saxon paad or pettkian, or the Greek jrareo)? All the etymologists are silent; Tooke and Richardson ignore the problem; and of the innumerable pamphlets in the Worcester and Webster Controversy, loading the tables of school-committee-men, not one ven- tures to grapple with the lily-pad. But was there ever a philological trouble for which the Sanscrit could not afford at least a conjectural cure ? A dictionary of that extremely venerable tongue is an os- trich's stomach, which can crack the hardest etymological nut. The Sanscrit name for the Lotus is simply Padma. The learned Brahmins call the Egyptian deities Padma Devi, or Lotus-Gods ; the second of the eighteen Hindoo Puranas is styled the Padma Parana, because it treats of the " epoch when the world was a golden Lotus " ; and the sacred incantation which goes murmuring through Thibet is " Om mani padme houm." It would be singu 286 WATER-LILIES. lar, if upon these delicate floating leaves a fragment of our earliest vernacular has been borne down to us, so that here the school-boy is more learned than the savans This lets us down easily to the more familiar uses of this plant divine. By the Nile, in early days, the water- lily was good not merely for devotion, but for diet. " From the seeds of the Lotus," said Pliny, the Egyp- tians make bread." The Hindoos still eat the seeds, roasted in sand; also the stalks and roots. In South America, from the seeds of the Victoria (Nymphcea Vic- toria, now Victoria Regia) a farina is made, preferred to that of the finest wheat, Bonpland even suggesting to our reluctant imagination Victoria-pies. But the Euro- pean species are used, so far as is reported, only in dye- ing, and as food (if the truth be told) of swine. Our own water-lily is rather more powerful in its uses; the root contains tannin and gallic acid, and a decoction of it * gives a black precipitate, with sulphate of iron." It graciously consents to become an astringent, and a styp- tic, and a poultice, and, banished from all other temples, still lingers in those of ^Esculapius. The botanist also finds his special satisfactions in the flower. It has some strange peculiarities of structure. So loose is the internal distribution of its tissues, that it was for some time held doubtful to which of the two great vegetable divisions, exogenous or endogenous, it belonged. Its petals, moreover, furnish the best example of the gradual transition of petals into stamens, illus- trating that wonderful law of identity which is the great discovery of modern science. Every child knows this peculiarity of the water-lily, but the extent of it seems to vary with season and locality, and sometimes one finds a succession of flowers almost entirely free from this con- fusion of organs. WATER-LILIES. 287 The reader may not care to learn that the order of Nymphaeacese "differs from Ranunculaceae in the con- solidation of its carpels, from Papaveraceae in the pla- centation not being parietal, and from Nelumbiaceae in the want of a large truncated disc containing monosper- mous achenia"; but they may like to know that the water-lily has relations on land, in all gradations of society, from poppy to magnolia, and yet does not con- form its habits precisely to those of any of them. Its great black roots, sometimes as large as a man's arm, form a network at the bottom of the water. Its stem floats, an airy four-celled tube, adapting itself to the depth, and stiff in shallows, like the stalk of the yellow lily: and it contracts and curves downward when seed- time approaches. The leaves show beneath the magnifier beautiful adaptations of structure. They are not, like those of land-plants, constructed with deep veins to re- ceive the rain and conduct it to the stem, but are smooth and glossy, and of even surface. The leaves of land- vegetation have also thousands of little breathing-pores, principally on the under side : the apple-leaf, for instance, has twenty-four thousand to a square inch. But here they are fewer ; they are wholly on the upper side, and, whereas in other cases they open or shut according to the moisture of the atmosphere, here the greedy leaves, secure of moisture, scarcely deign to close them. Never- theless, even these give some recognition of hygrometric necessities, and, though living on the water, and not merely christened with dewdrops like other leaves, but baptized by immersion all the time, they are yet known to suffer in drought and to take pleasure in the rain. After speaking of the various kindred of the water- lily, it would be wrong to leave our fragrant subject with- 288 WATER-LILIES. out dut> mention of its most magnificent, most lovely rela- tive, at first claimed even as its twin sister, and classed as a Nymphaea. I once lived near neighbor to a Vic- toria Regia. Nothing in the world of vegetable exist- ence has such a human interest. The charm is not in the mere size of the plant, which disappoints everybody, as Niagara does, when tried by that sole standard. The leaves of the Victoria, indeed, attain a diameter of six feet; the largest flowers, of twenty-three inches, four tunes the size of the largest of our water-lilies. But it is not the measurements of the Victoria, it is its life which fascinates. It is not a thing merely of dimensions, nor merely of beauty, but a creature of vitality and mo- tion. Those vast leaves expand and change almost visi- bly. They have been known to grow half an inch an hour, eight inches a day. Rising one day from the water, a mere clenched mass of yellow prickles, a leaf is trans- formed the next day to a crimson salver, gorgeously tinted on its upturned rim. Then it spreads into a raft of green, armed with long thorns, and supported by a framework of ribs and cross-pieces, an inch thick, and so substantial, that the Brazil Indians, while gathering the seed-vessels, place their young children on the leaves ; yrupe, or water-platter, they call the accommodating plant. But even these expanding leaves are not the glory of the Victoria ; the glory is in the opening of the flower. I have sometimes looked in, for a passing moment, at the green-house, its dwelling-place, during the period of flowering, and then stayed for more than an hour unable to leave the fascinating scene. After the strange flower-bud has reared its dark head from the placid tank, moving it a little, uneasily, like some imprisoned water- WATER-LILIES. 289 creature, it pauses for a moment in a sort of dumb de- spair. Then trembling again, and collecting all its pow- ers, it thrusts open, with an indignant jerk, the rough calyx-leaves, and the beautiful disrobing begins. The firm, white, central cone, first so closely infolded, quivers a little, and swiftly, before your eyes, the first of the hundred petals detaches its delicate edges, and springs back, opening towards the water, while its white reflec- tion opens to meet it from below. Many moments of repose follow, you watch, another petal trembles, detaches, springs open, and is stilL Then another, and another, and another. Each movement is so quiet, yet so decided, so living, so human, that the radiant creature seems a Musidora of the water, and you almost blush with a sense of guilt, in gazing on that peerless privacy. As petal by petal slowly opens, there still stands the cen- tral cone of snow, a glacier, an alp, a jungfrau, while each avalanche of whiteness seems the last. Meanwhile a strange rich odor fills the air, and Nature seems to concentrate all fascinations and claim all senses for this jubilee of her darling. So pass the enchanted moments of the evening, till the fair thing pauses at last, and remains for hours unchanged. In the morning, one by one, those white petals close again, shutting all their beauty in, and you watch through the short sleep for the period of waking. Can this bright transfigured creature appear again, in the same chaste loveliness? Your fancy can scarcely trust it, fearing some disastrous change ; and your fancy is too true a prophet. Come again, after the second day's opening, and you start at the transformation which one hour has secretly produced. Can this be the virgin Victoria, this thing of crimson passion, this pile of pink and yellow, 21M) WATER-LILIES. relaxed, expanded, voluptuous, lolling languidly upon the water, never to rise again ? In this short time every tint of every petal is transformed; it is gorgeous in beauty, but it is " Hebe turned to Magdalen." Such is the Victoria Regia. But our rustic water-lily, our innocent Nyraphaea, never claiming such a hot-house glory, never drooping into such a blush, blooms on placid- ly in the quiet waters, till she modestly folds her leaves for the last time, and bows her head beneath the surface forever. Next year she lives for us only in her children, fair and pure as herself. Nay, not alone in them, but also in memory. The fair vision will not fade from us, though the paddle has dipped its last crystal drop from the waves, and the boat is drawn upon the shore. We may yet visit many lovely and lonely places, meadows thick with violet, or the homes of the shy Rhodora, or those sloping forest-haunts where the slight Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads, but no scene will linger on our vision like this annual Feast of the Lilies. On scorching mountains, amid raw prairie-winds, or upon the regal ocean, the white pageant shall come back to memory again, with all the luxury of summer heats, and all the fragrant coolness that can relieve them. We shall fancy ourselves again among these fleets of anchored lilies, again, like Urvasi, sport- ing amid the Lake of Lotuses. For that which is remembered is often more vivid than that which is seen. The eye paints better in the presence, the heart in the absence, of the object most dear. " He who longs after beautiful Nature can best describe her," said Bettine ; " he who is in the midst of her loveliness can only lie down and enjoy." It enhances the truth of the poet's verses, that he writes them in his study. Ab- WATER-LILIES. 291 sence is the very air of passion, and all the best descrip- tion is in memoriam. As with our human beloved, when the graceful presence is with us, we cannot analyze or describe, but merely possess, and only after its departure can it be portrayed by our yearning desires ; so is it with Nature : only hi losing her do we gain the power to de- scribe her, aad we are introduced to Art, as we are to Eternity, by the dropping away of our companions. THE LIFE OF BIRDS. THE LIFE OF BIRDS. WHEN one thinks of a bird, one fancies a soft, swift, aimless, joyous thing, full of nervous en- ergy and arrowy motions, a song with wings. So re- mote from ours their mode of existence, they seem acci- dental exiles from an unknown globe, banished where none can understand their language ; and men only stare at their darting, inexplicable ways, as at the gyrations of the circus. Watch their little traits for hours, and it only tantalizes curiosity. Every man's secret is penetrable, if his neighbor be sharp-sighted. Dickens, for instance, can take a poor condemned wretch, like Fagin, whose emotions neither he nor his reader has experienced, and can paint him in colors that seem made of the soul's own atoms, so that each beholder feels as if he, personally, had been the man. But this bird that hovers and alights beside me, peers up at me, takes its food, then looks again, attitudinizing, jerking, flirting its tail, with a thou- sand inquisitive and fantastic motions, although I have power to grasp it in my hand and crush its life out, yet I cannot gain its secret thus, and the centre of its conscious- ness is really farther from mine than the remotest plane- tary orbit "We do not steadily bear in mind," says Darwin, with a noble scientific humility, " how profoundly 296 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. ignorant we are of the condition of existence of every animal." What " sympathetic penetration " can fathom the life, for instance, of yonder mysterious, almost voiceless, Hum- ming-Bird, smallest of feathery things, and loneliest, whirring among birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird-like, his path untraceable, his home unseen ? An image of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were nothing joyous in him. He seems like some exiled pygmy prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed to wings. Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long-past dynasty of the Humming-Birds ? It is strange to come upon his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled swamp, with this brilliant atom perched disconso- lately near it, upon some mossy twig ; it is like visiting Cinderella among her ashes. And from Humming-Bird to Eagle, the daily existence of every bird is a remote and bewitching mystery. Pythagoras has been charged, both before and since the days of Malvolio, with holding that " the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a fowl," that delinquent men must revisit earth as women, and delinquent women as birds. Malvolio thought nobly of the soul, and in no way approved his opinion ; but I remember that Harriet Rohan, in her school-days, accepted this, her destiny, with glee. " When I saw the Oriole," she wrote to me, " from his nest among the plum-trees in the garden, sail over the air and high above the Gothic arches of the elm, a stream of flashing light, or watched him swinging silently on pendent twigs, I did not dream how near akin we were. Or when a Humming-Bird, a winged drop of gorgeous sheen and gloss, a living gem, poising on his wings, thrust his dark, slender, honey-seeking bill into the white bins- THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 297 soms of a little bush beside my window, I should have thought it no such bad thing to be a bird, even if one next became a bat, like the colony in our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and skurry, all the length of moonless nights, in such ecstasies of dusky joy." Was this weird creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some far prime- val time ? and does he fancy, in unquiet dreams at night- fall, that he is one still ? I wonder whether he can enjoy the winged brotherhood into which he has thrust himself, victim, perhaps, of some rash quadruped-ambition, an Icarus doomed forever not to fall. I think, that, if required, on pain of death, to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird's egg. There is, first, its exquisite fragility of material, strong only by the mathematical precision of that form so daintily moulded. There is its absolute purity from external stain, since that thin barrier remains impassable until the whole is in ruins, a purity recognized in the household proverb of " An apple, an egg, and a nut." Then, its range of tints, so varied, so subdued, and so beautiful, whether of pure white, like the Martin's, or pure green, like the Robin's, or dotted and mottled into the loveliest of browns, like the Red Thrush's, or aqua-marine, with stains of moss-agate, like the Chipping-Sparrow's, or blotched with long weird ink- marks on a pale ground, like the Oriole's, as if it bore inscribed some magic clew to the bird's darting flight and pensile nest. Above all, the associations and predictions of this little wonder, that one may bear home between his fingers all that winged splendor, all that celestial melo- dy, coiled in mystery within these tiny walls ! Even the chrysalis is less amazing, for its form always preserves some trace, however fantastic, of the perfect insect, and 13* 298 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. it is but moulting a skin ; but this egg appears to the eye like a separate unit from some other kingdom of Nature, claiming more kindred with the very stones than with feathery existence ; and it is as if a pearl opened and an angel sang. The nest which is to contain these fair things is a won- drous study also, from the coarse masonry of the Robin to the soft structure of the Humming-Bird, a baby-house among nests. Among all created things, the birds come nearest to man in their domesticity. Their unions are usually in pairs, and for life ; and with them, unlike the practice of most quadrupeds, the male labors for the young. He chooses the locality of the nest, aids in its construction, and fights for it, if needful. He sometimes assists in hatching the eggs. He feeds the brood with exhausting labor, like yonder Robin, whose winged pic- turesque day is spent in putting worms into insatiable beaks, at the rate of one morsel in every three minutes. He has to teach them to fly, as among the Swallows, or even to hunt, as among the Hawks. His life is anchored to his home. Yonder Oriole fills with light and melody the thousand branches of a neighborhood ; and yet the centre for all this divergent splendor is always that one drooping dome upon one chosen tree. This he helped to build in May, confiscating cotton as if he were a Union provost-marshal, and singing many songs, with his mouth full of plunder ; and there he watches over his house- hold, all through the leafy June, perched often upon the airy cradle-edge, and swaying with it in the summer wind. And from this deep nest, after the pretty eggs are hatched, will he and his mate extract every fragment of the shell, leaving it, like all other nests, save those of birds of prey, clean and pure, when the young are flown. THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 299 This they do chiefly from an instinct of delicacy ; since wood-birds are not wont to use the same nest a second time, even if they rear several broods in a season. The subdued tints and notes which almost always mark the female sex, among birds, unlike insects ind human beings, of which the female is often more showy than the male, seem designed to secure their safety while sitting on the nest, while the brighter colors and louder song of the male enable his domestic circle to detect his whereabouts more easily. It is commonly noticed, in the same way, that ground-birds have more neutral tints than those which build out of reach. With the aid of these advantages, it is astonishing how well these roving creatures keep their secrets, and what sharp eyes are needed to spy out their habitations, while it always seems as if the empty last-year's nests were very plenty. Some, indeed, are very elaborately concealed, as of the Golden-Crowned Thrush, called, for this reason, the Oven-Bird, the Meadow-Lark, with its burrowed gal- lery among the grass, and the Kingfisher, which mines four feet into the earth. But most of the rarer nests would hardly be discovered, only that the maternal in- stinct seems sometimes so overloaded by Nature as to defeat itself, and the bird flies and chirps in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush, which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners among all our birds : both male and female sometimes flit in perfect silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which is scarce- ly audible. Passing along the shore-path by our lake, one day in June, I heard a great sound of scuffling and yelping before 300 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. me, as if dogs were hunting rabbits or woodchueks. On approaching, I saw no sign of such disturbances, and presently a Partridge came running at me through the trees, with ruff and tail expanded, bill wide open, and hissing like a Goose, then turned suddenly, and with ruff and tail furled, but with no pretence of lameness, scudded off through the woods in a circle, then at me again fiercely, approaching within two yards, and spread- ing all her furbelows, to intimidate, as before, then, taking in sail, went off again, always at the same rate of speed, yelping like an angry squirrel, squealing like a pig, occasionally clucking like a hen, and, in general, so filling the woods with bustle and disturbance that there seemed no room for anything else. Quite overawed by the dis- play, I stood watching her for some time, then entered the underbrush, where the little invisible brood had been unceasingly piping, in their baby way. So motionless were they, that, for all their noise, I stood with my feet among them, for some minutes, without finding it possible to detect them. When found and taken from the ground, which they so closely resembled, they made no attempt to escape ; but when replaced, they presently ran away fast, as if conscious that the first policy had failed, and that their mother had retreated. Such is the summer life of these little things ; but come again in the fall, when the wild autumnal winds go marching through the woods, and a dozen pairs of strong wings will thrill like thunder through the arches of the trees, as the full-grown brood whirrs away around you. Not only have we scarcely any species of birds which are thoroughly and unquestionably identical with Euro- pean species, but there are certain general variations of halit. For instance, in regard to migration. This is, THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 301 of course, a universal instinct, since even tropical birds migrate for short distances from the equator, so essential to their existence do these wanderings seem. But in New England, among birds as among men, the roving habit seems unusually strong, and abodes are shifted very rapidly. The whole number of species observed in Mas- sachusetts is about the same as in England, some three hundred in alL But of this number, in England, about a hundred habitually winter on the island, and half that number even in the Hebrides, some birds actually breed- ing in Scotland during January and February, incredible as it may seem. Their habits can, therefore, be observed through a long period of the year ; while with us the bright army comes and encamps for a month or two and then vanishes. You must attend their dress-parades, while they last ; for you will have but few opportunities, and their domestic life must commonly be studied during a few weeks of the season, or not at all. Wonderful as the instinct of migration seems, it is not, perhaps, so altogether amazing in itself as in some of its attendant details. To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and flee from its fading, south ; they must keep near the food on which they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees with their nests ; the Song-Sparrow seeks the ground ; the Blue-Bird finds a box or a hole somewhere ; the Red- Wing haunts the marshy thickets, safer in spring than at any other season ; and even the sociable Robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation ; and the thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change of lad- 302 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. tnde, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That the same Cat-Bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree, that is the thing astonishing to me. In England, a lame Redstart was observed in the same garden for sixteen successive years ; and the astonishing precision of course which enables some birds of small size to fly from Aus- tralia to New-Zealand in a day probably the longest single flight ever taken is only a part of the same mysterious instinct of direction. In comparing mode? of flight, the most surprising, of course, is that of the Swallow tribe, remarkable not merely for its velocity, but for the amazing boldness and instan- taneousness of the angles it makes ; so that eminent Eu- ropean mechanicians have speculated in vain upon the methods used in its locomotion, and prizes have been offered, by mechanical exhibitions, to him who could best explain it. With impetuous dash, they sweep through our perilous streets, these wild hunters of the air, "so near, and yet so far " ; they bathe flying, and flying they feed their young. In my immediate vicinity, the Chim- ney-Swallow is not now common, nor the Sand-Swallow ; but the Cliff-Swallow, that strange emigrant from the Far West, the Barn-Swallow, and the white-breasted species, are abundant, together with the Purple Martin. I know no prettier sight than a bevy of these bright little creatures, met "from a dozen different farm-houses to pic- nic at a wayside pool, splashing and fluttering, with their long wings expanded like butterflies, keeping poised by a constant hovering motion, just tilting upon their feet, which scarcely touch the moist ground. You will seldom see them actually perch on anything less airy than some telegraphic wire; but when they do alight, each will THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 303 make chatter enough for a dozen, as if all the rushing hurry of the wings had passed into the tongue. Between the swiftness of the Swallow and the state- litiess of the birds of prey, the whole range of bird-motion seems included. The long wave of a Hawk's wings seems almost to send a slow vibration through the at- mosphere, tolling upon the eye as yon distant bell upon the ear. I never was more impressed with the superior dignity of these soarings than in observing a bloodless contest in the air, last April. Standing beside a little grove, on a rocky hillside, I heard Crows cawing near by, and then a sound like great flies buzzing, which I really attributed, for a moment, to some early insect. Turning, I saw two Crows flapping their heavy wings among the trees, and observed that they were teasing a Hawk about as large as themselves, which was also on the wing. Presently all three had risen above the branches, and were circling higher and higher in a slow spiral. The Crows kept constantly swooping at their enemy, with the same angry buzz, one of the two taking decidedly the lead. They seldom struck at him with their beaks, but kept lumbering against him, and flapping him with their wings, as if in a fruitless effort to capsize him; while the Hawk kept carelessly eluding the assaults, now inclining on one side, now on the other, with a stately grace, never retaliating, but seeming rather to enjoy the novel amusement, as if it were a skirmish in balloons. During all this, indeed, he scarcely seemed once to wave his wings ; yet he soared steadily aloft, till the Crows refused to follow, though already higher than I ever saw Crows before, dim against the fleecy sky ; then the Hawk flew northward, but soon after he sailed over us once again, with loud, scornful chin; and they only cawed, and left him undisturbed. 304 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. When we hear the tumult of music from these various artists of the air, it seems as if the symphony never could be analyzed into its different instalments. But with time and patience it is not so difficult ; nor can we really enjoy the performance, so long as it is only a confused chorus to our ears. It is not merely the highest form of animal language, but, in strictness of etymology, the only form, if it be true, as is claimed, that no other ani- mal employs its tongue, lingua, in producing sound. In the Middle Ages, the song of birds was called their Latin, as was any other foreign dialect. It was the old German superstition, that any one who should eat the heart of a bird would thenceforth comprehend its lan- guage ; and one modern philologist of the same nation (Masius declares) has so far studied the sounds produced by domestic fowls as to announce a Goose-Lexicon. Du- pont de Nemours asserted that he understood eleven words of the Pigeon language, the same number of that of Fowls, fourteen of the Cat tongue, twenty-two of that of Cattle, thirty of that of Dogs, and the Raven language he understood completely. But the ordinary observer seldom attains farther than to comprehend some of the cries of anxiety and fear around him, often so unlike the accus- tomed carol of the bird, as the mew of the Cat-Bird, the lamb-like bleating of the Veery and his impatient yeoick, the chaip of the Meadow-Lark, the towyee of the Chewink, the petulant psit and tsee of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and the hoarse cooing of the Bobolink. And with some of our most familiar birds the variety of notes is so great as really to promise difficulties in the Ameri- can department of the bird-lexicon. I have watched two Song-Sparrows, perched near each other, in whom the spy-glass could show not the slightest difference of mark THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 305 ing, even in the characteristic stains upon the breast, who yet chanted to each other, for fifteen minutes, over and over, two elaborate songs which had nothing in common. I have observed a similar thing in two Wood-Sparrows, with their sweet, distinct, accelerating lay ; nor can I find it stated that the difference is sexual. Who can claim to have heard the whole song of the Robin? Tak- ing shelter from a shower beneath an oak-tree, the other day, I caught a few of the notes which one of those cheery creatures, who love to sing in wet weather, tossed down to me through the drops. (Before noticing me,) chirrup, cheerup; (pausing in alarm, at my approach,) che, c/ie, che; (broken presently by a thoughtful strain,) caw, caw; (then softer and more confiding,) tee, tee, see ; (then the original note, in a whisper,) chmttp, cheerup; (often broken by a soft note,) see, wee; (and an odder one,) squeal; (and a mellow note,) And all these were mingled with more complex com- binations, and with half-imitations, as of the Blue-Bird, so that it seemed almost impossible to doubt that there was some specific meaning, to him and his peers, in this endless vocabulary. Yet other birds, as quick-witted as the Robins, possess but one or two chirping notes, to which they seem unable to give more than the very rudest variation of accent. The controversy between the singing-birds of Europe and America has had various phases and influential disputants. Buffon easily convinced himself that our Thrushes had no songs, because the voices of all birds grew harsh in savage countries, such as he naturally held this continent to be. Audubon, on the other hand, re- lates that even in his childhood he was assured by his T 306 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. father that the American songsters were the best, though neither Americans nor Europeans could be convinced of it. MacGillivray, the Scottish naturalist, reports that Audubon himself, in conversation, arranged our vocalists in the following order : first, the Mocking-Bird, as un- rivalled; then, the Wood-Thrush, Cat-Bird, and Red thrush ; the Rose-Breasted, Pine, and Blue Grosbeak ; the Orchard and Golden Oriole ; the Tawny and Hermit Thrashes; several Finches, Bachmann's, the White- Crowned, the Indigo, and the Nonpareil ; and finally, the Bobolink. Among those birds of this list which frequent Massa- chusetts, Audubon might well put the Wood-Thrush at the head. As I sat the other day in the deep woods beside a black brook which dropped from stone to stone beneath the shadow of our Rattlesnake Rocks, the air seemed at first as silent above me as the earth below. The buzz of summer sounds had not begun. Sometimes a bee hummed by with a long swift thrill like a chord of music ; sometimes a breeze came resounding up the forest like an approaching locomotive, and then died utterly away. Then, at length, a Veery's delicious note rose in a fountain of liquid melody from beneath me ; and when it was ended, the clear, calm, interrupted chant of the Wood-Thrush fell like solemn water-drops from some source above. I am acquainted with no sound in Nature so sweet, so elevated, so serene. Flutes and flageolets are Art's poor efforts to recall that softer sound. It is simple, and seems all prelude ; but the music to which it is the overture belongs to other spheres. It might be the Angilus of some lost convent It might be the meditatioi of some maiden-hermit, saying over to herself in solitude, with recurrent tuneful pauses, the only song she knows. THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 307 Beside this soliloquy of seraphs, the carol of the Veery seems a familiar and almost domestic thing ; yet it is so charming that Audubon must have designed to include it among the Thrushes whose merits he proclaims. But the range of musical perfection is a wide one ; and if the standard of excellence be that wondrous bril- liancy and variety of execution suggested by the Mock- ing- Bird, then the palm belongs, among our New-England songsters, to the Red Thrush, otherwise called the Mavis or Brown Thrasher. I have never heard the Mocking- Bird sing at liberty ; and while the caged bird may surpass the Red Thrush in volume of voice and in quaintness of direct imitation, he gives me no such impression of depth and magnificence. I know not how to describe the voluble and fantastic notes which fall like pearls and diamonds from the beak of our Mavis, while his stately attitudes and high-born bearing are in full harmony with the song. I recall the steep, bare hillside, and the two great boulders which guard the lonely grove, where I first fully learned the wonder of this lay, as if I had met Saint Cecilia there. A thoroughly happy song, overflowing with life, it gives even its most familiar phrases an air of gracious condescension, as when some great violinist stoops to the " Carnival of Venice." The Red Thrush does not, however, consent to any parrot-like mimicry, though every note of wood or field Oriole, Bobolink, Crow, Jay, Robin, Whippoorwill appears to pass in veiled procession through the song. Retain the execution of the Red Thrush, but hopelessly impair his organ, and you have the Cat-Bird. This accustomed visitor would seem a gifted vocalist, but for the inevitable comparison between his thinner note and the gushing melodies of the lordlier bird. Is it some 308 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. hopeless consciousness of this disadvantage which lead? him to pursue that peculiar habit of singing softly to him- self very often, in a fancied seclusion ? When other birds are cheerily out-of-doors, on some bright morning of May or June, one will often discover a solitary Cat-Bird sitting concealed in the middle of a dense bush, and twittering busily, in subdued rehearsal, the whole copious variety of his lay, practising trills and preparing half-imitations, which, at some other time, sitting on the topmost twig, he shall hilariously seem to improvise before all the world. Can it be that he is really in some slight disgrace with Nature, with that demi-mourning garb of his, and that his feline cry of terror, which makes his opprobrium with boys, is part of some hidden doom decreed ? No, the lovely color of the eggs which his companion watches on, that laboriously builded staging of twigs shall vindicate this familiar companion from any suspicion of original sin. Indeed, it is well demonstrated by our American oologist, Dr. Brewer, that the eggs of the Cat-Bird affili- ate him with the Robin and the "Wood-Thrush, all three being widely separated in this respect from the Red Thrush. The Red Thrush builds on the ground, and has mottled eggs ; while the whole household establishment of the "Wood-Thrush is scarcely distinguishable from that of the Robin, and the Cat-Bird differs chiefly in being more of a carpenter and less of a mason. The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, which Audubon places so high on his list of minstrels, comes annually to one region in this vicinity, but I am not sure of having heard it The young Pine Grosbeaks come to our woods in winter, and have then but a subdued twitter. Every one knows the Bobolink ; and almost all recognize the Oriole, by sight at least, even if unfamiliar with all the notes of TxIE LIFE OF BIRDS. 309 his cheery and resounding song. The Red-Eyed Fly- catcher, heard even more constantly, is less generally identified by name ; but his note sounds all day among the elms of our streets, and seems a sort of piano-adap- tation, popularized for the million, of the rich notes of the Thrushes. He is not mentioned by Audubon among his favorites, and has no right to complain of the exclusion. Yet the birds which most endear summer are not neces- sarily the finest performers ; and certainly there is none whose note I could spare less easily than the little Chip- ping-Sparrow, called hereabouts the Hair-Bird. To lie half awake on a warm morning in June, and hear that soft insect-like chirp draw in and out with long melodious pulsations, like the rising and falling of the human breath, condenses for my ear the whole luxury of summer. Later in, the day, among the multiplicity of noises, the chirping becomes louder and more detached, losing that faint and dream-like thrilL The bird-notes which have the most familiar fascination are perhaps simply those most intimately associated with other rural things. This applies especially to the earliest spring songsters. Listening to these delicious prophets upon some of those still and moist days which slip in between the rough winds of March, and fill our li\ es for a moment with anticipated delights, it has seemed to me that their varied notes were sent to symbolize all the different elements of spring association. The Blue-Bird seems to represent simply spring's faint, tremulous, liquid sweetness, the Soig-Sparrow its changing pulsations of more positive and varied joy, and the Robin its cheery and superabundant vitality. The later birds of the sea- son, suggesting no such fine-drawn sensations, yet identify themselves with their chosen haunts, so that we cannot 310 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. think of the one without the other. In the meadows, we hear the languid and tender drawl of the Meadow-Lark, one of the most peculiar of notes, almost amounting to affectation in its excess of laborious sweetness. When we reach the thickets and wooded streams, there is no affectation in the Maryland Yellow-Throat, that little restless busybody, with his eternal which-is-it, whic/i-is-it, which-ts-it, emphasizing each syllable at will, in despair of response. Passing into the loftier woods, we find them resounding with the loud proclamation of the Golden Crowned Thrush, scheat, scheat) scheat, scheat, rising and growing louder in a vigorous way that rather sug- gests some great Woodpecker than such a tiny thing. And penetrating to some yet lonelier place, we find it consecrated to that life-long sorrow, whatever it may be, which is made immortal in the plaintive cadence of the Pewee. There is one favorite bird, the Chewink, or Ground- Robin, which, I always fancied, must have been known to Keats when he wrote those few words of perfect de- scriptiveness, " If an innocent bird Before my heedless footsteps stirred and stirred In little journeys." What restless spirit is in this creature, that, while so shy in its own personal habits, it yet watches every visitor with a Paul-Pry curiosity, follows him in the woods, peers out among the underbrush, scratches upon the leaves with a pretty pretence of important business there, and pres- ently, when disregarded, ascends some small tree and begins to carol its monotonous song, as if there were n< such thing as man in the universe ? There is something irregular and fantastic in the coloring, also, of the Che' THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 311 wink : unlike the generality of ground-birds, it is a showy thing, with black, white, and bay intermingled, and it is one of the most unmistakable of all our feathery creatures, in its aspect and hs ways. Another of my favorites, perhaps from our sympathy as to localities, since we meet freely every summer at a favorite lake, is the King-Bird or Tyrant-Flycatcher. The habits of royalty or tyranny I have never been able to perceive, only a democratic habit of resistance to tyrants ; but this bird always impresses me as a perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered person, who amid a very talkative society prefers to listen, and shows his char- acter by action only. So long as he sits silently on some stake or bush in the neighborhood of his family circle, you notice only his glossy black cap and the white feath- ers in his handsome tail ; but let a Hawk or a Crow come near, and you find that he is something more than a mere lazy listener to the Bobolink : far up in the air, determined to be thorough in his chastisements, you will see him, with a comrade or two, driving the bulky in- truder away into the distance, till you wonder how he ever expects to find his own way back again. He speaks with emphasis on these occasions, and then reverts, more sedately than ever, to his accustomed silence. After all the great labors of Audubon and "Wilson, it is certain that the recent visible progress of American ornithology has by no means equalled that of several other departments of Natural HL-tory. The older books are now out of print, and there is actually no popular treatise on the subject to be had : a destitution singularly contrasted with the variety of excellent botanical works which the last twenty years have produced. Nuttall's fascinating volumes, and Brewer's edition of Wilson, are 312 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. equally inaccessible ; and the most valuable contributions since their time, so far as I know, are that portion of Dr. Brewer's work on eggs printed in the eleventh volume of the " Smithsonian Contributions," and four admirable arti- cles in the Atlantic Monthly.* But the most important observations are locked up in the desks or exhibited in the cabinets of private observers, who have little oppor- tunity of comparing facts with other students, or with reliable printed authorities. What do we know, for in stance, of the local distribution of our birds ? I remem- ber that in my latest conversation with Thoreau, last December, he mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes. The Hawk most common at Concord, the Red-Tailed species, is not known near the sea-shore, twenty miles off, as at Boston or Plymouth. The "White-Breasted Spar- row is rare in Concord ; but the Ashburnham woods, thirty miles away, are full of it. The Scarlet Tanager's is the commonest note in Concord, except the Red-Eyed Flycatcher's ; yet one of the best field-ornithologists in Boston had never heard it. The Rose-Breasted Gros- beak is seen not infrequently at Concord, though its nest is rarely found ; but in Minnesota Thoreau found it more abundant than any other bird, far more so than the Robin. But his most interesting statement, to my fancy, was, that, during a stay of ten weeks on Monadnock, he found that the Snow-Bird built its nest on the top of the mountain, and probably never came down through the season. That was its Arctic ; and it would probably yet be found, he * " Our Birds and their Ways" (December, 1857); " The Singing- Birds and their Songs" (August, 1858); "The Birds of the Garden uid Orchard" (October, 1858); "The Birds of the Pasture and For- Mt" (December, 1858); the first by J. Elliot Cabot, and the last three by Wilson Flagg. THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 313 predicted, on Wachusett and other Massachusetts peaks. It is known that the Snow-Bird, or " Snow-Flake," as it is called in England, was reported by Audubon as having only once been proved to build in the United States, namely, among the White Mountains, though Wilson found its nests among the Alleghanies ; and in New Eng- land it used to be the rural belief that the Snow-Bird and the Chipping-Sparrow were the same. After July, most of our birds grow silent, and, but for the insects, August would be almost the stillest month in the year, stiller than the winter, when the woods are often vocal with the Crow, the Jay, and the Chickadee. But with patient attention one may hear, even far into the autumn, the accustomed notes. As I sat in my boat, one sunny afternoon of last September, beneath the shady western shore of our quiet lake, with the low sunlight striking almost level across the wooded banks, it seemed as if the last hoarded drops of summer's sweetness were being poured over all the world. The air was full of quiet sounds. Turtles rustled beside the brink and slid into the water, cows plashed in the shallows, fishes leaped from the placid depths, a squirrel sobbed and fretted on a neighboring stump, a katydid across the lake maintained its hard, dry croak, the crickets chirped pertinaciously, but with little fatigued pauses, as if glad that their work was almost done, the grasshoppers kept up their continual chant, which seemed thoroughly melted and amalgamated into the summer, as if it would go on indefinitely, though the body of the little creature were dried into dust. All this time the birds were silent and invisible, as if they would take no more part in the sym- phony of the year. Then, seemingly by preconcerted signal, they joined in: Crows cawed anxiously afar; 14 314 THE LIFE OF BIRDS. Jays screamed in the woods; a Partridge clucked to its brood, like the gurgle of water from a bottle ; a King- fisher wound his rattle, more briefly than in spring, as if we now knew all about it and the merest hint ought to suffice ; a Fish-Hawk flapped into the water, with a great rude splash, and then flew heavily away ; a flock of Wild Ducks went southward overhead, and a smaller party returned beneath them, flying low and anxiously, as if to pick up some lost baggage ; and, at last, a Loon laughed loud from behind a distant island, and it was pleasant to people these woods and waters with that wild shouting, linking them with Katahdin Lake and Amperzand. But the later the birds linger in the autumn, the more their aspect differs from that of spring. In spring, they come, jubilant, noisy, triumphant, from the South, the winter conquered and the long journey done. In au- tumn, they come timidly from the North, and, pausing on their anxious retreat, lurk within the fading copses and twitter snatches of song as fading. Others fly as openly as ever, but gather in flocks, as the Robins, most piteous of all birds at this season, thin, faded, ragged, their bold note sunk to a feeble quaver, and their manner a mere caricature of that inexpressible military smartness with which they held up their heads in May. Yet I cannot really find anything sad even in Novem- ber. When I think of the thrilling beauty of the season past, the birds that came and went, the insects that took up the choral song as the birds grew silent, the procession of the flowers, the glory of autumn, and when I think that, this also ended, a new gallery of wonder is opening, almost more beautiful, in the magnificence of frost and snow, there comes an impression of affluence and liber- ality in the universe which seasons of changeless and un- THE LIFE OF BIRDS. 315 eventful verdure would never give. The catkins already formed on the alder, quite prepared to droop into April's beauty, the white edges of the May-flower's petals, already visible through the bud, show in advance that winter is but a slight and temporary retardation of the life of Nature, and that the barrier which separates No- vember from March is not really more solid than that which parts the sunset from the sunrise. THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. IN Cuba there is a blossoming shrub whose multitudi- nous crimson flowers are so seductive to the hum- ming-birds that they hover all day around it, buried in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first up- right, the gorgeous bells droop downward, and fall un- withered to the ground, and are thence called by the Creoles " Cupid's Tears." Fredrika Bremer relates that daily she brought home handfuls of these blossoms to her chamber, and nightly they all disappeared. One morning she looked toward the wall of the apartment, and there, in a long crimson line, the delicate flowers went ascend- ing one by one to the ceiling, and passed from sight. She found that each was borne laboriously onward by a little colorless ant much smaller than itself: the bearer was invisible, but the lovely burdens festooned the wall with beauty. To a watcher from the sky, the march of the flowers of any zone across the year would seem as beautiful as that West- Indian pageant. These frail creatures, rooted where they stand, a part of the " still life " of Nature, yet share her ceaseless motion. In the most sultry silence of summer noons, the vital current is coursing with desperate speed through the innumerable veins of every leaflet: 320 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. and the apparent stillness, like the sleeping of a child's top, is in truth the very ecstasy of perfected motion. Not in the tropics only, but even in England, whence most of our floral associations and traditions come, the march of the flowers is in an endless circle, and, unlike our experience, something is always in bloom. In the North- ern United States, it is said, the active growth of most plants is condensed into ten weeks, while in the mother country the full activity is maintained through sixteen. But even the English winter does not seem to be a win- ter, in the same sense as ours, appearing more like a chilly and comfortless autumn. There is no month in the year when some special plant does not bloom : the Colts- foot there opens its fragrant flowers from December to February ; the yellow-flowered Hellebore, and its cousin, the sacred Christmas Rose of Glastonbury, extend from January to March ; and the Snowdrop and Primrose often come before the first of February. Something may be gained, much lost, by that perennial succession ; those links, however slight, must make the floral period con- tinuous to the imagination ; while our year gives a pause and an interval to its children, and after exhausted Octo- ber has effloresced into Witch-Hazel, there is ah absolute reserve of blossom, until the Alders wave again. No symbol could so well represent Nature's first yield- ing in spring-time as this blossoming of the Alder, this drooping of the tresses of these tender things. Before the frost is gone, and while the new-born season is yet too weak to assert itself by actually uplifting anything, it can at least let fall these blossoms, one by one, till they wave defiance to the winter on a thousand boughs. How pa- tiently they have waited ! Men are perplexed with anx- ieties about their own immortality; but these catkins, THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 321 which hang, almost full-formed, above the ice all winter, show no such solicitude, but when March wooes them they are ready. Once relaxing, their pollen is so prompt to fall that it sprinkles your hand as you gather them ; then, for one day, they are the perfection of grace upon your table, and next day they are weary and emaciated, and their little contribution to the spring is done. Then many eyes watch for the opening of the May- flower, day by day, and a few for the Hepatica. So marked and fantastic are the local preferences of all our plants, that, with miles of woods and meadows open to their choice, each selects only some few spots for its ac- customed abodes, and some one among them all for its very earliest blossoming. There is always some single chosen nook, which you might almost cover with your handkerchief, where each flower seems to bloom earliest, without variation, year by year. I know one such place for Hepatica a mile northeast, another for May-flowei two miles southwest ; and each year the whimsical crea- ture is in bloom on that little spot, when not another flower can be found open through the whole country round. Accidental as the choice may appear, it is un- doubtedly based on laws more eternal than the stars ; yet why all subtile influences conspire to bless that undistin- guishable knoll no man can say. Another and similar puzzle offers itself in the distribution of the tints of flow- ers, in these two species among the rest. There are certain localities, near by, where the Hepatica is all but white, and others where the May-flower is sumptuous in pink : yet it is not traceable to wet or dry, sun or shadow, and no agricultural chemistry can disclose the secret. Is it by some Darwinian law of selection that the white Hepatica has utterly overpowered the blue, in our Gas- 14* u 322 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. cade Woods, for instance, while yet in the very midst of this pale plantation a single clump will sometimes bloom with all heaven on its petals ? Why can one recognize the Plymouth May-flower, as soon as seen, by its won- drous depth of color ? Does it blush with triumph to see how Nature has outwitted the Pilgrims, and even suc- ceeded in preserving her deer like an English duke, still maintaining the deepest woods in Massachusetts precisely where those sturdy immigrants first began their clearings ? The Hepatica (called also Liverwort, Squirrel-Cup, or Blue Anemone) has been found in Worcester as early as March seventeenth, and in Danvers on March twelfth, dates which appear almost the extreme of credibility. Our next wild-flower in this region is the Claytonia, or Spring-Beauty, which is common in the Middle States, but here found in only a few localities. It is the Indian Miskodeed, and was said to have been left behind when mighty Peboan, the Winter, was melted by the breath of Spring. It is an exquisitely delicate little creature, bears its blossoms in clusters, unlike most of the early species, and opens in gradual succession each white and pink- veined bell. It grows in moist places on the sunny edges of woods, and prolongs its shy career from about the tenth of April until almost the end of May. A week farther into April, and the Bloodroot opens, a name of guilt, and a type of innocence. This fresh and lovely thing appears to concentrate all its stains within its ensanguined root, that it may condense all purity in the peculiar whiteness of its petals. It emerges from the ground with each shy blossom wrapt in its own pale-green leaf, then doffs the cloak and spreads its long petals round a group of yellow stamens. The flower falls apart so easily, that when in full bloom it will hardly bear trans- THE PROCESSION OF THE FLuWERS. 323 portation, but with a touch the stem stands naked, a bare gold-tipped sceptre amid drifts of snow. And the contra- diction of its hues seems carried into its habits. One of the most shy of wild plants, easily banished from its local- ity by any invasion, it yet takes to the garden with unpar- donable readiness, doubles its size, blossoms earlier, re- pudiates its love of water, and flaunts its great leaves in the unnatural confinement, until it elbows out the exotics. Its charm is gone, unless one find it in its native haunts, beside some cascade which streams over rocks that are dark with moisture, green with moss, and snowy with white bubbles. Each spray of dripping feather-moss ex- udes a tiny torrent of its own, or braided with some tiny neighbor, above the little water-fonts which sleep sunless in ever-verdant caves. Sometimes along these emerald canals there comes a sudden rush and hurry, as if some anxious housekeeper upon the hill above were afraid that things were not stirring fast enough, and then again the waving and sinuous lines of water are quieted to a serener flow. The delicious red thrush and the busy little yellow- throat are not yet come to this their summer haunt ; but all day long the answering field-sparrows trill out their sweet, shy, accelerating lay. In the same locah'ties with the Bloodroot, though some days later, grows the Dog-Tooth Violet, a name hope- lessly inappropriate, but likely never to be changed. These hardy and prolific creatures have also many locali- ties of their own ; for, though they do not acquiesce in cultivation, like the sycophantic Bloodroot, yet they are hard to banish from their native haunts, but linger after the woods are cleared and the meadow drained. The bright flowers blaze back all the yellow light of noonday, as the gay petals curl and spread themselves above their 324 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. beds of mottled leaves ; but it is always a disappointment to gather them, for in-doors they miss the full ardor of the sunbeams, and are apt to go to sleep and nod expres- sionless from the stalk. And almost on the same day with this bright apparition one may greet a multitude of concurrent visitors, arriving so accurately together that it is almost a matter of acci- dent which of the party shall first report himself. Per- haps the Dandelion should have the earliest place ; indeed, I once found it in Brookline on the seventh of April. But it cannot ordinarily be expected before the twentieth, in Eastern Massachusetts, and rather later in the interior ; while by the same date I have also found near Boston the Cowslip or Marsh-Marigold, the Spring-Saxifrage, the Anemones, the Violets, the Bellwort, the Houstonia, the Cinquefoil, and the Strawberry-blossom. Varying, of course, in different spots and years, the arrival of this coterie is yet nearly simultaneous, and they may all be expected hereabouts before May-day at the very latest After all, in spite of the croakers, this festival could not have been much better timed, the delicate blossoms which mark the period are usually in perfection on this day, and it is not long before they are past their prime. Some early plants which have now almost disappeared from Eastern Massachusetts are still found near Worces- ter in the greatest abundance, as the larger Yellow Violet, the Red Trillium, the Dwarf Ginseng, the Clin- tonia or Wild Lily-of-the- Valley, and the pretty fringed Polygala, which Miss Cooper christened " Gay- Wings." Others again are now rare in this vicinity, and growing rarer, though still abundant a hundred miles farther in- land. In several bits of old swampy wood one may still find, usually close together, the Hobble-Bush and the THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 325 Painted Trillium, the Mitella, or Bishop's- Cap, and the snowy Tiarella. Others again have entirely vanished within ten years, and that in some cases without any ade- quate explanation. The dainty white Corydalis, profanely called " Dutchman's Breeches," and the quaint woolly Ledum, or Labrador Tea, have disappeared within that time. The beautiful Linnaea is still found annually, but flowers no more ; as is also the case, in all but one distant locality, with the once abundant Rhododendron. Nothing in Nature has for me a more fascinating interest than these secret movements of vegetation, the sweet blind instinct with which flowers cling to old domains until ab- solutely compelled to forsake them. How touching is the fact, now well known, that salt-water plants still flower beside the Great Lakes, yet dreaming of the time when those waters were briny as the sea! Nothing hi the demonstrations of Geology seems grander than the light lately thrown by Professor Gray, from the analogies be- tween the flora of Japan and of North America, upon the successive epochs of heat which led the wandering flowers along the Arctic lands, and of cold which isolated them once more. Yet doubtless these humble movements of our local plants may be laying up results as important, and may hereafter supply evidence of earth's changes upon some smaller scale. May expands to its prime of beauty ; the summer birds come with the fruit-blossoms, the gardens are deluged with bloom, and the air with melody, while in the woods the timid spring flowers fold themselves away in silence and give place to a brighter splendor. On the margin ol some quiet swamp a myriad of bare twigs seem suddenly overspread with purple butterflies, and we know that the Ehodora is in bloom. Wordsworth never immortalized a 326 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. flower more surely than Emerson this, and it needs nc weaker words ; there is nothing else in which the change from nakedness to beauty is so sudden, and when you bring home the great mass of blossoms they appear all ready to flutter away again from your hands and leave you disenchanted. At the same time the beautiM Cornel-tree is in perfec- tion ; startling as a tree of the tropics, it flaunts its great flowers high up among the forest-branches, intermingling its long slender twigs with theirs, and garnishing them with alien blooms. It is very available for household decoration, with its four great creamy petals, flowers they are not, but floral involucres, each with a fantastic curl and stain at its tip, as if the fire-flies had alighted on them and scorched them ; and yet I like it best as it peers out in barbaric splendor from the delicate green of young Maples. And beneath it grows often its more abundant kinsman, the Dwarf Cornel, with the same four great petals enveloping its floral cluster, but lingering low upon the ground, an herb whose blossoms mimic the statelier tree. The same rich creamy hue and texture show them- selves in the Wild Calla, which grows at this season in dark, sequestered water-courses, and sometimes well rivals, in all but size, that superb whiteness out of a land of darkness, the Ethiopic Calla of the conservatory. At this season, too, we seek another semi-aquatic rarity, whose homely name cannot deprive it of a certain garden- like elegance, the Buckbean. This is one of the shy plants which yet grow in profusion within their own do- main. I have found it of old in Cambridge, and then upon the pleasant shallows of the Artichoke, that love- liest tributary of the Merrimack, and I have never seen THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 327 it where it occupied a patch more than a few yards square, while yet within that space the multitudinous spikes grow always tall and close, reminding one of hya- cinths, when in perfection, but more delicate and beauti- ful. The only locality I know for it in this vicinity lies seven miles away, where a little inlet from the lower winding bays of Lake Quinsigamond goes stealing up among a farmer's hay-fields, and there, close beside the public road and in full view of the farm-house, this rare creature fills the water. But to reach it we commonly row down the lake to a sheltered lagoon, separated from the main lake by a long island which is gradually forming itself like the coral isles, growing each year denser with alder thickets where the king-birds build ; there leave the boat among the lily-leaves, and take a lane which winds among the meadows and gives a fitting avenue for the pretty thing we seek. But it is not safe to vary many days from the twentieth of May, for the plant is not long in perfection, and is past its prime when the lower blossoms begin to wither on the stem. But should we miss this delicate adjustment of time, it is easy to console ourselves with bright armfuls of Lupine, which bounteously flowers for six weeks along our lake- side, ranging from the twenty-third of May to the sixth of July. The Lupine is one of our most travelled plants ; for, though never seen off the American continent, it stretches to the Pacific, and is found upon the Arctic coast. On these banks of Lake Quinsigamond it grows in great families, and should be gathered in masses and placed in a vase by itself; for it needs no relief from other flowers, its own soft leaves afford background enough, and though the white variety rarely occurs, yet the varying tints of blue upon the same stalk are a per- 828 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. petual gratification to the eye. I know not why shaded blues should be so beautiful in flowers, and yet avoided as distasteful in ladies' fancy-work ; but it is a mystery like that which repudiates blue-and-green from all well-regu lated costumes, while Nature yet evidently prefers it to any other combination in her wardrobe. Another constant ornament of the end of May is the large pink Lady's-Slipper, or Moccason-Flower, the " Cypripedium not due till to-morrow " which Emerson attributes to the note-book of Thoreau, to-morrow, in these parts, meaning about the twentieth of May. It be- longs to the family of Orchids, a high-bred race, fastidious in habits, sensitive as to abodes. Of the ten species named as rarest among American endogenous plants by Dr. Gray, in his valuable essay on the statistics of our Northern Flora, all but one are Orchids. And even an abundant species, like the present, retains the family traits in its person, and never loses its high-born air and its delicate veining. I know a grove where it can be gathered by the hundreds within a half-acre, and yet I never can divest myself of the feeling that each specimen is a choice novelty. But the actual rarity occurs, at least in this region, when one finds the smaller and more beau- tiful Yellow Moccason-Flower, pannflorum, which accepts only our very choicest botanical locality, the "Rattlesnake Ledge" on Tatessit Hill, and may, for aught I know, have been the very plant which Elsie Venner laid upon her schoolmistress's desk. June is an intermediate month between the spring and summer flowers. Of the more delicate early blossoms, the Dwarf Cornel, the Solomon's-Seal, and the Yellow Violet still linger in the woods, but rapidly make way for larger masses and more conspicuous hues. The meadows THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 329 are gorgeous with Clover, Buttercups, and Wild Gera- nium ; but Nature is a little chary for a week or two, maturing a more abundant show. Meanwhile one may afford to take some pains to search for another rarity, al- most disappearing from this region, the lovely Pink Azalea. It still grows plentifully in a few sequestered places, selecting woody swamps to hide itself; and cer- tainly no shrub suggests, when found, more tropical asso- ciations. Those great, nodding, airy, fragrant clusters, tossing far above one's head their slender cups of honey, seem scarcely to belong to our sober zone, any more than the scarlet tanager which sometimes builds its nest beside them. They appear bright exotics, which have wandered into our woods, and seem too happy to feel any wish for exit. And just as they fade, their humbler sister in white begins to bloom, and carries on through the summer the same intoxicating fragrance. But when June is at its height, the sculptured chalices of the Mountain Laurel begin to unfold, and thencefor- ward, for more than a month, extends the reign of this our woodland queen. I know not why one should sigh after the blossoming gorges of the Himalaya, when our forests are all so crowded with this glowing magnificence, rounding the tangled swamps into smoothness, lighting up the underwoods, overtopping the pastures, lining the rural lanes, and rearing its great pinkish masses till they meet overhead. The color ranges from the purest white to a perfect rose-pink, and there is an inexhaustible vege- table vigor about the whole thing, which puts to shame those tenderer shrubs that shrink before the progress of cultivation. There is the Rhododendron, for instance, a plant of the same natural family with the Laurel and the Azalea, and looking more robust and woody than either 330 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWER*. it once grew in many localities in this region, and still lingers in a few, without consenting either to die or to blossom, and there is only one remote place from which any one now brings into our streets those large luxuriant flowers, waving white above the dark green leaves, and bearing "just a dream of sunset on their edges, and just a breath from the green sea in their hearts." But the Laurel, on the other hand, maintains its ground, imper- turbable and almost impassable, on every hillside, takes no hints, suspects no danger, and nothing but the most unmistakable onset from spade or axe can diminish its profusion. Gathering it on the most lavish scale seems only to serve as wholesome pruning ; nor can I conceive that the Indians, who once ruled over this whole county from Wigwam Hill, could ever have found it more incon- veniently abundant than now. We have perhaps no single spot where it grows in such perfect picturesqueness as at " The Laurels," on the Merrimack, just above New- buryport, a whole hillside scooped out and the hollow piled solidly with flowers, the pines curving around it above, and the river encircling it below, on which your boat glides along, and you look up through glimmering arcades of bloom. But for the last half of June it monop- olizes everything in the Worcester woods, no one picks anything else ; and it fades so slowly that I have found a perfect blossom on the last day of July. At the same time with this 'royalty of the woods, the queen of the water ascends her throne, for a reign as un- disputed and far more prolonged. The extremes of the Water-Lily in this vicinity, so far as I have known, are the eighteenth of June and the thirteenth of October, a longer range than belongs to any other conspicuous wild-flower, unless we except the Dandelion and Hous* THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 331 tonia. It is not only the most fascinating of all flowers to gatW but more available for decorative purposes than aiuiuot any other, if it can only be kept fresh. The best method for this purpose, I believe, is to cut the stalk very short before placing in the vase ; then, at night, the lily will close and the stalk curl upward ; refresh them by changing the water, and hi the morning the stalk will be straight and the flower open. From this time forth Summer has it all her own way. After the first of July the yellow flowers begin to match the yellow fire-flies ; Hawkweeds, Loosestrifes, Primroses bloom, and the bushy Wild Indigo. The variety of hues increases ; delicate purple Orchises bloom in their chosen haunts, and Wild Roses blush over hill and dale. On peat-meadows the Adder's-Tongue Arethusa (now called Pogonia) flowers profusely, with a faint, delicious per- fume, and its more elegant cousin, the Calopogon, by its side. In this vicinity we miss the blue Harebell, the identical harebell of Ellen Douglas, which I remember waving its exquisite flowers along the banks of the Merri- mack, and again at Brattleboro', below the cascade in the village, where it has climbed the precipitous sides of old buildings, and nods inaccessibly from their crevices, in that picturesque spot, looking down on the hurrying river. But with this exception, there is nothing wanting here of the flowers of early summer. The more closely one studies Nature, the finer her adaptations grow. For instance, the change of seasons is analogous to a change of zones, and summer assimilates our vegetation to that of the tropics. In those lands, Hum- boldt has remarked, one misses the beauty of wild-flowers in the grass, because the luxuriance of vegetation develops everything into shrubs. The form and color are beauti- 332 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. ful, " but, being too high above the soil, they disturb that harmonious proportion which characterizes the plants of our European meadows. Nature has, hi every zone, stamped on the landscape the peculiar type of beauty proper to the locality." But every midsummer reveals the same tendency. In early spring, when all is bare, and small objects are easily made prominent, the wild- flowers are generally delicate. Later, when all verdure is profusely expanded, these miniature strokes would be lost, and Nature then practises landscape-gardening in large, lights up the copses with great masses of White Alder, makes the roadsides gay with Aster and Golden- Rod, and tops the tall coarse Meadow-Grass with nodding Lilies and tufted Spiraea. One instinctively follows these plain hints, and gathers bouquets sparingly in spring and exuberantly in summer. The use of wild-flowers for decorative purposes merits a word in passing, for it is unquestionably a branch of high art in favored hands. It is true that we are bidden, on high authority, to love the wood-rose and leave it on its stalk ; but against this may be set the saying of Bet- tine, that " all flowers which are broken become immortal in the sacrifice " ; and certainly the secret harmonies of these fair creatures are so marked and delicate that we do not understand them till we try to group floral decorations for ourselves. The most successful artists will not, for instance, consent to put those together which do not grow together; Nature understands her business, and distributes her masses and backgrounds unerringly. Yonder soft and feathery Meadow-Sweet longs to be combined with Wild Roses: it yearns towards them in the field, and, after wifl. ering in the hand most readily, it revives in water as if tc be with them in the vase. In the same way the White THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 333 Spiraea serves as natural background for the Field-Lilies. These lilies, by the way, are the brightest adornment of our meadows during the short period of their perfection. "We have two species : one slender, erect, solitary, scarlet, looking up to heaven with all its blushes on ; the other clustered, drooping, pale-yellow. I never saw the former in such profusion as last week, on the bare summit of Wachusett. The granite ribs have there a thin covering of crispest moss, spangled with the white starry blossoms of the Mountain Cinquefoil ; and as I lay and watched the red lilies that waved their innumerable urns around me, it needed but little imagination to see a thousand altars, sending visible flames forever upward to the answering sun. August comes : the Thistles are out, beloved of butter- flies ; deeper and deeper tints, more passionate intensities of color, prepare the way for the year's decline. A wealth of gorgeous Golden-Rod waves over all the hills, and en- riches every bouquet one gathers ; its bright colors com- mand the eye, and it is graceful as an elm. Fitly arranged, it gives a bright relief to the superb beauty of the Cardinal- Flowers, the brilliant blue-purple of the Vervain, the pearl- white of the Life-Everlasting, the delicate lilac of the Monkey-Flower, the soft pink and white of the Spiraeas, for the white yet lingers, all surrounded by trailing wreaths of blossoming Clematis. But the Cardinal-Flower is best seen by itself, and, indeed, needs the surroundings of its native haunts to dis- play its fullest beauty. Its favorite abode is along the dank mossy stones of some black and winding brook, shaded with overarching bushes, and running one long stream of scarlet with these superb occupants. It seema amazing how anything so brilliant can mature in such 9 334 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. darkness. When a ray of sunlight strays in upon it, the wondrous creature seems to hover on the stalk, ready to take flight, like some lost tropic bird. There is a spot whence I have in ten minutes brought away as many as I could hold in both arms, some bearing fifty blossoms on a single stalk ; and I could not believe that there was such another mass of color in the world. Nothing cultivated is comparable to them ; and, with all the talent lately lav- ished on wild-flower painting. I have never seen the pecu- liar sheen of these petals in the least degree delineated. It seems some new and separate tint, equally distinct from scarlet and from crimson, a splendor for which there is as yet no name, but only the reality. It seems the signal of autumn, when September exhibits the first Barrel-Gentian by the roadside ; and there is a pretty insect in the meadows the Mourning-Cloak Moth it might be called which gives coincident warning. The innumerable Asters mark this period with their varied and wide-spread beauty ; the meadows are full of rose-colored Poly gala, of the white spiral spikes of the Ladies'-Tresses, and of the fringed loveliness of the Gentian. This flower, always unique and beautiful, opening its delicate eyelashes every morning to the sunlight, closing them again each night, has also a thoughtful charm about it as the last of the year's especial darlings. It lingers long, each remain- ing blossom growing larger and more deep in color, as with many other flowers ; and after it there is nothing for which to look forward, save the fantastic Witch- Hazel. On the water, meanwhile, the last White Lilies are sinking beneath the surface, the last gay Pickerel-Weed is gone, though the rootless plants of the delicate Bladder- Wort, spreading over acres of shallows, still impurple the wide, smooth surface. Harriet Prescott says that some THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 335 souls are like the Water-Lilies, fixed, yet floating. But others are like this graceful purple blossom, floating un* fixed, kept in place only by its fellows around it, until perhaps a breeze comes, and, breaking the accidental cohesion, sweeps them all away. The season reluctantly yields its reign, and over the quiet autumnal landscape everywhere, even after the glory of the trees is past, there are tints and fascinations of minor beauty. Last October, for instance, in walking, I found myself on a little knoll, looking northward. Over- head was a bower of climbing Waxwork, with its yellow- ish pods scarce disclosing their scarlet berries, a wild Grape-vine, with its fruit withered by the frost into still purple raisins, and yellow Beech-leaves, detaching themselves with an effort audible to the ear. In the foreground were blue Raspberry-stems, yet bearing green- ish leaves, pale-yellow Witch-Hazel, almost leafless, purple Viburnum-berries, the silky cocoons of the Milkweed, and, amid the underbrush, a few lingering Asters and Golden-Rods, Ferns still green, and Maiden- hair bleached white. In the background were hazy hills, white Birches bare and snow-like, and a Maple half-way up a sheltered hillside, one mass of canary-color, its fallen leaves making an apparent reflection on the earth at its foot, and then a real reflection, fused into a glassy light intenser than itself, upon the smooth, dark stream below. The beautiful disrobing suggested the persistent and unconquerable delicacy of Nature, who shrinks from nakedness and is always seeking to veil her graceful boughs, if not with leaves, then with feathery hoar- frost, ermined snow, or transparent icy armor. But, after all, the fascination of summer lies not in any 336 THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. details, however perfect, but in the sense of total wealth which summer gives. Wholly to enjoy this, one must give one's self passively to it, and not expect to reproduce it in words. We strive to picture heaven, when we are barely at the threshold of the inconceivable beauty of earth. Perhaps the truant boy who simply bathes him- self hi the lake and then basks in the sunshine, dimly con- scious of the exquisite loveliness around him, is wiser, because humbler, than is he who with presumptuous phrases tries to utter it. There are multitudes of mo- ments when the atmosphere is so surcharged with luxury that every pore of the body becomes an ample gate for sensation to flow in, and one has simply to sit still and be filled. In after years the memory of books seems barren or vanishing, compared with the immortal bequest of hours like these. Other sources of illumination seem cisterns only ; these are fountains. They may not increase the mere quantity of available thought, but they impart to it a quality which is priceless. No man can measure what a single hour with Nature may have contributed to the moulding of his mind. The influence is self-renewing, and 'if for a long time it baffles expression by reason of its fineness, so much the better in the end. The soul is like a musical instrument : it is not enough that it be framed for the very most delicate vibration, but it must vibrate long and often before the fibres grow mel- low to the finest waves of sympathy. I perceive that in the veery's carolling, the clover's scent, the glistening of the water, the waving wings of butterflies, the sunset tints, the floating clouds, there are attainable infinitely more subtile modulations of delight than I can yet reach the sensibility to discriminate, much less describe. If, in the simple process of writing, one could physically impart THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS. 337 to this page the fragrance of this spray of azalea beside me, what a wonder would it seem ! and yet one ought to be able, by the mere use of language, to supply to every reader the total of that white, honeyed, trailing sweetness, which summer insects haunt and the Spirit of the Universe loves. The defect is not in language, but in men. There is no conceivable beauty of blossom so beautiful as words, none so graceful, none so perfumed. It is possible to dream of combinations of syllables so delicious that all the dawning and decay of summer cannot rival their perfec- tion, nor winter's stainless white and azure match their purity and their charm. To write them, were it possible, would be to take rank with Nature; nor is there any other method, even by music, for human art to reach so high. SNOW. SNOW. ALL through the long hours of yesterday the low clouds hung close above our heads, to pour with more unswerving aim their constant storm of sleet and snow, sometimes working in soft silence, sometimes with impatient gusty breaths, but always busily at work. Darkness brought no rest to these laborious warriors of the air, but only fiercer strife : the wild winds rose ; noisy recruits, they howled beneath the eaves, or swept around the walls, like hungry wolves, now here, now there, howl- ing at opposite doors. Thus, through the anxious and wakeful night, the storm went on. The household lay vexed by broken dreams, with changing fancies of lost children on solitary moors, of sleighs hopelessly over- turned in drifted and pathless gorges, or of icy cordage upon disabled vessels in Arctic seas ; until a softer warmth, as of sheltering snow-wreaths, lulled all into deeper rest till morning. And what a morning ! The sun, a young conqueror, sends in his glorious rays, like heralds, to rouse us for the inspection of his trophies. The baffled foe, retiring, has left far and near the high-heaped spoils behind. The glittering plains own the new victor. Over all these level and wide-swept meadows, over all these drifted, spotlw 342 SNOW. slopes, he is proclaimed undisputed monarch. On the wooded hillsides the startled shadows are in motion; they flee like young fawns, bounding upward and down- ward over rock and dell, as through the long gleaming arches the king comes marching to his throne. But shade yet lingers undisturbed in the valleys, mingled with timid smoke from household chimneys ; blue as the smoke, a gauzy haze is twined around the brow of every distant hill; and the same soft azure confuses the out- lines of the nearer trees, to whose branches snowy wreaths are clinging, far up among the boughs, like strange new flowers. Everywhere the unstained surface glistens in the sunbeams. In the curves and wreaths and turrets of the drifts a blue tinge nestles. The fresh pure sky an- swers to it ; every cloud has vanished, save one or two which linger near the horizon, pardoned offenders, seem- ing far too innocent for mischief, although their dark and sullen brothers, banished ignominiously below the hori- zon's verge, may be plotting nameless treachery there. The brook still flows visibly through the valley, and the myriad rocks that check its course are all rounded with fleecy surfaces, till they seem like flocks of tranquil sheep that drink the shallow flood. The day is one of moderate cold, but clear and bracing ; the air sparkles like the snow ; everything seems dry and resonant, like the wood of a violin. All sounds are mu- sical, the voices of children, the cooing of doves, the crowing of cocks, the chopping of wood, the creaking of country sleds, the sweet jangle of sleigh-bells. The snow has fallen under a cold temperature, and the flakes are perfectly crystallized ; every shrub we pass bears wreatha which glitter as gorgeously as the n -nila in the constella- tion Perseus ; but in another hour of sunshine every one a>NOW. 343 of those fragile outlines will disappear, and the white sur- face glitter no longer with stars, but with star-dust On such a day, the universe seems to hold but three pure tints, blue, white, and green. The loveliness of the universe seems simplified to its last extreme of refined delicacy. That sensation we poor mortals often have, of being just on the edge of infinite beauty, yet with always a lingering film between, never presses down more closely than on days like this. Everything seems perfectly pre- pared to satiate the soul with inexpressible felicity, if we could only, by one infinitesimal step farther, reach the mood to dwell in it. Leaving behind us the sleighs and snow-shovels of the street, we turn noiselessly toward the radiant margin of the sunlit woods. The yellow willows on the causeway burn like flame against the darker background, and will burn on until they burst into April. Yonder pines and hemlocks stand motionless and dark against the sky. The statelier trees have already shaken all the snow from their summits, but it still clothes the lower ones with a white covering that looks solid as marble. Yet see how lightly it escapes! a slight gust shakes a single tree, there is a Staub-bach for a moment, and the branches stand free as in summer, a pyramid of green amid the whiteness of the yet imprisoned forest. Each branch raises itself when emancipated, thus changing the whole outline of the growth ; and the snow beneath is punctured with a thousand little depressions, where the petty ava- lanches have just buried themselves and disappeared. In crossing this white level, we nave. been tracking our way across an invisible pond, whLh was alive last week with five hundred skaters. Now Uere is a foot of snow upon it, through whieb. there is a boyish excitement in 544 SNOW. making the first path. Looking back upon our track, it proves to be like all other human paths, straight in inten- tion, but slightly devious in deed. "We have gay com- panions on our way; for a breeze overtakes us, and a hundred little simooms of drift whirl along beside us, and whelm in miniature burial whole caravans of dry leaves. Here, too, our track intersects with that of some previous passer ; he has but just gone on, judging by the freshness of the trail, and we can study his character and purposes. The large boots betoken a woodman or ice- man ; yet such a one would hardly have stepped so irres- olutely where a little film of water has spread between the ice and snow and given a look of insecurity ; and here again he has stopped to observe the wreaths on this pen- dent bough, and this snow-filled bird's-nest And there the footsteps of the lover of beauty turn abruptly to the road again, and he vanishes from us forever. As we wander on through the wood, all the labyrinths of summer are buried beneath one white inviting path- way, and the pledge of perfect loneliness is given by the unbroken surface of the all-revealing snow. There ap- pears nothing living except a downy woodpecker, whirl- ing round and round upon a young beech-stem, and a few sparrows, plump with grass-seed and hurrying with jerk- ing flight down the sunny glade. But the trees furnish society enough. What a congress of ermined kings is this circle of hemlocks, which stand, white in their soft raiment, around the dais of this woodland pond! Are they held here, like the sovereigns in the palace of thf> Sleeping Beauty, till some mortal breaks their spell? What sage counsels must be theirs, as they nod the^r weary heads and whisper ghostly memories and old men'? tales to each other, while the red leaves dance on th- SNOW. 343 snowy gward below, or a fox or squirrel steals hurriedly through the wild and wintry night ! Here and there is some discrowned Lear, who has thrown off his regal mantle, and stands hi faded russet, misplaced among the monarchs. What a y m pie and stately hospitality is that of Nature in winter ! The season which the residents of cities think an obstruction is in the country an extension of inter- course : it opens every forest from here to Labrador, free of entrance ; the most tangled thicket, the most treacher- ous marsh, becomes passable; and the lumberer or moose- hunter, mounted on his snow-shoes, has the world before him. He says "good snow-shoeing," as we say "good sleighing " ; and it gives a sensation like a first visit to the sea-side and the shipping, when one first sees exhib- ited for sale, in the streets of Bangor or Montreal, these delicate Indian conveyances. It seems as if a new ele- ment were suddenly opened for travel, and all due facili- ties provided. One expects to go a little farther, and see in the shop-windows, " Wings for sale, gentlemen's and ladies' sizes." The snow-shoe and the birch canoe, what other dying race ever left behind it two memorials so perfect and so graceful. The shadows thrown by the trees upon the snow are blue and soft, sharply defined, and so contrasted with the gleaming white as to appear narrower than the boughs which cast them. There is something subtle and fantas- tic about these shadows. Here is a leafless larch-sapling, eight feet high. The image of the lower boughs is traced upon the snow, distinct and firm as cordage, while the higher ones grow dimmer by fine gradations, until the slender topmost twig is blurred, and almost effaced. But \e denser upper spire of the young spruce by its side 15* 846 SNOW. throws almost as distinct a shadow as its base, and tl whole figure looks of a more solid texture, as if yov could feel it with your hand. More beautiful than eithei is the fine image of this baby hemlock: each delicate leaf droops above as delicate a copy, and here and there the shadow and the substance kiss and frolic with each other in the downy snow. The larger larches have a different plaything : on the bare branches, thickly studded with buds, ch'ng airily the small, light cones of last year's growth, each crowned with a little ball of soft snow, four times taller than itself, save where some have drooped sideways, so that each carries, poor weary Atlas, a sphere upon its back. Thus the coy creatures play cup and ball, and one has lost its plaything yonder, as the branch slightly stirs, and the whole vanishes in a whirl of snow. Meanwhile a frag- ment of low arbor-vitse hedge, poor outpost of a neighbor- ing plantation, is so covered and packed with solid drift, inside and out, that it seems as if no power of sunshine could ever steal in among its twigs and disentangle it. In winter each separate object interests us ; in summer, the mass. Natural beauty in winter is a poor man's lux- ury, infinitely enhanced in quality by the diminution in quantity. Winter, with fewer and simpler methods, yet seems to give all her works a finish even more delicate than that of summer, working, as Emerson says of Eng- lish agriculture, with a pencil, instead of a plough. Or rather, the ploughshare is but concealed ; since a pithy old English preacher has said that " the frost is God'a plough, which he drives through every inch of ground in the world, opening each clod, and pulverizing the whole." Coming out upon a high hillside, more exposed to the SNOW. 347 direct fiiiy of the sleet, we find Nature wearing a wilder look. Every white-birch clump around us is bent di- vergingly to the ground, each white form prostrated in mute despair upon the whiter bank. The bare, writhing branches of yonder sombre oak-grove are steeped in snow, and in the misty air they look so remote and foreign that there is not a wild creature of the Norse mythology who might not stalk from beneath their haunted branches. Buried races, Teutons and Cimbri, might tramp solemnly forth from those weird arcades. The soft pines on this nearer knoll seem separated from them by ages and gen- erations. On the farther hills spread woods of smaller growth, like forests of spun glass, jewelry by the acre provided for this coronation of winter. We descend a steep bank, little pellets of snow rolling hastily beside us, and leaving enamelled furrows behind. Entering the sheltered and sunny glade, we are assailed by a sudden warmth whose languor is almost oppressive. Wherever the sun strikes upon the pines and hemlocks, there is a household gleam which gives a more vivid sensation than the diffused brilliancy of summer. The sunbeams maintain a thousand secondary fires in the /eflection of light from every tree and stalk, for the pres- ervation of animal life and ultimate melting of these accu- mulated drifts. Around each trunk or stone the snow has melted and fallen back. It is a singular fact, estab- lished beyond doubt by science, that the snow is abso- lutely less influenced by the direct rays of the sun than by these reflections. " If a blackened card is placed upon the snow or Ve in the sunshine, the frozen mass under- neath it will be gradually thawed, while that by which it is surrounded, though exposed to the full power of solar heat, is but little disturbed. If, however, we reflect the 348 SNOW. sun's rays from a metal surface, an exactly contrary re- sult takes place : the uncovered parts are the first to melt, and the blackened card stands high above the surround ing portion." Look round upon this buried meadow, and you will see emerging through the white surface a thou- sand stalks of grass, sedge, osmunda, golden-rod, mullein, Saint-John's-wort, plaintain, and eupatorium, an allied army of the sun, keeping up a perpetual volley of innu- merable rays upon the yielding snow. It is their last dying service. We misplace our ten- derness in winter, and look with pity upon the leafless trees. But there is no tragedy in the trees : each is not dead, but sleepeth ; and each bears a future summer of buds safe nestled on its bosom, as a mother reposes with her baby at her breast The same security of life per- vades every woody shrub : the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the first day of spring, and the sweet-fern has even now filled with fragrance its folded blossom. Winter is no such solid bar between season and season as we fancy, but only a slight check and inter- ruption : one may at any time produce these March blos- soms by bringing the buds into the warm house ; and the petals of the May-flower sometimes show their pink and white edges in autumn. But every grass-blade and flower- stalk is a mausoleum of vanished summer, itself crumbling to dust, never to rise again. Each child of June, scarce distinguishable in November against the background of moss and rocks and bushes, is brought into final promi- nence in December by the white snow which imbeds it. The delicate flakes collapse and fall back around it, but retain their inexorable hold. Thus delicate is the action of Nature, a finger of air, and a grasp of iron. We pass the old red foundry, banked in with snow ami SNOW. 349 its lew eaves draped with icicles, and come to the brook which turns its resounding wheel. The musical motion of the water seems almost unnatural amidst the general stillness : brooks, like men, must keep themselves warm by exercise. The overhanging rushes and alder-sprays, weary of winter's sameness, have made for themselves playthings, each dangling a crystal knob of ice, which sways gently in the water and gleams ruddy in the sun- light. As we approach the foaming cascade, the toys become larger and more glittering, movable stalactites, which the water tosses merrily upon their flexible stems. The torrent pours down beneath an enamelled mask of ice, wreathed and convoluted like a brain, and sparkling with gorgeous glow. Tremulous motions and glimmer- ings go through the translucent veil, as if it throbbed with the throbbing wave beneath. It holds in ite mazes stray bits of color, scarlet berries, evergreen sprigs, blue raspberry-stems, and sprays of yellow willow ; glittering necklaces and wreaths and tiaras of brilliant ice-work cling and trail around its edges, and no regal palace shines with such carcanets of jewels as this winter ball-room of the dancing drops. Above, the brook becomes a smooth black canal be- tween two steep white banks ; and the gla=sy water seems momentarily stiffening into the solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous cur- _ent ; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath the slight transparent surface till it reappears be- low. The same thing, on a larger scale, helps to form the oiighty ice-pack of the Northern seas. Nothing except ice is capable of combining, on the largest scale, bulk wilh mobility, and this imparts a dignity to its motions 850 SNOW. even on the smallest scale. I do not believe that any- thing in Behring's Straits could impress me with a grander sense of desolation or of power, than when in boyhood I watched the ice break up in the winding chan- nel of Charles River. Amidst so much that seems like death, let us turn and study the life. There is much more to be seen in winter than most of us have ever noticed. Far in the North the "moose-yard*" are crowded and trampled, at this season, and the wolf and the deer run noiselessly a deadly race, as I have heard the hunters describe, upon the white surface of the gleaming lake. But the pond beneath our feet keeps its stores of life chiefly below its level plat- form, as the bright fishes in the basket of yon heavy- booted fisherman can tell. Yet the scattered tracks of mink and muskrat beside the banks, of meadow-mice around the hay-stacks, of squirrels under the trees, of rabbits and partridges in the wood, show the warm lift- that is beating unseen, beneath fur or feathers, close be- side us. The chickadees are chattering merrily in the upland grove, the blue-jays scream in the hemlock glade, the snow-bird mates the snow with its whiteness, and the robin contrasts with it his still ruddy breast. The weird and impenetrable crows, most talkative of bird? and most uncommunicative, their very food at this season a mys- tery, are almost as numerous now as in summer. They always seem like some race of banished goblins, doing penance for some primeval and inscrutable transgression, and if any bird have a history, it is they. In the Spanish version of the tradition of King Arthur, it is said that he fled from the weeping queens and the island valley of Avilion in the form of a crow ; and hence it is said in " Don Quixote " that no Englishman will ever kill one. SNOW. 351 The traces of the insects in the winter are propnetic, from the delicate cocoon of some infinitesimal feathery thing which hangs upon the dry, starry calyx of the aster, to the large brown-paper parcel which hides in peasant garb the costly beauty of some gorgeous moth. But the hints of birds are retrospective. In each tree of this pas- ture, the very pasture where last spring we looked for nests and found them not among the deceitful foliage, the fragile domiciles now stand revealed. But where are the birds that filled them ? Could the airy creatures nurtured in those nests have left permanently traced upon the air behind them their own bright summer flight, the whole atmosphere would be filled with interlacing lines and curves of gorgeous coloring, the centre of all being this forsaken bird's-nest filled with snow. Among the many birds which winter here, and the many insects which are called forth by a few days of thaw, not a few must die of cold or of fatigue amid the storms. Yet how few traces one sees of this mortality ! Provision is made for it. Yonder a dead wasp has fallen on the snow, and the warmth of its body, or its power of reflecting a few small rays of light, is melting its little grave beneath it. With what a cleanly purity does Nature strive to withdraw all unsightly objects into her cemetery ! Their own weight and lingering warmth take them through air or water, snow or ice, to the level of the earth, and there with spring comes an army of burying- insects, Necrophagi, in a livery of red and black, to dig a grave beneath every one, and not a sparrow falleth to the ground without knowledge. The tiny remains thus disappear from the surface, and the dry leaves are soon spread above these Children in the "Wood. Thus varied and benignant are the aspects of winter or. 352 SNOW. these sunny days. But it is impossible to claim this weather as the only type of our winter climate. There occasionally come days which, though perfectly still and serene, suggest more terror than any tempest, terrible, clear, glaring days of pitiless cold, when the sun seems powerless or only a brighter moon, when the windows remain ground-glass at high noontide, and when, on going out of doors, one is dazzled by the brightness, and fancies for a moment that it cannot be so cold as has been re- ported, but presently discovers that the severity is only more deadly for being so still. Exercise on such days seems to produce no warmth ; one's limbs appear ready to break on any sudden motion, like icy boughs. Stage- drivers and draymen are transformed to mere human buffaloes by their fur coats ; the patient oxen are frost- covered ; the horse that goes racing by waves a wreath of steam from his tossing head. On such days life becomes a battle to all householders, the ordinary appa- ratus for defence is insufficient, and the price of caloric is continual vigilance. In innumerable armies the frost besieges the portal, creeps in beneath it and above it, and on every latch and key-handle lodges an advanced guard of white rime. Leave the door ajar never so slightly, and a chill creeps in cat-like ; we are conscious by the warmest fireside of the near vicinity of cold, its fingers are feeling after us, and even if they do not clutch us, we know that they are there. The sensations of such days almost make us associate their clearness and whiteness with something malignant and evil. Charles Lamb as- seits of snow, " It glares too much for an innocent color, methinks." Why does popular mythology associate the infernal regions with a high temperature instead of a low one ? El Aishi, the Arab writer, says of the bleak wind SNOW. 353 of the Desert, (so writes Richardson, the African travel- ler,) " The north wind blows with an intensity equalling the cold of hell ; language fails me to describe its rigorous temperature." Some have thought that there is a similar allusion in the phrase, " weeping and gnashing of teeth," the teeth chattering from frost. Milton also enumerates cold as one of the torments of the lost, " O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp " ; and one may sup full of horrors on the exceedingly cold collation provided for the next world by the Norse Edda. But, after all, there are but few such terrific periods hi our Massachusetts winters, and the appointed exit from their frigidity is usually through a snow-storm. After a day of this severe sunshine there comes commonly a darker day of cloud, still hard and forbidding, though milder in promise, with a sky of lead, deepening near the horizon into darker films of iron. Then, while all the nerves of the universe seem rigid and tense, the first reluctant flake steals slowly down, like a tear. In a few hours the whole atmosphere begins to relax once more, and in our astonishing climate very possibly the snow changes to rain in twenty-four hours, and a thaw sets in. It is not strange, therefore, that snow, which to Southern races is typical of cold and terror, brings associations of warmth and shelter to the children of the North. Snow, indeed, actually nourishes animal life. It holds, in its bosom numerous animalcules : you may have a glass of water, perfectly free from infusoria, which yet, after your dissolving in it a handful of snow, will show itself full of microscopic creatures, shrimp-like and swift ; and the famous red snow of the Arctic regions is only an exhibition of the same property. It has sometimes been 354 SNOW. fancied that persons buried under the snow have received sustenance through the pores of the skin, like reptiles imbedded in rock. Elizabeth Woodcock lived eight days beneath a snow-drift, in 1799, without eating a morsel ; and a Swiss family were buried beneath an avalanche, in a manger, for five months, in 1755, with no food but a trifling store of chestnuts and a small daily supply of milk from a goat which was buried with them. In nei- ther case was there extreme suffering from cold, and it is unquestionable that the interior of a drift is far warmer than the surface. On the 23d of December. 1860, at 9 P. M., I was surprised to observe drops falling from the under side of a heavy bank of snow at the eaves, at a distance from any chimney, while the mercury on the same side was only fifteen degrees above zero, not hav- ing indeed risen above the point of freezing during the whole day. Dr. Kane pays ample tribute to these kindly proper- ties. " Few of us at home can recognize the protecting value of this warm coverlet of snow. No eider-down in the cradle of an infant is tucked in more kindly than the sleeping-dress of winter about this feeble flower-life. The first warm snows of August and September, falling on a thickly pleached carpet of grasses, heath?, and wil- lows, enshrine the flowery growths which nestle round them in a non-conducting air-chamber ; and as each suc- cessive snow increases the thickness of the cover, we have, before the intense cold of winter sets in, a light cellular bed covered by drift, six, eight, or ten feet deep, in which the phnt retains its vitality I have found in midwinter, in this high latitude of 78 50', the surface so nearly moist as to be friable to the touch ; and upon the ice-floes, commencing with a surface-temperature of SNOW. 355 30, I found at two feet deep a temperature of 8, at four feet +2, and at eight feet +26 The glacier which we became so familiar with afterwards at Etah yields an uninterrupted stream throughout the year." And he afterwards shows that even the varying texture and quality of the snow deposited during the earlier and later portions of the Arctic winter have their special adaptations to the welfare of the vegetation they protect. The process of crystallization seems a microcosm of the universe. Radiata, mollusca, feathers, flowers, ferns, mosses, palms, pines, grain-fields, leaves of cedar, chest- nut, elm, acanthus : these and multitudes of other objects are figured on your frosty window ; on sixteen different panes I have counted sixteen patterns strikingly distinct, and it appeared like a show-case for the globe. What can seem remoter relatives than the star, the star-fish, the star- flower, and the starry snow-flake which clings this moment to your sleeve ? yet some philosophers hold that one day their law of existence will be found precisely the same. The connection with the primeval star, especially, seems far and fanciful enough, but there are yet unexplored affinities between light and crystallization : some crystals have a tendency to grow toward the light, and others develop electricity and give out flashes of light during their formation. Slight foundations for scientific fancies, indeed, but slight is all our knowledge. More than a hundred different figures of snow-flakes, all regular and kaleidoscopic, have been drawn by Sco-es- by, Lowe, and Glaisher, and may be found pictured in the encyclopaedias and elsewhere, ranging from the simplest stellar shapes to the most complicated ramifications. Pro- fessor Tyndall, in his delightful, book on " The Glaciers of the Alps," gives drawings of a few of these snow -blossoms. 356 SNOW. which he watched falling for hours, the whole air being filled with them, and drifts of several inches being accu- mulated while he watched. " Let us imagine the eye gifted with microscopic power sufficient to enable it to see the molecules which composed these stany crystals ; to observe the solid nucleus formed and floating in the air ; to see it drawing towards it its allied atoms, and these arranging themselvss as if they moved to music, and ended with rendering that music concrete." Thus do the Alpine winds, like Orpheus, build their walls by harmony. In some of these frost-flowers the rare and delicate blossom of our wild Mitella diphytta is beautifully figured. Snow-flakes have been also found in the form of regular hexagons and other plane figures, as well as in cylinders and spheres. As a general rule, the intenser the cold the more perfect the formation, and the most perfect speci- mens are Arctic or Alpine in their locality. In this cli- mate the snow seldom falls when the mercury is much below zero ; but the slightest atmospheric changes may alter the whole condition of the deposit, and decide whether it shall sparkle like Italian marble, or be dead- white like the statuary marble of Vermont, whether it shall be a fine powder which can sift through wherever dust can, or descend in large woolly masses, tossed like mouthfuls to the hungry earth. The most remarkable display of crystallization which I have ever seen was on the 13th of January, 1859. There had been three days of unusual cold, but during the night the weather had moderated, and the mercury in the morn- ing stood at -j-14. About two inches of snow had fallen, and the trees appeared densely coated with it. It proved, on examination, that every twig had on the leeward side a dense row of miniature fronds or fern-leaves executed in SNOW 357 snow, with a sharply defined central nerve, or midrib, and perfect ramification, tapering to a point, and varying in length from half an inch to three inches. On every post, every rail, and the corners of every building, the same spectacle was seen ; and where the snow had accumulated in deep drifts, it was still made up of the ruins of these fairy structures. The white, enamelled landscape was beautiful, but a close view of the details was far more so. The crystallizations were somewhat uniform in structure, yet suggested a variety of natural objects, as feather- mosses, birds' feathers, and the most delicate lace-corals, but the predominant analogy was with ferns. Yet they seemed to assume a sort of fantastic kindred with the objects to which they adhered: thus, on the leaves of spruce-trees and on delicate lichens they seemed like reduplications of the original growth, and they made the broad, flat leaves of the arbor-vitae fully twice as wide as before. But this fringe was always on one side only, except when gathered upon dangling fragments of spider's web, or bits of stray thread : these they entirely encircled, probably because these objects had twirled in the light wind while the crystals were forming. Singular disguises were produced : a bit of ragged rope appeared a piece of twisted lace-work; a knot-hole in a board was adorned with a deep antechamber of snowy wreaths ; and the frozen body of a hairy caterpillar became its own well- plumed hearse. The most peculiar circumstance was the fact that single flakes never showed any regular crystalli- zation : the magic was in the combination ; the under sides of rails and boards exhibited it as unequivocally as the upper sides, indicating that the phenomenon was created in the lower atmosphere, aud was more akin to frost than Bnow ; and yet the largest snow-banks were composed of 358 SNOW. nothing else, and seemed like heaps of blanched iron- filings. Interesting observations have been made on the rela- tions between ice and snow. The difference seems to lie only in the more or less compacted arrangement of the frozen particles. Water and air, each being transparent when separate, become opaque when intimately mingled , the reason being that the inequalities of refraction break up and scatter every ray of light. Thus, clouds cast & shadow ; so does steam ; so does foam : and the same ele- ments take a still denser texture when combined as snow. Every snow-flake is permeated with minute airy cnambers, among which the light is bewildered and lost ; while iron* perfectly hard and transparent ice ereiy trace of air disap- pears, and the transmission of light is unbroken. Yet th&x same ice becomes white and opaque wnen pulverized, iia fragments being then intermingled vith air again, just as colorless glass may be crushed into white powder. On the other hand, Professor Tyndall iias converted slao<* of snow to ice by regular pressure, and has shown that every Alpine glacier begins as a snow-drift at its summit, and ends in a transparent ice-cavern below. " The blue blocks which span the sources of the Aiveiron were once powdery snow upon the slopes of the Col du Geant." The varied and wonderful shapes assumed by s&ow and ice have been best portrayed, porhaps, by Dr. Kune hi his two works ; but their resources of color have been so ex- plored by no one as by this saaie favored Professor Tyn- dall, among his Alps, It appears that the tints which in temperate regions are seen feebly and occasionally, in hol- lows or angles of fresh drifts, become brilliant and constant above the line of perpetual snow, and the higher the alti- tude the more lustrous the display. "When a staff was SNOW. 359 struck into the new-fallen drift, the hollow seemed in- stantly to fill with a soft blue liquid, while the snow adhering to the staff took a complementary color of pinkish yellow, and on moving it up and down it was hard to resist the impression that a pink flame was rising and sinking in the hole. The little natural furrows in the drifts appeared faintly blue, the ridges were gray, while the parts most exposed to view seemed least illuminated, and as if a light brown dust had been sprinkled over them. The fresher the snow, the more marked the colors, and it made no difference whether the sky were cloudless or foggy. Thus was every white peak decked upon its brow with this tiara of ineffable beauty. The impression is very general that the average quan tity of snow has greatly diminished in America ; but it must be remembered that very severe storms occur only at considerable intervals, and the Puritans did not always, as boys fancy, step out of the upper windows upon the snow. In 1717, the ground was covered from ten to twenty feet, indeed ; but during January, 1861, the snow was six feet on a level in many parts of Maine and New Hampshire, and was probably drifted three times that depth in particular spots. The greatest storm recorded in England, I believe, is that of 1814, in which for forty- eight hours the snow fell so furiou.-ly that drifts of sixteen, twenty, and even twenty-four feet were recorded in vari- ous places. An inch an hour is thought to be the average rate of deposit, though four inches are said to have fallen during the severe storm of January 3d, 1859. When thus intensified, the " beautiful meteor of the snow " be- gins to give a sensation of something formidable ; and when the mercury suddenly falls meanwhile, and the wind 360 SNOW. snow-storm as no summer thunders can rival. The brief and singular tempest of February 7th, 1861, was a thing to be forever remembered by those who saw it, as I did, over a wide plain. The sky suddenly appeared to open and let down whole solid snow-banks at once, which were caught and torn to pieces by the ravenous winds, and the traveller was instantaneously enveloped in a whirling mass far denser than any fog ; it was a tornado with snow stirred into it. Standing in the middle of the road, with houses close on every side, one could see absolutely nothing in any direction, one could hear no sound but the storm. Every landmark vanished, and it was no more possible to guess the points of the compass than in mid- ocean. It was easy to conceive of being bewildered and overwhelmed within a rod of one's own door. The tempest lasted only an hour ; but if it had lasted a week, we should have had such a storm as occurred on the steppes of Kirgheez in Siberia, in 1827, destroying two hundred and eighty thousand five hundred horses, thirty thousand four hundred cattle, a million sheep, and ten thousand camels, or as " the thirteen drifty days," in 1620, which killed nine tenths of all the sheep in the South of Scotland. On Eskdale Moor, out of twenty thousand only forty-five were left alive, and the shepherds everywhere built up huge semicircular walls of the dead creatures, to afford shelter to the living, till the gale should end. But the most remarkable narrative of a snow-storm which I have ever seen was that written by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, in record of one which took place January 24th, 1790. James Hogg at this time belonged to a sort of literary society of young shepherds, and had set out, the day previous, to walk twenty miles over the hills to the placo SNOW. 36i of meeting ; but so formidable was the look of the sky that he felt anxious for his sheep, and finally turned back again. There was at that time only a slight fall of snow, in thin flakes which seemed uncertain whether to go up or down ; the hills were covered with deep folds of frost- fog, and in the valleys the same fog seemed dark, dense, and as it were crushed together. An old shepherd, pre- dicting a storm, bade him watch for a sudden opening through this fog, and expect a wind from that quarter ; yet when he saw such an opening suddenly form at mid- night, (having then reached his own home,) he thought it all a delusion, as the weather had grown milder and a thaw seemed setting in. He therefore went to bed, and felt no more anxiety for his sheep ; yet he lay awake in spite of himself, and at two o'clock he heard the storm begin. It smote the house suddenly, like a great peal of thunder, something utterly unlike any storm he had ever before heard. On his rising and thrusting his bare arm through a hole in the roof, it seemed precisely as if he had thrust it into a snow-bank, so densely was the air filled with falling and driving particles. He lay still for an hour, while the house rocked with the tempest, hoping it might prove only a hurricane ; but as there was no abate- ment, he wakened his companion-shepherd, telling him " it was come on such a night or morning as never blew from the heavens." The other at once arose, and, open- ing the door of the shed where they slept, found a drift as high as the farm-house already heaped between them and its walls, a distance of only fourteen yards. He floundered through, Hogg soon following, and, finding all the family up, they agreed that they must reach the sheep as soon as possible, especially eight hundred ews that were in one lot together, at the farthest end of the farm 16 362 SNOW. So, after family-prayers and breakfast, four of them stuffed their pockets with bread and cheese, sewed their plaids about them, tied down their hats, and, taking each his staff, set out on their tremendous undertaking, two hours before day. Day dawned before they got three hundred yards from the house. They could not see each other, and kept together with the greatest difficulty. They had to make paths with their staves, rolled themselves over drifts otherwise impassable, and every three or four minutes had to hold their heads down between their knees to recover breath. They went in single file, taking the lead by turns. The master soon gave out, and was speechless and semi-conscious for more than an hour, though he afterwards recovered and held out with the rest. Two of them lost their head-gear, and Hogg himself fell over a high precipice ; but they reached the flock at half past ten. They found the ewes huddled together in a dense body, under ten feet of snow, packed so closely, that, to the amazement of the shepherds, when they had extri- cated the first, the whole flock walked out one after an- other, in a body, through the hole. How they got them home it is almost impossible to tell. It was now noon, and they sometimes could see through the storm for twenty yards, but they had only one momen- tary glimpse of the hills through all that terrible day. Yet Hogg persisted in going by himself afterwards to rescue some flocks of his own, barely escaping with life from the expedition ; his eyes were sealed up with the storm, and he crossed a formidable torrent, without know- ing it, on a wreath of snow. Two of the others lost themselves in a deep valley, and would have perished but for being accidentally heard by a neighboring shepherd. SNOW. 863 who guided them home, where the female portion of the family had abandoned all hope of ever seeing them again. The next day was clear, with a cold wind, and they set forth again at daybreak to seek the remainder of the flock. The face of the country was perfectly transformed : not a hill was the same, not a brook or lake could be rec- ognized. Deep glens were filled in with snow, covering the very tops of the trees ; and over a hundred acres of ground, under an average depth of six or eight feet, they were to look for four or five hundred sheep. The attempt would have been hopeless but for a dog that accompanied them: seeing their perplexity, he began snuffing about, and presently scratching in the snow at a certain point, and then looking round at his master : digging at this spot, they found a sheep beneath. And so the dog led them all day, bounding eagerly from one place to another, much faster than they could dig the creatures out, so that he sometimes had twenty or thirty holes marked beforehand. In this way, within a week, they got out every sheep on the farm except four, these last being buried under a mountain of snow fifty feet deep, on the top of which the dog had marked their places again and again. In every case the sheep proved to be alive and warm, though half suffocated ; on being taken out, they usually bounded away swiftly, and then fell helplessly in a few moments, overcome by the change of atmosphere ; some then died almost instantly, and others were carried home and with difficulty preserved, only about sixty being lost in all. Marvellous to tell, the country-people unanimously agreed afterwards to refer the whole terrific storm to some secret incantations of poor Hogg's literary society aforesaid ; it was gener- ally maintained that a club of young dare-devils had 364 SNOW. the Fiend himself among them in the likeness of a black dog, the night preceding the storm, and the young students actually did not dare to show themselves at fairs or at markets for a year afterwards. Snow-scenes less exciting, but more wild and dreary, may be found in Alexander Henry's Travels with the Indians, in the last century. In the winter of 1776, for instance, they wandered for many hundred miles over the farthest northwestern prairies, where scarcely a white man had before trodden. The snow lay from four to six feet deep. They went on snow-shoes, drawing their stores on sleds. The mercury was sometimes 32 ; no fire could keep them warm at night, and often they had no fire, being scarcely able to find wood enough to melt the snow for drink. They lay beneath buffalo-skins and the stripped bark of trees : a foot of snow sometimes fell on them before morning. The sun rose at half past nine and set at half past two. " The country was one uninter- rupted plain, in many parts of which no wood, nor even the smallest shrub, was to be seen : a frozen sea, of which the little coppices were the islands. That behind which we had encamped the night before soon sank in the hori- zon, and the eye had nothing left save only the sky and snow." Fancy them encamped by night, seeking shelter in a scanty grove from a wild tempest of snow ; then sud- denly charged upon by a herd of buffaloes, thronging in from all sides of the wood to take shelter likewise, the dogs barking, the Indians firing, and still the bewildered beasts rushing madly in, blinded by the storm, fearing the guns within less than the fury without, crashing through the trees, trampling over the tents, and falling about in the deep and dreary snow ! No other writer has ever given us the full desolation of Indian winter-life. "Wholo SNOW. 365 families, Henry said, frequently perished together in such storms. No wonder that the aboriginal legends are full of " mighty Peboan, the Winter," and of Kabibonokka in his lodge of snow-drifts. The interest inspired by these simple narratives sug- gests the reflection, that literature, which has thus far portrayed so few aspects of external Nature, has described almost nothing of winter beauty. In English books, especially, this season is simply forlorn and disagreeable, dark and dismal. " And foul and fierce All winter drives along the darkened air." " When dark December shrouds the transient day, And stormy winds are howling in their ire, Why com'st not thou? 0, haste to pay The cordial visit sullen hours require ! " " Winter will oft at eve resume the breeze, Chill the pale morn, and bid his driving blasts Deform the day delightless." " Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire, With whom you might converse, and by the fire Help waste the sullen day." But our prevalent association with winter, in the Northern United States, is with something white and dazzling and brilliant ; and it is time to paint our own pictures, and cease to borrow these gloomy alien tints. One must turn eagerly every season to the few glimpses of American winter aspects : to Emerson's " Snow-Storm," every word a sculpture ; to the admirable storm in " Margaret " ; to Thoreau's " Winter Walk," in the " Dial " ; and to Low- ell's " First Snow-Flake." These are fresh and real pic- tures, which carry us back to the Greek Anthology, where the herds come wandering down from the wooded moun- 866 SNOW. tains, covered with snow, and to Homer's aged Ulysses, his wise words falling like the snows of winter. Let me add to this scanty gallery of snow-pictures the quaint lore contained in one of the multitudinous sermons of Increase Mather, printed in 1704, entitled " A Brief Discourse concerning the Prayse due to God for His Mercy ir. giving Snow like Wool." One can fancy the delight of the oppressed Puritan boys in the days of the nineteenthlies, driven to the place of worship by the tithing-men, and cooped up on the pulpit and gallery stairs under charge of the constables, at hearing for once a dis- course which they could understand, snowballing spirit- ualized. This was not one of Emerson's terrible exam- ples, " the storm real, and the preacher only phenom- enal " ; but this setting of snow-drifts, which in our winters lends such grace to every stern rock and rugged tree, throws a charm even around the grim theology of the Mathers. Three main propositions, seven subdivisions, four applications, and four uses, but the wreaths and the gracefulness are cast about them all, while the wonder- ful commonplace-books of those days, which held every- thing, had accumulated scraps of winter learning which cannot be spared from these less abstruse pages. Beginning first at the foundation, the preacher must prove, "Prop. I. That the Snow is fitly resembled to Wool Snow like Wool, sayes the Psalmist And not only the Sacred Writers, but others make use of this Com- parison. The Grecians of old were wont to call the Snow ERIODES HTJDOR, Wooly Water, or wet Wool. The Latin word Floccus signifies both a Lock of Wool and a Flake of Snow, in that they resemble one another The aptness of the similitude appears in three things." " 1. In respect of the Whiteness thereof." " 2. In re- SNOW. 367 spect of Softness." "3. In respect of that Warming Vertue that does attend the Snow." [Here the reasoning must not be omitted.] "Wool is warm. We say, As warm as Wool. Woolen-cloth has a greater warmth than other Cloathing has. The wool on Sheep keeps them warm in the Winter season. So when the back of the Ground is covered with Snow, it keeps it warm. Some mention it as one of the wonders of the Snow, that tho' it is itself cold, yet it makes the Earth warm. But Natu- ralists observe that there is a saline spirit in it, which ia hot, by means whereof Plants under the Snow are kept from freezing. Ice under the Snow is sooner melted and broken than other Ice. In some Northern Climates, the wild barbarous People use to cover themselves over with it to keep them warm. When the sharp Air has begun to freeze a man's Limbs, Snow will bring heat into them again. If persons Eat much Snow, or drink immoder- ately of Snow-water, it will burn their Bowels and make them black. So that it has a warming vertue in it, and is therefore fitly compared to Wool." Snow has many merits. " In Lapland, where there is little or no light of the sun hi the depth of Winter, there are great Snows continually on the ground, and by the Light of that they are able to Travel from one place to another At this day in some hot Countreys, they have their Snow-cellars, where it is kept in Summer, and if moderately used, is known to be both refreshing and healthful. There are also Medicinal Vertues in the snow. A late Learned Physician has found that a Salt extracted out of snow is a sovereign Remedy against both putrid and pestilential Feavors. Therefore Men should Praise God, who giveth Snow like Wool." But there is an account against the snow, also. " Not only the disease 368 SNOW. called Bulimia, but others more fatal have come out of the Snow. Geographers give us to understand that in some Countries Vapours from the Snow have killed multitudes in less than a Quarter of an Hour. Some- times both Men and Beasts have been destroyed thereby. Writers speak of no less than Forty Thousand men killed by a great Snow in one Day." It gives a touching sense of human sympathy, to find that we may look at Orion and the Pleiades through the grave eyes of a Puritan divine. " The Seven Stars are the Summer Constellation : they bring on the spring and summer ; and Orion is a Winter Constellation, which is attended with snow and cold, as at this Day More- over, Late Philosophers by the help of the Microscope have observed the wonderful Wisdom of God in the Fig- ure of the Snow ; each flake is usually of a Stellate Form, and of six Angles of exact equal length from the Center. It is like a little Star. A great man speaks of it with admiration, that in a Body so familiar as the Snow is, no Philosopher should for many Ages take notice of a thing so obvious as the Figure of it. The learned Kepler, who lived in this last Age, is acknowledged to be the first that acquainted the world with the Sexangular Figure of the Snow." Then come the devout applications. " There is not a Flake of Snow that falls on the Ground without the hand of God, Mat 10. 29. 30. Not a Sparrow falls to the Ground, without the Will of your Heavenly Father, all the Hairs of your head are numbred. So the Great God has numbred all the Flakes of Snow that covers the Earth. Altho' no man can number them, that God that tells the number of the Stars has numbred them all. .... We often see it, when the Ground is bare, if God SNOW. 369 speaks the word, the Earth is covered with snow in a few Minutes' time. Here is the power of the Great God. If all the Princes and Great Ones of the Earth should send their Commands to the Clouds, not a Flake of snow would come from thence." Then follow the "uses," at last, the little boys in the congregation having grown uneasy long since, at hearing so much theorizing about snow-drifts, with so little oppor- tunity of personal practice. " Use I. If we should Praise God for His giving Snow, surely then we ought to Praise Him for Spiritual Blessings much more." " Use IL We should Humble our selves under the Hand of God, when Snow in the season of it is witheld from us." " Use III. Hence all Atheists will be left Eternally Inexcusable." " Use IV. We should hence Learn to make a Spiritual Improvement of the Snow." And then with a closing volley of every text which figures under the head of " Snow " in the Concordance, the discourse comes to an end ; and every liberated urchin goes home with his head full of devout fancies of building a snow-fort, after sunset, from which to propel consecrated missiles against imagi- nary or traditional Pequota. And the patient reader, too long snow-bound, must be liberated also. After the winters of deepest drifts the spring often comes most suddenly ; there is little frost hi the ground, and the liberated waters, free without the expected freshet, are filtered into the earth, or climb on ladders of sunbeams to the sky. The beautiful crystals all melt away, and the places where they lay are silently made ready to be submerged in new drifts of summer ver ure. These also will be transmuted in their turn, and so the eternal cycle of the season glides along. Near my house there is a garden, beneath whose stately 370 SNOW. sycamores s fountain plays. Three sculptured girls lift forever upward a chalice which distils unceasingly a fine and plashing rain ; in summer the spray holds the maidens in a glittering veil, but winter takes the radiant drops and slowly builds them up into a shroud of ice which creeps gradually about the three slight figures : the feet vanish, the waist is encircled, the head is covered, the piteous uplifted arms disappear, as if each were a Vestal Virgin entombed alive for her transgression. They vanishing entirely, the fountain yet plays on unseen ; all winter the pile of ice grows larger, glittering organ-pipes of conge- lation add themselves outside, and by February a great glacier is formed, at whose buried centre stand immov- ably the patient girls. Spring comes at last, the fated prince, to free with glittering spear these enchanted beau- ties ; the waning glacier, slowly receding, lies conquered before their liberated feet ; and still the fountain plays. Who can despair before the iciest human life, when its unconscious symbols are so beautiful? Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, ft C*. YOUNG FOLKS' HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGCINSON. With Maps and Illustrations, an Appendix covering a List of Books for Consultation, Constitution of the United States, Chronological Table, Index, and a Series of Questions, izmo, price, gi.oo net. 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