THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE 
 
 OF 
 
 LOS 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 CALIFORNIA 
 ANGELES

 
 A BACHELOR'S STORY.
 
 BACHELOR'S STORY 
 
 By Oliver Bunce 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 RUDD & CARLETON 130 GRAND STREET 
 
 (BROOKS BUILDING COR OF BROADWAY) 
 
 MDCCCLIX.
 
 ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by 
 
 OLIVER BUNCE, 
 
 In the Clerk'i Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of 
 Nw York. 
 
 W. H. Tmtoic, Streotypr. R. CRAIBHBAD, Printer.
 
 \m 
 
 t? A GENTLEMAN THAT LOVES TO HEAR HIMSELF 
 TALK; AND WILL SPEAK MORE IN A MINUTE THAN 
 HE WILL STAND TO IN A MONTH." 
 
 Romeo and Juliet. 
 
 1631478
 
 P E E F A C E. 
 
 IF any demand a reason why these pages 
 are given to the world, I reply in the lan 
 guage of Shelley : " The spirits that I have 
 raised haunt me until they are sent to the 
 devil of a printer. All authors are anxious 
 to breech their bantlings."
 
 I. 
 
 Maggie and I begin by being cosy Our chats 
 formally initiated An introduction or two, and like 
 French falconers, we fly at anything I wax egotistical, 
 philosophical, topographical, sentimental, and end by a 
 retrospective digression. 
 
 1*
 
 A BACHELOR'S STORY. 
 
 I 
 
 66 ~1VTOW we are alone, Maggie, drop the 
 _1_ i curtains. Shut out the world ; shut 
 
 in our quiet. Move that screen and let the fire 
 
 light shine on us both. So I" 
 
 " There, sir, all done. How pleasant 1" 
 
 " Then come here, little elf. I have talk for you. 
 
 Nestle on that low seat ; look down into the fire ; 
 
 let my words flow easily into your ear for such an 
 
 attitude is your true listener's. 
 
 " How calm 1 The clock ticks, the fire snaps, 
 
 the curtains rustle slightly in little eddies of wind, 
 
 but these are things that make the silence iuteuser. 
 
 We shall need no candle. I like fire-lighted rooms, 
 
 whose warm, mellow tints gently excite to reverie. 
 
 The glare of gas drowns one's thoughts ; the full 
 
 it
 
 12 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 eloquence of the heart wells up only under the 
 richer tints of the blazing fire. And so, Maggie, 
 our nights begin." 
 
 Maggie comes weekly to take a place at my 
 bachelor fireside, and listen to the loquacious gossip 
 of a garrulous old fellow, who likes good talk and 
 a good listener. She is the daughter of a neighbor, 
 Farmer Dean, a skeptical, free-thinking fellow, who 
 wears a long beard, an independent dress, while in 
 his address is independence enlarged upon. But 
 between Maggie and me there has sprung up an 
 odd friendship. She comes to my cottage (a 
 bachelor's dull retreat, where I live alone with my 
 books, my dreams, and a Hibernian factotum), 
 tumbles over my books, listens to my caprices of talk, 
 and affords just such companionship to a world-loru 
 old man as his wayward sympathies require. She is 
 a wild, impetuous creature, with depths of charac 
 ter I take pleasure in developing a neglected child 
 of genius, whose powers, long dormant, I am watch 
 ing leap into life. 
 
 Maggie, with her own deep, thoughtful way, 
 looked into the fire, yet turned a listening ear to 
 me. I paused briefly, watching the mantel clock 
 crisply and sharply flinging the seconds off, and fairly 
 pelting the air with them ; then lazily stretching my 
 feet upon the fender, the talk came murmuringly.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 13 
 
 " We are to chat, Mag, and dream, and give our 
 fancies sportive wing ; and looking down into our 
 hearts, bring up what odd conceits and pleasant 
 sentiments we can find ; and brighten up the 
 weapons of our wit to pierce the bubbles and vani 
 ties we shall make war upon ; and you, Maggie, 
 shall be my Greek chorus the medium between my 
 monologues and all outside barbarians." 
 
 " Sir," said Maggie. 
 
 Now Maggie's thoughts flow out in a keen direct 
 line, like the blaze from a lantern and like the 
 lantern, with a dark side. Maggie has no humor. 
 A riotous and hearty mirth at times, I grant you, 
 but mirth, my masters, is not humor. Perpend 1 
 Mirth is animal briskness ; the caper and frolic of a 
 spirit whose wave of keen feelings tops to a joyous 
 crest, and through mere excess of life and force, 
 laughs and is merry. Mirth is a spontaneity ; it 
 springs none know whence ; it may be drunk in 
 from the atmosphere ; it is the leap of exultation ; 
 the noisy (for mirth must be noisy) hilarity of a 
 quick blood. But humor is the fantastic play of the 
 fancy. It lies in the sudden collision of incongruous 
 elements, in the ludicrous combination of fantastic 
 images, and is purely the offspring of intellectual 
 legerdemain. Mirth is innocent of idea, uncon 
 scious of fancy, utterly independent of the brain
 
 14 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 mirth is my pulse at a hundred ; humor, my fancy 
 rippling over a mine of deep and silent emotion for 
 near to the laugh of all humor, is the tear of all 
 pathos. 
 
 From this maze of dilucidation I hasten to be 
 delivered, for emotions and fancies, not words, are 
 the subjects I propose to dissect the school in 
 which I can, perhaps, best succeed as the exegete. 
 Therefore, I come back to Maggie. I spiced my 
 speech to Maggie with a single seed of humor, but 
 she saw it not, and her wondering " Sir," chilled me 
 into the consciousness thereof. I say chilled, and I 
 use a happy term. In the social thermometer, how 
 often does the cold, unsympathizing " Sir," plunge 
 the mercury down to freezing point ? " Sir," 
 has cut short my most eloquent harangues, clipped, 
 ere they were fairly winged, my happiest sayings, 
 and dragged down into dust my loftiest flights. 
 Oh, it is a biting word in the mouths of these 
 " envious Cascas," a cold North wind, that just as 
 you slip the leash of your fancy, and bid it soar, 
 blows it back, be-draggled and chopfallen, in your 
 face. 
 
 I made haste to change the subject ; and here let 
 me say, that Maggie and I reserve the privilege to 
 be as abrupt as we please. No matter at what 
 speed we may be driving at a subject, if we choose
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 15 
 
 to pause, even midway in our career, and amble off 
 either to the right or to the left, the reader shall not 
 complain. There shall be no graduating of the tints 
 we use. From dark to light, from sadness to mirth, 
 as our moods come and go, we shall abandon our 
 selves to the wanton waves of caprice emotion, 
 fancy, humor, whatever uppermost hi thought, up 
 permost in expression. 
 
 " I have been to town, Maggie." 
 
 " The city ? I pine to see it. So splendid is it 
 not, sir ?" 
 
 "Two parallels, Mag. A stream bright, flashing, 
 gay ; a rainbow upon its waves, fascination in the 
 music of its flow ; genius, life, beauty crowning it 
 with a glory. The other, its fellow, a dark, dead 
 current, with loathsome vices upon its surface, and 
 the dregs of unnumbered crimes clodding its bed." 
 
 " Alas, how wicked 1" 
 
 " And yet a brave world, Mag.'" 
 
 " My father says it is depraved dishonest hol 
 low false." 
 
 " Out upon the farmer's philosophy ! There is 
 the bitter taste of all his hard materialism, and his 
 many isms." 
 
 " I have not found the world so bad, sir. Have 
 you ?" 
 
 " No. There are many reasons why I cling to an
 
 16 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 old begotten faith in humanity, and among them is a 
 rampant, active egotism." 
 
 " I can't well understand that." 
 
 " If the world is depraved I cannot exempt myself 
 from the general infirmity. To that truth my phi 
 losophy persistently points ; self-love, self-worship 
 and self-faith, therefore, keep my judgments of the 
 world in charitable trim ; my exaltations of human 
 ity are a mirror hi which my vanity disports. 
 
 " But, indeed, Maggie, to those who look closely 
 and well the world is not other than fair. Every 
 where household gods are set up and loved ; affec 
 tions flourish in the most forsaken soils ; love and 
 tenderness put forth their sweetness in the abandoned 
 places of the world ; courage, fortitude, self-abnega 
 tion have their heroes every hour." 
 
 " But history, sir 1 My father says it is one record 
 of crime." 
 
 " History, Mag, is a pair of seven-league boots. 
 It stalks from war to war, from crime to crime, and 
 does not see the smiling valleys between. It is the 
 world's ^Newgate calendar, bloody with the record 
 of passion, ambition, and power ; or it is a drama 
 wherein are crowded in a few brief scenes the crimes 
 of generations. Ah, Maggie, the cynics do not 
 plumb the deepest. And is it not well if we find, 
 as I think we do, beneath the strata of wrong and
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 17 
 
 selfishness, the world's surface shows, a generous and 
 a pure current, permeating the heart of humanity, 
 and destined some day to lift up and purify us all ? 
 It is better to believe that the evil in us comes up to 
 the surface. It will give us hope and heart. 
 
 " But in truth no one accepts this common, trans 
 parent satire of the world and human nature as ap 
 plied to himself. Each man claps himself on the 
 back as a brilliant exception ; where all are rotten, 
 he claims to be undented. 
 
 " When hi town I went to see the comedy of ' Money' 
 acted. The sentiment of this play is the cheapest froth 
 in the world, but it tickles the general ear mightily. 
 Your misanthropical dogs, who wing these baited 
 shafts of satire, are liked ; and it was strange to see 
 the people applaud the broad, coarse hits at their 
 own follies. Why? Because each man believed 
 that it was not himself but his neighbor that was 
 satirized. And so did I. When Evelyn uttered 
 this pithy sentiment, ' God made man, but see 
 (pointing to a gold coin) what man has made a 
 god,' how magnanimously I handed over the applica 
 tion to everybody else 1 And thus it is. Do you 
 know why the world is no better than it is ? Be 
 cause each of us believes that the warnings, the 
 teachings, the wise inculcations, the hits at folly, 
 the moral aphorisms, the shafts shot at vice and
 
 l8 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 crime from pulpit, press, and stage, are all intended 
 for our right-hand neighbor, and our left-hand neigh 
 bor our withers are unwrung." 
 
 " Tell me something, sir, of the town," broke in 
 Maggie, apparently indifferent to my homily. 
 
 " Humph ! I am not topographical, nor was I 
 born for the style of a guide-book. I will paint the 
 picture that I best remember and if you are as 
 able as I think you are, it will be to you like the 
 single leaf by whose structure the botanist knows 
 the whole tree. 
 
 " I was on Broadway, at the head of the great 
 money-street, within the shadow of Trinity. On the 
 stone base of the railing of the church-yard, a blind 
 Scotchman was seated, playing upon a bag-pipe. 
 He had a sad, wan countenance, whose predominant 
 expression was that of utter and overwhelming lone 
 liness. His music floated upon the air unheeded 
 by the crowd, and mingled with the whirl and 
 clatter of that busy spot in sweetness wasted. No 
 one paused to give him a single glance. The itine 
 rant musician's customary audience of idle boys was 
 not there. The cold stones of the church tower 
 were no more deaf to him than was all the world 
 beside. Still he calmly, steadily played on, a pic 
 ture of utter desolation, an object of the most 
 pitiful loneliness and dreariness, set down where life
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 19 
 
 was busiest, gayest, swiftest. Even the church, 
 within whose shadow he sat, made his desolation 
 the more apparent. That grand edifice, reared in 
 His name, seemed to repel the poor outcast from its 
 bosom. The barred portal shut him out from its 
 protection. The spire above him seemed to point to 
 heaven for all the world save him. His aching heart 
 was at the foot of the cross, at the threshold of the 
 church, and yet it beat lonely, drearily. 
 
 " I wondered, Maggie, as I looked upon him. 
 Was his daily life a blank like this ? Was the 
 world all black to him to his soul as well as to 
 his sight, with no more joy in his heart than there 
 was sunlight upon his path ? Did a pall of gloom and 
 darkness forever close him in, through which no 
 light whatever penetrated ? Ever, ever alone, as 
 now, playing his wasted music, with never a caress, 
 nor a word of tenderness nor of sympathy ! What 
 a life to lead if this were so ! An awe overcomes 
 ine at the thought of that man's heart plunged in 
 such a dungeon, worse than ever invented by man, 
 feeding its hopes, aspirations, sympathies, emotions 
 upon perpetual and rayless darkness, where not even 
 a star glimmers 1" 
 
 " Who knows ?" said Maggie, " there might have 
 been for him somewhere those two needs, love and 
 home."
 
 2O A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " Aye. But his desolate air haunts me ; and it 
 is too fearfully certain that thousands of such help 
 less creatures flow down to eternity through blank- 
 uess, weariness and unutterable suffering." 
 
 " How terrible !" 
 
 " Terrible ! Sometimes in the very top of my 
 pleasures, when the heart is leaping quick and 
 glad, I am hurled upon that thought with a shock 
 that quivers through my frame, and holds me in 
 'bated breath. The wastes, the miseries, the 
 beauty that blooms and fades, the life that comes 
 so dearly and goes so cheaply, the strides of calam 
 ity, the cheap value nature everywhere seems to set 
 upon her own creations, appall and confound me 
 always. Tune, Mag, is nothing but a lubberly boy 
 perpetually blowing bubbles that float up into the 
 sunshine gay and glittering, and with a puff they 
 exhale into air. And the briefest of ah 1 things is 
 happiness. Youth leaps up lusty and glad, but sud 
 denly, at the very crest of joy and strength, a 
 breath comes out of a cloud and it withers the 
 limbs droop, the eye pales, the brow is shadowed, 
 and life sinks into the bent spine and the clogged 
 heart." 
 
 " I declare, sir, you are sad." 
 
 " So I am, but will change my mood with the 
 facility of a politician.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 21 
 
 " You know, Mag, that by the testimony of hard 
 measurement my study extends a few feet north and 
 a few feet east ; but to-day, surveying it leisurely, 
 it seemed to me that bald fact never came so utterly 
 short of general truth. Its real dimensions cannot 
 be measured. Look to the right, and the walls 
 open into space and back into tune old Italy, far- 
 off Egypt, ancient Rome, carry eye and memory 
 hence ; look to the left, and sweet landscapes, 
 meandering rivers, rare old woods, are before us, 
 where fancy may disport and the soul fill itself with 
 beauties. Such are pictures. Your miserable feet 
 and inches are for rooms whose sides are not 
 studded with these 'soul windows,' which let out 
 the fancy into spaces that are almost infinite. 
 Rooms like ours, Mag, cannot be compassed by a 
 carpenter's rule their boundaries are limited only 
 by the reaches of imagination." 
 
 " But books, sir, are grander than pictures. Poe 
 try for instance." 
 
 " Why, poetry, Mag, is not necessarily versifica 
 tion it is simply caged when it gets into rhyme. 
 Books are capital things sometimes I grant you ; 
 I have loved them more or less ever since I've been 
 a bachelor. But books demand premeditated enjoy 
 ment ; effort, purpose aforethought, preliminaries 
 of preparation, such as cut leaves, an amiable tern-
 
 22 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 per, and a snuffed candle. But pictures flash into 
 the heart, flood the soul with sudden tenderness, 
 start into life with an electric touch the sleeping 
 sympathies a look and presto ! upon your heart is 
 photographed forever a new form of beauty." 
 
 " That's true," said Maggie, musingly ; "but books 
 excite me, fill me with strange feelings. I like them 
 best, sir." 
 
 "And I profess utter catholicity of taste, and 
 love the universal range of the beautiful. I am per 
 petually asked who is my favorite author. Now 
 that question is absurd. It always reminds me of 
 the perturbation of a young western farmer, whose 
 matrimonial and agricultural tendencies were per 
 plexed by certain economical considerations, apper 
 taining to each, and who, hi consequence, gravely 
 submitted to the village Debating Society this pro 
 blem : Which is most, a barn or a wife 1 
 
 " Amusingly diverse as are the issues involved in 
 this question, they are scarcely more so than this 
 continually forcing the mind to a choice between 
 elements of taste, pleasure, enjoyment and apprecia 
 tion, so various, multiplied, and infinite as those em 
 ployed or created by our various authors. I abso 
 lutely decline saying, for I cannot say, whether I 
 weep more exquisitely over Lear, than I laugh enjoy- 
 ably with Touchstone. And I here declare, that my
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 23 
 
 mind is of that variable, apish, fantastic character, 
 that it reflects with equal fidelity, not only all the 
 various emotions of the poet, but all the character 
 istics and specific beauties of each individual poet. 
 Must I like but one man, one book, one set of ideas, 
 one mode of frame-work ? Pshaw ! My appetites 
 are infinite my tastes adjust themselves to innu 
 merable qualities, and they run the gamut down from 
 Hamlet to Paul Pry. I do not mean to pasture on 
 one field alone ; to eat nothing but roast beef ; to 
 tickle my palate with but one sauce. In the whole 
 wide realm of creative art, sculpture, poetry, painting, 
 I absorb idea and pleasure, and flit with utter pli 
 ancy of imagination, from the sublime to the lowly, 
 from sweet airs to grand orchestral bursts, through 
 all tunes, tones, phases, and modes of feeling." 
 
 " Then you have no favorite ?" said Maggie. 
 
 " Yes, Nature ! Admirable when art is faithful 
 in her reproduction ; best in her unadorned sim 
 plicity." 
 
 As I spoke the door suddenly flew open and a 
 grotesque, comical looking lad fell into the room. 
 I say fell deliberately, for Ike a youngster prema 
 turely smitten with love for Maggie amid a multi 
 tude of modes and means of locomotion, was uncon 
 scious of that simple one known as walking. He 
 either rolled, plunged, sidled, bounced, crept, turn-
 
 24 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 bled, or progressed by a means composite of all 
 these, but absolutely walk no mortal ever saw him 
 do. Upon this occasion the door flew open, his head 
 bolted in, followed by a confusion of limbs, but in no 
 ascertainable sequence. 
 
 Soon after my first acquaintance with Maggie 
 (whom I used to meet in my long solitary forest 
 rambles with such frequency that friendship grew 
 ftpace between us), as we were sauntering together 
 down a green lane, an object suddenly thrust its head 
 and then its body over the roadside wall. It was a 
 boy of about fifteen years of age. His hair was 
 white, and forced itself in tangled masses through a 
 huge rent in his hat ; his eyes were white ; his eye 
 brows were white ; his whole aspect was that of hav 
 ing been bleached. You could not look at him with 
 out serious doubts as to the color of his blood. He 
 was from head to foot tattered and torn ; barefooted, 
 shy ; and no creature ever so decidedly needed a tail 
 to his coat. And this was Maggie's lover. It was 
 the first time I ever beheld him. 
 
 He was the son and heir of a neighboring farmer, 
 and first met Maggie at the village school. It was 
 a case of love at first sight. He would, from that 
 time forward, be near Maggie if it were possible ; at 
 play hours, he would devise plans to get among the 
 girls ; he would bring her the choicest apples and
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 25 
 
 the finest berries, and was always during school hours 
 surreptitiously slipping fruit, cake, and such matters 
 into her lap. After school, he would follow her at a 
 respectful distance, until her companions would drop 
 off, and then with an awkward, sly excuse, edge up 
 to her side. 
 
 He would make errands to her father's house. If 
 Maggie was alone, he would ask her to have an 
 apple or a plum ; but if others were by, he would 
 stand and stare into her face without speaking, and 
 with all his might. 
 
 He would roam the forest for flowers, and come 
 staggering into Maggie's presence with bouquets of 
 mountain laurel, and such forest growths, bigger 
 than himself with which Maggie would decorate 
 the old-fashioned fireplace ; and they were generally 
 quite ample enough to entirely fill it. 
 
 He fought innumerable battles on her account ; 
 and sometimes rushed into her presence with stream 
 ing nose, that she might note and fully appreciate 
 the greatness of his devotion. 
 
 I do not know that he ever proposed ; or that 
 they indulged in those pleasant prattlings under 
 shady trees, which lovers delight in ; or that he com 
 posed sonnets to her beauty ; or that they took moon 
 light rambles together. 
 
 2
 
 26 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 Maggie laughed at her uncouth lover, but she was 
 too tender-hearted to let him see it. 
 
 But when Maggie and I grew intimate, and took 
 walks and chatted over books together, fearfully 
 grew the rage of this young Colin. When we met, 
 he frowned at me ferociously, and looked as black as 
 his white face permitted ; or stood apart, scowling 
 and red. He nursed in his little body a most tre 
 mendous hatred of me, and seemed to pant for some 
 huge and terrible revenge. 
 
 Unhappy Ike I To have tasted of the grand pas 
 sion, and all its bitter consequences, so early in life ! 
 Better to have stuck to your marbles and hoops, 
 Ike. 
 
 Once when Maggie and I were hunting on the 
 banks of a little stream for those woodland blossoms 
 which flourish hi low places upon the banks of 
 streams, Ike suddenly rushed by us in a frantic man 
 ner, and plunged deliberately into the stream. Mag 
 gie gave a little shriek ; and we both ran after him. 
 As we came up, he had floundered through to the 
 opposite bank, where he stood, dripping and muddy, 
 shaking his fist in the ah*, and with mutterings deep 
 declaring that he would drown himself. Maggie, 
 suppressing a laugh, wanted to know his reason for 
 this determination, whereupon he scowled at me with
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 27 
 
 all the ferocity he could assume, and then rushed into 
 the brushwood that surrounded him. 
 
 He also evinced his despair in other ways equally 
 grotesque. Once he insisted upon standing on his 
 head for ten minutes in succession. After this, he 
 adopted the plan of shutting his eyes tight whenever 
 he would see Maggie coming ; then, whenever her 
 eyes were upon him, he would begin to butt what 
 ever was at hand, whether tree or stone. But, still 
 Maggie remained obdurate ; and poor Ike, sadly for 
 lorn, grew piteously melancholy and more dirty and 
 ragged than ever. 
 
 But when I proposed to Maggie to sit by my 
 lonely fireside, and listen to an old man's talk, I 
 opened negotiations with Ike for a treaty of peace, 
 in order that he might be Maggie's escort to and 
 from the " farm." I began by proposing a weekly 
 stipend of sixpence. This nearly proved victorious 
 at the start. I then proceeded, by forcible logic re 
 duced to his obtuse capacity, to prove how im 
 probable and absurd it was to suppose that a gentle 
 man aged fifty, scantily supplied with that tonsorial 
 adornment, which, in his own case, flourished like a 
 wilderness upon whose features crusty Time had 
 stamped indelible wrinkles and crow's-feet, and 
 whose visage possessed at no time Adonian graces 
 could hope to supplant one of so much youth and
 
 28 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 natural fascinations as himself in the affections of his 
 Dulcinea, 
 
 My diplomacy was successful ; but I do not know 
 whether it was the stipend or the logic that proved 
 the most powerful agent.
 
 II. 
 
 A dream before a Bachelor's hearth which was not 
 all a dream.
 
 II. 
 
 AFTER Maggie and Ike had gone, I stood by 
 the window, looking at the moon rising 
 behind, the forest the ravaged forest that lifted 
 its torn trunks, bereft of their summer offspring, 
 mutely and pitifully to heaven. The moon was 
 dungeoned by clouds, but gleamed through open 
 bars, and its vast red disc seemed to set all the 
 forest ablaze. In the morning there was a wind, 
 and I walked forth, ushered by troops of leaves, 
 that rushed before me and danced in my path as if 
 I were a monarch ; some came clamoring, jostling, 
 and eager behind me, like swarms of hungry place- 
 seekers. But at night the wind was hushed, and 
 upon the meadows, the garden walks, the roads, the 
 dead leaves lay ghostly still. There was a hush 
 everywhere. The moon came mutely up, the trees 
 silently darkened themselves against its light, the 
 shadows crept like ghosts, the roads lay white as 
 grave-stones. So melancholy and death-like was 
 
 81
 
 32 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 the scene that I dropped the curtain, and stepping 
 stealthily back to my chair, wheeled it before the 
 fire, slumberously droning in the full-mouthed grate. 
 
 Down amid the red labyrinths of burning coals, 
 I see visions and dreams always and at midnight 
 hours how many, many a castle have I built out of 
 the ashes and embers of my lonely hearth ! 
 
 For I am a bachelor ruminant. Whatever I may 
 have been hi the hey-day of youth, my life, since its 
 decline into the sere and yellow leaf, has been one 
 of lonely reverie an anchorite's seclusion, in which 
 philosophy and rumination have compounded the 
 elements of a curious melancholy. Just frosted, 
 just struck into parti-colored white and grey, with 
 November wrinkles upon my temples and Indian 
 haze in my eyes, my life wanes into autumn mellow 
 ness all the colors, tones and tints, the remini 
 scences merely of a blooming summer past. 
 
 The fire was low, and seizing the poker I stirred 
 it into a sparkling and cheering blaze. The glow 
 fell so pleasantly upon my face, that I dropped lan 
 guidly back into the wide ample chair, and adjusted 
 my limbs into a luxurious repose, fit for mellow 
 dreams. 
 
 As I did so, my eye for an instant fell upon a 
 little toilet mirror upon the mantel, whose angle 
 reflected all the room behind me. I started, rubbed
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 33 
 
 my eyes, and threw a hasty glance over the back 
 of my chair. Nothing there ! It was fancy but 
 in that mirror I seemed distinctly to see, between 
 me and the wall, a shapeless mass, mist-like and 
 dun, swaying slowly to and fro. 
 
 I laughed at the fancy, and began staring at the 
 fire. Then I thought of many ghost-stories, and 
 fell into dreamy meditations upon the supernatural, 
 the wild, and the wonderful. I thought of one ter 
 rible fright, experienced in my boyhood how a wild 
 and mischief-loving cousin, robed from " top to toe " 
 in deathly white suddenly crossed 
 
 A startling, reverberating clang brought me sud 
 denly to my feet. It proved to be the poker, 
 dropped from my relaxing grasp, as from dreaming 
 I had begun falling away into slumber. With a 
 laugh and a shake I drew the chair nearer the 
 hearth, and then slowly and drowsily fell back into 
 its comfortable depths again. As my head touched 
 its cushioned rest, my eyes instinctively sought the 
 little toilet glass sought it, and were held fixed to 
 the polished surface spell-bound. 
 
 Behind my chair I clearly and distinctly saw a 
 huge mirror slowly rise until it nearly reached the 
 ceiling. Its whole surface was accurately reflected 
 in the miniature glass upon the mantel, into which 
 I was looking. A mist seemed to shroud the sur- 
 2*
 
 34 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 face, through which dim figures appeared to flit 
 and commingle. But suddenly, as if by magic, the 
 misty veil vanished and a scene appeared. 
 
 In the first impulse I would have sprung from my 
 chair, but some mystic power transfixed me to the 
 floor. I tried to turn upon the mysterious mirror, 
 but my gaze was held fastened to the glass before 
 me. 
 
 For the scene was a life the life mine ! 
 
 It was a vista, a long backward vista, back to 
 early manhood, back to youth, back to boyhood 
 crossed by many lights and shadows but ah, sun 
 shine too little cloud too much ! 
 
 There, in one single vast glance, my whole career 
 was revealed all the emotions I had ever known, 
 the ambitions I had ever cherished, the stern 
 realities against which my spirit had been broken 
 all as sharp and as clear as a memory of yester 
 day. Boyhood in its unbroken belief in the glories 
 of a future ; youth with its aspirations, ambitions, 
 its vague yearnings so incomprehensible, its grand 
 dreams never, never to be realized ; manhood, with 
 its fierce struggles, its poor triumphs, and worst 
 of all that appertains to manhood, the daily burst 
 ing of the fond bubbles so industriously blown in 
 youth ! 
 
 The vista appeared to lead from myself. I
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 35 
 
 seemed in my own person and state the consumma 
 tion of the story thus visioned in that strange 
 mirror. There, lonely, grey, wrinkled, unloved, un 
 known in the glass before me I saw my own figure, 
 the startling moral to the picture all the ambitions 
 so earnest, the hopes so big, the promises so loud, 
 the expectations so large ending in nothing but me ! 
 
 I shrunk from this truth, but it sternly forced 
 itself upon my soul. I hunted up and down the 
 vista for justification of this pitiful fulfillment of all 
 the huge promises of youth, but I could only see 
 opportunities slighted means neglected the golden 
 bowl heedlessly broken. 
 
 There was boyhood, sharp and clear, like a thing 
 of yesterday ; my early home, my mother's kiss, my 
 sister's entwining arms those tender scenes, whose 
 memory at times has almost new-made me. Ah, 
 from that placid spring opening of the Yista, to 
 turn my eyes to the stricken winter at the end ! 
 
 Back, almost to boyhood, was a bower. 
 
 Mad moment, mad passions, besotted hour, why 
 must you be recalled ? Two childish, once happy, 
 lovers, tearing from their hearts peace and love, 
 torn flowers, tears, anger, selfish cruelty, love 
 driven out, and only the dark-winged brooding 
 Passion in its stead. Love never recalled, bruised 
 heart never well !
 
 36 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 And then in youth, self-indulgence seductively the 
 master ; friendships sharply severed ; wise counsels 
 scorned ; precipitate will and huge egotism digging 
 pits and falls. 
 
 In manhood, the trampling down of the flowers 
 and home-growths of boyhood the proud head in 
 the air, but the stumbling feet. 
 
 I longed to look elsewhere. I almost prayed for 
 some power to extinguish memory. There were my 
 early pledges of greatness to be accomplished, and 
 good to be performed, sharply lettered, and seem 
 ingly pointing towards me ; there were the very 
 occasions where I had turned from the high roads 
 of duty and honor, to follow low desires ; there the 
 very temptations, so mean and pitiful to this after 
 gaze, to which I had so often yielded. 
 
 Remorse cuts sharp. No one perhaps could see 
 his Past, suddenly in a panoramic whole, reproduced 
 to his sense and judgment, and not feel ten thousand 
 blades in his conscience. Few have been good and 
 wise enough to review their career with utter placid- 
 ness. Yet most men can point to something accom 
 plished fruit has matured upon their boughs whose 
 taste is sweet. But not with me. With more than 
 average expectations I had attained far less than 
 average results. 
 
 And yet some bitter circumstances of my state
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 37 
 
 excited pity rather than condemnation. Alone and 
 unloved not these my crimes, assuredly. 
 
 I had loved more than once early and late 
 with spring's buoyant flush, with autumn's deep and 
 mellowed feeling. With passionate regret my eyes 
 lingered upon these brief, sweet, hallowed scenes, in 
 which were crowded everything of my life worth 
 experiencing or worth remembering. Each, it is 
 true, had been unblessed, but what moments of huge, 
 measureless bliss this dream of them recalled. That 
 of youth I had recklessly dashed from my lips ; the 
 other, years, many years later, was a heart passion 
 ate, despairing, beating itself against invulnerable 
 bars a wish that often as it winged, fell downward 
 to the earth ; a desire chained to a rock, plucked 
 back by cruel links as often as it struggled to 
 rise. 
 
 While I looked upon the Yista, lingering upon 
 the tender memories, shivering before those that 
 reproached me, I grew desirous to read the Future 
 as well as the Past. 
 
 " Let me behold," I exclaimed aloud the first 
 words my lips had been able to utter since the spell 
 seized me. Almost instantaneously with the utter 
 ance the Yista vanished, and a mist covered the sur 
 face of the mirror. My senses grew eager now, and 
 I strained my eyes with all my might. The mist
 
 38 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 gradually lifted a bleak, barren plain, dim and 
 indistinct, seemed to grow slowly out upon the 
 shadowy surface of the mirror and nothing else. 
 I bent forward, and fixed my eyes upon the glass on 
 the mantel with eagerness intense and hushed 
 when suddenly a crash the mirror appeared shiv 
 ered into myriads of pieces a cold blast struck me 
 
 On the floor, before the hearth, I suddenly found 
 myself, fallen from my chair, the candle flickering in 
 the last struggle of its existence, the fire gone out, 
 and a chill striking me to the bones. 
 
 I stood up and stretched out my arms as if to 
 grasp the shadows that had haunted me. The cold, 
 barren room, dimly visible in the uncertain light, 
 was like an angular fact rudely thrust into the at 
 mosphere of the dream. Its unimpressible rigidity, 
 with the hard outline of every object cutting into 
 the empty midnight air the chairs, the tables, the 
 book-cases looming up so stern and grim, like inex 
 orable and conscious facts preternaturally sharp 
 ened my senses, and while they drove the shadows 
 of the dream from my brain, the more indelibly 
 stamped its truth and moral. 
 
 With my head upon my breast, and a humble 
 step, I walked silently away to bed.
 
 III. 
 
 I tell my dream to Maggie, philosophize thereupon, 
 and freely branch into new fields of discussion An 
 audacious assertion implying the Pythagorean multiple 
 of Hamlets Nothing is but what is not, and certain 
 prophecies, which it is to be hoped will prove false A 
 new creed An authentic portrait warranted to be like. 
 
 39
 
 III. 
 
 I TOLD my dream to Maggie and yet not all. 
 There are some corners of the human heart 
 which shrink np and shut in their secrets at every 
 touch, however tender, friendly or loving. Maggie 
 shall not enter into forbidden memories, nor know all 
 that lies behind my fiftieth winter. There shall 
 mingle in her respect for me something of mystery, 
 and by that token I will hold her off from any fa 
 miliar knowledge that may breed commonplaces be 
 tween us. 
 
 To the world I can be as free in unfolding my 
 emotions, my memories, and my weaknesses as I 
 choose for the world to me and I to the world are 
 only abstractions. While I would shrink from a 
 single pair of eyes like Maggie's, resting, for ever so 
 briefly, on my scars and wounds, I may dwell upon 
 them within the gaze of the whole world with serene 
 unconsciousness. For every reader who reads me 
 perceives in my analysis of feeling and suffering, not 
 me but himself. I am only to him a vague double, 
 
 41
 
 42 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 a shape which he clothes with his own lineaments, in 
 whose exposed heart he recognizes only the reflection 
 of the secret passions concealed in his own. Therein 
 lie my immunity and my extenuation. I may talk of 
 myself forever, of what I suffer, what I feel, what I 
 dream ; of hope, ambition, love, and all the warm 
 phantoms of feeling that crowd upon the hearts of 
 men, and still am guilty of no indelicacy, guilty of 
 no more egotism than those who read this book 
 for it is only a voice that speaks, an experience find 
 ing utterance, which every man calls his own. 
 
 Something of this I said to Maggie. I am not 
 sure that she could understand it, but I never sim 
 plify my thoughts, nor reduce my language to her ex 
 perience. She must clamber up to my meaning, and 
 get what glimpses she can. Under my tuition she 
 shall acquire the strength for a long flight by early 
 learning to use her wings. 
 
 And let me say to all thinkers, who fire above the 
 heads of the people let them be true to their mark, 
 for the stature of the general mind will gradually 
 grow to the level of their ami ; unless, indeed, the 
 thinker's aim rises with the universal " progress " 
 for those internal forces that lift the plains nearer to 
 the heavens, lift the mountains too. 
 
 But all this tune, Maggie, in her chosen place by 
 the fire, has been buried in a book.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 43 
 
 Buried in a book ! What queer idioms we get 
 into to be sure ! It is a spiritual interment, possibly, 
 and yet the expression is more aptly true of the au 
 thor than the reader. How many a writer has 
 poured out his life upon the page literally flung his 
 vitality into his thoughts, and woven his breath into 
 the frame-work of his sentences? Thoughts that 
 burn feed upon the fuel of being ; there is many a 
 life-pulse subtly fused in a rhythmic line ; the pen digs 
 sure graves. 
 
 " Maggie, what do you read ?" 
 
 Maggie looked up quickly. The fire-light was 
 burning upon her cheek ; shadows were in her eyes ; 
 upon her head a broad ribbon-like glow. The pic 
 ture was mellow and pretty. 
 
 " Hamlet," said she. 
 
 " Ah ! And you like it ? 
 
 " No, sir." And she began to read on. 
 
 " Don't like it ?" 
 
 "It is so terrible. Ghostly too ! and murders 1 
 and funerals ! and graves !" She visibly shuddered. 
 
 "Now here, Maggie," said I, "is an odd error hi 
 judgment. You do like it. The very words you use 
 in condemnation are proof that I am right. You 
 read it with eagerness- for I have watched you. 
 You tremble and shudder, but are fascinated." 
 
 " Why should I like terrible things ?"
 
 44 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 "Why? You are puzzled, as philosophers are. 
 Some of them will try to explain to you why, and 
 drift sadly from the subject. It is a mystery of our 
 nature, Maggie ; we all like emotions of terror, of 
 grief, of awe ; we like them through the delicate 
 semi-robing of noble poetry, and like them sometimes 
 in the hard and vivid reality." 
 
 " I cannot understand it, sir." 
 
 " Never doubt the genuineness of a taste because 
 it is incomprehensible. Trust to nature. The soul 
 of man, Mag, is rich in functions, marvellously vari 
 ous in appetites and desires, and each faculty hun 
 gers for its own especial sustenance. But its owner 
 is a fool. He can only look one way, and starves 
 his soul into a skeleton with his hopeless efforts to 
 feed it through one channel. I tell you, Maggie, 
 we must have poetry for our imagination, humor for 
 our mirth, approval for our approbativeness, philoso 
 phy for our reason, color for our eye, beauty for our 
 taste, aims for our energies, music for our ear ; form, 
 life, motion, speech, pathos, sadness, wit all emo 
 tions and sensations for the thousand functions to 
 which they apply. We should live in the light ; 
 open our souls to the passing breezes ; catch upon 
 the surface of life all pure and true things. 
 
 " Not morbid passion, which to the true sublimities 
 is as disease to health. Enjoy heartily and well : be
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 45 
 
 no brooder over your own sensations. Self is a 
 danger always. Look abroad, not within." 
 
 " Was Hamlet mad, sir." 
 
 " Mad, but with a human madness such as lies 
 deep hi us all ; the madness that you and I possess, 
 and all who feel much ready always for a spark to 
 ignite. Heaven ! shall spirits play upon the suffer 
 ing and melancholy that I have in my heart and 
 which sometimes, as it is, rise like waves that ingulf, 
 and topple not from its balance the thing I call rea 
 son? Grief has ere this so sharpened sensibility, 
 that in the acute agony of suffering I have put an 
 antic disposition on ; words, light and wild, have 
 broken in bubbles from the deep shaft of feeling 
 piercing downward, and in the very choke of tears 
 I have burst into merry ' hillos.' 
 
 "For the things we love most, tender words are 
 too weak. We rebound from their calm, placid sur 
 face, and seize instead those rough, strong opposites, 
 in which intensity and energy are expressed. Their 
 meaning is at variance with our feeling, but our vig 
 orous love needs vigorous symbols. It is so with 
 other passions. They rush to their opposites in de 
 spair of adequate expression. The gibe and jest grin 
 on the brink of dark pools ; jocund mirth sits upon 
 the brim of the poisoned cup ; passion wreathes 
 laughter into its wildest and shrillest utterance.
 
 46 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 "I am Hamlet ; and all men in whom mingle 
 those two currents of philosophy and imagination, 
 are Hamlets : for the Dane is a representative man 
 and such as we can understand how the light of 
 his mind burned clearly, even while his frenzy of feel 
 ing rushed into wild words and antic disposition." 
 
 " Poor Ophelia 1" murmured Maggie. 
 
 " Ah, sweet, tender, gentle, lovable Ophelia ! 
 Mighty master who limned her, too who knew that 
 a huge imagination like Hamlet's would be sure to 
 fly to a magnetism like hers. Inscrutable truth of 
 nature ! Your men of the highest reach always 
 stoop to pluck the daisy." 
 
 " You call Shakspeare mighty. Was he so very 
 great, sir ?" 
 
 " I reply in the briefest and finest eulogy ever 
 written of him. ' If I were to prepare a dictionary,' 
 says the scholar in Buckstone's comedy, ' I'd add a 
 new word Shakspeare and define it as poetry, art, 
 and nature /' " 
 
 " Do not some people say that he didn't write his 
 plays ?" 
 
 " Yes. Nothing is but what is not, are his own 
 words a line I never could understand until I read 
 the different doubters, from Bishop Berkeley down. 
 But the world is tortured by those who magnify and 
 those who destroy ; pyramid builders who ravage
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 47 
 
 the plains that their temples may be glorified ; icono 
 clasts who break up every image niched in your 
 heart. The first have deified Shakspeare up into the 
 clouds, topping Olympus itself, and others not un 
 naturally have attempted to pull him down to earth. 
 These latter appear to distrust the individualization 
 of any fame, and in every evidence of singular great 
 ness, become inspired with a desire to discrown the 
 individual, and trace the cause home to some ab 
 straction to throw it back to a mystic generaliza 
 tion. And after all, are those wonderful dramas 
 his ? Is any man's book his own ? Is any thought 
 I utter mine ? Individuals do not create nor origi 
 nate ; mankind does both. We are each of us a leaf 
 in the human forest singly an infinitesimal nothing, 
 but as a whole how magnificent 1 What we accom 
 plish is in aggregation. Great men are only the 
 capitals to the pillars the last completeness and 
 exposition of the work that thousands have con 
 spired to erect ; or, to use another illustration, great 
 men are forced upon the shoulders of their contem 
 poraries the elevation which men see from afar, 
 which they crown and glorify, but the forces that 
 lift them up are underneath. The so considered giants 
 in every science are merely those who bring a thought 
 suddenly to light. It is new to the world, but the seed 
 has long been germinating unseen and unheeded.
 
 48 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " Take the steam engine. How many thousand 
 minds, how many thousand experiences, how vast an 
 aggregation of intellect has been employed in bring 
 ing it to its present perfection and yet we associate 
 with it only the name of Fulton. 
 
 " Take the most original book. Ten thousand 
 minds have contributed to the art which constructs 
 it, to the thoughts which animate it, to the graces 
 of expression in which it is clothed. 
 
 " The world is a gallery lined with looking-glasses. 
 A single ray is admitted it is multiplied in reflec 
 tion by thousands of surfaces, until perfect light is 
 attained. 
 
 " Discoveries are the matured growths of the age. 
 The world has progressed to the point when the 
 fruit is ripe one, more wise than the rest, steps for 
 ward, shakes the tree, and gathers in the harvest. 
 This is evident in the fact that great discoveries are 
 almost always simultaneous in different places. 
 
 "But I perceive no greatness in the future for any 
 man. I am a prophet, and looking in the crystal 
 wherein I descry all things." 
 
 " The crystal ?" 
 
 " My imagination, Magi There I see an ocean 
 of universal intelligence rising up and burying us all 
 in a startling monotonous level a dead plain of dull 
 and wearisome equality.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 49 
 
 " Individuals are to become nothing. In the past 
 they have been magnified. In the future they will 
 be utterly decimated. Results and abstractions are 
 to be the heroes of the future, Look at war, even 
 as it is now. It was once a splendid record of indi 
 vidual prowess ; it told of the might and valor of 
 Richard, of Godfrey, of Raymond, of Bayard. It is 
 now an affair of infernal machines, of gigantic bat 
 teries, gunpowder, bombs, and the like. Very pretty 
 fireworks, no doubt ; but the thousands of wretches 
 whose souls fly upward through the smoke and fire, 
 have no compensation either in song or history. They 
 are known only arithmetically as so many thousand 
 slain, and have their place in tabular figures, amid 
 bayonets, hams, potatoes, tobacco a part of the 
 supplies and cost, nothing more. 
 
 " In science and art we shall see the same thing 
 the sinking of the individual a falling back into the 
 ranks a more splendid consummation by union a 
 principle of aggregation in opposition to segregation 
 a sort of united we stand, divided we fall, by which 
 result will be greater, but individual recognition less. 
 For instance, the tune will come, I have no doubt, 
 when a picture will be painted by twenty men, 
 instead of one. One will paint the face, another 
 the drapery, a third the- foliage, and so on. 
 A like combination in the production of books 
 3
 
 50 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 will give that higher perfection which the world 
 demands. I tell you, Mag, the world by which 
 term I simply mean everybody else is getting hugely 
 selfish, and it will soon cease to care a fig who is who 
 so long as its appetites and wants are supplied up 
 to the high standard its fastidiousness demands. 
 
 " In a hundred years from this time, we shall have 
 the most consummate machinery, the most perfect 
 government which, to secure, must be a matter of 
 mechanism the highest philosophy the greatest 
 perfection in every branch of human effort a race 
 of workers in a vast hive, each busy only to a com 
 mon end all things upon a level, but freezingly 
 clear, monotonously perfect, unendurably admirable 
 with no idiosyncrasy, individuality, or undulating 
 variety ; a smooth and unbearable perfection which 
 repels me to think of." 
 
 " But did you not say," interposed Maggie, " that 
 those internal forces which lift the plains nearer to 
 the heavens, lift the mountains, too ?" 
 
 " Maggie," said I, in a tone much hurt, " your re 
 mark is preposterous. Are you so green as to exact 
 consistency ? That is a merit, if a merit, which I 
 leave to the ordinary mind. Every subject is octa 
 gonal or many-sided and I bless myself that I have 
 the faculty of looking at matters in all their aspects. 
 Can there be two, ten, or twenty honest opinions
 
 A Bachelor's Story. $1 
 
 upon any subject ? Then I have a pliancy of imagi 
 nation which can entertain them all. Hear my 
 creed : 
 
 " In ethics, monogamy ; in aesthetics, polygamy." 
 
 Maggie looked so bewildered that, unlike my 
 usual course, I proceeded to explain : 
 
 " In my morals, Maggie, I am faithful to a single 
 principle ; but in other matters I am a Turk, and 
 shall wed as many opinions as I please. There is a 
 picture hanging in yonder panel. Tell me what 
 it is." 
 
 " A groom leading a horse." 
 
 " Which way does he approach ?" 
 
 " This way, sir." 
 
 " JS"ow cross the room. Look at the picture from 
 the other side. What do you see ?" 
 
 " Why, the man and horse appear to come this 
 way now." 
 
 " The artist's cunning, Maggie. Every subject is 
 like that picture, and opinion merely a matter of 
 standpoint. To adhere to one view is nothing but 
 perversity. It is for me to say that the groom and 
 the horse come my way, and not yours whereas we 
 are both right, and I have only to shift my position 
 a little, to see them as you do now. It is a one-sided 
 imagination, that can only look one way, that cannot 
 place itself in various positions, accommodating itself
 
 52 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 to the prejudices, idiosyncrasies, habits, tastes, and 
 modes of thoughts of other imaginations that can 
 not perceive how narrow, after all, is the line which 
 divides all opinion, and how easy to cross that line. 
 
 " I am, you know, a broker of opinions. I trade 
 with them ; gather in what is curious ; speculate 
 upon them. Or, what may be a better illustration, 
 I am a rag-gatherer, searching after the valuable, or 
 the new, or the curious, in the refuse the world leaves 
 in its highways. I turn over and shake out what I 
 find. One has a rent ; another has proved valueless 
 by wear ; another is hopelessly tangled and snarled ; 
 a fourth is ragged ; a fifth, shapeless and contempti 
 ble at the beginning, has been begrimed and fouled 
 by long use, at the hands of demagogues and hypo 
 crites. And these rags I amuse myself, by holding 
 up in various lights. How fantastic in form, capri 
 cious in color, preposterous in conception many of 
 them are and yet, not one but in the web and woof 
 is woven some groundwork of truth and but few that 
 I cannot fling my imagination into the circumstances 
 which created them, and think for a brief moment in 
 the same way too. 
 
 " I draw flattering consolation and a grand exam 
 ple from nature. Perfect light, like that of the sun, 
 is the composite of all color. It is only when its rays 
 are distorted through the lenses of angular imagina-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 53 
 
 tions, that it breaks into parallel and unblending 
 tints. 
 
 " From the sun, the monarch of nature, let me 
 drop to an absurd extreme for another illustration. 
 Every opinion is a plum-pudding, and the plums are 
 the few grains of truth. You and I, Maggie, shall 
 pick them out." 
 
 I paused, and Maggie fell away into a dream. 
 
 What was it ? Maggie has strange, vehement 
 thoughts at times. There can be no doubt of it. 
 Around her brain is coiled that circle of fire which 
 inflames and sometimes maddens unresting spirits 
 those quickened natures whom we all recognize as 
 children of genius. Maggie has a brow wide and 
 bulging, but not high ; a pale, thin face underneath ; 
 a delicate, quivering nostril, a mouth firm but full. 
 Her eyes are dark, deep not vivid nor brilliant, 
 but with a glance of slumbering fire. They have a 
 hungry look a searching, eager expression, as if 
 hunting for sympathy not yet vouchsafed. There is 
 sometimes the unpleasant effect of a stare, but that 
 is when the soul behind unconsciously wanders in its 
 fancies, or drops away into some absorbing day 
 dream, and leaves the casement uncurtained and 
 open to the day. Wild elfish locks, black, tangled, 
 and heavy, hang down over her brow and cheeks. 
 Her figure is slight, her movements sharp, vehement,
 
 54 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 and often vibrative to passions and impulses that 
 never find voice. She talks little, but she seems 
 hushed in the silent awe of over-crowding thoughts 
 vague, shadowy, looming thoughts, which express 
 ion cannot measure nor compass. Ignorance, dull 
 association, and the need of fructifying sympathy, 
 have all conspired to crowd her sensibilities inward, 
 and gnarl and knot them in their growth. The forces 
 of her intellect find expression, therefore, through un 
 usual channels. The subjective becomes fantastically 
 objective. Flashes of thought or of feeling, which in 
 others would explode in words, in her rush into oddi 
 ties and impulses of action and movement. I have 
 seen her, in spasms of emotion, toss her arms about 
 like the limbs of a tree in the wind. She has fre 
 quently burst into my presence flushed and exhausted 
 from some violent exertion a race over the fields 
 with her pursuing fancies, or a mad scamper through 
 the forest with ten thousand imps of the brain, prick 
 ing, spurring, goading her on ; for by violence of 
 muscle the violence of passion is often cured. 
 
 I sat watching Maggie, and thinking of these 
 things, when I observed one of those quick impetu 
 ous movements so habitually expressive of her earnest 
 thinking. But this tune she gave her thought words. 
 
 " You say that men of the highest reach always 
 stoop to pluck the daisy. Why ? why ?"
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 55 
 
 " So, so ! that way tend your thoughts, daughter 
 of Eve !" This comment I solaced myself with 
 apart, and then I spoke aloud. 
 
 " Why, Maggie, your thoughts fly backward. It 
 is an hour since I made that remark." 
 
 " But what am I, sir ? Not a daisy ?" 
 
 " No." 
 
 " And yet " she stopped short. 
 
 " You admire greatness, you worship greatness, 
 you are awe-struck now at the grandeur with which 
 your imagination has invested it but take my word, 
 Maggie, you will marry Ike." 
 
 " Ike !" a splendid flush of indignation rose to her 
 cheek. 
 
 " Ike. The charge is audacious, but I repeat it. 
 If one came now across your way with the step of 
 a god, with the air and movement of majesty ; an 
 eye to subdue, a knowledge perfect, an intellect 
 great in every function, weak in none, with a will 
 absolute and unyielding, and a character so domi 
 nant and controlling that it moulded yours plastic to 
 its own stamp to such a one you would crawl up 
 and kneel down in homage. In the atmosphere of 
 such a man you would breathe new life. It would 
 be your happiness to serve, to be meek, to watch with 
 wistful eyes apart, to turn always towards him a 
 worshipping upward look, as the sunflower follows
 
 56 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 the sun. But to greatness less than this, you would 
 clamber up, find out its weak places, and then turn 
 disdainfully away from an image that proved to be 
 only of clay. All emotions and all passions are in 
 circles. You would rebound to the extreme ; find 
 ing none to worship, you would quickly shift your 
 ground and exact instead a worship rendered up to 
 you. This is written in the histories of many wo 
 men. From the admiration once passionately in 
 tended for others, they fly eagerly to the companion 
 ship of simple receptive natures, pliant to their will, 
 and eager to do them homage." 
 
 " I am not convinced," said Maggie, abruptly but 
 quietly. " Ike is a fool. He never talks to me, nor 
 I to him. He brings me flowers, and I burn them 
 up. I do not like him at all. It makes me angry 
 to hear you say I do." 
 
 " Will, Maggie." 
 
 " Why, sir, he's a little boy." 
 
 " I am good at a guess, Maggie, and I venture to 
 surmise that Ike, like most other boys, is not doomed 
 to an existence of perpetual roundabouts."
 
 IV. 
 
 An adventure An old man's story. 
 
 3* 57
 
 IV. 
 
 44 ~iy/r AGGIE, to-day I had an adventure." 
 
 _1>J_ " What was it, sir ?" 
 
 " You shall hear. The day was so soft and mel 
 low with the Indian haze, that with basket and reel 
 I wandered several miles up the banks of the stream, 
 and flung my line in some pools a little way below 
 the old mill, to which, you recollect, we once rambled 
 in the summer time. There, where the hum of the 
 mill came faintly and pleasantly down to me, with 
 my line fallen heedlessly into the stream, I sat for an 
 hour, half dreaming and idly watching the rippling 
 of the water over the pebbles in the shallow 
 places. 
 
 " In the midst of a reverie I was aroused. A foot 
 step fell upon my ear, and with its fall scattering to 
 oblivion certain airy nothings my vagrant fancy was 
 weaving. I started up from my half recumbent po 
 sition and looked around. An old man, so old that 
 he tottered, and his white hair hung like a shock 
 
 59
 
 60 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 around his ears, and his ample clothes bagged and 
 flapped about his thin limbs came down to the 
 bank of the stream, not many feet from where I lay, 
 and slowly, by the aid of his hickory walking-stick, 
 let himself down upon the sod. 
 
 " I watched him with sympathy ; for he had a 
 fine, sad face a manner abstracted and melancholy; 
 and he peered and felt about with his stick as if 
 nearly blind. When he was seated, he threw off his 
 hat ; a great, high, wrinkled brow loomed up, and 
 now I could see two deep, restless eyes under white, 
 shaggy, overhanging eyebrows. 
 
 " His body swayed lightly to and fro, as if hia 
 senses were rocked in a dream. Presently he clutched 
 handfuls of grass, and flung them into the stream. 
 They came drifting slowly by me in the current, and 
 one mass of tangled blades, in which an autumn 
 blossom was interwoven, shifted into an eddy, and 
 was borne directly to my feet. I reached forward 
 and secured the flower, beaded and glittering with 
 river drops, and rising, walked up to the old man 
 with it hi my hand. 
 
 " He looked up nervously as I came near. 
 
 " ' So,' said he, ' you've got it. Why could sht 
 not have been saved as well as her flower ? They 
 
 were both upon the stream she ' 
 
 flung upon the current as this flower was,'
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 61 
 
 said I, ' torn from her home, from life, and died as 
 this poor flower must die ?' 
 
 " ' So 1 so !' muttered he. 
 
 " ' You have a terrible memory burning in your 
 heart, dear sir give it words, and it will lighten.' 
 
 " The old man plucked fresh handfuls of grass, 
 and flung them into the current. He muttered un 
 intelligible words, but wild and disconnected, as I 
 thought. I seated myself by his side, and in a little 
 time so won upon his confidence, that with trem 
 bling lips and many silent tears he related me this 
 story : 
 
 " ' I was alone, save a little grand-daughter. My 
 sons and daughters were gone, every one ; my friends 
 were in the graveyards, or far-off places. I was 
 alone utterly, with my beautiful little grand-daughter. 
 She always seemed to me a little child, when others 
 told me she was a woman. Ah 1 she must have 
 been a woman, indeed, for she loved loved so 
 deeply, so despairingly a love which, even when 
 forsaken, was too big for her little heart, for it 
 broke it. 
 
 " ' I saw them together. I thought of no danger, 
 for looking down from my far-off age, they seemed 
 so like little children. Hun I liked yet his smile 
 was a false one he was old enough to be a villain 
 old enough to play the frank, careless, dashing
 
 62 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 old enough to conceal a bad nature under as fair an 
 exterior as ever I saw. 
 
 " ' Why, it is an old story. I can see now that 
 you have guessed it all. An old,old story repeated 
 in palace and hamlet, in busy towns and quiet fields 
 how many tunes repeated only the graveyards can 
 tell when they reveal their buried secrets. 
 
 " ' Do not be too fast. There was no crime on 
 her part, I mean. I thank God, for that. She was 
 torn up and cast away, but died pure as summer 
 blossoms. Her story the old story repeated for its 
 ten thousandth tune was the story of love aban 
 doned of love warmed and subtly fanned to a blaze 
 by cold cunning, and patient deceit then forsaken, 
 then trampled and crushed into the dust 1 
 
 " ' He was skilled in the craft of heart-winning. 
 Grace, beauty, accomplishments, genius these, with 
 a reckless purpose and an unprincipled heart making 
 beauty everywhere his desire, and too often the 
 bound captive to his will. 
 
 " ' Well, she lived awhile in his smiles fed upon 
 such rapture that her poor little heart could not con 
 tain all its joy. And when he had played enough 
 with his victim had found her in virtue superior to 
 his craft then, one day, with a cold word he left 
 her left her, and never came back. So also went 
 from her cheek roses and smiles, never more to
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 63 
 
 return. Pale and stony-like she came and went sad 
 and silent. To these banks, where her happiness 
 had dawned, where all the memories of her love 
 were interwoven with every tree and stone, did she 
 come and weep, and moan some said madly. One 
 day she came, when heavy rains had swollen this lit 
 tle stream until it spread over its banks, and rolled 
 along its course high and angrily. The hours 
 passed by and I watched for her return. She did 
 not come. I followed her, trembling with appre 
 hension 
 
 " ' Why dwell on what followed ? I found her 
 body a mile below ' 
 
 " ' Drowned ?' 
 
 (I C 
 
 : Drowned ! There she lay caught in a fallen 
 willow. Over her face tangled locks and ravaged 
 leaves had woven a veil. I did not look at it I 
 dared not I never saw it again.' 
 
 " The old man stopped, and slowly pressed two 
 heavy hands to his brow. Some minutes passed 
 silently. Then I spoke, not to offer consolation 
 for grief was the old man's friend all that was 
 left to him of her or of the past but I spoke to 
 show him that his story was not unheeded. 
 
 " ' The poor girl, sir her name ' 
 
 " ' Her name ? Ah ! I had forgotten. Your 
 pardon, sir. Her name was Beatrice.'
 
 64 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " Then, Maggie, I sprang npon my feet and al 
 most shrieked aloud. Beatrice ! It was a name 
 sacred to me, woven with a thousand memories of 
 that stream, more deeply loved and treasured than 
 any name in the wide world. It could not be. I 
 impetuously reiterated the question, which the old 
 man did not hear, but kept murmuringly and ten 
 derly repeating the fond, fond name. 
 
 "Then I went home musing deeply, haunted 
 by the old man's tale, and when I thought of 
 the Beatrice of his story there rose up before me 
 the fair lineaments and figure of my Beatrice, until 
 the two became so identified, that around my story 
 and its memories, sad, sad enough, there hovered an 
 additional poignancy, as if she whom I had seen 
 amid those scenes had let her spirit out upon the 
 waters of the stream had floated down upon the 
 current in a web of ravaged leaves and flowers."
 
 V. 
 
 Shady Side and its reminiscences Love under green 
 leaves The story of Beatrice. 
 
 65
 
 V. 
 
 ( t TT) UT who was Beatrice ?" inquired Maggie. 
 
 JD " To you, Maggie, my heart is an open 
 house. Its doors stand wide, ; day lights its cham 
 bers. I will tell you, therefore, of Beatrice." 
 
 " You know my favorite resort that wooded, 
 shadowy bank of the little stream, upon which I 
 have bestowed the name of Shady Side. There in 
 the summer days I loiter in its rich seclusion, listen 
 by the hour to the carol of the birds, watch the 
 play of light and shadow in the waving tree tops, 
 look down upon the blue waters which with their 
 musical ripple murmur an incessant song to the 
 flowers, or with my head laid on some ' antique 
 root,' stretch my gaze through the green canopy 
 above me, into the far blue beyond, while my 
 thoughts mount, expand, traversing worlds celestial 
 and terrestrial. I fancy myself, you know, a sound 
 disciple of Izaak Walton, and with my rod and reel 
 hang about the shores of the little stream, flinging 
 my line into the dark pools ; and in half revery, idly 
 
 6T
 
 68 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 watch it as it loosely trails upon the water. Once 
 while seated under a moss-bannered oak, and thus 
 dreamily employed, there came down towards me 
 through the trees, a young girl, with her bonnet on 
 her arm, her locks lifted and floating in the wind, a 
 bright flush upon her cheeks, a beautiful light in her 
 blue eyes, a radiant smile upon her lips. She paused 
 and threw up her hands to catch a pendant bough. 
 Her white arms glanced above her head, her white 
 neck shone through the falling tresses. I thought it 
 a rarely beautiful picture and held my breath to 
 look. Her form was light but full of wonderful 
 grace ; her bust was outlined with delicate fullness ; 
 her limbs, traceable through their drapery, seemed 
 perfect in symmetry. She came down to the water, 
 starting as she saw me, and blushing with beautiful 
 confusion. I said a word or two to her, and she 
 went on her way. 
 
 " All the rest of that day I found myself musing 
 upon this beautiful vision. I dreamed of her at 
 night, and awoke thinking of her. "We met again 
 the next day, and after that many times. We 
 came to know each other well, and to pass hours 
 together upon the banks of Shady Side. Beatrice 
 was her name. She was the only child of a gentle 
 man, a widower, who had come up from town to 
 settle amid the rural beauties of our neighborhood.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 69 
 
 She was very fair, trustful, pure, gentle, loving 
 could I have been a mortal not to have verged upon 
 the flowery precipice ? When she would speak 
 so soft and low, or place her hand in mine, or look 
 up into my face with her frank, sweet eyes, or play 
 some girlish prank, such as crowning me fantas 
 tically with flowers and oak garlands, as if she were 
 Titania, and I Bottom could I help the bound to 
 my heart, and the strange thrill that went through 
 it? 
 
 But I did penance for these heart-bounds. " Hi, 
 old fellow," said I, "look in the glass. What do 
 you see there ? Is there a face for sweet sixteen ? 
 Look at the crow-feet, sir at the furrows and the 
 wrinkles, and the hair and beard already pepper and 
 salt ! Is that a face for beautiful Beatrice ?" 
 
 I winced a little, but rigorously enforced myself to 
 study the looking-glass every day. 
 
 " You're old, old boy, old and ugly, too. Your 
 heart is choked with the ashes of old, dead sensations ; 
 it has burnt out its fire long ago. Shall you take a 
 withered heart, and a withered face, and dead hopes, 
 and sluggish brain, and tainted blood, to the pure, 
 fresh, unstained youth of Beatrice ? Out upon you, 
 old boy ! Don't you see how monstrous the thought 
 is ? Look close in the looking-glass, and you will 
 see it fully.'
 
 70 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " This plan was a happy one. It cured me of all 
 thoughts of loving Beatrice, and kept down into the 
 recesses of my heart emotions and passions that 
 otherwise would have struggled up. Occasionally, 
 indeed, at some word of hers, or some sweet caress for 
 we grew to know each other well and freely my 
 heart would rise in my throat, and the blood run 
 tingling through my veins, but a rigorous course of 
 looking-glass always succeeded hi subduing the rebel 
 lious sentiment. 
 
 " Indeed, I grew to be so completely a master of 
 what threatened at one tune to be a mighty passion, 
 and had buried my love so deeply in my bosom, that 
 I listened one day to her frank, ingenuous confession 
 of her betrothal to another, with no other outward 
 emotion than a sensible paleness, which I felt spread 
 ing over my cheek. A sharp, keen blade was enter 
 ing my heart as she spoke, but I kissed her on her 
 brow, perhaps with trembling lips, and hastened 
 away from her side. It needed all my courage, and 
 a pertinacious contemplation of the looking-glass that 
 day, to preserve the command over my emotions. I 
 kept repeating, as if it were a text : 
 
 " ' You're old, old boy, old and ugly, too !' 
 
 " I recalled, too, Goethe's plan, who, upon the 
 occurrence of any calamity, betook himself forth 
 with to the study of a new science. But, it was
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 71 
 
 sternly difficult to follow the cold abstrusities of a sci 
 ence, with visions of what might have been visions 
 of a trusting, up-looking, confiding love ever at my 
 side, nestling in my heart of a radiance upon my 
 hearthstone, where only a shadow was now forever 
 to rest of sunlight in my heart, which now could 
 never more enter with visions of youth, and bloom, 
 and beauty thrusting themselves between me and the 
 page I I was weaker than Goethe. The study af 
 forded me no oblivion. I paced my floor that night 
 until the dawn broke into my room, and then I buried 
 my face in my pillow, and half slept, half dreamed 
 away an hour or two. 
 
 " In the morning, I breakfasted before the looking- 
 glass, and I sternly said, ' Old and ugly ! What 
 presumption to think of love ! Study it well, old 
 boy; it is your only cure.' 
 
 "The wedding-day came, and I stood up in 
 church, very calm and very passive, to see the cere 
 mony. Every eye was strained to see the bride 
 enter ; she came, and her course led her within a 
 few feet of me. The church grew suddenly dark as 
 she swept by. A book dropped from my hand. I 
 could neither see nor hear. 
 
 " It was over, and the crowd passed out. I fol 
 lowed staggeringly, and when I reached the porch 
 the bride came up so rarely beautiful called me
 
 72 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 her old friend, and asked my blessing. I pressed 
 back her curls, gave the last kiss, and took the last 
 look. Then the crowd came in between us, the old 
 church tottered, sky and earth were commingled, and 
 I grasped at a column for support. 
 
 " I hardly knew what followed, except that I 
 found myself shortly afterwards hastening through 
 the fields with a wild, irregular step, pausing mechani 
 cally to stare up at the sky, following the devious 
 zig-zag fences abstractedly, until at last I came to 
 the old familiar Shady Side. I flew to the water 
 side, threw myself down upon the bank, pulled my 
 hat over my brows, and for once allowed my pent-up 
 grief to break, unchained and free. 
 
 " The next morning I brought out a rod, clapped 
 a small glass in my pocket, went down to the old 
 spot, threw my hook to the stream, and taking out 
 the aforesaid glass, read myself a lesson, while with 
 one eye I watched my reel. 
 
 " Old boy ! Sentiment and passion at your time 
 of life, hey ! A pretty how to do, upon my word ! 
 You're a man of the world, I should think. Be 
 cause you met a pair of pretty eyes, and a bright 
 smile, and a peachy cheek, you thought they were 
 for you, hey ? And now you would like to be me 
 lancholy and sentimental, and prate about unre 
 quited affection, I suppose. You are an old fool if
 
 A Bachelor's Story 73 
 
 you do. Shake it off, sir. It was only a dream. 
 Wake up, rub your eyes, dash your head in water 
 it will be all over with. You were weak yesterday. 
 You must shake and tremble like a girl, or a school 
 boy. Bah ! Can't you see beauty or loveliness 
 without thinking they must belong to you ? What 
 are you, old, dull, senseless block, that you should 
 dare hope for so much ? Keep along with your 
 books, and your rods, and your dogs, and don't ever 
 aspire to so much happiness again. It wouldn't be 
 wise. You'd only be dropped down upon earth as 
 harshly as now. Be a man that is, make money, 
 love stocks, count shares, pile up acres, take to Wall 
 street after the manner of manhood 1 But don't 
 think of beauty and youth again, old boy ! 
 
 " My line suddenly shot out. Away went the 
 glass over my head, and I sprang to my feet. A 
 bouncer was on my line, that was certain. Now for 
 my skill. ' Love and such folly,' I cried, ' avaunt ! 
 What are you to the glorious sport in hand ?' 
 
 " The fish, a splendid fellow, was safely landed, 
 and I went back to the looking-glass. 
 
 " It was shivered into a hundred pieces I 
 
 " ' Never mind, old boy !' said I, ' You're old and 
 ugly, you know, and you'll never be guilty of such 
 folly again ! Your passion is shivered as the glass 
 is, as your foolish dream was !' " 
 4
 
 VI. 
 
 Christmas Eve and holiday sadness Maggie and Ike 
 come laden with greens We adorn, festoon, and philo 
 sophize I digress into many matters, and make a 
 confession that may cause some doors to be shut upon 
 me. 
 
 75
 
 VI. 
 
 ON" Christmas Eve I caused my fire to be heaped 
 up unusually high ; and then with my own hand 
 I stirred it with the poker until it blazed and glared 
 from its great red heart outward to its extremest 
 limits, with such cheer and hearty good will as 
 wasn't outdone by Christmas fire anywhere. Then 
 I lighted two extra candles ; drew the heavy red 
 curtains close ; pulled out my table iato the centre 
 of the room ; flung myself into my deep, wide arm 
 chair, and looked around the hushed room, bright, 
 calm, peaceful, pleasant ; and then fell staring at the 
 fire, and listening to the silence* 
 
 Merrier and happier Christmas hearths there were 
 than mine, God grant ; brighter ones, with the glow 
 of generous fire, I do not believe. 
 
 But all day I had been struggling against an ap 
 proaching sadness. The bells that ring in holidays, 
 have to me a far-off melancholy cadence ; they strike 
 upon the memory and sound the past as well as the 
 present ; retrospection awakes at their touch, and 
 
 77
 
 78 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 tilings dead, things gone, things a thousand tunes 
 better forgotten, come up from the Dead Sea and 
 flood me with sadness. And while Mirth clashes its 
 cymbals, Hilarity bursts into carols, and Pleasure 
 leaps up shaking its lusty limbs and free locks, my 
 heart, amid the clashes and the jocund mirth, and 
 the rich laughter, sinks deeper and deeper into its 
 retrospective melancholy. 
 
 On these occasions I am like a traveller on a 
 barren road, pausing at a milestone, and looking 
 wistfully back at the flowery lanes forever past. 
 
 I fought against the sadness this Christmas Eve. 
 I got down my pleasantest books ; I called in my 
 dog that I might not be alone ; I tried to cheat 
 myself into cheerfulness by recalling only mirthful 
 thoughts but in vain. The sadness came slowly but 
 surely on, like a summer cloud. I began to think of 
 Christmases past to paint, in a contrasted picture, 
 my lonely Christmas now, and the jovial, social, glad 
 Christmas once to think of old friends gone before, 
 old hopes foregone, old happiness forever lost. The 
 old life and the old being came up, and with that 
 emotional egotism with which we so fondly dwell 
 upon the life of the past, I bade the curtains up, 
 and memory came forth to act the drama in which 
 I was the hero and the central interest. 
 
 But hi the midst of this self-art, the door opened,
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 79 
 
 and in came Maggie and Ike, each staggering under 
 a mighty load of Christmas greens. 
 
 " Ah, Maggie, so thoughtful ; kind, too." 
 
 " You said, sir," said she, " that you liked your 
 room decked with winter-green at Christmas tune, so 
 Ike and I have been to the woods, and brought you 
 these." 
 
 " The holly shall crown my mantel ; the spruce 
 and the cedar shall festoon the wall and entwine the 
 door-frames and pictures. We shall sit under a green 
 Christmas, and be merry if we can." 
 
 Maggie was in a flush of eagerness and pleasure ; 
 her dark eyes shone like jet ; her cheek was warm 
 and glowing ; and her little figure undulated and 
 vibrated with pleasurable excitement. 
 
 " Shall we begin, sir," said she, "now ?" 
 
 " Yes, at once." 
 
 Ike, only half my friend, and that his politic half, 
 scowled a moment in the doorway, then rolled or 
 twisted himself away into the shadows beyond, and 
 Maggie and I were alone. 
 
 Busy fingers had she ; the greens grew rapidly into 
 wreaths and prettily adjusted clusters. Together we 
 worked at the task intwining every salient object, 
 crowning every point of 'vantage ; festooning, gar 
 landing, or otherwise adorning. Beauty grew be 
 neath our hands. The gilding of the picture-framea
 
 8o A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 glistened through the green twigs ; the ruddy, bright 
 pleasant tint of the firelight fell upon the greens 
 richly and pleasantly ; the scene, mellow before, grew 
 rich and eloquent now. 
 
 " After all, Maggie," said I, " not an unworthy 
 Christmas Eve. May this pleasant custom of deck 
 ing our homes with the green of the winter forests be 
 perpetuated. The evergreen typifies the day and all 
 the associations of the day ; it symbolizes the ever 
 lasting verdure and enduring freshness of heavenly 
 mercy and love this day begun ; it is the outward 
 expression of memories greener to-day than other 
 days for associations and recollections of loved ones 
 dead, cling around these prominent epochs of the 
 year, and help to make them holy. Christmas day 
 is a memory of all things past, of all friends departed, 
 of all joys lost, all hopes buried, and the green wreaths 
 we hang upon our walls are immortelles. 
 
 " In Christmases to come, Maggie, may winter 
 wreaths keep our memory green !" 
 
 Maggie, seemingly touched, hung tenderly over a 
 portrait of my father ; and the wreath she wove and 
 hung upon its frame was the greenest and choicest 
 of them all. 
 
 And when the work was done, we drew seats to 
 our accustomed places before the fire I in my ample 
 Voltaire, Maggie on her low ottoman by the corner
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 81 
 
 and fell easily away into our usual discursive talk. 
 Maggie had said something about luck. 
 
 " Don't use the word, Maggie. I hate it. The 
 thing which it expresses does not exist. We are 
 all architects, Mag. If we build wisely and well, 
 our structures will stand ; if they fall, be sure that a 
 fundamental defect existed somewhere. To try is to 
 succeed. That marvellous gentleman of the nursery 
 tale who leaped into the brier-bush with all his might, 
 performed quite a possible feat in scratching in his 
 eyes again. With German subtlety I perceive a 
 grand moral in his story, illustrating how much 
 energy and resolute effort will accomplish how if a 
 man but jump into his purposes with 'might and 
 main/ mountains may be moved. Failure, Mag, I 
 believe to be invariably the consequence of some 
 weakness not always apparent, but nevertheless 
 existing. Close and long observation has convinced 
 me of this truth. I never failed in any undertaking 
 that afterwards I could not trace the cause back to 
 some incompetency or weakness. 
 
 " ' Strong will, my cousin, monarchs all.' 
 
 You will find that sentiment, Mag, in an almost for 
 gotten play, written in the hey-day of youth." 
 " Your play, sir ? was it a tragedy?" 
 
 " Yes. Every y ung man who becomes inoculated 
 4*
 
 82 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 with literature, writes a tragedy. It is inevitable. 
 Mine! I built hopes upon it once as high as the sky; 
 it proved an altar upon which I burnt out all my en 
 thusiasm a tomb in which were buried my dreams, 
 and my ambition. Ah, the fresh enthusiasm of youth 
 is as delicate as a flower; roughly touched or bruised, 
 it never revives. I have never labored upon another 
 work as I did upon that fond, foolish, boyish hope. 
 My courage has not been strong; it could not recover 
 the harsh wound inflicted then." 
 
 " Inflicted how V 
 
 " By failure." 
 
 " But failure is weakness, you say." 
 
 " Yes, but weakness is manifold in its workings. 
 It is sometimes constitutional, and sometimes springs 
 from inattention of means to ends. I planned a tra 
 gedy upon a grand scale ; sublime in its theme, heroic 
 in its tone, scanning the very heavens I forgot that 
 man is scarcely six feet high. So my tragedy went 
 up out of sight, and exploded in the air." 
 
 " Then it was too good." 
 
 " No. I am not deceived about it ; I was once, 
 but am not now. Its aim was above human sym 
 pathies, and therein I was a fool ; while the plan was 
 greater than the ability to perform. I chose to walk 
 on stilts, and rightfully had a tumble for my pains. 
 Orlando says prettily, that his love is just as high as
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 83 
 
 his heart. A good thought. The heart is the great 
 human level; its stature is the plain, over which you 
 may bowl your sentiments, your fancies, your thoughts, 
 and be sure of your aim. But he who amis higher is 
 lost. The world feels, and never thinks. Aggre 
 gately it has no brain. Touch its heart skillfully, and 
 its great pulse responds quickly, and surely; give it 
 an abstraction to crack, and it will make mouths at 
 you. As for my tragedy, in my will I shall order it 
 to be burned. The Hindoo widow is consumed upon 
 her husband's funeral pyre ; so my child shall be im 
 molated on its father's grave." 
 
 " Your child I do not understand." 
 
 " The offspring of my fancy. With every poet, the 
 product of his inspiration is linked to him by such 
 ties of consanguinity as the world cannot comprehend, 
 and which is paralleled alone by that intense fondness 
 manifested by a mother for her child. Every poet 
 knows this ; all others know it not. 
 
 " But it would have been better for me, as with 
 many other men, to have escaped the infection of lit 
 erature ; wiser if Parnassus, glittering in its eternal 
 sunlight, had never dazzled and blinded me. Wiser? 
 Ah, yes, there it is. It is always wiser to leave un- 
 attempted and undone. Wisdom, by which I mean 
 that quality otherwise known as common sense, is, 
 after all, a simple science. I can sum it up in one
 
 84 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 infallible word No! Its whole teachings are eternal 
 variations upon this word. It is simply a huge nega 
 tive. Impulse precipitates, wisdom restrains ; hot 
 young blood rushes forward and is lost; old calm 
 wisdom pauses and is saved. "Wisdom incessantly 
 cries, 'Don't;' ' Better not;' its mottoes are, 'Look 
 before you leap ;' ' Wisely and slow;' 'A bird in the 
 hand,' etc. It is a check-rein, and a tight one; it is 
 a social brake ; it is conservatively pledged to restrain 
 progress and advancement, and to frown upon innova 
 tion; it is cold, calm, lofty, dignified, impressive and 
 its name is, No! Impulse is all daring, but great folly. 
 Once in a while it snatches success, and accomplishes 
 an end; ninety-nine times it tumbles hi the mud. Do 
 you point out a great poet ? I will show you a hun 
 dred who have attempted the flight in defiance of 
 wisdom's whispered ' No/ and could not keep the 
 whig. These tremendously active affirmative souls, 
 have sometimes accomplished great results; but alas! 
 how often by the sacrifice of the individual. For 
 wisdom, among its other qualities, has an ' eye to the 
 main chance;' its negatives are intensely selfish; but 
 it faithfully points out the beaten, worn, respectable, 
 tried path, and has a holy horror of the unknown 
 wilds on either side. Think of it, and you will see I 
 am right. Wisdom is painted as an owl silent, 
 therefore negative; stolid and imperturbable nega-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 85 
 
 tive again! Its apostle is Solomon. What is his 
 greatest saying there is nothing new under the sun 
 but a sweeping negative ?" 
 
 Maggie's cheek grew hot. With one of her quick, 
 vehement motions, she exclaimed: 
 
 " I cannot understand you. To accomplish, seems 
 to me the hope and glory of all. Oh, sir, I long so 
 much to do something to be " She hesitated. 
 
 " A-h, Mag, I see, 
 
 " ' That fever at the core, 
 Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.' 
 
 Cast it out, trample it down hear wisdom speaking 
 now, assuming its eternal form of No, and imploring 
 you to come down from the clouds wherein you move; 
 for below, here on earth, amid simple hopes and 
 earthly things, lies happiness. Lift up your hands, 
 and you pull down hot coals upon your head ; you 
 light the fires of reckless discontent, and unsated 
 yearning; fires that grow upon the very tears shed 
 to extinguish them." 
 
 Those fires seemed to be lighted even as I spoke. 
 Her eyes gleamed, her cheeks blazed, and her lips 
 seemed as if some unseen hand had reached down 
 and touched them with fire. Ah, not from without, 
 but from within came that strange Promethean heat. 
 
 " Sir, sir, I am restless, discontented now; and I
 
 86 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 yearn miserably for things I cannot understand. I 
 am unhappy, I don't know why, but I am unhappy." 
 Tears even then, gemming, pearl-like, the hem of 
 her grand passions, broidered upon the woof and 
 web of her swelling thoughts. Thoughts, too, with 
 so little voice vague, unformed, and shadowy, but 
 convulsing with unseen, subterranean force, one day 
 to break out into some noble utterance, or ever min 
 ing within, consume and destroy. Alas, for those 
 who feel and think too much ! Sometimes I see a 
 glorious future for Maggie ; and sometimes, alas ! 
 the universal tragedy enacted in every heart grief, 
 storm, passion and death ! But these breakers 
 upon which her bark of destiny seems to set 
 these passions and the fires that slumber in her 
 breast, were not new to me. From the first I had 
 detected their presence ; and if the world were 
 different from what it is ; if large utterance, grand 
 thoughts, high purposes, had known roads upon 
 which to travel ; if for women, such as Maggie will 
 make, there were channels and currents to float 
 them onward to then* goal, then I would bid en 
 couragement and sympathy to shine on Maggie, in 
 whose warmth and light she would grow strong and 
 great. But as it is, the upward atmosphere is hot 
 and feverish the earth alone, cool and wholesome. 
 Her head upon the grass, and the daisy, and the violet,
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 87 
 
 then ! And from simple things let her soul draw 
 calm content. 
 
 " Maggie," said I, with my privilege of abruptly 
 changing a theme, "read to me. There is Mon 
 taigne. Open it anywhere. The old, quaint, garru 
 lous, whimsical gossip never lacks interest cool and 
 grateful interest, too. There is not a pulse-beat in a 
 line he has written. You can sleep after him as 
 calmly and sweetly as after an opiate ; not a dream, 
 nor a haunting sentiment, nor a disquieting thought 
 in his whole work. He is like a supper of porridge, 
 light and wholesome." 
 
 Maggie read a little, but even Montaigne could 
 not cool the heat so unexpectedly incited. It lin 
 gered and hung about her still plunged her into 
 fits of abstraction, broke out into those character 
 istic movements which I have described ; and at last 
 brought her to a full stop in the midst of one of 
 Montaigne's humorous stories. 
 
 " Oh, come, Maggie," said I, " this won't do. 
 Try Shakspeare." 
 
 She jumped up, ran to the volume, opened it 
 hastily, and began to read Macbeth. 
 
 " Stop, Mag. Not Macbeth. The Thane's wife 
 and Maggie Dean have elements in common, and 
 would run full tilt against each other. Like won't 
 cure like."
 
 88 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 "Why, to an ambitious nature, would not the 
 story of Macbeth prove a warning and a cure ?" 
 
 " No 1 It would prick him on as he never was 
 pricked before. I would not attempt to cure a thief 
 by showing him a hanging ; nor stop a murderer by 
 the history of other murders. There are in each of us 
 grains of perversity lying in wait for opportunity ; 
 and example stimulates them into activity. Con 
 vince a man that his crime is an isolated one, that it 
 is out of the range of human sympathy, that de 
 pravity has never before reached a depth so low, and 
 it will be horrible in his sight. The most forsaken 
 cling to some link with their kind, and find consola 
 tion for their wickedness in the wickedness of others. 
 Vice is as fond of precedents as a judge. Isolation 
 is the great horror of humanity. 
 
 " If intending to commit murder, I would read 
 1 Macbeth.' The sentiment of crime, with its central 
 interest, its harrowing sensations, its sublimity, its 
 heroic inflation of the ordinary to the extraordinary, 
 would gradually bring me to a grim and pleasurable 
 contemplation of my own dire purpose. There is 
 no doubt of it in my mind, Maggie. Murder in 
 blank verse is fascinating, but dangerous for we 
 cannot see the tremendous difference between it and 
 murder in prose. 
 
 " If, indeed, all murders have not a poetical ele-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 89 
 
 ment. De Quincey, when he considered Murder as a 
 Fine Art, touched the very core of the subject. 
 And I will make a bold confession. Looking back 
 at the sensations I have at tunes experienced when 
 seeing a murderer or a great criminal, and analyzing 
 them now, I discover their main element was envy !" 
 
 " Envy !" exclaimed Maggy, with an incredulous 
 stare of astonishment. 
 
 " Horror of the crime, of course, but envy of the 
 man's keener experience of passion and feeling. 
 Sensation is life, and any situation which can de 
 velop our emotions so as to magnify ourselves and 
 intensify existence, is a means of a higher, and 
 therefore superior vitality. To live is the great aim 
 of nature not merely respiration, but life vibrative, 
 profound, intense, in which every function springs 
 into action, every emotion throbs with ecstatic feel 
 ing, every power, quality and sensibility of the mind 
 or heart starts into active and vital being. See how 
 eagerly we all run after sensations and excitements. 
 The fascination of the battle-field, the intense pleasures 
 of the gaming-table, the delight in adventure and 
 danger, the eagerness for society, all these evince the 
 universal desire for enlarged experience of those 
 powers that lie within us. Fiction, the drama, and 
 poetry all grew up out of this need. By the aid 
 of the novel we not only live through our own sen-
 
 90 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 sations, but those of others ; we extend the boun 
 daries of life and feeling ; we transport ourselves by 
 the aid of the imagination into heroes, who act upon 
 a larger area and in a broader life than our own cir 
 cumstances admit of. Nothing is so egotistical as 
 the enjoyment of romance and poetry. It's nothing 
 more than looking in a mirror. The novel-reader 
 crawls into the skins of all the heroes he admires ; 
 he fills them out, strides in them, and when he 
 glorifies the original, is secretly glorifying him- 
 
 " But I tread upon ground too speculative. Turn 
 to ' As You Like It ' that is cool, dewy, pastoral 
 and sweet." 
 
 Maggie read, and the gentle influence of the most 
 thoroughly beautiful production of the world, fell 
 upon us both, benignly and deliciously. 
 
 You might extinguish all the literature of the 
 ante-present period, if you left me Hamlet for my 
 philosophy and As You Like It for my heart ! 
 
 Unfortunately Maggie's dull perception of humor 
 shuts out one source of pleasure in " As You Like 
 It." Touchstone, Audrey, and even much of Rosa 
 lind, are blank to her : but Jacques she enjoys with 
 such relish that I envy her. I must stimulate a love 
 of humor, however. Mr. Fowler shall tell me where 
 to look for the phrenological development of that
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 91 
 
 faculty, and I wonder if external applications 
 would accomplish anything? A cataplasm for in 
 stance ? 
 
 Humor is a perennial source of purity and fresh 
 ness to the mind. It clears away the cobwebs ; it 
 qualifies the hot, rich draughts of sentiment ; it 
 freshens up the sated edge of appetite ; it flows 
 through the whole being like a babbling stream, with 
 verdure always green upon its banks. Without 
 humor, we are either hot simooms or arid plains. 
 Your Keats and your Shelleys burn themselves out 
 for want of it ; your Shakspeares and your Dickenses 
 are so irrigated by its delicious coolness, that they 
 endure green and fresh forever.
 
 VII. 
 
 Hearts and brains The gauntlet thrown down at 
 the feet of facts, and Caesar confronted with Hamlet 
 The Shaksperians preferred to the Romans Birth 
 days hung in black The five comparisons of life and 
 a hint or two for the reader about talking and listening.
 
 VII. 
 
 SCENE : Maggie and I chatting in the warm 
 tint, of my fire-lighted study ; the curtains 
 dropped against the window panes ; the oaken book 
 cases, with open doors ; the low ceiling, crossed with 
 beams burnished by the fire-light ; the walls hi crim 
 son paper and panelled pictures. A rich, dreamy 
 atmosphere, in which the fancy delights. Maggie 
 by the fire, one cheek hi a glow, the other in 
 shadow ; and two eyes, restless and gleaming be 
 tween her elf-locks, fixed with their keen light on 
 me. In such a scene the thought makes free 
 ventures, and plays wanton pranks. I put no check 
 upon it ; it leads where it listeth. 
 
 "Well, Maggie," I am saying to her, "we are 
 somewhat liked, but a censorious critic has been 
 writing to my publisher,* declaring that my lucu 
 brations are misnamed, inasmuch as they partake 
 very little of Maggie and very much of Z" 
 
 * A few of these sketches first appeared in the pages of a New York 
 periodical, under the title of " Maggie and I." 
 
 95
 
 96 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " Why, sir, what would he have ?" 
 
 "1 do not know. But surveying the alphabet 
 coolly and dispassionately, up and down its full 
 length, I frankly acknowledge to that censor, whoever 
 he may be, that I cannot discover another letter to 
 which I am so much attached. 
 
 "And, speaking without malice, I do believe it to 
 be the favorite letter of mankind generally, not even 
 excepting the unamiable critic who has taken me to 
 task for a very natural weakness. And a mighty 
 letter truly. It reaches from arctic to antarctic, and 
 equatorially girdles the earth. Strike it from the 
 vocabulary of common use, and you blind the world 
 to a perception of its own greatness ; you undo self- 
 exultation, self-love, self-worship, and all the delight 
 ful forms of self-contemplation. 
 
 " The letter /is in the pupil of every man's sight, 
 and so big that he can but just peep over it at the 
 world outside." 
 
 Maggie made a quick movement, and then was 
 stiU. 
 
 " I understand your thought, Mag. You should 
 have spoken it. Youth and impulse belong so 
 naturally one to the other, that although we old fel 
 lows have learned the vices of policy and reserve, we 
 are unwilling to see them sitting in watch upon the 
 utterance of the young. Give thought breath, Mag ;
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 97 
 
 speak freely and openly ; some foolish things may live 
 for brief seconds upon the air (it being the high vir 
 tue of friendship that it forgets whatever it has no 
 pleasure to remember), but spontaneousness is so in 
 spiriting and fine, that it compensates many times for 
 the few unwise things the nnwary tongue drops off 
 with its pearls." 
 
 " Are you going to forget to tell me what my 
 thought was ?" said Maggie. 
 
 " No ; but I shall approach it by what devious 
 ways I please. The thought was this : he eternally 
 talks about egotism he judges by himself. 
 
 " So I do, Maggie. I have not as good oppor 
 tunities for observing other people's hearts as I have 
 my own. My heart is the only one I have in my 
 own possession ; and very naturally, therefore, it 
 serves as the sample by which I judge of its fellow 
 hearts. There is the advantage, too, of always hav 
 ing it at hand ; of experiencing its intolerable de 
 sires, its huge aspirations, its slothful pleasures, its 
 love of praise, its unceasing contemplation of self 
 of judging, in fact, from actual and mathematical de 
 monstration. A man without a heart now could 
 scarcely be a judge of hearts ; and if I bring my 
 own up and scrutinize it closely, I am all the more 
 able to accurately read other people's, which I 
 mostly do by deciphering the signs and the outward 
 5
 
 98 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 tokens by watching the face, that dial whereon the 
 movements of the works underneath are impressed in 
 unmistakable characters, to all grown wise by their 
 ' penny of observation.' 
 
 " This much I have learned. Absolutely bad 
 hearts are few ; bad heads are many. Some 
 selfish appetites are in the heart, I grant you ; 
 but it is the seat of all the generous emotions 
 and noble impulses. Tenderness, sympathy, love, 
 benevolence dwell in men's bosoms ; in their 
 brains, craft, cunning, cold sophistry, audacious 
 reason." 
 
 " Oh, sir, you must be wrong." 
 
 " I will prove it. Milton gave shape to the uni 
 versal idea of Satan when he created Lucifer the 
 impersonation of intellect. In him existed all the 
 forces of Mind, all the powers that create and dare 
 and do the will of the diplomat, the sophistry of 
 the skeptic, the skill of the general ; intellect that 
 soared, grasped, pierced high and looked far, but 
 intellect without a heart. And therein alone it 
 differs from human intellect. Our good angel sits 
 in the bosom ; in the heart burn the holy fires of 
 faith and charity ; it is the heart which lifts up and 
 guides the intellect in the right, which warms with 
 its human warmth the proud, cold, ambitions rea 
 son ; and by its ever-living humanity, makes men of
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 99 
 
 those who would otherwise be sneering, mocking, 
 daring Lucifers. Do you see ?" 
 
 "I try to, sir. But intellect inspires worship. 
 The great are so grand 1" 
 
 " Yes, to youth, when life is like a new play. But 
 I have peeped behind the scenes, and seen too often 
 corked eyebrows, blank verse, and a strut, make a 
 fool glitter like a god." 
 
 " But some are truly great," persisted Maggie ; 
 " all are not hollowuess behind a beautiful mask." 
 
 " No ; by humanity I swear it ! I shall not 
 destroy your faith, Mag, in human excellence, but 
 beware. Admire not intellect alone. Without a 
 heart, it is Lucifer and Milton's, let me tell you, 
 was not the last." 
 
 " There are two arcs in the world, Mag. 
 One rests on the horizons ; it spans the Visible from 
 the right to the left. The other is not bigger than 
 two spread hands, yet, by my soul, it outspans the 
 first a hundred fold ; its rests are upon the very 
 limits of space ; it reaches from to-day unto the very 
 beginning, and vaults, in its narrow space, all the 
 ages. I mean the brain." 
 
 " Oh, yes I see." 
 
 " I am glad you do. Obtuseness is not pleasant. 
 Yes, Maggie, the arc of the brain is a mighty one,
 
 loo A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 grander even than this 'brave overhanging firma 
 ment.' By the by, I doubt if this line is as Shak- 
 speare wrote it. In the early editions it is ' this 
 brave o'erhanging,' 'firmament? omitted and ' o'er- 
 hanging ' used snbstantively. So written, the phrase 
 has a trne Shaksperian sweetness and richness. I 
 like it best. 
 
 " Bnt of this dome that tops the human architec 
 ture. It is a grand affair in my present mode of 
 thought, I desire you to remember, for presently I 
 may be cynical. Who knows ? There is one I see 
 before me, I mean yours, of course. Even while I 
 speak, how it compasses all things ; how it outdoes 
 Puck, and puts a girdle round the earth with a 
 breath ; how it reaches from things terrestrial to 
 things celestial ; how, within the busy, throbbing, 
 dark and narrow vault, the world, in innumerable 
 fleeting pictures, is photographed ! And then, Mag, 
 the dreams it has known. Ah, could they all appear 
 and march before you now, like the procession of 
 ghostly kings in Macbeth, how preposterous and 
 absurd " 
 
 " Sir !" exclaimed Maggie, a little offended. 
 
 " Grand dreams, Mag, no doubt. Ah, we are all 
 artists. Our canvas is the future ; and our palettes 
 glow with Utopian colors. Jove ! how we paint 
 that future in colors to which Titian is pale and
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 101 
 
 weak 1 how we gild and adorn, and never touch our 
 pencils in the colors of the past. Never, never in 
 the past. 
 
 " We suffer, we see hopes burst, we live through 
 days of disappointment and weariness ; but still faith 
 ever turns hopefully and believingly to the future. 
 Crowd the past with what evils we may, experience 
 throws no shadow on the great to-come, the all-hail 
 hereafter." 
 
 Maggie shook her head. 
 
 " There is my father," said she ; " he is very 
 gloomy. He is always prophesying evil. He pre 
 dicts bad of everything." 
 
 " Your father's daughter's friend declines to be 
 beaten in a fair argument by personality. Gene 
 ralities were never broken by specialties. Theories 
 are sometimes more vital than apparent facts ; and 
 even in the face of ocular demonstration, I choose 
 to adhere to principle based upon comprehensive de 
 ductions of general truths. 
 
 " Facts, I dare say, are very convincing and 
 important things to some people, but I have very 
 little respect for them. Julius Csesar, no doubt, 
 was a tremendous fact ; but, absolutely, Hamlet is 
 much the more real personage of the two. It 
 requires more imagination to conceive the existence
 
 1O2 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 of the great Roman, than of the Dane. To dress 
 him up, to put your fancy into the circumstances 
 of his life ; to see hhn walk and hear his voice ; to 
 shape before you his individuality and clearly perceive 
 his character, are nothing like so easy as with the 
 Shaksperian creation, who lives in your imagination 
 with such reality, vividness, and circumstantiality 
 of occupation, thoughts, looks, accent, temper, feeling 
 and suffering, that the actuality of his existence is 
 more positive than of any of the dim personages who 
 move through the remote arcades of history. What 
 are facts worth, then, if so much less vital than 
 imagination? Let those love them who may. 
 There are some fictions I would not exchange for 
 half the facts in all the world. If called upon to 
 choose, for instance, between the host of Romans 
 and the characters of Shakspeare, I would not 
 hesitate. Hamlet and the rest are dear to me ; 
 Caesar, Antony, Brutus, Portia, would have to go. 
 And with my Shaksperians I would have the 
 hearts of men. Beatrice would make them laugh ; 
 Juliet and Ophelia would make them weep ; Ham 
 let would be every man's brother ; Romeo, Orlando, 
 Jacques, Benedict, each should hold some inseverable 
 link to human hearts ; and around about us would 
 gather forever the sympathies and loves of the
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 103 
 
 world. Of Cato, or Pompey, or Portia, could this 
 be so ? A fig for facts. The richness of my soul 
 has not been drawn from them." 
 
 "I wish I could understand you," said Maggie, 
 " but I cannot." 
 
 " You confound fad with truth. Truth is a prin 
 ciple at the base of all things genuine, but facts are 
 frequently nothing more than isolated impertinences, 
 or physical accidents. Take Alexander and Othello. 
 In the first part of the career of the Greek, he hap 
 pened to be born. Now, matter-of-fact people take 
 unfair advantage of this little superiority over Othello, 
 who happened not to be born but I do not. Mate 
 rial truth made up one; aesthetic truth the other. I 
 do not choose to acknowledge any important differ 
 ence. Profane history, which somebody says is a 
 conspiracy against truth, gives us the conquering 
 Grecian ; poetical history, which is a conspiracy in 
 behalf of truth, gives us the Moor." 
 
 " Please to tell me," said Maggie, " if I am an 
 isolated impertinence, or physical accident ? I am a 
 fact, I suppose." 
 
 " Facts are impertinences, Mag, when thrust angu 
 larly into theory; when, by virtue of a perverse ex 
 istence they damage beautiful dogmas built up with 
 out their aid. For instance: the philosophers have 
 a theory that mind is an attribute of man. A good
 
 104 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 theory. I accept it. But lo! there comes along some 
 one, my man Patrick, we'll say, utterly without 
 mind, and where is the theory or where would be 
 the theory if Pat, having no manner of right to exist 
 at all; was not set down as a perverse, though per 
 haps not an isolated, impertinence ? Here fact and 
 theory meet in full tilt. Fact goes down at once, of 
 course." 
 
 " I don't know, sir, whether you are in jest or 
 earnest." 
 
 " Let talk, Mag, have its full play; let jest season 
 truth, and the playful mingle with the earnest. Be 
 sides, if we cannot be a little extravagant, and hang 
 about our chat the free caprices of humor, there is 
 very little use of talking at all. I will consent to be 
 wise at tunes, but homeopathically ; for in wisdom, 
 at least, I am sure the world is on my side, and will 
 take its doses in infinitesimals. 
 
 " Maggie, do you not know that this is my birth 
 day ? 
 
 " Why no, I did not." 
 
 " To-day, fifty years ago, the world begun." 
 
 " Sir ? 
 
 " Of course, Mag, that's absurd, as I see you think. 
 You would tell me that the world's natal day was 
 thousands of years ago. But all that is nothing to 
 me. What was before me, to me did not exist : and
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 105 
 
 hence you see, categorically, that the world begun 
 when I, by dint of sight, and ear, and touch, made it 
 out. Before that we were only each a chaos to the 
 other." 
 
 " You ought to have had a celebration, sir." 
 
 " Oh, no. Show me some way to roll back the 
 years, and I will get up a celebration with all my 
 heart. If birthdays commemorated years won, and 
 not years lost, I should ' smell holyday ' indeed, and 
 have good cause. Birthdays should be hung in black, 
 and not in festive ; for they mark not what we have 
 gained, but what we have lost. Life, unhappily, is 
 not gradation, but retrogradation. It is a downward 
 sweep, from and not to the ends coveted and strug 
 gled for." 
 
 When Maggie does not understand me, a look so 
 wistful and eager crosses her countenance, that I 
 make haste to explain without waiting for her wish 
 to find words. In response to this look I pro 
 ceeded: 
 
 " Life, my girl, has its face forever set towards a 
 goal ; but year by year, sees that goal more and 
 more distant. It started out with hopes that it could 
 nearly reach ; with honors almost touching its brow ; 
 with glory, and fame, and happiness, seemingly falling 
 into its upstretched hands. But with every year, 
 those hopes, and that happiness, have slowly receded 
 5*
 
 106 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 fading into cloudy distances, and up to inaccessible 
 heights. Life pursues them, until age comes down 
 upon the blood, the limbs, and the lusty vigor, and 
 they disappear, alas, forever. Life is a perpetual 
 labor of Sisyphus. It is the schoolboy's two steps 
 backward to one step forward. Nothing, nothing 
 more. I will keep no birthdays, which only mark 
 how far I sink away from the things I have sought ; 
 which notch darkly my fall, and not my rise. 
 
 " Indeed, with me, by weakness, perversity, or what 
 I cannot tell, misfortune hath travelled my road with 
 persistent companionship. I have been incessantly 
 climbing ladders with broken rounds at the top. 
 Some spirit of my destiny has taken apparent delight 
 in pulling the pegs out from my ventures, and bring 
 ing me to earth with concussive abruptness. 
 
 " I was about to sum up in one sentence, what life 
 is, but I find comparisons numerous, springing to my 
 lips. It would not be difficult to find one for each of 
 your five fingers, Maggie. Begin and count them off. 
 
 " Life is a see-saw one perpetual succession of 
 hopes up, and hopes down. We keep at the game, 
 until at some odd tune, we drop off into the grave." 
 
 " Oh, I think that's good !" exclaimed Maggie. 
 
 " Life is a pair of stairs long, high, and steep, 
 up which we are pricked by inexorable Tune, with no 
 turning back, and no landing-place at top.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 107 
 
 " Life is like a picture with a far perspective, seem 
 ingly reaching to almost interminable distances ; it 
 proves but a span from beginning to end. 
 
 " Life is a roast joint; it begins by being very well 
 done on the outside, is poorly done in the middle, and 
 ends miserably in a refuse bone." 
 
 " I don't think that very true." 
 
 "I do. Give me life fresh served. Youth is the 
 only true glory, and real good of life ; the only 
 savory, juicy portion of existence. Let me see. 
 Where are you now, Mag ?" 
 
 " On the little finger." 
 
 " The little finger must not come poorly off. Life 
 is like a river, in its youth rushing forward to the 
 ocean, which is the world, full of big dreams, and 
 swelling with the huge importance it feels itself 
 about to confer upon the sea ; it plunges in, and is 
 astonished to find itself swallowed up, and never 
 more heard of." 
 
 " I declare they are all unhappy ones." 
 
 " Yes, something misanthropical ; I season my 
 talk according to the spice of my nature. But I 
 concede that life is not always ' as tedious as a twice- 
 told tale.' It falls differently to different men. To 
 some, for instance, it is like a June day, calm, agree 
 able, and gentle ; others seem to experience nothing 
 but March, and to be incessantly travelling around
 
 io8 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 blustery comers. Still others know only December 
 snows, stern and silent with great grief ; some are 
 consumed with the passionate heat of August suns ; 
 merry May makes up the glad natures of others ; but 
 alas ! how few know the mellow and golden fruitage 
 of autumn 1 
 
 " But bless me, Mag, we have nearly talked the 
 fire out. Heap it up. A dull hearth is worse than 
 a dull friend." 
 
 " There, sir ; it blazes again." 
 
 " So ! Ah, Mag ! there is heart hi a fire. I have 
 whispered more secrets to a good blaze, than I 
 would dare unfold to other mortals." 
 
 " Other mortals ! Are you crazy, sir ?" 
 
 " There may be nothing human in a fire, Mag ; 
 but let me confess that if ever I should abandon 
 Christianity, it would be to turn fire-worshipper. It 
 is the only species of heathenism I could ever com 
 prehend." 
 
 " I have thought of a comparison," interrupted 
 Maggie, quickly, " which I like better than yours." 
 
 " I listen." 
 
 " Life is a maze ; we wander bewildered through 
 its labyrinths, unable to find the clue, but still de 
 lighted with the flowers and beauties scattered along 
 its mysterious ways ; and at last death proves our 
 Ariadne."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 109 
 
 " Classical and pretty. You learn aptly, Mag." 
 
 " I try to, sir." 
 
 " Who knows ? In time you may turn talker, 
 and I listener. You have matter enough, there is 
 no doubt, but expression is the rub. The science of 
 words is held in contempt by some. Such fellows 
 are not ankle deep. By words both imps and angels 
 can be stirred up ; dark passions, and generous good 
 ness, by turns, fructify under their influence. They 
 make and unmake revolutions. Justly fitted to noble 
 thoughts, they become their immortal framework. 
 
 " Unspoken thoughts are virgins. They must be 
 wedded to words ere they can attain perfect exist 
 ence ; and once united, they live and bear fruit for 
 ever. No decree can divorce them. Or to put it 
 another way ; a thought unspoken is a seed in the 
 mould. By due culture it will flower into words. 
 And to despise the blossom is to despise the thought 
 itself ; for the flower, the fragrance, and the germ at 
 the heart, are indissolubly wedded by mysterious 
 alchemy into one whole, which live or die together. 
 
 " Words may conceal thoughts ; then they are 
 bastards. Words may paint thoughts with great 
 exaggeration of color then the soil is too rich, and 
 should be tempered with clay ; they may also tamely 
 and meanly expound the hidden conception then 
 the soil is poor.
 
 lio A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " There is one sin society will not forgive silence. 
 For there is more dogmatism, intolerance, and 
 bigotry in your wrapt up and silent fellow, than in 
 the most vehement zealot that ever preached. I 
 met recently such a one. My humor, my sallies 
 of wit, my permissible social exaggerations, my 
 touches of sentiment, all fell like snow-flakes around 
 a stone ; while my opinions, and my rampant an 
 tagonisms, purposely shotted so as to provoke a 
 reply, glanced from his stolid heart, making no visi 
 ble impression. The fellow baffled, defeated, and 
 sent me about my business, crest-fallen, purely be 
 cause of an impassive silence, which seemed to 
 throttle every sentence, and to sit in dogmatic con 
 demnation upon every thought I uttered. 
 
 " I cannot talk with ease to people who employ 
 themselves in any way ; who write, or sew, or whose 
 fingers busy themselves with occupation. I have 
 met people, ladies particularly, who I dare say were 
 good listeners, but whose faces and eyes have been so 
 bent upon embroidery, or like employment, that con 
 versation invariably flagged or died out altogether. 
 They did not seem to understand that nothing so 
 fills the sails of conversation, and wafts it on its way, 
 as looks, nods, eye-glances, smiles, watchful atten 
 tion, exclamations properly distributed, and other 
 indications of an intelligent sympathy with the mat-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. ill 
 
 ter discussed. Stolid listeners are my abomination. 
 They are almost as bad as another class of bores in 
 society the story-tellers. I mean those who relate 
 embroidered, rambling, loquacious accounts of insig 
 nificant events who travel around the world to pick 
 up a pin ; who will give you the particulars of a 
 burnt pudding, with such circumstantiality of detail, 
 that if every word were a pudding, and burnt at 
 that, you would rather eat them all, than listen to 
 the bewildering particulars. 
 
 " Good listeners are a sort of merchandise in de 
 mand ; the supply is inadequate. They are a 
 species that the world likes ; it ought to crown them, 
 for the virtues they exhibit and the sufferings they 
 endure are wonderful. They stand up in deserts 
 of talk as patient and passive as the pyramids. 
 Some day a benignant Fox will canonize them in a 
 new book of martyrs. 
 
 " But something too much of this. What have 
 you read to-day, Maggie ?" 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 " Why, I saw you with books." 
 
 " But I could not read. I could only think." 
 
 " Of what ?" 
 
 " I hardly know." 
 
 " Thought, Mag, is clear and mathematical in its 
 processes. You dreamed rather than thought."
 
 112 A Bachelor's Stciy. 
 
 "Yes, you are right. I dreamed I wish I did 
 not wish I could not. My dreams do not make 
 me happy." 
 
 "That's bad. The dreams of the young should 
 be bright and glorious." 
 
 " Mine are sometimes, and then sometimes so 
 strange I cannot tell." 
 
 " Humph 1 morbid, I see. Too much melancholy 
 and sentiment. I must prescribe for you." 
 
 " What, sir ?" 
 
 " A puzzle. Something that will crystallize. 
 Mathematics might do. It is an old remedy. 
 Those ancient Greeks sharpened up their wits vastly 
 by its use. But the clock, a stern autocrat in every 
 household, tells a tale of late hours ; I saw just now 
 a look of weariness cross your countenance ; and 
 Ike has been stamping in the hall down-stairs for ten 
 minutes, full. Good night." 
 
 " Good night," said Maggie ; but she first put her 
 two hands silently in mine.
 
 VIII. 
 
 A salutation to our companion the grate The heart 
 and color in the olden life An idea of Keats which 
 Maggie carries out A midnight reading of Macbeth 
 surrounded by certain dramatic accessories Travelling 
 down the ages A hint to Maggie about Titania and 
 her folly.
 
 VIII. 
 
 ~1 T AGGIE." 
 
 JLf-J_ Maggie looked up from " David Cop- 
 perfield." 
 
 "Soon, Mag, the summer sun will close up the 
 grate, and extinguish the blaze. What shall we do 
 then ?" 
 
 Maggie glanced affectionately at the fire, and 
 with one hand smoothed the red glow upon the 
 other. 
 
 " But the summer is pleasant." 
 
 " Yes ; and in the soft twilight of a summer's 
 day, when Zephyrus, that gentlest son of Astraeus, 
 comes laden with fragrance, one drops dreamily 
 away into the great depths of fancy, as we do now." 
 
 " And that is as fine as our evening fire." 
 
 " I love my hearth, and the fancies that come to 
 life within its genial circle ; so do I love the green 
 sweetness of summer. But this I claim : the 
 great invention of man is the chimney. When 
 that was conceived, civilization became complete ; 
 
 115
 
 n6 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 humanity was blessed ; the barbaric and nomadic 
 fled before it ; peace and good will curled up in 
 every wreath of smoke that issued from its mouth. 
 Our chimneys open up to heaven, and through them 
 ascend burnt incense to all the amenities of life. 
 An old quaint writer calls them ' windpipes of 
 hospitality.' You must not ask me who, for I 
 should have to be frank and confess that I have 
 quoted at second hand. I do not know. 
 
 "But I see you are reading Dickens, the new 
 Shakspeare." 
 
 " The new Shakspeare ?" 
 
 " Sacrilege, some would cry out. I do not think 
 so. For these two men alone have given the world 
 characters so vital that they live in the heart and 
 brain of every man ; and sayings so instinct with 
 truth, and responsive to universal needs and sympa 
 thies, that they vein and permeate the whole mass 
 of popular idioms and phrases. And I will call 
 that man the new Shakspeare, whose knowledge of 
 human nature is so masterly that in this one su 
 preme test he can approach the delineator of 
 Hamlet." 
 
 "But" 
 
 "But me no buts. 'But' is 'the most envious 
 word in the language. It is a burr which sundry 
 people industriously stick into the side of greatness ;
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 117 
 
 a qualification ^rhich slips the pedestal from beneath 
 the feet of the exalted, and brings them down to 
 our own level. It is very much like Touchstone's 
 ' If.' You can praise a man ever so highly if after 
 wards you stab him with a ' but.' Conrad is a 
 wit and a scholar ; he has judgment, taste, elo 
 quence, refinement ; he is honest and upright. 
 One would think such a character a grand one 
 as the world goes. Not so but. It counts all his 
 virtues on its ten fingers is puzzled for a moment, 
 then looks portentous, and cries, ' but he has no 
 depth,' and shakes all the ten virtues in the air as 
 worthless. ' But ' manages to wriggle itself into 
 the character of the noblest ; it stops at no fame 
 or worth ; it even fastens itself upon a man like 
 Washington. It says ; yes, he was wise, prudent, 
 just, magnanimous ; but then, you see, he had no 
 genius. No genius ! I look up and down his 
 career and discover this wonderful fact his judg 
 ment, in all its ten thousand trials was never at 
 fault ! Find rae genius of mortal growth of which 
 this magnificent praise can be uttered, and I am 
 down on my knees to it ; I'll do salaams by the 
 week, sprinkle my head with ashes, and transfer to 
 it all that humility which I now feel when I stand in 
 the historical presence of "Washington. 
 
 " I was thinking to-day, Maggie, about a
 
 ii8 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 very great want picturesqueness. The world was 
 once in bright colors and gay figures, but they 
 are washed out ; the hues were not fast, and the 
 harsh attrition of labor and necessity have rubbed 
 them into dim and undefinable tints. The objective 
 or the external no longer has its day, and I am 
 sorry for it. Simple, honest, healthy natures flour 
 ish with its growth ; and if we had a little more 
 of the old grand pomp and pageantry the medie 
 val love for the splendid, the rich-toned and the 
 high-colored, and the ancient passion for life and 
 action, we should all be better and happier for it. 
 Upon my troth, I do believe that the monster 
 now sacking and destroying the world is Utili 
 tarianism, and I pray daily for some St. George 
 to appear and exterminate it. All the genial 
 richness of life has succumbed to it ; it has white 
 washed red-hearted life into pale-livered money- 
 getting ; it has substituted for broad, vigorous 
 existence, a cramped, narrow, dull, colorless species 
 of respiration, anatomically accurate no doubt, but 
 meaningless and soulless as lay figures. It has 
 knocked imagination on the head ; and poets, 
 painters, and romancers are put in pound for fear 
 they will transcribe the cribbed and cabined limits 
 of a circumspect, practical, and cautious utility. 
 Life now and once is as pale-sherry to old port ; or
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 119 
 
 as a cold, white-leaved, black-lettered book to a glo 
 rious old illuminated missal. 
 
 " But all life is a pendulum, and vibrates to oppo- 
 sites. The richness of external life being denied, 
 some have turned to the hot internal, or subjective, 
 and fed upon sentiments, emotions, and sensations, 
 unnatural and distorted, until their hearts are 
 heated up as goose-livers were in epicurean Rome. 
 Startling consequence, that on one hand shows us 
 all the bloom and heartiness of life, extinct ; and 
 on the other, sentiment and passion bloated into 
 loathsome proportions for the want of natural vent 
 and healthy action ! We have been like the scor 
 pion. Driven into a corner and no escape, we 
 have turned our fangs inward, and stung ourselves 
 to death." 
 
 " Are you not severe upon the age ?" 
 
 " No. I only slightly emphasize my condemnation. 
 I cry anathema, but know none will heed me ; and 
 perhaps for that very reason I pitch my voice a little 
 too high. But, then, the nineteenth century pats it 
 self so complacently, that it deserves to have its 
 favorite bubble of ' progress and enlightenment ' 
 pretty severely pricked." 
 
 There is a heat in my blood that sometimes bub 
 bles. I am prone to wax warm upon a subject, and 
 have been known to explode into indignation, to the
 
 12O A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 alarm and surprise of good-natured friends. But as 
 there is grey in my hair, so is there silver in my 
 blood. Both are somewhat hoar, and teach me to 
 cool my temper in the sure bath of silence. So dis 
 covering a foam and lash upon the surface of my 
 thoughts, I backed from controversial breakers into 
 the placid depths of measureless meditation, and was 
 stiU. 
 
 Ten minutes tripped along, and nothing spoke save 
 the clock. 
 
 " Maggie," said I at last, " why don't you 
 speak ?" 
 
 " I don't know what to say, sir." 
 
 " Candid and blunt. You hit the core of a truth 
 not with the point, but with the haft of your arrow. 
 Talk of the weather, if of nothing else. An old, 
 stripped, threadworn subject, you will say, sitting like 
 a beggar at the portal of every man's tongue ! A 
 mistake at least in America. For with us, its 
 manifold and inscrutable changes render it always a 
 fresh and piquant matter for discussion. It never 
 ceases to astonish, puzzle and bewilder. Other 
 countries have some sort of definable climate fixed 
 like their institutions. But with us Cancer, and Cap 
 ricorn, and all the zones from Arctic to Antarctic, 
 and all the winds born of ^Eolus and Aurora, have 
 assembled upon our shores, in compliance no doubt
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 121 
 
 with our indiscreet national invitation to the op 
 pressed of all nations, here to indulge in such free 
 license and merry independence, as only some other 
 of our guests can equal. In a free country we have 
 the freest of climates ; the seasons disregard their 
 allotted places ; frost and heat play at thimble-rig, 
 and get blessedly confused as to the locality in which 
 they really belong ; the zones and the winds are ir 
 retrievably puzzled, while the months jostle about 
 here and there quite oblivious as to their true place 
 in the calendar procession. In fact, our climate has 
 read the Declaration of Independence, and with true 
 democratic spirit defies law, order and subordination. 
 Is it a wonder then, if twenty millions of people find 
 the vagaries of the weather an inexhaustible source 
 of amusing and profitable discussion ? Byron says, 
 somewhere in his naughty ' Don Juan,' that in Eng 
 land they have no weather except for three months 
 in the year all the rest is nothing but rain. Now, 
 with us there is no lack of weather ; it is perpetually 
 weather ; the weather is incessantly up and doing ; 
 and very much like Bottom, the weaver, tries to play 
 every part all at once. Now it will bellow Boreas 
 from the North, and, in the same breath, fairly 
 ' roar you like a sucking dove from the South ' 
 jumping from Pyramus to Thisbe with alacrity like 
 that of Osrick's before the melancholy Prince. Are 
 6
 
 122 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 you unread, and ask me what melancholy prince ? I 
 say him whose last words I seem to see written on 
 every tombstone, ' the rest is silence !' 
 
 " But this weather. I apostrophize : you 
 weather the sex is uncertain and the apostrophe in 
 consequence rather awkward, but you weather ! 
 You've been an idle, vacillating, shiftless jade (but 
 jade is feminine) long enough ; we are tired of your 
 tricks and pranks. You are old enough to know 
 better, and to become that sober, grave, docile insti 
 tution the venerable bless my soul 1 that draught 
 has blown the candle out ! 
 
 " I make a discovery. The weather is feminine 1" 
 ***** 
 
 The night is rough ; the wind shakes the cottage ; 
 the rain comes drenching down ; the trees shriek in 
 the blast, and beat their branches wildly against the 
 window panes. I cause Maggie to open " Lear " and 
 read me this grand passage, while the storm roars its 
 accompaniment without : 
 
 " Blow winds, and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow ! 
 You cataracts and hurricanoes spout, 
 Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks ! 
 You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, 
 Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, 
 Singe my white head, and thou all-shaking thunder, 
 Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world !" 
 
 " Don't stop there, Maggie. Let me have the
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 123 
 
 fool's rejoinder sweet and tender boy, though a 
 fool." 
 
 MAGGIE. (Reading}, " nuncle, court holy water 
 in a dry house, is better than this rain water out . o' 
 door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughter's bless 
 ing : here's a night pities neither wise men nor fools." 
 
 " So the fool, Maggie, hangs his jests upon the 
 hem of Lear's passion. Shakspeare always sets the 
 grand in startling contrast with the grotesque, and 
 heightens the terrible by graduations of bitter 
 mirth. The shivering fool's doleful jests, let in be 
 tween Lear's fierce outbreaks, stir mixed emotions 
 and sympathies, terror, pity, tenderness, manifold, ex 
 quisite, and conflicting. How, too, Lear's abandon 
 ment seems intensified by the devotion of this one 
 poor crack-brained fool with his fantastic songs, who 
 ' labors to out-jest his heart-struck injuries.' I 
 always loved the fool in Lear, and that one brief 
 lament of the dying king ' And my poor fool is 
 hanged 1' moistens my eyes when I read it. Lear, 
 Cordelia, the Fool 1 In the gallery of fiction, I 
 hang green chaplets upon then* memories." 
 
 " It is strange how fond you are of tragedy." 
 
 " No it is not. We all like tragedies ; we begin 
 with ' Red Riding Hood,' and end with ' Hamlet.' 
 And he who loves tragedy, Maggie, stalks a hundred 
 feet above the cheap affairs of the world.
 
 124 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " But how the storm rages ! It must have been a 
 night like this, when Duncan was murdered. Keats 
 once said, that he would not dare to read ' Macbeth ' 
 alone in a house, at two o'clock in the morning. One 
 curious in sensations would find this an occasion to 
 try it. In that long loft of ours, for instance, Mag 
 gie, with its black fathomless recesses, its vaulted 
 roof, grim and dark with ribs of timber behind which 
 shadows lurk, its one uncurtained window, against 
 which the branches of the trees beat in wild and 
 weird-like shapes ; the rain on the roof, the wind 
 howling, shrieking, moaning through crevices all 
 awe-inspiring enough at this moment, I'll be bound. 
 It were almost worth the trial." 
 
 " I will do it, sir," said Maggie, jumping up. 
 " The murder scene, remember." 
 " The murder scene ; and I will go alone." 
 I was at first prompted to prevent the folly ; but, 
 after a moment's consideration, I determined to let 
 her whim have its way. She took the book and 
 candle firmly enough, certainly, and walked away 
 without the slightest evidence of hesitation or 
 timidity. 
 
 I could not repress some anxiety as I reflected 
 upon her peculiarly susceptible and imaginative tem 
 perament, but I knew her at heart to be exceedingly 
 courageous.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 125 
 
 The minutes, however, passed ; the first five slowly, 
 the next more swiftly, and I began to wonder at her 
 prolonged absence. Fifteen minutes, and still she 
 did not return. I listened eagerly, and the silence 
 of a hushed house, so peculiarly painful when you 
 strain to catch every sound, ticked its low beat in 
 my ear, suggestive of hidden and mysterious horrors. 
 I jumped up at last, and seized the candle, resolved 
 to follow her. I ran up the stairs so swiftly that my 
 candle was extinguished, but guided by glimmers of 
 a light through the cracks of the attic door, I hurried 
 forward, threw it open, and took two steps into the 
 room two steps, and stood suddenly still. The place 
 was all I have described it vast, mysterious, and 
 dismal even to terror. In the centre stood Maggie 
 with her single candle held close to the volume in her 
 hand, reversing the shadows on her face, and flinging 
 over it that ghastly, strange look, always given by 
 the upward glare of a candle ; while the dim light 
 seemed to roll back the shadows only to pile them 
 up in masses of opaque and Egyptian density. But 
 Maggie's face, attitude, expression, and voice raised 
 in passionate declamation, startled me. The scene, 
 with all its ghostly accessories, had not terrified, but 
 inspired her. Her face was white, her eyes flashing 
 and burning with such fire and passion as are lighted
 
 126 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 only in the soul of genius, while her voice poured out 
 in thrilling accents : 
 
 " Methought I heard a voice cry, ' sleep no more ! 
 Macbeth does murder Bleep' the innocent sleep ; 
 Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, 
 The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, 
 Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course, 
 
 Chief nourisher in life's feast ; 
 
 Still it cried, ' sleep no more !' to all the house ! 
 Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor 
 Shall sleep no more ; Macbeth shall sleep no more !" 
 
 Accents so crowded with expression, so thrilling 
 with passion and feeling, have rarely fallen from hu 
 man lips. But then Macbeth is not usually acted 
 with such surroundings. 
 
 I stood in silence for a few minutes ; and then, 
 with a loud voice broke abruptly upon the recitation. 
 Maggie gave a violent start, dropped the candle and 
 book, the light went out, and Cimmerian darkness 
 came down between us, out from the dark panoply 
 of which burst peals of passionate and hysterical 
 laughter one of those sudden and intense reversions 
 of feeling so common to her character. 
 
 Alarmed, I called out to her earnestly, groped 
 my way until I reached and seized her hand, 
 and then, as hastily as possible, led her down to my 
 study.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 127 
 
 " By Jupiter Tonans, Maggie," said I, with a 
 long-drawn breath, "we'll have no more nocturnal 
 readings of Macbeth 1" 
 
 " I wasn't frightened, sir." 
 
 " I dare say, but I was, mightily. I never saw so 
 ghostly a place in my life. In another minute that 
 Murder Scene would have brought a host of demons, 
 goblins, and the like, out of those mysterious nooks 
 and impenetrable corners, just as Der Freyshutz in 
 voked them with his charmed circle and incompre 
 hensible incantations." 
 
 " Why, sir, you don't believe in ghosts ?" 
 
 " Dr. Johnson said that ah 1 opinion is against them, 
 but all belief for them. I do believe in ghosts, such 
 as those that come and nightly people my room here, 
 when you are gone, and the midnight quickens the 
 visions of fancy into preternatural vitality. 
 
 " Ah, the shadows, then 1 Not merely the loved 
 and sleeping ones haunt me, but events and impres 
 sions take to themselves human shapes, and mingle 
 with the shadowy crowd. By the side of re-animated 
 realities move re-animated ideals. Old boyhood fan 
 cies and wild imaginings have palpable form and 
 historic shape. There appear in these ghostly visita 
 tions such fair forms and divine faces as once existed 
 alone in summer dreams. And stranger still, by 
 some mysterious reversion, the dreamed-of future is
 
 128 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 cast back into dim shadows of a greatness that might 
 have been. These are the ghosts, Maggie, which I 
 not only believe in, but love. I am potent among 
 them as Manfred was among his spirits ; they appear 
 at my command, and we commune together ; but 
 the mystic compact between us, unlike that of the 
 Alpine recluse, involves no commerce with Powers 
 who may rise some day and destroy me. And these 
 shadows of the past are sweeter and dearer to me 
 than all the unhallowed present. 
 
 " I denounce the present ; so does every man ; so 
 has all ages. Look back, and you will find every 
 period fixing its gaze upon tradition, and worshipping 
 those obscure virtues which loom vaguely and mistily 
 in delusive proportions, along the backward paths of 
 history. Time is a desert in which the sands rise 
 and bury ten thousand lowly things, leaving only the 
 grand and towering to lift their eternal shapes 
 against the horizon. Or to give you another com 
 parison, Tune is a filterer, through which events and 
 things are continually strained. Of the past there 
 comes down to us only a pure, sweet stream of re 
 membrances, while in the present we drink of the 
 flood, thick with the sand and mud that agitate and 
 ferment the passing currents, soon, however, to gravi 
 tate to the bottom. The unwise hurl their anathe 
 mas at the literature and intellect of the day, forget-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 129 
 
 fol that time has cast away the chaff of the past, and 
 brought to us only the grain ; forgetful that we are 
 to sift and winnow for the future, just as previous 
 generations have done for us. 
 
 " For myself, I love the past, because it is a jewel 
 set, shining upon me with a calm, pure light, and 
 mirroring in its reflected depths, such things as 
 neither song nor eloquence have power to depict 
 things which only to re-act I would take up ' sandal 
 shoon and scallop shell/ and travel backward 
 through my career. 
 
 " If that could be so. If life were two roads, 
 one down, and the other up the ages. If one could 
 turn from the unknown hereafter and wander back 
 ward amid the men and things of the Once 1 Should 
 I accept it ? Would it be well to travel forth along 
 known roads, amid giant ruins and grand memories, 
 walking alone with all the greatness of the past 
 through her silent arcades ? Oh, immensity of sen 
 sation 1 But the future ? How its unseen gran 
 deur thrills and fascinates me ! The past has its 
 Babylon, its Jerusalem, its Athens, its Carthage, its 
 Rome, its vast total of mighty accomplishment, and 
 by these I tremble at the possibilities of the future. 
 The very conjecture of all that shall come to pass, 
 appalls and confounds me. I feel as one standing 
 upon the ' bank and shoal of time ;' the ocean, 
 6*
 
 130 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 which is the past, thunders up to my feet, the future 
 stretches its blank mysterious vastness beyond, while 
 I stagger on my way, awe-struck and bewildered by 
 both the known and the unknown. 
 
 " But learning is nothing more than a man's eyes 
 in the back of his head, with their gaze forever fixed 
 upon the travelled road, while his face is turned 
 sightless against a walled up future, and events slip 
 by under his feet and startle him when they are past. 
 Learning will not deserve to be crowned, until it 
 can read forward as well as backward." 
 
 " I do not understand what you say ; I love to 
 think of the future. It is what I dream about." 
 
 " Fancy, Mag, creates a Utopian future ; it 
 makes to itself, paradises in which it disports but 
 it steals all its materials from the past." 
 
 " Not mine, for I have no past." 
 
 " Therefore your dreams are fantastic imaginings, 
 bearing no human or earthly complexion ; they 
 pierce nothing, prophesy nothing, but hang in mid 
 air and are made of sunbeams and cobwebs. Did 
 you ever hear of Titania ?" 
 
 " Who was she, sir ?" 
 
 " A queen." 
 
 " Of what country 1" 
 
 " Eden, I think. Her throne was a rose-bud, her 
 palace a white lily. Oberon was her king and con-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 131 
 
 sort ; Puck, their prime minister. In a strange 
 dream once, her eyelids having been washed by juice 
 of a flower pierced by Cupid's shaft, she fell in love 
 with a donkey." 
 
 Maggie flushed. " What then, sir ?" 
 " Look to your dreams, that's all. Fancy is apt 
 to be vagrant and gipsyish ; it takes sometimes to 
 the fantastic, and monstrous in short, falls in love 
 with donkeys, and awakes from its dreams down 
 cast and chop-fallen. [The penetrating reader sees 
 my drift ; I am thinking all this time of Maggie's 
 dramatic power so startingly displayed in the old 
 loft, and without showing her which way my fear 
 points, I am trying to sound a caution in her ears 
 which may at some hereafter tune forewarn and fore 
 arm. She is impulsive and has tragic passion how 
 far from right, then, am I in fearing, to a tempera 
 ment like hers, the most dangerous kind of donkey 
 a love of the stage ? Power and taste h'ke to travel 
 the same road ; and when Maggie comes to know 
 the institution, as she will some day, the powers 
 within her will be touched as with fire. Some such 
 path she must climb ; the ordinary would kill her ; 
 but other than this, with its myriad foot-falls I must 
 guide her to.] We all of us, Mag, go through 
 Titania's folly. I have in my time been enamored 
 of a good many donkeys and the recollection of
 
 132 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 them cannot be erased from my tablets. I cannot 
 forget ; they stick like thorns in the sides of my 
 self-complacency ; they tingle in my cheek even 
 now. 
 
 " Men may sin consciously, systematically, and be 
 come hardened to it, yet be tender-hearted at remem 
 brance of their contretemps, for remorse will prick 
 more sharply at the recollection of a faux pas than 
 of an innocent wronged, or a widow nndone. A 
 man will cut a throat, and blush at a word mis 
 spoken. The sins against society, as the world goes, 
 overtop the sins against morals. The fact is, Mag " 
 I turned towards her with the emphasis finger up 
 lifted she was asleep.
 
 IX. 
 
 A glance at Shady Side A summer reminiscence 
 A new sobriquet which I like A story of 
 
 THE MONOMANIAC 
 
 Something about novels old and new A few private 
 but rather dangerous sentiments. 
 
 183
 
 IX. 
 
 ~]\ /f" AGGIE," said I, stretching my feet upon 
 .IT JL the fender, and preparing for a long even 
 ing's chat, " the morning was so fine that I took a 
 long ride in the brisk, but pleasant air. Even 
 ' Shady Side ' where I paused briefly, looked warm 
 and pleasant notwithstanding the naked boughs and 
 the brown sod. The little river rushed dun and sad, 
 however, and seemed to mourn for the flowers." 
 " That ' Shady Side ' is your passion, sir." 
 "It is. Nature everywhere is my mistress; amid 
 the slopes and shady dells of that wooded bank, when 
 the summer sun is in the heavens, I am happy al 
 ways. Few know it ; rarely have other shadows than 
 my own been thrown across its green glades. I re 
 joice that its seclusion is so perfect, and I wander in 
 and out, up and down, with a certain sense of mas 
 tership, as if I were monarch of the scene It rarely 
 occurs to me that it is the property of John Jellaway, 
 Builder. Indeed, if John Jellaway, Builder, should 
 appear some day, and lay his hand upon it and call 
 
 135
 
 136 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 it his, I should be tempted to ignore title-deeds, and 
 all such miserable red-tape affairs, and defy John 
 Jellaway, Builder, to his face." 
 
 " I think that I like the beauties of nature, too," 
 said Maggie, " yet I am surprised that you do not 
 find them monotonous you who have seen so much, 
 and are so wise." 
 
 "I am a philosopher, Maggie, by my winter 
 hearth ; but in the summer tune I am such a rustic 
 gentleman as can be found upon any green hill-side 
 in the country, with an ambition for big cabbages, 
 and a worthy emulation for miraculous pumpkins. I 
 love my garden, my vines, my nurselings, and the 
 creatures that flourish around my threshold ; but 
 more than these, I love the reverie and the noontide 
 dreams the woodside, the brook, the siesta under 
 nodding elms, the far-off haze of sleeping moun 
 tains, the smell of hay, the light and shade in forest 
 masses, the songs of birds, the flower-jewels which 
 nature hangs upon her broad bosom, the glorious 
 emerald of the fields, the rich shades of the forest 
 depths, the white clouds against the fathomless blue 
 of heaven ! To him who loves these things, Mag, 
 there is no monotony, but ever-shifting variety and 
 change. To my eyes there is a new picture pre 
 sented every morning, when, like Guiderius and 
 Arviragus in Shakspeare's ' Cymbeline,' I stoop
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 137 
 
 through my low door-way and salute the heavens. 
 There are the same general outlines it is true, but to 
 my tutored perception, new combinations continu 
 ally arrange themselves before me. I have a trick 
 of separating and framing in bits of- a scene of see 
 ing one object amid many objects, and grouping 
 around it those accessories best suited to its disposi 
 tion and effect, and by an act of will, shutting out 
 from my vision whatever detracts or destroys. A 
 prospect is rarely one wide grand view to me it is a 
 gallery of pictures, a collection of fragments and iso 
 lated portions set in frameworks of my own. Some 
 times the picture is a group of cattle that always pic 
 turesque adjunct to a landscape ; sometimes a single 
 tree photographed, as I may term it, apart from its 
 fellows, upon the retina of the eye ; sometimes a group 
 of rocks ; frequently a cluster of trees in the forest. 
 In my loved ' Shady Side ' I have innumerable such 
 pictures, which I go to frequently and pause before 
 bits of the opposite shore of the stream ; some lean 
 ing, fantastically-shaped trees ; mellow patches of 
 sun-light, flung amid dense shades; openings in the 
 tree-tops, where the blue of the sky seems to come 
 down to the green fringes of the branches ; dark 
 pools, hemmed in with wild thickets ; park-like slopes, 
 flecked with sun-drops; meadows that open in a rich 
 breadth of light from your stand-point amid shrub
 
 138 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 and shadow; cascade-bits of the stream, where the 
 water tumbles and foams, and the shore rises tangled 
 and wild ; brook expanses (of which there are many 
 in this neighborhood), with jutting shore, overhang 
 ing rock, picturesque bridges! 
 
 " These are the things that, with me, disarm mo 
 notony that, with the ever-marching seasons and 
 the progress towards summer maturity or autumn 
 decay, present day by day new colors and forms. 
 My pictures not only change in themselves, but I am 
 always seeing them in new lights; and in that musing, 
 dreamy way of mine, I daily walk around them, dis 
 covering differences, observing, comparing, and watch 
 ing the changes and contrasts as they occur." 
 
 " Why, sir, you would make a rural poet." 
 
 " Ah, Mag, a love of these things is an inborn and 
 instinctive passion in the hearts of the sons of Adam. 
 It is the ' grand old gardener's ' love of Eden 
 dimly perpetuated through all his race a shadowy, 
 haunting, reminiscence of that first paradise. 
 
 " Do you know, Maggie, the name that some of 
 my neighbors have got for me ?" 
 
 " No, sir. What can it be ?" 
 
 " They call me Jacques melancholy Jacques. 
 How this name became suggested to them I cannot 
 tell, for I know of none who are readers of Shak- 
 speare. One more learned than the rest may possi-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 bly be familiar with the great poet, but the likelihood 
 is that some city spark has discovered my habits of 
 rumination and love of philosophic reverie, and pro 
 posed the sobriquet. Whoever he may be, I thank 
 him. ' As you Like It ' is a frequent poem in my 
 hands (as it ought to be in those of all others who, like 
 me, are wedded to woodland life), and the melan 
 choly meditations of rare old Jacques hit my humors 
 perfectly. How often do I, like him, 
 
 " ' Lay along 
 Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out ' 
 
 And moralize upon the ' body of country, city, 
 court !' I, too, ' suck melancholy out of a song/ 
 and ' love it better than laughing.' I differ only 
 from Jacques in having a little of the lover's 
 melancholy, which he disclaims ; but mainly, like 
 his, mine is compounded of many simples, extracted 
 from many objects, and the ' sundry contemplation 
 of my travels, in which my rumination often wraps 
 me, is a most humorous sadness.' 
 
 " But as usual, Mag, I have drifted a long way 
 from the point for which I set out. I begun to tell 
 you of my morning ride. It led me up a mountain 
 to which I sometimes wander ; and on the brink 
 of one of its grand precipices, where the torn, jagged, 
 but upright wall scaled from the bed of a rocky
 
 140 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 stream hundreds of feet, I recalled a little sketch, 
 set down years ago, from facts which fell in my 
 way, and I resolved to read it to you to-night. 
 Will you listen ?" 
 
 " A story ?" 
 
 " Yes, I think you may call it a story." 
 
 " Then I shall listen with all my heart." 
 
 " And I begin. I will call it 
 
 " ' THE MONOMANIAC.' 
 
 " An old man, not so old as threescore, nor so 
 young as to escape whitening locks and the ine 
 vitable crow-feet, very sad in manner, abstracted 
 perpetually in a meditative mood, which gave a 
 ruminant glance to olive-shaped, dreamy eyes ; sim 
 ple and unprosperous in attire ; a slow walker, with 
 his eyes on the pebbles two yards ahead of his 
 feet came every day to the edge of a precipice two 
 hundred feet high, and standing upon its brink, 
 endeavored to wind his resolution up to the point 
 of performance essayed to fling himself from his 
 rocky throne into death and eternity. But his 
 courage, wound too high for its tender spring, daily 
 gave way ; the heart refused to comply ; the flesh 
 was weak, and shrunk from that harsh contact with 
 the flinty rocks, which the will had assigned it to 
 endure.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 141 
 
 " Weary of life, poor, sad, without friends, a torn 
 link from a chain of lost associations, the future 
 offered only such dull monotony, and promised merely 
 such prolongation of the terrible sadness and weari 
 ness which had gathered about his heart, that he 
 longed to return the unprofitable gift of life, and 
 to escape either to everlasting silence, or to a world 
 where existence would be more tolerable than in 
 this. But, unhappy man ! He had neither the 
 courage to live nor the courage to die. With the 
 rising of every sun he went forth with fresh reso 
 lution ; with the setting of every sun he came back 
 with his head upon his breast his purpose unac 
 complished. 
 
 " ' It is so terrible/ he would murmur, looking 
 down the fearful space ; ' I dare not attempt 
 the cold plunge into the air I shrink from that 
 downward, arrowy cleaving, with the still air rush 
 ing by like a gale ; then, too, the sudden up-coming 
 of the earth the crash of the rocks through your 
 brain the terrible force of a world impelled upon 
 you for so, I have learned, are the sensations of 
 a falling man. Yet, in these long distances, life 
 does not hold, some assert, until the bottom is 
 reached ; the blood falls into the head, brimming it 
 to the chin, and insensibility, catching you as you 
 fall, wraps the body in an impenetrable panoply,
 
 142 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 and drops it with tender unconsciousness upon the 
 rocks.' 
 
 " And so, day after day, he took his stand upon 
 the edge of the precipice, looked wistfully down 
 to the dwindled shrubs, and while he longed for 
 the courage to take the fatal plunge, curiously 
 speculated and philosophized upon the deed, upon 
 the Hereafter into which it would usher him, and 
 upon the suffering he would experience by the way. 
 
 " ' How swift !' he exclaimed once as he dropped 
 a stone over the precipice and watched it as it fell ; 
 ' the time is almost measureless. If the way were 
 lined with flaming swords, the ordeal would not be 
 severe. A spring a quick spasm and eternity. 
 Yet that time and space, so short to the calm 
 looker-on, would be an age to the victim, for our 
 measures and divisions of time convey no indication 
 of duration ages and moments, years and hours 
 have their sensible span in the circumstance of the 
 man only. An hour to the prisoner is the slow du 
 ration of sixty times sixty agonizing and prolonged 
 respirations to the lover a swift ecstasy. 
 
 " ' But ah, courage is all. Even insensibility is 
 better than this over-keen perception of possibili 
 ties. If I could stunt my imagination, give 
 my speculations wings, and see before me but 
 the one clear fact, that death would quickly fol-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 143 
 
 low the plunge, I should master my irresolution at 
 once, and consummate the purpose now. But alas ! 
 I see too far, too much ; my imagination fills up the 
 brief period between the leap and the death with 
 innumerable horrors ; it lines the way with undis 
 covered and unknown agonies ; it divides the seconds 
 of time into thousands of sub-divisions, and for each 
 sub-division it conjures up and creates a special and 
 perceptible sensation. But even if all that my fancy 
 pictures were true, I should brave them if I pos 
 sessed the courage. And there it is. How well do 
 I know my weakness ! From the beginning all that 
 I have suffered I trace back to this one great need 
 the misery which prompts me to end my career, and 
 the weakness which compels me to live on and en 
 dure, each arises from the same cause a timid 
 heart !' 
 
 " The old man's head fell upon his breast, and he 
 thought of his past of that irresolution manifested 
 through all his life, which had robbed him of much 
 good, and held forever the prizes of life within his 
 eager gaze, but beyond his feeble up-reaching. 
 Others had plucked up honor by the locks, while he 
 stood upon the brink of the flood letting 'I dare 
 not wait upon I would.' Boldness, courage, tena 
 cious adherence to chosen paths, had brought other 
 men mellow and fruitful autumns with him a thou-
 
 144 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 sand paths abandoned, enterprises of pith and mo 
 ment foregone, all because of a vacillating weakness, 
 and timid shrinking from consequences, from endur 
 ance, and from action ! 
 
 " He was a philosopher, curious and fine in specula 
 tion, subtle in reason, admirable in the reach and 
 breadth of his intelligence ; but allied to his fine 
 mental organization was great physical and moral 
 timidity. He lacked the courage and the motive for 
 exertion ; he shrunk from the collisions and an 
 tagonisms of the world. Most thoroughly unfitted 
 for the brisk pursuits and active struggles of life, 
 chance had thrown him into the very midst of its 
 whirl and clamor. Thus in his old age we find him 
 with an unhallowed past, an unhopeful future, and a 
 present which bore down upon him with a weight 
 almost beyond endurance. He had long since slipped 
 from the active avenues of life, and hid himself in soli 
 tude ; his only desire was to die ; his philosophy had 
 reasoned from the old Roman view, and sanctioned 
 self-destruction as the privilege of his race ; he 
 lacked only the ability to execute that which his 
 heart desired and his reason sanctioned. 
 
 "So the old man hovered about the precipice. 
 Weeks, months passed away, and even a second 
 summer found him daily ascending and descending 
 the mountain, as infirm of purpose as at the begin-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 ning. But the contemplation of one object had 
 unsettled his mind a little ; his eye was unsteady in 
 its gaze ; his walk was irregular ; his manner more 
 dejected than ever. At times his fancy would now 
 give a fantastic direction to his thoughts. He 
 evinced great eagerness in the phenomena of falling 
 bodies ; he searched for the written experience of 
 those who had survived great falls ; he acted and 
 reacted, in imagination, the sensations so likely to be 
 experienced ; he pictured ever his crushed form upon 
 the rocks, with upturned face white in the sunlight, 
 and very strangely seemed to feel a horrible pleasure 
 in the fancy. 
 
 " One day, as he lay stretched upon a rock which 
 projected over the precipice, a lad from the village 
 came wandering near in search of wild berries. It 
 was an open-faced, frank-eyed boy of about fourteen 
 years. The solitude of the monomaniac was so 
 rarely disturbed, that at the first sound of the boy's 
 foot he evinced vexation ; but suddenly brighten 
 ing up with a new thought, he called the lad to 
 approach. 
 
 " ' Boy,' said he, ' how far can you fling a 
 stone ?' 
 
 " ' Oh ! ever so far, sir,' replied the lad, with a 
 proud look. 
 
 " ' Let me see you. Throw it as high above you 
 1
 
 146 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 as you caii let it fall over the edge of the pre 
 cipice.' 
 
 " The boy very eagerly ran to pick up a stone, and 
 the old man, with his finger upon his pulse, watched 
 the missile as it flew high in the air, until it reached 
 its utmost height, and seemed to pause suspended for 
 an instant, and then swiftly descending, plunged into 
 the gulf of space far below the watchers. 
 
 " ' Not ten pulses 1' muttered the old man ; ' and 
 yet better if it had been longer. The speed is too 
 swift the heart would start and snap at such 
 velocity.' 
 
 " ' Shall I throw another ?' inquired the boy, who 
 thought his companion a jolly old fellow. 
 
 " ' Roll that large stone over the edge. Stop, I 
 will help you. It is too heavy for one.' 
 
 " The man and the lad tugged at the rock, by 
 strained muscle got it to the edge, and toppled it 
 over. As it slipped from the brink the old man fell 
 upon his knees, and, with head bent down, watched 
 the descent. The rock rushed with a noisy whir, 
 struck a projecting tree near the bottom, and bent it 
 up like a twig, bounded off and fell upon the angular 
 point of a rock with a concussion that startled the 
 listeners above, and split the piece in twain. 
 
 " ' Terrible !' exclaimed the monomaniac with a 
 shudder, but with his gaze eagerly fastened upon the
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 147 
 
 spot. ' If a body how mangled, crushed, battered 
 nothing human in its semblance would be re 
 tained ! But the blow would eject the spirit at 
 once the soul would fly out as body and rock came 
 together. The terror after all is in the spectator ; 
 the horror, the agony, the suffering in the imagina 
 tion and the sympathy of those who look upon the 
 tragedy ; to the actor, nothing but a tingling, and 
 he drops into spaces which are infinite he cleaves 
 into eternity like an arrow, he shoots among the 
 stars a soul fresh from earth, warm yet with the 
 pulse of its old life. How clearly it is so,' he mut 
 tered ; ' how easy to make this respiration the last 1 
 Yes, I will do so. This boy shall watch me as we 
 watched the stone. The horror will all be his ; he 
 shall suffer, and shrink, and cover his eyes ; and I 
 shall only take wings and fly into futurity.' 
 
 " He laughed low and fearfully. Presently he re 
 sumed : ' It was well thought. To make him the 
 sufferer to have another by to experience all the 
 pain. Now I will do it. The impulse has come at 
 last. Bear me quickly, you pleasant airs, to my 
 doom.' 
 
 " He stood up close on the verge, with his back to 
 the frightful gulf, closed his eyes, and appeared to 
 prepare for the plunge. Suddenly the arms of the 
 boy were thrown about his limbs.
 
 148 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " ' Oh ! sir, sir, don't ! don't !' cried the boy, very 
 white and with spread eyes. ' You will kill your 
 self. I am sure you will. Please, sir, don't.' 
 
 " The man tried to shake off the grasp of the boy ; 
 but the lad, though terrified at the horrible attempt 
 at self-destruction, was really courageous, and clung 
 firmly to his knees. The struggle was brief. The 
 elder's resolution faded away like the extinguishing 
 of a candle ; he grew dizzy and sick, and walked 
 away from the danger and the temptation. 
 
 " The boy, not insensible to the horrible, and loving 
 after the fashion of other humans whatever afforded 
 him a sensation, came eagerly to the cliff the next 
 day. He found the old man there, with his brow 
 upon his hand, so abstracted that the boy had to 
 put his hand upon his shoulder before his presence 
 became known. 
 
 " ' Ah !' said the elder, looking up. ' It is you. 
 I recollect. What is your name, lad ?' 
 
 " ' John Coombs.' 
 
 " ' John,' rising and whispering very eagerly in his 
 ear, ' did you ever fall from a high place ? from a 
 church steeple, say ?' 
 
 " ' No, sir,' replied the boy, laughing ; ' why, that 
 would kill a fellow, wouldn't it ?' 
 
 " ' No, no,' said the old man ; ' for I fell last night 
 down a space ten tunes higher than the highest
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 149 
 
 steeple, and here I am. Alive 1 am I not ? This is 
 life, boy ; is it not ?' 
 
 " The lad stared and was puzzled. 
 
 '"I will tell you my fall ; I know the way every 
 inch. First I shot out into the air, and my heart 
 leaped with such a bound it nearly burst ; then I 
 felt myself cutting through an atmosphere armed 
 with sharp points, and through my frame, from head 
 to toe, ran a cold current which tingled in the ex 
 tremities ; then my head grew swollen, and around 
 it was wound a band which cut into my brain. My 
 head grew hot while my heart grew cold so terribly, 
 horribly cold. Then a bloody film spread over my 
 eyes ; the sun looked blood-shot, the earth like a 
 battle-field, and the sky pressed down and around 
 me. Then my breast became encircled with a 
 bandage, below which I could not breathe ; respira 
 tion stopped short in the neck ; I could only get brief, 
 agonizing gasps. My limbs grew suddenly heavy 
 and of dead weight, my head expanded almost to 
 bursting, and the blood trickled from ears, nose and 
 mouth, but still down down I clove through the 
 air. It parted before me like waves, and closed be 
 hind with a palpable rush. Sound became magni 
 fied ; my nerves became touched as with electricity ; 
 sight alone was confused. First, great gaunt, pen 
 dant trees swept by it was down a rocky precipice
 
 150 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 then huge, seamed, riven rocks ; then smooth-hewn 
 surfaces, rain-stained with a million storms ; then 
 jutting, gnarled, angular trees, fantastic and hideous 
 in form ; then vines and low shrubs, wild, tangled 
 and clinging to crevices ; then chasms, where eternal 
 shadows clung ; then suddenly, up-sweeping with pre 
 cipitate and heedless force, rushing through the air 
 with a velocity horrible to behold, came the earth, 
 and with terrible force it crushed through my body 
 through and through mangling and battering it, then 
 suddenly left me floating beyond in a serene and 
 beautiful atmosphere.' 
 
 " ' A dream, sir, wasn't it ?' whispered the boy, 
 awed by the tale. 
 
 " ' A dream ? So, possibly. Yet it was fearfully 
 real real enough to have been true. All the 
 agony, the suffering, the prolonged terror, and no 
 result ! no death after all ! It is monstrous, boy. 
 A life drops off into eternity every second since we 
 have been talking a good hundred or so have sped 
 into heaven or hell, and yet I, who long to go, can 
 not escape from my prison.' 
 
 " ' Oh, my !' said the lad, choking down certain 
 tendencies to fright, and trying to think the affair 
 only a joke, ' why don't you shoot yourself ? I 
 would.' 
 
 " ' That's not it/ replied the old man, testily. ' I
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 151 
 
 know what my doom must be eventually. There is 
 my grave.' He pointed to the foot of the preci 
 pice. ' It is not the fact I doubt, lad ; I know 
 well enough, sooner or later, that my ribs and limbs 
 must be broken on the rocks below but I would 
 hasten the hour. I would have it now, and it can 
 not be." 
 
 " The boy began to fear that his strange compan 
 ion would make another attempt to throw himself 
 over the precipice, and while he half wished he 
 had stayed away, experienced no little of the 
 strange fascination which so mastered the elder. 
 Indeed that boy, healthy in his sympathies, but 
 with certain uncultured appetites, might, under cir 
 cumstances conducive, be educated into the old 
 man's accomplice and sympathizer. In the heart 
 of the lad, although a green sapling seemingly 
 sound to the core, could rapidly have sprung up a 
 love of blood and death a coarse, vile, dark passion 
 for torture, suffering and blood such a passion as 
 animated the spectators of old gladiatorial contests. 
 
 " How easy to see the passion working ! In that 
 boy's heart pure, frank, fresh, and true lay pas 
 sions dormant : the passions of avarice, of power, 
 of lust, of blood ! Not one that could not be stim 
 ulated, not one that had not already lifted its hydra- 
 head, half waking at some fierce temptation
 
 152 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 not one that had not already stirred its coils, and 
 prepared for that struggle for mastery, so sure to 
 come ere manhood crown him. And if the 
 tempter played upon these passions, fed them, 
 pricked them into activity, how soon out of his 
 calm blue eyes would flash the blood-red glance of 
 Murder ? how soon would his brain grow hot with 
 the thirst of Cam ? 
 
 " It is not difficult to image this development, 
 nor do we in supposing it to do violence to truth 
 and nature. May Heaven be blessed for tempta 
 tions withheld 1 We have many, and sin vastly, 
 but the good that is in us is too much the unfretted 
 surface of a stormless sea. When the winds rise, 
 our frail crafts of Yirtue sink swiftly, or float tat 
 tered wrecks upon the waves. 
 
 " But the old man was infatuated, not depressed ; 
 he sought no evil upon the boy ; and the lad 
 himself was in the main hearty and true. Like 
 most lads, his sensibilities were unrefined, but his 
 impulses were genial, robust, and sound, and these 
 got the best of a temporary hot flush of morbid 
 feeling. Moreover, in his own way, he was both 
 intelligent and shrewd. Seeing, or fancying that 
 he saw, a movement on the part of the monomaniac 
 which threatened the consummation of the tragedy, 
 he suddenly clapped his hands, and shouted :
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 153 
 
 " ' Oh ! look there ! Ain't it funny ?' and darting 
 up a little bank, seized an odd mountain growth, and 
 waved it before the eyes of his companion. ' Isn't 
 it queer, sir ?' continued he, with a bright glance 
 and a laugh. 
 
 " The old man was curiously learned in the sciences; 
 his attention was caught, his interest excited. An 
 old, long dormant passion was faintly revived, and 
 he begun with a manner gradually increasing in 
 warmth, to explain to his listener the mysteries 
 of the plant. The boy was receptive, and listened 
 wide-mouthed to the learned exposition of the 
 scholar. The fresh, clear magnetism of the boy 
 had aroused a responsive feeling in the elder the 
 first hour they met, and now this new relation 
 intensified the sympathy. The old man, worn, dull, 
 clogged, turned his heavy heart up to the sunlight 
 of youth, and seemed slowly stirred into life by con 
 tact and collision with the crisp, sharp newness of 
 feeling in the breast of his companion. 
 
 " The fount thus opened was not soon exhausted. 
 They walked down the mountain together, the would- 
 be suicide for once forgetful of his sorrows and his 
 sadness, the lad with such new sensations awakened 
 as he had never known before. 
 
 " From that hour these two met daily magnetic 
 opposites in harmonious unison. Both were tutors ; 
 T*
 
 154 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 both scholars. The grey-beard opened his store of 
 learning, poured into the empty vessel at his side the 
 rich accumulations of long years spent in the academic 
 groves, and received in return those boons more pre 
 cious even than learning the pure, fresh, vital flow 
 of peace and health. From that humble, ignorant, 
 half-clad boy he drew the wisdom of life a wisdom 
 which drove the demon of Unrest from his heart. 
 
 " It is unnecessary to follow step by step this old 
 man's rescue from his terrible infatuation. Affections 
 and sympathies long dormant sprang up into vigorous 
 life ; he turned from self, that dangerous inward 
 brooding which to all men is a disease, and in health 
 ful fellowship and love discovered the antidote to those 
 corroding, self-inflicted sorrows which so long had been 
 his bane the clouds that obscured but did not ob 
 literate the lights of humanity." 
 
 " I think, sir," said Maggie, after my little tale 
 was told, " that you ought to write a novel." 
 
 " Why ?". inquired I, curiously. 
 
 " Because grand novels are better than anything." 
 
 " Better than plays V 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 " Than poems ?" 
 
 " Better than anything. I don't know why. When 
 you read poetry, I am delighted ; when I read it my-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 self, I am only half pleased. It requires so much art, 
 and I've heard you say so, too, to read poetry well. 
 But a novel is always intense enjoyment." 
 
 " Which do you like best, the old or the new." 
 " I don't know ; I like them when they are good." 
 " A wise preference. There are those who can 
 make a keener distinction, however. Novel-writing, 
 like other matters, has changed, and perhaps pro 
 gressed. When steam was discovered, not locomo 
 tion only was pricked into new activity, but the 
 mystic force infused itself into all the affairs of 
 men. For six thousand years the blood-human had 
 moved sluggishly, but simultaneously with the appli 
 cation of this ingenious motor to the propulsion of 
 keel and axle, the heart of civilization began to boil 
 and bubble steam appeared to be suddenly gene 
 rated in the brains of men, and universal rush and 
 haste exhibited itself everywhere, in science, art and 
 even philosophy. Novel-writing did not escape. 
 The old-fashioned stage-coach novel was tripped up, 
 and a jaunty, fast, clever, rattling successor seized 
 the reins and cracked his whip in our ears. 
 
 " But what a stately, grand, decorous affair the 
 novel was, Maggie, in the olden tune. How method 
 ical in form, polished in diction, elaborate in style 
 moving with calm, unruffled progress as moved our 
 grandmothers in hoops, furbelows, and powder ! No-
 
 156 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 body thought, in that blessed period, of becoming in 
 terested in a novel before the second volume. It was 
 an understood thing that a certain quantity of dull 
 ness a purgatory of preliminaries was necessary 
 before the reader could expect to experience the full 
 interest of the story. But all this is not the modern 
 way. We are too impatient now for preliminaries, 
 introductions, and preparatory flourishes once so in 
 evitable. We demand to be startled at the begin 
 ning. We must bolt at the pith at once. Indeed, 
 it is all now very like taking a cold bath we turn 
 over the title page and jump in 1" 
 
 " That's true enough," said Maggie, laughing glee 
 fully, " and some of our modern writers see what they 
 can do to surprise us in the first sentence." 
 
 " I do not like, Maggie, to bolt into a parlor and 
 astound the company. It is more agreeable to 
 familiarize oneself to the assembly by degrees, and 
 allow the spirits to rise as the acquaintance deepens. 
 A novel, Mag, should be like Bridget's broth." 
 
 " Why, how, sir ?" 
 
 " You clap it on the fire cold, and let it warm by 
 gradual degrees until the boiling point is reached 
 then wisk it off your novel is cooked ! 
 
 " But I am not disposed to accept the old way 
 altogether. Melinda over her embroidery discussing 
 with such transcendent sweetness all the cardinal
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 157 
 
 virtues, in wonderful syntax, or Lord Montaine mak 
 ing love to Clarissa in such unendurable good gram 
 mar, and receiving the lady's blushing Yes in the style 
 of a homily were things which delighted, no doubt, 
 our fine old grandmothers, but would scarcely prove 
 acceptable to an age which insists that art shall come 
 down from her stilts and shake hands with nature 1 The 
 novel of old was an essay on virtue rich, stiff, and 
 showy, like old brocade a matter of grand toilettes, 
 exasperating propriety, powder, pumps, and rose- 
 water. But the novel of the present grasps 
 the utmost range of philosophy and nature ; 
 it delves into the mysteries of life, and with vast 
 subtlety dissects human motives and human passions. 
 It is the scalpel, laying open the heart of the 
 world!" 
 
 " Whose novels are the best ?" 
 
 " I canuot say. I am no umpire to venture upon 
 absolute dicta. So many excellences commingle in 
 the pages of all, so many spots dull the brightness of 
 the most ambitious, that I know of none to crown 
 above his fellows. For Dickens I have a warm cor 
 ner in my heart ; for Thackeray an admiration that 
 grows upon what it feeds. He is an artist who glides 
 into your sympathies, you scarcely know how, and by 
 insinuation the most subtle and powerful, infuses his 
 magnetism into your heart. He tints his pictures,
 
 158 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 rather than paints them, but the colors are fast ; 
 Dickens, on the contrary, lays on broad masses of 
 color keeps up his effects in startling lights and 
 shades. His humor is as broad and round as a Dutch 
 man ; his tragedy out-Rembrandts Rembrandt 
 opaque, dark, fearful ! 
 
 " But the man for whom I have ever an eager 
 sympathy is Hawthorne. To him my whole nature 
 turns up, like a peach to the sun. I ripen under the 
 warm, rich fullness of his genius; the tint and tone 
 of his mind flood through and through the chambers 
 of my soul, and light them up with mellow eloquence 
 of feeling. Under Hawthorne, I am more than my 
 self dead faculties spring up ; the imagination wells 
 to the brim and overflows; the life that is in me is 
 new-touched!" 
 
 " I have read the Scarlet Letter," broke in Maggie, 
 " and I think that I too had some such feelings." 
 
 "Possibly, Maggie; but I've observed lately that 
 you have fallen into the way of young ladies, and 
 have crammed yourself to repletion with various 
 watery novels, classified, I believe, under the general 
 name of ' domestic.' " 
 
 " Everything that I have read has been good!' 
 exclaimed Maggie, with some spirit. 
 
 " I bend my neck, and believe humbly," replied I, 
 in a tone which flushed Maggie's cheek. " But still,
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 159 
 
 Maggie, these novels which you have been reading, 
 although they are applauded in parlors, commended 
 by mild parsons, and receive the sanction of circum 
 spect dames, have not, ordinarily, vitality enough to 
 agitate a snail. A heart as deep as the ribbed edge 
 of a dime, would be beyond their fathom; they are 
 swallow novels, that skim along the surface of society, 
 and tip their beaks through the thin surface to catch 
 little fishes ; polite and proper novels ; novels of 
 skimmed commonplaces, with ill-cooked dinners for 
 catastrophes, pricked fingers and soiled silks for inci 
 dents; tapery, babies, small theology, and all the 
 milder-mannered passions for machinery novels, with 
 out one genuine, free, hearty pulse-beat from initial 
 to finis ! They are mostly written by women " 
 
 " Oh, but," cried Maggie, with warmth, " women 
 have written splendid novels Currer Bell, for in 
 stance." 
 
 " Of course, I shall not permit you to break your 
 lance so zealously, Maggie; I forestall you by confess 
 ing to the fact. Noble novels have been fathered by 
 women " 
 
 " Why, that's a bull, sir." 
 
 " Let it pass. But the most astonishing of all 
 novels are the theological ones. Women never have 
 any difficulties : the dear, little, clear-headed angels 
 see through the mysteries, philosophies, metaphysical
 
 160 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 subtleties, ethical problems, that puzzle and perplex 
 the astutest of learned and wise men, with a facility 
 wonderful and admirable. They disentangle an awk 
 ward question in theology as easy as a snarled skein; 
 or if the knot prove a little tough, they whip out 
 their scissors, and clip the Gordian puzzle. 
 
 " Indeed, I must confess that the thing least to be 
 endured with patience in a novel is a heroine scarcely 
 out of pinafores, given to white muslin and the ab 
 strusities, running about and disposing of grave and 
 vexed questions with a flippant assurance deserving 
 of nothing so much as boxed ears, and venturing, 
 with the audacity of ignorance, into those seas where 
 brave and wise men can find no soundings. Bread 
 and butter theology is very fashionable, I know ; but 
 I prefer young women who can leave these things to 
 then* betters." 
 
 " But do not the novels you speak of teach a good 
 moral ?" 
 
 " Their very fault. Knowingly, I will not read a 
 novel with a moral." 
 
 " Well, I declare 1 You talk so strange, sir. I 
 would suppose a good moral novel the very 
 thing." 
 
 " Has Niagara any moral ? let me ask ; or Mont 
 Blanc? or the Mammoth Cave? or the Highlands 
 of the Hudson ? or my loved Shady Side ? Such
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 161 
 
 morality as lives in the beautiful, the sentiment of 
 the sublime, and its divine expansion of heart and 
 soul ! No more. Novels are pictures of life, and 
 have artistically no more to do with ethics than the 
 canvases upon my walls. We want color, vitality, 
 movement, drama in our novels ; we read them that 
 we may put ourselves into shapes other than our 
 own ; the heroism, valor, sentiment, life, are all ours, 
 reflected in the page before us. We do not ask nor 
 seek for homilies ; we ask merely for a photograph 
 of life, in its exact tint and form. The novel, in 
 short, should always be dramatic, never didactic. 
 If it preach, it is an abomination. We might just 
 as well look for a wise maxim pinned to Niagara, as 
 for a moral clapped to the pages of a novel." 
 
 " My father says that amusement should always 
 be combined with instruction ; and novels therefore 
 should do something more than entertain." 
 
 " Yes, for first and second childhood, possibly. 
 But I deny the premises. I decline being in 
 structed ; I refuse permission for any gentleman, 
 under cover, to trick me into the knowledge of any 
 thing. I will, of my own free will, elect what I 
 shall learn, but no homilies, sugared over with delu 
 sive names no vagabondizing lecturers, prosaic and 
 soporific no ponderous gentlemen, who flourish in 
 amiable paragraphs in the corners of the newspapers
 
 162 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 none of these shall make a victim of me. I was 
 not born to be filled up with Tom, Dick and Harry's 
 refuse ; to be crammed with every would-be-moralist's 
 wise saws ; to be stuffed with sage maxims at the 
 option of every shallow-brained philanthropist who 
 crosses my way. I ask of poets, novelists, essayists, 
 wit and sentiment. They may make me laugh, or 
 by skillfully touching the fount of tears, make me 
 weep. My imagination unfolds, and will warm under 
 the touch of every man who can bring to it susten 
 ance and light ; but no one shall slip facts into the 
 machinery without my consent ; no man shall choke 
 me with proverbs ' and such small deer ' while I have 
 power to resist." 
 
 "Why, sir, you are the most incomprehensible 
 man I ever met. Now tell me, sir, if you had 
 a daughter, what would you begin by teaching 
 her ? 
 
 " Trigonometry I" 
 
 " My goodness 1" exclaimed Maggie, and laughed 
 merrily. 
 
 " All mathematics," said I, resuming ; " for I tell 
 you, Mag, that no one can think around a corner 
 who has not thumbed Euclid in his youth. I would 
 make my girl skilled in the subtleties of problem and 
 theorem as thoroughly as if my offspring were a 
 boy ; and from mathematics I would lead her into
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 163 
 
 the highest atmosphere of literature. The grandest 
 authors should give expansion to her mind ; her 
 imagination should put forth wide reaches under the 
 mightiest poets and philosophers. The Titans of 
 literature should be her teachers ; none of this 
 frothed cream this whipped syllabub for her, O 
 Maggie Dean 1"
 
 X. 
 
 How Maggie has flourished in my fireside corner 
 Love the mighty and Lovers the monarchs A love 
 thought fancifully pursued Life, the world, and the 
 imperfect sensibilities My hearthstone and a dream of 
 the impossible. 
 
 166
 
 X. 
 
 AS Maggie sits where the fire-light glances up 
 clear and full into her face, I am studying 
 her features from my seat opposite, peering at them 
 over the top of a journal in my hand. Maggie 
 is reading, and the candle-light falls over her 
 shoulder upon the page in her lap. 
 
 Vastly unproved is Maggie now from that elf 
 creature I met in the green lane. She is beautiful, 
 I think, but by no known law of beauty ; dark, but 
 clear ; irregular in feature, but with an expression 
 of refinement, power, and intelligence not discern 
 ible when I first knew her. Her eyes flash bright 
 and strangely as ever ; but the wild glance has 
 vanished, and the weird-like movement of her limbs 
 and body has been subdued into something refined, 
 although still nervous and emphatic. She is taller 
 and more rounded in outline ; and with the stature 
 of her body the stature of her mind has more than 
 kept pace. The whole tone and character of her 
 intelligence has broadened and deepened. She is 
 
 167
 
 168 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 far from being crammed with facts. In many di 
 rections she is sadly ignorant. But her acquire 
 ments have been dissolved into a state of fusibility 
 her whole nature is saturated with aesthetic feel 
 ing ; and this I attribute to the course I have 
 pursued with her. I turned her loose into my 
 library, after the advice of the gruff old author of 
 " Kasselas ;" and I urged her to read, no matter 
 what, so long as she put her mind in contact with 
 other minds. I felt assured that the native purity 
 and discernment of her character would sift the 
 gross from the true. In her own affinities and 
 repulsions I depended for the elements which would 
 absorb the excellent and the congenial, and at the 
 same time repel the false and vicious. 
 
 There is chemistry in the brain. If its spirit be 
 true, to it will fly the beautiful, the honest, the fair ; 
 it will assimilate from everything within its circle 
 the particles and parts apposite and consonant to 
 its nature. Like a plant, it will draw sustenance 
 from the atmosphere, and by processes of its own, 
 extract even from the rottenness around it, rich contri 
 butions from which golden fruit afterwards matures. 
 
 And so Maggie flourished and ripened with a 
 swiftness which could not have been equalled with 
 a soil less natively rich. At first facts confounded 
 her ; the multitude of sensations opened to her
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 169 
 
 imagination oppressed her with their regal boun- 
 tifulness. But order soon came out of chaos ; deep, 
 profound feeling matured under the crowd and 
 wealth of the impressions which poured into her 
 soul from every point ; from the poets for the first 
 time unveiled ; from the grand historical drama, 
 enacted down through the centuries by all the 
 nations of the past ; from the wealth of human 
 character, fancy, wit, range of passion, unfolded in 
 the pages of the romancists ; from facts in science, 
 bewildering in their marvellous beauty and measure 
 less wonder ! 
 
 Thinking these things, I watched Maggie by the 
 fire, until my fancy, unusually active, conjured up a 
 possibility which made me laugh. 
 
 But the laugh was affected, and died away into a 
 sigh. Maggie looked up wonderingly from her 
 book, with a smile upon her lips somewhat plaintive 
 and tender I thought. 
 
 " Come here, Maggie," said I, " and sit by me." 
 
 " Yes, sir." She came quickly, pushing along the low 
 seat with her foot, and took the place I pointed out. 
 
 " What are you reading ?" 
 
 " A love story." 
 
 " Ah ! your fancy leaps quick to the sentiment, I 
 dare say. The art of the story may be low, but it 
 warms the blood around your heart." 
 8
 
 170 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 Maggie looked down and blushed a little. 
 
 " LOTC, after all, Maggie," said I, with the fore 
 finger lifting and playing with the stray curl that 
 fell down upon the shoulder, " love is the grand pas 
 sion the end-all and be-all. There is nothing else 
 for which men endure so much, nothing else which 
 so masters the nature, and yet so spurs the faculties. 
 Hope never soars so highly, Joy never leaps so ex- 
 ultingly, Pea^e never settles upon the heart so 
 sweetly, Ambition never rises so mightily, as when 
 the little cherub Love sits in the chamber of the 
 fancy. The lover is a monarch ; his heart is the 
 world; he stalks a Colossus, with the little affairs of 
 the universe, the wars and policies, playing at bo-peep 
 about his legs. With a sigh in his ear, just fresh and 
 palpitating from the bosom of love, and its fellow 
 half-strangled in the throat as it leaps to respond, 
 your lover has neither sense nor comprehension for 
 the dull actualities that other men bruise their pa 
 tience against. To him past and present, loss and 
 profit, good and ill, are all merged into one sensation ; 
 a kiss blots out the universe, and the rapturous ec 
 stasy that tingles hi his blood is light, day, life, 
 respiration the sum of everything which makes up 
 existence. Somebody describes love as Self merged 
 into an idea dearer than self a perfect solution, to 
 my mind, of a world-old problem."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 171 
 
 But while I speak, Maggie does not follow me 
 as usual with her eyes. Her senses do not have 
 that eager and absorbing aspect with which my lu 
 cubrations are always greeted. Her eyes are veiled: 
 she does not respond. 
 
 " There are few things, Maggie," I resume, watch 
 ing her closely, " so well worth experiencing. I would 
 rather be a lover, than an actor hi any other field, 
 however grand. There are no triumphs so sweet as 
 those of love ; no pleasures so deep, no experience 
 so fruitful of profound, world-wide happiness. Fame, 
 power, wealth the altitude which commands worship, 
 and the incense which ascends to the great nothing 
 so transfuses the weight of mortality into gossamer, 
 nothing so essentially lifts us into an atmosphere 
 above vulgar care and earth-born perplexity." 
 
 " In the love story I have been reading," said 
 Maggie, without lifting her eyes from the floor, " is 
 abundance of both care and perplexity. It is a tale 
 of amusing cross-purposes, in which every possible ad 
 versity arises to thwart the desires of the hero and 
 heroine. I should say, sir, that it very effectually 
 disproves your theory." 
 
 " But you would leap into the shoes of the heroine 
 with one bound, if the power to do so could be vouch 
 safed to you. And I no less would slip off my age, 
 my philosophy, my love of idle reverie, and jump into
 
 172 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 the individuality of the hero. I would accept the 
 lover's tribulations even at the sacrifice of my ease, 
 if by that transformation I could enjoy, even briefly, 
 that broad, bristling experience of life which is his. 
 Think of it, Maggie. I metamorphosed into youth 
 and love, and you the Dulcinea for whom the mystic 
 transition is effected!" 
 
 " Strange enough. But I, unlike you, would not 
 desire the change." 
 
 " Why? Is youth so far receded that I must not 
 turn a wistful glance backward ? Or is it impossible 
 for your imagination to conceive a poor word-broker 
 like me, in the splendid flush of gallant youth ?" 
 
 " Oh, no, no, sir !" cried Maggie, impulsively; " I 
 do not mean either of those things. I know you as 
 you are is it not natural that I should prefer the 
 real to any imaginative picture that can be por 
 trayed r 
 
 " Most decidedly not. You are young, and you 
 are a woman. By those two facts I peep into the 
 arcana of your brain I see the dreams that hide 
 themselves there, and the grand images you delight to 
 bring forth, and fancy real. You have heroes in your 
 heart, Mag, and I cannot believe that your active 
 fancy can content itself with a man like me, with 
 temples crow-marked, a ridged brow, and lips withered 
 between a parenthesis of lines, set years ago by old
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 173 
 
 Time, as a signal that their best uses were past! No. 
 While I speak there leaps into the light before you a 
 youth of magnificent bloom ; white-browed, tender- 
 lipped, high-breasted, sun-eyed 1 Such a youth as 
 mnidenhood delights to paint, and your imagination 
 starts eager and warm to the picture, but 
 but" 
 
 " But what, sir ?" 
 
 " It glides into the peaked visage of Ike." 
 
 " Dear me 1 I do not like Ike. I've told you so 
 before." 
 
 " But have you noted how splendid he has grown ? 
 He is trimmed up and put in holiday attire. His 
 locks are clipped into comely proportion; his coat is 
 brushed ; he hath an itching to be polite. Be sure 
 of it, Mag, he is smoothing and trimming his plum 
 age, preparatory to a flight straight into your 
 heart." 
 
 " And I," exclaimed Maggie, with spirit, " will 
 shut the casement and exclude him. He can find no 
 resting-place in my good thoughts." 
 
 " Why, you encourage him. You let him walk by 
 your side ; you talk to him, and send him errands ; 
 you afford him the exquisite pleasure of doing you 
 service rank encouragement, under which his heart 
 waxeth resolute, and his passion roars into an unex- 
 tinguishable flame."
 
 174 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " Really, sir, you make me laugh. Ike is a comical, 
 good-natured fellow, who amuses me. He likes to be 
 in my company to please him I permit it." 
 
 " Ah, Mag, every woman spins her webs and builds 
 her meshes hi the sun. Her game is hearts. She 
 lays in wait and snaps them up, big and little, wise 
 and foolish the taste of all alike is sweet. She 
 feeds upon them, lives by the nourishment they afford; 
 and plans, strives, struggles, hopes to the one end of 
 conquering them." 
 
 " Monstrous!" 
 
 " You plead not guilty?" 
 
 " A thousand times. Women love deeply, and are 
 content; but you men dissect your tenderest impulses; 
 you philosophize upon your most precious affections 
 in such cold blood, that I am chilled to think of it. 
 How can you, sir ?" 
 
 " Not in cold blood, Mag. My philosophy, too 
 often, is the bubble upon the boiling liquid ; my 
 fancy sorntimes plays its fantastic antics upon the 
 very surface of down-reaching sorrows. My phi 
 losophy, like other men's philosophy, is all veneering. 
 It rarely strikes deep, but glitters with its polished 
 surface in the eyes of the world, and may pass with 
 some for substantial stuff." 
 
 " If you are in earnest now, sir, which I half 
 doubt, do tell me what you are."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 175 
 
 " An old man peeping from his loop-hole out upon, 
 the world and nature ; a curious speculator in 
 bubbles ; a pricker and stealer into other people's 
 thoughts. These things my occupation the flow 
 and set of my current of life. Beneath, more and 
 less a mine in which the lights of observation 
 will not burn 1 I cannot, even dare not, explore 
 into all the mysteries of passion, Bin, desire, love of 
 self, which hide themselves in the deep places of the 
 soul ; but I am conscious ever that I am an actor in 
 my own sight ; that beneath these ordinary motives, 
 this common daily life, lie possibilities of passion, 
 feeling, and thought, capable of some huge and 
 grand expression. I live in expectation ; the soul 
 is poised in suspense, and appears ever to wait the 
 striking of some signal by which it suddenly shall 
 expand into a life the vast multiple of this. There 
 is the feeling of insufficiency everywhere ; my facul 
 ties perpetually fall short of the power at which 
 they aim. There is some clog of earth or mor 
 tality upon my senses by which the zest of happi 
 ness and pleasure is dulled. In fact, we are all 
 half-ripened fruit with one-sided sensibilities and 
 faculties." 
 
 " But I thought you could think on every side of 
 a subject," said Maggie, half smiling, and with an 
 evident reminiscence in her mind of something I
 
 176 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 had said at another time. I did not choose to heed 
 her retort, and pursued my subject. 
 
 " Our susceptibilities fall vastly short of all the 
 forms and expressions of beauty, multiplied on our 
 every side. There is not one of us that isn't a 
 groper stone blind or senselessly dumb in some one 
 (if not more) of the human sensibilities. There are 
 those who are color blind, others who are musically 
 deaf. To some, outline is only mathematical, and 
 grace a sealed book. Material expression in all its 
 many phases through form, color, grace, or what 
 ever makes up the total which we foot under the 
 name of Beauty, very rarely finds a catholic ap 
 preciation centered hi one individual. We are 
 gnarled, half-sunned growths, with imprisoned desires 
 struggling for some more perfect development 
 eager to burst into a fuller enjoyment, but this 
 'muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close them 
 in.' 
 
 " Perhaps, indeed, a perfect man would prove an 
 organization too exquisite for this world. Pleasure 
 would press upon him through a thousand avenues 
 with a keen, sharp, ecstatic relish, too rapturous for 
 endurance. But the tune may come when these 
 forces within us, shall attain that destiny which now 
 in mysterious mutterings they vaguely indicate. 
 Our present is only the loam in which germinates
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 177 
 
 the seed of some great growth, which shall expand 
 into fullness in a hereafter." 
 
 " What you say, after all, is nothing more than 
 that which we find in the promises of religion." 
 
 " An old truth may be expressed in new ways. 
 The most obvious things become dulled to the appre 
 hension by their familiar front. If our gorgeous sun 
 sets were hung in the heavens but once a year, their 
 annual recurrence would have nations for spectators. 
 The millions of the earth would assemble upon the 
 high places in rapt and breathless admiration. In 
 their daily coming they are not less beautiful, but 
 we have sated appetites, and it is necessary to pause 
 sometimes, and remind ourselves of their true mag 
 nificence ; we must seek for new phases, fresh ex 
 pletives, suggestive similes, by which our jaded senses 
 can be stirred into a realization of their loveli 
 ness." 
 
 " That's true," said Maggie, musingly ; " but will 
 you tell me in what yon believe ?" 
 
 " In God, and in man the workmanship, exposition 
 and created of Divinity. Misanthropy must be the 
 unpardonable sin, for who doubts MAN, doubts with 
 high audacity the wisdom and power of the Maker. 
 I know what the history of man has been, how 
 fierce, frenzied, sinful, but still with undying tenacity 
 will I cling to the faith that beneath ah 1 has ever 
 8*
 
 178 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 flowed a pure, earnest current ; that evil thrusts 
 itself up in jagged outlines upon the surface, while 
 at heart truth and goodness warm in fruitful com 
 merce ; that the judgment, so often deluded, has 
 given its election to sin, while still the heart was 
 honest ; that will has been stirred into headstrong 
 iniquity, and still the heart was honest ; that sense 
 has yielded to hot temptation and wrapped itself in 
 dehrious pleasure, and still the heart was honest ! 
 These few who are altogether bad, these great rogues 
 are simply diseased. Their condition is not normal ; 
 good and evil, as in the healthy condition of men, 
 are not poised. There are twists and knots in their 
 moral growth ; they are an imperfect species, such 
 as tri-headed monsters, deformities with duplicate 
 legs, and the like. In the immaculate bosoms of the 
 angels there is infinite pity for these and for all 
 sinners." 
 
 There is a storm to-night, and Maggie has left me 
 early. I sit alone over the grate, thrusting my 
 poker down into the red anthracite, and shrinking 
 from the silence which the elements that are clatter 
 ing against the shutters, do not hush. There are 
 sounds which intensify silence ; and there is a rest 
 less throb in the stillness of some hours which pricks 
 and stirs like the alarms of conscience. When the
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 179 
 
 monotonous beat of utter silence is in the ear, there 
 is an acute tension to the brain, and impression em 
 bosses itself more swiftly and surely than when the 
 mind shrinks and half shuts its petals in the glare 
 and stir of day. 
 
 The best pictures are not photographed upon the 
 imagination by the sun ; dead midnight is a Rem 
 brandt which paints its cartoons upon the walls of 
 the brain in those vivid contrasts that live forever. 
 
 The sun, indeed, is a Gradgrind, clamorous for 
 facts ; it exacts the practical and the real, and 
 thrusts the mind into work-day clothes. But mid 
 night gives wings and space to fancy ; in its dim 
 aisles the grotesque, the wild, the fantastic pour out 
 from cells, where they hide themselves from light, 
 and enact their sportive antics. All bald, sharp-cut 
 facts, commerce, thrift, mechanism, material greats 
 ness are born of the day ; but poem, art, beauty, 
 love, eloquence, imagination, ambition, revolution, 
 tragedy, dark aspiration, and all fitful dreams and 
 the meteoric splendors of mind are born of starlight. 
 
 And so I, to-night, am pursuing a dream which in 
 the day-light would hide itself. 
 
 It is of Maggie. She is sixteen and I am 
 
 What now, if I am not the old man I have 
 painted myself? Shall I tell you that I have ca 
 priciously deepened my wrinkles, multiplied the grey
 
 180 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 hairs, and by virtue of a native melancholy drawn a 
 sadder portrait than the truth will justify? Per 
 haps I am younger by a dozen years than you give 
 me credit for ; and my talk of the sere and yellow 
 leaf only such affectation that comes upon us when 
 youth has indeed slipped by, and the mournful con 
 sciousness thereof magnifies to our quick apprehen 
 sions the approaches of age ! 
 
 The first crisp day of autumn precipitates us into 
 the belief that winter is come. But the long, mel 
 low Indian summer surprises us with its soft and 
 tender beauty, and the frosts prove more remote than 
 we supposed ! 
 
 But Maggie's relation to me is not truly indexed 
 by the difference in our years. I am younger to 
 Maggie than I am to the world, and she older to me, 
 in the tone and color of her mind, than her years 
 proclaim. We have assimilated. Impressions have 
 flowed from me to her ; the growth and blossom of 
 her intellect have drawn properties from mine ; 
 thought and sensibility have taken tint and shape 
 from me. Companionship like ours must need 
 ripen into something, and if Maggie, with her won 
 derful capacity for feeling, matures swiftly into sum 
 mer verdure, and clambers up to identity of sym 
 pathy and tastes with me, may not I trip back into 
 fhe briskness of younger sensation ?
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 181 
 
 But Beatrice ! I almost seem to hear the name 
 whispered audibly in the stillness of the room, and 
 the tender recollection brings down a mist between 
 me and the grate. 
 
 I have h'ked girlhood ever with strange depths of 
 tenderness. Love, painted by the poets as a boy, 
 always lives hi my imagination in the girlish graces of 
 Psyche ; and this sentiment, more profound than I 
 have power to illustrate, led me once into that un 
 wise passion for Beatrice ; on this whiter night is 
 leading me into dreams from which the sentinel, 
 Judgment, is sounding his distinct warning. 
 
 How is it ? Can one be a lover many tunes ? 
 
 Many tunes, perhaps, but with one love ! I utter 
 no paradox when I say, that the passion which blos 
 somed in the glades of Shady Side, and that warm 
 feeling which gathers sometimes around my heart 
 when my girlish listener is by, are identical in senti 
 ment ; a perception of the grace, tender freshness 
 and beauty of girlhood peculiar to men like me ; 
 perhaps a weakness, though still a sentiment which 
 proves my advancing tide of years ; for old men are 
 wont to fall in love with young girls. I will search 
 my philosophy for reasons why. 
 
 I veil my dream to myself and others. I speak 
 Maggie, but think Beatrice. It was fit that an 
 anchorite should have his dream, which, to the last
 
 182 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 fading away of all things earthly, should sit like a 
 companion at his hearth, lie upon his pillow, mingle 
 in his reverie, guide the helm of his meditation, and 
 live in all beauty, all tender sounds, all awakening 
 harmonies of earth and air. A dream which the 
 heart has striven to adjust to some reality which, 
 at this hour, in these mellow tints of the anthracite, 
 would fain fit to the youth and heart of Maggie as 
 once, in a wilder way, it strove to find realization 
 under the green leaves of Shady Side. 
 
 Let me dream on, then ; and if to-night my fancy 
 leads me into impossible conjunctions, the daylight 
 will restore the cold proprieties ; love, passion, senti 
 ment possibilities of sympathy and happiness, will 
 lie cold amid the morning ashes of the grate.
 
 XI. 
 
 A portrait of John Jellaway, Builder, pen-ographed 
 An anchorite's dreams discordant amid the affairs of 
 life I declare my faith in Bishop Berkeley and the 
 sovereignty of sensation Maggie is eloquent and strong- 
 minded I act the guide-post, and point to Maggie a 
 road that she may travel Art her new aspiration. 
 
 188
 
 XI. 
 
 i( "1% /I" AGGIE, I've heard a rumor that alarms 
 
 iVJL me." 
 
 " What is it, sir ?" 
 
 " John Jellaway, Builder, proprietor of Shady Side, 
 has cut it up into imaginary lots, and hung a map 
 thereof in the village post-office." 
 
 " What can he possibly intend to do ?" 
 
 "John Jellaway is a magnificent schemer, and 
 having succeeded hi erecting a railroad, by means of 
 stock from deluded subscribers, which runs from no 
 thing to nowhere, expects a rush from all quarters of 
 civilization to settle, occupy, sojourn, build upon, and 
 populate his unfruitful fields." 
 
 " Did you ever see John Jellaway ?" 
 
 " Never. But I will draw his portrait, and you 
 shall say it is correct." 
 
 " But I never laid eyes upon him in my life." 
 
 " Nevertheless you have instincts. I will draw 
 his portrait upon the air, and you shall, by impalpa 
 ble conviction, applaud the sketch. He is a broad,
 
 i86 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 short fellow, massive about the mouth, chin, and the 
 back of his head. Little, grey eyes, broad nostrils, 
 huge perceptive faculties, with receding brow." 
 
 " Oh, I see him exactly." 
 
 "Thick limbed, coarse bearded, huge lunged, 
 slovenly in dress, and a little proud thereof ; a bad 
 hat, and thick, unpolished boots ; a tobacco chewer, 
 and saliva copiously ejected upon everybody and 
 everything ! This is John Jellaway, Builder. 
 
 " I shall certainly try and see the man," said Mag 
 gie, " and so judge of the fidelity of your sketch. 
 But it is such a fellow as I would imagine." 
 
 " I am as sure of the likeness as if I were the sun 
 itself (that splendid portrait-taker !) and he had sat 
 to me for his picture. The fact is, John Jellaway 
 has amassed a huge fortune, and by means which to 
 speak of will always put the heads of the sagacious 
 in a mysterious vibration. He is, I am told, a great 
 speculator, a financial schemer ; his gods are stocks, 
 bonds and scrips ; he is a smart, nimble, go-ahead 
 (to where ?) enterprising citizen, a class so common 
 in our country, and the eulogies to whom, so clamor 
 ously thrust upon the public ear, are to me melan 
 choly tollings, ringing out the death in the public 
 mind of some virtue some love of honesty and the 
 right. For this common weakness of our country 
 men this love of success and worship of the high-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 187 
 
 priests of Mammon, indicate surely and painfully a 
 decay of honorable feeling, which, though still lover 
 of my kind, sometimes stirs in my heart gloomy fears 
 of the future. I would have my country honest 
 the glitter of material greatness may succeed, not 
 precede, this principle. 
 
 " But what shall I do if this vandal, Jellaway, 
 attack that virgin Shady Side ? How can I bear 
 to have it ruthlessly subjugated by his vulgar crew ? 
 How patiently see it violated by axe and spade? 
 how see its slopes dinted and trampled ? its shady 
 and sacred nooks exposed and desecrated its grand 
 old trees ravaged and destroyed ? Now, where calm 
 and beauty and poetry have their precious home, 
 must we see the invasion of masonry, timber, profane 
 workers, vulgar dwellings, squalid children, mean pur 
 suits must we see this grand temple of nature turned 
 to every use with which a low humanity desecrate 
 their haunts, and render vile the atmosphere they 
 breathe ? By Diana and all gods and goddesses of 
 grove and woodland, it must not be. John Jellaway, 
 Builder, touch it not, I charge you, or the sacrilege 
 shall find its Nemesis." 
 
 " If we could only buy it," said Maggie. 
 
 " I am not rich ; neither bonds, bankers' accounts, 
 stocks, silver, or precious stones are mine. The 
 vineyard I have been cultivating hath grown a fruit
 
 i88 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 unknown in husbandry. There are ripe hangings, 
 I venture to claim, but the purple clusters have no 
 price in mart or change. Commerce, the Prince 
 magnificent, dusky with his oriental tint, perfumed 
 with precious fragrance, robed in ermine from the ice 
 ridges, and in silk of the Indian woof knows them 
 not. They are not treasures for which he or his fol 
 lowers will bid, and so perforce, their value, if any 
 value they possess, must exist in the secret flavor 
 they retain for their otherwise poverty-stricken owner." 
 
 " The fruits that ripen hi the mind, the clusters of 
 wit, fancy, humor for such, sir, I suppose you to 
 mean have, I am sure, some value beyond that 
 which you give them. Will not good books sell, and 
 make money ?" 
 
 " I have ere this shaken my boughs in the public 
 highway, but the fruit was trampled in the dust un 
 heeded. An anchorite's dreams thrust amid the 
 busy congregations of men, is like the appearance of 
 some antipodean stranger. There is no sympathy, 
 identity of purpose, commerce of intelligence, unity 
 of feeling, between the new comer and those amid 
 whom circumstances have launched his existence. 
 The crowd stare, perhaps laugh, but pass with 
 shrugged shoulders by ; and he, chilled to the heart, 
 shrinks away from the public gaze and hides himself 
 in lowly obscurity.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 189 
 
 " I do not complain. It is natural. I have a 
 right to dream, and weave such fancies as I please, 
 but I cannot demand of the public submissive pa 
 tience to my small voice ; I cannot expect to hang 
 my cobwebs in whatever chamber I elect ; or blow 
 my bubbles, so meaningless to the many, wheresoever 
 I list. I have not taken the right course to be popu 
 lar. It would not be difficult to do so ; the applause 
 of the people is easily within my reach. There is 
 the ring, and here the clown's motley. The public 
 are in the boxes. It is but a glittering bound, a 
 brisk joke, a gay caper or two, and success is mine 
 the plaudits shall ring and the wreath fall." 
 
 " Fame is beautiful," exclaimed Maggie, with her 
 eyes flashing ; " it would be worth any struggle 
 any sacrifice." 
 
 " So youth in its untamed fervor has said before. 
 But neither the young, nor all of the old, are wise in 
 the subtlest of all wisdom, the knowledge of human 
 passion. There are land rats and water rats, as our 
 old friend of Stratford has said, and each must nibble, 
 burrow, steal, and flourish in his own element. They 
 cannot ' hurly burly,' change places, and grow fat as 
 before. And so, good Mag, there are underlying 
 differences in human organizations, by which a poet 
 would starve where an alderman grows boozy and 
 rubicund ; and a philosopher would be compelled to
 
 190 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 bury his book and break his wand, where your brisk 
 citizen, with elastic spring to his ankle, a compla 
 cently vivacious pat upon his buttoned-up breeches 
 pocket, and a smirk smile as greasy as the thumbed 
 coin he covets, will roll into his plethoric bank ac 
 count, his swift gains, and wax hearty under the 
 process. These differences are all radical and chemi 
 cal, and they extend into infinite ramifications. I 
 am a man whose imagination warms in the tints of 
 my fire-light, and under green leaves, but hi the fever 
 of busy life I am lost. My temper springs up angu 
 lar and antagonistic ; I bruise myself at every turn 
 against the habits and sharp manners of the world ; 
 I have not the catch of popular phrases, and cannot 
 talk with those commercial potentates who rule in 
 cities ; I have not the manner nor the address of 
 society, and flounder hi and out of drawing-rooms 
 like a whale out of water ; and being unable to keep 
 afloat on that tide of eloquent small talk which mean 
 ders so ripplingly among the beaux and belles, I al 
 ways find myself stranded in gloomy and ponderous 
 silence, high and dry above the currents of conversa 
 tion. 
 
 " So everywhere so in everything, Mag. I was 
 not born for success, nor for the battle by which the 
 crown is won. The clamor of the universal gold- 
 hunt stuns me ; the whirl and clatter of the world
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 191 
 
 unhitches the machinery of my philosophy. I am 
 nothing if not ruminant, and by my utter lack of the 
 genius to do, am driven into burrows, where I can 
 only peep out at a world in which I have no vocation 
 to mingle." 
 
 "Yet still," said Maggie, "I think your voice 
 might be heard even from your obscurity." 
 
 " It would be as easy to ascend in a balloon up to 
 the cragged edge of a cloud, and there address the 
 world below ; or as wise to plunge into the sea, and 
 piping my dull song in the ocean caverns, dream of 
 listeners upon the busy surface above. 
 
 "Maggie, within these four boundaries I am 
 Caesar. That is enough. I tread here the universe. 
 This is not only my world, but the world." 
 
 " Will you explain that ?" 
 
 "The natural philosophers assert that color is 
 only sensation where the eye, for instance, does 
 not rest upon the greenery of the fields, there is no 
 greenery there 
 
 " ' The gay tint that decks the vernal rose, 
 Not in the flower, but in our vision glows ; 
 The ripe flavor of Falernian tides, 
 Not in the wine but in our taste resides.' 
 
 I make this philosophy cover things material after 
 Bishop Berkeley, and when I drop the curtains to my 
 casements I shut the universe within. Sensation
 
 192 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 travels out from its home in the brain, and just so 
 much as it compasses -just so far as it extends, 
 lie the boundaries of the world. Do you per 
 ceive ?" 
 
 "Why, the doctrine is most incomprehensible," 
 exclaimed Maggie, a little inclined to be sa 
 tirical. 
 
 "Very," I exclaimed, half closing my eyes and 
 peering at the fire ; " but Maggie, if you can tell me 
 what the world is, outside of your sensations, you 
 may begin." 
 
 " Everything," cried Maggie, vehemently. " A past 
 and a present " 
 
 " Memory 1" echoed the philosopher, still peering 
 at the fire. 
 
 " Yast cities, mighty nations, wonderful physical 
 beauty " 
 
 " Imagination," cried the sonorous echo. 
 
 " What do you mean ?" 
 
 " This. If the yellow gilding of yonder frame is 
 not yellow at all, but only a sensation produced by 
 light upon the eye, why may not the frame be no 
 frame at all, but merely an appearance of form pro 
 duced by natural phenomena upon the senses? 
 Accepting this to be so, then this pleasant study 
 of mine, being for the time just the flight of 
 the conscious senses, is the world. There is no other.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 " At least, Maggie, you and I must make it so. 
 Ah ! let the rest roll on unheeded. Here is our 
 happiness ; here lies abundantly the means for full, 
 rich, munificent existence. Believe me, the wit 
 grows sharp in the world, but the imagination 
 sickens and dies. Here it flourishes, puts forth 
 branches, expands into wide banners in the ah*, 
 strikes deep roots into the soil. Here the passions, 
 the desires, the will, the ambitions are chained to the 
 heart ; they can leap no further than can easily be 
 plucked back again. But amid the struggles and 
 the stirrings of the town, they rise up and conquer 
 the jailer, and breaking from their bonds, rush with 
 passionate zeal into the tempest, and are lost. 
 
 " Let the world go, Mag. Be not aspiring for me 
 or for yourself. Take your ambitions to the window 
 and give them wing. Let them fly from you forever." 
 
 " I could do so, for you bid me ; but I should 
 carry a heavy heart about me ever afterwards. Oh ! 
 that I were a man 1 Then the sun would shine, the 
 world exist for me ! All things are for your sex ; 
 nothing for ours. We are shown fruit we cannot 
 taste, glories we cannot claim, a life whose fullness 
 we are shut from and expelled. Sir, the world is a 
 feast, in which we are thrust into the kitchen." 
 
 " A feast ! If so, like many grand dinners, much 
 show and starved guests." 
 
 9
 
 194 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 Maggie jumped to her feet, and running to the 
 window thrust her body behind the curtains ; against 
 the panes she thrummed with a rapid tattoo, then 
 suddenly broke from her screen into the room, and 
 hastily paced to and fro from wall to wall. 
 
 " In everything everywhere," she exclaimed, 
 " there is the same thing honor for men ; ob 
 scurity and contempt for women. Up all the avenues 
 you climb there are gates which bar out us ; which 
 ever way lies preferment, there you command us not 
 to look ; all attainments that might lead to accom 
 plishment you debar us from. Sir, the world is not 
 just, nor true, nor honorable to women ! It never 
 has been ! in no age, in no country, and yet there 
 have been Zenobias, and Joans, and Catherines, and 
 many mighty women. We can be as great as you, 
 why then do you exclude us from the paths you 
 tread ?" 
 
 " Bless me, Mag ! Why I have been like a town, 
 built with innocent security upon the side of a vol 
 cano. There is an eruption, and I am deluged with 
 fire and ashes." 
 
 " Please do not mock me, sir." 
 
 " Maggie, hear a wise saw ; the intellect feminine 
 can attain to no such altitude as that reached by 
 ours, for a great woman invariably loses the dis 
 tinguishing characteristics of the feminine mind. In
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 195 
 
 becoming great she ceases to be a woman ! Your 
 Elizabeths, Zenobias, Catherines were remarkable, 
 but just so far as they approached the standard of 
 masculine vigor and force they proved foreign to the 
 true type of your sex." 
 " Can this be so ?" 
 
 " Think of it. Absolute intellectuality is so far 
 removed from the accepted and desirable condition 
 of women, that those cases which you cite as evi 
 dence of your equality are merely monuments which 
 prove the rule by illustrating the exceptions." 
 
 " Still, still," cried Maggie ; "I have ambitions 
 and strong wishes ; they are as natural to me as to 
 you. I long for something higher and nobler than 
 has yet befallen me." 
 
 " To many young people, Maggie, the heart is the 
 mirror of the brain, and they occupy themselves by 
 perpetually measuring the capacity of the reflection. 
 You are one of these. You sit for hours looking 
 into the glass a self-consciousness which is not 
 healthy nor honest is the consequence. 
 
 " Still I judge you tenderly. Your bark has not 
 yet sailed into that current upon which alone it can 
 float buoyantly and true. There is but one goal, 
 Mag, to which the nature and instincts of woman 
 points ; but one fruition that crowns her with the 
 pure and tender glory which all the world, and all
 
 196 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 nature applauds and worships 1 And this fruition is 
 so unmistakably the true ripeness of her being, so 
 clearly the harvest and summer of her destiny, that 
 all other hopes, desires, seekings, are proofs of a 
 heart whose compass is not poised, whose needle is 
 disordered by false attraction." 
 
 " I think I know what you mean." 
 
 " Ah, Mag ! fly your grand heights ; dream of 
 fame, aspire to such things and attempt to win such 
 glories as you may, still shall you be plucked back to 
 our feet by a power by which we shall be your mas 
 ters so long as the stars are lighted by the sun." 
 
 "And that is" 
 
 " Love !" 
 
 Why did Maggie drop her head until the long 
 curls fell in a thick screen over her face ? and why 
 was she so suddenly hushed and still ! 
 
 For three minutes the clock ticked with great 
 briskness, and the wind, unheeded before, rose to a 
 shrill, melancholy whistle. Then I broke the 
 silence : 
 
 " If effort must be yours, Maggie, if that unresting 
 heart hungers for other food than that which lies in 
 the common paths, let me at least aid you a little 
 let me be to you a guide-post, pointing, with melan 
 choly finger, the safest of many roads, and yet most 
 unwilling to see you follow any."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 197 
 
 " Tell me all you can, sir," said Maggie. But her 
 voice was husky and low. 
 
 " Of the arts which are sought for as avenues that 
 lead to that grand height upon which youth sets its 
 wishes, there is one I will name, which to a sympa 
 thetic nature offers many sweets, even in its severest 
 efforts. To impressibility like yours, other things 
 being favorable, I believe it to be happily adapted. 
 Look around you. I mean that art which tells its 
 tales of eloquence and beauty upon my walls." 
 
 " Yes, yes!" exclaimed Maggie, eagerly. 
 
 "It is an art which allures with its promise of 
 fame, and supplies in itself abundant delights. It 
 absorbs completely; it takes possession of the imagi 
 nation more keenly than any other, and supplies to 
 fullness food for both heart and brain. The passions 
 and the intellect, the sensibilities and the aspirations, 
 are alike aroused and employed. With the poet, 
 whether he be of canvas or verse, exists ever the 
 necessity to create; and this necessity, which under 
 lies and causes much of that unrest so common to 
 genius, is afforded rich fruition with the painter. Forms 
 of beauty daily grow into life before him ; under his 
 skillful pencil spring into vital shape and color those 
 dreams which, with others, must still exist in the 
 imagination only ; and assuming this bodily form and 
 pressure, they prove both his rapture and his glory."
 
 198 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 Maggie again began that rapid tread of the 
 floor. 
 
 " But," inquired she, " is it not an art which re 
 quires a special genius ?" 
 
 " The arts, Maggie, are all of a kin a common 
 sensibility fathers them all. Not far from that feel 
 ing which can transport to canvas the tender beauty 
 of a landscape, is its fellow which paints the lights, 
 shades, blending tints and soft harmonies of a pic 
 ture in the happy utterance and melodious measure 
 of words." 
 
 "But can I be an artist ?" exclaimed Maggie, ab 
 ruptly. " Tell me, sir, what you think 1" 
 
 "Have you feeling for color? sympathy with 
 nature so' intense, that you can read her heart and 
 enter into her spirit better than the ordinary mortal ? 
 have you power to reproduce, in form, your impres 
 sions, and have you that vitality of imagination which 
 can put itself, at will, into circumstances and scenes 
 remote from its own experience ? If you have all 
 these, which I am inclined to admit, there must be 
 added certain special, but minor qualities, which cul 
 tivation cannot create, but will vastly develop." 
 
 Maggie resumed her seat, which was still close by 
 my side. 
 
 " I know but little of my own talents," said she ; 
 " but I recall circumstances of early tastes, which
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 199 
 
 give me hope. And I recollect, too, an old adage of 
 yours." 
 
 " What was that ?" 
 
 " To try is to succeed !" 
 
 " I have not suggested this path to yon, Maggie," 
 said I, " without a belief, founded upon some obser 
 vation, that your talents could shape themselves that 
 way." 
 
 Maggie parted from me that evening hi great glee; 
 and I, for once, in a parental way, kissed her fore 
 head when I bade her good-night.
 
 XII. 
 
 Patrick and his epistolary passion In grief over the 
 remains of an old friend A monody An apostrophe 
 to the elements, in the midst of which an erratic star 
 shoots among us The Happy Philosopher and his wise 
 sayings By the pricking of my thumb, shadows my 
 vay come. 
 
 9* 201
 
 XII. 
 
 THE hearth was swept, the candles lighted, and 
 a fine aphorism just on the point of deliver j ; 
 when I was interrupted by a knock at the door a 
 low, hesitating knock then the entrance of Patrick 
 with a letter between thumb and finger. 
 
 Patrick is my factotum ; my valet, when I need a 
 valet ; my gardener, groom, butler, secretary, clerk 
 and waiter. When I saw the letter in his hand, 
 and observed his unusually embarrassed manner, I 
 knew something had happened, and that the letter, 
 indited by himself, conveyed the intelligence. For 
 Pat is inspired with an epistolary passion. He 
 sends me formal weekly letters upon the state of 
 affairs. If a chicken die of the croup, the fact is 
 decorously and solemnly communicated under seal ; 
 if the pigs get into his corn-patch ; if any of the 
 creatures about the place are ill ; if a litter of pups, 
 or a family of kittens, or a colony of pigs are added 
 to my household, Pat rushes to pen and paper. He 
 keeps incessantly writing to me. I might meet him 
 
 208
 
 204 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 at nine o'clock, and at half-past find on my table 
 the inevitable letter, detailing events fresh in his 
 mind at the time of the interview. This passion 
 would not be so remarkable if he were a fluent or an 
 easy writer, but it is evidently a huge labor for him 
 to pen his sentences, as it is certainly a huge labor 
 for me to decipher them. 
 
 " Well, what is it, Pat ?" said I, putting out my 
 hand to secure the letter. Its meaning if not its 
 language was soon comprehended. It related, in 
 Pat's own curious orthography, the death of my 
 pony. I transcribe it literally : 
 
 "ONERED SUR 
 
 " Yer onor dide this evenin in is staybil as i was goin 
 To milken withe the blinde staggrs yer onors boss pone he 
 was sik the last night i guv im the medsin yer onor tuk yer- 
 eelf. From the chist wich Did him no good at alle until he 
 dide." " Yer onors umble sarvent, umbly 
 
 " PATRICK." 
 
 " My favorite pony, Maggie." 
 
 " Ah, sir, and mine, too." 
 
 " Alas, poor Yorick I He hath borne me on his 
 back a thousand times." 
 
 " Bedad, sir," exclaimed Patrick, " you've forgot 
 ten the beast's name. It was Jack, sir." 
 
 " Ah, Pat, you know nothing of Shakspeare."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 205 
 
 " Which, sir ?" 
 
 Maggie laughed at Pat's puzzled look, and said : 
 " You must bury him decently, Patrick. Peace to 
 his manes I" 
 
 " Manes, miss," exclaimed Pat, for Maggie's pro 
 nunciation was scarcely classical, "manes! sure, he 
 has but one, unless you count his tail." 
 
 This blunder was too much for either Maggie or 
 me ; we both laughed heartily, while we dispatched 
 Pat with directions as to the disposition of the 
 body. 
 
 But when Patrick withdrew, our mirth subsided, 
 and we grew sad instead. For Jack was a favorite. 
 Maggie never came near him without throwing her 
 arms around his neck, and laying her smooth cheek 
 next to his face. Many a time, in those abandon 
 ments of mirth and impulse so frequent with her, 
 I've seen her leap upon his back, without saddle, 
 and urge him to a free gallop around the pasturage. 
 And Jack loved Maggie. Did he hear her voice, or 
 detect by any means her nearness, he would hasten 
 to her side, thrust his nose over her shoulder, and 
 manifest hi various ways his affection and sympathy. 
 
 "What do yon say, Mag?" said I after a brief 
 pause, " shall we go and look at Jack ? There is a 
 moon." 
 
 Maggie assented, and we went together.
 
 206 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 There was scenery in the heavens. All along up 
 the northern sky the scattered hosts of some storm- 
 battle were fleeing with wild haste -jagged, torn, 
 broken masses of clouds, speeding with frightened 
 aspect from pursuing winds. The moon was high, 
 and poured down her silver radiance between two 
 dense train-clouds, which tore headlong by, as if 
 picked into precipitancy by the spur of goblin, or 
 sprite, or some cloud-bestrider of fable. 
 
 The moon glittered a sheen-path from the house- 
 door to the straw-stretched remains of poor Jack. 
 He lay in the air, and the moon in her marble light 
 gleamed cold and sepulchrally upon the stilled 
 limbs. 
 
 " Oh, sir," cried Maggie, with tears in her voice, 
 " I loved him ! Indeed I loved him 1" 
 
 " Hm 1" exclaimed the philosopher, just as a puff 
 of wind leaped in his teeth, and strangled a sigh in 
 the thorax, " he had no lordly pedigree. He was 
 not great, nor swift, and he liked better a lazy browse 
 on side-hill grass, than ambitious scamperings. There 
 was always meditation in his eye, and when he bore 
 me into woodland paths, he would pause in those 
 secluded glades so sweet for reverie, and with reins 
 slipped to the ears, clip the crisp herbage, patiently 
 attendant upon my dreams. There are warlike 
 people, Mag, who tell us of wonders of valor per-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 207 
 
 formed in the saddle, but mild achievements were 
 they all compared to mine upon the back of poor 
 Jack. I've crowned myself victorious in many a 
 battle with learned subtlety, in science or philosophy, 
 as absorbed to my eyes in my pocket-volume, he 
 hath trudged with me through quiet by-paths, with 
 rein on neck. We have tilted together at hard 
 facts, and charged upon broken-winded crotchets, 
 and clashed lance against the brazen shield of so 
 phistry ! Could Jack speak, he would recount, I am 
 sure, of whole battalions of false logic being put to 
 rout by us. And now, alas ! the old war-horse is 
 dead. Mag " 
 
 I turned, but Maggie was not there. In an in 
 stant she came running back with some evergreen 
 branches in her hand, which she flung upon the body 
 of Jack. 
 
 " Now, Pat," said I, when this bit of tender feel 
 ing was over, " do the rest. Give him decent 
 burial." 
 
 " As decent burial, sir, as a Christian could want. 
 Sure, he was a noble creature, and sorry will it be to 
 see him no more in this world." 
 
 " Gracious, Pat," exclaimed Mag, " what do you 
 mean by no more in this world ?" 
 
 " Why, miss," said Pat, vigorously rubbing his 
 ear, " I know that horses havn't no souls ; but sure,
 
 208 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 Jack was so tinder-hearted, and had such a knowin' 
 way of lookin' at you, and would put his nose in 
 your face so affectionate like, and his ways ginerally 
 were so intilligent, that may be, as it would seem, 
 his own nature got exchanged with some Christian- 
 born gentleman, Mr. Jellaway, say, who, saving yer 
 honor, was much the biggest baste of the two." 
 
 In Pat's circumlocutory eulogy Jack certainly was 
 duly praised, but I am afraid if my reader attempt 
 an exact translation it would be difficult to deter 
 mine whether I, or John Jellaway, Builder, came the 
 most honorably off. But to steer through a long 
 sentence safely, without bull or blunder, was a mar 
 vellous thing for Pat to accomplish, and so crowning 
 his intention with approval, I let the ambiguous com 
 pliment go. 
 
 "What a night," I uttered, as Maggie and I 
 slowly wended our way back. " This is a balcony 
 box ; the sky is a stage, and before us move the 
 brisk scenes, the shift and play of a drama. These 
 tearing, termagant clouds are the actors." 
 
 " They seem inspired with the divine afflatus," said 
 Maggie, demurely. 
 
 " Hi ! By Jupiter, the heir treads upon the heel of 
 the king. You will crowd me from my throne some 
 day, Mag, and snatch from my hand the wand of talk. 
 But well said, heir apparent. The jest was good."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 209 
 
 " Heir apparent to what, sir ?" 
 
 " To what ? Do you not know your inheritance ? 
 To the throne by my fireside, and the realm universal, 
 whose boundaries the telescope cannot discover. It 
 is the grandest sovereignty in the world, Mag, and ii 
 is called Imagination." 
 
 " It has many kings," suggested Maggie. 
 
 " Yes. It is an empire in which all poets and wits 
 are rulers ; or rather, a republic of sovereigns, in 
 which every mind is absolute just so far as it 
 possesses native power. 
 
 " But look I this sky ! By Luna, the scene is 
 grand. How swift the moon appears to rush through 
 the space ! To what can we liken her, Mag ? To 
 a stag, let us say, and those clouds are the pursuing 
 hounds. She has a frightened, staring look ; there 
 is bewilderment and imploring pity in her white face. 
 She is surrounded, and yet the panting pack fall back 
 as she speeds swiftly and surely on. This is such a 
 race, Mag, as recalls those Olympian ones in which 
 chariot locked with chariot, whirled around the Gre 
 cian plain. Then fair maids whipped the steeds into 
 frantic swiftness ; now it is old Boreas, from his ice- 
 throne in the north, who hurls those clouds upon the 
 flying moon, and spurs them onward." 
 
 Just then we emerged into an open space, unpro 
 tected by house or tree, and the winds came rushing
 
 210 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 down from the heavens and flung themselves with a 
 shriek in our arms. Maggie's long locks they caught 
 and flung out like a banner ; they rushed into her 
 eyes and squeezed out a tear or two ; thrummed in 
 her ears ; with a rollicking roar snatched free kisses 
 from her cheeks and lips ; then, discovering no more 
 specific gravity in my fifty years than in Maggie's six 
 teen, darted upon me with a howl, and whisking the 
 breath out of my lungs and the hat from my head, 
 rushed off with their trophies headlong. 
 
 The first I speedily succeeded in recovering, but 
 the second taking lodgment in the upper branches 
 of a tree, left me bare-headed in the wind, my locks 
 streaming like pennants from a turret. But a lithe 
 figure came rolling out of a door-way, and hurrying 
 to the tree, soon secured the fugitive, so unceremo 
 niously decamped with. 
 
 " It's late, and ever so cold," muttered Ike, for it 
 was he, as he restored the hat to my hand. I did 
 not heed him, but suddenly recollecting a passage in 
 Thomson, I threw myself in attitude, and began : 
 
 " Ye too, ye winds ! that now begin to blow 
 With boisterous sweep, I raise my voice to you." 
 
 " Holloa!" cried a stentorian voice suddenly, as a 
 figure approached and leaned on the garden-paling. 
 
 " Holloa 1" exclaimed I, putting on my hat and a 
 little pique, at this unceremonious interruption.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 211 
 
 "James!" 
 
 "Reuben!" 
 
 These exclamations went off simultaneously, and 
 then, as the stranger leaped over the low fence, I ran 
 forward with great eagerness to seize his hand. For 
 upon the second sound of his voice, I perceived he 
 was one for whom I cherished friendly memories. 
 
 " Once my companion; always my friend," said I, 
 as I led him up to Maggie. 
 
 " And the luckiest chance to discover you," said 
 he, with a free bow to Maggie, and a tremendous 
 grasp of my hand. 
 
 Maggie scanned him curiously and with admiration. 
 A large build, a broad, free, swinging gait, a hearty 
 voice, a fresh complexion comely and admirable, 
 truly, notwithstanding a few travel-stains and rents 
 in his garb. 
 
 " Well, sir," said I, as we all (all but Ike), entered 
 my study together, " it is five years, by the scythe 
 of old Tune, since we met; and you, Philosopher, 
 are as free, happy, good-for-nothing, excellent as when 
 I watched you mixing pigments in tunes of yore; 
 eh?" 
 
 " To be sure. I follow my humor now as then. I 
 amuse myself by snapping my fingers at fortune ; 
 making mouths at her; I go and come as I list ; I 
 defy good and ill-luck ; and I sleep soundly. But
 
 212 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 you were one of the wise ones who worked for fame, 
 while life and happiness tripped you up and slipped 
 by." 
 
 " Not so much fame, Reuben, as bread and butter. 
 I was civilized enough to eat my dough cooked, that 
 was all." 
 
 "Pshaw!" exclaimed he, with an emphasis that 
 sounded like the letting off a small ordnance, " civiliza 
 tion 1 If to eat my dough cooked required care 
 enough to kill a gnat, I'd forswear bakers, and live 
 on husks. The fact is, Maggie," (Maggie at the first 
 jump!) " I'm the only philosopher hi the world. I've 
 discovered the elixir and the philosopher's stone." 
 
 Maggie, all alive, her eyes dilated, asked for an 
 explanation. 
 
 " I create wealth by having no wants. None! A 
 handful of pebbles serve me as well as a handful of 
 eagles; as for the elixir that is a compound of the 
 simples patience and contentment. It might be called 
 anti-worry.." 
 
 " A good specific." 
 
 "A universal panacea! It would starve grave- 
 diggers and shut up the cemeteries." 
 
 " But there are real cares," said Maggie, " which 
 cannot be avoided must be borne." 
 
 " A mistake !" exclaimed the philosopher, with 
 crushing force.
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 213 
 
 "I do not see," said Maggie, "how your philo 
 sophy can prove it." 
 
 " Suffering," said I, "as Shylock says, is the 
 badge of our tribe." 
 
 " No !" replied the stentorian voice again ; " the 
 world is full of superfluities. Everything I own or 
 gain is an excess above my needs, sunshine and ap 
 petite being the only positive essentials of existence. 
 Care is nothing but anxiety about these superfluities ; 
 calamity and misfortune the loss merely of certain 
 incumbrances of life. While the sun shines, grass 
 grows and water runs, man has enough ; the rest is 
 only leather and prunello. ' The poorest beggar is 
 superfluous even in his rags.' So King Lear, Mag 
 gie ; don't know him, I suppose." 
 
 " Indeed I do," exclaimed Maggie, with consider 
 able warmth. 
 
 "We cry over broken toys," resumed Reuben, 
 "and talk of sorrow. There are no real misfor 
 tunes." 
 
 " Oh, sir 1 the death of our friends !" 
 
 " To die is to slip off old clothes and put on new. 
 What misfortune is there in that ?" 
 
 Maggie shook her head. 
 
 " Life 1" continued he. " There is my philosophy 
 in one word. The world is mine, and there isn't a 
 rich man's house, or a poor man's cot, or a bit of
 
 214 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 color, or a sweet odor, or a white cloud, or shapely 
 tree, or odd rock, or rippling brook that isn't mine 
 to enjoy ; and I enjoy it." 
 
 " And really never wish to be greater or richer ? 
 Have no ambition ?" 
 
 " Do I cry for the moon ?" 
 
 " And have no care ?" 
 
 " To keep my coat dry when it rains ; no 
 other." 
 
 "You've heard Reuben Dale's creed, Maggie," 
 said I ; " hear mine. Poverty is the Icing of evil 
 the greatest calamity that can befall." 
 
 " No, no," exclaimed both my listeners at once. 
 
 " Yes. Other misfortunes are sorrows which dig 
 nify ; they have sweet association and holy memo 
 ries. They elevate and chasten ; they are links, 
 sometimes with heaven sometimes with the heart 
 of humanity. But poverty degrades ; it alone is 
 mean, despicable, low. It thrusts men into con 
 tempt and servitude ; it robs them of manhood ; it 
 deprives the cheek of its bloom, the step of its light 
 ness, the soul of its courage I It consumes heart, 
 affection, tenderness, love, and every good and 
 human thing about us. You little know what devils 
 perpetual deprivation, ceaseless care and daily 
 drudgery will make of men." 
 
 " False !" exclaimed the happy philosopher. " By
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 215" 
 
 humanity, false 1 Poverty is only misfortune when 
 wishes keep the purse-strings. Poverty is the 
 normal condition of man ; neither banks, stocks, 
 dividends, houses, rents were dreamed of in Eden. 
 Adam was happy, and never saw a check-book in his 
 life." 
 
 Maggie gave more mirth to this last conceit than 
 I thought it deserved. 
 
 " Come, Reuben," said I, " tell us how flourish the 
 arts? How many square feet of canvas are you 
 pledged for ?" 
 
 " Is Mr. Dale an artist ?" cried Maggie, with 
 brightening eyes. 
 
 " A vagabond, Mag," said he, quietly patting her 
 hand as it lay on her knee. (I doubt if he would 
 not kiss the Sultan's favorite in five-and-twenty 
 minutes' acquaintance.) " A vagabond, Mag, with 
 caprice at the helm ; roving, halting, coming, going, 
 idling or working as humor or impulse rule me. I 
 love pictures, and so whistle and sing over the can 
 vas ; but there is Gipsy in my blood. I am a 
 growth that lives in the air, but cannot root in the 
 soil. Adhesion is a quality unknown to my com 
 position ; hence, unlike fellow-artists, sweating with 
 the fear of the academy in their eyes, and waxing 
 yellow with jaundice of hope deferred, you see me 
 Prince of myself, playing at shuttle-cock with my
 
 216 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 wishes ; tossing wants, temptations, sorrows into the 
 air with thumb and finger." 
 
 "I remember," said I, "the saying of an old 
 author poverty is the mother of modesty. I am 
 learning fast that he was wrong." 
 
 " By Angelo, you are right I A divinity hedges in a 
 man who has no wants. I am proud of my poverty." 
 
 "It sits gracefully upon you, I confess. But 
 beware how you think to stretch your rags over 
 another." 
 
 I saw him with his eyes greedily and widely 
 fixed upon Maggie. 
 
 " Bless me," said he, replying to me but with his 
 gaze still resting upon the cheek of Maggie, " bless 
 me, they stretch over numerous others. My pic 
 tures inherit their master's poverty. The slattern 
 brats get no pity from the world, and sit like beg 
 gars on the highway." 
 
 " Unappreciated ?" 
 
 "Not always. But there is an odd fatality 
 about them. There is an abundance of sympathiz 
 ing gentlemen with pockets as desolate as mine 
 who are munificent in praises ; but oddly enough, 
 these people with money inevitably lack the appre 
 ciation. There is rarely conjunction between 
 the two qualities ; they do not jostle ; they travel 
 different roads."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 217 
 
 "Then let me warn you. Seek to imprison no 
 free heart in your city dungeon " 
 
 " Sir," said the artist, " my dungeon is a house 
 top. You can look at the stars." 
 
 " That is not enough." 
 
 " Enough 1 It is a throne. I have an attic with 
 a curtain of chintz which divides my art from the 
 man natural. On one side the heavens pour down a 
 flood of light upon my canvases ; on the other, I hide 
 the paraphernalia which attends sleeping and eating. 
 Here I sing, I laugh, I chat, live Empereur ; and 
 paint most worshipfully, as I please. Enough ? If 
 rubies cropped up in my path ; if Fortunatus shook 
 showers of gold before my eyes ; if the Indies turned 
 their currents of wealth through my poor chamber 
 hear me, sir, there would be less, not more 1" 
 
 " Solve this newest problem." 
 
 "This have I proved ; what the purse gains, 
 the heart loses ; and the true richness of life, the 
 sum of its wealth, is not in ingots but heart-bounds. 
 By Adam ! the Ready Reckoner was unthought of 
 in the plan of creation. The crown of complete 
 ness does not belong to rent-rolls, and plethoric 
 money-bags, but to him whose life in its sym 
 pathies and its human ramifications is Briarean 1" 
 
 " Tell me," said Maggie, " are you always as 
 happy as you a,re now ?" 
 
 10
 
 218 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 "I strut ; flap my wings in the face of the 
 world ; bestride my whims and ride them where 
 they list ; owe no man anything but politeness, in 
 which I sometimes over-pay ; and lastly, have a 
 quick eye for sunshine. Now you are melancholy." 
 
 " Sometimes." 
 
 "Your eyes are olive shaped ; the lids droop 
 half-pendent ; the pupils swim in moist senti 
 ment ; your mouth has the pensive curve ; in your 
 forehead that bulges over the lines of your face 
 lives a drowsy and down-reaching rumination : 
 your brain, in fact, is rocked dreamily in a dun, 
 shadowed vale. Mine sparkles in the sun. Do you 
 see the difference ?" 
 
 "Yes, yes," exclaimed Maggie, with a quick, 
 vehement gesture in the air. 
 
 "Sunshine and shadow," said I, "are the in 
 separable obverse and reverse of all life and sub 
 stance." 
 
 "To be sure," replied the artist in his queer 
 way ; " the obverse, sunshine, is life ; the reverse, 
 shadow, is the under side of the sod." 
 
 I confess that when he said this thing a thrill 
 shot through me for the thought stalked in among 
 our light humors like a skeleton at a feast. 
 
 " For my part," resumed he, "I crowd all the 
 sunshine I can into my life, just as I crowd it into
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 219 
 
 my canvases ; but you, Sir Knight of the Whim 
 per, you I knew him once, Maggie, as fresh and 
 gay as a June rose you, I say, have shut up your 
 heart in a cavern : have put your temper in sack 
 cloth and ashes ; have Timoned yourself in this dull 
 fashion !" 
 
 " No ; the fashion has not been dull. Maggie 
 shall tell you some day how a bachelor's whiter 
 hearth can brighten and be happy." 
 
 " I can," replied Maggie, absently. 
 
 "With melancholy, no doubt ; with sighs that 
 have spun themselves in a web around you. Are 
 you not two melancholy ones ? Do you not eat 
 the sour side of the peach ? Hence, then, upon 
 your winter hearth have sat the Sphinx, the Raven, 
 the melancholy Muse grim Egyptian shadows, and 
 weird shapes ! You have been Niobes, I dare say, 
 all tears." 
 
 " Infidel 1" exclaimed I, with warmth. " Why, we 
 have capered ; shook our bells and frisked in mot 
 ley ! Absolutely, Mag, this fellow has stolen a 
 bit of sunshine, and running off into a corner, fan 
 cies all the rest of the world drowned in darkness." 
 
 " I tell you what," cried Ike, thrusting his head 
 through the door (and holding his head in it so 
 tightly that strangulation was imminent.) "I tell 
 you what, aint Maggie going home to-night ?"
 
 220 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 At which abrupt interruption there was a roar ; 
 and then Reuben, divining the matter in an instant, 
 astonished and terrified Ike by boldly seizing the 
 arm of Maggie, and declaring his intention of 
 accompanying her home. 
 
 Reuben, Maggie and Ike disappeared from the 
 room ; and as I peered wistfully down into the 
 grate, my listening ear caught a far-off silvery 
 cadence, rising merrily and sharp upon the winter 
 air. 
 
 And to this rising cadence my heart sunk hea 
 vily. I whistled softly as I walked the lonely pas 
 sages on the way to my chamber and slept that 
 night with my face to the wall.
 
 XIII. 
 
 The trio discussive How silence is Power A tilt 
 against world-wisdom in which the Philosopher breaks 
 lances, and shows us the paces of his favorite hobby 
 The world in its bustling Fifth Act Individualization 
 philosophically considered Hamlet A cherub in the 
 clouds. 
 
 221
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE candles were not lighted, and twilight 
 silence brooded in the room. Suddenly Mag 
 gie bolted out of a reverie, and said : 
 
 " Sir, your pictures will some day make you 
 famous." 
 
 This was to the artist, for now Maggie and I are 
 no longer alone ; now, nightly the glow of my fire 
 casts a new shadow on the wall ; now, by the north 
 window there is the easel where a summer landscape 
 daily glides upon the canvas. 
 
 " Success," replied the artist, spreading his ten 
 fingers to the blaze, " is up a precipice. I shall not 
 risk my neck by climbing." 
 
 " A miss is as good as a mile," I remarked. " So 
 says the old proverb ; but in literature, and perhaps 
 art, a miss is the infinite space between heaven and 
 its alliterative antagonism. Upon the heights of 
 Parnassus a few giants sit enthroned, upon whom 
 the gaze and light of the world are turned. A 
 little, a very little way below, are gathered thousands 
 
 223
 
 224 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 in the shadows, almost unheeded. A single step 
 would take them to the uttermost heights, but 
 their strength just fails the last strain. The bay- 
 wreath touches, maddens, but never crowns them ; 
 and they sink beneath a fate worse than that of 
 Tantalus." 
 
 "The world," exclaimed Reuben, "shall take me 
 as I am. I reject its candied promises of fame ; I 
 will not yield to its weak passion for notorieties. I 
 am not to be caged, stared at and petted ; I refuse 
 the distinguished consideration which it seeks to be 
 stow upon its lions ; I will not be elevated to those 
 dangerous heights, where every breath of envy may 
 blow upon me, and all the passions bespatter me at 
 then* will." 
 
 " But life should have some object." 
 
 " Life is affinity. It consists in enjoyment. It is 
 a sponge, and he is the wisest who can absorb the 
 most." 
 
 "Let us air your simile, a little," said I. " There 
 are sponges various in quality and complexion ; 
 empty sponges, dry and tough ; sponges bilged with 
 foulness ; sponges sly and secret, that feed upon their 
 acquisitions like rats in a corner ; then there are 
 sponges that absorb too much, and at a touch squirt 
 it upon you." 
 
 " I know one of the latter quality," said the
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 225 
 
 artist ; " when we meet there is a deluge. I float 
 upon his sea of talk, and pant for Ararat." 
 
 " Silence is power," exclaimed I, abruptly. 
 
 " A paradox," cried Maggie. 
 
 " Aye, and can be broken on the back of a butter 
 fly," said the artist. 
 
 "I am a talker," said I, " and have delivered 
 prosperously, I hope, some fair things. Yet am I 
 conscious that there is not a dunce stilted in stolid 
 silence anywhere, who is not my superior. For the 
 possibilities of wisdom that lie in matter unspoken 
 always master in general appreciation the quality of 
 that which is uttered." 
 
 " Fairly said," said Reuben, beating with his finger 
 in the air a sort of critical accompaniment to my 
 remarks. 
 
 " The talker, observe, is a tradesman with wares 
 to market. His listeners are his patrons, and may, 
 if they please, discard his fine fabrics ; they have 
 the power to sit oracular upon his trip sentences, 
 and may approve or condemn by the tyranny of 
 capricious ignorance. The talker is an actor who 
 makes his bow before the public, and must submit 
 to an orange-skin from the gallery, or a hiss from 
 the pit ; he is like a swordsman with his guard down 
 and his breast exposed, while silence, with its sword- 
 point up, its armor on, its visor closed, fossillated, 
 10*
 
 226 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 dull, stagnant, cut in alabaster, frowns and confronts 
 him in conscious power ; holds the trump in the 
 game, while his antagonist shows his hand ; by the 
 mystery and masterly virtue of being nothing, is 
 Dogberry judge over wit, oracle, and philosophy." 
 
 " Henceforth," said the artist, " I am in love with 
 negation." 
 
 "It is a good mistress to woo. /have told you 
 before, Maggie, how that monosyllable No is the 
 Solomon of the language." 
 
 " Wise men," exclaimed Reuben, " are my abomi 
 nation. I mean those apostles of the wisdom in 
 general circulation the coiners of this stamped 
 metal that passes current in trade and society as the 
 best representative of the wants and duties of man. 
 If all the wisdom in the world the indorsed and com 
 monly accepted wisdom were set before me in some 
 consolidated form, served up, say, as a baked pud 
 ding, I should forthwith begin and eat it bottom up 
 wards." 
 
 " Now," said Maggie, " let us see him get out of 
 the snarl he has got himself in." 
 
 " Most men are in leading-strings ; they are 
 tucked up under conventionalities ; they wear con 
 servative bibs and tuckers to the hour of their death 
 . or burial, let me say. Custom does not forego 
 them until the sod hides them. These men are mar-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 227 
 
 vellously proper gentlemen ; mild-mannered, gentle- 
 tongued, calm-brained ; they have the button-hole 
 of society, and make laws which turn only upon the 
 smooth and pleasant needs of her high courts. Avo 
 cation, bold performance, new roads to fame or 
 greatness ; the genius that prompts big hearts to 
 Do ; the philosophy that points to unknown paths ; 
 all individualization, and out-working of nature 
 these things these mild gentlemen do not understand 
 ; have no experiences by which they can understand 
 them and hence, being crowned by that respecta 
 bility whose frown the best of us dread patch up 
 and pass into currency certain trimmed, clipped phi 
 losophies representative of life in a negative form, 
 expository of the wisdom of the unattempted ; cau 
 tious, prudential, narrow philosophies, that hence 
 forth become household words and household gods 
 among the people." 
 
 " He is in the maze yet," said Maggie; "it is diffi 
 cult to follow him, but he will lead us somewhere, let 
 us hope." 
 
 " These are the social rulers; these are those whose 
 wisdom travels in the channels of commerce ; who by 
 the interests of property, and the influence of pro 
 perty, by the conservative instincts that spring up 
 in every man's heart the moment he can count acres, 
 obtain majorities and make laws for the world. They
 
 228 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 begin by vagabondizing all who travel off the high 
 way; they brand all pursuits that do not legitimately 
 ('legitimate ' is their word) carry banners upon which 
 are inscribed those two words which, hi their estima 
 tion, have civilized the world, ' Profit and Loss;" they 
 shut the door upon all who imply, ever so indirectly in 
 their mode of life, that the true foundation of society is 
 not seven per cent, per annum; or who aver, even as 
 an abstract doctrine, that there exist, or should exist, 
 no social distinctions between Much and Little. Let 
 me step down from generalization to special illustra 
 tion. I am an artist, as free in the bent of my impulses 
 as the nature I study and love hence I am itinerant, 
 vagabond ; but John Jellaway, of whom I've heard 
 you speak, whose art is to shuffle gams, who only 
 studies arithmetic in its one phase of addition, who 
 puzzles and tricks, and in his daily transactions hovers 
 on the verge of roguery why, he is honorable, legiti 
 mate, proper, and wise to the very top of wisdom. 
 It is monstrous to see how this class of men rule in 
 our civilization; it is startling to behold hi TRADE the 
 modern chivalry the art and aspiration, the hope 
 and desire of mankind; to see it enthroned and wor 
 shipped everywhere, and Life hi all its true phases 
 prostrated at the foot of such an idol." 
 
 " The Happy Philosopher is false to his title." 
 " No; I am content hi my own wisdom, which is
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 229 
 
 opposed to the worldly Solomons, but which is the 
 true philosophy, and I am its prophet. I know but 
 one rule of conduct the impulses that are in me shall 
 act, the nature that prompts shah 1 be obeyed. So 
 ciety, learning, the world, each and all tend to repress 
 the energies and weaken the motive forces of the in 
 dividual; it is only your free vagabond, like myself, 
 who can walk through life the sovereign of his sur 
 roundings whose nature, undwarfed, unstunted, 
 thrifty and vigorous in its powers to absorb and ex 
 pand, can justly claim the title of Happy can justly 
 fulfill the true destinies of man." 
 
 " Egotist !" said Maggie. 
 
 " Worse, Maggie; it is not only egotism that he ex 
 hibits, but that stronger passion, egoism ! Let him step 
 out of himself and his philosophies, and he will see 
 that the world is enough brimmed with life, thought 
 feeling. It seems to me to have gotten into one of 
 Shakspeare's fifth acts all bustle and action. I am 
 bewildered by the high-pressure rush of events; by 
 the whirl of new things; by the many who are shout 
 ing at the world with all their might to get the 
 world's attention ; by the new books, the new people, 
 the new politics, the new imbroglios, the new sciences, 
 the new arts, the new pleasures, the new revolutions, 
 the latest catastrophes. Every page of the journals is 
 crammed with intelligence you turn from one column
 
 230 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 only to find its fellow charged to the mouth, and ready 
 to belch its bristling contents at you until your head 
 whirls like a whip-top, and the whole confused 
 medley seems rushing around your cranium, heads 
 and points together, in a sort of up-side down, whirl- 
 a-gig steeple-chase. Absolutely something must be 
 done by which the brain can keep pace with all these 
 demands upon it." 
 
 " I suggest photography," cried the artist. 
 
 " It is my only hope. When the sensory becomes 
 a camera obscura, in which the procession of events 
 shall cast their shadows ; when by some mesmeric 
 process the last new books can be instantly photo 
 graphed upon the brain " 
 
 " Have you no mercy? All the new books ?" 
 
 " When these things come to pass, there will be 
 some possibility of the individual keeping pace with 
 the age in its mad scamper into the future." 
 
 " Mr. Dale," said Maggie to the artist, " he is 
 an anchorite; his talk belies himself; he shuts him 
 self from the world; to him at least it is as tedious 
 as a thrice-told tale." 
 
 " The jar of the world as it rushes by rattles our 
 casements, Maggie ; I see the smoke, the dust ; the 
 clatter breaks upon my seclusion. I speak now as 
 one who observes ; I put into my thought the sensa 
 tions of those who are hi the midst of the battle."
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 231 
 
 " There is noise and fury, it is true," said Reuben ; 
 " for life is a melo-drama. But how little character, 
 wit, high sentiment 1 Individualization is the un 
 known quantity." 
 
 " That is an old thought which needs airing; it has 
 grown musty and moth-eaten for want of a little 
 shaking up. The misery of life is not that we are 
 as so many peas in a pod, but that our differences 
 are angular and many. There is too much discord 
 and collision of individualities as it is. We bristle 
 with self-assertion, and, porcupine-like, stick our little 
 quills into every antagonistic self we encounter. 
 
 " Genius and taste, in whatever direction they 
 may accomplish, are perpetually addressing them 
 selves to the deaf and dumb ; thinkers, artists, poets, 
 creators in all arts, famish daily in the need of 
 assimilation ; their cry is for affinities. Individuali 
 zation, after all, is incompleteness. It is a warped, 
 gnarled, imperfect growth, far inferior to that grand 
 unity, where catholic and equal distribution of parts, 
 qualities, tastes and appreciations bestow the true 
 perfection of character. Completeness, the highest 
 glory, can exhibit but little individuality ; it ripens 
 towards all points of the compass ; its sympathizers 
 are comprehensive and universal. Men of whom 
 this praise can be uttered might render life a little 
 more monotonous, but it would be by softening down
 
 232 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 those granite angularities upon which now so many 
 hearts are bruised by filling those sloughs of neglect 
 and cold unsympathy, into which we plunge unheeded, 
 where we struggle and die unthought of. Give me 
 identity. Where is the man whose heart reflects the 
 images of life and nature cast upon it as mine reflects 
 them while my dear soul is mistress of her choice, 
 her election shall seal him for herself ! 
 
 " These individualized people who are made up of 
 saliences and abrupt angles are, after all, nothing but 
 odds and ends from the workshop of humanity. It 
 would seem as if some of nature's workmen, not to 
 speak it profanely, had moulded for mere pastime the 
 clippings and remnants, the chips hewn from 
 chiselled and perfected creations, into odd sem 
 blances of men, and flung them half made up into 
 the busy affairs of life. They are Mosaic ; like 
 grandam's patchwork, their parts do not mate nor 
 match ; the texture of their woof is motley. Do 
 such amuse ? By Momus ! so does a monkey, or 
 an obstinate donkey, or a clown, or any fantastic 
 thing ! 
 
 " Characteristics are weaknesses ; they are simply 
 the rattle and jar of ill-made machinery the sharp 
 friction of nature in weak adjustment of means to 
 ends ! The perfect instrument is smooth and 
 noiseless ; its functions are so equal to the per-
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 233 
 
 formance required that the task is accomplished 
 with the repose and ease of complete and perfect 
 strength. 
 
 " Character-drawing in fiction is as easy as lying. 
 How often does it consist in the portrayal of 
 dwarfed faculties abnormal, warted, knotty develop 
 ments ? It is a trade ; laws can be framed for it by 
 which success can be rendered certain. For instance, 
 go back to the old doctrine of temperaments. Select 
 your character from any one of the five divisions, 
 and cast him amid a series of counter-grained events 
 pit his nature and his surroundings against each 
 other. You trade with his weaknesses ; you scorch 
 him in the heat of adverse circumstances until every 
 vein and seam in his composition start out and show 
 themselves, webbed, intercrossed alto-relief against 
 the plane of his level nature. This is the whole 
 secret of Hamlet ; out of his weaknesses and his 
 melancholy arise the superstructure of character and 
 individuality. 
 
 "Had Hamlet been less he would have been 
 more. I explain. By this doctrine of tempera 
 ments and by phrenology I arrive at his charac 
 ter. His temperament was bilious, crossed by the 
 melancholic. Had he been of the first only -0? 
 that class whom the ancients assure us are the 
 rulers of the world, he would have walked frmi the
 
 234 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 ghost to the bed-side of his uncle-father and cut his 
 throat on the pillow ; tripped him, that his heels 
 might kick at heaven. Between the conception and 
 execution of his revenge the enterprise would not 
 have been sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
 and so turned awry. There would have been no 
 infirm vacillation ; his will and purpose would 
 have been single ; his clear one-sided mind would 
 have been equal to the commands imposed upon it ; 
 he would have been a hero such as the world's 
 heroes are, a Caesar or an Alexander. 
 
 " But Hamlet's intellect was complete and full ; 
 it scaled from cause to effect ; it was all-sided, mas 
 terly, bathed like the mountain-tops in perfect light. 
 Yet with all this splendid development of that 
 which was purely intellectual with that full, broad 
 high brow, somewhat weak at the base, but swell 
 ing upward from eyebrows and temples with the 
 inverted lines of the pyramid there was a deficiency 
 of what I will call alloy ; for man is like gold, which 
 in its purest state is consumed by the friction of 
 use ; it must be hardened by some base alloy ere it 
 can be adapted to work-day purposes. In Hamlet 
 the man animal was weak ; the brain bulged hi 
 its frontal lines, but the poll was flat ; the baser 
 but active quah'ties, the motive forces, the brain 
 behind the ears, the man as distinguished from
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 235 
 
 the intellect in its bold, blind self-assertion through 
 obstinacy, tenacity, will, spirit of action those 
 qualities which are supreme among Great Doers, 
 who think clearly and well, perhaps, but think 
 only in grooves and straight lines in all these 
 things lay Hamlet's weakness. Upon a man who 
 could only think was enjoined a duty which could 
 be performed alone by a man who could only act. 
 Yet Hamlet was not exclusively intellectual else 
 his philosophy by some cold and ingenious logic 
 would have opened doors for the escape of duty. 
 His heart was warm and rich ; it over-flowed with 
 love, and urged the reluctant will to its sacred 
 and filial purpose. Between the equipoise of im 
 pulse and philosophy he vacillated ; a purpose of 
 revenge born of the age, education, and the dark 
 surroundings of example and precept, tngged at 
 his heart one way ; while his philosophy, lighted 
 by the lights of a century in advance, tugged at 
 his heart the other way. 
 
 "Alas, for him and for all men who think too 
 much 1 Melancholy is the air they breathe ; doubt 
 sits like a ghoul upon their brains ; skepticism 
 flings its misty shadow ever on their path. Im 
 pulse alone is the god-like. Mysterious Nature ! 
 so often best for being lowliest ! To her " 
 
 I turned towards my listeners, and they were
 
 236 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 not ! For during all this digressive reverie my 
 gaze had been fixed abstractedly on a carved head 
 of marble on the mantel over my grate. I started 
 from the recumbent depths of my easy-chair, but 
 the suspended cadence of my voice had startled 
 them ; the curtains rustled, and from the window 
 recess they emerged the fire-light casting a glow 
 of unusual warmth over the features of Maggie. 
 
 "There is a cherub in the clouds," I said ; " you 
 have looked for him." 
 
 "Yes," replied the artist ; and he whistled. 
 
 I turned, and my eyes sought pensively the ashes 
 in the grate. " It is plain," I murmured ; " my phi 
 losophies will soon whistle about the corners of the 
 room and nobody heed them. Afar off there is a 
 cloud ; I feel its shadow grow ; I see, too well, that 
 soon it will cast its gloom athwart my hearth, and 
 silence, perhaps forever, my winter gossip."
 
 XIV. 
 
 The artist robs my hearthstone of its winter blossom 
 Maggie and I in our parting chat The lovers go 
 forth into their future Ike and I the abandoned and 
 disconsolate My winter fire is out. 
 
 28T
 
 XIV. 
 
 IT is more than two weekly cycles since the artist 
 crossed my threshold. But in that brief time 
 swift growths have sprung up in the heart-soils 
 around me. In Maggie there is expansion. Her 
 eyes glisten ; her cheeks dapple as if the fingers of 
 Aurora played with them ; smiles crop out upon her 
 lips in harvest bountifulness. I catch her at times 
 before the mirror, new ribboned ; and more than all, 
 when I talk, she does not, as before, sit at my feet 
 with ear pricked and eye wistful. She has seized 
 upon my suggestion and studies art over the 
 shoulder of Reuben Dale. 
 
 In the twilight glow of the fire, when the curtains 
 were dropped but the candles unlighted, Maggie 
 came alone and drew a low seat close to me. She 
 was silent and a h'ttle sad the sadness, however, as 
 it seemed to me, of some complete and hopeful hap 
 piness. 
 
 I placed my hand on her head. 
 
 " Well, Maggie, this is spring, and our winter fire
 
 240 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 will soon be out. Our talk is fast rounding to its 
 final period." 
 
 " Sir," said Maggie, and her voice was tremulous 
 and low, "your books, your friendship have done so 
 much for me P 
 
 " I have talked, Maggie, that is all wildly and 
 freely, I must confess. I have called up black spirits 
 and grey ; your ear has been like the witches' cal 
 dron, into which I have cast odd ingredients. But 
 out of sand, and loam, and clay the sun and the rain 
 spin fine tissues, and weave them into a vast, all- 
 beautiful robe of green for the universal face of 
 nature. So, Maggie, has your quickening nature 
 ripened into good and noble growths some of the 
 seed I have cast upon your heart. But tell me. 
 Those ambitions, do they blaze now as before ?" 
 
 " I do not know, sir. I think not at least not 
 always. I am more contented now." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 She blushed, then looked askance, and smiled. 
 
 " I have followed your teaching." 
 
 " Mine, Maggie, or the artist's ?" 
 
 " I mean to be an artist," said she with great 
 quickness. " Mr. Dale will teach me. The oppor 
 tunity will be afforded, and if I have any genius it 
 will appear." 
 
 " There is an art older than the art of painting
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 241 
 
 the first of all arts. It dates back to Eden. I 
 think sometimes, Maggie, that you are an amateur 
 already." 
 
 " Reuben says I am very apt." 
 
 She did not or would not understand me. 
 
 " I believe him, Mag. It is an art in which girl 
 hood fresh, green, timid girlhood makes the no 
 blest, adepts ; an art that has been glorified in all 
 ages, under ah 1 suns." 
 
 " I didn't mean that." 
 
 " Didn't mean what ?" 
 
 No answer, and a long, eloquent pause. 
 
 " Will you tell me, sir," speaking at last, but very 
 low, and hesitatingly, "will you tell me, sir, about 
 Mr. Dale ? Do you like him ?" 
 
 " He is a thief, Maggie." 
 
 A spring upright, and a blazing eye. 
 
 " There was a flower growing on my hearth-stone. 
 Its roots spread out, its leaves expanded under my 
 care and nurture. Blossoms began to unfold upon 
 its branches ; I was glad ; I bent over and watched 
 for the flower which should reward me ; suddenly 
 his hand stretched out and robbed me of all." 
 
 She sat down softly, and looked away. 
 
 " Do not think that I repine, however. The 
 flower will flourish better perhaps with him than 
 with me. He is young that is divine. He is the 
 11
 
 242 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 summer sun, and rich fruits will ripen beneath the 
 glory of his beams, while my winter rays, oblique 
 and chill, fail to warm the thing they shine upon. 
 Still I am a dreamer, one that scales all possibilities ; 
 and sometimes, inspired by this fireside flower, I have 
 dreamed of age rolled back into youth ivory on my 
 temples, raven in my locks, and nectar in my veins 
 the dull, clogged, heavy blood of age transfused into 
 the fiery currents of youth 1" 
 
 Maggie's head was averted and stilled into ala 
 baster. The flickering glow from the grate, ruddy 
 and gay, played and danced upon her cheek, her 
 ear, her shoulder came and went as the blaze from 
 the coals leaped and wavered, lighting up the shad 
 ows hi her curls, glancing into her eyes but all 
 unheeded. A stillness so profound came over us ! 
 The clock ticked as if its steam were up, and it was 
 off for a race with tune ; the curtains hung motion 
 less against the panes ; the fire blazed in a hushed, 
 watchful way ; the clock alone was noisy, and 
 rushed along pell-mell with us into the future. 
 
 Suddenly Maggie turned and put her two hands 
 on my knee, and looked earnestly in my face. 
 
 " Sir, tell me what you mean." 
 
 " Tut, Maggie ! I held a fireside masque that 
 was all. At midnight when churchyards yawn, 
 and all the wild fancies, those gipsies of the brain,
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 243 
 
 come out and dance their fantastic revel through 
 the mazes of the imagination, I gave caprice a 
 brief holiday ; I conjured up sweet possibilities ; I 
 dreamed of plucking my fireside blossom and wear 
 ing it in my left button-hole. But I am sixty, 
 you see, and you are" 
 
 " Seventeen that is, in May. But you are not 
 sixty 1" 
 
 "At least I have completed three cycles equal 
 to yours. I have spoken dreams, only, Mag. It is 
 sweet to dream. Henceforth I shall have a new 
 memory to cherish that's all." 
 
 " Then you forgive, you will sanction that is " 
 
 The artist broke in upon our talk. 
 
 "Reuben," cried I, "you are false in act and 
 false in tongue." 
 
 "I defend myself, my guard is up. Thrust 
 away." 
 
 " Your philosophy is a cheat, false disciple ! 
 It proclaims the divinity which hedges in a man 
 who has no wants, and in the very breath covets 
 a neighbor's goods." 
 
 " Life and Nature are mine ; I did not covet 
 I claimed the gift demised by heaven. Such boons 
 are clearly within the meaning of my philosophy. 
 Property, as Proudhon says, is theft. That I dis-
 
 244 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 dain, but wealth like this (he faced towards Mag 
 gie) is the gift of Eden the primal happiness." 
 
 " I would not trust your probity with my pocket 
 change. I am robbed, it seems, and can get no justice." 
 
 "The affinities alone are law-makers in a case 
 like this the jewel robbed elects to be stolen." 
 
 " And I must burrow henceforth sadly and alone 
 in the empty casket. Alas, I mourn for my de 
 serted hearth, for the capricious fancies that must 
 bubble up and die unheeded. Forsaken the familiar 
 places ! the walks ! the books ! the fireside corner ! 
 the very air forsaken is hapless Ike !" 
 
 Maggie ran and put two fingers upon my lips. 
 
 Happy and light-tongued were they both that 
 night ; they prophesied, and looked into the here 
 after through rose-tints. The future was their grand 
 cartoon, and on its ample spaces they limned mag 
 nificent dreams. 
 
 " To-morrow," said the artist, " I go." 
 
 "Whither?" 
 
 "Townward." 
 
 " And Maggie ?" 
 
 " Ah, dear sir," whispered Maggie, " this is the 
 last of our Winter Nights." 
 
 ***** 
 
 With my face against the pane I watched Richard 
 and Maggie wend homeward in the light of the
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 245 
 
 moon. They walked side by side, and by the line 
 of glittering sheen and by the shadow, I could trace 
 his arm as it wound about her form encircling, pro 
 tecting, usurping ! 
 
 " Come Prophecy," I muttered, " draw your happy 
 augury, for see, the shadows fall behind them, and 
 they walk forward into the light !" 
 
 I turned, for there was a shuffle and a snuffle in 
 the room, and there, wedged in between the mantel 
 column and the grate, stood poor Ike, his spread eyes 
 as big and red as rising moons, his hair part on 
 end and part matted down, and his lips curved 
 downward in the disconsolate and pitiful lines of 
 grief. 
 
 "She's gone," he blubbered, and rubbed his 
 knuckles into his eyes until they waxed bigger and 
 redder than ever. 
 
 The room looked so drear that I drew my chair 
 up to the grate. Ike snuffling and sidling, crept near 
 me, as if by the magnetism of sympathy, and dropped 
 on the floor at my feet. 
 
 " Ah, Ike 1" said I, " we are the forsaken ones. 
 We must put our two griefs together, and henceforth 
 be sympathizing friends. What say you ?" 
 
 He sobbed, and for a moment his grief threatened 
 to be explosive. 
 
 "Strange conjunction," muttered I; "by the
 
 246 A Bachelor's Story. 
 
 universal identity of human sentiment Ike and I 
 meet upon the same plane of experience and 
 feeling 1" 
 
 Ike nestled close to my feet and was still, the 
 candles flickered dun, a chill crept through the air, a 
 melancholy silence settled down heavily upon us both. 
 
 The grate looked dead, and I thrust the poker down 
 amid the coals my winter fire was out ! 
 
 This is spring. Nature, in its young greenness, is 
 as fresh as girlhood. The air is fragrant, and the 
 orchards are gay with apple blossoms. I am busy 
 for the nonce in my garden training my vines, 
 propping my nurselings, earthing my plants, and 
 watching with eager interest the rapid evolvements 
 of nature's great drama. How the subterranean 
 forces are at work ; how the juices course, the buds 
 burst, the leaves unfold, the roots sprout, until out 
 of this grand laboratory, the earth, spring myriad 
 forms of beauty. 
 
 Spring is almost as much a new birth to me as it 
 is to nature. I rejoice in it as a mother rejoices in 
 her latest born. I watch the green as it deepens on 
 the slopes, and the buds as they swell and expand. 
 Shady Side, so long unfrequented, becomes my haunt 
 again. The music of the flowing stream, so long 
 locked in icy silence, begins once more to ripple its
 
 A Bachelor's Story. 247 
 
 unbroken song ; and as the season advances, soon do 
 I hear the clashing leaves, swept by the summer 
 winds, rising and falling in melodious utterance. I 
 watch the tree-tops as they spread out and wave 
 their green awnings, and note the shadows daily 
 growing denser and richer, until a summer fullness 
 rests upon all. 
 
 Then the rod, the poem, the noonday reverie ; 
 then, while stretched under green boughs, come 
 dreams of the past ; down through a long vista come 
 Beatrice, and Maggie, and all memories ; then 
 imagination is a camera-obscura, peopled by shadows 
 cast from the teeming past. 
 
 THE END.
 
 .A.d.mira/ble ISTovel 
 
 THE ROMANCE 
 
 OF A 
 
 POOR YOUNG MAN. 
 
 BY OCTAVE FEUILLET. 
 
 Translated from the Seventh Paris Edition by HENRY J. MAO- 
 DONALD (late of Corpus Ghristi College, Oxford). One volume, 
 12mo., muslin. Price, $1 00. 
 
 " The story of a Poor Young Man, by OCTAYE FEUILLET, is the title of a fiction 
 which, under two distinct and even contradictory forms, has gained a success 
 unrivalled since the palmiest days of Voltaire. Having passed numerous editions 
 as a novel, and being read by everybody, it was dramatized, and after an immense 
 run in Paris, is now performed to crowded audiences on almost every stage from 
 which the French language is spoken. This is perhaps the first instance where a 
 first-rate novel, without the aid of the composer, has been highly successful on 
 the stage. 
 
 " The author is yet quite a young man, but his literary career from its very out 
 set has been distinguished by a brilliancy and good fortune seldom vouchsafed to 
 those who woo the muse until they have passed through the fierce ordeal of dis 
 appointments, heart-sores, and despair. He never made a failure; his earliest 
 production pleased the public, and his last enrolled his name in letters of gold on 
 the annals of French literature. The Empress sent for him to tell him how she 
 had wept over his book, and then made the Emperor compliment him. From 
 that moment every one wished to read a work that had called forth such distin 
 guished applause." Brussels Correspondent. 
 
 " Of late years a new and wholesome tendency has appeared in French imagi 
 native literature. A class of writers have appeared, who, instead of appealing to 
 morbid passions and depraved tastes, have gained a reputation by depicting the 
 pure and healthy emotions of the heart, by developing the charms of genial and 
 symmetrical characters, and by exhibiting men and women nobly triumphing 
 over adverse circumstances and social temptations. 
 
 "Of this new school of writers, two conspicuous examples are found in the 
 works of EMILE SOUVESTEE and OCTAVE FEUILLET. The latter we propose to 
 introduce, by a spirited version of his 'BOMANCE OF A POOR YOUNG MAN,' 
 which has recently appeared in Paris, and has been hailed by both French and 
 English critics as perhaps the most striking and admirable work of fiction that 
 appeared in any country during the year 1858. Indeed, since ' Jane Eyre ' startled 
 the novel-reading world, we hardly remember another production of the kind 
 which, for beauty and interest, can be compared with this." From the New 
 York Tribune. 
 
 * # * Sold by all Booksellers, and sent by mail, postage free, to any part of the 
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 KUDD & CARLETON, PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS, 
 
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 CURIOSITIES 
 
 OF 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY. 
 
 BY FRANCIS T. BUCKLAND, M.A., OXFORD. 
 1 Vol. 12mo. Illustrated. Price, $1 25. 
 
 From the London Edition. 
 
 "The reader need not apprehend stereotype anecdotes of 
 animals in this capital book, by the son of the late celebrated 
 geologist, Dr. BUCKLAND. The work is no stale repetition, but 
 enters upon a new field. One feels as if he were rambling in 
 the company of an agreeable and well-informed friend, who is 
 ever pointing out objects of interest, even in the most unlooked- 
 for places. Whoever, for instance, has hitherto regarded a horse- 
 pond with disgust, will after reading a few pages, take a sudden 
 interest in its contents, and look upon it even as an agreeable 
 variety of Aquarium. Then, too, the curious details respecting 
 Rats, those unfortunate animals who may be said to have no 
 friends, and yet seem to be always convivial. Snakes, also, 
 and fish and fishing come in for their share in Mr. Buckland's 
 book. Many a reader will, doubtless, here learn to his surprise 
 that certain kinds of fishes are known to make nests. Other 
 things too will he get a hint of, that will startle him out of his 
 apathy to facts in Natural History. It would puzzle many to 
 answer the question, Do bats lay eggs ? It would puzzle more 
 how best to rescue a friend from the folds of a Cobra. Of such 
 matters this volume is full. In short, it is a curiosity in itself, 
 and shows how completely a clever man, thoroughly impressed 
 with his subject, and of enlarged knowledge and varied expe 
 rience, can dispel the feelings of aversion with which the igno 
 rant and thoughtless have been wont to regard some of the 
 iiumbler members of the animal world. 
 
 In Natural History, as well as in other researches, it is too 
 much the practice to copy facts and observations from printed 
 books, the volume of Nature herself being left unopened. It has 
 been the aim of the author to search into this wonderful book, 
 to record facts which came under his own eyes, at the same 
 time not neglecting the numerous works and lectures of cele 
 brated Naturalists ; and the book before us is probably the most 
 complete collection of instructive and anecdotal sketches upon 
 the interesting subject of Natural History which has ever 
 appeared." 
 
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 RUDD & CARLETON, PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS, 
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 THE 
 
 AFTERNOON 
 
 OP 
 
 UNMARRIED LIFE. 
 
 A COMPANION TO "A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT -WOMEN." 
 
 1 Vol. 12mo. muslin. Price $1 00. 
 
 Extract from laU Review. 
 
 " We rarely see a book in which strong common sense and an 
 attractive style are so admirably combined in the treatment of 
 an interesting theme as in this volume. Of the work itself, we 
 have to say at the outset that it is the best in this particular 
 department of literature that we have ever read. Of its ability 
 there cun be no question. There is a strength and steadiness of 
 thought ; a flow of good sense and wise suggestions and coun 
 sel from introduction to finis. In style, the volume has the 
 nerve and masculinity of man ; and the spirit and clearness of 
 woman. The impression that rests in the mind after perusal i?, 
 that the book is the product of one who has seen much of 
 human nature, observed its workings and wants, who has the 
 power and feeling of thought to a more than common extent, 
 and in whom wide observation has grown into most intelligent 
 judgment. She sees woman both as she is and as she should 
 be, and pleads eloquently and like a woman for her sex. For 
 our own part we have read the work not only to the end of 
 experiencing a new sensation upon an old subject, but of getting 
 more and better ideas of woman her actualities, probabilities, 
 and possibilities, and one rises from its perusal with a conviction 
 that its author was gifted with a warm heart, a clear judgment, 
 and delicate feeling, and that she has thought, felt, and observed 
 much in the position of her sex. The simplest conclusions 
 wrought out by experience are worth a thousand unimproved 
 theories, therefore these chapters commend themselves to atten 
 tion and will touch some responsive chord in many hearts. We 
 think there are few women, be they maid or matron, mother, 
 wife, or sister, who might not gather from this suggestive volume 
 some hints to lighten their own lot or enable them to fulfil more 
 faithfully and cheerfully, the duties which Providence has 
 assigned to them." 
 
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 NEW SCHOOL TALE. 
 
 ERIC: OR, LITTLE BY LIITLE. 
 
 A TALE OP ROSLTN SCHOOL. 
 
 BY FREDERICK W. FARRER. 
 (FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.) 
 
 1 Vol. 12 mo. Muslin. Price $1 00. 
 
 From the London Literary Gazette. 
 
 11 It is pleasant to preface our notice of this work by a genuine 
 conviction that it is one of the most charming and touching of 
 books that it has ever been our lot to read. No book, since the 
 advent of ' Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby' has given 
 such an admirable picture of inner school life. Although couched 
 in the form of a fictitious narrative, and professing to deal wholly 
 with fictitious characters, the tale bears the impress of being a 
 record of the author's school-boy feelings and impressions. Writ 
 ten apparently for the immediate perusal of that class of readers 
 more peculiarly identified with the principal characters described, 
 yet the book is one which appeals most powerfully to the hearts 
 of all who have hearts to feel and minds to think. Apart from 
 its general tendency, which is pervaded by a strong religious 
 bias that is not pedantic or sectarian, and from which an ad 
 mirable moral may be derived, the powerful and diversified in 
 terest of the tale itself cannot fail of luring on from page to page 
 the feelings of curiosity and the reader. 
 
 Want of space allows us only to call attention to some touch 
 ing incidental remarks upon school-boy joys and sorrows, upon 
 the destinies of the boys, whose names are cut upon the school 
 room walls, and other topics connected with the poetic side of 
 juvenile life. All these scenes are most delicately touched ; and 
 if the volume contained no other, they alone would stamp Mr. 
 Farrar as a master in the art of psychological description." 
 
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