The experience of the latter suggested much and minute advice,
respecting the youth's journey through the trackless forest. Upon
this subject he spoke with calm earnestness, as if he were sending
Reuben to the battle or the chase, while he himself remained
secure at home; and not as if the human countenance that was
about to leave him, were the last he would ever behold. But his
firmness was shaken before he concluded.

“Carry my blessing to Dorcas, and say that my last prayer
shall be for her and you. Bid her to have no hard thoughts because
you left me here”—Reuben's heart smote him—“for that
your life would not have weighed with you, if its sacrifice could
have done me good. She will marry you, after she has mourned
a little while for her father; and Heaven grant you long and
happy days! and may your children's children stand round your
death-bed! And, Reuben,” added he, as the weakness of mortality
made its way at last, “return, when your wounds are
healed and your weariness refreshed, return to this wild rock,
and lay my bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them.”

An almost superstitious regard, arising perhaps from the customs
of the Indians, whose war was with the dead, as well as the
living, was paid by the frontier inhabitants to the rites of sepulture;
and there are many instances of the sacrifice of life, in the
attempt to bury those who had fallen by the “sword of the wilderness.”
Reuben, therefore, felt the full importance of the promise,
which he most solemnly made, to return, and perform Roger
Malvin's obsequies. It was remarkable, that the latter, speaking
his whole heart in his parting words, no longer endeavored to persuade
the youth, that even the speediest succor might avail to the
preservation of his life. Reuben was internally convinced that he
should see Malvin's living face no more. His generous nature
would fain have delayed him, at whatever risk, till the dying scene
were past; but the desire of existence and the hope of happiness
had strengthened in his heart, and he was unable to resist them.

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

“It is enough,” said Roger Malvin, having listened to Reuben's
promise. “Go, and God speed you!”

The youth pressed his hand in silence, turned, and was departing.
His slow and faltering steps, however, had borne him but a
little way, before Malvin's voice recalled him.

“Reuben, Reuben,” said he, faintly; and Reuben returned and
knelt down by the dying man.

“Raise me, and let me lean against the rock,” was his last request.
“My face will be turned towards home, and I shall see
you a moment longer, as you pass among the trees.”

Reuben, having made the desired alteration in his companion's
posture, again began his solitary pilgrimage. He walked more
hastily at first than was consistent with his strength; for a sort
of guilty feeling, which sometimes torments men in their most
justifiable acts, caused him to seek concealment from Malvin's
eyes. But, after he had trodden far upon the rustling forest-leaves,
he crept back, impelled by a wild and painful curiosity,
and, sheltered by the earthy roots of an uptorn tree, gazed
earnestly at the desolate man. The morning sun was unclouded,
and the trees and shrubs imbibed the sweet air of the month of
May; yet there seemed a gloom on Nature's face, as if she sympathized
with mortal pain and sorrow. Roger Malvin's hands
were uplifted in a fervent prayer, some of the words of which
stole through the stillness of the woods, and entered Reuben's
heart, torturing it with an unutterable pang. They were the
broken accents of a petition for his own happiness and that of
Dorcas; and, as the youth listened, conscience, something in its
similitude, pleaded strongly with him to return, and lie down
again by the rock. He felt how hard was the doom of the kind
and generous being whom he had deserted in his extremity.
Death would come, like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing
gradually towards him through the forest, and showing its ghastly
and motionless features from behind a nearer, and yet a nearer

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

tree. But such must have been Reuben's own fate, had he tarried
another sunset; and who shall impute blame to him, if he shrink
from so useless a sacrifice? As he gave a parting look, a breeze
waved the little banner upon the sapling-oak, and reminded
Reuben of his vow.

* * * * * * *

Many circumstances contributed to retard the wounded traveller
in his way to the frontiers. On the second day, the clouds,
gathering densely over the sky, precluded the possibility of regulating
his course by the position of the sun; and he knew not but
that every effort of his almost exhausted strength was removing
him farther from the home he sought. His scanty sustenance
was supplied by the berries, and other spontaneous products of
the forest. Herds of deer, it is true, sometimes bounded past
him, and partridges frequently whirred up before his foot-steps;
but his ammunition had been expended in the fight, and he had no
means of slaying them. His wounds, irritated by the constant
exertion in which lay the only hope of life, wore away his
strength, and at intervals confused his reason. But, even in the
wanderings of intellect, Reuben's young heart clung strongly to
existence, and it was only through absolute incapacity of motion,
that he last sank down beneath a tree, compelled there to await
death.

In this situation he was discovered by a party, who, upon the
first intelligence of the fight, had been despatched to the relief of
the survivors. They conveyed him to the nearest settlement,
which chanced to be that of his own residence.

Dorcas, in the simplicity of the olden time, watched by the
bed-side of her wounded lover, and administered all those comforts
that are in the sole gift of woman's heart and hand. During
several days, Reuben's recollection strayed drowsily among the
perils and hardships through which he had passed, and he was
incapable of returning definite answers to the inquiries, with

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

which many were eager to harass him. No authentic particulars
of the battle had yet been circulated; nor could mothers,
wives, and children tell, whether their loved ones were detained
by captivity, or by the stronger chain of death. Dorcas nourished
her apprehensions in silence, till one afternoon, when Reuben
awoke from an unquiet sleep, and seemed to recognize her more
perfectly than at any previous time. She saw that his intellect
had become composed, and she could no longer restrain her filial
anxiety.

“My father, Reuben?” she began; but the change in her lover's
countenance made her pause.

The youth shrank, as if with a bitter pain, and the blood gushed
vividly into his wan and hollow cheeks. His first impulse was to
cover his face; but, apparently with a desperate effort, he half
raised himself, and spoke vehemently, defending himself against
an imaginary accusation.

“Your father was sore wounded in the battle, Dorcas, and he
bade me not burthen myself with him, but only to lead him to the
lake-side, that he might quench his thirst and die. But I would
not desert the old man in his extremity, and, though bleeding myself,
I supported him; I gave him half my strength, and led him
away with me. For three days we journeyed on together, and
your father was sustained beyond my hopes; but, awaking at
sunrise on the fourth day, I found him faint and exhausted,—he
was unable to proceed,—his life had ebbed away fast,—and”—

“He died!” exclaimed Dorcas, faintly.

Reuben felt it impossible to acknowledge that his selfish love
of life had hurried him away, before her father's fate was decided.
He spoke not; he only bowed his head; and, between shame and
exhaustion, sank back and hid his face in the pillow. Dorcas
wept, when her fears were thus confirmed; but the shock, as it
had been long anticipated, was on that account the less violent.

“You dug a grave for my poor father in the wilderness,

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

tendrils over the hidden entrance, he stood beneath his own window,
in the open area of Doctor Rappaccini's garden.

How often is it the case, that, when impossibilities have come
to pass, and dreams have condensed their misty substance into
tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed,
amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium
of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us
thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene,
and lingers sluggishly behind, when an appropriate adjustment
of events would seem to summon his appearance. So was it now
with Giovanni. Day after day, his pulses had throbbed with
feverish blood, at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice,
and of standing with her, face to face, in this very garden,
basking in the oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching
from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his
own existence. But now there was a singular and untimely
equanimity within his breast. He threw a glance around the
garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were present, and
perceiving that he was alone, began a critical observation of
the plants.

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their
gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural.
There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying
by himself through a forest, would not have been startled to
find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out
of the thicket. Several, also, would have shocked a delicate
instinct by an appearance of artificialness, indicating that there
had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various
vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's
making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy,
glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably
the result of experiment, which, in one or two cases, had
succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound

[figure description] Blank Leaf.[end figure description]

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

her husband master of a farm, under older cultivation, larger,
and better stocked than most of the frontier establishments. Reuben
Bourne, however, was a neglectful husbandman; and while
the lands of the other settlers beeame annually more fruitful, his
deteriorated in the same proportion. The discouragements to
agriculture were greatly lessened by the cessation of Indian war,
during which men held the plough in one hand, and the musket in
the other; and were fortunate if the products of their dangerous
labor were not destroyed, either in the field or in the barn, by the
savage enemy. But Reuben did not profit by the altered condition
of the country; nor can it be denied, that his intervals of industrious
attention to his affairs were but scantily rewarded with success.
The irritability, by which he had recently become distinguished,
was another cause of his declining prosperity, as it occasioned
frequent quarrels, in his unavoidable intercourse with the neighboring
settlers. The results of these were innumerable lawsuits;
for the people of New England, in the earliest stages and
wildest circumstances of the country, adopted, whenever attainable,
the legal mode of deciding their differences. To be brief,
the world did not go well with Reuben Bourne, and, though not
till many years after his marriage, he was finally a ruined man,
with but one remaining expedient against the evil fate that had
pursued him. He was to throw sunlight into some deep recess
of the forest, and seek subsistence from the virgin bosom of the
wilderness.

The only child of Reuben and Dorcas was a son, now arrived
at the age of fifteen years, beautiful in youth, and giving promise
of a glorious manhood. He was peculiarly qualified for, and
already began to excel in, the wild accomplishments of frontier
life. His foot was fleet, his aim true, his apprehension quick, his
heart glad and high; and all, who anticipated the return of Indian
war, spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future leader in the land. The
boy was loved by his father with a deep and silent strength, as if

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

whatever was good and happy in his own nature had been transferred
to his child, carrying his affections with it. Even Dorcas,
though loving and beloved, was far less dear to him; for Reuben's
secret thoughts and insulated emotions had gradually made him a
selfish man; and he could no longer love deeply, except where
he saw, or imagined, some reflection or likeness of his own
mind. In Cyrus he recognized what he had himself been in
other days; and at intervals he seemed to partake of the boy's
spirit, and to be revived with a fresh and happy life. Reuben
was accompanied by his son in the expedition, for the purpose of
selecting a tract of land, and felling and burning the timber,
which necessarily preceded the removal of the household gods.
Two months of autumn were thus occupied; after which Reuben
Bourne and his young hunter returned, to spend their last winter
in the settlements.

* * * * * * *

It was early in the month of May, that the little family snapped
asunder whatever tendrils of affections had clung to inanimate
objects, and bade farewell to the few, who, in the blight of fortune,
called themselves their friends. The sadness of the parting
moment had, to each of the pilgrims, its peculiar alleviations.
Reuben, a moody man, and misanthropic because unhappy, strode
onward, with his usual stern brow and downcast eye, feeling few
regrets, and disdaining to acknowledge any. Dorcas, while she
wept abundantly over the broken ties by which her simple and
affectionate nature had bound itself to everything, felt that the
inhabitants of her inmost heart moved on with her, and that all
else would be supplied wherever she might go. And the boy
dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous
pleasures of the untrodden forest. Oh! who, in the enthusiasm
of a day-dream, has not wished that he were a wanderer in a
world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging
lightly on his arm? In youth, his free and exulting step

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topt
mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home, where Nature
had strewn a double wealth, in the vale of some transparent
stream; and when hoary age, after long, long years of that pure
life, stole on and found him there, it would find him the father of
a race, the patriarch of a people, the founder of a mighty nation
yet to be. When death, like the sweet sleep which we welcome
after a day of happiness, came over him, his far descendants
would mourn over the venerated dust. Enveloped by tradition in
mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would call
him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly
glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries!

The tangled and gloomy forest, through which the personages
of my tale were wandering, differed widely from the dreamer's
Land of Fantasie; yet there was something in their way of life
that Nature asserted as her own; and the gnawing cares, which
went with them from the world, were all that now obstructed their
happiness. One stout and shaggy steed, the bearer of all their
wealth, did not shrink from the added weight of Dorcas; although
her hardy breeding sustained her, during the larger part of each
day's journey, by her husband's side. Reuben and his son, their
muskets on their shoulders, and their axes slung behind them,
kept an unwearied pace, each watching with a hunter's eye for
the game that supplied their food. When hunger bade, they
halted and prepared their meal on the bank of some unpolluted
forest-brook, which, as they knelt down with thirsty lips to drink,
murmured a sweet unwillingness, like a maiden at love's first
kiss. They slept beneath a hut of branches, and awoke at peep
of light, refreshed for the toils of another day. Dorcas and the
boy went on joyously, and even Reuben's spirit shone at intervals
with an outward gladness; but inwardly there was a cold,
cold sorrow, which he compared to the snow-drifts, lying deep in

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

the glens and hollows of the rivulets, while the leaves were
brightly green above.

Cyrus Bourne was sufficiently skilled in the travel of the woods,
to observe that his father did not adhere to the course they had
pursued in their expedition of the preceding autumn. They were
now keeping farther to the north, striking out more directly from
the settlements, and into a region, of which savage beasts and
savage men were as yet the sole possessors. The boy sometimes
hinted his opinious upon the subject, and Reuben listened attentively,
and once or twice altered the direction of their march in
accordance with his son's counsel. But having so done, he
seemed ill at ease. His quick and wandering glances were sent
forward, apparently in search of enemies lurking behind the tree-trunks;
and seeing nothing there, he would cast his eyes backwards,
as if in fear of some pursuer. Cyrus, perceiving that his
father gradually resumed the old direction, forbore to interfere;
nor, though something began to weigh upon his heart, did his
adventurous nature permit him to regret the increased length and
the mystery of their way.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, they halted and made their
simple encampment nearly an hour before sunset. The face of
the country, for the last few miles, had been diversified by swells
of land, resembling huge waves of a petrified sea; and in one of
the corresponding hollows, a wild and romantic spot, had the
family reared their hut, and kindled their fire. There is something
chilling, and yet heart-warming, in the thought of three,
united by strong bands of love, and insulated from all that breathe
beside. The dark and gloomy pines looked down upon them, and,
as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying sound was heard
in the forest; or did those old trees groan, in fear that men were
come to lay the axe to their roots at last? Reuben and his son,
while Dorcas made ready their meal, proposed to wander out in
search of game, of which that day's march had afforded no

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

supply. The boy, promising not to quit the vicinity of the encampment,
bounded off with a step as light and elastic as that of the
deer he hoped to slay; while his father, feeling a transient happiness
as he gazed after him, was about to pursue an opposite
direction. Dorcas, in the meanwhile, had seated herself near
their fire of fallen branches, upon the moss-grown and mouldering
trunk of a tree, uprooted years before. Her employment,
diversified by an occasional glance at the pot, now beginning to
simmer over the blaze, was the perusal of the current year's
Massachusetts' Almanac, which, with the exception of an old
black-letter Bible, comprised all the literary wealth of the family.
None pay a greater regard to arbitrary divisions of time, than those
who are excluded from society; and Dorcas mentioned, as if the
information were of importance, that it was now the twelfth of
May. Her husband started.

“The twelfth of May! I should remember it well,” muttered
he, while many thoughts occasioned a momentary confusion in his
mind. “Where am I? Whither am I wandering? Where did
I leave him?”

Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband's wayward moods
to note any peculiarity of demeanor, now laid aside the Almanac,
and addressed him in that mournful tone, which the tender-hearted
appropriate to griefs long cold and dead.

“It was near this time of the month, eighteen years ago, that
my poor father left this world for a better. He had a kind arm
to hold his head, and a kind voice to cheer him, Reuben, in his
last moments; and the thought of the faithful care you took of
him, has comforted me many a time since. Oh! death would
have been awful to a solitary man, in a wild place like this!”

“Pray Heaven, Dorcas,” said Reuben, in a broken voice,
“pray Heaven, that neither of us three dies solitary, and lies unburied,
in this howling wilderness!” And he hastened away,
leaving her to watch the fire, beneath the gloomy pines.

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

Reuben Bourne's rapid pace gradually slackened, as the pang,
unintentionally inflicted by the words of Dorcas, became less
acute. Many strange reflections, however, thronged upon him;
and, straying onward, rather like a sleep-walker than a hunter, it
was attributable to no care of his own, that his devious course
kept him in the vicinity of the encampment. His steps were imperceptibly
led almost in a circle, nor did he observe that he was
on the verge of a tract of land heavily timbered, but not with pine
trees. The place of the latter was here supplied by oaks, and
other of the harder woods; and around their roots clustered a
dense and bushy undergrowth, leaving, however, barren spaces
between the trees, thick-strewn with withered leaves. Whenever
the rustling of the branches, or the creaking of the trunks, made
a sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber, Reuben
instinctively raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a
quick, sharp glance on every side; but, convinced by a partial
observation that no animal was near, he would again give himself
up to his thoughts. He was musing on the strange influence that
had led him away from his premeditated course, and so far into
the depths of the wilderness. Unable to penetrate to the secret
place of his soul, where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a
supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural
power had obstructed his retreat. He trusted that it was Heaven's
intent to afford him an opportunity of expiating his sin; he hoped
that he might find the bones, so long unburied; and that, having
laid the earth over them, peace would throw its sunlight into the
sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he was aroused by
a rustling in the forest, at some distance from the spot to which
he had wandered. Perceiving the motion of some object behind
a thick veil of undergrowth, he fired, with the instinct of a hunter,
and the aim of a practised marksman. A low moan, which
told his success, and by which even animals can express their

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

dying agony, was unheeded by Reuben Bourne. What were the
recollections now breaking upon him?

The thicket into which Reuben had fired, was near the summit
of a swell of land, and was clustered around the base of a rock,
which, in the shape and smoothness of one of its surfaces, was not
unlike a gigantic grave-stone. As if reflected in a mirror, its
likeness was in Reuben's memory. He even recognized the veins
which seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters;
everything remained the same, except that a thick covert of bushes
shrouded the lower part of the rock, and would have hidden Roger
Malvin, had he still been sitting there. Yet, in the next moment,
Reuben's eye was caught by another change, that time had
effected since he last stood, where he was now standing again,
behind the earthy roots of the uptorn tree. The sapling, to which
he had bound the blood-stained symbol of his vow, had increased
and strengthened into an oak, far indeed from its maturity, but
with no mean spread of shadowy branches. There was one singularity
observable in this tree, which made Reuben tremble.
The middle and lower branches were in luxuriant life, and an
excess of vegetation had fringed the trunk, almost to the ground;
but a blight had apparently stricken the upper part of the oak, and
the very topmost bough was withered, sapless, and utterly dead.
Reuben remembered how the little banner had fluttered on that
topmost bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen years before.
Whose guilt had blasted it?

* * * * *

Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, continued her
preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the
moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of
which she had spread a snow-white cloth, and arranged what
were left of the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in
the settlements. It had a strange aspect—that one little spot of
homely comfort, in the desolate heart of Nature. The sunshine

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

yet lingered upon the higher branches of the trees that grew on
rising ground; but the shadows of evening had deepened into the
hollow, where the encampment was made; and the fire-light
began to redden as it gleamed up the tall trunks of the pines, or
hovered on the dense and obscure mass of foliage that circled
round the spot. The heart of Dorcas was not sad; for she felt
it was better to journey in the wilderness, with two whom she
loved, than to be a lonely woman in a crowd that cared not for
her. As she busied herself in arranging seats of mouldering
wood, covered with leaves, for Reuben and her son, her voice
danced through the gloomy forest, in the measure of a song that
she had learned in youth. The rude melody, the production of
a bard who won no name, was descriptive of a winter evening in
a frontier cottage, when, secured from savage inroad by the highpiled
snow-drifts, the family rejoiced by their own fire-side. The
whole song possessed that nameless charm, peculiar to unborrowed
thought; but four continually-recurring lines shone out from the
rest, like the blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into
them, working magic with a few simple words, the poet had
instilled the very essence of domestic love and household happiness,
and they were poetry and picture joined in one. As Dorcas
sang, the walls of her forsaken home seemed to encircle her;
she no longer saw the gloomy pines; nor heard the wind, which
still, as she began each verse, sent a heavy breath through the
branches, and died away in a hollow moan, from the burthen of
the song. She was aroused by the report of a gun, in the vicinity
of the encampment; and either the sudden sound, or her loneliness
by the glowing fire, caused her to tremble violently. The
next moment, she laughed in the pride of a mother's heart.

“My beautiful young hunter! my boy has slain a deer!” she
exclaimed, recollecting that, in the direction whence the shot proceeded,
Cyrus had gone to the chase.

She waited a reasonable time, to hear her son's light step

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bounding over the rustling leaves, to tell of his success. But he did
not immediately appear, and she sent her cheerful voice among
the trees in search of him.

“Cyrus! Cyrus!”

His coming was still delayed, and she determined, as the report
of the gun had apparently been very near, to seek for him in
person. Her assistance, also, might be necessary in bringing
home the venison, which she flattered herself he had obtained.
She therefore set forward, directing her steps by the long-past
sound, and singing as she went, in order that the boy might be
aware of her approach, and run to meet her. From behind the
trunk of every tree, and from every hiding place in the thick
foliage of the undergrowth, she hoped to discover the countenance
of her son, laughing with the sportive mischief that is born of
affection. The sun was now beneath the horizon, and the light
that came down among the trees was sufficiently dim to create
many illusions in her expecting fancy. Several times she seemed
indistinctly to see his face gazing out from among the leaves;
and once she imagined that he stood beckoning to her, at the base
of a craggy rock. Keeping her eyes on this object, however, it
proved to be no more than the trunk of an oak, fringed to the
very ground with little branches, one of which, thrust out farther
than the rest, was shaken by the breeze. Making her way round
the foot of the rock, she suddenly found herself close to her husband,
who had approached in another direction. Leaning upon
the butt of his gun, the muzzle of which rested upon the withered
leaves, he was apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some
object at his feet.

“How is this, Reuben? Have you slain the deer, and fallen
asleep over him?” exclaimed Dorcas, laughing cheerfully, on her
first slight observation of his posture and appearance.

He stirred not, neither did he turn his eyes towards her; and
a cold, shuddering fear, indefinite in its source and object, began

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to creep into her blood. She now perceived that her husband's
face was ghastly pale, and his features were rigid, as if incapable
of assuming any other expression than the strong despair which
had hardened upon them. He gave not the slightest evidence
that he was aware of her approach.

“For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me!” cried Dorcas,
and the strange sound of her own voice affrighted her even more
than the dead silence.

Her husband started, stared into her face; drew her to the front
of the rock, and pointed with his finger.

Oh! there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon the fallen
forest-leaves! his cheek rested upon his arm, his curled locks were
thrown back from his brow, his limbs were slightly relaxed. Had
a sudden weariness overcome the youthful hunter? Would his
mother's voice arouse him? She knew that it was death.

“This broad rock is the grave-stone of your near kindred,
Dorcas,” said her husband. “Your tears will fall at once over
your father and your son.”

She heard him not. With one wild shriek that seemed to force
its way from the sufferer's inmost soul, she sank insensible by the
side of her dead boy. At that moment the withered topmost
bow of the oak loosened itself in the stilly air, and fell in soft,
light fragments upon the rock, upon the leaves, upon Reuben,
upon his wife and child, and upon Roger Malvin's bones. Then
Reuben's heart was stricken, and the tears gushed out like water
from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth had made, the
blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was expiated, the
curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood
dearer to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up
to Heaven from the lips of Reuben Bourne.

p134-336 P. 'S CORRESPONDENCE.

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My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by
the interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason.
The past and present are jumbled together in his mind, in a manner
often productive of curious results; and which will be better
understood after the perusal of the following letter, than from any
description that I could give. The poor fellow, without once
stirring from the little white-washed, iron-grated room, to which
he alludes in his first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller.
and meets, in his wanderings, a variety of personages, who have
long ceased to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion,
all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly
involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has
imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral
scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon
the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many
of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same
vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit
short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence,
which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from
what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering
after literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful
effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after
missing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he

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should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty excursions
beyond the limits of sanity.

London,February 25, 1845.

My dear friend:

Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity.
Daily custom grows up about us like a stone-wall, and consolidates
itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's strongest
architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me,
whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed
with all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do, at this
moment, in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over
which hangs a print of Queen Victoria—listening to the muffled
roar of the world's metropolis, and with a window at but five
paces distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out
on actual London—with all this positive certainty as to my
whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is just now perplexing
my brain? Why—would you believe it?—that, all this
time, I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber,—
that white-washed little chamber,—that little chamber with its one
small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of
taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars—
that same little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so
often brought you to visit me! Will no length of time, or breadth
of space, enfranchise me from that unlovely abode? I travel, but
it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my head. Ah,
well! I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life when present
scenes and events make but feeble impressions, in comparison
with those of yore; so that I must reconcile myself to be more
and more the prisoner of memory, who merely lets me hop about
a little, with her chain around my leg.

My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service,
enabling me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished

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characters, who, until now, have seemed as remote from the
sphere of my personal intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's
time, or Ben Jonson's compotators at the Mermaid. One of the
first of which I availed myself, was the letter to Lord Byron. I
found his lordship looking much older than I had anticipated;
although—considering his former irregularities of life, and the
various wear and tear of his constitution—not older than a man on
the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet's spiritual immortality.
He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat; so fat as to give
the impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and
without sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the
great mass of corporeal substance, which weighs upon him so
cruelly. You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while it fills your
eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within yourself—
“For Heaven's sake, where is he?” Were I disposed to be
cautic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol,
in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices
which unspiritualize man's nature, and clog up his avenues of
communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
and besides, Lord Byron's morals have been improving, while his
outward man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference.
Would that he were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to
present his hand, yet it was so puffed out with alien substance,
that I could not feel as if I had touched the hand that wrote
Childe Harold.

On my entrance, his lordship had apologised for not rising to
receive me, on the sufficient plea that the gout, for several years
past, had taken up its constant residence in his right foot; which,
accordingly, was swathed in many rolls of flannel, and deposited

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upon a cushion. The other foot was hidden in the drapery of his
chair. Do you recollect whether Byron's right or left foot was
the deformed one?

The noble poet's reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as
you are aware, of ten years' standing; nor does it exhibit, I am
assured, any symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to
be, if not a happy, at least a contented, or, at all events, a quiet
couple, descending the slope of life with that tolerable degree of
mutual support, which will enable them to come easily and comfortably
to the bottom. It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the
poet has redeemed his youthful errors, in this particular. Her
ladyship's influence, it rejoices me to add, has been productive of
the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious point of view.
He now combines the most rigid tenets of methodism with the
ultra doctrines of the Puseyites: the former being perhaps due to
the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble consort;
while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque illumination,
demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him,
is bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship;
and this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonym
of the foul fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits
of the metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is
an uncompromising conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether
in the House of Lords or in private circles, of denouncing
and repudiating the mischievous and anarchical notions of his
earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit similar sins, in other people,
with the sincerest vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is
capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on the most intimate
terms. You are aware that some little time before the death of
Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man to be
ejected from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart,
that it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness

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which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the Lyrist
died in a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred
melodies, and expressing his belief that it would be heard within
the gate of paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance.
I wish he may have found it so.

I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation
with Lord Byron, to pay the meed of homage due to a mighty
poet, by allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred,
and Don Juan, which have made so large a portion of the music
of my life. My words, whether apt or otherwise, were at
least warm with the enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of
immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that they did not go
precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that there was
some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with myself,
and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my
own heart to the gifted author's ear, the echo of those strains
that have resounded throughout the world. But, by and by,
the secret peeped quietly out. Byron—I have the information
from his own lips, so that you need not hesitate to repeat it in
literary circles—Byron is preparing a new edition of his complete
works, carefully corrected, expurgated and amended, in
accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics and
religion. It so happened, that the very passages of highest
inspiration, to which I had alluded, were among the condemned
and rejected rubbish, which it is his purpose to cast into the
gulf of oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me
that his passions having burnt out, the extinction of their vivid
and riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination
by which he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend
what he had written. Positively, he no longer understands
his own poetry.

This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to
read a few specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version.

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Whatever is licentious—whatever disrespectful to the sacred
mysteries of our faith—whatever morbidly melancholic, or splenetically
sportive—whatever assails settled constitutions of government,
or systems of society—whatever could wound the sensibility
of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter—
has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied
by unexceptionable verses, in his lordship's later style.
You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto
published. The result is not so good as might be wished; in
plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for though the torches
kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an abominably
ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed
fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this attempt, on Lord
Byron's part, to atone for his youthful errors, will at length
induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet its due
niche in the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when
brought from Greece, were denied sepulture among those of
his tuneful brethren there.

What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to
talk about burying the bones of Byron, whom I have just seen
alive, and encased in a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the
truth, a prodigiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of
hobgoblin; in the very extravagance of his mortal system, I
find something akin to the immateriality of a ghost. And then
that ridiculous old story darted into my mind, how that Byron
died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty years ago. More and
more I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for
my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction
between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If
there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial.

Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert

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Burns—now, if I mistake not, in his eighty-seventh-year—happens
to be making a visit to London, as if on purpose to afford
me an opportunity of grasping him by the hand. For upwards
of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet cottage in
Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither now
by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch's birthday by a
festival. It will be the greatest literary triumph on record.
Pray Heaven the little spirit of life within the aged bard's bosom
may not be extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already
had the honor of an introduction to him, at the British Museum,
where he was examining a collection of his own unpublished
letters, interspersed with songs, which have escaped the notice of
all his biographers.

Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of! How should
Burns have been embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty
old man!

The figure of the bard is tall, and in the highest degree reverend;
nor the less so, that it is much bent by the burthen of
time. His white hair floats like a snow-drift around his face,
in which are seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the
channels of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away.
The old gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his
time of life. He has that cricketty sort of liveliness—I mean
the cricket's humor of chirping for any cause or none—which
is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old
age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although
we perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others.
I was surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent
heart and brilliant imagination had both burnt down to the last
embers, leaving only a little flickering flame in one corner,
which keeps dancing upward and laughing all by itself. He
is no longer capable of pathos. At the request of Allan

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Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song to Mary in Heaven;
but it was evident that the feeling of those verses, so profoundly
true, and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the scope of
his present sensibilities; and when a touch of it did partially
awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes, and his
voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah! he must not think again
of Mary in Heaven, until he shake off the dull impediment of
time, and ascend to meet her there.

Burns then began to repeat Tam O'Shanter, but was so tickled
with its wit and humor—of which, however, I did suspect he had
but a traditionary sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping
laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very
agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather
not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the
last forty years of the peasant-poet's life have been passed in
competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his
bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive
to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is
now considered to be quite well off, as to pecuniary circumstances.
This, I suppose, is worth having lived so long for.

I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns
in regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am
sorry to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of
a hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler
attributes of which the body is the instrument. And thus
he vegetates from day to day, and from year to year, at that
splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and
became a symbol of the great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies,
prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether in verse, prose, or
architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in
infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his library,
and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales

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to an amanuensis. To an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not
deemed worth any one's trouble, now, to take down what flows
from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly
worth gold, and capable of being coined. Yet, Cunningham,
who has lately seen him, assures me that there is now and
then a touch of the genius; a striking combination of incident,
or a picturesque trait of character, such as no other man alive
could have hit off; a glimmer from that ruined mind, as if the
sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom of
an ancient hall. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
confused; the characters melt into one another; and the
tale loses itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy
and marshy ground.

For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had
lost his consciousness of outward things, before his works went
out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame, rather
than that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a
writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain
anything like the same position in literature. The world,
now-a-days, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and
a closer and homelier truth, than he was qualified to supply it
with. Yet who can be, to the present generation, even what Scott
has been to the past? Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very
pimple of the age's humbug. There is no hope of the public, so
long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher. I had
expectations from a young man—one Dickens—who published a
few magazine articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms
of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow died, shortly after
commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pickwick
Papers. Not impossibly, the world has lost more than it
dreams of, by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.

Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall, the other day? You
would not hit it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than

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Napoleon Bonaparte!—or all that is now left of him—that is to say,
the skin, bones, and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green
coat, white breeches and small sword, which are still known by
his redoubtable name. He was attended only by two policemen,
who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the old ex-Emperor,
appearing to have no duty in regard to him, except to see that
none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of the
star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody, save myself, so much as
turned to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even
I contrive to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the
warlike spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape,
had wrought upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating
the magic influence of a great renown, than by exhibiting
the possessor of it in the decline, the overthrow, the utter
degradation of his powers—buried beneath his own mortality—
and lacking even the qualities of sense, that enable the most ordinary
men to bear themselves decently in the eye of the world.
This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long endurance
of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age—for he is now above
seventy—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has
acted shrewdly, in re-transporting him from St. Helena to England.
They should now restore him to Paris, and there let him once
again review the relics of his armies. His eye is dull and
rheumy; his nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I was
observing him, there chanced to be a little extra bustle in the
street; and he, the brother of Cæsar and Hannibal—the Great
Captain, who had veiled the world in battle smoke, and tracked
it round with bloody footsteps—was seized with a nervous trembling,
and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed
aside, and patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and
led him away.

Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt!

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—or I fling my inkstand at your head. Tush, tush; it is all a
mistake. Pray, my dear friend, pardon this little outbreak. The
fact is, the mention of those two policemen, and their custody of
Bonaparte, had called up the idea of that odious wretch—you
remember him well—who was pleased to take such gratuitous and
impertinent care of my person, before I quitted New England.
Forthwith, uprose before my mind's eye that same little whitewashed
room, with the iron-grated window—strange, that it should
have been iron-grated—where, in too easy compliance with the
absurd wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years
of my life. Positively, it seemed to me that I was still sitting
there, and that the keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither,
but only a kind of intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just
peeped in at the door. The rascal! I owe him an old grudge,
and will find a time to pay it yet! Fie, fie! The mere thought
of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even now, that hateful
chamber—that iron-grated window, which blasted the blessed
sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes, and made it poison to
my soul—looks more distinct to my view than does this, my comfortable
apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that
which I know to be such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery
over the intolerably prominent illusion. Let us think of it no
more.

You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what
is known to all the world, that this celebrated poet has, for many
years past, been reconciled to the Church of England. In his
more recent works, he has applied his fine powers to the vindication
of the Christian faith, with an especial view to that particular
development. Latterly—as you may not have heard—he has
taken orders, and been inducted to a small country living, in the
gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily for me, he has
come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of a volume
of discourses, treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of

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Christianity, on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first
introduction, I felt no little embarrassment as to the mode of combining
what I had to say to the author of Queen Mab, the Revolt
of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound, with such acknowledgments
as might be acceptable to a Christian minister, and zealous upholder
of the Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my
ease. Standing where he now does, and reviewing all his successive
productions from a higher point, he assures me that there
is a harmony, an order, a regular procession, which enables
him to lay his hand upon any one of the earlier poems, and say,
“This is my work!” with precisely the same complacency
of conscience, wherewithal he contemplates the volume of discourses
above-mentioned. They are like the successive steps of
a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
to the support of the whole, as the highest and final one, resting
upon the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask
him, what would have been his fate, had he perished on the lower
steps of his staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the
celestial brightness.

How all this may be, I neither pretend to understand nor greatly
care, so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has,
from a lower region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their
religious merits, I consider the productions of his maturity superior,
as poems, to those of his youth. They are warmer with
human love, which has served as an interpreter between his mind
and the multitude. The author has learned to dip his pen oftener
into his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too
exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him.
Formerly, his page was often little other than a concrete arrangement
of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they were
brilliant. Now, you take it to your heart, and are conscious of
a heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character,
Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind and affectionate

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than his friends always represented him to be, up to that disastrous
night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense,
again!—sheer nonsense! What am I babbling about? I was
thinking of that old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezia,
and washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a
funeral pyre, with wine and spices and frankincense; while Byron
stood on the beach, and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise
heavenward from the dead poet's heart; and that his fire-purified
relics were finally buried near his child, in Roman earth. If all
this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I have met
the drowned, and burned, and buried man, here in London, only
yesterday?

Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald
Heber, heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to
a see in England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They
appeared to be on terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to
have a joint poem in contemplation. What a strange, incongruous
dream is the life of man!

Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel; it will
be issued entire by old John Murray, in the course of the present
publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser
stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from
his lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation
of ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth
died only a week or two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and
grant that he may not have completed the Excursion! Methinks I
am sick of everything he wrote, except his Laodamia. It is very sad—
this inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it once worshipped.
Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual
diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age,
and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
intellect the devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such

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a man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away
our speculative license of kicking him.

Keats? No; I have not seen him, except across a crowded
street, with coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers,
and divers other sensual obstructions, intervening betwixt
his small and slender figure and my eager glance. I would fain
have met him on the sea-shore—or beneath a natural arch of
forest trees—or the Gothic arch of an old cathedral—or among
Grecian ruins—or at a glimmering fireside on the verge of evening—
or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the dreamy
depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere,
in short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted
out by the porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I
stood and watched him, fading away, fading away, along the
pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual man,
or a thought that had slipped out of my own mind, and clothed
itself in human form and habiliments, merely to beguile me. At
one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything
so fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt
the effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs, caused by the
article on his Endymion, in the Quarterly Review, and which so
nearly brought him to the grave. Ever since, he has glided
about the world like a ghost, sighing a melancholy tone in the ear
of here and there a friend, but never sending forth his voice to
greet the multitude. I can hardly think him a great poet. The
burthen of a mighty genius would not have been imposed upon
shoulders so physically frail, and a spirit so infirmly sensitive.
Great poets should have iron sinews.

Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to
the world, is understood to have devoted himself to the composition
of an epic poem. Some passages of it have been communicated
to the inner circle of his admirers, and impressed them as

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the loftiest strains that have been audible on earth since Milton's
days. If I can obtain copies of these specimens, I will ask you
to present them to James Russell Lowell, who seems to be one of
the poet's most fervent and worthiest worshippers. The information
took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats's
poetic incense, without being embodied in human language,
floated up to heaven, and mingled with the songs of the immortal
choristers, who perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice
among them, and thought their melody the sweeter for it. But
it is not so; he has positively written a poem on the subject of
Paradise Regained, though in another sense than that which presented
itself to the mind of Milton. In compliance, it may be
imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend that all epic possibilities,
in the past history of the world, are exhausted, Keats
has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely remote futurity.
He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of the time-long
warfare between Good and Evil. Our race is on the eve of
its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection;
Woman, redeemed from the thraldom against which our Sybil
uplifts so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his
side, or communes for herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing
with her children's happier state, has clothed herself in
such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever witnessed since
our first parents saw the sunrise over dewy Eden. Nor then,
indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden
promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
mankind another peril; a last encounter with the Evil Principle.
Should the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and
misery of ages. If we triumph!—but it demands a poet's eye to
contemplate the splendor of such a consummation, and not to be
dazzled.

To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and
tender a spirit of humanity, that the poem has all the sweet and

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warm interest of a village tale, no less than the grandeur which
befits so high a theme. Such, at least, is the perhaps partial
representation of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a
single line of the performance in question. Keats, I am told,
withholds it from the press, under an idea that the age has not
enough of spiritual insight to receive it worthily. I do not like
this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet. The Universe is
waiting to respond to the highest word that the best child of time
and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is because he
mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
foreign to the purpose.

I visited the House of Lords, the other day, to hear Canning,
who, you know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed
me. Time blunts both point and edge, and does great
mischief to men of his order of intellect. Then I stept into the
Lower House, and listened to a few words from Cobbett, who
looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or, rather, as if he had lain
a dozen years beneath the clods. The men, whom I meet now-a-days,
often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the
long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones
of people who made noise enough in their day, but now can only
clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's spade disturbs them.
Were it only possible to find out who are alive, and who dead, it
would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of
my life, somebody comes and stares me in the face, whom I had
quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted never
more to be pestered with the sight or sound of him. For instance,
going to Drury-Lane Theatre, a few evenings since, up rose before
me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily presence of
the elder Kean, who did die or ought to have died, in some
drunken fit or other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely

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traditionary now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the
ghost of himself than the ghost of the Danish king.

In the stage box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and
among them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with
a profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into
my brain, as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture
with which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs.
Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind, a broken-down
figure, but still with a kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all
former achievements, nature enables him to look the part of Lear
far better than in the meridian of his genius. Charles Matthews
was likewise there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his
once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable one-sidedness,
from which he could no more wrench it into proper form than he
could re-arrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as if,
for the joke's sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
contrive; and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself
so hideous, an avenging providence had seen fit to petrify
him. Since it is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him
to change countenance; for his ugly visage haunts me both at
noontide and night-time. Some other players of the past generation
were present, but none that greatly interested me. It behoves
actors, more than all other men of publicity, to vanish from
the scene betimes. Being, at best, but painted shadows flickering
on the wall, and empty sounds that echo another's thought, it is a
sad disenchantment when the colors begin to fade, and the voice
to croak with age.

What is there new, in the literary way, on your side of the
water? Nothing of the kind has come under my inspection, except
a volume of poems, published above a year ago, by Dr. Channing.
I did not before know that this eminent writer is a poet;
nor does the volume alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics

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of the author's mind, as displayed in his prose works; although
some of the poems have a richness that is not merely of the surface,
but glows still the brighter, the deeper and more faithfully
you look into them. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
native manufacture, which are found among the gold dust from
Africa. I doubt whether the American public will accept them;
it looks less to the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning
manufacture. How slowly our literature grows up! Most of
our writers of promise have come to untimely ends. There was
that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain
with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never
could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last sleep,
with the Thanatopsis gleaming over him like a sculptured marble
sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer
verses in the newspapers, and published a Don Juanic poem
called Fanny, is defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying
the metempsychosis as a man of business. Somewhat
later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the
muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself
lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I remember,
too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who scattered
some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of Gottingen.
Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly,
in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going, to give
us sketches of the world's sunny face. If these had lived, they
might, one or all of them, have grown to be famous men.

And yet there is no telling—it may be as well that they have
died. I was myself a young man of promise. Oh, shattered
brain!—oh! broken spirit!—where is the fulfilment of that promise?
The sad truth is, that when fate would gently disappoint
the world, it takes away the hopefullest mortals in their youth;—

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when it would laugh the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them live.
Let me die upon this apophthegm, for I shall never make a
truer one!

What a strange substance is the human brain! Oh rather—
for there is no need of generalizing the remark—what an odd
brain is mine! Would you believe it? Daily and nightly there
come scraps of poetry humming in my intellectual ear—some as
airy as bird-notes, and some as delicately neat as parlor-music,
and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such verses as
those departed poets would have written, had not an inexorable
destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in
spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis
of their posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown
that they have forfeited by going hence too early. But I
have my own business to attend to; and, besides, a medical gentleman,
who interests himself in some little ailment; of mine,
advises me not to make too free use of pen and ink. There are
clerks enough out of employment who would be glad of such
a job.

Good bye! are you alive or dead? And what are you about?
Still scribbling for the Democratic? And do those internal compositors
and proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions
as vilely as ever? It is too bad. Let every man manufacture
his own nonsense, say I! Expect me home soon, and—to whisper
you a secret—in company with the poet Campbell, who purposes
to visit Wyoming, and enjoy the shadow of the laurels that
he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls himself
well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale, and
so shadow-like, that one might almost poke a finger through his
densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim
and forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.

Your true friend, P.

P.S. Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable

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and revered friend, Mr. Brockden Brown. It gratifies me to
learn that a complete edition of his works, in a double columned
octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press, at Philadelphia.
Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic reputation
on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his
century! And does he meditate an epic on the war between
Mexico and Texas, with machinery contrived on the principle of
the steam-engine, as being the nearest to celestial agency that our
epoch can boast? How can he expect ever to rise again, if,
while just sinking into his grave, he persists in burthening himself
with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?

p134-356 EARTH'S HOLOCAUST.

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Once upon a time—but whether in the time past or time to come,
is a matter of little or no moment—this wide world had become so
overburthened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, that
the inhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general
bonfire. The site fixed upon, at the representation of the insurance
companies, and as being as central a spot as any other on
the globe, was one of the broadest prairies of the West, where
no human habitation would be endangered by the flames, and
where a vast assemblage of spectators might commodiously admire
the show. Having a taste for sights of this kind, and imagining,
likewise, that the illumination of the bonfire might reveal some
profundity or moral truth, heretofore hidden in mist or darkness, I
made it convenient to journey thither and be present. At my arrival,
although the heap of condemned rubbish was as yet comparatively
small, the torch had already been applied. Amid that boundless
plain, in the dusk of the evening, like a far-off star alone in the
firmament, there was merely visible one tremulous gleam, whence
none could have anticipated so fierce a blaze as was destined to
ensue. With every moment, however, there came foot-travellers,
women holding up their aprons, men on horseback, wheelbarrows,
lumbering baggage wagons, and other vehicles, great and small,
and from far and near, laden with articles that were judged fit for
nothing but to be burnt.

“What materials have been used to kindle the flame?” inquired
I of a bystander, for I was desirous of knowing the whole process
of the affair from beginning to end.

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The person whom I addressed was a grave man, fifty years
old, or thereabout, who had evidently come thither as a looker-on;
he struck me immediately as having weighed for himself the true
value of life and its circumstances, and therefore as feeling little
personal interest in whatever judgment the world might form of
them. Before answering my question, he looked me in the face,
by the kindling light of the fire.

“Oh some very dry combustibles,” replied he, “and extremely
suitable to the purpose—no other, in fact, than yesterday's
newspapers, last month's magazines, and last year's withered
leaves. Here, now, comes some antiquated trash, that will take
fire like a handful of shavings.”

As he spoke, some rough-looking men advanced to the verge of
the bonfire, and threw in, as it appeared, all the rubbish of the
Herald's office; the blazonry of coat-armor, the crests and devices
of illustrious families; pedigrees that extended back, like lines of
light, into the mist of the dark ages, together with stars, garters,
and embroidered collars, each of which, as paltry a bauble as it
might appear to the uninstructed eye, had once possessed vast
significance, and was still, in truth, reckoned among the most
precious of moral or material facts, by the worshippers of the gorgeous
past. Mingled with this confused heap, which was tossed
into the flames by armfuls at once, were innumerable badges of
knighthood, comprising those of all the European sovereignties,
and Napoleon's decoration of the Legion of Honor, the ribands of
which were entangled with those of the ancient order of St.
Louis. There, too, were the medals of our own society of Cincinnati,
by means of which, as history tells us, an order of hereditary
knights came near being constituted out of the king-quellers
of the Revolution. And besides, there were the patents of nobility
of German counts and barons, Spanish grandees, and English
peers, from the worm-eaten instruments signed by William the

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Conqueror, down to the bran-new parchment of the latest lord
who has received his honors from the fair hand of Victoria.

At sight of these dense volumes of smoke, mingled with vivid
jets of flame that gushed and eddied forth from this immense pile
of earthly distinctions, the multitude of plebeian spectators set up
a joyous shout, and clapt their hands with an emphasis that made
the welkin echo. That was their moment of triumph, achieved, after long ages, over creatures of the same clay and the same
spiritual infirmities, who had dared to assume the privileges due
only to Heaven's better workmanship. But now there rushed
towards the blazing heap a grey-haired man, of stately presence,
wearing a coat from the breast of which a star, or other badge of
rank, seemed to have been forcibly wrenched away. He had not
the tokens of intellectual power in his face; but still there was
the demeanor—the habitual, and almost native dignity—of one
who had been born to the idea of his own social superiority, and
had never felt it questioned till that moment.

“People,” cried he, gazing at the ruin of what was dearest to
his eyes with grief and wonder, but nevertheless, with a degree
of stateliness; “people, what have you done! This fire is consuming
all that marked your advance from barbarism, or that
could have prevented your relapse thither. We—the men of the
privileged orders—were those who kept alive, from age to age, the
old chivalrous spirit; the gentle and generous thought; the
higher, the purer, the more refined and delicate life! With the
nobles, too, you cast off the poet, the painter, the sculptor—all
the beautiful arts; for we were their patrons, and created the
atmosphere in which they flourish. In abolishing the majestic
distinctions of rank, society loses not only its grace, but its steadfastness—”

More he would doubtless have spoken, but here there arose an
outcry, sportive, contemptuous, and indignant, that altogether
drowned the appeal of the fallen nobleman, insomuch that,

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casting one look of despair at his own half-burnt pedigree, he shrunk
back into the crowd, glad to shelter himself under his new-found
insignificance.

“Let him thank his stars that we have not flung him into the
same fire!” shouted a rude figure, spurning the embers with his
foot. “And, henceforth, let no man dare to show a piece of
musty parchment as his warrant for lording it over his fellows!
If he have strength of arm, well and good; it is one species of
superiority. If he have wit, wisdom, courage, force of character,
let these attributes do for him what they may. But, from this day
forward, no mortal must hope for place and consideration by
reckoning up the mouldy bones of his ancestors! That nonsense
is done away.”

“And in good time,” remarked the grave observer by my side,
in a low voice, however—“if no worse nonsense comes in its
place. But, at all events, this species of nonsense has fairly
lived out its life.”

There was little space to muse or moralize over the embers of
this time-honored rubbish; for, before it was half burnt out, there
came another multitude from beyond the sea, bearing the purple
robes of royalty, and the crowns, globes, and sceptres of emperors
and kings. All these had been condemned as useless baubles,
playthings, at best, fit only for the infancy of the world, or rods
to govern and chastise it in its nonage; but with which universal
manhood, at its full-grown stature, could no longer brook to be
insulted. Into such contempt had these regal insignia now fallen,
that the gilded crown and tinseled robes of the player-king, from
Drury-Lane Theatre, had been thrown in among the rest, doubtless
as a mockery of his brother-monarchs on the great stage of
the world. It was a strange sight to discern the crown-jewels of
England, glowing and flashing in the midst of the fire. Some of
them had been delivered down from the time of the Saxon princes;
others were purchased with vast revenues, or, perchance,

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ravished from the dead brows of the native potentates of Hindostan;
and the whole now blazed with a dazzling lustre, as if a star had
fallen in that spot, and been shattered into fragments. The
splendor of the ruined monarchy had no reflection, save in those
inestimable precious stones. But enough on this subject. It
were but tedious to describe how the Emperor of Austria's mantle
was converted to tinder, and how the posts and pillars of the
French throne became a heap of coals, which it was impossible
to distinguish from those of any other wood. Let me add, however,
that I noticed one of the exiled Poles stirring up the bonfire
with the Czar of Russia's sceptre, which he afterwards flung into
the flames.

“The smell of singed garments is quite intolerable here,”
observed my new acquaintance, as the breeze enveloped us in the
smoke of a royal wardrobe. “Let us get to windward, and see
what they are doing on the other side of the bonfire.”

We accordingly passed around, and were just in time to witness
the arrival of a vast procession of Washingtonians—as the votaries
of temperance call themselves now-a-days—accompanied by
thousands of the Irish disciples of Father Mathew, with that great
apostle at their head. They brought a rich contribution to the
bonfire; being nothing less than all the hogsheads and barrels
of liquor in the world, which they rolled before them across the
prairie.

“Now, my children,” cried Father Mathew, when they reached
the verge of the fire—“one shove more, and the work is done!
And now let us stand off and see Satan deal with his own liquor!”

Accordingly, having placed their wooden vessels within reach
of the flames, the procession stood off at a safe distance, and soon
beheld them burst into a blaze that reached the clouds, and
threatened to set the sky itself on fire. And well it might. For
here was the whole world's stock of spirituous liquors, which,
instead of kindling a frenzied light in the eyes of individual

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topers, as of yore, soared upwards with a bewildering gleam that
startled all mankind. It was the aggregate of that fierce fire
which would otherwise have scorched the hearts of millions.
Meantime, numberless bottles of precious wine were flung into
the blaze, which lapped up the contents as if it loved them, and
grew, like other drunkards, the merrier and fiercer for what it
quaffed. Never again will the insatiable thirst of the fire-fiend
be so pampered! Here were the treasures of famous bon-vivants—
liquors that had been tossed on ocean, and mellowed in the sun,
and hoarded long in the recesses of the earth—the pale, the gold,
the ruddy juice of whatever vineyards were most delicate—the
entire vintage of Tokay—all mingling in one stream with the
vile fluids of the common pot-house, and contributing to heighten
the self-same blaze. And while it rose in a gigantic spire, that
seemed to wave against the arch of the firmament, and combine
itself with the light of stars, the multitude gave a shout, as if the
broad earth were exulting in its deliverance from the curse of
ages.

But the joy was not universal. Many deemed that human life
would be gloomier than ever, when that brief illumination should
sink down. While the reformers were at work, I overheard
muttered expostulations from several respectable gentlemen with
red noses, and wearing gouty shoes; and a ragged worthy, whose
face looked like a hearth where the fire is burnt out, now expressed
his discontent more openly and boldly.

“What is this world good for,” said the last toper, “now that
we can never be jolly any more? What is to comfort the poor
man in sorrow and perplexity?—how is he to keep his heart
warm against the cold winds of this cheerless earth?—and what
do you propose to give him in exchange for the solace that you
take away? How are old friends to sit together by the fireside,
without a cheerful glass between them? A plague upon your
reformation! It is a sad world, a cold world, a selfish world, a

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low world, not worth an honest fellow's living in, now that good
fellowship is gone for ever!”

This harangue excited great mirth among the bystanders. But,
preposterous as was the sentiment, I could not help commiserating
the forlorn condition of the last toper, whose boon-companions had
dwindled away from his side, leaving the poor fellow without a
soul to countenance him in sipping his liquor, nor indeed any
liquor to sip. Not that this was quite the true state of the case;
for I had observed him, at a critical moment, filch a bottle of
fourth-proof brandy that fell beside the bonfire, and hide it in his
pocket.

The spirituous and fermented liquors being thus disposed of,
the zeal of the reformers next induced them to replenish the fire
with all the boxes of tea and bags of coffee in the world. And
now came the planters of Virginia, bringing their crops of tobacco.
These, being cast upon the heap of inutility, aggregated it to
the size of a mountain, and incensed the atmosphere with such
potent fragrance that methought we should never draw pure
breath again. The present sacrifice seemed to startle the lovers
of the weed more than any that they had hitherto witnessed.

“Well, they've put my pipe out,” said an old gentleman,
flinging it into the flames in a pet. “What is this world coming
to? Everything rich and racy,—all the spice of life—is to be
condemned as useless. Now that they have kindled the bonfire,
if these nonsensical reformers would fling themselves into it, all
would be well enough!”

“Be patient,” responded a staunch conservative; “it will come
to that in the end. They will first fling us in, and finally themselves.”

From the general and systematic measures of reform, I now
turned to consider the individual contributions to this memorable
bonfire. In many instances these were of a very amusing character.
One poor fellow threw in his empty purse, and another

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a bundle of counterfeit or insolvable bank notes. Fashionable
ladies threw in their last season's bonnets, together with heaps of
ribbons, yellow lace, and much other half-worn milliner's ware;
all of which proved even more evanescent in the fire than it had
been in the fashion. A multitude of lovers of both sexes—discarded
maids or bachelors, and couples mutually weary of one
another—tossed in bundles of perfumed letters and enamored sonnets.
A hack politician, being deprived of bread by the loss of
office, threw in his teeth, which happened to be false ones. The
Rev. Sidney Smith,—having voyaged across the Atlantic for that
sole purpose—came up to the bonfire with a bitter grin, and threw
in certain repudiated bonds, fortified though they were with the
broad seal of a sovereign state. A little boy of five years old, in
the premature manliness of the present epoch, threw in his playthings;
a college graduate, his diploma; an apothecary, ruined
by the spread of homœopathy, his whole stock of drugs and medicines;
a physician, his library; a parson, his old sermons; and
a fine gentleman of the old school, his code of manners, which he
had formerly written down for the benefit of the next generation.
A widow, resolving on a second marriage, slily threw in her
dead husband's miniature. A young man, jilted by his mistress,
would willingly have flung his own desperate heart into the
flames, but could find no means to wrench it out of his bosom.
An American author, whose works were neglected by the public,
threw his pen and paper into the bonfire, and betook himself to
some less discouraging occupation. It somewhat startled me to
overhear a number of ladies, highly respectable in appearance,
proposing to fling their gowns and petticoats into the flames, and
assume the garb, together with the manners, duties, offices, and
responsibilities, of the opposite sex.

What favor was accorded to this scheme, I am unable to say;
my attention being suddenly drawn to a poor, deceived, and half-delirious
girl, who, exclaiming that she was the most worthless

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thing alive or dead, attempted to cast herself into the fire, amid all
that wrecked and broken trumpery of the world. A good man,
however, ran to her rescue.

“Patience, my poor girl!” said he, as he drew here back from
the fierce embrace of the destroying angel. “Be patient, and
abide Heaven's will. So long as you possess a living soul, all
may be restored to its first freshness. These things of matter,
and creations of human fantasy, are fit for nothing but to be burnt,
when once they have had their day. But your day is eternity!”

“Yes,” said the wretched girl, whose frenzy seemed now to
have sunk down into deep despondency; “yes, and the sunshine
is blotted out of it!”

It was now rumored among the spectators that all the weapons
and munitions of war were to be thrown into the bonfire, with the
exception of the world's stock of gunpower, which, as the safest
mode of disposing of it, had already been drowned in the sea.
This intelligence seemed to awaken great diversity of opinion.
The hopeful philanthropist esteemed it a token that the millenium
was already come; while persons of another stamp, in whose
view mankind was a breed of bull-dogs, prophesied that all the
old stoutness, fervor, nobleness, generosity, and magnanimity of
the race would disappear; these qualities, as they affirmed,
requiring blood for their nourishment. They comforted themselves,
however, in the belief that the proposed abolition of war
was impracticable, for any length of time together.

Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose thunder had
long been the voice of battle—the artillery of the Armada, the
battering-trains of Marlborough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon
and Wellington—were trundled into the midst of the fire.
By the continual addition of dry combustibles, it had now waxed
so intense that neither brass nor iron could withstand it. It was
wonderful to behold how these terrible instruments of slaughter
melted away like playthings of wax. Then the armies of the

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earth wheeled around the might furnace, with their military
music playing triumphant marches, and flung in their muskets
and swords. The standard-bearers, likewise, cast one look upward
at their banners, all tattered with shot-holes, and inscribed
with the names of victorious fields, and, giving them a last flourish
on the breeze, they lowered them into the flame, which snatched
them upward in its rush toward the clouds. This ceremony being
over, the world was left without a single weapon in its hands,
except, possibly, a few old king's arms and rusty swords, and
other trophies of the Revolution, in some of our state armories.
And now the drums were beaten and the trumpets brayed all together,
as a prelude to the proclamation of universal and eternal
peace, and the announcement that glory was no longer to be won
by blood; but that it would henceforth be the contention of the
human race to work out the greatest mutual good, and that beneficence,
in the future annals of the earth, would claim the praise
of valor. The blessed tidings were accordingly promulgated,
and caused infinite rejoicings among those who had stood aghast at
the horror and absurdity of war.

But I saw a grim smile pass over the seared visage of a stately
old commander—by his war-worn figure and rich military dress,
he might have been one of Napoleon's famous marshals—who,
with the rest of the world's soldiery, had just flung away the
sword that had been familiar to his right hand for half a century.

“Aye, aye!” grumbled he. “Let them proclaim what they
please; but, in the end, we shall find that all this foolery has only
made more work for the armorers and cannon-founders.”

“Why, sir,” exclaimed I, in astonishment, “do you imagine
that the human race will ever so far return on the steps of its
past madness as to weld another sword, or cast another
cannon?”

“There will be no need,” observed, with a sneer, one who

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neither felt benevolence, nor had faith in it. “When Cain
wished to slay his brother, he was at no loss for a weapon.”

“We shall see,” replied the veteran commander. “If I am
mistaken, so much the better; but in my opinion—without pretending
to philosophize about the matter—the necessity of war
lies far deeper than these honest gentlemen suppose. What! Is
there a field for all the petty disputes of individuals, and shall
there be no great law-court for the settlement of national difficulties?
The battle-field is the only court where such suits can be
tried!”

“You forget, general,” rejoined I, “that, in this advanced
stage of civilisation, Reason and Philanthropy combined will
constitute just such a tribunal as is requisite.”

“Ah, I had forgotten that, indeed!” said the old warrior, as
he limped away.

The fire was now to be replenished with materials that had
hitherto been considered of even greater importance to the well-being
of society, than the warlike munitions which we had
already seen consumed. A body of reformers had travelled all
over the earth, in quest of the machinery by which the different
nations were accustomed to inflict the punishment of death. A
shudder passed through the mulititude, as these ghastly emblems
were dragged forward. Even the flames seemed at first to shrink
away, displaying the shape and murderous contrivance of each
in a full blaze of light, which, of itself, was sufficient to convince
mankind of the long and deadly error of human law. Those old
implements of cruelty—those horrible monsters of mechanism—
those inventions which it seemed to demand something worse than
man's natural heart to contrive, and which had lurked in the
dusky nooks of ancient prisons, the suject of terror-stricken
legend—were now brought forth to view. Headsmen's axes,
with the rust of noble and royal blood upon them, and a vast collection
of halters that had choked the breath of plebeian victims,

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were thrown in together. A shout greeted the arrival of the
guillotine, which was thrust forward on the same wheels that had
borne it from one to another of the blood-stained streets of Paris.
But the loudest roar of applause went up, telling the distant sky
of the triumph of the earth's redemption, when the gallows
made its appearance. An ill-looking fellow, however, rushed
forward, and, putting himself in the path of the reformers,
bellowed hoarsely, and fought with brute fury to stay their
progress.

It was little matter of surprise, perhaps, that the executioner
should thus do his best to vindicate and uphold the machinery by
which he himself had his livelihood, and worthier individuals
their death. But it deserved special note, that men of a far different
sphere,—even of that class in whose guardianship the
world is apt to trust its benevolence—were found to take the
hangman's view of the question.

“Stay, my brethren!” cried one of them. “You are misled
by a false philanthropy!—you know not what you do. The
gallows is a Heaven-ordained instrument! Bear it back, then,
reverently, and set it up in its old place; else the world will fall
to speedy ruin and desolation!”

“Onward, onward!” shouted a leader in the reform. “Into
the flames with the accursed instrument of man's bloody policy.
How can human law inculcate benevolence and love, while it
persists in setting up the gallows as its chief symbol? One
heave more, good friends, and the world will be redeemed from
its greatest error!”

A thousand hands, that nevertheless, loathed the touch, now
lent their assistance, and thrust the ominous burthen far, far, into
the centre of the raging furnace. There its fatal and abhorred
image was beheld, first black, then a red coal, then ashes.

“That was well done!” exclaimed I.

“Yes, it was well done,” replied—but with less enthusiasm

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

than I expected—the thoughtful observer who was still at my
side; “well done, if the world be good enough for the measure.
Death, however, is an idea that cannot easily be dispensed with,
in any condition between the primal innocence and that other
purity and perfection, which, perchance, we are destined to attain,
after travelling round the full circle. But, at all events, it is
well that the experiment should now be tried.”

“Too cold! too cold!” impatiently exclaimed the young and
ardent leader in this triumph. “Let the heart have its voice
here, as well as the intellect. And as for ripeness—and as for
progress—let mankind always do the highest, kindest, noblest
thing that, at any given period, it has attained the perception of;
and surely that thing cannot be wrong, nor wrongly timed.”

I know not whether it were the excitement of the scene, or
whether the good people around the bonfire were really growing
more enlightened every instant; but they now proceeded to measures,
in the full length of which I was hardly prepared to keep
them company. For instance, some threw their marriage certificates
into the flames, and declared themselves candidates for a
higher, holier, and more comprehensive union than that which
had subsisted from the birth of time, under the form of of theconnubial
tie. Others hastened to the vaults of banks, and to the
coffers of the rich—all of which were open to the first comer, on
this fated occasion—and brought entire bales of paper-money to
enliven the blaze, and tons of coin to be melted down by its intensity.
Henceforth, they said, universal benevolence, uncoined and
exhaustless, was to be the golden currency of the world. At
this intelligence, the bankers, and speculators in the stocks, grew
pale; and a pickpocket, who had reaped a rich harvest among
the crowd, fell down in a deadly fainting-fit. A few men of business
burnt their day-books and ledgers, the notes and obligations
of their creditors, and all other evidences of debts due to themselves;
while perhaps a somewhat larger number satisfied their

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zeal for reform with the sacrifice of any uncomfortable recollection
of their own indebtment. There was then a cry, that the
period was arrived when the title-deeds of landed property should
be given to the flames, and the whole soil of the earth revert to
the public, from whom it had been wrongfully abstracted, and
most unequally distributed among individuals. Another party
demanded that all written constitutions, set forms of government,
legislative acts, statute-books, and everything else on which human
invention had endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws, should
at once be destroyed, leaving the consummated world as free as
the man first created.

Whether any ultimate action was taken with regard to these
propositions, is beyond my knowledge; for, just then, some matters
were in progress that concerned my sympathies more nearly.

“See!—see!—what heaps of books and pamphlets!” cried a
fellow, who did not seem to be a lover of literature. “Now we
shall have a glorious blaze!”

“That's just the thing,” said a modern philosopher. “Now
we shall get rid of the weight of dead men's thought, which has
hitherto pressed so heavily on the living intellect that it has been
incompetent to any effectual self-exertion. Well done, my lads!
Into the fire with them! Now you are enlightening the world,
indeed?”

“But what is to become of the Trade?” cried a frantic bookseller.

“Oh, by all means, let them accompany their merchandise,”
cooly observed an author. “It will be a noble funeral pile!”

The truth was, that the human race had now reached a stage
of progress so far beyond what the wisest and wittiest men of
former ages had ever dreamed of, that it would have been a manifest
absurdity to allow the earth to be any longer encumbered
with their poor achievements in the literary line. Accordingly,
a thorough and searching investigation had swept the booksellers'

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shops, hawkers' stands, public and private libraries, and even the
little book-shelf by the country fireside, and had brought the
world's entire mass of printed paper, bound or in sheets, to swell
the already mountain-bulk of our illustrious bonfire. Thick,
heavy folios, containing the labors of lexicographers, commentators,
and encyclopedists, were flung in, and, falling among the
embers with a leaden thump, smouldered away to ashes, like rotten
wood. The small, richly gilt French tomes of the last age, with the
hundred volumes of Voltaire among them, went off in a brilliant
shower of sparkles, and little jets of flame; while the current
literature of the same nation burnt red and blue, and threw an
infernal light over the visages of the spectators, converting them
all to the aspect of parti-colored fiends. A collection of German
stories emitted a scent of brimstone. The English standard authors
made excellent fuel, generally exhibiting the properties of sound
oak logs. Milton's works, in particular, sent up a powerful blaze,
gradually reddening into a coal, which promised to endure longer
than almost any other material of the pile. From Shakspeare
there gushed a flame of such marvellous splendor that men shaded
their eyes as against the sun's meridian glory; nor even when the
works of his own elucidators were flung upon him did he cease
to flash forth a dazzling radiance from beneath the ponderous heap.
It is my belief that he is still blazing as fervidly as ever.

“Could a poet but light a lamp at that glorious flame,” remarked
I, “he might then consume the midnight oil to some good
purpose.”

“That is the very thing which modern poets have been too apt
to do, or at least to attempt,” answered a critic. “The chief
benefit to be expected from this conflagration of past literature
undoubtedly is, that writers will henceforth be compelled to light
their lamps at the sun or stars.”

“If they can reach so high,” said I. “But that task requires
a giant, who may afterward distribute the light among inferior

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men. It is not every one that can steal the fire from heaven, like
Prometheus; but when once he had done the deed, a thousand
hearths were kindled by it.”

It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was the proportion
between the physical mass of any given author, and the property
of brilliant and long-continued combustion. For instance,
there was not a quarto volume of the last century—nor, indeed,
of the present—that could compete, in that particular, with a
child's little gilt-covered book, containing Mother Goose's Melodies.
The Life and Death of Tom Thumb outlasted the biography
of Marlborough. An epic—indeed, a dozen of them—was
converted to white ashes, before the single sheet of an old ballad
was half consumed. In more than one case, too, when volumes
of applauded verse proved incapable of anything better than a
stifling smoke, an unregarded ditty of some nameless bard—perchance
in the corner of a newspaper—soared up among the stars,
with a flame as brilliant as their own. Speaking of the properties
of flame, methought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light
than almost any other productions of his day; contrasting beautifully
with the fitful and lurid gleams, and gushes of black vapor,
that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron. As
for Tom Moore, some of his songs diffused an odor like a burning
pastille.

I felt particular interest in watching the combustion of American
authors, and scrupulously noted, by my watch, the precise
number of moments that changed most of them from shabbily
printed books to indistinguishable ashes. It would be invidious,
however, if not perilous, to betray these awful secrets; so that I
shall content myself with observing, that it was not invariably
the writer most frequent in the public mouth that made the most
splendid appearance in the bonfire. I especially remember, that
a great deal of excellent inflammability was exhibited in a thin
volume of poems by Ellery Channing; although, to speak the

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truth, there were certain portions that hissed and spluttered in a
very disagreeable fashion. A curious phenomenon occurred in
reference to several writers, native as well as foreign. Their
books, though of highly respectable figure, instead of bursting
into a blaze, or even smouldering out their substance in smoke,
suddenly melted away, in a manner that proved them to be ice.

If it be no lack of modesty to mention my own works, it must
here be confessed, that I looked for them with fatherly interest,
but in vain. Too probably, they were changed to vapor by the
first action of the heat; at best, I can only hope that, in their
quiet way, they contributed a glimmering spark or two to the
splendor of the evening.

“Alas! and woe is me!” thus bemoaned himself a heavy-looking
gentelman in green spectacles. “The world is utterly ruined,
and there is nothing to live for any longer! The business of
my life is snatched from me. Not a volume to be had for love or
money!”

“This,” remarked the sedate observer beside me, “is a bookworm—
one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts.
His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He
has no inward fountain of ideas; and, in good earnest, now that
the old stock is abolished, I do not see what is to become of the
poor fellow. Have you no word of comfort for him?”

“My dear sir,” said I, to the desperate book-worm, “is not
Nature better than a book?—is not the human heart deeper than
any system of philosophy?—is not life replete with more instruction
than past observers have found it possible to write down in
maxims? Be of good cheer! The great book of Time is still
spread wide open before us; and, if we read it aright, it will be
to us a volume of eternal Truth.”

“Oh, my books, my books, my precious, printed books!” reiterated
the forlorn book-worm. “My only reality was a bound

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volume; and now they will not leave me even a shadowy
pamphlet!”

In fact, the last remnant of the literature of all the ages was
now descending upon the blazing heap, in the shape of a cloud
of pamphlets from the press of the New World. These, likewise,
were consumed in the twinkling of an eye, leaving the
earth, for the first time since the days of Cadmus, free from the
plague of letters—an enviable field for the authors of the next
generation!

“Well!—and does anything remain to be done?” inquired I,
somewhat anxiously. “Unless we set fire to the earth itself, and
then leap boldly off into infinite space, I know now that we can
carry reform to any further point.”

“You are vastly mistaken, my good friend,” said the observer.
“Believe me, the fire will not be allowed to settle down without
the addition of fuel that will startle many persons, who have lent
a willing hand thus far.”

Nevertheless, there appeared to be a relaxation of effort, for a
little time, during which, probably, the leaders of the movement
were considering what should be done next. In the interval, a
philosopher threw his theory into the flames; a sacrifice which,
by those who knew how to estimate it, was pronounced the most
remarkable that had yet been made. The combustion, however,
was by no means brilliant. Some indefatigable people, scorning
to take a moment's ease, now employed themselves in collecting
all the withered leaves and fallen boughs of the forest, and thereby
recruited the bonfire to a greater height than ever. But this was
mere by-play.

“Here comes the fresh fuel that I spoke of,” said my companion.

To my astonishment, the persons who now advanced into the
vacant space around the mountain fire, bore surplices and other
priestly garments, mitres, crosiers, and a confusion of Popish and

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Protestant emblems, with which it seemed their purpose to consummate
the great Act of Faith. Crosses, from the spires of old
cathedrals, were cast upon the heap with as little remorse as if
the reverence of centuries, passing in long array beneath the lofty
towers, had not looked up to them as the holiest of symbols. The
font, in which infants were consecrated to God; the sacramental
vessels, whence Piety received the hallowed draught; were given
to the same destruction. Perhaps it most nearly touched my
heart to see, among these devoted relics, fragments of the humble
communion-tables and undecorated pulpits, which I recognized as
having been torn from the meeting-houses of New England.
Those simple edifices might have been permitted to retain all of
sacred embellishments that their Puritan founders had bestowed,
even though the mighty structure of St. Peter's had sent its spoils
to the fire of this terrible sacrifice. Yet I felt that these were
but the externals of religion, and might most safely be relinquished
by spirits that best knew their deep significance.

“All is well,” said I cheerfully. “The wood-paths shall be
the aisles of our cathedral—the firmament itself shall be its ceiling!
What needs an earthly roof between the Deity and his
worshippers? Our faith can well afford to lose all the drapery
that even the holiest men have thrown around it, and be only the
more sublime in its simplicity.”

“True,” said my companion. “But will they pause here?”

The doubt implied in his question was well founded. In the
general destruction of books already described, a holy volume—
that stood apart from the catalogue of human literature, and yet,
in one sense, was at its head—had been spared. But the Titan of
innovation—angel or fiend, double in his nature, and capable of
deeds befitting both characters—at first shaking down only the old
and rotten shapes of things, had now, as it appeared, laid his terrible
hand upon the main pillars which supported the whole edifice
of our moral and spiritual state. The inhabitants of the

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earth had grown too enlightened to define their faith within a form
or words, or to limit the spiritual by any analogy to our material
existence. Truths, which the heavens trembled at, were now but
a fable of the world's infancy. Therefore, as the final sacrifice
of human error, what else remained to be thrown upon the embers
of that awful pile, except the Book, which, though a celestial
revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere, as
regarded the present race of man? It was done! Upon the
blazing heap of falsehood and worn out truth—things that the
earth had never needed, or had ceased to need, or had grown
childishly weary of—fell the ponderous church Bible, the great
old volume, that had lain so long on the cushion of the pulpit,
and whence the pastor's solemn voice had given hold utterance on
so many a Sabbath day. There, likewise, fell the family Bible,
which the long-buried patriarch had read to his children—in prosperity
or sorrow, by the fireside and in the summer shade of trees—
and had bequeathed downward, as the heir-loom of generations.
There fell the bosom Bible, the little volume that had been the
soul's friend of some sorely tried child of dust, who thence took
courage, whether his trial were for life or death, steadfastly confronting
both in the strong assurance of immortality.

All these were flung into the fierce and riotous blaze; and then
a mighty wind came roaring across the plain, with a desolate
howl, as if it were the angry lamentations of the Earth for the
loss of Heaven's sunshine, and it shook the gigantic pyramid of
flame, and scattered the cinders of half-consumed abominations
around upon the spectators.

“This is terrible!” said I, feeling that my cheek grew pale,
and seeing a like change in the visage about me.

“Be of good courage yet,” answered the man with whom I had
so often spoken. He continued to gaze steadily at the spectacle,
with a singular calmness, as if it concerned him merely as an
observer. “Be of good courage—nor yet exult too much; for

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there is far less both of good and evil, in the effect of this bonfire,
than the world might be willing to believe.”

“How can that be?” exclaimed I impatiently. “Has it not
consumed everything? Has it not swallowed up, or melted down,
every human or divine appendage of our mortal state that had
substance enough to be acted on by fire? Will there be anything
left us to-morrow morning, better or worse than a heap of embers
and ashes?”

“Assuredly there will,”said my grave friend. “Come hither
to-morrow morning—or whenever the combustible portion of the
pile shall be quite burnt out—and you will find among the ashes
everything really valuable that you have seen cast into the flames.
Trust me, the world of to-morrow will again enrich itself with
the gold and diamonds which have been cast off by the world of
to-day. Not a truth is destroyed—nor buried so deep among the
ashes, but it will be raked up at last.”

This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined to credit it;
the more especially as I beheld among the wallowing flames a
copy of the Holy Scriptures, the pages of which, instead of being
blackened into tinder, only assumed a more dazzling whiteness
as the finger-marks of human imperfection were purified away.
Certain marginal notes and commentaries, it is true, yielded to the
intensity of the fiery test, but without detriment to the smallest
syllable that had flamed from the pen of inspiration.

“Yes—there is the proof of what you say.” answered I, turning
to the observer. “But if only what is evil can feel the action
of the fire, then, surely, the conflagration has been of inestimable
utility. Yet if I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether
the world's expectation of benefit would be realized by it.”

“Listen to the talk of these worthies,” said he, pointing to a
group in front of the blazing pile. “Possibly they may teach
you something useful, without intending it.”

The persons whom he indicated consisted of that brutal and

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most earthy figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of
the gallows—the hangman, in short—together with the last thief
and the last murderer; all three of whom were clustered about
the last toper. The latter was liberally passing the brandy bottle,
which he had rescued from the general destruction of wines and
spirits. This little convivial party seemed at the lowest pitch of
despondency; as considering that the purified world must needs
be utterly unlike the sphere that they had hitherto known, and
therefore but a strange and desolate abode for gentlemen of their
kidney.

“The best counsel for all of us is,” remarked the hangman,
“that—as soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor—I help
you, my three friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree,
and then hang myself on the same bough. This is no world for
us any longer.”

“Poh, poh, my good fellows!” said a dark-complexioned personage,
who now joined the group—his complexion was indeed
fearfully dark, and his eyes glowed with a redder light than that
of the bonfire—“Be not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall
see good days yet. There is one thing that these wiseacres have
forgotten to throw into the fire, and without which all the rest of
the conflagration is just nothing at all; yes—though they had
burnt the earth itself to a cinder?”

“And what may that be?” eagerly demanded the last murderer.

“What but the human heart itself!” said the dark visaged
stranger, with a portentous grin. “And unless they hit upon
some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue
all the shapes of wrong and misery—the same old shapes,
or worse ones—which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble
to consume to ashes. I have stood by, this live-long night, and
laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word
for it, it will be the old world yet!”

This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for

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lengthened thought. How sad a truth—if true it were—that Man's
age-long endeavor for perfection had served only to render him
the mockery of the Evil Principle, from the fatal circumstance
of an error at the very root of the matter! The heart—the heart—
there was the little yet boundless sphere, wherein existed the
original wrong, of which the crime and misery of this outward
world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere; and the
many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem
almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms, and
vanish of their own accord. But if we go no deeper than the
Intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern
and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a
dream; so unsubstantial, that it matters little whether the bonfire,
which I have so faithfully described, were what we chose to call
a real event, and a flame that would scorch the finger—or only a
phosphoric radiance, and a parable of my own brain!

p134-379 THE OLD APPLE-DEALER.

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

The lover of the moral picturesque may sometimes find what he
seeks in a character, which is, nevertheless, of too negative a
description to be seized upon, and represented to the imaginative
vision by word-painting. As an instance, I remember an old man
who carries on a little trade of gingerbread and apples, at the
depot of one of our railroads. While awaiting the departure of
the cars, my observation, flitting to and fro among the livelier
characteristics of the scene, has often settled insensibly upon this
almost hueless object. Thus, unconsciously to myself, and unsuspected
by him, I have studied the old apple-dealer, until he
has become a naturalized citizen of my inner world. How little
would he imagine—many a beautiful face—has flitted before me, and
vanished like a shadow. It is a strange witchcraft, whereby
this faded and featureless old apple-dealer has gained a settlement
in my memory!

He is a small man, with grey hair and grey stubble beard, and
is invariably clad in a shabby surtout of snuff-color, closely buttoned,
and half-concealing a pair of grey pantaloons; the whole
dress, though clean and entire, being evidently flimsy with much
wear. His face, thin, withered, furrowed, and with features
which even age has failed to render impressive, has a frost-bitten

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aspect. It is a moral frost, which no physical warmth or comfortableness
could counteract. The summer sunshine may fling
its white heat upon him, or the good fire of the depot-room may
make him hte focus of its blaze, on a winter's day; but all in
vain; for still the old man looks as if he were in a frosty atmosphere,
with scarcely warmth enough to keep life in the region
about his heart. It is a patient, long-suffering, quiet, hopeless,
shivering aspect. He is not desperate—that, though its etymology
implies no more, would be too positive an expression—but merely
devoid of hope. As all his past life, probably, offers no spots of
brightness to his memory, so he takes his present poverty and discomfort
as entirely a matter of course; he thinks it the definition
of existence, so far as himself is concerned, to be poor, cold, and
uncomfortable. It may be added, that time has not thrown dignity,
as a mantle, over the old man's figure; there is nothing
venerable about him; you pity him without a scruple.

He sits on a bench in the depot-room; an before him, on the
floor, are deposited two baskets, of a capacity to contain his whole
stock in trade. Across, from one basket to the other, extends a
board, on which is displayed a plate of cakes and gingerbread,
some russet and red checked apples, and a box containing variegated
sticks of candy; together with that delectable condiment,
known by children as Gibraltar rock, neatly done up in white
paper. There is likewise a half-peck measure of cracked walnuts,
and two or three tin half-pints or gills, filled with the nut
kernels, ready for purchasers. Such are the small commodities
with which our old friend comes daily before the world, ministering
to its petty needs and little freaks of appetite, and seeking
thence the solid subsistence—so far as he may subsist—of his
life.

A slight observer would speak of the old man's quietude.
But, on closer scrutiny, you discover there there is a continual
unrest within him, which somewhat resembles the fluttering

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action of the nerves, in a corpse from which life has recently
departed. Though he never exhibits any violent action, and,
indeed, might appear to be sitting quite still, yet you perceive,
when his minuter peculiarities begin to be detected, that he is
always making some little movement or other. He looks anxiously
at his plate of cakes, or pyramid of apples, and slightly
alters their arrangement, with an evident idea that a great deal
depends on their being disposed exactly thus and so. Then, for
a moment, he gazes out of the window; then he shivers, quietly,
and folds his arms across his breast, as if to draw himself closer
within himself, and thus keep a flicker of warmth in his lonesome
heart. Now he turns again to his merchandise of cakes, apples,
and candy, and discovers that this cake or that apple, or yonder
stick of red and white candy, has, somehow, got out of its proper
position. And is there not a walnut-kernel too many, or too few,
in one of those small tin measures? Again, the whole arrangement
appears to be settled to his mind; but, in the course of a
minute or two, there will assuredly be something to set right.
At times, by an indescribable shadow upon his features—too
quiet, however, to be noticed, until you are familiar with his
ordinary aspect—the expression of frost-bitten, patient despondency
becomes very touching. It seems as if, just at that instant, the
suspicion occurred to him, that, in his chill decline of life, earning
scanty bread by selling cakes, apples, and candy, he is a very
miserable old fellow.

But, if he think so, it is a mistake. He can never suffer the
extreme of misery, because the tone of his whole being is too
much subdued for him to feel anything acutely.

Occasionally, one of the passengers, to while away a tedious
interval, approaches the old man, inspects the articles upon his
board, and even peeps curiously into the two baskets. Another,
striding to and fro along the room, throws a look at the apples and
gingerbread, at every turn. A third, it may be, of a more

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

sensitive and delicate texture of being, glances shily thitherward,
cautious not to excite expectations of a purchaser, while yet undetermined
whether to buy. But there appears to be no need
of such a scrupulous regard to our old friend's feelings. True,
he is conscious of the remote possibility of selling a cake or an
apple, but innumerable disappointments have rendered him so far
a philosopher, that, even if the purchased article should be returned,
he will consider it altogether in the ordinary train of
events. He speaks to none, and makes no sign of offering his
wares to the public; not that he is deterred by pride, but by the
certain conviction that such demonstrations would not increase
his custom. Besides, this activity in business would require an
energy that never could have been a characteristic of his almost
passive disposition, even in youth. Whenever an actual customer
appears, the old man looks up with a patient eye; if the price
and the article are approved, he is ready to make change; otherwise,
his eyelids droop again, sadly enough, but with no heavier
despondency than before. He shivers, perhaps, folds his lean
arms around his lean body, and resumes the life-long, frozen patience,
in which consists his strength. Once in a while, a schoolboy
comes hastily up, places a cent or two upon the board, and
takes up a cake or stick of candy, or a measure of walnuts, or an
apple as red cheeked as himself. There are no words as to price,
that being as well known to the buyer as to the seller. The old
apple-dealer never speaks an unnecessary word; not that he is
sullen and morose; but there is none of the cheeriness and briskness
in him, that stirs up people to talk.

Not seldom, he is greeted by some old neighbor, a man well-to-do
in the world, who makes a civil, patronizing observation
about the weather; and then, by way of performing a charitable
deed, begins to chaffer for an apple. Our friend presumes not
on any past acquaintance; he makes the briefest possible response
to all general remarks, and shrinks quietly into himself again.

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

After every diminution of his stock, he takes care to produce from
the basket another cake, another stick of candy, another apple,
or another measure of walnuts, to supply the place of the article
sold. Two or three attempts—or, perchance, half a dozen—are
requisite, before the board can be re-arranged to his satisfaction.
If he have received a silver coin, he waits till the purchaser is
out of sight, then examines it closely, and tries to bend it with his
finger and thumb; finally, he puts it into his waistcoat pocket,
with seemingly a gentle sigh. This sigh, so faint as to be hardly
perceptible, and not expressive of any definite emotion, is the accompaniment
and conclusion of all his actions. It is the symbol
of the chillness and torpid melancholy of his old age, which only
make themselves felt sensibly, when his repose is slightly disturbed.

Our man of gingerbread and apples is not a specimen of the
“needy man who has seen better days.” Doubtless, there have
been better and brighter days in the far-off time of his youth; but
none with so much sunshine of prosperity in them, that the chill,
the depression, the narrowness of means, in his declining years,
can have come upon him by surprise. His life has all been of
a piece. His subdued and nerveless boyhood prefigured his
abortive prime, which, likewise, contained within itself the prophecy
and image of his lean and torpid age. He was perhaps a
mechanic, who never came to be a master in his craft, or a petty
tradesman, rubbing onward between passably-to-do and poverty.
Possibly, he may look back to some brilliant epoch of his career,
when there were a hundred or two of dollars to his credit, in the
Savings Bank. Such must have been the extent of his better
fortune—his little measure of this world's triumphs—all that he
has known of success. A meek, downcast, humble, uncomplaining
creature, he probably has never felt himself entitled to more
than so much of the gifts of Providence. Is it not still something,
that he has never held out his hand for charity, nor has yet been

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

driven to that sad home and household of Earth's forlorn and
broken-spirited children, the alms-house? He cherishes no quarrel,
therefore, with his destiny, nor with the Author of it. All is
as it should be.

If, indeed, he have been bereaved of a son—a bold, energetic,
vigorous young man, on whom the father's feeble nature leaned,
as on a staff of strength—in that case, he may have felt a bitterness
that could not otherwise have been generated in his heart.
But methinks, the joy of possessing such a son, and the agony of
losing him, would have developed the old man's moral and intellectual
nature to a much greater degree than we now find it.
Intense grief appears to be as much out of keeping with his life,
as fervid happiness.

To confess the truth, it is not the easies matter in the world
to define and individualize a character like this which we are
now handling. The portrait must be so generally negative, that
the most delicate pencil is likely to spoil it by introducing some
too positive tint. Every touch must be kept down, or else you
destroy the subdued tone, which is absolutely essential to the
whole effect. Perhaps more may be done by contrast, than by
direct description. For this purpose, I make use of another cake-and-candy
merchant, who likewise infests the railroad depot.
This latter worthy is a very smart and well-dressed boy, of ten
years old or thereabouts, who skips briskly hither and thither,
addressing the passengers in a pert voice, yet with somewhat of
good breeding in his tone and pronunciation. Now he has caught
my eye, and skips across the room with a pretty pertness, which
I should like to correct with a box on the ear. “Any cake, sir?—
any candy?”

No; none for me, my lad. I did but glance at your brisk
figure, in order to catch a reflected light, and throw it upon your
old rival yonder.

Again, in order to invest my conception of the old man with a

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

more decided sense of reality, I look at him in the very moment of
intensest bustle, on the arrival of the cars. The shriek of the
engine, as it rushes into the car-house, is the utterance of the
steam-fiend, whom man has subdued by magic spells, and compels
to serve as a beast of burden. He has skimmed rivers in his
headlong rush, dashed through forests, plunged into the hearts of
mountains, and glanced from the city to the desert-place, and
again to a far-off city, with a meteoric progress, seen, and out of
sight, while his reverberating roar still fills the ear. The travellers
swarm forth from the cars. All are full of the momentum
which they have caught from their mode of conveyance. It
seems as if the whole world, both morally and physically, were
detached from its old standfasts, and set in rapid motion. And, in
the midst of this terrible activity, there sits the old man of ginger-bread,
so subdued, so hopeless, so without a stake in life, and yet
not positively miserable—there he sits, the forlorn old creature,
one chill and sombre day after another, gathering scanty coppers
for his cakes, apples and candy—there sits the old apple-dealer,
in his threadbare suit of snuff-color and grey, and his grisly stubble-beard.
See! he folds his lean arms around his lean figure,
with that quiet sigh, and that scarcely perceptible shiver, which
are the tokens of his inward state. I have him now. He and
the steam-fiend are each other's antipodes; the latter is the type
of all that go ahead—and the old man, the representative of that
melancholy class who, by some sad witchcraft, are doomed never
to share in the world's exulting progress. Thus the contrast
between mankind and this desolate brother becomes picturesque,
and even sublime.

And now farewell, old friend! Little do you suspect that a
student of human life has made your character the theme of more
than one solitary and thoughtful hour. Many would say, that
you have hardly individuality enough to be the object of your
own self-love. How, then, can a stranger's eye detect anything

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

in your mind and heart, to study and to wonder at? Yet could
I read but a tithe of what is written there, it would be a volume
of deeper and more comprehensive import than all that the wisest
mortals have given to the world; for the soundless depths of the
human sould, and of eternity, have an opening through your breast.
God be praised, were it only for your sake, that the present shapes
of human existence are not cast in iron, nor hewn in everlasting
adamant, but moulded of the vapors that vanish away while the
essence flits upward to the infinite. There is a spiritual essence
in this grey and lean old shape that shall flit upward too. Yes;
doubtless there is a region, where the life-long shiver will pass
away from his being, and that quiet sigh, which it has taken him
so many years to breathe, will be brought to a close for good and
all.

p134-387 THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL.

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing
along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy
evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window
of a small shop. It was a projecting window; and on the
inside were suspended a variety of watches,—pinchbeck, silver,
and one or two of gold,—all with their faces turned from the
street, as if churlishly disinclined to inform the wayfarers what
o'clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to the window,
with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece of
mechanism, on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a
shade-lamp, appeared a young man.

“What can Owen Warland be about?” muttered old Peter
Hovenden,—himself a retired watch-maker, and the former master
of this same young man, whose occupation he was now wondering
at. “What can the fellow be about? These six months
past, I have never come by his shop without seeing him just as
steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond his usual
foolery to seek for the Perpetual Motion. And yet I know enough
of my old business to be certain, that what he is now so busy
with is no part of the machinery of a watch.”

“Perhaps, father,” said Annie, without showing much interest
in the question, “Owen is inventing a new kind of time-keeper.
I am sure he has ingenuity enough.”

“Pooh, child! he has not the sort of ingenuity to invent

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

anything better than a Dutch toy,” answered her father, who had
formerly been put to much vexation by Owen Warland's irregular
genius. “A plague on such ingenuity! All the effect that
ever I know of it was, to spoil the accuracy of some of the best
watches in my shop. He would turn the sun out of its orbit, and
derange the whole course of time, if, as I said before, his ingenuity
could grasp anything bigger than a child's toy!”

“Hush, father! he hears you,” whispered Annie, pressing the
old man's arm. “His ears are as delicate as his feelings and
you know how easily disturbed they are. Do let us move on.”

So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on, without
further conversation, until, in a by-street of the town, they found
themselves passing the open door of a blacksmith's shop. Within
was seen the forge, now blazing up, and illuminating the high
and dusky roof, and now confining its lustre to a narrow precinct
of the coal-strewn floor, according as the breath of the bellows
was puffed forth, or again inhaled into its vast leathern lungs.
In the intervals of brightness, it was easy to distinguish objects in
remote corners of the shop, and the horse-shoes that hung upon
the wall; in the momentary gloom, the fire seemed to be glimmering
amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space. Moving
about in this red glare and alternate dusk, was the figure of the
blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect
of light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the
black night, as if each would have snatched his comely strength
from the other. Anon, he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the
coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm of might, and was seen
enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the strokes of his hammer
scattered into the surrounding gloom.

“Now, that is a pleasant sight,” said the old watchmaker,
“I know what it is to work in gold, but give me the worker in
iron, after all is said and done. He spends his labor upon a
reality. What say you, daughter Annie?”

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

“Pray don't speak so loud, father,” whispered Annie. “Robert
Danforth will hear you.”

“And what if he should hear me?” said Peter Hovenden;
“I say again, it is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon
main strength and reality, and to earn one's bread with the bare
and brawny arm of a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain
puzzled by his wheels within a wheel, or loses his health or the
nicety of his eyesight, as was my case; and finds himself, at
middle age, or a little after, past labor at his own trade, and fit
for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his ease. So, I say once
again, give me main strength for my money. And then, how it
takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a blacksmith
being such a fool as Owen Warland, yonder?”

“Well said, uncle Hovenden!” shouted Robert Danforth,
from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof
re-echo. “And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I
suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's
watch than to forge a horse-shoe or make a gridiron!”

Annie drew her father onward, without giving him time for
reply.

But we must return to Owen Warland's shop, and spend more
meditation upon his history and character than either Peter Hovenden,
or probably his daughter Annie, or Owen's old schoolfellow,
Robert Danforth, would have thought due to so slight a
subject. From the time that his little fingers could grasp a penknife,
Owen had been remarkable for a delicate ingenuity, which
sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally figures of
flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden
mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of
grace, and never with any mockery of the useful. He did not,
like the crowd of school-boy artizans, construct little windmills
on the angle of a barn, or watermills across the neighboring
brook. Those who discovered such peculiarity in the boy, as

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

to think it worth their while to observe him closely, sometimes
saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to imitate the beautiful
movements of nature, as exemplified in the flight of birds
or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new development
of the love of the Beautiful, such as might have made
him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely
refined from all utilitarian coarseness, as it could have been in
either of the fine arts. He looked with singular distate at the
stiff and regular processes of ordinary machinery. Being once
carried to see a steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive
comprehension of mechanical principles would be gratified, he
turned pale, and grew sick, as if something monstrous and un- natural had been presented to him. This horror was partly
owing to the size and terrible energy of the Iron Laborer; for
the character of Owen's mind was microscopic, and tended naturally
to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame,
and the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers.
Not that his sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense
of prettiness. The beautiful Idea has no relation to size, and
may be as perfectly developed in a space too minute for any but
microscopic investigation, as within the ample verge that is measured
by the arc of the rainbow. But, at all events, this characteristic
minuteness in his objects and accomplishments made the
world even more incapable than it might otherwise have been,
of appreciating Owen Warland's genius. The boy's relatives
saw nothing better to be done—as perhaps there was not—than
to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange
ingenuity might thus be regulated, and put to utilitarian purposes.

Peter Hovenden's opinion of his apprentice has already been
expressed. He could make nothing of the lad. Owen's apprehension
of the professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably
quick. But he altogether forgot or despised the grand object of

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

a watchmaker's business, and cared no more for the measurement
of time than if it had been merged into eternity. So long,
however, as he remained under his old master's care, Owen's
lack of sturdiness made it possible, by strict injunctions and sharp
oversight, to restrain his creative eccentricity within bounds.
But when his apprenticeship was served out, and he had taken
the little shop which Peter Hovenden's failing eye-sight compelled
him to relinquish, then did people recognize how unfit a person
was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along his
daily course. One of his most rational projects was, to connect
a musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that
all the harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and
each flitting moment fall into the abyss of the Past in golden drops
of harmony. If a family-clock was entrusted to him for repair—
one of those tall, ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied
to human nature, by measuring out the lifetime of many generations—
he would take upon himself to arrange a dance or funeral
procession of figures across its venerable face, representing
twelve mirthful or melancholy hours. Several freaks of this kind
quite destroyed the young watchmaker's credit with that steady
and matter-of-fact class of people, who hold the opinion that time
is not to be trifled with, whether considered as the medium of
advancement and prosperity in this world, or preparation for the
next. His custom rapidly diminished—a misfortune, however,
that was probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen
Warland, who was becoming more and more absorbed in a secret
occupation, which drew all his science and manual dexterity
into itself, and likewise gave full employment to the characteristic
tendencies of his genius. This pursuit had already consumed
many months.

After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed
at him, out of the obscurity of the street, Owen Warland was
seized with a fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand

[figure description] Page 169.[end figure description]

tremble too violently to proceed with such delicate labor as he was
now engaged upon.

“It was Annie herself!” murmured he. “I should have
known by this throbbing of my heart, before I heard her father's
voice. Ah, how it throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work again
on this exquisite mechanism to-night. Annie—dearest Annie—
thou shouldst give firmness to my heart and hand, and not shake
them thus; for if I strive to put the very spirit of Beauty into
form, and give it motion, it is for thy sake alone. Oh throbbing
heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come
vague and unsatisfied dreams, which will leave me spiritless tomorrow.”

As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, the
shop-door opened, and gave admittance to no other than the stalwart
figure which Peter Hovenden had paused to admire, as seen
amid the light and shadow of the blacksmith's shop. Robert
Danforth had brought a little anvil of his own manufacture, and
peculiarly constructed, which the young artist had recently bespoken.
Owen examined the article, and pronounced it fashioned
according to his wish.

“Why, yes,” said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the
shop as with the sound of a bass-viol, “I consider myself equal
to anything in the way of my own trade; though I should have
made but a poor figure at yours, with such a fist as this,”—added
he, laughing, as he laid his vast hand beside the delicate one of
Owen. “But what then? I put more main strength into one
blow of my sledge-hammer, than all that you have expended
since you were a 'prentice. Is not that the truth?”

“Very probably,” answered the low and slender voice of
Owen. “Strength is an earthly monster. I make no preten- sions to it. My force, whatever there may be of it, is altogether
spiritual.”

“Wll, but, Owen, what are you about?” asked his old

[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]

schoolfellow, still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist
shrink; especially as the question related to a subject so sacred
as the absorbing dream of his imagination. “Folks do say, that
you are trying to discover the Perpetual Motion.”

“The Perpetual Motion?—nonsense!” replied Owen Warland,
with a movement of disgust; for he was full of little petulances.
“It never can be discovered! It is a dream that may delude
men whose brains are mystified with matter, but not me. Besides,
if such a discovery were possible, it would not be worth my
while to make it, only to have the secret turned to such purposes
as are now effected by steam and water-power. I am not ambitious
to be honored with the paternity of a new kind of cottonmachine.”

“That would be droll enough!” cried the blacksmith, breaking
out into such an uproar of laughter, that Owen himself, and the
bell-glasses on his work-board, quivered in unison. “No, no,
Owen! No child of yours will have iron joints and sinews.
Well, I wont hinder you any more. Good night, Owen, and success;
and if you need any assistance, so far as a downright blow
of hammer upon anvil will answer the purpose, I'm your man!”

And with another laugh, the man of main strength left the shop.

“How strange it is,” whispered Owen Warland to himself,
leaning his head upon his hand, “that all my musings, my purposes,
my passion for the Beautiful, my consciousness of power to
create it—a finer, more ethereal power, of which this earthly
giant can have no conception—all, all, look so vain and idle,
whenever my path is crossed by Robert Danforth! He would
drive me mad, were I to meet him often. His hard, brute force
darkens and confuses the spiritual element within me. But I,
too, will be strong in my own way. I will not yield to him!”

He took from beneath a glass, a piece of minute machinery,
which he set in the condensed light of his lamp, and, looking
intently at it through a magnifying glass, proceeded to operate

[figure description] Page 171.[end figure description]

with a delicate instrument of steel. In an instant, however, he
fell back in his chair, and clasped his hands, with a look of horror
on his face, that made its small features as impressive as those of
a giant would have been.

“Heaven! What have I done!” exclaimed he. “The vapor!—
the influence of that brute force!—it has bewildered me, and
obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke—the fatal
stroke—that I have dreaded from the first! It is all over—the
toil of months—the object of my life! I am ruined!”

And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in
the socket, and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.

Thus it is, that ideas which grow up within the imagination,
and appear so lovely to it, and of a value beyond whatever men
call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated bycontact
with the Practical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess
a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its
delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself, while the incredulous
world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up
against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his
genius, and the objects to which it is directed.

For a time, Owen Warland succumbed to this severe, but
inevitable test. He spent a few sluggish weeks, with his head so
continually resting in his hands, that the townspeople had scarcely
an opportunity to see his countenance. When, at last, it was
again uplifted to the light of day, a cold, dull, nameless change
was perceptible upon it. In the opinion of Peter Hovenden,
however, and that order of sagacious understandings who think
that life should be regulated, like clock-work, with leaden weights,
the alteration was entirely for the better. Owen now, indeed,
applied himself to business with dogged industry. It was marvellous
to witness the obtuse gravity with which he would inspect
the wheels of a great, old silver watch; thereby delighting the
owner, in whose fob it had been worn till he deemed it a portion

[figure description] Page 172.[end figure description]

of his own life, and was accordingly jealous of its treatment. In
consequence of the good report thus acquired, Owen Warland
was invited by the proper authorities to regulate the clock in the
church-steeple. He succeeded so admirably in this matter of
public interest, that the merchants gruffly acknowledged his
merits on 'Change; the nurse whispered his praises, as she gave
the potion in the sick-chamber; the lover blessed him at the hour
of appointed interview; and the town in general thanked Owen
for the punctuality of dinner-time. In a word, the heavy weight
upon his spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his
own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of the church-clock
were audible. It was a circumstance, though minute, yet characteristic
of his present state, that, when employed to engrave
names or initials on silver spoons, he now wrote the requisite
letters in the plainest possible style; omitting a variety of fanciful
flourishes, that had heretofore distinguished his work in this kind.

One day, during the era of this happy transformation, old Peter
Hovenden came to visit his former apprentice.

“Well, Owen,” said he, “I am glad to hear such good accounts
of you from all quarters; and especially from the town-clock
yonder, which speaks in your commendation every hour of the
twenty-four. Only get rid altogether of your nonsensical trash
about the Beautiful—which I, nor nobody else, nor yourself to
boot, could ever understand—only free yourself of that, and your
success in life is as sure as daylight. Why, if you go on in this
way, I should even venture to let you doctor this precious old
watch of mine; though, except my daughter Annie, I have
nothing else so valuable in the world.”

“I should hardly dare touch it, sir,” replied Owen in a depressed
tone; for he was weighed down by his old master's
presence.

“In time,” said the latter, “in time, you will be capable of it.”

The old watchmaker, with the freedom naturally consequent on

[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]

his former authority, went on inspecting the work which Owen
had in hand at the moment, together with other matters that were
in progress. The artist, meanwhile, could scarcely lift his head.
There was nothing so antipodal to his nature as this man's cold,
unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which everything was
converted into a dream, except the densest matter of the physical
world. Owen groaned in spirit, and prayed fervently to be delivered
from him.

“But what is this?” cried Peter Hovenden abruptly, taking
up a dusty bell-glass, beneath which appeared a mechanical something,
as delicate and minute as the system of a butterfly's anatomy.
“What have we here! Owen, Owen! there is witchcraft
in these little chains, and wheels, and paddles! See! with
one pinch of my finger and thumb, I am going to deliver you
from all future peril.”

“For Heaven's sake,” screamed Owen Warland, springing up
with wonderful energy, “as you would not drive me mad—do
not touch it! The slightest pressure of your finger would ruin
me for ever.”

“Aha, young man! And is it so?” said the old watchmaker,
looking at him with just enough of penetration to torture Owen's
soul with the bitterness of worldly criticism. “Well; take your
own course. But I warn you again, that in this small piece of
mechanism lives your evil spirit. Shall I exorcise him?”

“You are my Evil Spirit,” answered Owen, much excited—
“you, and the hard, coarse world! The leaden thoughts and
the despondency that you fling upon me are my clogs. Else, I
should long ago have achieved the task that I was created for.”

Peter Hovenden shook his head, with the mixture of contempt
and indignation which mankind, of whom he was partly a representative,
deem themselves entitled to feel towards all simpletons
who seek other prizes than the dusty one along the highway. He
then took his leave with an uplifted finger, and a sneer upon his

[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]

face, that haunted the artist's dreams for many a night afterwards.
At the time of his old master's visit, Owen was probably on the
point of taking up the relinquished task; but, by this sinister
event, he was thrown back into the state whence he had been
slowly emerging.

But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating
fresh vigor, during its apparent sluggishness. As the summer
advanced, he almost totally relinquished his business, and permitted
Father Time, so far as the old gentleman was represented
by the clocks and watches under his control, to stray at random
through human life, making infinite confusion among the train of
bewildered hours. He wasted the sunshine, as people said, in
wandering through the woods and fields, and along the banks of
streams. There, like a child, he found amusement in chasing
butterflies, or watching the motions of water-insects. There was
something truly mysterious in the intentness with which he contemplated
these living playthings, as they sported on the breeze;
or examined the structure of an imperial insect whom he had
imprisoned. The chase of butterflies was an apt emblem of the
ideal pursuit in which he had spent so many golden hours. But,
would the Beautiful Idea ever be yielded to his hand, like the
butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet, doubtless, were these days,
and congenial to the artist's soul. They were full of bright conceptions,
which gleamed through his intellectual world, as the
butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and were
real to him for the instant, without the toil, and perplexity, and
many disappointments, of attempting to make them visible to the
sensual eye. Alas, that the artist, whether in poetry or whatever
other material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment
of the Beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond
the verge of his ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in
seizing it with a material grasp! Owen Warland felt the impulse
to give external reality to his ideas, as irresistibly as any of the

[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]

poets or painters, who have arrayed the world in a dimmer and
fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the richness of their
visions

The night was now his time for the slow progress of recreating
the one Idea, to which all his intellectual activity referred itself.
Always at the approach of dusk, he stole into the town, locked
himself within his shop, and wrought with patient delicacy of touch,
for many hours. Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the
watchman, who, when all the world should be asleep, had caught
the gleam of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland's
shutters. Daylight, to the morbid sensibility of his mind, seemed
to have an intrusiveness that interfered with his pursuits. On
cloudy and inclement days, therefore, he sat with his head upon
his hands, muffling, as it were, his sensitive brain in a mist of
indefinite musings; for it was a relief to escape from the sharp
distinctness with which he was compelled to shape out his thoughts,
during his nightly toil.

From one of these fits of torpor, he was aroused by the entrance
of Annie Hovenden, who came into the shop with the freedom of
a customer, and also with something of the familiarity of a childish
friend. She had worn a hold through her silver thimble, and wanted
Owen to repair it.

“But I don't know whether you will condescend to such a task,”
said she, laughing, “now that you are so taken up with the
notion of putting spirit into machinery.”

“Where did you get that idea, Annie?” said Owen, starting in
surprise.

“Oh, out of my own head,” answered she, “and from something
that I heard you say, long ago, when you were but a boy,
and I a little child. But, come! will you mend this poor thimble
of mine?”

“Anything for your sake, Annie,” said Owen Warland—
“anything; even were it to work at Robert Danforth's forge.”

[figure description] Page 176.[end figure description]

“And that would be a pretty sight!” retorted Annie, glancing
with imperceptible slightness at the artist's small and slender
frame. “Well; here is the thimble.”

“But that is a strange idea of yours,” said Owen, “about the
spiritualization of matter!”

And then the thought stole into his mind, that this young girl
possessed the gift to comprehend him, better than all the world
beside. And what a help and strength would it be to him, in his
lonely toil, if he could gain the sympathy of the only being whom
he loved! To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the
common business of life—who are either in advance of mankind,
or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of moral cold, that
makes the spirit shiver, as if it had reached the frozen solitudes
around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the
criminal, or any other man, with human yearnings, but separated
from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen Warland
felt.

“Annie,” cried he, growing pale as death at the thought,
“how gladly would I tell you the secret of my pursuit! You,
methinks, would estimate it rightly. You, I know, would hear
it with a reverence that I must not expect from the harsh, material
world.”

“Would I not! to be sure I would!” replied Annie Hovenden,
lightly laughing. “Come; explain to me quickly what is the
meaning of this little whirligig, so delicately wrought that it might
be a plaything for Queen Mab. See; I will put it in motion.”

“Hold,” exclaimed Owen, “hold!”

Annie had but given the slightest possible touch, with the point
of a needle, to the same minute portion of complicated machinery
which has been more than once mentioned, when the artist seized
her by the wrist with a force that made her scream aloud. She
was affrighted at the convulsion of intense rage and anguish that

[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]

writhed across his features. The next instant he let his head
sink upon his hands.

“Go, Annie,” murmured he, “I have deceived myself, and
must suffer for it. I yearned for sympathy—and thought—and
fancied—and dreamed—that you might give it me. But you lack
the talisman, Annie, that should admit you into my secrets. That
touch has undone the toil of months, and the thought of a lifetime!
It was not your fault, Annie—but you have ruined me!”

Poor Owen Warland! He had indeed erred, yet pardonably;
for if any human spirit could have sufficiently reverenced the
processes so sacred in his eyes, it must have been a woman's.
Even Annie Hovenden, possibly, might not have disappointed him,
had she been enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.

The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any
persons, who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him, that
he was, in truth, irrevocably doomed to inutility as regarded the
world, and to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a
relative had put him in possession of a small inheritance. Thus
freed from the necessity of toil, and having lost the steadfast influence
of a great purpose—great, at least, to him—he abandoned
himself to habits from which, it might have been supposed, the
mere delicacy of his organization would have availed to secure
him. But when the ethereal portion of a man of genius is obscured,
the earthly part assumes an influence the more uncontrollable,
because the character is now thrown off the balance to
which Providence had so nicely adjusted it, and which, in coarser
natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen Warland made
proof of whatever show of bliss may be found in riot. He looked
at the world through the golden medium of wine, and contemplated
the visions that bubble up so gaily around the brim of the
glass, and that people the air with shapes of pleasant madness,
which so soon grow ghostly and forlorn. Even when this dismal
and inevitable change had taken place, the young man might still

[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]

have continued to quaff the cup of enchantments, though its vapor
did but shroud life in gloom, and fill the gloom with spectres that
mocked at him. There was a certain irksomeness of spirit,
which, being real, and the deepest sensation of which the artist
was now conscious, was more intolerable than any fantastic miseries
and horrors that the abuse of wine could summon up. In
the latter case, he could remember, even out of the midst of his
trouble, that all was but a delusion; in the former, the heavy
anguish was his actual life.

From this perilous state, he was redeemed by an incident
which more than one person witnessed, but of which the shrewdest
could not explain nor conjecture the operation on Owen Warland's
mind. It was very simple. On a warm afternoon of
Spring, as the artist sat among his riotous companions, with a
glass of wine before him, a splendid butterfly flew in at the open
window, and fluttered about his head.

“Ah!” exclaimed Owen, who had drank freely, “Are you
alive again, child of the sun, and playmate of the summer breeze,
after your dismal winter's nap! Then it is time for me to be at
work!”

And leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed,
and was never known to sip another drop of wine.

And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and
fields. It might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had
come so spiritlike into the window, as Owen sat with the rude
revellers, was indeed a spirit, commissioned to recall him to the
pure, ideal life that had so etherealised him among men. It
might be fancied, that he went forth to seek this spirit, in its
sunny haunts; for still, as in the summer-time gone by, he was
seen to steal gently up, wherever a butterfly had alighted, and
lose himself in contemplation of it. When it took flight, his
eyes followed the winged vision, as if its airy track would show
the path to heaven. But what could be the purpose of the

[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]

unseasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watchman knew
by the lines of lamp-light through the crevices of Owen Warland's
shutters? The townspeople had one comprehensive explanation
of all these singularities. Owen Warland had gone
mad! How universally efficacious—how satisfactory, too, and
soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and dullness—is
this easy method of accounting for whatever lies beyond the
world's most ordinary scope! From Saint Paul's days, down to
our poor little Artist of the Beautiful, the same talisman had been
applied to the elucidation of all mysteries in the words or deeds
of men, who spoke or acted too wisely or too well. In Owen
Warland's case, the judgment of his townspeople may have been
correct. Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy—that
contrast between himself and his neighbors, which took away the
restraint of example—was enough to make him so. Or, possibly,
he had caught just so much ethereal radiance as served to
bewilder him, in an earthly sense, by its intermixture with the
common daylight.

One evening, when the artist had returned from a customary
ramble, and had just thrown the lustre of his lamp on the delicate
piece of work, so often interrupted, but still taken up again, as if
his fate were embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the
entrance of old Peter Hovenden. Owen never met this man
without a shrinking of the heart. Of all the world, he was most
terrible, by reason of a keen understanding, which saw so distinctly
what it did see, and disbelieved so uncompromisingly in
what it could not see. On this occasion, the old watchmaker
had merely a gracious word or two to say.

“Owen, my lad,” said he, “we must see you at my house
tomorrow night.”

The artist began to mutter some excuse.

“Oh, but it must be so,” quoth Peter Hovendon, “for the
sake of the days when you were one of the household. What,

[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]

my boy, don't you know that my daughter Annie is engaged to
Robert Danforth? We are making an entertainment, in our
humble way, to celebrate the event.”

“Ah!” said Owen.

That little monosyllable was all he uttered; its tone seemed
cold and unconcerned, to an ear like Peter Hovenden's; and yet
there was in it the stifled outcry of the poor artist's heart, which
he compressed within him like a man holding down an evil spirit.
One slight outbreak, however, imperceptible to the old watch-maker,
he allowed himself. Raising the instrument with which
he was about to begin his work, he let it fall upon the little system
of machinery that had, anew, cost him months of thought
and toil. It was shattered by the stroke!

Owen Warland's story would have been no tolerable representation
of the troubled life of those who strive to create the
Beautiful, if, amid all other thwarting influences, love had not
interposed to steal the cunning from his hand. Outwardly he had
been no ardent or enterprising lover; the career of his passion
had confined its tumults and vicissitudes so entirely within the
artist's imagination, that Annie herself had scarcely more than a
woman's intuitive perception of it. But, in Owen's view, it
covered the whole field of his life. Forgetful of the time when
she had shown herself incapable of any deep response, he had
persisted in connecting all his dreams of artistical success with
Annie's image; she was the visible shape in which the spiritual
power that he worshipped, and on whose altar he hoped to lay a
not unworthy offering, was made manifest to him. Of course he
had deceived himself; there were no such attributes in Annie
Hovenden as his imagination had endowed her with. She, in the
aspect which she wore to his inward vision, was as much a creation
of his own, as the mysterious piece of mechanism would be
were it ever realized. Had he become convinced of his mistake
through the medium of successful love; had he won Annie to

[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]

his bosom, and there beheld her fade from angel into ordinary
woman, the disappointment might have driven him back, with
concentrated energy, upon his sole remaining object. On the
other hand, had he found Annie what he fancied, his lot would
have been so rich in beauty, that out of its mere redundancy he
might have wrought the Beautiful into many a worthier type than
he had toiled for. But the guise in which his sorrow came to
him, the sense that the angel ofhis life had been snatched away
and given to a rude man of earth and iron, who could neither need
nor appreciate her ministrations; this was the very perversity of
fate, that makes human existence appear too absurd and contradictory
to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear. There
was nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a man
that had been stunned.

He went through a fit of illness. After his recovery, his small
and slender frame assumed an obtuser garniture of flesh than it
had ever before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his
delicate little hand, so spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy taskwork,
grew plumper than the hand of a thriving infant. His
aspect had a childishness, such as might have induced a stranger
to pat him on the head—pausing, however, in the act, to wonder
what manner of child was here. It was as if the spirit had gone
out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a sort of vegetable existence.
Not that Owen Warland was idiotic. He could talk,
and not irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people
begin to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome
length, of marvels of mechanism that he had read about in books,
but which he had learned to consider as absolutely fabulous.
Among them he enumerated the Man of Brass, constructed by
Albert Magnus, and the Brazen Head of Friar Bacon; and,
coming down to later times, the automata of a little coach and
horses, which, it was pretended, had been manufactured for the
Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about

[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]

the ear like a living fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute
steel springs. There was a story, too, of a duck that waddled,
and quacked, and ate; though, had any honest citizen purchased
it for dinner, he would have found himself cheated with the mere
mechanical apparition of a duck.

“But all these accounts,” said Owen Warland, “I am now
satisfied, are mere impositions.”

Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he once
thought differently. In his idle and dreamy days he had considered
it possible, in a certain sense, to spiritualize machinery;
and to combine with the new species of life and motion, thus
produced, a beauty that should attain to the ideal, which Nature
has proposed to herself, in all her creatures, but has never taken
pains to realize. He seemed, however, to retain no very distinct
perception either of the process of achieving this object, or of the
design itself.

“I have thrown it all aside now,” he would say. “It was a
dream, such as young men are always mystifying themselves
with. Now that I have acquired a little common sense, it makes
me laugh to think of it.”

Poor, poor, and fallen Owen Warland! These were the symptoms
that he had ceased to be an inhabitant of the better sphere
that lies unseen around us. He had lost his faith in the invisible,
and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in
the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and
trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch.
This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them,
and leaves the grosser understanding to assimilate them more and
more to the things of which alone it can take cognizance. But,
in Owen Warland, the spirit was not dead, nor past away; it
only slept.

How it awoke again, is not recorded. Perhaps, the torpid
slumber was broken by a convulsive pain. Perhaps, as in a

[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]

former instance, the butterfly came and hovered about his head, and
reinspired him—as, indeed, this creature of the sunshine had
always a mysterious mission for the artist—reinspired him with
the former purpose of his life. Whether it were pain or happiness
that thrilled through his veins, his first impulse was to thank
Heaven for rendering him again the being of thought, imagina
tion, and keenest sensibility, that he had long ceased to be.

“Now for my task,” said he. “Never did I feel such strength
for it as now.”

Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil the more
diligently, by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the
midst of his labors. This anxiety, perhaps, is common to all men
who set their hearts upon anything so high, in their own view of
it, that life becomes of importance only as conditional to its
accomplishment. So long as we love life for itself, we seldom
dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of
an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture. But, side by
side with this sense of insecurity, there is a vital faith in our invulnerability
to the shaft of death, while engaged in any task that
seems assigned by Providence as our proper thing to do, and
which the world would have cause to mourn for, should we leave
it unaccomplished. Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration
of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be
beckoned from this sensible existence, at the very instant when
he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should
he perish so, the weary ages may pass away—the world's whole
life-sand may fall, drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared
to develope the truth that might have been uttered then.
But history affords many an example, where the most precious
spirit, at any particular epoch manifested in human shape, has
gone hence untimely, without space allowed him, so far as mortal
judgment could discern, to perform his mission on the earth.
The prophet dies; and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain

[figure description] Page 184.[end figure description]

lives on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond
the scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The painter—
as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas, to
sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the
whole, if it be no irreverence to say so, in the hues of Heaven.
But, rather, such incomplete designs of this life will be perfected
nowhere. This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects
must be taken as a proof, that the deeds of earth, however etherealized
by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises
and manifestations of the spirit. In Heaven, all ordinary
thought is higher and more melodious than Milton's song. Then,
would he add another verse to any strain that he had left
unfinished here?

But to return to Owen Warland. It was his fortune, good or
ill, to achieve the purpose of his life. Pass we over a long space
of intense thought, yearning effort, minute toil, and wasting
anxiety, succeeded by an instant of solitary triumph; let all this
be imagined; and then behold the artist, on a winter evening,
seeking admittance to Robert Danforth's fireside circle. There
he found the Man of Iron, with his massive substance, thoroughly
warmed and attempered by domestic influences. And there was
Annie, too, now transformed into a matron, with much of her husband's
plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen Warland
still believed, with a finer grace, that might enable her to be the
interpreter between Strength and Beauty. It happened, likewise,
that old Peter Hovenden was a guest, this evening, at his daughter's
fireside; and it was his well-remembered expression of keen,
cold criticism, that first encountered the artist's glance.

“My old friend Owen!” cried Robert Danforth, starting up,
and compressing the artist's delicate fingers within a hand that
was accustomed to gripe bars of iron. “This is kind and neighborly,
to come to us at last! I was afraid your Perpetual Motion
had bewitched you out of the remembrance of old times.”

[figure description] Page 185.[end figure description]

“We are glad to see you!” said Annie, while a blush reddened
her matronly cheek. “It was not like a friend to stay from us
so long.”

“Well, Owen,” inquired the old watchmaker, as his first
greeting, “how comes on the Beautiful? Have you created it
at last?”

The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the
apparition of a young child of strength, that was tumbling about
on the carpet; a little personage who had come mysteriously out
of the infinite, but with something so sturdy and real in his composition
that he seemed moulded out of the densest substance which
earth could supply. This hopeful infant crawled towards the new
comer, and setting himself on end—as Robert Danforth expressed
the posture—stared at Owen with a look of such sagacious observation,
that the mother could not help exchanging a proud glance
with her husband. But the artist was disturbed by the child's
look, as imagining a resemblance between it and Peter Hovenden's
habitual expression. He could have fancied that the old
watchmaker was compressed into this baby-shape, and looking
out of those baby-eyes, and repeating—as he now did—the malicious
question:

“The Beautiful, Owen! How comes on the Beautiful? Have
you succeeded in creating the Beautiful?”

“I have succeeded,” replied the artist, with a momentary light
of triumph in his eyes, and a smile of sunshine, yet steeped in
such depth of thought, that it was almost sadness. “Yes, my
friends, it is the truth. I have succeeded!”

“Indeed!” cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping
out of her face again. “And is it lawful, now, to inquire what
the secret is?”

“Surely; it is to disclose it, that I have come,” answered
Owen Warland. “You shall know, and see, and touch, and
possess the secret! For, Annie—if by that name I may still

[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]

address the friend of my boyish years—Annie, it is for your bridal
gift that I have wrought this spiritualized mechanism, this harmony
of motion, this Mystery of Beauty! It comes late, indeed;
but it is as we go onward in life, when objects begin to lose their
freshness of hue, and our souls their delicacy of perception, that
the spirit of Beauty is most needed. If—forgive me, Annie—if
you know how to value this gift, it can never come too late!”

He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel-box. It was
carved richly out of ebony by his own hand, and inlaid with a
fanciful tracery of pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly,
which, elsewhere, had become a winged spirit, and was flying
heavenward; while the boy, or youth, had found such efficacy
in his strong desire, that he ascended from earth to cloud, and
from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the Beautiful. This
case of ebony the artist opened, and bade Annie place her finger
on its edge. She did so, but almost screamed, as a butterfly
fluttered forth, and, alighting on her finger's tip, sat waving the
ample magnificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if
in prelude to a flight. It is impossible to express by words the
glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness, which were softened
into the beauty of this object. Nature's ideal butterfly was
here realized in all its perfection; not in the pattern of such
faded insects as flit among earthly flowers, but of those which
hover across the meads of Paradise, for child-angels and the spirits
of departed infants to disport themselves with. The rich down
was visible upon its wings; the lustre of its eyes seemed instinct
with spirit. The firelight glimmered around this wonder—the
candles gleamed upon it—but it glistened apparently by its own
radiance, and illuminated the finger and outstretched hand on
which it rested, with a white gleam like that of precious stones.
In its perfect beauty, the consideration of size was entirely lost.
Had its wings overreached the firmament, the mind could not have
been more filled or satisfied.

[figure description] Page 187.[end figure description]

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” exclaimed Annie. “Is it alive? Is
it alive?”

“Alive? To be sure it is,” answered her husband. “Do you
suppose any mortal has skill enough to make a butterfly,—or
would put himself to the trouble of making one, when any child
may catch a score of them in a summer's afternoon? Alive?
certainly! But this pretty box is undoubtedly of our friend
Owen's manufacture; and really it does him credit.”

At this moment, the butterfly waved its wings anew, with a motion
so absolutely lifelike that Annie was startled, and even awe-stricken;
for, in spite of her husband's opinion, she could not
satisfy herself whether it was indeed a living creature, or a piece
of wondrous mechanism.

“Is it alive?” she repeated, more earnestly than before.

“Judge for yourself,” said Owen Warland, who stood gazing
in her face with fixed attention.

The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round
Annie's head, and soared into a distant region of the parlor, still
making itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which
the motion of its wings enveloped it. The infant, on the floor,
followed its course with his sagacious little eyes. After flying
about the room, it returned, in a spiral curve, and settled again on
Annie's finger.

“But is it alive?” exclaimed she again; and the finger, on
which the gorgeous mystery had alighted, was so tremulous that
the butterfly was forced to balance himself with his wings. “Tell
me if it be alive, or whether you created it?”

“Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?” replied
Owen Warland. “Alive? Yes, Annie; it may well be said
to possess life, for it has absorbed my own being into itself; and
in the secret of that butterfly, and in its beauty—which is not
merely outward, but deep as its whole system—is represented the
intellect, the imagination, the sensibility, the soul, of an Artist of

[figure description] Page 188.[end figure description]

the Beautiful! Yes, I created it. But”—and here his countenance
somewhat changed—“this butterfly is not now to me what
it was when I beheld it afar off, in the day-dreams of my
youth.”

“Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything,” said the blacksmith,
grinning with childlike delight. “I wonder whether it
would condescend to alight on such a great clumsy finger as mine?
Hold it hither, Annie!”

By the artist's direction, Annie touched her finger's tip to that of
her husband; and, after a momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered
from one to the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar,
yet not precisely the same waving of wings, as in the first experiment.
Then ascending from the blacksmith's stalwart finger, it
rose in a gradually enlarging curve to the ceiling, made one wide
sweep around the room, and returned with an undulating movement
to the point whence it had started.

“Well, that does beat all nature!” cried Robert Danforth, bestowing
the heartiest praise that he could find expression for;
and, indeed, had he paused there, a man of finer words and nicer
perception could not easily have said more. “That goes beyond
me, I confess! But what then? There is more real use in one
downright blow of my sledge-hammer, than in the whole five
years' labor that our friend Owen has wasted on this butterfly!”

Here the child clapped his hands, and made a great babble of
indistinct utterance, apparently demanding that the butterfly
should be given him for a plaything.

Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at Annie, to discover
whether she sympathized in her husband's estimate of the
comparative value of the Beautiful and the Practical. There
was, amid all her kindness towards himself, amid all the wonder
and admiration with which she contemplated the marvellous work
of his hands, and incarnation of his idea, a secret scorn; too
secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness, and perceptible only

[figure description] Page 189.[end figure description]

to such intuitive discernment as that of the artist. But Owen, in
the latter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of the region in
which such a discovery might have been torture. He knew that
the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, whatever
praise might be bestowed, could never say the fitting word,
nor feel the fitting sentiment which should be the perfect recompense
of an artist who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material
trifle—converting what was earthly to spiritual gold—had won
the Beautiful into his handiwork. Not at this latest moment was
he to learn that the reward of all high performance must be
sought within itself, or sought in vain. There was, however, a
view of the matter, which Annie, and her husband, and even
Peter Hovenden, might fully have understood, and which would
have satisfied them that the toil of years had here been worthily
bestowed. Owen Warland might have told them, that this butterfly,
this plaything, this bridal-gift of a poor watchmaker to a
blacksmith's wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch
would have purchased with honors and abundant wealth, and have
treasured it among the jewels of his kingdom, as the most unique
and wondrous of them all! But the artist smiled and kept the
secret to himself.

“Father,” said Annie, thinking that a word of praise from the
old watchmaker might gratify his former apprentice, “do come
and admire this pretty butterfly!”

“Let us see,” said Peter Hovenden, rising from his chair, with
a sneer upon his face that always made people doubt, as he himself
did, in everything but a material existence. “Here is my
finger for it to alight upon. I shall understand it better when
once I have touched it.”

But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when the tip of
her father's finger was pressed against that of her husband, on
which the butterfly still rested, the insect drooped its wings, and
seemed on the point of falling to the floor. Even the bright spots

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of gold upon its wings and body, unless her eyes deceived her,
grew dim, and the glowing purple took a dusky hue, and the
starry lustre that gleamed around the blacksmith's hand became
faint, and vanished.

“It is dying! it is dying!” cried Annie, in alarm.

“It has been delicately wrought,” said the artist, calmly. “As
I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence—call it magnetism,
or what you will. In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery, its
exquisite susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him
who instilled his own life into it. It has already lost its beauty;
in a few moments more, its mechanism would be irreparably
injured.”

“Take away your hand, father!” entreated Annie, turning pale.
“Here is my child; let it rest on his innocent hand. There, perhaps,
its life will revive, and its colors grow brighter than ever.”

Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his finger. The
butterfly then appeared to recover the power of voluntary motion;
while its hues assumed much of their original lustre, and the
gleam of starlight, which was its most ethereal attribute, again
formed a halo round about it. At first, when transferred from
Robert Danforth's hand to the small finger of the child, this radiance
grew so powerful that it positively threw the little fellow's
shadow back against the wall. He, meanwhile, extended his
plump hand as he had seen his father and mother do, and watched
the waving of the insect's wings with infantine delight. Nevertheless,
there was a certain odd expression of sagacity, that made
Owen Warland feel as if here were old Peter Hovenden, partially,
and but partially, redeemed from his hard scepticism into childish
faith.

“How wise the little monkey looks!” whispered Robert Danforth
to his wife.

“I never saw such a look on a child's face,” answered Annie,
admiring her own infant, and with good reason, far more than the

[figure description] Page 191.[end figure description]

artistic butterfly. “The darling knows more of the mystery than
we do.”

As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something
not entirely congenial in the child's nature, it alternately sparkled
and grew dim. At length, it arose from the small hand of the
infant with an airy motion, that seemed to bear it upward without
an effort; as if the ethereal instincts, with which its master's
spirit had endowed it, impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a
higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have
soared into the sky, and grown immortal. But its lustre gleamed
upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture of its wings brushed
against that earthly medium; and a sparkle or two, as if stardust,
floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet. Then
the butterfly came fluttering down, and, instead of returning to
the infant, was apparently attracted towards the artist's hand.

“Not so, not so!” murmured Owen Warland, as if his handiwork
could have understood him. “Thou hast gone forth out of
thy master's heart. There is no return for thee!”

With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremulous radiance,
the butterfly struggled, as it were, towards the infant, and
was about to alight upon his finger. But, while it still hovered in
the air, the little Child of Strength, with his grandsire's sharp and
shrewd expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvellous
insect, and compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed! Old
Peter Hovenden burst into a cold and scornful laugh. The blacksmith,
by main force, unclosed the infant's hand, and found within
the palm a small heap of glittering fragments, whence the Mystery
of Beauty had fled for ever. And as for Owen Warland, he
looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and
which yet was no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than
this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the Beautiful,
the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became
of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself
in the enjoyment of the reality.

p134-415 A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION.

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The other day, having a leisure hour at my disposal, I stept into
a new museum, to which my notice was casually drawn by a
small and unobtrusive sign: “To be seen here, a Virtuoso's
Collection.” Such was the simple, yet not altogether unpromising
announcement, that turned my steps aside, for a little while,
from the sunny sidewalk of our principal thoroughfare. Mounting
a sombre stair-case, I pushed open a door at its summit, and
found myself in the presence of a person, who mentioned the
moderate sum that would entitle me to admittance:

“Three shillings, Massachusetts tenor,” said he; “no, I mean
half a dollar, as you reckon in these days.”

While searching my pocket for the coin, I glanced at the door-keeper,
the marked character and individuality of whose aspect
encouraged me to expect something not quite in the ordinary way.
He wore an old-fashioned great coat, much faded, within which
his meagre person was so completely enveloped that the rest of
his attire was undistinguishable. But his visage was remarkably
wind-flushed, sun-burnt, and weather-worn, and had a most unquiet,
nervous, and apprehensive expression. It seemed as if
this man had some all-important object in view, some point of
deepest interest to be decided, some momentous question to ask,
might he but hope for a reply. As it was evident, however, that
I could have nothing to do with his private affairs, I passed
through an open doorway, which admitted me into the extensive
hall of the Museum.

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