MISCELLANIES.
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Gentlemen, brethren of the Alumni:—
The occasion which has called us together
to-day constitutes a fortunate pause in our career.
Near enough to the period when we left
these halls, to mingle in the cares and conflicts
of the world, and far enough onward in the active
march of life, it justifies us in looking back
thoughtfully to the past and in considering what
the great future may have in store for us.
Youth, at least, the first freshness and glory
of youth, are gone from us for ever. The gate
of that happy paradise, whose clouds were but
the ornaments of its morning heaven, and whose
sorrow only deepened joy, is closed to our steps.
Threatening and inexorable aspects warn us
from it, and we must henceforth seek, in a
wide and troubled world, such substitutes of
happiness as it may furnish. But the mind—
the unconquerable and adventurous memory—
breaks every fetter, and, hurrying back, leaps
that old garden wall, and introduces us for
a little hour to scenes, hopes, and pleasures,
that we thought were gone never more to return.
Who would not give all that he is and
all that he has to recover his youth, with its
buoyant heart, its cheerful dreams, its sense
of wonder, its full-bosomed and innocent delights?
But the future brightens in the distance, and
toward it we are impelled by the progressive
spirit that belongs to our race. What we have
been is chronicled in the great calendar of God.
What we are yet to be lies, in a considerable
measure, in the palms of our own hands, and
will be moulded to honor or to dishonor, as truth
and wisdom, or madness and error, teach us by
the way. What, then, are the true aims of
life? Many so far misapprehend the objects
of existence, as to suppose they are fulfilling all
the duty of life if they pursue some particular
and chosen career with honest and honorable
success. It is a low and cheap estimate of our
nature that regards men as mere merchants,
soldiers, and artisans. These are the accidents
and contingencies of our common life. No man
acquires dignity, in the eye of a sagacious and
comprehensive philosophy, by filling any or all
of these stations with the utmost worldly success.
It is not as the followers of business,
war, and commerce, that men are venerable
and noble beings. It is the condition of his
destiny that he should labor; but it is to improve
and exalt his intelligence, to broaden the
foundations of his intellectual and spiritual nature,
that he lives. It is the motion and impulses
of a soul that compasses earth and time
and transcends physical limits, that make him
the image of the great Mover of the heavens.
These considerations should teach him to reverence
his nature; to bow down to his higher
and better qualities with respect; and to cultivate
his mind and affections because their development
and cultivation is the noblest task
in which he can be engaged. By too many the
intellect is regarded as a means, a mere auxiliary
and mercenary, enlisted in the achievement
of secondary and common objects.
Instead of regarding and reverencing the
mind as essentially constituting the man, as
something in itself and by itself, without reference
to its available uses in life, it is held by
many as a lesser servant or menial, in the
large household of human nature, and ranked
only with the hand that hews, and the shoulder
that bears base burdens and drudges for the
abject and physical wants of man. The mind,
this human mind of ours, if rightly understood,
is a nobler subject of contemplation than temples
and pyramids—has in itself more durable
greatness and beauty than mountains and the
most glorious carved monuments fashioned by
the cunning of human skill.
Objects and pursuits which we regard in
themselves as final aims, intrinsically full of
worth and moment, are furnished merely as incitements
and means toward the development
of our higher nature. Many results which we
gaze on as prodigies of human ingenuity, are
the mere outbreak and transitory expression of
this divine fire smouldering within.
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To accomplish the true aims of life we must
first know what our nature is and what it requires.
Our nature, then, is not a simple element,
like the air, the ocean, or the wind, having a single
agency to perform, performing it always in
one way and through an established round or
channel of action. It is a compound and composite
condition—a rude, misshapen, unformed
chaos of moral, intellectual, and physical ingredients,
placed in our keeping to be wrought, by
a steady will and enlightened industry, into
symmetry and beauty. To show the vast reach,
the towering strength and altitude of our nature,
and its capacity of extension, we know
that it has been the laborious duty of a long life
in some men, to single out some separate quality
and devote night and day to its mature and
perfect development. Constantly heaping together
material from every corner of the visible
universe, and piling thought on thought, until
the broad earth seemed to be its base and the
heavens were pierced by its rising summit, we
have seen the majestic fabric of some great genius
ascend, and just as the structure was assuming
breadth and proportion, the earth has
opened and swallowed the mighty architect
with all his plans. Think you that sublime
labor was lost? No. He who here toiled at
the foundations in our midst will there be engaged
in completing the glorious structure of
his nature, and will work cheerfully at its architrave
and crowning capital in the eye of his
great Taskmaster.
In the whole range of animated beings there
is, I imagine, no creature in all respects like
man; none in the wide circuit of planets and
universes, possessing the same powers, placed
amid the same circumstances, and accomplishing
the parposes of his being through the same
hopes, fears, trials, joys; under a similar sky,
and impelled by spiritual and physical influences
of like potency and character.
It is our duty to unfold this vast, complex,
and peculiar nature, by availing ourselves of
every aid within our reach; and aids are not
wanting. Not a star, a stream, a shadow—
that does not co-operate with us in this great
ministry. Every mute thing in nature has a
voice to summon forth some faculty of ours and
to cherish it in its growth. The grandeur of
the heavens kindles our imagination, the stubborn
mountain-ascent evokes the resolute will,
the ocean-flood challenges our daring, and the
decaying blossoms of earth persuade us to weep.
I do not deny that many objects are of temporary
use and pass utterly away without any deep
and durable impressions on our character; but
I do believe, that in his infinite wisdom and
skill the great Builder has created this world
of ours and all that is in it, for this high purpose;
has devised it as the best school for human
nature, and in his mature and eternal
counsels has chosen it out of innumerable plans,
as the best suited for the composite and wonderful
being whose inheritance it is.
It is not in the material creation alone that
our nature finds aliment for its highest qualities.
The human world, the wide and restless
generation of our own kind, furnishes ample
means and inducements. We are so constituted
as to have our best faculties, our broadest enterprises,
our noblest emotions, elicited by the
quick sympathies of our common race. We
are generous, heroic, fearless in trial, and with
countenances glowing from within as well as
from without, amid the fires of martyrdom, that
we may acquire the affections and praises of
mankind. We build our loftiest and most eurable
monuments that we may live in the memory
of man. We give up household quiet, domestic
joy, serene contemplation, life itself, and
wrestle in the stormy conflict for a sudden and
glorious grave, to which men may come and
give their tears. We should therefore preserve
a pure and comprehensive sympathy for our
race, as one of the most precious and persuasive
instruments in accomplishing the true ends
of our existence. Let man, the living, actual
man, as he moves before us and around us, be
our perpetual study and one of the constant
and worthy objects of our regard. Let us also
bring ourselves in daily communion with the
generations that are past and distant. And
how can this be attained?
Fortunately we are not bound, like lower
natures, to that only which is present and
immediate. Our lives are not hedged in by
a little round of visible and present objects;
we can grasp the remote, the future, the past—
that which is above and beneath us, and
far off beyond the range of sense. It is by
literature that we thus enlarge and elevate
our vision; and in no wise plan of life will literature
be forgotten. The recorded thoughts
of men of genius will teach us to what sublime
heights the human soul may be borne in moments
of rapture and inspiration; how cheerful
our human nature may show itself in its
hour of genial and jovial enjoyment, and what
a divinity of sorrow it may express in its noblest
periods of pure and gentle emotion. Here
we may see great souls wrung and touched and
wrapt away in the glorious agony of deep feeling
and mighty thought, snatched from our common
life and hurried from our mortal view, but
casting back a prophet's mantle of many deathless
hues upon the earth. From these precious
legacies, left to our race by its richest benefactors,
we may learn what human nature has
been, what it is, and what it should be. In
them we shall discover pictures to startle, to
bless, to cheer, and kindle our nature. From
them, as from a great fountain, every faculty
may draw that which it thirsts for, and may
there be purified and strengthened.
In all moods of the soul, in every access of
sorrow, depression, and pain; in the tumult of
ambition and in the silent nook of contemplative
life, some voice, measured to the purpose,
will speak to us from some good and precious
page. A liberal devotion to literature is,
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perhaps, of all human means, best calculated to
expand and exalt our character, and to preserve
its great primary elements from being
undermined and swept away in the treacherous
and noisy currents of the world.
One important lesson to be derived from books
I should not omit. They teach us by their
general temper and spirit to regard every object
with interest, and to feel that nothing about us
is beneath our attention or can not contribute to
rational enjoyment. By that magic which belongs
to genius alone, a charm has been imparted
to a thousand objects which in themselves
are barren, trivial, and unprofitable; so
that what in nature has been left unfinished or
unfurnished by the Creator himself, has been
supplied by the creative and liberal hand of
gifted men. Literature has thus lent a glory to
nature herself, and has peopled her void and
desert places with her own cheerful and happy
progeny. Could we keep our souls open to the
pure impulses awakened by genius and nature
how happy would be this brief life of ours!
Could we retain the childish wonder and sensibility
of youth, and acquire the maturity of
manhood together, how smoothly and wisely
would our days go by! This can not be. The
boy is alive to every impulse from within and
from without; no cloud passes through the sky
without its influence on his susceptible temper;
no spectacle of nature or art that does not
awaken a certain magic sense of wonder and
delight. The man hardens; his mind becomes
rigid, like his body, and all these influences fall
upon him unheeded or with faint effect. It is
only men born with a peculiar tenderness and
beauty of character, who continue through
manhood and age plastic to the various agencies
under which they pass. To preserve something
of the boy, or at least the boy's feelings
in our haughty and proud manhood, and in our
calculating and selfish age, is given to but few
of us. This is one of the noblest arts of life;
to keep the soul open to the power of what is
great in nature, sublime in humanity, lovely in
beauty, or gentle in feeling.
To most of us this happy susceptibility of
nature soon passes away for ever, but, praised
be Heaven, there is a race of men whose duty
and privilege it is to bear on high the sacred
torch, and lend a new light to mankind by
which everything shall gain back a portion of
the freshness and lustre it possessed in our
youth.
“Blessings be with them and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares,
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.”
It is the prerogative of inspired natures to
present old objects to our minds as if they were
new; to make us see more in stars, streams,
mountains, than mere material objects, and to
link one majestic or lovely thing with another
bringing together the remotest and placing them
side by side to illustrate each other and thus
multiply nature itself. Thus, by a high effort
of intellect are the colors, bestowed on nature,
by youth, restored; and thus as we advance in
life, does the creation in the midst of which we
dwell, unfold new elements of happiness and
new materials on which our larger faculties
may labor.
As far as it lies within us, and within the
reach of our endeavor, we should strive to
make this fortunate temper—the most fortunate
that can belong to man—our own. Let us
shut out petty cares, low passions, and unworthy
desires, and in the silence of a pure breast,
this kindly visiter may, perhaps, enter in and
bless us, and ere it depart, it may, like the
magician of the eastern story, anoint our eyes
so that we shall thenceforth behold nothing but
splendor and beauty through the earth. To
live is nothing; but to possess a great soul, an
exalted spirit of duty and affection, a noble,
cultivated, and susceptible nature, is an honor
and distinction in any man.
No system of philosophy or morals, it seems
to me, is sound and genuine which conflicts
with this liberal cultivation of the powers;
which depresses some and allows others to start
into bold and prominent relief. The general
harmony of character must be preserved or the
great commonwealth of human faculties falls
into terrible and disastrous confusion; those
which have been degraded and disfranchised
finding cruel avengers in such as have acquired
a fearful and irregular ascendency.
Many, if not all, of the gloomy troubles on
which history feeds, have had their source in
this dictatorship of single and unchecked passions
or propensities.
Sometimes, imagination obtaining the entire
mastery, the steadfast world has, as it were
been swept from its moorings and rolled about
on a wide sea of speculation, vainly searching
for some unattainable shore of adventure, now
pressing for the holy sepulchre in the east, and
now drifting madly toward the western El
Dorado.
Again, where the strict judgment, the purely
moral powers of man have held the supremacy,
unmated with the gentler sentiments and unrestrained
by the enlightened intellect, we have
had persecution, martyrdom, baleful fires, and
bloodshed. And when, on the other hand, the
intellectual nature has attempted this solitary
authority, disdaining counsel from the heart and
silencing the great voice of duty, mankind have
lost themselves in the frivolous discussion of
schoolmen and the pigmy literature of Della
Cruscan authors.
In connexion with this broad and ample development
of our powers, another important
duty resting upon us all, is to select, as far as
in us lies, our own position in life; nay, I would
almost say, the very place and climate where
we shall live. Possessing a nature so complicated
and so finely sensitive to all influences,
whether from within or from without, man
should render the same justice and grant the
same privileges to his own nature as he
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bestows on other objects of his care. For his
garden he chooses an upland, of a healthy soil,
a pleasant exposure to the sun, and a spot
where the gentle showers of summer may fall
not unblessed. His watch-towers and observatories
he plants upon an eminence, looking
forth on a wide region of hill and valley, and
summoning by their majestic altitude, all earth
and heaven into the range of their vision.
Shall he deal less wisely and justly by his own
nature than by these? Shall he not choose for
himself a station in life, a condition of circumstances,
a range of outward objects which
shall exercise the happiest authority over the
nice organs of sense, and the delicate elements
of character? A man may be said to be the
result of all that be has known, seen, heard,
and felt. It is of high importance, then, that
he should see, know, feel, and hear, that which
will exert the most refined and exalted influence
over his mind, passions, and affections. We
are bound by our nature to no one condition of
action; there is not one business, one pursuit,
and one happiness provided for all men. Humanity
is given to each of us to make of it
what we can! Lofty natures require lofty incitements
to action. The ear that is deaf to
the soothing music of the dulcimer may be
stirred by the roll of the drum, or the clangor
of the trumpet. The sky may be the holiest
spectacle to one, and the fair earth awaken the
dearest solicitude of the other. To every man
there is a class of objects, associations, sights
and sounds, that speak to him with peculiar
force and agency.
Hard and stern realities are the best nurse
of some natures, while others grow and expand
in an atmosphere filled with the soft radiance
of poetic light, and peopled by fancy with innumerable
images of splendor and renown.
One pursues fame, and in fame finds his best
reward and true felicity—all his powers brought
into action, his whole being aroused—the audience
and occasion such as suit the temper of
the man. Another in some secluded nook passes
his days happy in peaceful labors and slumbers
unbroken by dream, vision, or hope. One
character shows to best advantage in the
broad blaze of noon; another, in the milder
splendor of morning; and a third, in a glimmering
twilight, half way between fame and
obscurity.
There are great influences, too, of city and
of country which sweep over large masses of
men. In a mighty metropolis a man's nature
is fed and excited from a thousand sources. It
is stimulated to action by the loud roar of the
multitude; it is kindled into enthusiasm by the
daily sight of a thousand faces; an inquisition
is fixed upon it from a thousand eyes. Bad
passions can not go long here without a prompter;
nor benevolent purposes long without an
object. He stands amid the clash of a Babel,
and a perpetual tumult is stirred within his
breast in which new and newly compounded
motives of action are daily springing up. Noth
ing is done simply as if he stood alone in the
view of Heaven. Then, with an observant
eye, what crowds of strange and curious images
are engendered in the brain by this swift and
varied phantasmagoria of life! Transitions
from fortune to famine; great men toppled
down from their elevation, and little men raised
on a pedestal as if they were gods. Here he
can laugh at one moment and weep at the
next. In the train of sunbright fashion and
beauty, dark sorrow walks as a mourner, and
every man's shadow is but a gloomy monitor of
distress. The picture of life is made up of
startling contrasts; gloom of more than midnight
darkness—joy of more than meridian
splendor. Here ambition stalks forth and assumes
a kingly post, and the next moment occupies
a coffin. This is a wonderful school of
human nature, but is it alone the wisest and
best? I think not; but if it be, and our duty
assign us a station here, let us not forget the
cheerful regions that lie beyond. From the
noise and madness, let the wise man steal forth
at times to other scenes where nature sits alone,
and where he may learn some lessons from her
unpurchased and incorruptible voice.
Among the healthiest influences that can be
brought to bear upon his nature, let him visit
the green fields often! No unwise thought—no
dark passion rises from the pure bosom of the
earth. There he will have happy meditations,
prosperous periods of thought, and, if his
childhood have been familiar with the scene,
thronging recollections that will swell his heart
and overflow at his eyes in tears of passionate
delight. Let him see the green fields often!
for there he will walk with angelic quiet, serene
contemplation, and when he returns, if return
he must, to the crowded and raging city,
these sweet companions will champion him
back, and crossing, perchance, the noisy bounds
will be content to dwell with him awhile and
cheer his heart in the intervals and calm hours
of strife and gain. Let him visit the green
fields often! there he will renew his youth and
acquire a fresh and cheerful spirit that shall be
better to him in his old age than rank, wealth,
or worldly honor.
Let other influences be sought and cherished
as they adapt themselves to the requirements
of each man's nature. If the ocean move him
with a special power, let him visit the ocean
and feel its greatness. Let his mind heave and
expand with the heaving mountain wave,
stretching far onward into the dark distance
and the darker future. If the thunder of the
cataract utter a more audible voice to him, let
him stand by its side while his nature wrestles
and grows strong in the embrace of the great
God of waters. Or if, on the other hand, in
the thronged assemblies of men his soul is
more deeply moved, and the inspiration of high
purposes breathed more fully upon him, let
him seek their companionship and school himself
amid the multitudinous tumult. These are
higher and worthier objects than fortune,
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conquest, victory in great battles, or triumph in
the loud senate of nations.
Another great consideration I would urge as
an important aid in attaining the true aims of
life: namely a devout and generous love of
our native land. A sincere and earnest attachment
to the land of our birth, is calculated to
awaken the whole soul into healthy action; to
appeal to us by a thousand silent sympathies,
and by casting a charm around the scene in
which we dwell, impart to our nature a genial
excitement under which its best powers are
exerted. To love our country is to love life, and
to strive to make that life happy by lending a
romantic interest to the spot in which it is cast.
Our country, if we truly love it, evokes our
feelings, our judgment, our imagination, and
solicits these, by an unseen persuasion, to employ
themselves in adorning and exalting the
object of their regard, and in contributing to
its well-being with all the strength and capacity
they possess. Where that country is a sublime
and noble one, and her external aspect
grand and lovely, we should endeavor to make
ourselves worthy of it, and to show that the
human spirit can be no less great and generous
than the outward objects with which it copes.
Who has not felt, at some period or other of
his life, an ardent wish, a burning desire, to
link himself in some way or other, with the
destinies of his country, to live in his land's
language, and to leave some memorial behind
him in which his country should have a claim?
Who knows not some little spot, some humble
stream, which is nearer to his heart because it
belongs to the land of his birth, the bower of
his boyhood, the shelter and solace of his declining
years?
By some, patriotism, or love of country, is
regarded as an airy bubble, raised by cunning
statesmen to dazzle and bewilder the multitude.
They speak of it as if there were in reality no
such thing as a genuine and honest attachment
to one's country. Is there, then, no solid
foundation in the constitution of our nature on
which to build such an affection? Are there
no claims that plead in the heart for such a
love? Here we first saw the morning light;
here we drank in the first breath of the pure
air. From its bosom we first beheld the glad
spectacles which cheer and illumine our life.
The first rainbow that we ever looked on
spanned our native land; the first sunset,
whose splendors made our young hearts dance
with joy, was kindled on the horizon of
our country. It is here that we have first
known spring-time and autumn, and the genial
round of seasons. Here we saw the first
odorous flower; and here we first beheld the
distant hill-tops and the broad green wood
tinged with the glory of the sun. From this
chosen scene of our existence we first looked
abroad on the starry miracle of a sustained
and balanced universe. Here dawned upon
our minds our earliest conceptions of duty,
justice, kindred, and fellowship with man.
Here we first felt the warm embrace of a
mother's love and the first pressure of a friendly
hand. It is here we have shed our first
tears, and felt all the tender emotions that
spring up over the grave of those we have
loved. Here, in a word, we first had life; and
here, in the dispensations of sovereign power,
we shall lay it down. Should not the spot of all
these gentle and affecting associations be dear to
us? Should it be as common earth? We do no
wrong to our nature by a devout and earnest
love of the land in which we live, but rather
render it an acceptable scrvice and aid its
powers in their development by all the impulses
of hope, reason, and affection, that grow from
such a love.
Another important and genuine aim of life
is to regulate the action of our own mind and
character on the mind and character of others.
The influence of man on man can not be
measured. Human nature is so full of startling
echoes and reflections, that a voice can scarcely
be raised or a light held up in any corner of
the earth without creating everywhere a thousand
responses, and returning the original
image in innumerable colors of surprise, indignation,
horror, and joy. In a narrower circle
mind acts upon mind with fearful force. Lured
on by the mutual voice of man, human beings
have reached their highest fortune or have been
plunged into utter and abject misery. Sustained
by the generous homage of a few wise and
steadfast friends, one of the great masters of
our age has toiled for half a century and is
now hailed a poet by the general acclaim of the
world. By human sympathy and influence
great enterprises are pushed to a successful
issue; purposes that lurked in the breast have
been matured into large and prosperous results;
conjecture has ripened into discovery, faith
swelled to martyrdom, and out of our common
and vulgar clay an almost angelic creature been
fashioned. So vast are the operations of human
sympathy, that pure natures, by its perversion,
may be brought down to degradation and shame,
and fiendish ones, by its higher influence, be
elevated to beauty and honor.
There are auspicious moments when the soul
lies open, by some natural and imperceptible
movements of its springs, when lofty thoughts
and happy visions glide serenely into the mind,
and when we are gently disposed to receive
sweet influences and grant them a residence in
the breast. It may be in the red twilight of
summer, that the heavenly visitant is disclosed;
it descends, perchance, in the soothing August
shower, or may flow upon us with the invisible
wind that stirs the green blades of the meadow
with life. These are the golden moments when
the influence of man on man is most deeply and
happily felt. We all have these, nor should we
let them pass in ourselves or in others, without
profit. It is these moments of natural revelation,
if I may so call them, that can give the
brightest and truest colors to our lives. If we
could always be what we are under the
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momentary inspiration of these divine awakenings,
old Eden would be restored and man would
walk again with his Maker without fear and
without reproach. Let no such moment—for
but a few such are granted to us—pass by unheeded
or unimproved. Then is the chosen
hour to enter the bosom of our fellow-man and
leave there some durable impress of goodness,
beauty, and truth. It is the peculiar privilege
of genius and eloquence to create a condition
of mind, in many respects, kindred to this, and
to win their way to the heart and there plant
the everlasting seeds of truth in a soil thus
genially prepared for their welcome.
Contemporary and co-ordinate with this, is
the duty to sustain great truths, and the discountenanced
advocates of great truths, in the
midst of doubt, opposition, and calumny. Into
the hands of a few chosen spirits falls, oftentimes,
the custody of principles vital to the
best interests of mankind. Scorned, slandered,
ridiculed, it is their generous labor to hold up
the banner of some outcast truth, and carry it
forward amid the clamors of an ignorant and
passionate multitude. A few fearless and highsouled
men in every generation act the part of
posterity to pure and lofty opinion, and anticipate
in themselves and by their own sagacious
hardihood, the verdict of that impartial tribunal.
Wherever, then, we see a vital truth delivered,
a noble creation of genius, a suppressed but
struggling thought that belongs to mankind,
let us bring it forth to the light, give it our
countenance and support, and fix it on an eminence
where the world can not but behold it, and
in the end fall down in worship of its excellence
and grandeur.
Common opinions, of use to the daily interests
of men, will find friends and patronage
in every street and marketplace; but new,
vast, and sublime creations, unfamiliar to the
vulgar mind, and startling to the trained criticism
and judgment of the day, require that
such as are capable of comprehending them,
should form themselves into a resolute guard,
and, by union, firmness, and a high tone of
manly and vigorous daring, urge them on the
attention of the world. No great truth, no sublime
creation, can utterly perish; but the hour
of its triumph may be held back, and a thousand
hearts be buried in the earth, that would
have been thrilled, refined, and exalted, by the
glorious vision, had it come earlier to greet
their eyes.
How blessed a consolation would it be to us
in old age—yea, even in an old age of poverty,
sorrow, and obscurity—that we have seen in silence
no good man trampled on, no great principle
crushed, which we might have saved from
such dishonor; have fled from the advocacy of
no friend because he was poor; have sought
the shelter of no unrighteous error because it
was strong, and might beat off the dark shower
of malice, oppression, or popular madness;
have not fawned on brutal or vulgar pomp;
and can close our eyes on a world which has
had in us no example of time-serving, cunning
cowardice, or a prudent and considerate love of
self and selfish ends. Not to have soothed
the anguish of some broken spirit; not to have
resisted unjust aggression; to have refrained
from upholding the truth through fear, favor,
or hope of reward; to have allowed insolent
magistracy to pervert or dally with the right,
or furious multitudes to invade public sanctuaries
or private homes; to have shrunk back
from stretching a hand to an overwhelming and
sinking fellow-being because he has sinned; to
have frowned down one honest smile in a poor
man's face, or to have wrung one tear from a
desolate woman's eye; these will be gloomy attendants
about a death-bed; a horrible retinue
to herald us into a perilous and fearful hereafter;
these, these it is that make the grave dark
and terrible!
Finally, if we adopt this broad and liberal
plan of cultivating our powers and affections,
by every faculty developed, we shall expand the
circle of our enjoyments, the grasp of our
minds, and the true manliness of our characters.
Where before we crept along impaired of the
very limbs that should aid our motions, we now
assume an erect and vigorous gait, and an eye
that smiles on the varied scenes and truths of
life with an intelligent joy. We thus provide
for ourselves a wide range of objects on which
to lavish our justice, affection, our observation
and fancy, our whole passionate and thoughtful
nature. Embracing thus many topics, and enlarging
our minds to the comprehension of a
wide range of duty and affection, we will become
endowed with a more just judgment, a
keener insight into right and wrong, and a
general capacity for action and meditation unknown
to us before. Many things which seemed
distasteful and repulsive to our narrow
vision, will now start up into significancy and
beauty under the authority of some newly developed
sense of enjoyment. All life will then
be full of meaning. The sad, the humorous,
the imaginative, will need no interpreter but the
faculty furnished by nature, to apprehend them.
From no phase of human nature, no condition
of men, can we then turn away our eyes without
injustice to the great law written in the
soul. We will glow at the thought of heroic
daring; weep over the sorrows that afflict gentle
natures, and smile at the grotesque and comic
exhibitions of humanity in the ordinary walks
of life. We can then sit with the philosopher
in his cell, and feel a kindred rapture in the
contemplation of the starry vastness and majesty
of the heavens, and with him weigh out
the glories and planetary masses of infinite
space. Amid the mountains we will wander
with the poet, and listening to the roar of distant
waters, have the divine particle, the blessed
imagination, stirred with a deep fervor with
in us. With the humbler moralist and the
shrewd observer of life, we will take our position
in the thoroughfare and catch, with a
pleased eye, the strange humors, the cunning
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dealings and actions of common men. Sky,
ocean, human faces, human thoughts, the fortunes
of rich and poor, God's anger in the
storm and earthquake, man's lesser rage in
battle and revenge, ambition, love, the finer
and coarser passions of the soul, our destiny
here and hereafter, will pass under the cognizance
of this organized and balanced intellect,
and each will have its due place accorded to it.
All objects, in such a mind, will attain their
just position, have their peculiar influence, and
be permitted to co-operate together in building
up that noblest of earthly existences, a human
soul. An exquisite harmony will pervade our
life and character. Every passion will enjoy
its due growth and enlargement; every faculty
move in conjunction with its kindred powers,
and none in this well-ordered assemblage, will
venture to usurp an unnatural and unwise
supremacy. The human spirit will then stoop
under no despotism, whether of lawless imagination,
harsh reason, or benighted conscience.
The world will not then assume to the eye a
level and repulsive smoothness, clothed in a
single and sombre hue, but will be disclosed in
varied shapes, hills, valleys, ample plains, and
be tinged with a thousand happy and cheerful
colors. Our life will not be single but a hundred
fold; every object will have many true and
just interpretations, which shall gather around
it like rays, and constitute the brightness and
effulgence of truth whose whole countenance
we shall then behold, as far as men may behold
it, turned with a full gaze upon our
own. Under this many-colored standard we
shall pursue the triumphant march of life,
while melodious sounds of many measures
cheer us on.
We shall then know how joyous a place is
this world of ours; how many sweet objects it
bears when rightly regarded. We shall then
repent that we have ever uttered one harsh
word against it, and shall weep to leave it with
its varied blessings behind. It will be a hard
thing, after all, to leave this pleasant chamber
of the earth in which we have dwelt so long.
It will be something to give up the bright sky,
and the green woods, and the blue waters, to
go and dwell with the worm. Our old familiar
friends, the forest, the mountain, and the
stream, must henceforth know us no more.
The silent shadow of the tree, the sweet voice
of the bird, and the glowing sunset, must no
longer look upon us, nor make music for our ear,
nor a cool shadow for our feet. We must yield up
the true friend and forget and forego his embrace.
The smile, the trust, and the tender
caress of woman must never more be our portion
or our solace. It is true we are to be apparelled
in glory and to put on the garments of
angels; but what can recompense us, what
height of glory, what rapture of bliss, for those
purely human joys which made a part of our
lot on earth? We would, if so permitted, bear
something of our mortality with us even to the
gate of heaven, and add it as a worthy ingre
dient to the nobler elements of celestial happiness.
We are now, as it were, in the vestibule
and outer court of nature;
before and above us
the solemn temple, the vast cathedral of the universe,
towers and broadens into immeasurable
extent. Ere we are admitted let us prepare our
hearts for this mighty habitation; let us lift up
our imaginations, purged of earthly grossness,
to the height and sanctity of that great structure;
so that when we enter in, our feeble and
guilty spirits may not tremble at its vastness,
nor shrink back from its holy and enduring
grandeur!
The world is peopled by two classes of beings,
which seem to be as cognate and necessary
to each other as male and female. Charlatans
and dupes exist by a mutual dependance.
There is a tacit understanding, that whatever
the one invents the other must believe. All
bills which the former draws, the latter comes
forward at once and honors. One is Prospero,
the other his poor slave Caliban. The charlatan
tricks himself out in a mask, assumes a
deep, hollow voice, and struts upon the stage;
while the dupe sits gaping in the pit, and takes
every word that drops from the rogue's mouth
for gospel truth and genuine philosophy. It
would really seem as if the two parties had entered
into a solemn compact, that wherever the
one exhibits as charlatan, the other, by an absolute
necessity, agrees to be present as simpleton.
Let the rogue open shop to dispense pills,
the simpleton, as soon as he learns the fact,
hies to the place of trade, and, pouring down
his pence on the counter, takes his box of specifics
and walks complacently away. The
knaves seem to consider the world as a rich
parish—a large diocese of dunces, into which
they have an hereditary and prescriptive right
to be installed. They are never at rest until
they have some subject on which to hold forth
in public; some novel doctrine running against
the grain of the old good sense; some antiquated
sophism dressed in a new suit, to be put
forth to surprise and startle the community, and
gather around it (as a gay adventurer) an
army of disciples. These men constantly assume
an attitude of battle. They wage war
upon everything past, present, and to come:
“Rather than fail they will decry
That which they love most tenderly:
Quarrel with minced pies, and disparage
Their best and dearest friend plum-porridge:
Fat pig and goose itself oppose,
And blaspheme custard through the nose.”
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General ignorance, with a smattering of medical
knowledge; some fluency in speaking, or
readiness with the pen; great tact in discovering
the disposition, and skill in the management
of a certain class of persons; an air of
easy, cool impudence in public; an oracular and
self-possessed manner in private, are parts of
that beautiful mosaic—an apostle of dietetics.
Of such materials are framed those little men
who attempt upon the earth to rival Deity; who
assume his thunder and trident; his power to
shake the heart with fear; to regulate the human
system; and to denounce penal fires, and
all imaginable and unimaginable tortures on the
head of rebellion. These are the cunning plotters
who work upon weak minds through their
fancies and doubts. “They give a life and
body to their fears.” Such men, broken down
in health and dyspeptic, whose whole lives have
been a scene of miserable and false feelings,
engendered by a morbid condition of body, assume
to become prophets and dispensers of
health. These ruined and ruinous horologues
would give the time o' day to the healthy world.
In every age there has existed some favorite
theory for the regeneration of the race; some
grand discovery (about to be made), which was
to be universal, ubiquitous in its influence and
success. At one time the philosopher's stone;
in the next age a short passage to the East Indies;
and now, in a third and less romantic period,
all the great objects of amelioration and
amendment are to be accomplished by the substitution
of unbolted flour in the place of pure
wheat and solid animal food. The authors of
these miraculous discoveries believe that the
human race is to be regenerated solely through
the medium of the palate; that the channels of
access to the human head and human heart are
not, as of old, through the understanding and
the affections, but through the alimentary ducts.
Instead of winding along the shore of the Mediterranean
and over the shoals of the Indian
ocean, they strike boldly across the Atlantic,
and find the country for which they are in search.
They take for granted that man has no imagination,
no heart, no nerves, no soul, nor arteries;
but that he is a creature all stomach; that
one mighty abdomen is the badge and property
of human kind; and that in it centres the machinery,
from it spring the movements, which
build up and overturn states and empires—the
strong fancy which moulds itself in epics and
histories—the gentle pathos which melts us from
the pulpit or in the elegy—the fierce wrath
and “energy divine” which shake the stage;
all hold their court in this vast subterranean
cavern, and from it rush forth upon the world.
The first great canon of this code of living,
is, that the flesh of beasts be banished from
the table. Unholy pig, nor stupid veal, nor silly
mutton, corpulent roast-beef, nor presumptuous
sirloin, must appear before these chaste,
dietetic vestals. Calf, sheep, ox, fowl, partridge—
they know them not in animated nature.
They have revised the edible universe,
and from it stricken these blots and monsters.
Tender-souled philanthropists! They would
know why these should not run rampant, and
fly on the earth and in the air harmless? They
are joint denizens here; fellow-citizens of ours,
are these, good friends!
These natural feeders have “a touch that
makes them kin” with us. Let them grow and
multiply. Let them fatten in our meadows, and
spread their pinions in our woods. Like us,
they are for an equitable division of property;
they, too, are humble agrarians; their desires
are moderate. Till your fields until the sweat
pearls upon your forehead; you need not chaffer
with customers—they will take the crop of
grain off your hands. Gay creatures, they will
frisk and eat for you. They have made us
their stewards; if we plough and plant, they
will, most willingly, gather the increase.
“The hog that ploughs not, nor obeys thy call,
Lives on the labors of this lord of all;
While man exclaims, `See all things for my use!'
`See man for mine!' replies a pampered goose.”
Yes, these prodigal Pythagoreans, these vegetable
philosophers, would give the earth up to
the undisputed possession of Messrs. Ox, Hog,
& Company. They would hand the title-deeds
over to that firm. It has, perhaps, never entered
the heads of these anti-carnivorous gentlemen,
these minor omnipotents, who would
change mankind into so many Nebuchadnezzars
and send the world to eat grass, what
disposition they would make of their fourfooted
rivals in the event of a general adoption of their
principles. We would have to turn back into
heathenism, and offer up a hecatomb to each one
of the forty thousand gods of antiquity, to reduce
the cattle-market within reasonable limits.
“Man partakes,” says one of the learned doctors
of this school, “of the nature of the animal
which he eats!” Here is a reverse system of
metempsychosis. The old doctrine was, that
the soul of a philosopher might possess the
body of a donkey; but it is an altogether new-fangled
thing for the spirit of a Bakewell bull
or a Merino to take up its residence in the body of
a doctor of divinity, or that of a lecturer on Hygiene.
But so it is; and it needs but a little disorder
of the nerves to make the imagination teem
with frightful consequences of this new faith.
Only to think of our rosy-cheeked friend, the
Englishman, who feeds on roast-beef, in the
excitement of a political argument, suddenly
protruding upon us the horns of an ox! Or
Madame Beauvais, our vivacious and agreeable
French acquaintance, getting animated into one
of the frogs she loves so well! Dear old Piscator,
too, who delighteth so in fishing and in eating
fish, to imagine him jumping from the boat
and turning into one of his own favorite striped
bass! Forfend us, that we should hook up our
bosom-friend, and salt him away for a morrow's
breakfast!
But the worst of it is, that these attenuated
apostles of bran bread and water-cresses—
whose worn-out organs can assimilate no strong
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meat, can not be content with feeding their own
way (which, if it be best for them, they have
our free leave to feed as they list), nor be contented
with simply proselyting by example and
doctrine men of their own kind, but they insist
upon imposing all the pains of moral excommunication
upon us who have healthy digestions
and cheerful spirits, unless we will follow their
examples swear by their names, and feed by
their rules.
Men must be lean, ghostlike, sepulchral—
who know not flesh at their tables. With
them, to be lean is a virtue; to be fat, an abomination.
If you fill your garments well,
and keep a running account with your butcher,
they will have an eye on you—you are not to
be altogether trusted. Crimes, in this code,
are regulated by pounds avoirdupois. “An adherence
to animal food,” says Hitchcock, “is no
more than a persistence in the customs of savage
life.” We are barbarians, all. Now we put it seriously
to the disciples of this creed, whether they
can call to mind a well-authenticated case of
murder, or any act implying brutality or cruelty
of disposition, committed by a corpulent man.
A fat murderer would be a monster. The earth
could not bear him up. It is true, such a one
may be an accomplice in the second or third
degree; a rosy landlord, who holds the light,
or a stout countryman, employed to watch under
a hedge for the approach of the victim. It is
a part of our nature, on the other hand, a Draconic
law of our blood and being, that we should
look upon a lean man with something of suspicion
in most cases; in many, with pity and
contempt. A corpulent man we may dislike
or detest, but in his broad, open countenance,
there is something so like candor and honest
living, that it would require much to bring us
to believe him a villain. In no case may we
despise him, or charge him reasonably with a
criminal act. It is your starvelings who fill the
calendar of the sessions. It is they who commit
thefts, burglaries, petit larcenies, and other
contemptible small crimes. It is they who are
seen running down streets with stray pieces of
linen or pairs of pilfered Wellingtons. Who
ever heard the cry, “Stop thief!” raised at the
heels of a man who weighed two hundred and
upward? It would be an anomaly, a practical
solecism, to see the hands of a constable
or sheriff's officer on the collar of a coat three
feet across the shoulders. It is your fat, solid
men—men who know the luxury of three full
meals—that make good citizens, kind fathers,
tender husbands. These men are all fed on
beef.
According to the dietetic system, food seems
to be apportioned in an inverse ratio to the character
and rank of the feeder. Thus, man, the
noblest creature of the earth, must fatten on
bran bread and spare vegetables; while the
horse, we suppose, is to feed on custards, and
the right worshipful donkey on blancmange and
ice-cream.
Charles Lamb, in one of his essays, has an
admirable battery of masked irony directed
against vegetable feeders. It is a short sketch,
supposed to be written by a lady (Hospita) describing
a gluttonous visiter. “What makes
his proceedings more particularly offensive at
our house is, that my husband, though out of
common politeness he is obliged to set dishes
of animal food before his visiters, yet himself
and his whole family (myself included) feed entirely
on vegetables. We have a theory that
animal food is neither wholesome nor natural
to man; and even vegetables we refuse to eat
until they have undergone the operation of fire,
in consideration of those numberless little living
creatures which the glass helps us to detect
in every fibre of the plant or root before it
be dressed. On the same theory we boil our
water, which is our only drink, before we suffer
it to come to table. Our children are perfect
little Pythagoreans; it would do you good to
see them in their nursery, stuffing their dried
fruits, figs, raisins, and milk, which is the only
approach to animal food which is allowed.
They have no notion how the substance of a
creature that ever had life can become food for
another creature. A beef-steak is an absurdity
to them; a mutton-chop, a solecism in terms;
a cutlet, a word absolutely without any meaning;
a butcher is nonsense, except so far as it
is taken for a man who delights in blood, or a
hero. In this happy state of innocence we
have kept their minds, not allowing them to
go into the kitchen, or to hear of any preparations
for dressing of animal food, or even to
know that such things are practised. But, as
a state of ignorance is incompatible with a certain
age; and as my eldest girl, who is ten
years old next midsummer, must shortly be introduced
into the world and sit at table with us,
where she will see some things which will shock
all her received notions, I have been endeavoring,
by little and little, to break her mind, and
prepare it for the disagreeable impressions
which must be forced upon it. The first hint
I gave her upon the subject, I could see her recoil
from it with the same horror with which
we listen to a tale of Anthropophagism; but
she has gradually grown more reconciled to it,
in some measure, from my telling her that it
was the custom of the world—to which, however
senseless, we must submit, so far as we
could do it with innocence, not to give offence;
and she has shown so much strength of mind
on other occasions, which I have no doubt is
owing to the calmness and serenity superinduced
by her diet, that I am in good hopes
that when the proper season of her debut arrives,
she may be brought to endure the sight
of a roasted chicken or a dish of sweetbreads,
for the first time, without fainting.”
We think one of the rarest spectacles in the
world must be, what is called, a Graham boardinghouse,
at about the dinner-hour. Along a
table, from which, perhaps, the too-elegant and
gorgeous luxury of a cloth is discarded (for we
have never enjoyed the felicity of an actual
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vision of this kind), seated some thirty lean-visaged,
cadaverous disciples, eying each other
askance, their looks lit up with a certain cannibal
spirit, which, if there were any chance of
making a full meal off each other's bones, might
perhaps break into dangerous practice. The
gentlemen resemble busts cut in chalk or white
flint; the lady-boarders (they will pardon the
allusion), mummies, preserved in saffron. At
the left hand of each stands a small tankard or
pint-tumbler of cold water, or, perchance, a decoction
of hot water with a little milk and sugar—
(as Professor Hitchcock justly styles it)—
“A harmless and salutary beverage;” at the
right, a thin segment of bran bread. Stretched
on a plate in the centre lie, melancholy twins!
a pair of starveling mackerel, flanked on either
side by three or four straggling radishes, and
kept in countenance by a sorry bunch of asparagus,
served up without sauce. The van of
the table is led by a hollow dish, with a dozen
potatoes, rather, corpses of potatoes, in a row,
lying at the bottom.
At those tables look for no conversation, or
for conversation of the driest and dullest sort.
Small wit is begotten of spare viands. They,
however, think otherwise. “Vegetable food,”
says the sagacious Hitchcock, “tends to preserve
a delicacy of feeling, a liveliness of imagination,
and acuteness of judgment, seldom enjoyed by
those who live principally on meat.” Green peas,
cabbage, and spinach, are enrolled in a new
catalogue. They are no longer culinary and
botanical—they take rank above that. They
are become metaphysical, and have a rare operation
that way; they “tend to preserve a delicacy
of feeling,” &c. Cauliflower is a power
of the mind; and asparagus, done tenderly, is
nothing less than a mental faculty of the first
order. “Buttered parsnips” are, no doubt, a
great help in education; and a course of vegetables,
we presume, is to be substituted at college
in the place of the old routine of Greek
and Latin classics. The student will be henceforth
pushed forward through his academic studies
by rapid stages of Lima beans, parsley, and
tomato. Very good—we like your novelties in
education. Nothing could certainly be more
original, or more happily thought of, than a
diet of greens for freshmen and sophomores,
and, you must have something expansive and
brilliant there, a regimen of sunflowers and
pumpkin for the elder classes. We like this
vastly. This is metempsychosis again. The
“soul of Socrates might take up its residence
in a stocking weaver,” as the doctrine used to
stand; but now, better still, a man may go out
into the fields and cull just such a soul as he
chooses, in the same way as you select a coat
in a tailor's shop, or a glove at the hosier's.
He has a free range of faculties to draw upon.
If he finds his sympathies begin to flag from too
much use, or to soil from contact with the rude
world, let him but step into his garden and
gather a few of those vegetables “which tend
to preserve a delicacy of feeling.” We have
here, also, a new specific for the composition
of Shaksperes, Miltons, and Byrons. Poets are
now to be turned into the meadow, and prepared
for the production of a tragedy or
epic, just as you fat a prize-ox or a piece of
mutton. Such feeding tends to preserve a
“liveliness of imagination.” Statesmen and
lawyers, who require “acuteness of judgment,”
will henceforward graduate on potherbs from
the kitchen-garden. Sir Walter Scott must
have been altogether at fault in the opinion expressed
in the autobiographical fragment prefixed
to the Life. “After one or two relapses,”
says he, speaking of an illness he had suffered
from, “my constitution recovered the injury it
had sustained, though for several months afterward
I was restricted to a severe vegetable
diet. And I must say, in passing, that though
I gained health under this necessary restriction,
yet it was far from being agreeable to me; and
I was afflicted, while under its influence, with a
nervousness which I never felt before nor since.
A disposition to start upon slight alarms—a
want of decision in feeling and acting, which
has not usually been my failing—an acute sensibility
to trifling inconveniences—and an unnecessary
apprehension of contingent misfortunes,
rise to memory as connected with my
vegetable diet, although they may very possibly
have been entirely the result of the disorder
and not of the cure.” It is clear, however,
which way he leaned, although he speaks in the
most guarded language. It will be observed,
that he attributed to vegetable diet a peculiar
malady, for which the dietetic professors assert
it is a most admirable specific.
The most lamentable aspect of the system
and teachings of these apostles of improved dietics
is that which regards its moral character
and influence. Not content with a total revolution
of the whole world by the aid of abstinence
and fasting, they would turn the same
engines toward heaven, and with them impiously,
perhaps ignorantly impious, batter down
the established muniments of gospel, morals,
and truth. Not satisfied with the operations of
their specific on mind and body, they would incorporate
their wild fantasies in the moral code,
and place the dogma of an itinerant lecturer at
the head of the commandments. These men
have interleaved the Bible, and, scrawling their
own absurd texts and comments upon the blank
pages, put forth an improved version of the
book of God.
They would turn all the denunciations of
scripture against the single sin of inordinate
indulgence of the appetite. They would make
repletion the Anti-Christ, and prove that penal
fires and scorchings of conscience are prepared
for him who dares partake in liberal measure
of the gifts and bounties of Heaven. All things
in the two testaments are, in the misty fancies
of these fanatical dreamers, typical of intemperance
in eating.
Thus, in the book of Numbers, occurs the
following passage: “So they did eat and were
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filled, for he gave them their own desire; they
were not estranged from their lust; but while their
meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God
came upon them, and slew the fattest of them, and
smote down the chosen men of Israel.” Here, according
to the dietists, is a vigorous argument
against corpulency and animal food. On the
surface it seems so; and as the philosophical
dogmatists to whom we refer, abhor the labor
of diving, we suppose they are very well pleased
with such deduction. Because they were
slain “while the meat was yet in their mouths,”
a judgment is pronounced, they believe, against
animal food. This, therefore, is an argument
for vegetable diet. But, by turning to a verse
in the same chapter, which precedes the one
we have quoted, the learned pundits will discover
that the Israelitish appetite was as keen
for vegetable as animal diet; so that the denunciation
was directed as strongly against the
one as the other. “Who shall give us flesh to
eat? We remember the fish which we did eat
in Egypt freely! the cucumbers, and the melons,
and the lecks, and the onions, and the garlic.”
Here is not only fish and flesh, but as select and
delicate a regimen of greens as one could wish.
But the “fattest” were slain. That is very
true, and it seems to us (no very profound biblical
critics) that they were particularly smitten
because they repined against the manna
which had been, to them at least, most healthy
and invigorating sustenance. But with our
new apostles it is no matter. They were punished
for rebellious murmuring, while their
mouths were filled with flesh—therefore, flesh-eating
is sinful; not merely eating too much
of whatever it be, nor even intemperate flesheating—
but any, the least degree of flesh-eating
whatever.
Not only (if they are to be believed) is Grahamism
the great burden of the Scripture, but
it is to be the great auxiliary in spreading
Christianity over the earth. The fiend infidelity
is to be put out of the way by nothing less
than spare diet and a course of vegetables.
“This demon,” says Hitchcock, the erudite
founder of the dietetic college, “can not be successfully
met and encountered by the puny arm
and shrinking sensibility of dyspepsy. It needs
the resolution, the assured faith, and the energetic
action of our pilgrim fathers. And then
again, what but the strong arm, and the resolute
courage, and unwavering faith, of men sustained
by EUPEPSY as well as the grace of God,
can urge forward, into the dark and untrodden
fields of spiritual death, the mighty wheels of
benevolence that are in motion?” Sustained by
eupepsy AS WELL as the grace of God! This is
good; it is admirable; a flight not contemptible—
at least as high as the fifth heaven of invention.
Have courage—he will be shortly in the
seventh! Rising on the wing, toward the region
we have indicated, he bursts out in the full fervor
of Grahamism: “They were eupeptics who
carried the gospel over the east, in primitive times.
They were eupeptics who, in modern times, have
successfully engaged in the same work; AND
THEY MUST BE EUPEPTICS WHO ARE TO BRING
ON THE MILLENIUM.”
We doubt much whether there will be any
human beings extant by the arrival of the millenium,
if the dietetic system should be universally
adopted. It hath a rapid operation in
translating its professors from the “smoke and
stir of this dim spot.” Their career on this
road to health brings them speedily in sight of
tombstones and family vaults. Pretending by
their false and base empiricism to lengthen,
they absolutely abbreviate life. There is an
amount of moral evil thus committed, which,
but for the ignorance of its apostles, should
place empirical dietetics at once on the list
with murder.
He who, in a time of scarcity, forestalls the
market, and by a monopoly of provisions stints
the people of their proper supply, is held guilty
of treason to the community, and, in some codes
of law, is subject to the penalty of death. But
the dietetic preachers would actually snatch
from the lips the very sustenance which its
possessor has in abundance, or can purchase
with ease. He perishes, deluded by the sophisms
of pretenders, in the midst of a full granary.
He falls surrounded by harvests of the
richest wheat. He starves in sight of a thousand
platters, smoking with substantial fare.
In truth, this whole system seems to be a disguised
and ignoble attempt to establish a kind
of monkish creed in the New World. It is a
phantom of the middle ages, revived from its
slumbers, and put forth again into the waking
light to marshal under its tattered and faded
banner, retouched and repaired, all that class
of human beings who, in every age, jump at
novelties, and are willing to go out and join in
a crusade against their own health, happiness,
and peace of mind, provided it is done in
the guise of accomplishing some mighty moral
or national purpose, and provided some special
mountebank appears boldly in the van to lead
them on. In this case starvation has turned
crusader and philanthropist, and by its stalwart
strength promises to banish poverty and crime;
to annihilate acutc and chronic diseases and
nervous maladies; to clear and strengthen the
mind; to elevate and purify the morals; to
brighten and invigorate the religious affections;
and, finally, to bring about the millenium!
Health, morals, and intellect, all hang on this.
Eupepsy is the good principle, the evil one is a
mighty dyspepsy.
We may remark, in passing, that one learned
professor hints that history might be hereafter
written on dietetic principles, and gives us an
illustration of the manner in which it could be
managed, by speaking of England as presenting
“an alarming contrast between the eupep
tic days of Elizabeth and the dyspeptic times
of George the Fourth.” Cooks, we suppose,
are henceforward to write the chronicles of the
times, and waiters will take charge of memoirs
and the lighter sketches of manners, morals,
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and customs. We may apply to them, in anticipation,
the language which the learned professor
of chymistry and natural history uses in
reference to the wonders which might be
achieved by a phalanx of eupeptic youth: “Oh,
the light and influence which they might thus send
out into the world and down to posterity, would not,
like other emanations proceeding from a centre,
spread and increase in the slow ratio of the square
of the distance and the time; but in a ratio so
high, that the quadratics of the millenium could
alone express and resolve if'!!
Certainly, one
of the most singular and mathematical emanations
we ever read of! We think the professor
must have (in addition to his aforesaid
duties) a small class in celestial trigonometry
under his charge.
The dietetic philosophers, whether they intend
it or not, are practical atheists, for they
rob God of one of his essential attributes, by
supposing that he has created the animal and
vegetable world merely to prey on each other
and encumber the earth. They render it a
shrewd problem, too, to explain why man has
carnivorous teeth.
We consider this system also as the most
pernicious and abhorrent, when we look upon
it as a fanatical attempt to shut out from mankind
certain sources of happiness and enjoyment,
which were clearly provided and intended
for them in the economy of the earth. We
humbly believe that all things were made to be
enjoyed rationally, temperately, and with an
eye to the great Benefactor. The universe
was not only built for the eye, that man might
sit in its midst, like a child at a theatre, and
gaze on its wonderful and shifting scenes, its
strange and grand actings and decorations.
There are also other senses which in their
measure may be gratified. That is a poor mystery
of gastronomy, which feeds the eyes and
leaves the stomach famished.
If these philosopherlings can not learn from
the constitution and history of their own species
what is due to themselves and their kind,
let them turn to the animal creation and gather
an example. They at least remind us of
one class of feathered bipeds. Of all the fowls
of the air, the most contemptible is a mongrel
heron, known familiarly as the mudpoke. The
mudpoke we take to be your best natural disciple
of Grahamism. He feeds little, and that
little does him small good. His digestion, such
as it is, is rapid indeed, but dry. Lean-visaged
and cadaverous, he sits upon a hard branch
or rail, and looking heaven in the face, with a
pharasaical expression of countenance, he drawls
a short denunciation in loud treble, against
high livers and good feeders. His skin hangs
about his bones like a coat ill-cut. He keeps
good hours, it is true—is never out late at night,
like the nightingale—is never found at a merrymaking,
nor high in the air, at morn, with the
lark, singing out his gratitude to the Giver of
all good. He feeds solitary on crusts and
scraps; drinks but little, and that of the stalest
puddle; and is, in fact, a Graham in feathers;
a deliverer of dry lectures, from sapless tree
tops; and his only fault is that his digestion is
a trifle too lively.
Those who have advocated in public the
spare system of diet, have generally been men
who have made a previous pilgrimage through
the catalogue of maladies, and who, therefore,
assume to be the most profoundly skilled in the
prescriptions necessary for each. From having
suffered much themselves, they believe they
have an equitable privilege to make others suffer
in a like degree. They become skilled in
the gnostics of every complaint, and by a sweeping
specific, purge the materia medica of every
malady save that with which they, as patients,
had been afflicted. Now, of all sorts of tampering,
we think tampering with the human
system is the most abominable and pernicious.
There is a class of sciolists, and those of whom
we have spoken belong to it, who believe that
all kinds of experiments are to be ventured upon
the human constitution; that it is to be
hoisted by pulleys and depressed by weights;
pushed forward by rotary principles, and pulled
back by stop-springs and regulators. They
have finally succeeded in looking upon the human
frame, much as a neighboring alliance of
stronger powers regards a petty state which is
doing well in the world and is ambitious of
rising in it. It must be kept under. It must
be fettered by treaties and protocols without
number. This river it must not cross; at the
foot of that mountain it must pause. An attempt
to include yonder forest in its territories
would awaken the wrath of its powerful superiors,
and they would crush it instantly. Or the
body is treated somewhat as a small-spirited
carter treats his horse; it must be kept on a
handful of oats and made to do a full day's
work. Famine has become custodian of the
key which unlocks the gate to health, to knowledge,
to religious improvement, and the millenium!
Unless checked, this wild fanaticism will
sweep through the land, overthrowing every
social comfort, every physical enjoyment, every
pleasure that springs from sense and refers
to sense. Indulgence in the common luxuries
of air and water, will be soon set down in the
index expurgatorial as a crime; and punishments
and penalties be attached to every gradation
of bodily comfort. To feel the pulse
throb with joy, or the cheek glow with delight,
or the heart beat under the genial influence of
springtime or autumn; in fine, to yield in any
way to the generous and universal emotions of
humanity, will next be deemed a damnable heresy
and perversion of our moral faculties. The
adventurous champions of this dietetical Quixotism,
would ride through the country armed capa-pie
with argument and denunciation, and,
like the Moss-troopers of the Scottish border,
snatch from the peasant's pot his haunch of
mutton or round of beef, and force him to dine
on kale and cold water.
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These men know not—they have no dream—
of the injury they would inflict on the poor
by depriving them of animal food, and the little
(what seems to us, at least, little) luxury
of a healthy and savory meal. Their daily
bread is the only comfort that many of the poor
enjoy. They have no knowledge of books—no
music—no pleasant, festive companies, where
care is laughed or danced away—no concerts nor
anniversaries—no resources of thought or conversation—
none of those delicate, refined sensations,
which are perpetual inlets to the thoughtful
and educated—no poetical joy in the fair
shows of nature, and at best nothing more than
a ruder sort of religion, which exhibits itself in
a simple, single, undoubting faith. Their “life is
rounded with” a meal. In this they are imparadised.
Nature has not denied to them the common
and yet sweet enjoyments of the palate. Sitting
at their rude tables, with their clean and wellcooked
mutton or steak, they are equal to kings.
The most royal of the earth can not enthrone
themselves with a finer sense of sweetness on
golden thrones or under canopies of purple.
Who would rob the poor of such dainties?
Be not afraid! ye poor of the land. God's
bounties flow, in these regions at least, from a
perennial urn. God still walks on the hill and
in the valley, and cheers the husbandman in
his labors. Be not afraid!—forward through
many years of household happiness, may ye look
for well-filled boards and hearthstones savory
with daily comforts and consolations. While
God guides your plough and gives the increase
to your honest toil, eat your bread in peace.
No fanatical visionary, no arbitrary and self-willed
man shall rob you of these. Your own
good sense, the good sense of your friends and
countrymen, will save you from the desolation
which these wild men would bring upon you
in common with all.
The people will not hearken to their mad appeal.
There is an instinct above all knowledge.
Guided by that, our countrymen will scorn the
starveling philosophy of Graham, and the wild
theories of Hitchcock. Our broad meadows will
still sustain their noble herds; and still shall the
cool stream and the open sea nurture its kind to
strengthen and cheer the sons of the earth. Our
rich wheatfields shall whiten as of old, and the
pure loaf be called the staff of life, though ignorant
and reckless men would strike it down
and bring man level with the earth and the
brute that feeds on husks and grass.
Sad and bitter consequences, God knows,
have already flowed from these false doctrines.
Alas! how many pale students, future ornaments
and defenders of their country, if permitted
to live; how many fair daughters; how
many mothers, blessed and blessing; how many
merchants, sagacious in business and liberal in
leisure; how many ministers of God, hallowed
oracles and voices of Heaven; how many of
the good, the great, the young, and the aged—
the tender-hearted and the learned and wise,
have already fallen before the arm of this hom
icidal and accursed dogma? In pale and sickly
troops they totter down the road to the
grave and lay themselves on the cold pillow of
their last slumber, emaciated, ghastly, the victims
of the cunning impostor who used imagination
as his tool, and with it undermined the
“house of life.” Upon their ashes we build a
monument, dedicated to temperate enjoyment
of the bounties of the air, the earth, and the
sea!
eaf265.n4[4] Dyspepsy Forestalled and Resisted: or Lectures
on Dfet. Regimen, and Employment: delivered to the
students of Amherst College, Spring term, 1830. By
Edward Hitchcock, Professor of Chymistry and Natural
History in that Institution. Amherst. Published by
J. S. & C. Adams, & Co.
[The author might, in mercantile phrase, evade
legal liability on the two or three sketches following,
on the ground that they were produced before
he had arrived at an age when one acquires the right
to utter paper. As more advanced life is, however,
glad enough at times to draw upon youth and
habits then acquired, in excuse of older offences,
the author foregoes his plea, with the hope of
showing, by their reproduction, at how early a
period he had fallen upon a vein of writing which
(whether good or bad) he has since wrought
upon in one or two more elaborate works. The
“trick of it” was, he thinks the reader will admit,
in the blood, and not caught from foreign
sources.]
(Knickerbocker Magazine, April, 1835.)
In his life-time Jeduthan Hobbs had never
suited himself with a dwelling-place. He was
ever flitting about, like a swallow on the wing,
from garret to garret. He has chambers now,
against which he can never more repine. A
few nails, and boards of lath, have shut out
apprehension, and care, and poverty. No
longer shall rich repasts, and the panorama of
delicate viands, move before his eye, which his
tongue may not taste. No longer shall his
gaunt form traverse the pavement of public
hostels, living on steams and odors. From the
unceremonious touch of catchpoles, henceforth,
the person of Jeduthan Hobbs is sacred.
They laid him according to his wish. He
had prayed, almost to the last hour of his life,
that Providence would grant him the farewell
privilege of selecting a spot for his grave,
which might be his own—the first and last
cantle of proprety he should ever possess. And
at the moment when death was holding his
final parley for the surrender of his body, a
missive arrived from a deceased aunt, bearing
within a gift just sufficient to purchase the
dying man the luxury of renting independently
his last habitation.
It was chosen strangely—one lone, solitary
strip of green, imbedded in rocks. It were
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vain to attempt to fathom this fancy. Perhaps
he wished to leave it as a testimonial—though
dark and difficult the interpretation—that thus
his heart had retained its freshness and verdure,
in the very midst of the rough roads and stony
circumstances of life.
His face, when living, was the very dial-plate
of hope. He lived on glorious expectation. He
breakfasted on hope, dined on hope, and was
even oftentimes forced, for the want of more
substantial food, to make his supper from the
same dish. Yet was he ever uncomplaining.
He was monarch over all futurity. No black
usurper dared intrude upon that ample realm.
He peopled it with his own subjects. They
never disobeyed his kingly authority, but ever
came at his beck. How well I remember the
last time I beheld him! He had just given—
poor and lowly as he was—a cheerful volume,
to a pale, thin young man, in a faded black
coat, who had been standing at a book-stall, at
the corner of the street, filching a little mental
entertainment from a meager collection of
dingy tomes. “Poor fellow!” said Hobbs, “he
has seen better days; but he should needs be
happy now, for I have given him a glorious
companion, and I have just read to him these
truth-speaking lines from good old Spenser.”
And the kind donor set down his humble basket
upon the flags, and with a benevolent chuckle,
read thus from a thumbed, yellow-leaved octavo:
“Ah! why doth flesh, a bubble-glass of breath,
Hunt after honor and advancement vain,
And rear a trophy for devouring Death,
With so great labor and long-lasting pain,
As if his days for ever should remain?
Sith all that in this world is great or gay,
Doth, as a vapor, vanish and decay.
“Look back who list unto the former ages,
And call to count what is of them become;
Where be those high-born men, those antique
Which of all grandeur knew the perfect sum?
Where those great warriors, which did overcome
The world with conquest of their might and main,
And made one mear of the earth and of their reign?”
Thus, with a fine vein of philosophy, would
Hobbs beguile penury of bitter remembrances,
and rob sharp misery of its pangs.
He would sit in his veteran arm-chair, at the
end of a long summer day, and looking through
the dusky panes of a narrow dormer window,
point to the sun melting afar over the Jersey
hills—dropping gently and softly, as a babe to
its evening slumbers. “That sun,” he would
exclaim, “rises brighter to-morrow, because it
rises on a happier man. My friend, I am not
crack-brained nor visionary. In truth, poor
denizens like me have no right to share that
privilege of the titled and wealthy. But I do
believe there is some great blessing in store for
me—some overwhelming joy—that, like wine
on the less, is but improving its flavor, by age,
for my palate.”
“But, Hobbs, how can you revel in such delights,
with these wrecks about you? How
can you, from a garret, like Moses from Pisgah,
steal such glimpses of a promised land?”
“Do you see,” was his answer, “yonder
flight of birds, fanning the rosy air around the
setting sun? Mark you how their wings are
gilded with royal gold and purple, as they bathe
themselves in the fading day-beams? So,
my friend, every thought, every imagination,
every common object and meaner sight, in
passing through my soul, is transmuted into a
precious and golden reality, that, though it
may have no existence in this world of fact,
transports me into a heaven!”
“What heaven? The bigot's—the sectarian's?”
“No, friend, there can be no heaven where
dwells the bigot or the sectarian. I mean his
heaven whose tastes are refined, whose eyes
are as crystal mirrors, reflecting joyously the
Creator's little universe below, the fair scenes
of nature, and the glories of air, earth, and
sea. Such alone can live in heaven. To brute
minds—minds that have no spirit, but are all
sinew and flesh—heaven would be but a `worse
hell.”'
Thus have we whiled hour after hour, in
pleasant converse, pilfering many a smile from
the wrinkled face of time, and smoothing the
yet untrodden road to the inevitable church-yard.
The vocation of my friend was a modest
and humble one. He was a book-pedlar. He
wended from house to house—a merchant of
the mind—bearing in his basket and pack the
rich products of every clime in which intellect
grows and buds.
He was born with a love for books. The
first object on which his infant eyes opened,
must have been the family Bible, or a copy of
the household almanac. He delighted, as soon
as his feeble hands could lift a volume, to gaze
on its black rows of letters. When his mind
expanded, its first dawnings were spent in marshaling
words in order, to form some little
“composition.” He took a kind of military
pride, in drilling the twenty-four letters of the
alphabet, in banding them into petty companies.
As he grew older he assumed his calling. It
was congenial, though lowly. He loved to
pass from dwelling to dwelling, dealing out, as
it were, delight by the handful—handing over
whole treasures of joy, volumes of fun and
knowledge. And he himself had been at the
festival, he had partaken of the feast.
He came at length to be known, to be loved,
to be welcomed. His face broadened and
brightened into the sun of many a house; and
wherever he threw a beam, some tender flower,
or some happy sentiment would spring and
blossom. He was the sower of good seed, and
he reaped the harvest that follows it.
And thus he spent twenty years. He was
the father of the book-pedlars. Much they
honored him; and, when chance had gathered
a circle of them together, they listened with
eager ears to his tales of the elder days of their
trade—how it had begun from nothing, how, on
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one bright summer morning, when he had risen
early and saw the milkmen and bakers busy
distributing their comforts, the thought struck
him, what a good and pleasant thing it would
be, if some kind people would thus actively
and alertly serve the aliment of mind to as
needy customers—how the thought would every
morning visit his soul—how he gave it welcome—
and, finally, how he became the pioneer
in the cause, dandling, as it were, the profession
upon his knee, until it had arrived to its
present manhood, sending its missionaries into
every nook and corner of the heathen city.
Farewell, Hobbs! I had said more and better
things of thee, but my pen would drop
nothing but tears. Farewell! Thou hast left
this world of book-making, book-reading, and
book-peddling, and art gone, I trust, where
angels chant poetry, and the face of thy Maker
shall be to thee, for perusal, thy brightest book!
(Knickerbocker Magazine, July, 1835.)
I have wept for the death of the late Benjamin
Smith until I can weep no more, and I have
come to the conclusion to vent the superflux of
my grief in ink-drops. Ben. was a metropolitan
loafer, and a phenomenon. He was the ruling
luminary of a whole shoal of shag-tailed comets
that used to shoot madly about the terrestrial
firmament of New York. He was not a New
Yorker, though born, bred, and reared in this
town. He had a spirit beyond and above it. I
sometimes conjectured that he was stolen in
his infancy from Thomson's “Castle of Indolence,”
or that he was merely a transient visiter
from Rabelais' island, where industrious sluggards
are paid sixpence ha'penny a day for
hard sleeping. As a faithful historian, however,
I am compelled to state, that my hero did
actually come into the world by the connivance
of Susan and Samuel Smith, loafer and loafress
of this burgh—not exactly under a favorable
planet—but with the auspicious light of a
brown, sputtering tallow candle.
His education was not collegiate or academical.
It was obtained, most of it, in the open
air, without the superfluous expense of books,
ferules, or schoolmasters. In truth, he considered
flagellation as a serious hinderance to
the circulation of the intellectual fluids. He
could not believe that it constituted an essential
element in education; and he often averred, in
proof of his position, that he was acquainted
with a cart-horse that had been belabored all
his life-time, and yet was as ignorant as an ass
to this day! Ben., however, had a diploma to
show, written on sheepskin, in legible characters,
and signed by competent authority. He
offered one day to produce it, before me, by
stripping his jacket. I excused him.
Young Benjamin Smith—like all remarkable
young men—had original views of this world.
He considered it, in the first place, as a large
dormitory, or bedroom; in the second place, as
a stupenduous cook-shop; and, in the third, as
an unbounded loafing-ground. And these views
would he defend with the pertinacity of a congressman.
Ask him why the wharves and pier-heads
were constructed? “Fine places to
stretch in the sun!” was his answer. “Why
was the court of sessions established by the
legislature?” “To help and further sleeping.”
“Why ministers ordained and consecrated?”
“To encourage somnolence.” “Why
the corporation opened fair streets, laid sidewalks,
labelled the corners?” “To point out
the shortest cut to the best loafing-grounds.”
On ordinary occasions Smith was pedestrian,
but sometimes he could prevail on a crony in
the next grade of life above himself, to give him
an airing to Harlaem. These were his gala
days—the real holydays of his heart. “Farewell!
ye foot-pad loafers,” he would exclaim,
as he mounted the vehicle, “trudge on—trudge
on, and wear out your shoes! I am Christian
henceforth, and believe in Providence, in that
he has created horses!” Truly, he was a
great man in his tours to Harlaem, Kingsbridge,
and parts adjacent. He would sit in his friend's
carriage, on a cross-board (for his charioteer
was generally a friendly Irishman, on a journey
for a load of dirt), and bracing his feet with a
most determined air, would grasp the reins with
a fierceness, and draw in his ghost of a steed
with a nerve that often produced an electric
titter from the lookers-on. He was irresistible.
Smith was fond of music, and whistled every
other mile all the way. He took much pride in
this accomplishment, which he had almost cultivated
into a fine art by his assiduity. He
had carried it to such a pitch of perfection,
that he very often whistled for his dinner. He
told me when I last saw him, that he had been
trying his mouth on a piece of sentimental
music, and that it needed only one quaver and
a bar to make it complete. Alas, poor Ben.!
He is now gone. He fell the victim of an attempt
to whistle a dull senator's speech in Congress.
He was heard late at night, rehearsing;
the next morning he was found lying on his
back, with his mouth wide agape, and drawn
askew by the violence of the attempt. The
result of the crowner's 'quest was, that the
deceased came to his death by a long sentence
in Senator—'s last harangue.
I have forgotten thus far—an omission almost
unpardonable in a small novelist—to
sketch the person and habiliments of my hero.
I will “about it straight.”
Benjamin Smith, then, was a tall loafer, surmounted
with a well-woven and well-entangled
mat of hair, that proved dame nature no indifferent
hatter. His frame was a bundle of
rods, or straight pipe-stem bones, wired
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together with small ligaments, and swinging easily in
their sockets, to and fro, as he shuffled through
the street. He was tall, nay, gigantic, in an
upward direction; a peculiarity from which he
drew the ingenious inference that if angels
ever came from above (and here he would look
reverently up), he believed about their nighest
landing place would be his head! This procerity,
with his stationary habits, would have
rendered his crown a grand building spot for a
crow's nest, or the little Parnassus of a flock of
singing birds. He would have sold the fee-simple
for a gin sling, and have never harmed
an occupant in the world.
How shall I describe his dress? 'Tis like
drawing a note for a thousand dollars, with an
empty pocket to meet it. Alas! he had no
dress; nothing that could be considered a broad-cloth
synonym for the word—nothing that a
tailor would have dignified with the name.
The very alms-house pensioners would have
laughed at his variegated coat and unmentionables.
They were patches of color, and shreds
of nothing; the very ghosts of defunct habiliments;
indigo blue at the bottom, and red at
the top, the intervals interspersed with an assortment
of shades. He was a walking rainbow,
and an observer might have thought that
he had eyes in every inch of his body, from the
spots of flesh that peeped forth from the irregular
casements of his “looped and windowed raggedness.”
In the event of a war, in his time,
he would have been a fine mark for small shot.
Possessing these inimitable graces of person
and pantaloon—together with a large amount
of intellect, to which I have not alluded, on the
supposition that the shrewd reader would take
it for granted—I was surprised, and often expressed
such surprise to the surviving friends
of Smith, that he never was sent to the legislature;
for he was one of our distinguished
“high-binders,” and deserved promotion and a
good office. And from the exhibition of certain
gushes of genius, I am confident he would
not have spent a winter at the capitol, without
learning the difference between steam and
botany, and that coal-heaving and legislation
are two distinct departments of knowledge.
What was life to Ben Smith? A mere farce,
during which pea-nuts might be munched, a
nap taken, and a little laughter indulged. Some
might have doubted whether he had a soul, or
if any, a proper-sized one. Such cavillers should
consider that the accommodations for that ethereal
essence were not ample. There is a test
that brings out one's soul as easily and certainly
as the knuckle elicits a spark from the Leyden
jar, a small and inevitable event (for like
death, it comes sooner or later to all), that
shakes up and jostles out a man's spirit into
broad daylight, like a cork from a bottle, or a
bird from its nest. He loved. He rehearsed
his little two act pathetic comedy (for love
is made up of laughter and tears), in such bycorners
and strange places as poverty affords.
To him and his beloved, garrets must needs
be drawing-rooms, and public streets parlors.
Cupid furnished no perfumery or purple hangings
for my hero and his enamorata. The
courtship commenced in an alley, where the
lover saw his “fond one” bearing a basket of
cold victuals to a blind aunt. The attitude
was romantic, and the heart can not be always
on its guard. Subsequent interviews were had
at the pump. She stole slyly into his bosom,
and left her little miniature on his heart. It
was better framed than if in gold, and more
wisely; for those who have golden miniatures
of their mistresses, are apt to love gold better
than their mistress. Smith's chosen was a
small, dark-eyed girl, with a neck of snow, and
black tresses that lay upon it in happy contrast.
Her step was light and elastic, and her voice
bird-like, though uncultivated.
I will not insult humble love, by describing
her weather-worn and use-worn garments.
She was clothed in feeling, home-spun, indeed,
but heart-spun, as well, and worth all your
silks and jewels. They were wedded. It was
the very night before his melancholy demise,
which I would fain think I have drawn with a
just remembrance of his virtues. Poor girl!
She knew not that death's high-constable was
so near, and so soon to serve his warrant. She
would gladly have put in bail, but it was not
permitted her. Let me not open the vial of her
sorrows afresh. She is yet living, lowly, and
disconsolate.
A word touching the funeral of the departed.
His demise, for he was a royal ragamuffin,
spread universal sorrow through all ranks of
the loafer community. The very beggars' dogs
seemed to be afflicted and cast down, as if they
had lost a father. The hour of his burial was
fixed at four o'clock, P. M., on the day of his
death, in order that his gentlemen cronies might
be allowed good time to arise from bed, and
that they might return from the ceremony late
enough for a fashionable dinner. Supported
by two sturdy associates, his mortal remains
were escorted to a snug corner of Potter's
Field—the true Westminster Abbey of New
York paupers. No clergyman was present to
administer the rites of sepulture. A brother
loafer officiated, but not like an ordinary functionary.
With his companions, he had inspired
himself with tears at a neighboring temple of
spirits, and instead of the cold, stereotyped
tones of official sorrow, he gave out (in the
moving melting accents of poetical pauperized
pity), verse by verse, as is the manner in
methodist chapels, a “talented” requiem, of
which the following stanzas were all that I was
enabled to remember:
“Toll, toll the watch-house bell,
Sound loud the sad conch-shell,
For Ben. is gone!
He did no harm,—all's well;
A-whistling brave he fell,—
His loafing's done!
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“Weep docks, wharves, cotton-bags?
Ben greets no more with rags
Your honored beds;
A little here he lagged
Then to his heaven Ben jagged,
And dropped his shreds!”
Let me add one word of eulogy in prose.
Ben was no gentleman, for he had never pulled
any man's nose nor fought a duel; no Christian,
for he never sung psalms loudly in church, nor
disturbed a whole congregation with the ostentatious
clink of his silver in the plate; no merchant,
for he was totally ignorant of that finest
of fine arts, the art of splitting one sixpence into two; no philanthropist, for he was not a
member of the society for the promotion of selfrighteousness;
and no politician, for he had
two eyes. Neither was he a learned man, for
he could eat pudding without knowing how it
was compounded. He was simply what I
have set forth, “The late Benjamin Smith,
Loafer.”
(Knickerbocker Magazine, Nov., 1836.)
“Some were for the utter extirpation
Of linsey-woosley in the nation.”
—Hudibras.
I trust I shall not be suspected of the purpose,
in this paper, of putting an insult upon
the respectable fraternity to whom it is addressed.
On the contrary, I have hopes, built
upon the justice of my object and the purity of
my wishes, to win them over to the view I intend
to take, and to convince them that a refined
and nice moral sense, as well as a lofty
and philosophical comprehension of the fitness
of things, requires at their hands an immediate
abandonment of the profession in which they
are at present engaged. I trust to be able to
prove to them that it is their duty to break in
pieces their lapboards, take down their signs,
give their iron geese the wing, and bid a long
farewell to skein and needle.
Beside the urgent necessity resting upon
them of restoring themselves, physically, to that
erect posture from which they have fallen, I
shall bring before them reasons more purely
addressed to their understanding.
It is clear, then, in the first place, that tailors
came in with the fall. Adam, in his primitive
condition, ennobled by the complete development
of every power of the mind and nerve
of the body—a profounder philosopher than Bacon—
superior (in all probability) in imagination
to Shakspere—as a musician, sweeter than
Mozart, and, in fact, as a universal handicraftsman,
to all the world since—Adam—what
was the secret, or, at least, the development
of all his power? He went undressed! If
I may so speak, without irreverence to the
founder of our family, he was the Great Shirtless.
His descendants degenerated. They were
trowsered and coated. And this was the first
sad symptom of the fall. Had not pantaloons
been introduced, there had been hope for man.
The downfall was not complete—the destruction
was not irremediable—the last chain was
not irrevocably bound upon us—till Adam drew
on his first pair of indispensables. Of immorality
—“the primitive tradition reaches
As far as Adam's first green breeches.”
In making up the account of our depravity, we
must halt here. Farther backward we can not
journey.
Adam, before this, might have perpetrated
the indecency of talking Dutch in the Garden;
but we have no records—no authentic history
of that absurdity. We begin with the surmounting
of the articles set forth in the couplet.
He drew them on, not like a modern juvenile,
with exultant eyes and eager limbs (though
they were his first suit), but with sorrowing and
tears. Through the two narrow vistas down
which his legs descended, as through the tubes
of a telescope, he saw the degradation of his
race. Bloody-visaged war and hypocritic peace,
pestilence and famine, disease and death, peered
at him through those twin openings.
Oh! had that fatal suit never been donned,
how glorious a spectacle would this our world
present! It would have swarmed with tall and
pure intelligences “only less than the angels.”
But mark the consequences! Cain becomes a
butcher, and Abel a huckster—afterward, the
first a vagabond, the second a carcass.
Such were the disgraces which the first clothing
put upon our humanity. Everyage, since the
ejectment of our first parent from his territories,
has seen their renewal. If man had remained to
this hour unclothed and unshirted, he had been
still pure and happy. But misery and dress go together—
they are natural yokefellows. Whenever
I see a pair of breeches I think of original sin,
and smallclothes remind me of total depravity.
A frock-coat is to me the exponent of damnation,
and a tight-bodied one the sign and token of
eternal torture.
Is it not our duty, then, to put away from us
these mementoes of our shame? to cast to the
winds these daily slaves of Philip, whose ever
business it is to babble in our ears, “Thou
must die!” Shall we endure these provocative
monitors? shall we put up with these woollen
impertinences?—manufactured disturbers of
peace?—these hangers-on?
I think not. Better visions dawn upon me.
I see the Naked Age approaching. I see the
time when tailors' bills shall be no more, or become
mere matters of history—remembered,
only to be classed with the witches and goblins
which affrighted our ancestors.
The argument against clothing assumes, if
possible, a still more serious aspect, when examined
in its connexion with the dignity of man.
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It must be confessed, that all objects are pure,
in proportion as they are free from contingents
and adjuncts. The diamond only when cleaned
from its imbedding earth exhibits its full
lustre, and the pearl shines not forth in its
clear, native whiteness, till disinterred from the
coffining oyster. Sir Isaac Newton was of
opinion that the only sorts of chaste matter on
earth were certain fine particles, or impenetrable
finite atoms, and that all other matter
was a mere mongrel. He considered the pure
existence of atoms to be in a state of undress.
I agree with the venerable author of the pippin
(sometimes called the gravitating) philosophy.
Man is among the corruptible—the adulterated—
the impure.
There is something to me ludicrous in the
very physical structure of man. He is a
“forked radish.” It always seemed to me some
strange error or accident in his formation, that
he was divided and cleft at the bottom. It
would better fulfil my notions of symmetry, if
he were fashioned column-like and progressed
with one leg. By having two, it would seem as
if, in some convulsion of nature he had split up.
My notions of a perfect being, gentle reader—
to let thee a little into some new mysteries—
is (abandoning the columnar doctrine), as a
shapeless and invisible cloud, containing in itself
the power of motion, and floating about,
guided by mere impulse. I would have it possess
a full source of harmony, and capable of
breathing music and sweet sounds at will. It
should journey to and fro, in company with the
seasons; it should rest under the shadow of a
mountain in Greece, and melt into crimson and
golden hues in our own far west. Sometimes
it should glide noiselessly amid the flowers, the
rare and pleasant flowers of England, or over
the famed war-fields of old France. It should
possess the perfect power of metempsychosis
or transition; at one time it might cool, far up
in the ether, into all the delicious freshness of
snow, and at another dissolve in all the sweet
summer tenderness of rain.
But mark me; it should be no common cloud,
this perfect creature, this paragon, this phœnix
of mine. It should bear about in the heavens
no semblance of garments. It should figure
forth to the clown or the school-boy's brain no
rude monster bedighted in fantastical apparel;
no celestial Dutchmen; no well-breeched harlequin;
no valorous chieftains, with black
cocked hats, made of wind, with swords of vapor.
No; but there, pillowed on the air, my
human cloud, my immortal fragment of ether,
my animate and beautiful substitute for man,
should sit and become intellectual with thought.
“Beautiful cloud! I would I were with thee,
In thy calm way o'er land and sea;
To rest on thy unrolling skirts and look
On earth as on an open book!”
By looking at your next neighbor, you will
soon see that he is no such thing as my perfect
and symmetrical being. You will not only see
that he is a little toy, moulded of clay, but that
he is also tricked out in that inhuman absurdity
styled dress. From the chin to the heels, he is
a tailor's ape. What an abasement!—how desperate
a degradation!
Man, it seems, can not be man without this
pitiful adjunct; he is a tree that blooms not
without this foliage. And yet it irks him; it
it is a bondage to him, to be cased up thus
within wooden walls. His soul lives in a double
prison; it is egg within egg; first a shell of
clay, and next an outer covering upon that of
cloth. How is it possible for orators and
divines to reach this doubly-defended nucleus?
Can a refined sentiment make its way through
broadcloth? or will a pointed thought, or fierce
denunciation pierce the solidity of a Petersham?
Man goeth about bearing his own shame as a
burden upon his back; and yet he aspires to
mate with the angels. Think you they stoop to
these appendages? That they walk the heavenly
avenues, cultivating the cock of a hat, or
staking the happiness of their immortal natures
on the roll of a collar? No: the higher we
ascend the scale of intelligence, the less do we
find of this vain incumbrance.
Even the brute has a lesson for us here. The
horse—does he wear aught over his leathern
jerkin? And have I not seen Sir Goat strut
forth with only his mohair cloak cast over his
shoulder, with much of native and dignified
simplicity?
Let us sift our notions nicely, then, and with
candor, and we shall speedily learn that we
have an instinct within us which preacheth
against clothing, at least against the modern
modification of that vileness.
Perhaps we may conceive, with some show
of reason, of Alcibiades promenading our
Broadway with a cane and whiskers, or the
Emperor Otho arranging his curls in faultless
mirrors; but what say you, reader, to Socrates
in the Portico philosophizing in a round-about?
or Cicero walking the Forum (forecasting an
oration against Catiline) in a pair of top-boots?
or Plato in nankeens? or Pythagoras
in a swallow-tail? Hercules in small-clothes?
or Homer (pauper though he was) in a dicky?
It is beyond you—is it not?
Post Scriptum.—When I had laid the first
timbers, as it were of the above essay, I mentioned
my views (such as I expected to set forth,
and have set forth here), to a bosom friend of
mine, confidentially. I think he must, in some
failing moment, have broken his trust. It appears
the tailors have “got wind” of the forthcoming
argument, and are beginning to take
steps to prevent the dissemination of its doctrines.
The following I take from an evening
paper:
“Notice.—To Tailors.—The tailors of the city of
New York are respectfully invited to attend a meeting
of the trade to be held at Jefferson House, on Monday
evening next, when business of importance will be laid before
them.”
The mark at which this points is palpable.
-- 313 -- p265-316
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I am farther corroborated in the belief that
some movement is on foot among the Thimbles,
from the circumstance that when the other day
I was taking my customary afternoon's walk, I
was met by a tailor's journeyman, who, in the
usual hobbling style, was hurrying home with
a coat on his left arm. As I passed him, the
fellow, who by some mode or other had become
acquainted with my person, put his unemployed
hand into his 'hind pocket, and shook out his
coat-tail deliberately in my face!
(Knickerbocker Magazine, April, 1837.)
On the second step of a “stoop” in Broad-way,
sat Quigg—Solomon Quigg, ex-member
of the nineteenth congress of the United
States—casting about in his mind, like a melancholy
heron, the means and devices for procuring
a breakfast. While his large person expanded
over the solid bench whereon he sat,
his ponderous chin rested on one hand, and the
other reposed in his breeches pocket; his eyes,
meantime, travelling here and there, as if in
search of something to silence the voice of
hunger.
His dress was a congress of absurdities—a
pie-bald court, to which every tailor's shop in
the city seemed to have sent its representative.
While one leg of his blue pantaloons draggled
on the ground, the other, apparently of a more
aspiring disposition, mounted to the very knee.
Half his coat was of a mixed gray, while
the other moiety was of a lively crimson.
His vest, originally the gift of a strolling player—
whom Quigg had once patronised at
Washington—had been so often remodelled
and amended, that, like the constitution of a
small debating society, scarce a shred of the
original articles remained. The countenance
of Quigg had certainly been once expressive;
now, the only feature which retained a claim to
that appellative, was a bulbous nose, which
stood out from his face like the boom of a vessel,
with a light run out at its extremity; a beacon
of warning to all those who sail the sea of
wine, lest one day when they dream not, shipwreck
may befall them. The mouth, which
had doubtless in days past been bearded with
scorn, and stiff with haughty feeling, now hung
loose and agape, like an old lady's worn-out
purse. On the summit of his head rested an
ancient, bell-shaped hat, the crown of which
had partly given way, and lifted up and down,
like the lid of a pipkin, with every passing gust
of wind. It seemed to be a convenience, by
which the wearer's more devout thoughts might
find a shorter road to heaven.
At times as Quigg sat thus, with an elbow
on his knee, a tear, despite a certain effort at
self-control, would steal from the corner of his
eye, and resting for a moment on a crow-foot
wrinkle underneath it, run down his cheek beside,
just so as to escape his mouth, over his
chin, and fall to the ground.
His aspect expressed, to me at least, a certain
regret for the past, and doubt of the future.
Quigg the congressman was now but a ragged
gentleman—a loafer. As he sat upon that cold
stone, weeping in tatters, he was, unconsciously,
the representative of a constituency larger
than his original political one; namely, of that
vast body known as decayed politicians—a red-faced,
tavern-haunting tribe; fishes who live
in an ocean of liquor, and yet are always
athirst; the cast-off leaders of parties; demagogues
out of favor; office-holders thrust into
that direst Erebus—out-of-office. The cushion
of state Quigg had exchanged for a more substantial
bench in the open sunshine. No longer
a servant of the people, he was the lacquey
of his own sweet will. Abandoning the dresscircle
of fashionable life, where he had once
revolved a special planet, he looked upon it
from an humble corner in the pit. And yet
hunger was not so easily to be got over. It is
a creditor who takes up its mansion within ourselves,
and devours our very seat of life, till it
be paid the uttermost farthing. Quigg was in
a perplexity.
The room into which Solomon Quigg was
ushered that night—when he had passed
triumphantly through the Marengo, the Austerlitz,
and the Waterloo of the day—breakfast,
dinner, and supper—was an upper chamber of
an old tavern in the second ward of our metropolis.
The tavern had once been the head-quarters
of a dominant political party. At a
glance, Quigg read its history. On one side,
the remnant of candle which he held in his
hand gleamed on the dusty fragment of a flag
which had erst waved proudly, illumined with
the national stars and stripes. This was rolled
up, and on it, as a pillow, Quigg laid his unkempt
head. Near his right hand, on the floor,
reposed a broken fiddle, which had once given
forth cheering music to the freemen of the
second ward. Against the instrument, reclined
the relics of a tin-pan, half through the bottom
of which was thrust a mouldering drum-stick,
which in its better days had summoned from the
cold metal sounds that stirred many a voter's
bosom, and filled many an urchin heart with
keen delight. In different corners of the
humble attic, hung from pegs and nails, flags,
banners, ensigns, and devices of a thousand
kinds, setting forth, in monstrous capitals the
virtues and qualifications of favorite candidates.
But—and this struck the somnolent eyes of
Quigg with most force—on the corner of one
of the tattered banners were the figures 18—;
the very year in which Quigg himself had been
elected, after a fierce struggle, to the American
Congress. As he stretched himself for sleep,
his hand by some mischance, struck against a
-- 314 -- p265-317
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modest pine box, which stood perched just over
his head; it came to the floor, and from its
bowels rolled forth a heap of dusty papers,
folded like doctors' prescriptions. He seized
one of them, and on it found:
For Congress.
SOLOMON QUIGG.
Here was a theme for thought. Quigg now
lay, as it were, before a wizard glass, over
which passed in gloomy procession the achievements,
the glories, and the triumphs, of his
past life. In contrast with that bright langsyne,
he felt the double bitterness of his present
condition. His soul began to stir afresh,
and to feel the throbbings of a revived ambition.
A thousand plans and enterprises crowded his
brain, and all that night he lay restless; meditating
high schemes, and devising new ladders,
in this his Jacob's vision, by which to reach
the heaven of his desire. Quigg was once
more an ambitious man.
On the bosom of the East river, cabled to
the wharf, floated a light sloop, with its deck
carefully scrubbed down, and its red flag floating
gayly in the wind. Gently upon the water
lay its cool image. From its anchorage to the
wharf its tall mast reached, and tipped with
its wavy shadow the countenance of a quiet
idler, whose head rested on a decayed pile,
while his feet hung carelessly over the wharf's
end. On board the graceful vessel, extended
flounderwise, with his twinkling eyes peering
at the water over the sloop's stern, was stretched
Solomon Quigg. A group of blue-fish had gathered
just before him. Perhaps they expected a
congressional effort. Ever and anon, Quigg
would cast an eye toward the shore, as if
in momentary expectation of the arrival of
some personage or the turning-up of some
matter of importance. About the time when
the guard on board a man-of-war's man, which
lay anchored in the middle of the stream, had
sounded the three o'clock bell, a group of vagabond
and listless persons began to gather before
the vessel on whose deck Quigg reposed.
Rapidly, dozen by dozen, their numbers increased.
Every moment the collection became
more extended and more motley. Stevedores,
wharfingers, a stray customhouse officer—old
gentlemen who had come to the neighboring
market for fish—all aided in completing the
human assortment.
Precisely at five, Quigg arose from his recumbent
posture, ascended the rigging to the maintop,
there took his stand, turned toward his auditory,
took off his bell-shaped hat, cast it on
the deck, and made a low and solemn bow,
which was received by the vast congregation
with nine cheers. He then addressed them in
a short speech, something in his old style of
eloquence.
He could not resist the temptation of so high
a pulpit. It was better, in that respect, than
the floor of the house; it gave him a more commanding
view of his audience. He closed his
harangue with a touching allusion to the difficulty
of obtaining a subsistence, and the brevity
of life—and leaped! Through the air, like
an arrow, Quigg descended to the water. His
head cleaved its glassy surface; the lookers-on
beheld his descending form, as, for an instant,
his white feet glimmered above the river and
then disappeared. Five minutes elapsed, and
Quigg arose not. The crowd thought this a
special feat, and gave three cheers. Five minutes
more passed, and yet Quigg reascended not
to the light. The feat was miraculous; the
assemblage burst into three cheers again, heartier
and more protracted than ever. A few philosophers
among the audience began now to doubt
the reappearance of the aquatic diver—the performance
was too good to be fictitious. Another
five minutes elapsed; an idle friend of
Quigg's stepped out from the rabble and began
to whimper.
The sun went down, and Solomon Quigg
arose not. He had made his last dive. The
river was searched, but no mortal relic discovered.
In the soft river-mud he had found a
ready coffin. In its liquid embraces slept for
ever the person of Solomon Quigg, ex-member of
the nineteenth congress of the United States.
(American Monthly Magazine, Jan., 1838.)
I have noticed, any time these last ten years,
a singular-looking creature—some would call
him goblin—prowling about the purlieus of
Theatre alley. This is his place of most frequent
resort, but by no means his only one. In
this region he has established his ordinary domicil.
In the dark hall that stretches in the rear
of the Park theatre he stalks most at home, in
a sort of grim, epic grandeur, as if he held that
region as his own. Bell's printing office, or
some kindred place in the neighborhood, is his
castle, the rest of New York his parks and
pleasure-grounds. This very negro seems to
be ubiquitous. Go whithersoever you will,
Rumbout is there. He mingles with every festivity,
and makes himself an element in every
kind of business or pleasure that goes on in
this great city. Carry yourself with the utmost
speed to any part of the metropolis, there, in
some shape or other, will turn up this African
Ubiquity. Stroll, ride, fish, walk, sail, he presents
himself as naturally, and in as good
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[figure description] Page 315.[end figure description]
keeping with the scenery you may be amid as the sky
itself, or the grass, the water, or the pavement.
You are in Castle garden to see the balloon
ascend; there is a vast crowd, innumerable
faces, colors of dress, shapes of hat, canes,
children, dogs, &c.; and yet you feel that the
group is not complete, and that something is
wanting to the perfect success of the aeronaut;
and, just as he is about to slip himself loose
from the earth, your unsatisfied eye falls on
Rumbout, tugging at one of the cords, with his
hands entangled, on the eve of ascending as a
sort of unwilling plummet at the end of the
rope to steady the air-ship. A happy voyage to
thee, Rumbout; and be not the fate of Cocking
thine!
Again, you are at the Parade ground, in the
extreme northern quarter of the city. Before
you flash the gaudy coats, gay plumes, glittering
sabres of officers and privates; the mimic
machinery of battle moves with admirable precision
in admirable time. A certain solemnity
hangs like a cloud over the place, as it might in
actual engagement, when Death rides out on
his white horse, distributing his darts on either
side. Suddenly a mirthful roar shakes the field.
You thrust through to learn the cause, and behold!
the omnipresent Rumbout's arms dexterously
pinioned together behind by the bayonet
of the guard. He looks like a roasted fowl
brought to the table with his arms reversed.
He had attempted, with his naturally eager and
inquisitive spirit, to get a nearer insight into
the mysteries of warfare, and this is the result.
Chatham square is a singular locality—“a
most ancient and fishlike” place. Any time in
the day before two in the afternoon, you will
see there as motley crowds as may be brought
together in Christendom. As every one knows,
it is the vendue of infirm furniture, disabled
chairs, superannuated stoves, decayed bedsteads,
neckless bottles, pots without legs,
frameless looking-giasses, shirts without owners,
owners without shirts. Finer voices, in
some of the ordinary keys, you will nowhere
find than belong to the eloquent auctioneers of
the square. There is one, I know, hath the
voice of a clarion; it stirs the spirit to its very
depths, and is like a sudden call to battle. In
a clear noon, when the wind is laid and he lifts
it up: “How much! gentlemen, how much!
how much for this small piece of spotted calico;
gentlemen and ladies, how much!” the
neighboring buildings shake to their base with
the sound, the hackmen pause and listen; Catharine
street, with its living tides, is silent, and
the cartmen are astounded in their frocks. If
there is any spare coin lurking in any secret
corner of the pocket of any human being within
reach of his lungs, it will be tolled from its
“hidden residence” by this magician's spell.
And among the buyers there is at times a voice
to be heard scarcely inferior to his. A watch
is up for sale; or, rather, I should say, that
which was the coffin once of the living works,
the vital parts of a chronometer; a huge, mon
strous, unformed shape of metal. Whether tin
or silver be the main ingredient in its composition,
is not to be decided rashly. A sweet, fluent
voice in the throng, however, assumes the
decision; “Threepence per pound without the
works, three and a half with!” It is the bugle
voice of our friend Rumbout.
I have been out in many snowstorms, and
always met Rumbout running hither and thither,
half bent, with his hands in his pocket or a
snow-shovel on his shoulder, looking for a
“small job.” It always excites odd feelings
in me to see a negro in a snowstorm. Innumerable
strange and jostling contrasts bustle
into my brain, and make themselves busy in
framing a many-colored web of humorous association.
The absurdity is so bold between the
pitch-black animalculæ moving about on the
surface, and the white masses piling themselves
around him on every side, and pressing upon
him from above; as if the heavens would
smother him to death with his opposite—a horrid
mummy, wrapped in winding-sheet wide
as creation. Foul blot on the page of nature.
Death's-head in the midst of gay bells and merry
shows. Black swan on the clear stream of
Sterchio, dimming its pellucid waters. Goblin,
dungeon-intruder into the heaps of half-molten
silver (as are these brilliant snowheaps), stealing
upon them like a dark-visaged thief flushed
with the hope of plunder. It seems as if the
earth should gape and swallow up this inconsistency—
this living foe to her fairness and
whiteness; yet Rumbout hobbles along, knowing
and dreaming none of these things. My
vein in this sketch is episode on episode.
I love, in a clear summer afternoon, to glide
up the East river in a light boat, and, dropping
anchor near the classic regions of Hurlgate,
partake the pleasant and contemplative joys of
angling. Many such sunny hours have I spent,
leaning over the boat's side, pretending to be
on the watch for the finny prey, but, in truth,
deep in a meditation on some bygone scene, or
building up fairy palaces from the ooze below,
and peopling them with fishlike nymphs, in
half dresses—water-colored silks—with pretty
round faces, and a train to their garments as
long as a queen's. And every time that I have
thus occupied my fancy, about the middle of
my revery I have heard the careful dash of an
oar, the gentle dropping of a line in water, and
looking up, have immediately beheld—Rumbout
the ubiquitous.
He is never out of place. In crowds, look
for Rumbout. Of processions, shows, wassailings,
riots (in an innocent way), feastings, fastings,
mobs, multitudes, he is a natural constituent.
He has a face that becomes all these
things, and, like the painter who wrought a
hand, in which he was skilful, prominently into
all his pictures, so Rumbout works in his
picturesque visnomy upon the ground of these
numberless exhibitions and diversions. I doubt
much whether a street-organ ever sounded in
our goodly city out of hearing of Rumbout. He
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listens afar off, and soon hies to the spot. No
band of musicians ever played in our thorough-fares
if Rumbout were missing. He is the
man that forms friendships with the drummer's
boy, and takes liberties with the third flute-player!
It is he that asked the captain of the
Flying guards, “how much he paid a yard for
the flannel in his coat?”—meaning his red uniform.
No presence, however imposing—no
authority, however grave or dignified, can
awe down the spirit of the immortal negro. He
has bearded the recorder in two petty larceny
suits; and has threatened Mr. Hays (the ancient
Hays) with a drubbing! Omnipresent,
Rumbout seems also to be immortal. He has
been called “Old Rumbout,” I have been informed,
since the year 1800. He is “Apollo—
ever young.” He has never looked younger
than at present; he will never look older. The
principles of life and youth seem to be rooted
down deep in the constitution of Rumbout.
These plants seem to flourish best in that rich,
black mould. Time can not pluck them up. He
appears to have known but one season of life.
Surly winter, sad autumn, capricious spring,
have not visited him.
He is an incarnation and creature of the
golden summer; gay with lowering clouds that
seem more than they mean, prodigal, content,
with fruit and blossom mingled; for Rumbout
has never seen want yet. Like the great sun,
in his favored season that we have spoken of,
he works leisurely, making a long circuit in his
labors—slowly, pleasantly, from the morning
to the eve. I think Rumbout was educated a
rag-gatherer. He goes through his vocation
more as if it were an elegant recreation than a
gainful mode of life. To appropriate the language
of the studio, there is a delicacy in his
touch, a mellowness and freedom in his style of
handling, and a picturesqueness in his grouping,
that render Rumbout the Raphael of his craft.
END OF MISCELLANIES.
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Mathews, Cornelius, 1817-1889 [1843], The various writings (Harper & Brothers, New York) [word count] [eaf265].
