CHAPTER VII. More pure azure.
Highfield sought Lucia, and found her sitting at
a window, which looked out upon the beautiful bay,
where the fair and noble Hudson basks its beauties
for awhile in the sun, before it loses itself for ever
in the vast solitudes of the pathless sea. It was an
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April morning, such as sometimes appears in the disguise
of sunshine and zephyrs, to cheat us into a belief,
that laughing jolly spring is come again. The
bay was one wide waveless mirror, along whose
surface lay here and there a little lazy mist lolling
in the warm sunbeams, or sometimes scudding along
before a frolic breeeze that rose in playful vigour,
and then died away in a moment. In some places,
the vessels appeared as if becalmed among the
clouds, their proportions looming in imposing
magnitude through the deceptive mists; and in
others, you might see them exhaling the damps and
fogs condensed on their sails and decks, in clouds of
snow-white vapour. Here and there, you could
trace the course of a steamboat to the Kills, or the
Quarantine, by a long pennon of dark smoke, slowly
expanding in the dampness of the circumambient
air, and anon see her shoot, as if by magic from
the distant obscurity. The grass had just begun to
put forth its spires of tender green; the trees to assume
an almost imperceptible purple tint, from the
expansion of the buds; the noisy city lads were
spinning tops, flying kites, or shooting marbles, in
the walks; and now and then, a little feathered
stranger, cheated by the genial hour into a belief
that spring was come, chirped merrily among the
leafless branches.
Lucia was at the open window—her rosy cheek
leaning pensively on her snowy hand. She had just
finished reading, for the twentieth time, the pathetic
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and interesting effusion of Mr. Goshawk. All that
she could understand from it was, that he was very,
very miserable, about something, she knew not what;
and the very mystery of his sorrows invested them
with an indescribable indefinable interest. Not but
what our heroine had her suspicions, and those very
suspicions increased her sympathy a hundred fold.
“Unfortunate man!” would she say to herself, “he
is consuming in the secret fires kindled in his bosom
by the intense ardour of his genius, the acute sensibilities
of his heart!”
Highfield was one of the most amiable of lovers,
who I must be allowed to say, nine out of ten deserve
to be turned out of doors by the fair objects
of their persecutions, once a day at least. If they
are in doubt, they are either stupidly silent or perversely
disagreeable; if they are jealous, they look
and act just like fools; and if successful, there is
an insulting security, a triumphant self-conceit, that,
to a woman gifted with the becoming pride of the
sex is altogether insufferable. I can tell a successful
wooer as far off as I can see him. He does nothing
but admire his leg, as he trips along; and you would
fancy he saw his mistress in every looking-glass.
But Highfield was gay, good humoured, and sensible.
He did not think it worth while to make
himself hated because he was in love; nor to increase
the preference of his mistress for another, by
treating her with neglect or ill manners. True,
these things are considered the best evidence of
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sincere passion; but I would advise young women to
beware of a man whom love makes unamiable; as
I myself would beware of one, whom the intoxication
of wine made turbulent and quarrelsome. Both
love and wine draw forth the inmost nature of man.
“Well, Lucia,” said Highfield, with a familiar
frankness, which his intimacy and near relationship
warranted—“Well, Lucia, have you begun my
watch chain yet?”
“No,” said she, sighing.
“Well, my coz, when do you mean to begin it?”
“I don't know,” replied she languidly—“one of
these days I believe.”
“What ails you, Lucia—are you not well?”
“Not, not very—I have got a sort of oppression,
a heaviness, a disposition to sigh; something
here,” pressing her hand on her bosom, from whence
peeped forth a little corner of Goshawk's effusion.
Highfield saw it, and the blood rushed into his
cheeks; but he quelled the rising fiend of jealousy,
and asked, in a tone of deep interest, if she would
not take a walk with him on the Battery. She declined,
in a tone of a quiet indifference.
“Shall we go, and call on Miss Appleby?” Lucia
was all life and animation. She put on her hat,
her shawl, and the thousand et-ceteras, that go to
the constitution of a fashionable lady; and tripped
away like a little fairy. She expects to meet Goshawk
there, thought Highfield; but he neither pouted,
or was rude to his cousin on the way. Nay, he
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exerted all his wit and pleasantry, and before they
arrived, Lucia thought to herself she would begin
to net the watch chain that very evening. They
found all the azures, except Mr. Goshawk, assembled
at one of the drawing room windows, Mrs. Petticoats
and all, clamourously reading, and clamourously
applauding, some verses, written on a pane of
glass, with a diamond pencil. The reader shall not
miss them. They ran as follows:
Curs'd be the sun—'tis but a heavenly hell!
Curs'd be the moon, false woman's planet pale;
Curs'd the bright stars, that man's wild fortunes tell;
And curs'd the elements! Oh! I could rail
At power, and potentates, and paltry pelf,
And, most of all, at that vile wretch, myself!
What are the bonds of life, but halters tied?
What love, but luxury of bitter woe?
What man, but misery personified?
What woman, but an angel fall'n below?
What hell but heaven—what heav'n but hell above?
What love, but hate—what hate, but curdled love?
What's wedlock, but community of ill?
What single blessedness, but double pain?
What life's best sweets, but a vile doctor's pill?
What life itself, but dying, o'er and o'er again?
And what this earth, the vilest, and the last,
On which the planets, all their offals cast?
“Oh! doubly curs'd—
Here, it would seem, the bard stopped to take
breath; overcome, either by his own exertions, or
finding there was nothing left for him to curse.
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“I never heard such delightful swearing,” cried
Miss Appleby.
“What charming curses!” cried Miss Overend.
“What touching misanthropy!” cried Mr. Paddleford.
“What powerful writing!” cried Puddingham.
“What glowing meteors!” cried Mrs. Coates,
determined not mistake meteors for metaphors, this
time.
Lucia said nothing; but the tumults of her bosom
told her nobody could write such heart-rending lines
but Mr. Goshawk.
“Don't you think them equal to Lord Byron?”
said Miss Appleby, to Highfield.
“Very likely, madam, Lord Byron wrote a vast
deal of heartless fustian.”
“Heartless fustian!” screamed Miss Appleby,
and “heartless fustian!” echoed the rest of the
azures, with the exception of Lucia, who determined
not to commence the watch-chain that evening, if
ever.
“Fustian! do you call such poetry fustian; so
full of powerful writing, and affording such delicious
excitement? For my part, I can't live without
excitement of some kind or other,” said Miss
Overend.
“What kind of excitement do you mean, madam,”
said Highfield, mischievously, “the Morgan
excitement or the Stephenson excitement?”
“Phsaw, Mr. Highfield, you are always
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ridiculing sentiment. I mean the excitement of powerful
writing, powerful feeling, powerful passion,
grief, joy, rage, despair, madness, misanthropy,
pain, pleasure, anticipation, retrospection, disappointment,
hope, and—and—every thing that creates
excitement. By the by, they say the author of
Redwood is coming out with a new novel. I wonder
what it is about.”
“I don't know,” answered Highfield; “but I
will venture to predict it will be all that is becoming
in a sensible, well bred, well educated, delicate
woman, neither misled by a false taste nor affected
sentiment.”
“Pooh!” said the great Puddingham, “there is
no fire in her works.”
“Nor brimstone either,” said Highfield.
“Nor murder,” said Miss Appleby.
“Nor powerful writing,” said Miss Overend.
“Nothing to make the heart burst like a barrel
of gunpowder,” said little Mrs. Petticoats.
“Perhaps so,” replied Highfield, “but a book
may be worth something, without either fire, murder,
or gunpowder in it.”
Here the discussion was cut short by the entrance
of Mr. Goshawk, who bowed languidly to the company,
walked languidly to a sofa, and, flinging
himself listlessly down, leaned pensively upon his
head, and sighed most piteously. Mr. Goshawk
was one of the most extraordinary men living. He
hated the world, yet could not live a day without
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attracting its notice in some way or other; he sighed
for solitude, yet took every opportunity of being in
a crowd; and though confessedly the most miserable
of mortals, was never so happy as when every body
was admiring his secret sorrows. He had thrown
himself accidentally by the side of Lucia.
“Ah! Mr. Goshawk,” said she, “we've found
you out!”
Goshawk knew as well what she meant as she did
herself; but he looked at her with the most absent,
vacant, ignorant wonder it was possible for any man
to assume, as he answered.
“Found me out, Miss Lee?”
“Yes, yes; the verses—the beautiful verses, written
with a diamond pencil, on the pane of glass:
you need not deny it; nobody but yourself could
have written such powerful poetry.”
“No, no; you can't deny it, Mr. Goshawk;
the foot of Hercules is in it,” cried Miss Appleby;
and the opinion was echoed by all present. Whereupon
Mr. Goshawk acknowledged that, being that
morning depressed by a dead weight of insupportable
melancholy, he had walked forth into Miss
Appleby's drawing room, and, finding no one there,
had relieved his overfraught heart, in those unpremeditated
strains. The azures applied their cambric
handkerchiefs to their eyes, and pitied poor Mr.
Goshawk, for labouring under such a troublesome
excess of sentimental sadness.
The conversation then took a different turn;
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interrupted occasionally by the assurances of Mr.
Goshawk, that his verses were all written on the
spur, and under the impress, of the moment; though
we, as authors knowing the secrets of all our brethren,
are ready to make affidavit, that he never wrote
a line, without cudgelling his poor brains into
mummy, and spurring his Pegasus till his sides ran
blood.
“So there is a new Waverly coming out,”
quoth Puddingham, who was deep in booksellers'
secrets, “I am told, one of the principal characters
is Charles the fifth.”
“What he that was beheaded at Whitehall slip?”
asked Mrs. Coates.
“No, my dear madam,” said Highfield, “he that
resigned his crown before he lost his head.”
“How I delight to read novels in which there is
plenty of kings and queens; 'tis so refined and
genteel, to be in such good society,” said Miss
Overend.
“I never get tired of kings and queens, let them
be ever so stupid,” said Miss Appleby; “every
thing they say is so clever, and every thing they do,
so dignified.”
“Well, for my part,” said Highfield, “to me
nothing is so vulgar an expedient of authorship, as
that of introducing the reader into the society of
great names, and making them talk, not like themselves,
but like the author. In this manner, Rochester
becomes a dull debauchee; Bolingbroke, a prosing
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blockhead; and the greatest wits of the age, as
stupid as the writer. For my part, I am tired of
seeing this vulgar parade of regal and titled realities
introduced as shadows to our acquaintance; and
have it in serious contemplation, unless I should
happen to fall into a cureless, causeless melancholy,
to write a novel, in which the principal actors shall
be gods, and the common people, kings and queens:
Queen Elizabeth shall lace Juno's corsets; Alexander
the great trim Jupiter's whiskers; Mary queen
of Scots enact a beautiful bar-maid; and Charlemagne,
a crier of Carolina potatoes.”
“Then you don't mean to recognise any distinctions
in mere mortal society?” asked Lucia, amused
in spite of herself with this banter.
“Why, I don't know. I have some thoughts of
a sort of geological, instead of genealogical arrangement,
to consist of the primitive, the secondary, and
the alluvial. The fashionable primitives shall be
those who carry their pedigrees back into oblivion;
whose origin is entirely unknown; the secondary
will consist of such as have not had time to forget
their honoured ancestors; and the alluvial, composed
of the rich washings of the other two, which
have so lately made their appearance above water,
that there has been no time for them to become barren
and good for nothing.” Highfield was now
called off by Miss Appleby.
Lucia appeared so much amused with this whimsical
arrangement, that Goshawk, who, though the
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most abstracted of human beings, never for a
moment forgot himself or his vanity, thought it high
time to interfere.
“A clever young man that—a very clever young
man,” drawled he, “quite pleasant, but superficial;
no energy, no pathos, no powerful passion, no
enthusiasm, without which there can be no such
thing as genius. Give me the man,” cried he, with
a fat and greasy flow of sonorous words, “give me
the man to whom the croaking of a cricket is the
signal for lofty meditation, and the fall of a leaf, a
text for lone and melancholy abstraction; one who
is alone in the midst of a crowd, and surrounded
when alone by myriads of sparkling imps of thought,
millions of beings without being, and thoughts
without outline or dimensions; one to whom shadows
are substances, and substances, shadows—
to whom the present is always absent, the future
always past—who lives, and moves, and has his
being, in an airy creation of his own, and circulates
in his own peculiar orb—who rejoices without joy,
and is wretched without wretchedness; one, in
short, who never laughs but in misery, or weeps
except for very excess of joy—who lives in the
world, a miserable yet splendid example of the
sufferings endured by a superior being, when condemned
to associate with an inferior race, and to
derive his enjoyments from the same, mean, miserable,
five senses.” Here he sunk back on the sofa,
overpowered by his emotions.
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“What a being!” thought Lucia, and fell into
a painful doubt, whether such a being would ever
condescend to think of her a moment, present or
absent. “He is above this world!” said she, and
sighed a hundred times, to think of a man being so
much superior to his fellow-creatures.
Paulding, James Kirke, 1778-1860 [1830], Chronicles of the city of Gotham (G. & C. & H. Carvill, New York) [word count] [eaf307].
