Chapter II: Part 2

Thoreau greatly rejoiced in what he called his "invisible suit," a sort of mottled brown-and-green stuff in which he could cross a field undetected.

* * * * *

There was once a golden age because golden hearts beat in it. If it come again, it will scarcely be through scientific progress.

* * * * *

What an excellent, high-minded motto would the last words of Walter Raleigh make: "So the heart be straight, it matters nought how the head lieth." It is an echo of that celestial text, "Be ye not solicitous," and implies serene disregard of all but things essential.

* * * * *

It may be exacting, but not a whit so beyond justice, when I feel that if I serve the king, he must repay me in love and trust, or my allegiance cannot thrive.

* * * * *

I came of late across a newly told jest of C. Lamb's concerning Stilton cheese, which pleased me tremendously, having the indubitable flavor of his wit, and being (what is rarely the case with floating anecdotes of him) unmistakably his.

* * * * *

I cannot recall faces or forms that I have seldom met, or recognize them again with ease, unless some revealed trait or expression of soul has made gait, contour, and presence memorable.

* * * * *

Pride is the distorter of souls; cheerfulness the helper; love the beautifier; sorrow the redeemer.

* * * * *

If I ever had the heroic strain, it has receded beyond my own perception; and like an athlete out of practice, I have to "brace" before doing that which is right, in defiance of inclination.

* * * * *

"The pure in heart shall see God,"--severe and lovely touchstone for mankind.

* * * * *

I saw once two sisters, the younger resembling the other as the translation of a poem does its original, moving by the same laws of beauty, yet inevitably lacking something of the earlier grace and flavor.

* * * * *

Twenty-third May, 1881. Hawthorne buried seventeen years ago to-day. "Who henceforth shall sing to thy pipe, O thrice-lamented? Who shall set mouth to thy reeds?"

* * * * *

How very considerate of the failings of others must that man be who remembers constantly the Infinite Mercy he himself needs!

* * * * *

A good temper is a jewel extraordinary, and a worker of wonders. One of the old chroniclers tells of an irresistibly amiable monk who for some misdemeanor was sent to hell and released again, because Satan could not provoke or torment him.

* * * * *

The sight of a hearse against the joyous streets is always depressing: a dark line drawn through thoughtless festivity, like the dread writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast.

* * * * *

C.'s poetry has much simplicity, calmness, pastoral sense, and beauty; his prose is jerky and barbaric. He is a sort of medal having the king's head finished on one side, the rough uncouth surface wanting a stamp on the other.

* * * * *

An odd and good resolve,--to carry the right hand always ungloved, lest one should meet a friend, and be off one's cordiality, so to speak; or a foe, and be off one's self-defence.

* * * * *

Reserve is made sometimes of chain-mail, sometimes of solid plate steel. One is as good armor as the other, though not so obvious.

* * * * *

Some people wear out everything quickly and naturally,--clothes, acquaintanceship, books, pleasures, even dear life itself.

* * * * *

I am delighted at Lowell's saying that our modern terms, "the deuce" and "Old Scratch," were evidently derived from _dus_ and _scrat_, hairy wood-demons among the Celts and Teutons.

* * * * *

The best of everything is the only individual of that thing. We should ignore the rest.

* * * * *

I think one of the drollest stories I ever heard of absent-mindedness, is this of old P., the barrister. He and his friend M. were sitting close together about the hearth of a winter night. There was no light; they were alone and silent. Suddenly P. got thinking of some project, and according to his villanous and immemorial habit, meditatively began to scratch his cranium. He came to a pause; but recovering the sequence of his thoughts, felt compelled likewise to resume the physical operation. But this time P. wildly clutched not his own, but M.'s profuser locks, and furiously recommenced. M. stood it for a moment, inwardly convulsed with laughter, then lightly removed the offending hand; and P. roared out angrily, faltering in the middle of his speech with a bewilderment beautiful to see: "Great George! don't you suppose I have a right, a right to-- to-- You don't mean to say that wasn't my own head!"

* * * * *

Standing is the most royal and natural pose. I have a sympathy for that Roman emperor who sprang to his feet to meet the quick death that came upon him.

* * * * *

Spenser: "The noblest mind the best contentment has." Thoreau, by way of exemplification: "I shall not fret to be a giant, but be the biggest pygmy that I can."

* * * * *

Hawthorne wrote with his conscience. It was a sort of celestial-colored ink which he kept by him, and into which ever and anon he dipped his pen.

* * * * *

I was struck anew, of late, with the complete ideality of the Venus of Melos, its charm of detail, out-naturing Nature: the head so delicately moulded, the neck so slender yet so strong, the scarce-deviating outline from shoulder to hip; the very apotheosis of health and beauty, with a spirituality over all that sets you thinking of a sweet and ample heart within.

* * * * *

There is scarcely a blow in after life comparable to that first sad intimation (perhaps in early youth), that human nature is not what we thought it, not the thing of our dreams; little else than a tissue of frailties woven together.

* * * * *

Shakespeare's "Rosalind" is not very dissimilar to the best type of the much-maligned American girl. She is full of "frolic parley," self-reliant, tender, womanly.

* * * * *

"Old hushed Egypt." Put down that golden phrase, along with many another, to Leigh Hunt. When a delightsome author threatens to be forgotten, credit him at least with what he has added to the soul of literature, and let him be buried "with all his travelling glories round him."

* * * * *

The French language is _eau sucré_; the German "A cup o' thy small beer, sweet hostess."

* * * * *

If I have a friend, though absent many years, I hold a true treasure with fear and trembling, knowing that whatever losses come, I have been blessed beyond measure with the wealth no chance can take away.

* * * * *

Love is unlike the bow of Ulysses, in that it can be drawn to its full capacity of magnificence or destruction not only by the greatest.

* * * * *

I know a man who looks like Boccaccio, and does not appreciate it.

* * * * *

Genius, like the lowly insect having prophetic stirrings of the beauty it is to evolve, needs solitude, and must build it unaided for itself. If it come forth in due time winged and lovely to the sun, or if it die in the dark, unsuspected of its aim, either end will be found best relatively to the life it affects.

* * * * *

There is no participator who serves so well in any conversation as an adept in commonplaces and "words, words, words."

* * * * *

Milton's "charm of half-awakened birds" means _charm_ in the pretty old English sense of "twittering," "piping softly and confusedly."

* * * * *

Much of Thomas Hood's more serious work is overlooked by the public eye. Some one will be obliged to come forth by and by to say, and to say truly, that nobler poems than the "Haunted House," the "Poet's Portion," and "Death" were never written.

* * * * *

In the matter of reform, I should choose often to be a crab-reformer, and to move backward after many wish-worthy things of yesterday.

* * * * *

Thackeray says somewhere that "we see the world, each of us, with our own sight, and make from within us the world we see."

* * * * *

By way of experiment, a youngling of scholarly race might be kept wholly from books, etc., to see if the ancestral learning would not revive of itself.

* * * * *

It pains me to see coarseness predominant in the human countenance,--a thing so ethereal and divine of itself. Think of the forerunning wrongs back in the generations which have prompted and helped it to its present degradation!

* * * * *

The poets, in chronicling strong emotion over things actual or imagined, must frequently outgo the force of the emotion in the expression of it, so that they have the power of draining off the whole supply and depth of their feeling.

* * * * *

Coleridge should have lived in the times of the oracles. He would have "drawn," as we say, better than Delphi.

* * * * *

At the funeral of a celebrated artist, wherein I took no part whatever, and had only a genuine sorrow for the public loss to excuse my slipping into the church, the sexton wanted to seat me conspicuously, taking me for a chief mourner, for a relative _at least_, he said. I was pleased at the limiting clause.

* * * * *

Children are born optimists, and we slowly educate them out of their heresy.

* * * * *

We are stricken mute by an heroic death. Praise is poor and vain if the life forerunning it was heroic too; and if it was not, love and forgiveness seem not half good enough to offer at the ruined shrine, where at last a divinity has descended.

* * * * *

In sensitive natures, just as the ordinary blessings of life cast an aggrandized shadow and result in supreme pleasure, so their denial becomes a matter of deep pain, equally disproportionate to the cause.

* * * * *

It is better to fall into added disrepute with an enemy than to alienate a would-be friend.

* * * * *

Frankness prevents troubles that only time can cure.

* * * * *

A good and worthy life cannot be detached or wholly useless, because unfinished. When you throw a number of broken rings on the floor, on lifting one you find it casually joined with another, and each, in turn, with many more. So must a man's endeavor co-operate with a predecessor's, and be linked again with some life-work to be ended to-morrow, in beautiful, enduring sequence; though to outward vision all three were but severally a fragment and a failure.

ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS.

IN the days of the schoolmen, when no vexed question went without its fair showing, it seems incredible that the proposition hereto affixed as a title provoked no labyrinthine reasoning from any of those musty and hair-splitting philosophers. Aristotle himself overlooked it; Duns Scotus and the noted Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de Hohenheim Paracelsus were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even that seventeenth-century English essayist and scholar, "whose understanding was wide as the terrene firmament," neither unearthed the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.

It is reserved, therefore, for some modern inquirer to fix it, for certain, whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, Pythonesses, Sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were theoretical merely, and at what age the grandams (for the condition of _hypermaternity_ was at least imperative) were allowed to matriculate themselves in the precincts of this lost art.

It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became idle and enfeebled; whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this new, leisurely, immeasurably mild and genteel trade could be acquired with imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past his nonage, are kittenish and irreverend figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother learning, with melancholy energy, to suck eggs.

We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them without question, should have been withheld from their gray spouses, who certainly would have preferred so sociable an industry to whetting the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night. But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle art was apparently sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the shaggy lords of creation, until the fierce creatures, ignorant of the innutritious properties of the shell, took to devouring them whole.

By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved? Statistics might be proffered concerning the ante-natal consumption of fledglings, which would edify students of natural history. One bitterly disputed point the noble adage under consideration permanently settles; a quibble which ought to have

----"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"

and which has come even to the notice of grave, inductive theologians: _videlicet_, that the bird, and not the egg, may claim the priority of existence. For had it been otherwise, _one's grandmother_ would have been early acquainted with the very article which her posterity recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful care, they taught her to utilize after a fashion best adapted to her time of life.

Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and salutary custom. There must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as the bulla of the youth, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's robe," or any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed out of the social code. Let a cynic add, who does not fear to chase a trope beyond bounds, that though certain misguided ancient ladies may lapse, contemporaneously, into the burlesque and parody of suction, and draw towards themselves some yet coveted fooleries, compliments, gallantries,--alas! anachronisms both; yet the orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent, austere, philosophic pastime, is no more, and that the glory of grandams is extinguished forever.

The dreadful civility of our Western woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political meeting: the casting of eggs wherefrom the elements of youth and jucundity are wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears as a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the world, among disagreeing kinswomen, the very primordial Battle of Eggs! where reloading was superfluous, where every shell told; whose blackest spite was spent in a golden rain and hail! What havoc over the face of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies! What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts trickled unwelcome moisture! terror not unshared even in the recesses of the coast:--

"Intus aquae dulcis, vivoque sedilia saxo,
Nympharum domus!"

One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated, marking the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the spirits of Richelieu and of the superb fourteenth Louis eying the great Revolution. What marvel if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of them whom old Fuller would name "she-citizens," they vowed never, never, to teach another grandmother to suck eggs. So was it, maybe, that the abused art was lost from the earth.

Nay, more, its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. "Teach your grandmother to suck eggs!" Is not the phrase the "scorn of scorn," the catchword of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken as a two-years' colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into the most amiable of professions, was nothing better in memory than an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the underground chamber of our private heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it would be fairly suicidal, all things considered, to aspire to the chair of that professorship.

Let some reformer who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not averse to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of his regard from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish thee extended acquaintance with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the liberal palate broiled wing and giblets _in posse_; and joy for many a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active life; but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.

OLD HAUNTS.

I SOMETIMES whimsically liken myself to that pursued bird, who, according to naturalists, spends her fine speed and strength in racing in a circle about her nest, until overtaken and overborne. She may be said to travel a great deal, yet her steps tend nowhere, and despite her coming and going, she is indubitably at home.

I betake me, with all the exhilaration of a tourist, into an adjacent county, and after experiencing the forlornness proper to a forty-years' exile, board the railway train, and throw myself into the arms of my native town. My wildest perambulations are but twenty miles away. I set out, with vehement desires to behold the world, and threading the narrow highways known of mine infancy,--

----"downwards to the sea
Or landwards to the west,"

return to look the stoutest navigators and explorers in the eye. My change of scene is mainly from Bromfield Street (what a green-and-golden westerly prospect it has!) to the Ridge Path of the Common; my perilous adventures are on side-walks; my discoveries, in omnibuses and the windows of shops.

Through sheer liberality and open-mindedness, when the first stirrings of spring are in the blood, or when a hearty October morning tempts idle feet afar, myself and one other seize on a map of the adjacent country, and push over hill and dale into some unexplored solitude. We make heroic efforts to appreciate a landscape. Was it not yesterday, thou best Bostonian! that we accomplished our showery pilgrimage across the Middlesex Fells, now drenched, now dried, by fickle skies, to sniff the young violet, and to pluck the silvern willow-tufts ere they had paled? or marched nigh six leagues of an Arcadian afternoon to front the gleaming waters at Ponkapog, the purple crests of Milton Hill? Vainly! Never saw we a Nereid along a pebbly margin, nor caught the cadence of a Hamadryad's footfall, as she hurried back to her old woods. The curse is upon us, as saith the problematical Lady of Shalott. What business have we in the country? Where is the plant that will teach us its name? Not green fields, but bricks and mortar are our affinity; and the ears that delight in the familiar roar of a crowd barely attend by courtesy to the madrigals of thrushes.

Rivers I can put up with. I can keep pace with Charles from Hopkinton to the sea. Neponset is a dear good prattler. Musketaquid, with his two exquisite parental streams, is mine old familiar. So with a pine grove, where one can watch the tardiest star arise, and the earliest daybeam break over its dark summits. But these everlasting downs and scrubby wildernesses, these formal, vacant pastures, with little white houses at chilling distances! it is not in me, by nature or by grace, to take kindly to the things. The spirit moveth me to look down on cows, hens, and cabbages, and to question the beauty of that manner of life where there is scarce a ratio of one fellow-creature to an acre. How shall your country folk learn to jostle and be jostled? Do they know a pick-pocket when they see him? Are they easy in their minds when street-bands are due? Have their unhappy progeny never spelled out a circus-bill's gorgeous charactery of blue and red, nor leaped into the jaws of a watering-cart, nor licked a lamp-post for a wager on a frosty night?

No, my masters: let Damætas and Daphnis sing at each other, over the heads of their woolly cohorts; I yearn for the whoop of the contemporaneous newsboy, and for the soul-satisfying thunder of wagons. I hasten back to the knee of mine illustrious mother-city, as a Peri to Paradise, or as a convict (we must have comparisons to suit all tastes) to that agreeable castle in which the State formerly entertained him. I am let loose anew on her historic thoroughfares. For her sake, I subsist, in no gastronomical sense, on dates, and pay court to hoary tombs and spectres of long-supplanted buildings. Her story is the kaleidoscope to charm my idle hours. Her ancient magistrates I behold in their portentous wigs. Her little maids rustle by in stomacher and kirtle. Jovial laughter floats out from the unlatched door of the Green Dragon; the aroma of venison betrays itself at the Cromwell's Head. I look upon sorrowful Quakers boarding the transportation ships, or at the beacon-light flaring out upon the bay; at Paddock, planting his memorial trees; at Mather Byles jesting among a crowd, under the Province House eaves; at Philemon Pormort shaking the birch at little Ben Franklin on the sunny side of School Street; at the chivalry of France riding twenty deep behind the drawn sword in thy gallant hand, Vioménil! Over all the shifting and confused panorama the great bells of Christ's--"Abel Rudhall cast them all"--are ringing the remembered chimes of home.

"The things to be seen and observed," said Bacon, "are the courts of princes, the courts of justice, consistories ecclesiastic, churches, monasteries, monuments; walls and fortifications, havens, harbors, antiquities, ruins, libraries, colleges, shipping, gardens, arsenals, burses." Rather than sigh for Cisalpine revelations, shall I not gloriously disport myself in following the fortunes of a local Punch and Judy show, such as our kind civic nurse hath provided for us? Perhaps elsewhere I should miss the white-bearded orange-vender dozing in the sun, and the sparrows fighting on the sombre steps of St. Paul's, and seedy students migrating from stack to stack of Elizabethan books in the tranquil lane that Uriah Cotting built. Dearer than coffers of gold are the old cherished places from which my rooted affections cannot stray. Their inviolate memories and their hopes are mine; and the city of my content is the loop-hole through which I gaze and wonder at the universe.

I wear out my restlessness circling round about her shining height, and breaking ever and anon momentarily from her fostering hand, to cling to it again with laughter, and so move on. Is it a braver sentiment to fret after reported continents? I would follow the moon around the untried earth, for the asking; and yet, and yet, O "three-hilled rebel town"! hate my own free spirit did it not thirst for thee on a ship that sailed against the Golden Horn, between Caucasus and the pinnacles of Greece.

FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS.

THE passion for collecting books, beginning with the Greeks, passed to the Roman senators and patriots, and thence to every corner of the civilized earth. A philosopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria, over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose survival embitters the thought of the lost volumes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh inaccessible tomes of Al Farabi of Farab ("who knew or wrote so much as he?"), of Berni, of Martorell; or of those princely libraries instanced by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away by Noah's flood!

A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with illustrious figures, what else is that but a presence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the Temple of Wisdom, more reverend than the altars of Pallas? Men have lived and died, like motes of the air, hovering about this hoarded preciousness of ages, and forgetful ever of the awakened world, with its exquisite outlook into the future. In the pathetic companionship of books lived Southey, long after their beauty was shut out from him, passing his trembling hand up and down their ranks, and taking comfort in the certainty that they had not forsaken him.

Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in gathering his treasures, the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they proclaim with startling fidelity so long as they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some benign shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances of trade. A second-hand book is verily a pitiful thing. It is broken down by adversity, and ready to meet your advances half-way. It appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that it is! lacking attention so long in the dingy precincts of a shop. Nothing is more gratifying to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, like a shipwrecked sailor along the sands of a lonely island, than its curled edges, "bethumbed horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear to you. What a precious, homely tribute! What delicater flattery, than to catch sight of a modest volume, supposing you take some parental interest in it, in a condition which, _à posteriori_, does _not_ suggest soap and water?

Certain books, which we handle for the first time, we cannot for the life of us lay down again, without vehement infringements on that edict forbidding envy and covetousness. We yearn for such a bit of property. Our pocket seems predestined to filch it. We love it much better than its proprietor, who never had the spirit to give it cordial abuse. We would not endure that paper cover veiling its genial face. We would scorn to divorce it from any dusty nook it chose to frequent. If we abduct it, it would be a great deal happier. On the same principle, it requires an impulse of Spartan righteousness to return a book to the civic library with the proper dispositions. It is heart-rending to make over a used and shaken veteran to the custody of the public, anew. We know well enough that it shall collapse utterly ere we shall have the virtue to borrow it a second time. Or we speculate on an inestimable octavo, readerless on the shelf for scores of years, till our mark is set over against it, and doomed to deeper than Abyssinian solitude when we loosen its clinging hold; and wonder if what a townsman and a wit called "bookaneering" would not be a chivalric pursuit for us to follow.

Uniform sets of any author, save a historian, are terrors to the discriminating eye. When we buy the Works even of one C. Dickens, we shall stipulate that the "Tale of Two Cities" (never to be named without reverence) shall get its just due of difference in size and hue, from any of its admirable kindred. Who wants Beaumont and Fletcher in sombre cloth, or in anything out of folio, or Jeremy Taylor in red morocco and gilt? Prefaces are not ill things in their places; but what has a preface got to do with jolly, self-explanatory Pepys; or a table of notes with Walton the Angler; or a glossary--fancy the pert thing!--with Philip Sidney's sonnets? Illustrations to some tales are insufferable. Picture a menagerie let loose on the seventh or eighth page of Rasselas, to bear out the diverting Johnsonian description of the sprightly kid bounding on the rocks, the subtle monkey frolicking among the trees, the solemn elephant reposing in the shade!

"A big book," said Myles Davis, "is a scarecrow to the head and pocket of author, student, buyer, and seller." That depends. The virile poets, like Burns, cannot be got into sylph-like draperies. Nobody could abide a prose Milton less than three and a half inches thick. Froissart, even, must be taken solid. We own up to loving our stumpy Don Quixote, with its print of beauteous Dorothea laving her impossible feet, although it be egregiously fat, and elbow its comelier neighbors right and left.

The fashion of including the productions of two or three contemporaneous writers in one volume is happily past, and may not revive. What dreary comradeship! like that of the ghosts driven together on the blast, in Dante's wonderful fifth canto. Why should Coleridge the dreamer, and Campbell the planner, be lashed so, wrist to wrist; or Waller's sweet dallying verse classed with Denham's sagacious strophes? What joint mundane sin warranted this posthumous halving of their immortal fortunes? If the trade must economize, and readers must needs get their literature in bunches, let the coupling be done on a saner basis, and arise from the affiliations, not of time or place, but of genius solely. We confess we should like to see Sheridan and Farquhar amicably sharing applause, within the compass of one lively-colored quarto; some of the singing-birds of the second and third Stuart courts caged with Gay, Matt Prior, and a few modern bardlings; Keats close to his loved Spenser; and Irving familiarly fixed by Addison and Goldsmith, the barriers of centuries between them broken down.

Family traits, like murder, will out. Nature has but so many moulds; and however unique and quaint a writer may be to his own circle, look up his intellectual pedigree, and you shall recognize the ancestral quality astray in him, on an altered world; the voice of Jacob, indeed, appealing through all disguises. What should Poe be like,--Poe the one and only,--but a blended brief echo of Marlowe and of Dryden? Whence came Charles Lamb, even, in great part (and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt besides, in the collateral line), but from golden-hearted Sidney and Sir Thomas Browne? Pages and pages of his that recall them! every tone of their old sedater voices prophetic of his sweet laughter, his fine, grave reasonings to be!

My young lord is spirited, but unlike his father or mother in feature, as in character: ah! go to the remotest corner of the portrait-gallery, and brush away the damp from the dark face of that Henry who fell at Crécy, and you shall read the mystery of transmission. A poet tries his morning lay, to a continent's delight, and after years of joy and triumph it shall be revealed to him how the self-same music fell from long-silent lips in a land across the sea. The unaltered radiance of an inspiration streams yesterday on one, to-morrow on another, as moving sunshine visits the hundred panes of a cathedral window; and that elusive thing which we name the originality of any artist resembles little else but the kaleidoscopic newness of color thrown hourly along the aisles.

So much have books wrought, to the confusion of the proud. The child's early, unconscious preference for authors of his choosing, urges itself upon him when he, too, shall write, and softly hoodwinks his imagination. Has he a sensitive pen, jealous of its rectitude, true as the magnet-lured steel to what he believes to be his frank, unshared fancies? How shall that affect the immutable law? For the very blood in his veins is not all his own; and though, for honor's sake, he would change the erect port, the persuasive speech, the innermost personal charm which was called his, and which he finds, later, to have been but a legacy,--yet, in places where his detecting conscience cannot follow, the hereditary principle will grow to blossom, and bespeak him, blamelessly, to be what the centuries have made him.

It was feelingly said by one of the gentle English essayists last named: "How pleasant is the thought that such lovers of books have themselves become books!" and do so become evermore, beginning and ending with a secluded library shelf, planting the seed of kindly influences close to the noble shade which sheltered them in youth, and under which they slumbered many a summer's day.

A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL.

HERE it is, the old bright day, the day fragrant of home, brought about once again by the whirligig of time. The New England snows are deep beneath the windows in the house where I was born, and iridescent icicles hang over the door; the city that is beyond is given up to joy and plenty,

"And all that mighty heart is lying still."

I sit quite solitary among you in a far-away corner, forgetfully turning the pages of a book, and letting my thoughts take wing for other scenes and other years. In memory there arises a succession of Thanksgivings, long gone into dust and ashes, so different from this, so careless and kind and merry, that it seems like wronging them to be sad for them even at this distance. Then all the world was golden, and our wilful, loving lives were jewels set in the heart of it. Then the air tingled, and the sun was jolly as Harlequin. Then there was a little brook in those familiar fields, delicately sheathed in ice every Thanksgiving morning, and lending itself to a childish holiday frolic just in the nick of time; and a stone, squirted along its surface, made the daintiest bird-like sound imaginable, and died into silence so delightfully that you sent innumerable pebbles after it, to see if they could sing as sweetly as the first. Then everybody was so considerate and tender that poor people could not want or suffer on that day, if they tried; then grown people were indulgent, and wee people docile and frisky as lambs. Then we used to have pop-corn and ginger-snaps and chestnuts and ruddy apples--and turkey! Well, we can have turkey yet, on any Thanksgiving, a sort of _in memoriam_ turkey, eaten in foreign lands, and made melancholy with recollections and vain wishes; so, of course, it is not the same turkey at all.

What a hospitable, social old festival it was! How gentle we tried to be, that not one harsh word should spoil it! We were taught to make out of the severely pious Thanksgiving of the Puritans, their dismal, unpicturesque opposition-Christmas, a day lovely and blithe and helpful beyond any in the calendar. There was a great halloo going on the whole time in the cheerful rambling old house, quartering an army of children: merry-making in the pantry, in the corridors, in the porches, where hungry sparrows gathered to squabble over hundreds of crumbs; and in the lively fire that winked and sputtered, and tossed the pans and kettles, and nearly burst a-laughing over the fat plum-pudding. As for the other Lords and Ladies of Misrule, you could not swing your arm anywhere without brushing a little boy or a little girl. You heard the patter of their tireless feet, the noise of their drums and doll-carriages, and the echo of their shrill voices upstairs and down,--some of them rolling about on the rugs in the sunny room, where the bare elms, with their battered nests, rattled against the pane on windy days; some strumming on the venerable piano in the hall, just at the balustrade's foot, and singing a little Tyrolese catch they had learned together; some grouped in the shadowy and quiet library (where the ceiling shone blue with its myriad stars, like a real summer's sky), telling over how good a king King Arthur was, or how queer was the Old Man of the Sea, or how sad and strange were the adventures of dear Sintram, ever and ever so long ago. Now other children fill those neglected places, and beautify the hours with associations fresh and fair as ours,--

"And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills!"

I must not forget the races, and the games, and ninepins on the frosty balcony; the ice-forts, puny for lack of material, and the Trojan war, re-fought in snow-balls; and the dinner! The table-cloth was very pretty, with sprays of evergreen festooning it here and there. Silver mugs looked particularly shiny. I can see yet, beyond the great steaming dishes, the celery towering with its delicate green; cider sparkling; grapes and oranges crowding one another over the rim; olives floating in colored bottles; jelly clearer than crystal; funny little crackers in funnier shapes, and the ring of hearty faces framing the picture in. Near the end, the majestic pudding made his appearance, crowned with blue flame; and blazed away so pompously for a minute that the youngest baby cried, and the boys clapped their hands, and curly-haired Helen leaned over against Bessy to get out of its way. Then came the final jingling of the water-glasses, when the household drank Grandmother Drapow's health, amid enthusiasm and tears and laughter and rustle of words. It was quite in order to wear your tissue-paper cap, which fell out of the candy-packet, whether it was quaint and odd as could be, or conventional as a beaver. When presently, with all conceivable glee, the whole twenty-six rose to their feet, the chairs and stools made volcanic noises, and the scene looked precisely like the Carnival. Then a sudden hush fell; and one of the several tall gentlemen who answered to the name of Papa, glanced at a certain child at the other end of the table. So the child dropped its bonbons, and gravely took off its gay cocked hat, and folded its brown hands, and lisped the words of the grace, while Eugene and little Georgie bobbed their innocent heads in cadence at its shoulder. Everybody answered "Amen!" very loud and clear. And everybody slipped forthwith through the door, like the tide, and left the sunny dining-room deserted.

Those Thanksgivings will never return. The caps are torn now, and the heads that wore them would fit them no more. We could not meet to be happy again, if we tried, because of the vacant places. The rogue who was made parson would not be present either,--which of us, outside Paradise, is quite the same after so many years?--having vanished just as surely as the old friends, and the dear kindred, who have died. For, in your own phrase, little folk, that was _me_. At least, I like to think it was. Perhaps this is all a make-believe story; but if you doubt it, go and ask somebody else who was there.

VAGABONDIANA.

CERTAIN words sound like caresses. "Thou vagabond!" must have been at some time or other a gentler appellation than our rude transition would make it. Why not? "Rogue" and "truant" have yet their playful uses. Though we translate illy such endearments of antiquity, we may read in Gascoigne:--

"O Abraham's _brats_! O brood of blessèd seed!"

The "goodly and virtuous young imps" of old citation, we should also construe but saucily. Besides, "vagabond" lendeth itself gracefully to the affectionate diminutives of alien tongues, which, to a philologist, may be as good as an argument: what can be tenderer than _vagaböndchen_, _vagabondellino_, and a like musical play of syllables over the solid English rock?

The vagabond is the modern representative of the knight-errant, shorn of his romance, inasmuch as both fall neatly under the definition of a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar does not allure or attach to any one fireside. The immortal Don of la Mancha, revived in this age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, before he had adorned public life twenty-four hours. But the vagabond proper has an Asiatic cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The Rônin of chivalrous Japan is a gentleman of leisure, who, not averse to a chance of seasonable employment, roams at large, settling his private differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, according to his lights. Vagabonds are legally denominated "such as wake on the night, and sleep on the day; and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and rout about; and no man wots whence they come nor whither they go:" a comprehensive statement in three parts, which has, moreover, a covert whimsical reference categorically to actors, politicians, and bank-clerks. A vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person; and if his name has come to imply variations of decorum, and a questionable standing in polite circles, it is to be accounted for only on the worn adage that Satan takes personal care of undedicated energies.

Our friend is vagrant as the swallow, "born in the eighth climate, and framed and constellated unto all." He is the world's freeman. He strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones his only ritual, and changes of weather the sole political economy of his study, by which he abides. Everybody's property is his in fief. Terminus and his stakes were never set up for him. He has no particular reason for moving on the first of May, nor for passing the winter in warm quarters. When he is very weary, since he has no tent to strike, nor bed to make, he unconcernedly "lays his neck on the lap of his mother." Neither landlord nor tenant is he; and never has he known a spring-cleaning, nor packed a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He trolls out that joyful strophe which Richard Brome wrote for his forefathers, as he swings past inland villages:

"Come away! why do we stay?
We have no debt or rent to pay,
No bargains or accompts to make,
Nor land nor lease, to let or take:
Or if we had, should that remore us,
When all the world's our own before us,
And where we pass and make resort,
There is our kingdom and our court!"

He has his choice of professions: he may have a natural disposition to beg, yet, on the whole, consider it genteeler to steal. He is exempt from Adam's curse. Nobody expects him to work, save in a moment of inspiration. When he has no funds, he travels on his dignity. There is that in his eye which awes the merchantman, and mesmerizes the maid at the hostel gate.

The vagabond, "extravagant and erring spirit," as Horatio would call him, has had his court-painter, who took the portraits of several of his eccentric family in the year of Waterloo, and exposed them for sale in Covent Garden under the title: "Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders, and other persons of Notoriety," drawn from the life in London town. There glisten perennially the seraphic upturned eyes of "Hot Peas!" there you may see the Hogarthian face and attitude of the one-armed vender of gasping "Live Haddock!" the pastoral cousin offering "Young (toy) Lambs!" the dealer in pickled cucumbers, his arms akimbo, a fork stuck in the dish on his head, and a surreptitious wink in his well-conducted eye; the flying pie-man, smirking like Malvolio, and starched and skirted like a dignitary of bluff Hal's; the reduced beau, sweeping crossings, with his yet fastidious air; and the humble bespectacled painter, his own drayman, changing quarters on holy Luke's day, so festooned with torsos, casts, brushes, phials, easels, that he seems a perambulating studio.

The vagabondistic sect is of exceedingly mutable nature. It distends, it contracts; it swears in, now a person of probity, not of wealth; now a sinner, like the rest of us, who seldom moves in good society: an odd congregation, comprising dozens that have no business among the elect, and lacking a proportionate number who stray untethered into other folds. On this showing, not only all mendicants, pedlers, street-singers, pick-pockets, and uneasy minds are accepted rascals, but poor queer B., who wrote poetry, and went veiled like the great Mokanna, distraught to know whether the aggregate stare of her fellow-citizens was attributable to her renown, or to her scarce Hellenic beauty, falls into the same category; and the venerable campaigner, who tacks on to her hurdy-gurdy a certificate of army membership signed by Napoleon (presumably to be referred to her fighting spouse, deceased),--that wrinkled and taciturn spook of what was once French vivacity and grace, faithfully grinding "_Partant pour la Syrie_," in snow and sun, within a fixed radius of Boston Common,--even she must emerge, despite the music of Austerlitz and Jena, nothing short of a naturalized Yankee vagabond! There are laws yet unrepealed, Céleste! for thy suppression; prices set on the innocuous heads of "minstrels and useless persons."

We could wish that a new Plutarch should write up the patron-saint of vagabonds,--one Bampfylde Moore Carew, a Devonshire celebrity born under William and Mary, a most conscientious, well-bred person, and of good parts, who became a gentleman at large only under irresistible conviction; and who, after a series of adventures before which an Arabian tale covers its head, rose to be king of the gypsies, and Great High Joss of beggars and mimics, henceforward: a pleasant, adroit creature, familiar with the wildernesses of what were not yet the Atlantic States, reckless enough to be kindly-disposed towards his fellows, and successful in everything he undertook, living, "gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as the devil," to a consistent and edifying old age.

We have a sneaking kindness for him and his votaries. A congenital affinity softens us towards suspicious characters. We were early aware that we startled shop-keepers with our roving thumb, how or whence we know not; but we have come to love the indiscreet something in us which calls forth Puritan vigilance, and we should violently resent a change of tactics. More than once a jeweller (who might have made a mad wag if he had not been so choked with virtue) refused to give back our repaired watch, eying us with grewsome distrust, and absolutely disclaimed having beheld our cockney countenance before! We enter a warehouse, only to await identification, as they are pleased to call it, from Tom, Dick, and Harry, and only by force of eloquence, or by literal making of faces (honest, ingenuous, reliable, unevasive faces, out of use, but quite as good as new, and triumphantly effective), do we succeed in securing the household necessities. Reading once, of a windy day, seated on the sea-wall of the Charles, through a chance waiting-hour, in cloistral privacy, we were accosted across lots by a sombre policeman, and mysteriously lured back to the confines of civilization; whereupon the misguided creature, scanning our cheerful lineaments,--cheerful from the pages of "Travels with a Donkey,"--burst into uncanny laughter, and presently explained that he had been detailed to save yon despondent crank from plunging into the hungry river!

Our career of vagabond by brevet had wellnigh closed. Seriously, sir or madam, you may stand by that harbor-mouth, and have an inkling into the tragedies of the strollers of whom "men wot not whence they come, nor whither they go." But, to keep you on the liberal side of compassion, you who are not of the faith must also be made aware that Aldebaran is a gracious star to his own; and that "wild and noble sights" are vouchsafed to the outer and inner eye of shabbiest Bohemianism, "such as they that sit in parlors never dream of."

MATHEMATICS.

RHADAMANTHUS is so old by this time, and so hardened into his own way of thinking, that I suppose it is useless to wish he were of my mind. What I look upon as justice, he may, moreover, call spitefulness, or worse. But I dearly desire to sit enthroned by Styx in his stead, that I might adjudge dire reparative torments to old Euclid and to Eaton, that modern figurative fiend, and to the entire tribe of evil-inventing Arabs. What hope is there in this world for redress? Such creatures have been lauded as friends of civilization and of human progress. Tens of thousands, mostly helpless minors, and stray rebels of all ages, among whom I am but a meek atom, make passionate protest. We go about, with an ancient school-rhyme for our Marseillaise:--

"Multiplication's a vexation,
Subtraction's just as bad;
The Rule of Three, it puzzles me,
And Fractions drive me mad."

We aspire to be moderate. We handle a slate and pencil forgivingly. We consider that history is somewhat against us; for Cæsar believed doggedly in addition; and the generals of the great Alexander were fond of division all their days. We try to get over our distrust of the Book of Numbers, and to think it quite canonical; vainly, vainly. We are still the army of the disaffected; and your numeric blood, which was transfused into us by main force, seethes and hisses in our unproselytized veins.

Mine antipathy to a unit, like an ancestral prejudice, developed in infancy. I cannot reconcile myself to that persistent squandering of my capabilities--and nothing shall persuade me that they were not fine, primarily--on insufferable jargon of twice two, and thirteen times twenty-seven; on angles, polygons, hypothenuses, and roots of diabolic cubes; on halving and cancelling everything Solomon in his wisdom had never heard of, save the growing, intact, substantial aversion outlasting all else. What glory and honor did it bring me? The singular privilege of taking and giving money on faith; of confusing ounces, yards, and quarts, and of being "circumvented," as Burton scornfully put it, "by every base tradesman."

The Vallais cretins, it is confidently asserted, cannot be taught mathematics. If so, the Vallais cretin is my cousin-german. My heart warms to him. I am his transatlantic affinity. He is the happier, inasmuch as his little eccentricity is recognized, and no tampering follows; whereas I fell heir to years of crazy importunities. I bethink me with anguish of so many precious hours spent between sunrise and sunset, in compulsory handling of snaky arithmetical characters, when I might have mastered the literature of Timbuctoo, or successfully dug out, in a mellower land, the hoary toy-pistols of little child Astyanax. It is drilled into my younger brethren and sistren (such is their venerable and true English title!) that a cipher to right of them, or a cipher to left of them, under certain circumstances which happily I forget, make vast differences with silly figures. Not one of the unfortunates is a stranger to such dogmas. A visitor of classrooms, with a proper dash of vinegar in him, knows nevertheless that the tender geometric parrot-prodigy shall scarce be taught some more curious problems: why political bribery is not a state-prison crime, nor oppression of dumb beasts, nor marriage--_O tempora!_--without love. Therefore the cretin wears his rue with a difference, and is enviable. He is not chained up (simply because it is the general barbaric custom) to "the hard-grained muses of the cube and square;" that is, not unless he gets astray on the educational world, and finds it quite useless to proclaim his identity.

If any one take kindly to the Black Art (as he might to the small-pox), he must, of course, be humored. Believe him sincerely mistaken. Perhaps he may not ripen into a college professor whose business it is to disseminate his evil lore. Perhaps, Heaven assoil him! he may.

A CHILD IN CAMP.

LIKE the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of life, literally, with flourish of trumpets. The Civil War was at its bursting-point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with incredible quickness,

"O bella Libertà! O bella!"--

rocked my fortunate cradle. She gave me a little flag for toy, instead of coral-and-bells; and filled my virginal ear with the classic strains of "John Brown's Body," ere yet I had heard a secular lullaby. She it was who dyed my infant mind in her own tri-color, and whose exciting companionship roused me surprisingly early into wide-awake consciousness and speculation. In laughing recognition of her old, old favor, these confused twilight memories (Impressions of America, as it were, _ab ovo_) may be recorded.