Chapter III: Part 3

A young person some twenty-four years my senior, for whom I had a violent liking, had preceded me "to the warres." I saw his ship sail away, at that exceedingly tender age when a human being is involved in mummy-like cerements, and cannot properly be said to exist at all. In the winter of 1864--he had been away during that long interval--I enlisted and went South to visit him. I had thrived at home through the distended agony of those days. I had a general idea that my cue in life was to fight; and I would smile endearingly over a colored plate of the Battle of Trafalgar, whose smoky glare, and indications of turmoil and slaughter, were supremely to my mind. Red, however, by some process of mistaken zeal, I came to regard as inimical to the party to which, as catechumen, I belonged. I had not then a very copious vocabulary at my command; but I soon indicated my convictions by screeching like a young eagle at the most innocent auction-flag that ever floated out of a Boston door of a sunny morning, or flushing with unmistakable wrath at a casual visitor who bore a trace of that outrageous color in anything worn or carried. It was long, indeed, before I was persuaded to transfer my misguided sentiment to A.D. 1775, and to believe that the neighboring rebel had no especial affinity with the hue in question. Prior to my memorable journey to Virginia, I had spent a few months in camp the year before. A slight epidemic ran the rounds of the tents, and took in ours. The only recollection which survives is a vivid one of neighboring trees, and a distant hill, visible as I lay facing the narrow door; a view which included the ever-flitting figure of the sentinel, his steady, silent tread, musket on shoulder, and the kind rustic face in profile, which turned, ever and anon, smilingly about, like the moon at her merriest. That welcome shadow which fell before him in the broad light was cut down in the ranks at Malvern Hill.

But my earliest real experiences began in '64. Hostilities had been some weeks suspended; yet the headquarters of a Southern regiment lay within gun-shot, and thither my delighted terrors reverted. Was Jeff Davis lurking on the other bank of the stream? Might they creep over by night and fall upon us? If I should be allowed to venture alone into the thicket, would the fiery eyes of the "reb" glare upon me? Please could I settle difficulties with any little boy in the opposing camp? in the admirable Roman fashion, of whose precedent I was yet ignorant.

How they would laugh, those bearded and epauletted guests of our exceptionally elegant log-house! And how uproariously they often planted me, regardless of ink and paper, on the table, and toasted me in some cordial beverage until I pranced in glee!

Be it humbly admitted that the freedom I enjoyed among officers and men of several organizations, and the indulgence which they showed, tended not to improve my scarce seraphic disposition. More than once was I called to order for some breach of discipline, the most venial of which were cutting the tent-strings, hanging about the sentry and impeding his progress with efforts to relieve him of his musket, or concealing the drum-sticks to postpone an anticipated signal. The dark-eyed young man to whom I owed allegiance--

"Ay me! while life did last that league was tender,"

--would exclaim, with the awful sense of a newly acquired dignity: "Disobey a colonel if you dare!" and threaten me, not with vulgar deprivations of supper, or trivial captivity in closets, but with a veritable court-martial for my predestined doom, when I should be so bad again.

Our family retinue consisted of a cook of jolly and rubicund exterior, and a pleasant lad, who, among his other duties, cared for my glossy-coated Arabian, and led him about like a circus-master, while I "snatched a fearful joy" upon his back. The memory of the former personage is embalmed in the fragrance of roast beef and mashed potatoes, edibles which he announced frequently with a melodramatic flourish and intonation never to be forgotten. Burly old Bush! He had a quaint way of delivering his best things, _stans pede in uno_, with a sidelong light of the eye to let you into the secret of his rich hyperboles.

Another favorite of mine was an adjutant, owner of two sociable King Charles spaniels, which I was permitted to endow with portions of my supper, and which I visited as regularly as a country lover his sweetheart, when the general evening relaxation set in. Captain J., too, stern, reticent, and little popular with his men, was strangely gentle to one that rode on his arm, and fell asleep, many a time, at his knee. He was a fascinating story-teller, and held my fancy longer than any soldier-playmate of his day. He had the absolute confidence of my infallible young man. The old figure, "true as steel," was made for him. They forbore to tell me till long afterwards, that he fell, shot through and through, at the Wilderness, with his face to the foe.

He had a brother, a mere boy, whose sunny hair I can remember under the military cap. But him I may come across any hour, prosperous and sunny-haired still. The only other figures plain to my mind's eye are F., the sweet-mannered gentleman who took care of me in a long railway journey; S., the surgeon, maker of jokes and of whistles; W., who used to sing "Malbrook s'en va-t en guerre," with immense satisfaction to himself, at least; and C., an inveterate patriot, who gave his good right arm for the asking, at touch of a cannon-ball.

During that stay there was much gayety and little mishap. My elders rode off to many a hunt, or held tournaments with all the tilting and fair ladies' smiles incidental, nay, essential, to their success. Twice, in the midst of less serious things, the men were called to sleep under arms. I can very well remember, another time, ominous talk of Mosby and his guerillas, and a cloud of dust on the horizon which seemed to betoken his restless squadron. But these were variations on a winter full of pastime, and uncommonly clement and merry. The campaign that followed was so arduous, and involved such heavy losses, that it is cheering to remember the hearty voices of old play-fellows during that genial holiday, to take down the books they used to read from their anchorage on a shelf, and to treasure up the gay incidents that brightened their tragic story.

I recall a waiter of exceeding blackness who impressed me in a Washington hotel, and a sandwich, uncommonly sharp with mustard, obtained on the homeward journey at the Baltimore station, where the city seemed to turn out to feed the very hungry in my person; and nothing at all further, beyond these unspiritual details, till the war drew to a close. For then my best-beloved soldier came home. He was terribly shattered with suffering and fatigue,--how irrevocably hurt I knew not. If "the stars had fallen from heaven to light upon his shoulders," the thunderbolt had fallen too; and the general's insignia was sealed with a minie-ball. After a series of escapes thrilling enough for a dime novel, after a plunge, horse and man, into a ravine, a solitary stampede in a swamp, the loss of a scabbard and a patch of clothing by the familiar brushing of a bomb, and a hole through a cap neatly made by an attentive sharp-shooter, the charmed bullets had hit at last. It was my earliest glimpse of the painful side of the war, when he stood worn, pale, drooping, waiting recognition with a weary smile, at the door of the sunny little house we all loved. Instantly, heedless of any persuasive arms or voices, I slipped headlong, like a startled seal from the rocks, and disappeared under the table. Such was my common mode of receiving strangers; and here, indeed, was a most bewildering and appalling stranger. In vain my soldier called me by the most endearing names; even the whimsical nomenclature of camp-life failed to convince me that this was no imposition. I shut my disbelieving eyes, and crouched on the carpet. For two long hours I did not capitulate, and then but warily. What was this spectre with whom I must not frolic, on whose shoulders I must not perch, whose head, bound in bandages, I must not handle? What was he, in place of my old-time comrade, blithe and boyish, and how could he expect to inherit the confidence I had given to quite another sort of person? Unhallowed Dixie! How it had cozened me out of what I prized most!

The wound that jarred upon me, I quickly came to consider as an admirable distinction, and altogether proper and desirable. I longed to be shot, in the interests of my native land; and presently, "by the foot of Pharaoh!" so I was, thanks to a pistol in the hands of a maladroit little neighbor. I underwent the ether-sponge and the knife, and my chubby cheek displayed with pride the reduced fac-simile of the parental scar. It was my day of jubilee, ere the cicatrice had vanished, when I might lean against that elder veteran's knee, and recount Munchausen-like tales of "our" prowess in the war.

I remember the shock of national loss when the President was assassinated; and, after that, the coming and going of army-faces,--some strange, some familiar. It was like Virginia once more, to hear the band march, serenading, up the quiet street; to recognize hearty voices at the garden gate; to command my most dutiful to "shoulder arms!" and "right wheel!" and, waking from slumber, to creep to the head of the stairs, and surreptitiously greet dear M. and B. and broad-shouldered A., as they passed below.

Not only these my childish fancy saw, but there seemed to gather with them many, many others, bearing names that sometime had been cited in my presence from the bright annals of Massachusetts; and out of their syllables I framed a ghostly pageant, following ever, like a breath of wind, close on the footsteps of their living peers. The dream-cohorts, too, smiled up at me, and swept by. "Trenmor came, the tall form of vanished years, his blue hosts behind him."

I went to camp several times thereafter, though never with my own brigade; but having outlived its enchantment, inasmuch as I were now conscious of "playing soldier" merely, I took a stand on my war record, and decided to withdraw from the militia. That was long ago. But the old prepossessions are immortal. The smell of powder is sweeter to me than Oriental lilies. I resent the doctrine of absorption into the restful bosom of Brahma. An it please you, I aspire to Mars.

I used to love the sight of those shabby warriors, dolefully bewailing their forlorn condition, and mildly suggesting their eligibility to a bounteous dinner, who prowled, in long succession, about our side door. I thrilled with indignation at their counterfeited wrongs. I brought them my sweetmeats, to throw a halo about their sober meal. Do I not take kindly yet to the battered coat bedizened with bright buttons, on the back of M., grimy vender of coal? Do I not encourage the handsome charges of our grocer, solely because I know his antecedents, and can trace his limp to Ball's Bluff?

It was an article of belief, in my Utopian childhood, that a soldier could do no wrong. It went hard with me, in my eleventh year, to catch a glimpse of the silver Maltese cross, the badge of the impeccable Fifth Corps, on the breast of a scowling state prisoner, the hero "shorn of his beams." His arm no longer rested on a howitzer; he wielded a crowbar. He might have hallowed Libby or Andersonville with his passing, and now,--O Absalom!

The warden, the benignant warden, himself of the "trade of war," did he know what he was doing, when he assured me that the cells were peopled with ex-Federal knights? Men have tried vainly to restore the lost completeness of the glorious statue of Melos. Even so with a broken faith. What it might have been is out of the province of diviners.

ON GRAVEYARDS.

A KINDNESS for graveyards, and a superadded leaning to the old, battered, weed-grown ones, are not incompatible with the cheeriest spirit. A marked distinction is to be drawn between the amateur and the professional haunter of the _coemetrion_, the place of sleep. If the pilgrimage among marbles cannot be an impersonal matter, pray, sweet reader, keep to the courts of the living. The intolerable pain of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name; the chance of stumbling on some parody of the departed, under a glass case, or of brushing against the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving,--these are things whose risk one would not willingly run. Therefore stick to antiquities, and let thy fastidious eye look with favor at no carven mortuary date that was cut later than under the third of the Georges. If there be a suspicion of Scotch granite, or of landscape gardening in any God's acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to windward. But where there stand, in honest slate, armorial ensigns, gaping cherubs, and cheerful scythes and hour-glasses, labelled (as a child labels his drawing, "This is a cow") with "Memento mori," or the scarcely less admirable truism, "Fugit hora," then enter in, and read that chronicle, with its grassy margin, which the centuries have written.

Here is the great dormitory; here sits the little god Harpocrates, swinging on the lotos-leaf, his finger on his lips.

"No noyse here
But the toning of a teare."

Thousands possess the earth in peace. Are not Spurius Cassius and the Gracchi vindicated, when the Agrarian law prevails at last?

How paltry a thing is a monument to the dead, save as expressing the affection of survivors! Cannot the liberal soil absorb, without comment, the vast number of lives so sadly inessential to the world's growth and beauty? It must needs forever be placarded to the stranger, who would fain not be critical concerning the failings of these old hearts, where John Smith lies. It is not the chisel which keeps a memory alive. An inscription is superfluous for him whose deeds are graven in the book of life. Many another, who has but elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is laid under all the figures of rhetoric, and is beholden to nothing better than an obelisk to speak him fair. "To be but pyramidally extant," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a fallacy in duration." A monument, "a stone to a bone," shows the terminus of the corporeal journey, and serves merely to mark the gateway through which something perishable, that was dear, has passed away.

Think of the gloomy, pessimistic habit of the Puritan colonists, surmounting every grave with a grinning skull, in tracery, when the benighted pagans, ages before, crushed out the material aspects of death beneath chaplets of roses, amaranth, and myrtle; imagery of the liberated insect, leaping to the sun with impetuous wings; poesy full of hopefulness and cheer; and the symbolic figure of an inverted torch over the burial pile! It might disparage the acrid sanctity of the forefathers to ask which of the two seemed worthiest to inherit immortality.

Cotton Mather, after his whimsical fashion, pronounces it as the best eulogy of Ralph Partridge, the first shepherd of the old Duxborough flock, that being distressed at home by the ecclesiastical setters, he had no defence, neither beak nor claw, but flight over the ocean; that now being a bird of Paradise, it may be written of him, that he had the loftiness of the eagle and the innocency of the dove. His epitaph is: AVOLAVIT.

The most exquisite epitaph I ever saw was one of an infant of German extraction, who died, at the notable age of sixteen months: "Beloved and respected by all who knew him." Wellnigh as pompous and as plausible is an obituary in favor of a similar lambkin, yet to be deciphered at Copp's Hill: "He bore a Lingering sicknesse with Patience, and met ye King of Terrors with a Smile." One Abigail Dudley sleeps in a New England village under a white stone, professionally indicative "of her moral character;" a widow droops in effigy over a Plymouth tomb, and states in large capitals that she has lost "an agreeable companion." Near by is the harrowing script: "Father. Parted Below;" and its sequel a yard's length off: "Mother. United Above." It flashes across your brain like a revelation of Vandal atrocities.

What wondrously sweet lines old English poets wrote over the graves of women and children! Think of Carew's "darling in an urn;" of Ben Jonson's "Elizabeth;" of "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;" of Drummond's "Margaret;" of Herrick's "On a Maid," every word precious as a pearl; and of the wholly startling pathos wherewith one now without a name bewailed his friend:--

"If such goodness live 'mongst men,
Bring me it! I shall know then
She is come from Heaven again."

General Charles Lee, that sad Revolutionary rogue, wrote in his last will and testament: "I do earnestly desire that I may not be buried in any church or churchyard, or within a mile of any Presbyterian or Anabaptist meeting-house; for since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company while living that I do not choose to continue it when dead."

Of Roger Williams, who was also granted solitary sepulture, a strange tale is told. There was question, some years back, of transplanting him from his sequestered resting-place to a stately mausoleum. The diggers dug, and the beholders beheld--what? Not any received version of that which was he, but the roots of an adjacent apple-tree formed into a netted oval, indented with punctures not wholly unlike human features; parallel branches lying perpendicularly on either side; fibres intertwined over a central area; and lastly, two long sprouts, knotted half-way down, and terminating in a pediform excrescence wonderful to see. It was plain, thought the _savants_ of P., that the apple-tree had eaten of ancient Roger; now who had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree? Verily, "to what base uses may we return!"

It was said of old by the English Chrysostom: "A man shall read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever was preached, will he but enter into the sepulchre of kings." Let a tourist go through Europe, from town to town, pausing in the porches of burial-grounds: shall he not touch the naked candor of governments and follow the hoary chronicle of ages backward with his Hebraic eye? To him, the graveyard moss that eats out the charactery of proud names, is a sage commentator on mundane fame; and the humble mound to which genius and virtue have lent their blessed association inspires him with precepts beyond all philosophy. For history is not a clear scroll, but a palimpsest; and he who is versed only in the autography of his contemporaries misses half the opportunity and half the gladness of life.

The habit of providing for personal comfort anticipates an easy couch and a fair prospect for us at the end. How many men, from the royal warriors of yore who willed their ashes to be carried into a far-away country, have chosen, and jealously guarded in thought, their to-morrow's place of rest? A superfluous care, when the unawaited waves of ocean have cradled thousands, and every battle-field opens to receive the staunch and strong! Even for the sake of mysterious beauty such as hath thy holy hill, Concordia! alert youth itself might harbor a not ungentle welcoming thought of death. Yet that head which is confident of quiet sleep is scarce solicitous of its pillow. One last assurance vibrates, like triumphant music, in ears impatient of much speech upon a text so sacred. "To live indeed," it echoes, "is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's churchyard as in the sands of Egypt: ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as with the moles of Adrianus."

SOME GARDEN-FOLK.

THE snail is a kind-hearted, happy-go-lucky creature. Carrying his house with him, he leaves no cares at home. He is _otium cum dignitate_. He is the moral antipode of the ant. He shirks responsibilities, and turns the cold shoulder on labor and fret. Deliberation, calmness of intellect, consciousness of superiority, are in his slow, majestic tread. So that he gets to the place in mind, it is of no possible consequence how long the journey may be. The crystal day is all his own. He is a Nabob, a gentleman of leisure, and considers haste vulgar, and proper only to grasshoppers and miserable sparrows.

Rose-bugs are impertinent. Humming-birds, bright and beautiful, come too seldom amongst our flowers of June, but the bees come instead, and burden the air with their soothing baritone. Yet the bees have a way of pressing personal souvenirs upon you. Pray you, avoid it! as Hamlet tells the players.

Caterpillars fascinate a spectator. They are full of mysterious interest, berthed in their soft cocoons, deftly caught on to the jagged edges of stone walls, or bent on travelling from leaf to leaf, with their "many twinkling feet" in full motion. A caterpillar, however varied and attractive his coloring, is not a favorite with society, or with that branch of it which goes about in bonnets and high-heeled boots. Moralists, rather, shall befriend him, the kind little creeper, and treat him with that reverence which the knowledge of his coming glories inspires.

The earth-worm is the Pariah of garden-folk. His appearance, primarily, is against him; he looks like an intriguer, an uneasy, officious sinner, wriggling his crooked way through the world. The "inadvertent step," which Cowper would fain spare him, ends too often our groundling's peregrinations. He is born to be disregarded and abused; a child, whose protective instincts are yet dormant, will decimate him for the pleasure of seeing his posthumous remnants take up their separate lives, and unconcernedly disperse. Worm is a reputed political exile. With his greater cousin, the snake, he shares the popular odium of Erin's isle. I have heard an old fellow, mowing grass, turn about to tell an incredulous companion that if, by any chance, one could put a bit of Irish soil, nay, so small a thing as a shamrock, under a "Yankee wurrum," that instant would be the death of him.

The legend is given in that very quaint "Lives of the Saints," which Warton thinks was written in the twelfth century:--

"Seyn Pateryck com thoru Goddes grace to preche in Irelonde,
To teche men ther ryt believe Jehu Cryste to onderstonde;
So fil of worms that londe he found that no man in myghte gon,
In som stede for worms that he nas wenemyd anon;
Seyn Pateryck bade our lord Cryste that the londe delyvered were
Of thilke foul wormis that none ne com ther!"

HOSPITALITIES.

IT does the heart good to read of some light-footed troubadour or reverend pilgrim trudging from gate to gate, all the way across a strange country, everywhere welcome as an expected guest, and given the liberty of the host's kingdom. Chroniclers give us pretty pictures of the household sitting about the dusty palmer, listening to his pious and spirited homily; of the errant singer, wrapped in his worn velvet cloak, delighting young maids and children with the old burden of Roncesvalles, or with the tale of that dreamer Rudel who crossed seas to find his unseen lady-love at Tripoli, and to die, satisfactorily, in her arms. Whether the master of the castle had subsequent cause to regret the shelter proffered to his birds of passage, posterity shall never learn. For those were the days of chivalry; and the brave bounty which accepted the wayfarers without question was able to overlook a deficiency, if such there were, in the family silver. Of this best sort, too, was the hospitality of Alcinoüs to Ulysses, treating him like a king, and dreaming not of his hidden kingliness. Spanish courtesy yet keeps a show of heart-whole giving: "This is thy house," an Andalusian tells his visitor. An Indian, in his forest wigwam, does yet better. If he abide you at all, with your scalp at its accustomed altitude, he tenders whatsoever he calls his, and would scorn to conceal from you the innermost recesses of his savage larder.

"Is he not hospitable," quaintly asks one of our American essayists, "who entertains thoughts?"

Think of the unlicensed generosity of the Roberds-men, dealing out what had but just become theirs by right of might, and of our niggardly modern dispensation! of that Duke of Newcastle, the lavish splendor of whose receptions bewildered all England; or of another social peer, Edward, Earl of Derby, "in whose grave, since 1572," said Thomas Fuller, "hospitality hath in a manner been laid asleep." Timon began as bravely as any of these. Waiving all formal recognition of his royal liberality, he made his frank exordium in the banquet-hall:--

----"My lords! ceremony
Was but devised at first to set a gloss
On faint deeds, hollow welcomes,
Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown;
But where there is true friendship, there needs none;
Pray sit...."

Hospitality hath been called threefold: for one's family, of necessity; for strangers, of courtesy; for the poor, of charity. Friendship pushes its privilege to the broad extreme, and loses its sense of ownership.

"Cot or cabin have I none,
And sing the more that thou hast one."

The twin playwrights of the reign of Queen Bess set up their tent "on the Bankside;" alternately wearing "the same cloathes and clokes," and having but one bench of the house between them, which the twain "did so much admire"!

A guest should be permitted to graze, as it were, in the pastures of his host's kindness, left even to his own devices, like a rational being, and handsomely neglected. Our merry friend, T., has been known to beat his breast and groan while passing a certain suburban house, whose inmates consider themselves his devoted friends. It seems that on his last visit he found only the ladies of the establishment at home,--ardent, solicitous creatures, whose good manners were nearly the death of him. He had a mind to await their brother's return, and while the fair Araminta was gathering roses on the terrace, and her sister had momentarily vanished in-doors, our tender innocent, pleased with the landscape, and not averse to bodily comfort, incontinently got into the hammock. He had barely begun to sway to and fro, in his idle fashion, when delicate expostulations smote his incredulous ear. He learned, with respectful awe, that he was liable to headache, to sea-sickness, to certain and sudden thuds on the floor of the piazza, and, lastly, to influenza and kindred ills, by facing the formidable summer atmosphere, in a recumbent position, without wrap or shawl. The climax was capped by the wheeling forward of a portly arm-chair, and the persuasive order to "take that," and be "comfortable." T. was too dazed, or too shy, to protest. When he sought a cool seat in the bay-window, down came the sash, "for fear of a draught;" he made bold to caress the dog, and Nero was led away and chained to his kennel, because he was "apt to bite;" he fell in, to his infinite diversion, with the junior member of the household, and master was marched off to bed, with the stern bidding to "be a good boy," and not "trouble the gentleman." Like sorrows hovered over him till the blessed hour of release. B. was back at seven, and wondered why his old classmate had gone.

Who does not envy them that knew Henry Wotton, "a very great lover of his neighbors, a bountiful entertainer of them very often at his table, where his meat was _choice_, and his discourse _better_;" or the Bohemian spirits of 4 Inner Temple Lane, with "the card-tables drawn out, the fire crackling, the long-sixes lit, the snuff-boxes ready for any one's handling, the kettle singing on the hob, glasses and bottles and cold viands within reach, books lying about, familiar guests doing what they pleased, chatting, reading, coming, going,--veritable At Homes, with a sense of slippered, almost of slip-shod ease"? But hold! are we to indite a disquisition on the Decay of Hospitality? Are there no open hearts above ground, nor any houses where the elected comer may still hold the key to every room, with no direful Blue-beard exclusions? Leaving Dives to the practice or omission of a virtue eminently appropriate to his coffers, what of the very poor? For there is a paradoxical extravagance in their way of life; a glorious communism between one that is needy and one whom he discovers, day on day, to be needier than himself. Where have they learned that sweet readiness of succor? The churl, with them, is he who withholds his little superfluity from a more miserable brother. In the close kinship of suffering, their souls grow mutually pitying, mutually helpful, clinging each to the rest, as a coral atom is moored to the patient island, built from the incalculable depths of the sea. If the wealth that is gracious and thoughtful should vanish to-morrow from the earth, generous giving should find its home in the thin, kind hands of poverty; and then, as now, should some bright-eyed student arise to deny the asseveration of history that the noble old Hospitallers are no more.

THE TWO VOICES.

DOWN a tranquil country road, I walked in a reverie, one April Sabbath afternoon. I seemed to be in a strange land, and pictures and fancies of Maiano and the Tyrol were floating in my brain; yet I was unconsciously moving, like a drowsy star, in the old, old orbit, whence I had never strayed, within brief distance of the spot where I was born, and where for years my life had worked itself into so dear a bondage, that the desire of journeying gladly elsewhere, save in the spirit, had become a sort of treason. The air was laden with the moist delicious fragrance of early spring, which comes as yet from nothing but the ground, as if the persuasive showers had stirred and awakened the very clods and roots and buried fragments of leaves into something like hope and aspiration. This is the advent-time of Nature, far more touching and suggestive than the imminent beauty whereof it is the fore-runner. As I ventured onward, wrapped in solitary thought, and resolved, as it were, into the sweet indolent joy of living, I stooped to pick up a branch, silvered with thick buds, which the wind had blown across my path. At that moment, distracted from the invisible world, and in the transition-state between dreaming and alert attention, I was saluted with a strain of exquisite music, such as one can conceive of as floating ever in Jeremy Taylor's "blessed country, where an enemy never entered, and whence a friend never went away." I raised my head to listen, and immediately perceived ahead of me, back from the highway, and embowered in trees, a gray church porch, out of which were ushered the interlacing harmonies which had charmed my wandering ear. The door stood open, and no idlers were in sight; no late wheel-marks were betrayed on the soft, fine dust of the road. Yet by the many-colored sunlight, filtered through the costly windows of the nave, I saw that a number of people were gathered together in the cool and quiet edifice. A single glance showed me that the interior was of extreme beauty, and of precisely that delicacy and airiness of design most unlikely to be coupled with massive granite walls. Yet there it was, impregnably grim without, peaceful and assuring within, like a kindly heroic heart beating under armor. From it, and about it, and through it, floated the siren voices of my search. In an illusion-loving mood, I sought not to pluck out the heart of my mystery, nor to rob it of its soft promise by vain questionings. I slipped into a deserted seat in the shadow of the choir-stairs, and gave myself up to this sole delight: as to prayers and sermons, either they were already over, or else they went past in the lapses of melody, as the swallows by the window above me, beating their shining way upward, utterly without my knowledge or furtherance.

I heard, above the rest, and sometimes intertwined only with each other, a brave, jubilant voice, and a voice steadfast and tender. Neither know I which was the fairer, so ministrant were both, so helpful and unfailing. The soft, starlit voice might touch an over-eager soul with calm; to the soul distressed, the strong voice would come like a great noon-tide wind, impelling it towards the height where the sun dwelt, and all the fountains of the day. Clear as thought was the bright voice, striving, surmounting, and instinct with truth; but like the first sigh of passion was the sad voice, thrilling, too, with memories of yesterdays that cannot return forever; fond, sensitive, dedicated to the deep recesses of the heart, where there is search after hidden meanings, and mourning over the inscrutable laws through which not even Love's anointed eyes can see. I recognized the battle-call, the rush of the wings of the morning, the pæan of young ambition in the victor-voice, whose very petition was a conquest, in the irresistible faith and strength of its asking; but the lowly voice sang with unspeakable pathos, in whose every plea the greater grief of rejection was already apprehended. A grateful spirit would fain bestow on the glorious voice an ardent welcome, and on the gentle voice a lingering caress. Both I loved, and unto both my soul hearkened; for they were the voices of angels, and one was Joy, and one was Peace.

Then, as in a vision, I beheld a fair prospect before me, and in the centre of its green beauty arose two hills, from whose separate summits the voices ruled perennially, showering blessings, healing sorrow, banishing care, cheering and solacing the earth. Now the weak needed not to rely on the strong; and pity and protection were scarcely asked or given; for music, "the most divine striker of the senses,"--music alone was the arbitress of the world. And all day, past twilight into the deep gloom, were the voices singing, not incapable of being wearied, but revivified forever by the smiles and tears of pilgrims who departed from the hill-top with hearts made whole.

I marked that the little children were drawn frequently to the abode of the melancholy voice, because it was soft and weird, like a gypsy mother's lullaby, or the rustle of aspens in serene weather. Thither also came youth, nursing its first grief with wilful indulgence, and manhood, yearning for summer melodies that should soothe all unrest, and close "tired eyelids over tired eyes." But I knew the babes were there only because of the sweet, curious affinity of childhood with sombre influences; and the young palmers, through some sophistry of love and honor; and the strong workers, overwrought, since there was no courage left for self-invigoration, and no guide to help them towards the city of the cordial voice, whither they should have turned. One I saw coming forth from the field, with a scroll under his arm, pale and worn with "glimpses of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch," who stood a moment, rapt in rash delight at the voice which betokened tears and infinite longing and regret; and who, straightway remembering that the poet's mission is gladness, incessant belief and prophecy of good, betook him, albeit with a sigh, to that other abiding-place, where he might learn of the happy voice. All the afflicted, with wild and doleful steps, sought to climb the dolorous mountain towards the setting sun; and often a friend's strong hand intervened, and led them, rather, with inspiring speech, into the land of healing. I watched, time on time, soldiers marching to the wars, sustained by the glad voice, and hastening forwards with its spell upon them like a consecration; and again, the weary troops returning, with tattered colors and broken ranks, pausing in the lovely courts of the grave voice, to chant with it a song of memory and reparation and thanksgiving. I came to understand, though but slowly and confusedly, that the entire universe was swayed by these voices; and that, while each was best in its holy office, the strong voice was that which nerved us to our duty, and the kind voice that which rewarded us for duty done. Always within hearing of them, we travel towards the ampler day, loyal to one until we have merited the loving offices of the other; holding them sweetly correlative, even as are labor and repose, or life and death.

So soon as I was filled with the glory and significance of the voices, they faded imperceptibly away, and I heard them no longer. Moreover, I found my lifted eye resting anew on the village church, where the dying light fell across the aisles, and the bare clematis-vine waved at the near window; and whence the last worshipper had departed. Had I indeed been on a strange road, and among strange sounds? It may be that even in my day-dream I might have called my beloved singers by their earthly names; and that so I might this hour, were it not for a clinging scruple. For I have been made wiser, and know verily that both are angels, and that one is Joy, and one is Peace.

SWEETHEART.

IN a mood made half of tenderness, and half of laughter, I begin to speak of her: in tenderness, since to name her is a joy; and in laughter, for that I cannot for sheer inability keep the knowledge of her to myself; partly because she had many liegemen and lovers who sung of her aloud to the tell-tale winds before I found my way to her blessed door, but most of all because it would strangely savor of injustice to appropriate so sweet a thing as her favor, without sharing it with the first comer found worthy. Therefore this delight of mine is no more mine than thine, and his, and theirs, and ours; and who would have it otherwise?

She dwelt of old in a tranquil vale apart from villages, with little society save that of the scarlet tanager and the periwinkle-blossom. Such visitors as entered the "piny aisles" that led into her presence, were those only who reverenced her truly. She could not abide harshness and scorn, and they were always gentle; she sat in her fragrant solitude as one that broods on mysteries, and they, in sympathy, sat beside her, one by one, and spake ever after with the enthusiasm and the unworldliness of children. But the immaculate stillness which she chose for her dwelling has long been assailed. Revellers came from the city to riot in her gardens, and to disport themselves in her halls. Railway trains thundered hourly over against her hallowed threshold. Often and often, in passing by, you may yet hear the sound of inharmonious voices, and catch a glimpse of her fair downcast brow, as she looks mutely out upon the invaders.

Amid this "heavy change" she is unchanged and unchangeable. Her pure serenity was a sharp rebuke to our doubting, when we first gathered around her, after the dread of missing the charm which had made her dear. We had known many of her kindred, and each of them, howsoever lovely, seemed coarsened and cheapened to the sensitive eye, by over-much familiarity with crowds. But our celestial lady moves like Penelope, amid throngs of her false suitors, with thoughts disentangled from their clamor, in forbearance and patience and hope and honor, the ineffable depths of her nature evermore unjarred. Long ago, and in the beginning of our affection for her, we twain found her asleep in the flooded noonday sunshine, having at her feet and at her head a sombre guard of pines; and behind them, the vagrant "glad light green" of spring; and again, above their topmost pennon, irregular amethystine clouds, visionary mountain-ranges, that climbed, peak on peak, to front

"Thee, Lincoln, on thy sovereign hill."

We flung ourselves in the young grass, and delayed there, lest our footsteps should break that exquisite slumber; and so awed, and so rejoicing, looked upon her whom we had travelled far to see. It was her exceeding comeliness that made the responsive gleam dance from eye to eye; but it was her sanctity, virginal as when the Spirit first breathed upon it and bade it be, that held our lips hushed then, our memory secure and deferent ever after. Over this unforgotten glory of ours, Saint Francis of Assisi might have breathed his soft hymn of thanksgiving for "my sister, who is very humble, useful, precious, and chaste." Crime should be wary of her bright presence; weariness should forget its landmarks, dreaming beside her; nobleness overwrought and embittered should take courage, and trust the world anew, as by a miracle, for her sake.

Many, many times, but especially at the breaking of the frosts, when sap begins to thrill in the naked boughs, comes the desire to approach her peaceful abiding-place, and learn, by moon or sun, what more of winsomeness or splendor one year hath brought her. What more can it ever bring? For her soul is crystalline and candid, and on her forehead shines perpetual youth. She is one of the touch-stones of our finer selves. Verily, with this secluded friend of friends, "in profanity, we are absent; in holiness, near; in sin, estranged; in innocence, reconciled." Her history is in hearts rather than in books; her unprofanable beauty is the special care of heaven; and we New Englanders that love her, and sometimes come about her, harping her praises with sweet extravagance, have no name for her which men shall recognize but that of WALDEN WATER.

ON THE BEAUTY OF IDLENESS.

IDLENESS is harder to distinguish than the philosopher's stone. Stupidity you can put your finger on; and so with sullenness, day-dreaming, or bovine lassitude. But idleness may link itself with any, all, or none of these. It is the will-o'-the-wisp among human characteristics. You avoid it, being hoodwinked as to its presence in your vicinage; you bear with it in others, when your tolerance is veritably bestowed on something very different. Small wonder if you wax so wise and so finical that you shall swear, sooner or later, in the phrase of a certain friend of ours, that "there never was no sich" a thing!

What astronomy is to astrology, or chemistry to the alchemy of old times, that is idleness, so called, the most useful and edifying spectacle in the world, to idleness criminal. Idleness, simon-pure, from which all manner of good springs like seed from a fallow soil, is sure to be misnamed and misconstrued, even when it is stuck, like a bill-post, in the public eye. A thinking person, the schoolmaster will allow you, is barely to be called idle; but for that exaggeration of thought, the almost tidal stand-still between activities, which belongs to Dunce on the back bench, he has no more respect than can fit in the circumference of his rod. Dunce, nevertheless, may grow up to be called Oliver Goldsmith, or Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Tommy, who stops on his way to market, to sit on a stone wall and plan a nest-robbing, indulgent passers-by shall consider busy, though misguided; but young Galileo or Columbus, planning nothing whatsoever, drifting into the mental hush and stillness whence astonishing ideas arise, are sure to be set up as a couple of intolerable wool-gatherers. A boy may crouch before the fire, looking through the kettle steam at "one far-off divine event," and be complimented on his prospective value to society, or ironically offered a penny for the contents of his ridiculous head.

Thoreau put his own case, in the illustration of the man who roves all day through a pine-forest, rejoicing in its height and shade and fragrance, and is heralded far and wide as a lazy good-for-nought, as opposed to the sober and industrious citizen who betakes himself, axe in hand, to hew the giants down. Every township has its business men, but Mr. Henry Thoreau was, without exception, the best American idleness-man on record. He floated about in his dory, the breathing reflection of Nature in its wealth of detail, inflated with pride because he had not ever chosen to stand behind a counter! Yet he "got his living by loving," and may be suspected of having grained his name, diamond-like, on that window which looks out eastward on the Atlantic. How else was half the wisdom of the Orient cradled, but in the solemn Buddhist, coiled up, with his sealed eyelids, his shut teeth, and parted lips, contemplating nothing with tremendous suavity? The secret of handsome leisure is a fast secret now, indeed. The ancients have not transmitted it. Who can think of a breathless Athenian, save in the hour of battle, or of manly sport? Pericles laid the fold of his garment, so, deliberately over his arm, and steadied himself against some calm assurance, "marchyng," as the old chronicler said of Queen Bess, "with leysure." Repose is stamped on every statue the Greeks left us. It is in their lyrics, however joyous; in their large drama; in their golden history. They did nothing in feverish haste. Perhaps it may not be rash to acknowledge that they were reasonably clever, and managed their terrene concerns with some intelligence. There is over-much stir around us: mountains heaving, cities building, seasons racing by, governments shifting and turning at the four corners of the earth. It is the modern miracle that the contemporaneous growing lilies have not lost their blessedness, in striving to toil and spin.

Wherever a soul keeps energy in reserve, and a little healthful languor dominant, a patch of Arcadia is yet to be found.

"Oblivion here thy wisdom is,
Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;
For a proud idleness like this
Crowns all thy mean affairs!"

When the familiar Yankee angel, Nervous Prostration, brushes you with his wing, Arcadia withers away. Your holiday siesta, after that, is not genuine. Of idleness you cannot be conscious, even as innocence is no longer itself when it knows its name. Therefore no week-day preacher need exhort you to be idle, ladies and gentlemen, as often as you can afford it. He can only cast an eye along your ranks, and discovering one or two of the elect, who shall remind him of boats swinging gently at their moorings, piously hold his tongue and go on his way with thanksgiving.

DE MOSQUITONE.

IF the Bruce loved his instructive spider, for which history does not vouch, why should not the public mosquito be dear to desponding minds, as a yet more victorious exponent of the value of perseverance and a set purpose? Who hath circumvented her? She laughs at all dissuasion. She evades the soldier's gun, the physician's potion; the Sophi with his fleet cannot drive her away, nor the Czar impale her in any dungeon. What the mosquito came hitherward to do, that she does. The "moral runs at large."

It is all very well to abuse her; one gets a poor, childish satisfaction out of such terms of endearment as can be readily bestowed: unfledged Tamerlane! disturber of the sanctities of night! Satan of summer joys!--and so on. What avails all that? We have to bow our necks, and endure her diabolics. She is an evil which the Constitution cannot remedy; and as we are given to understand that she does not speak English, no protest formulated in that tongue can pierce her horny and tyrannical heart.

The believing soul may picture her primarily in some sweet, decorous frolic through the glades of Eden (for charity would even accord to her the possibility of a state of first innocence), frisking airily with birds-of-Paradise, and given wholly to honorable practices. Ah! but what man is proof against violent thoughts of Father Noah, who, when she had already entered on her vein-glorious, flesh-loving, back-biting, and peace-disturbing career, gave her the shelter of his house through troublous days, and, like the short-sighted philanthropist that he was, cursed the four continents in befriending two obstreperous insects?

I cannot consider any cosmic force more eminently practical. The poet lauds a river-bank, and sheds on a grove the starry fascinations of rhetoric; it is none other than Mosquito who induces you to hate and shun what you would fain be persuaded to consider fair. She it is who can make the greenest landscape odious, and the calm haunts of trees vociferous as if all Bedlam were let loose under their outspread arms. She is your best circumnavigator. I cannot picture to my wildest speculations a place where she is not. Nowhere is she an exile, but hath her native bog all over Christendom. She holds her cannibalistic orgies wherever human foot hath trodden. In that Land which, geographically, is No Man's, methinks she prowleth still, looking for him. Howsoever arrant a folly it be to ignore so great an influence on our personal behavior, so huge a factor in the reckoning of men's woes, little enough is recorded of this wretched anthropophaginian. Dante did weakly, inasmuch as she figured not as chief tormentor among his perpetually condemned. The cricket, the glow-worm, the ant, the mole, long since found their bards, but no prophetic malediction has fallen from Parnassus on their evil-minded cousin. There must needs be a greater than Milton to pronounce her anathema.

The immense malignity of her disposition is, with superlative cunning, cloaked under her bodily slenderness and aerial grace. What monstrous discrepancy betwixt her and her doings! By what unheard-of perverseness in the natural order is she framed delicately as a kind sunbeam, or a fragment of sea-foam? On the theory of physical degeneracy, we may consider her in the archetypal plan to have been a grim enormity, like Regulus's Bagrada serpent, a candidate of yore for the attentions of some Jack-the-Giant-Killer, who, should he arise to-day, might prove but a clumsy blunderer in face of her impish agilities.

Helpless victim that I am, I look at Mosquito with unmixed awe. I harbor grotesque superstitions, and build up romances in her name. Why not metempsychosis? This marvellous restlessness,--might it not once have been a human thing? What if some world-scourge, like Attila, were pent in these narrow bounds, and sent whirring through space again, on the old, colossal mission of annoyance? Involuntarily I scan Mosquito with no humbler glass than a telescope. Even to the dignity of a malignant planet hath she attained in mine unjaundiced eye. Straightway, as fear building on fear, mount my fancies, memories, speculations, till on their topmost pinnacle flashes the saying of the liberal philosophers, that the immortal principle may not be lacking in the "meanest thing that feels;" and my sole, honest, overwhelming impulse is to forswear the pious Sunday-school hope of becoming an angel, that is, a winged creature, lest in any phase of untried being, Mosquito! I should bear affinity to that which thou art.

----"Execrable shape,
That dar'st, tho' grim and terrible, advance
Thy miscreated front across my way!"

Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend was it yesterday moved my shuddering lips to quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier spirit?--

"My sprightly neighbor! gone before
To that unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet as heretofore
Some summer morning?"

Such is the irony of revenge.

Dread Reminiscence! appalling Probability! disconcerting and inescapable Fact! thou art the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the Never-Reached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. In deference to thee, I salute the hem of a mosquito-net.

In the watches of the night, my soul shall rejoice to behold thy wrathful eye outside.

ON THE GARRET.

"I scorn your land,
So far it lies below me; here I see
How all the sacred stars do circle me."
HENRY VAUGHAN.

THERE survives in certain men a climbing instinct, a persistence, dating from Babel days, which keeps them to the belief that they were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, "neighbors to the sky." Put them down in a city, and they mount, by choice, as by force of circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. These are the garret-dwellers, disburdened, for the most part, of the money-bags of capitalists. Surely, the more a creature is denuded of riches and responsibilities, the lighter his spiritual weight, the fitter he is for nearing the unembarrassed planets. He is no underling. His poverty literally raises him up. He marches, like a conqueror towards some fine, deserted city, into the high places; his castle is over against the morning; and his bare forehead is reared above the hereditary crowns of Europe.