Chapter V: Part 5

When I arrived Mr. Curtis called me apart, and observed that he had heard the French were generally familiar and gay in their manner, but he would warn me that any familiarity, or the slightest appearance of freedom toward his daughters, would be met with my immediate dismissal and forfeiture of salary. I must confess, that when I heard this injunction, a remembrance of my family mantled my cheeks with a blush of pride, and it was with difficulty that I could suppress a flood of tears which were gushing to my eyes when I conjectured the shock my poor mother would have felt had she been a listener. I assured him, however, that I hoped never to give them cause to complain of my rudeness or discourtesy.

With this promise I was directed to my bed-room, which was a garret, on the back part of the house.

It was with no little nervousness that I commenced my duties on the following morning. On entering the class-room, I found the young ladies at their lessons. They slightly returned my bow, and seemed to regard me with a good deal of curiosity. At last I summoned courage to inquire the branches they were studying, and the progress they had made, which request they complied with after a little whispering and delay. I then laid before them the system I purposed to pursue, to which they nodded an approval.

As I anticipated, I found my duties were laborious and not very agreeable. The young ladies seemed to think a governess ought not only to teach but to do. If they found a branch of arithmetic difficult, an explanation was insufficient, I was also expected to solve its problems. If a picture which they were copying ceased to be attractive, I had to complete it, and then it was exhibited to visitors as a specimen of their ability. In their music lessons I could rarely prevail upon them to follow my directions, when, I regret to say, I would exhibit a little annoyance, and then they would leave the piano, and lodge a complaint with their father.

I remember upon one occasion I was very anxious that Jemima should learn a very pretty French ballad, which had been taught me by my mother. I was, moreover, desirous that if she sang it at all, she should sing it well. I took great pains in teaching, but she seemed very indifferent about learning it. When I urged her to practice it, she became impatient, and flung the song into the fire. As it was a copy made by my sister, I could not help weeping when I saw it enveloped in flames. At this moment Mr. Curtis entered the room in company with two ladies. Jemima immediately gave him an incorrect account of the cause of my tears, and he refused to hear my explanation, and expressed his impatience in seeing a governess giving herself such airs about a valueless piece of music. His companions nodded an assent to his remarks, and sympathized with Miss Curtis for the annoyance, they were sure, I occasioned her. Perhaps I was really a little irritable at times, when I fancied they endeavored to displease me; but on the whole, I am sure, I was too easy and obliging, and I thought my heart would have broken, when I heard them speak so disparagingly of me.

I may also mention another little reminiscence of my musical experience. Mr. Curtis frequently gave dinner-parties to gentlemen exclusively. On one occasion, while sitting over their wine, one of the company expressed a desire to hear Miss Curtis on the piano. This wish was acquiesced in by the others—and they accordingly entered the drawing-room to have it gratified. She played a pot-pourri of national airs. After the music had ceased, a Scotch gentleman, who was somewhat beyond the verge of sobriety, asserted that one of the airs—the Blue Bells of Scotland—had been incorrectly played. Mr. Curtis overheard the remark, and he replied that if that was the case, the fault was mine—and he ordered that I should be immediately sent for. You may suppose I was very much astonished when I entered the room, and found it filled with strange faces, and that I was much more frightened when I heard Mr. Curtis, addressing me in a loud voice, demanding to know if I expected to be kept and paid for incorrectly teaching music to his daughters? Upon receiving a somewhat indistinct explanation, I tremblingly endeavored—holding on to a back of a chair for support—to convince him that the alterations complained of were variations, and that the fault, if any, was the composer’s, not mine. Some of the gentlemen seemed to feel for my situation, and endeavored to defend me; but this exasperated him the more, and, with a very violent expression, he ordered me to leave the room.

I ran back to my little garret, stupefied and affrighted. I believed I was the most unfortunate being in the world. I looked out upon the stars, which were now peeping through the heavens, and imploringly asked if my troubles were never to cease?

On the following morning I communicated to Mr. Curtis my desire to leave, and he replied that I might do so whenever I paid him the money he had advanced me to purchase some articles of clothing. Our agreement was, he said, that I should be paid provided I gave satisfaction; but as I had not done so, I was not entitled to any remuneration. I had no means for repaying him, I had no one to give me advice or render me assistance, and therefore I felt myself compelled to remain. The clergyman, Mr. Bonner, who recommended the situation to me, had left London for another part of England.

Upon accepting it, I agreed to do any writing which Mr. Curtis might require, but I by no means anticipated the quantity which he daily laid before me. In the evenings it was necessary to take the documents he gave me to copy to my chamber, where I would work without intermission until my task was completed, or until drowsiness and fatigue compelled me to rest. Often during these occasions, about the hour of midnight, the letters would swim before my eyes; the glare of my candle became unbearable, and I would feel a knocking sensation at the back of my head. At these moments my imagination was more active, and my sensibility more acute. When I heard the sound of music, of mirth and merriment in the rooms below, past scenes would present themselves in painful distinctness; the merry days of childhood, my happy home, and my kind companions. My dear mother would return and give me that look of mingled love and sympathy which a mother only can bestow. My father and brother would stand by my side, and whisper a word of encouragement, and promise happier days. My sister would come back, in her sick dress, and repeat her last words, “Poor, dear Emma!” And then the thought of Alfred would renew conflicting hopes and fears. At one moment I would fancy he was dead, and then convince myself he was alive, and conjecture a favorable cause for his non-arrival. And so I would go on, hoping and fearing, thinking and dreaming, until my candle had sunk into the socket, or my aching head made further labor impossible.

It was necessary that I should get up at an early hour every morning, because, in addition to the writing which I was unable to finish on the previous evening, I had to dress the young ladies’ hair—a more difficult undertaking than it is now. After this Mr. Curtis required me to button-up his gaiters, because his stoutness prevented him from doing it himself, and he said I did it better than any of the servants. If I had completed my writing, he would give me a nod of approbation, and sometimes promise the payment of my salary, for the period he had formerly refused it. This would give me encouragement, and make me labor cheerfully, for it held out the hope of leaving.

Heavy as my duties were, I should have felt them much lighter if my diet had been more nutritious, and my opportunities for out-door exercise more frequent. With the exception of my visits to church on Sundays, I could rarely obtain more than two half-hours for walking through the week. My stomach gradually became so weak, on account of these disadvantages, that I was frequently unable to taste the food laid before me. My meals were sent to my room. The butter I had for breakfast and tea was purchased by Mr. Curtis from one of his tenants, and was called “pot-butter.” It smelt so disagreeable, that I was forced to ask the girl to remove it from my table. I also enjoyed the privilege of the tea-leaves which came direct from the parlor, and after a time, I was indulged with fresh tea on Sundays. I considered this a great favor, because the servants had to drink milk and water. My bread was home-made, and I used to find it dark in color, and difficult of digestion. At dinner I enjoyed a joint, cold or hashed, which came from the parlor on the preceding day, and what I left was then sent to the kitchen.

The close of the first year at length arrived. I repeated to Mr. Curtis my wish to leave, because my failing health was unequal to my duties. He stared at me with apparent wonder, and then declared his astonishment at my ingratitude, and his surprise at my complaint. He endeavored to assure me that I ought to feel highly indebted to him for the shelter he had afforded me; and that my labors, for a governess, were unusually light. By way of closing the conversation, he again hinted, that if I did leave, I could not expect any salary; and when I ventured to ask the reason, he frowningly alluded to our relative position, and censured my presumption in asking him for an explanation.

I was conscious that I was undeserving such treatment, but my defenseless condition rendered resistance impossible, and I was obliged to remain another year. When I communicated this intention to Mr. Curtis, he gave me, to my surprise, half of the amount due me, and promised the remainder when my agreement terminated.

My duties continued unaltered, my health gradually grew worse, and in a few months, I was laid upon a bed of sickness. The family wanted to send me to the hospital, but the doctor assured them I was unable to bear the removal. He attributed my illness to over-exertion, and a want of out-door exercise. I had become pale and emaciated. A look of premature old age had spread itself over my countenance. My head seemed stupefied, melancholy forebodings were constantly troubling me, and I was frequently subjected to fits of crying. I had lost all appetite for food, and all love for life. Like Natalie, I longed “for the grave and nothing more.”

A great change had come over me since my former illness. The loneliness of my situation, and the recollection of my losses, had frequently drawn my attention to matters beyond the grave. I gradually felt the necessity of studying as well as reading my Bible; and I began to look forward to the Sabbath more as a day for religious instruction than as a day of rest. As the subject of religion became nearer and dearer to me, I experienced a feeling of confidence and resignation which I had never felt before. I became less irritable when misfortune assailed me, and looked upon it as intended for some wise purpose. During my present sickness, I felt very much the need of a clergyman, but for some unaccountable reason, Mr. Curtis refused to allow one to be sent for, and threatened my removal to a hospital if I mentioned my wish to the physician.

The doctor was kind and skillful. By his attention, and the diet he recommended, I was declared convalescent after the lapse of nine weeks. But when I had recovered I did not regain my former strength, and was unable to go through with my former duties. The family speedily saw this, and Mr. Curtis then informed me that my services were no longer required. He presented me with an account, in which I was credited with nine pounds for salary, on which he requested me to write a receipt. After handing it to him he returned me another, in which I was charged fourteen pounds for board, etc., during my illness. That, he remarked, extinguished the amount due me, and left a balance of five pounds in his favor, which, out of kindness, he did not intend to charge.

This disappointment very much surprised me. My physician refused to make any charge for his attendance, and I never expected, as my illness was produced in Mr. Curtis’s service, that he would be less liberal. I was, therefore, once more thrust upon a strange world, weak, moneyless and friendless.

After I left his house, I wended my way to my former residence, for I had no where else to go to. Upon arriving I was told that my old room was occupied, and I was sent to one adjoining it. I felt very lonely that day. The scenes around forcibly brought back the recollection of my dead sister, and recalled my subsequent disappointments and my cheerless prospects. I did not know what to do, or where to go. But there was not wanting, amid this despondence, a degree of confidence in the superintendence of a Higher Power, which I formerly did not enjoy.

About nine in the evening Mrs. Grassett entered my room, and expressed her delight at my return. She said she would have called before, had she not been engaged in waiting upon a sick stranger, who occupied my former room, and who she did not think would live much longer. When I inquired about him, she replied that he was a foreigner, with an unpronounceable name, and desired that I should visit him with her, as I might be able to converse with him in his native tongue. After a moment’s consideration I consented to do so. I found the room greatly altered. The walls were actually black with dust, the plaster on the ceiling seemed on the point of falling off, the window was covered with cobwebs, and the bed-linen seemed very much in need of washing.

We found the patient asleep, his face buried in his pillow. A moment or two afterward he awoke, and asked, first in French and then in broken English, for a little water. I turned to observe his features, and notwithstanding his hollow cheeks, his distended eye-balls, and his disheveled hair, I recognized my long expected Alfred. My surprise was so great that I sprang forward, threw my arms around his neck, and alternately laughed and wept for joy.

He was suffering from typhus fever, and had been confined to his bed for eleven days. I gathered from him subsequently, that the last time he saw my brother was when we parted in Paris—that he did not hear of his death until some months after it occurred—that he had been compelled to remain in France some time after we left—that he had been in London for two or three months before I saw him, but he was unable to find me—that by some accident he had lost the money he brought with him to England, and was driven by necessity to seek for shelter in the place where I found him. I asked for some further information, not from mere curiosity, but from the interest I took in every thing which concerned him. He chided me for doing so, because it implied a want of confidence, and the fear of exhibiting that was sufficient to stop all further inquiries on my part.

The moment my surprise abated I commenced to wait upon him. I had three shillings and some odd pence in my pocket, which I placed into Mrs. Grassett’s hands, to purchase what necessaries she could with it for our patient. I now forgot all the trials which a few minutes ago weighed so heavily upon me; and with a lighter heart than I had felt for a long time before, I endeavored to put the room in order, and to add to his comfort.

Within a few days my little sum was exhausted. I then obtained fifteen shillings from a pawnbroker for a gold case in which my mother’s miniature had been set. This supported us for nearly ten days, and before the expiration of that time I succeeded, after much exertion, in obtaining collar work. I labored upon this principally during the moments Alfred slept, and earned from five to six shillings per week. With the exercise of economy, and the sale of the remaining trinkets which belonged to me and my sister, I was able to succeed pretty well, and to support Alfred somewhat comfortably.

Nearly six weeks elapsed before he recovered. His sickness made him a little irritable, and sometimes my inexperience made me displease him. My anxiety to please him sometimes confused me, and he would censure me for my stupidity.

For nearly four weeks Mrs. Grassett and myself would wait upon him in turns of twelve hours each. His sickness required unremitting attention, but I can truly say my labor about him was indeed a labor of love. The hope of sparing him one pang made the longest day seem short; and the hope that his life might be spared gave an unqualified pleasure to my exertions. Oh! how often during dark nights, when all eyes but mine were closed in sleep, have I watched his features, to seek for traces of returning health, as if my life depended upon his. Every expression of pain he exhibited had a sympathetic influence upon myself; every appearance of revival upon his looks spread a corresponding change upon mine own. And when gentle slumber had crept over him, I would kneel by his side, and in a subdued voice pour forth a supplication to Heaven, that his life might be spared. I felt as if he was the last and only link which bound me to earth.

Whenever an opportunity offered, I drew his attention to religion. Sometimes he would listen to me with attention, and at others he begged me to be silent on account of his debility.

Occasionally I tried to amuse him by singing some of our old French ballads, when the evening was too far advanced for my collar work. At other times I read interesting works, from a neighboring circulating library.

At length he became better, and we were to be married so soon as he could leave his room. Then hope once more drew back the curtains of despair. The future brightened again. During his sickness he seemed dearer to me than he ever was before. I felt as if he was now my own, to love and cherish, to live for, and, if need, to die for.

As his strength increased he agitated himself in conjecturing how he could obtain a livelihood; but I endeavored to convince him of my ability to earn a very comfortable maintenance for us both.

On the second day after he left his room, and three days previous to that fixed for our marriage, a letter reached him from Bonn, enclosing some money, and communicating the death of his uncle, who had bequeathed to him all his property. The receipt of this news gave us much joy. I looked upon it as an unequivocal guaranty that my troubles were ended. It may have been selfish in me, but I confess I felt a little disappointment when he informed me that this communication necessitated a further delay of our marriage until his return from Germany. I fancied that as we had been separated so long we should not be parted again so quickly, but he strove to convince me that his immediate absence was necessary, and I at last cheerfully assented. He left on the day which had been fixed for our wedding, and it was agreed he should return on the following month.

Within a few days after his departure I again fell sick, arising, perhaps, from my late exertions and insufficient rest. It was accompanied with the same loss of appetite, nervous fits of crying, lowness of spirits, and occasional attacks of delirium, which I had formerly suffered from. My sane moments, however, were enlivened by pleasing anticipations of Alfred’s return; and I even felt grateful he was ignorant of my sickness, because I believed it would spare him much pain and anxiety. I did not recover so soon as I expected. My physician did not seem to understand my complaint so well as his predecessor.

Four weeks had now elapsed since Alfred departed, and I heard no news of his return. Three or four days more elapsed without intelligence, and I became alarmed. At length a letter arrived, addressed to me in his hand—and my heart throbbed with joy. I felt so delighted, that I committed, what some will call a piece of extravagance, that is, I kissed the address, because I was convinced it was his writing. I then hurriedly broke the seal and began to read the contents. The first paragraph informed me that he had taken possession of his uncle’s property, and that it was more valuable than he had supposed, and was, I fancied, conveyed in cooler language than I expected. The next paragraph had reference to matters of little importance, but as I read on, another communication rose up, which made the blood freeze in my veins, and seemed to suspend the beating of my heart. It told me that now our relative conditions were greatly changed—that he feared our dispositions were incompatible—that our marriage was impossible. As I read on with a brain throbbing and burning, with a bosom struggling between doubt and despair, I observed an invitation to reside with him, and a promise to give me a settlement if I subsequently desired a separation. I think one more paragraph concluded the letter, but I could read no further. I alternately laughed and cried. I declared it was all a vile forgery, and then something told me all was true. I declared it was a dream, but anon the dread reality stared me in the face. At last every thing seemed to disappear. For many a long day reason deserted me.

* * * * *

About two years after, I felt as if I had awakened from a sleep, and I found myself in a very respectably furnished room, with an elderly lady, who was apparently watching me. I had a somewhat confused remembrance of both her and the room, though I could not divine her name, nor remember how I had become acquainted with her. She also appeared as much surprised as myself, from the earnest and dubious look she directed toward me. She arose from her chair, and introduced herself as Mrs. Burnett, I hardly knew what to say, or what inquiry to make. After a moment, I ventured to ask if I was not staying in her house—to what circumstance I was indebted for that favor, and whether I had not been suffering from insanity?—for that dreadful truth gradually came to my mind. Perceiving that I was restored to reason, she answered all my inquiries, and communicated much more than I anticipated. She informed me how that my father’s old and faithful steward had by some means prevented the confiscation of his property from being executed—how that he had, a few months after my departure, disposed of it, and escaped to London with the proceeds, for the purpose of handing it to me. How that he used great exertions, after his arrival, to find me, and in the midst of them fell sick and died. Before his decease, he lodged the money in the hands of her husband, who was a banker, together with every information he could give which might lead to my discovery. That Mr. Burnett had renewed his efforts, but after several months he abandoned them as useless. That shortly after he was appointed to be one of the inspectors of a metropolitan lunatic asylum, and at one of his visits there, he found an inmate bearing my name. Upon making inquiries from the keeper, and at the house where I had boarded, (where he examined some books and papers which belonged to me,) he satisfied himself that I was the person whom he and the steward had sought for; and as he heard a favorable character of me, he removed me to his house, in the hope of affording better treatment than I was likely to receive in the asylum.

You may suppose this explanation very much surprised me; but the unexpected recovery of the proceeds of my father’s property did not produce much gratification. I was not sorry I now possessed a competence, though I did not feel glad. I felt very grateful to my deliverers, and to Him by whom my life had been spared; but it was accompanied with a recklessness and indifference about my future prospects. My disposition also seemed to have changed into a settled sadness, which has never since altogether left me.

My kind friends wished me to remain with them, but, with many thanks, I declined their invitation. I wanted to leave London, and upon that determination I came to Cornwall, and occupied the little cottage where we became acquainted.

* * * * *

Many years have passed since these trials happened; and as the sweetest perfumes are derived from the bitterest drugs, so these dark clouds have produced many bright and sunny days. True, they are associated with painful reminiscences, but they have been followed with incalculable advantages. Amid their severest strokes I can now recognize the hand of a just but benevolent Father. If in my subsequent career I could bear disappointment without discontent, and misfortune without repining; if I could feel resignation suppressing impatience, and contentment controlling ambition, I owe it to the struggles which I have endeavored to describe. It is in the rugged vale of tribulation that the path to human happiness is found.

* * * * *

LOGAN’S VOW.

BY EDWARD J. PORTER.

It was not by the war-fire’s light,
With bright flames upward wreathed
Into the cloudless sky of night,
My battle vow was breathed;
It was not while the warriors flew,
With scalp-locks flung on air,
The mazes of the war-dance through,
My spirit poured its prayer.

Nor while the battle’s stormy strife
Shook the deep forests wide,
And tomahawk and scalping-knife
Flashed in their gleaming pride.
Alone I stood, amidst the dead,
When the spirit of repose,
That long had clasped my heart, had fled
And vengeance waked her throes.

The dead were round me; yes, my own,
The beautiful, the young;
Their calm looks waked the anguished tone
From Logan’s spirit wrung.
Then, only then, the wild flame woke,
And waved its scorching wings,
That, curbless in its frenzy, broke
My spirit’s slumberings.

The silence of the midnight hour,
Unbroken by a sound,
Hung over all, with spell-fraught power
Beneath its stillness bound;
I stood, as stands the forest’s pride,
When all its leaves are strown,
Swept by the whirlwind wild and wide,
In desolation lone.

Changed in an hour, the white man’s friend
Gleamed in his war array;
The league forever at an end,
And lighted hatred’s ray:
Dark records traced by widow’s tears,
And wailings sad and low,
Have borne wild tales to other years
Of Logan’s vengeful vow.

* * * * *

IMAGINATION AND FACT.

BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR.

Imagination’s world of air,
And our own world.
Halleck.

The world is of such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is bounded by a sleep.
Shakspeare.

S’ai che lá corre il mondo ove piu versi
Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso
E che ’l vero condito in molli versi,
I piu schivi allentando ha persuaso.
Tasso.

People seem to have an idea that facts are every thing in the business of the world—the only considerations in the philosophy of human progress. Opposed to what is merely imaginary, facts are allowed to have much dignity. Your practical reasoners look for facts; facts “are the jockies for them”—such as they can see, hear, handle, or demonstrate; while the imaginations are mostly held synonymous with the worthless, the unsubstantial and the ridiculous. They seem to say in the spirit of one of Congreve’s characters—we forget which—“fiddle-faddle, don’t tell me of this and that and every thing in the world; but give me mathematical demonstration.” Now we do not go so far as the philosopher Bayle, who, on the other hand, affected to laugh at mathematical demonstration; but we think, “under leave of Brutus and the rest,” that facts do not seem, and have not seemed to be so exclusively essential to “the cosmogony of the world,” to the history and progress of mind and the general business of things, as some solid authorities think. Without troubling our heads, in this gossiping paper, with the subtleties of Berkley and others, who knock all creation into the compass of a man’s perceptions—establish the column of the unsubstantial universe on the pentagonal base of the senses—we have an idea that a vast amount of the fictitious and imaginary is blended with our regular business of being, doing and suffering. Human nature has, in all times, contrived a little gilding, to make the bitter pill of life go down. Tasso truly says—in his Invocation to the Virgin Mary for a muse—at the opening of his “Gerusalemme Liberata”—

For well thou knowest, the world more fondly turns
To old Parnassus’ consecrated spot;
And truths which graceful poetry adorns
Win while they please us; and a spell is wrought
For the most subtle and reluctant thought.
Thus, for the sickly child, by friendly wile,
The cup’s deceptive edge, with sweetness fraught,
Lures to the bitter potion—he the while
Drinks life and health from the judicious guile.

Not alone have the edges of the cup of life been touched in this way, but the contents of it have always been dashed with large doses of the same emollient. Reality is not such a delightful thing, after all. The false and the phantasmal have ever been considered the necessary complements, as it were, of our condition here.

If we take away from the amount of what the world possesses that which belongs and is due to the imagination merely—what is not authentic, and could not be sworn to in a court of justice—what will be left? Let us take it away—and what then? There is a sudden solitude in the world. The beautiful is vanished, and the hard, blank remnant of things is full of gaps, and desert places, disastrous flaws and a strange silence. There is nothing now, but facts in this macrocosm. But, believe us, ’tis a very rude, cold place to live in—much worse than ever it was before; and that—in the opinion of the pale pessimist over the way there—was bad enough in all conscience. They who first found out this world, and roamed about on it, had scarcely called it very good when they began to make it better, by peopling its too extensive solitudes—creating phantasms and imaginations for it, where there were none before. The unclothed reality of things was too bare and blank, beautiful as it was, for the first human beings that walked the earth. They looked to the elements, and the infinite host of heaven, and following their unanswerable instincts, they began to make mysteries, airy fabrics and visions. They imagined a god for the cope and the clouds of the firmament, and he wielded the thunderbolts from a high mountain; another, shaped after the most perfectly formed of men, resided in the sun,

“The lord of life and poesy and light:”

His sister was the goddess of the earth’s satellite—

“Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns,
To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.”

They heard gods in winds and in fire—and altars to these were among the earliest raised. They saw a terrible divinity in the vastness or angry billows of the sea, and imagined a crowd of lesser beings to haunt its caverns and depths. The forests were sacred to the universal Pan—his fauns, sylvans and satyrs; every oak had its hamadryad, every river its naiad or potamid; the oreads took charge of the flowery meadows, and the napææ wandered forever in the shady valleys. Impatient of mere reality, men filled the universe with phantasies and theories—

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets—
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms or watery depths.”

Suppose we demolish all these graceful fallacies, and the poetry, also, in which they are embalmed. What a throng of splendid deeds, of heroic and beautiful figures—demigods, warriors, kings—bright women and brave men, moving in gorgeous panorama over the vast back-ground of antiquity—is extinguished in the darkness! The creations of the ancient poets and imaginative writers have filled up a space in the earlier ages of the world, which without them would be a blank and lost to the human mind, as much as the pre-Adamite chaos is. What a disinheritance it would be to take away the Iliad and Odyssey! to obliterate Hector, the kind-hearted and manly hero; and Priam with his mighty sorrows a suppliant for his dead son; and the warring Achilles—

“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,”

and the wandering Ulysses, seeing strange shores and cities, and the varying manners of men! Not alone would much be wanted in the want of these venerable works, but in the want of all that literature which they inspired and gave rise to in after time. The succeeding poets and dramatists of Greece and Rome drew light from Homer, as Milton’s stars did in their golden urns from the sun. They took his historic imaginations and characters as their models, and reproduced them in forms which the world will not willingly let die, and which it prizes nearly as much as the Institutes and Pandects of Justinian, or any thing else of that authentic and substantial kind.

To come to our own familiar literature, the fictions of our insular or continental writers are as favorably and generally remembered as the historic facts of the English-speaking peoples. In our genial moments, when the mind desires to be refreshed or pleased it will revert, with an almost universal preference, to what is imaginary, or adorned with the graces of imaginative literature; and half the world regard with as much attention the men and women of Shakspeare and Scott as those of Hume and Prescott. And how intimately and lovingly we give our interest to the words and actions of these imaginary beings! What a world of thought and life is in the dramas of Shakspeare! There is the venerable Lear, driven out into the storm, and talking the finest philosophy to the wild elements, that so feelingly persuade him what he is; and Hamlet, so sententious in his antic disposition; the fair Ophelia, and the prosy old courtier, Polonius; and the immortal bed-presser, and huge hill of flesh—the greatest liar and the greatest favorite in the world; and Macbeth, with his terrible hags on the heath, and his more terrible wife; and Richard, wooing Lady Anne, or fighting desperately his last battle. Then there are the witty and adventurous Rosalind, and

“The gentle lady wedded to the Moor;”

and Portia, the beautiful, wise young judge; and the impassioned Juliet, with the southern lightnings in her veins; and Miranda, the enchantress, of an enchanted island—and all that magnificent array of womanhood which reflects for ever the unequaled genius of Shakspeare.

We have also the creations of Scott—coming nearest of any to those of the great dramatic poet, and enjoying even a more general popularity. Successive generations prize them as an imperishable legacy, and the memory has a pleasure in conjuring them up—so vivid and picturesque in their colors and outlines: The hall of Cedric, the Saxon—the swineherd, the templar, the gorgeous tournament at Ashby de la Zouche, Friar Tuck, the storming of Torquilstone, the Black Knight, fighting as if ten men’s strength were in his single arm; and the beautiful Jewess—what splendid series of images—bringing back so vividly the old pomp and circumstance of the feudal times! We shall never forget the feelings with which we first read Ivanhoe, and there found all our vague feelings of romance and dreams of knightly doings put into such spirit-stirring expression. Then how true is the picturesque bravery of Fergus McIvor—

“All plaided and plumed in his tartan array;”

and the marching of the Scottish clans; the fine old Baron Bradwardine, the high-spirited Flora, and the tender Rose. We see the fierce Balfour of Burley, slaying the guardsman at Drumclog, or raving in his cave; and the swords of the Solemn League and Covenant waving in desperate tumult on Bothwell Bridge. Edgar and Lucy walk to the haunted spring, Caleb Balderstone performs laughable prodigies of cunning to save the credit of Wolf’s Crag, and the last Lord of Ravenswood disappears awfully into the “Kelpie’s flow,”

“And his name is lost for ever moe.”

Norna of the Fitful-Head, speaks her wild rune of the reimkennar to the spirits of the North wind; “bold Magnus, the son of the earl;” Minna, Brenda, Cleveland, Claude Halcro, feast, love, fight and rhyme in the Udaller’s charmed isle. Diana Vernon, on horseback, clears her five-barred gate and gallops by; Rob Roy cries “claymore,” and Bailie Nichol Jarvie fights his highlandman with a hot coulter, and goes up perilously to the Clachan of Aberfoil; Jeannie Deans stands in the presence of Queen Caroline, pleading for the life of her sister, while the Duke of Argyle puts his hand to his chin whenever her Majesty or the Duchess of Suffolk are in danger of a random hit from the lips of the unconscious advocate; Monkbarn’s discovers the remains of a Roman _prætorium_, and Edie Ochiltree comes up and says: “Prætorium here, prætorium there; I mind the bigging o’t!” The Knight of the Leopard and the disguised Soldan fight their chivalrous duel in the desert, and then feast together at the spring, and Richard Plantagenet, leaping from his sick-bed, in spite of the Hakim, tears down the standard of Austria from the mound at Acre, and hurls the giant Wallenrode from the top to the bottom of it. Dominic Sampson exclaims “prodigious!”—Dirk Hatterick strangles Glossin and shoots Charlotte Cushman—Meg Merrilies we should say, but it is all one—who recognizes young Bertram and dies hard. Hal o’ the Wynd “fights for his own band” on the Inch of Perth, in the mêlée of the clans Chattan and Quhule. Tristram l’Hermit, hangs the trees around Plessis les Tours with Zingaris, like acorns. Louis and Charles the Bold ride together into Liege by a breach in the walls, and the head of the savage De Lamarck secures to the Scottish soldier the hand of Isabel Croye. The Highland Widow mourns over her condemned son with all the tragic truth of Æschylus or nature; the Last Minstrel sings a wild epic of goblin gramarye—the Leaguer of Branksome—knights and ladies—the lists and the festival. Roderick and the Knight of Snowdon fight by the ford of Coilantogle; Constance perishes awfully in her convent cell, and Marmion dies like a courageous knight, at Flodden

“Charge, Chester, charge; on, Stanley, on—
Where the last words of Marmion!”

All these, and more, come thronging at the call of the wizard. And with them will also pass before the reader’s or muser’s eye the extravagant hero of him who “smiled Spain’s chivalry away;” Doctor Primrose and his delightful family, Parson Adams, Sir Roger de Coverley, Evangeline, Ichabod Crane, and a thousand others, which every body’s memory will distinguish for itself—just as every eye shapes its proper rainbow. They have all the distinctness of reality, and it is by an effort that we draw the line between them and _bona fide_ characters.

Many of these last, in fact, are little better than the fictions of poets, dramatists and romancers. The histories of the venerable Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, etc. are half imaginative. There are outlines of truth in them—

“The truth is there; but dashed and brewed with lies.”

The history of Scotland, for ages, from the reign of Fergus, and of Ireland from the days of Heber, Heremon and Ith, down to the conquest of the country by Strongbow, are just as fanciful as the metrical romances of Scott and Moore. Then, for the annals of Greece; Herodotus, the patriarch of history, sets down almost every thing he hears from the lying priests of Egypt, or that he can gather from vague tradition; and people don’t exactly know whether to call the Cyropædia of Xenophon a romance or an authentic narration. Plutarch romances at times like the Scuderis. An old English author, Taylor, says, of his fallacies and blunders in the lives of the orators—_mendaxille Plutarchus qui vitas oratorum dolis et erroribus consutas, olim conscribillavit_. Neibuhr has got into our old history of Rome and laid about him like an iconoclast. He destroys a crowd of our beliefs, and makes a solitude in the first ages of Rome—so wonderful and picturesque in our school-boy days. He makes a solitude and calls it truth. He demolishes Mars, Rhea Sylvia, Romulus and Remus and the Wolf—Numitor, Evander, and so forth. Under the flourishing of his pen they make themselves into thin air in which they vanish. Then the Tarquins, their insolence and expulsion; Lars Porsenna of Clusium, the siege of Rome, Cocles on the Bridge and Scævola at the flaming Altar—all are inventions of Fabius Pictor, Ennius, Nævius, and others. This portion of the history of Rome, says the German, should be called the Lay of the Tarquins, and is just as authentic as the Lay of the Nibelungen! “Livy’s _pictored_ page,” (if we may be permitted to make a critical emendation of Byron’s phrase in the spirit of Bishop Warburton’s Notes on Shakspeare,) is allowed to be just as fallible as it is brilliant. Thus we have a vast amount of what is called ancient history confounded with the professed creations of fanciful minds; and there does not seem to be any very marked difference between Agamemnon or Ajax, and Cecrops or Codrus; between Æneas or Dido, and Numa or Clelia—they are all equally distinct or indistinct. Scott’s King Richard, singing a roundelay and exchanging a buffet with the Clerk of Copmanhurst, is as firm on the canvas as Alfred baking his cakes, or Canute sitting on a chair to rebuke his flatterers on the sea-shore.

And even as regards the more modern and authentic annals of history, we do not think they have paid much more respect to the actual truth of things than do the fictionists. Sir Robert Walpole used to say to his friends, “Don’t read history; that must be false.” And Sir Walter Raleigh, looking from the window of his prison in the Tower, and witnessing a quarrel in the court-yard or the street, and the after-testimony of the by-standers respecting it, was tempted, it is said, to throw his History of the World into the fire, in despair of ever being able to gather any thing like truth from conflicting authorities. And, certainly, the differences of historians—their doubts concerning motives, and their disagreements concerning facts, tend to give us very unsettled ideas of history in general. Writers have sent Col. Kirke down to us from James the Second’s reign with a very black and bloody renown. But he was not half so black as he was painted by the whigs; and the story of the poor girl whose husband he hanged before her eyes, in the morning, though she had dearly purchased his life on Kirke’s own terms, is pronounced by Ritson to be an impudent and bare-faced lie. The story is much older than Kirke. Richard the Third is also one of the historical reprobates; though it is not unlikely that the young princes were not murdered in the Tower, and that Perkin Warbeck was really the prince after all; as truly as the surreptitious, warming-pan prince is known to have been the true son of James the Second, in spite of the Protestant historians. Then there are Jack Cade and Wat Tyler; these have been receiving cruel wrong at the hands of the annalists. They dared, in an age when the rights of the people were imperfectly understood, and the influence of the feudal system still strong in the nation, to take up arms and go to war with the king and the nobles for liberty! Their sufferings and provocations were undeniable, and their spirit was certainly heroic—kindred to that which glowed in the bosoms of Melchthal, Furst, and Stauffacher, at the Brunnens of Grutli. The Swiss peasants were successful, and are held in honorable remembrance forever. But the Englishmen failed, and are set up as scarecrows and _Indibria_, upon the field of history. Poor Tyler and Cade were animated by the same kind of blood which boiled in the face of a tyrant at Naseby, Marston Moor, Dunbar, and elsewhere—which warmed the hearts of the exiles on the cold rock of Plymouth, and flowed so freely at Lexington and Bunker Hill. We should honor these English rebels—in spite of history, and in spite of Shakspeare. It is remarkable to see this myriad-minded man, so full of the finer humanities of our nature, yet incapable of sympathizing with the cause and feelings of the mass of the lower classes. But Shakspeare was a man of his era—to which, with an astonishing and happy wizardry, he obliged chronology and human nature to conform; he dreamed as little of the later evangils of democracy as he did of the Daguerreotype and the electric telegraph. In this way Cade, Richard, and a thousand others are in the hands of the historians, tricked out as much in the colors of imagination as in those of fact.

No man can be sure of the lesser details of the annals, though he may put faith in some of their great facts. We are not indisposed to allow that there was a man named Julius Cæsar; though whether he ever said, _Quid times? vehis Cæzarem_, in the boat, or _Et tu Brute!_ when the republicans set upon him in the senate-house, is not quite so credible. Most of these picturesque properties of character or fact, so to speak, are furnished by the fancies and after-thoughts of the narrators, or fabricated wilfully for a purpose. We need not go very far back in history to discover the truth of this. In a late memoir (Achille de Vaulabelle’s) of the “Two Restorations,” we are told that an old story of the consternation of the members of the Directory, on its violent dissolution by Bonaparte, in 1800, was a false one. There was no hurry-skurry, nor jumping out of windows, any more than when Oliver Cromwell put an end to the Long Parliament. Again, that glorification made on the sinking of the _Vengeur_, in an engagement with the English fleet, during the first French revolution, has been latterly put out of countenance. The story in France was, that, being terribly damaged, this ship sunk with all on board, her flag flying, and the crew shouting, “Long live the republic!” Carlyle adopted this version in his history, and makes quite a cartoon of it, in his own outlandish phraseology. But on the appearance of the story in an English work, a naval officer who witnessed the affair of the _Vengeur_, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he stated that, instead of going down with true republican devotion, the poor French sailors, small blame to them! jumped overboard, and tried to save themselves, and that some hundreds of them were rescued in the British boats. That message, said to have come from the dying Dessaix to Bonaparte, on the field of Marengo, (“Tell the First Consul I die regretting I can no farther serve him and France,”) was fabricated in the bulletin by the aforesaid consul himself. The story of the Duke of Wellington lying in the hollow square of the Guards at Waterloo, and, on the advance of the French, crying, “Up, Guards, and at them!” is as untenable as our own famous saying—“A little more grape, Captain Bragg!” or the military speeches of the great generals of antiquity, as recorded by Tacitus, Sallust, Cæsar, and the rest of the writers. Then, as regards great facts, different nations give different accounts. Ask who gained Waterloo? “We did,” say the Prussians. “We gave vast assistance,” say the Belgians. Ask John Bull, or rather, don’t; his answer would be rather brief than polite. We should like to see a history of the campaigns in Greece of Darius, Xerxes, and Mardonius, written by Persians. All history is more or less deserving of Sir Robert Walpole’s designation. Hume, in one of his letters to Robertson, alluding to the publication of Murdin’s State Papers, which threw unexpected light upon the annals, exclaims, “We are all in the wrong!” And, indeed, Hume himself is among those to whom we are mostly indebted for the imaginative character of history. He had little of the industry of Gibbon, and trusted very much to his own sagacity for his views. He was also a tory, and became, in his scorn of whiggery, the apologist of the Stuarts. His history is charming as a composition, but errs in its colorings of facts and its conclusions from them.

Imagination, as we have said, seems the complement of the world of facts and things, in all mental exercises, except the logical and mathematical. If we contemplate nature it enhances what we behold. The mountains, rivers, forests, and the elements that gird them round about, would be only blank conditions of matter, if the mind did not fling its own divinity around them. Nature was thus endowed from the beginning—when men heard voices in the winds, and the supernatural inhabitants of terra firma,

“Met on the hill, the dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea;”

or, in the train of powerful Poseidon,

“Took in by lot, ’twixt high and nether Jove,
Imperial rule of all the sea-girt isles.”

And the modern lovers of nature, though they no longer recognize the mythologic people of the ancient beliefs in her picturesque wildernesses, clothe them with the attributes of the mysterious abstract power which is over all things. And, in the towering of her peaks, the murmur of her forests and seas, the roar of her storms, the singing of her nightly stars, they find revelations and prophecies of higher and farther existences. In this respect, the modern poetry of nature has a nobler scope and purer inspiration than the ancient. Wordsworth and Byron speculate more sublimely than Lucretius.

In another sense, the imagination materially imposes upon facts. In contemplating cities, works of art, ruins, or scenes of nature, we almost always appreciate them for the associations that belong to them—the imaginations they excite. Look at a gray bleak sort of plateau between mountains and the sea, and you see little to admire. But let somebody say, “that is Marathon!” while the blood thrills at the name, a flood of glory flashes over the immortal ground; the air is thick with phantoms—

To the hearer’s eye appear,
The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career—
The dying Mede, his shaftless, broken bow;
The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;
Mountains above, earth’s, ocean’s plain below;
Death in the front, destruction in the rear!

It is this quality of the imagination which gives old countries their superior attractions when compared with new soils. At the sight of battle-fields, religious houses, cathedrals, castles, either in ruins or otherwise, we are pleased in calling up a crowd of shadows from the dust, and finding a sort of mysterious companionship with them during our passing reveries.

Campbell says very well, that distance lends enchantment to the view, and it is generally true of the human mind that it regards the past with a feeling of tenderness—a disposition to make the best of it. There is a certain charm in Time, whom we regard as the dominator of us all; and the ruins or remnants of any thing speak an impressive warning of our own evanescent fate. That belief in the good old times is an instinct too strong for the philosophy of most of us. We have a thousand proofs that they were rude, bad, ignorant times. But the poetry of our nature will not be reasoned with, and we believe with the bard—

Not rough or barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.

Any thing old or historic is appreciated in proportion to the scope it gives to the imagination—to point a moral or adorn a tale. We gaze on the wild hill, vale, stream or forest of a new country, with none of those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an old land. The former may be as fair or fairer to see; but, as