Chapter XIX: Introduction (17)

Then there is the cool cucumber――like so many people, good for nothing when its ripe and the wildness has gone out of it. How inferior to the melon, which grows upon a similar vine, is of a like watery consistency, but is not half so valuable! The cucumber is a sort of low comedian in a company where the melon is a minor gentleman. I might also contrast the celery with the potato. The associations are as opposite as the dining-room of the duchess and the cabin of the peasant. I admire the potato both in vine and blossom; but it is not aristocratic....

The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it. Lettuce, like most talkers, is however apt to run rapidly to seed. Blessed is that sort which comes to a head, and so remains――like a few people I know――growing more solid and satisfactory and tender at the same time, and whiter at the centre, and crisp in their maturity. Lettuce, like conversation, requires a good deal of oil, to avoid friction, and keep the company smooth; a pinch of Attic Salt, a dash of pepper, a quantity of mustard and vinegar, by all means――but so mixed that you will notice no sharp contrast――and a trifle of sugar. You can put anything――and the more things the better――into salad, as into conversation; but everything depends upon the skill in mixing. I feel that I am in the best society when I am with lettuce. It is in the select circle of vegetables. The tomato appears well on the table; but you do not want to ask its origin. It is a most agreeable _parvenu_.

Of course, I have said nothing about the berries. They live in another and more ideal region; except perhaps the currant. Here we see that even among berries there are degrees of breeding. The currant is well enough, clear as truth, and exquisite in color; but I ask you to notice how far it is from the exclusive _hauteur_ of the aristocratic strawberry, and the native refinement of the quietly elegant raspberry.

* * * * *

Talk about the Darwinian theory of development, and the principle of natural selection! I should like to see a garden let to run in accordance with it. If I had left my vegetables and weeds to a free fight, in which the strongest specimens only should come to maturity, and the weaker go to the wall, I can clearly see that I should have had a pretty mess of it. It would have been a scene of passion and license and brutality. The “pusley” would have strangled the strawberry; the upright corn, which has now ears to hear the guilty beating of the hearts of the children who steal the raspberries, would have been dragged to the earth by the wandering bean; the snakegrass would have left no place for the potatoes under ground; and the tomatoes would have been swamped by the lusty weeds. With a firm hand I have had to make my own “natural selection.”

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

DONALD GRANT MITCHELL.

AUTHOR OF “REVERIES OF A BACHELOR” AND “DREAM LIFE.”

UNDER the pen name of “Ik Marvel,” Donald G. Mitchell is among the best known literary men of the world. His chief works consist of a dozen volumes or more ranging back for fifty years; but readers who know the “Reveries of a Bachelor” and “Dream Life,” possess a clear comprehension of this author. In learning those books they have learned him by heart. Except that he has mellowed with age there is little change in his charming style from his first book issued in 1847 to his last――“American Land and Letters”――which appeared in 1897.

Washington Irving spoke of being drawn to Donald G. Mitchell, by the qualities of head and heart which he found in his writings. No doubt if Irving had named these qualities he would have agreed with the general verdict that they consisted in a clearness of conception with which he grasped his theme, the faithfulness with which his thought pursued it, the sympathy with which he treated it and the quality of modesty, grace, dignity and sweetness which characterized his style. Says one of his critics: “Mitchell is a man who never stands in front of his subject, and who never asks attention to himself.” Washington Irving had the same characteristics and it was natural that they should be drawn together. In early life, Mitchell seems to have been much under Irving. “Dream Life” was dedicated to that veteran, and some of the best sketches that can now be found of Irving are in Mitchell’s written recollections of him. The disciple however, was not an imitator. Mitchell’s papers on “The Squire” and “The Country Church” are as characteristic as any thing in the “Sketch Book,” but their writer’s style is his own.

Donald G. Mitchell was born in Norwich, Connecticut, April 12, 1822. He graduated at Yale in 1841 and afterwards worked three years on his grandfather’s farm, thus acquiring a taste for agriculture which has clung to him through life, and which shows itself in his “Edgewood” books. His first contributions were to the “Albany Cultivator,” a farm journal. He begun the study of law in 1847, but abandoned it for literature.

Mr. Mitchell has been several times abroad, always returning with something refreshing for his American readers. He has also lectured on literature at Yale College. In 1853, he was appointed United States Consul to Venice by President Pierce, but resigned after a few months. His home has been, since 1855, on his charming country place, “Edgewood,” near New Haven, Connecticut, and nearly all his books――except “English Lands and Letters” (1890), and “American Lands and Letters” (1897)――are fragrant with the breath of the farm and rural scenery.

Mr. Mitchell was married in 1853 to Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, South Carolina, who accompanied him when he went as Consul to Venice.

Mr. Mitchell filled a number of semi-public positions, and was one of the first members of the council of the Yale Art School at its establishment in 1865. He was also one of the judges of Industrial Art at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and was United States Commissioner at the Paris Exposition in 1878. His contributions to “The Atlantic Monthly,” to “Harper’s Magazine,” and other periodicals, his lectures and addresses on Literature and Agriculture have always been well received.

Among his books not already mentioned are “The Seven Stories with Basement and Attic,” a series of tales of travel; “A Single Novel;” “Doctor Johns;” one juvenile story “About Old Story-Tellers,” and an elaborate genealogy of his mother’s family entitled “The Woodbridge Record.”

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WASHINGTON IRVING.

(FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO “DREAM LIFE.”)

IN the summer of 1852 Mr. Irving made a stay of a few weeks at Saratoga; and, by good fortune, I chanced to occupy a room upon the same corridor of the hotel, within a few doors of his, and shared many of his early morning walks to the “Spring.” What at once struck me very forcibly in the course of these walks was the rare alertness and minuteness of his observation. Not a fair young face could dash past us in its drapery of muslin, but the eye of the old gentleman――he was then almost seventy――drank in all its freshness and beauty, with the keen appetite and the graceful admiration of a boy; not a dowager brushed past us, bedizened with finery, but he fastened the apparition in his memory with some piquant remark, as the pin of an entomologist fastens a gaudy fly. No rheumatic old hero-invalid, battered in long wars with the doctors, no droll marplot of a boy, could appear within range, but I could see in the changeful expression of my companion the admeasurements and quiet adjustment of the appeal which either made upon his sympathy or his humor. A flower, a tree, a burst of music, a country market man hoist upon his wagon of cabbage――all these by turns caught and engaged his attention, however little they might interrupt the flow of his talk.

He was utterly incapable of being “lionized.” Time and again, under the trees in the court of the hotel, did I hear him enter upon some pleasant story, lighted up with that rare turn of his eye and by his deft expressions; when, as chance acquaintances grouped around him, as is the way of watering-places, and eager listeners multiplied, his hilarity and spirit took a chill from the increasing auditory, and drawing abruptly to a close, he would sidle away with a friend, and be gone....

I saw Mr. Irving afterwards repeatedly in New York, and passed two delightful days at Sunnyside. I can never forget a drive with him on a crisp autumn morning through Sleepy Hollow and all the notable localities of his neighborhood, in the course of which he called my attention, in the most unaffected and incidental way, to those which had been specially illustrated by his pen, and with a rare humor recounted to me some of his boyish adventures among the old Dutch farmers of that region.

Most of all it is impossible for me to forget the rare kindliness of his manner, his friendly suggestions, and the beaming expression of his eye. I met it last at the little stile from which I strolled away to the railway station. When I saw the kind face again, it was in the coffin at the little church where he attended services. But the eyes were closed, and the wonderful radiance of expression gone. It seemed to me that death never took away more from a living face. It was but a cold shadow lying there of the man who had taught a nation to love him.

* * * * *

GLIMPSES OF “DREAM-LIFE”

By Ik Marvel

_With original illustrations by Corwin K. Linson._

PSHAW!――said my Aunt Tabithy――have you not done with dreaming?

Illustration: “PSHAW! SAID MY AUNT TABITHY”

My Aunt Tabithy, though an excellent and most notable person, loves occasionally a quiet bit of satire. And when I told her that I was sharpening my pen for a new story of those dreamy fancies, and half-experiences, which lie grouped along the journeying hours of my solitary life, she smiled as if in derision.

It is very idle to get angry with a good-natured old lady: I did better than this: I made her listen to me.

Exhausted, do you say, Aunt Tabithy? Is life then exhausted, is hope gone out, is fancy dead?

No, no, Aunt Tabithy――this life of musing does not exhaust so easily. It is like the springs on the farm-land, that are fed with all the showers and the dews of the year, and that from the narrow fissures of the rock send up streams continually. Dream-land will never be exhausted until we enter on the land of dreams; and until, in “shuffling off this mortal coil,” thought will become fact and all facts will be only thought.

Illustration: “ISAAC, YOU ARE A SAD FELLOW”

It was warm weather, and my aunt was dozing. “What is this all to be about?” said she, recovering her knitting-needle.

“About love, and toil, and duty, and sorrow,” said I.

My aunt finished the needle she was upon――smoothed the stocking-leg over her knee, and went on to ask me in a very bantering way, if my stock of youthful loves was not nearly exhausted.

A better man than myself――if he had only a fair share of vanity――would have been nettled at this; and I replied somewhat tartly, that I had never professed to write my experiences. Life after all is but a bundle of hints, each suggesting actual and positive development, but rarely reaching it. And as I recall these hints, and in fancy, trace them to their issues, I am as truly dealing with life, as if my life had dealt them all to me.

Illustration: “MY AUNT WAS DOZING”

This is what I would be doing in the present book;――I would catch up here and there the shreds of feeling, which the brambles and roughnesses of the world have left tangling on my heart, and weave them out into those soft and perfect tissues, which――if the world had been only a little less rough――might now perhaps enclose my heart altogether.

“Ah,” said my Aunt Tabithy, as she smoothed the stocking-leg again, with a sigh――“there is after all but one youth-time; and if you put down its memories once, you can find no second growth.”

My Aunt Tabithy was wrong. There is as much growth in the thoughts and feelings that run behind us, as in those that run before us. You may make a rich, full picture of your childhood to-day; but let the hour go by, and the darkness stoop to your pillow with its million shapes of the past, and my word for it, you shall have some flash of childhood lighten upon you that was unknown to your busiest thought of the morning.

* * * * *

Illustration: “THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE”

I know no nobler forage-ground for a romantic, venturesome, mischievous boy, than the garret of an old family mansion on a day of storm. It is a perfect field of chivalry. There is great fun in groping through a tall barrel of books and pamphlets, on the look-out for startling pictures; and there are chestnuts in the garret, drying, which you have discovered on a ledge of the chimney; and you slide a few into your pocket, and munch them quietly――giving now and then one to Nelly, and begging her to keep silent;――for you have a great fear of its being forbidden fruit.

Illustration: “A PERFECT FIELD OF CHIVALRY”

Old family garrets have their stock, as I said, of cast-away clothes, of twenty years gone by; and it is rare sport to put them on; buttoning in a pillow or two for the sake of good fulness; and then to trick out Nelly in some strange-shaped headgear and old-fashioned brocade petticoat caught up with pins; and in such guise, to steal cautiously down stairs, and creep slyly into the sitting-room――half afraid of a scolding, and very sure of good fun;――trying to look very sober, and yet almost ready to die with the laugh that you know you will make. And your mother tries to look harshly at little Nelly for putting on her grandmother’s best bonnet; but Nelly’s laughing eyes forbid it utterly, and the mother spoils all her scolding with a perfect shower of kisses.

Illustration: “TRICKED OUT”

After this, you go marching, very stately, into the nursery; and utterly amaze the old nurse; and make a deal of wonderment for the staring, half-frightened baby, who drops his rattle, and makes a bob at you, as if he would jump into your waistcoat pocket.

* * * * *

Illustration: “THERE IS AFTER ALL BUT ONE YOUTH-TIME”

You have looked admiringly many a day upon the tall fellows who play at the door of Dr. Bidlow’s school; you have looked with reverence. Dr. Bidlow seems to you to belong to a race of giants; and yet he is a spare, thin man, with a hooked nose, a large, flat, gold watch-key, a crack in his voice, a wig, and very dirty wristbands.

Illustration: “LONG, WEARY DAYS OF CONFINEMENT”

You, however, come very little under his control; you enter upon the proud life in the small-boys’ department――under the dominion of the English master. He is a different personage from Dr. Bidlow: he is a dapper, little man, who twinkles his eye in a peculiar fashion, and steps very springily around behind the benches, glancing now and then at the books――cautioning one scholar about his dog’s ears, and startling another from a doze by a very loud and odious snap of his forefinger upon the boy’s head.

There are some tall trees that overshadow an angle of the schoolhouse; and the larger scholars play surprising gymnastic tricks upon their lower limbs.

Illustration: “OLD BID”

In time, however, you get to performing some modest experiments yourself upon the very lowest limbs,――taking care to avoid the observation of the larger boys, who else might laugh at you: you especially avoid the notice of one stout fellow in pea-green breeches, who is a sort of “bully” among the small boys.

One day you are well in the tops of the trees, and being dared by the boys below, you venture higher――higher than any boy has gone before. You feel very proud, so you advance cautiously out upon the limb: it bends and sways fearfully with your weight: presently it cracks: you try to return, but it is too late; then comes a sense of dizziness――a succession of quick blows, and a dull, heavy crash!

Illustration: “STARTLING ANOTHER FROM A DOZE”

After this, come those long, weary days of confinement, when you lie still, through all the hours of noon, looking out upon the cheerful sunshine, only through the windows of your little room. Yet it seems a grand thing to have the whole household attendant upon you; and when you groan with pain, you are sure of meeting sad, sympathizing looks.

* * * * *

Illustration: “AND EAT A DINNER IN A TAVERN”

To visit, is a great thing in the boy-calendar:――to go away on a visit in a coach, with a trunk, and a greatcoat, and an umbrella:――this is large! As you journey on, after bidding your friends adieu, and as you see fences and houses to which you have not been used, you think them very odd indeed; but it occurs to you, that the geographies speak of very various national characteristics, and you are greatly gratified with this opportunity of verifying your study.

Illustration: “AWAY ON A VISIT IN A COACH”

Your old aunt, whom you visit, you think wears a very queer cap, being altogether different from that of the old nurse, or of Mrs. Boyne, ――Madge’s mother. As for acquaintances, you fall in the very first day with a tall boy next door, called Nat, which seems an extraordinary name. Besides, he has traveled; and as he sits with you on the summer nights under the linden trees, he tells you gorgeous stories of the things he has seen. He has made the voyage to London; and he talks about the ship (a real ship) and starboard and larboard, and the spanker, in a way quite surprising; and he takes the stern oar in the little skiff, when you row off in the cove abreast of the town, in a most seaman-like way.

Illustration: “IT IS RATHER A PRETTY NAME TO WRITE”

Besides Nat, there is a girl lives over the opposite side of the way, named Jenny, with an eye as black as a coal. She has any quantity of toys, and she has an odd old uncle, who sometimes makes you stand up together, and then marries you after his fashion,――much to the amusement of a grown-up housemaid, whenever she gets a peep at the performance. And it makes you somewhat proud to hear her called your wife; and you wonder to yourself, dreamily, if it won’t be true some day or other.

Jenny is romantic, and talks of Thaddeus of Warsaw in a very touching manner, and promises to lend you the book. She folds billets in a lover’s fashion, and practices love-knots upon her bonnet strings. She looks out of the corners of her eyes very often, and sighs. She is frequently by herself, and pulls flowers to pieces.

All this time, for you are making your visit a very long one, so that autumn has come, and the nights are growing cool, and Jenny and yourself are transferring your little coquetries to the chimney-corner;――poor Charlie lies sick at home. Boyhood, thank Heaven, does not suffer severely from sympathy when the object is remote.

Illustration: “THE DOCTOR LIFTS YOU IN HIS ARMS”

It is on a frosty, bleak evening, when you are playing with Nat, that the letter reaches you which says Charlie is growing worse, and that you must come to your home. It is quite dark when you reach home, but you see the bright reflection of a fire within, and presently at the open door Nelly clapping her hands for welcome. But there are sad faces when you enter. Your mother folds you to her heart; but at your first noisy outburst of joy, puts her finger on her lip, and whispers poor Charlie’s name. The Doctor you see, too, slipping softly out of the bed-room door with glasses in his hand; and――you hardly know how――your spirits grow sad, and your heart gravitates to the heavy air of all about you.

Illustration: “WHO SOMETIMES MAKES YOU STAND UP TOGETHER”

You drop to sleep after that day’s fatigue, with singular and perplexed fancies haunting you; and when you wake up with a shudder in the middle of the night, you get up stealthily and creep down stairs; the bed-room door stands open, a little lamp is flickering on the hearth, and the gaunt shadow of the bedstead lies dark upon the ceiling. Your mother is in her chair, with her head upon her hand――though it is long after midnight. The Doctor is standing with his back toward you, and looks very solemn as he takes out his watch. He is not counting Charlie’s pulse, for he has dropped his hand; and it lies carelessly, but oh, how thin! over the edge of the bed.

He shakes his head mournfully at your mother; and she springs forward, and lays her fingers upon the forehead of the boy, and passes her hand over his mouth.

“Is he asleep, Doctor?” she says, in a tone you do not know.

“Dear Madam, he will never waken in this world.”

There is no cry――only a bowing down of your mother’s head upon the body of poor, dead Charlie!――and only when you see her form shake and quiver with the deep, smothered sobs, your crying bursts forth loud and strong.

Illustration: “LISTENING ATTENTIVELY TO SOME GRIEVOUS COMPLAINT”

The Doctor lifts you in his arms, that you may see――that pale head,――those blue eyes all sunken,――that flaxen hair gone,――those white lips pinched and hard!――Never, never, will the boy forget his first terrible sight of Death!

* * * * *

Illustration: “SOME OF BIDLOW’S BOYS”

Frank has a grandfather living in the country, a good specimen of the old-fashioned New England farmer. He is a Justice of the Peace, and many are the country courts that you peep upon, with Frank, from the door of the great dining-room. You watch curiously the old gentleman, sitting in his big arm-chair, with his spectacles in their silver case at his elbow, and his snuff-box in hand, listening attentively to some grievous complaint; you see him ponder deeply――with a pinch of snuff to aid his judgment,――and you listen with intense admiration, as he gives a loud, preparatory “Ahem,” and clears away the intricacies of the case with a sweep of that strong practical sense which distinguishes the New England farmer,――getting at the very hinge of the matter, without any consciousness of his own precision, and satisfying the defendant by the clearness of his talk, as much as by the leniency of his judgment. He farms some fifteen hundred acres,――“suitably divided,” as the old-school agriculturists say, into “woodland, pasture, and tillage.” The farm-house, a large irregularly built mansion of wood, stands upon a shelf of the hills looking southward, and is shaded by century-old oaks. The barns and outbuildings are grouped in a brown phalanx a little to the northward of the dwelling. Between them a high timber gate opens upon the scattered pasture-lands of the hills. Opposite to this, and across the farmyard, which is the lounging-place of scores of red-necked turkeys, and of matronly hens, clucking to their callow brood, another gate of similar pretensions opens upon the wide meadow-land.

Illustration: “A SQUIRE”

So it is, that as you lie there upon the sunny greensward, at the old Squire’s door, you muse upon the time when some rich-lying land, with huge granaries and cozy old mansion sleeping under the trees, shall be yours;――when the brooks shall water your meadows, and come laughing down your pasture-lands;――when the clouds shall shed their spring fragrance upon your lawns, and the daisies bless your paths.

Illustration: “SOME TIDY OLD LADY IN BLACK”

You will then be a Squire, with your cane, your lean-limbed hound, your stocking-leg of specie, and your snuff-box. You will be the happy and respected husband of some tidy old lady in black and spectacles,――a little phthisicky, like Frank’s grandmother,――and an accomplished cook of stewed pears, and Johnny-cakes!

* * * * *

Illustration: THE CHOIR

The country church is a square old building of wood, without paint or decoration, and of that genuine, Puritanic stamp, which is now fast giving way to Greek porticos, and to cockney towers. The unpainted pews are ranged in square forms, and by age have gained the color of those fragmentary wrecks of cigar-boxes, which you see upon the top shelves in the bar-rooms of country taverns. The minister’s desk is lofty, and has once been honored with a coating of paint;――as well as the huge sounding-board, which, to your great amazement, protrudes from the wall, at a very dangerous angle of inclination, over the speaker’s head.

The singing has a charm for you. There is a long, thin-faced, flax-haired man, who carries a tuning-fork in his waistcoat pocket, and who leads the choir. His position is in the very front rank of gallery benches, facing the desk; and by the time the old clergyman has read two verses of the psalm, the country chorister turns around to his little group of aids――consisting of the blacksmith, a carroty headed school-master, two women in snuff-colored silks, and a girl in a pink bonnet, somewhat inclined to frivolity,――to announce the tune.

Illustration: “FAT OLD LADIES IN IRON SPECTACLES”

This being done in an authoritative manner, he lifts his long music-book,――glances again at his little company, clears his throat by a powerful “Ahem,” followed by a powerful use of a bandanna pocket-handkerchief,――draws out his tuning fork, and waits for the parson to close his reading. He now reviews once more his company,――throws a reproving glance at the young woman in the pink hat, who at the moment is biting off a stout bunch of fennel,――lifts his music-book, thumps upon the rail with his fork, listens keenly, gives a slight “Ahem,” falls into the cadence,――swells into a strong _crescendo_,――catches at the first word of the line, as if he were afraid it might get away,――turns to his company,――lifts his music-book with spirit,――gives it a powerful slap with the disengaged hand, and, with a majestic toss of the head, soars away, with half the women below straggling on in his wake, into some such brave old melody as――LITCHFIELD!

Illustration: THE DEACON

Being a visitor, and in the Squire’s pew, you are naturally an object of considerable attention to the girls about your age; as well as to a great many fat old ladies in iron spectacles, who mortify you excessively by patting you under the chin after church; and insist upon mistaking you for Frank; and force upon you very dry cookies, spiced with caraway seeds.

Illustration: “IN TONES OF TENDER ADMONITION”

Illustration: (‡ Prayer book)

The farmers you have a high respect for;――particularly for one weazen-faced old gentleman in a brown surtout, who brings his whip into church with him, who sings in a very strong voice, and who drives a span of gray colts. Another townsman, who attracts your attention is a stout deacon, who before entering always steps around the corner of the church and puts his hat upon the ground to adjust his wig in a quiet way. He then marches up the broad aisle in a stately manner, and plants his hat, and a big pair of buckskin mittens, on the little table under the desk. When he is fairly seated in his corner of the pew, with his elbow upon the top-rail――almost the only man who can comfortably reach it,――you observe that he spreads his brawny fingers over his scalp, in an exceedingly cautious manner; and you innocently think again, that it is very hypocritical in a deacon to be pretending to lean upon his hand when he is only keeping his wig straight.

Illustration: “THE OLD MEN GATHER ON THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE BUILDING”

After the morning service, they have an “hour’s intermission,” as the preacher calls it; during which the old men gather on a sunny side of the building, and, after shaking hands all around, and asking after the “folks” at home, they enjoy a quiet talk about the crops, branching off, now and then, it may be, into politics.

Little does the boy know, as the tide of years drifts by, floating him out insensibly from the harbor of his home upon the great sea of life,――what joys, what opportunities, what affections, are slipping from him.

Illustration: “THE FIRELIGHT GLIMMERS UPON THE WALLS OF YOUR HOME”

But _now_, you are there. The fire-light glimmers upon the walls of your cherished home, like the Vestal fire of old upon the figures of adoring virgins, or like the flame of Hebrew sacrifice, whose incense bore hearts to heaven. The big chair of your father is drawn to its wonted corner by the chimney-side; his head, just touched with gray, lies back upon its oaken top. Little Nelly leans upon his knee, looking up for some reply to her girlish questionings. Opposite, sits your mother; her figure is thin, her look cheerful, yet subdued;――her arm perhaps resting on your shoulder, as she talks to you in tones of tender admonition, of the days that are to come.

Illustration: (‡ fireplace hearth)

The cat is purring on the hearth; the clock is ticking on the mantel. The great table in the middle of the room, with its books and work, waits only for the lighting of the evening lamp, to see a return to its stores of embroidery, and of story.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

PATRIOT AND MAN OF LETTERS.

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON is one of the group of men of whom their countrymen should be most proud. He has taken a noble part in the battles on behalf of freedom, which the last half-century has seen, and everywhere has borne himself with a nobility, a devotion and a courage worthy of all praise. The man who was driven from his church because he preached the freedom of the slaves, who sat with Parker and Phillips under indictment for murder for their part in attempting to rescue a fugitive slave, who was colonel of the first regiment of freed slaves mustered into the army of the United States, who bravely fought and patiently suffered for the cause of the Union; surely this man, if he had no other claims upon our respect and attention, should hold a high place in the hearts of his fellows.

Colonel Higginson is a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 1847, when he was twenty-four years old, became pastor of a Congregational Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Here his anti-slavery preaching allowed him to remain but three years. From 1852 until 1858 he was pastor of a free church in Worcester, after which he left the ministry and devoted himself to literature. During all this time his activity in the anti-slavery agitation was frequently getting him into trouble, and, with his friends who participated in the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns, he was discharged from custody only through a flaw in the indictment. He took part in the organization of the bands of free-state, emigrants to Kansas, and was personally acquainted with John Brown. With his regiment of colored troops, he took possession of Jacksonville, Florida; but was wounded in 1863 and was compelled to resign from the army. He has been an earnest advocate of equal suffrage for men and women and of the higher education for both sexes. He has served in his State Legislature and as a member of the State Board of Education.

Colonel Higginson’s contributions to literature consist largely of volumes of essays that originally appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” or other periodicals, and historical and biographical work. Some of his best known books are “Atlantic Essays;” “Young Folk’s History of the United States;” “Young Folk’s Book of American Explorers;” “Short Stories of American Authors;” “A Larger History of the United States;” “The Monarch of Dreams;” and “Brief Biographies of European Statesmen.” Besides these, he has translated his “Young Folk’s History of the United States” into German and French for publication in those languages, and has also published a number of English translations of modern and ancient classics. Colonel Higginson is one of our most popular writers, particularly upon American history, and his service to the cause of American letters has been no less distinguished than his share in the great victory which made our country in truth the land of the free.

* * * * *

“A PURITAN SUNDAY MORNING.”¹

FROM “ATLANTIC ESSAYS.”

¹ Copyright, Geo. R. Shepard.

IT is nine o’clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen hundred and something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest settlement, around whose expanding fields the great American wilderness recedes each day, withdrawing its bears and wolves and Indians into an ever remoter distance――not yet so far removed but a stout wooden gate at the end of the village street indicates that there is danger outside. It would look very busy and thriving in this little place to-day but for the Sabbath stillness which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of the numerous log-huts and these few framed houses, and since three o’clock yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world’s work has been done. Last night a Preparatory Lecture was held, and now comes the consummation of the whole week’s life, in the solemn act of worship. In which settlement of the great Massachusetts Colony is the great ceremonial to pass before our eyes? If it be Cambridge village, a drum is sounding its peaceful summons to the congregation. If it be Salem village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal, and a red flag is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the auction-flag of later periods. If it be Haverhill village, then Abraham Tyler has been blowing his horn assiduously for half an hour――a service for which Abraham, each year, receives a half pound of pork from every family in town.

Be it drum, bell, or horn that gives the summons, we will draw near to this important building, the centre of the village, the one public edifice: meeting-house, town-house, schoolhouse, watch-house, all in one. So important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than half a mile from it. And yet the people ride to “meeting,” short though the distance be, for at yonder oaken block a wife dismounts from behind her husband; and has it not, moreover, been found needful to impose a fine of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins are not modern ones, young gentlemen.

We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is the pillory, yonder are the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a terror to evil-doers, but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house is a high wooden paling, to which the law permits citizens to tie their horses, provided it be not done too near the passageway. For at that opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is painted black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears also a heavy match-lock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the ground, ready to support the weapon; and he is girded with his bandolier, or broad leather belt, which sustains a sword and a dozen tin cartridge-boxes.

* * * * *

O the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets in! “People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies,” says one writer triumphantly, “so much as in England.” The warning caution, “Be short,” which the minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no authority over his pulpit. He may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one thinks it long; for, indeed, at prayer-meetings four persons will sometimes pray an hour each――one with confession, one with private petitions, a third with petitions for Church and Kingdom, and a fourth with thanksgiving――each theme being conscientiously treated by itself. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his hour-glass, may say――but that he cannot foresee the levity to be born in a later century with Mather Byles――“Now, my hearers, we will take another glass.”

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

HAMILTON W. MABIE.

THE MODERN CRITIC.

IN the modern school of literary critics, whose best representatives are Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Lowell and Stedman, Hamilton W. Mabie has a prominent place. His aim has been, as is the aim of all great criticism, not only to give an estimate of a man’s work, but to show the man’s soul. He was born at Cold Springs, on the banks of the Hudson, of a family of culture. He was prepared for college under a private tutor, and graduated at Williams College in the Class of ’67――a class which numbered many men of fame.

From boyhood ♦Mabie has been a great reader, and he is familiar with the classics of all literatures, as well as a student of contemporaneous literature.

♦ ‘Maybie’ replaced with ‘Mabie’

After a course of law at Columbia University his literary tendencies drew him into his natural field and away from a profession uncongenial to him. In 1879 he took a position on the staff of the “Christian Union,” which under its new name, the “Outlook,” under the joint editorship of Mabie and Lyman Abbott, has taken a prominent place among the foremost religious journals of the world. “My Study Fire,” which expresses our author’s ideas of the function of literature, and the attitude and spirit of the literary man, first appeared as a series of articles in this religious journal.

In the last few years Mr. Mabie has taken a prominent place on the platform on literary and educational subjects, though he scrupulously keeps his public speaking subordinate to his writing. His addresses are marked with elegance, grace, and all the fruits of culture, and they show a profound study of the problems of life and spirit. He has a beautiful home at Summit, New Jersey, an enviable site for a writer, with the multitudinous charms of nature without and the gathered wisdom of the world’s great thinkers within.

He is a man of robust life, of clear, healthy mind and of high faith. He has declared that “Skepticism is the root of all evil in us and in our arts. We do not believe enough in God, in ourselves, and in the divine laws under which we live. Great art involves great faith――a clear, resolute, victorious insight into and grasp of things, a belief real enough in

‘The mighty hopes which make us men’

to inspire and sustain heroic tasks,” a declaration quite typical of all his thought.

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COUNTRY SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

BY HAMILTON W. MABIE

_Illustrated from original photographs by Conrad Baer._

AT the end of February the observer begins to see the faint forerunners of spring. The willow shows signs of renewing its freshness, and the long stretch of cold, with brilliant or steely skies, is interrupted by days full of an indescribable softness. It is almost pathetic to note with what joy the spirit of man takes cognizance of these first hints of the color, the bloom and the warmth slowly creeping up to the southern horizon-line. For we are children of the sun, and, much as we love our hearthstones, we are never quite at home unless we have the freedom of the out-of-door world. Winter finds its great charm in the ingathering of the memories of the summer that is gone and in the anticipation of the summer that is at hand. Half the cheer of the blazing log lies in the air of the woods which it brings into the narrow room.

Illustration: ON THE FARM IN CANADA

To be out of doors is the normal condition of the natural man. At some period of our ancestral life, so dim in our thought but so potential in our temper, disposition and physique, we have all lived, so to speak, in the open air; and although city-born and city-bred, we turn to the country with an instinctive feeling that we belong there. There are a few cockneys to whom the sound of Bow Bells is sweeter than the note of the bluebird, the resonant clarion of chanticleer or the far-off bleating of sheep; but to the immense majority of men these noises are like sounds that were familiar in childhood. I have sometimes thought that the deepest charm of the country lies in the fact that it was the home and play-ground of the childhood of the race, and, however long some of us have been departed from it, it stirs within us rare memories and associations which are imperishable. The lowing of cattle coming home at nightfall; the bleating of sheep on the hillside pastures; the crowing of the cock, are older than any human speech which now exists. They were ancient sounds before our oldest histories were written. I know of nothing sweeter to the man who comes out of the heat and noise and dust of the city in midsummer than to be awakened on the first morning by that irregular tinkle of bells which accompanies the early processions of the cows. One may never have come nearer a farm than his great-grandfather, but that sound makes him feel as if he were at home after some long and arduous absence.

Illustration: THE OLD WELL-CURB

And one has but to put into his pocket a few of those clever newspapers which satirize society people in spirited and well-drawn lines, and carry them into the country, to discover that the picturesque flees the city and loves the country; so far, that is, as people are concerned. There is certainly something wrong with our modern dress; it is impossible to discover anything suggestive or poetic in it, or to make any thing artistic out of it. Well-dressed individual men and women are often attractive to the eye; but when this is true it is because the charm of the person survives the monotonous uniformity of good clothes. Nothing can make the evening dress in which man extinguishes his personality either significant or artistic; but the man in overalls and shirt-sleeves is often a strikingly picturesque figure. Country life as a whole is steeped in the picturesque, in spite of the machines which so largely take the place of the old-time hand labor. One must go to the fields to find the poetry of human occupation; the man in the street is often interesting but he rarely stirs the imagination; the man in the fields constantly sets the imagination loose. What elemental strength and meaning are expressed in those peasant-figures of Millet? They belong to the world in which they toil; they disclose their identity with it; they express something of its meaning in their vigorous or bent forms.

Illustration: IMMIGRANT WOMEN HOEING POTATOES

Illustration: WAITING FOR MILKING-TIME

The entire life of the field is poetic in the true sense; from the hour when the last snow begins to melt to the hour when the last sheaf of grain goes creaking through the bars. The sower, moving across the open furrows, has a kind of antique picturesqueness; he seems to have stepped out of that ancient frieze with which the earliest habits encircled the oldest days. He expresses freedom, virility, personality in every movement; the eye follows him with a deepening impression that here is something native and original: a man in first-hand relations with his world. The reaper who follows him when sun and cloud have done their share, is not less striking and effective; and when the sheaves lie in rows or piles on the freshly cut stubble, the slow-moving, noisily creaking wagon, constantly pausing to take on its ripe load, seems a fit accessory in the staging of this pastoral drama. The fact that this poetry of motion is bound to toil so arduous and exacting that it often becomes a kind of relentless drudgery, is full of significance to those who believe that beauty is not esoteric, but the affluence of universal life in its normal relations and occupations.

Illustration: AFTER WORK

The sights and sounds of the farm are not only full of interest, but that interest is deepened by their constant recurrence. The horses at the trough; the sheep beside the stream as placid as themselves, or on the green uplands; the cows stolidly biding the coming of afternoon under the trees, or standing knee-deep in the cool brooks; the clucking of hens and their bustling leisure; the going out of the workers, with implements, seed, machines, wagons, and their return at sunset; the stir of the morning, the hush of the evening; what a world of homely, wholesome life is revealed in these old-time doings and happenings of the seasons and the life on the farm.

Illustration: A WINTER EVENING ON THE FARM

But the farm is often only a unit of measurement, a term of individual possession; there is something greater; there is the country. Beyond the fields there is the landscape, and above them there is the sky; and every farm fits into these wider relations and is part of the larger whole. The woods, cool and silent; the spring hidden from the sun by overhanging trees and from strange feet by moss-grown rocks; the brook where it runs noiselessly in a shadow so deep at noon that one bathes his eyes in it after the glare of the world; the old mill, deserted by man but loyally served by the stream that flows through the decaying sluice and over the wheel that turns no more; the quiet hilltop, above which the whole country sleeps on summer afternoons;――these are all simply extensions of the farm.

Illustration: SUNDAY AFTERNOON

The boys know them on holidays; the older people are drawn to them in those infrequent hours when the pressure of work is lightened; the man who is getting city sights and sounds out of head and heart knows and loves them. The very thought of them brings refreshment and repose; for they are, one and all, places of silence and solitude.

Illustration: A SUNNY PLAY-GROUND

The fever of this our life, and the tumult of it, vanish on the invisible boundaries of these ancient sanctuaries of nature. It is not difficult to understand the charm of these places for tired and worn souls; for it is to such places that exhausted men and women invariably turn. No one with a rich intellectual and spiritual nature, can keep in perfect health without a good deal of solitude and silence.

Illustration: CHURNING IN THE BARN

We come to know ourselves and the world in the deeper ways only when we are apart from the rush of things. It is only when traffic ceases and the dust is laid that the landscape becomes clear and complete to the pedestrian. The quiet of the woods, the cool note of the mountain streams, the silence of the summits, represent, not the luxuries and pleasures of a rich life, but its necessities. To the townsman these outlying provinces of the farm are even more important than are the well-tilled acres.

Illustration: THE OLD MILL

Some day some man or woman will write a luminous book on the education of country life; the training of the eye, the ear, the hand, the unconscious enrichment of the senses and of the mind which are effected by its sights and sounds. There has never been in the long history of education, a better school for the open-minded, imaginative boy or girl than the farm. Every day sets its tasks, every task teaches its lessons; and nature stands looking over the student’s shoulder and quietly whispering some of her deepest secrets to her fortunate child.

Illustration: AFTER A WET SNOW-STORM

For surely it is a great piece of good fortune to grow up in a wise, generous home in the country; to be young with all manner of four-footed beasts and fowls of the air, and grow up with them; to stumble over the roots of trees when one is beginning to walk; to hear the brooks chatter before one knows how to chatter himself; to awake in the stir of the morning, when the whole world seems to be going to work, and to fall asleep when the world comes trooping home, dusty and tired.

Illustration: MAPLE-SUGAR TIME

To see and hear these outdoor sights and sounds is to be born into vital relations with man’s natural background and to come unconsciously into possession of some of the greatest truths which life has to teach. It is also to be born on intimate terms with bluebirds and cherries!

Illustration: THE BLACK SHEEP

“If you want to know where the biggest cherries are to be found,” said Goethe, “consult the boys and the blackbirds.” There is a natural affinity between the two, and the boy who does not grow up in natural relationship with birds and trees suffers a loss of privilege which can never be entirely made up. For it is a great deal easier to make the acquaintance of nature in childhood than in those later years which bring “the philosophic mind,” but which leave the senses untrained for that instinctive observation which enables the boy to see without knowing that he sees.

Illustration: THE MILL-POND

John Burroughs has given us a charming description of the joys of boyhood on a farm, and has perhaps unconsciously betrayed the secret of his own extraordinary familiarity with the out-of-doors world. No knowledge is quite so much a part of ourselves as that which we gain without conscious effort; which we breathe in with the morning air of life.

Illustration: NOON IN THE SHEEP-LOT

The Hindoos have an idiomatic word or phrase for a walk before breakfast, which may be translated, “eating the morning air.”

The boy on the farm sees nature before breakfast, when senses and mind and heart are on the alert, when experience has not brought sophistication with it, and when sensation still keeps its pristine freshness.

Illustration: FEEDING THE CHICKENS

The healthy boy is one great appetite for sights and sounds, and nothing escapes him. He knows every path through the woods, every pool in the brook, every cavern in the hills, every sequestered hollow where the noise of the world is softened into the silence of rustling leaves and murmuring streams. One of the most erudite of American scholars, whose large learning has not smothered the instincts of his youth, declares that he is never entirely happy until he stands barefooted in the old fields.

Illustration: PICKING DAISIES

Nature’s true lovers perceive this, and demand that the companion whom he takes into the wilderness with him shall be of the right sort; one who, as Burroughs says, will not “stand between you and that which you seek.”

“I want for companion,” he continues, “a dog or a boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys――transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless quality that is akin to trees, and growths, and the inarticulate forces of nature. With him you are alone and yet you have company; you are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature stream through and around him; he is a good conductor of the subtle fluid.

“The quality or qualification I refer to belongs to most persons who spend their lives in the open air――to soldiers, hunters, fishers, laborers, and to artists and poets of the right sort.”

Illustration: MAKING FRIENDS

There is something incommunicable in such a fellowship with nature, which dates back to the time when the boy found in her his chosen playmate, and which still keeps up the old game of hide and seek even when his methods have become scientific and the result of his search is a contribution to knowledge.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.

POET AND CRITIC; AUTHOR OF “THE ♦VICTORIAN POETS.”

♦ ‘VICRTORIAN’ replaced with ‘VICTORIAN’

DURING the year 1859, two poems were published in the New York _Tribune_ which made genuine sensations. They were so unlike in subject and treatment that no one would have guessed they emanated from the same brain and were penned by the same hand. The first, entitled “The Diamond Wedding,” was a humorous thrust of ridicule at the “parade” made in the papers over the lavish and expensive jewels and other gifts presented by a wealthy Cuban to his bride――a young lady of New York. This poem, when published, called forth a challenge from the irate father of the lady; but, fortunately, a duel was somehow averted.