Chapter XV: Part 2: , 1896 (12)

Standing at the gate of Birth, it would seem as if it were the vital destination of all things to fly from their source, as if it were the dominant desire of life to enter into limitations. We might mentally represent to ourselves an essence simple and indivisible that denies itself in diversified manifold existence. To us, this side the veil, nay, immeshed in innumerable veils that hide from us the Father's face, this insistence appears to have the stress of urgency, as if the effort of all being, its unceasing travail, were like the beating of the infinite ocean upon the shores of Time; and as if, within the continent of Time, all existence were forever knocking at new gates, seeking, through some as yet untried path of progression, greater complexity, a deeper involvement. All the children seem to be beseeching the Father to divide unto them His living, none willingly abiding in that Father's house. But in reality their will is His will--they fly, and they are driven, like fledglings from the mother-nest.

II

The story of a solar system, or of any synthesis in time, repeats the parable of the Prodigal Son, in its essential features. It is a cosmic parable.

The planet is a wanderer (_planes_), and the individual planetary destiny can be accomplished only through flight from its source. After all its prodigality it shall sicken and return.

Attributing to the Earth, thus apparently separated from the Sun, some macrocosmic sentience, what must have been her wondering dream, finding herself at once thrust away and securely held, poised between her flight and her bond, and so swinging into a regular orbit about the Sun, while at the same time, in her rotation, turning to him and away from him--into the light, and into the darkness, forever denying and confessing her lord! Her emotion must have been one of delight, however mingled with a feeling of timorous awe, since her desire could not have been other than one with her destination. Despite the distance and the growing coolness she could feel the kinship still; her pulse, though modulated, was still in rhythm with that of the solar heart, and in her bosom were hidden consubstantial fires. But it was the sense of otherness, of her own distinct individuation, that was mainly being nourished, this sense, moreover, being proper to her destiny; therefore, the signs of her likeness to the Sun were more and more being buried from her view; her fires were veiled by a hardening crust, and her opaqueness stood out against his light. She had no regret for all she was surrendering, thinking only of her gain, of being clothed upon with a garment showing ever some new fold of surprising beauty and wonder. If she had remained in the Father's house--like the elder brother in the Parable--then would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous simplicity. But now, holding her revels apart, she seems to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among the gardens of cosmic order and loveliness. She glories in her many veils, which, though they hide from her both her source and her very self, are the media through which the invisible light is broken into multiform illusions that enrich her dream. She beholds the Sun as a far-off, insphered being existing for her, her ministrant bridegroom; and when her face is turned away from him into the night, she beholds innumerable suns, a myriad of archangels, all witnesses of some infinitely remote and central flame--the Spirit of all life. Yet, in the midst of these visible images, she is absorbed in her individual dream, wherein she appears to herself to be the mother of all living. It is proper to her destiny that she should be thus enwrapped in her own distinct action and passion, and refer to herself the appearances of a universe. While all that is not she is what she really is,--necessary, that is, to her full definition,--she, on the other hand, from herself interprets all else. This is the inevitable terrestrial idealism, peculiar to every individuation in time--the individual thus balancing the universe.

III

In reality, the Earth has never left the Sun; apart from him she has no life, any more than has the branch severed from the vine. More truly it may be said that the Sun has never left the Earth.

No prodigal can really leave the Father's house, any more than he can leave himself; coming to himself, he feels the Father's arms about him--they have always been there--he is newly appareled, and wears the signet ring of native prestige; he hears the sound of familiar music and dancing, and it may be that the young and beautiful forms mingling with him in this festival are the riotous youths and maidens of his far-country revels, also come to themselves and home, of whom also the Father saith: These were dead and are alive again, they were lost and are found. The starvation and sense of exile had been parts of a troubled dream--a dream which had also had its ecstasy, but had come into a consuming fever, with delirious imaginings of fresh fountains, of shapes drawn from the memory of childhood, and of the cool touch of kindred hands upon the brow. So near is exile to home, misery to divine commiseration--so near are pain and death, desolation and divestiture, to "a new creature," and to the kinship involved in all creation and re-creation.

Distance in the cosmic order is a standing-apart, which is only another expression of the expansion and abundance of creative life; but at every remove its reflex is nearness, a bond of attraction, insphering and curving, making orb and orbit. While in space this attraction is diminished--being inversely as the square of the distance--and so there is maintained and emphasized the appearance of suspension and isolation, yet in time it gains preponderance, contracting sphere and orbit, aging planets and suns, and accumulating destruction, which at the point of annihilation becomes a new creation. This Grand Cycle, which is but a pulsation or breath of the Eternal life, illustrates a truth which is repeated in its least and most minutely divided moment--that birth lies next to death, as water crystallizes at the freezing-point, and the plant blossoms at points most remote from the source of nutrition.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

(1836-)

A poet in verse often becomes a poet in prose also, in composing novels; although the novelist may not, and in general does not, possess the faculty of writing poems. The poet-novelist is apt to put into his prose a good deal of the same charm and the same picturesque choice of phrase and image that characterize his verse; while it does not follow that the novelist who at times writes verse--like George Eliot, for example--succeeds in giving a distinctly poetic quality to prose, or even wishes to do so. Among authors who have displayed peculiar power and won fame in the dual capacity of poet and of prose romancer or novelist, Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo no doubt stand pre-eminent; and in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes very strikingly combine these two functions. Another American author who has gained a distinguished position both as a poet and as a writer of prose fiction and essays is Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

It is upon his work in the form of verse, perhaps, that Aldrich's chief renown is based; but some of his short stories in especial have contributed much to his popularity, no less than to his repute as a delicate and polished artificer in words. A New Englander, he has infused into some of his poems the true atmosphere of New England, and has given the same light and color of home to his prose, while imparting to his productions in both kinds a delightful tinge of the foreign and remote. In addition to his capacities as a poet and a romancer, he is a wit and humorist of sparkling quality. In reading his books one seems also to inhale the perfumes of Arabia and the farther East, blended with the salt sea-breeze and the pine-scented air of his native State, New Hampshire.

He was born in the old seaside town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, November 11th, 1836; but moved to New York City in 1854, at the age of seventeen. There he remained until 1866; beginning his work quite early; forming his literary character by reading and observation, by the writing of poems, and by practice and experience of writing prose sketches and articles for journals and periodicals. During this period he entered into associations with the poets Stedman, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor, and was more or less in touch with the group that included Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, and William Winter. Removing to Boston in January, 1866, he became the editor of Every Saturday, and remained in that post until 1874, when he resigned. In 1875 he made a long tour in Europe, plucking the first fruits of foreign travel, which were succeeded by many rich and dainty gatherings from the same source in later years. In the intervals of these wanderings he lived in Boston and Cambridge; occupying for a time James Russell Lowell's historic house of Elmwood, in the semi-rural university city; and then established a pretty country house at Ponkapog, a few miles west of Boston. This last suggested the title for a charming book of travel papers, 'From Ponkapog to Pesth.' In 1881 he was appointed editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and continued to direct that famous magazine for nine years, frequently making short trips to Europe, extending his tours as far as the heart of Russia, and gathering fresh materials, for essay or song. Much of his time since giving up the Atlantic editorship has been passed in voyaging, and in 1894-5 he made a journey around the world.

From the beginning he struck with quiet certainty the vein that was his by nature in poetry; and this has broadened almost continually, yielding richer results, which have been worked out with an increasing refinement of skill. His predilection is for the picturesque; for romance combined with simplicity, purity, and tenderness of feeling, touched by fancy and by occasional lights of humor so reserved and dainty that they never disturb the pictorial harmony. The capacity for unaffected utterance of feeling on matters common to humanity reached a climax in the poem of 'Baby Bell,' which by its sympathetic and delicate description of a child's advent and death gave the author a claim to the affection^ of a wide circle; and this remained for a long time probably the best known among his poems. 'Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book' is another of the earlier favorites. 'Spring in New England' has since come to hold high rank both for its vivid and graceful description of the season, for its tender fervor of patriotism, and for its sentiment of reconciliation between North and South. The lines on 'Piscataqua River' remain one of the best illustrations of boyhood memories, and have something of Whittier's homely truth. In his longer narrative pieces, 'Judith' and 'Wyndham Towers,' cast in the mold of blank-verse idyls, Mr. Aldrich does not seem so much himself as in many of his briefer flights. An instinctive dramatic tendency finds outlet in 'Pauline Paulovna' and 'Mercedes'--the latter of which, a two-act piece in prose, has found representation in the theatre; yet in these, also, he is less eminently successful than in his lyrics and society verse.

No American poet has wrought his stanzas with greater faithfulness to an exacting standard of craftsmanship than Mr. Aldrich, or has known better when to leave a line loosely cast, and when to reinforce it with correction or with a syllable that might seem, to an ear less true, redundant. This gives to his most carefully chiseled productions an air of spontaneous ease, and has made him eminent as a sonneteer. His sonnet on 'Sleep' is one of the finest in the language. The conciseness and concentrated aptness of his expression also--together with a faculty of bringing into conjunction subtly contrasted thoughts, images, or feelings--has issued happily in short, concentrated pieces like 'An Untimely Thought,' 'Destiny,' and 'Identity,' and in a number of pointed and effective quatrains. Without overmastering purpose outside of art itself, his is the poetry of luxury rather than of deep passion or conviction; yet, with the freshness of bud and tint in springtime, it still always relates itself effectively to human experience. The author's specially American quality, also, though not dominant, comes out clearly in 'Unguarded Gates,' and with a differing tone in the plaintive Indian legend of 'Miantowona.'

If we perceive in his verse a kinship with the dainty ideals of Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset, this does not obscure his originality or his individual charm; and the same thing may be said with regard to his prose. The first of his short fictions that made a decided mark was 'Marjorie Daw.' The fame which it gained, in its separate field, was as swift and widespread as that of Hawthorne's 'The Gentle Boy' or Bret Harte's 'Luck of Roaring Camp.' It is a bright and half-pathetic little parody on human life and affection; or perhaps we should call it a parable symbolizing the power which imagination wields over real life, even in supposedly unimaginative people. The covert smile which it involves, at the importance of human emotions, may be traced to a certain extent in some of Mr. Aldrich's longer and more serious works of fiction: his three novels, 'Prudence Palfrey,' 'The Queen of Sheba,' and 'The Stillwater Tragedy.' 'The Story of a Bad Boy,' frankly but quietly humorous in its record of the pranks and vicissitudes of a healthy average lad (with the scene of the story localized at old Portsmouth, under the name of Rivermouth), a less ambitious work, still holds a secure place in the affections of many mature as well as younger readers. Besides these books, Mr. Aldrich has published a collection of short descriptive, reminiscent, and half-historic papers on Portsmouth,--'An Old Town by the Sea'; with a second volume of short stories entitled 'Two Bites at a Cherry.' The character-drawing in his fiction is clear-cut and effective, often sympathetic, and nearly always suffused with an agreeable coloring of humor. There are notes of pathos, too, in some of his tales; and it is the blending of these qualities, through the medium of a lucid and delightful style, that defines his pleasing quality in prose.

[The following selections are copyrighted, and are reprinted by permission of the author, and Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers.]

DESTINY

Three roses, wan as moonlight, and weighed down
Each with its loveliness as with a crown,
Drooped in a florist's window in a town.

The first a lover bought. It lay at rest,
Like flower on flower, that night, on Beauty's breast.

The second rose, as virginal and fair,
Shrunk in the tangles of a harlot's hair.

The third, a widow, with new grief made wild,
Shut in the icy palm of her dead child.

IDENTITY

Somewhere--in desolate wind-swept space--
In Twilight-land--in No-man's land--
Two hurrying Shapes met face to face,
And bade each other stand.

"And who are you?" cried one, agape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light.
"I know not," said the second Shape,
"I only died last night!"

PRESCIENCE

The new moon hung in the sky, the sun was low in the west,
And my betrothed and I in the churchyard paused to rest--
Happy maiden and lover, dreaming the old dream over:
The light winds wandered by, and robins chirped from the nest.

And lo! in the meadow sweet was the grave of a little child,
With a crumbling stone at the feet and the ivy running wild--
Tangled ivy and clover folding it over and over:
Close to my sweetheart's feet was the little mound up-piled.

Stricken with nameless fears, she shrank and clung to me,
And her eyes were filled with tears for a sorrow I did not see:
Lightly the winds were blowing, softly her tears were flowing--
Tears for the unknown years and a sorrow that was to be!

ALEC YEATON'S SON

GLOUCESTER, AUGUST, 1720

/*
The wind it wailed, the wind it moaned,
And the white caps flecked the sea;
"An' I would to God," the skipper groaned,
"I had not my boy with me!"

Snug in the stern-sheets, little John
Laughed as the scud swept by;
But the skipper's sunburnt cheek grew wan
As he watched the wicked sky.

"Would he were at his mother's side!"
And the skipper's eyes were dim.
"Good Lord in heaven, if ill betide,
What would become of him!

"For me--my muscles are as steel,
For me let hap what may;
I might make shift upon the keel
Until the break o' day.

"But he, he is so weak and small,
So young, scarce learned to stand--
O pitying Father of us all,
I trust him in thy hand!

"For thou who markest from on high
A sparrow's fall--each one!--
Surely, O Lord, thou'lt have an eye
On Alec Yeaton's son!"

Then, helm hard-port; right straight he sailed
Towards the headland light:
The wind it moaned, the wind it wailed,
And black, black fell the night.

Then burst a storm to make one quail,
Though housed from winds and waves--
They who could tell about that gale
Must rise from watery graves!

Sudden it came, as sudden went;
Ere half the night was sped,
The winds were hushed, the waves were spent,
And the stars shone overhead.

Now, as the morning mist grew thin,
The folk on Gloucester shore
Saw a little figure floating in
Secure, on a broken oar!

Up rose the cry, "A wreck! a wreck!
Pull mates, and waste no breath!"--
They knew it, though 'twas but a speck
Upon the edge of death!

Long did they marvel in the town
At God his strange decree,
That let the stalwart skipper drown
And the little child go free!

MEMORY

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour--
'Twas noon by yonder village tower.
And on the last blue noon in May--
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

TENNYSON (1890)

I

Shakespeare and Milton--what third blazoned name
Shall lips of after ages link to these?
His who, beside the wild encircling seas,
Was England's voice, her voice with one acclaim,
For threescore years; whose word of praise was fame,
Whose scorn gave pause to man's iniquities.

II

What strain was his in that Crimean war?
A bugle-call in battle; a low breath,
Plaintive and sweet, above the fields of death!
So year by year the music rolled afar,
From Euxine wastes to flowery Kandahar,
Bearing the laurel or the cypress wreath.

III

Others shall have their little space of time,
Their proper niche and bust, then fade away
Into the darkness, poets of a day;
But thou, O builder of enduring rhyme,
Thou shalt not pass! Thy fame in every clime
On earth shall live where Saxon speech has sway.

IV

Waft me this verse across the winter sea,
Through light and dark, through mist and blinding sleet,
O winter winds, and lay it at his feet;
Though the poor gift betray my poverty,
At his feet lay it; it may chance that he
Will find no gift, where reverence is, unmeet.

SWEETHEART, SIGH NO MORE

It was with doubt and trembling
I whispered in her ear.
Go, take her answer, bird-on-bough,
That all the world may hear--
_Sweetheart, sigh no more_!

Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
Upon the wayside tree,
How fair she is, how true she is,
How dear she is to me--
_Sweetheart, sigh no more_!

Sing it, sing it, and through the summer long
The winds among the clover-tops,
And brooks, for all their silvery stops,
Shall envy you the song--
_Sweetheart, sigh no more!_

BROKEN MUSIC

"A note
All out of tune in this world's instrument."

AMY LEVY.

I know not in what fashion she was made,
Nor what her voice was, when she used to speak,
Nor if the silken lashes threw a shade
On wan or rosy cheek.

I picture her with sorrowful vague eyes,
Illumed with such strange gleams of inner light
As linger in the drift of London skies
Ere twilight turns to night.

I know not; I conjecture. 'Twas a girl
That with her own most gentle desperate hand
From out God's mystic setting plucked life's pearl--
'Tis hard to understand.

So precious life is! Even to the old
The hours are as a miser's coins, and she--
Within her hands lay youth's unminted gold
And all felicity.

The winged impetuous spirit, the white flame
That was her soul once, whither has it flown?
Above her brow gray lichens blot her name
Upon the carven stone.

This is her Book of Verses--wren-like notes,
Shy franknesses, blind gropings, haunting fears;
At times across the chords abruptly floats
A mist of passionate tears.

A fragile lyre too tensely keyed and strung,
A broken music, weirdly incomplete:
Here a proud mind, self-baffled and self-stung,
Lies coiled in dark defeat.

ELMWOOD

_In Memory of James Russell Lowell_

Here, in the twilight, at the well-known gate
I linger, with no heart to enter more.
Among the elm-tops the autumnal air
Murmurs, and spectral in the fading light
A solitary heron wings its way
Southward--save this no sound or touch of life.
Dark is the window where the scholar's lamp
Was used to catch a pallor from the dawn.

Yet I must needs a little linger here.
Each shrub and tree is eloquent of him,
For tongueless things and silence have their speech.
This is the path familiar to his foot
From infancy to manhood and old age;
For in a chamber of that ancient house
His eyes first opened on the mystery
Of life, and all the splendor of the world.
Here, as a child, in loving, curious way,
He watched the bluebird's coming; learned the date
Of hyacinth and goldenrod, and made
Friends of those little redmen of the elms,
And slyly added to their winter store
Of hazel-nuts: no harmless thing that breathed,
Footed or winged, but knew him for a friend.
The gilded butterfly was not afraid
To trust its gold to that so gentle hand,
The bluebird fled not from the pendent spray.
Ah, happy childhood, ringed with fortunate stars!
What dreams were his in this enchanted sphere,
What intuitions of high destiny!
The honey-bees of Hybla touched his lips
In that old New-World garden, unawares.

So in her arms did Mother Nature fold
Her poet, whispering what of wild and sweet
Into his ear--the state-affairs of birds,
The lore of dawn and sunset, what the wind
Said in the tree-tops--fine, unfathomed things
Henceforth to turn to music in his brain:
A various music, now like notes of flutes,
And now like blasts of trumpets blown in wars.
Later he paced this leafy academe
A student, drinking from Greek chalices
The ripened vintage of the antique world.
And here to him came love, and love's dear loss;
Here honors came, the deep applause of men
Touched to the heart by some swift-wingèd word
That from his own full heart took eager flight--
Some strain of piercing sweetness or rebuke,
For underneath his gentle nature flamed
A noble scorn for all ignoble deed,
Himself a bondman till all men were free.

Thus passed his manhood; then to other lands
He strayed, a stainless figure among courts
Beside the Manzanares and the Thames.
Whence, after too long exile, he returned
With fresher laurel, but sedater step
And eye more serious, fain to breathe the air
Where through the Cambridge marshes the blue Charles
Uncoils its length and stretches to the sea:
Stream dear to him, at every curve a shrine
For pilgrim Memory. Again he watched
His loved syringa whitening by the door,
And knew the catbird's welcome; in his walks
Smiled on his tawny kinsmen of the elms
Stealing his nuts; and in the ruined year
Sat at his widowed hearthside with bent brows
Leonine, frosty with the breath of time,
And listened to the crooning of the wind
In the wide Elmwood chimneys, as of old.
And then--and then....

The after-glow has faded from the elms,
And in the denser darkness of the boughs
From time to time the firefly's tiny lamp
Sparkles. How often in still summer dusks
He paused to note that transient phantom spark
Flash on the air--a light that outlasts him!

The night grows chill, as if it felt a breath
Blown from that frozen city where he lies.
All things turn strange. The leaf that rustles here
Has more than autumn's mournfulness. The place
Is heavy with his absence. Like fixed eyes
Whence the dear light of sense and thought has fled,
The vacant windows stare across the lawn.
The wise sweet spirit that informed it all
Is otherwhere. The house itself is dead.

O autumn wind among the sombre pines,
Breathe you his dirge, but be it sweet and low.
With deep refrains and murmurs of the sea,
Like to his verse--the art is yours alone.
His once--you taught him. Now no voice but yours!
Tender and low, O wind among the pines.
I would, were mine a lyre of richer strings,
In soft Sicilian accents wrap his name.

SEA LONGINGS

The first world-sound that fell upon my ear
Was that of the great winds along the coast
Crushing the deep-sea beryl on the rocks--
The distant breakers' sullen cannonade.
Against the spires and gables of the town
The white fog drifted, catching here and there
At overleaning cornice or peaked roof,
And hung--weird gonfalons. The garden walks
Were choked with leaves, and on their ragged biers
Lay dead the sweets of summer--damask rose,
Clove-pink, old-fashioned, loved New England flowers
Only keen salt-sea odors filled the air.
Sea-sounds, sea-odors--these were all my world.
Hence is it that life languishes with me
Inland; the valleys stifle me with gloom
And pent-up prospect; in their narrow bound
Imagination flutters futile wings.
Vainly I seek the sloping pearl-white sand
And the mirage's phantom citadels
Miraculous, a moment seen, then gone.
Among the mountains I am ill at ease,
Missing the stretched horizon's level line
And the illimitable restless blue.
The crag-torn sky is not the sky I love,
But one unbroken sapphire spanning all;
And nobler than the branches of a pine
Aslant upon a precipice's edge
Are the strained spars of some great battle-ship
Plowing across the sunset. No bird's lilt
So takes me as the whistling of the gale
Among the shrouds. My cradle-song was this,
Strange inarticulate sorrows of the sea,
Blithe rhythms upgathered from the Sirens' caves.
Perchance of earthly voices the last voice
That shall an instant my freed spirit stay
On this world's verge, will be some message blown
Over the dim salt lands that fringe the coast
At dusk, or when the trancèd midnight droops
With weight of stars, or haply just as dawn,
Illumining the sullen purple wave,
Turns the gray pools and willow-stems to gold.

A SHADOW OF THE NIGHT

Close on the edge of a midsummer dawn
In troubled dreams I went from land to land,
Each seven-colored like the rainbow's arc,
Regions where never fancy's foot had trod
Till then; yet all the strangeness seemed not strange,
At which I wondered, reasoning in my dream
With twofold sense, well knowing that I slept.
At last I came to this our cloud-hung earth,
And somewhere by the seashore was a grave,
A woman's grave, new-made, and heaped with flowers;
And near it stood an ancient holy man
That fain would comfort me, who sorrowed not
For this unknown dead woman at my feet.
But I, because his sacred office held
My reverence, listened; and 'twas thus he spake:--
"When next thou comest thou shalt find her still
In all the rare perfection that she was.
Thou shalt have gentle greeting of thy love!
Her eyelids will have turned to violets,
Her bosom to white lilies, and her breath
To roses. What is lovely never dies,
But passes into other loveliness,
Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower, or wingèd air.
If this befalls our poor unworthy flesh,
Think thee what destiny awaits the soul!
What glorious vesture it shall wear at last!"
While yet he spoke, seashore and grave and priest
Vanished, and faintly from a neighboring spire
Fell five slow solemn strokes upon my ear.
Then I awoke with a keen pain at heart,
A sense of swift unutterable loss,
And through the darkness reached my hand to touch
Her cheek, soft-pillowed on one restful palm--
To be quite sure!

OUTWARD BOUND

I leave behind me the elm-shadowed square
And carven portals of the silent street,
And wander on with listless, vagrant feet
Through seaward-leading alleys, till the air
Smells of the sea, and straightway then the care
Slips from my heart, and life once more is sweet.
At the lane's ending lie the white-winged fleet.
O restless Fancy, whither wouldst thou fare?
Here are brave pinions that shall take thee far--
Gaunt hulks of Norway; ships of red Ceylon;
Slim-masted lovers of the blue Azores!
'Tis but an instant hence to Zanzibar,
Or to the regions of the Midnight Sun:
Ionian isles are thine, and all the fairy shores!

REMINISCENCE

Though I am native to this frozen zone
That half the twelvemonth torpid lies, or dead;
Though the cold azure arching overhead
And the Atlantic's never-ending moan
Are mine by heritage, I must have known
Life otherwhere in epochs long since fled;
For in my veins some Orient blood is red,
And through my thought are lotus blossoms blown.
I do remember ... it was just at dusk,
Near a walled garden at the river's turn,
(A thousand summers seem but yesterday!)
A Nubian girl, more sweet than Khoorja musk,
Came to the water-tank to fill her urn,
And with the urn she bore my heart away!

PÈRE ANTOINE'S DATE-PALM

Near the Levée, and not far from the old French Cathedral in the Place d'Armes, at New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, thirty feet in height, spreading its broad leaves in the alien air as hardily as if its sinuous roots were sucking strength from their native earth.

Sir Charles Lyell, in his 'Second Visit to the United States,' mentions this exotic:--"The tree is seventy or eighty years old; for Père Antoine, a Roman Catholic priest, who died about twenty years ago, told Mr. Bringier that he planted it himself, when he was young. In his will he provided that they who succeeded to this lot of ground should forfeit it if they cut down the palm."

Wishing to learn something of Père Antoine's history, Sir Charles Lyell made inquiries among the ancient Creole inhabitants of the faubourg. That the old priest, in his last days, became very much emaciated, that he walked about the streets like a mummy, that he gradually dried up, and finally blew away, was the meagre and unsatisfactory result of the tourist's investigations. This is all that is generally told of Père Antoine.

In the summer of 1861, while New Orleans was yet occupied by the Confederate forces, I met at Alexandria, in Virginia, a lady from Louisiana--Miss Blondeau by name--who gave me the substance of the following legend touching Père Antoine and his wonderful date-palm. If it should appear tame to the reader, it will be because I am not habited in a black ribbed-silk dress, with a strip of point-lace around my throat, like Miss Blondeau; it will be because I lack her eyes and lips and Southern music to tell it with.

When Père Antoine was a very young man, he had a friend whom he loved as he loved his life. Émile Jardin returned his passion, and the two, on account of their friendship, became the marvel of the city where they dwelt. One was never seen without the other; for they studied, walked, ate, and slept together.

Thus began Miss Blondeau, with the air of Fiammetta telling her prettiest story to the Florentines in the garden of Boccaccio.

Antoine and Émile were preparing to enter the Church; indeed, they had taken the preliminary steps, when a circumstance occurred which changed the color of their lives. A foreign lady, from some nameless island in the Pacific, had a few months before moved into their neighborhood. The lady died suddenly, leaving a girl of sixteen or seventeen, entirely friendless and unprovided for. The young men had been kind to the woman during her illness, and at her death--melting with pity at the forlorn situation of Anglice, the daughter--swore between themselves to love and watch over her as if she were their sister.

Now Anglice had a wild, strange beauty that made other women seem tame beside her; and in the course of time the young men found themselves regarding their ward not so much like brothers as at first. In brief, they found themselves in love with her.

They struggled with their hopeless passion month after month, neither betraying his secret to the other; for the austere orders which they were about to assume precluded the idea of love and marriage. Until then they had dwelt in the calm air of religious meditations, unmoved except by that pious fervor which in other ages taught men to brave the tortures of the rack and to smile amid the flames. But a blonde girl, with great eyes and a voice like the soft notes of a vesper hymn, had come in between them and their ascetic dreams of heaven. The ties that had bound the young men together snapped silently one by one. At last each read in the pale face of the other the story of his own despair.

And she? If Anglice shared their trouble, her face told no story. It was like the face of a saint on a cathedral window. Once, however, as she came suddenly upon the two men and overheard words that seemed to burn like fire on the lip of the speaker, her eyes grew luminous for an instant. Then she passed on, her face as immobile as before in its setting of wavy gold hair.

"Entre or et roux Dieu fit ses longs cheveux."

One night Émile and Anglice were missing. They had flown--but whither, nobody knew, and nobody save Antoine cared. It was a heavy blow to Antoine--for he had himself half resolved to confess his love to Anglice and urge her to fly with him.

A strip of paper slipped from a volume on Antoine's _priedieu_, and fluttered to his feet.

"_Do not be angry_," said the bit of paper, piteously; _"forgive us, for we love_." ("Pardonnez-nous, car nous aimons.")

Three years went by wearily enough. Antoine had entered the Church, and was already looked upon as a rising man; but his face was pale and his heart leaden, for there was no sweetness in life for him.

Four years had elapsed, when a letter, covered with outlandish postmarks, was brought to the young priest--a letter from Anglice. She was dying;--would he forgive her? Émile, the year previous, had fallen a victim to the fever that raged on the island; and their child, Anglice, was likely to follow him. In pitiful terms she begged Antoine to take charge of the child until she was old enough to enter the convent of the Sacré-Coeur. The epistle was finished hastily by another hand, informing Antoine of Madame Jardin's death; it also told him that Anglice had been placed on board a vessel shortly to leave the island for some Western port.

The letter, delayed by storm and shipwreck, was hardly read and wept over when little Anglice arrived.

On beholding her, Antoine uttered a cry of joy and surprise--she was so like the woman he had worshiped.

The passion that had been crowded down in his heart broke out and lavished its richness on this child, who was to him not only the Anglice of years ago, but his friend Émile Jardin also.

Anglice possessed the wild, strange beauty of her mother--the bending, willowy form, the rich tint of skin, the large tropical eyes, that had almost made Antoine's sacred robes a mockery to him.

For a month or two Anglice was wildly unhappy in her new home. She talked continually of the bright country where she was born, the fruits and flowers and blue skies, the tall, fan-like trees, and the streams that went murmuring through them to the sea. Antoine could not pacify her.

By and by she ceased to weep, and went about the cottage in a weary, disconsolate way that cut Antoine to the heart. A long-tailed paroquet, which she had brought with her in the ship, walked solemnly behind her from room to room, mutely pining, it seemed, for those heavy orient airs that used to ruffle its brilliant plumage.

Before the year ended, he noticed that the ruddy tinge had faded from her cheek, that her eyes had grown languid, and her slight figure more willowy than ever.

A physician was consulted. He could discover nothing wrong with the child, except this fading and drooping. He failed to account for that. It was some vague disease of the mind, he said, beyond his skill.

So Anglice faded day after day. She seldom left the room now. At last Antoine could not shut out the fact that the child was passing away. He had learned to love her so!

"Dear heart," he said once, "What is't ails thee?"

"Nothing, mon père," for so she called him.

The winter passed, the balmy spring had come with its magnolia blooms and orange blossoms, and Anglice seemed to revive. In her small bamboo chair, on the porch, she swayed to and fro in the fragrant breeze, with a peculiar undulating motion, like a graceful tree.

At times something seemed to weigh upon her mind. Antoine observed it, and waited. Finally she spoke.

"Near our house," said little Anglice--"near our house, on the island, the palm-trees are waving under the blue sky. Oh, how beautiful! I seem to lie beneath them all day long. I am very, very happy. I yearned for them so much that I grew ill--don't you think it was so, mon père?

"Hélas, yes!" exclaimed Antoine, suddenly. "Let us hasten to those pleasant islands where the palms are waving."

Anglice smiled. "I am going there, mon père."

A week from that evening the wax candles burned at her feet and forehead, lighting her on the journey.

All was over. Now was Antoine's heart empty. Death, like another Émile, had stolen his new Anglice. He had nothing to do but to lay the blighted flower away.

Père Antoine made a shallow grave in his garden, and heaped the fresh brown mold over his idol.

In the tranquil spring evenings, the priest was seen sitting by the mound, his finger closed in the unread breviary.

The summer broke on that sunny land; and in the cool morning twilight, and after nightfall, Antoine lingered by the grave. He could never be with it enough.

One morning he observed a delicate stem, with two curiously shaped emerald leaves, springing up from the centre of the mound. At first he merely noticed it casually; but presently the plant grew so tall, and was so strangely unlike anything he had ever seen before, that he examined it with care.

How straight and graceful and exquisite it was! When it swung to and fro with the summer wind, in the twilight, it seemed to Antoine as if little Anglice were standing there in the garden.

The days stole by, and Antoine tended the fragile shoot, wondering what manner of blossom it would unfold, white, or scarlet, or golden. One Sunday, a stranger, with a bronzed, weather-beaten face like a sailor's, leaned over the garden rail, and said to him, "What a fine young date-palm you have there, sir!"

"Mon Dieu!" cried Père Antoine starting, "and is it a palm?"

"Yes, indeed," returned the man. "I didn't reckon the tree would flourish in this latitude."

"Ah, mon Dieu!" was all the priest could say aloud; but he murmured to himself, "Bon Dieu, vous m'avez donné cela!"

If Père Antoine loved the tree before, he worshiped it now. He watered it, and nurtured it, and could have clasped it in his arms. Here were Émile and Anglice and the child, all in one!

The years glided away, and the date-palm and the priest grew together--only one became vigorous and the other feeble. Père Antoine had long passed the meridian of life. The tree was in its youth. It no longer stood in an isolated garden; for pretentious brick and stucco houses had clustered about Antoine's cottage. They looked down scowling on the humble thatched roof. The city was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land. But he clung to it like lichen and refused to sell.

Speculators piled gold on his doorsteps, and he laughed at them. Sometimes he was hungry, and cold, and thinly clad; but he laughed none the less.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!" said the old priest's smile.

Père Antoine was very old now, scarcely able to walk; but he could sit under the pliant, caressing leaves of his palm, loving it like an Arab; and there he sat till the grimmest of speculators came to him. But even in death Père Antoine was faithful to his trust: the owner of that land loses it if he harm the date-tree.

And there it stands in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful, dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamored. May the hand wither that touches her ungently!

"_Because it grew from the heart of little Anglice_," said Miss Blondeau tenderly.

MISS MEHETABEL'S SON

I

THE OLD TAVERN AT BAYLEY'S FOUR-CORNERS

You will not find Greenton, or Bayley's Four-Corners as it is more usually designated, on any map of New England that I know of. It is not a town; it is not even a village: it is merely an absurd hotel. The almost indescribable place called Greenton is at the intersection of four roads, in the heart of New Hampshire, twenty miles from the nearest settlement of note, and ten miles from any railway station. A good location for a hotel, you will say. Precisely; but there has always been a hotel there, and for the last dozen years it has been pretty well patronized--by one boarder. Not to trifle with an intelligent public, I will state at once that, in the early part of this century, Greenton was a point at which the mail-coach on the Great Northern Route stopped to change horses and allow the passengers to dine. People in the county, wishing to take the early mail Portsmouth-ward, put up over night at the old tavern, famous for its irreproachable larder and soft feather-beds. The tavern at that time was kept by Jonathan Bayley, who rivaled his wallet in growing corpulent, and in due time passed away. At his death the establishment, which included a farm, fell into the hands of a son-in-law. Now, though Bayley left his son-in-law a hotel--which sounds handsome--he left him no guests; for at about the period of the old man's death the old stage-coach died also. Apoplexy carried off one, and steam the other. Thus, by a sudden swerve in the tide of progress, the tavern at the Corners found itself high and dry, like a wreck on a sand-bank. Shortly after this event, or maybe contemporaneously, there was some attempt to build a town at Greenton; but it apparently failed, if eleven cellars choked up with _débris_ and overgrown with burdocks are any indication of failure. The farm, however, was a good farm, as things go in New Hampshire, and Tobias Sewell, the son-in-law, could afford to snap his fingers at the traveling public if they came near enough--which they never did.

The hotel remains to-day pretty much the same as when Jonathan Bayley handed in his accounts in 1840, except that Sewell has from time to time sold the furniture of some of the upper chambers to bridal couples in the neighborhood. The bar is still open, and the parlor door says PARLOUR in tall black letters. Now and then a passing drover looks in at that lonely bar-room, where a high-shouldered bottle of Santa Cruz rum ogles with a peculiarly knowing air a shriveled lemon on a shelf; now and then a farmer rides across country to talk crops and stock and take a friendly glass with Tobias; and now and then a circus caravan with speckled ponies, or a menagerie with a soggy elephant, halts under the swinging sign, on which there is a dim mail-coach with four phantomish horses driven by a portly gentleman whose head has been washed off by the rain. Other customers there are none, except that one regular boarder whom I have mentioned.

If misery makes a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows, it is equally certain that the profession of surveyor and civil engineer often takes one into undreamed-of localities. I had never heard of Greenton until my duties sent me there, and kept me there two weeks in the dreariest season of the year. I do not think I would, of my own volition, have selected Greenton for a fortnight's sojourn at any time; but now the business is over, I shall never regret the circumstances that made me the guest of Tobias Sewell, and brought me into intimate relations with Miss Mehetabel's Son.

It was a black October night in the year of grace 1872, that discovered me standing in front of the old tavern at the Corners. Though the ten miles' ride from K---- had been depressing, especially the last five miles, on account of the cold autumnal rain that had set in, I felt a pang of regret on hearing the rickety open wagon turn round in the road and roll off in the darkness. There were no lights visible anywhere, and only for the big, shapeless mass of something in front of me, which the driver had said was the hotel, I should have fancied that I had been set down by the roadside. I was wet to the skin and in no amiable humor; and not being able to find bell-pull or knocker, or even a door, I belabored the side of the house with my heavy walking-stick. In a minute or two I saw a light flickering somewhere aloft, then I heard the sound of a window opening, followed by an exclamation of disgust as a blast of wind extinguished the candle which had given me an instantaneous picture _en silhouette_ of a man leaning out of a casement.

"I say, what do you want, down there?" inquired an unprepossessing voice.

"I want to come in; I want a supper, and a bed, and numberless things."

"This isn't no time of night to go rousing honest folks out of their sleep. Who are you, anyway?"

The question, superficially considered, was a very simple one, and I, of all people in the world, ought to have been able to answer it off-hand; but it staggered me. Strangely enough, there came drifting across my memory the lettering on the back of a metaphysical work which I had seen years before on a shelf in the Astor Library. Owing to an unpremeditatedly funny collocation of title and author, the lettering read as follows:--"Who am I? Jones." Evidently it had puzzled Jones to know who he was, or he wouldn't have written a book about it, and come to so lame and impotent a conclusion. It certainly puzzled me at that instant to define my identity. "Thirty years ago," I reflected, "I was nothing; fifty years hence I shall be nothing again, humanly speaking. In the mean time, who am I, sure enough?" It had never before occurred to me what an indefinite article I was. I wish it had not occurred to me then. Standing there in the rain and darkness, I wrestled vainly with the problem, and was constrained to fall back upon a Yankee expedient.

"Isn't this a hotel?" I asked finally.

"Well, it is a sort of hotel," said the voice, doubtfully. My hesitation and prevarication had apparently not inspired my interlocutor with confidence in me.

"Then let me in. I have just driven over from K---- in this infernal rain. I am wet through and through."

"But what do you want here, at the Corners? What's your business? People don't come here, leastways in the middle of the night."

"It isn't in the middle of the night," I returned, incensed. "I come on business connected with the new road. I'm the superintendent of the works."

"Oh!"

"And if you don't open the door at once, I'll raise the whole neighborhood--and then go to the other hotel."

When I said that, I supposed Greenton was a village with a population of at least three or four thousand, and was wondering vaguely at the absence of lights and other signs of human habitation. Surely, I thought, all the people cannot be abed and asleep at half past ten o'clock: perhaps I am in the business section of the town, among the shops.

"You jest wait," said the voice above.

This request was not devoid of a certain accent of menace, and I braced myself for a sortie on the part of the besieged, if he had any such hostile intent. Presently a door opened at the very place where I least expected a door, at the farther end of the building, in fact, and a man in his shirt-sleeves, shielding a candle with his left hand, appeared on the threshold. I passed quickly into the house, with Mr. Tobias Sewell (for this was Mr. Sewell) at my heels, and found myself in a long, low-studded bar-room.

There were two chairs drawn up before the hearth, on which a huge hemlock back-log was still smoldering, and on the unpainted deal counter contiguous stood two cloudy glasses with bits of lemon-peel in the bottom, hinting at recent libations. Against the discolored wall over the bar hung a yellowed hand-bill, in a warped frame, announcing that "the Next Annual N.H. Agricultural Fair" would take place on the 10th of September, 1841. There was no other furniture or decoration in this dismal apartment, except the cobwebs which festooned the ceiling, hanging down here and there like stalactites.

Mr. Sewell set the candlestick on the mantel-shelf, and threw some pine-knots on the fire, which immediately broke into a blaze, and showed him to be a lank, narrow-chested man, past sixty, with sparse, steel-gray hair, and small, deep-set eyes, perfectly round, like a fish's, and of no particular color. His chief personal characteristics seemed to be too much feet and not enough teeth. His sharply cut, but rather simple face, as he turned it towards me, wore a look of interrogation. I replied to his mute inquiry by taking out my pocket-book and handing him my business-card, which he held up to the candle and perused with great deliberation.

"You're a civil engineer, are you?" he said, displaying his gums, which gave his countenance an expression of almost infantile innocence. He made no further audible remark, but mumbled between his thin lips something which an imaginative person might have construed into, "If you're a civil engineer, I'll be blessed if I wouldn't like to see an uncivil one!"

Mr. Sewell's growl, however, was worse than his bite,--owing to his lack of teeth, probably--for he very good-naturedly set himself to work preparing supper for me. After a slice of cold ham, and a warm punch, to which my chilled condition gave a grateful flavor, I went to bed in a distant chamber in a most amiable mood, feeling satisfied that Jones was a donkey to bother himself about his identity.

When I awoke, the sun was several hours high. My bed faced a window, and by raising myself on one elbow I could look out on what I expected would be the main street. To my astonishment I beheld a lonely country road winding up a sterile hill and disappearing over the ridge. In a cornfield at the right of the road was a small private graveyard, inclosed by a crumbling stone wall with a red gate. The only thing suggestive of life was this little corner lot occupied by death. I got out of bed and went to the other window. There I had an uninterrupted view of twelve miles of open landscape, with Mount Agamenticus in the purple distance. Not a house or a spire in sight. "Well," I exclaimed, "Greenton doesn't appear to be a very closely packed metropolis!" That rival hotel with which I had threatened Mr. Sewell overnight was not a deadly weapon, looking at it by daylight. "By Jove!" I reflected, "maybe I'm in the wrong place." But there, tacked against a panel of the bedroom door, was a faded time-table dated Greenton, August 1st, 1839.

I smiled all the time I was dressing, and went smiling downstairs, where I found Mr. Sewell, assisted by one of the fair sex in the first bloom of her eightieth year, serving breakfast for me on a small table--in the bar-room!