Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

"I was only giving some hints on the fine arts."

"Yes?"

--It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A _blanket_-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.

--We are the Romans of the modern world,--the great assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed _gladius_ of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:--

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.

_Corollary_. It was the Polish _lance_ that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to bound.

"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the _shattered spear_!"

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."

--Self-made men?--Well, yes. Of course every body likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. They never thought of praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther on.

Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society and travel. But as to saying that one is every way the equal of the other, that is another matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all things and persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say, that, _other things being equal_, in most relations of life I prefer a man of family.

What do I mean by a man of family?--O, I'll give you a general idea of what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.

Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of top-boots with tassels.

Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc. Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb full-blown, mediæval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory blood in his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants. 2. Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of Empire; bust _à la Josephine_; wisps of curls, like celery-tips, at sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As for the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the gallery.

Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,--family names:--you will find them at the head of their respective classes in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from their parents' condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of youthful progenitors, and _Hic liber est meus_ on the title-page. A set of Hogarth's original plates. Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octodecimos.

Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt.

If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished with claw-foot chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is complete.

No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, that have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear Professor over there ever read _Poll Synopsis_, or consulted _Castelli Lexicon_, while he was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.

--I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven't. Perhaps you would like to hear my

LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.

When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle--rasp--and straw--
Grow bigger _downwards_ through the box,--

When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,--
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light,--

When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean,--
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean,--

When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take,--
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience' sake,--

When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof,--

When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair,--

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harbor not
Such dimples as would hold your fist,--

When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before,--
When the first locomotive's wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore;--

_Till_ then let Gumming blaze away,
And Miller's saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
_Then_ order your ascension robe!

The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, _père_, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.

ILLUSIONS.

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit,--a niche or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams "Lethe" and "Styx"; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,--the icicle, the orange-flower, the acanthus, the grapes, and the snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the dark.

The sights and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to all natural objects, and which shames the fine things to which we foppishly compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the "Star-Chamber," our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song, "The stars are in the quiet sky," &c., and I sat down on the rocky door to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect.

I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coordinating, pictorial powers of the eye.

The same interference from our organization creates the most of our pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the Irishman in the ditch, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our primers. Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is pathetic in its name, and in his use of the name. It is an admission from a man of the world in the London of 1850, that poor old Puritan Bunyan was right in his perception of the London of 1650. And yet now, in Thackeray, is the added wisdom or skepticism, that though this be really so, he must yet live in tolerance of and practically in homage and obedience to these illusions.

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height. Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D'Alembert, "_Un état de vapeur était un état très fâcheux, parcequ'il nous faisait voir les choses comme elles sont._" I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking,--for the Power has many names,--is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own dream, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners. At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another youth with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good for something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them? I knew a humorist, who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God were two,--power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in the community, but whose sympathies were cold,--presidents of colleges, and governors, and senators,--who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and peacemakers, and cry _Hist-a-boy!_ to every good dog. We must not carry comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horsechestnuts, I own I enter into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate others. They see through Claud-Lorraines. And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the _coulisses_, stage effects, and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to _mirage_.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had been so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children, that makes the heart too big for the body. In the worst-assorted connections there is ever some mixture of true marriage. Teague and his jade get some just relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of each other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they were now to begin.

'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were any exempts. The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page; and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will daub with this new paint; but it will not stick. 'Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when he is gone.

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain fate in their constitution, which they know how to use. But they never deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray never so slightly their penetration of what is behind it. 'Tis the charm of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as well as Cæsar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as "dragon-ridden," "thunder-stricken," and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis well to know that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took away fatigue"; but he found the illusion of "arriving from the east at the Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our estimates are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher's meat, sugar, milk, and coal. "Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit." "Not so," says the good Heaven; "plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by." Well, 'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life seems a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways,--wailing, stupid, comatose creatures,--lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the _éclat_ in the universe. A little integrity is better than any career. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all illusions I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life--the life of all of us--identical. For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams. We see God face to face every hour, and know the savour of Nature.

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be. "The notions, 'I am,' and 'This is mine,' which influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance." And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute nature. It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence:--

"Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise;
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice."

THE GIFT OF TRITEMIUS.

Tritemius of Herbipolis one day,
While kneeling at the altar's foot to pray,
Alone with God, as was his pious choice,
Heard from beneath a miserable voice,--
A sound that seemed of all sad things to tell,
As of a lost soul crying out of hell.

Thereat the Abbot rose, the chain whereby
His thoughts went upward broken by that cry,
And, looking from the casement, saw below
A wretched woman, with gray hair aflow,
And withered hands stretched up to him, who cried
For alms as one who might not be denied.

She cried: "For the dear love of Him who gave
His life for ours, my child from bondage save,
My beautiful, brave first-born, chained with slaves
In the Moor's galley, where the sun-smit waves
Lap the white walls of Tunis!" "What I can
I give," Tritemius said,--"my prayers." "O man
Of God!" she cried, for grief had made her bold,
"Mock me not so; I ask not prayers, but gold;
Words cannot serve me, alms alone suffice;
Even while I plead, perchance my first-born dies!"

"Woman!" Tritemius answered, "from our door
None go unfed; hence are we always poor.
A single soldo is our only store.
Thou hast our prayers; what can we give thee more?"

"Give me," she said, "the silver candlesticks
On either side of the great crucifix;
God well may spare them on His errands sped,
Or He can give you golden ones instead."

Then said Tritemius, "Even as thy word,
Woman, so be it; and our gracious Lord,
Who loveth mercy more than sacrifice,
Pardon me if a human soul I prize
Above the gifts upon His altar piled!
Take what thou askest, and redeem thy child."

But his hand trembled as the holy alms
He laid within the beggar's eager palms;
And as she vanished down the linden shade,
He bowed his head and for forgiveness prayed.

So the day passed; and when the twilight came
He rose to find the chapel all a-flame,
And, dumb with grateful wonder, to behold
Upon the altar candlesticks of gold!

THE MOURNING VEIL.

Then in life's goblet freely press
The leaves that give it bitterness,
Nor prize the colored waters less,
For in thy darkness and distress
New light and strength they give

And he who has not learned to know
How false its sparkling bubbles flow,
How bitter are the drops of woe
With which its brim may overflow,
He has not learned to live.

LONGFELLOW.

It was sunset. The day had been one of the sultriest of August. It would seem as if the fierce alembic of the last twenty-four hours had melted it like the pearl in the golden cup of Cleopatra, and it lay in the West a fused mass of transparent brightness. The reflection from the edges of a hundred clouds wandered hither and thither, over rock and tree and flower, giving a strange, unearthly brilliancy to the most familiar things.

A group of children had gathered about their mother in the summer-house of a garden which faced the sunset sky. The house was one of those square, stately, wooden structures, white, with green blinds, in which of old times the better classes of New England delighted, and which remain to us as memorials of a respectable past. It stood under the arches of two gigantic elms, and was flanked on either side with gardens and grounds which seemed designed on purpose for hospitality and family freedom.

The evening light colored huge bosquets of petunias, which stood with their white or crimson faces looking westward, as if they were thinking creatures. It illumined flame-colored verbenas, and tall columns of pink and snowy phloxes, and hedges of August roses, making them radiant as the flowers of a dream.

The group in the summer-house requires more particular attention. The father and mother, whom we shall call Albert and Olivia, were of the wealthiest class of the neighbouring city, and had been induced by the facility of railroad travelling, and a sensible way of viewing things, to fix their permanent residence in the quiet little village of Q----. Albert had nothing in him different from multitudes of hearty, joyous, healthily constituted men, who subsist upon daily newspapers, and find the world a most comfortable place to live in. As to Olivia, she was in the warm noon of life, and a picture of vitality and enjoyment. A plump, firm cheek, a dark eye, a motherly fulness of form, spoke the being made to receive and enjoy the things of earth, the warm-hearted wife, the indulgent mother, the hospitable mistress of the mansion. It is true that the smile on the lip had something of earthly pride blended with womanly sweetness,--the pride of one who has as yet known only prosperity and success, to whom no mischance has yet shown the frail basis on which human hopes are built. Her foot had as yet trod only the high places of life, but she walked there with a natural grace and nobleness that made every one feel that she was made for them and they for her.

Around the parents were gathered at this moment a charming group of children, who with much merriment were proceeding to undo a bundle the father had just brought from the city.

"Here, Rose," said little Amy, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired pet, who seemed to be a privileged character, "let _me_ come; don't be all night with your orderly ways; let me cut that string." A sharp flash of the scissors, a quick report of the bursting string, and the package lay opened to the little marauder. Rose drew back, smiled, and gave an indulgent look at her eager younger sister and the two little ones who immediately gathered around. She was one of those calm, thoughtful, womanly young girls, that seem born for pattern elder sisters, and for the stay and support of mothers' hearts. She watched with a gentle, quiet curiosity the quick and eager fingers that soon were busy in exposing the mysteries of the parcel.

"There's a dress for Rose," said Amy, triumphantly drawing out a delicate muslin; "I can always tell what's for her."

"How?" put in the father, who stood regarding the proceeding with that air of amused superiority with which the wearers of broadcloth look down on the mysteries of muslin and barége.

"How?" said Amy, "why, because they look just like her. If I were to see that lilac muslin in China, I should say it was meant for Rose. Now this is mine, I know,--this bright pink; isn't it, mamma? No half shades about me!"

"No, indeed," said her mother; "that is your greatest fault, Amy."

"Oh, well, mamma, Rose has enough for both; you must rub us together, as they do light red and Prussian blue, to make a neutral tint. But oh, what a ribbon! oh, mother, what a love of a ribbon! Rose! Rose! look at this ribbon! And oh, those buttons! Fred, I do believe they are for your new coat! Oh, and those studs, father, where did you get them? What's in that box? a bracelet for Rose, I know! oh, how beautiful! perfectly exquisite! And here--oh!"

Here something happened to check the volubility of the little speaker; for as she hastily, and with the license of a petted child, pulled the articles from the parcel, she was startled to find lying among the numerous colored things a black crape veil. Sombre, dark, and ill-omened enough it looked there, with pink, and lilac, and blue, and glittering _bijouterie_ around it!

Amy dropped it with instinctive repugnance, and there was a general exclamation, "Mamma, what's this? how came it here? what did you get this for?"

"Strange!" said Olivia; "it is a _mourning veil_. Of course I did not order it. How it came in here nobody knows; it must have been a mistake of the clerk."

"Certainly it is a mistake," said Amy; "we have nothing to do with mourning, have we?"

"No, to be sure; what should we mourn for?" chimed in little Fred and Mary.

"What a dark, ugly thing it is!" said Amy, unfolding and throwing it over her head; "how dismal it must be to see the world through such a veil as this!"

"And yet till one has seen the world through a veil like that, one has never truly lived," said another voice, joining in the conversation.

"Ah, Father Payson, are you there?" said two or three voices at once.

Father Payson was the minister of the village, and their nearest neighbor; and not only their nearest neighbor, but their nearest friend. In the afternoon of his years, life's day with him now stood at that hour when, though the shadows fall eastward, yet the colors are warmer, and the songs of the birds sweeter, than even in its jubilant morning.

God sometimes gives to good men a guileless and holy second childhood, in which the soul becomes childlike, not childish, and the faculties in full fruit and ripeness are mellow without sign of decay. This is that songful land of Beulah, where they who have travelled manfully the Christian way abide awhile to show the world a perfected manhood. Life, with its battles and its sorrows, lies far behind them; the soul has thrown off its armor, and sits in an evening undress of calm and holy leisure. Thrice blessed the family or neighborhood that numbers among it one of these not yet ascended saints! Gentle are they and tolerant, apt to play with little children, easy to be pleased with simple pleasures, and with a pitying wisdom guiding those who err. New England has been blessed in numbering many such among her country pastors; and a spontaneous, instinctive deference honors them with the title of Father.

Father Payson was the welcome inmate of every family in the village, the chosen friend even of the young and thoughtless. He had stories for children, jokes for the young, and wisdom for all. He "talked good," as the phrase goes,--not because he was the minister, but because, being good, he could not help it; yet his words, unconsciously to himself, were often parables, because life to him had become all spiritualized, and he saw sacred meanings under worldly things.

The children seized him lovingly by either hand and seated him in the arbor.

"Isn't it strange," said Amy, "to see this ugly black thing among all these bright colors? such a strange mistake in the clerk!"

"If one were inclined to be superstitious," said Albert, "he might call this an omen."

"What did you mean, sir," asked Rose, quietly seating herself at his feet, "by 'seeing life through this veil'?"

"It was a parable, my daughter," he said, laying his hand on her head.

"I never have had any deep sorrow," said Olivia, musingly; "we have been favored ones hitherto. But why did you say one must see the world through such a medium as this?"

"Sorrow is God's school," said the old man. "Even God's own Son was not made perfect without it; though a son, yet learned he obedience by the things that he suffered. Many of the brightest virtues are like stars; there must be night or they cannot shine. Without suffering, there could be no fortitude, no patience, no compassion, no sympathy. Take all sorrow out of life, and you take away all richness and depth and tenderness. Sorrow is the furnace that melts selfish hearts together in love. Many are hard and inconsiderate, not because they lack capability of feeling, but because the vase that holds the sweet waters has never been broken."

"Is it, then, an imperfection and misfortune never to have suffered?" said Olivia.

Father Payson looked down. Rose was looking into his face. There was a bright, eager, yet subdued expression in her eyes that struck him; it had often struck him before in the village church. It was as if his words had awakened an internal angel, that looked fluttering out behind them. Rose had been from childhood one of those thoughtful, listening children with whom one seems to commune without words. We spend hours talking with them, and fancy they have said many things to us, which, on reflection, we find have been said only with their silent answering eyes. Those who talk much often reply to you less than those who silently and thoughtfully listen. And so it came to pass, that, on account of this quietly absorbent nature, Rose had grown to her parents' hearts with a peculiar nearness. Eighteen summers had perfected her beauty. The miracle of the growth and perfection of a human body and soul never waxes old; parents marvel at it in every household as if a child had never grown before; and so Olivia and Albert looked on their fair Rose daily with a restful and trusting pride.

At this moment she laid her hand on Father Payson's knee, and said earnestly,--"Ought we to pray for sorrow, then?"

"Oh, no, no, no!" interrupted Olivia, with an instinctive shudder,--such a shudder as a warm, earnest, prosperous heart always gives as the shadow of the grave falls across it,--"don't say yes!"

"I do not say we should pray for it," said Father Payson; "yet the Master says, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' not 'Blessed are they that prosper.' So heaven and earth differ in their judgments."

"Ah, me!" said Olivia, "I am afraid I have not courage to wish to be among the blessed."

"Well," said Albert, whom the gravity of the discussion somewhat disturbed. "let us not borrow trouble; time enough to think of it when it happens. Come, the dew is falling, let us go in. I want to show Father Payson some peaches that will tempt his Christian graces to envy. Come, Rose, gather up here."

Rose, in a few moments, gathered the parcel together, and quietly flitted before them into the house.

"Now," said Albert, "you'll see that girl will have everything quietly tucked away in just the right place; not a word said. She is a born housewife; it's in her, as much as it is in a pointer to show game."

"Rose is my right hand," said Olivia; "I should be lost without her."

Whence comes it, that, just on the verge of the great crises and afflictions of life, words are often spoken, that, to after view, seem to have had a prophetic meaning? So often do we hear people saying, "Ah, the very day before I heard of this or that, we were saying so and so!" It would seem sometimes as if the soul felt itself being drawn within the dark sphere of a coming evil, of which as yet nothing outward tells. Then the thoughts and conversation flow in an almost prophetic channel, which a coming future too well interprets.

The evening passed cheerfully with our friends, notwithstanding the grave conversation in the arbor. The mourning veil was laid away in a drawer along with many of its brilliant companions, and with it the thoughts it had suggested; and the merry laugh ringing from the half-open parlor-door showed that Father Payson was no despiser of the command to rejoice with them that do rejoice.

Rose played and sung, the children danced, and the mirth was prolonged till a late hour in the evening.

Olivia and Albert were lingering in the parlor after the departure of the family, busy in shutting windows, setting back chairs, and attending to all the last duties of orderly householders.

A sudden shriek startled them; such a shriek as, once heard, is never forgotten. With an answering cry of horror, they rushed up the stairs. The hall lamp had been extinguished, but the passage and staircase were red with a broad glare from the open door of the nursery.

A moment more showed them the drapery of the bed in which their youngest child was sleeping all in flames; then they saw a light form tearing down the blazing curtains.

"Oh, Rose! Rose! take care, for God's sake! your dress! you'll kill yourself! oh, God help us!"

There were a few moments--awful moments of struggle--when none knew or remembered what they did; a moment more and Rose lay panting in her father's arms, enveloped in a thick blanket which he had thrown around her burning night-dress. The fire was extinguished, the babe lay unawakened, and only the dark flecks of tinder scattered over the bed, and the trampled mass on the floor, told what had been. But Rose had breathed the hot breath of the flame, deadly to human life, and no water could quench that inward fire.

A word serves to explain all. The child's nurse had carelessly set a lamp too near the curtains, and the night breeze had wafted them into the flame. The apartment of Rose opened into the nursery, and as she stood in her night-dress before her mirror, arranging her hair, she saw the flashing of the flame, and, in the one idea of saving her little sister, forgot every other. That act of self-forgetfulness was her last earthly act; a few short hours of patient suffering were all that remained to her. Peacefully as she had lived, she died, looking tenderly on her parents out of her large blue eyes, and only intent to soothe their pain.

"Yes, I suffer," she said, "but only a short pain. We must all suffer something. My Father thinks a very little enough for me. I have had such a happy life, I _might_ bear just a little pain at the last."

A little later her mind seemed to wander. "Mamma, mamma," she said, hurriedly, "I put the things all away; the lilac muslin and the barége. Mamma, that veil, the mourning veil, is in the drawer. Oh, mamma, that veil was for you; don't refuse it; our Father sends it, and he knows best. Perhaps you will see heaven through that veil."

It is appalling to think how near to the happiest and most prosperous scene of life stands the saddest despair. All homes are haunted with awful possibilities, for whose realization no array of threatening agents is required,--no lightning, or tempest, or battle; a peaceful household lamp, a gust of perfumed evening air, a false step in a moment of gayety, a draught taken by mistake, a match overlooked or mislaid, a moment's oversight in handling a deadly weapon,--and the whole scene of life is irretrievably changed!

It was but a day after the scene in the arbor, and all was mourning in the so lately happy, hospitable house; everybody looked through tears. There were subdued breathings, a low murmur, as of many listeners, a voice of prayer, and the wail of a funeral hymn,--and then the heavy tread of bearers, as, beneath the black pall, _she_ was carried over the threshold of her home, never to return.

And Olivia and Albert came forth behind their dead. The folds of the dark veil seemed a refuge for the mother's sorrow. But how did the flowers of home, the familiar elms, the distant smiling prospect look through its gloomy folds,--emblem of the shadow which had fallen between her heart and life? When she looked at the dark moving hearse, she wondered that the sun still shone, that birds could sing, and that even her own flowers could be so bright.

Ah, mother! the world had been just as full of sorrow the day before; the air as full of "farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead"; but thou knewest it not! Now the outer world comes to thee through the _mourning veil_!

But after the funeral comes life again,--hard, cold, inexorable life, knocking with business-like sound at the mourner's door, obtruding its common-place pertinacity on the dull ear of sorrow. The world cannot wait for us; the world knows no leisure for tears; it moves onward, and drags along with its motion the weary and heavy-laden who would fain rest.

Olivia would have buried herself in her sorrows. There are those who refuse to be comforted. The condolence of friends seems only a mockery; and truly, nothing so shows the emptiness and poverty of human nature as its efforts at condolence.

Father Payson, however, was a visitor who would not be denied; there was something of gentle authority in his white hairs that might not be resisted. Old, and long schooled in sorrow, his heart many times broken in past years, he knew all the ways of mourning. His was no official common-place about "afflictive dispensations." He came first with that tender and reverent silence with which the man acquainted with grief approaches the divine mysteries of sorrow; and from time to time he cast on the troubled waters words, dropped like seeds, not for present fruitfulness, but to germinate after the floods had subsided.

He watched beside a soul in affliction as a mother waits on the crisis of a fever whose turning is to be for life or for death; for he well knew that great sorrows never leave us as they find us; that the broken spirit, ill set, grows callous and distorted ever after.

He had wise patience with every stage of sorrow; he knew that at first the soul is blind, and deaf, and dumb. He was not alarmed when returning vitality showed itself only in moral spasms and convulsions; for in all great griefs come hours of conflict, when the soul is tempted, and complaining, murmuring, dark, skeptical thoughts are whirled like withered leaves through all its desolate chambers.

"What have I learned by looking through this veil?" said Olivia to him, bitterly, one day when they were coming out of a house where they had been visiting a mourning family. "I was trusting in God as an indulgent Father; life seemed beautiful to me in the light of his goodness; now I see only his inflexible severity. I never knew before how much mourning and sorrow there had been even in this little village. There is scarcely a house where something dreadful has not at some time happened. How many families here have been called to mourning since we have! I have not taken up a paper in which I have not seen a record of two or three accidental deaths; some of them even more bitter and cruel than what has befallen us. I read this morning of a poor washerwoman, whose house was burned, and all her children consumed, while she was away working for her bread. I read the other day of a blind man whose only son was drowned in his very presence, while he could do nothing to help him. I was visiting yesterday that poor dress-maker whom you know. She has by toil and pains been educating a fine and dutiful son. He is smitten down with hopeless disease, while her idiot child, who can do nobody any good, is spared. Ah, this mourning veil has indeed opened my eyes; but it has taught me to add all the sorrows of the world to my own; and can I believe in God's love?"

"Daughter," said the old man, "I am not ignorant of these things. I have buried seven children; I have buried my wife; and God has laid on me in my time reproach, and controversy, and contempt. Each cross seemed, at the time, heavier than the others. Each in its day seemed to be what I least could bear; and I would have cried, '_Anything but this!_' And yet, now when I look back, I cannot see one of these sorrows that has not been made a joy to me. With every one some perversity or sin has been subdued, some chain unbound, some good purpose perfected. God has taken my loved ones, but he has given me love. He has given me the power of submission and of consolation; and I have blessed him many times in my ministry for all I have suffered, for by it I have stayed up many that were ready to perish."

"Ah," said Olivia, "you indeed have reason to be comforted, because you can see in yourself the fruit of your sorrows; but I am not improving; I am only crushed and darkened,--not amended."