Chapter IX (4)

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical ones;--I mean the formation of _Habits_. An old man who shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clockwork. The _animal_ functions, as the physiologists call them, in distinction from the _organic_, tend, in the process of deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them, to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement. Every man's _heart_ (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system) has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose _brains_, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their brains, have a _systole_ and _diastole_ as regular as that of the heart itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest function of being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a _vis a tergo_ for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he must economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,--that is all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to you. Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it wood, or coal, or bread and cheese. A reverend gentleman demurred to this statement,--as if, because combustion is asserted to be the _sine qua non_ of thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness another. It can be proved to him, by a very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that every Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it, and save his phosphorus and other combustibles.

It follows from all this that _the formation of habits_ ought naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the experience of the ring. A man is "stale," I think, in their language, soon after thirty,--often, no doubt, much earlier, as gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep their vital fire burning _with the blower up_.

----So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading the treatise, "De Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely performance. The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two or three years older. We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural instinct,--provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is what would be called in vulgar phrase "slow." It unpacks and unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back of, and toss each to its pigeonhole. I think ancient classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time. He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the weary hour. I remember only three,--Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and _Watts on the Mind_.

It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as a lyceum lecture, (_concio popularis_,) at the Temple of Mercury. The journals (_papyri_) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana,"--"Tribunus Quirinalis,"--"Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the analysis I intended to make.

IV. Kal. Mart....

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended by the _élite_ of our great city. Two hundred thousand sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house. The doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (_illotum vulgus_,) who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (_gladio jugulati_). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,--the subject, Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of _chick-pea_ (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (_toga_) was of cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress and manner (_habitus, vestitusque_) were somewhat provincial.

The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and Laelius. We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a few moments for refreshment (_pocula quoedam vini_).--All want to reach old age, says Cato, and grumble when they get it; therefore they are donkeys.--The lecturer will allow us to say that he is the donkey; we know we shall grumble at old age, but we want to live through youth and manhood, _in spite_ of the troubles we shall groan over.--There was considerable prosing as to what old age can do and can't--True, but not new. Certainly, old folks can't jump,--break the necks of their thigh-bones, (_femorum cervices_,) if they do, can't crack nuts with their teeth; can't climb a greased pole (_malum inunctum scandere non possunt_); but they can tell old stories and give you good advice; if they know what you have made up your mind to do when you ask them.--All this is well enough, but won't set the Tiber on fire (_Tiberim accendere nequaquam potest_).

There were some clever things enough, (_dicta haud inepta_,) a few of which are worth reporting.--Old people are accused of being forgetful; but they never forget where they have put their money.--Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year.--The lecturer quoted an ancient maxim,--Grow old early, if you would be old long,--but disputed it.-- Authority, he thought, was the chief privilege of age.--It is not great to have money, but fine to govern those that have it.--Old age begins at _forty-six_ years, according to the common opinion.--It is not every kind of old age or of wine that grows sour with time.--Some excellent remarks were made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited to Plato.--Several pleasing anecdotes were told.--Old Milo, champion of the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and whimpered, "They are dead." Not so dead as you, you old fool,--says Cato;--you never were good for anything but for your shoulders and flanks.--Pisistratus asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate. Old age, said Solon.

The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our culture and civilization.--The reporter goes on to state that there will be no lecture next week, on account of the expected combat between the bear and the barbarian. Betting (_sponsio_) two to one (_duo ad unum_) on the bear.

----After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise, "De Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new occupations when growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in the extreme period of life. Cato learned Greek when he was old, and speaks of wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such instrument, (_fidibus_,) after the example of Socrates. Solon learned something new, every day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim. Cyrus pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he had planted with his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the Duke of Northumberland's estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words, if not the same. That, like other country pleasures, never wears out. None is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy it.] There is a New England story I have heard more to the point, however, than any of Cicero's. A young farmer was urged to set out some apple-trees.--No, said he, they are too long growing, and I don't want to plant for other people. The young farmer's father was spoken to about it; but he, with better reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting. At last some one mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer. He had nothing else to do,--so he stuck in some trees. He lived long enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on those trees.

As for myself, after visiting a friend lately,--[Do remember all the time that this is the Professor's paper,]--I satisfied myself that I had better concede the fact that--my contemporaries are not so young as they have been,--and that,--awkward as it is,--science and history agree in telling me that I can claim the immunities and must own the humiliations of the early stage of senility. Ah! but we have all gone down the hill together. The dandies of my time have split their waistbands and taken to high-low shoes. The beauties of my recollections--where are they? They have run the gantlet of the years as well as I. First the years pelted them with red roses till their cheeks were all on fire. By and by they began throwing white roses, and that morning flush passed away. At last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and after that no year let the poor girls pass without throwing snow-balls. And then came rougher missiles,--ice and stones; and from time to time an arrow whistled and down went one of the poor girls. So there are but few left; and we don't call those few _girls_, but----

Ah, me! here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed _Ai, ai!_ and the old Roman, _Eheu!_ I have no doubt we should die of shame and grief at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that we see so many others as badly or worse off than ourselves. We always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.

[I was interrupted in my reading just here. Before I began at the next breakfast, I read them these verses;--I hope you will like them, and get a useful lesson from them.]

THE LAST BLOSSOM.

Though young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty's dear deluding wiles;
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.

Who knows a woman's wild caprice?
It played with Goethe's silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father's "niece"
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.

When sixty bids us sigh in vain
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.

We see the Patriarch's wintry face,
The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.

Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies,--
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.

Might we but share one wild caress
Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all!

My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.

Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.

Thou com'st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that wouldst seek the poet's cage,
Lured by the magic breath of song!

She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid,
Love's _drapeau rouge_ the truth has told!
O'er girlhood's yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!

Come to my arms!--love heeds not years;
No frost the bud of passion knows.--
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered,--Rose!

Sweet was her smile,--but not for me;
Alas, when woman looks _too_ kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see,--
Some youth is walking close behind!

As to _giving up_ because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, _la lèvre inférieure déjà pendante_, with what little life they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the malady in my own case.

First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less time for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my attention more thoroughly, and use my time more economically than ever before; so that I can learn anything twice as easily as in my earlier days. I am not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study. I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with good success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.

Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected privileges and pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a little courage to enjoy them. You may well suppose it pleased me to find that old Cato was thinking of learning to play the fiddle, when I had deliberately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied myself that I could get much comfort, if not much music, out of it.

Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which are commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed at a much later period.

A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of the journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies." Approving of his general doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experimental confirmation of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and amusement, namely, _boating_. For the past nine years, I have rowed about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water. My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three rowboats. 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy "dory" for two pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My own particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-foot sculls,--alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats, which have a swell after them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges,--those "caterpillar bridges," as my brother Professor so happily called them; rub against the black sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern of some tall India-man; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,--just as if I should hurt her by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,--till all at once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-house,--plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at the table,--all the dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with devils'-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long, narrow wings for home. When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,--though I have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off with the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called _Myrtle Street_, stretching in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding back and forward over it,--so delightfully closing at its western extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants,--so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the words of Dr. Watts,--

"Alike unknowing and unknown,"--

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal the secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly to avail itself.

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One's _hepar_, or, in vulgar language, liver,--a ponderous organ, weighing some three or four pounds,--goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a moneybox. Riding is good, for those that are born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day and night.

Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a more scientific form.

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action. In all forms of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in action,--the will, the muscles, and the intellect. Each of these predominates in different kinds of exercise. In walking, the will and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is left comparatively free. The mental pleasure in walking, as such, is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery. But in riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will, and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal, my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once gratified. When the horse ceases to have a will of his own and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take naps, as you like. But you will observe, that, in riding on horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the satisfaction from being complete.

Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won't suppose you to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to bestriding an Arab. You know the Esquimaux _kayak_, (if that is the name of it,) don't you? Look at that model of one over my door. Sharp, rather?--On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I will tell you about.--Our boat, then, is something of the shape of a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant _pod_, as one may say,-- tight everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit. Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand why you want those "outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the rowlocks in which the oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart; double or more than double the greatest width of the boat.

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars,--oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. But if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river, which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like. It has been long agreed that there is no way in which a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing. It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well as in his easy-chair.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long rood behind me. To lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat,--to rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek,--to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,--lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,--the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with skaters!

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not here speak. I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this matter a good while ago. Of course, if you heard it, you know my belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an improvement on the old model. Clipper-built, sharp in the bows, long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship, which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon its builder. All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of these influences, such as they are. We have a few good boatmen,--no good horsemen that I hear of,--nothing remarkable, I believe, in cricketing,--and as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all tend.

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening. It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case of emergency. It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving himself into the primitive constituents of his humanity. Here is a delicate young man now, with an intellectual countenance, a slight figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming deportment, a mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from between the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease. Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles! Ah, he is divesting himself of his cravat! Why, he is stripping off his coat! Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and with two things that look like batter puddings in the place of his fists. Now see that other fellow with another pair of batter puddings,--the big one with the broad shoulders; he will certainly knock the little man's head off, if he strikes him. Feinting, dodging, stopping, hitting, countering,--little man's head not off yet. You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit the little man's intellectual features. He needn't have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles at all. Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous bundle.--If my young friend, whose excellent article I have referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should have better sermons and an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant. A bout with the gloves would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion, which, united, have embroiled their subject in a bitter controversy. We should then often hear that a point of difference between an infallible and a heretic, instead of being vehemently discussed in a series of newspaper articles, had been settled by a friendly contest in several rounds, at the close of which the parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled.

But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid. I was for a moment tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last evening, to try the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a friend to the noble art; but remembering that he had twice my weight and half my age, besides the advantage of his training, I sat still and said nothing.

There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference to old age. I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the diminished refracting power of the humors of the eye,--in other words, spectacles. I don't use them. All I ask is a large, fair type, a strong daylight or gas-light, and one yard of focal distance, and my eyes are as good as ever. But if _your_ eyes fail, I can tell you something encouraging. There is now living in New York State an old gentleman who, perceiving his sight to fail, immediately took to exercising it on the finest print, and in this way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout. And now this old gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen, showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should be afraid to say to you how much he writes in the compass of a half-dime,-- whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms _and_ the Gospels, I won't be positive.

But now let me tell you this. If the time comes when you must lay down the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff, and drop the ten-foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and, after dallying awhile with eye-glasses, come at last to the undisguised reality of spectacles,--if the time comes when that fire of life we spoke of has burned so low that where its flames reverberated there is only the sombre stain of regret, and where its coals glowed, only the white ashes that cover the embers of memory,--don't let your heart grow cold, and you may carry cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your second century, if you can last so long. As our friend, the Poet, once said, in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his which he keeps for his private reading,--

Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,--
Turn to the record where his years are told,--
Count his gray hairs,--they cannot make him old!

_End of the Professor's paper_.

[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several instalments, and accompanied by various comments from different persons at the table. The company were in the main attentive, with the exception of a little somnolence on the part of the old gentleman opposite at times, and a few sly, malicious questions about the "old boys" on the part of that forward young fellow who has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, in these reports.

On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of, I have always tried to give a more appropriate character to our conversation. I have never read them my sermon yet, and I don't know that I shall, as some of them might take my convictions as a personal indignity to themselves. But having read our company so much of the Professor's talk about age and other subjects connected with physical life, I took the next Sunday morning to repeat to them the following poem of his, which I have had by me some time. He calls it--I suppose, for his professional friends--THE ANATOMIST'S HYMN; but I shall name it--]

THE LIVING TEMPLE.

Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker's glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame,--
Eternal wisdom still the same!

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature's flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.

No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o'er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.

But warmed with that unchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason's guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master's own.

See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid gloves no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.

Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thoughts in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation's faintest thrill
And flashes for the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads!

O Father! grant thy love divine
To make these mystic temples thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms!

* * * * *

LITERARY NOTICES.

_Library of Old Authors.--Works of John Marston_. London: John Russell Smith. 1856-7.

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works of Marston, (Vol. I. p. xxii.,) says, "The dramas now collected together are reprinted absolutely from the early editions, which were placed in the hands of our printers, who thus had the advantage of following them without the intervention of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as possible in their original state, the only modernizations attempted consisting in the alternations of the letters _i_ and _j_, and _u_ and _v_, the retention of which" (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the "alternations"?) "would have answered no useful purpose, while it would have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader."

This not very clear; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned foreign societies, and especially of the Royal _Irish_ Academy, perhaps it would he unfair to demand that he should write clear English. As one of Mr. Smith's editors, it was to be expected that he should not write it idiomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of bulls and blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the Library was projected. At the top of the same page from which we have made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of "conveying a favorable impression _on_ modern readers." It was surely to no such phrase as this that Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, "_Convey_ the _wise_ it call."

A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in two ways: the orthography may in certain cases indicate the ancient pronunciation, or it may put us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of a word among the roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not needful to undertake the reproduction of all the original errors of the press; and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in the editorial department are so glaring, that we are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratulate ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of the Elizabethan typesetters in their integrity and without any debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying to know that there lived stupid men before our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we demand absolute accuracy in the report of the _phenomena_ in order to arrive at anything like safe statistics. For instance, we find (Vol. I. p. 89) "ACTUS SECUNDUS, SCENA PRIMUS," and (Vol. III. p. 174) "_exit ambo_," and we are interested to know that in a London printing-house, two centuries and a half ago, there was a philanthropist who wished to simplify the study of the Latin language by reducing all the nouns to one gender and all the verbs to one number. Had his emancipated theories of grammar prevailed, how much easier would that part of boys which cherubs want have found the school-room benches! How would birchen bark, as an educational tonic, have fallen in repute! How white would have been the (now black-and-blue) memories of Dr. Busby and so many other educational _lictors_, who, with their bundles of rods, heralded not alone the consuls, but all other Roman antiquities to us! We dare not, however, indulge in the grateful vision, since there are circumstances which lead us to infer that Mr. Halliwell himself (member though he be of so many learned societies) has those vague notions of the speech of ancient Rome which are apt to prevail in regions which count not the _betula_ in their _Flora_. On page xv. of his Preface, he makes Drummond say that Ben Jonson "was dilated" (_delated_,--Gifford gives it in English, _accused_) "to the king by Sir James Murray,"--Ben, whose corpulent person stood in so little need of that malicious increment!

What is Mr. Halliwell's conception of editorial duty? As we read along, and the once fair complexion of the margin grew more and more pimply with pencil-marks, like that of a bad proof-sheet, we began to think that he was acting on the principle of every man his own washerwoman, --that he was making blunders of set purpose, (as teachers of languages do in their exercises,) in order that we might correct them for ourselves, and so fit us in time to be editors also, and members of various learned societies, even as Mr. Halliwell himself is. We fancied, that, magnanimously waving aside the laurel with which a grateful posterity crowned General Wade, he wished us "to see these roads _before_ they were made," and develope our intellectual muscles in getting over them. But no; Mr. Halliwell has appended notes to his edition, and among them are some which correct misprints, and therefore seem to imply that he considers that service as belonging properly to the editorial function. We are obliged, then, to give up our theory that his intention was to make every reader an editor, and to suppose that he wished rather to show how disgracefully a book might be edited and yet receive the commendation of professional critics who read with the ends of their fingers. If this were his intention, Marston himself never published so biting a satire.

Let us look at a few of the intricate passages, to help us through which Mr. Halliwell lends us the light of his editorial lantern. In the Induction to "What you Will" occurs the striking and unusual phrase, "Now out up-pont," and Mr. Halliwell favors us with the following note: "Page 221, line 10. _Up-pont_.--That is, upon't." Again in the same play we find--

"Let twattling fame cheatd others rest,
I um no dish for rumors feast."

Of course, it should read,--

"Let twattling [twaddling] Fame cheate others' rest,
I am no dish for Rumor's feast."

Mr. Halliwell comes to our assistance thus: "Page 244, line 21, [22 it should be,] _I um_,--a printer's error for _I am." Dignus vindice nodus_! Five lines above, we have "whole" for "who'll," and four lines below, "helmeth" for "whelmeth"; but Mr. Halliwell vouchsafes no note. In the "Fawn" we read, "Wise _neads_ use few words," and the editor says in a note, "a misprint for _heads_"! Kind Mr. Halliwell!

Having given a few examples of our "Editor's" corrections, we proceed to quote a passage or two which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly clear.

"A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap,
A button'd frizado sute, skarce eate good meate,
_Anchoves, caviare_, but hee's satyred
And term'd phantasticall. By the muddy spawne
Of slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesse--
That which the naturall sophysters tearme
_Phantusia incomplexa_--is a function
Even of the bright immortal part of man.
It is the common passe, the sacred dore,
Unto the prive chamber of the soule;
That bar'd, nought passeth past the baser court.
Of outward scence by it th' inamorate
Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beauties
Of his lov'd mistres."--Vol. I. p. 241.

In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough:--

"And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn
Of slimy newts";

and

----"past the baser court
Of outward sense";--

but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here deserted by our _fida compagna_?

Again, (Vol. II. pp. 55-56,) we read, "This Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his signes to me, and men of profound reach instruct aboundantly; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with signes," etc.

This Granuffo is qualified among the "Interlocutors" as "a silent lord," and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing. It is plain enough that the passage should read, "a man of excellent discourse, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach instruct abundantly," etc.

In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer,--"gone before and swept the way." An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own tongue should not be as tough to us as Aeschylus to a ten-years' graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to find (as is generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all. But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is in a speech of _Erichtho_, in the first scene of the fourth act of "Sophonisba," (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in this shape:--

----"hard by the reverent (!) ruines
Of a once glorious temple rear'd to Jove
Whose very rubbish....
....yet beares
A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac'd, [razed,]
Hurl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings,
So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing
Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow,
The ill-voyc'd raven, and still chattering pye,
Send out ungratefull sounds and loathsome filth;
Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs,

* * * * *

Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men
Stood in assured rest," etc.

The verse and a half in Italics are worthy of Chapman; but why did not Mr. Halliwell, who explains _up-pont_ and _I um_, change "Joves acts were vively limbs" to "Jove's acts were lively limned," which was unquestionably what Marston wrote?

In the "Scourge of Villanie," (Vol. III. p. 252,) there is a passage which has a modern application in America, though happily archaic in England, which Mr. Halliwell suffers to stand thus:--

"Once Albion lived in such a cruel age
Than man did hold by servile vilenage:
Poore brats were slaves of bondmen that were borne,
And marted, sold: but that rude law is torne
And disannuld, as too too inhumane."

This should read--

"_Man_ man did hold in servile villanage;
Poor brats were slaves (of bondmen that were born)";

and we hope that some American poet will one day be able to write in the past tense similar verses of the barbarity of his forefathers.

We will give one more scrap of Mr. Halliwell's text:--

"Yfaith, why then, caprichious mirth,
Skip, light moriscoes, in our frolick blond,
Flagg'd veines, sweete, plump with fresh-infused joyes!"

which Marston, doubtless, wrote thus:--

"I'faith, why then, capricious Mirth,
Skip light moriscoes in our frolic blood!
Flagged veins, swell plump with fresh-infused joys!"

We have quoted only a few examples from among the scores that we had marked, and against such a style of "editing" we invoke the shade of Marston himself. In the Preface to the Second Edition of the "Fawn," he says, "Reader, know I have perused this coppy, _to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression; yet so urgent hath been my business that some errors have styll passed, which thy discretion may amend_."

Literally, to be sure, Mr. Halliwell has availed himself of the permission of the poet, in leaving all emendation to the reader; but certainly he has been false to the spirit of it in his self-assumed office of editor. The notes to explain _up-pont_ and _I um_ give us a kind of standard of the highest intelligence which Mr. Halliwell dares to take for granted in the ordinary reader. Supposing this _nousometer_ of his to be a centigrade, in what hitherto unconceived depths of cold obstruction can he find his zero-point of entire idiocy? The expansive force of average wits cannot be reckoned upon, as we see, to drive them up as far as the temperate degree of misprints in one syllable, and those, too, in their native tongue. _A fortiori_, then, Mr. Halliwell is bound to lend us the aid of his great learning wherever his author has introduced foreign words and the old printers have made _pie_ of them. In a single case he has accepted his responsibility as dragoman, and the amount of his success is not such as to give us any poignant regret that he has everywhere else left us to our own devices. On p. 119, Vol. II., _Francischina_, a Dutchwoman, exclaims, "O, mine aderliver love." Here is Mr. Halliwell's note. "_Aderliver_.--This is the speaker's error for _alder-liever_, the best beloved by all." Certainly not "the _speaker's_ error," for Marston was no such fool as intentionally to make a Dutchwoman blunder in her own language. But is it an error for _alder-liever?_ No, but for _alderliefster_. Mr. Halliwell might have found it in many an old Dutch song. For example, No. 96 of Hoffmann von Fallersleben's "Niederländische Volkslieder" begins thus:--

"Mijn hert altijt heeft verlanghen
Naer u, die _alderliefste_ mijn."

But does the word mean "best beloved by all"? No such thing, of course; but "best-beloved of all,"--that is, by the speaker.

In "Antonio and Mellida" (Vol. I. pp. 50-51) occur some Italian verses, and here we hoped to fare better; for Mr. Halliwell (as we learn from the title-page of his Dictionary) is a member of the "_Reale Academia di Firenze_." This is the _Accademia della Crusca_, founded for the conservation of the Italian language in its purity, and it is rather a fatal symptom that Mr. Halliwell should indulge in the heresy of spelling _Accademia_ with only one _c_. But let us see what our Della Cruscan's notions of conserving are. Here is a specimen:--

"Bassiammi, coglier l'aura odorata
Che in sua neggia in quello dolce labra.
Dammi pimpero del tuo gradit' amore."

It is clear enough that the first and third verses ought to read,

"Lasciami coglier,--Dammi l'impero,"

though we confess that we could make nothing of _in sua neggia_ till an Italian friend suggested _ha sua seggia_. But a Della Cruscan academician might at least have corrected by his dictionary the spelling of _labra_.

We think that we have sustained our indictment of Mr. Halliwell's text with ample proof. The title of the book should have been, "The Works of John Marston, containing all the Misprints of the Original Copies, together with a few added for the First Time in this Edition, the whole carefully let alone by James Orchard Halliwell, F.R.S., F.S.A." It occurs to us that Mr. Halliwell may be also a Fellow of the Geological Society, and may have caught from its members the enthusiasm which leads him to attach so extraordinary a value to every goose-track of the Elizabethan formation. It is bad enough to be, as Marston was, one of those middling poets whom neither gods nor men nor columns (Horace had never seen a newspaper) tolerate; but, really, even they do not deserve the frightful retribution of being reprinted by a Halliwell.

We have said that we could not feel even the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the blunders of the old copies had been faithfully followed in the reprinting. We see reason for doubting whether Mr. Halliwell ever read the proof-sheets. In his own notes we have found several mistakes. For instance, he refers to p. 159 when he means p. 153; he cites "I, but her _life_," instead of "_lip_"; and he makes Spenser speak of "old Pithonus." Marston is not an author of enough importance to make it desirable that we should be put in possession of all the corrupted readings of his text, were such a thing possible even with the most minute painstaking, and Mr. Halliwell's edition loses its only claim to value the moment a doubt is cast upon the accuracy of its inaccuracies. It is a matter of special import to us (whose means of access to originals are exceedingly limited) that the English editors of our old authors should be faithful and trustworthy, and we have singled out Mr. Halliwell's Marston for particular animadversion only because we think it on the whole the worst edition we ever saw of any author.

Having exposed the condition in which our editor has left the text, we proceed to test his competency in another respect, by examining some of the emendations and explanations of doubtful passages which he proposes. These are very few; but had they been even fewer, they had been too many.

Among the _dramatis personae_ of the "Fawn," as we said before, occurs "Granuffo, _a silent lord_." He speaks only once during the play, and that in the last scene. In Act I., Scene 2, _Gonzago_ says, speaking to _Granuffo_,--