Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

"We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience. The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only mention, that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado factor; and that Mr. Listen's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 1811 he married his present lady, by whom he has been blest with one son, Philip, and two daughters, Ann and Angustina."

* * * * *

"Ask anybody you meet," writes Lamb to Miss Wordsworth, then visiting some friends in Cambridge, "who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and I'll hold a wager they'll say Mrs. ----. She broke down two benches in Trinity Gardens,--one on the confines of St. John's, which occasioned a litigation between the societies as to repairing it. In warm weather she retires into an ice-cellar, (literally,) and dates from a hot Thursday some twenty years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and windows, to let in a thorough draft, which gives her slenderer friends toothaches. She is to be seen in the market every morning at ten, cheapening fowls, which I observe the Cambridge poulterers are not sufficiently careful to stump."

On the person thus briefly sketched Elia wrote an article for the "London Magazine." As it is not to be found in the standard editions of its author's works, we herewith present it to our readers. They will find it to be a clever specimen of Lamb's peculiar and delightful humor. In truth, it is one of the very best things he ever conjured up. We observe he has changed the locality of the stout woman, and places her in Oxford, instead of Cambridge.

* * * * *

"THE GENTLE GIANTESS.

"The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but surely I never saw it. I take her to be lineally descended from the maid's aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She hath Atlantean shoulders; and as she stoopeth in her gait,--with as few offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve's daughters,--her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the peccadilloes that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth her waist--or what she is pleased to esteem as such--nearly up to her shoulders, from beneath which that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up and riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is, indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person is a burden to herself, no less than to the ground which bears her.

"To her mighty bone she hath a pinguitude withal which makes the depth of winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August she usually renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday, some twenty-five years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two doors in north and south direction, and two windows fronting the rising and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal point catch the contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a quadruple draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr that can escape her. I owe a painful face-ache, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught, sitting by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of coolness. Her fan in ordinary resembleth a banner spread, which she keepeth continually on the alert to detect the least breeze.

"She possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally incommensurate with her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in her favorite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden-chair. She setteth out with you at a fair foot-gallop, which she keepeth up till you are both well breathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is up again for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth,--her movement, on these sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying. Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this kind of relieved marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres on those well-wooded and well-watered domains.

"Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and gardens, where, when the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather, situated between the frontiers of that and ----'s College,--some litigation, latterly, about repairs, has vested the property of it finally in ----'s,--where at the hour of noon she is ordinarily to be found sitting,--so she calls it by courtesy,--but, in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her enormous settlement; as both those Foundations, who, however, are good-natured enough to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost. Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a book,--blest, if she can but intercept some resident Fellow, (as usually there are some of that brood left behind at these periods,) or stray Master of Arts, (to most of whom she is better known than their dinner-bell,) with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of literature. I have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very slight value upon female conversation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from the length of Maudlin Grove, and warily glide off into another walk,--true monks as they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of her polished converse, for their own perverse and uncommunicating solitariness!

"Within doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental, in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine; but, till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is for all the world like that of a piping bulfinch, while from her size and stature you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth,--running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and surprising.

"The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul in all respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth withal a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick susceptibility to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an attenuated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her humors and occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs,--being six foot high. She languisheth,--being two feet wide. She worketh slender sprigs upon the delicate muslin,--her fingers being capable of moulding a Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her glass daintily,--her capacity being that of a tun of Heidelberg. She goeth mincingly with those feet of hers,--whose solidity need not fear the black ox's pressure.

"Softest and largest of thy sex, adieu! By what parting attribute may I salute thee?--last and best of the Titanesses!--Ogress, fed with milk instead of blood!--not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's stately structures!--Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it!"

* * * * *

MY PALACE.

Wound round and round within his mystic veil
The poet hid a noble truth;
The Soul's Art-Palace then he named the tale
Of those far days in youth.

I sought that palace on its haughty height,
And came to know its starry joys,
Its sudden blackness, and the withering blight
Of all its mortal toys.

At length the soul took lesson from her past,
And found a vale wherein to dwell,
With no Arcadian visions overcast
Or history to tell.

My fellows tended wandering flocks and herds,
Or tilled and nursed their scanty corn;
Little they heeded life that grew to words,
Yet gave no man their scorn.

Like them I wrought my task and took its gain,
That one might serve their homely need,
When skies were dark, and every cloud a pain,
And there were mouths to feed.

Thus labored day by day these unskilled hands,
Whose only master was a willing heart,
Till barren space smiled into garden-lands
Where roses shone apart.

Half faint with toil from morn to set of sun,
One night I watched the shadows creep
With stealthy footstep, when the day was done,
Toward my encastled steep.

The palace gleamed upon my dazzled sight,--
From long estrangement grown more fair:
I sank and dreamed my feet were mounting light
Over each golden stair.

Once more there came the voice of waters low
On cooling breezes perfume-fed:
It seemed I followed a grand leader, slow
Through marble galleries led.

Then sad I wakened in the vale, but found
The stately guide still drew me on:
Her name was Charity; her voice a sound
Of pure compassion.

She said,--"Beside thee every day I stood
To keep false memories aloof;
To-night I sorrowed for thy labor rude,
And put thee to the proof.

"Ascend again to yon high palace-towers,
With brothers share its plenitude,
And gather up with all thy princely powers
Joys to infinitude."

"Ay me!" I cried, "bid me not go afar,
While yet these little children call,
Lest life grow pallid as the morning star
In that cold shining hall!

"All shall be theirs: my lot is here below
To minister the goods I hold,
While suffering ones shall watch the torrent flow
In waves of amber gold.

"There childhood shall be laid on gleaming beds,
A saintly-eyed prophetic band,
And tinted oriels flame above their heads
To picture the new land.

"And dusky men shall press the snowy lawn,
Shall feel those tears that ease all pain,
Then wake to greet the free earth's noble dawn
And turn to rest again.

"There tired soldiers wash their bleeding feet,
Who gave for us their ripening youth
To earn pure freedom, dared all danger meet,
Content to die for truth.

"There, in the sleepless watch the organ's tone
Shall bear them on its swelling wing
To dreamful space, while star-fires one by one
In vibrant chorus sing."

Sudden there came a thought,--Thou hast no home,
No shaded haunt, or mansion wide,
No refuge after toil in which to roam,
Where silence may abide.

And then I saw a palace broad as earth,
Built beautiful of land and seas,--
Its eastern gate shone in the morning's birth,
The west o'ertopped the trees.

Free as wild waves upon an autumn day,
A world of brothers through its space
Might wander up and down, and sunbeams play
Even on Sorrow's face.

Here in the broad sunned silence of the noon
Peace waiteth to salute the worn,
And ever crowneth with her tender boon
Those who have nobly borne.

Like shafted light dropped in a sunset sea,
The radiant pillars of my home
Send from their glowing swift mortality
Great voices crying, "Come!"

* * * * *

THE DEACON'S HOLOCAUST.

I

A First-class old lady is the most precious social possession of a New-England town. I have been in places where this office of Select Woman had languished for want of a proper incumbent,--that is, where the feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and character are to be found in such a place.

This deplorable state of things had never existed in Foxden. When strangers took a carriage at the depot and asked to be shown whatever was noteworthy in the town, they were driven to a many-gabled house shaded by a majestic oak, and informed that there lived Mrs. Widesworth, the grand-daughter of Twynintuft, the famous elocutionist. They were also assured that the oak was no other than the Twynintuft Oak, celebrated in the well-known sonnet of a distinguished American poet. Moreover, they were instructed that the room just to the right of the porch was a study added by Twynintuft himself in the year '87, and that the shattered shed in the background was originally an elocutionary laboratory which had seen the forming of many Congressional orators.

In so confident a way was this information imparted, that visitors were compelled to receive it in all humbleness, and as a matter of course. They could only feign that Twynintuft had been a household word from their tenderest infancy, and that they have made pilgrimage to Foxden to gaze upon the earthly abiding-place of this remarkable man. Accordingly, young ladies sent their best respects from the hotel, and "Would dear Mrs. Widesworth spare them a few leaves from her grandfather's oak?" And simple young gentlemen, with a morbid passion for notorieties and moral sentiments, forwarded little books, bound in sheepskin heavily gilt, inscribed, "World-Thoughts of My Country's Gifted Minds," and "Mrs. Widesworth is requested to write any maxim which her experience of life may have suggested on page 209 of this volume, just between the remarks of the Living Skeleton and the autograph of the Idiot Albino."

If invited to visit any one of consideration in Foxden, you would no sooner have deposited your travelling-bag and subsided into the arm-chair than you would perceive a curious nervous twitching about the features of your host, which would finally culminate in these, accents of patronizing triumph:--"My dear Sir, I shall be glad to take you across the street to pay your respects to Mrs. Widesworth!" Every householder quivered with anxiety until this rite had been solemnly performed.

Mrs. Widesworth, the actual, was a plump, well-to-do widow, of threescore years. She lived among her fellow-creatures, but not of them,--and that in a sense far more comfortable than Byronic misanthropy could imagine. She managed to keep all the tumult and competition of this rough world just outside the little whitewashed fence which inclosed her premises. No solitary saint of the Middle Ages floated in a more lofty independence of the foolish heresies of vulgar humanity. The mission of woman must, of necessity, be identical with the mission of Mrs. Widesworth,--and this was, to bestow a mellow patronage upon all creation. That whatever is is right, and that this is the best possible of worlds, were to Mrs. Widesworth propositions which her perfect health and unmitigated prosperity continually proved. That, in a theological point of view, everything was wrong, she considered an esoteric condiment to add piquancy to the loaves and fishes which Providence had set before her.

Concerning the eminent Twynintuft, it may be remarked that he had devoted a long life to elocution, and produced a bulky manual full of illustrative quavers. And as it happened that his work was the first of the sort published in America, it obtained a pretty general circulation in schools and colleges, and was even patronisingly noticed in a British Review,--at that time the apotheosis of our native authorship. But, alas for the perishable nature of literary productions! "Twynintuft on the Human Voice" had long been superseded, and lay comfortably buried in that cemetery of dead textbooks from which there is no resurrection. Yet, as he had once been one of the notables of Foxden, the inhabitants of the town indulged themselves in the soothing fiction that his memory was still verdant among men, and did pious homage to his representative.

Until the correspondence of Colonel Prowley had drawn Miss Hurribattle to Foxden, Mrs. Widesworth reigned by divine right. All quilting-bees and charitable fairs seemed but manifestations of her pervading vitality. Every social detail was submitted to her arbitrament. She hovered over the gossips of the town like Fate in a Greek tragedy,--but it was a reformed Fate, with a wholesome respect for family and condition.

An entertainment widely famous as "Mrs. Widesworth's Semiannual Singing-School" brought forth every spring and fall the entire strength of this excellent lady. The origin of this festivity was of ancient date. The early settlers in Foxden, while holding decided opinions concerning the mischief of church-organs, were unusually tolerant of vocal music. They doubted not that a preached gospel might be worthily seconded by a vigorous psalmody. Weekly meetings of the young men and maidens were allowed for practice, and the pot of beans, surmounted by its crisp coronal of pork, closed the evening in simple conviviality. This singing-school had descended through the generations, and in solemn rotation visited the families of all church-members. Under the fostering care of Mrs. Widesworth, the occasion grew to a musical festival of considerable importance. When the meeting was at her house, there were invited many citizens of distinction from the neighboring towns; also, there was summoned all that was lively, pretty, or profound in Foxden. From three in the afternoon until nine in the evening the old house broke out into singing, chatting, love-making, and sermonizing in rich variety. The ancient bean-pot gave place to a tea-table loaded with everything which might be baked or fried or stewed. Upon that day people in wise foresight made but slender dinners. The hostess was known to possess a culinary experience of no ordinary scope, and the air of the house was heavy with the delicate incense of waffles and dough-nuts. When the evening happened to be mild, and that comfortable estate of fulness whose adjectives the Latin Grammar tells us require the ablative had been attained, there was more music, secular, but highly decorous, beneath the rustling boughs of the oak. Then the merriment grew hearty, and mocked the sombre night. In vain the crickets chirped their shrill jeer at fallen humanity; the crackling leaves whispered,--but no more audibly than to the painted Indians who once danced beneath the tree which the unborn Twynintuft was to monopolize.

Perhaps you think Mrs. Widesworth a kind-hearted, charitable, respectable old lady,--in short, a model citizeness! Many Foxden people thought so, until, in the fulness of time, they were drugged with iconoclastic logic, ghastly and fierce. Then this worthy person suddenly loomed before them as a patron and upholder of every social abuse. She was a trampler upon the rights of her sex, and deeply involved in the guilt of baby-selling at Charleston. Above all, she was a _Moderate Drinker_, (half a glass of Sherry with her dinner, you know,) and, as such, could be proved to be the bulwark of the bar-room, and directly responsible for the ruin of the most talented graduates of Harvard College. The brutalities of every wife-beating drunkard just landed upon our shores might be logically credited to Mrs. Widesworth, and to those _respectable_ (with great sarcasm) _church-members_ (sarcasm more intense) who countenanced the moderate use of intoxicating drinks.

For now there had come upon Foxden that political, sanatory, anti-everything revival, which, in those days, thrilled through our river-towns and took the place of the theological revival, which the churches seemed too feeble to produce. And--but this is addressed only to simple souls who think that Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, and Luther instituted the Reformation--the settlement of Miss Patience Hurribattle in a Foxden boarding-house produced the social upheaval which shook the place. Of course, the enlightened reader of the "Atlantic" is well aware that the mighty personages of history may be philosophically bejuggled out of all claim to the admiration or reprobation of men. What did they do but react on the society which created them?--what were they but the average tendencies of an age clad in petticoats or top-boots, as the case might be? So let it be written, that the great Cosmos-machine had ground itself to the precise point which necessitated a reformatory tumult in Foxden, and it mattered little who happened to be there to patronize it.

For several previous years Miss Hurribattle had borne about her an uncomfortable turbulence of heroic effort. She had gradually accustomed herself to regard our crooked humanity as something capable of being caught up and reformed by a rapacious philanthropist. She had reached a mental condition to which the time was as thoroughly out of joint as it ever appeared to Hamlet, although, unlike that impracticable character, she took great comfort in the belief that she was especially born to set it right. The choice varieties of _men_ know that truth as it is and truth as it appears to them are very different matters. But, thank Heaven, the feminine nature is bound by no such doleful barrier! The man who thinks is limited; the woman who feels may expand indefinitely. Miss Hurribattle's mission was to attract the world's capital of unemployed sentiment, and to set it to work in the mills of society. Let it be said of this woman, that, without wealth of talent or any exact culture, she possessed the sweetest accompaniments of the highest masculine genius,--enthusiasm and simplicity.

The questioning spirit gradually took form in various radical clubs and associations. Pleasing themselves with shining symbols, and complimenting each other with antique titles of nobility, a large majority of the Foxden shop-keepers enlisted in the sacred crusade. This new physical revival, like the old religious revivals, soon got into the schools, and processions of children, fluttering many-colored ribbons, paraded the streets. There was an Anti-Spirit League and an Anti-Tea-and-Coffee League; also an Anti-Tobacco League was in hopeful process of formation. And soon professional reformers of most destructive character were attracted to the place, and, having once attached themselves, hung like leeches upon the community. The celebrated Mrs. Romulus, and the great socialist, Mr. Stellato, snuffing their victims afar off, left their work unfinished in towns of less importance, and hurried to Foxden. Shrewd wasps were these, bent upon getting up beehives of cooperative activity. Less and less grew the stanch garrison who must defend the conservative citadel against the daring hordes. Nevertheless, some boldly stood out, and showed a spirit--or shall it be said an obstinacy?--which cowed unpractised assailants. Deacon Greenlaw had not yet been persuaded to burn his cider-mill,--although committees of matrons had visited him to ascertain when he proposed to do so,--although bevies of children had been dressed in white and set upon Mrs. Greenlaw,--although Mr. Stellato, as Chief of the Progressive Gladiators, had called in person to demand a public destruction of that accursed instrument for the ruin of men. The Deacon defied the moral sentiment of the town. Doctor Dastick sturdily maintained that tea and coffee were not injurious, and had got hold of the preventing-waste-of-tissue theory in respect to more potent beverages. The old-fashioned hospitable soul of Colonel Prowley took cognizance of the fact that the Odes of Horace made no unkindly mention of ripe Falernian, and that the most admirable heroes of Plutarch do not appear to have been teetotalers. Mrs. Widesworth, good lady, rode like a cork upon the deep unrest of society: she thought the whole business infidel as well as absurd, and, so thinking, did not trouble herself much about it. Mr. Clifton had preached a sermon in which he took the ground that morality could be best promoted by regulating, instead of extirpating, human propensities.

Then the rising tide of reform beat heavily upon the church-doors. By stiff, inexorable logic, those clergymen who refused to join the popular charge against the outworks of Evil were declared to be in intimate alliance with its very Essence. Although the Bible, as a whole, was held in little regard by the leading reformers, they were wonderfully expert in plucking out texts here and there, and dove-tailing them into scaffolding to sustain their platform. The grand denunciations of Jeremiah were shown to have been shot point-blank at our poor little New-England meeting-houses. It was _their_ fasts and _their_ new moons which the prophet (his prophetic claims were here generously admitted) aimed at. Some churches stood the shock of the angry elements. But many young ministers were borne away before the storm, and carried their side-aisles and galleries along with them. What! had a theological _simulacrum_ of Satan excited their fathers to doughty deeds,--and should they hold back, when challenged to meet him in proper person, hand to hand? Thus persuading themselves, these ardent divines caught up bitter words which had drifted out of the dictionary, and laid about them with a spirit not wholly removed from the old ecclesiastical rancor which would kill where it could not convince. And taking it for granted that it is the mission of the intellect to rectify what is wrong in the world, fruition seemed to answer their efforts. Society was put to its purgation in very plausible fashion. Songs about Temperance and various desirable perfections of the outward man were shouted in bar-rooms hired for the purpose at considerable expense. Then there was dimly seen a further "progress," of which certain movers of the people were the warm advocates. Having got the machinery well to work, might it not be twitched and pulled to effect a wider purification? It began to be hinted that the use of wine in the sacred offices of religion could not be countenanced, if its employment elsewhere were the monster iniquity it was shown to be. That philosophical friend of humanity, Mr. Stellato, began to denounce the consumers of animal food with every unpleasant illustration the shambles could be made to supply. In very select companies of sympathizers, as well as in the Graduating Circle of Progressive Gladiators, it was known that Mrs. Romulus maintained a hideous doctrine subversive of that sacrament of the family which raises the life of man above the life of the wolf and ape.

Yet of the views and endeavors of the great mass of these earnest people we may speak only with honor and gratitude. Much good work done in that distant year of grace remains with us to-day. Who is more practical than the idealist? If I read history aright, it is only the white-heat of fanaticism which brands a true word into the tough hide of society. A supreme pursuit of one virtue by the few can alone neutralize a supreme devotion by the many to the opposite vice. Let us rejoice that some men and women are under the necessity of thinking no good thought which they do not attempt to utilize at all hazards. Also, it is well not to repine overmuch because many conscientious citizens cannot induce a concentration of vision which directs all feeling, hissing-hot, into one channel. They save us from the intolerable monotony of a whole world of heroes, and leave you and me, good reader, in blessed freedom to demand the theoretically right and ignore the practically expedient.

To the beginnings of this angry perturbation the Reverend Charles Clifton had returned, after abandoning the Vannelle manuscript under circumstances detailed in the last number of this magazine. To one in his position of mind it was of the highest importance to come upon some work that he was fitted to do. It was his unhappy destiny to be placed just where such power as he had could accomplish nothing. Timid by nature, a cautious lover of compromise, self-baffled in a brilliant flutter for truth, what had he to do in a vulgar conflict of opinion, in a common, healthy play of free thought and speech? Peering off into immensity until he had become utterly adrift in theology, the minister found himself too feeble to stand upon the moral basis of some practical creed. His regular parish duties afforded but slender occupation; he had the gift of speaking extemporaneously, or from such notes as might be made upon the back of a letter half an hour before church; he was not called upon to do more catechizing or visiting than was agreeable to his mood. He accordingly yielded to an indolence of disposition which detained his vanishing illusions, and indulged in such studies as served to prolong the barren contemplation which had wasted his youth. My knowledge of the secret committed for eighty years to the Mather Safe made me the only person to whom Clifton could freely write. At some private inconvenience, I admitted a tolerably full intercourse with my new correspondent. He declared that the sympathy of a man in active affairs was invaluable to a solitary student like himself: he hoped, so he said, to see through my eyes the facts of life. It was not difficult to discern the cause of the sad indecision which afflicted him. To state the case roughly, he had too much knowledge for his will. Busy people reason by instinct with sufficient accuracy, but with this man no conviction was for five minutes free from the probe of a metaphysical argument. Yet from glimpses I had obtained of that overwhelming System of Things elaborated by the two Vannelles, I could understand the condition in which its partial apprehension had left Clifton. The more I considered certain statements, authoritatively made in the portion of the manuscript I had dared to read, the firmer grew my belief that years of concentrated thought and fervent speculation had indeed illuminated, to these men, dim outlines of most august truths,--truths which some possible, although very distant, advancement of physical science might inductively realize. But I had made out to dismiss the matter, with the consideration that whatever it concerned me to know could be tied to no one method of pursuit,--and, so reflecting, returned contentedly to the multiplex concerns with which I was then occupied. Clifton, on the contrary, having always struggled loftily along the same narrow sunbeam, was utterly unable to accept such available knowledge of a principle as is sufficient to direct our activity,--he must ever soar skyward to gaze upon the origin of its authority, until, entangled in a web of contradictions, he fell impotent to earth.

Week by week, in my city-home, through letters from the minister and Colonel Prowley, I had been kept informed of the progress of that wild ferment going on in Foxden. At length the contentious spirit there evoked seemed ready to summon to trial all ancient and reputable things. My friends of the protesting minority were surely to be credited with good Puritan pluck; though there was also something admirable in the vigor which had marshalled a party for their discomfiture. I began to think it my duty to visit Clifton; moreover, I was curious to see the town at the height of its effervescence. A note from Mrs. Widesworth supplied me with the needed excuse. The singing-school was to hold its semiannual meeting at her house on Thursday next; would I not come down for a day and meet many old friends?

II.

The fragrance of perfected harvests pervaded Foxden. The air was full of those sweet remembrances of summer which are better than her radiant presence. The sky overhead was flooded with rich autumnal sunshine. Far to the north lay glimmering a heavy bank of clouds. There might be rain before night.

I entered the familiar parsonage and inquired for its occupant. He had walked to the end of the garden with Miss Hurribattle, who had been with him for some hours. I was at liberty to await his return in a depressing theological lumber-room, called the study. The First Church had liberally supplied its former ministers with the current literature of their craft. Current literature! are not the words a mockery? could they ever have applied to those printed petrifactions? One would sooner look for vitality among the frozen denizens of the Morgue on St. Bernard! Yet I doubt if these stately authors, wrapped in the cerements of their prosiness, may reasonably reproach a forgetful world. They ministered to the wants of _their_ present, and by so doing were privileged to fashion a future which they might not enter and possess. Complain indeed! Why, their progeny had a good ten, twenty, or fifty years' life of it, as the case might be,--and here about us are men of greater enterprise and grasp doomed to work off paragraphs that perish on the day of printing. Well, no earnest soul can fail to modify the character of his age, and thus of all ages. So, if our generation demands ministry in newspapers instead of folios, a man may still win an honest immortality without the biography and the bother of it.

I looked up from the books to see the clergyman part with Miss Hurribattle at the gate, and then turn his steps towards the house.

There was something like embarrassment as we exchanged greetings, yet there was hardly time to mark this before it had passed.

"Ah, Heaven!" exclaimed Clifton, passionately, "how I envy that woman's faith in the omnipotence of a trifle! Suppose you or I can attain a judicial largeness of view, is it any compensation for that intense glow of the sympathies as they crowd into one specious channel? Why this man's yearning after intellectual satisfaction, when we only want a little fragment of truth to hang our sentiments upon?"

There was bitterness in the tone in which Clifton spoke. It hinted of the living death of a proud, disappointed man, who has renounced his youth of high motives and warm ideas, who has learned to contemn his boyish ambition to do some great thing for the world. Truly it is better to consume in the flame of a fierce sectarianism than to permit the spirit of youth to die when the gray hairs come.

"Nay, Sir," said I, "it is for you to be heartily thankful for this exuberant enthusiasm which has come to town. The complaint of the day is, that the doctrines of Christianity have either dissolved into abstractions or hardened into formalisms; and here you have a crop of fresh insights to direct aright, and to keep from degenerating into fanatical clamor."

"But how satisfy or control these crazy people who begin by ignoring the creeping pace of Time? Why, here is Miss Hurribattle, who has been these two hours beating into me, as with logical sledge-hammers, that it is my duty to denounce Deacon Greenlaw from the pulpit. The argument, to her mind, is overwhelming, as thus: Intoxicating fluids cause the breaking of all the commandments; cider, if one drinks enough of it, is intoxicating; Deacon Greenlaw presses apples, and sells the juice; he therefore upholds and encourages the aforesaid commandment-breaking;--it is the business of the pulpit to denounce sinners persisting in their sin, therefore, etc., etc.,--you perceive the conclusion. In short, if I do not instantly take the ruts of their narrow logic, and go about pounding into some and propounding unto others their pet scheme of regeneration,--why, I am a wolf in the sheep-fold, the Antichrist of prophecy, and I know not what other accursed thing. And here is truly the alternative,--to stagnate in a lifeless church, or to join these ravers in their breakneck leap at the Millennium."

"There is a noble element in this one-sided pertinacity," I suggested, "and a wise man might humor and use it for the best ends. Instead of attempting to pull these hopeful people back into the church, cannot you urge the church forward to comprehend their position? This impulse,--fanatical as some of its manifestations doubtless are,--might it not be constrained, or at least directed?"

"Never by me!" exclaimed Clifton, haughtily. "I should have to commit myself to all the wild Saturnalia of their moralities before it would be possible to acquire any power over them."

"But surely you might go as far as any one in the advocacy of Temperance."

"Temperance! Why, you forget that I must denounce Temperance as the deadliest of sins, and proclaim Abstinence to be the only virtue. There is a grand State Convention of Progressive Gladiators at present in session in Foxden; all the neighboring towns have sent delegates. Well, it was only yesterday afternoon that Stellato, in behalf of one of the committees, denounced the clergy of New England as gross flesh-eaters who had made themselves incapable of perceiving any spiritual truth. And I happen to know that Mrs. Romulus so successfully manipulated Chepunic, not a hundred miles up the river, that before leaving that town she publicly delivered her lecture entitled, 'Marriage a Barbarism,' and professed to have discovered something far higher and holier than the chain of wedlock."

"I am sure that Miss Patience Hurribattle is ignorant of any such tendency in these new doctrines," I exclaimed, indignantly.

"Doubtless she is," assented Clifton. "There is a hopeful, simple-hearted gleam in her eye, a fine simplicity in her speech, which betokens enthusiasm of a purely religious type. But she is banded with those who would use religion only as a fiery stimulant to the intellect, never as a balm to the heart."

A crunching upon the gravel-walk. A man and a woman were hurrying up to the parsonage. The woman short, sharp, lean; the man unctious and foxy,--yet also representing a chronic state of gelatinous bewilderment. The Great Socialists,--I knew them at once.

"Triumph! triumph!" cried Mr. Stellato, bursting into the study. "Deacon Greenlaw has been converted at last! He will make a holocaust of his cider-mill!"

"He will signalize his submission to the Gladiators by a great Act of Faith!" exclaimed Mrs. Romulus. "His cider-mill will be publicly burned this afternoon at five o'clock. All the delegate Gladiators will march in procession to the ground. Invitations have been sent to the Order of Frugivorous Brothers, the Infants' Anti-Tobacco League,"--

"Two drops of the oil of tobacco will kill a tomcat of the largest proportions," murmured Mr. Stellato, in choral parenthesis.

--"the Principal and Patients of the Lilac-Hill Water-Cure, the Children of the Public Schools, the Millennial Choir, and Progressive Citizens generally," said Mrs. Romulus, finishing her sentence.

"It is the afternoon of Mrs. Widesworth's semiannual supper to the singing-school," hissed Mr. Stellato, maliciously. "The Deacon's cider-mill stands on the hill just before Mrs. Widesworth's house: the procession may be expected to pass before her windows about four o'clock; it will then make the circuit of the town, and reach the top of the hill a little before five, when the exercises will commence."

Some petulant reply seemed ready to spring from the lips of the clergyman, but he checked it, and said,--

"You will have more water than fire: those clouds drifting up over the river mean rain."

"Only wine-bibbers and flesh-eaters are affected by the weather!" responded Stellato, with great contempt. "Sunshine and storm are alike wholesome to the purified seekers for truth!"

"But there is no time to lose," cried Mrs. Romulus. "We have come to ask you, as pastor of the first church in this place, to make the prayer before the torch is applied. You will doubtless decline; but we shall then be able to assure the people that the Gladiators are rejected by an apostate church, which has been cordially invited to become their fellow-worker."

"You had really better think of it," urged Stellato, in a seductive whisper. "The fact is, there is a great excitement, and we are getting on famously. We are bound to carry the county at the next election, and in a year or two we shall sweep the State. We have already enrolled some of the best members of your parish, and you see the Deacon is added to the list. Influential men who join us now will be well provided for when we come into power. We want funds to carry on the cause. Think how much you might do with such men as Prowley and Dastick! Ah, those abominable old sinners, it would be a charity to get something out of them to repair a little of the mischief they have done in the world."

I protested at the way in which these gentlemen were mentioned: they were friends of mine, and highly esteemed citizens.

"Sir, they are _Moderate Drinkers_," said Mrs. Romulus, with an emphasis which claimed the settlement of the whole question. "The Gladiators are full of pity for the poor lost inebriate. They propose to convert their bar-keeping brothers by a course of moral suasion. But they will ever proscribe and defy those relentless Moderate Drinkers who admit the wine-cup into their families, and--and--why, Sir, did you ever see the stomach of a Moderate Drinker?"

I never had.

"Mr. Stellato has one fourteen times the size of life, colored after Nature by a progressive artist. It is a fearful sight!"

I did not question it.

"Once more, there is not a moment to spare," said Mrs. Romulus, turning suddenly upon the clergyman. "The question is, Shall we put you upon our Order of Exercises?"

"It would not sound badly," insinuated Stellato, perusing the document in imagination: "'Chant, by the Choir; Recitation of Original Verses, by Jane Romulus; Prayer, by the Reverend Charles Clifton'"--

"Stop!" cried the clergyman. "I decline all connection with this business. I have no sympathy with its promoters, and I will never cower before the mob-tyranny they evoke. If I have yet any influence in the First Church, it shall be used in solemnly counselling all youths and maidens of the congregation to report themselves at Mrs. Widesworth's singing-school. The feverish paroxysms of these public meetings are doubtless more stimulating than the humble duties of home, or the modest pleasures at which a lady of Mrs. Widesworth's character is willing to preside; but it is not the wholesome activity which a wise man may promote. And I know that to the children of our public schools such excitement is far more fatal than the cup they never coveted: their minds should be nurtured in moderation and simplicity, even as their bodies are best nourished upon bread and milk."

"Bread and milk!" echoed Mrs. Romulus in shrill falsetto; "say rather loaves of plaster and alum crumbed into bowls of chalk-mixture! This is the sort of bread and milk furnished by your barbarous civilization! But the beginning of the end of this priestridden world has at length come. A new era is dawning upon earth. Much-oppressed Woman asserts her entire freedom; she insists upon her passional independence, and demands harmonial development. She is going to get it, too! Stellato, come along!"

We watched them up the gravel-walk, and then off upon the dusty road.

The minister meditated in silence, as one who had the gift of penetrating beyond his fellows into the mystery of sin. Now he was distrustful: the time might soon come when he would be desperate. I think he almost longed for the power to become a proselyte to any active communion, even if it proposed but a new whitewashing of the sepulchre which hides the corruptions of society. Notwithstanding the vigorous words he had spoken, I knew him for one who could never take hearty satisfaction in denouncing any form of Error, because always fated to discern behind it the muffled figure of Truth. More than most men he felt the pressure of an awful fact which weighs upon such as are gifted with any fine apprehension of these worlds of spirit and matter,--namely, the impossibility of drawing anywhere in Nature those definite lines of demarcation which the mind craves to limit and fortify its feeble beliefs. If the boundaries of the animal and vegetable kingdoms are hopelessly interlaced, it is only an image of the confusion in which our blackest sins are shaded off into the sunlight of virtue.

"But why am I here?" exclaimed Clifton, suddenly starting to his feet. "I can at, least swim a few desperate strokes against this current, before sinking beneath it forever! I can do something to save a few ardent maidens from this whirling water of Reform!

"And yet," he continued, after a pause, "yet many, perhaps most of these wretched people, drained dry by their one idea, are devoted with absolute singleness of purpose to the pursuit of an honest thing. Let us consider whom and what we may be found fighting against. If these subverters do not altogether prove the truth of their own opinions, do they not at least demonstrate the error of those who totally oppose them? Here is Miss Hurribattle,--who will not acknowledge her noble contempt for the accidental and the transitory? I believe that woman desires Truth as earnestly as men desire wealth or reputation!"

"It is so, indeed," I assented. "Her large nature will assimilate whatever grandeur of idea may be found among this acid folk. After a little time she will reproduce in saintly form whatever gives its real vitality to this movement."

"Never!" said the clergyman; "they will put upon her the strait-jacket of their system, and carry her off to doom."

Soon after this we went in different ways through the town.

I called upon Mrs. Widesworth, who had a culinary engagement, and could not appear, and then walked to the top of the hill, where a number of the faithful were heaping tar-barrels and shavings about the solitary cider-mill. Regarding their operations from a little distance stood Deacon Greenlaw; his face wore an expression of grim humor, underlaid by a shrewd intelligence of the true position of affairs.

"They are making lively preparations for your holocaust," said I.

"Well, 't isn't exactly that long word neither," replied the Deacon. Fact is, I just looked it out in the dictionary, and there they call it 'a whole burnt-offering'; but it won't mean all that with me, I can tell you!"

"But, my dear Sir, surely you mean to go under the Juggernaut handsomely, and not squirm in the process?"

The Deacon indulged in an interrogative whistle, and jerked his thumb in the direction of a corn-barn which stood near the base of the hill.

I requested explanation.

"The floor of that corn-barn," observed its proprietor, "is covered with husks about four foot deep. Under those husks is my patent screw and a lot of cider-fixins. That old mill's a rattle-trap, any way. There's a place at the other end of the orchard a sight more handy for a new one. So, when folks get to reading their Bible without leaving out the marriage in Cana, why"--

"Then you have been badgered into this," I said, seeing that the Deacon was not disposed to finish his sentence.

"Well, they've been pecking at me pretty hard; and when Mis' Greenlaw and the girls went over, of course I couldn't hold out. I kept telling 'em that the Lord gave us apples, and I didn't believe He cared whether we eat 'em or drank 'em. But you see I had to knock under."

I questioned if it was going to rain, after all; for the clouds were scudding off to the east.

"They're just following the bend of the river," asserted the Deacon, elevating his chin to bring them within range, and giving them a significant nod, as if to recall an appointment. "These apple-trees will be dripping well before night. I know the weather-signs in Foxden. It _is_ going to rain,--and, what's more, when it does rain, it'll rain artichokes,--and, what's more than that, I don't care if it does!"

III.

A wretched fragment of the singing-class met at the house of Mrs. Widesworth. Professor Owlsdarck had kindly come over from Wrexford to help fill up the rooms; but the pressure of his ponderous attainments seemed only to compress yet more that handful of miscellaneous miserables in the front-parlor. Eight or ten elderly people, one or two undergraduates at home for the college-vacation,--these were the guests. The precautions of Mrs. Romulus had not been taken in vain,--there could be no singing: none, unless--but I trust that this evil suggestion occurred to nobody--we were so lost to shame as to call upon the college-boys to supply the place of our absent psalmody with some of those Bacchanalian choruses with which they were doubtless too familiar. We felt rather wicked. We knew that we were stigmatized by that terrible compound, "_Pro-Rum_"; we were held up as the respectable abettors of drunkenness, the _dilettanti_ patrons of pot-houses, the cold-blooded connoisseurs in wife-beating and _delirium tremens_. That we really appeared all this to many honest, enthusiastic people could not be doubted.

Certain perplexing questions, which had fifty times been answered and dismissed, were ever returning to worry the general consciousness of the company:--Is it not best to scourge one's self along with a popular enthusiasm, when, by many excellent methods, it would sweep society to a definite good? Are not the ardors of the imagination better working-powers than the cold judgments of the reason? Should we ever be carping at controlling principles, when much of their present manifestation seems full of active worthiness? Above all, have we not listened to contemptible fallacies of self-indulgence and indolence, and then cheated ourselves into believing them the sober testimonies of conscience?

That some such melancholic refinements were restless in the brains of many I have no doubt. Probably only Mrs. Widesworth and the undergraduates were wholly undisturbed by them. Yet, in spite of this secret uneasiness, there was common to the company a stiff recognition of its own virtue, which seemed to impart a certain queer rigidity to the bodily presence of the guests. Dr. Dastick, for the first and only time in my remembrance, appeared with his trousers bound with straps to the bottoms of his boots. Colonel Prowley had thrust his neck into a stock of extraordinary stiffness, which seemed to proceed from some antique coat-of-mail worn beneath the waistcoat. The collar and cuffs of Miss Prowley were wonderful in their dimensions, and fairly creaked with the starch. The clergyman, indeed, wore his dress and manners in relaxed and even slouchy fashion; but this seemed not due to lightness of heart, but only to weariness of mind. I knew that something had caused him to feel acutely the limitations of his office. One might attribute such feelings to the bass-viol player in an orchestra, who, in whatever whirl of harmony, is permitted to scrape out only a few gruff notes. But there was dear Mrs. Widesworth, so deliciously drugged by the anodynes of Authority that she could shake the chains of custom till they jingled like sleigh-bells.

"Come, come," said this good lady; "why, you all seem to be following the advice of my grandfather Twynintuft,--which was, to let the mind muddle after dinner. He thought it strengthened the voice,--gave it _timber_, as he called it. But, ah, dear! in these days so little attention is paid to elocution that it's of no consequence whatever!"

"I have endeavored, Madam," said Professor Owlsdarck, with great precision of utterance, "I have endeavored to impress upon my scholars that Socratic wisdom which condemned books as silent: a testimony, as I take it, of great importance to those who would perfect the instrument of oral instruction."

"There is no great elocutionist at the present day," said Mrs. Widesworth with pious regret.

"And little could we profit by him, if there were," rejoined the Principal of the Wrexford Academy. "For, in the present excited condition of our river-towns, men do not strive to copy the moderate virtues of the Ancients, but only to exaggerate their heathenish extispicy."

"Ah, very true, very true," sighed Mrs. Widesworth; "only I forget what that last word means."

"Extispicy," defined the Professor, "is properly the observation of entrails and divination thereby."

"Yet more is to be learned from bones," said Dr. Dastick, decidedly. "I hold that the performances of Cuvier alone are conclusive upon that point."

Colonel Prowley looked doubtful: it would hardly do to question thus lightly the wisdom of Antiquity.

Here Professor Owlsdarck experienced a queer twitching about the corners of his mouth,--an affection which since his poetical address before the Wrexford Trustees had occasionally troubled him.

"At any rate, Colonel," he observed, "we can agree, that, whatever amount of wisdom the Ancients may have shown in observing the digestive apparatus of animals, it certainly exceeded that of our modern philosophers, who are always contemplating their own."

"Truly, I believe you are right," responded Colonel Prowley. "There is my dear friend Miss Hurribattle, who is always coming to me with some new cure for people who are perfectly well. At one time Mrs. Romulus told her that everybody should live on fruits which ripen at least six feet above-ground,--all roots having an earthy and degrading tendency. The last recipe for the salvation of society is, to take a little gravel with our meals, like birds."

Dr. Dastick partly closed his eyes, and said, with some effort,--