Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

In discourse we are moved, not by what a man says, but by what he takes for granted. The undertow of power is something unstated to which all his facts and laws refer. But our resource seems to be rather a reversion, is not quite available; we have blood and a beat at the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of reaching his side. The great know well that all men are approaching their view even in departing from it, as travellers going from one port turn their backs on each other here and their faces together toward the antipodal point: they can leave their discoveries and fame to the race. There is one object of sight. Every piece of wisdom is no less my thought because another has found it in my mind. It is more mine than any perception I called my own, for really with that I have unconsciously been living in deeps below thought. The rest I have known, that in all these years I am.

No man seriously doubts that he is born to entertain the meaning of the world. Already we are inclined to reckon genius a mere faculty of saying, not of knowing, since it opens a common experience in every example. Minority and obligation to other eyes will cease. We have outgrown many a Magnus Apollo of childhood; his beauty is no longer beautiful, his gold is tinsel, we can dig better for ourselves. Therefore we can draw no line that will stand between poets and pretenders. That is fire which fires me to-day; to-morrow the same influence is frost. The standard is my temperature, a sliding scale. My neighbors are raised to ecstasy by what seems a rattle of pots and pans; but I remember when heaven opened to me also in Scheffer, Byron, Bellini. The judge places himself in his judgment,--declares only what is now above him, what below. If I find Milton prosaic beside Swedenborg, perhaps I do Milton no wrong; perhaps no man in the company so admires his impetuous grandeur; but now the impersonality of the Swede may meet my need more nearly, with his mysteries of correspondence, spiritual law, enduring Nature, and supremacy of Love. Discrimination is worth so much, because there are no great gaps between man and man, between mind and mind: there is no virtuous, no vicious, no poet, no unpoet, and only dulness lumps one with angels, another with dogs. There are infinite kinds and infinite degrees of intelligence; there is genius in every sort and every stage of adulteration, overlaid by this, by that, by the other grave mistake; and we cannot afford to be inhospitable to the feeblest protest against our condition and ourselves.

We pass all but the few great masters, and they are only before us on the road. Culture is the opening of spontaneous or liberal activity, and hangs all on the pivotal perception that everything, experience, effort, element, history, tradition, art, science, is another opening to the same centre, and that our life. When the pupil is roused, enchanted, fired, his redemption from sense is begun; he is delivered to the great God, if it were only in a crystal or a caterpillar; he will never again be the clod he was. The years are cruel and cold, want and appetite devour many a day, but the man can never forget what was promised to the boy. He believes in thought; believes against thought in the mad world, in foolish man; believes in himself, and wonders what he could do, if he had yet only half a chance. All that is streams toward the mind, will stream through it and be known.

God would not be God, if He could fill less than the universe, could leave cold and empty corners, could remain beyond thought, could be order around and not also within the brain. Deity is Revelation. Deity means for each the germ of knowledge and the sum of knowledge. Man is the guest of wisdom; he will drop for shame his arrogance, and seek never again to entertain or patronize this architect and master of the house. The triumph of inspiration is an unsealing of my own and of every mind, a delivery of the pupil to private inspiration. When the work of a master is masterly done, he abdicates therein, retires, and becomes unregarded as a flight of stairs behind. The statue is a failure, unless it makes me forget the statue,--the book, unless it makes me forget the book. All the rhyming, painting, singing of sentimental boys and girls springs from an intuition hardly yet more than instinct: that Nature has special scripts for each, to be by him, by her, alone, divined and published. They reach nothing sincere or unique, yet they feel the individuality and remoteness of experience. They cannot put forth their conscious power; but who among the gods of fame can put forth his power? Emerson says Jove cannot get his own thunder; much less can any mortal get his own thunder, however he may apply to Minerva for the key.

By the cheer of awakening intuition, a dawn which stirs before daylight, all men are secretly sustained. The common life is a borrowing, not a creation and giving: imitation is going on all-fours, and man is uneasy in that animal attitude. The horse comes only as horse: I am here not merely as man, but as John; I blush and ache till John is something pronounced and maintained against the mob of centuries, till men must feel his singularity and solidity, as the ocean is displaced and readjusted by every drop of rain. More or less, I must at least purely avail. Erectness is delivery to the private law, and something in each remains erect, and lifts him above the brute and the crowd. He is, and feels himself to be: he will advance and give the law of his life.

The brain is itself a nut from the tree Ygdrasil; it carries the world, and in the first glances we anticipate all knowledge. The joy of life does not wait for any theory of life, for we have only slept since the thought in us was embodied in this system; we took part in the making; we are drowsily at home with ourselves therein; we forget, yet do not forget, the roundness of design. As in a common experience we are often close upon some name which we seek to recall,--we feel, but cannot touch it,--so the secret of Nature lies close to the mind, and sustains us as if by magnetic communication, while we have yet no faculty to explore our own being or this apparition of it, the whirl of worlds.

We have rightly held genius to be miracle; but our great hope is postponed for lack of perception that all life is miracle, that man in every endowment is a form of the same plastic, incalculable power. Yet as we are brought to seek goodness, being sinners, so we shall be brought to seek the last perception, being dolts. The masters have not been quite masters, and their theory has never respected the natural as opening to a supernatural mind. We eat and drink and wait to be arrested, not by sunshine, but lightning. It comes at last, revealing from heaven the height and depth of our human prospect. The vision is appalling; the seer is stricken to the ground; he has no organ able to bear this light; he is blinded; he runs trembling for counsel to Paul, who was beaten from his horse, to Samuel, who was called in sleep, to Jesus, who taught the new birth, to John, who saw the white throne. But after a little we learn that the new experience is native to us as breath. No degeneracy of any period, no immersion in war, trade, production, tradition, can quite hide the cardinal fact that this strength of antiquity, of eternity, waits to descend, and does from time to time descend, into the private breast. He who prays has made the discovery, and is put by his own act in lonely communication with all heavens.

We find the sacred history legible only in the same light by which it was written: we are referred by it, therefore, to sources of interpretation above itself. God was hidden in the sky; the book in another sky; who shall reveal God hidden in the book? After so many ages, it has become a riddle as difficult of solution as any for which it offers solution: the last and best puzzle of the exulting old Sphinx, who will never be cheated of her jest. Our Christianity misses the highest value of the book, as it indicates the resource of universal man. We use the cover as some charm against danger, but the secret of devotion is not reached. At last it is plain that secular, nigh impenetrable Nature is a door as easily opened as this of the book. We must read upon our knees, we wait for grace to open the text, God must descend to light the page. The Quaker names our interpreter an inner light, the Church a Holy Ghost to purge the heart and eye. A deity who comes directly, and is no longer to seek when we are ready to read, must abolish the book. Of all gods offered in our Pantheon, of all persons in our Trinity, this must be the first.

I cannot fasten on the revelation which needs another to make it revelation to me; but when the divine aid is given, we seek no farther, for in this communion we have already all that was sought. The private illumination converts to gospel every creature on which its ray may fall; it makes a Bible of the world, a Bible of the heart. The doctors with dandling have now kept the child from his feet till there is doubt whether he have any feet. In this cradle of the record he shall spend his snug and comfortable life. "Here is safety!" Of course, he is bed-ridden.

But the weakness of man is no impediment to God. Remember who creates, who renews, who goes abroad in perpetual miracle of building, inhabiting, becoming. It is not a question of human power, but of divine.

Spiritual presence, apocalypse of every apocalypse, becomes our primal fact. It is the root of Protestantism, Democracy, Individualism. The sanctity of conscience is a rest of man upon undeniable Deity. There is no room for intervention of Peter or Paul.

The mind is immanence of Being, an original relation to all we have named reality and worshipped as divine. There are truths which we must reckon with Swedenborg among the Fundamentals of Humanity. To hold them is to be Man,--to be admitted to the hopeful council of our kind. Freedom is such a fundamental of the moral sense. From the thought of property in man we erect ourselves in God's name with indignant protestation, wiping it and its apologists together as dirt from our feet. By an equal necessity we count out from every discourse of reason those who find in them no organ of ultimate communication, who refer from common consciousness to saint and sage, as though God could be shut from presence and supremacy in thought. They are intellectual non-combatants who so refer. We take them at their own valuation; their certainty of uncertainty, their confession of remoteness from the centre we accept; but we must turn from the very angels, if they be not permitted for themselves to know. There is no outside to the universe except this embryotic condition, wherein a man may think that there is no result of thought.

I suppose no individual thinker will ever again have the importance which attaches to a few names in history. No man will found a religion with Mahomet, or overlie philosophers like Calvin, or shoulder out the poets like Shakspeare; still less will any man again be worshipped as a personal god. Let the newcomer be never so great, there is now a greatness in public thought to dwarf his proportions. He antedated all discoveries who first uttered the sacred name. That ray on darkness tells. Now we have nations of philosophers, thought flies like thistle-down, and the sublime speculations of the fore-world are cradle-songs and first spelling-lessons to excite the guesses of every barefooted boy. In early ages men met face to face with Nature, and spent their strength directly in questioning her. Now the work of God is overlaid. Every blunder is a rock in our field, and at last the field is a stone-heap of blunders, and our giants have work enough to reach any ground in the unsophisticated facts of life. We set no limit to the revolutionary power of truth; in happy hour it may sweep away doctrine and usage, supplant systems by songs, and governments by Love. Yet the first men were able to cleave the world to its centre, and predict the last results. We only enlarge their openings. Schools follow schools, Eclecticism comes with its band into the field to gather every ear; but Plato stands smiling behind, and holds in his hands that simple divided line, the image of all we know.

Who can wonder at the authority of the ancients, unbowed by an antiquity behind? Freedom from authority gave their directness, their simplicity, their superiority to misgiving and second thought, their confident "Thus saith the Lord."

We boast our enlightenment, but now the best minds are in question whether we have not lost as much by the ancients as we have gained. Plainly, they have not yet done their own work, have not given us to ourselves and to God. They should have been less or greater; they did not quite liberate, but became oppressors of the mind. To this misfortune we begin to find a single exception. Jesus, with his primal doctrine of a divine humanity, will now at last avail to be understood, will deliver us from every teacher to a Father in the heavens, and put us in direct communication with Him through the moral sense. After so many blind centuries, his truth breaks out, draws us to him from the misunderstanding of his followers, and refers from himself to the sources of his incomparable life.

Two men of our time are the primitive Christians,--not known for such, because their springs open, with those of the Master, not in any character, but in the Cause. They share his reliance, and accept in simplicity those brotherly words in which he extends his privilege to every child.

He will open to us Nature, for his habit is the only natural. He has no anxiety for immediate results, is never guarded in expression, does never explain; he makes no record of thought, calls no scholar to be scribe; he knows no labors, no studies; he walks on the hills, and frankly interprets the waving grain, the seed in the furrow, the lily, and the weed. Here is power which takes no thought for the morrow, an attitude which works endless revolutions without means or care or cost.

We must not dwell on this supreme example, lest we leave the hope of every reader far behind. Let us rather keep the level of common experience, and disclose the incursions of spirit which light a humble life. Love and Providence will appear in every breast; nothing more than Love and Providence appears to us above.

A supreme genius will fail, rather by under- than over-statement, to balance the popular exaggeration and repetition of fine phrases for which we have no corresponding fact. Why should any man be zealous or impatient? Why press a moral, dissecting it skeleton-like from throbbing textures of Freedom and Beauty? Why preach, threaten, and drive us with these bones, when a lover may draw us with kisses on living lips? Nature offers Duty as a manlier pleasure, leads the will so softly as to set us free in following, and her last thrill of delight is the steady heart-beat of heroism, facing danger with level eyes and fatal determination. Fear may arrest, but never restore. It is an arrest of fever by freezing, of disease by disease. Let it be understood, once for all, that this universe is moral, and say no more about that. Every man loves goodness, and the saint never exhorts to this love, but reinforces by addressing himself to it as matter of course. All power is a like repose on the basis of common desires and perceptions in the race. The didactic method is an insult alike to the pupil and the universe. Socrates is master and gentleman with his questions, suggestions, seeking in me and acting as midwife to my thought; but all _illuminati_ and professors, all who talk down or cut our meat into morsels, will quickly be counted aunties by the vigorous boys at school. Chairs and pulpits totter to-day with a scholastic dry rot, which is inability to recognize the equality of unsophisticated man to man. There will soon be no more chair or desk; the only eminence will be that of one who can stand with feet on the common level, and still utter over our heads a regenerating word. We shall learn to address ourselves in an audience, to utter before millions, as if in joyful soliloquy, the sincerest, tenderest thought. Speak as if to angels, and you shall speak to angels; take unhesitating inmost counsel with mankind. The response to every pure desire is instant and wonderful. Thousands listen to-day for a word which waits in the air and has never been spoken, a word of courage to carry forward the purpose of their lives.

Thought points to unity, and the thinker is impatient of squinting and side-glances while all eyes should be turned together to the same. Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal truth. Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,--and departure from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,--if he requires a new tombstone,--if he takes law, not from the many or the few, but from the sky,--if he is no subordinate, but an authority,--if he does not borrow judgment, but is judgment. Such a man is singular in his attitude only because we have so fallen from purity. He, not the fashion, is _comme il faut_. By every word and act he declares that as he is so all men must shortly be.

Plato and Swedenborg are trying to speak the same word, but each can avail only to turn some syllable. They regret this partiality as a provincial burr, as greenness and narrowness. Genius sees the white light and regrets its own impurity, though that be piquancy to the multitude, and marketable as a splendid blue or gold. Manner, in thought, speech, behavior, is popularity and falsehood; is the limping of a king deformity, though it set the fashion of limping. The grandest thoughts are colorless as water; they savor not of Milton, Socrates, or Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the pure sky. Whim and conceit are tare and tret. It matters little whether a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided and warped. The oddity relieves our commonplace, and pricks the dull palate; but we soon tire of exaggeration, and detest the trick. It is egotism, self-sickness, jaundice, adulteration of the light. We name it the subjective habit, personality; while the right illumination is a transparency, a putting-off of shoes, garments, body, and constitution, lest these should intercept or stain the ray. Genius is an eye single and serene. Good speech carries the sound of no man's, of no angel's voice. Good writing betrays no man's hand, but is as if traced by the finger of God.

Original will signify, therefore, not peculiar, but universal. The original is one who lives from the Maker, not from man. He has found and asserts himself as a piece of primal design: he is somewhat, and his life therefore significant. He first represents man in purity, man in God, and is a revelation. No matter what he repeats as approved, he will not be a repetition, but will give new value to each thing by his approval. The wisest man in separate propositions repeats only what has many times been spoken. In my reading of this past week I find anticipated every item of modern thought. Hooker says of the Bible,--"By looking in it for that which it is impossible that any book can have, we lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of books." Milton says,--

"He who reads and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains."

Coleridge gives perfect confidence to paradox as sure of solution above the term of it; in his "Table-Talk" he antedates Carlyle's doctrine of dynamics,--puts Faith above belief, as in another region of the mind,--declares that the conceivable is not to be revered, and says, before Emerson, that existence is the Fall of Man. But the failure of Coleridge teaches that no single perceptions, however subtile or deep, will solve the broad problem of Nature. These separate thoughts the great hold in new emphasis and relation. Of such sparks they make a flame, of such timbers a house or ship. The parts may be old, the whole is not; and Goethe falls into a modest fallacy, when, in acknowledging his obligation to others, he disclaims originality for himself. All is new in his use of it: you may say he has taken nothing, for what was iron or silver where he found it is gold in his transmuting grasp.

When a man authentic speaks, our interest goes through every statement to himself. The root of that word is not in the market or the street, but in humanity, and through that in the deep. We study Goethe, not any opinion of Goethe: he represents for us in his measure the nature, need, and resource of the race, because what he publishes he knows, lives, and is. We open the mind largely to take the sense of such a gospel: it will not appear in details of perception. Plato and Goethe see the same sun, and seem to the vulgar to follow each other; they have more in common than any man can have in privacy; yet if you enter to the entire habit of each, you will justify the making of these two. They are like and unlike, as apples on one and another tree. The great in any time hold in common the growing truth of their time, and refer to it in intercourse as understood, an atmosphere which he must breathe who now lives and thinks; yet no two will be identically related to the same. We are radiated as spokes from a centre; we enter to it and work for it from every side.

There is no danger of repetition, if the thought be deep. Superior insight will always sufficiently astonish, will always be novel in its place. The more simple the method, the more wonderful every result. Men are shut, as if by a wall of adamant, from all that is yet beyond their sympathy. My neighbor is immersed in planting, building, and the new road. Beside him, companion only in air and sunshine, walks one who has no ocular adjustment for these atoms; his thought overleaps them in starting, and is wholly beyond. The end of vision for a practical eye is beginning of clairvoyance. To the road-maker, man is a maker of roads; he cracks his nuts and his jokes unconscious, while the ground opens and the world heaves with revolutions of thought. Ask him in vain what Webster means by "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill"; what Channing sees in the Dignity of Man, or Edwards in the Sweetness of Divine Love; ask him in vain what is the "Fate" of Aeschylus, the "Compensation" of Emerson, Carlyle's "Conflux of Eternities," the "Conjunction" of Swedenborg, the "Newness" of Fox, the "Morning Red" of Behmen, the "Renunciation" of Goethe, the "Comforter" of Jesus, the "Justification" of Paul.

For the dull, this mystery of existence is not even a mystery; they are shut below the firmament of wonder. When the vulgar come with their definite gain and good, their circle of immediate ends, we feel the house contract, the sky descend,--we shrivel, our pores close, the skull hardens on the brain. The positive, who exactly knows, is a skeleton at the feast; that exactness is numbness, and chills every expansive guest. Dogma is a stoppage quite short of the nearest beginning; the liberal habit a beginning of all that has no end. Sense is a wall very near the eye, and when that is penetrated all lies open beyond; we see only paths, seas, and vistas. Wisdom explores and never concludes. The explanations of centuries are idle tales: my explanations are not so to be forestalled. We forget the shallow answers to shallow questions, when now we have deeper genuine questions to ask. The great are happy babes of Beauty and Good. Truth returns in a fresh suspicion, and all are welcome who wear on the brows that soft commingled light and shadow of an advancing, sweet, inexplicable Fate. Our hope is no house, but a wing; no roof can be endured but the blue one. What method have we yet to serve the spontaneous or spiritual being? what culture, art, society, worship, in which his need and power are so much as recognized? There is indefinable certainty of Nature beyond Nature, man beyond man. Genius opens all doors, the earth-doors, the sky-doors,--throws down the horizon and the heaven, to come into open air. All paths lead out to the sea, where a day's voyage may teach that the receding circle bounds our sight alone, and not the deep. We look out not on chaos and darkness, but on order too large for the brain, and light, for which as owls we have yet no capacious eye. We leave every perception neglected to wait on the future; but every future has its future devouring the past. What is left but bending of the knee and boundless confidence?

* * * * *

MY BROTHER AND I.

From the door where I stand I can see his fair land
Sloping up to a broad sunny height,
The meadows new-shorn, and the green wavy corn,
The buckwheat all blossoming white:
There a gay garden blooms, there are cedars like plumes,
And a rill from the mountain leaps up in a fountain,
And shakes its glad locks in the light.

He dwells in the hall where the long shadows fall
On the checkered and cool esplanade;
I live in a cottage secluded and small,
By a gnarly old apple-tree's shade:
Side by side in the glen, I and my brother Ben,--
Just the river between us, with borders as green as
The banks where in childhood we played.

But now nevermore upon river or shore
He runs or he rows by my side;
For I am still poor, like our father before,
And he, full of riches and pride,
Leads a life of such show, there is no room, you know,
In the very fine carriage he gained by his marriage
For an old-fashioned brother to ride.

His wife, with her gold, gives him friends, I am told,
With whom she is rather too gay,--
The senator's son, who is ready to run
For her gloves and her fan, night or day,
And to gallop beside, when she wishes to ride:
Oh, no doubt 'tis an honor to see smile upon her
Such world-famous fellows as they!

Ah, brother of mine, while you sport, while you dine,
While you drink of your wine like a lord,
You might curse, one would say, and grow jaundiced and gray,
With such guests every day at your board!
But you sleek down your rage like a pard in its cage,
And blink in meek fashion through the bars of your passion,
As husbands like you can afford.

For still you must think, as you eat, as you drink,
As you hunt with your dogs and your guns,
How your pleasures are bought with the wealth that she brought,
And you were once hunted by duns.
Oh, I envy you not your more fortunate lot:
I've a wife all my own in my own little cot,
And with happiness, which is the only true riches,
The cup of our love overruns.

We have bright, rosy girls, fair as ever an earl's,
And the wealth of their curls is our gold;
Oh, their lisp and their laugh, they are sweeter by half
Than the wine that you quaff red and old!
We have love-lighted looks, we have work, we have books,
Our boys have grown manly and bold,
And they never shall blush, when their proud cousins brush
From the walls of their college such cobwebs of knowledge
As careless young fingers may hold.

Keep your pride and your cheer, for we need them not here,
And for me far too dear they would prove,
For gold is but gloss, and possessions are dross,
And gain is all loss, without love.
Yon severing tide is not fordless or wide,--
The soul's blue abysses our homesteads divide:
Down through the still river they deepen forever,
Like the skies it reflects from above.

Still my brother thou art, though our lives lie apart,
Path from path, heart from heart, more and more.
Oh, I have not forgot,--oh, remember you not
Our room in the cot by the shore?
And a night soon will come, when the murmur and hum
Of our days shall be dumb evermore,
And again we shall lie side by side, you and I,
Beneath the green cover you helped to lay over
Our honest old father of yore.

* * * * *

A HALF-LIFE AND HALF A LIFE.

"On garde longtemps son premier amant, quand on n'en prend point de
second."

_Maximes Morales du Duc de la Rochefoucauld._.

It is not suffering alone that wears out our lives. We sometimes are in a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,--when, rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our veins with something like a living swiftness.

This death-in-life comes sometimes to the most earnest men, to those whose life is fullest of energy and excitement It is the reaction, the weariness which they name Ennui,--foul fiend that eats fastest into the heart's core, that shakes with surest hand the sands of life, that makes the deepest wrinkles on the cheeks and deadens most surely the lustre of the eyes.

But what are the occasional visits of this life-consumer, this vampire that sucks out the blood, to his constant, never-failing presence? There are those who feel within themselves the power of living fullest lives, of sounding every chord of the full diapason of passion and feeling, yet who have been so hemmed around, so shut in by adverse and narrowing circumstances, that never, no, not once in their half-century of years which stretch from childhood to old age, have they been free to breathe out, to speak aloud the heart that was in them. Ever the same wasting indifference to the things that are, the same ill-repressed longing for the things that might be. Long days of wearisome repetition of duties in which there is no life, followed by restless nights, when Imagination seizes the reins in her own hands, and paints the out-blossoming of those germs of happiness and fulness of being of whose existence within us we carry about always the aching consciousness.

And such things I have known from the moment when I first stepped from babyhood into childhood, from the time when life ceased to be a play and came to have its duties and its sufferings. Always the haunting sense of a happiness which I was capable of feeling, faint glimpses of a paradise of which I was a born denizen,--and always, too, the stern knowledge of the restraints which held me prisoner, the idle longings of an exile. But would no strong effort of will, no energy of heart or mind, break the bonds that held me down,--no steady perseverance of purpose win me a way out of darkness into light? No, for I was a woman, an ugly woman, whose girlhood had gone by without affection, and whose womanhood was passing without love,--a woman, poor and dependent on others for daily bread, and yet so bound by conventional duties to those around her that to break from them into independence would be to outrage all the prejudices of those who made her world.

I could plan such escape from my daily and yearly narrowing life, could dream of myself walking steadfast and unshaken through labor to independence, could picture a life where, if the heart were not fed, at least the tastes might be satisfied, could strengthen myself through all the imaginary details of my going-forth from the narrow surroundings which made my prison-walls; but when the time came to take the first step, my courage failed. I could not go out into that world which looked to me so wide and lonely; the necessity for love was too strong for me, I must dwell among mine own people. There, at least, was the bond of custom, there was the affection which grows out of habit; but in the world what hope had I to win love from strangers, with my repellent looks, awkward movements, and want of personal attractions?

Few persons know that within one hundred and fifty miles of the Queen City of the West, bounded on both sides by highly cultivated tracts of country, looking out westwardly on the very garden of Kentucky, almost in the range of railroad and telegraph, in the very geographical centre of our most populous regions, there lie some thousand square miles of superb woodland, rolling, hill above hill, in the beautiful undulations which characterize the country bordering on the Ohio, watered by fair streams which need only the clearing away of the few obstructions incident to a new country to make them navigable, and yet a country where the mail passes only once a week, where all communication is by horse-paths or by the slow course of the flat-boat, where schools are not known and churches are never seen, where the Methodist itinerant preacher gives all the religious instruction, and a stray newspaper furnishes all the political information. Does any one doubt my statement? Then let him ask a passage up-stream in one of the flat-boats that supply the primitive necessities of the small farmers who dwell on the banks of the Big Sandy, in that debatable border-land which lies between Kentucky and Virginia; or let him, if he have a taste for adventure, hire his horse at Catlettsburg, at the mouth of the river, and lose his way among the blind bridle-paths that lead to Louisa and to Prestonburg. If he stops to ask a night's lodging at one of the farm-houses that are to be found at the junction of the creeks with the rivers, log-houses with their primitive out-buildings, their half-constructed rafts of lumber ready to float down-stream with the next rise, their 'dug-outs' for the necessities of river-intercourse, and their rough oxcarts for hauling to and from the mill, he will see before him such a home as that in which I passed the first twenty years of my life.

I had little claim on the farmer with whom I lived. I was the child by a former marriage of his wife, who had brought me with her into this wilderness, a puny, ailing creature of four years, and into the three years that followed was compressed all the happiness I could remember. The free life in the open air, the nourishing influence of the rich natural scenery by which I was surrounded, the grand, silent trees with their luxuriant foliage, the fresh, strong growth of the vegetation, all seemed to breathe health into my frame, and with health came the capacity for enjoyment. I was happy in the mere gift of existence, happy in the fulness of content, with no playmate but the kindly and lovely mother Earth from whose bosom I drew fulness of life.

But in my seventh year my mother died, worn out by the endless, unvarying round of labors which break down the constitutions of our small farmers' wives. She grew sallow and thin under repeated attacks of chills and fever, brought into the world, one after another, three puny infants, only to lay them away from her breast, side by side, under the sycamore that overshadowed our cornfield, and visibly wasted away, growing more and more feeble, until, one winter morning, we laid her, too, at rest by her babies. Before the year was out, my father (so I called him) was married again.

My step-mother was a good woman, and meant to do her duty by me. Nay, she was more than that: she was, as far as her poor light went, a Christian. She had experienced religion in the great revival of 18--, which was felt all through Western Kentucky, under the preaching of the Reverend Peleg Dawson, and when she married my father and went to bury herself in the wilds of "Up Sandy" was a shining light in the Methodist church, a class-leader who had had and had told experiences.

But all that glory was over now; it had flashed its little day: for there is a glow in the excitement of our religious revivals as potent in its effect on the imaginations of women and young men as ever were the fastings and penances which brought the dreams and reveries, the holy visions and the glorious revealings, of the Catholic votaries. In this short, triumphant time of spiritual pride lay the whole romance of my step-mother's life. Perhaps it was well for her soul that she was taken from the scene of her triumphs and brought again to the hard realities of life. The self-exaltation, the ungodly pride passed away; but there was left the earnest, prayerful desire to do her duty in her way and calling, and the first path of duty which opened to her zeal was that which led to the care of a motherless child, the saving of an immortal soul. And in all sincerity and uprightness did she strive to walk in it. But what woman of five-and-thirty, who has outlived her youth and womanly tenderness in the loneliness and hardening influences of a single life, and who marries at last for a shelter in old age, knows the wants of a little child? Indeed, what but a mother's love has the long-enduring patience to support the never ceasing calls for forbearance and perseverance which a child makes upon a grown person? Those little ones need the nourishment of love and praise, but such milk for babes can come only from a mother's breast. I got none of it. On the contrary, my dearly loved independence, my wild-wood life, where Nature had become to me my nursing-mother, was exchanged for one of never ceasing supervision. "Little girls must learn to be useful," was the phrase that greeted my unwilling ears fifty times a day, which pursued me through my daily round of dish-washings, floor-sweepings, bed-making and potato-peeling, to overtake me at last in the very moment when I hoped to reap the reward of my diligence in a free afternoon by the river-side in the crotch of the water-maple that hung over the stream, clutching me and fastening me down to the hated square of patchwork, which bore, in the spots of red that defaced its white purity in following the line of my stitches, the marks of the wounds that my awkward hands inflicted on themselves with their tiny weapon.

And so the years went on. It was a pity that no babies came to soften our hearts, my step-mother's and mine, and to draw us nearer together as only the presence of children can. A household without children is always hard and angular, even when surrounded by all the softening influences of refinement and education. What was ours with its poverty and roughness, its every-day cares and its endless discomforts? One day was like all the rest, and in their wearying succession they rise up in my memory like ghosts of the past coming to lay their cold, death-like hands on the feebly kindling hopes of the present. I see myself now, as I look back, a tall, awkward girl of fifteen, with my long, straggling, sunburnt hair, my sallow, yet pimply complexion, my small, weak-looking blue eyes, that every exposure to the sun and wind would redden, and my long, lean hands and arms, that offended my sense of beauty constantly, as I dwelt on their hopelessly angular turns. I had one beauty; so my little paper-framed glass, that rested on the rough rafter that edged the sloping roof of my garret, told me, whenever I took it down to gaze in it, which, but for that beauty, would have been but seldom. It was a finely cut and firmly set mouth and chin. There was, and I felt it, beauty and character in the curves of the lips, in the rounding of the chin; there was even a healthy ruddiness in the lips, and something of delicacy in the even, well-set teeth that showed themselves when they parted.

The gazing at these beauties gave me great pleasure, not for any effect they might ever produce in others,--what did I know of that?--but because I had in myself a strong love of the beautiful, a passion for grace of form and brilliancy of color which made doubly distasteful to me our bare, uncouth walls, with their ugly, straight-backed chairs, and their frightfully painted yellow or red tables and chests-of-drawers.

My step-mother's appearance, too, was a constant offence to my beauty-loving eye,--with her lank, tall figure, round which clung those narrow skirts of "bit" calico, dingy red or dreary brown,--her feet shod in the heavy store-shoes which were brought us from Catlettsburg by the returning flat-boat men,--her sharp-featured face, the forehead and cheeks covered with brown, mouldy-looking spots, the eyes deep-set, with a livid, dyspeptic ring around them, and the lips thin and pinched,--the whole face shaded by the eternal sun-bonnet, which never left her head from early sunrise till late bedtime (no Sandy woman is ever seen without her sun-bonnet). All these were perpetual annoyances to me; they made me discontented without knowing why; they filled me with disgust, a disgust which my respect for her good qualities could not overcome.

And then our life, how dreary! The rising in the cold, gray dawn to prepare the breakfast of corn-dodgers and bacon for my father and his men,--the spreading the table-cloth, stained with the soil-spots of yesterday's meal,--the putting upon it the ugly, unmatched crockery,--the straggling-in of the unwashed, uncombed men in their coarse working-clothes, redolent of the week's unwholesome toil,--their washings, combings, and low talk close by my side,--the varied uses to which our household utensils were put,--the dipping of dirty knives into the salt and of dirty fingers into the meat-dish,--all filled me then, and fill me now, with loathing.

There was a relief when the men left the house; but then came the dreary "slicking-up," almost more disgusting, in its false, superficial show of cleanliness, than had been the open carelessness of the workmen.

But there was no time for rest; my step-mother's sharp, high-pitched voice was heard calling, "Janet!" and I followed her to the garden to dig the potatoes from the hills or to the cornfield to pull and husk the three dozen ears of corn which made our chief dish at dinner. Then came the week's washing, the apple-peeling, the pork-salting, work varied only with the varying season, until the blowing of the horn at twelve brought back the men to dinner, after which came again the clearing up, again the day's task, and again the supper.

I often thought that the men around us were always more cheerful and merry than the women. They worked as hard, they endured as many hardships, but they had, certainly, more pleasures. There was the evening lounge by the fire in winter, the sitting on the fence or at the door-step in summer, when, pipe or cigar in mouth, knife and whittling-stick in hand, jest and gibe would pass round among them, and the boisterous laugh would go up, reaching me, as I lay, tired out, on my little cot, or leaned disconsolate at my garret-window, looking with longing eyes far out into the darkness of the woods. No such gatherings-together of the women did I ever see. If one of our neighbors dragged her weary steps to our kitchen, and sat herself down, baby, in lap, on the upturned tub or flag-bottomed chair that I dusted off with my apron, it was to commence the querulous complaint of the last week's chill or the heavy washing of the day before, the ailing baby or the troublesome child, all told in the same whining voice. Even the choice bit of gossip which roused us at rare intervals always had its dark side, on which these poor women dwelt with a perverse pleasure.

In short, life was too hard for them; it brought its constant cares without any alleviating pleasures. Their homes were only places of monotonous labor,--their husbands so many hard taskmasters, who exacted from them more than their strength could give,--their children, who should have been the delight of their mothers' hearts, so many additional burdens, the bearing and nursing of which broke down their poor remaining health; the glorious and lavish Nature in which they lived only brought to them added labor, and shut them out from the few social enjoyments that they knew of.

I was old enough to feel all this,--not to reason on it as I can now, but to rebel against it with all the violence of a vehement nature which feels its strength only in the injuries it inflicts upon itself in its useless struggles for freedom. Bitter tears did I shed sometimes, as I lay with my head on my arms, leaning on that narrow window-sill,--tears of passionate regret that I was not a boy, a man, that I might, by the very force of my right arm, hew my way out of that encircling forest into the world of which I dreamed,--tears, too, that, being as I was, only an ugly, ignorant girl, I could not be allowed to care only for myself, and dream away my life in this same forest, which charmed me while it hemmed me in. My rude, chaotic nature had something of force in it, strength which I knew would stand me in good stead, could I ever find an outlet for it; it had also a power of enjoyment, keen, vivid, could I ever get leave to enjoy.

At length came the opening, the glimpse of sunlight. I remember, as if it were but yesterday, that afternoon which first showed to my physical sight something of that full life of which my imagination had framed a rude, faint sketch. I was standing at the end of the meadow, just where the rails had been thrown down for the cows, when, looking up the path that led through the wood by the river, I saw, almost at my side, a man on horseback. He stopped, and, half raising his hat, a motion I had never seen before, said,--

"Is this Squire Boarders's place?"

I pushed back my sun-bonnet, and looked up at him. I see him now as I saw him then; for my quick, startled glance took in the whole face and figure, which daguerreotyped themselves upon my memory. A frank, open face, with well-cut and well-defined features and large hazel eyes, set off by curling brown hair, was smiling down upon me, and, throwing himself from his horse, a young man of about five-and-twenty stood beside me. He had to repeat his question before I gained presence of mind enough to answer him.

"Is this Squire Boarders's house, and do you think I could get a night's lodging here?"

It was no unusual thing for us to give a night's lodging to the boatmen from the river, or to the farmers from the back-country, as they passed to or from Catlettsburg; but what accommodation had we for such a guest as here presented? I walked before him up the path to the house, and, shyly pointing to my step-mother, who stood on the porch, said,--

"That's Miss Boarders; you can ask her."

And then, before he had time to answer, I fled in an agony of bashfulness to my refuge under the water-maple behind the house. I lingered there as long as I dared,--longer, indeed, than I had any right to linger, for I heard my mother's voice crying, "Janet!" and I well knew that there was nobody but myself to mix the corn-cake, spread the table, or run the dozen errands that would be needed. I slipped in by the back-door, and, escaping my step-mother's peevish complaints, passed into the little closet which served us for pantry, and, scooping up the meal, began diligently to mix it.

The window by which I stood opened on the porch. My father and his men had come in, and, tipping their chairs against the wall, or mounted on the porch-railing, were smoking their cigars, laughing, joking, talking,--and there in the midst of them sat the stranger, smoking too, and joining in their talk with an easy earnestness that seemed to win them at once. Our country-people do not spare their questions. My father took the lead, the men throwing in a remark now and then.

"I calculate you have never been in these parts before?"

"No, never. You have a beautiful country here."

"The country's well enough, if we could clear off some of them trees that stop a man every way he turns. Did you come up from Lowiza to-day?"

"No; I have only ridden from the mouth of Blackberry, I believe you call it. I have left a boat and crew there, who will be up in the morning."

"What truck have you got on your boat?"

"Lumber and so forth, and plenty of tools of one sort or other."

"Damn me if I don't believe you're the man who is coming up here to open the coal mines on Burgess's land!" And the whole crowd gathered round him.

He laughed good-naturedly.

"Yes, I am coming to live among you. I hope you'll give me a welcome."

There was a cheery sound of welcome from the men, but my father shook his head.

"We don't like no new-fangled notions, noways, up here, and I'll not say that I'm glad you're bringing them in; but, at any rate, you're welcome here to-night."

The young man held out his hand.

"We are to be close neighbors, Squire Boarders, and I hope we shall be good friends; but I ought to tell you all about myself. Mr. Burgess's land has been bought by a company, who intend to open the coal mines, as you know, and I am sent up here as their agent, to make ready for the miners and the workmen. We shall clear away a little, and put up some rough shanties, to make our men comfortable before we go to work. We shall bring a new set of people among you, those Scotch and Welsh miners; but I believe they are a peaceable set, and we'll try to be friendly with each other."

The frank speech and the free, open face seemed to mollify my father.

"And how do you call yourself, stranger, when you are at home?"

"My name is George Hammond."

"Well, as I was telling you, you're welcome here to-night, and I don't know as I've anything against your settling over the river on Burgess's land. The people round here have been telling me your coming will be a good thing for us farmers, because you'll bring us a market for our corn and potatoes; but I don't see no use of raising more corn than we want for ourselves. We have enough selling to do with our lumber, and you'll be thinning out the trees.--But there's my old woman's got her supper ready."