Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

The _Essays_ of Emerson were subsequently attacked furiously in the _Princeton Review_ by Prof. Dod and Jas. W. Alexander. These gentlemen gave to the world, as criticisms of Emerson and other writers, several treatises on Pantheism, aiding the very cause they designed to destroy, by disseminating among the religious public a statement of the primitive Philosophy of the Vedas, and its reflection in Germany and America, clearer than any that had yet appeared: a task for which their scholarship and ability eminently fitted them. But in attacking German Philosophy, both learned to respect that which was practically useful in it. Prof. Dod left among his papers an unfinished translation of Spinoza, and the lamented Dr. Alexander, in his admirable lectures on literature to the students of Princeton College, recommended a perusal of what Kant and other German metaphysicians had written on Æsthetics. It is no reflection on the piety or sincerity of these sound divines and ripe scholars that they found something good and useful even in the armory of the enemy. The last step in piety, as in learning, is always to that noble liberality which recognizes Truth and Beauty wherever found.

And, while the religious reviews abounded in jeremiads and philippies, the newspaper wits stood outside and shouted in derision. The game was indeed too rare to be passed unnoticed. In a poem on Fanny Ellsler (1841) occurred the following:--

Our wits, as usual, late upon the road,
Pick up what Europe saw long since explode.
If this you doubt, ask Harvard, she can tell
How many fragments there from Deutschland fell;
How many mysteries boggle Cambridge men
That erst in England boggled Carlyle's pen,
And will, no doubt, be mysteries again;
And also what great Coleridge left unsung.
He, too, saw Germany when very young.'

To Emerson, at this moment, numbers looked with the deepest admiration or with fiercest hate. He was the type of his age, what Carlyle might perhaps call its 'Priest Vates.' In his _Essays_ he stood aloft and proclaimed, 'In me is the kernel of truth: eat and live!' But the shell that enclosed the kernel was hard to crack, and was, moreover, like the 'Sileni' of the old French apothecaries, as described by Rabelais, so decorated with wondrous figures, harpies, satyrs, horned geese and bridled hares, that men were incredulous, and doubted that precious ambergris, musk and gems were to be found within. In his first crudities, fyttes and tilts with thought, both knight and field are covered with a cloth of gold so dazzling that the crystalline lenses of our common vision are in danger of dissolution, and we vainly hope for page or dame who will whisper to us the magic word that shall dispel this scene of enchantment. Meanwhile, his sentences, like arrows, darken that sun, himself, and we hasten with bits of smoked glass to view the eclipse. Happily, we have chosen the right medium: the luminousness is destroyed, but the opaqueness remains visible. Entrenched behind a mannerism so adroitly constructed as at once to invite and repel invasion, Emerson hurls out axioms and establishes precedents that prove upon examination to be either admirably varnished editions of old truths or statements of new ones of questionable legitimacy. Turn over leaf by leaf these early essays, and doubts arise as to the validity of the author's claim to originality. Carlyle has led before these pompous parades of moral truths that your child recognizes in the nursery when he makes war upon Johnny, who has knocked down his ten-pins. The law of compensation and the existence of evil and consequent suffering are actual entities to him. And yet these men do not belong to the same school. The resemblance is on the surface. Emerson dabbles delicately, yet, let it be conceded, energetically, with theories: his hands are not the nervy, sinewy hands of the Viking of English literature; he lacks his keen discernment of life, his quick comprehension of the mutual relations of men and their times; he often wants his fine analytical power. Carlyle sees in the life of a man his actions, associations, aspirations, disappointments, successes, what deep principles swayed him, what noble or ignoble nature provided his impulses, and wrought his manhood: Emerson tests him by the great problems of the universe, as he understands them, and educes from their application to certain circumstances the character of the man. The one is sagacious, argus-eyed; the other oracular, sibylline. And yet Emerson, perhaps unconsciously, through admiration of the liberal views and unquestioned bravery of his contemporary, adopted something like his peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle was the rhinoceros of English, Emerson aspired to be its hippopotamus,--both pachyderms, and impenetrable to the bullets of criticism.

We have called Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of Æschylus and De Stael. Like the _Lehrer zu Sais_, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great is to be misunderstood,' (is this the true 'misery of greatness' of Milton?) it is hard to grasp his individuality. His haughty assertions meet us at every turn. We no more dare to question them than so many 'centaurs or sphinxes or pallid gorgons' in a nightmare. But he relieves our perplexity and gives us the key to that enigma himself. 'I unsettle all things. No facts to me are sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, _with no past at my back_.' What is this but another version of Brahma? 'Far or forgot to me is near.' It is a reflection of the Veda. 'I myself never was not, nor thou, nor all the princes of the earth, nor shall we ever hereafter cease to be.' Spinoza, the God-intoxicated man, never ventured on a declaration so bold. 'The eternal wisdom of God, _Dei oeterna Sapientia_,' says he, more modestly, 'is manifested in all things, but mostly in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus Christ.' Here then we find the individuality of Emerson, in his pure Pantheism, and, like the sword of Martin Antolinez, it illumines all the field. Now we understand the constant warfare, the 'inevitable polarity,' in these pages. We forgive the occasional inconsistencies of a man who is at once, by his own confession, 'God in Nature and a weed by the wall.' His weakness strives after infinite power. Conscious of a divinity within, he struggles to express it worthily; but ah! says Hermes Trismegistus,--'It is hard to conceive God, but impossible to express him.' Freedom within chafes at the iron necessity without, 'a necessity deep as the world,' all-controlling, imperial, which he acknowledges in the very depths of his being. But the necessity of Emerson is a Hegelian element, such as every Aristophanic comedy reveals. It is not the necessity of Fichte. 'I, with all that relates to me, am imprisoned within the bonds of Necessity. I am one link of her inflexible chain. A time was when I was not, so those have assured me who were before me, and, as I have no consciousness of this time, I am constrained to believe their testimony.' This is the necessity of mere existence, which bears no relation to the will of the man, not that inflexible destiny to which Emerson refers, that underlies his continued being. The first does not oppose the 'instinct of an activity free, independent,' which Emerson afterwards acknowledges. But 'I am God in Nature,' he repeats. 'The simplest person who in his integrity proclaims God, becomes God.' 'This thorough integrity of purpose,' writes Fichte, 'is itself the divine idea in its most common form, and no really _honest_ mind is without communion with God.' In Emerson the last height is reached. Brahm as Arjoon could do no more, no less. His eye roams over the universe and sees only manifestations of himself: the rose of morning, the shining splendor of the sea, the purple of the distant mountains, are his dawn and noon and eve.

'Alas! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with--a siren!'

This may be Pantheism, but if it is not in accordance with the needs of the ages, it is not the Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, it has little in common with Plato. The great idea, the latter tells us, in the _Republic_, 'the idea of the God, is perceived with difficulty, but can not be perceived without concluding that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, and in the invisible world it directly produces Strength and Intelligence.' Strength and Intelligence; whose correlatives are Progress and Happiness. Are there among Emerson's earlier 'big-sounding sentences and words of state,' any of which these are the legitimate fruit? Does the soul of Infinite Love that beamed from Nazareth inform these pages with the active, perfect, immortal spirit of truth? No. In these essays, Emerson is a royalist, an aristocrat: he aims for the centralization of power; he does not elevate the masses; he claims for himself, for all nature, ultra-refined and cultivated, to whom the Open Secret 'has been discovered, a separate and highly superior personality. 'The height, the duty of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.' What an Apollo Belvidere the man would be, moulded by no sympathies, standing aloof from his race, and independent of it, disdainful, magnificent, a palace of ice, untenable by the summer heat of Love. The true cosmopolite is the man of his age, even if he has known no latitude but that of his birth, for he has won for himself the highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with his fellow-man, and the laws that govern man in his efforts to secure these are the laws of the only true social science. Henry Carey says with reason, in Italy the highest individuality was found when the Campagna was filled with cities. It is a narrow belief that the highest development of character demands solitude. Give to a young man, genial, impulsive, and intelligent, only the companionship of forest, sea, and mountain, and the chances are, he will become morbid, unpractical, and selfish. But place him in the same position in the decline, or even in the noon of life, when the different parts of his nature have become subordinated to each other, by friction with diverse human organizations about him, and he will carry a brave individuality among nature's gifts, being himself her noblest development. 'Men,' says Emerson, 'resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been house-inmates for a course of years, that they grow alike: if they should live long enough we should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors such complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations.' But Darby and Joan in the chimney-corner are not types of mankind at large.

'Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving myself. I must absolve me to myself.' And what is myself? Let Fichte answer. 'I affirm that in what we call the knowledge or the contemplation of things, it is always ourselves that we know or contemplate: in every sentiment of consciousness it is only modifications of ourselves that we feel.' And again: 'The universe lives. From it arises a marvelous harmony that resounds deliciously in the very depths of my heart. I live in all that surrounds me. I recognize myself in every manifestation of Nature, in the various forms of the beings about me, as a sunbeam that sparkles in the million dew-drops that reflect it.... Within me Nature is flesh, nerves, muscles; without, turf, plant, animal.'

Thus the semi-poetical Pantheism of the Bhagvat-Gita is reproduced, beautiful, dreamy and mythical, but without the shadow of an addition. Emerson presents to us the primeval faith in its imposing majesty and terrible unity, but omits to mention its final winding up in the sacred Maya or Illusion of the Hindoos. Though his early essays are brilliant with many noble thoughts, the principles he advocates in them are thoroughly unprogressive and unpractical. Plato is to him the 'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by whose stature he measures the nations. Boëthius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His mission is to the Past or the Future, not to the Present. His theories, fine and venerable, as they are as here expressed, will never save a soul, and men are still convinced that one sharp, decisive action is worth a thousand fine strategic points on paper. Yet he won an enviable and wide reputation by these his early works. 'There is merit without elevation,' says La Rochefoucauld, 'but there is no elevation without some merit.' Such we find him in his earlier essays, while he had as yet only grasped at the Pantheistic wing of the Egyptian globe. In England, in 1848, four thousand people crowded Exeter Hall, to hear the champion of free thought from America. In Poland, men who knew him only by some fragments in a Polish review, considered him the thinker of the age. His courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness, visible through the veil of arrogance and petty affectations, secured respect.

In _Representative Men_, the old Plato-worship illumined by Schelling--_Wissenschaften_--is the key-note, and _English Traits_ is the record of impressions received during the _Sturm und Drang_, or rather 'cloud-compelling' days of the _Dial_ and _Essay_ developments. A volume of _Poems_, published in 1856, recalls the old landmarks. If they are rich in thought, they are also luxuriant in labyrinthine sentences that puzzle even the initiated in the Ziph language. A thought once extricated from a maze of inversion and entangled particles,

'we are in pain
To think how to unthink that thought again.'

As a poet, Emerson is careless in versification. Like Friar John, of the Funnels, he does not rhyme in crimson. His imagination is too bold to be confined by the petty limits of trochee or iambus. Consequently his pictures, when he condescends to paint, present rather a mass of brilliant coloring than the well-finished detail that we demand in a work of art. We look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by _staccato_ plaints, and the tender gold of its shining waters dimmed by dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions and metaphysical wanderings.

We open Emerson's latest work, the _Conduct of Life_, in a hopeful mood. Some mysterious sympathy, born from a natural faith in the progress of a mind that had already proved its power by a daring and successful onslaught upon old habits and associations, strengthened by a more practical philosophy that dawns in _English Traits_, and culminating in the intense passion of yearning in the _Phrenody_, justifies an expectation that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, Norse runes and ancient Dantean Infernos and Escurials for the models of a new literature, a new art, a new life. But an enlarged spirit is visible on every page.

'The south wind is strengthened
With the wild, sweet vigor of pine.'

We breathe a new air, gaze at new landscapes; a new climate is around us. Take this book into the sultry midsummer, and its words summon the ripe autumn with its fruits up from the west; read it by the light of the blazing Yule log, and it will still recall the wild breezes and warm suns of October. And it is this growing maturity of thought, this evident tendency to a grand realization, that prove the honesty and greatness of the man. He has worked perseveringly at his problems, disdaining to be aided by criticism or crushed by opposition. His power has silently gathered its energies in the mines of Thought, dark but rich, striking shaft after shaft of vast promise. He is a gymnast struggling now with the realities and possibilities of Life, and no longer grappling with ignis-fatui in the marshes by the road. Now his humor gleams genially in keen, swift comparisons: he sports with truths, like a king tossing up his crown-jewels or Vishnu worlds in the 'Cosmogony of Menu,' and he dares do this because they are no longer his masters, because he has made them subservient to an end--the great end of the amelioration of his race.

It is this great element of sport that in its broadest development elevates man to the far heights of his nature. There all is serene.

'Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.'

Even the Hindoos, those earliest _literati_ of the young earth, whose eyes peered first into the intricate machinery of Being, and brought therefrom strange and glowing and miraculous impressions of its mechanical appliances,--strong levers that men use now for criticism,--recognized this element. Afar from the scene of their sorrow, in the lotos a-bloom on Vishnu's head, they beheld the primitive Humor, the laughter of infinite Strength springing from bar to bar in the great gymnasium of life. Thus we read in the Cosmogony of Menu,--

'Numerous world-developments there are, creation and extermination;
_Sportively_ he produces either, the highest Creator for ever and ever.'

And says the more orthodox Schlegel, 'Nature was in its origin naught else than a beautiful image, a pure emanation, a wonderful creation, a _sport_ of omnipotent love.' And Schiller, whom an impregnable aristocracy of soul shut out from the ranks of humorists, who rode in his coupée, three feet above the level of the common stream of humanity, and never drifted with its tide, yet, with clear-eyed insight into the passions he did not share, acknowledged the _Spieltrieb_ as the highest possibility of man's nature. 'The last perfection of our faculties,' he says, 'is, that their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest, becomes _sport_.

Emerson's humor is peculiar to himself. It is not the massive, exuberant play of Jean Paul. He does not challenge the slow-riding moon to a cricket match, nor hurl the stars from their orbits in his mad game in the skies. Neither has he the brusque but more solid geniality of Lessing. Imagination fails him for the one, and a strong power of logic for the other. But he tears the clouds of ignorance and prejudice that are beneath his feet into ribbons and sends them streaming through space, filmy banners of blue and white, heavily charged with the electricity of his enfranchised thought, and illumines the world with the lightnings of their chance collision. His humor is rather latent than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits, it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but now the queen-rose of the architrave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny air. Step by step Emerson has traveled the great road worn by so many of old, passing from the 'ideal' to the real, from reverie to a cheerful awaking,--and the prophecy of genius is at last fulfilled.

For at last he has come out from the misty twilight of Transcendentalism into the clear daylight of common sense. And surely it is not for us to decry the bridge, or, if you please, the tunnel through which he has crossed. He agitates the necessity and practicability of social reform, but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it his swiftest arrows. In his essay on Wealth this sharp practical insight hardens every sentence. The sentimentalist, who believes, with Henri Blaze, that romance must be the issue of this marriage of Nature with Religion, betakes himself in consternation to his dainty, poetical dreams of a Utopia that shall arise, ready made, from the promising East. The capitalist, who sneers at Philosophy, and would ignorantly couple Faust with the Mysteries of Udolpho, or Andromeda with Jack the Giant-killer, rubs his hands gleefully over our author's nice appreciation of capital and the mysteries of its sudden fluctuations. 'Every step of civil advancement makes a dollar worth more.' 'Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.' 'The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call _common sense_; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.... He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, for every effect a perfect cause, and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.' 'The basis of political economy is non-interference.' The merchant looks narrowly at his theory of compensation, and finds it tallies well with the result of his own after-dinner meditations, expressed of mornings to doubting confreres. The philanthropist rejoices at the crushing of the shell of foppish indolence, the heralded downfall of the petty vanities, sprung, Heaven knows with what reason, from the loins of Norman robbers, of Huguenot refugees, of Puritans beggared and ignorant, and centered in some wide-spreading genealogical tree, that a whole family unite to cultivate into a banyan that may embrace the whole little world of their satellites with inflexible ligatures. Thus 'the doctrine of the snake' is to go out, and good men see that the sinews of society are to be strengthened.

It is worth while to observe, in that first chapter on Fate, how admirably Emerson provides for the exercise of a free activity in every man. 'Every spirit makes its house, but afterward the house confines the spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism,

'To make the absolute best of what God made,'

to sharpen every faculty, expand every capacity, and bow only to the Eternal.

Æterna æternus tribuit, mortalia confert
Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus.'

Here is the choice, eternal or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah, and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old man, whose whims and whose age we must respect. What is to become of his high claims upon creatures who are to work out an infinite purpose? _Il faut honorer la vieillesse?_ Emerson had anticipated this with his 'pistareen Providence, dressed in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity;' yet it proves that minds are arriving by widely diverging paths at the same truths.

There is nothing ideal or vague in the vigorous efforts he makes in this volume to rise to political economy and to set forth the practical action of capital and industry on life. He says no longer, 'To me commerce is of trivial import,' but endorses Henry Carey's theory of wealth, and acknowledges unreservedly, in its broadest sense, the universal domination of Law. Statistics bourgeon into prophecies under his pen: he does not disdain their significance, but rather aids their influence with all the power which his spasmodic style has given in drawing our grotesque-loving public to him. We suspect Buckle, and feel a cheerful sense of Bacon and Comte. In his plea for socialism, for education, we see the dawn of the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor. 'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky, _'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps_.' Here is wealth for want, industry for indolence, distinction for degradation, virtue for vice. It beams clear as the red of morning. Hear it in the whistle of the engine, the roar of the loom, the plowing of the steam-ship through battling waves, the tick of the telegraph, the whirr of the mill wheel, the click of the sewing machine; and he who doubts still may listen to the voice of cannon, the whistling of lances and the clash of swords, and catch the notes of the same chant with a sterner chorus. Hear even the idealist Schelling awaiting that broader freedom than any we have yet known:--

'The third period in history will be that when that which in preceding periods appeared as Destiny or Nature, shall develop and manifest itself as Providence. Thus what seems to us as the work of Destiny or Nature is already the beginning of a Providence, which reveals itself but imperfectly. When we shall look for the birth of this period, man can not say, but know that when it is, _God will be_.'

And Emerson takes up the strain with words of fire:--

'If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want, with his scourge; if War, with his cannonade; if Christianity, with its charity; if Trade, with its money; if Art, with its portfolios; if Science, with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set man's dull nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,--make way and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out--the age of the brain and the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.'

SPHINX AND OEDIPUS.

Why poets should sing of this WAR
In rapturous anthems of praise,
I know not. Its meanings so jar,
Its purpose hath so many ways,
The SPHINX never readeth the whole.
'Tis a riddle propounded to me
That I am unskillful to tell.
The Sphinx by the way-side, I see,
Is watching (I know her so well)
To mangle us, body and soul.

Is it 'Freedom, that Bondage may live,'
Which cheers on the North to the fray?
Is it 'Slavery more Freedom to give,'
That slogans the Southern foray?
She asks, and awaits your reply:
Now answer, ye _marshal_-bred bands
Whose business is murder and blood;
Ye priests with incarnadined hands;
Ye peace-men who 'fight for the good;'
Now solve her this riddle or die!

'Our Flag,' the conservative says,
'Waves over the land of the free;'
God save us!--I think many ways,
But still 'tis a riddle to me,
Whose mystery is hid from the eye;
But Oedipus, showing the souls
All fettered, imbruted and blained,
Who point where its blazonry rolls,
And wail the sad plaint of the chained,--
Asserts, 'There is, somewhere, a lie.'

THE ACTRESS WIFE.

I had been sent by my New York employers to superintend a branch of their business in a southern city. On the evening of a brilliant Sabbath, as I walked musingly through the cemetery, where thousands of the city's dead had found a calm and sequestered resting place, my attention was drawn to a monumental structure, the character and symbolism of which defied my comprehension. On a grassy mound, in a grove of oak trees, almost concealing it from observation, rose a mausoleum of dark stone, which at the first glance I conjectured to represent a Druidical temple. At the four corners were the carved resemblances of oak trees, the trunks forming columns for the structure, and the limbs branching out, intertwining above into a graceful net-work. The spaces between the trunks--forming the four sides of the edifice--were simply plain, deep-set slabs. The design could not be mistaken. It was that of an oak grove inclosing a tomb. But whose, and why this singular design? There was no inscription to afford an explanation. Another view added to the mystery. Standing in the middle of one of the sides, underneath the arch formed by the branching limbs, was an exquisite female figure of white marble. One foot and the body advanced, one hand grasping her robe, the other extended pointing into the distance, her head turned to one side, the lips parted as if speaking, the countenance expressive of the enthusiasm of love combined with impetuous resolution, an attire of the most perfect simplicity, similar to that worn by Roman maidens, and with a plain bandeau around the head,--the whole presented a figure of perfect symmetry and life-like impassioned earnestness, as beautiful as it was unintelligible. I sought through all my recollections of ancient and modern impersonations--of mythology, history, Scripture, and poetry--but could find nothing to furnish a solution. The structure and the figure surpassed even conjecture. Velleda, and Lot's wife, according to an old picture in the catechism, were the only resemblances I could recall, but the surroundings evidently did not suit the types.

While in my embarrassment, I became dimly conscious of seeing an elderly man coming towards me from behind the structure, but should have received no distinct impression of his presence had he not approached the gate of the inclosure upon which I chanced to be leaning, and mildly requested my permission to pass. Recalled to myself, I saw by a hasty glance that the person before me was a man apparently some sixty years of age, to whom time had imparted only a 'richness' of appearance, exhibiting the gentleman at every point, and with an aspect of the most profound grief, tempered with resignation, benevolence, and urbanity. Having politely assisted his egress, he passed onward with a graceful gesture of acknowledgment. He had taken but a few steps, when the thought occurred to me that he must have come from within the perplexing structure by some secret door, and that he could unravel its mystery. I was impelled to follow him, and proceeded hastily to do so, when the indelicacy of my intrusion on one evidently connected with the grief which the monument was designed to commemorate, flashed upon me, and I suddenly paused. He probably observed my rapid footsteps and their pause, for he turned toward me, when in a confused manner I stammered forth an apology, which, undesignedly on my part, involved a statement of the contradictory motives which had influenced me. With the most quiet and prepossessing demeanor he questioned me if I were a stranger visiting the city, and in reply I gave him all the necessary particulars concerning myself,--that my name was Waters, that I was employed by the firm of Brown, Urthers & Co., managing their branch business. A conversation ensued, which elicited the fact that the gentleman had been acquainted with my father a score of years before. The latter, whose head lies on his last pillow, was then a clerk in the New York house of Sampson, Bell & Co. The gentleman before me was Mr. Bell, who during the existence of the house had been first a clerk, and subsequently the partner who conducted their branch business at the city of my own present residence.

With this preliminary acquaintance, he kindly took my arm, and, leading me back to the monument, informed me, in a manner entirely free from any poignancy, or from that lionizing of costly memorials to departed friends so often indulged in, that it was erected to the memory of his wife; that she had formerly been an actress of celebrity, attaining peculiar distinction by her representation of the character of Imogen, in Shakespeare's Cymbeline; and that the marble figure portrayed her at the utterance of the words--

'Oh for a horse with wings! Hear'st thou, Pisanio?
He is at Milford Haven. Read and tell me
How far 'tis thither ... Say, and speak quick,
How far it is
To this same blessed Milford;'[5]

and that the architecture of the tomb was intended to correspond with the period at which the incidents of the drama transpired.

* * * * *

Mr. Bell's ordinary life was one neither of seclusion nor of widely extended social courtesies; but of active benevolence and cheerful retirement, disfigured neither by ostentatious philanthropy nor studied recluseness. A son and daughter who had hardly passed the confines of juvenility, with the necessary attendants, formed his household. For the rest, he lived apparently as a gentleman of taste and wealth might be supposed to do.

In this household I gradually acquired an intimacy. This was partially owing to the circumstance that I had solaced the many lonely hours of my bachelorhood in acquiring by memory and rehearsing many scraps of poetry. Mr. Bell's favorite method of passing the evening was in teaching his children to read and declaim poetry with dramatic expression, and in this delightful occupation I was an acceptable assistant. Many were the domestic dramas which we produced,--pieces of our own invention,--in addition to our readings from the poets.

* * * * *

Frederick and Clara were to pass a year or two in schools at the North, and thither Mr. B. removed. The first winter of their absence, I received a letter from him relating that Clara had succumbed to the rigor of a northern climate. Soon came the father and brother with the corpse of their darling, which was placed within the cemetery mausoleum. Into this I entered for the first time, but the interior differed in no respect from others. Within its walls the mother and daughter were left together. In less than a week it was again opened, to receive the son. He had been drowned while attempting the rescue of a companion.

To my surprise at the time, the desolate father exhibited no grief. There was in his demeanor an appearance of satisfaction that their removal had preceded his own,--that he would leave none of his heart's treasures behind him, but be enabled to claim them all in the future existence.

* * * * *

The days lengthened and shortened through three years, in which the routine of my life was varied by no incident. With Mr. Bell my relations continued the same. At all times he spoke cheerfully of the past and the future, frequently giving utterance to the feelings above attributed to him. In one of these conversations I ventured to inquire concerning his wife. His whole countenance was irradiated. It seemed that some bright and glorious recollection of her had been recalled. The fancy impressed itself on me that he had a visible consciousness of her presence. The animation subsided into a quiet self-communing, and he soon proceeded to relate the history of her whose marble similitude had so excited my wonder and admiration.

* * * * *

It is nearly thirty years since I came from a New England country house to this city, as a clerk in the branch house of Sampson Brothers. I was then a raw youth; but my New England training had given me the serious and money-seeking characteristics of that part of our country. For ten years I applied myself exclusively to the details of business, having but few associates, devoting my leisure to self-improvement, and steadily accumulating a competency. On the death of a member of the firm I took his place. Five years passed, and I had attained a fortune. Some friends from the North called upon me in their travels, and during the week of their visit, I participated in more gaieties than had been comprised in my whole previous life. One evening it was proposed to visit the theatre. Into a place of dramatic representation I had never before entered, and the enchantment of all its accessories was irresistible. But when the heroine of the evening appeared, I was deprived of every faculty except that of the most absorbing adoration. What was the drama enacted mattered not,--I had no perception of it, nor of anything except the person who had fascinated me. Tall in figure, commanding in gesture, scarcely developed into the full wealth of womanhood, with an eye of piercing blackness, yet changing with every gradation of passion, profuse black tresses, and a voice whose intonations swayed the audience to every mood of feeling, SHE for the first time appeared to me.

Well, I had passed my _premiére jeunesse_, and had arrived at that age when a passion, once called into active life, becomes unappeasable. I need not particularize the effects upon me of my first experience of love. For weeks and months I had no desire, no ability to do anything else than frequent the theatre. My want of acquaintance with all the peculiar circumstances connected with actors and actresses almost maddened me; for I knew of no method by which I might ever be able to exchange a word with her who had become to me more than an idol to a devotee, or the dream of fame to a poet. I sickened. To the physician called in attendance, after much shrewd questioning on his part, I revealed my secret. With a jocose laugh he left me, but in a half-hour returned, accompanied by a somewhat vulgar-looking female, whom he introduced as the mother of Evelyn Afton--the name of her for whom my life was wasting and my soul pining.

The mother was the widow of an actor, and Evelyn her only daughter, who had been bred for the stage, and her beauty and ability having secured success, she had been enabled to attain all the accomplishments of cultivated womanhood.

If anything could have disenchanted me, the manner of the mother would certainly have had such an effect. She regarded my passion as simply a business affair. She would present me to her daughter that day, and I might contract an engagement, if I would make certain liberal allowances and settlements. But a recurrence to these matters creates disgust. It is sufficient to say, that I surpassed in my provisions all the demands of the mother's avarice, and in a few months Evelyn and I were married.

There was on the part of my beautiful bride an inexplicable expression,--a demeanor in which cold and haughty reserve blended strangely with an utter carelessness, and occasional rapidly checked electric ebullitions of passion to the lip and eye, but never reaching words, followed by a passive yet proud languor. I was too happy to observe or speculate. I received merely the impression, but was too much occupied in arranging for my wedded life, too much absorbed in the feeling of bliss, to analyze it. I believed in her love,--that was sufficient for me. In after years I resolved the impression into its prismatic elements, and thus it is I am able to delineate them.

Time passed. The extravagance of my first raptures gradually subsided into a more settled but not less complete happiness. In all her attentions to myself my wife was perfect. In society she was supremely brilliant and fascinating; in private her demeanor preserved the characteristics of which I have spoken. I accepted it as her natural manner, and did not give it further thought. My son Frederick was born, and for a short time, under the influence of maternal impulses, my wife exhibited animation and emotions which I had not before witnessed,--soon, however, relapsing into her previous demeanor. The same contrasts--less strongly marked--occurred upon the birth of my daughter.

* * * * *

Returning one evening from business, at the usual dinner hour, I visited, before entering my residence, as was frequently my custom, the stables, and inquired, in passing, of the coachman--a favorite negro--if he had driven his mistress out that afternoon. He replied,--

'No, massa; Missers' brudder on here; been wid her dese two hours.'

The answer created much surprise, as I had not been informed that my wife had any relatives. A moment's reflection, however, on some of the peculiar connections of theatrical life, led me to believe that such a person might be in existence, who, for some unpleasant reasons, had not been recognized. Respecting my wife's secret, I passed on without further inquiry; and, to avoid an interview with the visitor, ascended a staircase into a conservatory connected with the upper apartments, intending to remain there until he had departed. As I entered the conservatory I was startled by the sound of voices, which proceeded from the adjoining apartment,--my wife's _boudoir_,--and was transfixed at beholding through the shrubbery, in the dim light of the room, my wife sitting upon a sofa, exhibiting traces of powerful but suppressed emotion, such as I had never seen in her, and partly kneeling, partly reclining at her side, a young man, apparently in the most violent and passionate entreaty.

'O, Evelyn! Evelyn!' he said, 'will you bid me leave you thus? Will you have no pity? For years I toiled at my art, poor and desolate, in a foreign land, sustained only by the hope of achieving success--fame--fortune--to lay them before you;--your love gifting me with all my ideal life--the hope of winning you the only incentive of my labor. When I heard of your marriage, I dashed away my chisels, with an oath never to resume them. In mad desperation, I destroyed the works of years. But I have lived on in solitude and wretchedness, unvisited even by the imaginations which once made life glorious. Now I have come to claim you--to take you from him who robbed me. Such a marriage as yours is not valid before just heaven. Renounce your contract. Fly with me to Italy,--let the world say what it will. With you at my side I can create works that will compel homage; knowing our own purity, we can laugh at its scorn, and, contented with each other, despise both its friendship and its enmity.'

'Stop, Frank!' she replied, 'and leave me. Do not prolong this agony. What you wish is, it must be, impossible. It is not for myself that I deny it. God knows I could brave any thing for you. But to yield your request would only aid your ruin. No, no, Frank; you are mad!'

'If I am not, I soon shall be!' he murmured bitterly.

'I shall fulfill my contract to the letter,' she continued; 'or, rather, that which was made for me. I consented to be the sacrifice, and I will accept the fire and the knife resolutely. But you--you--should I link myself to your fate, I should draw you to perdition. Even in the air of Italy, my presence would be poison to you. I speak not of guilt. But my connection--a perjured wife--would debar you from the companionship of all that is noble and good and beautiful. I am but a woman--one woman. Could I have been placed at your side, I might have assisted your conceptions and stimulated your aspirations. But now--_now_--it can not be. Go--seek some other. There are many worthy of your choice. You can find them. If not, live for your art, Frank, and forget me.'

'My art!' he replied, with passionate bitterness; 'curses on it! Aye, I can almost curse the Heaven which gifted me with "ideality." What is it, but unsatisfied mockery of longing?--the execution always failing to meet the promise of the conception. My art! What can the cold marble be to me, when no longer animated by the soul with which my hope of your presence infused it? My art! Would to God that a divine flash of genius would impel me to wield the chisel but for one short month, and then that I might expire by the side of my creation!'

'No, no, Frank,' she interposed; 'you will live long, become renowned, and create not one, but many works for fame; and I shall read of your successes and rejoice in them. More than that, I shall be present with you always in spirit and sympathy. Think of that, Frank. Make me your ideal still, if you will. This will be exquisite satisfaction to me. Let me think that I am always inspiring you. Work for me, Frank.'

The young man buried his face in the sofa and sobbed passionately. My wife bent over, and, unknown to him, unless he felt her breath, gently kissed the curls of his hair. 'Come,' she said, 'now you must be gone. Neither of us can endure this longer. Go--go. Do not give me a word or a look. You would only rend my heart, without killing me.'

Presently he rose, and, with an effort at self-control, walked towards the door, but stopped and faltered forth, 'Must this be? Is this then our last farewell?'

She merely waved her hand, hiding her face.

The young man sprang to her side, fell upon his knees, grasped her hand, and covered it with kisses, then rushed to the door and was gone.

My wife flung herself upon the sofa and burst forth into a flood of tears. Never before had I beheld her weeping.

During this interview I stood like a statue. It seemed to me that I had lived an age,--such a life as those may be supposed to have, who, as related in Eastern tales, are transformed to stone for a century, retaining their consciousness. A revolution had gone through its entire progress in me. For the first time did I understand how selfish had been my adoration of my wife,--how I had merely purchased her of her scheming and avaricious mother,--how I had wronged her and one who loved her,--how incompatible with her youth and brilliancy were my maturity and unpoetic nature. Her conduct since our marriage was now fully explained. My love for her was immeasurably increased, but I loathed myself. I had but one thought, how reparation could best be made. I swear before Heaven, that could it have been possible without staining her name, I would have torn her from my heart, and given her to the one who rightfully claimed her from me. This was impossible. Only by guilt or vulgar disgrace could she become his. Then the question took possession of me, 'How shall I win her love?--how shall I win her love?' This repeated itself again and again, with a distinct and fearful iteration, as if a demon were whispering it in my ear. A thousand mad thoughts took possession of me, and suicide thrust itself on me. For a few moments,--though it seemed an age of experience,--I was insane. The blow had dispossessed my reason. Dimly, as in a drunken man, however, still remained the ordinary instincts, and that perception, which, like the muscles of respiration, keeps ever at work, let the mind be filled as it may with thoughts and purposes that seem entirely to engross and absorb it. I crept silently from the conservatory, and passing out into the street, entered the house at the front. Dinner was soon served, as usual, and my wife took her seat, with her customary manner. I, too, was confident, exhibited no variation from mine. Her self-possession was the result of control, mine of mere numbness. The machinery of life was temporarily continuing its regular motion without any supervision.

This benumbed condition continued through a large portion of a sleepless night. The unintermitted repetition of the query, 'How shall I win her love?' tortured me into an agony like that experienced in a nightmare dream. Slowly and gradually my reason began to work, and I methodically commenced to elaborate a system by which to acquire what was now the chief object of my life,--my wife's _love_. I arose in the morning determined to obtain this, even should every other pursuit be relinquished and every other desire sacrificed. My system was formed. Life thereafter was to be devoted to it.

My first object was to create a change in her feelings toward my rival;--not to destroy her love for him,--of the futility of such an attempt I was aware,--but to modify the cold, desperate, and resentful feeling of disappointment she entertained; to superimpose upon her thwarted passion, which would continue to regard him as a hero of romance, another condition of feeling, that should bring him before her in a different aspect, and to rouse her listlessness by suggesting something to be done which should be connected with him,--the only incentive, I was assured, sufficiently powerful to stimulate her to action. I had a patient whom I intended to treat in the most delicate and scientific manner. I determined to appeal to her benevolence,--a feeling which, though latent, always exists in a true woman. My disconsolate hero of romance was to be brought down and made a mortal, capable of receiving favors. Instead of being the object of love, he was to become one of charity.

'My dear,' said I, one evening, with a suppressed yawn, as I was perusing a magazine, 'I have been reading a stupid account of the pictures and statues, and so on, in Florence. These things are very fine, doubtless, to those who understand and appreciate them. My early education in aesthetics was neglected; or rather the hard necessities of my youth allowed me no opportunity to cultivate them. But it is a good thing to encourage art, and I have been thinking it might be well for us to have some paintings and statuary. If I attempt to select them I shall be tricked and bamboozled into purchasing mere daubs and botches. Would it not be well to engage some person of judgment--perhaps an artist--to go to Italy and make an investment for us? I know none such, but you have been more associated with artists, and if you can secure one, I will give him _carte blanche_. Will you please make some inquiries?'