On one occasion, a few years ago, on my return from the field at evening, I was told that a foreigner had asked for lodgings during the night, but that, influenced by his dark, repulsive appearance, my mother had very reluctantly refused his request. I found her by no means satisfied with her decision. "What if a son of mine was in a strange land?" she inquired, self-reproachfully. Greatly to her relief, I volunteered to go in pursuit of the wanderer, and, taking a cross-path over the fields, soon overtook him. He had just been rejected at the house of our nearest neighbor, and was standing in a state of dubious perplexity in the street. His looks quite justified my mother's suspicions. He was an olive-complexioned, black-bearded Italian, with an eye like a live coal, such a face as perchance looks out on the traveller in the passes of the Abruzzi,--one of those bandit visages which Salvator has painted. With some difficulty I gave him to understand my errand, when he overwhelmed me with thanks, and joyfully followed me back. He took his seat with us at the supper-table; and, when we were all gathered around the hearth that cold autumnal evening, he told us, partly by words and, partly by gestures, the story of his life and misfortunes, amused us with descriptions of the grape- gatherings and festivals of his sunny clime, edified my mother with a recipe for making bread of chestnuts; and in the morning, when, after breakfast, his dark, sullen face lighted up and his fierce eye moistened with grateful emotion as in his own silvery Tuscan accent he poured out his thanks, we marvelled at the fears which had so nearly closed our door against him; and, as he departed, we all felt that he had left with us the blessing of the poor.
It was not often that, as in the above instance, my mother's prudence got the better of her charity. The regular "old stragglers" regarded her as an unfailing friend; and the sight of her plain cap was to them an assurance of forthcoming creature-comforts. There was indeed a tribe of lazy strollers, having their place of rendezvous in the town of Barrington, New Hampshire, whose low vices had placed them beyond even the pale of her benevolence. They were not unconscious of their evil reputation; and experience had taught them the necessity of concealing, under well-contrived disguises, their true character. They came to us in all shapes and with all appearances save the true one, with most miserable stories of mishap and sickness and all "the ills which flesh is heir to." It was particularly vexatious to discover, when too late, that our sympathies and charities had been expended upon such graceless vagabonds as the "Barrington beggars." An old withered hag, known by the appellation of Hopping Pat,--the wise woman of her tribe,--was in the habit of visiting us, with her hopeful grandson, who had "a gift for preaching" as well as for many other things not exactly compatible with holy orders. He sometimes brought with him a tame crow, a shrewd, knavish-looking bird, who, when in the humor for it, could talk like Barnaby Rudge's raven. He used to say he could "do nothin' at exhortin'
without a white handkercher on his neck and money in his pocket,"--a fact going far to confirm the opinions of the Bishop of Exeter and the Puseyites generally, that there can be no priest without tithes and surplice.
These people have for several generations lived distinct from the great mass of the community, like the gypsies of Europe, whom in many respects they closely resemble. They have the same settled aversion to labor and the same disposition to avail themselves of the fruits of the industry of others. They love a wild, out-of-door life, sing songs, tell fortunes, and have an instinctive hatred of "missionaries and cold water." It has been said--I know not upon what grounds--that their ancestors were indeed a veritable importation of English gypsyhood; but if so, they have undoubtedly lost a good deal of the picturesque charm of its unhoused and free condition. I very much fear that my friend Mary Russell Mitford,--sweetest of England's rural painters,--who has a poet's eye for the fine points in gypsy character, would scarcely allow their claims to fraternity with her own vagrant friends, whose camp- fires welcomed her to her new home at Swallowfield.
"The proper study of mankind is man," and, according to my view, no phase of our common humanity is altogether unworthy of investigation.
Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, in company with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of New Hampshire, I turned my horse's head towards Barrington for the purpose of seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, and returning, once for all, their numerous visits. Taking leave of our hospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we may suppose Major Laing parted with his friends when he set out in search of desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road, passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamlet noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely, half- ruinous mill, and climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a wide sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills, and dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of this desolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, grouped together as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal. Unfenced, unguarded, open to all comers and goers, stood that city of the beggars,--no wall or paling between the ragged cabins to remind one of the jealous distinctions of property. The great idea of its founders seemed visible in its unappropriated freedom. Was not the whole round world their own?
and should they haggle about boundaries and title-deeds? For them, on distant plains, ripened golden harvests; for them, in far-off workshops, busy hands were toiling; for them, if they had but the grace to note it, the broad earth put on her garniture of beauty, and over them hung the silent mystery of heaven and its stars. That comfortable philosophy which modern transcendentalism has but dimly shadowed forth--that poetic agrarianism, which gives all to each and each to all--is the real life of this city of unwork. To each of its dingy dwellers might be not unaptly applied the language of one who, I trust, will pardon me for quoting her beautiful poem in this connection:--
"Other hands may grasp the field or forest, Proud proprietors in pomp may shine; Thou art wealthier,--all the world is thine."
But look! the clouds are breaking. "Fair weather cometh out of the north." The wind has blown away the mists; on the gilded spire of John Street glimmers a beam of sunshine; and there is the sky again, hard, blue, and cold in its eternal purity, not a whit the worse for the storm. In the beautiful present the past is no longer needed.
Reverently and gratefully let its volume be laid aside; and when again the shadows of the outward world fall upon the spirit, may I not lack a good angel to remind me of its solace, even if he comes in the shape of a Barrington beggar.
THE TRAINING.
"Send for the milingtary."
NOAH CLAYPOLE in Oliver Twist.
WHAT'S now in the wind? Sounds of distant music float in at my window on this still October air. Hurrying drum-beat, shrill fife-tones, wailing bugle-notes, and, by way of accompaniment, hurrahs from the urchins on the crowded sidewalks. Here come the citizen-soldiers, each martial foot beating up the mud of yesterday's storm with the slow, regular, up-and-down movement of an old-fashioned churn-dasher. Keeping time with the feet below, some threescore of plumed heads bob solemnly beneath me. Slant sunshine glitters on polished gun-barrels and tinselled uniform. Gravely and soberly they pass on, as if duly impressed with a sense of the deep responsibility of their position as self-constituted defenders of the world's last hope,--the United States of America, and possibly Texas. They look out with honest, citizen faces under their leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the work of the tailor and tinker), and, I doubt not, are at this moment as innocent of bloodthirstiness as yonder worthy tiller of the Tewksbury Hills, who sits quietly in his wagon dispensing apples and turnips without so much as giving a glance at the procession. Probably there is not one of them who would hesitate to divide his last tobacco-quid with his worst enemy. Social, kind-hearted, psalm-singing, sermon-hearing, Sabhath-keeping Christians; and yet, if we look at the fact of the matter, these very men have been out the whole afternoon of this beautiful day, under God's holy sunshine, as busily at work as Satan himself could wish in learning how to butcher their fellow-creatures and acquire the true scientific method of impaling a forlorn Mexican on a bayonet, or of sinking a leaden missile in the brain of some unfortunate Briton, urged within its range by the double incentive of sixpence per day in his pocket and the cat-o'-nine-tails on his back!
Without intending any disparagement of my peaceable ancestry for many generations, I have still strong suspicions that somewhat of the old Norman blood, something of the grins Berserker spirit, has been bequeathed to me. How else can I account for the intense childish eagerness with which I listened to the stories of old campaigners who sometimes fought their battles over again in my hearing? Why did I, in my young fancy, go up with Jonathan, the son of Saul, to smite the garrisoned Philistines of Michmash, or with the fierce son of Nun against the cities of Canaan? Why was Mr. Greatheart, in Pilgrim's Progress, my favorite character? What gave such fascination to the narrative of the grand Homeric encounter between Christian and Apollyon in the valley? Why did I follow Ossian over Morven's battle-fields, exulting in the vulture-screams of the blind scald over his fallen enemies? Still later, why did the newspapers furnish me with subjects for hero-worship in the half-demented Sir Gregor McGregor, and Ypsilanti at the head of his knavish Greeks? I can account for it only in the supposition that the mischief was inhered,--an heirloom from the old sea-kings of the ninth century.
Education and reflection have, indeed, since wrought a change in my feelings. The trumpet of the Cid, or Ziska's drum even, could not now waken that old martial spirit. The bull-dog ferocity of a half- intoxicated Anglo-Saxon, pushing his blind way against the converging cannon-fire from the shattered walls of Ciudad Rodrigo, commends itself neither to my reason nor my fancy. I now regard the accounts of the bloody passage of the Bridge of Lodi, and of French cuirassiers madly transfixing themselves upon the bayonets of Wellington's squares, with very much the same feeling of horror and loathing which is excited by a detail of the exploits of an Indian Thug, or those of a mad Malay running a-muck, creese in hand, through the streets of Pulo Penang.
Your Waterloo, and battles of the Nile and Baltic,--what are they, in sober fact, but gladiatorial murder-games on a great scale,--human imitations of bull-fights, at which Satan sits as grand alguazil and master of ceremonies? It is only when a great thought incarnates itself in action, desperately striving to find utterance even in sabre-clash and gun-fire, or when Truth and Freedom, in their mistaken zeal and distrustful of their own powers, put on battle-harness, that I can feel any sympathy with merely physical daring. The brawny butcher-work of men whose wits, like those of Ajax, lie in their sinews, and who are "yoked like draught-oxen and made to plough up the wars," is no realization of my ideal of true courage.
Yet I am not conscious of having lost in any degree my early admiration of heroic achievement. The feeling remains; but it has found new and better objects. I have learned to appreciate what Milton calls the martyr's "unresistible might of meekness,"--the calm, uncomplaining endurance of those who can bear up against persecution uncheered by sympathy or applause, and, with a full and keen appreciation of the value of all which they are called to sacrifice, confront danger and death in unselfish devotion to duty. Fox, preaching through his prison- gates or rebuking Oliver Cromwell in the midst of his soldier-court Henry Vane beneath the axe of the headsman; Mary Dyer on the scaffold at Boston; Luther closing his speech at Worms with the sublime emphasis of his "Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me;" William Penn defending the rights of Englishmen from the baledock of the Fleet prison; Clarkson climbing the decks of Liverpool slaveships; Howard penetrating to infected dungeons; meek Sisters of Charity breathing contagion in thronged hospitals,--all these, and such as these, now help me to form the loftier ideal of Christian heroism.
Blind Milton approaches nearly to my conception of a true hero. What a picture have we of that sublime old man, as sick, poor, blind, and abandoned of friends, he still held fast his heroic integrity, rebuking with his unbending republicanism the treachery, cowardice, and servility of his old associates! He had outlived the hopes and beatific visions of his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwing down a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, and perjured Charles II., crouching to the harlot-thronged court of the tyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism.
The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends. Vane and Hampden slept in their bloody graves. Cromwell's ashes had been dragged from their resting-place; for even in death the effeminate monarch hated and feared the conquerer of Naseby and Marston Moor. He was left alone, in age, and penury, and blindness, oppressed with the knowledge that all which his free soul abhorred had returned upon his beloved country. Yet the spirit of the stern old republican remained to the last unbroken, realizing the truth of the language of his own Samson Agonistes:--
"But patience is more oft the exercise Of saints, the trial of their fortitude, Making them each his own deliverer And victor over all That tyranny or fortune can inflict."
The curse of religious and political apostasy lay heavy on the land.
Harlotry and atheism sat in the high places; and the "caresses of wantons and the jests of buffoons regulated the measures of a government which had just ability enough to deceive, just religion enough to persecute." But, while Milton mourned over this disastrous change, no self-reproach mingled with his sorrow. To the last he had striven against the oppressor; and when confined to his narrow alley, a prisoner in his own mean dwelling, like another Prometheus on his rock, he still turned upon him an eye of unsubdued defiance. Who, that has read his powerful appeal to his countrymen when they were on the eve of welcoming back the tyranny and misrule which, at the expense of so much blood and treasure had been thrown off, can ever forget it? How nobly does Liberty speak through him! "If," said he, "ye welcome back a monarchy, it will be the triumph of all tyrants hereafter over any people who shall resist oppression; and their song shall then be to others, 'How sped the rebellious English?' but to our posterity, 'How sped the rebels, your fathers?'" How solemn and awful is his closing paragraph!
"What I have spoken is the language of that which is not called amiss 'the good old cause.' If it seem strange to any, it will not, I hope, seem more strange than convincing to backsliders. This much I should have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth, earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our expiring liberties."
THE CITY OF A DAY.
The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and the companion pieces to 'The Stranger' in Lowell.
This, then, is Lowell,--a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor wrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that a few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls in the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of steam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint.
Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place for that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their much vilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers. Over the gateways of this new world Manchester glares the inscription, "Work, or die".
Here
"Every worm beneath the moon Draws different threads, and late or soon Spins, toiling out his own cocoon."
The founders of this city probably never dreamed of the theory of Charles Lamb in respect to the origin of labor:--
"Who first invented work, and thereby bound The holiday rejoicing spirit down To the never-ceasing importunity Of business in the green fields and the town?
"Sabbathless Satan,--he who his unglad Task ever plies midst rotatory burnings For wrath divine has made him like a wheel In that red realm from whence are no returnings."
Rather, of course, would they adopt Carlyle's apostrophe of "Divine labor, noble, ever fruitful,--the grand, sole miracle of man;" for this is indeed a city consecrated to thrift,--dedicated, every square rod of it, to the divinity of work; the gospel of industry preached daily and hourly from some thirty temples, each huger than the Milan Cathedral or the Temple of Jeddo, the Mosque of St. Sophia or the Chinese pagoda of a hundred bells; its mighty sermons uttered by steam and water-power; its music the everlasting jar of mechanism and the organ-swell of many waters; scattering the cotton and woollen leaves of its evangel from the wings of steamboats and rail-cars throughout the land; its thousand priests and its thousands of priestesses ministering around their spinning-jenny and powerloom altars, or thronging the long, unshaded streets in the level light of sunset. After all, it may well be questioned whether this gospel, according to Poor Richard's Almanac, is precisely calculated for the redemption of humanity. Labor, graduated to man's simple wants, necessities, and unperverted tastes, is doubtless well; but all beyond this is weariness to flesh and spirit. Every web which falls from these restless looms has a history more or less connected with sin and suffering, beginning with slavery and ending with overwork and premature death.
A few years ago, while travelling in Pennsylvania, I encountered a small, dusky-browed German of the name of Etzler. He was possessed by a belief that the world was to be restored to its paradisiacal state by the sole agency of mechanics, and that he had himself discovered the means of bringing about this very desirable consummation. His whole mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery; wheel within wheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagaras of water-power; wind-mills with "sail-broad vans," like those of Satan in chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to be exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom of the deep. Give him "three hundred thousand dollars and ten years'
time," and he would undertake to do the work.
Wrong, pain, and sin, being in his view but the results of our physical necessities, ill-gratified desires, and natural yearnings for a better state, were to vanish before the millennium of mechanism. "It would be," said he, "as ridiculous then to dispute and quarrel about the means of life as it would be now about water to drink by the side of mighty rivers, or about permission to breathe the common air." To his mind the great forces of Nature took the shape of mighty and benignant spirits, sent hitherward to be the servants of man in restoring to him his lost paradise; waiting only for his word of command to apply their giant energies to the task, but as yet struggling blindly and aimlessly, giving ever and anon gentle hints, in the way of earthquake, fire, and flood, that they are weary of idleness, and would fain be set at work.
Looking down, as I now do, upon these huge brick workshops, I have thought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were he with me, that his mechanical forces have here found their proper employment of millennium making. Grinding on, each in his iron harness, invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his huge prison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii of mechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley, steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose top stretches the broad table-land of promise?
Many of the streets of Lowell present a lively and neat aspect, and are adorned with handsome public and private buildings; but they lack one pleasant feature of older towns,--broad, spreading shade-trees. One feels disposed to quarrel with the characteristic utilitarianism of the first settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature.
For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one is tempted to adopt the language of a warm-weather poet:
"The lean, like walking skeletons, go stalking pale and gloomy; The fat, like red-hot warming-pans, send hotter fancies through me; I wake from dreams of polar ice, on which I've been a slider, Like fishes dreaming of the sea and waking in the spider."
How unlike the elm-lined avenues of New Haven, upon whose cool and graceful panorama the stranger looks down upon the Judge's Cave, or the vine-hung pinnacles of West Rock, its tall spires rising white and clear above the level greenness! or the breezy leafiness of Portland, with its wooded islands in the distance, and itself overhung with verdant beauty, rippling and waving in the same cool breeze which stirs the waters of the beautiful Bay of Casco! But time will remedy all this; and, when Lowell shall have numbered half the years of her sister cities, her newly planted elms and maples, which now only cause us to contrast their shadeless stems with the leafy glory of their parents of the forest, will stretch out to the future visitor arms of welcome and repose.
There is one beautiful grove in Lowell,--that on Chapel Hill,--where a cluster of fine old oaks lift their sturdy stems and green branches, in close proximity to the crowded city, blending the cool rustle of their leaves with the din of machinery. As I look at them in this gray twilight they seem lonely and isolated, as if wondering what has become of their old forest companions, and vainly endeavoring to recognize in the thronged and dusty streets before them those old, graceful colonnades of maple and thick-shaded oaken vistas, stretching from river to river, carpeted with the flowers and grasses of spring, or ankle deep with leaves of autumn, through whose leafy canopy the sunlight melted in upon wild birds, shy deer, and red Indians. Long may these oaks remain to remind us that, if there be utility in the new, there was beauty in the old, leafy Puseyites of Nature, calling us back to the past, but, like their Oxford brethren, calling in vain; for neither in polemics nor in art can we go backward in an age whose motto is ever "Onward."
The population of Lowell is constituted mainly of New Englanders; but there are representatives here of almost every part of the civilized world. The good-humored face of the Milesian meets one at almost every turn; the shrewdly solemn Scotchman, the transatlantic Yankee, blending the crafty thrift of Bryce Snailsfoot with the stern religious heroism of Cameron; the blue-eyed, fair-haired German from the towered hills which overlook the Rhine,--slow, heavy, and unpromising in his exterior, yet of the same mould and mettle of the men who rallied for "fatherland"
at the Tyrtean call of Korner and beat back the chivalry of France from the banks of the Katzback,--the countrymen of Richter, and Goethe, and our own Follen. Here, too, are pedlers from Hamburg, and Bavaria, and Poland, with their sharp Jewish faces, and black, keen eyes. At this moment, beneath my window are two sturdy, sunbrowned Swiss maidens grinding music for a livelihood, rehearsing in a strange Yankee land the simple songs of their old mountain home, reminding me, by their foreign garb and language, of
"Lauterbrunnen's peasant girl."
Poor wanderers, I cannot say that I love their music; but now, as the notes die away, and, to use the words of Dr. Holmes, "silence comes like a poultice to heal the wounded ear," I feel grateful for their visitation. Away from crowded thoroughfares, from brick walls and dusty avenues, at the sight of these poor peasants I have gone in thought to the vale of Chamouny, and seen, with Coleridge, the morning star pausing on the "bald, awful head of sovereign Blanc," and the sun rise and set upon snowy-crested mountains, down in whose valleys the night still lingers; and, following in the track of Byron and Rousseau, have watched the lengthening shadows of the hills on the beautiful waters of the Genevan lake. Blessings, then, upon these young wayfarers, for they have "blessed me unawares." In an hour of sickness and lassitude they have wrought for me the miracle of Loretto's Chapel, and, borne me away from the scenes around me and the sense of personal suffering to that wonderful land where Nature seems still uttering, from lake and valley, and from mountains whose eternal snows lean on the hard, blue heaven, the echoes of that mighty hymn of a new-created world, when "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
But of all classes of foreigners the Irish are by far the most numerous.
Light-hearted, wrongheaded, impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental love of hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and of that gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, the Celtic elements of their character do not readily accommodate themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a sister's farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distant churchyard far beyond the "wide wathers" has an eternal greenness in his memory; for there, perhaps, lies a "darlint child" or a "swate crather"
who once loved him. The new world is forgotten for the moment; blue Killarney and the Liffey sparkle before him, and Glendalough stretches beneath him its dark, still mirror; he sees the same evening sunshine rest upon and hallow alike with Nature's blessing the ruins of the Seven Churches of Ireland's apostolic age, the broken mound of the Druids, and the round towers of the Phoenician sun-worshippers; pleasant and mournful recollections of his home waken within him; and the rough and seemingly careless and light-hearted laborer melts into tears. It is no light thing to abandon one's own country and household gods. Touching and beautiful was the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:
"Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of the stranger, seeing that ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
PATUCKET FALLS.
MANY years ago I read, in some old chronicle of the early history of New England, a paragraph which has ever since haunted my memory, calling up romantic associations of wild Nature and wilder man:--
"The Sachem Wonolanset, who lived by the Groat Falls of Patucket, on the Merrimac."