Old Portraits and Modern Sketches Part 12

"Our Second Advent friends contemplate a grand conflagration about the first of April next. I should be willing there should be one, if it could be confined to the productions of the press, with which the earth is absolutely smothered. Humanity wants precious few books to read, but the great living, breathing, immortal volume of Providence. Life,--real life,--how to live, how to treat one another, and how to trust G.o.d in matters beyond our ken and occasion,--these are the lessons to learn, and you find little of them in libraries."

"That accursed drum and fife! How they have maddened mankind! And the deep ba.s.s boom of the cannon, chiming in in the chorus of battle, that trumpet and wild charging bugle,--how they set the military devil in a man, and make him into a soldier! Think of the human family falling upon one another at the inspiration of music! How must G.o.d feel at it, to see those harp-strings he meant should be waked to a love bordering on divine, strung and swept to mortal hate and butchery!"

"Leave off being Jews," (he is addressing Major Noah with regard to his appeal to his brethren to return to Judaea,) "and turn mankind. The rocks and sands of Palestine have been wors.h.i.+pped long enough.

Connecticut River or the Merrimac are as good rivers as any Jordan that ever run into a dead or live sea, and as holy, for that matter. In Humanity, as in Christ Jesus, as Paul says, 'there is neither Jew nor Greek.' And there ought to be none. Let Humanity be reverenced with the tenderest devotion; suffering, discouraged, down-trodden, hard-handed, haggard-eyed, care-worn mankind! Let these be regarded a little. Would to G.o.d I could alleviate all their sorrows, and leave them a chance to laugh! They are, miserable now. They might be as happy as the blackbird on the spray, and as full of melody."

"I am sick as death at this miserable struggle among mankind for a living. Poor devils! were they born to run such a gauntlet after the means of life? Look about you, and see your squirming neighbors, writhing and twisting like so many angleworms in a fisher's bait-box, or the wriggling animalculae seen in the vinegar drop held to the sun. How they look, how they feel, how base it makes them all!"

"Every human being is ent.i.tled to the means of life, as the trout is to his brook or the lark to the blue sky. Is it well to put a human 'young one' here to die of hunger, thirst, and nakedness, or else be preserved as a pauper? Is this fair earth but a poor-house by creation and intent?

Was it made for that?--and these other round things we see dancing in the firmament to the music of the spheres, are they all great s.h.i.+ning poor-houses?"

"The divines always admit things after the age has adopted them. They are as careful of the age as the weatherc.o.c.k is of the wind. You might as well catch an old experienced weatherc.o.c.k, on some ancient Orthodox steeple, standing all day with its tail east in a strong out wind, as the divines at odds with the age."

But we must cease quoting. The admirers of Jean Paul Richter might find much of the charm and variety of the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces" in this newspaper collection. They may see, perhaps, as we do, some things which they cannot approve of, the tendency of which, however intended, is very questionable. But, with us, they will pardon something to the spirit of liberty, much to that of love and humanity which breathes through all.

Disgusted and heart-sick at the general indifference of Church and clergy to the temporal condition of the people,--at their apologies for and defences of slavery, war, and capital punishment,--Rogers turned Protestant, in the full sense of the term. He spoke of priests and "pulpit wizards" as freely as John Milton did two centuries ago, although with far less bitterness and rasping satire. He could not endure to see Christianity and Humanity divorced. He longed to see the beautiful life of Jesus--his sweet humanities, his brotherly love, his abounding sympathies--made the example of all men. Thoroughly democratic, in his view all men were equal. Priests, stripped of their sacerdotal tailoring, were in his view but men, after all. He pitied them, he said, for they were in a wrong position,--above life's comforts and sympathies,--"up in the unnatural cold, they had better come down among men, and endure and enjoy with them." "Mankind," said he, "want the healing influences of humanity. They must love one another more.

Disinterested good will make the world as it should be."

His last visit to his native valley was in the autumn of 1845. In a familiar letter to a friend, he thus describes his farewell view of the mountain glories of his childhood's home:--

"I went a jaunt, Thursday last, about twenty miles north of this valley, into the mountain region, where what I beheld, if I could tell it as I saw it, would make your outlawed sheet sought after wherever our Anglo- Saxon tongue is spoken in the wide world. I have been many a time among those Alps, and never without a kindling of wildest enthusiasm in my woodland blood. But I never saw them till last Thursday. They never loomed distinctly to my eye before, and the sun never shone on them from heaven till then. They were so near me, I could seem to hear the voice of their cataracts, as I could count their great slides, streaming adown their lone and desolate sides,--old slides, some of them overgrown with young woods, like half-healed scars on the breast of a giant. The great rains had clothed the valleys of the upper Pemigewa.s.set in the darkest and deepest green. The meadows were richer and more glorious in their thick 'fall feed' than Queen Anne's Garden, as I saw it from the windows of Windsor Castle. And the dark hemlock and hackmatack woods were yet darker after the wet season, as they lay, in a hundred wildernesses, in the mighty recesses of the mountains. But the peaks,--the eternal, the solitary, the beautiful, the glorious and dear mountain peaks, my own Moosehillock and my native Haystacks,--these were the things on which eye and heart gazed and lingered, and I seemed to see them for the last time.

It was on my way back that I halted and turned to look at them from a high point on the Thornton road. It was about four in the afternoon. It had rained among the hills about the Notch, and cleared off. The sun, there sombred at that early hour, as towards his setting, was pouring his most glorious light upon the naked peaks, and they casting their mighty shadows far down among the inaccessible woods that darken the hollows that stretch between their bases. A cloud was creeping up to perch and rest awhile on the highest top of Great Haystack. Vulgar folks have called it Mount Lafayette, since the visit of that brave old Frenchman in 1825 or 1826. If they had asked his opinion, he would have told them the names of mountains couldn't be altered, and especially names like that, so appropriate, so descriptive, and so picturesque. A little hard white cloud, that looked like a hundred fleeces of wool rolled into one, was climbing rapidly along up the northwestern ridge, that ascended to the lonely top of Great Haystack. All the others were bare. Four or five of them,--as distinct and shapely as so many pyramids; some topped out with naked cliff, on which the sun lay in melancholy glory; others clothed thick all the way up with the old New Hamps.h.i.+re hemlock or the daring hackmatack,--Pierpont's hackmatack. You could see their shadows stretching many and many a mile, over Grant and Location, away beyond the invading foot of Incorporation,--where the timber-hunter has scarcely explored, and where the moose browses now, I suppose, as undisturbed as he did before the settlement of the State. I wish our young friend and genius, Harrison Eastman, had been with me, to see the sunlight as it glared on the tops of those woods, and to see the purple of the mountains. I looked at it myself almost with the eye of a painter. If a painter looked with mine, though, he never could look off upon his canvas long enough to make a picture; he would gaze forever at the original.

"But I had to leave it, and to say in my heart, Farewell! And as I travelled on down, and the sun sunk lower and lower towards the summit of the western ridge, the clouds came up and formed an Alpine range in the evening heavens above it,--like other Haystacks and Moosehillocks,--so dark and dense that fancy could easily mistake them for a higher Alps.

There were the peaks and the great pa.s.ses; the Franconia Notches among the cloudy cliffs, and the great White Mountain Gap."

His health, never robust, had been gradually failing for some time previous to his death. He needed more repose and quiet than his duties as an editor left him; and to this end he purchased a small and pleasant farm in his loved Pennigewa.s.set valley, in the hope that he might there recruit his wasted energies. In the sixth month of the year of his death, in a letter to us, he spoke of his prospects in language which even then brought moisture to our eyes:--

"I am striving to get me an asylum of a farm. I have a wife and seven children, every one of them with a whole spirit. I don't want to be separated from any of them, only with a view to come together again. I have a beautiful little retreat in prospect, forty odd miles north, where I imagine I can get potatoes and repose,--a sort of haven or port. I am among the breakers, and 'mad for land.' If I get this home,--it is a mile or two in among the hills from the pretty domicil once visited by yourself and glorious Thompson,--I am this moment indulging the fancy that I may see you at it before we die. Why can't I have you come and see me? You see, dear W., I don't want to send you anything short of a full epistle. Let me end as I begun, with the proffer of my hand in grasp of yours extended. My heart I do not proffer,--it was yours before,--it shall be yours while I am N. P. ROGERS."

Alas! the haven of a deeper repose than he had dreamed of was close at hand. He lingered until the middle of the tenth month, suffering much, yet calm and sensible to the last. Just before his death, he desired his children to sing at his bedside that touching song of Lover's, _The Angel's Whisper_. Turning his eyes towards the open window, through which the leafy glory of the season he most loved was visible, he listened to the sweet melody. In the words of his friend Pierpont,--

"The angel's whisper stole in song upon his closing ear; From his own daughter's lips it came, so musical and clear, That scarcely knew the dying man what melody was there-- The last of earth's or first of heaven's pervading all the air."

He sleeps in the Concord burial-ground, under the shadow of oaks; the very spot he would have chosen, for he looked upon trees with something akin to human affection. "They are," he said, "the beautiful handiwork and architecture of G.o.d, on which the eye never tires. Every one is a feather in the earth's cap, a plume in her bonnet, a tress on her forehead,--a comfort, a refres.h.i.+ng, and an ornament to her." Spring has hung over him her buds, and opened beside him her violets. Summer has laid her green oaken garland on his grave, and now the frost-blooms of autumn drop upon it. Shall man cast a nettle on that mound? He loved humanity,--shall it be less kind to him than Nature? Shall the bigotry of sect, and creed, and profession, drive its condemnatory stake into his grave? G.o.d forbid. The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressed had relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses of commentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, rather than to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave the constant a.s.sent of his practice. He sought not his own. His heart yearned with pity and brotherly affection for all the poor and suffering in the universe. Of him, the angel of Leigh Hunt's beautiful allegory might have written, in the golden book of remembrance, as he did of the good Abou Ben Adhem, "He loved his fellow-men."

ROBERT DINSMORE.

The great charm of Scottish poetry consists in its simplicity, and genuine, unaffected sympathy with the common joys and sorrows of daily life. It is a home-taught, household melody. It calls to mind the pastoral bleat on the hillsides, the kirkbells of a summer Sabbath, the song of the lark in the sunrise, the cry of the quail in the corn-land, the low of cattle, and the blithe carol of milkmaids "when the kye come hame" at gloaming. Meetings at fair and market, blus.h.i.+ng betrothments, merry weddings, the joy of young maternity, the lights and shades of domestic life, its bereavements and partings, its chances and changes, its holy death-beds, and funerals solemnly beautiful in quiet kirkyards, --these furnish the hints of the immortal melodies of Burns, the sweet ballads of the Ettrick Shepherd and Allan Cunningham, and the rustic drama of Ramsay. It is the poetry of home, of nature, and the affections.

All this is sadly wanting in our young literature. We have no songs; American domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified by the sweet and graceful and tender a.s.sociations of poetry. We have no Yankee pastorals. Our rivers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and are otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the spontaneous outgus.h.i.+ng of hearts warm with love, and strongly sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, the opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected to homeopathic dilution. It a.s.sumes to be prophetical, and its utterances are oracular. It tells of strange, vague emotions and yearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual "groanings which cannot be uttered." If it "babbles o' green fields" and the common sights and sounds of nature, it is only for the purpose of finding some vague a.n.a.logy between them and its internal experiences and longings. It leaves the warm and comfortable fireside of actual knowledge and human comprehension, and goes wailing and gibbering like a ghost about the impa.s.sable doors of mystery:--

"It fain would be resolved How things are done, And who the tailor is That works for the man I' the sun."

How shall we account for this marked tendency in the literature of a shrewd, practical people? Is it that real life in New England lacks those conditions of poetry and romance which age, reverence, and superst.i.tion have gathered about it in the Old World? Is it that

"Ours are not Tempe's nor Arcadia's vales,"

but are more famous for growing Indian corn and potatoes, and the manufacture of wooden ware and pedler notions, than for romantic a.s.sociations and legendary interest? That our huge, unshapely s.h.i.+ngle structures, blistering in the sun and glaring with windows, were evidently never reared by the spell of pastoral harmonies, as the walls of Thebes rose at the sound of the lyre of Amphion? That the habits of our people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warp and woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures of speech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography of Sam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a very awkward medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true. But the Yankee, after all, is a man, and as such his history, could it be got at, must have more or less of poetic material in it; moreover, whether conscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background of Nature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to the commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our poets, we must needs think, are deficient in that s.h.i.+ftiness, ready adaptation to circ.u.mstances, and ability of making the most of things, for which, as a people, we are proverbial. Can they make nothing of our Thanksgiving, that annual gathering of long-severed friends? Do they find nothing to their purpose in our apple-bees, buskings, berry- pickings, summer picnics, and winter sleigh-rides? Is there nothing available in our peculiarities of climate, scenery, customs, and political inst.i.tutions? Does the Yankee leap into life, shrewd, hard, and speculating, armed, like Pallas, for a struggle with fortune? Are there not boys and girls, school loves and friends.h.i.+p, courtings and match-makings, hope and fear, and all the varied play of human pa.s.sions, --the keen struggles of gain, the mad grasping of ambition,--sin and remorse, tearful repentance and holy aspirations? Who shall say that we have not all the essentials of the poetry of human life and simple nature, of the hearth and the farm-field? Here, then, is a mine unworked, a harvest ungathered. Who shall sink the shaft and thrust in the sickle?

And here let us say that the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist may as well keep their hands off. The prize is not for them. He who would successfully strive for it must be himself what he sings,--part and parcel of the rural life of New England,--one who has grown strong amidst its healthful influences, familiar with all its details, and capable of detecting whatever of beauty, humor, or pathos pertain to it,--one who has added to his book-lore the large experience of an active partic.i.p.ation in the rugged toil, the hearty amus.e.m.e.nts, the trials, and the pleasures he describes.

We have been led to these reflections by an incident which has called up before us the homespun figure of an old friend of our boyhood, who had the good sense to discover that the poetic element existed in the simple home life of a country farmer, although himself unable to give a very creditable expression of it. He had the "vision," indeed, but the "faculty divine" was wanting; or, if he possessed it in any degree, as Thersites says of the wit of Ajax, "it would not out, but lay coldly in him like fire in the flint."

While engaged this morning in looking over a large exchange list of newspapers, a few stanzas of poetry in the Scottish dialect attracted our attention. As we read them, like a wizard's rhyme they seemed to have the power of bearing us back to the past. They had long ago graced the columns of that solitary sheet which once a week diffused happiness over our fireside circle, making us acquainted, in our lonely nook, with the goings-on of the great world. The verses, we are now constrained to admit, are not remarkable in themselves, truth and simple nature only; yet how our young hearts responded to them! Twenty years ago there were fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light literature consisted of Ellwood's _Davideis_ and the selections of _Lindley Murray's English Reader_, it is not improbable that we were in a condition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of our village newspaper. Be that as it may, we welcome them as we would the face of an old friend, for they somehow remind us of the scent of haymows, the breath of cattle, the fresh greenery by the brookside, the moist earth broken by the coulter and turned up to the sun and winds of May. This particular piece, which follows, is ent.i.tled _The Sparrow_, and was occasioned by the crus.h.i.+ng of a bird's-nest by the author while ploughing among his corn. It has something of the simple tenderness of Burns.

"Poor innocent and hapless Sparrow Why should my mould-board gie thee sorrow!

This day thou'll chirp and mourn the morrow Wi' anxious breast; The plough has turned the mould'ring furrow Deep o'er thy nest!

"Just I' the middle o' the hill Thy nest was placed wi' curious skill; There I espied thy little bill Beneath the shade.

In that sweet bower, secure frae ill, Thine eggs were laid.

"Five corns o' maize had there been drappit, An' through the stalks thy head was pappit, The drawing nowt could na be stappit I quickly foun'; Syne frae thy cozie nest thou happit, Wild fluttering roun'.

"The sklentin stane beguiled the sheer, In vain I tried the plough to steer; A wee bit stumpie I' the rear Cam' 'tween my legs, An' to the jee-side gart me veer An' crush thine eggs.

"Alas! alas! my bonnie birdie!

Thy faithful mate flits round to guard thee.

Connubial love!--a pattern worthy The pious priest!

What savage heart could be sae hardy As wound thy breast?

"Ah me! it was nae fau't o' mine; It gars me greet to see thee pine.

It may be serves His great design Who governs all; Omniscience tents wi' eyes divine The Sparrow's fall!

"How much like thine are human dools, Their sweet wee bairns laid I' the mools?

The Sovereign Power who nature rules Hath said so be it But poor blip' mortals are sic fools They canna see it.

"Nae doubt that He who first did mate us Has fixed our lot as sure as fate is, An' when He wounds He disna hate us, But anely this, He'll gar the ills which here await us Yield lastin' bliss."

In the early part of the eighteenth century a considerable number of Presbyterians of Scotch descent, from the north of Ireland, emigrated to the New World. In the spring of 1719, the inhabitants of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, saw them pa.s.sing up the river in several canoes, one of which unfortunately upset in the rapids above the village. The following fragment of a ballad celebrating this event has been handed down to the present time, and may serve to show the feelings even then of the old English settlers towards the Irish emigrants:--

"They began to scream and bawl, As out they tumbled one and all, And, if the Devil had spread his net, He could have made a glorious haul!"

The new-comers proceeded up the river, and, landing opposite to the Uncanoonuc Hills, on the present site of Manchester, proceeded inland to Beaver Pond. Charmed with the appearance of the country, they resolved here to terminate their wanderings. Under a venerable oak on the margin of the little lake, they knelt down with their minister, Jamie McGregore, and laid, in prayer and thanksgiving, the foundation of their settlement.

In a few years they had cleared large fields, built substantial stone and frame dwellings and a large and commodious meeting-house; wealth had acc.u.mulated around them, and they had everywhere the reputation of a shrewd and thriving community. They were the first in New England to cultivate the potato, which their neighbors for a long time regarded as a pernicious root, altogether unfit for a Christian stomach. Every lover of that invaluable esculent has reason to remember with grat.i.tude the settlers of Londonderry.

Their moral acclimation in Ireland had not been without its effect upon their character. Side by side with a Presbyterianism as austere as that of John Knox had grown up something of the wild Milesian humor, love of convivial excitement and merry-making. Their long prayers and fierce zeal in behalf of orthodox tenets only served, in the eyes of their Puritan neighbors, to make more glaring still the scandal of their marked social irregularities. It became a common saying in the region round about that "the Derry Presbyterians would never give up a pint of doctrine or a pint of rum." Their second minister was an old scarred fighter, who had signalized himself in the stout defence of Londonderry, when James II. and his Papists were thundering at its gates. Agreeably to his death-bed directions, his old fellow-soldiers, in their leathern doublets and battered steel caps, bore him to his grave, firing over him the same rusty muskets which had swept down rank after rank of the men of Amalek at the Derry siege.

Erelong the celebrated Derry fair was established, in imitation of those with which they had been familiar in Ireland. Thither annually came all manner of horse-jockeys and pedlers, gentlemen and beggars, fortune- tellers, wrestlers, dancers and fiddlers, gay young farmers and buxom maidens. Strong drink abounded. They who had good-naturedly wrestled and joked together in the morning not unfrequently closed the day with a fight, until, like the revellers of Donnybrook,

"Their hearts were soft with whiskey, And their heads were soft with blows."

A wild, frolicking, drinking, fiddling, courting, horse-racing, riotous merry-making,--a sort of Protestant carnival, relaxing the grimness of Puritanism for leagues around it.