Old Portraits and Modern Sketches Part 13

In the midst of such a community, and partaking of all its influences, Robert Dinsmore, the author of the poem I have quoted, was born, about the middle of the last century. His paternal ancestor, John, younger son of a Laird of Achenmead, who left the banks of the Tweed for the green fertility of Northern Ireland, had emigrated to New England some forty years before, and, after a rough experience of Indian captivity in the wild woods of Maine, had settled down among his old neighbors in Londonderry. Until nine years of age, Robert never saw a school. He was a short time under the tuition of an old British soldier, who had strayed into the settlement after the French war, "at which time," he says in a letter to a friend, "I learned to repeat the shorter and larger catechisms. These, with the Scripture proofs annexed to them, confirmed me in the orthodoxy of my forefathers, and I hope I shall ever remain an evidence of the truth of what the wise man said, 'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'" He afterwards took lessons with one Master McKeen, who used to spend much of his time in hunting squirrels with his pupils. He learned to read and write; and the old man always insisted that he should have done well at ciphering also, had he not fallen in love with Molly Park. At the age of eighteen he enlisted in the Revolutionary army, and was at the battle of Saratoga. On his return he married his fair Molly, settled down as a farmer in Windham, formerly a part of Londonderry, and before he was thirty years of age became an elder in the church, of the creed and observances of which he was always a zealous and resolute defender. From occasional pa.s.sages in his poems, it is evident that the instructions which he derived from the pulpit were not unlike those which Burns suggested as needful for the unlucky lad whom he was commending to his friend Hamilton:--

"Ye 'll catechise him ilka quirk, An' sh.o.r.e him weel wi' h.e.l.l."

In a humorous poem, ent.i.tled Spring's Lament, he thus describes the consternation produced in the meeting-house at sermon time by a dog, who, in search of his mistress, rattled and sc.r.a.ped at the "west porch door:"--

"The vera priest was scared himsel', His sermon he could hardly spell; Auld carlins fancied they could smell The brimstone matches; They thought he was some imp o' h.e.l.l, In quest o' wretches."

He lived to a good old age, a home-loving, unpretending farmer, cultivating his acres with his own h.o.r.n.y hands, and cheering the long rainy days and winter evenings with homely rhyme. Most of his pieces were written in the dialect of his ancestors, which was well understood by his neighbors and friends, the only audience upon which he could venture to calculate. He loved all old things, old language, old customs, old theology. In a rhyming letter to his cousin Silas, he says:--

"Though Death our ancestors has cleekit, An' under clods then closely steekit, We'll mark the place their chimneys reekit, Their native tongue we yet wad speak it, Wi' accent glib."

He wrote sometimes to amuse his neighbors, often to soothe their sorrow under domestic calamity, or to give expression to his own. With little of that delicacy of taste which results from the attrition of fastidious and refined society, and altogether too truthful and matter-of-fact to call in the aid of imagination, he describes in the simplest and most direct terms the circ.u.mstances in which he found himself, and the impressions which these circ.u.mstances had made on his own mind. He calls things by their right names; no euphuism or transcendentalism,--the plainer and commoner the better. He tells us of his farm life, its joys and sorrows, its mirth and care, with no embellishment, with no concealment of repulsive and ungraceful features. Never having seen a nightingale, he makes no attempt to describe the fowl; but he has seen the night-hawk, at sunset, cutting the air above him, and he tells of it.

Side by side with his waving corn-fields and orchard-blooms we have the barn-yard and pigsty. Nothing which was necessary to the comfort and happiness of his home and avocation was to him "common or unclean."

Take, for instance, the following, from a poem written at the close of autumn, after the death of his wife:--

"No more may I the Spring Brook trace, No more with sorrow view the place Where Mary's wash-tub stood; No more may wander there alone, And lean upon the mossy stone Where once she piled her wood.

'T was there she bleached her linen cloth, By yonder ba.s.s-wood tree From that sweet stream she made her broth, Her pudding and her tea.

That stream, whose waters running, O'er mossy root and stone, Made ringing and singing, Her voice could match alone."

We envy not the man who can sneer at this simple picture. It is honest as Nature herself. An old and lonely man looks back upon the young years of his wedded life. Can we not look with him? The sunlight of a summer morning is weaving itself with the leafy shadows of the ba.s.s-tree, beneath which a fair and ruddy-checked young woman, with her full, rounded arms bared to the elbow, bends not ungracefully to her task, pausing ever and anon to play with the bright-eyed child beside her, and mingling her songs with the pleasant murmurings of gliding water! Alas!

as the old man looks, he hears that voice, which perpetually sounds to us all from the past--no more!

Let us look at him in his more genial mood. Take the opening lines of his Thanksgiving Day. What a plain, hearty picture of substantial comfort!

"When corn is in the garret stored, And sauce in cellar well secured; When good fat beef we can afford, And things that 're dainty, With good sweet cider on our board, And pudding plenty;

"When stock, well housed, may chew the cud, And at my door a pile of wood, A rousing fire to warm my blood, Blest sight to see!

It puts my rustic muse in mood To sing for thee."

If he needs a simile, he takes the nearest at hand. In a letter to his daughter he says:--

"That mine is not a longer letter, The cause is not the want of matter,-- Of that there's plenty, worse or better; But like a mill Whose stream beats back with surplus water, The wheel stands still."

Something of the humor of Burns gleams out occasionally from the sober decorum of his verses. In an epistle to his friend Betton, high sheriff of the county, who had sent to him for a peck of seed corn, he says:--

"Soon plantin' time will come again, Syne may the heavens gie us rain, An' s.h.i.+ning heat to bless ilk plain An' fertile hill, An' gar the loads o' yellow grain, Our garrets fill.

"As long as I has food and clothing, An' still am hale and fier and breathing, Ye 's get the corn--and may be aething Ye'll do for me; (Though G.o.d forbid)--hang me for naething An' lose your fee."

And on receiving a copy of some verses written by a lady, he talks in a sad way for a Presbyterian deacon:--

"Were she some Aborigine squaw, Wha sings so sweet by nature's law, I'd meet her in a hazle shaw, Or some green loany, And make her tawny phiz and 'a My welcome crony."

The practical philosophy of the stout, jovial rhymer was but little affected by the sour-featured asceticism of the elder. He says:--

"We'll eat and drink, and cheerful take Our portions for the Donor's sake, For thus the Word of Wisdom spake-- Man can't do better; Nor can we by our labors make The Lord our debtor!"

A quaintly characteristic correspondence in rhyme between the Deacon and Parson McGregore, evidently "birds o' ane feather," is still in existence. The minister, in acknowledging the epistle of his old friend, commences his reply as follows:--

"Did e'er a cuif tak' up a quill, Wha ne'er did aught that he did well, To gar the muses rant and reel, An' flaunt and swagger, Nae doubt ye 'll say 't is that daft chiel Old Dite McGregore!"

The reply is in the same strain, and may serve to give the reader some idea of the old gentleman as a religious controversialist:--

"My reverend friend and kind McGregore, Although thou ne'er was ca'd a bragger, Thy muse I'm sure nave e'er was glegger Thy Scottish lays Might gar Socinians fa' or stagger, E'en in their ways.

"When Unitarian champions dare thee, Goliah like, and think to scare thee, Dear Davie, fear not, they'll ne'er waur thee; But draw thy sling, Weel loaded frae the Gospel quarry, An' gie 't a fling."

The last time I saw him, he was chaffering in the market-place of my native village, swapping potatoes and onions and pumpkins for tea, coffee, mola.s.ses, and, if the truth be told, New England rum. Threescore years and ten, to use his own words,

"Hung o'er his back, And bent him like a muckle pack,"

yet he still stood stoutly and st.u.r.dily in his thick shoes of cowhide, like one accustomed to tread independently the soil of his own acres,-- his broad, honest face seamed by care and darkened by exposure to "all the airts that blow," and his white hair flowing in patriarchal glory beneath his felt hat. A genial, jovial, large-hearted old man, simple as a child, and betraying, neither in look nor manner, that he was accustomed to

"Feed on thoughts which voluntary move Harmonious numbers."

Peace to him! A score of modern dandies and sentimentalists could ill supply the place of this one honest man. In the ancient burial-ground of Windham, by the side of his "beloved Molly," and in view of the old meeting-house, there is a mound of earth, where, every spring, green gra.s.ses tremble in the wind and the warm suns.h.i.+ne calls out the flowers.

There, gathered like one of his own ripe sheaves, the farmer poet sleeps with his fathers.

PLACIDO, THE SLAVE POET.

[1845.]

I have been greatly interested in the fate of Juan Placido, the black revolutionist of Cuba, who was executed in Havana, as the alleged instigator and leader of an attempted revolt on the part of the slaves in that city and its neighborhood.

Juan Placido was born a slave on the estate of Don Terribio de Castro.

His father was an African, his mother a mulatto. His mistress treated him with great kindness, and taught him to read. When he was twelve years of age she died, and he fell into other and less compa.s.sionate hands. At the age of eighteen, on seeing his mother struck with a heavy whip, he for the first time turned upon his tormentors. To use his own words, "I felt the blow in my heart. To utter a loud cry, and from a downcast boy, with the timidity of one weak as a lamb, to become all at office like a raging lion, was a thing of a moment." He was, however, subdued, and the next morning, together with his mother, a tenderly nurtured and delicate woman, severely scourged. On seeing his mother rudely stripped and thrown down upon the ground, he at first with tears implored the overseer to spare her; but at the sound of the first blow, as it cut into her naked flesh, he sprang once more upon the ruffian, who, having superior strength, beat him until he was nearer dead than alive.

After suffering all the vicissitudes of slavery,--hunger, nakedness, stripes; after bravely and n.o.bly bearing up against that slow, dreadful process which reduces the man to a thing, the image of G.o.d to a piece of merchandise, until he had reached his thirty-eighth year, he was unexpectedly released from his bonds. Some literary gentlemen in Havana, into whose hands two or three pieces of his composition had fallen, struck with the vigor, spirit, and natural grace which they manifested, sought out the author, and raised a subscription to purchase his freedom.

He came to Havana, and maintained himself by house-painting, and such other employments as his ingenuity and talents placed within his reach.

He wrote several poems, which have been published in Spanish at Havana, and translated by Dr. Madden, under the t.i.tle of _Poems by a Slave_.

It is not too much to say of these poems that they will bear a comparison with most of the productions of modern Spanish literature. The style is bold, free, energetic. Some of the pieces are sportive and graceful; such is the address to _The Cucuya_, or Cuban firefly. This beautiful insect is sometimes fastened in tiny nets to the light dresses of the Cuban ladies, a custom to which the writer gallantly alludes in the following lines:--

"Ah!--still as one looks on such brightness and bloom, On such beauty as hers, one might envy the doom Of a captive Cucuya that's destined, like this, To be touched by her hand and revived by her kiss!

In the cage which her delicate hand has prepared, The beautiful prisoner nestles unscared, O'er her fair forehead s.h.i.+ning serenely and bright, In beauty's own bondage revealing its light!

And when the light dance and the revel are done, She bears it away to her alcove alone, Where, fed by her hand from the cane that's most choice, In secret it gleans at the sound of her voice!

O beautiful maiden! may Heaven accord Thy care of the captive a fitting reward, And never may fortune the fetters remove Of a heart that is thine in the bondage of love!"

In his Dream, a fragment of some length, Placido dwells in a touching manner upon the scenes of his early years. It is addressed to his brother Florence, who was a slave near Matanzas, while the author was in the same condition at Havana. There is a plaintive and melancholy sweetness in these lines, a natural pathos, which finds its way to the heart:--

"Thou knowest, dear Florence, my sufferings of old, The struggles maintained with oppression for years; We shared them together, and each was consoled With the love which was nurtured by sorrow and tears.

"But now far apart, the sad pleasure is gone, We mingle our sighs and our sorrows no more; The course is a new one which each has to run, And dreary for each is the pathway before.