Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Part 19

SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the Same Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston - - & Co. 185..

The same camera should be used,-so far as possible,-at a fixed distance.

Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures in his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades his province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be a pretty complement to his large work, which, so far as published, I find excellent. If my plan were carried out, and another series of a dozen English trees photographed on the same scale the comparison would be charming.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their various types of organization. We should begin with man, of course; inst.i.tute a large and exact comparison between the development of _la pianta umana_, as Alfieri called it, in different sections of each country, in the different callings, at different ages, estimating height, weigh, force by the dynamometer and the spirometer, and finis.h.i.+ng off with a series of typical photographs, giving the princ.i.p.al national physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has given us some excellent English data to begin with.

Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel forms of life in the two continents. Our naturalists have often referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the _animus_ of Nature in the two half globes of the planet is so momentous a point of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of express and elaborate study. Go out with me into that walk which we call _the Mall_, and look at the English and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree.

Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or not? Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of life can answer this question.

There is a parallelism without ident.i.ty in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it. As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality. We should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons have maintained. It may turn out the other way, as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue,-and though I took the other side, I liked his best,-that the American is the Englishman reinforced.

-Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?-I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,-as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she turned a little pale,-but smiled brightly and said,-Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.-She went for her bonnet.-The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow.

Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a school-book in her hand.]

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

This is the shortest way,-she said, as we came to a corner.-Then we won't take it,-said I.-The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more.-Oh, yes, _died_,-with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave,-said I.-His bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they lie,-which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight. I have never got over it. The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame!-that is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. The red Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors. I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here _lies_" never had such a wholesale ill.u.s.tration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July evening;-yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her comment upon what I told her.-How women love Love! said I;-but she did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the main street.-Look down there,-I said,-My friend the Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years. He died out of it, the other day.-Died?-said the schoolmistress.-Certainly,-said I.-We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been called "the house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the other day?-Do!-said the schoolmistress.

A man's body,-said the Professor,-is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time b.u.t.tons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe,-the Professor said,-for, like Mr. John Hunter and other great men, he brings in that _shall_ with great effect sometimes,-you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular b.u.mps and depressions.

Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head,-a little loosely,-shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with which they severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures.

See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a sh.e.l.l-fish which builds all manner of smaller sh.e.l.ls into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is.

I had no idea,-said the Professor,-until I pulled up my domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quant.i.ty of roots I had been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably, and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called out and fixed forever. We had a curious ill.u.s.tration of the great fact on a very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the midst of this picture was another,-the precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time,-not twenty years, but pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he pa.s.sed through it for the last time,-and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling.

Peace be to those walls, forever,-the Professor said,-for the many pleasant years he has pa.s.sed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.-In that little court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,-

-in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious...o...b..ws about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower sh.o.r.es,-up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions,-where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing ma.s.ses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old "Dollond" to see if the s.h.i.+ning Ones were not within range of sight,-sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of their harmless stroll,-the patulous f.a.ge, in the Professor's cla.s.sic dialect,-the spreading beech, in more familiar phrase,-[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before us,]-

-and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic,-dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs that s.h.i.+ne beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed demi-blondes,-in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region,-suggestive to mad fancies of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a half-buried t.i.taness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of the forest,-in that home where seven blessed summers were pa.s.sed, which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer,-

-in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,-full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,-in all these summer or winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.

This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,-this calenture which shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berks.h.i.+re and the mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as blind men's busy fingers,-is for that friend of mine who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same visions which paint themselves for me in the green depths of the Charles.

-Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?-Why, no,-of course not.

I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten minutes. You don't think I should expect any woman to listen to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a word?

-What did I say to the schoolmistress?-Permit me one moment. I don't doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the cla.s.sic version of a familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is _nullum tui negotii_.

When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.

EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.

(_To be burned unread_.)

I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which invites confidence and expansive utterance. I have been low-spirited and listless, lately,-it is coffee, I think,-(I observe that which is bought _ready-ground_ never affects the head,)-and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.

There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest ocean-buried inscription!

-Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!-Yet what is this which has been shaping itself in my soul?-Is it a thought?-is it a dream?-is it a _pa.s.sion_?-Then I know what comes next.

-The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron bars to all the windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll outside that very high fence. But I never see much life in those groups I sometimes meet;-and then the careful man watches them so closely! How I remember that sad company I used to pa.s.s on fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy!-B., with his arms full of yellow weeds,-ore from the gold mines which he discovered long before we heard of California,-Y., born to millions, crazed by too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,-made a Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,-(the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I don't doubt the good people made him easy for life,)-how I remember them all!

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in "Vathek," and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its heart,-a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder summit.

Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to lift its hand,-look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes.-No, I must not think of such an ending!

Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty.

Make a will and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping school.-I wonder what nice young man's feet would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility marry.

-It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.-It is the merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be married. She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so far, I will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her and her husband, sometimes.

No coffee, I hope, though,-it depresses me sadly. I feel very miserably;-they must have been grinding it at home.-Another morning walk will be good for me, and I don't doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh air before school.