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 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
THE EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 OP 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
 
 BY 
 
 ERNEST GODFREY HOFFSTEN, B.S., Ph.D. 
 
 MCKINLEY HIGH SCHOOL, ST. LOUIS, MO. 
 
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^ 
 
 I love thee for thyself — thyself alone ; 
 
 For that great soul whose breath most full and rare 
 
 Shall to humanity a message bear, 
 
 Flooding their dreary waste with organ tone." 
 
 {Marie Whitens tribute to Lowell after 
 they became engaged.) 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These essays are representative of the earlier writings of 
 Lowell, and have been, with the exception of the one on 
 Thoreau, taken from the collection known as " Fireside 
 Travels." The essay on Thoreau was first published as a 
 review of that author in October, 1865. 
 
 It will be readily observed that there is just as much of 
 the personality of Lowell in these essays as of the subject 
 matter upon which he is writing. The reader must therefore 
 be prepared for many digressions, which, indeed, at times 
 may seem unduly extended. To enable the student to ap- 
 preciate all the more the numerous literary references and 
 allusions, the editor has sought to make the notes as copious 
 as is advisable ; for, it must be added, an overabundance of 
 notes tends to detract from the interest in any narrative. 
 However, Lowell, without some guidance, would prove an 
 enigma. The reader will find, furthermore, that the use of 
 a dictionary is an absolute necessity. The results to be 
 obtained from a careful study of these essays cannot be 
 other than broadening, for Lowell's mind was a veritable 
 storehouse of fact and fancy, and he was exceedingly gen- 
 erous in divulging his best to his readers. In fact, Lowell 
 is a liberal education. 
 
 I desire to express my sincere obligation to Miss Mary 
 Fisher of the McKinley High School for her guidance in 
 and review of the notes. 
 
 E. G. H. 
 vi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 Introduction : 
 
 
 
 
 
 Chronology of Lowell's life ix 
 
 
 Lowell's life and literary style 
 
 
 
 xi 
 
 
 First publications of the essays in 
 
 this 
 
 volume 
 
 xix 
 
 
 Books of reference 
 
 
 . 
 
 XX 
 
 II. 
 
 Cambridge Thirty Years Ago 
 
 
 , 
 
 1 
 
 IIL 
 
 A MoosEHEAD Journal 
 
 
 , 
 
 52 
 
 IV. 
 
 Thoreau .... 
 
 
 
 90 
 
 V. 
 
 At Sea 
 
 
 . 
 
 108 
 
 VI. 
 
 In the Mediterranean 
 
 
 o 
 
 120 
 
 VII. 
 
 Italy 
 
 
 
 127 
 
 VIII. 
 
 A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic 
 
 
 . 
 
 183 
 
 IX. 
 
 Notes on the Essays . 
 
 
 , 
 
 209 
 
 vii 
 
CHRONOLOGY OF LOWELL'S LIFE 
 
 1819, Feb. 22, date of birth at " Ebnwood." 
 1838, graduated from Harvard. 
 
 1840, degree from Harvard Lav7 School. 
 
 1841, published " A Year's Life and Other Poems." 
 
 1843, helped found the monthly magazine entitled The 
 Pioneer. 
 
 1844, December, married Marie White. 
 
 1848, published " The Biglow Papers " (First series). 
 
 1848, published " A Fable for Critics." 
 
 1848, published "The Vision of Sir Launfal." 
 
 1851, traveled abroad. 
 
 1853, wife died. 
 
 1855-77, Professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard. 
 
 1855-56, abroad for purposes of study. 
 
 1857, married Miss Frances Dunlap. 
 
 1857-61, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 1862, published " The Biglow Papers " (Second series). 
 
 1864-72, one of the editors of the North American 
 
 Review. 
 1870, published " Among My Books," collected essays. 
 1877-80, Minister to Spain. 
 1880-85, Minister to England. 
 
 1884, address on " Democracy." 
 
 1885, second wife died. 
 
 1891, August 12, death at " Elmwood." 
 ix 
 
LOWELL'S LIFE 
 
 James Russell Lowell was born February 22, 1819. 
 The first quarter of the nineteenth century stands out prom- 
 inently as a time when the foremost men in American 
 letters first saw the light. Emerson, Whittier, Thoreau, 
 OHver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Parker, Walt Whitman, 
 T. W. Higginson, W. W. Story, the sculptor, — all of these 
 men were born during these years. And naturally as 
 they grew from boyhood into manhood their friendship 
 for each other waxed strong, out of which, due to personal 
 and Uterary ties, there was estabhshed a soHd foundation 
 upon which must rest America's claims to Uterary and 
 artistic recognition the world over. 
 
 The name Lowell, even before the birth of our essayist, 
 has stood in American fife for high principles and great 
 accomplishments. The parents of James were inspiring to 
 all of the children and became people of prominence in 
 their chosen fields. The city of Lowell in Massachusetts, 
 and the Lowell Institute of Boston, received their names 
 from uncles of the author. James Russell Lowell stands 
 forth as one of the most prominent members of the family. 
 His career is indicated by his versatiHty : he was a poet, 
 an essayist, a traveler, a teacher, a critic, a pubhc speaker, 
 a reformer, a poHtical writer and diplomatist ; and in all 
 
xii LOWELL'S LIFE 
 
 that he said or wrote there are the unmistakable evidences 
 of scholarsliip and breadth of \dew. 
 
 The chronology of Lowell's career, on page ix, will 
 give at a glance the chief points of interest with wliich we 
 are concerned, so that there will be no detailed repetition 
 of them here. 
 
 Lowell was born in the historic mansion, called '' Elm- 
 wood," situated in the suburbs of Cambridge, Massachu- 
 setts. WilUam Vaughn Moody, the American poet and 
 dramatist, thus describes this noted New England land- 
 mark: 
 
 ''It stands back from the encroachment of modern 
 houses and street-car lines, in a shelter of splendid EngUsh 
 elms, and there is a flavor of more generous days in its 
 broad hues, its small-paned windows, and its rich colonial 
 white and yellow." 
 
 In this connection it is interesting to note the comment 
 of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a boyhood friend and 
 life-long admirer of Lowell's, concerning the latter's un- 
 dying attachment to his birthplace : 
 
 ''One of his most attractive traits was his passionate 
 love of his birthplace, and although Matthew Arnold 
 pitied him for being obliged to return to it from London, 
 he was really nowhere else so happy." 
 
 Lowell, himself, in the essay entitled "A Moosehead 
 Journal," testifies in the following passage to the sym- 
 pathy that should always exist between a man and his 
 home : "I cannot help thinking that the indefinable some- 
 thing which we call character is cumulative, — that the 
 influence of the same climate, scenery and associations for 
 several generation^ is necessary to its gathering head, 
 
LOWELL'S LIFE xiii 
 
 and that the process is disturbed by the continual change 
 of place." 
 
 Lowell as a youth attended the school in Cambridge 
 conducted by WiUiam Wells, where he was prepared for 
 Harvard. As a college student, Lowell was not a success ; 
 that is, from the professors' views in the matter. He 
 was too much of a free lance. Indeed, he stirred up much 
 of what is called school spirit, together with his college 
 chum, William Story, who afterwards became a great 
 sculptor. In college, Lowell was the editor of Har- 
 vardiana, the students' paper, and in his senior year was 
 chosen class poet. Because of his sense of humor dis- 
 closing itself at the wrong time, Lowell was deprived of the 
 privilege of graduating with his class, and instead was 
 sent, before the term closed, to Concord, where he was 
 privately tutored in order to fulfill the college require- 
 ments. The following letter, taken from Higginson's 
 ''Old Cambridge," throws interesting light upon the inci- 
 dent which caused Lowell's temporary suspension : 
 
 ''June 28, 1893. 
 " .... I was a sophomore, and sat half a dozen seats 
 directly behind him. He came in as usual, — it was the 
 day he had been chosen class poet, by one or two votes 
 (I think) over my cousin John Ware, — and seemed to 
 regard the occasion as wholly compHmentary to himself. 
 His handsome face was richly suffused with the purple 
 glow of youth, and wreathed in smiles, as he rose, — my 
 venerable grandfather (Rev. Henry Ware, D.D.) had with 
 trembhng voice just begun the service — and bowed, 
 smirking right and left to the surprised congregation.. 
 
xiv LOWELL'S LIFE 
 
 It was the affair of a minute : my recollection is that he 
 was soon persuaded to sit down, and only made one more 
 ineffectual attempt to rise. The short service — it was 
 evening prayer, of course — went through and ended 
 decently and in order. Presumably, 'Old Quin' (Presi- 
 dent Quincy) was in his customary seat, and had a fair 
 view of the proceedings. We soon learned that it had 
 been dealt with quite seriously; by what seemed a hard 
 sentence, he had been suspended till after class day. I 
 suppose the date must have been March or April (1838), 
 but am not sure." 
 
 After his graduation, Lowell pursued the study of law 
 in the Harvard Law School and received his degree in three 
 years. There appears, however, to be no record of his 
 active practice of law. Lowell had all through college 
 trained himself to be a writer ; that was his one ambition, 
 so that law, of course, had not much attraction for him, 
 although he was admitted to the Boston bar. Lowell 
 very soon put his aspirations into tangible form, for a year 
 later, in 1841, he pubHshed the volume entitled, ''A 
 Year's Life and Other Poems." Two years later he helped 
 found a magazine entitled The Pioneer, to which Haw- 
 thorne, Poe and Whittier were contributors. 
 
 The great source of inspiration to Lowell at tliis time in 
 his career was Marie White, whom he married in 1844. 
 Her life was one of sweetness and poetic impulse ; traits, 
 indeed, to which Lowell responded with equal nobility. 
 It was she who inspired him to contribute his share to the 
 anti-slavery agitation. 
 
 Four years after the death of his wife, Lowell was 
 appointed, in 1855, professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard, 
 
LOWELVS life XV 
 
 succeeding Longfellow. With the exception of two or 
 three years' interruption, Lowell served in this capacity 
 for twenty-two years. During this time, also, he married 
 Miss Frances Dunlap; became editor of The Atlantic 
 Monthly, and one of the editors of The North American 
 Review. His pen was ever active, writing poetry and 
 essays, as well as Hterary and political criticisms. Perhaps 
 his class-room work suffered sometimes because of liter- 
 ary work elsewhere, yet he brought to class sufficient 
 inspiration to last the average student many days. 
 
 The latter part of Lowell's career, it will be noted in 
 the chronology, was devoted to his country in. the capac- 
 ity of foreign minister to Spain and England. In 
 England, Lowell formed friendships with the very best of 
 English writers and statesmen. Throughout his letters 
 he indicates this. Such men as Thackeray, Arnold, 
 Clough and Leslie Stephen were very close to his heart. 
 But Lowell did far more than cultivate selfish interests 
 abroad. He was a briUiant man, and as such he im- 
 pressed England with his American grace and scholarship. 
 Lowell was always democratic, even in the very conserva- 
 tive EngUsh gatherings in which his ambassadorship 
 placed him; but he maintained a fine spirit and dignity 
 that raised America high in English estimation. His noted 
 lecture on ''Democracy," dehvered at Birmingham in 
 1884, may be cited as the full fruition of a great doctrine, 
 to which he was an undying subscriber. The Queen, 
 herself, said of Lowell, when. he left England, in 1885, 
 "that no ambassador had ever excited more interest or 
 won more general regard in England." 
 
 One of the finest tributes ever paid to the memory of 
 
xvi lowelVs life 
 
 I 
 
 Lowell is the following from the pen of Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson: ''His death (Aug. 12, 1891) took from 
 us a man rich beyond all other Americans in poetic 
 impulses, in width of training, in varied experiences, and 
 in readiness of wit; sometimes entangled and hampered 
 by his own great wealth ; unequal in expression, yet rising 
 on the greatest occasions to the highest art; blossoming 
 early, yet maturing late; with a certain indolence of 
 temperament, yet accomplishing all the results of strenuous 
 labor; not always judicial in criticism, especially in 
 early years, yet steadily expanding and deepening; re- 
 taining in age the hopes and sympathies of his youth; 
 and dying, with singular good fortune, just after he had 
 gathered into final shape the literary harvest of his Ufe." 
 
 Lowell's essays will be found thought-provoldng. But 
 they will repay one for every moment of time spent in 
 their study. Halleck, in his "History of American Liter- 
 ature," makes this reference to Lowell: ''If we should 
 wish to persuade a group of moderately intelligent per- 
 sons to read less fiction and more solid literature, it is 
 doubtful if we should accomplish our purpose more easily 
 than by inducing them to dip into some of these essays." 
 
 Lowell had a mind that was overflowing with wisdom 
 and imagination ; and his essays show the constant inter- 
 mixture of these two qualities. He was a very wide reader 
 and never hesitated to refer to a character in hfe or fiction, 
 an incident, however obscure to most of us, or to combine 
 in a figurative manner, allusions that often appear in- 
 congruous. As Higginson says: "Lowell was always 
 liable to be entangled by his own wealth of thought ; his 
 
LOWELL'S LIFE xvil 
 
 prose and verse alike are full of involved periods, conun- 
 drums within conundrums." 
 
 But Lowell, himself, acknowledged this quality, as the 
 following prefatory note to his essays pubHshed April 25, 
 1890, will testify: 
 
 ''Though capable of whatever drudgery in acquisition, 
 I am by temperament impatient of detail in communi- 
 cating what I have acquired, and too often put into a 
 parenthesis or a note conclusions arrived at by long study 
 and reflection when perhaps it had been wiser to expand 
 them, not to mention that much of my illustration was 
 extemporaneous and is now lost to me. I am apt also to 
 fancy that what has long been familiar to my own mind 
 must be equally so to the minds of others, and this uncom- 
 fortable suspicion makes me shy of insisting on what may 
 be already only too little in need of it." 
 
 Lowell's style, however, as to sentence structure, is 
 always clear and crisp. Furthermore, he is entertaining; 
 one can hardly fall asleep over these essays. He was 
 also a great master of dialect, examples of which will 
 be found in the ''Moosehead Journal" and ''In the 
 Mediterranean." However, it must not be overlooked 
 that Lowell, at times, indulged in far-fetched figures, that 
 may be regarded as grotesque, as in the following example 
 taken from the essay on "Italy": "Milton is the only 
 man who has gotten much poetry out of a cataract, and 
 that was a cataract in his eye." 
 
 What must impress the reader of Lowell, it seems to me, 
 more than all else is the richness and keenness of his 
 thoughts. Furthermore, the smooth and elegant prose in 
 
xviii LOWELL'S LIFE 
 
 which they are expressed gives them a permanency that 
 is characteristic of proverbial expressions. Are not these 
 quaUties patent in the following extracts selected from the 
 essays in this volume? 
 
 From ''Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" : "The wise man 
 travels to find liimself. " 
 
 From ''In the Mediterranean": "It is so delightful 
 to meet a man who knows just what you do not. Nay, I 
 think the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance 
 like what the body feels in cushiony moss. " 
 
 From "A Moosehead Journal," referring to any Ameri- 
 can town : " It has a good chance of being pretty ; but, like 
 most American towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, growing 
 yet, and one cannot tell what may happen." 
 
 From "Thoreau" : "Mr. Thoreau seems to us to insist 
 in pubhc on going back to flint and steel, when there is a 
 match-box in his pocket which he knows very well how to 
 use at a pinch." 
 
 From "Italy": "The driving-wheels of all-powerful 
 Nature are in the back of the head, and, as man is the 
 highest type of organization, so a nation is better or worse 
 as it advances toward the highest type of man, or recedes 
 from it." 
 
 From "Thoreau": "We do not believe that the way 
 to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the woods or 
 the society of musquashes." 
 
 From "Thoreau": "The Puritanism of the past 
 found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative 
 imagination of the century, the rarest in some respects 
 since Shakespeare." 
 
 The essays contained in this volume are concerned, for 
 
LOWELL'S LIFE XIX 
 
 the most part, with travel. They are not, however, merely 
 objective ; that is, only descriptions of things seen : they 
 are also subjective, by which is meant that Lowell's own 
 personality, wisdom and humor infuse themselves in 
 them throughout. It is characteristic of Lowell to write, 
 as in the following extract from " In the Mediterranean " : 
 " But after all, Nature, though she may be more beauti- 
 ful, is nowhere so entertaining as in man, and the best 
 thing I have seen and learned at sea is our chief mate." 
 Lowell's interest in mankind supersedes all else. As we 
 follow him on his travels we shall take many httle jour- 
 neys in the realm of comment and reminiscence, and find 
 the experience instructive as well as entertaining. 
 
 FIRST PUBLICATIONS OF THE ESSAYS IN 
 THIS VOLUME 
 
 "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," Putnam's Magazine, 
 May, 1853. 
 
 " A Moosehead Journal," Putnam's Magazine, November, 
 1853. 
 
 "Fireside Travels," Putnam's Magazine, April and May, 
 1854. 
 
 " Fireside Travels," by James Russell Lowell ; Boston, 
 Ticknor and Fields, 1864. 
 
 "Thoreau" appeared in the North American Review for 
 October, 1865, occasioned by "Letters to Various Persons" 
 by Henry D. Thoreau ; Boston, Ticknor and Fields. 
 
BOOKS OF EEFERENCE FOR THE STUDY OF 
 LOWELL'S LIFE AND ASSOCIATIONS 
 
 J. R. Lowell : F. M. Underwood, 1882. 
 
 Letters of James Russell Lowell : Charles Eliot Norton, 
 1893. 
 
 Old Cambridge: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1900. 
 
 James Russell Lowell ; a Biography : Horace E. Scudder, 
 1901. 
 
 James Russell Lowell and His Friends : Edward Everett 
 Hale, 1901. 
 
 A General Survey of American Literature : Mary Fisher, 
 1901. 
 
 Literary Friends and Acquaintances : W. D. Howells, 1902. 
 
 Literary Pilgrimages in New England : Edwin Bacon, 
 1902. 
 
 J. R. Lowell : Ferris Greenslet, 1905. 
 
THE EARLIER ESSAYS OF 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 CAMBRIDGE^ THIRTY YEARS AGO 
 
 A MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG° IN ROME 
 
 In those quiet old winter evenings, around our Roman 
 fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, that we talked 
 of the advantages of travel, and in speeches not so long that 
 our cigars would forget their fire (the measure of just con- 
 versation) debated the comparative advantages of the 5 
 Old and New Worlds. You will remember how serenely 
 I bore the imputation of provincialism, while I asserted 
 that those advantages were reciprocal ; that an orbed and 
 balanced life would revolve between the Old and the New 
 as opposite, but not antagonistic poles, the true equator 10 
 lying somewhere midway between them. I asserted, also, 
 that there were two epochs at which a man might travel, — 
 before twenty, for pure enjoyment, and after thirty, for 
 instruction. At twenty, the eye is sufficiently delighted 
 with merely seeing ; new things are pleasant only because 15 
 they are not old; and we take everjrthing heartily and 
 naturally in the right way, — for even mishaps are like 
 knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them 
 by the blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry along 
 our scales, with lawful weights stamped by experience, 20 
 and our chemical tests acquired by study, with which to 
 
 B 1 
 
I EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 ponder and assay all arts, institutions, and manners, and 
 to ascertain either their absolute worth or their merely 
 relative value to ourselves. On the whole, I declared 
 myself in favor of the after thirty method, — was it partly 
 5 (so difficult is it to distinguish between opinions and per- 
 sonahties) because I had tried it myself, though with scales 
 so imperfect and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but 
 more because I held that a man should have travelled 
 thoroughly round himself and the great terra incognita° 
 
 lo just outside and inside his own threshold, before he under- 
 took voyages of discovery to other worlds. ''Far countries 
 he can safest visit who himself is doughty," says Beowulf. ° 
 Let him first thoroughly explore that strange country laid 
 down on the maps as Seauton° ; let him look down into 
 
 15 its craters, and find whether they be burnt-out or only 
 smouldering; let him know between the good and evil 
 fruits of its passionate tropics; let him experience how 
 healthful are its serene and high-lying table-lands; let 
 him be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to 
 
 20 be baffled) from its speculative northwest passages that 
 lead mostly to the dreary solitudes of a sunless world, be- 
 fore he think himself morally equipped for travels to more 
 distant regions. But does he commonly even so much as 
 think of this, or, while buying amplest trunks for his cor- 
 
 25 poreal apparel, does it once occur to him how very small 
 a portmanteau will contain all his mental and spiritual 
 outfit ? It is more often true that a man who could scarce 
 be induced to expose his unclothed body even to a village 
 of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as naked 
 
 30 as the day it wag born, without so much as a fig-leaf of 
 acquirement on it, in every gallery of Europe, — 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 3 
 
 "Not earing, so that sumpter-horse, the back, 
 Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse, 
 Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul." 
 
 If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple° of imagina- 
 tive culture, if not with the close-fitting, work-day dress 5 
 of social or business training, — at least, my dear Storg, 
 one might provide himself with the merest waist-clout of 
 modesty ! 
 
 But if it be too much to expect men to traverse and 
 survey themselves before they go abroad, we might cer- 10 
 tainly ask that they should be familiar with their own 
 villages. If not even that, then it is of little import whither 
 they go ; and let us hope that, by seeing how calmly their 
 own narrow neighborhood bears their departure, they 
 may be led to think that the circles of disturbance set in 15 
 motion by the fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of 
 eternity, will not have a radius of more than a week in 
 any direction ; and that the world can endure the subtrac- 
 tion of even a justice of the peace with provoking equa- 
 nimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do them 20 
 good, — may make them, if not wiser, at any rate less 
 fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, and a great fee 
 to pay for the lesson ? We cannot give too much for the 
 genial stoicism wliich, when life flouts us, and says, Put 
 that in your pipe and smoke it I can puff away with as 25 
 sincere a relish as if it were tobacco of Mount Lebanon in 
 a narghileh of Damascus. ° 
 
 After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that one has 
 need to travel, and not men. Those force us to come to 
 them, but these come to us, — sometimes whether we will 30 
 
4 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 or no. These exist for us in every variety in our own town. 
 You may find your antipodes without a voyage to China ; 
 he fives there, just round the next corner, precise, formal, 
 the slave of precedent, making all his teacups with a break 
 5 in the edge, because his model had one, and your fancy 
 decorates him with an endlessness of airy pigtail. There, 
 too, are John BuU, Jean Crapaud, Hans Sauerkraut, Pat 
 Murphy, ° and the rest. 
 It has been well said : 
 
 lo '*He needs no ship to cross the tide, 
 
 Who, in the lives around him, sees 
 Fair window-prospects opening wide 
 O'er history's fields on every side, 
 Rome, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece. 
 
 IS "Whatever moulds of various brain 
 
 E'er shaped the world to weal or woe, 
 Whatever empires' wax and wane. 
 To him who hath not eyes in vain, 
 His village-microcosm can show." 
 
 20 But things are good for nothing out of their natural habitat ° 
 If the heroic Barnum° had succeeded in transplanting 
 Shakespeare's house to America, what interest would it 
 have had for us, torn out of its appropriate setting in 
 softly-hilled Warwickshire, which showed us that the 
 
 25 most English of poets must be born in the most English 
 of counties ? I mean by a Thing that which is not a mere 
 spectacle, that which some virtue of the mind leaps forth 
 to, as it also sends, forth its sympathetic flash to the mind, 
 as soon as they come within each other's sphere of attrac- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 5 
 
 tion, and, with instantaneous coalition, form a new product 
 — knowledge. 
 
 Such, in the understanding it gives us of early Roman 
 history, is the little territory around Rome, the gentis 
 cunabula° without a sight of which Livy° and Niebuhr° 5 
 and the maps are vain. So, too, one must go to Pompeii 
 and the Museo Borbonico° to get a true conception of that 
 wondrous artistic nature of the Greeks, strong enough, 
 even in that petty colony, to survive foreign conquest and 
 to assimilate barbarian blood, showing a grace and fertility 10 
 of invention whose Roman copies Rafaello° himself could 
 only copy, and enchanting even the base utensils of the 
 kitchen with an inevitable sense of beauty to which we 
 subterranean Northmen have not yet so much as dreamed 
 of climbing. Mere sights one can see quite as well at 15 
 home. Mont Blanc does not tower more grandly in the 
 memory than did the dream-peak which loomed afar on 
 the morning horizon of hope, nor did the smoke-palm of 
 Vesuvius stand more erect and fair, with tapering stem 
 and spreading top, in that Parthenopean° air, than under 20 
 the diviner sky of imagination. I know what Shakespeare 
 says about homekeeping youths, and I can fancy what 
 you will add about America being interesting only as a 
 phenomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because we 
 have not yet done with getting ready to live. But is not 25 
 your Europe, on the other hand, a place where men have 
 done living for the present, and of value chiefly because 
 of the men who had done living in it long ago? And if, 
 in our rapidly-moving country, one feel sometimes as if 
 he had his home on a railroad train, is there not also a satis- 3° 
 faction in knowing that one is going somewhere? To what 
 
6 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 end visit Europe, if people carry with them, as most do, 
 their old parochial horizon, going hardly as Americans 
 even, much less as men? Have we not both seen persons 
 abroad who put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their vase, 
 5 isolated in that little globe of their own element, incapable 
 of communication with the strange world around them, a 
 show themselves, while it was always doubtful if they 
 could see at all beyond the limits of their portable prison? 
 The wise man travels to discover himself; it is to find 
 
 lo himself out that he goes out of himself and his habitual 
 associations, trying everything in turn till he find that, 
 one activit}^, that royal standard, sovran over him by 
 divine right, toward which all the disbanded powers of his 
 nature and the irregular tendencies of his life gather joy- 
 
 15 fully, as to the common rallying-point of their loyalty. 
 
 All these things we debated while the ilex° logs upon 
 
 the hearth burned down to tinlding coals, over which a 
 
 gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes, mocking the poor 
 
 wood with a pale travesty of that green and gradual 
 
 20 decay on forest-floors, its natural end. Already the clock 
 at the Cappuccini° told the morning quarters, and on the 
 pauses of our talk no sound intervened but the muffled 
 hoot of an owl in the near convent-garden, or the rattling 
 tramp of a patrol of that French army which keeps him a 
 
 25 prisoner in his own city who claims to lock and unlock the 
 doors of heaven. But still the discourse would eddy round 
 one obstinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, you 
 remember, that the wisest man was he who stayed at 
 home; that to see the antiquities of the Old World was 
 
 30 nothing, since the youth of the world was reaUy no farther 
 away from us than our own youth; and that, moreover, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 7 
 
 we had also in America things amazingly old, as our boys, 
 for example. Add, that in the end this antiquity is a 
 matter of comparison, which skips from place to place as 
 nimbly as Emerson's Sphinx, ° and that one old thing is 
 good only till we have seen an older. England is ancient $ 
 till we go to Rome ; Etruria° dethrones Rome, but only to 
 pass this sceptre of antiquity which so lords it over our 
 fancies to the Pelasgi,° from whom Egypt straightway 
 wrenches it, to give it up in turn to older India. And 
 whither then? As well rest upon the first step, since the lo 
 effect of what is old upon the mind is single and positive, 
 not cumulative. As soon as a thing is past, it is as in- 
 finitely far away from us as if it had happened millions 
 of years ago. And if the learned Huet° be correct, who 
 reckoned that all human thoughts and records could be is 
 included in ten folios, what so frightfully old as we our- 
 selves, who can, if we choose, hold in our memories every 
 syllable of recorded time, from the first crunch of Eve's 
 teeth in the apple downward, being thus ideally con- 
 temporary with hoariest Eld ?° 20 
 
 "The pyramids built up with newer might 
 To us are nothing novel, nothing strange." 
 
 Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the phrenolo- 
 gists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness, — how I stand 
 by the old thought, the old thing, the old place, and the 25 
 old friend, till I am very sure I have got a better, and even 
 then migrate painfully. Remember the old Arabian story, 
 and think how hard it is to pick up all the pomegranate- 
 seeds of an opponent's argument, and how, as long as one 
 remains, you are as far from the end as ever. Since I have 30 
 
8 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 you entirely at my mercy, (for you cannot answer me under 
 five weeks,) you will not be surprised at the advent of this 
 letter. I had always one impregnable position, which 
 was, that, however good other places might be, there was 
 5 only one in, which we could be born, and which therefore 
 possessed a quite peculiar and inalienable virtue. We 
 had the fortune, which neither of us have had reason to 
 call other than good, to journey together through the 
 green, secluded valley of boyhood; together we climbed 
 
 lo the mountain wall which shut in, and looked down upon, 
 those Italian plains of early manhood; and, since then, 
 we have met sometimes by a well, or broken bread together 
 at an oasis in the arid desert of life, as it truly is. With 
 this letter I propose to make you my fellow-traveller in 
 
 15 one of those fireside voyages which, as we grow older, we 
 make oftener and oftener through our own past. With- 
 out leaving your elbow-chair, you shall go back with me 
 thirty years, which will bring you among things and 
 persons as thoroughly preterite as Romulus or Numa.° 
 
 20 For so rapid are our changes in America that the transition 
 from old to new, the shifting from habits and associations 
 to others entirely different, is as rapid almost as the passing 
 in of one scene and the drawing out of another on the stage. 
 And it is this which makes America so interesting to the 
 
 25 philosophic student of history and man. Here, as in a 
 theatre, the great problems of anthropology — which in 
 the Old World were ages in solving, but which are solved, 
 leaving only a dry net result — are compressed, as it were, 
 into the entertainment of a few hours. Here we have I 
 
 30 know not how many epochs of history and phases of civili- 
 zation contemporary with each other, nay, within five 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 9 
 
 minutes of each other, by the electric telegraph. In two 
 centuries we have seen rehearsed the dispersion of man from 
 a small point over a whole continent; we witness with 
 our own eyes the action of those forces which govern the 
 great migration of the peoples now historical in Europe ; 5 
 we can watch the action and reaction of different races, 
 forms of government, and higher or lower civilizations. 
 Over there, you have only the dead precipitate, demanding 
 tedious analysis ; but here the elements are all in solution, 
 and we have only to look to know them all. History, 10 
 which every day makes less account of governors and 
 more of man, must j5nd here the compendious key to all 
 that picture-writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear 
 Storg, that we Yankees may still esteem our America a 
 place worth living in. But calm your apprehensions ; 1 15 
 do not propose to drag you with me on such an historical 
 circumnavigation of the globe, but only to show you that 
 (however needful it may be to go abroad for the study of 
 aesthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his heart may find 
 here also pretty bits of what may be called the social 20 
 picturesque, and little landscapes over which that Indian- 
 summer atmosphere of the Past broods as sweetly and 
 tenderly as over a Roman ruin. Let us look at the Cam- 
 bridge of thirty years since. 
 
 The seat of the oldest college in America, it had, of 25 
 course, some of that cloistered quiet which characterizes 
 all university towns. Even now delicately-thoughtful 
 A. H. C.° tells me that he finds in its intellectual atmos- 
 phere a repose which recalls that of grand old Oxford. 
 But, underlying this, it had an idiosyncrasy of its own. 30 
 Boston was not yet a city, and Cambridge was still a coun- 
 
10 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 try village, with its own habits and traditions, not yet 
 feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. 
 Approaching it from the west by what was then called 
 the New Road (it is called so no longer, for we change our 
 5 names whenever we can, to the great detriment of all 
 historical association), you would pause on the brow of 
 Symonds' Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and 
 placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, 
 lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massa- 
 
 lo chusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate 
 with the Tories° by whom, or by whose fathers, they were 
 planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the 
 square, brown tower of the church, and the slim, yellow 
 spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, 
 
 IS and then an invariable characteristic of New England 
 religious architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped 
 smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, 
 darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black- 
 grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these 
 
 20 marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with 
 softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the 
 eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. To 
 your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some half- 
 dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all com- 
 
 25 fortably fronting southward. If it were early June, the 
 rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of these houses 
 showed, through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, 
 and on the end of every drooping hmb, a cone of pearly 
 flowers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with the 
 
 30 crowding blooms of various fruit-trees. There is no 
 sound, unless a horseman clatters over the loose planks 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 11 
 
 of the bridge, while his antipodal shadow glides silently 
 over the mirrored bridge below, or unless, 
 
 "0 winged rapture, feathered soul of spring, 
 BUthe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one. 
 Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June s 
 Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds. 
 The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind 
 With rippling wings that quiver not for flight. 
 But only joy, or, yielding to its will. 
 Runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air." lo 
 
 Such was the charmingly rural picture which he who, 
 thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds' Hill had 
 given him for nothing, to hang in the Gahery of Memory. 
 But we are a city now, and Common Councils° have yet 
 no notion of the truth (learned long ago by many a Euro- 15 
 pean hamlet) that picturesqueness adds to the actual 
 money value of a town. To save a few dollars in gravel, 
 they have cut a kind of dry ditch through the hill, where 
 you suffocate with dust in summer, or flounder through 
 waistdeep snow-drifts in winter, with no prospect but the 20 
 crumbUng earth-walls on either side. The landscape was 
 carried away cart-load by cart-load, and, dumped down 
 on the roads, forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, 
 which has, I fear, driven many a teamster and pedestrian 
 to the use of phrases not commonly found in Enghsh 25 
 dictionaries. 
 
 We called it 'Hhe Village" then (I speak of Old Cam- 
 bridge), and it was essentially an Enghsh village, quiet, 
 unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and 
 only showing such differences from the original type as 30 
 the public school and the system of town government 
 
12 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood 
 around the bare Common, with ample elbow-room, and 
 old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through 
 the same windows from which they had watched Lord 
 
 5 Percy's^ artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a 
 gUmpse of the handsome Virginia General^ who had come 
 to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People were still 
 Uving who regretted the late unhappy separation from the 
 mother island, who had seen no gentry since the Vassalls° 
 
 lo went, and who thought that Boston had ill kept the day 
 of her patron saint, Botolph,° on the 17th of June, 1775. 
 The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the 
 hammocks of Burgoyne's° captive redcoats. If memory 
 does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the 
 
 15 town spring, clear as that of Bandusia.° One coach 
 sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commence- 
 ment had not ceased to be the great hoUday of the Puritan 
 Commonwealth, and a fitting one it was, — the festival 
 of Santa Scholastica,° whose triumphal path one may 
 
 2o conceive strewn with leaves of spelhng-book instead of 
 bay. The students (scholars they were called then) wore 
 their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive or capa- 
 ble of rousing democratic envy, and the old lines of caste 
 were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was 
 
 25 softened into beneficiary. The Spanish king was sure 
 that the gesticulating student was either mad or reading 
 Don Quixote, ° and if, in those days, you met a youth 
 swinging his arms and talking to himself, you might con- 
 clude that he was either a lunatic or one who was to ap- 
 
 30 pear in a ''part'^ at the next Commencement. A favorite 
 place for the rehearsal of these orations was the retired 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 13 
 
 amphitheatre of the Gravel-pit, perched unregarded on 
 whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a burst of plusquam 
 Ciceronian^ eloquence, and (often repeated) the regular 
 saluto vos, pr(Estantissim(B° &c., which every year (with a 
 glance at the gallery) causes a flutter among the fans in- 5 
 nocent of Latin, and dehghts to applauses of conscious 
 superiority the youth almost as innocent as they. It is 
 curious, by the way, to note how plainly one can feel the 
 pulse of self in the plaudits of an audience. At a political 
 meeting, if the enthusiasm of the Heges hang fire, it may 10 
 be exploded at once by an allusion to their intelHgence or 
 patriotism ; and at a literary festival, the first Latin quota- 
 tion draws the first applause, the clapping of hands being 
 intended as a tribute to our own famiharity with that 
 sonorous tongue, and not at all as an approval of the 15 
 particular sentiment conveyed in it. For if the orator 
 should say, "Well has Tacitus remarked, Americani omnes 
 quddam vi naturce furcd dignissimi/'° it would be all the 
 same. But the Gravel-pit was patient, if irresponsive ; nor 
 did the declaimer always fail to bring down the house, bits 20 
 of loosened earth falHng now and then from the precipitous 
 walls, their cohesion perhaps overcome by the vibrations 
 of the voice, and happily satirizing the effect of most 
 popular discourses, which prevail rather with the earthy 
 than the spiritual part of the hearer. Was it possible for 25 
 us in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than 
 the President of the University, in his square doctor's 
 cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge? If 
 there was a doubt, it was suggested only by the Governor, 
 and even by him on artillery-election days alone, superbly 30 
 martial with epaulets and buckskin breeches, and bestrid- 
 
14 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 ing the war-horse, promoted to that solemn duty for his 
 tameness and steady habits. 
 
 Thirty years ago, the town had indeed a character. 
 Railways and omnibuses had not rolled flat all Uttle social 
 
 5 prominences and pecuharities, making every man as much 
 a citizen everywhere as at home. No Charlestown boy 
 could come to our annual festival without fighting to 
 avenge a certain traditional porcine imputation against 
 the inhabitants of that historic locality, and to which 
 
 lo our youth gave vent in fanciful imitations of the dialect 
 of the sty, or derisive shouts of ''Charlestown hogs!" 
 The penny newspaper had not yet silenced the tripod of 
 the barber, oracle of news. Everybody knew everybody, 
 and all about everybody, and village wit, whose high 
 
 15 'change was around the httle market-house in the town 
 square, had labelled every more marked individuaUty 
 with nicknames that clung like burs. Tilings were estab- 
 Hshed then, and men did not run through all the figures 
 on the dial of society so swiftly as now, when hurry and 
 
 20 competition seem to have quite unhung the modulating 
 pendulum of steady thrift and competent training. Some 
 slow-minded persons even followed their father's trade, 
 — a humihating spectacle, rarer every day. We had our 
 estabUshed loafers, topers, proverb-mongers, barber, 
 
 25 parson, nay, postmaster, whose tenure was for life. The 
 great pohtical engine did not then come down at regular 
 quadrennial intervals, like a nail-cutting machine, to make 
 all official fives of a standard length, and to generate lazy 
 and intriguing ^expectancy. Life flowed in recognized 
 
 30 channels, narrower perhaps, but with all the more individu- 
 ality and force. 
 
EARLIER ESSA08 . 15 
 
 There was but one white-and-yellow-washer, whose 
 own cottage, fresh-gleaming every June through grape- 
 vine and creeper, was his only sign and advertisement. 
 He was said to possess a secret, which died with him Uke 
 that of Luca della Robbia,° and certainly conceived alls 
 colors but white and yellow to savor of savagery, civiHzing 
 the stems of his trees annually with Hquid hme, and 
 meditating how to extend that candent baptism even to 
 the leaves. His pie-plants (the best in town), compulsory 
 monastics, blanched under barrels, each in his Uttle her- lo 
 mitage, a vegetable Certosa.° His fowls, his ducks, his 
 geese, could not show so much as a gray feather among 
 them, and he would have given a year's earnings for a white 
 peacock. The flowers which decked his Httle door-yard 
 were whitest China-asters and goldenest sunflowers, which 15 
 last, backshding from their traditional Parsee° faith, used 
 to puzzle us urchins not a little by staring brazenly every 
 way except towards the sun. Celery, too, he raised, whose 
 virtue is its paleness, and the silvery onion, and turnip, 
 which, though outwardly conforming to the green heresies 20 
 of summer, nourish a purer faith subterraneously, like 
 early Christians in the catacombs. In an obscure corner 
 grew the sanguine beet, tolerated only for its usefulness in 
 allaying the asperities of Saturday's salt-fish. He loved 
 winter better than summer, because Nature then played 25 
 the whitewasher, and challenged with her snows the scarce 
 inferior purity of his overalls and neck-cloth. I fancy 
 that he never rightly hked Commencement, for bringing 
 so many black coats together. He founded no school. 
 Others might essay his art, and were allowed to try their 30 
 prentice hands on fences and the Uke coarse subjects, but 
 
16 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 the ceiling of every housewife waited on the leisure of 
 Newman (ic/inetAmon° the students called him for his diminu- 
 tiveness), nor would consent to other brush than his. 
 There was also but one brewer, — Lewis, who made the 
 5 village beer, both spruce and ginger, a grave and amiable 
 Ethiopian, making a discount always to the boys, and 
 wisely, for they were his chiefest patrons. He wheeled 
 his whole stock in a white-roofed handcart, on whose front 
 a sign-board presented at either end an insurrectionary 
 
 lo bottle; yet insurgent after no mad GaUic° fashion, but 
 soberly and Saxonly° discharging itself into the restraining 
 formulary of a tumbler, symbolic of orderly prescription. 
 The artist had struggled manfully with the difficulties of 
 his subject, but had not succeeded so well that we did not 
 
 15 often debate in which of the twin bottles Spruce was typi- 
 fied, and in which Ginger. We always beheved that 
 Lewis mentally distinguished between them, but by some 
 pecuUarity occult to exoteric eyes. This ambulatory 
 chapel of the Bacchus° that gives the colic, but not ine- 
 
 2obriates, only appeared at the Commencement hoHdays, 
 and the lad who bought of Lewis laid out his money 
 well, getting respect as well as beer, three sirs to every 
 glass, — ''Beer, sir? yes, sir: spruce or ginger, sir?" I 
 can yet recall the innocent pride with which I walked 
 
 25 away after that somewhat risky ceremony, (for a bottle 
 sometimes blew up,) dilated not alone with carbonic 
 acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air of that 
 titular flattery. Nor was Lewis proud. When he tried 
 his fortunes in the capital on Election days, and stood 
 
 30 amid a row of rival venders ' in the very flood of cus- 
 tom, he never forgot his small fellow-citizens, but wel- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 17 
 
 corned them with an assuring smile, and served them with 
 the first. 
 
 The barber's shop was a museum, scarce second to the 
 larger one of Greenwood in the metropohs. The boy who 
 was to be chpped there was always accompanied to the 5 
 sacrifice by troops of friends, who thus inspected the 
 curiosities gratis ° While the watchful eye of R. wandered 
 to keep in check these rather unscrupulous explorers, the 
 unpausing shears would sometimes overstep the boun- 
 daries of strict tonsorial prescription, and make a notch 10 
 through which the phrenological developments could be 
 distinctly seen. As Michael Angelo's° design was modified 
 by the shape of liis block, so R., rigid in artistic proprieties, 
 would contrive to give an appearance of design to this 
 aberration, by maldng it the key-note to his work, and 15 
 reducing the whole head to an appearance of premature 
 baldness. What a charming place it was, — how full of 
 wonder and delight ! The sunny little room, fronting 
 southwest upon the Common, rang with canaries and 
 Java sparrows, nor were the familiar notes of robin, thrush, 20 
 and boboHnk wanting. A large white cockatoo harangued 
 vaguely, at intervals, in what we believed (on R.'s au- 
 thority) to be the Hottentot° language. He had an 
 unveracious air, but what inventions of former grandeur 
 he was indulging in, what sweet South- African Argos° he 25 
 was remembering, what tropical heats and giant trees by 
 unconjectured rivers, known only to the wallowing hippo- 
 potamus, we could only guess at. The walls were covered 
 with curious old Dutch prints, beaks of albatross and 
 penguin, and whales' teeth fantastically engraved. There 30 
 was Frederick the Great, ° with head drooped plottingly, 
 c 
 
18 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 and keen side-long glance from under the three-cornered 
 hat. There hung Bonaparte, ° too, the long-haired, hag- 
 gard general of Italy, his eyes sombre with prefigured 
 destiny ; and there was his island grave ; — the dream 
 5 and the fulfilment. Good store of sea-fights there was 
 also ; above all, Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard :° 
 the smoke rolling courteously to leeward, that we might 
 see him deahng thunderous wreck to the two hostile vessels, 
 each twice as large as his own, and the reahty of the scene 
 
 lo corroborated by streaks of red paint leaping from the 
 mouth of every gun. Suspended over the fireplace, with 
 the curling-tongs, were an Indian bow and arrows, and in 
 the corners of the room stood New Zealand paddles and 
 war-clubs, quaintly carved. The model of a ship in glass 
 
 15 we variously estimated to be worth from a hundred to a 
 thousand doUars, R. rather favoring the higher valuation, 
 though never distinctly committing himself. Among these 
 wonders, the only suspicious one was an Indian toma- 
 hawk, which had too much the peaceful look of a shingHng- 
 
 20 hatchet. Did any rarity enter the town, it gravitated 
 naturally to these walls, to the very nail that waited to 
 receive it, and where, the day after its accession, it seemed 
 to have hung a Ufetime. We always had a theory that 
 R. was immensely rich, (how could he possess so much and 
 
 25 be otherwise ?) and that he pursued his calling from an 
 amiable eccentricity. He was a conscientious artist, and 
 never submitted it to the choice of his victim whether he 
 would be perfumed or not. Faithfully was the bottle 
 shaken and the odoriferous mixture rubbed in, a fact red- 
 
 30 olent to the whole school-room in the afternoon. Some- 
 times the persuasive tonsor would impress one of the at- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 19 
 
 tendant volunteers, and reduce his poll to shoe-brush 
 crispness, at cost of the reluctant ninepence hoarded for 
 Fresh Pond, and the next half-hoUday. So purely in- 
 digenous was our population then, that R. had a certain 
 exotic charm, a kind of game flavor, by being a Dutchman. 5 
 
 Shall the two groceries want their vates sacer° where E. 
 & W. L° goods and country prodooce were sold with an 
 energy mitigated by the quiet genius of the place, and 
 where strings of urchins waited, each with cent in hand, 
 }0Y the unweighed dates (thus giving an ordinary business 10 
 transaction all the excitement of a lottery), and buying, not 
 only that clojdng sweetness, but a dream also of Egypt, 
 and palm-trees, and Arabs, in which vision a print of the 
 Pyramids in our geography tyrannized like that taller 
 thought of Cowper's? 15 
 
 At one of these the unwearied students used to ply a 
 joke handed down from class to class. Enter A, and asks 
 gravely, ''Have you any sour apples. Deacon?" 
 
 ''Well, no, I haven't any just now that are exactly sour ; 
 but there's the bell-flower apple, and folks that Hke a sour 20 
 apple generally hke that." {Exit A.) 
 
 Enter B. "Have you any sweet apples. Deacon?" 
 
 "Well, no, I haven't any just now that are exactly 
 sweet; but there's the bell-flower apple, and folks that 
 Uke a sweet apple generally hke that." {Exit B.) 25 
 
 There is not even a tradition of any one's ever having 
 turned the wary Deacon's flank, and his Laodicean° 
 apples persisted to the end, neither one thing nor another. 
 Or shall the two town-constables be forgotten, in whom the 
 law stood worthily and amply embodied, fit either of them 30 
 to fill the uniform of an Enghsh beadle? Grim and silent 
 
20 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 as Ninevite° statues they stood on each side of the meeting- 
 house door at Commencement, propped by long staves of 
 blue and red, on which the Indian with bow and arrow, 
 and the mailed arm with the sword, hinted at the invisible 
 5 sovereignty of the state ready to reinforce them, as 
 
 ''For Achilles' portrait stood a spear 
 Grasped in an armed hand." 
 
 Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second only, if 
 second, to S., champion of the county, and not incapable 
 
 lo of genial unbendings when the fasces were laid aside. One 
 of them still sur\ives in octogenarian vigor, the Herodotus° 
 of village and college legend, and may it be long ere he 
 depart, to carry with liim the pattern of a courtesy, now, 
 alas ! old-fashioned, but which might profitably make 
 
 15 part of the instruction of our youth among the other hu- 
 manities ! Long may R. M.° be spared to us, so genial, 
 so courtly, the last man among us who will ever know how 
 to Uft a hat with the nice graduation of social distinction ! 
 Something of a Jeremiah° now, he bewails the decUne of 
 
 20 our manners. ^'My children," he says, ''say, 'Yes sir,' 
 and 'No sir'; my grand-children, 'Yes' and 'No'; and I 
 am every day expecting to hear ' D — n your eyes ! ' for an 
 answer when I ask a service of my great-grandchildren. 
 Why, sir, I can remember when more respect was paid to 
 
 25 Governor Hancock's" lackey at Commencement, than the 
 Governor and all his suite get now." M. is one of those 
 invaluable men who remember your grandfather, and 
 value you accordingly. 
 
 In those days the population was almost wholly with- 
 
 30 out foreign admixture. Two Scotch gardeners there were, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 21 
 
 — Rule, whose daughter (gHmpsed perhaps at church, or 
 possibly the mere Miss Harris of fancy) the students nick- 
 named Anarchy or Miss Rule, — and later Fraser, whom 
 whiskey subhmed into a poet, full of bloody histories of 
 the Forty-twa, and showing an imaginary French bullet, 5 
 sometimes in one leg, sometimes in the other, and some- 
 times, toward nightfall, in both. With this claim to mih- 
 tary distinction he adroitly contrived to mingle another 
 to a natural one, asserting double teeth all round his jaws, 
 and, having thus created two sets of doubts, silenced both 10 
 at once by a single demonstration, displaying the grinders 
 to the confusion of the infidel. 
 
 The old court-house stood then upon the square. It has 
 shrunk back out of sight now, and students box and fence 
 where Parsons once laid down the law, and Ames and 15 
 Dexter° showed their skill in the fence of argument. Times 
 have changed, and manners, since Cliief Justice Dana° 
 (father of Richard the First, and grandfather of Richard 
 the Second) caused to be arrested for contempt of court a 
 butcher who had come in without a coat to witness the 20 
 administration of his country's laws, and who thus had 
 his curiosity exemplarily gratified. Times have changed 
 also since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin- 
 brothers Snow. Oyster men were they indeed, silent in 
 their subterranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and flows 25 
 of custom with bivalvian serenity. Careless of the months 
 with an R° in them, the maxim of Snow (for we knew 
 them but as a unit) was, ''When 'ysters are good, they 
 air good; and when they ain't, they isnH.'' Grecian F. 
 (may his shadow never be less !) tells this, his great laugh 30 
 expected all the while from deep vaults of chest, and then 
 
22 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 coming in at the close, hearty, contagious, mounting with 
 the measured tread of a jovial but stately butler who brings 
 ancientest good-fellowship from exhaustless bins, and 
 enough, without other sauce, to give a flavor of stalled 
 ox to a dinner of herbs. Let me preserve here an antici- 
 patory elegy upon the Snows written years ago by some 
 nameless college rhymer. 
 
 DIFFUGERE NIVES** 
 
 Here lies, or lie, — decide the question, you, 
 
 If they were two in one or one in two, — 
 
 P. & S. Snow, whose memory shall not fade, 
 
 Castor and Pollux of the oyster-trade : 
 
 Hatched from one egg, at once the shell they burst, 
 
 (The last, perhaps, a P. S. to the first,) 
 
 So homoousian both in look and soul, 
 
 So undiscernibly a single whole. 
 
 That whether P. was S., or S. was P., 
 
 Surpassed all skill in etymology ; 
 
 One kept the shop at once, and all we know 
 
 Is that together they were the Great Snow, 
 
 A snow not deep, yet with a crust so thick 
 
 It never melted to the son of Tick ; 
 
 Perpetual ? nay, our region was too low, 
 
 Too warm, too southern, for perpetual Snow ; 
 
 Still, like fair Leda's sons, to whom 'twas given 
 
 To take their turns in Hades and in Heaven, 
 
 Our new Dioscuri would bravely share 
 
 The cellar's darkness and the upper air ; 
 
 Twice every year would each the shades escape, 
 
 And, like a sea-bird, seek the wave-washed Cape, 
 
 Where (Rumor voiced) one spouse sufficed for both ; 
 
 No bigamist, for she upon her oath, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 23 
 
 Unskilled in letters, could not make a guess 
 
 At any difference twixt P. and S. — 
 
 A thing not marvellous, since Fame agrees 
 
 They were as little different as two peas, 
 
 And she, like Paris, when his Helen laid 5 
 
 Her hand 'mid snows from Ida's top conveyed 
 
 To cool their wine of Chios, could not know, 
 
 Between those rival candors, which was Snow. 
 
 Whiche'er behind the counter chanced to be 
 
 Oped oysters oft, his clam-shells seldom he ; lo 
 
 If e'er he laughed, 'twas with no loud guffaw. 
 
 The fun warmed through him with a gradual thaw ; 
 
 The nicer shades of wit were not his gift. 
 
 Nor was it hard to sound Snow's simple drift ; 
 
 His were plain jokes, that many a time before i5 
 
 Had set his tarry messmates in a roar. 
 
 When floundering cod beslimed the deck's wet planks. 
 
 The humorous specie of Newfoundland banks. 
 
 But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well, 
 
 Buried (his last breath asked it) in a shell ; 20 
 
 Fate with an oyster-knife sawed off his thread, 
 
 And planted him upon his latest bed. 
 
 Him on the Stygian shore my fancy sees 
 
 Noting choice shoals for oyster colonies, 
 
 Or, at a board stuck full of ghostly forks, 25 
 
 Opening for practice visionary Yorks. 
 
 And whither he has gone, may we too go, — 
 
 Since no hot place were fit for keeping Snow ! 
 
 Jam satis nivis° 
 
 Cambridge has long had its port, but the greater part 
 of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago, intrusted to a 30 
 
24 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 single Argo,° the sloop Harvard, which belonged to the 
 College, and made annual voyages to that vague Orient 
 known as Down East, bringing back the wood that, in 
 those days, gave to winter life at Harvard a crackle and a 
 5 cheerfulness, for the loss of which the greater warmth of 
 anthracite hardly compensates. New England Hfe, to be 
 genuine, must have in it some sentiment of the sea, — it 
 was this instinct that printed the device of the pine-tree 
 on the old money and the old flag, — and these periodic 
 
 lo ventures of the sloop Harvard made the old Viking fibre 
 vibrate in the hearts of all the village boys. What a vista 
 of mystery and adventure did her sailing open to us ! 
 With what pride did we hail her return! She was our 
 scholiast upon Robinson Crusoe and the mutiny of the 
 
 15 Bounty. Her captain still lords it over our memories, 
 the greatest sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should 
 not look at Sir John Franldin° liimself with such admiring 
 interest as that with which we enhaloed some larger boy 
 who had made a voyage in her, and had come back with- 
 
 20 out braces (gallowses we called them) to his trousers, and 
 squirting ostentatiously the juice of that weed which still 
 gave him Uttle private returns of something very like sea- 
 sickness. All our shingle vessels were shaped and rigged 
 by her, who was our glass of naval fashion and our mould of 
 
 25 aquatic form. We had a secret and wild delight in behev- 
 ing that she carried a gun, and imagined her sending grape 
 and canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown. 
 Inspired by her w^ere those first essays at navigation on the 
 Winthrop duck-j^ond, of the plucky boy who was after- 
 
 30 wards to serve two famous years before the mast. The 
 greater part of what is now Cambridgeport was then (in 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 25 
 
 the native dialect) a huckleberry pastur. Woods were not 
 wanting on its outskirts, of pine, and oak, and maple, and 
 the rarer tupelo with downward limbs. Its veins did not 
 draw their blood from the quiet old heart of the village, 
 but it had a distinct being of its own, and was rather as 
 great caravansary than a suburb. The chief feature of 
 the place was its inns, of which there were five, with vast 
 barns and court-yards, which the railroad was to make , 
 as silent and deserted as the palaces of Nimroud.° Great 
 white-topped wagons, each drawn by double files of six or lo 
 eight horses, with its dusty bucket swinging from the 
 hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting silent under- 
 neath, or in midsumfner panting on the lofty perch beside 
 the driver, (how elevated tliither baffled conjecture,) 
 brought all the wares and products of the country to their is 
 mart and seaport in Boston. These filled the inn-yards, or 
 were ranged side by side under broad-roofed sheds, and 
 far into the night the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored 
 from the red-curtained bar-room, while the single lantern, 
 swaying to and fro in the black cavern of the stables, made 20 
 a Rembrandt° of the group of ostlers and horses below. 
 There were, beside the taverns, some huge square stores 
 where groceries were sold, some houses, by whom or why 
 inhabited was to us boys a problem, and, on the edge of 
 the marsh, a currier's shop, where, at high tide, on a float- 25 
 ing platform, men were always beating skins in a way to 
 remind one of Don Quixote's fulHng-mills. Nor did these 
 make all the Port. As there is always a Coming Man 
 who never comes, so there is a man who always comes (it 
 may be only a quarter of an hour) too early. This man 30 
 so far as the Port is concerned, was Rufus Davenport. 
 
26 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Looking at the marshy flats of Cambridge, and consider- 
 ing their nearness to Boston, he resolved that there should 
 grow up a suburban Venice. Accordingly, the marshes 
 were bought, canals were dug, ample for the commerce 
 5 of both Indies, and four or five rows of brick houses were 
 built to meet the first wants of the wading settlers who 
 were expected to rush in — whence ? This singular 
 question had never occurred to the enthusiastic projector. 
 There are laws which govern human migrations quite 
 
 lo beyond the control of the speculator, as many a man 
 with desirable building-lots has discovered to his cost. 
 Why mortal men will pay more for a chess-board square 
 in that swamp, than for an acre on the breezy upland close 
 by, who shall say? And again, why, having shown such 
 
 15 a passion for your swamp, they are so coy of mine, who 
 shall say? Not certainly any one who, hke Davenport, 
 had got up too early for his generation. If we could only 
 carry that slow, imperturbable old clock of Opportunity, ° 
 that never strikes a second too soon or too late, in our fobs, 
 
 20 and push the hands forward as we can those of our watches ! 
 With a foreseeing economy of space which now seems ludi- 
 crous, the roofs of this forlorn-hope of houses were made 
 flat, that the swarming population might have where to 
 dry their clothes. But A. U. C.° 30 showed the same 
 
 25 view as A. U. C. 1, — onlj^ that the brick blocks looked as 
 if they had been struck by a malaria. The dull weed 
 upholstered the decaying wharves, and the only freight 
 that heaped them was the kelp and eel-grass left by higher 
 floods. Instead of a Venice, behold a Torzelo!° The 
 
 30 unfortunate projector took to the last refuge of the un- 
 happy — book-making, and bored the reluctant public 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 27 
 
 with what he called a right-aim Testament, prefaced by 
 a recommendation from General Jackson, who perhaps, 
 from its title, took it for some treatise on ball-practice. 
 
 But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, did not want 
 associations poetic and venerable. The stranger who s 
 took the '' Hourly "° at Old Cambridge, if he were a phys- 
 iognomist and student of character, might perhaps have 
 had his curiosity excited by a person who mounted the 
 coach at the Port. So refined was his whole appearance, 
 so fastidiously neat his apparel, — but with a neatness lo 
 that seemed less the result of care and plan, than a some- 
 thing as proper to the man as whiteness to the lily, — 
 that you would have at once classed him with those individ- 
 uals, rarer than great captains and almost as rare as great 
 poets, whom Nature sends into the world to fill the arduous is 
 office of Gentleman. Were you ever emperor of that 
 Barataria° which under your peaceful sceptre would 
 present, of course, a model of government, this remark- 
 able person should be Duke of Biens6ance° and Master 
 of Ceremonies. There are some men whom destiny has 20 
 endowed with the faculty of external neatness, whose 
 clothes are repellent of dust and mud, whose unwithering 
 white neck-cloths persevere to the day's end, unappeas- 
 ably seeing the sun go down upon their starch, and whose 
 linen makes you fancy them heirs in the maternal line to 25 
 the instincts of all the washerwomen from Eve downward. 
 There are others whose inward natures possess this fatal 
 cleanness, incapable of moral dirt spot. You are not long 
 in discovering that the stranger combines in himself both 
 these properties. A nimhus° of hair, fine as an infant's, 30 
 and early white, showing refinement of organization and 
 
28 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 the predominance of the spiritual over the physical, un- 
 dulated and floated around a face that seemed Uke pale 
 flame, and over which the flitting shades of expression 
 chased each other, fugitive and gleaming as waves upon 
 5 a field of rye. It was a countenance that, without any 
 beauty of feature, was very beautiful. I have said that 
 it looked Uke pale flame, and can find no other words for 
 the impression it gave. Here was a man all soul, whose 
 body seemed a lump of finest clay, whose service was to 
 
 lo feed with magic oils, rare and fragrant, that wavering fire 
 which hovered over it. You, who are an adept in such mat- 
 ters, would have detected in the eyes that artist-look which 
 seems to see pictures ever in the air, and which, if it fall on 
 you makes you feel as if all the world were a gallery, and 
 
 15 yourself the rather indifferent Portrait of a Gentleman 
 hung therein. As the stranger brushes by you in ahght- 
 ing, you detect a single incongruity, — a smell of dead 
 tobacco-smoke. You ask his name, and the answer is, 
 ''Mr. Allston."° 
 
 20 ''Mr. AUston!" and you resolve to note down at once 
 in your diary every look, every gesture, every word of 
 the great painter? Not in the least. You have the true 
 Anglo-Norman indifference, and most likely never think 
 of him again till you hear that one of his pictures 
 
 25 has sold for a great price, and then contrive to let your 
 grandchildren know twice a week that you met him once 
 in a coach, and that he said, "Excuse me, sir," in a very 
 Titianesque° manner, when he stumbled over your toes 
 in getting out. Hitherto Boswell° is quite as unique as 
 
 30 Shakespeare. The country-gentleman, journeying up to 
 London, inquires of Mistress Davenant at the Oxford inn 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 29 
 
 the name of his pleasant companion of the night before. 
 ''Master Shakespeare, an't please your worship." And 
 the Justice, ° not without a sense of the unbending, says, 
 ''Truly, a merry and conceited gentleman!" It is lucky 
 for the peace of great men that the world seldom finds s 
 out contemporaneously who its great men are, or, perhaps, 
 that each man esteems himself the fortunate he who shall 
 draw the lot of memory from the helmet of the future. 
 Had the eyes of some Stratford burgess been achromatic 
 telescopes, capable of a perspective of two hundred years ! lo 
 But, even then, would not his record have been fuller of 
 says Fs than says he's? Nevertheless, it is curious to 
 consider from what infinitely varied points of view we 
 might form our estimate of a great man's character, when 
 we remember that he had his points of contact with the is 
 butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, as well as 
 with the ingenious A, the subHme B, and the Right Hon- 
 orable C. If it be true that no man ever clean forgets 
 everything, and that the act of drowning (as is asserted) 
 forthwith brightens up all those o'er-rusted impressions, 20 
 would it not be a curious experiment, if, after a remark- 
 able person's death, the pubHc, eager for minutest partic- 
 ulars, should gather together all who had ever been brought 
 into relations with him, and, submerging them to the hair's- 
 breadth hitherward of the drowning-point, subject them 25 
 to strict cross-examination by the Humane Society, as 
 soon as they become conscious between the resuscitating 
 blankets? All of us probably have brushed against des- 
 tiny in the street, have shaken hands with it, fallen asleep 
 with it in railway carriages, and knocked heads with it in 30 
 some one or other of its yet unrecognized incarnations. 
 
30 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Will it seem like presenting a tract to a colporteur ° my 
 dear Storg, if I say a word or two about an artist to you 
 over there in Italy? Be patient, and leave your button 
 in my grasp yet a little longer. A person whose opinion 
 
 5 is worth having once said to me, that, however one's 
 notions might be modified by going to Europe, one 
 always came back with a higher esteem for Allston. Cer- 
 tainly he is thus far the greatest English painter of his- 
 torical subjects. And only consider how strong must 
 
 lohave been the artistic bias in him, to have made him a 
 painter at all under the circumstances. There were no 
 traditions of art, so necessary for guidance and inspira- 
 tion. Blackburn, Smibert, Copley, Trumbull, Stuart,° 
 — it was, after all, but a Brentford° sceptre which their 
 
 IS heirs could aspire to, and theirs were not names to con- 
 jure with, like those from which Fame, as through a silver 
 trumpet, had blown for three centuries. Copley and 
 Stuart were both remarkable men; but the one painted 
 like an inspired silk-mercer, and the other seems to have 
 
 20 mixed his colors with the claret of which he and liis genera- 
 tion were so fond. And what could a successful artist 
 hope for, at that time, beyond the mere wages of his 
 work? His picture would hang in cramped back-parlors, 
 between deadly cross-fires of lights, sure of the garret or 
 
 25 the auction-room erelong, in a country where the nomad 
 population carry no household gods with them but their 
 five wits and their ten fingers. As a race, we care noth- 
 ing about Art ; but the Puritan and the Quaker are the 
 only EngHshmen jvho have had pluck enough to confess 
 
 30 it. If it were surprising that Allston should have become 
 a painter at all, how almost miraculous that he should 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 31 
 
 have been a great and original one ! We call him original 
 deUberately, because, though his school is essentially 
 ItaUan, it is of less consequence where a man buys his 
 tools, than what use he makes of them. Enough EngUsh 
 artists went to Italy and came back painting history in a 5 
 very Anglo-Saxon manner, and creating a school as melo- 
 dramatic as the French, without its perfection in techni- 
 caUties. But Allston carried thither a nature open on 
 the southern side, and brought it back so steeped in rich 
 Italian sunshine that the east winds (whether physical or lo 
 intellectual) of Boston and the dusts of Cambridgeport 
 assailed it in vain. To that bare wooden studio one 
 might go to breathe Venetian air, and, better yet, the very 
 spirit wherein the elder brothers of Art labored, ethe- 
 realized by metaphysical speculation, and subhmed by is 
 reUgious fervor. The beautiful old man! Here was 
 genius with no volcanic explosions (the mechanic result 
 of vulgar gunpowder often), but lovely as a Lapland 
 night ; here was fame, not sought after nor worn in any 
 cheap French fashion as a ribbon at the button-hole, but 20 
 so gentle, so retiring, that it seemed no more than an as- 
 sured and emboldened modesty; here was ambition, 
 undebased by rivalry and incapable of the sidelong look; 
 and all these massed and harmonized together into a purity 
 and depth of character, into a tone, which made the daily 25 
 life of the man the greatest masterpiece of the artist. 
 
 But let us go back to the Old Town. Thirty j^ears 
 since, the Muster and the CornwaUis° allowed some bent 
 to those natural instincts which Puritanism scotched, but 
 not killed. The CornwaUis had entered upon the estates of 30 
 the old Guy-Fa wkes° procession, confiscated by the Revo- 
 
32 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 lution. It was a masquerade, in which that grave and 
 suppressed humor, of which the Yankees are fuller than 
 other people, burst through all restraints, and disported 
 itself in all the wildest vagaries of fun. Commonly the 
 
 5 Yankee in his pleasures suspects the presence of Public 
 Opinion as a detective, and accordingly is apt to pinion 
 liimself in his Sunday suit. It is a curious commentary 
 on the artificiality of our lives, that men must be disguised 
 and masked before they will venture into the obscurer 
 
 lo corners of their individuahty, and display the true features 
 of their nature. One remarked it in the Carnival, and one 
 especially noted it here among a race naturally self-re- 
 strained ; for Silas and Ezra and Jonas were not only dis- 
 guised as Redcoats, Continentals, and Indians, but not 
 
 15 unfrequently disguised in drink also. It is a question 
 whether the Lyceum,° where the public is obliged to com- 
 prehend all vagrom men, supplies the place of the old 
 popular amusements. A hundred and fifty years ago, 
 Cotton Mather° bewails the carnal attractions of the 
 
 20 tavern and the training-field, and tells of an old Indian 
 who imperfectly understood the English tongue, but 
 desperately mastered enough of it (when under sentence 
 of death) to express a desire for instant hemp rather than 
 hsten to any more ghostly consolations. Puritanism — 
 
 25 1 am perfectly aware how great a debt we owe it — tried 
 over again the old experiment of dri\dng out nature with a 
 pitchfork, and had the usual success. It was like a ship 
 inwardly on fire, whose hatches must be kept hermetically 
 battened down ; . for the admittance of an ounce of 
 
 30 Heaven's own natural air would explode it utterly. Morals 
 can never be safely embodied in the constable. PoHshed, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 33 
 
 cultivated, fascinating Mephistopheles ! ° it is for the 
 ungovernable breakings-away of the soul from unnatural 
 compressions that thou waitest with a deprecatory smile. 
 Then it is that thou offerest thy gentlemanly arm to un- 
 guarded youth for a pleasant stroll through the City of s 
 Destruction, ° and, as a special favor, introducest him to 
 the bewitcliing Miss Circe, ° and to that model of the 
 hospitable old English gentleman, Mr. Comus.° 
 
 But the Muster and the Cornwallis were not pecuUar 
 to Cambridge. Commencement-day was. Saint Peda- lo 
 gogus was a worthy whose feast could be celebrated by 
 men who quarrelled with minced-pies, and blasphemed 
 custard through the nose. The holiday preserved all the 
 features of an Enghsh fair. Stations were marked out 
 beforehand by the town constables, and distinguished by 15 
 numbered stakes. These were assigned to the different 
 venders of small wares and exhibiters of rarities, whose 
 canvas booths, beginning at the market-place, sometimes 
 half encircled the Common with their jovial embrace. 
 Now all the Jehoiada-boxes° in town were forced to give 20 
 up their rattling deposits of specie, if not through the 
 legitimate orifice, then to the brute force of the hammer. 
 For liither were come all the wonders of the world, making 
 the Arabian Nights seem possible, and which we beheld 
 for half price ; not without mingled emotions, — pleasure 25 
 at the economy, and shame at not paying the more manly 
 fee. Here the mummy unveiled her withered charms, — 
 a more marvellous Ninon, ° still attractive in her three- 
 thousandth year. Here were the Siamese twins°; ah! 
 if all such forced and unnatural unions were made a show 30 
 of ! Here were the flying horses (their supernatural effect 
 
34 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 injured — like that of some poems — by the visibihty of 
 the man who turned the crank), on which, as we tilted at 
 the ring, we felt our shoulders tingle with the accolade ° 
 and heard the chnk of golden spurs at our heels. Are the 
 5 reaUties of hfe ever worth half so much as its cheats ? 
 And are there any feasts half so filhng at the price as those 
 Barmacide° ones spread for us by Imagination? Hither 
 came the Canadian giant, surreptitiously seen, without 
 price, as he ahghted, in broad day, (giants were always 
 
 lo foolish,) at the tavern. Hither came the great horse 
 Columbus, with shoes two inches thick, and more wisely 
 introduced by night. In the trough of the town-pump 
 might be seen the mermaid, its poor monkey's head care- 
 fully sustained above water, to keep it from drowning. 
 
 15 There were dwarfs, also, who danced and sang, and many 
 a proprietor regretted the transaudient properties of 
 canvas, which allowed the frugal pubhc to share in the 
 melody without entering the booth. Is it a slander of 
 J. H.,° who reports that he once saw a deacon, eminent for 
 
 20 psalmody, Ungering near one of those vocal tents, and, 
 with an assumed air of abstraction, furtively drinking in, 
 with unhabitual ears, a song, not secular merely, but with 
 a dash of Hbertinism? The New England proverb says, 
 ''AH deacons are good, but — there's odds in deacons." 
 
 25 On these days Snow became superterranean, and had a 
 stand in the square, and Lewis temperately contended 
 with the stronger fascinations of egg-pop. But space 
 would fail me to make a catalogue of everything. No 
 doubt, Wisdom iilso, as usual, had her quiet booth at the 
 
 30 corner of some street, without entrance-fee, and, even at 
 that rate, got never a customer the whole day long. For 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 35 
 
 the bankrupt afternoon there were peep-shows, at a cent 
 each. 
 
 But all these shows and their showmen are as clean gone 
 now as those of Csesar and Timour° and Napoleon, for 
 which the world paid dearer. They are utterly gone out, s 
 not leaving so much as a snuff behind, — as little thought 
 of now as that John Robins, who was once so considerable 
 a phenomenon as to be esteemed the last great Antichrist 
 and son of perdition by the entire sect of Muggletonians.° 
 Were Commencement what it used to be, I should be lo 
 tempted to take a booth myself, and try an experiment 
 recommended by a satirist of some merit, whose works 
 were long ago dead and (I fear) deedeed° to boot. 
 
 "Menenius, thou who fain wouldst know how calmly men 
 
 can pass 15 
 
 Those biting portraits of themselves, disguised as fox or 
 
 ass, — 
 Go borrow coin enough to buy a full-length psyche-glass, 
 Engage a rather darkish room in some well-sought 
 
 position, 20 
 
 And let the town break out with bills, so much per head 
 
 admission, — 
 Great natural curiosity ! ! The biggest living 
 
 FOOL ! ! 
 
 Arrange your mirror cleverly, before it set a stool, 25 
 
 Admit the public one by one, place each upon the seat. 
 Draw up the curtain, let him look his fill, and then re- 
 treat. 
 Smith mounts and takes a thorough view, then comes 
 
 serenely down, 30 
 
 Goes home and tells his wife the thing is curiously like 
 Brown ; 
 
36 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Brown goes and stares, and tells his wife the wonder's 
 
 core and pith 
 Is that 'tis just the counterpart of that conceited Smith. 
 Life calls us all to such a show : Menenius, trust in me, 
 5 While thou to see thy neighbor smil'st, he does the same 
 
 for thee." 
 
 My dear Storg, would you come to my show, and, in- 
 stead of looking in my glass, insist on taking your money's 
 worth in staring at the exhibitor ? 
 
 lo Not least among the curiosities which the day brought 
 together were some of the graduates, posthumous men, 
 as it were, disentombed from country parishes and dis- 
 trict-schools, but perennial also, in whom freshly survived 
 all the college jokes, and who had no intelUgence later 
 
 15 than their Senior year. These had gathered to eat the 
 College dinner, and to get the Triennial Catalogue (their 
 libro d'oro)° referred to oftener than any volume but the 
 Concordance. Aspiring men they were, certainly, but in 
 a right unworldly way ; this scholastic festival opening a 
 
 20 peaceful path to the ambition which might else have dev- 
 astated mankind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, ° or 
 Genealogies of the Dormouse Family. For since in the 
 academic processions the classes are ranked in the order 
 of their graduation, and he has the best chance at the 
 
 25 dinner who has the fewest teeth to eat it with, so, by 
 degrees, there springs up a competition in longevity, — 
 the prize contended for being the oldest surviving gradu- 
 ateship. This is an office, it is true, without emolument, 
 but having certain advantages, nevertheless. The in- 
 
 3ocumbent, if he come to Commencement, is a prodigious 
 lion, and commonly gets a paragraph in the newspapers 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 37 
 
 once a year with the (fiftieth) last survivor of Washington's 
 Life-Guard. If a clergyman, he is expected to ask a bless- 
 ing and return thanks at the dinner, a function which he 
 performs with centenarian longanimity, as if he reckoned 
 the ordinary life of man to be fivescore years, and that a s 
 grace must be long to reach so far away as heaven. Ac- 
 cordingly, this silent race is watched, on the course of the 
 Catalogue, with an interest worthy of Newmarket; and 
 as star after star rises in the galaxy of death, till one name 
 is left alone, an oasis of life in the stellar desert, it grows lo 
 solemn. The natural feehng is reversed, and it is the 
 sohtary life that becomes sad and monitory, the Styhtes° 
 there on the lonely top of his century-pillar, who has 
 heard the passing-bell of youth, love, friendship, hope, 
 — of everything but immitigable eld. is 
 
 Dr. K.° was President of the University then, a man 
 of genius, but of genius that evaded utilization, — a great 
 water-power, but without rapids, and flowing with too 
 smooth and gentle a current to be set turning wheels and 
 whirling spindles. His was not that restless genius of 20 
 which the man seems to be merely the representative, and 
 which wreaks itself in literature or poHtics, but of that 
 milder sort, quite as genuine, and perhaps of more contem- 
 poraneous value, which is the man, permeating the whole 
 Hfe with placid force, and giving to word, look, and gesture 25 
 a meaning only justifiable by our belief in a reserved 
 power of latent reinforcement. The man of talents pos- 
 sesses them like so many tools, does his job with them, 
 and there an end ; but the man of genius is possessed by 
 it, and it makes him into a book or a Hfe according to its 30 
 whim. Talent takes the existing moulds, and makes its 
 
38 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 castings, better or worse, of richer or baser metal, accord- 
 ing to knack and opportunity ; but genius is always shap- 
 ing new ones, and runs the man in them, so that there is 
 always that human feel in its results which gives us a 
 5 kindred thrill. What it will make, we can only conjecture, 
 contented always with knowing the infinite balance of 
 possibility against wliich it can draw at pleasure. Have 
 you ever seen a man whose check would be honored for a 
 milHon pay liis toll of one cent? and has not that bit of 
 
 lo copper, no bigger than your own, and piled with it by the 
 careless toll-man, given you a tingling vision of what 
 golden bridges he could pass, — into what Elysian regions 
 of taste and enjoyment and culture, barred to the rest of 
 us? Sometliing like it is the impression made by such 
 
 15 characters as K.'s on those who come in contact with them. 
 
 There was that in the soft and rounded (I had almost 
 
 said melting) outlines of his face which reminded one of 
 
 Chaucer. The head had a placid yet dignified droop like 
 
 his. He was an anachronism, fitter to have been Abbot 
 
 20 of Fountains® or Bishop Gohas,° courtier and priest, 
 humorist and lord spiritual, all in one, than for the master- 
 ship of a provincial college, which combined, with its 
 purely scholastic functions, those of accountant and chief 
 of poUce. For keeping books he was incompetent (unless 
 
 25 it were those he borrowed), and the only disci phne he 
 exercised was by the unobtrusive pressure of a gentleman- 
 liness which rendered insubordination to him impossible. 
 But the world always judges a man (and rightly enough, 
 too) by his Httle faults, which he shows a hundred times 
 
 30 a day, rather than by his great virtues, which he discloses 
 perhaps but once in a Hfetime, and to a single person, — 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 39 
 
 nay, in proportion as they are rarer, and he is nobler, is 
 shyer of letting their existence be known at all. He was 
 one of those misplaced persons whose misfortune it is that 
 their Uves overlap two distinct eras, and are already so 
 impregnated with one that they can never be in healthy 5 
 sympathy with the other. Born when the New England 
 clergy were still an establishment and an aristocracy, and 
 when office was almost always for life, and often hereditary, 
 he Uved to be thrown upon a time when avocations of all 
 colors might be shuffled together in the life of one man, 10 
 like a pack of cards, so that you could not prophesy that 
 he who was ordained to-day might not accept a colonelcy 
 of fihbusters to-morrow. Such temperaments as his attach 
 themselves, like barnacles, to what seems permanent ; but 
 presently the good ship Progress weighs anchor, and 15 
 whirls them away from drowsy tropic inlets to arctic 
 waters of unnatural ice. To such crustaceous natures, 
 created to cHng upon the immemorial rock amid softest 
 mosses, comes the bustling Nineteenth Century and says, 
 ''Come, come, bestir yourself and be practical! get out 20 
 of that old shell of yours forthwith!" Alas! to get out 
 of the shell is to die ! 
 
 One of the old travellers in South America tells of fishes 
 that built their nests in trees {piscium et summa hcesit genus 
 ulmo)° and gives a print of the mother fish upon her nest, 25 
 while her mate mounts perpendicularly to her without aid 
 of legs or wings. Life shows plenty of such incongruities 
 between a man's place and his nature, (not so easily got 
 over as by the traveller's undoubting engraver,) and one 
 cannot help fancying that K. was an instance in point. 30 
 He never encountered, one would say, the attraction 
 
40 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 / 
 
 proper to draw out his native force. Certainly, few men 
 who impressed others so strongly, and of whom so many 
 good things are remembered, left less behind them to justify 
 contemporary estimates. He printed nothing, and was, 
 5 perhaps, one of those the electric sparkles of whose brains, 
 discharged naturally and healthily in conversation, refused 
 to pass through the nonconducting medium of the ink 
 stand. His ana° would make a delightful collection. 
 One or two of his official ones will be in place here. Hear- 
 
 loing that Porter's flip (which was exemplary) had too 
 great an attraction for the collegians, he resolved to in- 
 vestigate the matter liimself. Accordingly, entering the 
 old inn one day, he called for a mug of it, and, having drunk 
 it, said, ''And so, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come 
 
 15 to drink your flip, do they?" ''Yes, sir, — sometimes." 
 "Ah, well, I should think they would. Good day, Mr. 
 Porter," and departed, saying notliing more ; for he always 
 wisely allowed for the existence of a certain amount of 
 human nature in ingenuous youth. At another time the 
 
 20 '' Harvard Washington" asked leave to go into Boston to 
 a collation which had been offered them. "Certainly, 
 young gentlemen," said the President, "but have you 
 engaged any one to bring home your muskets?" — the 
 College being responsible for these weapons, which belonged 
 
 25 to the State. Again, when a student came with a physi- 
 cian's certificate, and asked leave of absence, K. granted it 
 
 at once, and then added, "By the way, Mr. , persons 
 
 interested in the relation which exists between states of 
 the atmosphere^ and health have noticed a curious fact 
 
 30 in regard to the chmate of Cambridge, especially within 
 the College limits, — the very small number of deaths in 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 41 
 
 proportion to the cases of dangerous illness." This is 
 told of Judge W.,° himself a wit, and capable of enjojang 
 the humorous delicacy of the reproof. 
 
 Shall I take Brahmin Alcott's° favorite word, and call 
 him a daemonic man ? No, the Latin genius is quite old- s 
 fashioned enough for me, means the same thing, and its 
 derivative geniality expresses, moreover, the base of I^.'s 
 being. How he suggested cloistered repose, and quad- 
 rangles mossy with centurial associations ! How easy he 
 was, and how without creak was every movement of his lo 
 mind ! This life was good enough for him, and the next 
 not too good. The gentleman-like pervaded even his 
 prayers. His were not the manners of a man of the world, 
 nor of a man of the other world either; but both met in 
 him to balance each other in a beautiful equihbrium. 15 
 Praying, he leaned forward upon the pulpit-cushion as 
 for conversation, and seemed to feel himself (without irrev- 
 erence) on terms of friendly, but courteous, familiarity 
 with Heaven. The expression of his face was that of 
 tranquil contentment, and he appeared less to be sup- 20 
 phcating expected mercies than thankful for those already 
 found, — as if he were saying the gratias° in the refectory 
 of the Abbey of Theleme.° Under liim flourished the 
 Harvard Washington Corps, whose gyrating banner, in- 
 scribed Tarn Marti quam Mercurio° {atqui magis Lyceo 25 
 should have been added), on the evening of training-days, 
 was an accurate dynamometer of Willard's punch or 
 Porter's flip. It was they who, after being royally enter- 
 tained by a maiden lady of the town, entered in their 
 orderly book a vote that Miss Blank was a gentleman. 30 
 I see them now, returning from the imminent deadly 
 
42 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 breach of the law of Rechab,° unable to form other than 
 the serpentine Une of beauty, while their officers, brotherly 
 rather then imperious, instead of reprimanding, tearfully 
 embraced the more eccentric wanderers from military 
 5 precision. Under him the Med. Facs.° took their equal 
 place among the learned societies of Europe, numbering 
 among their grateful honorary members Alexander, Em- 
 peror of all the Russians, who (if College legends may be 
 trusted) sent them in return for their diploma a gift of 
 
 lo medals confiscated by the authorities. Under him the 
 College fire-engine was vigilant and active in suppressing 
 any tendency to spontaneous combustion among the Fresh- 
 men, or rushed wildly to imaginary conflagrations, gen- 
 erally in a direction where punch was to be had. All these 
 
 IS useful conductors for the natural electricity of youth, 
 dispersing it or turning it harmlessly into the earth, are 
 taken away now, — wisely or not, is questionable. 
 
 An academic town, in whose atmosphere there is always 
 something antiseptic, seems naturally to draw to itself 
 
 20 certain varieties and to preserve certain humors (in the 
 Ben Jonsonian° sense) of character, — men who came not 
 to study so much as to be studied. At the head-quarters 
 
 of Washington once, and now of the Muses, Uved C ° 
 
 but before the date of these recollections. Here for seven 
 
 25 years (as the law was then) he made his house Ms castle, 
 sunning himself in liis elbow-chair at the front-door, on 
 that seventh day, secure from every arrest but Death's. 
 Here long survived him his turbaned widow, studious 
 only of Spinoza,*^ and refusing to molest the canker-worms 
 
 30 that annually disleaved her elms, because we were all 
 vermicular ahke. She had been a famous beauty once. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 43 
 
 but the canker years had left her leafless, too ; and I used 
 to wonder, as I saw her sitting always alone at her accus- 
 tomed window, whether she were ever \asited by the re- 
 proachful shade of him who (in spite of RosaHnd) died 
 broken-hearted for her in her radiant youth. s 
 
 And this reminds me of J. F., who, also crossed in love, 
 allowed no mortal eye to behold his face for many years. 
 The eremitic instinct is not peculiar to the Thebais,° as 
 many a New England callage can testify ; and it is worthy 
 of consideration that the Romish Church has not forgotten lo 
 this among her other points of intimate contact with 
 human nature. F. became purely vespertinal, never 
 stirring abroad till after dark. He occupied two rooms, 
 migrating from one to the other, as the necessities of house- 
 wifery demanded, thus shunning all sight of womankind, 15 
 and being practically more solitary in his dual apartment 
 than Montaigne's° Dean of St. Hilaire in his single one. 
 When it was requisite that he should put liis signature to 
 any legal instrument, (for he was an anchorite of ample 
 means,) he wrapped liimself in a blanket, allowing nothing 20 
 to be seen but the hand which acted as scribe. What im- 
 pressed us boys more than anything else was the rumor 
 that he had suffered his beard to grow, — such an anti- 
 Sheffieldism° being almost unheard of in those days, and 
 the peculiar ornament of man being associated in our minds 25 
 with nothing more recent than the patriarchs and apostles, 
 whose effigies we were obliged to solace ourselves with 
 weekly in the Family Bible. He came out of his oyster- 
 hood at last, and I knew him well, a kind-hearted man, who 
 gave annual sleigh-rides to the town-paupers, and supplied 30 
 the poor children with school-books. His favorite topic 
 
44 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 of conversation was Eternity, and, like many other worthy 
 persons, he used to fancy that meaning was an affair of 
 aggregation, and that he doubled the intensity of what 
 he said by the sole aid of the multiph cation-table. '^Eter- 
 5 nity !" he used to say, ''it is not a day; it is not a year; 
 it is not a hundred years ; it is not a thousand years ; it is 
 not a miUion years; no, sir," (the sir being thrown in to 
 recall wandering attention,) ''it is not ten milHon years!" 
 and so on, his enthusiasm becoming a mere frenzy when 
 
 lo he got among his sextilUons, till I sometimes wished he had 
 continued in retirement. He used to sit at the open win- 
 dow during thunder-storms, and had a Grecian feeHng 
 about death by lightning. In a certain sense he had his 
 desire, for he died suddenly, — not by fire from heaven, 
 
 IS but by the red flash of apoplexy, leaving his whole estate 
 to charitable uses. 
 
 If K. were out of place as President, that was not P.° 
 as Greek Professor. Who that ever saw him can forget 
 him, in his old age, Uke a lusty winter, frosty but kindly, 
 
 20 with great silver spectacles of the heroic period, such as 
 scarce twelve noses of these degenerate days could bear? 
 He was a natural ceHbate, not dwelhng "Hke the fly in the 
 heart of the apple," but hke a lonely bee rather, abscond- 
 ing himself in Hymettian° flowers, incapable of matri- 
 
 25 mony as a solitary palm-tree. There was, to be sure, 
 a tradition of youthful disappointment, and a touching 
 story which L. told me perhaps confirms it. When 
 
 Mrs. died, a carriage with bhnds drawn followed 
 
 the funeral train ^t some distance, and, when the coffin 
 
 30 had been lowered into the grave, drove hastily away to 
 escape that saddest of earthly sounds, the first rattle of 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 45 
 
 earth upon the hd. It was afterward known that the 
 carriage held a single mourner, — our grim and unde- 
 monstrative Professor. Yet I cannot bring myself to 
 suppose him susceptible to any tender passion after that 
 single lapse in the immaturity of reason. He might have 5 
 joined the Abderites° in singing their mad chorus from the 
 Andromeda ;° but it would have been in deference to the 
 language merely, and with a silent protest against the 
 sentiment. I fancy him arranging liis scrupulous toilet, 
 not for Amaryllis or Nesera," but, like Machiavelli,° for the 10 
 society of his beloved classics. His ears had needed no 
 prophylactic wax to pass the Sirens' isle ;° nay, he would 
 have kept them the wider open, studious of the dialect in 
 which they sang, and perhaps triumphantly detecting the 
 iEolic digamma° in their lay. A thoroughly single man, 15 
 single-minded, single-hearted, buttoning over his single 
 heart a single-breasted surtout, and wearing always a hat 
 of a single fashion, — did he in secret regard the dual 
 number of liis favorite language as a weakness ? The son 
 of an officer of distinction in the Revolutionary War, he 20 
 mounted the pulpit with the erect port of a soldier, and 
 carried his cane more in the fashion of a weapon than a 
 staff, but with the point lowered, in token of surrender to 
 the peaceful proprieties of his calling. Yet sometimes 
 the martial instincts would burst the cerements of black 25 
 coat and clerical neckcloth, as once, when the students 
 had got into a fight upon the training-field, and the Hcen- 
 tious soldiery, furious with rum, had driven them at point 
 of bayonet to the College gates, and even threatened to 
 lift their arms against the Muses' bower. Then, Hkeao 
 Major Goffe at Deerfield, suddenly appeared the gray- 
 
46 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 haired P., all his father resurgent in him, and shouted: 
 " Now, my lads, stand your ground, you're in the right 
 now! Don't let one of them set foot within the College 
 grounds!" Thus he allowed arms to get the better of 
 5 the togaf but raised it, like the Prophet's breeches, into 
 a banner, and carefully ushered resistance with a preamble 
 of infringed right. Fidelity was liis strong characteristic, 
 and burned equably in him through a hfe of eighty-three 
 years. He drilled himself till inflexible habit stood sentinel 
 
 lo before all those postern-weaknesses which temperament 
 leaves unbolted to temptation. A lover of the scholar's 
 herb, yet loving freedom more, and knowing that the 
 animal appetites ever hold one hand behind them for Satan 
 to drop a bribe in, he would never have two cigars in his 
 
 IS house at once, but walked every day to the shop to fetch 
 liis single diurnal solace. Nor would he trust himself with 
 two on Saturdays, preferring (since he could not violate 
 the Sabbath even by that infinitesimal traffic) to depend 
 on Providential ravens, which were seldom wanting in 
 
 20 the shape of some black-coated friend who knew his need, 
 and honored the scruple that occasioned it. He was 
 faithful, also, to his old hats, in which appeared the con- 
 stant service of the antique world, ° and which he preserved 
 forever, piled like a black pagoda under his dressing-table. 
 
 25 No scarecrow was ever the residuary legatee of his beavers, 
 though one of them in any of the neighboring peach- 
 orchards would have been sovereign against an attack of 
 Freshmen. He wore them all in turn, getting through all 
 in the course of the year, like the sun through the signs of 
 
 30 the zodiac, modulating them according to seasons and ce- 
 lestial phenomena, so that never was spider-web or chick- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 47 
 
 weed so sensitive a weather-gauge as they. Nor did his 
 political party find him less loyal. Taking all the tickets, 
 he would seat himself apart, and carefully compare them 
 with the Hst of regular nominations as printed in his Daily 
 Advertiser, before he dropped his ballot in the box. In 5 
 less ambitious moments, it almost seems to me that I 
 would rather have had that slow, conscientious vote of 
 P/s alone, than to have been chosen Alderman of the 
 Ward! 
 
 If you had walked to what was then Sweet Auburn by 10 
 the pleasant Old Road, on some June morning thirty 
 years ago, you would very likely have met two other 
 characteristic persons, both phantasmagoric now, and 
 belonging to the past. Fifty years earlier, the scarlet- 
 coated, rapiered figures of Vassall, Lechmere, Oliver, and 15 
 Brattle° creaked up and down there on red-heeled shoes, 
 Ufting the ceremonious three-cornered hat, and offering 
 the fugacious hospitalities of the snuff-box. They are all 
 shadowy aHke now, not one of your Etruscan Lucumos° 
 or Roman Consuls more so, my dear Storg. First is W., 20 
 his queue slender and tapering, hke the tail of a violet crab, 
 held out horizontally by the high collar of his shepherd's- 
 gray overcoat, whose style was of the latest when he 
 studied at Leyden in his hot youth. The age of cheap 
 clothes sees no more of those faithful old garments, as 25 
 proper to their wearers and as distinctive as the barks of 
 trees, and by long use interpenetrated with their very 
 nature. Nor do we see so many Humors (still in the old 
 sense) now that every man's soul belongs to the PubHc, 
 as when social distinctions were more marked, and men 30 
 felt that their personahties were their castles, in which 
 
48 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 they could intrench themselves against the world. Now- 
 a-days men are shy of letting their true selves be seen, as if 
 in some former hfe they had committed a crime, and were 
 all the time afraid of discovery and arrest in this. For- 
 5 merly they used to insist on your giving the wall to their 
 pecuHarities, and you may still find examples of it in the 
 parson or the doctor of retired villages. One of W.'s 
 oddities was toucliing. A little brook used to run across 
 the street, and the sidewalk was carried over it by a broad 
 
 lo stone. Of course there is no brook now. What use did 
 that little glimpse of a ripple serve, where the children 
 used to launch their chip fleets? W., in going over this 
 stone, which gave a hollow resonance to the tread, had a 
 trick of striking upon it three times with his cane, and 
 
 IS muttering, ''Tom, Tom, Tom!" I used to think he was 
 only mimicking with his voice the sound of the blows, and 
 possibly it was that sound which suggested his thought, 
 for he was remembering a favorite nephew, prematurely 
 dead. Perhaps Tom had sailed his boats there; perhaps 
 
 20 the reverberation under the old man's foot hinted at the 
 hollowness of hfe ; perhaps the fleeting eddies of the water 
 brought to mind the fugaces annos° W., hke P., wore 
 amazing spectacles, fit to transmit no smaller image than 
 the page of mightiest folios of Dioscorides° or Hercules de 
 
 25 Saxonia,° and rising full-disked upon the beholder hke 
 those prodigies of two moons at once, portending change 
 to monarchs. The great collar disallowing any indepen- 
 dent rotation of the head, I remember he used to turn his 
 whole person in otder to bring their foci to bear upon an 
 
 30 object. One can fancy that terrified Nature would have 
 jdelded up her secrets at once, without cross-examination, 
 at their first glare. Through them he had gazed fondly 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 49 
 
 into the great mare's-nest of Junius, ° publishing his ob- 
 servations upon the eggs found therein in a tall octavo. 
 It was he who introduced vaccination to this Western 
 World. Malicious persons disputing his claim to this 
 distinction, he published this advertisement: ''Lost, as 
 gold snuff-box, with the inscription, 'The Jenner° of the 
 Old World to the Jenner of the New.' Whoever shall 
 
 return the same to Dr. shall be suitably rewarded." 
 
 It was never returned. Would the search after it have 
 been as fruitless as that of the alchemist after his equally lo 
 imaginary gold ? Malicious persons persisted in believing 
 the box as visionary as the claim it was meant to buttress 
 with a semblance of reality. He used to stop and say 
 good morning kindly, and pat the shoulder of the blushing 
 school-boy who now, with the fierce snow-storm wildering 15 
 without, sits and remembers sadly those old meetings and 
 partings in the June sunshine. 
 
 Then there was S.,° whose resounding "Haw, haw, haw ! 
 by George!" positively enlarged the income of every 
 dweller in Cambridge. In downright, honest good cheer 20 
 and good neighborhood, it was worth five hundred a year 
 to every one of us. Its jovial thunders cleared the mental 
 air of every sulky cloud. Perpetual childhood dwelt in 
 him, the childhood of his native Southern France, and its 
 fixed air was all the time bubbhng up and sparkling and 25 
 winking in his eyes. It seemed as if his placid old face 
 were only a mask behind which a merry Cupid had am- 
 bushed himself, peeping out all the while, and ready to 
 drop it when the play grew tiresome. Every word he 
 uttered seemed to be liilarious, no matter what the occa- 30 
 sion. If he were sick, and you visited him, if he had met 
 with a misfortune, (and there are few men so wise that 
 
50 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 they can look even at the back of a retiring sorrow with 
 composure,) it was all one ; his great laugh went off as if 
 it were set Uke an alarm-clock, to run down, whether he 
 would or no, at a certain nick. Even after an ordinary 
 5 Good morning ! (especially if to an old pupil, and in 
 French,) the wonderful Haw, haw, haw ! by George ! would 
 burst upon you Unexpectedly, like a salute of artillery on 
 some holiday which you had forgotten. Everytliing was 
 a joke to him, — that the oath of allegiance had been ad- 
 10 ministered to Mm by your grandfather, — that he had 
 taught Prescott Ms first Spamsh (of wMch he was proud), 
 — no matter what. Everything came to Mm marked by 
 Nature Right side up, with care, and he kept it so. The 
 world to him, as to all of us, was Uke a medal, on the ob- 
 is verse of which is stamped the image of Joy, and on the 
 reverse that of Care. S. never took the foolish pains to 
 look at that other side, even if he knew its existence; 
 much less would it have occurred to Mm to turn it into 
 view, and insist that Ms friends should look at it with Mm. 
 2o Nor was tMs a mere outside good-humor ; its source was 
 deeper, in a true Christian kindliness and amenity. Once, 
 when he had been knocked down by a tipsily-driven 
 sleigh, and was urged to prosecute the offenders, "No, 
 no," he said, Ms wounds still fresh, ''young blood! young 
 25 blood ! it must have its way ; I was young myself." Was ! 
 few men come into life so young as S. went out. He 
 landed in Boston (then the front door of America) in '93, 
 and, in honor of the ceremony, had his head powdered 
 afresh, and put on a suit of court-mourning before- he set 
 30 foot on the wharf. My fancy always dressed Mm in that 
 violet silk, and Ms soul certainly wore a full court-suit. 
 What was there ever like Ms bow? It was as if you had 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 51 
 
 received a decoration, and could write yourself gentleman 
 from that day forth. His hat rose, regreeting your own, 
 and, having sailed through the stately curve of the old 
 regime, sank gently back over that placid brain, which 
 harbored no thought less white than the powder which 5 
 covered it. I have sometimes imagined that there was a 
 graduated arc over his head, invisible to other eyes than 
 his, by wliich he meted out to each his rightful share of 
 castorial consideration. I carry in my memory three ex- 
 emplary bows. The first is that of an old beggar, who, 10 
 already carrying in his hand a white hat, the gift of benevo- 
 lence, took off the black one from his head also, and pro- 
 foundly saluted me with both at once, giving me, in return 
 for my alms, a dual benediction, puzzling as a nod from 
 Janus Bifrons.° The second I received from an old 15 
 Cardinal, who was taking his walk just outside the Porta 
 San Giovanni° at Rome. I paid him the courtesy due to 
 his age and rank. Forthwith rose, first, the Hat ; second, 
 the hat of his confessor ; third, that of another priest who 
 attended him ; fourth, the fringed cocked-hat of his coach- 20 
 man ; fifth and sixth, the ditto, ditto, of his two footmen. 
 Here was an investment, indeed; six hundred per cent 
 interest on a single bow! The third bow, worthy to be 
 noted in one's almanac among the other mirabilia° was 
 that of S., in wliich courtesy had mounted to the last round 25 
 of her ladder, — and tried to draw it up after her. 
 
 But the genial veteran is gone even while I am writing 
 this, and I will play Old Mortality no longer. Wandering 
 among these recent graves, my dear friend, we may chance 
 
 upon ; but no, I will not end my sentence. I bid you 30 
 
 heartily farewell ! 
 
A MOOSEHEAD° JOURNAL 
 
 ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG AT THE BAGNI DI 
 LUCCA 
 
 Thursday, llth August. — I knew as little yesterday 
 of the interior of Maine as the least penetrating person 
 knows of the inside of that great social millstone which, 
 driven by the river Time, sets imperatively agoing the 
 
 5 several wheels of our individual acti\ities. Born wliile 
 Maine was still a province of native Massachusetts, I was as 
 much a foreigner to it as yourself, my dear Storg. I had 
 seen many lakes, ranging from that of Virgil's Cum2ean° 
 to that of Scott's Caledonian Lady°; but Moosehead, 
 
 lowitliin two da.ys of me, had never enjoyed the profit of 
 being mirrored in my retina. At the sound of the name, 
 no reminiscential atoms (according to Kenelm Digby's° 
 Theory of Association, — as good as any) stirred and mar- 
 shalled themselves in my brain. The truth is, we think 
 
 isHghtly of Nature's penny shows, and estimate what we 
 see by the cost of the ticket. Empedocles° gave his Ufe 
 for a pit-entrance to /Etna, and no doubt found his account 
 in it. Accordingly, the clean face of Cousin Bull is imaged 
 patronizingly in Lake George, and Loch Lomond glasses 
 
 20 the hurried countenance of Jonathan, diving deeper in the 
 streams of European association (and coming up drier) 
 than any other man. Or is the cause of our not caring to 
 
 62 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 53 
 
 see what is equally within the reach of all our neighbors to 
 be sought in that aristocratic principle so deeply implanted 
 in human nature ? I knew a pauper graduate who always 
 borrowed a black coat, and came to eat the Commence- 
 ment dinner, — not that it was better than the one which 5 
 daily graced the board of the pubHc institution in which 
 he hibernated (so to speak) during the other three hundred 
 and sixty-four daj^s of the year, save in tliis one particular, 
 that none of his eleemosynary fellow-commoners could eat 
 it. If there are unhappy men who wish that they were 10 
 as the Babe Unborn, there are more who would aspire to 
 the lonely distinction of being that other figurative per- 
 sonage, the Oldest Inhabitant. You remember the charm- 
 ing irresolution of our dear Esthwaite, (Hke Macheath° 
 between his two doxies,) di\dded between his theory that 15 
 he is under tliirty, and his pride at being the only one of us 
 who witnessed the September gale and the rejoicings at 
 the Peace ? Nineteen years ago I was walking through the 
 Franconia Notch,° and stopped to chat with a hermit, who 
 fed with gradual logs the unwearied teeth of a saw-mill. 20 
 As the panting steel sht off the slabs of the log, so did the 
 less wiUing machine of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and- 
 down motion, pare away that outward bark of conversa- 
 tion which protects the core, and which, Hke other bark 
 has naturally most to do with the weather, the season, and 25 
 the heat of the day. At length I asked him the best point 
 of view for the Old Man of the Mountain. 
 
 " Dunno, — never see it." 
 
 Too young and too happy either to feel or affect the 
 Juvenahan° indifference, I was sincerely astonished, and 1 30 
 expressed it. 
 
54 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 The log-compelling man attempted no justification, 
 but after a little asked, ''Come from Bawsn?" 
 
 ''Yes" (with peninsular pride). 
 
 ''Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Bawsn." 
 5 "0 yes !" I said, and I thought, — see Boston and die ! 
 see the State-Houses, old and new, the caterpillar wooden 
 bridges crawling with innumerable legs across the flats of 
 Charles ; see the Common, — largest park, doubtless, in 
 the world, — with its files of trees planted as if by a drill- 
 lo sergeant, and then for your nunc dimittis !° 
 
 " I should like, 'awl, I should Uke to stan on Bunker Hill. 
 You've ben there off en, Hkely?" 
 
 "N — o — ^o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of the 
 horn in clear vision at the terminus of this Socratic° per- 
 15 spective. 
 
 "'Awl, my young frien', you've larned neow thet wut a 
 man ki7i see any day for nawtliin', cliildern half price, he 
 never doos see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' vally." 
 
 With this modern instance of a wise saw, I departed, 
 
 20 deeply revolving these things with myself, and convinced 
 
 that, whatever the ratio of population, the average amount 
 
 of human nature to the square mile is the same the world 
 
 over. I thought of it when I saw people upon the Pincian° 
 
 wondering at the Alchemist sun, as if he never burned the 
 
 25 leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles Street. I thought 
 
 of it when I found eyes first discovering at Mont Blanc 
 
 how beautiful snow was. As I walked on, I said to myself, 
 
 There is one exception, wise hermit, — it is just these 
 
 gratis pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, and 
 
 30 wliich we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest for a peep 
 
 at. The divine faculty is to see what everybody can look at. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 65 
 
 While every well-informed man in Europe, from the 
 barber down to the diplomatist, has liis view of the Eastern 
 Question, why should I not go personally down East and 
 see for myself? Why not, hke Tancred,° attempt my own 
 solution of the Mystery of the Orient, — doubly mysteri- 5 
 ous when you begin the two words with capitals? You 
 know my way of doing things, to let them simmer in my 
 mind gently for months, and at last do them impromptu° 
 in a kind of desperation, driven by the Eumenides° of 
 unfulfilled purpose. So, after talldng about Moosehead 10 
 till nobody beHeved me capable of going thither, I found 
 myself at the Eastern Railway station. The only event of 
 the journey hither (I am now at Waterville) was a boy 
 hawking exhilaratingly the last great railroad smash, — 
 thirteen hves lost, — and no doubt devoutly wishing there is 
 had been fifty. Tliis having a mercantile interest in horrors, 
 holding stock, as it were, in murder, misfortune, and pesti- 
 lence, must have an odd effect on the human mind. The 
 birds of ill-omen, at whose sombre flight the rest of the 
 world turn pale, are the ravens wliich bring food to this 20 
 Httle outcast in the wilderness. If tliis lad give thanks for 
 daily bread, it would be curious to inquire what that phrase 
 represents to liis understanding. If there ever be a plum 
 in it, it is Sin or Death that puts it in. Other details of my 
 dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it that I arrived here 25 
 in safety, — in complexion like an Ethiopian serenader 
 half got-up, and so broiled and peppered that I was more 
 like a devilled kidney than anything else I can tliink of. 
 
 10 p. M. — The ci\dl landlord and neat chamber at the 
 " Elmwood House" were very grateful, and after tea I set 30 
 forth to explore the town. It has a good chance of being 
 
56 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 pretty ; but, like most American towns, it is in a hobblede- 
 hoy age, growing yet, and one cannot tell what may happen. 
 A child with great promise of beauty is often spoiled by its 
 second teeth. There is something agreeable in the sense 
 5 of completeness which a walled town gives one. It is 
 entire, hke a crystal, — a work wliich man has succeeded in 
 finishing. I think the human mind pines more or less where 
 ever3^tliing is new, and is better for a diet of stale bread. 
 The number of Americans who \isit the Old World is be- 
 
 lo ginning to afford matter of speculation to observant Euro- 
 peans, and the deep inspirations with which they breathe 
 the air of antiquity, as if their mental lungs had been 
 starved with too thin an atmosphere. For my own part, 
 I never saw a house which I thought old enough to be torn 
 
 IS down. It is too Hke that Scythian° fasliion of knocking old 
 people on the head. I cannot help thinking that the inde- 
 finable something which we call character is cumulative, — 
 that the influence of the same climate, scenery, and asso- 
 ciations for several generations is necessary to its gather- 
 
 2oing head, and that the process is disturbed by continual 
 change of place. The American is nomadic in religion, in 
 ideas, in morals, and leaves his faith and opinions with as 
 much indifference as the house in which he was born. 
 However, we need not bother : Nature takes care not to 
 
 25 leave out of the great heart of society either of its two 
 ventricles of hold-back and go-ahead. 
 
 It seems as if every considerable American town must 
 have its one specimen of everytliing, and so there is a 
 college in Waterville, the buildings of which are three in 
 
 30 number, of brick, and quite up to the average ugHness 
 which seems essential in edifices of this description. Un- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 57 
 
 happily, they do not reach that extreme of ughness where 
 it and beauty come together in the clasp of fascination. 
 We erect handsomer factories for cottons, woollens, and 
 steam-engines, than for doctors, lawyers, and parsons. 
 The truth is, that, till our struggle with nature is over, till 5 
 this shaggy hemisphere is tamed and subjugated, the work- 
 shop will be the college whose degrees will be most valued. 
 Moreover, steam has made travel so easy that the great 
 university of the world is open to all comers, and the old 
 cloister system is faUing astern. Perhaps it is only the 10 
 more needed, and, were I rich, I should like to found a few 
 lazyships in my Alma Mater as a kind of counterpoise. 
 The Anglo-Saxon race has accepted the primal curse as a 
 blessing, has deified work, and would not have thanked 
 Adam for abstaining from the apple. They would have 15 
 dammed the four rivers of Paradise, substituted cotton for 
 fig-leaves among the antediluvian populations, and com- 
 mended man's first disobedience as a wise measure of 
 pohtical economy. But to return to our college. We can- 
 not have fine buildings till we are less in a hurry. We 20 
 snatch an education Hke a meal at a railroad-station. 
 Just in time to make us dyspeptic, the whistle shrieks, and 
 we must rush, or lose our places in the great train of fife. 
 Yet noble architecture is one element of patriotism, and an 
 eminent one of culture, the finer portions of which are 25 
 taken in by unconscious absorption through the pores of 
 the mind from the surrounding atmosphere. I suppose we 
 must wait, for we are a great bivouac as yet rather than a 
 nation, — on the march from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
 — and pitch tents instead of building houses. Our very 30 
 villages seem to be in motion, following westward the be- 
 
58 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 witching music of some Pied Piper of Hamelin.° We still 
 feel the great push toward sundown given to the peoples 
 somewhere in the gray dawn of history. The cUff-swaUow 
 alone of all animated nature emigrates eastward. 
 
 5 Friday, I2th. — The coach leaves Waterville at five 
 o'clock in the morning, and one must breakfast in the dark 
 at a quarter past four, because a train starts at twenty 
 minutes before fi^^e, — the passengers by both convey- 
 ances being pastured gregariously. So one must be up at 
 
 lo half past three. The primary geological formations con- 
 tain no trace of man, and it seems to me that these eocene 
 periods of the day are not fitted for sustaining the human 
 forms of Ufe. One of the Fathers held that the sun was 
 created to be worshipped at his rising by the Gentiles. 
 
 IS The more reason that Christians (except, perhaps, early 
 Christians) should abstain from these heathenish cere- 
 monials. As one arri\'ing by an early train is welcomed 
 by a drowsy maid with the sleep scarce brushed out of her 
 hair, and finds empty grates and polished mahogany, 
 
 20 on whose arid plains the pioneers of breakfast have not 
 yet encamped, so a person waked thus unseasonably is 
 sent into the world before his faculties are up and dressed 
 to serve him. It might have been for this reason that 
 my stomach resented for several hours a piece of fried 
 
 25 beefsteak which I forced upon it, or, more properly speak- 
 ing, a piece of that leathern conveniency which in these 
 regions assumes the name. You will find it as hard to 
 beheve, my d^ar Storg, as that quarrel of the Sorbonists,° 
 whether one should say ego amaf or no, that the use of the 
 
 30 gridiron is unknown hereabout, and so near a river named 
 after St. Lawrence, too ! 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 59 
 
 To-day has been the hottest day of the season, yet our 
 drive has not been unpleasant. For a considerable dis- 
 tance we followed the course of the Sebasticook River, a 
 pretty stream with alternations of dark brown pools and 
 wine-colored rapids. On each side of the road the lands 
 had been cleared, and Httle one-story farm-houses were 
 scattered at intervals. But the stumps still held out in 
 most of the fields, and the tangled wilderness closed in 
 behind, striped here and there \AT.th the sUm white trunks 
 of the elm. As yet only the edges of the great forest have lo 
 been nibbled awaj^ Sometimes a root-fence stretched up 
 its bleaching antlers, like the trophies of a giant hunter. 
 Now and then the houses thickened into an unsocial-look- 
 ing village, and we drove up to the grocery to leave and take 
 a mail-bag, stopping again presently to water the horses at 15 
 some palhd httle tavern, whose one red-curtained eye (the 
 bar-room) had been put out by the inexorable thrust of 
 Maine Law. Had Shenstone° travelled this road, he 
 would never have written that famous stanza of his ; had 
 Johnson, he would never have quoted it. They are to real 20 
 inns as the skull of Yorick° to Ms face. Where these 
 villages occurred at a distance from the river, it was diffi- 
 cult to account for them. On the river-bank, a saw-mill 
 or a tannery served as a logical premise, and saved them 
 from total inconsequentiahty. As we trailed along, at the 25 
 rate of about four miles an hour, it was discovered that one 
 of our mail-bags was missing. */ Guess somebody'll pick 
 it up," said the driver coolly ; " 't any rate, likely there's 
 nothin' in it." Who knows how long it took some Elam 
 D. or Zebulon K. to compose the missive intrusted to that 30 
 vagrant bag, and how much longer to persuade Pamela 
 
60 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Grace or Sophronia Melissa that it had really and truly 
 been wiitten ? The discovery of our loss was made by a 
 tall man who sat next to me on the top of the coach, 
 every one of whose senses seemed to be prosecuting its 
 5 several investigation as we went along. Presently, sniffing 
 gently, he remarked : " Tears to me's though I smelt 
 sunthin'. Ain't the aix het, think?" The driver pulled 
 up, and, sure enough, the off fore-wheel was found to be 
 smoking. In three minutes he had snatched a rail from 
 
 lo the fence, made a lever, raised the coach, and taken off the 
 wheel, bathing the hot axle and box with water from the 
 river. It was a pretty spot, and I was not sorry to lie under 
 a beech-tree (Tityrus-hke,° meditating over my pipe) and 
 watch the operations of the fire-annihilator. I could not 
 
 15 help contrasting the ready helpfulness of our driver, all 
 of whose wits were about him, current, and redeemable 
 in the specie of action on emergency, with an incident of 
 travel in Italy, where, under a somewhat similar stress of 
 circumstances, our vetturino° had nothing for it but to dash 
 
 20 his hat on the ground and call on Sant' Antonio, the ItaUan 
 Hercules. 
 
 There being four passengers for the Lake, a vehicle 
 called a mud-wagon was detailed at Newport for our ac- 
 commodation. In this we jolted and rattled along at a 
 
 25 hvelier pace than in the coach. As we got farther north, 
 the country (especially the hills) gave evidence of longer 
 cultivation. About the thriving town of Dexter we saw 
 fine farms and crops. The houses, too, became prettier; 
 hop-vines were trained about the doors, and hung their 
 
 30 clustering thyrsi over the open windows. A kind of wild 
 rose (called by the country folk the primrose) and asters 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 61 
 
 were planted about the door-yards^ and orchards, com- 
 monly of natural fruit, added to the pleasant home-look. 
 But everywhere we could see that the war between the 
 white man and the forest was still fierce, and that it would 
 be a long while yet before the axe was buried. The haying 5 
 being over, fires blazed or smouldered against the stumps 
 in the fields, and the blue smoke widened slowly upward 
 through the quiet August atmosphere. It seemed to me 
 that I could hear a sigh now and then from the immemorial 
 pines, as they stood watching these camp-fires of the in- 10 
 exorable invader. Evening set in, and, as we crunched 
 and crawled up the long gravelly hills, I sometimes began 
 to fancy that Nature had forgotten to make the correspond- 
 ing descent on the other side. But erelong we were rushing 
 down at full speed ; and, inspired by the dactylic beat of 15 
 the horses' hoofs, I essayed to repeat the opening fines of 
 Evangeline. At the moment I was beginning, we plunged 
 into a hollow, where the soft clay had been overcome by a 
 road of unhewn logs. I got through one line to this cor- 
 duroj'' accompaniment, somewhat as a country choir 20 
 stretches a short metre on the Pro crust ean° rack of a long- 
 drawn tune. The result was Hke this : — 
 
 " Thihis ihis thehe fohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhur- 
 muring pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks ! " 
 
 At a quarter past eleven, p.m., we reached Greenville, 25 
 (a little ^dllage which looks as if it had dripped down from 
 the hills, and settled in the hollow at the foot of the lake,) 
 having accompfished seventy-two miles in eighteen hours. 
 The tavern was totally extinguished. The driver rapped 
 upon the bar-room window, and after a while we saw 30 
 
62 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 heat-lightnings of unsuccessful matches followed by a low 
 grumble of vocal thunder, which I am afraid took the form 
 of imprecation. Presently there was a great success, and 
 the steady blur of lighted tallow succeeded the fugitive 
 5 brilHance of the pine. A hostler fumbled the door open, and 
 stood staring at but not seeing us, with the sleep sticking 
 out all over him. We at last contrived to launch him, 
 more Hke an insensible missile than an intelligent or intelli- 
 gible being, at the slumbering landlord, who came out 
 
 lo wide-awake, and welcomed us as so many half-dollars, — ■ 
 twenty-five cents each for bed, ditto breakfast. Shen- 
 stone, Shenstone !° The only roost was in the garret, 
 which had been made into a single room, and contained 
 eleven double-beds, ranged along the walls. It was like 
 
 15 sleeping in a hospital. However, nice customs curtsy to 
 eighteen-hour rides, and we slept. 
 
 Saturday, ISth. — Tliis morning I performed my toilet in 
 the bar-room, where there was an abundant supply of 
 water, and a halo of interested spectators. After a suffi- 
 
 20 cient breakfast, we embarked on the httle steamer Moose- 
 head, and were soon throbbing up the lake. The boat, it 
 appeared, had been chartered by a party, this not being 
 one of her regular trips. Accordingly we were mulcted 
 in twice the usual fee, the philosophy of which I could not 
 
 25 understand. However, it always comes easier to us to 
 comprehend why we receive than why we pay. I d-are say 
 it was quite clear to the captain. There were three or 
 four clearings on the western shore; but after passing 
 these, the lake became wholly primeval, and looked to us 
 
 30 as it did to the first adventurous Frenchman who paddled 
 across it. Sometimes a cleared point would be pink with 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 63 
 
 the blossoming willow-herb, ''a cheap and excellent sub- 
 stitute" for heather, and, like all such, not quite so good 
 as the real thing. On all sides rose deep-blue mountains, 
 of remarkably graceful outhne, and more fortunate than 
 common in their names. There were the Big and Little 5 
 Squaw, the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was 
 debated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (perhaps more 
 useful as an intellectual exercise than the assured vision 
 would have been,) and presently Mount Kineo rose ab- 
 ruptly before us, in shape not unUke the island of Capri. ° 10 
 Mountains are called great natural features, and why they 
 should not retain their names long enough for them also 
 to become naturalized, it is hard to say. Why should 
 every new surveyor rechristen them with the gubernatorial 
 patronymics of the current year? They are geological 15 
 noses, and, as they are aquiUne or pug, indicate terrestrial 
 idiosyncrasies. A cosmical physiognomist, after a glance 
 at them, will draw no vague inference as to the character 
 of the country. The word nose is no better than any other 
 word ; but since the organ has got that name, it is conven- 20 
 lent to keep it. Suppose we had to label our facial prom- 
 inences every season with the name of our provincial 
 governor, how should we Uke it? If the old names have 
 no other meaning, they have that of age; and, after all 
 meaning is a plant of slow growth, as every reader of Shake- 25 
 speare knows. It is well enough to call mountains after 
 their discoverers, for Nature has a knack of throwing 
 doublets, and somehow contrives it that discoverers have 
 good names. Pike's Peak is a curious hit in this way. 
 But these surveyors' names have no natural stick in them. 30 
 They remind one of the epithets of poet-asters, which peel 
 
64 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 off like a badly gummed postage-stamp. The oarly settlers 
 did better, and there is something pleasant in the sound of 
 Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Haystack. 
 
 "I love those names 
 5 Wherewith the exiled farmer tames 
 
 Nature down to companionship 
 
 With his old world's more homely mood, 
 And strives the shaggy wild to clip 
 With arms of familiar habitude." 
 
 10 It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount Hitchcock 
 may sound as well hereafter as Hellespont and Pelopon- 
 nesus, ° when the heroes, their namesakes, have become 
 mjrthic with antiquity. But that is to look forward a great 
 way. I am no fanatic for Indian nomenclature, — the 
 
 15 name of my native district having been Pigsgusset, — 
 but let us at least agree on names for ten years. 
 
 There were a couple of loggers on board, in red flannel 
 shirts, and with rifles. They were the first I had seen, and 
 I was interested in their appearance. They were tall, 
 
 2o well-knit men, straight as Robin Hood, and with a quiet, 
 self-contained look that pleased me. I fell into talk with 
 one of them. 
 
 *'Is there a good market for the farmers here in the 
 woods?" I asked. 
 
 25 ''None better. They can sell what they raise at their 
 doors, and for the best of prices. The lumberers want it 
 all, and more." 
 
 ''It must be^a lonely hfe. But then we all have to pay 
 more or less life for a living." 
 
 30 " Well, it is lonesome. Shouldn't Hke it. After all, the 
 best crop a man can raise is a good crop of society. We 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS &5 
 
 don't live none too long, anyhow ; and without society a 
 fellow couldn't tell more'n half the time whether he was 
 alive or not." 
 
 This speech gave me a ghmpse into the hfe of the lum- 
 berers' camp. It was plain that there a man would soon 5 
 find out how much ahve he was, — there he could learn to 
 estimate his quality, weighed in the nicest self-adjusting 
 balance. The best arm at the axe or the paddle, the surest 
 eye for a road or for the weak point of a jam, the steadiest 
 foot upon the squirming log, the most persuasive voice to 10 
 the tugging oxen, — all these things are rapidly settled, 
 and so an aristocracy is evolved from this democracy of the 
 woods, for good old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, and 
 with her either Canning or Kenning °means King. 
 
 A string of five loons was flying back and forth in long, 15 
 irregular zigzags, uttering at intervals their wild, tremulous 
 cry, which always seems far away, like the last faint pulse of 
 echo dying among the hills, and which is one of those few 
 sounds that, instead of disturbing solitude, only deepen 
 and confirm it. On our inland ponds they are usually seen 20 
 in pairs, and I asked if it were common to meet five together. 
 My question was answered by a queer-looking old man, 
 chiefly remarkable for a pair of enormous cowhide boots, 
 over which large blue trousers of frocking strove in vain to 
 crowd themselves. 25 
 
 '^Walil, 'tain't ushil," said he, ^'and it's called a sign o' 
 rain comin', that is." 
 
 ''Do you think it will rain?" 
 
 With the caution of a veteran auspex° he evaded a direct 
 reply, *'Wahl, they du say it's a sign o' rain comin'," 30 
 said he. 
 
66 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 I discovered afterward that my interlocutor was Uncle 
 Zeb. Formerly, every New England town had its repre- 
 sentative uncle. He was not a pawnbroker, but some 
 elderly man who, for want of more defined family ties, 
 
 5 had gradually assumed this avuncular relation to the com- 
 munity, inhabiting the border-land between respectabiUty 
 and the almshouse, with no regular calling, but worldng 
 at haying, wood-sawing, whitewashing, associated with the 
 demise of pigs and the ailments of cattle, and possessing as 
 
 lo much patriotism as might be implied in a devoted attach- 
 ment to " New England" — with a good deal of sugar and 
 very Uttle water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good specimen of 
 this palaeozoic class, extinct among us for the most part, 
 or surviving, hke the Dodo,° in the Botany Bays of society.' 
 
 15 He was ready to contribute (somewhat muddily) to all 
 general conversation ; but his chief topics were his boots 
 and the 'Roostick° war. Upon the lowlands and levels of 
 ordinary palaver he would make rapid and unlooked-for 
 incursions ; but, provision faihng, he would retreat to these 
 
 20 two fastnesses, whence it was impossible to dislodge him, 
 and to which he knew innumerable passes and short cuts 
 quite beyond the conjecture of common woodcraft. His 
 mind opened naturally to these two subjects, like a book to 
 some favorite passage. As the ear accustoms itself to any 
 
 25 sound recurring regularly, such as the ticking of a clock, 
 and, without a conscious effort of attention, takes no 
 impression from it whatever, so does the mind find a natural 
 safeguard against this pendulum species of discourse, and 
 performs its duties in the parliament by an unconscious re- 
 
 30 flex action, like the beating of the heart or the movement of 
 the lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our Uncle would 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 67 
 
 put the heel of one boot upon the toe of the other, to bring it 
 within point-blank range, and say, "Wahl, I stump the 
 Devil himself to make that 'ere boot hurt my foot," leaving 
 us in doubt whether it were the virtue of the foot or its 
 case wMch set at naught the wiles of the adversary ; or, 5 
 looking up suddenly, he would exclaim, ''Wahl, we eat 
 some beans to the 'Roostick war, I tell you!''' When his 
 poor old clay was wet with gin, his thoughts and words 
 acquired a rank flavor from it, as from too strong a fertihzer. 
 At such times, too, his fancy commonly reverted to a pre- 10 
 historic period of his Hfe, when he singly had settled all the 
 surrounding country, subdued the Injuns and other wild 
 animals, and named all the towns. 
 
 We talked of the winter-camps and the Ufe there. '' The 
 best thing is," said our Uncle, '' to hear a log squeal thru 15 
 the snow. Git a good, cole, frosty mornin', in February say, 
 an' take an' hitch the critters on to a log that'll scale seven 
 thousan', an' it'll squeal as potty as an'thin' you ever 
 hearn, I tell you J' 
 
 A pause. 20 
 
 ''Lessee, — seen Cal Hutchins lately?" 
 
 ''No." 
 
 "Seems to me's though I hedn't seen Cal sence the 
 'Roostick war. Wahl," &c., &c. 
 
 Another pause. 25 
 
 "To look at them boots you'd think they was too large; 
 but kind o' git your foot into 'em and they're as easy's a 
 glove." (I observed that he never seemed really to get his 
 foot in, — there was always a quahfjdng kind 0'.) "Wahl, 
 my foot can play in 'em like a young hedgehog." 30 
 
 By this time we had arrived at Kineo, — a flourishing 
 
68 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 village of one house, the tavern kept by 'Squire Barrows. 
 The 'Squire is a large, hearty man, with a voice as clear and 
 strong as a northwest wind, and a great laugh suitable to it. 
 His table is neat and well supplied, and he waits upon it 
 5 himself in the good old landlordly fashion. One may be 
 much better off here, to my thinking, than in one of those 
 gigantic Columbaria® which are foisted upon us patient 
 Americans for hotels, and where one is packed away in a 
 pigeon-hole so near the heavens that, if the comet should 
 
 lo flirt its tail, (no unhkely thing in the month of flies,) one 
 would be in danger of being brushed away. Here one 
 does not pay his diurnal three dollars for an undivided 
 five-hundredth part of the pleasure of looking at gilt 
 gingerbread. Here one's relations are with the monarch 
 
 15 liimself, and one is not obhged to wait the slow leisure of 
 those ^'attentive clerks" whose praises are sung by thank- 
 ful deadheads, and to whom the slave who pays may feel 
 as much gratitude as might thrill the heart of a brown- 
 paper parcel toward the express-man who labels it and 
 
 20 chucks it under Ms counter. 
 
 Sunday, 14:th. — The loons were right. About midnight 
 it began to rain in earnest, and did not hold up till about 
 ten o'clock tliis morning. ''This is a Maine dew," said a 
 shaggy woodman cheerily, as he shook the water out of his 
 
 25 wide-awake, "if it don't look out sharp, it'll begin to rain 
 afore it thinks on't." The day was mostly spent within 
 doors; but I found good and intelhgent society. We 
 should have to be shipwrecked on Juan Fernandez" not to 
 find men who knew more than we. In these travelHng 
 
 30 encounters one is thrown upon his own resources, and is 
 worth just what he carries about him. The social currency 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 69 
 
 of home, the smooth-worn coin which passes freely among 
 friends and neighbors, is of no account. We are thrown 
 back upon the old system of barter ; and, even with savages, 
 we bring away only as much of the wild wealth of the woods 
 as we carry beads of thought and experience, strung one by 5 
 one in painful years, to pay for them with. A useful old 
 jackknife will buy more than the daintiest Louis Quinze° 
 paper-folder fresh from Paris. Perhaps the kind of intelli- 
 gence one gets in these out-of-the-way places is the best, 
 — where one takes a fresh man after breakfast instead of 10 
 the damp morning paper, and where the magnetic tele- 
 graph of human sympathy flashes swift news from brain 
 to brain. 
 
 Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weather can be 
 discussed. The augury from the flight of birds is favor- 15 
 able, — the loons no longer prophesying rain. The wind 
 also is hauling round to the right quarter, according to 
 some, to the wrong, if we are to beheve others. Each 
 man has his private barometer of hope, the mercury in 
 which is more or less sensitive, and the opinion vibrant 20 
 with its rise or fall. Mine has an index which can be 
 moved mechanicallj^ I fixed it at set fair, and resigned 
 myself. I read an old volume of the Patent-Office Report 
 on Agriculture, and stored away a beautiful pile of facts 
 and observations for future use, which the current of 25 
 occupation, at its first freshet, would sweep quietly off to 
 blank obUvion. Practical appHcation is the only mordant 
 which will set things in the memory. Study, without it, is 
 gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual 
 bread. One learns more metaphysics from a single tempta- 30 
 tion than from all the philosophers. It is curious, though, 
 
70 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we 
 make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being 
 left alone with so much as our own minds. I have seen a 
 sensible man study a stale newspaper in a country tavern, 
 
 5 and husband it as he would an old shoe on a raft after ship- 
 wreck. Wliy not try a bit of hibernation ? There are few 
 brains that would not be better for living on their own fat 
 a little while. With these reflections, I, notwithstanding, 
 spent the afternoon over my Report. If our own experi- 
 
 lo ence is of so httle use to us, what a dolt is he who recom- 
 mends to man or nation the experience of others ! Like the 
 mantle in the old ballad, it is always too short or too long, 
 and exposes or trips us up. ''Keep out of that candle," 
 says old Father Miller, "or you'll get a singeing." "Pooh, 
 
 15 pooh, father, I've been dipped in the new asbestos prepara- 
 tion," and frozz ! it is all over with young Jlopeful. How 
 many warnings have been drawn from Pretorian bands, 
 and Janizaries, and Mamelukes,° to make Napoleon III. 
 impossible in 1851 ! I found myself thinking the same 
 
 20 thoughts over again, when we walked later on the beach 
 and picked up pebbles. The old time-ocean throws upon 
 its shores just such rounded and pohshed results of the 
 eternal turmoil, but we only see the beauty of those we 
 have got the headache in stooping for ourselves, and won- 
 
 25 der at the dull brown bits of common stone with which our 
 comrades have stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this little 
 fable came of it. 
 
 ^ DOCTOR LOBSTER 
 
 A PERCH, who had the toothache, once 
 Thus moaned, like any human dunce : 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 71 
 
 "Why must great souls exhaust so soon 
 
 Life's thin and unsubstantial boon? 
 
 Existence on such sculpin terms, — 
 
 Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms, — • 
 
 What is it all but dross to me, S 
 
 Whose nature craves a larger sea ; 
 
 Whose inches, six from head to tail, 
 
 Enclose the spirit of a whale ; 
 
 Who, if great baits were still to win, 
 
 By watchful eye and fearless fin lo 
 
 Might with the Zodiac's awful twain 
 
 Room for a third immortal gain? 
 
 Better the crowd's unthinking plan, — 
 
 The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan? 
 
 O Death, thou ever roaming shark, ig 
 
 Ingulf me in eternal dark !" 
 
 The speech was cut in two by flight : 
 
 A real shark had come in sight ; 
 
 No metaphoric monster, one 
 
 It soothes despair to call upon, 20 
 
 But stealthy, sidelong, grim, I wis, 
 
 A bit of downright Nemesis ; 
 
 While it recovered from the shock. 
 
 Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock : 
 
 This was an ancient lobster's house, 25 
 
 A lobster of prodigious nous, 
 
 So old that barnacles had spread 
 
 Their white encampments o'er its head, 
 
 And of experience so stupend, 
 
 His claws were blunted at the end, 30 
 
 Turning hfe's iron pages o'er. 
 
 That shut and can be oped no more. 
 
 Stretching a hospitable claw. 
 
72 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 **At once," said he, "the point I saw; 
 My dear young friend, your case I rue, 
 Your great-great-grandfather I knew ; 
 He was a tried and tender friend 
 S I know, — I ate him in the end : 
 
 In this vile sea a pilgrim long. 
 Still my sight's good, my memory strong; 
 The only sign that age is near 
 Is a slight deafness in this ear ; 
 
 lo I understand your ease as well 
 
 As this my old familiar shell ; 
 This sorrow's a new-fangled notion, 
 Come in since first I knew the ocean ; 
 We had no radicals, nor crimes, 
 
 15 Nor lobster-pots, in good old times ; 
 
 Your traps and nets and hooks we owe 
 To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; 
 I say to all my sons and daughters, 
 Shun Red Republican hot waters ; 
 
 20 No lobster ever cast his lot 
 
 Among the reds, but went to pot : 
 Your trouble's in the jaw, you said? 
 Come, let me just nip off your head. 
 And, when a new one comes, the pain 
 
 25 Will never trouble you again : 
 
 Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law. 
 Four times I've lost this starboard claw ; 
 And still, erelong, another grew. 
 Good as the old, — and better too !" 
 
 30 The perch consented, and next day 
 
 An osprey, marketing that way. 
 Picked up a fish without a head. 
 Floating with belly up, stone dead. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 73 
 
 Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws, 
 And sauce for goose is gander's sauce ; 
 But perch's heads aren't lobster's claws. 
 
 Monday, 15th. — The morning was fine, and we were 
 called at four o'clock. At the moment my door was 5 
 knocked at, I was mounting a giraffe with that charming 
 7iil admirari° which characterizes dreams, to visit Prester 
 John.° Rat-tat-tat-tat ! upon my door and upon the horn 
 gate of dreams also. I remarked to my skowhegan (the 
 Tatar for giraffe-driver) that I was quite sure the animal 10 
 had the raps, a common disease among them, for I heard a 
 queer knocking noise inside him. It is the sound of his 
 joints, Tambourgi! (an Oriental term of reverence,) 
 and proves him to be of the race of El Keirat. Rat-tat- 
 tat-too ! and I lost my dinner at the Prester's, embarking 15 
 for a voyage to the Northwest Carry instead. Never use 
 the word canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish to retain your 
 self-respect. Birch is the term among us backwoodsmen, 
 I never knew it till yesterday ; but, like a true philosopher, 
 I made it appear as if I had been intimate with it from' 20 
 childhood. The rapidity with which the human mind 
 levels itself to the standard around it gives us the most 
 pertinent warning as to the company we keep. It is as 
 hard for most characters to stay at their own average point 
 in all companies, as for a thermometer to say 65° for twenty- 2.5 
 four hours together. I like this in our friend Johannes 
 Tauras, that he carries everywhere and maintains his insu- 
 lar temperature, and will have everything accommodate 
 itself to that. Shall I confess that this morning I would 
 
74 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 rather have broken the moral law, than have endangered 
 the equipoise of the birch by my awkwardness? that 
 I should have been prouder of a compliment to my paddling 
 than to have had both my guides suppose me the author of 
 5 Hamlet ? Well, Cardinal RicheHeu° used to jump over 
 chairs. 
 
 We were to paddle about twenty miles, but we made it 
 rather more by crossing and recrossing the lake. Twice 
 we landed, — once at a camp, where we found the cook 
 
 lo alone, baldng bread and gingerbread. Monsieur Soyer 
 would have been startled a httle by this shaggy professor, 
 — this Pre-Raphaelite° of cookery. He represented the 
 
 ' saloeratus° period of the art, and his bread was of a brilhant 
 yellow, Hke those cakes tinged with saffron, which hold 
 
 15 out so long against time and the flies in little water-side 
 shops of seaport towns, — dingy extremities of trade fit to 
 moulder on Lethe° wharf. His water was better, squeezed 
 out of ice-cold granite in the neighboring mountains, and 
 sent through subterranean ducts to sparkle up by the door 
 
 20 of the camp. 
 
 *' There's notliin' so sweet an' hulsome as your real spring 
 water," said Uncle Zeb, '^git it pure. But it's dreffle hard 
 to git it that ain't got sunthin' the matter of it. Sno^- 
 water'U burn a man's inside out, — I larned that to the 
 
 25 'Roostick war, — and the snow lays terrible long on some 
 o' thes'ere hills. Me an' Eb Stiles was up old Ktahdn 
 once jest about this time o' year, an' we come acrost a kind 
 o' holler Hke, as full o' snow as your stockin's full o' your 
 foot. / see it fust, an' took an' rammed a settin'-pole ; 
 
 30 wahl, it was all o' twenty foot into 't, an' couldn't fin' no 
 bottom. I dunno as there's snow-water enough in this to 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 75 
 
 do no hurt. lon't somehow seem to tliiiik that real 
 spring-water's ) plenty as it used to be." And Uncle 
 Zeb, with perhtps a little over-refinement of scrupulosity, 
 appHed his lips to the Ethiop ones of a bottle of raw gin, 
 with a kiss that drew out its very soul, — a basia° that 5 
 Secundus° might have sung. He must have been a won- 
 derful judge of water, for he analyzed this, and detected 
 its latent snow simply by his eye, and without the clumsy 
 process of tasting. I could not help thinking that he had 
 made the desert his dwelling-place chiefly in order to enjoy 10 
 the ministrations of tliis one fair spirit unmolested. 
 
 We pushed on. Little islands loomed trembling between 
 sky and water, like hanging gardens. Gradually the filmy 
 trees defined themselves, the aerial enchantment lost its 
 potency, and we came up with common prose islands that 15 
 had so late been magical and poetic. The old story of the 
 attained and unattained. About noon we reached the 
 head of the lake, and took possession of a deserted wongen° 
 in wliich to cook and eat our dinner. No Jew, I am sure, 
 can have a more thorough dishke of salt pork than I have 20 
 in a normal state, yet I had already eaten it raw with 
 hard bread for lunch, and reUshed it keenly. We soon had 
 our tea-kettle over the fire, and before long the cover was 
 chattering with the escaping steam, which had thus vainly 
 begged of all men to be saddled and bridled, till James Watt 25 
 one day happened to overhear it. One of our guides shot 
 three Canada grouse, and these were turned slowly between 
 the fire and a bit of salt pork, which dropped fatness upon 
 them as it fried. Although my fingers were certainly not 
 made before knives and forks, yet they served as a con- 30 
 venient substitute for those more ancient inventions. We 
 
76 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 sat round, Turk-fashion, and ate thankfully, while a party 
 of aborigines of the Mosquito tribe, who had camped in the 
 wongen before we arrived, dined upon us. I do not know 
 what the British Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts 
 
 s to ; but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these blood- 
 thirsty savages, I no longer wondered that the classic 
 Everett had been stung into a wiUingness for war on the 
 question. 
 
 ''This 'ere'd be about a complete place for a camp, ef 
 
 lo there was on'y a spring o' sweet water handy. Frizzled 
 pork goes wal, don't it ? Yes, an' sets wal, too," said Uncle 
 Zeb, and he again tilted his bottle, which rose nearer and 
 nearer to an angle of forty-five at every gurgle. He then 
 broached a curious dietetic theory: "The reason we take 
 
 IS salt pork along is cos it packs handy : you git the greatest 
 
 amount o' board in the smallest compass, — let alone that 
 
 it's more nourisliin' than an'thin' else. It kind o' don't 
 
 digest so quick, but stays by ye, anourishin' ye all the while. 
 
 "A feller can Uve wal on frizzled pork an' good spring- 
 
 20 water, git it good. To the 'Roostick war we didn't askior 
 nothin' better, — • on'y beans." (Tilt, tilt, gurgle, gurgle.) 
 Then, with an apparent feeling of inconsistency, "But 
 then, come to git used to a particular kind o' spring- water, 
 an' it makes a feller hard to suit. Most all sorts o' water 
 
 25 taste kind o' insipid away from home. Now, I've gut a 
 spring to my place that's as sweet — wahl, it's as sweet as 
 maple sap. A feller acts about water jest as he does about 
 a pair o' boots, It's all on it in gittin' wonted. Now, 
 them boots," &c., &c. (Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, smack!) 
 
 30 All this while he was packing away the remains of the 
 pork and hard bread in two large firkins. This accom- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 77 
 
 plished, we reembarked, our uncle on his way to the birch 
 essaying a kind of song in four or five parts, of which the 
 words were hilarious and the tune profoundly melancholy, 
 and which was finished, and the rest of his voice apparently 
 jerked out of him in one sharp falsetto note, by his tripping s 
 over the root of a tree. We paddled a short distance up a 
 brook wliich came into the lake smoothly through a little 
 meadow not far off. We soon reached the Northwest 
 Carry, and our guide, pointing through the woods, said : 
 ''That's the Cannydy road. Yoii can travel that clearn lo 
 to Kebeck, a hundred an' twenty mile," — a privilege of 
 which I respectfully dechned to avail myself. The offer, 
 however, remains open to the pubHc. The Carry is called 
 two miles ; but this is the estimate of somebody who had 
 notliing to lug. I had a headache and all my baggage, 15 
 which, with a traveller's instinct, I had brought with me. 
 (P. S. — I did not even take the keys out of my pocket, 
 and both my bags were wet through before I came back.) 
 My estimate of the distance is eighteen thousand six 
 hundred and seventy-four miles and three quarters, — the 20 
 fraction being the part left to be travelled after one of my 
 companions most kindly insisted on reUeving me of my 
 heaviest bag. I know very well that the ancient Roman 
 soldiers used to carry sixty pounds' weight, and all that ; 
 but I am not, and never shall be, an ancient Roman soldier, 25 
 — no, not even in the miraculous Thundering Legion.° 
 Uncle Zeb slung the two provender firkins across his shoul- 
 der, and trudged along, grumbling that ''he never see sech 
 a contrairy pair as them." He had begun upon a second 
 bottle of his "particular kind o' spring- water," and, at 30 
 every rest, the gurgle of tliis peripatetic fountain might be 
 
78 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 heard, followed by a smack, a fragment of mosaic song, or a 
 confused clatter with the cowhide boots, being an arbitrary 
 symbol, intended to represent the festive dance. Christian's 
 pack gave him not half so much trouble as the firkins gave 
 s Uncle Zeb. It grew harder and harder to sHng them, and 
 with every fresh gulp of the Batavian° ehxir, they got 
 heavier. Or rather, the truth was, that his hat grew 
 heavier, in wliich he was carrying on an extensive manufac- 
 ture of bricks without straw. At last affairs reached a 
 
 lo crisis, and a particularly favorable pitch offering, with a 
 puddle- at the foot of it, even the boots afforded no sufficient 
 ballast, and away went our uncle, the satellite firkins 
 accompanying faithfully Ms headlong flight. Did ever 
 exiled monarch or disgraced minister find the cause of his 
 
 IS fall in himself ? Is there not always a strawberry at the 
 bottom of our cup of Hfe, on which we can lay all the blame 
 of our deviations from the straight path? Till now Uncle 
 Zeb had contrived to give a gloss of volition to smaller 
 stumbhngs and gyrations, by exaggerating them into an 
 
 20 appearance of playful burlesque. But the present case 
 was beyond any such subterfuges. He held a bed of justice 
 where he sat, and then arose slowly, with a stern deter- 
 mination of vengeance stiffening every muscle of his face. 
 But what would he select as the culprit ? *' It's that cussed 
 
 25 firkin," he mumbled to himself. " I never knowed a firkin 
 cair on so, — no, not in the 'Roostehicick war. There, go 
 long, will ye ? and don't come back till you've larned how to 
 walk with a genelman ! " And, seizing the unhappy scape- 
 goat by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. It is a curious 
 
 30 circumstance, that it was not the firkin containing the 
 bottle which was thus condemned to exile. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 79 
 
 The end of the Carry was reached at last, and, as we 
 drew near it, we heard a sound of shouting and laughter. 
 It came from a party of men making hay of the wild grass in 
 Seboomok meadows, which he arpund Seboomok pond, 
 into wliich the Carry empties itself. Their camp was near, 5 
 and our two hunters set out for it, leaving us seated in the 
 birch on the plashy border of the pond. The repose was 
 perfect. Another heaven hallowed and deepened the 
 poUshed lake, and through that nether world the fish- 
 hawk's double floated with balanced wings, or, wheeUng 10 
 suddenly, flashed his whitened breast against the sun. 
 As the clattering kingfisher flew unsteadily across, and 
 seemed to push his heavy head along with ever-renewing 
 effort, a visionary mate flitted from downward tree to tree 
 below. Some tall alders shaded us from the sun, in whose 15 
 yellow afternoon Hght the drowsy forest was steeped, giving 
 out that wholesome resinous perfume, almost the only 
 warm odor which it is refreshing to breathe. The tame 
 hay-cocks in the midst of the wildness gave one a pleasant 
 reminiscence of home, Hke hearing one's native tongue in a 20 
 strange country. 
 
 Presently our hunters came back, bringing with them a 
 tall, thin, active-looking man, with black eyes, that glanced 
 unconsciously on all sides, hke one of those spots of sunhght 
 which a child dances up and down the street with a bit of 25 
 looldng-glass. This was M., the captain of the hay- 
 makers, a famous river-driver, and who was to have fifty 
 men under him next winter. I could now understand that 
 sleepless vigilance of eye. He had consented to take two 
 of our party in his birch to search for moose. A quick, 30 
 nervous, decided man, he got them into the birch, and was 
 
80 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 off instantly, without a superfluous word. He evidently- 
 looked upon them as he would upon a couple of logs which 
 he was to deliver at a certain place. Indeed, I doubt if life 
 and the world presented themselves to Napier° himself in a 
 5 more logarithmic way. His only thought was to do the 
 immediate duty well, and to pilot his particular raft down 
 the crooked stream of hfe to the ocean beyond. The birch 
 seemed to feel him as an inspiring soul, and slid away 
 straight and smft for the outlet of the pond. As he dis- 
 
 lo appeared under the over-arcliing alders of the brook, our 
 two hunters could not repress a grave and measured ap- 
 plause. There is never any extravagance among these 
 woodmen ; their eye, accustomed to reckoning the number 
 of feet which a tree will scale, is rapid and close in its guess 
 
 15 of the amount of stuff in a man. It was laudari a laudato ° 
 however, for they themselves were accounted good men in 
 a birch. I was amused, in talking with them about him, to 
 meet with an instance of that tendency of the human mind 
 to assign some utterly improbable reason for gifts which 
 
 20 seem unaccountable. After due praise, one of them said, 
 " I guess he's got some Injun in him," although I knew very 
 well that the speaker had a thorough contempt for the red- 
 man, mentally and physically. Here was mythology in a 
 small way, — the same that under more favorable auspices 
 
 25 hatched Helen° out of an egg and gave MerUn° an Incubus 
 for a father. I was pleased with all I saw of M. He was in 
 his narrow sphere a true ava| av8pwv,° and the ragged edges 
 of his old hat seemed to become coronated as I looked at 
 him. He impressed me as a man really educated, — that 
 
 30 is, with his aptitudes drawn out and ready for use. He was 
 A. M. and LL. D. in Woods College, — Axe-master and 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 81 
 
 Doctor of Logs. Are not our educations commonly like 
 a pile of books laid over a plant in a pot ? The compressed 
 nature struggles through at every crevice, but can never 
 get the cramp and stunt out of it. We spend all our youth 
 in building a vessel for our voyage of Hf e, and set forth with 5 
 streamers flying ; but the moment we come nigh the great 
 loadstone mountain of our proper destiny, out leap all our 
 carefully-driven bolts and nails, and we get many a mouth- 
 ful of good salt brine, and many a buffet of the rough water 
 of experience, before we secure the bare right to live. lo 
 
 We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn aisle of alder, 
 on each side of which spired tall firs, spruces, and white 
 cedars. The motion of the birch reminded me of the 
 gondola, and they represent among water-craft the felidoe 
 the cat tribe, stealthy, silent, treacherous, and preying by 15 
 night. I closed my eyes, and strove to fancy myself in the 
 dumb city, whose only horses are the bronze ones of St. 
 Mark.° But Nature would allow no rival, and bent down 
 an alder-bough to brush my cheek and recall me. Only 
 the robin sings in the emerald chambers of these tall sylvan 20 
 palaces, and the squirrel leaps from hanging balcony to 
 balcony. 
 
 The rain which the loons foreboded had raised the west 
 branch of the Penobscot so much, that a strong current 
 was setting back into the pond ; and, when at last we 25 
 brushed through into the river, it was full to the brim, — 
 too full for moose, the hunters said. Rivers with low 
 banks have always the compensation of giving a sense of 
 entire fulness. The sun sank behind its horizon of pines, 
 whose pointed summits notched the rosy west in an endless 3° 
 black sierra ° At the same moment the golden moon 
 
 G 
 
82 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 swung slowly up in the east, like the other scale of that 
 Homeric balance in which Zeus° weighed the deeds of men. 
 Sunset and moonrise at once ! Adam had no more in 
 Eden — except the head of Eve upon his shoulder. The 
 5 stream was so smooth, that the floating logs we met seemed 
 to hang in a glowing atmosphere, the shadow-half being as 
 real as the solid. And gradually the mind was etherized 
 to a hke dreamy placidity, till fact and fancy, the substance 
 and the image, floating on the current of reverie, became 
 
 lo but as the upper and under halves of one unreal reality. 
 
 In the west still hngared a pale-green hght. I do not 
 
 known whether it be from greater familiarity, but it always 
 
 seems to me that the pinnacles of pine-trees make an edge to 
 
 the landscape which tells better against the twilight, or the 
 
 15 fainter dawn before the rising moon, than the rounded and 
 cloud-cumulus outline of hard-wood trees. 
 
 After paddling a couple of miles, we found the arbored 
 mouth of the httle Malahoodus River, famous for moose. 
 We had been on the look-out for it, and I was amused to 
 
 20 hear one of the hunters say to the other, to assure himself 
 of his familiarity with the spot, ''You drove the West 
 Branch last spring, didn't you?" as one of us might ask 
 about a horse. We did not explore the Malahoodus far, 
 but left the other birch to thread its cedared sohtudes, 
 
 25 while we turned back to try our fortunes in the larger 
 stream. We paddled on about four miles farther, lingering 
 now and then opposite the black mouth of a moose-path. 
 The incidents of our voyage were few, but quite as exciting 
 and profitable ^s the items of the newspapers. A stray 
 
 30 log compensated very well for the ordinary run of accidents, 
 and the floating carkiss of a moose which we met could pass 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 83 
 
 muster instead of a singular discovery of human remains 
 by workmen in digging a cellar. Once or twice we saw 
 what seemed ghosts of trees; but they turned out to be 
 dead cedars, in winding-sheets of long gray moss, made 
 spectral by the moonlight. Just as we were turning to s 
 drift back down-stream, we heard a loud gnawing sound 
 close by us on the bank. One of our guides thought it a 
 hedgehog, the other a bear. I inchned to the bear, as mak- 
 ing the adventure more imposing. A rifle was fired at 
 the sound, which began again with the most provoking lo 
 indifference, ere the echo, flaring madly at first from shore 
 to shore, died far away in a hoarse sigh. 
 
 Half past Eleven, p. m. — No sign of a moose yet. The 
 birch, it seems, was strained at the Carry, or the pitch was 
 softened as she lay on the shore during dinner, and she is 
 leaks a little. If there be an}'- virtue in the sitzbad° I shall 
 discover it. If I cannot extract green cucumbers from the 
 moon's rays, I get something quite as cool. One of the 
 guides shivers so as to shake the birch. 
 
 Quarter to Twelve. — Later from the Freshet! — The water 20 
 in the birch is about three inches deep, but the dampness 
 reaches already nearly to the waist. I am obhged to 
 remove the matches from the ground-floor of my trousers 
 into the upper story of a breast-pocket. Meanwhile, we 
 are to sit immovable, — for fear of frightening the moose, 25 
 — which induces cramps. 
 
 Half past Twelve. — A crashing is heard on the left bank. 
 This is a moose in good earnest. We are besought to hold 
 our breaths, if possible. My fingers so numb, I could not, 
 if I tried. Crash ! crash ! again, and then a plunge, followed 30 
 by dead stillness. '' Swimmin' crik," whispers guide, sup- 
 
84 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 pressing all unnecessary parts of speech, — "don't stir." 
 I, for one, am not likely to. A cold fog which has been 
 gathering for the last hour has finished me. I fancy myself 
 one of those naked pigs that seem rushing out of market- 
 5 doors in winter, frozen in a ghastly attitude of gallop. If I 
 were to be shot myself, I should feel no interest in it. As it 
 is, I am only a spectator, having declined a gun. Splash ! 
 again ; this time the moose is in sight, and click ! click ! one 
 rifle misses fire after the other. The fog has quietly spiked 
 
 lo our batteries. The moose goes crashing up the bank, and 
 presently we can hear it che^ving its cud close by. So we 
 he in wait, freezing. 
 
 At > one o'clock, I propose to land at a deserted wongen I 
 had noticed on the way up, where I will make a fire, and 
 
 15 leave them to refrigerate as much longer as they please. 
 Axe in hand, I go plunging through waist-deep weeds 
 dripping with dew, haunted by an intense conviction that 
 the gnawing sound we had heard was a bear, and a bear at 
 least eighteen hands high. There is something pokerish 
 
 20 about a deserted dwelhng, even in broad daylight; but 
 here in the obscure wood, and the moon filtering unwilhngly 
 through the trees ! Well, I made the door at last, and 
 found the place packed fuller with darkness than it ever 
 had been with hay. Gradually I was able to make things 
 
 25 out a httle, and began to hack frozenly at a log wliich I 
 groped out. I was reheved presently by one of the guides. 
 He cut at once into one of the uprights of the building till 
 he got some dry splinters, and we soon had a fire like the 
 burning of a whole wood-wharf in our part of the country. 
 
 30 My companion went back to the birch, and left me to keep 
 house. First I knocked a hole in the roof (which the 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 85 
 
 fire began to lick in a relishing way) for a chimney, and 
 then cleared away a damp growth of ''pison-elder/' to 
 make a sleeping place. When the unsuccessful hunters 
 returned, I had everything quite comfortable, and was 
 steaming at the rate of about ten horse-power a minute. 5 
 Young Telemachus° was sorry to give up the moose so 
 soon, and, with the teeth chattering almost out of his head, 
 he declared that he would Hke to stick it out all night. 
 However, he reconciled himself to the fire, and, making our 
 beds of some " spHts" which we poked from the roof, we lay 10 
 down at half past two. I, who have inherited a habit of 
 looking into every closet before I go to bed, for fear of fire, 
 had become in two days such a stoic of the woods, that I 
 went to sleep tranquilly, certain that my bedroom would 
 be in a blaze before morning. And so, indeed, it was ; and 15 
 the withes that bound it together being burned off, one of 
 the sides fell in without waking me. 
 
 Tuesday, 16th. — After a sleep of two hours and a half, 
 so sound that it was as good as eight, we started at half 
 past four for the hay-makers' camp again. We found them 20 
 just getting breakfast. We sat down upon the deacon-seaf 
 before the fire blazing between the bedroom and the salle a 
 manger ° which were simply two roofs of spruce-bark, slop- 
 ing to the ground on one side, the other three being left 
 open. We found that we had, at least, been luclder than 25 
 the other party, for M. had brought back his convoy with- 
 out even seeing a moose. As there was not room at the 
 table for all of us to breakfast together, these hospitable 
 woodmen forced us to sit down first, although we resisted 
 stoutly. Our breakfast consisted of fresh bread, fried salt 30 
 pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our kind hosts 
 
86 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 refused to take money for it, nor would M. accept anything 
 for his trouble. Tliis seemed even more open-handed 
 when I remembered that they had brought all their stores 
 over the Carry upon their shoulders, paying an ache extra 
 5 for every pound. If their hospitality lacked anything of 
 hard external poHsh, it had all the deeper grace which 
 springs only from sincere manliness. I have rarely sat at 
 a table d'hote^ which might not have taken a lesson from 
 them in essential courtesy. I have never seen a finer race 
 
 lo of men. They have all the virtue/ of the sailor, without 
 that unsteady roll in the gait with which the ocean pro- 
 claims itself quite as much in the moral as in the physical 
 habit of a man. They appeared to me to have hewn out a 
 short northwest passage through wintry woods to those 
 
 IS spice-lands of character wliich we dwellers in cities must 
 reach, if at all, by weary voyages in the monotonous track 
 of the trades. 
 
 By the way, as we were embirching last evening for our 
 moose-chase, I asked what I was to do with my baggage. 
 
 20 "Leave it here," said our guide, and he laid the bags upon a 
 platform of alders, which he bent down to keep them 
 beyond reach of the rising water. 
 ''Will they be safe here?" 
 *'As safe as they would be locked up in your house at 
 
 25 home." 
 
 And so I found them at my return ; only the hay-makers 
 had carried them to their camp for greater security against 
 the chances of the weather. 
 
 We got back to Kineo in time for dinner; and in the 
 
 30 afternoon, the weather being fine, went up the mountain. 
 As we landed at the foot, our guide pointed to the remains 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 87 
 
 of a red shirt and a pair of blanket trousers. *'That," 
 said he, " is the reason there's such a trade in ready-made 
 clo'es. A suit gits pooty well wore out by the time a camp 
 breaks up in the spring, and the lumberers want to look 
 about right when they come back into the settlements, so 5 
 they buy somethin' ready-made, and heave ole bust-up 
 into the bush." True enough, thought I, this is the Ready- 
 made Age. It is quicker being covered than fitted. So we 
 all go to the slop-shop and come out uniformed, every 
 mother's son with habits of thinldng and doing cut on one lo 
 pattern, with no special reference to Ms pecuhar build. 
 
 Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 750 above the 
 la,ke. The cUmb is very easy, with fine outlooks at every 
 turn over lake and forest. Near the top is a spring of 
 water, which even Uncle Zeb might have allowed to be 15 
 wholesome. The Httle tin dipper was scratched all over 
 with names, showing that vanity, at least, is not put out 
 of breath by the ascent. O Ozymandias,° King of kings ! 
 We are all scrawling on something of the Idnd. ' ' My name 
 is engraved on the institutions of my country," thinks the 20 
 statesman. But, alas ! institutions are as changeable as 
 tin-dippers ; men are content to drink the same old water, 
 if the shape of the cup only be new, and our friend gets two 
 lines in the Biographical Dictionaries. After all, these 
 inscriptions, which make us smile up here, are about as 25 
 valuable as the Assyrian ones which Hincks and RawHn- 
 son° read at cross-purposes. Have we not Smiths and 
 Browns enough, that we must ransack the ruins of Nim- 
 roud for more? Near the spring we met a Bloomer! It 
 was the first chronic one I had ever seen. It struck me 30 
 as a sensible costume for the occasion, and it will be the 
 
88 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 only wear in the Greek Kalends, ° when women believe that 
 sense is an equivalent for grace. 
 
 The forest primeval is best seen from the top of a moun- 
 tain. It then impresses one by its extent, like an Oriental 
 
 5 epic. To be in it is nothing, for then an acre is as good 
 as a thousand square miles. You cannot see five rods in 
 any direction, and the ferns, mosses, and tree-trunks just 
 around you are the best of it. As for soUtude, night will 
 make a better one with ten feet square of pitch dark ; and 
 
 lo mere size is hardly an element of grandeur, except in 
 works of man, — as the Colosseum. ° It is through one 
 or the other pole of vanity that men feel the subUme in 
 mountains. It is either. How small great I am beside it ! 
 or. Big as you are, httle I's soul will hold a dozen of you. 
 
 IS The true idea of a forest is not a selva selvaggia° but some- 
 thing humanized a httle, as we imagine the forest of Arden,° 
 with trees standing at royal intervals, — a commonwealth, 
 and not a communism. To some moods, it is congenial to 
 look over endless leagues of unbroken savagery without a 
 
 20 hint of man, 
 
 Wednesday. — Tliis morning fished. Telemachus caught 
 a laker° of thirteen pounds and a half, and I an over- 
 grown cusk, which we threw away, but which I found after- 
 wards Agassiz would have been glad of, for all is fish that 
 
 25 comes to his net, from the fossil down. The fish, when 
 caught, are straightway knocked on the head. A lad who 
 went with us seeming to show an over-zeal in this opera- 
 tion, we remonstrated. But he gave a good, human reason 
 for it, — ''He no need to ha' gone and been a fish if he 
 
 30 didn't hke it," — an excuse which superior strength or 
 cunning has always found sufficient. It was some comfort, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 89 
 
 in this case, to think that St. Jerome° believed in a limita- 
 tion of God's providence, and that it did not extend to 
 inanimate things or creatures devoid of reason. 
 
 Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my Oriental ad- 
 ventures, and somewhat, it must be owned in the diffuse s 
 Oriental manner. There is very little about Moosehead 
 Lake in it, and not even the Latin name for moose, which 
 I might have obtained by sufficient research. If I had 
 killed one, I would have given you his name in that dead 
 language. I did not profess to give you an account of the lo 
 lake ; but a journal, and, moreover, my journal, with a little 
 nature, a little human nature, and a great deal of I in it, which 
 last ingredient I take to be the true spirit of this species of 
 writing ; all the rest being so much water for tender throats 
 which cannot take it neat. 15 
 
THOREAU° 
 
 What contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of 
 his Hfe, (since Nature sets Hmits about her conscription for 
 spiritual fields, as the state does in physical welfare,) will 
 ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the ''Tran- 
 
 5 scendental Movement "° of thirty years ago. Apparently 
 set astirring by Carlyle's essays on the " Signs of the Times " 
 and on "History," the final and more immediate impulse 
 seemed to be given by ''Sartor Resartus."° At least the 
 repubhcation in Boston of that wonderful Abraham a 
 
 lo Sancta Clara° sermon on Lear's text of the miserable forked 
 radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral 
 mutiny. Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile !° was shouted on 
 all hands with every variety of emphasis, and by voices of 
 every conceivable pitch, representing the three sexes of 
 
 15 men, women, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagues. ° 
 The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil° was about to 
 set at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, 
 each eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg 
 from wliich the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched 
 
 20 in due time. Redeunt Saturnia reg7ia°, — so far was certain, 
 though in what shape, or by what methods, was still a 
 matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual and 
 physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its 
 prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its 
 
 90 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 91 
 
 martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed 
 neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the ''feathered Mer- 
 cury," as defined by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of 
 speech was carried to a pitch that would have taken away 
 the breath of George Fox ;° and even swearing had its s 
 evangehsts, who answered a simple inquiry after their 
 health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that 
 might have been honorablj^ mentioned bj^ ]\larlborough° 
 in general orders. Everybody had a mission (with a capi- 
 tal M) to attend to everybody-else's business. No brain lo 
 but has its private maggot, which must have found pitiably 
 short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots 
 abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), 
 professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. 
 Some had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as 15 
 hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. Com- 
 munities were estabhshed where everything was to be 
 common but common-sense. Men renounced their old 
 gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their furloughed 
 allegiance on Thor or Budh.° Conventions were held for 20 
 every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The belated gift of 
 tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men,° spread Uke 
 a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to all 
 Christian men; whether equally so to the most distant 
 possible heathen or not, was unexperimented, though 25 
 many would have subscribed hberally that a fair trial 
 might be made. It was the pentecost of Shinar.° The 
 day of utterances reproduced the day of rebuses and 
 anagrams, and there was nothing so simple that uncial 
 letters and the style of Diphilus° the Labyrinth could not 30 
 make into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out of work 
 
92 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 added to the general misunderstanding their contribution 
 of broken Enghsh in every most ingenious form of fracture. 
 All stood ready at a moment's notice to reform everything 
 but themselves. The general motto was : — 
 
 5 "And we'll talk with them, too, 
 
 And take upon 's the mystery 'of things 
 As if we were God's spies." 
 
 Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a 
 humorous hning. We have barely hinted at the comic side 
 
 lo of the affair, for the material was endless. This was the 
 wliistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very 
 solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly explosive- 
 ness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality sus- 
 pected nothing. The word "transcendental" then was 
 
 15 the maid of all work for those who could not think, as 
 " Pre-Raphaehte " has been more recently for people of 
 the same hmited housekeeping. The truth is, that there 
 was a much nearer metaphysical relation and a much 
 more distant aesthetic and literary relation between 
 
 20 Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness, as they were 
 called in New England, than has commonly been supposed. 
 Both represented the reaction and revolt against Philis- 
 terei° a renewal of the old battle begun in modern times 
 by Erasmus and Reuchlin,° and continued by Lessing, 
 
 25 Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by Heine in Germany, 
 and of which Fielding, Sterne, and Wordsworth in different 
 ways have been the leaders in England. It was simply a 
 struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be 
 opened, there was danger that panes would be broken, 
 
 30 though painted with images of saints and martyrs. Light 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 93 
 
 colored by these reverent effigies was none the more re- 
 spirable for being picturesque. There is only one thing 
 better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal 
 life out of which all tradition takes its rise. It was this life 
 which the reformers demanded, with more or less clearness 5 
 of consciousness and expression, life in pohtics, Hfe in 
 literature, Ufe in rehgion. Of what use to import a gospel 
 from Judaea, if we leave behind the soul that made it possi- 
 ble, the God who keeps it forever real and present ? Surely 
 Abana and Pharpar° are better than Jordan, if a Kving 10 
 faith be mixed with those waters and none with these. 
 
 Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual prog- 
 ress was dead; New England Puritanism was in hke 
 manner dead ; in other words. Protestantism had made its 
 fortune and no longer protested ; but till Carlyle spoke 15 
 out in the Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had 
 dared to proclaim, Le roi est mort : vive le roi !° The mean- 
 ing of which proclamation was essentially this : the vital 
 spirit has long since departed out of this form once so 
 kingly, and the great seal has been in commission long 20 
 enough; but meanwhile the soul of man, from wliich all 
 power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in 
 undiminished royalty; God still survives, little as you 
 gentlemen of the Commission seem to be aware of it, — 
 nay, may possibly outline the whole of you, incredible as 25 
 it may appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Presbyte- 
 rianism and New England Puritanism made their new 
 avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the heralds of their formal 
 decease, and the tendency of the one toward Authority 
 and of the other toward Independency might have been 30 
 prophesied by whoever had studied history. The neces- 
 
94 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 sity was not so much in the men as in the principles they 
 represented and the traditions which overruled them. 
 The Puritanism of the past found its unwilhng poet in 
 Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, 
 5 the rarest in some ideal respects since Sha^kespeare ; but the 
 Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that made 
 New England what it is, and is destined to make America 
 what it should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though 
 holding liimself aloof from all active partnersliip in move- 
 
 lo ments of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who has 
 supphed a great part of their capital. 
 
 The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read 
 critic must feel at once ; and so is that of ^schylus, so is 
 that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, 
 
 IS so is that of nearly every one except Shakespeare ; but 
 there is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of indi\'id- 
 uahty as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above all, 
 there is the standard of genetic power, the test of the 
 mascuHne as distinguished from the receptive minds. 
 
 20 There are staminate plants in literature, that make no fine 
 show of fruit, but without whose pollen, the quintessence 
 of fructif3dng gold, the garden had been barren. Emer- 
 son's mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no 
 man to whom our aesthetic culture owes so much. The 
 
 25 Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Rev- 
 olution pohtically independent, but we were still socially 
 and intellectually moored to EngHsh thought, till Emerson 
 cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the 
 glories of blue water. No man young enough to have felt 
 
 30 it can forget, or cease to be grateful for, the mental and 
 moral nudge which he received from the writings of his 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 95 
 
 high-minded and brave-spirited countryman. That we 
 agree with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is 
 aside from the question ; but that he arouses in us some- 
 thing that we are the better for having awakened, whether 
 that something be of opposition or assent, that he speaks 5 
 always to what is highest and least selfish in us, few Ameri- 
 cans of the generation younger than his own would be 
 disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa 
 Society" at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an 
 event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a 10 
 scene to be alwaj^s treasured in the memory for its pictur- 
 esqueness and its inspiration. Wliat crowded and breath- 
 less aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what 
 enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone 
 dissent ! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by 15 
 Abelard,° our Harvard parallel to the last pubHc appear- 
 ances of Fichte.° 
 
 We said that the '' Transcendental Movement" was the 
 protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and 
 an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather 20 
 than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching, and its 
 results, it differed radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. 
 The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor gigan- 
 tesque as that of Rabelais, ° has grown shriller and shriller 
 with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold, 25 
 and emptjdng very unsavory \ials of wrath on the head of 
 the sturdy British Socrates of worldly common-sense. 
 The teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively 
 to self-culture and the independent development of the 
 individual man. It seemed to many almost Pythagorean^ 30 
 in its voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. 
 
96 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but 
 Emerson in a far truer sense ; and wliile the one, from his 
 bias toward the eccentric, has degenerated more and more 
 into mannerism, the other has clarified steadily toward 
 
 5 perfection of style, — exquisite fineness of material, 
 unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fasliion, the 
 most high-bred garb of expression. Whatever may be 
 said of this thought, nothing can be finer than the dehcious 
 limpidness of his phrase. If it was ever questionable 
 
 lo whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the 
 problem has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, 
 in Ms cynicism and his admiration of force as such, has 
 become at last positively inhuman ; Emerson, reverencing 
 strength, seeking the highest outcome of the individual, 
 
 15 has found that society and poHtics are also main elements 
 in the attainment of the desired end, and has drawn 
 steadily manward and worldward. The two men repre- 
 sent respectively those grand personifications in the drama 
 of iEschylus, /8ta and KpdTo<s° 
 
 20 Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the 
 Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remark- 
 able ; and it is something eminently fitting that his post- 
 humous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they 
 are strawberries from his own garden. A singular mixture 
 
 25 of varieties, indeed, there is, — alpine, some of them, with 
 the flavor of rare mountain air; others wood, tasting of 
 sunny roadside banks or shy openings in the forest ; and 
 not a few seedlings swollen hugely by culture, but lacking 
 the fine natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange 
 
 30 books these are of his, and interesting in many ways, — 
 instructive chiefly as showing how considerable a crop 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 97 
 
 may be raised on a comparatively narrow close of mind, 
 and how much a man may make of his life if he will as- 
 siduously follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it 
 at last. 
 
 We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr. 5 
 Thoreau's writings, and have read through his six volumes 
 in the order of their production. We shall try to give an 
 adequate report of their impression upon us both as critic 
 and as mere reader. He seems to us to have been a man 
 with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without 10 
 questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects 
 and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers pecuHar 
 to liimself . Was he indolent, he finds none of the activities 
 which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of 
 him. Was he wanting in the quahties that make success, 15 
 it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks 
 persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an un- 
 mixed evil. Did his Hfe seem a selfish one, he condemns 
 doing good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be 
 of use was with him the most kilHng bait of the wily tempter 20 
 Uselessness. He had no faculty of generahzation from 
 outside of himself, or at least no experience which would 
 supply the material of such, and he makes his own whim 
 the law, his own range the horizon of the universe. He 
 condemns a world, the hoUowness of whose satisfactions 25 
 he had never had the means of testing, and we recognize 
 Apemantus° behind the mask of Timon. He had Uttle 
 active imagination ; of the receptive he had much. His 
 appreciation is of the highest quaUty; his critical power 
 from want of continuity of mind, very limited and in- 30 
 adequate. He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian,° as 
 
98 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 an example of the superiority of the old poetry to the new, 
 though, even were the historic evidence less convincing, 
 the sentimental melancholy of those poems should be 
 conclusive of their modernness. He had no artistic power 
 
 s such as controls a great work to the serene balance of com- 
 pleteness, but exquisite mechanical sldll in the shaping of 
 sentences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of 
 verse for the expression of a detached thought, sentiment, 
 or image. His works give one the feehng of a sky full of 
 
 lo stars, — sometliing impressive and exhilarating certainly, 
 sometliing high overhead and freckled thickly with spots of 
 isolated brightness; but whether these have any mutual 
 relation with each other, or have any concern with our 
 mundane matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture, 
 
 15 — astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 
 
 It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards 
 became, that he was not by nature an observer. He only 
 saw the things he looked for, and was less poet than natural- 
 ist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he did not know 
 
 20 that the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, 
 he had never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon 
 early famihar to most country boys. At forty he speaks of 
 the seeding of the pine as a new discovery, though one 
 should have thought that its gold-dust of l)lowing pollen 
 
 25 might have earher drawn liis eye. Neither his attention 
 nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind. He discovered 
 nothing. He thought everything a discovery of his own, 
 from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by 
 squirrels. This is a defect in his character, but one of his 
 
 30 chief charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under 
 his hand. He delved in his mind and nature ; he planted 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 99 
 
 them with all manner of native and foreign seeds, and 
 reaped assiduously. He was not merely soUtary, he would 
 be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost persuading 
 himself that he was autochthonous. He valued every- 
 thing in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively liis 5 
 own. He complains in '' Walden," that there is no one in 
 Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental hterature, 
 though the man was hving within two miles of liis hut who 
 had introduced him to it. This intellectual selfishness 
 becomes sometimes almost painful in reading him. He lo 
 lacked that generosity of '^ communication" which John- 
 son admired in Burke. De Quincey tells us that Words- 
 worth was impatient v/hen anyone else spoke of mountains, 
 as if he had a pecuhar property in them. And we can 
 readily understand why it should be so : no one is satisfied is 
 with another's appreciation of his mistress. But Thoreau 
 seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking (often we 
 should be incKned to call it a remote one) not so much be- 
 cause it was good in itself as because he wished few to share 
 it with him. It seems now and then as if he did not seek to 20 
 lure others up ^' above our lower region of turmoil," but to 
 leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the first 
 cHmber. This itch of originahty infects his thought and 
 style. To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns common- 
 places end for end, and fancies it makes something new of 25 
 them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is caught by 
 Dr. Windship'-s dumb-bells, one of wliich bears an inscrip- 
 tion testifying that it is the heaviest ever put up at arm's 
 length by any athlete ; and in reading Mr. Thoreau's books 
 we cannot help feeling as if he sometimes invited our atten- 30 
 tion to a particular sophism or paradox as the biggest yet 
 
100 EARLIER ESSAY'S 
 
 maintained by any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, 
 for perversity of thought, and revives the age of concetti° 
 while he fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. 
 ''A day," he says, ''passed in the society of those Greek 
 5 sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, 
 would not be comparable mth the dry wit of decayed cran- 
 berry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." 
 It is not so much the True that he loves as the Out-of-the- 
 Way. As the Brazen Age° shows itself in other men by 
 
 lo exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extravagance of 
 statement. He wishes always to trump your suit and to 
 ruff when you least expect it. Do you love Nature because 
 she is beautiful? He will find a better argument in her 
 ughness. Are you tired of the artificial man? He in- 
 
 15 stantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot Indian, and 
 attributes to this creature of his otherwise-mindedness 
 as peculiarities things that are common to all woodsmen, 
 white or red, and this simply because he has not studied 
 the pale-faced variety. 
 
 20 This notion of an absolute originahty, as if one could 
 have a patent right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot 
 escape in thought, any more than he can in language, 
 from the past and the present. As no one ever invents a 
 word, and yet language somehow grows by general con- 
 
 25 tribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau 
 seems to us to insist in public on going back to flint and 
 steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket which he 
 knows very well how to use at a pinch. Originality con- 
 sists in power of digesting and assimilating thought, so 
 
 30 that they become part of our life and substance. Mon- 
 taigne, ° for example, is one of the most original of authors, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 101 
 
 though he helped himself to ideas in every direction. But 
 they turn to blood and coloring in his style, and give a 
 freshness of complexion that is forever charming. In 
 Thoreau much seems yet to be foreign and unassimilated, 
 showing itself in symptoms of indigestion. A preacher-up 5 
 of Nature, we now and then detect under the surly and 
 stoic garb something of the sophist and the sentimentalizer. 
 We are far from implying that this was conscious on his 
 part. But it is much easier for a man to impose on himself 
 when he measures only with himself. A greater familiarity 10 
 with ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by 
 showing him how many fine qualities are common to the 
 race. The radical vice of this theory of life was, that he 
 confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. 
 One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep 15 
 himself clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly with- 
 drawn as exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. 
 It is a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world 
 of men empty and worthless before trying it, the instinctive 
 evasion of one who is sensible of some innate weakness, and 20 
 retorts the accusation of it before any has made it but him- 
 self. To a healthy mind, the world is a constant challenge 
 of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a healthy mind, 
 or he would not have been so fond of prescribing. His 
 whole life was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had 25 
 a wiser sense of what the world was worth. They or- 
 dained a severe apprenticeship to law, and even ceremo- 
 nial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery over 
 these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be re- 
 warded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faithful- 3° 
 ness with her were to win them at last the true bride of 
 
102 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 their souls. Active Life was with them the only path to 
 the Contemplative. 
 
 Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a 
 sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds 
 
 5 thought with style when he undertakes to speak of the 
 latter. He was forever talking of getting away from the 
 world, but he must be alwa^^s near enough to it, nay, to 
 the Concord corner of it, to feel the impression he makes 
 there. He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-Beuve, 
 
 lo "On touche encore a son temps et tres-fort, meme quand 
 on le repousse. "° Tlii^ egotism of his is a Styhtes° pillar 
 after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the public eye. 
 The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but therefore to 
 hold one's self too sacred and precious is the reverse of 
 
 15 excellent. There is something delightfully absurd in six 
 volumes addressed to a world of such ''vulgar fellows" as 
 Thoreau affirmed liis fellowmen to be. We once had a 
 glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent his winters one 
 hundred and fifty miles beyond all human communication, 
 
 20 and there dwelt with his rifle as his only confidant. Com- 
 pared with this, the shanty on Walden Pond has something 
 the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermitage of La 
 Chevrette.° We do not beheve that the way to a true 
 cosmopolitanism carries one into the woods or the society of 
 
 25 musquashes. Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that 
 of self ; that of Klein winkel° is nothing to it. The natural 
 man, like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as in- 
 evitably as the natural bear and the wild cat stick there. 
 To seek to be- natural imphes a consciousness that forbids 
 
 30 all naturalness forever. It is as easy — and no easier — to 
 be natural in a salon° as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 103 
 
 for what we call unnaturalness always has its spring in a 
 man's thinking too much about himself. "It is impossi- 
 ble,'' said Turgot,° "for a vulgar man to be simple." 
 
 We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimental- 
 ism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more 5 
 symptom of the general liver-complaint. In a man of . 
 wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough for a 
 mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those 
 who have most loudly advertised their passion for seclu- 
 sion and their intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, 10 
 have been mostly sentimentaHsts, unreal men, misan- 
 thropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion 
 of themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They 
 make demands on the world in advance proportioned to 
 their inward measure of their own merit, and are angry is 
 that the world pays only by the visible measure of perform- 
 ance. It is true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the 
 sect, true of Saint-Pierre, his intellectual child, and of 
 Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor of what we may 
 call the primitive forest-cure, and who first was touched by 20 
 the solemn falhng of a tree from natural decay in the wind- 
 less silence of the woods. It is a very shallow view that 
 affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that 
 men in communities are just as true to the laws of their 
 organization and destiny ; that can tolerate the puffin and 25 
 the fox, but not the fool and the knave ; that would shun 
 politics because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench 
 of the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more 
 wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than in any 
 other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained by 30 
 commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained 
 
104 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 it, or with one's own soul among men, as Dante, is the most 
 delightful, as it is the most precious, of all. In outward 
 nature it is still man that interests us, and we care far less 
 for the things seen than the way in which poetic eyes like 
 
 5 Wordsworth's or Thoreau's see them, and the reflections 
 they cast there. To hear the to-do that is often made 
 over the simple fact that a man sees the image of himself 
 in the outward world, one is reminded of a savage when he 
 for the first time catches a gUmpse of himself in a looking- 
 
 lo glass. ''Venerable child of Nature," we are tempted to 
 say, "to whose science in the invention of the tobacco- 
 pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate 
 hide not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to 
 climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my un- 
 
 15 happy country for a shilhng!" If matters go on as they 
 have done, and everybody must needs blab of all the favors 
 that have been done him by roadside and river-brink and 
 woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell were no longer treach- 
 ery, it will be a positive refreshment to meet a man who 
 
 2o is as superbly indifferent to Nature as she is to him. By 
 and by we shall have John Smith, of No. — 12, — 12th 
 Street, advertising that he is not the J. S. who saw a cow- 
 Hly on Thursday last, as he never saw one in his Hfe, would 
 not see one if he could, and is prepared to prove an aUbi 
 
 25 on the day in question. 
 
 SoHtary communion with Nature does not seem to have 
 been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau's 
 
 X character. On the contrary, his letters show him more 
 cynical as he^grew older. While he studied with respect- 
 
 30 ful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he 
 looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny 
 
E A SLIER ESSAYS 105 
 
 of which his country was the scene, and on which the cur- 
 tain had already risen. He was converting us back to a 
 state of nature "so eloquently," as Voltaire said of Rous- 
 seau, ''that he almost persuaded us to go on all fours," 
 while the wiser fates were making it possible for us to walk 5 
 erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with his 
 fellows, his sympathies would have widened with the assur- 
 ance that his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and 
 his writings a larger circle of readers, or at least a warmer 
 one, than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony 10 
 to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his 
 temper, and in his books an equally irrefragible one to 
 the rare quality of liis mind. He was not a strong thinker, 
 but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us as cold 
 and wintry in its purity. A Ught snow has fallen every- 15 
 where in which he seems to come on the track of the shier 
 sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. We think 
 greater compression would have done more for his fame. 
 A feeUng of sameness comes over us as we read so much. 
 Trifles are recorded with an over-minute punctuahty and 20 
 conscientiousness of detail. We cannot help thinking 
 sometimes of the man who 
 
 "Watches, starves, freezes and sweats 
 To learn but catechisms and alphabets 
 Of unconcerning things, matters of fact," 25 
 
 and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet,° that 
 *'when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at 
 the edge of a hole." We could readily part with some of 
 his affectations. It was well enough for Pythagoras to 
 say, once for all, ''When I was Euphorbus° at the seige of 30 
 
106 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Troy" ; not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into "When 
 I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria." A naive thing 
 said over again is anything but naive. But with every 
 exception, there is no writing comparable with Thoreau's in 
 
 5 kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best ; 
 where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled roots 
 and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientahsm and runs 
 limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror 
 for whatever is grand and lonely in both worlds. 
 
 lo George Sand° says neatly, that "Art is not a study of 
 positive reahty," {actuality were the fitter word,) "but a 
 seeking after ideal truth." It would be doing very inade- 
 quate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this 
 ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in larger 
 
 15 proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. 
 He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. 
 If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faithfully 
 every trip over a root, if he botanize somewhat weari- 
 somely, he gives lis now and then superb outlooks from 
 
 20 some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an inimit- 
 able ether, where the breathing is not difficult for those 
 who have any true touch of the cUmbing spirit. His 
 shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own con- 
 ception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. 
 
 25 The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau's 
 experiment actually presupposed all that complicated 
 civiUzation which it theoretically abjured. He squatted 
 on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, 
 his nails, liis ^bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his 
 
 30 fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence 
 against him as an accomphce in the sin of the artificial 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS , 107 
 
 civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as 
 Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen 
 excidit ausis° His aim was a noble and a useful one, in 
 the direction of ''plain Hving and high thinking." It was 
 a practical sermon on Emerson's text that "things are ins 
 the saddlfe and ride mankind," an attempt to solve Carlyle's 
 problem of "lessening your denominator." His whole 
 life was a rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our Ameri- 
 can luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry up- 
 holstery. He had "fine translunary things" in him. His lo 
 better, style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity 
 and purity of his life. We have said that his range is nar- 
 row, but to be a master is to be a master. He had caught 
 his English at its hving source, among the poets and prose- 
 writers of its best days ; his literature M^as extensive and 15 
 recondite, his quotations are always nuggets of the purest 
 ore; there are sentences of his as perfect as anything in 
 the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his 
 metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil ; he 
 had watched Nature like a detective who is to go upon the 20 
 stand ; as we read liim, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had 
 kept a diary and become its own Montaigne ; we look at 
 the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine® glass; compared 
 with his, all other books of similar aim, even White's 
 Selborne, seem dry as a country clergyman's meteorological 25 
 journal in an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and 
 Browne and Novahs;° if not with the originally creative 
 men, with the scarcely smaller class who are pecuhar, and 
 whose leaves shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns. 
 
AT SEA° 
 
 The sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as moun- 
 tains are from the plain. Lucretius° made this discovery- 
 long ago, and was blunt enough to blurt it forth, romance 
 and sentiment — in other words, the pretence of feeling 
 
 5 what we do not feel — being inventions of a later day. 
 To be sure, Cicero used to twaddle about Greek Hterature 
 and philosophy, much as people do about ancient art now- 
 a-days; but I rather sympathize with those stout old 
 Romans who despised both, and believed that to found 
 
 lo an empire was as grand an achievement as to build an epic 
 or to carve a statue. But though there might have been 
 twaddle, (as why not, since there was a Senate?) I rather 
 think Petrarch° was the first choragus of that sentimental 
 dance which so long led young folks away from the reahties 
 
 IS of Ufe Uke the piper of HameUn, and whose succession 
 ended, let us hope, with Chateaubriand." But for them, 
 Byron, whose real strength lay in his sincerity, would 
 never have talked about the "sea bounding beneath him 
 like a steed that knows his rider," and all that sort of thing. 
 
 20 Even if it had been true, steam has been as fatal to that 
 part of the romance of the sea as to hand-loom weaving. 
 But what say you to a twelve days' calm such as we dozed 
 through in mid- Atlantic and in mid- August? I know 
 nothing so tedious at once and exasperating as that regular 
 
 108 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 109 
 
 slap of the wilted sails when the ship rises and falls with 
 the slow breatliing of the sleeping sea, one greasy, brassy 
 swell following another, slow, smooth, immitigable as the 
 series of Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Even 
 at his best, Neptune, in a tete-a-tete ° has a way of repeat- 5 
 ing himself, an obtuseness to the ne quid nimis° that is 
 stupefying. It reminds me of organ-music and my good 
 friend Sebastian Bach. A fugue or two will do very well ; 
 but a concert made up of nothing else is altogether too 
 epic for me. There is nothing so desperately monotonous 10 
 as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates. 
 Fancy an existence in which the coming up of a clumsy 
 finback whale, who says Pooh! to you solemnly as you lean 
 over the taffrail, is an event as exciting as an election on 
 shore! The dampness seems to strike into the wits as 15 
 into the lucifer-matches, so that one may scratch a thought 
 haK a dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint sput- 
 ter, the forlorn hope of fire, which only goes far enough to 
 leave a sense of suffocation behind it. Even smoking be- 
 comes an employment instead of a solace. Who less likely 20 
 to come to their wit's end than W. M. T.° and A. H. C.?° 
 Yet I have seen them driven to five meals a day for mental 
 occupation. I sometimes sit and pity Noah; but even 
 he had this advantage over all succeeding navigators, that, 
 wherever he landed, he was sure to get no ill news from 25 
 home. He should be canonized as the patron-saint of 
 newspaper correspondents, being the only man who ever 
 had the very last authentic intelligence from everywhere. 
 The finback whale recorded just above has much the 
 look of a brown-paper parcel, — the whitish stripes that 30 
 run across him answering for the pack-thread. He has a 
 
110 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 kind of accidental hole in the top of his head, through 
 which he pooh-poohs the rest of creation,, and which looks 
 as if it had been made by the chance thrust of a chestnut 
 rail. He was our first event. Our second was harpooning 
 5 a sunfish, which basked dozing on the lap of the sea, look- 
 ing so much Hke the giant turtle of an alderman's dream, 
 that I am persuaded he would have made mock-turtle 
 soup rather than acknowledge his imposture. But he 
 broke away just as they were hauling liim over the side, 
 
 lo and sank placidly through the clear water, leaving behind 
 
 him a crimson trail that wavered a moment and was gone. 
 
 The sea, though, has better sights than these. When 
 
 we were up with the Azores, we began to meet flying-fish 
 
 and Portuguese men-of-war beautiful as the galley of 
 
 15 Cleopatra, tiny craft that dared these seas before Colum- 
 bus. I have seen one of the former rise from the crest of 
 a wave, and, glancing from another some two hundred feet 
 beyond, take a fresh fhght of perhaps as long. How Cal- 
 deron° would have simihzed this pretty creature had he 
 
 20 ever seen it ! How would he have run him up and down 
 the gamut of simile! If a fish, then a fish with wings; 
 if a bird, then a bird with fins ; and so on, keeping up the 
 poor shuttle-cock of a conceit as is his wont. Indeed, the 
 poor thing is the most killing bait for a comparison, and I 
 
 25 assure you I have three or four in my inkstand ; — but be 
 calm, they shall stay there. Moore, who looked on all 
 nature as a kind of Gradus ad Parnassum, a thesaurus^ of 
 similitude, and spent his Hfe in a game of What is my 
 thought like^ with himself, did the flying-fish on his way 
 
 30 to Bermuda. So I leave him in peace. 
 
 The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, all the 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS " 111 
 
 more so that I had never heard of it, is the trail of a shoal 
 of fish through the phosphorescent water. It is like a 
 flight of silver rockets, or the streaming of northern lights 
 through that silent nether heaven. I thought nothing 
 could go beyond that rustling star-foam which was churned 5 
 up by our ship's bows, or those eddies and disks of dreamy 
 flame that rose and wandered out of sight behind us. 
 
 'Twas fire our ship was plunging through, 
 
 Cold fire that o'er the quarter flew ; 
 
 And wandering moons of idle flame lo 
 
 Grew full and waned, and went and came, 
 
 Dappling with light the huge sea-snake 
 
 That slid behind us in the wake. 
 
 But there was something even more delicately rare in the 
 apparition of the fish, as they turned up in gleaming fur- 15 
 rows the latent moonshine which the ocean seemed to have 
 hoarded against these vacant interlunar nights. In the 
 Mediterranean one day, as we were lying becalmed, I ob- 
 served the water freckled with dingy specks, which* at last 
 gathered to a pinkish scum on the surface. The sea had 20 
 been so phosphorescent for some nights, that when the 
 Captain gave me my bath, by dousing me with buckets 
 from the house on deck, the spray flew off my head and 
 shoulders in sparks. It occurred to me that this dirty- 
 looking scum might be the luminous matter, and I had a 25 
 pailful dipped up to keep till after dark. When I went 
 to look at it after nightfall, it seemed at first perfectly 
 dead ; but when I shook it, the whole broke out into what 
 I can only liken to milky flames, whose lambent silence 
 was strangely beautiful, and startled me almost as actual 30 
 
112 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 projection might an alchemist. I could not bear to be the 
 death of so much beauty; so I poured it all overboard 
 again. 
 Another sight worth taking a voyage for is that of the 
 5 sails by moonhght. Our course was ''south and by east, 
 half south," so that we seemed bound for the full moon as 
 she rolled up over our wavering horizon. Then I used to 
 go forward to the bowsprit and look back. Our ship was 
 a chpper, with every rag set, stunsails, sky-scrapers, and 
 
 lo all ; nor was it easy to believe that such a wonder could 
 be built of canvas as that white many-storied pile of 
 cloud that stooped over me, or drew back as we rose and 
 fell with the waves. 
 
 These are all the wonders I can recall of my five weeks 
 
 15 at sea, except the sun. Were you ever alone with the sun ? 
 You think it a very simple question ; but I never was, in 
 the full sense of the word, till I was held up to him one 
 cloudless day on the broad buckler of the ocean. I sup- 
 pose one might have the same feeling in the desert. I 
 
 20 remember getting something like it years ago, when I 
 climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and lay face up 
 on the hot gray moss, striving to get a notion of how an 
 Arab might feel. It was my American commentary of 
 the Koran,° and not a bad one. In a New England winter, 
 
 25 too, when everything is gagged with snow^ as if some gi- 
 gantic physical geographer were taking a cast of the earth's 
 face in plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce you 
 to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea you 
 may be alone with him day after day, and almost all day 
 
 30 long. I never understood before that nothing short of 
 fuU dayhght can give the supremest sense of solitude. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 113 
 
 Darkness will not do so, for the imagination peoples it 
 with more shapes than ever were poured from the frozen 
 loins of the populous North. The sun, I sometimes think, 
 is a little grouty° at sea, especially at high noon, feeling 
 that he wastes his beams on those fruitless furrows. It is 5 
 otherwise with the moon. She ''comforts the night," as 
 Chapman° finely says, and I always found her a com- 
 panionable creature. 
 
 In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. It is the 
 true magic-circle of expectation and conjecture, — almost 10 
 as good as a wishing-ring. What will rise over that edge 
 we sail toward daily and never overtake? A sail? an 
 island? the new shore of the Old World? Something 
 rose every day, which I need not have gone so far to see, 
 but at whose levee I was a much more faithful courtier 15 
 than on shore. A cloudless sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond 
 comparison for simple grandeur. It is like Dante's style, 
 bare and perfect. Naked sun meets naked sea, the true 
 classic of nature. There may be more sentiment in morn- 
 ing on shore, — the shivering fairy-jewelry of de\^, the 20 
 silver point-lace of sparkhng hoar-frost, — but there is 
 also more complexity, more of the romantic. The one 
 savors of the elder Edda,° the other of the Minnesingers." 
 
 And I thus floating, lonely elf, 
 
 A kind of planet by myself, 25 
 
 The mists draw up and furl away, 
 
 And in the east a warming gray, 
 
 Faint as the tint of oaken woods 
 
 When o'er their buds May breathes and broods, 
 
 Tells that the golden sunrise-tide 30 
 
 Is lapsing up earth's thirsty side, 
 
114 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Each moment purpling on the crest 
 
 Of some stark billow farther west : 
 
 And as the sea-moss droops and hears 
 
 The gurgling flood that nears and nears, 
 5 And then with tremulous content 
 
 Floats out each thankful filament, 
 
 So waited I until it came, 
 
 God's daily miracle, — shame 
 
 That I had seen so many days 
 lo Unthankful, without wondering praise, 
 
 Not recking more this bliss of earth 
 
 Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth ! 
 
 But now glad thoughts and holy pour 
 
 Into my heart, as once a year 
 IS To San Miniato's open door. 
 
 In long procession, chanting clear, 
 
 Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar, 
 
 The coupled monks slow-climbing sing, 
 
 And like a golden censer swing 
 2o From rear to front, from front to rear 
 
 Their alternating bursts of praise. 
 
 Till the roof's fading seraphs gaze 
 
 Down through an odorous mist, that crawls 
 
 Lingeringly up the darkened walls, 
 25 And the dim arches, silent long, 
 
 Are startled with triumphant song, 
 
 I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed our prosy 
 lives with mystery and conjecture. But one is shut up 
 on shipboard like Montaigne in his tower, with nothing to 
 30 do but to review his own thoughts and contradict himself. 
 Dire, redire, et me contredire° will be the staple of my jour- 
 nal till I see land. I say nothing of such matters as the 
 montagna bruna° on which Ulysses wrecked ; but since the 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 115 
 
 sixteenth century could any man reasonably hope to stum- 
 ble on one of those wonders which were cheap as dirt in the 
 days of St. Saga? Faustus, Don Juan, and Tanhauser° 
 are the last ghosts of legend, that lingered almgst till the 
 Gallic cock-crow of universal enlightenment and disillusion, s 
 The Public School has done for Imagination. What shall 
 I see in Outre-Mer,° or on the way thither, but what can 
 be seen with eyes ? To be sure, I stick by the sea-serpent, 
 and would fain believe that science has scotched, not 
 killed, him. Nor is he to be lightl}^ given up, for, like the lo 
 old Scandinavian snake, he binds together for us the two 
 hemispheres of Past and Present, of BeUef and Science. 
 He is the link which knits us seaboard Yankees with our 
 Norse progenitors, interpreting between the age of the 
 dragon and that of the railroad-train. We have made 15 
 ducks and drakes of that large estate of wonder and de- 
 light bequeathed to us by ancestral vikings, and this alone 
 remains to us unthrift heirs of Linn. 
 
 I feel an undefined respect for a man who has seen the 
 sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers what the poet 20 
 is to his fellow-men. Where they have seen nothing better 
 than a school of horse-mackerel, or the idle coils of ocean 
 around Half-way Rock, he has caught authentic glimpses 
 of the withdrawing mantle-hem of the Edda age. I care 
 not for the monster himself. It is not the thing, but the 25 
 behef in the thing, that is dear to me. May it be long be- 
 fore Professor Owen° is comforted with the sight of his un- 
 fleshed vertebrae, long before they stretch many a rood 
 behind Kimball's or Barnum's glass, reflected in the shal- 
 low orbs of Mr. and Mrs. PubHc, which stare, but see not ! 30 
 When we read that Captain Spalding, of the pink-stern 
 
116 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Three Follies, has beheld him rushing through the brine 
 like an infinite series of bewitched mackerel-casks, we feel 
 that the mystery of old Ocean, at least, has not yet been 
 sounded, -7— that Faith and Awe survive there unevapo- 
 5 rate. I once ventured the horse-mackerel theory to an 
 old fisherman, browner than a tomcod. ''Hos-mackril!" 
 he exclaimed indignantly, ''hos-mackril be — " (here he 
 used a phrase commonly indicated in laical literature by 
 the same sign which serves for Doctorate in Divinity,) 
 
 10 "don't yer spose I know a hos-mackril ? " The intonation 
 of that "/" would have silenced Professor Monkbarns 
 Owen with his provoking yhoca forever. What if one 
 should ask him if he knew a trilobite ? 
 
 The fault of modern travellers is, that they see nothing 
 
 15 out of sight. They talk of eocene periods and tertiary 
 formations, and tell us how the world looked to the plesio- 
 saur. They take science (or nescience) with them, instead 
 of that soul of generous trust their elders had. All their 
 senses are sceptics and doubters, materialists reporting 
 
 20 things for other sceptics to doubt still further upon. Nature 
 becomes a reluctant witness upon the stand, badgered 
 with geologist hammers and phials of acid. There have 
 been no travellers since those included in Hakluyt and 
 Purchas,° except Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch or two 
 
 25 into the invisible at the Orkneys. We have peripatetic 
 lecturers, but no more travellers. Travellers' stories are 
 no longer proverbial. We have picked nearly every apple 
 (wormy or otherwise) from the world's tree of knowledge, 
 and that without an Eve to tempt us. Two or three have 
 
 30 hitherto hung lucidly beyond reach on a lofty bough shad- 
 owing the interior of Africa, but there is a German Doctor 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 111 
 
 at this very moment pelting at them with sticks and 
 stones. It may be only next week, and these too, bitten 
 by geographers and geologists, will be thrown away. 
 
 Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is 
 subjected to chemic tests. We must have exact knowl-s 
 edge, a cabinet stuck full of facts pressed, dried, or pre- 
 served in spirits, instead of the large, vague world our 
 fathers had. With them science was poetry; with us, 
 poetry is science. Our modern Eden is a hortus siccus ° 
 Tourists defraud rather than enrich us. They have not lo 
 that sense of aesthetic proportion which characterized the 
 elder traveller. Earth is no longer the fine work of art it 
 was, for nothing is left to the imagination. Job Hortop, 
 arrived at the height of the Bermudas, thinks it full time 
 to indulge us in a merman. Nay, there is a story told by 15 
 Webster, in his ''Witchcraft," of a merman with a mitre, 
 who, on being sent back to his watery diocese of finland, 
 made what advances he could toward an episcopal bene- 
 diction by bowing his head thrice. Doubtless he had 
 been consecrated by St. Antony of Padua.° A dumb 20 
 bishop would be sometimes no unpleasant phenomenon, 
 by the way. Sir John Hawkins° is not satisfied with tell- 
 ing us about the merely sensual Canaries, but is generous 
 enough to throw us in a handful of " certain fhtting islands " 
 to boot. Henry Hawkes describes the visible Mexican 25 
 cities, and then is not so frugal but that he can give us a 
 few invisible ones. Thus do these generous ancient mariners 
 make children of us again. Their successors show us an 
 earth effete and past bearing, tracing out with the eyes of 
 industrious fleas every wrinkle and crowfoot. 30 
 
 The journals of the elder navigators are prose Odysseys. 
 
118 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 The geographies of our ancestors were works of fancy and 
 imagination. They read poems where we yawn over items. 
 Their world was a huge wonder-horn, exhaustless as that 
 which Thor° strove to drain. Ours would scarce quench 
 5 the small thirst of a bee. No modern voyager brings 
 back the magical foundation-stones of a Tempest. No 
 Marco Polo,° traversing the desert beyond the city of Lok, 
 would tell of things able to inspire the mind of Milton with 
 
 "Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire, 
 lo And airy tongues that syllable men's names 
 
 On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 
 
 It was easy enough to believe the story of Dante, when 
 two thirds of even the upper-world were yet untraversed 
 and unmapped. With every step of the recent traveller 
 
 IS our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those 
 beautifully^ pictured notes of the Possible are redeemed at 
 a ruinous discount in the hard and cumbrous coin of the 
 Actual. How are we not defrauded and impoverished? 
 Does California vie with El Dorado ?° or are Bruce's° 
 
 20 Abyssinian kings a set-off for Prester John? A bird in 
 the bush is worth two in the hand. And if the philosophers 
 have not even yet been able to agree whether the world 
 has any existence independent of ourselves, how do we 
 not gain a loss in every addition to the catalogue of 
 
 25 Vulgar Errors? Where are the fishes which nidificated 
 in trees? Where the monopodes sheltering themselves 
 from the sun^ beneath their single umbrella-Uke foot, — 
 umbrella-hke in everything but the fatal necessity of being 
 borrowed? Where the Acephah,° with whom Herodotus, 
 
 30 in a kind of ecstasy, wound up his climax of men with 
 
, EARLIER ESSAYS 119 
 
 abnormal top-pieces? Where the Roc° whose eggs are 
 possibly boulders, needing no far-fetched theory of glacier 
 or iceberg to account for them ? Where the tails of the 
 men of Kent ?° Where the no legs of the bird of paradise ? 
 Where the Unicorn, ° with that single horn of his, sovereign 5 
 against all manner of poisons? Where the Fountain of 
 Youth ?° Where that Thessalian° spring, which, without 
 cost to the country, convicted and punished perjurers? 
 Where the Amazons of Orellana ?° All these, and a thou- 
 sand other varieties, we have lost, and have got nothing 10 
 instead of them. And those who have robbed us of them 
 have stolen that which not enriches themselves. It is 
 so much wealth cast into the sea beyond all approach of 
 diving-bells. We owe no thanks to Mr. J. E. Worcester, 
 whose Geography we studied enforcedly at school. Yet 15 
 even he had his relentings, and in some softer moment 
 vouchsafed us a fine, inspiring print of the Maelstrom, ° 
 answerable to the twenty-four mile diameter of its suction. 
 Year by year, more and more of the world gets disen- 
 chanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic 20 
 circles is invaded. Our youth are no longer ingenious, as 
 indeed no ingenuity is demanded of them. Everything 
 is accounted for, everything cut and dried, and the world 
 may be put together as easily as the fragments of a dis- 
 sected map. The Mysterious bounds nothing now on 25 
 the North, South, East, or West. We have played Jack 
 Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it. 
 
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 
 
 The first sight of a shore so historical as that of Europe 
 gives an American a strange thrill. What we always feel 
 the artistic want of at home, is background. It is all idle 
 to say we are Englishmen, and that English history is ours 
 5 too. It is precisely in this that we are not Englishmen, 
 inasmuch as we only possess their history through our 
 minds, and not by life-long association with a spot and an 
 idea we call England. History without the soil it grew 
 in, is more instructive than inspiring, — an acquisition, 
 
 lo and not an inheritance. It is laid away in our memories, 
 and does not run in our veins. Surely, in all that concerns 
 aesthetics, Europeans have us at an immense advantage. 
 They start at a point which we arrive at after weary years, 
 for literature is not shut up in books, nor art in galleries : 
 
 15 both are taken in by unconscious absorption through the 
 finer pores of mind and character in the atmosphere of 
 society. We are not yet out of our Crusoe-hood, and must 
 make our own tools as best we may. Yet I think we shall 
 find the good of it one of these days, in being thrown back 
 
 20 more wholly on nature ; and our literature, when we have 
 learned to feel our own strength, and to respect our own 
 thought because it is ours, and not because the European 
 Mrs. Grundy° agrees with it, will have a fresh flavor and 
 a strong body that will recommend it, especially as what 
 
 120 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 121 
 
 we import is watered more and more liberally with every 
 vintage. 
 
 My first glimpse of Europe was the shore of Spain. 
 Since we got into the Mediterranean, we have been be- 
 calmed for some days within easy view of it. All along 5 
 are fine mountains, brown all day, and with a bloom on 
 them at sunset like that of a ripe plum. Here and there 
 at their feet little white towns are sprinkled along the edge 
 of the water, Uke the grains of rice dropped by the princess 
 in the story. Sometimes we see larger buildings on the 10 
 mountain slopes, probably convents. I sit and wonder 
 whether the farther peaks may not be the Sierra Morena 
 (the rusty saw) of Don Quixote.° I resolve that they 
 shall be, and am content. Surely latitude and longitude 
 never showed me any particular respect, that I should be 15 
 over-scrupulous with them. 
 
 But after all. Nature, though she may be more beautiful, 
 is nowhere so entertaining as in man, and the best thing I 
 have seen and learned at sea is our Chief Mate. My first 
 acquaintance with liim was made over my knife, which 20 
 he asked to look at, and, after a critical examination, 
 handed back to me, saying, "I shouldn't wonder if that 
 'ere was a good piece o' stuff." Since then he has trans- 
 ferred a part of his regard for my knife to its owner. I 
 like folks who hke an honest bit of steel, and take no in- 25 
 terest whatever in ''your Raphaels, Correggios,° and stuff. " 
 There is always more than the average human nature in 
 , a man who has a hearty sympathy with iron. It is a 
 manly metal, with no sordid associations like gold and 
 silver. My sailor fully came up to my expectation on 30 
 further acquaintance. He might well be called an old 
 
122 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 salt who had been wrecked on Spitzbergen° before I was 
 born. He was not an American, but I should never have 
 guessed it by his speech, which was the purest Cape Cod, 
 and I reckon myself a good taster of dialects. Nor was 
 5 he less Americanized in all his thoughts and feelings, a 
 singular proof of the ease with which our omnivorous 
 country assimilates foreign matter, provided it be Prot- 
 estant, for he was a man ere he became an American 
 citizen. He used to walk the deck with his hands in his 
 
 lo pockets, in seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his 
 eye. How he saw, I could never make out, though I had 
 a theory that it was with Ms elbows. After he had taken 
 me (or my knife) into his confidence, he took care that I 
 should see whatever he deemed of interest to a landsman. 
 
 15 Without looking up, he would say, suddenly, ''Ther's a 
 whale blowin' clearn up to win'ard," or, ''Them's porpises 
 to leeward: that means change o' wind." He is as im- 
 pervious to cold as a polar bear, and paces the deck during 
 his watch much as one of those yellow hummocks goes 
 
 20 slumping up and down his cage. On the Atlantic, if the 
 wind IdIgw a gale from the northeast, and it was cold as 
 an English summer, he was sure to turn out in a cahco 
 shirt and trousers, his furzy brown chest half bare, and 
 shppers, without stockings. But lest you might fancy 
 
 25 this to have chanced by defect of wardrobe, he comes out 
 in a monstrous pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean, when 
 the evening is so hot that Adam would have been glad to 
 leave off his fig-leaves. ''It's a kind o' damp and unwhole- 
 some in these ere waters," he says, evidently regarding 
 
 30 the Midland Sea as a vile standing pool, in comparison with 
 the bluff ocean. At meals he is superb, not only for his 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 123 
 
 strengths, but his weaknesses. He has some how or other 
 come to think me a wag, and if I ask him to pass the butter, 
 detects an occult joke, and laughs as much as is proper for 
 a mate. For you must know that our social hierarchy on 
 sliipboard is precise, and the second mate, were he present, s 
 would only laugh half as much as the first. Mr. X. always 
 combs his hair, and works himself into a black frock-coat 
 (on Sundays he adds a waistcoat) before he comes to meals, 
 sacrificing liimself nobly ^nd painfully to the social pro- 
 prieties. The second mate, on the other hand, who eats lo 
 after us, enjoys the privilege of shirt-sleeves, and is, I 
 think, the happier man of the two. We do not have seats 
 above and below the salt, as in old time, but above and 
 below the white sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown sugar, 
 and it is delightful to see how he ignores the existence of is 
 certain dehcates wliich he considers above his grade, tip- 
 ping his head on one side with an air of abstraction, so 
 that he may seem not to deny himself, but to omit helping 
 himself from inadvertence or absence of mind. At such 
 times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar manner, in- 20 
 scrutable at first as a cuneiform inscription, but as easily 
 read after you once get the key. The sense of it is some- 
 thing like this : "I, X., know my place, a height of wis- 
 dom attained by few. Whatever you may think, I do not 
 see that currant jelly, nor that preserved grape. Es- 25 
 pecially, a kind Providence has made me bhnd to bowls of 
 white sugar, and deaf to the pop of champagne corks. It 
 is much that a merciful compensation gives me a sense of 
 the dingier hue of Havana, and the muddier gurgle of beer. 
 Are there potted meats? My physician has ordered me 30 
 three pounds of minced salt- junk at every meal." There ^ 
 
124 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 is such a thing, you know, as a ship's husband : X. is the 
 ship's poor relation. 
 
 As I have said, he takes also a below-the-white-sugar 
 interest in the jokes, laughing by precise point of compass, 
 5 just as he would lay the ship's course, all yawing being out 
 of the question with liis scrupulous decorum at the helm. 
 Once or twice I have got the better of him, and touched 
 him off into a kind of compromised explosion, hke that of 
 damp fireworks, that splutter and simmer a little, and 
 
 lo then go out with painful slowness and occasional relapses. 
 But his fuse is always of the unwilhngest, and you must 
 blow your match, and touch him off again and again with 
 the same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him many 
 times to get him en rapport° with a jest. This once accom- 
 
 15 plished, you have him, and one bit of fun will last the 
 whole voyage. He prefers those of one syllable, the a-b 
 abs of humor. The gradual fattening of the steward, a 
 benevolent mulatto with whiskers and ear-rings, who 
 looks as if he had been meant for a woman, and had be- 
 
 2o come a man by accident, as in some of those stories of the 
 elder physiologists, is an abiding topic of humorous com- 
 ment with Mr. X. "That 'ere stooard," he says, with a 
 brown grin like what you might fancy on the face of a 
 serious and aged seal, '"s agittin' as fat's a porpis. He 
 
 25 was as thin's a shingle when he come aboord last v'yge. 
 Them trousis'll bust yit. He don't darst take 'em off 
 nights, for the whole ship's company couldn't git him into 
 'em agin." Aad then he turns aside to enjoy the intensity 
 of his emotion by himself, and you hear at intervals low 
 
 3orumbUngs, an indigestion of laughter. He tells me of 
 St. Elmo's fires,° Marvell's corposants ° though with him 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 125 
 
 the original corpos santos has suffered a" sea change, and 
 turned to comepleasants, pledges of fine weather. I shall 
 not soon find a pleasanter companion. It is so dehghtful 
 to meet a man who knows just what you do not. Nay, I 
 think the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance 5 
 like what the body feels in cushiony moss. Talk of the 
 sympathy of kindred pursuits! It is the sympathy of 
 the upper and nether millstones, both forever grinding 
 the same grist, and wearing each other smooth. One has 
 not far to seek for book-nature, artist-nature, every variety 10 
 of superinduced nature, in short, but genuine human-nature 
 is hard to find. And how good it is! Wholesome as a 
 potato, fit company for any dish. The freemasonry of 
 cultivated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I hke better 
 the natural grip with which manhood recognizes man- 15 
 hood. 
 
 X. has one good story, and with that I leave him, wish- 
 ing him with all my heart that little inland farm at last 
 which is his calenture as he paces the windy deck. One 
 evening, when the clouds looked wild and whirUng, I asked 20 
 X. if it was coming on to blow. "No, I guess not," said 
 he; ''bumby the moon'll be up, and scoff away that 'ere 
 loose stuff." His intonation set the phrase "scoff away" 
 in quotation-marks as plain as print. So I put a query 
 in each eye, and he went on. "Ther' was a Dutch cappen 25 
 onct, an' his mate come to him in the cabin, where he sot 
 takin' his schnapps, an' says, 'Cappen, it's agittin' thick 
 an' looks kin' o' squally ; hedn't we's good's shorten sail ? ' 
 'Gimmy my alminick,' says the cappen. So he looks at 
 it a spell, an' says he, ' The moon's due in less'n half an 30 
 hour, an' she'll scoff away ev'ythin' clare agin.' So the 
 
126 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 mate he goes, an' bumby down he comes agin, an' says, 
 'Cappen, this 'ere's the allfiredest, powerfullest moon't 
 ever you did see. She's scoffed away the maintogallants'l, 
 an' she's to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you'd 
 
 5 better look in the alminick agin, an' fin' out when this moon 
 sets.' So the cappen thought 'twas 'bout time to go on 
 deck. Dreadful slow them Dutch cappens be." And X. 
 walked away, rumbUng inwardly, like the rote of the sea 
 heard afar. 
 
 lo And so we arrived at Malta. Did you ever hear of one 
 of those eating-houses, where, for a certain fee, the guest 
 has the right to make one thrust with a fork into a huge 
 pot, in wliich the whole dinner is bubbUng, getting per- 
 haps a bit of boiled meat, or a potato, or else nothing? 
 
 15 Well, when the great caldron of war is seething, and the 
 nations stand round it striving to fish out something to 
 their purpose from the mess, Britannia always has a great 
 advantage in her trident. Malta is one of the titbits she 
 has impaled with that awful implement. I was not sorry 
 
 20 for it, when I reached my clean inn, with its kindly Eng- 
 hsh landlady. 
 
ITALY 
 
 The impulse which sent the Edelmann Storg and me to 
 Subiaco° was given something Hke two thousand years 
 ago. Had we not seen the Ponte Sant' Antonio, ° we 
 should not have gone to Subiaco at this particular time; 
 and had the Romans been worse masons, or more ignorant s 
 of hydrodynamics than they were, we should never have 
 seen the Ponte Sant' Antonio. But first we went to 
 Tivoh,° — two carriage-loads of us, a very agreeable 
 mixture of EngHsh, Scotch, and Yankees, — on Tuesday, 
 the 20th April. I shall not say anything about TivoU. lo 
 A water-fall in type is Hkely to be a trifle stiffish. Old 
 association and modern beauty; nature and artifice; 
 worship that has passed away and the religion that abides 
 forever ; the green gush of the deeper torrent and the white 
 evanescence of innumerable cascades, delicately palpitant 15 
 as a fall of northern lights; the descendants of Sabine° 
 pigeons flashing up to immemorial dove-cots, for centuries 
 inaccessible to man, trooping with noisy rooks and daws ; 
 the fitful roar and the silently hovering iris, which, borne 
 by the wind across the face of the cliff, transmutes the 20 
 travertine to momentary opal, and whose dimmer ghost 
 haunts the moonhght, — as well attempt to describe to a 
 Papuan° savage that wondrous ode° of Wordsworth which 
 rouses and stirs in the soul all its dormant instincts of 
 resurrection as with a sound of the last trumpet. ^No, it 25 
 
 127 
 
128 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 is impossible. Even Byron's° pump sucks sometimes, 
 
 - and gives an unpleasant dry wheeze, especially, it seems 
 to me, at Terni.° It is guide-book poetry, enthusiasm 
 manufactured by the yard, which the hurried traveller 
 5 (John and Jonathan are always in a hurry when they turn 
 peripatetics) puts on when he has not a rag of private 
 imagination to cover his nakedness withal. It must be a 
 queer Idnd of love that could "watch madness with un- 
 alterable mien," when the patient, whom any competent 
 
 lo physician would have ordered into a strait-waistcoat long 
 ago, has sliivered himself to powder down a precipice. 
 But there is no madness in the matter. Velino° goes over 
 in his full senses, and knows perfectly well that he shall 
 not be hurt, that his broken fragments will reunite more 
 
 15 gUbly than the head and neck of Orrilo.° He leaps exult- 
 ant, as to his proper doom and fulfilment, and out of the 
 mere waste and spray of his glory the god of sunshine 
 and song builds over the crowning moment of his destiny 
 a triumphal arch beyond the reach of time and of decay. 
 
 20 But Milton is the only man who has got much poetry out 
 of a cataract, — and that was a cataract in his eye. 
 
 The first day we made the Giro° coming back to a 
 merry dinner at the Sibilla° in the evening. Then we had 
 some special tea, — for the Italians think tea-drinldng 
 
 25 the chief religious observance of the Inglesi° — and then 
 we had fifteen pauls' worth of illumination, which wrought 
 a sudden change in the scenery, like those that seem so 
 matter-of-course in dreams, turning the Claude° we had 
 seen in the morning into a kind of Piranesi-Rembrandt.° 
 
 30 The illumination, by the way, which had been prefigured 
 to us by the enthusiastic Itahan who conducted it as some- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 129 
 
 thing second only to the Girandola° turned out to be one 
 blue-Hght and two armfuls of straw. 
 
 The Edelmann Storg is not fond of pedestrian locomo- 
 tion, — nay, I have even sometimes thought that he 
 looked upon the invention of legs as a private and per- 5 
 sonal wrong done to himself. I am quite sure that he in- 
 wardly believes them to have been a consequence of the 
 fall, and that the happier Pre-Adamites were monopodes, 
 and incapable of any but a vehicular progression. A 
 carriage, with horses and driver complete, he takes to be 10 
 as simple a production of nature as a potato. But he is 
 fond of sketching, and after breaMast, on the beautiful 
 morning of Wednesday, the 21st, I persuaded him to walk 
 out a mile or two and see a fragment of aqueduct ruin. 
 It is a single glorious arch, buttressing the mountain-side 15 
 upon the edge of a sharp descent to the valley of the Anio.° 
 The old road to Subiaco passes under it, and it is crowned 
 by a crumbling tower built in the Middle Ages (whenever 
 that was) against the Gaetani.° While Storg sketched, I 
 clambered. Below you, where the valley widens greenly 20 
 toward other mountains, which the ripe Italian air dis- 
 tances with a bloom Hke that on unplucked grapes, are 
 more arches, ossified arteries of what was once the heart 
 of the world. Storg's sketch was highly approved of by 
 Leopoldo, our guide, and by three or four peasants, who, 25 
 being on their way to their morning's work in the fields, 
 had, of course, nothing in particular to do, and stopped to 
 see us see the ruin. Any one who has remarked how 
 grandly the Romans do nothing will be slow to beHeve 
 them an effete race. Their style is as the colossal to all 30 
 other, and the name of Eternal City fits Rome also, be- 
 
130 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 cause time is of no account in it. The Roman always 
 waits as if he could afford it amply, and the slow centuries 
 move quite fast enough for him. Time is to other races 
 the field of a task-master, which they must painfully till ; 
 
 5 but to the Roman it is an entailed estate, which he enjoys 
 and will transmit. The Neapolitan's^ laziness is that of 
 a loafer; the Roman's is that of a noble. The poor 
 Anglo-Saxon must count his hours, and look twice at his 
 small change of quarters and minutes; but the Roman 
 
 lo spends from a purse of Fortunatus.° His piccolo quarto 
 d'ora° is like his grosso° a huge piece of copper, big enough 
 for a shield, which stands only for a half -dime of our 
 money. We poor fools of time always hurry as if we were 
 the last type of man, the full stop with which Fate was 
 
 15 closing the colophon of her volume, — as if we had just 
 read in our newspaper, as we do of the banks on hohdays, 
 (I^^ The world will close to-day at twelve o'clock, an hour 
 earlier than usual. But the Roman is still an Ancient, 
 with a vast future before him to tame and occupy. He 
 
 20 and his ox and his plough are just as they were in Virgil's 
 time or Ennius's.° We beat him in many things ; but in 
 the impregnable fastness of his great rich nature he defies 
 us. 
 
 We got back to Tivoli, — Storg affirming that he had 
 
 25 walked fifteen miles. We saw the Temple of Cough, 
 which is not the Temple of Cough, though it might have 
 been a votive structure put up by some Tiburtine Dr. 
 Wistar.° We^saw the villa of Mecsenas,° which is not 
 the villa of Mecsenas, and other equally satisfactory an- 
 
 3otiques. All our Enghsh friends sketched the Citadel, of 
 course, and one enthusiast attempted a likeness of the fall, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 131 
 
 which I unhappily mistook afterward for a semblance of 
 the tail of one of the horses on the Monte Cavallo . Then we 
 went to the Villa d'Este, famous on Ariosto's° account, — 
 and which Ariosto never saw. But the laurels were worthy 
 to have made a chaplet for him, and the cypresses and the 5 
 views were as fine as if he had seen them every day of his Hfe. 
 
 Perhaps something I learned in going to see one of the 
 gates of the town is more to the purpose, and may assist 
 one in erecting the horoscope of Italia Unita° When 
 Leopoldo first proposed to drag me through the mud to 10 
 view this interesting piece of architecture, I demurred. 
 But as he was very earnest about it, and as one seldom 
 fails getting at a bit of character by submitting to one's 
 guide, I yielded. Arrived at the spot, he put me at the 
 best point of view, and said, — • ^5 
 
 "Behold, Lordship!" 
 
 "I see nothing out of the common," said I. 
 
 "Lordship is kind enough here to look at a gate, the 
 like of which exists not in all Ital}^, nay, in the whole world, 
 — I speak not of England," for he thought me an Inglese. 20 
 
 "I am not blind, Leopoldo; where is the miracle?" 
 
 "Here we dammed up the waters of the Anio, first by 
 artifice conducted to this spot, and letting them out upon 
 the Romans, who stood besieging the town, drowned al- 
 most a whole army of them. (Lordship conceives?) 25 
 They suspected nothing till they found themselves all 
 torn to pieces at the foot of the hill yonder, (Lordship 
 conceives ?) Eh ! per Bacco !° we watered their porridge 
 for them." 
 
 Leopoldo used we as Lord Buchan did /, meaning any 30 
 of his ancestors. 
 
132 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 "But tell me a little, Leopoldo, how many years is it 
 since this happened?" 
 
 ''Non saprei, signoria; ° it was in the antiquest times, 
 certainly; but the Romans never come to our Fair, that 
 5 we don't have blows about it, and perhaps a stab or two. 
 Lordship understands ? " 
 
 I was quite repaid for my pilgrimage. I think I under- 
 stand Italian politics better for hearing Leopoldo speak 
 of the Romans, whose great dome is in full sight of Tivoli, 
 loas a foreign nation. But what perennial boyhood the 
 whole story indicates ! 
 
 Storg's sketch of the morning's ruin was so successful 
 that I seduced him into a new expedition to the Ponte 
 Sant' Antonio, another aqueduct arch about eight miles 
 15 off. This was for the afternoon, and I succeeded the more 
 easily, as we were to go on horseback. So I told Leopoldo 
 to be at the gate of the Villa of Hadrian, at three o'clock, 
 with three horses. Leopoldo's face, when I said three, 
 was worth seeing; for the poor fellow had counted on 
 20 nothing more than trotting beside our horses for sixteen 
 miles, and getting half a dollar in the evening. Between 
 doubt and hope, his face seemed to exude a kind of oil, 
 which made it shine externally, after having first lubri- 
 cated all the muscles inwardly. 
 25 "With three horses, Lordship?" 
 "Yes, three.'' 
 
 "Lordship is very sagacious. With three horses they 
 go much quicker. It is finished, then, and they will have 
 the kindness to find me at the gate with the beasts, at 
 30 three o'clock precisely." 
 
 Leopoldo and I had compromised upon the term "Lord- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 133 
 
 ship." He had found me in the morning celebrating due 
 rites before the Sibyl's Temple with strange incense of the 
 nicotian herb, and had marked me for his prey. At the 
 very high tide of sentiment, when the traveller lies with 
 oyster-like openness in the soft ooze of reverie, do these 5 
 parasitic crabs, the ciceroni ° insert themselves as his in- 
 separable bosom companions. Unhappy bivalve, lying 
 so softly between thy two shells, of the actual and the 
 possible, the one sustaining, the other widening above 
 thee, till, obhvious of native mud, thou fanciest thyself 10 
 a proper citizen only of the illimitable ocean which floods 
 thee, — there is no escape ! Vain are thy poor crustaceous 
 efforts at self -isolation. The foe henceforth is a part of 
 thy consciousness, thy landscape, and thyself, happy only 
 if that irritation breed in thee the pearl of patience and of 15 
 voluntary abstraction. 
 
 "Excellency wants a guide, very experienced, who has 
 conducted with great mutual satisfaction many of his 
 noble compatriots." 
 
 Puff, puff, and an attempt at looking as if I did not see 20 
 him. 
 
 "Excellency will deign to look at my book of testi- 
 monials. When we return. Excellency will add his own." 
 
 Puff, puff. 
 
 "Excellency regards the cascade, proeceps Anio° as the 25 
 good Horatius called it." 
 
 I thought of the dissolve frigus° of the landlord in Rod- 
 erick Random, and could not help smiling. Leopoldo 
 saw his advantage. 
 
 "Excellency will find Leopoldo, when he shall choose 30 
 to be ready." 
 
134 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 ''But I will positively not be called Excellency. I am 
 not an ambassador, nor a very eminent Christian, and the 
 phrase annoys me." 
 
 ''To be sure, Excell — Lordship." 
 5 "I am an American." 
 
 "Certainly, an American, Lordsliip," — as if that 
 settled the matter entirely. If I had told him I was a 
 Caff re, ° it would have been just as clear to him. He sur- 
 rendered the "Excellency," but on general principles of 
 
 lo human nature, I suppose, would not come a step lower 
 than "Lordship." So we compromised on that. — P. S. 
 It is wonderful how soon a republican ear reconciles it- 
 self with syllables of this description. I think citizen 
 would find greater difficulties in the way of its naturaliza- 
 
 istion, and as for brother — ah! well, in a Christian sense, 
 certainly. 
 
 Three o'clock found us at the Villa of Hadrian. We 
 had explored that incomparable ruin, and consecrated it, 
 in the Homeric and Anglo-Saxon manner, by eating and 
 
 20 drinking. Some of us sat in the shadow of one of the great 
 walls, fitter for a city than a palace, over which a Nile of 
 ivy, gushing from one narrow source, spread itself in 
 widening inundations. A happy few Hstened to stories 
 of Bagdad from Mrs. , whose silver hair gleamed, a 
 
 25 palpable anachronism, like a snowfall in May, over that 
 ever-youthful face, where the few sadder lines seemed but 
 the signature of Age to a deed of quitclaim and release. 
 Dear Tito, tha.t exemplary traveller who never lost a day, 
 had come back from renewed explorations, convinced by 
 
 30 the eloquent custode that Serapeion was the name of an 
 ofl&cer in the Praetorian Guard. I was explaining, in ad- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 135 
 
 dition, that Naumachia, in the Greek tongue, signified a 
 place artificially drained, when the horses were announced. 
 
 This put me to reflection. I felt, perhaps, a little as 
 Mazeppa° must, when told that his steed was at the door. 
 For several years I had not been on the back of a horse, 5 
 and was it not more than likely that these mountains 
 might produce a yet more refractory breed of these fero- 
 cious animals than common? Who could tell the effect 
 of grazing on a volcanic soil like that hereabout? I had 
 vague recollections that the saddle nullified the laws gov- lo 
 erning the impulsion of inert bodies, exacerbating the 
 centrifugal forces into a virulent activity, and propor- 
 tionably narcotizing the centripetal. The phrase ratio 
 proportioned to the squares of the distances impressed me 
 with an awe which explained to me how the laws of nature 15 
 had been of old personified and worshipped. Meditating 
 these things, I walked with a cheerful aspect to the gate, 
 where my saddled and bridled martyrdom awaited me. 
 
 "Eccomi qim!''° said Leopoldo, hilariously. "Gentle- 
 men will be good enough to select from the three best 20 
 beasts in Tivoli." 
 
 "0, this one will serve me as well as any," said I, with 
 an air of indifference, much as I have seen a gentle- 
 man help himself inadvertently to the best peach in the 
 dish. I am not more selfish than becomes a Christian of 25 
 the nineteenth century, but I looked on this as a clear case 
 of tabida in naufragio° and had noticed that the animal 
 in question had that tremulous droop of the lower lip 
 which indicates senility, and the abdication of the wilder 
 propensities. Moreover, he was the only one provided 30 
 with a curb bit, or rather with two huge iron levers which 
 
136 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 might almost have served Archimedes" for his problem. 
 Our saddles were flat cushions covered with leather, 
 brought by years of friction to the highest state of poUsh. 
 Instead of a pommel, a perpendicular stake, about ten 
 5 inches high, rose in front, which, in case of a stumble, 
 would save one's brains, at the risk of certain evisceration. 
 Behind, a glary slope invited me constantly to slide over 
 the horse's tail. The selfish prudence of my choice had 
 well-nigh proved the death of me, for this poor old brute, 
 
 lowith that anxiety to oblige a forestiero° which charac- 
 terizes everybody here, could never make up his mind 
 which of his four paces (and he had the rudiments of four 
 — walk, trot, rack, and gallop) would be most agreeable 
 to me. The period of transition is always unpleasant, 
 
 IS and it was all transition. He treated me to a hodge- 
 podge of all his several gaits at once. Saint Vitus was 
 the only patron saint I could think of. My head jerked 
 one way, my body another, while each of my legs became 
 a pendulum vibrating furiously, one always forward while 
 
 20 the other was back, so that I had all the appearance and 
 all the labor of going afoot, and at the same time was 
 bumped within an inch of my life. Waterton's° aUigator 
 was nothing to it; it was like riding a hard-trotting ar- 
 madillo bare-backed. There is a species of equitation 
 
 25 peculiar to our native land, in which a rail from the nearest 
 fence, with no preliminary incantation of Horse and hattock ! 
 is converted into a steed, and this alone may stand the com- 
 parison. Storg in the mean while was triumphantly taking 
 the lead, his trousers working up very pleasantly above his 
 
 30 knees, an insurrectionary movement which I also was unable 
 to suppress in my own. I could bear it no longer. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 137 
 
 " Le-e-o-o-p-o-o-o-l-l-l-d-d-0-0-0 ! " jolted I. 
 
 "Command, Lordship!" and we both came to a stop. 
 
 "It is necessary that we change horses immediately, or 
 I shaU be jelly." 
 
 "Certainly, Lordship"; and I soon had the pathetics 
 satisfaction of seeing him subjected to all the excruciating 
 experiments that had been tried upon myself. Fiat ex- 
 perimentum in corpore vili° thought his extempore lord- 
 ship, Christopher Sly,° to himself. 
 
 Meanwhile all the other accessories of our ride were lo 
 delicious. It was a clear, cool day, and we soon left the 
 high road for a bridlepath along the side of the mountain, . 
 among gigantic ohve-trees, said to be five hundred years 
 old, and which had certainly employed all their time in 
 getting into the weirdest and wonderfullest shapes. 15 
 Clearly in this green commonwealth there was no heavy 
 roller of public opinion to flatten all character to a lawn- 
 Hke uniformity. Everything was individual and eccentric. 
 And there was something fearfully human, too, in the 
 wildest contortions. It was some such wood that gave 20 
 Dante the hint of his human forest in the seventh circle, 
 and I should have dreaded to break a twig, lest I should 
 hear that voice complaining, 
 
 "Perche mi scerpi? 
 Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno?"° 25 
 
 Our path lay along a kind of terrace, and at every open- 
 ing we had glimpses of the billowy Campagna, with the 
 great dome bulging from its rim, while on our right, chang- 
 ing ever as we rode, the Alban mountain showed us some 
 new grace of that sweeping outline peculiar to volcanoes. 30 
 
138 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 At intervals the substructions of Roman villas would crop 
 out from the soil like masses of rock, and deserving to rank 
 as a geological formation by themselves. Indeed, in 
 gazing into these dark caverns, one does not think of man 
 5 more than at Staffa.° Nature has adopted these frag- 
 ments of a race who were dear to her. She has not suffered 
 these bones of the great Queen to lack due sepulchral 
 rites, but has flung over them the ceremonial handfuls of 
 earth, and every year carefully renews the garlands of 
 
 lo memorial flowers. Nay, if what they say in Rome be 
 true, she has even made a new continent of the Colosseum, 
 and given it a flora of its own. 
 
 At length, descending a little, we passed through farm- 
 yards, and cultivated fields, where, from Leopoldo's con- 
 
 15 versations with the laborers, we discovered that he him- 
 self did not know the way for which he had undertaken 
 to be guide. However, we presently came to our ruin, 
 and very noble it was. The aqueduct had here been 
 carried across a deep gorge, and over the little brook which 
 
 20 wimpled along below towered an arch, as a bit of Shake- 
 speare bestrides the exiguous rill of a discourse which it 
 was intended to ornament. The only human habitation 
 in sight was a Httle casetta on the top of a neighboring 
 hill. What else of man's work could be seen was a ruined 
 
 25 castle of the Middle Ages, and, far away upon the horizon, 
 the eternal dome. A valley in the moon could scarce 
 have been lonelier, could scarce have suggested more 
 strongly the Reeling of preteriteness and extinction. The 
 stream below did not seem so much to sing as to murmur 
 
 30 sadly, Conclusum est penisti!° and the wind, sighing 
 through the arch, answered, Periisti ! Nor was the si- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 139 
 
 lence of Monte Cavi without meaning. That cup, once 
 full of fiery wine, in which it pledged Vesuvius and ^Etna 
 later born, was brimmed with innocent water now. Adam 
 came upon the earth too late to see the glare of its last 
 orgy, lighting the eyes of saurians in the reedy Campagna 5 
 below. I almost fancied I could hear a voice like that 
 which cried to the Egyptian pilot. Great Pan° is dead ! I 
 was looking into the dreary socket where once glowed the 
 eye that saw the whole earth vassal. Surely, this was the 
 world's autumn, and I could hear the feet of Time rus- 10 
 tling through the wreck of races and dynasties, cheap and 
 inconsiderable as fallen leaves. 
 
 But a guide is not engaged to lead one into the world of 
 imagination. He is as deadty to sentiment as a sniff of 
 hartshorn. His position is a false one, like that of the 15 
 critic, who is supposed to know everything, and expends 
 himself in showing that he does not. If you should ever 
 have the luck to attend a concert of the spheres, under 
 the protection of an Italian cicerone, he will expect you 
 to listen to him rather than to it. He will say : '^Ecco, 20 
 Signoria° that one in the red mantle is Signor Mars, eh ! 
 what a noblest basso., is Signor Mars ! but nothing (Lord- 
 ship understands ?) to what Signor Saturn used to be, (he 
 with the golden belt, Signoria,) only his voice is in ruins 
 now, — scarce one note left upon another ; but Lordship 25 
 can see what it was by the remains, Roman remains, 
 Signoria, Roman remains, the work of giants. (Lordship 
 understands?) They make no such voices now. Cer- 
 tainly, Signor Jupiter (with the yellow tunic, there) is a 
 brave artist and a most sincere tenor ; but since the time 30 
 of the Republic" (if he think you an oscurante,° or since 
 
140 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 the French, if he suspect you of being the least red) "we 
 have no more good singing." And so on. 
 
 It is a well-known fact to all persons who are in the 
 habit of cUmbing Jacob's-ladders,° that, if any one speak 
 5 to you during the operation, the fabric collapses, and you 
 come somewhat uncomfortably to the ground. One can 
 be hit with a remark, when he is beyond the reach of more 
 material missiles. Leopoldo saw by my abstracted man- 
 ner that I was getting slwslj from him, and I was the only 
 lo victim he had left, for Storg was making a sketch below. 
 So he hastened to fetch me down again. 
 
 "Nero built this arch, Lordship." (He didn't, but 
 Nero was Leopoldo's historical scapegoat.) "Lordship 
 sees the dome? he will deign to look the least little to 
 15 the left hand. Lordship has much intelligence. Well, 
 Nero always did thus. His works always, always, had 
 Rome in view." 
 
 He had already shown me two ruins, which he ascribed 
 equally to Nero, and which could only have seen Rome 
 20 by looking through a mountain. However, such trifles 
 are notliing to an accompHshed guide. 
 
 I remembered his quoting Horace in the morning. 
 "Do you understand Latin, Leopoldo?" 
 " I did a little once, Lordship. I went to the Jesuits' school 
 25 at Tivoli. But what use of Latin to a povenno° like me ? " 
 "Were you intended for the church? Why did you 
 leave the school ? " 
 
 "Eh, Lordship!" and one of those shrugs which might 
 mean that he left it of his own free will, or that he was ex- 
 sopelled at point of toe. He added some contemptuous 
 phrase about the priests. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 141 
 
 "But, Leopoldo, you are a good Catholic?" 
 
 "Eh, Lordship, who Imows? A man is no blinder for 
 being poor, — nay, hunger sharpens the eyesight some- 
 times. The cardinals (their Eminences!) tell us that it 
 is good to be poor, and that, in proportion as we lack on s 
 earth, it shall be made up to us in Paradise. Now, if the 
 cardinals (their Eminences!) believe what they preach, 
 why do they want to ride in such handsome carriages?" 
 
 "But are there many who think as you do?" 
 
 "Everybody, Lordship, but a few women and fools. lo 
 What imports it what the fools think?" 
 
 An immense deal, I thought, an immense deal; for of 
 what material is public opinion manufactured? 
 
 "Do you ever go to church?" 
 
 "Once a year, Lordship, at Easter, to mass and con- 15 
 fession." 
 
 "Why once a year?" 
 
 "Because, Lordship, one must have a certificate from 
 the priest. One might be sent to prison else, and one had 
 rather go to confession than to jail. Eh, Lordship, it is 20 
 a porchena.''° 
 
 It is proper to add, that in what Leopoldo said of the 
 priests he was not speaking of his old masters, the Jesuits. 
 One never hears anything in Italy against the purity of 
 their • lives, or their learning and ability, though much 25 
 against their unscrupulousness. Nor will any one who 
 has ever enjoyed the gentle and dignified hospitality of 
 the Benedictines be ready to believe any evil report of 
 them. 
 
 By this time Storg had finished his sketch, and we re- 30 
 mounted our grazing steeds. They were brisker as soon 
 
142 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 as their noses were turned homeward, and we did the 
 eight miles back in an hour. The setting sun streamed 
 through and among the Michael Angelesque olive-trunks, 
 and, through the long colonnade of the bridle-path, fired 
 5 the scarlet waistcoats and bodices of homeward villagers, 
 or was sullenly absorbed in the long black cassock and 
 flapped hat of a priest, who courteously saluted the stran- 
 gers. Sometimes a mingled flock of sheep and goats (as 
 if they had walked out of one of Claude's pictures) fol- 
 io lowed the shepherd, who, satyr-like, in goat-sldn breeches, 
 sang such songs as were acceptable before Tubal Cain° 
 struck out the laws of musical time from his anvil. The 
 peasant, in his ragged brown cloak, or with blue jacket 
 hanging from the left shoulder, still strides Romanly, — 
 IS incedit rex° — and his eyes have a placid grandeur, in- 
 herited from those which watched the glittering snake of 
 the Triumph, as it undulated along the Via Sacra. By 
 his side moves with equal pace his woman-porter, the 
 caryatid of a vast entablature of household-stuff, and 
 20 learning in that harsh school a sinuous poise of body and 
 a security of step beyond the highest snatch of the pos- 
 ture-master. 
 
 As we drew near TivoH the earth was fast swinging into 
 shadow. The darkening Campagna, climbing the sides 
 25 of the nearer Monticelli in a gray belt of olive-spray, rolled 
 on towards the blue island of Soracte, behind which we 
 lost the sun. Yes, we had lost the sun ; but in the wide 
 chimney of the largest room at the Sibilla there danced 
 madly, crackUng with ilex and laurel, a bright ambassador 
 30 from Sunland, Monsieur Le Feu,° no pinchbeck substitute 
 for his royal master. . As we drew our chairs up, after the 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 143 
 
 dinner due to Leopoldo's forethought, "Behold," said I, 
 "the Resident of the great king near the court of our (this- 
 day-created) Hogan Moganships." 
 
 We sat looking into the fire, as it wavered from shining 
 shape to shape of unearthliest fantasy, and both of us, 5 
 no doubt, making out old faces among the embers, for we 
 both said together, "Let us talk of old times." 
 
 "To the small hours," said the Edelmann; "and in- 
 stead of blundering off to Torneo to intrude chatteringly 
 upon the midnight privacy of Apollo, let us promote the 10 
 fire, there, to the rank of sun by brevet, and have a kind 
 of undress rehearsal of those night wanderings of his here 
 upon the ample stage of the hearth." 
 
 So we went through the whole catalogue of Do you re- 
 members f and laughed at all the old stories, so dreary to 15 
 an outsider. Then we grew pensive, and talked of the 
 empty sockets in that golden band of our young friendship, 
 — ■ of S., with Grecian front, but unsevere, and Saxon M., 
 to whom laughter was as natural as for a brook to ripple. 
 
 But Leopoldo had not done with us. We were to get 20 
 back to Rome in the morning, and to that end must make 
 a treaty with the company which ran the Tivoli diligence, 
 the next day not being the regular period of departure 
 for that prodigious structure. We had given Leopoldo 
 twice his fee, and, setting a mean value upon our capaci- 25 
 ties in proportion, he expected to bag a neat percentage 
 on our bargain. Alas! he had made a false estimate of 
 the Anglo-Norman mind, which, capable of generosity as 
 a compliment to itself, will stickle for the dust in the bal- 
 ance in a matter of business, and would blush at being 30 
 done by Mercury himself. 
 
144 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Accordingly, at about nine o'clock there came a knock 
 at the door, and, answering our Favonsca!° in stalked 
 Leopoldo, gravely followed by the two commissioners of 
 the company. 
 5 ''Behold me returned. Lordship, and these men are the 
 Vettunni.''° 
 
 Why is it that men who have to do with horses are the 
 same all over Christendom ? Is it that they acquire equine 
 characteristics, or that tliis particular mystery is mag- 
 
 lo netic to certain sorts of men ? Certainly they are marked 
 unmistakably, and these two worthies would have looked 
 perfectly natural in Yorkshire or Vermont. They were 
 just alike, — fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum° — 
 and you could not spUt an epithet between them. Simul- 
 
 15 taneously they threw back their large overcoats, and 
 displayed spheroidal figures, over which the strongly 
 pronounced stripes of their plaided waistcoats ran like 
 parallels of latitude and longitude over a globe. Simul- 
 taneously they took off their hats and said, "Your ser- 
 
 2ovant, gentlemen." In Italy, it is always necessary to 
 make a comhinazione° beforehand about even the most 
 customary matters, for there' is no fixed highest price for 
 anything. For a minute or two we stood reckoning -each 
 other's forces. Then I opened the first trench with the 
 
 25 usual, ''How much do you wish for carrying us to Rome 
 at half past seven to-morrow morning?" 
 
 The enemy glanced, one at the other, and the result of 
 this ocular witenagemof was that one said, "Four scudi,° 
 gentlemen." 
 
 30 The Edelmann Storg took his cigar from his mouth in 
 order to whistle, and made a rather indecorous allusion 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 145 
 
 to four gentlemen in the diplomatic service of his Majesty, 
 the Prince of the Powers of the Air. 
 
 "Whe-ewl quattro diavoli!" said he. 
 
 '' Macchd ! "° exclaimed I, attempting a flank-movement, 
 ''I had rather go on foot!" and threw as much horrors 
 into my face as if a proposition had been made to me to 
 commit robbery, murder, and arson all together. 
 
 "For less than three scudi and a half the diHgence parts 
 not from Tivoli at an extraordinary hour," said the stout 
 man, with an imperturbable gravity, intended to mask his lo 
 retreat, and to make it seem that he was making the same 
 proposal as at first. 
 
 Storg saw that they wavered, and opened upon them 
 with his fljdng artillery of sarcasm. 
 
 "Do you take us for Inglesi? We are very well here, 15 
 and will stay at the Sibilla," he sniffed scornfully. 
 
 "How much will Lordship give?" (This was showing 
 the white feather.) 
 
 "Fifteen pauls," (a scudo and a half,) ''buonamano° 
 included." 20 
 
 "It is impossible, gentlemen; for less than two scudi 
 and a half the diligence parts not from Tivoli at an ex- 
 traordinary hour." 
 
 "Fifteen pauls." 
 
 "Will Lordship give two scudi?" (with a sUght flavor 25 
 of mendicancy.) 
 
 "Fifteen pauls," (growing firm as we saw them waver.) 
 
 "Then, gentlemen, it is all over; it is impossible, gen- 
 tlemen." 
 
 "Very good; a pleasant evening to you!" and they 30 
 bowed themselves out. 
 
146 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 As soon as the door closed behind them, Leopoldo, who 
 had looked on in more and more anxious silence as the 
 chance of plunder was whittled slimmer and sUmmer by 
 the sharp edges of the parley, saw instantly that it was 
 
 5 for his interest to turn state's evidence against his ac- 
 compUces. 
 
 "They will be back in a moment," he said knowingly, 
 as if he had been of our side all along. 
 
 "Of course; we are aware of that." — It is always 
 
 lo prudent to be aware of everything in traveUing. 
 
 And, sure enough, in five minutes re-enter the stout 
 men, as gravely as if everything had been thoroughly set- 
 tled, and ask respectfully at what hour we would have 
 the diUgence. 
 
 15 This will serve as a specimen of Italian bargain-making. 
 They do not feel happy if they get their first price. So easy 
 a victory makes them sorry they had not asked twice as 
 much, and, besides, they love the excitement of the con- 
 test. I have seen as much debate over a Httle earthen 
 
 20 pot (value two cents) on the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence, 
 as would have served for an operation of millions in the 
 funds, the demand and the offer alternating so rapidly 
 that the litigants might be supposed to be playing the 
 ancient game of morra.° It is a part of the universal 
 
 25 fondness for gaming, and lotteries. An EngUsh gentle- 
 man once asked his Italian courier how large a percentage 
 he made on all of his employer's money which passed 
 through his hands. "About five per cent; sometimes 
 more, sometimes less," was the answer. "Well, I will 
 
 30 add that to your salary, in order that I may be rid of this 
 uncomfortable feeling of being cheated." The courier 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 147 
 
 mused a moment, and said, ''But no, sir, I should not be 
 happy ; then it would not be sometimes more, sometimes 
 less, and I should miss the excitement of the game." 
 
 22c;. — This morning the diligence was at the door 
 punctually, and, taking our seats in the coupe, we bade 5 
 farewell to La Sibilla. But first we ran back for a part- 
 ing glimpse at the water-fall. These last, looks, like 
 lovers' last kisses, are nouns of multitude, and presently 
 the povero stalliere, signori° waited upon us, cap in hand, 
 telling us that the vetturino was impatient, and begging 10 
 for drink-money in the same breath. Leopoldo hovered 
 longingly afar, for these vultures respect times and seasons, 
 and while one is fleshing his beak upon the foreign prey, 
 the others forbear. The passengers in the diligence were 
 not very lively. The Romans are a grave people, and 15 
 more so than ever since '49. Of course, there was one 
 priest among them. There always is; for the mantis 
 religiosa° is as inevitable to these public conveyances as 
 the curculio is to the plum, and one could almost fancy 
 that they were bred in the same way, — that the egg was 20- 
 inserted when the vehicle was green, became developed as 
 it ripened, and never left it till it dropped withered from 
 the pole. There was nothing noticeable on the road to 
 Rome, except the strings of pack-horses and mules which 
 we met returning with empty lime-sacks to Tivoli, whence 25 
 comes the supply of Rome. A railroad was proposed, but 
 the government would not allow it, because it would inter- 
 fere with this carrying-trade, and wisely granted instead 
 a charter for a road to Frascati, where there was no busi- 
 ness whatever to be interfered with. About a mile of 30 
 this is built in a style worthy of ancient Rome ; and it is 
 
148 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 possible that eventually another mile may be accomplished, 
 for some half-dozen laborers are at work upon it with 
 wheelbarrows, in the leisurely Roman fashion. If it is 
 ever finished, it will have nothing to carry but the con- 
 
 5 viction of its own uselessness. A railroad has been pro- 
 posed to Civita Vecchia ; but that is out of the question, 
 because it would be profitable. On the whole, one does 
 not regret the failure of these schemes. One would not 
 approach the solitary emotion of a lifetime, such as is the 
 
 lo first sight of Rome, at the rate of forty miles an hour. It 
 is better, after painfully crawling up one of those long 
 paved hills, to have the postilion turn in his saddle, and, 
 pointing with his whip, (without looking, for he knows 
 instinctively where it is,) say, Ecco San Pietro !° Then 
 
 15 you look tremblingly, and see it hovering visionary on 
 the horizon's verge, and in a moment you are rattling and 
 rumbUng and wallowing down into the valley, and it is 
 gone. So you play hide-and-seek with it all the rest of 
 the way, and have time to converse with your sensations. 
 
 20 You fancy you have got used to it at last ; but from the 
 next hill- top, lo, there it looms again, a new wonder, and 
 you do not feel sure that it will keep its tryst till you find 
 yourself under its shadow. The Dome is to Rome what 
 Vesuvius is to Naples ; only a greater wonder, for Michael 
 
 25 Angelo himg it there. The traveller cHmbs it as he would 
 a mountain, and finds the dwelHngs of men high up on 
 its sacred cliffs. It has its annual eruption, too, at Easter, 
 when the fire -trickles and palpitates down its mighty 
 shoulders, seen from far-off TivoH. — No, the locomotive 
 
 30 is less impertinent at Portici, haihng the imprisoned Titan 
 there with a kindred shriek. Let it not vex the solemn 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 149 
 
 Roman ghosts, or the nobly desolate Campagna, with 
 whose sohtudes the shattered vertebrae of the aqueducts 
 are in truer sympathy. 
 
 24:th. — To-day our journey to Subiaco properly begins. 
 The jocund morning had called the beggars to their street- s 
 corners, and the women to the windows; the players of 
 morra (a game probably as old as the invention of fingers), 
 of chuck-farthing, and of bowls, had cheerfully begun the 
 labors of the day ; the plaintive cries of the chair-seaters, 
 frog venders, and certain other peripatetic merchants, the lo 
 meaning of whose vocal advertisements I could never pene- 
 trate, quaver at regular intervals, now near and now far 
 away; a solitary Jew with a sack over his shoulder, and 
 who never is seen to stop, slouches along, every now and 
 then croaking a penitential Cenci !° as if he were somehow is 
 the embodied expiation (by the post-Ovidian metamor- 
 phosis) of that darkest Roman tragedy; women are bar- 
 gaining for lettuce and endive; the slimy Triton in the 
 Piazza Barberina spatters himself with vanishing dia- 
 monds ; a peasant leads an ass on which sits the mother 20 
 with the babe in her arms, — a living flight into Egypt ; 
 in short, the beautiful spring day had awakened all of 
 Rome that can awaken yet (for the ideal Rome waits for 
 another morning), when we rattled along in our carrettella 
 on the way to Palestrina. A carrettella is to the perfected 25 
 vehicle, as the coracle to the steamship; it is the first 
 crude conception of a wheeled carriage. Doubtless the 
 inventor of it was a prodigious genius in his day, and rode 
 proudly in it, envied by the more fortunate pedestrian, 
 and cushioned by his own inflated imagination. If the 30 
 chariot of Achilles were like it, then was Hector happier 
 
150 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 at the tail than the son of Thetis on the box. It is an 
 oblong basket upon two wheels, with a single seat rising 
 in the middle. We had not jarred over a hundred yards of 
 the Quattro Fontane, before we discovered that no elastic 
 
 s propugnaculum had been interposed between the body 
 and the axle, so that we sat, as it were, on paving-stones, 
 mitigated only by so much as well-seasoned ilex is less 
 flinty-hearted than tufo or hreccia° If there were any 
 truth in the theory of developments, I am certain that we 
 
 lo should have been furnished with a pair of rudimentary 
 elhptical springs, at least, before half our day's journey 
 was over. However, as one of those happy illustrations 
 of ancient manners, which one meets with so often here, 
 it was instructive; for I now clearly understand that it 
 
 1 5' was not merely by reason of pomp that Hadrian used to 
 be three days in getting to his villa, only twelve miles off. 
 In spite of the author of "Vestiges,"° Nature, driven to 
 extremities, can develop no more easy cushion than a 
 bUster, and no doubt treated an ancient emperor and a 
 
 20 modern republican with severe impartiality. 
 
 It was difficult to talk without biting one's tongue; 
 but as soon as we had got fairly beyond the gate, and out 
 of sight of the last red-legged French soldier, and tightly- 
 buttoned doganiere° our driver became loquacious. 
 
 25 "I am a good Catholic, — better than most," said he, 
 suddenly. 
 
 ''What do you mean by that?" 
 
 "Eh ! they say Saint Peter wrought miracles, and there 
 are enough who don't believe it; but / do. There's the 
 
 30 Barberini Palace, — behold one miracle of Saint Peter ! 
 There's the Farnese, — behold another ! There's the 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 151 
 
 Borghese, — behold a third ! But there's no end of them. 
 No saint, nor all the saints put together, ever worked so 
 many wonders as he ; and then, per Bacco ! he is the uncle 
 of so many folks, — why, that's a miracle in itself, and of 
 the greatest ! " 5 
 
 Presently he added : "Do you know how we shall treat 
 the priests when we make our next revolution ? We shall 
 treat them as they treat us, and that is after the fashion 
 of the buffalo. For the buffalo is not content vdth getting 
 a man down, but after that he gores him and thrusts him, lo 
 always, always, as if he wished to cram him to the centre 
 of the earth. Ah, if I were only keeper of hell-gate ! Not 
 a rascal of them all should ever get out into purgatory 
 while I stood at the door !" 
 
 We remonstrated a Uttle, but it only exasperated him 15 
 the more. 
 
 "Blood of Judas! they will eat nothing else than gold 
 when a poor fellow's belly is as empty as San Lorenzo 
 yonder. They'll have enough of it one of these days — 
 but melted ! How do you think they mil like it for soup ? " 20 
 
 Perhaps, if our vehicle had been blessed with springs, 
 our vetturino would have been more placable. I confess 
 a growing moroseness in myself, and a wandering specu- 
 lation or two as to the possible fate of the builder of our 
 chariot in the next world. But I am more and more per- 25 
 suaded every day, that, as far as the popular mind is con- 
 cerned, Romanism is a dead thing in Italy. It survives 
 only because there is nothing else to replace it with, for 
 men must wear their old habits (however threadbare and 
 out at the elbows) till they get better. ,It is literally a 30 
 superstition, — a something left to stand over till the great 
 
152 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 commercial spirit of the nineteenth century balances his 
 accounts again, and then it will be banished to the limbo 
 of profit and loss. The Papacy lies dead in the Vatican, 
 but the secret is kept for the present, and government is 
 
 5 carried on in its name. After the fact gets abroad, per- 
 haps its ghost will terrify men a little while longer, but 
 only while they are in the dark, though the ghost of a 
 creed is a hard thing to give a mortal wound to, and may 
 be laid, after all, only in a Red Sea of blood. 
 
 lo So we rattled along till we came to a large albergo° just 
 below the village of Colonna. While our horse was tak- 
 ing his nnfresco° we climbed up to it, and found it deso- 
 late enough, — the houses never rebuilt since Consul 
 Rienzi sacked it five hundred years ago. It was a kind 
 
 15 of gray incrustation on the top of the hill, chiefly inhabited 
 by pigs, chickens, and an old woman with a distaff, who 
 looked as sacked and ruinous as everything around her. 
 There she sat in the sun, a dreary, doting Clotho,° who 
 had outlived her sisters, and span endless destinies which 
 
 20 none was left to cut at the appointed time. Of course 
 she paused from her work a moment, and held out a skinny 
 hand, with the usual, "Noblest gentlemen, give me some- 
 thing for charity." We gave her enough to pay Charon's 
 ferriage across to her sisters, and departed hastily, for 
 
 25 there was something uncanny about the place. In this 
 climate even the finger-marks of Ruin herself are indelible, 
 and the walls were still blackened with Rienzi's fires. 
 
 As we waited for our carrettella, I saw four or five of the 
 lowest-looking peasants come up and read the handbill of 
 
 30 a tombola (a kind of lottery) which was stuck up beside 
 the inn-door. One of them read it aloud for our benefit, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 153 
 
 and with remarkable propriety of accent and emphasis. 
 This benefit of clergy, however, is of no great consequence 
 where there is nothing to read. In Rome, this morning, 
 the walls were spattered with placards condemning the 
 works of George Sand, Eugene Sue, Git)berti, and others, s 
 But in Rome one may contrive to read any book he likes ; 
 and I know Italians who are familiar with Swedenborg, 
 and even Strauss. 
 
 Our stay at the albergo was illustrated by one other 
 event, — a nightingale singing in a full-blossomed elder- lo 
 bush on the edge of a brook just across the road. So 
 liquid were the notes, and so full of spring, that the twig 
 he tilted on seemed a conductor through which the mingled 
 magnetism of brook and blossom flowed into him and 
 were precipitated in music. Nature understands thor- 15 
 oughly the value of contrasts, and accordingly a donkey 
 from a shed hard by, hitched and hesitated and agonized 
 through his bray, so that we might be conscious at once 
 of the positive and negative poles of song. It was pleasant 
 to see with what undoubting enthusiasm he went through 20 
 his solo, and vindicated Providence from the imputation 
 of weakness in making such trifles as the nightingale 
 yonder. "Give ear, heaven and earth!" he seemed 
 to say, "nor dream that good, sound commonsense is 
 extinct or out of fashion so long as / live." I suppose 25 
 Nature made the donkey half abstractedly^, while she was 
 feeling her way up to her ideal in the horse, and that his 
 bray is in like manner an experimental sketch for the neigh 
 of her finished animal. 
 
 We drove on to Palestrina, passing for some distance 30 
 over an old Roman road, as carriageable as when it was 
 
154 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 built. Palestrina occupies the place of the once famous 
 Temple of Fortune, whose ruins are perhaps a fitter mon- 
 ument of the fickle goddess than ever the perfect fane was. 
 
 Come hither, weary ghosts that wail 
 5 O'er buried Nimroud's carven walls, 
 
 And ye whose nightly footsteps frail 
 
 From the dread hush of Memphian halls 
 Lead forth the whispering funerals ! 
 
 Come hither, shade of ancient pain 
 lo That, muffled sitting, hear'st the foam 
 
 To death-deaf Carthage shout in vglin. 
 And thou that in the Sibyl's tome 
 Tear-stain' st the Jiever after Rome ! 
 
 Come, Marius, Wolsey, all ye great 
 15 On whom proud Fortune stamped her heel, 
 
 And see herself the sport of Fate, 
 Herself discrowned and made to feel 
 The treason of her slippery wheel ! 
 
 One climbs through a great part of the town by stone 
 20 steps, passing fragments of Pelasgic wall, (for history, like 
 geology, may be studied here in successive rocky strata,) 
 and at length reaches the inn, called the Cappellaro, the 
 sign of which is a great tin cardinal's hat, swinging from 
 a small building on the other side of the street, so that a 
 25 better view of it may be had from the hostelry itself. 
 The landlady, a stout woman of about sixty years, wel- 
 comed us heartily, and burst forth into an eloquent eulogy 
 on some fresh sea-fish which she had just received from 
 Rome. She promised everything for dinner, leaving us 
 30 to choose; but as a skilful juggler flitters the cards be- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 155 
 
 fore you, and, while he seems to offer all, forces upon you 
 the one he wishes, so we found that whenever we under- 
 took to select from her voluble bill of fare, we had in some 
 unaccountable manner always ordered sea-fish. There- 
 fore, after a few vain efforts, we contented ourselves, and, s 
 while our dinner was cooking, climbed up to the top of the 
 town. Here stands the deserted Palazzo Barberini, in 
 which is a fine Roman mosaic pavement. It was a dreary 
 old place. On the ceilings of some of the apartments 
 were fading out the sprawling apotheoses of heroes of lo 
 the family, (themselves long ago faded utterly,) who prob- 
 ably went through a somewhat different ceremony after 
 their deaths from that represented here. One of the 
 rooms on the ground-floor was still occupied, and from its 
 huge grated windows there swelled and subsided at inter- is 
 vals a confused turmoil of voices, some talking, some sing- 
 ing, some swearing, and some lamenting, as if a page of 
 Dante's Inferno had become suddenly alive under one's 
 eye. This was the prison, and in front of each window a 
 large stone block allowed tete-a-tete discourses between 20 
 the prisoners and their friends outside. Behind the 
 palace rises a steep, rocky hill, with a continuation of 
 ruined castle, the innocent fastness now of rooks and 
 swallows. We walked down to a kind of terrace, and 
 watched the Alban Mount (which saw the sunset for us 25 
 by proxy) till the bloom trembled nearer and nearer to 
 its summit, then went wholly out, we could not say when, 
 and day was dead. Simultaneously we thought of dining, 
 and clattered hastily down to the Cappellaro. We had 
 to wait yet half an hour for dinner, and from where I sat 3° 
 I could see through the door of the dining-room a kind of 
 
156 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 large hall into which a door from the kitchen also opened. 
 Presently I saw the landlady come out with a little hang- 
 ing lamp in her hand, and seat herself amply before a row 
 of baskets ranged upside-down along the wall. She care- 
 5 fully lifted the edge of one of these, and, after she had 
 groped in it a moment, I heard that hoarse choking scream 
 peculiar to fowls when seized by the leg in the dark, as 
 if their throats were in their tibiae after sunset. She took 
 out a fine young cock and set him upon his feet before 
 
 loher, stupid with sleep, and blinking helplessly at the 
 lamp, which he perhaps took for a sun in reduced circum- 
 stances, doubtful whether to crow or cackle. She looked 
 at him admiringly, felt of him, sighed, gazed sadly at his 
 coral crest, and put him back again. This ceremony she 
 
 15 repeated with five or six of the baskets, and then went 
 back into the kitchen. I thought of Thessalian hags and 
 Arabian enchantresses, and wondered if these were trans- 
 formed travellers, — for travellers go through queer trans- 
 formations sometimes. Should St org and I be crowing 
 
 20 and scratching to-morrow morning, instead of going to 
 Subiaco? Should we be Plato's men, with the feathers, 
 instead of without them? I would probe this mystery. 
 So, when the good woman came in to lay the table, I asked 
 what she had been doing with the fowls. 
 
 25 "I thought to kill one for the gentlemen's soup; but 
 they were so beautiful my heart failed me. Still, if the 
 gentlemen wish it — only I thought two pigeons would be 
 more delicatej' 
 
 Of course we declined to be accessory to such a murder, 
 
 30 and she went off delighted, returning in a few minutes 
 with our dinner. First we had soup, then a roasted kid, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 157 
 
 then boiled pigeons, (of which the soup had been made,) 
 and last the pesci di mare° which were not quite so great 
 a novelty to us as to our good hostess. However, hos- 
 pitahty, like so many other things, is reciprocal, and the 
 guest must bring his half, or it is naught. The prosperity 5 
 of a dinner Ues in the heart of him that eats it, and an 
 appetite twelve miles long enabled us to do as great justice 
 to the fish as if we were crowding all Lent into our meal. 
 The landlady came and sat by us; a large and serious 
 cat, winding her great tail around her, settled herself lo 
 comfortably on the table, Ucking her paws now and then, 
 with a poor relation's look at the fish ; a small dog sprang 
 into an empty chair, and a large one, with very confiden- 
 tial manners, would go from one to the other of us, laying 
 his paw upon our arms as if he had an important secret is 
 to communicate, and alternately pricldng and drooping 
 his ears in hope or despondency. The albergatrice° forth- 
 with began to tell us her story, — how she was a widow, 
 how she had borne thirteen children, twelve still living, 
 and how she received a pension of sixty scudi a year, under 20 
 the old Roman law, for her meritoriousness in this respect. 
 The portrait of the son she had lost hung over the chimney- 
 place and, pointing to it, she burst forth into the following 
 droll threnody. The remarks in parenthesis were screamed 
 through the kitchen door, which stood ajar, or addressed 25 
 personally to us. 
 
 "0 my son, my son! the doctors killed him, just as 
 truly as if they had poisoned him ! how beautiful lie 
 was ! beautiful ! beautiful ! ! beautiful ! ! ! (Are not those 
 fish done yet ?) Look, that is his Hkeness, — but he was 30 
 handsomer. He was as big as that" (extending her arms). 
 
158 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 — "big breast, big shoulders, big sides, big legs! (Eat 
 'em, eat 'em, they won't hurt you, fresh sea-fish, fresh! 
 fresh ! ! fresh ! ! !) I told them the doctors had murdered 
 him, when they carried him with torches ! He had been 
 
 5 hunting, and brought home some rabbits, I remember, 
 for he was not one that ever came empty-handed, and got 
 the fever, and you treated him for consumption, and 
 killed him! (Shall I come out there, or will you bring 
 some more fish?) " So she went on, talking to herself, to 
 
 lous, to the little serva in the kitchen, and to the medical 
 profession in general, repeating every epithet three times, 
 with increasing emphasis, till her voice rose to a scream, 
 and contriving to mix up her living children with her 
 dead one, the fish, the doctors, the serva, and the rabbits, 
 
 IS till it was hard to say whether it was the fish that had large 
 legs, whether the doctors had killed them, or the serva had 
 killed the doctors, and whether the bello ! hello I ! hello ! ! !° 
 referred to her son or a particularly fine rabbit. 
 
 25th. — Ha\dng engaged our guide and horses the night 
 
 20 before, we set out betimes this morning for Olevano. 
 From Palestrina to Cavi the road winds along a narrow 
 valley, following the course of a stream with rustles 
 rather than roars below. Large chestnut-trees lean every 
 way on the steep sides of the hills above us,, and at 
 
 25 every opening we could see great stretches of Campagna 
 rolling away and away toward the bases of purple 
 mountains streaked with snow. The sides of the road 
 were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn and honey- 
 suckle in full bloom, and bubbling with innumerable 
 
 30 nightingales that sang unseen. Overhead the sunny sky 
 tinkled with larks, as if the frost in the air were 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 159 
 
 breaking up and whirling away on the swollen currents 
 of spring. 
 
 Before long we overtook a little old man hobbling to- 
 ward Cavi, with a bag upon his back. This was the mail ! 
 Happy country, which Hurry and Worry have not yets 
 subjugated ! Then we clattered up and down the narrow 
 paved streets of Cavi, through the market-place, full of 
 men dressed all aUke in blue jackets, blue breeches, and 
 white stockings, who do not stare at the strangers, and so 
 out at the farther gate. Now oftener and oftener we meet lo 
 groups of peasants in gayest dresses, ragged pilgrims with 
 staff and scallop, singing (horribly) ; then processions 
 with bagpipes and pipes in front, droning and squeaUng 
 (horribly); then strings of two-wheeled carts, eight or 
 nine in each, and in the first the priest, book in hand, set- 15 
 ting the stave, and all singing (horribly). This must be 
 inquired into. Gigantic guide, who, splendid with blue 
 sash and silver knee-buckles, has contrived, by incessant 
 drumming with his heels, to get his mule in front, is hailed. 
 
 "Ho, Petruccio, what is the meaning of all this press of 20 
 people?" 
 
 ''Festa° Lordship, at Genezzano." 
 
 "What/esia.^" 
 
 "Of the Madonna, Lordship," and touches his hat, for 
 they are all dreadfully afraid of her for some reason or 25 
 other. 
 
 We are in luck, this being the great festa of the year 
 among the mountains, — a thing which people go out of 
 Rome to see. 
 
 "Where is Genezzano?" 30 
 
 "Just over yonder. Lordship," and pointed to the left. 
 
160 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 where was what seemed Hke a monstrous crystallization 
 of rock on the crown of a hill, with three or four taller crags 
 of castle towering in the midst, and all gray, except the 
 tiled roofs, whose wrinkled sides were gold-washed with a 
 5 bright yellow lichen, as if ripples, turned by some spell 
 to stone, had contrived to detain the sunshine with which 
 they were touched at the moment of transformation. 
 
 The road, wherever it came into sight, burned with 
 brilHant costumes, like an illuminated page of Froissart.® 
 
 lo Gigantic guide meanwhile shows an uncomfortable and 
 fidgety reluctance to turn aside and enter fairyland, which 
 is wholly unaccountable. Is the huge earthen creature 
 an Afrite,° under sacred pledge to Solomon, and in danger 
 of being sealed up again, if he venture near the festival of 
 
 IS our Blessed Lady? If so, that also were a ceremony worth 
 seeing, and we insist. He wriggles and swings his great 
 feet with an evident impulse to begin kicking the sides of 
 his mule again and fly. The way over the hills from 
 Genezzano to Olevano he pronounces seomodissima° de- 
 
 20 manding of every peasant who goes by if it be not entirely 
 impassable. This leading question, put in all the tones of 
 plausible entreaty he can command, meets the invariable 
 reply, "E scomoda, davvero; ma per le bestie — eh!" (it is 
 bad, of a truth, but for the beasts — eh !) and then one of 
 
 25 those indescribable shrugs, unintelligible at first as the 
 compass to a savage, but in which the expert can make 
 twenty hair's-breadth distinctions between N. E. and 
 N. N. E. 
 
 Finding that destiny had written it on his forehead, 
 
 30 the guide at last turned and went cantering and kicking 
 toward Genezzano, we following. Just before you reach 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 161 
 
 the town, the road turns sharply to the right, and, crossing 
 a little gorge, loses itself in the dark gateway. Outside 
 the gate is an open space, which formicated with peasantry 
 in every variety of costume that was not Parisian. Laugh- 
 ing women were climbing upon their horses (which they s 
 bestride like men) ; pilgrims were chanting, and beggars 
 (the howl of an Italian beggar in the country is something 
 terrible) howling in discordant rivalry. It was a scene 
 lively enough to make Heraclitus° shed a double allow- 
 ance of tears ; but our giant was still discomforted. As lo 
 soon as we had entered the gate, he dodged into a little 
 back-street, just as we were getting out of wliich the 
 mystery of his unwillingness was cleared up. He had been 
 endeavoring to avoid a creditor. But it so chanced (as 
 Fate can hang a man with even a rope of sand) that the 15 
 enemy was in position just at the end of this very lane, 
 where it debouched into the Piazza of the town. 
 
 The disputes of Italians are very droll things, and I 
 will accordingly bag the one which is now imminent, as 
 a specimen. They quarrel as unaccountably as dogs, who 20 
 put their noses together, dislike each other's kind of smell, 
 and instantly tumble one over the other, with noise enough 
 to draw the eyes of a whole street. So these people burst 
 out, without apparent preliminaries, into a noise and fury 
 and war-dance which would imply the very utmost pitch 25 
 and agony of exasperation. And the subsidence is as 
 sudden. They explode each other on mere contact, as 
 if by a law of nature, like two hostile gases. They do not 
 grow warm, but leap at once from zero to some degree of 
 white-heat, to indicate which no Anglo-Saxon thermom-30 
 eter of wrath is highly enough graduated. If I were 
 
162 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 asked to name one universal characteristic of an Italian 
 town, I should say, two men clamoring and shaking them- 
 selves to pieces at each other, and a woman leaning lazily 
 out of a window, and perhaps looking at something else. 
 5 Till one gets used to tliis kind of thing, one expects some 
 horrible catastrophe; but during eight months in Italy 
 I have only seen blows exchanged thrice. In the present 
 case the explosion was of harmless gunpowder. 
 
 " Why-haven't-you-paid-those-fif ty-five-baj occhi-at-the- 
 
 lo pizzicarolo'sf^'° began the adversary, speaking with such 
 inconceivable rapidity that he made only one word, nay, 
 as it seemed, one monosyllable, of the whole sentence. 
 Our giant, with a controversial genius which I should not 
 have suspected in him, immediately, and with great 
 
 15 adroitness, changed the ground of dispute, and, instead of 
 remaining an insolvent debtor, raised himself at once to 
 the ethical position of a moralist, resisting an unjust de- 
 mand from principle. 
 
 ''It was only /or^?/-five," roared he. 
 
 20 "But I say fifty-fiYe,'' screamed the other, and shook 
 his close-cropped head as a boy does an apple on the end 
 of a switch, as if he meant presently to jerk it off at his 
 antagonist. 
 
 "Birbone!"° yelled the guide, gesticulating so furiously 
 
 25 with every square inch of his ponderous body that I 
 thought he would throw his mule over, the poor beast 
 standing all the while with drooping head and ears while 
 the thunders of this man-quake burst over him. So feels 
 the tortoise that sustains the globe when earth suffers 
 
 30 fiery convulsions. 
 
 "Birbante!''° retorted the creditor, and the opprobrious 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 163 
 
 epithet clattered from between his shaking jaws as a re- 
 fractory copper is rattled out of a Jehoiada-box by a child. 
 
 "Andate vi far friggere!''° howled giant. 
 
 "Andate ditto, ditto l^'' echoed creditor, — and behold 
 the thing is over ! The giant promises to attend to the s 
 affair when he comes back, the creditor returns to his 
 booth, and we ride on. 
 
 Speaking of Italian quarrels, I am tempted to paren- 
 thesize here another which I saw at Civita Vecchia. We 
 had been five days on our way from Leghorn in a French lo 
 steamer, a voyage performed usuallj^, I think, in about 
 thirteen hours. It was heavy weather, blowing what a 
 sailor would call half a gale of wind, and the caution of our 
 captain, not to call it fear, led him to put in for shelter 
 first at Porto Ferrajo in Elba, and then at Santo Stefano is 
 on the Italian coast. Our little black water-beetle of a 
 mail-packer was knocked about pretty well, and all the 
 ItaUan passengers disappeared in the forward cabin before 
 we were out of port. When we were fairly at anchor 
 within the harbor of Civita Vecchia, they crawled out 20 
 again, sluggish as winter flies, their vealy faces mezzo- 
 tinted with soot. One of them presently appeared in the 
 custom-house, his only luggage being a cage closely covered 
 with a dirty red handkerchief, which represented his linen. 
 
 " What have you in the cage ? " asked the 'c^ogramere. 25 
 
 "Eh ! nothing other than a parrot." 
 
 "There is a duty of one scudo and one bajoccho, then." 
 
 ''Santo diavolo !° but what hoggishness ! " 
 
 Thereupon instant and simultaneous blow-up, or rather 
 a series of explosions, Kke those in honor of a Neapolitan 30 
 saint's-day, lasting about ten minutes, and followed by 
 
164 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 as sudden quiet. In the course of it, the owner of the 
 bird, playing irreverently on the first half of its name 
 (pappagSil\o)° hinted that it would be a high duty for 
 his HoUness himself {Papa). After a pause for breath, 
 5 he said quietly, as if nothing had happened, "Very good, 
 then, since I must pay, I will," and began fumbling for 
 the money. 
 
 " Meanwhile, do me the politeness to show me the bird," 
 said the officer. 
 
 lo ''With all pleasure," and, lifting a corner of the hand- 
 kerchief, there lay the object of dispute on his back, stone- 
 dead, with his claws curled up helplessly on each side his 
 breast. I beUeve the owner would have been pleased 
 had it even been his grandmother who had thus evaded 
 
 15 duty, so exquisite is the pleasure of an ItaUan in escaping 
 payment of anything. 
 
 "I make a present of the poor bird," said he blandly. 
 
 ^ The pubhcan, however, seemed to feel that he had been 
 somehow cheated, and I left them in high debate, as to 
 
 20 whether the bird were dead when it entered the custom- 
 house, and, if it had been, whether a dead parrot were 
 dutiable. Do not blame me for being entertained and 
 trying to entertain you with these trifles. I remember 
 Virgil's stern 
 
 25 *'Che per poeo e che teco non mi risso,"** 
 
 but Dante's journey was of more import to himself and 
 others than mine. 
 
 I am struck by the freshness and force of the passions 
 
 in Europeans, and cannot help feeling as if there were 
 
 30 something healthy in it. When I think of the versatile 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 165 
 
 and accommodating habits of America, it seems like a 
 land without thunderstorms. In proportion as man grows 
 commercial, does he also become dispassionate and in- 
 capable of electric emotions? The driving-wheels of all- 
 powerful nature are in the back of the head, and, as man s 
 is the highest type of organization, so a nation is better 
 or worse as it advances toward the highest type of man, 
 or recedes from it. But it is ill with a nation when the 
 cerebrum sucks the cerebellum dry, for it cannot live by 
 intellect alone. The broad foreheads always carry the lo 
 day at last, but only when they are based on or buttressed 
 with massive hind-heads. It would be easier to make a 
 people great in whom the animal is vigorous, than to keep 
 one so after it has begun to spindle into over-intellectu- 
 ality. The hands that have grasped dominion and held 15 
 it have been large and hard; those from which it has 
 slipped, deUcate, and apt for the lyre and the pencil. 
 Moreover, brain is always to be bought, but passion never 
 comes to market. On the whole, I am rather inclined to 
 like this European impatience and fire, even wliile I laugh 20 
 at it, and sometimes find myself surmising whether a 
 people who, like the Americans, put up quietly with all 
 sorts of petty personal impositions and injustices, will not 
 at length find it too great a bore to quarrel with great 
 public wrongs. 25 
 
 Meanwhile, I must remember that I am in Genezzano, 
 and not in the lecturer's desk. We walked about for an 
 hour or two, admiring the beauty and grand bearing of 
 the women, and the picturesque vivacity and ever-re- 
 newing unassuetude of the whole scene. Take six of the 30 
 most party-colored dreams, break them to pieces, put 
 
166 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 them into a fantasy-kaleidoscope, and when you look 
 through it you will see something that for strangeness, 
 vividness, and mutabiUty looked hke the httle Piazza of 
 Genezzano seen from the church porch. As we wound 
 s through the narrow streets again to the stables where we 
 had left our horses, a branch of laurel or ilex would mark 
 a wine-shop, and, looking till our eye cooled and toned 
 itself down to dusky sympathy with the crypt, we could 
 see the smoky interior sprinkled with white head-cloths 
 
 lo and scarlet bodices, with here and there a yellow spot of 
 lettuce or the red inward gleam of a wine-flask. The 
 head-dress is precisely of that most ancient pattern seen 
 on Egyptian statues, and so colossal are many of the 
 wearers, that you might almost think you saw a party of 
 
 IS young sphinxes carousing in the sunless core of a pyramid. 
 We remounted our beasts, and, for about a mile, can- 
 tered gayly along a fine road, and then turned into a by- 
 path along the flank of a mountain. Here the guide's 
 strada scomodissima° began, and we were forced to dis- 
 
 20 mount, and drag our horses downward for a mile or two. 
 We crossed a small plain in the valley, and then began to 
 cUmb the opposite ascent. The path was perhaps four 
 feet broad, and was paved with irregularly shaped blocks 
 of stone, which, having been raised and lowered, tipped, 
 
 25 twisted, undermined, and generally capsized by the rains 
 and frosts of centuries, presented the most diaboUcally 
 ingenious traps and pit-falls. All the while the scenery 
 was beautifuh Mountains of every shape and hue 
 changed their slow outlines ever as we moved, now open- 
 
 30 ing, now closing around us, sometimes peering down 
 solemnly at us over each other's shoulders, and then 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 167 
 
 sinking slowly out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of the 
 path, seeming to stride into the valley and confront us 
 with their craggy challenge, — a challenge which the 
 little valleys accepted, if we did not, matching their rarest 
 tints of gray and brown, and pink and purple, or that s 
 royal dye to make which all these were profusely melted 
 together for a moment's ornament, with as many shades 
 of various green and yellow. Gray towns crowded and 
 clung on the tops of peaks that seemed inaccessible. We 
 owe a great deal of picturesqueness to the quarrels and lo 
 thieveries of the barons of the Middle Ages. The travel- 
 ler and artist should put up a prayer for their battered 
 old souls. It was to be out of their way and that of the 
 Saracens that people were driven to make their homes 
 in spots so sublime and inconvenient that the eye alone is 
 finds it pleasant to climb up to them. Nothing else but 
 an American land-company ever managed to induce set- 
 tlers upon territory of such uninhabitable quality. I 
 have seen an insect that makes a mask for himself out of 
 the lichens of the rock over which he crawls, contriving so 20 
 to deceive the birds; and the towns in this wild region 
 would seem to have been built on the same, principle. 
 Made of the same stone with the cliffs on which they 
 perch, it asks good eyesight to make them out at the dis- 
 tance of a few miles, and every wandering mountain- 25 
 mist annihilates them for the moment. 
 
 At intervals, I could hear the giant, after digging at 
 the sides of his mule with his spurless heels, growling to 
 himself, and imprecating an apoplexy (accidente) upon 
 the path and him who made it. This is the universal 30 
 malediction here, and once it was put into rhyme for my 
 
168 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 benefit. I was coming down the rusty steps of San 
 Gregorio one day, and having paid no heed to a stout 
 woman of thirty odd who begged somewhat obtrusively, 
 she screamed after me, 
 
 S "Ah, vi pigh un accidente, 
 
 Voi che non date niente !" 
 
 Ah, may a sudden apoplexy, 
 
 You who give not, come and vex ye ! 
 
 Our guide could not long appease his mind with this 
 
 10 milder type of objurgation, but soon intensified it into 
 accidentaccio, which means a selected apoplexy of uncom- 
 mon size and ugliness. As the path grew worse and worse, 
 so did the repetition of his phrase (for he was slow of in- 
 vention) become more frequent, till at last he did nothing 
 
 15 but kick and curse, mentally, I have no doubt, including 
 us in his malediction. I think it would have gratified 
 Longinus or Fuseli (both of whom commended swearing) 
 to have heard him. Before long we turned the flank of 
 the hill by a little shrine of the Madonna, and there was 
 
 20 Olevano just above us. Like the other towns in this 
 district, it was the diadem of an abrupt peak of rock. 
 From the midst of it jutted the ruins of an old stronghold 
 of the Colonna. Probably not a house has been built in 
 it for centuries. To enter the town, we literally rode up 
 
 25 a long flight of stone steps, and soon found ourselves in 
 the Piazza. We stopped to buy some cigars, and the 
 zigararo, as he^ rolled them up, asked if we did not want 
 dinner. We told him we should get it at the inn. Benis- 
 simo° he would be there before us. What he meant, we 
 
 30 could not divine : but it turned out that he was the land- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 169 
 
 lord, and that the inn only became such when strangers 
 arrived, relapsing again immediately into a private dwell- 
 ing. We found our host ready to receive us, and went 
 up to a large room on the first floor. After due instruc- 
 tions, we seated ourselves at the open window, — Storg 5 
 to sketch, and I to take a mental calotype of the view. 
 Among the many lovely ones of the day, this was the love- 
 liest, — or was it only that the charm of repose was added ? 
 On our right was the silent castle, and beyond it the silent 
 mountains. To the left we looked down over the clus- 10 
 tering houses upon a campagna-valley of peaceful culti- 
 vation, vineyards, olive-orchards, grain-fields in their 
 earliest green, and dark stripes of new-ploughed earth, 
 over which the cloud-shadows melted tracklessly toward 
 the hills which round softly upward to Monte Cavi. is 
 
 When our dinner came, and with it a* flask of drowsy 
 red Aleatico,° like ink with a suspicion of Hfe-blood in it, 
 such as one might fancy Shakespeare to have dipped his 
 quiU in, we had our table so placed that the satisfaction 
 of our hunger might be dissensualized by the view from 20 
 the windows. Many a glutton has eaten up farms and 
 woodlands and pastures, and so did we, aesthetically, 
 saucing our frittata° and flavoring our Aleatico with land- 
 scape. It is a fine thing when we can accustom our animal 
 appetites to good society, when body and soul (Hke master 25 
 and servant in an Arab tent) sit down together at the 
 same board. This thought is forced upon one very often 
 in Italy, as one picnics in enchanted spots, where Imagi- 
 nation and Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters in 
 the fairy-story, and serve us with course after course of 30 
 their ethereal dishes. Sense is satisfied with less and 
 
170 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 simpler food when sense and spirit are fed together, and the 
 feast of the loaves and fishes is spread for us anew. If it 
 be important for a state to educate its lower classes, so is 
 it for us personally to instruct, elevate, and refine our 
 5 senses, the lower classes of our private body-politic, and 
 which, if left to their own brute instincts, will disorder or 
 destroy the whole commonwealth with flaming insurrection. 
 After dinner came our guide to be paid. He, too, had 
 had his frittata and his fiasco° (or two), and came back 
 
 lo absurdly comic, reminding one of the giant who was so 
 taken in* by the little tailor. He was not in the least 
 tipsy; but the wine had excited his poor wits, whose 
 destiny it was (awkward servants as they were !) to trip 
 up and tumble over each other in proportion as they be- 
 
 15 came zealous. He was very anxious to do us in some way 
 or other ; he only vaguely guessed how, but felt so gigan- 
 tically good-natured that he could not keep his face sober 
 long enough. It is quite clear why the Italians have no 
 word but recitare° to express acting, for their stage is no 
 
 20 more theatric than their street, and to exaggerate in the 
 least would be ridiculous. We graver-tempered and 
 -mannered Septentrions° must give the pegs a screw or 
 two to bring our spirits up to nature's concert-pitch. 
 Storg and I sat enjoying the exhibition of our giant, as if 
 
 25 we had no more concern in it than as a comedy. It was 
 nothing but a spectacle to us, at which we were present 
 as critics, while he inveighed, expostulated, argued, and 
 besought, in -a breath. Finding all his attempts mis- 
 carry, or resulting in nothing more solid than applause, 
 
 30 he said, "Forse non capisconof (Perhaps yoti don't 
 understand?) "Capiscono pur' troppo," (They under- 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 171 
 
 stand only too well,) replied the landlord, upon which 
 terrce filius° burst into a laugh, and began begging for 
 more buonamano° Failing in this, he tightened his sash, 
 offered to kiss our lordships' hands, an act of homage 
 which we decHned, and departed, carefully avoiding Genez- 5 
 zano on his return, I make no doubt. 
 
 We paid our bill, and went down to the door, where 
 we found our guides and donkeys, the host's handsome wife 
 and handsomer daughter, with two of her daughters, and 
 a crowd of women and children waiting to witness the 10 
 exit of the foreigners. We made all the mothers and 
 children happy by a discriminating largesse° of copper 
 among the little ones. They are a charming people, the 
 natives of these out-of-the-way Italian towns, if kindness, 
 courtesy, and good looks make people charming. Our 15 
 beards and felt hats, which make us pass for artists, were 
 our passports to the warmest welcome and the best cheer 
 everywhere. Reluctantly we piounted our donkeys, and 
 trotted away, our guides (a man and a boy) running by 
 the flank (true henchmen, haunchmen, flanquiers or flunk- 20 
 eys) and inspiring the httle animals with pokes in the 
 side, or with the even more effectual ahrrrrrrr I Is there 
 any radical affinity between this rolling fire of r's and the 
 word arra, which means hansel or earnest-money? The 
 sound is the same, and has a marvellous spur-power over 25 
 the donkey, who seems to understand that full payment 
 of goad or cudgel is to follow. I have known it to move 
 even a SiciUan mule, the least sensitive and most obstinate 
 of creatures with ears, except a British church- warden. 
 
 We wound along under a bleak hill, more desolate than 30 
 anything I had ever seen. The old gray rocks seemed not 
 
172 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 to thrust themselves out of the rusty soil, but rather to be 
 stabbed into it, as if they had been hailed down upon it 
 by some volcano. There was nearly as much look of 
 design as there is in a druidical circle, and the whole looked 
 5 like some graveyard in an extinguished world, the monu- 
 ment of mortality itself, such as Bishop Wilkins° might 
 have found in the moon, if he had ever got thither. The 
 path grew ever wilder, and Rojate, the next town we came 
 to, grim and grizzly, under a grim and grizzly sky of low- 
 
 lotraiHng clouds, which had suddenly gathered, looked 
 drearier eten than the desolations we had passed. It 
 was easy to understand why rocks should like to live here 
 well enough; but what could have brought men hither, 
 and then kept them here, was beyond all reasonable sur- 
 
 15 mise. Barren liills stood sullenly aloof all around, in- 
 capable of any crop but lichens. 
 
 We entered the gate, and found ourselves in the 
 midst of a group of wild-looking men gathered about the 
 door of a wine-shop. Some of them were armed with 
 
 2o long guns, and we saw (for the first time in situ°) the tall 
 bandit hat with ribbons wound round it, — such as one 
 is famiUar with in operas, and on the heads of those in- 
 habitants of the Scalinata° in Rome, who have a costume 
 of their own, and placidly serve as models through the 
 
 25 whole pictorial range of divine and human nature, from 
 the Padre Eterno° to Judas. Twenty years ago, when my 
 notion of an Italian was divided between a monk and a 
 bravo, the first of whom did nothing but enter at secret 
 doors and drink your health in poison, while the other 
 
 30 lived behind corners, supporting himself by the produc- 
 tive industry of digging your person all over with a stiletto, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 173 
 
 I should have looked for instant assassination from these 
 carousing ruffians. But the only blood shed on the occa- 
 sion was that of the grape. A ride over the mountains 
 for two hours had made us thirsty, and two or three bajoc- 
 chi gave a tumbler of vino asciutto° to all four of us. " You s 
 are welcome," said one of the men, "we are all artists after 
 a fashion; we are all brothers." The manners here are 
 more republican, and the title of lordship disappears alto- 
 gether. Another came up and insisted that we should 
 drink a second flask of wine as his guests. In vain we lo 
 protested; no artist should pass through Rojate without 
 accepting that token of good-will, and with the liberal 
 help of our guides we contrived to gulp it down. He was 
 for another ; but we protested that we were entirely full, 
 and that it was impossible. I dare say the poor fellow 15 
 would have spent a week's earnings on us, if we would 
 have allowed it. We proposed to return the civihty, and 
 to leave a paul for them to drink a good journey to us 
 after we were gone; but they would not listen to it. Our 
 entertainer followed us along to the Piazza, begging one 20 
 of us to let him serve as donkey-driver to Subiaco. When 
 this was denied, he said that there was a festa here also, 
 and that we must stop long enough to see the procession 
 of zitelle (young girls), which would soon begin. But 
 evening was already gathering, the clouds grew momently 25 
 darker, and fierce, damp gusts, striking us with the sud- 
 denness of a blow, promised a wild night. We had still 
 eight miles of mountain-path before us, and we struggled 
 away. As we crossed the next summit beyond the town, 
 a sound of chanting drifted by us on the wind, wavered 30 
 hither and thither, now heard, now lost, then a doubtful 
 
174 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 something between song and gust, and, lingering a few 
 moments, we saw the white head-dresses, gUding two by 
 two, across a gap between the houses. The scene and the 
 music were both in neutral tints, a sketch, as it were, in 
 
 5 sepia° a little blurred. 
 
 Before long the clouds almost brushed us as they eddied 
 silently by, and then it began to rain, first mistily, and then 
 in thick, hard drops. Fortunately there was a moon, 
 shining placidly in the desert heaven above all this tur- 
 
 lo moil, or we could not have found our path, which in a few 
 moments became a roaring torrent almost knee-deep. It 
 was a cold fain, and far above us, where the mountain- 
 peaks tore gaps in the clouds, we could see the white si- 
 lence of new-fallen snow. Sometimes we had to dismount 
 
 15 and wade, — a circumstance which did not make our 
 saddles more comfortable when we returned to them and 
 could hear them go crosh, crosh, as the water gurgled out 
 of them at every jolt. There was no hope of shelter 
 nearer than Subiaco, no sign of man, and no sound but 
 
 20 the multitudinous roar of waters on every side. Rivulet 
 whispered to rivulet, and water-fall shouted to water-fall, 
 as they leaped from rock to rock, all hurrying to reinforce 
 the main torrent below, which hummed onward toward 
 the Anio with dilated heart. So gathered the hoarse 
 
 25 Northern swarms to descend upon sunken Italy ; and so 
 forever does physical and intellectual force seek its fatal 
 equilibrium, rushing in and occupying wherever it is drawn 
 by the attraction of a lower level. 
 
 We forded large streams that had been dry beds an 
 
 30 hour before ; and so sudden was the creation of the floods, 
 that it gave one almost as fresh a feeling of water as if one 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 175 ' 
 
 had been present in Eden when the first rock gave birth to 
 the first fountain. I had a severe cold, I was wet through 
 from the hips downward, and yet I never enjoyed anything 
 more in my Ufe, — so different is the shower-bath to which 
 we doom ourselves from that whose string is pulled by s 
 the prison-warden compulsion. After our little bearers 
 had tottered us up and down the dusky steeps of a few 
 more mountain-spurs, where a misstep would have sent'^ 
 us spinning down the fathomless black nowhere below, 
 we came out upon the high-road, and found it a fine one, lo 
 as all the great Italian roads are. The rain broke off sud- 
 denly, and on the left, seeming about haK a mile away, 
 sparkled the lights of Subiaco, flashing intermittently like 
 a knot of fire-flies in a meadow. The towii, owing to the 
 necessary windings of the road, was still three miles off, 15 
 and just as the guides had progued and ahrred the donkeys 
 into a brisk joggle, I resolved to give up my saddle to the 
 boy, and try Tom Coryate's° compasses. It was partly 
 out of humanity to myself and partly to him, for he was 
 tired and I was cold. The elder guide and I took the lead, 20 
 and, as I looked back, I laughed to see the lolling ears of 
 Storg's donkey thrust from under his long cloak, as if he 
 were coming out from a black Arab tent. We soon left 
 them behind, and paused at a bridge over the Anio till 
 we heard the patter of little hoofs again. The bridge is 25 
 a single arch, bent between the steep edges of a gorge 
 through which the Anio huddled far below, showing a 
 green gleam here and there in the struggling moonlight, 
 as if a fish rolled up his burnished flank. After another 
 mile and a half, we reached the gate, and awaited our com- 3° 
 panions. It was dreary enough, — waiting always is, — 
 
176 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 and as the snow-chilled wind whistled through the damp 
 archway where we stood, my legs illustrated feeUngly to 
 me how they cool water in the East, by wrapping the jars 
 with wet woollen, and setting them in a draught. At last 
 5 they came ; I remounted, and we went sliding through 
 the steep, wet streets till we had fairly passed through the 
 whole town. Before a long building of two stories, with- 
 out a symptom of past or future light, we stopped. ^'Ecco 
 laPaletta!''° said the guide, and began to pound furiously 
 
 lo on the door with a large stone, which he some time before 
 had provided for the purpose. After a long period of 
 sullen irresponsiveness, we heard descending footsteps, 
 light streamed through the chinks of the door, and the 
 invariable "Chi e?''° which precedes the unbarring of all 
 
 15 portals here, came from within. "Due forestieri,''° an- 
 swered the guide, and the bars rattled in hasty welcome. 
 ^'Make us," we exclaimed, as we stiffly climbed down from 
 our perches, "your biggest fire in your biggest chimney, 
 and then we will talk of supper!" In five minutes two 
 
 20 great laurel-fagots were spitting and crackling in an enor- 
 mous fire-place ; and Storg and I were in the costume which 
 Don Quixote wore on the Brown Mountain. Of course 
 there was nothing for supper but a frittata ; but there are 
 worse things in the world than a frittata col prosciutto° 
 
 25 and we discussed it like a society just emerging from 
 barbarism, the upper half of our persons presenting all 
 the essentials of an advanced civilization, while our legs 
 skulked underiihe table as free from sartorial impertinences 
 as those of the noblest savage that ever ran wild in the 
 
 30 woods. And so eccoci jinalmente arrivati !° 
 
 27th. — Nothing can be more lovely than the scenery 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 111 
 
 about Subiaco. The town itself is built on a kind of cone 
 rising from the midst of a valley abounding in oUves and 
 vines, with a superb mountain horizon around it, and the 
 green Anio cascading at its feet. As you walk to the high- 
 perched convent of San Benedetto, you look across thes 
 river on your right just after leaving the town, to a cliff 
 over which the ivy pours in torrents, and in which dwell- 
 ings have been hollowed out. In the black doorway of 
 every one sits a woman in scarlet bodice and white head- 
 gear, with a distaff, spinning, while overhead countless lo 
 nightingales sing at once from the fringe of shrubbery. 
 The glorious great white clouds look over the mountain- 
 tops into our enchanted valley, and sometimes a lock of 
 their vapory wool would be torn off, to lie for a while in 
 some inaccessible ra\dne like a snow-drift ; but it seemed 15 
 as if no shadow could fly over our privacy of sunshine to- 
 day. The approach to the monastery is delicious. You 
 pass out of the hot sun into the green shadows of ancient 
 ilexes, leaning and twisting every way that is graceful, 
 their branches velvety with brilliant moss, in which grow 20 
 feathery ferns, fringing them with a halo of verdure. Then 
 comes the convent, with its pleasant old monks, who show 
 their sacred vessels (one by CelUni)° and their relics, 
 among which is a finger-bone of one of the Innocents. 
 Lower down is a convent of Santa Scolastica, where the 25 
 first book was printed in Italy. 
 
 But though one may have dayhght till after twenty- 
 four o'clock in Italy, the days are no longer than ours, and 
 I must go back to La Paletta to see about a vettura to TivoH. 
 I leave Storg sketching, and walk slowly down, lingering 30 
 over the ever-changeful views, lingering opposite the 
 
178 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 nightingale-cliff, but get back to Subiaco and the vetturion 
 at last. The growl of a thunder-storm soon brought 
 Storg home, and we leave Subiaco triumphantly, at five 
 o'clock, in a Hght carriage, drawn by three gray stalUons 
 5 (harnessed abreast) on the full gallop. I cannot describe 
 our drive, the mountain-towns, with their files of girls 
 winding up from the fountain with balanced water-jars 
 of ruddy copper, or chattering around it bright-hued as 
 parrots, the ruined castles, the green gleams of the capri- 
 
 lo cious river, the one great mountain that soaked up all the 
 rose of sunset, and, after all else grew dim, still glowed as 
 if wdth inward fires, and, later, the white spray smoke of 
 Tivoli that drove down the valley under a clear cold moon, 
 contrasting strangely with the red glare of the Hme-fur- 
 
 isnace on the opposite hillside. It is well that we can be 
 happy sometimes without peeping and botanizing in the 
 materials that make us so. It is not often that we can 
 escape the evil genius of analysis that haunts our modern 
 daylight of self-consciousness {wir haben ja aufgekldrt !)° 
 
 20 and enjoy a day of right Chaucer. 
 
 P. S. Now that I am printing this, a dear friend sends 
 me an old letter, and says, " Slip in somewhere, by way of 
 contrast, what you wrote me of your visit to Passawamp- 
 scot." It is odd, almost painful, to be confronted with 
 
 25 your past self and your past self's doings, when you have 
 forgotten both. But here is my bit of American scenery, 
 such as it is. 
 
 While we were waiting for the boat, we had time to 
 investigate P. a little. We wandered about with no one 
 
 30 to molest us or make us afraid. No cicerone was lying in 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 179 
 
 wait for us, no verger expected with funeral solemnity the 
 more than compulsory shiUing. I remember the whole 
 population of Cortona gathering round me, and beseech- 
 ing me not to leave their city till I had seen the lampadone,° 
 whose keeper had unhappily gone out to walk, taking 5 
 the key with him. Thank Fortune, here were no antiq- 
 uities, no galleries of Pre-Raphaelite art, every lank 
 figure looking as if it had been stretched on a rack, before 
 which the Anglo-Saxon writhes because he ought to Hke 
 them and cannot for the soul of him. It is a pretty little lo 
 village, cuddled down among the hills, the clay soil of 
 which gives them, to a pilgrim from the parched gravelly 
 inland, a look of almost fanatical green. The fields are 
 broad, and wholly given up to the grazing of cattle and 
 sheep, which dotted them thickly in the breezy sunshine, is 
 The open doors of a barn, through which the wind flowed 
 rusthng the loose locks of the mow, attracted us. Swal- 
 lows swam in and out with level wings, or crossed each 
 other, twittering in the dusky mouth of their hay-scented 
 cavern. Two or three hens and a cock (none of your 20 
 gawky Shanghais, long-legged as a French peasant on his 
 stilts, but the true red cock of the ballads, full-chested, • 
 coral-combed, fountain-tailed) were inquiring for hay- 
 seed in the background. What frame in what gallery 
 ever enclosed such a picture as is squared within the 25 
 groundsel, side-posts, and Untel of a barn-door, whether 
 for eye or fancy? The shining floor suggests the flail- 
 beat of autumn, that pleasantest of monotonous sounds, 
 and the later husking-bee, where the lads and lasses sit 
 round laughingly busy under the swinging lantern. 30 
 
 Here we found a fine, stalwart fellow shearing sheep. 
 
180 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 This was something new to us, and we watched him for 
 some time with many questions, which he answered with 
 off-hand good-nature. Going away, I thanked him for 
 having taught me something. He laughed, and said, 
 5 ''Ef you'll take off them gloves o' yourn, I'll give ye a 
 try at the practical part on't." He was in the right of it. 
 I never saw anything handsomer than those brown hands 
 of his, on which the sinews stood out, as he handled his 
 shears, tight as a drawn bow-string. How much more 
 
 lo admirable is this tawny vigor, the badge of fruitful toil, 
 than the crop of early muscle that heads out under the 
 forcing-glass of the gymnasium! Foreigners do not feel 
 easy in America, because there are no peasants and under- 
 lings here to be humble to them. The truth is, that none 
 
 15 but those who feel themselves only artificially the superiors 
 of our sturdy yeomen see in their self-respect any uncom- 
 fortable assumption of equahty. It is the last thing the 
 yeoman is likely to think of. They do not like the ''I say, 
 ma good fellah" kind of style, and commonly contrive to 
 
 20 snub it. They do not value condescension at the same 
 rate that he does who vouchsafes it to them. If it be a 
 good thing for an English duke that he has no social su- 
 periors, I think it can hardly be bad for a Yankee farmer. 
 If it be a bad thing for the duke that he meets none but 
 
 25 inferiors, it cannot harm the farmer much that he never 
 has the chance. At any rate, there was no thought 
 of incivility in my friend Hobbinol's" jibe at my kids, 
 only a kind of jolly superiority. But I did not like to be 
 taken for a city gent, so I told him I was born and bred in 
 
 30 the country as well as he. He laughed again, and said, 
 "Wal, anyhow, I've the advantage of ye, for you never 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 181 
 
 see a sheep shore, an' I've ben to the Opery and shore 
 sheep myself into the bargain." He told me that there 
 were two hundred sheep in the town, and that his father 
 could remember when there were four times as many. 
 The sea laps and mumbles the soft roots of the hills, and s 
 licks away an acre or two of good pasturage every season. 
 The father, an old man of eighty, stood looking on, pleased 
 with his son's wit, and brown as if the Passawampscot 
 fogs were walnut-juice. 
 
 We dined at a little tavern, with a gilded ball hung out lo 
 for sign, — a waif, I fancy, from some shipwreck. The 
 landlady was a brisk, amusing little body, who soon in- 
 formed us that her husband was own cousin to a Senator 
 of the United States. A very elaborate sampler in the 
 parlor, in which an obelisk was wept over by a somewhat 15 
 costly willow in silver thread, recorded the virtues of the 
 Senator's maternal grandfather and grandmother. After 
 dinner, as we sat smoking our pipes on the piazza, our good 
 hostess brought her little daughter, and made her repeat 
 verses utterly unintelligible, but conjecturally moral, and 20 
 certainly depressing. Once set agoing, she ran down like 
 an alarm-clock. We waited her subsidence as that of a 
 shower or other inevitable natural phenomenon. More 
 refreshing was the talk of a tall returned Calif ornian, who 
 told us, among other things, that ''he shouldn't mind 25 
 Panahmy's bein' sunk, oilers providin' there warn't none 
 of our folks onto it when it went down !" 
 
 Our landlady's exhibition of her daughter puts me in 
 mind of something similar, yet oddly different, which 
 happened to Storg and me at Palestrina. We happened 30 
 to praise the beauty of our stout locandiera's° little 
 
182 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 girl "Ah, she is nothing to her elder 'lister just 
 married," said the mother. "If you could see her! She 
 is bella, bella° bella !" We thought no more of it; but 
 after dinner, the good creature, with no warning but a 
 
 5 tap at the door and a humble con permesso° brought her 
 in all her bravery, and showed her off to us as simply and 
 naturally as if she had been a picture. The girl, who was 
 both beautiful and modest, bore it wdth the dignified 
 aplom.b° of a statue. She knew we admired her, and liked 
 
 loit, but with the indifference of a rose. There is some- 
 thing very charming, I think, in this wholly unsophisti- 
 cated consciousness, with no alloy of vanity or coquetry. 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC° 
 
 Byron hit the white, which he often shot very wide of 
 in his ItaUan Guide-Book, when he called Rome ''my 
 country." But it is a feeling which comes to one slowly, 
 and is absorbed into one's system during a long residence. 
 Perhaps one does not feel it till he has gone away, as things 5 
 always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is 
 out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing 
 leans and beckons. However it be. Fancy gets a rude 
 shock at entering Rome, which it takes her a great while to 
 get over. She has gradually made herself believe that 10 
 she is approaching a city of the dead, and has seen nothing 
 on the road from Civita Vecchia° to disturb that theory. 
 Milestones, with ''Via Aurelia"° carved upon them, have 
 confirmed it. It is eighteen hundred years ago with her 
 and on the dial of time the shadow has not yet trembled 15 
 over the line that marks the beginning of the first century. 
 She arrives at the gate, and a dirty, blue man, with a cocked 
 hat and a white sword-belt, asks for her passport. Then 
 another man, as like the first as one spoon is like its fellow, 
 and having, like him, the look of being run in a mould, 20 
 tells her that she must go to the custom-house. It is as 
 if a ghost, who had scarcely recovered from the jar of 
 hearing Charon° say, "I'll trouble you for your obolus, if 
 you please," should have his portmanteau seized by the 
 
 183 
 
184 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 Stygian tide-waiters to be searched. Is there anjrthing, 
 then, contraband of death ? asks poor Fancy of herself. 
 
 But it is the misfortune (or the safeguard) of the English 
 mind that Fancy is always an outlaw, liable to be laid by 
 5 the heels wherever Constable Common Sense can catch 
 her. She submits quietly as the postilion cries, "Yeeip!'^ 
 and cracks his whip, and the rattle over the pavement 
 begins, struggles a moment when the pillars of the colon- 
 nade stalk ghostly by in the moonlight, and finally gives 
 
 lo up all for lost when she sees Bernini's° angels polking on 
 their pedestals along the sides of the Ponte Sant' Angelo° 
 with the emblems of the Passion in their arms. 
 
 You are in Rome, of course; the shirr o° said so, the 
 doganiere° bowed it, and the postihon swore it; but it is 
 
 15 a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets, dingy caffes, 
 cigar-smokers, and French soldiers, the manifest junior of 
 Florence. And yet full of anachronisms, for in a Uttle 
 while you pass the column of Antoninus, ° find the Dogana 
 in an ancient temple whose furrowed pillars show through 
 
 20 the recent plaster, and feel as if you saw the statue of 
 Minerva° in a Paris bonnet. You are driven to a hotel 
 where all the barbarian languages are spoken in one wild 
 conglomerate by the Commissionnaire, have your dinner 
 wholly in French, and wake the next morning dreaming of 
 
 25 the Tenth Legion, to see a regiment of Chasseurs de Vin- 
 cennes° trotting by. 
 
 For a few days one undergoes a tremendous recoil. 
 Other places have a distinct meaning. London is the 
 visible throne of King Stock; Versailles is the apotheosis 
 
 30 of one of Louis XIV.'s cast periwigs; Florence and Pisa 
 are cities of the Middle Ages; but Rome seems to be a 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 185 
 
 parody upon itself. The ticket that admits you to see the 
 starting of the horses at carnival, has S. P. Q. R.° at the 
 top of it, and you give the custode° a paul for showing you 
 the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. The Senatus 
 seems to be a score or so of elderly gentlemen in scarlet, $ 
 and the Populusque Romanus a swarm of nasty friars. 
 
 But there is something more than mere earth in the 
 spot where great deeds have been done. The surveyor 
 cannot give the true dimensions of Marathon or Lexing- 
 ton,° for they are not reducible to square acres. Dead lo 
 glory and greatness leave ghosts behind them, and de- 
 parted empire has a metempsychosis, if nothing else has. 
 Its spirit haunts the grave, and waits, and waits till at 
 last it finds a body to its mind, sUps into it, and historians 
 moralize on the fluctuation of human affairs. By and by, 15 
 perhaps, enough observations will have been recorded to 
 assure us that these recurrences are firmamental, and his- 
 torionomers will have measured accurately the sidereal 
 years of races. When that is once done, events will move 
 with the quiet of an orrery, and nations will consent to 20 
 their peridynamis and apodynamis with planetary com- 
 posure. 
 
 Be this as it may, you become gradually aware of the 
 presence of this imperial ghost among the Roman ruins. 
 You receive hints and startles of it through the senses 25 
 first, as the horse always shies at the apparition before the 
 rider can see it. Then, little by little, you become assured 
 of it, and seem to hear the brush of its mantle through some 
 hall of Caracalla's° baths, or one of those other soUtudes 
 of Rome. And those solitudes are without a parallel ; 30 
 for it is not the mere absence of man, but the sense of his 
 
186 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 departure, that makes a profound loneliness. Musing 
 upon them, you cannot but feel the shadow of that disem- 
 bodied empire, and, remembering how the foundations of 
 the Capitol were laid where a head was turned up, you are 
 
 5 impelled to prophesy that the Idea of Rome will incarnate 
 
 itself again as soon as an Italian brain is found large enough 
 
 to hold it, and to give unity to those discordant members. 
 
 But, though I intend to observe no regular pattern in 
 
 my Roman mosaic, which will resemble more what one 
 
 lo finds in his pockets after a walk, — a pagan cube or two 
 from the palaces of the Caesars, a few Byzantine bits, given 
 with many shrugs of secrecy by a lay-brother at San 
 Paolo fuori le mura° and a few more (quite as ancient) 
 from the manufactory at the Vatican, — it seems natural 
 
 15 to begin what one has to say of Rome with something 
 about St. Peter's; for the saint sits at the gate here as 
 well as in Paradise. 
 
 It is very common for people to say that they are disap- 
 pointed in the first sight of St. Peter's; and one hears 
 
 20 much the same about Niagara. I cannot help thinking 
 'hat the fault is in themselves; and that if the church 
 and the cataract were in the habit of giving away their 
 thoughts with that rash generosity which characterizes 
 tourists, they might perhaps say of their visitors, "Well, 
 
 25 if you are those men of whom we have heard so much, we 
 are a little disappointed, to tell the truth!" The refined 
 tourist expects somewhat too much when he takes it for 
 granted that ^t. Peter's will at once decorate him with 
 the order of imagination, just as Victoria° knights an 
 
 30 alderman when he presents an address. Or perhaps he 
 has been getting up a little architecture on the road from 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 187 
 
 Florence, and is discomfited because he does not know 
 whether he ought to be pleased or not, which is very much 
 as if he should wait to be told whether it was fresh water 
 or salt which makes the exhaustless grace of Niagara's 
 emerald curve, before he benignly consented to approve. 5 
 It would be wiser, perhaps, for him to consider whether, 
 if Michael Angelo had had the building of him, his own 
 personal style would not have been more impressive. 
 
 It is not to be doubted that minds are of as many dif- 
 ferent orders as cathedrals, and that the Gothic imagina- 10 
 tion is vexed and discommoded in the vain endeavor to 
 flatten its pinnacles, and fit itself into the round Roman 
 arches. But if it be impossible for a man to like every- 
 thing, it is quite possible for Mm to avoid being driven mad 
 by what' does not please him ; nay, it is the imperative 15 
 duty of a wise man to find out what that secret is which 
 makes a thing pleasing to another. In approaching St. 
 Peter's, one must take his Protestant shoes off his feet, 
 and leave them behind him, in the Piazza Rusticucci.° 
 Otherwise the great Basilica, with those outstretching 20 
 colonnades of Bramante,° will seem to be a bloated spider 
 lying in wait for him, the poor Reformed fly. As he lifts 
 the heavy leathern flapper over the door, and is discharged 
 into the interior by its impetuous recoil, let him disburden 
 his mind altogether of stone and mortar, and think only 25 
 that he is standing before the throne of a dynasty which, 
 even in its decay, is the most powerful the world ever saw. 
 Mason-work is all very well in itself, but it has nothing 
 to do with the affair at present in hand. 
 
 Suppose that a man in pouring down a glass of claret 30 
 could drink the South of France, that he could so dis- 
 
188 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 integrate the wine by the force of imagination as to taste 
 in it all the clustered beauty and bloom of the grape, all 
 the dance and song and sunburnt jollity of the vintage. 
 Or suppose that in eating bread he could transubstantiate 
 
 5 it with the tender blade of spring, the gleam-flitted corn- 
 ocean of summer, the royal autumn, with its golden beard, 
 and the merry funerals of harvest. This is what the great 
 poets do for us, we cannot tell how, with their fatally- 
 chosen words, crowding the happy veins of language again 
 
 lo with all the life and meaning and music that had been 
 dribbHng away from them since Adam. And this is what 
 the Roman Church does for religion, feeding the soul 
 not with the essential religious sentiment, not with a drop 
 or two of the tincture of worship, but making us feel one 
 
 IS by one all those original elements of which worship is com- 
 posed; not bringing the end to us, but making us pass 
 over and feel beneath our feet all the golden rounds of 
 the ladder by which the climbing generations have reached 
 that end; not handing us drily a dead and extinguished 
 
 20 Q. E. D.,° but letting it rather declare itself by the glory 
 with which it interfuses the incense-clouds of wonder 
 and aspiration and beauty in which it is veiled. The 
 secret of her power is typified in the mystery of the Real 
 Presence. She is the only church that has been loyal to 
 
 25 the heart and soul of man, that has clung to her faith in 
 the imagination, and that would not give over her symbols 
 and images and sacred vessels to the perilous keeping of 
 the iconoclast Understanding. She has never lost sight 
 of the truth, that the product human nature is com- 
 
 30 posed of the sum of flesh and spirit, and has accordingly 
 regarded both this world and the next as the constituents 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 189 
 
 of that other world which we possess by faith. She knows 
 that poor Panza,° the body, has his kitchen longings and 
 visions, as well as Quixote, ° the soul, his ethereal, and has 
 wit enough to supply him with the visible, tangible raw 
 material of imagination. She is the only poet among the 5 
 churches, and, while Protestantism is unrolling a pocket 
 surveyor's-plan, takes her votary to the pinnacle of her 
 temple, and shows him meadow, upland, and tillage, 
 cloudy heaps of forest clasped with the river's jewelled 
 arm, hillsides white with the perpetual snow of flocks, 10 
 and, beyond all, the interminable heave of the unknown 
 ocean. Her empire may be traced upon the map by the 
 boundaries of races; the understanding is her great foe; 
 and it is the people whose vocabulary was incomplete till 
 they had invented the archword Humbug that defies her. 15 
 With that leaden bullet John Bull can bring down Senti- 
 ment when she flies her highest. And the more the pity 
 for John Bull. One of these days some one whose eyes 
 are sharp enough will read in the Times a standing adver- 
 tisement, — "Lost, strayed, or stolen from the farm-yard 20 
 of the subscriber the valuable horse Pegasus.° Probably 
 has on him part of a new plough-harness, as that is also 
 missing. A suitable reward, etc. J. Bull." 
 
 Protestantism reverses the poetical process I have 
 spoken of above, and gives not even the bread of life, but 25 
 instead of it the alcohol, or distilled intellectual result. 
 This was very well so long as Protestantism continued to 
 protest ; for enthusiasm subhmates the understanding into 
 imagination. But now that she also has become an es- 
 tablishment, she begins to perceive that she made a 30 
 blunder in trusting herself to the intellect alone. She is 
 
190 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 beginning to feel her way back again, as one notices in 
 Puseyism,° and other such hints. One is put upon re- 
 flection when he sees burly Englishmen, who dine on beef 
 and porter every day, marching proudly through Saint 
 5 Peter's on Palm Sunday, with those frightfully artificial 
 palm-branches in their hands. Romanism wisely pro- 
 vides for the childish in men. 
 
 Therefore I say again, that one must lay aside his 
 Protestantism in order to have a true feeling of Saint 
 
 lo Peter's. Here in Rome is the laboratory of that mys- 
 terious enchantress, who has known so well how to adapt 
 herseK to all the wants, or, if you will, the weaknesses of 
 human nature, making the retirement of the convent- 
 cell a merit to the solitary, the scourge or the fast a piety 
 
 15 to the ascetic, the enjoyment of pomp and music and in- 
 cense a religious act in the sensual, and furnishing for the 
 very soul itself a confidante in that ear of the dumb confes- 
 sional, where it may securely disburden itself of its sins 
 and sorrows. And the dome of St. Peter's is the magic 
 
 20 circle within which she works her most potent incanta- 
 tions. I confess that I could not enter it alone without a 
 kind of awe. 
 
 But, setting entirely aside the effect of this church upon 
 the imagination, it is wonderful, if one consider it only 
 
 25 materially. Michael Angelo created a new world in which 
 everything was colossal, and it might seem that he built 
 tliis as a fit temple for those gigantic figures with which 
 he peopled it to worship in. Here his Moses should be 
 high-priest, the service should be chanted by his prophets 
 
 30 and sibyls, and those great pagans should be brought 
 hither from San Lorenzo° in Florence, to receive baptism. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 191 
 
 However unsatisfactory in other matters, statistics are 
 of service here. I have seen a refined tourist who entered, 
 Murray° in hand, sternly resolved to have St. Peter's look 
 small, brought to terms at once by being told that the 
 canopy over the high altar (looking very like a four-post s 
 bedstead) was ninety-eight feet high. If he still obstinates 
 himself, he is finished by being made to measure one of the 
 marble putti° which look hke rather stoutish babies, and 
 are found to be six feet, every sculptor's son of them. 
 This ceremony is the more interesting, as it enables him lo 
 to satisfy the guide of his proficiency in the Itahan tongue 
 by calling them putty at every convenient opportunity. 
 Otherwise both he and his assistant terrify each other into 
 mutual unintelligibility with that lingua franca° of the 
 English-speaking traveller, which is supposed to be^^r 15 
 some remote affinity to the French language, of which 
 both parties are as ignorant as an American Ambassador. 
 
 Murray gives all these little statistical nudges to the 
 Anglo-Saxon imagination; but he knows that its finest 
 nerves are in the pocket, and accordingly ends by teUing 20 
 you how much the church cost. I forget how much it is ; 
 but it cannot be more, I fancy, than the Enghsh national 
 debt multipUed into itself three hundred and sixty-five 
 times. If the pilgrim, honestly anxious for a sensation, 
 will work out this little sum, he will be sure to receive all 25 
 that enlargement of the imaginative faculty which arith- 
 metic can give him. Perhaps the most dilating fact, after 
 all, is that this arcliitectural world has also a separate 
 atmosphere, distinct from that of Rome by some ten 
 degrees, and unvarying through the year. 30 
 
 I think that, on the whole, Jonathan gets ready to be 
 
192 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 pleased with St. Peter's sooner than Bull. Accustomed 
 to our lath and plaster expedients for churches, the port- 
 able sentry-boxes of Zion,° mere solidity and permanence 
 are pleasurable in themselves ; and if he get grandeur also, 
 5 he has Gospel measure. Besides, it is easy for Jonathan 
 to travel. He is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows 
 where his home is to-day, but can make no guess of where 
 it may be to-morrow. Even in a form of government he 
 only takes lodgings for the night, and is ready to pay his 
 
 lo bill and be off in the morning. He should take his motto 
 from Bishop Golias's "Mihi est propositum in tabernd 
 mori,"° though not in the sufistic sense of that misunder- 
 stood Churchman. But Bull can seldom be said to travel 
 at all, since the first step of a true traveller is out of him- 
 
 15 self. He plays cricket and hunts foxes on the Campagna,° 
 makes entries in his betting-book while the Pope is giving 
 his benediction, and points out Lord Calico to you aw- 
 fully during the Sistine Miserere° If he let his beard 
 grow, it always has a startled air, as if it suddenly re- 
 
 2o membered its treason to Sheffield, and only makes him 
 look more EngUsh than ever. A masquerade is impossible 
 to him, and his fancy balls are the solemnest facts in the 
 world. Accordingly, he enters St. Peter's with the dome 
 of St. Paul's® drawn tight over his eyes, like a criminal's 
 
 25 cap, and ready for instant execution rather than confess 
 that the English Wren had not a stronger wing than the 
 ItaUan Angelt I like this in Bull, and it renders him the 
 pleasantest of travelling-companions; for he makes you 
 take England along with you, and thus you have two 
 
 30 countries at once. And one must not forget in an Italian 
 inn that it is to Bull he owes the clean napkins and sheets, 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 193 
 
 and the privilege of his morning bath. Nor should Bull 
 himself fail to remember that he ate with his fingers till 
 the Italian gave him a fork, 
 
 Browning° has given the best picture of St. Peter's on 
 a festival-day, sketching it with a few verses in his large 5 
 style. And doubtless it is the scene of the grandest spec- 
 tacles which the world can see in these latter days. Those 
 Easter pomps, where the antique world marches visibly 
 before you in gilded mail and crimson doublet, refresh the 
 eyes, and. are good as long as they continue to be merely 10 
 spectacle. But if one think for a moment of the servant 
 of the servants of the Lord in cloth of gold, borne on men's 
 shoulders, or of the children receiving the blessing of their 
 Holy Father, with a regiment of French soldiers to pro- 
 tect the father from the children, it becomes a Httle sad. 15 
 If one would feel the full meaning of those ceremonials, 
 however, let him consider the coincidences between the 
 Romish and the Buddhist forms of worship, and remem- 
 bering that the Pope is the direct heir, through the Pon- 
 tifex Maximus,° of rites that were ancient when the Etrus- 20 
 cans were modern, he will look with a feeling deeper than 
 curiosity upon forms which record the earliest conquests 
 of the Invisible, the first triumphs of mind over music. 
 
 To me the noon silence and solitude of St. Peter's were 
 most impressive, when the sunlight, made visible by the 25 
 mist of the ever-burning lamps in which it was entangled, 
 hovered under the dome like the holy dove goldenly de- 
 scending. Very grand also is the twilight, when all out- 
 lines melt into mysterious vastness, and the arches expand 
 and lose themselves in the deepening shadow. Then, 30 
 standing in the desert transept, you hear the far-off vespers 
 
194 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 swell and die like low breathings of the sea on some con- 
 jectured shore. 
 
 As the sky is supposed, to scatter its golden star-pdlenl 
 once every year in meteoric showers, so the dome of St. 
 
 5 Peter's has its annual efflorescence of fire. This illumina- 
 tion is the great show of Papal Rome. Just after sunset, 
 I stood upon the Trinita dei Monti° and saw the Uttle 
 drops of pale light creeping downward from the cross and 
 trickling over the dome. Then, as the sky darkened be- 
 
 lo hind, it seemed as if the setting sun had lodged upon the 
 horizon and there burned out, the fire still clinging to his 
 massy ribs. And when the change from the silver to the 
 golden illumination came, it was as if the breeze had 
 fanned the embers into flame again. 
 
 15 Bitten with the Anglo-Saxon gadfly that drives us all 
 to disenchant artifice, and see the springs that fix it on, I 
 walked down to get a nearer look. My next glimpse was 
 from the bridge of Sant' Angelo; but there was no time 
 nor space for pause. Foot-passengers crowding hither 
 
 2c and thither, as they heard the shout of Avanti !° from the 
 mile of coachmen behind, dragoon-horses curtsying back- 
 ward just where there were most women and children to 
 be flattened, and the dome drawing all eyes and thoughts 
 the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of at any 
 
 25 desperate hazard. Besides, one could not help feeling 
 nervously hurried; for it seemed quite plain to every- 
 body that this starry apparition must be as momentary 
 as it was wonderful, and that we should find it vanished 
 when we reached the piazza. But suddenly you stand in 
 
 30 front of it, and see the soft travertine of the front suffused 
 with a tremulous, glooming glow, a mildened glory, as if 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 195 
 
 the building breathed, and so transmuted its shadow into 
 soft pulses of hght. 
 
 After wondering long enough, I went back to the Pincio, 
 and watched it for an hour longer. But I did not wish 
 to see it go out. It seemed better to go home and leave s 
 it still trembling, so that I could fancy a kind of perma- 
 nence in it, and half beheve I should find it there again 
 some lucky evening. Before leaving it altogether, I went 
 away to cool my eyes with darkness, and came back sev- 
 eral times ; and every time it was a new miracle, the more lo 
 so that it was a human piece of faery-work. Beautiful as 
 fire is in itseK, I suspect that part of the pleasure is meta- 
 physical, and that the sense of playing with an element 
 which can be so terrible adds to the zest of the spectacle. 
 And then fire is not the least degraded by it, because it is 15 
 not utilized. If beauty were in use, the factory would 
 add a grace to the river, and we should turn from the fire- 
 writing on the wall of heaven to look at a message printed 
 by the magnetic telegraph. There may be a beauty in the 
 use itself ; but utilization is always downward, and it is 20 
 this feeling that makes Schiller's Pegasus° in yoke so 
 universally pleasing. So long as the curse of work clings 
 to man, he will see beauty only in play. The capital of 
 the most frugal commonwealth in the world burns up five 
 thousand dollars a year in gunpowder, and nobody mur- 25 
 murs. Provident Judas° wished to utiUze the ointment, 
 but the Teacher would rather that it should be wasted in 
 poem. 
 
 The best lesson in aesthetics I ever got (and, like most 
 good lessons, it fell from the lips of no regular professor) 30 
 was from an Irishman on the day the Nymph Cochituate° 
 
196 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 was formally introduced to the people of Boston. I made 
 one with other rustics in the streets, admiring the digni- 
 taries in coaches with as much Christian charity as is con- 
 sistent with an elbow in the pit of your stomach and a heel 
 5 on that toe which is your only inheritance from two ex- 
 cellent grandfathers. Among other allegorical phenom- 
 ena, there came along what I should have called a hay- 
 cart, if I had not known it was a triumphal car, filled with 
 that fairest variety of mortal grass which with us is apt 
 loto spindle so soon into a somewhat sapless womanhood. 
 Thirty-odd young maidens in white gowns, with blue 
 sashes and pink wreaths of French crape, represented the 
 United States. (How shall we limit our number, by the 
 way, if ever Utah be admitted?) The ship, the printing- 
 is press, even the wondrous train of express-wagons, and 
 other solid bits of civic fantasy, had left my Hibernian 
 neighbor unmoved. But this brought him down. Turn- 
 ing to me, as the most appreciative public for the moment, 
 with face of as much delight as if his head had been broken, 
 20 he cried, ''Now this is raly beautiful! Tothally regyard- 
 less uv expinse ! ' ' Methought my shirt-sleeved lecturer 
 on the Beautiful had hit at least one nail full on the head. 
 Voltaire but epigrammatized the same thought when he 
 said, Le superflu, chose tres-necessaire.^ 
 
 25 As for the ceremonies of the Church, one need not waste 
 time in seeing "many of them. There is a dreary sameness 
 in them, and one can take an hour here and an hour there, 
 as it pleases him, just as sure of finding the same pattern 
 as he would in the first or last yard of a roll of printed 
 
 30 cotton. For myself, I do not like to go and look with 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 197 
 
 mere curiosity at what is sacred and solemn to others. 
 To how many these Roman shows are sacred, I cannot 
 guess ; but certainly the Romans do not value them much. 
 I walked out to the grotto of Egeria° on Easter Sunday, 
 that I might not be tempted down to St. Peter's to sees 
 the mockery of Pio Nono's° benediction. It is certainly 
 Christian, for he blesses them that curse him, and does 
 all the good which the waving of his fingers can do to 
 people who would use him despitefuUy if they had the 
 chance. I told an ItaHan servant she might have the day ; lo 
 but she said she did not care for it. 
 
 ''But," urged I, ''will you not go to receive the blessing 
 of the Holy Father?" 
 
 "No,sir." 
 
 " Do you not wish it ? " is 
 
 "Not in the least: his blessing would do me no good. 
 If I get the blessing of Heaven, it will serve my turn." 
 
 There were three famihes of foreigners in our house, and 
 I believe none of the Italian servants went to St. Peter's 
 that day. Yet they commonly speak kindly of Pius.° 20 
 I have heard the same phrase from several Italians of the 
 working-class. "He is a good man," they said, "but 
 ill-led." 
 
 What one sees in the streets of Rome is worth more than 
 what one sees in the churches. The churches themselves 25 
 are generally ugly. St. Peter's has crushed all the Ufe 
 out of architectural genius, and all the modern churches 
 look as if they were swelling themselves in imitation of 
 the great Basilica. There is a clumsy magnificence about 
 them, and their heaviness oppresses you. Their marble 30 
 incrustations look like a kind of architectural elephan- 
 
198 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 tiasis, and the parts are puffy with a dropsical want of 
 proportion. There is none of the spring and soar which 
 one may see even in the Lombard churches, and a Roman 
 column standing near one of them, slim and gentleman- 
 5 like, satirizes silently their tawdry parvenuism. Attempts 
 at mere bigness are ridiculous in a city where the Colos- 
 seum still yawns in crater-like ruin, and where Michael 
 Angelo made a noble church out of a single room in Diocle- 
 tian's° baths. 
 
 lo Shall I confess it ? Michael Angelo seems to me, in his 
 angry reaction against sentimental beauty, to have mis- 
 taken bulk and brawn for the antithesis of feebleness. He 
 is the apostle of the exaggerated, the Victor Hugo of 
 painting and sculpture. I have a feeling that rivalry was 
 
 IS a more powerful motive with him than love of art, that he 
 had the conscious intention to be original, which seldom 
 leads to anything better than being extravagant. The 
 show of muscle proves strength, not power; and force 
 for mere force's sake in art makes one think of Milo° 
 
 20 caught in his own log. Tliis is my second thought, and 
 strikes me as perhaps somewhat niggardly toward one in 
 whom you cannot help feeUng there was so vast a possi- 
 bility. And then his Eve, his David, his Sibyls, his 
 Prophets, his Sonnets ! Well, I take it all back, and come 
 
 25 round to St. Peter's again just to hint that I doubt about 
 domes. In Rome they are so much the fashion that I 
 felt as if they were the goitre° of architecture. Generally 
 they look heavy. Those on St. Mark's in Venice are the 
 only light ones I ever saw, and they look almost airy, like 
 
 30 tents puffed out with wind. I suppose one must be 
 satisfied with the interior effect, which is certainly noble 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 199 
 
 in St. Peter's. But for impressiveness both within and 
 without there is nothing Hke a Gothic cathedral for me, 
 nothing that crowns a city so nobly or makes such an 
 island of twiUght silence in the midst of its noonday 
 clamors. S 
 
 Now as to what one sees in the streets, the beggars are 
 certainly the first things that draw the eye. Beggary is 
 an institution here. The Church has sanctified it by the 
 establishment of mendicant orders, and indeed it is the 
 natural result of a social system where the non-producing lo 
 class makes not only the laws, but the ideas. The beggars 
 of Rome go far toward proving the diversity of origin in 
 mankind, for on them surely the curse of Adam never fell. 
 It is easier to fancy that Adam Vaurien° the first tenant 
 of the Fool's Paradise, after sucking his thumbs for a is 
 thousand years, took to wife Eve Faniente° and became 
 the progenitor of this race, to whom also he left a calendar 
 in which three hundred and sixty-five days in the year were 
 made feasts, sacred from all secular labor. Accordingly, 
 they not merely do nothing, but they do it assiduously and 20 
 almost with religious fervor. I have seen ancient members 
 of this sect as constant at their accustomed street-corner 
 as the bit of broken column on which they sat ; and when 
 a man does this in rainy weather, as rainy weather is in 
 Rome, he has the spirit of a fanatic and martyr. 25 
 
 It is not that the Italians are a lazy people. On the 
 contrary, I am satisfied that they are industrious so far 
 as they are allowed to be. But, as I said before, when 
 a Roman does nothing, he does it in the high Roman 
 fashion. A friend of mine was having one of his rooms 30 
 arranged for a private theatre, and sent for a person who 
 
200 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 was said to be an expert in the business to do it for him. 
 After a day's trial, he was satisfied that his lieutenant was 
 rather a hinderance than a help, and resolved to dismiss him. 
 "What is your charge for your day's services?" 
 5 ''Twoscudi,°sir." 
 
 "Two scudi! Five pauls° would be too much. You 
 have done nothing but stand with your hands in your 
 pockets and get in the way of other people." 
 
 "Lordship is perfectly right; but that is my way of 
 
 lo working." 
 
 It is impossible for a stranger to say who may not beg 
 in Rome. It seems to be a sudden madness that may 
 seize any one at the sight of a foreigner. You see a very 
 respectable-looking person in the street, and it is odds but, 
 
 15 as you pass him, his hat comes off, his whole figure sud- 
 denly dilapidates itself, assuming a tremble of professional 
 weakness, and you hear the everlasting qualche cosa per 
 caritd!° You are in doubt whether to drop a bajoccho 
 into the next cardinal's hat which offers you its sacred 
 
 20 cavity in answer to your salute. You begin to believe 
 that the hat was invented for the sole purpose of ingulfing 
 coppers, and that its highest type is the great Triregno° 
 itself, into which the pence of Peter rattle. 
 
 But you soon learn to distinguish the established beg- 
 
 25 gars, and to the three professions elsewhere considered 
 liberal you add a fourth for this latitude, — mendicancy. 
 Its professors look upon themselves as a kind of guild 
 which ought to be protected by the government. I fell 
 into talk with a woman who begged of me in the Colosseum. 
 
 30 Among other things she complained that the government 
 did not at aU consider the poor. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 201 
 
 "Where is the government that does?" I said. 
 
 ^^Eh gid!° Excellency; but this government lets beg- 
 gars from the country come into Rome, which is a great 
 injury to the trade of us born Romans. There is Beppo, 
 for example ; he is a man of property in his own town, 5 
 and has a dinner of three courses every day. He has 
 portioned two daughters with three thousand scudi each, 
 and left Rome during the time of the Republic with the 
 rest of the nobility." 
 
 At first, one is shocked and pained at the exhibition of 10 
 deformities in the street. But by and by he comes to 
 look upon them with little more emotion than is excited 
 by seeing the tools of any other trade. The melancholy 
 of the beggars is purely a matter of business; and they 
 look upon their maims as Fortunatus purses, which will 15 
 always give them money. A withered arm they present 
 to you as a highwayman would his pistol; a goitre is a 
 life-annuity; a St. Vitus dance is as good as an engage- 
 ment as prima ballerina^ at the Apollo; and to have no 
 legs at all is to stand on the best footing with fortune. 20 
 They are a merry race, on the whole, and quick-witted, 
 like the rest of their countrymen. I believe the regular 
 fee for a beggar is a quattrino, about a quarter of a cent ; 
 but they expect more of foreigners. A friend of mine 
 once gave one of these tiny coins to an old woman ; she 25 
 delicately expressed her resentment by exclaiming, 
 "Thanks, signoria. God will reward even you!" 
 
 A begging friar came to me one day with a subscription 
 for repairing his convent. "Ah, but I am a heretic," 
 said I. "Undoubtedly," with a shrug, implying a re- 30 
 spectful acknowledgment of a foreigner's right to choose 
 
202 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 warm and dry lodgings in the other world as well as in 
 this, "but your money is perfectly orthodox." 
 
 Another favorite way of doing nothing is to excavate 
 the Forum. I tliink the Fanientes like this all the better, 
 
 5 because it seems a kind of satire upon work, as the witches 
 parody the Christian offices of devotion at their Sabbath. 
 A score or so of old men in voluminous cloaks shift the 
 earth from one side of a large pit to the other, in a manner 
 so leisurely that it is positive repose to look at them. The 
 
 lo most bigoted anti-Fourierist° might acknowledge this to 
 be attractive industry. 
 
 One conscript father trails a small barrow up to another, 
 who stands leaning on a long spade. Arriving, he fumbles 
 for his snuff-box, and offers it deliberately to his friend. 
 
 IS Each takes an ample pinch, and both seat themselves to 
 await the result. If one should sneeze, he receives the 
 Felicita !° of the other ; and, after allowing the titillation 
 to subside, he replies, Grazia !° Then follows a little con- 
 versation, and then they prepare to load. But it occurs 
 
 20 to the barrow-driver that this is a good opportunity to fill 
 and light his pipe ; and to do so conveniently he needs his 
 barrow to sit upon. He draws a few whiffs, and a little 
 'more conversation takes place. The barrow is now ready ; 
 but first the melder of the spade will fill his pipe also. 
 
 25 This done, more whiffs and more conversation. Then a 
 spoonful of earth is thrown into the barrow, and it starts 
 on its return. But midway it meets an empty barrow, 
 and both stop to go through the snuff-box ceremonial 
 once more, and to discuss whatever new thing has occurred 
 
 30 in the excavation since their last encounter. And so it 
 goes on all day. 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 203 
 
 As I see more of material antiquity, I begin to suspect 
 that my interest in it is mostly factitious. The relations 
 of races to the physical world (only to be studied fruit- 
 fully on the spot) do not excite in me an interest at all 
 proportionate to that I feel in their influence on the moral 5 
 advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace in his 
 own library as on the spot. The only useful remark I 
 remember to have made here is, that, the situation of 
 Rome being far less strong than that of any city of the 
 Etruscan league, it must have been built where it is for lo 
 purposes of commerce. It is the most defensible point 
 near the mouth of the Tiber. It is only as rival trades- 
 folk that Rome and Carthage had any comprehensible 
 cause of quarrel. It is only as a commercial people that 
 we can understand the early tendency of the Romans is 
 towards democracy. As for antiquity, after reading his- 
 tory, one is haunted by a discomforting suspicion that 
 the names so painfully deciphered in hieroglyphic or 
 arrow-head inscriptions are only so many more Smiths 
 and Browns masldng it in unknown tongues. Moreover, 20 
 if the Yankees are twitted with not knowing the difference 
 between big and great, may not those of us who have 
 learned it turn round on many a monument over here with 
 the same reproach? I confess I am beginning to sym- 
 pathize with a countryman of ours from Michigan, who 25 
 asked our Minister to direct him to a specimen ruin and 
 a specimen gallery, that he might see and be rid of them 
 once for all. I saw three young Enghshmen going through 
 the Vatican by catalogue and number, the other day, in a 
 fashion which John Bull is apt to consider exclusively 30 
 American. "Number 300!" says the one with catalogue 
 
204 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 and pencil, "have you seen it?" "Yes," answer his two 
 comrades, and, checking it off, he goes on with Number 
 301. Having witnessed the unavailing agonies of many 
 Anglo-Saxons from both sides of the Atlantic in their 
 
 5 effort to have the correct sensation before many hideous 
 examples of antique bad taste, my heart warmed toward 
 my business-like British cousins, who were doing their 
 aesthetics in this thrifty auctioneer fashion. Our cart- 
 before-horse education, which makes us more familiar 
 
 lo with the history and literature of Greeks and Romans than 
 with those of our own ancestry, (though there is nothing 
 in ancient art to match Shakespeare or a Gothic minster,) 
 makes us the gulls of what we call classical antiquity. In 
 sculpture, to be sure, they have us on the hip. Europe 
 
 15 were worth visiting, if only to be rid of this one old man of 
 the sea. 
 
 I am not ashamed to confess a singular sympathy with 
 what are known as the Middle Ages. I cannot help think- 
 ing that few periods have left behind them such traces of 
 
 2o inventiveness and power. Nothing is more tiresome than 
 the sameness of modern cities ; and it has often struck me 
 that this must also have been true of those ancient ones 
 in which Greek architecture or its derivatives prevailed, 
 — true at least as respects pubUc buildings. But mediaeval 
 
 25 towns, especially in Italy, even when only fifty miles asun- 
 der, have an indiidduahty of character as marked as that 
 of trees. Nor is it merely this originality that attracts 
 me, but likewise the sense that, however old, they are 
 nearer to me in being modern and Christian. I find it 
 
 30 harder to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of cen- 
 turies. Apart from any difference in the men, I had a far 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 205 
 
 deeper emotion when I stood on the Sasso di Dante ° than 
 at Horace's Sabine farm or by the tomb of Virgil. The 
 latter, indeed, interested me chiefly by its association with 
 comparatively modern legend; and one of the buildings 
 I am most glad to have seen in Rome is the Bear Inn, 5 
 where Montaigne lodged on his arrival. 
 
 I think it must have been for some such reason that I 
 liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks, though 
 I am vastly more contented with merely being in Rome. 
 Florence is more noisy ; indeed, I think it the noisiest 10 
 town I was ever in. What with the continual jangling 
 of its bells, the rattle of Austrian drums, and the street- 
 cries, Ancora mi raccapriccia° The Italians are a vocifer- 
 ous people, and most so among them the Florentines. 
 Walking through a back street one day, I saw an old 15 
 woman higgling with a peripatetic dealer, who, at every 
 interval afforded him by the remarks of his veteran antag- 
 onist, would tip his head on one side, and shout, with a 
 kind of wondering enthusiasm, as if he could hardly trust 
 the evidence of his own senses to such loveliness, 0, che 20 
 bellezza !° che belle-e-ezza ! The two had been contending 
 as obstinately as the Greeks and Trojans over the body of 
 Patroclus,° and I was curious to know what was the object 
 of so much desire on the one side and admiration on the 
 other. It was a half-dozen of weazeny baked pears, beg- 25 
 garly remnant of the day's traffic. Another time I 
 stopped before a stall, debating whether to buy some fine- 
 looking peaches. Before I had made up my mind, the 
 vender, a stout fellow, with a voice like a prize-bull of 
 Bashan,° opened a mouth round and large as the muzzle 30 
 of a blunderbuss, and let fly into my ear the following 
 
206 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 pertinent observation: "Belle pesche !° belle pe-e-eschef' 
 (crescendo.) I stared at him in stunned bewilderment; 
 but, seeing that he had reloaded and was about to fire 
 again, took to my heels, the exploded syllables rattUng 
 
 5 after me like so many buckshot. A single turnip is argu- 
 ment enough Avith them till midnight ; nay, I have heard 
 a ruffian yelling over a covered basket, wliich, I am con- 
 vinced, was empty, and only carried as an excuse for his 
 stupendous vocaUsm. It never struck me before what 
 
 lo a quiet people Americans are. 
 
 Of the pleasant places within easy walk of Rome, I 
 prefer the garden of the Villa Albani, as being most 
 ItaHan. One does not go to Italy for examples of Price 
 on the Picturesque. Compared with lands cape-garden- 
 
 15 ing, it is Racine° to Shakespeare, I grant ; but it has its 
 o\\m charm, nevertheless. I like the balustraded terraces, 
 the sun-proof laurel walks, the vases and statues. It is 
 only in such a climate that it does not seem inhuman to 
 thrust a naked statue out of doors. Not to speak of 
 
 20 their incongruity, how dreary do those white figures look 
 at Fountains Abbey in that shrewd Yorksliire atmos- 
 phere ! To put them there shows the same bad taste that 
 led Prince Polonia,° as Thackeray calls him, to build an 
 artificial ruin within a mile of Rome. But I doubt if the 
 
 25 Italian garden will bear transplantation. Farther north, 
 or under a less constant sunshine, it is but half-hardy at 
 the best. Wifhin the city, the garden of the French 
 Academy is my favorite retreat, because Httle frequented ; 
 and there is an arbor there in which I have read comfort- 
 
 30 ably (sitting where the sun could reach me) in January. 
 By the way, there is something very agreeable in the way 
 
EARLIER ESSAYS 207 
 
 these people have of making a kind of fireside of the sun- 
 shine. With us it is either too hot or too cool, or we are 
 too busy. But, on the other hand, they have no such 
 thing as a chimney-corner. 
 
 Of course I haunt the collections of art faithfully ; but 5 
 my favorite gallery, after all, is the street. There I al- 
 ways find something entertaining, at least. The other 
 day, on my way to the Colonna Palace, I passed the 
 Fountain of Tre\d, from which the water is now shut off 
 on account of repairs to the aqueduct. A scanty rill of 10 
 soap-sudsy water still trickled from one of the conduits, 
 and, seeing a crowd, I stopped to find out what nothing 
 or other had gathered it. One charm of Rome is that 
 nobody has anything in particular to do, or, if he has, can 
 always stop doing it on the slightest pretext. I found 15 
 that some eels had been discovered, and a very vivacious 
 hunt was going on, the chief Nimrods being boys. I 
 happened to be the first to see a huge ee] wriggling from the 
 mouth of a pipe, and pointed him out. Two lads at once 
 rushed upon him. One essayed the capture with liis 20 
 naked hands, the other, more pro\ddent, had armed him- 
 self with a rag of woollen cloth with which to maintain 
 his grip more securely. Hardly had this latter arrested 
 his slippery prize, when a ragged rascal, watching liis 
 opportunity, snatched away the prize, and instantly se- 25 
 cured it by thrusting the head into his mouth, and clos- 
 ing on it a set of teeth like an ivory vice. But alas for 
 ill-got gain ! Rob Roy's° 
 
 "Good old plan, 
 That he should take who has the power, 30 
 
 And he should keep who can," 
 
208 EARLIER ESSAYS 
 
 did not serve here. There is scarce a square rood in 
 Rome without one or more stately cocked hats in it, 
 emblems of authority and pohce. I saw the flash of 
 the snow-white cross-belts, gleaming through that dingy 
 5 crowd like the panache° of Henri Quatre at Ivry, I saw the 
 mad plunge of the canvas-shielded head-piece, sacred and 
 terrible as that of Gessler;° and while the greedy throng 
 were dancing about the anguilhceps, each taking his 
 chance twdtch at the undulating object of all wishes, the 
 
 lo captor dodging his head hither and thither, (vulnerable, 
 like Achilles, only in his 'eel, as a British tourist would 
 say,) a pair of broad blue shoulders parted the assailants 
 as a ship's bows part a wave, a pair of blue arms, termi- 
 nating in gloves of Berhn thread, were stretched forth, 
 
 15 not in benediction, one hand grasped the slippery Briseis° 
 by the waist, the other bestowed a cuff on the jaw-bone 
 of Achilles, which loosened (rather by its authority than 
 its physical force) the hitherto refractory incisors, a snuffy 
 bandanna was produced, the prisoner was deposited in 
 
 20 this temporary watch-house, and the cocked hat sailed 
 majestically away with the property thus sequestered for 
 the benefit of the state. 
 
 "Gaudeant anguillse si mortuus sit homo ille, 
 Qui, quasi morte reas, excrueiabat eas!"° 
 
 25 If you have got through that last sentence 1 without 
 stopping for breath, you are fit to begin on the Homer 
 of Chapman, who, both as translator and author, has the 
 longest wind, (especially for a comparison,) without being 
 long-winded, of all writers I know anything of, not except - 
 
 30 ing Jeremy Taylor.° 
 
NOTES 
 
 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 
 
 Title. Cambridge. This essay was published in 1853 
 and is therefore a description of the Cambridge of a hun- 
 dred years ago. For a delightful essay to parallel this one, 
 the student is referred to "Old Cambridge" by Thomas 
 Wentworth Higginson. 
 
 Heading. Edelmann Storg. Lowell's title for W. W. 
 Story, the noted sculptor, who spent a considerable period 
 of his life in Rome. A life-long friend of Lowell's. 
 
 2 : 9. terra incognita. Unknown or unfamiliar country. 
 
 2 : 12. Beowulf. The hero in an Anglo-Saxon epic 
 poem of the sixth century. 
 
 2 : 14. Seauton. Yourself. From the accusative mas- 
 culine singular of the Greek reflexive pronoun. The 
 allusion is to TvQdi ceavrbv (gnothi seauton) know thy- 
 self: inscription on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. 
 
 3 : 4. Tyrian purple. Also called Tyrian dye, ob- 
 tained from various species of shellfish. Here, of course, 
 used figuratively for the gorgeous fabric of imagination 
 or fancy. 
 
 3 : 27. Damascus. As much contentment may be 
 
 secured in the domestic product as in that imported 
 
 from Mount Lebanon, a range in Syria, and smoked in 
 
 the narghile, which is an oriental pipe, in which the 
 
 p 209 
 
210 NOTES 
 
 smoke is passed through water. Damascus is the capital 
 of Syria. 
 
 4 : 8. John Bull, etc. England, France, Germany, 
 and Ireland. 
 
 4 : 20. Habitat. Natural or proper abode ; habitation. 
 
 4 : 21. Barnum. Phineas T., 1810-1891 — was an 
 American showman and circus proprietor, noted for 
 his spectacular mode of advertising. 
 
 5 : 5. Gentis cunabula. Cradle of the race. 
 
 5 : 5. Livy. A Roman historian — 59 B.C.-17. a.d. 
 
 6 : 5. Niebuhr. Karsten, 1733-1815 — a German 
 traveler. 
 
 5 : 7. Museo Borbonico. Afterwards called Muses 
 Nazionale or National Museum, located in Naples. 
 
 5:11. Rafaello. 1483-1520 ; a famous Italian painter, 
 one of whose noted works is the Sistine Madonna. 
 
 6 : 20. Parthenopean. The ancient and poetical name 
 of Naples. Parthenope was a siren who threw herself 
 into the sea in despair at not being able to beguile Ulysses 
 by her songs. She was cast up drowned on the shore of 
 Naples which was named for her. 
 
 6 : 16. Ilex. The holly tree. 
 
 6:21. Cappuccini. This refers to a convent of 
 Franciscan nuns in Rome. 
 
 7 : 4. Emerson's Sphinx. A poem by Emerson, one 
 
 stanza of which reads : 
 
 "Uprose the merry sphinx, 
 And crouched no more in stone ; 
 She melted into purple cloud ; 
 She silvered in the moon ; 
 She spired into a yellow flame ; 
 She flowered in blossoms red ; 
 She flowed into a foaming wave ; ^ 
 
 She stood Monadnoc's head." 
 
NOTES 211 
 
 7 : 6. Etruria. An ancient country, northwest of the 
 Tiber in west central Italy. It was conquered by the 
 Romans, 283 B.C. 
 
 7 : 8. Pelasgi. A prehistoric race inhabiting the 
 coasts of the Mediterranean. 
 
 7 : 14. Huet. Pierre Daniel, 1630-1721 ; a noted 
 French scholar and critic. 
 
 7 : 20. Eld. Antiquity. 
 
 8 : 19. Romulus. The legendary founder of Rome, 
 B.C. 752 ; Numa, the second legendary king of Rome (715- 
 672), successor to Romulus. 
 
 9 : 28. A. H. C. Arthur Hugh Clough, a noted Eng- 
 lish poet, who, in 1852, sailed with Lowell and Thackeray 
 for Boston. Clough was about to seek his fortune in the 
 new world. 
 
 10:11. Tories. The name given to an English political 
 party, which, at the time of the American Revolution, 
 took sides with the king. 
 
 11 : 14. Common Councils. A name given to a legis- 
 lative branch of government in some American cities. 
 
 12 : 5. Lord Percy. One of the chief commanders of 
 the English army in the American Revolution. 
 
 12 : 6. Virginia General. George Washington. 
 
 12 : 9. Vassalls. Refers to the John Vassall family of 
 colonial days. John Vassall was a member of the Vir- 
 ginia company of London, and his name is inserted in its 
 second charter of May 23, 1609, as " John Vassall, Gentle- 
 man." His two sons, Samuel and William, acquired by 
 purchase, as original proprietors, two-twentieths of all 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 12:11. Botolph. Saint; date of birth unknown; 
 died about 680; the patron saint of Boston. 
 
212 NOTES 
 
 12 : 13. Burgoyne. John, 172' -1792 — an English gen- 
 eral who surrendered his army to Gates at Saratoga, 1777. 
 
 12 : 15. Bandusia. A pleasant fountain near Venusia 
 which was the birthplace of Horace and celebrated by 
 him in song. 
 
 12 : 19. Santa Scholastica. Saint Scholarship. 
 
 12 : 27. Don Quixote. The hero of Cervantes' ro- 
 mance of the same name, written in 1605. 
 
 13 : 3. Plusquam Ciceronian, Greater than the elo- 
 quence of Cicero. 
 
 13 : 4. Salute vos, praestantissimae. I greet you, 
 most excellent — . 
 
 13 : 18. Americani, etc. All Americans, by the force 
 of nature, are very deserving of the gallows. 
 
 15:5. Luca della Robbia. (1399-1482) — a Floren- 
 tine sculptor. In the latter part of his life he worked 
 principally at terra-cotta reliefs, covered with enamel in 
 polychrome. He founded a school for the production of 
 Delia Robbia ware. 
 
 15:11. Certosa. A Carthusian monastery. 
 
 15 : 16. Parsee. This refers to the old Persian religious 
 body of men, whose ancestors fled from Persia to India 
 about the eighth century, on account of Mohammedan 
 persecutions. 
 
 16 : 2. Ichneumon. Literally this means a small ani- 
 mal which tracks the crocodile and destroys its eggs. 
 
 16 : 10. Gallic. Pertaining to ancient Gaul or mod- 
 ern France. 
 
 16:11. Saxonly. This has reference, by contrast 
 with the Gallic fashion, to the Teutonic source; for ex- 
 ample, the Germans and the English. 
 
 16 : 19. Bacchus. The god of wine. 
 
NOTES 213 
 
 17 : 7. Gratis. Freely ; without cost. 
 
 17 : 12. Michael Angelo. Italian painter and sculp- 
 tor, 1475-1564. 
 
 17 : 23. Hottentot. A South African people who 
 occupied the Cape Colony region when it was first entered 
 by whites. 
 
 17 : 25. Argos. A famous and beautiful city of Greece, 
 the leading Dorian city in the eighth century B.C., noted 
 for art, music, sculpture, and the drama. 
 
 17:31. Frederick the Great. Frederick II, king of 
 Prussia, 1740-1786. 
 
 18 : 2. Bonaparte. Napoleon I ; Emperor of the 
 French, 1804-1815. 
 
 18 : 6. Bonhomme Richard. The vessel with which 
 John Paul Jones, the American naval commander, de- 
 feated the Serapis, 1779. 
 
 19 : 6. Vates sacer. Holy prophet or seer. 
 
 19 : 7. E. & W. I. East and West India goods (in- 
 cluding china, spices, rum and molasses). In Under- 
 wood's "Life of Lowell," p. 31 : " The W. I. Goods Store, 
 with clusters of farmer's teams in front." 
 
 19 : 27. Laodicean. Neither sweet nor sour. The 
 church at Laodicea was neither zealous for nor against. 
 Revelation iii. 14-16, " I know thy works, that thou art 
 neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot." 
 
 20:1. Ninevites. Referring to the statues in the 
 ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. 
 
 20 : 11. Herodotus. The father of History ; a Grecian 
 who lived about 490-409 b.c. 
 
 20 : 16. R. M. Royal Morse, the old village con- 
 stable and auctioneer. (Cf . Edwin Bacon, " Literary 
 Pilgrimages in New England," p. 319.) 
 
214 NOTES 
 
 20 : 19. Jeremiah. A Hebrew prophet who uttered 
 severe denunciations and lamentations; he began his 
 career about 628 b.c. 
 
 20 : 25. Hancock. John, 1737-1793 ; an American 
 statesman ; signer of the Declaration of Independence ; 
 first governor of Massachusetts, 1780. 
 
 21 : 16. Parsons, Ames and Dexter. Theophilus Par- 
 sons, American jurist, 1750-1813 ; Fisher Ames, American 
 orator and statesman, 1758-1808 ; Samuel Dexter, 
 American statesman, 1761-1816. 
 
 21 : 17. Dana. Richard Dana, the head of the Boston 
 bar in his day, was a native of Cambridge in 1699 ; as 
 was his son Francis Dana, equally eminent, and followed 
 in lineal succession by Richard Henry Dana, the poet ; 
 and by his son of the same name, author of " Two Years 
 Before the Mast." 
 
 21 : 27. R. It is believed by some that oysters should 
 not be eaten during the months whose names do not con- 
 tain the letter R. 
 
 22 : 8. DifEugere Nives. The snows disappear. 
 
 23 : 28. Jam satis nivis. Already enough snow. 
 
 24:1. Argo. The ship of the Argonauts, in Greek 
 mythology. 
 
 24 : 17. Sir John Franklin. English arctic explorer, 
 1786-1847. 
 
 25:9. Nimroud. (Nimrud.) An ancient Assyrian 
 city, nineteen -miles below Nineveh. Its ruined pal- 
 aces were excavated by Layard in 1848 and 1851. 
 Many treasures from these ruins are now in the British 
 Museum. 
 
 25 : 21. Rembrandt. A Dutch painter, 1606-1669. 
 
 26 : 18. Opportunity. The Lowell family motto was 
 
NOTES 215 
 
 " Seize your chance." (Ferris Greenslet, " James Russell 
 Lowell.") 
 
 26 : 24. A. U. C. Anno Urbis ConditsB = in the year 
 of the building of the city (Rome). 
 
 26: 29. Torzelo. (Torcello.) A small island six miles 
 from Venice, once of importance, now reminding one of 
 Venice only in that it contains two ancient churches. 
 
 27 : 6. Hourly. The omnibus that ran between Cam- 
 bridge and Boston. 
 
 27 : 17. Barataria. In Cervantes' " Don Quixote," the 
 island town of which Saneho Panza was made governor 
 and where his duties were so arduous that he soon gave 
 up the position. 
 
 27 : 19. Bienseance. A play upon the French word, 
 meaning decorum or manners. 
 
 27 : 30. Nimbus. Halo. 
 
 28 : 19. Allston. Washington, an American painter 
 and poet, 1779-1843 ; lived in Cambridge. 
 
 28 : 28. Titianesque. In the style of Titian, the 
 greatest of the Venetian painters. 
 
 28 : 29. Boswell. The famous biographer of Samuel 
 Johnson, a noted English writer. 
 
 29 : 3. Justice. For an entertaining account of 
 Shakespeare's youthful troubles, see Walter Savage Lan- 
 dor's " The Citation of William Shakespeare." 
 
 30:1. Colporteur. A traveling agent of a religious 
 society who sells or gives away Bibles. 
 
 30 : 13. Blackburn, etc. A group of early American 
 portrait and historical painters, who flourished before 
 1850. 
 
 30 : 14. Brentford. The allusion is to the rival kings 
 in the Duke of Buckingham's play, '* The Rehearsal." 
 
216 NOTES 
 
 "United, yet divided, twain at once. 
 So sit two kings of Brentford on one throne." 
 
 CowPER, The Task, Book 1, 1. 77. 
 
 31 : 28. Cornwallis. A military masquerade formerly 
 held in New England ; so called in allusion to the surren- 
 der of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. 
 
 31 : 31. Guy Fawkes. (1570-1606.) An English con- 
 spirator ; his name is always associated with the famous 
 Gunpowder Plot. 
 
 32 : 16. Lyceum. A literary association for mutual 
 improvement, usually by means of lectures. Very popular 
 in the United States. 
 
 32 : 19. Cotton Mather. 1663-1728. An American 
 Congregational minister and writer. 
 
 33 : 1. Mephistopheles. Spirit of evil in the Faust 
 legend. 
 
 33:6. City of Destruction. Cf. Bunyan's "Pilgrim's 
 Progress." 
 
 33 : 7. Miss Circe. A mythological character ; an 
 enchantress. Lowell satirizes in the appellation, Miss, as 
 he does in Mr. Comus, who is the god of revelry. 
 
 33 : 20. Jehoiada-boxes. Metal boxes with a slot to 
 receive coins. So called from the collection boxes made at 
 command of Joash, king of Judah. Jehoiada was the high 
 priest of Joash who, in 837 B.C., placed King Joash on the 
 throne. See 2 Chron. xxiv. 6-11. 
 
 33 : 28. Ninon. Anne, but more popularly Ninon de 
 Lenclos ; a French beauty and social leader, whose salon 
 was the rendezvous of many famous Frenchmen. 
 
 33:29, Siamese twins. Eng and Chang, twins born in 
 Siam in 1811, joined to one another by a short cartilaginous 
 band. They were brought to America for exhibition in 1828. 
 
NOTES 217 
 
 34 : 3. Accolade. A light blow with the flat of a 
 sword upon the shoulders, as an indication that knight- 
 hood is thus conferred. 
 
 34 : 7. Barmecide. One who gives imaginary feasts. 
 See the " Arabian Nights " for the imaginary feast given 
 by one of the Barmecide family to the beggar, Schacabac. 
 
 34 : 19. J. H. John Holmes, brother of Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes. A member of the Whist Club, to which 
 Lowell belonged. 
 
 35:4. Timour. Also called Tamerlane — one of the 
 greatest warrior-kings that ever lived, 1336-1405. He was 
 the Tartar conqueror of India and Asia. 
 
 35 : 9. Muggletonians. A religious sect founded by 
 Lodovic Muggleton, a journeyman tailor, who set himself 
 up for a prophet in 1651. 
 
 35 : 13. Deedeed. A play upon the title D.D. = 
 Doctor of Divinity. 
 
 36 :17. Libre d'oro. Literally, book of gold. (Italian.) 
 
 36 : 21. Pentateuch. The first five books of the Bible, 
 taken collectively. 
 
 37 : 12. Stylites. Early religious recluses who lived 
 most of the time on the tops of pillars, without shelter, 
 as an expression of their piety. The founder of the sect 
 was Simeon Stylites, a Syrian ascetic, died 459 a.d. 
 
 37 : 16. Dr. K. J. T. Kirkland, President of Harvard 
 College from 1810 to 1828. 
 
 38 : 20. Fountains. Fountains Abbey, near Ripon in 
 Yorkshire, founded about 1135, considered to be the most 
 perfect monastery in England. Lowell visited the ruins 
 of this abbey in his travels. 
 
 38 : 20. Golias. Bishop Golias was the head of a 
 school of monks in Germany in the thirteenth century. 
 
218 NOTES 
 
 Lowell's opinion was that Dr. Kirkland was better 
 fitted to be the head of a mediaeval school of monks than 
 to be the president of a modern university. 
 
 39 : 25. Piscium et summa haesit genus ulmo. The 
 race of fishes also climbs to the top of the elm. 
 
 40 : 8. Ana. Of or pertaining to ; applied to a person 
 with regard to his sayings or anecdotes concerning him, 
 as, for example, " Kirklandana." 
 
 41 : 2. Judge W. Probably Judge Wells, referred to 
 in a letter from Lowell to Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, Elm- 
 wood, January- 11, 1853. Cf. Norton, " Letters of 
 LoweU," Vol. I. 
 
 41 : 4. Brahmin Alcott. A. Bronson Alcott. 
 
 41:22. Gratias. Offering " thanks." 
 
 41 : 23. Abbey of Theleme. Cf. Rabelais' " Gar- 
 gantua." The elegant and gay establishment whose 
 motto was: " Fay ce que vouldras," which translated is: 
 " Do as you please." 
 
 41 : 25. Tam Marti quam Mercuric (Atqui magis Lyaeo) : 
 — as much for Mars as for Mercury = equally qualified 
 for war and diplomacy ; also more for LysBus. Lyseus 
 was one of the names of Bacchus, the god of wine. 
 
 42:1. Rechab. Cf. Bible, 2 /vtn^s x. 16. Rechabites 
 is a name given to total abstainers from intoxicants. 
 
 42 : 5. Med. Facs. In a letter of OHver W. Holmes 
 to Phineas Barnes, Cambridge, Dec. 1828, we read : "I 
 will send you ajeatalogue of the officers and students, and 
 one of the Medical Faculty. This will need some expla- 
 nation. It is a mock society among the students which 
 meets twice a year in disguise, and after admitting mem- 
 bers of the Junior class, distributes honorary degrees to 
 distinguished men. The room where they meet is hung 
 
NOTES 219 
 
 around with sheets and garnished with bones. They 
 burn alcohol in their lamps and examine very curiously 
 and facetiously the candidates for admission. Every 
 three years they publish a catalogue in exact imitation 
 of the Triennial catalogue published in the college. The 
 degrees are given with all due solemnity to all the hons 
 of the day." 
 
 42:21. Ben Jonson. A very scholarly dramatist, 
 contemporary of Shakespeare's. 
 
 42 : 23. C. " We all knew the spot where Washing- 
 ton took command of the army ; and the house (the Craigie 
 House) where he dwelt." In 1837 Mr. Longfellow re- 
 moved to this house. Cf. T. W. Higginson, " Old Cam- 
 bridge." 
 
 42 : 29. Spinoza. A Dutch Jewish philosopher, 1632- 
 1677. His interpretation of life regarded the entire uni- 
 verse as one universal substance, covering man and matter. 
 
 43 : 8. Thebais. A Latin epic by Statins, a Roman 
 poet of the first century. 
 
 43:17. Montaigne. A French philosopher and essay- 
 ist, 1533-1592. 
 
 43 : 24. Anti-Sheffieldism. The town of Sheffield in 
 Yorkshire, England, is noted for its manufacture of all 
 kinds of cutlery. 
 
 44: 17. P. " Dr. Popkin, who died in 1852, and who 
 wore the last of the cocked hats, which, with his umbrella, 
 is carefully preserved in the Cambridge Public Library." 
 Cf. T. W. Higginson, " Old Cambridge," p. 23. 
 
 44 : 24. Hymettian flowers. Flowers of Hymettus, a 
 mountain of Attica, in ' Greece, famed for its heather 
 blossoms, and its honey. 
 
 45 : 6. Abderites. Inhabitants of Abdera in Thrace. 
 
220 NOTES 
 
 45 : 7. Andromeda. The reference is to a tragedy of 
 Euripides. 
 
 45 : 10. Amaryllis or Neaera. Names found in classic 
 pastoral poetry, given to shepherdesses and nymphs. 
 
 45 : 10. Machiavelli. A Florentine statesman and 
 writer, 1469-1527. 
 
 45: 12. Sirens' isle. The habitation of the sirens or 
 sea-nymphs in legendary lore. 
 
 45 : 15. .ffiolic digamma. ^olia was a country in 
 ancient Greece; digamma, the original, but early dis- 
 used, sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. 
 
 46 : 5. Toga. The distinctive outer garment of a 
 Roman citizen. Dr. Popkin thus allowed the military to 
 get the better of the civilian spirit. 
 
 46: 23. Antique world. See " As You Like It," II. iii. 
 57. 
 
 47 : 16. Vassall, Lechmere, Oliver, and Brattle. Dis- 
 tinguished colonial families of Cambridge. 
 
 47 : 19. Etruscan Lucumos. Among the Etruscans, 
 the head of a noble family. 
 
 48 : 22. fugaces annos. Fleeting years. 
 
 48 : 24. Dioscorides. A physician who lived about 
 the middle of the first century, a.d. He was from Anaz- 
 arbos in Cicilia, southeastern part of Asia Minor. He 
 wrote a very voluminous work on pharmaceutics. 
 
 48 : 25. Hercules de Saxonia. Lowell may have in 
 mind Saxo Grammaticus, a famous Danish historian, 
 since Saxo's labors would suggest those of Hercules. 
 Saxonia is the land of the Saxons. 
 
 49: 1. Junius. The pen name of the writer of some 
 famous political letters, between 1769 and 1772, whose 
 identity, though often heralded as discovered, was never 
 
NOTES 221 
 
 known. The mare*s-nest refers to the amazing literary 
 and political discoveries, which all proved worthless, made 
 in the search for the true author. 
 
 49 : 6. Jenner. Edward Jenner (1749-1823) ; Eng- 
 lish physician who introduced vaccination. 
 
 49: 18. " S." In Higginson's " Old Cambridge " we 
 read: — "that delightful and sunny representative of 
 southern France, that Hving Gil Bias in hair-powder and 
 pigtail, Francis Sales." He was " the Franco-Spanish 
 teacher, who lived till 1854." 
 
 61 : 15. Janus Bifrons. Two-faced Janus ; a charac- 
 ter in Roman mythology with two faces, looking east and 
 west. 
 
 51 : 17. Porta San Giovanni. Gate of St. John ; a 
 modern gate of Rome, built by Gregory XIII, in the six- 
 teenth century. 
 
 51 : 24. mirabilia. Wonders. 
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 
 
 Title. Moosehead. Moosehead Lake is located in 
 Piscataquis and Somerset counties in Maine, and is thirty- 
 six miles long. 
 
 52 : 8. Cumsean. Relating to the ancient city Cumae 
 in Campania, Italy. 
 
 52 : 9. Caledonian Lady. Caledonia is the ancient 
 name for Scotland. The reference is to Scott's " Lady of 
 the Lake." Ellen's Isle is in Loch Katrine, celebrated in 
 the legendary history of Scotland. 
 
 52 : 12. Digby. Sir Kenelm, 1603-1665, an Enghsh 
 author. 
 
 52 : 16. Empedocles. (455?-395 b.c.) — a Greek poet, 
 
222 NOTES 
 
 physicist, and philosopher ; said to have cast himself into 
 ^tna. 
 
 53:14. Macheath. A highwayman in Gay's "Beg- 
 gar's Opera," who has difficulty in choosing between his 
 loves, as is indicated in the lines : 
 
 "How happy could I be with either 
 Were t'other dear charmer away." 
 
 53 : 19. Franconia Notch. The Franconia Mountains 
 are located in the western part of the White Mountains, 
 Grafton County, N. H. The Old Man of the Mountain is 
 the famous profile, the " Great Stone Face " on the moun- 
 tain top. 
 
 53 : 30. Juvenalian. Juvenal was a Roman satirical 
 poet, born in 50 and died 130. 
 
 54: 10. Nunc dimittis. " Now lettest thou thy serv- 
 ant depart in peace." 
 
 54 : 14. Socratic. Socrates was an Athenian phi- 
 losopher, born B.C. 460 and died 399. 
 
 54 : 23. Pincian. Adjective formed from Pincio, cele- 
 brated public gardens of Rome, elevated above the sur- 
 rounding city. 
 
 55 : 4. Tancred. Norman leader in the first Crusade, 
 who died 1112. 
 
 55 : 8. impromptu. Off-hand, without preparation. 
 
 55 : 9. Eumenides. The more pleasing name given 
 by the Greeks-to the Furies, because it was dangerous to 
 utter their true name of Eurinyes, the avengers. 
 
 56: 15. Scythian. Scythia was the ancient name for 
 parts of Europe and Asia, now in the Russian Empire. 
 
 58 : 1. Pied Piper of Hamelin. For the explanation of 
 this, see Robert Browning's poem of this title. 
 
NOTES 223 
 
 58 : 29. Sorbonists : ego amat. The former refers to 
 the doctors of the Sorbonne, an institution of theology, 
 science, and literature in Paris. " Ego " is first person 
 singular; " amat " is third person singular. 
 
 59 : 18. Shenstone. Johnson's favorite stanza from 
 Shenstone, as quoted by Boswell in his " Life of Johnson " 
 is: 
 
 "I prized every hour that went by, 
 Beyond all that had pleased me before ; 
 But now they are gone and I sigh, 
 And I grieve that I prized them no more." 
 
 59:21. Skull of Yorick. Cf. the play of " Hamlet," 
 the grave-digger's scene. "Hamlet," V. i. 198. 
 
 60:13. Tityrus-like. A character in 1 "Eclogue," 
 Virgil ; representing Virgil in some parts, in others, an old 
 slave in his employment: " You, Tityrus, reclining under 
 the covert of a spreading beech, are practising a pastoral 
 lay on a slender pipe." 
 
 60 : 19. Vetturino. Hackney-coach driver. 
 
 61 : 21. Procrustean. Referring to Procrustes, a legend- 
 ary Greek robber, who is said to have tortured cap- 
 tives by stretching their limbs if too short, or cutting them 
 off if too long, to fit a certain bed. 
 
 62 : 12. O Shenstone. Lowell probably has in mind 
 the last stanza of Shenstone's poem, entitled " Written at 
 an Inn at Henley," which reads as follows : 
 
 "Whoe'er has traveled life's dull round, 
 Where'er his stages may have been, 
 May sigh to think he still has found 
 His warmest welcome at an inn." 
 
 63 : 10. Capri. Celebrated island in the Bay of 
 Naples. 
 
224 NOTES 
 
 64 : 12. Hellespont and Peloponnesus. The former 
 referring to the long narrow strait across which Leander 
 swam ; the latter to the Peloponnesian War in ancient 
 Greek history. 
 
 65 : 14. Canning or Kenning. Doing or knowing; 
 referring to the speculations of Carlyle and others on the 
 root meaning of the word King. " He is called Rex, Regu- 
 lator, Roi; our name is still better: King, Konning, which 
 means Can-ning, Ableman." Carlyle: "The hero as 
 king," in " Heroes and Hero Worship." King, in fact, 
 is from Anglo-Saxon, cynn, tribe, and denotes the Tribe 
 Head or Leader. 
 
 65 : 29. Auspex. Bird-seer ; one who foretells future 
 events from his observations of birds. 
 
 66 : 14. Dodo. A large extinct bird or pigeon. It 
 became extinct toward the latter part of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 66 : 17. 'Roostick war. In 1837-1838 the unsettled 
 boundary between Maine and New Brunswick nearly led 
 to active hostilities on the Aroostook River. 
 
 68 : 7. Columbaria. Literally, dove-cotes. Satirical 
 usage. 
 
 68 : 28. Juan Fernandez. A group of islands in the 
 Pacific Ocean, thought by some to have been the solitary 
 residence of Alexander Selkirk, or Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 69 : 7. Louis Quinze. Louis XV of France, from 
 1715-1774. ^ 
 
 70 : 18. Pretorian, Janizaries, and Mamelukes. The 
 first refers to the Pretorian body-guard of the Roman 
 emperors, who, at times, set up and deposed emperors; 
 the second, to the Turkish body-guard of the Sultan ; the 
 third, to a military corps that ruled Egypt until 1517, 
 
NOTES 225 
 
 after having been sold as fighting slaves to the Sultan of 
 Egypt in the thirteenth century. 
 
 73 : 7. Nil admirari. To wonder at nothing, however 
 marvelous. 
 
 73 : 8. Prester John. A mediaeval legendary Christian 
 priest and king. He is king of Ethiopia in the Orlando 
 Furioso of Ariosto. 
 
 74 : 5. Cardinal Richelieu. A French ecclesiastic and 
 statesman ; prime-minister of Louis XIII. 
 
 74 : 12. Pre-Raphaelite. A name given to a follower 
 of the " Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood " which practised 
 the truth and earnestness in art existing before the time 
 of the Italian painter Raphael. 
 
 74:13. salaeratus. Literally "aerated salt"; our 
 common baking soda. 
 
 74 : 17. Lethe. The stream of Oblivion in the lower 
 world. 
 
 75 : 5. Basia. Kisses. 
 
 75:6. Secundus. Johannes Secundus, 1511-1536, a 
 Dutch poet, famed for his Latin lyrics and Elegiacs. 
 His most noted poem " Basia " was published in 1536. 
 
 75 : 18. Wongen. A hut on the shore. 
 
 77 : 26. Thundering Legion. A popular name for the 
 Twelfth Legion in the army of imperial Rome. 
 
 78 : 6. Batavian. Batavia is the capital of the Dutch 
 East Indies, on the northern coast of Java, and the chief 
 commercial city in the East Indies. Gin was first dis- 
 tilled by the Dutch. 
 
 80 : 4. Napier. John, a Scotchman who invented 
 logarithms. 
 
 80 : 15. Laudari a laudato. To be praised by one who 
 is praised. 
 Q 
 
226 NOTES 
 
 80:25. Helen. (Cf. Greek and Roman mythology.) 
 She was the daughter of Jupiter and Leda, and the wife 
 of Menelaus, king of Sparta. 
 
 80: 25. Merlin. A famous magician of alleged super- 
 natural origin, celebrated in the tales and romances of 
 chivalry ; contemporary with King Arthur. 
 
 80 : 27. avag avSpcov. Ruler or prince of men. 
 
 81 : 18. St. Mark. A reference to St. Mark's church 
 in Venice. 
 
 81 : 31. Sierra. A ridge of mountains and craggy rocks. 
 
 82 : 2. Zeus. The Greek name of Jupiter, the king of 
 gods and men. 
 
 83 : 16. Sitzbad. Literally, sitting bath. 
 
 85 : 6. Telemachus. Lowell's own note to this reads : 
 '* This was my nephew Charles Russell Lowell, who fell 
 at the head of his brigade in the battle of Cedar Creek." 
 In Homer's " Odyssey " Telemachus is the son of Ulysses 
 and Penelope. 
 
 85:21. Deacon-seat. Hewn log used by lumbermen 
 as a bench. 
 
 85 : 23. Salle a manger. (French) ; dining-room. 
 
 86 : 8. Table d'hote. A meal served at fixed hours 
 at a fixed price for the entire meal; to be distinguished 
 from " a la carte," that is, the plan by which one eats 
 what he chooses and pays for each item. Lowell's sen- 
 tence is obscure in the light of this present use of the 
 above expression. Literally, the meaning is " host's 
 table." In the earlier European hotels the host usually 
 sat at the head of the table. 
 
 87 : 18. " O Ozymandias," etc. This line is taken 
 from Shelley, and is a modern impression of the spirit of 
 ancient Egypt. The lines from Shelley read : 
 
NOTES 227 
 
 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
 Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 
 Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies. 
 
 And on the pedestal these words appear : 
 ' My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. 
 Look on my works. Ye Mighty, and despair.' 
 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
 The lone and level sands stretch far away." 
 
 87 : 27. Hincks and Rawlinson. Rev. Edward Hincks 
 was noted, for his knowledge of Assyrian and Egyptian 
 inscriptions; born in Ireland, 1791, died, 1866; George 
 Rawlinson was an English orientalist and historian, 
 born 1812, died 1902. 
 
 88:1. Kalends. The kalends, nones, and ides were 
 Roman divisions of the months. In the Greek kalends 
 is a Roman proverb, Ad kalendes Grcecas, for a day that 
 will never come ; for the Greeks had no Kalends. 
 
 88:11. Colosseum. The great amphitheatre in Rome. 
 
 88 : 15. Selva Selvaggia. Wild wood or forest. (Ital- 
 ian.) 
 
 88:16. Arden. See Shakespeare's "As You Like 
 It " for the Forest of Arden as the scene of this play. 
 
 88 : 22. Laker. Lake trout. 
 
 89 : 1. St. Jerome. 340-420. One of the fathers of 
 the church. He made the Latin translation of the Bible 
 known as the Vulgate. 
 
 THOREAU 
 
 Title. Thoreau. Henry David, author and philos- 
 opher, who lived in New England from 1817 to 1862. 
 
228 NOTES 
 
 He was a great lover of outdoor life and the beauties of 
 nature. His noted work is " Walden," in which he gives 
 an intimate account of his " hermit " life at Walden. 
 The student should acquaint himself with this work in 
 order to appreciate properly Lowell's estimate of the man 
 and his work. It may be of interest to note that Lowell, 
 in his review of Thoreau's " A Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers," as published by Lowell in The Massa- 
 chusetts Quarterly Review for Dec. 1849, is appreciative of 
 Thoreau ; somewhat in contrast to the spirit of this essay. 
 
 90 : 5. Transcendental Movement. The New Eng- 
 land school of philosophy, one of whose chief advocates 
 was Emerson. It placed the spiritual in man above the 
 material, and also emphasized the " self-sufficiency " of 
 the individual. 
 
 90 : 8. Sartor Resartus. A noted work by Carlyle 
 which contains much of his philosophy. The title means 
 the " patcher repatched " or the " tailor retailored." 
 
 90 : 10. Sancta Clara. 1644-1709 ; Augustinian 
 monk; court-preacher at Vienna; witty and satirical 
 writer, the miscellaneous contents of whose book " Etwas 
 fiir AUe " (Something for Everybody) suggested to Lowell 
 the similarity to Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus." 
 
 90 : 12. Ecce nunc, etc. Behold, now is the accepted 
 time. 
 
 90 : 15. Lady Montague. An EngHsh author, 1689- 
 1762 ; noted for her letters and literary criticisms, notably 
 on Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson. She had a wide 
 acquaintance among the literary people of her time. 
 
 90 : 16. Ygdrasil. Norse mythology. The world-tree 
 whose roots and branches bind together heaven, earth, 
 and hell. An eagle sits in the top of the tree. 
 
NOTES 229 
 
 90 : 20. Redeunt Saturnia regna. The golden age 
 returns. 
 
 91 : 5. George Fox. 1624-1691 ; an English religious 
 reformer, and founder of the Society of Friends. 
 
 91 : 8. Marlborough. Duke of, an EngUsh general 
 who defeated the French at Blenheim, Aug. 13, 1704. 
 
 91 : 20. Thor or Budh. The former, the Norse god of 
 war and thunder; the latter (Buddha), the founder of 
 Buddhism, an oriental religion. 
 
 91 : 22. Fifth Monarchy men. A sect of English 
 fanatics in the days of the Puritans, who maintained that 
 Christ was about to come a second time to the earth, and 
 estabhsh the fifth universal monarchy. The four preceding 
 monarchies were the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedo- 
 nian, and the Roman. 
 
 91 : 27. Shinar. An ancient country along the lower 
 Tigris and Euphrates. 
 
 91 : 30. Diphilus. One of the chief Athenian poets of 
 the New Comedy ; and a dramatist. Of the third century 
 B.C., contemporary of Menander. Uncial. Uncial letters. 
 (LitteroB unciales) inch letters. Large, rounded manuscript 
 letters, resembling modern capitals but more rounded. 
 
 92 : 23. Philisterei. The same as Phihstinism, a word 
 that characterizes low aims in life. 
 
 92 : 24. Erasmus and Reuchlin. The latter was a Ger- 
 man humanist and Hebrew student. The reference is to 
 the Byzantine method of pronouncing Greek, or pronounc- 
 ing it as a Hving language, as opposed to the Erasmian. 
 
 93 : 10. Abana and Pharpar. Rivers in Damascus. 
 See 2 Kings vi for the Biblical allusion. 
 
 93 : 17. Le roi est mort, etc. The king is dead : long 
 live the king. 
 
230 NOTES 
 
 95 : 9. Phi Beta Kappa Society. A Greek letter hon- 
 orary fraternity, membership into whose ranks depends 
 upon high standing at college. 
 
 95:16. Abelard. Pierre; a French philosopher; 
 1079-1142. 
 
 95 : 17. Fichte. Johann Gottlieb, a German philos- 
 opher, 1762-1814. 
 
 95:24. Rabelais. 1483 (?)-1553; a French writer 
 characterized by coarse and grotesque satire and humor. 
 
 95 : 30. Pythagorean. This refers to the mystical 
 philosophy and doctrines propounded by Pythagoras, a 
 Greek philosopher of the sixth century b.c. 
 
 96 : 19. Bia and Kparos. Violence or force, and power 
 or authority. 
 
 97 : 27. Apemantus. A churlish philosopher, in Shake- 
 speare's " Timon of Athens." 
 
 97:31. Ossian. A cycle of poems by James Mac- 
 pherson, purporting to be a translation from the Gaelic 
 of Ossian, a legendary hero of the third century ; pub- 
 lished 1760-1763. 
 
 100 : 2. Concetti. Plural form of " concetto," meaning, 
 in literary criticism, a conceit, fanciful idea or whim. 
 
 100 : 9. Brazen Age. The age of war and violence. 
 
 100:31. Montaigne. A French philosopher and 
 essayist, 1533-1592. 
 
 102:11. *' On touche encore a son temps, etc." A 
 man is still of his time and very strongly even when he 
 rejects it. 
 
 102: 11. Stylites. See note to 37: 12. 
 
 102 : 23. La Chevrette. The reference is to " The 
 Hermitage," a small house on the estate of La Chevrette, 
 near Montmorency, in France, belonging to Madame 
 
NOTES 231 
 
 D'Epinay, in which, in 1756, Jean Jacques Rousseau 
 attempted, not very successfully, to retire from the world. 
 
 102 : 26. Kleinwinkel. German word; meaning, " little 
 corner." 
 
 102:31. Salon. Parlor or drawing-room. 
 
 103 : 3. Turgot. A French statesman, 1727-1781. 
 
 105:26. Persian poet. Omar Khayyam; 1025(?)- 
 1123; author of the " Rubaiyat," translated by Edward 
 Fitzgerald. 
 
 105:31. Euphorbus. A Trojan son of Panthous, 
 slain by Menelaus in the Trojan war. 
 
 106 : 10. George Sand. Pen-name of Armantine 
 Dudevant, French novelist, 1804-1876. 
 
 107 : 3. Magnis tamen, etc. He failed in his great 
 attempt. 
 
 107 : 23. Claude Lorraine. Pseudonym of Claude 
 Gelee, 1600-1682, a French landscape painter. The 
 name Claude Lorraine glass is given to a tinted glass 
 which gives to the object viewed a coloring characteristic 
 of Claude Lorraine's works. 
 
 107 : 25. White's Selborne. " The Natural History 
 of Selborne," by Gilbert White, London, 1789. 
 
 107 : 27. Donne, Browne, Novalis. The first two were 
 English writers, the last a Prussian poet, whose works are 
 difficult to understand, and whose popularity is therefore 
 limited. 
 
 AT SEA 
 
 108. Title. At Sea. See also Washington Irving's 
 account of his sea-trip in the " Sketch Book," entitled 
 " The Voyage." 
 
232 NOTES 
 
 108:2. Lucretius. Latin poet; 95-52 b.c. ; the lines 
 referred to, translated, are : 
 
 "'Tis sweet, when violent winds roughen the sea, to view from 
 the land the toils of others ; not that it is pleasant to see others 
 in distress, but because one is glad to know one's self secure." 
 
 108 : 13. Petrarch. A noted Italian poet, born 1304, 
 and died 1374. 
 
 108 : 16. Chateaubriand. Francois Auguste, a French 
 author, born 1768, died 1848. 
 
 109 : 5. Tete-a-tete. Private conversation ; literally, 
 head to head. (French.) 
 
 109 : 6. Ne quid nimis. Literally, nothing to excess ; 
 or, freely, moderation in all things. 
 
 109: 21. W. M. T. and A. H. C. William Makepeace 
 Thackeray and Arthur Hugh Clough, the former, a noted 
 English novelist ; the latter, an English poet. 
 
 110 : 19. Calderon. A noted Spanish dramatic author, 
 born about 1600, died 1681 ; a tendency to use elaborate 
 figures is a characteristic of his work. 
 
 110 : 27. Gradus ad Parnassum, a thesaurus. Steps 
 to Parnassus, a treasure-house or repository of words. 
 
 112 : 24. Koran. The scriptures of the Mohammedans. 
 
 113 : 4. Grouty. An English dialect word, meaning 
 grimy or muddy. 
 
 113 : 7. Chapman. George, English dramatic poet 
 and translator of Homer; 1557-1634. 
 
 113 : 23. Edda, Minnesingers. The former, mytho- 
 logical or heroic songs in the Old Norse or Icelandic ; the 
 latter, German lyric poets and musicians, who flourished 
 from about the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the 
 fourteenth century. 
 
NOTES 233 
 
 114:31. Dire, redire, et me contredire. (French.) 
 Literally, to state, to repeat, and to contradict myself. 
 
 114:33. Montagna bruna. (Italian.) Literally, 
 gloomy or dark mountains. 
 
 115:3. Faustus, etc. The first a play by Marlowe; 
 with this character as the hero ; the second, the hero in 
 Byron's poem of this name ; the third, a famous legendary 
 hero of Germany, the subject of an ancient ballad of the 
 same name, and of Wagner's modern opera. 
 
 115 : 7. Outre-Mer. The title of a book by Long- 
 fellow; it means, "beyond the sea." 
 
 115: 27. Professor Owen. Richard Owen, an English 
 zoologist ; born 1804, died 1892. 
 
 116 : 24. Hakluyt and Purchas. The former, Richard 
 Hakluyt, 1553-1616, author of " Voyages " and " Dis- 
 coveries " ; the latter, Samuel Purchas, 1577-1626, author 
 of " Pilgrimage and Pilgrims." 
 
 117 : 9. Hortus siccus. (Latin.) An herbarium ; 
 literally, " a dry garden." 
 
 117 : 20. St. Anthony of Padua. *' II Santo," the 
 sepulchral church in Padua, is named after St. Anthony, 
 born at Lisbon, 1195 ; died at Arcella, 1231. 
 
 117 : 22. Sir John Hawkins. An English admiral ; 
 born 1532, died 1595. 
 
 118 : 4. Thor. The god of war and thunder in Norso 
 mythology. 
 
 118 : 7. Marco Polo. A Venetian traveler*, 1254-1324. 
 
 118 : 19. El Dorado. Any region rich in gold, such as 
 that sought for in the New World by the Spanish con- 
 querors and explorers. California was called by this 
 name after the discovery of gold there in 1848. 
 
 118 : 19. Bruce. James, a Scottish traveler in Abyssinia. 
 
234 NOTES 
 
 118 : 29. Acephali. Imaginary men or animals with- 
 out heads. 
 
 119: 1. Roc. A fabulous bird of prey of enormous 
 size, in Arabian and Persian legend. 
 
 119: 4. Kent. Certain of the men of Kent fabled to 
 be born with tails, as a punishment for the murder of 
 Thomas a Becket, by their ancestors. 
 
 119 : 5. Unicorn. A fabulous animal, with a single 
 straight horn in the centre of the forehead, and the body 
 of a horse. 
 
 119 : 7. Fountain of Youth. A wonderful fountain 
 whose waters were fabled to renew youth. 
 
 119 : 7. Thessalian. Magical, from the ancient repu- 
 tation of the district. 
 
 119 : 9, Amazons of Orellana. Orellana was a Span- 
 ish explorer who gave the name to the Amazon River. 
 He found there a nation of fighting women, called Amazons 
 by the Spaniards. 
 
 119 : 17. Maelstrom. A famous whirlpool off the 
 coast of Norway. Cf. Poe's famous story of this name. 
 It has disappeared and Lowell fears it never existed. 
 
 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 
 
 120 : 23. European Mrs. Grundy. In Morton's com- 
 edy "Speed the Plough," the wife of a lucky farmer; 
 envied by Dame Ashfield, a neighbor, who continually 
 exclaims, " What will Mrs. Grundy say? " Hence a 
 censor of morals, etc. 
 
 121 : 13. Sierra Morena of Don Quixote. The rugged 
 mountains, the scene of many incidents in Don Quixote, 
 
 121 : 26. Raphaels, Correggios. Italian painters. 
 
NOTES 235 
 
 122: 1. Spitzbergen. A group of almost uninhabited 
 islands in the Arctic Ocean, east of Greenland and north of 
 Norway. 
 
 124:14. En rapport. (French.) In sympathetic rela- 
 tions. 
 
 124:31. St. Elmo's fires. The electric lights seen 
 playing about the masts of ships in stormj'^ weather. 
 
 124:31. Marvell's corposants. The same as St. 
 Elmo's fires. " Corpos sanctos " is Portuguese for holy 
 bodies. Note the play on the words in " come pleasants." 
 Marvell, Andrew, 1621-1678. The reference is to his poem, 
 " First Anniversary " : 
 
 " While bale Tritons to the shipwreack guide 
 And corposants along the tackling slide." 
 
 ITALY 
 
 127 : 2. Subiaco. A town of central Italy, in the 
 Sabine Mountains, on the Teverone (ancient Anio), thirty- 
 three miles east by north of Rome. 
 
 127 : 3. Ponte Sant' Antonio. The Rialto bridge in 
 Venice, built in 1592 from the plans of Antonio de Ponte. 
 
 127 : 8. Tivoli. Eighteen miles east northeast of 
 Rome. It was a favorite resort of the ancient Romans. 
 
 127 : 16. Sabine. The name of an ancient people of 
 central Italy, with whom the Romans married by force. 
 
 127 : 23. Papuan. Papua or New Guinea, an exten- 
 sive island of the Eastern Archipelago, lying north of 
 Australia. 
 
 127 : 23. Ode. " Ode on the Intimations of Immor- 
 tality." 
 
 128: 1. Byron. Cf. " Childe Harold," Canto Fourth. 
 
236 NOTES 
 
 128 : 3. Terni. A town of Italy, forty-nine miles north 
 northeast of Rome. Noted for the falls of Terni, a few 
 miles from the town, descending 650 feet in three leaps. 
 
 128 : 12. Velino. A river of central Italy ; the falls 
 of the Velino are among the finest cascades of Europe. 
 Cf. Byron's " Childe Harold," 72d stanza of the Fourth 
 Canto, which closes with the lines : 
 
 "Resembling 'mid the torture of the scene 
 Love watching madness with unalterable mien." 
 
 128 : 15. Orrilo. A magician and robber who lived at 
 the mouth of the Nile. He was the son of an imp and 
 fairy. He had the power of restoring his limbs when 
 lopped off, and also his head. Cf. Ariosto : " Orlando 
 Furioso." 
 
 128 : 22. Giro. Tour or circuit. 
 
 128 : 23. Sibilla. Monte Sibilla, a summit of the 
 Apennines in central Italy. 
 
 128 : 25. Inglesi. The English. 
 
 128 : 28. Claude. A noted landscape painter, born 
 in Lorraine, in 1600; he was a great student of Italian 
 scenery. See note to 107 : 23. 
 
 128 : 29. Piranesi. Italian engraver and designer, 
 born in Venice, 1720 ; especially noted for his engravings 
 of architecture and ruins; Rembrandt, the noted Dutch 
 painter. 
 
 129 : 1. Girandola. Catherine-wheel, a circular win- 
 dow with divisions arranged like spokes. 
 
 129 : 16. Anio. A river in central Italy. 
 
 129 : 19. Gaetani. Inhabitants of Gaeta, a strongly 
 fortified seaport of Italy, forty miles northwest of Naples. 
 It has a handsome cathedral. 
 
NOTES 237 
 
 130 : 6. Neapolitan. A native or resident of Naples. 
 
 130 : 10. Fortunatus. The hero of a German popular 
 romance of the fifteenth century, remembered for his 
 inexhaustible purse and wishing-cap. 
 
 130:11. Piccolo quarto d'ora. Little quarter of an 
 hour. 
 
 130 : 11. Grosso. A silver coin formerly in use, worth 
 nearly three pence. 
 
 130 : 21. Ennius. A Roman epic poet, born of a Greek 
 family, about 239 b.c. 
 
 130 : 28. Dr. "Wistar. A noted American physician 
 born at Philadelphia, 1761 , and died 1818. Tiburtine refers 
 to Tibur, which is modern Tivoli. Lowell is evidently 
 playing on the idea of coughing, thereby calling in the 
 physician. 
 
 130 : 28. Mecsenas or MaBcenas. A celebrated pa- 
 tron of literature at Rome, born about 70 b.c. 
 
 131 : 3. Ariosto. Famous Italian poet ; 1474-1533. 
 
 131 : 9. Italia Unita. United Italy. 
 
 131 : 28. Eh ! per Bacco ! Ah, by Bacchus ! 
 ' 132 : 3. Non saprei, signoria. I don't know, your 
 excellency. 
 
 133 : 6. Ciceroni. Guides. 
 
 133 : 25. Praeceps Anio. Swift Anio. 
 
 133 : 27. Dissolve frigus. The frost melts. Roderick 
 Random is a novel by Smollett, published 1748. 
 
 134 : 8. Caffre. Same as Kafir, a member of a group of 
 South-African Bantu tribes. 
 
 135 : 4. Mazeppa. A Cossack chief, Hetman, or 
 headman, of the Cossacks, born 1644, died 1709. The 
 allusion here is to the story of his ride on the back of a 
 wild horse, as told in Byron's " Mazeppa." 
 
238 NOTES 
 
 135 : 19. Eccomi qu&. Here I am. 
 
 135 : 27. Tabula in naufragio. Plank in a shipwreck. 
 
 136:1. Archimedes. Greek mathematician; b.c. 
 287(?)-212. The problem of Archimedes was to find a 
 fulcrum for his levers, " If I had a irbv crrw (a place where) " 
 he said, " to place my levers, I could move the world." 
 
 136 : 10. Forestiero. Foreigner. 
 
 136 : 22. Waterton, Charles, English naturalist and 
 traveler, 1782-1865. 
 
 137 : 8. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili. Let the 
 experiment be made upon a worthless object. 
 
 137 : 9. Christopher Sly. Drunkard in the introduc- 
 tion to Shakespeare's " Taming of the Shrew." 
 
 137:24. Perche mi scerpi, etc. Why sever me? 
 Hast thou no feeling of sympathy whatever? 
 
 138 : 5. Staffa. Fingal's cave, in the island of Staffa, 
 seven miles west of Hull in Scotland, is 288 feet long, 117 
 feet high. Fingal is a mythical hero whose name occurs 
 in Highland (Scotch) ballads and traditions. 
 
 138 : 30. Conclusum est ; periisti ! It is the end ; 
 thou shalt die ! 
 
 139 : 7. Pan. Cf. " The Dead," a poem by Mrs. 
 Browning, founded on the legend that when Christ died 
 on the cross a cry swept across the sea that, " Great Pan 
 is dead ! " 
 
 139 : 21. Ecco, Signoria. Behold, your excellency. 
 
 139 : 31. Oscurante. Black. The terms black and 
 red were used to designate political parties in Italy. 
 
 140:4. Jacob' s-ladders. An allusion to the ladder 
 which Jacob dreamt about. Cf . Genesis xxviii. 12. 
 
 140 : 25. Poverino. Poor fellow. 
 
 141 : 21. Porch eria. Filth or trash. 
 
NOTES 239 
 
 142: 11. Tubal Cain. The first artificer in brass and 
 iron. Cf. Bible, Genesis iv. 22. 
 
 142 : 15. Incedit rex. Walks like a king. 
 
 142 : 30. Monsieur Le Feu. Mr. Fire. 
 
 144 : 2. Favorisca. Do me the favor. 
 
 144 : 6. Vetturini. Coachmen. 
 
 144 : 13. Fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum. 
 Literally, " and the brave Gyas, as well as the brave 
 Cloanthus." These are characters in Virgil, about whom 
 little is known. 
 
 144:21. Combinazione. Agreement; literally, com- 
 bination or happy chance. 
 
 144:28. Witenagemot. The group of "wise men" 
 gathered to give advice to the king and through him to 
 propose a course of action to the folk, in Anglo-Saxon 
 England. Cf. Green's " Short History of the English 
 People." 
 
 144:28. Scudi. Singular, " scudo," a crown (dollar). 
 
 145 : 3. Quattro diavoli. Four devils I 
 
 145:4. Macche! What! 
 
 145 : 19. Buonamano, Tip. 
 
 146:24. Morra. Also spelled Mora, "a game which 
 consists in throwing out the hand with one or more fingers 
 extended, and at the same time uttering a guess at the 
 number they will make when added to the number si- 
 multaneously extended by the other player." Hoare: 
 " Itahan Dictionary." 
 
 147 : 9. Povero stalliere, signori. Poor stable-boy, sirs. 
 
 147: 18. Mantis religiosa. The praying mantis, a 
 well-known voracious insect, remarkable for a peculiar 
 method of crossing its forelegs when waiting for prey, 
 resembling hands folded in prayer. 
 
240 NOTES 
 
 148 : 14. Ecco San Pietro ! Here is Saint Peter's ! 
 
 149 : 15. Cenci ! Rags ! 
 
 150 : 8. Tufo. Sandstone. Breccia, a rock consisting 
 of mixed fragments. 
 
 150:17. "Vestiges." A reference to "Vestiges of 
 the Natural History of Creation," published by Robert 
 Chambers, anonymously, 1844. 
 
 150 : 24. Doganiere. Custom-house officer. 
 
 162 : 10. Albergo. Hotel. 
 
 162 : 12. Rinfresco. Refreshment. 
 
 152:18. Clothe. (Classical mythology.) One of the 
 Fates, represented as holding the distaff, and sometimes 
 as spinning the thread of life. 
 
 167 : 2. Pesci di mare. Sea fish. 
 
 167 : 17. Albergatrice. Hostess. 
 
 168 : 17. Belle ! Beautiful ! 
 
 169 : 22. Festa. Feast day or holiday. 
 
 160 : 9. Froissart. Noted French historian, 1337- 
 1410(?). The allusion is to the beautifully illuminated 
 manuscripts of his Chronicles. 
 
 160 : 13. Afrite. (Mohammedan mythology) a demon 
 or monstrous giant. 
 
 160 : 19. Seomadissima. Very bad, uncomfortable. 
 
 161:9. Heraclitus. "The Naturalist"; Greek phi- 
 losopher, lived about 500 b.c. 
 
 162 : 10. Pizzicarolo's. Pork butcher's. 
 
 162 : 24. Birbone ! Rascal ! 
 
 162:31. Birbante! Knave! 
 
 163 : 3. Andate vi far friggere ! Go and get frozen I 
 Ditto, the same. 
 
 163 : 28. Santo diavolo ! Holy Satan ! 
 
 164 : 3. Pappagallo. Parrot. 
 
NOTES 241 
 
 164: 25. " Che per poco," etc. " A little more and I 
 should quarrel with thee." Virgil's reproof to Dante in 
 the Inferno for stopping to listen eagerly to a quarrel, 
 because, as he said, " To hear such wrangling is a joy for 
 vulgar minds." 
 
 166 : 19. Strada scomodissima. Very bad street. 
 
 168 : 29. Benissimo. Very well. 
 
 169 : 17. Aleatico. Name of a Tuscan grape and wine. 
 169 : 23. Frittata. Omelette. 
 
 170 : 9. Fiasco. Flask or wine-bottle, 
 
 170 : 19. Recitare. To recite, to play a part. 
 
 170 : 22. Septentrions. Northerners. 
 
 171 : 2. Terrae filius. Son of the earth ; a man of 
 obscure or low origin. 
 
 171 : 3. Buonamano. See 145 : 19. 
 
 171 : 12. Largesse. Bounty, charity. 
 
 172 : 6. Bishop Wilkins. John Wilkins, an English 
 divine, Bishop of Chester ; born 1614, died 1672. 
 
 172 : 20. In situ. In its original position. 
 
 172 : 23. Scalinata. Flight of stairs. 
 
 172 : 26. Padre Eterno. Eternal father. 
 
 173 : 5. Vino asciutto. Dry wine, that is, sour wine. 
 
 174 : 5. Sepia. A brown pigment used in water-colors. 
 
 175 : 18. Tom Corygate. An English traveler, intro- 
 duced table-forks into England ; walked from Palestine 
 to India ; born 1577, died 1617. 
 
 176 : 9. La Paletta. The name of the inn. 
 
 176:14. Chie? Who is it? 
 
 176 : 15. Due forestieri. Two foreigners. 
 
 176 : 24, Frittata col prosciutto. Omelette with ham. 
 
 176 : 30. Eccoci finalmente arrivati ! Here we are 
 finally arrived I 
 
242 NOTES 
 
 177 : 23. Cellini. An Italian artist in metal, gold, 
 silver, and bronze ; 1500-1571. 
 
 178 : 19. Wir haben ja aufgeklart. We have indeed 
 cleared up. 
 
 179 : 4. Lampadone. Gas lamp. 
 
 180 : 27. Hobbinol. Fictitious name of countryman 
 in Spenser's " Shepherd's Calendar." 
 
 181:31. Locandiera. Innkeeper's wife. 
 
 182 : 3. Bella. Beautiful. 
 
 182 : 5. Con permesso. With permission ; allow me. 
 182 : 9. Aplomb. Stolidity. 
 
 A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 
 
 183. Title. Mosaic. Decorative inlaid work, made 
 up of small pieces of glass, stone, or other material. This 
 is, of course, a figurative title, suggested by the miscel- 
 laneous character of the article. 
 
 183 : 12. Civita Vecchia. " Old city " — name of a small 
 seaport town about twenty-seven miles west of Rome. It 
 was once one of the territories of the church. 
 
 183 : 13. Via Aurelia. Aurelian road ; one of the high- 
 ways leading into Rome. Should be " Aurelio." 
 
 183 : 23. Charon. The ferryman of the river Styx, 
 in Hades, in classical mythology. 
 
 184 : 10. Bernini. Giovanni Lorenzo, an Italian sculp- 
 tor (1598-1680)^ He designed the colossal colonnade of 
 St. Peter's in Rome. 
 
 184: 11. Ponte Sant' Angelo. Bridge of Saint Angelo. 
 
 184 : 13. Sbirro. Policeman. 
 
 184 : 14. Doganiere. Custom-house officer. 
 
 184 : 18. Antoninus. One of the early Roman emperors. 
 
NOTES 243 
 
 184:21. Minerva. Goddess of wisdom, in Roman 
 mythology. 
 
 184 : 26. Chasseurs de Vincennes. The Duke of 
 Orleans' rifle corps ; so called because they were garri- 
 soned at Vincennes. 
 
 185:2. S. P. Q. R. (Senatus Populusque Romanus). 
 The Senate and People of Rome. 
 
 185:3. Custode. Keeper. 
 
 185 : 10. Marathon and Lexington. References to 
 famous battles. 
 
 185 : 29. Caracalla. A Roman emperor, 212-217. 
 
 186 : 13. Fuori le mura. Outside the walls. Rome 
 was at one time a walled city, and parts of the walls are 
 still standing, but the city has grown far beyond them. 
 San Paolo = St. Paul. 
 
 186 : 29. Victoria. Queen of England from 1837 to 1901. 
 
 187 : 19. Piazza Rusticucci. The open area or public 
 square before the Piazza di S. Pietro in the Vatican. 
 
 187 : 21. Bramante. An Italian architect and painter, 
 who designed St. Peter's at Rome. 
 
 188 : 20. Q. E. D. (Quod erat demonstrandum.) 
 Which was to be proved. 
 
 189 : 2. Panza ; Quixote. In Cervantes' " Don 
 Quixote," Panza is the squire whose good sense is contin- 
 ually called into play when his master is over-rash. 
 
 189^: 21. Pegasus. According to classical mythology, 
 the winged horse on which Bellerophon rode against the 
 chimsera. 
 
 190 : 2. Puseyism. The principles of Dr. Pusey and 
 others at Oxford, England, as exhibited in a series of 
 publications, entitled " Tracts for the Times," from 1833 
 to 1841. 
 
244 NOTES 
 
 190: 31. San Lorenzo. A famous church in Florence, 
 containing the tombs of the Medici with their famous 
 sculptured figures by Michael Angelo. 
 
 191 : 3. Murray. The reference is to the famous 
 guide book published by Murray of London. 
 
 191 : 8. Putti. Plural of " putto," meaning a little 
 boy. The u is pronounced properly like oo in moon, and 
 not with the short u sound of the English word " putty." 
 
 191 : 14. Lingua franca. Frank language ; bold, free 
 speech. Lowell intends a punning reference to correct 
 French, the Italian for which would be " lingua francese." 
 
 192 : 3. Sentry-boxes of Zion. Satirical reference to 
 rude structures that pass for churches. 
 
 192:12. " Mihiest," etc. " I intend to die in a tavern." 
 
 192 : 15. Campagna. Field or estate. 
 
 192 : 18. Sistine Miserere. The fiftieth psalm, usually 
 appointed for penitential acts, in the Latin version, and 
 repeated in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. 
 
 192 : 24. St. Paul's. A famous cathedral in London, 
 the architect of which was Sir Christopher Wren. Note 
 the play on the word Wren as opposed to Angel from 
 Angelo. 
 
 193 : 4. Browning. In the tenth division of Browning's 
 " Christmas Eve " is to be found the following descrip- 
 tion of St. Peters : 
 
 "And wkat is this that rises propped 
 With pillars of prodigious girth? 
 Is it really on the earth, 
 This miraculous Dome of God ? 
 . . . What is it, yon building 
 Ablaze in front, all paint and gilding, 
 With marble for brick, and stones of price 
 For garniture of the edifice." etc. 
 
NOTES 245 
 
 193 : 20. Pontifex Maximus. Literally, the chief 
 pontiff ; the head of the sacred college, in ancient 
 Rome, who had supreme jurisdiction over all matters of 
 religion. 
 
 194 : 7. Trinita del Monti. Name of a celebrated 
 church in Rome, not far from the elevated public gardens, 
 the Pincio. Lowell means that he stood on this elevation 
 in the vicinity of this church. 
 
 194 : 20. Avanti ! Go ahead ! 
 
 195:21. Schiller's Pegasus. Schiller was a noted 
 German poet and dramatist ; Pegasus refers to his poetic 
 inspiration or muse, as in the phrase, *' I am on my 
 Pegasus," i.e. engaged in A\Titing verses. 
 
 195 : 26. Judas. The disciple who betrayed Christ 
 for a few pieces of silver. 
 
 195:31. Nymph Cochituate. Cochituate is the name 
 of a small lake in Middlesex County, Mass., which partly 
 supplies Boston with water. Lowell wrote an ode in 
 celebration of the introduction of the Cochituate water 
 into the city of Boston, Oct. 25, 1848. 
 
 196 : 24. Le superflu, chose tres-necessaire. The 
 superfluous, a thing very necessary. 
 
 197 : 4. Egeria. This was the name of the nymph, in 
 the fabulous history of Rome, who in her grotto near 
 Aricia gave lessons in statecraft to Numa Pompilius. 
 
 197 : 6. Pio None. Pius IX. 
 
 197 : 20. Pius. Pius IX, Pope from 1846-1878. 
 
 198 : 9. Diocletian. The Roman Emperor, noted for 
 his fierce persecution of the Christians, 303. 
 
 198 : 19. Mile. An athlete of Crotona. It is said 
 that he carried through the stadium at Olympia a heifer 
 four years old, and ate the whole of it afterwards. When 
 
246 NOTES 
 
 old, he attempted to tear up an oak tree, but the parts 
 closing held him fast, till he was devoured by wolves. 
 
 198 : 27. Goitre. Lowell is here using this word in the 
 sense of abnormal enlargement, therefore disagreeably 
 noticeable. 
 
 199 : 14. Vaurien. (French.) Worthless. Faniente. 
 (Italian.) Do nothing, lazy. 
 
 200:5. Scudi. Italian; plural of " scudo " ; equivalent 
 to ninety-six cents. 
 
 200 : 6. Pauls. Paolo, an old Italian silver coin, 
 worth about ten cents. 
 
 200:18. Qualche cosa per carit^ ! Something for 
 charity's sake ! 
 
 200 : 22. Triregno. Tiara ; Pope's crown. 
 
 201 : 2. Eh gia ! Truly ! 
 
 201 : 19. Prima Ballerina. Foremost dancing-girl. 
 
 202 : 10. Fourierist. One who believes in the coopera- 
 tive socialistic system advanced by Charles Fourier, a 
 Frenchman. 
 
 202 : 17. Felicita ; Grazia. The former equivalent to 
 *' your health," or German, " gesundheit " ; the latter, 
 *' thank you." 
 
 205: 1. Sasso di Dante. Dante's tomb. 
 
 205 : 13. Ancora mi raccapriccia. I am still horror- 
 struck. 
 
 205 : 21. Che bellezza ! What perfection ! 
 
 205:23. Patroclus. In Homer's " Iliad," a friend of 
 Achilles, who went to battle in Achilles' armor and was 
 slain by Hector. 
 
 205 : 30. Bashan. A region in Palestine, east of the 
 Jordan; famous for oaks and wild bulls. See Deut. 
 iii. 1-14 ; Psalm xxii. 12. 
 
NOTES 247 
 
 206 : 1. Belle pesche ! Beautiful peaches ! 
 
 206 : 15. Racine. Jean Baptiste, French dramatic 
 poet, 1539-1699. 
 
 206 : 23. Prince Polonia. Prince Torlonia. Lowell is 
 quoting Thackeray's humorous version of the name. 
 
 207 : 28. Rob Roy. The hero of the novel of the same 
 name, by Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 208 : 5. Panache. A plume, or bunch of feathers. 
 
 208 : 7. Gessler. The Austrian governor in Schiller's 
 " Wilhehn Tell." 
 
 208 : 15. Briseis. The woman taken captive by the 
 Greeks, in the " Iliad," and falling to the lot of Achilles, 
 when the spoils were divided. 
 
 208:24. gaudeant, etc. "The eels would rejoice, if 
 that man were dead, who would torture them, just as you 
 would think, with death." 
 
 208 : 30. Jeremy Taylor. English bishop and author, 
 1613-1667. 
 
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