University of Virginia Library

1. I.
Sea-Coal.

IT is like a flirt—mused I;—lively, uncertain,
bright-colored, waving here and there, melting
the coal into black shapeless mass, making foul, sooty
smoke, and pasty, trashy residuum! Yet withal,—
pleasantly sparkling, dancing, prettily waving, and
leaping like a roebuck from point to point.

How like a flirt! And yet is not this tossing
caprice of girlhood, to which I liken my sea-coal
flame, a native play of life, and belonging by nature
to the play-time of life? Is it not a sort of essential
fire-kindling to the weightier and truer passions—even
as Jenny puts the soft coal first, the better to kindle
the anthracite? Is it not a sort of necessary consumption

of young vapors, which float in the soul,
and which is left thereafter the purer? Is there not
a stage somewhere in every man's youth, for just
such waving, idle heart-blaze, which means nothing,
yet which must be got over?

Lamartine says somewhere, very prettily, that
there is more of quick running sap, and floating
shade in a young tree; but more of fire in the heart
of a sturdy oak:—Il y a plus de séve folle et d'ombre
flottante dans les jeunes plants de la forèt; il y a
plus de feu dans le vieux cœur du chene.

Is Lamartine playing off his prettiness of expression,
dressing up with his poetry,—making a good
conscience against the ghost of some accusing
Graziella, or is there truth in the matter?

A man who has seen sixty years, whether widower
or bachelor, may well put such sentiment into words:
it feeds his wasted heart with hope; it renews the
exultation of youth by the pleasantest of equivocation,
and the most charming of self-confidence. But
after all, is it not true? Is not the heart like new
blossoming field-plants, whose first flowers are half
formed, one-sided perhaps, but by-and-by, in maturity
of season, putting out wholesome, well-formed
blossoms, that will hold their leaves long and bravely?

Bulwer in his story of the Caxtons, has counted
first heart-flights mere fancy-passages—a dalliance

with the breezes of love—which pass, and leave
healthful heart appetite. Half the reading world has
read the story of Trevanion and Pisistratus. But
Bulwer is—past; his heart-life is used up—épuisé.
Such a man can very safely rant about the cool
judgment of after years.

Where does Shakspeare put the unripe heart-age?—All
of it before the ambition, that alone makes
the hero-soul. The Shakspeare man `sighs like a
furnace,' before he stretches his arm to achieve the
`bauble, reputation.'

Yet Shakspeare has meted a soul-love, mature and
ripe, without any young furnace sighs to Desdemona
and Othello. Cordelia, the sweetest of his play
creations, loves without any of the mawkish matter,
which makes the whining love of a Juliet. And
Florizel in the Winter's Tale, says to Perdita, in the
true spirit of a most sound heart—

How is it with Hector and Andromache?—no sea-coal
blaze, but one that is constant, enduring, pervading:
a pair of hearts full of esteem, and best love,—
good, honest, and sound.

Look now at Adam and Eve, in God's presence,
with Milton for showman. Shall we quote by this
sparkling blaze, a gem from the Paradise Lost? We
will hum it to ourselves—what Raphael sings to
Adam—a classic song.

And again:

None of the playing sparkle in this love, which
belongs to the flame of my sea-coal fire, that is now
dancing, lively as a cricket. But on looking about
my garret chamber, I can see nothing that resembles
the archangel Raphael, or `thy fair Eve.'

There is a degree of moisture about the sea-coal
flame, which with the most earnest of my musing, I
find it impossible to attach to that idea of a waving,
sparkling heart which my fire suggests. A damp

heart must be a foul thing to be sure! But whoever
heard of one?

Wordsworth somewhere in the Excursion, says:—

What, in the name of Rydal Mount, is a dry
heart? A dusty one, I can conceive of: a bachelor's
heart must be somewhat dusty, as he nears the
sixtieth summer of his pilgrimage;—and hung over
with cobwebs, in which sit such watchful gray old
spiders as Avarice, and Selfishness, forever on the
look out for such bottle-green flies as Lust.

“I will never”—said I—griping at the elbows
of my chair,—“live a bachelor till sixty:—never, so
surely as there is hope in man, or charity in woman,
or faith in both!”

And with that thought, my heart leaped about in
playful coruscations, even like the flame of the sea-coal;—rising,
and wrapping round old and tender
memories, and images that were present to me,—
trying to cling, and yet no sooner fastened, than off—
dancing again, riotous in its exultation—a succession
of heart-sparkles, blazing, and going out!

—And is there not—mused I,—a portion of this

world, forever blazing in just such lively sparkles;
waving here and there as the air-currents fan them?

Take for instance your heart of sentiment, and
quick sensibility, a weak, warm-working heart, flying
off in tangents of unhappy influence, unguided by
prudence, and perhaps virtue. There is a paper by
Mackenzie in the Mirror for April, 1780, which sets
this untoward sensibility in a strong light.

And the more it is indulged, the more strong and
binding such a habit of sensibility becomes. Poor
Mackenzie himself must have suffered thus; you
cannot read his books without feeling it; your eye,
in spite of you, runs over with his sensitive griefs,
while you are half-ashamed of his success at picture-making.
It is a terrible inheritance; and one that a
strong man or woman will study to subdue: it is a
vain sea-coal sparkling, which will count no good.
The world is made of much hard, flinty substance,
against which your better, and holier thoughts will be
striking fire;—see to it, that the sparks do not burn
you!

But what a happy, careless life belongs to this
Bachelorhood, in which you may strike out boldly
right and left! Your heart is not bound to another
which may be full of only sickly vapors of feeling;
nor is it frozen to a cold, man's heart under a silk
boddice—knowing nothing of tenderness but the

name, to prate of; and nothing of soul-confidence,
but clumsy confession. And if in your careless
out-goings of feeling, you get here, only a little lip
vapidity in return; be sure that you will find, elsewhere,
a true heart utterance. This last you will
cherish in your inner soul—a nucleus for a new
group of affections; and the other will pass with a
whiff of your eigar.

Or if your feelings are touched, struck, hurt, who
is the wiser, or the worse, but you only? And have
you not the whole skein of your heart-life in your
own fingers to wind, or unwind, in what shape you
please? Shake it, or twine it, or tangle it, by the
light of your fire, as you fancy best. He is a weak
man who cannot twist and weave the threads of his
feeling—however fine, however tangled, however
strained, or however strong—into the great cable of
Purpose, by which he lies moored to his life of
Action.

Reading is a great, and happy disentangler of all
those knotted snarls—those extravagant vagaries,
which belong to a heart sparkling with sensibility;
but the reading must be cautiously directed. There
is old, placid Burton when your soul is weak, and its
digestion of life's humors is bad; there is Cowper
when your spirit runs into kindly, half-sad, religious
musing; there is Crabbe when you would shake off

vagary, by a little handling of sharp actualities.
There is Voltaire, a homeopathic doctor, whom you
can read when you want to make a play of life, and
crack jokes at Nature, and be witty with Destiny;
there is Rousseau, when you want to lose yourself in
a mental dream-land, and be beguiled by the harmony
of soul-music and soul-culture.

And when you would shake off this, and be
sturdiest among the battlers for hard, world-success,
and be forewarned of rocks against which you must
surely smite—read Bolingbroke;—run over the
letters of Lyttleton; read, and think of what you
read, in the cracking lines of Rochefoucauld. How
he sums us up in his stinging words!—how he puts
the scalpel between the nerves—yet he never hurts;
for he is dissecting dead matter.

If you are in a genial careless mood; who is better
than such extemporizers of feeling and nature—good-hearted
fellows—as Sterne and Fielding?

And then again, there are Milton and Isaiah, to
lift up one's soul until it touches cloud-land, and you
wander with their guidance, on swift feet, to the very
gates of Heaven.

But this sparkling sensibility to one struggling
under infirmity, or with grief or poverty, is very
dreadful. The soul is too nicely and keenly hinged
to be wrenched without mischief. How it shrinks,

like a hurt child, from all that is vulgar, harsh, and
crude! Alas, for such a man!—he will be buffeted,
from beginning to end; his life will be a sea of
troubles. The poor victim of his own quick spirit
he wanders with a great shield of doubt hung before
him, so that none, not even friends can see the goodness
of such kindly qualities as belong to him.
Poverty, if it comes upon him, he wrestles with in
secret, with strong, frenzied struggles. He wraps
his scant clothes about him to keep him from the
cold; and eyes the world, as if every creature in it
was breathing chill blasts at him, from every opened
mouth. He threads the crowded ways of the city,
proud in his griefs, vain in his weakness, not stopping
to do good. Bulwer, in the New Timon, has painted
in a pair of stinging Pope-like lines, this feeling in a
woman:—

Cold picture! yet the heart was sparkling under
it, like my sea-coal fire; lifting and blazing, and
lighting and falling,—but with no object; and only
such little heat as begins and ends within.

Those fine sensibilities, ever active, are chasing

and observing all; they catch a hue from what the
dull and callons pass by unnoticed,—because unknown.
They blunder at the great variety of the world's
opinions; they see tokens of belief, where others see
none. That delicate organization is a curse to a
man; and yet poor fool, he does not see where his
cure lies; he wonders at his griefs, and has never
reckoned with himself their source. He studies
others, without studying himself. He eats the leaves
that sicken, and never plucks up the root that will
cure.

With a woman it is worse; with her, this delicate
susceptibility is like a frail flower, that quivers at every
rough blast of heaven; her own delicacy wounds her;
her highest charm is perverted to a curse.

She listens with fear; she reads with trembling;
she looks with dread. Her sympathies give a tone,
like the harp of Eolus, to the slightest breath. Her
sensibility lights up, and quivers and falls, like the
flame of a sea-coal fire.

If she loves—(and may not a Bachelor reason on
this daintiest of topics)—her love is a gushing, wavy
flame, lit up with hope, that has only a little kindling
matter to light it; and this soon burns out. Yet
intense sensibility will persuade her that the flame
still scorches. She will mistake the annoyance of
affection unrequited for the sting of a passion, that

she fancies still burns. She does not look deep
enough to see that the passion is gone, and the
shocked sensitiveness emits only faint, yellowish
sparkles in its place; her high-wrought organization
makes those sparks seem a veritable flame.

With her, judgment, prudence, and discretion are
cold measured terms, which have no meaning, except
as they attach to the actions of others. Of her own
acts, she never predicates them; feeling is much too
high, to allow her to submit to any such obtrusive
guides of conduct. She needs disappointment to
teach her truth;—to teach that all is not gold that
glitters—to teach that all warmth does not blaze.
But let her beware how she sinks under any fancied
disappointments: she who sinks under real disappointment,
lacks philosophy; but she who sinks under a
fancied one, lacks purpose. Let her flee as the
plague, such brooding thoughts as she will love to
cherish; let her spurn dark fancies as the visitants of
hell; let the soul rise with the blaze of new-kindled,
active, and world-wide emotions, and so brighten into
steady and constant flame. Let her adjure such
poets as Cowper, or Byron, or even Wordsworth; and
if she must poetize, let her lay her mind to such
manly verse as Pope's, or to such sound and ringing
organry as Comus.

My fire was getting dull, and I thrust in the poker:

it started up on the instant into a hundred little
angry tongues of flame.

—Just so—thought I—the over-sensitive heart
once cruelly disturbed, will fling out a score of
flaming passions, darting here, and darting there,—
half-smoke, half-flame—love and hate—canker and
joy—wild in its madness, not knowing whither its
sparks are flying. Once break roughly upon the
affections, or even the fancied affections of such a
soul, and you breed a tornado of maddened action—
a whirlwind of fire that hisses, and sends out jets of
wild, impulsive combustion, that make the bystanders,—even
those most friendly—stand aloof, until the
storm is past.

But this is not all that the dashing flame of my
sea-coal suggests.

—How like a flirt!—mused I again, recurring to
my first thought—so lively, yet uncertain; so bright,
yet so flickering! Your true flirt plays with sparkles;
her heart, much as there is of it, spends itself
in sparkles; she measures it to sparkle, and habit
grows into nature, so that anon, it can only sparkle.
How carefully she cramps it, if the flames show too
great a heat; how dexterously she flings its blaze here
and there; how coyly she subdues it; how winningly
she lights it!

All this is the entire reverse of the unpremeditated

dartings of the soul at which I have been looking;
sensibility scorns heart-curbings, and heart-teachings;
sensibility enquires not—how much? but only—
where?

Your true flirt has a coarse-grained soul; well
modulated and well tutored, but there is no fineness
in it. All its native fineness is made coarse, by
coarse efforts of the will. True feeling is a rustic
vulgarity, the flirt does not tolerate; she counts its
healthiest and most honest manifestation, all sentiment.
Yet she will play you off a pretty string of sentiment,
which she has gathered from the poets; she adjusts
it prettily as a Ghobelin weaver adjusts the colors in
his tapis. She shades it off delightfully; there are
no bold contrasts, but a most artistic mellow of
nuances.

She smiles like a wizzard, and jingles it with a
laugh, such as tolled the poor home-bound Ulysses
to the Circean bower. She has a cast of the head,
apt and artful as the most dexterous cast of the best
trout-killing rod. Her words sparkle, and flow
hurriedly, and with the prettiest doubleness of meaning.
Naturalness she copies, and she scorns. She accuses
herself of a single expression or regard, which nature
prompts. She prides herself on her schooling. She
measures her wit by the triumphs of her art; she
chuckles over her own falsity to herself. And if by

chance her soul—such germ as is left of it—betrays
her into untoward confidence, she condemns herself,
as if she had committed crime.

She is always gay, because she has no depth of
feeling to be stirred. The brook that runs shallow
over hard pebbly bottom always rustles. She is
light-hearted, because her heart floats in sparkles—
like my sea-coal fire. She counts on marriage, not
as the great absorbent of a heart's-love, and life, but
as a happy, feasible, and orderly conventionality, to
be played with, and kept at distance, and finally to be
accepted as a cover for the faint and tawdry sparkles
of an old and cherished heartlessness.

She will not pine under any regrets, because she
has no appreciation of any loss: she will not chafe at
indifference, because it is her art; she will not be
worried with jealousies, because she is ignorant of
love. With no conception of the soul in its strength
and fulness, she sees no lack of its demands. A
thrill, she does not know; a passion, she cannot
imagine; joy is a name; grief is another; and Life
with its crowding scenes of love, and bitterness, is a
play upon the stage.

I think it is Madame Dudevant who says, in something
like the same connection:—Les hiboux ne
connaissant pas le chemin par où les aigles vont au
soliel

—Poor Ned!—mused I, looking at the play of
the fire—was a victim and a conqueror. He was a
man of a full, strong nature—not a little impulsive—
with action too full of earnestness for most of men to
see its drift. He had known little of what is called
the world; he was frosh in feeling and high of hope;
he had been encircled always by friends who loved
him, and who, may be, flattered him. Scarce had he
entered upon the tangled life of the city, before he met
with a sparkling face and an airy step, that stirred
something in poor Ned, that he had never felt before.
With him, to feel was to act. He was not one to be
despised; for notwithstanding he wore a country air,
and the awkwardness of a man who has yet the biensèance
of social life before him, he had the soul, the
courage, and the talent of a strong man. Little
gifted in the knowledge of face-play, he easily
mistook those coy manœuvres of a sparkling heart,
for something kindred to his own true emotions.

She was proud of the attentions of a man who
carried a mind in his brain; and flattered poor Ned
almost into servility. Ned had no friends to counsel
him; or if he had them, his impulses would have
blinded him. Never was dodger more artful at the
Olympic Games than the Peggy of Ned's heart-affection.
He was charmed, beguiled, entranced.

When Ned spoke of love, she staved it off with

the prettiest of sly looks that only bewildered him the
more. A charming creature to be sure; coy as a
dove!

So he went on, poor fool, until one day—he told
me of it with the blood mounting to his temples, and
his eye shooting flame—he suffered his feelings to run
out in passionate avowal,—entreaty,—everything.
She gave a pleasant, noisy laugh, and manifested—
such pretty surprise!

He was looking for the intense glow of passion;
and lo, there was nothing but the shifting sparkle of
a sea-coal flame.

I wrote him a letter of condolence—for I was his
senior by a year;—“my dear fellow,” said I, “diet
yourself; you can find greens at the up-town market;
eat a little fish with your dinner; abstain from heating
drinks: don't put too much butter to your
cauliflower; read one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons,
and translate all the quotations at sight; run carefully
over that exquisite picture of Geo. Dandin in
your Moliere, and my word for it, in a week you will
be a sound man.”

He was too angry to reply; but eighteen months
thereafter I got a thick, three-sheeted letter, with a
dove upon the seal, telling me that he was as happy
as a king: he said he had married a good-hearted,
domestic, loving wife, who was as lovely as a June

day, and that their baby, not three months old, was
as bright as a spot of June day sunshine on the grass.

—What a tender, delicate, loving wife—mused I—
such flashing, flaming flirt must in the end make;—
the prostitute of fashion; the bauble of fifty hearts
idle as hers; the shifting make-piece of a stage scene;
the actress, now in peasant, and now in princely
petticoats! How it would cheer an honest soul to
call her—his! What a culmination of his heart-life;
what a rich dream-land to be realized!

—Bah! and I thrust the poker into the clotted
mass of fading coal—just such, and so worthless is the
used heart of a city flirt; just so the incessant sparkle
of her life, and frittering passions, fuses all that is
sound and combustible, into black, sooty, shapeless
residuum.

When I marry a flirt, I will buy second-hand
clothes of the Jews.

—Still—mused I—as the flame danced again—
there is a distinction between coquetry and flirtation.

A coquette sparkles, but it is more the sparkle of a
harmless and pretty vanity, than of calculation. It
is the play of humors in the blood, and not the play
of purpose at the heart. It will flicker around a true
soul like the blaze around an omelette au rhum, leaving
the kernel sounder and warmer.

Coquetry, with all its pranks and teasings, makes
the spice to your dinner—the mulled wine to your
supper. It will drive you to desperation, only to
bring you back hotter to the fray. Who would
boast a victory that cost no strategy, and no careful
disposition of the forces? Who would bulletin such
success as my Uncle Toby's, in a back-garden, with
only the Corporal Trim for assailant? But let a man
be very sure that the city is worth the siege!

Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves
it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose—
easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is
like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to
handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in
slimy waters.

And so, with my eye clinging to the flickering
blaze, I see in my reverie, a bright one dancing before
me, with sparkling, coquettish smile, teasing me with
the prettiest graces in the world;—and I grow
maddened between hope and fear, and still watch with
my whole soul in my eyes; and see her features by
and by relax to pity, as a gleam of sensibility comes
stealing over her spirit;—and then to a kindly, feeling
regard: presently she approaches,—a coy and doubtful
approach—and throws back the ringlets that lie
over her cheek, and lays her hand—a little bit of
white hand—timidly upon my strong fingers,—and

turns her head daintily to one side,—and looks up in
my eyes, as they rest on the playing blaze; and my
fingers close fast and passionately over that little
hand, like a swift night-cloud shrouding the pale tips
of Dian;—and my eyes draw nearer and nearer to
those blue, laughing, pitying, teasing eyes, and my
arm clasps round that shadowy form,—and my lips
feel a warm breath—growing warmer and warmer—

Just here the maid comes in, and throws upon the
fire a pan-ful of Anthracite, and my sparkling sea-coal
reverie is ended.