University of Virginia Library

—L'Evangile des femmes.

I am not sure whether Lebanon Springs, the scene
of a romantic story I am about to tell, belong to New-York
or Massachusetts. It is not very important, to
be sure, in a country where people take Vermont and
Patagonia to be neighbouring States, but I have a
natural looseness in geography which I take pains to
mortify by exposure. Very odd! that I should not
remember more of the spot where I took my first lessons
in philandering; where I first saw you, brightest and
most beautiful A. D. (not Anno Domini,) in your white
morning-frocks and black French aprons!

Lebanon Springs are the rage about once in three
years. I must let you into the secret of these things,
gentle reader, for perhaps I am the only individual
existing who has penetrated the mysteries of the four
dynasties of American fashion. In the fourteen millions
of inhabitants in the United States, there are precisely

four authenticated and undisputed aristocratic
families. There is one in Boston, one in New-York,
one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. By a blessed
Providence they are not all in one State, or we should
have a civil war and a monarchy in no time. With
two hundred miles' interval between them, they agree
passably, and generally meet at one or another of the
three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston or Lebanon.
Their meeting is as mysterious as the process
of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. You
must explain it by some theory of homœopathy or
magnetism. As it is not known till the moment they
arrive, there is of course great excitement among the
hotel keepers in these different parts of the country,
and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants
one summer, has, for the next, scarce as many
score. The vast and solitary temples of Pæstum are
gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment.

As I make a point of dawdling away July and
August in this locomotive metropolis of pleasure, and
rather prefer Lebanon, it is always agreeable to me to
hear that the nucleus is formed in that valley of hemlocks.
Not for its scenery, for really, my dear Eastern-hemispherian!
you that are accustomed to what
is called nature in England, (to wit, a soft park, with a
gray ruin in the midst,) have little idea how wearily
upon heart and mind presses a waste wilderness of
mere forest and water, without stone or story. Trees
in England have characters and tongues; if you see a
fine one, you know whose father planted it, and for
whose pleasure it was designed, and about what sum
the man must possess to afford to let it stand. They
are statistics, as it were—so many trees, ergo, so many
owners so rich. In America, on the contrary, trees
grow and waters run, as the stars shine, quite unmeaningly;
there may be ten thousand princely elms, and

not a man within a hundred miles worth five pounds
five. You ask, in England, who has the privilege of
this water? or you say of an oak, that it stood in such
a man's time: but with us, water is an element unclaimed
and unrented, and a tree dabbles in the clouds
as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul
or responsibility.

If Lebanon had a history, however, it would have
been a spot for a pilgrimage, for its natural beauty.
It is shaped like a lotus, with one leaf laid back by
the wind. It is a great green cup, with a scoop for a
drinking-place. As you walk in the long porticoes of
the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a
leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine-tops,
and the eagles sail across from horizon to horizon,
without lifting their wings, as if you saw them
from the bottom of a well. People born there think
the world about two miles square, and hilly.

The principal charm of Lebanon to me is the village
of “Shakers,” lying in a valley about three miles
off. As Glaucus wondered at the inert tortoise of
Pompeii, and loved it for its antipodal contrast to himself,
so do I affection (a French verb that I beg leave
to introduce to the English language) the Shaking
Quakers. That two thousand men could be found in
the New World, who would embrace a religion enjoining
a frozen and unsympathetic intercourse with
the diviner sex, and that an equal number of females
could be induced to live in the same community, without
locks or walls, in the cold and rigid observance
of a creed of celibacy, is to me an inexplicable and
grave wonder. My delight is to get into my stanhope
after breakfast, and drive over and spend the forenoon
in contemplating them at their work in the fields.
They have a peculiar and most expressive physiognomy;
the women are pale, or of a wintry redness in

the cheek, and are all attenuated and spare. Gravity,
deep and habitual, broods in every line of their thin
faces. They go out to their labor in company with
those serious men, and are never seen to smile. Their
eyes are all hard and stony, their gait is precise and
stiff, their voices are of a croaking hoarseness, and
nature seems dead in them. I would bake you such
men and women in a brick-kiln.

Do they think the world is coming to an end?
Are there to be no more children? Is Cupid to be
thrown out of business, like a coach proprietor on a
rail-road? What can the Shakers mean, I should be
pleased to know?

The oddity is that most of them are young. Men
of from twenty to thirty, and women from sixteen to
twenty-five, and often, spite of their unbecoming
dress, good-looking and shapely, meet you at every
step. Industrious, frugal, and self-denying they certainly
are, and there is every appearance that their
tenets of difficult abstinence are kept to the letter.
There is little temptation beyond principle to remain,
and they are free to go and come as they list, yet there
they live on in peace and unrepining industry, and a
more thriving community does not exist in the republic.
Many a time have I driven over on a Sunday,
and watched those solemn virgins dropping in one
after another to the church; and when the fine-limb-ed
and russet-faced brotherhood were swimming round
the floor in their fanatical dance, I have watched their
countenances for some look of preference, some betrayal
of an ill-suppressed impulse, till my eyes ached
again. I have selected the youngest and fairest, and
have not lost sight of her for two hours, and she
might have been made of cheese-parings for any trace
of emotion. There is food for speculation in it. Can
we do without matrimony? Can we “strike,” and be

independent of these dear delightful tyrants, for whom
we “live and move and have our being?” Will it
ever be no blot on our escutcheon to have attained
thirty-five as an unfructifying unit? Is that fearful
campaign, with all its embarrassments and awkwardnesses,
and inquisitions into your money and morals,
its bullyings and backings-out—is it inevitable?

Lebanon has one other charm. Within a morning
drive of the Springs lies the fairest village it has
ever been my lot to see. It is English in its character,
except that there is really nothing in this country
so perfect of its kind. There are many towns in the
United States more picturesquely situated, but this,
before I had been abroad, always seemed to me the
very ideal of English rural scenery, and the kind of
place to set apart for either love or death—for one's
honeymoon or burial—the two periods of life which
I have always hoped would find me in the loveliest
spot of nature. Stockbridge lies in a broad sunny
valley, with mountains at exactly the right distance,
and a river in its bosom that is as delicate in its windings,
and as suited to the charms it wanders among,
as a vein in the transparent neck of beauty. I am
not going into a regular description, but I have carried
myself back to Lebanon; and the remembrance
of the leafy mornings of summer in which I have
driven to that fair earthly Paradise, and loitered under
its elms, imagining myself amid the scenes of song
and story in distant England, has a charm for me
now. I have seen the mother land; I have rambled
through park, woodland and village, wherever the
name was old and the scene lovely, and it pleases me
to go back to my dreaming days and compare the reality
with the anticipation. Most small towns in America
have traces of new-ness about them. The stumps
of a clearing, or freshly-boarded barns—something

that is the antipodes of romance—meets your eye
from every aspect. Stockbridge, on the contrary, is
an old town, and the houses are of a rural structure;
the fields look soft and genial, the grass is sward-like,
the bridges picturesque, the hedges old, and the elms,
nowhere so many and so luxuriant, are full grown
and majestic. The village is embowered in foliage.

Greatest attraction of all, the authoress of “Redwood”
and “Hope Leslie,” a novelist of whom America
has the good sense to be proud, is the Miss Mitford of
Stockbridge. A man, though a distinguished one,
may have little influence on the town he lives in, but
a remarkable woman is the invariable cynosure of a
community, and irradiates it all. I think I could
divine the presence of one almost by the growing of
the trees and flowers. “Our Village” does not look
like other villages.