University of Virginia Library

2. II.

You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell,
dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of —
(perhaps you don't care about knowing exactly when
it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of
dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on
faster than I.) The Springs were thronged. The
President's lady was there, (this was under our administration,
the Adams',) and all the four cliques spoken
of above were amicably united—each other's beaux
dancing with each other's belles, and so on. If I were
writing merely for American eyes, I should digress
once more to describe the distinctive characters of the
south, north, and central representations of beauty;
but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I
may say in passing that the Boston belles were à l' Anglaise, rosy and riantes; the New-Yorkers, like
Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy; and the Baltimorians,

(and so south,) like Ionians or Romans, indolent,
passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men, women
and pine apples, I am inclined to think, flourish with
a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes.

The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it
was—for the parties concerned had the management
of their own affairs; i. e. they who had hearts to sell
made the bargain for themselves, (this was the greater
number,) and they who disposed of this commodity
gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant of the
world, made the transfer in the same manner, in person.
This is your true republic. The trading in
affections by reference—the applying to an old and
selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenuous
one—the swearing to your rents, and not to your
faithful passion to your settlements, and not your
constancy the cold distance between yourself and
the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till
the purchase-money is secured,—and the hasty marriage
and sudden abandonment of a nature thus chilled
and put on its guard, to a freedom with one almost a
stranger, that cannot but seem licentious, and cannot
but break down that sense of propriety in which modesty
is most strongly entrenched—this seems to me the
one evil of your old worm-eaten monarchies this side
the water, which touches the essential happiness of
the well-bred individual. Taxation and oppression
are but things he reads of in the morning paper.

This freedom of intercourse between unmarried people
has a single disadvantage,—one gets so desperately
soon to the end of the chapter! There shall be two
hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given season,
and, by the difference in taste so wisely arranged by
Providence, there will scarce be, of course, more than
four in that number whom any one gentleman at all
difficult will find within the range of his beau ideal.

With these four he may converse freely twelve hours
in the day—more, if he particularly desires it. They
may ride together, drive together, ramble together, sing
together, be together from morning till night, and at
the end of a month passed in this way, if he escape a
committal, as is possible, he will know all that are
agreeable, in one large circle, at least, as well as he
knows his sisters—a state of things that is very likely
to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere dearth
of amusement. I have imagined, however, the case of
an unmarrying idle man, a character too rare as yet
in America to affect the general question. People
marry as they die in that country—when their time
come. We must all marry is as much an axiom as
we must all die, and eke as melancholy.

Shall we go on with the story? I had escaped for
two blessed weeks, and was congratulating the susceptible
gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we
should never be in love with less than the whole sex
again, when a German Baron Von — arrived at the
Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen,
transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly
dependent, so delicate, so child-like, that attention to
her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as
naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The
only womanly trait about her was her voice, which
was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gentle,
so touched with subdued pathos and yet so gentle,
so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melancholy
calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I
turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she
was not the same,—as if some impassioned and eloquent
woman had taken unaware the place of the
simple and petted child.

I am inclined to think there is a particular tenderness
in the human breast for lame women. Any
other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous; but

lameness (the Devil's defect) is “the devil.” I picture
to myself, to my own eye, now—pacing those ricketty
colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging
heavily, and with the dependence inseparable from
her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was
the moon of the Rhine to her, full of thrilling and unearthly
influences) rode solemnly up above the mountain-tops.
And that strange voice filling like a flute
with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregular
pressure of the small wrist in her forgotten lameness,
and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling
as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her
delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that
dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and
womanly passion, of dependence and superiority, of
reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confidence
on every other—if I had not a story to tell I
could prate of those June nights and their witcheries
till you would think
and myself “bitten by the dipsas.”

We were walking one night late in the gallery running
around the second story of the hotel. There was
a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened
somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and
mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added
to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my
bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta
that I loved her.

The building stands against the side of a steep mountain
high up above the valley, and the pines and hemlocks
at that time hung in their primeval blackness
almost over the roof. As the most difficult and embarrassed
sentence of which I had ever been delivered
died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on

my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my
side, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the
woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song.
It produced an instant and startling effect on my companion.
With the first word she quickly withdrew
her arm; and, after a moment's pause, listening with
her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense
eagerness, she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade,
and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of
the forest. The voice ceased, and she started back,
and laid her hand hastily upon my arm.

“I must go,” she said, in a voice of hurried feeling;
“if you are generous, stay here and await me!” and in
another moment she sprang along the bridge connecting
the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and
was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks.

I have made a declaration, thought I, just five
minutes too soon.

I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade,
and picked up the fragments of my dream with what
philosophy I might. By the time Meeta returned,
perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure
by her feelings or mine, I had hatched up a very
pretty and heroical magnanimity. She would have
spoken, but was breathless.

“Explain nothing,” I said, taking her arm within
mine, “and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you
better than by silence, command me entirely. I live
but for your happiness,—even,” I added after a pause,
“though it spring from another.”

We were at her chamber door. She pressed my
hand with a strength of which I did not think those
small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me,
I am free to confess, less resigned than you would suppose
from my last speech. I had done the dramatic
thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry

Cornwall! but it was not in a play. I remained killed
after the audience was gone.