 | Letters from New York |  |
LETTER III.
Oh, these damp, sultry days of August! how oppressive
they are to mind and body! The sun staring at you from
bright red walls, like the shining face of a heated cook.
Strange to say they are painted red, blocked off with white
in their narrowness. What an expenditure for ugliness
and discomfort to the eye! To paint bricks their own
color, resembles the great outlay of time and money in
theological schools, to enable dismal, arbitrary souls to give
an approved image of themselves in their ideas of Deity.
After all, the God within us is the God we really believe
in, whatever we may have learned in catechisms or creeds.
Hence to some, the divine image presents itself habitually
as a dark, solemn shadow, saddening the gladsomeness
of earth, like thunder-clouds reflected on the fair mirror of
the sea. To others, the religious sentiment is to the soul
what Spring is in the seasons, flowers to the eye, and music
to the ear. In the greatest proportion of minds these sentiments
are mixed, and therefore two images are reflected,
one to be worshipped with love, the other with fear.
Hence, in Catholic countries, you meet at one corner of
the road frightfully painted hell-fires, into which poor struggling
human souls are sinking; and at another, the sweet
Madonna, with her eye of pity and her lip of love. Whenever
God appears to the eye of faith as terrible in power,
and stern in vengeance, the soul craves some form of mediation,
and satisfies its want. As the reprobate college-boy
trusts to a mother's persuasive love to intercede for him
with an angry father, so does the Catholic, terrified with
visions of torment, look up trustingly to the “Blessed mother,
Virgin mild.”
Not lightly, or scornfully, would I speak of any such
manifestations of faith, childish as they may appear to the
eye of reason. The Jewish dispensation was announced
in thunder and lightning; the Christian, by a chorus of love
from angel voices. The dark shadow of the one has fearfully
thrown itself across the mild radiance of the other.
Those old superstitious times could not well do otherwise
than mix their dim theology with the new-born glorious
the blessed Idea completely veiled in gloom. Since the
Past will overlap upon the Present, and therefore Christianity
must slowly evolve itself from Judaism, let us at
least be thankful that,
The shadow and the song.”
Whence came all this digression? It has as little to do
with New-York, as a seraph has to do with Banks and
Markets. Yet in good truth, it all came from a painted
brick wall staring in at my chamber window. What a
strange thing is the mind! How marvellously is the infinite
embodied in the smallest fragment of the finite!
It was ungrateful in me to complain of those walls, for
I am more blest in my prospect than most inhabitants of
cities; even without allowing for the fact that more than
most others, I always see much within a landscape—“a
light and a revealing,” every where.
Opposite to me is a little, little, patch of garden, trimly
kept, and neatly white-washed. In the absence of rippling
brooks and blooming laurel, I am thankful for its marigolds
and poppies,
And at each end a hollyhock,
With an edge of London Pride.”
And then between me and the sectarian brick wall, there
are, moreover, two beautiful young trees. An Ailanthus
twisting its arms lovingly within its smaller sister Catalpa.
One might almost imagine them two lovely nymphs
suddenly transformed to trees in the midst of a graceful,
twining dance. I should be half reluctant to cut a cluster
of the beautiful crimson seed-vessels, lest I should wound
the finger of some Hamadryad,
Who of one favorite tree in some sweet spot,
Make home and leave it not.”
But I must quit this strain; or you will say the fair, floating
Grecian shadow casts itself too obviously over my
Christianity. Perchance, you will even call me “transcendental;”
that being a word of most elastic signification,
used to denote every thing that has no name in particular,
and that does not especially relate to pigs and poultry.
Have patience with me, and I will come straight back
from the Ilissus to New-York—thus.
You too, would worship two little trees and a sunflower,
if you had gone with me to the neighbourhood of the Five
Points the other day. Morally and physically, the breathing
air was like an open tomb. How souls or bodies
could live there, I could not imagine. If you want to see
something worse than Hogarth's Gin Lane, go there in a
warm afternoon, when the poor wretches have come to
what they call home, and are not yet driven within doors, by
darkness and constables. There you will see nearly every
form of human misery, every sign of human degradation.
The leer of the licentious, the dull sensualism of the drunkard,
the sly glance of the thief—oh, it made my heart ache
for many a day. I regretted the errand of kindness that
drew me there; for it stunned my senses with the amount
of evil, and fell upon the strong hopefulness of my character,
like a stroke of the palsy. What a place to ask one's
self, “Will the millenium ever come!”
And there were multitudes of children—of little girls.
Where were their guardian angels? God be praised, the
wilfully committed sin alone shuts out their influence; and
therefore into the young child's soul they may always
enter.
Mournfully, I looked upon these young creatures, as I
said within myself, “And this is the education society gives
her children—the morality of myrmidons, the charity of
constables!” Yet in the far-off Future I saw a gleam.
sung over the hills of Judea; and the heavenly music will
yet find an echo deep in their hearts.
It is said a spacious pond of sweet, soft water once occupied
the place where Five Points stands. It might have
furnished half the city with the purifying element; but it
was filled up at incredible expense—a million loads of
earth being thrown in, before perceivable progress was
made. Now, they have to supply the city with water from
a distance, by the prodigious expense of the Croton Water
Works.
This is a good illustration of the policy of society toward
crime. Thus does it choke up nature, and then seek
to protect itself from the result, by the incalculable expense
of bolts, bars, the gallows, watch-houses, police courts, constables,
and “Egyptian tombs,” as they call one of the
principal prisons here. If viewed only as a blunder, Satan
might well laugh at the short-sightedness of the world, all
the while toiling to build the edifice it thinks it is demolishing.
Destroying violence by violence, cunning by cunning,
is Sisyphus' work, and must be so to the end. Never shall
we bring the angels among us, by “setting one devil up to
knock another devil down;” as the old woman said, in
homely but expressive phrase.
| Letters from New York | |