University of Virginia Library

LETTER XL.

The first of May! How the phrase is twined all round
with violets; and clumps of the small Housitania, (which
remind me of a “Sylvania phalanx” of babies:) and slight
anemones, nodding gracefully as blooming maidens, under
the old moss-grown trees! How it brings up visions of fair
young floral queens, and garlanded May-poles, and door-posts
wreathed with flowers, and juvenile choirs hymning the return
of the swallows, in the ancient time! The old French
word Mes, signifies a garden; and in Lorraine, Mai still
has that meaning; from which, perhaps, the word maiden.
In Brittany, Mae signifies green, flourishing; the Dutch
Mooy, means beautiful, agreeable; the Swedish Mio is
small, pretty and pleasant; and the East India Maya is
Goddess of Nature. Thus, have men shown their love of
this genial month, by connecting its name with images of
youth and loveliness.

In our climate, it happens frequently, that “Winter lingering,
chills the lap of May,” and we are often tantalized
with promises unfulfilled. But though our Northern Indians
named June “the month of flowers,” yet with all her
abundant beauty, I doubt whether she commends herself to
the heart, like May, with her scanty love-tokens from the
grave of the frosty past. They are like infancy, like resurrection,
like everything new and fresh, and full of hopefulness
and promise.

The First, and the Last! Ah, in all human things, how

does one idea forever follow the other, like its shadow!
The circling year oppresses me with its fulness of meaning.
Youth, manhood, and old age, are its most external significance.
It is symbolical of things far deeper, as every
soul knows, that is travelling over steep hills, and through
quiet valleys, unto the palace called Beautiful, like Bunyan's
world-renowned Pilgrim. Human life, in its forever-repeating
circle, like Nature, in her perpetual self-restoring
beauty, tells us that from the burial place of Winter, young
Spring shall come forth to preach resurrection; and thus
it must be in the outward and symbolical, because thus it
is in the inward, spiritual progression of the soul.

Blessings on the Spring-time, when Nature stands like
young children hand in hand, in prophecy of future marriage!

May-day in New-York, is the saddest thing, to one who
has been used to hunting mosses by the brook, and paddling
in its waters. Brick walls, instead of budding trees, and
rattling wheels in lieu of singing birds, are bad enough;
but to make the matter worse, all New-York moves on the
first of May; not only moves about, as usual, in the everlasting
hurry-scurry of business, but one house empties itself
into another, all over the city. The streets are full of
loaded drays, on which tables are dancing, and carpets
rolling to and fro. Small chairs, which bring up such
pretty, cozy images of rolly-pooly mannikens and maidens,

eating supper from tilted porringers, and spilling the milk
on their night-gowns—these go ricketting along on the tops
of beds and bureaus, and not unfrequently pitch into the
street, and so fall asunder. Children are driving hither and
yon, one with a flower-pot in his hand, another with workbox,
band-box, or oil-canakin; each so intent upon his important
mission, that all the world seems to him (as it does
to many a theologian,) safely locked up within the little
walls he carries. Luckily, both boy and bigot are mistaken,
or mankind would be in a bad box, sure enough. The dogs
seem bewildered with this universal transmigration of
bodies; and as for the cats, they sit on the door-steps,
mewing piteously, that they were not born in the middle
ages, or at least, in the quiet old portion of the world. And
I, who have almost as strong a love of localities as poor
puss, turn away from the windows, with a suppressed
anathema on the nineteeth century, with its perpetual
changes. Do you want an appropriate emblem of this
country, and this age? Then stand on the side-walks of
New-York, and watch the universal transit on the first of
May. The facility and speed with which our people change
politics, and move from sect to sect, and from theory to
theory, is comparatively slow and moss-grown; unless, indeed,
one excepts the Rev. O. A. Brownson, who seems to
stay in any spiritual habitation a much shorter time than
the New-Yorkers do in their houses. It is the custom
here, for those who move out to leave the accumulated
dust and dirt of the year, for them who enter to clear up.
I apprehend it is somewhat so with all the ecclesiastical
and civil establishments, which have so long been let out
to tenants in rotation. Those who enter them, must make
a great sweeping and scrubbing, if they would have a clean
residence.

That people should move so often in this city, is generally
a matter of their own volition. Aspirations after the infinite,

lead them to perpetual change, in the restless hope
of finding something better and better still. But they would
not raise the price of drays, and subject themselves to great
inconvenience, by moving all on one day, where it not that
the law compels everybody who intends to move at all, to
quit his premises before twelve o'clock, on May morning.
Failing to do this, the police will put him and his goods
into the street, where they will fare much like a boy beside
an upset hornet's nest. The object of this regulation is to
have the Directory for the year arranged with accuracy.
For, as theologians, and some reformers, can perceive no
higher mission for human souls than to arrange themselves
rank and file in sectarian platoons, so the civil authorities
do not apprehend that a citizen has any more important object
for living, just at this season, than to have his name
set in a well-ordered Directory.

However, human beings are such creatures of habit and
imitation, that what is necessity soon becomes fashion, and
each one wishes to do what everybody else is doing. A
lady in the neighbourhood closed all her blinds and shutters,
on May-day; being asked by her acquaintance whether
she had been in the country, she answered, “I was
ashamed not to be moving on the first of May; and so I
shut up the house that the neighbours might not know it.”
One could not well imagine a fact more characteristic of
the despotic sway of custom and public opinion, in the
United States, and the nineteenth century. Elias Hick's
remark, that it takes “live fish to swim up stream,” is
emphatically true of this age and country, in which liberty-caps
abound, but no one is allowed to wear them.

I am by temperament averse to frequent changes, either
in my spiritual or material abodes. I think I was made for
a German; and that my soul in coming down to earth, got
drifted away by some side-wind, and so was wafted into
the United States, to take up its abode in New-York. Jean

Paul, speaking of the quiet habits of the Germans, says he
does not believe they turn in their beds so often as the
French do. O, for one of those old German homes,
where the same stork, with his children and grandchildren,
builds on the same roof, generation after generation; where
each family knows its own particular stork, and each stork
knows the family from all the world beside. Oh, for a quiet
nook in good old Nuremberg, where still flourishes the lime
tree, planted seven hundred years ago, by empress Cunegunde;
where the same family inhabits the same mansion for
five centuries; where cards are still sold in the same house
where cards were first manufactured; and where the great
grandson makes watches in the same shop that was occupied
by his watchmaking great-grandfather.

But after all, this is a foolish, whining complaint. A
stork's nest is very pleasant, but there are better things.
Man is moving to his highest destiny through manifold revolutions
of spirit; and the outward must change with the
inward.

It is selfish and unwise to quarrel with this spiritual
truth or its ultimate results, however inconvenient they
may be. The old fisherman, who would have exterminated
steam-boats, because they frightened the fish away from
the waters where he had baited them for years, was by no
means profound in his social views, or of expansive benevolence.

If the world were filled with different tribes of Nurembergers,
with their storks, what strangers should we
brethren of the human household be to each other! Thanks
to Carlyle, who has brought England and America into such
close companionship with the mind of Germany. Thanks
to Mary Howitt, who has introduced Frederika Bremer into
our homes, like a sunbeam of spring, and thus changed
Sweden from a snowy abstraction to a beautiful and healthy
reality. It is so pleasant to look into the hearts and eyes

of those Northren brothers! To be conveyed to their
firesides by a process so much swifter than steam?

Do you fear that the patriot will be lost in the cosmopolite?
Never fear. We shall not love our own household
less, because we love others more. In the beautiful words
of Frederika: “The human heart is like Heaven; the
more angels, the more room.”