University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

Letter from Howard Pinckney to Charles Matemon,
of Charleston, S. C.

Here I am once more on the terra firma of my
native land. We were just twenty-four days on our
voyage. No accidents, or incidents, except the loss of
one poor fellow overboard in a gale. My fellow
passengers were not much to my liking, and so I
spent the most of my time in reading, or in leaning
over the vessel sides and musing on the waste of
waters around me.

What a glorious song that is. You should hear it
as I have heard it, while the stiff breeze bore us
rapidly ahead, sung by a sailor whose enthusiastic
tones made the nerves tingle, while they seemed to
stretch to an illimitable distance over the waters, and
make the wild waves merry with their melody and
language so appropriate to the scene.

How sometimes a scrap of verse lives in one's
memory. We know not how the deuce it got into
our minds, but out it pops on some occasion, and
then for the first time we know that we have remembered
it. Often as I have looked out upon the waves
I found myself repeating Byron's lines, as though they
were my own spontaneous thoughts:

I have trod the deck beneath a bright and holy

moon, and felt as if the sensation of drowsiness would
never weigh my eyelids down again. Those three
lines which I have quoted pleased me more than all
Byron's Address to the Ocean, in the conclusion of
Childe Harold. There is too much effect in the
address—too much theatrical effect—it seems studied
for the occasion, like a player's dignified exit in the
last scene; but what has this to do with my whereabout
now. On my arrival at New York I received
a letter from our old friend, Sid Fitzhurst, inviting
me to go to — and spend some time with him.
Well, as I had nothing else to do, no fair cynosure to
draw me east or west, or north or south, I determined
to accept his invitation. You know well what a fine
fellow he is, and I felt satisfied that his society would
afford me great pleasure. Besides, as I wrote you, I
have business relative to my pecuniary matters, which
requires my presence here for a while.

On my arrival in —, in the steamboat, I met
Fitzhurst on the wharf ready to welcome me. Business
detained me in town that day, and the next I
proceeded with him to his father's.

Holly is the name of the estate, and it is beautifully
situated. Arriving from a country so richly cultivated
as England, the scene around me, as I proceeded
to Holly, arrested my attention from the striking contrast.
After passing five or ten miles from the city,
the country appeared apparently uncultivated compared
with those to which my eye has been lately
accustomed. After journeying in an aristocratic old
family coach (I like these family vehicles), over hill
and dale, and through stream and woodland, we wound
for several miles around the foot of a chain of hills
through a wild country, and came all at once in view
of a baronial-looking estate, with a village romantically
situated beyond it. The village is called Springdale,
and appears picturesque and beautiful; but I

suppose on visiting it, if I ever do, it will disenchant
me, as have many beauties, whose attractions,
reversing the general law, were greater in the distance.

I remember you wrote me that you met Sidney's
father and aunt in one of your flying visits
through their city, but that you were not fortunate
enough to see Sidney's sister, as she was then indisposed.
Well, sir, I have seen her for you. The
family received me with the greatest kindness. Old
Mr. Fitzhurst and his sister appeared to vie with each
other in welcoming me with old-fashioned courtesy.
Sidney's sister—I was impressed with her beauty at
the moment of presentation—greeted me as demurely
as her aunt, and yet I thought I saw a lurking humour
in her eye. In the course of the afternoon we
chanced to be left alone, when the lady changed her
manner instantly, and said laughably:

“Do tell me, Mr. Pinckney, don't you think when
I come to be aged—as old as aunt—that I will make a
most dignified old maid? I am now in the course of
study to that desirable end; and if I am not a little
perfect, as the actors say, it will not be Aunt Rachellina's
fault.”

Before this I had felt dull as an oyster: but the
maiden gay so completely altered her address—I had
thought her the very pink of primness—that I really
laughed outright.

“Come, Mr. Pinckney,” said she archly, at the
same time putting her finger to her lip to enjoin
silence, “if aunt hears you I shall get a lecture;
and aunt will insist upon it that, notwithstanding you
are a gentleman of travelled experience and practised
courtesy, you could not resist my hoydenish ways,
and your mirth exploded in spite of you.”

Matemon, this fair Fanny is certainly well calculated
to make the hours pass uncounted. You are a

marrying man—therefore do I advise you at your
earliest leisure to make a visit to Holly. I do, upon
my honour, believe that this fair one would soon
become your ladye love.

I will describe her to you—paint her with my pen.
She is, perhaps, above the middle height. I am, you
know, a connoisseur in beauty, and I hold her height
the very one for woman—at least if her lover be tall.
Her form slightly approaches embonpoint, and she has
a wavy walk—do you understand—like Celeste's, for
instance. I fancy that when Pigmalion's prayer was
granted, the creature of his creation, endowed by the
merciful gods with Promethean heat, approached him
with her tread. How prettily her feet, as that saucy
fellow Suckling has it,

Nothing in the wide world, Matemon, arrests my
attention quicker than Cinderella's slipper when it is
performing duty. She has a fairy little hand full of
rings, and when I see it playing with her curls I understand
the poetry of motion. Her bust is like the young
swan's when it first swells to the wave, and her neck
is worthy of it, and delicately fair. As the southern
sun has browned my cheek, I confess my devotion
to its contrast, and therefore worship I a fair complexion.
The mouth of this gay girl you would call, perhaps,
a thought too large, were not her lips so finely
moulded—the upper the very type of the little god's
bow, and the under one pouting, and apparently
formed of a rose-leaf—and did they not develop
teeth of dazzling white. Her nose is straight, and
the chisseled curve of the nostril would have bewitched
Canova. Her forehead is high and fair—I might
say pale; and, being shaded by dark brown hair, it

gives an intellectual cast to features which otherwise
would be marked only for their beauty and archness.
Her eye—here's Byron again—
is of dark hazel and the best feature in her face. It
is formed for every expression—the gayest or the
gravest. Her voice is music itself, and she repeats
poetry as a nightingale sings. She would have made
a great actress—a very great actress. In short, such
a form, when I have been drunk with the witchery of
the arts, has come to me beneath Italian skies,
when my spirit was lapped in the fairy land, and my
dreams were of heaven.

There, sir, is not this a phœnix of a fair one? I
think I hear you say as Sheridan said of Whitbread's
treatise on this celebrated bird:

“A poulterer's description of a phœnix.” Maybe
it is such—I described her to you just as she appears
to me, and just as I would describe a picture which
had touched my imagination, but which could make
no impression on my heart. I do certainly admire
Miss Fitzhurst—but, Matemon, I have seen enough of
the sex. “Man delights not me, nor woman either.”
I make one or two exceptions to the first assertion,
but the other is the rule without an exception, a rare
thing in logic, but you know there is no logic for the
heart.

Furthermore of the above described lady (you
must court her, Matemon), I believe, though you
would not think so at first, that she possesses not only
wit and playfulness, but deep sensibility. I think, too,
she has a superior genius: she has read much, particularly
James's plays and novels. And if I might

say so, I suspect she has a little wilfulness and waywardness
mixed up with her good qualities. But,
Matemon, she will suit you exactly; come and court
her; make me your groomsman, and I'll go south with
your bridal party, and enjoy happiness by reflection;
I never shall catch it in any other way—shadows,
shadows.
You know the rest, and I know the sex are now
as they always were and always will be. No, I have
seen enough of them abroad; and of one in particular,
but no matter—I have written you upon that
theme, and would to God that I could make by-gones
by-gones in all respects.

I have made up my mind to spend this winter with
Fitzhurst. I think I can quite sedately enjoy myself
here in the country, and should I want excitement
the city is not many miles off, and I can soon throw
myself in its whirlpool.

It is wearing towards night. I have been setting
alone up in my chamber, which commands a glorious
prospect of hill and dale, and river winding through,
writing to you. Such is not solitude. For the last
five minutes I have been nibbling my pen unconsciously,
while looking out on the setting sun as he hides his
broad disk behind a clump of oaks that caps the very
summit of a hill not far off. He flings his parting
radiance there like the halo round the brow of the martyr,
while the vale below is as rayless as the valley of
the shadow of death. This coming of still twilight on,
particularly of an autumn evening, has always had a
melancholy fascination for me. The many tinted,
rustling leaves that fall in the silence around you,
seem like the hopes which a few months ago were
green, but which are now strewed on the ground—
midst the dirt and ashes of the past—never to rise more.

I tell you what, Matemon, a man should have some

steady aim in view through all his wanderings—to
travel in pursuit of pleasure is to chase a butterfly,
that only lives in a summer's day, or a phantom that
lures you to the shades of unrest and inquietude. I
have a kind of moody, morbid discontent hanging
about me which I cannot dispel. I seek for enjoyment,
and find it not. The fruit whose taste gives
pleasure to others turn to ashes on my lips. This is
expressing myself, perhaps, too strongly; but what I
mean to say is, that I have a perpetual and wayward
restlessness upon me, from which I in vain endeavour
to escape. The cause of it, I do believe, is the want
of a settled object in life. Until I was eighteen, you
are aware I expected that it would be my lot to make
my own fortune. While preparing myself in college
with the double motive of necessity and ambition, as
incentives to action, my energies were elastic, and my
spirit fearless and, panting not only for collegiate honours,
but the broader and showier ones of the world.
True, sometimes I wished for wealth, for I knew if I
possessed it the harassing cares of pecuniary want
would not intrude upon me—and all others, while
health remained, I believed would be merely a pleasurable
excitement in the career of ambition.

One gloomy evening in college, while I was indulging
in such a reverie, and longing for the philosopher's
stone, the postman brought me a letter sealed with
black. I started—from whom could it be—I paused
ere I opened it. My father and my mother were in
their graves;—I was an orphan with extensive connections,
but without any near relation except a
cousin. I left him in high health, on the eve of being
married to a lovely woman, and in the possession of
one of the largest fortunes in all the south. He was
several years my elder, and it was by his assistance
that I was then at college. A strange, unnatural, and
shuddering excitement ran through me as I thought

of my cousin, of his immense possessions, of my dependance,
of that black seal. I tore it open. My cousin
was no more. He had been shot in a duel by a
former rival in his love affair, whom he had supplanted.
The rival had been secretly practicing for
months previous to challenging him. He had succeeded
in his murderous intent. My cousin was
shot through the heart. Before going on the ground
he had made his will, and left me his sole heir. I
sprang to my feet with a bound, at the thought of
the immense wealth of which I was master. The
next moment I threw myself on my couch in humiliation
and shame. I cursed myself from my heart at
the idea that I should have such an impulse on the
acquirement of wealth by the death—and such a death
—of one so near and dear to me. One who had been
my benefactor, and had left me his all. Matemon,
the deepest sense of self-degradation I have ever
known was then. You were at college with me
when this occurred. I do not know why I should
call it up now except to say, that the wealth I thus
acquired, while it left me open to pursue any path of
ambition I might desire—what I had been so ardently
wishing for—gave me also the means of sensual gratification—presented
the Circean cup, and all the deity
within me became of the earth, earthy. But though
I did taste of this cup, my “misery” was not so
“perfect” as Milton, in his splendid Masque of Comus,
describes that of Circe's votaries to have been, who,
No! I panted to see my native home again. You
must present my remembrances warmly to all our
mutual friends. In a few months I shall be with you
all. Write me, write me; give me all the news. I
have an idea of following Washington Irving's example:
taking a tour upon the prairies; or something
like it. There would be excitement in such adventures—and
what a contrast with the scenes I have
left behind me! This contrast would be the zest of
the enjoyment. Is it not wonderful that he who had
been housed so carefully and luxuriously should have
been exposed to the open lodgings of the wilderness,
the skiey canopy, not only without detriment to his
health but to its improvement. He tells us that, after
returning from his tour, he experienced a sensation of
suffocation on awaking in the night and finding himself
in a room. How many of our aches and troubles
we bring upon ourselves. What a free pulse I should
have now were I treading on the prairies!

Sidney Fitzhurst and myself have been reading
Irving to-day together. Sid has just entered my
room, he says:—

“Come, Pinckney, if you wish to imitate Irving,
suppose you accompany me to a neighbouring farmer's,
where there is to be a husking match.”

What is that? I asked.

“After the corn,” said he, “has been gathered
from the field, it is arranged in a pile near the corn-crib,
and the labouring people, white and black, meet
there on some night and strip it of the husks. They
form themselves into parties, divide the corn heaps
equally, and the contest is, which shall finish their
pile the soonest. Come, it will amuse you—I do not
know but that I may be a candidate some of these
days for popular favours, and shaking hands with
the sovereigns; these may be of service to me;—and
frankly, apart from such considerations, I like these
gatherings.”

I agreed; and so here I go, Matemon, to a husking-match.
Sidney sends a thousand good wishes to
you. Adieu!