University of Virginia Library

ARGUMENT FOR SEDAN CHAIRS.

“Mr. Editor: You stand accredited as the ready
friend of luxurious elegance, the happy mingler of
those foreign ingredients, the utile with the dulci.
My dear sir, why have you never said a word in favor
of the Sedan-Chairs? The very name carries one
back to the days of Pope and Addison; to the routs,

and masquerades and Ranelagh of London, in the
`reign of wits.' Even Cowper celebrates it:—

“It is an Italian seggietta; and thus defined by an
old writer: `a kind of chaire used in Italy to carrie
men and women up and downe.' It seems to have
emigrated to London from Sedan, the birthplace of
Turenne. Dryden used it for the lectica of the Romans:—

“Were you ever in one? Then you will agree that
it is as necessary in Broadway as a gondola in Venice.
Think of Pope's `two pages and a chair.' Our
thousand and one idlers, who are too ragged to beg,
and too poor to keep a cab, might flourish their poles
to some purpose in front of St. Paul's—a better class
of chairmen than some we wot of.—They need not
have so heavy a load, nor so great a peril, as those
who, according to Swift, helped in the Trojan horse:—

“The new police would defend the glass from any
roystering blood, who, as Prior sings:—

Opposition may be expected: there was such at the
cab-epocha. But who can even name a cab, without
ignominy. Think of a trundling box—a packing-case
on wheels—surmounted by a top-heavy Milesian,
enthroned on a remnant of Chatham-street-great-coat,
forcing you along sidewise by a series of thumps, and
then, with a paroxysm that tries every ball and socket,
dumping you on the trottoir! Our semi-tropical
climate demands a protection from the sun: something
emulating the oriental palanquin; a parasol
which shall preclude fatigue and dust, as well as sunlight—which
shall transport the delicate woman with
the gentlest conceivable carriage, and into the very
hall of the stately mansion. What, prithee, can
answer these conditions but the sedan-chair? I already
see you in one, peering through the sky-blue
curtain, as you swim through your evening survey.
The corporation will at once adjust a bill of rates;
the thing is done. “Lunarius.”

We have been but in one city where sedans were
in use—Dublin. What struck us, in using them (and
that is what the reader cares most to know, we presume)
was the being shut up where it was warm and
dry, and let out where it was warm and dry. The
sedan is a small close carriage—an easy chair enclosed
by windows—carried on poles by two men.
They come into your drawing-room if you wish, shut
you up in a carriage by the fireside, and carry you,
without the slightest jar or contact with out-of-doors,
into the house where you are to dine or dance—no
wet sidewalk and no gust of cold wind, snow, or rain!
They are cheaper than carriages because men are
easier kept than horses, and as a sedan-chairman can
also follow some other trade in the daytime, we
should think it would be good economy to introduce
them to New York. Many a delicate woman might
then go to parties or theatres with a quarter of the
present risk—to lungs or head-dress!

Prince's Gardens.—We have received an immense
catalogue of the fruit-trees, plants, flowers,
vines, and berries, comprised in this ark of vegetation
at Flushing, and we should think from the account
of Prince's gardens, and the prodigal variety of this
catalogue, that the establishment would be better
worth visiting than any object of curiosity in the
neighborhood. It is now in the hands of the third
generation of descendants from the original founder—
no slight marvel of constancy of pursuit in this
country!

But we have found a singular pleasure in this catalogue—no
less than a perfect feast upon the names and
descriptions of the fruits and flowers! It reads like a
directory of some city of fairies, with a description of
the fairy-citizens written out against their names.
We can fancy a delightful visiting-list of people answering
to these descriptions of fruits and flowers.
Here are a few of the characters:—

Different APPLES are described as—“flesh stained
with red, perfumed;” “snow-white flesh, musky
sweet;” “fair, beautiful, pleasant flavor, sprightly;”
“tender, juicy, keeps well;” “remains juicy till
late;” “red flesh, a curiosity,” etc., etc. Different
pears are described as—“rich, sugary, delicious
aroma;” “most splendid, extra delicious, none more
estimable, grows vigorously, bears soon;” “beautiful,
aromatic, bears young, greatly esteemed;” “rich,
musky;” “excellent, slow to yield fruit;” “thin skin,
sweet, very good;” “new native variety, estimable,
handsome;” “very large, skin shining, flesh crisp,
agreeable flavor, excellent,” &c. Different peaches
are described as—“oval, splendid, luscious;” “estimable,
foliage curled, peculiar;” “waxen appearance,
globular, delicious flavor,” &c. Different grapes are
described as—“large, estimable, vigorous;” “sweet,
firm, thick skin, hangs long, monstrous clusters;”
“monstrous fox variety;” “Willis's large black;” (?)
“sprightly, pure for wine,” etc. Different roses are
called by name and described—“formidable red;”
“glory of the reds;” “insurmountable beauty;”
“new Dutch virgin's blush;” “sombre agreeable;”
“Watson's blush;” “red prolific;” “pale rose, deep
centre;” “deep rose, very robust;” “bluish violet,
superb, singular;” “bright pink, flaked with scarlet;”
“pubescent yellow flowering;” “white quilled;”
“extra magnificent;” “splendid, full, double-shaded
blush, monstrous size,” etc., etc.

Such names and definitions, of anything, were
enough to bring one to Flushing, and Mr. Prince
may look out for us very early in May, catalogue in
hand, to see beauties he has described so glowingly!
We trust the list of adjectives we have put so venturesomely
close together in our cool columns will not
explode in type, with spontaneous combustion!

Letters of Introduction.—The following query
may be answered briefly enough by quoting only European
usage, but the propriety of an American variation
occurs to us, and we will write a line on the subject—first
giving the suggestive note:—

“Sir: My friend N., usually a well-informed,
though rather an obstinate individual, is about to
travel, and asked me for a letter of introduction to a
friend abroad. The letter is written, and is submitted
to his perusal, after which he hands it back to be
sealed, insisting that the rule is inflexible that all letters
should be sealed. I refuse to affix the wax,
holding that a letter of introduction should be open.

“We leave the question to your decision. As my
friend N. can not sail until the question is decided, an
early decision will oblige him and your humble servant,
“B.”

With very ceremonious people, and ceremonious
notes of introduction, it is usual to affix a seal upon
the outside of the letter, leaving it to be read and

fastened by the bearer, before delivery. If the letter
extends beyond the mere stating of who the
bearer is, and the desire that he should be kindly received,
or if it treats of other matters, it is given
sealed. Either mode is perfectly allowable, for if the
bearer objects to a sealed letter, he can ask the contents
when he receives it. It is more common, however,
to give it unsealed.

Briefly, now, to the point we are coming to: letters
of introduction, in this country, should be addressed
to the women and not to the men, and should
go more into details of what the bearer is and what is
his errand of travel, and therefore should be sealed.
We have long been aware of a prevailing impression
that Americans treat letters of introduction with a
very uncivilized inattention, and so they do—because the
etiquetical and hospitable cares of American families
are in charge of the wife, and the husband is very likely
to stick the letter into a pigeon-hole of his desk, and
forget all about it. The wife in America does all the
ornamental. To see a rich man come down the steps
of his own house (almost anywhere “up town”) you
would take him to be a tradesman who had been in to
collect a bill. To see the wife follow, you would at
once acknowledge that she looked as though she lived
in the house, and fancy that she was probably annoyed
to see that man pass out by the front door!
From making himself a slave to keep his wife a goddess,
the American loses all idea of the propriety of
looking like a mate for his wife, and he unconsciously
ceases to take any care of the civilities to which his
own manners give so little value, and neglects all
persons who have not had the tact to be presented
first to the ornamental moiety. It should be an
American usage, therefore, growing out of the inferiority
of the husband's breeding to the wife's, that letters
of introduction should be addressed to the woman.

Of course, as she has no opportunity to inquire
into the bearer's position or habits, these should be
more minutely set down, and the letter should be
sealed.

“Findings.”—We see advertised continually certain
commodities called “findings,” which we understand
are what hatters and shoemakers require besides
peltry and leather. There are findings for
newspapers, too — what the editors require besides
leaders and news—and it may gratify our subscribers
to know, that out of the weary slip-slop which we
commonly scribble after making up the Mirror's leaders
and news, our contemporaries supply themselves
with the greater part of their ornamental “findings.”
Like every other editor, we are in the habit of giving
a line or two occasionally, in the body of our paper,
to the wares of our most liberal advertisers, and it appears
that even this wastage of business notices is
considered spice enough for other papers to be seasoned
with. The Boston Transcript spices its little
sheet very often with these parings of our daily apple.
Here is part of a letter which contains a touch:—

“The leading articles in the Mirror and Commercial
Advertiser for the last day or two have been devoted
to the all-engrossing topic, the spring style of
hats. After admitting that `knowingness could no
further go' than Beebe & Costar went, Willis winds
up thus: `For ourself and ten thousand other workies
whom we could name, the sadder model of Orlando
Fish—timid, proper, and thoughtful—is perhaps more
appropriate.' This passage has produced a great
sensation in dandy-dom. The Fish party are in raptures,
and could hug Willis to their very bosoms;
`the opposition' is in a fury. Nobody can tell what
the result may be. Willis dare not venture out, it is
thought without a body-guard of Fishites. There
are, moreover, many surmises with regard to the
character of the `ten thousand other workies' whom
Mr. Willis `could name.' Some think that he
means to be witty, and alludes ironically to the “upper
ten.” This is a great mystery.

“The constituent elements of `japonica-dom' and
`dandy-dom' may be seen daily in Broadway, between
the hours of twelve and three. All the beauty above
Bleecker street wanders at that time down as far as
the Park, hazarding even the contamination of the
vulgar crowd, in the hope of securing an appetite for
dinner. The liveried lacqueys, who oscillate upon a
black board behind the carriages of our republican
nabobs, sport their gayest trappings; I had the pleasure
of seeing one yesterday in a drab `cut-away' with
gold lace and yellow facings, and white silk stockings
with purple velvet smalls! What is this great country
coming to? We Gothamites do sometimes make
ourselves ridiculous, by aping what as a people we
profess to despise. It is rumored that a deputation
of English `small-potato' baronets may be expected
in this city next summer; and that the object of their
transatlantic mission is, to establish an aristocratic
nucleus among our `upper ten thousand.' A `herald's
college' has already been set on foot; and I have
heard that it enjoys considerable patronage. It is
proposed to build wings on either side of `the up-town
opera-house'—the one to be assigned to this `herald's
college,' and the other to the `university of fashion,'
of which Mr. Willis is to be president. Some say
that Colonel Webb has applied for the vice-presidency,
but I can not vouch for this.

“The chief feature of the Broadway Journal is a
defence by Mr. Poe of his attack upon Longfellow,
&c. It is as stupid as might be expected from a man
who used to `do up' such very small prosodial criticisms
for Graham's Magazine. Mr. Poe comes down
rather severely on Willis—he therefore has probably
discontinued his services at the Mirror office.”

One mistake in the above: Mr. Poe left us some
time before writing in the Broadway Journal, and to
edit that journal; and he never offended us by a criticism,
nor could he, except by personalities, in which
he never indulges.

Schiller and Goethe.—Mr. Calvert of Baltimore
has given us, as translator, a most agreeable
collection of gossippy letters—the undress of two
great minds, of the age just closed behind us. What
we most wish to comment on, however (the book
speaks for itself), is Mr. Calvert's own—the preface,
in which he indignantly and most properly rebukes
the last orator of the “Phi Beta Kappa Society,” for
a short-sighted and illiberal attack on the memory of
Goethe. We found it difficult, at the time, to restrain
an outbreak of disgust, but the oration was not published
for some time, and we were unwilling to take
ground upon a newspaper report of it. Meantime,
our natural alacrity at forgetting disagreeable things
dropped it out of memory. We are not sorry that a
condemnation of it is now recorded in a book that
must live.

Mr. Calvert puts the truth thus forcibly: “How
little outward testimony survives about Shakspere;
but whoso can read his poetry, may get a knowledge
of the man surer and more absolute than could have
been gotten even from the fullest contemporancous opinions.
As the tree is known by its fruit, we know that
the parent of the Shaksperian progeny must have
been a man in whom, in close alliance with a kingly
intellect, dwelt, as well the virtues that ennoble, as
the graces that beautify and the affections that sweeten
life. Into whatever errors an ardent temperament
may have drawn him, they dim not the lucent image
of him, fixed in our minds by study of his works;
nay, we presume not to wish them uncommitted, lest

an attempt to better such a bounteous gift from God,
should mar, but by a tittle, the original proportions of
one, the sum of whose life has been to the world an unmeasurable
benefaction. When a bad man's brain
shall give birth to an Iphiginea, a Clara, a Mignon,
you may pluck pomegranates from Plymouth rock,
and reap corn on the sands of Sahara.

“On a formal public occasion (the Phi Beta Kappa
oration at Cambridge in 1844), a blind and
most rude assault has been made on one of the
mightiest of the dead, whose soul lives on earth, and
will for ages live in the exaltation of the loftiest
minds. Out of stale German gossip, out of shallow
wailings of prosaic critics, shallower clamors of pseudopatriots,
uncharitable magnification of common failings,
were compounded calumny against one of the foremost
men of the world, and the most honored man of
a people rich in virtue and genius.”

Quite aside from the defence of Goethe, we think
there is an obvious presentment here of the continual
manner of treating all kinds of eminence and celebrity,
here, in our own country, and at this present hour.
As the proverb says:—

Stewart's Stable Economy.—We covet three
things in the Arab's condition—his loose trousers, his
country without fences, and his freedom to live with
his horse. That we have once had the centaur variety
in the human race, men-quadrupeds, and have once
known horseflesh as “flesh of our flesh,” the natural
longing to prance, when we first get into the open air
after long confinement, is but one of many evidences.
In a mere notice of a book, however, we have no
leisure to trace back a problem of physiology. We
merely wish to convey to such of our enviable readers
as can resume the centaur (by loving and living with a
horse in the country), the treasure they have in a book
which shows them how to make their life (the horse
half of it) a luxury instead of an endurance, and to give
our own five years enjoyment in breaking, petting, and
improving horses, by aid of this same book, as experienced
commendation. We had the English edition
of Stewart's books on horses, but the Appletons have
republished the “Stable Economy,” with “notes
adapting it to American food and climate,” by Mr.
Allen, the able editor of the Agriculturist, and it is
now an invaluable vade-mecum, for all men who have
the luxury of a stable.

We can not help repeating that a visitable stable,
with friends in it in the shape of horses—with horses
in it one has himself broken and trained—a stable to
which the ladies like to go after breakfast, and where
a gentleman can throw on his own saddle and bridle,
and gallop off, without needing first to find his groom—
that this is the next best luxury our country affords,
after ladies' society. (Horses, that is to say, before
politics or stocks, under male discussion.)

The stable at Gordon castle (approachable by a
covered passage from the principal hall) was a frequent
resort for the ladies after breakfast; and we
have seen women, the highest in rank at the English
court, going in and out of the stalls, patting the favorites
they were to ride later in the day, and discussing
their beauty with the simplicity and frankness of
Arabs in the desert. While we are building country-houses
and forming habits in America, it is well to
know all the luxury we can enjoy in rural life, and no
one should build stable, or own horse, without consulting
the excellent directions for stabling and using
the horse, in this book of Stewart's.

Grund's Letters from Europe.—In Godey's
Lady's Book for April we find one of these best
epistles of the day, and (to tell the truth) we read
them with very little satisfaction, for they leave us
with a want to go where they are written. The April
number of Godey is principally the work of unwedded
quills (no less than ten misses numbered among the
contributors!), but we have read it with great satisfaction,
and felicitate our old friend upon the brilliancy
of his maiden troop. Godey is the pioneer of
magazines, and he has a tact at collection and selection,
which has put him where he is—safe at high-water
mark in enduring prosperity. Success to him.

By-the-way—though we have no room to expatiate
on the several papers in this number—the “Sketch of
Joseph Bonaparte” is capital. Is that by a “miss”
too?

And apropos, Godey! What a vile word “miss”
is, to express the sweetest thing in nature! Why
should the idol of mankind be called a “miss?”
Why should the charming word heifer be degraded to
the use of kine? We say “degraded,” for it once
served ladies as a synonym for the proudest of virgin
sweethearts. Ben Jonson, in his play of the “Silent
Woman,” thus writes a speech for his hero:—

“But heare me, faire lady, I do also love her whom
I shall choose for my heifer, to be the first and principal
in all fashions.”

The derivation of the word heifer is so complimentary!
It comes from two Anglo-Saxon words, which
signify “to step superbly,” as a young creature who
has borne no burthens. With this explanation, we
trust our friend Godey will no longer hesitate to advertise
his fair contributors as the bright lights of
HEIFFRDOM—disusing henceforth, for ever, the disparaging
epithet of misses.

An Idea for Tattersall's.—There are luxuries
which rich men forego, not for the money but for the
mind they cost. Hundreds of people in this city, for
instance, could very well afford a carriage, but they
can not afford the trouble of buying horses, the care
of looking after grooms, nor the anxieties inseparable
from horse-owning in this country of perpetual new
servants. In England this want is provided for by the
system the livery-stable keepers call jobbing. Lady
Blessington's two or three different equipages for instance,
are allowed to be the prettiest and best appointed
in London. Yet she owns neither carriages,
horses, nor harness. She pays a certain sum per
annum to be provided with what she wants in the
way of equipages, and keeps only her own coachman

and footmen. A new carriage is furnished whenever
wanted, and of whatever style is wanted (the jobber
finding no trouble probably in disposing of the one
given up) and a sick or lame horse is replaced immediately
from a stable where the first blood and shape
are alone kept. Her ladyship thus knows precisely
what her driving is to cost her for the year, and
transfers to the jobber all the risk, anxiety, and
trouble.

A wealthy New-Yorker, a day or two since, made
a very handsome offer to a livery-stable keeper to
furnish him a carriage on this same plan, and the offer
was refused. But, though a single customer of
this kind might be troublesome, combination (that great
secret of luxurious economies) might “make it answer.”
Twenty nice carriages, let out to private
gentlemen at $1,000, or $1,500 a year each, might be
looked after by one jobber well versed in horseflesh,
and his taste and experience would turn out better
equipages than could be got up by private individuals.
The twenty stables now kept up would be combined
in one (this in itself, no small saving) and the rich
man might be driven in better style, for less money
than it now costs him, and—better than all—without
the vexatious care, vigilance and anxiety of keeping a
private carriage.

P. S. We can safely say that we are entirely disinterested
in the proposed arrangement!

Graham for April.—The equinox brought us
such detestable weather, that instead of our usual two
hours' airing of brains under a hat, we lay on our
back yesterday afternoon and read “Graham.” How
does the man get so many good things! Grund,
Fanny Forester, Mrs. C. H. Butler, Win. Lander,
Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Osgood, Mr. Peterson—all have
written their best for this number. Our friend Fanny's
story of “Nickie Ben” seems to us particularly fresh,
bright, and original. Mr. Grund's letter from Paris
is full of intelligence, and among other things, he thus
speaks of Eugene Sue and his two tasters:—

“He lives now, by the product of his industry, in
princely style; but his enjoyments are troubled by
the constant fear of being poisoned by his political
and religious adversaries. He has, therefore, contracted
an intimate friendship with two large, beautiful
Newfoundland dogs, who are his constant dinner and
breakfast companions, and who always eat first of every
dish that is brought on the table. If these judges of
gastronomy pronounce in favor of it, by first eating a
large quantity, with apparent relish, the author of
“The Mysteries” and “The Wandering Jew” himself
partakes of it without farther scruple. He believes
dogs much more faithful than men, and the
sagacious instincts of a regular Newfoundlander superior
to the science of chymists and physicians.”

Poor dogs! Considering that they would doubtless
have been wagging their tails in Paradise, but for
Adam's transgression, it seems hard to make them
die, for a human master, besides!

But, to turn to the first leaf—lo! the brigadier! There
he stands, looking as amiable as if he had just nabbed
a flying thought for a song, his smile a little more
rigid, however, and his phiz a little thinner than his
accommodating wont. The picture is enough like
him, notwithstanding, for all “business purposes.”
We think him better looking than the artist has
“done” him, and this we request the ladies (who sing
his songs) to allow for. The magazine opens with a
critical biography, exceedingly well done, and (the
brigadier below stairs playing salesman) we see nothing
to prevent our quoting a note of our own to the
writer:—

We get, from literary fledglings, at least one letter
per diem requesting detailed advice on the quo modo
of a first flight in prose or poesy. We really suppose
we have, or are to have, an end to our life, and we like
to economise time. So we publish a letter, which we
once had occasion to write, and which must serve as
a circular—a letter which we recorded in our diary
when it was written—recorded with the following
preface:—

There lies before me now, upon my table, a letter
of three tolerably compact pages, addressed to a
young gentleman of — college, who is “bit by the
dipsas” of authorship. His mother, a sensible, plain,
farmer's widow, chanced to be my companion for a
couple of days, in a stage-coach, and while creeping
over the mountains between the Hudson and the Susquehannah,
she paid my common sense the compliment

of unburthening a very stout heart to me.
Since her husband's death, she has herself managed
the farm, and by active, personal oversight, has contrived
“to make both ends so far lap” (to use her own
expression), as to keep her only boy at college. By
her description, he is a slenderish lad in his constitution,
fond of poetry, and bent on trying his fortune
with his pen, as soon as he has closed his thumb and
finger on his degree. The good dame wished for the
best advice I could give him on the subject, leaving it
to me (after producing a piece of his poetry from her
pocket, published in one of the city papers) to encourage
or dissuade. I apprehended a troublesome
job of it, but after a very genial conversation (on the
subject of raising turkeys, in which she quite agreed
with me, that they were cheaper bought than raised,
when corn was fifty cents a bushel—greedy gobblers!),
I reverted to the topic of poetry, and promised to
write the inspired sophomore my views as to his prospects.
Need I record it?—that long letter affects me
like an unsigned bank-note—like something which
might so easily have been money—like a leak in the
beer-barrel—like a hole in the meal-bag! It irks me
to lose them—three fair pages—a league's drift to leeward—a
mortal morning's work, and no odor lucri
thence arising! I can not stand it, Mrs. —, and
Mr. Sophomore —! You are welcome to the
autograph copy, but faith! I must print it. There is
a superfluity of adjectives (intended, as it was, for
private perusal), but I will leave them out in the copy.

Thus runs the letter:—

Dear Sir: You will probably not recognise the
handwriting in which you are addressed, but by casting
your eye to the conclusion of the letter, you will
see that it comes from an old stager in periodical literature;
and of that, as a profession, I am requested
by your mother to give you, as she phrases it, “the
cost and yield.” You will allow what right you please
to my opinions, and it is only with the authority of
having lived by the pen, that I pretend to offer any
hints on the subject for your guidance. As “the
farm” can afford you nothing beyond your education,
you will excuse me for presuming that you need information
mainly as to the livelihood to be got from
literature.

Your mother thinks it is a poor market for potatoes,
where potatoes are to be had for nothing, and
that is simply the condition of American literature (as
protected by law). The contributors to the numerous
periodicals of England, are the picked men of
thousands—the accepted of hosts rejected—the flower
of a highly-educated and refined people—soldiers,
sailors, lords, ladies, and lawyers—all at leisure, all
anxious to turn a penny, all ambitious of print and
profit; and this great army, in addition to the hundreds
urged by need and pure literary zeal—this great
army, I say, are before you in the market, offering
their wares to your natural customer, at a price for
which you can not afford to sell—nothing! It is true
that by this state of the literary market, you have
fewer competitors among your countrymen—the best
talent of the country being driven, by necessity, into
less congenial and more profitable pursuits; but even
with this advantage (none but doomed authors in the
field) you would probably find it difficult, within five
years after you graduated, to convert your best piece
of poetry into a genuine dollar. I allow you, at the
same time, full credit for your undoubted genius.

You naturally inquire how American authors live.
I answer, by being English authors. There is no
American author who lives by his pen, for whom London
is not the chief market. Those whose books sell
only in this country, make scarce the wages of a day-laborer—always
excepting religious writers, and the
authors of school-books, and such works as owe their
popularity to extrinsic causes. To begin on leaving
college, with legitimate book-making—writing novels,
tales, volumes of poetry, &c., you must have at least
five years support from some other source, for until
you get a name, nothing you could write would pay
“board and lodging;” and “getting a name” in
America, implies having first got a name in England.
Then we have almost no professed, mere authors.
They have vocations of some other character, also.
Men like Dana, Bryant, Sprague, Halleck, Kennedy,
Wetmore, though, no doubt, it is the first wish of
their hearts to devote all their time to literature, are
kept, by our atrocious laws of copyright, in paths less
honorable to their country, but more profitable to
themselves, and by far the greatest number of discouraged
authors are “broken on the wheel” of the public
press. Gales, Walsh, Chandler, Buckingham, and
other editors of that stamp, are men driven aside from
authorship, their proper vocation.

Periodical writing seems the natural novitiate to
literary fame in our country, and I understand from
your mother that through this lies your chosen way.
I must try to give you as clear an idea as possible of
the length and breadth of it, and perhaps I can best
do so by contrasting it with another carcer, which (if
advice were not always useless) I should sooner
advise.

Your mother's farm, then, consisting of near a hundred
acres, gives a net produce of about five hundred
dollars a year—hands paid, I mean, and seed, wear and
tear of tools, team, &c., first subtracted. She has
lived as comfortable as usual for the last three or four
years, and still contrived to lay by the two hundred
and fifty dollars expended annually on your education.
Were you at home, your own labor and oversight
would add rather more than two hundred dollars
to the income, and with good luck you might call
yourself a farmer with five hundred dollars, as the
Irish say, “to the fore.” Your vocation, at the same
time, is dignified, and such as would reflect favorably
on your reputation, should you hereafter become in
any way eminent. During six months in the year,
you would scarce find more than an hour or two in
the twenty-four to spare from sleep or labor; but in
the winter months, with every necessary attention to
your affairs out of doors, still find as much leisure for
study and composition as most literary men devote to
those purposes. I say nothing of the pabulum of
rural influences on your mind, but will just hint at
another incidental advantage you may not have
thought of, viz.: that the public show much more
alacrity in crowning an author, if he does not make
bread and butter of the laurels! In other words, if
you are a farmer, you are supposed (by a world not
very brilliant in its conclusions) to expend the most of
your mental energies (as they do) in making your
living; and your literature goes for an “aside”—
waste-water, as the millers phrase it—a very material
premise in both criticism and public estimation.

At your age, the above picture would have been
thrown away on myself, and I presume (inviting as it
seems to my world-weary eyes) it is thrown away now
upon you. I shall therefore try to present to you the
lights and shadows of the picture which seem to you
more attractive.

Your first step will be to select New York as the
city which is to be illustrated by your residence, and
to commence a search after some literary occupation.
You have a volume of poetry which has been returned
to you by your “literary agent,” with a heavy charge
for procuring the refusal of every publisher to undertake
it, and with your pride quite taken out of you,
you are willing to devote your Latin and Greek, your
acquaintance with prosody and punctuation, and a very
middling proficiency in chicography (no offence—
your mother showed me your autograph list of bills
for the winter term)—all this store of accomplishment

you offer to employ for a trifle besides meat, lodging,
and apparel. These, you say, are surely moderate
expectations for an educated man, and such wares, so
cheap, must find a ready market. Of such stuff, you
know that editors are made, and in the hope of finding
a vacant editorial chair, you pocket your MSS., and
commence inquiry. At the end of the month, you
begin to think yourself the one person on earth for
whom there seems no room. There is no editor
wanted, no sub-editor wanted, no reporter, no proof-reader,
no poet! There are passable paragraphists by
scores—educated young men, of every kind, of promising
talent, who, for twenty dollars a month, would
joyfully do twice what you propose—give twice as
much time, and furnish twice as much “copy.” But
as you design, of course, to “go into society,” and
gather your laurels as they blossom, you can not
see your way very clearly with less than a hay-maker's
wages. You proceed with your inquiries,
however, and are, at last, quite convinced that few
things are more difficult than to coin uncelebrated
brains into current money—that the avenues for the
employment of the head, only, are emulously crowded—that
there are many more than you had supposed
who have the same object as yourself, and that, whatever
fame may be in its meridian and close, its morning
is mortification and starvation.

The “small end of the horn” has a hole in it, however,
and the bitter stage of experience I have just
described, might be omitted in your history, if, by any
other means, you could be made small enough to go
in. The most considerable diminution of size, perhaps,
is the getting rid, for the time, of all idea of
“living like a gentleman” (according to the common
acceptation of the phrase). To be willing to satisfy
hunger in any clean and honest way, to sleep in any
clean and honest place, and to wear anything clean and
honestly paid for, are phases of the crescent moon of
fame, not very prominently laid down in our imaginary
chart; but they are, nevertheless, the first indication
of that moon's waxing. I see by the advertisements,
that there are facilities now for cheap living, which did
not exist “when George the Third was king.” A
dinner (of beef, bread, and potatoes, with a bottle of
wine) is offered, by an advertiser, of the savory name
of G— for a shilling, and a breakfast, most invitingly
described, is offered for sixpence. I have no
doubt a lodging might be procured at the same modest
rate of charge. “Society” does not move on this
plane, it is true, but society is not worth seeking at
any great cost, while you are obscure, and if you'll
wait till the first moment when it would be agreeable
(the moment when it thinks it worth while to caress
you), it will come to you, like Mohammed to the mountain.
And like the mountain's moving to Mohammed,
you will find any premature ambition on the subject.

Giving up the expectation of finding employment
suited to your taste, you will, of course, be “open to
offers,” and I should counsel you to take any that
would pay, which did not positively shut the door
upon literature. At the same wages you had better
direct covers in a newspaper office, than contribute
original matter which costs you thought, yet is not
appreciated; and in fact, as I said before with reference
to farming, a subsistence not directly obtained
by brain-work, is a material advantage to an author.
Eight hours of mere mechanical copying, and two
hours of leisurely composition, will tire you less, and
produce more for your reputation than twelve hours
of intellectual drudgery. The publishers and booksellers
have a good deal of work for educated men—
proof-reading, compiling, corresponding, &c., and this
is a good step to higher occupation. As you moderate
your wants, of course you enlarge your chances
for employment.

Getting up in the world is like walking through a
mist—your way opens as you get on. I should say,
that with tolerable good fortune, you might make by
your pen, two hundred dollars the first year, and increase
your income a hundred dollars annually, for
five years. This, as a literary “operative.” After
that period, you would either remain stationary, a
mere “workey,” or your genius would discover “by
the dip of the divining rod,” where, in the well-searched
bowels of literature, lay an unworked vein
of ore. In the latter case, you would draw that one
prize in a thousand blanks of which the other competitors
in the lottery of fame feel as sure as yourself.

As a “stock” or “starring” player upon the literary
stage, of course you desire a crowded audience,
and it is worth your while, perhaps, to inquire (more
curiously than is laid down in most advices to authors)
what is the number and influence of the judicious,
and what nuts it is politic to throw to the groundlings.
Abuse is, in criticism, what shade is in a picture, discord
in harmony, acid in punch, salt in seasoning.
Unqualified praise is the death of Tarpeia, and to be
neither praised nor abused is more than death—it is
inanition. Query—how to procure yourself to be
abused? In your chymical course next year, you will
probably give a morning's attention to the analysis of
the pearl, among other precious substances, and you
will be told by the professor, that it is the consequence
of an excess of carbonate of lime in the flesh of the
oyster—in other words, the disease of the sub-aqueous
animal who produces it. Now, to copy this politic
invalid—to learn wisdom of an oyster—find out
what is the most pungent disease of your style, and
hug it 'till it becomes a pearl. A fault carefully
studied is the germ of a peculiarity, and a peculiarity
is a pearl of great price to an author. The critics
begin very justly by hammering at it as a fault, and
after it is polished into a peculiarity, they still hammer
at it as a fault, and the noise they make attracts
attention to the pearl, and up you come from the deep
sea of obscurity, not the less intoxicated with the sunshine,
because, but for your disease, you would never
have seen it.

With one more very plain piece of counsel, I have
done. Never take the note of any man connected
with literature, if he will cash it for fifty per cent.

Breakfasts and the Quarterly.—Mr. Lockhart
cna never do harm except indirectly. His assertions
and his criticisms are taken with more than the
“grain of salt.” Mr. Cooper may have a private
quarrel with him for some of his ungentlemanly
phraseology, but for the literary part of the criticism
on “England,” it will stand in the place of a good advertisement
to the book, and there ends all its good
and evil. In the following passage, however, a blow
(most unwise and most injurious) is struck at one of
the pleasantest usages of English hospitality:—

“We suspect that Mr. Cooper will not think Mr.
Rogers's breakfasts quite so admirable, nor the other
twenty so transcendantly agreeable, when he learns
that it is by no means usual to invite strangers to
breakfast in London, and that such breakfasts are
generally given when the guest is one about whose
manners, character, or social position, there is some
uncertainty—a breakfast is a kind of mezzo-termine,
between a mere visit and the more intimate hospitality
of a dinner. It is, as it were, a state of probation.”—
Quarterly Review for October.

As the great organ of the tory party in England,
the Quarterly might fairly be taken by a foreigner as
an authority upon a point of English manners. The
consequence follows, that he can not be invited to breakfast
without fair ground to presume it an insult. Shots
have been exchanged upon slighter ground. At the

best, a suspicion is thrown upon this mode of hospitality
which deprives it entirely of its easy and confidential
character; and that it is an injury to society
which could only be corrected by the publication of
a correct portrait of Mr. Lockhart. No one after
seeing it would credit any assertion he might make
upon a subject involving a knowledge of good-fellowship.

The editor of the Quarterly looks his vocation better
than any man it has been my fortune to see. In
his gait and voice there is a feline resemblance which
is remarkable. It is impossible for a human being to
be more like a cat. To aid the likeness, he is slightly
parry-toed, and when you see him creeping along
Pall Mall on his way to the club, you can not avoid
the impression that he is mousing. In his person he
is extremely thin, and, but for his mouth, Lockhart
would look like a gentleman. In that feature lies a
whole epitome of the man. The lips are short, and
of barely the thickness of the skin, and habitually
drawn in close against the teeth. To this feature,
which resembles somewhat the mouth of a small
purse, all the countenance seems subordinate. The
contraction pulls upon every muscle of his face, and
upon every muscle is stamped the malice of which
his mouth is the living and most legible type.

This description of the man is very apropos of his
opinions of breakfast. I presume he was never asked
to an unceremonious breakfast in his life. Would
any one in his senses begin his day by sitting down
opposite to such a face for a couple of hours? Not
willingly, I should think.

I presume every Englishman except the editor of
the Quarterly will agree that to ask a stranger to
breakfast is much more flattering than to invite him
to dinner. Engagements to breakfast, indeed, are
almost always made at dinner. The reply to a letter
of introduction is usually a card and an invitation to
dine. If your host is pleased with you, nothing is
more common than for him to say at parting, “You
have been so engrossed that I have scarce spoken to
you—come and breakfast with me to-morrow at nine.”
You accept, and you improve on acquaintance into a
friend. In a snug library, all ceremony put off, the
mind tranquil and sincere, you enter upon a different
class of subjects, more familiar, more confidential.
The attention of your host is more undivided, and
your conversation leads you to make engagements for
the day, or the evening; and thus a man with whom
you might have discussed the corn-laws or the new
opera, forty times, across the glare of a dinner-table,
and only known at last as a talker of commonplaces,
becomes a pleasant friend, perhaps an intimate companion.

I have not the Quarterly Review by me at this moment,
but, if I do not mistake, the breakfasts with the
poet Rogers, described by Mr. Cooper, furnish the
text for Mr. Lockhart's “new light” upon this subject.
I am happy to have it in my power to set our
countrymen right upon the estimation in which
Cooper is held by that polished and venerable amphytrion.
It was kindly and complimentarily done of
Mr. Rogers to talk a great deal of a compatriot,
of whose talents he justly supposed every American
should be proud. I was enjoying (according to
Mr. Lockhart) the equivocal honor of breakfasting
with him—an honor which, questionable or not,
I shared with one of the most distinguished foreigners
then in England. This latter gentleman professed
the highest enthusiasm for the works of Cooper,
and took pains to draw out the venerable poet on the
subject of his personal manners, conversation, &c. A
handsomer eulogium of an absent author I never
heard. Mr. Rogers admired the bold independence
of his cast of mind, and spoke in the highest terms of
him as a gentleman and a friend. I can not, if it
were proper, quote the exact words he used; but,
subtract from this praise all you please to fancy might
have been said in kindness or compliment to a compatriot,
there was still enough left to gratify the self-love
of the most exacting.

If Mr. Lockhart had ever been similarly honored,
he would have excused Mr. Cooper for dwelling complacently
on the “breakfasts in St. James's Place.”
Rogers has lived in the very core of all that is precious
or memorable of two ages of English wit, literature,
and politics, himself oftenest the bright centre
around which it gathered. His manners are amenity
itself, his wit is celebrated, his powers, of narration
delightful. With all this he seems to forget his own
fame and himself, and never to have known envy or
ill-will. As he sits at that small breakfast-table, his
head silvery white, the bland smile of intellectual enjoyment
upon his lips, talking or listening with equal
pleasure, and with the greatest tact and delicacy, alternately
drawing out the resources of his guests, and
exhibiting modestly his own, he is a picture of tranquil,
dignified, and green old age, which it were a pity
to have travelled far and not seen. I felicitate Mr.
Cooper on the possession of his esteem and friendship.
I please myself with remembering that I have
seen him. I pity Mr. Lockhart that the class of entertainments
of which this is one, is reserved for those
whose faces will not “spoil the cream.”

Between butchering for Fraser and dissecting for
the Quarterly, Mr. Lockhart may have derived a sufficient
revenue to “give dinners;” but he forgets that
more amiable literature is not so salcable, and that his
brother authors are compelled to entertain strangers at
breakfast. Taboo that meal, and, good heavens!
what becomes of the “great army of writers” in London,
who, over “tea and toast,” in their quiet lodgings,
give the admiring pilgrim of literature a feast of
reason—one alone worth all the dinners of May fair?

What becomes of younger sons, and callow orators,
and lawyers in the temple, who, over red herrings and
coffee, let the amused guest into the secrets of their
menus-plaisirs, and trenching a half-crown, at the
most, upon their slender pockets, send him away delighted
with their gay hospitality. Breakfasts! What
would you know of authors and artists without
breakfasts? You see but half the man in his works.
Would you rather breakfast with Chantrey in his studio,
and hear him criticise his own marble, or dine
with him at Lord Lansdowne's, and listen to his bavardage
upon fly-fishing? Would you rather see gentle
Barry Cornwall, smothered and silent, among wits and
lordlings at “miladi's,” or breakfast with him in his
crammed library in St. John's Wood, and hear him
read one of his unpublished songs, with the tears in
his eyes, and the children at his knee, breathless with
listening? Would you rather meet Moore, over a
cup of tea, in the shop-parlor at Longman's, in Paternoster
row, or see him at one of the show-dinners
of this publishing Mecenas, at his villa in Hampstead?
Out upon the malicious hand that would sow
distrust and suspicion in these delightful by-paths of
hospitality!

An author is always a double existence, and it is
astonishing how different may be the intellectual man
from his everyday representative. Lockhart, the author
of Valerius, Adam Blair, and the Life of Sir
Walter Scott, is a splendid and delightful intellect—
no one can deny it. Mr. Lockhart, the gentleman
who looks as if he had a perpetual inclination to
whistle, and who does the bourreau for the Quarterly,
is an individual I should rather meet anywhere than—
at breakfast. Heaven send him a relaxation of his
facial muscles, and a little charity to leave the world
with.

A Spring Day in Winter.—A spring day sometimes
bursts upon us in December. One scarcely
knows whether the constant warmth of the fire, or the
fresh sunny breathings from the open window, are the
most welcome. At such a time, the curtains swing
lazily to the mild wind as it enters, and the light green
leaves of the sheltered flowers stir and erect themselves
with an out-of-door vigor, and the shuffled steps
and continued voices of the children in the street,
have the loitering and summer-like sound of June. I
do not know whether it is not a cockney feeling, but
with all my love for the country, fixed as it is by the
recollections of a life mostly spent in the “green
fields” I sometimes “babble of,” there is something in
a summer morning in the city, which the wet, warm
woods, and the solitary, though lonely haunts of the
country do not, after all the poetry that has been
“spilt upon them” (as Neal would say), at all equal.
Whether it is that we find so much sympathy in the
many faces that we meet, made happy by the same
sweet influences, or whatever else may be the reason,
certes, I never take my morning walk on such a day,
without a leaping in my heart, which, from all I can
gather by dream or revelation, has a touch in it of
Paradise. I returned once, on such a day, from an
hour's ramble after breakfast. The air rushed past
my temples with the grateful softness of spring, and
every face that passed had the open, inhaling expression
which is given by the simple joy of existence.
The sky had the deep clearness of noon. The clouds
were winnowed in light parallel curves, looking like
white shells inlaid on the arched heavens; the smooth,
glassy bay was like a transparent abyss opening to the
earth's centre, and edging away underneath, with a
slope of hills, and spires, and leafless woods, copied
minutely and perfectly from the upper landscape, and
the naked elms seemed almost clothed as the teeming
eye looked on them, and the brown hills took a teint
of green—so freshly did the summer fancies crowd
into the brain with the summer softness of the sunshine
and air. The mood is rare in which the sight
of human faces does not give us pleasure. It is a
curious occupation to look on them as they pass,
and study their look and meaning, and wonder at the
providence of God, which can provide, in this crowded
world, an object and an interest for all. With what
a singular harmony the great machine of society goes
on! So many thousand minds, and each with its
peculiar cast and its positive difference from its fellow,
and yet no dangerous interference, and no discord
audible above the hum of its daily revolution. I
could not help feeling a religious thrill, as I passed
face after face, with this thought in my mind, and saw
each one earnest and cheerful, each one pressing on
with its own object, without waiting or caring for the
equally engrossing object of the other. The man of
business went on with an absorbed look, caring only
to thread his way rapidly along the street. The student
strided by with the step of exercise, his lips
parted to admit the pleasant air to his refreshed lungs,
and his eye wandering with bewildered pleasure from
object to object. The schoolboy looked wistfully up
and down the street, and lingered till the last stroke
of the bell summoned him tardily in. The womanish
school-girl, with her veil coquettishly drawn, still
flirted with her boyish admirer, though it was “after
nine,” and the child, with its soiled satchel and shining
face, loitered seriously along the sidewalk, making
acquaintance with every dog, and picking up every
stone on its unwilling way. The spell of the atmosphere
was universal, and yet all kept on their several
courses, and the busy harmony of employment went
steadily and unbrokenly on. How rarely we turn
upon ourselves, and remember how wonderfully we
are made and governed!

Evanescent Impressions.—I have very often, in
the fine passages of society—such as occur sometimes
in the end of an evening, or when a dinner-party
has dwindled to an unbroken circle of choice
and congenial spirits, or at any of those times when
conversation, stripped of all reserve or check, is
poured out in the glowing and unfettered enthusiasm
to which convivial excitement alone gives the confidence
necessary to its flow—I have often wished, at
such times, that the voice and manner of the chance
and fleeting eloquence about us could be arrested and
written down for others beside ourselves to see and
admire. In a chance conversation at a party, in the
bagatelle rattle of a dance, in a gay hour over coffee
and sandwiches en famille, wherever you meet those
whom you love or value, there will occur pieces of
dialogue, jeux d'esprit, passages of feeling or fun—
trifles, it is true, but still such trifles as make eras in
the calendar of happiness—which you would give the
world to rescue from their ephemeral destiny. They
are, perhaps, the soundings of a spirit too deep for
ordinary life to fathom, or the gracefulness of a fancy
linked with too feminine a nature to bear the eye of
the world, or the melting of a frost of reserve from
the diffident genius—they are traces of that which is
fleeting, or struck out like phosphorus from the sea
by irregular chance—and you want something quicker
and rarer than formal description to arrest it warm
and natural, and detain it in its place till it can be
looked upon.

The First Feeling of Winter.—How delightfully
the first feeling of winter comes on the mind!
What a throng of tranquillizing and affectionate
thoughts accompany its first bright fires, and the
sound, out of doors, of its first chilling winds. Oh,
when the leaves are driven in troops through the
streets, at nightfall, and the figures of the passers-by
hurry on, cloaked and stooping with the cold, is there
a pleasanter feeling in the world than to enter the
closed and carpeted room, with its shaded lamps, and
its genial warmth, and its cheerful faces about the
evening table! I hope that I speak your own sentiment,
dear reader, when I prefer to every place and
time, in the whole calendar of pleasure, a winter
evening at home—the “sweet, sweet home” of childhood,
with its unreserved love and its unchanged and
unmeasured endearments. We need not love gayety
the less. The light and music and beauty of the
dance will always breed a floating delight in the brain
that has not grown dull to life's finer influences; yet
the pleasures of home, though serener are deeper,
and I am sure that the world may be searched over in
vain for a sense of joy so even and unmingled. It is
a beautiful trait of Providence that the balance is
kept so truly between our many and different blessings.
It were a melancholy thing to see the summer
depart with its superb beauty, if the heart did not
freshen as it turned in from its decay to brood upon
its own treasures. The affections wander under the
enticement of all the outward loveliness of nature,
and it is necessary to unwind the spell, that their rich
kindness may not become scattered and visionary. I
have a passion for these simple theories, which I trust
will be forgiven. I indulge in them as people pun.
They are too shadowy for logic, it is true—like the
wings of the glendoveer, in Kehama, gauze-like and
filmy, but flying high withal. You may not grow
learned, but you surely will grow poetical upon them.
I would as lief be praised by a blockhead as be asked
the reason.

The Poet Shelley.—Shelley has a private nook
in my affections. He is so unlike all other poets that

I can not mate him. He is like his own “skylark”
among birds. He does not keep ever up in the thin
air with Byron, like the eagle, nor sing with Keats
low and sweetly like the thrush, nor, like the dove
sitting always upon her nest, brood with Wordsworth
over the affections. He begins to sing when the
morning wakes him, and as he grows wild with his
own song, he mounts upward,
and it is wonderful how he loses himself, like the
delirious bird in the sky, and with a verse which may
be well compared for its fine delicacy with her little
wings, penetrates its far depths fearlessly and full of
joy. There is something very new in this mingled
trait of fineness and sublimity. Milton and Byron
seem made for the sky. Their broad wings always
strike the air with the same solemn majesty. But
Shelley, near the ground, is a very “bird in a bower,”
running through his merry compass as if he never
dreamed of the upward and invisible heavens. Withal,
Shelley's genius is too fiery to be moody. He was a
melancholy man, but it was because he was crossed
in the daily walk of life, and such anxieties did not
touch his imagination. It was above—far, far above
them. His poetry was not, like that of other poets,
linked with his common interests; and if it “unbound
the serpent of care from his heart,” as doubtless
it did, it was by making him forget that it was
there. He conceived and wrote in a wizard circle.
The illiberal world was the last thing remembered,
and its annoying prejudices, gall him as they might in
the exercise of his social duties, never followed over
the fiery limit of his fancy. Never have we seen
such pure abstraction from earthliness as in the temper
of his poetry. It is the clear, intellectual lymph,
unalloyed and unpolluted.

An Author's Judgment of his own Works.—
It is a false notion that the writer is no judge of his
own book. Verses in manuscript and verses in print,
in the first place, are very different things, and the
mood of writing and the mood of reading what one
has written, are very different moods. We do not
know how it is with others, but we open our own
volume with the same impression of strangeness and
novelty that we do another's. The faults strike us at
once, and so do the beauties, if there are any, and we
read coolly in a new garb, the same things which
upon paper recalled the fever of composition, and
rendered us incapable of judgment. As far as I can
discover by others' experience and my own, no writer
understands the phenomena of composition. It is
impossible to realize, in reading, that which is to him
impassioned, the state of feeling which produced it.
His own mind is to himself a mystery and a wonder.
The thought stands before him, visible to his outward
eye, which he does not remember has ever haunted
him. The illustration from nature is often one which
he does not remember to have noticed—the trait of
character, or the peculiar pencilling of a line in beauty
altogether new and startling. He is affected to tears
or mirth, his taste is gratified or shocked, his fancy
amused or his cares beguiled, as if he had never before
seen it. It is his own mind, but he does not recognise
it. He is like the peasant-child taken and
dressed richly; he does not know himself in his new
adornments. There is a wonderful metamorphosis in
print. The author has written under strong excitement,
and with a development and reach of his own
powers which would amuse him were he conscious
of the process. There are dim and far chambers in
the mind which are never explored by reason. Imagination
in her rapt phrensy wanders blindly there
sometimes, and brings out their treasures to the light
—ignorant of their value, and almost believing that
the dreams when they glitter are admired. There
are phantoms which haunt the perpetual twilight of
the inner mind, which are arrested only by the daring
hand of an overwrought fancy, and like a need done
in a dream, the difficult steps are afterward but faintly
remembered. It is wonderful how the mind accumulates
by unconscious observation—how the teint of a
cloud, or the expression of an eye, or the betrayal of
character by a word, will lie for years forgotten in the
memory till it is brought out by some searching
thought to its owner's wonder.

Frost.—It is winter—veritable winter—with bona-fide
frost, and cramping cold, and a sun as clear and
powerless as moonlight. The windows glitter with
the most fantastic frost-work. Cities, with their
spires and turrets, ranks of spears, files of horsemen
—every gorgeous and brilliant array told of in romance
or song, start out of that mass of silvery tracery,
like the processions of a magic mirror. What a
miraculous beauty there is in frost! What fine work
in its radiant crystals! What mystery in its exact
proportions and its maniform varieties! The feathery
snow-flake, the delicate rime, the transparent and
sheeted ice, the magnificent ice-berg moving down
the sea like a mountain of light—how beautiful are
they all, and how wonderful is it, that, break and
scatter them as you will, you find under every form
the same faultless angles, the same crystalline and
sparkling radiation. It sometimes grows suddenly
cold at noon. There has been a heavy mist all the
morning, and as the north wind comes sharply in, the
air clears and leaves it frozen upon everything, with
the thinness of palpable air. The trees are clothed
with a fine white vapor, as if a cloud had been arrested
and fixed motionless in the branches. They look, in
the twilight, like gigantic spirits, standing in broad
ranks, and clothed in drapery of supernatural whiteness
and texture. On close examination, the crystals
are as fine as needles, and standing in perfect parallelism,
pointing in the direction of the wind. They are
like fringes of the most minute threads, edging every
twig and filament of the tree, so that the branches are
thickened by them, and have a shadowy and mysterious
look, as if a spirit foliage had started out from the
naked limbs. It is not so brilliant as the common
rime seen upon the trees after a frozen rain, but it is
infinitely more delicate and spiritual, and to me seems
a phenomenon of exquisite novelty and beauty.

The Closing Year.—It is a melancholy task to
reckon with the departed year. To trace back the
curious threads of affection through its many-colored
woof, and knot anew its broken places—to number
the missing objects of interest, the dead and the neglected—to
sum up the broken resolutions, the deferred
hopes, the dissolved phantoms of anticipation, and
the many wanderings from the leading star of duty
—this is indeed a melancholy task, but, withal, a
profitable, and, it may sometimes be, a pleasant and a
soothing one. It is wonderful in what short courses
the objects of this world move. They are like arrows
feebly shot. A year—a brief year, is full of things
dwindled and finished and forgotten. Nothing keeps
evenly on. What is there in the running calendar
of the year that has departed, which has kept its place
and its magnitude? Here and there an aspirant for
fame still stretches after his eluding shadow—here and
there an enthusiast still clings to his golden dream—
here and there (and alas! how rarely) a friend keeps

his truth, and a lover his fervor—but how many more,
that were as ambitious, as enthusiastic, as loving as
these, when this year began, are now sluggish, and
cold, and false? You may keep a record of life, and
as surely as it is human, it will be a fragmented and
disjointed history, crowded with unaccountableness
and change. There is nothing constant. The links
of life are for ever breaking, but we rush on still. A
fellow-traveller drops from our side into the grave—a
guiding star of hope vanishes from the sky—a creature
of our affections, a child or an idol, is snatched from
us—perhaps nothing with which we began the race is
left to us, and yet we do not halt. “Onward—still
onward” is the eternal cry, and as the past recedes,
the broken ties are forgotten, and the present and future
occupy us alone.

There are bright chapters in the past, however. If
our lot is capricious and broken, it is also new and
various. One friend has grown cool, but we have
won another. One chance was less fortunate than
we expected, but another was better. We have encountered
one man's prejudices, but, in so doing, we
have unexpectedly flattered the partialities of his
neighbor. We have neglected a recorded duty, but a
deed of charity done upon impulse, has brought up
the balance. In an equable temper of mind, memory,
to a man of ordinary goodness of heart, is pleasant
company. A careless rhymer, whose heart is better
than his head, says —

It was a good thought suggested by an ingenious
friend of mine, to make one's will annually, and remember
all whom we love in it in the degree of their
deservings. I have acted upon the hint since, and
truly it is keeping a calendar of one's life. I have
little to bequeath, indeed—a manuscript or two, some
half dozen pictures, and a score or two of much-thumbed
and choice authors—but, slight as these
poor mementoes are, it is pleasant to rate their difference,
and write against them the names of our friends,
as we should wish them left if we knew we were presently
to die. It would be a satisfying thought in sickness,
that one's friends would have a memorial to
suggest us when we were gone—that they would
know we wished to be remembered by them, and remembered
them among the first. And it is pleasant,
too, while alive, to change the order of appropriation
with the ever-varying evidences of affection. It is a
relief to vexation and mortified pride to erase the
name of one unworthy or false, and it is delightful,
as another gets nearer to your heart, with the gradual
and sure test of intimacy, to prefer him in your secret
register.

If I should live to be old, I doubt not it will be a
pleasant thing to look over these little testaments.
It is difficult, now, with their kind offices and pleasant
faces ever about one, to realize the changes of feeling
between the first and the last—more difficult still to
imagine, against any of those familiar names, the
significant asterisk which marks the dead—yet if the
common chances of human truth, and the still more
desperate changes of human life, continue—it is
melancholy to think what a miracle it would be if
even half this list, brief and youthful as it is, should
be, twenty years hence, living and unchanged.

The festivities of this part of the year always seemed
to me mistimed and revolting. I know not what
color the reflections of others take, but to me it is
simply the feeling of escape—the released breath of
fear after a period of suspense and danger. Accident,
misery, death, have been about us in their invisible
shapes, and while one is tortured with pain, and
another reduced to wretchedness, and another struck
into the grave beside us, we know not why or how, we are
still living and prosperous. It is next to a miracle that
we are so. We have been on the edge of chasms continually.
Our feet have tottered, our bosoms have
been grazed by the thick shafts of disease—had our
eyes been spirit-keen we should have been dumb with
fear at our peril. If every tenth sunbeam were a
deadly arrow—if the earth were full of invisible abysses
—if poisons were sown thickly in the air, life would
hardly be more insecure. We can stand upon our
threshold and see it. The vigorous are stricken down
by an invisible hand—the active and busy suddenly
disappear—death is caught in the breath of the night
wind, in the dropping of the dew. There is no place
or moment in which that horrible phantom is not
gliding among us. It is natural at each period of
escape to rejoice fervently and from the heart; but I
know not, if others look upon death with the same
irrepressible horror that I do, how their joy can be so
thoughtlessly trifling. It seems to me, matter for
deep, and almost fearful congratulation. It should
be expressed in religious places and with the solemn
voice of worship; and when the period has thus been
marked, it should be speedily forgotten lest its cloud
become depressing. I am an advocate for all the
gayety that the spirits will bear. I would reserve no
particle of the treasure of happiness. The world is
dull enough at the best. But do not mistake its
temper. Do not press into the service of gay pleasure
the thrilling solemnities of life. I think anything
which reminds me of death, solemn; any time, when
our escape from it is thrust irresistibly upon the mind,
a solemn time; and such is the season of the new
year. It should be occupied by serious thoughts.
It is the time to reckon with one's heart—to renew
and form resolutions—to forgive and reconcile and
redeem.

Midnight.—The bell struck as the word was written!
Twelve—and how many-toned in the human
ear are the measured strokes that have proclaimed it.
The well and contemplative, the sick and restless, the
reveller hailing it as the empress of the hours, and the
patient and solemn watcher by the dead, counting it
on his vigil, and shuddering at the dreadful silence it
makes audible—sleepless ambition starting from its
waking dream, and sleeping guilt blessedly aroused
from its nightmare of detection—with what a different
voice and meaning do the tremulous and lengthened
cadences of that same bell fall upon the different ears
that listen to them! Yet it is so with everything
about us—and the boldest and best lesson of philosophy
is that which teaches us that outward circumstances
have no color of their own—that the universe
is within us—that the eye sees no light or shadow,
and the ear hears no music or jar, and the senses receive
no impression of pain or pleasure, but as the
inward eye is light or shaded, the inward ear attuned
or discordant, and the inward sense painful or pleasurable.
It is a glorious creed—for by it, he who
governs his own soul holds the key of the universe.
Its colors are put on at his bidding, its music wakes
at his desire, and its magnificent changes, arbitrary
and omnipotent as they seem, take form and pressure
from the small, still thought in his bosom! Yet how
difficult it is! How true, that “he who ruleth his
own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.”
To put down at will the maniform spectres of
thought—to suppress fear and discouragement, and
sadness that comes up uncalled—to lay a finger on
the lip of complaint, and seal up a tear in its cell, and
press down, with a stern fetter, the ungovernable
nerve of unrest—to “lay commandment” on a throbbing

pulse, and break the wings of a too earnest imagination,
and smother, in their first rising, the thousand
impatient feelings that come out of time and
season—this it is that the anchorite in his cell, and
the master spirit in his career, and the student, wasting
over his lamp, may pray, and wrestle, and search
into many mysteries for—in vain!

In my days of idleness (a habit, by-the-by, which
should be put down as a nervous complaint in the
books) I occupied, for some nine hours in the day, a
window opposite a city-clock. It was a tolerable
amusement, between breakfast and recitation, to watch
the passing of the hours, “hand over hand.” I thought
then, as I think now, that the great deficiency in the construction
of the human mind, is the want of something
on the principle of the stop-watch, to suspend its operations
at will—but it is no slight relief, since I must
think, to have a dial-plate, or a nail in the wall, or any
object that it is no trouble to see, to serve as a nucleus
to thought. By-and-by, with the force of habit,
the dial became necessary. I could not think
tranquilly without it. My pulses beat sixty in the
minute. My imagination built by the hour—nine—
ten—twelve castles a day, as the lectures interfered
more or less with my repose.

In the course of time, I fell into the habit of musing
on the circumstances dependant on the arrival of
the hours, and as my mood happened to be gay or
gloomy, I pondered, with the strong sympathy of unoccupied
feelings, on the happiness or misery they
brought. If it was a bright sunny forenoon in May,
and the eggs had been well boiled at breakfast, the
striking of the clock—say twelve—stirred a thousand
images of pleasure. The boys just leaping out of
school, the laborer released from his toil, the belle
stepping forth for a promenade, the patient in the interval
of his fever—all came up in my imagination,
and their several feelings, with all the heightening of
imagination, became my own. If the weather was
hot, on the contrary, or the professor had bored me
at lecture, or if my claret was pricked at dinner, I
suffered the miseries of an hospital. There goes the
clock—say four! Some poor fellow now, at this very
moment, is baring his limb to the surgeon—the afternoon
is at the hottest, and the sick are getting restless
and weary—some hectic consumptive, fallen, perhaps,
into a chance sleep, is waked, by the troublesome
punctuality of his nurse, to take his potion—it
is the hour the dying man is told he can not survive.
Every misery imaginable under the sun rose in phantoms
around me, and I suffered and groaned under
the concentrated horrors of them all. It serves to
show how the mind is its own slave or its own master.
And so, having arrived at the moral, with your leave,
dear reader, for it is “past one,” I will to bed. Good
night!

Snow.—The black, unsightly pavement, every
stone of which you know with as cursed a particularity
as the chinks in the back of your fireplace, covered
with white. The heavy-wheeled carts, which
the day before shook the ground under you, and split
your ears with their merciless noise, replaced by sleds
with musical bells, driven swiftly and skilfully past.
The smoked houses, with their provokingly-regular
windows and mean doors, that have disturbed the sentiment
of grace in your fancy every walk you have
taken for months, all laden, and tipped, and frosted
into lines and surfaces of beauty; faultless icicles
hanging from the eaves of the shutters, and sparkling
crystals of snow edging every projecting stone—
magic could not exceed it! If the horn of Astolpho
had been blown from the cupola of the statehouse,
and the whole city had run mad, things could
not have looked more strangely new and delightful.
And the sleighing—other people like it, and for their
sake I blessed Providence for another item. I like it
myself—for the first mile. But with the loss of sensation
in our feet and hands, I have a trick of growing
very unhappy. I am content, after one ride, with
seeing a sleigh through a parlor-window.

Eight o'clock—how merrily the sleigh-bells ring
to-night! One comes into hearing as another is lost,
and the loud, laughing, and merry voices of the gay
riders come up to my retired room in the veriest contrast
to my own quiet occupation. How more than
solitude it separates one from humanity, to live in the
midst of the gay world and take no part in its enjoyments!
An eremite in the crowd is the only contented
solitary. In the midst of the heaviest sadness
the heart feels in this wretched world, the form of
distant pleasure is beautiful. We must live near that
treacherous dame to know how sorrows lurk in her
shadow. Break down the imagination as you will, and
bind it by the most relentless memories to your sick
heart, it will steal away to scenes you had thought
forgotten, and come back fired with their false beauty,
to tempt you to try their winning flatteries once
more. It is only by knowing that you can call gayety
at any moment to your side, that you can quite
forget it; and the studious tenant of a garret, to
whose solitude the mingled murmur of a city comes
constantly up—who can abandon his books whenever
the fancy takes him, for the crowd, and enter and
throng on with it after its fleeting lure—is the only
man who, with youth and the common gifts of Providence,
can heartily despise it.

And he—if contrast is (as who will deny that has
followed after the impossible spirit of contentment, till
hope is dead within him)—if contrast is, I say, the
only bliss in life—then does he, the scholar in the
crowd, live with a most excellent wisdom. He is
roused from communion with a spirit whose immortal
greatness has outlived twenty generations, by the
passing mirth of a fool whose best deed will not live
in the world's memory an hour. He sits and pores
upon an eternal truth, or fires his fancy with heavenly
poetry, or winds about him the enchantments of truth-woven
fiction, or searches the depths of his own sufficient
heart for the sublime wisdom of human nature,
and from the very midst he is plucked back to this
every-day world, and compelled to the use of faculties
in which a brute animal equals or surpasses him!
One moment following the employment of an angel,
the next contending with meanness and cunning for
his daily bread—now kindled to rapture with some
new form of beauty, and now disgusted to loathing
with some new-developed and unredeemable baseness
in his fellow-men. What contrast is there like this?
Who knows so well as a scholar the true sweetness
of surprise? the delightful and only spice of this otherwise
contemptible life—novel sensation?

Change.—How natural it is, like the host in the
rhyme, to

How true a similitude it is of every change, not only
of time and season, but of feeling and fancy. I have
just walked from the window where I stood looking
upon the two elms that have refreshed my eye with
their lively verdure the summer long, and the adventurous
vine, overtopping our neighbor's chimneys, that
was covered but a week ago with masses of splendid
crimson and scarlet, and with the irresistible regret I feel
always at the decay of nature powerful within me, I have
seated myself at the fire, with a gladness in the supplanting
pleasures of winter, that brings with it, not
only a consolation for the loss, but an immediate forgetfulness
of the past. “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is
more delightful than to feel a new passion rising when
the flame that burned before is not quite extinguished,
as, when the sun sets, we turn with pleasure
to the rising moon.” Who would give a fig for
friendship! Who would waste golden hours in winning
regard! Who, with this lesson before him,
would do aught but look well to his reckoning with
heaven, and turn in upon his own soul what time and
talents are left to him after! It is a bitter philosophy
to learn. The outward world is my first love, and,
with all my disappointment, it is difficult at first to
set up a new altar for the inner. I would not be ascetic;
neither would I be so happy that, like Polycrates,
I must throw my ring into the sea that I may
have something to lament; but I believe he has the
true savoir vivre, who, believing fully in the world's
unprofitableness, is willing to be amused by it, and
who, conversant with its paths and people, has better
places and friends (solitude and his books) to which
he can enter and shut the door to be at peace.

Winter Trip to Nahant.—The old chronicler,
Time, strides on over the holyday seasons as if nothing
could make him loiter. It may be a hallucination,
but a winter's day, spite of the calendar, is as
long to me as two summer ones. I do not feel the
scene pass. There is no measure kept on my senses
by its evenly-told pulse. The damp morning, and the
silent noon, and the golden twilight, come and go;
and if I breathe the freshness of the one, and sleep
under the repose of the other, and gaze upon the
beauties of the third, why, the end of existence seems
answered. Labor is not in harmony with it. The
thought that disturbs a nerve is an intrusion. Life's
rapid torrent loiters in a pool, and its bubbles all break
and are forgotten. Indolence is the mother of philosophy,
and I “let the world slide.” I think with
Rousseau, that “the best book does but little good to
the world, and much harm to the author.” I remember
Colton's three difficulties of authorship, and Pelham's
flattering unction to idleness, that “learning is
the bane of a poet.” The “mossy cell of peace,”
with its

is a very Eden; and, of all the flowers of the field,
that which has the most meaning is your lily that
“toils not, neither does it spin;” and of all the herbs
of the valley, the
has the most medicinal balm. I am of the school of
Epicurus. I no longer think the “judicious voluptuousness”
of Godwin dangerous. Like the witch of
Atlas, I could “pitch my tent upon the plain of the
calm Mere,” and rise and fall for ever to its indolent
swell. And speaking of idleness (I admire Mochingo's
talent for digression—“Now thou speakest of
immortality, how is thy wife, Andrew”)—one of the
pleasantest ways of indulging that cardinal virtue
used to be by an excursion to Nahant. Establishing
myself unostentariously upon the windward quarter
of the boat, to avoid the vile volatile oils from the
machinery—Shelley in one hand, perhaps, or Elia, or
quaint Burton—(English editions, redolent in Russia,
and printed as with types of silver)—with one of these,
I say, to refresh the eye and keep the philosophic
vein breathing freely, the panorama of the bay passes
silently before my eye—island after island, sail after
sail, like the conjurations of a magic mirror. And
this is all quiet, let me tell you—all in harmony with
the Socratic humor—for the reputable steamer Ousatonic
(it distresses me daily that it was not spelt with
an H) is none of your fifteen-milers—none of your
high-pressure cut-waters, driving you through the
air, breathless with its unbecoming velocity, and with
the fear of the boiler before your eyes—but with a
dignified moderation, consistent with a rational doubt
of the integrity of a copper-kettle, and a natural abhorrence
of hot water, she glides safely and softly
over her half-dozen miles an hour, and lands you,
cool and good-humored, upon the rocky peninsula,
for a consideration too trifling to be mentioned in a
well-bred period. And then if the fates will me an
agreeable companion (I wish we had time to describe
my beau-ideal), how delightful, as Apple island is
neared, with its sweep of green banks and its magnificent
elms—every foot of its tiny territory green and
beautiful—how delightful to speculate upon the character
of its eccentric occupant, and repeat the thousand
stories told of him, and peer about his solitary
cottage to catch a glimpse of his erect figure, and
draw fanciful portraits of his daughter, who, the world
says, for the sixteen years of her sweet life, has had
only the range of those limited lawns, which she may
ramble over in an hour—and, as the boat glides by, to
watch the fairy isle sleeping, if the bay is calm, with
its definite shadow, and looking like a sphere, floating
past in the air, covered with luxuriant verdure. It is
but a brief twelve miles from Boston to Nahant, and
the last four stretch out beyond the chain of islands,
upon the open sea. To a city-bred eye and fancy
there is a refreshing novelty, added to the expanding
influence of so broad a scene, which has in it a vigorous
and delightful stimulus. The mind gets out of
its old track. The back-ground of the mental picture
is changed, and it affects the whole. The illimitable
sky and water draw out the imagination to its remotest
link, and the far apart and shining sails, each covering
its little and peculiar world, and sped with the
thousand hopes of those for whom its lonely adventurers
are tracking the uncertain sea, win on the mind
to follow them upon their perilous way, and breathe
for them the “God speed” of unconscious interest.
It is a beautiful and magic sight to see them gliding
past each other on their different courses, impelled
by the same invisible wind, now dark with shadow,
and now turning full to the light, and specking the
horizon, like the white birds careering along the edge
of its definite line. The sea grows upon you as you
see it more. The disappointment felt at first in its
extent wears away, as you remember its vast stretch
under those blue depths, which your eye can not
search; and the waste of its “untrampled floor,” and
the different depths at which the different spoils of
the sunk ships have balanced and hung, and the innumerable
tribes who range their own various regions
of pressure, from the darkest caverns to the thin and
lighted chambers at its surface, all come step by step
upon the mind, and crowd it with a world of wondering
speculation. It is delightful to sit with the
agreeable companion spoken of, and with the green
waves heaving about us, to indulge in these wayward
and unprofitable imaginations. It is a splendid range
for a wild-winged thought—that measureless sea! I
love to talk of its strange mysteries. I love to go
down with one who will not check me with cold objections,
and number and shape out its inhabitants.
With such a fellow-wanderer, I have found palaces
that surpass Aladdin's, and beings to whom the upper
and uncondensed water has a suffocating thinness.
But these are idle speculations to the world's eye,
gentle reader, and should be reserved for your private
ear. We will go, some summer afternoon, and talk
them over together on the deck of that same deliberate
steamer. You have no idea how many things
are untold of the deep sea—how many dreams of it
an idler man than yourself will weave out of its green
depths in his after-dinner musings.

Sir Philip Sidney.—“Gentle Sir Philip Sidney,”
says Tom Nash, in two sweetly-flowing sentences
of his Pierce Penniless, “thou knewest what belonged
to a scholar; thou knewest what pains, what
toil, what travel, conduct to perfection; well couldst
thou give every virtue his encouragement, every art
his due, every writer his desert, 'cause none more
virtuous, witty, or learned, than thyself. But thou
art dead in thy grave, and hast left too few successors
of thy glory; too few to cherish the sons of the muses,
or water those budding hopes with their plenty,
which thy bounty erst planted.”—“He was not only
of an excellent wit,” relates, in his own confused and
rambling way, the eminent antiquarian John Aubrey,
who was born not more than forty years after Sidney's
decease, “but extremely beautiful; he much resembled
his sister, but his hair was not red, but a little inclining,
viz., a dark amber color. If I were to find fault
in it, methinks it is not masculine enough; yet he
was a person of great courage.”[1] “He was, if ever
there was one,” says another writer, “a gentleman
finished and complete, in whom mildness was associated
with courage, erudition mollified by refinement,
and courtliness dignified by truth. England will ever
place him among the noblest of her sons; and the
light of chivalry, which was his guide and beacon,
will ever lend its radiance to illume his memory. He
died at the age of thirty-two, and if the lives of Milton
and Dryden had not been prolonged beyond that
period, where would have been their renown?”

Glorious Sidney! It stirs the blood warmly about
one's heart to think of him. It is somewhat late in
the day, I know, to eulogize him; but his bright
honor and his beautiful career, are among my earliest
historical recollections, and I have remembered it
since with the passionate interest that in every one's
mind burns in, with an enamel of love, some one of
the bright images presented in boyhood. You have
some such idol of fancy, I dare answer for it, reader
of mine—some young (for young he must be, or affection
stiffens into respect)—some young and famous,
and withal courtly, and perhaps “beautiful,” winner
of a name. It is Gaston de Foix, perhaps, with his
fierce thirst for glory (the pictures of him by the old
masters are models of manly beauty), or the fourth
Henry, with his temper of romance (the handsomest
man in his kingdom), or (if you loved your classics)
Alcibiades (you forget, of course, that he was a voluptuary),
or the generous Antony (“Shakspere's” rather
than the historian's), or Hylas, or Endymion, or
Phæton (he cleared the first few planets in fine style),
or some other formosus puer adored and sung by the
glorious old bards upon the shores of Tiber or Ilissus.
He rises to your mind as I mention it—a figure of
graceful youth, the slight and elegant proportions of
the boy, just ripening into the muscular fulness of
manhood—his neck rising with a free majesty from
his shoulders, and his eye kindling with some passing
thought of glory, answered by the proud and deliberate
curving of his lip, and the animated expansion of
his nostril. You see him with your mind's eye—the
classic model and classic dream of your scholar-days,
when the sound of the leaves in the tree over you had
the swell of an hexameter in your ear, and your
thoughts came in Latin, and a line of Homer sprung
to your lips in your involuntary soliloquies. Ah!
those were days for dreams! Who would not let
slip the straining grasp of manhood—be it at wealth,
fame, power—anything for which he is flinging his
youth and gladness, and all his best treasures, behind
him—to be once more the careless dreamer that he
was—to lie once more upon a hill-side, and forget
everything in the unquestioned and unshadowed blessedness
of a boy!

Death-Love and Warning.—It was getting toward
midnight when a party of young noblemen came
out from one of the clubs of St. James street. The
servant of each, as he stepped upon the pavement,
threw up the wooden apron of the cabriolet, and
sprung to the head of the horse; but, as to the destination
of the equipages for the evening, there seemed
to be some dissensions among the noble masters.
Between the line of coroneted vehicles, stood a
hackney-coach, and a person in an attitude of expectancy
pressed as near the exhilarated group as he could
without exciting immediate attention.

“Whiich way?” said he whose vehicle was nearest,
standing with his foot on the step.

“All together, of course,” said another. “Let's
make a night of it.”

“Pardon me,” said the clear and sweet voice of
the last out from the club; “I secede for one. Go
your ways, gentlemen!”

“Now, what the deuse is afoot?” said the foremost,
again stepping back on the sidewalk. “Don't
let him off, Fitz! Is your cab here, Byron, or will
you let me drive you? By Jove, you sha'n't leave us!”

“But you shall leave me, and so you are not forsworn,
my friend! In plain phrase, I won't go with
you! And I don't know where I shall go; so spare
your curiosity the trouble of asking. I have a presentiment
that I am wanted—by devil or angel—

“And a very pretty hand it is, I dare swear,” said
the former speaker, jumping into his cab and starting
off with a spring of his blood horse, followed by all
the vehicles at the club-door, save one.

Byron stood looking after them a moment, and
raised his hat and pressed his hand hard on his forehead.
The unknown person who had been lurking
near, seemed willing to leave him for a moment to his
thoughts, or was embarrassed at approaching a stranger.
As Byron turned with his halting step to descend
the steps, however, he came suddenly to his side.

“My lord!” he said, and was silent, as if waiting
for permission to go on.

“Well,” replied Byron, turning to him without the
least surprise, and lookingly closely into his face by
the light of the street-lamp.

“I come to you with an errand which perhaps—”

“A strange one, I am sure; but I am prepared for
it—I have been forewarned of it. What do you require
of me? for I am ready!”

“This is strange!” exclaimed the man.—“Has
another messenger, then—”

“None except a spirit—for my heart alone told me
I should be wanted at this hour. Speak at once.”

“My lord, a dying girl has sent for you!”

“Do I know her?”

“She has never seen you. Will you come at once
—and on the way I will explain to you what I can of
this singular errand; though, indeed, when it is told
you, you know all that I comprehend.”

They were at the door of the hackney-coach, and
Byron entered it without further remark.

“Back again!” said the stranger, as the coachman
closed the door, “and drive for dear life, for we shall
scarce be in time, I fear!”

The heavy tongue of St. Paul's church struck
twelve as the rolling vehicle hurried on through the
now lonely street, and though so far from the place
whence they started, neither of the two occupants

had spoken. Byron sat with bare head and folded
arms in the corner of the coach; and the stranger,
with his hat crowded over his eyes, seemed repressing
some violet emotion; and it was only when they
stopped before a low door in a street close upon the
river, that the latter found utterance.

“Is she alive?” he hurriedly asked of a woman
who came out at the sound of the carriage-wheels.

“She was—a moment since—but be quick!”

Byron followed quickly on the heels of his companion,
and passing through a dimly lighted entry to
the door of a back-room, they entered. A lamp,
shaded by a curtain of spotless purity, threw a faint
light upon a bed, upon which lay a girl, watched by
a physician and a nurse. The physician had just removed
a small mirror from her lips, and holding it to
the light, he whispered that she still breathed. As
Byron passed the edge of the curtain, however, the
dying girl moved the fingers of the hand lying on the
coverlet, and slowly opened on him her languid eyes
—eyes of inexpressible depth and lustre. No one had
spoken.

“Here he is,” she murmured. “Raise me, mother,
while I have time to speak to him.”

Byron looked around the small chamber, trying in
vain to break the spell of awe which the scene threw
over him. An apparition from the other world could
not have checked more fearfully and completely the
worldly and scornful under-current of his nature.
He stood with his heart beating almost audibly, and
his knees trembled beneath him, awaiting what he
prophetically felt to be a warning from the very gate
of heaven.

Propped with pillows, and left by her attendants,
the dying girl turned her head toward the proud,
noble poet, standing by her bedside, and a slight blush
overspread her features, while a smile of angelic
beauty stole through her lips. In that smile the
face reawakened to its former loveliness, and seldom
had he who now gazed breathlessly upon her, looked
on such spiritual and incomparable beauty. The
spacious forehead and noble contour, still visible, of
the emaciated lips, bespoke genius impressed upon a
tablet all feminine in its language; and in the motion
of her hand, and even in the slight movement of her
graceful neck, there was something that still breathed
of surpassing elegance. It was the shadowy wreck
of no ordinary mortal passing away—humble as were
the surroundings, and strange as had been his summons
to her bedside.

“And this is Byron?” she said at last, in a voice
bewilderingly sweet even through its weakness.
“My lord! I could not die without seeing you—
without relieving my soul of a mission with which it
has long been burthened. Come nearer—for I have
no time left for ceremony, and I must say what I
have to say—and die! Beautiful,” she said, “beautiful
as the dream of him which has so long haunted
me! the intellect and the person of a spirit of light!
Pardon me, my lord, that, at a moment so important to
yourself, the remembrance of an earthly feeling has
been betrayed into expression.”

She paused a moment, and the bright color that had
shot through her cheek and brow faded, and her
countenance resumed its heavenly serenity.

“I am near enough to death,” she resumed—
“near enough to point you almost to heaven from
where I am; and it is on my heart like the one errand
of my life—like the bidding of God—to implore you
to prepare for judgment. Oh, my lord! with your
glorious powers, with your wondrous gifts, be not
lost! Do not, for the poor pleasures of a world like
this, lose an eternity in which your great mind will
outstrip the intelligence of angels. Measure this
thought—scan the worth of angelic bliss with the
intellect which has ranged so gloriously through the
universe; do not, on this one momentous subject
of human interest—on this alone be not short-sighted!”

“What shall I do?” suddenly burst from Byron's
lips in a tone of agony. But with an effort, as if
struggling with a death-pang, he again drew up his
form and resumed the marble calmness of his countenance.

The dying girl, meantime, seemed to have lost
herself in prayer. With her wasted hands clasped
on her bosom, and her eyes turned upward, the slight
motion of her lips betrayed to those around her that
she was pleading at the throne of mercy. The physician
crept close to her bedside, but with his hand in
his breast, and his head bowed, he seemed but watching
for the moment when the soul should take its
flight.

She suddenly raised herself on the pillow. Her
long brown tresses fell over her shoulders, and a
brightness unnatural and almost fearful kindled in her
eyes. She seemed endeavoring to speak, and gazed
steadfastly at Byron. Slowly, then, and tranquilly
she sank back again upon her pillow, and as her hands
fell apart, and her eyelids dropped, she murmured,
“Come to Heaven!” and the stillness of death was in
the room. The spirit had fled.

The breaking of the silver cord is the first tone from
the life-strings of genius, which is answered only in
vibrations of affection. This truth, indeed, is touchingly
shadowed forth in the accompaniments of death.
The dark colors in the drapery of life, are dropped in
the weaving of the shroud. The discords of music
are rejected in the melody of the dirge. The praise
upon the marble is the first tribute written without
disparagement, and the first suffered without dissent.
It is this new relation of the public to a great name—
this completed and lucent phase of a light in literature—which
seems to make a posthumous recast of
criticism one of the legitimate departments of a review.
Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of
criticism toward an author's fame, are essentially
changed by his death. His personal character, and
the events of his life—the foreground, so to speak, in
the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting
to the critical perspective; and when the hand to correct
is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded
is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve
in comparison and final estimate, are done way.

It is time for the reviews to take up, on this ground,
the character and writings of Hillhouse. The author
of Hadad, the most finished and lofty poem of its
time, should have been followed, within a year after
his death, by a new and reverential appreciation, and
living, as he did, in a learned and literary circle of
friends, a biography at least, was looked for, out of
which criticism might shape a fresh monument to his
genius. Such men as Hillhouse are not common,
even in these days of universal authorship. In accomplishment
of mind and person, he was probably
second to no man. His poems show the first. They
are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finished—works
for the highest taste to relish, and for the
severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model.
Hadad was published in 1825, during my second year in
college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven
of imagination. The leading characters possessed me
for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language
was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.
The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and
for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged
in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a
man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn
dignity and elegance of address. His person was very

finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high-bred,
and his countenance purely and brightly intellectual.
Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high
courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular simplicity
and taste in dress, and you have the portrait
of one who, in other days, would have been the mirror
of chivalry, and the flower of nobles and troubadors.
Hillhouse was no less distinguished in oratory.
There was still remembered, at the time of the publication
of Hadad, an oration pronounced by him at
the taking of his second degree—an oration upon
“the Education of a Poet,” gloriously written, and
most eloquently delivered. His poem of “the Judgement,”
delivered before the “Phi Beta Kappa Society,”
added in the same way to his renown, as did a
subsequent noble effort of eloquence, to which I listened
myself, with irresistible enchantment.

Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many
years of his life which he should have passed either
in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were
enslaved to the drudgery of business. His constitution
seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood,
however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and
when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to
the beautiful and poetic home of “Sachem's Wood,”
his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a
ripe and long enduring career of literature. In harmony
with such a life were all his surroundings—
scenery, society, domestic refinement, and companionship—and
never looked promise fairer for the realization
of a dream of glory. That he had laid out something
of such a field in the future, I chance to know,
for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he
confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a
series of dramas, different from all he had attempted,
upon which he designed to work with the first mood
and leisure he could command. And with his high
scholarship, knowledge of life, taste and genius, what
might not have been expected from its fulfilment?
But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light,
just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the world.
Love and honor to the memory of such a man.