University of Virginia Library

7. LETTER VII.

I am of opinion, dear Doctor, that a letter to be read
understandingly, should have marginal references to
the state of the thermometer, the condition of the
writer's digestion, and the quality of his pen and ink,
at the time of writing. These matters, if they do not
affect a man's belief in a future state, very sensibly operate
upon his style of composition, sometimes (so
with me at least), upon his sentiments and minor morals.

Like most other pen-and-inklings in this be-printed
country, I commenced authorship at precisely the
wrong end — criticism. Never having put my hat upon
more than one or two grown-up thoughts, I still feel
myself qualified to pronounce upon any man's literary
stature from Walter Scott to whom you please —
God forgive me! I remember (under this delusion of
Sathan) sitting down to review a book by one of the
most sensible women in this country. It was a pleasant
morning — favorable symptom for the author. I
wrote the name of the book at the head of a clean sheet
of Bath post, and the nib of my pen capered nimbly
away into a flourish, in a fashion to coax praise out of
a pumpkin. What but courtesy on so bright a morning
and with so smooth a pen? I was in the middle
of the page, taking breath after a long and laudatory
sentence, when, paff! through the window came a
gust of air, labelled for the bare nerves. (If you have
ever been in Boston, perhaps you have observed that
an east wind, in that city of blue noses in June, gives
you a sensation like being suddenly deprived of your
skin.) In a shudder of disgust I bore down upon the
dot of an i, and my pen, like an “over-tried friend,”
gave way under the pressure. With the wind in that
same quarter, dexterity died. After vain efforts to
mend my pen to its original daintiness, I amputated the
nib to a broad working stump, and aimed it doggedly
at the beginning of a new paragraph. But my wits
had gone about with the grasshopper on the church-steeple.
Nothing would trickle from that stumpy
quill, either graceful or gracious; and having looked
through the book, but with a view to find matter to
praise, I was obliged to run it over anew to forage for
the east wind. “Hence the milk in the cocoa-nut,”
as the showman says of the monkey's stealing children.
I wrote a savage review, which the reader was
expected to believe contained the opinions of the reviewer!!
Oh, Jupiter!

All this is to apologize, not for my own letter, which
I intend to be a pattern of good humor, but for a passage
in your last (if written upon a hard egg you
should have mentioned it in the margin), in which,
apropos of my jaunt to the Chemung, you accuse me
of being glad to get away from my hermitage. I
could write you a sermon now on the nature of content,
but you would say the very text is apocryphal. My
“lastly,” however, would go to prove that there is bigotry
in retirement as in all things either good or pleasureable.
The eye that never grows familiar with nature,
needs freshening from all things else. A room, a
chair, a musical instrument, a horse, a dog, the road
you drive daily, and the well you drink from, are all
more prized when left and returned to. The habit of
turning back daily from a certain mile-stone, in your
drive, makes that milestone after a while, a prison wall.
It is pleasant to pass it, though the road beyond be
less beautiful. If I were once more “brave Master
Shoetie, the great traveller,” it would irk me, I dare
say, to ride thirty miles in a rail-car drawn by one slow
horse. Yet it is a pleasant “lark” now, to run down
to Ithaca for a night, in this drowsy conveyance,
though I exchange a cool cottage for a fly-nest, “lavendered
linen” for abominable cotton, and the service
of civil William for the “young lady that takes care
of the chambers.” I like the cobwebs swept out
of my eyes. I like to know what reason I have to
keep my temper among my household gods. I like
to pay an extravagant bill for villanous entertainment
abroad, and come back to escape ruin in the luxuries
of home.

Doctor! were you ever a vagabond for years together?
I know you have hung your hat on the south
pole, but you are one of those “friend of the family”
men, who will travel from Dan to Beersheba, and be
at no charges for lodging. You can not understand, I
think, the life from which I have escaped — the life of
“mine ease in mine inn.” Pleasant mockery! You
have never had the hotel fever — never sickened of the
copperplate human faces met exclusively in those
homes of the homeless — never have gone distracted at
the eternal “one piece of soap, and the last occupant's
tooth-brush and cigar!” To be slighted any hour of
the evening for a pair of slippers and a tin candlestick
— to sleep and wake amid the din of animal wants,
complaining and supplied — to hear no variety of human
tone but the expression of these baser necessities
— to be waited on either by fellows who would bring
your coffin as unconcernedly as your breakfast, or by a
woman who is rude, because insulted when kind — to lie
always in strange beds — to go home to a house of strangers
— to be weary without pity, sick without soothing,
sad without sympathy — to sit at twilight by your lonely
window, in some strange city, and, with a heart
which a child's voice would dissolve in tenderness, to
see door after door open and close upon fathers, brothers,
friends, expected and welcomed by the beloved
and the beloving — these are costly miseries against
which I almost hourly weigh my cheaper happiness in
a home! Yet this is the life pined after by the grown-up
boy — the life called fascinating and mystified in romance
— the life, dear Doctor, for which even yourself
can fancy I am “imping my wing” anew! Oh, no!
I have served seven years for this Rachel of contentment,
and my heart is no Laban to put me off with a
Leah.

“A!” Imagine this capital letter laid on its back,
and pointed south by east, and you have a pretty fair
diagram of the junction of the Susquehannah and the
Chemung. The note of admiration describes a superb
line of mountains at the back of the Chemung
valley, and the quotation marks express the fine bluffs
that overlook the meeting of the waters at Athens.
The cross of the letter (say a line of four miles), defines
a road from one river to the other, by which
travellers up the Chemung save the distance to the
point of the triangle, and the area between is a broad
plain, just now as fine a spectacle of teeming harvest
as you would find on the Genesee.

As the road touches the Chemung, you pass under
the base of a round mountain, once shaped like a
sugar-loaf, but now with a top, o' the fashion of a
schoolboy's hat punched in to drink from; the floor-worn
edge of the felt answering to a fortification
around the rim of the hill built by — I should
be obliged if you would tell me whom. They call
it Spanish Hill, and the fortifications were old at
the time of the passing through of Sullivan's army.
It is as pretty a fort as my Uncle Toby could
have seen in Flanders, and was, doubtless, occupied
by gentlemen soldiers long before the Mayflower
moored off the rock of Plymouth. The tradition
runs that an Indian chief once ascended it to look for
Spanish gold: but on reaching the top, was enveloped
in clouds and thunder, and returned with a solemn
command from the spirit of the mountain that no Indian
should ever set foot on it again. An old lady,
who lives in the neighborhood (famous for killing two
tories with a stone in her stocking), declares that the
dread of this mountain is universal among the tribes,
and that nothing would induce a red man to ascend it.
This looks as if the sachem had found what he went

after; and it is a modern fact, I understand, that a man
hired to plough on the hill-side, suddenly left his employer
and purchased a large farm, by nobody knows
what windfall of fortune. Half this mountain belongs
to a gentleman who is building a country-seat on an
exquisite site between it and the river, and to the kindness
of his son and daughter, who accompanied us in
our ascent, we are indebted for a most pleasant hour,
and what information I have given you.

I will slip in here a memorandum for any invalid,
town-weary person, or new-married couple, to whom
you may have occasion, in your practice, to recommend
change of air. The house formerly occupied
by this gentleman, a roomy mansion, in a commanding
and beautiful situation, is now open as an inn, and
I know nowhere a retreat so private and desirable. It
is near both the Susquehannah and the Chemung, the
hills laced with trout-streams, four miles from Athens,
and half way between Owego and Elmira. The scenery
all about is delicious, and the house well kept at
country charges. My cottage is some sixteen miles
off; and if you give any of your patients a letter to
me, I will drive up and see them, with a posy and a pot
of jelly. You will understand that they must be people
who do not “add perfume to the violet.” In my
way — simple.

I can in no way give you an idea of the beauty of
the Chemung river from Brigham's Inn to Elmira.
We entered immediately upon the Narrows — a spot
where the river follows into a curve of the mountain,
like an inlaying of silver around the bottom of an emerald
cup — the brightest water, the richest foliage —
and a landscape of meadow between the horns of the
crescent that would be like the finest park scenery in
England, if the boldness of the horizon did not mix
with it a resemblance to Switzerland.

We reached Elmira at sunset. What shall I say
of it? From a distance, its situation is most beautiful.
It lies (since we have begun upon the alphabet)
in the tail of a magnificent L, formed by the bright
winding of the river. Perhaps the surveyor, instead
of deriving its name from his sweetheart, called it L.
mirabile — corrupted to vulgar comprehension. Elmira.
If he did not, he might, and I will lend him the
etymology.

The town is built against a long island, covered
with soft green-sward, and sprinkled with noble trees;
a promenade of unequalled beauty and convenience,
but that all which a village can muster of unsightliness
has chosen the face of the river-bank “to turn
its lining to the sun.” Fie on you, Elmira! I intend
to get up a memorial to Congress, praying that
the banks of rivers in all towns settled henceforth,
shall be government property, to be reserved and
planted for public grounds. It was the design of
William Penn at Philadelphia, and think what a
binding it would have been to his chequer-board.
Fancy a pier and promenade along the Hudson at
New York! Imagine it a feature of every town in
this land of glorious rivers!

There is a singular hotel at Elmira (big as a statehouse,
and be-turreted and be-columned according to
the most approved system of impossible rent and
charges to make it possible), in the plan of which,
curious enough, the chambers were entirely forgotten.
The house is all parlors and closets! We were
shown into superb drawing-rooms (one for each party),
with pier-glasses, windows to the floor, expensive furniture,
and a most polite landlord; and began to think
the civilization for which he had been looking east,
had stepped over our heads and gone on to the Pacific.
Excellent supper and civil service. At dark,
two very taper mutton candles set on the superb marble-table
— but that was but a trifling incongruity.
After a call from a pleasant friend or two, and a walk,
we made an early request to be shown to our bed
rooms. The “young lady, that sometimes uses a
broom for exercise,” opened a closet-door with a look
of la voila! and left us speechless with astonishment,
There was a bed of the dimensions of a saint's niche.
but no window by which, if stifled, the soul could escape
to its destination. Yet here we were, evidently
abandoned on a hot night in July, with a door to shut
if we thought it prudent, and a candle-wick like an
ignited poodle-dog to assist in the process of suffocation!
I hesitated about calling up the landlord, for,
as I said before, he was a most polite and friendly
person; and if we were to give up the ghost in that
little room, it was evidently in the ordinary arrangements
of the house. “Why not sleep in the parlor?”
you will have said. So we did. But, like the king
of Spain, who was partly roasted because nobody
came to move back the fire, this obvious remedy did
not at the instant occur to me. The pier-glass and
other splendors of course did duty as bed-room furniture,
and, I may say, we slept sumptuously. Our
friends in the opposite parlor did as we did, but took the
moving of the bed to be, tout bonnement, what the landlord
expected. I do not think so, yet I was well pleased
with him and his entertainment, and shall stop at the
“Eagle” incontinently — if I can choose my apartment.
I am not sure but, in other parts of the house, the
blood-thirsty architect has constructed some of these
smothering places without parlors. God help the unwary
traveller!

Talking of home (we were at home to dinner the
next day), I wonder whether it is true that adverse fortunes
have thrown Mrs. Sigourney's beautiful home
into the market. It is offered for sale, and the newspapers
say as much. If so, it is pity, indeed. I was
there once; and to leave so delicious a spot must, I
think, breed a heart-ache. In general, unless the reverse
is extreme, compassion is thrown away on those
who leave a large house to be comfortable in a small
one; but she is a poetess, and a most true and sweet
one, and has a property in that house, and in all its
trees and flowers, which can neither be bought nor
sold. It is robbery to sell it for its apparent value.
You can understand, for “your spirit is touched to
these fine issues,” how a tree that the eye of genius
has rested on while the mind was at work among its
bright fancies, becomes the cradle and home of these
fancies, The brain seems driven out of its workshop
if you cut it down. So with walks. So with streams.
So with the modifications of natural beauty seen thence
habitually — sunrise, sunsetting, moonlight. In peculiar
places these daily glories take peculiar effects, and
in that guise genius becomes accustomed to recognise
and love them most. Who can buy this at auction!
Who can weave this golden mesh in another tree —
give the same voices to another stream — the same sunset
to other hills? This fairy property, invisible as it
is, is acquired slowly. Habit, long association, the connexion
with many precious thoughts (the more precious
the farther between), make it precious. To
sell such a spot for its wood and brick, is to value
Tom Moore for what he will weigh — Daniel Webster
for his superficies. Then there will be a time (I trust
it is far off) when the property will treble even in saleable
value. The bee and the poet must be killed before
their honey is tasted. For how much more would
Abbotsford sell now than in the lifetime of Scott? For
what could you buy Ferney — Burns's cottage — Shakspere's
house at Stratford? I have not the honor of
a personal acquaintance with Mrs. Sigourney, and
can not judge with what philosophy she may sustain
this reverse. But bear it well or ill, there can be no
doubt it falls heavily; and it is one of those instances,
I think, where public feeling should be called on to
interpose. But in what shape? I have always admired
the generosity and readiness with which actors
play for the benefit of a decayed “brother of the sock.”

Let American authors contribute to make up a volume,
and let the people of Hartford, who live in the light
of this bright spirit, head the subscription with ten
thousand copies. You live among literary people,
dear Doctor, and your “smile becomes you better than
any man's in all Phrygia.” You can set it afloat if you
will. My name is among the W.'s, but I will be
ready in my small turn.

“Now God b'wi'you, good Sir Topas!” for on this
sheet there is no more room, and I owe you but one.
Correspondence, like thistles, “is not blown away till
it hath got too high a top.” Adieu.