University of Virginia Library

11. LETTER XI.

The box of Rhenish is no substitute for yourself,
dear Doctor, but it was most welcome — partly, perhaps,
for the qualities it has in common with the gentleman
who should have come in the place of it. The
one bottle that has fulfilled its destiny, was worthy to
have been sunned on the Rhine and drank on the Susquehannah,
and I will never believe that anything can
come from you that will not improve upon acquaintance.
So I shall treasure the remainder for bright
hours. I should have thought it superior even to the
Tokay I tasted at Vienna, if other experiments had not
apprized me that country life sharpens the universal
relish. I think that even the delicacy of the palate is
affected by the confused sensations, the turmoil, the
vexations of life in town. You will say you have your
quiet chambers, where you are as little disturbed by
the people around you as I by my grazing herds. But,
by your leave, dear Doctor, the fountains of thought
(upon which the senses are not a little dependant) will
not clear and settle over-night like a well. No — nor
in a day, nor in two. You must live in the country
to possess your bodily sensations as well as your mind,
in tranquil control. It is only when you have forgotten
streets and rumors and greetings — forgotten the
whip of punctuality, and the hours of forced pleasures
— only when you have cleansed your ears of the din
of trades, the shuffle of feet, the racket of wheels, and
coarse voices — only when your own voice, accustomed
to contend against discords, falls, through the fragrant
air of the country, into its natural modulations, in harmony
with the low key upon which runs all the music
of nature — only when that part of the world which partook
not of the fall of Adam, has had time to affect
you with its tranquility — only then that the dregs of
life sink out of sight, and while the soul sees through
its depths, like the sun through untroubled water, the
senses lose their fever and false energy, and play their
part, and no more, in the day's expenditure of time
and pulsation.

“Still harping on my daughter,” you will say; and
I will allow that I can scarce write a letter to you without
shaping it to the end of attracting you to the Susquehannah.
At least watch when you begin to grow
old, and transplant yourself in time to take root, and
then we may do as the trees do — defy the weather till
we are separated. The oak, itself, if it has grown up
with its kindred thick about it, will break if left standing
alone; and you and I, dear Doctor, have known the
luxury of friends too well to bear the loneliness of an
unsympathizing old age. Friends are not pebbles,
lying in every path, but pearls gathered with pain, and
rare as they are precious. We spend our youth and
manhood in the search and proof of them, and when
Death has taken his toll we have too few to scatter —
none to throw away. I, for one, will be a miser of mine.
I feel the avarice of friendship growing on me with
every year — tightening my hold and extending my
grasp. Who at sixty is rich in friends? The richest
are those who have drawn this wealth of angels around
them, and spent care and thought on the treasuring.
Come, my dear Doctor! I have chosen a spot on
one of the loveliest of our bright rivers. Here is all
that goes to make an Arcadia, except the friendly
dwellers in its shade. I will choose your hill-side,
and plant your grove, that the trees at least shall lose
no time by your delay. Set a limit to your ambition,

achieve it, and come away. It is terrible to grow old
amid the jostle and disrespectful hurry of a crowd.
The academy of the philosophers was out of Athens.
You can not fancy Socrates run against, in the market-place.
Respect, which grows wild in the fields,
requires watching and management in cities. Let us
have an old man's Arcady — where we can slide our
“slippered shoon” through groves of our own consecrating,
and talk of the world as without — ourselves
and gay philosophy within. I have strings pulling
upon one or two in other lands, who, like ourselves,
are not men to let Content walk unrecognised
in their path. Slowly, but, I think, surely, they are
drawing thitherward; and I have chosen places for
their hearthstones, too, and shall watch, as I do for
you, that the woodman's axe cuts down no tree that
would be regretted, If the cords draw well, and
Death take but his tithe, my shady “Omega” will
soon learn voices to which its echo will for long years
be familiar, and the Owaga and Susquehannah will
join waters within sight of an old man's Utopia.

“My sentiments better expressed” have come in
the poet's corner of the Albion to-day — a paper, by
the way, remarkable for its good selection of poetry.
You will allow that these two verses, which are the
closing ones of a piece called “The men of old,” are
above the common run of newspaper fugitives: —

The man who wrote that, is hereby presented with the
freedom of the Omega.

The first of September, and a frost! The farmers
from the hills are mourning over their buckwheat,
but the river-mist saves all which lay low enough for
its white wreath to cover; and mine, though sown on
the hill-side, is at mist-mark, and so escaped. Nature
seems to intend that I shall take kindly to farming, and
has spared my first crop even the usual calamities. I
have lost but an acre of corn, I think, and that by the
crows, who are privileged marauders, welcome at
least to build in the Omega, and take their tithe without
rent-day or molestation. I like their noise, though
discordant. It is the minor in the anthem of nature —
making the gay song of the blackbird, and the merry
chirp of the robin and oriel, more gay and cheerier.
Then there is a sentiment about the raven family, and
for Shakspere's lines and his dear sake, I love them,

The very name of a good deed shall protect them.
Who shall say that poetry is a vain art, or that
poets are irresponsible for the moral of their verse!
For Burns's sake, not ten days since, I beat off my dog
from the nest of a field-mouse, and forbade the mowers
to cut the grass over her. She has had a poet for
her friend, and her thatched roof is sacred. I should
not like to hang about the neck of my soul all the evil
that, by the last day, shall have had its seed in Byron's
poem of the Corsair. It is truer of poetry than of
most other matters, that

But I am slipping into a sermon.

Speaking of music, some one said here the other
day, that the mingled hum of the sounds of nature,
and the distant murmur of a city, produce, invariably,
the note F in music. The voices of all tune, the
blacksmith's anvil and the wandering organ, the church
bells and the dustman's, the choir and the cart-wheel,
the widow's cry, and the bride's laugh, the prisoner's
clanking chain and the schoolboy's noise at play — at
the height of the church steeple are one! It is all
“F” two hundred feet in air! The swallow can outsoar
both our joys and miseries, and the lark — what
are they in his chamber of the sun! If you have any
unhappiness at the moment of receiving this letter,
dear Doctor, try this bit of philosophy. It's all F
where the bird flies! You have no wings to get there,
you say, but your mind has more than the six of the
cherubim, and in your mind lies the grief you would
be rid of. As Cæsar says,

I'll be above F, and let troubles hang below. What
a twopenny matter it makes of all our cares and vexations.
I'll find a boy to climb to the top of a tall pine
I have, and tie me up a white flag, which shall be
above high-sorrow mark henceforth. I will neither be
elated or grieved without looking at it. It floats at
“F,” where it is all one! Why, it will be a castle in
the air, indeed — impregnable to unrest. Why not,
dear Doctor! Why should we not set up a reminder,
that our sorrows are only so deep — that the lees are
but at the bottom, and there is good wine at the top —
that there is an atmosphere but a little above us where
our sorrows melt into our joys! No man need be unhappy
who can see a grasshopper on a church vane.

It is surprising how mere a matter of animal spirits
is the generation of many of our bluest devils; and it
is more surprising that we have neither the memory to
recall the trifles that have put them to the flight, nor
the resolution to combat their approach. A man
will be ready to hang himself in the morning for an
annoyance that he has the best reason to know would
scarce give him a thought at night. Even a dinner is a
doughty devil-queller. How true is the apology of
Menenius when Coriolanus had repelled his friend!

I have recovered my spirits ere now by a friend asking
me what was the matter. One seems to want but
the suggestion, the presence of mind, the expressed
wish, to be happy any day. My white flag shall serve
me that good end! “Tut, man!” it shall say, “your
grief is not grief where I am! Send your imagination
this high to be whitewashed!”

Our weather to-day is a leaf out of October's book,
soft, yet invigorating. The harvest moon seems to
have forgotten her mantle last night, for there lies on
the landscape a haze, that to be so delicate, should be
born of moonlight. The boys report plenty of deer-tracks
in the woods close by us, and the neighbours tell
me they browse in troops on my buckwheat by the
light of the moon, Let them! I have neither trap
nor gun on my premises, and Shakspere shall be their
sentinel too. At least, no Robin or Diggory shall
shoot them without complaint of damage; though if
you were here, dear Doctor, I should most likely borrow
a gun, and lie down with you in the buckwheat to
see you bring down the fattest. And so do our partialities
modify our benevolence. I fear I should compound
for a visit by the slaughter of the whole herd.
Perhaps you will come to shoot deer, and with that
pleasant hope I will close my letter.