University of Virginia Library

LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE,

PREFACE.

The “Letters from under a Bridge” were written in a secluded glen of the valley of the Susquehannah.
The author after several years residence and travel abroad, made there, as he hoped, an altar of life-time
tranquillitty for his household-gods. Most of the letters were written in the full belief that he should pass
there the remainder of his days. Inevitable necessity drove him again into active metropolitan life, and the
remembrance of that enchanting interval of repose and rural pleasure seems to him, now, little but a dream.
As picturing truly the color of his own mind, and the natural flow of his thoughts during a brief enjoyment
of the kind of life alone best suited to his disposition as well as to his better nature, the book is interesting
to himself and to those who love him. As picturing faithfully the charm of nature and seclusion, after years
of intoxicated life in the gayest circles of the gayest cities of the world, it may be curious to the reader.

1. LETTER I.

My Dear Doctor: Twice in the year, they say,
the farmer may sleep late in the morning—between
hoeing and haying, and between harvest and thrashing.
If I have not written to you since the frost was
out of the ground, my apology lies distributed over
the “spring-work,” in due proportions among ploughing,
harrowing, sowing, plastering, and hoeing. We
have finished the last—some thanks to the crows, who
saved us the labor of one acre of corn, by eating it in
the blade. Think what times we live in, when even
the crows are obliged to anticipate their income!

When I had made up my mind to write to you, I
cast about for a cool place in the shade—for, besides
the changes which farming works upon my epidermis,
I find some in the inner man, one of which is a vegetable
necessity for living out-of-doors. Between five
in the morning and “flower-shut,” I feel as if four
walls and a ceiling would stop my breath. Very
much to the disgust of William (who begins to think
it was infra dig. to have followed such a hob-nail
from London), I showed the first symptom of this
chair-and-carpet asthma, by ordering my breakfast
under a balsam-fir. Dinner and tea soon followed;
and now, if I go in-doors by daylight, it is a sort of
fireman's visit—in and out with a long breath. I have
worn quite a dial on the grass, working my chair
around with the sun.

“If ever you observed,” (a phrase with which a
neighbor of mine ludicrously prefaces every possible
remark), a single tree will do very well to sit, or dine,
or be buried under, but you can not write in the shade
of it. Beside the sun-flecks and the light all around
you, there is a want of that privacy, which is necessary
to a perfect abandonment to pen and ink. I dis
covered this on getting as far as “dear Doctor,” and,
pocketing my tools, strolled away up the glen to borrow
“stool and desk” of Nature. Half open, like a
broad-leafed book (green margin and silver type), the
brook-hollow of Glenmary spreads wide as it drops
upon the meadow, but above, like a book that deserves
its fair margent, it deepens as you proceed. Not far
from the road, its little rivulet steals forth from a
shadowy ravine, narrow as you enter, then widening
back to a mimic cataract; and here, a child would
say, is fairy parlor. A small platform (an island
when the stream is swollen) lies at the foot of the fall,
carpeted with the fine silky grass which thrives with
shade and spray. The two walls of the ravine are
mossy, and trickling with springs; the trees overhead
interlace, to keep out the sun; and down comes
the brook, over a flight of precipitous steps, like children
bursting out of school, and after a laugh at its
own tumble, it falls again into a decorous ripple, and
trips murmuring away. The light is green, the
leaves of the overhanging trees look translucent above,
and the wild blue grape, with its emerald rings, has
wove all over it a basket-lattice so fine, that you
would think it were done to order—warranted to keep
out the hawk, and let in the humming-bird. With a
yellow pine at my back, a moss cushion beneath, and
a ledge of flat stone at my elbow, you will allow I had
a secretary's outfit. I spread my paper, and mended
my pen; and then (you will pardon me, dear Doctor)
I forgot you altogether. The truth is, these fanciful
garnishings spoil work. Silvio Pellico had a better
place to write in. If it had been a room with a Chinese
paper (a bird standing for ever on one leg, and a
tree ruffled by the summer wind, and fixed with its
leaves on edge, as if petrified with the varlet's impudence),
the eye might get accustomed to it. But first

came a gold-robin, twittering out his surprise to find
strange company in his parlor, yet never frighted from
his twig by pen and ink. By the time I had sucked a
lesson out of that, a squirrel tripped in without knocking,
and sat nibbling at a last-year's nut, as if nobody
but he took thought for the morrow. Then came an
enterprising ant, climbing my knee like a discoverer;
and I wondered whether Fernando Cortes would have
mounted so boldly, had the peak of Darien been as
new-dropped between the Americas, as my leg by his
ant-hill. By this time, a small dripping from a moss-fringe
at my elbow betrayed the lip of a spring; and,
dislodging a stone, I uncovered a brace of lizards
lying snug in the ooze. We flatter ourselves, thought
I, that we drink first of the spring. We do not know
always whose lips were before us.

Much as you see of insect life, and hear of bird-music,
as you walk abroad, you should lie perdu in a
nook, to know how much is frighted from sight, and
hushed from singing, by your approach. What
worms creep out when they think you gone, and what
chatterers go on with their story! So among friends,
thought I, as I fished for the moral. We should be
wiser, if we knew what our coming hides and silences,
but should we walk so undisturbed on our way?

You will see with half a glance, dear Doctor, that
here was too much company for writing. I screwed
up my inkstand once more, and kept up the bed of
the stream till it enters the forest, remembering a still
place by a pool. The tall pines hold up the roof high
as an umbrella of Brobdignag, and neither water
brawls, nor small birds sing, in the gloom of it. Here,
thought I, as far as they go, the circumstances are
congenial. But, as Jean Paul says, there is a period
of life when the real gains ground upon the ideal;
and to be honest, dear Doctor, I sat leaning on the
shingle across my knees, counting my sky-kissing
pines, and reckoning what they would bring in saw-logs—so
much standing—so much drawn to the mill.
Then there would be wear and tear of bob-sled,
teamster's wages, and your dead-pull springs—the
horses' knees. I had nearly settled the per and contra,
when my eye lit once more on “my dear Doctor,”
staring from the unfilled sheet, like the ghost of a
murdered resolution. “Since when,” I asked, looking
myself sternly in the face, “is it so difficult to be
virtuous! Shall I not write when I have a mind?
Shall I reckon pelf whether I will or no? Shall butterfly
imagination thrust iron-heart to the wall? No!”

I took a straight cut through my ruta-baga patch
and cornfield, bent on finding some locality (out of
doors it must be) with the average attractions of a
sentry-box, or a church-pew. I reached the highroad,
making insensibly for a brush dam, where I
should sit upon a log, with my face abutted upon a
wall of chopped saplings. I have not mentioned my
dog, who had followed me cheerfully thus far, putting
up now and then a partridge, to keep his nose in; but,
on coming to the bridge over the brook, he made up
his mind. “My master,” he said (or looked), “will
neither follow the game, nor sit in the cool. Chacun
à son gout. I'm tired of this bobbing about for nothing
in a hot sun.” So, dousing his tail (which, “if
you ever observed,” a dog hoists, as a flag-ship does
her pennant, only when the commodore is aboard), he
sprung the railing, and spread himself for a snooze
under the bridge. “Ben trovato!” said I, as I seated
myself by his side. He wagged his tail half round to
acknowledge the compliment, and I took to work like
a hay-maker.

I have taken some pains to describe these difficulties
to you, dear Doctor, partly because I hold it to be fair,
in this give-and-take world, that a man should know
what it costs his fellow to fulfil obligations, but more
especially, to apprize you of the metempsychose that is
taking place in myself. You will have divined, ere
this, that, in my out-of-doors life, I am approaching a
degree nearer to Arcadian perfectability, and that if I
but manage to get a bark on and live by sap (spare
your wit, sir), I shall be rid of much that is troublesome,
not to say expensive, in the matters of drink and
integument. What most surprises me in the past, is,
that I ever should have confined my free soul and body,
in the very many narrow places and usages I have
known in towns. I can only assimilate myself to a
squirrel, brought up in a school-boy's pocket, and let
out some June morning on a snake fence.

The spring has been damp for corn, but I had
planted on a warm hill-side, and have done better than
my neighbors. The Owaga[1] creek, which makes a
bend round my meadow before it drops into the Susquehannah
(a swift, bright river the Owaga, with as
much water as the Arno at Florence), overflowed my
cabbages and onions, in the May freshet; but that
touches neither me nor my horse. The winter wheat
looks like “velvet of three-pile,” and everything is
out of the ground, including, in my case, the buckwheat,
which is not yet put in. This is to be an old-fashioned
hot summer, and I shall sow late. The
peas are podded. Did it ever strike you, by the way
that the pious æneas, famous through all ages for
carrying old Anchises a mile, should, after all, yield
glory to a bean. Perhaps you never observed, that
this filial esculent grows up with his father on his
back.

In my “new light,” a farmer's life seems to me
what a manufacturer's might resemble, if his factory
were an indigenous plant—machinery, girls, and all.
What spindles and fingers it would take to make an
orchard, if nature found nothing but the raw seed,
and rain-water and sunshine were brought as far as a
cotton bale! Your despised cabbage would be a
prime article—if you had to weave it. Pumpkins, if
they ripened with a hair-spring and patent lever,
would be, “by'r lady,” a curious invention. Yet
these, which Aladdin nature produces if we but
“rub the lamp,” are more necessary to life than
clothes or watches. In planting a tree (I write it
reverently), it seems to me working immediately with
the divine faculty. Here are two hundred forest trees
set out with my own hand. Yet how little is my part
in the glorious creatures they become!

This reminds me of a liberty I have lately taken
with nature, which I ventured upon with proper diffidence,
though the dame, as will happen with dames,
proved less coy than was predicted. The brook at my
feet, from its birth in the hills till it dropped into the
meadow's lap, tripped down like a mountain-maid
with a song, bright and unsullied. So it flowed by
my door. At the foot of the bank, its song and
sparkle ceased suddenly, and, turning under the hill,
its waters disappeared among sedge and rushes. It
was more a pity, because you looked across the
meadow to the stately Owaga, and saw that its unfulfilled
destiny was to have poured its brightness into
his. The author of Ernest Maltravers has set the
fashion of charity to such fallings away. I made a
new channel over the meadow, gravelled its bed, and
grassed its banks, and (last and best charity of all)
protected its recovered course with overshadowy trees.
Not quite with so gay a sparkle, but with a placid and
tranquil beauty, the lost stream glides over the
meadow, and, Maltravers-like, the Owaga takes her
lovingly to his bosom. The sedge and rushes are
turned into a garden, and if you drop a flower into the
brook at my door, it scarce loses a breath of its perfume
before it is flung on the Owaga, and the Susquehannah
robs him of it but with his life.

I have scribbled away the hours till near noon, and

it is time to see that the oxen get their potatoes.
Faith! it's a cool place under a bridge. Knock out
the two ends of the Astor-house, and turn the Hudson
through the long passage, and you will get an idea of it.
The breeze draws through here deftly, the stone wall
is cool to my back, and this floor of running water, besides
what the air steals from it, sounds and looks refreshingly.
My letter has run on, till I am inclined
to think the industry of running water “breeds i'the
brain.” Like the tin-pot at the cur's tail, it seems to
overtake one with an admonition, if he but slack to
breathe. Be not alarmed, dear Doctor, for, sans potatoes,
my oxen will loll in the furrow, and though the
brook run till doomsday, I must stop here. Amen.

2. LETTER II.

My Dear Doctor: I have just had a visit from
the assessor. As if a man should be taxed for a
house, who could be luxurious under a bridge! I
have felt a decided “call” to disclaim roof and threshold,
and write myself down a vagabond. Fancy the
variety of abodes open, rent-free, to a bridge-fancier.
It is said among the settlers, that where a stranger
finds a tree blown over (the roots forming, always, an
upright and well-matted wall), he has only his house
to finish. Cellar and chimney-back are ready done to
his hand. But, besides being roofed, walled, and watered,
and better situated, and more plenty than over-blown
trees—bridges are on no man's land. You are
no “squatter,” though you sit upon your hams. You
may shut up one end with pine boughs, and you have
a room a-la-mode—one large window open to the
floor. The view is of banks and running water—exquisite
of necessity. For the summer months I
could imagine this bridge-gipsying delicious. What
furniture might pack in a donkey-cart, would set forth
a better apartment than is averaged in hotels (so
yelept), and the saving to your soul (of sins committed,
sitting at a bell-rope, ringing in vain for water)
would be worthy a conscientious man's attention.

I will not deny that the bridge of Glenmary is a favorable
specimen. As its abutments touch my cottage-lawn,
I was under the necessity of presenting the
public with a new bridge, for which act of munificence
I have not yet received the freedom of the town. Perhaps
I am expected to walk through it when I please,
without asking. The hitherward railing coming into
the line of my fence, I have, in a measure, a private
entrance; and the whole structure is overshadowed by
a luxuriant tree. To be sure, the beggar may go
down the bank in the road, and, entering by the other
side, sit under it as well as I—but he is welcome. I
like society sans-géne—where you may come in or go
out without apology, or whistle, or take off your shoes.
And I would give notice here to the beggary of Tioga,
that in building a stone seat under the bridge, and
laying the banks with green-sward, I intend no sequestration
of their privileges. I was pleased that a swallow,
who had laid her mud-nest against a sleeper
overhead, took no offence at my improvements. Her
three nestlings made large eyes when I read out what
I have scribbled, but she drowses on without astonishment.
She is a swallow of last summer, and has seen
authors.

A foot-passenger has just gone over the bridge,
and, little dreaming there were four of us listening
(the swallows and I), he leaned over the railing, and
ventured upon a soliloquy. “Why don't he cut
down the trees so's he can see out?” said my unconscious
adviser. I caught the eye of the mother-swallow,
and fancied she was amused. Her swallowlings
looked petrified at the sacrilegious suggestion. By
the way, it is worthy of remark, that though her little
ones have been hatched a week, this estimable parent
still sits upon their heads. Might not this continued
incubation be tried with success upon backward children?
We are so apt to think babies are finished
when their bodies are brought into the world!

For some minutes, now, I have observed an occasional
cloud rising from the bottom of the brook, and,
peering among the stones, I discovered one of the
small lobsters with which the streams abound. (The
naturalists may class them differently, but as there is
but one, and he has all the armament of a lobster,
though on the scale of a shrimp, the swallows agree
with me in opinion that he should rank as a lobster.)
So we are five. “Cocksnouns!” to borrow Scott's
ejaculation, people should never be too sure that they
are unobserved. When I first came under the bridge,
I thought myself alone.

This lobster puts me in mind of Talleyrand. You
would say he is going backward, yet he gets on faster
that way than the other. After all, he is a great man
who can turn his reverses to account, and that I take
to be, oftentimes, one of the chief secrets of greatness.
If I were in politics, I would take the lobster
for my crest. It would be ominous, I fear, in poetry.

You should come to the country now, if you would
see the glory of the world. The trees have been coquetting
at their toilet, waiting for warmer weather;
but now I think they have put on their last flounce
and furbelow, spread their bustle, and stand to be admired.
They say “leafy June.” To-day is the first
of July, and though I give the trees my first morning
regard (out-of-doors) when my eyes are clearest, I
have not fairly thought till to-day, that the foliage was
full. If it were not for lovers and authors, who keep
vigil and count the hours, I should suspect there was
foul play between sun and moon—a legitimate day
made away with now and then. (The crime is not
unknown in the upper circles. Saturn devoured his
children.)

There is a glory in potatoes—well hoed. Corn—
the swaying and stately maize—has a visible glory.
To see the glory of turnips, you must own the crop,
and have cattle to fat—but they have a glory. Pease
need no pæan—they are appreciated. So are not cabbages,
which, though beautiful as a Pompeian wine-cup,
and honored above roses by the lingering of the
dew, are yet despised of all handicrafts—save one.
Apt emblem of ancient maidenhood, which is despised,
like cabbages, yet cherishes unsunned in its bosom the
very dew we mourn so inconsistently when rifled from
the rose.

Apropos—the delicate tribute in the last sentence
shall serve for an expiation. In a journey I made
through Switzerland, I had for chance-travelling companions,
three Scotch ladies, of the class emulated by
this chaste vegetable. They were intelligent, refined,
and lady-like; yet in some Pencillings by the Way
(sketched, perhaps, upon an indigestion, of mountain
cheese, or an acidity of bad wine—such things affect
us) I was perverse enough to jot down a remark, more
invidious than just. We are reached with a long
whip for our transgressions, and, but yesterday, I received
a letter from the Isle of Man, of which thus
runs an extract: “In your description of a dangerous
pass in Switzerland, you mention travelling in the
same public conveyance with three Scotch spinsters,
and declare you would have been alarmed, had there
been any neck in the carriage you cared for, and assert,
that neither of your companions would have hesitated
to leap from a precipice, had there been a lover
at the bottom. Did either of us tell you so, sir? Or
what ground have you for this assertion? You could
not have judged of us by your own beautiful countrywomen,
for they are proverbial for delicacy of feeling.
You had not yet made the acquaintance of mine.
We, therefore, must appropriate entirely to ourselves

the very flattering idea of having inspired such an
opinion. Yet allow me to assure you, sir, that lovers
are by no means so scarce in my native country, as
you seem to imagine. No Scotchwoman need go
either to Switzerland, or Yankee-land, in search of
them. Permit me to say then, sir, that as the attack
was so public, an equally public amende honorable is
due to us.”

I make it here. I retract the opinion altogether. I
do not think you “would have leaped from the precipice,
had there been a lover at the bottom.” On the
contrary, dear Miss —, I think you would have
waited till he climbed up. The amende, I flatter myself,
could scarce be more complete. Yet I will make
it stronger if you wish.

As I look out from under the bridge, I see an oriel
sitting upon a dog-wood tree of my planting. His
song drew my eye from the paper. I find it difficult,
now, not to take to myself the whole glory of tree,
song, and plumage. By an easy delusion, I fancy he
would not have come but for the beauty of the tree,
and that his song says as much, in bird-recitative. I
go back to one rainy day of April, when, hunting for
maple saplings, I stopped under that graceful tree, in
a sort of island jungle, and wondered what grew so
fair that was so unfamiliar, yet with a bark like the
plumage of the pencilled pheasant. The limbs grew
curiously. A lance-like stem, and, at regular distances
a cluster of radiating branches, like a long cane
thrust through inverted parasols. I set to work with
spade and pick, took it home on my shoulder, and set
it out by Glenmary brook, and there is stands to-day,
in the full glory of its leaves, having just shed the
white blossoms with which it kept holyday in June.
Now the tree would have leaved and flowered, and the
oriel, in black and gold, might perchance have swung
and sung on the slender branch, which is still tilting
with his effort in that last cadenza. But the fair picture
it makes to my eye, and the delicious music in
my ear, seem to me no less of my own making and
awaking. Is it the same tree, flowering unseen in
the woods, or transplanted into a circle of human love
and care, making a part of a woman's home, and
thought of and admired whenever she comes out from
her cottage, with a blessing on the perfume and verdure?
Is it the same bird, wasting his song in the
thicket, or singing to me, with my whole mind afloat
on his music, and my eyes fastened to his glittering
breast? So it is the same block of marble, unmoved
in the caves of Pentelicus, or brought forth and
wrought under the sculptor's chisel. Yet the sculptor
is allowed to create. Sing on, my bright oriel!
Spread to the light and breeze your desiring finger,
my flowering tree! Like the player upon the organ,
I take your glory to myself; though, like the hallelujah
that burns under his fingers, your beauty and music
worship God.

There are men in the world whose misfortune it is
to think too little of themselves—rari nantes in gurgite
vasto: I would recommend to such to plant trees,
and live among them. This suggesting to nature—
working, as a master-mind, with all the fine mysteries
of root and sap, obedient to the call—is very king-like.
Then how elevating is the society of trees! The objection
I have to a city, is the necessity, at every other
step, of passing some acquaintance or other, with all
his merits or demerits entirely through my mind—
some man, perhaps, whose existence and vocation I
have not suggested (as I might have done were he a
tree)—whom I neither love, nor care to meet; and
yet he is thrust upon my eye, and must be noticed.
But to notice him with propriety, I must remember
what he is—what claims he has to my respect, my civility.
I must, in a minute balance the account between
my character and his, and if he speak to me,
remember his wife and children, his lst illness, his
mishap or fortune in trade, or whatever else it is necessary
to mention in condolence or felicitation. A
man with but a moderate acquaintance, living in a
city, will pass through his mind each day, at a fair
calculation, say two hundred men and women, with
their belongings. What tax on the memory! What
fatigue (and all profitless) to them and him! “Sweep
me out like a foul thoroughfare!” say I. “The town
has trudged through me!”

I like my mind to be a green lane, private to the
dwellers in my own demesne. I like to be bowed to
as the trees bow, and have no need to bow back or
smile. If I am sad, my trees forego my notice without
offence. If I am merry, or whimsical, they do not
suspect my good sense, or my sanity. We have a
constant itching (all men have, I think) to measure
ourselves by those about us. I would rather it should
be a tree than a fop, or a politician, or a 'prentice.
We grow to the nearest standard. We become Lilliputians
in Lilliput. Let me grow up like a tree.

But here comes Tom Groom with an axe, as if he
had looked over my shoulder, and started, apropos of
trees.

“Is it that big button-ball you'll have cut down,
sir?”

“Call it a sycamore, Tom, and I'll come and see.”
It is a fine old trunk, but it shuts out the village spire,
and must come down.

Adieu, dear Doctor; you may call this a letter if you
will, but it is more like an essay.

3. LETTER III.

Dear Doctor: There are some things that grow
more certain with time and experience. Among
them, I am happier for finding out, is the affinity
which makes us friends. But there are other matters
which, for me, observation and knowledge only serve
to perplex, and among these is to know whose “education
has been neglected.” One of the first new
lights which broke on me, was after my first day in
France. I went to bed with a newborn contempt,
mingled with resentment, in my mind, toward my venerable
alma mater. The three most important branches
of earthly knowledge, I said to myself, are, to understand
French when it is spoken, to speak it so as to be
understood, and to read and write it with propriety
and ease. For accomplishment in the last, I could
refer to my diploma, where the fact was stated on indestructible
parchment. But, allowing it to speak
the truth (which was allowing a great deal), there
were the two preceding branches, in which (most
culpably to my thinking) “my education had been
neglected.” Could I have taken out my brains, and,
by simmering in a pot, have decocted Virgil, Homer,
Playfair, Dugald Stewart, and Copernicus, all five,
into one very small Frenchman—(what they had
taught me to what he could teach)—I should have
been content, though the fiend blew the fire.

I remember a beggarly Greek, who acquired an
ascendency over eight or ten of us, gentlemen and
scholars, travelling in the east, by a knowledge of
what esculents, growing wild above the bones of Miltiades,
were “good for greens.” We were out of provisions,
and fain to eat with Nebuchadnezzar. “Hang
grammar!” thought I, “here's a branch in which my
education has been neglected.” Who was ever called
upon in his travels to conjugate a verb? Yet here,
but for this degenerate Athenian, we had starved for
our ignorance of what is edible in plants.

I had occasion, only yesterday, to make a similar
remark. I was in a crowded church, listening to a
Fourth of July oration; what with one sort of caloric
and what with another, it was very uncomfortable, and

a lady near me became faint. To get her out, was
impossible, and there was neither fan, nor sal volatile,
within twenty pews. The bustle, after awhile, drew
the attention of an uncombed Yankee in his shirt-sleeves,
who had stood in the aisle with his mouth
open, gazing at the stage in front of the pulpit, and
wondering, perhaps, what particular difference between
sacred and profane oratory, required this pains-taking
exhibition of the speaker's legs. Comprehending
the state of the case at a single glance, the
backwoodsman whipped together the two ends of his
riding-switch, pulled his cotton handkerchief tightly
over it, and, with this effective fan, soon raised a
breeze that restored consciousness to the lady, besides
cooling everybody in the vicinity. Here is a man,
thought I, brought up to have his wits ready for an
emergency. His “education has not been neglected.”

To know nothing of sailing a ship, of farming, of
carpentering, in short, of any trade or profession, may
be a proper, though sometimes inconvenient ignorance.
I only speak of such deficiencies, as a modest
person will not confess without giving a reason—as a
man who can not swim will say he is liable to the
cramp in deep water. With some reluctance, lately,
I have brought myself to look after such dropped
threads in my own woof of acquisitions, in the hope
of mending them before they were betrayed by an exigency.
Trout-fishing is one of these. I plucked up
heart a day or two since, and drove to call upon a
young sporting friend of mine, to whom I confessed,
plump, I never had caught a trout. I knew nothing
of flies, worms, rods, or hooks. Though I had seen
in a book that “hog's down” was the material for the
May-fly, I positively did not know on what part of that
succulent quadruped the down was found.

“Positively?”

“Positively!”

My friend F. gravely shut the door to secure privacy
to my ignorance, and took from his desk a volume—of
flies! Here was new matter! Why, sir!
your trout-fishing is a politician of the first water!
Here were baits adapted to all the whims, weaknesses,
states of appetite, even counter-baits to the very cunning,
of the fish. Taking up the “Spirit of the
Times” newspaper, his authority in all sporting matters,
which he had laid down as I came in, he read a
recipe for the construction of one out of the many of
these seductive imitations, as a specimen of the labor
bestowed on them. “The body is dubbed with hog's
down, or light bear's hair mixed with yellow mohair,
whipped with pale floss silk, and a small strip of peacock's
herl for the head. The wings from the rayed
feathers of the mallard, dyed yellow; the hackle from
the bittern's neck, and the tail from the long hairs of
the sable or ferret.”

I cut my friend short midway in his volume, for,
ever since my disgust at discovering that the perplexed
grammar I had been whipped through was nothing
but the art of talking correctly, which I could do before
I began, I have had an aversion to rudiments.
“Frankly,” said I, “dear F. my education has been
neglected. Will you take me with you, trout-fishing,
fish yourself, answer my questions, and assist me to
pick up the science in my own scrambling fashion?”

He was good-natured enough to consent, and now,
dear Doctor, you see to what all this prologue was
tending. A day's trout-fishing may be a very common
matter to you, but the sport was as new to me as
to the trout. I may say, however, that of the two, I
took to the novelty of the thing more kindly.

The morning after was breezy, and the air, without
a shower, had become cool. I was sitting under the
bridge, with my heels at the water's edge, reading a
newspaper, while waiting for my breakfast, when a
slight motion apprized me that the water had invaded
my instep. I had been wishing the sun had drank less
freely of my brook, and within a few minutes of the
wish, it had risen, doubtless, from the skirt of a shower
in the hills beyond us. “Come!” thought I, pulling
my boots out of the ripple, “so should arrive favors
that would be welcome—no herald, and no weary expectation.
A human gift so uses up gratitude with
the asking and delaying.” The swallow heard the increased
babble of the stream, and came out of the air
like a cimeter to see if her little ones were afraid, and
the fussy lobster bustled about in his pool, as if there
were more company than he expected. “Semper paratus
is a good motto, Mr. Lobster!” “I will look
after your little ones, Dame Swallow!” I had scarce
distributed these consolations among my family, when
a horse crossed the bridge at a gallop, and the head of
my friend F. peered presently over the railing.

“How is your brook?”

“Rising, as you see!”

It was evident there had been rain west of us, and
the sky was still gray—good auspices for the fisher.
In half an hour we were climbing the hill, with such
contents in the wagon-box as my friend advised—the
debris of a roast pig and a bottle of hock supposed to
be included in the bait. As we got into the woods
above (part of my own small domain), I could scarce
help addressing my tall tenantry of trees. “Grow
away, gentlemen,” I would have said, had I been
alone; “I rejoice in your prosperity. Help yourselves
to the dew and the sunshine! If the showers are
not sent to your liking, thrust your roots into my
cellar, lying just under you, and moisten your clay
without ceremony—the more the better.” After all,
trees have pleasant ways with them. It is something
that they find their own food and raiment—something
that they require neither watching nor care—something
that they know, without almanac, the processions
of the seasons, and supply, unprompted and
unaided, the covering for their tender family of germes.
So do not other and less profitable tenants. But it is
more to me that they have no whims to be reasoned
with, no prejudices to be soothed, no garrulity to reply
or listen to. I have a peculiarity which this
touches nearly. Some men “make a god of their
belly;” some spend thought and cherishing on their
feet, faces, hair; some few on their fancy or their
reason. I am chary of my gift of speech. I hate to
talk but for my pleasure. In common with my fellow-men,
I have one faculty which distinguishes me
from the brute—an articulate voice. I speak (I am
warranted to believe) like my Maker and his angels.
I have committed to me an instrument no human art
has ever imitated, as incomprehensible in its fine and
celestial mechanism, as the reason which controls it.
Shall I breathe on this articulate wonder at every
fool's bidding? Without reasoning upon the matter
as I do now, I have felt indignant at the common adage,
“words cost nothing!” It is a common saying
in this part of the country, that “you may talk off ten
dollars in the price of a horse.” Those who have
travelled in Italy, know well that in procuring anything
in that country, from a post-carriage to a paper
of pins, you pay so much money, so much talk—the
less talk the more money. I commenced all my bargains
with a compromise—“You charge me ten scudi,
and you expect me to talk you down to five. I know
the price and the custom. Now, I will give you seven
and a half if you will let me off the talk.” I should
be glad if all buying and selling were done by signs.
It seems to me that talking on a sordid theme invades
and desecrates the personal dignity. The “scripta
verba manent” has no terrors for me. I could write
that without a thought, which I would put myself to
great inconveniences to avoid saying.

You, dear Doctor, among others, have often asked
me how long I should be contented in the country.
Comment, diable! ask, rather, how you are contented

in a town! Does not every creature, whose name
may have been mentioned to you—a vast congregation
of nothinglings—stop you in the street, and, will
you, nill you, make you perform on your celestial organ
of speech—nay, even choose the theme out of his
own littlenesses? When and how do you possess your
thoughts, and their godlike interpreter, in dignity and
peace? You are a man, of all others, worthy of the
unsuggestive listening of trees. Your coinage of
thought, profuse and worthy of a gift of utterance, is
alloyed and depreciated by the promiscuous admixtures
of a town. Who ever was struck with the
majesty of the human voice in the street? Yet, who
ever spoke, the meanest, in the solitude of a temple,
or a wilderness, or, in the stillness of night—wherever
the voice is alone heard—without an awe of his
own utterance—a feeling as if he had exercised a gift,
which had in it something of the supernatural?

The Indian talks to himself, or to the Great Spirit,
in the woods, but is silent among men. We take
many steps toward civilization as we get on in life,
but it is an error to think that the heart keeps up with
the manners. At least, with me, the perfection of existence
seems to be, to possess the arts of social life,
with the simplicity and freedom of the savage. They
talk of “unbridled youth!” Who would not have
borne a rein at twenty, he scorns at thirty? Who
does not, as his manhood matures, grow more impatient
of restraint—more unwilling to submit to the
conventional tyrannies of society—more ready, if there
were half a reason for it, to break through the whole
golden but enslaving mesh of society, and start fresh,
with Nature and the instincts of life, in the wilderness.
The imprisonment to a human eye may be as irksome
as a fetter—yet they who live in cities are never loosed.
Did you ever stir out of doors without remembering
that you were seen?

I have given you my thoughts as I went by my tall
foresters, dear Doctor, for it is a part of trout-fishing,
as quaint Izaak held it, to be stirred to musing and
revery by the influences of nature. In this free air,
too, I scorn to be tied down to “the proprieties.”
Nay, if it come to that, why should I finish what I
begin? Dame swallow, to be sure, looks curious to
hear the end of my first lesson with the angle. But
no! rules be hanged! I do not live on a wild brook to
be plagued with rhetoric. I will seal up my letter
where I am, and go a-field. You shall know what
we brought home in the basket when I write again.

4. LETTER IV.

My Dear Doctor: Your letters, like yourself, travel
in the best of company. What should come with
your last, but a note from our friend Stetson of the
Astor, forwarding a letter which a traveller had left in
the bronze vase, with “something enclosed which feels
like a key.” “A key,” quotha! Attar of jasmine,
subtle as the breath of the prophet from Constantinople
by private hand! No less! The small gilt bottle,
with its cubical edge and cap of parchment, lies breathing
before me. I think you were not so fortunate as
to meet Bartlett, the draughtsman of the American scenery—the
best of artists in his way, and the pleasantest
of John Bulls, any way. He travelled with me a summer
here, making his sketches, and has since been
sent by the same enterprising publisher (Virtue, of
Ivy Lane), to sketch in the Orient. (“Stand by,” as
Jack says, for something glorious from that quarter.)
Well—pottering about the Bezestein, he fell in with
my old friend Mustapha, the attar-merchant, who lifted
the silk curtains for him, and over sherbet and
spiced coffee in the inner divan, questioned him of
America—a country which, to Mustapha's fancy, is as
far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt
tip of the seraglio. Bartlett told him the sky was
round in that country, and the women faint and exquisite
as his own attar. Upon which Mustapha took his
pipe from his mouth, and praised Allah. After stroking
the smoke out of his beard, and rolling his idea
over the whites of his eyes for a few minutes, the old
merchant pulled from under his silk cushion, a visiting-card,
once white, but stained to a deep orange with
the fingering of his fat hand, unctuous from bath-hour
to bath-hour with the precious oils he traffics in.
When Bartlett assured him he had seen me in America
(it was the card I had given the old Turk at parting,
that he might remember my name), he settled the
curtains which divide the small apartment from the
shop, and commanding his huge Ethiopian to watch
the door, entered into a description of our visit to the
forbidden recesses of the slave-market, of his purchase
(for me), of the gipsy Maimuna, and some other
of my six weeks' adventures in his company—for
Mustapha and I, wherever it might lie in his fat body,
had a nerve in unison. We mingled like two drops
of the oil of roses. At parting, he gave Bartlett this
small bottle of jasmine, to be forwarded to me, with
much love, at his convenience; and with the perfume
of it in my nostrils, and the corpulent laugh of old
Mustapha ringing in my ear, I should find it difficult
at this moment, to say how much of me is under this
bridge in Tioga, North America. I am not sure that
my letter should not be dated “attar-shop, near the seraglio”
for there, it seems to me, I am writing.

“Tor-mentingest growin' time, aint it!” says a neighbor,
leaning over the bridge at this instant, and little
thinking that on that breath of his I travelled from the
Bosphorus to the Susquehannah. Really, they talk
of steamers, but there is no travelling conveyance like
an interruption. A minute since, I was in the capital
of the Palæologi, smoking a narghile in the Turk's
shop. Presto! here I am in the county of Tiog'; sitting
under a bridge, with three swallows and a lobster
(not three lobsters at a swallow—as you are very likely
to read it in your own careless way), and no outlay
for coals or canvass. Now, why should not this be reduced
to a science—like steam! I'll lend the idea to
the cause of knowledge. If a man may travel from
Turkey to New York on a passing remark, what might
be done on a long sermon? At present the agent is
irregular, so was steam. The performance of the
journey, at present, is compulsory. So was travelling
by steam before Fulton. The discoveries in animal
magnetism justify the most sanguine hopes on the subject,
and “open up,” as Mr. Bulwer would express it,
a vast field of novel discovery.

The truth is (I have been sitting a minute thinking
it over), the chief obstacle and inconvenience in travelling
is the prejudice in favor of taking the body with
us. It is really a preposterous expense. Going abroad
exclusively for the benefit of the mind, we are at no
little trouble, in the first place, to provide the means
for the body's subsistence on the journey (the mind
not being subject to “charges”) and then, besides trailing
after us through ruins and galleries, a companion
who takes no enjoyment in pictures or temples, and is
perpetually incommoded by our enthusiasm, we undergo
endless vexation and annoyance with the care of
his baggage. Blessed be Providence, the mind is independent
of boots and linen. When the system
above hinted at is perfected, we can leave our box-coats
at home, item pantaloons for all weathers, item cravats,
flannels, and innumerable hose. I shall use my portmanteau
to send eggs to market, with chickens in the
two carpet-bags. My body I shall leave with the dairy-woman,
to be fed at milking-time. Probably, however,
in the progress of knowledge, there will be some
discovery by which it can be closed in the absence
of the mind, like a town-house when the occupant is

in the country—blinds down, and a cobweb over the
keyhole.

In all the prophetic visions of a millenium, the chief
obstacle to its progress is the apparently undiminishing
necessity for the root of all evil. Intelligence is
diffusing, law becoming less merciless, ladies driving
hoops, and (I have observed) a visible increase of marriages
between elderly ladies and very young gentlemen—the
last a proof that the affections (as will be
universally true in the millenium) may retain their
freshness in age. But among all these lesser beginnings,
the philanthropist has hitherto despaired, for to
his most curious search, there appeared no symptom
of beginning to live without money. May we not discern
in this system (by which the mind, it is evident,
may perform some of the most expensive functions of
the body), a dream of moneyless millenium—a first
step toward that blessed era when “Biddle and discounts”
will be read of like “Aaron and burnt-offerings”—ceremonies
which once made it necessary for
a high-priest, and an altar at which the innocent sufered
for the guilty, but which shall have passed away
in the blessed progress of the millenium?

If I may make a grave remark to you, dear Doctor,
I think the whole bent and spirit of the age we live in,
is, to make light of matter. Religion, which used to
be seated in the heart, is, by the new light of Channing,
addressed purely to the intellect. The feelings
and passions, which are bodily affections, have less to
do with it than the mind. To eat with science and
drink hard, were once passports to society. To think
shrewdly and talk well, carry it now. Headaches
were cured by pills, which now yield to magnetic
fluid—nothing so subtle. If we travelled once, it
must be by pulling of solid muscle. Rarefield air does
it now better than horses. War has yielded to negotiation.
A strong man is no better than a weak one.
Electro-magnetism will soon do all the work of the
world, and men's muscles will be so much weight—
no more. The amount of it is, that we are gradually
learning to do without our bodies. The next great discovery
will probably be some pleasant contrivance for
getting out of them, as the butterfly sheds his worm.
Then, indeed, having no pockets, and no “corpus” for
your “habeas,” we can dispense with money and its
consequences, and lo! the millenium! Having no
stomachs to care for, there will be much cause of sin
done away, for in most penal iniquities, the stomach
is at the bottom. Think what smoothness will follow
in “the cause of true love”—money coming never between!
It looks ill for your profession, dear Doctor.
We shall have no need of physic. The fee will go to
him who “administers to the mind deceased”—probably
the clergy. (Mem. to put your children in the
church.) I am afraid crowded parties will go out of
fashion—it would be so difficult to separate one's
globule in case of “mixed society”—yet the extrication
of gases might be improved upon. Fancy a
lady and gentleman made “common air” of, by the
mixture of their “oxygen and hydrogen!”

What most pleases me in the prospect of this Swedenborg
order of things, is the probable improvement
in the laws. In the physical age passing away, we
have legislated for the protection of the body, but no
pains or penalties for wounds upon its more sensitive
inhabitant—murder to break the snail's shell, but innocent
pastime to thrust a pin into the snail. In the
new order of things, we shall have penal laws for the
protection of the sensibilities—whether they be touched
through the fancy, the judgment, or the personal
dignity. Those will be days for poets! Critics will
be hanged—or worse. A sneer will be manslaughter.
Ridicule will be a deadly weapon, only justifiable when
used in defence of life. For scandal, imprisonment
from ten to forty years, at the mercy of the court.
All attacks upon honor, honesty, or innocence, capital
crimes. That the London Quarterly ever existed,
will be classed with such historical enormities as the
Inquisition, and torture for witchcraft; and “to be
Lockharted,” will mean, then, what “to be Burked”
means now.

You will say, dear Doctor, that I am the “ancient
mariner” of letter-writers—telling my tale out of all
apropos-ity. But after some consideration, I have
made up my mind, that a man who is at all addicted
to revery, must have one or two escape-valves—a
journal, or a very random correspondence. For reasons
many and good, I prefer the latter; and the best
of those reasons is my good fortune in possessing a
friend like yourself, who is above “proprieties” (prosodically
speaking), and so you have become to me,
what Asia was to Prometheus—

Talking of trout. We emerged from the woods of
Glenmary (you left me there in my last letter), and
rounding the top of the hill, which serves for my sunset
drop-curtain, we ran down a mile to a brook in the
bed of a low valley. It rejoices in no name, that I
could hear of; but, like much that is uncelebrated, it
has its virtues. Leaving William to tie the horse to a
hemlock, and bring on the basket, we started up the
stream, and coming to a cold spring, my friend sat
down to initiate me into the rudiments of preparing
the fly. A very gay-coated gentleman was selected,
rather handsomer than your horse-fly, and whipped
upon a rod quite too taper for a comparison.

“What next?”

“Take a bit of worm out of the tin box, and cover
the barb of the hook!”

“I will. Stay! where are the bits? I see nothing
here but full-length worms, crawling about, with
every one his complement of extremities—not a tail
astray.”

“Bah! pull a bit off!”

“What! you don't mean that I am to pull one of
these squirming unfortunates in two?”

“Certainly!”

“Well, come! that seems to me rather a liberty.
I grant you `my education has been neglected,' but,
my dear F., there is mercy in a guillotine. I had
made up my mind to the death of the fish, but this
preliminary—horror!”

“Come! don't be a woman!”

“I wish I were—I should have a pair of scissors.
Fancy having your leg pulled off, my good fellow. I
say it is due to the poor devil that the operation be as
short as possible. Suppose your thumb slips?”

“Why, the worm feels nothing! Pain is in the
imagination. Stay! I'll do it for you—there?”

What the remainder of the worm felt, I had no opportunity
of observing, as my friend thrust the tin box
into his pocket immediately; but the “bit” which he
dropped into the palm of my hand, gave every symptom
of extreme astonishment, to say the least. The
passing of the barb of the hook three times through
him, seemed rather to increase his vitality, and looked
to me as little like happiness as anything I ever saw
on an excursion of pleasure. Far be it from me, to
pretend to more sensibility than Christopher North, or
Izaak Walton. The latter had his humanities; and
Wilson, of all the men I have ever seen, carries, most
marked in his fine face, the philtre which bewitches
affection. But, emulous as I am of their fame as anglers,
and modest as I should feel at introducing innovations
upon an art so refined, I must venture upon
some less primitive instrument than thumb and finger,
for the dismemberment of worms. I must take
scissors.

I had never seen a trout caught in my life, and I do

not remember at this moment ever having, myself,
caught a fish, of any genus or gender. My first lesson,
of course, was to see the thing done. F. stole
up to the bank of the stream, as if his tread might
wake a naiad, and threw his fly into a circling, black
pool, sparkling with brilliant bubbles, which coiled
away from a small brook-leap in the shade. The
same instant the rod bent, and a glittering spotted
creature rose into the air, swung to his hand, and was
dropped into the basket. Another fling, and a small
trail of the fly on the water, and another followed.
With the third, I felt a curious uneasiness in my elbow,
extending quickly to my wrist—the tingling of a
newborn enthusiasm. F. had taken up the stream,
and with his lips apart, and body bent over, like a mortal
surprising some troop of fays at revel, it was not reasonable
to expect him to remember his pupil. So,
silently I turned down, and at the first pool threw in
my fly. Something bright seemed born at the instant
under it, and the slight tilting pull upon the pole,
took me so much by surprise, that for a second I forgot
to raise it. Up came the bright trout, raining the
silver water from his back, and at the second swing
through the air (for I had not yet learned the sleight
of the fisher to bring him quick to hand), he dropped
into the pool, and was gone. I had already begun to
take his part against myself, and detected a pleased
thrill, at his escape, venturing through my bosom.
I sat down upon a prostrate pine, to new-Shylock my
poor worm. The tin box was in F.'s pocket! Come!
here was a relief. As to the wild-wood worms that
might be dug from the pine-tassels under my feet, I
was incapable of violating their forest sanctuary. I
would fish no more. I had had my pleasure. It is
not like pulling up a stick or a stone, to pull up a resisting
trout. It is a peculiar sensation, unimaginable
till felt. I should like to be an angler very well, but
for the worm in my pocket.

The brook at my feet, and around me, pines of the
tallest lift, by thousands! You may travel through
a forest, and look upon these communicants with the
sky, as trees. But you can not sit still in a forest,
alone, and silent, without feeling the awe of their presence.
Yet the brook ran and sang as merrily, in
their black shadow, as in the open sunshine; and the
woodpecker played his sharp hammer on a tree evergreen
for centuries, as fearlessly as on a shivering
poplar, that will be outlived by such a fish-catcher as
I. Truly, this is a world in which there is small recognition
of greatness. As it is in the forest, so it is
in the town. The very gods would have their toes
trod upon, if they walked without their wings. Yet
let us take honor to ourselves above vegetables. The
pine beneath me has been a giant, with his top in the
clouds, but lies now unvalued on the earth. We recognise
greatness when it is dead. We are prodigal
of love and honor when it is unavailing. We are, in
something, above wood and stubble.

I have fallen into a sad trick, dear Doctor, of preaching
sermons to myself, from these texts of nature.
Sometimes, like other preachers, I pervert the meaning
and forget the context, but revery would lose its
charm if it went by reason. Adieu! Come up to
Glenmary, and catch trout if you will. But I will
have your worms decently drowned before boxed for
use. I can not sleep o'nights, after slipping one of
these harmless creatures out of his own mouth, in a
vain attempt to pull him asunder.

5. LETTER V.

My dear Doctor: If this egg hatch without getting
cold, or, to accommodate my language to your
oity apprehension, if the letter I here begin comes to
a finishing, it will be malgré blistering hands and
weary back—the consequences of hard raking—of
hay. The men are taking their four o'clock of cheese
and cider in the meadow, and not having simplified
my digestion as rapidly as my habits, I have retired
to the shelter of the bridge, to be decently rid of the
master's first bit, and pull at the pitcher. After
employing my brains in vain, to discover why this particular
branch of farming should require cider and
cheese (eaten together at no other season that I can
learn), I have pulled out my scribble-book from the
niche in the sleeper overhead, and find, by luck, one
sheet of tabula rasa, upon which you are likely to pay
eighteen pence to Amos Kendall.

Were you ever in a hay-field, Doctor? I ask for
information. Metaphorically, I know you “live in
clover”—meaning, the society of wits, and hock of a
certain vintage—but seriously, did you ever happen
to stand on the natural soil of the earth, off the pavement?
If you have not, let me tell you it is a very
pleasant change. I have always fancied there was a
mixture of the vegetable in myself; and I am convinced
now, that there is something in us which grows
more thriftily on fresh earth, than on flag-stones.
There are some men indigenous to brick and mortar,
as there are plants which thrive best with a stone on
them; but there are “connecting links” between all
the varieties of God's works, and such men verge on
the mineral kingdom. I have seen whole geodes of
them, with all the properties of flints, for example.
But in you, my dear Doctor, without flattery, I think
I see the vegetable, strong, though latent. You
would thrive in the country, well planted and a little
pruned. I am not sure it would do to water you freely—but
you want sunshine and fresh air, and a little
bird to shake the “dew” out of your top.

I see, from my seat under the bridge, a fair meadow,
laid like an unrolled carpet of emerald, along the
windings of a most bright and swift river. The first
owner of it after the savage, all honor to his memory,
sprinkled it with forest trees, now at their loftiest
growth, here and there one, stately in the smooth
grass, like a polished monarch on the foot-cloth of
his throne. The river is the Owaga, and its opposite
bank is darkened with thick wood, through which a
liberal neighbor has allowed me to cut an eye-path to
the village spire—a mile across the fields. From my
cottage door across this meadow-lawn, steals, with
silver foot, the brook I redeemed from its lost strayings,
and, all along between brook and river, stand haycocks,
not fairies. Now, possess me as well of your
whereabout—what you see from your window in
Broadway! Is there a sapling on my whole arm that
would change root-hold with you?

The hay is heavy this year, and if there were less, I
should still feel like taking off my hat to the meadow.
There is nothing like living in the city, to impress one
with the gratuitous liberality of the services rendered
one in the country. Here are meadows now, that
without hint or petition, pressing or encouragement,
pay or consideration, nay, careless even of gratitude,
shoot me up some billions of glass-blades, clover-flowers,
white and red, and here and there a nodding
regiment of lilies, tall as my chin, and it is understood,
I believe, that I am welcome to it all. Now,
you may think this is all easy enough, and the meadow
is happy to be relieved; but so the beggar might think
of your alms, and be as just. But you have made the
money you give him by the sweat of your brow. So
has the meadow its grass. “It is estimated,” says
the Book of Nature, “that an acre of grass-land transpires,
in twenty-four hours, not less than six thousand
four hundred quarts of water.” Sweat me that without
a fee, thou “dollar a visit!”

Here comes William from the post, with a handful
of papers. The Mirror, with a likeness of Sprague.

A likeness in a mirror could scarce fail, one would
think, and here, accordingly, he is,—the banker-poet,
the Rogers of our country—fit as “as himself to be
his parallel.” Yet I have never seen that stern look
on him. We know he bears the “globe”[2] on his
back, like old Atlas, but he is more urbane than the
world-bearer. He keeps a muscle unstrained for a
smile. A more courteous gentleman stands not by
Mammon's altar—no, nor by the lip of Helicon—yet
this is somehow stern. In what character, if you
please, Mr. Harding? Sat Plutus, or Apollo, astride
your optic nerve when you drew that picture? It may
be a look he has, but, fine head as it stands on paper,
they who form from it an idea of the man, would be
agreeably disappointed in meeting him. And this,
which is a merit in most pictures, is a fault in one
which posterity is to look at.

Sprague has the reputation of being a most able
financier. Yet he is not a rich man. Best evidence
in the world that he puts his genius into his calculations,
for it is the nature of uncommon gifts to do
good to all but their possessor. That he is a poet,
and a true and high one, has been not so much acknowledged
by criticism, as felt in the republic. The
great army of editors, who paragraph upon one name,
as an entry of college-boys will play upon one flute,
till the neighborhood would rather listen to a voluntary
upon shovel and tongs, have not made his name
diurnal and hebdomadal; but his poetry is diffused
by more unjostled avenues, to the understandings and
hearts of his countrymen. I, for one, think he is a
better banker for his genius, as with the same power
he would have made a better soldier, statesman, farmer,
what you will. I have seen excellent poetry
from the hand of Plutus—(Biddle, I should have said,
but I never scratch out to you)—yet he has but ruffled
the muse, while Sprague has courted her. Our
Theodore,[3] bien-aimé, at the court of Berlin, writes a
better despatch, I warrant you, than a fellow born of
red tape and fed on sealing-wax at the department. I
am afraid the genius of poor John Quincy Adams is
more limited. He is only the best president we have
had since Washington—not a poet, though he has a
volume in press. Briareus is not the father of all who
will have a niche. Shelley would have made an unsafe
banker, for he was prodigal of stuff. Pope,
Rogers, Crabbe, Sprague, Halleck, waste no gold,
even in poetry. Every idea gets his due of those
poets, and no more; and Pope and Crabbe, by the
same token, would have made as good bankers as
Sprague and Rogers. We are under some mistake
about genius, my dear Doctor. I'll just step in-doors,
and find a definition of it in the library.

Really, the sun is hot enough, as Sancho says, to
fry the brains in a man's scull.

“Genius,” says the best philosophical book I know
of, “wherever it is found, and to whatever purpose
directed, is mental power. It distinguishes the man
of fine phrensy, as Shakspere expresses it, from the
man of mere phrensy. It is a sort of instantaneous insight
that gives us knowledge without going to school
for it. Sometimes it is directed to one subject, sometimes
to another; but under whatever form it exhibits
itself, it enables the individual who possesses it, to
make a wonderful, and almost miraculous progress in
the line of his pursuit.”

Si non é vero, é ben trovato. If philosophy were
more popular, we should have Irving for president,
Halleck for governor of Iowa, and Bryant envoy to
Texas. But genius, to the multitude, is a phantom
without mouth, pockets, or hands—incapable of work,
unaccustomed to food, ignorant of the uses of coin,
and unfit candidate, consequently, for any manner of
loaves and fishes. A few more Spragues would leaven
this lump of narrow prejudice.

I wish you would kill off your patients, dear Doctor,
and contrive to be with us at the agricultural show. I
flatter myself I shall take the prize for turnips. By
the way, to answer your question while I think of it,
that is the reason why I am not at Niagara, “taking a
look at the viceroy.” I must watch my turnip-ling.
I met Lord Durham once or twice when in London,
and once at dinner at Lady Blessington's. I was excessively
interested, on that occasion, by the tactics of
D'Israeli, who had just then chipped his political shell,
and was anxious to make an impression on Lord Durham,
whose glory, still to come, was confidently foretold
in that bright circle. I rather fancy the dinner
was made to give Vivian Grey the chance; for her
ladyship, benevolent to every one, has helped D'Israeli
to “imp his wing,” with a devoted friendship, of
which he should imbody in his maturest work the
delicacy and fervor. Women are glorious friends to
stead ambition; but effective as they all can be, few
have the tact, and fewer the varied means, of the lady
in question. The guests dropped in, announced but
unseen, in the dim twilight; and, when Lord Durham
came, I could only see that he was of middle stature,
and of a naturally cold address. Bulwer spoke to him,
but he was introduced to no one—a departure from
the custom of that maison sans-gêne, which was either
a tribute to his lordship's reserve, or a ruse on the
part of Lady Blessington, to secure to D'Israeli the
advantage of having his acquaintance sought—successful,
if so; for Lord Durham, after dinner, requested
a formal introduction to him. But for D'Orsay,
who sparkles, as he does everything else, out of
rule, and in splendid defiance of others' dulness, the
soup and the first half hour of dinner would have
passed off, with the usual English fashion of earnest
silence. I looked over my spoon at the future premier,
a dark, saturnine man, with very black hair, combed
very smooth, and wondered how a heart, with the turbulent
ambitions, and disciplined energies which were
stirring, I knew, in his, could be concealed under that
polished and marble tranquillity of mien and manner.
He spoke to Lady Blessington in an under-tone, replying
with a placid serenity that never reached a
smile, to so much of D'Orsay's champagne wit as
threw its sparkle in his way, and Bulwer and D'Israeli
were silent altogether. I should have foreboded a dull
dinner if, in the open brow, the clear sunny eye, and
unembarrassed repose of the beautiful and expressive
mouth of Lady Blessington, I had not read the promise
of a change. It came presently. With a tact, of
which the subtle ease and grace can in no way be conveyed
into description, she gathered up the cobweb
threads of conversation going on at different parts of
the table, and, by the most apparent accident, flung
them into D'Israeli's fingers, like the ribands of a four-in-hand.
And, if so coarse a figure can illustrate it,
he took the whip-hand like a master. It was an appeal
to his opinion on a subject he well understood,
and he burst at once, without preface, into that fiery
vein of eloquence which, hearing many times after,
and always with new delight, have stamped D'Israeli
on my mind as the most wonderful talker I have ever
had the fortune to meet. He is anything but a declaimer.
You would never think him on stilts. If
he catches himself in a rhetorical sentence, he mocks
at it in the next breath. He is satirical, contemptuous,
pathetic, humorous, everything in a moment; and his
conversation on any subject whatever, embraces the
omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis. Add to this, that
D'Israeli's is the most intellectual face in England—
pale, regular, and overshadowed with the most luxuriant
masses of raven-black hair; and you will scarce
wonder that, meeting him for the first time, Lord Durham

was (as he was expected to be by the Aspasia of
that London Academe), impressed. He was not carried
away as we were. That would have been unlike
Lord Durham. He gave his whole mind to the brilliant
meteor blazing before him; but the telescope of
judgment was in his hand—to withdraw at pleasure.
He has evidently native to his blood, that great quality
of a statesman—retenu. D'Israeli and he formed at
the moment a finely contrasted picture. Understanding
his game perfectly, the author deferred, constantly
and adroitly, to the opinion of his noble listener, shaped
his argument by his suggestions, allowed him to
say nothing without using it as the nucleus of some
new turn to his eloquence, and all this, with an apparent
effort against it, as if he had desired to address
himself exclusively to Lady Blessington, but was compelled,
by a superior intellectual magnetism, to turn
aside and pay homage to her guest. With all this instinctive
management there was a flashing abandon in
his language and choice of illustration, a kindling of
his eye, and, what I have before described, a positive
foaming at his lips, which contrasted with the warm
but clear and penetrating eye of Lord Durham, his
calm yet earnest features, and lips closed without compression,
formed, as I said, a picture, and of an order
worth remembering in poetry. Without meaning any
disrespect to D'Israeli, whom I admire as much as any
man in England, I remarked to my neighbor, a celebrated
artist, that it would make a glorious drawing of
Satan tempting an archangel to rebel.

Well—D'Israeli is in parliament, and Lord Durham
on the last round but one of the ladder of subject
greatness, The viceroy will be premier, no doubt;
but it is questionable if the author of Vivian Grey
does more than carry out the moral of his own tale.
Talking at a brilliant table, with an indulgent and superb
woman on the watch for wit and eloquence, and
rising in the face of a cold common-sense house of
commons, on the look out for froth and humbug, are
two different matters. In a great crisis, with the nation
in a tempest, D'Israeli would flash across the
darkness very finely—but he will never do for the calm
right-hand of a premier. I wish him, I am sure, every
success in the world; but I trust that whatever
political reverses fall to his share, they will drive him
back to literature.

I have written this last sentence in the red light of
sunset, and I must be out to see my trees watered, and
my kine driven a-field after their milking. What a
coverlet of glory the day-god draws about him for his
repose! I should like curtains of that burnt crimson.
If I have a passion in the world, it is for that royal
trade, upholstery; and so thought George the Fourth,
and so thinks Sultan Mahmoud, who, with his own
henna-tipped fingers, assisted by his assembled harem,
arranges every fold of drapery in the seraglio. If poetry
fail, I'll try the profession some day en grand, and
meantime let me go out and study one of the three
hundred and sixty-five varieties of couch-drapery in
he west.

6. LETTER VI.

My dear Doctor: Your letter contained

Why should you not pass August at Glemmary?
Have your patients bought you, body and soul? Is
there no “night-bell” in the city but yours? Have
you no practice in the country, my dear Esculapius?
Faith! I'll be ill! By the time you reach here, I
shall be a “case.” I have not had a headache now
in twenty years, and my constitution requires a change.
I'll begin by eating the cucumbers we had saved for
your visit, and you know the consequences. Mix me a
pill for the cholera—first, second, or third stage of the
disease, according to your speed—and come with
what haste you may. If you arrive too late, you lose
your fee, but I'll return your visit, by the honor of a
ghost.

By the way, as a matter of information, do you
charge in such cases? Or, the man being dead, do
you deduct for not feeling his pulse, nor telling him
the name of his damaged organ in Latin? It should
be half-price, I think, these items off. Let me know
by express mail, as one likes to be prepared.

Since I wrote to you, I have added the Chemung
river to my list of acquaintances. It was done a l'improvista,
as most pleasant things are. We were driving
to the village on some early errand, and met a
friend at the cross-roads, bound with an invalid to
Avon Springs. He was driving his own horses, and
proposed to us to set him a day's journey on his way.
I had hay to cut, but the day was made for truants—
bright, breezy, and exhilarating; and as I looked over
my shoulder, the only difficulty vanished, for there
stood a pedlar chaffering for a horn-comb with a girl
at a well. We provided for a night's toilet from his
tin-box, and easing off the check-reins a couple of
holes, to enlighten my ponies as to the change in
their day's work, we struck into the traveller's trot,
and sped away into the eye of a southwest breeze,
happy as urchins when the schoolmaster is on a jury.

When you come here, I shall drive you to the
Narrows of the Susquehannah. That is a word, nota
bene, which, in this degree of latitude, refers not at all
to the breadth of the stream. It is a place where the
mountain, like many a frowning coward, threatens to
crowd its gentler neighbor, but gives room at its calm
approach, and annoys nobody but the passer-by. The
road between them, as you come on, looks etched
with a thumb-nail along the base of the cliff, and you
would think it a pokerish drive, making no allowance
for perspective. The friable rock, however, makes
rather a smooth single track, and if you have the inside
when you meet Farmer Giles or the stage-coach,
you have only to set your hub against the rock, and
“let them go by as likes.” The majestic and tranquil
river sweeps into the peaked shadow, and on again,
with the disdain of a beauty used to conquer. It reminded
me of Lady Blessington's “do if you dare!”
when the mob at the house of lords threatened to
break her chariot windows. There was a calm courage
in Miladi's French glove that carried her through,
and so amid this mob of mountains, glides the Susquehannah
to the sea.

While I am here, let me jot down an observation
worthy the notice of Mr. Capability Brown. This
cliff falls into a a line of hills running from northwest
to southeast, and by five in the summer afternoon,
their tall shoulders have nudged the sun, and the long,
level road at their bases lies in deep shadow, for miles
along the Owaga and Susquehannah. “Consequence
is,” as my friend of the “Albany Daily” says, we can
steal a march upon twilight, and take a cool drive before
tea. What the ruination shops on the west side
of Broadway are to you, this spur of the Alleganies
is to me (minus the plate-glass, and the temptations).
I value this—for the afternoons in July and
August are hot and long; the breeze dies away, the
flies get in-doors, and with the desire for motion, yet
no ability to stir, one longs for a ride with Ariel
through “the veins o' the earth.” Mr. C. Brown
now would mark me down, for this privilege of road
well shaded, some twenty pound in the rent. He is a
man in England who trades upon his taste. He goes
to your country-seat to tell you what can be done
with it—what are its unimproved advantages, what to
do with your wood, and what with your water. He
would rate this shady mountain as an eligibility in the

site, to be reckoned, of course, as income. A very
pleasant man is Mr. Brown!

It occurs to me, Doctor, that a new branch of this
gentleman's profession might be profitable. Why not
set up a shop to tell people what they can make of
themselves? I have a great mind to take out a patent
for the idea. The stock in trade would be two chairs
and a green curtain—(for taste, like rouge, should be
sold privately)—not expensive. I would advertise to
see gentlemen in the morning, ladies in the evening,
“secresy in all cases strictly observed.” Few people
of either sex know their own style. Your Madonna
is apt to romp, for instance, and your romp to wear
her hair plain and a rosary. Few ladies know what
colors they look best in—whether smiles or tears are
most becoming, whether they appear to most advantage
sitting, like Queen Victoria and Tom Moore (and
this involves a delicate question), or standing and
walking. The world is full of people who mistake
their style—fish for your net every one. How many
women are never charming till they forget themselves!
A belle is a woman who knows her weapons—colors,
smiles, moods, caprices; who has looked at her face
in the glass like an artist, and knows what will lighten
a defect or enhance a beauty. The art is as rare as
the belle. “Porquoy, my dear knight.” Because
taste is, where knowledge was before the discovery of
printing—locked up with the first possessor. Why
should it not be diffused? What a refuge for reduced
gentility would be such a vocation. What is now the
disease of fortunes would be then their remedy; parents
would cultivate a taste for eloquence in their
children, because there is no knowing what they may
come to—the reason, now, why they take pains to repress
it.

I presume it is in consequence of the diffusion of
printing that ignorance of the law is no apology for
crime. Were taste within reach of all (there might
be dispensaries for the poor), that “shocking bad hat”
of yours, my dear Doctor, would be a criminal offence.
Our fat friend with the long-tailed coat, and the waist
at his shoulder-blades, would be liable to fine for misinforming
the tailor as to the situation of his hips—
the tailor of course not to blame, having nothing to go
by. Two scandalous old maids together would be
abated as a nuisance—as it is the quantity of tin-pots,
which, in a concert upon that tintinnabulary instrument,
constitutes a disturbance of the peace. The
reform would be endless. I am not sure it could be
extended to bad taste in literature, for, like rebellion,
the crime would merge in the universality of the offenders.
But it would be the general putting down of
tame monsters, now loose on society. Pensex y!

What should you think of dining with a woman behind
your chair worth seven hundred thousand pounds
sterling—well invested? You may well stare—but
unless a large number of sensible people are very
much mistaken, you may do so any day, for some
three shillings, at a small inn on the Susquehannah.
Those who know the road, leave behind them a showy,
porticoed tavern, new, and carefully divested of all
trees and grass, and pull up at the door of the old inn
at the place, a low, old-fashioned house, built on a
brook-side, and with all the appearance of a comfortable
farmhouse, save only a leaning and antiquated
sign-post. Here lives a farmer well off in the world,
a good-natured old man, who for some years has not
meant to keep open tavern, but from the trouble of
taking down his sign-post, or the habit, and acquaintance
with travellers, gives all who come what chance
fare may be under the roof, and at the old prices common
in days when the bill was not ridden by leagues
of white paint and portico. His dame, the heiress, is
a tall and erect woman of fifty (“or, by'r lady, three-score”),
a smiling, intelligent, ready hostess, with the
natural manners of a gentlewoman. Now and then, a
pale daughter, unmarried, and twenty-four or younger,
looks into the whitewashed parlor, and if the farmer
is home from the field, he sits down with his hat on,
and lends you a chat with a voice sound and hearty as
the smell of day. It is altogether a pleasant place to
loiter away the noon, and though it was early for dinner
when we arrived, we put up our horses (the men
were all a-field), and Dame Raymond spread her white
cloth, and set on her cherry-pie, while her daughter
broiled for us the de quoi of the larder, in the shape
of a salt mackerel. The key of the “bin” was in her
pocket, and we were young enough, the dame said, as
she gave it to us, to feed our own horses. This good
woman, or this great lady, is the only daughter, as I
understand it, of an old farmer ninety years of age,
who has fallen heir to an immense fortune in England.
He was traced out several years ago by the executors,
and the proper testimonials of the property placed in
his hands; but he was old, and his child was well off
and happy, and he refused to put himself to any trouble
about it. Dame Raymond herself thought England
a great way off; and the pride of her life is her
fine chickens, and to go so far upon the strength of a
few letters, leaving the farm and hen-roost to take care
of themselves, was an undertaking which, she felt, justified
Farmer Raymond in shaking his head. Lately
an enterprising gentleman in the neighborhood has
taken the papers, and she consented to write to her
father, who willingly made over to her all authority in
the matter. The claim, I understand, is as well authenticated
as paper evidence can make it, and the
probability is, that in a few months Dame Raymond
will be more troubled with her riches than she ever
was with her chickens.

We dined at our leisure, and had plenty of sharp
gossip with the tall hostess, who stood to serve the tea
from a side-table, and between our cups kept the flies
from her tempting cherry-pie and brown sugar, with a
large fan. I have not often seen a more shrewd and
sensible woman, and she laughs and philosophizes
about her large fortune in a way that satisfied me she
would laugh just as cheerly if it should turn out a
bubble. She said her husband had told her “it was
best not to be proud, till she got her money.” The
only symptom that I detected of castle-building, was a
hint she let slip of hoping to entertain travellers, some
day, in a better house. I coupled this with another
remark, and suspected that the new tavern, with its big
portico and blazing sign, had not taken the wind out
of her sails without offence, and that, perhaps, the
only use of her money, on which she had determined,
was to build a bigger and eclipse the intruder.

I amused myself with watching her as she bustled
about with old-fashioned anxiety to anticipate our
wants, and fancying the changes to which the acquisition
of this immense fortune might introduce her in
England. There was her daughter, whom a little millinery
would improve into a very presentable heiress,
cooking our mackerel; while Mrs. Thwaites, the grocer's
widow in London, with no more money probably,
was beset by half the unmarried noblemen in England,
Lord Lyndhurst, it is said, the most pressing. But
speculation is endless, and you shall go down with
your trout line, dear Doctor, and spin your own cobwebs
while Dame Raymond cooks your fish.

I have spun out my letter to such a length, that I
have left myself no room to prate to you of the beauties
of the Chemung, but you are likely to hear
enough of it, for it is a subject with which I am just
now something enamoured. I think you share with
me my passion for rivers. If you have the grace to
come and visit us, and I survive the cholera you have
brought upon me, we will visit this new Naiad in company,
and take Dame Raymond in our way. Adieu.

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, lal elled 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 bedrooms.
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—Burus'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.

8. LETTER VIII

My Dear Doctor: What can keep you in town
during this insufferable hot solstice? I can not fancy,
unless you shrink from a warm welcome in the country.
It is too hot for enthusiasm, and I have sent the
cart to the hay-field, and crept under the bridge in
my slippers, as if I had found a day to be idle, though
I promised myself to see the harvest home, without
missing sheaf or winrow. Yet it must be cooler here
than where you are, for I see accounts of drought on
the seaboard, while with us every hot noon has bred
its thunder-shower, and the corn on the dry hill-sides
is the only crop not kept back by the moisture. Still,
the waters are low, and the brook at my feet has depleted
to a slender vein, scarce stouter than the pulse
that flutters under your thumb in the slightest wrist
in your practice. My lobster is missing—probably
gone to “the springs.” My swallowlets too, who
have, “as it were, eat paper and drunk ink,” have
flitted since yesterday, like illiterate gipseys, leaving
no note of their departure. “Who shall tell Priam
so, or Hecuba.” The old swallows circle about as if
they expected them again. Heaven send they are not
in some crammed pocket in that red school-house,
unwilling listeners to the vexed alphabet, or, perhaps,
squeezed to death in the varlet's perplexity at crooked
S.

I have blotted that last sentence like a school-boy,
but between the beginning and the end of it, I have
lent a neighbor my side-hill plough, besides answering,
by the way, rather an embarrassing question. My
catechiser lives above me on the drink (his name for
the river), and is one of those small farmers, common
here, who live without seeing money from one year's
end to the other. He never buys, he trades. He
takes a bag of wheat, or a fleece, to the village for salt
fish and molasses, pays his doctor in corn or honey,
and “changes work” with the blacksmith, the saddler,
and the shoemaker. He is a shrewd man withal,
likes to talk, and speaks Yankee of the most Bœotian
fetch and purity. Imagine a disjointed-looking Enceladus,
in a homespun sunflower-colored coat, and
small yellow eyes, expressive of nothing but the merest
curiosity, looking down on me by throwing himself
over the railing like a beggar's wallet of broken meats.

“Good morning, Mr. Willisy!”

From hearing my name first used in the possessive
case, probably (Willis's farm, or cow), he regularly
throws me in that last syllable.

“Ah! good morning!” (Looking up at the interruption,
I made that unsightly blot which you have
just excused.)

“You aint got no side-hill plough?”

“Yes, I have, and I'll lend it you with pleasure.”

“Wal! you're darn'd quick. I warnt a go'n' to
ask you quite yet. Writin' to your folks at hum?”

“No!”

“Making out a lease!”

“No!”

“How you do spin it off! You haint always work'd
on a farm, have ye?”

It is a peculiarity (a redeeming peculiarity, I think),
of the Yankees, that though their questions are rude,
they are never surprised if you do not answer them.
I did not feel that the thermometer warranted me in
going into the history of my life to my overhanging
neighbor, and I busied myself in crossing my t's and
dotting my i's very industriously. He had a maggot
in his brain, however, and must e'en be delivered of it.
He pulled off a splinter or two from under the bridge
with his long arms, and during the silence William
came to me with a message, which he achieved with
his English under-tone of respect.

“Had to lick that boy some, to make him so darn'd
civil, hadn't ye?”

“You have a son about his age, I think.”

“Yes; but I guess he couldn't be scared to talk
that way. What's the critter 'fear'd on?”

No answer.

“You haint been a minister, have ye?”

“No!”

“Wal! they talk a heap about your place. I say,
Mr. Willisy, you aint nothing particular, be ye?”

You should have seen, dear Doctor, the look of
eager and puzzled innocence with which this rather
difficult question was delivered. Something or other
had evidently stimulated my good neighbor's curiosity,
but whether I had been blown up in a steamboat,
or had fatted a prize pig, or what was my claim to the
digito monstrari, it was more than half his errand to
discover. I have put down our conversation, I believe,
with the accuracy of a short-hand writer. Now,
is not this a delicious world in which, out of a museum
neither stuffed nor muzzled, you may find such
an arcadian? What a treasure he would be to those
ancient mariners of polite life, who exist but to tell
you of their little peculiarities!

I have long thought, dear Doctor, and this reminds
me of it, that there were two necessities of society unfitted
with a vocation. (If you know of any middle-aged
gentlemen out of employment, I have no objection
to your reserving the suggestion for a private
charity, but otherwise, I would communicate it to the
world as a new light.) The first is a luxury which no
hotel should be without, no neighborhood, no thoroughfare,
no editor's closet. I mean a professed,
salaried, stationary, and confidential listener. Fancy
the comfort of such a thing. There should be a well-dressed
silent gentleman, for instance, pacing habitually
the long corridor of the Astor, with a single button
on his coat of the size of a door-handle. You enter
in a violent hurry, or with a mind tenanted to suit
yourself, and some fainéant babbler, weary of his
emptiness, must needs take you aside, and rob you of
two mortal hours, more or less, while he tells you his
tale of nothing. If “a penny saved is a penny got,”
what a value it would add to life to be able to transfer
this leech of precious time, by laying his hand politely
on the large button of the listener! “Finish your
story to this gentleman!” quoth you. Then, again,
there is your unhappy man in hotels, newly arrived,
without an acquaintance save the crisp and abbreviating
bar-keeper, who wanders up and down, silent-sick,
and more solitary in the crowd about him than
the hermit on the lone column of the temple of Jupiter.
What a mercy to such a sufferer to be able to
step to the bar, and order a listener. Or to send for
him with a bottle of wine when dining alone (most
particularly alone), at a table of two hundred! Or to
ring for him in number four hundred and ninety-three,
of a rainy Sunday, with punch and cigars! I am deceived
in Stetston of the Astor, if he is not philosopher
enough to see the value of this suggestion
“Baths in the house, and a respectable listener if desired,”
would be an attractive advertisement, let me
promise you!

The other vocation to which I referred, would be

that of a sort of ambulant dictionary, used mostly at
evening parties. It should be a gentleman not distinguishable
from the common animated wall-flower,
except by some conventional sign, as a bit of blue riband
in his button-hole. His qualifications should be
to know all persons moving in the circle, and something
about them—to be up, in short, to the town
gossip—what Miss Thing's expectations are—who
“my friend” is with the died mustache—and which
of the stout ladies on the sofa are the forecast shadows
of coming balls, or the like desirablenesses. There
are a thousand invisible cobwebs threaded through society,
which the stranger is apt to cross à travers—
committing his enthusiasm, for instance, to the deaf
ears of a fiancée; or, from ignorance, losing opportunities
of knowing the clever, the witty, and the famous
—all of whom look, at a first glance, very much like
other people. The gentleman with the blue riband,
you see, would remedy all this. You might make
for him after you bow to the lady of the house, and in
ten minutes put yourself au courant of the entire field.
You might apply to him (if you had been absent to
Santa Fè or the Pyramids) for the last new shibboleth,
the town rage, the name of the new play or poem, the
form and color of the freshest change in the kaleidoscope
of society. It is not uncommon for sensible
people to retire, and “sweep and garnish” their self-respect
in a month's seclusion. It is some time before
they become au fait again of what it is necessary to
know of the follies of the hour. The graceful yet
bitter wit, the unoffending yet pointed rally, the confidence
which colors all defeats like successes, are delicate
weapons, the dexterity at which depends much
on familiarity with the ground. What an advent to
the diffident and the embarrassed would be such a
profession! How many persons of wit and spirit
there are in society blank for lack of confidence, who,
with such a friend in the corner, would come out like
magic-ink to the fire! “Ma hardiesse” (says the aspiring
rocket), “vient de mon ardeur!” But the device
would lose its point did it take a jack-o'-lantern
for a star. Mention these little hints to your cleverest
female friend, dear Doctor. It takes a woman to introduce
an innovation.

Since I wrote to you, I have been adopted by perhaps
the most abominable cur you will see in your
travels. I mention it to ward off the first impression
—for a dog gives a character to a house; and I would
not willingly have a friend light on such a monster in
my premises without some preparation. His first apparition
was upon a small floss carpet at the foot of an
ottoman, the most luxurious spot in the house, of
which he had taken possession with a quiet impudence
that perfectly succeeded. A long, short-legged cur,
of the color of spoiled mustard, with most base tail
and erect ears—villanous in all his marks. Rather a
dandy gentleman, from New-York, was calling on us
when he was discovered, and presuming the dog to be
his, we forbore remark; and, assured by this chance
indulgence, he stretched himself to sleep. The indignant
outcry with which the gentleman disclaimed
all knowledge of him, disturbed his slumber; and,
not to leave us longer in doubt, he walked confidently
across the room, and seated himself between my feet
with a canine freedom I had never seen exhibited, except
upon most familiar acquaintance. I saw clearly
that our visiter looked upon my disclaimer as a “fetch.”
It would have been perilling my credit for veracity to
deny the dog. So no more was said about him, and
since that hour he has kept himself cool in my shadow.
I have tried to make him over to the kitchen,
but he will neither feed nor stay with them. I can
neither outrun him on horseback, nor lose him by
crossing ferries. Very much to the discredit of my
taste, I am now never seen without this abominable
follower—and there is no help for it, unless I kill him,
which, since he loves me, would be worse than shooting
the albatross; besides, I have at least a drachm
(three scruples) of Pythagoreanism in me, and “fear
to kill woodcock, lest I dispossess the soul of my
grandam.” I shall look to the papers to see what
friend I have lost in Italy, or the East. I can think
of some who would come to me thus.

Adieu, dear Doctor. Send me a good name for my
cur—for since he will have me, why I must needs be
his, and he shall be graced with an appellation. I
think his style of politics might be worth something
in love. If I were the lady, it would make a fair beginning.
But I will waste no more ink upon you.

9. LETTER IX.

My Dear Doctor: As they say an oyster should
be pleased with his apotheosis in a certain sauce, I
was entertained with the cleverness of your letter
though you made minced-meat of my trout-fishing.
Under correction, however, I still cover the barb of my
“fly,” and so I must do till I can hook my trout if he
but graze the bait with his whisker. You are an
alumnus of the gentle science, in which I am but a
neophyte, and your fine rules presuppose the dexterity
of a practised angler. Now a trout (I have observed
in my small way) will jump once at your naked
fly; but if he escape, he will have no more on't, unless
there is a cross of the dace in him. As it is a fish
that follows his nose, however, the smell of the worm
will bring him to the lure again, and if your awkwardness
give him time, he will stick to it till he has
cleaned the hook. Probatum est.

You may say this is unscientific, but, if I am to
breakfast from the contents of my creel; I must be
left with my worm and my ignorance.

Besides—hang rules! No two streams are alike—
no two men (who are not fools) fish alike. Walton
and Wilson would find some new “wrinkle,” if they
were to try these wild waters; and, to generalize the
matter, I have, out of mathematics, a distrust of rules,
descriptions, manuals, etc., amounting to a 'phobia.
Experience was always new to me. I do not seem to
myself ever to have seen the Rome I once read of.
The Venice I know is not the Venice of story nor of
travellers' books. There are two Londons in my
mind—one where I saw whole shelves of my library
walking about in coats and petticoats, and another
where there was nothing visible through the fog but
fat men with tankards of porter—one memory of it all
glittering with lighted rooms, bright and kind faces,
men all manly, and women all womanly, and another
memory (got from books) where every man was surly,
and dressed in a buff waistcoat, and every woman a
giantess, in riding-hat and boots.

It is delightful to think how new everything is,
spite of description. Never believe, dear Doctor, that
there is an old world. There is no such place, on
my honor! You will find England, France, Italy,
and the East, after all you have read and heard, as
altogether new as if they were created by your eye,
and were never sung, painted, nor be-written—you
will indeed. Why—to be sure—what were the world
else? A pawnbroker's closet, where every traveller
had left his clothes for you to wear after him! No!
no! Thanks to Providence, all things are new! Pen
and ink can not take the gloss off your eyes, nor can
any man look through them as you do. I do not believe
the simplest matter—sunshine or verdure—has
exactly the same look to any two people in the world.
How much less a human face—a landscape—a broad
kingdom? Travellers are very pleasant people. They
tell you what picture was produced in their brain by
the things they saw; but if they forestalled novelty by

that, I would as soon read them as beseech a thief to
steal my dinner. How it looks to one pair of eyes!
would be a good reminder pencilled on the margin of
many a volume.

I have run my ploughshare, in this furrow, upon a
root of philosophy, which has cured heart-aches for
me ere now. I struck upon it almost accidentally,
while administering consolation, years since, to a sensitive
friend, whose muse had been consigned, alive
and kicking, to the tomb, by a blundering undertaker
of criticism. I read the review, and wrote on it with
a pencil, “So thinks one man in fifteen millions;” and,
to my surprise, up swore my dejected friend, like Master
Barnardine, that he would “consent to die that
day, for no man's persuasion.” Since that I have
made a practice of counting the enemy; and trust me,
dear Doctor, it is sometimes worth while not to run
away without this little preliminary. A friend, for instance,
with a most boding solemnity, takes you aside,
and pulls from his pocket a newspaper containing a
paragraph that is aimed at your book, your morals,
perhaps your looks and manners. You catch the
alarm from your friend's face, and fancy it is the voice
of public opinion, and your fate is fixed. Your book
is detestable, your character is gone. Your manners
and features are the object of universal disapprobation.
Stay! count the enemy! Was it decided by a convention?
No! By a caucus? No! By a vote on the
deck of a steamboat? No! By a group at the corner
of the street, by a club, by a dinner-party? No!
By whom then? One small gentleman, sitting in a
dingy corner of a printing-office, who puts his quill
through your reputation as the entomologist slides a
pin through a beetle—in the way of his vocation. No
particular malice to you. He wanted a specimen of
the genus poet, and you were the first caught. If
there is no head to the pin (as there often is none), the
best way is to do as the beetle does—pretend to be
killed till he forgets you, and then slip off without a
buzz.

The only part of calumny that I ever found troublesome
was my friends' insisting on my being unhappy
about it. I dare say you have read the story of the
German criminal, whose last request that his head
might be struck off while he stood engaged in conversation,
was humanely granted by the provost. The
executioner was an adroit headsman, and watching his
opportunity, he crept behind his victim while he was
observing the flight of a bird, and sliced off his bulb
without even decomposing his gaze. It was suggested
to the sufferer presently that he was decapitated, but
he thought not. Upon which one of his friends stepped
up, and begging he would take the pains to stir
himself a little, his head fell to the ground. If the
story be not true the moral is. In the many times I
have been put to death by criticism, I have never felt
incommoded, till some kind friend insisted upon it,
and now that I can stand on a potato-hill in a circle
of twice the diameter of a rifleshot, and warn off all
trespassers, I intend to defy sympathy, and carry my
top as long as it will stay on—behead me as often as
you like, beyond my periphery.

Still, though

it is very pleasant now and then to pounce upon a bigger
bird screaming in the same chorus. Nothing impairs
the dignity of an author's reputation like a newspaper
wrangle, yet one bold literary vulture struck
down promptly and successfully serves as good a purpose
as the hawk nailed to the barn door. But I do
not live in the country to be pestered with resentments.
I do not well know how the thoughts of them came
under the bridge. I'll have a fence that shall keep
out such stray cattle, or there are no posts and rails in
philosophy.

There is a little mental phenomenon, dear Doctor,
which has happened to me of late so frequently, that
I must ask you if you are subject to it, in the hope
that your singular talent for analysis will give me the
“pourquoy.” I mean a sudden novelty in the impression
of very familiar objects, enjoyments, etc. For
example, did it ever strike you all at once that a tree
was a very magnificent production? After looking at
lakes and rivers for thirty years (more or less), have
you ever, some fine morning, caught sight of a very
familiar stream, and found yourself impressed with its
new and singular beauty? I do not know that the miracle
extends to human faces, at least in the same degree.
I am sure that my old coat is not rejuvenescent.
But it is true that from possessing the nil
admirari becoming to a “picked man of countries”
(acquired with some pains, I may say), I now catch
myself smiling with pleasure to think the river will not
all run by, that there will be another sunset to-morrow,
that my grain will ripen and nod when it is ripe,
and such like every-day marvels. Have we scales
that drop off our eyes at a “certain age?” Do our
senses renew as well as our bodies, only more capriciously?
Have we a chrysalis state, here below,
like that parvenu gentleman, the butterfly? Still
more interesting query—does this delicious novelty
attach, later in life, or ever, to objects of affection—
compensating for the ravages in the form, the dulness
of the senses, loss of grace, temper, and all outward
loveliness? I should like to get you over a flagon of
tokay on that subject.

There is a curious fact, I have learned for the first
time in this wild country, and it may be new to you,
that as the forest is cleared, new springs rise to the
surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the sunshine.
The settler knows that water as well as herbage
will start to the light, and as his axe lets it in upon
the black bosom of the wilderness, his cattle find
both pasture and drink, where, before, there had never
been either well-head or verdure. You have yourself
been, in your day, dear Doctor, “a warped slip of
wilderness,” and will see at once that there lies in this
ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain moral
changes that come in upon the heels of more cultivated
and thoughtful manhood. Of the springs that
start up in the footsteps of thought and culture, the
sources are like those of forest springs, unsuspected
till they flow. There is no divining-rod, whose
dip shall tell us at twenty what we shall most relish at
thirty. We do not think that with experience we shall
have grown simple, that things we slight and overlook
will have become marvels, that our advancement in
worth will owe more to the cutting away of overgrowth
in tastes than to their acquisition or nurture.

I should have thought this change in myself scarce
worth so much blotting of good paper, but for its bearing
on a question that has hitherto given me no little
anxiety. The rivers flow on to the sea, increasing in
strength and glory to the last, but we have our pride
and fulness in youth, and dwindle and fall away toward
the grave. How I was to grow dull to the ambitions
and excitements which constituted my whole existence—be
content to lag and fall behind and forego
emulation in all possible pursuits—in short, how I
was to grow old contentedly and gracefully, has been
to me a somewhat painful puzzle. With what should
I be pleased? How should I fill the vacant halls
from which had fled merriment and fancy, and hope,
and desire?

You can scarce understand, dear Doctor, with what
pleasure I find this new spring in my path—the content
with which I admit the conviction, that without
effort or self-denial, the mind may slake its thirst, and

the heart be satisfied with but the waste of what lies
so near us. I have all my life seen men grow old,
tranquilly and content, but I did not think it possible
that I should. I took pleasure only in that which required
young blood to follow, and I felt that to look
backward for enjoyment, would be at best but a difficult
resignation.

Now let it be no prejudice to the sincerity of my
philosophy, if, as a corollary, I beg you to take a farm
on the Susquehannah, and let us grow old in company.
I should think Fate kinder than she passes for,
if I could draw you, and one or two others whom we
know and “love with knowledge,” to cluster about
this—certainly one of the loveliest spots in nature, and,
while the river glides by unchangingly, shape ourselves
to our changes with a helping sympathy.
Think of it, dear Doctor! Meantime I employ myself
in my rides, selecting situations on the river banks
which I think would be to yours and our friends'
liking; and in the autumn, when it is time to transplant,
I intend to suggest to the owners where trees
might be wanted in case they ever sold, so that you
will not lose even a season in your shrubbery, though
you delay your decision. Why should we not renew
Arcady? God bless you.

10. LETTER X.

You may congratulate me on the safe getting in of
my harvest, dear Doctor; for I have escaped, as you
may say, in a parenthesis. Two of the most destructive
hail-storms remembered in this part of the country
have prostrated the crops of my neighbors, above and
below—leaving not a blade of corn, nor an unbroken
window; yet there goes my last load of grain into the
barn, well-ripened, and cut standing and fair.

I confess I should have fretted at the loss of my
firstlings more than for a much greater disaster in another
shape. I have expended curiosity, watching, and
fresh interest, upon my uplands, besides plaster and my
own labor; and the getting back five hundred bushels
for five or ten, has been to me, through all its beautiful
changes from April till now, a wonder to be enjoyed
like a play. To have lost the denouement by a
hail-storm, would be like a play with the fifth act
omitted, or a novel with the last leaf torn out. Now, if
no stray spark set fire to my barn, I can pick you out the
whitest of a thousand sheaves, thrash them with the
first frost, and send you a barrel of Glenmary flour,
which shall be, not only very excellent bread, but
should have also a flavor of wonder, admiration—all
the feelings, in short, with which I have watched it,
from seed-time to harvest. Yet there is many a dull
dog will eat of it, and remark no taste of me! And so
there are men who will read a friend's book as if it
were a stranger's—but we are not of those. If we
love the man, whether we eat a potato of his raising,
or read a verse of his inditing, there is in it a sweetness
which has descended from his heart—by quill or
hoe-handle. I scorn impartiality. If it be a virtue,
Death and Posterity may monopolize it for me.

I was interrupted a moment since by a neighbor,
who, though innocent of reading and writing, has a
coinage of phraseology, which would have told in
authorship. A stray mare had broken into his peas,
and he came to me to write an advertisement for the
court-house door. After requesting the owner “to
pay charges and take her away,” in good round characters,
I recommended to my friend, who was a good
deal vexed at the trespass, to take a day's work out
of her.

“Why, I haint no job on the mounting,” said he,
folding up the paper very carefully. “It's a side-hill
critter! Two off legs so lame, she can't stand
even.”

It was certainly a new idea, that a horse with two
spavins on a side, might be used with advantage on a
hill-farm. While I was jotting it down for your benefit,
my neighbor had emerged from under the bridge,
and was climbing the railing over my head.

“What will you do if he won't pay damages?” I
cried out.

“Put the types on to him!” he answered; and,
jumping into the road, strided away to post up his advertisement.

I presume, that “to put the types on to” a man, is
to send the constable to him with a printed warrant;
but it is a good phrase.

The hot weather of the last week has nearly dried
up the brook, and, forgetting to water my young trees
in the hurry of harvesting, a few of them have hung
out the quarantine yellow at the top, and, I fear, will
scarce stand it till autumn. Not to have all my hopes
in one venture, and that a frail one, I have set about
converting a magnificent piece of wild jungle into an
academical grove—an occupation that makes one feel
more like a viceroy than a farmer. Let me interest
you in this metempsychosis; for, if we are to grow
old together, as I proposed to you in my last, this
grove will lend its shade to many a slippered noontide,
and echo, we will hope, the philosophy of an old age,
wise and cheerful. Aptly for my design, the shape of
the grove is that of the Greek —the river very nearly
encircling it; and here, if I live, will I pass the Omega
of my life; and, if you will come to the christening,
dear Doctor, so shall the grove be named, in solemn
ceremony—The Omega.

How this nobly-wooded and water-clasped little peninsula
has been suffered to run to waste, I know not.
It contains some half-score acres of rich interval; and,
to the neglect of previous occupants of the farm, I probably
owe its gigantic trees, as well as its weedy undergrowth,
and tangled vines. Time out of mind (five
years, in this country) it has been a harbor for woodcocks,
wood-ducks, minks, wild bees, humming birds,
and cranes—(two of the latter still keeping possession)
—and its labyrinth of tall weeds, interlaced with the
low branches of the trees, was seldom penetrated, except
once or twice a year by the sportsman, and as
often by the Owaga in its freshet. Scarce suspecting
the size of the trees within, whose trunks were entirely
concealed, I have looked upon its towering mass of
verdure but as a superb emerald wall, shutting the
meadows in on the east—and, though within a lance-shot
of my cottage, have neglected it, like my prede
cessors, for more manageable ground.

I have enjoyed very much the planting of young
wood, and the anticipation of its shade and splendor in
Heaven's slow, but good time. It was a pleasure of
Hope; and, to men of leisure and sylvan taste in England,
it has been—literature bears witness—a pursuit
full of dignity and happiness. But the redemption of
a venerable grove from the wilderness, is an enjoyment
of another measure. It is a kind of playing of King
Lear backward—discovering the old monarch in his
abandonment, and sweeping off his unnatural offspring,
to bring back the sunshine to his old age, and give him
room, with his knights, in his own domain. You
know how trees that grow wild near water, in this
country, put out foliage upon the trunk as well as the
branches, covering it, like ivy, to the roots. It is a
beautiful caprice of Nature; but the grandeur of the
dark and massive stem is entirely lost—and I have
been as much surprised at the giant bodies we have
developed, stripping off this unfitting drapery, as

Richard at the thewes and sinews of the uncowled
friar of Copmanhurst.

You can not fancy, if you have never exercised this
grave authority, how many difficulties of judgment
arise, and how often a jury is wanted to share the responsibility
of the irretrievable axe. I am slow to
condemn; and the death-blow to a living tree, however
necessary, makes my blood start, and my judgment
half repent. There are, to-day, several under
reprieve—one of them a beautiful linden, which I can
see from my seat under the bridge, nodding just now
to the wind, as careless of its doom as if it were sure
its bright foliage would flaunt out the summer. In
itself it is well worth the sparing and cherishing, for it
is full of life and youth—and, could I transplant it to
another spot, it would be invaluable. But, though
full grown and spreading, it stands among giants,
whose branches meet above it at twice its height; and,
while it contributes nothing to the shade, its smaller
trunk looks a Lilliputian in Brobdignag, out of keeping
and proportion. So I think it must come down—
and, with it, a dozen in the same category—condemned,
like many a wight who was well enough in his place,
for being found in too good company.

There is a superstition about the linden, by the
way, to which the peculiarity in its foliage may easily
have given rise. You may have remarked, of course,
that from the centre of the leaf starts a slender stem,
which bears the linden-flower. Our Savior is said,
by those who believe in the superstition, to have been
crucified upon this tree, which has ever since borne
the flowering type of the nails driven into it through
his palms.

Another, whose doom is suspended, is a ragged
sycamore, whose decayed branches are festooned to
the highest top by a wild grape-vine, of the most superb
fruitfulness and luxuriance. No wife ever pleaded
for a condemned husband with more eloquence than
these delicate tendrils to me, for the rude tree with
whose destiny they are united. I wish you were here,
dear Doctor, to say spare it, or cut it down. In itself,
like the linden, it is a splendid creature; but, alas! it
spoils a long avenue of stately trees opening toward my
cottage porch, and I fear policy must outweigh pity.
I shall let it stand over Sunday, and fortify myself
with an opinion.

Did you ever try your hand, dear Doctor, at this
forest-sculpture? It sounds easy enough to trim out
a wood, and so it is, if the object be merely to produce
butter-nuts, or shade-grazing cattle. But to thin, and
trim, and cut down, judiciously, changing a “wild and
warped slip of wilderness” into a chaste and studious
grove, is not done without much study of the spot, let
alone a taste for the sylvan. There are all the many
effects of the day's light to be observed, how morning
throws her shadows, and what protection there is from
noon, and where is flung open an aisle to let in the
welcome radiance of sunset. There is a view of
water to be let through, perhaps, at the expense of
trees otherwise ornamental, or an object to hide by
shrubbery which is in the way of an avenue. I have
lived here as long as this year's grasshoppers, and am
constantly finding out something which should have a
bearing on the disposition of grounds or the sculpture
(permit me the word) of my wood and forest. I am
sorry to finish “the Omega” without your counsel
and taste; but there is a wood on the hill which I will
keep, like a cold pie, till you come to us, and we will
shoulder our axes and carve it into likelihood together.

And now here comes my Yankee axe (not curtal)
which I sent to be ground when I sat down to scrawl
you this epistle. As you owe the letter purely to its
dulness (and mine), I must away to a half-felled tree,
which I deserted in its extremity. If there were truth
in Ovid, what a butcher I were! Yet there is a groan
when a tree falls, which sometimes seems to me more
than the sundering of splinters. Adieu, dear Doctor,
and believe that

if I can give it you by wishing.

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 par
took not of the fall of Adam, has had time to affect
you with its tranquillity—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 neighbors 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.

12. LETTER XII.

I have nearly had by breath taken away this morning,
dear Doctor, by a grave assurance from a railroad
commissioner, that five years hence I should
“devour the way” between this and New York in
seven hours. Close on the heels of this gentleman
came an engineer of the canal, who promised me as
trippingly, that in three years I should run in a packet-boat
from my cottage to tide-water. This was intended,
in both cases, I presume, to be very pleasant
intelligence. With a little time, I dare say, I shall
come to think it so. But I assure you at present,
that, of all dwellers upon the canal route, myself, and
the toads disentombed by the blasting of the rocks, are,
perhaps, the most unpleasantly surprised—they, poor
hermits, fancying themselves safe from the troubles of
existence till dooms-day, and I as sure that my cottage
was at a safe remove from the turmoil of city
propinquity.

If I am compelled to choose a hearthstone again
(God knows whether Broadway will not reach bodily
to this), I will employ an engineer to find me a spot,
if indeed there be one, which has nothing behind it or
about it, or in its range, which could by any chance
make it a thoroughfare. There is a charm to me in
an in-navigable river, which brought me to the Susquehannah.
I like the city sometimes, and I bless
Heaven for steamboats; but I love haunts where I
neither see a steamboat nor expect the city. What is
the Hudson but a great highroad? You may have
your cottage, it is true, and live by the water-side in
the shade, and be a hundred miles, more or less, from
the city. But every half hour comes twanging through
your trees, the clang of an untuneable bell informing
you, whether you will or no, that seven hundred cits
are seething past your solitude. You must be an abstracted
student indeed if you do not look after the
noisy intruder till she is lost to the eye. Then follow
conjectures what news may be on board, what friends
may be passing unknown, what celebrities or oddities,
or wonders of beauty, may be mingling in the throng
upon her decks; and by the time you remember again
that you are in the country, there sounds another bell,
and another discordant whiz, and so your mind is
plucked away to city thoughts and associations, while
your body sits alone and discontented amid the trees.

Now, for one, I like not this divorce. If I am to be
happy, my imagination must keep my body company,
and both must be in the country, or both in town.
With all honor to Milton, who avers—

my mind to make a heaven, requires the society of its
material half. Though my pores take in a palpable
pleasure from the soft air of morning, my imagination
feeds twice as bountifully, foraging amid the sunshine
and verdure with my two proper eyes; and in turn my
fancy feeds more steadily when I breathe and feel what
she is abroad in. Ask the traveller which were his
unhappiest hours under foreign skies. If he is of my
mind, he will say, they were those in which his
thoughts (by letters or chance news) were driven irresistibly
home, leaving his eyes blind and his ears deaf
in the desert or the strange city. There are persons,
I know, who make a pleasure of revery, and, walking
on the pavement, will be dreaming of fields, and in the
fields think only of the distractions of town. But
with me, absent thoughts, unless to be rid of disagreeable
circumstances, are a disease. When in health, I
am all together, what there is of me—soul and body,
head and heart—and a steamboat that should daily cut
the line of my horizon with human interest enough on
board to take my thoughts with her when she disappeared,
would, to my thinking, be a daily calamity. I
thank God that the deep shades of the Omega lie between
my cottage and the track of both canal and railroad.
I live in the lap of a semicircle of hills, and the
diameter, I am pleased to know, is shorter than the
curve. There is a green and wholesome half mile,
thickly wooded, and mine own to keep so, between my
threshold and the surveyor's line, and like the laird's
Jock, I shall be “aye sticking in a tree.”

Do not think, dear Doctor, that I am insensible to
the grandeur of the great project to connect Lake Erie
with the Hudson by railroad, or that I do not feel a
becoming interest in my country's prosperity. I would
fain have a farm where my cattle and I can ruminate
without fear of falling asleep on a rail-track, or slipping
into a canal; but there is an imaginative and a
bright side to these improvements, which I look on as
often as on the other. What should prevent steam-posting,
for example—not in confined and cramped
carriages, suited to the strength of a pair of horses, but
in airy and commodious apartments, furnished like a
bachelor's lodgings, with bed, kitchen, and servants?
What should prevent the transfer of such a structure
from railroad to canal-boat as occasion required? In
five years probably, there will pass through this village
a railroad and a canal, by which, together, we shall
have an unbroken chain of canal and railroad communication
with most of the principal seaboard cities of
this country, and with half the towns and objects of
curiosity in the west and north.

I build a tenement on wheels, considerably longer
than the accommodations of single gentlemen at hotels,
with a small kitchen, and such a cook as pleases
the genius of republics, the vehicle shall be furnished,
we will say, with tangent moveable rails, or
some other convenience for wheeling off the track
whenever there is occasion to stop or loiter. As I
said before, it should be arranged also for transfer to a
boat. In either case there shall be post-horses, as
upon the English roads, ready to be put to at a moment's
warning, and capable, upon the railroad at
least, of a sufficient rate of speed. What could be
more delightful or more easy than to furnish this ambulatory
cottage with light furniture from your stationary
home, cram it with books, and such little refinements
as you most miss abroad, and, purchasing
provisions by the way, travel under your own roof from
one end of the country to the other? Imagine me
sending you word, some fine morning, from Jersey
city, to come over and breakfast with me at my cottage,
just arrived by railroad from the country? Or
going to the Springs with a house ready furnished?
Or inviting you to accept of my hospitality during a
trip to Baltimore, or Cincinnati, or Montreal! The
English have anticipated this luxury in their expensive
private yachts, with which they traverse the Levant,
and drink wine from their own cellars at Joppa and
Trebizond; but what is that to travelling the same
distance on land, without storms or sea-sickness, with
the choice of companions every hour, and at a hundredth
part of the cost? The snail has been before
us in the invention.

I presume, dear Doctor, that even you would be
obliged to fish around considerably to find Owego on
the map; yet the people here expect in a year or
two to sit at their windows, and see all the fashion
and curiosity, as well as the dignity and business of
the world go by. This little village, to which prosperity

lies at the joint of a great cross of northern and western
travel. The Erie railroad will intersect here the
canal which follows the Susquehannah to the Chenango,
and you may as well come to Glenmary if you
wish to see your friend, the General, on his annual
trip to the Springs. Think what a superb route it
will be for southern travellers. Instead of being filtered
through all the seaboard cities, at great cost
of money and temper, they will strike the Susquehannah
at Columbia, and follow its delicious windings past
Wyoming to Owega, where, turning west, they may
steam up the small lakes to Niagara, or keeping on the
Chenango, track that exquisite river by canal to the
Mohawk, and so on to the Springs—all the way by the
most lovely river-courses in the world. Pure air,
new scenery, and a near and complete escape from the
cities in the hot months, will be (the O-egoists think)
inducements enough to bring the southern cities, rank
and file in annual review before us. The canal-boat,
of course will be “the genteel thing” among the arrivals
in this metropolis. Pleasure north and south,
business east and west. We shall take our fashions
from New Orleans, and I do not despair of seeing a
café on the Susquehannah, with a French dame de
comptoir, marble tables, and the Picayune newspaper.
If my project of travelling cottages should succeed, I
shall offer the skirt of my Omega to such of my New
Orleans friends as would like to pasture a cow during
the summer, and when they and the orioles migrate in
the autumn, why, we will up cottage and be off to the
south too—freeze who likes in Tioga.

I wish my young trees liked this air of Italy as well
as I. This ten days' sunshine has pinched their thirsty
tops, and it looks like mid-autumn from my seat under
the bridge. No water, save a tricklet in the early morning.
But such weather for pick-nick-ing! The buck-wheat
is sun-dried, and will yield but half a crop. The
deer come down to the spring-heads, and the snakes
creep to the river. Jenny toils at the deep-down well-bucket,
and the minister prays for rain. I love the sun,
and pray for no advent but yours.

You have never seen, I dare be certain, a volume
of poems called “Mundi et Cordis Carmina,” by
Thomas Wade. It is one of those volumes killed,
like my trees, in the general drought of poesy, but
there is stuff in it worth the fair type on which it is
printed, though Mr. Wade takes small pains to shape
his verse to the common comprehension. I mention
him now, because, in looking over his volume, I find
he has been before me in particularizing the place
where a letter is written, and goes beyond me, by
specifying also the place where it should be read.
“The Pencilled Letter” and its “Answer” are among
his most intelligible poems, and I will give you their
concluding lines as containing a new idea in amatory
correspondence:—

The reply has a very pretty conclusion, aside from the
final oddity:—
It is in your quality as bachelor that you get the loan
of this idea, for in love, “a trick not worth an egg,”
so it be new, is worth the knowing.

Here's a precious coil! The red heifer has chewed
up a lace cape, and the breachy ox has run over the
“bleach and lavender” of a seven days' wear and
washing. It must be laid to the drought, unless a
taste for dry lace as well as wet can be proved on the
peccant heifer. The ox would to the drink—small
blame to him. But lace is expensive fodder, and the
heifer must be “hobbled”—so swears the washerwoman.

I have only the “turn overs” left, dear Doctor, and I
will cover them with one of Mr. Wade's sonnets,
which will serve you, should you have occasion for an
epithalamium. It is called “the Bride,” and should
be read fasting by a bachelor:—

13. LETTER XIII.

This is not a very prompt answer to your last, my
dear Doctor, for I intended to have taken my brains
to you bodily, and replied to all your “whether-or-noes”
over a broiled oyster at * * * * *. Perhaps I
may bring this in my pocket. A brace of ramblers,
brothers of my own, detained me for a while, but are
flitting to-day; and Bartlett has been here a week, to
whom, more particularly, I wish to do the honors of
the scenery. We have climbed every hill-top that has
the happiness of looking down on the Owaga and Susquchannah,
and he agrees with me that a more lovely
and habitable valley has never sat to him for its picture.
Fortunately, on the day of his arrival, the dust
of a six weeks' drought was washed from its face, and,
barring the wilt that precedes autumn, the hill-sides
were in holyday green and looked their fairest. He
has enriched his portfolio with four or five delicious
sketches, and if there were gratitude or sense of renown
in trees and hills, they would have nodded their
tops to the two of us. It is not every valley or pine-tree
that finds painter and historian, but these are as
insensible as beauty and greatness were ever to the
claims of their trumpeters.

How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett's
visit to Constantinople? Not more than four or five
weeks, it seems to me, and yet, here he is, on his return
from a professional trip to Canada, with all its
best scenery snug in his portmanteau! He steamed to
Turkey and back, and steamed again to America, and
will be once more in England in some twenty days—
having visited and sketched the two extremities of the
civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susquehannah
and keep my town-house in Constantinople—
(with money). It seemed odd to me to turn over a
drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly-pencilled
sketch of a mosque, and on the next a view of Glenmary—my
turnip-field in the foreground. And then
the man himself—pulling a Turkish para and a Yankee
shinplaster from his pocket with the same pinch
—shuffling to breakfast in my abri on the Susquehannah,
in a pair of peaked slippers of Constantinople,
that smell as freshly of the bazar as if they were
bought yesterday—waking up with “pekke! pekke!
my good fellow!” when William brings him his boots
—and never seeing a blood-red maple (just turned
with the frost) without fancying it the sanguine flag
of the Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek! All
this unsettles me strangely. The phantasmagoria of
my days of vagabondage flit before my eyes again.
This, “by-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?”
and “the view you recollect from the Seraglio!” and
such like slip-slop of travellers, heard within reach of
my corn and pumpkins, affects me like the mad poet's
proposition,

I have amused my artist friend since he has been
here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as
the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful—
the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over
the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three
or four young men who have been staying with us
were very content to tramp into the woods with a bundle
of straw and a match-box, and they have been initiated
into the mysteries of “picking and piling,” to
the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glenmary.
Shelley says,

and I am inclined to think that there are varieties of
glory in its phenomena which would make it worth
even your metropolitan while to come to the west and
“burn fallow.” At this season of the year—after the
autumn droughts, that is to say—the whole country
here is covered with a thin smoke, stealing up from
the fires on every hill, in the depths of the woods, and
on the banks of the river; and what with the graceful
smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing beacons all
around the horizon by night, it adds much to the variety,
and, I think, more to the beauty of our western
October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood
by the pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in
the disforested Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a
crackling wood, and toast himself by a thousand cords
burnt for the riddance. What experience I have had
of these holocausts on my own land has not diminished
the sense of waste and wealth with which I first
watched them. Paddy's dream of “rolling in a bin
of gold guineas,” could scarce have seemed more
luxurious.

Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way,
burnt enough, I dare say, to have made a comfortable
drawing-room of Hyde Park in January, and the effects
of the white light upon the trees above and
around were glorious. But our fires were piles of
logs and brush—small beer, of course, to the conflagration
of a forest. I have seen one that was like the
Thousand Columns of Constantinople ignited to a red
heat, and covered with carbuncles and tongues of
flame. It was a temple of fire—the floor, living coals
—the roof, a heavy drapery of crimson—the aisles
held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, sometimes
swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked
redness while the eye could see far into their depths,
and again covered and wreathed and laved in ever-changing
billows of flame. We want an American
Tempesta or “Savage Rosa,” to “wreak” such pictures
on canvass; and perhaps the first step to it would
be the painting of the foliage of an American autumn.
These glorious wonders are peculiarities of our country;
why should they not breed a peculiar school of
effect and color?

Among the London news which has seasoned our
breakfasts of late, I hear pretty authentically that Compbell
is coming to look up his muse on the Susquehannah.
He is at present writing the life of Petrarch, and
superintending the new edition of his works (to be illustrated
in the style of Rogers's), and, between whiles,
projecting a new poem; and, my letters say, is likely
to find the way, little known to poets, from the Temple
of Fame to the Temple of Mammon. One would
think it were scarce decent for Campbell to die without
seeing Wyoming. I trust he will not. What would
I not give to get upon a raft with him, and float down
the Susquehannah a hundred miles to the scene of
his Gertrude, watching his fine face while the real displaced
the ideal valley of his imagination. I think it
would trouble him. Probably in the warmth of composition
and the familiarity of years, the imaginary
scene has become enamelled and sunk into his mind,
and it would remain the home of his poem after Wyoming
itself had made a distinct impression on his
memory. They would be two places—not one. He
wrote it with some valley of his own land in his mind's
eye, and gray Scotland and sunny and verdant Pennsylvania
will scarce blend. But he will be welcome.
Oh, how welcome! America would rise up to Campbell.
He has been the bard of freedom, generous and
chivalric in all his strains; and, nation of merchants
as we are, I am mistaken if the string he has most
played is not the master-chord of our national character.
The enthusiasm of no people on earth is so
easily awoke, and Campbell is the poet of enthusiasm.
The schoolboys have him by heart, and what lives upon
their lips, will live and be beloved for ever.

It would be a fine thing, I have often thought, dear
Doctor, if every English author would be at the pains
to reap his laurels in this country. If they could
overcome their indignation at our disgraceful robbery
of their copyrights, and come among the people who
read them for the love they bear them—read them as
they are not read in England, without prejudice or favor,
personal or political—it would be more like taking
a peep at posterity than they think. In what is the
judgment of posterity better than that of contemporaries?
Simply in that the author is seen from a distance—his
personal qualities lost to the eye, and his
literary stature seen in proper relief and proportion.
We know nothing of the degrading rivalries and difficulties
of his first efforts, or, if we do, we do not realize
them, never having known him till success sent his
name over the water. His reputation is a Minerva to
us—sprung full-grown to our knowledge. We praise
him, if we like him, with the spirit in which we criticise
an author of another age—with no possible private
bias. Witness the critiques upon Bulwer in this
country, compared with those of his countrymen.
What review has ever given him a tithe of his deservings
in England! Their cold acknowledgment of his
merits reminds one of Enobarbus's civility to Menas

I need not to you, dear Doctor enlarge upon the benefits,
political and social, to both countries, which
would follow the mutual good-will of our authors.
We shall never have theirs while we plunder them so
barefacedly as now, and I trust in heaven we shall,
some time or other, see men in Congress who will go
deeper for their opinions than the circular of a pirating
bookseller.

I wish you to send me a copy of Dawes's poems
when they appear. I have long thought he was one
of the unappreciated; but I see that his fine play of
Athanasia is making stir among the paragraphers. Rufus
Dawes is a poet if God ever created one, and he
lives his vocation as well as imagines it. I hope he
will shuffle off the heavenward end of his mortal coil
under the cool shades of my Omega. He is our Coleridge,
and his talk should have reverent listeners. I
have seldom been more pleased at a change in the literary
kaleidoscope, than at his awakening popularity;
and, I pray you blow what breath you have into his
new-spread sail. Cranch, the artist, who lived with
me in Italy (a beautiful scholar in the art, whose hand
is fast overtaking his head), has, I see by the papers,
made a capital sketch of him. Do you know whether
it is to be engraved for the book?

Ossian represents the ghosts of his heroes lamenting
that they had not had their fame, and it is a pity,
I think, that we had not some literary apostle to tell
us, from the temple of our Athens, who are the unknown
great. Certain it is, they often live among us,
and achieve their greatness unrecognised. How profoundly
dull was England to the merits of Charles

Lamb till he died! Yet he was a fine illustration of
my remark just now. America was posterity to
him. The writings of all our young authors were
tinctured with imitation of his style, when, in England
(as I personally know), it was difficult to light upon
a person who had read his Elia. Truly “the root
of a great name is in the dead body.” There is Walter
Savage Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations
contain more of the virgin ore of thought than any
six modern English writers together, and how many
persons in any literary circle know whether he is alive
or dead—an author of Queen Elizabeth's time or
Queen Victoria's? He is a man of fortune, and has
bought Boccacio's garden at Fiesolé, and there upon
the classic Africus, he is tranquilly achieving his renown,
and it will be unburied, and acknowledged when
he is dead. Travellers will make pilgrimages to the
spot where Boccacio and Landor have lived, and wonder
that they did not mark while it was done—this
piling of Ossa on Pelion.

By the way, Mr. Landor has tied me to the tail of
his immortality, for an offence most innocently committed;
and I trust his biographer will either let me
slip off at “Lethe's wharf,” by expurgating the book
of me, or do me justice in a note. When I was in
Florence, I was indebted to him for much kind attention
and hospitality; and I considered it one of the
highest of my good fortunes abroad to go to Fiesolé,
and dine in the scene of the Decameron with an author
who would, I thought, live as long as Boccacio.
Mr. Landor has a glorious collection of paintings, and
at parting he presented me with a beautiful picture by
Cuyp, which I had particularly admired, and gave me
some of my most valuable letters to England, where I
was then going. I mention it to show the terms on
which we separated. While with him on my last visit,
I had expressed a wish that the philosophical conversations
in his books were separated from the political,
and republished in a cheap form in America; and
the following morning, before daylight, his servant
knocked at the door of my lodgings, with a package
of eight or ten octavo volumes, and as much manuscript,
accompanied by a note from Mr. Landor, committing
the whole to my discretion. These volumes,
I should tell you, were interleaved and interlined very
elaborately, and having kept him company under his
olive-trees, were in rather a dilapidated condition.
How to add such a bulk of precious stuff to my baggage,
I did not know. I was at the moment of starting,
and it was very clear that even if the custom-house
officers took no exception to them (they are
outlawed through Italy for their political doctrines),
they would never survive a rough journey over the
Appenines and Alps. I did the best I could. I sent
them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in
Florence, requesting him to forward them to America
by ship from Leghorn; a commission which I knew
that kindest and most honorable of men and poets,
would execute with the fidelity of an angel. So he
did. He handed them to an American straw-bonnet
maker (who, he had no reason to suppose, was the malicious
donkey he afterward proved), and through him
they were shipped and received in New York. I expected,
at the time I left Florence, to make but a short
stay in England, and sail in the same summer for
America; instead of which I remained in England
two years at the close of which appeared a new book
of Mr. Landor's Pericles and Aspasia. I took it up
with delight, and read it through to the last chapter,
where, of a sudden, the author jumps from the academy
of Plato, clean over three thousand years, upon
the shoulders of a false American, who had robbed
him of invaluable manuscripts! So there I go to posterity
astride the Finis of Pericles and Aspasia! I
had corresponded occasionally with Mr. Landor, and
in one of my letters had stated the fact, that the man
uscripts had been committed to Mr. Miles to forward
to America. He called, in consequence, at the shop
of this person who denied any knowledge of the
books, leaving Mr. Landor to suppose that I had been
either most careless or most culpable in my management
of his trust. The books had, however, after a
brief stay in New York, followed me to London; and
Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together,
the explanation was made and the books and manuscripts
restored unharmed to the author. I was not
long enough in London afterward to know whether I
was forgiven by Mr. Landor; but, as his book has not
reached a second edition, I am still writhing in my
purgatory of print.

I have told you this long story, dear Doctor, because
I am sometimes questioned on the subject by the literary
people with whom you live, and hereafter I shall
transfer them to your button for the whole matter.
But what a letter! Write me two for it, and revenge
yourself in the postage.

14. LETTER XIV.

This is return month, dear Doctor, and if it were
only to be in fashion, you should have a quid pro quo
for your four pages. October restores and returns;
your gay friends and invalids return to the city; the
birds and the planters return to the south; the seed
returns to the granary; the brook at my feet is noisy
again with its returned waters; the leaves are returning
to the earth; and the heart that has been out-of-doors
while the summer lasted, comes home from its
wanderings by field and stream, and returns to feed on
its harvest of new thoughts, past pleasures, and
strengthened and confirmed affections. At this time
of the year, too, you expect a return (not of paste
board) for your “visits;” but, as you have made me
no visit, either friendly or professional, I owe you
nothing. And that is the first consolation I have
found for your short-comings (or no-comings-at-all)
to Glenmary.

Now, consider my arms a-kimbo, if you please,
while I ask you what you mean by calling Glenmary
“backwoods!” Faith, I wish it were more backwoods
than it is. Here be cards to be left, sir, morning
calls to be made, body-coat soirées, and ceremony
enough to keep one's most holyday manners well aired.
The two miles' distance between me and Owego serves
me for no exemption, for the village of Canewana,
which is a mile nearer on the road, is equally within
the latitude of silver forks; and dinners are given in
both, which want no one of the belongings of Belgrave-square,
save port-wine and powdered footmen.
I think it is in one of Miss Austin's novels that a lady
claims it to be a smart neighborhood in which she
“dines with four-and-twenty families.” If there are
not more than half as many in Owego who give dinners,
there are twice as many who ask to tea and give
ice-cream and champaign. Then for the fashions,
there is as liberal a sprinkling of French bonnets in
the Owego church as in any village congregation in
England. And for the shops—that subject is worthy
of a sentence by itself. When I say there is no need
to go to New-York for hat, boots, or coat, I mean
that the Owego tradesmen (if you are capable of describing
what you want) are capable of supplying you
with the best and most modish of these articles. Call
you that “backwoods?”

All this, I am free to confess, clashes with the beau
ideal of the

I had myself imagined (and continued to imagine
for some weeks after coming here), that, so near the

primeval wilderness, I might lay up my best coat and
my ceremony in lavender, and live in fustian and a
plain way. I looked forward to the delights of a broad
straw hat, large shoes, baggy habiliments, and leave to
sigh or whistle without offence; and it seemed to me
that it was the conclusion of a species of apprenticeship,
and the beginning of my “freedom.” To be
above no clean and honest employment of one's time,
to drive a pair of horses or a yoke of oxen with equal
alacrity, and to be commented on for neither the one
nor the other; to have none but wholesome farming
cares, and work with nature and honest yeomen, and
be quite clear of mortifications, envies, advice, remonstrance,
coldness, misapprehensions, and etiquettes;
this is what I, like most persons who “forwear the
full tide of the world,” looked upon as the blessed
promise of retirement. But, alas! wherever there is
a butcher's shop and a post-office, an apothecary and
a blacksmith, an “Arcade” and a milliner—wherever
the conveniences of life are, in short—there has already
arrived the Procrustes of opinion. Men's eyes
will look on you and bring you to judgment, and unless
you would live on wild meat and corn-bread in the
wilderness, with neither friend nor helper, you must
give in to a compromise—yield half at least of your
independence, and take it back in common-place comfort.
This is very every-day wisdom to those who
know it, but you are as likely as any man in the world
to have sat with your feet over the fire, and fancied
yourself on a wild horse in a prairie, with nothing to
distinguish you from the warlike Camanche, except
capital wine in the cellar of your wigwam, and the last
new novel and play, which should reach this same wigwam—you
have not exactly determined how! Such
“pyramises are goodly things,” but they are built of
the smoke of your cigar.

This part of the country is not destitute of the
chances of adventure, however, and twice in the year,
at least, you may, if you choose, open a valve for your
spirits. One half the population of the neighborhood
is engaged in what is called lumbering, and until
the pine timber of the forest can be counted like the
cedars of Lebanon, this vocation will serve the uses
of the mobs of England, the revolutions of France, and
the plots of Italy. I may add the music and theatres
of Austria and Prussia, the sensual indulgence of the
Turk, and the intrigue of the Spaniard; for there is
in every people under the sun a superflu of spirits unconsumed
by common occupation, which, if not turned
adroitly or accidentally to some useful or harmless
end, will expend its reckless energy in trouble and
mischief.

The preparations for the adventures of which I
speak, though laborious, are often conducted like a
frolic. The felling of the trees in mid-winter, the cutting
of sluingles, and the drawing out on the snow, are
employments preferred by the young men to the tamer
but less arduous work of the farm-yard; and in the
temporary and uncomfortable shanties, deep in the
woods, subsisting often on nothing but pork and whiskey,
they find metal more attractive than village or
fireside. The small streams emptying into the Susquehannah
are innumerable, and eight or ten miles
back from the river the arks are built, and the materials
of the rafts collected, ready to launch with the
first thaw. I live, myself, as you know, on one of these
tributaries, a quarter of a mile from its junction. The
Owago trips along at the foot of my lawn, as private
and untroubled for the greater part of the year as
Virginia Water at Windsor; but, as it swells in March,
the noise of voices and hammering coming out from
the woods above, warn us of the approach of an ark,
and at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour the rude
structure shoots by, floating high on the water without
its lading (which it takes in at the village below), and
manned with a singing and saucy crew, who dodge the
branches of the trees, and work their steering paddles
with an adroitness and nonchalance which sufficiently
shows the character of the class. The sudden bends
which the river takes in describing my woody Omega,
put their steersmanship to the test; and when the
leaves are off the trees, it is a curious sight to see the
bulky monsters, shining with new boards, whirling
around in the swift eddies, and, when caught by the
current again, gliding off among the trees like a singing
and swearing phantom of an unfinished barn.

At the village they take wheat and pork into the
arks, load their rafts with plank and shingles, and wait
for the return of the freshet. It is a fact you may not
know, that when a river is rising, the middle is the
highest, and vice versa when falling, sufficiently proved
by the experience of the raftsmen, who, if they start
before the flow is at its top, can not keep their crafts
from the shore. A pent house, barely sufficient for
a man to stretch himself below, is raised on the deck,
with a fire-place of earth and loose stone, and with
what provision they can afford, and plenty of whiskey,
they shove out into the stream. Thenceforward it is
vogue la galére! They have nothing to do, all day,
but abandon themselves to the current, sing and dance
and take their turn at the steering oars; and when the
sun sets they look out for an eddy, and pull in to the
shore. The stopping-places are not very numerous,
and are well known to all who fellow the trade; and,
as the river swarms with rafts, the getting to land, and
making sure of a fastening, is a scene always of great
competition, and often of desperate fighting. When
all is settled for the night, however, and the fires are
lit on the long range of the flotilla, the raftsmen get
together over their whiskey and provender, and tell
the thousand stories of their escapes and accidents;
and with the repetition of this, night after night, the
whole rafting population along the five hundred miles
of the Susquehannah becomes partially acquainted,
and forms a sympathetic corps, whose excitement and
esprit might be roused to very dangerous uses.

By daylight they are cast off and once more on the
current, and in five or seven days they arrive at tide
water, where the crew is immediately discharged, and
start, usually on foot, to follow the river home again.
There are several places in the navigation which are
dangerous, such as rapids and dam-sluices; and what
with these, and the scenes at the eddies, and their pilgrimage
through a thinly settled and wild country
home again, they see enough of adventure to make
them fireside heroes, and incapacitate them (while
their vigor lasts, at least), for all the more quiet habits
of the farmer. The consequence is easy to be seen.
Agriculture is but partially followed throughout the
country, and while these cheap facilities for transporting
produce to the seaboard exist, those who are contented
to stay at home, and cultivate the rich river
lands of the country, are sure of high prices and a
ready reward for their labor.

Moral. Come to the Susquehannah, and settle on
a farm. You did not know what I was driving at all
this while!

The raftsmen who “follow the Delaware” (to use
their own poetical expression) are said to be a much
wilder class than those on the Susquehannah. In returning
to Owego, by different routes, I have often
fallen in with parties of both: and certainly nothing
could be more entertaining than to listen to their tales.
In a couple of years the canal route on the Susquehannah
will lay open this rich vein of the picturesque
and amusing, and as the tranquil boat glides peacefully
along the river bank, the traveller will be surprised
with the strange effect of these immense flotillas,
with their many fires and wild people, lying in
the glassy bends of the solitary stream, the smoke
stealing through the dark forest, and the confusion of
a hundred excited voices breaking the silence. In my

trip down the river in the spring, I saw enough that
was novel in this way to fill a new portfolio for Bartlett,
and I intend he shall raft it with me to salt water
the next time he comes among us.

How delicious are these October noons! They
will soon chill, I am afraid, and I shall be obliged to
give up my out-of-door's habits; but I shall do it unwillingly.
I have changed sides under the bridge, to
sit with my feet in the sun, and I trust this warm corner
will last me till November at least. The odor of
the dying leaves, and the song of the strengthening
brook, are still sufficient allurements, and even your
rheumatism (of which the Latin should be podagra)
might safely keep me company till dinner. Adieu,
dear Doctor! write me a long account of Vestris and
Matthews (how you like them, I mean, for I know very
well how I like them myself), and thank me for turning
over to you a new leaf of American romance. You
are welcome to write a novel, and call it “The Raftsman
of the Susquehannah.”

15. LETTER XV.

“When did I descend the Susquehannah on a
raft?” Never, dear Doctor! But I have descended
it in a steamboat, and that may surprise you more. It
is an in-navigable river, it is true: and it is true, too,
that there are some twenty dams across it between
Owego and Wilkesbarre; yet have I steamed it from
Owego to Wyoming, one hundred and fifty miles, in
twelve hours—on the top of a freshet. The dams were
deep under water, and the river was as smooth as the
Hudson. And now you will wonder how a steamer
came, by fair means, at Owego.

A year or two since, before there was a prospect of
extending the Pennsylvania canal to this place, it became
desirable to bring the coal of “the keystone
state” to these southern counties by some cheaper
conveyance than horse-teams. A friend of mine, living
here, took it into his head that, as salmon and
shad will ascend a fall of twenty feet in a river, the
propulsive energy of their tails might possibly furnish
a hint for a steamer that would shoot up dams and
rapids. The suggestion was made to a Connecticut
man, who, of course, undertook it. He would have
been less than a Yankee if he had not tried. The
product of his ingenuity was the steamboat “Susquehannah,”
drawing but eighteen inches; and, besides
her side-paddles, having an immense wheel in the
stern, which playing in the slack water of the boat,
would drive her up Niagara, if she would but hold together.
The principal weight of her machinery hung
upon two wooden arches running fore and aft, and altogether
she was a neat piece of contrivance, and
promised fairly to answer the purpose.

I think the “Susquehannah” had made three trips
when she broke a shaft, and was laid up; and, what
with one delay and another, the canal was half completed
between her two havens before the experiment
had fairly succeeded. A month or two since, the proprietors
determined to run her down the river for the
purpose of selling her, and I was invited among others
to join in the trip.

The only offices professionally filled on board were
those of the engineer and pilot. Captain, mate, firemen,
steward, cook, and chambermaid, were represented
en amateur by gentlemen passengers. We
rang the bell at the starting hour with the zeal usually
displayed in that department, and, by the assistance of
the current, got off in the usual style of a steamboat
departure, wanting only the newsboys and pickpockets.
With a stream running at five knots, and paddles calculated
to mount a cascade, we could not fail to take
the river in gallant style, and before we had regulated
our wood-piles and pantry, we were backing water at
Athens, twenty miles on our way.

Navigating the Susquehannah is very much like
dancing “the cheat.” You are always making straight
up to a mountain, with no apparent possibility of
escaping contact with it, and it is an even chance up
to the last moment which side of it you are to chassez
with the current. Meantime the sun seems capering
about to all points of the compass, the shadows falling
in every possible direction, and north, south, east, and
west, changing places with the familiarity of a masquerade.
The blindness of the river's course is increased
by the innumerable small islands in its bosom,
whose tall elms and close-set willows meet half-way
those from either shore; and, the current very often
dividing above them, it takes an old voyager to choose
between the shaded alleys, by either of which you
would think Arethusa might have eluded her lover.

My own mental occupation, as we glided on, was
the distribution of white villas along the shore, on
spots where nature seemed to have arranged the
ground for their reception. I saw thousands of sites
where the lawns were made, the terraces defined and
levelled, the groves tastefully clumped, the ancient
trees ready with their broad shadows, the approaches
to the water laid out, the banks sloped, and in everything
the labor of art seemingly all anticipated by nature.
I grew tired of exclaiming, to the friend who
was beside me, “What an exquisite site for a villa!
What a sweet spot for a cottage!” If I had had
the power to people the Susquehannah by the wave
of a wand, from those I know capable of appreciating
its beauty, what a paradise I could have spread out
between my own home and Wyoming! It was pleasant
to know, that by changes scarcely less than magical,
these lovely banks will soon be amply seen and
admired, and probably as rapidly seized upon and inhabited
by persons of taste. The gangs of laborers
at the foot of every steep cliff, doing the first rough
work of the canal, gave promise of a speedy change
in the aspect of this almost unknown river.

It was sometimes ticklish steering among the rafts
and arks with which the river was thronged, and we
never passed one without getting the raftsman's rude
hail. One of them furnished my vocabulary with a
new measure of speed. He stood at the stern oar of
a shingle raft, gaping at us, open-mouthed as we came
down upon him. “Wal!” said he, as we shot past,
“you're going a good hickory, mister!” It was amusing,
again, to run suddenly round a point and come
upon a raft with a minute's warning; the voyagers as
little expecting an intrusion upon their privacy, as a
retired student to be unroofed in a London garret.
The different modes of expressing surprise became at
last quite a study to me, yet total indifference was not
infrequent; and there were some who, I think, would
not have risen from their elbows if the steamer had
flown bodily over them.

We passed the Falls of Wyalusing (most musical
of Indian names) and Buttermilk Falls, both cascades
worthy of being known and sung, and twilight overtook
us some two hours from Wyoming. We had no
lights on board, and the engineer was unwilling to run
in the dark; so our pilot being an old raftsman, we
put into the first “eddy,” and moored for the night.
These eddies, by the way, would not easily be found
by a stranger, but to the practised navigators of the
river they are all numbered and named like harbors on
a coast. The strong current, in the direct force of
which the clumsy raft would find it impossible to come
to, and moor, is at these places turned back by some
projection of the shore, or ledge at the bottom, and a
pool of still water is formed in which the craft may lie
secure for the night. The lumbermen give a cheer
when they have steered successfully in, and springing
joyfully ashore, drive their stakes, eat, dance, quarrel,

and sleep; and many a good tale is told of rafts slily
unmoored, and set adrift at midnight by parties from
the eddies above, and of the consequent adventures of
running in the dark. We had on board two gentlemen
who had earned an independence in this rough
vocation, and their stories, told laughingly against
each other, developed well the expedient and hazard
of the vocation. One of them had once been mischievously
cut adrift by the owner of a rival cargo,
when moored in an eddy with an ark-load of grain.
The article was scarce and high in the markets below,
and he had gone to sleep securely under his pent-house,
and was dreaming of his profits, when he suddenly
awoke with a shock, and discovered that he was
high and dry upon a sedgy island some miles below
his moorings. The freshet was falling fast, and soon
after daylight his competitor for the market drifted
past with a laugh, and confidently shouted out a good-by
till another voyage. The triumphant ark-master
floated on all day, moored again at night, and arrived
safely at tide-water, where the first object that struck
his sight was the ark he had left in the sedges, its
freight sold, its owner preparing to return home, and
the market of course forestalled! The “Roland for
his Oliver” had, with incredible exertion, dug a canal
for his ark, launched her on the slime, and by risking the
night-running, passed him unobserved and gained a
day—a feat as illustrative of the American genius for
emergency as any on record.

It was a still, starlight night, and the river was laced
with the long reflections of the raft-fires, while the
softened songs of the men over their evening carouse,
came to us along the smooth water with the effect of
far better music. What with “wooding” at two or
three places, however, and what with the excitement
of the day, we were too fatigued to give more than a
glance and a passing note of admiration to the beauty
of the scene, and the next question was, how to come
by Sancho's “blessed invention of sleep.” We had
been detained at the wooding-places, and had made
no calculation to lie by a night. There were no beds
on board, and not half room enough in the little cabin
to distribute to each passenger six feet by two of
floor. The shore was wild, and not a friendly lamp
glimmering on the hills; but the pilot at last recollected
having once been to a house a mile or two back
from the river, and with the diminished remainder of
our provender as a pis aller in case of finding no supper
in our forage, we started in search. We stumbled
and scrambled, and delivered our benisons to rock
and brier, till I would fain have lodged with Trinculo
“under a moon-calf's gaberdine,” but by-and-by our
leader fell upon a track, and a light soon after glimmered
before us. We approached through cleared
fields, and, without the consent of the farmer's dog, to
whose wishes on the subject we were compelled to do
violence, the blaze of a huge fire (it was a chilly night
of spring) soon bettered our resignation. A stout,
white-headed fellow of twenty-eight or thirty, bare-footed,
sat in a cradle, see-sawing before the fire, and
without rising when we entered, or expressing the
slightest surprise at our visit, he replied to our questions,
that he was the father of some twelve sorrel and
barefoot copies of himself huddled into the corner,
that “the woman” was his wife, and that we were
welcome “to stay.” Upon this the “woman” for the
first time looked at us, counted us with the nods of
her head, and disappeared with the only candle.

When his wife reappeared, the burly farmer extracted
himself with some difficulty from the cradle,
and without a word passing between them, entered
upon his office as chamberlain. We followed him
up stairs, where we were agreeably surprised to find
three very presentable beds; and as I happened to
be the last and fifth, I felicitated myself on the good
chance of sleeping alone, “clapped into my prayers,”
as was recommended to Master Barnardine, and was
asleep before the candle-snuff. I should have said
that mine was a “single bed,” in a sort of a closet partitioned
off from the main chamber.

How long I had travelled in dream-land I have no
means of knowing, but I was awoke by a touch on the
shoulder, and the information that I must make room
for a bedfellow. It was a soft-voiced young gentleman,
as well as I could perceive, with his collar turned
down, and a book under his arm. Without very clearly
remembering where I was, I represented to my proposed
friend that I occupied as nearly as possible the
whole of the bed—to say nothing of a foot, over which
he might see (the foot) by looking where it outreached
the coverlet. It was a very short bed, indeed.

“It was large enough for me till you came,” said
the stranger, modestly.

“Then I am the intruder?” I asked.

“No intrusion if you will share with me,” he said;
“but as this is my bed, and I have no resource but
the kitchen-fire, perhaps you will let me in.”

There was no resisting his tone of good humor, and
my friend by this time having prepared himself to take
up as little room as possible, I consented that he should
blow out the candle and get under the blanket. The
argument and the effort of making myself small as he
crept in, had partially waked me, and before my ears
were sealed up again, I learned that my companion,
who proved rather talkative, was the village schoolmaster.
He taught for twelve dollars a month and his
board—taking the latter a week at a time with the different
families to which his pupils belonged. For the
present week he was quartered upon our host, and having
been out visiting past the usual hour of bedtime,
he was not aware of the arrival of strangers till he found
me on his pillow.

I went to sleep, admiring the amiable temper of my
new friend under the circumstances, but awoke presently
with a sense of suffocation. The schoolmaster
was fast asleep, but his arms were clasped tightly round
my throat. I disengaged them without waking him,
and composed myself again.

Once more I awoke half suffocated. My friend's arms
had found their way again round my neck, and, though
evidently fast asleep, he was drawing me to him with
a clasp I found it difficult to unloose. I shook him
broad awake, and begged him to take notice that he
was sleeping with a perfect stranger. He seemed very
much annoyed at having disturbed me, made twenty
apologies, and turning his back, soon fell asleep. I
followed his example, wishing him a new turn to his
dream.

A third time I sprang up choking from the pillow,
drawing my companion fairly on end with me. I could
stand it no longer. Even when half aroused he could
hardly be persuaded to let go his hold of my neck. I
jumped out of bed, and flung open the window for a
little air. The moon had risen, and the night was exquisitely
fine. A brawling brook ran under the window,
and after a minute or two, being thoroughly
awaked, I looked at my watch in the moonlight, and
found it wanted but an hour or two of morning. Afraid
to risk my throat again, and remembering that I could
not fairly quarrel with my friend, who had undoubtedly
a right to embrace, after his own fashion, any intruder
who ventured into his proper bed, I went down stairs,
and raked open the embers of the kitchen fire, which
served me for less affectionate company till dawn.
How and where he could have acquired his caressing
habits, were subjects upon which I speculated unsatisfactorily
over the coals.

My companions were called up at sunrise by the
landlord, and as we were paying for our lodging, the
schoolmaster came down to see us off. I was less surprised
when I came to look at him by daylight. It
was a fair, delicate boy of sixteen, whose slender health

had probably turned his attention to books, and who,
perhaps, had never slept away from his mother till he
went abroad to teach school. Quite satisfied with one
experiment of filling the maternal relation, I wished
him a less refractory bedfellow, and we hastened on
board.

The rafts were under weigh before us, and the tortoise
had overtaken the hare, for we passed several
that we had passed higher up, and did not fail to get a
jeer for our sluggishness. An hour or two brought
us to Wilkesbarre, and excellent hotel, good breakfast,
and new and kind friends; and so ended my trip on
the Susquehannah. Some other time I will tell you
how beautiful is the valley of Wyoming, which I have
since seen in the holyday colors of October. Thereby
hangs a tale too, worth telling and hearing; and as a
promise is good parting stuff, adieu!

16. LETTER XVI.

The books and the music came safe to hand, dear
Doctor, but I trust we are not to stand upon quid-pro-quosities.
The barrel of buck wheat not only cost me
nothing, but I have had my uses of it in the raising, and
can no more look upon it as value, than upon a flower
which I pluck to smell, and give away when it is faded.
I have sold some of my crops for the oddity of the sensation;
and I assure you it is very much like being paid
for dancing when the ball is over. Why, consider the
offices this very buckwheat has performed. There was
the trust in Providence, in the purchase of the seed—
a sermon. There were the exercise and health in
ploughing, harrowing, and sowing—prescription and
pill. There was the performance of the grain, its
sprouting, its flowering, it earing, and its ripening—a
great deal more amusing than a play. Then there
were the harvesting, thrashing, fanning, and grinding—
a sort of pastoral collection, publication, and purgation
by criticism. Now, suppose your clergy man, your
physician, your favorite theatrical corps, your publisher,
printer, and critic, thrashed and sold in bags
for six shillings a bushel! I assure you the cases are
similar, except that the buckwheat makes probably
the more savory cake.

The new magazine was welcome; the more, that it
brought back to my own days of rash adventure in
such ticklish craft, with a pleasant sense of deliverance
from its risk and toil. The imprint of “No. I.,
Vol. I.,” reads to me like a bond of the unreserved
abandonment of time and soul. Truly, youth is wisely
provided with little forethought, and much hope.
What child would learn the alphabet if he could see
at a glance the toil that lies behind it? I look upon
the fresh type and read the sanguine prospectus of
this new-born monthly, and remember, with astonishment,
the thoughtlessness with which, years ago, I
launched in the same gay colors such a venture on
the wave. It is a voyage that requires plentiful stores,
much experience of the deeps and shallows of the
literary seas, and a hand at every halyard; yet, to
abandon my simile, I proposed to be publisher and
editor, critic and contributer; and I soon found that I
might as well have added reader to my manifold offices.
No one who has not tried this vocation can
have any idea of the difficulty of procuring the light,
yet condensed—the fragmented, yet finished—the
good-tempered and gentlemanly, yet high-seasoned
and dashing papers necessary to a periodical. A man
who can write them, can, in our country, put himself
to a more profitable use—and does. The best magazine
writer living, in my opinion, is Edward Everett;
and he governs a state with the same time and attention
which in England, perhaps, would be cramped
to contributing to a review. Calhoun might write
wonderfully fine articles. Legaré, of Charleston, has
the right talent, with the learning. Crittenden, of the
senate, I should think might have written the most
brilliant satirical papers. But these, and others like
them, are men the country and their own ambition
can not spare. There is a younger class of writers,
however; and though the greater number of these, too,
fill responsible stations in society, separate from general
literature, they might be induced, probably, were the
remuneration adequate, to lend their support to a
periodical “till the flower of their fame shall be more
blown,” Among them are Felton and Longfellow,
both professors at Cambridge; and Summer and Henry
Cleaveland, lawyers of Boston—a knot of writers
who sometimes don the cumbrous armor of the North
American Review, but who would show to more advantage
in the lighter harness of the monthlies. I
could name twenty more to any one interested to
know them, all valuable allies to a periodical; but no
literary man questions that. We have in our country
talent enough, if there were the skill and means to put
it judiciously together.

Coleridge and others have mourned over the age of
reviews, as the downfall and desecration of authorship;
but I am inclined to think authors gain more than they
lose by the facility of criticism. What chance has a
book on a shelf, waiting to be called for by the purchaser
uninformed of its merits, to one whose beauties
and defects have been canvassed by these Mercury-winged
messengers, volant and universal as the quickest
news of the hour? How slow and unsympathetic
must have been the progress of a reputation, when the
judicious admirer of a new book could but read and
put it by, expressing his delight, at farthest, to his
immediate friend or literary correspondent? The apprehensive
and honest readers of a book are never
many; but in our days, if it reach but one of these,
what is the common outlet of his enthusiasm? Why,
a trumpet-tongued review, that makes an entire people
partakers of his appreciation, in the wax and wane
of a single moon. Greedily as all men and women
devour books, ninety-nine in a hundred require them
to be first cut up, liable else, like children at their
meals, to swallow the wrong morsel. Yet, like children
still, when the good is pointed out, they digest it
as well as another, and so is diffused an understanding,
as well as prompt admiration of the author. For myself,
I am free to confess I am one of those who like
to take the first taste of an author in a good review. I
look upon the reviewer as a sensible friend, who came
before me to the feast, and recommends me the dish
that has most pleased him. There is a fellowship in
agreeing that it is good. I have often wished there
were a Washington among the critics—some one upon
whose judgment, freedom from paltry motives, generosity
and fairness, I could pin my faith blindly and
implicitly. Dilke, of the London Athenæum, is the
nearest approach to this character, and a good proof
of it is an order frequently given (a London publisher
informed me), by country gentlemen: “Send me everything
the Athenæum praises.” Though a man of
letters, Dilke is not an author, and, by the way, dear
Doctor, I think in that lies the best qualification, if not
the only chance for the impartiality of the critic.
How few authors are capable of praising a book by
which their own is thrown into shadow. “Why does
Plato never mention Zenophon? and why does Zenophon
inveigh against Plato?”

But I think there is less to fear from jealousy, than
from the want of sympathy between writers on different
subjects, or in different styles. D'Israeli the elder,
from whom I have just quoted, sounds the depth
of this matter with the very plummet of truth. “Every
man of genius has a manner of his own; a mode
of thinking and a habit of style; and usually decides
on a work as it approximates or varies from his own.

When one great author depreciates another, it has often
no worse source than his own taste. The witty
Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; the cold, classical
Boileau, the rough sublimity of Crebillon; the
refining Marivaux, the familiar Moliére. The deficient
sympathy in these men of genius, for modes of feeling
opposite to their own, was the real cause of their opinions;
and thus it happens that even superior genius is
so often liable to be unjust and false in its decisions.”

Apropos of English periodicals, we get them now
almost wet from the press, and they seem far off and
foreign no longer. But there is one (to me) melancholy
note in the Pæan with which the Great Western
was welcomed. In literature we are no longer a
distinct nation. The triumph of Atlantic steam navigation
has driven the smaller drop into the larger, and
London has become the centre. Farewell nationality!
The English language now marks the limits of a
new literary empire, and America is a suburb. Our
themes, our resources, the disappearing savage, and
the retiring wilderness, the free thought, and the action
as free, the spirit of daring innovation, and the irreverent
question of usage, the picturesque mixture
of many nations in an equal home, the feeling of expanse,
of unsubserviency, of distance from time-hallowed
authority and prejudice—all the elements which
were working gradually but gloriously together to
make us a nation by ourselves, have, in this approximation
of shores, either perished for our using, or
slipped within the clutch of England. What effect
the now near and jealous criticism of that country will
have upon our politics is a deeper question, but our
literature is subsidized at a blow. Hitherto we have
been to them a strange country; the few books that
reached them they criticised with complimentary jealousy,
or with the courtesy due to a stranger; while
our themes and our political structures were looked on
with the advantage of distance, undemeaned by acquaintance
with sources or familiarity with details.
While all our material is thrown open to English authors,
we gain nothing in exchange, for, with the instinct
of descendants, we have continued to look back
to our fathers, and our conversance with the wells of
English literature was as complete as their own.

The young American author is the principal sufferer
by the change. Imagine an actor compelled to
make a début without rehearsal and you get a faint
shadow of what he has lost. It was some advantage,
let me tell you, dear Doctor, to have run the gauntlet
of criticism in America before being heard of in
England. When Irving and Cooper first appeared as
authors abroad, they sprung to sight like Minerva, full-grown.
They had seen themselves in print, had reflected
and improved upon private and public criticism,
and were made aware of their faults before they were
irrecoverably committed on this higher theatre. Keats
died of a rebuke to his puerilities, which, had it been
administered here, would have been borne up against
with the hope of higher appeal and new effort. He
might have been the son of an American apothecary,
and never be told by an English critic to “return to
his gallipots.” The Atlantic was, hitherto, a friendly
Lethe, in which the sins of youth (so heavily and unjustly
visitited on aspirants to fame), were washed out
and forgotten. The American “licked into shape”
by the efficient tongues of envy and jealousy at home,
stepped ashore in England, wary and guarded against
himself and others. The book by which he made
himself known, might have been the successful effort
after twenty failures, and it met with the indulgence
of a first. The cloud of his failures, the remembrance
of his degradations by ridicule were left behind.
His practised skill was measured by other's beginnings.

We suffer, too, in our social position, in England.
We have sunk from the stranger to the suburban or
provincial. In a year or two every feature and detail
of our country will be as well known to English society
as those of Margate and Brighton. Our similarity
to themselves in most things will not add to their
respect for us. We shall have the second place accorded
to the indigenous society of well-known places
of resort or travel, and to be an American will be
in England like being a Maltese or an East Indian—
every way inferior, in short, to a metropolitan in London.

You see, my dear Doctor, how I make my correspondence
with you serve as a trap for my stray
thoughts; and you will say, that in this letter I have
caught some that might as well have escaped. But
as the immortal Jack “turned” even “diseases to
commodity,” and as “la superiorité est une infirmité
sociale,” perhaps you will tolerate my dulness, or consider
it a polite avoidance of your envy. Write me
better or worse, however, and I will shape a welcome
to it.

17. LETTER XVII.

Do you remember, my dear Doctor, in one of the
Elizabethan dramas (I forget which), the description
of the contention between the nightingale and the
page's lute? Did you ever remark how a bird, sitting
silent in a tree, will trill out, at the first note which
breaks the stillness, as if it had waited for that signal
to begin? Have you noticed the emulation of pigs in
a pasture—how the gallopping by of a horse in the
road sets them off for a race to the limits of the cross-fence?

I have been sitting here with my feet upon the
autumn leaves, portfolio on knee, for an hour. The
shadow of the bridge cuts a line across my breast,
leaving my thinking machinery in shadow, while the
farmer portion of me mellows in the sun; the air is as
still as if we had suddenly ceased to hear the growing
of the grain, and the brooks runs leaf-shod over the
pebbles like a child frightened by the silence into a
whisper. You would say this was the very mark and
fashion of an hour for the silent sympathy of letter-writing.
Yet here have I sat, with the temptation of
an unblotted sheet before me, and my heart and
thoughts full and ready, and by my steady gazing in
the brook, you would fancy I had taken the sun's function
to myself, and was sitting idle to shine. All at
once from the open window of the cottago poured a
passionate outbreak of Beethoven's music (played by
the beloved hand), and with a kind of fear that I should
not overtake it, and a resistless desire (which, I dare
say, you have felt in hearing music) to appropriate
such angelic utterance to the expression of my own
feelings, I forthwith started into a scribble, and have
filled my first page as you see—without drawing nib.
If turning over the leaf break not the charm, you are
likely to have an answer writ to your last before the
shadow on my breast creep two buttons downward.

Your letter was short, and if this were not the commencement
of a new score, I should complain of it
more gravely. Writing so soon after we had parted,
you might claim that you had little to say; yet I
thought (over that broiled oyster after the play) that
your voluble discourse would “put a girdle round the
earth” in less time than Ariel. I listened to you as a
child looks at the river, wondering when it would all
run by. Yet that might be partly disuse in listening—
for I have grown rustic with a year's seclusion, I
found it in other things. My feet swelled with walking
on the pavement. My eyes were giddy with the
multitude of people. My mouth became parched
with the excitement of greetings, and surprises, and
the raising of my tones to the metropolitan pitch. I
was nearly exhausted by mid-day with the “infinite

deal of nothing.” Homœopathy alone can explain
why “patter versus clatter” did not finish me quite.

Ah! how admirably Charles Matthews played that
night! The papers have well named him the Mercury
of comedians. His playing will probably create
a new school of play-writing—something like what he
has aimed at (without sufficient study) in the pieces he
has written for himself. The finest thing I could imagine
in the dramatic way, would be a partnership (á
la Beaumont and Fletcher) between the stage knowledge
and comic talent of Matthews, and the penetrating,
natural, and observant humor of Boz. The true
“humor of the time” has scarcely been reached, on
the stage, since Molière; and it seems to me, that a
union of the talents of these two men (both very
young) might bring about a new era in high comedy.
Matthews has the advantage of having been from boyhood
conversant with the most polished society. He
was taken to Italy when a boy by one of the most
munificent and gay noblemen of England, an intimate
of his father, and, if I have been rightly informed, was
his companion for several years of foreign residence
and travel. I remember meeting him at a dinner-party
in London three or four years since, when probably
he had never thought seriously of the stage. Yet at
that time it was remarked by the person who sat next
me, that a better actor than his father was spoiled in
the son. He was making no particular effort at humor
on the occasion to which I refer; but the servants, including
a fat butler of remarkable gravity, were forced
to ask permission to leave the room—their laughter
becoming uncontrollable. He would doubtless have
doubled his profits in this country had he come as a single
star; but I trust his success will still be sufficient
to establish him in an annual orbit—from cast to west.

One goes to the city with fresh eyes after a year's
absence, and I was struck with one or two things,
which, in their gradual wax or wane, you do not seem
to have remarked. What Te Deum has been chanted,
for example, over the almost complete disappearance
of the dandies? I saw but two while I was in New-York,
and in them it was nature's caprice. They
would have been dandies equally in fig-leaves or wampum.
The era of (studiously) plain clothes arrived
some years ago in England, where Count D'Orsay,
and an occasional wanderer from Broadway, are the
only freshly-remembered apparitions of excessively
dressed men; and slow as has been its advent to us,
it is sooner come than was predicted. I feared,
for one, that our European reputation of being the
most expensive and showy of nations was based upon
the natural extreme of our political character, and
would last as long as the republic. I am afraid
still, that the ostentation once shown in dress is but
turned into another channel, and that the equipages
of New-York more than supply the showiness abated
in the costume. But even this is a step onward.
Finery on the horse is better than finery on the owner.
The caparison of an equipage is a more manly
study than the toilet of the fine gentleman; and possesses,
besides, the advantage of being left properly to
the saddler. On the whole, it struck me that the
countenance of Broadway had lost a certain flimsy and
tinsel character with which it used to impress me, and
had, in a manner, grown hearty and unpretentious. I
should be glad to know (and none can tell me better
than yourself) whether this is the outer seeming of
deeper changes in our character. Streets have expressive
faces, and I have long marked and trusted
them. It would be difficult to feel fantastic in the
sumptuous gravity of Bond street—as difficult to feel
grave in the bright airiness of the Boulevard. In
these two thoroughfares you are made to feel the distinctive
qualities of England and France. What say
you of the changed expression of Broadway?

Miss Martineau, of all travellers, has doubtless
written the most salutary book upon our manners
(malgré the womanish pique which distorted her
judgment of Everett and others), but there is one reproach
which she has recorded against us, in which I
have felt some patriotic glory, but which I am beginning
to fear we deserve no longer. The text of her
fault-finding is the Quixotic attentions of Americans
to women in public conveyances, apropos of a gentleman's
politeness who took an outside seat upon a
coach to give a lady room for her feet. From what I
could observe in my late two or three days' travel, I
think I could encourage Miss Martineau to return to
America with but a trifling risk of being too particularly
attended to, even were she incognita and young. We
owe this décadence of chivalry to Miss Martineau, I
think it may be safely said. In a country where every
person of common education reads every book of
travels in which his manners are discussed, the most
casual mention of a blemish, even by a less authority
than Miss Martineau, acts as an instant cautery. I
venture to say that a young lady could scarcely be
found in the United States, who would not give you
on demand a complete list of our national faults and
foibles, as recorded by Hall, Hamilton, Trollope, and
Martineau. Why, they form the common staple of
conversation and jest. Ay, and of speculation! Hamilton's
book was scarcely dry from the press before orders
were made out to an immense extent for egg-cups
and silver forks. Mrs. Trollope quite extinguished
the trade in spit-boxes, and made fortunes for the finger-glass
manufacturers; and Captain Marryat, I understand,
is besieged in every city by the importers, to
know upon what deficiency of table furniture he intends
to be severe. It has been more than once suggested
(and his manners aided the idea) that Hamilton
was probably a travelling agent for the plated-fork
manufactories of Birmingham. And a fair caveat to
both readers and reviewers of future books of travels,
would be an inquiry touching their probable bearing
on English manufactures. I would not be illiberal to
Miss Martineau, but I would ask any candid person
whether the influx of thick shoes and cotton stockings,
simultaneously with her arrival in this country, could
have been entirely an unpremediated coincidence?

We are indebted, I think, to the Astor House, for
one of the pleasantest changes that I noticed while
away—and I like it the better, that it is a departure
from our general rule of imitating English habits too
exclusively. You were with us there, and can bear witness
to the delightful society we met at the ladies' ordinary;
while the excellence of the table and service,
and the prevalence of well-bred company, had drawn
the most exclusive from their private parlors, and
given to the daily society of the drawing-room the
character of the gay and agreeable watering-places of
Germany. The solitary confinement of English hotels
always seemed to me particularly unsuited to the
position and wants of the traveller. Loneliness is no
evil at home, where books and regular means of employment
are at hand; but to be abandoned to four
walls and a pormanteau, in a strange city, of a rainy
day, is what nothing but an Englishman would dream
of calling comfortable. It was no small relief to us,
on that drizzly and chilly autumn day, which you remember,
to descend to a magnificent drawing-room,
filled with some fifty or a hundred well-bred people,
and pass away the hours as they would be passed under
similar circumstances in a hospitable country-house
in England. The beautiful architecture of the
Astor apartments, and the sumptuous elegance of the
furniture and table service, make it in a measure a peculiarity
of the house; but the example is likely to be
followed in other hotels and cities, and I hope it will
become a national habit, as in Germany, for strangers
to meet at their meals and in the public rooms. Life
seems to me too short for English exclusiveness in travel.

I determined to come home by Wyoming, after you
left us, and took the boat to Philadelphia accordingly

We passed two or three days in that clean and pleasant
city, and among other things made an excursion to
Laurel Hill—certainly the most beautiful cemetery in
the world after the Necropolis of Scutari. Indeed,
the spot is selected with something like Turkish feeling,
for it seems as if it were intended to associate the
visits to the resting-places of the departed more with
our pleasures than our duties. The cemetery occupies
a lofty promontory above the Schuylkill, possessing
the inequality of surface so favorable to the object,
and shaded with pines and other ornamental trees
of great age and beauty. The views down upon the
river, and through the sombre glades and alleys of the
burial-grounds, are unsurpassed for sweetness and repose.
The elegance which marks everything Philadelphian,
is shown already in the few monuments
erected. An imposing gateway leads you in from the
high road, and a freestone group, large as life, representing
old Mortality at work on an inscription, and
Scott leaning upon a tombstone to watch his toil, faces
the entrance. I noticed the area of one tomb enclosed
by a chain of hearts, cast beautifully in iron.
The whole was laid out in gravel-walks, and there was
no grave without its flowers. I confess the spirit of
this sweet spot affected me deeply, and I look upon
this, and Mount Auburn at Cambridge, as delightful
indications of a purer growth in our national character
than politics and money-getting. It is a real-life
poetry, which reflects as much glory upon the age as
the birth of a Homer.

The sun has crept down to my paper, dear Doctor,
and the shadow of the bridge falls cooler than is good
for my rheumatism. I wish that the blessing of Ceres
upon Ferdinand and Miranda,

might light on Glemmary. I enjoy winter when it
comes, but its approach is altogether detestable. It
is delightful to get home, however; for, like Prospero,
in the play I have just quoted, there is a “delicate
Ariel” (content), who only waits on me in solitude. You
will carry out the allegory, and tell me I have Caliban
too, but to the rudeness of country monsters, I take as
kindly as Trinculo. And now I must to the woods,
and by the aid of these same “ancient and fish-like”
monsters, transplant me a tree or two before sunset.
Adieu.

18. LETTER XVIII.

Our summer friends are flown, dear Doctor; not a
leaf on the dogwood worth watching, though its fluted
leaves were the last. Still the cottage looks summery
when the sun shines, for the fir-trees, which
were half lost among the flauntings of the deciduous
foliage, look out green and unchanged from the naked
branches of the grove, with neither reproach for our
neglect, nor boast over the departed. They are like
friends, who, in thinking of our need, forget all they
have laid up against us; and, between them and the
lofty spirits of mankind, there is another point of resemblance
which I am woodsman enough to know.
Hew down those gay trees, whose leaves scatter at the
coming of winter, and they will sprout from the trodden
root more vigorously than before. The evergreen,
once struck to the heart, dies. If you are of
my mind, you would rather learn such a pretty mock
of yourself in nature, than catch a fish with a gold
ring in his maw.

A day or two since, very much such another bit of
country wisdom dropped into my ears, which I thought
might be available in poetry, albeit the proof be unpoetical.
Talking with my neighbor, the miller, about
sawing lumber for a stable I am building, I discovered,
incidentally, that the mill will do more work between
sunset and dawn, than in the same number of hours
by daylight. Without reasoning upon it, the miller
knows practically that streams run faster at night. The
increased heaviness of the air, and the withdrawal of
the attraction of light, are probably the causes. But
there is a neat tail for a sonnet coiled up in the fact,
and you may blow it with a long breath to Tom Moore.

Many thanks for your offer of shopping for us, but
you do injustice to the “cash stores” of Owego when
you presume that there is anything short of “a hair
off the great Cham's beard,” which is not found in
their inventory. By the way, there is one article of
which I feel the daily want, and as you live among authors
who procure them ready made for ballads and
romances, perhaps you can send me one before the
canal freezes. I mean a venerable hermit, who having
passed through all the vicissitudes of human life
shall have nothing earthly to occupy him but to live
in the woods and dispense wisdom, gratis, to all comers.
I don't know whether, in your giddy town vocations,
it has ever occurred to you to turn short upon
yourself, in the midst of some grave but insignificant
routine, and inquire (of the gentleman within) whether
this is the fulfilment of your destiny; whether these
little nothings are the links near your eye of the great
chain, which you fancy, in your elevated hours, connects
you with something kindred to the stars. It is
oftenest in fine weather that I thus step out of myself,
and retiring a little space, borrow the eyes of my better
angel, and take a look at the individual I have evacuated.
You shall see him yourself, dear Doctor, with
three strokes of the pen; and in giving your judgment
of the dignity of his pursuits, perform the office to
which I destine the hermit above bespoken.

It is not the stout fellow, with the black London
hat, somewhat rusty, who stands raking away cobs
from the barn-floor, though the hat has seen worshipful
society (having fallen on those blessed days when
hats are as inseparable from the wearer as silk stocking
or culotte), and sports that breadth of brim by
which you know me as far off as your indigenous omnibus.
That's Jem, the groom, to whom, with all its
reminiscences, the hat is but a tile. Nor is it the half
sailor-looking, world-worn, never-smiling man, who is
plying a flail upon that floor of corn, with a look as if
he had learned the stroke with a cutlass, though in his
ripped and shredded upper garment, you might recognise
the frogged and velvet redingote, native of the
Rue de la Paix, which has fluttered on the Symplegades,
and flapped the dust of the Acropolis. That
is my tenant in the wood, who, having passed his youth
and middle age with little content in a more responsible
sphere of life, has limited his wishes to solitude
and a supply of the wants of nature; and though quite
capable of telling story for story with my old fellow-traveller,
probably thinks of it only to wish its ravelled
frogs were horn buttons, and its bursted seams less
penetrable by the rain.

And a third person is one of my neighbors, who can
see nothing done without showing you a “'cuter
way,” and who, sitting on the sill of the barn, is amusing
himself, quite of his own accord, with beheading,
cleaning, and picking an unfortunate duck, whose leg
was accidentally broken by the flail. His voluntary
occupation is stimulated by neither interest nor good
nature, but is simply the itching to be doing something,
which in one shape or another, belongs to every
genuine Jonathan. Near him, in cowhide boots,
frock of fustian, and broad-brimmed sombrero of coarse
straw, stands, breathing from a bout with the flail, the
individual from whom I have stepped apart, and upon
whose morning's worth of existence you shall put a
philosopher's estimate.

I presume my three hours' labor might be done for
about three shillings—my mind, meantime, being entirely
occupied with what I was about, calculating the
number of bushels to the acre, the price of corn farther
down the river, and between whiles, discussing

the merits of a patent corn-sheller, which we had
abandoned for the more laborious but quicker process
of thrashing.

“Purty 'cute tool!” says my neighbor, giving the
machine a look out of the corner of his yellow eye,
“but teoo slow! Corn ought to come off ravin' distracted.
'Taint no use to eat it up in labor. Where
was that got out?”

“'Twas invented in Albany, I rather think.”

“Wal, I guess t'want. It's a Varmount notion.
Rot them Green Mountingeers! they're a spiling
the country. People won't work when them things
lay round. Have you heern of a machine for bottoning
your gallowses behind?”

“No, I have not.”

“Wal, I've been expecting on't. There aint no
other hard work they haint economized. Is them
your hogs in the garding?”

Three vast porkers had nosed open the gate, during
the discussion, and were making the best of their opportunities.
After a vigorous chase, the latch was
closed upon them securely, and my neighbor resumed
his duck.

“Is there no way of forcing people to keep those
brutes at home,” I asked of my silent tenant.

“Yes, sir. The law provides that you may shut
them up, and send word to the owners to come and
take them away.”

“Wal! It's a chore, if you ever tried it, to catch
a hog if he's middlin' spry, and when he's cotch,
you've got to feed him, by law, till he's sent for; and
it don't pay, mister.”

“But you can charge for the feed,” says the other.

“Pesky little, I tell ye. Pig fodder's cheap, and
they don't pay you for carrying on't to 'em, nor for
catching the critters. It's a losin' consarn.”

“Suppose I shoot them.”

“Sartin you can. The owner 'll put his vally on it,
and you can have as much pork at that price as 'll fill
your barn. The hull neighb'r'hood 'll drive their
hogs into your garding.”

I saw that my neighbor had looked at the matter all
round; but I was sure, from his manner, that he could,
if encouraged, suggest a remedy for the nuisance.

“I would give a bushel of that handsome corn,” said
I, “to know how to be rid of them.”

“Be so perlite as to measure it out, mister, while I
head in that hog. I'll show you how the deacon kept
'em out of the new buryin' ground while the fence was
buildin'.”

He laid down the duck, which was, by this time,
fairly picked, and stood a moment looking at the three
hogs, now leisurely turning up the grass at the roadside.
For a reason which I did not at the moment
conceive, he presently made a dash at the thinnest of
the three, a hungry-looking brute, built with an approach
to the greyhound, and missed catching him by
an arm's length. Unluckily for the hog, however, the
road was lined with crooked rail-fence, which deceived
him with constant promise of escape by a short turn,
and by a skilful heading off, and a most industrious
chase of some fifteen minutes, he was cornered at last,
and secured by the hind leg.

“A hog,” said he, dragging him along with the
greatest gravity, “hates a straight line like pizen. If
they'd run right in eend you'd never catch 'em in
natur. Like some folks, aint it? Boy, fetch me a
skrimmage of them whole corn.”

He drove the hog before him, wheelbarrow fashion,
into an open cow-pen, and put up the bars. The boy
(his son, who had been waiting for him outside the barn)
brought him a few ears of ripe corn, and as soon as the
hog had recovered his breath a little, he threw them
into the pen, and drew out a knife from his pocket,
which he whetted on the rail before him.

“Now,” said he, as the voracious animal, unaccus
tomed to such appetizing food, seized ravenously on
the corn, “it's according to law to take up a stray hog
and feed him, aint it?”

“Certainly.”

By this time the greedy creature began to show symptoms
of choking, and my friend's design became clearer.

“And it's Christian charity,” he continued, letting
down the bars, and stepping in as the hog rolled upon
his side, “not to let your neighbor lose his critters by
choking, if you can kill 'em in time to save their meat,
ain't it?”

“Certainly.”

“Wal!” said he, cutting the animal's throat, “you
can send word to the owner of that pork to come and
take it away, and if he don't like to salt down at a minute's
notice, he'll keep the rest at hum, and pay you
for your corn. And that's the way the deacon sarved
my hogs, darn his long face, and I eat pork till I was
sick of the sight on't.”

A bushel of corn being worth about six shillings, I
had paid twice the worth of my own morning's work for
this very Yankee expedient. My neighbor borrowed
a bag, shouldered his grist, and trudged off to the
mill, and relinquishing my flail to Jem, I leaned over
the fence in the warm autumn sunshine, and with my
eyes on the swift yet still bosom of the river below,
fell to wondering, as I said before, whether the hour
of which I have given you a picture, was a fitting link
in a wise man's destiny. The day was one to give
birth to great resolves, bright, elastic, and genial; and
the leafless trees, so lorn and comfortless in cloudier
times, seemed lifting into the sky with heroic endurance,
while the swollen Owaga, flowing on with twice
the summer's depth, seemed gathering soul to defy the
fetters of winter. There was something inharmonious
with little pursuits in everything I could see. Such
air and sunshine, I thought, should overtake one in
some labor of philanthropy, in some sacrifice for
friend or country, in the glow of some noble composition,
or, if in the exercise of physical energy, at least to
some large profit. Yet a few shillings expressed the
whole result of my morning's employment, and the
society by which my thoughts had been colored were
such as I have described. Still this is “farming,” and
so lived Cincinnatus.

Now, dear Doctor, you can be grand among your
gallipots, and if your eye turns in upon yourself, you
may reflect complacently on the almost sublime ends
of the art of healing: but resolve me, if you please,
my little problem. What state of the weather should
I live up to? My present avocations, well enough in
a gray day, or a rainy, or a raw, are quite put out of
countenance by a blue sky and a genial sun. If it
were always like to-day, I should be obliged to seek
distinction in some way. There would be no looking
such a sky in the face three days consecutively, busied
always with pigs and corn. You see the use of a
hermit to settle such points. But adieu, while I have
room to write it.