University of Virginia Library

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.