University of Virginia Library

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:—