 | The snow-image |  |
THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS.
The summer moon, which shines in so many a tale,
was beaming over a broad extent of uneven country.
Some of its brightest rays were flung into a spring of
water, where no traveller, toiling, as the writer has, up
the hilly road beside which it gushes, ever failed to
quench his thirst. The work of neat hands and considerate
art was visible about this blessed fountain. An
open cistern, hewn and hollowed out of solid stone, was
placed above the waters, which filled it to the brim, but,
by some invisible outlet, were conveyed away without
dripping down its sides. Though the basin had not
room for another drop, and the continual gush of water
made a tremor on the surface, there was a secret charm
that forbade it to overflow. I remember, that when I
had slaked my summer thirst, and sat panting by the
cistern, it was my fanciful theory, that nature could not
afford to lavish so pure a liquid, as she does the waters
of all meaner fountains.
While the moon was hanging almost perpendicularly
over this spot, two figures appeared on the summit of the
hill, and came with noiseless footsteps down towards the
spring. They were then in the first freshness of youth;
nor is there a wrinkle now on either of their brows, and
yet they wore a strange, old-fashioned garb. One, a
young man with ruddy cheeks, walked beneath the
have inherited his great-grandsire's square-skirted coat,
and a waistcoat that extended its immense flaps to his
knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a
mode unknown to our times. By his side was a sweet
young damsel, her fair features sheltered by a prim little
bonnet, within which appeared the vestal muslin of a
cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole
attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who
had faded half a century before. But that there was
something too warm and life-like in them, I would here
have compared this couple to the ghosts of two young
lovers, who had died long since in the glow of passion,
and now were straying out of their graves, to renew the
old vows, and shadow forth the unforgotten kiss of their
earthly lips, beside the moonlit spring.
“Thee and I will rest here a moment, Miriam,” said
the young man, as they drew near the stone cistern, “for
there is no fear that the elders know what we have
done; and this may be the last time we shall ever taste
this water.”
Thus speaking, with a little sadness in his face, which
was also visible in that of his companion, he made her
sit down on a stone, and was about to place himself very
close to her side; she, however, repelled him, though not
unkindly.
“Nay, Josiah,” said she, giving him a timid push with
her maiden hand, “thee must sit further off, on that
other stone, with the spring between us. What would
the sisters say, if thee were to sit so close to me?”
“But we are of the world's people now, Miriam,”
answered Josiah.
The girl persisted in her prudery, nor did the youth,
in fact, seem altogether free from a similar sort of shyness;
so they sat apart from each other, gazing up the
hill, where the moonlight discovered the tops of a group
of buildings. While their attention was thus occupied,
a party of travellers, who had come wearily up the long
ascent, made a halt to refresh themselves at the spring.
There were three men, a woman, and a little girl and
boy. Their attire was mean, covered with the dust of
the summer's day, and damp with the night-dew; they
all looked woe-begone, as if the cares and sorrows of the
world had made their steps heavier as they climbed the
hill; even the two little children appeared older in evil
days than the young man and maiden who had first
approached the spring.
“Good-evening to you, young folks,” was the salutation
of the travellers; and “Good-evening, friends,”
replied the youth and damsel.
“Is that white building the Shaker meeting-house?”
asked one of the strangers. “And are those the red
roofs of the Shaker village?”
“Friend, it is the Shaker village,” answered Josiah,
after some hesitation.
The travellers, who, from the first, had looked suspiciously
at the garb of these young people, now taxed them
with an intention which all the circumstances, indeed,
rendered too obvious to be mistaken.
“It is true, friends,” replied the young man, summoning
up his courage. “Miriam and I have a gift to love
each other, and we are going among the world's people,
to live after their fashion. And ye know that we do not
elders themselves, have a right to hinder us.”
“Yet you think it expedient to depart without leave-taking,”
remarked one of the travellers.
“Yea, ye-a,” said Josiah, reluctantly, “because father
Job is a very awful man to speak with; and being aged
himself, he has but little charity for what he calls the
iniquities of the flesh.”
“Well,” said the stranger, “we will neither use force
to bring you back to the village, nor will we betray you
to the elders. But sit you here a while, and when you
have heard what we shall tell you of the world which
we have left, and into which you are going, perhaps you
will turn back with us of your own accord. What say
you?” added he, turning to his companions. “We have
travelled thus far without becoming known to each
other. Shall we tell our stories, here by this pleasant
spring, for our own pastime, and the benefit of these
misguided young lovers?”
In accordance with this proposal, the whole party
stationed themselves round the stone cistern; the two
children, being very weary, fell asleep upon the damp
earth, and the pretty Shaker girl, whose feelings were
those of a nun or a Turkish lady, crept as close as possible
to the female traveller, and as far as she well could
from the unknown men. The same person who had
hitherto been the chief spokesman now stood up, waving
his hat in his hand, and suffered the moonlight to fall
full upon his front.
“In me,” said he, with a certain majesty of utterance,
“in me, you behold a poet.”
Though a lithographic print of this gentleman is
forty, a thin and stooping figure, in a black coat, out at
elbows; notwithstanding the ill condition of his attire,
there were about him several tokens of a peculiar sort of
foppery, unworthy of a mature man, particularly in the
arrangement of his hair, which was so disposed as to give
all possible loftiness and breadth to his forehead. However,
he had an intelligent eye, and, on the whole, a
marked countenance.
“A poet!” repeated the young Shaker, a little puzzled
how to understand such a designation, seldom heard in
the utilitarian community where he had spent his life.
“O, ay, Miriam, he means a varse-maker, thee must
know.”
This remark jarred upon the susceptible nerves of the
poet; nor could he help wondering what strange fatality
had put into this young man's mouth an epithet, which
ill-natured people had affirmed to be more proper to his
merit than the one assumed by himself.
“True, I am a verse-maker,” he resumed, “but my
verse is no more than the material body into which I
breathe the celestial soul of thought. Alas! how many
a pang has it cost me, this same insensibility to the
ethereal essence of poetry, with which you have here
tortured me again, at the moment when I am to
relinquish my profession forever! O Fate! why hast
thou warred with Nature, turning all her higher and
more perfect gifts to the ruin of me, their possessor?
What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear
of taste? How can I rejoice in my strength and delicacy
of feeling, when they have but made great sorrows
out of little ones? Have I dreaded scorn like death,
find myself in a middle state between obscurity and
infamy? But I have my revenge! I could have given
existence to a thousand bright creations. I crush them
into my heart, and there let them putrefy! I shake off
the dust of my feet against my countrymen! But posterity,
tracing my footsteps up this weary hill, will cry
shame upon the unworthy age that drove one of the
fathers of American song to end his days in a Shaker
village!”
During this harangue, the speaker gesticulated with
great energy; and, as poetry is the natural language of
passion, there appeared reason to apprehend his final
explosion into an ode extempore. The reader must
understand that, for all these bitter words, he was a kind,
gentle, harmless, poor fellow enough, whom Nature, tossing
her ingredients together without looking at her recipe,
had sent into the world with too much of one sort of
brain, and hardly any of another.
“Friend,” said the young Shaker, in some perplexity,
“thee seemest to have met with great troubles; and,
doubtless, I should pity them, if — if I could but understand
what they were.”
“Happy in your ignorance!” replied the poet, with an
air of sublime superiority. “To your coarser mind,
perhaps, I may seem to speak of more important griefs,
when I add, what I had well-nigh forgotten, that I am
out at elbows, and almost starved to death. At any rate,
you have the advice and example of one individual to
warn you back; for I am come hither, a disappointed
man, flinging aside the fragments of my hopes, and
anxious to leave.”
“I thank thee, friend,” rejoined the youth, “but I do
not mean to be a poet, nor, Heaven be praised! do I think
Miriam ever made a varse in her life. So we need not
fear thy disappointments. But, Miriam,” he added,
with real concern, “thee knowest that the elders admit
nobody that has not a gift to be useful. Now, what
under the sun can they do with this poor varse-maker?”
“Nay, Josiah, do not thee discourage the poor man,”
said the girl, in all simplicity and kindness. “Our
hymns are very rough, and perhaps they may trust him
to smooth them.”
Without noticing this hint of professional employment,
the poet turned away, and gave himself up to a sort of
vague reverie, which he called thought. Sometimes he
watched the moon, pouring a silvery liquid on the clouds,
through which it slowly melted till they became all
bright; then he saw the same sweet radiance dancing on
the leafy trees which rustled as if to shake it off, or
sleeping on the high tops of hills, or hovering down in
distant valleys, like the material of unshaped dreams;
lastly, he looked into the spring, and there the light was
mingling with the water. In its crystal bosom, too,
beholding all heaven reflected there, he found an emblem
of a pure and tranquil breast. He listened to that most
ethereal of all sounds, the song of crickets, coming in
full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight
could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally,
he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it
were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose
a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore
ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion,
with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written,
he took the first opportunity to send, by one of the
Shaker brethren, to Concord, where they were published
in the New Hampshire Patriot.
Meantime, another of the Canterbury pilgrims, one so
different from the poet that the delicate fancy of the
latter could hardly have conceived of him, began to
relate his sad experience. He was a small man, of
quick and unquiet gestures, about fifty years old, with a
narrow forehead, all wrinkled and drawn together. He
held in his hand a pencil, and a card of some commission-merchant
in foreign parts, on the back of which, for
there was light enough to read or write by, he seemed
ready to figure out a calculation.
“Young man,” said he, abruptly, “what quantity of
land do the Shakers own here, in Canterbury?”
“That is more than I can tell thee, friend,” answered
Josiah, “but it is a very rich establishment, and for a
long way by the road-side thee may guess the land to
be ours, by the neatness of the fences.”
“And what may be the value of the whole,” continued
the stranger, “with all the buildings and improvements,
pretty nearly, in round numbers?”
“O, a monstrous sum, — more than I can reckon,”
replied the young Shaker.
“Well, sir,” said the pilgrim, “there was a day, and
not very long ago, neither, when I stood at my counting-room
window, and watched the signal flags of three of
my own ships entering the harbor, from the East Indies,
from Liverpool, and from up the Straits; and I would
title-deeds of this whole Shaker settlement. You stare.
Perhaps, now, you won't believe that I could have put
more value on a little piece of paper, no bigger than the
palm of your hand, than all these solid acres of grain,
grass and pasture-land, would sell for?”
“I won't dispute it, friend,” answered Josiah, “but I
know I had rather have fifty acres of this good land than
a whole sheet of thy paper.”
“You may say so now,” said the ruined merchant,
bitterly, “for my name would not be worth the paper I
should write it on. Of course, you must have heard of
my failure?”
And the stranger mentioned his name, which, however
mighty it might have been in the commercial world, the
young Shaker had never heard of among the Canterbury
hills.
“Not heard of my failure!” exclaimed the merchant,
considerably piqued. “Why, it was spoken of on
'Change in London, and from Boston to New Orleans
men trembled in their shoes. At all events, I did fail,
and you see me here on my road to the Shaker village,
where, doubtless (for the Shakers are a shrewd sect),
they will have a due respect for my experience, and
give me the management of the trading part of the concern,
in which case, I think I can pledge myself to double
their capital in four or five years. Turn back with me,
young man; for though you will never meet with my
good luck, you can hardly escape my bad.”
“I will not turn back for this,” replied Josiah, calmly,
“any more than for the advice of the varse-maker,
between whom and thee, friend, I see a sort of likeness,
I can earn our daily bread among the world's people, as
well as in the Shaker village. And do we want anything
more, Miriam?”
“Nothing more, Josiah,” said the girl, quietly.
“Yea, Miriam, and daily bread for some other little
mouths, if God send them,” observed the simple Shaker
lad.
Miriam did not reply, but looked down into the spring,
where she encountered the image of her own pretty face,
blushing within the prim little bonnet. The third pilgrim
now took up the conversation. He was a sunburnt
countryman, of tall frame and bony strength, on whose
rude and manly face there appeared a darker, more
sullen and obstinate despondency, than on those of either
the poet or the merchant.
“Well, now, youngster,” he began, “these folks have
had their say, so I 'll take my turn. My story will cut
but a poor figure by the side of theirs; for I never
supposed that I could have a right to meat and drink,
and great praise besides, only for tagging rhymes
together, as it seems this man does; nor ever tried to
get the substance of hundreds into my own hands, like
the trader there. When I was about of your years, I
married me a wife, — just such a neat and pretty young
woman as Miriam, if that 's her name, — and all I asked
of Providence was an ordinary blessing on the sweat of
my brow, so that we might be decent and comfortable,
and have daily bread for ourselves, and for some other
little mouths that we soon had to feed. We had no very
great prospects before us; but I never wanted to be idle;
help me, because I was willing to help myself.”
“And did n't he help thee, friend?” demanded
Josiah, with some eagerness.
“No,” said the yeoman, sullenly; “for then you
would not have seen me here. I have labored hard for
years; and my means have been growing narrower, and
my living poorer, and my heart colder and heayier, all
the time; till at last I could bear it no longer. I set
myself down to calculate whether I had best go on the
Oregon expedition, or come here to the Shaker village;
but I had not hope enough left in me to begin the world
over again; and, to make my story short, here I am.
And now, youngster, take my advice, and turn back; or
else, some few years hence, you 'll have to climb this
hill, with as heavy a heart as mine.”
This simple story had a strong effect on the young
fugitives. The misfortunes of the poet and merchant
had won little sympathy from their plain good sense and
unworldly feelings, qualities which made them such
unprejudiced and inflexible judges, that few men would
have chosen to take the opinion of this youth and
maiden as to the wisdom or folly of their pursuits. But
here was one whose simple wishes had resembled their
own, and who, after efforts which almost gave him a
right to claim success from fate, had failed in accomplishing
them.
“But thy wife, friend?” exclaimed the young man,
“What became of the pretty girl, like Miriam? O, I
am afraid she is dead!”
“Yea, poor man, she must be dead, — she and the
children, too,” sobbed Miriam.
The female pilgrim had been leaning over the spring,
wherein latterly a tear or two might have been seen to
fall, and form its little circle on the surface of the water.
She now looked up, disclosing features still comely, but
which had acquired an expression of fretfulness, in the
same long course of evil fortune that had thrown a
sullen gloom over the temper of the unprosperous yeoman.
“I am his wife,” said she, a shade of irritability just
perceptible in the sadness of her tone. “These poor
little things, asleep on the ground, are two of our
children. We had two more, but God has provided
better for them than we could, by taking them to himself.”
“And what would thee advise Josiah and me to do?”
asked Miriam, this being the first question which she
had put to either of the strangers.
“'T is a thing almost against nature for a woman to
try to part true lovers,” answered the yeoman's wife,
after a pause; “but I 'll speak as truly to you as if these
were my dying words. Though my husband told you
some of our troubles, he did n't mention the greatest, and
that which makes all the rest so hard to bear. If you and
your sweetheart marry, you 'll be kind and pleasant to
each other for a year or two, and while that 's the case,
you never will repent; but, by and by, he 'll grow
gloomy, rough, and hard to please, and you 'll be peevish,
and full of little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by
the fireside, when he comes to rest himself from his
troubles out of doors; so your love will wear away by
little and little, and leave you miserable at last. It has
lovers once, if ever two young folks were.”
As she ceased, the yeoman and his wife exchanged a
glance, in which there was more and warmer affection
than they had supposed to have escaped the frost of a
wintry fate, in either of their breasts. At that moment,
when they stood on the utmost verge of married life, one
word fitly spoken, or perhaps one peculiar look, had they
had mutual confidence enough to reciprocate it, might
have renewed all their old feelings, and sent them back,
resolved to sustain each other amid the struggles of the
world. But the crisis passed, and never came again. Just
then, also, the children, roused by their mother's voice,
looked up, and added their wailing accents to the testimony
borne by all the Canterbury pilgrims against the
world from which they fled.
“We are tired and hungry!” cried they. “Is it far to
the Shaker village?”
The Shaker youth and maiden looked mournfully into
each other's eyes. They had but stepped across the
threshold of their homes, when lo! the dark array of
cares and sorrows that rose up to warn them back. The
varied narratives of the strangers had arranged themselves
into a parable; they seemed not merely instances
of woful fate that had befallen others, but shadowy
omens of disappointed hope, and unavailing toil, domestic
grief, and estranged affection, that would cloud the
onward path of these poor fugitives. But after one
instant's hesitation, they opened their arms, and sealed
their resolve with as pure and fond an embrace as ever
youthful love had hallowed.
“We will not go back,” said they. “The world
another.”
Then the Canterbury pilgrims went up the hill, while
the poet chanted a drear and desperate stanza of the
Farewell to his Harp, fitting music for that melancholy
band. They sought a home where all former ties of
nature or society would be sundered, and all old distinctions
levelled, and a cold and passionless security be
substituted for mortal hope and fear, as in that other
refuge of the world's weary outcasts, the grave. The
lovers drank at the Shaker spring, and then, with
chastened hopes, but more confiding affections, went on
to mingle in an untried life.
| The snow-image | |