University of Virginia Library

33. CHAPTER XXXIII.
SCHOOL-LIFE IN CLOUDLAND.

THE academy in Cloudland was one of those pure wells from
which the hidden strength of New England is drawn, as
her broad rivers are made from hidden mountain brooks. The
first object of every colony in New England, after building the
church, was to establish a school-house; and a class of the most
superior men of New England, in those days of simple living,
were perfectly satisfied to make it the business of their lives to
teach in the small country academies with which the nooks and
hollows of New England were filled.

Could materials be got as profuse as Boswell's Life of Johnson
to illustrate the daily life and table-talk of some of the
academy schoolmasters of this period, it would be an acquisition
for the world.

For that simple, pastoral germ-state of society is a thing forever
gone. Never again shall we see that union of perfect
repose in regard to outward surroundings and outward life
with that intense activity of the inward and intellectual world,
that made New England, at this time, the vigorous, germinating
seed-bed for all that has since been developed of politics,
laws, letters, and theology, through New England to America, and
through America to the world. The hurry of railroads, and the
rush and roar of business that now fill it, would have prevented
that germinating process. It was necessary that there should be
a period like that we describe, when villages were each a separate
little democracy, shut off by rough roads and forests from the rest
of the world, organized round the church and school as a common
centre, and formed by the minister and the schoolmaster.

The academy of Cloudland had become celebrated in the
neighborhood for the skill and ability with which it was conducted,
and pupils had been drawn, even from as far as Boston,

to come and sojourn in our mountain town to partake of
these advantages. They were mostly young girls, who were
boarded at very simple rates in the various families of the
place. In all, the pupils of the academy numbered about a
hundred, equally divided between the two sexes. There was a
class of about fifteen young men who were preparing for college,
and a greater number of boys who were studying with the same
ultimate hope.

As a general rule, the country academies of Massachusetts
have been equally open to both sexes. Andover and Exeter,
so far as I know, formed the only exceptions to this rule, being
by their charters confined rigorously to the use of the dominant
sex. But, in the generality of country academies, the girls and
boys studied side by side, without any other restriction as to the
character of their studies than personal preference. As a general
thing, the classics and the higher mathematics were more
pursued by the boys than the girls. But if there were a daughter
of Eve who wished, like her mother, to put forth her hand to the
tree of knowledge, there was neither cherubim nor flaming sword
to drive her away.

Mr. Rossiter was always stimulating the female part of his
subjects to such undertakings, and the consequence was that in
his school an unusual number devoted themselves to these pursuits,
and the leading scholar in Greek and the higher mathematics
was our new acquaintance, Esther Avery.

The female principal, Miss Titcomb, was a thorough-bred, old-fashioned
lady, whose views of education were formed by Miss
Hannah More, and whose style, like Miss Hannah More's,
was profoundly Johnsonian. This lady had composed a set of
rules for the conduct of the school, in the most ornate and
resounding periods. The rules, briefly epitomized, required of us
only absolute moral perfection, but they were run into details
which caused the reading of them to take up about a quarter of
an hour every Saturday morning. I would that I could remember
some of the sentences. It was required of us all, for one
thing, that we should be perfectly polite. “Persons truly polite,”
it was added, “invariably treat their superiors with reverence,

their equals with exact consideration, and their inferiors with
condescension.” Again, under the head of manners, we were
warned, “not to consider romping as indicative of sprightliness,
or loud laughter a mark of wit.”

The scene every Saturday morning, when these rules were
read to a set of young people on whom the mountain air acted
like champagne, and among whom both romping and loud
laughter were fearfully prevalent, was sufficiently edifying.

There was also a system of marks, quite complicated, by which
our departure from any of these virtuous proprieties was indicated.
After a while, however, the reciting of these rules, like
the reading of the Ten Commandments in churches, and a great
deal of other good substantial reading, came to be looked upon
only as a Saturday morning decorum, and the Johnsonian
periods, which we all knew by heart, were principally useful in
pointing a joke. Nevertheless, we were not a badly behaved set
of young people.

Miss Titcomb exercised a general supervision over the manners,
morals, and health of the young ladies connected with the
institution, taught history and geography, and also gave especial
attention to female accomplishments. These, so far as I could
observe, consisted largely in embroidering mourning pieces, with
a family monument in the centre, a green ground worked in
chenille and floss silk, with an exuberant willow-tree, and a
number of weeping mourners, whose faces were often concealed
by flowing pocket-handkerchiefs.

Pastoral pieces were also in great favor, representing fair
young shepherdesses sitting on green chenille banks, with crooks
in their hands, and tending some animals of an uncertain description,
which were to be received by faith as sheep. The
sweet, confiding innocence which regarded the making of objects
like these as more suited to the tender female character than
the pursuit of Latin and mathematics, was characteristic of the
ancient régime. Did not Penelope embroider, and all sorts of
princesses, ancient and modern? and was not embroidery a true
feminine grace? Even Esther Avery, though she found no
time for works of this kind, looked upon it with respect, as

an accomplishment for which nature unfortunately had not given
her a taste.

Mr. Rossiter, although he of course would not infringe on the
kingdom of his female associate, treated these accomplishments
with a scarce concealed contempt. It was, perhaps, the frosty
atmosphere of scepticism which he breathed about him touching
those works of art, that prevented his favorite scholars from going
far in the direction of such accomplishments. The fact is, that
Mr. Rossiter, during the sailor period of his life, had been to
the Mediterranean, had seen the churches of Spain and Italy,
and knew what Murillos and Titians were like, which may
account somewhat for the glances of civil amusement which he
sometimes cast over into Miss Titcomb's department, when the
adjuncts and accessories of a family tombstone were being eagerly
discussed.

Mr. Jonathan Rossiter held us all by the sheer force of his
personal character and will, just as the ancient mariner held the
wedding guest with his glittering eye. He so utterly scorned
and contemned a lazy scholar, that trifling and inefficiency in
study were scorched and withered by the very breath of his nostrils.
We were so awfully afraid of his opinion, we so hoped for
his good word and so dreaded his contempt, and we so verily believed
that no such man ever walked this earth, that he had
only to shake his ambrosial locks and give the nod, to settle us
all as to any matter whatever.

In an age when in England schools were managed by the
grossest and most brutal exercise of corporal punishment, the
schoolmasters of New England, to a great extent, had entirely
dropped all resort to such barbarous measures, and carried on
their schools as republics, by the sheer force of moral and intellectual
influences. Mr. Jonathan Rossiter would have been
ashamed of himself at even the suggestion of caning a boy, —
as if he were incapable of any higher style of government.
And yet never was a man more feared and his will had in
more awful regard. Mr. Rossiter was sparing of praise, but his
praise bore a value in proportion to its scarcity. It was like
diamonds and rubies, — few could have it, but the whole of his
little commonwealth were working for it.

He scorned all conventional rules in teaching, and he would
not tolerate a mechanical lesson, and took delight in puzzling
his pupils and breaking up all routine business by startling and
unexpected questions and assertions. He compelled every one
to think, and to think for himself. “Your heads may not be
the best in the world,” was one of his sharp, off-hand sayings,
“but they are the best God has given you, and you must use
them for yourselves.”

To tell the truth, he used his teaching somewhat as a mental
gratification for himself. If there was a subject he wanted to investigate,
or an old Greek or Latin author that he wanted to dig
out, he would put a class on it, without the least regard to
whether it was in the course of college preparation or not, and
if a word was said by any poor mechanical body, he would blast
out upon him with a sort of despotic scorn.

“Learn to read Greek perfectly,” he said, “and it 's no matter
what you read”; or, “Learn to use your own heads, and you
can learn anything.”

There was little idling and no shirking in his school, but a
slow, dull, industrious fellow, if he showed a disposition to work
steadily, got more notice from him than even a bright one.

Mr. Rossiter kept house by himself in a small cottage adjoining
that of the minister. His housekeeper, Miss Minerva Randall,
generally known to the village as “Miss Nervy Randall,”
was one of those preternaturally well-informed old mermaids
who, so far as I know, are a peculiar product of the State of
Maine. Study and work had been the two passions of her life,
and in neither could she be excelled by man or woman. Single-handed,
and without a servant, she performed all the labors of
Mr. Jonathan Rossiter's little establishment. She washed for
him, ironed for him, plaited his ruffled shirts in neatest folds,
brushed his clothes, cooked his food, occasionally hoed in the
garden, trained flowers around the house, and found, also, time
to read Greek and Latin authors, and to work out problems in
mathematics and surveying and navigation, and to take charge
of boys in reading Virgil.

Miss Minerva Randall was one of those female persons who

are of Sojourner Truth's opinion, — that if women want any
rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it. Her
sex had never occurred to her as a reason for doing or not doing
anything which her hand found to do. In the earlier part
of her life, for the mere love of roving and improving her mind
by seeing foreign countries, she had gone on a Mediterranean
voyage with her brother Zachariah Randall, who was wont to
say of her that she was a better mate than any man he could
find. And true enough, when he was confined to his berth with
a fever, Miss Minerva not only nursed him, but navigated the ship
home in the most matter-of-fact way in the world. She had no
fol-de-rol about woman's rights, but she was always wide-awake
to perceive when a thing was to be done, and to do it. Nor
did she ever after in her life talk of this exploit as a thing to be
boasted of, seeming to regard it as a matter too simple, and
entirely in the natural course of things, to be mentioned. Miss
Minerva, however, had not enough of the external illusive charms
of her sex, to suggest to a casual spectator any doubt on that
score of the propriety of her doing or not doing anything.
Although she had not precisely the air of a man, she had very
little of what usually suggests the associations of femininity.
There was a sort of fishy quaintness about her that awakened
grim ideas of some unknown ocean product, — a wild and withered
appearance, like a wind-blown juniper on a sea promontory,
— unsightly and stunted, yet not, after all, commonplace or
vulgar. She was short, square, and broad, and the circumference
of her waist was if anything greater where that of other females
decreases. What the color of her hair might have been in days
of youthful bloom was not apparent; but she had, when we
knew her, thin tresses of a pepper-and-salt mixture of tint,
combed tightly, and twisted in a very small nut on the back of
her head, and fastened with a reddish-yellowish horn comb. Her
small black eyes were overhung by a grizzled thicket of the
same mixed color as her hair. For the graces of the toilet, Miss
Nervy had no particular esteem. Her clothing and her person,
as well as her housekeeping and belongings, were of a scrupulous
and wholesome neatness; but the idea of any other beauty than
that of utility had never suggested itself to her mind. She wore
always a stuff petticoat of her own spinning, with a striped linen
short gown, and probably in all her life never expended twenty
dollars a year for clothing; and yet Miss Nervy was about the
happiest female person whose acquaintance it has ever been my
fortune to make. She had just as much as she wanted of exactly
the two things she liked best in the world, — books and work,
and when her work was done, there were the books, and life
could give no more. Miss Nervy had no sentiment, — not a
particle of romance, — she was the most perfectly contented
mortal that could possibly be imagined. As to station and position,
she was as well known and highly respected in Cloudland
as the schoolmaster himself: she was one of the fixed facts of the
town, as much as the meeting-house. Days came and went, and
spring flowers and autumn leaves succeeded each other, and boys
and girls, like the spring flowers and autumn leaves, came and
went in Cloudland Academy, but there was always Miss Nervy
Randall, not a bit older, not a bit changed, doing her spinning
and her herb-drying, working over her butter and plaiting
Mr. Jonathan's ruffled shirts and teaching her Virgil class. What
gave a piquancy to Miss Nervy's discourse was, that she always
clung persistently to the racy Yankee dialect of her childhood,
and when she was discoursing of Latin and the classics the
idioms made a droll mixture. She was the most invariably good-natured
of mortals, and helpful to the last degree; and she would
always stop her kitchen work, take her hands out of the bread,
or turn away from her yeast in a critical moment, to show a
puzzled boy the way through a hard Latin sentence.

“Why, don't you know what that 'ere is?” she would say.
“That 'ere is part of the gerund in dum; you 've got to decline
it, and then you 'll find it. Look here!” she 'd say; “run that
'ere through the moods an' tenses, and ye 'll git it in the subjunctive”;
or, “Massy, child! that 'ere is one o' the deponent
verbs. 'T ain't got any active form; them deponent verbs allus
does trouble boys till they git used to 'em.”

Now these provincialisms might have excited the risibles of so
keen a set of grammarians as we were, only that Miss Randall

was a dead shot in any case of difficulty presented by the learned
languages. No matter how her English phrased it, she had
taught so many boys that she knew every hard rub and difficult
stepping-stone and tight place in the Latin grammar by heart,
and had relief at her tongue's end for any distressed beginner.

In the cottage over which Miss Randall presided, Harry and
I had our room, and we were boarded at the master's table; and
so far we were fortunate. Our apartment, which was a roof-room
of a gambrel-roofed cottage, was, to be sure, unplastered
and carpetless; but it looked out through the boughs of a great
apple-tree, up a most bewildering blue vista of mountains, whence
the sight of a sunset was something forever to be remembered.
All our physical appointments, though rustically plain, were kept
by Miss Nervy in the utmost perfection of neatness. She had
as great a passion for soap and sand as she had for Greek roots,
and probably for the same reason. These wild sea-coast countries
seemed to produce a sort of superfluity of energy which
longed to wreak itself on something, and delighted in digging
and delving mentally as well as physically.

Our table had a pastoral perfection in the articles of bread and
butter, with honey furnished by Miss Minerva's bees, and game
and fish brought in by the united woodcraft of the minister and
Mr. Rossiter.

Mr. Rossiter pursued all the natural sciences with an industry
and enthusiasm only possible to a man who lives in so lonely and
retired a place as Cloudland, and who has, therefore, none of the
thousand dissipations of time resulting from our modern system
of intercommunication, which is fast producing a state of
shallow and superficial knowledge. He had a ponderous herbarium,
of some forty or fifty folios, of his own collection and arrangement,
over which he gloated with affectionate pride. He
had a fine mineralogical cabinet; and there was scarcely a ledge
of rocks within a circuit of twelve miles that had not resounded
to the tap of his stone hammer and furnished specimens for
his collection; and he had an entomologic collection, where
luckless bugs impaled on steel pins stuck in thin sheets of
cork struggled away a melancholy existence, martyrs to the

taste for science. The tender-hearted among us sometimes
ventured a remonstrance in favor of these hapless beetles, but
were silenced by the authoritative dictum of Mr. Rossiter. “Insects,”
he declared, “are unsusceptible of pain, the structure
of their nervous organization forbidding the idea, and their spasmodic
action being simply nervous contraction.” As nobody
has ever been inside of a beetle to certify to the contrary, and as
the race have no mode of communication, we all found it comfortable
to put implicit faith in Mr. Rossiter's statements till
better advised.

It was among the awe-inspiring legends that were current of
Mr. Rossiter in the school, that he corresponded with learned men
in Norway and Sweden, Switzerland and France, to whom he
sent specimens of American plants and minerals and insects, receiving
in return those of other countries. Even in that remote
day, little New England had her eyes and her thoughts and her
hands everywhere where ship could sail.

Mr. Rossiter dearly loved to talk and to teach, and out of
school-hours it was his delight to sit surrounded by his disciples,
to answer their questions, and show them his herbarium and his
cabinet, to organize woodland tramps, and to start us on researches
similar to his own. It was fashionable in his school to
have private herbariums and cabinets, and before a month was
passed our garret-room began to look quite like a grotto. In
short, Mr. Rossiter's system resembled that of those gardeners
who, instead of bending all their energies toward making a handsome
head to a young tree, encourage it to burst out in suckers
clear down to the root, bringing every part of it into vigorous life
and circulation.

I still remember the blessed old fellow, as he used to sit
among us on the steps of his house, in some of those resplendent
moonlight nights which used to light up Cloudland like a fairy
dream. There he still sits, in memory, with his court around
him, — Esther, with the thoughtful shadows in her eyes and the
pensive Psyche profile, and Tina, ever restless, changing, enthusiastic,
Harry with his sly, reticent humor and silent enjoyment,
and he, our master, talking of everything under the sun,

past, present, and to come, — of the cathedrals and pictures of
Europe, describing those he had not seen apparently with as
minute a knowledge as those he had, — of plants and animals, —
of the ancients and the moderns, — of theology, metaphysics,
grammar, rhetoric, or whatever came uppermost, — always full
and suggestive, startling us with paradoxes, provoking us to arguments,
setting us out to run eager tilts of discussion with him, yet
in all holding us in a state of unmeasured admiration. Was he
conscious, our great man and master, of that weakness of his
nature which made an audience, and an admiring one, always a
necessity to him? Of a soul naturally self-distrustful and melancholy,
he needed to be constantly reinforced and built up in his
own esteem by the suffrage of others. What seemed the most
trenchant self-assertion in him was, after all, only the desperate
struggles of a drowning man to keep his head above water;
and, though he seemed at times to despise us all, our good
opinion, our worship and reverence, were the raft that kept him
from sinking in despair.

The first few weeks that Tina was in school, it was evident
that Mr. Rossiter considered her as a spoiled child of fortune,
whom the world had conspired to injure by over-much petting.
He appeared resolved at once to change the atmosphere and
the diet. For some time in school it seemed as if she could do
nothing to please him. He seemed determined to put her through
a sort of Spartan drill, with hard work and small praise.

Tina had received from nature and womanhood that inspiration
in dress and toilet attraction which led her always and instinctively
to some little form of personal adornment. Every
wild spray or fluttering vine in our woodland rambles seemed to
suggest to her some caprice of ornamentation. Each day she
had some new thing in her hair, — now a feathery fern-leaf, and
anon some wild red berry, whose presence just where she placed
it was as picturesque as a French lithograph; and we boys were
in the habit of looking each day to see what she would wear next.
One morning she came into school, fair as Ariadne, with her
viny golden curls rippling over and around a crown of laurel-blossoms.
She seemed to us like a little woodland poem. We

all looked at her, and complimented her, and she received our
compliments, as she always did coin of that sort, with the most
undisguised and radiant satisfaction. Mr. Rossiter was in one of
his most savage humors this morning, and eyed the pretty toilet
grimly. “If you had only an equal talent for ornamenting the
inside of your head,” he said to her, “there might be some hopes
of you.”

Tears of mortification came into Tina's eyes, as she dashed the
offending laurel-blossoms out of the window, and bent resolutely
over her book. At recess-time she strolled out with me into the
pine woods back of the school-house, and we sat down on a mossy
log together, and I comforted her and took her part.

“I don't care, Horace,” she said, — “I don't care!” and she
dashed the tears out of her eyes. “I 'll make that man like me
yet, — you see if I don't. He shall like me before I 'm done with
him, so there! I don't care how much he scolds. I 'll give in to
him, and do exactly as he tells me, but I 'll conquer him, — you
see if I don't.”

And true enough Miss Tina from this time brushed her curly
hair straight as such rebellious curls possibly could be brushed,
and dressed herself as plainly as Esther, and went at study as if
her life depended on it. She took all Mr. Rossiter's snubs and
despiteful sayings with the most prostrate humility, and now we
began to learn, to our astonishment, what a mind the little creature
had. In all my experience of human beings, I never saw
one who learned so easily as she. It was but a week or two
after she began the Latin grammar before, jumping over all the
intermediate books, she alighted in a class in Virgil among scholars
who had been studying for a year, and kept up with them,
and in some respects stood clearly as the first scholar. The vim
with which the little puss went at it, the zeal with which she turned
over the big dictionary and whirled the leaves of the grammar,
the almost inspiration which she showed in seizing the poetical
shading of words over which her more prosaic companions
blundered, were matters of never-ending astonishment and admiration
to Harry and myself. At the end of the first week she
gravely announced to us that she intended to render Virgil into

English verse; and we had not the smallest doubt that she
would do it, and were so immensely wrought up about it that we
talked of it after we went to bed that night. Tina, in fact, had
produced quite a clever translation of the first ten lines of
“Arma virumque,” &c. and we wondered what Mr. Rossiter would
say to it. One of us stepped in and laid it on his writing-desk.

“Which of you boys did this?” he said the next morning, in
not a disapproving tone.

There was a pause, and he slowly read the lines aloud.

“Pretty fair!” he said, — “pretty fair! I should n't be surprised
if that boy should be able to write English one of these
days.”

“If you please, sir,” said I, “it 's Miss Tina Percival that
wrote that.”

Tina's cheeks were red enough as he handed her back her
poetry.

“Not bad,” he said, — “not bad; keep on as you 've begun,
and you may come to something yet.”

This scanty measure of approbation was interpreted as high
praise, and we complimented Tina on her success. The project
of making a poetical translation of Virgil, however, was not carried
out, though every now and then she gave us little jets and
spurts, which kept up our courage.

Bless me, how we did study everything in that school! English
grammar, for instance. The whole school was divided into
a certain number of classes, each under a leader, and at the close
of every term came on a great examination, which was like a
tournament or passage at arms in matters of the English language.
To beat in this great contest of knowledge was what
excited all our energies. Mr. Rossiter searched out the most
difficult specimens of English literature for us to parse, and
we were given to understand that he was laying up all the most
abstruse problems of grammar to propound to us. All that
might be raked out from the coarse print and the fine print of
grammar was to be brought to bear on us; and the division that
knew the most — the division that could not be puzzled by any
subtlety, that had anticipated every possible question, and was

prepared with an answer — would be the victorious division, and
would be crowned with laurels as glorious in our eyes as those of
the old Olympic games. For a week we talked, spoke, and
dreamed of nothing but English grammar. Each division sat in
solemn, mysterious conclave, afraid lest one of its mighty secrets
of wisdom should possibly take wing and be plundered by some
of the outlying scouts of another division.

We had for a subject Satan's address to the sun, in Milton,
which in our private counsels we tore limb from limb with as
little remorse as the anatomist dissects a once lovely human body.

The town doctor was a noted linguist and grammarian, and his
son was contended for by all the divisions, as supposed to have
access to the fountain of his father's wisdom on these subjects;
and we were so happy in the balloting as to secure him for our
side. Esther was our leader, and we were all in the same division,
and our excitement was indescribable. We had also to manage
a quotation from Otway, which I remember contained the
clause, “Were the world on fire.” To parse “on fire” was a
problem which kept the eyes of the whole school waking. Each
division had its theory, of which it spoke mysteriously in the
presence of outsiders; but we had George Norton, and George
had been in solemn consultation with Dr. Norton. Never shall I
forget the excitement as he came rushing up to our house at nine
o'clock at night with the last results of his father's analysis. We
shut the doors and shut the windows, — for who knew what of
the enemy might be listening? — and gathered breathlessly
around him, while in a low, mysterious voice he unfolded to us
how to parse “on fire.” At that moment George Norton enjoyed
the full pleasure of being a distinguished individual, if he
never did before or after.

Mr. Rossiter all this while was like the Egyptian Sphinx, perfectly
unfathomable, and severely resolved to sift and test us to
the utmost.

Ah, well! to think of the glories of the day when our division
beat! — for we did beat. We ran along neck and neck with
Ben Baldwin's division, for Ben was an accomplished grammarian,
and had picked up one or two recondite pieces of information

wherewith he threatened for a time to turn our flank, but
the fortunes of the field were reversed when it came to the
phrase “on fire,” and our success was complete and glorious. It
was well to have this conflict over, for I don't believe that Tina
slept one night that week without dreams of particles and prepositions,
— Tina, who was as full of the enthusiasm of everything
that was going on as a flossy evening cloud is of light, and to
whose health I really do believe a defeat might have caused a
serious injury.

Never shall I forget Esther, radiant, grave, and resolved, as
she sat in the midst of her division through all the fluctuations
of the contest. A little bright spot had come in each of her
usually pale cheeks, and her eyes glowed with a fervor which
showed that she had it in her to have defended a fortress, or
served a cannon, like the Maid of Saragossa. We could not
have felt more if our division had been our country and she
had led us in triumph through a battle.

Besides grammar, we gave great attention to rhetoric. We
studied Dr. Blair with the same kind of thoroughness with which
we studied the English grammar. Every week a division of
the school was appointed to write compositions; but there was,
besides, a call for volunteers, and Mr. Rossiter had a smile of
approbation for those who volunteered to write every week; and
so we were always among that number.

It was remarkable that the very best writers, as a general
thing, were among the female part of the school. There were
several young men, of nineteen and twenty years of age, whose
education had been retarded by the necessity of earning for them
selves the money which was to support them while preparing
for college. They were not boys, they were men, and, generally
speaking, men of fine minds and fine characters. Some of them
have since risen to distinction, and acted leading parts at Wash
ington. But, for all that, the best writers of the school, as I have
before said, were the girls. Nor was the standard of writing
low: Mr. Rossiter had the most withering scorn for ordinary sentimental
nonsense and school-girl platitudes. If a bit of weakly
poetry got running among the scholars, he was sure to come

down upon it with such an absurd parody that nobody could ever
recall it again without a laugh.

We wrote on such subjects as “The Difference between the
Natural and Moral Sublime,” “The Comparative Merits of Milton
and Shakespeare,” “The Comparative Merits of the Athenian
and Lacedæmonian Systems of Education.” Sometimes,
also, we wrote criticisms. If, perchance, the master picked up
some verbose Fourth of July oration, or some sophomorical newspaper
declamation, he delivered it over to our tender mercies
with as little remorse as a huntsman feels in throwing a dead
fox to the dogs. Hard was the fate of any such composition
thrown out to us. With what infinite zeal we attacked it! how
we riddled and shook it! how we scoffed, and sneered, and jeered
at it! how we exposed its limping metaphors, and hung up in
triumph its deficient grammar! Such a sharp set of critics
we became that our compositions, read to each other, went
through something of an ordeal.

Tina, Harry, Esther, and I were a private composition club.
Many an hour have we sat in the old school-room long after all
the other scholars had gone, talking to one another of our literary
schemes. We planned poems and tragedies; we planned romances
that would have taken many volumes to write out; we
planned arguments and discussions; we gravely criticised each
other's style, and read morsels of projected compositions to one
another.

It was characteristic of the simple, earnest fearlessness of those
times in regard to all matters of opinion, that the hardest theological
problems were sometimes given out as composition subjects,
and we four children not unfrequently sat perched on the
old high benches of the school-room during the fading twilight
hours, and, like Milton's fallen angels, —

Esther, Harry, and I were reading the “Prometheus Bound”
with Mr. Rossiter. It was one of his literary diversions, into

which he carried us; and the Calvinism of the old Greek tragedian
mingling with the Calvinism of the pulpit and of modern
New England life, formed a curious admixture in our thoughts.

Tina insisted on reading this with us, just as of old she insisted
on being carried in a lady chair over to our woodland study
in the island. She had begun Greek with great zeal under Mr.
Rossiter, but of course was in no situation to venture upon any
such heights; but she insisted upon always being with us when
we were digging out our lesson, and in fact, when we were talking
over doubtfully the meaning of a passage, would irradiate it
with such a flood of happy conjecture as ought to have softened
the stern facts of moods and tenses, and made itself the meaning.
She rendered some parts of it into verse much better than any
of us could have done it, and her versifications, laid on Mr. Rossiter's
desk, called out a commendation that was no small triumph
to her.

“My forte lies in picking knowledge out of other folks and
using it,” said Tina, joyously. “Out of the least bit of ore that
you dig up, I can make no end of gold-leaf!” O Tina, Tina,
you never spoke a truer word, and while you were with us you
made everything glitter with your “no end of gold-leaf.”

It may seem to some impossible that, at so early an age as
ours, our minds should have striven with subjects such as have
been indicated here; but let it be remembered that these problems
are to every human individual a part of an unknown tragedy
in which he is to play the rôle either of the conqueror or the
victim. A ritualistic church, which places all souls under the
guardianship of a priesthood, of course shuts all these doors of
discussion so far as the individual is concerned. “The Church”
is a great ship, where you have only to buy your ticket and pay
for it, and the rest is none of your concern. But the New England
system, as taught at this time, put on every human being
the necessity of crossing the shoreless ocean alone on his own
raft; and many a New England child of ten or twelve years of
age, or even younger, has trembled at the possibilities of final
election or reprobation.

I remember well that at one time the composition subject

given out at school was, “Can the Benevolence of the Deity
be proved by the Light of Nature?” Mr. Rossiter generally
gave out the subject, and discussed it with the school in an
animated conversation, stirring up all the thinking matter that
there was among us by vigorous questions, and by arguing
before us first on one side and then on the other, until our
minds were strongly excited about it; and, when he had wrought
up the whole school to an intense interest, he called for volunteers
to write on either side. Many of these compositions were
full of vigor and thought; two of those on the above-mentioned
subject were very striking. Harry took the affirmative ground,
and gave a statement of the argument, so lucid, and in language
so beautiful, that it has remained fixed in my mind like a gem
ever since. It was the statement of a nature harmonious and
confiding, naturally prone to faith in goodness, harmonizing and
presenting all those evidences of tenderness, mercy, and thoughtful
care which are furnished in the workings of natural laws.
The other composition was by Esther; it was on the other and
darker side of the subject, and as perfect a match for it as the
“Penseroso” to the “Allegro.” It was condensed and logical,
fearfully vigorous in conception and expression, and altogether a
very melancholy piece of literature to have been conceived and
written by a girl of her age. It spoke of that fearful law of existence
by which the sins of parents who often themselves escape
punishment are visited on the heads of innocent children, as a
law which seems made specifically to protect and continue the
existence of vice and disorder from generation to generation.
It spoke of the apparent injustice of an arrangement by which
human beings, in the very outset of their career in life, often
inherit almost uncontrollable propensities to evil. The sorrows,
the perplexities, the unregarded wants and aspirations, over
which the unsympathetic laws of nature cut their way regardless
of quivering nerve or muscle, were all bitterly dwelt upon.
The sufferings of dumb animals, and of helpless infant children,
apparently so useless and so needless, and certainly so undeserved,
were also energetically mentioned. There was a bitter
intensity in the style that was most painful. In short, the two
compositions were two perfect pictures of the world and life as
they appear to two classes of minds. I remember looking at
Esther while her composition was read, and being struck with
the expression of her face, — so pale, so calm, so almost hopeless,
— its expression was very like despair. I remember that
Harry noticed it as well as I, and when school was over he
took a long and lonely ramble with her, and from that time a
nearer intimacy arose between them.

Esther was one of those intense, silent, repressed women
that have been a frequent outgrowth of New England society.
Moral traits, like physical ones, often intensify themselves in
course of descent, so that the child of a long line of pious ancestry
may sometimes suffer from too fine a moral fibre, and become
a victim to a species of morbid spiritual ideality.

Esther looked to me, from the first, less like a warm, breathing,
impulsive woman, less like ordinary flesh and blood, than
some half-spiritual organization, every particle of which was a
thought.

Old Dr. Donne says of such a woman, “One might almost say
her body thought”; and it often came in my mind when I
watched the movements of intense yet repressed intellect and
emotion in Esther's face.

With many New England women at this particular period,
when life was so retired and so cut off from outward sources of
excitement, thinking grew to be a disease. The great subject
of thought was, of course, theology; and woman's nature has
never been consulted in theology. Theologic systems, as to the
expression of their great body of ideas, have, as yet, been
the work of man alone. They have had their origin, as in
St. Augustine, with men who were utterly ignorant of moral and
intellectual companionship with woman, looking on her only in
her animal nature as a temptation and a snare. Consequently,
when, as in this period of New England, the theology of
Augustine began to be freely discussed by every individual
in society, it was the women who found it hardest to tolerate or
to assimilate it, and many a delicate and sensitive nature was
utterly wrecked in the struggle.

Plato says somewhere that the only perfect human thinker
and philosopher who will ever arise will be the MAN-WOMAN, or
a human being who unites perfectly the nature of the two sexes.
It was Esther's misfortune to have, to a certain degree, this
very conformation. From a long line of reasoning, thinking,
intellectual ancestry she had inherited all the strong logical faculties,
and the tastes and inclinations for purely intellectual modes
of viewing things, which are supposed to be more particularly
the characteristic of man. From a line of saintly and tender
women, half refined to angel in their nature, she had inherited
exquisite moral perceptions, and all that flattering host of tremulous,
half-spiritual, half-sensuous intuitions that lie in the borderland
between the pure intellect and the animal nature. The
consequence of all this was the internal strife of a divided nature.
Her heart was always rebelling against the conclusions
of her head. She was constantly being forced by one half of her
nature to movements, inquiries, and reasonings which brought
only torture to the other half.

Esther had no capacity for illusions; and in this respect her
constitution was an unfortunate one.

Tina, for example, was one of those happily organized human
beings in whom an intellectual proposition, fully assented to,
might lie all her life dormant as the wheat-seed which remained
thousands of years ungerminate in the wrappings of a mummy.
She thought only of what she liked to think of; and a disagreeable
or painful truth in her mind dropped at once out of sight, —
it sank into the ground and roses grew over it.

Esther never could have made one of those clinging, submissive,
parasitical wives who form the delight of song and story, and
are supposed to be the peculiar gems of womanhood. It was her
nature always to be obliged to see her friends clearly through
the understanding, and to judge them by a refined and exquisite
conscientiousness. A spot or stain on the honor of the most
beloved could never have become invisible to her. She had none
of that soft, blinding, social aura, — that blending, blue haze,
such as softens the sharp outlines of an Italian landscape, and in
life changes the hardness of reality into illusive and charming

possibilities. Her clear, piercing hazel eyes seemed to pass
over everything with a determination to know only and exactly
the truth, hard and cold and unwelcome though it might be.

Yet there is no doubt that the warm, sunny, showery, rainbow
nature of Tina acted as a constant and favorable alterative
upon her. It was a daily living poem acting on the unused
poetical and imaginative part of her own nature; for Esther had
a suppressed vigor of imagination, and a passionate capability
of emotion, stronger and more intense than that of Tina herself.

I remarked this to Harry, as we were talking about them one
day. “Both have poetical natures,” I said; “both are intense;
but how different they are!”

“Yes,” said Harry, “Tina's is electricity, and that snaps
and sparkles and flashes; Esther's is galvanism, that comes in
long, intense waves, and shakes and convulses; she both thinks
and feels too much on all subjects.”

“That was a very strange composition,” I said.

“It is an unwholesome course of thought,” said Harry, after
thinking for a few moments with his head on his hands; “none
but bitter berries grow on those bushes.”

“But the reasoning was very striking,” said I.

“Reasoning!” said Harry, impatiently; “we must trust the
intuition of our hearts above reason. That is what I am trying
to persuade Esther to do. To me it is an absolute demonstration,
that God never could make a creature who would be better
than himself. We must look at the noblest, best human beings.
We must see what generosity, what tenderness, what magnanimity
can be in man and woman, and believe all that and more in
God. All that there is in the best fathers and best mothers
must be in him.”

“But the world's history does not look like this, as Mr. Rossiter
was saying.”

“We have not seen the world's history yet,” said Harry.
“What does this green aphide, crawling over this leaf, know of
the universe?”