Life, here and there, or, Sketches of society and adventure at far-apart times and places

Preface

So imperceptibly is one stage of life shaded into the next— so gradual and easy are the transitions, through the changes worked by experience and observation — that we refer back to what we u always said," and " always thought," as if we had always looked through the same eyes and judged by the same standards. Yet, if we could recal the Past, with the backwardwaving wand of the magician, and could see, together, the two pictures — life as it seemed then, and life as it seems now — how startling, to any mind, would be the comparison ! An author who has chronicled his impressions, and preserved pictures of society, as he saw it at earlier and later stages of observation, has almost this magical privilege. He can look again at the scenes which he has copied and treasured up, and judge, as few others can, with what different eyes men look around them at far-apart times and places.

In the following sketches, the writer records much in which he had a personal share, though the narratives, even when told in if

PREFACE.

the first person, are, by no means, intended to be strictly autobiographic. The characters are all drawn from life, however, and several of them are portraits, done with studied faithfulness, of celebrated men and women whom he has had the opportunity to know ; while the scenes of the different stories are minutely true to the manners of the countries, and the style of the society, in which they are laid. If the two parts of the book do not seem to the reader to be written by the same pen, it but strengthens the remark with which this preface commences. But if, from these contrasted pictures, any knowledge can be drawn, as to the tendencies of a varied life, and as to the comparative value of the different spheres and relations of society, here and abroad, he will not feel that even so sketchy a work is without its uses.

Contents

EDITH Lip>SEY.

A Snow Storm— Desperate Work— First Introduction— Love Commencing— InUl* lectual Communion— Epicurism of Reading— Old Authors— Vision Explained— Too Fine for Use— Religion in Illness— Anatomy of Love— Minute Philosophies — Easy Luxuries— The Gulture of Love— Albina McLush— Nature's Parallels — Surprise at Health— To Realize Death— The Feelings of the Sick— Illness, Poetry and Love— "Verses in Absence— A Digression— A Charming Town— After Long Partings— For whom Write We ?— Time and Place of Happiness— Sketch of a Chum— A Venture lor a Friend— Souls in the Wrong Bodies— Naming Children— Boy Poems— June in America— Scenery versus Society— Travel in Canal Boats— Unwritten Music— Trenton Falls— Job on Horseback— Crack in the Earth— Rapids at Trenton— A Surprise— Meeting Again— End of a First Love

SCENES OF FEAR.

Part I. Frost And Flirtation

a Oh yes — for you're in love with me !

(I'm very glad of it, I'm sure ;) But then you are not rich, you see,

And I you know Vm very poor 1

'Tis true that I can drive a tandem —

J Tis true that I can turn a sonnet — ? Tis true I leave the law at random,

When I should study — plague upon it !

But this is not — excuse me ! — money !

(A thing they give for house and land ;) And we must eat in matrimony — And love is neither bread nor honey —

And so you understand V

" Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine, lady mine ! Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine ! But the noon will have its ray, And snow-wreaths melt away — And hearts — why should not they ? — Why not thine V J

It began to snow. The air softened ; the pattering of the

horse's hoofs was muffled with the impeded vibration ; the sleigh

glided on with a duller sound ; the large loose flakes fell soft and

last ; and the low and just audible murmur, like the tread of a i

A SNOW-STORM.

fairy host, melted on the ear with a drowsy influence, as if it were a descent of palpable sleep upon the earth. You may talk of falling water — of the running of a brook — of the humming song of an old crone on a sick vigil — or of the levi susurro of the bees of Ilybla — but there is nothing like the falling che snow, for soft and soothing music. You hear it, or not, as you will, but it melts into your soul unaware. If you have ever a heartache, or feel the Weed of " poppy or ;mandragora," or, like myself, grow sometimes a-weary of the stale repetitions of this unvaried world, seek me out in Massachusetts, when the wind softens and veers south, after a frost — say in January. There shall have been a long-lying snow on the ground, well-trodden. The road shall be as smooth as the paths to our first sins — of a seeming perpetual declivity, as it were — and never a jot or jar between us and the edge of the horizon ; but all onward and down apparently, with an insensible ease. You sit beside me in my spring-sleigh, hung with the lightness of a cob-web cradle for a fairy's child in the trees. Our horse is, in the harness, of a swift and even pace, and around his neck is a string of fine small bells, that ring to his measured step in a kind of muffled music, softer and softer as the snow-flakes thicken in the air. Your seat is of the shape of the fauteuil in your library, cushioned aud deep, and with a backward and gentle slope, and you are enveloped to the eyelids in warm furs. You settle down, with every muscle in repose, the visor of your ermine cap just shedding the snow from your forehead, and, with a word, the groom stands back, and the horse speeds on, steady, but beautifully fast. The bells, which you hear loudly at first, begin to deaden, and the low hum of the alighting flakes steals gradually on your ear ; and soon the hoof- Btrokes are as silent as if the steed were shod with wool, and away

EARLIER DAYS.

you flee through the white air, like birds asleep upon the wing diving through the feathery fleeces of the noon. Your eyelids fall — forgetfulness steals upon the senses — a delicious torpor takes possession of the uneasy blood — and brain and thought yield to an intoxicating and trance-like slumber. It were perhaps too much to ask that any human bosom may go scathless to the grave ; but, in my own unworthy petitions, I usually supplicate that my heart may be broken about Christmas. I know an anodyne o' that season.

Fred Fleming and I occupied one of the seven long seats in a stage-sleigh, flying at this time twelve miles in the hour, (yet not fast enough for our impatience), westward from the university gates. The sleighing had been perfect for a week, and the cold keen air had softened for the first time that morning, and assumed the warm and woolly complexion that foretokened snow. Though not very cheerful in its aspect, this is an atmosphere particularlypleasant to breathe ; and Fred, who was making his first move after a six weeks' fever, sat with the furs away from his mouth, nostrils expanded, lips parted, and the countenance altogether of a man in a high state of physical enjoyment. I had nursed him through his illness, by-the-way, in my own rooms, and hence our position as fellow-travellers. A pressing invitation from his father to come home with him to Skaneateles, for the holydays, had diverted me from my usual winter journey to the North ; and, for the first time in my life, I was going upon a long visit to a strange roof. My imagination had never more business upon its hands.

Fred had described to me, over and over again, every person I was to meet — brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and friends — a household of thirty people, guests included ; but there was one

WHAT IS SHE LIKE?

person among them of whom his descriptions, amplified as the? were, were very unsatisfactory.

" Is she so very plain ?" I asked, for the twentieth time.

" Abominably !"

" And immense black eyes ?'

" Saucers (»

" And large mouth ?"

"Huge!"

" And very dark ?"

" Like a squaw !"

" And skinny hands, did you say ?"

" Lean, long, and pokerish !"

" And so very clever ?"

" Knows everything, Phil !"

" But a sweet voice ?"

" Um ! everybody says so."

" And high temper ?"

" She's the devil, Phil ! don't ask any more questions about her."

" You don't like her, then ?"

" She never condescends to speak to me; how should I."

And thereupon I put my head out of the sleigh, and employed myself with catching the snow-flakes on my nose, and thinking whether Edith Linsey would like me or no ; for, through all Fred's derogatory descriptions, it was clearly evident that she was the ruling spirit of the hospitable household of the Flemings.

As we got farther on, the new snow became deeper, and we found that the last storm had been heavier here than in the country from which we had come. The occasional farm-houses Were almost wholly buried, the black chimney alone appearing

EARLIER DAYS.

above the ridgy drifts, while the tops of the doors and windows lay below the level of the trodden road, from which a descending passage was cut to the threshold, like the entrance to a cave in the earth. The fences were quite invisible. The fruit-trees looked diminished to shrubberies of snow-flowers, their trunks buried under the nsible surface, and their branches loaded with the still falling flakes, till they bent beneath the burden. Nothing was abroad, for nothing could stir out of the road without danger of being lost, and we dreaded to meet even a single sleigh, lost, in turning out, the horses should " slump" beyond their depth, in the untrodden drifts. The poor animals began to labor severely, and sunk at every step over their knees in the clogging and woollike substance ; and the long and cumbrous sleigh rose and fell in the deep pits like a boat in a heavy sea. It seemed impossible to get on. Twice we brought up with a terrible plunge and stood suddenly still, for the runners had struck in too deep for the strength of "the horses ; and, with the snow-shovels, which formed a part of the furniture of the vehicle, we dug them from their concrete beds. Our progress at last was reduced to scarce a mile in the hour, and we began to have apprehensions that our team would give out between the post-houses. Fortunately it was still warm, for the numbness of cold would have paralyzed our already flagging exertions.

We had reached the summit of a long hill with the greatest 'difficulty. The poor beasts stood panting and reeking with sweat ; the runners of the sleigh were clogged with hard cakes of snow, and the air was close and dispiriting. We came to a stand-still, with the vehicle lying over almost on its side, and I stepped out to speak to the driver and look forward. It was a discouraging prospect ; a long deep valley lay before us, closed at the distance c

SNOW perii/:

of a couple of miles by another steep hill, through a cleft in tha top of which lay our way. We could not even distinguish the line of the road between. Our disheartened animals stood at this moment buried to their breasts, and to get forward without rearing at every step seemed impossible. The driver sat on his box looking uneasily down into the valley. It was one undulating ocean of snow, not a sign of a human habitation to be seen, and even the trees indistinguishable from the general muss by their whitened and overladen branches. The storm had ceased, but the usual sharp cold that succeeds a warm fall of snow had not yet lightened the clamminess of the new-fallen flakes, and they clung around the foot like clay, rendering every step a toil.

" Your leaders are quite blown," I said to the driver, as he slid off his uncomfortable seat.

" Pretty nearly, sir !"

" And your wheelers are not much better."

" Sca'cely."

'* And what do you think of the weather ?"

u It'll be darnation cold in an hour." As he spoke, he looked lp to the sky, which was already peeling off its clouds in long stripes, like the skin of an orange, and looked as hard and cold as marble between the widening rifts. A sudden gust of a more chilling temperature followed immediately upon his prediction, and the long cloth curtains of the sleigh flew clear off their slight pillars, and shook off their fringes of icicles.

" Could you shovel a little, mister ?" said the driver, handing me one of the broad wooden utensils from his foot-board, and commencing, himself, after having thrown off his box-coat, by heaving up a solid cake of the moist snow at the side of the road.

EARLIER DAYS.

" It's just to make a place to rub down them creturs," said ho, as I looked at him, quite puzzled to know what he was going to do.

Fred was too weak to assist us, and having righted the vehicle a little, and tied down the napping curtains, he wrapped himself in his cloak, and I set heartily to work with my shovel. In a few minutes, taking advantage of the hollow of a drift, we had cleared a small area of frozen ground, and, releasing the tired animals from their harness, we rubbed them well down with the straw from the bottom of the sleigh. The persevering driver then cleared the runners of their iced and clinging masses, and, a half hour having elapsed, he produced two bottles of rum from his box, and, giving each of the horses a dose, put them again to their traces.

We heaved out of the pit into which the sleigh had settled, and for the first mile it was down-hill, and we got on with compara tive ease. The sky was by this time almost bare, a dark, slaty mass of clouds alone settling on the horizon in the quarter of the wind, while the sun, as powerless as moonlight, poured with dazzling splendor on the snow, and the gusts came keen and bitter across the sparkling waste, rimming the nostrils as if with bands of steel, and penetrating to the innermost nerve with their pungent iciness. No protection seemed of any avail. The whole surface of the body ached as if it were laid against a slab of ice. The throat closed instiactively, and contracted its unpleasant respiraration — the body and limbs drew irresistibly together, to economize, like a hedge-hog, the exposed surface — the hands and feet felt transmuted to lead — and across the forehead, below the pressure of the cap, there was a binding and oppressive ache, as if a bar of frosty iron had been let into the scull. The mind, meantime, seemed freezing up — unwillingness to stir, and inability to

I

DESPERATE WORK.

think of anything but the cold, becoming every instant more decided.

From the bend of the valley our difficulties became more serious. The drifts often lay across the road like a wall, some feet above the heads of the horses, and we had dug through one or two, and had been once upset, and often near it, before we came to the steepest part of the ascent. The horses had by this time begun to feel the excitement of the rum, and bounded on through the snow with continual leaps, jerking the sleigh after them with a violence that threatened momently to break the traces. The steam from their bodies froze instantly, and covered them with a coat like hoar-frost ; and, spite of their heat, and the unnatural and violent exertions they were making, it was evident by the pricking of their ears, and the sudden crouch of the body when a stronger blast swept over, that the cold struck through even their hot and intoxicated blood.

We toiled up, leap after leap, and it seemed miraculous to me that the now infuriated animals did not burst a blood-vessel or crack a sinew with every one of those terrible springs. The sleigh plunged on after them, stopping dead and short at every other moment, an4 reeling over the heavy drifts, like a boat in a surging sea. A finer crystallization had meantime taken place upon the surface of the moist snow, and the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on the blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle-points. The driver, and his maddened but almost exhausted team, were blinded by the glittering and whirling eddies, the cold grew intenser every moment, the forward motion gradually less and less, and when, with the very last effort apparently, we reached a spot on the summit of the hill, which, from its exposed situation, had

EARLIER DAYS.

been kept bare by the wind, the patient and persevering whip brought his horses to a stand, and despaired, for the first time, of his prospects of getting on. I crept out of the sleigh, the iron-bound runners of which now grated on the bare ground, but found it impossible to stand upright.

" If you can use your hands," said the driver, turning his back to the wind, which stung the face like the lash of a whip, " I'll trouble you to^un tackle them horses."

I set about it, while he buried his hands and face in the snow to relieve them for a moment from the agony of cold. The poor animals staggered stiffly as I pushed them aside, and every vein stood out from their bodies like ropes under the skin.

" What are you going to do ?" I asked, as he joined me again, and taking off the harness of one of the leaders, flung it into the snow.

" Ride for life !" was his ominous answer.

" Good God ! and what is to become of my sick friend ?"

" The Almighty knows — if he can't ride to the tavern !"

I sprang instantly to poor Fred, who was lying in the bottom

of the sleigh almost frozen to death, informed him of ^ie driver's

decision, and asked him if he thought he could ride one of the

horses. He was beginning to grow drowsy, the first symptom of

death by cold, and could with difficulty be roused. With the

driver's assistance, however, I lifted him out of the sleigh, shook

him soundly, and, making stirrups of the traces, set him upon one

of the horses, and started him off before us. The poor beasts

seemed to have a presentiment of the necessity of exertion, and,

though stiff and sluggish, entered willingly upon the deep drift which

blocked up the way, and toiled exhaustedly on. The cold in our

exposed position was agonizing. Every small fibre in the skin of 1*

FIRST INTRODUCTION, my own face felt splitting and cracked, and my eyelids seemed made of ice. Our limbs soon lost all sensation. I could only press with my knees to the horse's side, and the whole collected energy of my frame seemed expended in the exertion. Fred held on wonderfully. The driver had still the use of his arm, and rode behind, flogging the poor animals on, whose every step seemed to be the last summons of energy. The sun set, and it was rather a relief, for the glitter upon the snow was exceedinglyj^ainful to the sight, and there was no warmth in its beams. I could see my poor friend drooping gradually to the neck of his horse, but, until he should drop off, it was impossible to assist him, and his faithful animal still waded on. I felt my own strength fast ebbing away. If I had been alone, I should certainly have lain down, with the almost irresistible inclination to sleep ; but the thought of my friend, and the shouting of the energetic driver, nerved me from time to time — and, with hands hanging helplessly down, and elbows fastened convulsively to my side, we plunged and struggled painfully forward. I but remember being taken afterward to a fire, and shrinking from it with a shriek — the suffering of reviving consciousness was so intolerable. We had reached the tavern literally frozen %pon our horses.

XL

I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at the breakfast-table, the morning after our arrival, when Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my virtues as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same moment, he said simply in parenthesis, " My cousin Edith, Mr. Slingsby," and went on with his story. I rose and bowed, and, as Fred had the parole, I had time to collect my

EARLIER DAYS.

courage, and take a look at the enemy's camp — for, of that considerable household, I felt my star to be in conjunction or opposition with her's only, who was at that moment my vis-a-vis across a dish of stewed oysters.

In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait-painting, I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I see at this moment (I have carried it about the world ever since) as distinctly as the incipient lines of care in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in that time from dread or admiration, or something between these, to pity ; she was so unscrupulously and hopelessly plain — so wretchedly ill and suffering in her aspect — so spiritless and unhappy in every motion and look. " I'll win her heart," thought I, "by being kind to her. Poor thing ! it will be something new to her, I dare say !" Oh, Philip Slingsby ! what a doomed donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy !

And yet, even as she sat there, leaning over her untasted breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy — with her large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow complexion, and not one redeeming feature — there was something in her face which produced a phantom of beauty in my mind — a glimpse, a shadowing of a countenance that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at her last innocent orison — a loveliness moulded and exalted by superhuman and overpowering mind — instinct through all its sweetness with energy and fire. So strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my thoughts of her, as an angel in heaven, (for I supposed her dying for many a month, and a future existence was her own most frequent theme), she always rose to my fancy with a face half Niobe, half Psyche, radiantly lovely. And this, too, with a face of her own, a bond fide physiognomy, that must have made a mirror an unpleasant article of furniture in her bed-room.

12 LOVE COMMENCING.

I have no suspicion, in my own mind, whether Time was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of those Christmas holydays. The second Saturday had come round, and I just remember that Fred was very much out of humor with me for having appeared to his friends to be everything he said I was not, and nothing he said I wa*. He had described me as the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, and agreeable dog in the world. And I was not that, at all — particularly the last. The old judge told him he had not improved in his penetration at the university.

A week ! and what a life had been clasped within its brief calendar, for me ! Edith Linsey was two years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of consumption ; and it was little matter whom she loved, or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by a new affection, she could beguile the preying melancholy of illness ; for, by that gentle name, they called, in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of character that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have been endured for a day. But she was not capricious, or bitter to me ! Oh, no ! And from the very extreme of her impatience with others — from her rudeness, her violence, her sarcasm — she came to me with a heart softer than a child's, and wept upon my hands, and weighed every word that might give me offence, and watched to anticipate my lighest wish, and was humble, and generous, and passionately loving and dependent. Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar character, but more to her own solemn conviction that she was dying— that her best hope of life was not worth a week's purchase.

We had begun with books, and upon them her past enthusiasm

EARLIER DAYS.

had hitherto been released. She loved her favorite authors with a passion. They had relieved her heart ; and there was nothing of poetry or philosophy, that was deep, or beautiful, in which she had not steeped her very soul. How well I remember her repeating to me from Shelley those glorious lines to the soaring swan : —

" Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird ! Thou voyagest to thy home — Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright with the lustre of their own fond joy ! And what am I, that 1 should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers To the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts !"

There was a long room in the southern wing of the house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtained, dim old place, with deep-embayed windows, and so many nooks, and so much furniture, that there was that hushed air, that absence of echo within it, which is the great charm of a haunt for study or thought. It was Edith's kingdom. She might lock the door, if she pleased, or shut or open the windows ; in short, when she was there, no one thought of disturbing her, and she was like a " spirit in its cell," invisible and inviolate. And here I drank, into my very life and soul, the outpourings of a bosom that had been locked till (as we both thought) the last hour of its life — a flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran my heart like lava, sweeping everything into its resistless fire, and (may God forgive her !) leaving it scorched and desolate when its mocking brightness had gone out

INTELLECTUAL COMMUNION.

I remember that " Elia" — Charles Lamb's Elia — was the favorite of favorites among her books ; and, partly, that the late death of this most-to-be-loved author reminded me to look it up, and, partly, to have time to draw back my indifference over a subject that it something stirs me to recall, you shall read an imitation (or continuation, if you will) that I did for Edith's eye, of his " Essay on Books and Reading." I sat with her dry and fleshless hand in mine while I read it to her, and the fingers of Psyche were never fairer to Canova than they to me.

" It is a little singular," I began (looking into her eyes as long as I could remember what I had written), " that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought of writing a book upon ' Reading.' The refinements of the true epicure in books are surely as various as those of the gastronome and the opium-eater ; and I can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless it is that that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indolence, has never numbered among its votaries one of the busy craft of writers.

" The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true secret of the thing is uo more adapted to their comprehension, then the sublimations of Louis Eustace Ude for the taste of a day-laborer. The refined reading-taste, like the palate of gourmanderie, must have got beyond appetite — gross appetite. It shall be that of a man who, having fed through childhood and youth on simple knowledge, values nw, only, as it were, the apotheosis of learning — the spiritual nare. There are, it is true, instances of a keen natural relish : a boy, as you will sometimes find one, of a premature thoughtful ness, will carry a favorite author in his bosom, and

EARLIER DAYS.

feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the exquisite story :

' I saw a boy, with eager eye, Open a book upon a stall, And read as he'd devour it all \ Which, when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, " You, sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look !"