ページの画像
PDF
ePub

concussion of one of the rafters on his brain.

But these were some of the incidents not belonging to the beginning of his career. On the contrary, a sort of humble prosperity attended him for a time. Insomuch that once he was not without hopes of being able to buy his homeward passage, so soon as the war should end. But, as stubborn fate would have it, being run over one day at Holborn Bars, and taken into a neighboring bakery, he was there treated with such kindliness by a Kentish lass, the shopgirl, that in the end he thought his debt of gratitude could only be repaid by love. In a word, the money saved up for his ocean voyage was lavished upon a rash embarkation in wedlock.

Originally he had fled to the capital to avoid the dilemma of impressment or imprisonment. In the absence of other motives, the dread of those hardships would have fixed him there till the peace. But now, when hostilities were no more; so was his money. Some period elapsed ere the affairs of the two governments were put on such a footing as to support an American consul at London. Yet, when this came to pass, he could only embrace the facilities for a return here furnished, by deserting a wife and child; wedded and born in the enemy's land.

The peace immediately filled England and more especially London, with hordes of disbanded soldiers; thousands of whom, rather than starve, or turn highwaymen (which no few of their comrades did; stopping coaches at times in the most public streets), would work for such a pittance, as to bring down the wages of all the laboring classes. Neither was our adventurer the least among the sufferers. Driven out of his previous employ-a sort of porter in a river-side warehouse-by this sudden influx of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself, with the ingenuity of his race, he turned his hand to the village art of chair-bottoming. An itinerant, he paraded the streets with the cry of "old chairs to mend !" furnishing a curious illustration of the contradictions of human life; that he who did little but trudge, should be giving cosy seats to all the rest of the world. Meantime, according to another well-known Malthusian enigma in human affairs, his family increased. In all, eleven children were born to him in certain sixpenny garrets in Moorfields. One after the other, ten were buried.

When chair-bottoming would fail, resort was had to match-making. That business being overdone in turn, next came the cutting of old rags, bits of paper, nails, and broken glass. Nor was this the last step. From the gutter, he slid to the sewer. The slope was smooth. In poverty,

"Facilis descensus Averni."

But many a poor soldier had sloped down there into the boggy canal of Avernus before him. Nay, he had three corporals and a sergeant for company.

war.

But his lot was relieved by two strange things, presently to appear. In 1793 war again broke out; the great French This lighted London of some of its superfluous hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean society of his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom, wandering forlorn through the black kingdoms of mud, he used to spin yarns about sea prisoners in hulks, and listen to stories of the Black-hole of Calcutta ; and often would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect strangers, at the more public corners and intersections of sewers-the Charing-Crosses below; one soldier having the other by his remainder button, earnestly discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or the tide; while through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty skylights of the realm, caine the hoarse rumblings of bakers' carts, with splashes of the flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city lived.

Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel returned to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden market, at early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he experienced one of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That chatting with the ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks yet trickled the dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded by bales of hay, as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those glimpses of garden produce, the blood-beets, with the damp earth still tufting the roots; that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking him of whence they must have come; the green hedges through which the wagon that brought them had passed; that trudging home with them as a gleaner with his sheaf of wheat; all this was inexpressibly grateful. In want and bitterness, pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had rural returns of his boyhood's sweeter day samong them; and

the hardest stones of his solitary heart (made hard by bare endurance alone), would feel the stir of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of deserted flagging, upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes, when incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself, thoughts of home would-either by gradually working and working upon him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection-overpower him for a time to a sort of hallucination.

Thus was it:-One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck, he was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the sward in an oval inclosure within St. James' Park, a little green, but a three minutes' walk along the gravelled way, from the brickbesmoked and grimy Old Brewery of the palace, which gives its ancient name to the public resort on whose borders it stands. It was a little oval, fenced in with iron palings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure peered forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage. And alien Israel thereat times staring dreamily about himseemed like some amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on the shores of Narragansett Bay, long ago; and back to New England our exile was called in his soul. For still working, and thinking of home; and thinking of home, and working amid the verdant quietude of this little oasis, one rapt thought begat another, till at last his mind settled intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image of Old Huckleberry, his mother's favorite old pillion horse; and, ere long, hearing a sudden scraping noise (some hob-shoe without, against the iron paling), he insanely took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall, hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the planks his customary trick when hungry and so, down goes Israel's hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the inclosure, he bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean, must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry would be found long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless, being dead many a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And many years after, in a far different part of the town, and in far less winsome weather too, passing with his bun

dle of flags through Red-Cross street, towards Bartican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks of houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges on ranges of midnight hills; he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds; tramplings, lowings, halloos, and was suddenly called to by a voice, to head off certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog. Next instant he saw the white face -white as an orange blossom--of a black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like through the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid shout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers, their owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Bartican. Monomaniac reminiscences were in him-" To the right, to the right!" he shouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove to the left, towards Smithfield: "To the right! you are driving them back to the pastures-to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!" "Barn-yard?" cried a voice; "you are dreaming, old man." And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists, which goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain; leaving the cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.

In 1817, he once more endured extremity; this second peace again drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts. Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in sabots. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him: "An honorable scar, your honor, received at Bunker-Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for his most gracious Majesty, King George!" So now, in presence of the still-surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates: "An honorable scar, your honor, received at Gorunna, or at Waterloo, or at Trafalgar!" Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside of the London Smoke; a sort of

crafty aristocracy in their way, who, without having endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no insignificant share, both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles they claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in corners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.

Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance threepenny job by the added thousands who contended with him against starvation, nevertheless, somehow he continued to subsist, as those tough old oaks of the cliffs, which though hacked at by hail-stones of tempests, and even wantonly maimed by the passing woodman, still, however cramped by rival trees and fettered by rocks, succeed, against all odds, in keep. ing the vital nerve of the tap-root alive. And even towards the end, in his dismallest December, our veteran could still at intervals feel a momentary warmth in his topmost boughs. In his Moorfields' garret, over a handful of reignited cinders (which the night before might have warined some lord), cinders raked up from the streets, he would drive away dolor, by talking with his one only surviving, and now motherless child-the spared Benjamin of his old age of the far Canaan beyond the sea; rehearsing to the lad those well-remembered adventures among New-England hills, and painting scenes of nestling happiness and plenty, in which the lowliest shared. And here, shadowy as it was, was the second alleviation hinted of above.

To these tales of the Fortunate Isles of the Free, recounted by one who had been there, the poor enslaved boy of Moorfields listened, night after night, as to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor. When would his father take him there? "Some day to come, my boy;" would be the hopeful response of an unhoping heart. And "would God it were tomorrow!" would be the impassioned reply.

In these talks Israel unconsciously sowed the seeds of his eventual return. For with added years, the boy felt added longing to escape his entailed misery, by compassing for his father and himself, a Voyage to the Promised Land. By his

persevering efforts he succeeded at last, against every obstacle, in gaining credit in the right quarter to his extraordinary statements. In short, charitably stretching a technical point, the American Consul finally saw father and son embarked in the Thames for Boston.

It was the year 1826; half a century since Israel, in early manhood, had sailed a prisoner in the Tartar frigate from the same port to which he now was bound. An octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he showed locks besnowed as its foam. White-haired old ocean seemed as a brother.

[blocks in formation]

It was on Copps' Hill, within the city bounds, one of the enemy's positions during the fight, that our wanderer found his best repose that day. Sitting down here on a mound in the graveyard, he looked off across Charles River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient monument, at that period, was hard to see, as a struggling sprig of corn in a chilly spring. Upon those heights, fifty years before, his now feeble hands had wielded both ends of the inusket. There too he had received that slit upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair with the Serapis, being traversed by a cutlass wound, made him now the bescarred bearer of a cross.

For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about him. The sultry July day was waning. His son sought to cheer him a little ere rising to return to the lodging for the present assigned them by the ship-captain. "Nay," replied the old man, "I shall get no fitter rest than here by the mounds."

But from this true "Potters' Field," the

boy at length drew him away; and encouraged next morning by a voluntary purse made up among the reassembled passengers, father and son started by stage for the country of the Housatonic. But the exile's presence in these old mountain townships proved less a return than a resurrection. At first, none knew him, nor could recall having heard of him. Ere long it was found, that more than thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his family in that region, a bachelor, following the example of three-fourths of his neighbors, had sold out and removed to a distant country in the west; where exactly, none could say.

He sought to get a glimpse of his father's homestead. But it had been burnt down long ago. Accompanied by his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted, he next went to find the site. But the roads had years before been changed. The old road was now broused over by sheep; the new one ran straight through what had formerly been orchards. But new orchards, planted from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel. At length he came to a field waving with buckwheat. It seemed one of those fields which himself had often reaped. But it turned out, upon inquiry, that but three summers since, a walnut grove had stood there.

Then he

vaguely remembered that his father had sometimes talked of planting such a grove, to defend the neighboring fields against the cold north wind; yet where precisely that grove was to have been, his shattered mind could not recall. But it seemed not unlikely that during his long exile, the walnut grove had been planted and harvested, as well as the annual crops preceding and succeeding it, on the very same soil.

Ere long, on the mountain side, he passed into an ancient natural wood, which seemed some way familiar, and midway in it, paused to contemplate a strange, mouldy pile, resting at one end against a sturdy beech. Though wherever touched by his staff, however lightly, this pile would crumble, yet here and there, even in powder, it preserved the exact look, each irregularly defined line, of what it had originally been-namely, a half-cord of stout hemlock (one of the woods least affected by exposure to the air), in a foregoing generation chopped and stacked up on the spot, against

sledging-time; but, as sometimes happens in such cases, by subsequent oversight, abandoned to oblivious decay. Type now, as it stood there, of for ever arrested intentions, and a long life still rotting in early mishap.

"Do I dream?" mused the bewildered old man, "or what is this vision that comes to me, of a cold, cloudy morning, long, long ago, and I heaving yon elbowed log against the beech, then a sapling? Nay, nay; I can not be so old."

"Come away, father, from this dismal damp wood," said his son, and led him forth.

Blindly ranging to and fro, they next saw a man ploughing. Advancing slowly, the wanderer met him by a little heap of ruinous burnt masonry, like a tumbled chimney, what seemed the jams of the fire-place, now aridly stuck over hero and there, with thin, clinging, round prohibitory mosses, like executors' wafers. Just as the oxen were bid stand, the stranger's plough was hitched over sideways, by sudden contact with some sunken stone at the ruin's base.

"There; this is the twentieth year my plough has struck this old hearthstone. Ah, old man,-sultry day, this."

"Whose house stood here, friend?" said the wanderer, touching the halfburied hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.

"Don't know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe. You know 'em ?"

But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.

"What are you looking at so, father?" "Father!' here," raking with his staff, "my father would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do. The ends meet. Plough away, friend."

Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close. Few things remain.

He was repulsed in efforts, after a pension, by certain caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print-himself out of being-his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.

SENSITIVE SPIRITS.

"In Nature there is nothing melancholy."

SO saith Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Nor is there. For melancholy, we know, means black bile,* and a misanthropist is a uσáν@рwñоç—a man-haterboth of them inconsistent with the love

unity of brethren. We have absolutely no faith in the atrabiliar, and regard much of the "inarticulate dumb show," and all of the lugubrious utterances of our numberless Byronlets, very much in the same light as we do the disconsolate brayings of some woe-begone A—.

But, while these are our sentimentsthere is, nevertheless, in every person of fine feelings, a tinge of sadness-the result of the strange, motley minglings of these awful life-and-death commingling scenes that seems to steep nature in tears, and renders everything sadly solemn to the eye and to the heart.

We remember reading, some years ago, in those delightful "Conversations with Goethe," by Eckermann, a passage wherein Goëthe refers to the modern "Passion-school" of poetry, the followers of which, says he, seem to regard every person as sick, and the whole world one vast lazaretto-and observes that it is the function of poetry to make us more contented with life, and to exhibit the joyous side thereof. Now, this may be just, but it would be well for us to remember that the author of this dictum was he who, a few years previously, with passionate fire-words, penned the Sorrows of Werter!

Else how, indeed, are we to interpret the melodious moanings of a poor Shelley, "filling the earth," as our great, benignant Thomas Carlyle tells us, "with inarticulate wail; like the infinite inarticulate grief and weeping of forsaken children?"

And more especially is what we have enunciated above, the case with that class which we may call sensitive spirits. For we recognize two types of man: the cold, heavy, sluggish, unexcitable, nil admirari man-the phlegmatic, and he whom nature has strung with finer chords-he of the flashing eye, and the impulsive temperament, and the acute perception, and the exquisite sensibility -the sensitive man.

Now, this sensitiveness is an innate,

an unbought thing-coming with and forming the very framework and tissue of one's being-not at all to be dispensed with, save at the peril of losing your own self. And this we declare, albeit it may appear unorthodox-albeit parents train and teachers thrash us into a contrary belief--and these great world-influences seen all to tend towards the making of us a community of apathists.

The sum total of their teaching may be thus expressed: "Nature has made us altogether wrong; we, however, are going to rectify nature. And, in order to effect this, begin by getting rid of all those fine feelings; they are nothing but romance, and sentimentality, and very troublesome at best. Make yourself hardy (i. e. heartless). Scour off this exquisite coating of susceptibility, so that, instead of a soul on whose surface every passing sunbeam and shadow may daguerreotype itself, you will be sensible to naught that comes not in positive cuffs and downright hard blows!"

Now, to these doctrines, friend, we, for one, cannot subscribe credo. Nay, on this score, we are utter unbelievers! We say, feelings make the man-opinions are but the outer dress. We live, as saith Festus,

"In feelings, not in figures on a dial;

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,

Who thinks most-feels the noblest-acts the best!"

"Nature," says Novalis-that most ethereal of thinkers-"is an Eolian harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us." And this is that which constitutes sensitiveness-the more heart-tones that we have in unison with the great Æolian harp of Nature, that resounds with jubilee and wail all around us-in proportion as we increase the points of affectibility-in proportion as our feelings pulsate with the great heart of humanityso much, and in such proportion, are we sensitive.

And is it, then, that there are those who are to an exquisite degree alive to all vague, boundless, inexplicable impressions; to whom

"The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears;"

* μέλας, χολή.

« 前へ次へ »