The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship and capacity. It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth. Some time afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course of independent study he was proposing to himself. I was most happy to smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's chambers. For such a youth, seemingly destined for the inner life of contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come once more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same region I had left! No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by Evangeline upon the great river. Ah, me! if that railroad-crash had been a few hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so close to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough. The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did do, and as I took it for granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity, and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares, and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,—and all this after the swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk—cart! Thanks, uncounted thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was no longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were Kool Slaa and Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet, simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom, we passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences, and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. It is not a breeding-place of ideas, which makes it a more agreeable residence for average people. It is the great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits, and result in a compound that turns neither litmus red nor turmeric brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its famous water-works. In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism. But in the place of "Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and the old house where Robert Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension-bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a single bound,—an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the rectangular city. Philadelphia will never be herself again until another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new palladium. She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple, remembering the glories of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not charm, a weary soul,—and such a vacant hour there was on this same Friday evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated. As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces. I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was irresistibly droll, and Areturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr. Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and meant to do it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,—each length being of a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of Frederick already referred to, as mementos of my journey.

I had come to feeling that I know most of the respectably dressed people whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time or other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a group by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at New Haven. The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show. Suppose I should really wish, some time or other, to get away from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor?

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's-Bluff accident, the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our homeward journey at the Fifth-Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full. Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,—to reach the neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well. The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however. It is a giant corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Ixion, and the other Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels that it is his property,—at least, as much as it is anybody's. My Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards.

I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds the citizens had been arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen. The Central Park is an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to form ridges which will give views and hollows that will hold water. The hips and elbows and other bones of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of rocks which give character to the scenery, and an unchangeable, unpurchasable look to a landscape that without them would have been in danger of being fattened by art and money out of all its native features. The roads were fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,—but it cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by-and-by depends on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as Brookline is central to Boston. The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but remote pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his Eccentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond, I say this not invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our own metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for Home. Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford; then NORWALK. Here, on the 6th of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of the great disaster. But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them hanging over the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of two hundred miles was a long funeral-procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its phoenix-egg domes,—bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown again, iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that look like monstrous billiard-tables, with haycocks lying about for balls,—romantic with West Rock and its legends,—cursed with a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dure must be the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,—with its neat carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, its vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows; Hartford, substantial, well-bridged, many-steepled city,—every conical spire an extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so onward, by and across the broad, shallow Connecticut,—dull red road and dark river woven in like warp and woof by the shuttle of the darting engine; then Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving, hot-summered, giant-treed town,—city among villages, village among cities; Worcester, with its Diedalian labyrinth of crossing railroad-bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled in their dens; Framingham, fair cup-bearer, leaf-cinctured Hebe of the deep-bosomed Queen sitting by the sea-side on the throne of the Six Nations. And now I begin to know the road, not by towns, but by single dwellings, not by miles, but by rods. The poles of the great magnet that draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must be near at hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall granite obelisk comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled capstone sharp against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of the three-hilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half-open chlamys before her worshippers.

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters and towards the western sun! Let the joyous light shine in upon the pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side of honor and of duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his aches and weariness. So comes down another night over this household, unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings,—a night of peaceful rest and grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.

WAITING

 
Drop, falling fruits and crispèd leaves!
Ye tone a note of joy to me;
Through the rough wind my soul sails free,
nigh over waves that Autumn heaves.
 
 
Such quickening is in Nature's death,
Such life in every dying day,—
The glowing year hath lost her sway,
Since Freedom waits her parting breath.
 
 
I watch the crimson maple-boughs,
I know by heart each burning leaf,
Yet would that like a barren reef
Stripped to the breeze those arms uprose!
 
 
Under the flowers my soldier lies!
But come, thou chilling pall of snow,
Lest he should hear who sleeps below
The yet unended captive cries!
 
 
Fade swiftly, then, thou lingering year!
Test with the storms our eager powers;
For chains are broken with the hours,
And Freedom walks upon thy bier.
 

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Eyes and Ears. By HENRY WARD BEECHER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, pp. 419.

There is perhaps no man in America more widely known, more deeply loved, and more heartily hated than the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. This little book, fragmentary and desultory as it is, gives us a key wherewith to unlock the mystery both of the extent of his influence and the depth of the feelings which he excites. It is but a shower of petals flung down by a frolicsome May breeze; but the beauty and brilliancy of their careless profusion furnish a hint of the real strength and substance and fruitfulness of the tree from which they sprang.

Within the compass of some four hundred pages we have about one hundred articles, most of which had previously appeared in weekly newspapers. They embrace, of course, every variety of subject,—grave and gay, practical and poetical. They are not such themes as come to a man in silence and solitude, to be wrought out with deep and deliberate conscientiousness; they are rather such as He around one in his outgoing and his incoming, in the field and by the way-side, overlooked by the preoccupied multitude, but abundantly patent to the few who will not permit the memories or the hopes of life to thrust away its actualities, and, once pointed out, full of interest and amusement even to the absorbed and hitherto unconscious throngs. We have here no pale-browed, far-sighted philosopher, but a ruddy-faced, high-spirited man, cheerful-tempered, yet not equilibrious, susceptible to annoyance, capable of wrathful outbursts, with eyes to see all sweet sights, ears to hear all sweet sounds, and lips to sing their loveliness to others, and also with eyes and ears and lips just as keen to distinguish and just as hold to denounce the sights and sounds that are unlovely;—and this man, with his ringing laugh and his springing step, walks cheerily to and fro in his daily work, striking the rocks here and there by the way-side with his bright steel hammer, eliciting a shower of sparks from each, and then on to the next. It is not the serious business of his life, but its casual and almost careless experiments. He does not wait to watch effects. You may gather up the brushwood and build yourself a fire, if you like. His part of the affair is but a touch and go,– partly for love and partly for fun.

There are places where a severer taste, or perhaps only a more careful revision, would have changed somewhat. At times an exuberance of spirits carries him to the very verge of coarseness, but this is rare and exceptional. The fabric may be slightly ravelled at the ends and slightly rough at the selvedge, but in the main it is fine and smooth and lustrous as well as strong. A coarse nature carefully clipped and sheared and fashioned down to the commonplace of conventionality will often exhibit a negative refinement, while a mind of real and subtile delicacy, but of rugged and irrepressible individuality, will occasionally shoot out irregular and uncouth branches. Yet between the symmetry of the one and the spontaneity of the other the choice cannot be doubtful. We are not defending coarseness in any guise. It is always to be assailed, and never to be defended. It is always a detriment, and never an ornament. No excellence can justify it. No occasion can palliate it. But coarseness is of two kinds,—one of the surface, and one in the grain. The latter is pervading and irremediable. It touches nothing which it does not deface. It makes all things common and unclean. It grows more repulsive as the roundness of youth falls away and leaves its harsh features more sharply outlined. But the other coarseness is only the overgrowth of excellence,—the rankness of lusty life. It is vigor run wild. It is a fault, but it is local and temporal. Culture corrects it. As the mind matures, as experience accumulates, as the vision enlarges, the coarseness disappears, and the rich and healthful juices nourish instead a playful and cheerful serenity that illumines strength with a softened light, that disarms opposition and delights sympathy, that shines without dazzling and attracts without offending.

Here arises a fear lest the apologetic nature of our remarks may seem to indicate a much greater need of apology than actually exists. We have been led into this line of remark, not so much by a perusal of the book under consideration, in which, indeed, there is very little, if anything, to offend, as by the nature of the objections which we have most frequently heard against this author's productions, both written and spoken. We do not even confine ourselves to defence, but go farther, and question whether the allegations of coarseness may not oftener be the fault of the plaintiff than of the defendant. Is there not a conventional standard of refinement which measures things by its own arbitrary self, and finds material for displeasure in what is really but a sincere and almost unconscious rendering of things as they exist? There are facts which modern fastidiousness justly enough commands to he wrapped around with graceful drapery before they shall have audience. But do we not commit a trespass against virtue, when we demand the same soft disguises to drape facts whose disguise is the worst immorality, whose naked hideousness is the only decency, which must be seen disgusting to warrant their being seen at all? So Mr. Beecher has been censured for irreverence, when what was called his irreverence has seemed to us but the tenderness engendered of close connection. Cannot one live so near to God as that His greatness shall he merged in His goodness? What would be irreverence, if it came from the head, may be but love springing up warm from the heart.

One of the strongest characteristics of Mr. Beecher's mind, the one that has, perhaps, the strongest influence in producing his power over men, is his quick insight into common things, his quick sympathy with common minds. He knows common dangers. He understands common interests. He is sensitive to common sorrows. He appreciates common joys. Without necessarily being practical himself, he is full of practical suggestions. He is a leveller; but he levels up, not down. He continually seeks to lift men from the plane of mere toil and thrift to the loftier levels of aspiration. He would disinthrall them from what is low, and introduce them to the freedom of the heights. He would bring them out of the dungeons of the senses into the domains of taste and principles. He believes in man, and he battles for men. With him, humanity is chief: science, art, wealth are its handmaidens. Yet, writing for ordinary people, he never falls into the sin of declaiming against extraordinary ones. No part of his power over the poor is obtained by inveighing against the rich, as no part of his power over the rich is obtained by pandering to their prejudices or their passions. He builds up no influence for himself on the ruins of another man's influence. The elevation which he aims to produce is real, not factitious,—absolute, not relative. It is the elevation to be obtained by ascending the mountain, not by digging it away so that the valley seems no longer low by contrast.

For the manner of his teaching, he is not always gentle, but he is always sincere. He speaks soft words to persuade; but if that is not enough, he does not scruple to knock the muck-rake out of sordid hands with a fine, sudden stroke, if so he may make men look up from the rubbish under their feet to the flowers that bloom around them and the stars that glow above and the God that reigns over all.

Thinking of the multitudes of hard-working, weary-hearted people whom he weekly met with these words of cheer: sometimes homely advice on homely things; sometimes wise counsels in art; sometimes tender lessons from Nature; sometimes noble words from his own earnest soul; sometimes sympathy in sorrow; sometimes strength in weakness; sometimes only the indirect, but real help that comes from the mere distraction wrought by his sportiveness, and wild, winsome mirth; but all kindly, hearty, honest, sympathetic,—indignation softening, even while it surges, into pity and love, and itself finding or framing excuses for the very outrage which it lashes: thinking of this, we do not marvel that he has furrowed for himself so deep a groove in so many hearts. Nor, on the other hand, is it difficult to see, even from so genial a book as this, whence polemics are not so much banished as where there is no niche for them, should they apply, why it is that he is so fiercely opposed. When a man like Mr. Beecher encounters that which excites his moral disapprobation, there is no possibility of mistaking him. He flings himself against it with all the strength and might of his manly, uncompromising nature. There is no coquetting with the proprieties, no toning down of objurgation to meet the requirements of personal dignity, but an audacious and aggressive repugnance of the whole man to the meanness or malignity. And the very clearness of his vision gives terrible power to his vituperation. With his keen, bright eye he sees just where the vulnerable spot is, and with his firm, strong hand he sends the arrow in. The victim writhes and reels and—does not love the marksman. And as the victim has a large circle of relatives by birth and marriage, he inoculates them with his own animosity; and so, at a safe distance, Mr. Beecher is sometimes considerably torn in pieces. Yet we have no doubt that by far the greater number of these opponents would, if once fairly brought within the circle of his influence, acknowledge the truth as well as the force of his principles; and certainly it is a matter of surprise that a man with such a magnificent mastery of all the weapons of attack and defence should be so sparing and discreet in their use as is Mr. Beecher. In this book, compiled of articles thrown off upon the spur of the moment, with so much to amuse, to awaken, to suggest, and to inspire, there is hardly a sentence which can arouse antagonism or inflict pain. You may not agree with his conclusions, but you cannot resist his good nature.

Long may he live to do yeoman's service in the cause of the beautiful and the true!

History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France from A.D. 1807 to A.D. 1814. By MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W.F.P. NAPIER, K.C.B., etc. In Five Volumes, with Portraits and Plans. New York: W.J. Widdleton.

A new edition of the great military history of Sir William Napier, printed in the approved luxurious style which the good examples of the Cambridge University Press have made a necessity with all intelligent book-purchasers, calls at the present time for a special word of recognition. Of the merits and character of the work itself it is scarcely required that we should speak. An observer of, and participant in, the deeds which he describes, cautious, deliberate, keen-sighted, candid, and unsparing, General Napier's book has qualities seldom united in a single production. Southey wrote an eloquent history of the War in the Peninsula, perhaps as good a history as an author well-trained in compositions of the kind could be expected to produce at a distance. But that was its defect. It lacked that knowledge and judgment of a complicated series of events which could be acquired only on the field and by one possessed of consummate military training. On the other hand, we can seldom look for any laborious work of authorship from a general in active service. Men of action exhaust their energies in doing, and are usually impatient of the slow process of unwinding the tangled skein of events which at the moment they had been compelled to cut with the sword. It is by no means every campaign which furnishes the Commentaries of its Caesar. To Sir William Napier, however, we are indebted for a work which has taken its place as a model history of modern campaigning. The protracted struggle of the Peninsular War through six full years of skilful operations, conducted by the greatest masters of military science, in a country whose topographical features called out the rarest resources of the art of war, at a time when the military system of Napoleon was at its height, summing up the experience of a quarter of a century in France of active military pursuits,—the story of sieges, marches, countermarches, lines of retreat and defence, followed by the most energetic assaults, blended with the disturbing political elements of the day at home and the contrarieties of the battle-field amidst a population foreign to both armies,—certainly presented a subject or series of subjects calculated to tax the powers of a conscientious writer to the uttermost. To furnish such a narrative was the work undertaken by General Napier. Sixteen years of unintermitted toil were given by him to the task. He spared no labor of research. Materials were placed at his disposal by the generals of both armies, by Soult and Wellington. The correspondence left behind in Spain by Joseph Bonaparte, written in three languages and partly in cipher of which the key had to be discovered, was patiently arranged, translated, and at length deciphered by Lady Napier, who also greatly assisted her husband in copying his manuscript, which, from the frequent changes made, was in effect transcribed three times. By such labors was the immense mass of contemporary evidence brought into order, clearly narrated, and submitted to exact scientific criticism. For it is the distinguishing characteristic of the book, that it is a critical history, constantly illuminating facts by principles and deducing the most important maxims of political and military science from the abundant material lavishly contributed by the virtues, follies, and superabundant exertions of three great nations in the heart of Europe, in the midst of the complex civilization of the nineteenth century. The ever earnest, animated style in which all this is written grows out of the subject and is supported by it, always rising naturally with the requirements of the occasion. If our officers in the field would learn how despatches should be written and a record of their exploits be prepared to catch the ear of posterity, let them give their leisure hours of the camp to the study of Napier. The public also may learn many lessons of patience and philosophy from these pages, when they turn from the book to the actual warfare writing its ineffaceable characters on so many fair fields of our own land.