The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863

ABIJAH WITHERPEE'S RETREAT

For many years Abijah Witherpee had kept, in East Hampton, the largest country store for miles around, and by more than ordinary shrewdness had accumulated a snug little fortune, and with it the reputation among the country folk of being an immensely rich man. It is no trifle, as every one knows, in a small village, to be accounted its richest man, but that was the least of Abijah's honors. It appears by record that Abijah maintained the responsible—and, since Squire Adams has been gathered to his fathers, the solitary—dignity of justice of the peace in and for the county of which East Hampton formed a highly respectable portion. It was not the mere flourish of 'Esq.' at the end of the great man's name—it was the essence of the great man himself. It found him, as he was proud to think, an ordinary, commonplace individual. The good people of East Hampton saw what it had made him, and trembled. And well they might, where justice herself, in the person of the magistrate, stood in awe of her own responsibility and power.

We have been told that, at the outset of Squire Witherpee's administration, he held his breath at the thought of venturing upon judicial grounds with much the same uneasiness that the tyro in science exhibits in some new and hazardous experiment. The honors of office had grown scarcely a week old upon him, when opportunity offered for a full display of the 'feeling and perspiration' (to borrow the words of our informant) 'with which he dispensed justice at the lowest cash price.'

It was bright and early one winter morning that two tall, raw old farmers drove up to the 'West India Goods and General Emporium' establishment, and emerging from an avalanche of buffalo robes, made good their way into the back part of the store, where the customary knot of hangers-on was gathered around the stove, to drag through the day, doing nothing and talking politics. A single look convinced the proprietor that he was wanted 'professionally;' he was informed that they wished to have a deed executed. With great presence of mind, Abijah concealed every symptom of growing palpitation, and led the way out of the store into the kitchen of his house near by, where Mrs. Witherpee was busy ironing, and several little Witherpees at 'sixes and sevens' about the floor.

Like all justices, he thought it of prime importance to be assured that the instrument had been drawn up in proper shape, though he consumed about five times the time ordinarily devoted to such preliminaries. His protracted scrutiny would have alarmed the parties in waiting, less gifted as they were in the mysteries of legal lore, had it not been for a generous approval that he gave at intervals, of 'Wells' and 'Ahems', in a tone that was intended to let them know he was doing them a special favor to think so well of what they had submitted.

'Well, my friends,' he remarked, laying down the sacred document, 'it seems that at this stage of proceedings, the statute requires that—' and then a pause which was solemn enough.

''Squire, hadn't I ought to sign that 'ar now?' timidly suggested one of the party. The 'Squire was taking a hasty run over the pages of the 'Town Justice' for instruction in such emergencies, but finding none, he kept on at a venture, and replied with native dignity: 'I decide you'd ought to.'

While the 'grantor' was 'putting his hand and seal' to the deed, in the largest-sized penmanship that can conveniently be displayed on half a foot of paper with all the advantages of a slant up hill, the magistrate had arrived at the place desired, and was now 'in his element.' Kindly, and yet with no lack of firmness, he is said to have turned to Mrs. Witherpee and observed:

'Wife, I think you'd better go into the next room and take the children with you!'

After this fraction of the family had been removed to a place of safety, the prudent husband and father continued:

'Hold up your hands! You severally and solemnly swear that this is all right, true, and legal, according to the provisions of the Constitution of the United States, and the laws and regulations of the State of–. So help you God, gentlemen, and me, Abijah Witherpee, Justice of the Peace, fee two shillings.' There is reason to believe that both parties experienced a sense of relief when the crisis was over, and the requirements of the law had been satisfied.

Rich and varied as Abijah's legal experiences may have been, it was not on their account that he has been introduced, but rather for the contemplation of his 'fine points' as a citizen. He was never classed among those men who exaggerate to the assessors the value of their worldly possessions; in fact, it was always difficult to discover where 'what little money he had' was invested. There was one piece of property, however, of which he not only acknowledged himself the owner, but publicly declared he never would dispose of, a threat that seemed harmless enough, there not being the slightest possibility that any one else would be willing to hold such a miserable waste on any pretext whatever:—a half acre down by the railroad, slabsided, full of gnarled stumps and brake, and about equally distributed into rock, black mud, and water. Had the original trees been standing, it must have approached quite as near the correct type of the 'howling wilderness,' the horrida inculta, as could be exhibited this side of 'Turkey Buzzard's Land, Arkansas.' Few strangers were suffered to pass by the locality in company with any of the East Hampton folk, without having their attention directed to 'Abijah Witherpee's Retreat;' and the opinion was apt to be freely ventured that at some period of his life, that gentleman had come into what is popularly termed 'a tight fix.'

The place had originally belonged to nobody in particular, and one day fell into the hands of a Mr. Jones, at a merely nominal price, in connection with a large tract through which it was thought the railroad, then contemplated, would be likely to run. The railroad changed its mind, as all railroads do, and Mr. Jones's speculation was not so profitable as he had anticipated. It happened that among his friends was a wild, freakish fellow, Charley Davis, who undertook to be on the best of terms with everybody, and had succeeded admirably, with the exception of Justice Witherpee, who, he swore, had swindled him outrageously in a business transaction they had together in getting out lumber. What made it all the worse, the aggrieved party used to say, was the shameful manner in which the 'old reprobate' would publicly boast of it.

'I say, Jones,' exclaimed the Major (as he was called) one day as he sat smoothing off a new ramrod for his fowling piece, 'what would you say to a chance of getting that old stick-in-the-mud, Witherpee, on the hip? I rather flatter myself that I can do it.'

'Go ahead, my son,' said Jones, pleasantly, by way of encouragement.

'You own that infernal piece of swamp down by the railroad crossing, don't you? That air's a valuable piece of real estate!'

'Well, yes. It's never been spoilt by too much cultivation that I know of.'

'I reckon I can just get a heap of money for that air; and what's more, I can have the satisfaction of selling it to a gentleman who can appreciate it.'

'It does you credit, Major. That's what I call a genuine love of nature. It ain't every man that sees the beauties of a first-class rural retreat like that,' and the speaker's countenance was radiant with benignity—whether at the high-toned sentiment of his friend, or at the prospect of getting the better of the 'Squire, it was difficult to determine. He thought it well, however, to add: 'But I'd advise you to be mighty careful if you're calc'lating to run a saw on old 'Bijh. What's your programme?'

'You see this here interesting and valuable collection of gold dust,' said the Major, producing a vial which contained particles of the ore in unusual abundance, and flourishing it in his hand in a manner intensely theatrical. 'Belonging to a friend of mine, he donates it for this occasion only, so to speak. It will appear, of course, to have been dug out of a piece of ground belonging to that highly respectable and public spirited citizen, Mr. G. G. Jones. With a cupidity not at all to be wondered at, I shall attempt to keep the matter secret and immediately to make a purchase. I shall apply to Witherpee, as a man of wealth, to advance me part of the funds, or get him, rather, to act as my agent in buying it, because you, Jones, a friend of mine, would suspect me of being up to something if I should offer to buy it myself. D'ye see the bait, now? Catch him playing off!'

As further conversation was modulated to an undertone, and accompanied with a complete signal code of nods and chuckles, it is fair to presume that Mr. J. did see the bait—and was sure of a good nibble too.

No time was lost before the speculator and his victim had their knees under the same table—with a mug of hard cider between them. Mingled suspicion and avarice in Abijah's expression argued well for the success of the scheme. As is often the case, his love of money was only surpassed by the credulity with which he gave ear to new plans for satisfying it. He was slow to trust Davis, because they had not been the best of friends, but the Major played his cards so well that the old fellow did not waver long:

'All you will have to do is to hand it right over to me, you know, and take your commission money. You see just as well as I do that it wouldn't do no how for me to undertake it on my own hook.'

And the 'Squire said, 'Yes, certainly,' but couldn't see it distinctly either, and after they had fixed upon the maximum price, and the 'Squire had feasted his eyes once more on the 'real glitter,' and Charley had explained for the twenty-first time that the divining rod had demonstrated the singular fact that not a bit of ground outside that particular lot was worth a red cent to prospect on, and the 'Squire had once for all swallowed the whole story, and declared it the most remarkable thing he ever heard of, he consented to act as agent in the purchase.

For some unaccountable reason, Abijah Witherpee found Mr. Jones not at all in the humor for a bargain. The land wasn't worth much, he knew, and it was very handsome in the 'Squire to offer fifty dollars for it, but the fact was that his feelings somehow prompted him to keep it: it was a silly idea, perhaps, but he had always thought, ever since he had owned the land, that some day it would be worth gold to him.

'Gracious goodness!' thought Abijah; 'Jones swore that it was a secret that only he and the diviner knew. Could this man have felt it out by animal magnetism, or anything of that sort?' But his mind was at ease again when he was assured by further conversation that the owner was entirely ignorant of the momentous truth. The 'Squire's offers were tempting, and, from byplay and bantering, at last amounted to what appeared a perfectly fabulous sum. The upshot of the matter was that the coolheaded Jones got rid of the wretched little lot for $490 cash. The purchaser was now quite sure that he was the shrewdest fellow in that part of the country.

Just as had been anticipated, the agent's next move was to lay claim to the auriferous region himself, and refuse to turn it over to the lawful owner. The Major exhibited a proper degree of anxiety to learn the results of the interview, and appeared well enough satisfied with the price—high as it was.

He was deaf to every proposition of the 'Squire, who was ready almost to double on the purchase money; till at last the latter declared point blank that he meant to stick to the property himself; that the agreement was verbal merely, and he would have ownership in writing, in spite of what Major Davis or anybody else could do. It was in vain that the Major protested and threatened prosecution for swindling, and called witnesses to the transaction. Before sunset, Witherpee was the sole and indisputable proprietor of the newly discovered El Dorado.

It is hardly worth while to state how so extraordinary a financier succeeded when he came to actual prospecting. It was currently reported that there was 'some pretty tall digging going on down in that swamp lot.' It required a lengthy series of geological arguments, with practical illustrations, to convince 'Squire Witherpee that the soil of East Hampton was somewhat feeble in the production of the precious metals—except, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense.

When he talked of 'taking the law on those rascals,' he found after all that the best thing he could do was not to move in the matter at all. Mr. Jones and his friend were no rascals, and took pleasure in contributing every cent of the money to the town fund for supporting the poor. Abijah Witherpee was since known to have acknowledged that though rather hard, it was no more than he had deserved, and the change that was wrought in his dealings gained him from that time no more faithful friends than the confederates, Jones and the Major.

REASON, RYHME, AND RYTHM

CHAPTER III.—THE INFINITE

The Divine Attributes are the base of all true Art

No work of art can be considered truly beautiful unless it recalls or reproduces, even in its finite form, some of the divine attributes; not that the work must treat of them, or consciously suggest them to the intellect, but that they must enter into the creation of the artist, that the immediate and intuitive perception of beauty, always attached to their manifestation, may appeal to those faculties or instincts which ever answer in delight when these attributes are suggested to the human spirit; for, consciously or unconsciously, the soul yearns for a clearer view of the beauty of God.

Whatever good there may be desirable by man, more especially good belonging to his moral nature, there will be a corresponding agreeableness in whatever external object reminds him of such good, whether it remind him by arbitrary association, by typical resemblance, or by awakening intuitions of the divine attributes, which he was created to glorify and to enjoy eternally. Leibnitz says:

'The perfections of God are those of our own souls, but He possesses them without limit; He is the exhaustless ocean from which we have received but a drop; we have some power, some wisdom, some love; but God is all power, all wisdom, all love. Order, unity, proportion, harmony, enchant us; painting, sculpture, music, poetry, charm us in the degree in which, in their appropriate spheres, they have succeeded in manifesting fragments of the above: but God is all order, all proportion, all unity, all harmony; and all beauty visible here is but a dim reflex of the eternal rays.'

The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of the divine attributes, and from nothing enduringly but that which is, is the most ennobling of all that can be said of human nature, not only setting a great gulf of specific separation between us and the brutes that perish, but it seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious with the Being in whose darkened manifestations we here unconsciously and instinctively delight. It is at least probable that the higher the order of intelligences, the more of the divine image becomes palpable in all around them, and the redeemed spirits and angels may have perceptions as much more full and rapturous than ours, as ours than those of the beasts and creeping things. It may be received almost as an axiom that no natural instinct or desire can be entirely frustrated, and as these desires for the beautiful are so unfailing that they have not escaped the thinkers of any age, but were held divine of old, and even in heathen countries, it must be admitted that in these visionary pleasures, lightly as we may now be disposed to regard them, there are causes of gratitude, grounds of hope, anchors of faith, more than in all the manifold material gifts with which God mercifully crowns the years and hedges the path of men.

We turn to Plato to show how clearly such ideas were held by the thinkers of antiquity:

'Eternal beauty, not created, not made; exempt from increase or decay; not beautiful in one part and deformed in another, beautiful in such a time, such a place, such a relation; not beauty which hath any sensible parts or anything corporeal, or which may be found comprised in any one thought or science, or residing in any creation different from itself, as in an animal, the earth, or the heavens;—but absolute beauty, identical and invariable in itself; beauty in which, would they please the spirit of men, other things must participate, but their creation or destruction brings IT neither diminution, increase, nor the slightest change.'

Plotinus writes in the same spirit:

'Let him who has closed his eyes upon mere sensuous beauty, advance boldly into the depths of the sanctuary. Let him reverently gaze upon the true beauty, the original type of those pale and fleeting images to which he may have hitherto applied the holy name of beautiful.'

We propose to consider reverently and with a humble sense of the limited sphere from which we must regard the infinite, some of the divine attributes, which must, in the finite mode, enter into every creation of artistic excellence. We begin our reflections with the infinite itself.

Infinite—this word is by no means the expression of a clear idea: it is merely the expression of an effort to attain one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. Man needed a term by which to point out the direction of this effort—the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt. The fact is, that upon the enunciation of any one of that class of terms to which 'infinite' belongs—the class representing thoughts of thought—he who has a right to say he thinks at all, feels himself called upon, not to entertain a conception, but simply to direct his mental vision toward some given point, in the intellectual firmament, where lies a nebula never to be resolved. And yet to this very point, which the intellect cannot define, are our spirits forever tending. No artistic creation ever fully pleases unless there is given in it some suggestion of this mystic attribute, underlying and permeating all other attributes of Deity. It is the dim unconscious feeling after this attribute which causes the forever recurring dissatisfaction with the finite, which so ruthlessly pursues us through life. It is the source of that vague but tender longing, that restless but dreamy yearning, that haunting melancholy, which characterize human souls created for the enjoyment of the infinite; divining and insatiably thirsting for the absolute.

Let us now attempt to trace some of the various ways in which this feeling after the infinite manifests itself. Plato and his school tried to explain the existence of absolute ideas in the soul by the hypothesis of its preëxistence to that of the body in the bosom of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; and, consequently, that such ideas are but reminiscences of a more perfect life. We find the following passage in an ode of Wordsworth's:

 
'Our birth is but a sleep, and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
 
 
'Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'
 

It seems useless here to enter upon the vexed subject of 'innate ideas,' or to attempt to convince the reader, metaphysically, that the very negation contained in the word finite, necessarily suggests its affirmation in the word infinite. Enough that the idea of the infinite is certainly found in the mind of man, that he seeks it in the material world, in himself, in God. High gifts may have been wrought into the dim soul, which are destined to be gradually awakened through the growing perceptions of the mind. Every spiritual being created by eternal love may have had imparted to him a ray from the sun of eternal love, which, in its due time and place, is to manifest itself in his consciousness. Such participation in God as the primary source of all that is to abide eternally with the redeemed, has, in the present state of our vague consciousness, been described by men who felt its stirrings in their soul as the memory of eternal love. It might more properly be called an intuition of eternal love; such an instinct as leads the chrysalis to prepare for the change which it certainly does not understand. Life, such as the beat of the heart, the action of the lungs, is not manifested to the consciousness—neither is the source of this intuition, which, however, gives evidence of itself by an intuitive feeling of incessant longing. It reveals its presence constantly; sometimes in an undefinable feeling of profound desire, satisfied with no earthly object, yet but vaguely directed to the eternal or divine; sometimes in a profound and absorbing religiosity. This longing exists in an inchoate state; it is a love yet to be developed. From this mystic root springs much that is intellectually great, even the love of scientific certainty. Philosophy may, indeed, almost be termed the science of longing.

Developing in its normal growth, it gives us our true saints; those who live but to love God, and to serve man. But like all human gifts, it may be perverted. It is some such perverted apprehension or illusory longing for the infinite, which causes a man to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some ruling habit, some favorite and engrossing pursuit. Alas! it often leads the most gifted of our race to devote all their energies, thoughts, feelings, to one faulty, fading, changing object, vainly pouring that worship upon the creature, which should be rendered only to the Creator.

 
'He that sits above
In His calm glory, will forgive the love
His creatures bear each other, even if blent
With a vain worship, for its close is dim
Ever with grief, which leads the wrung soul back to Him.'
 

The despair which this feeling sometimes occasions in the perverted soul of one intent upon feeding it with the gross aliments of the debased senses, is, without doubt, a very frequent cause of suicide. It may lead, in the soul of the infidel or sensualist, to the idolatry of art. It is a feeling, and requires direction. When enlightened by revelation and purified by faith, it manifests itself in the sublime abnegation and ardent love of the faithful follower of Jesus Christ.

This instinctive longing for the infinite, existing in the soul itself, cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for which he was created. His misery springs from the root of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot succeed in burying under the finite. This is a pregnant subject; under this strange caption might be written the psychological history of most human despair.

 
'The Fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect
His eyes seek in vain.'
 

Thus is faith a necessity of the soul, 'the evidence of things not seen.'

The idea of eternity is necessarily evolved from the negation contained in the limited meaning of the word time. Eternity is the all embracing, completely complete time; eternity, which is infinite not only a parte externa, that is everpassing yet everlasting, without beginning and without end; but also infinite a parte interna—so that in the endlessly living, thoroughly luminous present, the whole past, also the whole future, are equally actual, equally clear, and equally present to us, as the very present itself. Can we indeed form any other conception of a state of perfect bliss? Is the idea of a state of entire happiness at all compatible with the regret that must be felt for a blissful past; the consciousness of a flying present; and the fear of an uncertain future? Yet the idea of time does not seem necessarily excluded from a conception of the essence and operations of God. Does there in very reality exist such an absolute opposition between time and eternity, that it is quite impossible for them to subsist in any mutual contact or relation? Is there no transition from the one to the other conceivable? Is eternity anything more than time vitally full, blissfully complete? If eternity is nothing more than the living, full, essential time, and if our earthly, fettered, and fragmentary time is, as the great poet says, 'out of joint,' fallen with man's disobedience to his God into a state of strange disorder—it is easily conceivable that the two do not stand apart so as to have no mutual contact. Those who have seen a holy death leave a calm and beautiful smile upon the face of a dying Christian, can scarcely help believing that the beginning of a blissful eternity has impressed itself upon the rapt features, actually breaking through the shackles of time before the prisoner was emancipated from its fetters. And those brief intervals of rapture which are sometimes experienced in the midst of earnest and ardent devotion—what are they but eternity thus manifesting itself through time in the soul? Those who have been rescued from the very jaws of death, frequently tell us that the moment preceding insensibility was crowded and filled with vivid recollections of the whole apparently forgotten past—thus bringing into the soul in the midst of time, a foretaste and interval of eternity! and those prophetic intimations of things yet to be, which frequently break in with startling power upon the human spirit, what indeed are they but sudden contacts between our fettered time, 'so out of joint,' and the fulness of eternity? Men rave against the justice of eternal punishment, as if its duration were not essentially part of their own immortality! Ah! if the memories of the deeds done in the body are essentially undying, were it not well for us that the writing traced against us by our own hands should be nailed to the cross, obliterated in the blood of the Immaculate Victim? that mystic blood which has bathed the universe!

The innate longing for the infinite, with its accompanying intuitions of the eternal love, and the yearnings for that fulness of time when the past and future shall live with us as really as the present itself, are ever vivid within us, and are two of the great vital arteries of all true art. This burning human thirst for the fulness of eternity in opposition to our fragmentary time manifests itself in our agonizing efforts to bring back the past, to which sad efforts we have given the melancholy name of memory; shows itself in our restless longing for the future, which we call hope; and frequently reveals itself in an insane seizing upon something in the imperfect and fleeting present, which it insists upon worshipping, in regarding as divine. Upon this last phase is dependent all that excited, exaggerated, but frequently beautiful passion of language which marks our poems of love. Ah! it is the merciful will of the Creator that we should worship only the divine, and so the human passion ends in sobs and wails of anguish, for the finite idol can never fill the shrine of the Absolute, the infinite God!

As the intuition of eternal love in the past, we find this longing for the infinite breathing through poetry in the form of elegy; in sad recollections of a faded world of demigods and heroes; and in the plaints for the loss of man's native home in Paradise, in the faint and dying echoes of the happy innocence of creation before the first outbreak of evil, and the consequent misery of nature. Poetry is indeed so full of haunting, melancholy memories, that it might almost be called the 'mind's supersensuous recollection of the eternal.' And what else can be said of music? Is it not an art eminently addressed to this intuition of eternal love, this constant longing for the infinite? Do not its giddy flights and dying falls at once arouse this mystic yearning, seeking, feeling, which may appropriately be termed the passion of the soul? That music holds some deep relation to the soul not yet clearly developed, may be inferred, not only from the magic power it sways over our spirits, but from the fact that the inspired writers picture it among the joys of heaven. It is now the language of our 'divine despair;' it is yet to be the speech of our eternal beatitude!

'God is love:' through all the hidden veins of ever-germing life beats this divine pulse of universal being. Hope, faith, and charity spring from the revelation and answering intuitions of this blissful love: from the hope, faith, and love of men sprang all the really noble works of art. All this is full of consolation, 'though inward far we be'—even the mournful memory of a past of celestial innocence becomes the harbinger of a divine hope. Let the poet then still sing of the past; like the glories of the setting sun flushing down the golden west, it but whispers of a more glorious rise in the mythic east. The root of art springs from the intuitions of eternal love; its leaves, flowers, and fruit, are faith, hope, and charity. May the rapt artist ever remember that the beauty of this earth was not intended to satisfy the requisitions of his longing soul, but to awaken and nourish in it the love of eternal beauty!

A golden thread of glories yet to be, twines through the woof of this our mortal life, and by tracing its wavy lines of glittering brilliancy, shining even through the dim symbolism of matter, many secrets of the life to come may be divined. The arts may be regarded as significant hieroglyphics of delights yet to be fulfilled in other spheres of being. The living pulse of omnipotence, the heart of God, beats sensibly in the beauty of the boundless universe; it is the fountain at which the young immortal is to imbibe his first draught for eternity. Not that, as erroneously held by the Pantheists, nature is God, no more than Raphael is the pictures he paints; but assuming the existence of a God as the creator of the worlds, what else can nature be but a revelation of God and divine love, a visible and symbolic representation thereof in matter; living, because His breath is life?