The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 09, July, 1858

So spring drew near. The mill was nearly finished. One day in March a warm south-wind "quieted the earth" after a long rain, the river began to stir, its mail of ice to crack and heave under the sun's rays. I persuaded Jo to take a little drive, and once in the carriage the air reanimated her; she rested against me and talked more than I had known her for weeks.

"What a lovely day!" said she; "how balmy the air is! there is such an expression of rest without despair, such calm expectation! I always think of heaven such days, Sally!—they are like the long sob with which a child finishes weeping. Only to think of never more knowing tears!—that is life indeed!"

A keen pang pierced me at the vibration of her voice as she spoke. I thought to soothe her a little, and said, "Heaven can be no more than love, Jo, and we have a great deal of that on earth."

"Do we?" answered she, in a tone of grief just tipped with irony,—and then went on: "I believe you love me, Sally. I would trust you with—my heart, if need were. I think you love me better than any one on earth does."

"I love you enough, dear," said I; more words would have choked me in the utterance.

Soon we turned homeward.

"Tell John to drive down by the river," said Josephine,—"I want to see the new mill."

"But you cannot see it from the road, Jo; the hemlocks stand between."

"Never mind, Sally; I shall just walk through them; don't deny me! I want to see it all again; and perhaps the arbutus is in bloom."

"Not yet, Jo."

"I can get some buds, then; I want to have some just once."

We left the carriage, and on my arm Jo strolled through the little thicket of hemlock-trees, green and fragrant. She seemed unusually strong. I began to hope. After much searching, we found the budded flowers; she loved most of all wild blossoms; no scent breathed from the closed petals; they were not yet kissed by the odor-giving south-wind into life and expression; but Jo looked at them with sad, far-reaching eyes. I think she silently said good-bye to them.

Presently we came out on the steep bank of the river, directly opposite the mill. A heavy timber was thrown across from the shore to the island, on which the workmen from the west side had passed and repassed; it was firm enough for its purpose, but now, wet with the morning's rain, and high above the grinding ice, it seemed a hazardous bridge. As we stood looking over at the new mill, listening to the slight stir within it, apparently the setting to rights by some lingering workman of such odds and ends as remain after finishing the great whole of such a building, suddenly the cool wind, which had shifted to the north, brought on its waft a most portentous roar. We stood still to listen. Nearer and nearer it swelled, crashing and hissing as it approached. Josephine grasped my arm with convulsive energy, and at that instant we perceived Mr. Waring's plaid cap pass an open casement. She turned upon me like a wild creature driven to bay. I looked up-stream;—the ice had gathered in one high barrier mixed with flood-wood and timber, and, bearing above all the uprooted trunk of a huge sycamore, was coming down upon the dam like a battering-ram. Jo gasped. "The river is broken up and Arthur is on the island," said she, in a fearfully suppressed tone, and, swifter than I could think or guess her meaning, she had reached the timber, she was on it,—and with light, untrembling steps half across, when both she and I simultaneously caught sight of Mr. Waring running for dear life to the other and stronger bridge. Jo turned to come back; but the excitement was past that had sustained her; she trembled, she tottered. I ran to meet and aid her. Just then the roots of the great sycamore thundered against the dam; the already heavily pressed structure gave way; with the freed roar of a hurricane, the barrier, the dam, the foot-bridge swept down toward us. She had all but reached the end of the timber,—I stood there to grasp her hand,—when the old tree, whirled down by the torrent, struck the other end of the beam and threw Josephine forward to the bank, dashing her throbbing, panting breast, with all the force of her fall, against the hard ground. I lifted her in my arms. She was white with pain. Presently she opened her eyes and looked up, a flush of rapture glowed all over her face, and then the awful mist of death, gray and rigid, veiled it. Her head dropped on my shoulder; a sharp cry and a rush of scarlet blood passed her lips together; the head lay more heavily,—she was dead. But Arthur Waring never knew how or for what she died!

Five years have passed since that day. Still I live at Nook Cottage; but not alone. Of us three, Josephine is in heaven. Letty is still troubled upon earth; her husband tests her patience and her temper every hour, but both temper and patience are in good training; and if ever Henry Malden is reclaimed, as I begin to see reasons to hope he will be, he will owe it to the continual example and gentle goodness of his wife, who has grown from a petulant, thoughtless girl into a lovely, unselfish, religious woman, a devoted mother and wife, "refined by fire." For me, the last,—whenever now I say, as I used to say, "Three of us," I mean a new three,—Paul, baby, and me; for Jo was not a prophet. Four years ago, while my heart- ache for her was fresh and torturing, a new pastor came to the little village church of Valley Mills. Mr. Lyman was very good; I have seen other men with as fine natural traits, but I have never seen a man or woman so entirely good. He came to me to console me; for he, too, had just lost a sister, and in listening to his story I for a moment forgot my own, as he meant I should. But I did not love him,—no, not till I discovered, months afterward, that he suffered incessantly from ill-health, and was all alone in the world. I was too much a woman to resist such a plea. I pitied him; I tried to take care of him; and when he asked me if I liked the office of sick-nurse, I told him I liked it well enough to wish it were for life; and now, when he wants to light my eyes out of that dreamy expression that tells him I am re-living the past, and thinking of the dead, he tells me, for the sake of the flash that follows, that I offered myself to him! Perhaps I did. But he is well now; the air of the Tunxis hills, and the rest of a quiet life, partly, I hope, good care also, have restored to him his lost health. And I am what Jo said I should have been,—a blessed mother, as well as a happy wife. The baby that lies across my lap has traits that endear her to me doubly,—traits of each of us three cousins: Josephine's hair on her little nestling head, Letty's apple-blossom complexion, and my eyes, except that they are serene when they are not smiling. I ask only of the love that has given me all this unexpected joy, that my little Jo may have one better trait,—her father's heart; a stronger, tenderer, and purer heart than belonged to any one among "Three of us!"

WHAT A WRETCHED WOMAN SAID TO ME

All the broad East was laced with tender ringsOf widening light; the Daybreak shone afar;Deep in the hollow, 'twixt her fiery wings,Fluttered the morning star.A cloud, that through the time of darkness wentWith wanton winds, now, heavy-hearted, cameAnd fell upon the sunshine, penitent,And burning up with shame.The grass was wet with dew; the sheep-fields layLapping together far as eye could see;And the great harvest hung the golden wayOf Nature's charity.My house was full of comfort; I was proppedWith life's delights, all sweet as they could be,When at my door a wretched woman stopped,And, weeping, said to me,—"Its rose-root in youth's seasonable hoursLove in thy bosom set, so blest wert thou;Hence all the pretty little red-mouthed flowersThat climb and kiss thee now!"I loved, but I must stifle Nature's criesWith old dry blood, else perish, I was told;Hence the young light shrunk up within my eyes,And left them blank and bold."I take my deeds, all, bad as they have been,—The way was dark, the awful pitfall bare;—In my weak hands, up through the fires of sin,I hold them for my prayer.""The thick, tough husk of evil grows aboutEach soul that lives," I mused, "but doth it kill?When the tree rots, the imprisoned wedge falls out,Rusted, but iron still."Shall He who to the daisy has access,Reaching it down its little lamp of dewTo light it up through earth, do any less,Last and best work, for you?"

SONGS OF THE SEA

Not Dibdin's; not Barry Cornwall's; not Tom Campbell's; not any of the "Pirate's Serenades" and "I'm afloats!" which appear in the music-shop- windows, illustrated by lithographic vignettes of impossible ships in impracticable positions. These are sung by landsmen yachting in still waters and in sight of green fields, by romantic young ladies in comfortable and unmoving drawing-rooms to the tinkling of Chickering's pianos. What are the songs the sailor sings to the accompaniment of the thrilling shrouds, the booming double-bass of the hollow topsails, and the multitudinous chorus of Ocean? What does the coaster, in his brief walk "three steps and overboard," hum to himself, as he tramps up and down his little deck through the swathing mists of a Bank fog? What sings the cook at the galley-fire in doleful unison with the bubble of his coppers? Surely not songs that exult in the life of the sea. Certainly not, my amateur friend, anything that breathes of mastery over the elements. The sea is a real thing to him. He never is familiar with it, or thinks of it or speaks of it as his slave. It is "a steed that knows his rider," and, like many another steed which the men of the forecastle have mounted, knows that it can throw its rider at pleasure, and the riders know it too. Now and then a sailor will utter some fierce imprecation upon wind or sea, but it is in the impotence of despair, and not in the conscious, boastful mastery which the land-songs attribute to him. What, then, does the sailor sing?—and does he sing at all?

Certainly the sailor sings. Did you ever walk through Ann Street, Boston, or haunt the purlieus of the Fulton Market? and when there did you never espy a huckster's board covered with little slips of printed paper of the size and shape of the bills-of-fare at the Commonwealth Hotel? They are printed on much coarser paper, and are by no means as typographically exact as the aforesaid carte, or as this page of the "Atlantic Monthly," but they are what the sailor sings. I know they are there, for I once spent a long summer's day in the former place, searching those files for a copy of the delightful ballad sung (or attempted to be sung) by Dick Fletcher in Scott's "Pirate,"—the ballad beginning

"It was a ship, and a ship of fame,Launched off the stocks, bound for the main."

I did not find my ballad, and to this day remain in ignorance of what fate befell the "hundred and fifty brisk young men" therein commemorated. But I found what the sailor does sing. It was a miscellaneous collection of sentimental songs, the worn-out rags of the stage and the parlor, or ditties of highwaymen, or ballad narratives of young women who ran away from a rich "parient" with "silvier and gold" to follow the sea. The truth of the story was generally established by the expedient of putting the damsel's name in the last verse,—delicately suppressing all but the initial and final letters. The only sea-songs that I remember were other ballads descriptive of piracies, of murders by cruel captains, and of mutinies, with a sprinkling of sea-fights dating from the last war with England.

The point of remark is, that all of these depend for their interest upon a human association. Not one of them professes any concern with the sea or ships for their own sake. The sea is a sad, solemn reality, the theatre upon which the seaman acts his life's tragedy. It has no more of enchantment to him than the "magic fairy palace" of the ballet has to a scene-shifter.

But other songs the sailor sings. The Mediterranean sailor is popularly supposed to chant snatches of opera over his fishing-nets; but, after all, his is only a larger sort of lake, with water of a questionable saltness. It can furnish dangerous enough storms upon occasion, and, far worse than storms, the terrible white-squall which lies ambushed under sunny skies, and leaps unawares upon the doomed vessel. But the Mediterranean is not the deep sea, nor has it produced the best and boldest navigators. Therefore, although we still seek the sources of our maritime law amid the rock-poised huts (once palaces) of Amalfi, we must go elsewhere for our true sea-songs.

The sailor does not lack for singing. He sings at certain parts of his work;—indeed, he must sing, if he would work. On vessels of war, the drum and fife or boatswain's whistle furnish the necessary movement-regulator. There, where the strength of one or two hundred men can be applied to one and the same effort, the labor is not intermittent, but continuous. The men form on either side of the rope to be hauled, and walk away with it like firemen marching with their engine. When the headmost pair bring up at the stern or bow, they part, and the two streams flow back to the starting-point, outside the following files. Thus in this perpetual "follow-my-leader" way the work is done, with more precision and steadiness than in the merchant-service. Merchant-men are invariably manned with the least possible number, and often go to sea shorthanded, even according to the parsimonious calculations of their owners. The only way the heavier work can be done at all is by each man doing his utmost at the same moment. This is regulated by the song. And here is the true singing of the deep sea. It is not recreation; it is an essential part of the work. It mastheads the topsail-yards, on making sail; it starts the anchor from the domestic or foreign mud; it "rides down the main tack with a will"; it breaks out and takes on board cargo; it keeps the pumps (the ship's,—not the sailor's) going. A good voice and a new and stirring chorus are worth an extra man. And there is plenty of need of both.

I remember well one black night in the mid-Atlantic, when we were beating up against a stiff breeze, coming on deck near midnight, just as the ship was put about. When a ship is tacking, the tacks and sheets (ropes which confine the clews or lower corners of the sails) are let run, in order that the yards may be swung round to meet the altered position of the ship. They must then be hauled taut again, and belayed, or secured, in order to keep the sails in their place and to prevent them from shaking. When the ship's head comes up in the wind, the sail is for a moment or two edgewise to it, and then is the nice moment, as soon as the head-sails fairly fill, when the main-yard and the yards above it can be swung readily, and the tacks and sheets hauled in. If the crew are too few in number, or too slow at their work, and the sails get fairly filled on the new tack, it is a fatiguing piece of work enough to "board" the tacks and sheets, as it is called. You are pulling at one end of the rope, but the gale is tugging at the other. The advantages of lungs are all against you, and perhaps the only thing to be done is to put the helm down a little, and set the sails shaking again before they can be trimmed properly.—It was just at such a time that I came on deck, as above mentioned. Being near eight bells, the watch on deck had been not over spry; and the consequence was that our big main-course was slatting and flying out overhead with a might that shook the ship from stem to stern. The flaps of the mad canvas were like successive thumps of a giant's fist upon a mighty drum. The sheets were jerking at the belaying-pins, the blocks rattling in sharp snappings like castanets. You could hear the hiss and seething of the sea alongside, and see it flash by in sudden white patches of phosphorescent foam, while all overhead was black with the flying scud. The English second-mate was stamping with vexation, and, with all his ills misplaced, storming at the men:—"'An'somely the weather main- brace,—'an'somely, I tell you!—'Alf a dozen of you clap on to the main sheet here,—down with 'im!—D'y'see 'ere's hall like a midshipman's bag,—heverythink huppermost and nothing 'andy.—'Aul 'im in, Hi say!" —But the sail wouldn't come, though. All the most forcible expressions of the Commination-Service were liberally bestowed on the watch. "Give us the song, men!" sang out the mate, at last,—"pull with a will! —together, men!—haltogether now!"—And then a cracked, melancholy voice struck up this chant:

"Oh, the bowline, bully bully bowline,Oh, the bowline, bowline, HAUL!"

At the last word every man threw his whole strength into the pull,—all singing it in chorus, with a quick, explosive sound. And so, jump by jump, the sheet was at last hauled taut.—I dare say this will seem very much spun out to a seafarer, but landsmen like to hear of the sea and its ways; and as more landsmen than seamen, probably, read the "Atlantic Monthly," I have told them of one genuine sea-song, and its time and place.

Then there are pumping-songs. "The dismal sound of the pumps is heard," says Mr. Webster's Plymouth-Rock Oration; but being a part of the daily morning duty of a well-disciplined merchant-vessel,—just a few minutes' spell to keep the vessel free and cargo unharmed by bilge-water,—it is not a dismal sound at all, but rather a lively one. It was a favorite amusement with us passengers on board the – to go forward about pumping-time to the break of the deck and listen. Any quick tune to which you might work a fire-engine will serve for the music, and the words were varied with every fancy. "Pay me the money down," was one favorite chorus, and the verse ran thus:—

Solo. Your money, young man, is no object to me.

Chorus. Pay me the money down!

Solo. Half a crown's no great amount.

Chorus. Pay me the money down!

Solo and Chorus. (Bis) Money down, money down, pay me the money down!

Not much sense in all this, but it served to man and move the brakes merrily. Then there were other choruses, which were heard from time to time,—"And the young gals goes a-weepin',"—"O long storm, storm along stormy"; but the favorite tune was "Money down," at least with our crew. They were not an avaricious set, either; for their parting ceremony, on embarking, was to pitch the last half-dollars of their advance on to the wharf, to be scrambled for by the land-sharks. But "Money down" was the standing chorus. I once heard, though not on board that ship, the lively chorus of "Off she goes, and off she must go,"—

"Highland day and off she goes,Off she goes with a flying fore-topsail,Highland day and off she goes."

It is one of the most spirited things imaginable, when well sung, and, when applied to the topsail-halyards, brings the yards up in grand style.

These are some of the working-songs of the sea. They are not chosen for their sense, but for their sound. They must contain good mouth-filling words, with the vowels in the right place, and the rhythmic ictus at proper distances for chest and hand to keep true time. And this is why the seaman beats the wind in a trial of strength. The wind may whistle, but it cannot sing. The sailor does not whistle, on shipboard at least, but does sing.

Besides the working-day songs, there are others for the forecastle and dog-watches, which have been already described. But they are seldom of the parlor pattern. I remember one lovely moonlight evening, off the Irish coast, when our ship was slipping along before a light westerly air,—just enough of it for everything to draw, and the ship as steady as Ailsa Crag, so that everybody got on deck, even the chronically sea-sick passengers of the steerage. There was a boy on board, a steerage passenger, who had been back and forth several times on this Liverpool line of packets. He was set to singing, and his sweet, clear voice rang out with song after song,– almost all of them sad ones. At last one of the crew called on him for a song which he made some demur at singing. I remember the refrain well (for he did sing it at last); it ran thus:—

"My crew are tried, my bark's my pride,I'm the Pirate of the Isles."

It was no rose-water piracy that the boy sang of; it was the genuine pirate of the Isle of Pines,—the gentleman who before the days of California and steamers was the terror of the Spanish Main. He was depicted as falling in deadly combat with a naval cruiser, after many desperate deeds. What was most striking to us of the cabin was, that the sympathy of the song, and evidently of the hearers, was all on the side of the defier of law and order. There was no nonsense in it about "islands on the face of the deep where the winds never blow and the skies never weep," which to the parlor pirate are the indications of a capital station for wood and water, and for spending his honeymoon. It was downright cutting of throats and scuttling of ships that our youngster sang of, and the grim faces looked and listened approvingly, as you might fancy Ulysses's veterans hearkening to a tale of Troy.

There is another class of songs, half of the sea, half of the shore, which the fishermen and coasters croon in their lonely watches. Such is the rhyme of "Uncle Peleg," or "Pillick," as it is pronounced,—probably an historical ballad concerning some departed worthy of the Folger family of Nantucket. It begins—

"Old Uncle Pillick he built him a boatOn the ba-a-ck side of Nantucket P'int;He rolled up his trowsers and set her afloatFrom the ba-a-ck side of Nantucket P'int."

Like "Christabel," this remains a fragment. Not so the legend of "Captain Cottington," (or Coddington,) which perhaps is still traditionally known to the young gentlemen at Harvard. It is marked by a bold and ingenious metrical novelty.

"Captain Cottington he went to sea,Captain Cottington he went to sea,Captain Cottington he went to sea-e-e,Captain Cottington he went to sea."

The third verse of the next stanza announces that he didn't go to sea in a schoo-oo-ooner,—of the next that he went to sea in a bri-i-ig,—and so on. We learn that he got wrecked on the "Ba-ha-ha-hamys," that he swam ashore with the papers in his hat, and, I believe, entered his protest at the nearest "Counsel's" (Anglicé. Consul's) dwelling.

For the amateur of genuine ballad verse, here is a field quite as fertile as that which was reaped by Scott and Ritson amid the border peels and farmhouses of Liddesdale. It is not unlikely that some treasures may thus be brought to light. The genuine expression of popular feeling is always forcible, not seldom poetic. And at any rate, these wild bits of verse are redolent of the freshness of the sea-breeze, the damps of the clinging fog, the strange odors of the caboose-cookery, of the curing of cod, and of many another "ancient and fish-like smell." Who will tell us of these songs, not indeed of the deep sea, but of soundings? What were the stanzas which Luckie Mucklebackit sang along the Portanferry Sands? What is the dredging-song which the oyster "come of a gentle kind" is said to love?

These random thoughts may serve to indicate to the true seeker new and unworked mines of rhythmic ore. We are crying continually, that we have no national literature, that we are a nation of imitators and plagiarists. Why will not some one take the trouble to learn what we have? This does not mean that amateurs should endeavor to write such ballad fragments and popular songs,—because that cannot be done; such things grow,—they are not made. If the sea wants songs, it will have them. It is only suggested here that we look about us and ascertain of what lyric blessings we may now be the unconscious possessors. Can it be that oars have risen and fallen, sails flapped, waves broken in thunder upon our shores in vain? that no whistle of the winds, or moan of the storm-foreboding seas has waked a responsive chord in the heart of pilot or fisherman? If we are so poor, let us know our poverty.

And now to bring these desultory remarks to a practical conclusion. I have written these seemingly trifling fragments with a serious purpose. It is to show that the seaman has little or no art or part in the poetry of the seas. I have put down facts, have given what experience I have had of some of the idiosyncrasies of the forecastle. The poetry of the sea has been written on shore and by landsmen. Falconer's "Shipwreck" is a clever nautical tract, written in verse,—or if it be anything more, it is but the solitary exception which proves and enforces the rule. Midshipmen have written ambitious verses about the sea; but by the time the young gentlemen were promoted to the ward-room they have dropped the habit or found other themes for their stanzas. In truth, the stern manliness of his calling forbids the seaman to write poetry. He acts it. His is a profession which leaves no room for any assumed feeling or for any reflective tendencies. His instincts are developed, rather than his reason. He has no time to speculate. He must be prepared to lay his hand on the right rope, let the night be the darkest that ever came down upon the waves. He obeys orders, heedless of consequences; he issues commands amid the uproar and tumult of pressing emergencies. There is no chance for quackery in his work. The wind and the wave are infallible tests of all his knots and splices. He cannot cheat them. The gale and the lee-shore are not pictures, but fierce realities, with which he has to grapple for life or death. The soldier and the fireman may pass for heroes upon an assumed stock of courage; but the seaman must be a brave man in his calling, or Nature steps in and brands him coward. Therefore he cares little about the romance of his duties. If you would win his interest and regard, it must be on the side of his personal and human sensibilities. Cut off during his whole active life from any but the most partial sympathy with his kind, he yearns for the life of the shore, its social pleasures and its friendly greetings. Captains, whose vessels have been made hells-afloat by their tyranny, have found abundant testimony in the courts of law to their gentle and humane deportment on land. Therefore, when you would address seamen effectively, either in acts or words, let it be by no shallow mimicry of what you fancy to be their life afloat. It will be at best but "shop" to them, and we all know how distasteful that is in the mouth of a stranger to our pursuits. They laugh at your clumsy imitations, or are puzzled by your strange misconceptions. It is painful to see the forlorn attempts which are made to raise the condition of this noble race of men, to read the sad nonsense that is perpetrated for their benefit. If you wish really to benefit them, it must be by raising their characters as men; and to do this, you must address them as such, irrespectively of the technicalities of their calling.