The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 11, September, 1858

How the old men envy us! They wisely preclude us from their world, since they know how it would bereave us of all that makes our state so full of freedom and delight, and to them so suggestive of the past.

  "I remember, when I think,  That my youth was half divine."

Thus the great have ever chosen young men for companions. Was it not Plato who wished he were the heavens, that he might look down upon his young companion with a thousand eyes? Thus they do homage to the gift of youth, and by its presence contrive to nestle into its buoyant and pure existence. If youth will enjoy itself virtuously with gymnastics, with music, with friendship, with poetry, there will come no hours of lamentation and repentance. They attend the imbecile and thoughtless. These halcyon days will return to temper and grace the period of old age; as upon the ripened peach reappear the hues of its early blossoms.

Among his seniors the youth perceives a certain jealousy of him. They pretend that all has been said and done. They awe him with their great names. He has to learn, that, though Jew and Greek have spoken, nevertheless he must reiterate and interpret to his own people and generation. Perchance in the process something new will likewise be added. Many things still wait an observer. Still is there infinite hope and expectation, which youth must realize. In war, in peace, in politics, in books, all eyes are turned to behold the rising of his star.

Reluctantly does the youth yield to the claims of moderation and reserve. Abandonment to an object has hitherto been his highest wisdom. But in the pursuit of the most heroic friendship, or the most sovereign passion, the youth discovers that a certain continence is necessary. He cannot approach too closely; for that moment love is changed into disgust and hate. He would drink the nectar to the lees. This is one of Nature's limitations, and has many analogies; and he who would never see the bottom of any cup, and always be possessed with a divine hunger, must observe them. I remember how it piqued my childish curiosity that the moon seemed always to retreat when I ran towards her, and to pursue when I fled. It was a very significant symbol. Stand a little apart, and things of their own accord will come more than half-way. Nobody ever goes to meet a loafer. Self-centred, domesticated persons attract. What would be the value of the heavens, if we could bring the stars into our lap? They cannot be approached or appropriated. Upon the highest mountain the horizon sinks you in a valley, and far aloft in night and mystery gleam the retreating stars.

It must be remembered that indirect vision is much more delicate than direct. Looking askance, with a certain oblique and upward glance, constitutes the art and power of the poet; for so a gentle invitation is offered the imagination to contribute its aid. We see clearest when the eye is elongated and slightly curtained. Persons with round, protuberant eyes are obliged to reduce their superfluous visual power by artificial means. We subordinate the external organ in order to liberate the inner eye of the mind. The musing, pensive Hindoos, who have elongated eyes, look through the surface of things to their essence, and call the world Illusion,—the illusory energy of Vishnu.

There is a vulgar trick of wishing to touch everything. But the greatest caution is necessary, in beholding a statue or painting, not to draw too near; and it is thus with every other beautiful thing. Nature secretly writes, Hands off!—and men do but translate her hieroglyph in their galleries and museums. The sense of touch is only a provision against the loss of sight and hearing. We should cultivate these, until, like the Scandinavian Heimdal, we can hear the trees and the flowers grow, and see with Heraclitus the breathing of the stars.

The youth once loved Nature after this somewhat gross and material fashion, for the berries she gave him, the flowers she wove in his hair, and the brooks that drove his mimic mills. He chased the butterfly, he climbed the trees, he would stand in the rain, paint his cheeks with berry juice, dabble in the mud, and nothing was secure from his prying fingers and curious eyes. He must touch and taste of everything, and know every secret. But it eluded him; and he lay down from his giddy chase, tired and unsatisfied, yet still anticipating that the morning would reveal all. Later he approaches men and things in a different mood. Experience has taught him so much. He begins to feel the use of the past. Memory renders many present advantages as nothing, and there is a rare and peculiar value to every reminiscence that connects him with the years from which he is so fast receding. The bower which his own hands wove from birch-trees and interwove with green brakes, where at the noon-time he was wont to retreat from the hot school-house, with the little maid of his choice, and beguile the hour so happily, suggests a spell and charm to preserve him in perpetual childhood.

* * * * *

PINTAL

In San Francisco, in 1849, on Dupont Street near Washington, a wretched tent, patched together from mildewed and weather-worn sails, was pitched on a hill-side lot, unsightly with sand and thorny bushes, filthy cast-aways of clothing, worn-out boots, and broken bottles. The forlorn loneliness of this poor abode, and the perfection of its Californianness, in all the circumstances of exposure, frailness, destitution, and dirt, were enough of themselves to make it an object of interest to the not-too-busy passer; yet, to complete its pitiful picturesqueness, Pathos had bestowed a case of miniatures and a beautiful child. Beside the entrance of the tent a rough shingle was fastened to the canvas, and against this hung an unpainted picture-frame of pine, in humble counterpart of those gilded rosewood signs which, at the doors of Daguerreotype galleries, display fancy "specimens" to the goers-to-and-fro of Broadway. Attracted by an object so novel in San Francisco then, I paused one morning, in my walk officeward from the "Anglo-Saxon Dining-Saloon," to examine it.

There were six of them,—six dainty miniature portraits on ivory, elaborately finished, and full of the finest marks of talent. The whole were seemingly reproductions of but two heads, a lady's and a child's,—the lady well fitted to be the mother of the child, which might well have been divine. There were three studies of each; each was presented in three characters, chosen as by an artist possessed of a sentiment of sadness, some touching reminiscence.

In one picture, the lady—evidently English, a pensive blonde, with large and most sweet blue eyes curtained by the longest lashes, regular and refined features suggestive of pure blood, budding lips full of sensibility, a chin and brow that showed intellect as well as lineage, and cheeks touched with the young rose's tint—was as a beautiful debutante, the flower of rich drawing-rooms, in her first season: one white moss-rosebud in her smoothly-braided hair; her dimpled, round, white shoulders left to their own adornment; and for jewels, only one opal on her ripening bosom;—as much of her dress as was shown was the simple white bodice of pure maidenhood.

In the next, she had passed an interval of trial, for her courage, her patience, and her pride,—a very few years, perhaps, but enough to bestow that haughty, defiant glance, and fix those matchless features in an almost sneer. No longer was her fair head bowed, her eyes downcast, in shrinking diffidence; but erect and commanding, she looked some tyranny, or insolence, or malice, in the face, to look it down. Jewels encircled her brow, and a bouquet of pearls was happy on her fuller bosom.

Still a few years further on,—and how changed! "So have I seen a rose," says that Shakspeare of the pulpit, old Jeremy Taylor, when it has "bowed the head and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it has fallen into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." Alas, Farewell, and Nevermore sighed from those hollow cheeks, those woebegone eyes, those pallid lips, that willow-like long hair, and the sad vesture of the forsaken Dido.

So with the child. At first, a rosy, careless, curly-pate of three years or so,—wonder-eyed and eager, all spring and joyance, and beautiful as Love.

Then pale and pain-fretted, heavy-eyed and weary, feebly half-lying in a great chair, still,—an unheeded locket scarce held by his thin fingers, his forehead wrinkled with cruel twinges, the sweet bowed lines of his lips twisted in whimpering puckers, the curls upon his vein-traced temples unnaturally bright, as with clamminess,—a painful picture for a mother's eyes!

But not tragic, like the last; for there the boy had grown. Nine years had deepened for his clustered curls their hue of golden brown, and set a seal of anxious thought upon the cold, pale surface of his intellectual brow, and traced his mouth about with lines of a martyr's resignation, and filled his profound eyes, dim as violets, with foreboding speculation, making the lad seem a seer of his own sad fate. Here, thought I, if I mistake not, is another melancholy chapter in this San Franciscan romance. This painter learned his art of Sorrow, and pitiless Experience has bestowed his style; he shall be for my finding-out.

Home-sickness had marked me for its own one day. I sat alone in my rude little office, conning over again for the hundredth time strange chapters of a waif's experience,—reproducing auld-lang-syne, with all its thronged streets and lonely forest-paths, its old familiar faces, talks, and songs,—ingathering there, in the name of Love or Friendship, forms that were dim and voices that were echoes; and many an "alas," and "too late," and "it might have been," they brought along with them.

  "Let this remembrance comfort me,—that when  My heart seemed bursting,—like a restless wave  That, swollen with fearful longing for the shore,  Throws its strong life on the imagined bliss  Of finding peace and undisturbed calm,—  It fell on rocks and broke in many tears.  "Else could I bear, on all days of the year,—  Not now alone, this gentle summer night,  When scythes are busy in the headed grass,  And the full moon warms me to thoughtfulness,—  This voice that haunts the desert of my soul:  'It might have been!' Alas! 'It might have been!'"

I drew from my battered, weather-beaten sea-box sad store of old letters, bethumbed and soiled,—an accusation in every one of them, and small hope of forgiveness, save what the gentle dead might render. There were pretty little portraits, too.—Ah, well! I put them back, —a frown, or a shadow of reproachful sadness, on the picture of a once loving and approving face is the hardest bitterness to bide, the self-unsparing wanderer can know. Therefore I would fain let these faces be turned from me,—all save one, a merry minx of maidenhood, of careless heart, and laughing lips, and somewhat naughty eyes. It was a steel engraving, not of the finest, torn from some Book of Beauty, or other silly-sentimental keepsake of the literary catch-penny class, brought all the way from home, and tenderly saved for the sake of its strange by-chance resemblance to a smart little lionne I had known in Virginia, in the days when smart little lionnes made me a sort of puppy Cumming. The picture, unframed, and exposed to all the chances of rough travel, had partaken of my share of foul weather and coarse handling, and been spotted and smutched, and creased and torn, and every way defaced. I had often wished that I might have a pretty painting made from it, before it should be spoiled past copying. So here, I thought, shall be my introduction to my fly-in-amber artist, of the seedy tent and the romantic miniatures. So pocketing my picture, I hied me forthwith to Dupont Street.

The tent seemed quite deserted. At first, I feared my rare bird had flitted; I shook the bit of flying-jib that answered for a door, and called to any one within, more than once, before an inmate stirred. Then, so quietly that I had not heard his approach, a lad, of ten perhaps, came to the entrance, and, timidly peering up into my face, asked, "Is it my father you wish to see, Sir?"

How beautiful! how graceful! with what touching sweetness of voice! how intellectual his expression, and how well-bred his air!—plainly a gentleman's son, and the son of no common gentleman! Instinctively I drew back a pace to compare him with the child of the "specimens." Unquestionably the same,—there were the superior brow, the richly clustered curls of golden brown, the painful lips, and the foreboding eyes.

"If your father painted these pretty pictures, my boy,—yes, I would be glad to see him, if he is within."

"He is not here at present, Sir; he went with my mother to the ship, to bring away our things. But it is quite a long while since they went; and I think they will return presently. Take a seat, Sir, please."

I accepted the stool he offered,—a canvas one, made to "unship" and fold together,—such a patent accommodation for tired "hurdies" as amateur sketchers and promiscuous lovers of the picturesque in landscape take with them on excursions. My accustomed eye took in at a glance the poor furniture of that very Californian make-shift of a shelter for fortune-seeking heads. There were chests, boxes, and trunks, the usual complement, bestowed in every corner, as they could best be got out of the way,—a small, rough table, on temporary legs, and made, like the seats, to unship and be stowed,—several other of the same canvas stools,—a battered chest of drawers, at present doing the duty of a cupboard,—some kitchen utensils, and a few articles of table furniture of the plainest delft. As for the kitchen, I had noticed, as I passed, a portable furnace for charcoal, without, and at the rear of the tent; it was plain they did their cooking in the open air. On one side of the entrance, and near the top of the tent, a small square had been cut from the canvas, and the sides framed with slats of wood, making a sort of Rembrandtish skylight, through which some scanty rays of barbaric glory fell on an easel, with its palette, brushes, and paints. A canvas framed, on which the ground had been laid, and the outline of a head already traced, was mounted on the easel; other such frames, as if of finished portraits with their faces turned to the wall, stood on the earthen floor, supported by a strip of wood tacked to the tent-cloth near the bottom. On the floor, at the foot of the easel, lay an artist's sketch-book. A part of the tent behind was divided off from what, by way of melancholy jest, I may call the reception-room, or the studio, by a rope stretched across, from which were suspended a blanket, a travelling shawl, and a voluminous, and evidently costly, Spanish cloak. Protruding beyond the edge of this extemporaneous screen, I could see the footposts of an iron bedstead, and the end of a large poncho, which served for a counterpane.

"Will you amuse yourself with this sketch-book, please," said the pretty lad, "till my father comes?"

"With pleasure, my boy,—if you are sure your father will not object."

"Oh, no, indeed, Sir! My father has told me I must always entertain any gentlemen who may call when he is out,—that is, if he is to return soon; and any one may look at this book;—it is only his portfolio, in which he sketches whatever new or pretty things we see on our travels; but there are some very nice pictures in it,—landscapes, and houses, and people."

"Have you travelled much, then?"

"Oh, yes! we have been travelling ever since I can remember; we have been far, and seen a great many strange sights, and some such queer people!—There! that is our shepherd in Australia; isn't he funny? his name was Dirk. I tied that blue ribbon round his straw hat, that seems big enough for an umbrella. He looks as if he were laughing, doesn't he? That's because I was there when my father sketched him; and he made such droll faces, with his brown skin and his great grizzly moustaches, when father told him he must make up a pleasant expression, that it set me laughing,—for my father said he looked like a Cape lion making love; and then Dirk would laugh too, and spoil his pleasant expression; and father would scold; and it was so funny! I loved Dirk very much, he was so good to me; he gave me a tame kangaroo, and a black swan, and taught me to throw the boomerang; and once, when he went to Sydney, he spent ever so much money to buy me a silver bell for Lipse, my yellow lamb. I wonder if Dirk is living yet? Do you think he is dead, Sir? I should be very much grieved, if he were; for I promised I would come back to see him when I am a man."

–"That is Dolores,—dear old Dolores! Isn't she fat?"

"Yes, and good, too, I should think, from the kind face she has. Who was Dolores?"

"Ah! you never saw Dolores, did you? And you never heard her sing. She was my Chilena nurse in Valparaiso; and she had a mother—oh, so very old!—who lived in Santiago. We went once to see her; the other Santiago—that was Dolores's son—drove us there in the veloche. Wasn't it curious, his name should be the same as the city's? But he was a bad boy, Santiago,—so mischievous! such a scamp! Father had to whip him many times; and once the vigilantes took him up, and would have put him in the chain-gang, for cutting an American sailor with a knife, in the Calle de San Francisco, if father had not paid five ounces, and become security for his good behavior. But he ran away, after all, and went as a common sailor in a nasty guano ship. Dolores cried very much, and it was long before she would sing for me again. Oh, she did know such delightful songs!—Mi Niña, and Yo tengo Ojos Negros, and

  "'No quiero, no quiero casarme;  Es mejor, es mejor soltera!'"

And the delightful little fellow merrily piped the whole of that "song of pleasant glee," one of the most melodious and sauciest bits of lyric coquetry to be found in Spanish.

"Ah," said he, "but I cannot sing it half so well as Dolores. She had a beautiful guitar, with a blue ribbon, that her sweetheart gave her before I was born, when she was young and very pretty;—he brought it all the way from Acapulco."

–"And that pretty girl is Juanita; she sold pine-apples and grapes in the Almendral, and every night she would go with her guitar—it was a very nice one, but did not cost near so much money as Dolores's—and sing to the American gentlemen in the Star Hotel. My mother said she was a naughty person, and that she did not dare tell where she got her gold cross and those jet ear-rings. But I liked her very much, for all that; and I'm sure she would not steal, for she used to give me a fresh pine-apple every morning; and whenever her brother José came down from Casa Blanca with the mules and the pisco, she sent me a large melon and some lovely roses."

–"That is the house we lived in at Baltimore. It was painted white, and there was a paling in front, and a dooryard with grass. We had some honeysuckles on the porch;—there they are, and there's the grape-vine. I had a dog-house, too, made to look like a church, and my father promised to buy me a Newfoundland dog,—one of those great hairy fellows, with brass collars, you know, that you can ride on,—when he had sold a great many pictures, and made his fortune. But we did not make our fortune in Baltimore, and I never got my dog; so we came here to Tom Tiddler's ground, to pick up gold and silver. When we are fixed, and get a new tent, my father is going to give me a little spade and a cradle, to dig gold enough to buy a Newfoundland dog with, and then I shall borrow a saw and make a dog-house, like the one I had in Baltimore, out of that green chest. Charley Saunders lived in that next house in the picture, and he had a martin-box, with a steeple to it; but his father gave fencing-lessons, and was very rich."

As the intelligent little fellow ran on with his pretty prattle, I was diligently pursuing the lady and child of the specimens through the sketches. On every leaf I encountered them, ever changing, yet always the same. Here was the child by my side,—unquestionably the same; though now I looked in vain for the anxious mouth and the foreboding eyes in his face of careless, hopeful urchinhood. But who was the other?—his mother, no doubt; and yet no trace of resemblance.

"And tell me, who is this beautiful lady, my lad,—here, and here, and here, and here again? You see I recognize her always,—so lovely, and so gentle-looking. Your mother?"

"Oh, no, Sir!" and he laughed,—"my mother is very different from that. That is nobody,—only a fancy sketch."

"Only a fancy sketch!" So, then, I thought, my pretty entertainer, confiding and communicative as you are, it is plain there are some things you do not know, or will not tell.

"She is not any one we ever saw;—she never lived. My father made her out of his own head, as I make stories sometimes; or he dreamed her, or saw her in the fire. But he is very fond of her, I suppose, because he made her himself,—just as I think my own stories prettier than any true ones; and he's always drawing her, and drawing her, and drawing her. I love her, too, very much,—she looks so natural, and has such nice ways. Isn't it strange my father—but he's so clever with his pencil and brushes!—should be able to invent the Lady Angelica? —that's her name. But my mother does not like her at all, and gets out of patience with my father for painting so many of her. Mamma says she has a stuck-up expression,—such a funny word, 'stuck-up'!—and does not look like a lady. Once I told mamma I was sure she was only jealous, and she grew very angry, and made me cry; so now I never speak of Lady Angelica before her. What makes me think my father must have dreamed her is that I dreamed her once myself. I thought she came to me in such a splendid dress, and told me that she was not only a live lady, but my own mother, and that mamma was– Hush! This is my father, Sir."

Wonderful! how the lad had changed!—like a phantom, the thoughtless prattler was gone in a moment, and in his place stood the seer-boy of the picture, the profound foreboding eyes fixed anxiously, earnestly, on the singular man who at that moment entered: a singularly small man, cheaply but tidily attired in black; even his shoes polished,—a rare and dandyish indulgence in San Francisco, before the French bootblacks inaugurated the sumptuary vanity of Day and Martin's lustre on the stoop of the California Exchange, and made it a necessity no less than diurnal ablutions; a well-preserved English hat on his head, which, when he with a somewhat formal air removed it, discovered thin black locks, beginning to part company with the crown of his head. In his large, brown eyes an expression of moving melancholy was established; a nervous tremulousness almost twitched his refined lips, which, to my surprise, were not concealed by the universal moustache,—indeed, the smooth chin and symmetrically trimmed mutton-chop whiskers, in the orthodox English mode, showed that the man shaved. His nose, slightly aquiline, was delicately cut, and his nostrils fine; and he had small feet and hands, the latter remarkably white and tender. As he stood before me, he was never at rest for an instant, but changed his support from one leg to the other,—they were slight as a young boy's,—and fumbled, as it were, with his feet; as I have seen a distinguished medical lecturer, of Boston, gesticulate with his toes. He played much with his whiskers, too, and his fingers were often in his hair—as a fidgety and vulgar man would bite his nails. From all of which I gathered that my new acquaintance was an intensely nervous person,—very sensitive, of course, and no doubt irritable.

He was accompanied by a—female, much taller than he, and as stalwart as dear woman can be; an especially common-looking person, bungled as to her dress, which was tawdry-fine, unseasonable for the place as well as time, inappropriate to herself, inharmonious in its composition, and every way most vilely put on; a clumsy and, as I presently perceived, a loud person, whose face, still showing traces of the coarse but decided beauty it must once have possessed, fell far short of compensating for the complete gracelessness of her presence.

Her eyes had a bibulous quality, and the bright redness of her nose vied vulgarly with the rusty redness of her cheeks. I suspected her complexion of potations, but charitably let it off with—beer; for she was, at first glance, English. As she jerked off her flaunting bonnet, and dragged off her loud shawl, saluting me, as she did so, with an overdone obeisance, she said, "This San Fanfrisko"—why would she, how could she, always twist the decent name of the metropolis of the Pacific into such an absurd shape?—"was a norrid 'ole; she happealed to the gentleman,"—meaning me,—"didn't 'e find it a norrid 'ole, habsolutely hawful?" And then she went clattering among tinware and crockery, and snubbed the gentlemanly boy in a sort of tender Billingsgate.