The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 56, June, 1862

But a far stronger point is the power of portraiture. Seraphael having been identified, people turned their attention to the other cipher. Disregarding the orchestral similitude of sound in his name, which, by the way, nobody pronounces as Aronach instructed, they chose to infer that Charles Auchester himself was the Herr Joachim, that Starwood Burney stood for Sterndale Bennett, that Diamid Albany meant Disraeli, that Zelter figured as Aronach, and that Jenny Lind, of whom Mendelssohn himself said there would not in a whole century be born another being so gifted, and whom the Italians, those lovers of fair pseudonymes, called "La Benedetta," is no other than Clara Benette. But these are trivial, compared with Rodomant and Porphyro. It was daring enough, when Beckendorf mimicked Prince Metternich; but to undertake and to contrast Louis Napoleon and Beethoven, without belittling either, pales every other performance. They tower before us grand and immutable as if cast in bronze, and so veritable that they throw shadows; the prison-gloom is sealed on Porphyro's face,—power and purpose indomitable; just as the "gruesome Emperor" is to-day, we find him in that book,—dark in the midst of his glory, as enduring as a Ninevite sculpture, strong and inscrutable as the Sphinx. But his heights topple over with this world's decline, while the other builds for the eternal aeons. Rodomant,—did one fail to find his identity, they would yet recognize him in those old prints, the listening head bent forwards, the features like discords melting info chords; it is hard to tell how such strength was given in such slight sentences,—but from the time when he contemptuously tossed out his tune-fooleries, through the hour when with moonlight fancies "a serene ecstatic serenade was rippling silently beneath his pen," to that when the organ burst upon his ear in thunders quenchless and everlasting as the sea's, he is still Beethoven, gigantic in pride, purity, and passion. "I dream now," said Rodomant; "like the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, so stir my shadows, dim shapes of sound, across the chaos of my fathomless intention." This "Rumour" has never been reprinted in America; it will, then, be excusable to give here a scene which Is indeed its climax.

"A spiritual nature has for its highest and hardest temptation a disposition to outrage, precedent,—sometimes propriety. It is sure of itself—very likely—but it may endanger the machinery, moral or tangible, which it employs for agent. Again, who has not dreamed of a dream? who has not remembered dimly what yet experience contradicts? who does not confound fact and imagination, to the damage of his reputation for truth?

"Rodomant was in a lawless frame, a frame he had fixed on himself by his outrage on precedent; his subsequent excitement had enchanted him more wildly, and any number of imps and elves were ready to rush at his silent word from the caverns of his haunted brain. Again, he felt he must spend his energy, his long idleness reacted on a sudden in prodigious strength of intellect, it stirred like a giant refreshed. Long time ago he had dreamed—he had entirely forgotten it was a fact that he had been told—that, if the whole force of that organ were put out, the result would be tremendous. He had also dreamed—that is, been assured—that there was a law made to the purpose that the whole force of the organ was never to be employed. The law had never been broken, except once;—but there his memories waxed dim and indistinct; he was at the mercy of his own volition, which resolved on recalling nothing that could dissuade him from his rash and forbidden longing. Unknown to himself, perhaps the failure of his design to escape, of which the princess had assured him, drove him to the crisis of a more desperate endeavor. But, whether it was so or not, he was unconscious of it,—so far innocent. He sat down, believing himself alone…. 'Softly, softly,' mocked his whisper—to himself,—and he touched alone the whispering reeds, Adelaïda held her breath, and chid the beating of her heart, which seemed louder than the mellow pulse that throbbed in tune above. The symphony that followed fell like a mighty universal hush, through which the clarionet-stop chanted, unuttered but articulate,—'Give to us peace.' Then the hush dissolved into a sea of sighs: 'Peace, peace!' they yearned, and the mild deep diapason muttered, 'Peace.' She, the one listener, felt, as it were, her brain fill soft with tears, her eyes rained them, and her heart, whose pulses had dropped as calm as dew, echoed the peaceful longing of the whole heart of humanity. A longing as peaceful in its expression as the peace it longed for; the creation's travail seemed spent to the edge of joy.

"Suddenly, as light swept chaos, this peaceful fancy was disrupted,—her heart ravished from its rest, its calm torn from it. Down went the pedal which forced the whole first organ out at once, and as if shouted by hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna. The mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace could be so glorious as that praise; and vast as was the volume of sound, the hands that invoked it had it so completely under control—voluntary control as yet—that it did not swamp her sense; her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves towards the measureless immensity of music at its source. To reach that centre without a circle,—that perfection which imperfection shadows not,—that unborn, undying principle, which art tries humbly, falteringly, to illustrate,—was never given to man on earth; and tries he to attain it, some fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the warning, fastens to his soul for life.

"The princess had bowed her head, and the soft and plenteous waters of her eyes had dried like dew under the midsummer sun; yet still she closed her eyes, for her brain felt fixed and alight with a nameless awe, such as passion lends presentiment.

"Suddenly, in the words of Albericus, there burst overhead a noise like the roaring of 'enormous artificial golden lions,'—that was the drum: less, in this instance, like smitten parchment than the crackling roll of clouds that embrace in thunder. The noise amazed himself,—yet Rodomant exulted in it, his audacity expanded with it, broke down the last barrier of reason. He added stop after stop,—at the last and sixtieth stop, he unfettered the whole volume of the wind. That instant was a blast, not to speak irreverently, which sounded like the crack of doom. To her standing stricken underneath, it seemed to explode somewhere in the roof with a shock beyond all artillery,—to tear up the ground under her feet, like the spasm of an earthquake,—to rend the walls, like lightning's electric finger; and to shriek in her ringing brain the advent of some implacable and dreadful judgment, but not the doom of all men,—only one, which doom, alas! she felt might be also hers in his.

"All men and women within a mile had heard the shock, or rather felt it, and interpreted it in various ways. Only the prince himself—who was standing on the terrace, and had distinctly perceived the rich vibration of the strong, but calm, Hosanna—interpreted it rightly and directly; more than that, his animal sagacity told him it was Rodomant, who, having amused himself, was now indulging the same individual….

"To Adelaïda there was something more terrible in the succeeding silence than in the shock of sound; it had ceased directly, died first into a discordant groan, which, rising to a scream, was still. She listened intensely: there was no fall of rattling fragments, the vibration had been insufficient, or not prolonged enough, to injure the window,—that had been her first, chief fear. This removed, however, she felt doubly, desperately anxious. Why did he not come down, or speak, or stir? The men employed to feed the monstrous machine with wind had all rushed away together by the back-ladder through which they entered: hence the cause of the shrieking groan and silence. He was there alone,—for he knew not that she was there. Oh that he would give some sign!

"In a few minutes a sign was given, but not from him. The princess heard the grinding of the immense door near the altar; it was opened; steps entered hurriedly. She heard, next instant, her father's voice,—impregnated with icy ire, low with smothered hatred, distinct with the only purpose he ever entertained,—punishment. She flew, with feet that gave no echo, up the stair on her side of the lobby. Rodomant was sitting dead-still, with his face in his hands; they looked rigid; the veins in his forehead, as it showed above his hands, were swollen and stood out, but colorless as the keys that stretched beneath. His calmness chilled her blood. She thought him dead, and all within her that lived seemed to pass out of her in the will, nay, the power also, to restore him. She grasped his arm. He was not dead, then, for he sighed,—an awful sigh; it shook him like a light reed in the tempest, he shuddered from head to foot; he leaned towards her, as if about to faint, but never removed his close-locked hands from his eyes…. She had only clasped his arm before; as hand met hand, or touch thrilled touch, he shivered, his grasping fingers relaxed in their hold on each other, but closed on hers…. She waited long,—she listened to his breathing, intermittent with tearless sobs. At last he gasped violently, a cold tear dropped on her hand, and he thrust it rudely from him.

"'God has taken my punishment into Hiss own hands: yet I defied not Him, only something made by man, and man himself.' He spoke loudly, yet in halting words, with gaps of silence between each phrase; then stared wildly round him, and clapped both his hands upon his ears,—withdrew them,—closed his ears with his fingers, then dropped his hands, and cast on her a glance that implored—that demanded—the whole pity of her heart. 'Have mercy!' were his words; 'I have lost my hearing, and it is forever!'"

The discrimination of character exercised by Miss Sheppard is very wonderful. Many as are the figures on her stage, they are never repeated, and they are all as separate, as finely edged and bevelled, as gems. The people grow under her pen,—whether you take Auchester, developing so when first thrown on himself in Germany, and becoming at length the rare type of manhood which he presents,—or the one change wrought by years in Miss Benette, just the addition of something that would have been impossible in any child, a deepened sweetness, that completest touch of the perfect woman, "like perfume from unseen flowers, diffusing itself when the wind awakens, while we know neither whence the windy fragrance comes nor whither it flows." Perhaps this characterization is most noticeable in "Counterparts," which she called her small party of opposing temperaments: Salome, so gracious; Rose, like the spirit of a sunbeam; Sarona, so keen and incisive, his passion confronting Bernard's sweetness; and Cecilia, who, it is easy to conjecture, wrote the book. I have always fancied that some mystic trine was chorded by three beings who, with all their separate gifts, possessed an equal power and sweetness,—Raphael, Shelley, and Mendelssohn. And perhaps the same occurred more emphatically to Miss Sheppard, for after Seraphael she drew Bernard,—Bernard, who is exceeded by none in the whole range of romance. "Counterparts" is a novel of ideal life; it is the land of one's dreams and one's delights; its dwellers are more real to us than the men and women into whose eyes we look upon the street, they haunt us and enrapture us, they breathe about us an atmosphere of gentle and delicious melancholy like the soft azure haze spread over meadow and hills by the faint south-wind. With fresh incident on every leaf, with a charm in every scene, its spell is enthralling, and its chapters are enchanted. There is no fault in it; nothing can be more perfect, nothing more beautiful. One may put "Consuelo" side by side with "Charles Auchester," but what novel in the wide world deserves a place by "Counterparts"? It was worth having lived, to have once thrown broadcast such handfuls of beauty.

Between the publication of Miss Sheppard's second book and "Rumour" two others were issued,—"Beatrice Reynolds" and "The Double Coronet,"—for which one wishes there were some younger sister, some Acton or Ellis, to whom to impute them,—evidently the result of illness, weariness, and physical weakness, perhaps wrung from her by inexorable necessity, but which should never have been written. In the last, in spite of its very Radcliffean air, there are truly terrible things, as Gutilyn and his green-eyed child bear witness; but the other reminds one, as nearly as a modern book may do so, of no less a model than the redoubtable "Thaddeus of Warsaw!" But Miss Sheppard had already written all that at present there was to say; rest was imperative till the intermittent springs again overflowed. "Rumour," which approached the old excellence, was no result of a soul's ardor,—merely very choice work. Notwithstanding, everything is precious that filters through such a medium, and in these three publications she found opportunity for expressing many a conviction and for weaving many a fancy; moreover, she was afraid of no one, and never minced matters, therefore they are interspersed with criticisms: she praised Charlotte Bronté, condemned George Sand, ridiculed Chopin, reproved Elizabeth Browning, and satirized "Punch." In her last book there was a great, but scarcely a good change of style, she having been obliged by its thinness to pepper the page with Italics; still these are only marks of a period of transition, and in spite of them the book is priceless. Judging from internal evidence, she here appears to have frequented more society, and the contact of this carelessly marrying world with her own pure perception of right struck the spark which kindled into "Almost a Heroine." Here awakens again that graceful humor which is the infallible sign of health, and which was so lightly inwrought through the earlier volumes. Reading it over, one is struck with its earnestness, its truth and noble courage,—one feels that lofty social novels, which might have infused life and principle and beauty into the mass of custom, were promised in this, and are now no longer a possibility. And herein are the readers of this magazine especially affected; since there is no reason to suppose that the work promised and begun by her for these pages would not have been the peer of her best production, some bold and beautiful elucidation of one of the many mysteries in life; for the lack of appreciation in England was no longer to concern her, and, unshackled and unrestrained, she could feel herself surrounded by the genial atmosphere of loving listeners. But perhaps it was not lawful that she should further impart these great secrets which she had learned. "I sometimes think," she murmurs, "when women try to rise too high either in their deeds or their desires, that the spirit which bade them so rise sinks back beneath the weakness of their earthly constitution, and never appeals again,—or else that the spirit, being too strong, does away with the mortal altogether,—they die, or rather they live again." It was like forecasting her own horoscope. All suffering seems to have descended upon her,—and there are some natures whose power of enjoyment, so infinite, yet so deep as to be hidden, is balanced only by as infinite a power to endure; she learned anew, as she says, and intensely, "what a long dream of misery is life from which health's bloom has been brushed,—that irreparable bloom,—and how far more terrible is the doom of those in whom the nerve-life has been untoned." Sun-stroke and fever, vibration between opiates at night and tonics at noon,—but the flame was too strong to fan away lightly, it must burn itself out, the spirit was too quenchless,—pain, wretchedness, exhaustion. On one of those delicious days that came in the middle of this year's April,—warmth and fresh earth-smells breathing all about,—the wide sprays of the lofty boughs lying tinged in rosy purple, a web-like tracery upon the sky whose azure was divine,—the air itself lucid and mellow, as if some star had been dissolved within it,—on such a day the little foreign letter came, telling that at length balm had dropped upon the weary eyelids,—Elizabeth Sheppard was dead.

But in the midst of regret,—since all lovely examples lend their strength, since they give such grace even to the stern facts of suffering and death, and since there are too few such records on Heaven's scroll,—be glad to know that for every throb of anguish, for every swooning lapse of pain, there was one beside her with tenderest hands, most careful eyes, most yearning and revering heart,—one into whose sacred grief our intrusion is denied, but the remembrance of whose long and deep devotion shall endure while there are any to tell how Severn watched the Roman death-bed of Keats!

It is impossible to estimate our loss, because it draws upon infinitude; there was so much growth yet possible to this soul; to all that she was not she might yet have enlarged; and while at first her audience had limits, she would in a calm and prosperous future have become that which she herself described in saying that a really vast genius who is as vast an artist will affect all classes, "touch even the uninitiated with trembling and delight, and penetrate even the ignorant with strong, if transient spell, as the galvanic energy binds each and all who embrace in the chain-circle of grasping hands, in the shock of perfect sympathy." Nevertheless, she has served Art incalculably,—Art, which is the interpretation of God in Nature. And if, as she believed, in spiritual things Beauty is the gage of immortality, the pledge may yet be redeemed on earth, ever forbidding her memory to die.

ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862

  When first I saw our banner wave    Above the nation's council-hall,    I heard beneath its marble wall  The clanking fetters of the slave!  In the foul market-place I stood,    And saw the Christian mother sold,    And childhood with its locks of gold,  Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood.  I shut my eyes, I held my breath,    And, smothering down the wrath and shame    That set my Northern blood aflame,  Stood silent—where to speak was death.  Beside me gloomed the prison-cell    Where wasted one in slow decline    For uttering simple words of mine,  And loving freedom all too well.  The flag that floated from the dome    Flapped menace in the morning air;    I stood, a perilled stranger, where  The human broker made his home.  For crime was virtue: Gown and Sword    And Law their threefold sanction gave,    And to the quarry of the slave  Went hawking with our symbol-bird.  On the oppressor's side was power;    And yet I knew that every wrong,    However old, however strong,  But waited God's avenging hour.  I knew that truth would crush the lie,—    Somehow, sometime, the end would be;    Yet scarcely dared I hope to see  The triumph with my mortal eye.  But now I see it! In the sun    A free flag floats from yonder dome,    And at the nation's hearth and home  The justice long delayed is done.  Not as we hoped, in calm of prayer,    The message of deliverance comes,    But heralded by roll of drums  On waves of battle-troubled air!—  'Midst sounds that madden and appall,    The song that Bethlehem's shepherds knew!—    The harp of David melting through  The demon-agonies of Saul!  Not as we hoped;—but what are we?    Above our broken dreams and plans    God lays, with wiser hand than man's,  The corner-stones of liberty.  I cavil not with Him: the voice    That freedom's blessed gospel tells    Is sweet to me as silver bells,  Rejoicing!—yea, I will rejoice!  Dear friends still toiling in the sun,—    Ye dearer ones who, gone before,    Are watching from the eternal shore  The slow work by your hands begun,—  Rejoice with me! The chastening rod    Blossoms with love; the furnace heat    Grows cool beneath His blessed feet  Whose form is as the Son of God!  Rejoice! Our Marah's bitter springs    Are sweetened; on our ground of grief    Rise day by day in strong relief  The prophecies of better things.  Rejoice in hope! The day and night    Are one with God, and one with them    Who see by faith the cloudy hem  Of Judgment fringed with Mercy's light!

PÈRE ANTOINE'S DATE-PALM

A LEGEND OF NEW ORLEANS

I

MISS BADEAU

It is useless to disguise the fact: Miss Badeau is a Rebel.

Mr. Beauregard's cannon had not done battering the walls of Sumter, when Miss Badeau was packed up, labelled, and sent North, where she has remained ever since in a sort of aromatic, rose-colored state of rebellion.

She is not one of your blood-thirsty Rebels, you know; she has the good sense to shrink with horror from the bare mention of those heathen who, at Manassas and elsewhere, wreaked their unmanly spite on the bodies of dead heroes: still she is a bitter little Rebel, with blonde hair, superb eyelashes, and two brothers in the Confederate service,—if I may be allowed to club the statements. When I look across the narrow strait of our boarding-house table, and observe what a handsome wretch she is, I begin to think that if Mr. Seward doesn't presently take her in charge, I shall.

The preceding paragraphs have little or nothing to do with what I am going to relate: they merely illustrate how wildly a fellow will write, when the eyelashes of a pretty woman get tangled with his pen. So I let them stand,—as a warning.

My exordium should have taken this shape:—

"I hope and trust," remarked Miss Badeau, in that remarkably scathing tone which she assumes in alluding to the U.S.V., "I hope and trust, that, when your five hundred thousand, more or less, men capture my New Orleans, they will have the good taste not to injure Père Antoine's Date-Palm."

"Not a hair of its head shall be touched," I replied, without having the faintest idea of what I was talking about.

"Ah! I hope not," she said.

There was a certain tenderness in her voice which struck me.

"Who is Père Antoine?" I ventured to ask. "And what is this tree that seems to interest you so?"

"I will tell you."

Then Miss Badeau told me the following legend, which I think worth writing down. If it should appear tame to the reader, it will be because I haven't a black ribbed-silk dress, and a strip of point-lace around my throat, like Miss Badeau; it will be because I haven't her eyes and lips and music to tell it with, confound me!

II

THE LEGEND

Near the levée (quay) and not far from the old French Cathedral, in New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, some thirty feet high, growing out in the open air as sturdily as if its roots were sucking sap from their native earth. Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Second Visit to the United States," mentions this exotic:—"The tree is seventy or eighty years old; for Père Antoine, a Roman Catholic priest, who died about twenty years ago, told Mr. Bringier that he planted it himself, when he was young. In his will he provided that they who succeeded to this lot of ground should forfeit it, if they cut down the palm."

Wishing to learn something of Père Antoine's history, Sir Charles Lyell made inquiries among the ancient Creole inhabitants of the faubourg. That the old priest, in his last days, became very much emaciated, that he walked about the streets like a mummy, that he gradually dried up, and finally blew away, was the meagre result of the tourist's investigations.

This is all that is generally known of Père Antoine. Miss Badeau's story clothes these bare facts.

When Père Antoine was a very young man, he had a friend whom he loved as he loved his eyes. Émile Jardin returned his passion, and the two, on account of their friendship, became the marvel of the city where they dwelt. One was never seen without the other; for they studied, walked, ate, and slept together.

Antoine and Émile were preparing to enter the Church; indeed, they had taken the preliminary steps, when a circumstance occurred which changed the color of their lives.

A foreign lady, from some far-off island in the Pacific, had a few months before moved into their neighborhood. The lady died suddenly, leaving a girl of sixteen or seventeen entirely friendless and unprovided for. The young men had been kind to the woman during her illness, and at her death, melting with pity at the forlorn situation of Anglice, the daughter, swore between themselves to love and watch over her as if she were their sister.