The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861

Under the volutes of this capital, and belting the top of the shaft, is a broad band of ornamentation, so happy and effectual in its uses, and so pure and perfect in its details, that a careful examination of it will, perhaps, afford us some knowledge of that spiritual essence in the antique Ideal out of which arose the silent and motionless Beauty of Greek marbles.

Here are brought together the sentiments of certain vegetable productions of Greece, but sentiments so entirely subordinated to the flexure of the abstract line, that their natural significance is almost lost in a new and more human meaning. Here is the Honeysuckle, the wildest, the most elastic and undulating of plants, under the severe discipline of order and artistic symmetry, assuming a strict and chaste propriety, a formal elegance, which render it at once monumental and dignified. The harmonious succession and repetition of parts, the graceful contrasts of curves and the strict poise and balance of them, their unity in variety, their entire subjection to aesthetic laws, their serious and emphatic earnestness of purpose,—these qualities combine in the creation of one of the purest works of Art ever conceived by the human mind. It is called the Ionic Anthemion, and suggests in its composition all the creative powers of Greece. Its value is not alone in the sensuous gratification of the eye, as with the Arabesque tangles of the Alhambra, but it is more especially in its complete intellectual expression, the evidence there is in it of thoughtfulness and judgment and deliberate care. The inventor studied not alone the plant, but his own spiritual relationships with it; and ere he made his interpretation, he considered how, in mythological traditions, each flower once bore a human shape, and how Daphne and Syrinx, Narcissus and Philemon, and those other idyllic beings, were eased of the stress of human emotions by becoming Laurels and Reeds and Daffodils and sturdy Oaks, and how human nature was thus diffused through all created things and was epigrammatically expressed in them.

"And he, with many feelings, many thoughts,Made up a meditative joy, and foundReligious meanings in the forms of Nature."

Like Faustus, he was permitted to look into her deep bosom, as into the bosom of a friend,—to find his brothers in the still wood, in the air, and in the water,—to see himself and the mysterious wonders of his own breast in the movements of the elements. And so he took Nature as a figurative exponent of humanity, and extracted the symbolic truths from her productions, and used them nobly in his Art.

Garbett, an English aesthetical writer, assures us that the Anthemion bears not the slightest resemblance to the Honeysuckle or any other plant, "being no representation of anything in Nature, but simply the necessary result of the complete and systematic attempt to combine unity and variety by the principle of gradation." But here he speaks like a geometer, and not like an artist. He seeks rather for the resemblance of form than the resemblance of spirit, and, failing to realize the object of his search, he endeavors to find a cause for this exquisite effect in pure reason. With equal perversity, Poe endeavored to persuade the public that his "Raven" was the result of mere aesthetical deductions!

And here the old burden of our song must once again be heard: If we would know the golden secret of the Greek Ideal, we must ourselves first learn how to love with the wisdom and chastity of old Hellenic passion. We must sacrifice Taste and Fancy and Prejudice, whose specious superficialities are embodied in the errors of modern Art,—we must sacrifice these at the shrine of the true Aphrodite; else the modern Procrustes will continue to stretch and torture Greek Lines on geometrical beds, and the aesthetic Pharisees around us will still crucify the Greek Ideal.

[To be continued.]

THE ROSE ENTHRONED

It melts and seethes, the chaos that shall growTo adamant beneath the house of life:In hissing hatred atoms clash, and goTo meet intenser strife.And ere that fever leaves the granite veins,Down thunders o'er the waste a torrid sea:Now Flood, now Fire, alternate despot reigns,—Immortal foes to be.Built by the warring elements, they rise,The massive earth-foundations, tier on tier,Where slimy monsters with unhuman eyesTheir hideous heads uprear.The building of the world is not for youThat glare upon each other, and devour:Race floating after race fades out of view,Till beauty springs from powerMeanwhile from crumbling rocks and shoals of deathShoots up rank verdure to the hidden sun;The gulfs are eddying to the vague, sweet breathOf richer life begun,—Richer and sweeter far than aught before,Though rooted in the grave of what has been.Unnumbered burials yet must heap Earth's floor,Ere she her heir shall win;And ever nobler lives and deaths more grandFor nourishment of that which is to come:While 'mid the ruins of the work she plannedSits Nature, blind and dumb.For whom or what she plans, she knows no moreThan any mother of her unborn child;Yet beautiful forewarnings murmur o'erHer desolations wild.Slowly the clamor and the clash subside:Earth's restlessness her patient hopes subdue:Mild oceans shoreward heave a pulse-like tide:The skies are veined with blue.And life works through the growing quietnessTo bring some darling mystery into form:Beauty her fairest Possible would dressIn colors pure and warm.Within the depths of palpitating seasA tender tint;—anon a line of graceSome lovely thought from its dull atom frees,The coming joy to trace;—A pencilled moss on tablets of the sand,Such as shall veil the unbudded maiden-blushOf beauty yet to gladden the green land;—A breathing, through the hush,Of some sealed perfume longing to burst outAnd give its prisoned rapture to the air;—A brooding hope, a promise through a doubtIs whispered everywhere.And, every dawn a shade more clear, the skiesA flush as from the heart of heaven disclose:Through earth and sea and air a message flies,Prophetic of the Rose.At last a morning comes of sunshine still,When not a dew-drop trembles on the grass;When all winds sleep, and every pool and rillIs like a burnished glassWhere a long-looked-for guest may lean to gaze;When day on earth rests royally,—a crownOf molten glory, flashing diamond rays,From heaven let lightly down.In golden silence, breathless, all things stand.What answer meets this questioning repose?A sudden gush of light and odors bland,And, lo! the Rose! the Rose!The birds break into canticles around;The winds lift Jubilate to the skies:For, twin-born with the rose on Eden-ground,Love blooms in human eyes.Life's marvellous queen-flower blossoms only so,In dust of low ideals rooted fast.Ever the Beautiful is moulded slowFrom truth in errors past.What fiery fields of Chaos must be won,What battling Titans rear themselves a tomb,What births and resurrections greet the sun,Before the rose can bloom!And of some wonder-blossom yet we dream,Whereof the time that is infolds the seed,—Some flower of light, to which the rose shall seemA fair and fragile weed.

A BAG OF MEAL

I often wonder what was the appearance of Saul's mother, when she walked up the narrow aisle of the meeting-house and presented her boy's brow for the mystic drops that sealed him with the name of Saul.

Saul isn't a common name. It is well,—for Saul is not an ordinary man,—and—Saul is my husband.

We came in the cool of an evening upon the brink of the swift river that flows past the village of Skylight.

The silence of a nearing experience brooded over my spirit; for Saul's home was a vast unknown to me, and I fain would have delayed awhile its coming.

I wonder if the primal motion of unknown powers, like electricity, for instance, is spiral. Have you ever seen it winding out of a pair of human eyes, knowing that every fresh coil was a spring of the soul, and felt it fixing itself deeper and deeper in your own, until you knew that you were held by it?

Perhaps not. I have: as when Saul turned to me in the cool of that evening, and drew my eyes away, by the power I have spoken of, from the West, where the orange of sunset was fading into twilight.

I have felt it otherwise. A horse was standing, surrounded by snow; the biting winds were cutting across the common, and the blanket with which he had been covered had fallen from him, and lay on the snow. He had turned his head toward the place where it lay, and his eyes were fixed upon it with such power, that, if that blanket had been endowed with one particle of sensation, it would have got up, and folded itself, without a murmur, around the shivering animal. Such a picture as it was! Just then, I would have been Rosa Bonheur; but being as I was, I couldn't be expected to blanket a horse in a crowded street, could I?

We were on the brink of the river. Saul drew my eyes away, and said,—

"You are unhappy, Lucy."

"No," I answered,—"not that."

"That does not content me. May I ask what troubles you?"

I aroused myself to reason. Saul is never satisfied, unless I assign a reason for any mood I am in.

"Saul!" I questioned, "why do the mortals that we call Poets write, and why do non-Poets, like ourselves, sigh over the melancholy days of autumn, and why are we silent and thoughtful every time we think enough of the setting sun to watch its going down?"

"Simply because the winter coming is cold and dreary, in the one case,—and in the other, there are several reasons. Some natures dread the darkness; others have not accomplished the wishes or the work of the day."

"I don't think you go below the surface," I ventured. "It seems to me that the entire reason is simple want of faith, a vague uncertainty as to the coming back of the dried-up leaf and flower, when they perish, and a fear, though unexpressed, that the sun is going down out of your sight for the last time, and you would hold it a little longer."

"Would you now to-night, Lucy?"

"If I could."

My husband did not speak again for a long time, and gradually I went back into my individuality.

We came upon an eminence outside the river-valley, and within sight of the village.

"Is it well? do you like it?" asked Saul.

The village was nested in among the elms to such a degree that I could only reply,—

"I am certain that I shall, when I find out what it is."

Saul stayed the impatient horse at the point where we then were, and, indicating a height above and a depth below, told me the legend of the naming of his village.

It was given thus:—

"A long time ago, when the soundless tread of the moccason walked fearlessly over the bed of echoes in this valley, two warriors, Wabausee and Waubeeneemah, came one day upon the river, at its opposite sides. Both were, weary with the march; both wore the glory of many scalps. Their belts were heavy with wampum, their hearts were heavy with hate. Wabausee was down amid the dark pines that grew beside the river's brink. Waubeeneemah was upon the high land above the river. With folded arms and unmoved faces they stood, whilst in successive flashes across the stream their eyes met, until Wabausee slowly opened out his arms, and, clasping a towering tree, cried out, 'I see sky!' and he steadfastly fixed his gaze upon the crevices of brightness that urged their way down amid the pines over his head.

"Waubeeneemah turned his eyes over the broad valley, and answered the cry with, 'I see light!'

"Thus they stood, one with his eyes downward, the other with his intent on the sky, and fast and furious ran the river, swollen with the meltings of many snows, and fierce and quick rang the battle-cries of 'I see sky!' 'I see light!'

"A white man was near; his cabin lay just below; he had climbed a tree above Waubeeneemah and remained a silent witness of this wordy war, until, looking up the river, he saw a canoe that had broken from its fastenings and was rushing down to the rapids below. It contained the families of the two warriors, who were helplessly striving against the swift flow of waters.

"The white man spoke, and the warriors listened. He cried, 'Look to your canoe! and see Skylight!'

"Through the pines rushed Wabausee, and down the river-bank Waubeeneemah, and into the tide, until they met the coming canoe, across whose birchen bow they gave the grasp of peace, and ever since that time Indian and white man have called this place Skylight."

"Where are the Indians now?" I could not help asking,—and yet with no purpose, beyond expression of the thought question.

The shadows were gathering, the eyelids of the day were closing. Saul caught me up again through the shadows into those eyes of his, and answered,—

"Here, Lucy! I am a pale form of Waubeeneemah! I know it! I feel it now!

I sometimes ache for foemen and the wilds."

Why do I think of that time to-night on the Big Blue, far away from Skylight, and imagine that the prairie airs are ringing with the echoes of the great cries that are heard in my native land, "I see North!" and "I see South!" and there is no white man of them all high enough to see the United States?

I've wandered! Let me think,—yes, I have it! My thought began with trying to fancy Saul's mother taking him to baptism.

She was dead, when I went to Skylight, her son's wife.

She went into the higher life at thirty-three of the threescore-and-ten cycle of the human period. How young to die!

The longer we live, the stronger grows the wish to live. And why not? When the circle is almost ended, and all the momentum of threescore-and-ten is gained, why not pass the line and enter into second childhood? What more beautiful truth in Nature's I Am, than obedience to this law?

I've another fancy on the Big Blue to-night. It is a place for fancies. I remember—a long time ago it seems, and yet I am not so old as Saul's mother—the first knowledge that I had of life. I saw the sun come up one morning out of the sea, and with it there came out of the night of my past a consciousness. I was a soul, and held relations separate from other souls to that risen sun and that sea. From that hour I grew into life. A growth from the Unseen came to me with every day, born I knew not how into my soul. I sent out nothing to people the future. All came to me.

Is this true, this faith or fancy that God sends a tidal wave through man, bringing with it from Heaven's ocean fragments set afloat from its shore to lodge in our lives, until there comes an ebb, and then begin our hopes and desires all to tend heavenward, or elsewhere? Have you never felt, do you not now feel, that there is more of yourself somewhere else than there is upon the Earth?

I like to think thus, when I see a person ill, or in sorrow, or weighed down with weary griefs. I like to think that that which is ebbing here is flowing and ripening into fitness for the freed soul in that land where there shall be "no more sea."

In insanity, does the kind Lord remove all from this world in order to fit up the new life more gloriously? and are those whom most we pity clasped the closest in the Living Arms?

It may be,—there is such comfort in possibilities.

Will Saul come to-night? I am all alone on the Big Blue. There's not another settled claim for miles away.

The August sun drank up the moisture from our corn-fields, took out the blood of our prairie-grasses, and God sent no cooling rains. Why?

Skylight was charmful for a while. I had forgotten Saul's assertion that he was a pale shadow of Waubeeneemah, as we forget a dream of our latest sleep.

At my home Aunt Carter appeared one day, and said she had "come to spend the afternoon and stay to tea"; and she seated her amplitude of being in Saul's favorite chair, and began to count the stitches in the heel of the twenty-fourth stocking that she assured me "she had knit every stitch of since the night she saw my husband lift me down at the gate just outside the window." Her blue eyes went down deeper and deeper into the bluer yarn her fingers were threading; and after a long pause, during which I had forgotten her presence, and was counting out the hours on the face of the clock which the slow hands must travel over before Saul would be at home, suddenly she looked up and began with,—

"Mrs. Monten!"

There was something startling in her voice. I knew it was the first drop of a coming flood, and I fortified myself. She went on repeating,—

"Mrs. Monten! I've been thinking, for a great long while, that it isn't right for you to go on living with that man, without knowing what he is. And I for one have got up to the point of coming right over here and telling you of it to once."

I could not help the involuntary question of—

"Is my husband an evil man?"

"Evil! I should think he might be, when he has got"–

"Stay, Mrs. Carter!" I interrupted. "I will hear no news of my husband that he does not choose to give me. Only one question,—Do you know of any action that my husband has done that is wrong or wicked?"

Aunt Carter forgot her blue eyes and her bluer yarn, for she stopped her knitting, and her eyes changed to gray in my sight, as she ejaculated,—

"He's got Indian blood in him! I should think you'd be afraid he'd scalp you, if you didn't do just as he told you to. Everybody in Skylight is just as sorry for you as ever they can be."

Aunt Carter paused. An open door announced my husband's unexpected presence.

Aunt Carter rolled up her twenty-fourth twin of a stocking, and, hastily declaring that "she'd always noticed that 't was better to visit people when they was alone," she made all possible effort to escape before Saul came in.

My husband an Indian! I looked at him anew. He wore the same presence that he did when first I saw him, a twelve-month before. There was no outward trace of the savage, as he came to welcome me; and I forgot my thought presently, as I listened to his words.

"I am tired of this life," he said; "let us go."

"Where, Saul?"

"Anywhere, where we can breathe. I feel pent up here. I long to hunt something wild and free as I would be. Shall it be to the prairies, Lucy?"

"Will you live on the hunt?" I asked.

"I had not thought of that. No; I'll build you a"–And he paused.

I laughed, and added,—

"Let us have it, Saul. A wigwam?"

"Why not?"

"Why not, indeed, Saul? I am content,—let us go."

On the morrow I began the work of preparation. I was sitting upon the carpet, where I had cast all our treasures of knowledge, in the various guises of the printer's and binder's art, and was selecting the books that I fondly thought would be essential to my existence, when Saul came in.

He looked down upon me with that look that always drinks up my sight into his, and said,—

"You are sorry to go, Lucy. I will stay."

"No, Saul, I wish to go. You shall teach me the pleasures of wild life; and who knows but I shall like it so well that we will give up civilization for it? Where shall I pack all these books?"

"Leave them all," he said. "We will close the house as it is, until we come back." And I left them all at home.

In the heart of these preparations an insane desire came into my mind to know something of Saul's ancestors, and there was but one way to know, namely, by asking, which I would not do of human soul. Thus it came to pass that I was driven out, between this would of my mind and wouldn't of my soul, to search for some knowledge from inanimate things. The last night before our departure I became particularly restless and unsatisfied. I went to the place of burial of the villagers, where I found duly recorded on two stones the names of Saul's parents, Richard Monten and Agnes Monten, his wife.

There was nothing Indian there, and I went home once more to the place that had been so happy until the spirit of inquiry grew stronger than I. That night I watched Saul, until he grew restless, and asked me why I did so.

I evaded direct reply, and on the morrow we were wheeling westward.

From the instant we left the line of man's art, Saul became another person. All the romance and the glory in his nature blossomed out gorgeously, and I grew glad and gay with him. We crossed the Missouri. We traversed the river-land to Fort Leavenworth, amid cottonwoods, oaks, and elms which it would have done Dr. Holmes's heart and arms good to see and measure.

"Will you ride, Lucy? will you try the prairie?" asked Saul, the morning following our arrival in Fort Leavenworth.

I signified my pleasure, and mounted a brave black mustang, written all over with liberty. We had ridden out the dew of the morning, and for miles not one word had been spoken, the only sound in the stillness having been the hoofs' echo on the prairie-grass, when Saul rode close to me, and, laying his hand on my pony's head, spoke in a deep, strange voice that put my soul into expectancy, for I had heard the same once before in my life.

"Lucy," he said, "I sometimes think that I have done a great wrong in taking you into my keeping; for I must accept these calls to wildness that come over me at intervals."

"Have you ever been here before?" I asked.

"Twice, Lucy, I have crossed the American Desert, and lain down to sleep at the foot of the Rocky Mountains."

"You are not going there now?" I almost gasped.

"Why not? Can't you go with me?"

Oh, how my spirit recoiled at the thought of the Desert! Wild animals processioned through my brain in endless circles. All the stories of Indian ferocity that ever I had heard came into my consciousness, as it is said all the past events of life do in the drowning, and I had no time to hesitate. The decision of my lifetime gathered into that instant. Saul or nothing; and bravely I answered,—did I not?—when, with brightening eyes, I said, "Let us on!"—and shaking the hand from my saddle-bow, I gave my prairie friend leave to fly.

"Lucy! Lucy!" cried Saul, and he soon overtook me,—"Lucy, I sought you as the thirsting man seeks water on the desert; and I have sought to bless you, almost as Hagar blessed the Angel,—almost as the devout soul blesses God, when it finds a spring that He has made to rise out of the sands. Having found you, I was content. I thought that I could live always, as other men do, in the tameness of Town and Law; but I could not, unless you refused to go with me into the Nature that my spirit demands as a part of its own life."

"Saul, you know that you can go without me,—else I should not wish to go. I go, not because I am a necessity to you, but a free-born soul, that wills to go where you go."

The grave Professor (for I whisper it here to-night, with only the wind to hear, that Saul is a Professor in a famed seat of learning not many leagues away from the Atlantic coast) looked down at me with a vague, puzzled air, for an instant, then said,—

"I see! It is so, Lucy. You have divined the secret. I am not to let you know that I cannot live without you,—and, if you can, you are to make me think that you only tolerate me."

"What of it? Isn't it almost true? I sometimes think, that, if ever we are in heaven, effort to remain there will be necessary to its full joy. We are always crying for rest, when effort is the only pleasure worth possessing."

"You are right, and you are wrong. Let us leave mental philosophy with mankind, who have to do with it. Just now, I am willing to confess that I need you, and you are to do as you will. Come! let us look into this thicket."

And leading the way, Saul rode presently under a tall cotton wood-tree, and, lifting for me the low-hanging branches of a black-jack, I entered an amphitheatre whose walls were leaves of living green domed in blue, with a river-aisle winding through.

I had not time to take in all the joy of the circle, before it was evidenced that Saul had premeditated the scene. A fire of twigs sent up a spicy perfume. A camp-kettle stood beside the fire, and a creature stood beside it. A yellow savage I should have said, but for my husband's welcome. Never in our home library did brother-professor ever receive warmer grasp of hand than I knew this Indian met. They used words, in speaking, that were unknown to me. Presently I perceived that an introduction was pending. That being over, the Indian, Meotona, pointed to a swinging-chair, built for me out of the wealth of grapevine. It was cushioned with the velvet of the buffalo-grass.

"Tell me how to thank him," I said to Saul.