The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 29, March, 1860

We couldn't get through five pages of Hannah More, on a wet day, at the dreariest railway-station, when the expected train was telegraphed as "not due under two hours." What have the innocent heirs of our name done, that Hannah should continue under numberless noms-de-plume to cater for them?

We know there must have been a large lump of the Blarney-Stone, conglomerate probably, kept in the desk of our reverend instructor in the ways of syntax and the dismal paths of numbers. We have a lively recollection of the countless tables of foreign coins which we committed to memory, and of the provoking additions and subtractions we underwent to reduce to dollars and cents of the Federal denomination the fortunes of a score of Rothschilds. But when, under the shadow of the Drachenfels, we attempted to reimburse the Teutonic waiter for a cup of café noir, we were ignominiously constrained to hold forth a handful of coin and to await the white-jacketed and bearded one's pleasure, as he helped himself.

We have a strong impression that we should never have attained to our present proud position of being allowed to write for (and be printed in) the "Atlantic Monthly," without much previous polish, through the companionship of the fairer sex. Why was it made a crime worthy of Draconian sternness to address our she-comrades in the pleasant paths of learning? Why did we behold the severe Magister Morum himself, in utter forgetfulness of his own rule, mingle in the mazy dance on an evening occasion, at which we were allowed to sit up? Did the girls of a larger growth lose their dangerous qualities on arriving at belle-hood? Why were our primary billets-doux confiscated, and our offending palms, like Cranmer's, visited with the first penalty, though we had been obliged to walk blushingly the gauntlet of fifty pairs of maiden eyes and deliver to the "female principal" of the girls' school across the entry notes which we have since but too much reason to conclude bore no reference to the affairs of the school-realm? There is a bit of the Blarney-Stone (always of the nursery formation) which we are sure is discoverable to the true geologic eye in the underpinning of the Fifth Congregational Society's house of worship,—then called a meeting-house, now, we believe, styled a church. For all sermons therein delivered were supposed to be for our personal edification; albeit we were not, by reason of our tender years, specifically exposed to the heresies of Origen or Pelagius. It must have been on some afternoon when we were absent, then, that Dr. Baxter delivered the discourse of which we found a commentary written on the fly-leaf of the hymn-book in our pew,—"Terribly tedious this P.M., isn't he?" We have always felt that a great opportunity was lost to us. We should doubtless have been permitted to indulge unchecked in the solution of that lost mystery of our boyhood, as to the exact number of little brass rods in the front of the gallery, to scratch our initials with a pin upon the pew-side, or, propped by the paternal arm, to sweetly slumber till nineteenthly's close. No such sermon was ever pronounced in our hearing. Oh, golden time of youth! precious season thus lost! We intend yet revisiting that ancient and time-worn edifice, and, borrowing the keys of the sexton, we mean to revel in all and sundry those delights of "boyhood's breezy hour" from which we were debarred by that untimely absence. Like the old gentleman who visited nightly Van Amburg's exhibition of the head-in-the-lion's-mouth feat, in the moral certainty that a single absence would fall inevitably upon the one night when Leo would vary the programme by decapitation,—so we lost the one afternoon when that dull discourse diversified the pious eloquence of Jotham Baxter, D.D., disciple of Dr. Hopkins and believer in Cotton Mather. Many a refreshing slumber has sealed our eyes under subsequent outpourings of divinity, but never with that entire sense of permissible indulgence which then would certainly have been ours. Why was it—except for the Blarney-Stone—that we were always checked in any Sabba'day notes and queries of what we had noticed in the sanctuary? Why was it wicked and deserving of a double infliction of catechism (Assembly's) for us to have seen that Bob Jones had a new jacket, and that he took five marbles and a jack-knife (in aggravating display) out of its pockets, while our mother and sisters were enabled, without let or hindrance to the most absorbing devotion, to chronicle every bonnet and ribbon within the walls of the temple?

Certainly, the family-physician carried—as well he might—a bit of the precious rock in his waistcoat-pocket; for all our subsequent experience of materia medica has never revealed to us the then patent fact, that all our bodily ailments were the consequence of those particular sports which damaged clothes and disturbed the quiet of the household. Surely, the connection between the measles and sailing on the millpond was about as obvious as that between Macedon and Monmouth; and whooping-cough must have had a very long road to travel, if it originated in our nutting frolic, when we returned home with a ghastly gash in our trousers-knee.

The Blarney-Stone got into our "Manual of History"; for either it or the "Boston Centinel" must have made some egregious mistakes as to the character of some famous men who nursed our country's fortunes. So, too, did the author of "Familiar Letters on Public Characters"; for he was anything but an indorser of the History-Book, with its wood-cuts (after Trumbull and West) of the death of General Wolfe, exclaiming, "They run who run the French then I die happy," and of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, with its amazing portraits of the first six Presidents, and the death of Tecumseh. Nay, we have found hard work to reconcile our faith, as per History-Book, in the loveliness of those gentlemen whom stress of weather and a treacherous pilot put ashore upon Plymouth beach, (where they luckily found a rock to step upon,) with a certain sweet pastoral called "Evangeline." We found ourselves, just after reading the proceedings of the Plymouth Monument Association, the other day, pondering over the possible fate of the Dutch colony of the Mannahattoes, supposing that the Mayflower had made (as was purposed) the Highlands of Neversink instead of Shankpainter Hill at the end of Cape Cod. It was a perilous meditation, for we found our belief in Plutarch's Lives, the Charter Oak, and the existence of the Maelström all sliding away from under us. "Think," we said, "if New York had been Boston, how it would have fared with the good Knickerbockers!"

Who was our geographer? Why did he insist upon our believing that all French men and women passed their time in mutual bows and "curchies," and that all Italians were on their knees to fat priests, clean and rosy-looking? Why did he palm upon us that outrageous fiction of three kings (like those of Cologne) sitting in full ermine robes, with gold crowns on their heads, all alone in a sort of summer-parlor, where the heat, must have been at 80° in the shade, engaged in disparting Poland? We have seen, say, a million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,—but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited by Pietro il Parlatore, we recall a sketch of a boy running for life down a slope of at least 45°, just before a snowball some five hundred times as big as the one our school-boys unitedly rolled up in the back-yard. It was a snowball, round, symmetrical, just such a magnified copy of the backyard one as might be expected to follow a boy in dreams after too much Johnny-cake for supper. And that was an avalanche. We have stood since then under the shadow of the Jungfrau, on the Wengern Alp, at the selfsame spot where Byron beheld the fall of so many. We had the noble lord's luck, (as most people have.) and saw dozens, but not one big snowball.

We believe there has been reform since that day. Thanks to the London "Illustrated News" and the "Penny Magazine," juster ideas visit the ingenious youth of the present age. But we solemnly declare that we grew up in the belief that the President of the United States was daily ushered to his carriage by a long array of bareheaded and bowing menials, and that his official dress was a cocked hat and knee-breeches. We furthermore make affidavit that we supposed all the nobility of Europe to be in the habit of driving four-in-hand over wooden-legged beggars. And we also depose and say, that we had no other idea of royalty than as continually clad in coronation-robes, with six peers in the same, with huge wigs, as attendants. All this upon the faith of that same Malte-Brun, à la P.P. Wasn't this a pretty dish to set before—not a king-but a young republican, who fancied himself the equal of kings? And lastly, upon the same authority, we held that "the horrible custom of eating human flesh does not belong exclusively to any nation." We have seen, we repeat, men and cities. We have dined at the Rocher de Cancale, the Maison Dorée, at Delmonico's, at German Gasthauses, at Italian Trattorias, at "Joe's" in London, the Trosachs Inn in the Highlands, and upon all peculiar and national dishes, from the sardines au gratin of Naples to the sauer kraut of Berlin, from the "one fish-ball" of Boston to the hog and hominy of Virginia,—but never yet upon any carte did we encounter "Cold Missionary" or "Enfans en potage Fijien."

Where, we repeat, is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? or rather, where is it not?

The gentle reader (prepared to corroborate with many a juvenile reminiscence) must by this time be prepared for our moral; and it is very briefly this:—Is it not time to consider the budding brain as entitled to fair play? We, the dear middle-aged people, must surely remember that it has taken us much toil and trouble to unlearn many things. We know, that, when we pen anything for our coevals, it is with due attention to such facts as we can command,—that we have a wholesome fear of criticism,—that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, some awful Knickerbocker stands by with the Marine Dictionary in hand to pounce upon us. But for the poor little innocents at home any cast-off rags of knowledge are good enough. We hand down to them the worn-out platitudes of history which we have carefully eschewed. We humbug their inexperience with the same nursery fables beneath whose leonine hide our matured vision detects the ass's ears.

We have been writing lightly enough, but with a purpose. For, absurd as may seem the fictions we have sported with, are they not types of many other far more serious ones which we cram down the throats of our rising generation, long after we ourselves have begun to disbelieve them? There is a conventional teaching which we decorously administer, and leave our pupils to disavow it when they can. History is still taught in our public and private schools, seasoned with all the exploded blunders of the past. Men grow up to full manhood with ideas of foreign lands as ridiculous and unfounded as the pictures over which we have been amusing ourselves just now in our old Geography. Young America is ignorant enough, Heaven knows, of a great deal he ought to learn; but what shall we say of our persistently cramming him with what he ought not to learn? No exploding process is strong enough, it would seem, to blow away the countless pretty stories with which juvenile histories are embroidered. Niebuhr and Arnold have forever finished Romulus and Remus and the Livian legends, for maturer beliefs; but childhood goes on in the same track. Lord Macaulay's Romance of English History has been riddled by the acute reviewers; but he will be abridged for the use of schools, and not a fiction about William Penn, or John of Marlborough, or Grahame of Claverhouse, be left out.

Can you plant a garden with weeds and then pull them up again in secure trust that no lurking burdocks and Canada thistle shall remain? Dear model mothers and prudent papas, be not afraid of wholesome fiction, as such, duly labelled and left uncorked. It will be far better to administer plenty of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad" and "Arabian Nights," good ringing old ballads with a healthy sentiment at bottom of manly honor and womanly affection, fairy stories and ancient legends, than all the mince-meat histories and biographies that nurse-wise have been chewed soft for the use of tender gums. Let us all, for the benefit of ourselves, keep clear of cant; but if cant we must, why let it be for those who will cant back again, laughing in their sleeves the while, and not for the dear little faces so solemnly upturned to ours, whose honest blue eyes (black or green, if you please, as you take your tea) confidingly meet ours.

American education, especially home education, is wanting not in quantity so much as quality; in that it is fearfully lacking, and we, the educators, are the ones to blame for it.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY

CHAPTER V.

AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER

It was a comfort to get to a place with something like society, with residences which had pretensions to elegance, with people of some breeding, with a newspaper, and "stores" to advertise in it, and with two or three churches to keep each other alive by wholesome agitation. Rockland was such a place.

Some of the natural features of the town have been described already. The Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded than the passing stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate by cutting off the northern winds and holding the sun's heat like a garden-wall. Peach-trees, which, on the northern side of the mountain, hardly ever came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.

But there was still another relation between the mountain and the town at its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and which was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants. Those high-impending forests,—"hangers," as White of Selborne would have called them,—sloping far upward and backward into the distance, had always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare, precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest chance-support, and, so sliding, crush the village out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled over on the valley of Goldau.

Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this awful green wall piled up into the air over their heads. They would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffled snapping of roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet, by one of those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature, there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening mountain-side, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls. The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction. If the mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought to be there. It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source of danger which was an element in the everyday life of the Rockland people. The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against them, that a Rocklander couldn't hear a bean-pod rattle without saying, "The Lord have mercy on us!" It is very true, that many a nervous old lady has had a terrible start, caused by some mischievous young rogue's giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy vegetable products in her immediate vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes, mean ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent without his venom,– poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag. Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger. It was noted that the old people retained their hearing longer than in other places. Some said it was the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to the habit of keeping their ears open whenever they were walking through the grass or in the woods. At any rate, a slight sense of danger is often an agreeable stimulus. People sip their crème de noyau with a peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there is a bare possibility that it may contain prussic acid enough to knock them over; in which case they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had emptied itself into the earth through their brain and marrow.

But Rockland had other features which helped to give it a special character. First of all, there was one grand street which was its chief glory. Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its elms made a long, pointed-arched gallery of it through most of its extent. No natural Gothic arch compares, for a moment, with that formed by two American elms, where their lofty jets of foliage shoot across each other's ascending curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of green. When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,—

"Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appearAs when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!"—

he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and makes arrangements for coming up by-and-by. So, in spring, one finds a crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small compared to those, succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them, slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod's innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and parsnip-consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean girth, three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or "mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street, also, the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a house in Elm Street.

A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square, with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of clean shirt-front. It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master wears his white wrist-bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs. It may not have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at any rate. Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for want of any linen to show. The mansion-house which has had to button itself up tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin, will be advertising for boarders presently. The old English pattern of the New England mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas Abney's place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family, and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into consciousness in our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between the momenta of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over us when we can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears to the hot, aching eyes beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy calm with them which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed and sung under the shelter of the old English mansion-house.

Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story, trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses, which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses. Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower story almost to the exclusion of light and air, so that, what with small windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere among the abodes of the living. Their garnishing was apt to assist this impression. Large-patterned carpets, which always look discontented in little rooms, hair-cloth furniture, black and shiny as beetles' wing-cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,—these things were inevitable. In set piles round the lamp was ranged the current literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound numbers of one of the Unknown Public's Magazines with worn-out steel engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished British author whom it is unnecessary to mention, a volume of sermons, or a novel or two, or both, according to the tastes of the family, and the Good Book, which is always Itself in the cheapest and commonest company. The father of the family with his hand in the breast of his coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a print of the Last Supper, by no means Morghen's, or the Father of his Country, or the old General, or the Defender of the Constitution, or an unknown clergyman with an open book before him,—these were the usual ornaments of the walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the others according to politics and other tendencies.

This intermediate class of houses, wherever one finds them in New England towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the farm-house. They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature. The mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open to the sunshine. The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it has a good warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with the rest of the family, without fear and without reproach. These lesser country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion. The chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the warmest welcome. If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,—The dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney. If you can't afford this, don't try to live in a "genteel" fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest farm-house.

There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland. The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of rustic architecture. A little back from the road, seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of the ground. This, like the "mansion-house," is copied from an old English pattern. Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they sprung. The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet dove- or slate-color. An old broken mill- stone at the door,—a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens, which the shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,—a single large elm a little at one side,—a barn twice as big as the house,—a cattle-yard, with