Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader Part 29

Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of criticism toward an author's fame, are essentially changed by his death. His personal character, and the events of his life--the foreground, so to speak, in the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting to the critical perspective; and when the hand to correct is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve in comparison and final estimate, are done away.

Such men as Hillhouse are not common, even in these days of universal authorship. In accomplishment of mind and person, he was probably second to no man. His poems show the first. They are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finished--works for the highest taste to relish, and for the severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model.

Hadad was published in 1825, during my second year in college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears. The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn dignity and elegance of address. His person was very finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high-bred, and his countenance purely and brightly intellectual.

Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular simplicity and taste in dress, and you have the portrait of one who, in other days, would have been the mirror of chivalry, and the flower of n.o.bles and troubadours. Hillhouse was no less distinguished in oratory.

... Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many years of his life which he should have pa.s.sed either in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were enslaved to the drudgery of business. His const.i.tution seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood, however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to the beautiful and poetic home of "Sachem's Wood," his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a ripe and long enduring career of literature. In harmony with such a life were all his surroundings--scenery, society, domestic refinement, and companionship--and never looked promise fairer for the realization of a dream of glory. That he had laid out something of such a field in the future, I chance to know, for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and leisure he could command. And with his scholarship; knowledge of life, taste, and genius, what might not have been expected from its fulfilment? But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light, just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the world. Love and honor to the memory of such a man.

=_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-. _= (Manual, pp. 503, 505.)

From "Hyperion."

=_206._= THE INTERRUPTED LEGEND.

One by one the objects of our affection depart from us. But our affections remain, and like vines stretch forth their broken, wounded tendrils for support. The bleeding heart needs a balm to heal it; and there is none but the love of its kind,--none but the affection of a human heart. Thus the wounded, broken affections of Flemming began to lift themselves from the dust and cling around this new object. Days and weeks pa.s.sed; and, like the Student Crisostomo, he ceased to love, because he began to adore. And with this adoration mingled the prayer, that, in that hour when the world is still, and the voices that praise are mute, and reflection cometh like twilight, and the maiden, in her day dreams, counted the number of her friends, some voice in the sacred silence of her thoughts might whisper his name.

They were sitting together one morning, on the green, flowery meadow, under the ruins of Burg Unspunnen. She was sketching the ruins. The birds were singing, one and all, as if there were no aching hearts, no sin nor sorrow, in the world. So motionless was the bright air, that the shadow of the trees lay engraven on the gra.s.s. The distant snow-peaks sparkled in the sun, and nothing frowned, save the square tower of the old ruin above them.

"What a pity it is," said the lady, as she stopped to rest her weary fingers, "what a pity it is, that there is no old tradition connected with this ruin!"

"I will make you one, if you wish," said Flemming.

"Can you make old traditions?"

"O, yes! I made three, the other day, about the Rhine, and one very old one about the Black Forest. A lady with dishevelled hair; a robber with a horrible slouched hat; and a night storm among the roaring pines."

"Delightful! Do make one for me."

"With the greatest pleasure. Where will you have the scene? Here, or in the Black Forest."

"In the Black Forest, by all means! Begin."

"I will unite this ruin and the forest together. But first promise not to interrupt me. If you snap the golden threads of thought, they will float away on the air like the film of the gossamer, and I shall never be able to recover them."

"I promise." "Listen, then, to the Tradition of 'THE FOUNTAIN OF OBLIVION.'"

"Begin."

Flemming was reclining on the flowery turf, at the lady's feet, looking up with dreamy eyes into her sweet face, and then into the leaves of the linden-trees overhead.

"Gentle Lady! Dost thou remember the linden trees of Bulach,--those tall and stately trees, with velvet down upon their shining leaves, and rustic benches underneath their overhanging eaves? A leafy dwelling, fit to be the home of elf or fairy, where first I told my love to thee, thou cold and stately Hermione! A little peasant girl stood near, and listened all the while, with eyes of wonder and delight, and an unconscious smile, to hear the stranger still speak on in accents deep yet mild,--none else was with us in that hour, save G.o.d and that little child!"

"Why, it is in rhyme!"

"No, no! the rhyme is only in your imagination. You promised not to interrupt me, and you have already snapped asunder the gossamer threads of as sweet a dream as was ever spun from a poet's brain."

"It certainly did rhyme!"

=_Henry Reed, 1808-1854._= (Manual, p. 501.)

From "Lectures on English History."

=_207._= LEGENDARY PERIOD OF BRITISH HISTORY.

It would be a weary, and probably vain inquiry to consider minutely the claims which such historical materials have on our belief; and so little is there attractive in the legends of British history, that I need not attempt to dwell upon any of the alleged facts. But I wish before pa.s.sing from this part of my subject, briefly to examine the curious tenacity with which the belief in this legendary literature was once held, and to show that it was not relinquished until a more critical standard of historic belief was adopted, and scientific investigation took the place of uninquiring and pa.s.sive credulity. It has been said that no man, before the sixteenth century, presumed to doubt that the Britons were descended from Brutus the Trojan; and it is equally certain that no modern writer could presume confidently to a.s.sert it.

... It is most difficult for us, in these later days of higher standards of historic credibility, to form anything like an adequate conception, of the entire and unquestioning confidence which was felt for the story of British origin, and the race of ancient British kings. Of this feeling there is a curious proof in a transaction in the reign of Edward I., when the sovereignty of Scotland was claimed by the English monarch.

The Scots sought the interposition and protection of the pope, alleging that the Scottish realm belonged of right to the see of Rome. Boniface VIII., a pontiff not backward in a.s.serting the claims of the papacy, did interpose to check the English conquest, and was answered by an elaborate and respectful epistle from Edward, in which the English claim is most carefully and confidently derived from the conquest of the whole country by the Trojans in the times of Eli and Samuel--a.s.suredly a very respectable antiquity of some two thousand four hundred years.

No Philadelphia estate could be more methodically traced back to the proprietary t.i.tle of William Penn, than was this claim to Scotland up to Brutus, the exile from Troy.... Now, all this is set forth with the most imperturbable seriousness, and with an air of complete a.s.surance of the truth. It appears, too, to have fully answered the purpose intended; and the Scots, finding that the papal antiquity was but a poor defence against such claims, and as if determined not to be outdone by the Southron, replied in a doc.u.ment a.s.serting their independence by virtue of descent from Scota, one of the daughters of Pharaoh. The pope seems to have been silenced in a conflict of ancestral authority, in which the succession of St. Peter seemed quite a modern affair, when overshadowed, by such Trojan and Egyptian antiquity.

=_Caroline M. Kirkland, 1808-1864._= (Manual, p. 484.)

From "Forest Life."

=_208._= THE FELLING OF A GREAT TREE.

One darling tree,--a giant oak which looked as if half a dozen Calibans might have been pegged in its knotty entrails--this one tree, the grandfather of the forest, we thought we had saved. It stood a little apart,--it shadowed no man's land,--it shut the broiling sun from n.o.body's windows, so we hoped it might be allowed to die a natural death. But one unlucky day, a family fresh from "the 'hio" removed into a house which stood at no great distance from this relic of primeval grandeur. These people were but little indebted to fortune, and the size of their potato-patch did not exactly correspond with the number of rosy-cheeks within doors. So the loan of a piece of ground was a small thing to ask or to grant. Upon this piece of lent land stood our favorite oak. The potatoes were scarcely peeping green above the soil, when we observed that the great boughs which we looked at admiringly a dozen times a day, as they towered far above the puny race around them, remained distinct in their outline, instead of exhibiting the heavy ma.s.ses of foliage which had usually clothed them before the summer heat began. Upon nearer inspection it was found that our neighbor had commenced his plantation by the operation of girdling the tree, for which favor he expected our thanks, observing pithily that "nothing wouldn't never grow under sich a great mountain as that!" It is well that "Goth" and "Vandal" are not actionable.

Yet the felling of a great tree has something of the sublime in it. When the axe first falls on the trunk of a stately oak, laden with the green wealth of a century, or a pine whose aspiring peak might look down on a moderate church steeple, the contrast between the puny instrument and the gigantic result to be accomplished approaches the ridiculous. But as "the eagle towering in his pride of place was, by a mousing owl, hawked at and killed," so the leaf-crowned monarch of the wood has no small reason to quiver at the sight of a long-armed Yankee approaching his deep-rooted trunk with an awkward axe. One blow seems to accomplish nothing: not even a chip falls. But with another stroke comes a broad slice of the bark, leaving an ominous, gaping wound. Another pair of blows extends the gash, and when twenty such have fallen, behold a girdled tree. This would suffice to kill, and a melancholy death it is; but to fell is quite another thing.... Two deep incisions are made, yet the towering crown sits firm as ever. And now the destroyer pauses,--fetches breath,--wipes his beaded brow, takes a wary view of the bearings of the tree,--and then with a slow and watchful care recommences his work. The strokes fall doubtingly, and many a cautious glance is cast upward, for the whole immense ma.s.s now trembles, as if instinct with life, and conscious of approaching ruin. Another blow! it waves,--a groaning sound is heard--... yet another stroke is necessary.

It is given with desperate force, and the tall peak leaves its place with an easy sailing motion accelerated every instant, till it crashes p.r.o.ne on the earth, sending far and wide its scattered branches, and letting in the sunlight upon the cool, damp, mossy earth, for the first time perhaps in half a century.

From "Western Clearings."

=_209._= THE BEE TREE.

One of the greatest temptations to our friend Silas, and to most of his cla.s.s, is a bee hunt. Neither deer, nor 'c.o.o.ns, nor prairie hens, nor even bears, prove half as powerful enemies to anything like regular business, as do these little thrifty vagrants of the forest. The slightest hint of a bee tree will entice Silas Ashburn and his sons from the most profitable job of the season, even though the defection is sure to result in entire loss of the offered advantage; and if the hunt prove successful, the luscious spoil is generally too tempting to allow of any care for the future, so long as the "sweet'nin" can be persuaded to last. "It costs nothing," will poor Mrs. Ashburn observe; "let 'em enjoy it. It isn't often we have such good luck."

=_Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1810-1850._= (Manual, p. 502.)

From "At Home and Abroad."

=_210._= CHARACTER OF CARLYLE.