Anonymous - "The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I"

Joseph Cottle - "Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey"

Elisabeth Woodbridge - "More Jonathan Papers"

Eliza Leslie - "Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858




Ah, did we know to give her all her right,
What wonders even in our poor clay were done!
It is not Woman leaves us to our night,
It is our earth that grovels from her sun.

Our nobler cultured fields and gracious domes
We whirl too oft from her who still shines on
To light in vain our caves and clefts, the homes
Of night-bird instincts pained till she be gone.

Still must this body starve our souls with shade;
But when Death makes us what we were before,
Then shall her sunshine all our depths invade,
And not a shadow stain heaven's crystal floor.




METEMPSYCHOSIS.

"The sense of the world is short,--
Long and various the report,--
To love and be beloved:
Men and gods have not outlearned it;
And how oft soe'er they've turned it,
'Tis not to be improved!"--EMERSON.


Mr. Vane and Mr. Payne both were eagerly describing to me their
arrangements for an excursion to the Lake. I did not doubt it would
be charming, but neither of these two gentlemen would be endurable
on such a drive, and each was determined to ask me first. I stood
pushing apart the crushed flowers of my bouquet, in which all the
gardener's art vindicated itself by making the airy grace of Nature
into a flat, unmeaning mosaic.

In the next room the passionate melancholy of a waltz was mocked and
travestied by the frantic and ungrateful whirl that only Americans
are capable of executing; the music lived alone in upper air; of men
and dancing it was all unaware; the involved cadences rolled away
over the lawn, shook the dew-drooped roses on their stems, and went
upward into the boundless moonlight to its home. Through all, Messrs.
Vane and Payne harangued me about the splendid bowling-alley at the
Lake, the mountain-strawberries, the boats, the gravel-walks! At
last it became amusing to see how skilfully they each evaded and
extinguished the other; it was a game of chess, and he was to be
victor who should first ask me; if one verged upon the question, the
other quickly interposed some delightful circumstance about the
excursion, and called upon the first to corroborate his testimony;
neither, in Alexander's place, would have done anything but assure
the other that the Gordian knot was very peculiarly tied, and quite
tight.

Presently Harry Tempest stood by my side. I became aware that he had
heard the discussion. He took my bouquet from my hand, and stood
smelling it, while my two acquaintance went on. I was getting
troubled and annoyed; Mr. Tempest's presence was not composing. I
played with my fan nervously; at length I dropped it. Harry Tempest
picked it up, and, as I stooped, our eyes met; he gave me the fan,
and, turning from Messrs. Vane and Payne, said, very coolly,--

"The Lake is really a charming place; I think, Miss Willing, you
would find a carriage an easier mode of conveyance, so far, than
your pony; shall I bring one for you? or do you still prefer to ride?"

This was so quietly done, that it seemed to me really a settled
affair of some standing that I was to go to the Lake with Mr. Tempest.
Mr. Vane sauntered off to join the waltzers; Mr. Payne suddenly
perceived Professor Rust at his elbow and began to talk chemistry. I
said, as calmly as I had been asked,--

"I will send you word some time tomorrow; I cannot tell just now."

Here some of my friends came to say good night; my duties as hostess
drew me toward the door; Harry Tempest returned my bouquet and
whispered, or rather said in that tone of society that only the
person addressed can hear,--

"Clara! let it be a drive!"

My head bent forward as he spoke, for I could not look at him; when
I raised it, he was gone.

The music still soared and floated on through the windows into the
moonlight; one by one the older part of my guests left me; only a
few of the gayest and youngest still persevered in that indefatigable
waltz, the oval room looking as if a score of bubbles were playing
hop and skip,--for in the crinoline expansions the gentlemen's black
pen-and-ink outlines were all lost. At length even these went; the
music died; its soul went up with a long, broken cry; its body was
put piecemeal into several green bags, shouldered by stout Germans,
and carried quite out of sight. The servants gathered and set away
such things as were most needful to be arranged, put out the lights,
locked the doors and windows, and went to bed. Mrs. Reading, my good
housekeeper, begged me to go up stairs.

"You look so tired, Miss Clara!"

"So I am, Delia!" said I. "I will rest. Go to bed you, and I shall
come presently."

I heard her heavy steps ascend the stairs; I heard the door of her
room close, creaking. How could I sleep? I knew very well what the
coming day would bring; I knew why Harry Tempest preferred to drive.
I had need of something beside rest, for sleep was impossible; I
needed calmness, quiet, enough poise to ask myself a momentous
question, and be candidly answered. This quiet was not to be found
in my room, I well knew; every bit of its furniture, its drapery,
was haunted, and in any hour of emotion the latent ghosts came out
upon me in swarms; the quaint mandarins with crooked eyes and fat
cheeks had eyed me a thousand times when Elsie's arm was clasped
over my neck, and with her head upon my shoulder we lay and laughed,
when we should have been dressing, at those Chinese chintz curtains.
Elsie was gone; if she had been here, I had been at once counselled.
Rest there, dead Past!--I could not go to my bedroom.

The green-house opened from the large parlor by a sash-door. At this
season of the year the glazed roof and sides were withdrawn or
lowered, but at night the lower sashes were drawn up and fastened,
lest incursive cats or dogs should destroy my flowers. The great
Newfoundland that was our guard slept on the floor here, since it
was the weakest spot for any ill-meaning visitors to enter at.

I drew the long skirt of my lace dress up over my hair, and quietly
went into the green-house. The lawn and its black firs tempted me,
but there was moonlight on the lawn, and moonlight I cannot bear; it
burns my head more fiercely than any noon sun; it scorches my eyelids;
it exhausts and fevers me; it excites my brain, and now I looked for
calm. This the odor of the flowers and their pure expression
promised me. A tall, thick-leaved camellia stood half-way down the
border, and before it was a garden-chair. The moonlight shed no ray
there, but through the sashes above streamed cool and fair over the
blooms that clung to the wall and adorned the parterres and vases;
for this house was set after a fashion of my own, a winter-garden
under glass; no stages filled the centre. It was laid out with no
stiff rule, but here and there in urns of stone, or in pyramidal
stands, gorgeous or fragrant plants ran at their own wild will, while
over all the wall and along the woodwork of the roof trailed
passion-flowers, roses, honeysuckles, fragrant clematis, ivy, and
those tropic vines whose long dead names belie their fervid
luxuriance and fantastic growth; great trees of lemon and orange
interspaced the vines in shallow niches of their own, and the languid
drooping tresses of a golden acacia flung themselves over and across
the deep glittering mass of a broad-leaved myrtle.

As I sat down in the chair, Pan reared his dusky length from his mat,
and came for a recognition. It was wont to be something more
positive than caresses; but to-night neither sweet biscuit nor
savory bit of confectionery appeared in the hand that welcomed him;
yet he was as loving as ever, and, with a grim sense of protection,
flung himself at my feet, drew a long breath, and slept. I dared not
yet think; I rested my head against the chair, and breathed in the
odor of the flowers: the delicate scent of tea-roses; the Southern
perfume, fiery and sweet, like Greek wine, of profuse heliotropes,--a
perfume that gives you thirst, and longing, and regret. I turned my
head toward the orange-trees; Southern, also, but sensuous and tropic,
was the breath of those thick white stars,--a tasted odor. Not so
the cool air that came to me from a diamond-shaped bed of Parma
violets, kept back so long from bloom that I might have a succession
of them; these were the last, and their perfume told it, for it was
at once a caress and a sigh. I breathed the gale of sweetness till
every nerve rested and every pulse was tranquil as the air without.

I heard a little stir. I looked up. A stately calla, that reared one
marble cup from its gracious cool leaves, was bending earthward with
a slow and voluntary motion; from the cup glided a fair woman's shape;
snowy, sandalled feet shone from under the long robe; hair of
crisped gold crowned the Greek features. It was Hypatia. A little
shiver crept through a white tea-rose beside the calla; its delicate
leaves fluttered to the ground; a slight figure, a sweet, sad face,
with melancholy blue eyes and fair brown hair, parted the petals. La
Valliere! She gazed in my eyes.

"Poor little child!" said she. "Have you a treatise against love,
Hypatia?"

The Greek of Egypt smiled and looked at me also. "I have discovered
that the steps of the gods are upon wool," answered she; "if love
had a beginning to sight, should not we also foresee its end?"

"And when one foresees the end, one dies," murmured La Valliere.

"Bah!" exclaimed Marguerite of Valois, from the heart of a rose-red
camellia,--"not at all, my dear; one gets a new lover!"

"Or the new lover gets you," said a dulcet tone, tipped with satire,
from the red lips of Mary of Scotland,--lips that were just now the
petals of a crimson carnation.

"Philosophy hath a less troubled sea wherein to ride than the stormy
fluctuance of mortal passion; Plato is diviner than Ovid," said a
puritanic, piping voice from a coif that was fashioned out of the
white camellia-blooms behind my chair, and circled the prim beauty
of Lady Jane Grey.

"Are you a woman, or one of the Sphinx's children?" said a stormy,
thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild purple and scarlet flower
of the Strelitzia, that gradually shaped itself into gorgeous
Oriental robes, rolled in waves of splendor from the lithe waist and
slender arms of a dark woman, no more young,--sallow, thin, but more
graceful than any bending bough of the desert acacia, and with eyes
like midnight, deep, glowing, flashing, melting into dew, as she
looked at the sedate lady of England.

"You do not know love!" resumed she. "It is one draught,--a jewel
fused in nectar; drink the pearl and bring the asp!"

Her words brought beauty; the sallow face burnt with living scarlet
on lip and cheek; the tiny pearl-grains of teeth flashed across the
swarth shade above her curving, passionate mouth; the wide nostrils
expanded; the great eyes flamed under her low brow and glittering
coils of black hair.

"Poor Octavia!" whispered La Valliere. Lady Jane Grey took up her
breviary and read.

"After all, you died!" said Hypatia.

"I lived!" retorted Cleopatra.

"Lived and loved," said a dreamy tone from the hundred leaves of a
spotless La Marque rose; and the steady, "unhasting, unresting" soul
of Thekla looked out from that centreless flower, in true German
guise of brown braided tresses, deep blue eyes like forget-me-nots,
sedate lips, and a straight nose.

"I have lived, and loved, and cut bread and butter," solemnly
pronounced a mountain-daisy, assuming the broad features of a
fraeulein.

Cleopatra used an Egyptian oath. Lady Jane Grey put down her breviary
and took up Plato. Marguerite of Valois laughed outright. Hypatia
put a green leaf over Charlotte, with the air of a high-priestess,
and extinguished her.

"Who does not love cannot lose," mused La Valliere.

"Who does not love neither has nor gains," said Hypatia. "The dilemma
hath two sides, and both gain and loss are problematic. It is the
ideal of love that enthralls us, not the real."

"Hush! you white-faced Greek! It was not an ideal; it was Mark Antony.
By Isis! does a dream fight, and swear, and kiss?"

"The Navarrese did; and France dreamed he was my master,--not I!"
laughed Marguerite.

"This is most weak stuff for goodly and noble women to foster,"
grimly uttered a flame-colored hawk's-bill tulip, that directly
assumed a ruff and an aquiline nose.

Mary of Scotland passed her hand about her fair throat. "Where is
Leicester's ring?" said she.

The Queen did not hear, but went on. "Truly, you make as if it was
the intent of women to be trodden under foot of men. She that
ruleth herself shall rule both princes and nobles, I wot. Yet I had
done well to marry. Love or no love, I would the house of Hanover
had waged war with one of mine own blood; I hate those fair, fat
Guelphs!"

"Love hath sometimes the thorn alone, the rose being blasted in bud,"
uttered a sweet and sonorous voice with a little nasal accent, out
of the myrtle-boughs that starred with bloom her hair, and swept the
hem of her green dress.

"Sweet soul, wast thou not, then, sated upon sonnets?" said Mary of
Scotland, in a stage aside.

"Do not the laurels overgrow the thorn?" said La Valliere, with a
wistful, inquiring smile.

Laura looked away. "They are very green at Avignon," said she.

Out of two primroses, side by side, Stella and Vanessa put forth
pale and anxious faces, with eyes tear-dimmed.

"Love does not feed on laurels," said Stella; "they are fruitless."

"That the clergy should be celibate is mine own desire," broke in
Queen Elizabeth. "Shall every curly fool's-pate of a girl be turning
after an anointed bishop? I will have this thing ended, certes! and
that with speed."

Vanessa was too deep in a brown study to hear. Presently she spoke.
"I believe that love is best founded upon a degree of respect and
veneration which it is decent in youth to render unto age and
learning."

"Ciel!" muttered Marguerite; "is it, then, that in this miserable
England one cherishes a grand passion for one's grandfather?"

The heliotrope-clusters melted into a face of plastic contour, rich
full lips, soft interfused outlines, intense purple eyes, and heavy
waving hair, dark indeed, but harmonized curiously with the narrow
gold fillet that bound it. "It is no pain to die for love," said the
low, deep voice, with an echo of rolling gerunds in the tone.

"That depends on how sharp the dagger is," returned Mary of Scotland.
"If the axe had been dull"----

From the heart of a red rose Juliet looked out; the golden centre
crowned her head with yellow tresses; her tender hazel eyes were
calm with intact passion; her mouth was scarlet with fresh kisses,
and full of consciousness and repose. "Harder it is to live for love,"
said she; "hardest of all to have ever lived without it."

"How much do you all help the matter?" said a practical Yankee voice
from a pink hollyhock. "If the infinite relations of life assert
themselves in marriage, and the infinite I merges its individuality
in the personality of another, the superincumbent need of a passional
relation passes without question. What the soul of the seeker asks
from itself and the universe is, whether the ultimate principle of
existent life is passional or philosophic."

"Your dialectic is wanting in purity of expression," calmly said
Hypatia; "the tongue of Olympus suits gods and their ministers only."

"Plato hath no question of the matter in hand," observed Lady Jane
Grey, with a tone of finishing the subject.

"I know nothing of your questions and philosophies," scornfully
stormed Cleopatra. "Fire seeks fire, and clay, clay. Isis send me
Antony, and every philosopher in Alexandria may go drown in the Nile!
Shall I blind my eyes with scrolls of papyrus when there is a goodly
Roman to be looked upon?"

From the deep blue petals of a double English violet came a delicate
face, pale, serene, sad, but exceeding tender. "Love liveth when the
lover dies," said Lady Rachel Russell. "I have well loved my lord in
the prison; shall I cease to affect him when he is become one of the
court above?"

"You are cautious of speech, Mesdames," carelessly spoke Marguerite.
"Women are the fools of men; you all know it. Every one of you has
carried cap and bell."

They all turned toward the hawk's-bill tulip; it was not there.

"Gone to Kenilworth," demurely sneered Mary of Scotland.

A pond-lily, floating in a tiny tank, opened its clasped petals; and
with one bare pearly foot upon the green island of leaves, and the
other touching the edge of the marble basin, clothed with a rippling,
lustrous, golden garment of hair, that rolled downward in glittering
masses to her slight ankles, and half hid the wide, innocent, blue
eyes and infantile, smiling lips, Eve said, "I was made for Adam,"
and slipped silently again into the closing flower.

"But we have changed all that!" answered Marguerite, tossing her
jewel-clasped curls.

"They whom the saints call upon to do battle for king and country
have their nature after the manner of their deeds," came a clear
voice from the fleur-de-lis, that clothed itself in armor, and
flashed from under a helmet the keen, dark eyes and firm, beardless
lips of a woman.

"There have been cloistered nuns," timidly breathed La Valliere.

"There is a monk's-hood in that parterre without," said Marguerite.

The white clematis shivered. It was a veiled shape in long robes,
that hid face and figure, who clung to the wall and whispered,
"Paraclete!"

"There are tales of saints in my breviary," soliloquized Mary of
Scotland; and in the streaming moonlight, as she spoke, a faint
outline gathered, lips and eyes of solemn peace, a crown of blood-red
roses pressing thorns into the wan temples that dripped sanguine
streams, and in the halo above the wreath a legend, partially
obscured, that ran, "Utque talis Rosa nulli alteri plantae adhaereret"----

"But the girl there is no saint; I think, rather, she is of mine own
land," said a purple passion-flower, that hid itself under a black
mantilla, and glowed with dark beauty. The Spanish face bent over me
with ardent eyes and lips of sympathetic passion, and murmured,
"Do not fear! Pedro was faithful unto and after death; there are some
men"----

Pan growled! I rubbed my eyes! Where was I? Mrs. Reading stood by me
in very extempore costume, holding a night-lamp:--

"Goodness me, Miss Clara!" said she, "I never was more scared. I
happened to wake up, and I thought I see your west window open
across the corner; so I roused up to go and see if you was sick; and
you wasn't in bed, nor your frock anywhere. I was frighted to pieces;
but when I come down and found the greenhouse door open, I went in
just for a chance, and, lo and behold! here you are, sound asleep in
the chair, and Pan a-lying close onto that beautiful black lace frock!
Do get up, Miss Clara! you'll be sick to-morrow, sure as the world!"

I looked round me. All the flowers were cool and still; the calla
breathless and quiet; the pond-lily shut; the roses full of dew and
perfume; the clematis languid and luxuriant.

"Delia," said I, "what do you think about matrimony?"

Mrs. Reading stared at me with her honest green eyes. I laughed.

"Well," said she, "marriage is a lottery, Miss Clara. Reading was a
pretty good feller; but seein' things was as they was, if I'd had
means and knowed what I know now, I shouldn't never have married him."

"May-be you'd have married somebody else, though," suggested I.

"Like enough, Miss Clara; girls are unaccountable perverse when they
get in love. But do get up and go to bed. A'n't you goin' to the
Lake to-morrow?"

That put my speculation to flight. Up I rose and meekly followed
Delia to my room; this time she staid to see me fairly disrobed. But
I had had sleep enough. I was also quiet; I could think. The future
lay at my feet, to be planned and patterned at my will; or so I
thought. I had not permitted myself to think much about Harry Tempest,
from an instinctive feeling of danger; I did not know then that

"En songeant qu'il faut oublier
On s'en souvient!"

I was young, rich, beautiful, independent; I came and went as I would,
without question, and did my own pleasure. If I married, all this
power must be given up; possibly I and my husband would tire of each
other,--and then what remained but fixed and incurable disgust and
pain? I thought over my strange dream. Cleopatra, the enchantress,
and the scorn of men: that was not love, it was simple passion of
the lowest grade. Lady Jane Grey: she was only proper. Marguerite de
Valois: profligate. Elizabeth: a shrewish, selfish old politician.
Who of all these had loved? Arria: and Paetus dying, she could not
love. Lady Russell: she lived and mourned. I looked but at one side
of the argument, and drew my inferences from that, but they
satisfied me. Soon I saw the dawn stretch its opal tints over the
distant hills, and tinge the tree-tops with bloom. I heard the
half-articulate music of birds, stirring in their nests; but before
the sounds of higher life began to stir I had gone to sleep, firmly
resolved to ride to the Lake, and to give Harry Tempest no
opportunity to speak to me alone. But I slept too long; it was noon
before I woke, and I had sent no message about my preference of the
pony, as I promised, to Mr. Tempest. I had only time to breakfast
and dress. At three o'clock he came,--with his carriage, of course.
So I rode to the Lake!

It's all very well to make up one's mind to say a certain thing; it
is better if you say it; but, somehow or other,--I really was
ashamed afterward,--I forgot all my good reasons. I found I had taken
a great deal of pains to no purpose. In short, after due time, I
married Harry Tempest; and though it is some time since that happened,
I am still much of Eve's opinion,--

"I WAS MADE FOR ADAM."

* * * * *




CRAWFORD AND SCULPTURE.

There is as absolute an instinct in the human mind for the definite,
the palpable, and the emphatic, as there is for the mysterious, the
versatile, and the elusive. With some, method is a law, and taste
severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith.
The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace
of Sculpture have analogies in literature and character: the terse
despatch of a brave soldier, the concentrated dialogue of Alfieri,
some proverbs, aphorisms, and poetic lines, that have become
household words, puritanic consistency, silent fortitude, are but so
many vigorous outlines, and impress us by virtue of the same
colorless intensity as a masterpiece of the statuary. How
sculpturesque is Dante, even in metaphor, as when he writes,--

"Ella non ci diceva alcuna cosa;
Ma lasciavane gir, solo guardando,
A guisa di leon quando si posa."

Nature, too, hints the art, when her landscape tints are covered
with snow, and the forms of tree, rock, and mountain are clearly
defined by the universal whiteness. Death, in its pale, still, fixed
image,--always solemn, sometimes beautiful,--would have inspired
primeval humanity to mould and chisel the lineaments of clay. Even
New Zealanders elaborately carve their war-clubs; and from the
"graven images" prohibited by the Decalogue as objects of worship,
through the mysterious granite effigies of ancient Egypt, the brutal
anomalies in Chinese porcelain, the gay and gilded figures on a
ship's prow,--whether emblems of rude ingenuity, tasteless caprice,
retrospective sentiment, or embodiments of the highest physical and
mental culture, as in the Greek statues,--there is no art whose
origin is more instructive and progress more historically significant.
The vases of Etruria are the best evidence of her degree of
civilization; the designs of Flaxman on Wedgwood ware redeem the
economical art of England; the Bears at Berne and the Wolf in the
Roman Capitol are the most venerable local insignia; the carvings of
Gibbons, in old English manor-houses, outrival all the luxurious
charms of modern upholstery; Phidias is a more familiar element in
Grecian history than Pericles; the moral energy of the old Italian
republics is more impressively shadowed forth and conserved in the
bold and vigorous creations of Michel Angelo than in the political
annals of Macchiavelli; and it is the massive, uncouth sculptures,
half-buried in sylvan vegetation, which mythically transmit the
ancient people of Central America.

We confess a faith in, and a love for, the "testimony of the rocks,"--
not only as interpreted by the sagacious Scotchman, as he excavated
the "old red sandstone," but as shaped into forms of truth, beauty,
and power by the hand of man through all generations. We love to
catch a glimpse of these silent memorials of our race, whether as
Nymphs half-shaded at noon-day with summer foliage in a garden, or
as Heroes gleaming with startling distinctness in the moonlit
city-square; as the similitudes of illustrious men gathered in the
halls of nations and crowned with a benignant fame, or as prone
effigies on sepulchres, forever proclaiming the calm without the
respiration of slumber, so as to tempt us to exclaim, with the
enamored gazer on the Egyptian queen, when the asp had done its work,--

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