The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857

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One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that
copy of verses,--which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always
feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of
boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable
jingles.

* * * * youth
* * * * morning
* * * * truth
* * * * warning

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above musical
and suggestive coincidences.

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her
limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my
next neighbour.

When a young female wears a flat circular side-curl, gummed on each
temple,--when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against
the back of hers,--and when she says "Yes?" with the note of interrogation,
you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the
"feller" was you saw her with.

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house, moistening her
lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

"I was only giving some hints on the fine arts."

"Yes?"

--It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young
ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a sort of
crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our
own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am
only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before
me. A _blanket_-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the
aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.

--We are the Romans of the modern world,--the great assimilating people.
Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with
our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword
is the short, stiff, pointed _gladius_ of the Romans; and the American
bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil
society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu
or the journals of Congress:--

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.

_Corollary_. It was the Polish _lance_ that left Poland at last with
nothing of her own to bound.

"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the _shattered spear_!"

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot
pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched
the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters, there
might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best
passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."

--Self-made men?--Well, yes. Of course every body likes and respects
self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to
be made at all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember that
Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from
drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many years to
build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little
wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A
regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very
good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people praised it, and
said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. They never thought of
praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther on.

Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves
more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article, shaped
by the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society and travel.
But as to saying that one is every way the equal of the other, that is
another matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all things and
persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most
precious republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I
say, that, _other things being equal_, in most relations of life I prefer a
man of family.

What do I mean by a man of family?--O, I'll give you a general idea of what
I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.

Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member
of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or two
Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of
top-boots with tassels.

Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The great
merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a
velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his
commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one
directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc. Great-grandmother, by
the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old
lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular,
hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb
full-blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory blood in his
veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed
up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy
sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom with an impetuous
generosity, as if it would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good
for twenty thousand dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests to
all relatives and dependants. 2. Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high
waist, as in time of Empire; bust _a la Josephine_; wisps of curls,
like celery-tips, at sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like
rose-cordial. As for the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the
gallery.

Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,--family
names:--you will find them at the head of their respective classes in
the days when students took rank on the catalogue from their parents'
condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of youthful
progenitors, and _Hic liber est meus_ on the title-page. A set of Hogarth's
original plates. Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow
on the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark
platoon of octodecimos.

Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms of the
family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt.

If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished
with claw-foot chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged
mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is complete.

No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man that
inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four
or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled
about in a library. All men are afraid of books, that have not handled them
from infancy. Do you suppose our dear Professor over there ever read _Poll
Synopsis_, or consulted _Castelli Lexicon_, while he was growing up to
their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment
and leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs
sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at
home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No
self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I
have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of
them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places.
Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and
down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of
prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I
go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with
the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the
better of the two.

--I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought
the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and
besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring
myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me
essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened;
but they haven't. Perhaps you would like to hear my

LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.

When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle--rasp--and straw--
Grow bigger _downwards_ through the box,--

When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,--
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light,--

When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean,--
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean,--

When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take,--
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience' sake,--

When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof,--

When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair,--

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harbor not
Such dimples as would hold your fist,--

When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before,--
When the first locomotive's wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore;--

_Till_ then let Gumming blaze away,
And Miller's saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
_Then_ order your ascension robe!

The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others
occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not
expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these
things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not
taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, _pere_, used to date every
proof he sent to the printer; but they were scattered over several
breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since, which I shall
very possibly print some time or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious
friends.

ILLUSIONS.

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer
day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through
spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and
county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern
to the innermost recess which tourists visit,--a niche or grotto made of
one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the
light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice of
unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo River,
whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams "Lethe"
and "Styx"; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming
galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured
and fretted chambers,--the icicle, the orange-flower, the acanthus, the
grapes, and the snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins
of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four
combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in
the dark.

The sights and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to all
natural objects, and which shames the fine things to which we foppishly
compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which Nature,
on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day, and
chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly
remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion.
On arriving at what is called the "Star-Chamber," our lamps were taken from
us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I
saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or
less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among
them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our
musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song, "The stars are in
the quiet sky," &c., and I sat down on the rocky door to enjoy the serene
picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting
the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect.

I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with
this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and
since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously analyzing
the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The
cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights
are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our
organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere,
and mix their own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the
earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct
the rounding, coordinating, pictorial powers of the eye.

The same interference from our organization creates the most of our
pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance
gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life
is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold
pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field,
the Irishman in the ditch, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods,
the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain
pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it. Health and
appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy that
our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our primers.
Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is pathetic in its name, and in his use of the
name. It is an admission from a man of the world in the London of 1850,
that poor old Puritan Bunyan was right in his perception of the London of
1650. And yet now, in Thackeray, is the added wisdom or skepticism, that
though this be really so, he must yet live in tolerance of and practically
in homage and obedience to these illusions.

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in
Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height.
Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece it would be
an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great
is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who
destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It was
wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D'Alembert, "_Un etat de vapeur
etait un etat tres facheux, parcequ'il nous faisait voir les choses
comme elles sont._" I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life.
Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or
another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's
Mocking,--for the Power has many names,--is stronger than the Titans,
stronger than Apollo. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated
in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a
fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his
own dream, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and
badge.

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then
a sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the
show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the
glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a
search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.
At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of
fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had
a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that
perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another youth
with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best
comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could
only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good for
something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why
need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them? I knew a
humorist, who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of sense.
He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God were
two,--power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious man
to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in the
community, but whose sympathies were cold,--presidents of colleges,
and governors, and senators,--who held themselves bound to sign every
temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and
peacemakers, and cry _Hist-a-boy!_ to every good dog. We must not carry
comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the
boys come into my yard for leave to gather horsechestnuts, I own I enter
into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing
that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But
this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very
thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is
the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they
hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest
fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had
flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women,
more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated,
they fascinate others. They see through Claud-Lorraines. And how dare
any one, if he could, pluck away the _coulisses_, stage effects, and
ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region
of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to _mirage_.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid
hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with,
and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had been
so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates
into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some
great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children, that
makes the heart too big for the body. In the worst-assorted connections
there is ever some mixture of true marriage. Teague and his jade get some
just relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of each
other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they were
now to begin.

'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were
any exempts. The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life
heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and miscellaneous
books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page;
and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent a new style
or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all brave and right, if
dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will
daub with this new paint; but it will not stick. 'Tis like the cement which
the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with it, but
you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when
he is gone.

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain
fate in their constitution, which they know how to use. But they never
deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray
never so slightly their penetration of what is behind it. 'Tis the charm
of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry
and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred
to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as
well as Caesar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have
a gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are
illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the
cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as "dragon-ridden,"
"thunder-stricken," and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis well to know
that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the
phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and
beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took away
fatigue"; but he found the illusion of "arriving from the east at the
Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our
faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You
play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics;
but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will
show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must
migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the
portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in
your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and
playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and
that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to
ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men
were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret
of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and
beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our estimates
are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of
the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand,
and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the
drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to run
with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the
sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who
are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of
Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low
debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher's meat,
sugar, milk, and coal. "Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show
my spirit." "Not so," says the good Heaven; "plod and plough, vamp your
old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine
by and by." Well, 'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in
all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no
cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads
were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the
law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and
nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it
is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where
our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life
are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and
we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any
hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the
system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us
all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not without
their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life seems
a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. The
visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped
with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our
hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only
from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what
becomes of such castaways,--wailing, stupid, comatose creatures,--lifted
from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.
There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe
barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played
with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with
the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of
veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak
as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be
owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what
cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the _eclat_ in the
universe. A little integrity is better than any career. This reality is the
foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the
bottom of all illusions I set the cheat which still leads us to work and
live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that
it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with
fate or fortune.

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