Mosses from an old manse
little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until they lay
strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads beneath
the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to the
noontide sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something worth
living for had been done. A new substance was born into the world. They
were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of
and rejoice in. A cabbage, too,—especially the early Dutch cabbage,
which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its ambitious heart
often bursts asunder,—is a matter to be proud of when we can claim a
share with the earth and sky in producing it. But, after all, the
hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable children of ours are
smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them.
What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden, the
reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old Manse.
But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep him out
of doors. I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation till a long
spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof. There could not
be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as then seen from the
windows of my study. The great willow-tree had caught and retained
among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be shaken down at
intervals by the frequent gusts of wind. All day long, and for a week
together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash-splash-splashing
from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into the tubs beneath the
spouts. The old, unpainted shingles of the house and outbuildings were
black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient growth upon the walls
looked green and fresh, as if they were the newest things and
afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was
blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a
completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the impression that the
earth was wet through like a sponge; while the summit of a wooded hill,
about a mile distant, was enveloped in a dense mist, where the demon of
the tempest seemed to have his abiding-place and to be plotting still
direr inclemencies.
Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain. In the fiercest
beat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes the
wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot penetrate;
but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us shiver to
think of those deep, umbrageous recesses, those overshadowing banks,
where we found such enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not a twig
of foliage there but would dash a little shower into our faces. Looking
reproachfully towards the impenetrable sky,—if sky there be above that
dismal uniformity of cloud,—we are apt to murmur against the whole
system of the universe, since it involves the extinction of so many
summer days in so short a life by the hissing and spluttering rain. In
such spells of weather,—and it is to be supposed such weather
came,—Eve’s bower in paradise must have been but a cheerless and aguish
kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old parsonage, which had
resources of its own to beguile the week’s imprisonment. The idea of
sleeping on a couch of wet roses!
Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has
left behind it from a period before the Revolution. Our garret was an
arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was
but a twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns, of
deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too
reverent of their dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters, roughly hewn
and with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of the
chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, an aspect unlike
what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house. But on one
side there was a little whitewashed apartment, which bore the
traditionary title of the Saint’s Chamber, because holy men in their
youth had slept, and studied, and prayed there. With its elevated
retirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its closet
convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where a young man might
inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly dreams. The
occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and ejaculations
inscribed upon the walls. There, too, hung a tattered and shrivelled
roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the forcibly wrought
picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown, holding a Bible in his
hand. As I turned his face towards the light, he eyed me with an air of
authority such as men of his profession seldom assume in our days. The
original had been pastor of the parish more than a century ago, a
friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal in fervid eloquence. I bowed
before the effigy of the dignified divine, and felt as if I had now met
face to face with the ghost by whom, as there was reason to apprehend,
the Manse was haunted.
Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed with
spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used
to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor, and sometimes
rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper
entry,—where nevertheless he was invisible, in spite of the bright
moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of
manuscript discourses that stood in the garret. Once, while Hillard and
other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a
rustling noise as of a minister’s silk gown, sweeping through the very
midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs.
Still there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business was that of a
ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest
midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short, all
kinds of domestic labor,—although no traces of anything accomplished
could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her
servitude, some ill-starched ministerial band, disturbed the poor
damsel in her grave and kept her at work without any wages.
But to return from this digression. A part of my predecessor’s library
was stored in the garret,—no unfit receptacle indeed for such dreary
trash as comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books would
have been worth nothing at an auction. In this venerable garret,
however, they possessed an interest, quite apart from their literary
value, as heirlooms, many of which had been transmitted down through a
series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty Puritan
divines. Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded ink on
some of their fly-leaves; and there were marginal observations or
interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegible
shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom. The
world will never be the better for it. A few of the books were Latin
folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry, as
with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on the Book of
Job—which only Job himself could have had patience to read—filled at
least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or three
volumes to a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divinity,—too
corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the spiritual
element of religion. Volumes of this form dated back two hundred years
or more, and were generally bound in black leather, exhibiting
precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to books of
enchantment. Others equally antique were of a size proper to be carried
in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,—diminutive, but as black
as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with Greek and
Latin quotations. These little old volumes impressed me as if they had
been intended for very large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted
at an early stage of their growth.
The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
that the works of man’s intellect decay like those of his hands.
Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the spirits
of one generation affords no sustenance for the next. Books of
religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring and
vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so seldom
really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so
little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul can
attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in
holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most
part, stupendous impertinence.
Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last
clergyman’s lifetime. These threatened to be of even less interest than
the elder works a century hence to any curious inquirer who should then
rummage then as I was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal Preacher and
Christian Examiner, occasional sermons, controversial pamphlets,
tracts, and other productions of a like fugitive nature, took the place
of the thick and heavy volumes of past time. In a physical point of
view, there was much the same difference as between a feather and a
lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the specific gravity of old
and new was about upon a par. Both also were alike frigid. The elder
books nevertheless seemed to have been earnestly written, and might be
conceived to have possessed warmth at some former period; although,
with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled down even to the
freezing-point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other
hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little to do
with the writer’s qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of this whole
dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt
myself none the less a Christian for eschewing it. There appeared no
hope of either mounting to the better world on a Gothic staircase of
ancient folios or of flying thither on the wings of a modern tract.
Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea
of permanence. There were a few old newspapers, and still older
almanacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had
issued from the press with a distinctness that was altogether
unaccountable. It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass
among the books with the images of a vanished century in them. I turned
my eyes towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked of the
austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, after the
most painful rummaging and groping into their minds, had been able to
produce nothing half so real as these newspaper scribblers and
almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a moment. The
portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself. It is the age
itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible
truth for all times; whereas most other works—being written by men who,
in the very act, set themselves apart from their age—are likely to