Mosses from an old manse
peaceful inhabitants of Beulah, must have sent its discord even through
the celestial gates.
While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our ears we heard an
exulting strain, as if a thousand instruments of music, with height and
depth and sweetness in their tones, at once tender and triumphant, were
struck in unison, to greet the approach of some illustrious hero, who
had fought the good fight and won a glorious victory, and was come to
lay aside his battered arms forever. Looking to ascertain what might be
the occasion of this glad harmony, I perceived, on alighting from the
cars, that a multitude of shining ones had assembled on the other side
of the river, to welcome two poor pilgrims, who were just emerging from
its depths. They were the same whom Apollyon and ourselves had
persecuted with taunts, and gibes, and scalding steam, at the
commencement of our journey—the same whose unworldly aspect and
impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the wild revellers of
Vanity Fair.
“How amazingly well those men have got on,” cried I to Mr.
Smoothit—away. “I wish we were secure of as good a reception.”
“Never fear, never fear!” answered my friend. “Come, make haste; the
ferry boat will be off directly, and in three minutes you will be on
the other side of the river. No doubt you will find coaches to carry
you up to the city gates.”
A steam ferry boat, the last improvement on this important route, lay
at the river side, puffing, snorting, and emitting all those other
disagreeable utterances which betoken the departure to be immediate. I
hurried on board with the rest of the passengers, most of whom were in
great perturbation: some bawling out for their baggage; some tearing
their hair and exclaiming that the boat would explode or sink; some
already pale with the heaving of the stream; some gazing affrighted at
the ugly aspect of the steersman; and some still dizzy with the
slumberous influences of the Enchanted Ground. Looking back to the
shore, I was amazed to discern Mr. Smooth-it-away waving his hand in
token of farewell.
“Don’t you go over to the Celestial City?” exclaimed I.
“Oh, no!” answered he with a queer smile, and that same disagreeable
contortion of visage which I had remarked in the inhabitants of the
Dark Valley. “Oh, no! I have come thus far only for the sake of your
pleasant company. Good-by! We shall meet again.”
And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-away laugh outright, in
the midst of which cachinnation a smoke-wreath issued from his mouth
and nostrils, while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of either eye,
proving indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent
fiend! To deny the existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures
raging within his breast. I rushed to the side of the boat, intending
to fling myself on shore; but the wheels, as they began their
revolutions, threw a dash of spray over me so cold—so deadly cold, with
the chill that will never leave those waters until Death be drowned in
his own river—that with a shiver and a heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven
it was a Dream!
THE PROCESSION OF LIFE
Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. All of us
have our places, and are to move onward under the direction of the
Chief Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the invariably
mistaken principles on which the deputy marshals seek to arrange this
immense concourse of people, so much more numerous than those that
train their interminable length through streets and highways in times
of political excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory
of man or even the record of history, and has hitherto been very little
modified by the innate sense of something wrong, and the dim perception
of better methods, that have disquieted all the ages through which the
procession has taken its march. Its members are classified by the
merest external circumstances, and thus are more certain to be thrown
out of their true positions than if no principle of arrangement were
attempted. In one part of the procession we see men of landed estate or
moneyed capital gravely keeping each other company, for the
preposterous reason that they chance to have a similar standing in the
tax-gatherer’s book. Trades and professions march together with
scarcely a more real bond of union. In this manner, it cannot be
denied, people are disentangled from the mass and separated into
various classes according to certain apparent relations; all have some
artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn
to consider as a genuine characteristic. Fixing our attention on such
outside shows of similarity or difference, we lose sight of those
realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or Providence has constituted
for every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one great office of human
wisdom to classify him. When the mind has once accustomed itself to a
proper arrangement of the Procession of Life, or a true classification
of society, even though merely speculative, there is thenceforth a
satisfaction which pretty well suffices for itself without the aid of
any actual reformation in the order of march.
For instance, assuming to myself the power of marshalling the aforesaid
procession, I direct a trumpeter to send forth a blast loud enough to
be heard from hence to China; and a herald, with world-pervading voice,
to make proclamation for a certain class of mortals to take their
places. What shall be their principle of union? After all, an external
one, in comparison with many that might be found, yet far more real
than those which the world has selected for a similar purpose. Let all
who are afflicted with like physical diseases form themselves into
ranks.
Our first attempt at classification is not very successful. It may
gratify the pride of aristocracy to reflect that disease, more than any
other circumstance of human life, pays due observance to the
distinctions which rank and wealth, and poverty and lowliness, have
established among mankind. Some maladies are rich and precious, and
only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
Of this kind is the gout, which serves as a bond of brotherhood to the
purple-visaged gentry, who obey the herald’s voice, and painfully
hobble from all civilized regions of the globe to take their post in
the grand procession. In mercy to their toes, let us hope that the
march may not be long. The Dyspeptics, too, are people of good standing
in the world. For them the earliest salmon is caught in our eastern
rivers, and the shy woodcock stains the dry leaves with his blood in
his remotest haunts, and the turtle comes from the far Pacific Islands
to be gobbled up in soup. They can afford to flavor all their dishes
with indolence, which, in spite of the general opinion, is a sauce more
exquisitely piquant than appetite won by exercise. Apoplexy is another
highly respectable disease. We will rank together all who have the
symptom of dizziness in the brain, and as fast as any drop by the way
supply their places with new members of the board of aldermen.
On the other hand, here come whole tribes of people whose physical
lives are but a deteriorated variety of life, and themselves a meaner
species of mankind; so sad an effect has been wrought by the tainted
breath of cities, scanty and unwholesome food, destructive modes of
labor, and the lack of those moral supports that might partially have
counteracted such bad influences. Behold here a train of house
painters, all afflicted with a peculiar sort of colic. Next in place we
will marshal those workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal
disorder into their lungs with the impalpable dust of steel. Tailors
and shoemakers, being sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
part of the procession and march under similar banners of disease; but
among them we may observe here and there a sickly student, who has left
his health between the leaves of classic volumes; and clerks, likewise,
who have caught their deaths on high official stools; and men of genius
too, who have written sheet after sheet with pens dipped in their
heart’s blood. These are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But
what is this cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear
with the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are
seamstresses, who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the
service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now it is
almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud. Consumption
points their place in the procession. With their sad sisterhood are
intermingled many youthful maidens who have sickened in aristocratic
mansions, and for whose aid science has unavailingly searched its
volumes, and whom breathless love has watched. In our ranks the rich
maiden and the poor seamstress may walk arm in arm. We might find
innumerable other instances, where the bond of mutual disease—not to
speak of nation-sweeping pestilence—embraces high and low, and makes
the king a brother of the clown. But it is not hard to own that disease
is the natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the color of a
fever flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their own physical
infirmities, and display their symptoms as the badges of high station.
All things considered, these are as proper subjects of human pride as
any relations of human rank that men can fix upon.
Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and herald, with thy voice
of might, shout forth another summons that shall reach the old baronial
castles of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our western wilderness! What
class is next to take its place in the procession of mortal life? Let
it be those whom the gifts of intellect have united in a noble
brotherhood.
Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional distinctions of
society melt away like a vapor when we would grasp it with the hand.
Were Byron now alive, and Burns, the first would come from his
ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited
honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who
grew immortal while he stooped behind his plough. These are gone; but
the hall, the farmer’s fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace, the
counting-room, the workshop, the village, the city, life’s high places
and low ones, may all produce their poets, whom a common temperament
pervades like an electric sympathy. Peer or ploughman, we will muster
them pair by pair and shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in its most
artificial state, consents to this arrangement. These factory girls
from Lowell shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and
literary circles, the bluebells in fashion’s nosegay, the Sapphos, and
Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of intellect bring
together as strange companies. Silk-gowned professor of languages, give
your arm to this sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the
conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the anvil. All varieties
of human speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man.
Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank they
come, who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway a
people—Nature’s generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with them also
the deep philosophers who think the thought in one generation that is
to revolutionize society in the next. With the hereditary legislator in
whom eloquence is a far-descended attainment—a rich echo repeated by
powerful voices from Cicero downward—we will match some wondrous
backwoodsman, who has caught a wild power of language from the breeze
among his native forest boughs. But we may safely leave these brethren