Mosses from an old manse
the firelight began to redden as it gleamed up the tall trunks of the
pines or hovered on the dense and obscure mass of foliage that circled
round the spot. The heart of Dorcas was not sad; for she felt that it
was better to journey in the wilderness with two whom she loved than to
be a lonely woman in a crowd that cared not for her. As she busied
herself in arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves, for
Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the gloomy forest in the
measure of a song that she had learned in youth. The rude melody, the
production of a bard who won no name, was descriptive of a winter
evening in a frontier cottage, when, secured from savage inroad by the
high-piled snow-drifts, the family rejoiced by their own fireside. The
whole song possessed the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought,
but four continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the
blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them, working
magic with a few simple words, the poet had instilled the very essence
of domestic love and household happiness, and they were poetry and
picture joined in one. As Dorcas sang, the walls of her forsaken home
seemed to encircle her; she no longer saw the gloomy pines, nor heard
the wind which still, as she began each verse, sent a heavy breath
through the branches, and died away in a hollow moan from the burden of
the song. She was aroused by the report of a gun in the vicinity of the
encampment; and either the sudden sound, or her loneliness by the
glowing fire, caused her to tremble violently. The next moment she
laughed in the pride of a mother’s heart.
“My beautiful young hunter! My boy has slain a deer!” she exclaimed,
recollecting that in the direction whence the shot proceeded Cyrus had
gone to the chase.
She waited a reasonable time to hear her son’s light step bounding over
the rustling leaves to tell of his success. But he did not immediately
appear; and she sent her cheerful voice among the trees in search of
him.
“Cyrus! Cyrus!”
His coming was still delayed; and she determined, as the report had
apparently been very near, to seek for him in person. Her assistance,
also, might be necessary in bringing home the venison which she
flattered herself he had obtained. She therefore set forward, directing
her steps by the long-past sound, and singing as she went, in order
that the boy might be aware of her approach and run to meet her. From
behind the trunk of every tree, and from every hiding-place in the
thick foliage of the undergrowth, she hoped to discover the countenance
of her son, laughing with the sportive mischief that is born of
affection. The sun was now beneath the horizon, and the light that came
down among the leaves was sufficiently dim to create many illusions in
her expecting fancy. Several times she seemed indistinctly to see his
face gazing out from among the leaves; and once she imagined that he
stood beckoning to her at the base of a craggy rock. Keeping her eyes
on this object, however, it proved to be no more than the trunk of an
oak fringed to the very ground with little branches, one of which,
thrust out farther than the rest, was shaken by the breeze. Making her
way round the foot of the rock, she suddenly found herself close to her
husband, who had approached in another direction. Leaning upon the butt
of his gun, the muzzle of which rested upon the withered leaves, he was
apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some object at his feet.
“How is this, Reuben? Have you slain the deer and fallen asleep over
him?” exclaimed Dorcas, laughing cheerfully, on her first slight
observation of his posture and appearance.
He stirred not, neither did he turn his eyes towards her; and a cold,
shuddering fear, indefinite in its source and object, began to creep
into her blood. She now perceived that her husband’s face was ghastly
pale, and his features were rigid, as if incapable of assuming any
other expression than the strong despair which had hardened upon them.
He gave not the slightest evidence that he was aware of her approach.
“For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me!” cried Dorcas; and the
strange sound of her own voice affrighted her even more than the dead
silence.
Her husband started, stared into her face, drew her to the front of the
rock, and pointed with his finger.
Oh, there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon the fallen forest
leaves! His cheek rested upon his arm—his curled locks were thrown back
from his brow—his limbs were slightly relaxed. Had a sudden weariness
overcome the youthful hunter? Would his mother’s voice arouse him? She
knew that it was death.
“This broad rock is the gravestone of your near kindred, Dorcas,” said
her husband. “Your tears will fall at once over your father and your
son.”
She heard him not. With one wild shriek, that seemed to force its way
from the sufferer’s inmost soul, she sank insensible by the side of her
dead boy. At that moment the withered topmost bough of the oak loosened
itself in the stilly air, and fell in soft, light fragments upon the
rock, upon the leaves, upon Reuben, upon his wife and child, and upon
Roger Malvin’s bones. Then Reuben’s heart was stricken, and the tears
gushed out like water from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth had
made the blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was expiated,—the
curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood dearer
to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven
from the lips of Reuben Bourne.
P.’S CORRESPONDENCE
My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first
paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible
to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a
delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the
imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that
he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less
distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of
illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based
upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not
a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of
correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend
from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after
literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to
achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object
while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have
stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
LONDON, February 29, 1845.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind’s
strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me
whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all
the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in my
hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of
Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’s
metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,
whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,—with all this
positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you
think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,—would you believe it?—that
all this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little
chamber,—that whitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its
one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste
or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars,—that same
little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought
you to visit me! Will no length of time or breadth of space enfranchise
me from that unlovely abode? I travel; but it seems to be like the
snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose,
on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble
impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile
myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me
hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me
to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until
now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse
as the wits of Queen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the
Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself was the letter to
Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had
anticipated, although, considering his former irregularities of life
and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not older than a man
on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual
immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat,—so fat as to give the
impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without
sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of
corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the
mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be
Byron, you murmur within yourself, “For Heaven’s sake, where is he?”
Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly
matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and
carnal vices which unspiritualize man’s nature and clog up his avenues
of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
and, besides, Lord Byron’s morals have been improving while his outward
man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he
were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet
it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on
the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up
its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed
in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot
was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether
Byron’s right or left foot was the deformed one.
The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
aware, of ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any
symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at
least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple, descending the
slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support which will
enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is
pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful
errors in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to
add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a