Mosses from an old manse
worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet.
The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best
child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is
because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
foreign to the purpose.
I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time
blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order
of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few
words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or
rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men whom
I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long
grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who
made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter,
clatter, when the sexton’s spade disturbs them. Were it only possible
to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely
to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me
in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men,
and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.
For instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
before me, in the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the bodily presence of the
elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or
other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His
powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the
ghost of the Danish king.
In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into my
brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she
took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother,
John Kemble, sat behind,—a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly
majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, Nature enables
him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his
genius. Charles Matthews was likewise there; but a paralytic affection
has distorted his once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable
one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into proper form
than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as
if, for the joke’s sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
contrive, and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so
hideous, an avenging Providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it
is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him to change
countenance, for his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and
night-time. Some other players of the past generation were present, but
none that greatly interested me. It behooves actors, more than all
other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best
but painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
anther’s thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to
fade and the voice to croak with age.
What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of
poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know
that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to
exhibit any of the characteristics of the author’s mind as displayed in
his prose works; although some of the poems have a richness that is not
merely of the surface, but glows still the brighter the deeper and more
faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
native manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from Africa. I
doubt whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to
the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly
our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to
untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned
my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else
he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last
sleep, with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured
marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer verses
in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis
as a man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker
youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and
who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I
remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who
scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of
Gottingen. Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly, in
1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going to give us sketches
of the world’s sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one or all
of them, have grown to be famous men.
And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I
was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit,
where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when
fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest
mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world’s hopes to scorn,
it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall never
make a truer one.
What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,—for there is no
need of generalizing the remark,—what an odd brain is mine! Would you
believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my
intellectual ear—some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat
as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such
verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable
destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit,
perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their
posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they
have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to
attend to; and besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in
some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of
pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be
glad of such a job.
Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still
scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and
proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever?
It is too bad. Let every man manufacture his own nonsense, say I.
Expect me home soon, and—to whisper you a secret—in company with the
poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and enjoy the shadow of
the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls
himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale,
and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through his
densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and
forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.
Your true friend, P.
P. S.—Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic
reputation on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century. And
does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas with
machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine, as being the
nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can boast? How can he expect
ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists
in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?
EARTH’S HOLOCAUST
Once upon a time—but whether in the time past or time to come is a
matter of little or no moment—this wide world had become so
overburdened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, that the
inhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire.
The site fixed upon at the representation of the insurance companies,
and as being as central a spot as any other on the globe, was one of
the broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation would be
endangered by the flames, and where a vast assemblage of spectators
might commodiously admire the show. Having a taste for sights of this
kind, and imagining, likewise, that the illumination of the bonfire
might reveal some profundity of moral truth heretofore hidden in mist
or darkness, I made it convenient to journey thither and be present. At
my arrival, although the heap of condemned rubbish was as yet
comparatively small, the torch had already been applied. Amid that
boundless plain, in the dusk of the evening, like a far off star alone
in the firmament, there was merely visible one tremulous gleam, whence
none could have anticipated so fierce a blaze as was destined to ensue.
With every moment, however, there came foot-travellers, women holding
up their aprons, men on horseback, wheelbarrows, lumbering
baggage-wagons, and other vehicles, great and small, and from far and
near, laden with articles that were judged fit for nothing but to be
burned.
“What materials have been used to kindle the flame?” inquired I of a
bystander; for I was desirous of knowing the whole process of the
affair from beginning to end.
The person whom I addressed was a grave man, fifty years old or
thereabout, who had evidently come thither as a looker-on. He struck me
immediately as having weighed for himself the true value of life and
its circumstances, and therefore as feeling little personal interest in
whatever judgment the world might form of them. Before answering my
question, he looked me in the face by the kindling light of the fire.
“O, some very dry combustibles,” replied he, “and extremely suitable to
the purpose,—no other, in fact, than yesterday’s newspapers, last
month’s magazines, and last year’s withered leaves. Here now comes some
antiquated trash that will take fire like a handful of shavings.”
As he spoke, some rough-looking men advanced to the verge of the
bonfire, and threw in, as it appeared, all the rubbish of the herald’s
office,—the blazonry of coat armor, the crests and devices of
illustrious families, pedigrees that extended back, like lines of
light, into the mist of the dark ages, together with stars, garters,
and embroidered collars, each of which, as paltry a bawble as it might
appear to the uninstructed eye, had once possessed vast significance,
and was still, in truth, reckoned among the most precious of moral or
material facts by the worshippers of the gorgeous past. Mingled with
this confused heap, which was tossed into the flames by armfuls at
once, were innumerable badges of knighthood, comprising those of all
the European sovereignties, and Napoleon’s decoration of the Legion of
Honor, the ribbons of which were entangled with those of the ancient
order of St. Louis. There, too, were the medals of our own Society of
Cincinnati, by means of which, as history tells us, an order of
hereditary knights came near being constituted out of the king quellers