Mosses from an old manse
spoken. He continued to gaze steadily at the spectacle with a singular
calmness, as if it concerned him merely as an observer. “Be of good
courage, nor yet exult too much; for there is far less both of good and
evil in the effect of this bonfire than the world might be willing to
believe.”
“How can that be?” exclaimed I, impatiently. “Has it not consumed
everything? Has it not swallowed up or melted down every human or
divine appendage of our mortal state that had substance enough to be
acted on by fire? Will there be anything left us to-morrow morning
better or worse than a heap of embers and ashes?”
“Assuredly there will,” said my grave friend. “Come hither to-morrow
morning, or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite
burned out, and you will find among the ashes everything really
valuable that you have seen cast into the flames. Trust me, the world
of to-morrow will again enrich itself with the gold and diamonds which
have been cast off by the world of today. Not a truth is destroyed nor
buried so deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last.”
This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined to credit it, the
more especially as I beheld among the wallowing flames a copy of the
Holy Scriptures, the pages of which, instead of being blackened into
tinder, only assumed a more dazzling whiteness as the fingermarks of
human imperfection were purified away. Certain marginal notes and
commentaries, it is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test,
but without detriment to the smallest syllable that had flamed from the
pen of inspiration.
“Yes; there is the proof of what you say,” answered I, turning to the
observer; “but if only what is evil can feel the action of the fire,
then, surely, the conflagration has been of inestimable utility. Yet,
if I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether the world’s
expectation of benefit would be realized by it.”
“Listen to the talk of these worthies,” said he, pointing to a group in
front of the blazing pile; “possibly they may teach you something
useful, without intending it.”
The persons whom he indicated consisted of that brutal and most earthy
figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of the gallows,—the
hangman, in short,—together with the last thief and the last murderer,
all three of whom were clustered about the last toper. The latter was
liberally passing the brandy bottle, which he had rescued from the
general destruction of wines and spirits. This little convivial party
seemed at the lowest pitch of despondency, as considering that the
purified world must needs be utterly unlike the sphere that they had
hitherto known, and therefore but a strange and desolate abode for
gentlemen of their kidney.
“The best counsel for all of us is,” remarked the hangman, “that, as
soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor, I help you, my three
friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang
myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer.”
“Poh, poh, my good fellows!” said a dark-complexioned personage, who
now joined the group,—his complexion was indeed fearfully dark, and his
eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; “be not so
cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There is one
thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and
without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all;
yes, though they had burned the earth itself to a cinder.”
“And what may that be?” eagerly demanded the last murderer.
“What but the human heart itself?” said the dark-visaged stranger, with
a portentous grin. “And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying
that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong
and misery—the same old shapes or worse ones—which they have taken such
a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this
livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. O, take
my word for it, it will be the old world yet!”
This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened
thought. How sad a truth, if true it were, that man’s age-long endeavor
for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of the evil
principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of
the matter! The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless
sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery
of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and
the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem
almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of
their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and
strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what
is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial
that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully
described, were what we choose to call a real event and a flame that
would scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a parable of
my own brain.
PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK
AT HOME
From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made
me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes,
using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between
myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been
very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men
and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father’s
pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a
wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of
them, have run the course which this volume will describe. Yet there is
room for doubt whether I should have been any better contented with
such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,—at least, till
after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
trial.
My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones,
would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such
pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the
whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in
imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and
belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable
adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering his
sermons could have supported the good parson’s health under the mental
toil which they cost him in composition.
Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a
warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose,
to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a good and
wise man after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself,
it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any
mode of education with which it was possible for him to be acquainted
have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier fortune
than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it
was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for
parents have an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
children, and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and
affection of his parents which he cannot transfer to any delegate of
their duties, however conscientious. An orphan’s fate is hard, be he
rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old
gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding
out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in contact with the
stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen;
they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what
they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man
who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be
satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent in
its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that
violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as
if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,—with the
drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence
of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which
I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been
suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant
than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering
orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one
illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere,—of Goldsmith, who
planned and performed his travels through France and Italy on a less
promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various
qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking.
Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up
an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I
must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives
were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than
seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit
upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I
had written romances instead of reciting them.
The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had
collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed,
the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence