Mosses from an old manse
devote so much time, pains, and expense to the collection of this
museum, he impressed me as one of the hardest and coldest men of the
world whom I had ever met.
“To despise all things!” repeated I. “This, at best, is the wisdom of
the understanding. It is the creed of a man whose soul, whose better
and diviner part, has never been awakened, or has died out of him.”
“I did not think that you were still so young,” said the virtuoso.
“Should you live to my years, you will acknowledge that the vase of
Bias was not ill bestowed.”
Without further discussion of the point, he directed my attention to
other curiosities. I examined Cinderella’s little glass slipper, and
compared it with one of Diana’s sandals, and with Fanny Elssler’s shoe,
which bore testimony to the muscular character of her illustrious foot.
On the same shelf were Thomas the Rhymer’s green velvet shoes, and the
brazen shoe of Empedocles which was thrown out of Mount AEtna.
Anacreon’s drinking-cup was placed in apt juxtaposition with one of Tom
Moore’s wine-glasses and Circe’s magic bowl. These were symbols of
luxury and riot; but near them stood the cup whence Socrates drank his
hemlock, and that which Sir Philip Sidney put from his death-parched
lips to bestow the draught upon a dying soldier. Next appeared a
cluster of tobacco-pipes, consisting of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, the
earliest on record, Dr. Parr’s, Charles Lamb’s, and the first calumet
of peace which was ever smoked between a European and an Indian. Among
other musical instruments, I noticed the lyre of Orpheus and those of
Homer and Sappho, Dr. Franklin’s famous whistle, the trumpet of Anthony
Van Corlear, and the flute which Goldsmith played upon in his rambles
through the French provinces. The staff of Peter the Hermit stood in a
corner with that of good old Bishop Jewel, and one of ivory, which had
belonged to Papirius, the Roman senator. The ponderous club of Hercules
was close at hand. The virtuoso showed me the chisel of Phidias,
Claude’s palette, and the brush of Apelles, observing that he intended
to bestow the former either on Greenough, Crawford, or Powers, and the
two latter upon Washington Allston. There was a small vase of oracular
gas from Delphos, which I trust will be submitted to the scientific
analysis of Professor Silliman. I was deeply moved on beholding a vial
of the tears into which Niobe was dissolved; nor less so on learning
that a shapeless fragment of salt was a relic of that victim of
despondency and sinful regrets,—Lot’s wife. My companion appeared to
set great value upon some Egyptian darkness in a blacking-jug. Several
of the shelves were covered by a collection of coins, among which,
however, I remember none but the Splendid Shilling, celebrated by
Phillips, and a dollar’s worth of the iron money of Lycurgus, weighing
about fifty pounds.
Walking carelessly onward, I had nearly fallen over a huge bundle, like
a peddler’s pack, done up in sackcloth, and very securely strapped and
corded.
“It is Christian’s burden of sin,” said the virtuoso.
“O, pray let us open it!” cried I. “For many a year I have longed to
know its contents.”
“Look into your own consciousness and memory,” replied the virtuoso.
“You will there find a list of whatever it contains.”
As this was all undeniable truth, I threw a melancholy look at the
burden and passed on. A collection of old garments, banging on pegs,
was worthy of some attention, especially the shirt of Nessus, Caesar’s
mantle, Joseph’s coat of many colors, the Vicar of Bray’s cassock,
Goldsmith’s peach-bloom suit, a pair of President Jefferson’s scarlet
breeches, John Randolph’s red baize hunting-shirt, the drab
small-clothes of the Stout Gentleman, and the rags of the “man all
tattered and torn.” George Fox’s hat impressed me with deep reverence
as a relic of perhaps the truest apostle that has appeared on earth for
these eighteen hundred years. My eye was next attracted by an old pair
of shears, which I should have taken for a memorial of some famous
tailor, only that the virtuoso pledged his veracity that they were the
identical scissors of Atropos. He also showed me a broken hourglass
which had been thrown aside by Father Time, together with the old
gentleman’s gray forelock, tastefully braided into a brooch. In the
hour-glass was the handful of sand, the grains of which had numbered
the years of the Cumeean sibyl. I think it was in this alcove that I
saw the inkstand which Luther threw at the Devil, and the ring which
Essex, while under sentence of death, sent to Queen Elizabeth. And here
was the blood-incrusted pen of steel with which Faust signed away his
salvation.
The virtuoso now opened the door of a closet and showed me a lamp
burning, while three others stood unlighted by its side. One of the
three was the lamp of Diogenes, another that of Guy Fawkes, and the
third that which Hero set forth to the midnight breeze in the high
tower of Ahydos.
“See!” said the virtuoso, blowing with all his force at the lighted
lamp.
The flame quivered and shrank away from his breath, but clung to the
wick, and resumed its brilliancy as soon as the blast was exhausted.
“It is an undying lamp from the tomb of Charlemagne,” observed my
guide. “That flame was kindled a thousand years ago.”
“How ridiculous to kindle an unnatural light in tombs!” exclaimed I.
“We should seek to behold the dead in the light of heaven. But what is
the meaning of this chafing-dish of glowing coals?”
“That,” answered the virtuoso, “is the original fire which Prometheus
stole from heaven. Look steadfastly into it, and you will discern
another curiosity.”
I gazed into that fire,—which, symbolically, was the origin of all that
was bright and glorious in the soul of man,—and in the midst of it,
behold a little reptile, sporting with evident enjoyment of the fervid
heat! It was a salamander.
“What a sacrilege!” cried I, with inexpressible disgust. “Can you find
no better use for this ethereal fire than to cherish a loathsome
reptile in it? Yet there are men who abuse the sacred fire of their own
souls to as foul and guilty a purpose.”
The virtuoso made no answer except by a dry laugh and an assurance that
the salamander was the very same which Benvenuto Cellini had seen in
his father’s household fire. He then proceeded to show me other
rarities; for this closet appeared to be the receptacle of what he
considered most valuable in his collection.
“There,” said he, “is the Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains.”
I gazed with no little interest at this mighty gem, which it had been
one of the wild projects of my youth to discover. Possibly it might
have looked brighter to me in those days than now; at all events, it
had not such brilliancy as to detain me long from the other articles of
the museum. The virtuoso pointed out to me a crystalline stone which
hung by a gold chain against the wall.
“That is the philosopher’s stone,” said he.
“And have you the elixir vita which generally accompanies it?” inquired
I.
“Even so; this urn is filled with it,” he replied. “A draught would
refresh you. Here is Hebe’s cup; will you quaff a health from it?”
My heart thrilled within me at the idea of such a reviving draught; for
methought I had great need of it after travelling so far on the dusty
road of life. But I know not whether it were a peculiar glance in the
virtuoso’s eye, or the circumstance that this most precious liquid was
contained in an antique sepulchral urn, that made me pause. Then came
many a thought with which, in the calmer and better hours of life, I
had strengthened myself to feel that Death is the very friend whom, in
his due season, even the happiest mortal should be willing to embrace.
“No; I desire not an earthly immortality,” said I.
“Were man to live longer on the earth, the spiritual would die out of
him. The spark of ethereal fire would be choked by the material, the
sensual. There is a celestial something within us that requires, after
a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it from decay and
ruin. I will have none of this liquid. You do well to keep it in a
sepulchral urn; for it would produce death while bestowing the shadow
of life.”
“All this is unintelligible to me,” responded my guide, with
indifference. “Life—earthly life—is the only good. But you refuse the
draught? Well, it is not likely to be offered twice within one man’s
experience. Probably you have griefs which you seek to forget in death.
I can enable you to forget them in life. Will you take a draught of
Lethe?”
As he spoke, the virtuoso took from the shelf a crystal vase containing
a sable liquor, which caught no reflected image from the objects
around.
“Not for the world!” exclaimed I, shrinking back. “I can spare none of
my recollections, not even those of error or sorrow. They are all alike
the food of my spirit. As well never to have lived as to lose them
now.”
Without further parley we passed to the next alcove, the shelves of
which were burdened with ancient volumes and with those rolls of
papyrus in which was treasured up the eldest wisdom of the earth.
Perhaps the most valuable work in the collection, to a bibliomaniac,
was the Book of Hermes. For my part, however, I would have given a
higher price for those six of the Sibyl’s books which Tarquin refused
to purchase, and which the virtuoso informed me he had himself found in
the cave of Trophonius. Doubtless these old volumes contain prophecies
of the fate of Rome, both as respects the decline and fall of her
temporal empire and the rise of her spiritual one. Not without value,
likewise, was the work of Anaxagoras on Nature, hitherto supposed to be
irrecoverably lost, and the missing treatises of Longinus, by which
modern criticism might profit, and those books of Livy for which the
classic student has so long sorrowed without hope. Among these precious
tomes I observed the original manuscript of the Koran, and also that of
the Mormon Bible in Joe Smith’s authentic autograph. Alexander’s copy
of the Iliad was also there, enclosed in the jewelled casket of Darius,
still fragrant of the perfumes which the Persian kept in it.
Opening an iron-clasped volume, bound in black leather, I discovered it
to be Cornelius Agrippa’s book of magic; and it was rendered still more
interesting by the fact that many flowers, ancient and modern, were
pressed between its leaves. Here was a rose from Eve’s bridal bower,
and all those red and white roses which were plucked in the garden of
the Temple by the partisans of York and Lancaster. Here was Halleck’s
Wild Rose of Alloway. Cowper had contributed a Sensitive Plant, and
Wordsworth an Eglantine, and Burns a Mountain Daisy, and Kirke White a
Star of Bethlehem, and Longfellow a Sprig of Fennel, with its yellow
flowers. James Russell Lowell had given a Pressed Flower, but fragrant
still, which had been shadowed in the Rhine. There was also a sprig
from Southey’s Holly Tree. One of the most beautiful specimens was a
Fringed Gentian, which had been plucked and preserved for immortality
by Bryant. From Jones Very, a poet whose voice is scarcely heard among
us by reason of its depth, there was a Wind Flower and a Columbine.
As I closed Cornelius Agrippa’s magic volume, an old, mildewed letter
fell upon the floor. It proved to be an autograph from the Flying
Dutchman to his wife. I could linger no longer among books; for the
afternoon was waning, and there was yet much to see. The bare mention
of a few more curiosities must suffice. The immense skull of Polyphemus
was recognizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the forehead
where once had blazed the giant’s single eye. The tub of Diogenes,
Medea’s caldron, and Psyche’s vase of beauty were placed one within