Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX.

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"Is Nature's sternest painter, yet the best";

and that gives us, even without the crimson coloring which flows over the
recent picture, some conception of what a repulsive, brutal, sickening,
hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we
give the name of armies. The end to be attained justifies the means, we
are willing to believe; but the sight of these pictures is a commentary on
civilization such as a savage might well triumph to show its missionaries.
Yet through such martyrdom must come our redemption. War Is the surgery of
crime. Bad as it is in itself, it always implies that something worse has
gone before. Where is the American, worthy of his privileges, who does not
now recognize the fact, if never until now, that the disease of our nation
was organic, not functional, calling for the knife, and not for washes and
anodynes?

It is a relief to soar away from the contemplation of these sad scenes and
fly in the balloon which carried Messrs. King and Black in their aerial
photographic excursion. Our townsman, Dr. John Jeffries, as is well
recollected, was one of the first to tempt the perilous heights of the
atmosphere, and the first who ever performed a journey through the air of
any considerable extent. We believe this attempt of our younger townsmen
to be the earliest in which the aeronaut has sought to work the two
miracles at once, of rising against the force of gravity, and picturing
the face of the earth beneath him without brush or pencil.

One of their photographs is lying before us. Boston, as the eagle and the
wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the
solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South and
Trinity Church are two landmarks not to be mistaken. Washington Street
slants across the picture as a narrow cleft. Milk Street winds as if the
cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its
commercial palaces. Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in
the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in
numbers. Towards the circumference it grows darker, becoming clouded and
confused, and at one end a black expanse of waveless water is whitened by
the nebulous outline of flitting sails. As a first attempt it is on the
whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what
we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.

While the aeronaut is looking at our planet from the vault of heaven where
he hangs suspended, and seizing the image of the scene beneath him as he
flies, the astronomer is causing the heavenly bodies to print their images
on the sensitive sheet he spreads under the rays concentrated by his
telescope. We have formerly taken occasion to speak of the wonderful
stereoscopic figures of the moon taken by Mr. De la Rue in England, by Mr.
Rutherford and by Mr. Whipple in this country. To these most successful
experiments must be added that of Dr. Henry Draper, who has constructed a
reflecting telescope, with the largest silver reflector in the world,
except that of the Imperial Observatory at Paris, for the special purpose
of celestial photography. The reflectors made by Dr. Draper "will show
Debilissima quadruple, and easily bring out the companion of Sirius or the
sixth star in the trapezium of Orion." In taking photographs from these
mirrors, a movement of the sensitive plate of only one-hundredth of an
inch will render the image perceptibly less sharp. It was this accuracy of
convergence of the light which led Dr. Draper to prefer the mirror to the
achromatic lens. He has taken almost all the daily phases of the moon,
from the sixth to the twenty-seventh day, using mostly some of Mr.
Anthony's quick collodion, and has repeatedly obtained the full moon by
means of it in _one-third of a second_.

In the last "Annual of Scientific Discovery" are interesting notices of
photographs of the sun, showing the spots on his disk, of Jupiter with his
belts, and Saturn with his ring.

While the astronomer has been reducing the heavenly bodies to the
dimensions of his stereoscopic slide, the anatomist has been lifting the
invisible by the aid of his microscope into palpable dimensions, to remain
permanently recorded in the handwriting of the sun himself. Eighteen years
ago, M. Donne published in Paris a series of plates executed after figures
obtained by the process of Daguerre. These, which we have long employed in
teaching, give some pretty good views of various organic elements, but do
not attempt to reproduce any of the tissues. Professor O.N. Rood, of Troy,
has sent us some most interesting photographs, showing the markings of
infusoria enormously magnified and perfectly defined. In a stereograph
sent us by the same gentleman the epithelium scales from mucous membrane
are shown floating or half-submerged in fluid,--a very curious effect,
requiring the double image to produce it. Of all the microphotographs we
have seen, those made by Dr. John Dean, of Boston, from his own sections
of the spinal cord, are the most remarkable for the light they throw on
the minute structure of the body. The sections made by Dr. Dean are in
themselves very beautiful specimens, and have formed the basis of a
communication to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which many
new observations have been added to our knowledge of this most complicated
structure. But figures drawn from images seen in the field of the
microscope have too often been known to borrow a good deal from the
imagination of the beholder. Some objects are so complex that they defy
the most cunning hand to render them with all their features. When the
enlarged image is suffered to delineate itself, as in Dr. Dean's views of
the _medulla oblongata_, there is no room to question the exactness of the
portraiture, and the distant student is able to form his own opinion as
well as the original observer. These later achievements of Dr. Dean have
excited much attention here and in Europe, and point to a new epoch of
anatomical and physiological delineation.

The reversed method of microscopic photography is that which gives
portraits and documents in little. The best specimen of this kind we have
obtained is another of those miracles which recall the wonders of Arabian
fiction. On a slip of glass, three inches long by one broad, is a circle
of thinner glass, as large as a ten-cent piece. In the centre of this is a
speck, as if a fly had stepped there without scraping his foot before
setting it down. On putting this under a microscope magnifying fifty
diameters there come into view the Declaration of Independence in full, in
a clear, bold type, every name signed in fac-simile; the arms of all the
States, easily made out, and well finished; with good portraits of all the
Presidents, down to a recent date. Any person familiar with the faces of
the Presidents would recognize any one of these portraits in a moment.

Still another application of photography, becoming every day more and more
familiar to the public, is that which produces enlarged portraits, even
life-size ones, from the old daguerreotype or more recent photographic
miniature. As we have seen this process, a closet is arranged as a
camera-obscura, and the enlarged image is thrown down through a lens above
on a sheet of sensitive paper placed on a table capable of being easily
elevated or depressed. The image, weakened by diffusion over so large a
space, prints itself slowly, but at last comes out with a clearness which
is surprising,--a fact which is parallel to what is observed in the
stereoscopticon, where a picture of a few square inches in size is
"extended" or diluted so as to cover some hundreds of square feet, and yet
preserves its sharpness to a degree which seems incredible.

The copying of documents to be used as evidence is another most important
application of photography. No scribe, however skilful, could reproduce
such a paper as we saw submitted to our fellow-workman in Mr. Black's
establishment the other day. It contained perhaps a hundred names and
marks, but smeared, spotted, soiled, rubbed, and showing every awkward
shape of penmanship that a miscellaneous collection of half-educated
persons could furnish. No one, on looking at the photographic copy, could
doubt that it was a genuine reproduction of a real list of signatures; and
when half a dozen such copies, all just alike, were shown, the conviction
became a certainty that all had a common origin. This copy was made with a
_Harrison's globe lens_ of sixteen inches' focal length, and was a very
sharp and accurate duplicate of the original. It is claimed for this new
American invention that it is "quite ahead of anything European"; and the
certificates from the United States Coast-Survey Office go far towards
sustaining its pretensions.

Some of our readers are aware that photographic operations are not
confined to the delineation of material objects. There are certain
establishments in which, for an extra consideration, (on account of the
_difficilis ascensus_, or other long journey they have to take,) the
spirits of the departed appear in the same picture which gives the
surviving friends. The actinic influence of a ghost on a sensitive plate
is not so strong as might be desired; but considering that spirits are so
nearly immaterial, that the stars, as Ossian tells us, can be seen through
their vaporous outlines, the effect is perhaps as good as ought to be
expected.

Mrs. Brown, for instance, has lost her infant, and wishes to have its
spirit-portrait taken with her own. A special sitting is granted, and a
special fee is paid. In due time the photograph is ready, and, sure
enough, there is the misty image of an infant in the background, or, it
may be, across the mother's lap. Whether the original of the image was a
month or a year old, whether it belonged to Mrs. Brown or Mrs. Jones or
Mrs. Robinson, King Solomon, who could point out so sagaciously the
parentage of unauthenticated babies, would be puzzled to guess. But it is
enough for the poor mother, whose eyes are blinded with tears, that she
sees a print of drapery like an infant's dress, and a rounded something,
like a foggy dumpling, which will stand for a face: she accepts the
spirit-portrait as a revelation from the world of shadows. Those who have
seen shapes in the clouds, or remember Hamlet and Polonius, or who have
noticed how readily untaught eyes see a portrait of parent, spouse, or
child in almost any daub intended for the same, will understand how easily
the weak people who resort to these places are deluded.

There are various ways of producing the spirit-photographs. One of the
easiest is this. First procure a bereaved subject with a mind "sensitized"
by long immersion in credulity. Find out the age, sex, and whatever else
you can, about his or her departed relative. Select from your numerous
negatives one that corresponds to the late lamented as nearly as may be.
Prepare a sensitive plate. Now place the negative against it and hold it
up close to your gas-lamp, which may be turned up pretty high. In this way
you get a foggy copy of the negative in one part of the sensitive plate,
which you can then place in the camera and take your flesh-and-blood
sitter's portrait upon it in the usual way. An appropriate background for
these pictures is a view of the asylum for feeble-minded persons, the
group of buildings at Somerville, and possibly, if the penitentiary could
be introduced, the hint would be salutary.

The number of amateur artists in photography is continually increasing.
The interest we ourselves have taken in some results of photographic art
has brought us under a weight of obligation to many of them which we can
hardly expect to discharge. Some of the friends in our immediate
neighborhood have sent us photographs of their own making which for
clearness and purity of tone compare favorably with the best professional
work. Among our more distant correspondents there are two so widely known
to photographers that we need not hesitate to name them: Mr. Coleman
Sellers of Philadelphia and Mr. S. Wager Hull of New York. Many beautiful
specimens of photographic art have been sent us by these gentlemen,--among
others, some exquisite views of Sunnyside and of the scene of Ichabod
Crane's adventures. Mr. Hull has also furnished us with a full account of
the dry process, as followed by him, and from which he brings out results
hardly surpassed by any method.

A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other's
faces (that is, in Nature's original positive, the principal use of which,
after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a
new form of friendship. After an introduction by means of a few views of
scenery or other impersonal objects, with a letter or two of explanation,
the artist sends his own presentment, not in the stiff shape of a
purchased _carte de visite_, but as seen in his own study or parlor,
surrounded by the domestic accidents which so add to the individuality of
the student or the artist. You see him at his desk or table with his books
and stereoscopes round him; you notice the lamp by which he reads,--the
objects lying about; you guess his condition, whether married or single;
you divine his tastes, apart from that which he has in common with
yourself. By-and-by, as he warms towards you, he sends you the picture of
what lies next to his heart,--a lovely boy, for instance, such as laughs
upon us in the delicious portrait on which we are now looking, or an old
homestead, fragrant with all the roses of his dead summers, caught in one
of Nature's loving moments, with the sunshine gilding it like the light of
his own memory. And so these shadows have made him with his outer and his
inner life a reality for you; and but for his voice, which you have never
heard, you know him better than hundreds who call him by name, as they
meet him year after year, and reckon him among their familiar
acquaintances.

* * * * *

To all these friends of ours, those whom we have named, and not less those
whom we have silently remembered, we send our grateful acknowledgments.
They have never allowed the interest we have long taken in the miraculous
art of photography to slacken. Though not one of them may learn anything
from this simple account we have given, they will perhaps allow that it
has a certain value for less instructed readers, in consequence of its
numerous and rich omissions of much which, however valuable, is not at
first indispensable.

* * * * *

THE WRAITH OF ODIN.

The guests were loud, the ale was strong,
King Olaf feasted late and long;
The hoary Scalds together sang;
O'erhead the smoky rafters rang.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The door swung wide, with creak and din;
A blast of cold night-air came in,
And on the threshold shivering stood
An aged man, with cloak and hood.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The King exclaimed, "O graybeard pale,
Come warm thee with this cup of ale."
The foaming draught the old man quaffed,
The noisy guests looked on and laughed.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

Then spake the King: "Be not afraid;
Sit here by me." The guest obeyed,
And, seated at the table, told
Tales of the sea, and Sagas old.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

And ever, when the tale was o'er,
The King demanded yet one more;
Till Sigurd the Bishop smiling said,
"'T is late, O King, and time for bed."
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The King retired; the stranger guest
Followed and entered with the rest;
The lights were out, the pages gone,
But still the garrulous guest spake on.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

As one who from a volume reads,
He spake of heroes and their deeds,
Of lands and cities he had seen,
And stormy gulfs that tossed between.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

Then from his lips in music rolled
The Havamal of Odin old,
With sounds mysterious as the roar
Of billows on a distant shore.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

"Do we not learn from runes and rhymes
Made by the Gods in elder times,
And do not still the great Scalds teach
That silence better is than speech?"
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

Smiling at this, the King replied,
"Thy lore is by thy tongue belied;
For never was I so enthralled
Either by Saga-man or Scald."
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

The Bishop said, "Late hours we keep!
Night wanes, O King! 't is time for sleep!"
Then slept the King, and when he woke,
The guest was gone, the morning broke.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

They found the doors securely barred,
They found the watch-dog in the yard,
There was no foot-print in the grass,
And none had seen the stranger pass.
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

King Olaf crossed himself and said,
"I know that Odin the Great is dead;
Sure is the triumph of our Faith,
The white-haired stranger was his wraith."
Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

* * * * *

GALA-DAYS.

II.

The descent from Patmore and poetry to New York is somewhat abrupt, not to
say precipitous, but we made it in safety; and so shall you, if you will
be agile. New York is a pleasant little Dutch city, on a dot of island a
few miles southwest of Massachusetts. For a city entirely unobtrusive and
unpretending, it has really great attractions and solid merit; but the
superior importance of other places will not permit me to tarry long
within its hospitable walls. In fact, we only arrived late at night, and
departed early the next morning; but even a six-hours' sojourn gave me a
solemn and "realizing sense" of its marked worth,--for, when, tired and
listless, I asked for a servant to assist me, the waiter said he would
send the housekeeper. Accordingly, when, a few moments after, it knocked
at the door with light, light finger, (See De la Motte Fouque,) I drawled,
"Come in," and the Queen of Sheba stood before me, clad in purple and fine
linen, with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. I stared in
dismay, and perceived myself rapidly transmigrating into a _ridiculus
mus_. My gray and dingy travelling-dress grew abject, and burned into my
soul like the tunic of Nessus. I should as soon have thought of asking
Queen Victoria to brush out my hair as that fine lady in brocade silk and
Mechlin lace. But she was good and gracious, and did not annihilate me on
the spot, as she might easily have done, for which I shall thank her as
long as I live.

"You sent for me?" she inquired, with the blandest accents imaginable. I
can't tell a lie, pa,--you know I can't tell a lie; besides, I had not
time to make up one, and I said, "Yes," and then, of all stupid devices
that could filter into my soggy brain, I must needs stammer out that I
should like a few matches! A pretty thing to bring a dowager duchess up
nine pairs of stairs for!

"I will ring the bell," she said, with a tender, reproachful sweetness and
dignity, which conveyed without unkindness the severest rebuke tempered by
womanly pity, and proceeded to instruct me in the nature and uses of the
bell-rope, as she would any little dairy-maid who had heard only the chime
of cow-bells all the days of her life. Then she sailed out of the room,
serene and majestic, like a seventy-four man-of-war, while I, a squalid,
salt-hay gundalow, (Venetian blind-ed into _gondola_,) first sank down in
confusion, and then rose up in fury and brushed all the hair out of my
head.

"I declare," I said to Halicarnassus, when we were fairly beyond ear-shot
of the city next morning, "I don't approve of sumptuary laws, and I like
America to be the El Dorado of the poor man, and I go for the largest
liberty of the individual; but I do think there ought to be a clause in
the Constitution providing that servants shall not be dressed and educated
and accomplished up to the point of making people uncomfortable."

"No," said Halicarnassus, sleepily; "perhaps it wasn't a servant."

"Well," I said, having looked at it in that light silently for half an
hour, and coming to the surface in another place, "if I could dress and
carry myself like that, I would not keep tavern."

"Oh! eh?" yawning; "who does?"

"Mrs. Astor. Of course nobody less rich than Mrs. Astor could go up-stairs
and down-stairs and in my lady's chamber in Shiraz silk and gold of Ophir.
Why, Cleopatra was nothing to her. I make no doubt she uses gold-dust for
sugar in her coffee every morning; and as for the three miserable little
wherries that Isabella furnished Columbus, and historians have towed
through their tomes ever since, why, bless your soul, if you know of
anybody that has a continent he wants to discover, send him to this
housekeeper, and she can fit out a fleet of transports and Monitors for
convoy with one of her bracelets."

"I don't," said Halicarnassus, rubbing his eyes.

"I only wish," I added, "that she would turn Rebel, so that Government
might confiscate her. Paper currency would go up at once from the sudden
influx of gold, and the credit of the country receive a new lease of life.
She must be a lineal descendant of Sir Roger de Coverley, for I am sure
her finger sparkles with a hundred of his richest acres."

Before bidding a final farewell to New York, I shall venture to make a
single remark. I regret to be forced to confess that I greatly fear even
this virtuous little city has not escaped quite free, in the general
deterioration of morals and manners. The New York hackmen, for instance,
are very obliging and attentive; but if it would not seem ungrateful, I
would hazard the statement that their attentions are unremitting to the
degree of being almost embarrassing, and proffered to the verge of
obtrusiveness. I think, in short, that they are hardly quite delicate in
their politeness. They press their hospitality on you till you sigh for a
little marked neglect. They are not content with simple statement. They
offer you their hack, for instance. You decline, with thanks. They say
that they will carry you to any part of the city. Where is the pertinence
of that, if you do not wish to go? But they not only say it, they repeat
it, they dwell upon it as if it were a cardinal virtue. Now you have never
expressed or entertained the remotest suspicion that they would not carry
you to any part of the city. You have not the slightest intention or
desire to discredit their assertion. The only trouble is, as I said
before, you do not wish to go to any part of the city. Very few people
have the time to drive about in that general way; and I think, that, when
you have once distinctly informed them that you do not design to inspect
New York, they ought to see plainly that you cannot change your whole plan
of operations out of gratitude to them, and that the part of true
politeness is to withdraw. But they even go beyond a censurable urgency;
for an old gentleman and lady, evidently unaccustomed to travelling, had
given themselves in charge of a driver, who placed them in his coach,
leaving the door open while he went back seeking whom he might devour.
Presently a rival coachman came up and said to the aged and respectable
couple,--

"Here's a carriage all ready to start."

"But," replied the lady, "we have already told the gentleman who drives
this coach that we would go with him."

"Catch me to go in that coach, if I was you!" responded the wicked
coachman. "Why, that coach has had the small-pox in it."

The lady started up in horror. At that moment the first driver appeared
again, and Satan entered into me, and I felt in my heart that I should
like to see a fight; and then conscience stepped up and drove him away,
but consoled me by the assurance that I should see the fight all the same,
for such duplicity deserved the severest punishment, and it was my duty to
make an _expose_ and vindicate helpless innocence imposed upon in the
persons of that worthy pair. Accordingly I said to the driver, as he
passed me,--

"Driver, that man in the gray coat is trying to frighten the old lady and
gentleman away from your coach, by telling them it has had the small-pox."

Oh I but did not the fire flash into his honest eyes, and leap into his
swarthy cheek, and nerve his brawny arm, and clinch his horny fist, as he
marched straightway up to the doomed offender, fiercely denounced his
dishonesty, and violently demanded redress? Ah! then and there was
hurrying to and fro, and eagerness and delight on every countenance, and a
ring formed, and the prospect of a lovely "row,"--and I did it; but a
police-officer sprang up, full-armed, from somewhere underground, and
undid it all, and enforced a reluctant peace.

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