Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863

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SCENE II.--_An Inn near the Chateau of Chalus._

Well, the whole thing is over, and here I sit
With one arm in a sling and a milk-score of gashes,
And this flagon of Cyprus must e'en warm my wit,
Since what's left of youth's flame is a head flecked with ashes.
I remember I sat in this very same inn,--
I was young then, and one young man thought I was handsome,--
I had found out what prison King Richard was in,
And was spurring for England to push on the ransom.

How I scorned the dull souls that sat guzzling around,
And knew not my secret nor recked my derision!
Let the world sink or swim, John or Richard be crowned,
All one, so the beer-tax got lenient revision.
How little I dreamed, as I tramped up and down,
That granting our wish one of Fate's saddest jokes is!
I had mine with a vengeance,--my king got his crown,
And made his whole business to break other folks's.

I might as well join in the safe old _tum_, _tum_:
A hero's an excellent loadstar,--but, bless ye,
What infinite odds 'twixt a hero to come
And your only too palpable hero _in esse_!
Precisely the odds (such examples are rife)
'Twixt the poem conceived and the rhyme we make show of,
'Twixt the boy's morning dream and the wake-up of life,
'Twixt the Blondel God meant and a Blondel I know of!

But the world's better off, I'm convinced of it now,
Than if heroes, like buns, could be bought for a penny,
To regard all mankind as their haltered milch-cow,
And just care for themselves. Well, God cares for the many;
And somehow the poor old Earth blunders along,
Each son of hers adding his mite of unfitness,
And, choosing the sure way of coming out wrong,
Gets to port, as the next generation will witness.

You think her old ribs have come all crashing through,
If a whisk of Fate's broom snap your cobweb asunder;
But her rivets were clinched by a wiser than you,
And our sins cannot push the Lord's right hand from under.
Better one honest man who can wait for God's mind,
In our poor shifting scene here, though heroes were plenty!
Better one bite, at forty, of truth's bitter rind
Than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty!

I see it all now: when I wanted a king,
'Twas the kingship that failed in myself I was seeking,--
'Tis so much less easy to do than to sing,
So much simpler to reign by a proxy than _be_ king!
Yes, I think I _do_ see: after all's said and sung,
Take this one rule of life and you never will rue it,--
'Tis but do your own duty and hold your own tongue,
And Blondel were royal himself, if he knew it!

* * * * *

NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT.

Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I
resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another
side of Nature. I have done so.

According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites,
"wherein is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon." My
journal for the last year or two has been _selenitic_ in this sense.

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not
tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad,
and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the
Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there
to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the
night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions
up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the
mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.

I shall be a benefactor, if I conquer some realms from the night,--if I
report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season
worthy of their attention,--if I can show men that there is some beauty
awake while they are asleep,--if I add to the domains of poetry.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon
discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion; and as for
the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter,
occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?

Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one
month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in
literature or religion? But why not study this Sanscrit? What if one
moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its weird teachings,
its oracular suggestions,--so divine a creature freighted with hints for
me, and I have not used her,--one moon gone by unnoticed?

I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticizing Coleridge, that for
his part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as
he must look at away up in the heavens. Such a man, one would say, would
never look at the moon, because she never turns her other side to us.
The light which comes from ideas which have their orbit as distant from
the earth, and which is no less cheering and enlightening to the
benighted traveller than that of the moon and stars, is naturally
reproached or nicknamed as moonshine by such. They are moonshine, are
they? Well, then, do your night-travelling when there is no moon to
light you; but I will be thankful for the light that reaches me from the
star of least magnitude. Stars are lesser or greater only as they appear
to us so. I will be thankful that I see so much as one side of a
celestial idea, one side of the rainbow and the sunset sky.

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities
very well, and despised them,--as owls might talk of sunshine. None of
your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they
do not understand, which they are abed and asleep to, however much it
may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.

It must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is
for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we
have, is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun. But
the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to
us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants. "The
moon gravitates toward the earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the
moon." The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his
thought which is to be referred to lunar influence. I will endeavor to
separate the tide in my thoughts from the current distractions of the
day. I would warn my hearers that they must not try my thoughts by a
daylight standard, but endeavor to realize that I speak out of the
night. All depends on your point of view. In Drake's "Collection of
Voyages," Wafer says of some Albinos among the Indians of Darien,--"They
are quite white, but their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite
different from the fair or pale European, as they have not the least
tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion.... Their eyebrows are
milk-white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which is very
fine.... They seldom go abroad in the daytime, the sun being
disagreeable to them, and causing their eyes, which are weak and poring,
to water, especially if it shines towards them; yet they see very well
by moonlight, from which we call them mooneyed."

Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there
"the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion," but we are
intellectually and morally Albinos,--children of Endymion,--such is the
effect of conversing much with the moon.

I complain of Arctic voyages that they do not enough remind us of the
constant peculiar dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual twilight
of the Arctic night. So he whose theme is moonlight, though he may find
it difficult, must, as it were, illustrate it with the light of the moon
alone.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season.
Take a July night, for instance. About ten o'clock,--when man is asleep,
and day fairly forgotten,--the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely
pastures where cattle are silently feeding. On all sides novelties
present themselves. Instead of the sun, there are the moon and stars;
instead of the wood-thrush, there is the whippoorwill; instead of
butterflies in the meadows, fire-flies, winged sparks of fire!--who
would have believed it? What kind of cool, deliberate life dwells in
those dewy abodes associated with a spark of fire? So man has fire in
his eyes, or blood, or brain. Instead of singing-birds, the
half-throttled note of a cuckoo flying over, the croaking of frogs, and
the intenser dream of crickets,--but above all, the wonderful trump of
the bull-frog, ringing from Maine to Georgia. The potato-vines stand
upright, the corn grows apace, the bushes loom, the grain-fields are
boundless. On our open river-terraces, once cultivated by the Indian,
they appear to occupy the ground like an army,--their heads nodding in
the breeze. Small trees and shrubs are seen in the midst, overwhelmed as
by an inundation. The shadows of rocks and trees and shrubs and hills
are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. The slightest
irregularities in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the
feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified in
consequence. For the same reason the whole landscape is more variegated
and picturesque than by day. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim
and cavernous; the ferns in the wood appear of tropical size. The
sweet-fern and indigo in overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up to
your middle. The leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were
flowing over them. The pools seen through the trees are as full of light
as the sky. "The light of the day takes refuge in their bosoms," as the
Purana says of the ocean. All white objects are more remarkable than by
day. A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hill-side.
The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight
reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if
she selected what to shine on. These small fractions of her light remind
one of the plant called moon-seed,--as if the moon were sowing it in
such places.

In the night the eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other
senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of
smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now,--swamp-pink
in the meadow, and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry
scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels. The senses both of
hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which
we never detected before. From time to time, high up on the sides of
hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air: a blast which has come up
from the sultry plains of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide
hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid
flowers. It is an air in which work has been done,--which men have
breathed. It circulates about from wood-side to hill-side, like a dog
that has lost its master, now that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all
night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the
sand: if you dig a few inches into it, you find a warm bed.

You lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill
at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars
are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day
has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but
bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that
a man could get along with _them_, though he was considerably reduced in
his circumstances,--that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never
failed.

No wonder that there have been astrologers,--that some have conceived
that they were personally related to particular stars. Du Bartas, as
translated by Sylvester, says he'll

"not believe that the Great Architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches decked
Only for shew, and with these glistering shields,
'T awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields,"--

he'll

"not believe that the least flower which pranks
Our garden-borders or our common banks,
And the least stone that in her warming lap
Our Mother Earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heaven have none."

And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "The stars are instruments of far
greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after
sunset"; and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they "are significant,
but not efficient"; and also Augustine as saying, "_Deus regit inferiora
corpora per superiora_": God rules the bodies below by those above. But
best of all is this, which another writer has expressed: "_Sapiens
adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrae naturam_": A wise man
assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of
the soil.

It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very
important to the traveller, whether the moon shines brightly or is
obscured. It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth,
when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been
abroad alone in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war
with the clouds in your behalf. Yet we fancy the clouds to be _her_ foes
also. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing,
displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness,--then suddenly
casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes her way triumphant
through a small space of clear sky.

In short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small
clouds which lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily
dissipating and shining through them, makes the drama of the moonlight
night to all watchers and night-travellers. Sailors speak of it as the
moon eating up the clouds. The traveller all alone, the moon all alone,
except for his sympathy, overcoming with incessant victory whole
squadrons of clouds above the forests and lakes and hills. When she is
obscured, he so sympathizes with her that he could whip a dog for her
relief, as Indians do. When she enters on a clear field of great extent
in the heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is glad. And when she has
fought her way through all the squadron of her foes, and rides majestic
in a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any obstructions in her
path, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his
heart, and the cricket also seems to express joy in its song.

How insupportable would be the days, if the night, with its dews and
darkness, did not come to restore the drooping world! As the shades
begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we
steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in
search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey
of the intellect.

Richter says, that "the earth is every day overspread with the veil of
night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened, namely,
that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought
in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts which day turns into smoke
and mist stand about us in the night as light and flames; even as the
column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius in the daytime
appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire."

There are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty, so
medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive
nature would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man
but would be better and wiser for spending them out of doors, though he
should sleep all the next day to pay for it, should sleep an Endymion
sleep, as the ancients expressed it,--nights which warrant the Grecian
epithet _ambrosial_, when, as in the land of Beulah, the atmosphere is
charged with dewy fragrance, and with music, and we take our repose and
have our dreams awake,--when the moon, not secondary to the sun,

"gives us his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime."

Diana still hunts in the New-England sky.

"In heaven queen she is among the spheres;
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure;
Eternity in her oft change she bears;
She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.

"Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
Mortality below her orb is placed;
By her the virtues of the stars down slide;
By her is Virtue's perfect image cast."

The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the last
stage of bodily existence.

Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night, when the
harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our
village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a
master. The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and old
things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a
wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an
instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and
flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative. Consider
the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!

The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It is
no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere,
and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are.

"In such a night let me abroad remain
Till morning breaks, and all's confused again."

Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an
inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the
morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.

When Ossian, in his address to the Sun, exclaims,--

"Where has darkness its dwelling?
Where is the cavernous home of the stars,
When thou quickly followest their steps,
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky,--
Thou climbing the lofty hills,
They descending on barren mountains?"

who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their "cavernous
home," "descending" with them "on barren mountains"?

Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black; for we see
through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day,
where the sunbeams are revelling.

* * * * *

ANDANTE.

BEETHOVEN'S SIXTH SYMPHONY.

Sounding above the warring of the years,
Over their stretch of toils and pains and fears,
Comes the well-loved refrain,
That ancient voice again.

Sweeter than when beside the river's marge
We lay and watched, like Innocence at large,
The changeful waters flow,
Speaks this brave music now.

Tender as sunlight upon childhood's head,
Serene as moonlight upon childhood's bed,
Comes the remembered power
Of that forgotten hour.

The little brook with merry voice and low,
The gentle ripples rippling far below,
Talked with no idle voice,
Though idling were their choice.

Now through the tumult and the pride of life,
Gentler, yet firmly soothing all its strife,
Nature draws near once more,
And knocks at the world's door.

She walks within her wild, harmonious maze,
Evolving melodies from doubt and haze,
And leaves us freed from care,
Like children standing there.

* * * * *

THE BROTHERS.

Doctor Franck came in as I sat sewing up the rents in an old shirt, that
Tom might go tidily to his grave. New shirts were needed for the living,
and there was no wife or mother to "dress him handsome when he went to
meet the Lord," as one woman said, describing the fine funeral she had
pinched herself to give her son.

"Miss Dane, I'm in a quandary," began the Doctor, with that expression
of countenance which says as plainly as words, "I want to ask a favor,
but I wish you'd save me the trouble."

"Can I help you out of it?"

"Faith! I don't like to propose it, but you certainly can, if you
please."

"Then give it a name, I beg."

"You see a Reb has just been brought in crazy with typhoid; a bad case
every way; a drunken, rascally little captain somebody took the trouble
to capture, but whom nobody wants to take the trouble to cure. The wards
are full, the ladies worked to death, and willing to be for our own
boys, but rather slow to risk their lives for a Reb. Now you've had the
fever, you like queer patients, your mate will see to your ward for a
while, and I will find you a good attendant. The fellow won't last long,
I fancy; but he can't die without some sort of care, you know. I've put
him in the fourth story of the west wing, away from the rest. It is
airy, quiet, and comfortable there. I'm on that ward, and will do my
best for you in every way. Now, then, will you go?"

"Of course I will, out of perversity, if not common charity; for some of
these people think that because I'm an abolitionist I am also a heathen,
and I should rather like to show them, that, though I cannot quite love
my enemies, I am willing to take care of them."

"Very good; I thought you'd go; and speaking of abolition reminds me
that you can have a contraband for servant, if you like. It is that fine
mulatto fellow who was found burying his Rebel master after the fight,
and, being badly cut over the head, our boys brought him along. Will you
have him?"

"By all means,--for I'll stand to my guns on that point, as on the
other; these black boys are far more faithful and handy than some of the
white scamps given me to serve, instead of being served by. But is this
man well enough?"

"Yes, for that sort of work, and I think you'll like him. He must have
been a handsome fellow before he got his face slashed; not much darker
than myself; his master's son, I dare say, and the white blood makes him
rather high and haughty about some things. He was in a bad way when he
came in, but vowed he'd die in the street rather than turn in with the
black fellows below; so I put him up in the west wing, to be out of the
way, and he's seen to the captain all the morning. "When can you go up?"

"As soon as Tom is laid out, Skinner moved, Haywood washed, Marble
dressed, Charley rubbed, Downs taken up, Upham laid down, and the whole
forty fed."

We both laughed, though the Doctor was on his way to the dead-house and
I held a shroud on my lap. But in a hospital one learns that
cheerfulness is one's salvation; for, in an atmosphere of suffering and
death, heaviness of heart would soon paralyze usefulness of hand, if the
blessed gift of smiles had been denied us.

In an hour I took possession of my new charge, finding a
dissipated-looking boy of nineteen or twenty raving in the solitary
little room, with no one near him but the contraband in the room
adjoining. Feeling decidedly more interest in the black man than in the
white, yet remembering the Doctor's hint of his being "high and
haughty," I glanced furtively at him as I scattered chloride of lime
about the room to purify the air, and settled matters to suit myself. I
had seen many contrabands, but never one so attractive as this. All
colored men are called "boys," even if their heads are white; this boy
was five-and-twenty at least, strong-limbed and manly, and had the look
of one who never had been cowed by abuse or worn with oppressive labor.
He sat on his bed doing nothing; no book, no pipe, no pen or paper
anywhere appeared, yet anything less indolent or listless than his
attitude and expression I never saw. Erect he sat, with a hand on either
knee, and eyes fixed on the bare wall opposite, so rapt in some
absorbing thought as to be unconscious of my presence, though the door
stood wide open and my movements were by no means noiseless. His face
was half averted, but I instantly approved the Doctor's taste, for the
profile which I saw possessed all the attributes of comeliness belonging
to his mixed race. He was more quadroon than mulatto, with Saxon
features, Spanish complexion darkened by exposure, color in lips and
cheek, waving hair, and an eye full of the passionate melancholy which
in such men always seems to utter a mute protest against the broken law
that doomed them at their birth. What could he be thinking of? The sick
boy cursed and raved, I rustled to and fro, steps passed the door, bells
rang, and the steady rumble of army-wagons came up from the street,
still he never stirred. I had seen colored people in what they call "the
black sulks," when, for days, they neither smiled nor spoke, and
scarcely ate. But this was something more than that; for the man was not
dully brooding over some small grievance; he seemed to see an
all-absorbing fact or fancy recorded on the wall, which was a blank to
me. I wondered if it were some deep wrong or sorrow, kept alive by
memory and impotent regret; if he mourned for the dead master to whom he
had been faithful to the end; or if the liberty now his were robbed of
half its sweetness by the knowledge that some one near and dear to him
still languished in the hell from which he had escaped. My heart quite
warmed to him at that idea; I wanted to know and comfort him; and,
following the impulse of the moment, I went in and touched him on the
shoulder.

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