Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859», sayfa 14
"Here it is," said Miss Prissy, at last. "I only copied out the parts about being presented at Court. She says:—
"'One is obliged here to attend the circles of the Queen, which are held once a fortnight; and what renders it very expensive is, that you cannot go twice in the same dress, and a court-dress you cannot make use of elsewhere. I directed my mantua-maker to let my dress be elegant, but plain as I could possibly appear with decency. Accordingly, it is white lutestring, covered and full-trimmed with white crape, festooned with lilac ribbon and mock point-lace, over a hoop of enormous size. There is only a narrow train, about three yards in length to the gown-waist, which is put into a ribbon on the left side,—the Queen only having her train borne. Ruffled cuffs for married ladies,—treble lace ruffles, a very dress cap with long lace lappets, two white plumes, and a blonde lace handkerchief. This is my rigging.'"
Miss Prissy here stopped to adjust her spectacles. Her audience expressed a breathless interest.
"You see," she said, "I used to know her when she was Nabby Smith. She was Parson Smith's daughter, at Weymouth, and as handsome a girl as ever I wanted to see,—just as graceful as a sweet-brier bush. I don't believe any of those English ladies looked one bit better than she did. She was always a master-hand at writing. Everything she writes about, she puts it right before you. You feel as if you'd been there. Now, here she goes on to tell about her daughter's dress. She says:—
"'My head is dressed for St. James's, and in my opinion looks very tasty. Whilst my daughter is undergoing the same operation, I set myself down composedly to write you a few lines. Well, methinks I hear Betsey and Lucy say, "What is cousin's dress?" White, my dear girls, like your aunt's, only differently trimmed and ornamented,—her train being wholly of white crape, and trimmed with white ribbon; the petticoat, which is the most showy part of the dress, covered and drawn up in what are called festoons, with light wreaths of beautiful flowers; the sleeves, white crape drawn over the silk, with a row of lace round the sleeve near the shoulder, another half-way down the arm, and a third upon the top of the ruffle,—a little stuck between,—a kind of hat-cap with three large feathers and a bunch of flowers,—a wreath of flowers on the hair.'"
Miss Prissy concluded this relishing description with a little smack of the lips, such as people sometimes give when reading things that are particularly to their taste.
"Now, I was a-thinking," she added, "that it would be an excellent way to trim Mary's sleeves,—three rows of lace, with a sprig to each row."
All this while, our Mary, with her white short-gown and blue stuff-petticoat, her shining pale brown hair and serious large blue eyes, sat innocently looking first at her mother, then at Miss Prissy, and then at the finery.
We do not claim for her any superhuman exemption from girlish feelings. She was innocently dazzled with the vision of courtly halls and princely splendors, and thought Mrs. Adams's descriptions almost a perfect realization of things she had read in "Sir Charles Grandison." If her mother thought it right and proper she should be dressed and made fine, she was glad of it; only there came a heavy, leaden feeling in her little heart, which she did not understand, but we who know womankind will translate for you: it was, that a certain pair of dark eyes would not see her after she was dressed; and so, after all, what was the use of looking pretty?
"I wonder what James would think," passed through her head; for Mary had never changed a ribbon, or altered the braid of her hair, or pinned a flower in her bosom, that she had not quickly seen the effect of the change mirrored in those dark eyes. It was a pity, of course, now she had found out that she ought not to think about him, that so many thought-strings were twisted round him.
So while Miss Prissy turned over her papers, and read out of others extracts about Lord Caermarthen and Sir Clement Cotterel Dormer and the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta, in black and silver, with a silver netting upon the coat, and a head stuck full of diamond pins,—and Lady Salisbury and Lady Talbot and the Duchess of Devonshire, and scarlet satin sacks and diamonds and ostrich-plumes, and the King's kissing Mrs. Adams,—little Mary's blue eyes grew larger and larger, seeing far off on the salt green sea, and her ears heard only the ripple and murmur of those waters that earned her heart away,—till, by-and-by, Miss Prissy gave her a smart little tap, which awakened her to the fact that she was wanted again to try on the dress which Miss Prissy's nimble fingers had basted.
So passed the day,—Miss Prissy busily chattering, clipping, basting,—Mary patiently trying on to an unheard-of extent,—and Mrs. Scudder's neat room whipped into a perfect froth and foam of gauze, lace, artificial flowers, linings, and other aids, accessories, and abetments.
At dinner, the Doctor, who had been all the morning studying out his Treatise on the Millennium, discoursed tranquilly as usual, innocently ignorant of the unusual cares which were distracting the minds of his listeners. What should he know of dress-makers, good soul? Encouraged by the respectful silence of his auditors, he calmly expanded and soliloquized on his favorite topic, the last golden age of Time, the Marriage-Supper of the Lamb, when the purified Earth, like a repentant Psyche, shall be restored to the long-lost favor of a celestial Bridegroom, and glorified saints and angels shall walk familiarly as wedding-guests among men.
"Sakes alive!" said little Miss Prissy, after dinner, "did I ever hear any one go on like that blessed man?—such a spiritual mind! Oh, Miss Scudder, how you are privileged in having him here! I do really think it is a shame such a blessed man a'n't thought more of. Why, I could just sit and hear him talk all day. Miss Scudder, I wish sometimes you'd just let me make a ruffled shirt for him, and do it all up myself, and put a stitch in the hem that I learned from my sister Martha, who learned it from a French young lady who was educated in a convent;—nuns, you know, poor things, can do some things right; and I think I never saw such hemstitching as they do there;—and I should like to hemstitch the Doctor's ruffles; he is so spiritually-minded, it really makes me love him. Why, hearing him talk put me in mind of a real beautiful song of Mr. Watts,—I don't know as I could remember the tune."
And Miss Prissy, whose musical talent was one of her special fortes, tuned her voice, a little cracked and quavering, and sang, with a vigorous accent on each accented syllable,—
"From the third heaven, where God resides,
That holy, happy place,
The New Jerusalem comes down,
Adorned with shining grace.
"Attending angels shout for joy,
And the bright armies sing,—
'Mortals! behold the sacred seat
Of your descending King!'"
"Take care, Miss Scudder!—that silk must be cut exactly on the bias"; and Miss Prissy, hastily finishing her last quaver, caught the silk and the scissors out of Mrs. Scudder's hand, and fell down at once from the Millennium into a discourse on her own particular way of covering piping-cord.
So we go, dear reader,—so long as we have a body and a soul. Two worlds must mingle,—the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out, like the grotesque carvings on a Gothic shrine;—only, did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial; since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred. Have not ribbons, cast-off flowers, soiled bits of gauze, trivial, trashy fragments of millinery, sometimes had an awful meaning, a deadly power, when they belonged to one who should wear them no more, and whose beautiful form, frail and crushed as they, is a hidden and a vanished thing for all time? For so sacred and individual is a human being, that, of all the million-peopled earth, no one form ever restores another. The mould of each mortal type is broken at the grave; and never, never, though you look through all the faces on earth, shall the exact form you mourn ever meet your eyes again! You are living your daily life among trifles that one death-stroke may make relics. One false step, one luckless accident, an obstacle on the track of a train, the tangling of the cord in shifting a sail, and the penknife, the pen, the papers, the trivial articles of dress and clothing, which to-day you toss idly and jestingly from hand to hand, may become dread memorials of that awful tragedy whose deep abyss ever underlies our common life.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PARTY.
Well, let us proceed to tell how the eventful evening drew on,—how Mary, by Miss Prissy's care, stood at last in a long-waisted gown flowered with rose-buds and violets, opening in front to display a white satin skirt trimmed with lace and flowers,—how her little feet were put into high-heeled shoes, and a little jaunty cap with a wreath of moss-rose-buds was fastened over her shining hair,—and how Miss Prissy, delighted, turned her round and round, and then declared that she must go and get the Doctor to look at her. She knew he must be a man of taste, he talked so beautifully about the Millennium; and so, bursting into his study, she actually chattered him back into the visible world, and, leading the blushing Mary to the door, asked him, point-blank, if he ever saw anything prettier.
The Doctor, being now wide awake, gravely gave his mind to the subject, and, after some consideration, said, gravely, "No,—he didn't think he ever did." For the Doctor was not a man of compliment, and had a habit of always thinking, before he spoke, whether what he was going to say was exactly true; and having lived some time in the family of President Edwards, renowned for beautiful daughters, he naturally thought them over.
The Doctor looked innocent and helpless, while Miss Prissy, having got him now quite into her power, went on volubly to expatiate on the difficulties overcome in adapting the ancient wedding-dress to its present modern fit. He told her that it was very nice,—said, "Yes, Ma'am," at proper places,—and, being a very obliging man, looked at whatever he was directed to, with round, blank eyes; but ended all with a long gaze on the laughing, blushing face, that, half in shame and half in perplexed mirth, appeared and disappeared as Miss Prissy in her warmth turned her round and showed her.
"Now, don't she look beautiful?" Miss Prissy reiterated for the twentieth time, as Mary left the room.
The Doctor, looking after her musingly, said to himself,—"'The king's daughter is all glorious within; her clothing is of wrought gold; she shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework.'"
"Now, did I ever?" said Miss Prissy, rushing out. "How that good man does turn everything! I believe you couldn't get anything, that he wouldn't find a text right out of the Bible about it. I mean to get the linen for that shirt this very week, with the Miss Wilcox's money; they always pay well, those Wilcoxes,—and I've worked for them, off and on, sixteen days and a quarter. To be sure, Miss Scudder, there's no real need of my doing it, for I must say you keep him looking like a pink,—but only I feel as if I must do something for such a good man."
The good Doctor was brushed up for the evening with zealous care and energy; and if he did not look like a pink, it was certainly no fault of his hostess.
Well, we cannot reproduce in detail the faded glories of that entertainment, nor relate how the Wilcox Manor and gardens were illuminated,—how the bride wore a veil of real point-lace,—how carriages rolled and grated on the gravel works, and negro servants, in white kid gloves, handed out ladies in velvet and satin.
To Mary's inexperienced eye it seemed like an enchanted dream,—a realization of all she had dreamed of grand and high society. She had her little triumph of an evening; for everybody asked who that beautiful girl was, and more than one gallant of the old Newport first families felt himself adorned and distinguished to walk with her on his arm. Busy, officious dowagers repeated to Mrs. Scudder the applauding whispers that followed her wherever she went.
"Really, Mrs. Scudder," said gallant old General Wilcox, "where have you kept such a beauty all this time? It's a sin and a shame to hide such a light under a bushel."
And Mrs. Scudder, though, of course, like you and me, sensible reader, properly apprised of the perishable nature of such fleeting honors, was, like us, too, but a mortal, and smiled condescendingly on the follies of the scene.
The house was divided by a wide hall opening by doors, the front one upon the street, the back into a large garden, the broad central walk of which, edged on each side with high clipped hedges of box, now resplendent with colored lamps, seemed to continue the prospect in a brilliant vista.
The old-fashioned garden was lighted in every part, and the company dispersed themselves about it in picturesque groups.
We have the image in our mind of Mary as she stood with her little hat and wreath of rose-buds, her fluttering ribbons and rich brocade, as it were a picture framed in the door-way, with her back to the illuminated garden, and her calm, innocent face regarding with a pleased wonder the unaccustomed gayeties within.
Her dress, which, under Miss Prissy's forming hand, had been made to assume that appearance of style and fashion which more particularly characterized the mode of those times, formed a singular, but not unpleasing, contrast to the sort of dewy freshness of air and mien which was characteristic of her style of beauty. It seemed so to represent a being who was in the world, yet not of it,—who, though living habitually in a higher region of thought and feeling, was artlessly curious, and innocently pleased with a fresh experience in an altogether untried sphere. The feeling of being in a circle to which she did not belong, where her presence was in a manner an accident, and where she felt none of the responsibilities which come from being a component part of a society, gave to her a quiet, disengaged air, which produced all the effect of the perfect ease of high breeding.
While she stands there, there comes out of the door of the bridal reception-room a gentleman with a stylishly-dressed lady on either arm, with whom he seems wholly absorbed. He is of middle height, peculiarly graceful in form and moulding, with that indescribable air of high breeding which marks the polished man of the world. His beautifully-formed head, delicate profile, fascinating sweetness of smile, and, above all, an eye which seemed to have an almost mesmeric power of attraction, were traits which distinguished one of the most celebrated men of the time, and one whose peculiar history yet lives not only in our national records, but in the private annals of many an American family.
"Good Heavens!" he said, suddenly pausing in conversation, as his eye accidentally fell upon Mary. "Who is that lovely creature?"
"Oh, that," said Mrs. Wilcox,—"why, that is Mary Scudder. Her father was a family connection of the General's. The family are in rather modest circumstances, but highly respectable."
After a few moments more of ordinary chit-chat, in which from time to time he darted upon her glances of rapid and piercing observation, the gentleman might have been observed to disembarrass himself of one of the ladies on his arm, by passing her with a compliment and a bow to another gallant, and, after a few moments more, he spoke something to Mrs. Wilcox, in a low voice, and with that gentle air of deferential sweetness which always made everybody well satisfied to do his will. The consequence was, that in a few moments Mary was startled from her calm speculations by the voice of Mrs. Wilcox, saying at her elbow, in a formal tone,—
"Miss Scudder, I have the honor to present to your acquaintance Colonel Burr, of the United States Senate."
(To be continued.)
THE WALKER OF THE SNOW
Speed on, speed on, good master!
The camp lies far away;—
We must cross the haunted valley
Before the close of day.
How the snow-blight came upon me
I will tell you as we go,—
The blight of the shadow hunter
Who walks the midnight snow.
To the cold December heaven
Came the pale moon and the stars,
As the yellow sun was sinking
Behind the purple bars.
The snow was deeply drifted
Upon the ridges drear
That lay for miles between me
And the camp for which we steer.
'Twas silent on the hill-side,
And by the solemn wood
No sound of life or motion
To break the solitude,
Save the wailing of the moose-bird
With a plaintive note and low,
And the skating of the red leaf
Upon the frozen snow.
And said I,—"Though dark is falling,
And far the camp must be,
Yet my heart it would be lightsome,
If I had but company."
And then I sang and shouted,
Keeping measure, as I sped,
To the harp-twang of the snow-shoe
As it sprang beneath my tread.
Nor far into the valley
Had I dipped upon my way,
When a dusky figure joined me,
In a capuchon of gray,
Bending upon the snow-shoes
With a long and limber stride;
And I hailed the dusky stranger,
As we travelled side by side.
But no token of communion
Gave he by word or look,
And the fear-chill fell upon me
At the crossing of the brook.
For I saw by the sickly moonlight,
As I followed, bending low,
That the walking of the stranger
Left no foot-marks on the snow.
Then the fear-chill gathered o'er me,
Like a shroud around me cast,
As I sank upon the snow-drift
Where the shadow hunter passed.
And the otter-trappers found me,
Before the break of day,
With my dark hair blanched and whitened
As the snow in which I lay.
But they spoke not, as they raised me;
For they knew that in the night
I had seen the shadow hunter,
And had withered in his blight.
Sancta Maria speed us!
The sun is falling low,—
Before us lies the Valley
Of the Walker of the Snow!
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES
A New History of the Conquest of Mexico. In which Las Casas' Denunciations of the Popular Historians of that War are fully vindicated. By ROBERT ANDERSON WILSON, Counsellor at Law; Author of "Mexico and its Religion," etc., Philadelphia: James Challen & Son. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, & Co.
(SECOND NOTICE.)
According to the well-authenticated legend of the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, the Saint, as he lay upon the grid-iron, conscious that he had been sufficiently done on one side, begged the cooks, if it were a matter of indifference to them, to turn him on the other. Common humanity demanded compliance with so reasonable a request. We fancy that we hear Mr. Wilson, preferring a similar petition; and we hope we are too good-natured to be insensible to the appeal. We cannot, at this moment, indeed, think of him otherwise than good-naturedly. With many things in his book we have been highly pleased. The number, the novelty, and the variety of his blunders have given us a very favorable impression of his ingenuity, and have afforded us constant entertainment in what we feared was to be a drudgery and a task. We had intended to cull some of these beauties for the amusement of our readers and the personal gratification of Mr. Wilson himself. But, as children, gathering shells on the sea-shore, resign, one after another, the treasures which they have collected, and grasp at newer, and, therefore, more pleasing specimens, which are abandoned in their turn, so we, finding our stores accumulate beyond our means of transportation, and tantalized by a richness that made the task of selection an impossible one, have been forced to relinquish the prize and come away with empty hands. If there be, in the compass of what the author calls "these volumes,"—though to us, perhaps from inability to distinguish between unity and duality, his work appears to be comprised in a single tome,—a sentence decently constructed, a foreign name correctly spelt, a punctuation-mark rightly placed, a fact clearly and accurately stated, or an argument that is not capable of an easy reduction to the absurd, we have not been so unfortunate as to discover it. Mr. Wilson is a man who, to use Carlyle's favorite expression, has "swallowed all formulas." The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the "sevenfold censorship" and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing the free communication of ideas. All such trammels he rejects; and, accordingly, we have to thank him, so far as mere style is concerned, for an uninterrupted flow of pleasure in the perusal of his book, adorned as it is with "graces" that are very far indeed "beyond the reach of Art."
We come now to those important questions which Mr. Wilson was not, indeed, the first to agitate, but which he has awakened from their profound slumbers in the bosom of the Hon. Lewis Cass and the pages of the "North American Review." We are not to be tempted into writing another "New History of the Conquest of Mexico"; but we shall endeavor to state with clearness those points on which the world has had the temerity to differ from the "high authorities" we have named. It has been, then, commonly asserted, and is, we fear, by the great mass of our readers still superstitiously believed, that, at the time of the discovery of this continent, there existed, in certain portions of it, nations not wholly barbarous, and yet not civilized, according to our notions of that term,—nations which had regular governments and systems of polity, many correct notions in regard to morals, and some acquaintance with Art and with the refinements of life,—but which were yet, in a great measure, ignorant of the true principles of science, little skilled in mechanics, and addicted to the practice of idolatrous rites. This assertion would seem to have some primâ-facie evidence in its favor. The regions in which these nations are said to have existed lie within the tropics; and it is a well-established principle, that a genial climate, a fertile soil, the consequent facilities for obtaining a subsistence, and the stimulus thus given to the increase of population, are the first elements of an advance from a savage to a civilized state, of the abandonment of rude freedom and nomadic habits, and of the development of a regular social system. This principle is clearly set forth and elaborately illustrated by Mr. Buckle; and we the more readily refer to this author, because he stands high in the esteem of Mr. Wilson, who, in order to prove his own especial fitness for historical composition, and the incompetence of all who have preceded him in the attempt, refers to a passage in Buckle, containing an enumeration of the qualifications which he considers indispensable for the historian. This enumeration includes all the attainments that have ever been in the common possession of the human family. Mr. Buckle remarks, with indisputable truth, that one historian has lacked some of these qualifications, another historian has lacked others of them. Mr. Wilson states that "each and every writer" who has preceded him has lacked them all. Mr. Buckle, by implication, excepts one person, as uniting in himself all the qualifications he demands. Mr. Wilson thinks he is the exception; but we are quite sure that the exception intended by the author was—Henry Thomas Buckle.
In the Old World, civilization, as all admit, had its origin in tropical regions. Across the whole extent of the Eastern Continent, races are found inhabiting the warmer latitudes, which are now, or formerly were, in what is popularly called a semi-civilized condition. No one, we believe, has ever been foolish enough to account for this fact by supposing that a single people or tribe, having attained some degree of culture, had diffused the germs of knowledge over so large a portion of the globe. Chinese civilization differs almost as much from that of Hindostan as from that of England or of France. The Assyrian civilization was indigenous on the borders of the Euphrates, and the Egyptian on the borders of the Nile. What is remarkable in these and in all the other cases that might be cited is, that in those regions civilization never reached the high point which it has attained in other parts of the world, less favored at the outset; that it exhibited a grotesque union of refined ideas and strangely artificial institutions, with customs, manners, and creeds that seem to the European mind abhorrent and ridiculous; and that, the internal impulse with which it started having been exhausted, it either remained stationary, without further development, or sank into decay, or fell before the hostile attacks of races that had never yielded to its influence. Now the civilization which is described as having once existed in America exhibits these general characteristics, while it has, like each of the others, its own peculiar traits. If the discoverers had made a different report, we might have been led to suppose that some such state of things as we have described had previously existed, but had perished before their arrival.
Mr. Wilson, however, does not reason in this manner. He has found, from his own observation,—the only source of knowledge, if such it can be called, on which he is willing to place much reliance,—that the Ojibways and Iroquois are savages, and he rightly argues that their ancestors must have been savages. From these premises, without any process of reasoning, he leaps at once to the conclusion, that in no part of America could the aboriginal inhabitants ever have lived in any other than a savage state. Hence he tells us, that, in all statements regarding them, everything "must be rejected that is inconsistent with well-established Indian traits." The ancient Mexican empire was, according to his showing, nothing more than one of those confederacies of tribes with which the reader of early New England history is perfectly familiar. The far-famed city of Mexico was "an Indian village of the first class,"—such, we may hope, as that which the author saw on his visit to the Massasaugus, where, to his immense astonishment, he found the people "clothed, and in their right minds." The Aztecs, he argues, could not have built temples, for the Iroquois do not build temples. The Aztecs could not have been idolaters or offered up human sacrifices, for the Iroquois are not idolaters and do not offer up human sacrifices. The Aztecs could not have been addicted to cannibalism, for the Iroquois never eat human flesh, unless driven to it by hunger. This is what Mr. Wilson means by the "American standpoint"; and those who adopt his views may consider the whole question settled without any debate.
But there are some slight difficulties to be overcome, before we can embrace these views. Putting human testimony aside, there are witnesses of the past that still give their evidence to the fact, that parts of this continent were once inhabited by races who had other pursuits besides hunting and fishing, and whose ideas and manners differed widely from those of the "red men" of the North. Ruined cities, defaced temples, broken statues,—relics such as on the Eastern Continent, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the shores of the Ganges, mark the sites of fallen empires and extinct civilizations,—relics such as we should have expected, from a priori reasoning, to meet with in the corresponding latitudes of the New World,—lie scattered through their whole extent, proclaiming themselves the works of men who lived in settled communities and under regular forms of government, who had some knowledge of architecture and some rude notions of the beautiful and the sublime, who had strong feelings and vivid conceptions in regard to the agency of supernal powers in the control of human affairs, but who clothed their conceptions in uncouth forms, and worshipped their deities with absurd and debasing rites. Some of these remains being known to Mr. Wilson, on the evidence of the only pair of eyes in the universe which, in his estimation, have the faculty of seeing, he cannot treat them, according to his usual method in such cases, as fabrications of Spanish priests and lying chroniclers. How, then, does he account for them? He unfolds a theory on the subject, which he has stolen from the "monkish chroniclers" whom he treats with so much contempt, and which has long ago been exploded and set aside. He tells us, that these relics have no connection with the history of the American Aborigines,—that they have a different origin and a far greater antiquity,—that they are proofs, not to be gainsaid, of the discovery of this continent, at a very early date, by Phoenician adventurers, and of the establishment, in the regions where they are found, of Phoenician colonies. These ruins, he tells us, were Phoenician temples, these statues are the representations of Phoenician gods. In the comparison of facts by which he endeavors to support this theory, we have been surprised to find him admitting the testimony of other explorers. But they are, it seems, reluctant witnesses. Their inferences from the facts which they have themselves collected are directly opposite to his. "Proving our case," he says, "by such testimony, we have admitted their statement of fact, only rejecting their conclusions." Their proper business, it would appear, was to amass the materials which our author alone was competent to use. He encountered, indeed, a solitary difficulty; but this, in the most astonishing manner, has been removed. "Thus far," he writes, "had we carried the argument, but had here been compelled to stop, for want of further evidence; and the very stereotype plate that at first occupied this page, expressed our regrets that we were not able more completely to identify the Palenque statue as Hercules. At our publishers', however, the eyes of that distinguished Orientalist, the Rev. Mr. Osborn, chanced to fall upon a proof of the American goddess in the fourth note to this chapter, which he at once recognized as Astarte, represented according to an antique pattern. Her head-dress, he insisted, was in the ancient form of the mural crown, without the crescent, the prototype of that worn by Diana of the Ephesians, and so too, he insisted, was her necklace of 'two rows.'" Thus the chain of evidence was complete, and, for once, Mr. Wilson derived assistance from eyes not placed in his own head.
