“Farewell, poor old man!” said the school-master within himself, as he shut out the cold autumnal air, and entered his comfortable study. “We are not worthy of thee, or we should have had thee with us forever. Go back again to the place of thy childhood, the scene of thine early labors and thine early love; let thy days end where they began, and like the emblem of eternity, let the serpent of life coil itself round and take its tail into its mouth, and be still from all its hissings for evermore! I would not call thee back; for it is better thou shouldst be where thou art, than amid the angry contentions of this little town.”
Not all took leave of the old clergyman in so kindly a spirit. Indeed, there was a pretty general feeling of relief in the village, as when onegets rid of an ill-fitting garment, or old-fashioned hat, which one neither wishes to wear, nor is quite willing to throw away.
Thus Mr. Pendexter departed from the village. A few days afterwards he was seen at a fall training, or general muster of the militia, making a prayer on horseback, with his eyes wide open; a performance in which he took evident delight, as it gave him an opportunity of going quite at large into some of the bloodiest campaigns of the ancient Hebrews.
XI.
For a while the school-master walked to and fro, looking at the gleam of the sunshine on the carpet, and revelling in his day-dreams of unwritten books, and literary fame. With these day-dreams mingled confusedly the pattering of little feet, and the murmuring and cooing of his children overhead. His plans that morning, could he have executed them, would have filled a shelf in his library with poems and romances of his own creation. But suddenly the vision vanished; and another from the actual world took its place. It was the canvas-covered cart of the butcher, that, like the flying wigwam of the Indian tale, flitted before his eyes. It drove up the yard and stopped at the back door; and the poet felt that the sacred rest of Sunday, the God’s-truce with worldly cares, was once more at an end. A dark hand passed between him and the land of light. Suddenly closed the ivory gate of dreams, and the horn gate of every-day life opened, and he went forth to deal with the man of flesh and blood.
“Alas!” said he with a sigh; “and must my life, then, always be like the Sabbatical river of the Jews, flowing in full stream only on the seventh day, and sandy and arid all the rest?”
Then he thought of his beautiful wife and children, and added, half aloud, —
“No; not so! Rather let me look upon the seven days of the week as the seven magic rings of Jarchas, each inscribed with the name of a separate planet, and each possessing a peculiar power; — or as the seven sacred and mysterious stones which the pilgrims of Mecca were forced to throw over their shoulders in the valleys of Menah and Akbah, cursing the devil and saying at each throw, ‘God is great!’”
He found Mr. Wilmerdings, the butcher, standing beside his cart, and surrounded by five cats, that had risen simultaneously on their hind legs, to receive their quotidian morning’s meal. Mr. Wilmerdings not only supplied the village with fresh provisions daily, but he likewise weighed allthe babies. There was hardly a child in town that had not hung beneath his steelyards, tied in a silk handkerchief, the movable weight above sliding along the notched beam from eight pounds to twelve. He was a young man with a very fresh and rosy complexion, and every Monday morning he appeared dressed in an exceedingly white frock. He had lately married a milliner, who sold “Dunstable and eleven-braid, open-work and colored straws,” and their bridal tour had been to a neighbouring town to see a man hanged for murdering his wife. A pair of huge ox-horns branched from the gable of his slaughter-house; and near it stood the great pits of the tannery, which all the school-boys thought were filled with blood!
Perhaps no two men could be more unlike than Mr. Churchill and Mr. Wilmerdings. Upon such a grating, iron hinge opened the door of his daily life; — opened into the school-room, the theatre of those life-long labors, which theoretically are the most noble, and practically the most vexatious in the world. Toward this, as soon as breakfast was over, and he had played awhile with his children, he directed his steps. On his way, he had many glimpses into the lovely realmsof Nature, and one into those of Art, through the medium of a placard pasted against a wall. It was as follows: —
“The subscriber professes to take profiles, plain and shaded, which, viewed at right-angles with the serious countenance, are warranted to be infallibly correct.
“No trouble of adorning or dressing the person is required. He takes infants and children at sight, and has frames of all sizes to accommodate.
“A profile is a delineated outline of the exterior form of any person’s face and head, the use of which when seen tends to vivify the affections of those whom we esteem or love.
— William Bantam.”
Ere long even this glimpse into the ideal world had vanished; and he felt himself bound to the earth with a hundred invisible threads, by which a hundred urchins were tugging and tormenting him; and it was only with considerable effort, and at intervals, that his mind could soar to the moral dignity of his profession.
Such was the school-master’s life; and a dreary, weary life it would have been, had notpoetry from within gushed through every crack and crevice in it. This transformed it, and made it resemble a well, into which stones and rubbish have been thrown; but underneath is a spring of fresh, pure water, which nothing external can ever check or defile.
XII.
Mr. Pendexter had departed. Only a few old and middle-aged people regretted him. To these few, something was wanting in the service ever afterwards. They missed the accounts of the Hebrew massacres, and the wonderful tales of the Zumzummims; they missed the venerable gray hair, and the voice that had spoken to them in childhood, and forever preserved the memory of it in their hearts, as in the Russian church the old hymns of the earliest centuries are still piously retained.
The winter came, with all its affluence of snows, and its many candidates for the vacant pulpit. But the parish was difficult to please, as all parishes are; and talked of dividing itself, and building a new church, and other extravagances, as all parishes do. Finally it concluded to remainas it was, and the choice of a pastor was made.
The events of the winter were few in number, and can be easily described. The following extract from a school-girl’s letter to an absent friend contains the most important: —
“At school, things have gone on pretty much as usual. Jane Brown has grown very pale. They say she is in a consumption; but I think it is because she eats so many slate-pencils. One of her shoulders has grown a good deal higher than the other. Billy Wilmerdings has been turned out of school for playing truant. He promised his mother, if she would not whip him, he would experience religion. I am sure I wish he would; for then he would stop looking at me through the hole in the top of his desk. Mr. Churchill is a very curious man. To-day he gave us this question in arithmetic: ‘One-fifth of a hive of bees flew to the Kadamba flower; onethird flew to the Silandhara; three times the difference of these two numbers flew to an arbor; and one bee continued flying about, attracted on each side by the fragrant Ketaki and the Malati. What was the number of bees?’ Nobody could do the sum.
“The church has been repaired, and we have a new mahogany pulpit. Mr. Churchill bought the old one, and had it put up in his study. What a strange man he is! A good many candidates have preached for us. The only one we like is Mr. Kavanagh. Arthur Kavanagh! is not that a romantic name? He is tall, very pale, with beautiful black eyes and hair! Sally — Alice Archer’s Sally — says ‘he is not a man; he is a Thaddeus of Warsaw!’ I think he is very handsome. And such sermons! So beautifully written, so different from old Mr. Pendexter’s! He has been invited to settle here; but he cannot come till Spring. Last Sunday he preached about the ruling passion. He said that once a German nobleman, when he was dying, had his hunting-horn blown in his bed-room, and his hounds let in, springing and howling about him; and that so it was with the ruling passions of men; even around the death-bed, at the well-known signal, they
howled and leaped about those that had fostered them! Beautiful, is it not? and so original! He said in another sermon, that disappointments feed and nourish us in the desert places of life, as the ravens did the Prophet in the wilderness; andthat as, in Catholic countries, the lamps lighted before the images of saints, in narrow and dangerous streets, not only served as offerings of devotion, but likewise as lights to those who passed, so, in the dark and dismal streets of the city of Unbelief, every good thought, word, and deed of a man, not only was an offering to heaven, but likewise served to light him and others on their way homeward! I have taken a good many notes of Mr. Kavanagh’s sermons, which you shall see when you come back.
“Last week we had a sleigh-ride, with six white horses. We went like the wind over the hollows in the snow; — the driver called them ‘thank-you-ma’ams,’ because they make every body bow. And such a frantic ball as we had at Beaverstock! I wish you had been there! We did not get home till two o’clock in the morning; and the next day Hester Green’s minister asked her if she did not feel the fire of a certain place growing hot under her feet, while she was dancing!
“The new fashionable boarding-school begins next week. The prospectus has been sent to our house. One of the regulations is, ‘Young ladies are not allowed to cross their benders in school’!Papa says he never heard them called so before. Old Mrs. Plainfield is gone at last. Just before she died, her Irish chamber-maid asked her if she wanted to be buried with her false teeth in! There has not been a single new engagement since you went away. But somebody asked me the other day if you were engaged to Mr. Pillsbury. I was very angry. Pillsbury, indeed! He is old enough to be your father!
“What a long, rambling letter I am writing you! — and only because you will be so naughty as to stay away and leave me all alone. If you could have seen the moon last night! But what a goose I am! — as if you did not see it! Was it not glorious? You cannot imagine, dearest, how every hour in the day I wish you were here with me. I know you would sympathize with all my feelings, which Hester does not at all. For, if I admire the moon, she says I am romantic, and, for her part, if there is any thing she despises, it is the moon! and that she prefers a snug, warm bed (O, horrible!) to all the moons in the universe!”
XIII.
The events mentioned in this letter were the principal ones that occurred during the winter. The case of Billy Wilmerdings grew quite desperate. In vain did his father threaten and the school-master expostulate; he was only the more sullen and stubborn. In vain did his mother represent to his weary mind, that, if he did not study, the boys who knew the dead languages would throw stones at him in the street; he only answered that he should like to see them try it. Till, finally, having lost many of his illusions, and having even discovered that his father was not the greatest man in the world, on the breaking up of the ice in the river, to his own infinite relief and that of the whole village, he departed on a coasting trip in a fore-and-aft schooner, which constituted the entire navigation of Fairmeadow.
Mr. Churchill had really put up in his study the old white, wine-glass-shaped pulpit. It served as a play-house for his children, who, whether in it or out of it, daily preached to his heart, and were a living illustration of the way to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Moreover, he himself made use of it externally as a note-book, recording his many meditations with a pencil on the white panels. The following will serve as a specimen of this pulpit eloquence: —
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead-reckoning, — an endeavour to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings, — as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic idols may be worshipped for a while; but at length they are overturned by the continual and silent progress of Truth, as the grim statues of Copan have been pushed from their pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined walls.
The every-day cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration, and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon the wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move, the clock stands still.
The same object, seen from the three different points of view, — the Past, the Present, and the Future, — often exhibits three different faces to us; like those sign-boards over shop doors, which represent the face of a lion as we approach, of a man when we are in front; and of an ass when we have passed.
In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground.
The motives and purposes of authors are not always so pure and high, as, in the enthusiasm of youth, we sometimes imagine. To many the trumpet of fame is nothing but a tin horn to call them home, like laborers from the field, at dinnertime; and they think themselves lucky to get the dinner.
The rays of happiness, like those of light, are colorless when unbroken.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
The country is lyric, — the town dramatic. When mingled, they make the most perfect musical drama.
Our passions never wholly die; but in the last cantos of life’s romantic epos, they rise upagain and do battle, like some of Ariosto’s heroes, who have already been quietly interred, and ought to be turned to dust.
This country is not priest-ridden, but press-ridden.
Some critics have the habit of rowing up the Heliconian rivers with their backs turned, so as to see the landscape precisely as the poet did not see it. Others see faults in a book much larger than the book itself; as Sancho Panza, with his eyes blinded, beheld from his wooden horse the earth no larger than a grain of mustard-seed, and the men and women on it as large as hazel-nuts.
Like an inundation of the Indus is the course of Time. We look for the homes of our childhood, they are gone; for the friends of our childhood, they are gone. The loves and animosities of youth, where are they? Swept away like the camps that had been pitched in the sandy bed of the river.
As no saint can be canonized until the Devil’sAdvocate has exposed all his evil deeds, and showed why he should not be made a saint, so no poet can take his station among the gods until the critics have said all that can be said against him.
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
XIV.
At length the Spring came, and brought the birds, and the flowers, and Mr. Kavanagh, the new clergyman, who was ordained with all the pomp and ceremony usual on such occasions. The opening of the season furnished also the theme of his first discourse, which some of the congregation thought very beautiful, and others very incomprehensible.
Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the Spring! — the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron’s rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches! — the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees, — gentle, and yet irrepressible, — which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!
But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men, onl
y the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be. We are like children who are astonished and delighted only by the second-hand of the clock, not by the hour-hand.
Such was the train of thought with which Kavanagh commenced his sermon. And then, with deep solemnity and emotion, he proceeded to speak of the Spring of the soul, as from its cheerless wintry distance it turns nearer and nearer to the great Sun, and clothes its dry and withered branches anew with leaves and blossoms, unfolded from within itself, beneath the penetrating and irresistible influence.
While delivering the discourse, Kavanagh had not succeeded so entirely in abstracting himself from all outward things as not to note in some degree its effect upon his hearers. As inmodern times no applause is permitted in our churches, however moved the audience may be, and, consequently, no one dares wave his hat and shout,— “Orthodox Chrysostom! Thirteenth Apostle! Worthy the Priesthood!” — as was done in the days of the Christian Fathers; and, moreover, as no one after church spoke to him of his sermon, or of any thing else, — he went home with rather a heavy heart, and a feeling of discouragement. One thing had cheered and consoled him. It was the pale countenance of a young girl, whose dark eyes had been fixed upon him during the whole discourse with unflagging interest and attention. She sat alone in a pew near the pulpit. It was Alice Archer. Ah! could he have known how deeply sank his words into that simple heart, he might have shuddered with another kind of fear than that of not moving his audience sufficiently!
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 175
