In the course of his long conversation with Miss Manchester, Kavanagh learned many things about the inhabitants of the town. Mrs. Wilmerdings was still carrying on her labors in the “Dunstable and eleven-braid, open-work and colored straws.” Her husband had taken to the tavern,and often came home very late, “with a brick in his hat,” as Sally expressed it. Their son and heir was far away in the Pacific, on board a whale-ship. Miss Amelia Hawkins remained unmarried, though possessing a talent for matrimony which amounted almost to genius. Her brother, the poet, was no more. Finding it impossible to follow the old bachelor’s advice, and look upon Miss Vaughan as a beautiful statue, he made one or two attempts, but in vain, to throw himself away on unworthy objects, and then died. At this event, two elderly maidens went into mourning simultaneously, each thinking herself engaged to him; and suddenly went out of it again, mutually indignant with each other, and mortified with themselves. The little taxidermist was still hopping about in his aviary, looking more than ever like his gray African parrot. Mrs. Archer’s house was uninhabited.
XXX.
Kavanagh continued his walk in the direction of Mr. Churchill’s residence. This, at least, was unchanged, — quite unchanged. The same white front; the same brass knocker; the same old wooden gate, with its chain and ball; the same damask roses under the windows; the same sunshine without and within. The outer door and study door were both open, as usual in the warm weather; and at the table sat Mr. Churchill, writing. Over each ear was a black and inky stump of a pen, which, like the two ravens perched on Odin’s shoulders, seemed to whisper to him all that passed in heaven and on earth. On this occasion, their revelations were of the earth. He was correcting school exercises.
The joyful welcome of Mr. Churchill, as Kavanagh entered, and the cheerful sound oftheir voices, soon brought Mrs. Churchill to the study, — her eyes bluer than ever, her cheeks fairer, her form more round and full. The children came in also, — Alfred grown to boy’s estate and exalted into a jacket; and the baby that was, less than two years behind him, and catching all his falling mantles, and all his tricks and maladies.
Kavanagh found Mr. Churchill precisely where he left him. He had not advanced one step, — not one. The same dreams, the same longings, the same aspirations, the same indecision. A thousand things had been planned, and none completed. His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely used his good ideas in conversation, and in letters; and they were straightway wrought into the texture of other men’s books, and so lost to him for ever. His work on Obscure Martyrs was anticipated by Mr. Hathaway, who, catching the idea from him, wrote and published a series of papers on Unknown Saints, before Mr. Churchill had fairly arranged his materials. Before he had written a chapter of his great Romance, another friend and novelist had published one on the same subject.
Poor Mr. Churchill! So far as fame and external success were concerned, his life certainly was a failure. He was, perhaps, too deeply freighted, too much laden by the head, to ride the waves gracefully. Every sea broke over him, — he was half the time under water!
All his defects and mortifications he attributed to the outward circumstances of his life, the exigencies of his profession, the accidents of chance. But, in reality, they lay much deeper than this. They were within himself. He wanted the all-controlling, all-subduing will. He wanted the fixed purpose that sways and bends all circumstances to its uses, as the wind bends the reeds and rushes beneath it.
In a few minutes, and in that broad style of handling, in which nothing is distinctly defined, but every thing clearly suggested, Kavanagh sketched to his friends his three years’ life in Italy and the East. And then, turning to Mr. Churchill, he said, —
“And you, my friend, — what have you been doing all this while? You have written to me so rarely that I have hardly kept pace with you.But I have thought of you constantly. In all the old cathedrals; in all the lovely landscapes; among the Alps and Apennines; in looking down on Duomo d’Ossola; at the Inn of Baveno; at Gaeta; at Naples; in old and mouldy Rome; in older Egypt; in the Holy Land; in all galleries and churches and ruins; in our rural retirement at Fiesoli; — whenever I have seen any thing beautiful, I have thought of you, and of how much you would have enjoyed it!”
Mr. Churchill sighed; and then, as if, with a touch as masterly, he would draw a picture that should define nothing, but suggest every thing, he said, —
“You have no children, Kavanagh; we have five.”
“Ah, so many already!” exclaimed Kavanagh. “A living Pentateuch! A beautiful Pentapylon, or five-gated temple of Life! A charming number!”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Churchill; “a beautiful number; Juno’s own; the wedding of the first even and first uneven numbers; the number sacred to marriage, but having no reference, direct or indirect, to the Pythagorean novitiate of five years of silence.”
“No; it certainly is not the vocation of children to be silent,” said Kavanagh, laughing. “That would be out of nature; saving always the children of the brain, which do not often make so much noise in the world as we desire. I hope a still larger family of these has grown up around you during my absence.”
“Quite otherwise,” answered the school-master, sadly. “My brain has been almost barren of songs. I have only been trifling; and I am afraid, that, if I play any longer with Apollo, the untoward winds will blow the discus of the god against my forehead, and strike me dead with it, as they did Hyacinth of old.”
“And your Romance, — have you been more successful with that? I hope it is finished, or nearly finished?”
“Not yet begun,” said Mr. Churchill. “The plan and characters still remain vague and indefinite in my mind. I have not even found a name for it.”
“That you can determine after the book is written,” suggested Kavanagh. “You can name it, for instance, as the old Heimskringla was named, from the initial word of the first chapter.”
“Ah! that was very well in the olden time,and in Iceland, when there were no quarterly reviews. It would be called affectation now.”
“I see you still stand a little in awe of opinion. Never fear that. The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticized.”
“That is the truth, Kavanagh; and I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for.”
“I will not say,” replied Kavanagh, “that humility is the only road to excellence, but I am sure that it is one road.”
“Yes, humility; but not humiliation,” sighed Mr. Churchill, despondingly. “As for excellence, I can only desire it, and dream of it; I cannot attain to it; it lies too far from me; I cannot reach it. These very books about me here, that once stimulated me to action, have now become my accusers. They are my Eumenides, and drive me to despair.”
“My friend,” said Kavanagh, after a short pause, during which he had taken note of Mr. Churchill’s sadness, “that is not always excellentwhich lies far away from us. What is remote and difficult of access we are apt to overrate; what is really best for us lies always within our reach, though often overlooked. To speak frankly, I am afraid this is the case with your Romance. You are evidently grasping at something which lies beyond the confines of your own experience, and which, consequently, is only a play of shadows in the realm of fancy. The figures have no vitality; they are only outward shows, wanting inward life. We can give to others only what we have.”
“And if we have nothing worth giving?” interrupted Mr. Churchill.
“No man is so poor as that. As well might the mountain streamlets say they have nothing worth giving to the sea, because they are not rivers. Give what you have. To some one, it may be better than you dare to think. If yo
u had looked nearer for the materials of your Romance, and had set about it in earnest, it would now have been finished.”
“And burned, perhaps,” interposed Mr. Churchill; “or sunk with the books of Simon Magus to the bottom of the Dead Sea.”
“At all events, you would have had the pleasureof writing it. I remember one of the old traditions of Art, from which you may perhaps draw a moral. When Raphael desired to paint his Holy Family, for a long time he strove in vain to express the idea that filled and possessed his soul. One morning, as he walked beyond the city gates, meditating the sacred theme, he beheld, sitting beneath a vine at her cottage door, a peasant woman, holding a boy in her arms, while another leaned upon her knee, and gazed at the approaching stranger. The painter found here, in real life, what he had so long sought for in vain in the realms of his imagination; and quickly, with his chalk pencil, he sketched, upon the head of a wine-cask that stood near them, the lovely group, which afterwards, when brought into full perfection, became the transcendent Madonna della Seggiola.”
“All this is true,” replied Mr. Churchill, “but it gives me no consolation. I now despair of writing any thing excellent. I have no time to devote to meditation and study. My life is given to others, and to this destiny I submit without a murmur; for I have the satisfaction of having labored faithfully in my calling, and of having perhaps trained and incited others to do what Ishall never do. Life is still precious to me for its many uses, of which the writing of books is but one. I do not complain, but accept this destiny, and say, with that pleasant author, Marcus Antoninus, ‘Whatever is agreeable to thee shall be agreeable to me, O graceful Universe! nothing shall be to me too early or too late, which is seasonable to thee! Whatever thy seasons bear shall be joyful fruit to me, O Nature! from thee are all things; in thee they subsist; to thee they return. Could one say, Thou dearly beloved city of Cecrops? and wilt thou not say, Thou dearly beloved city of God?”’
“Amen!” said Kavanagh. “And, to follow your quotation with another, ‘The gale that blows from God we must endure, toiling but not repining.”’
Here Mrs. Churchill, who had something of Martha in her, as well as of Mary, and had left the room when the conversation took a literary turn, came back to announce that dinner was ready, and Kavanagh, though warmly urged to stay, took his leave, having first obtained from the Churchills the promise of a visit to Cecilia during the evening.
“Nothing done! nothing done!” exclaimed he, as he wended his way homeward, musing and meditating. “And shall all these lofty aspirations end in nothing? Shall the arms be thus stretched forth to encircle the universe, and come back empty against a bleeding, aching breast?”
And the words of the poet came into his mind, and he thought them worthy to be written in letters of gold, and placed above every door in every house, as a warning, a suggestion, an incitement: —
“Stay, stay the present instant!
Imprint the marks of wisdom on its wings!
O, let it not elude thy grasp, but like
The good old patriarch upon record,
Hold the fleet angel fast until he bless thee!”
THE END
The Travel Writing
105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts — Longfellow’s home for almost fifty years. It was also a place of residence for George Washington during the Siege of Boston in 1775-1776. The building now serves as a popular museum.
The house in Longfellow’s time
OUTRE-MER: A PILGRIMAGE BEYOND THE SEA
This collection of prose sketches was Longfellow’s first published book, with the title of “outre-mer” being the French word for “overseas”. As a stipulation of his appointment as professor of language at his alma mater Bowdoin College, Longfellow traveled Europe extensively, providing him with plenty of material for this travelogue. The accounts are styled on The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving, who Longfellow had actually met while in Madrid in 1829. Irving was impressed with the young traveler and urged him to develop his literary interests.
The sketches reveal Longfellow’s detailed knowledge of the places he visited and his uncanny ability to become familiar, even fluent, in multiple languages, aided by his thorough learning of Latin. Many of the sketches are laced with poetry quotations and extracts from a range of poets, perhaps hinting at the writer’s more familiar genre.
The first parts of Outre-Mer were published in pamphlet form in the 1830s and Harpers published the completed work in two volumes in 1835, without the author’s name. Longfellow traveled to Europe shortly afterward, and while in London he had an English edition printed, credited only by “An American”. Although the travelogue was not particularly successful, the author’s former classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne enjoyed the work so much that it inspired him to rekindle their acquaintanceship.
The original title pages of both volumes
CONTENTS
THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY.
THE PILGRIM OF OUTRE-MER.
FRANCE.
NORMAN DILIGENCE.
THE GOLDEN LION INN.
MARTIN FRANC AND THE MONK OF SAINT ANTHONY
THE VILLAGE OF AUTEUIL.
JACQUELINE.
THE SEXAGENARIAN.
PÈRE LA CHAISE.
THE VALLEY OF THE LOIRE.
THE TROUVÈRES.
THE BAPTISM OF FIRE.
COQ-À-L’NE.
NOTARY OF PÉRIGUEUX.
SPAIN.
THE JOURNEY INTO SPAIN.
SPAIN.
A TAILOR’S DRAWER.
ANCIENT SPANISH BALLADS.
THE VILLAGE OF EL PARDILLO.
THE DEVOTIONAL POETRY OF SPAIN.
THE PILGRIM’S BREVIARY.
ITALY.
THE JOURNEY INTO ITALY.
ROME IN MIDSUMMER.
THE VILLAGE OF LA RICCIA.
NOTE-BOOK.
THE PILGRIM’S SALUTATION.
COLOPHON.
“Washington Irving and his Friends at Sunnyside” by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. Longfellow stands left of centre, his arm resting on the back of a chair. Washington Irving was a great source of encouragement to the younger writer.
THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY.
The cheerful breeze sets fair; we fill our sail,
And scud before it. When the critic starts,
And angrily unties his bags of wind,
Then we lay to, and let the blast go by.
HURDIS.
WORTHY AND GENTLE READER, I dedicate this little book to thee with many fears and misgivings of heart. Being a stranger to thee, and having never administered to thy wants nor to thy pleasures, I can ask nothing at thy hands, saving the common courtesies of life. Perchance, too, what I have written will be little to thy taste; — for it is little in accordance with the stirring spirit of the present age. If so, I crave thy forbearance for having thought that even the busiest mind might not be a stranger to those moments of repose, when the clock of time clicks drowsily behind the door, and trifles become the amusement of the wise and great.
Besides, what perils await the adventurous author who launches forth into the uncertain current of public favor in so frail a bark as this! The very rocking of the tide may overset him; or peradventure some freebooting critic, prowling about the great ocean of letters, may descry his strange colors, hail him through a gray goose-quill, and perhaps sink him without more ado. Indeed, the success of an unknown author is as uncertain as the wind. “When a book is first to appear in the world,” says a celebrated French writer, “one knows not whom to consult to learn its destiny. The stars preside not over its nativity. Their influences have no operation on it; and the most confident astrologers dare not foretell the diverse risks of fortune it must run.”
It is from such considerations, worthy reader, that I would fain bespeak thy friendly offices at the outset. But, in asking these, I would not forestall thy good opinion too far, lest in the sequel I should disappoint thy kind wishes. I ask only a welcome a
nd God-speed; hoping, that, when thou hast read these pages, thou wilt say to me, in the words of Nick Bottom, the weaver, “I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb.”
Very sincerely thine,
THE AUTHOR.
THE PILGRIM OF OUTRE-MER.
I am a Palmer, as ye se,
Whiche of my lyfe muche part have spent
In many a fayre and farre cuntrie,
As pilgrims do of good intent.
THE FOUR PS.
“LYSTENYTH, ye godely gentylmen, and all that ben hereyn!” I am a pilgrim benighted on my way, and crave a shelter till the storm is over, and a seat by the fireside in this honorable company. As a stranger I claim this courtesy at your hands; and will repay your hospitable welcome with tales of the countries I have passed through in my pilgrimage.
This is a custom of the olden time. In the days of chivalry and romance, every baron bold, perched aloof in his feudal castle, welcomed the stranger to his halls, and listened with delight to the pilgrim’s tale and the song of the troubadour. Both pilgrim and troubadour had their tales of wonder from a distant land, embellished with the magic of Oriental exaggeration. Their salutation was,
“Lordyng lysnith to my tale,
That is meryer than the nightingale.”
The soft luxuriance of the Eastern clime bloomed in the song of the bard; and the wild and romantic tales of regions so far off as to be regarded as almost a fairy land were well suited to the childish credulity of an age when what is now called the Old World was in its childhood. Those times have passed away. The world has grown wiser and less credulous; and the tales which then delighted delight no longer. But man has not changed his nature. He still retains the same curiosity, the same love of novelty, the same fondness for romance and tales by the chimney-corner, and the same desire of wearing out the rainy day and the long winter evening with the illusions of fancy and the fairy sketches of the poet’s imagination. It is as true now as ever, that
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 182
