And so our Dolly goes to her new life, and, save in memories of her childhood, is to be no longer one of the good people of Poganuc. . . . . . . . . .
Years have passed since then. Dolly has held her place among the matronage of Boston; her sons have graduated at Harvard, and her daughters have recalled to memory the bright eyes and youthful bloom of their mother.
As to Poganuc, all whom we knew there have passed away; all the Town-Hill aristocracy and the laboring farmers of the outskirts have gone, one by one, to the peaceful sleep of the Poganuc graveyard. There was laid the powdered head, stately form, and keen blue eye of Colonel Davenport; there came in time the once active brain and ready tongue of Judge Belcher; there, the bright eyes and genial smile of Judge Gridley; there, the stalwart form of Tim Hawkins, the gray, worn frame of Zeph Higgins. Even Hiel’s cheery face and vigorous arm had its time of waxing old and passing away, and was borne in to lie quiet under the daisies. The pastor and his wife sleep there peacefully with their folded flock around them.
“Kinsman and townsman are laid side by side,
Yet none have saluted, and none have replied.”
A village of white stones stands the only witness of the persons of our story. Even the old meeting-house is dissolved and gone. Generation passeth, generation cometh, saith the wise man, but the earth abideth forever. The hills of Poganuc are still beautiful in their summer woodland dress. The Poganuc river still winds at their feet with gentle murmur. The lake, in its steel-blue girdle of pines, still reflects the heavens as a mirror; its silent forest shores are full of life and wooded beauty. The elms that overarch the streets of the central village have spread their branches wider, and form a beautiful walk where other feet than those we wot of are treading. As other daisies have sprung in the meadows, and other bobolinks and bluebirds sing in the tree-tops, so other men and women have replaced those here written of, and the story of life still goes on from day to day among the POGANUC PEOPLE.
THE END
The Short Story Collections
Stowe was educated at Litchfield Female Academy, Connecticut
The Colonial Review Style house built on the former site of the academy
FOUR WAYS OF OBSERVING THE SABBATH AND OTHER RELIGIOUS SKETCHES
SKETCHES FROM THE NOTE BOOK OF AN ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
CONTENTS
CHILDREN
THE OLD OAK OF ANDOVER
THE ELDER’S FEAST
A SCENE IN JERUSALEM
THE OLD MEETING-HOUSE
LITTLE EDWARD
CONVERSATION ON CONVERSATION
HOW DO WE KNOW
HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH MAMMON
FOUR WAYS OF OBSERVING THE SABBATH
CHILDREN
“A little child shall lead them.”
One cold market morning I looked into a milliner’s shop, and there I saw a hale, hearty, well-browned young fellow from the country, with his long cart whip, and lion-shag coat, holding up some little matter, and turning it about on his great fist. And what do you suppose it was? A baby’s bonnet! A little, soft, blue satin hood, with a swan’s-down border, white as the new-fallen snow, with a frill of rich blonde around the edge.
By his side stood a very pretty woman, holding, with no small pride, the baby — for evidently it was the baby. Any one could read that fact in every glance, as they looked at each other, and then at the large, unconscious eyes, and fat, dimpled cheeks of the little one.
It was evident that neither of them had ever seen a baby like that before.
“But really, Mary,” said the young man, “isn’t three dollars very high?”
Mary very prudently said nothing, but taking the little bonnet, tied it on the little head, and held up the baby. The man looked, and without another word down went the three dollars — all the avails of last week’s butter; and as they walked out of the shop, it is hard to say which looked the more delighted with the bargain.
“Ah,” thought I, “a little child shall lead them.”
Another day, as I was passing a carriage factory along one of our principal back streets, I saw a young mechanic at work on a wheel. The rough body of a carriage stood beside him, and there, wrapped up snugly, all hooded and cloaked, sat a little dark-eyed girl, about a year old, playing with a great, shaggy dog. As I stopped, the man looked up from his work, and turned admiringly towards his little companion, as much as to say, “See what I have got here!”
“Yes,” thought I; “and if the little lady ever gets a glance from admiring swains as sincere as that, she will be lucky.”
Ah, these children, little witches, pretty even in all their faults and absurdities. See, for example, yonder little fellow in a naughty fit. He has shaken his long curls over his deep blue eyes; the fair brow is bent in a frown, the rose leaf lip is pursed up in infinite defiance, and the white shoulder thrust angrily forward. Can any but a child look so pretty, even in its naughtiness?
Then comes the instant change; flashing smiles and tears as the good comes back all in a rush, and you are overwhelmed with protestations, promises, and kisses! They are irresistible, too, these little ones. They pull away the scholar’s pen, tumble about his paper, make somersets over his books; and what can he do? They tear up newspapers, litter the carpets, break, pull, and upset, and then jabber unheard-of English in self-defense; and what can you do for yourself?
“If I had a child,” says the precise man, “you should see.”
He does have a child, and his child tears up his papers, tumbles over his things, and pulls his nose like all other children; and what has the precise man to say for himself? Nothing; he is like everybody else; “a little child shall lead him.”
The hardened heart of the worldly man is unlocked by the guileless tones and simple caresses of his son; but he repays it in time, by imparting to his boy all the crooked tricks and callous maxims which have undone himself.
Go to the jail, to the penitentiary, and find there the wretch most sullen, brutal, and hardened. Then look at your infant son. Such as he is to you, such to some mother was this man. That hard hand was soft and delicate; that rough voice was tender and lisping; fond eyes followed him as he played, and he was rocked and cradled as something holy. There was a time when his heart, soft and unworn, might have opened to questionings of God and Jesus, and been sealed with the seal of Heaven. But harsh hands seized it; fierce goblin lineaments were impressed upon it; and all is over with him forever!
So of the tender, weeping child is made the callous, heartless man; of the all-believing child, the sneering skeptic; of the beautiful and modest, the shameless and abandoned; and this is what the world does for the little one.
There was a time when the divine One stood on earth, and little children sought to draw near to him. But harsh human beings stood between him and them, forbidding their approach. Ah, has it not always been so? Do not even we, with our hard and unsubdued feelings, our worldly and unspiritual habits and maxims, stand like a dark screen between our little child and its Saviour, and keep even from the choice bud of our hearts the sweet radiance which might unfold it for paradise? “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not,” is still the voice of the Son of God; but the cold world still closes around and forbids. When, of old, disciples would question their Lord of the higher mysteries of his kingdom, he took a little child and set him in the midst, as a sign of him who should be greatest in heaven. That gentle teacher remains still to us. By every hearth and fireside Jesus still sets the little child in the midst of us.
Wouldst thou know, O parent, what is that faith which unlocks heaven? Go not to wrangling polemics, or creeds and forms of theology, but draw to thy bosom thy little one, and read in that clear, trusting eye the lesson of eternal life. Be only to thy God as thy child is to thee, and all is done. Blessed shalt thou be, indeed, “when a little child shall lead thee.”
THE OLD OAK OF ANDOVER
A REVERIE
Silently, with dreamy languor, the fleecy
snow is falling. Through the windows, flowery with blossoming geranium and heliotrope, through the downward sweep of crimson and muslin curtain, one watches it as the wind whirls and sways it in swift eddies.
Bight opposite our house, on our Mount Clear, is an old oak, the apostle of the primeval forest. Once, when this place was all wildwood, the man who was seeking a spot for the location of the buildings of Phillips Academy climbed this oak, using it as a sort of green watch-tower, from whence he might gain a view of the surrounding country. Age and time, since then, have dealt hardly with the stanch old fellow. His limbs have been here and there shattered; his back begins to look mossy and dilapidated; but, after all, there is a piquant, decided air about him, that speaks the old age of a tree of distinction, a kingly oak. To-day I see him standing, dimly revealed through the mist of falling snows; to-morrow’s sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs — all rose color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months, and spring will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath, and break out once more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps, into a vernal crown of leaves. I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find their life’s experience recorded in them. Our oak! what a crop of meditations and remembrances must he have thrown forth, leafing out century after century. Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things, that live in the gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific light, laid out and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest days! — when blue jay, and yellowhammer, and bobolink made his leaves merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering, fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down trees, scaring bobolinks — and Andover, as men say, began to be settled.
Stanch men were they — these Puritan fathers of Andover. The old oak must have felt them something akin to himself. Such strong, wrestling limbs had they, so gnarled and knotted were they, yet so outbursting with a green and vernal crown, yearly springing, of noble and generous thoughts, rustling with leaves which shall be for the healing of nations.
These men were content with the hard, dry crust for themselves, that they might sow seeds of abundant food for us, their children; men out of whose hardness in enduring we gain leisure to be soft and graceful, through whose poverty we have become rich. Like Moses, they had for their portion only the pain and weariness of the wilderness, leaving to us the fruition of the promised land. Let us cherish for their sake the old oak, beautiful in its age as the broken statue of some antique wrestler, brown with time, yet glorious in its suggestion of past achievement.
I think all this the more that I have recently come across the following passage in one of our religious papers.
The writer expresses a kind of sentiment which one meets very often upon this subject, and leads one to wonder what glamour could have fallen on the minds of any of the descendants of the Puritans, that they should cast nettles on those honored graves where they should be proud to cast their laurels.
“It is hard,” he says, “for a lover of the beautiful — not a mere lover, but a believer in its divinity also — to forgive the Puritans, or to think charitably of them. It is hard for him to keep Forefathers’ Day, or to subscribe to the Plymouth Monument; hard to look fairly at what they did, with the memory of what they destroyed rising up to choke thankfulness; for they were as one-sided and narrow-minded a set of men as ever lived, and saw one of Truth’s faces only — the hard, stern, practical face, without loveliness, without beauty, and only half dear to God. The Puritan flew in the face of facts, not because he saw them and disliked them, but because he did not see them. He saw foolishness, lying, stealing, worldliness, — the very mammon of unrighteousness rioting in the world and bearing sway, — and he ran full tilt against the monster, hating it with a very mortal and mundane hatred, and anxious to see it bite the dust that his own horn might be exalted. It was in truth only another horn of the old dilemma, tossing and goring grace and beauty, and all the loveliness of life, as if they were the enemies instead of the sure friends of God and man.”
Now, to those who say this we must ask the question with which Socrates of old pursued the sophist: What is beauty? If beauty be only physical, if it appeal only to the senses, if it be only an enchantment of graceful forms, sweet sounds, then indeed there might be something of truth, in this sweeping declaration that the Puritan spirit is the enemy of beauty.
The very root and foundation of all artistic inquiry lies here. What is beauty? And to this question God forbid that we Christians should give a narrower answer than Plato gave in the old times before Christ arose, for he directs the aspirant who would discover the beautiful to “consider of greater value the beauty existing in the soul, than that existing in the body.” More gracefully he teaches the same doctrine when he tells us that “there are two kinds of Venus (beauty); the one, the elder, who had no mother, and was the daughter of Uranus (heaven), whom we name the celestial; the other, younger, daughter of Jupiter and Dione, whom we call the vulgar.”
Now, if disinterestedness, faith, patience, piety, have a beauty celestial and divine, then were our fathers worshipers of the beautiful. If high-mindedness and spotless honor are beautiful things, they had those. What work of art can compare with a lofty and heroic life? Is it not better to be a Moses than to be a Michael Angelo making statues of Moses? Is not the life of Paul a sublimer work of art than Raphael’s cartoons? Are not the patience, the faith, the undying love of Mary by the cross, more beautiful than all the Madonna paintings in the world. If, then, we would speak truly of our fathers, we should say that, having their minds fixed on that celestial beauty of which Plato speaks, they held in slight esteem that more common and earthly.
Should we continue the parable in Plato’s manner, we might say that the earthly and visible Venus, the outward grace of art and nature, was ordained of God as a priestess, through whom men were to gain access to the divine, invisible One; but that men, in their blindness, ever worship the priestess instead of the divinity.
Therefore it is that great reformers so often must break the shrines and temples of the physical and earthly beauty, when they seek to draw men upward to that which is high and divine.
Christ says of John the Baptist, “What went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold they which are clothed in soft raiment are in kings’ palaces.” So was it when our fathers came here. There were enough wearing soft raiment and dwelling in kings’ palaces. Life in papal Rome and prelatic England was weighed down with blossoming luxury. There were abundance of people to think of pictures, and statues, and gems, and cameos, vases and marbles, and all manner of deliciousness. The world was all drunk with the enchantments of the lower Venus, and it was needful that these men should come, Baptist-like in the wilderness, in raiment of camel’s hair. We need such men now. Art, they tell us, is waking in America; a love of the beautiful is beginning to unfold its wings; but what kind of art, and what kind of beauty? Are we to fill our houses with pictures and gems, and to see that even our drinking cup and vase are wrought in graceful pattern, and to lose our reverence for self-denial, honor, and faith?
Is our Venus to be the frail, ensnaring Aphrodite, or the starry, divine Urania?
THE ELDER’S FEAST
A TRADITION OF LAODICEA AT a certain time in the earlier ages there lived in the city of Laodicea a Christian elder of some repute, named Onesiphorus. The world had smiled on him, and though a Christian, he was rich and full of honors. All men, even the heathen, spoke well of him, for he was a man courteous of speech and mild of manner.
His wife, a fair Ionian lady but half reclaimed from idolatry,
though baptized and accredited as a member of the Christian Church, still lingered lovingly on the confines of old heathenism, and if she did not believe, still cherished with pleasure the poetic legends of Apollo and Venus, of Jove and Diana.
A large and fair family of sons and daughters had risen around these parents; but their education had been much after the rudiments of this world, and not after Christ. Though, according to the customs of the church, they were brought to the font of baptism, and sealed in the name of the Father, and the Son, and Holy Ghost, and although daily, instead of libations to the Penates, or flower offerings to Diana and Juno, the name of Jesus was invoked, yet the spirit of Jesus was wanting. The chosen associates of all these children, as they grew older, were among the heathen; and daily they urged their parents, by their entreaties, to conform, in one thing after another, to heathen usage. “Why should we be singular, mother?” said the dark-eyed Myrrah, as she bound her hair and arranged her dress after the fashion of the girls in the temple of Venus. “Why may we not wear the golden ornaments and images which have been consecrated to heathen goddesses?” said the sprightly Thalia; “surely none others are to be bought, and are we to do altogether without?”
“And why may we not be at feasts where libations are made to Apollo or Jupiter?” said the sons; “so long as we do not consent to it or believe in it, will our faith be shaken thereby?”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 455
