Goose-quill papers
Guiney, Louise Imogen, 1861-1920
mK m lU:1 M .^ m ,*§ Sr to&l J?' m m <^.': M-< K m ' m y'''--^ m w #; &> m :**K*4f • «?££ !&■' GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. Goose -Quill Papers. BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. r&"2>' ^te BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1885. Copyright, 1885, By Louise Imogen Guiney. John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES THE LOVING HOMAGE OF is 33ooL CONTENTS. PAGE On the Good Repute of the Apple .... 9 A Hand 16 An Open Letter to the Moon 28 Brentford Pulpit 39 Notes made by Troilus Gently 56 On Teaching One's Grandmother how to Suck Eggs 74 Old Haunts . ^ ... 82 Free Thoughts on Books ... ... 89 A November Eestival .... ... 98 Vagabondiana 104 Mathematics . 113 A Child in Camp 117 On Graveyards 130 » Some Garden-Eolk 138 Hospitalities 141 The Two Voices 148 Sweetheart 156 On the Beauty of Idleness . 161 De Mosquitone 166 On the Garret 172 GOOSE-QUILL PAPEKS. ON THE GOOD REPUTE OE THE APPLE, OR the sake of an apple Atalanta lost her nigh-won victory; and that other apple, thrown for the fairest, moved all Olympus into discord. Bragi, the north-god, and his peers renewed their youth with one touch of its cool juices. Dragons circled it in the en- chanted garden ; " the daughters three " stood# about it in a sacred ring, and none but Hercu- les was its captor. The renascent marbles of the Greeks are dug out of earth, — " Praxitelean shapes ! " — with its rounded beauty yet in their outstretched hands. What a superb mythologic pedigree ! What noble mention (each worth an 10 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. immortality) from old poets, romancers, histori- ans ! All heterodoxy lauded thee, apple of mine eye. It was reserved for true-church traditions to belie thee. Thou who art full of virtue, what is this rumor of thy defection in Eden, thy remote causing of all contemporaneous woe ? Thou who art fair without as a cherub's cheek, how couldst thou be abettor to the treacherous spirit ? Shall the fault of our frail ancestress rest upon thy rosy head ? " That the forbidden fruit of Paradise was an apple," saith a grave and learned author, " is commonly believed, confirmed by tra- dition, perpetuated by writings, verses, pictures ; and some are so bad prosodians as thence to derive the Latin word malum, because that fruit ♦was the first occasion of evil : wherein, notwith- standing determinations are presumptuous, many, I perceive, are of another belief. " Let the per- sonal argument stand, in default of a bolder plea. Mephisto, who hath had no chance of reforma- tion, and who may be supposed to keep his early leanings, is in modern times no frequenter of ON TEE GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE. 11 orchards. Not by farmer, nor wayside knight, nor loitering sweethearts at dusk, hath he ever been detected prowling about an innocent apple-tree. It hath, on the other hand, been affirmed by an ingenious clerk, that apple-eating is a mascu- line passion, and that no woman hath a domi- nating natural relish for this hearty fruit ; which, proven, would seem to indicate (as a burnt child dreads the fire, according to the proverb) that Eve's mindful daughters shun by instinct the immemorial enemy. If, indeed, it needs must be demonstrated by some unborn logician, that our primal happiness was forfeited by nought else, beyond the serpent's wiles, than a Gilliflower or a Greening, hanging on the representative tree, and criterion of obedience, — then there exist myriads of her descendants with the ancestral weakness, who shall look on our abused common mother with new and tender consideration, such as her disastrous connection with a plum, or a currant, or a quince, could never have evoked. The apple is the only fruit which deserveth the name of genial. A peach is but a Capuan dish ; 12 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. the lime approacheth with cold infrequency ; the amiable pear hath too little character ; the grape is chiefly suggestive, anticipatory of its hereafter, as the larva of the gorgeous butterfly. But Apple standeth on her own merits. Tart, jelly, fritters, dumpling, enter not into the imagination of her possessor. Nay, nor even cider, that fret- ful disempurpled wine, — wine, as it were, with the bar sinister. Apple hath not the flippant gayety of the cherry ; her glad humor is some- what dashed with cynicism : she warmeth the heart, and trippeth up the tongue, and is, in the accepted phrase of artists, " a good fellow ; " foe to unrighteous melancholy, as Laurentius writ, and frankly compassionate. She should have had Horace for her court-poet. One can conceive of poor, manly Fielding loving her at the modest ratio of three dozen a day; and of little Mr. Pope brushing her aside with fastidious petulance. The friends of Apple, your sworn familiars, who offend not her sun-mottled exterior with barbaric divisions of the knife, may be known ON TEE GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE. 13 by their ready wit and their bright glances. Hath not the wholesome autumn light, which filtered into the fruit they affect, permeated their moral temperament ? They must needs be sound, consolatory, humane, and fit to wrestle with every wind that blows. " Man is that he eats/' we read among the bewilderments of German speculation. But of her chaste and subtle cup, rimmed with gold or crimson, as Nature willed, the elect drink invigoration. " Encompass me about with apples," saith the Canticle, " for I am sick with love ; " which, driven to its bare and literal sense, implies that apples are antidotes to languor and over-fond- ness. Apple, be it said, is a Platonist. Bake her not. Take her in her gypsy wild- ness, in the homespun, lovelier so than pome- granates in their velvet : not too untimely, either, lest she be vindictive, and become the apotheca- ry's friend rather than thine. Learn to trace her maiden growth among her cheery sisters, from some gnarled seat. Deny her not the arm-chair with thee before the flickering hearth- fire ; and in thy most solitary meditations, thy rapt brooding- 14 GOOSE- QUILL PAPERS. hours, trust her that she shall not distract thee. Out of celestial gardens, in the tender Cappa- docian legend, maid Dorothy's angel brought apples to Theophilus ; to him, indeed, the fruit of salvation. Yet, having lost the sweet symbolic grace of yore, she comes ever benignly, and with- out malice. Lavish October's legacy, foretelling to thy fancy other seasons yet to make glad the earth, she, more than any other, is the staunch stand-by, the winter friend. Her native orchards droop lifelessly in snows; but, like a fair deed, she surviveth mortality, a kind and vital influence still. Darling of the tourist and the huntsman that she is, never was there creature so abso- lutely adapted to the student. Her happy moisture fructifieth the brain. Only our neighboring Concord sages, far back in the Athenian beginnings of the present school, sought her intellectual aid in vain. They, and the listening element, met for conversation, — Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Curtis, even Haw- thorne, with his sylvan shyness about him. There were appalling breaks, pertinacious " flashes of silence/' such as were indigenous to Macaulay. ON THU GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE. 15 The philosophers sat erect, and struggled; then the narrator tells us how, with Olympic sweet- ness, the host, Ealph Waldo Emerson, brought out a dish of russets, — magna spes altera, genius having failed, — which were consumed, unavailingly, in silence. The ally was wistfully courted on after occasions ; but the club solemnly dispersed on the third night. If Apple, alas ! hath her freaks, let them be expended on philosophers. For her humbler adherents, she hath too constant a good-will. To us, at least, she is faithful, recompensing our old affection for every branch of her house. We are no specialist, but cherish her to the twenti- eth remove : all her pale and soured graftings, her pungent windfalls, her eccentric hangers-on, her disregarded poor relations. Yea, till our judgment and our gallantry for- sake us, be thou our deity, Pomona ! " Candles we '11 give to thee, And a new altar." Nothing shall divert our vow. Wilfully and in cold blood, we subscribe ourself thy pagan. A HAND. T would be a judicious pastime for some curious scholar to write up the antecedents and traditions of these ten ubiquitous digits with which Nature dowers most of us; a survey reaching from the crime that darkened the morning of the world — the handiwork of Cain — to the most delicate out- come of art, finished yesterday ; a summary of all the vicissitudes and symbolisms connected with the hand and its doings; challenges, in- vestitures, perjuries, salutations ; the science of chiromancy that the Romans loved ; records made by chisel or pen by Michael Angelo, Goethe, Palestrina ; of gloves and rings and falcon-jesses; of armor buckled on by saddened sweethearts, and prizes bestowed at tourneys ; of A HAND. 17 power in the soldier, and persuasiveness in the fair lady; of Eastern juggling, and missal illu- minations in gray cells, and manuscripts folded and preserved through centuries ; of " pickers and stealers " and money-getting associations, seizures, bestowals, and benedictions. The Dutch boy, stopping the dyke with his frozen thumb in times of flood, shall not be forgotten; nor that maid of honor who, with her slender wrist, bolted the door against the raging mob of revo- lutionists, undauntedly long, and at last vainly; and in the chapter of heroisms shall be found the patient pyramid-builders, and Mucius Scse- vola, unflinching in fire ; how with his hand Attila made kings tremble, Xerxes scourged the sea, and the saint of old Assisi won bird and beast from solitude, to feed and be ca- ressed. We bethink us lastly of antique instru- ments, old tapestries, intaglios, and rare lamps; of the child Christopher Wren, raising card- houses and forecasting the stone glories of Lon- don; or of Petrarch, roving in a dusty world of books, and so dying, suddenly and with- 2 18 GOOSE-QUILL PJPERS. out paiiij with his arm about them, as of things among those which our historian shall touch. Scarce any author, save Sir Thomas Browne, hath thought it worth while to spend learned discussion on the right and the left hand. Yet it is a peculiar schism we graft on a young- ling's mind when we teach it to discard the o*ood service and ready offices of its honest sin- istral member ; so that we may come to look upon a left-handed neighbor as a sort of natural protest against an ill custom, and a vindication of unjustly suppressed forces. A hand clinched, a hand outstretched, have in them all of defiance and supplication ; hospi- tality shines in a hand proffered, — fCa frank hand/' as the Moor saitli. Like a shell turned from the light, but with the tints of the morning not yet faded from it, is a babe's hand, rrtip- tilted/' lovely, as if it should close on nothing ruder than a flower. The bronzed hands of toil, the opaque hands of idleness, differing even as life and death, the dear, remembered, cordial hands of one's youth, — shall they not have A HAND. 19 their laureate also in the commentator that is to be, this new philosopher in trifles, this stu- dent of the furthest and subtlest bodily activi- ties, and choronicler, as it were, in extremis ? The hand betrays the heart; not to thee, ob- streperous gypsy ! with thy sapient life-lines, but even to the unchrismed eye of the laity. We detect good-nature in yon plump matron, because of that pudgy but roseate part of her appended to her Tuscan bracelet; good-nature and generosity and simple faith. We have close acquaintance with courageous hands, melancholy hands, avaricious hands, compassionate hands, fas- tidious hands, hands sensitive and fair, friends to all things gentle, and pulsing with intelli- gence. We read in this hand how it hath healed a bitter wound ; and in that, how it hath locked the door against a cry. Have we not known hands dark and shrunken with age or suffering, instinct yet with so-called patrician blood ? The memory comes over us of the prince (such was verily his meek title) from a far isle, the inscrutable Asiatic, acclimated in speech and 20 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. dress, whose chilling touch, recalling icicles in midsummer, we superstitiously evaded at meet- ing and parting, and over #hose origin we sun- lovers made jests, in the halls of that dreaming heir of a later dynasty, Madame B. It was the boast of Job that he had not kissed his hand in sign of worship to sun nor moon nor stars. Note the pertinent and noble met- aphor of Banquo, to express reliance and rest in time of perplexity : — " In the great hand of God I stand." To what fopperies, what wild freaks of medi- aeval years, hath the pliant hand lent itself! to the triangles, stars, portraits of ancient cali- graphic cunning; to the wig, shape facetious, embodying a request to the barber, or the heart, dolphin, and true-love knot, that revealed a swain's metrical sighs to the scrutinizing eyes of Phyllis. Peace to those old minimizers ! to him, the spider-worker, whose elfin Iliad Cicero saw, packed miraculously in a nut- shell; to sturdy Peter Bales, "that did so take A HAND. 21 Eliza " with his infinitesimal tracery, which the lion-queen delighted to read through a mighty glass, holding his airy volume on her thumb- nail ! Disraeli the elder tells us of the pleasing ori- gin of that modern phrase, — " to write like an angel ;" gracefully derived from one Angelo Vergecio, a scribe who drifted to Paris under Francis L, and whose name became in time a synonyme for beautiful caligraphy. To write like an angel ! Now, with due allowance of the possession, among celestial beings, of our poor terrene accomplishments, yet may angels them- selves most solemnly and securely preserve us from the foregoing solecism ! Saving the pri- mordial Angelo, a legend incorporated, none do so much write like angels as that slave-trader, the writing-master, enemy and subjugator of the hand's natural freedom. Handwriting, that should be matter of separate mental habit and muscular action, as Hartley Coleridge averred, the writing-master artificializes into a set form : a young lady is to write so ; a clerk, so. There 22 GOOSE-QTJILL PAPERS. is a rascally supposed respectability in keeping to this masquerade, where revelations of individ- uality are never in order. Spectre of our child- hood, bugbear -of ambrosial years, tyrant, nay, what can we call thee worse than thou art in bare English, Copy-book ! the faithfullest vow of our life, religious as Hannibal's, was against thee. We recall with unalterable haugh- tiness, that not for one moment did we tolerate thee, save under burning protest ; that thy long- drawn da capo moralities, all letter and no spirit, made our soul shudder; that every hour at the desk of old, under thy correct, staring eye, was an hour of scorn and insurrection; and that we celebrate daily thine anniversary and thy festival, after our own heart, in cherishing every irregu- larity that thy Puritan code abhorreth. Aye, tails and quirks are dear to us, and we fear not to send forth our t without his bar, our i without her dot, lest we should seem reconciled to thine atrocious ritual. We shake our en- franchised hand in thy face, thou stereotyped impostor ! A HAND. 23 We are not of misanthropic habit, but we reserve a sentiment warm as York's against Lan- caster, or a right Carlist's towards the mild usurping race of Spain, for that fellow-mortal whose traceries in ink and pencil are sealed with orthodoxy. By the accepted wretchedness of their capitals, the moral depravity of their loop- letters, we choose our friends, — the least erring the least dear. We cannot abide Giotto, because of his 0, that had no blemish. We take solace and delight in that exquisite Janus-jest of the last Bourbon Louis, who, re-entering his palace, the Imperial initial everywhere above and beside him, said, with a light shudder, to one of his blood, " Voila des ennemis autour de nous ! iy Not for all the authority of divine Prudence herself, shall we be mindful of our P's and Q's. A flourish — not, indeed, the martial blare of trumpets, but the misguided capers of a pen- point — we look upon as a cardinal, yea (if we may proportion adjectives to our grade of feel- ing), a pontifical sin. Character demonstrates itself in trifles. Wash- 24 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. ington wrote with clearness and deliberation, like a law-maker ; Eufus Choate, intricately and whim- sically, like a wit. Oldys runs down the list of English royal autographs, drawing no infer- ences, and set solely on his fact. Cromwell's signature is paradoxically faint and vacillating. " Elizabeth writ an upright hand, — a large, tall character; James I., in an ungainly fash- ion, all awry ; Charles I., an Italian hand, the most correct of any prince we ever had ; Charles II., a little, fair, running, uneasy hand/' such, adds a commentator, as we might expect from that illustrious vagabond, who had much to write, often in odd situations, and never could get rid of his natural restlessness and vivacity. It goes somewhat hard with us that Porson, Young, and especially Thackeray, wielded a proper quill, and were prone to consider pen- manship as one of the fine arts. Nevertheless, we take it that Mr. Joseph Surface, in the com- edy, would write so as to gladden the " herte's roote " of a school-mistress ; as, likewise, might our honest friend Iago. Item, that Homer's A HAND. 25 mark was but a hen-scratch, outdone, in his own day, by the most time- out- of -mind stroller that sang, eyeless, with him. No missionary, fretting over the innocent ras- calities of Afric tribes, burns with holier wrath than seizes us on beholding the prospectus of the "Penman's Gazette/' Hark to its beguil- ing philippics : "Good penmanship hath made fortunes; every year thousands are advanced by it to position and liberal salaries ; students make it a specialty. It is worth more than all the Greek and Latin, the antiqiiatecl rubbish of the higher schools and colleges, for, ('thine exqui- site reason, dear knight ? ') — for it yields prompt and generous returns in money, food, clothing, good associations, and incentives to usefulness in the world ! " The gentle reader is to imagine money in huge capitals, and the other rewards of merit dwindling successively, till the incen- tives to usefulness are scarce visible to the naked eye. And then, forsooth, one is encour- aged periodically by the fish-like portraits of Famous Penmen ! Have a care, have a care, 26 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. little guileless abecedarian, lest thy physiogno- my, some black morning, should lend its beauty to the procession of fiends who "Write Like Angels ! "Whom shall we hire to shout from the house- tops, vehemently, and with Quixotic disinterest- edness, that success should be won through ambitions a trifle exclusive of money, food, and clothing ; and that this " new heraldry of hands, not hearts," is a monstrous error? Who is there to heed that strange doctrine ? Think into what grave parley we might be drawn, even by the silken string of the " Penman's Gazette ; " into what resentment of an unheavenly lesson ! But we forbear. A century closes at the finger-tips of two men of unequal age, and every touch of palm to palm forges a link of the unseen social chain which connects us with the father of our race. We take in ours, with enthusiastic consciousness, a hand we honor, or a hand that by represen- tation has, perhaps, held cordially that of " the great of old." So chance we to strike, across A HAND. 27 the gulf of time, into the grasp of Caedmon, the Saxon beginner, or the real Roland of the horn, or Plato, or Alcuin, or him of Salzburg, the sunniest-hearted maker of music. Neither in our speculations can we forget that a Hand not all of earth rested once upon childish heads in Galilee, and passed among vast crowds, for- giving, healing, and doing good; and we know not but that our meanest brother, coming as a stranger, may bring to us, in more ways than one, its transmitted benediction. AN OPEN LETTEB TO THE MOON. " To the Celestial and my Soul's Idol, the Most Beautified : " — T might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your some- time contemporary, Adam of the Garden ; and while we are worried into acquiescence with years, cares, wrinkles, and such inevitable designs of age, we are more pleased than envious to dis- cover that you grow never old to the outward AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON. 29 eye, and that you appear the same "lovesoine ladie bright/' as when we first stared at you from a child's pillow. You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with our family history, having seen what sprt of figure our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. But we do mean to frankly free our mind on the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. "We take this resolve to be no breach of that exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than you, in your skyward station. We have, in part, lost our ancient respect foi you, — a sorry fact to chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our cra- dle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phoebe, twin to Phoebus, " goddess excellently bright ; " a queen, having a separate establishment, coming into a deserted court by night, and kindling it into more than daytime revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary so divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies, lour presence was indispensable for felicitous dreams. To be moon-struck, then, meant to be charmed inexpressibly, — to be lifted oil' our feet ^ Now, we allow that you may have suffered by misrepresentation, or else are we right in detecting your arts ; for, bv all your starry handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be. We are informed (our quondam faith in you almost beshrews the day we learned to read!) that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show yourself while he is on his p grinations ; thai you slyly steal the garb of his splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your borrowed finery. You are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to house-breakers. You are conspirator in manv direful deeds, attending base nocturnal ft v councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law. "Let us be Diana's foresterSj gentle- men of the shade, . . . governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon. ,(N 0/7.W LETTER TO THE MOON. 81 under whose countenance we — steal." Was it nol well said, no1 frankly ? Your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. Your inconstancy^ to come on delicate ground; shineth above your other characteristics. Since we have seen your color come and go, we sur- mise there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee up there; and being, moreover, well acquainted with the texture o( your red and your gray veil, we infer that you masquerade periodically at very unseasonable hours. Of painting your com- plexion we are disposed io acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us io learn from the most trustworthy sources, that you wax. Selene, Artemis ! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware o( the exasperation of the lower classes ! whose awakening is what we call below, a French Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge beam in yours ? 32 SB- KX You are in grievous need o( a resident mission- ary, considering' that you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orientalism, the Crescent, in the face and eyes of Christendom. You are much more distant and reserved, O beguiler ! than you pretend. Your temper is said to be volcanic. You that were Diana ! who is this Falstaf- fian, Toby IVlehian, Kriss Kringlish person we see about your premises? lie hangeth his great, ruddy, comfortable phiz out of your ease- ments, and holdeth it sidewise with a wink or a leer. AYe look on him as an officious rascal. Tie peereth where you only, by privilege, have permission to enter, lie hath the evil eye. lie thirtieth himself a proper substitute for you, and King of the Ulumiuari ; he reprodueeth your smile, and seattereth your largesses; he maketh faces — we say it shudderingly — at your wor- shippers below. frequently hath he appropri- ated kisses that were blown to you personally, or consigned to you for delivery from one sweet- heart to another. AN OPEN LETTER TO THE 310 ON 33 0 Lady, 0 Light-dispenser ! think, we hereby beseech you, of the danger of his being taken for you ! Picture the discomfiture of your min- strel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms, and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is confronted instead with that broad, ingenuous vagabond ! In some such despairing rage as the minstrel's must have been the inventor of the German tongue, who dis- carded all other chances of observation after once beholding this thing ycleped your Man, and angrily insisted on " Der Mond w — the Moon, he — as the proper mode of speech. Get you straightway a more acceptable min- ion, one of more chivalric habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior. Your credit and our com- fort demand it. " Pray you, remember/' Less know we of your interminable starry neighbors. Is Mars civil, or heavy Saturn capa- ble of laughter? Hath a comet vexed you, — that tireless incendiary? Doth Leo roar too loudly on your sensitive ear? We fancy that the Dipper is replenished frequently in your 3 34 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. Ladyship's court ; that the Milky Way is pleas- antest of your pastures ; that the Scorpion guard- eth your palace gateway ; and that Aquarius, be he not delinquent, tendeth your flower-beds. "What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you beheld ! What joy, what plenty ; what riot and desolation ! You are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He iurketh like an anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your bland leisurely eye looketh down impar- tially on all. Caravans rested a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices; the Eu- phrates, while the infant world fell into its first slumber, leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely through the ages ? Are there not centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON. 35 still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke of altars ? Have you forgotten the beginners of the " star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth ? How sang Blon- del against the prison-door? How brawny was Bajazet ? How fair was Helen ; Semiramis how cruel ? Moon ! where be the treasures of the doughty Kidd? Where, too, is the slow, mysterious evening of our childhood, or its dawn, anticipating change, as you turned away ? Or, rather, where is the child that enjoyed them by your kindly ray, — retaining now, of all which was its iden- tity, only the dense sleep, the illimitable dreams, of those intervening nights? Do you call to mind, you that saw them often, its after-supper frolics ; its Hallow-e'en captures, despite tub and candle ; its inopportune studies, stolen out of mere greediness to know, — a fever long sub- sided? You were kind to that something of yesterday, dead as Amenophis now. Gleam, in some recess of the south, to-night, on bright- eyed F., who answered its young jests, and 86 900SE-QUILL PAPERS, journeyed with ir over the icy river, arm-in- arm ; and on T>. G., austere yet gentle, who played Brutus once to its Cassius ; and rise not, rise wot too soon upon our Philippi ! You have been fed, 0 Cynthia ! upon the homage of mortal lips : you have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a time have we rehearsed before you such as Ave recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus, — 44 0 sovereign unstress of true melancholy ! M to the hymnal " Orbed maiden ! with white fire lade or the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit over seas : — " Oh ! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be. Huntress or Dian, or whatever named ; And he the veriest pagan, that first fr:r. His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee!" Drummondj Sidney, Milton, glorified your wan- derings. And your truest votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that, "the oldest shade midst oldest tr Peels palpitations when thou lookest i AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON. 87 You are an incorrigible charmer; but as you are likewise ~ a relief To the peer, patient oyster, where he sleeps Within his pearly house," we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you are something better: a humanitarian. Now, we venture to assert that you remem- ber compliments, meant to be of this same Or- phic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you. The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe. We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not comely ? Do you not spiritualize the dark- ness with one touch of your pale garment ? Then what are they to us, — your dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowl- edge ! Abuse of earthly privileges ! 38 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. If we affect the abusive,, shy of more ceremo- nious forms of address, forgive us, Luna ! We make recantation, and disown our banter. We extend the hand of cordiality even to your Man. How blithe and beauteous he is ! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it. For- give us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon! Poet are we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, 0 most best ! believe it." BRENTFORD PULPIT. ROM a little church of some celebrity, and from a remote corner in its quiet nave, come these rude by-gone impres- sions, transcribed faithfully, save in whatsoever is mainly personal and local. No word is here of Brentford choir or Brentford pews; but a record, strict and spare, of the now vanished figures who expounded texts to the village folk. For the most part, they were but birds of passage, seldom remaining long enough to lose the gloss of novelty, or to escape the awakened scrutiny of young eyes. Two only of these preachers were widely known; but each of them, on the other hand, possessed a striking individuality. The "King of Brentford," as readers of a certain swinging translation of Beranger will remember, 40 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. was something of an anomaly ; and Brentford chaplains, at least in their public career, were indubitably of his court. First, shall we not recall the Beverend L., with his soft majesty of speech, having in it an ever- recurring sforzando, peculiarly impressive and overpowering, — L., with his benignity of soul and his keen, evanescent smile, intellect flashing through it, like lightning over a sombre waste of waters ? He required the closest attention of any speaker to whom we have listened. The following must be incessant, the allegiance unabated, lest the Emersonian and gossamer-like sequence of ideas, the swift beauty of phrase and figure, elude you, never to reappear the same. His playful- ness in the pulpit was unique. Subdued it was, yet how potent ! Humor has many a fit abiding- place in this world, of which the pulpit seems last to be chosen. But L/ s discretion was royally sure. His salutary wit, felicitous in placing itself, and infrequent enough to rouse attention always newly, went on angelic errands with its Puck's wings. An apostolic purpose consecrated BRENTFORD PULPIT. 41 his airy thrusts at evil. The hand of steel was present ever under his caressing touches. We surmise that if there was anything con- nected with his vocation which L. abhorred, it was the necessity of periodical charity-sermons. When induced to appear as pleader on these occa- sions, his conduct was amusingly characteristic. He played hide-and-seek with his petition; he put it off, eyed it curiously, fenced with it, and kept it at arm's length ; then, beginning to advocate its claims, he held it up for your inspection reluc- tantly, as if it were no child of his, and his right were rather to befriend it in private than thrust it into public notice. He would say a few glowing words, making his fortitude under such an emer- gency as truly a hint to your benevolence as his spoken plea. He would sum up for you the misery of the poor, the lamentable differences in comfort, the evils that spring from unalleviated poverty, the precept of brotherly love, the imper- ative command of giving and sharing and making glad ; all this with an air of indifference over facts in array, and of needless appealing to such hearts 42 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. and such purses as yours were sure to be! L. could have written noble charity-sermons for another's delivery, but to ask in his own person was wellnigh impossible. He seemed to rebel, not against the actual discomfort of his position, but rather against the advisability of reminding you of a duty you never could have forgotten. In his chivalrous dealing he smote your sensibilities more surely than many a professional beggar with seven small children; and the shekels leaped in a fountain from you and from everybody else, un- til the alms-box overflowed. L.'s utility in this strange office was quite wonderful, even to him- self. His very exordium, "Dear old friends!" was, though he knew it not, irresistible. On the morrow, Workhouse Tommy with a new cap, or barefooted Molly in the exhilaration of a sturdy dinner, must have blessed the shy and half-resent- ful claim which a great heart put forth as theirs. L/s preaching, for the most part, whether in its bright or solemn phases, was best understood by those who best knew the man. Like Walter Savage Landor, in whom he delighted, and whom BRENTFORD PULPIT. 43 he strongly resembled, he required appreciators as well as hearers. He loved a thoughtful audience, and to such spoke with all the outpouring of his mightier self. There were minds of a certain cast, wholly foreign to his sympathies, which were slow to be persuaded into a belief of his accessi- bility. Yet a meeker and kinder heart than L/s never beat. Half the country knew him as a fine theologian, and scarce fifty for the "sweet sociable spirit" that he was. A touch of the intolerance of genius he had indeed, without which the symme- try of his character would have been impaired. D., with his active and high-strung temper- ament, was your true conversational preacher, treating with glad and reverent familiarity "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." Beneath the sounding-board he was perpetually on the defensive. He was always setting you straight, putting you in the way of seeing good, reconciling you to your antipathies. If we may use the word to signify a process so gentle, he hammered his optimism into you. You must be cheerful, you must be thankful, you must be self- 44 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. sacrificing ; there was no escaping it. D., in his zeal and his amiability, was a far-away echo of John the Evangelist; and the phrase, "My little children/' came with peculiar unction from his lips. His voice was not powerful. It may have been a slight hesitation and reluctance of speech which gave it an especial charm. " Somewhat he lisped, " also, like Chaucer's Friar ; if not — " for his wantonnesse To make his English sweete upon his tonge." We remember that once, by some chance de- velopment of his favorite topic, he came across a wayside tramp, and gave him an apotheosis laugh- ingly called to mind whenever one of that thence- forth respected species lights upon our path. " Here is a vagabond, an outcast of society," began the Reverend D., with his usual high-bred gesture of expostulation, — "a good-for-nothing beggar whom you brush as you pass; and drawing aside, mayhap in your heart of hearts you despise him. You have no right to despise him. Noth- ing has destroyed or will destroy the eternal BRENTFORD PULPIT. 45 brotherhood between you. Despise him ? Why, it is a disloyalty to mankind. In the eye of Heaven sinlessness is the criterion, not riches or health or intelligence. And he may stand nearer to the Throne than you, because of a more repent- ant spirit. Why should you despise him? It belongs to you rather to love and aid him. He is a reflection of yourselves, distanced from you by the mean formalities of the world, but fash- ioned like you without and within, and co-heir of whatever has fallen to your share. What you have been taught through the dignity of manhood and womanhood to think yourselves — that is he. He is the Image of Uncreated Beauty. He is the Wedding Guest in the palace of the King. He is the Mortal who shall put on Immortality. He is the Son of the House of David, the hope and joy of Israel. His head is like Carmel, and his form as of Libanus, excellent as the cedars. Dare you despise him ? Even as you deal with him in your thought, should the Most High deal with you in our great day forthcoming ! " This extraordinary burst was delivered with 46 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. indescribable serenity. We have but suggested the gorgeous language in which D. revelled when he chose, nor hinted at the peculiarity of pose and intonation which helped to make his words vital. To one hearer, at least, the effect was superb, and the tramp was established in his native dignity forever. Dr. E. had the artistic temperament, being a poet of rare worth. There was always a fine met- aphoric haze about his sermons. He was by na- ture diffident and somewhat listless ; the effort of mounting the pulpit stair must have been dis- tasteful to him. His phrasing was of extreme nicety and justness ; and he spoke English pure and simple. Yet his " Greek languor," his low, unobtrusive voice, served to veil the excellence of his thoughts. He was shy of any display. His Sunday efforts certainly did not become popular, in the Brentford acceptance of that term. But while *E., like the clouds, seemed gray always to heedless eyes, to brighter perceptions he must have shown the delicate, transitory tints of the rainbow. He had two great merits : his BRENTFORD PULPIT. 47 quotations, scriptural and other, were exquisitely apt; lie likewise knew the value of sudden epi- logues. You had not time to suspect that the last rounded period was having its dying fall, before " He straight, disburdened, bounded off as fleet As ever any arrow from a cord." Altogether another type of Levite was the Eev- erend M., of clear Puritan descent. He had an expansive personality, and could rise to any occa- sion, clothing what he had to say in easy and ele- gant language. As a rule, his sermons, not to speak it profanely, were pacifying as an opiate. But sometimes he stood before his astonished hearers not wholly as a symbol of the peace- maker. For his text, many years back, he once took the " abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet," Matthew xxiv. The awful sublimity of his reading prepared his auditors for what was to follow. Hearts were stirred to the depths that day, with the measured musical utterance, the dread and calm authority, such as 48 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. fancy had conceived proper to the Recording Angel. M. never seemed quite so aerial and boy- ish in his proper person again. That one grand sermon shed its supernatural light still over him, as he walked on Monday and Tuesday in view of the laity. It seemed as if all his previous and subsequent words and ways were a disguise, and that only on the never-to-be-forgotten morning he had been revealed. None of his other attempts were thereafter held in comparison with this, an advantage not to be doubted. A magnificent prejudice in his favor would fain have forced upon his every parley the beauty which the first had worn. We last heard the Reverend M. (he was then nearing his sixtieth year) on the evening of a Christmas day. We recall that he began by poetically picturing the corresponsive hour of that primal Christmas when the divine Child lay slumbering in His mother's arms, the hush of the Bethlehem hills, the unconsciousness of the broad kingdom that " knew him not." Little by little, the monotones of this tranquil dis- BRENTFORD PULPIT. 49 course fell, like so many snow-flakes, upon our eyelids. A swinging festoon of smilax, stirred by chance beneath the pulpit edge, charmed us deeper into oblivion. The light ran in eddies on the faint gray walls. The visible, the palpa- ble, were as if they had not been. We had slipped from our moorings into the irresistible depth of dreams. Presently we heard anew, half-distinctly, half- confusedly, " 0 expectaiio gentium ! " We looked towards the starting-point of that Latin spray, but nothing followed upon our sudden rousing save the burst of the organ. All about us was a rustling and a stirring, such as the Ephesian sleepers might make at the awakening. Horri- ble ! Dreams were over for many others beside the solitary culprit we had supposed ourself. Bonnets nodded ; furs were smoothed ; numbed feet were tapped upon the carpet for resuscita- tion; and Chubbuck in the next pew rubbed his eyes, to the imminent extinction of those useful auxiliaries. Heaven forgive us our drow- siness ! How much aesthetic pleasure, how much 4 50 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 